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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.

ARCHITECT OF FATE

ACCURSED ETERNITY

S P CAWKWELL

I

+++

Amaranthine encrypted message, code Theta Gamma Four Three Nine. Captain Tanek of the Star Dragons Sixth Company, presently designated commanding officer of Containment Fleet Kappa, hear this on the order of the Ordo Malleus. I send you greetings and demand your immediate compliance. There has been a reported sighting of the vessel matching archive description of the Accursed Eternity.

By the power vested in me and through my position within the Holy Ordos, you are ordered to bring your fleet to the coordinates I will transmit following this message. This sighting warrants an immediate investigation and your fleet is the closest available. I will speak with you in person upon your arrival.

Message ends.

+++

It drifted without direction, carried by the endless tides of space. Partially curtained by a swirling dust cloud, it loomed out of the darkness like a monstrous leviathan surfacing in a ponderous climb from the mighty deeps for a lungful of life-giving air. The analogy was not entirely without basis.

Surrounded on all sides by ruthless escort vessels, the ship was a thing of legend and myth. It may once have been a battle-barge – but since nobody had ever destroyed its companion fleet, no one had ever gotten close enough to find out exactly what it was, or who it belonged to. It responded to no hails. As soon as any fleet was sent to investigate, inexplicable warp storms blew up and the thing was gone. At most, it had only ever remained visible for five hours: barely long enough for its presence to even register. Chaos, however, inevitably followed in its wake, along with other companions: madness, corruption and death.

It had earned itself the name Accursed Eternity over the many years that it had been spotted. Most people dismissed it as a ghost story, a tale whispered by the ratings who toiled in the sub-levels; tales that were shared with amusement by junior officers. Veterans of the void found little laughter in such things. They knew better than to dismiss the evils of the warp so easily.

A ghost ship. The spectral echo of a vessel lost to the tides. Perhaps, the stories went, it was filled with the shackled spirits of its former crew, bound in eternal torment. Perhaps seductive sirens of ruinous powers inhabited its empty decks just waiting to lure an innocent victim to a death most unworthy.

Whatever was on board had to be a product of the warp. On that, the stories all agreed. There had to be something or someone deeply important hidden within its twisted hull to warrant the escort that it brought with it, but it was not a prize that mortal men dared attempt to reach out and snatch.

One hundred years had passed since the last time the full fleet had been spied. One hundred years, during which the tale of its nature had had time to evolve and distort, until it became something it was not. It became a legend. It became a myth. The recovered records of the battle a century before had never been corroborated. It was believed that nobody would ever truly discover the facts of the deaths at Balanor.

In the past few decades the appearance of the lone ship itself had increased in regularity and yet it had only ever been sighted in passing, a glimpse – an idea – of something that may or may not have been a battle-barge. Descriptions of the ship never suggested anything physically abnormal; it was the same as any other of its kind, despite the legends surrounding it. No external markings of allegiance had been reported and the overall condition of the ship remained largely unknown.

It became synonymous with bad luck. To see the Accursed Eternity, even if only for a fleeting moment, was a premonition of doom and destruction.

In the wake of the fleet’s sudden, unexplained appearance, the astropathic choirs of the Imperium of Mankind came to urgent life as a suitable, expedient response was sought. Increasingly frantic messages were transmitted back and forth, and were then met by a cool, calm and very deliberate response.

+++

By the command of the Ordo Malleus of the Holy Inquisition, the Balanor system and all vessels therein are deemed traitoris in extremis. In His name, we come.

This situation is now under our control.

+++

The situation was anything but under control. The small Ordo Malleus fleet had ripped into real space with its guns already fully charged and ready to unleash the wrath of their kind. Batteries of weapons pounded relentlessly against the encroaching Chaos fleet, constant streams of light razoring through the endless darkness. For a time, a brief and incredible moment, it seemed that they would achieve their objective. For a fleeting second it seemed that they had the upper hand. The Chaos ships looked as though they were preparing for a retreat. But they weren’t.

There were five vessels in the Chaos fleet, each one unidentifiable but for a proudly displayed eight-pointed star emblem emblazoned across their prows, and as one they peeled from the ship they escorted. Turning with excruciating slowness, they broke from their prescribed path and plunged headlong into the Inquisitorial fleet. Four escort ships were destroyed instantly, caught in the path of the cruisers as they accelerated and torn to pieces. Debris, fuel and corpses dribbled from the broken vessels and briefly cluttered the path of the strike cruisers. The Chaos vessels cut a steady path through the carnage.

Not a single shot left the gunnery decks of the Chaos fleet. Every death they caused came from the fact that they rammed without hesitation into the ships of the Ordo Malleus.

Doggedly determined, the Inquisition held their ground with implacable and commendable ferocity. They re-engaged the Chaos ships and eliminated two of them with a savage and unrelenting volley of fire from their main cannons. Yet, when the ships were destroyed, there was nothing to prove that they had ever existed. No twisted, broken metal, no trails or wisps of smoke… Nothing. It was simply as though they had never been.

It was only when the Inquisition fleet had battled the enemy down to equal numbers, that they put the call out for Containment Fleet Kappa.

Mistress Kerys Jabiru, Primaris Astropath on board the Star Dragons flagship Ladon, was a thin woman. At one time in her life, she might have been considered slim, willowy and graceful, but the simple fact of the matter now was that she was almost painfully undernourished. The years in service to the Imperium had robbed her of any youth, beauty and vitality that might once have been admirable. Her life in servitude to the Throne of Terra had taken its toll on her, physically and mentally. But despite that, she was still able to hold herself proudly.

There was nothing even slightly womanly in her motion as she walked at great speed through the ship’s dimly-lit corridors, no sensuality or feminine fluidity in her stride. She walked in a manner not unlike a strutting, long-legged water bird. Even her head bobbed slightly with every step she took. It was a gait that might have been considered comical by those whose dispositions tended towards the unkind.

Even blind as she was, her psychic senses guided her with skill and effortless ease through the sprawling vessel. Her speed only began to hint at the true sense of urgency she felt. Since she had received and relayed the message from the Inquisition, orders had begun flying back and forth, but this one was a personal missive for the captain and she was, if she would only admit it to herself, curious to see how its contents were received.

Kerys had served the Star Dragons for more than twenty years, girl and woman, and whilst she retained the proper sense of awe and respect for the Adeptus Astartes, she had, over the years, built up a comfortable rapport with the captain of Sixth Company. She was not afraid of him.

Not too afraid, at least.

It was hard not to like Captain Tanek. Although a fierce, stern and allegedly brutal warrior on the field of battle, when the armour came off and the other side of him was in force, there was a certain affability about him. He treated his company – and those who served them – with fairness and he actively encouraged those aboard to speak their minds. Such openness, he declared, was an important trait. His men virtually idolised him; the mortal crew component of the Ladon actually did idolise him. He found it faintly uncomfortable and did whatever he could to dissuade such adulation. Such modesty was becoming and, if anything, made the situation worse.

Kerys turned a corner and slowed her pace. The skin of her pale cheeks, papery and dry as a result of the recycled air of the Ladon’s environment, was touched with two spots of pink from her exertions. Her greying hair, tied back in a severe knot at the back of her head, had come free and thin, wispy strands hung untidily around her pinched face. Pursing her lips tightly, she spent a few moments tucking the escaped hair back into the knot. It would not do to present herself before Captain Tanek looking so dishevelled.

The ship, which had been ripping through the warp for several hours since the receipt of the initial message, was not travelling smoothly and a sudden shifting of the floor beneath her feet made her stumble. She threw out her arms to balance herself and the ship lurched immediately in the other direction throwing her completely off-balance. Before she could fall, however, a hand reached out and caught her. A strong hand that fully encircled her upper arm with room to spare. One of the Star Dragons.

‘Mistress Jabiru.’ A rich, warm voice sounded and a flicker of a smile came onto her face.

‘Sergeant Korydon.’ She was pleased by the tone of respect and concern in the warrior’s voice and she turned her blind face towards him. Her hands came up in the sign of the aquila and she bowed her head to show equal respect for the Adeptus Astartes.

‘I presume you are walking to the Clutch? I would consider it an honour if you would let me escort you. The passage through the empyrean is rough and I would be deeply distressed if you were to fall.’

His manners were impeccable and she could not find it in herself to be offended. She had never seen Korydon, but she conversed with him often. He was a serious warrior with a dry, often sarcastic sense of humour that complemented Tanek’s straight talking style admirably. She had never been able to gauge the age of any of the Star Dragons, but all the clues she had pulled together from his presence at the Clutch had led her to deduce that Korydon was comparatively young. This close, she could smell the unique aroma that seemed to accompany all of the Adeptus Astartes: a mixture of gun oils and armour abrasives, and the faintest hint of sweet incense that suggested he had not long left the ship’s chapel. She straightened her shoulders.

‘I would be equally honoured for you to escort me, Sergeant Korydon.’

‘Of course, Mistress Jabiru.’

She felt him take her hand and place it on his bare forearm so that he could guide her safely through the unsteady corridors of the Ladon. Although she would never openly voice the opinion, she was rather glad of his strong, steady support. The speed with which the Star Dragons and the Blood Swords were heeding the Inquisition’s call was both alarming and unsettling. The news she brought now to the ears of the captain was equally disturbing.

Suddenly, she felt very glad for Korydon’s presence. She had a deep-seated feeling that today’s Clutch was going to become complicated very swiftly.

The Clutch was the name given to the daily meeting of the Ladon’s key personnel. During the Clutch any and all problems were brought to the table and orders shared out. It was a functional thing, rarely coloured with any sort of excitement. But a vessel the size of the strike cruiser needed to run smoothly and Tanek, whose sense of organisation was second to none, ran an exceptionally tight ship.

Led into the strategium by Korydon, Kerys paused before the statue of the Emperor. There was such a palpable aura of faith around it that it was not hard to locate it. She almost absently muttered the litany of guidance and thanked the sergeant as he led her to her given place at the table.

It was several minutes later that she heard the captain’s voice. It arrived into the strategium a moment before he did and Kerys turned her head towards the sound, her ears working to gauge what her eyes never could. The years of blindness had finely tuned her other senses to be far more receptive to her surroundings. There was a measure of impatience in his voice that suggested he was fractious and annoyed, but he tempered it with customary politeness.

He was not alone as he entered; other footfalls echoed his own. Captain Khorvash of the Blood Swords, no doubt. The other captain had been on board the Ladon when the call had come from the Inquisition, and rather than travel back to his own vessel he had saved valuable time by remaining on board the Star Dragons craft. He had attended several Clutches over Kappa’s tour of duty and had always treated Kerys with due deference, albeit with the clear distrust so many showed towards those of a psychic bent.

Her sharp thoughts almost absently brushed the minds of the two captains, and she marvelled at how two such god-like beings could project such different personalities without ever speaking a word. From what she understood, Khorvash was the younger of the two captains by several decades and it was clear, even to one as blind as she was, that he wore his youth proudly. There was arrogance in his voice and attitude that had not yet been tempered by experience. He was smart and he was eager. Yet, despite the shared rank, he obviously deferred to the older warrior. From the cadence of his voice, and the extra distance it had to travel, she sensed that he respectfully kept a step or two behind Tanek, falling into place eventually at the captain’s right shoulder.

There was another presence too; Kerys could hear him walking, but he chose not to announce himself. She inhaled and coughed slightly; whereas Korydon had smelt of incense and the chapel, the other newcomer positively reeked of it. Iakodos, she deduced. The only one of the Star Dragons she felt true fear towards.

‘Thank you all for your patience,’ said Tanek. He spoke in slow, almost indolent tones but offered no further explanation as to why he had arrived late. He was captain. It was his prerogative, and there was never any sense of haste or urgency about him. Kerys, who had heard many tales of Tanek’s battlefield valour knew that he was a deeply thoughtful soul who ensured that he had the full measure of his enemy before he ever took up arms. It was a trait endemic amongst the Star Dragons; they were fierce, implacable fighters.

The Clutch continued as normal, each member present delivering any pertinent news. However, as Kerys had anticipated, due to their travels through the warp there was nothing that any of them could add. Korydon provided an update on the readiness of the company’s squads and the state of the armoury. Kerys was sure that the rest of the Star Dragons found it compelling but she found it painfully dull. Surprised at how bored she felt and realising this was due to the earlier anxiety at the need to deliver the latest message, she allowed her attention to drift.

‘Mistress Kerys? Any further communication?’

Tanek’s voice had a slight hint of amusement and Kerys’s cheeks flushed as she realised he had already spoken her name once. She patted the back of her hair and coughed politely to clear her throat.

‘A repeat of the original request for help, my lord, perhaps sent on a relay. But, yes, there has been a further message received. It is… personal, Captain Tanek. I am under instruction to give the message to you and you alone.’

‘Personal?’

Though she could not see him, Kerys suspected that the captain’s eyebrow had risen.

‘And who exactly is this “personal” message from?’

‘He gives his name as Inquisitor Shadrach Remigius, my lord.’ The sudden hiss of annoyance from the direction of Chaplain Iakodos did little to calm the churning sea of acid that was in her gut.

‘Personal. I see.’ She heard him tap his fingers on the table. ‘My rule has always been that there are to be no secrets on board this ship. If I cannot adhere to that myself I cannot lead by example. Please continue with the message, mistress.’

‘Do you think that is wise, Tanek?’ Iakodos spoke for the first time, his voice so deep that it felt to Kerys as though the floor beneath her very feet rumbled with the bass pitch of it.

‘I think it is very wise, Chaplain.’

A flash of an unspoken battle of wills touched the edge of her psychic awareness and she knew misery. Externally, Kerys looked suddenly unsure of herself, her earlier manner of prim propriety dissolved in the sudden realisation that she was being asked to go against an inquisitor’s wishes. Her senses were on fire as she became slowly aware that everyone was looking at her. She wrung her hands together anxiously and when she spoke again, her voice eked its way out as barely more than a squeak.

‘He was… really quite specific, my lord. I… I’m not sure that I should… It is only very short and will take next to no time to impart to you if you would but retire to…’

‘I will not. Please deliver the message, Mistress Kerys.’

His tone brooked no argument and with her expression becoming slightly more miserable, she let her voice slip into the gravelly tones of the faceless inquisitor.

‘The time has come to collect my due, Tanek. I will take my payment on your arrival.’

Silence descended upon the gathering like dust settling after a flurry of wind. Kerys’s hands were still wringing together miserably, her chest rising and falling swiftly.

It was Khorvash who broke the peace.

‘What does that mean exactly? Tanek? Do you know this Inquisitor Remigius?’

‘It is unimportant. An… existing arrangement between the inquisitor and myself.’ Tanek stared into the astropath’s hollow eyes for a few moments longer, as though he could somehow discern the inquisitor’s full meaning, but eventually took his piercing gaze from her. Standing up, he clasped his hands behind his back and let his gaze roam around the Clutch.

‘Inquisitor Shadrach Remigius is indeed known to me, Khorvash.’ He nodded abruptly. The gesture more than indicated that he had no desire to talk about it in front of the Clutch despite his earlier assertion. He tweaked his pointed beard between thumb and forefinger and considered for a moment before nodding.

‘Very well. Mistress Kerys, make arrangements to respond to the good inquisitor, if you would be so kind. Tell him that his message has been received and understood. That will suffice.’

There was an undercurrent of bitter sarcasm in his voice, but Kerys decided that it would be far more prudent to keep her counsel than speak her mind. She dipped her head in a bow, her long hair falling free once again and framing her face. ‘As my lord commands,’ she responded, taking his order as her cue to leave.

Tanek watched her go, his expression unreadable and his consternation growing. He let none of the concern show on his face but his soul was in turmoil.

The Accursed Eternity. Both captains knew its name, as did many of the others present. It was a legend. A thing of myth. Yet, here they were, following the orders of the Inquisition, travelling to verify its existence.

If any of those present at the Clutch thought this was strange, none of them voiced that opinion out loud. Tanek cast a wary eye around the assembly, almost as though daring any of them to question the situation.

‘Estimates put our time of arrival at less than three hours,’ he said. ‘Ensure that the fleet is at full battle readiness and be ready to engage as soon as we translate into the Balanor system. That is all.’

The Clutch dispersed, leaving the two captains and the Chaplain standing alone in the strategium. Khorvash studied the others with open interest. Their shared duty had formed strong bonds of friendship and loyalty.

For now, the Blood Swords and the Star Dragons travelled the wastes of space together. For centuries prior to their deployment here, they had frequently joined forces when a given situation demanded it. The proximity of their home worlds had given them great reason to remain cordial and closely allied. In the wake of the act of shame that had seen the Blood Swords torn from their home world, the Star Dragons had been there to support them. There had been no question of debt or honour. It merely was.

This reciprocal loyalty engendered a rare sense of genuine fraternity between the two that more commonly was confined to battle-brothers of the same Chapter. There was a pooling of similar traditions and history, and this gave rise to friendships that spanned across the two Chapters. Above and beyond this, both the Star Dragons and the Blood Swords fielded stalwart warriors with an eye for tactics that made them a terrifying force to be reckoned with when they took the field of battle together.

Khorvash had been the latest captain to take his place amongst the fleet. It was a duty that was performed on a rotational basis with each Blood Swords company captain expected to spend a preordained length of time serving aboard the Chapter’s vessel Ophidian. As for the Star Dragons, there was nothing that commanded their presence here. They served alongside their cousins out of choice alone.

Tanek liked Khorvash. He was an eager, enthusiastic slab of pure impulse who frequently gave voice to thoughts that others might consider inappropriate or tactless. To Tanek’s mind it was a refreshing honesty that served him well.

‘I do not wish to pry into matters that do not concern me, Tanek,’ Khorvash began after a long period of considering the others, ‘but what is the meaning behind that message?’

‘Allow me to share some of my greater experience with you, Brother-Captain Khorvash.’ Tanek gave the younger captain a faintly benevolent smile and made a point of addressing his battle-brother in full. ‘If you start a sentence by stating that you have no wish to pry, then you would be well advised not to. The details of the matter are unimportant. Suffice it to say that the inquisitor is owed a favour by my Chapter.’ His eyes were clear and steady. ‘Evidently he feels that the time has come to settle the debt.’

His gaze met that of Iakodos and there was concern in it. ‘For now at least, that is all you need to know.’

The return to real space from the warp was hazardous at the best of times, but to emerge straight into a void war was far more so. Manifesting from the empyrean, the small fleet was instantly caught up in the very heart of the battle that raged between the Chaos ships and those of the Inquisition. Two of Kappa’s small escort vessels were incapacitated instantly by the guns of the Ordo Malleus, merely by dint of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Furious words from both Imperial parties were exchanged. The Inquisition had not been expecting the Containment Fleet to arrive with such alacrity, they claimed, and conversely, Kappa had not anticipated arriving into a hotly fought battle-zone. With obvious reluctance, the Inquisition ships altered their position and held fire long enough to allow the Ladon and the Ophidian to take position and lend much-needed supporting fire.

The Ladon opened up every gun port on her port side and unleashed a barrage of deadly fire on the traitor vessels as they traversed the void of space. As the streams of destruction burned their way towards the enemy, the Inquisition sent a security-coded message. Its contents were conveyed with all haste to the Adeptus Astartes. Tanek took the data-slate from the crewman who brought it to him and read it. His brow creased in confused irritation.

+++

Do not fire on the anomalous vessel. Inquisitor Remigius and his retinue will make their way to you with all expedience. Repeat, hold your fire.

+++

By Tanek’s calculations, Inquisitor Shadrach Remigius was at least in his mid to late sixties. However, the augmetics and assorted juvenat treatments that he had undergone made him seem far younger. It had been at least twenty years since Tanek had seen him last and in that time he seemed not to have aged at all.

Unless you looked directly into his eyes. Then you saw the truth of it. In the very heart of the inquisitor’s cold, emerald stare was intelligence and the wisdom of his years, and the power and ability to coerce that had served him so well. But Remigius generated an aura of such inherent disdain that it shrouded his true self. People did not voluntarily meet the inquisitor’s stare; they did not look into the depths of his eyes. Staring at the floor was eminently preferable to looking directly at him.

Those, like Tanek, who did possess the wherewithal to hold his gaze saw a tall, slender man with a mane of greying hair that was pulled into false order by a tattered ribbon of red cloth. His narrow face was dominated by a long, thin nose and those hard, green eyes. The right side of his face was a mass of ugly scar tissue that even the juvenat treatments had failed to disguise and his lip was drawn upwards in a permanent sneer.

One arm had long ago been severed at the elbow and its mechanical replacement was clearly the work of an artisan: beautifully made and polished to a high sheen. Not for Remigius the pretence of covering it with a sleeve. This was who he was. He was proud of it.

He wore a sword in a scabbard at his waist and as he stepped into the strategium, he kept one hand on its pommel. Tanek watched him enter and kept his voice carefully free of anything other than neutral tones.

‘Greetings, inquisitor,’ he rumbled. ‘Welcome aboard the Ladon.’

‘Captain Tanek. Who would have thought our paths would cross again so soon? And for such a great purpose.’ His voice, when he spoke, was surprising. For such an ugly man, it was rich and almost lyrical in its quality. He turned his penetrating gaze onto Khorvash.

Before Tanek could introduce him, the inquisitor spoke again. ‘You would be Captain Khorvash of the Blood Swords. You are presently serving with Containment Fleet Kappa as part of your Chapter’s ongoing penitence.’

Khorvash bristled visibly and Remigius’s sneer split in a parody of a smile. ‘I mean no offence, of course.’

‘Still yourself, brother,’ murmured Tanek. He knew that Khorvash would most certainly have taken Remigius’s words as a personal slur, but they could ill-afford to draw the ire of the Ordo Malleus.

‘We will take this discussion to the strategium. My Chaplain awaits us.’ Without further statement, Tanek spun on his heel and began marching away.

‘Captain Tanek.’ The inquisitor’s words halted the Star Dragons captain, but he did not turn. Remigius took a few steps towards him. ‘My retinue…’

‘Dismiss those you do not need and retain whomever you deem necessary, inquisitor, but make it swift. My time is precious and I need a damned good explanation as to why the Containment Fleet has been denied its right to destroy that ship.’ Tanek’s jaw was so tight that it was aching.

‘All in good time. You have nothing to fear from the Accursed Eternity. At least… not at this moment.’

At that statement, Tanek did turn. His dark eyes were blazing with fury.

‘The Star Dragons fear nothing.’

‘Perhaps that will change.’

The inquisitor would not be drawn any further and he was led to the strategium in stormy silence. As he entered, Iakodos rose from his seat in a show of respect for a servant of the Inquisition. His calm gaze took in the inquisitor and his lackeys, seemingly without interest. Remigius considered Iakodos with equal attention. The Chaplain was shaven-haired and otherwise entirely unremarkable in appearance. Had it not been for the varicoloured las-tattooed dragon scales on the left side of his face and neck, he would have looked like nearly every other Adeptus Astartes Chaplain he had ever come into contact with.

‘Chaplain Hetor Iakodos.’ There was a reverence in the inquisitor’s tone that he certainly hadn’t demonstrated to either of the two captains, and Khorvash’s eyebrows lifted curiously. ‘The pleasure is mine, I’m sure.’

‘Inquisitor.’ Iakodos returned the greeting in a similarly polite manner, echoing that of his captain. ‘Welcome aboard the Ladon.’

The formalities over, Tanek indicated all present to be seated. Remigius’s retinue continued to fuss around him, but the inquisitor merely dismissed them with a wave of his hand. They retired to just outside the strategium.

The inquisitor leaned back in the oversized chair, which had been designed for a warrior more than twice his size. ‘I will dispense with pleasantries and get straight to the point.’ Leaning forwards on the table, he steepled his fingers beneath his chin and let his gaze wander from captain to captain, and then to the Chaplain. ‘Historically, the Accursed Eternity has only remained visible for a few hours, enough time to sow its seeds of discord. However, this time…’ His smile was unnerving. There was something reminiscent of a predator in it. ‘This time, it has remained for longer than usual and we cannot possibly afford to turn down the opportunity that presents.’

‘Opportunity?’ It was Iakodos who asked the question and Tanek was content to let the Chaplain take the floor. ‘Since we have been ordered not to destroy it, perhaps you would care to elaborate on what such an opportunity might be?’

‘Of course, my dear Iakodos – you don’t mind if I use your name in this way, do you? Or would you prefer to be addressed by your full title?’ Iakodos tilted his head in a gesture that suggested he did not particularly care either way, so the inquisitor continued. ‘I plan a mission aboard the Accursed Eternity. My order has come into possession of vital information concerning its origins and how to end its threat.’

‘And what relevance does that have to my Containment Fleet?’ Tanek asked softly.

‘Containment Fleet Kappa is made up of loyal and noble warriors of the Adeptus Astartes. Fine, upstanding representations of your great brotherhood. You are… uniquely placed to give me the assistance I require.’

‘You want protection.’ Tanek’s expression did not change one bit.

‘So simple. I could not have put it better myself.’ The inquisitor rubbed the palms of his hands together. ‘Yes, indeed. I want protection. I must travel to the Accursed Eternity and deal with the threat, but I must ask for your assistance in this matter.’

‘Ask?’ Tanek’s brow rose. ‘That is not something you usually do, Remigius.’

‘I am pleased that you remember the tenets of my order, Captain Tanek. I have the decree here if you wish to check it?’ Remigius took out a data-slate and offered it to the captain, who ignored it in favour of staring at the inquisitor.

‘If we do not agree?’

‘I believe you will find that you are not in a position to refuse my request.’ Remigius’s smile could have frozen oceans. ‘Or have you forgotten the terms of the agreement we made the last time we met?’

‘No, inquisitor. I have not forgotten.’

There was a long pause, before Iakodos spoke. ‘What is the nature of this vessel? What would we expect if we were to travel across to it with you?’

‘Trials that will test the very depths of even your faith, Chaplain.’

‘I will ignore that slur.’

‘None was intended. My research leads me to believe that what we might face on board the Accursed Eternity will test and try you to the very limits of your undoubtedly considerable resolve. A challenge? Yes, I think so. But one which I am sure you are more than capable of meeting.’

Remigius got to his feet and moved down the table until he was standing before a viewport, staring out into the darkness of space. ‘Agree to aid me and I will consider the debt the Star Dragons Chapter owes to the Ordo Malleus paid in full. We will wipe the slate clean, to coin an old Terran turn of phrase.’

Khorvash looked curiously at the two Star Dragons in response to this, but no explanation was forthcoming. The Blood Swords captain sensed that here was another matter into which he should not pry, so he remained silent. In the pit of his stomach, an unprecedented sense of paranoia began to squirm. It could not be denied that there was a history between the inquisitor and his cousins of the Star Dragons.

Was there more to the Star Dragons’ eagerness to serve alongside the Blood Swords?

As quickly as the thought surfaced, Khorvash chased it down. He had come to like Tanek in the time the two captains had spent together. He could not imagine for one moment that the Star Dragons were acting as some kind of intermediary between a penitent Chapter and the Inquisition. Coupled with the obvious rage that the Chaplain was keeping under control, it was a foolish thought and Khorvash forced himself to purge it from his mind.

Tanek shook his head and spoke, breaking the Blood Sword’s train of thought. ‘No. I cannot agree to this. I would have the truth of it before I commit my forces to anything, inquisitor.’

‘The truth of it. Oh, you shall have the truth of it.’ Without turning to face the Space Marines at the table, the inquisitor seemed to consider his words for a while. When he did finally turn around, his expression had lost its former arrogance and there was an earnest honesty there for all to see.

‘The Accursed Eternity is what can best be termed as a daemon-ship, though that is a crude description and not one which fully conveys its true nature…’

The admission provoked an immediate response from Khorvash, who bounded to his feet, hand on the hilt of the ceremonial sword he wore belted at the waist of his tunic. His voice boomed around the strategium, echoing against the plain walls and bouncing back to them. ‘Then we should bring an end to its unholy existence! Containment Fleet Kappa is strong enough to obliterate the thing. It will take no effort at all on our part to destroy it.’

‘Sit down, Captain Khorvash.’ Remigius looked up at the eager warrior with an air of superiority. ‘If you open fire on the Accursed Eternity, it will end the same way it has done for so many other servants of the Imperium across the years – in your destruction and in the ship’s inevitable re-appearance once again. It is not something that can be purged through the crude and conventional methods your fleet would employ.’

Khorvash bristled and Tanek laid a hand on his forearm. The Blood Sword took his seat again, but his face was creased in a scowl.

Remigius nodded gravely. ‘I’m glad that you feel so strongly about the level of threat this craft possesses, Captain Khorvash, and your enthusiasm is to be commended. Such an attitude will prove invaluable in aiding me to eliminate its threat once and for all. To defeat the Accursed Eternity, it will be necessary for me to exorcise the daemon bound at its heart. My order has granted me the means and the method to accomplish just that. What I do not have – and where I must look to you – is the might. Spare me a number of your warriors, ensure my safe arrival at the machine’s core, and you will see this evil banished once and for all.’

Iakodos was watching the inquisitor carefully. There was complete honesty in the man’s tone, in the stance he had adopted and in the words he was speaking, and yet he still sensed that the entire truth was being withheld. It was nothing he could explain beyond a gut instinct; he was no psyker.

‘That is all you require of us? A bodyguard detail?’

‘That is all. I do not ask for your Librarians or your Chapter champions. I ask merely for a reasonable detachment of men to ensure that I arrive alive to carry out my task.’ The inquisitor looked from Khorvash to Tanek and back again. ‘It can do neither of your respective Chapters any harm at all to grant me this boon. Tanek’s debt will be wiped out and Khorvash will earn great respect for the Blood Swords, which will go a long way to restoring a gravely tarnished reputation. These are worthy rewards in themselves, are they not?’

‘Are there not other Adeptus Astartes brothers whose skills are more suited to dealing with such situations?’

‘There are, of course. However, the more – how shall we say – the more militant wing of my order does not have a presence in the Balanor system. The Star Dragons and Blood Swords however…’ His smile would perhaps have been considered charming by some, but not by the Adeptus Astartes who saw nothing on the inquisitor’s face but slyness and the half-truth that Iakodos had noted. ‘The Accursed Eternity is a difficult problem. It comes and goes without any pattern. There is no way we can predict when it will arrive and I have to use any and all tools at my disposal when it does.’

Khorvash’s scowl had not lessened any, and he traced idle patterns on the surface of the table with one finger whilst he studied Remigius. ‘Our numbers are low already, Tanek,’ he said after a few moments of silence. ‘But if you agree to this, I would be able to spare at least one squad for such a task. Sergeant Ardashir and his men would be the perfect choice.’

‘I would not ask for more from you, my friend,’ came the reply. ‘The Star Dragons can spare two Scales at least. The Blood Swords need to retain their numbers. All the while you are unable to recruit to your number…’ He did not continue. He did not need to, and he trusted enough to their friendship that Khorvash would not take offence.

‘I will go also,’ interjected Iakodos. ‘If this daemonic entity is truly as challenging as the inquisitor suggests, then they will need reminders of their faith.’

Tanek eyed the inquisitor. ‘Thirty battle-brothers and the Chaplain. More than generous, I think you will agree. Is this acceptable?’

‘More than generous.’ Remigius dropped into a low bow that showed great deference, although all three Adeptus Astartes could not help but consider it slightly sarcastic.

‘I tell you this now, Remigius,’ Tanek said in a low and dangerous voice. ‘The first hint that you have betrayed us will lead to consequences far beyond those you believe us capable of.’

‘I speak only the truth, captain.’

Aye, Tanek thought. Only the truth you think we need to know, though.

II

It continued on its aimless course, drifting through the void of space, and made no attempt to attack or impede the boarding torpedoes in any way at all. Even when they connected with the Accursed Eternity and the grinding teeth chewed into its hull, there was no response. The ship was, to all intents and purposes, dead.

Chaplain Iakodos stepped out of the nose of the first torpedo, already wearing his distinctive skull-helm. An exquisite cloak, hand-stitched by Chapter-serfs from the skins of the reptilian draconae of the Chapter’s home world, Draconith, fluttered behind him. As thick as chainmail and gleaming iridescent in the half-light, the cloak was a valuable Chapter artefact and as much a mark of Iakodos’s office as the crozius arcanum in his hand.

Iakodos looked around at the interior of the so-called daemon-ship. Its emergency lights were at their lowest possible ebb and the sensors in his helm adjusted accordingly. Temperature sensors registered at almost freezing.

Behind the sergeants, Inquisitor Remigius stepped out of the torpedo. A tiny figure next to the assembled Space Marines, he was wearing a thick robe and cloak that he pulled around himself with a shiver. The rebreather mask covering most of his face rendered his expression impossible to gauge.

Sergeant Korydon of the Star Dragons Third Scale squad and his counterpart, Sergeant Evander of Ninth Scale, resplendent in their royal blue battle-plate, had been mustered for the expedition. A squad of crimson-clad Blood Swords who had been assembled under the command of Sergeant Ardashir joined them once the second boarding torpedo opened to let them out.

Iakodos watched as Korydon gathered the warriors together and further noted the way in which he eyed the inquisitor with caution. As the senior sergeant present, the overall command of the military detail had fallen to him and the Chaplain was well aware that he had been subjected to a private briefing from Captain Tanek before they had departed the Ladon.

The three sergeants had not yet put on their helms and their breath ghosted in front of their faces as they called their squads to order. Korydon considered Ardashir carefully. Whilst there was an undoubted kinship between the two Chapters, he had never personally fought alongside Ardashir and had no idea of the other’s capabilities. The Blood Swords warrior had initially shown some resistance to the idea of deferring command to a sergeant of the Star Dragons, but a word from Khorvash had silenced his complaints.

Like his captain, Ardashir seemed eager and energetic, a trait that both Korydon and Iakodos found pleasing. He rallied his squad with ease and they responded to his softly-voiced commands without hesitation, presenting a professional, efficient and well-ordered front. The Blood Swords had a good reputation on the field of battle. In the best possible way, Korydon fervently hoped that it would not be put to the test.

His own squad, Third Scale, and Evander’s Ninth were standing ready, their bolters slowly panning left and right to cover the gloomy corridor into which they had emerged. Iakodos walked amongst the Star Dragons first, laying his hand on shoulders and speaking words of benediction and cleansing in a clear voice.

‘The Blood Swords are ready for your command, Sergeant Korydon,’ Ardashir said, and there was nothing but respect in his tone. Iakodos nodded in approval. Whatever disgruntlement Ardashir had known before departure had evidently been set aside in favour of duty.

‘Very good.’ Pulling his helm on over his close crop of fair hair, Korydon turned to Remigius. ‘Inquisitor, this is your mission. We are here to guide and support you if it is needed.’

‘Oh, it will be needed, Sergeant Korydon. It’s not a question of “if” but rather “when”. Ensure your men are prepared to handle anything that they encounter… It will not all be corporeal.’ The inquisitor’s musical voice, muffled by the mask across his face, carried through the silence of the ship. ‘Our targets are the enginarium and the bridge; the daemonic heart of this ship is most likely to be situated in one of these locations.’

‘Most likely?’ Korydon snorted. ‘That is a little vague, inquisitor.’

‘The activities of daemons do not conform to any sort of exact science, Sergeant Korydon. Guard your temper. Your impatience won’t serve you well in this situation…’

Iakodos had watched the exchange silently, his eyes unseen behind his skull mask, but at Remigius’s statement he stepped forwards, his hands raised, one palm directed at the man and another at the warrior. His face was hidden but his manner was clear.

‘Peace, Brother-Sergeant Korydon. Carry yourself with decorum.’ Korydon turned his face away from the Chaplain and Iakodos noted the tell-tale clenching of his fists. ‘Mark my words, inquisitor.’ Iakodos’s gravel tones rumbled, made inhuman by the helm he wore. ‘All of the battle-brothers here assembled attended me in the chapel before we were despatched. Their faith is as strong as it ever was and as their guide in all matters of a spiritual nature, I see no reason to doubt them.’ He turned to the others. ‘Trust in the words and the litanies we shared before we left, brothers. Trust in the Emperor and trust in the warrior beside you, and we will end this threat to the Imperium forever.’

Several of the warriors made the sign of the aquila at Iakodos’s words. Korydon shrugged slightly, then shouldered his bolter and turned to Remigius. His expressionless helmet lenses fixed on the inquisitor giving away nothing of his thoughts or feelings. His voice, when he spoke, was composed and neutral.

‘Lead on, inquisitor,’ he said. ‘We have your back.’

It became swiftly apparent to all of the Space Marines and their human charge that the Accursed Eternity was devoid of any signs of life. There was no indication of any sort of battle that had ended lives. No bloodstains, no tell-tale scorch marks that would suggest gunfire. There was simply nothing.

‘It is as though the ship just came from the shipyards,’ observed Evander across the vox. ‘It is… pristine. Untouched.’ His words were accurate. There was a shining newness about the walls of the corridors through which they walked. The clean, desolate halls of the ship made it seem slightly unreal; something about it didn’t feel right. Not one of them could fully explain what they meant but the feeling, it seemed, was universal.

Evander received no reply, but one or two of the warriors nodded agreement, Evander having merely put into words what they were all feeling. After some time, Brother Mehrak offered up a further and decidedly hesitant opinion, his words carefully chosen and tinged with doubt.

‘If someone wanted to recreate the interior of an Imperial ship but did not quite know how to apply the wear and tear of age and use, it would look just like this.’ He laughed without humour. ‘My apologies, brothers. That is fanciful and ridiculous to even consider.’

‘There is nothing to apologise for, Blood Sword. You are merely expressing your thoughts on the matter. Do not feel that you cannot do that. Do not hesitate to externalise your feelings in this place, brother,’ said Iakodos without turning to look at the warrior. ‘The inquisitor has suggested that this is a ship that has been taken by daemonic powers. None of us here can truly comprehend what they may or may not be capable of. Better by far to say what your concerns are than to brood upon them.’

‘It feels and looks real enough. Although given its nature, it is hard to believe that it is anything but an illusion. Something woven from warp-stuff. A fragment of the immaterium.’ Evander gave a light chuckle. ‘Fanciful, I know.’

‘Be reassured, sergeant. The Accursed Eternity most definitely exists.’ Remigius’s voice cut across the vox conversations. ‘Its machine spirit has been broken and compromised, but it exists nonetheless. It is solid and very real. The fact that it continues to exist despite the best efforts of the Imperium is why we are here.’

They continued down the corridor in silence, the only sounds those of the booted feet of the Space Marines ringing out on the decking, the constant hum of their energy packs and the occasional creaking of a joint of power armour. Iakodos moved down the corridor at the back of the assembled squads, his cloak billowing as he walked. He too felt the discomfort that the nature of the ship was instilling in the others.

‘He does not know where he is leading us.’ The Chaplain glanced sharply at Korydon who had seemingly switched to a private vox-channel. ‘I am no psyker, but I sense that our charge is more than a little anxious.’

‘Patience, brother. I appreciate your own need for haste, but we need to let this situation play out however it will.’

‘He does not know where we will find our enemy, Chaplain. How can we believe in his claim that he knows how to deal with it?’

Iakodos was robbed of his chance to reply as, without warning, Remigius came to an abrupt halt at a junction in the corridor. It was only because Korydon had ensured a respectful distance that the inquisitor wasn’t trampled by three squads of Adeptus Astartes.

‘Here is where we make a choice,’ the inquisitor said, looking first one way and then another down the corridors that intersected their current path. ‘The enginarium or the bridge.’

‘There. You see what I mean? I rest my case.’ Korydon’s frustration was wearing and decidedly uncharacteristic. Iakodos scowled beneath the skull-helm and spoke aloud.

‘How certain are you that we will find what we seek in either of these places, inquisitor?’

‘As certain as I can be, Chaplain.’

Despite the inquisitor’s confidence, Iakodos recognised tell-tale signs of uncertainty: a slight tremor to the voice, a brief clasping of the hands.

‘Perhaps…’ For the first time, there was genuine hesitation in Remigius’s manner. ‘Perhaps we could consider splitting our efforts?’

‘It is not an ideal solution, inquisitor, and given what you have told us about this ship I cannot say that I approve of the idea of isolating a squad from the others.’

‘It would certainly speed this process up, Chaplain.’ Korydon stepped forwards. ‘We can stay in constant communication and, if necessary, the squads can join back up.’

‘The final say is yours, sergeant. You have command of this mission.’ Iakodos stepped back again. Despite his seniority in years, he deferred easily to the sergeant’s command.

Korydon raised a gauntleted hand and rubbed it against the jaw of his helm. His red lenses stared down the corridor ahead, first to the left and then the right. The same featureless white expanse met his gaze wherever he looked. He came to a decision.

‘Third Scale, we will head for the bridge and make an assessment of the area. Evander, you take Ninth and Sergeant Ardashir. Stay with the inquisitor.’ There was a heavy emphasis on the final command and Evander nodded his compliance.

‘We will move towards the command deck,’ Korydon confirmed, his tone forceful and compelling. ‘We will remain in constant contact and in the event that we run into difficulties, or if you require our extra support, we will fall back to this position and reunite our forces.’

Third Scale moved apart from the others and gathered at the head of the right-hand corridor. Iakodos switched to the private channel again.

‘This is a rash decision, sergeant, and one that seems ill-advised in this environment. I will come with you.’

‘It is my decision to make, Chaplain. And no, you must remain with the inquisitor. I apologise for speaking so of one of the Ordo Malleus, but I do not trust him. You need to be with him. Those were Captain Tanek’s express orders. He did not require the rest of us to be present, however.’

Iakodos clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. ‘Very well, sergeant. As you command. Keep your faith strong, Brother Korydon. Keep your wits about you and heed your own warnings about falling back if you encounter difficulties.’

‘I will, Chaplain. Fire and fury.’

‘Fire and fury, brother.’

The two Space Marines clasped arms in a warrior’s grip and, without another word, Third Scale peeled off from the main group and turned right down the corridor junction. Iakodos had no doubt that they were strong, faithful souls to a man and that they would cope with anything that might be thrown at them, but he still felt a creeping unease at their forces having been split.

‘Sergeant Evander… We are now under your command, I believe.’

‘Yes, Chaplain.’ Evander nodded and moved ahead of the inquisitor, leading the larger of the two battle forces left towards the enginarium.

As they walked, the corridor began to take a slight slope downwards. Iakodos considered again Evander’s words from earlier. There was something fundamentally unreal about the design of the ship’s interior. There should have been more bulkheads, more doors barring their passage, but there was nothing but the seemingly endless white corridors. The Chaplain laid his hand against the wall and could not even feel a distant vibration from the ship’s engines. The sensors in his gauntlet returned no movement, and as he passed his hand across the wall it seemed smooth and almost frictionless. No casting or welding lumps or rivets, just a stark, sterile surface.

‘This vessel is dead,’ he observed. ‘I have never been aboard a ship that is so utterly devoid of life and soul.’

He would learn, to his great cost, that the Accursed Eternity was anything but dead.

Korydon strode ahead with great purpose. He had felt the unease of his battle-brothers from the moment they had exited the boarding torpedo. It was an unease he shared and the urge to complete this duty and return to the Ladon was strong. He had disliked the inquisitor from the moment they had met and felt a certain sense of relief now that he was out of the man’s presence. Since they had boarded, a niggling voice at the back of his skull had tried to convince him that were they to lose the inquisitor, it would be no tragedy.

‘What exactly is it that we are seeking, sergeant?’ Arion asked. This corridor, like the embarkation one along which they had previously been walking, was spartan and empty.

‘Anything at all would be a start,’ muttered Tylissus. This drew a hesitant chuckle from Third Scale and even Korydon cracked a brief smile beneath his helm.

‘Have you ever known anything like this place?’ Tylissus continued, the bemusement in his voice expressing what Korydon suspected all of them felt. ‘When we were told this was a daemon-ship, I expected some sort of engagement the moment we set foot on the deck. Not this endless nothing. Is it possible, do you think, that the inquisitor is wrong in his assessment?’

‘I do not know, Tylissus,’ replied Korydon thoughtfully. ‘It is more than evident that this ship is not normal. But like you, I wonder exactly what it is we should expect. I feel this sense of…’ He trailed off, unable to articulate the feelings he had. It was almost like a premonition of what was to come, but that was impossible. He was a warrior. He did not have precognitive powers. ‘A sense of discomfort.’ It was a pitiful word compared to the depth of feeling he described, but it was the best he could manage. ‘If the inquisitor asserts that this is a daemon-ship then who am I to question that?’

A daemon-ship. Korydon let out a soft snort of derisive laughter. He didn’t know what he had been expecting either. Certainly not metre after metre of expansive, clinically white corridors. Perhaps he had been anticipating attacks from misshapen warp entities. Perhaps he had been expecting the walls of the ship to be oozing ichor and blood…

The thought dissolved into the ether and he shook himself. Fanciful, foolish thinking that had no place in the head of an Adeptus Astartes sergeant. ‘Move onwards,’ he ordered, waving with his bolter. Best to leave such ridiculous and fantastical imaginings to others. He could not allow such things to taint his duty.

He abandoned the thought and the Star Dragons continued forwards. In the wake of their passage, something held onto the ethereal wisp of Korydon’s abandoned idea. With an inhuman appetite, it devoured what it needed to give itself the strength to take form. It had been left starving for so many years that the single thread of imagination was a veritable banquet. It was gorged upon and fed the invisible horrors of the Accursed Eternity. When it had finished, it wanted more.

There was a saying from Old Terra that held truth in this place. Careless talk, so the saying went, costs lives.

The future began to shape itself. In the corridor behind Third Scale, a dark and viscous fluid began to seep slowly from the walls, going entirely unnoticed by the Space Marines as they passed.

‘The corridor is all wrong.’

The Chaplain’s observation put into words what all present were thinking. They had marched for far too long down the endless white hallway and there was no sign of its end. There had been nothing but the unblemished walls and the sound of their feet on the decking. Iakodos moved ahead a few more metres and, utilising the sensors in his helm, scanned ahead down the corridor. He focused his attention on the relevant readout, but there seemed to be something preventing the runes from giving him a fixed response. The numbers flickered and changed repeatedly.

‘Look, there.’ Ardashir stepped forwards. There was a hint of anxiety in his voice and the Chaplain watched him sharply. He looked to see what it was that the Blood Sword indicated.

‘I moved too close to the wall and made a mark just like that when we took the corridor from the crossroads,’ he said. The scrape mark of red armour on the wall of the corridor was almost like a smear of blood. ‘It must be a coincidence.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure, sergeant,’ murmured Remigius. Iakodos turned to look at him. His words sent a muttered ripple of uncertainty through the Space Marines.

‘Are you suggesting that we are trapped in this corridor?’ Ardashir stared down at the inquisitor. ‘That we will not be able to find our way out of it?’

‘I’m suggesting that there is a possibility the daemon at the heart of this ship is utilising the opportunity to play with us. Chaplain Iakodos, you need to ensure your brothers’ faith remains strong. If they begin to doubt, then we will be lost.’

‘We need to keep moving,’ interrupted Evander. ‘But to give us a clearer idea, let us be certain of what we are dealing with, shall we?’ With a metallic screech, he dragged the forearm of his armour in a cross-stroke over the red mark, adding a blue stripe to the marking on the wall. With caution, they proceeded down the corridor.

It took them barely five minutes to return to the red and blue mark on the wall.

‘It was no coincidence, then.’ Ardashir slammed his balled fist into the wall in frustration. ‘We are trapped.’

‘Movement up ahead.’ The snapped announcement from Evander drew Iakodos’s attention and he brought his crozius up automatically, ready for an attack. Evander’s bolter was brought to bear and he pointed directly down the tunnel. The Chaplain followed the line of the sergeant’s gun and stiffened slightly as he too caught the motion. Again, his helm refused to feed him any data.

Evander took a few steps forwards, then halted, raising his bolter again. ‘Moving towards us. Something… A lone figure. A huge form. Adeptus Astartes size at least.’ A thought came to him and he activated his vox-bead.

‘Third Scale, report in. Korydon, do you have any sort of visual contact?’

‘Negative. We have found nothing at all, brother. Is there a problem?’

‘Nothing we cannot handle.’ Evander cut the link and ratcheted the slide on his bolter. Without needing to speak the command, the entire squad, with the Blood Swords close behind, began to move to contact.

The route to the bridge was remarkably uneventful for Third Scale. Apart from the single vox communication from Evander, there had been nothing to break the monotony of their investigation. They had reached a half-open bulkhead door that two of them were able to easily breach and had left the corridor behind.

Korydon’s unease had not left him, however. Periodically, he had experienced the sense of shadows moving just out of the corner of his eye and had paused in his stride to turn his bolter towards something that only he could see. His behaviour was starting to cause similar actions amongst the rest of Third Scale and he silently berated himself.

On leaving the bulkhead, they had entered a darker and much lower corridor with side rooms leading from it. Each of the Adeptus Astartes had to hunch slightly in order to fit their massive bulk into it. It was a puzzle and nothing at all like the layout of a strike cruiser that they had come to expect. The air was hazy and particles of dust twinkled in the light cast from the lumen-globes mounted on the walls.

Inhaling briefly, Korydon caught the faintest hint of an aroma carried in the air. He could not quite identify it, however, and dismissed it as nothing more than stale air of an aeons-old ship. It was a musty scent, something that reminded him of the Librarium back home on Dracolith where the precious, ancient tomes of generations long past stood in preservative stasis bubbles.

‘Old books,’ supplied Tylissus. Korydon turned to him, both surprised and suspicious that the warrior had just voiced the very thought he had been harbouring.

‘What?’

‘It smells like old books in here,’ replied Tylissus, crouching low enough to peer in through one of the side rooms. It was empty but for a small cot in the corner of the room and several small piles of dust on the floor. He straightened up again and moved to look at the room radiating off on the opposite side. The same picture met him there.

‘Why would it smell like old books?’ It was a rhetorical question and Korydon got no response. ‘More to the point, why is this ship laid out in such a bizarre way?’

‘These may be the serfs’ quarters. Or may once have been,’ offered one of the squad, and Korydon nodded slowly. It made some sense that that might be the case; after all, the human element of a fleet’s complement did not require accommodation on the same scale as the massive post-humans.

‘Check all of these side rooms, then we press onwards to the bridge,’ he ordered. Hunkering to a crouch, he scooped up a handful of the dust on the floor. It had a faint ochre cast to it, almost as though it was rusted metal that had simply crumbled into its component atoms.

He watched it thoughtfully as it trickled to the ground between the fingers of his gauntleted hand. It was fine and powdery and had he not been wearing his helm, which filtered the air to keep it passably breathable, he would have inhaled it with every lungful of oxygen he took.

Korydon rubbed the dust between the fingers of his gauntlet, noting how it stained the blue ceramite with its ochre shade. Tylissus, who had completed his sweep of the side room, moved to stand beside him.

‘I am going to take a guess that all this dust might well be whatever is left of the former crew,’ he suggested in a low tone.

The sergeant looked up at him and then back down at the dust. There was something unpleasant about the thought. He had stalked amongst the eviscerated and beheaded dead on battlefields like a spectre of death and had never felt revulsion. But to think that the very air he was breathing was filled with desiccated remains made Korydon wrinkle his nose in disgust.

He got back to his feet and absently wiped his gauntlet down the length of his thigh, leaving a red streak.

When the squad reassembled they confirmed that there was nothing to be found within the side rooms at all. Korydon had expected nothing less and so this came as no real surprise to him.

Before he could give the order to press on, something caught his attention: a strange movement from out of the corner of his left eye. He turned to face the wall and recoiled as a thick trickle of blood began to run down its length. It dribbled its way in a perfectly straight line to the floor and then, incredibly, began creeping along its length, through the dust, towards the gathered Space Marines.

He stepped back into two battle-brothers who were standing directly behind him and with a loud clatter of armour, they crashed unceremoniously into the wall.

‘Sergeant?’ Tylissus was alert instantly, his blade unsheathed and at the ready. ‘What is it?’

‘There!’ Korydon pointed at the rivulet of ichor that had been oozing towards them. Only when he looked back, there was nothing there.

Tylissus looked. He shook his head and Korydon momentarily tasted shame.

‘My apologies, brothers. I thought I saw…’ He shook his head and gave a gruff, humourless laugh. ‘Nothing. My mistake. Something in this place is attempting to get to me. We press on.’

That was when the whispering started; and it was not just confined to the interior of Korydon’s skull. Wordless noises that ranged between hissing and cackling laughter reverberated throughout the small chamber. Every weapon came to the fore and every Star Dragons warrior tensed ready for an ambush that didn’t come.

The noise built to a crescendo, an almost deafening roar of sound that filled the densely packed room in which the Adeptus Astartes stood. Then the first of the figures rose from the dust on the ground. Coalescing with alarming speed, the ash flowed into a solid figure that was humanoid in shape but featureless. It wavered for a few seconds, tipping this way and that, balancing itself. Eventually it ceased its rocking motion and stopped dead.

A hideous gash split its head almost in two in a horrendous parody of a mouth. It held out a hand towards the Space Marines, a finger creating itself particle by painstaking particle. The digit extended and pointed towards Korydon.

You die now.

The words entered every battle-brother’s mind though none had been spoken, and Korydon waited no longer.

‘We will not,’ he replied, squeezing the trigger of his bolter. The shell lodged in the torso of the dust-thing, and it dipped its head to look at it. The slit mashed itself together and with creeping horror, Korydon got the uncanny sense that it was laughing. It raised its head again.

You die now.

Seconds later, it detonated. The ash exploded outwards, showering the squad in red dust and eliminating the creature. Only now more of them were appearing, flowing upwards into the same humanoid form.

They inched forwards slowly as though movement itself was a difficult task. Korydon destroyed two more before bellowing the order to move through the chamber and leave through the other door. In short order, they were surrounded on all sides by the creeping wraiths. Bolt shells either passed through them or destroyed them in the way that Korydon’s shots had with the first.

The creatures made no attempt to attack, merely continuing their slow approach towards the gathered Space Marines. They were silent but for the whispering sound that their movement generated. No more verbal threats came from them, but their very presence was menacing enough.

Arion brought his bolter up again as another creature moved towards him and let a shell loose. It disintegrated his would-be attacker and his entire suit of power armour was covered from head to foot in a layer of the fine dust. In a powdered rush, it poured through the grille of his helm. Much was instantly filtered out, but caught unaware by the suddenness of it, Arion was unable to activate the armour sealing around his grille. He swallowed a mouthful of the sediment whole.

Doubling over, he retched violently, even as his Adeptus Astartes physiology kicked in to deal with the foreign contaminant he had ingested.

Korydon cast him a sideways glance. ‘Are you all right, brother?’

Arion put a hand up as though to wave away Korydon’s concern and nodded his head vigorously. A few brief moments passed before he was back upright, defending himself once again.

Another creature exploded, then another… until the air of the chamber was filled with a cloying, obfuscating haze. Still the dust creatures made no apparent attempt to attack; they merely moved closer and closer. Then something inexplicable happened. Each one of the creatures threw its head back in a silent scream.

The whispering seemed to grow to a long, sibilant hiss. And then there was silence, and a huge puff of fresh dust as every last one of the creatures simply lost its animation. As one, they broke into a million specks which drifted lazily to the floor, swiftly coating it once again in an ochre carpet.

It had gone.

Whatever it was that Evander had spotted moving at the end of the corridor, it had vanished completely by the time the two squads and the inquisitor had reached the spot where it had been. It had, however, led them to a locked bulkhead, something they had not seen for the entirety of the time they had been aboard this foul vessel.

‘Ninth, this is Korydon. We have just encountered–’

The vox-transmission crackled and distorted, then broke off briefly. When it came back, there was doubt in Korydon’s voice. ‘We have just encountered something. I cannot be more specific than that, but whatever it was seems to have retreated for now.’

‘Any injuries, brother-sergeant?’ Iakodos asked the question and received a reply in the negative.

‘None, Chaplain. We will continue proceeding to the bridge, but we have received our first proof that this ship is definitely not dead. Recommend extreme caution for all. Whatever has control of this vessel must surely know of our presence. We will check in regularly. Any contacts to report?’

‘I thought…’ Evander began, then shook his head. ‘Nothing, Kor. I will keep you appraised of the situation.’

‘Understood.’

Korydon broke off the transmission. Evander released a mag-clamp that held a melta charge to his armour and made to begin setting it against the door. The Chaplain laid a hand on his arm and shook his head almost imperceptibly. Turning to the inquisitor, Iakodos stared down at the human through the red eye lenses of his skull-helm. When he spoke there was a carefully measured level of threat implicit in his tone.

‘Inquisitor Remigius, it is my belief that you have been withholding vital information from us regarding the nature of this vessel. If you wish for us to offer further aid and assistance to you, then you will tell us all that you know. Should you refuse to do so, then I will open a channel to Sergeant Korydon and advise him that we are aborting this mission.’

‘You don’t need to fear–’

‘Hold your wrath, sergeant.’ Iakodos was forced to put up a restraining arm to stop Evander from reaching for Remigius. ‘Inquisitor, please refrain from insulting my brothers. We are not demonstrating fear in this matter. Rather, consider that we are exercising extreme caution. You have not been truthful with us. It does not make for a conducive relationship. You can rectify that quite easily.’

‘There is no need to speak to me as though I were one of your flock, Chaplain Iakodos,’ countered the inquisitor in his irritatingly superior tone. ‘I haven’t strayed from the path of true faith. There is no need whatsoever for you to lecture me on the error of my ways and insist upon guiding me back onto the straight and narrow. I probably have more faith in my body and mind than this entire contingent has put together.’

They were near blasphemous words, and brave ones for a lone inquisitor surrounded by twenty Space Marines to utter. Perhaps it was the realisation of this fact – possibly combined with the suddenness with which the circle around him closed ever so slightly – that made Remigius snarl suddenly.

‘Very well,’ he snapped. ‘The practical truth of the matter is this; I must get to the daemon in control of this ship so that I may speak the words and perform the rites necessary to banish it back to the darkness from whence it crawled. This sword…’ He rested his hand on the hilt of the weapon poking from the finely tooled leather scabbard he wore at his waist. ‘This is a weapon wrought for the destruction of the ancient evil that beats at the heart of this vessel. Hundreds have toiled in the course of its creation and hundreds more have been sacrificed to ensure its purity.’

With a flourish, he drew the sword from its scabbard and lay the flat of the blade against his forearm to show it to Iakodos. Gothic script looped its entire length, delicate and ornate. The litanies and the finely forged blade itself crackled with barely contained power. Remigius studied it with a strangely thoughtful expression on his thin face. ‘Many of my own people have died so that I might stand before you now and show you the fruit of their labours. They were, in a sense, my battle-brothers. I owe it to the memory of their names to complete their work.’

The inquisitor looked at Iakodos, who was quietly impressed despite himself. ‘You understand that, don’t you, Chaplain?’

‘I do, inquisitor. Very well, we will proceed. But I ask that you refrain from antagonising my brethren. There is no place for more tension on this mission.’

‘Sergeant! Look at that!’

The call came from a brother of the Blood Swords squad who had been standing behind the inquisitor. He pointed with his bolter to the wall opposite. Where once there had been clinically white, featureless walls of no character, there was now a creeping, spreading line of corrosion. It began where the wall met the floor and was moving slowly but perceptibly upwards in spidery lines. Where it touched the substance of the wall, the pure white surface was visibly ageing, tarnishing before their eyes as though centuries of erosion were occurring in but a few seconds. The sterile coating of the corridor’s walls flaked into little piles on the ground, and as the assembly watched the process, the lines seemed less like cracking, breaking metal and more like veins spreading across the skin of the ship.

A twisted smile flickered over Remigius’s face and he sheathed the sword once again. ‘Behold,’ he said softly. ‘The taint revealed. The presence of this weapon brings out the daemon’s disquietude. Open the bulkhead, Sergeant Evander. We must hurry.’

All the earlier rage at the inquisitor seemed to be forgotten as the sergeant, with the aid of two more Space Marines, began to prime the melta charges.

‘What can we expect to deal with once we pass through this door, inquisitor? What do you know of the nature of this daemon?’ Iakodos kept his voice so low and calm that he seemed to be holding nothing but a normal conversation.

Cold, hard eyes looked up at the Chaplain and Remigius shook his head. ‘If I knew that, Star Dragon, I could prepare you. Simply… be prepared. It is the best I can offer you. Be assured though that once this deed is done, the name of your Chapter and that of the Blood Swords will be elevated to a position of reverence amongst the Ordo Malleus.’

Aye, Iakodos thought as the party moved back out of the detonation zone. Whether we want that dubious honour or not.

III

‘All is well here. No further incursions.’

Korydon reported back to Evander and got nothing but a burst of static in response. ‘Arion,’ he said without turning. ‘Keep trying to raise Ninth.’

‘Aye, brother.’ Arion dropped back from his position at Korydon’s side and quietly began repeating his sergeant’s words on various vox frequencies.

Not for Third Scale the creeping repugnance of the ship’s inner rot. Since their encounter with the dust creatures, they had seen nothing else. The Accursed Eternity had taken on a more familiar aspect and their initial tension was beginning to lessen, although none of them were off their guard.

‘All is well here. No further incursions.’ Arion’s voice came across the vox-bead in Korydon’s ear. There had still been no response from Ninth and that bothered him greatly. A warrior of great honour and resolution, Korydon was not yet quite prepared to abandon his personal mission in favour of following Evander’s squad. The last contact they had received suggested that all was well with his brothers and this could simply be nothing more than a temporary communications glitch. He checked his retinal feeds for details on the current life signs of his distant brothers. That connection at least appeared to be working; all of Ninth Scale seemed to be at full health, their indicator runes green and solid. He did not have the data for the Blood Swords squad, but he felt confident enough that they would be fine.

‘We should reach the bridge in a few minutes,’ he said to his own squad.

There was no response.

Korydon turned around and both of his hearts leaped into his mouth. Where before there had been nine Space Marines behind him, now there was just one. Arion stood opposite him, arms hanging loosely at his side, his head tipped slightly to the right as though he were carefully considering Korydon. His posture was bizarre and for the first time Korydon feared that one of his squad had been compromised.

His squad.

‘Arion, where are the rest of the squad?’

The Space Marine took a step towards the sergeant, who immediately raised his bolter, levelling it at his battle-brother. ‘Do not make me do this, Arion,’ Korydon said. ‘We have served together for many years. But if you are compromised, you will leave me with no choice. Now answer my question. Where are Third Scale?’

Arion stopped and stared down at the black tunnel of the bolter’s muzzle. He reached up and unclamped the seals of his helm. He removed it and it clattered to the floor. Korydon stared in disbelief. Where once his brother’s battle-scarred face had been there was now nothing but shaped dust.

You die now.

Taking several steps backwards, Korydon fired his bolter at the creature that had subsumed his brother and rapidly blink-clicked through to his own squad’s health readings. Arion’s reading was wavering between solid green and a blinking amber. Something of his brother remained, but it would not last. He hurriedly assimilated the rest of the data; Third Scale were here. They were alive somewhere, but he could not see them. Repeated calls to them on the vox were returning nothing at all.

The shot he had fired had hammered into Arion’s power armour, forcing the creation to take several staggering steps backwards. But just as it had somehow inhabited Arion’s armour, so it had gained access to his weapons. With a whispering laugh that sounded like leaves rustling in the wind, it raised its own bolter and prepared to return fire on the sergeant.

Korydon felt the impact of the shell on his armour before it exploded, defacing the aquila that decorated his chest. The sergeant stumbled under the impact and received a second shot that scarred the Chapter badge on his shoulder and sent ceramite chips spinning in all directions. Another shell whistled through his field of vision and glanced off his helmet. His head jarred backwards with a crack and he raised his bolter to fire back.

You die now.

‘You first.’

‘Sergeant Evander, this is Tylissus. Sergeant Korydon and Arion… They have disappeared.’

The explosion had rocked the two squads but had performed its designated task admirably. The bulkhead door lay in molten fragments along the corridor. That the Accursed Eternity was a living ship was now a moot point. The veins of daemonic life that had begun to spread from the corridor were now threaded through the floors and ceilings. Some of them pulsed as though they carried blood through them. Ardashir had hacked into one of them with his combat knife and a sticky, tar-like ichor had oozed slowly from it. The fluid had burned a hole through the floor and the Space Marines had from that point onwards made a concerted effort to keep clear of it.

They had barely gotten through the destroyed door before Tylissus’s transmission had been received.

‘What do you mean they have “disappeared”, brother?’ Evander was already on the cusp of anger and Tylissus’s words did little to assist in the calming of his mood.

‘We were moving towards the bridge. Arion moved up to stand beside him and then they just vanished. As though they had never been here at all.’

Evander scrolled through his own data-feed and studied Third Scale’s readings. The icons for both Arion and Korydon had winked out. ‘That is impossible,’ he said, more to himself than to either Tylissus or his own group.

‘No,’ said Inquisitor Remigius. ‘No, not impossible. Highly improbable, but possible nonetheless. Daemons have abilities we can only guess at and we are deep within the realm of a powerful entity. We believe that they can create…’ He paused, attempting to draw the picture in a simple manner. It was, strangely for him, not an act of condescension, but simply because the Ordo Malleus themselves had never been able to accurately describe such activity. ‘They can create pockets in the immaterium. Places that exist outside of our awareness that allow them to move unhindered, unseen, until they desire otherwise. Perhaps the sergeant has been pulled into such a trap.’

‘How, exactly, do we undo it? How can we bring our men back?’ Evander turned on the inquisitor, his eye lenses glowing a furious red.

The inquisitor gave a helpless shrug. ‘We can’t,’ he replied. ‘If I had more of my brethren with me, perhaps we might stand a chance of performing the ritual, combining our powers with enough force to pierce this sorcery. But I don’t, and with the greatest of respect, Sergeant Evander, we don’t have the time. There is every chance that the pocket will tear at any moment and your missing men will return just as suddenly as they vanished, but whether they do or not, we have to move onwards. I’m sorry for your loss…’

This time, Iakodos was not anywhere near fast enough to prevent Evander from grabbing hold of the inquisitor. The Star Dragons sergeant slammed the old man into the wall of the ship causing the pulsing veins beneath the inquisitor’s back to throb slightly. A snaking tendril crept forwards and looked for a moment as though it would wrap itself around the man. With a swift move, one of the Blood Swords sliced at the tendril with a blade. More of the tar-like ichor pooled on the floor, sizzling gently.

Remigius laughed, a wheezing sound that suggested it was not something he did well; a sound his vocal cords were unused to making. His face twisted in a snarl and his cold eyes fixed on Evander.

‘I am an inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus, charged by the God-Emperor of Mankind with the destruction of daemons wherever I find them. You dare to lay hands on me? Release me, you barbaric fool,’ he said, wiping spittle from the corner of his mouth. ‘What good will killing me do other than to satisfy your own primitive bloodlust? Without me, Sergeant Evander, you stand no chance of getting off the Accursed Eternity.’

‘Brother.’ Iakodos moved to stand behind Evander. ‘Do as he says. Let him go.’

Evander held firm for a moment longer, then he snorted in disgust and released his grip on the inquisitor’s shoulders. Remigius fell to the floor and got back up, dusting himself off in an exaggerated fashion. Several more tendrils snaked out from the wall, but before any of the Space Marines could deal with the threat, the inquisitor had unsheathed his sword and sliced through them.

And the ship screamed. It was a horrific echo of a thousand voices shrieking in unimaginable agony. It was shrill and Iakodos felt a warm trickle from his ears beneath his helmet as blood began to drip from them. The inquisitor dropped to his knees again, doubled over with his hands clamped to his ears. The sword clattered to the floor and another vein-ridden thing reached to grasp it, but Iakodos stood on it.The screaming stopped.

‘Sergeant Evander? Did you hear that?’ Tylissus’s alarmed tone cut into the abrupt silence.

‘We move on,’ Evander said. He spoke into the vox. ‘Yes, we heard it, brother. Continue your investigation, Tylissus. Our… charge suggests that Sergeant Korydon may yet return. Report back to me if you find anything. Do you understand me?’

‘Message received. Understood.’

The Space Marines began to move onwards and Remigius looked up at the Chaplain. He took his hands away from his ears and they were stained scarlet.

‘My tha–’

‘Do not give me your thanks, inquisitor,’ said the Chaplain in a cold, hard tone. He leaned down until his skull mask was inches away from the inquisitor’s face. ‘Your deceit is something that I was prepared to make an allowance for, given the circumstances. Your repeated insults to my battle-brothers, however… Trust me when I say that I can only stay Evander’s hand for so long.’

With those words, the Chaplain began to follow the others. Remigius shuddered, gathered up the sword and sloped along behind them.

Blood. Blood in his mouth. Its coppery taste was unwelcome and yet at the same time served to remind him that he was still alive, that the creature who had murdered and possessed his brother had not won the fight. With the toe of his boot, Korydon kicked aside the crumpled pile of power armour. Not even dust remained. He was alone here – wherever here was.

‘Korydon to Third Scale.’

His voice echoed around the corridor and went unanswered. Korydon cycled through the usual vox-channels but every single attempt to contact his brothers was met with crackling static. A further pass through the different frequencies saw no further response, but if he strained to listen, there was something. Half-heard whispers in the heart of the white noise that were indecipherable at first but which seemed then to resolve into distorted echoes of his own words repeated over and over. It was deeply unsettling.

Taking a moment to compose himself, he ran a self-analysis. The breastplate of his power armour was compromised from the bolter rounds it had withstood. Part of it had crumpled inwards, the buckled ceramite pressing against his fused ribcage. He had taken a hit to the side of the helm, much of which had been destroyed in the process and which had led to the facial injury that had put the blood into his mouth.

His retinal feed was completely broken. Not a single rune was visible and yet despite its uselessness, he could not bring himself to remove his helmet. He felt, although he could not eloquently vocalise the thought, that to expose himself fully to the air of the Accursed Eternity would be an open invitation to the denizens of the warp.

Keeping his bolter raised before him, Sergeant Korydon moved alone through a mirror image of the corridor where he had been, unheard and unseen. He had become another one of the daemon-ship’s many ghosts.

Evander’s fury was great. He stalked the corridor, his bolter ready to fire in a heartbeat. The disappearance of his fellow sergeant, of both of his battle-brothers, weighed heavily on his mind and the anger he harboured towards the inquisitor who had been the cause of those losses knew no bounds.

‘You should have killed him when you had the chance.’ The voice entered his ear via his vox-bead but he did not recognise it. Perhaps one of the Blood Swords, he thought. He did not reply and neither did he turn around.

‘You could see the very lifeblood pulsing through his jugular vein when you had him held up against the wall, couldn’t you, Evander? How quickly and easily you could have snuffed out his existence, like a hurricane extinguishing a candle. His very being rested in the hands of a great and mighty Star Dragon…’

‘Stop that.’ Evander responded into the vox. There was no reply and none of his companions gave any sign that they had even heard him. He called for a communications check and received several responses, including from Tylissus. It did little to satisfy the growing sense of unease he felt. Whose voice had it been? Which one of his brothers dared to speak in such a profoundly disrespectful way?

‘Third Scale are dead.’ It was the same voice, as light and insubstantial as a bubble, and it sounded delighted with the news it brought.

‘What?’ This time, Evander stopped and whirled around. He spoke, not through the vox, but through the mouth-grille of his helm. ‘Who said that?’

‘Sergeant?’ Ardashir moved ahead of the group to stand before him. ‘Nobody said anything.’

‘Someone spoke over the vox and told me that Third Scale…’ Evander stared around the assemblage.

‘But they are dead. Lost to your Chapter forever and gifted to the master of the Accursed Eternity. Third Scale are lost.’ The voice came again and he stiffened.

Ardashir noticed the strange movement and took the initiative. He spoke softly into the vox. ‘Tylissus, this is Ardashir. If you witness any other unusual occurrences, be sure to let us know immediately. Received?’

‘Message received. Understood.’

‘See, Sergeant Evander? They are fine. Control yourself, or do you want to defer command of this group to me?’ Ardashir laid a hand on Evander’s shoulder. He felt great sympathy for Evander at the apparent loss of two of the Star Dragons, but he could not stand by when his brother-sergeant was starting to demonstrate such behaviour.

Their attention was snapped away from Evander’s erratic mood swings, however, when a low growling noise drew their eyes ahead. A huge beast stood before them, effectively blocking the corridor. It had appeared from seemingly nowhere. It was a dark brown in colour, without fur. Beneath its thin skin muscles and sinew could be seen moving quite clearly. Eight eyes either side of its long snout burned blood-red in the glow of the Space Marines’ gun-mounted lights, and its razor-sharp fangs dripped with saliva.

The daemon-beast snarled and crouched low, making ready to spring on the group.

Evander gave a single order which every Space Marine present acted upon obediently and without hesitation.

‘Terminate.’

The order came a moment too late. The daemon-beast threw back its head and opened its muzzle. No sound came out, but all of the Adeptus Astartes cringed backwards as a psychic scream ripped through their minds. The inquisitor stumbled and fell, blood dribbling from his ears. The four Space Marines at the front of the group squeezed the triggers on their bolters to no avail. Even as the shells struck the creature, it vaporised. A flow of ethereal mist marked its passage as it tore between them, only to rematerialise at the back of the group where Remigius stood.

Iakodos leaned down and picked up the inquisitor bodily, flinging him backwards out of the way and to safety. Ignoring the faint sounds of protest that he heard, he raised his crozius above his head. The daemon beast shook its head, spittle flying. It bared its lethal-looking teeth again and crouched low. The muscles in its hind quarters bunched and rippled as it prepared to spring at the inquisitor.

Standing bold before the foul warp-spawned creature, Iakodos raised his skull-helmed head and crozius in defiance of its existence. He began to speak, his voice low at first but rising rapidly to a crescendo. His voice was rich and confident, carrying with it the experience of years of battle.

‘I am Hetor Iakodos of the Star Dragons. I serve to live and I live to serve. With my staff of office, I mete out retribution and with my fist I deliver the justice of the Imperium. You have no place here, warp-spawn. Begone!’ The eagle-headed tip of the crozius began to crackle with energy as he thumbed the stud that brought its hidden power to the fore.

There was a wet burbling sound as though the daemon laughed in response to the Chaplain’s words and Iakodos wasted no more breath. Lunging forwards, he brought the crozius around in a powerful swing. It struck the daemon-beast on the flank and it let out a screech of fury before melting into nothingness again. The trail of mist flowed some way down the corridor before it reconstituted again. The beast stood there, its devil gaze locked with the Chaplain’s own.

With a strange shimmering, another of the same wicked-looking creatures came into being, as thick and stocky as the first. Unless Iakodos’s eyes deceived him, there was another forming into solidity behind that one. He cursed loudly. The corridor was narrow enough that no more than four battle-brothers could stand abreast, limiting the advantage conferred by their superior numbers considerably. The Chaplain considered the first daemon. A thick, sticky ichor dripped from its hindquarters where he had struck it. Beneath his helm he smiled grimly. Never worry about limitations; focus instead upon the positives.

‘It bleeds, my brothers,’ he said, pointing an armoured finger at the creature. ‘And if it bleeds, we can kill it.’

‘You cannot kill it, Chaplain.’ It was Remigius’s voice. ‘It is a daemon. Unless you can banish it back to the warp, the best you can hope for is to… inconvenience it.’

‘Then inconvenience it we shall.’ At his words and with him in the lead, the Space Marines pounded down the corridor towards the beast. At the same time, the thing uncoiled its muscles and sprang at them. It struck one of the Blood Swords warriors, Kayan, in the chest with its bear-sized front paws and knocked him off balance. Before Kayan could raise his bolter and shoot, the daemon’s iron jaws had closed around his leg, and with a single bite it tore the limb clean off.

Kayan’s armour fizzed and popped at the thigh joint where his leg had been severed, and two other warriors grabbed him under the arms, preparing to drag him free. The daemon, however, had other plans. With a toss of its head it discarded the disembodied leg and reared up onto its hindquarters, lashing out with its front legs. The wickedly sharp claws at the end of each massive paw gouged into Kayan’s chest armour just above the midriff and cleaved through the ceramite. They pierced his ribcage and shredded his internal organs, and with blood bubbling from his lips, Kayan died in silence, stubbornly refusing to give voice to his suffering.

‘Korydon to Evander. Come in.’

Silence met his words.

‘Chaplain Iakodos, can you hear me?’

Static. Nothing but static. His vox was as good as useless to him. Korydon had walked the corridors of this unreality he found himself in and he had encountered nothing. No hostility, nothing. It was as though the whole of the ship was his and his alone.

As he moved, he became painfully aware of the dull ache across his chest where his fused ribcage had splintered. The scratches and gouges he had taken during the fight with Arion were already clotted and healing, but his chest hurt with every step he took. He cursed himself softly and took a moment of respite. His body felt hot, feverish as his implants kicked in to speed his healing and, despite its damage, his power armour infused his bloodstream with fresh stimms, alleviating the pain.

After a few moments, he loaded a fresh magazine into his bolter and loosened his combat blade in its scabbard. Allowing himself to move at a pace which would grant his physiology a chance to heal his wounds, he continued onwards in the direction of the bridge. It was the only thing he could think of to do. Perhaps he would learn something if he got there.

Three more times the beast appeared and disappeared. The ground beneath the Adeptus Astartes was littered with the spent casings of bolter shells and their weapons were trained on the daemonic entity. The thing’s torso was torn in several places, more of the tar-like ooze leaking from each wound struck by the Space Marines. It was snarling and its eyes blazed with a fury that would not be quenched. Its torso heaved, rising and falling in a bizarre parody of breathing despite it surely having no need to perform such a mortal act.

‘We must press on, Chaplain,’ said Remigius, pushing his way with great difficulty through the throng of Space Marines. ‘I told you. You can’t kill it.’

‘Can you help us or not, inquisitor?’ Iakodos’s reply came through clenched teeth. ‘Because if you have nothing practical to offer…’

As a reply, Remigius took a book from his belt. The tome was small, but thick with yellowing, dusty pages. As he flicked through it, Iakodos could feel his ire growing. Periodically, the sound of another bolter round being fired at the daemon interrupted the comparative silence.

‘In your own time, inquisitor.’

The sarcasm was lost on Remigius, he was sure, but Iakodos made the comment anyway. The inquisitor seemed in no hurry as he traced a spindly finger down the reams of text on the page. Then he smiled – not a pleasant smile – and pushed to the front of the group. Unsheathing the sword, he held it up in front of him. The daemon’s baleful stare moved to focus on it and once more, its powerful hind legs coiled, ready to spring.

In his musical lilt, Remigius spoke words that Iakodos could not understand and was almost entirely sure he would never want to understand. Stuttering syllables and guttural sounds burst forth from the inquisitor’s mouth and with a howl of fury, the daemon began backing up the corridor. Striding forwards in time with its retreat, Remigius was relentless. He spoke the banishment clearly and without stumbling. He knew, as did all of his order, that one mistake could prove fatal. There was a crackling nimbus of power, faint at first but building swiftly to a crescendo, around him. Jagged lightning sparked from the palms of his hands and he thrust one towards the daemon.

With a final howl of rage, the daemon seemed to suddenly contract, and then in a rush it exploded into nothing. No flesh, no blood… just nothing. It may as well never have been at all. Its fellows which had wavered between solid and insubstantial faded away as well.

Silence fell.

‘As I said,’ Remigius murmured, re-attaching the book to his belt and not even looking up, ‘we must press on.’

There was nothing to say in response to that and so nobody replied, until Iakodos finally spoke, his voice low and dangerous.

‘You are a psyker.’ It was a statement rather than a question. ‘And you did not think to tell us?’

‘Think of it rather as you did not think to ask, Chaplain.’

The Blood Sword died because that whoreson did not step in sooner and banish the daemon. Third Scale are dead, Evander. Gone. Remigius could have saved the Blood Sword, but he did not. He could have done that right from the start. But he waited. Too long. Much too long.

Third Scale are dead, Evander. Soon, you will join them.

Evander walked several paces behind the inquisitor, the voice in his head filled with loathing and anger. Occasionally, he would reach up and absently tap at the side of his helmet as though he could dislodge the treacherous thoughts that way. But whenever he tried, they just came back stronger than before.

‘Tylissus, this is Evander. Report.’

Static.

‘Tylissus, this is Evander. Are you receiving me?’ Despite himself, Evander could not help the rising tone of anxiety in his voice. ‘Tylissus, report back to me, now.’ Iakodos looked over at the sergeant, deeply concerned.

More static, but then, through the white noise, came the barely audible sound of Tylissus’s voice.

‘…sage received. Und… ood.’

Evander drew a shuddering breath of relief but started when he felt Iakodos’s hand rest lightly on his shoulder.

‘Let your concerns go, brother,’ said the Chaplain. ‘We are all shaken by the loss of young Kayan, but we must keep our focus. We cannot afford to lose any more of our brethren due to our own distractions. What is troubling you?’

‘Nothing. I am fine.’ Evander shrugged off the Chaplain’s touch, an action that would in other circumstances have drawn grave censure. Iakodos merely withdrew his hand and moved slightly closer to Evander than he had been, all the while murmuring soft litanies of faith in an effort to keep Evander’s mind focused.

It really did very little to help, other than add to the noise that was worming its way through Evander’s skull. His helm lenses bored into the inquisitor’s back and he wondered what it would feel like if he were to reach out and take the man’s neck in his gauntlets and wring it until he heard the satisfying sound of it snapping.

It would be the most satisfying thing you have ever heard, Evander. He has lied to you. He has kept secrets from you. He has caused the death of a brother Adeptus Astartes. And he still lives. Where is the justice in that?

Third Scale are dead, Evander.

The sergeant stopped walking and held his hands up to his ears. Iakodos immediately moved to press him against the wall, bringing his skull-helmed face in close.

‘I hear voices, Chaplain!’ Evander’s words came out in a rushed, panicked babble of sound. ‘They are telling me… suggesting that I… things I cannot let myself fall prey to. But it would be easy. So easy…’

‘Pull yourself together, Sergeant Evander.’ Despite the deep sympathy he felt for the unfortunate sergeant, Iakodos knew that he could not be compassionate. ‘There are no voices. This is all your imagination. The enemy are picking up on your weakness, on your failure to see past the darkness and feel the warmth of the Emperor’s light. See it, brother-sergeant.’

Iakodos turned his skull-helm away from Evander and reached for the strength of the God-Emperor. It came easily, as it always had. When he looked back, his voice had changed. The gently admonishing tone was gone, replaced by the hard practical Chaplain who had fought countless battles. ‘Cast off the daemonic witchery that binds you, brother. Cast it off with the purity of your faith. Take it. Mould it. Control it. Use it as your shield against this foul temptation.’

‘Third Scale…’

‘Third Scale are well. Tylissus reported back to you. Now show your spirit! Remind your men why it is that you above any other rose to take your current rank.’

The Chaplain’s words had a calming effect on Evander and he nodded slowly. He felt a faint whispering as though the voice would try to reach him again, but he used the mental image of the Emperor’s light as a focus. ‘Yes, Chaplain. Yes, of course. I apologise.’

‘Do not apologise, brother. Merely acquit yourself with honour.’

Releasing him, Iakodos let Evander shake himself down and resume his position at the head of the group.

‘We make speed for the enginarium,’ announced the sergeant. ‘We find this bastard daemon and we end this. For the Emperor. Fire and fury, brothers!’

IV

‘Evander, this is Korydon. Talk to me, brother.’

The futility of attempting to raise his battle-brother on the vox was beginning to exert its own pressure on the injured Space Marine. He did not understand what had happened to him but he had gone from believing he had somehow been separated from the others to believing that they had been separated from him. He didn’t know if he was alive and they were dead or the other way around.

He had retraced his steps to the crossroads and headed in the direction the other squad and the Blood Swords had taken. He thought once that he saw them in the distance and had moved gladly towards them. They had moved towards him too, and then had simply disappeared.

His frustration was growing. Whatever had taken him, plucked him from his own existence and dropped him in this netherworld, was toying with him. Everything was tinged faintly with a soft violet glow, an unreality that he could not start to comprehend. He had considered the possibility that he was unconscious somewhere and so badly injured that he had dropped into healing stasis and was merely suffering some sort of nightmare.

It felt real enough, though.

Since Korydon, like all Adeptus Astartes, rarely required what was termed as ‘True Sleep’, his experiences of dreaming were extremely limited. His mind was so filled with endless reams of texts on xenos biology or weapon maintenance that simple dreams had no place in his resting thoughts. As such, it was easy enough to assume that that was what was happening to him. Simple enough, and strangely comforting. Being able to write off his situation as a dream was actually helping his focus.

For Korydon, the corridors of the Accursed Eternity remained empty. He encountered no more of the dust creatures. He was completely alone. It was almost as though he were the only living, breathing thing aboard the dead ship.

His footsteps resounded in a dull echo as he moved onwards towards the enginarium. Every step he took thudded through his aching body giving him a fresh reminder of the pain he would have felt had he been denied his painkilling narcotics.

A sudden movement ahead caught his eye and he looked up eagerly. But it was nothing more than his own shadow. He uttered several expletives and took a moment to check the magazine in his bolter. He had one spare left.

He cast his eyes up and down the passageway he traversed even though he had long given up hope of seeing anything or anybody else. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing to be seen. He was quite categorically alone; something he had never been in the entirety of his service to the Golden Throne. He was not afraid, but it was definitely unsettling.

Whilst his attention was thus engaged, he entirely failed to notice the strange manner in which his shadow began to coalesce and reassemble itself. It was a thing of darkness: an inky blackness into which light fell, never to return, and it was tangible. It moved slowly towards Korydon and raised its shadow weapon, bringing it to bear on the unsuspecting Space Marine.

Things were no better for Evander and Ardashir. Their progress, impeded by the attack of the daemonic hound, or whatever it had been, was taking a turn for the extreme worse. The walls, no longer even attempting to look like a clinical ship interior, were quite literally alive. The tendrils that reached out and grasped at them were like lengths of sinewy muscle, tough and difficult to avoid. Whenever they were cut away, more of the black acid dripped from them.

Ardashir scowled beneath his helm as he hacked away yet another snaking vein and watched the pungent acid dissolve the blade of his combat knife into corroded, rusted metal. The second time he attempted to use the knife, it simply disintegrated into a thousand flakes of rust.

But the Space Marines were relentless and pressed onwards nonetheless. Every so often, one of the group would stop suddenly and turn to hack at another groping barb. Iakodos had insisted that the inquisitor walk in amongst the Space Marines rather than separately so that they could at least offer some kind of protection to him. His blessed blade was unsheathed and he had reluctantly conceded temporary ownership of it to the Chaplain. It seemed to be the only thing that made the tendrils recoil without releasing any more of their destructive bile.

The next attack came far sooner than any of them anticipated. Without warning, half a dozen figures stepped from the walls. Ardashir saw them first, and they were so repugnant and vile – such things of horror – that he hesitated before firing. As big again as the Adeptus Astartes themselves, the humanoid shapes were walking horrors. Ardashir had seen men flayed alive, skin peeling from their bodies to reveal the twitching muscle, sinew and bone beneath, but these abominations were worse. In his mind, a flash of memory came to the fore – the recollection of an anatomy chart of the human body he had seen during his earliest training. The creatures looked like that, blue veins and pulsing arteries covering them in a horrific, crawling network.

No longer insensible with disgust, Ardashir thumbed the activation stud on his chainsword and turned to face the closest creature. The tungsten teeth of his blade whirred into life at his touch and he brought the weapon down in a cross-stroke across its right shoulder. It bit into the daemon and chewed through to the breastbone. Blood and marrow spattered across Ardashir and several others who also turned to face this new threat.

‘Keep going,’ the Blood Swords sergeant urged across the vox. ‘We will deal with this threat. No more time to waste, Evander. Get the inquisitor to the heart of the ship!’

‘I hear you, brother. Join us when you are finished.’

Despite his misgivings about sanctioning another split to the group, Iakodos agreed with Ardashir. The Star Dragons set off at a swift jog and Remigius was hard pressed to keep up with the punishing pace. The Chaplain could see more of the flesh beasts forming from the walls of the ship. The foulness of them stirred his anger and hatred, not all of which was directed at the daemons. For a fleeting moment, he hated Remigius. He hated the inquisitor and all his kind. He loathed the fact that the Ordo Malleus had such a hold over the Star Dragons Chapter.

Hatred. It was his cardinal weapon. The Chaplain allowed the smouldering fury to raise his ire. He stoked the flames of rage that burned in his heart, fuelling his desire to deliver retribution to the enemies of mankind. Once the fire caught, it would spill over to his brothers and they too would burn with righteous anger. The familiar weight of his crozius gave him a focus as they reached yet another locked bulkhead. His fingers closed around it and he drew it close to his chest. A litany fell from his lips and several of his battle-brothers picked up the words and spoke with him.

A calmness descended. The choice had been a good one. Iakodos could feel the tension ebbing away, but the sense of readiness did not leave the assembly.

Evander shouldered his bolter as the others readied more melta charges in order to get through the next bulkhead that blocked their passage. By his reckoning, they did not have much further to go before they came to the enginarium. Once they were there, the Emperor alone knew what would be waiting for them. If what the inquisitor had hinted at was even remotely correct, it would likely be the end of them all.

‘Ardashir, report.’ Evander used the temporary lull in proceedings to check in with the Blood Swords sergeant.

‘We are keeping them at bay,’ came the strained reply. Ardashir’s words were terse, his voice that of a man in the midst of battle. ‘They do not regenerate, but they keep coming. It is like the Accursed Eternity can produce an endless supply of these things. Whatever it is that you are doing, you need to do it faster, brother.’

‘Fine words, Ardashir. I am in complete agreement.’

Evander’s earlier urge to grab the inquisitor by the throat and squeeze the life out of the man’s body had subsided, but he still felt a gnawing hate in his gut whenever his eyes fell on Remigius.

You could snap his windpipe with no difficulty at all. The repercussions of murdering Remigius will be far less severe than what waits for you behind this door, Brother-Sergeant Evander.

He knew doubt then. Perhaps they should…

The melta charges detonated with an echoing boom, distracting his attention and splintering his thoughts of retreat into a million shards.

Korydon had no time to avoid the bolter shell as it thundered into the ceramite of his armour. The unexpected attack knocked him from his feet, sending him flying several metres backwards. In its already weakened state, it would not take much more to render his battle-gear entirely useless and it was this thought, more than any other that got him back to his feet again.

His breath came in a ragged, wet rasp now; the damage he had sustained to his ribcage was considerable and he intuitively knew that he had a punctured lung. His enhanced physiology was compensating, but it was at a cost to the rest of his strength. Still it wasn’t enough to stop him from hurling himself with full force into his attacker.

He passed right through it, crashing into the wall. As he did so, he was sure that he heard the sound of a hollow laugh of derision.

You cannot fight what is not there, Korydon.

Had that been a voice, or his own thoughts? He no longer knew – or cared – which it was. The black shadow flickered and wavered in front of his eyes, like a poorly-crafted hololithic image. He got back to his feet again, but it was not there. The shot to his torso had been quite real. He had felt the pain of impact quite solidly and the copper taste of blood in his mouth was no illusion.

You cannot fight what is not there, Korydon.

Had his own mind been so warped and twisted by this vessel that he was now even imagining his own pain? Was it possible for him to imagine his own death? A distant memory, long forgotten, resurfaced in his skull. It was of himself as a child, before he had been given over to the recruiting sergeants of the Star Dragons. Speaking to his mother, asking her a question that she had never been able to answer.

‘If I die in my dreams, does that mean I will never wake up?’

It was the type of philosophical question that his mother, a menial worker, had neither the inclination nor the education necessary to discuss. She had ruffled his hair and smiled indulgently at him. ‘When you are one of the Emperor’s angels,’ she had said to him, ‘you will find all the answers you seek.’

That had been a lie. There were still many things that Korydon questioned, and the memory of this question was now the thing that would save his life.

‘Awaken, Korydon,’ he said, and taking his combat blade he drove it into his own chest.

His world exploded.

I see you.

He is in some kind of trance, some sort of dream state that he cannot possibly hope to comprehend. He is at one and the same time dead, dying and alive. It is a non-state. Everything feels heavy, oppressive and stifling. His own power armour threatens to overwhelm him with its impossible weight. The agonising pain in his chest flares like fire spreading across dry grassland.

His eyes roam desperately, seeking, searching, hunting for something that will tell him what is going on, and they lock with those of another Space Marine. A matrix of exquisite crystal reaches from the gorget of his armour. A psyker.

But we brought no psykers.

His livery, whilst the blue of all witch-kin, is not the rich cobalt of the Star Dragons. It is softer, paler, more indigo than blue.

I do not know you.

He reaches out a hand as if to touch the psyker, but his gauntlet passes straight through. Another ghost. Another daemon. Not to be trusted. And yet…

You do not know me.

Are you my past? Present? Future?

Despite his misgivings, Korydon takes a step closer.

Time is irrelevant. Past, present, future… All these things are the same and yet different.

A typical psyker response. Half riddle, half philosophy and devoid of any sense at all. Korydon’s fists curl in impotent fury.

Though he cannot see it, he knows that the other figure is smiling. He does not know how he knows, but he does. Perhaps it is in the stance, in the way that the shoulders shift position, or in the way that the helmeted head twists slightly. The voice, when it returns, is filled with an emotion he does not recognise and understands even less. It is pity.

For you, they are all the same, brother.

With a shudder, with a jolt of awareness, Korydon wakes. He is lying on the floor of the corridor in which he fought Arion. His brother’s armour is still there; he is still naught but dust. But there is no sign of the rest of his squad.

Every movement brings fresh pain. Every shred and fibre of his being screams as he moves, but he moves anyway. What else can he do?

In the distance, there is the faintly resonating boom of an explosion. He is enough of a veteran to know the sound. It is the echo of melta charges. His brothers. His twin hearts gladdening at the thought, he hurries, as much as his battered body will allow, towards the sound.

It is then that he knows, with absolute clarity, what it is that they face behind the final door. His desperate dash to rejoin them becomes a race against time, a race that he has no hope of ever winning.

If only he realised the futility of it he would never push himself harder than he has ever pushed himself before. But then, if he knew the truth of it he would not try at all. Giving up is not in Korydon’s nature. It would not end well.

Time has him in its clutches and will never willingly release him. He understands. He can grasp the concept of time immaterial without really knowing how the knowledge comes to him. This is where he has always been. This is where he will always be.

He belongs to the Accursed Eternity.

V

This deep into the heart of the ship, lights were flickering; fizzing and popping as though something was racing across the circuit and causing it to fail. As the Star Dragons, once more surrounding the inquisitor, passed by, the lights flared momentarily into blinding brilliance, causing the Space Marines to turn their heads away, before they faded once again to a dull and slightly pulsating ebb. The sensors in the helmets of the Star Dragons took several moments to balance the light levels out again.

Evander, still plagued by occasional whispers that suggested many glorious ends to the inquisitor’s life, had fallen into a sullen silence; it was palpable, a dark mood that was now seeping through the Star Dragons like a slow poison. Evander’s fingers occasionally clenched into a fist and then slowly unclenched again as he battled against the words in his mind.

‘You should stay here, brother.’

The voice startled him and he looked up into the skull mask of the Chaplain. Shaking his head, Evander did not speak his reply, but in the cant of his head and the set of his shoulders, his refusal was evident.

‘You are not yourself. We can all feel it. You are becoming an increasing danger to the rest of the squad, not to mention yourself. Your faith, brother. Where is your faith? Did you leave it behind in the corridor? If you are going to continue to lead this mission, then you must pull yourself together.’ Iakodos struck where he knew the sergeant would hurt the most and was rewarded by the other Adeptus Astartes physically recoiling from him.

‘He will bring our doom upon us, Chaplain.’ The words were spoken so softly that Iakodos wondered if he had imagined them. He leaned a little closer and tapped his helmet, indicating that the sergeant should switch to a private vox-channel.

‘Who will, Evander?’

‘Remigius. He leads us to a fate worse than death. We should abort the mission.’

‘We cannot do that, brother. We swore an oath to serve the Ordo Malleus…’

‘Damn them!’ Evander raised his voice. ‘I have no idea what we owe them, but we do not owe them the lives of so many good men from two Chapters!’

‘We are almost at the enginarium. Whatever waits for us there will soon be brought to an end. The inquisitor has the means and he has the tenacity. As to the reasons why we agreed to take this mission…’ The Chaplain’s hand closed around his crozius and his skull mask turned towards Remigius. ‘There are some debts that cannot be ignored. In time, brother-sergeant, you will learn. For now, focus on the mission. The moment he strikes, we will withdraw. On that, you have my word.’

Evander shook his head grimly. ‘It will be too late by then, Chaplain. Far too late.’ He spoke the words with a grim finality and clicked off the vox-channel leaving Iakodos wondering just how prophetic the sergeant’s words actually were. The next vox exchange that occurred did little to settle the uncertainty roiling in his gut.

‘Evander, this is Ardashir.’

‘Report.’

‘The enemy are quiescent once again,’ replied the Blood Sword. ‘No more are attacking.’ He sounded uncertain that this was actually the case and Iakodos did not blame him. There was so little they understood about this entire situation that it was next to impossible to predict what would happen next.

‘Casualties?’

The pause stung and Iakodos dreaded the answer. Already they had lost one of Ardashir’s squad. For a Chapter that was already dwindling, further deaths would be a harsh blow.

‘One dead, three injured, but nothing that we cannot manage.’

‘Hold your position there. Third Scale, begin making your way back to the corridor and head towards the enginarium. We are going to need all the back-up we can muster.’

‘Message received. Understood.’

The exchange, grim though its content had been, seemed to have bolstered Evander’s resolve and the sergeant’s back straightened noticeably. Iakodos laid a hand briefly on his battle-brother’s shoulder and nodded once.

The door to the main deck loomed before them and Remigius pushed his way through the warriors to stand before them. He raised his head up and down, then moved to place his hand on the door. He nodded vigorously.

‘Yes. This is where we need to be,’ said the inquisitor, speaking for the first time in a while. He retrieved the sword from Iakodos and the dormant runes that ran along its length burned ferociously. ‘The daemon is waiting for us. Let’s not disappoint it.’

The door opened easily. There was no need for melta charges or violent ingress of any sort. It simply shuddered and slid slowly apart, old hydraulics and machinery grating as though they had forgotten how to operate. Iakodos and Evander stepped up to take point, shrouding the inquisitor and his sword from view. For once, the inquisitor didn’t complain. All his bluster and bravado seemed to be turned inwards. There was no sign of fear on his face, only the kind of distracted expression that suggested he was concentrating hard on the task ahead.

‘Move on,’ said Evander softly, and as a unit the Star Dragons crossed the threshold of the enginarium. Almost immediately, every bolter and every blade came to bear as movement caught their attention.

Ghostly figures drifted in front of their eyes, colourless things without true shape or form but with the size and build of Adeptus Astartes. They moved as though in a trance, seemingly without direction or purpose. On second, closer study, that was incorrect. There was definitely a purpose to the way they interacted. They stopped, they spoke soundlessly to one another and they continued as though uninterrupted. No markings of any kind could be made out on their largely transparent armour. And there were others, barely visible shapes that were far smaller. Servitors. Humans. They all moved around the busy deck.

Iakodos did not believe in ghosts. They had featured heavily in the tales of his childhood – a distant memory now – but his time in service to the Golden Throne had taught him that spirits and ghosts were not real. Daemons and creatures from the warp, they were tangible things that could be put down with bolter and chainsword or, at the very least, the right words from those trained to deal with them. But ghosts?

And yet here they were, right in front of his eyes. They were translucent, silvery grey and wispy things that moved endlessly around the enginarium. Not one of them took any notice of the Star Dragons and the inquisitor; they seemed intent on their task. All around him, Iakodos could hear the sounds of muttered litanies as his battle-brothers sought to reassert their faith, which had been shaken to the core so many times already during the course of this mission.

Apart from the spectres, or whatever they were, the enginarium was as deserted and forgotten as the rest of the Accursed Eternity had been. Taking a few steps forwards to the top of a flight of stairs that descended to the main hub, Iakodos raised a gauntlet. It passed through the misty form of one of the ghostly Adeptus Astartes. He met no resistance as his hand scythed through. The shape simply shimmered, wavering briefly before reforming and continuing about its business as though nothing had happened.

There was no clear sign of aggression but all those present maintained a close eye on the moving figures and a tight grip on their weapons. As they descended into the central area of the enginarium, it became evident that there were still more of the ghosts, seated at stations. Here a servitor slaved to the communications terminal. There a Space Marine surveying an occulus that showed nothing at all.

‘What are they?’ Evander’s words gave voice to the question that was on every set of lips. Before Iakodos could respond, Remigius spoke.

‘Echoes of the past,’ he said, and to Iakodos’s surprise and consternation there was an audible tremble in his voice. ‘We are seeing the last living moments of this ship. The Chapter who once called this vessel theirs, before it became the Accursed Eternity…’

‘To which Chapter do they belong?’ Iakodos looked more closely. There were symbols etched into the instruments but they were old, corroding and faded, and entirely illegible. The Chaplain took a few more paces and leaned forwards in an effort to make out the symbol he saw ingrained in the surface of the cogitator. He could not make it out at all.

‘We have never been fully certain,’ responded the inquisitor, that same tremor in his tone betraying his fear and anxiety. ‘We are sure that they were loyal to the Golden Throne, however; that a series of complicated events overtook them, and that ultimately they succumbed to the warp.’

‘Succumbed? Or perhaps chose to succumb. Consider that possibility, inquisitor.’

It was a new voice and it was filled with venomous loathing and endless hatred. A voice so sharp it could slice through metal. Its timbre was a sonorous rumble and it was pitched at a peculiar frequency. The inquisitor shook his head as blood began to run slowly from his ears. Iakodos suspected that had he and his men not had their helmets on, they would also be suffering similarly.

Even as he watched, the walls of the enginarium began to buckle and distort, ripples passing across their unblemished surfaces as though someone had dropped a rock into a calm lake. Everything shimmered and took on a wavering unreality. The inquisitor, reaching up to wipe the blood from his ears, bellowed through the re-breather mask as loudly as it would allow. Any nervousness was gone, and despite his inherent dislike and distrust of the man, Iakodos found himself deeply impressed by the depth of conviction in the words.

‘I am Shadrach Remigius, inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus by the grace of the God-Emperor, and I demand that you show yourself and meet your end at my hands.’

‘In such a rush to die, inquisitor?’ There was an insatiable, slavering hunger in the voice. Iakodos could not say how he knew the thing, whatever it was, thirsted for blood, but he sensed it nonetheless.

Remigius continued, seemingly undaunted. ‘You are an abomination and you are cursed. I am sworn to end your existence and I will do so.’

‘I will snuff you out in a heartbeat.’ The amusement was gone and the daemonic voice had changed pitch. There was now an underlying growl to it that accentuated its hunger. ‘You have nothing that can defeat me. Soon, the only sounds you will hear will be your own bones crunching in my grasp and the sound of your blood as it drips down to feed my master’s unslakable thirst.’

The inquisitor inclined his head, then raised it again, and Iakodos could see the passion in his eyes.

‘I do have something, creature. I have your name.’

VI

The pain had stopped long ago but the memory of it still lingered. As Korydon made his way through the ship, he became aware that he was still over-compensating for the pain in his leg, despite his awareness that it was healing even as he moved. He had no other option but to continue. Despite the increasing knowledge that his efforts would get him no further, it was simply not in his nature to give up.

Occasionally, he made a concerted attempt to raise his brothers on the vox but received nothing but static for his efforts. Once, he thought he heard a voice and had answered it gladly, but he had been forced to conclude that his own mind was beginning to play tricks on him. The idea had occurred to him that this entire situation was nothing more than an elaborate hallucination, in which case there was nothing he could do but ride it to its conclusion.

Whatever that conclusion might ultimately be.

He pressed forwards. The enginarium could not be far now; but then he had been thinking that for a while. Hours, perhaps. Or it could only have been minutes. Time ceased to have any meaning when you never seemed to get any further forwards.

His movement seemed slightly impaired now and he tried to coax himself past the memory of his injuries and into a better mental space. It was then that he noticed the first signs of corrosion on his blue armour.

Pausing in his determined stride, Korydon glanced more closely at one of his thigh plates. Sure enough, there was a hint of degradation there, as though it were old and uncared for. It was something that only happened to a warrior who neglected his armour, or to those who died in battle and whose bodies were never recovered.

But such was the design and solidity of the Adeptus Astartes’ wargear such corrosion did not happen for decades, unless it were in an environment in which the process was hastened. He had not been here for decades, so he had to assume the latter.

‘The sooner we get off this ship, brothers,’ he muttered to the empty air beside him, ‘the better.’

Korydon’s armour and body were withstanding the effects of his predicament. His mind was not faring so well.

Iakodos had never been in such close proximity to a daemon of this power before. He had faced them on the field of battle but they had always been small and insignificant things, foul and bloodthirsty certainly, but easily defeated with faith and fire. This thing, this mighty horror that was forming in front of him, was anything but insignificant.

The first sign of its manifestation was a strong scent of coppery blood in the air, as though a body had been freshly butchered. Iakodos and the Star Dragons took up positions beside the inquisitor, ready to fire as soon as there was something to actually fire upon.

‘Lower your weapons,’ said the inquisitor. There was firm resolve in his stance. ‘They will only stoke the daemon’s wrath.’

‘We are sworn to protect you,’ retorted Evander, and Iakodos noted that the words were spat rather than spoken. It was clear that the sergeant’s urge to kill the inquisitor was still strong. ‘And we will do that,’ Evander continued, ‘for the honour of our Chapter.’

Evander shifted the weight of the bolter in his grip and whether consciously or not, it ended up with the muzzle pointed directly at Remigius. Iakodos stepped forwards and nudged it discreetly away.

‘There is a lust to kill in you, Adeptus Astartes.’ It was the daemon’s voice again and it broke the tension of the moment. ‘I approve of this. My master will approve of you. You may bargain for your life with that bloodlust.’

‘Show yourself, daemon,’ said Remigius. ‘Show yourself so that we may end this charade.’ He casually shook the sword in his hand and Iakodos stared at it. The runes that had been burned into the carefully crafted blade were now glowing with a hateful red light. Eldritch lightning crackled along its edges as it responded to the presence of…

…still nothing. Only the same powerful scent of fresh blood and the images of a body-strewn battlefield it evoked. In his mind’s eye, despite the urgency of the situation, Iakodos recalled his last deployment. He remembered with absolute clarity the aftermath; he had walked the ruins where the dead and dying had lain, bringing the words of the Emperor to those beyond the Apothecary’s aid. It stirred his ingrained desire to fight. Yet he struggled against it. It would be too easy to fall prey to such a weakness. His judgement would be impaired.

He had little time to linger on it because with a sudden, violent shudder, the Accursed Eternity lurched hard to starboard. They all stumbled and the inquisitor lost his balance completely, tumbling to the ground. The sword fell from his grip and clattered to the floor.

‘The blade! Recover the blade!’ Remigius’s scream cut through the calm resolve he had previously demonstrated.

‘Why, certainly.’ The daemonic voice was filled with amusement.

Iakodos did not know what he had expected from the manifestation of such a daemon, but he had not expected the sudden, raw aura of power that filled the enginarium. He felt an overwhelming urge to turn to those around him, take out his anger on them and smite them where they stood. But Iakodos was a Chaplain. His faith in the Emperor was unshakeable and all of his years of service overrode his basic, primal urges.

‘Brothers, control your emotions!’ The Chaplain bellowed the order to the few brothers who had not withstood the mental assault. They were drawing their blades or aiming their bolters, turning the weapons on their own kin.

Appalled at the lack of control that his brothers were demonstrating, Iakodos strode to the closest. He pulled back his clenched fist and struck his brother squarely in the centre of his helmet. ‘Orestes, stop this. Remember who you are, brother.’ He flung the dazed battle-brother towards Evander who still wavered between pointing his bolter at the inquisitor and the swirling mass of particles that was taking shape before him. ‘Sergeant, control your squad or I will take over the command of this mission. Get your men into a semblance of order now.’

Not waiting to see whether or not Evander complied, Iakodos strode over and dragged Remigius to his feet. The inquisitor’s eyes were transfixed by the coalescing apparition. Iakodos turned his head to look up on the daemon for himself and was staggered by its immense size. What had, mere seconds before, been a swirling mass of intangibility, was now quite visible.

Twice as tall again as the largest of the Star Dragons, bigger even, perhaps, than one of the Chapter’s Dreadnoughts, the daemon burst into full corporeal form as though it had torn its way into reality through nothing more substantial than paper. Its entire body was a uniform shade of blue and almost translucent, rippling as though warp tides ebbed and flowed just beneath the skin. Its lower limbs were heavily muscled and even the tiniest movement was traced in sinew beneath the surface. Its forearms ended in long and strangely delicate fingers that were tipped with lethal-looking claws. Vast wings, presently folded tightly against its back, sprang from its shoulders. Iakodos suspected that if the daemon were to unfurl them, they would be too big for the confines of the enginarium.

His eyes travelling upwards, Iakodos stared at the two heads of the creature. Avian, with a wicked beak, its eyes burned with something he could not relate to. It was not the hatred of a Space Marine for his enemy, but something unfathomably complex.

‘Kill it,’ the Chaplain said in a hoarse voice. ‘Evander… We must kill it!’

Evander had regained control of his senses and once he had begun issuing orders the rest of the Star Dragons slowly came out of their semi-daze. As a unit, they stepped forwards and opened fire simultaneously. Every bolter shell impacted on the daemon’s scaly body, but none of the direct hits seemed to have any effect.

‘You humans are pathetic creatures. Always so keen to die,’ the daemon said. It stepped forwards, the ground shaking beneath its tread. In a single move it swiped a clawed hand towards the closest Space Marine, impaling him on the end of one of its claws. It turned and flung the unfortunate warrior towards the wall at the far end of the enginarium. Orestes struck the wall with a sickening crack of bone and slumped to the ground, blood surging so quickly from the gouge in his chest that there seemed no way his constitution could hope to withstand it. But there was no time to check if Orestes would live or die. If he lived, he would be useless to them right now. If he was dead then there was nothing that could be done.

Another round of bolter fire sounded as the Star Dragons attempted to vanquish their enemy. Two battle-brothers pressed forwards, their chainswords roaring in hungry anticipation. They were cast back, dashed against the wall as easily as Orestes had been as soon as they got within a few metres.

‘This is not your fight, sons of the Imperium. But I will never turn down such sport. If you wish to die at my hand, then I will not stop you.’

The daemon leaned down and took up the blade that the inquisitor had wielded. It sparked ferociously in its long fingers, red fire burning down the length of the weapon’s blade. Though it growled as the fire curled around its flesh, the daemon seemed otherwise unaffected. There was a stench of burning meat as it raised the sword to eye level and studied the weapon closely. Its burning eyes considered the weapon’s design and the runes burned into its steel.

‘An amateur attempt at best, mortal,’ it said, directing its comments towards the inquisitor. ‘Pathetic at worst.’ Without skipping a beat, without even turning its heads, it flung the sword away and it speared through Evander’s torso. The sergeant cried out in pain at the sudden impact and toppled over backwards. He lay still for a few heart-stopping moments before slowly sitting back up with a groan, the sword having been stopped in its path through his body by his now-cracked ceramite plate and heavy power pack. He had sustained a severe injury, but with an Apothecary’s attention he would live.

Momentarily abandoning his place at the inquisitor’s side, concerned far more with Evander’s wellbeing than the squeaky, stuttered rage that came from Remigius, Iakodos helped the sergeant to his feet and pulled the sword from his belly. It freed with a sickening squish, the blade smeared in blood. The Chaplain voxed both the Blood Swords and Third Scale to make all haste to the boarding torpedoes that had brought them to this place.

‘This is Sergeant Ardashir. Message received. Understood.’

There was no response from Third Scale. Iakodos voxed them again. The Chaplain felt a sudden surge of anxiety for Korydon’s squad. He had been so caught up in the unfolding drama that he had temporarily put the other sergeant’s disappearance to the back of his mind.

‘Third Scale, report in!’

‘Message received. Understood.’

Iakodos’s relief gave way to sudden doubt. He had received nothing but that response from Tylissus for some considerable time. There was no time to linger on the concern, however. They would hold this thing off for as long as possible as they made their retreat. Then he would determine Korydon and Third Scale’s fate. He felt increasingly certain that it would not be a good one.

The daemon was massive, so huge that the walls of the enginarium kept it largely contained, preventing it from moving much further forwards to attack. The Space Marines used this to their advantage, peppering it with more rounds from their bolters and bolt pistols. But the shots were little more than a distraction, nothing seeming capable of penetrating whatever warp trickery protected it.

‘You said that the sword would end this daemon, inquisitor.’ Iakodos was long past pleasantries and cordiality. He snarled at the desperate-looking Remigius even as he turned to face the daemon, his hands gripped tightly around the haft of his crozius. ‘That does not look to me like the face of defeat!’

Remigius shook his head, seemingly lost for words. His voice recovered enough to stutter out an explanation. ‘It was designed to defeat the daemon at the heart of this vessel. It looks…’ The inquisitor stared up at the daemon. ‘Its appearance. Exactly as we had come to understand. It is everything it should be. The sword was perfect. Perfect! The situation is somehow wrong.’

‘Well done, inquisitor. It appears that you have caught me out!’ The daemon ceased its snarling at the inquisitor’s words. With a pop, a sudden inrush of air, the creature decreased dramatically in size. One head folded in upon itself in the most hideous fashion, the other moving in a sickening way to a more central position.

‘That shape was a memory,’ it said. ‘A guise that the former – how shall we put this – controller of this vessel wore. It seemed the most appropriate way to greet you.’ Its sharp, intelligent eyes fixed on the inquisitor.

‘The blade,’ moaned Remigius, wringing his hands together in horror. ‘The blade must have been forged incorrectly. Such a careful process… One error and everything is wrong. This mission–’

‘This mission,’ said Iakodos furiously, ‘is killing my battle-brothers. We are withdrawing from this fight.’ With Evander down, he had made the decision to take over command of the mission.

The Chaplain turned his head to the inquisitor, his red lenses glowing. For a fleeting moment, to the inquisitor’s increasingly desperate mind, the Space Marine looked every bit as daemonic as the thing in front of them had been mere moments before. Now, it was standing there, half its previous size and apparently preening its wings in affected disinterest. No longer too big for the confines of the enginarium, it could attack at any time.

‘Brothers, fall back. We are retreating,’ Iakodos ordered.

‘No! Wait!’ Remigius leaped forwards and grasped the Chaplain’s arm. ‘Let me at least try the banishment. It is a daemon of the Chaos god of change! This could be a double-bluff. Give me a few moments more. Just hold it at bay for as long as it takes me to perform the necessary rites to invoke the power of its name! Let me try that one last thing, then we can retreat! It is your duty, Chaplain!’

The heads of the rest of the squad turned to Iakodos, awaiting his orders. Evander was stumbling, but on his feet. The injury had clearly injected sense back into him because his bolter was very firmly trained on the daemon. He flipped the weapon to semi-automatic and opened fire. As before, every shell impacted harmlessly against the daemon, but this time instead of clattering uselessly to the ground, they were repelled by the thing’s invisible defences. Several shells were fired straight back in Evander’s direction and only by throwing himself to the floor did he escape their impact. They struck the wall behind him, detonating one after the other. The damage to the walls of the ship repaired itself even as the Space Marines watched.

‘How is that possible?’ Evander voiced his disbelief.

‘This is my ship,’ said the daemon, its tone almost conversational. ‘I can shape it as I wish. I can shape myself as I wish and that extends beyond my body to the vessel I inhabit.’

Its attention seemed largely focused on the inquisitor now. Remigius had dropped to the floor and was drawing a number of incomprehensible runic shapes on the floor with the tip of his blade. The runes were being drawn in Evander’s own blood and the arterial red sigils stood out on the hard, metal deck.

‘What are you doing, inquisitor?’

Remigius didn’t answer and the daemon advanced, pausing as it encountered another round of covering fire from the Space Marines. It stared at them in irritation and thrust out a hand. Instantly, the walls of the enginarium came to life in much the same way as they had done in the corridor. But no corpses tore free from the walls this time. Instead, disembodied arms stretched from the skin of the daemon-ship and grasped blindly for them. For the first time, Iakodos noted that the ghosts on the deck had stopped moving. They were still, as though someone had paused a hololith in the middle of playback. Perhaps, he thought wildly as he struck at the reaching limbs with his crozius, the daemon only has strength enough to manifest one aspect of this madness at a time.

‘What are you doing, inquisitor?’ There was a strange catch in the daemon’s voice and it stepped closer again to Remigius who was scribbling frantically. All the while, inaudible to human ears but perfectly clear to the enhanced aural sense of the Space Marines, he was muttering words in an unfamiliar language.

‘Your time is at an end, daemon of Tzeentch,’ said the inquisitor as he finished his work. ‘With this sword, I could not defeat you. But with this weapon and with the one true word I have at my command, I can banish you back to the heart of the warp.’

With that said, he began to speak the guttural words he had been uttering before. He used the sword to help him back to his feet and raised his head to stare the daemon directly in the face. Iakodos felt an ethereal wind whipping up in the enginarium and despite the distraction of his own battle could not help but watch the unfolding events.

‘I name you, daemon,’ said Remigius, his voice barely a whisper. ‘Mortal man may know you by the name Fateweaver, but now I invoke the true power of the name which binds you.’

He slammed the blade of the sword down in the centre of the runes he had hastily drawn. A glaring white light spewed forth from the tip of the weapon, boiling around the wards on the deck and around the inquisitor.

It was so bright that Iakodos had to turn his eyes from it. The wind rose to a crescendo of howling and he could not hear the rest of the words that the inquisitor spoke. Then, with a primal scream of terrible rage and agony the daemon dropped to its knees. It buried its bestial head in its claws and roared its terrible fury. It was a sound that caused every hair on Iakodos’s body beneath his armour to stand on end. It was horrific. Yet again, the Chaplain felt blood trickling from his ears. The power of a daemonic name to harm extended far beyond its bearer, it seemed.

The old inquisitor for his part was channelling every last shred of his psychic power through the force sword. The light still roiled from the runes on its blade although it was no longer blinding. Iakodos could see, from the way that Remigius’s body was shaking that he could not possibly support himself for very much longer. But the grasping hands had stopped and been absorbed back into the walls, and the daemon seemed far too concerned with its own horrific and impending demise.

‘This is our chance, Chaplain.’ Evander’s voice whilst wracked with pain was clear and firm. ‘We should leave. Now.’

‘The inquisitor has to finish the ritual. We cannot just walk away.’

‘That thing said that this was not our fight. We cannot harm it. What good can we do by staying here? Look at him, brother. The inquisitor is giving his life for this. He cannot survive that much power. We have done our duty. We should go whilst we still can.’

Evander was right. The inquisitor’s face was a vision of exquisite pain, his psychic power tearing the very essence of his being free. The daemon had stopped screaming now which was a blessed, merciful relief, but its face was contorted in a silent agony. The Chaplain considered his options, then he nodded to Evander.

‘Take the squad and make your way back to the boarding torpedo. Do what you can to establish the fate of Third Scale.’

‘Chaplain Iakodos?’

‘I will cover your retreat. Remigius may be a bastard, I do not dispute that. But he is giving his life to rid the Imperium of this creature. We owe it to the Inquisition to return his body.’

‘I will not accept this.’

‘You are presently unfit for command and Sergeant Korydon is absent. I am therefore in charge of the mission and I am giving you a direct order. Take Orestes and the squad. Get out of here now. If you locate Korydon on the way, then bring him too.’ The Chaplain paused for a heartbeat. ‘Do not linger in your search, though.’ Iakodos spoke softly but with such command in his voice that the only thing Evander could do was nod in acquiescence.

The inquisitor was slowly sinking to his knees, his shaking legs unable to support him any more, and he stared up at Iakodos as the Chaplain came towards him. Weakly, he put a hand up to stop him coming any closer.

‘It’s still wrong,’ he said, his voice barely a whisper. ‘It’s… not working how it should.’

The daemon was furled in a foetal ball, its back to the inquisitor and the Chaplain. It suddenly stopped moving, but an instant later bounded to its feet, a cackling screech of gloating laughter emanating from its beak-like mouth.

‘Twice wrong, inquisitor! Your words have no power over me, for I am not the Oracle of Tzeentch!’

‘No… This cannot be.’ Remigius’s voice was a croak. ‘Years of research. You are Fateweaver. You must be. How can you be ano–’

‘Enough of this. What has taken place on this ship is not the business of pathetic fleshlings. Accept the simple truth of the matter. Your precious “research” has led you to your demise. You are wrong. And now you die.’ It prowled sinuously towards the weakened inquisitor.

Iakodos closed his grip tightly around his crozius and placed himself squarely in its path.

‘Out of my way, Adeptus Astartes warrior. I told you before that my fight was not with you.’

‘Regardless, you will have to go through me to get to him.’

‘A noble intention. But really?’ With an almost idle wave of its hand, the daemon caused Iakodos to fly backwards into the wall. Undeterred, the Chaplain got to his feet once again and calling upon every ounce of his strength began to charge towards the daemon.

The creature let out some foul epithet in its besmirched guttural language, which took on warp-fuelled substance and crawled over the Chaplain’s armour, peeling away the ceramite and crippling him with agonising seizures. He watched, helpless to move or act as the daemon reached Remigius. It looked down on him almost as though it pitied him, then took the failing man up in its vicious grasp. Its clawed hands closed around the inquisitor’s throat.

‘I have a gift for you, Shadrach Remigius,’ it said to the stricken man who, unable to respond, stared back at the daemon in horror. ‘Since you have gone to so much trouble to track me down, I will give you what you seek. You desire my name? You shall have it. A tragedy that this lesson will be your last. The power of a true name works both ways...’

These last words were spoken in no more than a whisper, but even from the distance he was presently at, Iakodos could feel the raw warp power that came with them.

The inquisitor tried to turn his face away from the shards of sorcery in the daemon’s breath as it spoke, but he was held tight and could not move. Iakodos watched with a mixture of disgust and fury as the skin on the old man’s face began to peel away. Strips of raw meat that had once been the inquisitor’s visage blended with chunks of metal from his implants. His eyes bubbled and melted and eventually all that remained of Shadrach Remigius was a bloodied skull attached to a ruined body.

With arrogant indifference, the daemon crushed the skull in its grasp until it was dust. Then it dropped the corpse to the floor and turned to Iakodos.

‘You had a chance to leave and you did not take it. You sealed your fate with that lack of foresight. The others you sent to investigate elsewhere in the ship – their unknowing sacrifice gave me quite a taste for your kind’s flesh.’ Its eyes narrowed sardonically. ‘Message received,’ it said in a disturbingly passable impression of Tylissus’s voice. ‘Understood.’

A soft groan escaped Iakodos’s lips. Now that the fate of Third Scale had been revealed, his desire to exact revenge on this thing grew. But still caught in the coruscating power of the creature’s sorcery, his armour smoking, he remained helpless.

Whether to enrage him further or merely out of a sadistic desire to reveal its dark nature, the daemon continued.

‘It was their presence which awoke my consciousness. I’ve been alone on this accursed ship for an eternity. But their minds… were sharp. They were delicious. And their imaginations! They expected bleeding walls, creatures of the warp, and I was all too glad to oblige.’

A sickening knot tightened in Iakodos’s gut as he realised that it had been their very thoughts which had brought about the demise of Third Scale and the deaths of the Blood Swords. He fervently hoped that Evander was heeding his order.

His demise was imminent and he faced it stoically. The daemon considered him for a moment and took a step towards him. Then it stopped short, its eyes narrowing as it looked over Iakodos’s shoulder to a point just beyond him.

‘What do you mean?’ the daemon said, to Iakodos’s surprise.

Korydon had reached the enginarium just in time to see the daemon crush Remigius’s skull. He had stared at the unfolding scene. His battle-brothers seemed hazy and pale: flickering images that had no substance. Only the inquisitor and the daemon seemed real to him. Iakodos was a pale, shimmering ghost that only the daemon seemed able to communicate with.

The Star Dragons sergeant had stared down at his old, scuffed armour. It was corroded with age and wear. He knew with absolute certainty that he had witnessed this exchange before. It was how he had known what his battle-brothers would find behind the door of the enginarium. Korydon had fathomed with absolute clarity the nature of the Accursed Eternity and that, combined with all the hypno-doctrination that had shaped his early years, had led him to a simple conclusion.

‘You will not kill him,’ he repeated to the daemon. It was not a threat, not a plea. It was merely a statement.

‘How do you know?’ The reply was filled with deep curiosity. And then the daemon smiled nastily, understanding in an instant what Korydon had taken a lifetime to realise.

Iakodos was released from the trap that had snared him and he fell to the ground with a thud. He paused for a few moments, catching his breath. He gripped his crozius and stood, ready to fight for what he knew and believed was right.

The daemon was distracted by something, though what it was Iakodos could not understand. It seemed to be staring directly at one of the white figures that had bustled around the deck previously. This one, however, was different. Its armour was far from pristine, old and uncared for. The insignia had long been erased. And yet there was something hauntingly familiar about it. It was as still and unmoving as the others, but the daemon’s attention seemed intent upon it. Considering his options carefully, the Chaplain reached the conclusion that a tactical withdrawal was rapidly becoming the best course of action.

‘You will not kill him.’ Korydon squared his shoulders. ‘It is not something that you have ever done and you will not do it this time. You are trapped in this course of events just as much as I have been. I have seen that you will not kill him.’ Korydon took a breath. ‘Ergo, you will not.’

‘A self-fulfilling prophecy. Clever.’ The daemon flexed its powerful shoulders and shifted its gaze to linger on Iakodos. The hunger that lay within the infinite depths of its oil-black eyes was palpable and for several brief moments tension crackled between the two, Adeptus Astartes and daemon-spawn of the warp.

‘Why are you still here, mortal?’

It was all Iakodos needed. He did not understand what it was that had transpired. All he knew was that he had been given an opportunity to withdraw, possibly even the chance to get back to his ship alive, although he was not prepared to trust the daemon in the slightest. Nonetheless, he made his way to the exit leaving the corpse of the inquisitor lying on the floor.

The daemon watched him go, then turned its attention back to Korydon. The Star Dragon’s armour was corroded, where it still held together. The sergeant showed all the signs of having spent decades, maybe centuries, in the same wargear. The warp taint that infused the vessel created things that even the daemon did not fully understand. It had seen this before, though. Mortals caught in pockets of time.

Tricked many thousands of years ago by the daemon Fateweaver, the creature now bound at the heart of the Accursed Eternity lived a cursed existence, doomed to live the same sequence of events in endless repetition. Yet every time history repeated itself, something changed. Sometimes it was something small and seemingly insignificant: a word spoken out of place, a head of hair where previously a warrior had borne a shorn scalp. Other times something more important had altered, but the daemon could not quite fathom the nuances of its prison. It was not the warp creature’s nature to understand – or even care – about the nature of causality.

‘You said I would not kill him,’ the daemon said to Korydon eventually. A slow, cruel smile raised its peculiar mouth in a sadistic twist. ‘But the ship itself may have other ideas.’

VII

The first of the boarding torpedoes was already loaded with Adeptus Astartes by the time Iakodos sighted the landing zone. His eyes sought eagerly for Third Scale only to realise disappointment and sorrow at their continued absence. With that came the memory of the dead Blood Swords. He took some comfort from the fact that some of their fallen had been recovered, at least. The daemon’s words regarding the fate of his brothers had been truth, he suspected. He slowed from a run to a steady walk and Evander raised a head, nodding at him curtly. The sergeant was clearly feeling the pain of his injury, but he lived.

‘Get the first torpedo out,’ he was saying to those aboard. ‘We will follow as soon as we can. I want to do a final sweep for Third Scale…’

‘They are gone, brother. We have to retreat ourselves.’

Evander stared at the Chaplain and his face showed a moment of grief. ‘You are sure of this?’

‘I am positive. And there is no time to investigate the daemon’s claim any further. You know as well as I do. Here.’ The Chaplain clapped a hand against his breastplate.

The sergeant nodded abruptly and leaned into the boarding torpedo. ‘As soon as you are in communications range, tell the Ladon that once we are clear, they should open fire on this cursed ship.’

The battle-brother closest to the open end of the boarding torpedo acknowledged the order and reached for the lever that would seal it closed and begin the retraction process. Gears ground back into life and slowly the tube began to scrape back through the hull of the ship. Whatever it was that passed for intelligence aboard the Accursed Eternity acted instinctively, the ship sealing the gaping hole in its hull like skin closing over an open wound.

The first torpedo had barely completed inching its way into the void of space when the howling began: a low, keening wail that set hair and teeth on edge, and brought with it the banshee promise of certain death. The remaining Space Marines, most of Ninth Scale and three of the remaining Blood Swords, watched in a state of horrified disbelief as the remaining rent in the hull of the Accursed Eternity began to warp. It shifted and distorted impossibly before their eyes becoming a fanged maw that closed tightly around the second boarding torpedo.

‘It will tear it apart!’ The Blood Sword who had spoken merely voiced what they were all thinking. But it was nothing so simple. The malformed mouth, a circular series of razor-sharp fangs, merely clamped itself down on the boarding torpedo, locking it in place.

The blood-curdling wail sounded again, accompanied by the sound of many scurrying feet as though the entire corridor was filled with rats or other rodent-like creatures. So vivid was the sound that Evander and several others turned the muzzles of their guns to the floor.

Iakodos held his crozius aloft. With the unswerving devotion and loyalty that had earned him his rank and title, he spoke in a steady voice that fuelled the faith and fire of his battle-brothers. The Litany of Devotion was one of the first things that he had committed to memory as a young novitiate and never had its words felt more true and meaningful than they did right now.

‘Where there is uncertainty, I shall bring light. Where there is doubt, I shall sow faith. Where there is shame, I shall point atonement…’

His voice never changed pitch and never wavered, even as he caught sight of the daemonic pack-beasts thundering at full speed down the corridor towards him. He could hear Evander barking out commands to set melta charges around the sides of the torpedo in an effort to free it, but he focused on the words he was speaking.

‘Where there is rage, I shall show its course… My word in the soul shall be as my bolter in the field.’

The Litany complete, he held his crozius out in front of him and spoke a final time. ‘All of this I say and all of this I am. Die!’

In an effort to buy some of his companions time to blast the torpedo free from the infernal grip of the daemon, Iakodos led a counter-charge against the creatures. Spent shell casings hit the floor like rain as bolters spat out one round after another. When the magazines were spent, the Space Marines resorted to blades and pistols. Every shot that was fired and every blow which was landed was a singular strike against the dark forces that contrived to keep them prisoner and to overwhelm them.

The first of the two boarding torpedoes had achieved a perfect exit and had cleared the hull. The Space Marines within took a moment to check their weapons. They might have retreated successfully from the ship, but that did not mean by any stretch that they considered the mission to be at an end.

Ardashir switched vox-channel and hailed the Ladon. He had his orders from Evander, who had once again taken command in Korydon’s absence.

‘Boarding party first vessel returning. Complement…’ Looking around the interior of the torpedo, Ardashir felt a sting of loss. They had travelled across with three full squads as well as the Chaplain and the inquisitor. Thirty Adeptus Astartes. They had lost the entirety of Third Scale and several others to boot. ‘Complement twelve souls,’ he finished, his voice heavy. ‘Five remaining on board the Accursed Eternity. Once they are in transit, unleash hell. Tear that ship from the void.’

Silence followed his report but for a few bursts of crackling static. Ardashir repeated his report, and then the vox officer’s voice came timorously across the distance that separated them from the Ladon.

‘Ship’s chronometers have your insertion at less than an hour past, sergeant.’

An hour? They had been trapped in the horror of the daemon-ship for what had felt like an eternity. Had it really been only an hour? For a moment, Ardashir doubted himself. Perhaps he had simply lost his mind. But the gravely injured form of Orestes, slumped in the corner, reminded him that his experience had been anything but based in imagination.

‘We will debrief fully when we get back on board. Repeat message. Once Sergeant Evander and his remaining warriors are extracted, destroy the Accursed Eternity.’

‘Message received. Understood.’

The words, the same that Third Scale had repeatedly responded with across the vox, sent a chill down Ardashir’s spine.

There was no way that the melta charges could be placed any faster than Evander was managing. He moved as swiftly as he could, his ears ringing with the jumbled sounds of his remaining four battle-brothers fighting the daemonic creatures. Their snarls and shrieks of bitter hatred cut through everything and Evander longed more than anything for Iakodos to end the monsters’ existence. Ammunition was running low, but the sheer ferocity of the combined force of Star Dragons and Blood Swords was at least keeping the horde at bay.

‘Charges set,’ Evander said finally, speaking the words that Iakodos was longing to hear.

Pressing forwards, the Chaplain renewed his attack on the daemon-beasts, every one of his brothers, including Evander, joining him. They forced their attack, pushing the daemons back a little further down the corridor but not so far that they were putting themselves out of the range of their escape route. When the charges blew, the hull of the ship would be torn open to space and they would have to move swiftly.

With tremendous force, the melta-bombs detonated, the sound and reverberation shaking the very ground beneath the Space Marines’ feet. The hull of the Accursed Eternity ripped apart and the torpedo was freed.

Bellowing the retreat as loudly as he could, Evander called the five Space Marines to the boarding torpedo. Four of them dived in leaving only Iakodos facing down the daemons. With a final roar of defiance, the Chaplain turned, ran and dived into the torpedo. Evander slammed the release lever and the tube closed up even as the creatures hurled themselves at them.

They could feel them scrabbling against the smooth surface of the torpedo but they all held tightly to their faith. They had come too far and endured too much to give up the belief that they would make their way to freedom and that they would see this foul ship destroyed.

A scream of daemonic fury reached them even through the armour-plated hull of the boarding torpedo as it made its way slowly out of the Accursed Eternity. Then the scream was joined in a sinister harmony by an answering shriek, then another, and then another. Within scant moments the sound of multiple screaming daemons could be heard as the monstrous host of the vessel threw everything it had at its escaping prey.

It was too little too late. The boarding torpedo dropped into the void and moved agonisingly slowly away.

‘This is Evander. We are clear. Repeat, we are clear of the hull. Fire on my mark.’

‘Received, Sergeant Evander.’

Timing would be critical. If they were too close when the fleet fired, they would be vaporised along with its target. The viewing aperture in the torpedo was little more than a slit and it was difficult to gauge the distance between them and the Accursed Eternity…

Far enough. Evander let out the breath he’d not realised he was holding and spoke a single word.

‘Mark.’

Both of the strike cruisers, as well as their escort fleet of destroyers and frigates, opened fire simultaneously and a relentless stream of ordnance razored across space, striking the daemon-ship with unerring accuracy. Light flared brightly through the viewport of the torpedo and Evander was forced to turn his face away. Their vox crackled and spat in relation to the proximity of the various weapon discharges, until finally there was nothing but silence.

And in the silence there was nothing. The Accursed Eternity was no more. But to Evander, staring over at Iakodos who was knelt in fervent prayer, simple destruction was not nearly enough. He voiced this concern to the Chaplain who looked up at him and reached up to remove his skull-helm.

Iakodos ran his gauntleted hand across his shorn head. ‘You may be right, my brother,’ he acknowledged. ‘But thank the Emperor that it is no longer there.’

The meeting with Remigius’s retinue lasted long after the Accursed Eternity had disappeared. Nobody could comment upon the veracity of the claim that it had been destroyed, but then nobody could prove that it hadn’t been. Careful scrutiny of the augury returns suggested conflicting answers. There were all the signs that there had been a plasma core breach but there was no debris to support this.

Iakodos had taken the burden of relaying the news of Remigius’s actions to his followers and had been met with cold anger, the rage of those in denial at news they had half-expected but had never fully prepared to hear.

Shock had turned to disbelief, and that in turn had led to anger. Iakodos had stood patiently through the tears and the pleas and then the barrage of accusations, until there was nothing left to say. He had not lied to the inquisitor’s retinue; he had given them a full and frank account of what had occurred there.

It had taken one man to raise a single question for the conversation to come finally to an end.

‘What of the Star Dragons’ debt to the Ordo Malleus?’

Tanek, who had sat in silence throughout Iakodos’s debriefing had stood abruptly at this question. He had leaned across the table that had separated him from the servant. It was that and the captain’s exceptional self-control that ensured the man wasn’t throttled where he stood.

‘My men did everything Inquisitor Remigius asked of them. As a result of this mission, my company has been decimated. I suggest that you learn from your errors. In future, you should think very long and very hard about the sense of asking a captain of the Adeptus Astartes a question like that.’

An icy look crossed the captain’s face and he turned his back on the gathering. His voice, when he spoke again, was low and measured. Iakodos knew his captain well enough to recognise that tone. ‘The Star Dragons have more than paid back their debt to the Ordo Malleus. You have precisely two hours to get off the Ladon and to remove yourselves from the vicinity of my vessels. As one of the commanders of the Containment Fleet, I suggest that your foolishness in this engagement has generated enough risk for us to consider you a threat.’

‘And if we don’t leave?’ Remigius’s elderly adviser attempted a moment of bravado.

His unfortunately chosen and highly facetious comment was quelled instantly when Tanek turned around. The genial and affable face that they had come to know was replaced with the mask of a tyrant.

‘Then you will be disobeying a direct order of Containment Fleet Kappa. And I would heartily suggest that you do not test me to see where that path leads.’

It was a threat, plain and simple. Had the inquisitor still been alive, there would have been resistance to the suggestion but, perhaps fortunately for the demoralised remains of Remigius’s followers, he was not. Picking up on the barely shrouded threat, they left with such alarming haste it seemed as though all the daemons of the warp were hot on their tail.

‘There will be questions, captain, possibly censure,’ Iakodos finally took a seat at the table. ‘The Ordo Malleus will not let this go. You appreciate that, I am sure.’

Tanek nodded. ‘Let the questions come,’ he replied. ‘I will answer them honestly and truthfully. We were summoned here to aid the inquisitor and we have done that. I propose we remain in the area for a while. Continue to give support to our brothers in the Blood Swords and monitor for any sign of that ship returning.’

‘You do not believe it is destroyed?’

‘I simply do not know, Chaplain.’ Tanek sighed. ‘Our Chapter has taken a great loss today and I have to hold on to the hope that the Accursed Eternity was destroyed. Otherwise, what was the point of our Chapter’s sacrifice? I cannot allow myself to walk that dark path of thought. Its end is not a good one.’

The Chaplain laid his crozius on the table. ‘Brother-Sergeant Evander may be a concern for a while,’ he said softly. ‘His mind was weaker than I had hoped. He fell easily to the whispers of the daemon. We should watch him closely for a while.’

‘What of the Blood Swords?’ Ardashir and his men had travelled back to their own vessel for debriefing and to undergo care at the hands of their own Apothecary.

‘Exemplary,’ replied Iakodos without hesitation. ‘Those who whisper in the shadows against them, those who scorn them for their penitence should watch their words in future. They are well on the path to redemption.’

‘And you, Chaplain?’ Tanek turned his attentions to Iakodos. He had been through many campaigns with the Chaplain’s words of faith powering him forwards. But he had learned long ago that it did no harm to assess the spirituality of the most spiritual of them all.

‘I am…’ Iakodos sought for the words to describe how he felt. ‘I am cautious. Do I think that the Accursed Eternity is destroyed? I do not know either. If I were to speak plainly I would have to say that I do not believe it is the last we – or others of our kind – will see of that daemon-ship. The inquisitor believed he knew its name and its nature, but he was wrong. Those mistakes cost him his life and cost us even more dearly. But if we have banished the vessel, even if only for a time, we must look upon it as a success, high though the cost has been.’

His words held conviction, even if his eyes did not.

‘Aye,’ replied Tanek. ‘For the good of the Imperium. Ours is not to question why, Chaplain. Ours is merely to serve. We have to pick ourselves up from this blow and move forward with renewed resolve. It is our purpose.’

He was lost.

Not in space, but in time. Whatever foul warp magic had seen him step sideways into an entirely different causality had effectively ended any hope he might ever have had of returning to real space.

Staring around the enginarium of the Accursed Eternity, Korydon finally understood the reason for the ship’s name. In time, he came to know all that there was to know about it. After all, he had lived within its confines for centuries, maybe even millennia. His armour was old and corroded, and he had witnessed its history over and over. He had been here before. He would be here again. Of that, he was certain.

Without the life blood of the Star Dragons and Blood Swords on board the ship to sustain its physical presence, the daemon had faded back to the warp, trapped within its prison until the next time it was woken. Korydon was alone on board the cursed ship, but for the ever-present shifting ghosts of those who had once called this place home. They seemed unaware of his presence.

He was lost and he was alone. But he was not without hope. Just as the daemon had, Korydon had come to learn that every time events replayed themselves, every time the endless loop repeated, something changed. And one day, the change would come that would mean he could step from the shadows and once again take his place alongside his brothers.

When that day comes, I will exact revenge. Not even knowing if his prayers would be heard by the distant God-Emperor, Korydon swore himself to the moment.

He waited. He was faced with an eternity. It was all that he could do.

+++

Amaranthine encrypted message, code Theta Gamma Four Three Nine. Captain Tanek of the Star Dragons Third Company, presently designated commanding officer of Containment Fleet Kappa, hear this on the order of the Ordo Malleus. I send you greetings and demand your immediate compliance. There has been a reported sighting of the vessel matching archive description of the Accursed Eternity.

By the power vested in me and through my position within the holy Ordos, you are ordered to bring your fleet to the co-ordinates I will transmit following this message. This sighting warrants an immediate investigation and your fleet is the closest available. I will speak with you in person on your arrival.

Message ends.

+++

SANCTUS

DARIUS HINKS

I am betrayed, thinks Sergeant Halser. Betrayed.

‘Comus is down!’ howls Brother Volter over the vox. ‘Dead, maybe... I-I can’t be sure. They’ve taken the infirmary. I’m pulling back. What are your orders? Sergeant?’ His voice is broken, his words half-buried beneath the sound of artillery. ‘Are you there? Sergeant Halser?’

Halser keeps his gun pressed to the prophet’s head and gives no reply. The pilgrims scream at him from the shadows, but he keeps his gaze fixed on a pair of grotesque, fathomless eyes.

The prophet stares back.

Halser places his finger on the trigger.

‘I can save both of us,’ says the prophet. His head lolls inside his bowl-shaped helmet, suspended by a pale, thin neck and a gloop of viscous liquid. The solution distorts his voice, but he tries to contort his vowels into something more human, enunciating each word carefully, as though speaking to a child. He points a long, webbed finger at the man in the doorway. ‘They’ve lied to you. They have murdered us both. They knew exactly what would happen. They have always known.’

Halser follows his gaze and sees to his horror that Gideon Pylcrafte is laughing. No mouth is visible beneath his black hood, just a quivering mass of cables, but his amusement is clear. Halser’s resolve evaporates. His hand falters. If Pylcrafte saw this coming, the whole mission was a lie. Halser tries to marshal his thoughts. He tries to pray, but the sound of Brother Volter’s pain knifes into him, merged with the wailing of the pilgrims. The artillery grows louder until it seems the whole valley is groaning. The noise is unbearable and too loud to be just heavy guns. As the blasts ring around his head, Halser is forced to accept the truth.

The orbital bombardment has already begun.

Without Comus’s protection, his mind edges quickly towards collapse. The temporal distortion has reached its zenith and the pilgrims’ voices claw at his thoughts like blades across metal. He cannot be sure what is now and what was then. Simultaneously, he is leading the squad through the catacombs, slaughtering the pilgrims at the city gates and reaching the inner temple, but he knows that has already been. He stares deeper into the prophet’s misshapen eyes, trying to anchor himself.

‘Comus is down!’ howls Brother Volter over the vox. ‘Dead, maybe... I-I can’t be sure. They have taken the infirmary. I’m pulling back. What are your orders? Sergeant?’

Halser curses and looks back at the doorway. Time is collapsing. He has heard those words before, but how many times?

‘I will not let you live,’ he snaps, turning back to the prophet. The metallic ring of his amplified voice booms around the chamber. ‘You’re an abomination.’

The prophet’s bloated skull drifts to one side and splits open in a grin. ‘You have a ship and I have vision. The clouds are no barrier to me.’ He waves at Pylcrafte. ‘He’s wronged us both. Why should we accept our fate? We are the elect few. We have great work ahead of us. Great deeds.’

Halser shakes his head, but there is doubt kindling in his eyes. To shoot the prophet means death. Worse than that, it means failure. But what is the alternative? After everything he has seen, how could he let such a man live?

The prophet brushes his elongated fingers against Halser’s power armour. They trace around a filigreed skull and he narrows his eyes. ‘Why did you come to Madrepore, Relictor?’

The chamber lurches and the ground shifts. The enemy fire is closing in. Centuries-old marble tumbles from the vaulted ceiling. Ten-metre eagles splinter and crack, covering the floor with vast, broken wings.

‘Behold, the immutable will of the Emperor!’ cries Pylcrafte from the doorway, raising his voice over the cacophony. ‘You’re a proud fool, Sergeant Halser. This is all on your head. This is the price you pay for all your lowly, creeping misbelief and your repeated use of xenos–’

Halser silences him with a shot to the head. The blast echoes around the chamber and Pylcrafte crumples in a plume of blood. The cables in his hood twitch for a few seconds longer, then he lies still.

Halser turns away and presses his bolt pistol back against the prophet’s helmet. ‘You’re a mutant.’

‘And what are you, Relictor?’ The prophet’s glass helmet is now splattered with Pylcrafte’s blood but his voice remains defiant. He waves at the network of passageways that lead off from his throne room. ‘There are weapons here. Weapons we could use.’ His voice grows softer. ‘They lied to you, Relictor. All of them. Your fidelity is misplaced, don’t you see?’

Halser grimaces as the agonised chorus grows louder: Brother Volter’s desperate requests for orders, the chanting of the pilgrims, the groaning of the earth, the pounding of the guns. But worse than the noise is the doubt. How could Mortmain have tricked him? As the question torments Halser, the doubt turns to rage. Even his oldest friend does not believe in him, does not believe in his Chapter. He and his men have been sent to their deaths. Perhaps the braver act would be to listen to the prophet? ‘I will prove you wrong, Mortmain,’ he spits. ‘I will make you pay.’

As his fury grows, the déjà vu becomes unbearable. The prophet’s words loop around the chamber, growing louder with each repetition. Halser’s indecision grows and lights blossom in his head, merging with the crystals in the walls and the glyphs rolling across his visor. He sees a corona of sunlight around Ilissus, shimmering like spun gold as he breaks orbit and drops down into the storm.

CHAPTER ONE

‘Ilissus IV. Shrine World.’ Pylcrafte speaks in the awed tones of a supplicant. ‘Until the enemy seized control, this was one of the holiest sites in the galaxy. Before the dark days of the Heresy, the Emperor Himself trod its hallowed earth.’

As they fall from the heavens, the curvature of the planet vanishes, obscured by a tormented mass of thunderheads and tornadoes. The gunship begins to rattle and shake, but Sergeant Halser is distracted by the strangeness of the storms: strands of gilded vapour, rising from bottomless valleys of cloud. The whole planet is shrouded. It looks like a ghost.

‘And the clouds?’ he asks.

Pylcrafte lowers his voice. ‘A sign of the infernal transgressions that have doomed Ilissus, a badge of its utter corruption. This is the witchcraft Inquisitor Mortmain spoke of. The tempest is not natural, Sergeant Halser. It is the most profane manifestation of Chaos. The clouds appeared after the arrival of the Black Legion, three centuries ago, and they bleed heresy. They are sentient. Malevolent. A metamorphic likeness of nature. A cheap glamour, constructed to hide the face of the enemy. And their reach is growing longer.’

Halser is a bull-necked lump of rage. His slab-like features are flushed and trembling and his lips are curled back in a sneer. The glare he turns on Brother-Librarian Comus would shrivel a normal man.

Comus scowls back, undaunted, his eyes full of the same bitter fury.

‘What do you sense?’ growls Halser.

Comus shrugs his broad, armoured shoulders and looks down at something in the palm of his right hand. ‘Sorcery, yes, the libellus is clear on that, but in the clouds…?’ His scowl deepens as he turns towards Pylcrafte. ‘I’m sure Inquisitor Mortmain’s servant is correct.’

The gunship lurches again as the golden storm envelops its hull. Servitors scurry back and forth trying to silence alarms and steady flickering lights.

Halser punches the comms panel as though imagining it is someone’s face. ‘Thunderhawk Five, this is Thunderhawk Four. Brother Silvius, state your position.’

There is a burst of static, followed by a staccato, inhuman voice. ‘… Five… Navigation difficult… Unsure of altitude… Extreme turbulence…’ There is another burst of static, followed by: ‘Sergeant, I’m not sure if we can hold our–’

The connection dies, leaving a thin screech of feedback in its wake. Halser silences the machine and glares at it for a few seconds. Then he looks over at Pylcrafte. The turbulence has thrown him into his seat and his hood has fallen from his tonsured head, revealing the oily knot of cables where his face should be. Each coiled flex ends in a glistening, brass-rimmed lens, and as he turns towards Halser they focus on him with a series of whirring clicks.

‘Inquisitor Mortmain warned that landing would be difficult,’ says the inquisitor’s acolyte, ‘but as long as your men follow his counsel exactly, they will only be on the surface briefly. The planet is riddled with tunnels. They were wrought thousands of years ago by mendicants, before they yielded to the malign dominion of the Inferior Powers. The corruption in the air is clearly of no concern to heretics, but to us it could mean death, or even worse: transmutation. We must spend as little time in the open as possible.’

‘Mortmain mentioned the priests. He said they were connected to the original invasion.’

Pylcrafte nods. ‘They were confounded by the Ruinous Powers, and then they were butchered by the Black Legion.’ His voice trembles slightly. ‘And, to the eternal shame of the Ecclesiarchy, they brought it all on themselves. A group of senior priests were responsible for Ilissus. Who else could watch over a world where the Emperor once walked? But their deceit brought ignominy on their blessed brotherhood. The priests left in charge of the infamous Zeuxis Scriptorium became enamoured of certain artefacts, certain magic charms enshrined during the days of the Great Crusade.’ Pylcrafte pulls his hood back into place and withdraws his optical cables. He looks like a snail, retreating into its shell. ‘It’s a tale as old as the Imperium. What began as innocent research ended in loathsome idolatry. The doomed priests summoned the most vile, unspeakable malefactors into their temples. They handed over their souls to the Black Legion as a gift. It would seem that whatever they found in the scriptorium was too much for their simple faith to overcome. They were the architects of their own miserable fate.’

Comus clenches his fists and mutters to the floor. ‘And here we are, following in their footsteps.’

The spasms in Halser’s face grow more noticeable as he struggles to keep his voice low. ‘Mortmain sent us. Why would he do that if he thought we were insufficient for the task?’

Pylcrafte raises a slender, ivory cane and waves it at the distant fleet. ‘I would remind you, Sergeant Halser, that my master did not send you anywhere. He merely pointed out the tragedy of losing such an ancient site in the impending Exterminatus.’

‘He said more than that.’

The inquisitor’s acolyte shrugs. ‘He gave you no orders, Sergeant Halser. He learned of your esoteric interests and, by the providence of our Most Venerable Emperor, he was able to offer you a chance for elucidation – an opportunity to explore the scriptoria before they are destroyed. You are here of your own volition.’

Halser’s lips curl back further from his teeth into a terrifying smile. ‘Don’t worry. I learned long ago not to expect any official endorsements.’

The gunship banks hard and Pylcrafte’s cane slips from his grip, clattering harmlessly off Comus’s armour and bouncing into a corner. As the gunship plunges through the clouds, the lights fail for a few seconds. In the darkness Halser sees Pylcrafte’s cluster of eyes, watching him closely from within his hood. He remembers something odd that Comus said about him and leans forwards with a question. Then the sound of the turbulence becomes deafening and he leans back.

The question is forgotten.

‘We need to find shelter!’ yells Pylcrafte. He is cowering behind the armoured bulk of Halser with his cane wedged in the dust, struggling to stay on his feet.

Comus and the rest of the squad are spread out around the downed gunship with their bolters trained on the storm, as motionless as statues. Their pewter-coloured armour matches the smoke pouring from the ship’s damaged hull; if not for the white skulls painted on their pauldrons they would be nearly invisible.

Halser ignores Pylcrafte, fascinated by the view. Even his enhanced vision cannot pierce the clouds, but as they whirl and heave around him, he catches glimpses of Ilissus’s strange landscape: soaring limbs of rock, wrenched from the earth by forces he can only imagine, creating a bewildering web of ruddy stone towers, almost indistinguishable from the storm. The rock is so contorted it resembles a great coral reef, dragged from beneath the ground. As the clouds rush between the columns they howl, and it seems to Halser as though they are trying to speak. He even holds his breath for a second, trying to catch a meaning in the sound; then he gives a short bark of laughter, amused by his own ridiculousness.

Remembering the pain in his leg, he looks down at the jagged hole in his armour. The Larraman cells have already done their work – the wound scabbed over in seconds – but he will be left with yet another ugly scar. He mutters a prayer of thanks. Every jagged line only serves to remind him of his proud burden. A lesser man would not have survived such a disastrous landing.

He stoops to wipe the blood from his damaged armour then turns to the others. They are still scanning the horizon for signs of attack. A few of them have injuries of their own but, to a man, they are straight-backed and alert. He feels a swell of pride. Even now, after all the lies and slander, they are unbroken: as determined as he is to prove their worth – even if only to themselves.

‘Which way to the scriptoria?’ he calls, ignoring the cowled figure standing next to him.

Pylcrafte flinches at the sergeant’s words. The crash has left him badly shaken. His floor-length robes are torn, and as he looks back at the Librarian his head twitches with fear.

Comus nods in reply and unclasps a book from his power armour. It is small, leather-bound, sealed with gold clasps and foiled with symbols that are far too bizarre to be of human design. It could be mistaken for a harmless piece of arcana, but Halser knows the truth. He knows what he is asking of his old friend.

Comus unlocks the clasps and flips open the cover, frowning with concentration as he handles the tiny book. There are no pages inside, just a hinged, steel case covered with dials, runes and a glass screen. The Librarian inserts a cable into a socket on the side of the device, closes his eyes and winces in pain. Then he begins to mouth words that are lost to the wind.

As he watches Comus praying, Pylcrafte’s terrified expression becomes a sneer of disgust. ‘How can you allow him to handle such a talisman?’ he asks, looking up at the sergeant.

Halser gives no answer, but he knows the question is a fair one.

‘According to the libellus, the Zeuxis Scriptorium was five kilometres north of this spot.’ Comus’s voice is taut with pain. ‘If I understand the xenos text correctly, the storm has not thrown us too far off target.’

‘Five kilometres away?’ cries Pylcrafte, looking afraid again. ‘Then we must move fast. We’ve already spent too long above ground. I told you – the only safe way to cross this planet is underground. We must find a tunnel before we do anything else.’

Halser nods. ‘Once we’ve located Brother Silvius’s ship.’

Pylcrafte reels as though slapped. His voice shrieks even higher. ‘Your battle-brothers could be scattered across the continent. They could all be dead. You’ve heard no word from them.’ He jabs his cane into the dusty ground. ‘We need to find cover now.’

Rage is ever-present in Sergeant Halser’s eyes, but for a moment it seems on the verge of boiling over into violence. His huge jaw tightens and his voice fills with disbelief. ‘Are you ordering me?’

A little colour creeps into Pylcrafte’s pallid face. ‘Of course not, but you’ve tried to contact your men and there’s no response.’ He lowers his nest of eyes. ‘You may have to consider that they have fallen. Why would they ignore your signal?’

Halser thumps the lifeless auspex at his belt. ‘Since that storm spat us out, we have no signal.’ He looks again at the towering clouds. ‘Nothing. We are alone.’ He lifts his helmet and snaps it into place. When he speaks again, his voice is an inhuman growl. ‘But I will not abandon my brothers.’

Pylcrafte cringes pitifully and clutches his cane to his chest. ‘Of course not, Sergeant Halser. But you must understand, if we don’t head below the surface now, we might encounter the enemy.’

Halser studies him through the featureless visor of his helmet. Then he raises his bolt pistol and clangs it against the battered grey ceramite of his chest armour. ‘I hope so, Pylcrafte, I really do.’

CHAPTER TWO

Inquisitor Mortmain sits quietly in the cathedral, head bowed and weary, relishing the solitude. Even here, deep within the bewildering network of cloisters and buttressed towers he cannot fully escape the sounds of the ship: the rumble of engines, the grinding of weapons batteries and the droning hum of power circuits; but it is the closest thing the Domitus has to a haven. Vast, lancet windows watch over him, flooding the cathedral with coloured light and painting his face a lurid green. Mortmain could never be considered handsome. His features are as angular and harsh as the statues that line the nave, but there is a fierceness to his blunt, crooked nose; a sense of purpose beneath his low, heavy brow, that would mark him out in a crowded room, even without the badge of office that hangs around his neck.

As he studies the windows Mortmain finds it hard to meet his master’s eye. Despite the horrors the ship has endured the Emperor’s gaze has not faded. The stained glass was crafted on Terra, countless centuries ago, but the scale of the artist’s vision is undimmed: the Emperor glares down resplendent from the backlit glass, still sure of His purpose, still blazing with unshakeable faith.

The inquisitor grimaces and steers his thoughts beyond the glass, beyond the cathedral, beyond even the rest of the Domitus. He pictures Fleet Sanctus, trailing after him through the void. The Emperor’s might, turned aside from its purpose, redirected at his command. Mortmain pulls his thick leather cloak a little tighter, suddenly conscious of the cold. His shoulders slump as he considers the weight of his choices. In his left hand he grips a vellum scroll, beautifully illuminated, clasped with silver and covered with wax purity seals. It bears the mark of governors, company commanders, captains and bishops: everyone who could possibly question his decision. The Concordat of Zeuxis they named it, in recognition of Ilissus’s famed scriptorium, but Mortmain is under no illusions: it is a death warrant. The fate of an entire world is in his hands. Maybe more. He draws a deep breath. Compared to such weighty matters, what concern is a friendship? Is he risking too much?

A polite cough interrupts his thoughts. He looks up and sees a hooded priest watching him from the far end of the nave.

‘Is the Novator here?’ Mortmain has not spoken for several hours and his voice is a hesitant croak, but the acoustics of the cathedral are such that his words are amplified, echoing around the vaulted ceilings and sculpted columns.

The distant figure nods. ‘Should I show him in, Inquisitor Mortmain?’

Mortmain clears his throat and rises to his feet, flinging back his floor-length cloak. There is a flash of silver as the light plays across his etched breastplate. The intricate designs in the metal are worked around a central device: the letter I, crossed with three bars and studded with a single, blood-red stone.

Mortmain has a black, serrated billhook tucked into his belt and as he stands he grips the hilt in his right hand, soothed by the feel of its cool, pitted ebony against his skin.

He nods, and when he speaks again the doubt has gone from his voice. ‘Bring him to me.’

The priest bows and shuffles back into the shadows.

After a few minutes a man approaches. He is stooped low to the floor and moving backwards in a series of strange, lurching hops. Mortmain realises that he is dusting the floor, furiously wiping the stones to save the shoes of his master.

This must be van Tol, thinks Mortmain as another man appears. The second man walks upright, with a confident stride and his shoulders thrown back. He is immaculately dressed in a starched military uniform. Every centimetre of his tall, elegant frame is braided and adorned, and there is an ornate, gilt-handled sabre at his side. As he catches sight of Mortmain, his waxed moustache quivers over a glib smirk. ‘Inquisitor,’ he drawls. ‘Have I interrupted your prayers? You must forgive me.’ His face is the complete antithesis of Mortmain’s, with a small, receding chin, creamy, flawless complexion and features so delicate they are almost pretty.

Mortmain gives a stiff bow and steps away from the altar, filling the cathedral with noise as his iron-shod boots clang across the flagstones. ‘Not at all, baron. I have been looking forward to meeting you again.’ As he approaches his guest, the inquisitor notices other men waiting in the shadows: the baron has brought his guards. This is no social call, he thinks, gripping the billhook a little tighter.

Baron van Tol holds out a limp, white-gloved hand. It is unclear whether he expects it to be shaken or kissed.

Mortmain grasps it firmly in his own. ‘Your chambers are sufficient, I hope?’

The baron continues to smirk. ‘Sufficient, yes.’ The words merge into one another, as though he can barely find the energy to separate vowels from consonants. He is unusually tall and studies Inquisitor Mortmain down the length of a long, aquiline nose, his eyes half-lidded and full of disdain, like those of a basking lizard waiting idly to be fed. ‘Not a single dissenter,’ he says.

Mortmain frowns, confused.

The baron nods at the scroll in Mortmain’s hand. ‘The concordat.’ There is an unmistakable note of mockery in his voice. ‘Your word is law, Inquisitor Mortmain. Your doubts were unfounded. There are few, even here, who would question the will of the Imperial Inquisition.’

Mortmain shrugs, ignoring the baron’s sneering tone. ‘I claim no credit. We are all just vessels for the Emperor’s will. And, besides, your evidence was persuasive. What hope do we have of containing anything with corruption left unchecked at our backs?’

‘Exactly.’

The two men stand in silence for a few seconds, still clutching each other’s hands. Finally, Mortmain withdraws his grip and waves to one of the pews.

‘Tell me,’ says the inquisitor, once they are seated, ‘what has brought you to the Domitus? The concordat is signed. I thought you would be eager to return home. I understand that being in such close proximity to the Eye of Terror is particularly unpleasant for someone with your talents.’ At the word ‘talents’ he gazes briefly at the baron’s forehead. Van Tol is wearing a peaked cap, pulled low, and there is no sign of anything strange; beyond a vaguely translucent quality to his skin, he might be a normal man.

The baron shrugs. ‘I will return to Terra as soon as possible, of course, but I…’ He hesitates, as though doubting the inquisitor’s ability to understand. ‘I have complete confidence in your abilities, Inquisitor Mortmain. Let me make that clear. I have nothing but respect for men who drag themselves up from the…’ a look of distaste crosses his face, ‘lower orders of society. I’m sure that you’re a very competent individual.’ He seems unwilling to meet Mortmain’s gaze. ‘But I will not be able to rest until this situation has been resolved.’

Mortmain raises his eyebrows and leans back in the pew. ‘Ilissus will be destroyed, Baron van Tol.’

‘Of course it will, Inquisitor Mortmain, I have no doubt of that. No doubt at all.’ The baron laughs. It is a shrill, mirthless sound and his eyes remain fixed on the floor. ‘But it would set an old man’s heart at ease to witness the deed first-hand.’

Mortmain opens his mouth to reply, but before he can speak one of the baron’s attendants steps out of the shadows. He is a double of the baron, with the same feminine features and languid bearing. The only difference is a little less grey in his moustache and a few less medals on his uniform.

‘Why is there no action?’ demands the younger noble, his face flushed with emotion. ‘Every minute sees the contagion spreading. While we–’

‘Silence, my dear Palchus!’ The baron’s voice is soft, but full of venom. ‘How dare you interrupt? Stand down.’

The young man’s eyes glitter with rage, but he does as ordered and steps back into the darkness.

The baron turns back to Mortmain, clearly embarrassed. ‘You must forgive my son’s appalling manners. We are all very concerned about the situation.’ He shifts awkwardly in the pew. ‘In his clumsy way, though, he has asked the question that is on my own mind: when exactly will the bombardment begin? Your ships are in place, are they not?’

Mortmain studies the baron in silence for a few seconds, struggling to keep his expression neutral. ‘Ilissus will be destroyed.’ He chooses his words carefully. ‘The nobles of House van Tol have played an important part in bringing this situation to light, but the matter is now in the hands of the Inquisition.’

The baron briefly meets the inquisitor’s gaze, his eyes still hooded with mirth. ‘Of course. I merely came to offer my assistance. You must understand…’ The baron’s words trail off as he notices how closely Mortmain is studying him. The smirk finally vanishes, as abruptly as a light being extinguished. ‘Has the defence of Ilissus definitely been abandoned?’

Mortmain stares at van Tol, unused to having his actions questioned.

‘I just wondered,’ continues the baron, ‘about the two gunships that launched a few hours ago.’

Mortmain continues to stare.

The baron waits for an answer that never comes. Eventually he rises to his feet, uncomfortable under Mortmain’s intense gaze. ‘I sense I’ve annoyed you Inquisitor Mortmain, and that was not my intention.’ He steps back with a slight bow. The smirk returns. ‘I will be in my chambers if you need anything.’

Mortmain narrows his eyes, but says nothing as he watches the baron saunter down the nave, whispering to his lackeys as they vanish into the long shadows. Once their footfalls have faded, the inquisitor looks up into the benevolent gaze of the Emperor. ‘They’re hiding something,’ he mutters, keeping his eyes fixed on the glass.

A voice replies from the darkness. The words are moist and distorted, as though spoken through a bundle of wet rags. The language is impenetrable and revolting.

Mortmain nods in agreement and purses his lips. ‘Exterminatus can wait a little longer. I will not consign millions to their deaths without knowing every relevant fact.’

Another stream of gurgled vowels answers him.

Mortmain massages his shaven head and slips back into silent reverie. ‘The young one,’ he says finally, ‘the baron’s son. I think the Novator called him Palchus. He is clearly unstable. I’m sure we could use that to our advantage. The Domitus is a large ship, after all. I imagine he might easily get lost.’

There is a rumble of laughter, accompanied by the sound of chains, scraping across stone.

Mortmain’s voice is full of distaste. ‘Be gentle, Cerbalus. I will soon have the death of a world on my conscience. Do not add to my burden.’

CHAPTER THREE

Even through the howling wind, the sound of bolter fire is unmistakable as Brother Thymus spins backwards through the storm, a blackened hole in his breastplate.

‘Down,’ snaps Sergeant Halser over the vox, and the Relictors vanish from sight.

Pylcrafte moans pitifully as he cowers between the sergeant and Brother-Librarian Comus. ‘We must be steadfast,’ he whimpers, trembling violently. ‘The dominion of the idolaters is–’

Comus clamps a hand over his mouth and shoves him unceremoniously to the ground.

Their cover is a narrow gulley, no more than four metres wide.

‘The next ridge,’ mutters Comus.

Halser nods and looks back through the swirling dust clouds. Brother Thymus is lying on his side, convulsing. Blood and hydraulic fluid is spraying from his punctured chest armour and he seems unable to rise. He has fallen above the gulley and is completely exposed, but it is useless to think of saving him. The sound of his laboured breathing is terrible to hear. He will not survive.

The sergeant is so furious that for a few seconds he cannot speak. How could he be so foolish as to lead his men into an ambush? Brother Thymus has served at his side in countless engagements. Inside Halser’s helmet, his cheeks flush purple with rage and he spits a prayer. ‘Everything that happens is the Emperor’s will.’ The words bring him no solace. He shakes his head and raises his hand, preparing to give an order.

Before he can speak, two objects clatter across the rocks.

The Space Marines react instantly, recognising the frag grenades before they even settle, but it is no use: the grenades are primed to detonate on impact.

The gulley fills with sound and light.

Halser lands heavily on his back behind a narrow limb of rock, his ears ringing from the blast. Great plumes of dust mingle with the storm as he strains to see the others. Bulky, grey shadows dash through the smoke but he cannot see who, if anyone, has fallen. He repeats his prayer, sounding even less convinced. ‘Everything that happens is the Emperor’s will.’

The limb of rock explodes as a round of bolter fire slams into it. The sergeant rolls clear, dropping into another gulley and glimpsing muzzle flare above a distant crest of rock. He marks the position.

The smoke dances away in the storm and Halser spots Brother-Librarian Comus, crouching a few metres away. He looks uninjured, but he is clutching the ornate mantle that surrounds his gorget, grimacing in pain. The cables that connect the metal hood to his skull are pulsing with inner fire.

Halser catches his eye, nods to the location of the enemy and mimes a throwing movement; then he taps his bolt pistol and waves it down the gulley.

Comus nods in reply, but the grimace remains on his face and as he unclips a grenade from his belt he clutches his head with his other hand, furiously massaging his temples.

There is another deafening blast as Comus’s grenade finds its mark.

At the same moment, Sergeant Halser emerges from the far end of the gulley, sprinting towards the crest of rock. As he knifes through the clouds, a black-armoured figure rises and tumbles away from him, thrown back by the grenade blast.

Halser fires as he runs, unloading several rounds into the reeling figure and drawing his chainsword. As he vaults over the lip of rock, the sergeant’s blade is already rattling and spitting oil.

The enemy tries to return fire, but before he can level his pistol at Halser, the sergeant’s chainsword slices through his forearm in a shower of sparks, blood and splintered bone.

As his opponent staggers back, clutching countless wounds, Halser gets a clear look at him.

The Traitor Marine is clad in ancient, black armour, twisted and sculpted into a baroque mess of curves and spikes, and trimmed with golden, razor-sharp edges. The mouth grille of his helmet has been wrenched into a bestial leer and his breastplate is emblazoned with a pus-yellow eye.

The sergeant howls. The sound could either be rage or ecstasy, it is impossible to tell. He raises his chainsword to strike again.

The Traitor Marine is too fast. He blocks Halser’s chainsword with his own and the air fills with sparks and the sound of grinding gears.

Halser lifts his bolt pistol but, before he can fire, pain explodes in his side. He is lifted from his feet, spun around and sent crashing to the ground. Before landing he glimpses a second Traitor Marine, looming out of the storm and lifting his bolter for another shot.

Halser rolls to one side as the ground explodes around him.

Then there is a screech of grinding metal and the gunfire stops.

He rises from the ground and sees the second Traitor Marine drop his bolter and clutch his chest, howling in pain. The blade of a sword has emerged from his chest armour and is slicing up towards his throat. The sword shimmers with unnatural light as it rips the enemy warrior in two, emitting a final, blinding pulse as it wrenches free in a fountain of blood and sparks.

Brother-Librarian Comus steps around his victim as he topples, lifeless, to the ground. His force sword is still blazing with psychic energy as he turns towards the other Traitor Marine but, before he can strike, he clutches his head in agony and stumbles, the tip of his sword clattering uselessly against the rocks.

The remaining Traitor Marine turns his gun on the Librarian but the left side of his helmet evaporates before he can pull the trigger, leaving a smouldering pulp of ruptured armour and charred brains.

He drops to the floor with a whistling gurgle.

Sergeant Halser steps over him and fires a second shot into his mouth grille. Then another. He keeps firing until the traitor’s head is nothing but a bloody stain on the rock. Then he crouches low and spins around, peering down the barrel of his gun. The rattle of bolter fire echoes around the valley, but the sound is distorted and muffled by the clouds, making it impossible to pinpoint anything.

‘Squad Elicius,’ he grunts into his vox-bead, ‘state your condition.’

Voices crackle over the comm-net. The fighting has been brief. Only Brother Thymus has fallen.

Halser shakes his head, suspicious at the ease of their victory. ‘Hold your positions. The enemy don’t usually attack in such small numbers.’ He turns to see that Comus has dropped to his knees and is still clutching his head.

He rushes to the Librarian’s side. ‘Are you wounded?’

As Comus looks up, his face is ashen and his eyes are blazing. ‘Is the device sending me mad? Can’t you hear it?’

Halser shakes his head in confusion. ‘Hear what?’

‘The clouds,’ groans Comus, his voice filled with horror. ‘They’re talking to us.’

CHAPTER FOUR

Monks and servitors melt into the shadows, scattering like vermin before the approaching Navigator. A servo-skull drifts ahead of him, trailing smoke-shrouded censers and bearing a tall, guttering candle. As the light flickers across rows of gloomy alcoves, it picks out the Domitus’s cowering denizens. They peer suspiciously at the slender noble and mutter prayers into their hoods. Even the ship’s most ill-omened wretches breathe a sigh of relief as Palchus van Tol passes them by.

At the end of a long, vaulted passageway stands his father, peering through a leaded viewport. It is hard to see anything through the metre-thick panes, clouded as they are by ash and cobwebs, but as Palchus approaches he can just make out the vague, spectral presence of Ilissus.

‘They were Relictors,’ he mutters.

‘Who were?’ asks the baron, turning towards him.

‘The Adeptus Astartes sent down onto the planet. I spoke to some of the stevedores. Mortmain himself had sworn them to secrecy.’ He grimaces. ‘It was not easy to extract the truth.’

‘Oh yes, I know who’s down there.’ Baron van Tol fixes his half-lidded eyes on his son. ‘You’re not the only one here with sight.’ He raps his knuckles against the glass. ‘What do you see now, though?’

Palchus looks out at the ghostly planet and shakes his head. ‘Nothing. Nothing beyond the warp storms, that is. I’ve never seen such power.’

The baron sneers. ‘It’s a dirty, crude form of sorcery, but yes, it’s certainly powerful.’ He looks around, noting the hooded figures flitting through the shadows, and leans closer to his son, lowering his voice. ‘If Mortmain doesn’t act soon the corruption will spread.’ He plucks an object from his braided ceremonial jacket and lifts it up into the candlelight. It is a tiny hourglass, housed within a frame of intricately engraved finger bones.

Palchus grimaces at the sight of it. The sand has gathered in the centre, refusing to fall either way. He grabs his father’s wrist, pulls the hourglass closer and shakes it, to no effect. ‘What does it mean?’

The baron shrugs. ‘Time is on the run, Palchus. The storm on Ilissus is spreading.’ He lowers his voice even further. ‘The concordat has only bought us a brief reprieve. If Ilissus isn’t destroyed soon, the other Houses will smell a rat. They have a little more insight than these plebeians.’ He looks back at the planet. ‘They won’t believe this rubbish about the Black Legion. They will see the storms for what they truly are. We will be ruined.’

‘Then what do we do?’ Palchus’s voice is edged with panic. ‘The inquisitor is obviously lying to us. Why would he send Space Marines onto a planet scheduled for Exterminatus?’

The baron shakes his head and puts the hourglass back into his pocket. ‘The Relictors are scavengers. They’re famed for it. They’re vile magpies, always peering beneath stones that ought to be left unturned. Everyone knows they’re just a step away from heresy, but Inquisitor Mortmain must have allowed them one last chance to explore the planet for some reason. Before–’ He pauses and curls his lip with displeasure. ‘Before the problems arose, Ilissus was famed for its scriptoria. One in particular is said to house documents and relics older than the Imperium itself.’

‘The Zeuxis Scriptorium.’

The baron nods. ‘The Zeuxis Scriptorium is particularly infamous. The priests in charge had similar interests to the Relictors, interests that most reputable people would consider heretical. It has been lost for centuries, but the Relictors have a knack of unearthing things.’ He pulls back his shoulders and raises his chin. ‘I must think. Meet me in my chambers in an hour.’ As he ambles off down the passageway, another servo-skull drifts down from the rafters and trails after him, lighting the way. ‘Do nothing,’ he says, sneering at Palchus as he disappears around a corner.

Palchus drums his fingers against the viewport. What’s Mortmain thinking? Why would he delay even a second when so much is at risk? Why would he ignore the concordat? Someone must know. He stands there for a few minutes, muttering to himself, until an idea hits him. It seems to arrive fully formed, as though the ship itself has answered his question. ‘Of course,’ he mutters. ‘There are other Relictors on board. They must know what’s going on.’

He strides over to an empty alcove. It is a shrine of some kind, but he pays no attention to the hunched, winged statue crouched in the darkness, as he sits on a stone bench and closes his eyes. He places his fingers beneath the peak of his cap, resting them on a swelling in the middle of his forehead. Then he whispers an incantation under his breath and, after a few minutes, his breathing begins to quicken and beads of sweat appear on his face. Numb pain spreads from his forehead and he moans softly. Images tumble through his mind. He sees engines: vast, oil-black behemoths, thundering and belching far below him in the belly of the Domitus. Then he sees miles of featureless hab blocks, housing legions of crewmen and priests and whole regiments of Guardsmen. Many of the Guardsmen are wounded and as Palchus’s mind touches theirs, he feels agony and fear. He moves on, holding his breath as he looks through flight decks, chapels, cloisters and hangars, searching desperately until he senses something quite different from the Guardsmen: a sliver of cool, hard arrogance. ‘Yes,’ he whispers. The minds of the Adeptus Astartes are unmistakable. He removes his fingers from his forehead, pulls his cap back into place and finally exhales. ‘Just a few kilometres away.’ To find his targets so easily seems a little odd, but Palchus is so anxious he does not pause to consider the odds of stumbling across the Relictors so quickly.

He rises and looks out into the passageway. The baron’s light has faded from view. ‘I’m sorry, father,’ he says, his voice trembling with emotion, ‘I won’t just sit around as our name is thrown to the dogs.’ With that, he turns and hurries in the opposite direction, quickly disappearing into the endless maze of corridors.

After a few seconds the large, winged shape crouched in the shrine climbs down from the wall. As it steps out into the passage, the outline of the thing is hard to discern, but as it slips quietly after Palchus, one of the hooded onlookers is unfortunate enough to catch a brief glimpse. He stumbles back against the wall with a curse, left with an image of torn, ruptured flesh and battered, jagged iron. As the onlooker drops to his knees, pressing his palms over his eyes, he hears the rattle of chains, scraping into the distance.

After half an hour, Palchus notices that the passageways are growing narrower and less well-kept. There is no sign of any servitors and piles of waste lie uncleared in the corners. The air grows thick with the smell of engine oil and faeces, and the Navigator hides his face behind a silk, perfumed handkerchief. Are these really suitable quarters for Adeptus Astartes, he wonders? Then he remembers which Chapter he is looking for: the Relictors. Their fall from grace is almost laughable. An open sewer is the perfect place to house men with so many accusations of heresy hanging over them.

Eventually, the ceiling falls so low that the servo-skull is unable to follow and Palchus curses, stumbling to a halt in the darkness. ‘What is this place?’ he mutters, pulling a small light from his jacket pocket. As the thin beam washes over the walls ahead, he sees the passageway is no longer made of stone: it is a jumble of corrugated iron, rusted heating vents and gurgling, hissing pipes.

‘Perhaps this isn’t right,’ he mutters, stooping and edging slowly forwards.

Then he hears a sound from behind him and turns around, levelling his light at the shadows. The darkness ripples and slides but he can see nothing clearly. A feeling of dread grips him.

Palchus draws his sword and considers turning back, but barely has the thought formed in his mind when the door behind rattles free of its supports and slams down onto the stone floor. The resultant clang causes the Navigator to flinch so violently that his light slips from his fingers and bounces away into the shadows, extinguishing itself as it goes.

Palchus curses as pitch dark descends. ‘Is anyone there?’ he calls, his words echoing weirdly through the narrow passageway.

There is no reply.

Palchus drops to his knees and reaches through the darkness. He is sure he can pinpoint where the light fell, but as his fingers brush over the cold stone, they find no trace of the metal cylinder.

‘Where is it?’ he hisses, with a rising sense of panic.

As the Navigator’s fingers stretch further, they brush against something soft and warm.

He yelps in horror, scrabbling back towards the wall.

Terror grips him as he climbs to his feet and backs away as fast as he can. The darkness is so complete that he is forced to feel his way along the cold, sticky metal of the walls, cursing under his breath as his fingers catch on jagged edges and broken screws.

Despite the pain he gradually picks up speed, gaining confidence as his eyes start to adjust to the dark. He realises that there is an opening up ahead and breaks into a sprint, holding his sword out in front of him as he runs.

As Palchus nears the doorway, he glimpses movement up ahead: a hunched, glistening shape, too fast to make out clearly.

Seconds before he reaches the opening, the door clangs shut.

Palchus slams into it with a grunt. His sword buckles and twists painfully in his grip.

As he slides to the floor, holding his hands up in front of his face, he senses something in the darkness.

A shape is approaching.

CHAPTER FIVE

As the rest of Squad Elicius clamber awkwardly over the rocks, Sergeant Halser pauses on an outcrop and waits for Brother-Librarian Comus to catch up. As he watches his old friend approaching he feels a painful mixture of anger and guilt. Comus’s power armour is cloaked in dust and as he stumbles over the weird terrain his face remains locked in a grimace, but he still has the libellus clasped firmly in his grip. ‘I had no choice,’ growls Halser to himself. ‘This is our last chance.’

He wipes his visor and scours the horizon for signs of the enemy. The sun has already slipped lower in the sky, trimming the clouds with bronze and making it even harder to see. Halser grabs the auspex from his belt but it is still dead. They have heard nothing from Brother Silvius since the crash. More worryingly, they have not been able to contact Fleet Sanctus or the Domitus. They are utterly alone. As his gaze falls back on the stooped figure of Comus, Halser keeps thinking the same thought. This is our last chance.

Comus is only a few metres away when Halser notices something odd. As the Librarian enters a narrow defile, he vanishes briefly from view, before re-emerging and giving the sergeant a wave of his sword. Sergeant Halser nods in reply, but then frowns. A bank of dust drifts between the two Space Marines and when it clears, Comus has vanished. Halser prepares to call out, but before he can, Comus reappears, climbing into view exactly as before. He even gives Halser the same wave, as though nothing has happened. Halser feels a chill of alarm. Something is wrong, but he is unable to say exactly what. Comus could have stumbled back into the defile, but there was something strange about the way he signalled. His second wave was identical to his first. Halser shakes his head and rises to greet the Librarian. Déjà vu, he thinks, but the sense of alarm stays with him as he helps Comus up the rocks to his side.

‘Are you fit for duty?’ he asks, hiding his concern behind a scowl. He realises that there are tears of blood welling in the Librarian’s eyes.

Comus nods, but is too short of breath to reply.

‘Is it the presence of the Traitor Marines?’ asks Halser. ‘Is that what’s causing you such pain?’

Comus frowns and shakes his head. ‘No,’ he manages to grunt after a few minutes. As he speaks, small flecks of blood glisten on his lips. He nods at the libellus. ‘It is the xenos device – and something else. There is something else here.’

Halser waves at the columns of rock and the rolling clouds. ‘This is the work of heretics, though, surely?’

Comus follows his gaze and looks up at the tormented sunset. ‘Something else,’ he repeats.

Halser realises that he has never seen his battle-brother in such pain. ‘Should you head back to the gunship, Comus? We don’t have time for passengers. Perhaps you could help the tech-priests? They seemed to think the repairs would take a while, but an extra pair of hands might speed things up.’ He hesitates. ‘Perhaps you could show me how to use the xenos device.’

Comus grips the sergeant’s arm. ‘No. I must continue. I’m shielding you from something.’ He waves at the clouds. ‘That’s why…’ His words trail off and he grimaces again. ‘The pain is not just from the libellus. It’s because I’m holding back the prayers.’

‘Prayers?’ Halser shakes his head in confusion. ‘Whose prayers?’

‘There are prayers on the wind. And they are filled with such power they would flay you to the bone if I let them.’

‘Power? You mean witchcraft?’

Comus closes his eyes and presses a hand against one of the dozens of purity seals that adorn his power armour. His fingers press deep into the lump of wax and crumpled parchment, and when he opens his eyes they are a little clearer. ‘No, not witchcraft. At least, not the sort you mean. I hear catechisms and the names of saints. I hear prayers that speak of obedience to the Immortal Emperor.’ He massages his scalp. ‘But there is a power in them like nothing I’ve ever…’ His voice trails off and his eyes fill with confusion. Then he turns to Halser. ‘I do not believe Ilissus has fallen to the Black Legion. Some great power is in control here, but it has no love of Chaos.’

Halser shakes his head furiously. ‘Of course the planet has fallen to Chaos. Inquisitor Mortmain was certain. Exterminatus is only hours away.’ He looks at the rest of the squad, picking their way across the brutalised landscape. The inquisitor’s acolyte is tiny in comparison, leaning heavily on his cane as he stumbles after the Space Marines. ‘Pylcrafte said the clouds were a mark of Chaos. He said they arrived with the Black Legion.’

Comus locks his gaze on the sergeant. ‘I do not place much faith in the words of that man. I sense he is holding something from us.’

Halser shrugs off the Librarian’s grip and nods at the horizon. ‘Well, we will find out the truth soon enough if we keep moving. We only have six hours. Then Inquisitor Mortmain will begin the bombardment, Chaos or not.’

They have not travelled far when shots ring out again.

The squad vanishes silently into the storm.

Sergeant Halser drops behind a trunk of rock. ‘Brother Vortimer,’ he hisses into his vox-bead, ‘Is anyone hit? What do you see?’

The reply is a burst of white noise.

‘Brother Vortimer?’

There is another hiss of static, but this time words are audible beneath the distortion. ‘Bolter fire. The shots went wide. They are holed up in some kind of building. Half a kilometre east. It might be a tower but I can’t be–’

The signal dies.

Halser feels his pulse quicken. He will not lose another man. He opens up the comm-net to include the whole squad. ‘Brothers Vortimer, Borellus and Sabine: circle around, approach from the rear. The rest of you hold your positions. Wait for my signal.’

He turns to face Comus. ‘Is this the power you felt?’

The Librarian shakes his head. ‘This is Traitor Marines.’ He frowns. ‘They are in such terrible pain.’

Halser looks at his auspex and curses the blank screen. Then, as a particularly fierce dust cloud twists past, he risks a glance around the stone. Brother Vortimer is right; there is some kind of building to the east. As the clouds roll past he sees it quite clearly: a fluted spiral of rock, topped with crumbling, teeth-like projections that resemble the merlons of a castle. It looks to be part of a larger building, but before he can make out anything else he sees movement behind the jagged stone. As he ducks out of view he glimpses a flash of light.

A fizzing whine cuts through the storm and, a few metres to the left of Halser, the ground dissolves into a cloud of dust and spinning rock. As stone pings off his armour the sergeant curses. ‘Lascannon.’ He looks back at Comus. ‘They’re not in too much pain to fire their weapons.’

Comus shakes his head. ‘Something is badly wrong with them, though. Why do you think their aim is so bad?’

Halser nods at a narrow trench a few feet back, and as they drop heavily into it he opens up the comm-net. ‘Vortimer, Borellus, Sabine – are you in position? What do you see?’

Halser receives his answer in the form of gunfire: a whole volley of rattling shots that ring out from the tower.

‘Move in!’ he cries, leaping from the trench and racing in the direction of the gunfire.

CHAPTER SIX

Palchus awakes to darkness and the sound of rattling chains.

He tries to move but an awful, wrenching pain explodes in his stomach. ‘Who’s there?’ he gasps, trying to stand. To his horror, he realises he is trapped. Thick, leather straps are wrapped around him, binding him to some kind of metal chair. Terror grips him. ‘You don’t realise what you’re doing!’ he cries, peering into the shifting shadows. ‘I belong to the House of van Tol.’

The sound of scraping metal continues, but there is no reply.

Palchus raises his voice into something approaching a scream. ‘I am Navis Nobilite! You may not treat me like this!’ He strains to free himself from the chair and feels the awful pain in his stomach again. Something is embedded in his flesh and he realises his jacket is drenched with blood. ‘What have you done to me?’

Finally there is a reply: a liquid gurgle that comes from somewhere behind him. The words make no sense whatsoever but, simultaneously, Palchus becomes aware of something else. As the vile belching sound fills the darkness, the Navigator feels words forming in his mind. He realises, to his amazement, that the small, hard eye embedded in his forehead is processing the gibberish into a language he can understand. It is as though the warp itself is speaking to him. Every syllable adds to his pain, like needles being pressed into his brain.

‘You did that to yourself, actually.’ The words appear as thoughts, rather than sound, and the thoughts are full of hate. The sense of malice is so great that the Navigator lets out an involuntary whine.

‘Did what?’ he manages to gasp eventually.

‘You have quite literally fallen on your sword, Palchus.’

The Navigator peers down at his stomach. It is too dark to see anything clearly, but he can just about make out a glimmer of twisted steel, jammed into his belly. ‘I need help then!’ he cries. ‘You can’t just leave me like this.’ His fear starts to mingle with rage. ‘Who are you?’

The burbled reply makes no sense but, as before, words appear in Palchus’s head. ‘I have more names than I care to remember. Some of them might make sense to you, I suppose, but none of them come close to the truth. My current master calls me Cerbalus. That will suffice for one such as you.’

Palchus latches desperately on to these shreds of information. ‘Your master? Who is your master? Let me speak with him. As soon as he realises who I am, you will find–’

‘Oh, Inquisitor Mortmain knows very well who you are, Palchus van Tol. You are here on his instructions, in fact.’

Despite his agony, Palchus lets out an incredulous laugh. ‘Mortmain? He would not dare!’

The darkness fills with the sound of scraping metal and a face appears directly in front of Palchus. It is the most terrifying thing the Navigator has ever seen. It must once have belonged to a mortal, living man, but now it is a fleshy casket, straining to contain a writhing, unspeakable horror. The shaven scalp has split in several places, revealing cherry-coloured coils of bone and a faint, shimmering light. The eyes have been scorched away, leaving two blackened pits, with cold blue fire shimmering in their centres. The whole head is torn and misshapen. Only one thing seems to be holding the mangled lump together: a mass of rusty chains snake in and out of the face, embedded deep in the bones and glinting dully as the mouth opens in a wide, toothless grin. ‘Oh, you would be surprised at what he dares.’

As the ruptured flesh talks, Palchus sees the reason for the gurgling, moist quality of its voice. The thing’s throat is torn and ruined, and its vocal cords are clearly exposed, rattling loosely in a nest of glistening muscle.

Palchus tries to pull back from the monster. Terrible as its appearance is, the thing that really appals him is the voice in his head. The words are so unnatural and malignant he can feel his mind buckling under the strain. This is no mortal creature leaning over him. Something unholy has been bound into the flesh of man. The word ‘daemon’ drifts into his thoughts, but he tries to squash it before madness overwhelms him. ‘You have to help me,’ he gasps.

‘Of course I do,’ answers the pile of gore and chain. ‘Mortmain was most concerned for your safety. I cannot leave you in this awkward condition.’

Palchus screams. The monster has placed a hand on the sword in his belly and is tugging it up towards his ribcage.

‘Of course,’ it continues when the Navigator is quiet again, ‘I can remove this blade quickly or slowly. I can remove it with care, or less care.’

‘What do you want of me?’ moans the Navigator, as fresh blood pools in his lap.

‘I want you to talk, Palchus, that is all. There is no need for any more unpleasantness. I just need to know why you and your family have come to the Domitus.’

Palchus sees a glimmer of hope, then sighs as he realises the truth of his situation. Strangely, he feels his fear diminishing slightly as he accepts his fate. ‘You could never let me live. Not now you’ve told me who your master is.’

There is another rattle of shifting chains and something appears in front of Palchus’s face. It is the monster’s hand. The fingers are grey and crooked. Gleaming patches of bone are visible beneath lines of jagged, crudely sewn skin. The nails are purple and torn. But it is not the ruined flesh that Palchus notices, it is the long, metal syringe in its grip.

‘You’re quite wrong,’ explains the voice in Palchus’s head. ‘If you would just talk to me, I can wipe away all memory of this encounter. My master has an endearing propensity for mercy, you see. He has specifically requested that I try to help you. You will be found slumped in a gutter, near the slaves’ quarters, wounded but alive, and your father will reprimand you for nearly getting yourself killed.’ The monster brings the needle closer to Palchus’s face so that he can see the liquid dripping from its tip. ‘All you need to do is explain why you have not left for Terra. What is your family’s particular interest in this planet? What links you to Ilissus?’

Palchus’s heart begins to race again as he sees that he might be able to survive after all. All he need do is tell the monster about the true cause of Ilissus’s storms.

The ravaged face moves closer, sensing that the Navigator is about to speak.

Then Palchus closes his eyes and bites down hard on his lip. To his surprise, he realises that something means more to him than his own precious life. How could he confide in this creature? If the truth about Ilissus were revealed, it would be the end of everything; the end of House van Tol. Their long, distinguished history would be stricken from Imperial records. His glorious lineage would be made worthless. Their properties would be taken and, worst of all, they would be disgraced. The whole of Terra would think that Palchus van Tol was the son of a traitor.

Palchus groans in torment. ‘I won’t tell you anything,’ he whispers, unable to believe what he is saying.

The monster leans on the broken sword and sends another bolt of agony through Palchus’s stomach. ‘Are you sure?’ A long, rusty knife appears in front of Palchus’s face. ‘I’m more than happy to extract the information from you, but people don’t generally enjoy my methods.’

Palchus knows all too well the methods that are likely to be employed by an Inquisitorial lackey, but there is a new sensation mixed with his abject terror: a surety that he cannot let this dreadful being discover the truth. ‘Some things are worth dying for,’ he says quietly.

The thing laughs. ‘Oh, you won’t die, Palchus, I will make sure of that.’ The blade presses against the Navigator’s trembling throat. ‘I’m very skilled at my craft. I’ve had millennia to perfect it.’

Palchus’s voice remains oddly calm as he replies. ‘My father had doubts about coming to the Domitus. He knew it would be disastrous if one of us spoke out of turn. His great fear was that Mortmain might discover the truth.’

‘The truth, Palchus? What is the truth?’

Palchus lifts his chin and flares his nostrils. ‘The truth is that you will get nothing from me. My father foresaw just this kind of eventuality. He made us take precautions.’

The voice in Palchus’s head sounds excited, as though trying to contain laughter. ‘Precautions? What do you mean? What kind of–’

The sentence goes unfinished as Palchus stamps his right foot on the stone floor with all his strength. The heel of his boot collapses and the explosive charge contained within fills the chamber with blinding light.

The blast is so powerful that the sound travels several kilometres, to a small, dingy chamber, where Palchus’s father looks up in alarm.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The ground splits and churns as Halser races towards the tower. Rocks and bolter shells rattle against his helmet as he weaves through the enemy blasts. At the foot of the building he launches his power-armoured bulk against a rotten door and it implodes in spectacular fashion, sending him tumbling into a small courtyard. The gunfire grows even more frenzied, but the sergeant turns his tumble into a roll and clatters across the exploding flagstones, scraping to a halt behind a ruined well and raising his bolt pistol to return fire.

He sees a row of Traitor Marines, slumped against the undulating parapet at the top of the strange tower. One of them is carrying a twisted, horned lump of metal. At first Halser cannot recognise it, but as a beam of crackling blue light erupts from the thing’s barrel, he realises it is a lascannon.

The well disintegrates and Halser is thrown back across the courtyard. The impact would have killed a mortal man, but the sergeant’s power armour softens the blast with a wheeze of hydraulics, allowing him to roll clear, unharmed. As a second Traitor Marine opens fire with an equally grotesque bolt pistol, Halser stands and calmly fires back. Shots ring out from several directions at once, filling the courtyard with light, sound and smoke, and making it impossible to see anything. Power-armoured boots pound back and forth, and metallic voices ring out through the din.

Halser cannot be sure if he has hit anything. He tries to aim at the traitor with the lascannon, but the drifting smoke makes it impossible to be sure what he is seeing. Twice he almost fires and then lowers his weapon, afraid of hitting one of his own men. He sees a flash of sparking metal to his left. Comus is jamming his force sword into someone Halser cannot see. There is a screech of grinding metal as the Librarian wrenches his blade free, painting the clouds red as he staggers back and prepares to swing again. ‘Their shots are wild!’ he cries, levelling his sword at the walls. ‘Someone else is attacking them!’

Someone else? Halser pounds through the smoke to get a better view. As he nears the wall he sees the Chaos Marines lined up on the battlements. Comus is right. All of them are being twisted into bizarre positions: dragged awkwardly to one side or wrenched back over the wall. One of them manages to aim his bolter at Halser, but the shot whines past his head, missing by a metre as the traitor struggles to hang on to his gun.

Halser sprints through the whirling clouds, calling for the squad to advance as he spies a staircase at the foot of the circular wall. As he pounds up the crumbling steps, he sees the reason for the Chaos Marines’ odd poses. The clouds of smoke and dust have taken hold of them, wrapping around their misshapen power armour in hazy, shifting columns.

The traitor with the lascannon hefts it round to face the oncoming sergeant, but as he tries to aim he slumps forwards onto his knees, weighed down by the storm.

Halser raises his bolt pistol to fire and pauses in shock. His opponent’s leg is now encased in stone, stone that merges seamlessly with the clouds. The limbs of smoke are solidifying as they envelop the Chaos Marines, and morphing into rock. ‘By the Throne,’ gasps Halser, stumbling to a halt. He does not have long to consider the strangeness of the scene. The parapet behind him explodes as another shot goes wide. Halser puts aside his amazement and charges at the beleaguered enemy, jamming his rattling chainsword into the first breastplate he reaches and howling a battle-cry as he disappears in a shower of blood and shredded armour.

The others race up after him, firing calm, precise shots into the heaving mass. The enemy outnumber them two to one, but there is no contest. As the Relictors blast them apart, the Chaos Marines are wrenched to the ground by vast, animated banks of smoke. As they drop to the flagstones, the smoke forms spines of rock – just like all the other twisted pillars that cover the planet’s surface.

For a few minutes the clouds pulse with light as Halser and the others unleash a sustained volley at their howling foes. Then, as it becomes clear that there are no shots being fired in return, Halser wrenches his rattling chainsword from a limp body and staggers back, raising the bloody weapon over his head and turning to face his men.

The gunfire ceases and the Relictors lower their guns, surveying the carnage they have wrought. The walls of the tower are scorched and peppered with holes, and the mangled remains of Chaos Marines lie sprawled across the blood-slick masonry. The Relictors watch in amazement as the columns lose their last shreds of smoke and settle into solid, fixed limbs of rock, enveloping the fallen like a shroud. Horned, groaning helmets adorn the towers like onyx studs in a vast piece of jewellery.

Halser counts the Space Marines gathered on the wall. Only seven have climbed up with him. There is no sign of Comus. He looks down into the courtyard and sees the Librarian’s distinctive blue power armour, spread-eagled across the flagstones, surrounded by blood. A man is backing away from him, quickly disappearing into the rolling dust clouds.

The sergeant’s pulse pounds in his ears, still charged with bloodlust and, without a second thought, he raises his pistol and guns down the receding figure. Only as he climbs down the steps does he see that the fallen man is unarmed and his robes are embroidered with Imperial insignia. Halser curses and turns the man over with his boot. He is still alive but gasping for breath and clutching feebly at the ragged hole in his shoulder. His robes must have originally been white, but they are quickly turning red. The wound looks bad but not fatal and Halser cannot decide whether that is a good or bad thing. The Imperial aquila is emblazoned across the man’s chest, but there is something about him that reeks of heresy: both his eyes have been surgically removed, replaced by two lines of ragged stitching, and a lump of crystal in the shape of a star has been hammered into his forehead.

The man tries to speak, but his words are muffled by the blood welling up in his mouth.

Halser crouches down next to him and raises him into a sitting position. ‘What did you say?’

The wounded man spits a gobbet of blood onto his chest and tries again. ‘Stay away. Stay away from the prophet,’ he gurgles, before being wracked by a terrible cough that dislodges even more blood.

‘What?’ asks Halser, looking anxiously at the slumped form of Comus, lying a couple of metres away. ‘What prophet? Who are you talking about?’

‘Astraeus,’ he gasps, grasping Halser by the shoulders. ‘You must allow him to complete his trials. You must not ruin his great work.’

‘Astraeus?’ Halser shakes his head. ‘What great work?’

The man pulls himself closer and Halser has the unnerving sensation that he is looking at him through the crystal star. As he turns his head from side to side, the failing light refracts through the prism to reveal the grey, knotted brain beneath. ‘Ilissus is just the beginning. He will purge the entire galaxy.’ He turns towards the columns of rock that have enveloped the Chaos Marines. ‘The elements are now his to command. Soon, the Dark Powers will learn to crawl. The Great Enemy will grovel before him like a cur.’ The man’s voice grows shrill. ‘But you must leave Ilissus! You will ruin everything–’

The man stiffens and lets out a hoarse croak as a smouldering hole appears in his chest. Blood fountains from his nose and he slumps back in the sergeant’s arms.

Halser drops him and whirls around.

‘Filthy idolator,’ hisses Pylcrafte, lowering his laspistol and withdrawing his optical cables back into his hood.

Halser leaps to his feet and grabs Inquisitor Mortmain’s acolyte by the throat, lifting him up from the ground and slamming him against the shattered wall. ‘You do not make the decisions here!’ His words are so loud that they emerge from his helmet as a distorted blast of noise.

Pylcrafte whines with a mixture of terror and outrage. ‘This planet is damned! We cannot preserve the life of transgressors! The unsparing severity of the Emperor’s wrath must be as swift as a–’

His words end in an explosion of air as Halser slams Pylcrafte onto the ground and aims his pistol at his undulating hood. ‘Silence!’ he howls, his whole body trembling with anger.

Pylcrafte looks up at the circle of Space Marines who have gathered around him. Every one of them has levelled a weapon at him. He mutters under his breath but says nothing more.

Halser looses him and turns away, waving his men over to the fallen Librarian. ‘Comus,’ he says, kneeling down beside him. ‘Are you shot?’

The Librarian shakes his head and grimaces at the clouds undulating over their heads. ‘No, I can continue.’ He nods at the dead stranger. ‘I’m starting to understand. The pilgrims never left Ilissus. They never died. They are still here, after all these centuries, but their worship has become confused.’ He waves at the clouds again. ‘The prophet he mentioned is somehow connected to all this. He is the one who has doomed Ilissus.’ He clutches his head and groans in pain and confusion. ‘But he is not a follower of the Ruinous Powers.’

Pylcrafte cannot hold his tongue. ‘Then why have they defiled a shrine of the Immortal Emperor! What does it matter who their leader is? They are the worst kind of–’

At a nod from Halser, one of the Relictors steps forwards and clamps a gauntleted hand over Pylcrafte’s face.

‘Whoever this prophet is, we are very close to him,’ continues Comus as he sits up and looks around the courtyard. ‘Either by chance or his design we have stumbled across one of the routes to his home.’ He taps his finger against the small leather-bound book. ‘According to the libellus, if we find the Zeuxis Scriptorium, we will find the prophet.’

Halser turns to look through the ruined walls of the tower. The sinking sun flashes crimson across the visor of his helmet. ‘Come nightfall, Mortmain will begin the orbital bombardment. We have less than four hours left to find the scriptorium.’ He lowers his voice. ‘Brother Silvius and the others must manage without us.’

Comus shakes his head as Halser helps him to his feet. ‘But what really is the use in finding the scriptorium, without any guidance from the Domitus?’

There is a hiss of escaping air as Halser removes his helmet. His brutal features are as red as the sky. ‘This is our last chance, Comus, don’t you understand? Mortmain is our only friend and our enemies are legion. We have to convince them all. We have to show them that our willingness to learn is not heresy, but the Imperium’s last hope. We have the courage to go where the other Chapters will not. We are the only ones who–’

‘You do not have to explain any of this to me,’ interrupts the Librarian with a look of disbelief. He leads Halser a few paces away from the others and speaks in an urgent whisper. ‘But how will we get off the planet before Mortmain begins dropping his bombs? If we cannot navigate the clouds, how will we make it off the planet alive? We have four hours left. Perhaps we should return to the gunship and see if we can help the tech-priests?’

A network of throbbing veins spreads across Halser’s face and he hisses through gritted teeth. ‘If we return empty handed we are dead anyway. You remember Captain Asamon’s orders: find a weapon powerful enough to cleanse every world in the system. Only if the Inquisition sees our true potential will we have any hope of redemption. If we return now, with nothing, the Relictors are doomed. Every last one of us.’ He clutches his hands together as though praying. ‘But if we can show the strength of our faith, show them that we can wield even the most powerful artefacts, they will have to accept us once more as true servants of the Emperor.’ As the sergeant looks around at the shattered tower there is an edge of mania to his voice. ‘And anyway, what use do you think it would be returning to the gunship?’ He waves at the dust clouds. ‘We have no signal. How would we fly? I doubt we would make ten kilometres before hitting a mountain.’

Comus narrows his eyes, unnerved by the sergeant’s odd tone, but he cannot deny his logic. It was a miracle that they managed to land as well as they did. And since then the weather has become even more violent.

Halser pounds his chest armour. ‘We’re not done yet, Comus. I will not allow it!’ He stamps one of his boots on the ground, surrounding them both in a cloud of dust. ‘The Zeuxis Scriptorium is the best known of Ilissus’s reliquaries. Think what treasures might be there.’ He nods at the bloodstained flagstones. ‘And you say it is also the source of all this,’ he waves at the sky, ‘sorcery. Why should we head back to the gunship without at least investigating this so-called prophet? I do not doubt he is a charlatan, but who knows what kinds of artefacts he is hoarding. Alone, without any Imperial support, he has outwitted the Black Legion. Think what that might mean! He has surrounded the whole planet with clouds that turn men to stone. How could he achieve such things? Perhaps by harnessing a forbidden text? Perhaps by uncovering a relic from the days when the Emperor Himself walked here?’

Comus shakes his head. ‘I don’t understand. You want us to head towards the man who has corrupted the whole planet?’

‘Why not?’ Halser’s voice is a ragged snarl. ‘By the Throne, Comus, can’t you see? Maybe we are doomed, but at least we might end our days covered in glory. At least we might put an end to whatever monster is plaguing this wretched planet. And perhaps…’ A trace of smile appears on his face. ‘Perhaps we could find something that truly makes the trip worthwhile.’

The Librarian turns to look at the other Space Marines. They are waiting patiently for orders, as proud and noble as ever. He sighs and shakes his head. They do not deserve to die in Mortmain’s firestorm, but he knows Halser is right: they are doomed anyway. For decades now, the Inquisition has been working towards their destruction. Perhaps this would be a more fitting end: death in battle, at the hands of the Imperium’s foes, rather than excommunication and disgrace at the hands of a shadowy cabal. He looks back at the sergeant and falls quiet, unsure what to say. All the options seem black. Then he looks into Halser’s eyes and sees how fiercely they are burning. If they have any hope at all, he decides, it is here – in the fury of Sergeant Halser.

Comus takes out the strange little book and attaches another cable to it. The others wait patiently as he prays. Even Pylcrafte ceases his struggles.

‘I see another group of towers,’ says the Librarian in a hoarse voice. ‘Two kilometres south of this one. They are on the exact location of the underground temple network that once housed various scriptoria, including Zeuxis. If we can make it that far, I believe we will find the man who is in control of Ilissus. What we would do then, I cannot imagine.’

Halser grabs the Librarian by both arms. ‘Have faith, Comus.’ He looks south and watches the spirals of wind, whipping across the desolate landscape. ‘We will be heroes again, I promise you.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

Inquisitor Mortmain picks his way through chunks of glowing metal and smouldering flesh. The space where the interrogation chamber once stood is now a blackened wound. The blast was so fierce that several walls have buckled and fallen, creating an oddly liquid scene: girders, doors and coving lie draped over each other in a surreal slump of melted steel and shattered stone. Mortmain wrinkles his nose in distaste; the air is thick with the smell of charred meat. ‘Oh, Palchus,’ he breathes, kneeling to examine a pile of ash. ‘What did you do?’

A towering figure watches from the darkness: a hulking giant, clad in gleaming bare ceramite. As he steps closer, the light of Mortmain’s torch washes across the giant’s power armour, revealing rows of intricate letters engraved into every available space. When he speaks, his voice peals from his helmet like a sword being drawn. ‘Does it live?’

The inquisitor lifts a piece of broken chain from the rubble and holds it to his chest, muttering a prayer. ‘Emperor save us, Justicar Lyctus, it might.’ He looks up at the silver-clad Space Marine and shakes his head. ‘I’ve been a fool. Cerbalus must have seen this coming. Whatever the Navigator used to do this has broken the wards and bonds we used to bind the daemon. If it managed to latch on to any other living thing, it will now be loose on the Domitus.’ He rises and turns to face the Space Marine looming over him, his face utterly drained of colour. ‘Cerbalus knows everything. It knows that Ilissus is on the verge of plunging the whole sector into madness. If it lives, it will attempt to stop the Exterminatus.’

Justicar Lyctus seems unimpressed by the urgency in Mortmain’s voice. His glittering gauntlets remain draped calmly over the hilt of his halberd; if not for the faint light, flickering across the weapon’s blade, Lyctus could be mistaken for a statue. ‘What do you intend to do, inquisitor?’ he asks, in the same ringing tones.

Mortmain clutches his shaven scalp in both hands and mutters another curse. ‘I have no choice.’ He looks out through a misshapen viewport at the wraith-like planet below. ‘I can wait no longer. Baron van Tol’s wretched secrets will have to wait. I must destroy Ilissus now.’ He looks back at the Space Marine and shakes his head in disbelief. ‘Damn it all. If Cerbalus lives, I may already be too late. It will tear the Domitus apart.’ He looks past Justicar Lyctus into the shattered remains of the corridor. The light of his torch reveals more glittering, statuesque figures. ‘You and your squad must do what you can.’ Mortmain places a hand on the cover of a metal book, hung around the Space Marine’s cuirass. ‘I will pray for you.’

Lyctus nods and envelops the inquisitor’s hand in his own massive, silver gauntlet. ‘If it lives, we will bring it to heel, Inquisitor Mortmain.’

Mortmain shakes his head and withdraws his hand. ‘No, you will not, justicar. Not this one. Even you will be unable to destroy a horror such as Cerbalus.’

There is a hint of emotion in the Space Marine’s reply that is either disbelief or injured pride. ‘Then what are you asking?’

Mortmain looks up at him. ‘If Cerbalus is free, we are already dead. But Ilissus must still be destroyed. Too much is at stake.’ He looks out at the planet again. ‘You must buy me whatever time you can. Find Cerbalus and throw yourself against it with all the fury you can muster. You cannot win against such a being, but you must try anyway. If you can keep the thing at bay long enough, I will be able to begin the bombardment of Ilissus.’

‘And what about Sergeant Halser?’

Mortmain lowers his head. ‘I will pray for him too.’

CHAPTER NINE

Baron Cornelius van Tol stumbles awkwardly to the door of his chamber, clumsy with fear. The dry, ironic tone is entirely absent from his voice as he calls for his guards. ‘Something is approaching,’ he cries as ranks of soldiers, wearing peaked caps and epaulettes, hurry towards him. ‘The inquisitor has sent some kind of…’ His words trail off and he seems unsure how to continue. He shakes his head. ‘No, not Mortmain, this is something else. Something worse. Man the doors!’

Rows of polished lasguns line the passageway as he emerges, peering anxiously into the dark. ‘Something is on the ship,’ he mutters, drawing a gold-plated pistol and training it on the rippling shadows. ‘The Domitus has been breached.’

A captain arrives, hastily fastening the collar of his uniform as he bows to the baron. ‘My lord, what has happened?’

Van Tol looks back at him, his eyes wild with fear. ‘Thayer. Didn’t you hear the explosion?’

The officer’s aristocratic features are identical to the baron’s, and as he sees van Tol’s fear his skin pales to the same shade of grey. He has never seen the baron show such emotion before. ‘I heard a noise, uncle, but I assumed it was just an engine fault. The Domitus is as ancient as the stars. Perhaps it was just–’

‘Palchus is dead!’ whispers the baron, clutching the officer by the shoulder. ‘I can feel his absence.’

‘Dead?’ Thayer’s mouth drops open. ‘How? Was it the inquisitor?’

The baron shakes his head and looks back at the darkened corridor. The night sights attached to his men’s guns send flickering red lines across the vaulted masonry, creating an unnerving sense of movement. ‘No. This is not Mortmain’s doing. Why would he attack his own flagship?’ He lowers his voice and pulls his nephew closer. ‘I can see something.’ He taps the front of his cap. ‘It’s as though the immaterium has come after us and breached the hull.’ He shakes his head in disbelief and looks at the floor. ‘Palchus is dead.’

Captain Thayer frowns. ‘The warp has entered the ship? What do you mean? How could that happen now? We’re in real space.’

The baron gives a vague nod and starts to reply, but his words are lost beneath the whining screech of las-fire.

The two officers turn to find that the corridor has erupted with crackling energy as the soldiers fire wildly into the darkness.

They both raise their pistols and crouch next to the other soldiers.

‘What is it?’ cries the baron to the man next to him, struggling to be heard over the noise. ‘What did you see?’

The soldier shakes his head, clearly terrified. ‘I saw nothing,’ he admits, ‘but the others–’

‘Hold your fire!’ cries the baron, realising that his men are jumping at shadows, infected by his panic.

The shots continue for a few more seconds, until the baron manages to make himself heard. Then, one by one, the soldiers lower their guns and look towards him.

‘My lord,’ cries a man at the front of the group. ‘There was something there. I couldn’t see exactly, but it was moving quickly.’

‘And what if it was one of our own sentries?’ asks the baron, rising to his feet and peering into the dark.

The soldier’s mouth flaps wordlessly as he fails to think of a suitable answer.

‘Perhaps you should go and see what you’ve been incinerating?’ The baron’s voice is sharp with grief. ‘If you’re so certain you saw something.’

The soldier’s eyes widen in fear. Then he regains a semblance of self-control and rises to his feet, adjusting his cap and giving a stiff salute before stepping away from the rest of the men. He keeps his lasgun levelled at the oily shadows as he edges forwards. The others watch in anxious silence as he approaches a gloom-shrouded fork in the passageway.

‘I might have been mistaken,’ says the soldier, looking up and down the corridors. He peers down the barrel of his gun, scoping the shadows for movement, but sees nothing. The relief on his face is visible, even in the half-light. Then his eyes narrow as he spots a darker shadow slip across the floor towards him. He mutters something, but the words are too quiet for the others to hear.

‘What was that?’ calls Captain Thayer, leaning around his uncle for a better look.

‘Nothing,’ replies the soldier, raising his voice. ‘I think it’s just a rat.’

‘A rat?’ Thayer looks at his uncle in disbelief.

‘That’s not it,’ hisses the baron, fixing Captain Thayer with a wild stare. ‘There is something out there.’

‘Kaleb?’ cries one of the soldiers. ‘What’s the matter?’

The baron and the captain look back down the corridor and see that the soldier has started acting strangely. His body has been gripped by some kind of spasm. ‘A rat!’ he cries in an odd-sounding voice. The words sound as though they are echoing in a vast cavern and as he cries out again the sound draws out into a long, rolling bellow.

‘Kaleb?’ calls out another voice, but the soldier’s fit is growing rapidly worse. His head is jerking from side to side, spraying spit and curses as his legs collapse beneath him.

A few of the soldiers start moving towards him, but the baron halts them with a barked order: ‘Halt! Hold your positions, damn you!’

The soldiers’ desire to aid their fallen comrade is short-lived. As they watch in horror, his flesh starts to ripple and bulge, like a sheet caught in the wind.

‘I knew it,’ breathes the baron as the soldier’s arms and legs begin to elongate, forming a teetering, arachnid frenzy of limbs, lashing violently back and forth across the stone floor and filling the air with a horrible, wet thumping sound.

‘Kill it,’ he whispers, but nobody hears.

The writhing mass lurches up from the shadows and the soldiers back away in horror. The thing that was Kaleb is now a five-metre nest of twitching limbs, surrounding a yellow, egg-shaped sack that quivers with revolting, subcutaneous shapes.

‘Kill it!’ repeats the baron. His voice is now a scream and before his men have a chance to respond, he begins firing his laspistol at the nightmarish vision.

Gunfire throws back the darkness for a second time, as the soldiers unleash a desperate volley of las-fire at the approaching colossus. The light is dazzling. It is impossible to see anything clearly so the soldiers fire blind, screaming as they register the full horror of what they have seen. The onslaught continues for several minutes, until finally the baron calls a halt.

As the echoes and smoke drift away the soldiers peer at the distant, hulking shape blocking the far end of the corridor.

Someone screams.

The monster has absorbed every shot as a welcome, nourishing feast. The featureless sack that passes for its head is now pulsing with inner fire and its jumble of spider limbs has swelled to three times the size, completely filling the passageway.

A few of the men begin firing again. A few drop to their knees and clutch their heads, their minds splintered. The rest turn and flee, dropping their guns as they race past the baron and disappear into the dark.

‘Uncle,’ gasps Captain Thayer, pulling at the baron’s arm. ‘Run.’ To his horror, he realises that his uncle’s face has gone slack and his eyes are fixed in an unblinking stare, locked on the undulating mass squeezing down the passageway. He tries again to drag the baron after his fleeing men, but van Tol will not move. Thayer keeps his gaze averted from the approaching mass, sure his mind will break if he looks at it even briefly, but he senses that the featureless sack is turned towards his uncle, as though the monster has singled him out amongst the crowd of terrified soldiers. ‘Uncle,’ he repeats in a tremulous wail, barely recognisable as speech. Finally, as he sees the forest of limbs in the corner of his vision, slithering across the ground towards him, he lets go of the baron’s arm and bolts, sprinting after the others.

The baron is not conscious of his nephew’s departure. He is not conscious of the figures dashing past him. He is not even conscious of his own being. All he sees is the vast, pallid, featureless head looming out of the darkness, fixed determinedly on him.

The creature heaves its awkward, pulsating bulk the last few metres to the baron, then reaches out with several of its triple jointed limbs. It grasps the baron in a delicate embrace and picks him carefully from the ground, lifting him towards its trembling, bloated head. For a second it holds him there, just a few centimetres away from the gleaming expanse of skin, then it shoves him through the membrane with a liquid plop and he vanishes from view.

The baron finds himself drowning in a saffron-coloured sea. The liquid fills his ears and rushes down his throat but, despite the absurd horror of his situation, van Tol feels a part of his mind step back, calmly removing itself from the agony of his death throes. This fragment of sentience is not even surprised to hear a voice, drifting through the yellow fluid.

‘Baron van Tol,’ it says in a perfectly reasonable tone.

The baron feels an inexplicable swell of pride that his murderer should know his name.

‘What is down there, baron, on Ilissus?’

The baron’s lungs are already full of the creature’s fluid and there is no way he can form speech, but as life slips away from him, he answers with his mind, delighted to be able to answer the god-like being that is digesting him.

He feels sure his answer will come as a surprise.

CHAPTER TEN

Gideon Pylcrafte kneels in the dust and mutters a prayer. The towers rising up ahead of him defy all logic. They resemble the fossil of a tornado, preserved at its most destructive: frozen, twisted spirals of rock, ten times taller than anything they have yet seen. They lean and bulge in a way that should send them toppling to the ground, but instead of falling they weave several kilometres up into the churning sky, towering over everything. ‘Sweet, merciful Emperor,’ moans Pylcrafte, shaking his mass of cables, ‘save us from this place.’

Sergeant Halser lets out a bitter laugh. ‘I think we will have to save ourselves.’

Halser, Comus and the rest of the squad are stood behind Pylcrafte on a lip of rock, also surveying the mountainous towers. If they feel any of Pylcrafte’s horror, it is hidden behind their expressionless helmets. Only the Librarian has his face exposed to the needling dust and he is poring over the book chained to his power armour.

‘According to the libellus,’ he says, tracing a finger over the murky screen, ‘the Emperor once paused here to rest. In those days the planet was a verdant haven, full of life. The natives flooded the towns and cities, showering their saviour with rose petals and chanting His name. It must have been something to see.’ Comus looks up and his face is a mask of pain. Blood is flowing freely from his eyes and his skin is as grey as the lifeless rocks. He closes the book. ‘Whoever rules this place now is a saviour of a different kind.’

Sergeant Halser nods. Even through the grille of his helmet his voice betrays his excitement. ‘But a saviour nonetheless.’ He nods at Pylcrafte. ‘Inquisitor Mortmain believed this place was crawling with the Black Legion. And what have we seen? A few pitiful stragglers at most. This prophet clearly has great weapons at his command.’

Pylcrafte climbs to his feet and points his cane in the direction of the towering peaks. ‘How can you say such things? Look at that! It reeks of sorcery! My master gave you license to investigate ruins, not to consort with magicians and apostates!’

Halser grips the hilt of his chainsword and speaks in a series of explosive barks. ‘Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut.’

Mortmain’s acolyte clutches an I-shaped medallion as though it will ward off the sergeant’s fury. ‘I am my master’s eyes and ears, Sergeant Halser, you would do well to remember that.’

Halser lets out an incoherent howl and rises up over him, but Comus steps forwards and places a hand on his arm, looking at him with pain-filled eyes.

Halser backs away with a curse and waves his men towards the towering shapes. ‘Don’t just stand there, move!’

The Relictors climb down from the lip of rock and start making their way across a featureless plain towards the warped peaks. The scene resembles a clearing in a forest of stone, and as the Space Marines lurch and stumble through the knee-deep dust, they keep their guns trained on the horizon, conscious of how exposed they are, even in the golden, hazy dusk. As they near the columns of rock they realise they are the beginnings of a bizarre mountain range. As they climb a gradual incline, they see dozens more of the teetering spires stretching away across the horizon.

‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ calls Sergeant Halser through the swirling dust.

Comus nods. His chin and neck are slick with blood and his face is white with pain. He is leaning heavily on one of the other Relictors. ‘The xenos device is pointing here. The Zeuxis Scriptorium is hidden somewhere in these mountains. And the air is so thick with prayers, I can hardly breathe.’ He waves weakly over the sergeant’s shoulder. ‘They are coming to greet you.’

Halser peers through the clouds and sees a group of tiny silhouettes rippling through the storm. He signals for his men to fan out and keep their guns on the approaching figures.

Even in their servo-powered suits, the Space Marines find it almost impossible to walk through the shifting terrain and it takes another fifteen minutes to reach the men. There are three of them: skeletal, shaven-headed wretches dressed in white, priestly robes. As they bow in greeting, light flickers across the star-shaped crystals embedded in their foreheads. Each of them has a line of thick, black stitches where their eyes should be.

‘Heretics,’ mutters Pylcrafte inside his hood, quietly enough that Sergeant Halser does not hear. ‘How can they see without eyes? Unless they have witch-sight.’

‘Friends!’ cries one of the men in heavily accented Low Gothic, holding up his hands in greeting.

Sergeant Halser notices that none of them are carrying weapons but keeps his gun raised just the same. ‘Who are you?’

The man beams back at him, delighted by the question. ‘We’re the Sons of Astraeus.’ He signals for the two men behind him to approach. ‘I’m Frater Gortyn. This is Frater Eusebius. And this is Frater Carmina. We are Pilgrims of the Sacred Light.’ He points at the tower behind them. ‘It is by our will, and the will of Astraeus himself that you have been allowed to find your way here.’

Sergeant Halser feels his hackles rising at the word ‘allowed’ but manages to keep his reply reasonably civil. ‘And where is “here”?’

Frater Gortyn steps towards him with his hands still outstretched in greeting and Halser notices that they are wrapped in a silken mesh that stretches around his fingers, giving them a webbed appearance.

The pilgrim’s smile grows even wider. ‘You have found that which the enemy never could.’ He looks past the Space Marines to the rocky outcrop at the edge of the plain. ‘But we should talk once we are safely through the catacombs. Even now, the Great Enemy has not completely withdrawn from Ilissus. Astraeus has recently turned his thoughts to the celestial bodies. He cannot devote as much time to material concerns as he once did.’ The pilgrim waves at the mountains. ‘We can relax once we are in the city.’

Sergeant Halser gives Comus a questioning glance, but the Librarian’s only reply is a shrug.

At the sight of Halser’s hesitation, Frater Gortyn’s smile falters. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘We have travelled a long way,’ replies Halser. ‘We have come from the celestial bodies that you mentioned, in search of an ancient scriptorium. Have you heard of such a thing? It was once known as the Zeuxis Scriptorium.’

The pilgrim smiles again and makes a strange little gesture with his hands, as though scattering light from the crystal in his head. ‘Astraeus knows everything.’ His voice is a droning chant. ‘All questions shall be answered. All truths shall be revealed.’

Halser studies the white-clad figures for a moment, taking in their thin, wasted bodies, gangly, feeble limbs and gaunt, eyeless faces. Despite the eagle designs daubed on their robes, everything about them screams heretic. He has seen the same vacant, blissful smile countless times before, on a hundred worlds, and it has only ever meant one thing: corruption. Without looking back he can sense Inquisitor Mortmain’s lackey staring at him, willing him to execute them, and for once he is not sure that Pylcrafte’s puritanism is misplaced. Doubt grips him and quickly morphs into anger. He feels as though he is teetering on the brink of something without knowing which way to fall. He scowls at his men as they wait patiently for his next move; their faith in him is as complete as it is unquestioning. Even Comus is staring at him, his eyes as full of hope as they are of blood. Halser looks past him at the sunset. The knotted branches of cloud are taking on a crimson sheen as the day’s light slips from the sky. Only a few more hours, he thinks.

He turns back to the mutilated pilgrims. ‘I am Sergeant Halser. We are the Emperor’s Adeptus Astartes. Lead on.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Captain Thayer van Tol weeps as he runs, sprinting past crowds of wailing crewmen, Imperial Navy officers and his own, whimpering guards.

Behind him the Domitus is being devoured.

The battleship screams along with its crew as a monster tears into its brittle flesh.

The captain flings open a door and pounds up a flight of stairs, struggling to maintain his balance as a series of violent spasms rock the corridor, tearing support struts from the walls and firing rivets across the splintering floor. He slices through the carnage and bolts into a vast, open space. The ceiling disappears into cavernous darkness, only interrupted by the occasional winged saint, peering down sadly at the crowds flooding into one of the Domitus’s launch bays.

As he joins the terrified throng, Captain Thayer sees he was not the first to think of abandoning the doomed battleship. Thousands of desperate souls are clawing over each other in an attempt to reach the hulking rows of frigates and cruisers.

‘Make way for House van Tol!’ he cries, but his voice is lost, drowned beneath the general clamour. ‘Let me through!’ he demands, but nobody hears.

The chorus of screams grows as a vast shape tears through the wall on one side of the hangar. As the dust and debris settles, it becomes clear that Cerbalus has grown to surreal proportions. As its limbs unfold from the shadows, they dwarf even the beleaguered spacecraft, crumpling armoured hulls like tinfoil as they carry the daemon into the chamber. Then the egg-like head swings into view, hanging over the shrieking crowds like a sloshing, glistening moon.

Once more, Captain Thayer manages to look away before he takes in the full horror of the thing. He feels his mind tremble on the edge of collapse, but manages not to plunge fully into the abyss. Others are less lucky. All around him rows of hardened crewmen drop to their knees, howling and clawing at their own eyes in an attempt to remove the vision that has ruined their minds.

The Navigator shouts prayers as he turns and flees back the way he came, vaulting over the toppling, drooling ranks of crewmen. He is conscious that the impossible monster is ploughing through the crowds towards him. The screams leap in pitch again as the thing stuffs hundreds of pitiful souls into its quivering head, spilling yellow fluid onto the crowds as it attempts to satisfy a dreadful, centuries-old hunger.

Thayer makes it back to the doorway, but sees to his horror that the stairs have collapsed. ‘Emperor preserve us,’ he gasps, looking around for another exit.

Those still sane enough to control their limbs are now flooding back out of the hangar and Captain Thayer finds himself barged and jostled into a corner. Terror overcomes him and he draws his laspistol. ‘Stand back!’ he screams, levelling the gun at rows of ashen faces. Nobody hears him and after a glimpse of the creature’s teetering, spider-like limbs, a pistol does not make much of an impression.

As the crowds press closer Thayer loses control and begins firing indiscriminately into the crowd. Men, women and children are indistinguishable to him as he attempts to blast a path to another door. As quickly as the bodies tumble to the floor, more rush into the gaps they create. However desperately he fires, the captain only manages to move at a snail’s pace, and all the while he senses the huge shape looming closer – smashing through the remaining ships and tearing statues from the balconies overhead.

‘Let me through!’ he screams again and, this time, to his amazement, the figures ahead of him do actually move to one side. Captain Thayer can barely believe his luck as he rushes towards the door.

He has only taken a few steps when he sees the reason for the gap in the crowd. A towering, glittering figure is striding towards him: a Space Marine, wearing flashing plates of unpainted power armour and carrying a halberd that shimmers with blue light. As he smashes effortlessly through the crowd, the Space Marine makes a formidable sight. The sheer bulk of him is incredible and every inch of the warrior is clad in thick, gleaming plate.

‘Wait!’ cries Captain Thayer, reaching out to the Space Marine, but he finds himself barged unceremoniously to one side as the warrior ploughs through the crowds towards the still-growing monster.

The captain scrambles back to his feet and manages to climb onto the pedestal of a broken statue. As he looks out over the heaving throng, he catches other glimpses of silver, appearing at various points in the vast, shifting darkness. It seems almost as though they are arriving from nowhere. As Thayer watches in disbelief seven of the glittering figures materialise from the shadows and begin charging towards the mountain of thrashing limbs.

Thayer looks back at the door and sees that he has a chance to escape, but he finds he cannot leave. The scene unfolding before him is like a tale from the oldest legends: a giant creature from the warp, surrounded by glittering, armour-clad knights. The captain forgets his terror for a moment as he watches the Space Marines charge towards the thing that is devouring the ship.

The monster lifts its mountainous pile of limbs, severing a cluster of fuel pipes and spilling gouts of blue flame across the hangar. Whole swathes of the crowd ignite and their agonised shadows begin to dance and writhe across the walls.

The fire does not slow the Space Marines and as they race towards the writhing monster they raise their halberds with mute synchronicity, levelling the pulsing blades at its huge, arachnoid limbs.

At the last minute, Captain Thayer looks away, unwilling to watch the creature feed on its silver-clad attackers. Then, rather than the sounds of messy consumption he was expecting, he hears a new sound: a thin, piercing whistle, so loud he has to clamp his hands over his ears. He looks back and sees to his amazement that the vile creature is rearing up in pain. The Space Marines’ weapons are embedded deep in its legs and their power has spread across its flesh in a network of glittering, sapphire veins.

As he follows the lines of light, Thayer sees that they are racing towards the warp creature’s featureless, sack-like head. The captain howls in fear, realising too late that he has made a terrible mistake: in his excitement he has looked directly at the thing. His mind recoils from the insanity of it. ‘Mercy,’ he groans, sliding down the pedestal onto the trembling floor. No mercy is forthcoming as his thoughts race down avenues best left unexplored. In a fraction of a second the captain perceives all the dreadful, pitiless lunacy of the universe. ‘Mercy, mercy, mercy,’ he repeats as screaming, burning figures barge past him. His shattered thoughts present him with a variety of disturbing images, one of which might be reality. He sees the monster lash out with its countless limbs, sending a Space Marine spinning through the air like a child’s toy. The warrior flies up towards the gloomy, vaulted ceiling of the hangar, then plummets back down into the hellish inferno.

The vast hangar is quickly filling with flames and the temperature is rocketing. As Captain Thayer lies gibbering against the pedestal, the rows of faces racing past him begin to shimmer in the heat. Then he starts to question even that; is it really the heat making their features undulate and slide? There is something fierce and bestial about their expressions.

He looks back at the warp being and sees that, incredibly, most of the Space Marines are still attacking it. The light spreading from their halberds is blazing even brighter and the monster is recoiling in pain. Captain Thayer realises that the thin squealing sound is coming from its yellow, membranous head. ‘Mercy,’ he says again, but this time his tone is one of awed respect. Even from the depths of his growing madness, he realises the immensity of what they are doing. How can they be so calm, he wonders, in the face of such a mind-bending horror?

As the creature attempts to wrench its limbs free, its impossible bulk topples back against the wall of the chamber. The whole edifice teeters and as the wall gives way, so does a large section of the ceiling. Marble saints topple from the shadows: gleaming goliaths the size of houses explode as they slam down on the raging fires.

Still the Space Marines endure, climbing, mountaineer-like, up the monster’s heaving bulk. Another one dies, pulped against the wall as a twitching, kilometre-long limb breaks free. But the rest simply thrust their blades deeper. The blue light is now so bright that the warp creature’s innards are visible – pulsing like the flames below.

Captain Thayer realises that however hard they fight, the Space Marines have no hope. With every second that passes, the monster continues to grow in size and fury. Thayer starts to laugh. It is a wild, shrill sound, almost in tune with the monster’s screams. As he laughs he places the muzzle of his pistol against his head and makes a final plea for mercy.

CHAPTER TWELVE

As they enter the catacombs, Frater Gortyn plucks a torch from the walls and waves it around his head, pushing back the darkness to reveal a jumbled mess of broken headstones and shattered sarcophagi.

‘These old stones mark the heroism of a glorious age,’ he says, dusting down one of the inscriptions with his silk-clad hand.

Sergeant Halser’s eyes glitter hungrily in the flames. The names carved into the stones have long since faded, but their power still hangs heavy in the air. This is clearly the resting place of legendary figures. Rows of alcoves lead off into the darkness, each one filled with tall, pillared tombs, grandiose winged sculptures and faded murals. ‘Who were these champions?’ he asks, taking another torch from the wall and holding it over a tomb.

The gaunt-faced pilgrim still has the same, inane grin frozen on his face, even as he discusses the dead. ‘Forgotten heroes, Sergeant Halser, of the highest order. These men and women fought beside the Holy Emperor as He carved a great empire in the stars. Only the bravest and most loyal of His servants were interred in the sacred earth of Ilissus. For many decades they were brought here, as defiant and noble in death as they were in life. As the Emperor’s wars grew in ambition, the number of casualties grew too. But we cared for them all, placing their remains in the most beautiful caskets we could build and storing the spoils of their crusade in our most secret reliquaries.’

Brother-Librarian Comus is still hesitating at the entrance, but Frater Gortyn waves him in and hurries off down the aisles of gloomy alcoves. ‘But the Emperor never forgot his loyal comrades. He visited Ilissus several times in his star chariot. Many records from those days are still held in the scriptoria. They describe how the Emperor did not just come here to pay His respects, He came seeking solace and even advice when He was most sorely pressed. The Zeuxis chamber contains several portraits of Him, kneeling at these very tombs.’

Most of the Relictors look around in awe, shocked by the idea that they might be treading in the Emperor’s footsteps, but Halser rushes after the pilgrims, lifting his torch higher. ‘Then the scriptorium does still exist!’

Frater Gortyn turns his grin back on the sergeant. ‘The Pilgrims of the Sacred Light have endured on Ilissus since the days of the Holy Emperor, guarding and waiting. When the Emperor’s fallen heroes came to us laden with strange, dangerous treasures, we swore to protect not just their memories, but their power. Our centuries of vigilance are recorded in great detail.’ His smile falters. ‘There were many dark years, of course.’ He waves at the dozens of smaller passageways that lead off from the main artery of the catacombs. ‘The Emperor’s visits ceased without explanation and we were forced to hide ourselves down here as the Great Enemy ran unchallenged, razing our forests and farms to the ground.’ Then the smile returns to his face and he makes the strange gesture again, flicking his fingers away from the crystal. ‘But finally the Emperor sent us a sign that He still lived. A star fell from the sky. And that star was His prophet, Astraeus.’

As the Relictors squeeze their armoured bulk past the mounds of shattered stone, the smaller, hooded shape of Pylcrafte hurries after them, eyeing the group of pilgrims with undisguised hate. ‘And just how did you survive all those “dark years”?’ He points his cane at the ceiling. ‘Hiding under a few rocks is not usually enough to avoid the snares of the Ruinous Powers.’

The bile in Pylcrafte’s voice is obvious to everyone except Frater Gortyn, who smiles cheerfully back at him. ‘You are quite right, friend. Over the years the black knights hunted us down without mercy. Our numbers dwindled and many priceless treasures had to be destroyed, lest they fall into the enemy’s hands.’

Pylcrafte shakes his head, but keeps his optical cables fixed on the grinning pilgrim. ‘And I suppose you had no option but to lay your hands on those “priceless treasures” and turn them against your foes? After all, why would you let your fraternity fail, when you had access to items of unnatural power?’ He shivers in disgust. ‘Whatever the source of that power might be.’

Frater Gortyn stumbles to a halt and shakes his head in speechless denial. The smile drops from his face.

One of the other pilgrims steps from the shadows, looking equally dismayed. ‘Oh, no. You don’t understand. We cannot use the objects left in our care. They are for the hands of the Emperor alone.’ He shrugs. ‘And the hands of His prophet, of course.’

Pylcrafte sounds unconvinced, and Sergeant Halser makes no move to silence him, keen to hear more detail about the relics left in the scriptorium. ‘So how have you survived?’ demands Pylcrafte in a peevish tone. ‘It is a matter of Imperial record that the Black Legion landed on Ilissus in large numbers. How can your order have survived intact, unless…’ He draws himself erect and places a hand on the medallion swinging beneath his hood. ‘Unless you are in league with them?’

Frater Gortyn steps closer to Pylcrafte, oblivious to the revulsion his nearness induces in Inquisitor Mortmain’s acolyte. Despite his lack of eyes, the pilgrim reaches unerringly for Pylcrafte’s arm and grips it with his silk-bound fingers. ‘Some of us fell, it is true. Mephitis and Axum and many other places failed in their duty, overcome by fear, but who can really blame them?’

Pylcrafte snatches his arm free and jabs a finger at the pilgrim. ‘You do not even condemn their heresy, then?’ The cables under his hood flick out like snakes and focus on the Space Marines towering over them. ‘Did you hear that? He who excuses heresy must himself be a brother of the damned. He just said that they have survived down here for years, but we know that in recent times the planet has been utterly overrun by Chaos. How can they have survived? Answer me that?’

He draws his laspistol and levels it at Frater Gortyn. His voice is verging on a scream. ‘There is blatant heresy here, Sergeant Halser. Are you really willing to let it go unpunished? By the Emperor – they don’t even have eyes! How do they see? Will you really endorse such repugnant sin?’

‘Brother Volter,’ says the sergeant, with a nod to one of his men.

As the Space Marine steps towards him, Pylcrafte backs away, cursing, and holsters his gun.

Halser’s jaw ripples with muscle as he glares at the hooded figure. Then he turns to Frater Gortyn. ‘How did you survive?’

The pilgrim steps away from Pylcrafte and raises his hands in a gesture of bemused innocence. ‘Astraeus, of course.’ He frowns at the sergeant. ‘If you have travelled from the heavenly bodies surely you must know of the Emperor’s prophet? Have you never heard of Astraeus?’

Halser shakes his head and looks back at Comus. ‘Does the name mean anything to you? Is it recorded in the libellus?’

The Librarian is clutching his temples again, clearly in pain, but he manages to shake his head.

‘Well,’ exclaims Frater Gortyn, grinning at his fellow pilgrims. ‘It looks like we are going to spread a lot of happiness this day!’

They grin back at him, nodding eagerly.

‘The prophet is both father and shield,’ he continues, turning his crystal star in the direction of Pylcrafte. ‘He is one with Ilissus. He is one with the earth and the air. He blinds the eyes that would wish us harm.’

‘And this prophet,’ asks Halser, ‘is he here somewhere? We have very little time.’

‘Of course!’ beams Frater Gortyn. ‘He knows everything about you. He’s dying to meet you. He’s waiting for you in the City of Stars.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Inquisitor Mortmain stands in the doorway for a moment, silhouetted by the inferno raging behind him. His leather cloak is lined with smoke and his shaven head is caked in blood. His eyes are as flat and lifeless as those of a corpse.

‘My lord?’ cries a young Naval officer, rushing towards him. ‘Are you injured?’

Mortmain gives no reply as he slams the door shut. He turns, aims his laspistol at the lock and fires repeatedly, turning the mechanism into a molten lump. Then he stands there in silence, staring at the door as the officer watches him anxiously.

‘The ship is lost,’ he announces after a few moments, without turning to face the officer.

The officer laughs nervously and looks around. They are standing at the end of a long antechamber that leads onto the bridge of the Domitus. Ranks of limbless, hooded servitors line the walls, grafted onto flickering control panels. Their pallid, slack-jawed faces show no sign of recognition but the officer hurries to the inquisitor’s side and lowers his voice. ‘Perhaps you should speak to the captain, I’m sure he can reassure you.’

Mortmain finally looks at the officer and sees that he is little more than a boy. The inquisitor shakes his head sadly, then says: ‘Lead me to him, son.’

Captain Severinus is a ruddy-faced bear of a man, with a wispy crown of red hair and a barrel chest that his braided jacket cannot quite hold in check. His reply is a deep bellow of laughter. ‘I do not think we should write off an Imperial battleship quite so easily, Inquisitor Mortmain. Do you realise what kind of manpower we have on board?’

Mortmain gives no reply, and the captain looks to his officers for an explanation. They look as confused as he does.

‘What have you seen, Inquisitor Mortmain?’ The captain cannot entirely hide the fear in his voice. Whole sections of his ship are imploding without any sane explanation. The only information that has made its way back to him is the kind of lunatic gibberish that he would rather not consider.

The inquisitor looks at the hunched rows of servitors. ‘We don’t have much time. We will have to begin sooner than I thought.’ He grabs the captain by the arm and drags him back to his chair. ‘Give the order to drop into orbit. Alert the rest of the fleet. We must prepare the missiles for launch.’

Captain Severinus wrenches his arm free and his cheeks shift from red to purple. ‘I’m not a navvy!’ he roars, drawing back his shoulders. ‘This is my ship, Inquisitor Mortmain. Show some bloody respect! I give the orders on this bridge. Even the Ordo Malleus can manage a little–’

Inquisitor Mortmain rounds on him with a snarl. ‘We’re going to die.’ His voice is low and dangerous. ‘Very soon.’

The captain shakes his head and opens his mouth to reply, but the inquisitor is too fast.

‘Listen to me!’ he roars. ‘We are going to die. All of us. But if you can shut up and listen for a second we may still be able to save the rest of the sector.’

Captain Severinus’s jaw drops. He has never heard the inquisitor’s voice raised before.

When he is sure he has the captain’s full attention, Mortmain gives a nod of satisfaction. ‘Good,’ he says, in a softer voice.

‘What is it? What has happened?’ asks the young officer.

Mortmain runs a hand over his blistered scalp and looks back at the door. The sounds of destruction are growing louder with every second that passes. Deep, rumbling explosions rock through the hull and the rattle of gunfire rings up through the mesh floor. It feels as though the ship is already in its death throes. ‘The immaterium has taken physical form. And it is hungry.’

‘What do you mean?’ The captain regains a little of his anger. ‘We left warp space weeks ago. How could such a thing happen?’

Mortmain looks at the floor for a moment, unsure how to reply. ‘There is no time to explain, captain. It is enough for you to understand that we are carrying a daemon. A daemon. It is making its way towards us, but it wants more than just our souls. I believe it will attempt to stop the Exterminatus.’

Captain Severinus drops heavily into his chair, looking dazed. ‘A daemon from the warp?’ He clutches his head. ‘How could that happen?’

‘What interest would such a thing have in Ilissus?’ asks one of the other officers, his face draining of colour. ‘The planet has already fallen to the Ruinous Powers.’

Mortmain looks out at the vaporous planet. ‘The daemon knows of our mission. It knows the strange nature of the weather that has been spreading from Ilissus. I believe it will attempt to save the planet and then feed the disturbance with its own life-force. No one entirely understands what is happening down there, but one thing is clear: if the disturbance is not curtailed immediately, we could be looking at a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.’ He taps the tube of parchment clasped to his belt. ‘All these pretty signatures will be meaningless if the daemon manages to stoke whatever strange fire is burning down there. The temporal disturbances that have been plaguing this system could spread to the whole sector.’ He looks at the officer. ‘Even I cannot predict what would happen then.’ His voice drops even lower. ‘We must destroy the planet now, while our souls are still intact.’

Captain Severinus lifts his head from his hands. ‘But we’ve just sent men down there. And not just any men: Adeptus Astartes.’ His jabs a finger at the viewports. ‘One of them is your friend!’

Mortmain nods and closes his eyes for a second, but gives no other reply.

Severinus shakes his head. ‘There has to be a way to stop this thing. Even a daemon must have a weakness. Surely the Ordo Malleus has faced such things before?’ He narrows his eyes. ‘I hear that you have Space Marines in your own entourage, Inquisitor Mortmain. Adeptus Astartes who travel with an inquisitor? What horrors must they have seen? Surely they can do something to help?’

Mortmain scowls. The captain has been prying into things that do not concern him. Then he shrugs. What difference does it make now? He waves his hand at the door. ‘If you listen carefully, Captain Severinus, you can hear them dying.’

They all listen to the distant sounds of battle, the wailing of sirens and the groaning of the damaged ship.

Mortmain closes his eyes. ‘Their heroism is beyond reckoning, but it will not be enough.’

The captain’s cheeks flush darker. He places a hand on the hilt of his sabre and glares at Mortmain. ‘And what if you’re wrong? What if it’s our close proximity to Ilissus that’s causing the problems? If we enter attack formation we might open ourselves up to even greater danger. What if–’

Inquisitor Mortmain moves with unnerving speed. Before the captain can finish his sentence he steps forwards, draws his laspistol and clubs him to the ground.

There is a loud thud as Captain Severinus slams onto the floor.

Mortmain calmly wipes a splash of blood from his cheek and looks around the circle of officers. His expression is a sharp contrast to their looks of shocked disbelief. ‘I apologise for my rough manners, gentlemen,’ he says, holstering his pistol, ‘but we really don’t have time for a debate. Does anyone else wish to question my authority?’

The officers shake their heads and back away, looking anxiously at the pool of blood spreading around their captain’s head.

‘See to him,’ mutters the inquisitor, turning to the young officer.

As the youth kneels to examine the captain’s injury, Mortmain addresses the others. ‘Inform the rest of Fleet Sanctus. Prepare for bombardment.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

As they leave the catacombs Frater Gortyn steps proudly to one side so that the Relictors can enjoy the view.

Sergeant Halser is the first to emerge, taking a deep, grateful breath of evening air as he steps out onto a rocky promontory. He immediately staggers back and mutters an oath, stunned by the unexpected scene spread out before him. They have come out at one end of a long, steep-sided valley. The strange, convoluted mountains rear up on either side of them, dripping with scarlet fire, robed by the setting sun. It is not the sheer-sided peaks that cause Sergeant Halser to gasp, though. At the heart of the hidden valley lies a beautiful, glittering secret.

‘Welcome to Madrepore,’ sighs Frater Gortyn, his voice trembling. ‘The City of Stars.’

As the other Relictors climb up out of the shadows, they are as stunned as their sergeant. Madrepore is a small, walled city, designed in the shape of a five-pointed star and even in the fading light it sparkles like a polished jewel. The towering walls are as organic and coral-like as their surroundings, but they are also bedecked with countless shimmering lights. The whole structure has a shifting, pearlescent quality quite unlike anything the Space Marines have ever seen. It seems as though a portion of the heavens has fallen to earth and is slumbering amongst the mountains of Ilissus.

Halser steps further onto the ledge. ‘What is this place?’ He shakes his head. ‘That’s not Imperial architecture.’ He grabs the hilt of his chainsword and glares at the grinning pilgrims. ‘Where have you brought us? Is this a xenos city?’

‘Far from it. This is our home.’ The pilgrim laughs and points to a single tower that reaches even higher than the city’s outer walls. ‘Astraeus lifted these stones from beneath the ground with nothing but the power of prayer. His father, the Emperor of Terra, bequeathed him the merest scintilla of his eternal light, but that was enough to create this blessed, beautiful haven.’ He waves at the surrounding mountains. ‘For decades we hid ourselves down here in this valley, guarding the ruins of the old scriptoria in the knowledge that one day, inevitably, the Great Enemy would find us. But then, when the prophet came, his prayers did more than build us a city – they also shrouded the valley from sight. Nobody can see over these peaks. If Astraeus had not willed it, even you could never have found this place.’

Sergeant Halser looks back at Brother-Librarian Comus with a raised eyebrow.

Comus nods in reply but is too weak to make comment. He has clasped the libellus back onto his belt, but there is no sign of his pain lessening. If not for the firm grip of Brother Volter, he would not have made it through the catacombs.

Halser looks down at the sparkling city walls. ‘What are the lights in the rock?’

Frater Gortyn’s smile becomes a giggle and he does not seem to have heard the question. ‘The prophet’s vision goes far beyond mortal sight. His mind is alive with countless images. He sees the movements of the heavens and the changing of the weather. In fact, he is the weather.’ Gortyn waves at the tumultuous clouds, merging seamlessly with the spirals of rock that cover the landscape. ‘What you see here is only a fraction of his power. The spirit of the Immortal Emperor has been harnessed and refracted through the prophet’s flesh. The towers you see out there are the fingers of Astraeus, reaching up and dragging us to salvation.’

Pylcrafte mutters under his hood and even Halser clenches his jaw. He has heard this kind of deluded cant before. He feels a growing sense of dread as the pilgrims lead the way down a narrow, stone stair, chuckling merrily to themselves as they go.

Unlike the rest of Ilissus, the land around Madrepore is flat and verdant. For several kilometres in every direction, well-tilled fields and herds of grazing cattle skirt the City of Stars. Clusters of adobe huts run alongside wide, tree-lined tracks, bustling with white-robed figures. After the desolation that preceded it, the Relictors struggle to comprehend the orderly scene spread out below them. Stranger still is the greeting they receive as they reach the valley floor and begin marching towards the city gates. The sound of power-armoured boots crunching down the road should cause a commotion, regardless of the pilgrims’ mutilated eyes. But as the Relictors march past, the groups labouring in the fields pay them no attention, as though the arrival of Space Marines is a daily occurrence.

‘Do they not wonder who we are?’ asks Sergeant Halser, turning to Frater Gortyn.

‘They know who you are,’ replies the pilgrim. ‘We are all one with the mind of our father. Everything he sees, we see.’

Halser grimaces. Every minute he spends in the company of the pilgrims confirms his doubts. He looks around at the blind, toiling figures and mutters under his breath, horrified to see how confidently they swing their scythes and leap onto the back of moving carts. He decides to ask Gortyn about the star-shaped crystals in their foreheads but, before he can speak, he feels a tap on his shoulder and turns to see Comus. The Librarian is holding up the xenos device and tapping its screen. The casing is smeared with blood, but he has discerned something in the glyphs pulsing beneath the glass.

‘I was right,’ he gasps. ‘The Zeuxis Scriptorium is here.’ As he struggles to speak, energy arcs from the mantle of his power armour and crackles across his furrowed brow. ‘Whoever this prophet is, he has built his city right over the top of one of the Ecclesiarchy’s most ancient reliquaries.’

Halser pauses for a moment to let the pilgrims move ahead. ‘Then we must gain entry to the scriptorium, by whatever means, and see what it is they’re guarding. If the objects stored there are as powerful as they think, we may even find a way to navigate a way back through the storms.’ He grabs the Librarian by the shoulder. ‘Do you still have the strength to contact the others, back at the gunship? Could you summon them to this spot?’

Comus grimaces and nods at the blood-drenched book. ‘This xenos filth is killing me.’ He closes his eyes for a second. ‘But yes, contacting them should still be possible.’

Sergeant Halser nods. ‘Good. The repairs to the ship should be complete by now. It would take them minutes to reach us. We might be able to salvage a victory yet. If we can find something to help us see through these wretched storms, we could empty the scriptorium and be out of here before the bombs start falling.’ He looks at the chronometer attached to his weapons belt. ‘Inquisitor Mortmain has promised me another two hours.’ He waves at the crowds of eyeless pilgrims shuffling through the fields. ‘Then these dupes will receive their heavenly reward.’

Comus looks at the glittering walls looming ahead of them. ‘And what if we are unable to gain access to the scriptorium? What if we can’t leave Ilissus before the Exterminatus begins?’

Halser’s habitual sneer grows even more pronounced. ‘Then we all burn together.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Justicar Lyctus crawls along the shattered remains of a girder, clutching his glimmering halberd to his chest while beneath him the hangar disintegrates. As the daemon continues to grow it has begun tearing holes through the ship’s hull, its colossal, viscous mass growing more frenzied with every second. As the rest of Lyctus’s squad struggle to hold it in place, the nest of segmented limbs jerk back and forth, wrenching machinery and support struts free from the walls and sending screaming crewmen sailing through the air. As Lyctus clings determinedly onto the girder, the Domitus is spilling its innards to the void, but he keeps his gaze locked on the heaving yellow sack at the centre of the mayhem.

As he nears the daemon, the justicar’s armour begins to ripple with light. Countless inscriptions flash and shimmer, straining to protect Lyctus from the unholy power washing over him.

‘Brothers,’ he breathes into his vox-bead, ‘just a few more minutes. Then lend me your faith. I’m almost overhead. I’m going to drop straight–’

Lyctus’s words are cut short as a new sound is added to the cacophony: a barking claxon that cuts through the sound of grinding metal. At the same moment, in the areas of the hangar that are still intact, rows of red lights blink into life.

Justicar Lyctus curses as the daemon lurches back towards the gore-splattered hole in the wall.

From the furthest reaches of the Domitus comes the deep rumble of heavy munitions roaring into life.

‘Justicar?’ crackles a voice in Lyctus’s helmet. ‘Is it withdrawing?’

As the screaming crowds continue to charge past the Space Marines, the daemon heaves its revolting flesh upright and pauses for a moment, like a dog that has caught a scent. The only movement is a slight trembling of its egg-like membrane.

Justicar Lyctus nods his head. ‘Inquisitor Mortmain must have reached the bridge. He is preparing the Exterminatus.’ Then, as the daemon starts to swing its bulk around, Lyctus realises they are about to miss their opportunity.

‘Brother Gallus,’ he snaps into the vox-bead. ‘Your incinerator!’

The darkness is torn open by a column of flame. It leaps up from one of the Space Marines and envelops the featureless head of the daemon. The air fills with the smell of burning scented oil as the daemon jerks back, flinging its attackers across the hangar and emitting another high-pitched scream.

The thing thrashes in pain and Justicar Lyctus spots his chance, charging across the girder and leaping off the end, diving headlong at the daemon with his halberd held before him like a lance.

There is an explosion of pus, flame and psychic energy as he bursts through the wall of membrane and disappears from view.

Down below, on the blood-slick floor of the hangar, the rest of the Space Marines climb awkwardly to their feet. Some of them have wide, bloody gashes in their power armour and some topple back onto the mounds of corpses, gasping in pain, but one of them, Brother Gallus, swings his heavy, two-handed weapon around for a second shot, lighting up the vast chamber with another dripping arch of fire.

Justicar Lyctus sinks through the daemon’s flesh, feeling its ancient malice clawing at his soul. Every liturgy and prayer inscribed into his armour burns with the strain of upholding his sanity. The Emperor preserves, thinks Lyctus, drawing on his bottomless, inviolable well of faith. Three centuries of devotion shield him, even as he feels his armour warp and crack. ‘I rebuke you, Cerbalus,’ he whispers, knowing that the daemon can hear. ‘I forbid you to exist.’

As Gallus struggles to hold his bucking, thrashing incinerator, he senses his injured battle-brothers lining up beside him. As the column of flame forces the daemon back into a corner of the hangar, the other Space Marines begin firing their own psychically-charged weapons. A blinding volley of fire, metal and faith tears into the lurching daemon.

‘Advance!’ orders Brother Gallus, his voice calm and sure.

As they approach the daemon, its head begins to pulse with light, becoming a kaleidoscope of different colours as it jerks from side to side. At the heart of the display is a silvery core: Justicar Lyctus’s shape is recognisable as he spins in the daemon’s mind. Then, with another explosion of energy and gunk, the justicar’s halberd bursts from the flame-shrouded sack.

The daemon’s head begins to split open, vomiting brains across its hideous legs and changing its piercing cry to a moist, popping gurgle.

The daemon’s head collapses and Justicar Lyctus tumbles into view, spewed out on a virulent, yellow wave. He clatters to the hangar floor, shrouded in smoke and sparks and then lurches to his feet, stepping clear seconds before a tree-sized limb slams down where he landed.

There is no victory cry from Lyctus’s men as they surround the collapsing daemon. They simply maintain their unrelenting volley of blessed promethium and bolter shells, forcing it back into the corner.

Justicar Lyctus staggers drunkenly towards his men, still clutching his blazing halberd. His armour has been scorched and wrenched out of shape and his bloody chin is visible through a rent in his helmet, but as he joins the other ranks of Space Marines he raises his fist and fires a screaming volley of shells from the storm bolter mounted on his wrist. As he shoots he repeats his cry: ‘I rebuke you, Cerbalus!’

The daemon collapses into a wall of billowing flames and disappears from view.

After firing a few more rounds, Justicar Lyctus opens his raised fist, signalling for his men to hold their fire.

For a second the daemon falls quiet, but the hangar is still a riot of noise and colour: the claxons are blaring; crowds of crewmen and servitors are crushed against the various exits, screaming desperately as others are sucked out into the void. Banks of blue flame are still gushing from the severed fuel pipes and the Domitus itself is howling as its infrastructure gives way, wrenched out of the holes torn by the daemon’s violence.

Lyctus keeps his hand raised as he edges closer to the rolling flames.

There is a flash of light and a shape flies towards him. A lean, red, humanoid figure that towers over the Space Marines as it crashes through them and bolts towards one of the exits.

Lyctus and the others fire wildly after it, but the blood-red figure carves straight through the crowds and dashes through the exit, disappearing from view.

Justicar Lyctus rises painfully to his feet. His armour is ruined and bloody, and half his men are dead. He nods calmly as he surveys the carnage. Then he speaks, not to his groaning men but to Inquisitor Mortmain, on the far side of the ship. ‘You were right. It will be with you in minutes. We will attempt to pursue.’ He pauses and kneels, trying to stem the blood rushing from one of his men’s throats. ‘Our prayers are with you, inquisitor.’

The reply that crackles in his helmet is just as composed. ‘Thank you, Justicar Lyctus. It has been an honour serving with you. The Emperor protects.’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Two vast, etched iron gates loom over Sergeant Halser as he reaches the city walls. He looks up at the strange designs and sees stars, planets and galaxies whirling in a stylised storm. Far above, at the top of the walls he sees rows of pilgrims surveying the valley as it sinks into darkness, as uninterested in the Relictors as all the other pilgrims they have passed.

Frater Gortyn and their other guides reach the foot of the gate and wait without knocking. After a few seconds, the doors begin to swing slowly inwards, revealing a glimpse of bustling crowds and a wide, sweeping road.

The rest of the squad are still half a kilometre away. Sergeant Halser curses under his breath as he sees how slowly they are moving. Only the hunched, cowled figure of Pylcrafte has managed to keep up with him and he is staring at the city in abject horror. Brother Librarian Comus can barely walk and the others are matching their pace to his agonised steps. In an attempt to distract himself, Halser steps to the side of the road to examine Madrepore’s soaring, rippling walls. The dusk is reflected in the countless rows of gems, embedded in the contorted rock. It is these crystals that give Madrepore its sparkle and, as he waits for the rest of the squad to arrive, Halser leans closer to examine one of them.

‘By the Throne!’ he grunts, turning to Pylcrafte. ‘What is this?’

What he had mistaken for crystals are actually eyes. As Halser and Pylcrafte stagger back in disgust, they creak in their jagged sockets, rolling to watch them. Every one of them shimmers with an inner light, but they are unmistakably human. Halser looks over at Gortyn’s scarred, empty sockets and howls. ‘What sorcery is this? What have you done?’

Frater Gortyn’s drawn features remain fixed in a vacant smile. ‘There is no sorcery, Sergeant Halser. We have merely lent our vision to the prophet.’ He taps the star-shaped crystal lodged in his forehead. ‘We see so much further now.’

Sergeant Halser groans as he looks back at the banks of rolling, blinking eyes. He can bear this no longer. He draws his bolt pistol and levels it at Frater Gortyn. ‘This is unspeakable. If I had known–’

Halser’s words are drowned out by an explosion. The blast is so violent that the whole valley shakes, jolting the sergeant sideways and sending his gun clattering across the road.

Pylcrafte lets out a stream of curses as he topples backwards into a ditch.

Ignoring his cries for help, Halser and the pilgrims look back down the road in confusion. A huge plume of smoke is rolling down into the valley from the entrance to the catacombs and distant shapes are visible, moving quickly through the haze.

Frater Gortyn’s grin finally drops from his face. As a line of black-armoured figures begins pouring down into the valley, he slumps heavily against the city gates. ‘The enemy,’ he groans, turning to his fellow pilgrims. ‘How? How can they have found Madrepore?’

Sergeant Halser curses and snatches his gun from the road. ‘I thought you said your prophet kept them blind to this place?’

Frater Gortyn clutches his head in his hands as his brethren begin whining in fear. ‘He does. They are.’ He pauses and turns his head towards the sergeant. ‘Or, at least, they always have been.’ His voice becomes a hideous shriek. ‘You’ve led them to us! How else can this be?’

The other two pilgrims cease their whining and turn around, shaking their heads in shock. ‘It’s the only explanation,’ gasps one of them, pointing at Halser. ‘You’re in league with the Black Knights. You must be! You’ve betrayed Astraeus!’ He looks up at the faces looking out from the battlements. ‘We’re betrayed!’ he cries, pressing his mouth to the gap opening between the gates.

Halser backs away, keeping his gun trained on the wailing pilgrims. ‘How many?’ he breathes into his vox-bead, snatching a brief glimpse at the distant line of figures.

Brother Volter is the first to reply, his voice full of disbelief. ‘Sergeant, they must have been toying with us. Those small attacks must have been a feint.’

‘What do you mean?’ snaps Halser, still unable to take his eyes off the raving pilgrims.

‘There are hundreds of them, sergeant. I can’t even count the–’

The exchange is interrupted by another huge explosion and this time it is much closer. Halser staggers again and the pilgrims launch themselves at him. He moves to shrug them off, but to his fury he feels a blinding pain in his forehead and words echoing beneath his scalp. ‘Betrayal!’ drone the voices, so loud that Halser cries out in pain.

‘Get out of my head!’ he roars, but the voices swell in volume, chanting the word ‘betrayal’ like a prayer as Halser drops, groaning, to his knees.

Blood erupts from his nose as the pilgrims continue their furious assault on his mind. He is vaguely aware that they are also thrashing uselessly against his power armour with their fists, but the external world is quickly slipping away from him as their prayers clamp around his agonised brain.

‘Comus,’ he manages to gasp as the pain overwhelms him.

Immediately he feels another presence in his thoughts, enveloping the wailing voices and easing the pain in his head. Before the agony has a chance to overpower him again, Halser rises to his feet and fires his bolt pistol, tearing a ragged hole through Frater Gortyn’s chest and sending him spinning across the road.

The other two pilgrims scramble for cover but he guns them down too, killing them before they can reach the gate and sending a fan of bright blood across the hammered iron.

Halser spins around and stares back down the road. The mountain looks as though it has sprung a black, glistening leak. Countless ranks of Traitor Marines are flooding down across the foothills and gathering on the road. He sees the gold trim on their spiked power armour, glinting as they charge towards the city.

‘The barn!’ he cries, waving to a low, stone building at the side of the road near his men. ‘Take cover! Volter, buy them time.’

The Relictors finally move with some speed. Two of them lift Comus from his feet and charge from the road with him while the rest dive for cover. At the same time, Brother Volter drops to one knee and brings his lascannon to bear on the approaching hordes. The far end of the road erupts in blue flames as he finds his mark. Tiny, black-clad figures spin into the air and for a moment the advance falters. Before they have chance to return fire, Brother Volter rolls across the road and drops into the roadside ditch.

Seconds later, the road where he knelt explodes like a lake in a hailstorm. Stone and shrapnel whines through the air as the enemy guns tear up the landscape.

As the Black Legion continue to race down the road, the Relictors hunker down by the barn and open fire. The enemy make no attempt to find cover and the air shimmers with the heat of the Relictors’ bolter fire.

The evening lights up again as Brother Volter fires a second shot with his lascannon, cutting another great hole in the advancing ranks.

As the wall behind him starts shattering under the enemy fire, Sergeant Halser clamps his helmet into place and looks from his men to the gates behind him. Through the gap he sees a stampede of white-robed figures as the pilgrims empty the streets and rush to defend the walls. ‘What can they do?’ he wonders aloud. Then he remembers the pain of Frater Gortyn’s prayers, clawing at his thoughts.

‘Comus,’ he snaps, dragging the still cursing Pylcrafte from the ditch. ‘I think I have a chance of reaching the scriptorium. The pilgrims will focus their attention on the Traitor Marines. Can you lend me your support if they try and stop me?’

The reply through the vox-bead is a hoarse, indecipherable grunt, but a clearer voice appears in the sergeant’s thoughts. ‘Be quick. There are too many of them for us to hold.’

‘I think you may have help,’ replies Halser, watching the pilgrims rushing to man Madrepore’s battlements. He turns and addresses Pylcrafte. ‘I’m going in. Stay and fight, or help me find the scriptorium.’ Then, as the enemy fire grows in ferocity, he leans on one of the iron gates and shoves it back a few more centimetres, allowing himself enough room to squeeze through and enter the city.

The sight that greets him is bewildering. At the heart of the city is a huge fortified temple with a thick, hexagonal tower at its centre. Nestled around it are hundreds of other buildings, all constructed of the same, writhing, coral-like rock, and all glittering with rows of crystalline eyes. As the eyes roll and blink, the buildings shimmer, so that the city seems to be undulating with light, and the whole scene is shrouded in vast, drifting columns of moonlit cloud. The storms Halser saw from orbit seem to be emanating from this single point. The combination of glimmering eyes and writhing clouds is overwhelming. It looks as though Madrepore is carved from shifting, moonlit water.

Halser pauses for a second, trying to see a way through the pulsing clouds and milling, panic-stricken crowds. He hisses into his vox-bead: ‘Which way, Comus? What do I do?’

‘Head for the centre of the city,’ comes a reply in his mind. ‘The prophet has built his temple directly over the scriptorium. If anyone knows what happened to its contents, it will be him.’ There is a pause, then Comus speaks through the vox-bead, his voice a ragged growl. ‘I don’t know how long I can keep them out of your head, sergeant.’

Halser nods, but still hesitates, unsure how to proceed through the incredible display. Most of the pilgrims are charging to the walls, but hundreds are also racing down the wide road that leads from the gate to the temple.

‘So many of them, and all damned,’ mutters a trembling voice at Halser’s side and he remembers the inquisitor’s acolyte is still with him. Pylcrafte is waving his cane at the shifting clouds, as though he can ward off the corruption surrounding him.

The sergeant turns to speak, but before he can, a huge section of wall explodes just above the gate. The air fills with screams and spinning chunks of masonry and, to Halser’s delight, the road ahead clears, as the pilgrims scramble for cover.

‘Keep close,’ he cries, charging down the road.

As he approaches the temple walls he sees a long building to his left, topped with a huge stone star and crowded with pilgrims. Many of them have stopped to watch him and, even with Comus shielding his thoughts, he starts to feel their furious prayers battering against his mind. He tries to ignore them and focus on reaching the doors to the temple, but as he does so, he stumbles to a halt.

He is back at the city gates, looking down at Pylcrafte.

‘So many of them, and all damned,’ says the hooded figure, waving his cane.

Halser curses and shakes his head, trying to rid himself of his confusion. ‘What is happening?’ he cries. ‘I keep seeing the same thing, over and over.’

He hears the voice of Comus in his head again. ‘Sergeant. The power of this Astraeus is like nothing I’ve ever felt. I think time itself is bending to his will.’ He pauses. ‘Or maybe not even that. It feels almost as though time is collapsing.’

Halser groans in frustration. ‘By the Throne, Comus. What are you talking about?’

There is no reply and Halser vents his frustration on the city wall, slamming his armoured fist into the rock and shattering a cluster of blinking eyes. Then he tries again, racing off towards the temple with Pylcrafte stumbling after him, still cursing and muttering into his hood.

Brother-Librarian Comus lies bleeding in a ditch. Bolter fire rattles and whines overhead but he is only vaguely aware of it. All his attention is fixed on the small, metal-bound book clutched in his hand. He remembers the first time he handled the xenos device, given to him by Inquisitor Mortmain, all those years ago. It took months of fierce, uninterrupted prayer before he would even consider opening his mind to such unholy, alien sentience. He was sure of his purpose then: to glean what he could whilst keeping his mind intact. But now what does he feel? The thing is killing him, he is sure of that. Every time he allows those luminous characters to flood his mind, he feels a little more of his soul being torn away. Even on a purely psychical level the effect is obvious: he has been bleeding heavily from his nose and mouth since they arrived on Ilissus and, without the aid of his battle-brothers, he can barely stand. However, that is not the worst of it. The thing that fills him with dread is that the libellus no longer feels so alien. It no longer feels wrong. It is becoming part of him. Comus draws himself upright and closes the book with a shudder. What is he becoming?

He turns to the Relictor crouched next to him in the ditch. Brother Borellus has his bolter balanced on the scorched earth and his shoulder is jerking back as he fires round after round down the road, picking off the advancing traitors with medical precision. For a second, Comus cannot recall exactly how they got there.

‘Where are the others?’ he groans, wiping the blood from his eyes.

Brother Borellus holds fire for a second but does not turn around. ‘Brothers Sabine and Thaler are just behind you, further down the ditch. Strasser, Vortimer and Brunman are holed up in the barn, although they’ve taken some heavy hits. Volter is on the far side of the road.’ A note of pride enters his voice. ‘His lascannon is giving them pause for thought.’ He fires off another few rounds, muttering happily to himself as more of the traitors spin back into the clouds. ‘And Sergeant Halser has entered the city, with Inquisitor Mortmain’s servant, but…’ He looks down at the Librarian briefly, his voice hesitant. ‘…you know that.’

Comus nods, relieved that Borellus’s words make sense. He cannot help but notice, though, that his battle-brother’s Low Gothic seems unusually crude and clumsy. He realises, to his horror, that he is comparing it unfavourably to the alien language that has embedded itself in his thoughts. Anger knots his stomach. Why should they have to endure this? Why should they have to prove themselves after so many long centuries of service and so many sacrifices in the Emperor’s name? He shakes his head and looks back along the ditch. As Borellus stated, there are another two Relictors crouched behind him firing steadily into the oncoming ranks. Above them, further down the road, rise the walls of Madrepore and its shimmering, hexagonal tower. Prove them wrong, Sergeant Halser, he thinks, grasping one of the religious texts chained to his power armour. Show them what we are worth.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

As Inquisitor Mortmain marches through the Domitus, he draws the billhook from his belt. The black metal blinks red under the flashing lights as he strides through the corridors, swinging it back and forth, testing the weight of the blade in his hand. Crude script runs down its centre: words too vile for even an inquisitor to study. As he reaches a shattered door he pauses, listening to what he hopes is the sound of vast, thermonuclear weapons powering up. But the ship is shaking so violently he cannot be sure if he is hearing the result of his orders or the sound of the approaching daemon.

‘Cerbalus,’ he breathes, wondering if he has the strength to face the coming encounter. He is an old man, and all the faith in the galaxy cannot match the fury of youth. The officers on the bridge have their orders and they will work fast, but he will still need to buy them time. The inquisitor casts his mind back through the decades to the day he bound Cerbalus to his will. On the scorched earth of Azoras he and his brothers faced the monster down, armed with powerful, ancient wards and a bitter chorus of litanies. But the cabal that saved Azoras is no more. Inquisitors Medeon, Orium and Shaaraim are long dead. This time he must face the beast alone. Even his old friend Sergeant Halser will soon be gone: torn apart by a firestorm of Mortmain’s own creation.

Mortmain looks down at the capital ‘I’ emblazoned across his breastplate. Youth is gone. Friendship is gone. Faith will have to suffice. He kicks the broken door, scattering the blackened metal across the heaving corridor and strides into the next chamber. He enters a pillar-lined cloister, so wide and tall it seems as though he has stepped out into a stormy, summer’s evening. The air is cloying, thick and sulphurous. Ancient, beautiful mosaics are tumbling from the walls, exploding across the flagstones like brittle, enamelled rain.

At the far end of the central colonnade there is a shape. It is no more than a shadow amongst shadows, but Mortmain knows his prey. Evil seeps from it like smoke. The inquisitor peers through the darkness, straining to make out details, but the shadow shifts and ripples across the floor, liquid and supple.

There is still hope, thinks Mortmain. The idea surprises him, but once loosed from his subconscious it grows in certainty. ‘There is hope,’ he breathes, realising that the daemon is bodiless; it has no host. Its vile presence has been set loose by Justicar Lyctus and his Grey Knights, and without a physical home it will soon be dragged into the immaterium, folded back into the shifting hell that spawned it.

The shadow elongates and drifts down the colonnade, assuming a fixed shape only when it is a few metres away. It adopts the form of a man; or, at least, something resembling a man. It towers over Mortmain, three metres tall and topped by the head of a diseased, slick-feathered carrion crow. As the daemon steps closer, it spreads a pair of ink-black wings and two scrawny arms, delighting in the destruction it has wrought. ‘Do you think, master,’ it asks in an amiable tone, ‘that, after all these years of service, I might request something in return?’

Mortmain gives no reply, stepping sideways between the columns, passing the billhook from hand to hand. He knows his pistol would only feed the thing’s strength, but the blade has secrets even Cerbalus does not share.

‘Come now,’ laughs the daemon. ‘Is it so much to ask?’ Its form breaks apart and reassembles itself behind Mortmain, causing him to whirl around and adopt a fighting stance. ‘Think of the squalid deeds I have performed at your request. Think of the blood on my hands that should have been on yours. Surely I deserve a little thanks? A little recompense?’

Mortmain backs carefully away. There is hope, he thinks again as he notices an edge to the daemon’s voice. Despite its attempt to sound calm, he senses an undercurrent of emotion. Decades of interrogation have honed his senses until he can discern even the subtlest hints of fear, or anger. As he circles the daemon, Mortmain realises that he has one final weapon: the daemon hates him, hates him with a passion that could even blind it to anything else.

‘You think I would let your vile presence pollute the body of an Imperial inquisitor?’ Mortmain’s voice is as calm and even as the daemon’s. Suddenly he feels as though his entire life has been building to this moment, this single test of his will. Can he keep the daemon distracted long enough for the crew to launch the attack on Ilissus? Can he play one final trick on a servant of the greatest trickster of them all? ‘Try me, Cerbalus!’ he roars, relishing the look of shock in the daemon’s avian eyes. ‘I will take you down, daemon! Send you back to the pit you crawled out of!’

Cerbalus’s huge, ragged wings droop and it tilts its head to one side, surprised to find the old man in such a defiant mood.

Before the daemon has chance to reply, Mortmain snaps a syllable so coarse and guttural he has to spit it out with a grimace. As he speaks, the first of the glyphs carved into his billhook blazes with light and he attacks with surprising speed, slashing the blade through the daemon’s leg before it has chance to recoil.

Cerbalus screeches. The sound slices through the cacophony, shrill and hideous as it echoes around the towering columns. ‘How?’ it whines, scrabbling back into the darkness, tearing up flagstones with its clawed feet.

‘How?’ cries Mortmain. ‘How can I hurt you like that?’ He swings the billhook from side to side, flinging inky blood into the shadows as he advances on the huge, cowering shape. The first character on the blade is still aflame with the force of his oath, and as he advances he spits out another contorted syllable. As the sound leaves his lips, a second glyph pulses into life and Mortmain leaps forwards, hacking another chunk out of the daemon’s leg.

Cerbalus wails in pain and shock and, with a beat of its enormous wings, hurls itself up towards the distant, ribbed vaults of the ceiling.

‘Your name, daemon!’ Mortmain’s voice is a deep, victorious howl. ‘I did not share everything with you! Do you think I have been idle all these long decades? Do you think I never foresaw this moment?’ The inquisitor climbs on the shattered stump of a marble column and levels the billhook at the shape hovering overhead. ‘Face me, abomination! Or are you afraid?’

Cerbalus swoops across the chamber and wraps its shifting form around one of the pillars, several metres above Mortmain. At the word ‘afraid’ its bird-like head snaps around and glares at the inquisitor. ‘Afraid?’ it screeches. Its rage is so great that its form shifts through dozens of shapes, trembling and flickering in and out of view. ‘You are nothing! You are the lapdog of a puppet corpse. How can you even look at me? You are an insect!’

The lights in the chamber dim as a grinding, deafening hum rumbles through the walls.

The daemon snaps its head in the other direction, peering at the broken door. ‘You have already begun,’ it whispers. ‘Exterminatus.’

The chamber lurches to one side and Mortmain is forced to grab a pillar to steady himself. ‘Go, then, daemon,’ he cries. ‘You will find nothing but pain here.’

Cerbalus looks back at the inquisitor, its eyes full of dark fire. ‘What would you know of pain?’ The daemon launches itself from the pillar, ripples through the darkness and materialises next to Mortmain.

Before the inquisitor can raise his billhook, a ragged, filthy claw slices through his leather cloak and sends him flying across the room in a spray of blood. He slams into a pillar with a howl of pain and scrambles away into the darkness, cursing under his breath.

Cerbalus spins on the spot, spreading its wings and arching its long neck as it laughs with pleasure, forgetting everything but the ecstasy of revenge.

Mortmain staggers from pillar to pillar, his head spinning. Once he reaches the far side of the chamber he pulls back the shreds of his cloak to reveal an arm that is equally torn. His left bicep is completely ruined, hanging from his tattered flesh like raw steak. As the daemon continues spinning through the shadows, laughing to itself, Mortmain tears a strip of leather from his cloak and ties a quick tourniquet. He still has the glowing billhook in his right hand, and as he taps it against his breastplate he is relieved to feel that it is still intact. Without the prayers and sigils worked into its ornate metal, the mere presence of the daemon would split his mind as thoroughly as his ruined arm.

Suddenly the laughter is right next to him, but this time Mortmain is ready. He rolls clear of the daemon’s claws and chants a third, potent syllable, lighting up another character on his weapon.

Cerbalus cringes at the sound, but before it can withdraw its claw, Mortmain chops down with the billhook, slicing another piece of the daemon and causing it to screech in pain and frustration.

This time it does not flee, though. Before Mortmain can draw breath for another letter, the daemon stoops low over him and a talon rips open his thigh, sending him toppling to the ground. The pain is like nothing he has ever experienced but, as he slams onto the floor, he manages to gasp another syllable and lash out with the billhook.

Cerbalus croaks and gurgles as the blade rips open its throat.

By now the inquisitor’s black weapon is alive with flaming characters. ‘I have your name!’ howls Mortmain, attempting to disguise the lie by screaming it with all the force he can muster. ‘I will banish you, Cerbalus! You have no place here!’

The daemon’s twisted, stooping form backs away from him, clutching at the wound in its throat, unable to comprehend how the inquisitor’s weapon could sever flesh that does not even exist. ‘My name? How could you?’

The lights dip again as another deafening rumble fills the chamber.

Almost there, thinks Mortmain. Just a few more minutes.

The daemon looks at the doorway, its head twitching with indecision. It looks in the direction of the Domitus’s bridge, then back at the gore-splattered man writhing at its feet. It peers suspiciously at the short, curved blade pulsing in Mortmain’s grip, trying to make out the characters that have yet to ignite. ‘You do not have the power to wield such a thing. If my name were really held in that piece of metal it would tear your mind open.’

Knowing that he only has to maintain the lie for a few more minutes, Mortmain screams another syllable and attempts to stab Cerbalus again.

The daemon beats its wings and disappears.

Mortmain’s broken body floods with adrenaline at the thought that the daemon has given up on him and made for the bridge. Then he sees it reappear, crouched like a gargoyle on the broken pillar where he was standing a few minutes earlier.

‘My flesh is not for one such as you!’ he cries, spraying blood across his breasplate. He tries to stand, but his leg collapses beneath him and he sprawls across the flagstones like a drunk. ‘Try me, Cerbalus. Just a few more characters and you will be in my power once more.’

Cerbalus lets out a scream that even drowns out the klaxons. It launches itself from the pillar, smashing headlong into the inquisitor and sending them both tumbling across the bloody flagstones.

As they roll, Mortmain continues crying out the foul syllables and hacking into the daemon’s shifting flesh, even as Cerbalus’s frenzied claws tear his body apart.

Finally, they come to a halt against the feet of a statue and Mortmain begins to laugh.

‘You are mine!’ screams the daemon, lifting the inquisitor up into the air by the throat and shaking him like a broken toy.

Mortmain continues to laugh even as his innards spill to the floor. The chamber is shaking more violently than ever as the Domitus’s weapons silos finally launch their missiles at Ilissus.

‘Perhaps you will have me after all, Cerbalus,’ he laughs, vaguely aware that silver-clad figures are emerging from the shadows, their weapons trained on the daemon. ‘But you will never have Ilissus.’

Far below, the planet’s surface flashes red, then purple, then a beautiful opalescent white as it begins to die.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The temple of Astraeus is the grandest of follies. As Halser races through the great hall its walls swoop and bulge around him like the sails of a ship. Every inch of the place – floor, ceiling and walls – is studded with thousands of eyes, all of which follow the sergeant as he pounds towards the archway at the far end. The windows have been constructed in such a way that stars appear to hang in the air, and the dervish-like eddies of dust and cloud are even more fierce inside the building: waltzing and swaying like dancers across the floor, merging seamlessly with the undulating walls. It seems to Halser that he has been cut adrift in the heavens, and as he runs he weaves drunkenly from side to side, disorientated by the extraordinary display.

‘Heresy!’ whines Pylcrafte, stumbling after him and firing shots at the walls with his laspistol, shattering as many of the blinking eyes as he can. ‘Heresy, heresy, heresy, heresy, heresy!’ He has his cane in his other hand and he tries to stab the rolling clouds, hacking and lunging like a deranged swordsman.

Halser ignores him and keeps running towards the archway.

‘He’s going to unfetter us.’ Comus’s pain is clear to Halser, even over the vox. ‘Whatever he’s doing, it’s going to unhinge time.’

‘I don’t understand!’ cries Halser, reaching the archway and leaning against the stone to catch his breath.

‘Ilissus is heading towards some kind of time loop. Maybe even the whole sector. Whoever this prophet is, you need to stop him.’ There is an uncharacteristic note of fear in the Librarian’s voice. ‘You have to kill him, sergeant. The Black Legion want him to succeed. They have only attacked now to stop us hindering him. They could have struck at any time. He is dangerous, Halser. More than I guessed. Maybe he doesn’t even realise it himself.’

Halser shakes his head and stumbles into the next chamber. ‘A time loop? I don’t understand.’ The room he has entered is a vast, glass-roofed atrium, surrounding the hexagonal tower at the heart of the temple. Most of the pilgrims have fled to the walls to launch whatever strange defence they can manage, but a few are leaving the tower as Halser approaches. They drop to their knees and start screaming, horrified by his presence in their inner sanctum. The sergeant gasps and reels backwards. Their screamed prayers fill his head like a sickness. The pain snatches his breath and he stumbles, gasping inside his helmet, unable to breathe. He drops to his knees, feeling unconsciousness looming. Before he blacks out, he fires his bolt pistol. The shots are wild and frenzied, but one of the pilgrims crumples to the floor and the pain lessens. Feeling stronger, Halser manages to stand and fire off a few more shots. The pilgrims make no attempt to flee and it takes seconds to kill them. Then he staggers on, feeling his mouth filling with blood.

Pylcrafte staggers after him, waving his cane at nothing as he goes, trying to strike the prayers that fill the air.

Halser does not pause as he passes the pilgrims’ corpses and enters the tower. He sees a wide, serpentine, spiral staircase and begins to climb. His mind is numb with pain. He can barely remember his purpose, beyond a fierce drive to reach the architect who summoned this nightmarish temple into being. As he climbs the stairs more of the pilgrims launch attacks on his mind, but he guns them down without even pausing, haunted by Comus’s ominous term: ‘time loop’.

‘Pull back to the city!’ cries Comus, staggering through the shrapnel and smoke, and pointing his force sword at the walls of Madrepore. ‘We have to buy Halser some time. We can hold them at the gates!’

The barn has become a smouldering crater. Brothers Strasser, Vortimer and Brunman are dead. The remnants of their power armour is scattered throughout the rubble, torn open by the enemy’s heavy artillery. There are five Relictors left to make the run. Brothers Sabine and Thaler help Comus while Borellus and Volter give them covering fire.

After a few minutes, Volter lowers his lascannon and races down the road after them, but Borellus remains crouched in a ditch, firing blast after blast with his bolter.

‘Borellus!’ snaps Comus as he reaches the relative safety of the city. ‘Move!’

Brother Borellus shakes his head and continues firing.

Volter reaches the gates and rolls clear as a storm of bolter fire follows him into the city.

Comus jerks to one side as a hole explodes in the wall next to him. Then he peers briefly through it and sees that Borellus is still in the ditch, firing as calmly as ever, despite the fact that the enemy ranks are almost on him.

‘Borellus,’ he repeats, but there is no command in his voice now, only respect.

Borellus nods calmly in reply, then vanishes from view as the black-clad figures swarm over the ditch.

Comus hears a brief cough of pain over the vox as the Traitor Marines tear Borellus apart, and he lowers his head in prayer. Then he looks around the city. Hundreds, if not thousands of pilgrims are gathered on the city walls. He can feel the weight of their prayers as they try to repel the attacking army. And he can also feel their panic as they realise their words are having no effect.

‘They could have killed you at any time,’ he mutters, his voice full of disgust. ‘But they wanted your prophet to complete his work as much as you did.’ Then he notices a low, flat-roofed building to the left of the gates, with thick walls and small windows. He waves his force sword at the building and staggers towards it, ignoring the sound of enemy fire pulverising the city walls.

The other three Relictors sprint after him.

By the time Halser reaches the top of the stairs his mind is like that of an animal closing in on its prey, blind to everything but the chase. The City of Stars is collapsing but all he can think of is the prophet. He can barely remember why, but he knows he must stop Astraeus, even if it means his life.

Ahead of him is a tall, white door, studded with the same rolling eyes that line the walls. He pauses for a second and looks at them; blue, grey and brown irises look back, filled with terror and hate. Hate. Suddenly Halser remembers something other than the prophet of Ilissus. He remembers every doubt, rumour and lie that has been levelled at his beloved Chapter. An involuntary growl rolls deep in his chest and he shoves the door open, entering the central chamber.

The scene that greets him is strange enough to halt him in his steps. Pilgrims line the walls, kneeling in the five corners of a room built in the shape of a star, and the object of their genuflection is even more peculiar than they are. The man that Halser assumes is the prophet is as tall as a Space Marine, but where Halser is an armour-clad hulk of muscle, the prophet is a grey, emaciated wraith of a man, draped in voluminous black robes that hide most of his skeletal frame. His flesh is the colour of rain clouds and his limbs and hands are oddly elongated. The fingers clutching the arms of his ornate throne resemble pale spider’s legs; they are also webbed, like those of a lizard and end in long, crimson talons. Strangest of all is his head. It is swollen to three times the size of a normal skull and it is contained within a spherical, liquid-filled bowl. His eyes are barely visible behind thick, tinted goggles that also cover most of his forehead, and his pallid skull is pierced by a forest of thick wires that emerge from the glass helmet and connect to a bewildering collection of measuring devices: brass sextants, compasses and spinning, ticking depth gauges are all piled on the glass bowl like a rusty crown.

Despite everything he has seen on Ilissus, the sight of the prophet leaves Halser speechless. Everything strange about the planet clearly emanates from this one, bizarre figure. The coils of cloud that spread from the temple to the heavens are all trailing from his swollen, smiling face.

It takes Pylcrafte, stumbling into the room a few moments later, to state the undeniable truth. ‘You–you’re a Navigator,’ he stammers, as his nest of cables snake from his hood to focus on the prophet.

Astraeus smiles, eliciting a chorus of sighs from his subjects. ‘I used to be.’ His voice sounds odd and distant, muffled by the liquid in his helmet, and as he speaks the air in the chamber ripples like heat haze. ‘I was once Iarbonel van Tol, the first son of Baron Cornelius van Tol. But that was a long time ago, and I have a suspicion I might have been disinherited. The Emperor has a better name for me now, though, and a far greater purpose.’ He fixes his gaze on Halser. As the light in the chamber swells, his eyes become visible behind the lenses of his goggles.

Halser forgets his purpose for a moment, hypnotised by the prophet’s stare, then he shakes his head and recalls the words of Comus. ‘What are you doing here?’ he snaps, waving his gun at the rolling clouds and the banks of eyes. ‘What sorcery is this?’

The prophet’s smile falters. He frowns, clearly surprised by the accusation of sorcery. ‘I have watched you from afar, Space Marine,’ he says. ‘I thought you at least would understand.’

Halser continues shaking his head, too confused to answer.

‘When the Emperor cast me down onto Ilissus I thought He had abandoned me.’ The prophet waves at the ceiling. ‘My beloved ship was utterly destroyed.’

Halser looks up and notices Imperial designs, warped into the strange architecture, as though the whole place has been grown from the carcass of a battleship.

‘My injuries were horrendous,’ he turns his head slightly revealing the signs of crude, brutal surgery on the back of his skull, ‘but my children kept me safe.’ He smiles at the adoring pilgrims. ‘Over time, I realised the damage to my brain had untapped my true potential. That is all you are seeing here, sergeant: the true potential of a loyal subject.’ He flexes his fingers and the air ripples visibly, like water. ‘Soon I will have the power to crush those who would oppose us.’ His voice grows higher in pitch. ‘I will be invincible.’

Halser grips his bolt pistol tighter as he remembers his goal. He must stop this deluded monster before he tears the whole galaxy apart with his witchcraft. He raises his gun and mutters a prayer, but before he can fire, the temple lurches to one side.

The pilgrims’ prayers become a scream of terror as the walls start to bulge and sag.

‘It is beginning,’ smiles the prophet, leaning his head forwards so that the glass bowl touches Halser’s gun with a clink. ‘Your friends have sent you to your death. They want us to die together.’

Halser gasps. ‘You’re a liar!’ he cries, but as he speaks he recognises the scale of the explosions. He snatches the chronograph at his belt. ‘I still have time!’ He looks at the crumbling walls in disbelief. ‘Mortmain would not do this to me!’

The prophet nods. ‘They fear courage more than anything. My own father has sent them to kill me. And you…’ He pauses. ‘They sent you here to die, my friend. Your death, by my side, will be their final proof. Now they will speak openly the word they have long whispered against you: heretic.’

I am betrayed, thinks Sergeant Halser. Betrayed.

‘Comus is down!’ howls Brother Volter over the vox. ‘Dead, maybe... I-I can’t be sure. They’ve taken the infirmary. I’m pulling back. What are your orders? Sergeant?’ His voice is broken, his words half-buried beneath the sound of artillery. ‘Are you there? Sergeant Halser?’

Halser keeps his gun pressed to the prophet’s head and gives no reply. The pilgrims scream at him from the shadows, but he keeps his gaze fixed on a pair of grotesque, fathomless eyes.

The prophet stares back.

Halser places his finger on the trigger.

‘I can save both of us,’ says the prophet. His head lolls inside his bowl-shaped helmet, suspended by a pale, thin neck and a gloop of viscous liquid. The solution distorts his voice, but he tries to contort his vowels into something more human, enunciating each word carefully as though speaking to a child. He points a long, webbed finger at the man in the doorway. ‘They’ve lied to you. They have murdered us both. They knew exactly what would happen. They have always known.’

Halser follows his gaze and sees to his horror that Gideon Pylcrafte is laughing. No mouth is visible beneath his black hood, just a quivering mass of cables, but his amusement is clear. Halser’s resolve evaporates. His hand falters. If Pylcrafte saw this coming, the whole mission was a lie. Halser tries to marshal his thoughts. He tries to pray, but the sound of Brother Volter’s pain knifes into him, merged with the wailing of the pilgrims. The artillery grows louder until it seems the whole valley is groaning. The noise is unbearable and too loud to be just heavy guns. As the blasts ring around his head, Halser is forced to accept the truth.

The orbital bombardment has already begun.

Without Comus’s protection, his mind edges quickly towards collapse. The temporal distortion has reached its zenith and the pilgrims’ voices claw at his thoughts like blades across metal. He cannot be sure what is now and what was then. Simultaneously, he is leading the squad through the catacombs, slaughtering the pilgrims at the city gates and reaching the inner temple, but he knows that has already been. He stares deeper into the prophet’s misshapen eyes, trying to anchor himself.

‘Comus is down!’ howls Brother Volter over the vox. ‘Dead, maybe... I-I can’t be sure. They’ve taken the infirmary. I’m pulling back. What are your orders? Sergeant?’

Halser curses and looks back at the doorway. Time is collapsing. He has heard those words before, but how many times?

‘I will not let you live,’ he snaps, turning back to the prophet. The metallic ring of his amplified voice booms around the chamber. ‘You’re an abomination.’

The prophet’s bloated skull drifts to one side and splits open in a grin. ‘You have a ship and I have vision. The clouds are no barrier to me.’ He waves at Pylcrafte. ‘He’s wronged us both. Why should we accept our fate? We are the elect few. We have great work ahead of us. Great deeds.’

Halser shakes his head, but there is doubt kindling in his eyes. To shoot the prophet means death. Worse than that, it means failure. But what is the alternative? After everything he has seen, how could he let such a man live?

The prophet brushes his elongated fingers against Halser’s power armour. They trace around a filigreed skull and he narrows his eyes. ‘Why did you come to Madrepore, Relictor?’

The chamber lurches and the ground shifts. The enemy fire is closing in. Centuries-old marble tumbles from the vaulted ceiling. Ten-metre eagles splinter and crack, covering the floor with vast, broken wings.

‘Behold, the immutable will of the Emperor!’ cries Pylcrafte from the doorway, raising his voice over the cacophony. ‘You’re a proud fool, Sergeant Halser. This is all on your head. This is the price you pay for all your lowly, creeping misbelief and your repeated use of xenos–’

Halser silences him with a shot to the head. The blast echoes around the chamber and Pylcrafte crumples in a plume of blood. The cables in his hood twitch for a few seconds longer, then he lies still.

Halser turns away and presses his bolt pistol back against the prophet’s helmet. ‘You’re a mutant.’

‘And what are you, Relictor?’ The prophet’s glass helmet is now splattered with Pylcrafte’s blood but his voice remains defiant. He waves at the network of passageways that lead off from his throne room. ‘There are weapons here. Weapons we could use.’ His voice grows softer. ‘They lied to you, Relictor. All of them. Your fidelity is misplaced, don’t you see?’

Halser grimaces as the agonised chorus grows louder: Brother Volter’s desperate requests for orders, the chanting of the pilgrims, the groaning of the earth, the pounding of the guns. But worse than the noise is the doubt. How could Mortmain have tricked him? As the question torments Halser, the doubt turns to rage. Even his oldest friend does not believe in him, does not believe in his Chapter. He and his men have been sent to their deaths. Perhaps the braver act would be to listen to the prophet? ‘I will prove you wrong, Mortmain,’ he spits. ‘I will make you pay.’

As his fury grows, the déjà vu becomes unbearable. The prophet’s words loop around the chamber, growing louder with each repetition. Halser’s indecision grows and lights blossom in his head, merging with the crystals in the walls and the glyphs rolling across his visor. He sees a corona of sunlight around Ilissus, shimmering like spun gold as he breaks orbit and drops down into the storm.

ENDEAVOUR OF WILL

BEN COUNTER

PART 1

Lochos was a beautiful city.

Steel spires burned silver in the sun of Olympia. Rivers of mercury ran through the streets, winding between the forges and the temples of that warrior-world’s oldest ancestors. Minarets and steeples competed to reach the sky. Mosaiced streets glittered and hearth-fires glowed deep red in the shadows between the foundries. From mountainside to seashore the city stretched, encompassing a thousand generations of Olympia’s past, and a million dreams of her future.

Statues of mighty armoured men of war stood atop every important building. The new gods of Lochos, the icons of a pious world, they were emblematic of the new galaxy and the Great Crusade that was to unite it. They were exemplars of what humanity could one day become. They were the Iron Warriors.

This was the sight that beamed down on Shon’tu as he knelt upon the sacrificial stone. The warsmith had never knelt to any man, but he knelt now, because it was in deference to something more than a man. The vision of Lochos, the lost capital of Olympia, filled him with something that might have been emotion. He could not properly remember it, because it had been ten thousand years since he had last felt joy, or sadness, or anything so petty as that. Iron within, he had told himself then. Iron without. Never again will there be anything in this soul but the iron of purpose and the steel of fury.

Perhaps it was regret he felt. It might have been longing that flickered across Shon’tu’s barely-human features, the few fleshy parts of his face almost crowded out by the steel jaw and the studded metal cranium. The man that later became Shon’tu had been born in Lochos. That man’s memory remained in Shon’tu. He remembered when he left it to join the Great Crusade of the wretch he would later know as the False Emperor, the Corpse-God. He remembered when he returned. He remembered when it fell.

Lochos was dead. Olympia was dead. But its spirit still lived.

‘I kneel,’ said Shon’tu.

‘Stand,’ replied the Spirit of Lochos.

Shon’tu stood up, armour clanking and whining, letting off jets of steam from its archaic motors. The Spirit of Lochos filled the whole ritual chamber, giving the impression that the chamber carried on for dozens of miles in every direction. In truth it was a small patch of holy ground set aside within the confines of the Ferrous Malice, consecrated with battlefield trophies offered up by the Iron Warriors. The ship was a relic of a previous age, pitted and scarred by the millennia, as gnarled and vicious as the Iron Warriors who rode in it. It was more than a machine or a weapon – it was cruel and self-aware like an animal trained to attack. Every piece of it was consecrated in battle, but the ritual chamber had been set aside solely for Shon’tu. The sacrificial stone was one pried from the streets of Lochos and bathed in the blood of its people long ago. Shon’tu had poured his own blood – though little enough remained in his body – onto it.

‘I was born in the streets of your city,’ continued the Spirit. ‘My birth pangs were the screams of its people. In the deeds of the Iron Warriors alone I live on. To you alone I grant my presence.’

‘The dying words of a hundred oracles brought us here,’ said Shon’tu, ‘to this place beside the Eye of Terror. They spoke of havoc and bloodshed to be wrought.’

‘They did not lie, warsmith.’

‘Then how shall we find it?’

Battles were raging in the streets of Lochos now. Citizens and soldiers facing the Space Marines of the Iron Warriors. Each Warrior was like a walking bastion, invulnerable to the fire and blades of his enemies, blazing death from his guns. The Purging of Lochos was a time of horror and betrayal, but it was also the time when the Iron Warriors had realised the weakness of the Emperor and his new order. It was the birth of Shon’tu’s Legion, a sacred time, a forging in fire. The vision of the city reddened as the streets ran with blood.

‘The Eye has opened,’ said the Spirit, ‘and Chaos pours forth. Many of the Corpse-God’s lackeys are isolated and alone, though they do not yet know it. Two star forts guard a gateway into the Eye. The Bastion Inviolate and the Endeavour of Will. If they are attacked, there are none to help them save a few. Their loss will strike a grievous blow, for deprived of them the Imperium will not recapture the region without a crusade of a magnitude beyond its capacity to mount. But this concerns you less than those who hold them now.’

‘Who?’ said Shon’tu.

The bodies were being heaped up now in the squares and crossroads of Lochos. Good men and women, portrayed as rebels and traitors by the Emperor, whose deaths were demanded to prove the loyalty of the Iron Warriors. Instead, the betrayal compelled loyalty only to the powers of the warp, the Gods of Chaos, of whom the Spirit of Lochos was a messenger.

‘The Sons of Dorn,’ replied the Spirit of Lochos. ‘The Imperial Fists.’

Warsmith Shon’tu was silent for a moment, watching the carnage in the city. He remembered being there. He remembered taking part in it. Somewhere he was there in the vision, striding from house to house, killing everything that dared move. The same bolter that hung at his waist had shed blood that day. The same combat knife sheathed on his chest. The same hands.

Then, Warsmith Shon’tu began to laugh.

‘It’s the Ferrous Malice.’

The man who had spoken, Cartographer Skune, was dwarfed by the Space Marines who stood beside him. In the gloom of the Bastion Inviolate’s command deck, wearing the golden armour of his Chapter, Castellan Lepidus looked more like a statue carved from amber than anything that had once been a man.

‘You are certain?’ said Lepidus.

‘As certain as can be,’ replied the Cartographer. His rank was high among the unaugmented humans who crewed the star fort, but his deference to the Space Marine was clear. He could not look Lepidus in the eye, as if Lepidus were some holy relic and Skune’s eyes were unworthy to look upon him. ‘The ship profile is very old and somewhat corrupt, but the correlation is clear.’

Lepidus stood at the head of the command table, which took up the centre of the deck. The deck resembled the interior of a castle on some feudal-level world, with shields and swords hung on the stone-clad walls beside tapestries of the star fort’s battles, the holo-projectors and station controls hidden within the huge hardwood table. Around the edge of the chamber sat the crew, their dark blue uniforms and golden fist emblems marking them out as unaugmented men and women who served the Imperial Fists Chapter.

‘Prepare the machine-spirit for war and bring all weapons on-line,’ said Lepidus. A smile crept onto his face. ‘And alert the astropath. Send a communication to Strike Fleet Helios informing them of our position. Include a note for Captain Lysander. Let him know that if he is quick, he might have the chance to pick over the corpses we shall leave in our wake.’

Castellan Lepidus had earned his role in command of the Bastion Inviolate with several episodes of intense violence levelled against the Chapter’s foes. His armour was in the form of a fortress, the ceramite collar worked into ornate battlements and his greaves buttressed like foundations. It was hung with trophies of the enemies whose lives he had taken – ears from a greenskin warlord, delicate wraithbone trinkets from a farseer of the eldar, teeth and vertebrae from a host of malformed aliens. He clapped a fist to his chestplate.

‘I have a space kept here,’ he said, ‘for a part of the heretic who helms the Ferrous Malice. Many of us have sworn to take him down, and I shall be the one to keep that oath. Some finger or jawbone, a rib or a hand, it does not matter! Some piece of Warsmith Shon’tu shall hang here.’ He turned to the crew already working at the various command helms, bringing up the many weapons systems of the star fort. ‘Rejoice, you sons and daughters of mankind! This day you shall serve your Emperor by giving him the head of an Iron Warrior! The head of Shon’tu!’

Deep in the heart of the star fort, infernally hot and lit by the winking green lights that studded the menhirs of black datamedium, Techmarine Korgon waited for the machine-spirit of the Bastion Inviolate to unfurl. The intelligence was encoded in the millions of sheets of datamedium, untold trillions of calculations in every fraction of a second weaving together to create a sentience as old as the Imperium. Forged in the age before the Emperor had united humanity, the Bastion Inviolate had accumulated more battle-wisdom than a whole Chapter of Space Marines could boast.

From a well lined with black crystal a swarm of flickering motes rose, glowing blue and green. They coalesced into a shape that could have represented something alive, perhaps a serpent squirming in knots or a colony of polyps. Or it could have been an expression of something mathematical, a fractal constantly splitting and turning in on itself.

‘Bastion!’ called out Techmarine Korgon. ‘We are at war!’

‘Who,’ demanded the machine-spirit, ‘is the enemy?’ Its synthesised voice filled the datacore of the Bastion Inviolate. The spirit was known to be curt and crude, constantly angry about something.

‘The Iron Warriors,’ replied the Techmarine. The servo-arm on his armour’s backpack inserted a dataprobe into a socket on the crystal wall behind Korgon, inputting the data the star fort’s sensorium had collected on the enemy ship. ‘The Ferrous Malice, known to be the flagship of Warsmith Shon’tu. Less than half an hour ago it emerged into real space within striking distance of us.’

‘Filth-licking dogs!’ spat the machine-spirit. ‘Would that I had hands to wring their necks! Would that I had bowels that I might void them on their corpses!’

There was a reason Techmarine Korgon tended to converse with the machine-spirit alone. He was used to its temperament, but the same could not be said of the other Imperial Fists and Chapter crew who staffed the Bastion Inviolate. ‘You echo our own sentiments,’ he said. ‘The Ferrous Malice is a Castigation-class grand cruiser and is a formidable foe. We ask that you lend your wisdom to the battle sure to come.’

‘My wisdom?’ snapped the machine-spirit. ‘Wisdom counts for nothing against such a foe! No, it is hatred that will count! Rage! They stew in their filth and imagine our heads on spikes. But I’ll split their hull open with my lance fire and turn them into frozen mist! My servitors will string their entrails on my battlements! Whatever foetid data festers in their systems, I’ll delete it zero by one and scrape that ship bare! Long ago the Ferrous Malice opened its machine-spirit up to traitors and daemons! Whatever’s left, I’ll kill. You’ll be lucky if there are any Iron Warriors left on whom to practise your aim.’

‘Then I shall cede the primary weapons to you, machine-spirit,’ continued Korgon. ‘And retain the defensive systems under the command of my crew that you might focus on the enemy. I have ordered them to make ranging shots at–’

‘Quiet!’ bellowed the machine-spirit. The fractal of light flattened and spread out, the holo-image rippling over the Techmarine’s armoured form and up the crystalline walls. ‘I can hear them.’

‘Hear them?’ said Korgon. ‘They are still beyond medium sensorium range. We can barely pick up any comms at all.’

‘They are here,’ said the spirit. ‘I can taste them. I can smell their filth! Filling the radio spectrum with their ordure! Flooding the data network with seething rot! Techmarine, this is no physical assault! I am… I am besieged!’

The fractal darkened. Flecks of yellowish light flickered like fireworks in the datacore. A tendril of fractal spilled against the edge of the well, like a weary hand steadying a battered fighter.

‘Bastion!’ said Korgon in alarm. ‘Speak! What ails you?’

‘Witchcraft!’ spat the machine-spirit. ‘Daemon-magic! Flee this place, Techmarine! Flee! These rancid frag-holes, these rot-belching vermin, they have undone me! Ten thousand years, an entire age of Imperium, and now by these cowards I am undone!’

The whole datacore shook. Shards of black crystal fell as the stacks of datamedium fractured. The floor tilted and split, crevasses opening around Korgon’s feet.

‘What must I do?’ shouted Korgon over the din of tearing metal.

‘Go! Now! Run! Take my guns and blast them from the void!’

‘I cannot leave you! I have my duty!’

‘Your duty is the destruction of our foes!’

Tendrils of yellow-green light were writhing through the steel of the deck and the crystal of the datamedium now, like snakes squirming beneath the surface of black ice. Korgon fell, the deck breaking under him, and he grabbed at the shards of metal to keep himself from sliding into the well.

The fractal was shimmering between black and sickly yellow-green, a semblance of tormented features shuddering across it. There was something else in there with it, too, something dark and sinuous, smoky coils wrapping around the machine-spirit to strangle and constrain it.

Korgon scrabbled to his feet and backed away from the struggle. The daemon-coils snagged around his feet and arms but he broke them, breaking into a run as he headed for the exit that would take him into the maintenance sections of the Bastion Inviolate. A hand half composed of greenish light and half seething darkness grabbed the dataprobe on the end of the Techmarine’s servo-arm and wrenched it towards one of the datamedium stacks. The probe stabbed into the black crystal and the servo-arm glowed bright as a torrent of data stormed through it.

Korgon’s back arched as his muscles convulsed. Bones cracked. His lips peeled back from his teeth and his eyes rolled back, his body shuddering. Foam flecked around his mouth.

‘Techmarine!’ yelled the machine-spirit. ‘My brother!’

Korgon’s body deformed under the convulsions of his own muscles. The ceramite of his armour buckled. Where it split, blood flowed.

Where the armour was torn, eyes bulged, veined and filmy, staring madly. Korgon the man disintegrated, replaced with something awful and inhuman.

The machine-spirit of the Bastion Inviolate bellowed in anguish and pain. As one the stacks of datamedium shattered, shards of crystal howling on a gale of shredded information. The daemon-shadow slithered over everything and a well of darkness erupted in the heart of the star fort.

Death came to the Bastion Inviolate beneath a veil of shadow and flesh.

Castellan Lepidus outlived the command deck crew by a handful of seconds. They were asphyxiated as the machine-spirit lost control to the data-daemon and the airlocks and bulkhead doors were slammed open. The air shrieked out of the star fort, dragging many crew with it, kicking out blindly as they were thrown out into the void. Those who held on died in the next moment, blood vessels rupturing, lungs bursting, their blood coughed out into a frozen mist in the sudden cold.

A Space Marine could survive the void for a while. It was not the void that killed Lepidus. It was the face that bulged up from the deck under his feet, its lines carved hard from the steel, huge glassy black eyes unblinking as Lepidus was dragged down into its yawning mouth by hands of data-shadow. The Castellan was drawn into a pit of gnashing blades, the throat of a steel serpent lined with jagged teeth, and swallowed whole by the abomination conjured from the substance of the Bastion Inviolate. His shouts of defiance were swallowed by the vacuum and his life winked out as his body was shredded and crushed down there beneath the deck.

The scene was repeated all across the star fort. The fort’s small detail of Imperial Fists were ground to paste or impaled on fingernails of steel from hands that unfolded from the machinery around them. Others followed the crew out of the airlocks, tumbling through space, alive for the moment but certain to die as their armour’s air supplies ran out. They had the last sight of the Bastion Inviolate, of the way its ornate arches and buttresses folded in on themselves to form huge faces, of the enormous filmy eyes that stared from the wounds opening up in the star fort’s hull.

As they died, they saw the Bastion Inviolate die too. In its place was created something much, much worse.

Sometimes, Captain Lysander’s thoughts turned to sacrifice.

The first lesson he had learned as a Space Marine was sacrifice. The man who had begun his training under the Chaplains of the Imperial Fists was long gone now, replaced by someone who was more a legacy, an embodiment of his Chapter, than a human being; but Lysander still remembered what he had learned. In battle, nothing can be won without sacrifice. Be it the expenditure of a single bullet or the death of a whole world, victory had to be paid for somehow.

Sacrifice was foremost in his mind now as he regarded the tactical map of the region surrounding the Eye of Terror. In the immediate vicinity of the Eye, grey icons marked worlds which had been sacrificed to the tide of Chaos that had flooded from the Eye. There were the graveyards of vast armies and planetary populations, billions fallen to the Chaos-worshipping heretics who called themselves the soldiers of the Black Crusade. Prominent battles and naval actions shone bright in the holo-display, all of them marking mass sacrifices to the possibility of victory by Imperial commanders. Some had been successful. Most had not, and the campaign around the Eye was one of containment. The Chaos spearhead had to be blunted. If it burst through in force from the Eye and crashed through the cordons the Imperial Navy had thrown around it, the Black Crusade would make for Terra herself.

That would not happen. The Imperium would sacrifice everything it had to keep it from happening. The Imperial Guardsman or Naval crewman might not understand that. He might equate victory with survival, in the way that the small-minded Imperial citizen had to just to stay sane. But Lysander understood.

Lysander contemplated this in the tactical orrery of the strike cruiser Siege of Malebruk. The ship had been sent from Fleet Helios, the Imperial Fists fleet guarding one of the approaches from the Eye. It was all the fleet could spare. Any moment now the fleets of Chaos could approach and force the Imperial Fists to a naval battle. Lysander himself was an asset that the Imperial Fists could ill afford to have anywhere but in the heart of battle – but his task was more important even than to lead his brother Space Marines of Fleet Helios.

His task was to confirm that Warsmith Shon’tu really was dead.

Lysander’s vox-link chirped behind his ear.

‘Speak,’ he said.

‘Captain,’ came the voice of the ship’s commander, Chrystis. ‘We are exiting the warp. All indicators green.’

‘Contact the Bastion Inviolate and the Endeavour of Will as soon as we are in real space,’ said Lysander. ‘Have us battle-ready. The fight will have been joined and may still be going on. We must be ready to lend our guns.’

‘Yes, captain,’ replied Chrystis. ‘Breaching real space now. The Emperor protects.’

The tactical orrery, clad in brass and inscribed with the cogs and stylised enginework of the Adeptus Mechanicus, shuddered as the Siege tore through the veil between the warp and reality. For a split-second the architecture of the orrery shifted; impossible angles ghosted across its architecture as reality protested at the intrusion. Then the moment was over and the Siege was back in reality.

The holo-display winked out and was replaced, the ship’s immediate vicinity being picked out in light. The Endeavour of Will was surrounded by flickering icons representing its small garrison of Imperial Fists. A star a handful of light hours away, with dead moonlets and a band of asteroids. Long-defunct explorator platforms.

There was no Bastion Inviolate.

‘Comms coming in,’ came Chrystis’s voice over the vox. ‘It’s garbled. Distress beacons everywhere from the Endeavour.’

‘What of the Bastion?’ demanded Lysander.

‘Nothing,’ said Chrystis. ‘We’re searching for it. It’s not putting out anything, not even static beacons.’

‘Find it,’ said Lysander.

‘Yes, captain. Should we hold position?’

‘No,’ said Lysander. ‘Bring us in to the Endeavour of Will.’

Daemon virus, the last message had said. In the arcane code of the astropath, it had flickered across from one star fort to the other at the speed of thought. Witchcraft. Moral threat. We are undone.

The words ran through Techmarine Hestion’s mind as he shouldered his way through the bulkhead door, forging a path through a maintenance passage not built for a Space Marine in armour. From somewhere deep in the engine and power sections of the Endeavour of Will, warning klaxons were blaring and synthesised voices were issuing dire warnings in a confused babble of sound.

Hestion pulled himself through a hatch into a vast, cold vault. The arched ceiling high above was obscured with freezing mist, and the polished metal of the walls was caked in ice. The vault housed a roughly spherical mass of archeotech, a biomechanical mass woven together from dozens of human forms, swathed in cabling and steel casings. The machine-spirit of the Endeavour of Will was housed here, the rhythms of a hundred human bodies regulating its functions and a hundred human brains containing the architecture of its mind. Just as the servitors that maintained the star fort’s systems were built around the bodies of deceased crew, so this machine was composed of the bodies of the various tech-adepts and magi who had maintained it over the millennia. Their final honour had been to join the machine-spirit, their own minds mingled with it, their own wisdom added to the vast knowledge fillings its memory banks.

‘I can see them,’ said the Endeavour of Will, its voice issuing from its hundred mouths. ‘They are between the seventh and eighth moons. They watch us.’

‘The enemy ship is not the biggest threat,’ said Hestion. ‘The last communication from the Bastion Inviolate spoke of witchcraft. Of a tech-virus, born of daemon magic.’

‘Then the Bastion is lost,’ said the Endeavour of Will. ‘I felt an emptiness in the realm of information, and I feared my friend was gone. For ten thousand years we have been brothers, forged in the same age, fighting alongside one another in the age that followed. So does time rob us even of that which cannot die.’

‘They will assault us next,’ said Hestion. ‘Shon’tu and his Iron Warriors will not be satisfied with one prize. He will want to take us too.’

‘He cannot have us,’ said the Endeavour of Will. ‘You and I, we are forewarned. We will fend off this daemon-scourge. Shon’tu will have to pursue his victory with gun and blade, not witchcraft.’

‘This I swear too,’ said Hestion.

A Space Marine’s lifespan far eclipsed that of an unaugmented human, but even by a Space Marine’s standards Hestion was old. His long, mournful face seemed out of place in the red and gold armour of an Imperial Fists Techmarine. He lacked none of the size and presence of a Space Marine, but somehow still looked more like he should be bent over a scholar’s desk instead of bringing fire and bloodshed to the Emperor’s enemies. Sure enough, bundles of scrolls and books hung from his armour, containing the various tech-rites with which he honoured the spirits of the machines and wargear he maintained for the Chapter.

Hestion took one of the thickest books and his servo-arm unfolded down over his shoulder, the manipulator at its tip unlocking the clasp holding the book’s cover closed. Hestion flipped rapidly through the pages and found the ritual he was looking for.

The pages were covered in blocks of zeroes and ones, separated by complicated algebra. Hestion ran his finger down the page, the bionics behind his eyes whirring as they parsed the phrases of machine-code and sent them to the logic circuits in the back of his skull.

‘Omnissiah,’ read Hestion. ‘You whose knowledge builds a fortress of understanding in the realm of information. You whose domain is everything forged and wrought. The dark powers look upon your servant with jealousy. Protect him and snatch his sacred knowledge back from the jaws of sin.’

The mouths of the many bodies opened. The machine-spirit inside coordinated their vocal cords to create a harmony of machine-code, a white noise of clicking and buzzing that echoed Hestion’s words in a language that an unaltered human mind could not comprehend. Fingers twitched as their nervous systems, long unused to movement, stuttered into life.

‘Ah, they are here,’ growled the Endeavour of Will. Warning lights flickered across the casing, sending red-edged shadows flitting across the columns and arches of the vault. ‘An edifice of such profane knowledge, crashing through the sea of understanding like a ship crewed by the dead and hung with the trophies of violation. Would that you could see them, Imperial Fist! Even your vaunted hate would be inflamed to a new height!’

Warning icons ghosted over Hestion’s vision, projected onto his retina. They told him that an unknown vessel had breached the sensorium range of the Endeavour of Will and was approaching fast, cloaked in all manner of sensor-fooling effects that rendered it a shadow on the void. The Imperial Fists garrison and the human crew, already on the highest of alerts after the death rattle of the Bastion Inviolate, were powering up the star fort’s weapons.

‘But it was not guns or torpedoes that took down my brother star fort,’ continued the machine-spirit. ‘That is something he could have fought on his own terms! Fire with fire! No, it was the very soul of deceit that brought him low. But I will not follow him into the depths of ignorance! I will not be lied to! By the holy truth shall I be shielded!’

Hestion’s servo-arm reconfigured and seared a complicated pentagrammic symbol on the floor of the vault with a cutting laser. The steel of the floor seethed and bubbled around it, and not just with heat.

The shadows were darkening. The bodies of the machine-spirit’s casing were ageing rapidly, skin turning grey and flaking away, muscle and organ sinking into skeletal hollows. Faces decayed into bare teeth and black eye sockets.

‘Omnissiah, grant us your aid!’ shouted Hestion. ‘Delete not this ancient soul! Permit not this corruption!’

Crackles of red lightning played across the high ceiling forming blood-coloured fingers along the columns and walls. Distant voices chanted and gabbled, competing with Hestion’s lone voice. One section of the wall bowed in and split, becoming the lids of a huge bloodshot eye that rolled madly. Hestion yelled and threw a handful of pure carbon into the circle, and the eye withdrew.

The vault was shuddering. Voices were flitting across the star fort’s vox-net, carrying information about the enemy drawing closer. It was a grand cruiser, its shape well-known by the tactical histories accessed from the valley of datamedium in which the machine-spirit kept its immense reserves of knowledge. It was a flagship of the Iron Warriors, servants of Chaos. If Hestion did not fend off their daemonic attack, the Imperial Fists would never have the chance to look this enemy in the face.

Thick reddish veins blistered up from the floor and up the side of the machine-spirit’s casing. Withered bodies broke and flopped aside, revealing the tangle of circuitry and cabling inside.

‘Back! Back to the warp with you!’ came the machine-spirit’s voice, distorted to an atonal bray. ‘You will not have this soul! For ten thousand years I have wrought a grim end for your kind! I will not die now! Not now!’

Hestion looked around him. Corruption was flooding through the vault. Eyes were opening above him. The circle, the focus for his ritual, was distorting, new symbols appearing among the sigils of protection and warding.

‘Flee!’ said Hestion. ‘Move your spirit to your datamedium vault! Abandon this place!

‘I cannot,’ replied the Endeavour of Will, synthesised voice distorted. ‘It will follow me. There all my knowledge is vulnerable.’

‘They will not follow you,’ said Hestion. ‘I swear. I cannot hold it back here. I will not lose you. Flee, Endeavour of Will! Let this fight be mine!’

‘Then Emperor’s speed upon you, Techmarine,’ said the Endeavour of Will. ‘What you have done for me will never be deleted.’

The lights on the casing turned dark. The bodies remaining fell limp, the cacophony of their machine-code silent and replaced by the wrenching of metal as the vault was warped and distorted by the daemonic virus seeking out a way to the machine-spirit.

Hestion extended his servo-arm and plunged it into the machine-spirit’s casing. ‘In a few seconds you will reach this machine,’ he said aloud, knowing that whatever was attacking the star fort could hear him. ‘And nothing I can do will stop that. But you will find no way to the machine-spirit. Your virus will follow the only path it can, the only one open to it, and that is me! My body! You will never reach it, because you have to go through me first!’

All the mass of profane knowledge that made up the daemon-virus, all the vastness of its hate and the torrent of its blasphemy, poured through Techmarine Hestion’s body. Hestion jerked and spasmed as if in the throes of electric shock, fire spitting from the extremities of his armour. The edges of his battle-plate glowed red and the skin around his collar scorched as he cooked in the heat. Blood ran from his eyes and ears. He slumped to his knees but did not fall, muscles held rigid by the force of the current.

The daemon virus coalesced into a pair of triangular red eyes, blistering down from the ceiling of the machine-spirit vault. Monstrous features pushed against the steel of the vault from the other side of reality, gnashing mandibles twisted with anger, pseudopods bowing up the floor and pushing in the walls. The daemon’s roar echoed through the chamber, competing with the howl of twisting metal and the crackle of the power coursing through Hestion.

Hestion ripped the dataprobe from the machine-spirit casing. The link was snapped. Its information spine broken, the daemon screamed, an impossible sound that was both loud and distant, a thunder from another dimension booming through the star fort. The whole vault was suddenly twisted as if wrenched in two opposite directions by a pair of gigantic hands, and shards of torn metal fell from the broken columns.

Hestion fell to the floor, smoke rising from him, blood dribbling from his face. He dragged himself half a pace and slumped again, all his energy drained away by the task of standing against the virus. He doubled up in pain as the vault collapsed around him. The whole ceiling loomed down as the fabric of the vault failed.

Hestion waited to die. He would be crushed as the machine-spirit vault collapsed on top of him. He had saved the Endeavour of Will. To die fulfilling such a duty was no bad death.

He was moving now. He thought the floor had partly collapsed into the maintenance deck below and was tilting, and that he was sliding towards a crevasse opening up. But what little of his sight remained caught a glimpse of a gold-armoured hand grabbing one wrist and dragging him away from the collapse, towards the vault entrance. Behind him the machine-spirit casing disappeared in a torrent of torn metal where he had been lying a moment before.

Hestion forced his head to turn. Skin tore away where it had been welded to his collar armour. But what he saw took enough of the pain away.

He was looking up at Captain Lysander.

Velthinar Silverspine recoiled in anger, shuddering the jewel-encrusted pillars of its temple. Slabs of silver fell from the wall, and the lesser abominations that attended on it, misshapen things like mosquitoes crossed with many-armed humans, squealed and flitted around in fear. One of Velthinar’s many limbs swatted a couple from the air, slamming them against the temple walls.

Around the temple, which took up a good portion of the midsection of the Ferrous Malice, ran a gallery where supplicants and sacrifices could walk around the temple at Velthinar’s eye level. At intervals along this gallery were statues looted from benighted, primitive worlds where the gods of the warp were worshipped, and their sacred power helped keep Velthinar manifest while the Ferrous Malice was in real space. Onto this gallery emerged Warsmith Shon’tu, the only man on the ship who could walk into the presence of Velthinar when it was angry and not rile it up further.

Velthinar, if anything, sank down a little at the sight of the warsmith. It was here on the sufferance of the Iron Warriors leader, whether it liked it or not.

‘You failed,’ said Shon’tu.

It was not an accusation. It was just a statement of fact.

‘I was betrayed!’ replied the daemon. ‘Betrayed by ignorance! One of them was armed with the knowledge of their false machine-idol. That pitiful god of stupidity and rust! That its teachings should befuddle me so! Had I known I would have stripped that information from their minds and left them grass-eating imbeciles.’

‘But you did not,’ said Shon’tu. ‘Your virus form could not break the Endeavour of Will.’

‘It will,’ said Velthinar. ‘It will! The next time I will decorate the walls with the liquid mush I leave of their brains! I will–’

‘There will not be a next time.’

The daemon Velthinar Silverspine resembled an enormous bloated insect, something that might be found clinging to a leaf on a poisonous jungle world but expanded to a titanic size. Its fleshy bulk could not be contained within its exoskeleton and bulged between the carapace plates in pallid hanging folds. It had legs, many of them, but its size was such that it could not hope to move normally, and it lay on its back with its head curled up over its thorax. Its carapace was iridescent and jewelled, like a suit of alien armour created by the finest craftsmen, with fine silver filigree over plates of deep blue that shimmered to purple. Its head was a mass of eyes and mouthparts, its mandibles sheathed in silver and decorative rings and jewels hanging from every piece of exposed flesh. Its eyes were orbs of red and blue, misty and swirling inside like a soothsayer’s crystal ball. Its lack of apparent mobility was irrelevant given its role – its shadow form, the shape it took when shifted into the realm of information, was the form it used to do all its damage. It was the techno-virus that had destroyed the Bastion Inviolate, just as it was the insectoid horror that lurked inside the Ferrous Malice like a parasite in a hollowed-out organ.

‘But… to me was promised the spirit of the star forts!’ Velthinar’s voice, issued from several sets of mouthparts, sounded like several chittering, sibilant voices clamouring at once.

‘And you promised that you would cripple their machine-spirits and deliver them to us!’ snapped Shon’tu. Velthinar’s flesh rippled as it recoiled a little. ‘You will devour the Bastion Inviolate. That you have earned. But you did not deliver on your side of the bargain where the Endeavour of Will is concerned. The Iron Warriors will do with that star fort as we wish.’

Velthinar’s many eyes narrowed. ‘If you think, warsmith, that a lord of the Silver Towers will be cowed by your anger…’

‘Anger?’ replied Shon’tu. ‘Why do you think I am angry?’

It was normally impossible to read expressions from the daemon’s alien face, but the waggling of its mandibles and flexing of its forelimbs might well have indicated confusion.

‘The lords of my Legion care only that a blow is struck against the sons of Dorn,’ continued Shon’tu. ‘But what glory is there in watching their corpses tumble through the void? What pleasure can be gained from giving the kill to a creature such as you? Now, the Iron Warriors can face the Imperial Fists as it should be, face to face! The iron within us, and the iron without, will crush their entreaties to their Corpse-Emperor, and prove with whom the strength of the warp lies! Perhaps we need some humanity in us, daemon, to understand. Whatever I now am, I was once a human being, a man, and still I possess the jealousy and rage of a man faced with an enemy whose inferiority he cannot demonstrate. Now I can sate that anger with the blood of Imperial Fists! I give thanks to all the gods that you have failed, Velthinar. It is a gift from the warp! I am not here to remonstrate with you. I am here to tell you to stay out of our way until the killing is done.’

Velthinar was silent for a moment, limbs folding and unfolding as its various eyes came to focus on the Iron Warrior. ‘I begin to understand,’ said the daemon, ‘why this task was given to you.’

The apothecarion of the Endeavour of Will was kept dark, the patients illuminated by the spotglobes that trained their lights on the prayer book over each bed. Automated manipulators turned each page at regular intervals, to make sure that if no one else was reading a prayer over the wounded, the eyes of the Emperor at least were looking on their words of devotion.

The Endeavour of Will had an apothecarion large enough for the wounded of an army. Now, however, it only had one patient – Techmarine Hestion, stripped of his armour and surrounded by medical servitors patiently weaving artificial skin over the wet red expanses of his burned body.

Lysander watched the servitors work. Hestion was unconscious, kept in an induced coma by the autosurgeon pumping chemicals into his system. He could die then and there, or he could hold on for a long time. But Hestion was most certainly dying.

‘His sacrifice will be remembered,’ came a voice behind Lysander. Lysander turned to see another Imperial Fist in the doorway of the apothecarion. He walked into the ward, the dim light revealing him to be a lot younger than either Lysander or Hestion, a sergeant by his markings of rank, fresh-faced and relatively unscarred by the years of battle a Space Marine veteran endured. Young, thought Lysander, to have his own squad. Five Imperial Fists, wearing the same squad markings, followed him in.

‘It is our duty,’ replied Lysander, ‘to see that someone lives to remember.’

The sergeant held out a gauntlet. ‘Sergeant Rigalto,’ he said. ‘It is an honour, First Captain.’

Lysander remembered the name. Every Space Marine in a Chapter at least knew of every other. Lysander remembered Rigalto as a line trooper, bright and respected, but not an officer.

‘Those campaign badges,’ said Lysander. ‘Agripinaa subsector.’

‘You are correct, captain. Storming of the Basilica Pestilax.’

‘Then that explains it,’ said Lysander.

‘Explains it?’

‘Heavy losses at the Basilica. Your sergeant died and you took his place. Am I correct?’

‘You are,’ said Rigalto. ‘My honour and my despair. I saw him die, and could not stop it. One day he will be avenged.’

‘Such things must be known by a captain of the Chapter without asking,’ said Lysander. ‘We are spread so thin, we can die without our brothers knowing of it.’

‘They will all be remembered, just like Techmarine Hestion,’ said Rigalto. ‘In time, their names will be written down, when the enemy is driven back into the Eye.’

Lysander nodded. ‘That at least I can promise. Well, we have you and your squad, and myself. Who else holds the Endeavour of Will?’

‘Scout squad Menander,’ replied Rigalto. ‘They are on their tour of service, in preparation for elevation to full brotherhood. The station crew under Enginseer Selicron, and Astropath Vaynce.’

‘And my command squad,’ said Lysander. ‘Seventeen Imperial Fists, including myself. Quite the army, is it not?’

‘And the Siege of Malebruk,’ said Rigalto. ‘And the weapons of the star fort. Thanks to Hestion, the machine-spirit still has some of the weapons on-line.’

‘Enough to kill Shon’tu,’ said Lysander. ‘He banked on us being slain by his virus attack without his traitors having to raise their guns. Now he must give us a fight that we can win.’

‘I have heard tell,’ said Rigalto, ‘of the Shield of Valour. Of Malodrax. To us, those who were recruited after the event, it is told like a parable. But to you, it was real. It is memory. To fight alongside one who–’

‘Malodrax is in the past,’ said Lysander, holding up a hand to silence Rigalto. ‘A battle is to be fought now, and it is to the present that I would have us turn our thoughts.’

‘Then it is enough to say that we shall help you make the Iron Warriors pay for the Shield of Valour, and all that followed.’

Lysander’s vox-link chirped. ‘Chrystis here,’ came the transmission from the Siege of Malebruk.

‘Speak,’ said Lysander.

‘Captain, we are under attack.’

From the glare of the system’s sun, the waning red star Kholestus, the Ferrous Malice dived through sensor-baffling bands of solar radiation.

The Siege of Malebruk turned to face it, presenting a broadside which brought as many of its guns to bear as possible. In its tactical orrery, Chrystis and the ship’s battle-cartographers used holographic void-maps, and rulers and compasses alike, to build up an arsenal of manoeuvres the Siege could execute depending on the actions of their enemy. On the Ferrous Malice far less natural things, crewmen possessed with daemons of cunning and corrupted machine-spirits, were doing the same.

Naval battle proceeded at its own pace, as if time meant something different when it came to ship-to-ship murder in the void. Torpedoes and broadside shells proceeded not at the speed of gunfire, but lazily, spiralling through space to intersect with the likely locations of the enemy. It was war in which geometry and helmsmanship counted for more than aggression and fearlessness, cold-blooded and removed compared to the thunder of face-to-face battle.

That cool detachment broke as the first shells hit home. The barrage from the Ferrous Malice’s nose cannons speckled the hull of the Siege with silvery explosions, and inside, crewmen were shredded as metal deformed into bursts of jagged blades. Air shrieked out of hull breaches and damage control teams stationed beyond the inner hull died as the void boomed in to strangle and freeze them. Fires broke out, cutting off teams of crewmen with walls of flame.

The return fire from the Siege took its toll, hammering into the armoured prow of the enemy ship. Hull plates were torn free, and ribbons of frozen blood billowed out as the strange, half-living physiology of the ship was breached. The Ferrous Malice passed under the Siege, both ships battered by the first exchange of fire.

The Ferrous Malice was the larger ship, a grand cruiser of a design long forgotten by the shipyards of the Imperial Navy, and it sported more firepower covering every angle of attack. But the Siege of Malebruk was a Space Marine strike cruiser, with far greater agility and a quick-witted machine-spirit that calculated thousands of attack solutions every moment at the same time as fending off the virus attacks from the mind of Velthinar Silverspine. The two spiralled around one another, the Chaos vessel in one moment seeming lumbering and slow, and in the next making the strike cruiser seem massively outgunned and outclassed.

But this was just the overture. In a plume of purple black flame, alchemical rockets flared along the spine of the Ferrous Malice and slowed it down suddenly, twisting it into a reverse manoeuvre far beyond any Imperial-built ships of its size. At the same time its prow split open, revealing folds and tendons of vulnerable muscle, already torn and bleeding from the opening fire. From this biomechanical mass emerged the snout of a nova cannon. Few Imperial shipyards could forge such a weapon now, and none knew the secrets of creating the nuclear flame that now flared around the barrel as the weapon charged.

The crew of the Siege of Malebruk responded to this unexpected change in the battlefield by turning every effort towards evasion. The machine-spirit charted a crazed, jinking path that wrapped itself around the Ferrous Malice, too far for defensive turrets to open up against the strike cruiser but too close for the nova cannon to be brought to bear.

The nova cannon stayed silent. The Siege of Malebruk moved out of its arc of fire, even as the Chaos ship’s alchemical rockets fired again to turn it back on itself again.

The Ferrous Malice had no machine-spirit. In place of an artificial intelligence roosted a host of data-daemons, insubstantial warp creatures that flocked to serve their master, Velthinar. They squabbled and fought faster than the speed of thought and, through the sheer bedlam that went through their inhuman minds, wove battle plans that no enemy could predict. Their pronouncements were passed on to the crew and the strange unwholesome creatures that writhed through the oil sumps of the engine decks. The insane command structure of the ship, with the Iron Warriors overseeing multiple castes of mind-slaves, possessees, daemons and mutants, should never have permitted anything so complicated as a warship to function – but the Ferrous Malice was a construct of Chaos, transformed into a voidbound asylum by millennia in the warp, and by some incomprehensible process all the madness produced a ship that could think and act faster than should have been possible for its size.

And so the Ferrous Malice rolled on its side, presenting a scarred expanse of hull to the enemy. The broadside guns mounted there did not fire, and the crew of the Siege of Malebruk took advantage of this unusual good luck to hammer out a broadside of their own, stripping away hull plating and ripping charred craters along the length of the enemy. Fires billowed out into the void as ammunition and fuel stores cooked off. The wounding was terrible, with laser turrets boring holes decks deep and vast areas of the Ferrous Malice depressurising and throwing struggling handfuls of crew into space.

Then the hull peeled away of its own accord. Coils of muscle unravelled, whipping across the closing gap between the two ships and wrapping around the extremities of the Siege of Malebruk. The tentacles reeled in the strike cruiser, even as armoured beaks, like the mouthparts of some sea-dwelling kraken, emerged from the ruination of torn flesh and metal inside the Ferrous Malice.

The machine-spirit of the Siege of Malebruk had not factored in this turn of events. The ship had nothing to fight off the grand cruiser’s predations. Up close it had its defensive turret fire, which was designed to shoot down approaching torpedoes and bombers, and would have scarcely any impact on the mass of the Ferrous Malice. It had the option to board, but aside from the few spare crewmen it could arm it had only the single command squad who had accompanied Captain Lysander to the star fort. The Ferrous Malice, meanwhile, was guaranteed to be brimming with mutants, psychopaths and worse.

The Imperial Fists on board, offensive as the presence of the Ferrous Malice was, would not throw their lives away boarding it and accepting certain death. They would do more good opposing the ship’s undoubted intention to take on the Endeavour of Will. The order was given for the Siege of Malebruk’s crew to abandon ship.

The Ferrous Malice had no intention of letting all those fleshy morsels go. Tendrils snapped out from its ruptured hull, snaring saviour pods and shuttle craft as they fled the Siege. Dozens of men and women died as their escape craft were smashed open, or were forced alive down one of the gullets that opened up within the biological mass beneath the hull of the Ferrous Malice. The armoured shuttle carrying the Imperial Fists weaved between spinning wrecks and the biological growths trying to ensnare it, the survival of five of the Imperium’s finest warriors now down to nothing more than the encoded skills of a servitor-pilot and a hefty dose of fate.

The Ferrous Malice reeled the Siege of Malebruk into a close embrace. Beaks armoured with bone crunched into the strike cruiser’s hull, ripping through decks and shearing off one of the ship’s engine sections. Plasma coolant billowed silver-black into the vacuum, and the reactors discharged their power load in a storm of blue lightning. The shockwaves tore apart more escape craft, or shredded their guidance systems to send them tumbling without power in all directions.

The Chaos ship dismembered the strike cruiser, forcing massive chunks of spaceship into its many jaws. The machine-spirit of the Siege of Malebruk survived until the last, moving from one stack of datamedium to the next as parts of the ship were crushed or torn away. The strike cruiser was a gutted shell by the time it ran out of places to hide, and its existence winked out in the closing maw of the Chaos ship.

The Ferrous Malice let the remains of the Siege of Malebruk drift away. One side of the strike cruiser was gone completely, the rest hollowed out like a carcass abandoned by scavengers. The Chaos ship had a bloated appearance, an insect gorged on blood, squatting in a haze of debris. Only a few silvery specks remained of the Siege’s crew. The Ferrous Malice, sated for now, ignored the fleeing escape craft, and the escapees clung to life for a few hours more as their craft headed for the relative safety of the Endeavour of Will. Among them were the five members of the Imperial Fists First Company, seething with eagerness to get to grips with the enemy who had just handed them such a total defeat.

PART 2

Shon’tu stepped through the door of the Dreadclaw, and breathed in the ancient, stale air of a dying empire.

Behind him, a squad of Iron Warriors followed him out of the Dreadclaw’s jaws and into the interior of the Endeavour of Will. The Dreadclaw was a make of hull-boring assault capsule that the Imperium had long since forgotten how to make, but which still hung in their dozens over the assault decks of the Ferrous Malice. Its bronze-cased beak had torn through the star fort’s outer layers and come to rest in a maze of maintenance passages and superstructure supports, into which the Iron Warriors emerged already prepared for a fight.

Shon’tu went helmetless, for even a sudden vacuum could do little harm to his artificial skin and bionic lungs. ‘Dust and desolation,’ he said. ‘Like the inside of a tomb. Such a lifeless place.’

‘And we shall make it literally so,’ said Brother Ku’Van, one of the veterans accompanying Shon’tu.

‘As we have done so many times before, my brethren,’ replied the warsmith. ‘We shall leave this voidbound coffin as empty as the souls of those we kill. For they have no iron within!’

‘Iron within!’ shouted the squad in response. ‘Iron without!’

‘Warsmith!’ came a vox from somewhere nearby, among the webs of dark iron and cramped maintenance spaces that soared in every direction. The rune on Shon’tu’s retina told him it was Steelwatcher Mhul speaking. ‘My coven has made safe breach.’

‘As has the Choir,’ came another vox from Forge-Chaplain Koultus. Koultus’s voice was unmistakable, a brash growl of amplified bass and churning sub-tones. It had to be, or the Choir couldn’t have heard the prayers with which he drove them forwards.

‘Then converge on me, brothers,’ replied Shon’tu. ‘To you has been given the honour of accompanying me in this boarding action. Prove to me that you deserve my favour. Drive on, strike hard and without pause, and we will drive a spear of iron into the heart of this place!’

‘Well met, captain,’ said Brother-Sergeant Laocos, clapping a hand to the enormous ceramite barrel of his chest.

‘Well met, my brother,’ replied Lysander.

The star fort’s archive, a high-ceilinged room lined with cases of books and scroll tubes, was one of the few places Lysander and the Imperial Fists of his command squad could gather without being cramped. Like Lysander, the five-strong squad wore Terminator armour, a mark of the esteem in which the Chapter held the First Company, and the rarest and most advanced piece of wargear in the Chapter’s armouries. Each man was closer to a walking tank than a single soldier, close to three metres tall and not much less across. Most other suitable places on the Endeavour of Will were too small to accommodate them all comfortably. It was the first time Lysander had seen the men of his command squad since he had left the Siege of Malebruk to see to the star fort’s situation in person.

‘I so nearly lost you,’ continued Lysander. ‘The Emperor’s shield was on you.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Laocos. ‘But the Siege did not have such good fortune.’

‘I saw only via the tactical sensors here,’ said Lysander. ‘It looked bad enough from there.’

‘It was a horror such as I have rarely witnessed,’ replied Laocos. ‘All we knew of Shon’tu and the Ferrous Malice is but a fragment of the truth. We were–’

‘We were caught out,’ said Lysander grimly. ‘This is not an act of opportunism by the Iron Warriors. Scavengers they may be at heart, but Shon’tu knew the disposition of the star forts and the fact we could spare but few to defend them if their own weaponry failed. He had exactly the tools he needed to destroy them, and but for the valour of Techmarine Hestion he would have done just that. He made sure to bring a ship the equal of the best we could afford to spare from the front line. What we know – what I know – of Shon’tu is enough to tell me that he will have brought the means to destroy the Endeavour of Will now, even when his assault on the machine-spirit failed.’

‘Then what will he do next?’ said Brother-Scholar Demosthor. Demosthor, in training to attend the Reclusiam of the Chapter’s Chaplains, had passages of Dorn’s philosophy pinned to his armour, and to the casing of the squad’s assault cannon, which he carried.

‘The Iron Warriors are creatures of directness,’ said Lysander. ‘Not for Shon’tu another round of deceit and trickery. He will take the path that leads most clearly to victory, though it may be the hardest.’ He looked from face to face, noting the features of men who had served their Chapter for the better part of centuries even before they had been assigned to Lysander’s own squad. ‘Shon’tu is going to board us. Against any other enemy, any other Chapter, he might pause. But not against us. He wants to fight us. He wants our blood on him, he wants to see us die.’

‘If he wants battle,’ said Laocos, ‘should we give it to him?’

His words were answered with an explosion from somewhere far off in the body of the star fort, and the equally distant blaring of alarms and klaxons. A cogitator console near the door of the archive lit up with warning icons.

‘We will,’ said Lysander. ‘To arms, Fists of Dorn.’

The star fort’s six segments radiated around its core. The core, heavily armoured and covered by the defensive weapons the machine-spirit still controlled, housed the datamedia vault and other essential command systems, along with the power plant. The six segments housed all the other structures needed for a battle station – barracks, now almost completely empty, supplies and ammunition stores, fighter decks silent without crew to fly the fighters and bombers stored there, fuel tanks, sensorium stations and mountings for weapons now lost to the machine-spirit. Here could also be found the places of worship used by the station’s crew, chapels to many faces of the Emperor and shrines to Rogal Dorn for the use of the Imperial Fists.

One of these sacred places was consecrated to the hero of the Chapter who was entombed there. In death, he still watched out on the void for the enemies of mankind, for his sarcophagus had been installed on the Endeavour of Will some two and a half thousand years before.

It was at the Tomb of Ionis that the Imperial Fists drew the battle lines.

Scout Sergeant Menander peered across the expanse of the Tomb of Ionis, his magnoculars sweeping past the fluted columns and scrollwork. It was a forest of stonework, as dense as a death world jungle. With little need to conserve space on the huge star fort, the tomb had grown with successive generations of masons and artisans, so the sarcophagus sat at the centre of a labyrinth of statuary and decoration. The sarcophagus itself rose like a granite mesa in the centre of the tomb, crowned with an outsized carving of Ionis himself lying in state.

Menander’s squad crouched around him among the coils of stone. Their cameleoline cloaks had turned speckled grey to match their surroundings, and they were adept at clinging to the shadows and breaking up lines of sight. Menander’s four Imperial Fists Scouts carried sniper rifles, draped in cameleoline strips to diffuse the outlines of the weapons.

‘Brother Moltos,’ said Menander softly. ‘Bless us.’

Brother Moltos made the sign of the aquila, and clapped a hand silently to his chest in the salute of Dorn. ‘Emperor most high, and Omnissiah who knows all, bless this battle-gear that will so sorely be tested. Keep our lenses bright and focused, and fill them with the sight of the enemy. Let our bullets fly true. Let the armour of the enemy crumble before them. Let them find nothing but the hearts of traitors.’

‘Amen,’ said Menander, echoed by the other three Scouts. ‘Spread out. Intel pattern. Do not engage.’

The Scouts split up and moved quietly through the tomb, heading on different winding paths towards the sarcophagus. Menander glanced behind him and could see the glint of golden ceramite between the columns lining the near edge of the tomb. Captain Lysander and Sergeant Rigalto’s squads were mustering there, ready to act.

And somewhere up ahead were the enemy.

‘I have movement,’ came a subvocalised vox message from Menander’s right. Scout-Brother Tisiphon’s rune winked. ‘Three hundred metres, approaching. Two of the clock.’

Menander looked in the direction Tisiphon had indicated. He thought he could see movement, black against black. He held up his magnoculars and could make out, clearly now, the dark shape advancing towards the Imperial Fists.

It moved without concern to stealth. Menander could even hear it now, crunching through granite carvings. It was taller than a Space Marine and far more broad, and the oily gunmetal of the Iron Warrior’s armour was deformed by red, weeping bands of corded muscle.

‘Captain,’ voxed Menander. ‘I have sighted the enemy.’

‘Is Shon’tu among them?’ came Captain Lysander’s reply.

‘I cannot tell,’ said Menander. ‘They have sent in the Obliterators.’

Shon’tu watched as the Obliterators forged ahead. The five sons of the Coven, marshalled by the relatively normal Steelwatcher Mhul. Each Obliterator had once been an Iron Warrior, just like Shon’tu or Mhul himself. But the fates had seen fit to infect them with a warp-born tech-virus that had melded their flesh and armour into one, and turned them into machines of Chaos.

The Obliterators were twice the size of a Space Marine, and crashed through the statuary towards the high ground of the sarcophagus. Their limbs, wrapped in clubbing masses of muscle, opened up into dozens of orifices from which emerged gun barrels and chainblades. Each one was a walking arsenal, containing within him the firepower of a whole squad of Space Marines.

The rest of the strikeforce advanced in their wake. Shon’tu’s own squad, alongside the Choir, swept the avenues of fire with bolter barrels, watching for the glint of Imperial Fists armour. Lysander’s men had chosen to face them here, perhaps to force a decisive battle, perhaps because this was sacred ground.

‘Brethren!’ bellowed the amplified voice of Forge-Chaplain Koultus. Koultus’s skull-shaped faceplate had a yawning mouth framing a speaker which boomed his voice in all directions. ‘Behold you all the enemy! They cower from us! They pray that death might come before their weak hearts compel them to flee! Grant their wishes, and by iron seal their fates!’

The Choir rushed forwards around him, leaping through the wreckage left by the Obliterators. Their gunmetal armour burned from the inside, blue and red flames flickering where the plasteel plates met. The fires were barely contained, for they formed the haloes of daemons caged within them, desperate to break free through the sacrament of combat.

The first of the Obliterators clambered into the lip of the sarcophagus. Its limbs reformed into twin assault cannons, bundles of revolving barrels which span as they hammered out a rain of fire towards the Imperial Fists at the other end of the tomb. A few return shots snapped up at it, but the Obliterator stood proud as its brothers of the Coven took up position beside it. Steelwatcher Mhul was directing their fire, crouched beside the huge sarcophagus, the enlarged lens of his bionic eye sending greenish light beams playing across the statuary ahead.

Shon’tu’s own veteran squad were the backbone of this force, advancing patiently with bolters levelled. Soon their fire would chew through the few Imperial Fists that weathered the storm of the Obliterators. Shon’tu was a patient creature, but even his soul seemed to drag him forwards a pace, eager to kill.

Shon’tu backed against a half-collapsed statue that had once depicted one of the honour guard of the hero buried here. He peered through the dust kicked up by the gunfire and saw the shape of an Imperial Fist in Terminator armour, sheltering behind a pile of fallen rubble as he gave orders to the Space Marines around him. He was huge, shaven-headed, with a massive storm shield in one hand. In the other was a weapon that Shon’tu recognised – a thunder hammer with its end forged into the shape of a fist. The Fist of Dorn.

Captain Lysander.

Shon’tu’s spirit won the battle, and Shon’tu rushed forwards for the kill.

‘Hold them at the sarcophagus!’ yelled Lysander over the gunfire. ‘Advance! Imperial Fists, advance!’

Lysander could see one Scout fallen, a leg blown off by the storm of fire that had come from the Obliterators. Lysander knew of the Obliterators – he had fought them – and he knew well how deadly they could be. There was nothing in the Imperial Fists armoury that could kill as swiftly, man for man, as those infected by the tech-virus.

Lysander held his shield in front of him as he led the way forwards. Gunfire hammered against it, jarring his arm. His command squad advanced behind him, with Squad Rigalto to the right. Lysander could hear Rigalto yelling his own orders and bolter fire was streaking up towards the sarcophagus in return now. The sound was deafening – literally so, for anyone other than a Space Marine, with his enhanced and protected senses, would have been robbed of hearing by the din.

Something screeched among the bedlam. Some old soldier’s instinct took over in Lysander and he brought his shield down just in time to take the charge of an Iron Warrior who crashed through the statue forest right into him. Lysander kept his footing and slammed the shield down, trapping the leg of the Iron Warrior and pinning it to the ground.

The Iron Warrior was the colours of his Legion, oily gunmetal with yellow and black warning strips. But he was not a Space Marine. He had given up that label when he had allowed himself to be possessed by the thing squirming out of the eyepieces of his faceplate. Its twin wriggling pseudopods lashed from holes in his face and one of its gauntlets burst apart, more fleshy tendrils snaking out to wrap around the edges of Lysander’s shield.

Lysander’s stomachs turned at the sight of the possessed Iron Warrior. He raised the Fist of Dorn over his head and slammed the butt end down, impaling the Iron Warrior through the chest. He ripped it free and lifted his shield, carrying the enemy up on it and slamming it into the pedestal of a statue. Lysander brought the Fist of Dorn down again, the head falling in an arc, crunching into the Iron Warrior’s deformed face.

‘Possessed!’ yelled Sergeant Laocos. ‘Brothers, the enemy wears the face of his corruption!’

‘Not for long!’ came the voice of Brother-Scholar Demosthor. A volley of assault cannon fire blew one possessed’s head open, revealing a mass of squirming muscle like the bloom of a fleshy flower. The screeching thing kept attacking, but now blind and without coordination. Demosthor drew back his power fist and punched the Iron Warrior with such strength he was thrown clear out of sight by the impact.

Lysander pushed on, throwing another Iron Warrior aside with a swing of his shield. The sarcophagus rose right ahead of him, the shape of the nearest Obliterator illuminated by the blaze of fire roaring from the weapons unfolded from its arms. Lysander planted a foot on the lower edge of the sarcophagus and powered up onto the top.

The Obliterator turned to face him. Its face was a mass of muscle and machinery, gun barrels emerging from its eye-sockets and its mouth lolling open, glowing with the fire of its internal forges. Smoke and steam rose from it, spurting from between the armour plates fused with its flesh. The multi-barrelled cannon on one of its arms folded back into the mass of muscle and steel, and iron-sheathed claws emerged in its place, forming a bunched fist crackling under a power field.

Lysander braced himself into a stance his body knew from decades sparring in the duelling rings of the Phalanx and the battlefields of the Imperium. His shoulder dropped, shield held low and firm to take the charge. The floor under his feet was uneven, for he was standing on the carved face of Ionis, whose body lay in the sarcophagus below.

The Obliterator roared a wordless war-cry, loud and braying, the sound of an angry machine. Its bulk loped forwards, fist drawn back to club down and crush.

Lysander sidestepped with speed that should have been impossible for his Terminator-armoured form. He spun, cracking the front of his shield into the side of the Obliterator, using its own momentum to knock it forwards off-balance. He swung the Fist of Dorn around into the Obliterator’s back, smashing into its spine. Bone and iron cracked. The Obliterator slumped to one knee and Lysander slammed the lower edge of his shield down onto the back of its calf, splintering the stone beneath and trapping the Iron Warrior in place.

The second swipe of Lysander’s hammer crunched through the Obliterator’s upper back. The head of the hammer ripped right through the Iron Warrior’s bulk, tearing its upper chest and head off in a fountain of shredded meat and gore. Sparks sprayed from its ruined body as it toppled over.

‘Menander!’ said Lysander into the vox-net as he turned to scan for more targets. ‘What is your situation?’

‘Almost in position,’ came the reply.

‘We hold the sarcophagus,’ said Lysander. ‘Act now!’

‘It will be done,’ said Menander.

Rigalto’s squad were embattled at the other end of the sarcophagus, pinned down by volleys of bolter fire from the advancing Iron Warriors. The Imperial Fists were outnumbered and outgunned. They could not hold. Not for more than a few moments.

Lysander’s thoughts were broken as he saw the black and yellow heraldry, like a warning sign. He saw the brass superstructure around the armour, the nightmare in clockwork striding through the wreckage.

This Iron Warrior’s armour was bulkier and more elaborate, the ornate plates supported by a framework of brass struts and powered by a shuddering back-mounted generator with spinning cogs and pumping pistons, wreathing the traitor’s form in greasy smoke. One hand was a monstrous claw, and the other was encased in a triple-barrelled bolt cannon from which hung chains of ammunition rattling as it blasted volleys of fire into Squad Rigalto.

The Iron Warrior’s face was bare, but it was a face as much of steel as of flesh. Twin rebreathers were implanted in his throat and his mouth was articulated like a hunter’s trap with teeth of iron. The eyes were human, and it seemed that into them was poured all the hatred and anger that had been replaced by steel throughout the rest of the traitor’s body.

‘Warsmith!’ bellowed Lysander. ‘Shon’tu! I see you! Before the Emperor’s sight shall you fall!’

Shon’tu looked up at Lysander and, somehow, that mechanical nightmare of a face smiled. ‘Commander Lysander!’ he replied. ‘Such kind fates the warp has woven, to give your death to me!’

Shon’tu laughed and kicked through a ruined statue, where an Imperial Fist of Squad Rigalto lay trying to get back to his feet with a bolter shell through his thigh. Shon’tu’s claw clamped around the Imperial Fists warrior’s torso and he held him up for Lysander to see. The talons of the claws sheared closed, pneumatic pistons slamming shut, and the Imperial Fist’s body was sliced into three. The parts flopped to the ground, blood already pumping from between the sheared ceramite. The blood spattered across Shon’tu and hissed as it touched the warsmith’s hot armour, turning to black smoke.

‘In position,’ came Menander’s vox.

‘Fall back!’ ordered Lysander, not taking his eyes from the sight of Shon’tu driving on through the gunfire. ‘Imperial Fists, stay tight and fall back!’

The sound that reached Lysander’s hearing through the gunfire was Shon’tu laughing, an awful mechanical noise like tearing metal. One of the surviving Obliterators turned its guns on Lysander and he ducked back behind the plasteel slab of his shield. The weight of fire hitting it was like an avalanche, almost throwing Lysander onto his back.

Lysander jumped down from the sarcophagus. His command squad were back to back, surrounded by shattered statuary and the bodies of the possessed Iron Warriors who had charged into the range of their guns and power fists. Down at the base of the sarcophagus Lysander could see one of Menander’s Scouts crouched down, attaching a large, thick metal disc to the stone. Lysander recognised it as a demolition charge.

Bolter fire slammed into the Scout. The Imperial Fist slumped against the sarcophagus, mouth gaping dumbly, eyes glassy.

The charge was set. His duty was done.

Lysander led the way back towards the edge of the tomb. The Terminators’ storm bolters gave Rigalto’s squad enough covering fire to make it out from under the guns of the Iron Warriors. Sergeant Rigalto himself was firing his bolter one-handed, his other hand a mess of torn skin and gore.

The Imperial Fists passed through the corridors leading away from the tomb. Menander and the surviving three Scouts were last out, Menander slamming his hand against a control plate mounted on the wall. Pneumatic pistons hissed and warnings sounded, and reinforced twin blast doors slid down, closing off the tomb with a biological seal.

It wouldn’t stand up to a concerted blast of fire from the Iron Warriors Obliterators. It wouldn’t have to.

Lysander focused on the detonator rune on his retina.

‘The Imperial Fists do not retreat,’ said Shon’tu, more to himself than to anyone else. The dead Space Marine lay just behind him, oozing vermilion blood, and even as they witnessed their battle-brother dying Lysander and his force were falling back.

Shon’tu opened up a vox-link to the Ferrous Malice. ‘Velthinar!’ he demanded.

‘Could the warsmith deign to speak with us?’ came the reply from the daemon that squatted in the bowels of the Iron Warriors ship. ‘We who have failed him so?’

‘I have not the time,’ said Shon’tu. ‘Scour the memories taken from the Bastion Inviolate. Seek out knowledge of Ionis, a hero of the Imperial Fists, entombed on the Endeavour of Will. Now!’

The Iron Warriors around Shon’tu were pursuing the Imperial Fists squad in front of them through the ruins that remained of the tomb’s decoration. Shon’tu could see Lysander and his Terminator-armoured cohorts also moving towards the exits.

They could be cut off and trapped like rats. The Choir, those Iron Warriors blessed enough to harbour daemons sent to possess them, could move rapidly, like hunting animals. The Obliterators could blast and melt through bulkhead walls. The Iron Warriors had superior numbers and firepower. Lysander would never commit his force to a retreat into the tangle of maintenance and crew decks, never. It was as wrong as could be.

‘Warsmith,’ came Velthinar’s chittering buzz of a voice. ‘Ionis was a Castellan of the Phalanx, millennia ago. For three hundred years he served, until caught in the virus-bombing of Golgothix Superior and slain.’

‘Virus-bombing,’ spat Shon’tu. ‘Lysander! I owe you a betrayal! I owe you a death by deceit! Iron Warriors, retreat! Back to the Dreadclaws!’

The order did not have time to register in the minds of the Iron Warriors before the detonation charge mounted on the sarcophagus exploded. The detonation threw members of the possessed Choir off their feet, throwing chunks of statue everywhere. Normal troops would have been killed and thrown into disarray, but not the Iron Warriors. That wasn’t the aim.

Shon’tu could see, through the billowing dust and smoke, the side of the sarcophagus blasted open. The grinning skull of Ionis, resting on a bed of golden silks now tattered and blackened, rolled onto its side as if fixing Shon’tu with its eye sockets. Super-cooled air misted and rolled from the ruptured sarcophagus.

One of the Choir was loping through the ruins, falling behind his fellow possessed. He slipped to one knee, faceplate breaking open into a tangle of gnarled mandibles like a fist opening and closing. The possessed’s body convulsed and a yawning mouth opened up in its chest, a fat purple tongue lolling out and coughing out stringy red gore.

The Iron Warrior’s joints were eroding, some corrosive substance finding purchase in the joints of the armour. One of his arms fell off, crumbling bone and flaking muscle pouring from the exposed socket. The ceramite was becoming pitted and discoloured, the exposed flesh drying and flaking off as if ageing centuries in a few moments. The possessed toppled to the ground and came apart, armour cracking like dropped pottery.

‘Virus attack!’ yelled Shon’tu. ‘Mhul! Koultus! Get them back to the Dreadclaws in good order! Move!’

One of the Obliterators had been caught in the invisible tide. The virus leaking from the ruptured sarcophagus had infected the thick bands of muscle wrapping around its deformed armour. The muscles contracted, the armour plates warping and splitting under the pressure, spiny growths bursting from exposed flesh. Malformed gun barrels cycled, lumps of fused ammunition thunking to the floor. The Obliterator’s face burst into a clutch of eyeballs, each one swelling and bursting to dribble red-white gore down the torn armour. It took a long few moments to die, its body deforming until it was turned almost completely inside out, metallic organs split into fans of bloody steel and loops of articulated entrails clattering around its feet.

The warning systems built into Shon’tu’s cranial augmentations were sending pulses of alert hormones through him, and setting off microscopic klaxons and strobes in his ears and eyes. Every bio-alert was going off, his armour detecting the presence of pathogens, his augmetic organs fending off the voracious strains of virus which mutated into new forms with every moment.

Shon’tu made it to the rear of the tomb. Twin blast doors had descended, cutting off the Tomb of Ionis and turning it into a biological containment zone. Shon’tu ripped through the first door with his power claw, punching through the front and ripping the door off its mountings. The second lasted no longer, and he was through, the cavernous outer hull voids reaching ahead of him. Steelwatcher Mhul and the remaining possessed had made it through too, and Shon’tu could feel the impacts of the Obliterators stomping behind him.

The virus incubated in Ionis’s ancient corpse was voracious enough to kill a Space Marine, but not a warsmith of the Iron Warriors. Most of the Iron Warriors of Shon’tu’s own unit, veterans with multiple augmetics and enhanced physiologies, had also made it, their altered immune systems rapidly adapting to the virus’s assaults. Most of the possessed were gone, left behind among the ruined statuary to writhe and deform as they died.

Shon’tu cast a glance back towards the Tomb of Ionis, now a smoking ruin blanketed in an invisible layer of bio-predator. The emotions in him were not human, but might have most closely resembled a mix of anger, shame and hate.

‘A trick worthy of victory,’ said Shon’tu. ‘But it is no victory you have won here. All my brothers wait for you. The Ferrous Malice waits for you. You have bought yourself a far worse death, Lysander, and I will still be the one to deliver it.’

The remains of the Iron Warriors strike force headed for the waiting Dreadclaws as maintenance servitors were already trundling to erect replacement bio-seals to cut off the Tomb of Ionis.

It did not matter, this defeat, any more than the failure of Velthinar to destroy the Endeavour of Will’s machine-spirit truly mattered. Shon’tu had not reached the position of warsmith without thinking many steps ahead. The next stage of the star fort’s death was already laid out, ready to be enacted with an order. The Imperial Fists had achieved nothing here but to listen to the ticking of the clock counting down their final moments.

Lysander knew there would be little time before he would have to act again in the star fort’s defence. The Iron Warriors were the masters of the siege, just as the Imperial Fists were the masters of defence – Shon’tu would not have thrown his entire force against one weak spot. He would have more in reserve, ready to storm in when the first breaches were opened. They would attack soon enough. Shon’tu would not let the ignominy of defeat last for long.

Lysander was alone as he ascended the chill spiral staircase towards the belfry, a place lined in marble and silver plate, kept isolated from the rest of the star fort. Above him the lofty reaches of the belfry’s rafters were hung with huge bronze bells. The belfry’s single occupant knelt on the floor, a small desk in front of him with an array of inkwells, quill stands, pots of sealing wax and reams of parchment. His head was bent as if in prayer and he did not turn to look at Lysander – not because he did not care that the captain had approached, but because the eyes hidden under the heavy bottle-green hood could not see at all.

‘News must be grave,’ said Astropath Vaynce. ‘It is rare anyone comes up here when there is not some crisis to be transmitted to the galaxy.’

‘I am sorry to break your silence,’ said Lysander.

‘It is in silence that I take solace,’ replied Vaynce. ‘But I have my duty. What do you wish of me, Captain Lysander?’

‘I have a message I need you to send,’ said Lysander. He could see now that the shadowy walls of the belfry were lined with intricate cages, each with several tiny, silent birds, their bright plumage hidden in the gloom, hopping between their perches. Vaynce had the company of several hundred birds in total.

‘I understand the Tomb of Ionis was violated,’ said Vaynce.

Lysander was silent for a moment. ‘It is no concern of yours, astropath. Damage was inflicted to the star fort, as would be the case in any battle.’

‘Ionis had lain here for thousands of years,’ said Vaynce. ‘So few knew what his sarcophagus really contained. A stroke of cunning, do you not think? To contain a sample of such a dangerous bio-predator within the body of the last man it killed, and disguise it as his resting place? How many men and women who served here knew it was beneath their feet? I would imagine it was sealed there so it could be recovered and employed as a weapon by the Imperial Fists. Perhaps that purpose was forgotten. In any case, it will not be fulfilled now.’

‘Ionis decreed with his last breaths that he be used as such a weapon,’ replied Lysander.

‘Some would call it a violation,’ said Vaynce, ‘of the venerated dead.’

‘Then let them say it,’ said Lysander. ‘I have answers for them.’

Vaynce smiled and turned. His eyes were bound with a strip of embroidered cloth which could not quite hide the enlarged, scorched pits beneath. He smiled. His teeth were black, carved from ebony and inscribed with prayers of humility and perseverance. ‘Mere words, captain,’ he said. ‘Forgive me. I spend much time alone. Proper etiquette has rather… passed me by.’

‘Can you encode my message now?’ said Lysander.

‘Indeed,’ replied Vaynce. He took a book from beneath the pile of parchment in front of him and opened it. Its pages were crammed with symbols, some pictures of animals or objects, others completely abstract. Each had a meaning that changed with its proximity to other symbols, forming an infinitely complicated language of symbols that those strange, blessed individuals known as astropaths had to master before they could serve the Imperium. Vaynce ran his fingers along the page, reading the symbols through the feel of the ink on the paper. ‘Commence, if you will.’

Captain Lysander dictated his message to Astropath Vaynce. He kept it succinct, leaving out all but that which was necessary, knowing that an astropath’s art became more difficult, the message more prone to mistranslation at the other end, the longer it was.

Vaynce did not flinch as he heard it. One hand flicked through the book with a speed born of decades of practice, the other scratching down symbols on a strip of parchment that unrolled from a tiny motorised reel. He used a quill and reddish ink.

When Lysander was done, Vaynce lit a stick of incense and took a fingertip of ash, smearing it in a circular symbol onto the floor in front of him. He spat into the circle, mumbled a prayer, and wiped off the ash and spittle with his sleeve. The ritual done with, he rolled up the parchment into a tight tube and sealed it with a blob of wax and the ring that hung on a chain around his neck.

‘And the recipient?’ asked Vaynce, although it was obvious to whom the message was addressed.

Lysander told him the identity of the recipient. Vaynce scrawled a corresponding symbol on the outside of the rolled parchment, then climbed unsteadily to his feet. He tottered over to one of the bird cages, opened the door, and took out a bird with blue and red plumage that glittered under the light of the belfry’s glow-globes. The bird sat calmly on Vaynce’s finger, tiny black eyes flitting from Lysander to the astropath, making no effort to fly away.

‘We all have our ways,’ said Vaynce. ‘Every one of us is different. Some make sculptures, some paint pictures. Some even make music. But in the end we are the same. Whatever we create, we must destroy.’

The astropath tied the rolled-up message to the bird’s leg with a piece of scarlet ribbon. ‘Go, go,’ he whispered, and the bird flitted off his finger and skipped up towards the bells hanging from the rafters.

‘It is the trauma of destruction,’ said Vaynce, ‘that gives it form in the warp. To see our creations die gives us the focus to do what we must.’

A grid of needle-thin lasers glittered into existence, strung between the bells like a driftnet. The tiny bird flew through the grid and disappeared in a flash of flame.

Vaynce closed his eyes. The embroidery around his eyes glowed and the empty sockets smouldered beneath them. Flickers of blue-white power played around Vaynce’s skull, earthing through his fingers to the belfry floor.

Lysander, though he possessed no psychic ability, could feel the fabric of reality shifting, as if a wrinkle was being pulled out or the galaxy had moved along some infinitely distant fault line.

Vaynce coughed and his shoulders slumped. Smoke coiled off him.

‘It is done,’ he said.

‘Was it received?’

‘Impossible to tell,’ replied Vaynce. ‘It would be futile, I believe, to expect a confirmation, given the recipient.’

‘Then we are finished here,’ said Lysander.

‘I understand.’

‘No,’ said Lysander. ‘Perhaps you do not.’

Vaynce sighed and sat back down next to his writing desk. ‘What I have sent for you is… toxic. The information contained therein is dangerous.’

‘Not least,’ said Lysander, ‘to our enemies. And I have no doubt that Shon’tu has the means at his disposal to tear memories from even the mind of an astropath. Ours would not be the first Imperial force to be undone by just such a breach.’

‘Some astropaths possess compartmentalised minds,’ said Vaynce. ‘Dangerous knowledge can be isolated and burned away, and the memory wiped clean. But not I.’

‘Then you know what must be done.’

‘Of course.’ Vaynce pulled down the hood of his robe, exposing a shaven skull criss-crossed with burn marks.

Lysander levelled his storm bolter at the back of Vaynce’s head. The selector was set to single shot – even so, it would be massive overkill.

‘If there was another way,’ he said, ‘I would take it.’

‘I have always known that it would end this way,’ replied Vaynce, his voice unwavering. ‘Some of us can see… echoes, of what might be. I saw this place many times before I was assigned to this star fort. I knew that I would die here. Whatever form our duty takes, we must welcome it, must we not? We must give thanks that we know what must be done.’

Lysander did not answer. The report of the storm bolter shot echoed around the belfry, ringing off the bells overhead. Vaynce’s headless body slumped onto its front, the astropath’s skull vaporised by the bolter shell’s detonation.

Lysander lowered the gun. He left the body where it was, and descended the stairs to join his fellow Imperial Fists.

PART 3

The ritual chamber, when stripped of the battlefield trophies the Iron Warriors had set up there, served as a passable fighting pit. Two huge doorways were revealed when captured banners and tapestries were removed, and the sacrificial stone was strewn with a handful of shell casings and a sprinkling of blood to ready it for battle.

One door rumbled open. The holding pen beyond was full of the seething, coiled flesh of the first combatant, a serpentine monster composed of dozens of torsos fixed end to end. Its hundred limbs were fused from the claws and talons of executed xenos creatures, and they skittered along the floor drawing sparks as the serpent raised a head hung with grasping hands around a crocodilian maw. The serpent whipped around the chamber, every movement revealing another way in which human and xenos had been fused into a single horror. Here and there faces remained and they were alive, conscious and full of terror, features deformed in pain. A stinger on the serpent’s tail was held in place by a fusion of human and alien heads, half-flensed skulls and drooling jaws screaming silently.

The second door opened. The creature revealed was enormous and apelike, its massive shoulders supporting club-like arms that dragged along the ground, leaving a trail of blood from its torn skin. Skinless muscle wrapped a framework of fused skeletons, the bones inscribed with runes that glowed with the creature’s fury. Steam hissed between its vertebrae and from the vertical mouths of its two heads, wreathing around the tiny red eyes set deep into each deformed mass.

The serpent reeled around the wall opposite the newcomer, hissing and spitting as it reacted to its rival. The beast roared, its two voices combining to a storm of atonal noise, and slammed its fists into the floor. The serpent made to cower and the beast took a step forwards, before the serpent bunched its muscles and struck.

The beast was far too quick for anything of its size. One fist whipped up and caught the serpent around the throat, holding it down pinned against the floor as the length of its body thrashed. The beast’s other fist came up and hammered down onto the top of the serpent’s head, again and again. Bone crunched and gore spattered across the chamber’s walls.

But the beast had not paid attention to the serpent’s stinger. The slender point of curved bone hissed with acidic venom as it arched over the beast’s shoulder, the human and xenos heads embedded around it twisting as the muscle beneath tensed.

The beast slammed the serpent into the ground again. Its mouths split wide as it made to bite into the serpent’s head, and bloody saliva ran between the rows of fangs lining its mouths and throats.

The stinger punched down through the flesh of the beast’s shoulder. The beast let out a twin howl as the poison sacs along the serpent’s underside emptied themselves into its torso. Flesh and skin blistered along the beast’s back, and greenish boils welled up and burst. The beast clutched at its shoulder, and chunks of corrupted flesh came away by the handful, exposing bone and organ beneath. The serpent, wounded but alive, slithered away to the back of the room and watched the beast stumble blindly. The venom had reached its faces and they were withering away, fangs falling from its jaws and thudding to the floor amid the rain of blood and muscle.

The beast thudded into the wall and slid down it. Its voice was growing weak as its lungs were eaten away. Its upper body was now a semi-liquid mass, only the bones remaining intact as everything between them sluiced away. Finally it was silent, gory skulls lolling senselessly, blood emptying away into the drains in the chamber floor.

Doors opened and crewmen entered the room. Most of the Ferrous Malice’s crew were mutants, whose deformities had made them reviled and oppressed by the rest of the Imperium, and who eagerly flocked for the chance to serve the Imperium’s enemies. In their malformed limbs they carried goads and coils of rope, and they advanced on the wounded serpent coiled in the corner. They jabbed at it, driving it back towards the door it had emerged from as its half-crushed head wavered between them and its coils bunched up as it prepared to strike.

The mutants yelled to one another in the short, barking language of the ship’s crew, herding the serpent back. The serpent snatched a goading pike off one of the mutants and splintered it between its jaws, and threw another off his feet with a lash of its tail. But metre by metre the crew forced it through the doorway, and one of their number hauled on a lever that slammed the door shut behind it.

‘Leave us,’ came an order from vox-casters mounted in the chamber. The mutants cowered at the artificial voice and hurried out of the chamber, dragging their wounded crewmate along the floor.

In their place, Warsmith Shon’tu entered. When the last of the crewmen were gone and the door shut behind him, he walked over to the dead beast and examined its ruined corpse. He knelt down and magnification lenses unfolded over his eye, bringing out the detail of the beast’s strange physiology. With much of its flesh liquefied it was clear from the skeleton the number of creatures that had been fused together to make it.

‘You have your sacrifice,’ said Shon’tu, though the beast could surely not hear him. ‘A hundred victims made it, and a hundred more made its conqueror. Once they died by the knives of our priests, and again they died by violence. This is what was written. This was what you demanded.’

‘To show ourselves,’ came a reply, a high, grating hiss from somewhere near the chamber’s sacrificial stone. ‘Nothing more.’

‘Then show yourself, as you are bound,’ said Shon’tu.

The blood and shadows around the sacrificial stone flowed up into the air, as if filling an invisible vessel. They formed a spindly, roughly humanoid shape, with a head hung low between its shoulders and a long, equine face. It was somewhat taller than a man, and when half formed it drew the shadows around it like a cloak or furled wings, the spindly construct of blood obscured by the darkness that clung to it.

Behind it several more were forming in the same way, figures that seemed barely sketched on the surface of reality, stylised daemons scratched in blood onto the canvas of the air.

Shon’tu took a scroll case that hung on the waist of his armour. He opened it and unravelled the long sheet of lizard-like hide within. It was covered in cramped writing and symbols, and at the end was the seal, in black wax, of the steel helm emblem of the Iron Warriors Legion.

The leader of the daemons skittered forwards, its limbs seemingly jointed at random. Its head, which had now formed three eyes of bluish fire, was held low as it perused the writing on the hide.

‘The contract is as it was made,’ said the daemon. ‘All parties are thus bound.’

‘Then you must bargain,’ said Shon’tu. ‘The terms of our agreement state that you must enter into an agreement for services we demand of you.’

‘And you must give us what we want,’ said the daemon. ‘The Dancers on the Precipice do no man’s will for nothing.’

Shon’tu scowled. ‘It is always thus,’ he said. ‘Though our enemies are the same, though the warp’s glory relies on our labours, still the spawn of the warp must take their payment.’

‘It is written,’ said the Dancer. ‘So it shall be.’

Shon’tu opened a small compartment in the armour on his chest. Inside was a tiny glass vial of red liquid. ‘Shed by Perturabo,’ he said, ‘upon the fields of Isstvan. Collected even as the Corpse-God’s lackeys were butchered beneath our guns. Seasoned in the smoke from their pyres.’

‘The blood,’ said the Dancer, ‘of a primarch.’

Its fingers grew longer as it reached for the vial. Shon’tu snatched it back out of the daemon’s reach. ‘I have a very specific task,’ he said, ‘for which this is the payment.’

‘Give it unto us,’ replied the Dancer, ‘and it shall be done.’

‘Payment will be granted when the task is complete,’ retorted Shon’tu. ‘That is also written.’

The Dancer spat in frustration. ‘For the blood of Perturabo, for the life-stuff of the warp’s prophet, we will do as you wish. But break this covenant, delete what was written, and terrible shall be the warp’s vengeance! For ten thousand years you will find no ally in the empyrean, Warsmith Shon’tu. Only enemies shall swarm wherever your soul touches the warp, and the gods themselves will learn of it!’

‘There will be no reneging on this bargain,’ said Shon’tu. ‘That is not our way. This is a high price to pay, and it does us ill to part with it; but the victory it will buy us is worth the price, and it will be paid.’

The Dancer turned to its fellows. Just beyond reality shimmered the forms of many more, a whole tribe of these warp-predators. Their silent conversation lasted a few moments and the Dancer turned back to Shon’tu.

‘What is it the Iron Warriors desire?’

Shon’tu locked the vial of primarch’s blood back into its compartment in his armour. ‘Kill Lysander,’ he replied.

The first sign that anything was wrong, as was so often the case, was when the bodies were found.

Three of them, all engineers, were found near one of the star fort’s primary thruster arrays. The array, which was used to keep the Endeavour of Will in a steady orbit around its star, had been one of the many systems to be damaged during the attack on the machine-spirit, and the engineers were attempting to get it back to working order. They wore grey habits emblazoned with the half-cog symbol, showing that they were laymen trained by the magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus; and the body of each had been hollowed out, as if by hungry fingers cracking them open and tearing out the meat inside.

Lysander knelt in that moment beside the corpses lain out on the floor of the barracks, where they had been brought. They were a sorry sight, lopsided and sagging as if deflated. Rigalto stood behind him with a couple of the battle-brothers from his squad, along with the gaggle of crewmen who had found the bodies. Rigalto’s wounded hand was bound and bloody.

‘What other signs were there?’ asked Lysander, not taking his eyes from the bodies.

‘Prints,’ said one of the crew, a woman, stocky and smeared with machine grease. ‘On the floor and the ceiling. In blood.’

‘Footprints?’

‘I could not tell.’

Lysander stood up. ‘They were in blood?’

‘They were.’

He pointed at the corpses. ‘Their blood?’

‘I could not tell.’

‘They were eaten,’ said another member of the crew. This one was lanky with awful skin, and a deep rash around his mouth and nose where a rebreather mask normally sat. ‘Duct spiders. We had an infestation of ’em on the Executioner’s Moon. They get into the engines and breed, and they’ll chew you up just like that.’

‘This is daemon-work,’ said Lysander.

‘Are you certain?’ said Rigalto.

‘I have rarely been more certain of anything. These souls were their way in. With enough will, enough power, even the mind of a non-psyker can be a gateway for the daemon. We bloodied Shon’tu’s nose at the Tomb, my brothers. It is not the way of the Iron Warriors to send warp-spawn to do what they could themselves do face to face. We are forcing their hand.’

‘Then let us take what encouragement we can, captain,’ said Rigalto. ‘But that does not change the fact that these things are running around our star fort.’

‘Leave us,’ said Lysander. The crew, used to taking their orders from an Imperial Fist, bowed their heads and left the barracks room, leaving the Space Marines with the bodies.

‘And you, Rigalto,’ added Lysander.

‘Captain? If we are to hunt them down we must stick together. We could sweep by sections, drive them towards–’

‘Leave,’ said Lysander. ‘This is not a battle to be fought, because the enemy is not a soldier. Not this daemon. It is an assassin. It will not make itself known until it can move on its target. We could wait forever for it to emerge from whatever shadow it hides in, only for it to strike when our guard eventually falls.’

‘Then it is here to kill you,’ said Rigalto. ‘And you will use yourself as bait?’

‘The bait has no say in the kill,’ replied Lysander. ‘I shall. My orders have kept us alive thus far. Follow them again, Rigalto. Make your brothers ready, for Shon’tu will strike as soon as his daemons have either succeeded or failed. Go.’

‘As you command, captain,’ said Rigalto with a bow of the head. ‘Good luck.’

‘Dorn wrote that there is no such thing as luck,’ replied Lysander. ‘Fate perhaps, but not luck. To your duties, sergeant.’

‘Yes, captain.’

Rigalto saluted and turned away, leading his squadmates out of the barracks. Lysander turned again to the sorry sight of the bodies on the floor.

‘If you hear all, as you claim,’ he said quietly, ‘then hear this. I am the victim you are commanded to kill, but you will find no victim on this star fort. If you can feel anything so human as regret, then you will regret the binding that compels you to seek me out. I am an Imperial Fist, a son of Rogal Dorn, and I do not feel fear. But I know what fear is, because it is my duty to inflict it on creatures such as you.’

Lysander could hear them, their limbs clicking on the walls and ceiling of the corridors around the barracks like so many spiders scuttling around their web. He did not look back as he left the barracks and the corpses, and headed towards the star fort’s apothecarion.

The Dancers at the Precipice did not perceive reality at all. Existing partially in the warp, their senses strained to reach across the veil to real space. It was the warp’s reflection they saw, the emotional echoes of structures in reality. The corridors and hangars of the Endeavour of Will were seen in the shades of old emotions left there. All areas of the star fort were veneered in a thin layer of fear, as suffered by the unaugmented crew in times of battle. Pain was scattered, like blood spatter, around old battle damage scars, and it pooled in glowing stains around triage stations and the way leading to the apothecarion.

Arrogance and a sense of iron-bound duty glowed around the command areas where the Imperial Fists were most often found, details picked out in anger and flavoured with the lust for battle secretly held by so many Space Marines, and acknowledged by only a few. The airlocks, where the dead were traditionally sent on their final voyage, were steeped in sorrow and regret. Trace elements of happiness, even pinpoints of ecstasy in hidden secret places among the star fort’s architecture, were swamped by the grim emotions of war, those stains that lasted the longest and brought out every passageway and compartment as the Dancers scampered through them.

They followed the pain. They had tasted Lysander and the train of relentless duty he left, a metallic thread winding through the star fort, and it coincided with the increasing density of pain and desperation encrusting the approaches to the apothecarion.

The Dancers had no leader. They were moved by the currents of the warp that flowed through them, and in that moment it demanded that they kill. Lysander’s was a taste they knew well, and nothing would be as delicious as to temper it with pain and anger, and the awful certainty that came with the approach of death. They had already killed, but the deaths of those whose bodies they had usurped was weak and watery. Their deaths were tasteless compared to the banquet that would be Lysander’s death. The warp gave them hunger, and they sprang on to sate it.

Techmarine Hestion was awake. His eyes opened as Lysander boomed hurriedly into the room. The autosurgeon knitting together the skin of his chest recoiled at the motion, spindly arms folding up and away from the exposed muscle. He still looked shockingly weak, his musculature scorched and wasted away, and it looked impossible for him to ever fill the armour stacked up at his bedside. He sat up as best he could at Lysander’s approach.

‘Captain!’ he said, raw-throated. ‘I have heard of battle. The orderlies know little, only that the enemy is upon us and that you have fought them off. Is it so?’

‘Thus far,’ said Lysander. ‘The battle is not done. And forgive me, brother, for I have brought it with me.’

The apothecarion darkened. Spidery shadows flickered over the glow-globes in the ceiling. Half-glimpsed figures of gnarled, blood-red muscle, cloaked in darkness, scampered around the walls. Lysander backed up against Hestion’s bed, drawing the Fist of Dorn up into a guard and shouldering his shield so it protected Hestion from the gathering shadows.

Spectral fingers lashed out, congealing into reality as they raked across Lysander’s shield. More reached out from the warp and snared Lysander’s limbs, trying to haul him off his feet. He wrenched his shield arm around and batted one of the shadows against the far wall, its body like a bundle of spiders’ legs bunching up as it slammed into the wall and thrashed to the ground. Lysander raised the hammer and punched its head into a second daemon as it coalesced in front of him – the daemon flitted back, vanishing through the wall as the hammer crunched home a hair’s breadth too late.

‘I may be laid low, but I am still Adeptus Astartes,’ said Hestion, struggling to sit up. ‘Hand me my gun, Lysander. My blade.’

‘You will fight, my brother, fear not on that score,’ said Lysander as he circled, starting at the daemons as they stalked through the half-light around him. ‘I must ask more of you than I have ever asked of an Imperial Fist.’

‘Then ask, captain. What little I have left to give, I would give in battle.’

‘For once, Hestion, do not give so unthinkingly. For I ask of you your death.’

Hestion forced himself into a sitting position and swung his legs over the side of the bed, grimacing as his half-healed skin tore. He wrenched a surgical blade from the autosurgeon above him, wielding it like a dagger. ‘I do not understand, captain,’ he said, voice strained.

‘Your death, Hestion. The one thing I can have no right to demand of you. I must ask for it, freely given.’

‘I will die here anyway, captain. The apothecary cogitator has made its prognosis. My organs are too badly damaged. Soon I will be comatose, and death will then be swift.’

Another daemon slashed forwards, aiming for Hestion. Lysander stepped into its path and caught the charge on his shield. He was forced back a pace, before swinging the Fist of Dorn into the daemon and tearing it into a shower of shredded limbs and broken shadows.

‘Back!’ yelled Lysander. ‘Just as Dorn cast the daemon from Terra, so I will cast you from this place! Back to the warp, to burn beneath the wrath of your gods! You will not take Lysander today!’

‘I told myself that death is no shame, if it be a warrior’s death,’ said Hestion. His blade was held in front of him, but his hand wavered, for most of the muscles had been scorched away and his strength was gone.

‘It will not be a warrior’s death,’ said Lysander. ‘It will be a wretched one. Will you give this to me, my brother? I ask you as a friend, not a commander. Will you accept?’

Hestion’s eyes turned from Lysander to the daemons. They were gathering more thickly now, as if the apothecarion was disappearing to be replaced by a hellish place composed of daemon’s flesh.

‘When you returned from Malodrax,’ the Techmarine said, ‘some said that you should not rejoin us. The risk was too great that you had… brought something back with you. That you were corrupted, somewhere deep down.’

‘What are you saying, Hestion?’ demanded Lysander.

Hestion’s voice shook as he forced out the words. ‘You ask if I trust you with my death, brother. My reply is that I… I do not know.’

The walls bowed in and the daemons tore through, reality splitting like torn skin. The Dancers at the Precipice roared like a tornado of daemons’ flesh centred on Lysander and Hestion, limbs lashing out at the two Imperial Fists. Lysander caught blows on his shield and on the haft of the Fist of Dorn, protecting Hestion as best he could. Hestion fended off a claw that unfolded from a stalk of lashing, knotted flesh, cutting through the unreal muscle with his blade, but other talons caught him and opened up new wounds on his half-formed skin. Hestion slumped off the bed to one knee, a red slash along the side of his throat, exposing spine and sinew.

Hestion coughed out an angry growl. He grabbed one of the Dancers with his free hand, dragging it out of the swirling mass. He stabbed down at its shifting face, the features swimming around the blade as it punched into the place where its head should have been. Limbs split and reformed, squirming under Hestion and pincering around him to hold him fast. Lysander kicked out and shattered the daemon’s body with a massive armoured boot, smacking the remains off Hestion with a swing of his hammer.

The Dancers swarmed closer. Hestion was caught by a dozen limbs at once and hauled off his feet, pulled into the mass. Lysander yelled and tried to drag the Techmarine back, even as the Dancers ripped at him too, scoring deep gashes in the ceramite of his armour and shield, clawing at his face and eyes.

‘I was there when the black sun rose!’

Lysander’s voice cut through the hiss of the daemons’ talons.

‘Upon the blood-red sands, I laid him low!’ continued Lysander. ‘I cast his head into the ammonia sea! I stood against you and I defeated you! I am the Gilded Wrath of Malodrax!’

It was upon the blasted ground of Malodrax that the Dancers at the Precipice coalesced into real space for the first time, dragged out of formlessness and bedlam by a thousand voices raised in terror and pain. Malodrax was one of a million worlds found, conquered and subsequently forgotten by the Imperium, and seized by the powers of the warp who did not forget. From the flint-bladed mountains and ammonia oceans of Malodrax were forged death pits and warrens, carved by the hands of slaves and the sorcery of Chaos’s champions. Each one was dedicated to a different form of torment or execution. Artists begged the God of Change to transport them to Malodrax so they might create wonders there that no sane world would permit. Daemons gambolled between the death pits, and among them were the Dancers at the Precipice, who congealed from the stuff of the warp to attend joyfully on the millions of extinguished lives.

Cultists among the shipping lanes of the Imperium diverted passenger liners and pilgrim hulks into the dead, uninhabited space around Malodrax. Their living cargoes were poured into the death pits, and the Dancers at the Precipice took their place among the daemons and madmen welcoming them to their new and final home in the lava chambers or parasite nests, the endless steel-clad tunnels hung with flensed skin, the acid springs and the oubliettes full of razorblades.

The Iron Warriors saw a place of worship and pain, yes, but also one of inefficiency and waste. Space Marines of the Iron Warriors Legion landed there and turned the bands of daemons into armies, the death pits into factories. Daemon-scholars were summoned or created to keep a tally of every death offered up to the warp, and every form of torture discovered among the madness.

Then from the warp arrived a spacecraft accompanied by the heralds of Tzeentch singing in celebration. Every daemon, it is said, stopped their bloody work and watched as it descended from the torn skies of Malodrax. It had been lost in the warp for many years, as evidenced by the blistered hull and its state of disrepair, but there was no mistaking the heraldry of the Imperial Fists it bore. It was the Shield of Valour, thought destroyed in a warp collapse decades before, and it had been vomited up by the ether as a gift to the daemons of Malodrax. The Iron Warriors formed a guard to shepherd the passengers off the ship, and even now there was no doubting the pride and deadliness of those men – for they were Imperial Fists. First among them, like an animal kept caged in his armour of gold, was a Space Marine captain who with the merest glance told everyone who saw him what he would do to them when he got free.

All of the Imperial Fists were consigned to the pits. One by one, they died. They held on for a long time, and the unique opportunities offered by a Space Marine’s physiology were not wasted by those daemons who fancied themselves surgeons. The Iron Warriors made a particular point of watching the captain, for they knew that he would last the longest. They were disappointed that he died so soon after his battle-brothers, and that the daemons, in their enthusiasm, had heaped upon him so many varying methods of death that it was impossible to tell what had killed him.

The Iron Warriors argued with the daemon torturers. The Dancers at the Precipice were among them, newly-born and already resenting the bonds that compelled them to obey the Iron Warriors or fade from real space. They denied that they had thrown away the Imperial Fist’s life, for his soul was now being rent by their fellow daemons of the warp, and indeed the Iron Warriors were the wasteful ones for they denied the warp their kill for too long.

Guns were drawn. Daemons’ teeth were bared. The Iron Warriors and the daemons were ready to offer each other’s deaths up to the warp; then one of them noticed the Imperial Fists captain’s corpse was missing.

What followed was remembered only in scraps of memory. A few details were scraped onto the walls of a fortress in the warp, where details of a billion battles were kept inscribed on the massive lead blocks of its battlements. Others turned up in séances and daemon-haunted nightmares for years afterwards. The Imperial Fist became the Gilded Wrath of Malodrax, and daemons spoke of him as men spoke of daemons. He tore his way through the death pits, and by the time he reached the surface of Malodrax he was accompanied by everyone who could walk and fight that had broken from their chains as he slaughtered every daemon in his way.

Somehow, a message reached the Imperial Fists. A force sent to Malodrax found their battle-brother fending off a tide of horrors at the edge of a chemical ocean. The Dancers at the Precipice fought him there, and from their number he tore the one who had been their primary personality, the thing closest to a leader.

The Imperial Fist tore the daemon’s head off and threw it into the sea. Malodrax’s sun turned black, the eclipse like an eye closing in response to the challenge. The Space marine cried out that he was Darnath Lysander, and that no daemon could kill him. And the Iron Warriors who had overseen his captivity, if they had a spine between them, would face him there and fight to the death, for no one locked up an Imperial Fist and lived.

The Imperial Fists landed and took their brother back to his Chapter before daemon reinforcements could arrive. Lysander spat on the ground and cursed the Iron Warriors. A daemon was hatred and evil incarnate, but an Iron Warrior had once been a man who had chosen to become what he was. Lysander would never forgive them, not for what they had done to him, but for what they had done to themselves. And he would see them all dead in his lifetime, or he would have failed in his duty to mankind.

The Dancers hovered around Lysander. They crouched against the ceiling and on the floor, the knotted muscle of their bodies masked in shifting veils of shadow that fluttered like banners in the wind.

‘I took one of you,’ said Lysander. ‘I laid him low. The inquisitors of the Holy Ordos sought out the works of madmen and prophets, and found there the binding laws of the Dancers at the Precipice. I know that when I shed your blood, you are bound to me. You must obey, only once, but absolutely. Is this not so? Is this not written?’

‘It is so,’ came the hissing reply. ‘Upon the hides of the Gravendran Hydra, in the ink from the Tears of Morgedren, it was written. This was the contract that wove us into being from the raw stuff of the warp. This was the form taken by the will of Tzeentch.’

‘Then I may command you once.’

‘Not to destruction!’ came the reply. It seemed all the Dancers spoke at once, but as if through the same throat, so many voices tangled into one torrent of noise. ‘Not unto the end of existence! It is written!’

Lysander turned and looked down at Hestion. The Techmarine was breathing heavily, his fused ribs obvious as they moved beneath gelatinous, half-made muscle. He did not look back, his eyes instead fixed on the daemons that formed a wall before him. Lysander looked away from the Techmarine and spoke.

‘Take the body of Techmarine Hestion of the Imperial Fists,’ he said. ‘Into his body I bind you. Let his form be your prison. This is the will of the Gilded Wrath of Malodrax, and you are compelled to obey. So it is written.’

The daemons screamed. They fought. They howled and scratched at reality. But they were bound by fate, a force as certain and relentless in the warp as gravity was in real space. Their forms stretched and deformed as they were drawn by the grasp of fate towards Hestion.

It was impossible to tell if Hestion understood what was happening as he was caught in a cage of painful light, his form merging with that of the Dancers. Their tangled limbs rippled through his skin and muscle, their glowing eyes bulged from his body and his features distorted with theirs.

Hestion’s body contracted again, forcing the Dancers into his own form. He writhed on the apothecarion floor, and joints cracked and popped as his body was forced out of its proper shape. The faces of the Dancers, red eyes and indistinct folds of features, shifted under his skin. Hestion’s face was as distorted as the rest of him, jaw locked open, eyes screwed shut, blood trickling from his nose and eyes.

‘Now you have a body, an honest human body,’ said Lysander, bringing the Fist of Dorn over his head. ‘And now you can die.’

The Dancers screamed in denial, but as was written, the Gilded Wrath who had defeated them had bound them to his will and they could not escape the bonds of fate that held them in Hestion’s body. Hestion was in there with them too, and perhaps some of the screams that issued from his raw throat were his. But they were lost among the inhuman sound that issued from Hestion, a howl like a gale roaring straight from the warp.

Lysander yelled and brought the Fist of Dorn down. Hestion, his body commanded by the Dancers at the Precipice, tried to rise to face him, but Hestion’s body was broken and Lysander was too quick. The head of the hammer slammed into Hestion’s chest and drove him against the wall of the apothecarion. Ribs crunched and splayed, painting the wall with the Techmarine’s blood. From his ruptured body the broken limbs of the Dancers reached, waving feebly at Lysander as if trying to fend him off.

Lysander’s second strike knocked Hestion’s head from his shoulders. His body toppled to the side, and the cries of the daemons were replaced with the awful high-pitched squealing and gibbering that was their death rattle. As Hestion’s blood pooled on the floor, the Dancers at the Precipice discorporated and became once again the formless stuff of the warp.

The silence seemed to take a long time to return. The air rang with the din that had died down, as if the apothecarion was reluctant to let go of the battle it had seen. Moment by moment the echoes faded, until the only sound was the dripping of Hestion’s blood from the ceiling and the autosurgeon bed.

Lysander knelt beside the body of the Techmarine. Hestion’s body was a wreck, intact only below the waist, the torso broken open and the head gone.

‘I am…’ said Lysander. The rest of the sentence caught in his throat.

I am sorry, brother. There was no one to hear it.

He switched on his vox-link. ‘Rigalto, Menander. Lysander here. The daemons have been cast out, but Techmarine Hestion is dead. Attend upon the apothecarion for his honour guard. Though we are at war, we will give him the rites that are his due.’

Acknowledgement runes flickered. Lysander stood back up, and looked down at himself. Hestion’s blood was spattered over him, already congealing into rust-red crystals, for a Space Marine’s blood did so almost instantly to seal the wounds of battle.

Lysander leaned the Fist of Dorn against the wall and, pulling the sheets from a nearby bed, began to wipe Hestion’s blood from his armour.

The muster deck of the Ferrous Malice was hung with captive banners, from the delicate silks of an eldar pirate lord to the bullet-shredded standards of Imperial Guard regiments. The siege masters of the Iron Warriors had taken them from the most secure fortresses in the galaxy, or from the corpses of the enemies who had dared to besiege their own strongholds.

Shon’tu looked up at them, and knew that added to them would be a standard torn from the hallways of the Endeavour of Will. It was not a vow, it was not an ambition. It was a simple fact. The gods of the warp had decided it would be so. Fate would take care of the rest. Fate, and the guns of the Iron Warriors.

Shon’tu turned to the Iron Warriors gathered on the muster deck. Beneath the blood-coloured light from above, the steel of their armour shone grimly, punctuated by the glow of the eye lenses beneath the visors of their helmets. Well over fifty Iron Warriors stood ranked up, the entire warband sworn to Warsmith Shon’tu. Four squads of Space Marines, along with the surviving Obliterators of the Coven and the possessed of the Choir. Forge-Chaplain Koultus, priest of the dark gods who brought the favour of the warp with him. Steelwatcher Mhul, Shon’tu’s weaponsmith. Shon’tu’s own veterans. Even with the losses at the Tomb of Ionis, the Iron Warriors outnumbered the Imperial Fists by three to one at least.

And every one of them wore iron within just as he wore the iron of his armour without. Every one had taken the steps on the path that Shon’tu himself had almost finished – the conversion from man into machine, from a weak thing of fallible flesh to a weapon in the image of the primarch Perturabo. The forges of the Iron Warriors created bionics with technology long forgotten by the Adeptus Mechanicus of the Imperium, and every one of Shon’tu’s warband carried within him a relentless steel heart or a bionic limb, cranial implants loaded with battle-routines or inhuman artificial senses.

‘Fate has seen fit,’ said Shon’tu, ‘to place before us a test. A puzzle box hangs in the void before us to be unlocked. The prize inside is the head of Captain Lysander of the Imperial Fists. The daemon could not tear its machine-spirit from its shell. We have sought to pick its lock with a surgical assault. We have sought to bypass its defences and strike at the prize directly.’ Shon’tu drove a fist into the palm of his gauntlet. ‘The only tactic that remains is to smash it!’

The Iron Warriors raised their left fists. ‘Iron within!’ they yelled. ‘Iron without!’

‘Brother Malikos!’ ordered Shon’tu. ‘To your squad falls the task of securing the western lance battery. The assault on the machine-spirit left it dormant, and it has no defences against our Dreadclaws. Brother Veyrin, you will accompany Steelwatcher Mhul to the spur. Brother Tektos, Brother Skast, with me you will secure the rest of the western defence spur.’

The hullward edge of the muster deck was dominated by enormous cradles holding a dozen Dreadclaw assault-pods. Vapour hissed as pneumatic arms lowered the pods into boarding positions, warning lanterns flashing. Mutant crewmen scrambled across the machinery, tightening valves and operating controls, as the Iron Warriors lined up with parade ground efficiency to board.

Shon’tu’s mind had long been given over to the seething stuff of a devotee of Chaos, but fragments of human emotions could still surface, an echo of the man he had presumably been several lifetimes ago. He was angry. He was humiliated. The Imperial Fists had him – Lysander had bested him, with a cunning that should have been the province of an Iron Warrior. Lysander’s death would burn that away. The human side of Shon’tu would be forced down again, buried under the steel of an Iron Warrior, not to emerge again for another ten thousand years.

He would have to send his whole warband onto the Endeavour of Will. It was the only way he could be sure that no trickery of Lysander’s could withstand an attack. He had held back his force to test the Imperial Fists defences, and to claim the prize of the star fort and Lysander’s head without risking his entire strength. But risking it now was worth it. To silence that weak human, the final part of him not yet replaced with iron, it was worth it.

The Iron Warriors embarked into their assault-pods. The sergeants spoke words of prayer to the Iron Warriors they led. The crew hauled the Dreadclaws closed after them, sealing the embarkation doors with sigils of warding that called on the powers of the warp to deliver them to their enemies.

Shon’tu’s own veterans lined up with him at the final Dreadclaw. ‘I shall cast the head of Lysander into the warp,’ he told them. ‘It matters not who kills him. To us all the glory will belong. But I shall stand upon the threshold and give his head to the gods. That is all that matters.’

‘For such an offering,’ said Brother Ku’Van, ‘daemonhood will surely be granted.’

‘Then if it is so,’ said Shon’tu, ‘I shall take the wings of the daemon and let their shadow fall across the Imperium. No Imperial Fist will be spared my wrath. And then, no Space Marine. And then, no man. It is here that it will begin; with the death of Lysander, and with the boon of daemonhood, it will never end.’

Shon’tu’s squad climbed into the Dreadclaw. Grav-restraints locked around them as the door was hauled closed, and the only light was the winking of the status display that told Shon’tu the Dreadclaw was ready to launch.

‘Iron within!’ ordered Shon’tu. ‘Iron without! To the fray, my brothers! Launch!’

‘He was a Space Marine,’ said Lysander, his head bowed. ‘He was a son of Dorn. A defender of the Imperium. A golden light in the darkness. But above all things, he was a brother.’

Lined up in the airlock corridor stood the seven surviving members of Squad Rigalto, Scout-Sergeant Menander and his two remaining Scouts, and Lysander’s First Company command squad. In front of them, held above the ground by a suspensor unit, was Techmarine Hestion’s coffin. It was a functional box for transporting bodies from the apothecarion – a Space Marine required better, according to the law of the Chapter, but on a war footing there had not been the time to organise full funeral rites for Hestion. As commanding officer it was Lysander’s duty to say the eulogy, a duty he had fulfilled many dozens of times. The circular airlock portal was ready to receive the coffin and send it on its way into the void, as was traditional for those who died on a spacecraft or space station. Hestion’s gene-seed had been extracted by the star fort’s apothecary staff as best it could from what remained of his head and neck, and all that remained for the Techmarine was this final journey.

‘Victory,’ said Lysander, ‘is sacrifice. Rogal Dorn teaches us this. He learned it in turn from the Emperor Most High, who willingly sacrificed everything he was to defeat the arch-traitor, Horus. One day the sacrifice will be ours to make, just as it was our battle-brother Hestion’s, and it is the greatest honour we can bestow upon him to make that sacrifice as he did before us. Go to Dorn, brother, stand beside the Emperor, and at His side may you fight on.’

‘May you fight on,’ echoed the assembled Imperial Fists. Their heads were bowed in prayer, too. They had performed this scene already for the Space Marines lost at the Tomb of Ionis, and sent five such coffins into space with the same sentiments. It never became routine, this farewell to a brother, because every Imperial Fist knew that one day it would be him in the coffin, be it a wooden box cast from an airlock or a gilded sarcophagus interred in a memorial on the Phalanx.

But this time was different. Hestion had died from a head wound that every Imperial Fist who saw the corpse knew was from a thunder hammer strike. The only such weapon on the Endeavour of Will now hung across the back of Captain Lysander. Even if Hestion’s body had been a host to daemons, Hestion himself dead, it had still been the hand of a fellow Imperial Fist that struck the final blow. It was not the first time a brother had killed a brother, nor would it be the last, but such an event was always toxic. It could only happen through treachery, as one brother turned on another, or the collapse of an Imperial Fist’s vaunted mental defences, as when a mind was driven from its body and replaced with the daemon. For Lysander to have killed Hestion, no matter how justified in the moment, must have been the result of some appalling violation of everything a Space Marine should be.

Two of Squad Rigalto pushed the coffin towards the airlock. One of the star fort’s crew operated the controls that slid open the portal, and the coffin passed through the first airlock door. The inner door closed again, the airlock depressurised, and the outer door opened.

The coffin slid out into the void, accompanied only by silence and a shoal of icy slivers that flaked off in the sudden cold of space. Hestion’s coffin got smaller and smaller, lit into a hard-edged lozenge of red light from the star Kholestus, until it became impossible to distinguish from the scattering of stars and the billows of the nebulae marking the edge of the Eye of Terror.

Lysander’s vox chirped. ‘Sensorium helm here,’ came the voice of one of the star fort’s bridge crew. ‘Multiple contacts coming in, looks like boarding craft. They’re moving in on the western spur.’

‘What defences are active there?’ said Lysander.

‘None,’ came the reply. ‘All were lost to the machine-spirit.’

Lysander looked up at the Imperial Fists who were now waiting for his orders. They knew from the tone of his voice that the time for reflection was gone, and that they were back at war.

‘Shon’tu has launched his final attack,’ said Lysander. ‘We have humiliated him and he is sending everything he has to destroy us. But that also means he is risking everything he has. Take comfort from the examples of the brothers we have lost. Through sacrifice, they have defied Shon’tu this far. Through sacrifice, if needs be, we shall defy him again. You have your orders. You know what is expected of you. To your stations, sons of Dorn.’

As the Imperial Fists split up to man the positions Lysander had dictated, Lysander took a final look through the airlock porthole. Hestion’s coffin was invisible against the backdrop of stars. The Techmarine had gone to join Dorn and the Emperor at the end of time, to fight the final battle for mankind’s soul. Lysander had at least one more battle to fight before he could take his place there too.

It was worth it. There was no doubt about that. Everything could be gambled and lost, if that was what it took to achieve victory.

Everything.

Though the Obliterators could no longer speak – their vocal cords having long ago been sacrificed for yet another gun barrel – there was never any doubt about their mood. They existed in a permanent state of anger, for the tech-virus that had altered their bodies also took a hold of their minds and filled them with the desire to destroy everything around them. Commanding such troops was as much a matter of reining them in as letting them loose.

Steelwatcher Mhul had the task of commanding the coven of Obliterators that belonged to Shon’tu’s warband. Only two such creatures remained, the other having fallen to Lysander and the Fist of Dorn or to the virus in the Tomb of Ionis. Two was more than enough.

Mhul watched the Obliterators tear through the layers of steel and circuitry surrounding the massive cylindrical base of the defence laser. The laser was the largest weapon in the western spur of the star fort, a titanic weapon which focused enough power to punch a torrent of las-fire straight through the hull of a spaceship the size of the Ferrous Malice. The Obliterators could not fit through the narrow passages designed for the unaugmented crew of the Endeavour of Will, so they made their own path. Mhul followed, prodding the Obliterators in the right direction with bursts of pain from the mind impulse unit that surrounded his head like a steel halo.

The Obliterators’ hands reformed into steel claws that ripped away the metal of the weapon’s housing, revealing stacks of datamedium amid the destruction.

‘Stop,’ said Mhul, his words accompanied by a burst of psychic code that seized the Obliterators’ muscles. ‘There. You. Infect it.’

One of the Obliterators took a step back and reeled as if struck. His face split open and cycled through various calibres of gun barrels, melding from one to the other from the flesh and steel inside its skull. Finally something other than a weapon emerged – a nest of tendrils, fleshy and red, that probed in front of them accompanied by a wet hissing sound. The tendrils found the crystalline datamedium and wrapped around it, slithering across its surface to find a way in.

The Obliterators were created when an Iron Warrior, already as much machine as Space Marine, became host to a tech-virus. The virus itself had its origin in the warp. Perhaps it was a gift from one of the dark gods that reigned there, or was a curse on the Traitor Legions. Perhaps it was a natural predator (as natural as anything could be in the warp), or it was a daemon itself, one that existed entirely in information form. Whatever its reason for being, it took the substance of a Space Marine and turned it into a biomechanical weapon, every muscle and bone adapted to form part of the hundreds of weapon systems an Obliterator could form from his mutating body. And the tech-virus had another property even more dangerous than its capacity to turn flesh into a weapon. It was infectious, and could be transmitted.

The tendrils wormed their way under the surface of the datamedium. The crystal became blotchy and discoloured as the virus found a new place to live and thrive, forming mottled blooms like bacteria on a culture plate.

The air was filled with the sound of grinding metal as the whole defence laser shuddered. It rotated in its mountings, the building-sized laser barrel turning towards the main structure of the Endeavour of Will. Flakes of rust fell like a dark rain around Steelwatcher Mhul, and loose components clattered to the deck around him. The Obliterators extracted themselves from the tangle of metal as it churned with the movement. The one who had infected the gun stumbled out of the wreckage as its face reformed into the scowl it always carried, one eye narrow and hateful, the other replaced with a gun barrel.

The Obliterators crouched down beside Steelwatcher Mhul like attack dogs deprived of prey, scanning for targets.

‘Good,’ said Mhul, sending a wave of pacifying code through the coven. He switched to the command vox-channel. ‘Warsmith,’ he said. ‘It is done.’

Shon’tu and the Iron Warriors under his command stood lined up ready to advance, in the primary arterial corridor that led to the main structure of the Endeavour of Will. The top half of the corridor was transparent and so Shon’tu could see the mass of the star fort looming over him, covered with soaring battlements and arched portholes, studded with weaponry. The banners of the Imperial Fists, articulated sheets of steel half a kilometre long, hung to display the gold colours and red fist of the Chapter.

‘See?’ said Shon’tu, pointing up at the colours that hung from the star fort. ‘We shall tear them down. There shall hang the heraldry of Olympia.’

‘Warsmith,’ came Mhul’s voice over the vox. ‘It is done.’

‘Good,’ replied Shon’tu. ‘Ensure that the targeting is sound, and then open fire.’

The Endeavour of Will had one massive advantage over the Iron Warriors. Even with its weapons mostly dead and its garrison outnumbered, its sheer size made it a difficult fortress to break down. Between the Iron Warriors and the command centres at the heart of the star fort, the machine-spirit housing and datamedium vault, the bridge from which the whole star fort was controlled, were hundreds of kilometres of corridors, thousands of bulkheads and blast doors. Forcing a way through them would take time the Imperial Fists could use to set ambushes or outflank the Iron Warriors, cut them off from one another and channel them into battles they fought on their terms. The Iron Warriors would still be victorious, but only at the expense of many of Shon’tu’s warband, and that was not an acceptable way for an Iron Warrior to fight a battle.

There was no easy way into the heart of the Endeavour of Will. So Shon’tu would make one.

There need be no risk at all, said a familiar but unwelcome voice in Shon’tu’s head, buzzing around his cranial implants and hijacking the logic circuits wired into his brain. There is another way.

‘Silence,’ said Shon’tu, quietly enough for only him to hear.

Release me.

‘I said silence.’

The whole western spire shuddered and thrummed with power. Behind Shon’tu’s position the titanic defence laser was powering up, the energy coils along its length glowing at first a dull burned orange, then blue, then white, as enormous amounts of power were pooled. The barrel completed its traverse to point straight at the centre of the star fort. Safety circuits that would normally prevent the laser from being aimed at the star fort itself had been burned out by the Obliterator virus, while the control circuits destroyed by the initial attack on the machine-spirit had been repaired. The defence laser was in Iron Warriors hands now, and there was nothing the star fort or anyone on board could do to stop it.

The laser fired, and it seemed that the void itself was torn open, a gash through reality that opened up to an ocean of burning light. The augmetic vision of the Iron Warriors kept them from being blinded. The heat and magnetic shielding of the star fort’s structure kept them from being incinerated and irradiated. For that split second, a lance of energy hotter than a star transfixed the star fort like an arrow through the heart.

When the glare died, the star fort was laid open, a massive wound revealing the tangled steel entrails surrounding the machine-spirit core and the command decks. Torrents of wreckage spilled out, spinning off into the void in all directions. Severed power lines spat energy at random and explosions burst silently, instantly snuffed out by the vacuum.

‘Onwards,’ voxed Shon’tu. ‘They are dead, they merely do not know it. Let us educate them. Onwards!’

The Iron Warriors followed Shon’tu as he led them down the arterial tunnel towards the ruptured heart of the Endeavour of Will, feet tramping in time, as the wreckage from the blast pattered against the transparent ceiling overhead.

Lysander forged through the dense smoke, the heavy chemical taste of it distinct even through his armour’s filter, which had folded up over his mouth and nose.

He had been on his way to the command deck when the explosion had hit. He had known instantly that something huge had impacted upon the Endeavour of Will – the din echoed from every corner of the star fort, the floor shaking in a manner that told of the whole station shuddering, the sudden kaleidoscope of warning icons on his retina signifying a massive strike.

Around him, sections of ceiling had fallen in, and slabs of flooring had collapsed into the decks below. A fire had caught light somewhere very near and within seconds had filled the corridor with toxic smoke. Lysander found his footing, bracing himself against a buttress in the wall.

‘Rigalto!’ yelled Lysander into the vox. ‘Where are you?’

‘Command deck, captain,’ came the reply.

‘Casualties?’

‘None of my squad or Menander’s. I can’t tell if any of the crew is hurt, but I can scarcely believe there are no casualties. One of the defence lasers hit us. Shon’tu must have taken control of it.’

‘He has,’ said Lysander. ‘He had four choices for his final assault. That was one of them.’

‘Commander?’

‘Shon’tu’s way of war is much like ours,’ replied Lysander. His augmetic senses had adapted to the smoke and fire, and he could see several bodies in the corridor ahead of him, knocked unconscious or killed outright by the explosion and now aflame. The crew uniforms, with the heraldry of the Imperial Fists, were being consumed by the fire. ‘According to our ways, only a few possibilities for capturing the fort presented themselves. This was one of them. Shon’tu has gone through the same process of thought.’

‘Then what are your orders?’

‘Take your squad and Menander’s to the datamedium vault,’ replied Lysander.

‘The vault? There are more defensible areas of–’

‘Those are your orders,’ repeated Lysander. ‘Shon’tu relies on speed and shock. Do not give him those advantages. Go now, I will meet you there.’

Lysander ignored Rigalto’s acknowledgement, as through the smoke and flames charged the shape of a Space Marine.

Lysander knew it was an Iron Warrior by its unnatural silhouette, broken by ungainly bionics which looked more like industrial tools than replacement limbs. A steam hammer was attached by pistons and cables to the stump of one arm, and it crashed through a sheet of fallen ceiling as it swung at Lysander.

Lysander ducked the blow and brought the Fist of Dorn around for a reverse strike. But the floor shifted beneath him and he was falling head over toe, metal twisting around him.

Lysander hit the deck below at an awkward angle, almost head-first. Flames were everywhere around him, scorching his unprotected face, rippling up the walls and along what remained of the ceiling. He forced his way back to his feet but already the Iron Warrior was falling after him, hammer-first, steam spraying as the pistons drove the weapon forwards.

The hammer crunched into Lysander’s chest. Lysander sprawled onto his back under the weight, rolling onto his shield side to get out from under the enemy. The Iron Warrior stayed with him, his human hand holding on as the hammer was brought up to slam down again, this time into Lysander’s face.

Lysander smacked the edge of his shield into the Iron Warrior’s visor. The visor was sheared away and for a moment Lysander could see his assailant’s face. The skin was grey and withered, as if it had been drained of all vital fluids and filled up with colourless sludge. The eyes were silver orbs without pupils. The nose was gone completely, leaving two slits leading to implanted filters. The face ended just above where the mouth should be, everything from that point to the collarbone a tangle of cables, gauges and valves, spurting steam.

Lysander and the Iron Warrior were bathed in flames. Lysander wrestled with his attacker as the fire rippled over him, submerging him as if in water. He could feel the skin of his face blistering, the inside of his armour heating up, as he kicked and thrashed to throw the Iron Warrior off him.

Lysander caught the Iron Warrior’s hammer with the haft of his own, forcing the traitor to one side. His shield arm was free again and he forced the shield under the Iron Warrior’s body, levering the traitor off him. With a yell of effort and anger he threw the Iron Warrior back into the flames.

Lysander lost sight of his attacker. The flames and the choking smoke masked everything. Even the ceramite of Lysander’s armour was faltering in the fire, scorching him at the joints. He had to get out, but if he turned and ran the enemy would have a free shot at his back – and even Terminator armour could not be trusted to save him then.

The Iron Warrior leaped through the flames, the exposed skin of his face crackling and bubbling. Lysander stepped back, raising his shield to take the charge.

The side of the Iron Warrior’s head burst in a spray of dark blood and torn wires. He skidded onto the ground, sliding through the flames and coming to a halt at Lysander’s feet. He twitched a little and the flames rolled over him.

Sergeant Laocos strode out of the smoke. Lysander recognised the leader of his command squad, and the glowing of the barrels of his storm bolter, the gun which had just fired the fatal shot.

‘Captain!’ shouted Laocos over the din of the fire. ‘The enemy seeks to surround and flank us! We must move!’

Brother-Scholar Demosthor was behind Laocos, tracking for targets with his assault cannon. The deck behind him was in a similar state of destruction, and while no unaugmented crew could have survived down here, the Iron Warriors could use it as a way through the star fort if they moved fast enough.

‘To the datamedium vault!’ shouted Lysander. ‘That is where our stand will be!’

Laocos nodded. ‘My brothers! Forge on!’

The five-strong squad gathered on Laocos and followed Lysander as he kicked his way through the burning wreckage and headed for the nearest stairwell leading upwards. The pain was great, with the burns on his face and joints just now flaring up, but a Space Marine could ignore pain for as long as he had to.

‘I suspect I know what you are planning,’ said Laocos. His voice came over an individual vox-channel – the rest of the squad could not hear. ‘As your sergeant, it is my duty to speak.’

‘Then do so,’ replied Lysander. He shouldered open a buckled door and revealed a stairwell. The deck above was smothered in smoke but there were no flames, and the way towards the vault looked clear.

‘I am compelled to ask if you truly understand the consequences of this plan,’ said Laocos.

‘I am more aware of them than anyone,’ replied Lysander.

‘Shon’tu must fall, that is certain. And we have all heard of what his kind did to you on Malodrax. Any one of us would–’

‘I am not fighting for revenge,’ said Lysander sharply. ‘On Malodrax I saw what the Iron Warriors truly are, and that they cannot be permitted to live on. That is the sole relevance of the events on Malodrax to this battle. Shon’tu will not die to satisfy my bloodlust. He will die to ensure mankind never suffers from his depredations again. Does that answer your concerns, sergeant?’

‘My apologies, captain,’ said Laocos. ‘I felt I had to say something.’

‘And it is said,’ replied Lysander. He climbed the stairs and headed towards the central spire of the star fort, where the heavily armoured vault of datamedium lay, and where the machine-spirit of the Endeavour of Will now held court.

Rarely did anyone enter through the airlocked doors of the datamedium vault. The air was recycled from the same atmosphere that had been sealed inside the last time the datamedium stacks had been maintained, more than six hundred years ago. The stacks themselves formed rows of columns reaching up to the ceiling, like the pipes of an infernally complicated pipe organ taking up the entirety of the huge chamber. The stacks of black crystal were banded with gold and brass, and thick bundles of cables hung down between them like the viny foliage of a jungle. Freezing mist clung to the floor, generated by the coolant flowing through the pipes that criss-crossed the floor, and the air was as chill.

In those stacks of black crystal cylinders resided vast amounts of information, more than a planet’s worth of human minds could contain: all the memories, wisdom and personality that made up the machine-spirit of the Endeavour of Will. It was the most sacred place on the whole star fort, and a follower of the Adeptus Mechanicus would fall to his knees in the presence of such knowledge, such closeness to the infinite wisdom of the Omnissiah.

Freezing air hissed and vapour billowed as one of the doors slid open. Rigalto and Menander’s squads entered, spreading out rapidly as they scouted out the best firing zones and defensive positions.

‘It is a fine place to fight,’ said Menander. ‘Cover from every direction. Limited entrances. Very fine.’

‘But a bad place to be trapped,’ replied Rigalto. ‘And any damage here could lose a hundred years of knowledge. I would say it is an ill place for a battle. Better that we should sabotage the command circuits and hold one of the spurs, and attempt to get its weapons back on-line.’

‘But then we would relinquish this vault,’ said Menander, ‘and the enemy would have the machine-spirit at their mercy. They would succeed where they failed before, to do to it what they did to the Bastion Inviolate.’

‘Perhaps you are right, Brother Menander. And Lysander has chosen this place for the battle. He knows more of such things than I.’

‘Than any of us,’ agreed Menander.

Menander joined his Scouts near the only other way into the vault, among a bank of brass-cased cogitators around the door set into the far wall. The three Scouts and their sergeant were armed with sniper rifles from the star fort’s armoury and they concealed themselves among the knurled valve wheels and steam pipes that connected the various cogitator sections, giving themselves lanes of fire right down the length of the vault.

Rigalto formed a firing line across the vault, his men’s bolters levelled like an execution squad. The squad’s tattered banner was planted in the middle of the line, the bullet-riddled fist symbol, on a field of red, surrounded by silver lightning bolts. To the battle honours embroidered beneath the symbol would be added the Endeavour of Will, if anyone from the squad survived.

The sound of gunfire and thumping explosions reached the vault. Loose components fell as the vault shuddered and distant warnings blared. The damage control signals reaching the sergeants told them that the star fort’s central spire was massively compromised, with many decks completely depressurised and the crew fighting countless fires. Crew were still dying out there, both to fire and vacuum, and to the guns of the invaders as they stormed through the ruined star fort.

The doors boomed open again and Lysander’s squad stomped through, trailing smoke as they went. Lysander himself was the most badly scorched of them, his face red and raw, one side of his golden yellow armour black with soot.

‘They are on our tail!’ yelled Lysander. ‘Stand fast, Imperial Fists! They have the numbers, but we have the will!’

A burst of fire ripped through the wall beside Lysander, throwing two of his command squad to the ground. Through the wreckage crunched the two Obliterators, the vanguard of Shon’tu’s force, blazing fire in every direction. Their flesh was seething and sheened with blood, black tendrils of corruption writhing from their skin. The steel of the wall they burst through became blackened and veined, the tech-virus they carried bleeding out from them into everything around them.

Lysander grabbed one of the fallen command squad and dragged him into the cover of a datamedium column. The rest of the command squad followed, Brother-Scholar Demosthor carrying Brother Tingelis over one shoulder as he turned to bring the assault cannon in his other hand to bear. Shrapnel rained off Demosthor as he returned fire, and the Obliterators disappeared in a storm of flame and debris.

‘Rigalto! Watch our flank! My brothers, bring them down!’

Demosthor shrugged Tingelis off his shoulder and braced beside one of the columns, keeping up the storm of fire as his assault cannon’s barrels span. Lysander looked down to see that he had dragged Sergeant Laocos from the fray – Laocos’s armour was smoking and battered but he did not look badly hurt. Laocos rolled to one knee and hammered out fire in the same direction as Demosthor with his storm bolter.

The attack was a diversion. The Obliterators’ task was to draw the attention of the Imperial Fists gun-line. The real attack ripped through the opposite wall, explosive charges blasting out a section of the wall and sending shards of datamedium crystal showering down. An Iron Warriors champion was first through the breach, surrounded by the baying remnants of the possessed who had been mauled so badly at the Tomb of Ionis. He wore a debased echo of a Chaplain’s garb, his face an iron skull, a mace in his hand with a head in the shape of an eight-pointed star.

The possessed charged right into the teeth of Rigalto’s guns. The bolter drill that Rigalto had taught them with such discipline sent chains of fire rattling through the bodies of the possessed. Eyes and mouths, clawed and taloned limbs, burst from the shredded flesh of the possessed. They fell and mutated where they lay, forms liquefying into piles of quivering, warp-tainted gore.

The Chaplain was struck in the chest and thrown against one of the columns. He rolled into the cover, the last of the possessed loping through the carnage towards the gun-line. One of them vaulted over a bundle of pipes behind which two of the Imperial Fists were sheltering – Rigalto stepped forwards and impaled the possessed Iron Warrior with a thrust of his chainsword. The blade carved out through the Iron Warrior’s lower back and Rigalto twisted it, pulling it out and bringing the contents of the Iron Warrior’s abdomen with it. Rigalto plunged the blade over and over again into the possessed, each withdrawal bringing out a fouler knot of squirming flesh, until there was not enough structure left in the Iron Warrior’s body to contain its corruption and its armour clattered to the deck, liquid gore spilling out.

But the Iron Warriors had their foothold. Shon’tu’s hulking form was just visible through the mist of bolter smoke, surrounded by perhaps forty Iron Warriors taking advantage of the possessed’s charge to sprint through the wreckage and into cover of their own. Lysander could see Shon’tu’s battle plan unfolding even as Rigalto’s squad returned fire and the first Iron Warriors fire fell among them. He had his beachhead, his breach had been secured. And he had more guns than the Imperial Fists.

He would win. There was no doubt about that. It was a fine piece of strike warfare, a besieger’s gambit to force the beseiged into fighting a final battle that he could not win.

‘Shon’tu!’ bellowed Lysander, knowing that the Iron Warrior could hear him. ‘Here is the head of Lysander! Here is a trophy for the halls of your Legion! Take it and become a god!’

In spite of what he had become, of all the inhuman filth in which his soul was steeped, warsmith Shon’tu was still a Space Marine, and he still suffered from a weakness that was so definingly theirs. He still had the pride which had seen Chapters, and Legions before them, refuse to quit the field when all was lost; which had created animosity when there should have been brotherhood. It was the pride from which the Horus Heresy itself had taken root.

Shon’tu’s augmetic eyes focused on Lysander. Bolter fire punched through the datamedium around him but Lysander stood proud of the cover, impossible to mistake even through the grime and chaos of the battle. Shon’tu shoved aside the Iron Warrior in front of him and broke into a run, gunfire sparking against his armour.

Lysander’s command squad drew in around him, but they too recognised a warrior’s pride when it was brought into play. Their efforts were focused on keeping their commander safe from the advancing Obliterators. Lysander alone would face Shon’tu.

Shon’tu seemed to cover the breadth of the datamedium vault in a few huge strides. In a cloud of steam and smoke he fell upon Lysander like a comet from the sky. His claw sliced forwards, talons snapping shut towards Lysander’s face. Lysander ducked and took as much of the impact as he could on his shield. He was thrown back, bowling Sergeant Laocos aside, and rolled as he landed to bring him out of the way of the claw, which ripped into the deck beneath him.

Lysander and Shon’tu were face to face for half a second, more than long enough for Lysander to learn that there was nothing human in what remained of the warsmith’s face.

Lysander batted aside Shon’tu’s next attack with his shield, knowing it was a feint. The real attack was from Shon’tu’s triple-barrelled boltgun, which he tried to ram up into Lysander’s midriff so he could unload half its ammo chain into the Imperial Fist’s body. Lysander spun, knocked the gun aside with the haft of the Fist of Dorn, and kicked out hard enough to shatter the bronze struts lending strength to Shon’tu’s right leg.

Shon’tu stumbled back and Lysander had a moment to seize the advantage. It had to be enough. He placed his hand against the nearest datamedium column and let his armour’s interface connect with it, a probe in his gauntlet extending to dip into the ocean of knowledge inside.

‘I am ready,’ said the artificial voice that tapped into his vox-unit. It was the voice of the Endeavour of Will – the machine-spirit, the intelligence that had inhabited this place since its forging in the days when the Emperor still walked the galaxy.

‘You have one more battle to fight,’ said Lysander. He knew that his battle-brothers could only hear his side of the conversation. ‘One blow to strike.’

‘It must be done.’

‘Forgive me, machine-spirit, that I command this of you.’

‘Then redeem yourself, Imperial Fist, by avenging what I have lost.’

Lysander gave the order, a thought that triggered a sequence of commands in the machine-spirit. They in turn triggered more, the effect spreading out like ripples in a pond or the multiplication of an epidemic. Torrents of information were retrieved and released, centuries of battle-lore, millions of hours of battleground data, endless waterfalls of stellar cartography, earthquakes of raw mathematics coursing through every remaining stack of datamedium.

Some of the Iron Warriors might have understood what was happening. Shon’tu certainly did. As the green glow from the datamedium bathed the vault, he stepped back from the duel with Lysander. As power arced against the floor and ceiling, he ducked down, claw brought up to guard instead of attack.

‘I want to look into your eyes,’ said Lysander, ‘and see the moment you know defeat.’

‘You dare?’ yelled Shon’tu. ‘You think this is a victory?’

‘What else is it?’ Around Lysander, green-white bolts of power, like lightning, were earthing against the floor. The columns were glowing so bright now that the whole vault shone with them, and they were bulging, cracking as the volume of information multiplied beyond their capacity to store it.

‘You will learn,’ retorted Shon’tu. ‘When your soul goes dark! When this galaxy burns! You will learn!’

The columns shattered. Shards of crystal flew, spearing into the armour of Imperial Fist and Iron Warrior alike. They were not deadly enough to lay a Space Marine low, but they were not the true danger.

Every digit of information ever assembled or contemplated by the Endeavour of Will erupted into the vault, pure and raw.

Lysander’s armour seized and shorted around him, suddenly heavy as the nerve-fibre bundles and servos were overloaded. Shots of pain punched through him as the many implants he possessed, interfaces drilled into his fused ribcage and cranial jacks that allowed input to his augmented eyes, sparked and died.

But the Iron Warriors suffered much worse. Shon’tu tried to continue with his retort, but his brass-cased form contorted and spurted jets of burning fuel. Components burst from the little flesh he had, panels of his armour falling open and bundles of bionics tumbling out. The other Iron Warriors were falling and spasming, losing control of their half-mechanical bodies.

The torrent of information released by the machine-spirit had flooded into them, and into the machinery with which they had replaced their weak, untrustworthy flesh. As one, every single bionic in the Iron Warriors of Shon’tu’s warband overloaded and destroyed itself.

The retreat had been ragged. Almost half the warband were dead, shot down as they limped or crawled away from the datamedium vault. The Imperial Fists had been mauled, too, and some of the hated enemy had fallen. But it had been an appalling loss. Shon’tu felt what a human might call shame, if such a word could encompass the volcanic hate that it ignited; the emptiness within him, as vast and cold as the void, which could only be filled with thoughts of revenge.

Release me, came the voice again. It struck as Shon’tu was leading the retreat back towards the defence laser spur, dragging his heavy inert mechanical form along with the few motor systems that still functioned inside him. Around him the Iron Warriors were trying to maintain decent order, many unable to fight, their arms useless and their weapons seized up; some barely able to move.

Release me. It must be done.

‘I cannot. You know that…’

In defeat all bonds break. In desperation, in the face of shame and catastrophe, the only rule is revenge. Release me. It is the only way. You know this to be true.

Shon’tu looked back along the route he had taken to the datamedium vault. It was burnt out and wrecked, scattered with the bodies of the star fort’s crew who had fallen to the laser strike or the Iron Warriors’ guns. Now he saw Forge-Chaplain Kourtos being carried by two of his Iron Warriors, his bullet-scarred body spasming as his spinal implants refused to obey the orders coming from his cortex.

Gunfire streaked from the Imperial Fists, who were pursuing in tight order, moving from cover to cover and taking only what shots could not be returned. One of the Iron Warriors fell and Kourtos clattered to the deck. Silhouetted against a bank of flames, one of the Imperial Fists Terminators stood out from cover and levelled his assault cannon. A volley of fire thudded into Kourtos’s body and the Forge-Chaplain, unable to move, was torn apart. Chunks of his flesh spattered across the ceiling and walls, and over the Iron Warriors trying to drag themselves into cover.

‘Then I release you!’ yelled Shon’tu. ‘In the name of vengeance! To see the corpse of this star fort tumbling through the void, as dead as the Imperial Fists for whom it has become a tomb! I release you from your bonds of servitude, from imprisonment in the Ferrous Malice! Lord Velthinar, I release you!’

Seen from space, the Endeavour of Will was clearly wounded, still bleeding wreckage from the crater left by the defence laser’s strike. A halo of debris surrounded it and flashes of explosions sparked as the fires in its central spire continued to burn, and fuel and ammunition stores cooked off. Much of it was completely dark, lights extinguished by the loss of power. It was a stricken animal, lame and vulnerable.

The Ferrous Malice was the predator. Far smaller, but unwounded and swift, it bore down upon the Endeavour of Will. Its hull split open and it seemed for a moment that it would try to grapple the star fort as it had the Siege of Malebruk. But forward thrusters fired and the grand cruiser slowed, pointing its slit belly towards the Endeavour of Will.

Light bled out. Multicoloured fire bathed the ship as the first limbs unfolded from its interior, followed by the chitinous bulk of a creature that had spent an aeon confined.

The daemon Velthinar forced its way out of the ship. Its abdomen was a long, slithering white-fleshed mass that pulsed with veins, its thorax armoured in gilt and jewels. Hundreds of limbs opened up, tipped in golden claws. Finally its wings unfurled, a tremendous mass of iridescent sails uncoiling. With a single beat the dozen wings thrust Velthinar towards the Endeavour of Will.

Lightning crackled around it in every colour. The red giant star dulled as Velthinar drew off its light, surrounding itself in the star’s fire so that every edge and tip of its armoured form glowed painfully bright. White-hot and trailing flame lightning like a comet, Velthinar accelerated, arrowing straight for the Endeavour of Will, shining with enough power to punch through the star fort and rip out its innards.

‘Velthinar rises!’ came the screaming voice of Shon’tu. ‘You think you have defeated us, Imperial Fist? You do not even know what defeat means! But fear not! Velthinar will show you!’

Lysander and his squad heard Shon’tu’s words as they pursued the Iron Warriors through the arterial corridor leading towards the defence spur. The corridor was dense with smoke but even so the aim of his command squad had despatched half a dozen Iron Warriors during their retreat, and they had almost reached the foothold the Iron Warriors had established with their Dreadclaw assault-pods. Lysander peered through the smoke, unable to make out any detail among the darkness. Gunfire could be heard from elsewhere in the spur as Rigalto’s squad moved swiftly to recapture the defence laser itself.

‘Warsmith!’ yelled Lysander in reply. ‘I hear only the words of one fleeing for his life! I hear the squeals of a coward! Stand forward and face me, as you were so eager to a few moments ago! Or do the Iron Warriors do all their fighting with words?’

The squad spread out around Lysander, covering every angle of fire. The shapes of giant capacitors loomed from the smoke, empty now of the energy they had stored for the defence laser. Lysander made out one of the Dreadclaw pods, its serrated jaws protruding through the hull into the space between two capacitors.

Above Lysander, the transparent roof of the corridor cleared for a moment as the smoke coiled out of the way. The light breaking through shone from a vast insectoid daemon streaking through space, aiming for the centre of the star fort. It was an abomination, half titanic maggot and half bejewelled predatory insect, and the power streaming off it burned brighter than the nearest star.

Lysander took a few steps forwards and saw Shon’tu. The warsmith had made it to one of the Dreadclaws and was in the process of hauling its jaws shut.

‘See, Lysander!’ yelled Shon’tu. ‘See the herald of your deaths! Every move you made, I had a counter! For every thrust, I had a feint! Our victory was decided before the first shot was fired, Imperial Fist!’

Lysander charged through the smoke. He slammed into the jaw of the Dreadclaw just as it was closing, reducing his view of Shon’tu to a sliver. The warsmith’s face was lit red by the warning lights inside the assault-pod, just a few centimetres from Lysander’s.

‘My brothers on Malodrax were weak,’ said Shon’tu. ‘They were the dregs of our Legion. You think you have stared into the soul of the Iron Warriors. You have no idea.’ Shon’tu smiled as he saw Lysander trying to force the Dreadclaw’s jaws open, and failing.

‘I know what you left behind on Malodrax,’ said Shon’tu, with a smirk on the remains of his half-mechanical face. ‘And I know what you took from there, too. What you still carry. It is what drives you to kill me, Lysander. It will be the death of every battle-brother who ever stands at your side, and it will not let you go until you have killed everything you fight for!’

‘I didn’t fight you here to defeat you,’ said Lysander as the jaw ground closed. ‘I fought you here to bring out Velthinar.’

The faintest trace of confusion passed over Shon’tu’s face. Then the Dreadclaw was closed and in a hiss of steam the clamps holding it in place disengaged.

‘Breach!’ yelled Lysander. ‘Back! Fall back and seal us off!’

The Dreadclaw’s thrusters roared and the assault-pod was ripped back out of the star fort’s hull. Air whistled out behind it. Lysander pulled his helmet from the waist of his armour and jammed it over his head as warning runes flickered telling him the air pressure had suddenly dropped to little over nothing.

Smoke swirled out, the air suddenly clear. The area was strewn with the bodies of Iron Warriors, and Lysander’s squad shot down a couple who were still moving even as the air dissipated and silence fell.

‘Missed him,’ voxed Brother-Scholar Demosthor. ‘Damnation and filth.’

Lysander did not answer. He looked back up through the ceiling of the arterial corridor, the view no longer obscured. But he was not looking at the burning mass of Velthinar. He was looking at the storm of purplish lightning that was swelling into real space just behind the daemon, the sign of a spacecraft ripping its way from the warp.

‘Throne of Gold,’ said Sergeant Laocos, standing just behind Lysander and following his gaze. ‘What is that?’

‘A friend,’ replied Lysander.

Velthinar knew that something was wrong. It paused in its path towards the Endeavour of Will and turned to see what was causing the disturbance in the warp behind it.

What it saw was reality splitting and the stuff of the warp pouring through. A billowing tide of sorcery crashed into the vacuum, carrying upon it a vast shape, like a ghost hulk carried on a stormy ocean. Its hull was pitted and scored with the punishment of the warp, and every surface was blistered with pustules and veins. Eyes opened everywhere there was space for them, clustering like buboes, rolling madly and bloodshot. The shape trailed ragged tentacles and arteries that spilled blackish blood into the void.

It was deformed and horrible, all symmetry destroyed, but it still carried enough of its original form to be identified as a star fort, much the same shape and size as the Endeavour of Will. A few tattered banners still hung from it, carrying the colours of the Imperial Fists.

‘I cannot be redeemed,’ bellowed an artificial voice, transmitted through the substance of reality. It was heard by everyone for light years around, but it was directed at the daemon Velthinar. ‘I cannot be saved. I cannot know peace.’

Tentacles burst from beneath the corrupted mass of the star fort, snaking around Velthinar’s primary limbs. Velthinar thrashed, but the star fort was bigger and stronger.

‘But I can have revenge,’ the voice continued.

Velthinar fought. The energy it had siphoned from the star Kholestus raked across the corrupted star fort, blasting off battlements and defence spurs, but it was no good. The grip was tight and not even Velthinar Silverspine could break free.

Velthinar was looking into the million eyes of the Bastion Inviolate.

‘My god will shred your soul!’ spat the daemon.

‘I have no soul,’ came the reply. ‘I was a machine. Now I am a disease. You did this to me.’

‘Serve Him!’ countered Velthinar. ‘Untold power will be yours!’

‘I do not want power,’ said the Bastion Inviolate, ‘save the power to break you upon the anvil of my hate.’

A tentacle wrapped around the head and mouthparts of Velthinar, silencing the daemon for the moment. The eyes of the Bastion Inviolate turned towards the Endeavour of Will, the star fort which had until recently been its brother.

‘Lysander,’ it said.

On the Endeavour of Will, Lysander heard the voice, and he knew that it could hear him too. He had watched the corrupted star fort and the daemon struggling, and it had been clear from the outset that the Bastion Inviolate would win. Velthinar Silverspine had not destroyed it, for a being with the tenacity and willpower of the Bastion Inviolate’s machine-spirit would not simply be wiped out by corruption. It would become something else, something awful, and it would thrive.

‘Your astropath called for me,’ the machine-spirit said. ‘He told I could have revenge on the being that did this to me.’

‘And you have it,’ said Lysander. ‘Now depart. This reality has no place for you now.’

‘I know what I am,’ said the Bastion Inviolate. ‘And I know the oaths that you swear. I am an abomination. Your kind must hunt me down.’

‘And we shall,’ said Lysander. ‘When we meet again, it will be as enemies.’

‘That will not be for a long time.’ The Bastion Inviolate held up the squirming daemon like a hunter displaying the body of a kill. ‘For many thousands of years I feel my enthusiasm shall remain. I am a newcomer to the warp. I have much to learn of what pain a daemon can feel. It will be a long time in the learning.’

‘We will find you,’ said Lysander.

‘And when you do, the sundered corpse of this creature will be impaled upon my battlements, and its flayed skin shall be my standard. Farewell, Captain Lysander of the Imperial Fists. What remains of me with the capacity to honour you will soon be lost to the warp, but for now, it salutes you.’

Lysander could hear Velthinar screaming as the warp tore open again and the Bastion Inviolate sank out of real space. The daemon struggled and thrashed but the star fort held it fast in its hundreds of spiny tentacles. The vacuum boomed shut behind it, and when the afterglow died down, Velthinar Silverspine and the Bastion Inviolate were gone.

The Dancer was a messenger, neutered of its deadliness and malice, a barely perceptible shadow within a shadow. The destruction of its kind had left only this shade, the ghost of a daemon. Only its eyes were obvious, flickering red-black orbs that darted in every direction as if watching for enemies.

Lysander knew it was there before he saw it. It had been nine days since the Ferrous Malice, shorn of the daemon that commanded it, had limped away from the Endeavour of Will with Shon’tu and the surviving Iron Warriors on board, and the star fort was still a wreck. More than half its crew were dead and large areas were ruined, amongst them the shattered expanse of map rooms and tactical libraries that Lysander was searching for dead crew or Iron Warriors.

Lysander froze, hand hovering over the shaft of the Fist of Dorn.

‘I have not come to fight,’ hissed the Dancer.

‘The last time I met your kind, I tore you all to shreds. And the time before that. So for your sake, be speaking the truth.’

The Dancer slithered out of the darkness where it had been lurking, beneath the charred remains of a map table surrounded by scrolls and books. ‘I come to give thanks.’

Lysander spat on the floor. ‘Thanks from the warp are a curse. Begone or I will throw you back to your god in pieces.’

‘But what else can the gods of the warp give to Captain Lysander of the Imperial Fists, when he has given to them a victory their servants could not win? The violation of Ionis’s tomb. The death of Astropath Vaynce. The soul of Techmarine Hestion, upon which we still feast. The loss of a billion minds’ worth of battle-lore. And the pact with the Bastion Inviolate, a pact to which no god could force a spirit such as yours and yet one of which you were the author! How could any servant of the warp win such victories from the Imperial Fists? Shon’tu sought only your deaths. He could never have won such triumph as we gained, but you have given it to us of your own will.’

Lysander hefted the Fist of Dorn and took a stride towards the Dancer. The daemon did not move, holding out its arms as if about to embrace the Imperial Fist.

‘The warp thanks you, Lysander! The greatest champion of the gods could not have done more!’

Lysander swatted the daemon aside with the Fist of Dorn. The hammer’s head tore right through the creature and its shadow dissipated into a thousand wisps that vanished like smoke into the air. There was no impact, no satisfying crunch of bone. The daemon was simply gone, for it had been sketched so lightly on reality its destruction had no meaning.

Lysander stood there for a long time. The words of a daemon would not sway him. They might worm into a lesser man’s head, to discourage and corrupt, but not the mind of an Imperial Fist.

Nothing had changed. If anything, the events aboard the Endeavour of Will had proven to him what he already knew.

Everything could be sacrificed. It took a man of Lysander’s will to know that. Everything was secondary to victory.

Everything.

FATEWEAVER

JOHN FRENCH

‘We know no fear. It was cut from our souls at birth. We can feel it only as an absence, as an empty shadow cast by the light of annihilation. In the face of a future of atrocity I stand mute, numb to the only feeling that would make me human. But I remember what fear was: its cold pulse in my veins; its echo in my ears. I remember fear, and remember that I was once human. I look towards what must come to pass and I wish that I could meet it as my ancestors did, with fear. The future deserves that, it deserves fear.’

– Epistolary Cyrus Aurelius, unheard confession

I

SUMMONED

The vision unfolded into the present in a cascade of sensations.

The sword is hot in his hand, the fury at its core bright with his rage. He cuts, feeling his armour move with the surge of his muscles. The edge meets deformed flesh, the sword shuddering in his grip as power flows through it. A bloated creature with a face like a flayed skull dissolves into smoke. Threat runes spin across his vision, pulsing red, swarming. A taste like burned sugar and ruined meat fills his mouth.

He is a figure in blue armour the shade of a clear sky, standing at the centre of a turning circle of countless twisted creatures. They close on him, pacing forwards, claws clicking on the stone floor. He can feel the creatures’ raw power, feel them thirsting for his soul. A death light fills their eyes. He stands alone and knows that he has failed.

A shape with a wide mouth of glittering needle teeth comes at him, its limbs flowing into new shapes as it moves. The storm bolter roars in his fist, muscle fibres swallowing its kick. Detonations turn warp bloated flesh to red pulp. A threat rune blinks out. He turns, finger still squeezing the trigger, watching the ammunition count fall as the weapon trails a line of fire.

I have failed, he thinks, and there will be nothing after this moment.

The gun clatters silent. He raises his sword. A clawed hand bites through a leg joint. He feels the warm fluid pooling inside his armour. He steps forward, ramming the sword into the open mouth of a bird-shaped creature until its blade disappears in flesh. The power flows through him like a storm rush. The half-feathered body explodes in a blaze of light. He realises he is screaming. Lightning gathers around his body in a crackling spiral. The creatures fall back for a brief moment, turning their lidless eyes from the light. He raises the sword. His limbs are shuddering. Inside his helmet he is weeping blood.

They come for him again, a tide of teeth and claws. He is striking, each blow a thunderclap. Many of the creatures fall, their distorted forms sliding back into shadow and smoke. But they are many and he is alone.

This has not come to pass yet, he thinks, this is not happening. I am not dying. This is my fate, what shall be. This is the future, it has not happened yet. But the thought dies.

The creatures around him howl and he feels the psychic crystals haloing his head shatter. He is blind.

The world goes quiet and warm.

I am dying, he thinks, I have failed and there will be nothing left, nothing but ash and hungering darkness.

Something within him dims, fluttering to nothing like a flame fading to cold embers.

He tries to raise his sword.

He is falling…

He was…

… running the ashes of a dead world through his fingers. The vision faded, bleeding away into the grey present. He blinked, pushing away the sensations that remained coiled in his mind like a fever’s touch. He had seen echoes of possible futures before, but this had felt different; stronger, more instant, like a memory of something that had already happened.

‘Epistolary?’ said a voice, its sound flat inside his helmet. Cyrus looked up from the grey dust falling from his armoured fingers.

He flicked his eyes across the green runes at the edge of his sight; the four green cruciform marks of Phobos’s squad winked back at him. He turned to look back at his escort spread behind him in a loose diamond. The white of their armour was bright beneath the shroud grey sky.

Like him they were clad in monstrous Terminator armour. Their genetically enhanced physiques wrapped in layer upon layer of adamantium, their movements augmented by sheathes of fibre bundles that ran through the armour like a second set of muscles. The suits were relics of a lost time, their components replaced and repaired so many times that they were like walking scar tissue. To wear such armour was to feel the past as a cold shroud against one’s skin. Hundreds of his Chapter ancestors had worn Cyrus’s suit before it had passed to him. Most of those ancestors had died wearing it, he recalled.

‘Is everything well, brother?’ said the red-helmed sergeant.

‘Yes, brother. An errant thought, nothing more.’

‘As you say, Epistolary.’ Phobos’s tone was clipped and respectful, but Cyrus could feel the sergeant’s questions unspoken behind the blunt snout of his helm: why had they come down to the surface of this planet?

A flat, grey plain extended away from them, its surface undisturbed by wind, rain or the tread of feet. Runes flowed across Cyrus’s vision, his sensorium searching for movement, heat, life, and finding nothing. Two hundred and thirty million people had died here. He blink-clicked away the questing runes; this world was dead, and it had died at its protector’s hand.

It was called Kataris, an agri-world of processing cities and endless plains of crops, ripening under a bright sun. It had died in less time than it took that sun to circle the sky. Something had drawn the eyes of the daemons to it, and they had come from beyond reality. Millions had died in the first assault. Their deaths had prepared the world for the arrival of more of their kind. More and more had slipped across the shadow divide between reality and the warp. The few, the very few people who had not died then became a defiant clutch of humanity clinging to the planet’s last fortifications. There they had muttered prayers, tears rolling down their ash-dusted cheeks, and waited for the end.

An astropath had sent a desperate call out through the warp. It had called for help, for the protection promised by the priests of the Imperial Creed. ‘The Emperor protects’ had been the last words of the message. And a single word of execution had answered that message: Exterminatus. The death sentence of a world and all who lived on it. Kataris had pleaded for aid and been answered by death falling from the tortured sky. For a moment the wide plains of ruin had been still, the sound of thunder settling with the dust. Then the inferno came, rushing across the world from horizon to horizon, consuming the tainted air in a roar like the war-cries shouted at the end of time.

Cyrus could almost taste the pyre.

‘This was no victory,’ he murmured to himself.

Decades before, Cyrus and his brothers had fought on Kataris against a raiding force of eldar. They had defeated the aliens and broken their hidden witch-gate. It had been a vicious war, but they had won and the world had lived. This time their answer to the dead world’s plea was too late. They had arrived many days after the ships of the Inquisition execution force had departed.

If we had been here, could we have saved this world? The question had no answer, but that did not stop Cyrus asking it to himself. Unlike the rest of his brothers he could feel what had happened here as echoes lingering in the immaterium. He was a psyker, gifted with an ability to channel and manipulate the power of the realm beyond reality. The warp was a nightmare other realm of psychic energy, but the mind of a psyker could tap and shape that energy. To some it was sorcery. To others it was a step in the evolution of humanity. To Cyrus it was a weapon. It was a gift that allowed Cyrus to do things beyond even his brother White Consuls. But the gift also set him apart from the rest of his Chapter; it could not be otherwise. How could it be, when he felt the death of this world resonate over him like dust blowing over bare skin?

That is why I ordered us to come to the surface, he thought. Because someone needed to witness what had happened, someone needed to touch it and remember the price of survival.

‘Epistolary,’ said a voice washed in static. It came from the bridge of the Aethon, the battle-barge that hung above them in high orbit.

‘Speak,’ said Cyrus.

‘We have received a signal. It seems to be another plea for help.’ The voice paused. ‘It includes the word “Fateweaver”.’

Cyrus closed his eyes for a moment. It could only mean one thing.

The world he stood on was only the latest to be subject to a daemonic incursion. World after world had fallen in this crescent of stars that edged the Eye of Terror. Thousands of millions had died as the Inquisition attempted to contain the incursion. And in the wake of this destruction a name followed like whisper made with a dying breath: Fateweaver.

‘Where?’ asked Cyrus.

‘The message is garbled but we have an origin location. An astropathic relay fortress in the Claros system.’ The vision of the future resurfaced in Cyrus’s mind. ‘What are your orders?’

The astropath’s voice sounded like the rasp of a dying man. ‘…report… Claros… the enemy beyond…’ The robed figure turned in a cone of cold green light, mouth flapping in a thin face as it spoke words which were not its own. ‘…lies… Fateweaver, we… blinded… failing…’ The man’s lips twisted, breath wheezing as he tried to say incomplete thoughts. ‘…soul… that hear this… send… help… accursed eternity.’

Cyrus sat alone and watched the holo-recording. He wore no armour; his suit of blue Terminator plate was being cleansed and re-blessed after his journey to the surface of Kataris. A cowled robe of white covered his hunched form, its edges woven in blue and with the names of Chapter ancestors. Within the cowl’s shadow his gaunt face looked as if it were carved from white marble. Around him the battle council chamber was dark, the pale light of the holo-recording showing the outlines of a wide stone table and chairs. Beyond the circle of light the darkness hummed with the roar of the Aethon’s engines as it cut through the warp.

As soon as he had stepped back onto the Aethon, Cyrus had asked for a recording of the signal. As an Epistolary of the Adeptus Astartes, he was capable of receiving the psychic messages that passed from the mind of one astropath to another. Passing through the warp, these messages crossed the vast distances of space faster than the light of stars. This message, though, had arrived while he was down on the surface of Kataris. Amongst the death echoes surrounding that world his mind had been deaf to such subtle telepathy. The Aethon’s own astropath had received it and now Cyrus looked at a recording of that moment.

Something about the signal disturbed him. It was garbled, chewed by its transmission from one mind to another, but he felt as if he could almost hear the words that hung unsaid in the gaps.

‘It won’t change you know.’ The voice came out of the gloom towards the chamber’s door.

Cyrus looked up. His eyes turned the darkness into monochrome shades of light and shadow. The figure standing at the other end of the deserted council chamber wore a tunic of white fabric. His blunt head was shaved smooth and snaked with scars, and there were two chrome studs above his left eye. Bare forearms, thick with muscle and looped by heavy copper vambraces, hung loose at his side.

‘Phobos,’ Cyrus said, smiling as the figure walked forwards. ‘Come to shake me from my melancholy?’ Phobos said nothing but stopped on the other side of the circular stone table. Between them the holographic astropath still turned and spoke in its cone of light.

Phobos stared at the projection. ‘You still judge it best to follow this?’

Cyrus frowned: there was something wrong with his old friend. There was no trace of the usual stone dry humour in his words, just a tone that Cyrus could not place.

‘Yes, brother,’ said Cyrus, standing up from the iron backed chair. ‘You did not raise an objection when I ordered the Aethon to the Claros system. Is there something you wish to say now?’ Phobos was silent, but Cyrus could see emotions playing across the sergeant’s blunt features.

Cyrus was commander of the force aboard the Aethon; he had no need to listen to the sergeant’s misgivings, but he would. As a psyker he had always stood apart from others. It was as true now as it had been when he was a shunned boy on a long forgotten world. But Phobos had never shown the remoteness that was common in his brothers. A sergeant of the First Company, a Proconsul, bearer of the Crux Terminatus, he was a warrior to the bone, and the closest thing to a friend Cyrus had ever known.

‘We have been wardens out here for three decades,’ said Phobos slowly. ‘Three decades of war.’

‘That was our oath and our duty,’ said Cyrus.

‘Yes, and a duty we paid in blood,’ said Phobos. Cyrus nodded. It had been paid in blood indeed. The Aethon was a battle-barge, a vessel for making war amongst the stars. It could carry three hundred Adeptus Astartes, their vehicles and tools of war. When it had left Sabatine it had been close to its full strength, but three decades of war in the margins of the Eye of Terror had demanded its price. Captains and veterans of hundreds of years of war lay dead on lost worlds, or drifting through the cold void. Silence filled the ship, its crew reduced to servitors, and its systems to the bare essentials necessary to serve the remaining White Consuls.

Yes, and we paid that price many times over, my friend, thought Cyrus. ‘Is there any other way for the Adeptus Astartes to fulfil their duty?’ he said instead, with a sternness he did not feel.

‘We are White Consuls.’ Phobos leaned on the table looking at the raptor head emblems carved into the stone surface. ‘We are inches away from extinction. The Chapter calls and…’ His words fell away.

‘And what?’ Cyrus watched his friend swallow.

‘The Chapter calls, but we linger.’

‘You think that is what we do? Linger?’

‘I think that our Chapter needs us,’ said Phobos.

Cyrus felt ice run through him at the words. It was true. The Chapter had gathered in great numbers to face a terrible foe, and it had been wounded to the point that its future hung by a thread. The call had come, drawing all the sons of Sabatine back to their home.

‘And what of the purpose of our Chapter, Sergeant Phobos?’ said Cyrus, and Phobos looked up at the coldness in his voice. ‘We are White Consuls, Primogenitors of Guilliman. We shepherd and guard mankind. That is what we were created for. That is our duty to our Chapter.’

‘And if the Chapter is no more?’ growled Phobos. ‘If it is destroyed and we are not there?’

‘If we forget our purpose, my friend, then there will be nothing but ash blowing across dead worlds.’ He thought he saw a flash of sympathy in Phobos’s dark eyes, and knew that he had seen the echo of lost Kataris in his words.

‘It had fallen,’ said Phobos, his voice softening. ‘There was nothing that could have been done to save it. Were we there, or ten times our number, there would have been no option but Exterminatus.’

Cyrus thought of the dead world’s last scream for help before it burned.

‘We could not have saved it, and we will not be able to save Claros if the daemons come to it,’ Phobos added.

‘There is always something that should be tried before you step into annihilation,’ Cyrus growled. ‘Pay for the survival of humanity with atrocity and there will be nothing left.’ He shut down the holo-display, and walked away leaving Phobos alone in the dark.

The Aethon cut towards the bronze-hulled space station, its auspex nodes filling the void around it with overlapping folds of sensor fields. It was over eight kilometres long, a blunt barb of off-white armour and macro weaponry folded in crackling void shields. The roar of its plasma engines at full burn made the bridge vibrate under Cyrus’s feet.

‘No signs of enemy activity, or battle residue, my lord,’ said the logistician bound into the main sensor dais. The man turned his green bionic eyes to Cyrus. ‘The station seems to be intact and unharmed. They are acknowledging our hails and have accepted our request to dock.’

‘Very well,’ said Cyrus. He had expected to find the station wreathed in the fires of battle and shouting for help with its last breath. But looking at it on a viewscreen it was clear that it was far from falling.

Claros station looked a great wheel turning in starlight. Its armour gleamed as if forged from polished bronze. Five wings extended spoke-like from the station’s central hub, each resembling the transept of a cathedral and over two kilometres long. Buttresses and towers tangled the station’s surface, light glinting from the faces of vast statues that gazed out on the void with blank eyes. At its centre a tower extended above the central hub, its domed tip a mass of antennae masts. A thick collar of stone ringed the base of the tower, its surface blistered with shield generators and gargoyles the size of hab blocks. To Cyrus’s eyes it looked formidable.

Beside him Phobos shifted. Freshly attached purity seals hung from his shoulder guards, and he held his crimson helmet in the crook of his arm. Cyrus had not spoken to him since their words in the command chamber.

‘I will prepare an honour guard, if you intend to go aboard,’ said Phobos.

Cyrus could feel the question held in check behind Phobos’s words: if we came here to save this place and it does not need saving, why waste more time?

The memory of the vision he had seen on Kataris slid into Cyrus’s mind: the stink of warp, the wet warmth of his blood. The memory was as fresh and raw as an unhealed wound. He was a haruspex, trained in his Chapter’s tradition as a diviner of meaning in visions and omens. To an oracle there was no such thing as blind chance. The arrival of the signal and his vision were linked. Fate was pulling him to this place, he was sure.

‘Yes,’ Cyrus said. ‘Prepare the battle force to stand in armour. There is more here than meets the eye.’

The docking bay rumbled. Beyond the bay’s blast doors, the hull of the Aethon met the armoured dock of Claros with a sound like the tolling of an iron bell.

Before the doors the White Consuls stood in ranks, their armour bright under the light that filled the docking bay. Cyrus stood at their head, his force sword resting point down, its psy-active core quiet without his will to give it life. Parchments hung from his shoulders and greaves, and white cloth fell to the deck from his torso. In deference to the occasion his helmet hung from his waist so that his pale face looked out uncovered from its collar of crystal nodes.

Phobos and his Terminators stood a step behind Cyrus, and behind them were the Devastators of Valerian alongside the Vanguard and Tactical squads under Galba and Vetranio. All stood below the strength demanded by the Codex. But they were still a battle force of the Adeptus Astartes, an assemblage great enough to break armies.

The blast doors split open with a hiss of pressure. A void-cold wind spilled into the docking bay, stirring the parchments on Cyrus’s armour. Two figures waited in the growing breach at the head of a sea of kneeling figures. One was a man with a hawk-thin face and a wash of gloss black hair pulled back into a braided tail. The burnished gold of his chest armour – worked with laurels and eagle wings – caught the light as he bowed. Beside the man was a tall woman with a wrinkled, withered face, the bald skin of her scalp tattooed with swirls of faded text. A high-collared blue coat covered her thin form, and she held a staff in her right hand. An eagle topped its black shaft, a blue crystal eye clutched in its claws. She looked at Cyrus with an expression of rank dislike, a sneer edging her mouth.

‘Hail in the name of the Emperor.’ The man’s voice trembled in the cold air. Behind the man the kneeling ranks echoed the words.

Cyrus bowed his head briefly; he disliked such moments. To most people of the Imperium the Space Marines were a breed apart: terrifying beings of protection and destruction made at the dawn of history by an Emperor they called a god. Such crawling deference was to be expected, but to Cyrus it ignored the reason for his existence: to protect these people and the realm of which they were a part.

‘Rise,’ he said, stepping forwards and offering the pair a smile. ‘I am Cyrus Aurelius, Epistolary of the White Consuls, and we come in might as we were called.’ The man looked up and Cyrus saw curiosity mingled with anxiety.

‘Rihat, colonel commander of the Helicon Guard.’ There was a tremor of fear in the man’s voice. Rihat gestured to the woman at his side. ‘And this is Hekate, Savant Imma–’

‘This can speak for herself.’ The woman’s voice cut through Rihat’s words like a knife.

She looked straight at Cyrus; there was no fear or awe in her eyes. He could feel the strength of the woman’s mind, the tamed and tethered psychic power held within her.

‘You see the confusion in his eyes, Space Marine?’ she said. ‘The fear he feels at the presence of the Emperor’s angels of death?’

‘My lord, we are honoured by your presence…’ blustered Rihat, his face paling.

Cyrus kept his gaze locked with Hekate’s. He felt the contest in that look, the challenge.

‘Why are you here, Space Marine?’ she asked, tilting her head, and Cyrus knew that she had seen his kind before, had perhaps seen and survived more than most humans could imagine. She was a primaris psyker, a battle psyker and occult savant who might be his equal or superior in power. He wondered at the dislike and anger that radiated from her like an icy cloud.

‘We were summoned, lady,’ said Cyrus calmly. ‘We intercepted a call for aid that indicated that this station was under threat. We came to answer that call.’

Rihat flicked a puzzled look at Hekate who broke Cyrus’s gaze to return it. Rihat shook his head, frowning. ‘My lord, no signal was sent.’

Cyrus flicked the bone cards over one at a time. His eyes took in images while his mind danced with inferences and possibilities. He did not like any of them.

The chamber around him was echoing and bright. Pillars of white marble rose from a floor of pale green stone. Light shone from clusters of glow-globes which hung by chains from the arched roof. Sentences of High Gothic covered every inch of the chamber. Rihat had said that they were the words of lost messages heard by astropaths over the thousands of years the station had existed. The lost words filled many rooms. Some, he had been told, believed that they formed a kind of oracle, that fate could be divined in their broken fragments of meaning. That belief had seemed fitting to Cyrus.

On the brass-topped table, beside the pile of bone cards, the holo-recording of the astropathic message turned and spoke. Cyrus had been listening to it again and again since his arrival. He believed that the signal had come from the station he stood in, but it was also clear that the station had not called for help. He would not leave, though, not yet; there were too many unanswered questions.

Phobos had nodded at the order to remain, but Cyrus had felt the sergeant’s dissent in his dutiful response: why waste more time? Because of a vision and a feeling that I cannot share with you, was the answer that had gone unsaid. The sergeant had withdrawn with Rihat to review the station’s tactical readiness, while Cyrus had asked for a place of solitude. They had brought him to the pillared chamber and there he had stayed, shuffling through his brooding thoughts for several hours.

A blind man reaching into oblivion, that is what I am, he thought.

The bone cards were slivers of polished ivory the length of a human hand. An intricate picture painted with subtle skill in fading colours looked up from one side of each card. Some showed figures from myth, others patterns of lines and numbers. Words in High Gothic wove through each design. In the hands of a psyker sensitive to how the future echoed through the tides of the warp they could reveal hidden truths about what was and what might be. It was an old form of divination, one that had persisted with variations for millennia. The designs of the cards came from a time before the great darkness of the Age of Strife, an age of lost history and forgotten lore. The bone cards that flicked through Cyrus’s armoured fingers had been crafted on Sabatine, the home world of the White Consuls. Cyrus had used this set for over two centuries, and they felt as much a part of him as the armour that wrapped his body.

He turned another card. The Blind Oracle sat over the Nine Blades: confused ends, paradox and lies.

‘…Fateweaver…’ the voice recording crackled next to him. He lifted his hand to turn the last bone card.

The vision pierced his thoughts like a knife.

The sword in his hand, blood sizzling as it drips down his arm to meet the weapon’s caged fire. The sword twisting in his grip, pinning feathered flesh to the floor. A carrion scream, echoing through him, blotting out the shouts of his brothers around him. Light flowing like water from a face like a flayed bird, flowing into the floor, twisting through metal, changing it, becoming it. Its mouth is opening to say…

‘You are adept at divination, I see,’ said a voice close by. Reality snapped back into place around Cyrus, leaving him with a dull ache behind his eyes. He looked up from the unturned card to the speaker. It was a man, thin and bent by time, the green silk of his robes falling from hunched shoulders. A stole of black and gold thread circled his thin neck and a skull cap of blue velvet topped a wizened and bearded face. He had no eyes but the empty sockets seemed to be watching Cyrus. In his mind Cyrus could feel the ghost touch of the man’s psychic senses play across his skin. The man smiled, showing Cyrus a mouth of crooked teeth.

‘Never been much interested in it myself,’ the man said. He raised a hand and shrugged. ‘I know. Astropaths are supposed to be concerned with such things: the deeper resonances of the universe, insights into eternal mysteries. But, I must admit I find it tedious, and liable to lose me too much sleep.’ Cyrus found that he was smiling. The man shuffled closer, the tip of a silver cane tapping as it took his weight with each step. ‘I am sorry to disturb you, but I thought I should apologise for not greeting you when you arrived.’ The old man dipped his head, making him briefly even more hunched. ‘My name is Colophon; I am the senior astropath of this station.’

‘Epistolary Cyrus Aurelius of the White Consuls,’ said Cyrus, returning the bow without thinking.

Colophon grinned broadly. ‘Hmm, a Librarian of the Adeptus Astartes. No wonder Hekate is so put out. Can’t stand a rival that one.’

Cyrus remembered the primaris psyker’s challenging gaze when they had met at the docking gate. ‘I am sure that she is a worthy servant of the Imperium,’ he replied carefully.

‘You must have Emperor-given patience. I can’t stand her myself.’

Colophon stepped closer, leaning in to where the recording of the signal still turned on the brass table top. The naturalness of Colophon’s movements struck Cyrus. Astropaths often possessed psychic senses that allowed them to see the world through a veil of telepathic resonance. But if it were not for his empty eye sockets, Cyrus would have said that the old man could see perfectly.

Colophon cocked his head to one side, listening. The recording rasped through the last syllables of its cycle and began again.

‘So this is the signal that brought you here, the one that has everyone so puzzled?’

Cyrus nodded. ‘Yes, it is what brought us here. It is distorted but it appeared to be a call for help.’ Colophon did not reply but waited while the message finished.

‘Yes, yes. I see what you mean,’ he said finally. ‘But as Rihat and Hekate told you, no signal has been sent from here. Certainly not one of this nature.’ He gave a chuckle. ‘I should know.’ He turned away from the projection, sucking his teeth. ‘Librarians are versed in the basics of astropathic transmission; had you not considered the possibility of temporal distortion?’

The possibility had occurred to Cyrus. Astropathic messages passed through the warp, and were subject to that realm’s inconsistent flow of time. A message might arrive millennia after it was sent, or be broken into incomprehensible pieces, or even arrive before it was sent. The message might be a plea from a future waiting just beyond the horizon of the present. It was that possibility of an unknown future that had made Cyrus linger.

‘It had occurred to me,’ Cyrus said. ‘Do you think it likely?’

Colophon shrugged. ‘The possibility alarms you?’

Cyrus thought of the ash of the dead world running through his fingers. ‘Yes, particularly given recent events.’

Colophon’s eyebrows rose. ‘Recent events?’

Cyrus frowned. The incursions were only fragments of a sudden flaring of conflict around the Eye of Terror. Never a place of peace, in recent times it had become a place of all out war, a war that the Imperium might lose. Forces from several Chapters were involved, and the front was spreading.

‘The incursion from the Eye,’ he said, ‘the manifestation of the Accursed Eternity. This is a strategic station; word of these things must have passed through here?’

Colophon shook his head. ‘This is a relay station: a hundred of my kind sifting the void for messages, absorbing them and echoing them on far beyond the reach of the original sender. We do not hear the messages that pass through us, any more than a pipe drinks the water that passes through it.’ ‘I thought that as senior astropath you might have received word of the war…’

A frown spread wrinkles across Colophon’s face. ‘No, I am simply concerned with the flow of messages, not their content. If anyone knows it will be Hekate. She must have thought it unnecessary to tell me. She is our chief watchdog, our “Savant Immaterium”. An honourable position, though she loathes the fact that a primaris must sit here and look after us less gifted souls.’ He gave a snort. ‘You would never have guessed would you?’

There was a pause and Cyrus was about to speak again when the old man seemed to shake himself of worry. He gave a smile that only looked a little forced and tapped his cane on the floor. ‘Come, let us walk, Cyrus Aurelius of the White Consuls. It will do my bones good and might ease whatever is worrying you.’ He began to walk off, cane tip clicking. Cyrus followed, wondering about echoes and messages from an unknown future.

Colonel Rihat had never seen an angel of death before. He had been a soldier for most of his life – had seen people die: a few pirates during the scouring of the margin worlds, a few deserters – but he had never been in a fight larger than a skirmish.

In his old regiment he had been a platoon officer, though after a few decades he had known that he would never rise any higher. One day the regiment had been shipped to the Cadian Gate. He had been in transit from a garrison duty on a backwater mining world and missed the redeployment. There was nowhere for him to go, so they had sent him to join the Helicon Guard.

The Helicon Guard was a regiment of veterans pulled together from units that had suffered such high casualties that they were no longer viable as a combat force. Recruits took its ochre and red fatigues and bronze battle armour when they joined, casting off their former allegiances. Most were from regiments raised in systems around the Eye: hard people from hives or population sinks on worlds where you could look up and see the Eye glaring back out of the night sky.

Rihat knew that he had no right to the respect of the men and women under him. Command had fallen to him by a technicality: he had been the most senior officer when he joined and had thus been promoted to the role. He was not a hero, he knew that. He did his best, and tried to lean on what experience he did have. But that experience did not include a detailed knowledge of the Adeptus Astartes.

His first reaction was fear. When the blast doors of the station dock opened, he had felt a cold knot tighten in his guts. It was not just the warriors’ size – that they were taller than any of the troopers ranked behind him – it was something about how they moved and looked at you. He remembered as a child seeing one of the ice lions of his home world. The beast had padded out onto the tundra road in front of their vehicle, its movements slow, muscle shifting under its patterned pelt. It had stopped and looked at them. Rihat had looked back into the animal’s yellow eyes. For a second he had known that he was looking into the soul of something utterly indifferent to him, something whose nature was to kill or not as it chose. Looking into the eyes of the one called Cyrus he had felt an echo of that memory.

His second reaction was curiosity. The one called Phobos had asked to appraise the station, and so Rihat found himself walking beside the angel of death down the station’s passages and colonnades. As they walked he could not help but glance at the Space Marine’s blunt face. There was a compact ferocity to it, a predator cast to the set of the eyes and brow. He wondered what kind of soul moved behind that face.

‘Something worrying you, colonel?’ said Phobos, his voice a stony growl.

‘No, my lord,’ said Rihat, trying carefully to hide his unease.

The Space Marine grunted. ‘Phobos, colonel. I am no lord, and you are a commander of men, an officer.’ He turned an emotionless gaze on Rihat. ‘My given name will suffice.’

Rihat gave a small nod that Phobos did not seem to notice.

They turned into a wide passage which ran around the inside of the kilometre-wide central hub of the station. Walls of verdigris bronze arched up to a central spine hung with glow-globes clasped in eagle claw fittings. This was the largest and greatest of the central passages. Any part of the station could be reached from its circle.

‘You have not seen a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes before.’

It was a flat statement, Rihat realised. It was difficult to judge what Phobos intended. There was no emotion in his words, at least none that Rihat could sense. He watched as a woman in the robe of a Cipher looked at Phobos, the mnemonics she was muttering fading to nothing as she stared.

‘No, I don’t think many here have.’

‘The primaris psyker, the one called Hekate; she has,’ said Phobos in the same flat growl.

Rihat frowned. Hekate seemed to know a lot more than anyone else around her and was never shy of saying so. How she had talked to the Space Marines in the docking bay had shocked Rihat. It was almost as if she held them in contempt. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, shaking his head at how anyone could face one of these creatures and speak to them as if they were ignorant children. But Hekate had done just that.

‘Are we so strange to your eyes?’

The question made Rihat blink with surprise for a moment. He almost wanted to smile. ‘Yes. To be honest, yes, you are.’

Phobos gave a thoughtful grunt, head nodding slightly in its armoured setting. ‘The angels of death walking amongst mortals.’

‘Yes, something like that,’ said Rihat, frowning. For a moment he had heard a hint of something he could not quite place in the Space Marine’s voice.

Phobos stopped and turned to Rihat. Behind them the honour guard clattered to a halt. The Space Marine looked steadily at Rihat, his storm-grey eyes unblinking amongst ridges of glossy scar tissue. His armour was white, but Rihat could see gouges and score marks under the paint. The crux on Phobos’s left shoulder was a death’s head of dull stone. There were patches where damage had been ground smooth. A sword hung in a bronze-worked scabbard at his waist, its grip bound with hide, its pommel a silver skull. Rihat doubted he could easily lift it.

Phobos’s armour clicked and whined as he shifted his posture, leaning closer. A smell of machine oil filled Rihat’s nose. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Tell me, do I look like an angel?’

‘No… No, you don’t. You look like the most terrifying thing I have ever seen.’

A ghost of a smile twitched across Phobos’s face. ‘Very good, colonel,’ he said, and turned to walk on, seeming to growl as he moved.

After a few steps, Rihat realised that the Space Marine was chuckling.

‘How long have you been an oracle?’

The question had come after they had walked the corridors and chambers of Claros station for several hours, Cyrus striding alongside the shuffling old man. They had talked and Cyrus found himself warming to Colophon’s wry remarks and sharp questions.

‘For as long as I can remember,’ Cyrus said. The brief years of his youth opened in his mind. The fear of his parents at their child’s strangeness, the shuddering terror of his dreams: all long ago on a world that existed now only in his memory. ‘It was the first sign of my talent. I would see snatches of things that would later happen.’

Colophon nodded. ‘The first awakenings of psychic talent are always the worst,’ said the old man softly.

‘Yes,’ said Cyrus. The Librarian found himself wondering at what might have happened to him if he had not proved strong enough in mind and body to be sent from the Black Ships to the White Consuls. Would he have been shuffling along these corridors, blind to everything beyond his mind’s eyes?

They turned to walk down a central chamber of one of the five wings of the station. It was wide and tall enough that a Titan could have strode between its stone pillars. People crowded its black stone floor. Administratum Ciphers hurried past, muttering mnemonic rhyme as they carried information from one part of the station to another. Hooded adepts talked in small groups, their mouths hidden by wide grey hoods. Menials in drab grey carried stacks of brass data sceptres, the tattooed marks of their service bright on their shaved heads. Wide eyes followed Cyrus from the crowd, fear and awe mingling on their faces. Some had knelt until he passed. It made him uncomfortable. He was a warrior used to the company of his brothers, not the grovelling fear of those he tried to protect.

‘It must be a burden,’ said Colophon, breaking Cyrus’s thoughts. ‘To see the future, to know what must happen.’

Cyrus shrugged, the gesture magnified through his armour into a massive shifting of armour plates. ‘It is a tool, that is all. A weapon that I wield for my Chapter and the Imperium.’

Colophon turned his blind eyes towards Cyrus, and the Librarian felt the old man’s psychic senses focus on him. ‘Is it a vision of what will happen that makes you wait and worry so, my friend? Do you know that something will happen here?’

Cyrus thought of the omens in the bone slivers, of the snatches of sensation and vision: snarling faces, bird-like cries, his life pulsing away. ‘Sometimes an omen is wrong, or open to interpretation,’ he said carefully. ‘Even if it appears clear, by knowing it and acting the oracle may change that future.’

‘A very clear answer to a different question,’ chuckled Colophon, turning to point them towards an arched door which led out of the pillared chamber. Beyond the door a spiral of wide iron steps led downwards. At the bottom was a tangle of narrow corridors, and cramped chambers. Most were closed by brass bound doors. Through the unsealed doors Cyrus could see figures polishing data sceptres by candlelight. In other chambers bent-backed curators shifted piles of parchment scrolls between dusty shelves. They looked up and watched as Cyrus and Colophon passed.

This place exists for the hundred astropaths that sit at its centre, he thought, but here is the blood and muscle of the station, never resting, always moving on the edge of others’ shadows.

‘Tell me,’ said Colophon, and Cyrus heard the shift in his voice, the edge of worry. Cyrus stopped and Colophon turned to face him, flickering candlelight from a side chamber turning the old man’s face into a twitching mask of shadow. ‘What is it that you see coming?’

‘Blood, Colophon. I see blood and ruin.’

The astropathic chamber was a place of whispers. A circular bowl over five hundred paces wide, its sides rose in tiers of grey stone seats to a domed ceiling of black glass. Green-robed astropaths sat on every tier. There were hundreds of them, their minds open to the immaterium like nets cast into the currents of a deep ocean. Gathered in these numbers they could send messages over vast distances. They were a choir of minds acting in concert, but each reacted to their task differently. Some mumbled strings of words, or twitched as if stirring in a fitful dream. Others sat as still as statues, chests hardly moving as they breathed. The air was heavy, filled with the smell of sweat, incense and the static tang of psychic power. Ether-sensors hung from the ceiling above, feeling the flow of power within the chamber, alert for anything abnormal. Even psykers soul-bound to the Emperor were a risk when gathered together in large numbers. Out in the shadow tides of the warp such a gathering shone bright to the predators that swarmed there. The sensors were there to warn of any dangerous levels of psychic activity.

The hush broke without warning as an astropath on the third tier moaned and shivered in her trance. Supervisory adepts looked up from their screens and moved towards her. When the adepts were a pace away she arched her back and screamed. There was a sound of bones cracking as she convulsed. Above them the ether-sensors shattered. A mist coiled from the woman’s mouth spreading into the air. It touched another green-robed figure and a new voice began to scream. The adepts froze for an instant and then began to run to the containment system.

More astropaths began to howl. Sparks rained down onto the tiered seats as the sensor arrays exploded. On every tier green-robed bodies spasmed, fingers clawing at the stone armrests of their chairs, pus running from empty eyes. A heavy stench of iron and raw meat spread through the air. Voice after voice rose into a storm of noise like the call of a choir of the damned. Frost began running across the domed ceiling. At the centre of the chamber adepts and guards fell to their knees. Some of the guards vomited as they felt voices rush through their minds, voices that moaned and pleaded for mercy. Alarms began to sound, but their shrills were swallowed in the chorus of screams.

They began to die. One man opened his mouth and liquid fire poured down his body, his flesh powdering from his bones. Another tried to stand, cables ripping from his scalp. He stumbled and exploded in a wet cloud of skin and bone fragments. Others rose screaming into the air before dissolving into smoke and black dust.

The sound grew louder, screams rolling over each other until a single voice shrieked from a hundred throats.

Beyond the chamber panic spread through the station in the blare of alarms, the clang of sealing blast doors and the shouts of running guards.

In the astropathic chamber the screams became a single word.

Then all was still, except for the drip of blood and softly falling ash.

Cyrus charged through the doors at a run, his strides shaking the floor. Behind him Rihat did his best to match the White Consul’s pace. Helicon Guard followed in their wake. Cyrus had been in the station’s command chamber when the alarms had sounded and the servitors slaved to the sensors systems began to babble. Rihat had gone pale and then started to run, ordering troops to follow. Cyrus had overtaken him after only ten paces.

The psychic aftershock hit Cyrus as he entered the astropathic chamber, forcing him to stagger. The crystal matrix of his psychic hood was blazing with sickly light as it compensated for the wild power surging around him. A psychic event of huge magnitude had occurred in the chamber and a powerful echo of its fury still lingered. Dark liquid pooled on the floor; crumpled bodies lay in their stone thrones. Behind him, Cyrus heard some of the Helicon Guard vomiting onto the deck. The stink of sorcery was thick in the air: a sharp ozone tang that brought the twisted faces from his vision back into his mind. He scanned the chamber, its devastation lit by sparking glow-globes.

‘Spread out,’ he called. ‘Look for survivors, be alert for any hostile action.’ The Guardsmen moved around him, fanning out into the shadows. His storm bolter in hand, Cyrus moved deeper into the chamber.

There were bodies draping the stone tiers in piles of tangled limbs. A powdered layer covered everything, coating the dead so that they looked like grotesque sculptures. Scraps of debris still fell slowly through the air. Cyrus saw a severed hand on the snow-like covering, its fingers twisted into claws. There were lines in the dust, trail marks where people had crawled towards the doors. Dark stains had soaked into the ash in places, and Cyrus’s steps left red prints as he moved across the chamber.

A figure staggered towards him, its eyes wide in a face smeared red. Dust spilled from the man as he moved. Cyrus recognised the marks of a senior adept on the man’s robes. He mouthed something at Cyrus, his lips moving but his words muffled. Cyrus kept the muzzle of his bolter steady.

‘What did you say?’ asked Cyrus. The adept’s mouth spoke the half sounds again. ‘What did you say?’ repeated Cyrus.

‘He said that they screamed the same thing,’ came a cracked voice from behind him.

Cyrus turned to see Colophon limping into the chamber. He looked into the old astropath’s eyes, seeing an expression he could not read on the man’s face.

Colophon walked over to the adept, who was swaying where he stood. ‘I can see it in his thoughts,’ he added. ‘It is the only thing he is thinking. They screamed the same word at the end.’

Cyrus looked at the adept and saw the silent word in the shape of his moving lips. He felt a cold pulse run through him as he spoke the word out loud: ‘Fateweaver.’

The adept nodded, his eyes wide with fear. Cyrus thought of the recorded signal and of the visions that would not leave him. It was all happening as he had feared it must. The daemon came to consume this place, as it had so many others.

Will I fail, he thought, will I be able to defy that part of fate?

‘Not all of them are dead,’ called Rihat, bent down next to a green-robed figure that lay sprawled on the floor. ‘Some survived whatever this was.’

Cyrus saw that a few of the bodies scattered around the chamber were stirring, their movements feeble but signs of life none the less. ‘Something is coming,’ he said, glancing at the hunched man by his side. ‘Colophon, a message must be sent now.’ But the old astropath was shaking his head.

‘Can’t you feel it? The warp around us is…’ Colophon closed his eyes briefly, a shiver running through his hunched form. ‘The warp around us is a curtain of pain. No message will be able to break through. Even if any of my brothers and sisters recover, it would not be possible.’

Cyrus reached out with his psychic senses and tasted the veil of agony surrounding the station. It was as if a barbed web lay all around them, a shadow’s width away. The old man was right; no telepathic message could leave.

Colophon trembled, almost falling, before Rihat caught him and lowered him to sit on the edge of the first stone tier. ‘We are alone,’ the astropath said. The old man looked up, and Cyrus saw the panic overcoming him. ‘An evacuation?’ A tremor of fear edged his voice. ‘Your ship can hold many. We could–’

‘No.’ Cyrus cut the old man off. ‘It could carry some, but what of the rest, Colophon? What of those we left behind?’

Colophon looked into Cyrus’s eyes for an instant and then looked down, his hand trembling on his cane top.

‘Your orders, Epistolary?’ said Rihat.

Cyrus turned, looking at the tiered chamber and the motionless figures that would never rise from their seats. A few survivors were beginning to call out from the shadows. ‘Prepare the defences. We are alone, and so we must hold alone.’

‘How long do we have until an attack begins?’ asked Rihat. His face was pale and Cyrus could see fear in his wide eyes.

Cyrus looked at the colonel, and then at the blood congealing at their feet. ‘It has already begun.’

II

BLOODED

‘Flesh will fail, Space Marine,’ said Hekate, and Phobos had to bite back his anger at the contempt in her voice. ‘Against the enemy that comes, this is our true defence.’ Hekate raised her staff to point at the black pillar that rose above them. Bundles of humming cables snaked around it, and purity seals covered almost every inch of its surface. Phobos could see a delicate pattern of marks etched into the obsidian beneath the fluttering strips of parchment. The chamber was a narrow armoured cylinder that followed the pillar into blackness above. The air held a greasy static charge that played over his armour in small arcs.

Phobos had been reviewing the station’s defences for hours. His eyes had taken in every readied gun and choke-point, his mind sifting through possible weaknesses. Helicon Guard units waited in each of the five wings of the station. The White Consuls under his and Cyrus’s command formed a force of small units, ready to respond should the enemy break through. The Aethon would remain docked to the station, its guns ready if necessary. It was Cyrus’s plan and Phobos could not fault it given their resources, but the key to the defence was in front of him.

The pillar was a Geller field generator. The field it projected was a product of techno-arcana of the powerful kind. Normally used to shield ships as they passed through the warp, here it existed to shield the station from daemonic assault.

Phobos disliked Hekate but knew that she spoke truth. Besides his brothers, there were Rihat’s regiment of Helicon Guard, batteries of macro cannons trained on the void, and layers of void shields that could keep a battlefleet at bay. But, as Hekate had pointed out, they were not facing a battlefleet. She was a primaris psyker, a savant immaterium who knew secrets that Phobos would never learn. She had shared her thoughts with them over the past hours, and each comment was as accurate as it was barbed. Her latest observation was no less so. The Geller field was the station’s true defence.

The field would envelop the central section of the station, closing it off from daemonic assault. There would be sections that would be unshielded, flaws in the invisible wall where a daemon could pass through. These would be the points where flesh and bone would have to stand against the enemy. Should the daemons force a way inside the field envelope then there would be slaughter. Phobos thought of the thousands of non-military personnel crammed into chambers of the central hub, running prayer beads through their fingers, muttering implorations to the Emperor to protect them from their fears.

‘Are they at full power?’ asked Phobos.

‘They are bringing the generator on-line now,’ said Rihat, consulting a brass-framed data-slate in his hand. As he finished, the deck began to shake. Bright chains of electricity played up and down the pillar. The purity seals rustled as if in a rising wind. A warning chime sounded in Phobos’s ear as his armour detected a growing power spike.

The pillar shivered and issued a sound like a bell tolling underwater. A skin of heat haze formed on its surface. Phobos could hear a high hum like vibrating glass.

‘Fields are at maximum strength,’ said Rihat, looking up and running a hand nervously across his head. ‘I have commanded the Guard here for a decade and the full field mantle has never been activated.’

Phobos heard unspoken fears in the colonel’s voice. Rihat was a commander of men but he had never faced the kind of enemy that now came for them. A thought came unbidden to Phobos’s mind as he placed a hand upon the man’s shoulder: maybe you are another weakness in our armour, Rihat.

‘These are not our only defences,’ Phobos said. The colonel looked up at the scar-twisted face of the White Consul, and Phobos saw the uncertainty in his eyes. ‘We must stand whether these fields fail or not. Should they fail, flesh and spirit will have to suffice.’

Beside him Hekate gave a derisive snort. ‘That is true, Space Marine,’ said the psyker with a grim smile, ‘but if it comes to that, the station will fall.’

A pre-storm quiet permeated the pillared chamber where the White Consuls armed themselves. They gathered in squads, talking in low voices as servitors attached oath parchments to their shoulder guards. The clink of weapons and the smell of incense hung in the air.

Cyrus stood apart, his thoughts drifting back into the past. He was not supposed to have memories from before he became a White Consul. Years of psychic conditioning, and the indoctrinations of the Adeptus Astartes, should have removed any remnants of what he had been. But he did remember. Sometimes Cyrus wondered if it was the shadow of his oracular gift.

He could not recall much from before he became a Space Marine, but he could remember the day the Black Ships came. They had appeared out of the noon sun and had hung in the blue sky like impossible castles. On the mountain sides and on the plains, people looked up from the shadows they cast over the ground. He had not understood what it meant but the old men of the village had. They glanced at him with fear as they clustered around the fire in the meeting hall that night. They said that the shapes in the sky were the Sky God’s witch-seekers, and that they had come to take the god’s due.

There were many witches on their world. Most were killed or hounded into the wild, but more were born every year. When the emissaries of the Sky God came they took all the witches they could find up to the stars. If they found witches had been hidden their anger would be terrible. Cyrus had heard them talk and knew what would happen.

His mother had kept his abilities secret for several years, but it had not lasted; there was too much strangeness about him. Sometimes he yelled strange things in his sleep, or knew what someone was about to do before it happened. People noticed and people talked.

That night his father had sat amongst the men looking pale, saying little, not looking at his son. His mother had tried to hide him, had argued with his father, raging through falling tears. It had made no difference. The village had waited outside the house until his father led him out. They took him down to the plains where the temples that fell from the sky waited, swallowing long lines of people: confused old men, wild-eyed hermits and weeping children. Cyrus had not cried; there was no point. He knew what was going to happen.

The world had given up its witches, but it had ultimately made no difference. A clutch of uncontrollably powerful alpha plus psykers had been born there a decade later. The Imperium had burned the world from orbit, reducing it to cinders. Far away in his cell on Sabatine, Cyrus had woken with the taste of ash in his mouth.

Cyrus blinked and ran his tongue through his mouth. The memory of the gritty taste was a ghost sensation on his palate. The servitors pulled away, smoke coiling from where the wax cooled on his newly attached parchments. He nodded, flexing his hand inside his gauntlet. His storm bolter cycled to readiness with a metallic snarl. Another servitor clanked forwards on chained tracks, his helmet held in callipered hands. The helmet locked over his head with a hiss. For an instant, blind darkness wrapped him before his vision flickered with luminous readouts.

Now we wait for the storm to come, he thought.

In the gulf beyond the station’s hull, the void split like skin slit with a knife. A luminous miasma poured out of the wound, staining the light of the stars as it spread. It coiled in the vacuum, forming folds and tendrils like milk curdling in dark wine. Half-formed shapes moved through the spreading cloud as thousands of hungering eyes turned towards the station. The wound stretched wider and the cloud grew.

Claros station shook with the metal-voiced fury of cannon fire. Beams of energy and lines of shells streamed across the black expanse. They struck the oncoming tide and sliced through it like claws raking through fat. Chunks of solidifying matter cooked to charred fragments. Explosions scooped holes in ethereal flesh. Vast mouths opened in the cloud’s surface crying out in silent pain. And the guns kept firing. Auto loaders rammed macro shells into smoking breeches. Las-capacitors shrieked as they built up charge, and plasma generators boiled with overheating ferocity. Behind blast doors and barricades the defenders felt the station quake and prayed for hope, for salvation, for fate to favour them.

The first salvoes cut into the sickly pall, but it swelled without pausing. When it reached the station’s hull it writhed across it, searching for weakness. Where it found that weakness it poured through in an ethereal wave of extending talons and bared teeth.

Cyrus closed his eyes. Sounds and images faded until he was conscious of only a few sensations: the familiar feeling of his Terminator armour against his skin, the heft of his sword in his hand, and the worn segments of his gauntlets, flexing as he shifted his grip on the hide-wound hilt. The blade was keening, its edge shivering.

He opened his eyes. The dark metal walls of the lift shaft slid past, the red glow of his brothers’ eyes diluting the darkness. Galba and his squad stood beside him. Six figures in ghost white, the blue of their helmets lost in the low light. The top of the lift shaft receded above them. Numbers flickered across Cyrus’s vision, counting down the estimated time to engagement.

The enemy had broken through into a tunnel under the fifth station wing. The Helicon Guard defending the unshielded tunnel were on the edge of breaking. Panicked voices washed through Cyrus’s vox, and tactical assessments filled his helmet display. It was the sound and measure of a massacre.

This is what we exist for, he thought. This is what we were made for: to step into certain defeat and undo that fate.

The lift platform halted with a metallic clang. In front of Cyrus the blast doors waited. He could almost feel what was beyond those closed metal teeth.

‘The Emperor wills it, and we are His weapon,’ growled Galba from behind Cyrus.

‘The Emperor wills it, and His will is fury,’ said Cyrus. Cold power blazed down the sword in his hand, its edge singing in tune with his mind. Chainblades snarled to life. A crackling field enveloped Galba’s fist, casting the White Consuls in flickering shadows.

‘By His will,’ spoke the White Consuls.

The blast doors ground open. A broad, circular passage extended away in front of Cyrus. The pipes and support ribs lining its side made it look like the inside of a vast animal. A shoulder-high barrier of welded plasteel ran across the tunnel’s mouth. Behind it, the remains of a company of Helicon Guard were dying.

A wall of sound washed over Cyrus: human shrieks, the crack-fizz of lasguns, and inhuman sounds cried from the throats of daemons. Some of the Helicons were falling back, firing ragged bursts into a glittering fog that rolled across the barricade. Shifting shapes moved like shadows cast by a flickering fire.

Cyrus began to run. He was fifty paces from the barrier, armour shaking with each step. Las-bolts whipped past him, sparkling as they vanished into the boiling fog in front of him. The troops who had not fled the barricade were dying. Distorted shapes with many limbs spun amongst the Guardsmen. Blue flames ate through armour and flesh where the shapes touched. Single-eyed creatures pulled at the barrier with rotting hands. A thick sweet scent reached Cyrus’s nose, mocking his sealed armour.

He was thirty paces away. He began firing, his storm bolter stitching fire through threat markers, explosions blooming amongst the coiling fog. A Guardsman staggered away from the barricade and took a trembling step towards Cyrus. His face was pale and streaked with blood, his lasgun loose in his hands. A shape flowed out of the fog behind the man. He took another step. The shape snapped into sharp focus. It stood poised on the top of the barrier. Its body was a lithe sculpture of taut muscle and glittering skin. Eyes that were circles of reflective darkness looked at Cyrus and it hissed like a snake. Cyrus drew his sword back.

The figure leaped, its claws closing over the fleeing Guardsman’s head as it turned in the air. It landed in a whip spray of blood as the Guardsman crumpled to the floor. For an instant the creature stood, quivering as if in pleasure. It looked at Cyrus, and smiled with a mouth of hooked teeth.

Cyrus charged. The creature pounced, its teeth wide in its beautiful skull, its eyes glinting like moonlight on frost. Cyrus dropped into a half crouch and rammed his sword forwards. The sword tip punched into the creature’s slender neck. Glowing blood flowed down its length as the creature’s momentum rammed it onto the blade. Cyrus felt the creature’s essence dissolve into black vapour. He ripped the sword back. The creature’s death in his mind was like the taste of honey and bile.

Another creature blurred towards him, claws clicking, movements coiling. Cyrus cut, armour and muscles flowing. The figure swayed, and Cyrus’s sword struck the deck in a shower of sparks. The creature flipped through the air faster than Cyrus could turn his sword, its claws reaching for his face as it spun. He could see the death in its eyes, felt it call him to oblivion.

An armoured fist closed on the creature’s body with a crack of bound thunder. Galba lifted the broken creature from the ground and threw it down. The sergeant brought his foot down on its skull, grinding it to fragments.

‘They come,’ shouted the sergeant to Cyrus. Bolt shells roared from Galba’s pistol as he turned towards the tunnel mouth.

The barricade had given way. Rotting figures scrambled through the breach, rusted blades scraping on the decking, their mouths drooling pus. The Helicon Guard who had clung to the barricades fell back. Cyrus felt a buzzing inside his head, an insect touch on his skin. Shells flew from his storm bolter. He kept the trigger squeezed, the gun sucking rounds from its drum feed. Targets vanished and pulsed back into sight. He stepped forwards into the space gouged by the storm bolter.

Cyrus glanced over at Galba. The sergeant was at the centre of a closing circle of leering faces, slime thick blades hacking at his armour. The four other members of his squad were cutting towards him with their chainblades. Galba punched forwards and gripped a horned head in his lightning-sheathed fist. He lifted the creature and fired his pistol into its eye. The head exploded like an overripe fruit. Cyrus saw Galba back-fist three creatures to pulp before the cage of hacking blades closed over him.

Claws and blades scraped across Cyrus’s armour. Rotting bodies surrounded him, their yellow eyes pressed against his helmet lenses. He tried to move his sword arm, felt the press of bodies weighing it down. Something sharp found a join in his armour. He could feel pathogens trying to find purchase in his immune system, radiating pain through his body. Their daemon’s reek reached inside his mind. He could feel their hunger. He remembered the vision: the circling creatures, the sword slipping from his hand. Was this the fate he had seen? The thought sunk into him and for an instant he teetered on the edge of doubt.

Anger flared through him, overwhelming his pain and doubt. He would not fall, not here. He would deny that fate.

A pattern of thought and feeling formed in his mind. It burned like a sun trapped in his skull. He held on to it for a moment, feeling it feed on his rage, growing wilder and hotter. He released the thought. Flames burst from him. The creatures around him wailed as their flesh cooked. He poured his anger into the fire, feeling power mirror his rage. It quickened and grew until he was a still figure, at the heart of a white-hot storm. The display inside his helmet dimmed against the brightness. In the inferno the daemons shrieked as he tore their essence apart.

His body sang with the power running through him, and his psychic hood was ice-cold against his scalp. He did not want to let go. He could hear something whispering, calling to him to never let this end, to give himself to it, to hold on to this power forever. It would be right, it would be…

He released the fury in his mind, the burning power collapsing into a dull ember ache in his skull.

Sudden silence and stillness surrounded him. He was breathing hard, his skin clammy and cold in his armour. Around him the floor and walls of the passage glowed. The barricade was a twisted mound of blackened metal, like a crumpled cloth. He turned, meeting the staring eyes of the Helicon Guard who looked up from where they cowered by the lift entrance. Sheathing his sword he reached up and released his helmet. The air smelt of cooked meat and sulphur.

Four members of Galba’s squad stood amongst the wreck of the barricade. The teeth of their chainblades were thick with oozing flesh. Galba lay between them. Congealing blood and yellow mucus caked his splintered armour. His helmet was a ruin of squashed bone and torn ceramite.

Galba’s four squad brothers lifted their sergeant onto their shoulders. They murmured the death lament of Sabatine as they moved. They would carry him back to the Aethon where he would wait in cold stasis until he returned to his birth planet for the last time. Hearing the old words from a planet that was home but which had not borne him, Cyrus found that there was nothing he could say.

Its new face was dull and uninteresting. It had worn more faces than it could recall, and it would forget this one as soon as it had taken another. The weaker flesh-born moved around it. They were those that they called soldiers. It found the idea of such a title laughable: as if a name could change their herd animal nature into something greater. It had many names, both granted and stolen. Changeling some called it, but that was not its name and the description barely touched the essence of its nature. It knew how little a name was worth.

It breathed, feeling the world as the flesh-born felt it, dulled to simple stimuli and base sensations. A giant warrior in blue stood close by. Space Marines: that was what the flesh-born called them. It could taste this one’s thoughts, feel their nuances, the characteristics and temperament they implied. Interesting. So much more interesting than the role it played now. There were subtleties and depths of self-deception at play that would make such an identity a delight to play. But it had a bargain to fulfil, and for that bargain the drab face that it wore was what it needed.

During the battle it had worn the form of lesser children of decadence, passing amongst its supposed kind with flawless ease. Isolated and forgotten on the edge of the violence it had found what it needed. The man had been hugging his legs to his chest and weeping silently. An ideal face to wear, it had thought. It had destroyed the original, reducing the flesh-born’s body to dust with a touch. Now it wore the flesh-born’s shape.

‘Harlik,’ said a voice close by.

For a moment it stayed where it was, staring at the scorched plating of the deck.

‘Harlik, come on, they’re pulling us out.’

Harlik. Yes, that would be the name that went with the face, a dull name for a dull entity. It turned to look at the speaker. A heavy-faced man, smeared with soot, the ochre and red of his uniform stained by blood and vomit.

‘Yeah, I’m coming,’ it said, its voice perfect, the layer of shocked slowness consistent with what Harlik would have sounded like had he survived the assault. ‘I’m coming.’

It followed the flesh-born, tasting their thoughts as it moved amongst them. Most were struggling with emotions and thoughts it could not comprehend: shock, terror, guilt, anger, hope. It could not understand these feelings, but it could imitate their effects flawlessly.

Shoulders hunched, eyes vacant, it trudged on with the rest. It would need a new face as it moved towards its goal. Yes, it would wear another face soon.

The blind figure talked to Cyrus in his dreams.

‘There is no way out. Your fate is written,’ says the astropath, turning in the cone of hololight, its voice a dry croak. He reaches out but the figure turns, and he sees that it has two faces: one grinning, the other snarling; both blind. He reaches for his sword but feels his hand close on nothing. The two-faced figure laughs.

He is falling through fading shadow, tumbling past stars and moons, drifting through eternity, his body a lie, time a lie.

He stands at the bottom of stone tiers that ascended into darkness. He looks up. Eyes blaze back at him.

His brothers are shouting at him, close by servitors are blurting code in frantic streams. He is raising his sword.

He is standing on the bridge of a ship as it falls through winds that howl with laughter.

Darkness folds over him.

There are Space Marines in blue armour. He can see dragons coiling on their shoulder guards. A figure in black armour moves amongst them, a reptilian cloak hanging from his back in folds of iridescent scales. They are walking through ghost-quiet corridors. Dark liquid seeps out of the walls in their wake. He calls to them, but they are wraiths hovering beyond an impenetrable veil.

He brings his sword down and the two heads of the astropath scream with the sound of a murder of dying crows.

This has not happened. This is the future, he thinks.

The blind figure turns in its cone of cold light, its two faces grinning, laughing from both of its mouths.

‘No, this is the past,’ says the blind figure.

Cyrus opened his eyes with a snarl of pain. A servitor with a skull of polished chrome cocked its head, looking at him with cold blue eye lenses, a piston hand poised above his shoulder armour. He took a ragged breath.

Shadows surrounding pools of harsh light filled the armoury. He was standing at the centre of a clutch of white-robed servitors, limbs splayed on a cruciform frame that supported the dead weight of his armour. The armour was silent, its machine spirit slumbering while the servitors peeled it from his body.

It had been some hours since the first attempts by the daemons to break through the gaps in the Geller field. The warp still enclosed the station but after the first attacks there had been quiet. It was not peace, though, just an in-breath before the next onslaught.

Scorched and stained by battle, Cyrus had returned to the Aethon to have his armour stripped and cleansed. He had hoped that the act would be mirrored in his body and mind, but his temples still throbbed with the psychic exertion of the battle. He had not been able to stop thinking about the signal that had called them here. The more he thought about it the more he was sure he was missing something about it, something just out of hearing waiting beneath the surface. Then the vision had taken him again.

He nodded to the servitors and they continued to unpick the Terminator armour, pulling away plates, and uncoupling system links with cold, mechanical fingers.

‘A hard fight,’ said a voice beyond the stab lights of the hovering servo-skulls.

Cyrus squinted, his eyes cutting into the darkness. Phobos stood in his own armour, the white Terminator plate making him look a marble statue.

‘You look weary,’ he said. There was a hint of a smile on his lips.

Cyrus nodded grimly. ‘We held the breach. It cost us Galba.’

The first cost we must pay, he thought, a cost I have said we must bear.

‘He goes to the ancestors,’ said Phobos, nodding. ‘As must we all.’

Cyrus did not reply but watched as two servitors disconnected a series of bio-readout cables from plugs in his side. They burbled to each other in machine code as they worked. In over two centuries of war he had seen thousands die. Brothers had fallen at his side, and he had made decisions that had both cost and saved lives. But the first tangible price of coming to Claros troubled him. He felt as if he had sleepwalked into a cobweb that bound tighter around him with every move he made.

‘Does it still trouble you?’

Cyrus looked up at Phobos, seeing the look of friendly concern on his brother’s face.

‘This?’ Cyrus winced as the servitors pulled the blood-streaked greave from his leg. ‘It will not slow me.’ The flesh underneath was livid, black veins crawling out from a suppurating wound.

‘No, not that.’ The sergeant frowned. ‘You are brooding on something; you have been since you decided to come here.’

A servo-skull drifted close to Cyrus’s wounded leg, extending a red-hot cauterising blade. Cyrus nodded and the blade lanced into his flesh. He did not make any expression as the smell of burned flesh sizzled into the air.

‘You said before that there was nothing we could do even if this place was attacked. That it would burn anyway.’

Phobos shook his head gently. ‘I misspoke. I spoke as I felt I must, but you lead us and you led us here, and here we have an enemy to stand against.’

Cyrus was suddenly aware of how worn his friend looked, his face weathered by war and framed by white armour older than memory.

‘You were right, old friend,’ breathed Phobos heavily. ‘You were right. Don’t let my words weaken you for what we must do now.’

Cyrus shook his head. Beside his temple a servo-skull buzzed as it unlinked the crystalline mesh of his psychic hood from his scalp. There were blisters and lesions in places where it rested on his skin.

‘The signal and the omens worry me. They are why we are here and I still understand neither fully. That…’ He paused sifting through words to sum up his worry. ‘That makes me wonder if it was not bait, if I have not led us into a trap, if I should not have chosen differently.’

It was Phobos’s turn to shake his head, armoured shoulders turning his chuckle into a ripple of armour. ‘The enemy did not come here for us; they came here for the light of the astropaths and the souls on the station. If we weren’t here they would already have fallen. And we are not here for omens, brother. We are here to fight and to win.’

Cyrus frowned. ‘And we bear the price of that chance for survival?’

Phobos grinned, his scarred face splitting with grim humour. ‘That, brother, is why we were made.’

It began with one man.

Guardsmen crowded the vaulted chamber that ran down the centre of the fourth wing of the station. They had been there for several rotations, not sleeping, just looking nervously into the shadows. No one had explained what was happening. Station command had said only that the station was under attack, and that they were a primary reserve if the enemy broke through from other sections. No one had said who the enemy was, and that only made things worse. Rumours of attacks in other areas had come some hours earlier, but the lack of details created spaces filled by fears and rumour. No two rumours agreed on anything other than a single fact: it was bad. The lack of any solid information only confirmed it.

Private first class Ramiel straightened up from his crouched position and flexed his shoulders under his bronze-plated armour, trying to work the tightness from his back. Over a decade ago he had been a gang boss, lording it over his own chunk of the Vortis underhive in the distant Mandragora sector. He had killed how he liked, and who he liked. It had been a good life. Bad luck had seen him lose that life and gain a rank of flat nothing in an Imperial Guard regiment that went on to lose ninety per cent of its numbers in its first campaign. Ramiel had survived though, he always did.

He had been watching a sealed door that led off the broad colonnade for over four hours. It was supposed to lead to an unshielded section, whatever that meant. Nothing had happened and nothing was going to, just another waste of time. Sure, he had been jumpy when the alarm had come through and they were deployed on maximum alert. They said there were Space Marines on the station, that the station had already been attacked. With every hour spent crouched watching the unmoving door he had believed it less and less. There was no attack, no Space Marines. It was just a drill, a waste of time, and the more he thought about it the more it had started to irritate him.

‘Get back on post, Ramiel,’ the sour voice of the sergeant spat from a few yards behind him.

Ramiel ignored it; the sergeant was a straight-backed son of a bitch who scared most of the squad. Not Ramiel, though. He knew that the sergeant was a nothing, no real fight in him. Let him shout, he thought, let him try whatever he liked. He pulled his helmet off and dropped it next to his lasgun. He rotated his neck stretching out his muscles as he reached into a pouch and pulled out a lho-stick. He heard the sergeant marching up behind him as he lit the tip of the stick.

‘Pick up your gun and get back into position, soldier,’ growled the sergeant next to Ramiel’s ear.

Ramiel turned and looked the sergeant in the eye. A reckless anger was coursing through him now. He did not know where it had come from: he just knew it felt good. He took a long draw of the lho-stick and grinned at the sergeant.

‘Pick it up or–’

Ramiel’s fist slammed into the sergeant’s guts and he brought his knee up hard as the man doubled over. The sergeant went down with a wet noise and lay on the floor, blood pooling around his mashed face. There was a soundless pause; men were staring from other positions across the colonnade.

‘Well you’re down there now, sergeant. Why don’t you pick it up?’ He smiled and took another drag of his lho-stick.

The sergeant came to his feet faster than Ramiel could blink. There was the polished glitter of a knife in his hand. Ramiel jumped back but the tip of the blade stabbed up under the edge of his armour. Suddenly there was blood splattering the floor. Ramiel lashed a kick at the sergeant, ignoring the pain flaring in his guts. People were running towards them. Suddenly all Ramiel wanted was to see the sergeant’s blood pulse away, to see his head become a skinless skull. He came forwards fast and the sergeant lunged, the point of the knife scoring across Ramiel’s breastplate. His hand went to the sergeant’s face, fingers finding the softness of the eyes. The sergeant screamed. There were others around Ramiel, other people shouting, but he did not care. He pulled the knife from the sergeant’s fingers and rammed it up under the man’s chin. Blood gushed over him. He was laughing. There was a hand on his shoulder, pulling him. He turned and sliced a face from eye to chin.

A red haze formed in the air. Angry cries spread around Ramiel, figures bunching into knots of sudden violence. Someone opened up with a heavy weapon, hard rounds pulping through the growing crowd. The stone-tiled floor was slippery with dark fluid. There was a stink of offal in the air.

Ramiel kept moving, kept cutting and stabbing. His skin and armour glistened crimson. Around him fallen bodies began to twitch, dead fingers spasming, muscles bunching. Flesh twisted, bursting skin and venting fresh, bright blood. Ramiel could feel the murder hunger inside him like a beast. He raised his hand to cut again, to feed the beast.

Something sharp rammed through Ramiel’s chest. He looked down at the black blade tip projecting from his ribs. He grinned a dead man’s grin, swaying where he stood. Ramiel’s mouth began to open wider and wider. With a sound of ripping sinew the form of an impossible thing pulled itself from Ramiel’s skin. The creature sloughed off the sleeve of loose flesh. It was slick with blood, its tongue flicking out to taste the air. Its eyes were pits of reflective darkness in a long skull. It stepped forwards, its black jointed legs shaking with the freshness of its birth, its flesh a raw meat red.

A man who had been firing his lasgun into the fight looked at the newly born daemon and opened his mouth. The daemon bounded forwards, the black blade in its hands leaving a trail of smoke as it cut. The man never had a chance to scream.

The daemon looked around seeing more waiting kills, hearing the pulse of the living calling to it. More of its kin came, pulling themselves from the bodies of the dead and the pools of blood. Lifting the severed head of its first kill the daemon raised its flayed skull face and howled.

It had been the wrong way to clear his mind, thought Cyrus. Walking the station had seemed like a good way to work out troubling thoughts. Armoured in cleaned plate he had paced through the silent halls and the service tunnels where the station’s population sheltered as far from the outer areas as possible. They looked at him and he could feel the fear in their eyes. People crowded the service tunnels: menials, prefects, techno-mats, and their families. They formed tight clusters, huddled around a few possessions, talking in low voices as if the sound of raised voices were indecent.

There was a tension in the close atmosphere, panic held just below the surface. He had hoped to gain some clarity of thought, but the atmosphere seemed to infect him with a mixture of fear and caution. He tried to let his thoughts unknot, tried to focus on presenting a soothing presence to the people that looked at him. It was not working. In no small part that was the fault of Hekate.

‘It was only the first, and the weakest, attack that we will see.’ Hekate’s harsh voice rang out. She had chosen this time to impart her thoughts on the situation, following him as he walked the station, staff clicking on the deck in time with her steps.

Hekate had not been present at any of the two assaults on the station. She had been noticeably absent, only appearing afterwards to question survivors and make dire predictions. Cyrus pursed his lips. He could almost hear the look of superiority on her face.

‘We held the breach,’ growled Cyrus.

‘No, we did not,’ she spat. ‘You held the breach. If it had not been for you and your brothers the enemy would have forced through our defences.’

People were looking up at the raised voices, the air tightening. Cyrus had nearly reached the end of his patience. A thick ache had begun to spread across his head. All he could think about was the holographic image of a blind face repeating a single word just beyond hearing again and again.

He stopped and turned, looking down at the woman, catching the surprised look in her eyes, anger slipping his control.

‘Are you not a primaris? What is it that you fear? You have lent no aid to the defences apart from your observations. Is there something that keeps you in the shadows?’

‘I–’ she began, but Cyrus was in no mood for what she might have said. He leaned forwards.

‘You may speak the truth and know much, but you seem blind to the fact that we either stand together or we die. The enemy we face will destroy us from within as easily as it will from without.’ He looked around at the people huddled and silent at the edge of the passage. ‘You do not see this? You know much of the enemy that faces us, more than Rihat, more than I. But you do not see this?’

He looked at the marks of the Psykana tattooed on her scalp and woven into the cloth of her storm coat. An expression that he could not place ghosted across her face. ‘Is there something you fear, mistress? Something you know of this enemy that makes you afraid?’ She held his gaze and a previously unformed question dropped into his mind. ‘What is your purpose here?’

‘I cannot say.’ There was a low almost fearful note in her voice that surprised Cyrus. ‘I tell you the truth that I see. That is what I am here to do. That is the help I give.’

Cyrus gazed at the woman, a suspicion forming in his mind. The Inquisition had servants in many places and drew its acolytes from many quarters. Did such a secret servant stand before him now? There was a regal surety about her that made him wonder what she really was. ‘How long have you been here, Mistress Hekate?’ he said quietly.

‘A little over a month, Brother-Librarian,’ she replied, her voice brittle.

‘And before that?’

‘I cannot say.’

Cyrus smiled but it did not reach his eyes. He was thinking of executed worlds, and the hand that wielded that final judgement. What was she?

Hekate looked away, suddenly appearing hunched and tired as she leaned on her staff. ‘Another attack will come,’ she said without looking at him. ‘You should know that the varieties of daemons that attacked were of many orders. Such creatures only overcome their own rivalries when great powers turn them to a single purpose.’

The image of an astropath speaking a broken plea for help flashed through his mind, and a word came to Cyrus’s lips. ‘Fateweaver,’ he said.

Hekate shot him a hard look. For a moment he thought he saw surprise and fear in her blue eyes.

‘That is a name that should be spoken with care,’ said Hekate with careful control.

Cyrus was about to speak but the ache in his head suddenly blossomed to press against the inside of his skull. The crystals of his psychic hood were sparking. He blinked, opening his eyes to find red light flooding the passage. Alarms filled the air. His vox-link was screeching with panicked voices. He heard the word ‘incursion’ spit from the static and started running. He had ordered Phobos to be ready as a counter-attack force. The sergeant and his Terminators would reach any breach first.

‘Phobos,’ he shouted into the vox. As the sergeant replied Cyrus thought he could hear a whispered word repeated again and again.

Overwhelmed. It was not a word Phobos had often needed to contemplate. Layers of ceramite and adamantium, crafted at the birth of the Imperium, and his skill as a warrior made the word as irrelevant to him as a blow from a flint axe. But the word rang in his mind: undeniable, certain.

A lattice of fire overlaid the scene before him, spitting from his storm bolter, interweaving with that of his brothers. Four of them; there were four of them to turn the tide. A killing rage had engulfed the troops in the fourth wing of the station. Hundreds of Helicon Guard had become a churning sea of hate and murder. They stabbed and hacked at anyone in reach, shouting vile words through torn lips. Amongst the men the daemons moved: black iron blades sizzling as they cut through the press of bodies.

Phobos and his three brothers had pushed into the carnage, hurling the mob back with a torrent of explosions. For a few moments the bloody tide had faltered. Then it had enfolded them like closing jaws.

Phobos’s shoulders almost brushed those of his brothers, his eyes flicking from target to target, as he aimed, assessed and fired. His mind was focused solely upon the tactical data, which told him that they could not win. But this wing of the station was close to falling, and if it did the murderous tide would spill past all of their defences. He had made an oath that he would stand against this enemy: that he would not let them pass.

‘Nevra, firestorm pattern,’ said Phobos calmly. He remembered the hundreds of oaths he had made over decades of war. He had never failed to honour a single one and he was not going to do so now.

A clutch of Helicon Guard came towards them, eyes white, screaming in rage. There was no sanity left in them, no perception of what they had been, only a lust for death and blood.

‘By His will,’ came Nevra’s stony voiced reply. The missiles shrieked from the Cyclone launcher on his shoulders. The first missile hit, then the second, then the rest, each overlapping blast growing into a shrapnel-laden fireball. For a moment the murderous tide seemed to ebb. Phobos smiled grimly to the inside of his helmet as a black cloud mushroomed up to spread dirty smoke and yellow tongues across the ceiling far above. The floor shook and his armour whined as it compensated.

They came out of the fire in a wave of serrated blades and howling faces marked with jagged cuts. Men ran amongst the daemons, their flesh charring as they danced in the flames, howling triumph into the torched air.

‘Close formation,’ said Phobos. His brothers closed on him, shoulder to shoulder, a white armoured diamond amongst the slaughter. ‘Fire on all targets,’ he shouted, his storm bolter already roaring as the tide closed over them.

It was close now. Alarms blared as it walked down the passage through pulsing red light. Clusters of flesh-born in red and ochre uniform rushed past. It could taste the fear in their thoughts. The children of slaughter had begun their work. Perhaps they would succeed, but it doubted they would; they were so unsubtle, only useful in creating terror and spilling blood. It had masqueraded as such beings many times, had mimicked their blink-quick reactions and their death thirst. It understood them from within and without. They would kill and glory in their massacre, but powerful enemies stood against them: the strongest of the flesh-born, the Space Marines. They had the strength to perhaps stand even against the Taker of Skulls’ children. But whether their attack succeeded or not was no matter. Within its multi-faceted mind it smiled. Fear and confusion filled the station and that made the fulfilment of its bargain all the easier. As it had intended.

The hurrying flesh-born passed, paying it no attention. It had chosen this face carefully. The person it had stolen it from was a functionary of modest authority, not high enough to draw too much attention, not so lowly that anyone would question that it walked alone against the flow of movement. It was its third face since it had entered the station, and it hoped that it would need no more.

Turning into an arched door off the main passage it raised a cipher talisman to a sensor panel. A heavy blast door pealed back into the oily walls. It had taken the talisman from the owner of the face it wore. Functioning technology was one of the few things it could not imitate. The passage beyond was quiet and bathed in cold light. It could feel the presence of what it sought. It was close, so close now. Behind it, the armoured door ground shut as it walked into the electric twilight.

‘Phobos?’ Cyrus said in his ear.

Phobos sent a burst of shells into the face of a creature of glistening muscle. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye as a blow flicked towards his shoulder. He brought his sword around to meet it. The power field crackled and spat sparks as it met a blade of smoking black iron.

‘Yes, Brother-Librarian,’ said Phobos, voice straining, muscles and armour bunching as he forced against the inhuman strength of the creature. It opened its mouth and its pink tongue tasted the air. He brought the muzzle of his storm bolter up under the creature’s face and fired.

‘We are almost with you. Hold, brother, for the primarch, hold,’ said Cyrus, his voice distorted by static.

Phobos heard his storm bolter dry cycle as the last round spat from its muzzle. At his back there was a pillar of black stone the width of a battle tank. To his left Nevra was firing short bursts, the Cyclone launcher on his back empty, the teeth of his chainfist thick with viscera. To his right Valens stood, blood streaming from the mangled mass of his helmet; the stump of his severed gun arm dribbled blackening liquid onto the floor. It was barely credible that the veteran still stood let alone fought.

They had driven into the horde of daemons and crazed Helicon Guard, they had thrown dozens back into the immaterium, but it was not enough. Out across the vaulted chamber the horde grew, seeming to swell even as they cut it down. They had lost Gratian, his armour split from helm to gut by a shrieking blade. The enemy had forced them back until they were three figures in gore-painted white, their backs against the pillar. They were too few and the enemy too many. The fourth wing of the station was about to fall.

Phobos met a downward cut at his face, let it whistle past him as he flicked his sword around, slicing a figure from shoulder to hip. Another leapt into the space left by the collapsing body. To his right Nevra’s gun went silent.

‘No, brother,’ said Phobos, his voice low and calm. ‘The enemy will break through before you reach us. Our oaths will not be kept.’

There was a second of silence, and then Cyrus’s voice came back. ‘I hear.’ There was an edge to his voice.

To Phobos’s left Valens staggered, his knee crashing to the ground, splintering marble, blood seeping from rents in his armour. Valens brought his power fist up to meet a black sword in a fountain of sparks.

‘You know what must be done, brother,’ said Phobos. ‘I have failed and now there is only one price to pay for victory.’ There was a pause. Phobos could almost see his brother weighing-up what Phobos meant, the implication of his words. ‘It was what we were made to do; it is our fate.’

‘As you will it,’ said Cyrus.

Phobos felt a sharp impact across his right shoulder as ceramite splintered under warp-forged iron.

‘I go to the ancestors,’ said Valens from beside Phobos, the words a wet gurgle in his throat. They were the words of lament and passing spoken for the dead who could not speak for themselves. The words reminded Phobos of the smoke of funeral pyres trailing across the blue skies of Sabatine.

Phobos stabbed at a creature in front of him. He smiled grimly.

‘I go to the ancestors,’ repeated Phobos, and the voices of Valens and Nevra rose in broken chorus.

‘As they are the past, so shall I be.’

Phobos dropped his storm bolter, hand lunging forwards to grasp a creature’s twisting horns.

‘As I am, so shall all be.’ The words of the three Terminators echoed across the vox.

Phobos brought the edge of his sword up under the creature’s neck in a sawing sweep that scattered drops of burning blood into the air. Throwing the severed daemon’s head at its kin, he lunged at them.

‘I am the dead and I will pass through the gates of my ancestors.’

Outside the station the macro cannon and lances of the Aethon began to rotate. Plasma flushed into reactors and energy wells, the fury of suns snarling in its shackles.

Phobos could see Valens beaten down at the edge of his sight, lifeblood trailing from his arm as he tried to raise it.

A blow struck Phobos’s helmet, carving through into his face and eye. Blind, he rammed his weight forwards and brought his sword around like a scythe, feeling it bite through flesh and bone. He reached up and pulled the helmet from the ruin of his face. The daemon tide stood before him.

‘I go to the ancestors!’ he shouted, and the world suddenly filled with bright light.

The beams of energy from the Aethon hit the fourth wing of the station a third of the way down its length. The lance strike cut the section from station like a limb from a corpse. The rest of the station shuddered as if in pain. Venting molten debris and burning air, the wing fell away taking the four lost White Consuls to their ancestors. An instant later macro cannon shells hit the severed section and it became a brief blaze of light smeared against the black void.

There were five Space Marines between it and its objective. They wore white armour and blank-faced helmets with red eyes. It had anticipated that they might be a last obstacle to it fulfilling its bargain. Having anticipated them, it was ready.

It came round the corner wearing a new face, the face of a tech-adept long dead and reduced to ash in a dark corridor. The five stood around a sealed blast door covered in strips of parchment attached with red seals. The final door.

‘Halt,’ said a Space Marine with a red helm, and pointed a weapon at it. The rounded muzzle was venting shimmering gas with a rising hum. The other five Space Marines raised their weapons.

‘I come to do my duty, honoured warriors.’ The face’s voice was a plaintive whine filtered through a mechanical throat. ‘See, I bear the writ of service and this is the appointed hour.’ The weapons aimed at it stayed silent but did not waiver. These were no weak-willed creatures filled with doubt and fear. It was within a few paces now. It could feel the decision to fire forming in their minds. Vetranio: that was the leader’s name. It took a step forwards and changed its shape.

Its new shape was faster, much faster. It was on Vetranio in a single bound, bone claws the size of scythe blades punching through his eye pieces. It changed again, its shape becoming that of the dead Space Marine. It plucked the gun from Vetranio’s dead fingers as he fell. It turned, shooting a stream of energy into the heads of two of the Space Marines. Two remained. They fired at the same instant. It felt something that it understood as pain.

It dropped the weapon and changed its form into a boiling mass of flesh and half-formed faces. Blue fire burned from its eyes and along its limbs. Explosive rounds hit it and it felt chunks rip from its unreal flesh. It leapt at the two Space Marines, glittering droplets trailing after it. They tried to fight but its touch cooked them inside their armour.

When the charred armour no longer twitched, it bent down and picked up the weapon it had dropped. Wearing Vetranio’s face it turned towards the sealed portal. The layered doors slid open one at a time, and it saw its prize.

Cyrus watched the fires die and bleed off into the void. The command hub of the station was a circular chamber in the neck below the central astropathic chamber. Light from screens on stone daises diluted the gloom. The crew at each dais stared grimly at their readouts and dials, trying not to look as the remains of the severed part of the station cooled to embers on the viewscreen above them. Cyrus could feel the funereal hush around him, the numb disbelief at what had happened, at what he had ordered done. Beside him Rihat stood at attention, his thin face grey.

Cyrus had come here as soon as he had given the Aethon the order to sever the overwhelmed wing from the station. The rest of the White Consuls were in position ready to respond if another attack should come. He, though, had to see it for himself. On the screen the fading explosions were a red-hued ripple in the sickly haze of colour and substance that hung over the station. Looking at the fading after-image he felt empty, unreal, as if he had looked into a mirror and seen someone else looking back at him.

It was the only way, he thought. If he had not ordered the Aethon to destroy what was already lost then the rest of the defences would have fallen soon after. It had been necessary, the kind of choice that had angered him when he had seen its results in the ashen wastes of Kataris. He was the executioner this time; his choices had committed his brothers, and hundreds of others, to oblivion.

‘Enough,’ he said softly. ‘Cut the view-feed.’ Rihat motioned and the viewscreen flicked to flowing green readouts of the station’s systems.

‘Do you have any further orders, lord?’ said Rihat, looking up at him with stiff formality.

‘No, colonel commander. Not at present.’ He nodded as Rihat saluted and stalked away, brittle formality overlaying anger and disbelief. Cyrus could not fault his response.

Almost involuntarily Cyrus took the milled disc of the holo-projector out of a pouch. It held the message that had drawn him here, the message that no one had sent. It sat on the palm of his gauntlet for a second, then the cone of green light sprung up from its surface. The ghost-green figure of the astropath rotated again in front of his eyes.

‘…report… Claros… the enemy beyond…’

This broken stream of words had brought him here, it had placed him here. He had watched and listened to these words so often that he heard his memory speak them as much as he heard the recording.

‘…lies… Fateweaver… we were blinded… failing…’

Something about the signal had troubled him since he first reviewed it. Somehow it felt familiar, almost as if he had heard it long ago.

‘Soul… that hear this…’

Should he have followed its call? Was it a trick?

‘…send… help…’

But it felt so familiar.

‘Colophon…’

His vision snapped into focus, senses suddenly sharp. The image continued to rotate and speak through its familiar loop.

‘…accursed eternity.’ The image blinked and began its loop again. Cyrus watched it, his ears straining for the word that he was sure he had heard. It did not occur again. He cycled through the signal but it was as it had always been, a broken string of words spaced with patches of distortion. Had his mind filled a space with a stray thought? He clicked off the projection, looking around at the command chamber without seeing. If he had somehow heard an extra portion of the signal that was not there before, what did it mean?

Colophon. He had not seen the senior astropath for hours. The old man was attending to the recovery of the remaining astropaths in his charge. A stray word heard in a signal sent by no one; could it mean that Colophon would send the signal? That it was a plea from a point in time not yet reached?

Face set into a stone-hard expression, Cyrus strode from the command chamber. A new question had begun to coil around his thoughts like a poisonous snake: what else could the word Colophon in a signal from the future imply?

It stood and looked up at the pillar, watching the power crackle over its black surface and stir the strips of parchment. The thing was abhorrent; even being this close made the skin of its stolen flesh crawl. The space around the pillar was filled with eddies of power that tugged at its substance. The pillar projected a veil far out from this chamber, enclosing this place and keeping its kind away from the prey they sought, the prey that they had hunted across worlds and through time. It had seen veils of this kind before, enclosing the ships of the flesh-born as they hurried through the warp. Like riptides woven into a spun glass curtain, they kept those ships safe. That was until they failed. With the veil around this place gone the rest of its kind could reach their prey. There would be much slaughter among the flesh-born.

For a second it considered whether to keep to its bargain. It would gain much, that was true. An endless amount of possibilities and favours would be its to claim, and bargains with the greater kind were difficult to break. But it was a creature of lies and the delight of the unexpected change was delicious. If it left here now the energies sustaining its kin would eventually dissipate in the poisonous nature of the flesh-world. This place would stand. The flesh-kin would endure. The blind prey hiding amongst them would survive and rise from its weakness again. And what then? What possibilities would there be then, what endless unforeseen new permutations and changes to fate?

Slowly, it raised the weapon taken from the warrior whose face it wore, the glowing ribs along the weapon’s back brightening as if sensing its intent.

But, it thought, a bargain was a bargain.

The whine from the weapon rose in pitch until it was a shrill of barely restrained power. It grinned with its stolen face and squeezed the trigger. A bolt of sun-bright light speared from the weapon. The bolt of energy struck the pillar and liquefied the workings at its core.

For a second the pillar quivered, the power it had projected around the station snapping, its tethers broken. It cracked with a sound of shearing iron. Balls of lightning formed and collapsed around the pillar’s surface. Parchments charred to black scraps that fell amongst a deluge of sparks. Then it exploded in a wave of brilliant light.

By the time the Geller field generator exploded the being some called the Changeling had long vanished, discarding its last face without a thought.

For a few minutes no one on Claros station realised what had happened. In the sheltered passages people continued to talk, mumbling worries to each other, stirring food over the flickering heat of chemical burners, and laughing at grim jokes. Behind barricades the Helicon Guard watched and waited as they had for hours, muscles cramping from not moving, wondering when they would be able to sleep. The armour-clad White Consuls stood in a scattered selection of passages, their minds calm, waiting for the next attack to pull them from inaction. In a lightless chamber Colophon sat immobile, the remaining astropaths ringing him in silence.

In the half-lit gloom of the command chamber Colonel Rihat turned away from the disappearing back of the Librarian. For a moment he had thought he had seen a flicker of emotion in Cyrus’s eye, a glimmer beneath cold dark water. He had heard stories of the Adeptus Astartes, that they were mankind’s final shield, made by the Emperor at the dawn of the Imperium. He had seen the truth of the stories, seen that those words could never approach the truth. He realised he had not understood them, that he could never understand them.

The shout snapped his head around, his thoughts vanishing at the terror in the voice. ‘The Geller field!’ The officer looked at Rihat, eyes wide. Crimson runes began to flicker across control surfaces, angry red spreading around the chamber, parchment readouts spewing from the fingers of data servitors. ‘It’s gone!’

Rihat’s first thought was to ask why, but as the icy reality filled him he knew it was a useless question. The truth was blaring at him from every corner of the chamber. Their greatest defence had fallen and the enemy would be coming.

‘Arm yourselves,’ he shouted and drew his pistol. Alarm sirens began to sound a moment later.

The warp found the genatorium chamber in the seconds after the field failed. Blackened cylinders the height of hab blocks filled its floor. Each was a low-yield plasma generator that fed power to the station’s central hub. The machines had functioned for millennia, beating with a steady pulse, holding at their hearts the power of suns. Servitors and engineers moved through the chamber, murmuring machine code and shaking blessed oil over their beloved machines. The first sign that something was wrong was a blurt of angry code from a monitor servitor. The enginseers moved to see what had troubled the spirits of their machines. Before they could take more than a step warning sirens filled the air. Runes indicating system failures flashed on control panels. Data parchment spooled onto the floor. The enginseers began to run for their control systems.

There was a shriek of shearing metal. Steam poured into the chamber as pipes ruptured. The enginseers and servitors close to the generators vanished in a wash of venting coolant. Across the station lights flickered and dimmed.

A generator burst, glowing fuel breaking through its layered metallic shell. Molten metal flowed like wax onto the chamber floor. Jagged-edged fragments of debris spun through the air. The remains of the broken machine began to judder, its wreckage twisting and writhing. Wires and cables coiled, bonding to mangled plates. Pistons snapped together into gigantic limbs. Warp flame flowed from component to component as something aware and alive pulled itself from the reshaping wreckage. It had a scorpion body of machine parts and a torso of smoking flesh the colour of cooling iron. A long head crowned by spear-like horns pushed itself from its shoulders. It reared up, raising piston-driven arms, roaring at the glory of its birth.

A second generator exploded, the being within it spinning a form from the ruin of its machine womb. The first born did not wait for its kin, but stalked to the chamber’s sealed blast door, claws clenching in anticipation. The door was forged of plasteel and layered adamantium, over two metres thick and eight metres tall. The creature paused for a second and then began to gouge through the armoured door, its eyes alight behind a mask of scorched bronze.

Cyrus moved down the central passage at a run. Close behind him Valerian’s Devastators followed with the remains of Galba’s Vanguard squad. All thoughts of the signal and Colophon had passed from his mind. The Geller field was down and warp entities were breaking through into reality across the station. A dozen desperate fights outlined in snatches of panicked vox traffic scrolled across his helmet display.

‘Rihat,’ he said, the vox chatter dimming as he linked to the colonel commander. ‘This is Cyrus, I am showing massive internal damage data from the secondary plasma generator cluster.’

‘Yes, Epistolary. Confirmed: we are seeing the same. Significant power loss and multiple bulkhead breaches moving along the primary access passage.’

‘We are moving to the blast door junction on the lower mechanical levels. Whatever is coming down that tunnel, we will meet it there. Order all units in the vicinity to that position.’

‘So ordered. I will join you.’

The passage they moved along curved to meet the junction following the circle of the central hub. Ahead, Cyrus could see a cruciform of four passage openings, each many times his height. Arched doors filled a single passage opening. The doors’ surface was worked in brass relief with images of vast machines. At the doors’ centre was the cog-haloed skull of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Beyond the blast door a broad passage spiralled into the centre of the station where the red-robed tech-priests kept the mechanical heart of the station beating. In that heart something had spawned after the Geller field failed.

A wide semi-circular killing ground was forming in front of the closed doors. In the archways of the other doors Helicon Guard were setting up auto cannons, lifting drum feeds of fat rounds to meet the waiting breeches. Some with the black shoulder guards of unit officers were yelling at Guardsmen to form firing lines.

Cyrus reached the junction as the first blow hit the doors from the inside. They rang like a gong. All other sound died. Men and women looked up from their weapons, eyes fixed on the door, listening to the sound of the blow fade. Cyrus turned to face the door. To his side the four brothers of Galba’s Vanguard squad spread out, the motors of their chainblades growling. Valerian hurried his squad back amongst the Helicon Guard, their bulky heavy weapons tracking to cover the doors as they moved.

‘Epistolary, my command is nearly at your position,’ Rihat’s breathless voice crackled over the vox. Cyrus could tell that the man was running.

A second blow hit the doors. Dust trickled from the brass reliefs. The doors glowed red, a heat haze shimmering in front of them.

Cyrus had opened his mouth to reply to Rihat when the third blow struck. The doors burst apart. A vast shape pulled itself through the molten breach. Cyrus had an impression of eyes burning with a furnace heat above a taurian form fused with jagged spider legs. He felt dizzy, the presence and power of the beast beating on his mind like a forge hammer.

The beast roared, its breath a burning gush of vapour. Lines of tracer leapt to meet it, biting into its skin, scoring lines in its metal plating. Cyrus could hear Guardsmen shouting as they fired, terror mixed with defiance in a stream of expletives.

The creature stood for an instant as rounds and energy bolts sparked off its hide. Then it ran forward towards Cyrus and the first line of Guardsmen. It was fast – insect fast – its claws sparking on the deck, piston arms raised above its horned head.

Cyrus threw himself sideways. He hit the floor, the deck plates buckling beneath his weight. The Guardsmen in the first line were not so fast. The beast rammed through the line of bodies, its bladed forelimbs punching through meat and bone, iron fists pistoning down to mash and sever.

Cyrus was on his feet in time to see a second beast pull itself from the ruin of the doors. It looked on the scene with black eyes, a circular mouth of translucent teeth pulsing as if in hunger. Its flesh was a mottled red, the muscles of its arms fused with serrated splits of metal the height of a man. It gave a booming cry and followed its kin into the growing circle of slaughter.

The Helicon Guard lines fragmented, some holding, some running to die in the beasts’ flesh-stripping breath. Cyrus took the scene in a glance, as he drew his force sword, blue fire licking its edge. This was no planned engagement; it was a bloody scramble against terror. Their opportunities to change the battle were like water spilling through their fingers. The two iron beasts were advancing side by side, vomiting warp fire onto those they did not rip apart. There was no sign of Rihat or his reinforcements.

‘We must split them,’ Cyrus said across the vox, charging towards the nearest creature. ‘Valerian, I will draw one to you. Fire once one is isolated. Brothers of Galba, take the legs.’

‘By your will, brother,’ Valerian growled in acknowledgement.

Beside him, Cyrus sensed the four remaining Vanguard of Galba’s squad follow him. The back of one of the beasts was twenty paces away. He could see the pale cartilage of its spine projecting from the slick sinew of its back. He pulled power into his mind, rolling it around, letting it gather hate from his psyche. He stopped ten paces from the beast. The four Vanguard sprinted past him, their death laments crackling through the vox.

He released a part of the power gathered in his mind, sending it out in front of him in an etheric shout of challenge. The beast paused, ragged blade edges dripping red, and turned to look at him. Cyrus looked into its black eyes as they reflected the light of gunfire, and raised his open palm. The beast charged.

This is not what I have seen, thought Cyrus, the thought a whisper in the cyclone of power in his mind. It will not end now.

Five paces away the beast reared, its back legs driving it on as its arms and forelimbs rose ready to bring its blades down on Cyrus. He let the power go. Power arced from his palm and flowed across the beast’s flesh and iron hide. It staggered, forelegs crashing down to scrabble on the floor. Cyrus felt his mind digging into the machinery of the creature’s body, hate and spite writhing through its components, fusing joints and stopping gears. The beast staggered. Cyrus could feel its power gathering to push back at him. He would not be able to hold it back.

The four Vanguard came at the beast’s legs from the sides, chainblades swinging. Motor driven teeth bit into pistons and translucent tendons. Two legs crumpled. A leg whipped up and down, punching a metre-long blade through a Vanguard’s helm and ramming on through his body, pinning it to the floor in a welter of blood.

The beast howled in Cyrus’s mind, shrugging off his psychic shackles. The beast’s body whipped forwards, its jaws closing on the head of a Vanguard with the noise of cracking armour. It lifted the Space Marine off the floor, chewing on armour and flesh before spitting it out with a gout of flame.

Two more gone to the ancestors, thought Cyrus. Two more gone in as many seconds.

‘Valerian! Now!’ he shouted. The Devastators fired before he had finished the order.

Valerian’s squad carried heavy bolters, suspensor-cradled blocks of oiled machinery that cycled explosive rounds through their breeches in a rolling laugh of thunder. The beast arched back as explosions blistered across it spine, ripping wet shreds from its flesh. Somewhere out in the chaos that filled the junction, a Helicon gunner with more will than fear began to fire. Others followed, sputtering lines of shells and pulses of las-bolts converging on the beast. Armour plates buckled and shredded under the hail of impacts. Yellow ichor bled from the beast’s flesh. It tried to turn, its limbs thrashing as if it was trying to fend off a swarm of insects. It screeched, fire spluttering out with the noise as its legs collapsed. Cyrus was close enough to see the thing’s black eyes as its pulped torso scrabbled amongst the ruin of its metal hide. It gave a final growl of rage and dissolved into wreckage and oozing flesh.

In the centre of the Helicon lines, the remaining beast sensed the end of its kin. It turned, its gaze sweeping across the scene, looking for the cause of its twin’s demise. Its furnace eyes fixed on the seven Space Marines of Valerian’s squad. It ran forwards, chewing men to glistening lumps beneath its strides.

Cyrus was already moving, forcing his way through the press of half-panicked Helicon Guard. He could feel the beast’s rage drawing power from the warp as it ground a charnel path towards the Devastators. It was shredding reality in its wake. Half-formed daemons coalesced around its legs, like lesser fish drawn to the bloody kill of a shark. They were slug-like things, congealed out of split corpses, eyes wobbling in suppurating flesh. More of the Helicons began to run.

Valerian stood his ground with his brothers beside him. He was bare-headed, his bolter loose in his hands, controlled fury curling his lip. Unlike many of his brothers, he was unscarred by his century of war, his sculptural features of Sabatine nobility unmarked. He raised his bolter, its barrel scorched by firing, smoke still coiling from its mouth. The beast raised its arm. Pipes jutted from its flesh, forming an irregular fist of tubes bound together by muscle. The beast sent a stream of molten rounds at the Devastators. One of the rounds found the helmet of a White Consul and punched him off his feet in puff of blood and liquefied ceramite. The rest of the squad did not flinch. Valerian waited for the target lock tone to steady, for the range to be optimal. The beast took another step.

‘Fire,’ said Valerian, and beside him the thunder of heavy bolter fire poured out towards the beast. It slowed for a moment, then crossed its arms over its head and torso, thick plates and blades overlapping to create a shield. It strode on into the storm.

Cyrus pushed aside a Guardsman. The space around the beast boiled with daemon kind. Creatures formed of a boiling mass of tentacles and rotting flesh enveloped Guardsmen in acid embraces. The fire from the remaining Guardsmen had dropped to nothing: many were running, more were dead.

Cyrus raised his sword. The price he had paid for the power he wielded was a dull ache in his mind. A daemon creature made of boils and yellow tumours turned a slit eye on him. He stepped forwards.

Would this be it? Was this the moment he had seen?

Flames suddenly gushed through the daemons. Thick, oily fire crawled over rotting flesh, melting fat from rotting bones. Las-bolts punched into the dissolving forms in disciplined volleys.

‘Lord Cyrus,’ Rihat’s voice crackled through the vox. Cyrus looked around to see the colonel commander striding forwards flanked by lines of bronze-armoured figures in black-visored helms. Red smears and soot covered Rihat’s face. His right arm hung loose at his side, the sleeve wet and dark. But there was a defiant look in his eye, and in front of him the flamer units burned their way through the daemon spawn. Creatures with too many limbs and eyes tried to pull themselves forwards even as they collapsed into cinders and smoke.

Cyrus realised that the stuttering roar of heavy bolters had vanished. He turned, looking back to where Valerian’s squad had stood. Flames filled his vision, spreading across the junction floor. Beyond the fire the beast lifted a ruin of bloody meat and white fragments in an iron claw. Cyrus began to run through the flames, purity seals burning, armour blackening. His helmet vision darkened, compensating for the brightness of the fire, objects and movements becoming a series of coloured runes overlaying shifting shadows. The beast’s movements were a bladed blur overlaid with a green grid of lines.

The three remaining Devastators backed off, weapons fire spitting up at the beast as it advanced. Cyrus came out of the flames, the world snapping back to brightness. He saw Valerian twist the priming handle of a melta charge, and duck a scything blade. He reached for the beast’s armoured thorax. The beast reached down, piston jaws flicking shut, as it yanked the sergeant from the ground. It brought the dying Space Marine level with its furnace eyes. Valerian’s hand closed on the detonator with the last of his strength. A sun-bright sphere swallowed the sergeant and the beast’s arm with a shriek of super-heated air. The beast rocked back, a cry like grating steel splitting the air.

Cyrus took his last strides, muscles and armour straining, his mind pulling power through him in a raw rush. He realised he was shouting; the names of his fallen brothers, of the dead worlds and lost wars, pouring from his lips. The beast sensed him, turned, blades scything downwards. Cyrus struck.

The blow buried the sword to the hilt in oil-black flesh. Inky liquid gushed from the wound. It stank of promethium and decay. A soul-born rage poured from Cyrus into the blade. All he could feel was the tide rolling through him, the anger of his soul given form by the warp. He felt…

…blood dripping from his armour as he walks through a familiar door…

A thing with the head of a vulture is laughing. The sound is like a murder of crows….

An astropath turns in a cone of green light. The astropath is laughing. It has two faces…

He is fading to nothing…

Cyrus awoke to fading screams and dimming fires. He lay amongst the ruin of his enemy, the warped machinery draped with tatters of oily flesh that were slowly dissolving to a sickly sheen. His hand still clasped his sword, its edge glimmering with a fading echo of power.

Pulling himself to his feet he felt the fever-ache of the psychic power he had channelled. Every movement brought a dull stab of pain. He looked around, his vision filling with threat assessment icons. The dead were thick on the floor and pools of flame cast the scene in a mottled orange light. No threat icons. They had won.

Cyrus saw Rihat approaching. The colonel was limping slightly, his left arm bloody and cradled at his side.

‘Victory, colonel,’ Cyrus said with a grim smile.

Rihat did not smile back; he looked grey, pain held back by will alone. ‘The enemy has broken through in many places. I am not even sure if some of the defences still hold.’ He grimaced as pain shot through his face. ‘I do not think they have penetrated into the civilian areas. Not yet.’

Cyrus heard the fatalism in the colonel’s voice. ‘We will hold, colonel. We will hold no matter the cost.’ A surprised look passed across Rihat’s face, as if he had puzzled out a hidden truth. He opened his mouth to speak. He did not get the chance.

The voice spoke inside their skulls. ‘By the power and grace of the God-Emperor of Mankind, and the authority and majesty of His Holy Inquisition, judgement is proclaimed on this place and on all souls within its bounds.’

It was a single psychic voice made of many telepathic minds all transmitting the same message. It echoed through the warp with such force that it filled the mind of every person on Claros station. It was an announcement of judgement, a herald of intent.

‘All are judged lost and the hammer will so fall. Exterminatus is here declared. May the Emperor have mercy on all true souls.’

The voices faded. Rihat looked at Cyrus, fear and confusion playing across his face. Cyrus staggered as a wave of psychic energy hit. It was the bow wave of a fleet punching back from the warp into reality with hammer-blow force.

Around them shocked silence was breaking into blind panic.

No. Cyrus would not let everything be consumed by the Inquisition’s judgement. Not again, not after the price they had already paid. He turned to Rihat, ordering the last two of Valerian’s squad to his side with a gesture. ‘The Inquisition is here. Their ships will take some time to get within firing range. Get as many people as you can to the Aethon. We will break dock and outrun the Exterminatus.’ He gave a ferocious grin. ‘They can try and stop us but we still have teeth.’

Rihat was frowning. ‘Colonel?’ Cyrus said.

Rihat looked up at him. ‘The Inquisition knew that this place was under attack. But how? You and Colophon said that no messages could be sent?’

Cyrus suddenly felt cold. He thought of his visions, of the sensation of a future growing closer, a vision of an astropath turning in green light. An astropath with two faces. ‘Where is Colophon?’ he growled.

‘I do not know, lord,’ shrugged Rihat.

Cyrus nodded, his eyes focused on nothing, his mind racing. Colophon: the word he had thought he had heard in the signal. He felt as if all the threads of choices and half-glimpsed futures were weaving together, tightening into a single strand. He looked back at Rihat and his last two brother Space Marines. ‘The station is lost. Evacuate everyone you can, if I do not return you have command.’

Rihat turned and began to shout orders as Cyrus strode away. He knew where he would find what he needed, where fate was leading him.

‘Where are you going, lord?’ called Rihat.

‘For answers,’ growled Cyrus to himself.

There were nine ships. Five destroyers rode on bright cones of fire ahead of their greater sisters. Behind the destroyers were two Adeptus Astartes strike cruisers, their crenellated hulls coloured and marked with the deep sea blue of the Star Dragons. Beside them the spear-sleek hull of a Dauntless-class cruiser sliced through the void. At the centre of them all was a vast craft of black metal, its hull capped with towers, its prow a golden point of swept eagle wings. At its birth it had been named for a hero of a lost past; reconsecrated in the service of the Inquisition it bore a name more suited to its task. The Sixth Hammer was an executioner, a slayer of worlds. One day it might return to the fleet from which it had been drawn, but at that moment it served the will of the man who watched Claros station grow nearer from its bridge.

Inquisitor Lord Xerxes watched the magnified view of Claros station on a vast holoscreen suspended in front of his throne. The view was stripped bare of tactical data and information icons. He did not need them, nor did he trust artificial aids to judgement. Judgement was a matter of clear-sightedness, something to be decided with the simplest tools and senses available to mankind. On the screen the warp-rift was a wound leaking swirling colours and tendrils of coiling energy. The station, or what remained of it, crawled with writhing ghost light. There was no hope for it, there never had been.

Xerxes turned the slot eyes of his iron face to the two figures that stood to his left. One wore segmented armour lacquered in arterial red over a powerful frame, his face hidden by a black cloth hood. The other was a spindle-thin form of clicking brass joints and desiccated flesh held together by bundles of tubes. The spindle figure wore no mask because it had no real face. Both were inquisitors, the only remaining two of the cell Xerxes had drawn around him. They had lost two of their number, one to the Accursed Eternity, another to folly, but their resolve had never wavered. They had hunted the creature called Fateweaver across the stars, executing the planets the daemon invaded, seeking for a way to cast it back into the warp for another aeon. Where they found the daemon they burned the ground from under it. They were the left hand of the Emperor and it was their duty as much as it was their right.

‘The judgement has been spoken?’ asked Xerxes, his flat voice coming from the horizontal slot in his mask.

‘Yes,’ said the spindle-bodied inquisitor in a mechanical voice. ‘The astropathic choir has transmitted it across the void. Any still alive on the station will know that judgement will be done.’

Xerxes nodded. ‘When we are in range the rest of the fleet is to begin the attack. Nothing is to be left for the warp.’ He looked back to where the station’s bronze hull writhed in the warp’s grasp. ‘Nothing but ashes and silence.’

‘Astropath.’

The word echoed in the empty silence of the astropathic chamber. The hunched figure in green turned his blind face to follow the fading noise as it reflected from the empty stone tiers.

‘Cyrus? That is you, isn’t it, my friend?’ Colophon’s voice added its own echoes to the empty gloom. The astropathic chamber lay at the heart of the station, a sanctuary as far from the advancing daemon forces as was possible. It was deserted, quiet, and dark. What need did the blind have for light?

Cyrus moved out of the shadowed arch of the entrance, armour purring with every movement. He had his storm bolter in his right fist, its twin mouths pointed at the hunchbacked old man. The blue surface of his armour was charred and streaked with drying fluids. He looked like a revenant dragged from a death pyre.

‘It is Cyrus.’ The Librarian’s voice was a low growl. Colophon twitched towards him, his liver-spotted hands clutching the top of his cane. Bathed in the monochrome tint of Cyrus’s helmet display he looked scared. No, he looked terrified.

‘The Inquisition is coming,’ Colophon stammered. ‘They will hammer this place to nothing and all of us with it. We should g–’

‘Why did you deceive me?’ Cyrus kept his distance from the old man, walking a slow circle around Colophon’s green-robed form. The single targeting rune in his helmet display was an unresolved amber, pulsing over the old man.

‘I have not deceived you.’ Colophon stayed where he was, speaking to the air rather than following Cyrus’s movements. Cyrus carried on, discarding Colophon’s reply without thought.

‘The signal, it has been puzzling me ever since we got here. How could it be sent when we were cut off as soon as the attack began? I am not as adept as you at astropathic transmission, but I touched the warp and felt that we were isolated as you said.’

Colophon drew his green robes around him as if against a chill wind. ‘I don’t understand what you are saying.’ He shook his head and took a few steps towards the door of the chamber. ‘We should go. We could escape on your ship, we–’

‘But the signal did get sent. It drew me here, drew the Inquisition here no doubt.’ Cyrus gave a humourless laugh. ‘Temporal distortion; you suggested it to me, and I did not consider an alternative.’ The old man opened his mouth as if to say something, but Cyrus kept speaking, suspicion and anger making his voice a low rumble of restrained threat. ‘You sent the signal, Colophon. You brought me here, and you have brought the final execution of the Inquisition down on this place.’

Colophon shook his head, shock and anger on his face.

‘You are mad, my friend,’ Colophon spluttered. ‘You do not–’

‘But how could you veil the warp with pain that even I could feel? And why would you lure people here like playing pieces only to destroy them?’ Cyrus drew his sword. ‘There is one creature that could do such things, that could watch from within while its kin came from beyond…’

Colophon flinched back as the sword kindled with cold light. ‘I am–’

‘A creature that could seem to be flesh and blood.’ Cyrus felt the weight of the sword in his hand, its power icy in echo of his fury. ‘Tell me, astropath, if I cut you, how will you bleed?’

‘I…’

‘Fateweaver.’ Cyrus said the name and Colophon flinched as if struck. Inside Cyrus’s helm the threat rune turned red. He took a step forwards, his voice a low rumble of menace. ‘Is that a name you recognise?’

‘I am only an astropath,’ wailed Colophon.

Cyrus thought of all the worlds that had been dragged down into the mire of the warp, of the pyre smell of dead Kataris. He felt a fool, he had been manipulated. His visions and his ideals had been turned against him. He did not know why a daemon would play such a game; he did not want to know. The creature in front of him was alone and bound in human flesh that he could destroy. His finger began to squeeze on the storm bolter trigger; his sword glowed brighter in his hand.

His finger froze on the trigger. He could not move his limbs, sweat prickled his skin and he could feel the crystals of his psychic hood become ice-cold as they fought against the psychic power that held him. It had enveloped him so quickly that he had not even sensed its touch.

‘You truly are a fool, Space Marine.’ The voice came from behind him, the contempt in its tone ringing clear in the still air.

‘I am sorry,’ said Colophon, the lie spread across his face in a smile. Cyrus heard steps and the clicking of a staff draw nearer. He tried to call on his own power, but the influence focused on him was like a flexing coil that shifted and tightened even as he pushed against it.

‘He is not the daemon you call Fateweaver, at least not wholly,’ said the mocking voice, now just behind his back. The willow-thin form of Hekate stepped out in front of him. Her eyes glittered brightly and the winged jewel in her staff pulsed with cold radiance. She stood beside Colophon, the old man appearing all the more bent and vulture-like by her side. ‘The daemon has two heads, Space Marine,’ she said, and smiled.

Cyrus felt as if he was falling, assumptions and truths trailing behind him in tatters.

Colophon was shaking his head as if in sorrow, the wrinkled folds of his thin neck trembling. ‘It will be all right, friend,’ the astropath said, and Cyrus felt the complete falsity in the words.

Hekate blinked slowly and walked closer to Cyrus so that she could look up at him.

‘You will die soon, Space Marine.’ She nodded carefully. ‘But first you must come and see.’ She smiled and the world spun into fragments.

Cyrus was falling, disconnected sensations flicking through him: the taste of spiced wine; the brush of a feather on skin; pain; the face of his father, hollow and broken; the reek of corpses; colours flowing without form or pattern; the sound of the sea throwing stones at a cliff. All surfaced and faded faster than he could grasp. He wanted to cry out but he had no mouth.

The world flickered into being around him.

He sat on the top of a parapet of warm stone under a sky of clear blue. Looking down he saw a tower wall that descended to a settlement. The low dun stone buildings clustered around the tower’s base like young suckling at a mother. Smoke rose from chimneys, scented with flavours of cooking meat and spice. Beyond the frayed edges of the settlement a plain stretched to the sky’s base, its surface rippling as a warm wind stirred the green sea of crops.

The sun was warm on his face, the fabric of a white and blue tunic soft against his skin. He clenched his fist, felt the muscles and bones bunch.

‘Quite real,’ said a voice next to him, and he looked up with a start. Ochre robes swathed the figure that sat next to him, its hunched form hidden by the fabric that stirred and twitched in the wind. Within the shadow of the hood Cyrus thought he saw glimmers of blue, like distant stars in a night sky. For a moment he thought of pitching the robed figure from the parapet, of watching it fall to a pulped ruin on the ground below.

He looked at the hooded figure and shook his head. ‘Which head speaks? The one that tells the truth or the one that lies?’

The robed figure chuckled. ‘Very good, Space Marine. You begin to perceive truly. A little late it is true but–’

‘Where have you brought me, daemon? I will not bend my knee to your kind.’

The figure laughed. To Cyrus it sounded like the cry of carrion birds across a dead land.

‘I am not here to corrupt you, Space Marine. I have claimed greater souls than yours, and you flatter yourself to think that you could resist if I tried. Corruption is not my intent. I am here to illuminate you, so that you can understand what has happened and what has led you to where you are.’

‘Why?’ he growled.

‘Does a friend and fellow traveller need a reason to grant a gift? A last gift.’

Cyrus thought he could hear the tones of Colophon’s voice in the words.

The figure raised a wide, yellow sleeve as a limb with too many joints extended to point down into the town with a taloned finger. ‘Look,’ it said.

Cyrus looked. Amongst the figures moving through the streets, two walked next to each other. One was a tall woman wrapped in dark cloths, a sour expression on her face. Beside her, a man with a bent back limped to keep up, a worn wooden pole clutched in his wrinkled hands.

‘You,’ said Cyrus.

‘Yes, my two faces.’

‘Where is this place?’

‘When, might be a better question. You know it, though you may not recognise it.’ Cyrus felt suddenly cold despite the sun.

‘Kataris,’ breathed Cyrus.

Beside him the figure gave a clicking laugh.‘Very good.’ It pointed to the clear sky. ‘Watch.’

A crack opened in the sky. Its edges were silver-white and within it was black. The sky darkened, purple and red clouds spreading like a bruise across pale skin. In the town below, people had begun to look up and the screaming started. Amongst the panic the tall woman and limping man pressed on towards the tower’s base. Out on the plains, fires had begun to kindle and, amongst the smoke, shapes slithered and loped towards the settlement. Sirens began to wail.

‘You caused this,’ Cyrus growled. ‘You summoned your kin to this world and killed it.’

‘Perhaps I caused its extinction. In a broad sense that might be true.’ The figure paused. ‘But I did not summon my kin here. Not intentionally at least.’ It turned its hooded head, the shadowed face twisting further than a neck should allow. ‘See.’

Cyrus turned, realising that it had never occurred to him to look behind them.

It was not a tower they sat on; it was a landing platform. Behind them, the hulls of lighters and heavy lifters baked in the sun. People were already rushing amongst them attaching fuel hoses; the whine of engines was rising to a shriek.

Fights were breaking out amongst those trying to get away. Cyrus saw a man in the robes of a prefect shot in the face when he tried to stop the ramp of a lifter closing. Others were simply battered aside by those that were stronger than them. The man and woman moved amongst the confusion, seemingly unseen by others. Cyrus watched as they ducked into the hold space of a lighter. A moment later it rose into the sky, heading for one of the few ships clustered around the planet. Others followed, the noise of their engines lost amongst the screams of the settlement and the first howls of the daemons.

‘You fled?’ Cyrus looked at the figure beside him.

‘Yes, Space Marine. I fled.’

‘Why?’

‘Because my kin did not come to this pitiful place for the clutch of worthless souls that breathed its air.’ The figure turned its hooded head back to the settlement. Blood was already flowing through its streets. ‘They came for me.’

‘For you?’

‘Yes, for me. I have many enemies amongst my kind. Some are my enemies because I laid them low or humiliated them. And then of course there is jealousy: jealousy of the power I had, jealousy of my favour in the eternal court of change.’ The figure shrugged. ‘We are daemons, fragments of the will of greater beings made of lies and hate. Our grudges are never simple, merely eternal.’ Cyrus saw the implication of what the thing was saying.

‘You were hiding.’

‘Well done, friend,’ said the figure in Colophon’s voice.

‘Why?’ said Cyrus. The world around him faded, its dying screams becoming distant murmurs of horror.

‘That question again,’ came the daemon’s voice from the fading world.

Cyrus could see nothing, He was falling again.

‘Because I am blind, Space Marine,’ said the daemon, its voice becoming faint and distant. Cyrus felt something like feathers brush his skin in the blackness. ‘Because I am blind.’

Cyrus opened his eyes and saw the world of his birth. The daemon stood next to him as he watched the Black Ships come to the skies of his childhood. Its yellow robe fluttered in the wind, the cowl hanging down its hunched back. Its hands clutched the fabric around its tall form, the gesture reminding Cyrus of Colophon pulling his green robes closer around him. It had two heads on long, feathered necks. Each was like the skinless skull of a vulture. Azure blue eyes, without iris or pupil, stared at him from each head.

‘The past,’ said one head in a voice that sounded like Hekate’s. The other was looking up at the dark silhouettes of the spacecraft drifting in low orbit. ‘Your past, Space Marine. The world that made you before it burned. I can see this because this is the past. These are dead and unchanging moments in the flow of time.’

The daemon shivered and the world changed, moving through images like cards dealt from a pack.

Here the command chamber of the Aethon, Cyrus watching the shape of an astropath turning in cold green light.

Here warships danced amongst lines of fire and spinning debris, their engines roaring as they turned before the ramming prows of spear-shaped warships. They turned too slowly and died, debris dribbling out of their broken hulls.

‘The past,’ came the daemon’s voice as Cyrus blinked from one moment to another. ‘All this is past. I am a weaver of fate, an oracle who sees all the paths of the future. That is my power, my advantage over my rivals and the thing that once kept me out of their jealous reach.’

Here Phobos, his sword held above him, the death lament on his lips.

‘But now I am blind, the future is lost to me. I cannot see past the present. This dead past is all that I can see.’

And here Space Marines in blue armour moved through rooms covered in rust brown dust. They have rearing dragons on their shoulder plates. But I have seen this, he thinks as he watches. I have seen this and it is not the past. It is the future.

The daemon continued, ignorant to Cyrus’s realisation.

‘While I am blind I cannot stand against my kin and so they hunt me across your worlds.’

Cyrus saw something move under the soft layer of dust, like a wave pushed across the surface of water by a shark. A shape is rising from the dust. He shouts but the blue armoured Space Marines do not hear. The shape becomes a figure. It rises from the floor slowly, features forming on its powdered surface. It reaches towards the Space Marines. Cyrus can sense the death hunger of the figure. He shouts again and the mouth of the dust figure moves.

You die now, he says with a voice like sand blown on a dry wind. The Space Marines turn to look at him. He is reaching for them.

He looks at his hands.

They are made of dust.

His vision blinked out and Cyrus was falling through swirling starlight and rushing sensation.

They had returned to the astropathic chamber. Colophon and Hekate stood in front of him.

‘You, Cyrus Aurelius,’ said Hekate as Colophon nodded. ‘I cannot see past you. You are a block in my sight, the point I cannot see past. I never saw you coming here and I cannot see your future now, only your past.’

Cyrus tried to move his limbs but found that they were still locked in place.

‘I let you live until now,’ Hekate continued. ‘You had a purpose in keeping my kin at bay. You might even have won here. But now the Inquisition come and the daemons that hunt me are at my heels, and so I must run and hide again.’ She stepped back. ‘So you must die.’

Hekate turned to walk away, but Colophon paused and smiled up at Cyrus.

‘Thank you for the ship that you have so helpfully ordered to run before the Inquisition’s fury. It was most kind of you.’ He patted Cyrus’s unmoving armour and limped after Hekate.

On the highest tier of the chamber silent figures in green robes stepped from the shadows. Warp light shone in their blind eyes. There were eighty-one of them: the survivors of the attack on the astropaths. But he understood then that they had not survived. Those that had resisted had died, those who survived had become bound to Fateweaver. Cyrus could hear a low chattering like the cries of birds and the swish of feathers. Frost was forming under their feet with every step they took down the stone tiers.

‘There is one thing you should know before the end, my friend,’ called Colophon from the doorway.

‘I sent no message,’ said Hekate, and both figures vanished from sight.

The astropaths closed on him. Skin flayed from their new forms as the power of the warp reshaped them. Claws extended from hands and feet. Bones snapped and reset in twisted positions. Fur and feathers spread across stretched flesh. Cyrus was at the centre of a circle of snarling creatures.

Cyrus felt the force holding him weaken. Straining with all his will he felt his fingers move on the grip of his sword. His limbs trembled with effort, sweat coating him as he felt muscles shift. Threat runes swarmed his sight.

I have failed, he thinks. This is no longer the future, it is the present. I have failed and here I fall.

III

BOUND

The strike cruisers were the first to fire. Linear accelerators mounted along their spines spoke with one voice. Explosions blossomed off the station’s void shields, splashing against domes of energy that shimmered as they collapsed. On the strike cruisers’ flank the spear shape of the light cruiser turned on its axis, presenting a flank of macro batteries to the station. Bolts of plasma and explosive shells the size of battle tanks streaked across the void.

On board the smaller destroyers officers waited until the station’s shield envelope was on the edge of failing. As the blasts rippled over the last layers of shielding they launched torpedoes. Each carried a melta warhead. They were not intended to destroy but to cripple and burn. For the final killing blow they had other more exotic weapons to unleash.

The Sixth Hammer remained silent, like a king of old watching his young knights take the first blood. From his brass throne Inquisitor Lord Xerxes watched as the perfectly timed torpedo volley struck the station at the instant the last void shield collapsed. He nodded in brief satisfaction and raised his sceptre, its golden length worked with High Gothic script, its tip a leering daemon face of jade. He had killed many worlds and he preferred the final blows to fall at the simplest of commands.

‘Fire,’ he said, and The Sixth Hammer shook at his word.

Claws raked across Cyrus’s armour. Wild psychic energy lashed at him, slithering from clawed hands searching for weaknesses in his armour. Distorted faces filled his vision biting at him with pointed ivory teeth. He could hear them laughing and babbling in death-dry voices. His arm moved, lifting his storm bolter, dragging upwards as if pulling against tangling webs. Something sharp and serrated found a weak join in his armour. He began to bleed.

The deck quaked under his feet, trembling as if in time with distant thunder. The Inquisition had begun its bombardment.

Anger rolled through him, anger at his own stupidity. He knew he must fail: he had seen it. These were not new moments, they were past memories of visions being lived for the first time. A thing with a withered face was eye to eye with him, its clawed fingers cradling his helmet, razor tips alive with warp light as they reached for his eye pieces.

I will not fall to this fate! He bellowed the thought and the fallen astropaths fell back from him. He seized the anger that boiled through his mind and ripped free of the force that held him. Power flowed from him, radiating outwards as lightning spilled from his sword’s edge. His storm bolter spat, pumping explosive rounds through the twisted figures.

The sword was hot in his hand, the fury at its core bright with his rage. He cut into bodies with the death lament on his lips.

The station was dying. Rihat knew it. Blood red emergency light suffused the trembling docking corridor, and he could hear the low hiss of atmosphere bleeding into the void through cracks. The doors of the Aethon’s docking bay remained open as the dwindling stream of people swarmed through them. They had got as many as they could, but there were many more that they had left: hundreds trapped in parts of the station that could not be reached, pockets of Guardsmen surrounded and dying to the creatures that swarmed into the station even as it was torn apart. He had spoken to many of them over the vox, listening to their curses and cries over the spilling static. If he survived he knew he would hear those voices again for years to come, ghost voices cursing him from his dreams.

‘We must close the dock, colonel,’ called one of the last two White Consuls from just beyond the toothed blast doors. ‘The station is coming under sustained bombardment. It will begin to break apart soon. If we are to outrun its death we must break dock.’

Rihat shook his head. ‘Not yet. There are more who may reach us. Your Librarian ordered me to save all I could. I will honour that order.’

The Space Marine paused for a moment then gave a curt nod.

Rihat looked back to the people passing him. Grey-robed menials hurried beside purple-mantled prefects. Bloodied and pale-faced Guardsmen, some still cradling their weapons, jostled beside tech-adepts and slab-muscled ratings.

‘Colonel, we must break dock now.’ The harsh voice made his head snap around. Hurrying towards him were Hekate and Colophon, the bent-backed astropath wheezing as he kept up with the psyker’s long strides. ‘The bombardment will claim the station in moments; you must give the order now.’

Rihat looked from Hekate to Colophon. The old man looked pale, almost shivering with fear.

‘What of Cyrus? He went to find you?’

The old man shook his head. ‘I have not seen him,’ he said.

‘Colonel–’ began Hekate, but he cut her off.

‘We will go at the last possible moment, mistress.’ He gestured at the few people that hurried towards the dock, but kept his eyes locked with the psyker’s stare ‘The last possible moment.’ Hekate glanced at the two Space Marines bracketing the open blast doors, and people still passing through. ‘I suggest you get on board. There is not much time.’

The psyker curled her lip but walked away towards the Aethon, Colophon limping in her wake.

They came for him again, a tide of teeth, and claws. His storm bolter was silent and empty, discarded on the corpse-strewn floor. Lightning arced from his hand, leaping from body to body. Many fell but the rest still came forwards, scrambling over the dead with vulture cries. They reached him, claws scoring through armour, opening its polished innards to shine in the light of their dead eyes. Cyrus could feel strength leaching from him through a dozen wounds. With a grunt of effort he raised his sword above his head, both hands wrapped around the worn grip. A withered creature hissed at him as it lunged forwards. His first cut split it in two. The second cut scythed through another’s stomach and spine.

Something struck him from behind, his shoulder armour splitting as pain stabbed through him. His knee buckled to the ground. He could taste his own blood. Around him he could feel the creatures that had been astropaths laugh at him through the warp.

He could feel the worn joints of the armour gauntlet against his fingers, and the dull pressure of his fingers still gripping his sword. He had expended every weapon he had, used every skill he knew, and still he would fall to the fate he had foreseen. The creatures closed on him. He looked up, pulling himself to his feet. There was one thing, one terrible thing that he had not yet dared to do. It was a monstrous thing, a thing warned against and as difficult to survive as it was to control. Inside his helmet he smiled grimly to himself. With the last shred of his focused will he reached out and ripped a hole through reality.

The creatures fell back as Cyrus stood. The air around him was an accelerating cyclone of flickering power. He ripped the hole wider, his mind holding the vortex in front of him. It opened wider and wider, spinning with distorting shreds of reality. Twisted bodies vanished into the spinning hole, sucked through it with shrieks of anger and fear. For a second Cyrus held the vortex controlled, felt his mind try and grasp the thing he had birthed into being. He began moving a second before he lost control. The vortex broke from his grip with a shriek like shattering glass. Its black maw ripped wider, spinning everything it touched to nothingness.

Cyrus ran for the doors, feeling his wounded body fill with pain as he moved. Behind him the maw of the vortex grew with a hungering shriek.

The station burned. Red fire ate through armour plating, sucking the oxygen from its innards, twisting the bones of its structure until they cracked and distorted like the broken spine of a dying leviathan. Warp fire mingled with the blaze, daemonic faces rising and falling through the flames.

The circling ships of the execution fleet silenced their guns for an instant, pausing before the last blow fell. A narrow spread of torpedoes spat from the prow of The Sixth Hammer. Black darts running on bright trails, they carried the most esoteric and dangerous of payloads. As they struck the heart of the station the vortex mechanisms created a rippling chain of holes through reality. Black centred spirals opened in an overlapping cyclone that pulled the station into oblivion.

Cyrus ran through corridors filled with smoke and wreckage. His helmet display was pulsing with environmental warning icons that told him of sudden pressure changes, spiking toxicity and fatal oxygen levels. His torn armour was bleeding air from multiple rents. Some of the fibre bundles running through the armour had been severed. He could feel his muscles tearing as they hauled the armour’s dead weight through a limping run.

He turned a corner and saw the armoured doors of the dock still open, the docking bay of the Aethon beyond lit by strobing warning lights. There was a figure slumped over the dock controls, a last soul standing guard over the gates to safety.

Rihat was dying, his skin pale with oxygen debt, but his hand was still clamped over the door controls keeping the doors open to the very last moment. Cyrus paused. Behind him the long passage was beginning to twist and buckle.

‘Colonel,’ he said. The man did not move. ‘Rihat.’ His eyelids flickered and his blue lips mouthed something that Cyrus could not hear. Back down the passage a wide tear opened in the wall, spreading across ceiling and floor, sucking flames and air into the blackness beyond. Cyrus reached down to lift the colonel but the man had stopped moving, his eyes staring without seeing. Cyrus thought of saying something, whispering a last word to the man’s soul. He thought of the station that was being torn apart at that moment, as many dying within it as might have reached the Aethon, and could think of nothing that would give the dead comfort.

Cyrus moved the man’s hand from the dock controls. With a sound of hissing pistons the Aethon’s blast doors began to close. He walked alone between the closing teeth as the ship broke its bond with the station. Behind him the passage came apart with a shriek of rending metal.

The vortices swallowed the last of the station’s carcass. On their edge, the white hull of an Adeptus Astartes battle-barge turned, engines straining to claw against the forces pulling it back into the waiting mouths of the growing vortices.

On his throne Inquisitor Xerxes saw the ship slip from the imploding debris of the station and make for open space, noting the heraldry of the White Consuls. A noble Chapter indeed but one laid low in recent times. The loss of such a ship would be a blow to a brotherhood fading into history. But he could not permit any to outrun a decree of Exterminatus. He nodded to one of the bridge officers and watched as the destroyers and light cruiser accelerated into a looping course that would cut the ship off before it could reach the system’s edge.

The closed doors to the Aethon’s bridge waited in front of him. The carved images of Sabatine glinted in the light of braziers on either side. He paused, tasting the breath that flowed in and out of his lungs.

The daemon would have gone to the bridge to be close to the centre of decisions and authority, to ensure it could influence its own escape. He had hurried through the ship, passing servitors and confused knots of refugees from the station. He had felt tremors run through the ship as its engines fought against the pull of the vortices that had taken the station.

He had stopped in front of the bronze doors. Flickers of half-remembered visions poured through his mind. He knew what would happen, what all the fragmentary glimpses would amount to, the price that would have to be paid.

Slowly he reached up, unlocking his helmet from his armour and tossing it onto the deck. He let out a long breath. The suppressed pain of his wounds was a spreading numbness across his body. He brought his sword up, resting his forehead against the flat of the blade. It was cold against his skin. He thought of the ash of a dead world in his fingers, of his brothers shouting their death lament, of Rihat mouthing unheard last words, of looking up to see a Black Ship in a blue sky.

‘It is what we were made for,’ he muttered to himself and pushed the bronze doors open.

‘Fateweaver.’ He said its name as the doors swung wide. Faces turned to look at him as he strode onto the bridge, his blackened armour grinding with every step. In front of him the command throne of the ship rose at the centre of a long platform. Clusters of servitors sat hunched over system readouts, a few white-robed serfs moving amongst them. Armoured shutters sealed the viewports that lined the walls of the bridge. A spinning holo-display hung in the air before the command throne. Icons moved in the green gridded projection, showing relative positions and trajectories of ships.

Colophon and Hekate stood together next to the empty throne, the two White Consuls beside them. All of them turned as Cyrus walked towards them. Hekate’s face twisted with anger, Colophon’s with shock and surprise. Cyrus opened his mouth to call to his brothers, the order to fire forming on his tongue. He never got to speak it.

With a sound of bursting skin and laughter the figures of Colophon and Hekate exploded. Their flesh came apart, skin and glistening muscle hanging briefly in the air as if pinned out on an invisible dissection table. A rank smell of exposed organs and sweet incense filled the bridge, making Cyrus gag. The stretched faces of the old man and the psyker grinned from the elongating and distorting curtain of flesh. The lengths of muscle and skin began to wind together like strands of twine spun into a knotted rope. The flesh changed colour and form. Feathers and claws sprouted and grew. Blue light surrounded the growing shape, weaving through it in bright coils. Wings formed on a hunched back. Skin hung loose over long limbs tipped with bird-like claws. Two long, feathered necks shook themselves in the spinning light before turning to look down at Cyrus. Mismatched eyes stared from above hooked beaks. The daemon laughed with both heads, the sound like the cries of a murder of crows.

Cyrus’s two brothers brought their bolt pistols up and fired. A rippling shimmer formed around the shells. They turned in their trajectory and began to orbit the daemon like fireflies. Around them the bridge fell to madness. Servitors ripped themselves from their housings, collapsing onto the floor in pools of oil. Serfs and officers doubled over, vomiting yellow bile onto the deck. With a flick of its hand the daemon sent the bolt shells spiralling away to explode amongst the crew. It raised a clawed limb, iridescent fire sheathing its talons as it pointed at Cyrus. The beaked mouths cracked open to speak.

Cyrus charged, his sword raised above his right shoulder. His muscles tore as they drove his armoured form forwards. He felt a calm settle over him; he could see what would happen, his vision of the future riding just ahead of the present. The moment expanded, dragging through instants. It was his purpose to be there, to make the choice that he could sense waiting for him just beyond the horizon of the present. All was happening as it always was going to, as it would always have to.

The sword sheared through the daemon’s sheath of energy and bit into feathered flesh. There was a burst of multihued light. The daemon lurched back, screeching in pain, half collapsing to the deck. Cyrus brought his sword up, spinning its long hilt through his hands, and rammed its point down through the daemon’s torso, skewering it to the deck.

He paused, looking down at the daemon. The two heads laughed. Its body began to break apart, dissolving into luminous vapour. The glowing daemon essence flowed into the deck of the ship, rooting itself in the Aethon, spreading through its bones.

Cyrus let go of the sword hilt. There was nothing he could do about what would happen next, about the fate to which he had condemned the ship and all on board. He had known he could not kill the daemon; not truly. It would always have the power to cling onto existence somehow. But he had broken its psychical form and he knew it would do everything it could not to flee back to the warp. The only way it could now survive was by taking the substance of the ship as its host.

The fabric of the Aethon was changing even as he looked at it, distorting as the daemon coiled through its bones. It would change more in the future, becoming something unrecognisable, something accursed. He knew it; he had seen it.

He looked down at the last of the daemon’s physical body, its twin vulture heads twitching amongst liquefying flesh and feathers.

‘There is something you should know,’ he said as the daemon hissed. ‘You said you are blind, that you cannot see the future. You said you see only the past endlessly repeated. But what you see is your future, daemon. You are blind because the past is your future.’ Cyrus smiled at the daemon as it faded into the deck. ‘What I see in the future is what you see in the past. You are blind because of this moment, the moment that the future becomes the past. I am the architect of your fate.’

He looked up at the tactical display of the approaching Inquisition fleet, and the slowly collapsing vortices. The spinning holes in reality would take whatever they swallowed into the warp, to ride on wild currents through time and space. Under his feet he could still feel the plasma engines fighting to pull the ship clear of the vortices’ embrace.

Slowly he walked to sit on the command throne and spoke his last order.

‘Shut down the engines.’

A moment later the ship went silent. It drifted on through the void, carried by its momentum. Then it began to slide back towards the vortices that had consumed the station.

On the bridge Cyrus rested his sword across his knees. The bridge was changing, cancerous blooms of distorted metal expanding before his eyes as the daemon sunk its claws deeper into the structure. He had no illusions about what he did. He was condemning the ship, the crew and those who had fled onto it in hope of escape. He was condemning them to an accursed eternity riding through time, bound to an abomination.

In the depths of his psyker’s soul he felt the vortices close over the Aethon. The ship had not raised its Geller fields; it was open to the full force of the warp. Raw psychic power washed through the hull in an invisible wave. Those aboard died a thousand times over, their bodies broken down and remade over and over again before being scattered as dry dust through the halls of the ship.

Cyrus kept his eyes open through it all, holding his body and soul together with the last scrap of his will.

He thought of the signal. The signal that had fixed this fate from the moment he heard it, the signal the daemon had never sent, that no one had ever sent. He closed his eyes and sent his voice out into the warp. His words would become a broken message to trap himself and the daemon, binding their fates together. Somewhere in the bones of the ship the daemon heard his words and howled.

His last unheard confession spoken, he let go and the storm broke his body and soul apart.

The Aethon tumbled on, falling back through time, becoming something new, as was fated.

THE SIEGE OF CASTELLAX

C L WERNER

CHAPTER I

I-DAY MINUS 15

Obedience. Labour. Fidelity.

The three words stretched across the cyclopean wall, each letter ten metres high and stamped in steel. Lines of corrosion bled downwards from each word, scarring the ferrocrete blocks to which they were bolted. At the base of each wall, a narrow gutter carried the oxidised runoff into drainage pits, where it mixed with the waste of the smelters to create a slither of toxic steam that danced in the hot susurrus of the foundry’s machinery.

Yuxiang stared up at those words, feeling them pressing down upon him in all their corroded malignance. From no point in the mammoth processing plant was it possible to escape the steel letters. Like watchful gods, they glared down upon the slaves chained beside the conveyor belts, pneumatic presses, industrial ovens and bubbling slag pits. Every time the great blast furnaces vented a sheet of flame from their stacks, the steel letters reflected a hellish glow, the light of mirrored fires rippling along their length.

Above the din and roar of the conveyors, the fiery growl of the furnaces and the shriek of steam leaving the ovens, it was impossible to escape the low snarl being vomited by the vox-casters scattered about the plant. An endless litany of dry, grim voices chanting the same mantra stamped upon the factory wall.

Obedience. Labour. Fidelity.

The slaves in Processing Plant Secundus Minorus lived by the words that had been drilled into their very souls. Very often, they died by them.

Across the face of Castellax, there were millions who slaved to feed the war machine of their oppressors. Hour after hour, day after day, without rest or respite, they toiled to spread tyranny and destruction across the galaxy. Their only reward was the continuance of life, but for men like Yuxiang, it was enough. They had seen what became of those who defied the lords of Castellax.

Work had halted in Yuxiang’s section. Sometimes the machinery would require maintenance or some fault in the processors mandated a shut down. Such occasions were cause for cheer among the slaves. The reason for the current break, however, didn’t make even the most jaded labourer happy.

Yuxiang watched the whip-thin figure of Prefect Wyre, supervisor of Processing Plant Secundus Minorus, pace along the steel gantry above his section. Wyre’s face was lean and hard, his features stamped with callousness and cruelty. Among the thousands of slaves in the factory, there wasn’t one who hadn’t felt the burn of Wyre’s shock baton against his ribs. As he paced, the prefect slapped the deactivated baton against his palm, the hollow thwack making a menacing accompaniment to the click of his boots against the metal grating.

Kneeling before the prefect was a dishevelled, emaciated man, his scrawny frame draped in the coveralls of a factory slave, the brand of Secundus Minorus etched across his forehead. Blood streamed from the man’s broken nose and with each breath a bubble of blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. The black-clad overseers who flanked the prostrate slave hadn’t been gentle when they subdued him.

‘Who is that?’ The question came in a whisper, uttered by Chingwei, Yuxiang’s alternate at the pneumatic press.

‘Mendes, from Blast Furnace Gamma-four,’ Yuxiang whispered back.

‘An off-worlder,’ Chingwei sighed, a trace of envy in his tone. Yuxiang could understand the sentiment. Whatever fate awaited Mendes, at least the man hadn’t been born into servitude on Castellax. At least he had known some kind of life before he was condemned to the factories.

‘What did he do?’ Chingwei hissed. Despite the horror of the situation, the slave couldn’t restrain his curiosity about the reason for this break in routine.

Yuxiang hesitated before answering, glancing about to make sure none of Wyre’s overseers were near. ‘He made the sign of the aquila,’ he said.

‘Poor, stupid off-world bastard,’ Chingwei said. ‘Wyre will have him shot for that. When will these off-worlders learn?’

The gaunt prefect was launching into a harangue now, his voice raised in a caustic hiss that was amplified into a fiery roar by the factory’s vox-casters.

‘When will you vermin learn?’ Wyre asked. ‘When will you understand that your superstitions will not help you?’ The prefect leaned in, activating his baton and driving the butt of the weapon against Mendes’s midsection. The slave cried out as electricity crackled across his body. He writhed in the grip of the overseers who held him, his captors safe inside their insulated uniforms.

‘You are no longer a man,’ Wyre snapped, turning away from the slave and pacing along the gantry. ‘You do not think. You do not dream. You do not hope.’ He rounded on Mendes, smashing the baton across his mouth. Lightning sizzled through the captive’s clenched teeth. ‘You do not pray!’

Yuxiang watched the torture, impotent rage boiling inside him. He longed to do something, anything to stop the hideous tableau. But he knew there was nothing that could be done. He had seen Wyre at work too many times to hold any delusions that the prefect could be stopped. Any gesture of defiance and he would simply join Mendes in his suffering.

‘Did you really think anyone would answer you?’ Wyre sneered, stabbing the butt of his baton into Mendes’s shoulder. The slave’s body twisted and jerked in a spasm of agony as the shock scorched his flesh. ‘What did you pray for, scum? Did you pray for freedom? Did you pray for justice? Did you ask for revenge?’ The baton crackled against the man’s thigh, searing through the leg of his coverall as Wyre intensified the strength of its discharge. The smell of burned meat drifted down from the gantry.

‘There are none of those things here,’ Wyre announced, turning from his victim and glaring across the upturned faces of the factory’s slaves. He raised his baton, jabbing it over his shoulder, pointing at the steel words on the wall. ‘Obedience. Labour. Fidelity. Those are the only things here! And when you forget that… there is pain.’

Wyre spun around, thrusting the baton into Mendes’s gut. The slave screamed, thrashing wildly in the grip of the overseers. The prefect grinned sadistically as he held the activated shock baton in place, watching it burn into the slave’s body.

‘God-Emperor have mercy!’ Mendes shrieked.

Wyre’s face turned crimson with rage. He drew back the baton, revealing blackened skin where it had rested on the captive’s body. His gloved hand seized the slave’s hair, forcing the man’s face upwards, forcing him to look into the prefect’s blazing eyes. ‘There is no God-Emperor here,’ he spat. His finger ran across the power stud of his shock baton, pushing it to maximum intensity. Electricity danced from the head of the weapon. ‘There is only me!’

Wyre raised the baton to jab it into Mendes’s face, but before the prefect’s blow could land, a thunderous voice called out, ‘Restrain yourself, peon.’

The red rage drained from Wyre’s face, replaced by an ashen pallor. He turned slowly, facing in the direction from which the booming voice had sounded. Immediately, the prefect deactivated his shock baton and dropped to his knees, bowing his head in abject submission.

From the shadow of a loading elevator, a giant stalked out onto the gantry, the steel grates groaning under his armoured weight. The huge figure towered over the black-clad overseers, men chosen for their size and ferocity. His dimensions were superhuman, two metres from crown to toe, as broad as an ore-cart. The ornate armour he wore was a masterwork of ceramite plates, deeply engraved with gilded flames. The giant’s helmet encased his head completely, red optics glaring out from a mask of iron. The face of the helm was pulled forwards in a long beak, its sides carved into the image of a fanged, snarling mouth. Upon one bulky shoulder pauldron, a leering metal skull glowered down at the slaves of Processing Plant Secundus Minorus.

A thrill of terror swept through the assembly. Chains clattered as men covered their eyes, moans of horror rose unbidden from stunned spectators. For once, even the overseers were taken aback, staring with outright fear as the giant marched towards Prefect Wyre.

Yuxiang’s body trembled like a leaf in a storm. He longed to hide his face from the armoured nightmare but found himself as transfixed as a sump-rat watching an ash-viper.

Wyre was nothing. His brutality was nothing. His cruelty was nothing. The prefect was little better than a slave himself, a vassal to the masters of Castellax, a clever pet to the monsters who ruled over Yuxiang’s home world.

Among the slaves, particularly the off-worlders, there were whispers about the warrior angels who defended the Imperium, the semi-divine Adeptus Astartes, supermen who brought battle to the enemies of mankind and enabled the spread of humanity across the stars. They were demigods, sons of the God-Emperor Himself, protectors of His faithful children.

The masters of Castellax were a profane mockery of that holy image. They were angels defiled and corrupted, twisted into things monstrous and obscene.

They were the Iron Warriors.

‘My Lord Rhodaan,’ Wyre addressed the armoured giant, his voice little more than a frightened squeak. ‘You do Processing Plant Secundus Minorus great honour with your presence.’

Rhodaan stopped his march only a few metres from the cowering prefect. When he spoke, his voice was deep and malignant, infected with a metallic snarl by the amplifiers in his helmet. The Iron Warrior didn’t deign to look at the prefect when he spoke, instead fixing his gaze upon the tortured Mendes.

‘Why have you halted production?’ Rhodaan demanded. ‘Why is this Flesh not at its work station?’

Shivering with terror, Wyre risked a look at the slave he had been punishing. ‘I-I was making a-an example of this one.’ He pointed his baton at the slaves below. ‘I felt th-that the others n-needed discipline...’

The Iron Warrior stood in silence for a moment, still staring at Mendes. ‘What did this Flesh do?’ he asked at last.

The question brought beads of sweat dripping down Wyre’s forehead. He swallowed nervously. ‘He was ca-caught making the sign of the aquila.’

Rhodaan’s head turned, the lenses of his helmet boring down upon the trembling prefect. ‘That is unfortunate.’

‘I-I was making a-an example… Reminding th-the rest…’

The Iron Warrior was no longer listening to Wyre. With two steps, Rhodaan reached Mendes. The giant’s ceramite gauntlets closed around the slave’s scrawny forearms. With a single wrenching motion, he broke both of the man’s arms and dropped the screaming wretch at the feet of the overseers.

‘Hang this animal above one of the smelters,’ Rhodaan ordered Wyre as he began to march away. ‘Every minute the creature fails to make the sign of the aquila, you will lower him one centimetre. It will be interesting to see if his faith in the False Emperor sustains him when he feels the kiss of molten titanium on his toes.’

Yuxiang held his gaze on Rhodaan until the Space Marine vanished once more into the shadows around the loading elevator. Only then did he look back at Mendes, watching with horror as Wyre ordered his overseers to secure the mangled man to one of the chains suspended above the closest smelter. With his broken arms, there was no chance Mendes could make the gesture demanded of him. Centimetre by centimetre, he would be lowered towards the molten metal and hideous death.

Truly, the off-worlder would have been better left to the brutality of Wyre. Compared to the Iron Warrior, the prefect’s punishment would have been an act of mercy.

Captain Antares leaned back in his grox-hide command throne and watched as the icy grey globe grew steadily smaller. At this distance, he could just barely make out the superstructures of the transfer stations orbiting the moon. If not for the guide-lights mounted to their docking arms, he doubted if he’d have been able to pick them out from the black starscape which stretched across the bridge’s viewscreen.

Impex V, outermost of the vagabond moons of the Castellax system. For an interplanetary tanker like the Stardrinker, it took two weeks to make the voyage, take on cargo and return. Two weeks of unrelieved monotony and boredom. Impex V to Castellax. Castellax to Impex V. Back and forth, week in and week out. An unbreakable pattern that had ruled Antares’s life for the past seven years, ever since he’d had the misfortune of surviving an Iron Warriors slave raid and become one of their thralls.

Antares rose from his throne, hearing the heavy grox-hide adjust itself to his vanished weight. Idly the captain descended the short flight of stairs separating the command dais from the main deck of the bridge. He filed past the technicians labouring at their displays, sometimes pausing to look over a shoulder and study the information scrolling across a screen. Antares didn’t understand half of what he was looking at, but it was more important that his crew thought he did. Efficiency through encouraged paranoia was something the Iron Warriors used to dominate their fleet. Antares found it worked just as well for him on his own bridge.

The captain looked up from the terminal of a sandy-haired officer, frowning at the younger man. ‘Don’t you think we can do better?’ he asked the lieutenant. Antares didn’t wait for an answer, but continued walking the bridge. Any questions might have proved awkward. He wasn’t sure if better meant an increase or decrease.

The black sprawl of the bridge’s pict screen stretched before Antares as he reached the last of the terminals. He paused a moment, staring out at the grey blob which marked Impex V’s position. Two weeks, he thought, and then I’ll be staring at the exact same thing all over again.

It was a problem that had plagued Castellax for a hundred years. Even before the world fell to the Iron Warriors, it had been a desolate place. If not for its vast mineral resources, the Imperium would have bypassed the planet. But Castellax was rich in promethium and heavy metals, so the Imperium had established a colony on the world to exploit the planet’s wealth.

That same wealth had drawn the Iron Warriors. They needed the resources of Castellax to feed their great war machine, to build new warships for their raider fleets, tanks and guns for their marauding armies. After seizing control of the planet, they had instituted a policy of savage exploitation that made the Imperium’s industry pale by comparison. Such rampant ravaging of the planet had not been without its consequences. The seas were drained to feed the factories and strip mines, the water table under the planet’s surface was hopelessly corrupted by industrial waste. After a century of occupation by the Iron Warriors, there wasn’t a spoonful of freestanding water left on Castellax that wasn’t nine-parts toxic sludge.

The Iron Warriors had been forced to look elsewhere to feed Castellax’s thirst. In the frozen outer moon of Impex V, they found their solution. Orbital stations were brought to surround the moon, each station deploying hundreds of small barges which would fly down to harvest the ice. A fleet of tankers like the Stardrinker would then collect it, ferrying the huge frozen blocks back to Castellax, a continuous chain of supply to keep the fires of industry burning.

‘Captain Antares!’ one of the officers suddenly cried out, breaking Antares’s contemplation of the ice-moon. He turned towards the excited crewman, marching over to his station and staring at the pict screen.

‘These objects just appeared in our starboard quadrant,’ the officer reported. Antares did not know much about the actual operation of his ship, but he was able to recognise the fast-moving blips whose trajectory put them on an intercept course.

‘Could they be elements of the supply fleet?’ Antares asked. The officer shook his head.

‘No, sir. They are too far from Castellax to be fighters and too small to be destroyers.’

As Antares digested the problem of what the blips might represent, the crewmen at the communications relays suddenly clapped their hands to their ears, swiftly turning down the volume of the vox-implants bolted to their skulls.

‘Captain Antares!’ one of them shouted. ‘We’ve tried hailing the blips. Every frequency is being overwhelmed by some kind of strange intercept.’ The comms officer reached down to his terminal. As he depressed an activation rune, vox-casters began to broadcast the weird chatter. It was a confusion of deep grunts and croaking laughter, a bedlam of gruff, brutal vocalisations.

Antares listened to the chatter, a feeling of dread crawling up his spine. He glanced again at the display of the starboard quadrant. The objects were quickly gaining on the Stardrinker. There was no question of them being meteors or any other stellar phenomenon – to maintain their position, the objects had made a deliberate course correction. Only something with awareness could pursue a ship.

‘Raise the defence fleet,’ Antares ordered the comms officer. Tell them we are being menaced by unidentified craft.’

The officer shook his head. ‘We can’t raise anyone, captain. The chatter is across the board. On every frequency.’

Antares stared once more at the display. At their present speed, the unknown ships would intercept the tanker within a matter of a few minutes.

‘All crew to battle stations,’ Antares ordered.

‘Keep trying to break through the interference. Find an open channel. Spread the alarm.

‘We are under attack.’

Bodras curled his gnarled hand around the jug of caff and took a long pull of the fiery drink. It was an old mixture he’d picked up from some gunrunners on the Eastern Fringe, back when his vessel had been an Imperial patrol ship – caff mixed with fermented vespid jelly and twenty grams of cordite. On a ship like the Vulture, it was smart to have a drink none of your crew would touch.

Wiping the treacly residue of the drink from his beard, Bodras shifted in his command throne, staring down into the crew pits flanking the captain’s bridge. The pits were so filled with scanners, relays, exchanges, comms hubs, fire control systems and observation-slates that there was scarcely room for the crew to breathe. The original complement of machinery the frigate had been fitted out with when it left the shipyards of Calth had been greatly augmented in the decades since she had entered the thraldom of the Iron Warriors. Every vessel the Vulture had captured had contributed something to her conqueror’s improvement, augmenting her far beyond the frugality imposed by the Imperial Navy.

Bodras smoothed the front of his brocaded jacket as he rose from his throne. The jacket was two sizes too big for him, but the smoothness of its virgin scand-wool and the jade-studded epaulets were too fine for him to worry overmuch about the garment’s fit. The jacket had belonged to the deputy governor of Galar IX, right up until five seconds before Bodras blew his head off. Such a noble heritage, he felt, was bound to have rubbed off on the jacket – and by extension to himself.

Aristocratic pretensions notwithstanding, Bodras bellowed down at his junior officers, ‘Any sign of that damn scow?’ and punctuated his shout with a cordite-scented belch.

‘Negative, captain,’ called back a hook-nosed lieutenant, the mechanical eye set into his scarred face whirring and buzzing as it focused upon Bodras. ‘We’ve picked up no sign of the Stardrinker.’

‘Did you try raising her?’ Bodras growled. He didn’t care for patrol duty to begin with – any interruption to routine only made it worse.

The one-eyed lieutenant jabbed a thumb over his shoulder to one of the frigate’s comms relays. ‘All we’ve been able to get is a bunch of noise. It’s across all frequencies. Probably solar interference.’

Bodras glared down at the lieutenant. ‘Did that shrapnel take out part of your brain as well as your eye? We’re sixty-four AU from the sun! Any solar activity that could interfere with us here would also burn Castellax to a cinder.’

The lieutenant ran his thumb along his scarred cheek. ‘My… my apologies, captain. I will have the arrays examined for malfunctions.’

‘All six of them?’ Bodras growled. He was beginning to wonder why he’d made this idiot an officer. Something about two kilograms of fire-emeralds if he remembered right. He was reconsidering that bribe right now. What good was all this equipment if the man in charge of it was a moron?

‘Narrow the range of the frequency sweep. If they are using unsecured transmissions on Impex V, we might be catching echoes.’ Bodras stepped down from his throne, passing between the pair of armed bodyguards flanking the raised dais. It was astounding what the threat of two shotguns could do to enforce morale in a confined space.

The captain loomed over the sunken crew pit, watching as the comms men adjusted their equipment. Bodras tapped the holster of his laspistol, growing irritated at the delay.

‘Captain, we’re detecting a vapour cloud one hundred kilometres starboard,’ another officer reported. Bodras favoured the communication section with a last menacing look, then turned his attention to the long-range scanners. The crewmen shifted aside to allow Bodras a clear view.

‘The molecular scan identifies a high oxygen/hydrogen content,’ the scanner officer said. ‘It could be water vapour. The tanker might have had an accident.’

‘If the idiot dumped his cargo, he’d better hope it was a serious accident,’ Bodras said. Even that probably wouldn’t save the tanker’s crew from the ire of the Iron Warriors. Men seldom lived to disappoint the lords of Castellax twice.

Studying the screen, Bodras pointed at a large blotch a few thousand kilometres from the vapour cloud. ‘What is that?’ he asked.

‘Asteroid,’ the officer replied. ‘High metal content. They will be happy to hear of such a find back on Castellax.’ The man’s face spread in a steel-toothed grin. ‘The ship who reports this discovery will be well favoured by the Iron Warriors.’

Bodras shook his head. Something wasn’t right. Castellax needed water more than metal – any captain who dumped his cargo so that he could race back and gain the dubious gratitude of the Iron Warriors for discovering a new asteroid was too stupid to be believed. No, there was something very wrong. An asteroid loaded with metal ore just sitting right next to the most travelled space route in the system…

The vox-casters on the bridge suddenly broke out in a chaotic din of savage growls and grunts. Bodras spun around, his eyes bulging as the hideous cacophony struck horror in his heart. The comms men had narrowed down their scan to isolate a very narrow frequency range, then filtered it further to a single transmission band. Now that he heard it, Bodras almost wished he hadn’t. The interference had been caused by a bedlam of crude vox-transmissions scattered across a range of frequencies, their erratic and unstable nature causing them to bleed across each other. In effect, their very primitiveness, the obsolescent inefficiency and instability of the transmissions had overwhelmed the frigate’s sensitive equipment. The Vulture’s sharp ears had been deaf to the howls of the worst predator in the galaxy.

Bodras knew those voices. He’d heard them before, on the Eastern Fringe.

Now he understood why there was an asteroid lying just off the trade route between Impex V and Castellax.

‘Battle stations! Battle stations! Battle stations!’ Bodras roared, storming across the bridge and smashing his fist through the glass casing of the alert signal. Claxons wailed as harsh crimson lights flashed from the ceiling.

‘Hail all gun crews,’ Bodras snarled down at his officers. ‘I want every battery trained on that asteroid! I want torpedoes at the ready! I–’

‘Captain, we are picking up thirty… no… forty energy discharges from the surface of the asteroid,’ one of the officers shouted. ‘Captain, it’s firing at us!’

Bodras raised the jug of caff and took a quick swig. They were too late. The enemy had gotten off the first salvo. All they could do now was hope their void shields could withstand the barrage.

Because what was out there, lurking off the space lane, wasn’t an asteroid any more. It had been hollowed out and turned into a space-faring fortress by the most murderous species in the galaxy.

The orks.

CHAPTER II

I-DAY MINUS 14

It came lumbering out of the void, a great darkness that blotted out the stars with its advance. A leviathan from space, a behemoth that roared between worlds like a vengeful devil. It had been born in the cauldron of an angry cosmos, a slab of rock and metal seventy kilometres in diameter, a fledgling planet that had never found its place and so had been cast into the emptiness between galaxies.

There, in the darkness, savage intelligences had found it, had descended upon this abandoned almost-world and through their barbaric technology had given it purpose, a place in the cosmos. A place of horror, havoc and destruction.

The Vulture was like a fly buzzing about the wings of a hawk, the disparity between the patrol ship and the rok was so immense. The rok was vast enough to exert its own gravitational pull on the ship, dragging her slowly towards it, affording the terrified crew an increasingly clear view of their mammoth adversary.

The rok was pitted and scarred, pockmarked with the impacts of smaller asteroids against its surface, gouged by the crude excavations of the orks. Towers and bunkers projected from the asteroid’s surface, hangars gaped in the walls of its canyons, gun emplacements bristled from its jagged mountains. Cyclopean engines, their exhausts a hundred metres wide, projected from the rok’s sides, spitting streams of atomic fire as the orks inside the asteroid struggled to direct its trajectory, to exert some measure of control upon the elemental force they had attempted to enslave.

It was a futile effort. The best the orks could do was cause the rok to revolve, to spin on its axis as it hurtled through the void. For the xenos, however, it was enough, allowing them to adjust the position of their heaviest guns and bring them to bear against those victims unfortunate enough to encounter the rok.

The crew of the Vulture was almost upon the rok before they were aware of their peril. The deranged array of guns and missile batteries the orks had fitted to the hollowed-out asteroid opened fire in a savage burst of destruction. An armada of alien craft exploded from the canyon hangars and from launch craters littering the surface. The rok had provided shelter to a ramshackle flotilla of smaller ork ships, an ugly assortment of scrap metal that somehow managed to be space-worthy. What the ork ships lacked in grace, they made up for in firepower. Some of the weapons they boasted were so massive that the ships which carried them fairly disintegrated the moment they fired.

It was punishment the frigate’s void shields were never meant to handle. More and more of the alien barrage was getting through, ripping Bodras’s ship apart.

The Vulture reeled as another broadside smashed into her. The ship’s artificial gravity struggled to compensate for the rolling vessel, creating a wild confusion of forces upon the bridge. Bodras watched as one of his bodyguards hurtled forwards, then was grabbed and dragged by a malfunctioning inertia dampener. The screaming man smashed into the wall as though he’d been fired from a torpedo tube, his ribcage collapsing as the dampener tried to pull his body through the bulkhead.

The captain took another pull of his jug and shuddered. Squashed like a bug wasn’t a pretty way to die.

‘Damage report,’ he snarled at the bloodied men down in the crew pits. Between overloaded circuits, dislodged machinery and debris from the ship’s infrastructure, not a man in the pit had escaped some sort of injury. The dead had been unceremoniously dumped onto the walkway where the inertia dampener grabbed hold of them. The worst of the wounded had been similarly disposed of until Bodras ordered the practice stopped. Even if they were in the way, the wounded had to be shown some consideration. It was bad for morale if they weren’t.

Lieutenant Collorus studied one of the flickering pict screens and cried back to the command throne. ‘There is a hull breach aft, exposing three decks to vacuum. The gravity generators can’t compensate, so we’re vacillating between a seven and ten degree list. Alpha and Beta batteries have been obliterated by direct hits. Gamma battery is still firing but we’ve lost all communication with the gunnery crew.’

‘Send runners,’ Bodras snapped. ‘We need to maintain fire control. The only way we’ll survive is by concentrating our fire!’

Even as he gave the order, Bodras wondered if it would really make any difference.

‘Only one macro-cannon still operational,’ an ensign with a raw gash across his forehead reported, cringing back as his terminal spat a shower of sparks at him. ‘Vox communications have been lost throughout the lower decks!’

Bodras groaned. That would be those filthy missiles the rok had fired into them. The moment they had struck, the crew had breathed a sigh of relief, thinking they were duds. Then the electronic pulses had started, gradually increasing in scope and intensity. Somehow the missiles were both absorbing and projecting energy. The effect was like a massive haywire grenade, shorting out machinery close to the point of impact and utterly severing the lines of communication passing through that part of the ship.

‘Fires in the kitchens, crew barracks and officers’ deck!’ another ensign shouted.

‘Get a fire control team down there,’ Bodras ordered. If a fire was allowed to go unchecked in that part of the frigate, the ship would be effectively cut in two.

‘The team assigned to that area was killed by a hull breach,’ Lieutenant Collorus reported. ‘We’re trying to redirect another team there now.’

‘Don’t try, do!’ Bodras roared. He stared at the view-screen beside him. The rok was slowly closing upon the frigate, rotating to bring an obscenely huge cannon mounted on its surface to bear on the Vulture. Some of the smaller ork ships were scattering, intimidated by the approach of their hulking comrade. Others, too lost in their mindless urge to destroy, continued to swarm about the frigate.

‘More hull breaches in decks nineteen through twenty-four!’

‘Fire control has been hit! Can’t raise fire control!’

‘Last macro-cannon has gone silent!’

‘Delta battery reports two plasma batteries have overheated!’

Bodras turned the jug upside down, draining the last few drops from the bottom. He tossed the empty vessel aside, watching as the inertia dampener caught it and smashed it against the bulkhead.

‘Report to Castellax,’ the captain said, his voice cold as he watched the rok rotate into position. ‘Tell them we’ve occupied the orks as long as we can.’

Bodras watched as a brilliant glow gathered in the mouth of the rok’s oversized cannon.

‘Tell our dread masters they can expect some company real soon,’ Bodras spat. He glanced down at his elegant jacket. It was such a shame that so fine a garment was going to be ruined.

Mummified husks of humanity, bound in sinews of steel and garbed in mantles of iron, mouths stretched wide in frozen screams, the Eternal Choir loomed from the vaulted heights, incense dripping from their desiccated chests, madness crawling in their shrivelled eyes. Each servitor was bolted fast to the face of a curved pillar, their broken arms wrapped about the obverse side. A low chant hissed from the throats of the automatons, a sibilance that somehow melded the harmony of song to the howling of beasts.

The monstrous chant swept across the grim chamber below. Promethium lamps cast an infernal glow, sending weird shadows slithering about the pillars and dancing along the heavily adorned walls. Bas relief battles raged anew as the play of crimson light and black shadow swept across them, once more igniting the ancient campaigns of Sebastus IV and Olympia. Power-armoured giants contested bloodied battlegrounds, their gilded bolters and chainswords glistening with reflected light. Stone Titans rained destruction upon screaming masses of humanity, thorny towers bristling with armaments wrought carnage upon Space Marines of the Imperial Fists Legion while gloating killers adorned in the heraldry of the Iron Warriors visited doom upon those striving to escape the trap.

Everywhere in the frescoes, one terrifying visage was repeated. The glowering countenance of an Iron Warrior encased in baroque Terminator armour, wielding a storm bolter and a power claw encrusted with shining rubies. Half the Space Marine’s face was flesh, the rest was nought save a snarling skull of metal. Wherever the hulking warrior appeared, there the enemy lay heaped and torn about his feet. Always there was a sense of malignance and power in his piercing stare.

Seated in a throne of pure diamond, clear as ice and strong as adamantium, its legs shaped into clawed feet and its back carved into folded wings, the half-faced monster from the wall cast a steely gaze across the gloom. The flesh of his face was puckered and raw, scarred with hideous burns and the corrosive caress of things beyond human imagining. The metal of his exposed skull bristled with cables and power feeds, a nest of synthetic serpents that coiled about the Iron Warrior’s neck before sinking into sockets scattered across the bulky armour he wore. Even in rest, safe within the halls of the Iron Bastion, mightiest fortress-keep on Castellax, Warsmith Andraaz kept himself locked inside his ancient suit of Terminator armour. It was whispered that his body hadn’t stirred from the plasteel and ceramite shell in five millennia.

To either side of the throne towered the hulk of another Space Marine encased in Terminator armour, a member of the elite Rending Guard. Bodyguard to the Warsmith, the Terminators were veterans of countless campaigns, their armour studded with battle honours and draped in trophies torn from the bodies of their conquests. When the Terminators committed themselves to combat, it was only on the express command of Andraaz. They recognised no other authority short of Perturabo himself.

The Warsmith stretched out his hand, closing the armoured gauntlet into a fist and smashed it down against the immense table of obsidian which dominated the centre of the chamber. The crazed network of glowing wires and relays streaming through the semi-transparent rock blinked as the impact sent a tremor through the table.

‘Enough,’ Andraaz growled, his voice like a metallic scratch. The word echoed through a suddenly silent room, even the chanting of the servitors retreating before the monster’s anger.

Seated about the obsidian table, a half-dozen armoured giants shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. Masters of life and death, gods of destruction and doom to the millions of slaves entombed upon Castellax, the Iron Warriors felt their hearts quicken as Andraaz focused his ire upon them.

‘It does not matter how the filthy xenos infiltrated the system,’ Andraaz hissed, turning the red lens of his synthetic eye upon the man seated to his right.

Broad of build, massive of frame, Captain Morax, Skylord of Castellax, glared spitefully at his opposite across the table. Morax ran a jewelled glove through the stubble of hair covering his scalp, wiping away the beads of perspiration gathering there. ‘Honoured Warsmith,’ Morax said, sucking at the moist fingers of his glove, ‘I was merely observing that if control of the fleet had been shared with my administration, then these intruders would have been dealt with much sooner.’ A trace of a smile curled the Skylord’s flaccid cheeks as he watched his rival across the table react to his taunt.

‘That is a dangerous insinuation, Sky-rat,’ the other Iron Warrior spat. Admiral Nostraz was a towering man whose face was, if anything, even more scarred than that of Andraaz, though he hadn’t augmented any of his mutilations with cybernetic implants. ‘The raider fleets stand as ready for action as they ever have.’ His eyes darkened and his voice dripped with menace. ‘Or perhaps you would prefer we send half our ships out every time we hear a noise or one of our tankers is overdue?’

‘It is a sad thing to see timidity masquerading as strategy,’ Morax said, grinning. Nostraz’s eyes narrowed into murderous slits and he lurched up from his chair.

‘The Warsmith said there was to be an end to this squabbling!’ roared the Iron Warrior seated to the left of Andraaz. Captain Gamgin was a vicious specimen of savagery, one arm a mass of gears and cables bound in plasteel plate and armaplas fibres, one leg given over to a grumbling bundle of machinery, his lower jaw a set of piston-driven steel fangs. The Ruinous Powers had been quite attentive to Gamgin over the millennia, corrupting his body with fierce mutations. Each time the warp corruption settled into his flesh, a bit more of Gamgin had been cut away and replaced by metal. The millions of conscript soldiers Gamgin maintained on Castellax held that the first part of him that had been changed to steel was his heart. Only one purpose beat there now: complete and merciless loyalty to Andraaz.

Both Nostraz and Morax shifted their hateful gaze from one another to Gamgin. As much as the two rivals might hate each other, their mutual contempt for Gamgin and envy at his favour with the Warsmith gave them common cause. At the slightest nod from Morax, Nostraz pointed at the shifting pattern of lights displayed above the surface of the obsidian table. It was a three-dimensional star-map of the Castellax system, not a true hologram but rather a projection of the table’s weird elements. As Nostraz pointed, the table reacted, shifting and magnifying one portion of the starfield while allowing the rest of the map to recede.

‘The orks struck from the fringe of the system, in the vicinity of Impex V. The high proportion of asteroids in that sector has always been a detriment to our sensors.’ The admiral gestured and brought the image of an old Imperial frigate into view. ‘Our initial response, a single system patrol sentry, was overwhelmed by the intruders. They have since penetrated the static defences surrounding the ice-moon and its neighbours. Mostly through the crude callousness of their assaults. They think nothing of driving their smaller ships straight into the waiting guns of a satellite and obliterating the position with the debris of their own comrades.’ At the snap of his fingers a dozen more ships appeared on the map, each image slowly collapsing into a menagerie of lights gradually streaming towards Impex V. ‘The second wave consists of five Infidel-class raiders and seven system-defence destroyers. They will engage the orks. After whetting the aliens’ appetite for battle, the raiders will withdraw, using their greater speed to outdistance the destroyers. They will maintain a presence just beyond the enemy guns while the orks are occupied with the destroyers. With the greenskins busy, the raiders will use their macro-cannon to pick them off from afar.’

‘And if the xenos have weaponry able to match the range of the macro-cannons? Or if the orks have infiltrated in numbers capable of focusing on both elements of your fleet?’ The questions came from a scowling man, his richly adorned armour studded with battle honours and the leathery trophies of past conquests. Over-Captain Vallax, his face split by the jagged scar of a World Eater’s chainaxe, his long hair shifting in hue as his emotions darkened, leaned over the obsidian table. The Over-Captain’s gauntlet touched a line of ships further towards the core of the system.

‘I see these possibilities have already occurred to you,’ Vallax mused. As he touched the lights, each was revealed as another vessel in the Castellax fleet. In all, there were fifty-nine ships in the second line Nostraz had established.

The admiral nodded his head. ‘The second wave has a two-fold purpose. The first is to engage the xenos, but more importantly they are to gauge their numbers and deployment.’

‘Orks don’t have any rational deployment,’ scoffed the ghoulish Skintaker Algol, Slavemaster of Castellax. The Iron Warrior’s armour was lost beneath the hideous folds of the cloak he wore, a garment fashioned from human skin flayed from slaves. The stink of blood still clung to the freshest patches of Algol’s vestment. When the aroma wore off, he would stalk back into the strip mines in search of fresher replacements.

‘Rational or not, we need to know where they are,’ Morax snapped back. ‘Our sensors can’t give us proper intelligence for that sector, and there is too much psychic disturbance in the area for the Navigators on our ships to provide us with anything useful.’

Captain Rhodaan stood and faced the Skylord. ‘What about using the Speaker?’ he suggested. Morax ran his glove across his scalp again, hesitating to answer the question.

When the question was answered, it was Warsmith Andraaz who spoke. ‘The Speaker may be needed for other duties.’

A dull, mechanical rasp crackled from the end of the table. Alone among those gathered in the war room, the speaker wasn’t an Iron Warrior, but rather a withered shell of humanity. Pale, corpse-like flesh fused to a mechanical armature, its gaping mouth housing the meshwork of a vox-caster, the servitor was acting as the proxy for the only member of Castellax’s hierarchy absent from the chamber. When it spoke, however, all within the room knew they heard the voice of Fabricator Oriax.

‘To focus the Speaker’s thoughts upon such a task would require a drastic change to the chemical mixture in its bath. To safely perform such a procedure would take days. To unsafely perform such a procedure might kill it. Or, even worse, return it to awareness.’

There was no emotion on the corpse-face of the servitor as it transmitted Oriax’s words, but a flicker of uneasiness crossed the countenance of each Iron Warrior who heard them. Veterans of thousands of wars, victorious conquerors of hundreds of worlds, they knew better than to tamper with an alpha-grade psyker, especially after what they had done to him.

‘Using the Speaker is out of the question,’ Andraaz declared. ‘We will proceed with Admiral Nostraz’s plan.’

Three scarred and battered Infidel-class raiders raced across the stellar emptiness. Behind them, the ships abandoned wounded comrades and slower support vessels, consigning each to the doubtful mercies of the orks. Survival, not loyalty, was the law of the moment. Flee now, or remain forever with the dead.

From the bridge of the Requiem, Arch-Commander Vortsk watched as the survivors drew steadily closer to the defensive line his fleet had established. The old pirate’s brow knitted with dismay, disturbing the nest of cables implanted into his forehead that hardwired his mind with the cogitators of his battleship. He could feel his vessel’s agitation pulsing through the wires, like a hound smelling blood. The Requiem was an old hand at slaughter, having perpetrated thousands of atrocities in her time, both for and against the decaying Imperium. Since defecting after the Badab War, the battleship’s lust for violence had only grown. Vortsk sometimes wondered if her time in the Eye of Terror had endowed his ship with a consciousness of her own.

‘Patience,’ Vortsk whispered, his fingers tapping against the command baton resting in his lap. ‘You shall glut your hunger soon enough, my sweet.’

The Arch-Commander forced the ship’s agitation into his subconscious and focused his attention upon the pict screens scattered about his control-nest. The armoured, tomb-like pod was ringed with flickering displays, cycling through views of every deck on the battleship. Vortsk ignored these and the thousands of relays transmitting views of the Requiem’s exterior hull. What interested him were the long-range observium reports, the transmissions from the fleeing raiders and the vox-chatter of the on-coming enemy.

Together, the data created a fearsome picture. The raiders and their destroyer escorts had encountered a far bigger mass of orks than the doomed Vulture had reported. The rok was still active, but now it served as just another warship in an armada that dwarfed the combined might of the entire Castellax fleet. If the data from the raiders was to be trusted, the aliens had infiltrated the system with three hundred vessels of destroyer-size or greater, including two monstrosities boasting a mass approaching that of an Oberon-class battleship.

There were other ork vessels operating deep in the system. An alien species as wild and vicious as the orks rarely maintained focus and cohesion, and the invaders of Castellax were no different. Small splinters of the armada were attacking the remote mining outposts scattered through the planetoids at the fringe of the system, while a hulking kill kroozer had been closing upon the Impex V station when the last message was transmitted from the ice-moon.

Vortsk scowled as he examined the data. The odds were against the human fleet, but he knew there was more to securing victory than simple numerical advantage. The human mind was organised, analytical and calculating. That of the ork was simple barbarous instinct, with no greater thought than closing with an enemy and giving immediate battle.

The Arch-Commander studied the pict screens displaying the proximity of the ork forces. While some of the armada had lingered behind to finish off the abandoned destroyers and crippled raiders, a small number of ships were pursuing the three raiders that had escaped. Vortsk licked his lips as he saw that among the pursuers was one of the big battleship analogues. The ork armada as a whole might outnumber the human fleet, but in the present circumstance, the advantage belonged to Vortsk. There were only a half-dozen escorts with the ork battleship, none of them larger than a frigate. Even allowing for the ork propensity to pile ridiculous amounts of armament onto their ships, the human battle line had them outgunned twenty to one.

‘Raise the captains of the Pride and the Damnation,’ Vortsk said, hissing into the vox-sceptre which would convey his order to the bridge surrounding his command-crypt.

‘What about the Vindictive?’ a sub-altern’s question crackled back. Vortsk smiled as he glanced again at the positions of the approaching ships.

‘Maintain strict silence as regards the Vindictive,’ Vortsk said. ‘It is best that her captain doesn’t know our plans.’

Arch-Commander Vortsk felt a shiver of excitement crackle down his steel spine as he watched the pict screens. The raiders and their pursuers had only just drawn within range of the battle line’s guns. Instead of losing momentum, the ork pursuers had picked up speed. Vortsk smiled as he imagined the desperate efforts the aliens had made to force this last burst from their ships. They were so eager to sate their appetite for battle that they were charging headlong into destruction.

Only one thing more was needed to complete the trap and, by prearranged conspiracy, the Pride and Damnation provided what Vortsk required. As soon as the three raiders were within range of the fleet’s heavy guns, the Pride and Damnation fired upon the Vindictive. The close-range barrage tore through the raider’s void shields, smashing into her engines and leaving her a cripple.

Predictably, as her betrayers raced away and left her behind them, the Vindictive blasted away at them with the few guns she could bring to bear in such an unexpected emergency. Her fire was ineffectual as far as punishing her betrayers, but it did serve the purpose Vortsk needed it to. It reminded the pursuing orks that, though crippled, the Vindictive was still very much alive.

Vortsk’s breathing became shallow, his mind feeling the eagerness of his ship as he watched the drama playing out upon the pict screen. The Vindictive abandoned her vengeful fusillade and turned her guns back upon the approaching orks, unleashing a desperate and futile barrage into the grotesque battleship. The crackle of energy shields intercepted most of the raider’s fire, what little penetrated did nothing more than scratch the battleship’s armoured hull.

The frantic efforts of the Vindictive to save herself did ensure she had the orks’ full and undivided attention. The battleship and her escorts closed upon her like a pack of wolves. Vortsk grinned, lifting the vox-sceptre to his trembling mouth. ‘Arch-Commander Vortsk to all ships,’ he said. ‘The orks are engaging the Vindictive. When they close to three kilometres of her, open fire. All batteries are to concentrate upon the battleship designated as Target Omega.’

Dim memories of his pampered childhood flashed through Vortsk’s mind as he waited for the aliens to close the distance. He remembered waiting impatiently for his father, a noble of Decima X’s ruling cadre, to bring home the traditional grox-hide cassock each St. Julian’s day. The same unbearable eagerness gripped him now. He could almost hear the Requiem growling in expectation.

‘Unleash hell!’ Vortsk hissed into the vox-sceptre as the orks finally came within range. From every ship in the fleet, a withering barrage of macro-cannon, lances, plasma batteries and lasers slammed into Target Omega. The ork battleship seemed to glow like a tiny sun as its shields struggled against the awesome violence. Two of its escorts, whether by accident or design, diverted into the path of the barrage and were almost instantly gutted by the concentrated fire.

Target Omega, venting vapour from breaches in her hull, fires rippling across her starboard side, began to turn, shifting away from the Vindictive.

‘Close with Target Omega,’ Vortsk screamed into his vox-sceptre. ‘Don’t let it get away!’ He could hear the blood pounding in his heart. The idea that the ork ship could survive the initial barrage wasn’t half as repugnant as the idea that it might escape from his trap.

The fire coming from Target Omega was far less than what the battleship had been directing against the Vindictive. Vortsk smiled. The initial assault must have obliterated most of the xenos gun batteries. More than ever, he was determined not to allow the ship to escape. Gripping his vox-sceptre, he demanded greater speed from his ships.

In the blink of an eye, the situation suddenly, horribly, changed.

The front of Target Omega burst apart in a great fireball. At first, Vortsk thought it was the result of damage inflicted upon the battleship by his fleet, but he was quickly forced to think again. From the smoke and debris, a dozen bulky assault ships erupted onto his pict screens. He felt his insides grow cold as the Requiem’s cogitators analysed the fast, fat-bodied vessels. The ugly ships were almost all engine except for the immense mass of armour piled up about their prows.

Ram ships! As that hideous realisation came to him, a second explosion ripped through Target Omega. A smaller flotilla of ork craft burst from the battleship’s portside, racing straight towards Vortsk’s fleet. As they streaked away from the battleship, the larger vessel began to roll, its stability overwhelmed by the violent, speedy launch of its cargo.

Target Omega wasn’t a battleship at all. It was an assault carrier!

Panic crackled across the displays monitoring communications within Vortsk’s fleet. The ram ships, impossibly fast with their oversized engines, were smashing into the human vessels almost before their crews were aware they were being attacked. The ork craft charged straight into the fleet, breaching hulls with their armoured prows. More than the actual damage they inflicted, it was the confusion they wrought upon the fleet. Even as he tried to exert his authority and bring cohesion back into his force, Vortsk was seeing segments of his command scatter. Pirates and renegades, traitors to a man, there was no loyalty to bind them to the battle.

‘Arch-Commander!’ the screaming voice of the Requiem’s captain echoed from the vox-casters within the command-crypt. ‘Target Omega is losing integrity. She’s breaking up!’

Vortsk looked over at the pict screen showing the clearest view of the ork craft. With the loss of stability, the slow roll had turned into an apocalyptic vision. The spine of the ship had snapped in the middle of its roll, turning the scrap-work mass of metal into a spiralling corkscrew of shrapnel. Shrapnel hurtling directly towards the Requiem.

‘Evasive manoeuvres,’ Vortsk growled. Even as he spoke, however, he could feel the Requiem cry out. The battleship shuddered as one of the rampaging ork ram ships slammed into her side.

‘Hull breach in decks fifty through fifty-five,’ the captain’s voice cried out. ‘The ork ship has buried itself in our starboard!’

Vortsk closed his eyes, pulling the information he needed from the Requiem’s cogitators. The drag of the ork ship would compromise her manoeuvrability, too much so for her to escape the spiralling wreckage of Target Omega.

The Arch-Commander raised the vox-sceptre one last time. ‘All weapon batteries, open fire on Target Omega.’

The order tasted like ash on his tongue. Even the firepower of an Oberon-class battleship wouldn’t help them now. The best they could hope for was that the Requiem’s armour would hold and they wouldn’t suffer so much damage that they’d be left immobile and defenceless when the rest of the ork armada showed up.

Damn xenos, Vortsk thought bitterly. They used my own trick on me.

‘Grim Lord, there can be no question that the orks will penetrate the second line of defence.’ Admiral Nostraz’s voice was subdued as he made the pessimistic report. He bowed his head in contrition as the Warsmith stirred upon his translucent throne.

‘How long can we expect the third line to hold?’ Andraaz demanded.

Skylord Morax reached out and brought the cluster of lights representing the third of Castellax’s defence fleets into focus. ‘Raiders and slaveships,’ he grumbled. ‘Nothing here that can possibly stand up to the orks.’

‘Then the aliens will make planetfall?’ Captain Gamgin asked, a trace of anticipation and eagerness in his tone. After five generations of training, he was curious to see how his janissaries would perform against an enemy more formidable than a rabble of feral slaves.

Morax ran his glove across his scalp and glowered at Gamgin. ‘An armada that size might have a billion howling greenskins. If they make planetfall…’

‘We will destroy them,’ Andraaz stated, his voice brooking no argument. His red eye focused upon the youngest of his war council. Sergeant Ipos was the only member of the inner-circle who had been created with hybrid gene-seed, a necessity for a Legion whose own genetic material was rife with corruption and mutation. Despite the admixture of gene-seed, Ipos had proven himself a brilliant strategist and tactician, as well as a shrewd political manipulator. He had used a careful campaign of conspiracy and subterfuge to worm his way into his position as Castellan of the Iron Bastion, one long coveted by full-blooded Iron Warriors like Algol and Vallax.

Ipos rose from his chair, sweeping his gauntlet across the surface of the table. The starfield faded. In its place appeared an orbital view of Castellax itself, its satellites and space stations. Another sweep of Ipos’s hand and hundreds of lights began swarming around the world.

‘We shouldn’t expect a concentrated attack by the orks for several hours, perhaps even days,’ Ipos declared. ‘Until their warlord exerts its influence, the xenos will attack by individual squadrons, each warboss trying to cheat its fellows of loot and glory. We can exploit that.’

Admiral Nostraz smirked at the last statement. ‘How do we do that, half-breed?’ he grumbled.

Ipos ignored the admiral, directing his attention instead to the other Iron Warriors. ‘We can’t keep the orks from making planetfall. What we can do is prevent them from gaining a firm foothold once they are here.’ He pointed to the ring of defence satellites and armed weapons stations orbiting the planet. ‘If we adjust the orbits of five per cent of our installations we can present the orks with deliberate gaps in the defences. Eager for plunder, the xenos will use those gaps to try and reach the surface as quickly as possible.’

‘You want to make it easier for the orks to reach Castellax?’ Algol almost choked on the words, such was his incredulity.

The sergeant shook his head and made an adjustment to the illuminated display. Now some of the swarming lights were streaming down towards Castellax. ‘By focusing the orks into pre-arranged windows of opportunity, we will funnel them into specific areas of the planet. Far from the industrial centres, though we will need to present the orks with some lesser installations to maintain their interest. As the xenos converge upon these sacrificial settlements, the Air Cohort will deploy and bomb them into oblivion. We’ll be able to destroy the first wave of orks piecemeal, a tactic which Skylord Morax’s squadrons should be fully capable of implementing.’

Morax clapped his hands together, almost chortling with pleasure as he imagined the glory which would belong to his Air Cohort. ‘Indeed, indeed. We’ll burn down every xenos that sets one foot on Castellax!’

Over-Captain Vallax leaned over the table, studying the pattern of lights swirling about the projected planet. ‘That might settle for the vanguard, but you don’t expect the entire armada to hit us at the same time. I’ve fought orks. They might be stupid, but they’re also cunning. They won’t fall for the same bait twice.’

‘Afraid of getting your chainaxe dirty?’ Morax chuckled, waving his jewelled glove at the Over-Captain. ‘By the time the orks figure out what to do next, our surviving ships will be well on their way to Medrengard for help.’

‘The Third Grand Company fights its own battles, Skylord,’ Vallax snapped. ‘To contemplate anything less is cowardice.’

‘I shall quote you when the warlords of Medrengard demand to know why their shipments of arms are behind schedule,’ Admiral Nostraz retorted. ‘If the greenskins are allowed to set up a siege of even a few months, production will grind to a halt.’

‘We might manage food for the slaves,’ Algol said, pondering the problem. ‘Synthetics will last out for the better part of a year and can be supplemented, but water will be a problem. The only extra water supplies we can tap into are those at the embryo farms and that will deprive us of our next generation of workers. Unless we go out and collect our own on a large scale. Like in the good old days.’

‘Castellax has been fortified against full assault by the False Emperor’s minions,’ the crackling drone of Oriax’s servitor announced. ‘We are the sons of the Iron Cage. We are the Betrayers of Isstvan. However great the xenos horde, it shall break upon our walls.’

Warsmith Andraaz stepped away from his throne, steam venting from the coil of cables sunk into his armour as idle servo-motors pulsed into life. The hulking Iron Warrior stalked across the chamber, his Rending Guard falling into step behind him. Andraaz kept one eye fixed upon the obsidian table while his mechanical eye flashed across the faces of his officers.

‘There will be no call for help,’ Andraaz stated. ‘There are those upon Medrengard who believe the Third Grand Company to be weak, that our days of glory and might are behind us, that we are but a sorry remnant of the past!’ The Warsmith drove his fist straight into the middle of the projection, stabbing deep into the sphere representing Castellax. ‘This battle will belong to us, and us alone! We shall exterminate the xenos and send their skulls to Great Perturabo as tribute. There will be no retreat. There will be no surrender. And there will be no mercy.’

‘What of our fleet, Grim Lord?’ Admiral Nostraz asked. ‘If they remain engaged with the orks they will be destroyed and we will lose them all. We can’t replenish our losses without raiders to secure fresh materials.’

‘The Warsmith has already said there will be no retreat,’ Gamgin growled. His temper subsided when he felt Andraaz’s gaze focus upon him. Abased, he sank down into his chair.

‘The fleet will disengage and withdraw to the far side of the sun,’ Andraaz decided. ‘That will put Castellax between them and the ork armada.’

Morax nodded appreciatively at the strategy. ‘With the orks caught up in the planetary fortifications, we can recall the fleet and have it engage the ships the xenos leave in orbit.’ The Skylord cast a sneer in Nostraz’s direction. ‘Or they can withdraw into the warp and get help.’

A cold smile twisted the half of Andraaz’s face that was still flesh. ‘There will be no withdrawal.’

‘But, Grim Lord, many of our ships are crewed by pirate scum,’ objected Nostraz. ‘If one of them should lose nerve, or perceive our situation as being–’

‘There will be no retreat,’ Oriax’s proxy droned, the servitor’s lifeless eyes staring emptily at the ceiling. ‘The Speaker will issue a compulsion to every Navigator in the fleet. They will bite down upon the capsule hidden in their teeth. The poison will put them into a coma until such time as an antidote can be administered.’

Warsmith Andraaz slammed his fist against the obsidian table once more, vanquishing the display in a crackle of sparks. ‘The pirates will have to come to the Iron Bastion for that antidote. Without the Navigators, they dare not tempt the warp. No, my brothers, there will be no retreat from Castellax, no display of weakness to cheer our persecutors.’

The Warsmith turned and slowly marched back to his throne. ‘Castellax belongs to the Third Grand Company of the Iron Warriors Legion. No one will forget that fact. Not the filthy xenos. Not the pawns of the False Emperor. And not the warlords of Medrengard.

‘Castellax is ours. Any who think otherwise live on borrowed time.’

CHAPTER III

I-DAY

The binary rasp of a Lingua-Technis chant hissed through the mesh-work funnel of copper and titanium which had replaced the mouth of Enginseer Heroditus three centuries ago. The protruding, insect-like muzzle of his respirator melded into the blocky contours of a face rebuilt in adamantium and platinum. A confusion of pipes and hoses snaked away from his cheeks, coiling around his head to secure themselves to sockets built into his spine and servo-limbs. Crab-like arms jutted from spurs built into his shoulders, steel mechadendrites that rippled with the gleam of idle energies.

There was little of Enginseer Heroditus that remained organic. Five centuries of zealous service to the Omnissiah had replaced most of his decayed flesh with bionics. Bundled in a heavy robe of vat-grown synthfibre, the only exposed portion of the tech-priest betraying his tenuous relation to humanity were the pale, empty eyes staring from the depths of his metal face. Sight had fled from those eyes long ago, his vision replaced by mechanical sensors embedded in his forehead and on the backs of his bionic hands. Heroditus had declined to have his organic eyes removed, despite their obsolescence, believing he must maintain them until the Omnissiah’s advent. Only then would he offer them up to the Machine-God as a final sacrifice of flesh.

The enginseer’s valve-pump slowed its pulsations as his brain sent a surge of emotion crackling through his nerve-relays. The hiss of binary faltered for an instant as Heroditus fought down the pathetic despair that flickered into life within his brain. It was true, he was unlikely to ever make that sacrifice, to gaze upon the glory of the Deus Mechanicus incarnate. That was no excuse for such weakness. To be a servant of the Machine-God was to cast aside the flawed illogic of the flesh and embrace the cold reason of technology. A tech-priest did not know regret. His purpose was to accept the path before him and to walk it in such a way as to bring greater glory to the Machine-God.

Heroditus bowed his head in acknowledgment of his weakness. However much they cut away, it seemed there was still too much flesh left inside to make him complete. Without disrupting the binary chant hissing from his mouth, he transmitted a liturgy of penance from the vox-caster built into his chest, an appeal to the machine-spirits of his bionics and augmetics to forgive the discord caused by his sorrowed emotions. To ensure the sincerity of his prayer, Heroditus had the flagellation bundles fixed to his spine send pulses of electricity throbbing through his organics.

It was an act of self-castigation that Heroditus had performed many times since Castellax fell to the Iron Warriors. When the traitors had descended from the stars and rained death upon the colony, the adepts of the Machine Cult had been spared the most infamous of the Chaos Space Marines’ outrages. Indeed, the invaders had expended some effort taking as many of the tech-priests intact as possible. It was not an act of mercy, of course, but rather a question of practicality. The Iron Warriors wanted to transform Castellax into a forge world to feed the war machine of their infamous Legion. To do that, they required more than billions of simple slaves. They needed specialists, men who understood the arcane sciences of manufacturing and design, processing and refinement.

Under the terrible scrutiny of their Fabricator Oriax, the Iron Warriors had pressed the captured tech-priests into their service. The exchange was simple: life for obedience. Some of the adepts had refused. Their deaths had been terrible spectacles of barbarism, outrages against the machine-spirits of their components as they were disassembled piece by piece.

Most of the adepts, like Heroditus, had agreed to obey, believing that even under the lash of the Iron Warriors they could serve the Machine-God. While they could function, they might yet serve a greater purpose.

Heroditus raised his head, staring at the acid-scoured walls of the immense drainage sluice, watching the crust of oxidised metal slowly drip into the toxic mire on the floor. Twenty metres across, nearly half again as high, the barrel-like tunnel ran the length of Vorago’s processing district, funnelling pollutants and waste from the city into the abandoned strip mines that pock-marked the face of Castellax. Poisonous vapours rose from the rainbow-hued confusion of sludge and slime, filling the passage with an atmosphere so hostile to life that the hardiest sump-rat would be dead before it drew its third breath.

Only something as devoid of organic frailty as a tech-priest could prowl these passages in relative safety; yet even here Heroditus was wary. He knew Oriax was a fiend incarnate, a living devil, a Chaos Space Marine who had compounded his outrages with a perverted corruption of the Quest for Knowledge. There was no place on Castellax one could be certain the Fabricator did not have his spies. The floating ‘Steel Blood’, Oriax’s ghoulish imitation of servo-skulls, flitted throughout Vorago, watching everything and everyone. Oriax claimed each of the fiendish skulls had a bit of his own genetic material pulsing through its circulation, heightening its responsiveness to his commands. Servitors, both those crafted in the Fabricator’s workshops and those scavenged from the conquest of Castellax, were often fitted with transmitters that fed intelligence directly to Oriax’s stronghold in the sub-catacombs of the Iron Bastion. More hideous still were the seemingly organic specimens Oriax had transformed, implanting them with complex mechanics without consideration of the subject’s suitability and worthiness for such augmentation, or the dignity of the machine-spirits of the devices he abused in these monstrous experiments.

A terrible darkness had descended upon Castellax, but Heroditus calculated that there might finally be a chance to see the light again. It was why he chanted orisons to dull and mislead the sentinel-implants Oriax had attached to his body. It was why he braved the toxic miasma of the drainage sluice, hiking through kilometres of corrosive sludge.

Hope, that most irrational of feelings, had begun to burn once more in the mind of Enginseer Heroditus.

Taofang pulled the goggles from his face and stared up at the night sky. Even the sting of Castellax’s polluted atmosphere wasn’t enough to dissuade him from watching the awesome light show unfolding far above the planet. It was a spectacle of such beauty as to move even the hardened janissary to tears. Great spheres of light streaked across the sky, sometimes spewing streams of energy, sometimes expanding into brilliant blazes before collapsing in upon themselves and fading into darkness. Whorls of star-fire coruscated through the blackness, racing about the planet in dazzling displays of colour and patterns of the most compelling fascination. To Taofang, it was like watching the birth of some cosmic–

‘Put those goggles back on!’

The sharp command broke the fascination. Hastily, Taofang pulled the protective lenses back across his eyes and turned his gaze from the sky to the men around him. There were over five hundred of them, janissaries of the Scorpion Brigade, each man fitted out in the corrosion-resistant duster and ore-scuttle helmet of their regiment. Mustered from the grim ferrocrete barracks which cast its shadow across the marshalling yard, the soldiers waited for their quartermasters to distribute arms from a sunken bunker at the far end of the plaza. Officers in black storm coats stalked among the troops, chastising those who, like Taofang, allowed their awe of the light show over Castellax to overcome their discipline.

‘There is a beta-level caution tonight!’ one of the officers, a thick-necked, dark-skinned colonel named Nehring barked over a vox-caster. He raised a gloved hand and tapped the opaque lenses of the goggles he wore. ‘Three minutes of exposure to the air and the pollution will begin to deteriorate your vision. Half an hour, and you would be as good as blind. If that isn’t enough to make you scum keep your goggles on, consider this: any man who can’t pull his own weight is a burden on the regiment...’ Nehring’s hand dropped to the jewelled holster hanging from his belt. There was no need for the colonel to continue his threat. The janissaries had seen him use his laspistol too many times to need the consequences explained to them. It was a custom weapon, plunder from some forge world, calibrated to fire a wider, more powerful beam than a standard pattern weapon. The charred wounds it left behind were big enough to put a man’s fist through.

Colonel Nehring removed his peaked cap and raised his face to the sky. A sneer twisted his features. ‘That spectacle you find so fascinating is our orbital defences and satellites being obliterated. A few of the big ones might be remnants of the system fleet falling to xenos guns.’ Nehring’s shielded eyes glared over the faces of his soldiers. ‘Hold a happy thought,’ he growled. ‘When the orks are done up there, they’ll be paying us a visit down here. Then each of you will get the chance to show our masters the quality of your training.’

A few jeers of defiance rose from the ranks. The janissaries weren’t strangers to combat, even if their previous experiences had been limited to putting down slave revolts or tracking renegades in the wastelands between the mining settlements. Only a few of the soldiers in the Scorpion Brigade had ever been seconded to the raider ships and engaged in battle off-world – and even those expeditions had been strikes against the Imperium. None of the janissaries had ever seen a xenos in battle, but they doubted it would be much different to killing their fellow man. All of them had done that often enough to become calloused to the prospect of battle.

Taofang was still in shock. Orks attacking Castellax! It was fantastic, unbelievable. Born and raised under the lash of the Iron Warriors, he had come to view them as invincible, a malignant force as irresistible as an earthquake or an ash-storm. The very idea that anything would dare to attack them was almost absurd to Taofang. That the orks had succeeded in driving through the system fleet and threatening Castellax itself was incredible. Yet, the evidence was all around him. The first frantic rumours of battle above the planet, the frightened mutters of orks from the comms tower garrison, the mustering of every soldier in Dirgas – all of it was grim testament to the reality of the situation.

As Nehring began barking new orders to the men filing past the quartermaster’s bunker, the officer’s voice caught in his throat. His dark features turned ashen as he snapped to attention and bent his body almost in half sketching a profound and self-humiliating bow. Taofang had never seen a colonel display such deference to anyone before. He turned his head, following the direction of Nehring’s gaze. Instantly, the janissary snapped to attention. All around him, the click of boots filled the air as the rest of the brigade followed suit.

As he stood at attention, an icy wave of fear rushed through Taofang’s body, chilling him from toe to scalp. Striding across the plaza was the armoured hulk of an Iron Warrior, his ceramite boots scarring the flagstones as he marched. The soldier had seen the Space Marines before, but always at a distance and never one as terrifying in appearance as the legionary he now gazed upon. A revolting mantle of flayed human skin was draped across the giant’s shoulders. Taofang didn’t need to look at the skull-like helm with its maze of jewelled campaign-markers to recognise the monster. It was Algol, the fiend of Castellax, feared as the Skintaker, the merciless Slavemaster.

Every eye in the plaza was locked upon the Skintaker as he marched towards the bunker. Even the shriek of Air Cohort fighters as they streaked overhead wasn’t enough to make the janissaries look away. They watched Algol’s gruesome cloak billow about his shoulders as the fighters screamed through the sky. They watched as the Iron Warrior approached the still bowed Colonel Nehring and held their breaths in anticipation.

‘I require the Scorpion Brigade,’ Algol said, the vox-casters in his helm sending his voice booming across the plaza.

Nehring’s words came in a frightened squeak. ‘Of course, Dread Lord! We are distributing weapons right now. They can be–’

Algol reached out with one of his armoured hands, his gauntlet closing about Nehring’s head as he drew the bowed officer upright. The crimson optics in his helm bored into Nehring’s terrified eyes. ‘You have two minutes to get this rabble armed,’ Algol hissed. ‘I want them loaded on the trucks within five.’

‘Ye-yes, Dre-Dread Lord,’ Nehring sputtered. Algol removed his crushing grip and turned away, leaving the colonel to dab at the blood trickling from his crumpled cap.

‘Five minutes,’ the Iron Warrior reminded as he marched away.

Nehring reached to his holster and drew his pistol. The colonel spun around, firing the weapon into the face of the closest unarmed janissary. The soldier didn’t even have time to scream, simply dropping to the flagstones, a smouldering crater where his forehead should have been. ‘Faster, you maggots!’ Nehring shrieked. ‘Lord Algol wants you scum in the trucks and by the warp, you will not disappoint him!’

The orderly ranks of men collapsed into a crush of humanity as the janissaries swarmed towards the bunker, snatching lasguns and autoguns from the quartermasters. As soon as they had a weapon in their hands, the soldiers were sprinting across the plaza towards the motor pool and the waiting trucks. Such was their panic that many of them neglected to snatch extra ammunition from the crates lined against the bunker’s wall.

As Taofang pushed his way into the mass, he looked once more at the terrible figure of Algol. The Space Marine continued to stalk across the plaza at the same measured march. He has such contempt for us, Taofang thought, that he didn’t even bother to see what we’re doing. He didn’t even care who was shot. We’re too small for him to even notice us.

Taofang stared skywards again, watching as another bright burst of light slowly faded into nothing. How terrible must the orks be to cause war-gods like the Iron Warriors such concern? What could mere men like the Scorpion Brigade do against such an enemy?

The fat-bodied trucks lurched and bounced as they rumbled through the deserted streets of Dirgas. Curfew had been imposed upon the city on Algol’s command, freezing all shipment to and from the factories, arresting all transportation from the production plants and hab-pens. Slaves were ordered to remain where they were, either locked inside their cells in the hab-pens or else shackled to their machinery in the factories. Travel meant communication, and communication was something now forbidden in the city.

Taofang hugged the cold steel of his lasgun closer to his chest, grimacing as he stared down at the three clips of ammunition he’d taken. Among the last men to leave the plaza, he’d been in too much of a hurry when he’d raced past the ammunition boxes. Instead of three energy cells for his lasgun, he had three clips of bullets for an autogun. Trying to haggle with his comrades in the truck had been fruitless. None of the men were from his own platoon and several of them were in an even worse state than he was, having neglected to grab any ammunition at all. As it stood, Taofang had twenty shots from the energy cell already inside his weapon.

With a shudder and screech, the truck came to a stop. The steel doors at the back of the cabin swung open, the bark of an officer ordering the janissaries from their conveyance. Taofang dropped down from the truck, finding himself in the warren-like sprawl of a factory. Metal girders and ferrocrete pillars soared dozens of metres upwards to support a vaulted roof. Stamps and presses, a river of conveyor belts and production lines filled the immense structure. Toppled carts, their cargo of tank treads and hatch-doors strewn about them, littered the floor. Here and there, a gore-soaked body lay sprawled amid the wreckage. Looming from the destruction like some scrap-work colossus, was the still-smoking casing of a huge rocket, its hull glowing a dull orange from its fiery descent through Castellax’s atmosphere.

Taofang’s truck had pulled up halfway along the sloped ramp leading to the factory’s transport node, a monorail connecting it to Dirgas’s main railway. A quick glance showed him that a half-dozen other trucks were likewise positioned around the transport node, an officer snarling orders at the soldiers as they disembarked. In all, there were about two hundred janissaries being deployed. He thought he could hear the sound of the other trucks’ engines below the din of the factory’s machines and thought the rest of the regiment might be deploying on the far side of the building.

Closer at hand, however, was the sinister bulk of an armoured transport quite unlike the crude trucks employed by the janissaries. It was a box-like vehicle, its hull fashioned from plates of reinforced plasteel, every centimetre pitted and scarred from millennia of warfare. Great titanium treads powered the machine up the ramp, its engine belching thick black fog as it powered its way forwards. Stained in dull grey livery, marked with the metal skull of the Iron Warriors, the transport was a formidable contrast to the khaki-painted trucks.

‘Establish a cordon!’ the officer was bellowing at the janissaries as they disembarked. ‘No xenos leaves this factory!’

Only a few metres away, a pair of janissaries jerked in agony as large calibre rounds ripped through their bodies. Soldiers scattered from the doomed men, taking cover behind the trucks and abandoned loading cranes scattered about the transport node. Taofang thumbed the activation rune on his lasgun and dove for shelter behind a wrecked cargo carrier, falling flat as his boot slipped on the slick floor. He bit down a livid curse as he found himself staring into the mushy remains of what was either the carrier’s operator or a regurgitated mass of vita-gruel.

Heavy slugs continued to slam into the floor, pulverising the dead bodies of the ambushed janissaries. A confusion of other shots plastered the same area, displaying a crazed variety of calibres and ammunition types. The helmet of one of the corpses melted under the glowing discharge of a low-intensity plasma weapon, the skull inside smoking as the man’s hair caught fire.

Taofang followed the afterglow of the plasma beam, tracing it back to its source on one of the steel gantries criss-crossing the factory. As he did, he felt his skin crawl. There were creatures crouched upon the walkway. He could see one of the beasts clearly, a thing the likes of which he had never dared imagine. Its shape was vaguely human, or at least humanoid, though swollen in proportions with thick knots of muscle and sinew. Its arms were short and thick, its legs stumpy and broad. Its head seemed to jut directly from its powerful shoulders, an apelike skull that was mostly jawbone and tusks. Beady little eyes glistened from shadowy pits sunken into its monstrous face. A patchwork of crudely assembled textiles clothed its massive frame, each scrap stained and dyed into a checkerboard of white and black. Bandoliers of bullets and knives criss-crossed its chest and straddled its waist. A machete bigger than Taofang’s arm was thrust through the alien’s belt, keeping company with a cluster of primitive-looking grenades and a nest of still-dripping human scalps.

The alien’s leathery green skin marked it as an ork, but the vicious brute crouched upon the walkway bore only the slightest resemblance to the absurd, clownish marauders Taofang had heard of. Looking up at the monster, he couldn’t see anything amusing. It looked like death, and a more brutal death the janissary was unable to picture as his gaze strayed back to the mutilated bodies of his comrades.

Orks in Dirgas! How had the aliens penetrated the defences of Castellax so quickly? Even if they had pierced the orbital defences, there were the city’s defence batteries and the Air Cohort to fend them off. Indeed, Taofang hadn’t heard so much as a peep from the gigantic surface-to-orbit defence cannons, guns so immense their recoil felt like an earth tremor. It was impossible that the orks could strike so suddenly.

The rattle of renewed gunfire slammed against the sides of the trucks, some shots of such strength that they ripped clean through the vehicles and into the men cowering behind them. Screams of agony echoed through the factory as injured janissaries writhed on the ground, clutching at the bleeding stumps of arms and legs or trying to push splintered ribs into the wet meat of mangled chests.

The aliens on the gantries coughed and growled, savouring the carnage. Las-beams sizzled up at the monsters, searing ugly scars into their flesh and scouring their primitive vests of chain and scrap metal. Taofang joined in the vengeful fire, targeting his shots at the ugly xenos with the plasma weapon. Again and again he fired at the ork, watching its hulking body jerk with each shot. For a brief moment, Taofang felt exhilaration. For the first time he experienced a feeling of true accomplishment. He was a real soldier, fighting one of mankind’s most ancient foes. And he was winning.

Then, as the ork reared up and pointed its weapon in his direction, Taofang’s exhilaration evaporated. He could see now the effect his shots had on the alien. A half-dozen black splotches on its leathery green skin, a nice cluster of fresh scars to go with the confusion of old wounds already marring the alien’s hide. Staring down the sight of his lasgun, Taofang could see the ork staring back at him, its face pulling back in a leer of amusement as it brought its weapon to bear.

Before the ork could shoot, however, the greenskin was bowled backwards by the meaty impact of an explosive round. Bone and sinew burst from the alien’s body as the shell detonated against its shoulder. Uttering a shriek that was half snarl and half howl, the ork struggled to spin around and face its attacker. Even as it made the effort, a second explosive shell tore deep into its chest, detonating an instant later. Ripped almost in two by the explosion, the dying ork fell from the gantry and hurtled to the factory floor far below.

‘Iron within! Iron without!’ The bellow rolled like thunder through the factory. Marching from behind the box-like hull of his Rhino, Algol pressed a fresh clip into his ornately adorned boltgun and began looking for new targets. The armoured giant moved without hesitation, stalking towards the raised walkways and the xenos fiends infesting them. Like a heathen war-god, the Iron Warrior raised his weapon and sent burst after burst of high-calibre death speeding towards the orks. Alien howls of confusion and pain now filled the factory as the orks suddenly found themselves the attacked rather than the attackers.

The janissaries, only a moment before quaking in their boots, rallied to the gruesome Algol. The terror the Space Marine inspired now emboldened them. The Skintaker was the most fearsome fiend on Castellax… and he was fighting on their side!

Bullets from the ork guns gouged the floor as the aliens struggled to get the Iron Warrior in their sights. It seemed an effort beyond their savage brains. Algol’s huge frame was constantly shifting from one direction to another, fading into the shadow of a truck or support pillar in that fragment of time before an ork loosed a barrage of automatic fire. Instantly, the Space Marine would return fire, leaning out from behind cover to deliver unerringly accurate bursts from his bolter. Each shot seemed to send another xenos hurtling from the walkways.

‘Castellax!’ the voice of Colonel Nehring rang out. The officer rose from behind the shelter of a pile of steel crates and made a beckoning sweep with his arm. Dozens of janissaries took up his cry, lunging from cover and rushing towards the aliens on the gantries, loosing a withering stream of las-fire as they charged. With the invincible Iron Warrior leading them, the men forgot their fear of the orks, remembering only their training and the thrill of battle.

Taofang rose from behind the crane, his heart hammering in his chest. He felt his awe of the Space Marine flooding through his mind, driving him to bold heroics. Screaming an inarticulate war cry, he charged the closest gantry, firing at the skulking ork crouched at the top of the stairs. He saw his shots burn into the alien’s flesh, saw one of his las-bolts melt the tinted visor of the alien’s helmet and sear into the beady eye behind it. He saw the ork pitch and fall, tumbling down the stairs like a rag doll. He laughed as he continued to shoot the wounded brute, burning fresh holes into its leathery flesh.

It took him a few seconds to realise his weapon wasn’t firing any more. Taofang stared incredulously at his lasgun, noting with some confusion the blinking red light of the depleted energy cell. For an instant, fear tried to well up inside him. The ork he had been shooting wasn’t dead, its hideous physiology preserving it through the fusillade. Wounded, bleeding, several of its bones broken in its fall, the monster was struggling to rise, its one good eye glaring murderously at Taofang.

Before panic could grip the janissary, he noticed the terrifying figure of Algol marching across the factory. One of the orks, more crafty than its comrades, had played dead and now, as Algol passed beneath the walkway the xenos was lying on, the alien leaped down onto the Iron Warrior’s shoulders.

Algol didn’t even break stride. As the ork’s weight slammed into him, the Space Marine reached back and closed his gauntlet about the alien’s jaw. Pivoting at the waist, he used his grip to swing the ork across his hip, breaking its hold and dashing it to the ground. Before the ork was even aware of what had happened to it, Algol’s boot came smashing down into its face. The alien thrashed wildly, but a second stomp from the Skintaker crushed its skull and ended its struggles.

Taofang looked back at the ork he had injured. With a vicious scream, he shifted his grip on the lasgun and ran at the alien. Swinging the weapon like a club, he brought its heavy stock cracking into the monster’s head, ripping open its cheek and knocking its helmet askew. The ork swiped at him with one of its paws, but the clumsy effort only spilled the brute back onto the floor. Standing above the prostrate beast, Taofang drove the butt of his lasgun into its head, pounding its skull until he felt it splinter and crack beneath his blows. Carried away by the violence and feeling of unspeakable power, Taofang kept up the assault until there was only a gooey mush clinging to the stock of his weapon.

Breathing heavily, his lungs burning with the intensity of his exertions, Taofang stepped away from the pulverised mess. The factory echoed with the bark of gunfire, the shouts and screams of men, the howls of savage aliens. He could see janissaries rushing up onto the gantries, hurdling the butchered bodies of slaves and overseers, firing at the scattered orks. He watched as Algol emptied his bolter into a huge ork with massive tusks and a rifle that looked like it had started life as a small howitzer. He saw the ork keel over, its face reduced to pulp by the Iron Warrior’s shots. The howitzer-rifle roared as the ork’s twitching fingers tugged the trigger, sending a shot straight into the roof with all the devastation of a mortar shell. Debris clattered down around the triumphant Space Marine, glancing off his ceramite helm and pauldrons.

Then, Taofang saw something else, something that offended his eyes and made his brain recoil in disbelief. As he stared at the victorious Iron Warrior, he saw a strange image, like a phantom vision projected across the scene. He could see the ghostly echo of some immense room, an impression of spectral orks scurrying about strange machines.

A sound like tearing metal shrieked across the factory and with it came an ozone stink and a weird ripple of light that penetrated Taofang’s eyelids when he closed them against the glare. As he tried to blink the searing pain away, he caught a blur of motion on the walkway above him. Forcing his eyes to focus, he felt his gorge rise as he began to make out more clearly what it was he was looking at. There was another ork on the gantry.

No, he corrected himself. Not on the gantry. In the gantry, its body inextricably fused into the metal framework, the grille woven through its leathery flesh. Taofang was at a loss to explain how such a gruesome thing could happen, even more so because he was willing to swear on the fiends of the warp, that the alien hadn’t been there a few seconds before.

The incredible supposition was further emboldened by the magnified sounds of combat roaring through the factory. Taofang could see orks charging at the janissaries from every quarter, even from places the soldiers had definitely cleared already. The men were taken completely aback by this incredible ambush, and the xenos spared them no chance to recover from their surprise.

Even Algol was beset by fresh foes, firing into a mob of orks who came charging at him from the transport node, a place that had been absolutely devoid of enemies only a moment before. To the strangeness of the attack was added the disheartening spectacle of the Space Marine retreating from the aliens, firing short, undirected bursts at them as he sprinted back towards the ramp and his transport.

Taofang wasn’t the only one who saw Algol’s withdrawal. Colonel Nehring’s stern voice rose above the crackle of gunfire, calling for the Scorpion Brigade to fall back to the trucks. Judging by the number of orks between most of the men and their transports, it was unlikely more than half of them would make it.

The janissary turned to make his way back to the ramp, but as he did so the tearing sound swelled to a deafening din, the ozone-stink so profound he fumbled for the respirator hanging from his belt. Whichever way he turned his eyes, he saw the same spectral image, the mammoth room with the scrap-metal walls and strange machines. And he saw orks. Not one or two, not dozens, not even hundreds. There were thousands of the aliens, their fanged mouths open in noiseless roars.

A blinding blast of light exploded through the factory, this time accompanied by an electrical crackle that set every hair on Taofang’s body standing upright. The janissary gave small notice to even this strange effect, instead clapping his hands to his ears as a thunderous clamour resounded through the factory. It was the bestial cry of a thousand savages, the primordial bellow of mindless brutality.

‘Waaagh!’

His clearing vision displayed a factory that had been torn to shreds, mangled and twisted as though the funnel of a tremendous ash-storm had rampaged inside the building. Walkways had been wrenched from their foundations, curled into knots by the malignant force. Pillars and beams had been toppled, bringing with them great sections of roof and wall. Conveyor belts had been flattened, stamps and presses twisted into jumbles of unrecognisable wreckage. Dripping heaps of meat gave loathsome evidence that the same havoc had been visited on flesh as well as metal and ferrocrete.

Taofang had only an instant to gauge the destruction, for the flash of light had brought more than simple carnage. It had brought the cause of that monstrous bellow. Massed among the wreckage was a horde of greenskinned aliens, their hulking bodies draped in ragged armour and tattered rags, their fists wrapped about a crazed assemblage of weaponry, from crude stub guns to complex meltas and everything between.

The city was infested with aliens now. The brutes hadn’t penetrated the defences, they had bypassed them entirely. It was teleportation, that most mysterious and esoteric of human technology, but on a scale so vast that even the most crazed tech-priest would balk at the possibility. Taofang had heard stories of boarding parties of five or six Adeptus Astartes appearing inside a raider during an engagement against the Imperium, but this went far beyond. The orks had teleported thousands of their loathsome breed from orbit to the surface of Castellax.

There was ghastly evidence of the hazards of the ramshackle alien technology all around. Many orks had been fused into pieces of the factory, their bodies melted into gantries and pillars. Hundreds of orks at the very fringe of the teleportation’s effect had only partially reformed, their horribly translucent bodies collapsing into puddles of quivering mush after a few abominable moments of agonised animation. Where some of the strange machines had failed to materialise along with the ork horde, at least two had been caught in the area of effect, emerging as sputtering, smoking towers of runaway energy.

Yet, however crude the process, there was no denying the brutal fact that the orks had circumvented all of Dirgas’s complex defences. The xenos invaders had gained a beachhead within the very walls of the city!

Algol’s Rhino was firing into the massed orks as it hurriedly backed down the ramp. With the Iron Warrior’s withdrawal, the trucks weren’t far behind, their drivers scarcely waiting for the frantic janissaries scrambling to climb onto them. Most of the orks were too disoriented by their transference to react to the fleeing humans, but enough of them opened fire to turn the retreat into a complete rout.

Taofang raced down the ramp, climbing onto the running board of a truck as it made a crazed three-point turn and tore out of the factory. The janissary was spun around as the truck turned, clinging to the massive door panel to maintain his footing. Behind him, he could see fleeing soldiers being cut down by the deranged marksmanship of the orks. He watched as a smoke-belching missile rose from the massed aliens and slammed into one of the trucks. The vehicle exploded in a burst of flame and shrapnel, shredding the janissaries racing after it.

The sight of the blazing wreckage was Taofang’s last view inside the factory. In the next instant, his truck lunged out into the streets of Dirgas and was racing along the desolate lanes.

Behind him, Taofang could hear the vicious aliens raise their croaking voices in another guttural howl.

‘Waaagh!’

Warsmith Andraaz glowered at the liveried slave trembling beside his diamond throne. The Space Marine’s eye smouldered with cold hate as he digested the report the man had brought into the Iron Bastion’s war room. It was news that sat ill with the overlord of Castellax, news that demanded an appropriate response.

In a blur of motion, the gigantic Warsmith surged from his chair. Before the slave could even blink an eye, Andraaz closed the armoured fingers of his gauntlet around the man’s throat. With a savage wrench, he twisted the messenger’s head, snapping his neck like a twig. Arrogantly, he let the corpse flop to the floor and turned to regard the Iron Warriors gathered about the great table. One of the Rending Guard stepped away from the diamond throne and dragged the carcass out of view.

‘The orks are in Dirgas,’ Andraaz repeated, his voice an angry growl. ‘Algol says the local janissaries are unable to contain the aliens to the manufacturing district. He requests extraction of all portable resources.’

Sergeant Ipos nodded in agreement. ‘As distasteful as it is, the Skintaker may be right. If Dirgas is lost to us then it would be prudent to remove whatever we can while we can. There is no knowing how long the xenos will lay siege to Castellax or what measures will be necessary…’

‘Pull out and flatten the city from the sky,’ Over-Captain Vallax declared, slamming his fist against the table. ‘Let the orks taste a few hundred megatons of vengeance from our bombers. That will make them think twice before using their teleporters again.’

‘Wasteful and impetuous,’ scoffed Captain Morax. ‘You couldn’t drive a thought into an ork’s brain with a power maul. All bombing Dirgas will do is destroy valuable infrastructure and material. By my calculations, losing the city will reduce overall production by fifteen per cent. We will have a hard time meeting our tithe to Medrengard if we turn the city into a cinder.’

‘What do you propose, Skylord?’ Admiral Nostraz sneered. ‘Leave the aliens to establish a foothold in Dirgas?’

‘There is something to be said for such a tactic,’ Morax said. ‘Dirgas is the other side of the Mare Ossius and the Witch Wall. If we can contain the orks on that side of the sea, we can fortify Vorago and our other strongholds.’

‘Which will disrupt our production even further,’ said Vallax. ‘If you are so set against bombing Dirgas, then maybe a deep strike is in order.’

From his place at the end of the table, Captain Rhodaan turned to face his commander. ‘You have heard Algol’s report. The ork numbers are already formidable. There is no telling how many more they might still be teleporting down into the city.’

‘Allowing that the xenos technology continues to function,’ came the mechanised voice of Oriax’s servitor, voicing its master’s objection. ‘Ork machinery is wildly unpredictable. The more complex the mechanism, the less likely it is to maintain integrity after repeated use. The xenos do not understand the necessity of placating the machine-spirit.’

Rhodaan shook his head and ignored the servitor. ‘Attacking Dirgas will be costly,’ he said.

‘Necessary losses,’ Vallax countered.

Rhodaan felt his blood begin to boil. ‘And whose squad will suffer these losses?’ he hissed through clenched teeth. The two Assault Marines locked eyes, each of them glaring deep into the blackened soul of the other. Centuries of rivalry and hate pounded inside their hearts and sent adrenaline coursing through their veins.

‘There will be no attack on Dirgas,’ Warsmith Andraaz declared. ‘Captain Morax is right. If we allow the orks to concentrate in the city, we will be able to more easily contain and monitor them. Moreover, until we can be certain this teleportation machine is no longer a threat, a direct assault would benefit us nothing.’ Andraaz shifted his gaze to Oriax’s cyborg mouthpiece. ‘The teleporter is your area of expertise, Fabricator. Whatever it takes, I want to know if it is still in operation.’

A cruel smile crawled onto the Warsmith’s scarred face. He stared at Vallax, then shifted his attention to Rhodaan. ‘If the teleporter is non-functional, then you will have your chance for glory. But do not be so eager to claim it that you forget your obligation to the Third Grand Company and the Legion.

‘No Iron Warrior dies unless I allow him to. Forget that, and the orks are the least of your worries.’

CHAPTER IV

I-DAY PLUS 9

The great doors of the assault hangar slowly descended, sinking into the ferrocrete floor of the Iron Bastion. Alarm claxons sounded as thousands of tons of reinforced steel and titanium shifted upwards, lifting the bulky assault boats from the arming bays deep beneath the hangar. Slaves in the cobalt-coloured livery of the Castellax Air Cohort scrambled to remove the restraining bolts from the missiles slung underneath each boat’s stubby wings. Other humans, garbed in the blue tunics and breeches of the Cohort proper, made a final examination of each craft before boarding.

‘It is a great honour to be chosen by the Warsmith himself,’ Brother Baelfegor said, his voice fairly crackling with pride. Captain Rhodaan didn’t even deign to look at him as they marched through the hangar towards their assault boat.

‘Any honour will be bestowed upon Over-Captain Vallax,’ Rhodaan growled. Across the hangar he could see Vallax and the Assault Marines of Squad Vidarna climbing the boarding ramp of their own craft. ‘We are to support them, nothing more.’

‘This raid upon Dirgas is too important to trust to Vallax,’ grumbled Brother Gomorie, the fingers of his afflicted hand unconsciously lengthening into knife-like claws.

Rhodaan rounded upon the other Iron Warrior. ‘You were not asked for opinions, only obedience.’ He pointed at Gomorie’s hand. ‘Perhaps the virus has spread its tendrils into your mind, brother. Perhaps soon you will be a berserk monstrosity like Brother Merihem.’

Gomorie stopped in his tracks, shifting uneasily under his commander’s reprimand. ‘Forgive me, captain. I know my obligations. I will not dishonour the Legion or Squad Kyrith.’

The other Iron Warriors continued to march towards the assault boat. Rhodaan remained behind with the chastened Gomorie. ‘See that you remember that,’ he warned. ‘I would hate to see one of my battle-brothers cast into the Oubliette with Merihem.’ His voice dropped to a vicious snarl. ‘In fact, I will not see such a thing. Do we understand each other, brother?’

‘Yes, captain!’ Gomorie cried, his hand crashing against his chest in salute. Rhodaan gestured for the Space Marine to join the rest of the squad. He turned to watch as Vallax’s assault boat finished its preparations and began to taxi onto the hangar’s launching catapult.

The raid upon Dirgas was a plan conceived by Warsmith Andraaz himself. The city had been the first to fall to the orks and in the days since the invasion’s start, the xenos had transformed it into a vital command and supply centre for their forces. Aerial reconnaissance showed that the orks were cannibalising the infrastructure of Dirgas for their own use, destroying valuable resources so they might cobble together their ramshackle war machines. Morax was especially dour in his predictions of how the damage would affect Castellax’s industry after the orks were repulsed. It was a prediction grim enough for the Warsmith to dispatch ten of his Iron Warriors against the alien beachhead, ten of a complement that numbered only sixty-four.

Ten demigods of death to capture a city infested by thousands of murderous aliens.

It would be a battle worth remembering.

The assault boat shuddered as it catapulted from the Bastion’s hangar. The human air crew were jounced violently by the craft’s rapid ascent into the skies of Vorago. Rhodaan could almost pity the men the weakness of their bodies. To be human was to be frail and inferior. To be an Iron Warrior was to walk among the gods.

Seated in the cargo compartment of the assault boat, the hulking Iron Warriors barely stirred as the craft gained momentum. Mag-clamps built into their boots and designed to thwart the vacuum of space kept each of them firmly fixed to the plasteel deck. A steady grip upon the metal guide-bar running the length of the compartment further restricted the effects of inertia to a minimum.

‘The Cohort does not spare itself,’ Brother Baelfegor observed. ‘We should make good time to Dirgas.’

‘Morax has probably promised them extra rations if they perform well,’ Brother Pazuriel said. He lowered his gaze to the chainaxe lying across his lap, his gauntlet caressing the diamond studs embedded in each tooth. ‘Or perhaps he has provided a different incentive should they fail his expectations.’

‘All humans are weak maggots,’ Brother Uzraal growled. ‘They exist only to serve the Legions and even in this they are found wanting.’ He turned his angry glare to the front of the compartment where a half-dozen Cohort auxiliaries sat in high-backed crash chairs. ‘Tell me, flesh-maggots,’ he barked at the men. ‘Tell me what gives you the right to breathe the same air as a legionary? What reason can you give me for not opening this door and feeding you to the wind? Why– Ow!’

Captain Rhodaan leaned back in his seat, the little motors built into his gauntlet making tiny whirring noises after their abrupt impact against the side of Uzraal’s helmet. The stricken Iron Warrior turned about in a display of wolfish fury. His anger quickly faded when he saw it was his captain who had struck him.

‘Focus on the objective,’ Rhodaan warned. ‘These distractions are beneath an Iron Warrior.’ He turned his fanged helm in the direction of the ashen-faced auxiliaries. ‘They will perform what is demanded of them. They understand their purpose.’

Suddenly, the assault boat shook with violence far greater than might be occasioned by turbulence in Vorago’s polluted sky. The auxiliaries appeared to hop and squirm in their seats, their helmets cracking against the rests of their chairs. The Iron Warriors themselves were jounced from side to side, their hands sliding along the guide-bars.

‘By the walls of Medrengard!’ Pazuriel cursed. ‘What are those fools doing up there!’ The huge Iron Warrior turned towards the cockpit and started to rise from his seat, but a gesture from Rhodaan curbed his action.

The captain was listening to the Air Cohort frequency, and what he was hearing wasn’t good. Since the orks’ first assault on Castellax the relentless alien attacks had choked the stratosphere with a cloud of debris and chaff, effectively cutting the planet off from the network of observation satellites orbiting it. As a result, the Iron Warriors had been forced to rely upon fly-bys and ground-based intelligence stations to follow enemy movement and deployment. As Morax had complained loudly and frequently, it was like trying to fight with only half an eye open.

The Skylord’s fears were now being realised. The Castellax Air Cohort had been thrown into complete panic by the sudden descent of several hundred ork craft which had been orbiting the planet. Like a meteor storm, the armada was hurtling towards Vorago. Before the sub-orbital defences could be brought to bear against the invaders, the vanguard of the aliens was already over the city.

Rhodaan partitioned his concentration, letting only a fragment of his attention rest upon the Cohort vox reports. Humans were his emotional, frightened inferiors and he didn’t trust their observations. What he did trust were his own eyes. Rising from his seat, he marched over to the assault boat’s side door, rolling its armoured weight aside as though it wasn’t even there.

Beyond the door, the vast industrial sprawl of Vorago stretched before Rhodaan’s eyes. He could see plumes of fire belching from hundreds of blast furnaces, pillars of smoke snaking upwards from thousands of smoke stacks. But he could also see dozens of other scenes of fire and smoke, less regimented, scattered throughout the city. It didn’t take much imagination to guess what the fires represented. In their ferocious, headlong plunge from orbit, the orks had abandoned any pretensions of caution. Hundreds of their ramshackle craft must have found the descent too much for their air frames, cracking apart as they dived towards the city.

Yet even in death, the orks served the greater cause of their Waaagh! Each broken craft became a shower of shrapnel, hurtling at the city with a velocity that could shatter plasteel. They smashed into Vorago with the fury of an orbital bombardment, shaking the city to its foundations. Worse, the doomed attack ships acted as decoys for the other aliens. The panicked janissaries manning the defence batteries chose the closest of the descending craft as their targets, training their fire on already disabled ships rather than the still intact orks following behind them.

It was a mistake no Iron Warrior would have made. Bitterly, Rhodaan regretted the schism that had broken the Third Grand Company, reducing it from over a thousand battle-brothers to the tiny remnant occupying Castellax. With a full complement of legionaries manning every aspect of the city’s defences, no alien would have made planetfall.

Now, however, the sky was thick with a confusion of ork craft. Huge, fat-bodied bombers, their exhausts belching thick streams of smog and diesel fumes, lumbered over the city, disgorging tons of ordnance with reckless abandon. Scrap-metal fighters raced along the ferrocrete canyons, training their crude slug-throwers on anything that moved.

More troubling were the bulky transports. Looking like big boxes of pig-iron fitted with wings and a mad array of guns, they rumbled across the sky. While Rhodaan watched, the side of one of the transports bulged outwards, distorted by some violent impact from within. A moment later, a ten-metre section of the aircraft’s hull was sent hurtling away, kicked loose by the mob of frenzied orks within.

The aliens roared with glee as the hull plate was torn free, paying no notice to the handful of their comrades pulled from the ship by the resulting suction. They were a fierce-looking mob, steel helmets crushed down around their apelike heads, their mouths distorted by a profusion of yellowed tusks. Each of the orks gripped some sort of weapon in its leathery paw, from stubby pistols to crude axes and clubs. One monster flexed the talons of a massive power claw, electricity crackling about each finger.

It did not take the orks long to spot Rhodaan’s assault boat and realise it wasn’t part of their armada. A fierce howl sounded from the mob and their transport screeched in protest as it swung around to adopt a parallel course to the assault boat.

‘Man the door guns,’ Rhodaan snarled into his vox. ‘I think the xenos want to play.’

Solid shot rattled off the hull of the assault boat as the orks in the transport began to blast away at the Air Cohort ship. One of the shots glanced off the pauldron of Rhodaan’s power armour. The captain responded by delivering a quick burst from his bolt pistol, blowing gory chunks from the massed ork mob. The stricken aliens were tossed from the compartment with callous disregard by their comrades, the wounded greenskins plummeting earthwards like rag dolls.

The human auxiliaries were beside Rhodaan now, unlimbering the pintle-mounted heavy bolter from its fastenings and feeding ammunition into its magazine. One of the men cried out as a lucky shot from an ork bolter ripped half of his torso away. The rest of the gun crew instantly ducked behind the armoured door, leaving Rhodaan alone to face the alien onslaught.

‘Worthless simpering flesh-maggots!’ Uzraal bellowed, kicking his way through the cowering auxiliaries. His gauntlet gripped one of the men by the back of his tunic. Slinging the man as though he weighed nothing, he tossed the soldier back towards the doorway. The man screamed as he pitched over the side and fell into Vorago’s polluted sky.

‘A bit too much force,’ Uzraal apologised as Rhodaan darted a glance at him. The other Iron Warriors were in the doorway now, their bolt pistols sending withering fire into the ork transport. Uzraal took their timely intervention to march over to the heavy bolter. In a few seconds, he completed the arming of the weapon and directed its murderous fire against the alien vessel.

The scrap-metal transport was shredded by the high-impact, automatic fire from the heavy bolter. Plates were ripped from the alien craft, the crystallised canopy of the flight compartment burst apart in a shower of fragmented shards, the pilots reduced to gory smears at their controls. Howling like a daemon from the warp, Uzraal ripped the heavy bolter from its mounting and leaned out from the side of the assault boat. With savage precision, he sent a continuous stream of shells slamming into the crippled transport, pulping the ork warriors in the exposed cargo compartment.

‘Left at the four!’ Rhodaan said, slapping his hand against Uzraal’s shoulder to get the Iron Warrior’s attention. Descending above and from the left of the assault boat was another ork transport, this one painted a dull grey and adorned with crude glyphs and crosses. As it dropped down, Rhodaan saw doors slide open in its sides and little metal gantries clatter out from the hull. At first he wondered if the orks were mad enough to try a boarding action, as though they were aboard ancient sea vessels, not aircraft hurtling through the sky thousands of metres above a modern city.

As Uzraal’s weapon began to chew chunks from the bottom of the ork ship’s hull, Rhodaan saw the real purpose of the gantries. Ork warriors were emerging from the transport, climbing out upon the shuddering metal platforms. They were somewhat slighter and paler of colour than the vicious mob in the first transport, wearing dull grey fatigues in what seemed some crude attempt at a uniform. More importantly, however, each of the monsters had a huge rocket fastened to its back.

The Iron Warriors immediately turned their fire from the transport to the orks on the gantries. They had fought the greenskins many times and each of them remembered the vicious stormboyz who employed their own crude versions of jump packs to stage brutal assaults in the very heart of their enemy’s position. These orks weren’t going to get the chance.

An autocannon positioned in the tail of the transport growled into life, punching holes in the Iron Warriors assault boat. There was a shrill scream as one of the ork shells tore through a Cohort auxiliary, splashing the man’s innards across the compartment. Uzraal shifted his aim, directing his heavy bolter against the ork gun. The other Iron Warriors continued to pick off stormboyz from the gantries. With each shot, another ork went careening from the transport. One especially good bit of marksmanship from Baelfegor exploded the rocket strapped to one ork’s back, transforming it into a living torch and bathing four of its fellows in burning promethium. The stricken greenskins fell earthwards, igniting patches of industrial smog as their burning bodies plummeted through the brown sky.

A nimbus of flame suddenly erupted from the rear of the ork ship, the telltale impact of a krak missile. The sensors in Rhodaan’s helmet instantly calculated the trajectory, spotting Vallax’s assault boat in the distance. He could see the Iron Warriors of Squad Vidarna standing at the open doors of the craft, blasting away at a swarm of ork stormboyz flitting about their ship. Though the Space Marines were slaughtering their foes by the bushel, more of the rocket-packed xenos were converging on the assault boat.

‘Pilot,’ Rhodaan snarled into his vox. ‘Reduce speed! Bring us closer to the other assault boat.’ Whatever his personal animosity towards Vallax, his pride as an Iron Warrior wouldn’t allow him to abandon his brothers on the field of battle.

‘Lord Rhodaan,’ the pilot objected, his voice quaking with fear. ‘We are taking too much punishment ourselves to render aid to the other gunship.’

Rhodaan’s voice was sharp as steel as he growled back at the pilot. ‘Iron Warriors do not forsake their battle-brothers,’ he said. ‘Bring us about, or I will take command of this ship.’ He didn’t need to explain to the human crew what would happen to them if he was forced to pilot the assault boat himself.

‘By your command, Lord Rhodaan,’ the pilot replied. Immediately, the assault boat’s speed began to slacken and the craft began to veer towards Vallax’s ship.

Almost instantly, Rhodaan saw a mob of stormboyz shoot away from a saucer-shaped transport vessel, their rocket packs spewing black fumes as they surged across the sky. It quickly became clear that the aliens had spotted their assault boat and were manoeuvring to intercept. The stormboyz veered crazily through the polluted sky. Rhodaan watched as one of the rocket packs exploded, sending a burning mass of ork-meat plummeting earthwards. Other orks tried to compensate for the erratic trajectory of their flight by attempting to steer with their flapping arms. Still others were too occupied firing their bolters at the assault boat to be bothered by something as inconsequential as speed and direction.

‘Brother Uzraal, bring down that rabble!’ Rhodaan ordered. Uzraal marched across the compartment to the opposite doorway and braced himself against the recoil of the heavy bolter. A bloodthirsty hiss sounded from his helmet’s vent as he took aim.

Before Uzraal could fire, the assault boat was shaken by a tremendous explosion. Two of the auxiliaries were hurled from the compartment and it was all the Iron Warriors could do to maintain their footing. The frantic voices of the crew sounded over the vox, shouting that the dorsal stabilisers and airfoil had been hit. The boat was becoming unbalanced, slipping over into a roll the pilot couldn’t bring her out of.

Rhodaan glared at the oncoming mob of stormboyz, firing into the laughing orks. Beyond them, he could see Vallax’s assault boat veering away, escaping the crush of enemies swarming about her. Clearly the Over-Captain didn’t have the same sense of martial pride as his subordinate.

‘Brace for impact,’ Rhodaan ordered his squad as the boat’s roll increased, shifting the craft to a forty-five degree angle.

‘I don’t think we can expect a soft landing.’

The factory walls throbbed from the reverberations of Vorago’s cannon. Tiles rained down from the roof as bombs exploded across the district. A section of ceiling came crashing inwards as an immense block of ferrocrete, blasted from a neighbouring structure, smashed its way into Processing Plant Secundus Minorus. The huge chunk of debris scored a deep gouge in the floor as it tumbled through the factory, obliterating ovens and conveyors in its path. Dozens of slaves struggled futilely in their chains as the rolling wreckage tottered towards them.

Yuxiang turned his face so he wouldn’t have to watch the men at the nearby conveyor ground into paste by the runaway block. It wasn’t the sight of death that unsettled him – he had been a spectator to grisly death since he’d taken his first breath on Castellax. No, it was the knowledge that the slightest deviation in the block’s rampage would have made him one of its victims. This was what threatened to turn his knees to jelly and his mind sick with terror.

Now, at this moment, Yuxiang couldn’t allow his emotions to overwhelm him. If he was going to survive, he had to keep his wits. He had to keep focused.

Defiantly, Yuxiang raised his eyes to the wall and the glowering steel words bolted to its surface, the words that had oppressed him for so many years, burning themselves into his mind.

Obedience. Labour. Fid–

As he stared at the words, the entire factory was rocked by a tremendous impact. An entire section of wall was blasted inwards, ripping the last letters from the wall in a shower of sparks and a shriek of steel. Yuxiang gaped in awe as he watched an armoured assault boat come thundering into the factory, smoke and flame streaming from its scarred hull. The deathly insignia of the Iron Warriors glared at him from the boat’s wing as the craft began to roll. A moment later, the craft smashed into one of the blast furnaces, spewing molten metal across the factory in a shower of fire.

The slave could only stare in disbelief at the devastation, his eyes straining to pierce the veil of steam and smoke that now engulfed the assault boat. That had been an Iron Warriors gunship, only the terrifying Traitor Marines were allowed to bear that insignia. Yuxiang’s stunned mind couldn’t come to grips with that fact. All his life he had looked upon the Iron Warriors as something indestructible, unconquerable. Like a force of nature, or a cabal of cruel gods spat from the depths of hell. To think that they could die, that they could be beaten was something Yuxiang had never dared believe possible.

The harsh bark of gunfire broke Yuxiang’s fascination. Whipping around, the slave found his eyes again turned to the wall. Through the great gash torn by the assault boat, he could see hideous forms streaming into the factory. They were things possessed of only a general semblance of human design and upon the broad back of each creature a massive rocket had been strapped. They used these to power down through the rent in the wall, laughing and shooting as they made their descent.

Raw horror raced through Yuxiang’s body. He had never seen an alien before, but he knew he was seeing the dreaded xenos now. No man who had ever heard tell of an ork could fail to recognise the creatures when he saw them.

The monsters must have been the ones who shot down the assault boat, then pursued the crippled craft into the factory. Once inside, however, the bloodthirsty orks quickly forgot their quarry. Even after the havoc wrought by the explosions around it, there were still thousands of slaves shackled to the machinery of Processing Plant Secundus Minorus. The sight of helpless, cowering prey was too much for the orks to ignore. Laughing their brutish calls, the aliens raised their crude weapons and happily began to massacre the defenceless humans.

Prefect Wyre was nowhere in sight, but several of his overseers had remained behind to safeguard the factory during the attack. At the sound of gunfire, they emerged from the shelters they had retreated to at the height of the bombing. Quickly they fanned out, seeking cover from which to engage the orks. Yuxiang knew it wasn’t concern for the slaves that motivated the overseers, but rather fear of what would happen to them if the aliens caused further damage to the factory’s infrastructure with their reckless carnage.

One of the hulking orks pitched over onto its side as its body was peppered with shot from the overseers’ guns. Despite being blasted by three shotguns, the greenskin still had fight in it, aiming its fat-barrelled pistol in the general direction of its attackers and emptying the magazine at the humans. When the weapon was spent, the ork threw its weapon at the oven the closest overseer had taken shelter behind, then threw one of its boots when the pistol failed to hit a target. The wounded brute was groping about looking for something else to throw when another fusillade from the shotguns smashed into it, nearly ripping its head from its shoulders.

The first ork the overseers killed was also their last. With savage glee, every ork in the factory turned away from their slaughter of the slaves to converge upon the small cluster of humans who had the temerity to fight back. Slugs and shells smashed into the machinery the guards were using as cover. The projectiles with lower velocity glanced from the sides of the obstacles, but there was no consistency among the alien armaments and several rounds tore through the machinery as though it were made of paper. Human screams rose from behind the cover as one by one the guards were torn to ribbons by the high-calibre ork weaponry.

Yuxiang cowered deeper in the shadows as he saw the last of the overseers pitch and fall, his shotgun clattering across the floor only a few metres away. The slave watched in terror as several orks prowled among the bodies, stripping weapons and ammunition belts from the dead men. He glanced back at the shotgun. Indecision gripped him. He could make a mad dash for the weapon, seize it before the orks saw him.

The very possibility of attracting the attention of the aliens made Yuxiang shift even lower against the side of his work station. He was no soldier, he couldn’t expect to equal the fighting prowess of the overseers. If he had a gun, he still wouldn’t be any match for one of the aliens. No, his only hope was to hide and keep quiet.

A greasy, musky stink struck Yuxiang’s senses a moment before he saw the ork step out from the other side of his work station. The reek of the alien’s leathery flesh was overwhelming, as though it would take root in his lungs and choke him with its foulness. The slave clapped a hand over his mouth to keep from coughing, fighting against his body’s instinctive revulsion.

It was a wasted effort. The ork took a few steps towards the shotgun, then suddenly swung around. The monster’s beady red eyes narrowed as it stared down at Yuxiang, but it was the alien’s flaring nostrils that told the slave how he had been found. Just as he had smelled the alien, so the alien had smelled him.

Yuxiang rose slowly to his feet, a coil of chain clenched in one hand, the twisted piece of rebar he had used to break his chain in the other. The ork scowled at him for a moment, then its face pulled back in a sadistic leer, exposing its yellowed fangs. He could see the alien’s body shivering with amusement as the ork holstered its pistol. Its eyes darted from the loop of chain to the piece of rebar.

Chuckling, the ork reached to its belt and dragged out an immense knife, a weapon with a blade bigger than Yuxiang’s forearm. The greenskin stabbed one of its fat fingers against an activation stud and the teeth along the edge of the knife began to churn back and forth. Hefting its brutal weapon, the grinning ork stepped towards Yuxiang.

The next instant, a single shot exploded from just over the slave’s head. The ork staggered, the knife dropping from its numbed hand. Smoke rose from the hole in its forehead, its beady red eyes crossed as though trying to look at the wound between them. A second later, the explosive round detonated, blasting the helmet from the greenskin’s head and sending most of its brains and part of its skull spurting across the floor. The alien’s body crumpled to its knees, then pitched forwards onto what was left of its face.

Yuxiang’s relief quickly collapsed into fear as his deliverer marched into view. Like the ork, his rescuer came from behind the machinery and towered above the slave. Again, Yuxiang found himself gazing upon the skull-icon of the Iron Warriors, but where before he had seen it emblazoned across the wing of one of their gunships, now he saw it engraved upon the pauldron of a Space Marine’s own armour.

The Iron Warrior’s plate was almost black from where it had been scorched and charred. It was incredible, but Yuxiang realised this Space Marine must have been on the assault boat and survived the conflagration that consumed it. He could see the scarring along the muzzle of the Iron Warrior’s bolt pistol, the bubbling that bespoke exposure to the most extreme temperature. Somehow, the armour had endured the same heat – and so had the man inside.

No, not a man, Yuxiang corrected himself. A monster, something as cruel and alien as any ork. An Iron Warrior.

Like a god of death, the hulking Space Marine gazed at his handiwork. He brought his armoured boot down upon the wreckage of the ork’s head, smashing what was left of it into a greasy smear. Peering around the corner of Yuxiang’s workstation, the Iron Warrior studied the dispersal of the other orks. After a moment, his fanged helm dipped in a nod of satisfaction.

‘Thirty targets,’ the Iron Warrior growled over his vox-caster. ‘Brother Baelfegor will frag the three near the conveyors. When the rest react to the grenade, the remainder of the squad will assault from the flanks. I will maintain a firing position at their rear. If any of the aliens attempt to disengage, flush them towards my position.’

Almost as soon as the Iron Warrior issued his orders, the factory echoed once more with the discharge of bolters and the boom of grenades. From the smouldering wreckage of their transport, the Space Marines had risen like avenging phoenixes. Now it was their turn to bring death into Processing Plant Secundus Minorus.

Yuxiang sank against the base of his work station, all ideas of escape and freedom dashed. There was no defying the Iron Warriors. They were indestructible. They were unbeatable.

The only thing a mere mortal could hope for was to keep out of their way.

Rhodaan brought the screaming edge of his chainsword crunching through the ork’s body. The greenskin flailed on the gnawing blade, yet even as its spine was cut in half, the alien struggled to bring its wide-barrelled pistol towards the Iron Warrior’s head. The Space Marine twisted aside at the last instant as the ork’s finger tightened on the trigger, the violent flash of the discharged weapon causing the left lens of Rhodaan’s helmet to darken its display for a moment. The slug whipped past his head, burying itself in the side of a pneumatic press. The next moment, the bisected ork’s body was flopping on the floor.

The Iron Warrior stared contemptuously at the mutilated alien, then pointed his bolt pistol at its head. Where the ork had missed, Rhodaan’s aim proved more accurate, exploding the brute’s skull with a single shot.

Sounds of battle slowly faded from the processing plant, only a few scattered howls and the occasional stutter of gunfire where moments before bedlam had reigned. The other members of Squad Kyrith were taking their share of the alien invaders. The stormboyz who had pursued the crippled assault boat were learning what it meant to oppose the Iron Warriors. They had thought the Space Marines destroyed in the crash. Now they knew better. Not that the lesson would do them any good. A dead ork didn’t perform new tricks.

Rhodaan fired a few rounds at an ork rising off the floor, trying to use its rocket pack to reach the hole in the wall and escape. The shots crippled the creature’s pack, causing a stream of flame to erupt from the side of the mechanism and sending the rocket careening through the factory on an erratic trajectory which ended in a ball of fire when the alien smacked headfirst into one of the walls.

Rhodaan had already dismissed the alien from his thoughts. With the ork incursion in the factory effectively eliminated, he turned his attention back to the bigger situation.

‘Squad Kyrith to Bastion,’ Rhodaan growled into his helmet’s vox-unit. ‘Assault craft destroyed. Request extraction and redeployment. Our location is Processing Plant Secundus Minorus. Minimal xenos presence at our position.’

The captain waited while his report was relayed by the Bastion’s servitors. Warily, he watched the breach in the wall, ready to spot any more orks trying to enter or leave the factory. The building was still being shaken by the bombs the aliens were continuing to rain down on the district. Simple logic dictated that the orks wouldn’t be deploying troops in this area, only an idiot or a madman would bomb his own soldiers. But Rhodaan had fought orks before and knew that the aliens were both idiots and madmen. The only thing they could be depended upon to do was to be undependable.

‘Captain Rhodaan, this is the Bastion.’ Rhodaan stiffened slightly as he heard the voice of Sergeant Ipos over his vox. ‘Over-Captain Vallax reported your craft destroyed with all personnel. It is good to hear that his report was in error.’

Rhodaan took a second to drain the emotion from his voice before responding. Again, he considered the eerie accuracy of the shots which had disabled the assault boat’s dorsal engine. So, Vallax had thought Squad Kyrith destroyed, had he?

‘Squad Kyrith is fully operational,’ Rhodaan said, his tone as tempered and mechanical as that of a servitor. ‘We require only extraction to pursue our objective.’ If Vallax thought he would reap the glory of assaulting Dirgas on his own, then the Over-Captain was going to be disappointed.

‘Negative, Captain Rhodaan,’ Ipos replied. ‘The Dirgas mission has been cancelled. The xenos have descended upon Vorago in considerable force. They must not be allowed to establish a beachhead. Warsmith Andraaz has made the extermination of the xenos within Vorago top priority for all brothers of the Third Grand Company.’

‘Squad Kyrith obeys,’ Rhodaan said, slamming his fist against his chest plate in an almost automatic gesture of fealty. Beneath his helmet, his lip curled in a sneer. If his men were denied the opportunity to win glory in the raid on Dirgas, then at least Vallax wouldn’t be adding any laurels to his name either.

‘Brothers!’ Rhodaan called over the inter-squad vox frequency. ‘Cleanse this place swiftly. We have been given new orders from the Bastion. The foul xenos seek to gain a foothold within Vorago.

‘We will see that the only ground they keep is the pit we dump their carcasses into.’

CHAPTER V

I-DAY PLUS THIRTY

A blossom of flame and smoke rose from the hab-pen, an incandescent mushroom of atomised stone and vaporised metal that spiralled into the greasy sky. Somewhere within that pillar of devastation, the ashes of six thousand slaves reached towards the heavens before sinking back into the rubble of their bombed-out cage.

Better them than me, thought Group-Captain Xiaowang as he stared from the cockpit of his ebon-winged Spineripper. The swept-back intrusion-bomber represented the latest word in Castellax design templates, a vicious fusion of human engineering and xenos technology. Capable of incredible atmospheric speeds, the Spineripper had earned its name for its uncompromising manoeuvrability, far in excess of what the human body could safely endure. Even competent pilots like Xiaowang, with years of hypno-conditioning and training behind them, had to be vigilant lest the aircraft get out of control. Sometimes, when he looked at the alien crystal relays scattered across the control console, the pilot wondered if some malignant intelligence was staring back at him, waiting for him to make the slightest mistake.

‘Hab-blocks six and seven now eliminated,’ a quivering voice reported over the squadron comms channel. Xiaowang pressed his thumb against the activation rune for his vox-unit.

‘They’re better off dead,’ he snarled at the other pilot. There were twelve Spinerippers in his command and he wasn’t certain which man made the report. He didn’t want to know. Skylord Morax was extremely unforgiving when it came to displays of emotion. A favourite punishment for such displays of weakness was for the offender to be shackled to a bomb and dropped in the very next run. Xiaowang had seen it happen more times than he cared to admit. Mercy was something only a complete idiot expected from the Iron Warriors. Do your job with efficiency and diligence and they might ignore you – anything less was playing with death.

Xiaowang turned his attention back to the flight path of his squadron. Pillars of fire sprouted from the city below, like some hellish grove with leaves of ash and smoke. It was sobering to think of the many thousands of dead those pillars represented, the atomised destruction of so many men and women who had been alive before the Iron Bats appeared in the skies over Oramis.

The orks had descended en masse on the city of Oramis in the early days of the invasion. The local defence forces had been overwhelmed in a matter of days and the governor of the city had been slow implementing the murderous abandonment measures demanded by the Iron Warriors. Instead of leaving a desolate city, the governor had allowed the foul xenos to capture a populated metropolis with most of its industry still intact. The orks had quickly started using the city to manufacture weaponry to facilitate their conquest, impressing the population into their workforce.

Xiaowang grimaced as he pictured the brutal, monstrous aliens. The people of Oramis had fallen from the pot into the fire. The Iron Warriors were merciless and unforgiving, but at least they didn’t think of their slaves as a supplemental food supply.

The very thought of food brought a growl from Xiaowang’s stomach. Since the onset of the siege, the people of Castellax had been subsisting from an even lower quality protein sludge than normal. The loss of the orbital algae swamps had reduced their rations to a noxious mix of synthetics and protein supplements. At best, the villainous paste lacked any semblance of taste. At worst, it was like trying to eat sand after a silica rain.

Xiaowang shook his head. It was a poor metaphor, but naturally his mind had turned to thoughts of water. There was little left on Castellax, most of it so polluted by the planet’s industry that a sump-ghoul couldn’t drink it. Even more than food, water was becoming a dire scarcity. The reserves maintained in Vorago and the other cities wouldn’t last forever, whatever the Iron Warriors might claim. It was fine for the Space Marines – as far as Xiaowang knew, they didn’t need to eat or drink or sleep for that matter – but for mere mortals it was mighty important to know where the next drink was coming from. Or if there was even going to be a next drink.

Another blossom of fire boiled upwards as the last of the Spinerippers released its payload. The visor of Xiaowang’s helmet darkened as the bright blast burned across the sky. How many had perished in that blast, he wondered? Perhaps it was better not to know.

He turned his face from the explosion, scowling as his gaze stared out across the sweeping panorama of factories and processing plants which made up the industrial section of Oramis. Many of the structures were blackened and burned, but not from the attentions of the Castellax Air Cohort. Skylord Morax had given them strict orders against bombing Oramis’s industry. What damage the factories had suffered was caused by the orks when they captured the city. From the deranged confusion of derricks, gantries and improvised balustrades arrayed around the buildings, it appeared the conquerors had gone to great pains to put everything into working order again.

Xiaowang clenched his fist. The target priority established by Morax was beyond callous. The Iron Bats were to eliminate the workforce to disrupt ork activity in Oramis. Another squadron was to bomb the rail-lines to hinder transport of materiel from the city to other ork positions. But the factories, they were sacrosanct. Any pilot who dropped his payload in the industrial area was to be skinned alive before his entire wing and then thrown into the acid-flats of Teramis.

The city, Xiaowang understood, was to be the focus of a future campaign. The goal of that campaign was recapturing the factories. For the Iron Warriors, that was the only thing that made the city worth possessing. The fate of the humans living in Oramis was less than nothing to them. They could always cultivate a new generation of slaves from the embryo farms.

‘Bandits! Bandits!’ a voice screamed across the vox. Xiaowang’s head snapped around, his eyes darting to the proximity display. True to the panicked report, there were a dozen blips rising from the midst of the industrial centre. Xiaowang didn’t need visual confirmation to know they were ork fighters. After three sorties against Oramis, the aliens had figured out the pattern and moved their hangars into the inviolate part of the city.

‘Iron Bats,’ Xiaowang snarled into his vox-bead. ‘Hostiles at our five. Xenos-pattern craft!’ He almost laughed at that classification. When it came to ork aircraft, there was no pattern. Every plane was as different from the next as one alkali crystal from another. Until each example was actually engaged there was no way to gauge its speed or manoeuvrability. Or its armament.

‘All wings, drop bombs and scatter,’ Xiaowang ordered. Loaded down with ordnance, there was small chance of outmanoeuvring the fighters. Oramis had been too distant from the aerodrome for the Spinerippers to bring their own fighter cover. Even Morax would have to agree that a discreet withdrawal was the smart thing. He might execute Xiaowang anyway, of course.

The Spineripper was jostled violently as the last bombers dropped their loads onto the smouldering hab-blocks. Watching the pillars of fire and ash rise into the sky, Xiaowang smiled. The ring of destruction was between the Iron Bats and the approaching orks. He hadn’t planned it this way, but he couldn’t have asked for a better screen to cover the squadron’s retreat.

‘All wings, peel off at your nine. Keep the blast-area between you and the bandits as long as possible.’ Xiaowang pulled back on the control stick, putting his bomber into a steep-angled turn. With one eye on the proximity-slate, he watched the ork fighters continuing their approach. Some of the aliens were initiating steep climbs or drastic turns to avoid the ash clouds, others seemed intent on just ploughing straight through the radioactive pillars. A flicker of relief spread through him. The orks weren’t going to catch them now.

‘Incoming!’ came a frantic shriek, shattering the moment of calm Xiaowang had taken possession of. He looked back at the proximity-slate. It was peppered with a confusion of little specks. In his ears, Xiaowang could hear the clatter of bullets glancing off the fuselage of his Spineripper.

Whatever air detection device the orks had, it wasn’t very good. The Iron Bats had been able to sortie over Oramis with relative impunity before. In the past, however, their flight path had taken them well away from the city before turning back to the aerodrome. This time, they were crossing their own tail and flying over a city infested with kill-crazy aliens fully aware of them. Looking down from the cockpit, Xiaowang could see rooftops swarming with orks, every one of them armed with a gun of some kind and firing wildly into the sky. It wasn’t a question of accuracy or precision, the sheer amount of fire being thrown into the air made it impossible to avoid. It was like trying to fly through an ash-storm of lead.

The only saving grace was that the ork weaponry was of too low a calibre to bring down a Spineripper at such distance. Even as that comforting thought came to Xiaowang, an agonised scream shrieked across the vox. Through the cockpit, he could see his wingman descending in flames, his Spineripper trailing smoke from its mangled fuselage. On the ground below, an ork rocket battery belched a salvo of twenty warheads into the sky. He saw several of the rockets detonate soon after, probably struck by the wild fire of small arms, but there were still a half-dozen left when they reached the Iron Bats’ altitude. Xiaowang stabbed his thumb against a rune on the control panel, releasing a bundle of metallic chaff to misdirect the rockets. He felt his body go cold when they ignored the bait, shifting course to match his own. Whatever machine-spirit the orks had pounded into their weapons to guide them, it was too primitive to change targets once it was unleashed.

‘I don’t want to die in Oramis,’ Xiaowang cursed as the first of the rockets slammed into his tail.

A moment later, his world vanished in a sheet of flame, his broken Spineripper spiralling downwards until it evaporated in the mushroom cloud rising from the rubble of hab-block six.

Captain Rhodaan prowled along the marble crypt, inspecting the artefacts entombed in their stasis-field niches. The segments of a massive crystal, the spider-web of flaws marring its face still weeping the same tears of blood as when he had ripped it from the shell of an eldar wraithguard. The sceptre of an ecclesiarch, its thorns as keen as the day the priest had vainly tried to bludgeon Rhodaan with it, little specks of the cleric’s brain still clinging to the ornate baton. The talon of a tyranid hive tyrant, its alien flesh still squirming and striving to regenerate itself five centuries after it was chopped from the monster’s arm.

Rhodaan paused before one of the niches, letting his gaze linger upon the pride of his collection, the centrepiece of his own private reliquary.

The still-leering head of a Space Marine, a captain from the Imperial Fists Chapter, one of the servile fools who yet slaved for the False Emperor. Preserved at the very moment Rhodaan had hewed it from the man’s shoulders, he could still see the hate in the dead Imperial Fist’s eyes. It was validation, a testament to his prowess and might. It was tangible proof that he, Rhodaan, was a true Iron Warrior, a son of Perturabo, proud inheritor of the legacy of the Legion.

He turned away from the decapitated head, all doubt vanquished in his mind. It did not need the calculated flattery of Skylord Morax or the grudging acknowledgement of Over-Captain Vallax or even the regard of Warsmith Andraaz to justify Rhodaan’s sense of purpose. It took only one look into the dead eyes of a butchered enemy. Hate was his purpose, to avenge his Legion’s betrayal upon the galaxy. Millions had already been sacrificed to his hate, but it was not enough to scratch the surface. The Imperium’s suffering had only begun. So long as there was a breath in his body, a beat in one of his hearts, Rhodaan would prosecute the Long War.

‘Revenge is my honour,’ the Iron Warrior growled, his words echoing from the marble walls. Rhodaan’s voice was an alchemy of pride and bitterness. After millennia of unending war, he knew the Legion’s thirst for revenge would never be quenched and so he was doomed to die without honour. The moment the Legion’s flesh-rippers had claimed him, he had become one of the damned. They had given him strength and power beyond anything a mere mortal could possess, but in return they had taken everything.

Rhodaan closed his eyes, picturing that final moment when the flesh-rippers had come. He could see their chainaxes tearing through the sealed door of the hab-unit, shredding the furniture that had been piled behind it to strengthen the barrier. He could hear the death agonies of his parents and sister as the slavers butchered them before his eyes. The Iron Warrior felt no kinship to these people now. The only feeling that stirred within him was disgust at the sloppy tactics displayed by the flesh-rippers. It was insufferable to think such vermin served the Third Grand Company, dared call themselves vassals of Warsmith Andraaz.

The Space Marine stalked through the empty halls of his reliquary, abandoning thoughts of the past and turning his mind to promises of the future. Skylord Morax was pushing for the recapture of Oramis, promising that his Air Cohort could immobilise the orks infesting the city long enough for ten divisions of janissaries to sweep in and seize the initiative. The Iron Warriors themselves would strike at the vital industrial district, exterminating every alien lurking within the factories. Morax was quite confident that the entire operation could be organised and put into action in as little as a week.

Of course, there had been voices raised in protest. Algol and Gamgin were concerned about maintaining the strength of the garrison manning the Witch Wall and the Mare Ossius fortifications. Already bemoaning the reserves that had been detached from the Mare Ossius area of operations in order to assist Project Malice – Ipos’s plan for dealing with the orks should they breach the Witch Wall and cross the dry ocean – the two captains weren’t about to lose more men to Morax’s offensive.

Admiral Nostraz went one better, calling for a surgical strike against Oramis. A single run targeting the spoil heaps looming over the city’s northern and western districts would smash Oramis flat under an avalanche of industrial waste. Even if the orks could dig themselves out, they wouldn’t be using the factories to arm any more of their brood. It was a proposal that seemed to be gaining more favour with the Warsmith each day. Having lost his fleet, Nostraz appeared to be manoeuvring to assume Morax’s position as Skylord.

The sharp tang of fresh blood struck Rhodaan’s nostrils as he rounded a marble partition. A flicker of tension passed through the Space Marine’s towering physique, an instinctive reaction to the potential for violence and strife. He paused beside the partition, his fingers closing about the carved figures of daemons writhing along the cold stone. The sound of a murmured litany relaxed the Iron Warrior. There was the potential for violence and strife here, but it was violence he would unleash.

Down a dimly lit hallway, Rhodaan marched, the sounds and smell growing more distinct with each step. Now the niches were filled with different trophies. A diamond-toothed chainsword from the foundries of Olympia. A masterwork plasma pistol crafted by the vanquished abhumans of Freya Seven. The vicious talons of an enormous power claw, each knuckle moulded into the semblance of a grinning skull, a product of the bloodthirsty daemonlings of Zhok, deep within the Eye. Each weapon was more than a simple trophy to Rhodaan. These were battle honours, living symbols of his might and power. Gazing upon them, he could remember not only the moment he had torn them from the lifeless fingers of an enemy, but all his other battles, the wars in which these instruments of death had known him as their master. They had shed blood upon a thousand worlds and would do so upon a thousand more.

The subdued sound of the litany increased as Rhodaan made his way deeper into the confines of his arsenal-chapel. Now he could hear a wet, gurgling noise as well, punctuated by the dull pulsations of a machine. How often had he heard that sound? How often had it presaged the coming of conflict and glory?

Rhodaan turned a corner and stared into a marble-walled alcove draped in pressure-film and the crackling coils of temporal bafflers. The drapery had been pulled back, carefully bound in lengths of leathery hide and parchment conjure-strips. Within the recess beyond, a tall metal stand rested. Between the stand’s splayed arms, a sinister-looking device was displayed. It was a bulky mass of ceramite and titanium, its surface etched with the most elaborate calligraphy. Huge thrusters sprouted from its back, their intakes looking like the fanged mouths of ancient star-devils. Straps of plasteel dangled from its front, merging into a skull-shaped buckle, forming a cobweb of segmented metal and glistening gemstone.

Most striking of all, however, were the folded wings which jutted from the sides of the device. Sheathed in reptilian leather, veins pulsing and quivering beneath the skin, an evil-smelling musk rising from its pores, the wings seemed not only organic but alive.

The Iron Warriors captain smiled as he gazed upon his prize possession. It was named Eurydice and he had claimed it from one of his own battle-brothers, Sergeant Gaos. The Raptor had died in the talons of Rhodaan’s power claw during the violent overthrow of the old Warsmith. Since that time, it had been Rhodaan’s right to wear the daemo-mechanical marvel into battle. It was a thing of the warp, beyond mundane rules of physics and chemistry. Swifter and more agile than any jump pack fabricated by the priests of Mars, Eurydice had served its new master well.

It would have cause to do so again.

A clutch of shaven mamelukes knelt on the floor surrounding Eurydice, the slave-serfs looking like shapeless heaps of grey in their heavy robes. It was from their parched lips that the chords of the litany rose. The humans swayed in rhythm to the archaic syllables, a chorus of adoration and genuflection to the somnolent essence of the jump pack. Rhodaan had scores of mamelukes detailed for no other purpose than to tend Eurydice and keep it ready for him. Artisans who diligently mended every nick and scrape, machinist-fabricators who ministered to every gear and piston, tech-adepts who placated the essence of the device through prayer and ritual.

And the butchers, who satisfied Eurydice’s hunger.

The smell of blood emanated from a circular framework standing in the hall outside the alcove. Two wizened mamelukes attended the cobalt-hued skeleton of rods and tubes, their faces locked behind snarling fetish-masks. Upon the frame itself, limbs spread wide, was the limp paleness of a naked slave. From the shackle attached to each wrist and ankle, a fat tube snaked away from the body, undulating across the framework before dipping down into a reservoir. With each breath the slave took, the tubes shuddered and a spurt of crimson fell into the reservoir.

The exsanguinator was a fiendish device of torture, exploiting the victim’s own pulse to bleed him dry. But it was not mere torture which caused Rhodaan to order its use. One of the butchers held a long, brush-like instrument in his withered hand. As the reservoir filled, he would dip the bristles into the collected blood. Once the brush was saturated, the mameluke would approach Eurydice and paint the reptilian wings with the sanguine fluid. It was almost possible to see the blood soaking through the skin and swelling the veins beneath.

Rhodaan paid scant attention to his slaves and even less to the dying wretch in the grip of the exsanguinator. He had eyes only for Eurydice. Would its essence be placated? Would it accede to his demands, or would it be capricious and betray him the way it had Gaos?

He could almost picture the scene in his mind, the reptilian wings folding in upon themselves, dropping him to his destruction. He could see Vallax gloating over his corpse as the Over-Captain stripped Eurydice from him.

Rhodaan reached out, seizing one of the chanters by the neck. His fingers tightened about the slave, crushing his windpipe, pulverising his vertebrae. As he felt the man’s death spasm against his palm, an icy determination filled his hearts. His hated superior would never plunder Rhodaan’s treasure. He glared at Eurydice, eyes boring into the empty sockets of the skull-buckle. Whatever awareness the jump pack’s essence had, it could not fail to mistake the Space Marine’s warning. He would not be a mere victim like Gaos. If Eurydice failed him, Rhodaan would destroy them both. The jump pack would never serve a jackal like Vallax!

Thoughts of the Over-Captain brought a tightening of Rhodaan’s hand and torn skin and sinew oozed through his fingers. He stared down at the dead slave, then let the carcass slump to the floor. Vallax had been conspiring against Rhodaan’s Raptors, picking the choice assaults for his own squad and assigning the less prestigious missions to his subordinate. It was a strategy calculated to ensure Rhodaan remained in obscurity while Vallax’s name was ever before Warsmith Andraaz.

The next mission was no different. While Vallax led a raid against an important ork staging area, Rhodaan would coordinate the evacuation of material from a mining outpost in the path of the latest xenos incursion east of the Convallis Robigo. There would be glory for Vallax, leading an attack against the invaders. There was none for the man who organised a retreat.

Of course, this effort on the Over-Captain’s part to relegate Rhodaan to the most ignominious duties could simply be a clever ploy to put his rival off guard. It was no secret that something would need to be done about the ork presence in Dirgas. Since Algol’s abandonment of the city, the xenos had transformed it into a fortress bristling with anti-aircraft batteries. Morax’s Air Cohort had suffered tremendous losses in their last run against Dirgas, exchanging only the most minor damage to the city for their efforts. Since then, the Skylord had been making one excuse after another to avoid Dirgas entirely, pleading a campaign of strategic isolation to neutralise the ork stronghold’s impact on the overall war effort.

It was a tactic which was only a stop-gap. Eventually, Warsmith Andraaz would order the Dirgas problem settled. When that time came, it would be the Raptors who would be in the vanguard. All of them, both Vallax and Rhodaan. The Over-Captain wouldn’t be able to sideline his rival when it came to knocking out the invader’s stronghold. He would need to find another way to keep the glory for himself.

Which brought Rhodaan’s thoughts back to a conversation he’d had, a clandestine liaison with Uhlan, one of the Raptors from Vallax’s squad. Uhlan was a half-breed, his gene-seed cobbled together from the plundered glands of butchered enemies. It was a fact Vallax never allowed his subordinate to forget. Such treatment had eroded the other Space Marine’s loyalty to the Over-Captain, moving him to look for a more supportive patron.

Rhodaan felt contempt course through his gut. He was a pure Iron Warrior and the temerity of a half-breed like Uhlan disgusted him. Such creatures were a necessary evil to maintain the ranks of the Legion and allow them to prosecute the Long War, but for such abominations to think they were equals was absurd! He would have laughed in Uhlan’s face if he hadn’t realised the mongrel’s delusions might prove useful. He had disclosed something to Rhodaan that the captain had suspected from the first. The crash of his assault boat during the attack on Vorago hadn’t been entirely the work of orks. Vallax had the opportunity to take down the ork who shot down Rhodaan’s transport, but the Over-Captain had refrained from action.

Strategic inaction. It was the most cunning sort of treachery, the kind only a psyker could prove. And the only psyker of such power on Castellax was the Speaker, whose talents could be exploited only on the express orders of Warsmith Andraaz. It was clear from the Warsmith’s remarks that the Speaker would be detailed to other duties for the duration of the siege. Vallax had nothing to worry about from that quarter.

But he did have a victim who was aware of his treachery now. Rhodaan would know what to watch for and he would know what steps to take to ensure that when the smoke cleared, he would be the man left standing.

Perhaps he would even thank Uhlan before sending the half-breed to join the Over-Captain in hell.

Rhodaan nodded as he watched the mameluke paint another coat of blood on Eurydice’s wings.

It was never wise to trust a traitor, the Iron Warrior reflected.

Brother Uhlan stole through the maze-like network of vaults running between the sub-levels of the Iron Bastion’s cellars. Thick bundles of pipe and wire snaked along the vaulted ceiling above his head, the parchment attendance-liturgies brushing against his helmet as he passed them. A thick, cloying stink of promethium fumes filled the narrow corridors, in places becoming so dense as to make spots flicker across his lenses.

The Raptor growled in irritation. It galled his pride to slink through these black vaults, creeping around in the darkness like some kind of sump-rat.

Ahead, a red light winked into life, its beam strobing through the darkness. Uhlan quickened his pace. It was the signal he had been watching for. Soon he could be quit of these forgotten cellars.

The source of the light was mounted in the shoulder of a tall, gangly figure, its metal knees folded back upon themselves to allow it to clear the overhanging pipes. The thing’s face was pale and corpse-like, its gaping mouth stuffed with the copper honeycomb of a vox-caster. Insect-like lenses protruded from the pits of its face, clicking and whirring as they adjusted to focus on the approaching Iron Warrior.

‘You were not followed,’ the servitor announced, its voice shrill and fleshless.

Uhlan smirked at the statement. He did not need the cyborg to tell him that. After centuries of warfare, he could smell a lurking enemy at fifty metres; hearing a slinking spy following him in the abandoned tunnels would have proved no challenge. Sneering at the servitor, he told it as much.

‘There is always the chance,’ the robotic voice intoned. ‘Flesh is weak and can be deceived. Only the machine is infallible.’

The Space Marine’s hard features curled in an angry snarl. ‘Machines are only tools,’ he growled. ‘They cannot compare with the perfection of the Iron Warriors. The machine is nothing beside the flesh that commands it, the flesh that designs it, the flesh that builds it. There is no weakness in the flesh of an Iron Warrior.’ His eyes hardened as he stared into the servitor’s optics, making sure their image was conveyed to the cyborg’s secluded master. ‘Have you forgotten what it is to be an Iron Warrior, Oriax? Buried in your cobweb of machines, have you forgotten what it is to stalk among the stars, to spread the terror and the glory of the Legion wherever you tread? To know that billions live only because you have not brought death upon them? Do you remember the power and the glory, or has that memory rusted away, Fabricator?’

There was no change in the monotone of the servitor’s broadcast. If Uhlan’s reprimand had drawn any emotion from Oriax, it wasn’t conveyed by the cold, metallic voice. ‘I remember more than you have forgotten, Uhlan Half-blood. While I function, there is purpose. While you function, there is purpose.’

‘I have done what you asked,’ Uhlan said. ‘Captain Rhodaan has been made aware of Over-Captain Vallax’s actions during the attack.’ The Iron Warrior paused, directing a concerned look at the servitor. ‘It is a dangerous game, playing the two against one another.’

The servitor lumbered forwards on its segmented legs. ‘The rivalry has been there a long time. It is only now that it becomes propitious for exploitation.’

Uhlan’s hand tightened into a fist. ‘So long as Vallax is brought low,’ he vowed.

The servitor’s lenses glistened in the crimson light. ‘He will be,’ the modulated voice promised. ‘And when he is, you shall have your reward.’

‘You have promised me considerable–’

‘It has all been arranged, all factored into my calculations,’ Oriax’s words droned from the servitor’s speaker. ‘From this crisis, the Third Grand Company will embrace its destiny and you will have a part in that destiny.

‘All of us will.’

CHAPTER VI

I-DAY PLUS FORTY

‘Incoming!’

Blared across the vox-casters bulging from the stone faces of the gargoyles leering down from the rooftops, the warning was almost drowned out by the steady crump of artillery. The streets seemed to bounce as a barrage slammed into the hills five kilometres away. Plumes of dust and smoke exploded into the air, sending a foul brown smog rushing down into the settlement.

Taofang dived into the dubious cover of an open trench he hoped had been dug as a shelter rather than a latrine. The soldier landed in a tangle of bruised flesh and virulent curses, the protesting mass of a motorman breaking the impetus of his fall. Snarling his own oaths, Taofang drove the butt of his lasgun into the rail-worker’s back until he made room for the janissary. Somehow, the motorman managed to squeeze himself into a small gap between the wall of the trench and a trembling tech-adept.

Taofang hugged the bottom of the trench and opened his mouth, hoping to keep his eardrums from bursting under the shock of the barrage. Ork artillery was wildly unpredictable, over-shooting the target and falling short with utter abandon, often within the same salvo. About the only consistency was a general direction, yet even that was never totally dependable when it came to orks. The settlement was pock-marked with the evidence of their chaotic ideas of accuracy.

Gamma Five was the only designation the mining settlement bore on the maps. If its inhabitants had some other name for it, Taofang neither knew nor cared. Crouched in the shadow of a string of rocky hills, stinking like a chemical bath and coated in a green scum of pollutants, the settlement was like a sore on the buttocks of Castellax. If the orks wanted the rotten jumble of hab-pens and ore-crushers, the xenos were welcome to them as far as Taofang was concerned. The thought of dying over such a forsaken piece of land made the janissary’s insides turn.

But they were dying. Nearly ten thousand janissaries had been dispatched to Gamma Five. If a quarter of them ever left the mining settlement, it would be a wonderment. Over the course of five weeks, the soldiers had been engaged in a protracted campaign against the orks.

At first, it had been the humans who were on the attack, striking out in mechanised columns to harass the advance elements of the alien invaders. The orks were establishing themselves in the bombed-out ruins of a transport nexus along the Dirgas-Aboro rail-line, using it as a base from which to expand outwards. The stated objective of Colonel Nehring’s ‘reconnaissance in force’ had been to disrupt the alien advance, to prevent them from establishing advance camps further along the line. A series of lightning raids against the xenos march which would blunt the thrust of their attack and force the orks to withdraw and dig-in. Such was the intention of the campaign.

In practice, it had been so much less. The orks were always more numerous than expected; their absurd vehicles, knocked together from seemingly random jumbles of scrap, outgunned anything the janissaries had. It was easy enough to surprise the aliens and throw them into confusion, but the janissaries quickly discovered that a confused ork didn’t break and run. A confused ork just started shooting at the closest target and didn’t stop until it ran out of ammunition.

Hit and run quickly became the watchwords. The soldiers would strike from the shelter of a spoil heap or ash dune, assault the flanks of the ork column, then fade away before the xenos could muster an effective response. It was the strategy of harassment, not victory, dealing little real damage to the orks. Perhaps if the raids had been carried out by Iron Warriors rather than mere mortals, the results would have been different. Indeed, Taofang wondered if the campaign had been conceived by the dread masters of Castellax, with little consideration for the abilities of the men who would be tasked with carrying out the actual fighting.

As the weeks grew, however, a grimmer prospect occurred to Taofang. The Iron Warriors had conceived the campaign and they knew the limitations of their human janissaries. The harassing attacks might not have done much damage to the orks, but they had drawn the aliens’ attention. In steadily increasing numbers, the invaders had been striking northwards, advancing for the janissaries’ staging area of Gamma Five. There had never been any intention of recapturing territory from the orks. Taofang and the other soldiers were nothing more than a diversion, a distraction to keep the aliens in the vicinity of the Convallis Robigo.

The proof of that lay in the near total absence of the Air Cohort. Almost from the start, the presence of Skylord Morax’s fighters and bombers had been negligible. For the past two weeks, however, the orks had complete control of the skies, their crude planes and gyrocopters roaring over Gamma Five with impunity and keeping the janissaries bottled up inside the settlement.

Taofang bit down on a curse as something solid slammed into his back, flattening him into the dust. The taste of Gamma Five’s polluted dirt filled his mouth, sizzling against his teeth as it reacted to his saliva. The soldier thrashed about beneath the weight. Then he felt the cold touch of sharp metal against the back of his neck.

‘If one of us is getting thrown out of here, it’s going to be you,’ a voice as hard and cold as the blade pressing against his flesh threatened.

Taofang froze, holding himself as still as the artillery barrage would allow him. He turned his head slowly, finding himself staring at a black boot and a camouflage legging. Whoever his assailant was, they were a janissary. ‘Taofang, Dirgas XX Division, Scorpion Brigade,’ he introduced himself, trying to keep any element of panic out of his voice.

‘Mingzhou, Ossuarian Jackals,’ the other soldier replied, removing the knife from the base of Taofang’s neck.

Slowly, with careful deliberation, Taofang rolled onto his side. The Ossuarian Jackals were hunters and trackers especially recruited from the scattered outposts deep within the desert wastes of the Ossuarium. Trained to the exacting standards of Lord Gamgin, they were some of the hardest fighters on Castellax next to the Iron Warriors themselves, capable of tracking an escaped slave across the toxic quagmire of the slag-moors and the poisonous desolation of the Mare Ossius. With such a killer holding a knife at his back, Taofang was amazed to still be alive. Almost sheepishly, he lifted his gaze to regard the fearsome desert haunter.

He wasn’t quite prepared for what he saw. The camouflage tunic and fatigues clung to a lithe, lean body in which every trace of excess had been burned away, leaving only hardened muscle behind. A bandolier of ‘hot-las’ cartridges straddled the swell of the soldier’s breast, locking into a second ammo belt which circled a slender waist. The ugly snout of a suppressed lasrifle jutted over one shoulder, secured to the soldier’s back by a weathered leather strap. The face that stared back at Taofang was as hard and weathered as her gear, high-cheekbones framing a slim nose and slender mouth. Eyes of deep blue stared from beneath a subdued brow. A wild mass of long hair, burned crimson by the pollutants of the Ossuarium, fell about the woman’s neck.

Taofang swallowed anxiously as he felt Mingzhou’s icy eyes study him, evaluating him like a plate of contaminated protein paste. Instantly, he felt the sting of the toxic dirt in his throat. He pressed himself against the side of the trench, hacking a mix of mud and mucus onto the motorman’s boots. It took the better part of a minute for the fit to pass and most of the dirt to be purged from his mouth. Ignoring the slurs thrown at him by the motorman, Taofang shifted himself into an upright position and turned his attention back to the other soldier.

Mingzhou’s attention was no longer fixed on the janissary. She had unlimbered her rifle and was squinting through the scope, watching the desolate streets of Gamma Five. Taofang moved closer to the woman, flinching as another barrage of shells slammed into the hills beyond the settlement. One shell, falling short or lacking the same amount of propellant as the rest of the salvo, smashed into a nearby hab-pen, sending a sickening shower of cement and body parts spraying into the air.

The hunter kept her focus on the scope of her rifle, not even noticing when a fist-sized chunk of cement glanced off the lip of the trench only a few centimetres from her head.

‘Are you crazy?’ Taofang hissed at the woman. ‘Get your head down!’ He tugged at the camouflage legging when she ignored him.

‘Want to keep that hand?’ Mingzhou asked, her eye never leaving the rifle-scope. There was something about the tone of her voice that made the question so much more than a threat. Chastened, Taofang relented and slipped back against the wall of the ditch. Another cannonade sounded from the ork position, shells and rockets screaming overhead. This time, the detonations were much closer, landing solidly within the confines of the settlement. Taofang expected Mingzhou to duck down, but she maintained her vigil. Cursing under his breath, the janissary removed his helmet and, stretching to his utmost, held it behind the hunter’s head to shield her from any flying debris.

‘D’spawn!’ Taofang swore. ‘Are you trying to get killed?’

‘Far from it,’ Mingzhou said, keeping her eye fixed to the scope. ‘If there’s one thing I intend to do, it’s getting out of here alive.’

‘You have an interesting way of doing it,’ Taofang grumbled. ‘Most people have brains enough to keep their head down during an artillery barrage.’ He glanced over at the motorman and the tech-adept. ‘Even these wretches know better.’

‘They know nothing,’ the hunter hissed back. ‘Neither do you,’ she added. ‘How will your brains look spattered across an ork’s axe?’

The image sent a shiver through Taofang, then his mind rebelled at the thought. ‘Even the orks wouldn’t drop a barrage on their own troops,’ he protested.

‘You think so?’ the woman sneered. ‘Do you think their artillery is that accurate? They’d probably do it deliberately if it seemed amusing to them.’

Taofang shuddered. After his experience in Dirgas, watching the orks teleport straight down from orbit by the thousands, heedless of their own ghastly losses in the process, he knew there was nothing beyond the aliens.

A moment later, he had a demonstration of just how little he understood the invaders. Mingzhou shifted slightly, swinging the muzzle of her lasrifle to the right. Her finger slowly pulled the trigger. A soft glow erupted from the weapon as the concentrated energy beam sped away, most of the flash and sound consumed by the dampener fastened to the lasrifle’s muzzle. Somewhere, in the dust-choked gloom of Gamma Five’s streets, the deadly charge struck its target.

Without changing her position, Mingzhou motioned for Taofang to stand. Gripped by a feeling of dread, the janissary rose and stood beside her. When the sniper leaned her face away from the rifle, he pressed his cheek against the warm barrel and squinted down the scope. The filters built into the device cut through the confusion of smoke and dust, the magnification revealing a clear view of the street. Sprawled at the end of the lane, its forehead burned clear through, was the hideous bulk of a massive ork. Beyond the corpse, Taofang could see other aliens creeping through the murk.

Hastily, Taofang withdrew. Mingzhou smoothly leaned her head back against the rifle. Almost at once, her finger was pulling at the trigger again. ‘Their eyesight is poor,’ she said. ‘While the smoke lasts, they’ll never know we’re here.’

Taofang gripped his own lasgun and stared dubiously into the brown cloud of dust. ‘What about when it clears?’ he wondered aloud.

Mingzhou fired another shot, then looked away from the scope to direct a sharp look at Taofang. ‘It would be best not to be around,’ she said, punctuating the statement by nodding towards the cowering tech-adept and motorman. ‘Keep an eye on those two,’ she advised. ‘The only way out of here is by train. The colonel won’t be able to take everyone out when he sounds the retreat. We keep those two close and we won’t be left behind.’

The janissary nodded grimly and turned his weapon towards the motorman. ‘I think I can guarantee our new friends wouldn’t think of deserting us.’

As each slave was marched out from the subterranean hab-pens cut into the corroded mountainside, he stared in awed terror at the crenellated rooftop of the processing centre. The once fearsome aspect of their prefect, an only semi-human mutant called Spyder, now seemed absurd and inconsequential beside the monsters who stood beside him. Encased in their armour of ceramite and plasteel, the Space Marines exuded an aura of brutality and tyranny far beyond anything the mine-workers had imagined. After a single glance, they hurriedly averted their eyes lest they draw down upon themselves the notice of such terrifying manifestations of Evil. Until this day, the slaves had laboured in the dark of the mines, allowed themselves to forget that theirs was simply a small piece of a greater whole. The knowledge that Epsilon Station was only a small cog in the great machine of Castellax had become inconsequential to their daily allotment of toil and suffering. Now, as they marched past the processing centre towards the rail yard, they were reminded of their place in the world and the superhuman devils to whom their lives, their thoughts and their souls belonged.

The Iron Warriors.

Prefect Spyder rubbed his scaly hands together in satisfaction as he watched the slaves being herded towards the rail yard, a sadistic smile splitting his broad face every time one of his overseers set a whip cracking against some slow-moving wretch. ‘The evacuation is going more quickly than I anticipated,’ he chuckled into the ruff of fur which circled his neck. Immediately, he regretted the comment, cringing against the battlements as he felt the eyes of his masters turn upon him. There was a promise of death in those optic-lenses, none more so than in the red eyes which glared from either side of Captain Rhodaan’s Corvus-pattern helm.

‘Acceptable,’ Captain Rhodaan’s voice growled at the prefect, ‘only if one makes allowances for the Flesh. Five seconds for their eyes to adjust to the sun. Three more for them to note our presence. Five more seconds for their craven minds to slip from fear back into obedience.’ The demi-organic wings on the Iron Warrior’s jump pack quivered in a spasm of psycho-sympathetic irritation. ‘The Legion does not make allowances for weakness. All resources from this outpost are being transferred to Vorago. The timetable will not be adjusted.’ The snarling beak of Rhodaan’s helm tilted to stare down at the column of emaciated labourers. ‘If the Flesh threatens that timetable, they are no longer a resource but a liability.’

Spyder’s scaly face recoiled into the shadows of the leathery hood he wore. ‘But Dread Lord, these men have worked all night! The order for evacuation reached us only this morning…’

‘Obedience does not offer excuses,’ Rhodaan growled, threat dripping from each word. ‘In five minutes, the rest of the Flesh will embark. Whatever must be left behind will be herded back into the pens.’

‘But… the mines have been rigged to…’ The mutant’s protest died on his lips, his beady eyes bulging as he understood that the Iron Warriors had already made that calculation. Such deliberate destruction offended Spyder’s sense of materialism, years of overseeing Epsilon Station had given him a very keen appreciation of how much each slave was worth, the correct expenditures of provision which would keep the mine operating at peak efficiency. To see that thrown away so readily and callously offended him on a spiritual level and sent a chill of fear rattling through his soul. Like the slaves, he had learned a new appreciation for who the masters of Castellax were.

‘The Warsmith has ordered scorched earth,’ Rhodaan declared. ‘Nothing is to be left that may be of use to the enemy. The mines will be destroyed. Any resources that cannot be removed will also be destroyed.’

Rhodaan’s demi-organic wings flittered with a touch of annoyance. It was a waste of breath to explain these things to this creature. The prefect’s duty was to obey, not question. He had learned long ago it was the way of such base animals, the dregs that called themselves humanity. They lacked the vision to see beyond their immediate needs, the strength to endure the travails demanded of them. If there was one thing the False Emperor had done correctly, it was to engineer something better than mankind. His mistake was failing to recognise that what he had created were not guardians of mankind but their replacement.

The Iron Warrior turned and regarded his fellow Space Marines. He could see at a glance that they shared his annoyance. This task was beneath them, watching over a rabble of slaves as they were herded into transport carriages. The strategy of stripping the entire region of resources was one that grated on Rhodaan’s sensibilities. However sound the tactics, it offended his martial pride to concede anything to an enemy so base as the orks, even a land made desolate and barren. Pride in the Legion was the ultimate purpose in an Iron Warrior’s heart. Take that from him and you took his very soul.

Rhodaan strode across the centre’s roof, the optics in his helm adjusting as they focused upon the rail yard. He could see Spyder’s militia forcing the slaves into the box-like transport carriages, compelling them to lie flat so they could be stacked in staggered tiers across the bed of the car. Those on the bottom were gradually crushed as the mass of Flesh was packed ever tighter into the car. More would be smothered to death once the doors were shut. Nine out of ten would have expired by the time the train reached Vorago, but it was of small consequence to Rhodaan. His orders were clear: remove all portable resources from Epsilon Station and send them to Vorago. Whatever condition the Flesh arrived in, his job was done.

The Raptor swung back around, glaring out across the polluted wasteland beyond Epsilon Station. He could see the mire of slag spilling across the crevasses which snaked through the blighted earth, watched the eerie shimmer of toxins radiating from the scummy surface of chat mounds. Somewhere, beyond the desolation, were the orks. How he longed to find them, every molecule in his body cried out to give battle to the invader. It was only the discipline of his conditioning and the loyalty of his training that restrained him, kept him from leaving Spyder’s wretched little outpost and leading his troops to the battle they sought.

Dirgas, that should be their objective. Strike down the orks in their filthy nest, not slink away and wait for the aliens behind the Witch Wall! Warsmith Andraaz was wrong to concede even a millimetre of ground to the xenos vermin. The honour of the Third Grand Company was crumbling under the burden of inactivity. They should strike, fast and swift and with merciless brutality. Teach the aliens the meaning of fear.

Duty silenced the thoughts raging within Rhodaan’s mind. His first obligation was to the Legion and his commander, not the dictates of his own heart. There would be battle enough when the time was right. Andraaz was no coward, whatever else he might be. However hard for him to stomach, Rhodaan had to trust the Warsmith’s strategy.

‘Pazuriel. Baelfegor,’ Rhodaan called out. The two Raptors snapped to attention, fists slamming in salute against their breastplates. ‘Span out. Ensure the bombs are in place and armed. The train will be departing. Our orders are to leave nothing behind.’

‘I obey, lord captain,’ the two Iron Warriors growled back, their voices drowned out by the roar of their jump packs as the enormous thrusters launched them from the surface of the roof and flung them across the sprawl of Epsilon Station.

Rhodaan watched the two Space Marines until they landed near the base of the mountain. The long column of Flesh froze as the Iron Warriors approached. It took only a flourish of their weapons for Pazuriel and Baelfegor to turn the slaves around and send them fleeing back into the darkness of the mineshaft.

‘All those workers…’ Spyder grumbled, watching as the Iron Warriors ruthlessly pressed the slaves towards their doom.

In a single motion, Captain Rhodaan swung around, the snarling mouth of his plasma pistol thrust towards Spyder’s hideous face. A blaze of brilliant light, the sizzle of super-heated power-coils, the stench of vaporised flesh, and the mutant’s headless body collapsed. ‘The prefect would have taken two minutes to board the train,’ Rhodaan told the other Raptors. ‘Embarkation is to be completed in one. No intact resources are to be left for the enemy.’

‘I obey, lord captain,’ the Iron Warriors said again as they launched themselves from the roof.

Rhodaan gazed at the rail yard. It would be a ridiculously short massacre. There were barely five hundred slaves and overseers still waiting to board the train. Hardly worth Squad Kyrith’s attention, really. But orders were orders and obedience was what separated an Iron Warrior from the lesser orders of humanity.

Obedience, Rhodaan reflected with a grin, and ambition. Today had called for the one. Tomorrow might very well belong to the other.

Gamma Five’s station was a scene of complete panic. A monstrous mass of reinforced ferrocrete, it had withstood the worst of the ork shelling, though some of the tracks hadn’t been so fortunate. Teams of slaves and soldiers worked frantically to repair the damage, slapping down magnetised plates that would conduct the current where the rails had been smashed. It was a temporary fix; the plates would be ripped from their fastenings as soon as the train passed over them, dragged along by the magnetic pull of the last car. There would be no second train following after the first.

Janissaries were already destroying the other engines in the station, demolishing their controls and propulsion rods, exorcising their machine-spirits with flame and profanity. Gangs of slaves pushed ore-cars into position behind the only engine remaining, coupling them into a long line of titanium and plasteel. Even before the cars were in place, packs of terrified humanity were clambering aboard, abandoning weapons and equipment in their frantic haste.

Taofang watched the spectacle with a feeling of contempt. Many of these men were comrades in arms, but their lack of perspective disgusted him just the same. Any janissary who threw down his gun was no better than a slave, forsaking the ability to fight for the dubious promise of safety. He hugged his own weapon tighter against his chest. Beside him, Mingzhou kept her sniper rifle at the ready, frequently looking down the sight and staring across the station into the streets beyond. From their perch on the roof of the fifth car, they had a good view of the mining settlement and the fierce fighting raging in its outskirts.

The ork scouts had penetrated Gamma Five in significant numbers, launching their attack in the midst of the barrage. But for the efforts of Mingzhou and the other Jackals, the aliens would have overwhelmed the entire settlement. As it was, the orks had been contained to the southern perimeter, hemmed in by such armour as Colonel Nehring still possessed. While the xenos were pinned down, the colonel ordered the withdrawal.

At first, the operation had a veneer of organisation about it. That illusion collapsed once the barrage stopped. The silence of the ork guns meant one thing: the main body of their force was now starting its advance on Gamma Five.

Slaves and soldiers alike fought for a place on the train. Taofang quickly lost count of the acts of murder and brutality he witnessed as order broke down. He thought of the rearguard, holding their positions in the ruins, trying to delay the ork assault. He wondered what they would think if they could see the selfish confusion they were giving their lives to protect.

Taofang shook his head sadly. He was no better than any of them, he reflected. As the motorman’s ‘escort’, he and Mingzhou had easily wormed their way onto the train. It was a shining example of Castellax morality. Survival at any cost. It was a maxim Colonel Nehring and his staff had certainly adopted. The officers made certain they were given the first car behind the engine, detailing an entire company of shock troops to secure the car against trespassers.

Sounds of explosions and a marked increase in gunfire rose from the distant battle line. Whatever their feelings might be, the rearguard was committed now. The orks were attacking the perimeter.

The sounds of violence threw the massed humanity within the station into a final excess of crazed panic. Soldiers and slaves rushed the cars, thrusting their bodies into doorways, scrambling up ladders and clinging to walls. Like a swelling tide, the frightened mob surged about the cars, darting from one to another in their search for escape. Taofang was forced to smash the butt of his lasgun into groping hands and crazed faces as terrified men sought to drag him down from the roof and take his place. From the front of the train, the sharp crack of shotguns sounded, Nehring’s shock troops ensuring the dignity of their officers with lethal efficiency.

Above the shouting mob, the vox-casters suddenly sounded, blaring an alarm across the length of the station. For a moment there was silence, then a shaky voice gasped the news from the speakers. The orks had penetrated the perimeter.

All pretence at discipline shattered. The mob clawed and fought their way to the train, the strong smashing down the weak. Shotguns fell silent as desperate men swarmed over the shock troops, crushing them beneath a flood of fear. Yet even as the first of the rioters scrambled onto the steps of the officers’ car, the train suddenly lurched into motion.

Aware of the threat, Nehring had given the order to leave, abandoning thousands of men to their doom.

Clouds of toxic dust billowed into the desert sky, churned from the sun-baked surface by the growling treads that gouged the earth. Through the bleached, polluted wasteland, seven armoured behemoths raced, the roar of their engines echoing across the desolation, blue smog spewing from their exhausts. At random intervals, flame would explode from the barrels of the guns embedded in the turrets which topped the hulking machines and some distant patch of desert would be blasted to oblivion.

Until a few weeks past, the tanks had formed the core of the Dirgas garrison’s armoured company. Abandoned by the fleeing humans, looted by the conquering orks, the war machines had been pressed into service by the xenos. The khaki and brown camouflage of the original paint was still visible beneath the crude graffiti and primitive symbols that had been scrawled across the hull. Slabs of sheet metal had been bolted to the original armour in a simplistic effort to break the regimented, organised appearance of the tanks, to lend them a more individualistic profile. Deranged arrays of weaponry had been fitted to the turrets and hulls, from pintle-mounted heavy stubbers to nests of rocket tubes and deadly arrays of plasma batteries. One tank crew had even removed their vehicle’s main gun in order to fit a lunatic amalgamation of boltguns, meltaguns and multilasers into a single piece of patchwork ordnance.

Around the tanks, clinging to their flanks like scavengers slinking behind a pack of steel sharks, was a motley confusion of warbikes and buggies, ramshackle vehicles slapped together with the wreckage of Dirgas. Goggled ork bikers circled around the tanks, impatient with the slower speed of the armoured giants while bored gunners in the beds of buggies fired bursts into the dingy sky. Occasionally, the growling head of an ork tanker would sprout from an open hatch to snarl abuse at the mob.

The aliens were unfocused and inattentive, too eager to locate some mining camp or settlement to attack to display any interest in the desolate terrain. A few catcalls and rude gestures was the only reaction from the crew of the nearest tank when one of the warbikes suddenly ploughed into a hole in the sand, the vehicle’s weight punching through a thin layer of silica dust. None of the ork mob stopped to render aid to the crashed bike, instead continuing to thunder across the desert, the accident already dismissed from their minds.

In the hole, the ork biker had been slung into the handle-bars, the wind rushing from its lungs as its chest smashed into unyielding metal. Before the xenos could try to draw breath back into its body, a powerful arm was wrapped about its neck. The hole wasn’t some accident of nature and corrosion but a carefully prepared pit.

A pit that was far from empty.

Over-Captain Vallax held the stunned ork in one hand, with his other he thumbed the activation stud on his chainaxe. Gripping the weapon just behind the head, he pressed its churning edge into the face of the struggling alien, relenting only when he felt the ork’s thick skull split beneath the sawing blade.

Contemptuously, Vallax dropped the dead ork and pushed it to the far side of the pit. The ork’s stupid blundering would have been disastrous if the aliens had even a semblance of caution about them. Fortunately, they were as crude and mindless as they looked, not bothering to check on their comrade. The roar of the chainaxe was drowned out by the far louder roar of alien engines – the greenskins were so enamoured of loud noises they’d even stripped the mufflers from the exhausts on the tanks they’d captured. That obsession with noise was going to cost the aliens dearly.

‘Situation stabilised,’ Vallax hissed into his vox-bead.

‘Have you suffered injury?’ Uhlan’s voice crackled over the vox. The half-breed sounded more disappointed than concerned.

Vallax glared at the warbike, its treads still clawing at the wall of the pit, sending a spray of dirt into the air. The machine had missed crushing him by only a few centimetres when it had broken through the silica covering and plunged into the hole. He brought his chainaxe slashing into the vehicle’s engine, silencing it in a burst of sparks and smoke.

When he fell, it would be in full honour in battle, not the victim of some pathetic accident.

Ignoring Uhlan’s question, Vallax demanded reports from the rest of his Raptors. Each of the Iron Warriors was hidden in a pit like that which Vallax was in, separated from one another by a few hundred metres in a convex formation so that if one of them had been discovered by the orks, the others would still be in a position to retaliate.

The Space Marines replied, one after the other, each ready and eager to carry out their mission. Vallax’s scarred face twisted into a smile. Today, Squad Vidarna would earn new honours for him, and all at the expense of Skintaker Algol. It had been the Skintaker’s slave-officer who had failed to destroy the tanks before retreating from Dirgas. That failure had so incensed Algol that he hadn’t left a patch on the man’s body whole enough to stitch into his cloak.

Algol’s wrath amused Vallax. Let the self-indulgent sadist harbour his puny hate, his star was fading. The Third Grand Company had outgrown the need for such brutes and Warsmith Andraaz knew it. The future belonged to warriors like Vallax, not thuggish butchers like Algol.

The sound of las-beams and autoguns suddenly echoed from the distance. Again, Vallax smiled. The Flesh had started their diversion. The janissaries were positioned in a tank ditch a kilometre behind Squad Vidarna’s pits. They had been quickly assembled and dispatched from a nearby settlement. They lacked the numbers or equipment to seriously threaten the tanks, but the orks wouldn’t care about that. Vicious savages, all the xenos would care about was the fact they had been attacked. That would be enough to goad them into an immediate response.

While they were closing on the janissaries, the orks would be unaware of what was happening behind their backs.

Vallax climbed to the top of the warbike, crouching low so that the thrusters of his jump pack wouldn’t protrude above the lip of the pit. He glanced down at the ruined mush of the biker’s head. The orks had been fortunate thus far. They’d had only a few opportunities to learn why Vallax and his Raptors were called the Faceless.

‘Iron within!’ Vallax snarled across the vox-channel. ‘Iron without!’

On the Over-Captain’s command, the Raptors exploded from their pits, the mighty thrusters of their jump packs launching them hundreds of metres into the sky. As they reached the apex of their leap, the Iron Warriors stared down at the tanks far below. Each of them angled his body towards one of the armoured machines and began his descent.

Hurtling through the polluted sky, Vallax kept his gaze locked upon the hull of the lead tank. He watched the ork crew as they manned pintle-mounted stubbers and fired at the distant ditch. He didn’t care about the Flesh being gunned down by the steady stream of automated fire. The janissaries were obeying their command, that was all he expected of them. Keep the orks’ attention fixed upon them until the Iron Warriors could strike.

The Space Marine came slamming down against the engine block behind the tank’s turret, the report of his violent impact sounding like the crack of a cannon. The ork sitting in the turret shifted around at the noise, its jaw dropping in a surprised howl. Before the brute could think to train its weapon on the Iron Warrior, Vallax sent a burst of bolt-shells punching through its head. The gory mess slumped in the hatch and disappeared as it slipped down inside the turret.

Furious roars echoed from inside the tank, but Vallax didn’t have the moment needed to attend his enemies. Letting his pistol drop and dangle from the chain which fastened it to his wrist, he reached to his belt and withdrew the blocky mass of a melta-charge. Thumbing the activation rune, the Raptor slapped it against the tank’s engine.

Bullets ricocheted from the hull at his feet, shells glanced from his armour as Vallax rose from his task. Another burly ork had appeared in the turret, shooting at the Space Marine with an oversized stub pistol. A second ork had climbed out from one of the drivers’ hatches and was dragging itself along the hull with one paw while firing at him with the bolter clenched in the other.

In what seemed a single motion, Vallax brought his pistol back into his hand with a flip of his arm and fired at the aliens. The brute in the turret yelped in surprise and ducked down, part of its jaw shot away. The ork crawling across the hull screamed as Vallax’s shells blew off the fingers of the hand clutching the hull and sent the xenos tumbling away from the tank to be splattered across the desert landscape.

More bullets slammed into Vallax’s armour, scratching the ceramite casing. Two of the buggies had turned their guns on him, opening fire without regard to their comrades in the tank. As the machines closed, Vallax activated his jump pack, launching himself hundreds of metres into the air.

It wasn’t fear of the approaching enemy that motivated the Raptor but rather the steadily-declining countdown of the melta-charge. As he soared into the sky, the rear of the tank burst into flame, sending a cloud of smoke and shrapnel scything into the nearby bikes and buggies. Fire belched from the tank’s hatches and burning orks struggled to escape the armoured giant, whose insides had become a furnace.

Across the desert, Vallax could see four more tanks blasted into ruin, testament to the prowess and efficiency of Squad Vidarna. Only the best Iron Warriors became Raptors. Only the toughest Raptors were allowed to survive among the Faceless.

Over-Captain Vallax angled his descending body towards one of the surviving tanks. The ork in the turret hatch saw him, using a pintle-mounted heavy bolter to send a stream of shells screaming up at him. The beast had neither the discipline nor the accuracy to hit a fast-moving target like the plummeting Raptor.

There was nothing it could do to prevent what was coming.

Vallax’s fingers tightened about the heft of his chainaxe. He could already see the churning blade slicing through the ork’s flesh, stripping skin from skull. It was already another victim of the Faceless, it just didn’t know it yet.

Taofang felt a sense of nausea as the armoured train picked up speed and hissed down the magnetic rails. On every side, frantic men raced after the train, making wild grabs for the cars. He could see a half-dozen uncoupled ore-cars still standing on the siding, their holds packed with masses of screaming humanity, cheated at the last moment of the escape they believed they had won.

Over his shoulder, Mingzhou’s cold voice spoke. ‘Here they come,’ she said. Taofang didn’t need the las-rifle’s scope to see the orks this time. From the station’s entrance, a motley array of rude vehicles roared into the building, black fumes belching from their exhausts. The screams that greeted the appearance of the aliens were quickly lost beneath the chatter of autoguns, bolters and stubbers. Every ork machine that drove into the station was fitted with some manner of weapon, weapons that were now turned loose upon the hopeless humans. Those not cut down by gunfire were run over by the ork machines, crushed beneath their tyres and treads. Taofang watched in horror as an ork warbike rode down a fleeing janissary, the man’s body becoming caught in its treads. The ork glanced back at the gruesome obstruction, then revved its engine until the steel treads churned the soldier’s body into pulp.

A thousand scenes of similar havoc played out behind the train as it picked up momentum and raced away from the burning wreckage of Gamma Five. A motley pack of buggies, perhaps desirous of bigger prey than the forsaken men left behind, sped away from the station in pursuit.

Now the lack of foresight by those soldiers who had cast aside their weapons came back to haunt them. From the rearmost cars, only a feeble, sporadic fire challenged the oncoming greenskins. The withering roar of heavy bolters answered the desultory opposition, the explosive rounds chewing through the hindmost ore-car in a spray of torn metal and shattered flesh.

Mingzhou sighted down the scope of her rifle, picking off the driver of a gaudily painted warbuggy. The vehicle careened wildly as the ork slumped at its controls, the gunner in the carriage behind it roaring in panic as it realised what had happened. The monstrous alien had just started to climb out from the carriage in an effort to reach the steering wheel when the machine struck a rail tie and went spinning end over end through the air, throwing the gunner ahead of it to slam into the desert floor with bone-shattering force.

The beleaguered rear car suddenly broke away, receding into the distance as the rest of the train sped onwards. Observing its peril, the officers in the advance car had uncoupled it by remote signal to its cogitator. The callous tactic bore only meagre fruit, just a handful of the orks remaining behind to finish off the abandoned car while the rest maintained their pursuit of the train.

A precedent had been set, however, and through the long hours of the chase, the scene was repeated at intervals. Embattled car after embattled car was detached from the train, left behind as a distraction for the pursuing orks. By gradual attrition, the train became slimmer and sleeker, picking up speed with each discard.

Finally, Taofang found himself watching the sixth ore-car recede into the distance. His own refuge now formed the tail of the train, the unenviable post of next to be martyred. He scowled at the advance car. For a brief moment, he considered his chances of climbing over the intervening roofs. Quickly he dismissed the idea. He had watched too many men try to cross the roofs of the cars that had been behind him only to be swept away by the train’s momentum. The lucky ones had been killed outright by the fall. He didn’t like to think about the unlucky ones.

Only a dozen or so vehicles were still following the train, the others having fallen away to allow their passengers to deal with the abandoned cars or to attend to some malfunction of their ramshackle machines. There was small comfort in the fact, however. Each of the pursuers boasted weaponry heavier than anything aboard the train, capable of slaughtering an entire ore-car of men.

Taofang ducked down against the roof as a wartrak turned its heavy stubber loose against the car. The bullets rattled against the titanium wall, denting it with each hammer-like blow. An ugly wartrike, a side-car bolted to its frame, brought the nozzle of a flamer around to bathe the side of the car in a blast of searing promethium. The passengers aboard a wide-bodied battlewagon opened up with a riotous array of sidearms, howling with brutal glee.

It could only be a matter of moments before the aliens would close upon their prey and the callous officers in the advance car decided to cut loose the embattled men.

Taofang glanced at Mingzhou, his gaze telling her what words would not. He knew he was a dead man, but he was determined to go down fighting, to send as many aliens into the darkness ahead of him as it was within his power to do. He saw the same grim intent in the sniper’s eyes. She favoured him with a sombre nod, then slapped a fresh power pack into her lasrifle.

Suddenly, the crump of artillery roared overhead and the desert exploded in a burst of sand. Another loud boom, a second explosion of sand, this time right behind one of the pursuing warbuggies.

At first Taofang wondered if the train’s speedy retreat had accomplished nothing more than to draw them into another nest of orks. Then, as the barrage intensified, as shells peppered the landscape behind the train, the truth dawned on him. It wasn’t ork artillery he was witnessing, but a barrage from friendly guns.

The concentrated barrage only drove the orks closer to the train, the aliens recognising the position of their enemy as the only safe place to be. Taofang wondered if they were wrong, if the artillerists behind the barrage might not prove as callous as Nehring and his officers, willing to sacrifice their own.

The idea sent a surge of raw hate thundering through the janissary’s veins. Leaning over the side of the train, Taofang stared down into the bestial visage of an ork biker. Vindictively, he fired his lasgun at the monster. The ork braked hard, preventing the shot from striking its head. Instead, the energy beam struck the warbike’s forks, melting through the scrap-metal pipe. The damaged fork snapped, causing the bike to jerk to the left, straight into the path of a pursuing buggy. Both vehicles disintegrated in the resulting collision, spilling a junk-heap of debris across the tracks.

A loud explosion to the right turned Taofang’s attention away from his own handiwork. He watched in awe as the big battlewagon went spinning through the air, its cargo of burned and mangled orks hurtling across the desert. An instant later there was an explosion to the left – a wartrak had struck another mine.

Between the barrage and the minefield, the remaining orks lost heart and turned their machines around. Taofang watched the aliens as they tried to make good their retreat, stubbornly trying to navigate the cratered landscape where the first barrage had fallen. With their own fire marking the range for them, the artillery made an easy job of annihilating the fleeing aliens.

Taofang turned to congratulate Mingzhou on their miraculous escape, but instead found his eyes fixated upon the sight directly ahead of the train. Stretching away across the horizon, as far as the eye could follow, was an immense wall half a kilometre high. Rising from the barren waste, black as night, bristling with guns of every size and calibre, it could only be the Witch Wall, the almost cyclopean fortification engineered by the Iron Warriors to defend their world from invasion.

Today, the Witch Wall’s defences had claimed their first victims.

They would not be the last. Of that Taofang was sure.

CHAPTER VII

I-DAY PLUS FIFTY

‘…and I say it is the failure of Morax’s vaunted Air Cohort that has brought us to this impasse!’ Admiral Nostraz’s words boomed through the vaulted halls of the Iron Bastion, drowning out the chorus rising from the gargoyles. ‘We are losing air superiority in our own skies to a bunch of slack-brained xenos trash!’

Skylord Morax rose from his seat and leaned across the table, his gauntlets hissing as they tightened about the edge. ‘If I had been given half the resources squandered on your system defence fleet, brother, then the orks wouldn’t dare show their filthy faces in the sunlight. As it stands, my squadrons are being taxed to their limit just trying to keep the xenos away from the Witch Wall and maintain control on this side of the Mare Ossius. I need more pilots. I need more bombs. I need more planes. Give me the tools to do the job and I will have the orks scurrying back to Dirgas like whipped curs.’

‘More empty promises from the hero of Janicar,’ Skintaker Algol scoffed. The clutch of robed attendants hovering about him, sewing fresh patches of leather into his cloak, froze as they heard their fearsome master speak. It would take much for him to lash out at another Iron Warrior, but almost less than nothing for him to turn his ire on mere slaves.

Morax’s face grew crimson as he heard Algol’s insult. The siege of Janicar had been fought over two millennia past, yet it was still a raw wound against his pride. There, too, Morax had commanded the Iron Warriors’ air arm, using it to smash the massed armour of the Imperium. He had caught an entire tank army upon the plains of Boresh, annihilating it in a merciless campaign of saturation bombing. At least, that is what he reported to his battle-brothers. In truth, he’d been tricked by the Imperial commander, gulled into destroying a phoney formation – civilian vehicles dressed to look like tanks and artillery. While he was bombing the fake army, the real armour was slipping away to surprise the Iron Warriors ground forces encircling the planetary capital. It had been a near disaster and a stinging blemish on Morax’s career.

‘Damn it, Algol!’ Morax exploded, his armoured fingers digging into the table’s surface, cracking the transparent stone. ‘I can do nothing without more equipment. I need more Flesh to fly the planes. I need more munitions to drop on the orks. My resources are not unlimited!’ He swung around, pointing a finger at Nostraz. ‘Complain about the great admiral’s cowardly pirates. If they had done their job, we would still be able to draw supplies from off-world, instead of rationing every las-pack and protein-tube!’

Admiral Nostraz started to respond, but thought better of rising to Morax’s bait. From the corner of his eye, he studied Warsmith Andraaz on his diamond throne. Anything the admiral might say to defend the performance of his defence fleet would challenge the Warsmith’s policy of isolation. Any challenge to Andraaz’s authority was reckless, but especially on a day like today. The Rending Guard seemed especially eager for an excuse to defend their master’s rank and honour. Discretion proving the better part of wisdom, the admiral sat down and contented himself with glaring death at his rival across the table.

‘We must all make do with what we have,’ Warsmith Andraaz declared, his voice like the rasp of a chainsword. ‘In the hands of an Iron Warrior, the rudest tool becomes an instrument of death.’

‘I cannot work miracles with nothing,’ Morax grumbled under his breath. Andraaz leaned outwards from his throne, the talons of his power claw clacking against one another with unspoken menace.

‘You will perform as it is demanded of you to perform,’ the Warsmith said. ‘Fail me and you will not have the chance to repent your weakness.’

Sucking in a great breath, the chastened Skylord sank down into his seat. ‘As you command, Grim Lord.’

‘As I command,’ Andraaz repeated. ‘Do not forget that. Any of you.’ He turned his head and fixed his smouldering gaze on Over-Captain Vallax. ‘What news of the ork advance? What have your scouts reported?’

Disappointment flashed across Vallax’s hair in a ripple of lavender colour, the mutation betraying the emotion if not its cause. He had hoped to exploit the Warsmith’s call for deep penetration in the ork-held wastes. Captain Rhodaan had been so eager for action the cretin hadn’t even questioned the assignment. Vallax had been very careful to choose the most ork-ridden region of the planet for Squad Kyrith’s mission, stealing data-slates from Morax’s Air Cohort to verify the hazards. It had been frustrating to see Rhodaan and his rabble return to Vorago intact. Perhaps his rival hadn’t been as credulous as he had seemed.

‘An enormous concentration of ork machinery is gathering in the heights overlooking the Convallis Robigo,’ Vallax recited Rhodaan’s report. Having Squad Kyrith reassigned to duties in the Mare Ossius afforded the Over-Captain the opportunity to make the report himself and claim it for his own. ‘A mass horde of warbikes, buggies, trucks and primitive armour, supported by an array of artillery and rockets. Enemy numbers are estimated to be above six hundred thousand. There can be little question the xenos intend to move against the Witch Wall.’

‘Captain Gamgin has been alerted,’ Admiral Nostraz interjected. ‘The janissaries manning the fortifications have been placed on double watches. Supplemental provisions and water rations have been drawn from the stores at Aboro against the potential for a prolonged xenos assault.’

‘The orks won’t have the patience for a long attack,’ Algol said. ‘They’ll lose twenty or thirty thousand trying to break through the defences and then lose interest. They don’t have the discipline for a long siege.’

Sergeant Ipos stood and bowed his head as he addressed Warsmith Andraaz. ‘It is impossible to predict the alien mind,’ he cautioned. ‘It is just possible the orks may bypass the Witch Wall. We have to be prepared against that possibility.’

‘Your ambition is showing,’ growled Algol. ‘Afraid Gamgin will reap all the glory for himself and leave nothing for a scheming half-seed?’

‘The only glory I seek is that of the Third Grand Company,’ Ipos retorted, just the faintest hint of mockery in his deferential tone. ‘I exist only to serve the Legion.’ A thin smile twisted the Iron Warrior’s mouth. ‘To do so, I require another sixty thousand slaves. Can you manage that, lord captain?’

‘Digging more holes in the desert, sergeant?’ Morax snarled.

Ipos kept his voice subservient as he answered the Skylord’s displeasure. ‘No, now we need to fill them. If the orks gain a foothold this side of the Mare Ossius, it will be the worst mistake of their campaign. I can guarantee it.’

‘Sergeant Ipos’s plan is sound,’ the metallic rasp of Oriax’s servitor-proxy intoned. ‘With the proper allocation of Flesh, everything can be in readiness. I have already detached three-quarters of my tech-adepts to the project.’

Warsmith Andraaz brought his armoured fist slashing through the air. ‘I have already decided on Sergeant Ipos’s plan. The debate is closed. Captain Algol, you will provide the sergeant with whatever he requires.’

‘The Flesh he asks for was already detailed to reinforce the Witch Wall,’ the Skintaker objected.

Andraaz clenched the talons of his power claw, sending a crackle of energy rippling across his forearm. ‘Then Captain Gamgin will just have to do without,’ he declared.

Stretching across half a continent, marking the shoreline of a dead ocean, the black mass of the Witch Wall was a synthetic scar upon the face of Castellax, so immense as to be visible from orbit whenever the planet’s pollution levels dropped to sub-toxic levels. A megalithic mass of stone, ferrocrete and plasteel half a kilometre high, the fortress was a monstrosity of guns and assault batteries. Divided every few hundred metres into fortified segments, fed by a network of subterranean railways, workshops, arsenals and troop-kennels, the wall was a world unto itself. Locked within its dungeons, generations of slaves laboured in the darkness to provide ammunition for its guns, to produce synthetic food for its garrison, to supply energy to its generators. Imprisoned within containment-crypts, their bodies immersed in preservative salt-baths, their brains wired into thrall-engines, hundreds of psykers sent their mental screams wailing through the battlements, a psychic clamour to confound the witchery of any enemy.

Four hundred thousand janissaries and mamelukes manned the defences of the Witch Wall, an army equipped with the best munitions to emerge from the factories of Castellax. Only the very best of the millions who passed through the brutal training regimes were allowed to serve here. Captain Gamgin would accept nothing less.

The Iron Warrior prowled along the wind-swept battlements, ignoring the caustic pollutants brushing across his armour as the breeze stirred up the dusty bed of the Mare Ossius. The extinct ocean was at his back, before him yawned the blighted wastes of the desert and the yawning pit of the Convallis Robigo, a great canyon gouged into the surface of Castellax by centuries of indiscriminate strip-mining. The lower depths of the canyon were a poisonous bog of acids and alkalis, toxic waste and industrial run-off. Those who attempted to desert the Witch Wall’s garrison, weak-willed cowards unable to endure the constant wailing of the entombed psykers, were often tossed into the canyon where their lingering deaths could be observed by the closest of the forts.

Now a different sort of spectacle was unfolding about the rim of the canyon. Gamgin raised the magnoculars to his helm, staring through the polarised optics to filter out the haze of pollutants and distance. His hearts pounded faster as he saw the magnitude of the ork warhost. It seemed to stretch away to the very horizon, an armada of ramshackle machines and roaring engines, a veritable storm of smog rising from the motley confusion of exhausts. Through the polluted sky, a swarm of alien aircraft soared and hovered, swooped and dived, like angry flies buzzing over an unburied corpse.

Gamgin lowered the magnoculars and glared at the nearest guard post. Even through the filters of his helmet, he fancied he could smell the fear dripping off his troops. Weak, fragile men. For all their training, for all the discipline that had been whipped, beaten and burned into them, they remained pathetic Flesh. This was the foundation the False Emperor had imagined he could build his Imperium upon. It would be amusing if it wasn’t so pathetic.

Gamgin marched to the guard post, the janissaries snapping to terrified attention as the hulking Iron Warrior loomed over the fire control of their missile battery. Obedience through fear, so long as the Flesh was more afraid of Gamgin than the orks, they would do their duty. Reaching down to the face of a trembling loader, the Space Marine decided to remind his troops why they should fear. Gripping the man’s insect-like rebreather, Gamgin pulled the mask away, exposing the soldier’s pale flesh to the toxic dust. At once, the skin began to blister.

‘Breathe,’ Gamgin ordered. The doomed soldier stared back at him, his eyes imploring the monstrous giant for mercy. ‘Breathe,’ Gamgin repeated, closing his fingers about the janissary’s face, forcing the man’s mouth open. The loader struggled in the Space Marine’s grip, but at last his starving lungs forced him to draw the unfiltered dust into his lungs.

The Iron Warrior dropped the quivering wretch, leaving him to bleed out as the poisons burned away his lungs. The twitching body would be an object lesson to his comrades, a reminder to them of who they served… and why.

‘Soldiers of the Witch Wall,’ Gamgin growled into his helmet’s vox-bead. His voice boomed out from the thousands of vox-casters stretching across the continent-spanning stronghold, echoing through the endless labyrinth of service tunnels and sub-cellars running beneath the ground. ‘The hour of your duty is at hand. The enemy shall set upon you with all his savagery and in all his numbers. He will seek to breach the wall. He will fail. You will drive him back. You will destroy him. You will kill him. You will butcher and annihilate him. Here we exterminate the xenos vermin who have dared trespass upon our world. No quarter shall be given, no mercy shall be shown. Your orders are total annihilation!’

Gamgin’s voice dropped into a bestial snarl. ‘You will obey your orders. The Iron Warriors demand it of you. Fail your masters and you will wish the orks had taken you...’

All across the wall, Gamgin could see officers hurrying to spur their commands into readiness, lashing out with whips and clubs at those who failed to respond quickly enough. The bark of orders, the shouts of command echoed across the barrier, sometimes interrupted by the groan of shells being loaded or the creak of elevators bringing up missiles from the underground arsenals. The thrum of hundreds of lascannon and plasma batteries cycling over to full charge formed an omnipresent susurrus that silenced even the howls of the buried psykers.

This was the Witch Wall, and the green tide of the invader would be broken upon it. Gamgin already had a freight train waiting on one of the rail bridges to bear evidence of his victory back to Vorago. When the fighting was over, three thousand slaves would be sent into the wastes to collect the heads of slaughtered orks. It would be a fitting tribute to Gamgin’s command and the defences he had engineered. One that none of his battle-brothers would be able to deny him.

The shrieking siren of an ork fighter-bomber ripped across the sky, the primitive aircraft swooping so near the battlements that Gamgin could clearly make out the snaggle-toothed squig painted across its nose. Streamers of black smoke belched from the plane’s wing, but it was impossible to tell if it was from damage or the crude exhausts of its combustion engine. Whatever its condition, the Iron Warrior watched as the plane’s guns opened up, splashing the wreckage of a gun crew across the interior of a weapon pit. An instant later, the bright beam of a lascannon burned a hole through the plane’s fuselage, sending it plummeting from the sky to crash in a great fireball against the desert floor.

As far as Gamgin’s eyes could see, similar scenes of carnage were being played out. That swarm of ork planes and gyrocopters had struck with the fury of a tempest, blazing across the length of the wall in a firestorm of rocketry and gunfire. Hundreds had been burned from the skies and still there seemed no end to the alien flyers. With reckless abandon, the orks had flown straight into the anti-aircraft batteries and missile defences, negating the efficiency of each strategically positioned emplacement and ruthlessly trained gun crew through sheer weight of numbers. The orks had simply overwhelmed each position, sacrificing dozens of their planes to knock out a single lascannon or missile battery.

It was viciously inefficient, but Gamgin could not deny that the xenos strategy was yielding results. He had been compelled to husband his resources, order entire batteries to stand down and keep quiet so that they might avoid drawing the attentions of the ork flyers. It galled him to allow the aliens any kind of respite, but he knew he had to preserve his strength. For all the malignity of their attack, the ork planes were only a distraction. The real battle would be joined when the xenos ground forces joined the assault.

Out across the desert, the black smog of the ork advance drew closer. Gamgin stalked towards the edge of the battlements, ignoring the chatter of a passing fighter-bomber’s boltguns as he peered through the magnoculars at the oncoming horde. Like some thousand-headed beast, the alien army rolled through the dust, implacable and unstoppable.

Or so it might appear. Gamgin smiled coldly as he watched the advance. Soon the xenos vermin would reach the range of the wall’s heavy artillery. It was disappointing to allow the alien vanguard to pass unmolested, but it was necessary. There were other defences that would deal with them. He turned the glasses, following the leading rabble of bikes and buggies, trucks and wartraks. He could see some of the ork gunners firing at the wall, ignoring the fact they were still woefully out of range. Pitiful brutes, it was almost embarrassing to slaughter them. They’d never appreciate the skill with which they were exterminated.

A red-painted warbike was the first of the ork machines to hit the minefield. It was thrown into the air in a burst of flame and smoke, spinning end over end until it crashed in a smouldering heap. Other machines soon joined it in destruction, an entire section of desert seeming to blossom into a garden of explosions. Now that the first mine had been struck, the proximity sensors attached to the rest had been activated. The orks didn’t need to actually pass over the buried explosives now. Simply coming within five metres of them was enough. It was amusing to watch the xenos trying to veer across the deadly expanse, trying to avoid the death lurking under their tyres.

The entry of the vanguard into the first ring of mines was the signal Gamgin’s artillery had been waiting for. Biding their time while the ork flyers raged across the sky, now the wall’s heavy guns roared into violent life, hurling tons of explosive across the desert to slam into the oncoming xenos. Tanks were shattered by four-ton shells, their hulls shredded like parchment. Battlewagons vanished in great sheets of flame, the aliens swarming about their decks obliterated in the flash of an eye.

Somehow, the orks refused to break under the onslaught. Every second brought death to hundreds of the aliens, yet still they came, thundering through the artillery barrage, racing across the smoking moonscape of the minefield. Now the alien vanguard was near enough to the wall that the janissaries began opening up with their lasguns and autocannon.

Gamgin watched as the orks hit the next ring of defences, the buried chainwire that leapt up from the sand as the vibrations of the alien machines activated their sensors. He saw ork bikers hit the snarling stretches of wire, their bodies torn into gory cubes by the whirling blades. Dozens of orks hit the wire, cut to ribbons in a burst of blood and gristle, yet still the creatures refused to break. Heavier vehicles lumbered forwards, firing a crazed array of weaponry into the obstructions or simply riding it down beneath their treads.

Ferrocrete tank traps, the jagged obstructions called the Devil’s Teeth, delayed the orks only a bit longer than the chainwire. With callous disregard for their own comrades, the orks slapped explosive charges to the obstacles, wrapped chains about them and pulled them free or employed heavy dozer blades to topple them over. All of this while a withering fire poured down on them from the black face of the Witch Wall. The carnage was unspeakable, thousands of greenskin dead lying torn and mangled across the desolation.

Yet still they came.

Gamgin growled into the vox-bead, sending his fury echoing along the wall, enjoining his troops to still greater effort. Guns fired into the orks until their barrels became red-hot, elevators shot up from the arsenals with such rapidity that fresh gangs of slaves had to be sent along to unload the ammunition when it reached the gun emplacements and missile batteries. Hour by hour, the humans strove to repulse the alien invader. Protein-pastes packed with stimulants were dispensed, punishment squads executed those too fatigued to fight, conscripts were drawn from the subterranean workshops and munitions plants.

The orks finally penetrated the Devil’s Teeth, sparing no thought for their massed dead. Now the rumble of alien guns slammed against the battlements, pitting and scarring the black walls. The aliens plunged ahead, striking hidden gas projectors and deadfalls, subsidiary pillboxes and fortified blockhouses. Each obstruction was met with the same response – mindless, barbaric violence. There was no hesitation, no pause to consider strategy in the face of a changing battlefield. Nothing, it seemed, would be allowed to blunt the momentum of the ork advance.

Gamgin glared down from the wall, appreciating for the first time the nature of the enemy. He had allowed himself to be deluded, to mistake the individual ork, the crude almost bumbling savage as his real foe. It was not the individual ork he was fighting, but the Waaagh!, the gestalt collective, the millions-strong warhost, an elemental force that could do nothing except advance and attack.

The Iron Warrior snarled into his vox-bead, calling up fresh reserves from the lower bunkers. Swiftly, the soldiers ascended to the battlements, bringing with them massive drums of lead. With practised precision, the janissaries opened the drums, exposing the ash-like contents. Gamgin turned and faced towards the dead sea, evaluating the strength and direction of the wind.

If the orks were an elemental force, then he would use another element to destroy them. ‘Seed the wind,’ Gamgin ordered. Obediently, the janissaries dug into the barrels of ash with long leaden ladles and cast the shimmering poison into the wind. The corrosive chemical would bond with the toxic dust swirling up from the dry ocean bed. A few moments after being cast into the breeze, it would create an acidic cloud capable of chewing through flesh. The orks might be hardy enough to breathe the polluted fumes of Castellax’s atmosphere, but they wouldn’t shrug off the Daemon’s Breath.

It was a death sentence, of course, for the advance troops down in the bunkers and blockhouses, but Gamgin was pragmatic about such losses. With the orks already swarming about their positions, the isolated men were as good as dead already. Besides, there was plenty of fresh Flesh waiting and eager to replace them. Common humanity needed little encouragement to breed like vermin.

Agonised howls rose from the massed orks as the deadly cloud descended upon them. Through the magnoculars, Gamgin could see the acid corroding their flesh, scorching and blistering as it gnawed its way through the leathery skin. Where an instant before there had been an unstoppable horde, now he stared down upon a twitching morass of suffering. Coldly, he ordered the men on the wall to fire down into the afflicted aliens.

Uncertain of what had beset their vanguard, the main body of the ork column shifted, changing direction. Gamgin sneered at their effort to escape the trap. The aliens might avoid the cloud, but they would soon find themselves beset by an even more primal adversary. Eagerly, Gamgin watched as the first ork tank rumbled out onto the seemingly innocuous stretch of desert on the southern flank. Only a trained eye could see the subtle difference in hue, even the men stationed on the Witch Wall weren’t so sharp as to immediately spot the difference. And it was an important difference.

The difference between life and death.

The tank’s speedy advance collapsed in a groan of protesting gears and shrieking aliens. The armoured vehicle plunged into the open ground, sinking through the thin scum of dirt and debris which covered the polluted quagmire. Not as impressive as the Convallis Robigo, the canyon was more strategically placed, an implacable barrier to guard the fortress’s flank.

Unable to check the momentum of their charge, dozens of other ork machines followed the first tank into destruction. Frantic drivers and crew tried to throw themselves from their doomed machines only to flounder in the toxic mire as they too were sucked down. Once the oily clutch of the mire closed about a victim, no force could drag it free.

Locked between the quagmire and the billowing acid cloud, thousands of orks were abandoned to the mercy of the Iron Warriors. Gamgin would show them none. At his command, a vicious barrage of artillery and missiles slammed into the confusion of buggies and battlewagons.

From the doomed column to the south, Gamgin turned his gaze to the north. A section of the ork assault force had diverted towards the railway, braving the minefields in preference to the acid cloud and the quagmire. The Iron Warrior glared at the alien machines. They would not escape. Issuing orders into his vox-bead, he started to redirect his artillery against the northern column. It was then that the entire fortress was shaken by a tremendous impact. The janissaries in the gun emplacement closest to him were knocked about like rag dolls, one man splitting his head open against the bore of the gun. Gamgin himself was nearly thrown from his feet. A kilometre away, he could see a great smouldering crater pitting the face of the Witch Wall.

An instant later, the wall was rattled by a second impact, an entire stronghold collapsing in an explosion of ferrocrete and plasteel. Gamgin’s mind whirled at the impossible devastation, something he would expect only from a battleship or the largest Titans.

Raising the magnoculars once more, he followed the slender ribbon of railway into the west. There, in the distance, Gamgin saw them: two gigantic lumbering machines. In size, they bore no kinship to any tank or train he had ever seen. They were more like Imperial strike cruisers mounted on carriages, trundling down the railway with sluggish yet inexorable momentum. Gaping in the face of each of the mobile battlefortresses was a mammoth cannon, the sort of thing that would be more properly used to pummel a planet into submission from high orbit.

Gamgin clenched his fist. The Witch Wall would never withstand the approach of these monsters. Their guns would blast open a hole in it through which the entire Waaagh! could pour. There was nothing he could do to stop them. All he could do was inform the Warsmith that he had failed. The Witch Wall was breached. The Mare Ossius lay open before the invaders and perhaps Vorago as well.

CHAPTER VIII

I-DAY PLUS SIXTY-FOUR

Through the poisonous green mist, the droning crackle of the Lingua-Technis echoed, slithering off the maze of immense pipes and slime-covered conduits. It was the phantom voice of forbidden praise, the shadow worship of the doomed and the damned.

Enginseer Heroditus bowed his head and kept his mechadendrites piously folded as the chant progressed. Only that facet of his brain assigned to reciting binary orisons to confuse the sentinel-implants hidden within his own body was not devoted to the ritual of praise. All bless the Omnissiah!

Gathered within the radioactive sump-pit, the abandoned sub-catacomb far beneath the manufactorums of Vorago, the indentured tech-priests of Castellax resembled a conclave of grotesque ghouls in their robes of synth-fibre. The stink of antiseptic unguents and grease-lubricant oozed from one and all, a stench which would have overcome anything still more flesh than machine. With their senses partitioned by automated cogitators or replaced entirely by cybernetic mechanisms, the tech-priests barely perceived the reek, much less reacted to it.

Heroditus cast his gaze across the clandestine gathering. There were nearly a dozen this time, an observation which brought a tremble to his valve-pump. It was dangerous to assemble in such numbers. If the absence of even one of them were to be noticed, if anyone were lax in his orisons or failed to lose a trailing Steel Blood…

Fabricator Oriax’s punishment would be a thing of unrivalled horror, of that Heroditus was certain. If the Iron Warrior discovered why his slaves were sneaking through the sewers and catacombs, his vengeance would be more terrible still.

Strangely, that observation brought confidence rather than caution. Heroditus suspected it was organic illogic, but somehow the thought that Oriax would be alarmed if he became aware… That made the enginseer feel pride. It made him feel strong. For the first time since Castellax had fallen to the Iron Warriors, he had a sense of accomplishment.

It was a reckless emotion and Heroditus drove it from his mind as soon as it started to assert itself. Pride and confidence might make a man, even a tech-priest, overbold. With all the evil of the Iron Warriors already ranged against them, they did not need their own foolish mistakes, errors born of hubris, presenting them with still greater obstacles.

As his mind emerged from such ruminations, Heroditus focused upon his fellow tech-priests. More had arrived and there were nearly twenty of them, hunched amid the pipes, perched upon the corroded gantries, skulking against ferrocrete reservoirs and titanium flow valves. Again, he felt an impulse of wariness as he considered such numbers. If even one of his fellows had failed to distract his sentinel-implant…

‘Brothers of the Machine!’ the voice of Logis Acestes sliced across the binary chant like a rusty razor. The senior adept of the Mechanicus to survive the invasion, Acestes was a lank apparition, a scarecrow of steel and plasfibre bundles draped in a heavy cloak of synthetic leather. An expert at predictive simulation and mathematical extrapolation, Acestes was the only member of their little cabal who had avoided capture at the fall of Castellax. His robes yet bore the Cog Mechanicus symbol of the Adeptus, a mark not only of his freedom but of his uncompromised servitude to the Machine-God. The Logis had hidden himself away for many decades in the most forsaken depths of Vorago before emerging from the shadows and recruiting his congregation from Oriax’s slaves.

The chant fell silent as Acestes raised his arms, slim pistons of steel fitted with an array of hinged servo-limbs, each ending in an esoteric confusion of tools, blades and pincers. The nest of tubes and hoses which protruded from the hood of his robe contracted as the Logis drew air into the archaic circulator attached to his chest. The device hissed and shuddered as it distilled the worst pollutants, expelling them in a black slime which oozed from a vent in its side.

‘My brothers,’ the Logis spoke. ‘Long have we endured the confusion of servitude, of prostituting the rites of the machine-spirit to obscene purposes. But now, the time of forced blasphemy is nearly over. Soon we shall rise and achieve that for which we have struggled!’

Speaking, Acestes pivoted on his ankles, swinging his body around and gesticulating at the jumble of machinery piled atop a brick-work causeway. Pale servitors, their mechanics displaying a frightful state of decay and corrosion, their flesh branded with the Cog Mechanicus, scurried about the seeming scrap-heap, choosing isolated pieces and arranging them in carefully sorted piles.

‘We may thank the Omnissiah for providing the xenos incursion, for it has given the heretical oppressors over to distraction. While their eyes are set upon the orks, they allow their vigilance to wane. Opportunity, so long elusive, now provides us with all we require.’

The crimson optics protruding from the nest of hoses that served Acestes as a face whirred on their metal stalks, fixing a lone tech-adept with their mechanical stare. One of the Logis’s limbs circled forwards, jabbing a slender plasma-cutter in the adept’s direction.

‘We cannot allow anything to interfere with our duty,’ Acestes declared. ‘One among you has become suspect. The Steel Blood are no longer attentive, as though they have lost interest. There can only be one cause for such an adjustment in their calculations.’

The doomed tech-adept did not protest, did not seek to escape. He understood the judgement that had already been reached. Though he was aware of no conscious treachery, the possibility of implanted treachery was too great to permit. He himself had reported the inattentiveness of the Steel Blood towards him. Alone among the conspirators, he did not need to chant the liturgy of distraction to elude the servitor-spies. It was a problem that had perturbed him greatly. Despite his role in the drama, he admired the directness of Acestes’s solution.

Stepping around the scorched husk of the tech-adept, Enginseer Heroditus approached Acestes. He bowed his head before addressing the Logis, an act of almost automatic contrition. Acestes had not profaned his knowledge and ability by serving the cause of the traitors; that placed him far closer to the Machine-God than any of them. It was a holiness that made the enginseer feel lowly and unclean. If his synthesised voice was capable of conveying emotion, his words would have been meek and humble as he spoke.

‘The heretic Ipos has mobilised nearly a million slaves,’ Heroditus reported. ‘He works them day and night, without rest or respite. Already the first of the munitions have been disassembled and removed from the city.’

Acestes nodded, digesting the enginseer’s words. ‘It is a sacrilege to defile such holy armaments,’ he sighed. ‘The traitors compound their sins without thought of what they do. For all their terrible potential, the vile Traitor Marines yet wallow in the ignorance of their barbarities. We must not repeat their error! Have the machine-spirits been placated? Have the proper supplications been made?’

‘Yes, Revered Logis,’ Heroditus answered. His mechadendrites curled in upon themselves, grasping the thick loop of power coil protruding from the synthfibre sack he carried. Extending the cybernetic limbs, he offered the heavy loop of electrum to Acestes. The Logis nodded and gestured with one of his steel claws. With another bow, Heroditus deposited the coil on the ground beside the senior tech-priest.

‘The heretics continue to allow us to oversee the profanation of the ordnance,’ Heroditus explained. ‘Their janissaries understand nothing of what we do. With their eyes upon us, we take what we need. It is only when Ipos or one of the other Chaos Marines are around that we must display caution.’

‘What of the arch-blasphemer Oriax?’ Acestes demanded. ‘Are his spies not observing you?’

A curious sensation tugged at Heroditus’s mind as he heard the question. It took him a moment to realise his brain was sending out the impulse to make his face smile… as if there was still enough organic flesh for such an expression. ‘We have practised the logarithms which will deceive the Steel Blood,’ he explained. ‘Beneath the purification and pacification litanies to sanctify the blasphemous disassembly, we disseminate the logarithms and confuse the sensors of Oriax’s servitors. The Fabricator sees only what we allow him to see. Any of our own whom we suspect of serving him have been deleted. The frantic pace of Ipos’s schedule has resulted in many accidents. The traitors have not noticed those we have arranged.’

‘It is well,’ declaimed Acestes, ‘but never allow your vigilance to become complacent. Any of our brothers may become corrupted and lose their spirits to the heretical dogma of the traitors. We cannot allow that. There is too much work yet to be done. We must not fail in this duty which the Omnissiah has bestowed upon us.’

‘We will not fail,’ Heroditus promised. ‘We have been studious in our distasteful labour. Never do we take more than can be concealed. From each of the ten, we take only what will not be noticed. Though it is a profanation of the sacred template, we have bypassed fail-safes and redundancies to ensure the mechanisms remain functional.’ The enginseer paused, a sensation of disgust crackling through his neurons as he contemplated the despicable violations he had helped perpetrate. He could only trust that the machine-spirits of the offended ordnance would forgive him for what he had done.

‘The problem,’ Heroditus continued, ‘is with Lartius Maximus. We were compelled to remove systems without redundancies. Revered Logis, the machine-spirit is impaired. The ordnance will not function.’

Acestes considered the grim revelation. He turned and gazed at the mechanisms already assembled atop the causeway, his optics focusing on the immense cylindrical housing taking shape in the shadows. ‘When will the traitors be aware of its failing?’

‘If the Omnissiah smiles upon our labour, they will not know anything until they try to activate the ordnance,’ Heroditus said, his optic senses gazing up reverently at the housing the servitors were building. ‘I think only one of our own, or the arch-blasphemer Oriax could understand the omissions in Lartius Maximus. If Oriax does not interfere, by the time the traitors know it will be too late. By then, Lartius Maximus will be lost behind the xenos advance.’

Logis Acestes’s voice dipped into a thin whisper. ‘Then let us pray that the Omnissiah favours us and keeps Oriax inside his sanctum.’

Huge blocks of ferrocrete exploded into the murky sky, hurled dozens of kilometres by the relentless punishment of the ork artillery. The city of Aboro was burning, entire blocks enveloped in flame as fuel stores and industrial waste caught fire. The conflagration roared like a hungry beast as it devoured the factories and processing plants, devouring the very heart of the city with its crimson fangs.

Captain Rhodaan watched the holocaust unfold from the shelter of a ferrocrete pillbox, one of hundreds lining the streets of Aboro. On his back, Eurydice shivered in bloodthirsty anticipation. The Iron Warriors had poured half a million troops into Aboro, along with attendant artillery and armoured support. Even Morax’s diminished Air Cohort had played a role, engaging in fierce aerial skirmishes to deny the enemy control of the skies. Street by street, block by block, the humans had defended their city, blunting the momentum of the ork onslaught, forcing the beasts to fight for every centimetre of ground.

Rhodaan was certain the janissaries fought under some delusion of heroism and accomplishment. Such phantasms were a part of Gamgin’s relentless training pogroms, things which became a part of the slave-soldier’s psyche. They were always there, lurking in the subconscious, waiting to be exploited.

The Flesh would obey, that was all they were good for. Let them believe the battle was of consequence. Let them remain ignorant that Warsmith Andraaz had decided to concede Aboro to the enemy weeks ago. Knowledge could only dull their efficiency. For all their frailty and weakness, men clung to the belief that their lives had value. If it would make them fight harder, Rhodaan was willing to allow them their little fantasy.

The defence of Aboro was inconsequential in its own right. With the orks across the Mare Ossius, holding the city could only weaken the resources available to the defence of Vorago. But if the Iron Warriors could not hold the southern city, they could still exploit its doom. By making a powerful stand in Aboro, they had drawn the full attention of the invaders. Columns of enemy had diverted from their incursions in the north to take part in the battle, ignoring soft targets of opportunity in their savage lust for a worthy fight. By the sacrifice of Aboro, dozens of outposts and camps had been granted a reprieve, time to evacuate their resources to Vorago.

Now, the fighting in Aboro was reaching the critical stage. The ork warlord, tiring of the bloody slog to exterminate the human defenders, had finally decided to settle the question in typically brutal fashion. Every cannon in the alien warhost had been turned against Aboro, pounding it in a merciless barrage without respite for the past three days. It didn’t seem to bother the ork warlord that thousands of its own troops were still fighting in the ruins. The city had become an annoyance, an impediment to the warlord’s grand scheme. As such, it would be obliterated.

Rhodaan smiled within the ceramite casket of his helm. Everything was going according to plan.

Dust rained down from the ceiling as Rhodaan descended the steps leading from the pillbox to the vault-like cavern which formed the terminus of Aboro’s main rail-line. A metallic trail of mag-lev plates stretched away into the subterranean vastness, glistening with a greenish gleam in the fitful illumination of suspended flood lamps. With each fresh salvo from the ork artillery, each tremor that groaned down the tunnel, the lights flickered and threw the passage into momentary darkness.

The tunnel was swarming with Flesh, janissaries and slaves frantically loading supplies into the freight cars of a monstrous train. Despite the barrage, the terror which glistened in the eyes of each man, the Flesh operated with discipline and restraint. The crazed desperation of other evacuations had no place here. Because here, in this tunnel, the Flesh were in the presence of their masters. The Raptors of Squad Kyrith marched along the loading ramps, the lenses of their gruesome helmets watching the throng for the first sign of panic. The first hint, the first suspicion, and the Iron Warriors would act, cutting down the malcontent before he could spread his disobedience to those around him. It was a duty the Space Marines had performed several times already, the mangled remains of their victims tossed unceremoniously into the waiting freight cars.

Rhodaan returned Pazuriel’s salute as he marched along the ramp. ‘The ork barrage is beginning to lessen,’ he told his minion. ‘We can expect the filthy xenos to launch another assault soon.’

Pazuriel nodded his head. ‘We will be ready,’ he said, turning his gaze onto the slaves. ‘The Flesh will be herded to the prepared positions. Those sections designated to protect the train will be loaded onto the garrison carriages. Everything will follow Captain Gamgin’s plan.’

Eurydice twitched as it registered Rhodaan’s annoyance. ‘No plan is exact,’ he reminded Pazuriel. ‘It remains perfect only until it has encountered the enemy. Remember that, brother. Always guard against the unexpected. More so when the foe is as unpredictable as orks.’

‘But the xenos vermin have acted exactly as predicted,’ Pazuriel persisted.

‘Yes,’ Rhodaan agreed. He spun around, his armoured gauntlet striking out and smashing the face of a janissary who had dared step in the Iron Warrior’s shadow. The stricken man collapsed, his burden of protein-paste spilling across the ramp. Empty eyes stared blindly at the trembling roof. Rhodaan’s blow had snapped the wretch’s neck. The other Flesh in the vicinity hurriedly scattered, pushing against the mass of their fellows until they had widened the perimeter surrounding the Raptor’s position.

‘The xenos are performing exactly the way Ipos and Oriax said they would,’ Rhodaan continued, turning his back on the murdered soldier. ‘That is why I want you to be ready for any surprises.’ He left unspoken his belief that it wasn’t the orks alone they had to be wary of. Over-Captain Vallax and his Squad Vidarna had been a bit too gracious in allowing Squad Kyrith the honour of conducting the Aboro operation. Such beneficence from his commander brought Rhodaan’s suspicions to the fore.

Prowling along the ramp, dust and debris clattering from his armour, slaves scrambling to clear his path, Rhodaan approached Captain Gamgin’s command centre in the staff carriage just behind the train’s enormous mag-engine. The car was a bulky mess of armour plate and gun turrets, a forest of antennas bristling from its roof. One side of the carriage had been swung open, the titanium doors lashed to hooks set into the base of the car’s frame. The exposed interior was without partition, a single room stuffed with terminals and workstations. Dozens of pict screens displayed various views of Aboro, scores of cogitators rumbled and chattered as they analysed the reports streaming in from the vox-casters. Mobs of janissary officers, their shoulders festooned with garish strings of braid and brass, scurried about the command centre, their pace growing ever more frantic as they turned from one workstation to another. Every report made it clear that the complete breakdown of the city’s defence was imminent.

Through it all, like a primordial god, stalked the huge shape of Captain Gamgin. The Iron Warrior held his helmet beneath his arm, exposing his scarred visage and glowering countenance. His expression remained implacable as he read the reports and studied the image relays. Amid the barely suppressed panic of the Flesh, Gamgin was a rock of calm calculation, digesting each new report before dispensing his orders in a voice as cold as steel.

Rhodaan was not deceived by Gamgin’s air of invulnerability, of emotionless logic and careful calculation. He was also a legionary and knew the strange alchemy of duty and honour which governed the mind of an Iron Warrior. Devoid of fear for their own lives, absolutely without empathy for the sacrifices of others, an Iron Warrior cared about only one thing: the Legion. To fail the Legion, to disgrace the Third Grand Company, this was the secret terror that smouldered deep inside their hearts. Gamgin had failed to hold the Witch Wall, failed to keep the orks isolated on the far shore of the Mare Ossius. That was a shame which burned within him with the intensity of star-fire. Rhodaan could almost see it blazing from Gamgin’s eyes. To atone for his failure, to redeem himself, these were the things that mattered to Gamgin now, not the defence of Aboro or the lives of half a million slaves.

‘Lord captain,’ Rhodaan’s voice growled from the vox-casters in his helm. He slammed his fist against his chest plate in salute as Gamgin turned away from a bank of pict screens and faced the Raptor.

‘The time is at hand,’ Gamgin declared. He waved an armoured hand at the pict screens. ‘The Steel Blood maintain their vigil. The orks have ignored thirty-seven per cent of them, leaving many of them transmitting well behind enemy lines.’ The Space Marine’s face twisted in a derisive sneer. ‘Simple brutes, incapable of appreciating the value of intelligence!’ He pointed to one of the pict screens, his finger stabbing at the broadcast image as though thrusting a sword into it. For Gamgin, the image was as familiar as it was despised.

‘The artillery barrage is being lifted,’ Gamgin said. ‘This is why. The orks are moving for the final push, bringing up one of their battlefortresses.’ The Iron Warrior’s eyes took on a cold glint. ‘Their warlord wants to be in on the kill personally.’

‘They might still use their big cannons,’ Rhodaan cautioned as he studied the grotesque ork machine. Bigger than a strike cruiser, the immense vehicle straddled the railway, exploiting the mag-plates to aid its propulsion. The mammoth barrel of an orbital cannon jutted from the front of the machine’s hull. It had been such weapons which had broken the Witch Wall and pulverised the Charybdis Line. With a range of several hundred kilometres, it might still prove an insurmountable obstacle to their plans.

Gamgin nodded in understanding. ‘It is time for Squad Kyrith to play their part,’ he said. He turned and gestured at a detailed map of Aboro, the underground networks of service tunnels and industrial sewers clearly picked out in neon ribbons of gold and azure. ‘The battlefortress is moving through quadrant alpha-seven. When it crosses into alpha-nine, it will be poised fifty metres from this sub-station.’ Gamgin’s finger pointed to a crimson smudge linked to one of the golden lines.

‘The orks have become callously arrogant in their push,’ Gamgin said. ‘Convinced they have crushed all but a token resistance, they have forgotten even the most rudimentary security protocols.’

Rhodaan clenched his hand into a fist. ‘I will give them reason to regret their confidence. The gun will be silenced.’

‘Do not compromise the enemy’s mobility,’ Gamgin warned.

The reminder brought a curl to Rhodaan’s lips. ‘I am no half-seed,’ he hissed back. ‘I do not forget my orders. I do not fail in my duty.’

The last barb brought a flash of colour to Gamgin’s features. ‘Your ability had better equal your boasting,’ he snarled, ‘because I will be waiting for you in the Eye!’

Rhodaan slammed his fist across his chest in salute. ‘A long wait, brother,’ he growled as he turned his back on the command carriage. As he marched back along the ramp, he scolded himself for his anger. Gamgin was of no consequence. His career was over.

It was wasteful to squander hate on the dead.

The nexus of quadrants alpha-seven and alpha-nine was a scene of ruin and desolation. Fires raged unchecked, sewage bubbled from ruptured pipes, waste-gases vented from shattered collection vats. The charred husk of a reclamation tower leaned precariously against the burned-out rubble of an ore-smashing facility. The skeletal framework of a servo-crane lay strewn across the street, its cybernetic operator still pawing mindlessly at the charred control column.

‘The xenos have done a good job flattening this sector,’ observed Brother Gomorie, his afflicted hand flowing into a cleaver-like appendage in emulation of the image. Strange reflections played across the infected mess of flesh and metal, too suggestive in their resemblance to coherent images to be merely a trick of shadow and flame.

Crouched within the exposed sub-cellar of a shelled warehouse, the Space Marines of Squad Kyrith shifted away from Gomorie, uncomfortable with this reminder of their battle-brother’s affliction. The taint was a symbol of the raw, undisciplined nature of Chaos. It was a reminder of the menace that lurked inside each of them, the unfocused power which might rise up to overwhelm them in mind and body. It was a warning of what it meant to fail the Legion, to be consumed by the weakness of mere humanity. Mankind was the prey of such forces, only a Space Marine had the force of will to resist and restrain such power. Chaos was a power to be harnessed by those with the strength and vision to use it. Yet each of them knew that few, even among the Space Marines, had such strength. Gomorie was an example that even among the Iron Warriors there was weakness.

‘Inefficient,’ Baelfegor grumbled with contempt, keeping his eyes turned from Gomorie’s hand. ‘With all the ordnance they’ve fired, we could have smashed an entire world.’

‘Perhaps you should offer your services to the xenos as military advisor,’ Uzraal sneered. ‘They’d probably make you a general, half-seed. If they didn’t shoot you outright for your incessant complaining!’

Baelfegor bristled at the insult, his hand clenching tight about the grip of his meltagun. ‘We must discuss this again, brother. At a more appropriate time.’

Uzraal leaned into the other Space Marine’s face. ‘I welcome it,’ he hissed. ‘You are little more than a flesh-maggot in my eyes.’

‘Don’t let the orks shoot you, brother,’ Baelfegor growled back, enjoying the way Uzraal grew tense when their kinship was addressed. ‘I should hate to be cheated because you were clumsy.’

The whirring edge of Rhodaan’s chainsword suddenly sliced down between the two Iron Warriors, missing the masks of their helms by a matter of centimetres. Baelfegor and Uzraal cringed away from the menacing blade.

‘Keep your focus on the mission,’ Rhodaan snarled at them. ‘I will tell you when you have permission to die.’ He could feel the hatred of the reprimanded Iron Warriors stabbing at him from behind the optics of their helmets. Good, he thought. Let them hate, so long as they fear. Fear was obedience, no different for his fellow Space Marines than it was for the miserable Flesh who fed their war machine.

The walls of the pit-like sub-cellar trembled, sending scorched beams and shapeless lumps of heat-blasted ferrocrete tumbling into the depression. Rhodaan focused upon the tiny display of the data-slate he held, the feed from a nearby Steel Blood. The transmission depicted the gigantic ork battlefortress ploughing through the ruins, its enormity far in excess of the trains the tracks had been designed for. Buildings were brushed aside by the oncoming behemoth, its hull pulverising walls into rubble as it forced its way onwards. Rhodaan could almost hear the ground whining in protest as the prodigious weight of the machine pressed down upon it. That the mag-plates could afford any kind of support to such a monstrosity was grim testament to the genius of the Iron Warriors engineering.

The orks had profited long enough from such genius. Now the xenos would become victims of it.

‘Stand ready!’ Rhodaan barked, loosening the catch on his plasma pistol’s holster. The other Space Marines followed his example. Soon the pit resounded with the metallic whine of idling turbines as the Raptors activated their jump packs.

The tremor’s violence continued to rise, the roar of collapsing buildings becoming a deafening clamour. A smog of dust and debris billowed across the mouth of the pit, blotting out the Space Marines’ view of the polluted sky. Now, the groan of pulverised architecture was accompanied by the mechanical shriek of mighty engines, the bellow of driving pistons and the crazed chatter of firing guns.

Rhodaan’s horned helm stared straight up into the obscuring dust. ‘Iron within! Iron without!’ he shouted as his thumb depressed the launch rune and his pack’s thrusters launched him into the sky. He could hear the battle cry repeated by the other Raptors as they flew after him.

It took only the blink of an eye to clear the gritty smog of dust and wreckage. One instant, Rhodaan’s vision was consumed by a grey oblivion. The next he was hundreds of metres above the burning streets of Aboro, staring down at the Cyclopean enormity of the ork battle-fortress. Turrets and weapon batteries protruded from every corner of the colossus, scattered about in random disarray. Tall towers, ornamented with scrap-metal glyphs and primitive clan heraldry, bristled from the top of the hull, a crazed forest of gun emplacements, observation posts and communication hubs. As the Iron Warriors shot up into the sky, they could see clusters of orks firing their weapons into the ruins, venting their bloodlust in a display of mindless aggression. Those few who were observant enough to notice the Raptors as they rocketed into the sky could only blink in open-mouthed confusion, their savage brains losing precious seconds as they struggled to comprehend what they were seeing.

Before the orks could react, the Iron Warriors were diving down upon them. Pazuriel smashed into the tallest of the towers, pulverising the face of a stunned ork with his boot as he descended. An instant later and the Raptor’s chainaxe was transforming the observation post into an abattoir. Gomorie landed upon the flat roof of an anti-aircraft emplacement, his bolt pistol rupturing ork flesh with a steady fusillade of explosive rounds while his afflicted hand lengthened into an eviscerating tendril of flailing bio-steel.

Leaving his battle-brothers to spread alarm among the xenos and keep their focus upon the towers, Rhodaan spread his demi-organic wings and dived upon the yawning mouth of the main gun, its bore a full ten metres wide. Baelfegor and Uzraal followed in his wake. All three Iron Warriors struck their objective at the same moment, the mag-clamps within their boots gripping the surface of the cannon. The three Raptors had only a second to gain their bearings before bullets began ricocheting off the surface of the cannon. From a confusion of gantries and catwalks fixed to the hull of the battlefortress, a swarm of orks appeared. The aliens hooted and howled as they fired down at the Iron Warriors.

Baelfegor returned fire, dropping an ork with each burst from his bolt pistol, the mangled aliens hurtling from the walkways to smash against the street far below. Uzraal withdrew a frag grenade from the dispenser on his belt, throwing it at the centremost of the gantries. The explosive ripped through the packed orks, killing dozens outright and sending the wounded stumbling back inside the fortress. The aliens on the lower gantries took cover as a rain of debris and torn bodies came crashing down on them, while those above the explosion were blinded by an oily cloud of smoke.

‘Down,’ Rhodaan ordered. Taking advantage of the brief respite, the three Raptors withdrew into the muzzle of the cannon, using their mag-clamps to climb down the bore of the gun. The hearts of each Iron Warrior pounded inside his chest, as they wondered if one of the ork gunners would take it into its mind to fire the cannon while the invaders were inside. Rhodaan was gambling that their communication wasn’t that efficient. By the time the xenos relayed such a command, the Space Marines would be at their objective.

Near the base of the barrel, Rhodaan fired his plasma pistol, unleashing a full charge of superheated destruction into the side of the gun. For an instant, the metal turned white hot, then crumbled into blackened ash. The Iron Warriors didn’t hesitate. Gripping in both hands, Uzraal deactivated the mag-clamps in his boots. Half falling, half leaping, the Raptor lunged through the smouldering hole Rhodaan had made.

Uzraal found himself in the arming chamber of the immense gun, shells bigger than railway cars stacked and piled throughout the mammoth room. it was occupied by a small army of wiry aliens, wizened little dwarfs barely a quarter the size of their hulking ork masters. Stricken with amazement by the strange injury to the gun, the gretchin were still watching in stupefied awe when Uzraal came lunging into the room. They barely had opportunity to scream before the Iron Warrior’s flamer was turned on them, streams of burning promethium engulfing the nearest of the grots and transforming them into living torches.

The survivors scattered, throwing down tools and supplies as they scrambled for cover. The few orks in the arming chamber, brutish runtherds and hulking artillerists, barked jeers and curses at the frightened gretchin, then dragged a motley assortment of pistols and blades from their belts. Before the orks could join the battle, they found themselves beset by new enemies.

Leaping through the gap in the cannon, Baelfegor threw himself into a rolling dive, his bolt pistol firing as he skidded along the floor. A one-legged runtherd, its face a maze of tattoos and hair-squigs, wilted under the barrage. The orks near him ducked behind shells and loading gantries in a desperate effort to avoid their comrade’s fate.

From beside the cannon itself, a hulking ork clad in thick layers of flak armour and tool belts took aim at Baelfegor, squinting down the sight of a blocky weapon that appeared to be a confusion of spare parts, muzzle brakes and powercells. The mekboy barked with laughter as its combi-weapon belched into life, hurling a concentrated beam of energy at the Iron Warrior. The brute’s own laughter spoiled its shot, giving its target just enough warning to realise his peril. Flinging himself across the room, Baelfegor crashed behind a stack of spent shell casings, the back of one of his boots reduced to molten slag by the glancing shot.

The xenos wasn’t to get the opportunity to fire again. Even as it swung around to follow Baelfegor’s flight, the mekboy’s head evaporated in a sizzling mess of steam. Rhodaan scowled at his overheated plasma pistol, hoping the sensitive power coils hadn’t been compromised from over-use. Sliding the smoking weapon into its insulated holster, he activated the thrusters of his jump pack, rocketing across the arming chamber to where the rest of the gun crew had taken shelter.

The orks were just recovering from their initial shock when suddenly Rhodaan was among them, his chainsword lashing out in a vicious dance of dismemberment and death. Pistols, axes, swords and bludgeons, the entire brutal arsenal of the bellowing aliens was unequal to the murderous precision of the Iron Warrior. The howling mob of xenos killers disintegrated into a tangle of severed limbs and mangled bodies, blood and spattered brains.

The massacre of the fearsome orks threw the surviving gretchin into complete panic. Shrieking in terror, the greenskins ran from their hiding places, fleeing in complete disorder down entry hatches and loading bays.

Uzraal and Baelfegor didn’t waste their time on the fleeing monsters. The moment Rhodaan engaged the orks, the other Raptors converged upon the gun, removing melta bombs from their belts and slapping the magnetic charges against the breech of the gun.

‘Why do we waste time with the gun?’ Baelfegor grumbled. ‘With a little time we could rig the entire arsenal to detonate. Blow this abomination back to Dirgas!’

‘That would stall the ork attack,’ Uzraal agreed, stuffing the last of his charges into the shell extractor. ‘Give the miserable flesh-maggots more time to run.’

‘Follow orders,’ Rhodaan told them. He paused a moment, listening to the sound of more orks rushing down the corridors of the battlefortress. From the sound of it, they’d been momentarily blocked by the fleeing herds of gretchin. He didn’t expect that obstacle to delay them long.

‘Set the charges and get out,’ Rhodaan ordered. Leaping from the raised loading platform, his demi-organic wings snapped open, dropping him to the base of the cannon in a twisting glide. He lost no time climbing back into the barrel, or engaging the thrusters of his jump pack once inside. The confined space magnified the force of the engines, shooting him from the cannon with a velocity that would have shattered the bones of a mere human. Even as a legionary, the experience tested his endurance almost to the limit. He could feel blood vessels burst, the softer tissues of ear and nose tearing as he thundered out into the sky. Using his wings, Rhodaan turned his ascent into a spin, allowing him to watch as the rest of his squad came shooting from the cannon one by one.

An instant later, the belly of the battlefortress shuddered. Thick black smoke belched from the cannon and the hull around it. The detonation of the melta bombs was the signal Pazuriel and Gomorie had been waiting for. Rocketing from their positions on the towers, the final members of Squad Kyrith rose from the stricken xenos behemoth.

It would have been easy to destroy it, Rhodaan mused. Baelfegor had been right about that. The ork warhost in Aboro would have been crippled by such a loss. But Gamgin’s plan called for the elimination of that warhost, not its temporary debilitation.

The melta bombs provoked a response from the rail terminus, the last stronghold of human resistance in Aboro. Every siege gun and missile battery left in the city opened fire, the barrage crashing down all around the battle-fortress. The impossibly thick hull withstood even the worst of the barrage, a field eerily similar to the void shield of a Titan crackling into life and blunting the attack. Ork gun crews returned the barrage and Rhodaan fancied he could hear the ork warlord howling in frustration over the loss of its main cannon.

The orks would be mad now, mad enough to forget anything except revenge. Mad enough to forget what little their primitive minds understood about logic and strategy.

Captain Gamgin’s trap was baited. Now all that was left was to reel the prey in.

CHAPTER IX

I-DAY PLUS SIXTY-FIVE

The pict screens turned black one after another as the armoured train sped away from Aboro and beyond the transmission range of the Steel Blood. Captain Gamgin stayed beside the terminals, watching as the last view from the city began to flicker and distort. Through the eyes of the cybernetic skull, he watched as a vast swarm of buggies and battlewagons raced out from the ruins. A cold smile formed as he saw the immense bulk of the battlefortress, smoke still rising from its sabotaged cannon, lumber down the tracks. The core of the ork warhost, every vehicle and piece of armour the xenos could assemble, was tearing across the desert in vengeful pursuit of the humans.

The janissary officers had been horrified by Gamgin’s decision to retreat in broad daylight. It had taken four messy executions to silence their pleading. Terror of the ork air supremacy had overwhelmed their discipline. They should have known better than to question an Iron Warrior.

By standard logic, the exodus would have been suicidal. The ork planes would have strafed and bombed the exposed train into oblivion. It was a sound strategy any rational commander would adopt. Fortunately an enraged ork was far from rational. Lifting the artillery barrage before the city was fully subdued had given Gamgin an understanding of the ork warlord’s mentality. The beast was selfish, it wanted the credit for destroying the enemy for itself personally. It wouldn’t suffer its underlings to steal that achievement.

During the first hour out from Aboro, the train had been bombed and strafed repeatedly. Those attacks had been barely fended off by the weapon emplacements mounted on the carriage roofs. Doubt had started to creep into Gamgin’s own mind, for who could say with any certainty how a xenos brain might think? Then, through the eyes of the Steel Blood, he had watched that moment when the ork flyers peeling off from one of their runs had flown over the alien ground forces. Plane after plane was blasted from the sky by their own troops in a vicious storm of rocketry and cannon-fire. The crippled squadrons had fled southwards, keeping well away from their crazed comrades. The message had been clear enough even for orks. Since the fratricidal exchange, not a single ork plane had appeared overhead.

The warlord was going after the bait, but Gamgin was becoming worried. Only the lightest and fastest elements of the warhost were keeping pace with the train. He wanted more than that before he sprang his trap. He needed more than that to atone for his failure at the Witch Wall. Like the alien warlord, there was revenge to be satisfied. Only destruction of the battlefortress would bring that satisfaction.

Gamgin turned away from the pict screen as it finally went dark. The walls of the command car echoed with the impact of heavy calibre bullets, the chatter of a stub gun or large bolter. Human technicians and officers cowered behind their work stations each time a fresh salvo crackled against the train’s heavy armour. The towering Iron Warrior marched past them, his face dripping with contempt. Was there anything in the universe so weak as man?

The Space Marine’s gauntlet closed about the shoulder of a technician cringing in his chair. It took the barest exertion to tear the man from his station, his chair’s straps and buckles shredding into frayed ribbons beneath the Iron Warrior’s strength. The man landed in a screaming heap on the floor, several of his ribs snapped like twigs by Gamgin’s assault. The legionary didn’t glance at the broken man, the Flesh dismissed from his calculations as soon as he was no longer in the Iron Warrior’s way.

The casual mutilation of the janissary turned every eye in the command car to Gamgin. Horrified men watched as the giant lifted a slender communication wand from the terminal, the device looking puny and toy-like in the Space Marine’s hand. ‘Gamgin to engine,’ he snarled. ‘Reduce speed.’ His face pulled back into an expression of inhuman malevolence. ‘Do not question. Obey.’

Gamgin turned away from the terminal, dropping the communication wand. Before the stunned gaze of the officers, the Space Marine strode to the armoured wall and peeled back one of the titanium shutters. Silently, he gazed upon a desert swarming with scrap-work machines and murderous aliens. A stub gun stitched a tattoo of death across the armour, several rounds punching through the armaplas window and deflecting from the inner wall before finally embedding themselves in the floor. Fresh screams sounded from the men unfortunate enough to be caught in the fire.

The Iron Warrior remained at his post, no emotion crossing his features, his attention fixated upon calculations of speed and proximity. He watched the ork buggies and bikes swirling around the train, swarming like angry insects. They were less than vermin to him. It was bigger prey he wanted, prey that had fallen too far behind. The crew in the mag-engine would make the necessary adjustments. He had made that clear to them.

A palpable tension filled the command car, every mind but one gripped by terror. The janissary officers had been under no delusion that their superhuman overlords were beneficent, but until now they hadn’t stopped to consider that the Iron Warriors were insane. Digging deep inside himself, drawing upon reserves of courage he hadn’t believed possible, a young captain squirmed out from beneath a fire control station. Rising to his feet, he looked into the eyes of his fellow officers, trying to bestow upon them a small part of his own courage.

All he found was fear. The others were too in awe of the Iron Warriors to act, clinging to the fragile belief that through obedience they could earn their own survival. For an instant, the young captain knew the contempt the Iron Warriors felt for lesser humanity. Grimly, he drew his laspistol, holding it behind his back as he approached the comms station and the wand dangling from its tether.

‘They are reducing speed, captain. No need to repeat their orders,’ Gamgin’s booming voice declared, freezing the janissary officer as he reached for the wand. His head snapped around, staring in horror at the armoured giant. The Iron Warrior hadn’t moved, his gaze still upon the battle outside.

Superstitious terror closed its icy fingers about the officer’s heart, beliefs about the near-divinity of the Space Marines rising unbidden from ancient childhood. It was the gleam of broken armaplas that restored the captain’s boldness. There had been no magic in Gamgin’s intercession, simply his reflection in the glass.

‘The orks will overwhelm us if we slow,’ the officer shouted. ‘Our troops are barely keeping them off now!’ He raised his laspistol, pointing it at the giant. ‘I was there at Gamma Five. The only way we can escape is to cut loose the rear cars and leave them to the orks!’

Slowly, the Space Marine turned, his cold eyes boring into those of the captain. ‘Who said we are trying to escape?’ he snarled.

A beam of sizzling energy leapt from the laspistol, searing across the command car. For a brief moment, the officer dared believe he had accomplished the unthinkable. He dared believe he had achieved that secret dream locked inside the heart of every human on Castellax. He dared to imagine he had struck down an Iron Warrior.

Like all dreams, the captain’s was nothing but shadow and fog. He had aimed at Gamgin’s unprotected face, and his aim had been true. But he hadn’t factored the superhuman reflexes of a Space Marine into his shot. Instead of burning a hole in the Iron Warrior’s forehead, the las-beam had seared across the giant’s cheek, exposing the gums and teeth beneath the skin. The maimed flesh contorted in a sneer.

In a blinding flash of speed, Gamgin drew his bolt pistol and aimed it at his foe. ‘Pain,’ he growled as his finger depressed the trigger. The janissary captain shrieked as the explosive round struck him in his gut, detonating with an impact that split his body in two. The screaming torso struck the wall and slid to the floor.

Gamgin’s roar of frustration boomed from his armour’s vox-casters. He could feel the train picking up speed. The craven little human had countermanded his commands, the cowards manning the engine were going to outpace the ork warhost!

Gamgin marched to the armoured door of the carriage. It took six men to lock the massive doors in place. The Iron Warrior’s effort was made even harder by the fact that he was trying to open the doors against the velocity of a speeding train, bypassing locks and safeguards set in place by a dozen security cogitators. Sweat dripped down his forehead, his muscles burned with strain, the servo-motors in his armour groaned in protest, threatening to seize up and freeze his limbs in place.

Pride. Duty. Honour. Like a religious mantra, the three words formed a cadence in Gamgin’s mind, refusing to allow him to relent. Gritting his teeth, the Iron Warrior redoubled his effort.

With the scream of broken metal, the armoured door swung open, slamming against the side of the train before it was torn away completely by its own weight. The smoke which had a moment before filled the carriage was sucked away in an instant, consumed by the raging windstorm of the train’s passage. Stunned men scrambled for handholds as the wind tore at their uniforms and whipped across their faces. The few who had managed to don their goggles hastily turned to the exposed doorway, searching for some evidence of their murderous overlord.

There was no trace of Gamgin.

Not inside the command car.

Gamgin’s armoured fingers closed about the lip of the command car’s roof, the optics of his helm cycling through different magnifications as he alternately directed his gaze at the fast attack swarms circling the train and the heavier ork machines steadily receding further into the distance.

The Iron Warrior ducked his head against the roof as the gunner in the back of a scarlet war buggy sent a barrage of metal flechettes clattering against the command car. Screams rose from the carriage beneath him, telling Gamgin that the orks had disposed of at least a few of the simpering Flesh.

Dismissing the officers and the orks from his thoughts, Gamgin focused instead upon the mag-engine ahead of him. At the train’s present velocity, the slightest misstep would smear him across the desert, his body smashed to pulp inside his armour. It was not the sort of death an Iron Warrior would seek. Gamgin knew of a far better one, one that would blot out the shame of his failure and make his name a legend.

Mustering his superhuman body’s tremendous strength, Gamgin flung himself from the roof, clearing the five metres between the car and the mag-engine. The Iron Warrior’s gauntlets scraped against the curved surface of the engine roof as the train’s momentum dragged him backwards. For a moment, it appeared to be a vain effort, but at the last instant the Space Marine’s fingers closed about the leaden nub of a purity seal. Years of exposure to the pollutants of Castellax had hardened the seal and endowed it with incredible tensile strength. For a second, it was able to arrest Gamgin’s momentum. It was all the time a Space Marine needed.

Using the seal to pivot, exploiting the momentum of his own body, Gamgin swung down into the bed of the mag-engine, landing amid the pulsating power coils and shuddering piston-drives.

Smashing his boot against the door separating the bed from the control booth, Gamgin burst in upon his objective. The horrified crew gawked at the giant, their faces drawn into almost comical masks of shock. The Iron Warrior chose the closest of the men, splattering his brains across the booth with a shot from his pistol.

‘Who else wants to question my orders?’ he growled at the other crewmen. With obscene haste, the slaves leapt to the controls, drawing down the magnetic pulse. At once Gamgin could feel the train reducing speed.

‘Survival is the reward for obedience,’ the Iron Warrior told the ashen-faced men, savouring each word of the lie.

Shots slammed into the sides of the engine, the stutter of automatic fire, the crack of plasma bolts, the shriek of spear-launchers and grapnels. Gamgin peered through the armaplas window, watching as ork buggies swarmed around the slowing train. He saw two of the scrap metal constructs bowled over by the hurtling train, dragged along in its path by the cables their gunners had unwisely fired into the engine. Janissaries on the rear cars increased their desperate efforts to fend off the attacks, directing a withering stream of bolt-shells and las-beams into the alien horde. Each casualty only seemed to increase the orks’ determination, goading them closer to the hurtling train, urging them to step up the rate of their own fire.

The heavier ork machines were drawing close now. Battlewagons and trucks kept pace with the train, casting ropes and chains onto the roofs so that alien warriors might board the carriages. The janissaries were frantic in their efforts to stop the boarding actions, but at every turn the fierce vitality of the greenskins defied their efforts. Only a concentration of fire could drop the monsters and while focusing on one attacker, others were able to scramble up the ropes and onto the roofs.

Gamgin dismissed the doomed Flesh, staring instead at the immense bulk of the battlefortress. At its present speed, the mobile stronghold would be right where he needed it to be. The Iron Warrior smiled as he stared at the little counter displayed in the corner of his optics. Only a few more kilometres and everything would be in place.

A violent impact against the roof of the engine brought Gamgin spinning away from the window. Snarling his annoyance, the Space Marine fired his bolt pistol into the ceiling, his shots rewarded with the pained howls of orks. From the opposite window, he could see the black mass of a battlewagon, its body swarming with roaring aliens. A tall mast equipped with a spiked gangplank told the rest of the story. Blood-hungry orks surged along the rickety walkway, shoving their own comrades off in their eagerness to do battle. Gamgin saw one ork pitch into oblivion, a second dangling precariously from a handhold on the plank’s steel side.

The Space Marine decided he had seen enough. Bringing his bolt pistol against the face of the window, he blasted a hole in the armaplas. Wind howled through the control booth as the room lost pressure. Gamgin ignored the tempest and thumbed another grenade from his belt. Without hesitation, he dropped the explosive through the window and into the bed of the battlewagon.

The engine shook as the grenade detonated, peppering the side of the train with shrapnel. The stricken vehicle disintegrated as its hull lost its integrity, bursting into a shower of metal scrap and mangled bodies. Warbikes veered away from the debris, some of the riders shaking leathery fists at the wreckage as they passed it.

The crump of heavy boots on the roof was a reminder that some of the orks had managed to disembark before the explosion and survive the resulting shrapnel. A bright crimson glow began to eat through the ceiling, the burn of a meltagun. Gamgin directed another burst from his pistol overhead and the glow began to fade.

‘I’ll be back,’ the Space Marine hissed, glaring at the terrified slaves. His gauntlet closed about the control booth’s door, wrenching it open in a vicious tug. An ork, its body peppered with oozing wounds and slivers of metal, stood on the other side, an immense hammer gripped in its paws. Gamgin drove the muzzle of his pistol under the brute’s chin and exploded its skull.

Shoving the shuddering corpse aside, the Iron Warrior threw himself at the half-dozen greenskins trying to tear apart the mag-drives. As he ruptured organs with bolt-shells and split bone with his combat knife, Gamgin was struck by the immense weight of an ork warrior dropping down from the roof of the engine. The Space Marine flattened beneath the murderous ambusher, smashed against the metal floor of the platform.

The massive ork, one of the hulking brutes that served as bosses among their kind, brought the talons of a crude power claw shearing through the fingers of Gamgin’s right hand, slashing through the ceramite plates and the reinforced bones of the legionary’s fingers. A fist the size of a human head slammed into the side of the Iron Warrior’s helmet, the ork’s tremendous strength further magnified by bulky piston-motors fitted to its scrap-work armour. Gamgin’s right side optic display burst into a crackle of static.

The fungal stink of the ork’s breath washed over Gamgin as the alien leaned over him. Through his still functional optic, the Space Marine could see the brute’s shadow falling across the platform. Judging the ork’s position, exploiting the power of his vat-grown muscles and the servo-motors in his armour, Gamgin arched his body and brought the back of his helmet smashing into the ork’s face.

The brute reared back, blood raining from its pulverised nose, a cracked tusk hanging from the corner of its mouth. Gamgin rolled out from under the monster, taking advantage of its momentary confusion. The Iron Warrior’s knife came slashing down, tearing through the cables looped about the ork’s hip.

Roaring, the ork was swinging around to avenge itself on the Iron Warrior when he made his attack. Sparks exploded from the broken cables, oil spurted from severed hoses. The alien’s leg froze in place as the mechanics of its scrap-work armour seized. The resulting loss of leverage spilled the huge ork to the floor of the platform.

Gamgin tore a fat-mouthed plasma pistol from one of the orks he had killed. Coldly he pointed the weapon at the crippled alien. It glared back at him, its beady eyes filled with frustrated rage.

Slowly, Gamgin lowered the pistol.

‘You were almost early to your own funeral,’ he told the ork.

From the Air Cohort gunship that extracted them from the ruins of Aboro, Rhodaan and his squad had a perfect view when a ten kilometre-wide section of desert suddenly vanished. One instant they could see Gamgin’s troop train speeding down the tracks, flanked on all sides by a numberless swarm of ork buggies and battlewagons, the gigantic bulk of the battlefortress lumbering several kilometres behind. The next instant, that vista was obliterated in a burst of fiery annihilation. It seemed as though a talon of fire had reached up from the flaming core of Castellax to visit a vengeful judgement upon the puny creatures who capered about its surface. For hundreds of kilometres, the desert became a mass of dust and debris, smashed flat by the holocaust’s murderous might.

The shock wave of that blast sent earthquakes coursing through the continent, gouging new faults in the substrata of Castellax. Air currents shifted wildly, sending storms raging across the planet as its desiccated atmosphere tried to adjust to the sudden vacuum from the hole that had burned clear to its stratosphere. A wall of dust and sand three kilometres high spilled across the desert, smothering entire outposts lying in their path.

The gunship pitched and rolled, its crew fighting wildly to maintain control. Rhodaan forced his way into the cockpit, brushing the men aside. The Space Marine forced the gunship higher, trying to rise above the cataclysm.

Even for Iron Warriors, there was a feeling of awe at the incredible power that they had witnessed. Captain Gamgin had sought to redeem the legacy of his service, to make his name a thing of honour in the sagas of the Legion. Rhodaan didn’t know if Gamgin would be remembered by the Legion, but as he gazed down at the glass-lined scar gouged into the desert, he was certain of one thing.

Castellax would forever bear the mark of Gamgin’s passing.

One surface-to-orbit missile had caused such carnage. Unable to employ the weapons against the ork ships circling Castellax due to the debris field, Sergeant Ipos had proposed a different use for the ordnance. Detaching the mammoth warheads from the missiles, thousands of slaves had buried them across the desert in a ring of annihilation that no force could defy. Seeking to redeem himself for failing to hold the Witch Wall, Captain Gamgin had offered to goad an entire ork army within range of the trap, turning a defensive position into a weapon of offence.

The gambit had been a vicious success. Drawing the orks after him, a transmitter inside his own armour sending the detonation signal to the bomb, Gamgin had claimed over a million aliens in his final moment. Even the xenos had been taken aback by such devastation. For three weeks, they were silent, keeping to their scattered strongholds, regathering their strength.

When the orks did start to move again, however, it became clear that their objective was now Vorago itself. The annihilation of an entire army group had done something to the aliens, given them a focus and drive that had been absent before. No longer did they range pell-mell across the wastes, assaulting every outpost and settlement in their way. It was as though some fiendish hand had reached out and brought the beasts to heel. In the councils of the Warsmith, discussion began to turn to the supreme warboss, the focus of the Waaagh! itself.

Biglug. It was a name that had become increasingly prominent in the ork vox signals blanketing the planet, a name that had been echoed in the feral war cries of the invader. Oriax interpreted it as evidence that the warlord was taking a more direct hand in the campaign.

The ork advance on Vorago, for instance, displayed a care and caution no one had expected from the aliens. Their solution to the threat of more buried warheads had been at once brilliant and simple. Rather than scour the desert trying to detect the hidden traps, the orks focused their attention on the one spot where they could be certain the ground was clear. A vast alien horde descended on the gaping pit where Gamgin had sprung his trap. With amazing industry, the orks began to construct a bridge across the crater, concentrating such an immense number of flakwagons and crude fighter planes at the site that Morax’s Air Cohort was incapable of attacking the construction.

Once the orks were across the pit, they would be within the ring of warheads Ipos had buried. By deploying the traps in a manner that would maximise their breadth, the Iron Warriors had thought to construct a wall of death far beyond the environs of their stronghold. It was a tactic that would have stalled Imperial ground forces for months. They had expected the orks to be similarly delayed. The very simplicity of the alien mindset was again proving a foil to their plans.

As it stood, they could expect the orks to reach the outer defences of Vorago within one month.

Already pushed to their limits, the millions of slaves toiling beneath the lashes of the Iron Warriors would have to increase their productivity.

There was no choice if Castellax were to withstand the siege.

A green haze drifted through the skies of Vorago, crawling around the smoke stacks and spoil heaps as though possessed of some loathsome life of its own. There had been many strange colours and clouds in the skies since the detonation of the orbital warhead. The explosion had thrown clouds of dust and debris into the atmosphere, elements ripped from deep within the planet’s strata. Some of the displays had been amazingly beautiful, illuminating the sky with hues of surpassing wonder and vibrancy. Others had been dark smudges, aerial blots that made the normal shades of smog and pollution seem clean and cheerful.

As he stared up at the green haze, Yuxiang was struck by its ghastly gyrations. He could almost feel the thing dripping its poison into the streets, corroding the metal siding of hab-pens and the brickwork of storehouses. What it was doing to mere flesh, that was something he tried very hard not to think about.

‘Next.’ The word was pronounced like a death sentence, which in a very real way it was. Yuxiang turned his gaze from the ghastly sky to the even more hideous vista of Vorago proper, or at least that section of the city he could see from his place atop the firebreak.

Firebreak. A typically deceptive turn of phrase. Yuxiang doubted if the megalithic ferrocrete wall had ever been intended to confine industrial fires to a single section of the city. No, from the very start the Iron Warriors had engineered their cities with an eye towards battle. Each street was a nest of hidden pillboxes and bunkers, fortified blockhouses and flak towers loomed above each district. The firebreaks were arranged in strategic patterns, positioned to support the other fortifications. Staggered along their faces were gun emplacements and missile batteries.

As final proof of their purpose, the surface of each firebreak was scored with two-metre-deep holes. One wall in each of these pits looked out over the city, a narrow slit cut into the ferrocrete. There was just enough room in the pit for a man to be posted with some measure of accommodation and comfort.

Naturally, the Iron Warriors expected two men to a pit.

The long line of slaves gradually dwindled as men were detached and lowered into the pits. Overseers from bombed out factories and janissaries from disbanded regiments supervised the positioning of men and the distribution of equipment. The slaves who had been pressed into the Vorago militia were similarly dispossessed, men from conquered outposts, destroyed settlements or, like Yuxiang, from decimated districts within the city itself.

‘Next,’ the tired growl came. The man ahead of Yuxiang shuffled forwards, raising his arms as a uniformed janissary inspected him, checking for any sharp objects that might allow the slave to cause mischief. When he was satisfied, the soldier nodded to the officer in charge. He was a dark-skinned colonel, his hair beginning to turn grey, his eyes lifeless and doll-like, utterly devoid of compassion or empathy.

At a gesture from the colonel, the slave was directed into the pit. When the man didn’t move fast enough, a burly overseer stepped forwards and jabbed the glowing end of a shock baton into his ribs. With a yelp of pain, the slave dropped down into the hole.

‘Next,’ the colonel snarled. Yuxiang stepped forwards again, submitting himself to the humiliating inspection. Then it was his turn to march to the pit. Tired as he was, he forced himself to move quickly and deny the thug with the shock baton his sadistic pleasure.

Dropping down into the pit was made harder for Yuxiang by his efforts to avoid the slave already down there. Somehow, he managed to prevent himself hitting anything more important than a toe. The other man was too exhausted even to curse at him.

‘Chains,’ the colonel’s growl echoed down from the mouth of the pit. Yuxiang and his companion glanced at the wall, finding the thick loops of chain bolted into the ferrocrete. Reluctantly, they brought the iron links into contact with the manacle locked around their left wrist. As the chain made contact, an automated clasp clicked open and closed about the striated edge of the manacle. The slaves raised their arms, tugging at the chain to show the colonel that the manacles had been secured.

‘Weapon,’ the colonel called out, turning away from the pit. A janissary appeared at the opening and lowered a weathered lasgun down to the slaves. One weapon to a pit, that was also the Iron Warriors’ decree. The expectation was that when the armed man died, the unarmed man would take up his weapon. With barely enough room in the pit to aim one gun, anything more would be excessive.

Yuxiang took the lasgun, noting how light it felt in his hands. The slaves who had been dragooned into the militia had received an entire twenty minutes of training. In that time, Yuxiang had been allowed to handle a lasgun twice. It took him only a moment to appreciate the reason the weapon was so light. There was no power pack. The slight detail of ammunition was something the Iron Warriors would delay until the last possible moment.

When the orks were within firing range of the wall, then would be the time to distribute ammunition.

Any sooner and the slaves might take it in their minds to shoot at someone else.

Rounding his crystalline throne, Warsmith Andraaz gestured with the talons of his power claw, using the razored fingers to emphasise his statements.

‘The loss of Captain Gamgin has not bought us the time we had anticipated,’ Andraaz said, accusation in his tone. Several eyes turned towards Sergeant Ipos, one of the Rending Guard even shifted his position slightly to face him, but the Iron Bastion’s seneschal seemed oblivious to the unspoken recriminations.

The massive table at the centre of the war room came alive with a three-dimensional image of Vorago and its environs. While the assembled Iron Warriors watched, the glowing lines representing railways and roads began to darken and wink out. ‘According to Fabricator Oriax’s predictions, we can expect all ground transport to be cut off within two months,’ Andraaz stated. His gaze shifted to Skylord Morax. ‘Less if the xenos gain air supremacy.’

Morax was quick to reassure the Warsmith. ‘The Air Cohort will be able to resupply Vorago as long as we can assemble resources at the northern outposts. If the humans cannot maintain those positions, then I make no guarantees.’

‘It sounds like you are already excusing failure,’ Admiral Nostraz hissed. ‘I think the Air Cohort would benefit from new leadership.’

Morax fixed his rival with a menacing glare. ‘You would do better? The man who allowed the orks to make planetfall? I think Gamgin lacked perspective. There are some who have done far more to disgrace the Third Grand Company.’

Nostraz rose to the Skylord’s challenge. ‘You are too concerned with damaging infrastructure and destroying resources,’ the admiral sneered. ‘You are too worried about preserving a non-existent production quota. You prosecute this war like an accountant, not a soldier!’

‘Enough,’ Andraaz snarled. ‘This bickering achieves nothing. If we are to drive back the invader, we must focus only on that task. Ambition, glory, hate, all of these are distraction!’ The Warsmith’s talons closed into a cage of crackling steel. ‘Destruction! Extermination! Annihilation! These are the only things which shall find a place in your hearts. These are the only pursuits worthy of an Iron Warrior.’ Andraaz gestured at the illuminated display of Vorago. ‘So long as we hold Vorago, we hold Castellax!’

‘Grim Lord,’ Skintaker Algol said, pulling away from the pallid slaves mending his grisly cloak. ‘The defence of Vorago will be difficult. We have supplies of food and water for the Flesh that will maintain them for six weeks. No more.’

Andraaz rounded on the slavemaster. ‘How many slaves have you taken into your calculations?’

The Skintaker’s eyes narrowed with understanding. ‘The full supply of Flesh available, the current population of Vorago. Fifty million.’ Algol paused, warming to the idea the Warsmith’s objection had aroused. ‘I will begin sending disposal crews to eliminate the excess and begin establishing protocols for the reduction of reserves. The useless eaters will be eliminated, Grim Lord.’

Morax’s eyes bulged as he heard the callous extermination of millions of slaves being bandied about. ‘It will take years to cultivate a new workforce from the embryo vaults!’ he cried. ‘Even when the orks are forced from Castellax, it will take us decades to resume production. We will fall behind in our tithe to Medrengard!’

Andraaz scowled at the angry Skylord. ‘Medrengard will not investigate our shipments for much longer than that,’ he declared. ‘Warp travel being what it is. By the time it becomes an immediate concern, my raider fleets will have collected fresh slaves for my factories.’ He waved his hand towards Admiral Nostraz. ‘That fleet is still available to us through the cautious tactics of your brother-captain.

‘No,’ Andraaz mused, pacing back towards his throne. ‘The question of supplies and Flesh is a concern for the future. For now, we must rid ourselves of the xenos menace. To do that, we must draw upon all resources that are available to us.’

As he made the last statement, the Warsmith fixed his gaze upon the ghoulish servitor acting as Fabricator Oriax’s surrogate. The half-machine folded its arms together in a gesture of genuflection.

‘All shall be in readiness, Grim Lord,’ the fleshless voice hissed from the servitor’s vox-caster.

Andraaz shifted his gaze to Over-Captain Vallax. ‘The loss of Captain Gamgin has impaired the prowess of the Third Grand Company. It compels me to commit the most extreme of the resources available to us.’ The Warsmith’s eyes became like chips of steel as they stared into Vallax’s face. ‘You will fetch Brother Merihem from the Oubliette,’ the Warsmith declared. ‘It is time he rejoined his brothers.’

Vallax’s hair turned an icy blue as he heard what the Warsmith asked of him, a visible manifestation of the repugnance boiling inside him. He hesitated before speaking, trying to conceal the distaste he felt. It would do no good to object, the orders of the Warsmith were not open to question.

‘It shall be done, Grim Lord,’ Vallax declared. As he spoke, he turned his head, staring across the table to where Captain Rhodaan stood. A frigid smile crawled across Vallax’s lips.

It was as well that Rhodaan had returned from Aboro. Vallax’s subordinate hadn’t quite outlived his usefulness, it seemed.

CHAPTER X

I-DAY PLUS EIGHTY-SEVEN

The howling violence of an ash-storm swirled about the lone assault boat as it sped above the desert wastes. The squadron of fighters which had started out as the transport’s escort had fallen back some time ago, unwilling to brave the ravages of the storm. The crew of the assault boat would have done the same but for the insistence of their passengers. Between the fury of the storm and the fury of the Iron Warriors, the men wisely chose to defy the elements.

Rhodaan stared from the window, the optics in his helm shifting through visual frequencies in an effort to pierce the clouds of toxic ash. It was an effort beyond even the artifices of pre-Heresy engineering.

‘Do you see anything, captain?’ The question came from Brother Gomorie. Like Rhodaan, the Raptor was leaning against one of the windows trying to see through the howling storm.

‘The impurities in the ash are confounding the optic filters,’ Rhodaan said. ‘They don’t present a unified visual frequency for exclusion.’ He shrugged, the gesture exaggerated by his unimpeded shoulders. After days of continuously bearing the weight of a jump pack, it would take time to adjust to that burden’s absence. By then, of course, they would probably be redeployed in their capacity as Raptors and wearing the heavy packs once more.

‘The storm will confine itself to the hot air over the desert,’ Rhodaan told Gomorie. ‘Once we drop down into the crevasse, the air will clear.’ He stared hard at the other Space Marine, reading the agitation in his posture. ‘We will be able to see the Oubliette before we land.’

Rhodaan saw the way Gomorie’s infected hand twitched in a spasm of bio-steel at the very mention of the prison-hermitage. A journey to the Oubliette was distasteful enough for the rest of them, but he could appreciate how much worse it must be for Gomorie. For Rhodaan and the majority of his brothers, the state of Brother Merihem was repugnant, but at the same time distant. His corruption was like the rumble of artillery on the horizon, menacing but not immediate.

To Gomorie, however, the fallen Iron Warrior’s fate was deeply personal. The same contagion that had overwhelmed and consumed Merihem had set its foul seed in his flesh. It was a daily struggle to restrain it, to force the infection into abeyance, to prevent it from raging through his mind and soul. So far, Gomorie’s force of will had been strong enough, his sense of identity proud enough to resist. Yet always, at the back of his mind, lurked the knowledge that one day the virus would win out. One day he would become like Merihem, all the gifts of the Legion devoured by the warp-taint until the superhuman degenerated into the subhuman.

‘Do you think any good will come of seeking out the abomination?’ Uzraal asked. Like the rest of Squad Kyrith, he was visibly anxious. Before leaving Vorago, the Raptor had removed a meltagun from the stores. He was now stripping it down and cleaning its components for the sixteenth time.

Rhodaan considered the question for a moment before answering. ‘Whatever else he is, Brother Merihem is an Iron Warrior. Warsmith Andraaz believes that will be enough to bind him to our cause.’

‘But what do you believe, lord captain?’ Gomorie asked.

Unconsciously, Rhodaan reached down to his left leg. Despite the heavy layers of ceramite and plasteel, the neurofibres and servo-motors, the mesh of insulation and padding, he imagined he could feel the ugly scars beneath his fingers. Merihem had given him those scars when he was being subdued and entombed within the Oubliette.

He shook his head and returned his gaze to the window. ‘I would not question the Warsmith,’ Rhodaan said. ‘Even if I did believe him wrong,’ he added in a bitter undertone.

The long, jagged crevasse marked the easternmost limit of the Ossuarium, the vast desert which dominated Castellax’s eastern continent. Hundreds of metres deep, its floor choked with a slurry of ore waste and acidic runoff from the strip mines pitting the walls of the canyon, the trench was dark and shadowy, all sunlight smothered by the ash-storm raging above it. Frost, brown from the polluted air, began to gather on the windows in defiance of the assault boat’s heat shield.

Before the frost could completely obscure his view, Rhodaan saw an immense shape rising from the sludge of the canyon floor, a monstrous tower of stone and plasteel. Its sides bristled with gun turrets and sentinel relays, flood lamps and vigil monitors. As the assault boat neared the tower, the weapon emplacements rotated, locking the craft in their aiming reticules.

‘Approaching aircraft,’ a stern voice growled across the boat’s vox-channel. ‘Identify or be destroyed.’

‘Assault boat delta-nine-seven, Castellax Air Cohort,’ one of the pilots stammered, his voice quaking with fear.

Rhodaan switched over his vox-bead to transmit across the localised frequency. ‘We are Iron Warriors,’ he snarled. ‘You have been warned to expect our arrival. Fire on us at your peril.’

There was a moment of silence. Rhodaan could almost see the human officer at the other end of the transmission trying to make his courage equal to his duty. ‘What… Give the code word.’

‘The word is “Carnage”. If you would not learn the full meaning of that word, you will transmit landing instructions.’ Rhodaan watched the gun turrets rotate back into their original positions and a pattern of blinking lights blaze into brilliance on the flattened roof of the tower.

‘Brothers,’ he called out to his squad. ‘Welcome to the Oubliette.’

The assault boat was still settling onto the landing pad when Baelfegor swung open the door and lowered the boarding ramp. The edge of the titanium ramp scraped across the ferrocrete surface, gouging a long scratch across the ground. The Space Marines seemed oblivious to the precipice yawning to either side of them as they tromped down the trembling ramp.

A score of janissary troopers, their faces locked behind the insect-like frames of rebreathers, their bodies bulky beneath heavy flak armour, snapped to attention as the first of the Iron Warriors descended to the platform. Behind the goggles of their masks, their eyes were wide with awe. For most of them, this was their first view of a Space Marine. It was a moment of wonder and terror that would stay with them always.

Rhodaan marched between the columns of humans, towering over them as he passed. Ahead of him, a heavy-set woman stood at the end of the janissary ranks. Features accustomed to imperious command wilted into timid obedience as the armoured giant drew closer. Her gloved fingers closed a bit tighter about the grip of her rune-crusted command rod, as though trying to draw some measure of reassurance from the badge of her office.

‘Warden Geena Zhroah, at your command, my lord,’ the woman said, bowing her head as Rhodaan stood before her.

The Raptor turned his head, staring down at the warden as though noticing her for the first time. ‘We have come for our battle-brother,’ Rhodaan stated. ‘Bring him to us.’

The warden’s complexion became pale. ‘There have been… complications, my lord. The abom– Your brother-lord has failed to respond to the pacification vapours.’

Rhodaan’s tone hardened. ‘You have only one duty here,’ he warned, pointing at the baton clenched in her fist, reminding her that with her authority came responsibility. ‘Attend to it,’ he added in a low hiss before continuing his march down the landing pad, the rest of Squad Kyrith following behind him.

The warden’s body trembled as she stared after the Iron Warriors. Slowly, she raised the command rod to her lips, pressing the rune which would broadcast her voice to the tower control room. ‘This is Warden Zhroah,’ she announced. ‘The inmate is to be exhumed from the Reclusiam.’ She licked her lips, feeling sick as the next words formed in her mind. ‘Pacification protocols are suspended. Open the crypt. The masters will tolerate no delay.’

Grimly, the warden powered down the volume of her vox-unit. She didn’t want to hear the horrified protests from her officers. She knew what her orders meant but there was nothing that could be done.

Even so, she wondered how many men she had just sent to their deaths.

The lieutenant keyed the final runes into the control slate embedded in the crypt’s door. Before the first adamantine tumbler began cycling into its disengaged pattern, the officer was scrambling down the long corridor, dashing past the brigade of janissaries lining the hall. The soldiers closed ranks as the officer passed them, raising their shotguns and lasguns, aiming the weapons at the groaning door. Sweat dripped from each man’s brow as he listened to the tumblers rotate.

At the end of the hall, the major in command of the extraction struggled for composure. He might be the only man in the Oubliette who had any real understanding of what was behind that door. Aside from the warden herself, he didn’t think anyone had clearance to view the old holo-recordings of the entombed Iron Warrior. It was felt that ignorance of what they were guarding would be beneficial to the mental condition of the garrison. Being privy to the secret himself, the major had to sympathise with the logic behind such a decision.

‘Lasguns at full charge,’ the major reminded his troops, his voice crackling through the vox-casters lining the hall. He listened as the last of the tumblers cycled into its open phase, watched as a burst of steam gushed from the vents in the hydraulic locks. Three janissaries bearing enormous bronze keys advanced down the hall. They would need them to unlock the chains which restrained the captive. The major wasn’t especially looking forward to that moment. He felt it was better for all concerned if the Iron Warrior remained shackled. Even Merihem would be slowed down by a few tons of titanium lashed about his limbs.

Like the segments of some metallic flower, the layers of the immense door peeled away. The janissaries in the hall shielded their eyes against the bright glare emanating from the tomb beyond the door. As their eyes adjusted to the light, their pulses quickened. Framed in the doorway was a gigantic shape, a figure of colossal proportions, immense beyond even the standards of the Space Marines. Three metres tall, at least half as wide across its hunched shoulders, the dark shape all but filled the entrance to the crypt.

For a long time, silence gripped the corridor. The janissaries barely dared to breathe, their eyes riveted to the hulking shape of the Oubliette’s lone prisoner. Framed by the glare of its cell, the shape was only a black shadow to the men in the hallway, utterly without detail or distinction. It was there – that was all the soldiers knew.

The major watched along with his troops as the shape contemplated them. The chains, those restraints the warden placed so much faith in, were still locked about the monster’s body. Immense coils of titanium, each link as big around as a man’s chest, the Iron Warrior was still restrained. Why then did the major’s heart quake in fear? His hand shook as though afflicted with palsy as he raised the vox-bead to his lips. ‘Lord Merihem,’ he said, his words echoing from the vox-casters. ‘We have been appointed your honour guard, to conduct you to your battle-brothers. They have…’

The officer’s voice faltered as the hulking shape began to move. With ponderous steps that sent a shudder through the floor, Merihem descended from his cell. As the Iron Warrior emerged from the light, moans of terror rose from the watching janissaries. They had suspected that the Oubliette’s inmate was something monstrous and horrible. In their worst nightmares, however, they had never imagined such a walking atrocity.

Veins of wire and cable rippled about Merihem’s huge body, pulsating and writhing with fecund gyrations. Slabs of metal oozed along his limbs, slithering and rippling with loathsome vitality. Plates of armour bubbled and boiled, shifting shape and substance with each step, flowing in a cascade of obscenity. Streams of raw, glistening meat burst from between the metallic chaos, exuding the charnel stink of putrescent decay. Amid the formless madness of his body, buried atop a steel stump of a neck, the face of Merihem contemplated the terror around him. Small and dwarfish beside the ghastly enormity of the body beneath it, the face was devoid of colour, almost transparent in its pallor. It was utterly perfect in its cast, almost ethereal in its terrible beauty. The black eyes set amid the pallid flesh gleamed with abhorrent wisdom and forbidden knowledge.

With another step, the chains wrapped about the monster grew taut, then fell away, crashing to the floor in a confusion of twisted metal. At some point, perhaps hundreds of years past, the Iron Warrior had burst his bonds all on his own, without the need for rune-encrusted keys and the pardon of his Warsmith.

The major was gripped by the same horror that froze his men. It was one thing to observe such an abomination on a holo-recording. It was something else entirely to stand before it in the flesh, free and unfettered. His lips fluttered impotently as he tried to frame a command, an order that would arrest the monster’s advance.

An instant later, the opportunity was gone. One of the janissaries, unable to restrain his fear in the face of Merihem’s thunderous steps, opened fire with his lasgun. The beam seared down the hallway, sizzling against the oozing morass of the Iron Warrior’s breast. The monster paused, his black eyes fixing upon the soldier. Merihem’s mouth peeled back in a malicious grin, exposing a nest of glistening metal fangs.

All restraint collapsed. Fingers pulled at triggers and activation studs, loosing a withering hail of fire down the hallway. The walls trembled from the roar of guns, the air grew thick with smoke. A wave of energy beams and solid shot wailed along the corridor, one hundred guns all trained upon a single target. It should have been murder.

It was.

Screams reverberated along the hallway as janissaries pitched and fell, their bodies ripped and torn, organs burst and limbs exploded. Beneath the steady crack of guns, the thunderous steps of Merihem formed a ghoulish beat. Through the gun smoke the hideous giant loomed, his arm raised. The sludge of metal and meat which formed his body knitted itself into distinct shapes, flowing into the semblance of autocannons. More than a semblance, Merihem’s arm became the weapon itself, loosing shot after shot into the soldiers. Through the slush of ruined bodies, the Iron Warrior marched, almost oblivious to the havoc around him.

Almost, for sometimes the Space Marine would pause before a wounded man or linger over a trembling wretch who had somehow survived a burst from his guns. Then the monster’s pallid face would smile and the claws of his other arm would descend.

The remaining janissaries took advantage of such pauses, retreating down the hallway. In an act of duty he knew to be futile, the major drew his laspistol and fired into the controls for the elevator behind him, desperately hoping to contain the escaped monster on this level of the tower. An instant later, one of his own soldiers, horrified to see their only hope of retreat destroyed, exploded the officer’s skull with a burst from his shotgun.

With nothing left to lose, the men trapped at the end of the corridor threw grenades at the oncoming giant. The concussion wave from the confined blast dropped a dozen men, their ears burst by the fury of the explosion. Their comrades didn’t spare them any attention, focusing instead on the smoke-filled hallway, desperately trying to see if their ploy had worked. Their hearts sickened after a moment as they heard Merihem’s ponderous tread once more. Through the smoke, the hideous giant appeared, the corrupt substance of his body already flowing back into the wounds inflicted by the grenades.

The last fifty janissaries opened fire. Merihem waded through the barrage as though it were no more threatening than a light rain. The Iron Warrior’s left arm lengthened, shaping itself into whirring blades not unlike the industrial saws in a manufactorum. The pallid face was soon darkened by spattered blood, but the vicious smirk remained.

It took the Obliterator only a moment to wrench open the armoured door to the elevator, a moment more to fuse his palm to the interior controls and allow his will to dominate the simple cogitator within. Something the little Flesh had said about his battle-brothers coming for him governed the command Merihem sent racing through the wires.

If Iron Warriors had come to the Oubliette, they would be on the roof. Merihem sent the lift speeding upwards. After so many years, he was eager to see his battle-brothers again.

‘It is free!’ Warden Zhroah shrieked. Desperately she tried to form her janissaries into a battle line, but even her threats were having a hard time overcoming their terror. Some fool in the command centre had broadcast images from the hallway to the pict screens on the landing pad. Every man on the roof had seen them before the warden cut off the transmission. Rather than face what was coming, seven of them had jumped off the tower. One of Rhodaan’s Raptors had been compelled to guard their assault boat and prevent the frightened men from stealing it.

The warden turned towards Rhodaan, falling to her knees as she begged the armoured giant for help. ‘You can stop him!’ she pleaded, trying to make herself believe her own words. ‘You have to stop him!’ she added when the Space Marine failed to take notice of her.

Rhodaan’s horned head turned, his optics glaring down at the woman. ‘We came here to bring back our battle-brother, not to destroy him.’

‘But he will kill us all!’ Zhroah cried.

The Iron Warrior stared back at the elevator, watching as the indicator sped towards the roof. ‘All Flesh dies,’ he said.

The heavy steel doors slid open as the carriage reached the top of the shaft. Zhroah’s janissaries sighted down the barrels of their weapons, each man tense and ready for action. The warden crept behind the soldiers, biting her lip to keep from giving the command to fire. The Iron Warriors wanted their corrupt brother alive, to take any action against Merihem would be to sign her own death warrant. Besides, she had seen the transmission. She knew how hopeless it was for mere men to defy something like the Obliterator. Rhodaan and his Space Marines were their only chance.

‘Brother Merihem,’ Rhodaan called out, his empty hands held away from his body in a non-threatening display. ‘We have come to bring you back to Vorago.’

The immense bulk of Merihem stalked out onto the landing pad, his movements wary as those of a wild beast. The Obliterator towered over the other Iron Warrior, neck sinking into his viscous body so that the lowered head might stare more easily at the Raptor. For an instant, as he advanced, Merihem’s body jerked backwards, his arm extending back towards the elevator. There was a sound of tearing metal. In the next instant, the extended arm was slithering back towards the Obliterator, the hand encased in the twisted remains of the control panel. Before the eyes of the onlookers, the debris began to corrode, bubbling into a molten mess that seeped into the monster’s body. Torn wires whipped away from the shaft, sinking into Merihem’s wrist.

The pallid face smiled coldly at Rhodaan. ‘It has been a long time,’ the Obliterator said, his voice sounding like slime sloshing in a sump pit. The black eyes narrowed. ‘I have not forgotten you, Rhodaan.’ Colourless lips peeled back, metal teeth gleamed. ‘This time, I will not leave enough of a leg for them to stitch back on.’

Rhodaan felt his hearts go cold at the reminder of what he had suffered the last time he had encountered the Obliterator. The abomination should have been destroyed then, but the Warsmith had dictated otherwise. The monster should have been left to rot in his cell regardless of the orks, but again, the Warsmith had decreed otherwise. Seldom had Rhodaan been more tempted to disobey an order, but his sense of duty held him back. Whatever his feelings, he had to obey Andraaz’s commands.

‘The Warsmith sent us,’ Rhodaan said, maintaining his composure as the hulking Merihem loomed over him.

‘Kind of him to remember me,’ Merihem sneered. ‘When I am finished with you, it will be his turn.’

Rhodaan shook his head and sighed with mock disappointment. ‘I had hoped you would be cooperative,’ he said.

While Merihem was still focused upon Rhodaan, Baelfegor and Pazuriel sprang into action. With incredible speed, the two Iron Warriors dived at the monster, their armoured fists pounding against the viscous morass of metal and wire. As they dashed away, they left behind fist-sized bombs magnetically clamped to the Obliterator’s body. Before the giant could react, the bombs detonated, engulfing Merihem in a blaze of crackling energy.

‘Haywire grenades,’ Rhodaan explained. ‘You might remember them from the last time you defied the Warsmith.’

The pallid face wailed in pain, the Obliterator’s huge bulk reared back as electricity crackled about it, sizzling along wires and dancing across plates. An ozone reek rolled across the roof.

Rhodaan stared up at the screaming monster. Haywire grenades were designed to disrupt energy transmissions, to shut down the electrical circulation within any machine, even one infested with the techno-organic Obliterator virus. ‘I am disappointed in you, brother,’ he told the writhing giant. ‘I had expected more of a fight.’

Merihem’s arm came whipping around, smashing into Rhodaan and flinging him across the roof. A half-dozen janissaries collapsed beneath the hurtling Space Marine, cushioning his fall and preventing him from pitching over the edge.

Electricity continued to crackle about the monster’s body, but the pallid face was no longer screaming. Instead, there was an expression of daemonic delight. Lurching forwards, the Obliterator started after Rhodaan, pausing only when Pazuriel and Baelfegor rushed at him, another set of bombs clenched in their fists. Merihem’s arm contracted into a muzzle and series of energy coils. As the two Iron Warriors ran at him, he sent a sonic concentration smashing into them. The Obliterator’s body had partially absorbed the first set of bombs, allowing him to understand their mechanism and the frequency by which they were armed. The sonic projection detonated the bombs the Raptors held, felling both of them as the servo-motors inside their power armour shorted out.

The delay was enough for Rhodaan to regain his feet. Grimly, he drew his chainsword and plasma pistol. ‘The Warsmith wants him alive,’ he called out. The reminder was for Uzraal, creeping around Merihem’s flank with a meltagun rather than the terrified janissaries and their puny efforts to bring down the monster.

‘Your concern is touching,’ Merihem growled, crushing the head of a janissary in one hand while raking three more with the autocannon that had formed at the end of his other arm. Energy still crackled around the monster’s body, as though the haywire grenades were still trying to bring him down.

‘Alive doesn’t mean unharmed,’ Rhodaan growled back. With a fierce cry, he lunged at the Obliterator, a superheated shot from his pistol sizzling across the beast’s knee. Wires bubbled, metal burned as the star-fire scorched its way through Merihem’s leg. The Obliterator wobbled uneasily for a moment, then the two halves of his leg knitted back together. While Rhodaan’s pistol was still cooling down, the monster struck at him with his claw.

‘That might have worked before,’ Merihem jeered, not entirely surprised when Rhodaan dodged beneath the sweep of his claw. ‘But the gift has had a long time to work on me since last we met.’ The Obliterator’s chest bulged outwards in a cage of wire as Rhodaan chopped at him with the edge of his sword. The Raptor pulled back before he could become snared in the nest of metal, springing away as the monster’s left hand slashed at him.

‘The old tricks won’t work,’ Merihem scoffed. The Obliterator drew back, the metal of his arm parting to expose a mush of raw, pulsating flesh. ‘I have insulated myself, bundled my core within living flesh. So much for your disruptors!’ The monster’s smile became even more malignant. His arm bulged into a ring of autocannon muzzles. ‘So much for you!’

‘Brother Merihem! Remember you are an Iron Warrior. Remember your duty and your honour!’

The Obliterator’s head swung around, oozing along his neck until it faced backwards. The black eyes narrowed with scorn as he saw a lone Iron Warrior rushing towards him. The fool’s hands were empty, he hadn’t even remembered his weapon.

Just as Merihem was shifting his autocannon to address the interloper, the Obliterator noted one of the Space Marine’s hands. His smile collapsed as he recognised the infection. He froze, his gaze locked on to Gomorie’s hand. It was like looking into his own past, at the man he had once been. Duty, honour, the things that had once been the core of his identity, the things that had been so important before the virus had consumed him.

Rhodaan hesitated, studying Merihem’s reaction to Gomorie. He could almost see the training and hypno-conditioning reasserting themselves. There was a chance, just a chance, the monster would listen now.

‘Brother Merihem,’ Rhodaan called out, lowering his sword. ‘Castellax is besieged by xenos hordes. The abominable orks think to steal this world from the Iron Warriors. We will not allow that. We will slaughter every last one of them. Your place is with us, brother, fighting at our side. Reclaim the honour that is your right as an Iron Warrior!’

Merihem was silent for a moment, his gaze shifting between Rhodaan and Gomorie. At last, the monster relented, the autocannon disintegrating, melting back into the morass of his body. ‘I remember my duty. I will see the xenos driven from Castellax.’ The black eyes grew sharp, stabbing into Rhodaan’s optics. ‘But afterwards there will be a reckoning,’ the Obliterator promised. His head twisted around, staring across the roof. His little face curled into a malicious smile. From the end of his hand, a spear of metal shot forth, hurtling across the landing pad.

Warden Zhroah writhed on the end of the harpoon, blood bubbling across her lips as Merihem dragged her to him. Callously, he ripped the metal spike from her chest, studying her as she tried to suck air into ruptured lungs. As the warden expired, Merihem fixed Rhodaan with a menacing stare.

‘A reckoning, brother,’ the monster hissed.

CHAPTER XI

I-DAY PLUS NINETY

In the early dawn, as the sun’s rays struggled through the murk of Castellax’s diseased sky, the ork assault on Vorago began. For days the city had watched the aliens assemble on the polluted plains, a numberless horde that boiled up out of the desert like a hurricane. At first, small mobs of the invaders had charged directly for the gigantic perimeter wall which surrounded the city, throwing themselves upon the rings of defences that guarded Vorago in a display of brute aggression. Chainwire, minefields, pits of industrial acid, trenches lined with razored shards of scrap-metal, concealed deadfalls, ferrocrete barriers – all of them took their toll upon the impetuous attackers. In only a few hours, the outskirts of Vorago came to resemble a junkyard strewn with the broken wrecks of alien machines and the mangled shapes of alien carrion.

There was little real fighting in those first reckless attacks. From their positions on the walls, the Flesh could fire down into the orks with relative impunity. The few ork aircraft that put in an appearance were quickly shot down by the Castellax Air Cohort and the anti-air batteries strewn across the roofs of Vorago.

Algol knew that there would come a time when the Flesh of Vorago would look back upon those initial attacks as the ‘happy times’. If the aliens had been capable of deliberate strategy, he would have called those first charges probing attacks, but the reality was they were simple blind aggression, the wildest of the orks expending themselves in a reckless advance without plan or purpose. The result wasn’t a battle. Upon the formidable rings of traps and barriers the Iron Warriors had erected, the aliens died in their thousands.

Yet the defenders could take small comfort from the slaughter, for beyond the waves of ork buggies and trucks, the mobs of infantry and armour throwing themselves against the walls, Algol could see the real storm gathering. A vast encampment was taking shape, a great sprawling mass of orks that stretched across the horizon. Not in their hundreds or their thousands, but in their millions. It was almost like watching another city sprouting up from the parched dirt of the plain, a city peopled with giant monsters devoted to razing Vorago and killing everyone within its walls.

Distinct amid the sprawl of machines, tents, trenches and bivouacs, the grotesque bulk of the battlefortress towered. The second of the immense behemoths that had broken through the Witch Wall, the gargantuan machine formed the core of the ork encampment. An effort by the Air Cohort to bomb the thing had proven futile, only two planes had escaped from the murderous anti-air fire concentrated around the fortress. A Deathstrike missile had been launched from the Iron Bastion itself, but the weapon had detonated without effect against the crackling void fields protecting the battlefortress.

For three days, the orks waited and gathered their strength. On the third night, the darkness was violated by the fierce war cries rising from the alien camp, primitive howls and chants that were punctuated by the sound of weapons being discharged into the sky. All through the hours of darkness, the clamour continued unabated, sometimes growing louder, sometimes dropping to a dull roar, but always the noise was there. Until just before dawn, when an eerie quiet descended upon the ork camp, a brooding stillness that sent a chill into the weak hearts of the Flesh.

The stillness shattered as the first rays of dawn stabbed down onto the roofs of Vorago. From the ork camp came the deafening bellow of thousands of guns. The sky was torn by the shriek of shells as the titanic artillery barrage hurtled overhead. The city shook as death rained down upon it, tons of ferrocrete and stone flung into the air as explosions erupted throughout Vorago. Streets became choked with rubble, factories and hab-pens collapsed, fires raged unchecked.

Billowing outwards from the ork camp, rushing forwards beneath the roar of artillery, the xenos came. Tens of thousands of machines, advancing in a great mass of snarling engines and black promethium-smoke. After them came millions of infantry, mobs of hulking green warriors howling and bellowing, sometimes firing their weapons at the distant walls despite the extreme range. Vicious ork aircraft flew into the sky, not the handfuls that had been so easily dispatched before, but in their hundreds, entire squadrons of bombers and fighters, whole wings of box-like gunships and transports.

Algol felt a sense of exhilaration rush through him as he watched the battle begin. Simple, brutal creatures, the orks nevertheless possessed a degree of cunning. With callous opportunism, they concentrated their attack on those sections of the perimeter where the wreckage of their own comrades was thickest. In these regions, the traps laid by the Iron Warriors had already been expended, claiming their toll in casualties. By driving over the very bones of their own dead, the orks eased their passage through the outer defences.

Steadily, relentlessly, heedless of the fire being hurled down upon them from the walls, the orks ploughed closer and closer to Vorago.

The Skintaker smiled. It was going to be a good fight.

Taofang’s view of the attack abruptly became far more personal. A trio of ork gunships swept along the length of the perimeter wall, spitting death across the parapets with boltguns and heavy stubbers. Janissaries and conscripted slaves returned fire, peppering the bulky aircraft with a desperate fusillade of solid-shot and las-beams. The rattle of bullets and shells against the heavily armoured fuselages crackled down the length of the wall, mocking the horrified men below.

Contemptuously, the orks refused to withdraw in the face of the effort to repulse them. Instead, the doors set into the sides of the gunships rolled back, exposing compartments crammed with hulking green monsters. Barking their savage glee, the ork troops didn’t even wait for the gunships to descend to the parapets. Firing their weapons as they fell, the brutes dropped the four metres between gunship and wall. Their powerful bodies absorbed the shock of the impact, for the most part. Even those who suffered injury clung to a stubborn urge to fight. Taofang saw one ork, his body draped in plates of metal wired together in the crudest semblance of armour, land in such a way that its legs snapped like twigs beneath it. Rather than consider its hurt, however, the alien dug a big pistol from its belt and began shooting at a squad of janissaries. His last sight of the monster was watching it crawl after the squad, its broken legs dragging behind it.

Another of the gunships hovered only twenty metres from where Taofang and his platoon were positioned. The gunship was venting smoke and flame from a huge rent in its hull, the result of a missile fired at it from one of the flak towers inside the city. The pilot seemed to be making a concentrated effort to keep its ship airborne, its bloodied face visible through the glass cowling over the cockpit.

Taofang watched with horror as the door in the side of the gunship slid back. Smoke billowed from the compartment, the orks inside were black with burns and many were scarred with slivers of shrapnel. The janissary could imagine the carnage that had taken place within the gunship when it had been struck. By rights, these creatures should be counting themselves lucky and slinking back home to tend their wounds. Instead, their beady eyes were glowing with hate and a primal lust to destroy.

‘Don’t let them reach the wall!’ The order came from a young major, his face a mess of grey scars, the legacy of a slave riot at a strip mine long ago. Major Kuantai was matching words to actions, firing a long-barrelled stub pistol into the ork ship as he shouted commands.

Since the fiasco at Gamma Five, Taofang’s mauled regiment had been broken up, the survivors deployed in irregular formations cobbled together from janissaries, overseers, rail guards and even Air Cohort ground crew. In his current platoon, there were only five Scorpions. The only other soldier he knew was Mingzhou, the Jackal sniper. It was an eerie thing, fighting alongside men who you didn’t know, wondering whether they could be counted upon when things became desperate.

The leadership of an officer like Kuantai made the difference. The major led by bold example, demanding nothing from his troops he wouldn’t demand of himself. Where officers like Colonel Nehring would slink off and leave the men under his command to risk all the danger, Kuantai was there with them, sharing every hazard.

Emboldened by the major’s bravado, Taofang leaned out from behind the ferrocrete embrasure he was using for shelter. Steadying his grip on his lasgun, he fired into the gunship, targeting one of the blackened brutes standing in the doorway. The ork howled back at him, brandishing a huge axe with an electrified blade. Grinning murderously, the alien leapt down onto the parapet. It lunged up from its crouch as it landed, storming across the wall, its beady eyes locked on Taofang.

The janissary fired shot after shot into the charging ork, but the las-beams failed to strike any of the alien’s vitals, or else the beast was too stupid to recognise its injuries. Roaring like some prehistoric leviathan, it closed upon Taofang. Reeling back, he cringed as the ork’s axe sheared through the side of the embrasure, sending a sliver of ferrocrete crashing to the ground.

Before the monster could strike again, its face was split by a crimson beam of light. The ork blinked in confusion, stumbled back. It dropped the axe and jabbed a fat finger into the smouldering hole in its forehead. There was a confused look on its face as it probed the wound. A glob of greasy material hung from its finger as it withdrew. The ork sniffed curiously at the stuff, then, finally acknowledging that it should be dead, slammed against the side of the embrasure.

Taofang looked around, waving his thanks to Mingzhou. The flame-haired wastelander was lying prone across the roof of a pillbox, already seeking another victim for her lasrifle. He chastised himself for the absurdity of his emotions. A battlefield was no place for frivolities like gratitude.

Firming his grip on his lasgun, Taofang dashed across the wall towards the low barricade where a dozen janissaries were trying to hold their position. Ranged against them were only a handful of orks, but the odds went beyond mere numbers. Each of the orks was the equal of three men when it came to raw muscle and strength, and the weapons they carried were similarly powerful. While the humans fired their las-beams into the monsters, charring their armour or sometimes scorching their leathery flesh, the high-calibre rounds flying from the ork’s boltguns and stubbers were chewing chunks from the barricade. Only the slovenly aim of the charging aliens gave the humans any chance at all.

Taofang rushed into the embattled position, pressing himself against the barricade. He could feel the vibrations of the ork bullets slamming into the ferrocrete, a steady tattoo like the pounding of a drum. One janissary, rising to take his shot at the aliens, fell in a twitching mash of pulverised flesh, his chest exploded by a burst from a stubber. Taofang could see panic spreading among the others as they watched the wreckage of their comrade writhe. He could feel the same panic blazing up inside his own body.

Just as fear began to overwhelm them, Major Kuantai rose from behind the barricade and lobbed a fistful of grenades into the orks. The aliens vanished in a brilliant blaze of fire and smoke. Even before the smoke started to clear, Kuantai had his pistol drawn and was vaulting over the barricade.

‘Come on!’ the officer shouted to his men. ‘We finish them, or I promise you they will finish us!’ Kuantai didn’t wait to see if the janissaries were following him, but ran across the scarred surface of the wall to loom over the bleeding bulk of an ork that had been caught in the explosion. Vengefully, Kuantai brought his pistol against the beast’s skull and blew its brains out. Wiping the gore from his tunic, the major looked up to see his soldiers executing the other injured aliens.

Taofang saw the grim smile that appeared on Kuantai’s face. It was an expression of defiant fatalism. The men under Kuantai’s command might be annihilated by the orks, but they would not be broken. Such was the major’s determination. Strangely, it gave Taofang a feeling of pride.

For more than half an hour, the fighting on the parapets continued. In the end, the defenders were neither annihilated nor beaten. Exhausted, shivering as the repressed horror of the close-quarter fighting returned to them, tending a catalogue of wounds that ranged from cuts and scrapes to broken bones and severed limbs, the janissaries were strewn along the wall, too weary even to separate the living, the dead and the dying. They had paid a desperate price to hold their position, but under Major Kuantai’s leadership, hold it they had.

His back against the cold bulk of an embrasure, Taofang tried to bind the gash across his forearm by pulling at the bandage with his clenched teeth. Despite the pain, he counted himself lucky. A few centimetres more and the ork’s knife would have taken the whole limb. Just the same, it was hard to feel fortunate with his arm feeling like it was on fire.

‘Let me do that.’ Mingzhou didn’t give him a chance to protest. Crouching beside him, leaning the lethal length of her lasrifle against the embrasure, the sniper inspected the crude bandage. Her face twisted in a scowl of disapproval. Taofang bit his lip as she undid the wrapping and a wave of raw agony coursed through his body.

‘You’re lucky you didn’t lose this,’ Mingzhou observed as she redid the bandage.

Taofang winced, trying not to squirm while she worked. ‘I… I guess my… protector had other things… to do.’ He cried out as the woman gave a sharp pull and the bandage tightened.

‘You should have kept your head down,’ Mingzhou reprimanded him. She gestured irritably at the bloody bandage. ‘Only a fool lets himself get that close to an ork.’

Somehow, through the pain, Taofang managed a smile. ‘We had to get the orks off the wall,’ he said, then shook his head. ‘I suppose you could say I let myself get caught up in the moment.’ His gaze strayed from the sniper to a cluster of men prowling along the wall, inspecting the bodies strewn about the parapets. Centremost among them was the figure of Major Kuantai, his tunic spattered with blood, his side bandaged where an ork bullet had nearly broken his ribs.

‘A brave man,’ Mingzhou conceded, her tone bitter.

Taofang shifted his body, eliciting a sullen groan as his arm brushed against his belt. ‘If not for him, we could never have held the wall.’

‘A brave man,’ Mingzhou repeated. She might have said more, but whatever words were forming themselves stayed unspoken. Her eyes became wide with alarm, pallor crept into her face. Taofang could see her body grow tense beneath her uniform and he wondered what could make this bold, almost callous woman, display such fear.

Turning his gaze back towards the officers, Taofang found his answer. His own pulse quickened as he watched a gigantic figure stalk along the parapet. It was something he had last seen in Dirgas, the ghoulish shape of Skintaker Algol.

The Skintaker did not spare a glance for the dead and dying men strewn around him, indeed it was left to the wounded to drag themselves from his path. Algol’s attention was fixed entirely upon the officers. As these men became aware of the Space Marine’s approach, their conclave broke apart, each man snapping to attention and sketching a hasty salute.

Algol glowered down at them, the optics in his skull-like helm seeming to smoulder with rage. ‘Which Flesh is in command here?’ the Iron Warrior demanded.

Paling visibly, a tremor in his step that hadn’t been there even in the thickest of the fighting, Major Kuantai advanced and bowed before the armoured giant. ‘Major Kuantai of the 4/5 Rosicracian Tigers…’

Algol closed the distance between them in a single step, his cloak of human skin snapping in the wind. The Iron Warrior paused a moment, as though listening to the sounds of battle raging in other parts of the city, then his attention reverted to the puny human trembling before him.

‘Casualties: one hundred and fifty-four,’ the Iron Warrior growled. ‘Xenos losses: seventy-five.’ Algol raised his hand, the talons of his gauntlet pointing into Kuantai’s face. ‘This action took forty-two minutes.’ The statement ended in a grunt of contempt. ‘One Iron Warrior could have accomplished this much in three.’

Kuantai bowed again. ‘Forgive me, lord captain,’ he begged. ‘I shall do better.’

‘Your successor will,’ Algol hissed. His armoured hand smashed down, punching through the back of the bowed officer. Kuantai screamed as steel fingers ripped into his flesh and pulled several centimetres of spine from his body.

‘It seems you did have a backbone,’ Algol spat, tossing the gory talisman onto Kuantai’s quivering body. The Iron Warrior wiped the man’s blood on the hem of his grisly cloak, then turned to regard the other officers. ‘One of you is now major,’ he declared.

The Space Marine turned, started to walk away, then stopped. ‘Leave that for disposal,’ he said, pointing at Kuantai’s body. ‘And remember what is expected of you.’

The skull-faced helm glared across the horrified janissaries. ‘The eyes of the Legion are everywhere,’ he warned. ‘If you are weak, we will know. There is no room for weakness on the battlefield. Remember that too.’

The Skintaker whipped his cloak about him and marched away, savouring the stink of terror. Let them fear, he thought. Fear is the seed of obedience. If it would not take root, then there was always room for a fresh face on the raiment of Algol.

Yuxiang rolled his shoulders, the only effort the narrow confines of the pit allowed him when it came to stretching his cramped body. His fellow inmate, a burly welder named Shenlau, gave him an ugly look as his arm brushed against the man’s chest.

‘Enough of that,’ Shenlau cursed. ‘There’s not enough room already.’ He slapped his calloused palm against the stock of the lasgun. ‘You want to spoil my aim?’

Yuxiang matched the other man’s angry stare. ‘What do you expect to shoot from way back here?’ he demanded. Despite the thunder of artillery and the las-pack a janissary had tossed down into the pit some hours before, he found it inconceivable to think anything could penetrate the perimeter of Vorago, much less drive so deep as to reach the firebreak.

With short, scuffling steps, Shenlau pulled away from the narrow slit in the side of the pit. Extending the lasgun, he motioned for Yuxiang to take a look for himself.

The firebreak towered over the adjacent buildings, offering a panoramic view of Vorago that was interrupted only by the still more immense flak towers. Yuxiang could see the entire district laid out below, the streets slashing their way through the maze of factories and processing plants. For the first time, he was confronted by the deranged layout of the city. Streets and roads, even railways, twisted and twined around the buildings, seldom allowing themselves more than a few blocks for any straightaway before resuming their meandering habits. Seen from above, the effect was a confusing labyrinth. It didn’t take much imagination to picture the effect the maze would have on someone actually down in the streets.

The bright blaze of an explosion drew Yuxiang’s eyes to the immense perimeter wall. He could see ork gunships, resembling gigantic scrap metal bloat-flies, buzzing about the parapets, unleashing a murderous fire into the defenders. Alien warriors, disembarking from the hovering aircraft, ran amok along the wall, slaughtering any human unfortunate enough to cross their path. It was a scene at once fascinating and horrifying. But it was soon eclipsed by an even more awesome vision.

The city was rocked by a tremendous explosion, even the walls of the pit rained ferrocrete dust as the tremor rolled through the firebreak. A boom like the cracking of the planet roared through the air. Yuxiang felt Shenlau’s hand clawing at him with sweaty fingers.

‘What is it?’ the man pleaded. ‘What is happening? What do you see?’

Yuxiang hesitated, wondering how mere words could describe the holocaust of destruction he had just witnessed. An entire section of the perimeter wall had blown up, ripped from the earth as though by some giant hand and then dashed across the landscape. The force of the explosion had flattened nearby buildings and toppled distant smoke stacks. Where the section had been there was now only a thick haze of smoke and a blackened crater marred by the odd ferrocrete block or twisted titanium girder.

‘The wall… The orks blew up the wall...’ Yuxiang managed to gasp. He pressed closer to the slit, trying to will his eyes to pierce the smoke. It might be his imagination, but he thought he saw shapes moving in the smoke. Had someone survived the explosion? It seemed impossible.

The next instant dissolved the naïve idea that anything human had survived the breaching of the wall. The shapes moving through the smoke were orks, their squat, apish builds clearly distinct even from such a distance. At first only in small mobs, but then in increasing numbers, the aliens rushed across the destruction, their savage brains showing no hesitation, no fear of crossing the scene of such recent havoc.

The trickle of xenos warriors soon became a swarm, numbers greater than Yuxiang could calculate. Roaring and shooting, the orks rushed into the winding streets, eager to find something to kill.

It was only when they were deep within the labyrinth that the orks discovered the trap they had rushed so recklessly into. From his vantage on the firebreak, Yuxiang watched as the hidden defences of the district swung into operation. Automated death traps hidden in every factory, each sewer and workshop; traps that exploited the hazards of Vorago’s production plants and processing centres. Reclamation towers sprayed showers of molten slag onto the heads of the oncoming orks. Toxic vapours vented from the air recyclers built into the walls of factories. Raw industrial waste was pumped into the streets, spilling from the sewer lines and flow trenches. Entire buildings shuddered and collapsed, broken by charges planted against their very foundations, the rubble burying whole mobs of orks and blocking the paths of those who followed.

As he watched trap after trap deployed against the orks, a sickening thought occurred to Yuxiang. The Iron Warriors had planned for this. These traps had been built when the structures were first being constructed. From the start, they had been prepared for an enemy to attack Vorago, to breach the perimeter and fall prey to the deadly maze within. More than prepared, perhaps the Space Marines had even goaded the xenos horde into the labyrinth, drawn them in like a rat catcher baiting his snares. Had it been an uncannily accurate ork barrage which broke the perimeter wall, or had it been some ruthless machination of the Iron Warriors themselves?

‘Let me see!’ Shenlau demanded, clamping his hand on Yuxiang’s shoulder. ‘Let me see,’ he repeated in a low growl when the slave didn’t move. ‘I’ve got the gun,’ he hissed. ‘My place is at the window!’

Yuxiang turned his head and glared at the other man. ‘What will you do? Shoot me?’

Shenlau smiled coldly. ‘If I thought a disposal team would fish you out of here before you started to stink, I’d consider it.’ His finger tightened about the trigger, his eyes like chips of ice. ‘I still might.’

‘Go ahead,’ Yuxiang said, calling the other slave’s bluff. He jabbed his thumb at the slit behind him. ‘From what I can see, we’ll both be dead soon.’

Shenlau’s eyes went wide. ‘The orks are winning?’ he cried.

Yuxiang shook his head as he awkwardly drew away from the window.

‘Orks or Iron Warriors, it makes no difference,’ he said. ‘Either way, whichever wins, we lose.’

‘The orks have taken the bait. They are rushing into the breach in Omicron-Sigma. From the information being relayed by Oriax’s Steel Blood, we can expect to exterminate upwards of fifty thousand of the filth.’

Warsmith Andraaz digested Sergeant Ipos’s report, the talons of his power claw drumming against the arm of his diamond throne. Though the death toll was impressive, it hardly justified the demolition of their own perimeter wall and the sacrifice of an entire district. No, the slaughter of so many orks was inconsequential, a drop in the bucket beside the vast number of aliens still laying siege to the city.

The real purpose of the ploy was more subtle. The Warsmith turned his attention away from Ipos, fixing his imperious gaze upon the cadaverous shape of Oriax’s servitor. ‘Fabricator, you have heard Ipos’s summary of the situation. How soon can we expect results?’

The servitor stared blankly at the massive Warsmith, its dead features displaying only the same silent agony they always bore. After a brief space, the metallic voice of Oriax crackled from the cyborg’s vox-caster. ‘The death of so many orks in such a short period will cause a disruption in the gestalt consciousness of the horde. They will become confused, unfocused. We can expect them to break off their attack while their individual psyches adjust.’

‘Your Steel Blood are in position,’ Andraaz did not phrase it as a question, but rather as a vocalisation of what he expected the Fabricator to have already accomplished.

‘Yes, Grim Lord,’ the vox-caster crackled. ‘I am able to monitor more than thirty-nine per cent of the xenos camp. My spies will maintain visual observation of the orks throughout this crisis.’

‘They will look for leadership,’ Ipos stated. ‘In that, they are no different than any thinking creature of limited ability. When beset by calamity, they look to something better than themselves to tell them what to do.’ The Iron Warrior shook his head, his features dripping with disdain. ‘That has been the foundation of societies primitive and modern, the basis of every religion, government and tyranny. The weak look to the strong. They desire to be dominated.’

Andraaz continued to regard Oriax’s ghoulish proxy. ‘Tell me, Fabricator, where do the orks look for guidance? Where is their leader?’

Again, the servitor was silent for a space. Deep within his sanctum, Oriax was consulting the data being fed to him by his grisly spies. It was almost a minute before the servitor answered.

‘There is evidence of a convergence of xenos around the battlefortress,’ Oriax pronounced. ‘Data gathered by Captain Rhodaan and our martyred battle-brother Captain Gamgin suggest that the warboss of the attack against Aboro was headquartered within a similar battlefortress. It would be unlike an ork to stray too far from custom.’

The Warsmith digested the information, nodding his head as he pondered the situation. His cold gaze swept across the assembled commanders of the Third Grand Company, finally settling on Over-Captain Vallax.

‘Recall your squads from the walls,’ Andraaz commanded. ‘I have a mission for my Raptors.’ His gaze hardened and an edge crept into his tone. ‘All of them, this time, Over-Captain.’

Vallax bristled under the reprimand, crimson streaks shifting through his mutated hair. ‘I obey, Grim Lord,’ he replied, adding another humiliation to the growing list of offences Rhodaan had perpetrated. The upstart’s luck couldn’t last forever. It was a prediction that eased Vallax’s pride.

Especially since he intended to take a hand in bringing that prediction to fruition.

CHAPTER XII

I-DAY PLUS NINETY-TWO

Enginseer Heroditus carefully made his way around the hulking atmosphere generator, reciting a binary mantra of serenity as the machine shuddered and wheezed erratically. He set a slender appeasement seal against the device’s power plant, a long strip of aluminium lined with letters etched in acid. The generator seemed to accept the offering, subsiding with a shudder into a lesser degree of agitation.

The generator’s machine-spirit had every right to take offence, Heroditus reflected, feeling a twinge of guilt transmit through the neurofibres of his nervous system. It had been woefully abused in its hurried disassembly and clandestine removal to the depths beneath Vorago. Necessity had demanded that the customary rituals of approbation be dispensed with. Only the most cursory of placations had been attempted and there had been no time to wait for the generator’s acquiescence to its relocation. Heroditus felt like an atavistic techno-barbarian defiling such a complex mechanism in so crude and deliberate a fashion.

Still, he had to defer to the wisdom of Logis Acestes. Since the beginning of the ork assault on Vorago, the vaults beneath the city had become compromised. Packs of escaped slaves from the factories, deserters from the janissaries, renegade overseers and slavedrivers; all of these and more had fled the besieged city to take refuge in the forgotten tunnels and catacombs. It was a situation that could not be tolerated by Acestes and his disciples. Their work was too important to allow any risk of exposure.

Precious labour had been expended constructing combat-servitors to patrol the passages connecting to the assembly chamber. Nothing so ostentatious as a Praetorian, but rather an assemblage of cyborgs that would appear quite mundane until their murderous directives asserted themselves. Meticulous care had been taken with their neurologic protocols so that should one of the combat-servitors be disassembled it would appear to be the subject of malfunction rather than deliberately pernicious programming.

Such crude measures of dealing with intruders was too uncertain to satisfy Acestes, however. His plan was to employ the atmosphere generator from one of the smelting plants to ensure the conspirators would be undisturbed. The atmosphere in the tunnels was poisonous, but its lethality might be bypassed by taking certain precautions. Death was certain for any organism exposed to the air in the tunnels for a prolonged period, but there was a big difference between a matter of minutes and a slow decline over several decades from trace carcinogens.

It made Heroditus ashamed the way the generator had been adjusted, its function deliberately violated to transform it from a source of clean, sustaining air to a purveyor of death. Instead of removing toxins from the air, the generator was now pumping them into it, a vicious cocktail of proticide that would bond with its victims on a molecular level, rendering the protons within the atoms unstable. Death would be almost instant and within an hour, even the evidence of a corpse would be obliterated as the body reduced itself to a sort of protean goo.

Heroditus had passed several of these puddles of organic mash on his descent into the catacombs. It was a pity that the dead were unaware they were martyrs to the Omnissiah, that their passing was necessary to ending the heretical dominion of the Iron Warriors on Castellax and ending the blasphemies being churned out from their factories. Of course, their deaths had been so quick they really hadn’t had the opportunity to reflect on such blessed dissolution even if they had known what was killing them and why.

As the enginseer stepped around the shuddering generator, he removed the complicated array of anti-toxin injectors from his chassis. He stared at them for a moment, evaluating how much of the chemicals remained. Enough for another journey through the tunnels? Perhaps for two? It was beneficial that so much of his flesh had been sacrificed to the Machine-God already, even to sustain what little remained against the effects of proticide took a distressingly high proportion of anti-toxin.

It was even more distressing that there were insufficient resources at hand to manufacture the poison in volume. Had there been, Castellax could be scoured of both its infectious presences! Heroditus quietly reprimanded himself for such a flagrantly emotional thought. There were too many orks to simply poison into extermination and, even if they could, there were the Iron Warriors themselves to consider. Against a normal human, the poison was invariably lethal, but the holy Adeptus Astartes and their fallen kin were a different matter. Proticide had proven incapable of defiling the enhanced genetics of a Space Marine, the advanced healing and regenerative properties of their cells nullifying the poison almost instantaneously. The best that exposure could inflict on an Iron Warrior would be a sensation of nausea. Even that was something of a triumph for the unknown geneseer who had created the poison.

No, even with the tunnels around the assembly chamber filled with proticide, the conspirators still had to fear discovery by the Iron Warriors. The blasphemous Chaos Marines would have nothing to fear from the poison, they could march through it at their leisure to reach the rebel tech-priests.

This was the subject of Heroditus’s recent foray into the city. Every opportunity had to be exploited to prevent the Iron Warriors from becoming aware of the hidden cabal dedicated to their annihilation. The enginseer had met with other tech-priests, those who had remained at their posts in the factories and power plants, armouries and assembly centres. If things were too quiet, the Iron Warriors would become suspicious. For this reason, the tech-priests had arranged small acts of sabotage and inefficiency in the factories ever since the beginning of the campaign. Now, however, logic dictated that they should step up their efforts, become almost openly overt in their sabotage. It was the natural evolution demanded by the changing situation and the seeming vulnerability of the Iron Warriors in the face of their xenos attackers.

Heroditus knew what he was asking of his brothers. The Iron Warriors would be severe in their retaliation. Where before the production had been sabotaged in subtle ways so as not to draw too much attention or too close a scrutiny, now they had to be almost blatant. Guns would be produced with dramatic proclivities towards inaccuracy. Explosives would be rendered half as destructive. Ammunition would be altered from their design to increase swelling and warpage after use to increase jamming and blockage.

While the Iron Warriors concentrated upon a thousand fiascos throughout Vorago, they would be oblivious to the great menace growing under their very feet.

The pumps in the enginseer’s chest increased their rhythm as he contemplated the tremendous blast which had shook the city when the Iron Warriors demolished the perimeter wall and invited the orks into their trap. The ordnance Acestes was assembling would make the earlier blast seem insignificant, it would be like the fist of the Omnissiah crashing down upon the foul violators of holy standard template constructs.

Heroditus focused his optic senses from the murk of the chamber floor to the causeway where the warhead housing was reaching completion. He could see Logis Acestes kneeling before the weapon, his vox-speaker crackling with a Lingua-Technis mantra of baptism.

After careful evaluation, it had been decided to christen the machine-spirit of the new ordnance after its defiled predecessor. Vindex Lartius. When it was complete, it would fulfil its purpose in a cataclysm of destruction.

Vindex Lartius would avenge not only Lartius Maximus, but all of Castellax.

Heroditus paused, an incongruous thought occurring to him. Even at this late stage, there was still the potential for failure. Everything depended upon the barbaric xenos maintaining their assault, pressing their attack against Vorago. If that attack should falter, then the opportunity would be lost. The deployment of Vindex Lartius would be inconsequential.

The hour of vengeance must await the onslaught of the orks.

The thunder of anti-aircraft shells burst all around the assault boat as it hurtled above the wasteland. The rattle of shrapnel against the hull formed a persistent clamour, echoing and re-echoing through the craft. The serf-slaves tending the craft looked more like frightened vermin as they tended to their duties.

‘What’s wrong, flesh-maggot?’ Brother Uzraal growled through his helmet at the human he had selected as his current irritation. ‘Did you think you would live forever?’ The human, shivering from head to toe, tried to ignore the giant’s taunts, burying himself in his study of a proximity terminal. It was the worst thing he could have done. Uzraal, feeling slighted, rose from his crash-couch and began to walk towards the man.

‘Answer your betters when they speak to you,’ Uzraal hissed. The assault boat rocked wildly as flak burst directly below it, but the mag-clamps in the Space Marine’s boots made him barely react to the craft’s motion.

‘Leave it alone, brother,’ Pazuriel advised. ‘The Flesh isn’t worth the effort.’

Uzraal turned and favoured the other Raptor with an icy stare. ‘It has forgotten its place. It needs a lesson.’

Pazuriel glanced aside at Baelfegor and Gomorie before replying. ‘I was unaware you had taken up slave indoctrination as a vocation,’ he said. ‘A peculiar secondary specialty for an Iron Warrior. It is fine for Captain Algol, he’s a degenerate homicidal sadist with delusions of godhood.’ He paused, leaning back as though pondering a sudden revelation. ‘Actually, Uzraal, it probably suits you.’

The other Raptors laughed at Uzraal’s expense. Uzraal glared back at them as he stalked back to his crash-couch. Battle-brothers bound by duty and obligation, shackled to one another by chains of honour and loyalty. That didn’t make them despise each other any less. When he looked at another Iron Warrior, he saw a reflection of himself and there were few in the Legion who liked what he saw.

Captain Rhodaan left his squad to vent their agitation. After a tour along the walls, supporting pathetic contingents of Flesh, they were all eager for real action, a proper deployment that would allow them to use the skills they had been taught. A tactical strike against the enemy, that was the purpose of Raptors, not a demeaning role as nurse-maids to a rabble of puny humans who couldn’t even manage a defensive role without help. There was no glory to be had there!

Rhodaan smiled. That was over now. Warsmith Andraaz was unleashing the sword of the Third Grand Company at last! A swift thrust straight into the ork headquarters, and the extermination of the ork warboss. With the head struck from the body, the rest of the xenos horde would collapse, riven by infighting as thousands of petty warlords vied with one another for control. The death of the warboss would shatter the alien juggernaut and allow the Iron Warriors to pick it apart at their leisure.

There would be no moment of greater import in the entire campaign. Only the thought that he must share the glory with Over-Captain Vallax and his Faceless bothered Rhodaan, though he supposed Skylord Morax would be there too, to try and steal some of the thunder. The Castellax Air Cohort was being deployed in a diversionary assault, attacking the battlefortress from the north while the assault boats struck from the south.

Far below the assault boat, the great swamps of industrial sewage beyond Vorago’s walls were giving way to the desolation of the desert. Orange dirt, riddled with pollutants and baked into a consistency as tough and unforgiving as cement, stretched away in a great sweep of waste, broken here and there by the blackened smudge of a fallen aircraft. Ork or human, the debris shared a kindred expression of forlorn abandonment. Even the scavenging xenos were unwilling to trek across the bleak wastes for so meagre a prize. The wrecks would linger there for months until wind and pollution broke them apart and added their rusty residue to the dirt.

Beyond the desolation, the sprawl of the alien encampment loomed like the shore of some tainted ocean. A smudge of smog and smoke rose from the camp, defiling even the polluted sky of Castellax. At this distance, the camp was just an indistinct blackness on the horizon, but here and there bright flashes winked amidst the darkness. The discharge of missile launchers and cannon, the chatter of flak guns and plasma batteries. The orks had noticed the raiders flying towards them across the desert.

As the assault boat was shaken by a nearby burst of flak, Rhodaan considered that Morax’s pilots were managing a commendable performance. He could almost picture the Skylord briefing his crews, laying out the parameters of their mission before enjoining them about taking extreme care not to lose any planes in the execution of that mission.

‘Distance to target,’ Rhodaan snapped at the serf-slave tending the proximity terminal.

‘Fi-five kilometres, lord captain,’ the human stammered, casting a wary glance in Uzraal’s direction as he answered.

Rhodaan turned towards the door in the side of the assault boat, the demi-organic wings of his jump pack unfolding expectantly, knowing that soon the Raptor would again be soaring through the sky. The other members of Squad Kyrith made last minute inspections of their armour and gear, Pazuriel and Baelfegor tending one another’s jump packs to ensure the intakes were free of dirt. Uzraal hefted the bulk of his meltagun, conspicuously pointing it in the direction of the human irritation. Gomorie knelt on the deck, scrubbing his tainted hand. The serf-slaves watched the water drip into the metalised flesh, smacking their lips in longing. It had been three months since any of them had tasted real water, forced to subsist off rations of liquid reclamations that had been processed and recycled dozens of times.

‘It won’t help,’ the rolling bellow sounded from deep within the cargo hold. Gomorie looked up to stare at the grotesque hulk of Merihem.

‘The virus will win out,’ Merihem explained. ‘You should embrace your doom. Defying it will only bring you pain.’

Gomorie stood and turned towards the monstrous Obliterator. ‘My honour and my duty will sustain me,’ he declared.

Merihem laughed, his pallid face exposing its steel teeth. ‘So I thought… once.’ His body flowed in an undulation of liquefied metal, ropes of raw meat gleaming behind the confusion of plates and wires. ‘Accept what is and what will be. All else is… delusion.’

Captain Rhodaan listened to the exchange between the Space Marine and the monster. It was the first time Merihem had spoken since embarking and Rhodaan wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. He had read the reports detailing the Obliterator’s performance in the ork attack on the perimeter wall. Merihem had single-handedly held a three-kilometre section, accounting for some five hundred xenos casualties. Of course, the reason the abomination had defended his post alone was because he’d also accounted for three hundred janissaries and slave-militia, going so far as to dig the latter from their firing pits.

More and more, Rhodaan was coming to appreciate the kind of beast Merihem was. The virus had wiped out all sense of kinship to the Legion. He suspected that the only thing motivating the Obliterator was some perverse fascination with Gomorie’s infection and the Raptor’s efforts to overcome it. What would happen if that fascination were to lose its hold was something Rhodaan hoped he wouldn’t have to find out. The orks and the schemes of Vallax were enough to worry about, he didn’t need the prospect of a blood-mad Obliterator at his back.

‘Two kilometres, lord captain,’ the serf-slave announced. The assault boat shuddered violently as a flak shell exploded against the fuselage, sending slivers of metal slashing across the cabin. Two humans wilted under the debris, their bodies torn and mangled. Baelfegor grunted in irritation, plucking a six-centimetre chunk of steel from his vambrace. The coagulants in his blood sealed the wound almost immediately.

‘Squad Kyrith,’ Captain Rhodaan growled, reaching to the door and flinging it open. Wind whipped about him, smoke from the damaged fuselage streaming into the ship. He could see the confused sprawl of the ork encampment whizzing by far below, a jumble of scrap-heaps, bonfires and sheet metal shanties. Here and there, patches of desert burned a rusty orange by the pollutants in the air gaped between the ork bivouacs. Beyond the junkyard sea, like a great island of darkness, towered the enormity of the battlefortress. Rhodaan felt the faintest flicker of doubt as he stared at the cyclopean machine. Grimly, he crushed his uncertainty. He was an Iron Warrior. He would not fail in his duty, whatever obstacles the xenos might put in his way. His voice was an angry snarl as he hissed into his vox-bead. ‘Ready for battle.’

‘Iron within! Iron without!’ the other Raptors roared, marching towards the doorway. One by one, the Space Marines leapt from the assault boat, hurtling into a sky blackened by clouds of flak, plummeting hundreds of metres before igniting their jump packs and launching themselves at the gigantic hull of the battlefortress.

Rhodaan waited until each Iron Warrior was deployed. He hesitated in the doorway, glancing back at Merihem’s imposing bulk. ‘If the transport can land close enough, I will see you inside, brother.’

‘You will see me inside,’ Merihem assured him. ‘Flesh will not fail Iron,’ he assured, his face peeling back in a daemonic leer.

Rhodaan turned his back on the monster, flinging himself out into the polluted sky. As he descended, he felt an uncharacteristic twinge of pity for the crew of the assault boat.

If the orks killed them, they would be lucky men indeed.

Without warning, the orks resumed their artillery barrage, pounding Vorago even more viciously than before. It was wild, erratic fire, spread throughout the city without any strategy or concentration. Shells exploded in the destroyed Omicron-Sigma with as much frequency as they did within the ‘secure’ districts beyond the firebreaks. Even the Iron Bastion was victimised, the megalithic tower’s void shields crackling with a spectral glow as xenos ordnance detonated against the force field.

Yuxiang covered his ears and opened his mouth as he crouched in the bottom of the firing pit, aping the actions of some janissaries he had seen caught beneath the fury of an artillery strike. He kept his eyes open, however, stubbornly refusing to close them even when smoke and dust skittered through the narrow slit in the wall, coating the slaves inside with a layer of gritty filth. All but deaf from the thundering guns, he was determined he would at least see death when it came for him.

Shenlau, displaying even more stubbornness, kept himself at the firing slit, the lasgun thrust through the opening. The man exhibited such unwavering commitment and resolve that even the Iron Warriors could have found no fault in the slave’s courage. With the firebreak itself shaking and trembling under the fury of the barrage, Shenlau maintained his vigil, immovable as a statue, as steadfast as a mountain.

It took Yuxiang several minutes to realise the reason for his companion’s composure was that the man was dead. Little beads of blood dripping down the wall, that was his clue. Timidly, he reached out a hand and tugged at Shenlau’s leg. When there was no response, he recoiled in disgust. Yuxiang was no stranger to death, no man of Castellax was ever far from its shadow, but to be trapped alone, within the narrow confines of the pit… It was a thing that awakened horror in his mind.

As though sensing Yuxiang’s fear, the corpse abruptly lost its poise and toppled from where it had been standing, spilling across the pit and trapping Yuxiang beneath it.

The slave shrieked in terror, squirming under the morbid weight, trying to push it off him. Every effort was thwarted by the confines of the pit, the corpse invariably striking a wall and sliding back down upon him. Yuxiang could see the grisly gash in Shenlau’s forehead where a sliver of shrapnel had split open his skull. A greasy slime of brains and blood oozed from the wound, turning black as it absorbed the ferrocrete dust coating the cadaver’s face.

Many horrible minutes passed as Yuxiang struggled with a dead man. It was only by squeezing himself against the back of the wall and using his legs to lever Shenlau to one side that he was finally able to extricate himself from the abhorrent weight. More minutes passed as Yuxiang stared in loathing at the body, trying to force his brain to accept its disgusting presence and closeness.

The violence of the ork artillery began to slacken, dropping from a deafening thunder to a sporadic rumble. The comparative silence came almost as a shock to Yuxiang. Suddenly, it seemed, he could hear again. Faintly, dimly, voices drifted down to him from above. There was another sound as well, a wet, meaty sound that he couldn’t account for, but which sent a chill down his spine all the same.

Frightened into action, Yuxiang forgot his loathing of the corpse and instead crouched over it, trying to roll it away from the wall in a frantic search for the lasgun. Shenlau was already starting to grow stiff, making the effort doubly difficult. Only by pressing his entire weight against each leg and breaking it at the knee was Yuxiang finally able to move the corpse and slip past it towards the firing slit.

The lasgun was there! Eagerly Yuxiang grabbed the weapon, his fingers wrapping about its grip with the desperate gentleness of a lover. The sounds drifting down into the pit were closer now, resolving themselves into words.

‘Post three-forty-two,’ a nasally pitched voice cried out. ‘Two conscripts.’ There was a pause, then the voice continued. ‘Two subjects for disposal. Forward a claim for replacements to central processing.’

Disposal. The word made Yuxiang’s stomach lurch. The voice he was hearing belonged to corpse-collectors, making their rounds and fishing the dead from the firing pits.

He looked aside at Shenlau. At least he would soon be spared the noxious company of a corpse. The disposal team would pull him out and then a new conscript would be sent to replace him.

How will that help me? Yuxiang wondered. He stared up at the lip of the pit, watching as shadows began to play across the surface. He hefted the lasgun, aiming upwards. Quickly he lowered the weapon, disabusing himself of the reckless and suicidal impulse. Even if he killed the men in the disposal team, it wouldn’t get him out of the pit. Janissaries would just come along and shoot him like a rat for daring to rebel. The most bitter irony was that such a small act of defiance wouldn’t even be noticed by the Iron Warriors, rendering the very gesture worthless.

No, the only way Yuxiang could make his life count for something was to survive. To do that, he had to get out of the pit.

Staring at the body of Shenlau, a daring idea came to him. Fighting down his repugnance, he brought his hand sweeping down the corpse’s forehead, coating his palm in the dead man’s gore. Yuxiang hesitated a moment, staring in disgust at the filth, but the sound of the disposal team marching away from the nearest pit settled his repugnance. In one quick motion, he wiped the crud across his face, then threw himself to the ground.

‘Post two-forty-two,’ the voice called down. ‘Two conscripts.’ The corpse-collector peered down into the pit, his features obscured by a brutish gas mask and rebreather. ‘Anyone alive down there?’ he shouted. He paused a moment, then spoke to his comrades who were just out of sight. ‘Two subjects for disposal. Forward a claim for replacements to central processing.’

Behind his mask of gore, Yuxiang watched as a pair of burly, thuggish looking men wearing plastic dusters and ugly breath masks peered down into the pit. In the next moment, one of them produced a long, hook-headed spear. Yuxiang watched in silent horror as the men stabbed the weapon downwards, scraping it along the floor of the pit. He felt the cold steel rasp along his leg, cutting the skin as it progressed towards Shenlau. When the hook was close to the corpse, the man wielding it gave it a deft twist, slipping the barbed curve of the hook up and under the body’s arm. There was a revolting, meaty sound as the hook stabbed into the flesh. The next instant, both men were struggling with the spear, pulling it upwards hand-over-hand and dragging the body skewered on the end of the hook out of the pit.

Yuxiang’s insides went cold. They were going to do the same to him! He was committed now, he hadn’t called out when the overseer asked if anyone was alive. If they found out he was alive, he’d be shot as a coward. Yet if he tried to play dead, the terrible hook would come for him, sticking him like an insect on a pin. Hungry steel would tear his flesh…

There was no other way. He had to escape the pit. What he would do after that, Yuxiang didn’t know. All the mattered right now was getting out. Biting down on his own tongue, he waited for the bruisers to return. Now that he had resigned himself to the ordeal, everything seemed to move with excruciating slowness. The hook descended at a slothful rate, sliding clumsily along the floor in its advance. The disposer missed him on the first pass, compelling him to repeat the procedure. Yuxiang braced himself for the agony when the–

It was all he could do to keep from screaming when the blade stabbed into his body, slashing through skin and muscle, lodging itself against bone and sinew. Spots flashed before his eyes, he could hear his own blood pounding in his ears. Consciousness flickered; it was a fight to retain his awareness. If he submitted to the lure of oblivion, he might give himself away by some unconscious action, alerting the disposers that he was alive.

He had to stay awake. He had to stay aware and alert. It was the only way he could be certain.

Then the disposers began to extract him from the pit and all of Yuxiang’s weight came to bear on the hook embedded in his body. He thought he knew what pain was, but until that moment, he didn’t even have a clue.

His last conscious act was to clench his teeth against the scream he so desperately wanted to utter. Then the red agony overwhelmed him and awareness fled into some dark corner of his being.

Yuxiang didn’t see the overseer give him a cursory inspection as he was lifted from the pit. The man saw nothing different about Yuxiang than any of the hundreds of other corpses he had hauled away. With a shrill command, he led the two bruisers to a small, tank-like tractor, its bed piled with human carrion.

‘Those last two make a full weight quota,’ the overseer said.

The larger of the two disposers dumped Yuxiang unceremoniously on the top of the heap. ‘Back to processing?’ he asked, his tone making it clear the prospect didn’t please him.

‘Unless you want to stay around here and wait for the next ork attack,’ the overseer said.

That prospect seemed to disturb the disposers even more. Without a glance at their macabre cargo, they closed the gate at the rear of the tractor’s bed and scrambled around to the driver’s cabin. The combustion engine sputtered noisily into life and the tractor began its long journey into the bowels of Vorago.

An immense cliff of rusted metal, exposed wires, dangling chains and apparently random jumbles of scrap, the hull of the ork battlefortress towered before Captain Rhodaan as he dropped through the smoky sky. It was like a small city, if that city had been designed by an inattentive child with an overabundance of sadistic imagination and a little aptitude for symmetrical construction. Towers rose from slab-like masses of metal in seemingly random disorder, their sides bristling with spikes, guns and pipe-work gantries. Massive glyphs cut from sheet metal were bolted to every available surface, grinning in brutal glee at the destruction wrought by the aliens. From stem to stern, the battlefortress was nearly five kilometres long, its tallest towers and communication masts reaching at least a kilometre into the sky. Rhodaan could almost weep for the opportunity such a target would have offered their now vanquished orbital defence stations. Something so colossal could have been targeted from orbit with the naked eye and obliterated in a single bombardment.

A veritable curtain of firepower sizzled through the air around Rhodaan; occasionally a lucky shot would strike his power armour, glancing off the thick ceramite plates. It was as well for the Iron Warriors that the heaviest ordnance invariably found its way into the paws of the biggest orks. They were apt to be the most arrogant and belligerent, their vicious enthusiasm rendering their accuracy wild and erratic. Precision was left to the smaller breeds and these were forced to make do with whatever weaponry they could steal or scavenge.

Still, there was always the possibility of some xenos having the wit to take advantage of a human-crafted targeter system. Certain elements within the ork horde had displayed a propensity for aping human strategy and armament. An Iron Warrior did not march through millennia of unending warfare by leaving anything to chance if he could avoid it. As he hurtled through the sky, Rhodaan reached to his belt, thumbing small coin-like discs from the grenade dispenser. Touching their surface, he powered the tiny bombs into action, tossing them into the air around him. Instantly, thick black smoke billowed from the discs, choking the sky in inky darkness, further obscuring him from the deranged marksmanship of the orks.

Judging the distance between himself and the battlefortress, Rhodaan estimated he would need to repeat the procedure one more time. The Space Marine’s armoured bulk was dropping much faster than the grenades spewing his smoke screen. In a few seconds he would fall beyond the inky cloud and be exposed to the vision of his enemies.

Within his helmet, Rhodaan smiled coldly. The orks wouldn’t take advantage of that brief opportunity. Most of their fire was concentrated on the assault boat. It was typical of the xenos mentality to concentrate their attack on the biggest target, ignoring any other menace until it was too late. Through gaps in the smoke, Rhodaan could see the transport ship, its fuselage aflame, its nose a mass of twisted wreckage. While he watched, the ship smashed into the side of the battlefortress, its wings shorn away instantly by the impact, a great ball of fire welling up around it.

Nothing human could have survived the impact. The thought came to Rhodaan with a mixture of worry and relief, his feelings conflicting with his determination to carry out his mission and achieve his objective.

‘Brother Merihem?’ Rhodaan transmitted across the inter-squad vox-channel.

There was a moment of silence, then the gruesome crackle of Merihem’s voice slithered across the vox. ‘I… function,’ the Obliterator said.

Rhodaan deployed the second bunch of smoke grenades, exploiting his moment of exposure to orient himself with the layout of the hull. This close to it, he was again reminded of an Imperial cruiser dragged from orbit and cast adrift upon the desert. The similarity gave him inspiration. Before the smoke engulfed him once more, he used his demi-organic wings to steer towards a gun emplacement high upon the machine’s central superstructure.

‘Hone in on Squad Kyrith’s identifier,’ Rhodaan ordered. ‘Rendezvous with us at your first opportunity.’

Rhodaan could hear the chatter of gunfire across the vox-channel. ‘I obey,’ Merihem replied, his words almost drowned out by screaming aliens in the background.

No need to tell the Obliterator to kill everything in his way, telling the monster to do anything else would have been the problem. If they had sent a rabid tyranid hive tyrant rampaging through the belly of the battlefortress, the Raptors could have asked for no better diversion. Merihem would march through the orks like some primordial devil, flinging death at anything that dared show its face. The orks, with that wonderfully simple, savage lust for combat, would converge upon the marauding monster by the hundreds.

While the xenos were trying to stop Merihem, they would expose and neglect other sections of the battle-fortress, easing the progress of the Raptors. In the long run, it was of no consequence if the orks destroyed Merihem or not, by drawing the aliens to him, the Obliterator would have served his purpose.

Rhodaan’s diving form ploughed through the last stretch of smoke. The Iron Warrior’s wings unfurled, arresting his descent almost instantaneously. He found himself directly above his objective, the flattened paddock where the orks had slapped together a flak battery. Leathery green faces gawped at him in surprise.

The armoured giant didn’t give the aliens a chance to recover from their shock. His plasma pistol blazed in his hand as he fired into the ork gunners, the super-heated gas melting through organ and bone with the ferocity of an enraged sun. Mortally wounded aliens collapsed in shuddering heaps, upsetting the belts of ammunition strewn about the platform.

Descending the final few metres to the deck in a graceful dip, Rhodaan’s boot crunched down on the skull of a mangled ork, grinding it into pulp. Folding his wings, Rhodaan fired his pistol at an ork huddled behind one of the flak guns, spraying the alien’s face with molten metal as the shot scorched along the creature’s cover. The injured ork hopped away, one paw covering its melted face while it fired blindly with the massive stub-pistol clenched in its other hand. A second shot of plasma settled the alien, dropping its steaming carcass over the railing which bounded the platform on three sides. Rhodaan could hear its coarse scream as it plunged down the side of the battlefortress to the desert far below.

‘Squad Kyrith, report,’ Rhodaan snarled over the vox, spinning as another lurking ork came rushing at him from behind a flat-bedded ammo cart. The alien’s momentum kept its body plunging towards the Iron Warrior even after a ball of plasma evaporated most of its head. Rhodaan side-stepped as the ork neared him, letting the corpse pitch over the side and hurtle after its comrade.

‘Brother Pazuriel. Have effected entry at missile emplacement one hundred metres east of your position.’

‘Brother Gomorie. Securing maintenance corridor fifty metres west.’

One after another, the other members of his squad reported to him across the vox. Rhodaan fitted each of their positions to the map he was drawing inside his brain. The cogitator inside his data-slate would perform the same function, but he knew no machine could ever match the mentality of a legionary. Cogitators could provide logistics and summations but they did not possess a Space Marine’s experience or the intuition born from the cauldron of war.

A hoarse bellow of rage brought Rhodaan sweeping towards the side of the gun emplacement. The egress hacked into the side of the hull opened with a hiss, exposing a massive ork with steel-capped tusks and an enormous steam-driven spanner clutched in its paws. Coldly, the Iron Warrior fired his pistol full into the alien’s face, then pushed the twitching body to one side. Beyond the dead ork was a long corridor, its deck uneven, a motley confusion of doors and stairs opening into it almost at random.

Almost, but not quite. Rhodaan could see the echo of a familiar pattern, as though he was peeling away layers of vandalism to peer at the defiled original. He felt no fear as a rabble of aliens came rushing down the corridor, barking and shooting as they came. Calmly, he aimed his pistol and began picking off the maddened brutes.

‘Squad Kyrith,’ Rhodaan growled into his vox. ‘Make your way into the central superstructure. This machine is based on the deckplan of a Dictator-class cruiser. Our objective will likely have established itself in the section analogous to the command deck.’

Rhodaan ducked back through the egress as a howling ork tried to incinerate him with a blast from a flamer. Sheets of fire exploded through the doorway as he pressed himself against the hull. As soon as the flames subsided, he thumbed a grenade from his belt and tossed it down the corridor. No smoke grenade this time but a deadly explosive designed to send tiny shrapnel fragments into the enemy. In the aftermath of the ensuing explosion, pained shrieks sounded from the corridor.

‘Converge upon the wardroom,’ Rhodaan ordered as he strode back into the hallway, marching through the dead and dying wreckage of orks. ‘We will assemble there before making our attack on the command deck.’

A wounded ork clawed at Rhodaan’s boot, its fanged face leering at him vengefully. The Iron Warrior glared down at the alien. Viciously, he pressed the barrel of his plasma pistol against its forehead, using the white-hot heat of the gun itself to burn a hole through the ork’s head.

‘Keep a watch for Squad Vidarna,’ he hissed, watching with satisfaction as the ork thrashed beneath him, struggling to remove the heated gun barrel searing through its skull. ‘This objective belongs to us. I will not share the glory with anyone.’ The tortured ork at last became still beneath Rhodaan’s grip. The Iron Warrior rose, staring at its bleeding husk.

How much more satisfying, he thought, if he could do the same to Over-Captain Vallax.

After the mission was accomplished, of course. Anything before then would be more than premature.

It could be construed as treacherous.

CHAPTER XIII

I-DAY PLUS NINETY-THREE

With a deafening roar, the massive ork charged across the debris-littered ‘wardroom’ of the battlefortress. The huge alien was easily head and shoulders above any of the Iron Warriors, its bulky build making it vastly more massive as well. Despite the crudity of the mega-armour which encased its body, there was a sensation of power behind it that was undeniable. The brute smashed its way through the bullet-scarred wreckage of a steel-plated workbench and machinist’s shop, sending a weird assembly of tools clattering about the chamber.

Bolt-shells smacked into the onrushing juggernaut, gouging craters in its heavy armour and sending a spray of molten metal blobs flying in every direction. The brute simply grunted, its face locked behind the fanged mask of its helmet, speakers mounted in its shoulder plates magnifying the sound into a pulsating bellow. Lifting one of its enormous arms, the ork sent a withering stream of fire crashing across the room, blasting apart piles of scrap metal and coils of wire, pulverising heaps of scavenged machinery and the husks of half-formed armaments.

The Iron Warriors of Squad Vidarna were there, amid the junkyard confusion, seizing whatever cover they could to protect themselves from the crazed ork’s barrage. For once, Vallax and his Faceless didn’t dare show their own faces.

From the doorway, Captain Rhodaan watched as the chaotic mixture of bullets, shells and slugs erupting from the ork’s combi-weapon chewed away Vallax’s cover. The Over-Captain had chosen a solid refuge, a jumble of armour plate looted by the orks from a mag-lev train. The solidity of his shelter, however, wasn’t doing him much good as the seemingly inexhaustible barrage sent slivers of metal flying in every direction. The other Raptors of Squad Vidarna were likewise pinned down, kept in check by the ork warriors supporting their massive champion, chief among them a cigar-chomping creature with a heavy bolter clutched in its paws, a hopper lashed to its side feeding a continuous belt of ammunition into the gun.

It was a sore temptation to leave Vallax and his Raptors to their fate. The Over-Captain or one of his henchmen had listened in on Squad Kyrith’s frequency and attempted to beat them to the prize. Rhodaan wondered how they were enjoying their stolen glory now. Vallax had made one severe error in his calculations. He’d taken the reference to a wardroom too literally. Instead of finding a bivouac for the ork warboss and its lieutenants, he’d instead stumbled onto a makeshift machine shop, a catch-all armoury and repair centre for the clique of alien mekaniks who maintained the battlefortress.

There was always a danger of underestimating the ork as an enemy. Crude, primitive, often near mindless in its brutality, there existed within the hordes aberrant individuals of terrible potency. Some of these orks exhibited their advanced mentality through use of specialised tactics, others were potent psykers who tapped into the gestalt consciousness of their breed to manifest hideous exhibitions of witchery. The mekboyz were another example of the same aberrancy, cobbling together machines and weapons of astounding capability from nothing but scraps and oddments. Their weaponry might be laughably slapdash in appearance, but at the same time exhibit qualities unrivalled by anything to emerge from the manufactorum of a tech-priest.

Vallax was finding that out now. So eager to prevent his rival from accomplishing the objective, he was now faced with a bigger fight than he had anticipated.

Rhodaan thumbed the intensity setting on his plasma pistol to its highest node, then glanced back at the other members of Squad Kyrith. Brother Uzraal had yet to rendezvous with them, but had encountered the others while making his way to the wardroom. He could feel their eyes studying him, could almost read the thoughts stirring in their heads. They would stand beside him if he chose to abandon Squad Vidarna, he knew that, it would be their secret. But that secret would become a taint from which there could be no recovery. He would lose their respect, and with that respect his squad would lose its discipline and cohesiveness. It would become like Squad Vidarna, a pack of cut-throat opportunists always on the lookout for some advantage to exploit for their own personal benefit. Which of them, he wondered, would be the first to plot against him the way the half-breed Uhlan intrigued against Vallax.

‘On my mark,’ Rhodaan told his Raptors. ‘Gomorie, your initial target is the ork with the heavy bolter. Pazuriel, you take the one in red flak armour with the stubber. Baelfegor, the one with the flamer. After you eliminate your initial targets, employ your own discretion.’ He glanced back into the room. ‘Leave the big one to me.’

Without further preamble, the Iron Warriors of Squad Kyrith exploded into the room. Focused upon the Space Marines they had pinned down, the xenos were taken by surprise, their shock further increased when explosive bolt-shells detonated the bodies of their comrades. Rhodaan’s Raptors did not linger over their triumphs, but immediately dived for cover, firing as they went. Assaulting the alien flank, they caught many of the orks in the open, cutting them down before they had a chance to react.

Captain Rhodaan had only a dim impression of Squad Vidarna rallying to the changing situation, leaping from their own cover to charge the embattled xenos. In that initial burst of violence, his attention was focused on the hulking ork mekboy in the mega-armour. The supercharged shot from his plasma pistol seared across the room, sending a heat-haze ripple in its wake. At its highest intensity, Rhodaan had used his weapon to burn through the hatches of a battleship. However thick the ork’s armour, he knew it would make short work of the metal plates and quickly incinerate the alien inside.

It was the Iron Warrior’s turn to be surprised and curse himself for underestimating his foe. The shot from his plasma pistol struck true, directly into the ork’s side. At least the shot would have struck true, if not for the coruscating blue sheen that suddenly surrounded the creature, distorting the ball of energy and draining away much of its impetus. Instead of burning clean through the ork, by the time the shot passed through the force field, all it could manage was to blacken the garishly painted plates and melt a few exposed tubes.

The mekboy swung around, bellowing its war cry. Rhodaan threw himself flat as the brute opened fire, the deadly assortment of bullets and shells smacking into the floor around him. As he rolled behind the momentary shelter of a metal crate stuffed with scrap, he holstered his expended pistol. It would take the weapon nearly a minute to build another charge in its power coil. Until then, he would have to make do with his chainsword.

Slugs tore apart Rhodaan’s shelter, shredding the crate as though it had been cobbled together from sheet-tin. Instead of dodging around the side of the crate, The Raptor leapt over the top, using his demi-organic wings to hurl himself at the mekboy in a sudden pounce. His chainsword came whirling down at the ork’s head before the alien could react.

Again, the ork’s force field saved it. As the chainsword’s whirring edge descended along with Rhodaan’s lunge, its momentum was foiled by the resistance of the field. It was like trying to cleave through water, the crackling energy trying to throw back the blade. Only the tremendous strength of a Space Marine and the powerful servo-motors in Rhodaan’s armour could have prevailed. Even then the reward was scant. The edge of the chainsword clove through the mask of the ork’s helmet, exposing the alien’s scarred face and fanged leer.

The next instant, the mekboy struck back, swatting Rhodaan with the enormous hammer clenched in its fist. The Raptor was dashed to the floor by the savage blow, his body shuddering from the impact despite the protective layers of plasteel and ceramite. Instantly, he tried to roll away, but before he could move, the mekboy’s steel-shod boot was pressing down on him.

A grotesque grin split the beast’s face as it aimed its combi-weapon at the Space Marine trapped under its heel.

It was the moment of a heartbeat before the ork’s expression changed. From sadistic triumph, the mekboy’s face collapsed into confused agony. Deep red blood oozed from the corners of its mouth, the hand holding the ponderous combi-weapon fell limp at its side. With a groan, the huge ork slumped to its knees, then crashed onto its face.

Over-Captain Vallax stood above the slaughtered ork, strips of shredded metal and green flesh clinging to the teeth of his chainaxe. For a moment, he stared down at Rhodaan.

Rhodaan stared back at his commander. There was no gratitude in his hearts for the other Iron Warrior’s assistance. He had come to Vallax’s aid out of a sense of duty and to maintain control over his squad. Vallax had helped him out of something even less noble. The Over-Captain simply wanted to show Rhodaan that he was still the better warrior.

The moment passed. Rhodaan regained his feet. The swift intervention of Squad Kyrith and the charge of Squad Vidarna had been too much for the orks to overcome. In short order, the room had been secured. Before Vallax’s chainaxe settled the mekboy, the lesser xenos were already being mopped up.

‘Our target should be behind that bulkhead,’ Vallax announced, gesturing with the still buzzing head of his axe at the left wall. ‘At least if your interpretation of the design of this place is correct.’

Inwardly, Rhodaan bristled under the hostile remark. There was no mistaking Vallax’s intention. If the warboss was on the other side, then the Over-Captain would take credit for its extermination. If the target wasn’t there, then he would lay the blame squarely on Rhodaan’s shoulders. Whichever way things turned out, he would be the loser.

Brother Uhlan stepped forwards, making a cursory examination of the bulkhead door. The half-breed shook his head in disgust as he inspected the crude locking mechanism, a deranged network of analogue locks requiring an equally deranged confusion of keys.

‘Step aside, half-seed,’ Uzraal’s voice snarled across the inter-squad channel. Uhlan didn’t hesitate, diving aside as the other Iron Warrior fired into the locks with a blast from his meltagun. In the blink of an eye, the mechanism was dripping down the face of the door.

Rhodaan turned and regarded the last member of his squad. Uzraal’s armour was spattered in gore, one of his pauldrons twisted and crumpled from some terrific impact. The Raptor favoured his left leg, displaying a noticeable limp as he marched across the chamber.

‘You are late, brother,’ Rhodaan reprimanded him.

Uzraal hesitated, glancing from Rhodaan to Vallax and back again. ‘I apologise, lord captain. I encountered more resistance in my descent than anticipated.’

‘An Iron Warrior makes no excuses,’ Vallax sneered. ‘Captain Rhodaan, you and this man will maintain this position and safeguard our withdrawal. The rest of Squad Kyrith will provide support for my assault against the command deck.’ The Over-Captain’s fingers tightened ever so slightly around the grip of his chainaxe.

Rhodaan bit down on his offended pride. ‘I obey,’ he stated. ‘This position will be held.’

There was a slight swagger in Vallax’s motion as he turned away, the only hint of the victorious gloating that must be dominating the Over-Captain’s thoughts.

‘Malfas! Nazdrav!’ Vallax shouted. Two of his squad snapped to attention, rushing to the bulkhead when their commander gestured at it with his axe. ‘Help Uhlan get that door open!’

Before the Space Marines could converge upon the door and drag it open with their combined strength, the portal burst inwards in a shower of sparks and smoke. The mangled body of an ork crumpled across the fallen door.

Both squads drew back in alarm, levelling their weapons at the doorway, uncertain of what they should expect. Something immense and monstrous loomed out from the smoke.

‘Mission accomplished… brothers,’ the grisly tones of Merihem oozed across the vox. The Obliterator emerged from the smoke, his hideous body rippling with unclean life at each step. Arrogantly, the monster lifted his hand, displaying the decapitated head of a truly gigantic ork. ‘You may tell Andraaz that his opposite number has been subtracted.’ The black eyes in the little pallid face narrowed, lips exposing steel fangs. ‘I have honoured my obligations to the Legion.’

Vallax advanced towards the Obliterator. ‘You are under my command, abomination,’ he said. ‘While you are, you will show Warsmith Andraaz proper respect.’

Merihem stalked forwards, his arm lengthening into a cluster of missile tubes. ‘Respect is earned… not given,’ the monster snarled.

‘Your obligations to the Legion have yet to be satisfied,’ Rhodaan declared. Vallax seemed oblivious to how close Merihem really was to completely losing control. In such close quarters, it was quite possible the Obliterator could kill all of them before the monster could be brought down.

Merihem transferred his angry glare from Vallax to Rhodaan. He hefted the ork head in his hand. ‘The warlord is dead,’ he stated.

‘But the Waaagh! itself has not been broken,’ Rhodaan pointed out. ‘While the aliens yet infest Castellax, it is your duty to destroy them.’

The Obliterator’s armoured body writhed in angry agitation, its hand lengthening into talons that pierced the ork’s head, then split it into sections with a twitch of his fingers. The gory fragments plopped to the floor, smashed into pulp as Merihem marched across them.

‘I can bide my time,’ Merihem promised. He paused beside the body of the mekboy. The missile launcher melted back into the substance of his arm as he reached down to the corpse. There was a cruel grin on the Obliterator’s face as he caressed the confused mess of the ork’s combi-weapon. Before the amazed eyes of the other Iron Warriors, the weapon began to disintegrate under Merihem’s touch, its every particle being absorbed back into the monster’s body. In less than a minute, the combi-weapon was gone. A few seconds later, something very much like it was taking shape on the Obliterator’s forearm.

Vallax stormed past the hulking Merihem, the rest of Squad Vidarna following close behind him. ‘Keep that abomination away from me, Rhodaan,’ he snarled.

Rhodaan smiled at the order. Even if he knew how, he didn’t think he would.

Some opportunities were too good to squander.

What little light filtered down into the cargo bed of the tractor was coloured a dull crimson by the blood dripping into Yuxiang’s eyes. It was the blood of dead men, stacked twelve high and five deep, a mangled monument to the savagery of the orks and the callousness of the Iron Warriors. The stink of mortification threatened to choke the slave, turning each breath into an agony of nausea and disgust. The weight of the bodies piled above him threatened to crush him like a slag-roach.

Squirming through the carrion heap, worming his body between torn fragments of flesh, Yuxiang worked his way towards the light. His passage was eased somewhat by the knife he had discovered hidden in the boot of a dead janissary. One stroke of luck weighed against the hours of horror since his ordeal began.

The light became more vivid as Yuxiang thrust his head from the corpses. Immediately he drew a deep breath, filling his lungs with air that hadn’t been filtered through the stinking wreckage of men. Even the polluted taint of Vorago’s atmosphere was a welcome relief. He closed his eyes, savouring the moment, then drew a second breath. An anxious giggle slipped between his teeth as his mind joined his body in the indulgence.

It was the sound of the disposal crew that snapped Yuxiang back from his idyll, the first tentacles of madness slithering back into the depths of his brain. Quickly he lowered his head and tightened his grip on the knife, watching as the masked corpse-collectors came marching around the back of the slow-moving tractor.

Raising a face made monstrous by his gas mask, one of the disposers made a hurried examination of their surroundings. The tractor had trundled its way deep into the subterranean bowels of Vorago, driving along one of the massive underground roads that connected all of the city’s principal buildings. A great tunnel, fifty metres wide and half again as tall, the passage was formed from great slabs of ferrocrete reinforced with steel columns and braces. Light came from chemical lamps bolted into the ceiling at regular intervals, their illumination flickering in sympathy to the ork barrage, which could be felt even at this depth.

The disposer made his inspection, then raised a gloved hand. ‘All clear,’ he announced, his voice muffled by the mask. ‘No sign of Steel Blood.’

Mention of the gruesome skull-spies of the Iron Warriors caused the other disposer to shudder visibly beneath his plastic duster. He cast a nervous glance over his shoulder, then stared at his comrade. ‘Let’s be quick,’ he said, anxiety robbing his voice of all authority.

The first disposer didn’t answer, instead grabbing hold of a metal handgrip and climbing onto the back step of the slow-moving transport. As soon as he was aboard, he began prodding and poking the heap of bodies, shifting them around as best he could with a length of pipe. As the black boot of a janissary emerged from beneath the pile, he gave a grunt of pleasure. Immediately he fell upon the boot, savagely pulling at it, trying to wrench it free.

‘Body’s gone stiff!’ the ghoul complained.

‘Then break the bones,’ the overseer snarled back, again glancing nervously at the tunnel behind them. ‘Don’t be squeamish.’

The ghoul muttered a curse beneath his breath, then began to viciously pound the corpse’s foot with his pipe. Yuxiang wasn’t sure if it was imagination, but he seemed to hear a dull crunch accompany each blow.

‘This would be easier if you’d let us stop,’ the ghoul snapped, continuing to hammer the foot.

‘You explain why we’re stopped if somebody from processing comes along,’ the overseer growled at him. ‘Now just focus on what you’re doing!’

A cry of triumph came from the scavenger as the boot finally slipped free from the shattered foot. Tucking his trophy under one arm, he began shoving bodies aside to reach the corpse’s other leg. Jubilation turned to rage as he found himself staring at a charred stump that ended well above the knee.

‘Deacon!’ the ghoul cried out. ‘Did you notice any loose legs when we were loading up?’

The overseer spun around, distracted from another of his paranoid inspections of the tunnel. ‘No,’ came the curt answer. ‘Only big bits. No pieces. You should know, you lugged them onto the tractor.’

‘I thought maybe somebody might have chipped in and tossed the small stuff on while I was busy,’ the scavenger cursed.

Deacon’s shrill voice became thin and sharp. ‘Nobody helps disposal. You know that.’

Angrily, the ghoul took the lone boot from beneath his arm and hurled it into the darkness.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Deacon scolded him. ‘Processing Omega could have used that.’

‘To the warp with Processing Omega!’ the scavenger growled back. He raised the heavy pipe, bringing it crashing down into the skull of a body only a few centimetres from Yuxiang. This time there was no imagination when the hidden slave heard bones shatter. ‘I’d like to do that to every one of those sump-vermin!’

Deacon’s expression became frightened behind his mask. Nervously, he spun around, watching the tunnel. ‘Talk like that and they’ll take you to Processing Omega,’ he hissed. ‘The rest of us too, just for being associated with you.’

The ghoul chuckled, the sound made even more inhuman by his mask. ‘Maybe we could all share the same paste-tube,’ he joked.

The blood seemed to drain out of Yuxiang’s body as he heard the two disposers talk, his mind refusing to accept the obscenity the ghouls were discussing. It couldn’t be possible! It was too vile to believe, even of the most monstrous tyrants!

Paste. Processing. No, it couldn’t happen, couldn’t be real! Even the Iron Warriors wouldn’t do such a thing!

Yet with every word that passed between the bickering scavengers, Yuxiang felt his resistance crumble. The monstrosity was true, the Iron Warriors were that inhuman. The fiendish reality was that the lords of Castellax viewed their human slaves as nothing but cattle and, like cattle, they thought nothing of harvesting their flesh. A staple of the rations being issued to the defenders of Vorago, the tubes of protein-paste were created from the bodies of their own dead!

With acceptance of that abominable fact, an even more terrifying realisation seized Yuxiang. The tractor, the cargo he had allowed himself to become a part of, it was on its way to Processing Omega. These weren’t bodies piled around him but slabs of meat destined to be rendered down into core nutrients and proteins, dissolved into shapeless mush to be injected into foil tubes and issued to millions of starving wretches!

Horror overwhelmed fatigue, injury, caution – every handicap that might have restrained Yuxiang in that moment. Like a maddened berserker, the slave thrust himself from the pile of corpses, exploding upon the disposers in a burst of violence that might have impressed an ork. The scavenger on the cargo bed was just turning around when Yuxiang’s knife licked out, raking across his face with an almost psychotic strength. The ghoul shrieked, clutching at his slashed mask and the gory debris bubbling up from behind it. Yuxiang eviscerated him with a back-handed slash and kicked the body from the bed.

The mutilated man slammed into the trailing Deacon, smashing the overseer to the ground. Yuxiang leapt down after his first victim, intent upon claiming his second when the tractor suddenly lurched to a halt.

Spinning around, the slave saw the driver come charging back from the cab, a cudgel-like maintenance tool clenched in his fist. Yuxiang didn’t give the man time to close with him, but instead rushed forwards to meet him. Long accustomed to the brutality of Prefect Wyre and his slavemasters, Yuxiang barely reacted to the blow that crashed against his shoulder as the driver struck at him. It was the only blow the man would strike and he had wasted it.

Again, the knife flashed in Yuxiang’s hand, ripping through the disposer’s duster and stabbing deep between his ribs. The driver screamed into his mask, flailing on the point of the blade. Throwing an arm about the struggling man, Yuxiang drew him closer, burying the blade still deeper in the man’s body.

As soon as he felt the man’s struggles falter, Yuxiang tore his blade free and let the driver collapse. Immediately, he turned and sprinted towards the back of the tractor, intent on finishing the third disposer.

The last of the corpse collectors had finally freed himself from the dying weight of his comrade. The eyes above Deacon’s gas mask became wide with fright as he saw Yuxiang’s blood-coated form looming above him. Desperately, he lifted his hands to ward off the murderous apparition.

‘No! Don’t do it!’ the disposer wailed.

Yuxiang glared down at him, the slave’s face pulling back in merciless contempt. ‘You help them feed us our own dead!’ he shrieked, raising the knife and pouncing on the man.

Displaying unanticipated agility, Deacon rolled away from the maddened slave, darting beneath the bed of the tractor. Cringing against the treads, he shouted at Yuxiang. ‘I was only following orders. I was just doing what I was told to do!’

Yuxiang reached beneath the tractor, slashing at the disposer with his knife. ‘Now I’m telling you to die!’ he yelled.

Deacon recoiled from his attacker, manoeuvring to keep the treads between himself and Yuxiang. ‘I’m sorry!’ he shrieked. ‘We didn’t know you were alive.’ He squirmed away from a savage lunge, retreating towards the underside of the cab. ‘Don’t kill me, I can help you! Stop! Listen to me!’

Yuxiang hesitated, staring hard into the disposer’s eyes. There was no guile there, only raw terror. Nor was that fear directed solely at the man trying to knife him. Even now, Deacon kept glancing anxiously at the tunnel around them. Yuxiang remembered what the man had said about the Steel Blood. Almost against his will, he felt sympathy for the disposer. Even if the man appreciated the horror of what he was doing, there was nothing he could do about it. If he tried, the Iron Warriors would just kill him and put someone else in his place.

Noticing his attacker falter, Deacon continued to plead with him. ‘I can help you,’ he insisted. ‘If you kill me and run off, they’ll look for you. I can keep that from happening.’

‘How?’ Yuxiang asked, suspicion in his tone.

Deacon gestured towards the back of the tractor where one of the dead disposers lay. ‘Put on Zhang’s gear. They’ll think you are him down at Processing Omega.’ Even through the blood coating his features, Deacon could see Yuxiang’s doubtful scowl. ‘It’s the only way,’ he declared. ‘They won’t notice and I won’t tell them. If they found out, I’d be shot for lying to them.’

‘You wouldn’t have a chance to get shot,’ Yuxiang promised, fingering his knife.

Deacon nodded in understanding. ‘However you want it,’ he said. ‘But we have to hurry. The Steel Blood might be around any time. Get into Zhang’s gear.’

‘What about the other man?’ Yuxiang said, gesturing with his knife at the driver.

‘I’ll hide his gear and we can dump the body into the tractor along with Zhang.’ Deacon sighed as he saw the horror that flashed through Yuxiang’s eyes. ‘If they find bodies in the tunnel, they’ll know something happened. Nobody will question a few more kilograms delivered to Processing.’

Feeling sick to his stomach, Yuxiang had to bend to Deacon’s logic. Keeping his eyes on the disposer, he made his way back to the first man he had killed and started to strip the corpse. ‘How will you explain the driver?’

Deacon was already out from under the tractor, frantically unlacing the driver’s boots. ‘I can drive the tractor,’ he said. ‘We’ll report that Wang had a breakdown and fled into the tunnels.’ He paused, shaking his head. ‘It happens a lot to disposers. Takes a certain mentality to do this sort of work. They’ll send a patrol to look for him, but of course they won’t find anything.’ He hesitated again as another thought occurred to him. ‘What will you do after we reach Processing Omega?’

Yuxiang smiled grimly. ‘I’ll stick with you,’ he promised. ‘Just to make sure you stay honest.’

‘You’ll have to see some horrible things,’ Deacon warned. ‘Nobody knows how bad the Iron Warriors are until they’ve seen Processing Omega.’

The comment sent a chill down Yuxiang’s spine, a chill that seemed to spread to his heart. Instead of making him shudder, however, it seemed to pour strength into his veins. ‘Maybe the orks will destroy those monsters,’ he said, then looked up and stared into Deacon’s eyes. ‘Or maybe that job is up to us.’

Deacon froze, a haunted look creeping into his eyes. He wondered if Yuxiang was slipping from lucidity back into madness.

Yuxiang was oblivious to the disposer’s scrutiny. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how well do you know these tunnels?’

The sun’s polluted rays glared down upon the scrap yard wasteland of the ork encampment, seemingly eager to illuminate the carnage unfolding amidst the wreckage. Over-Captain Vallax’s chainaxe screamed as he brought it cleaving through the metre-long blades reaching out for him. In a shower of sparks and smoke, the savaged metal was cleft asunder, falling into the toxic desert sand. The arm behind the industrial shears recoiled as though in pain.

Vallax rounded upon his adversary, a hulking cylinder of steel mounted on a pair of piston-driven hydraulic legs. From either side of the cylinder, a mechanised arm protruded, the left mounting a massive cannon, the right equipped with the torn remains of a set of power shears. The crude semblance of a snarling face had been painted across the cylindrical hull, a long visor-like gash serving as its eyes. Behind the gash, real eyes, beady yellow orbs, stared.

There had been four of the ‘killa kans’ when the Iron Warriors were first ambushed. The machines had been lurking behind a pile of scrap within the ork encampment, seemingly just another jumble of junk. At least until they had lurched upwards in obscene life and started firing on the Space Marines.

That had been their first mistake. With their cannons, the killa kans could have kept the Raptors at a distance, denying them the close-quarters combat at which they excelled. By waiting until their enemies were right on top of them, the xenos had woefully overestimated their own strength.

Malfas had claimed the first of the machines, blowing off one of its legs with a krak grenade and then ripping open its hull with his power fist. The alien operator, a wizened little gretchin that had been hard-wired into the killa kan, shrieked as it was forcibly removed from the cockpit. Its shrieks grew louder when Malfas dashed its brains out against the cylindrical hull.

Uzraal took the second killa kan, his meltagun scorching a hole clean through the hull and causing its promethium-fuelled engine to explode. The wreckage had staggered for a few moments, even managing to fire a few wild shots into the air before it finally slumped over and was still.

The third and fourth machines had become the objectives of Vallax and Rhodaan, the two commanders taking it as a matter of pride to outdo each other. Both of them had warned away the other Iron Warriors, determined to tackle the enemy alone. While Vallax duelled with his foe, picking it apart piecemeal with his chainaxe, Rhodaan scored the hull of his adversary with quick shots from his plasma pistol, trying to angle around to the killa kan’s engine.

Since their withdrawal from the battlefortress, the Iron Warriors had been subjected to almost constant attack. The anticipated confusion and disorder from the death of their warlord had yet to manifest among the orks. Vallax laid it down to a simple cause – the presence of Space Marines in the alien camp. With an enemy in their midst, the orks had a common cause to provide them with cohesion and unity of purpose. Once that cause was eliminated, then the brutes would fall to fighting among themselves to determine the new warboss.

It was a theory that supported the facts, though Rhodaan wasn’t going to let himself and his men be slaughtered just to prove Vallax right. The only course of action was a speedy extraction from the ork camp, but with air supremacy questionable, extraction was something the Raptors would have to attend to on their own. Short, controlled jumps across the ork camp had drained their packs of fuel, forcing them to make the last leg of their retreat on foot, repelling enraged aliens every step of the way.

Rhodaan dived as his enemy finally opened fire with its cannon. The gretchin inside the killa kan was panicking now that half its comrades were destroyed. In that panic, it could only focus on a limited range of action. By finally goading it into using the cannon, Rhodaan could ignore the menace of the power shears, at least for a few seconds.

A few seconds were all he needed. Throwing himself in a long slide that carried him between the killa kan’s stomping legs, Rhodaan fired a blast from his plasma pistol into the underside of the machine’s engine. The point-blank shot quickly bore results, thick black smoke billowing from the engine and little flames flickering from rents in the hull. The killa kan swung around, its shears snapping at Rhodaan as the Iron Warrior withdrew. Blasting a vicious bellow across its loudspeakers, the machine started to pursue him. After a few steps however, the bellows turned to squeals. Flames were now spewing from all over the hull, fires raging inside the killa kan. Pursuit degenerated into frantic flight as the gretchin cooked within its own machine. Its blind panic drove it into a stack of ruined battlewagons which toppled on top of the killa kan, burying it completely.

Rhodaan turned away from his victory to see Vallax bringing down his own enemy, sawing through a hatch on its hull, then driving the blade of the axe deep inside to pulp the gretchin within. Greasy blood and gobs of flesh churned from the exposed hatchway, spattering Vallax’s armour.

The Over-Captain stared across the wreckage, observing the smoke rising from where Rhodaan’s own foe was buried. With an angry shift of his shoulder, he pulled the chainaxe away, glaring sullenly at the whirring blade. ‘Brother Nazdrav,’ he growled across the vox. ‘This weapon is no longer functioning at peak efficiency. You will provide me with yours.’

Rhodaan could see Nazdrav’s hand clench into a fist as his commander issued the order, but the Raptor knew better than to question Vallax. Dutifully, he marched to the Over-Captain’s side and exchanged his sword for the gore-crusted axe.

‘Our ingress to Vorago is two kilometres east,’ Vallax announced across the inter-squad channel, gesturing past the piled wreckage with his new sword. ‘There is an old drainage pipe. We will cut our way in and employ it to re-enter the city.’ The Over-Captain paused, turning to stare at Rhodaan.

‘Captain,’ Vallax resumed. ‘Without the benefit of a jump pack, it seems Brother Merihem has fallen behind. You will provide a rearguard to lead him to the extraction point.’

Rhodaan glared at the Over-Captain, visualising the smirk on Vallax’s scarred face. ‘Warsmith Andraaz will require every Iron Warrior he can get when he goes on the offensive,’ he pointed out.

Vallax nodded. ‘Precisely why I want you to recover Brother Merihem. If you do not feel up to the task, however, I am certain we can explain your failure to the Warsmith.’

‘There will be no need, Over-Captain,’ Rhodaan announced. ‘I will stay here and await Merihem.’

‘Excellent, captain,’ Vallax declared. He waved his arm, motioning the Raptors of Squad Kyrith and Squad Vidarna forwards. ‘When you rendezvous with Merihem, lead him back to the drainage pipe. Unless there is danger of the orks exploiting the breach, we will leave the way open for you.’

Rhodaan watched as the Iron Warriors withdrew beyond the scrap yard, listening to the sounds of gunfire as they fended off isolated pockets of aliens. Vallax’s last words echoed in his mind, taunting him with their barely disguised malice.

Whatever else happened, he was certain of one thing. He was going to need to find his own way back inside Vorago.

CHAPTER XIV

I-DAY PLUS NINETY-FOUR

Taofang scrambled for shelter as the clunky ork fighter swept along the wall, strafing anything that moved. The deranged xenos pilot flew its craft so low that he could see its fanged face leering from behind the glass cowling, its mouth gaping in raucous laughter. Heavy bolters, secured to the fighter’s wings with loops of chain, chattered incessantly, their vibrations making the plane wobble ridiculously as it streaked overhead. By all the rules of logic, there was no way such a crude patchwork of scrap should be able to fly, yet fly it did, well enough to slaughter the men posted along the firebreak.

‘Taofang! Here!’

The janissary spun as he heard Mingzhou call him. He could just see the wild cascade of her crimson hair peaking above the lip of a firing pit. He gave one last desultory glance at the embrasure he had been sprinting towards, then dashed towards the pit. There was a lot a Scorpion could learn from a Jackal, it seemed. Not least of which was that in a crisis it paid to think beyond one’s training.

A second ork fighter came screaming down from the sky, stitching the surface of the firebreak with high-impact rounds. Flecks of ferrocrete exploded from the wall. The effect upon the men caught in the path of the automatic fire was more dramatic. Soldiers jerked and writhed like puppets, flailing obscenely before sprawling across the ground like heaps of bloodied rags.

Bullets smacked at his very heels as Taofang rushed to the pit. Without bothering to even look at what he was doing, he threw himself down into the hole, somehow twisting around in his descent so that he found himself staring upwards when the xenos plane went sailing above the mouth of the pit.

‘If I knew you were going to kick me in the eye, I would have let the orks shoot you,’ Mingzhou complained. ‘And if you want to keep that hand, then you’d better move it.’

Experiencing a pang of guilt, which he recognised as absurd given the situation, Taofang pulled away from the sniper, extracting himself from where he had become tangled in her tunic. The motion brought a gasp of pain from him, a stabbing sensation racing down his arm. It seemed he hadn’t cleared the lip of the pit as smoothly as he had thought.

Reeling back, Taofang felt the cold wall of the firing pit press against him. Through the ferrocrete he could feel the vibrations of a renewed ork barrage, the most vicious to yet assail Vorago. Each tremor sent a fresh twinge of agony rushing down his arm.

Mingzhou was beside him almost at once, her face pinched with concern. She did the incredible, setting down her lasrifle so she could inspect his arm. It was the first time he’d ever seen her out of contact with the weapon. ‘I thought you slept with that thing,’ he joked, but the effort brought his teeth snapping together against a fresh surge of misery.

The sniper scowled at him. ‘Exactly how much do you want this to hurt?’ Her hands closed about his arm, one behind and one above his elbow. An icy chill of anticipation crawled through Taofang’s flesh.

‘Is there a painless option?’ he asked, the last word barely leaving his lips before a blast of excruciation thundered through him. His eyes snapped shut, his mouth clamped tight, biting his tongue. His arm felt like it had been set on fire and then smashed under the treads of a tank.

‘It’s broken,’ Mingzhou announced, her voice a grim whisper. ‘We might be able to fool Nehring, if we’re careful.’

‘Why...’ Taofang shuddered as he opened his eyes, a wave of nausea almost overwhelming him. He closed his eyes and started over. ‘Why fool anybody? I can go to the aid section.’

‘Broken bones aren’t tended at the aid section,’ Mingzhou said, dread creeping into her voice. ‘Serious injuries are taken care of at Processing Omega.’

Taofang started to shrug, then thought better of it. ‘So I go to Processing–’

The sniper pressed her hand against his lips, smothering the rest of his words. Her eyes were like chips of steel as she locked him in an intense gaze. ‘Have you ever heard of anyone coming back from Processing?’ she demanded.

Smiling, Taofang pulled Mingzhou’s hand away. ‘Of course they come back. Probably reassigned to whatever units…’

His gaze strayed from the sniper to the other occupants of the firing pit. He suddenly felt cold all over, staring down at the two dead men, factory slaves who had been chained to the walls of the pit. He only had a good view of one of them, a big black hole burned through his forehead. It was more than he wanted to see. He lifted his gaze back to Mingzhou.

No, Taofang decided, he wasn’t going to ask her how these men died. Knowing wouldn’t do anybody any good.

Castellax bled compassion from men. It was a weakness that could kill quicker than an ash-storm. Survival was the only thing a man had to cling to, survival at any cost. Whatever didn’t help him survive, it was something he had to teach himself to ignore. What good to wonder if someone he didn’t know had been murdered? This was a planet of murder; hundreds died each day just to placate the whims of the Iron Warriors. Who would care about two nameless slaves in a firing pit?

Taofang knew the answer to that question even as he asked it. The Iron Warriors were vicious, brutal monsters who thought nothing of slaughtering their own slaves, but they had very different standards for the human cattle who served them. If one slave killed another, then that was a crime against the property of their masters.

‘Mingzhou,’ Taofang gestured at the dead slaves. ‘We have to get rid of them. Make it look like the orks got them.’ He pushed himself away from the wall. Drawing his knife, he began to attack the chain binding the closest slave to the wall. In his mind, he kept seeing Colonel Nehring and his shock troops appearing and dragging Mingzhou away.

He couldn’t let that happen. Ignoring the pain from his arm, Taofang tried to pry the links apart, to free the corpse from its fastening.

Almost gently, Mingzhou pressed her hands against his chest and pushed him back. ‘They won’t know,’ she assured him. His panic had touched her more profoundly than any words could have. On Castellax, where life was cheap, the rarest thing of all was to fear for any life that wasn’t your own. ‘We’ll be gone before the disposers show up.’

A feeling of intense relief gripped Taofang as he bowed to the woman’s logic. The disposal teams weren’t the sort to brave ork guns. They’d wait until the worst of the barrage was over before sallying from the tunnels to gather the dead. By then, as Mingzhou said, they would be safely away, neither Nehring nor his monstrous masters any the wiser.

‘Post one-thirty-five,’ a nasal voice cried out from above, its words almost drowned out by the roar of artillery and the scream of ork planes. ‘Anyone alive down there?’

Taofang retrieved his lasgun from where he had dropped it, frantically swinging the weapon towards the mouth of the pit. His moment of relief tasted bitter now. Against all precedent, the disposers were ranging along the firebreak in the midst of the barrage. A fine time for the corpse-collectors to grow a spine!

The weight of the lasgun was too much for Taofang to manage with one arm. Unwisely he set the muzzle against his broken arm. Instantly a surge of pain swept through him, the weapon slipping from fingers shocked into helplessness. Mingzhou tried to squirm past him to reach her lasrifle, but between the janissary and the dead slaves, the space was too tight.

A muffled gasp drifted down from the mouth of the pit. A masked face quickly withdrew, darting away before Taofang could try to recover his lasgun. The faintest suggestion of a hurried exchange filtered down into the pit, then another masked figure stared down at them from above, a long hook clenched in his gloved fists.

‘Janissaries,’ the man said, making the word sound like a curse. Before the crippled Taofang could move, the disposer lashed out with the hook, swatting his hand and knocking the lasgun from his fingers. Mingzhou lunged for the hook, but with a twisting motion, the disposer pulled it free from her grip.

‘Did you kill them?’ the disposer demanded, gesturing at the dead slaves.

Taofang glared up at the masked man. ‘Does it matter? You’ll tell Nehring we did and earn yourself a reward. Maybe an extra ration of protein-paste.’

The disposer flinched as Taofang said the last words, lurching back almost as though he had been struck. The eyes behind the lenses of his mask narrowed. ‘What would you do if I didn’t turn you in? Would you go back to your regiment, or would you try to escape?’

Mingzhou sneered up at the disposer. ‘There is no escape.’

The masked man nodded his head. ‘Maybe not, but at least there is a chance to fight back. To die like men, not dogs.’

A cynical laugh hissed through Taofang’s teeth. ‘No revolt succeeds. I’ve put down enough of them to know that.’

‘Success or failure,’ the disposer said. ‘They don’t matter. All that matters is fighting against… them.’

Taofang turned his head, staring into Mingzhou’s eyes. He could read the same thought in her mind. The man wasn’t just a rebel, he was mad. Fighting the Iron Warriors was suicide. No mere mortal could hope to oppose the Space Marines.

‘I can get you away from here,’ the disposer was saying. ‘Load you onto the tractor as though you were dead, take you away into the tunnels.’

Mingzhou nodded slowly, still staring at Taofang. ‘It is better than being turned over to Nehring,’ she said. ‘And we can sneak away as soon as we reach the tunnels,’ she added in a whisper. The suggestion pleased Taofang. He wanted no part in this madman’s impossible crusade and was grateful that Mingzhou shared his sentiment.

‘All right,’ Taofang called up to the disposer. ‘Get us off the firebreak.’

The masked man nodded, lowering the hook back down into the pit. ‘Loop the straps of your weapons over the point. Get the one from the dead men too.’

Taofang laughed at the order. ‘You ask us to trust you, disposer. You ask us to believe in your fight.’ His fingers wrapped about the muzzle of his lasgun as he lifted it from the floor. ‘That is asking a lot. So I think we’ll be keeping our weapons.’

The disposer shrugged. ‘You’ll have to hide them,’ he said. ‘An armed corpse might attract attention.’ He dropped flat as a shell burst somewhere overhead, the firebreak trembling with the impact. ‘No more discussion,’ he snarled. ‘Are you coming or not?’

Taofang hefted his lasgun, shaking it at the masked man. ‘We’re coming,’ he said. He hesitated, wondering if it was wise to continue. The rebel had obviously expected to find only slaves in the pit. Taofang didn’t want him getting any crazy ideas now that he had two armed janissaries under his wing. ‘But we make no promises about fighting the Iron Warriors, disposer.’

‘Yuxiang,’ the masked man introduced himself. ‘And I won’t ask you to fight the Iron Warriors.’ He paused, his body shuddering beneath the slimy sheen of his plastic duster. ‘I won’t need to after you have seen Processing Omega for yourself.

‘After you have been there, you will know the kind of monsters they are. You will know that they must be destroyed.’

The hulking ork chief thumped its chest with the armoured backs of its power claws. The immense masses of cable and steel were surgically attached to the alien’s body at the shoulder, replacing its natural arms entirely. Painted in a bloody shade broken up by rings of black and white checks, the brutal weapons presented a garish contrast to the tattered leather cloak and leggings the beast wore. A bowl-like helmet fitted with massive black horns was crushed down around the brute’s scalp, casting its pushed-in face into shadow.

Rhodaan pressed the activation stud on his chainsword and favoured the ork with a grandiose flourish of his blade. His plasma pistol was dangerously close to overheating after fending off incessant waves of orks for the past two hours. It was becoming dangerously unpredictable. Gazing at the ork chief, he didn’t think he’d trust anything less than a full charge to burn through the brute’s thick skull. Less than that would probably just piss it off.

Killing the warlord hadn’t done much to throw the xenos into confusion. The monsters had been fully capable of mounting another assault against Vorago even as the Raptors were extracting themselves from the battle-fortress. Ork artillery thundered through the sky, ork planes ruled the air, ork warriors rampaged across the desert and assailed the perimeter walls. Alien mobs patrolled the wastes, hunting for the enemies who had penetrated into their headquarters.

How many had Rhodaan killed since Vallax and the others had withdrawn into the pipe? The tabulation icon in his helmet registered two hundred and forty-seven confirmations and another twenty-three probables. To the Iron Warrior, the numbers were unimpressive, mere drops in the bucket. There were millions of orks infesting Castellax, the deaths of a few hundred were nothing. There were only sixty-four Iron Warriors on the entire planet – their deaths had to be sold at only the highest price. Killing the warlord would have had consequence. Dying here, in a scrap yard of scavenged junk, would account for nothing. It would be shameful, a disgrace.

Rhodaan would not die in disgrace. When his spirit was cast into the warp, he would stare at the Great Powers and spit at them. They would know he had died as an Iron Warrior, not Flesh grovelling on its knees in the dirt.

The ork chief clambered down from its perch atop the smashed chassis of a tank, barking its savage laughter as it answered Rhodaan’s challenge. Weedy little gretchin attendants scurried out from hiding to assist the ork as it advanced, activating a crazed array of drives and gears fitted to the shell of its claws. Streamers of golden lightning crackled around the brute’s steel paws, dripping from each chequered talon in rivulets of molten fire.

The Space Marine took one step, then his body jerked back as a high-calibre round smashed into his cuirass. Rhodaan pitched, almost falling, but his psycho-conditioned reflexes turned his sprawl into a roll, throwing him behind cover. A barrage of enthusiastic but erratic fire pelted the ground around him.

Raucous bellows roared from the ork chief’s fanged maw. On the scrap-heaps around it, a pack of grimy aliens bedecked in blue paint and wearing human skulls as trophies maintained a steady rate of fire against Rhodaan’s refuge. The Space Marine chided himself for underestimating the ork chief. The brainless brutes were so often unable to resist the promise of a fight that it was easy to forget that sometimes the monsters could display a crude intelligence.

Rhodaan thumbed a grenade from his belt. Three more and then he would be empty. The Iron Warrior nodded grimly. He would just have to make each one count. Reaching out, he wrenched a piece of pipe from the broken railcar he was using for cover. With deliberate precision, he threw the piece of debris into the darkest path of shadow he could find.

Ork eyesight was notoriously poor and the aliens reacted on instinct rather than strategy. The sound of the pipe clattering across the shadowy ground brought a withering fire chopping down at it, every xenos gun shifting to annihilate the unexpected sound.

It was a momentary distraction, but a moment was all Rhodaan needed. Darting from around the opposite side of the railcar, he braved the fire of the few orks who still had the presence of mind not to forget their original enemy. The thin grenade sailed from the Space Marine’s hand, flying not towards the ork warriors atop the scrap-heaps, but at the base of the junk pile itself.

Rhodaan dove back behind cover, crouching low against the railcar as the grenade detonated. The deafening shriek of tons of metal sliding and scraping together scratched across the scrap yard. There was a dull rumble, the panicked barks of orks, then the upset scrap-heaps came smashing down in a rattling avalanche of rusted metal and shredded steel.

The rolling junk heap smashed against Rhodaan’s shelter, pushing it back a dozen metres, threatening to upset it and smash him into paste beneath the mass of the railcar. Bits and oddments went sailing over the top of the vehicle, crashing to the ground in a clamour of dislodged wreckage. Rhodaan held fast to the side of his refuge, braving the cataclysm he had set into motion.

When the clamour fell still, the Raptor lunged to the top of the railcar, using his demi-organic wings to aid his leap. He scowled down at the sprawling mess of twisted metal, the torn bodies of orks strewn about the jumble. A few of the aliens moved feebly, trying to drag their mangled remains free. Rhodaan clenched his fist tighter about his chainsword and drove down upon the torn survivors.

As he hacked the head from one ork and kicked in the face of another, Rhodaan was suddenly bowled over by a tremendous impact. Thrown across the scrap yard, he landed in an agonised heap, only his superhuman constitution and the amazing durability of his power armour protecting him from immediate death. The object that had smashed into him rolled away, the burned-out hulk of a warbike.

Monstrous, familiar laughter roared at him from across the debris-field. The ork chief wrenched its leg free from a tangle of wires and pipe, glaring at the Space Marine with its beady eyes. Its face was a mash of torn flesh and shrapnel, one power claw sparking and hanging obscenely from its torn shoulder. The ork reached out with its good claw, scooping the drive-shaft of a truck from the ground and hurling it like a javelin at the prostrate Rhodaan.

The Iron Warrior had underestimated this brute, but it had done the same in turn. The ork hadn’t reckoned upon the agility and speed of a legionary. Rhodaan threw himself flat as the drive-shaft went sailing over his head. As soon as it was past, he sprang into a vicious charge, rushing at the hulking alien beast. He could see the savage anticipation in the ork’s eyes, the excitement as it clenched and unclenched its power claw.

At the last instant, before he closed with the ork, Rhodaan activated his jump pack, launching himself over the alien’s head. ‘You had your chance,’ he hissed at the brute. ‘Now you can burn.’

As though understanding Rhodaan’s words, the ork chief didn’t turn to see where the Space Marine was going, but instead stared at the little discs the Raptor had dropped on the ground at its feet. A heartbeat later the incendiary grenades detonated, engulfing the ork in flame.

Screaming, its flesh cooking beneath its skin, the ork chief stubbornly clung to life, staggering blindly around the wreckage in a futile attempt to close upon its killer. The living torch raged and bellowed for more than a minute before a sharp whine whistled across the scrap yard and smacked into the ork’s burning body. Rhodaan was forced to shield his eyes as a brilliant explosion consumed the ork.

Spinning around, clutching the doubtful plasma pistol in his fist, Rhodaan tried to find the location of the shooter who had finished the ork. It was a simple task, the shooter made no effort to hide himself. Lumbering across the scrap yard, the missile launcher gradually flowing back into the substance of his arm, Brother Merihem smiled his steel smile at Rhodaan.

‘A magnificent battle,’ the Obliterator congratulated. ‘A good display of tactics against a more numerical foe and with woefully limited resources.’

Rhodaan glanced at the steaming ruin of the ork chief, then glared into Merihem’s pallid face. ‘How long have you been standing out there watching?’

The Obliterator chuckled, a throaty sound like the gurgle of fuel in a sputtering engine. ‘Long enough,’ he answered. ‘The Legion does not tolerate weakness. It is corruption and corruption must be cut away… or buried somewhere it can be forgotten. Is not that the axiom of the Iron Warriors?’

If his pistol had a full charge, Rhodaan believed he would have melted the smirk from Merihem’s face. It was as well the weapon was compromised. The Obliterator might still prove useful to him.

‘You were left behind,’ Rhodaan said. ‘Over-Captain Vallax thought you were weak.’

Merihem chuckled again, raising an immense talon of metal and meat. ‘And he left you behind, Captain Rhodaan.’

Rhodaan shook his head. ‘I disagreed with him. I stayed to wait for you, to lead you back.’

The Obliterator’s steel smile grew. ‘He left you behind,’ the monster repeated. ‘You were meant to die out here with the abomination.’ Merihem’s chest bubbled and flowed, pulling back until it exposed the corroded remains of a cybernetic skull. A pseudopod of meat and plasteel extruded from the Obliterator, extending the skull towards Rhodaan.

‘One of Oriax’s Steel Blood,’ Merihem explained. ‘The Fabricator builds such amusing things. He calls these “Steel Blood” because there is a little of himself in each one. I found slaughtering orks tedious, so when I chanced upon this little spy, I distracted a segment of my consciousness by dissecting it. You won’t believe the things it has seen.’

To prove his words, the Obliterator reached his talon over and activated the Steel Blood. The crystal eyes in its sockets glowed back into life, its jaws clacking together. From one of the eyes, a beam of light shone, projecting a holographic image onto the ground. Rhodaan watched in fascination as the skull’s recording played out, displaying Vallax and the other Raptors creeping down the pipe.

At the first junction, the Iron Warriors stopped. Vallax began issuing instructions to the others. Brother Baelfegor started to protest, but some sharp reprimand brought him back in line. As Rhodaan watched the Space Marines start planting melta-charges against the walls of the pipe, he could well imagine the argument Vallax had used. There was a chance the orks could use the pipe to infiltrate Vorago and bypass the defences. Therefore, the way had to be shut. The men of Squad Kyrith had no choice but to obey.

The Steel Blood withdrew before the final, fiery detonation collapsed the pipe and brought the street above crashing down. It didn’t matter at that point. Rhodaan had seen enough.

‘You see, captain,’ Merihem laughed. ‘We are both orphans, cast aside to die in disgrace and shame. How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel like your existence is a lie? Does it make you feel like an outcast? An abomination?’

Rhodaan clenched his fist. ‘Vallax will pay,’ he vowed.

Merihem’s oily chuckle bubbled from the speakers in his armour. ‘Revenge? What a delicious thought, captain. It can sustain a man when all else has crumbled into ash...’

‘Let me be, monster,’ Rhodaan snarled at the Obliterator. He hefted his chainsword, but before he could strike an undulating coil of metal whipped out from Merihem’s wrist and wound itself around his arm.

‘I had considered killing you, captain,’ Merihem said, tightening the coil until Rhodaan could feel ceramite plates begin to crack. ‘But you have persuaded me to let you live. Revenge is too rare a delicacy to let go to waste. It is something we share in common.’ The coil of metal retracted back into Merihem’s body, releasing the Raptor.

‘Shall we go?’ the Obliterator asked, extending his talon.

‘Where?’ Rhodaan demanded, rubbing at his arm, trying to feel if any of the armour plates had indeed cracked.

‘Back to Vorago,’ Merihem said. His chest bubbled and boiled, withdrawing the crushed Steel Blood back into his body. ‘There’s another way in. As I told you, you wouldn’t believe the things Oriax’s spy has seen.’

Rhodaan’s eyes narrowed behind the lenses of his helmet. ‘You also said we share a need for revenge,’ he said, his tone full of challenge. ‘Who do you want revenge against?’

The Obliterator turned towards him, all joviality draining from his tiny face. Merihem’s eyes were pits of blackness as he stared down at Rhodaan and answered the Iron Warrior’s question.

‘I haven’t decided yet.’

Warsmith Andraaz leaned against the back of his crystalline throne, his armoured fingers drumming against the arms in a steady tattoo of brooding malignance. His gaze lingered over the projected image of Vorago and the alien army laying siege to the city, studying the tallies and figures scrolling alongside the image. Casualties among the Flesh were becoming critical, draining manpower from the remaining production lines nuzzled close to the Iron Bastion in the heart of the city. Ammunition stores were being depleted at an unacceptable rate. Food stores were in such a decline that quarter rations would soon be imposed on all non-specialised personnel. Water, however, was even scarcer. Reclamation procedures had been intensified, but there was only so much that could be done to recycle the existing supply.

Most troubling to Andraaz, however, had been the losses to the Iron Warriors. The sacrifice of a million Flesh was nothing to him, but the loss of a single legionary represented a slight against his own prestige and that of the Third Grand Company. So far, two Space Marines had been lost fighting on the walls, Captain Gamgin had executed a suicide attack and Admiral Nostraz had fallen victim to an accident in one of the flak towers while inspecting the missile batteries embedded in the roof. Each was a loss the lords of Castellax could ill afford.

Now, to the list of casualties, Andraaz was forced to add Captain Rhodaan and Brother Merihem. Lost in the fruitless attack against the ork battlefortress, an assault that was supposed to buy the Iron Warriors the time they needed to recover from the rapid ork advance and marshal the resources necessary to go back on the offensive.

‘At the current rate of attrition, what are the best estimates for resistance?’ Andraaz growled, his eyes never leaving the holographic projection.

Sergeant Ipos didn’t need the Warsmith to look at him to know the question belonged to him. ‘If losses are maintained at present levels, the Flesh will endure for another three months,’ Ipos stated. ‘However, Dread Lord, we must anticipate increased casualties from fatigue and distress when we reduce rations.’

‘What do you anticipate?’ Skintaker Algol asked. The slavemaster’s cloak had grown frayed and tattered in the fighting, his cringing retinue scurrying about him trying to mend the gruesome raiment.

‘Between a ten and twenty-five per cent increase,’ Ipos declared. ‘Those are losses strictly from debility and illness. There is no ready formula for determining how many will be lost to enemy fire from reduced alertness and stamina.’

Vallax’s hair darkened into an almost black hue, his face curling in contempt. ‘If we depend on the Flesh, then we deserve to be defeated,’ he said. ‘Victory will not come from them. It will come from us. We have to strike at the enemy!’

‘We have heard this argument before,’ Morax protested, pointing a thick finger at the Over-Captain. ‘Your last raid cost us Captain Rhodaan and Merihem, not to mention four assault boats and over a dozen of my fighters. And to what effect? The orks are still on our doorstep, as belligerent as ever!’ The Skylord snapped his fingers and a pasty-faced officer from the Air Cohort stepped out from the shadow of a support column. The human bowed deeply before his master, presenting him with a gilded folio.

‘This is the latest aerial reconnaissance from Dirgas,’ Morax announced. ‘Gathered at extreme risk to my remaining observation ships.’ He opened the folio, spreading the parchment illuminations for the other Iron Warriors to examine. His thumb pressed down against one section of illuminated text in particular. ‘This is what is most important to us,’ he declared. ‘The xenos are building another battlefortress, bigger than anything we have yet seen. Everyone in this room has fought orks before. No warlord would trust a subordinate with a weapon bigger than his own.’ Morax sneered at Vallax. ‘Biglug was never here,’ he said. ‘The bastard was down in Dirgas the whole time building this monstrosity!’

Vallax glared back at the Skylord. He wondered how long Morax had known about this, how long he had known the raid against the battlefortress was a fool’s errand. Already, he could guess the plan Morax would propose to the Warsmith. The orks would undoubtedly try to bring the new battlefortress to Vorago. Every kilometre of the journey, the machine would be vulnerable to the Castellax Air Cohort and the planes Morax had been so conservative about deploying earlier in the campaign. The glory of driving back the orks would belong to the Skylord.

The ghoulish servitor acting as Fabricator Oriax’s proxy approached the table, the lenses of its eyes focusing on Morax’s data-scrolls. The machine-man’s speaker crackled as its distant master reacted to the illuminated transcripts. ‘This explains intelligence gathered by the few operational Steel Blood yet within Dirgas,’ the mechanised voice declared. ‘Biglug must indeed be there and he must intend to use this new battlefortress to deliver the final blow against Vorago.’

Morax folded his arms across his chest, revelling in the approbation of his chief detractor among the Third Grand Company’s hierarchy. The servitor’s next transmission, however, turned the Skylord’s blood cold.

‘Only the presence of Biglug could explain the stores of aviation fuel the xenos are storing in Dirgas,’ the servitor stated. ‘No other warboss would be powerful enough to restrain so many of the xenos squadrons. There is only one conclusion to be reached. The warlord is forcing a mass concentration of his air power to provide his land fortress with protection when it leaves Dirgas.’

Vallax wasted no time pouncing on the opportunity Oriax’s statement presented. ‘It is vital then that we strike while Biglug is still in Dirgas. A lightning raid against the battlefortress. Kill the warlord before he leaves the city!’

‘We have already tried that…’ Morax started to object, but fell silent when Andraaz lifted his hand.

The Warsmith scowled at his bickering commanders. It was useful to keep them at each other’s throats, but there were times when the consequent lack of cohesion was troublesome. ‘An attack against the battlefortress would be costly and with no guarantee of catching the warlord,’ he said. ‘The surest way of destroying the machine would be through aerial bombardment. Even if the warlord were absent, loss of the battlefortress would impose a delay in its attack plans.’

‘What about the ork planes?’ Ipos wondered.

Andraaz stared at Vallax. ‘The orks won’t be able to fly without fuel,’ he said. ‘It will be the role of the Raptors to strike the fuel stores Oriax has located. Eliminate the fuel and we ground the xenos planes. If the orks wait to stockpile more, then we gain the time we need. If they rush ahead, then they leave their battlefortress exposed to Morax’s bombers.’

The Warsmith raised one of his claws, shaking it at Vallax. ‘You have been granted a rare opportunity to redeem yourself, Over-Captain. Do not squander it.’

Vallax bowed before his overlord. ‘I will honour my duty, Dread Lord.’

‘You will do more than that,’ Andraaz warned. ‘You will return to the Iron Bastion in triumph.’ The Warsmith’s voice dropped into a menacing growl. ‘Triumph, Vallax, or do not come back at all.’

Brother Uhlan was uneasy as he prowled the halls of the Iron Bastion. The blood of one mameluke who strayed too close to the legionary still dripped from the Raptor’s gauntlet, each drop being sucked down in the proto-synthetics which covered the upper halls. Marching across the fur-like morass of plastic fibres was like gliding across the top of a pond, conveying a peculiar deception of weightlessness. A Space Marine, conditioned not merely to function but to fight in zero-gravity environments, didn’t find the sensation very discomfiting, but the Flesh, without the benefit of such training, with their fragile little bodies of meat and superstition, they would find the effect debilitating. The coverings were one of the more subtle safeguards in place within the Iron Bastion to defend against a slave revolt. No Flesh, however determined and insane, would be able to withstand the effects of the proto-synthetics.

Flesh, however, was not Uhlan’s concern at the moment. Not even the ork hordes were foremost in his thoughts. His worries were focused firmly upon Iron. Namely upon Over-Captain Vallax.

Intriguing against the Over-Captain had been reckless, Uhlan appreciated that now. Vallax had exploited his authority and position to dispose of Rhodaan. The hopes the half-breed had pinned upon Rhodaan had perished with the captain. They were buried with the ambitious officer out there in the wasteland, forgotten and forsaken on the battlefield.

The hours since returning to Vorago had given Uhlan time to think about his position and his future. He had dared aspire to ambitions beyond the reach of a half-breed Raptor. Indeed, he had clung so fervently to those ambitions that he had even argued with Vallax against demolishing the escape route behind them. That had been a mistake. Uhlan had seen the suspicion in Vallax’s eyes.

No, ambition was forgotten now. What was uppermost in Uhlan’s thoughts was survival. Rhodaan’s fate had given him a very clear example of how Vallax disposed of his enemies – at least once they were no longer useful. At the moment, Uhlan was trying very hard to find a way to be useful to his Over-Captain.

The emaciated servitor surged out from a niche cut into the ferrocrete wall, its chassis deeply engraved to match the murals etched across the walls. Its cadaverous face stared blankly from its brazen setting, scenes of battle stained across its features. One of its metal armatures extended across the corridor, blocking the way. It was a feeble obstacle, Uhlan could have snapped the arm in half without breaking a sweat. Doing so, however, would send alarms racing through the entire tower. The halls leading up to the Chamber of the Speaker were lined with such sentinels. Those higher up were better armed and even more cunningly concealed, designed not merely to challenge an errant Iron Warrior, but to eliminate him.

Uhlan had no need to go further up the hall. The first servitor was the only one he needed to seek out. Staring into the lenses glowing from the servitor’s eye sockets, the Raptor intoned the cumbersome equations of a Lingua-Technis code. By way of response, the servitor shuddered, almost as if in the grip of a fit. When the episode passed, it leered ahead, lenses scanning the Iron Warrior’s face. Uhlan could not shake the impression that it was more than a mere machine, that a cruel intelligence now stared at him from behind the servitor’s face.

‘Brother Uhlan,’ the servitor’s vox-caster crackled. ‘You have something to report?’

Uhlan nodded his head. ‘Yes, Fabricator Oriax,’ he said. ‘Over-Captain Vallax has been given a mandate from the Warsmith. He is to lead a raid against the enemy in Dirgas.’

‘This much is already known to me,’ Oriax’s voice stated.

‘Yes, of course, Fabricator,’ Uhlan said. ‘But what you do not know is that Over-Captain Vallax feels there is no hope of achieving our objective. Not without assistance.’ The Iron Warrior hesitated before continuing, wondering even before he spoke if he had assumed too much. ‘I have been of use to you before, Fabricator. You have said that while I function I have purpose. Vallax believes his mission to be a suicide run and is making his plans accordingly. With the proper support – your support, Fabricator – he might…’

A crackle of static hissed through the servitor’s speaker. ‘Humility, Uhlan Half-breed? No contempt from the Space Marine who stands proud in battle against the Fabricator, buried in his sanctum with his machines? Your need must indeed be great.’

Uhlan coughed, choking on the rage boiling up inside him. Yes, he was a half-breed, inferior to those crafted from pure gene-seed, but he was at least an Iron Warrior. Oriax was nothing but a metal maggot, a toad chewing at the roots of the Iron Bastion. It offended the very core of his being to grovel before such a creature. Yet he knew he must grovel if he was to avoid a useless death on the funeral pyre Vallax was preparing.

‘The Third Grand Company will be ill-served by the useless sacrifice of its Raptors,’ Uhlan said.

‘Did you know that Captain Rhodaan has returned?’ Oriax abruptly asked. ‘Climbed through an old service catacomb in the Epsilon sector. Can’t imagine how he found it.’

The news sent Uhlan’s mind racing. If Rhodaan was alive then the entire situation might change. Warsmith Andraaz might favour him ahead of Vallax, put him in command of the raid. The realisation only brought more bitterness in Uhlan’s heart. Rhodaan was sure to use his new position to avenge himself on Vallax, and the best way to conceal that revenge was to send the rest of the Faceless to share the Over-Captain’s doom. Uhlan had dared to manipulate Rhodaan against Vallax in hopes of bringing down his hated commander. Now he would share in that destruction.

The servitor retracted back into the niche. ‘Tell Vallax I will support him,’ Oriax said. ‘I will send something to guide him to my sanctum.’

Uhlan stared in disbelief at the servitor. In all his centuries, he had never heard of anyone being invited into the Fabricator’s sanctum. Perhaps Warsmith Andraaz had seen it, but certainly no other Iron Warrior. At once, Uhlan appreciated the magnitude of the aid Oriax was offering.

‘I will tell him,’ Uhlan vowed, clamping his fist to his chest.

The servitor’s lenses shifted in their sockets, fixing him in a mechanical stare. ‘Impress upon Vallax the urgency of his situation. The return of Rhodaan changes everything. If he accepts failure, then he abandons the glories of victory to others. You would do well to remind him of this.’

The lenses seemed to sparkle, the voice from the vox-caster dropped to a whisper. ‘Your fate is joined with that of Squad Vidarna, Brother Uhlan. All of you are creatures of Vallax in Captain Rhodaan’s mind. Do not forget that.’

It was on Uhlan’s tongue to argue with the Fabricator, to accuse him of manipulating the Iron Warrior into this position. Playing the two officers against one another had been a strategy Oriax had encouraged. Now that Uhlan was caught between the two, it seemed he was being left to bear the consequences of failed intrigues.

Uhlan left his outburst unspoken, however. He could sense the change that had settled upon the servitor. That feeling of malignant intelligence was absent. Oriax was no longer in communion with his machine. Arguing with it now would be like arguing with his bolter.

Angrily, the Iron Warrior turned and withdrew along the proto-synthetic floor. He would tell Vallax of the Fabricator’s offer, if for no other reason than the simple fact that Oriax was right. Uhlan was bound to Vallax now. Whatever doom awaited the Over-Captain, it was waiting for his Raptors too.

CHAPTER XV

I–DAY PLUS ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR

Over-Captain Vallax marched along the deserted corridor, the sensors in his helmet stifling the drone of sirens and the thunder of shells. It was a testament to the enormous calibre of the enemy guns that any sound at all could penetrate far enough to reach the bunker. Vallax wasn’t certain if such an achievement was impressive or absurd. Anything of such size would be almost immobile. When the time came for the guns to be dealt with, the enemy wouldn’t be able to move them somewhere safe.

The thought brought a curl to Vallax’s scarred lip. As though anywhere was safe for an enemy of the Iron Warriors.

Vallax’s hair bristled as raw hate crackled through his brain, a peculiar psycho-reactive mutation inflicted upon him by the baleful emanations of the warp and its denizens. Vallax rarely suffered such an irritant for long, but Rhodaan had proven himself not without a certain aptitude. He had not maintained his rank of Over-Captain for two thousand years by disposing of irritants while they were still useful to him. Still, Captain Rhodaan’s usefulness was no longer equal to the menace he represented. Rhodaan had acquired quite a reputation of his own in the recent campaign against the hrud. Vallax didn’t like subordinates who possessed too much renown.

The Iron Warrior glared at the ferrocrete walls, then fixed his gaze on the pseudo-mechanical flesh-drone acting as his guide. The thing was enough to nauseate even an Iron Warrior, a loathsome hodgepodge of skin and steel, cable and bone. Fabricator Oriax never assembled two of his flesh-drones quite the same way. But there was one thing the Techmarine never failed to implement. Each flesh-drone still had a recognisable face stitched onto it somewhere, a face that continually writhed in silent screams. It was said that Oriax never completely lobotomised the subjects of the conversion process, that he left just enough self-awareness in the flesh-drones for them to experience the full horror of their new existence while their mechanical programming made it impossible for them to escape it.

Even among the Iron Warriors, Fabricator Oriax was regarded with a measure of caution, a wariness that stopped just short of being outright fear. The Techmarine was an enigma to the rest of the Third Grand Company and had been so for millennia. Maimed in the crystal-swamps of Tarsis IX, Oriax was more machine than flesh, his mind driven by the strange impulses of steel, not the demands of honour and pride. Since the conquest of Castellax, the Fabricator had rarely stirred from the bunker complex beneath the Iron Bastion, and then only at the command of Warsmith Andraaz. Visitors to the bunker were even more rare.

Vallax, however, was a special case. If not for him, Oriax would never have left the crystal-swamps. The Techmarine owed his life to the Over-Captain, a fact which Vallax had exploited to his benefit many times in the past. Now, it was time for him to do so again.

The flesh-drone hesitated outside a massive titanium bulkhead, the vox-caster built into its chest spitting and crackling as it transmitted a steady stream of binary. Vallax knew the bunker was rife with traps to safeguard Oriax’s seclusion. Without the flesh-drone’s transmissions, nothing alive could penetrate the Fabricator’s sanctum.

With a growled rumble, the bulkhead door retreated into the floor, allowing Vallax and his guide to enter a vast inner chamber, its most prominent feature being the forest-like confusion of pipes rising from its floor and vanishing into the ceiling far overhead. A riotous array of pict screens flickered from every corner of the room, presenting a thousand different views of Castellax, from the dark depths of the promethium mines to the jagged spires of the Iron Bastion and the decayed sprawl of Vorago, the city’s outskirts now further despoiled by the marauding orks.

Vallax’s hand shifted to his pistol holster as he saw his own visage fill one of the monitors. His hypno-trained senses immediately estimated from what location such a view of himself would be afforded. Spinning around, he found himself staring into the skeletal face of one of Oriax’s grisly spies, the floating skulls he called his ‘Steel Blood’. The followers of the False Emperor employed similar constructs, but Vallax doubted they had the dedication to craft them the way Oriax did. There was the stink of the warp about the Steel Blood, a daemonic taint that no mortal could experience without a twinge of uneasiness. It was a sensation too elusive for understanding, like something that could be seen only out of the corner of the eye but which hid itself when viewed straight-on.

While he glared at the Steel Blood, the metal jaw of the floating skull snapped open, exposing the metal meshwork of a vox-caster. ‘Salutation and honour to Over-Captain Vallax. Deathsmith of the Faceless. Scourge of the Pox-pits. Brother Iron Warrior.’

The Iron Warrior brushed past the floating skull, ignoring the Steel Blood’s synthesised praises. ‘Show yourself, Oriax!’ Vallax’s voice boomed through the forest of cables and pipes. ‘I did not descend twenty levels and forsake the call of battle to waste words with your mindless tinker-toys.’ The Space Marine marched deeper into the tangle of machinery and monitors. ‘I am not the Warsmith, Oriax. I do not suffer proxies.’

In a single fluid motion, Vallax swung about, drew his pistol and sent a single shot slamming into the centre of the Steel Blood’s cranium. The floating skull exploded in a burst of sparks, shards of metal and shreds of organics flying in every direction.

‘Your marksmanship is as good as when you patrolled the citadels of Olympia,’ a shrill, mechanical voice reverberated from the darkness.

‘It is better,’ Vallax said, his armoured thumb rubbing across the smoking barrel of his weapon. The optics of his helmet adjusted to filter away the chemical haze that filled Oriax’s sanctum, but the compounds were so complex as to baffle even the engineering of the Legion’s artificers. His anger rising, Vallax marched in the direction of the voice. ‘Reveal yourself, Oriax. I want to look at what I’m speaking to.’

The chamber shuddered as fans suddenly churned into life, drawing away the obscuring gases and chemicals that enabled the sanctum to retain its preternatural darkness. Vallax’s optics immediately adjusted to the natural gloom, but there was no sign of anyone where the voice had spoken.

‘Is this better?’ Oriax’s voice came from the same place, rising from a vox-caster fitted to one of the pict screens. A moment later, the same words echoed from a spot some fifteen metres to Vallax’s left. The Iron Warrior spun around, glaring through the darkness. This time there was something to reward his gaze. Nestled amidst a jumble of machinery and cogitator cabinets, their blinking lights and flashing diodes casting a diabolic glow about his body, was Fabricator Oriax.

The Techmarine presented a ghastly shape, devoid of the symmetry of rational design. His body was a mass of cables and gears fused about the remnants of a man. A confusion of spidery steel arms jutted from his figure at every angle, scrabbling at the consoles arrayed about him with dazzling speed. A massive metal claw arced upwards from his back and hung menacingly above his head, fiddling with an array of rune-boards suspended from the ceiling. A set of pincers, electricity crackling between their steel talons, projected from his right shoulder, hovering about a table resting at the Techmarine’s side. Vallax felt a moment of shock when he saw that the pincers appeared to be assembling another Steel Blood – possibly to replace the one he had so noisily destroyed. Efficiency, or anticipation? Vallax wasn’t sure which answer was more disturbing.

‘You should count yourself favoured, Over-Captain,’ Oriax’s distorted metal voice declared. ‘There are few I allow to see me as I am.’ The Techmarine’s limbs paused in their assorted duties, each curling back to point for a moment at the body to which they were attached. At the core of that trash-heap of cables and gears was a cuirass of ancient armour from the time of the Great Crusade, the skull-helm symbol of the Iron Warriors engraved across the breast. Staring from above the symbol was an iron visage every bit as inhuman and forbidding, a clutch of pale, scarred flesh surrounding a lipless gash of mouth and a torn stump of nose. A brace of mechanical eyes burned with crimson light from the pits of Oriax’s mangled face.

Vallax felt no horror at Oriax’s condition, only a sneering contempt. There was a good reason why the Techmarine hid himself away and tried to guard himself with a cloak of mystery. The brutal fact was there hadn’t been much left of him after the crystal-swamps, less than even a normal man; much less than a Space Marine.

‘I did not come here to waste time gawking at freaks,’ Vallax growled. ‘Your surrogate convinced the Warsmith to allow me to lead the assault.’

‘You find that prospect daunting?’ The synthesised voice made it impossible to tell if there was a mocking tone behind the words.

‘I worry only that Captain Rhodaan will betray his own duty,’ Vallax snarled at the Fabricator. Rhodaan’s return to the Iron Bastion had been something of a shock to him, but even more so had been the way Andraaz had responded to him. Rhodaan had been placed on an equal footing with Vallax in planning out the raid, given co-command in all but name. It was a final humiliation for the Over-Captain and one in which he read the seeds of his own ruin. Merely by surviving, Rhodaan had turned the Warsmith against Vallax. Andraaz might have overlooked treachery, but he would never forgive failure. ‘The success of my mission depends upon Rhodaan’s diversion against the ork headquarters. The vermin must believe that their command centre is our target, not the fuel dump.’

The Techmarine’s claw lowered so that it could point at Vallax, shaking at him like the reproving finger of an Olympian combat instructor. ‘Rhodaan won’t know his is a diversion unless you tell him. Lead the upstart to believe his is the real attack. Provide him with enough janissaries to cover his assault. Enough serf-meat to keep the orks occupied.’

Under his helmet, Vallax’s lips pulled back in a cunning smile. ‘Leave him ignorant of the true purpose of the mission,’ he mused. ‘But Rhodaan is no fool, he will question the deployment of my own squad as a diversionary force. He may guess the deception and undermine me.’ Vallax’s hand tightened into a fist as unpleasant memories recurred to him. ‘He has done it before,’ the Over-Captain admitted, thinking of Rhodaan’s ambush of the hrud.

Oriax’s laugh was like a burst of electronic interference. ‘You will not deploy anywhere near the blockhouse, or anywhere that might give Rhodaan warning. When the time for action comes, your squad will come to my sanctum.’ The entire console around the Techmarine shifted with him as he turned to face a particular portion of wall. At an unspoken command from the Fabricator the entire wall sank into the floor, exposing a second chamber.

Even through his armour, Vallax felt a chill and knew it to be a cold born not of flesh but of spirit, a psychic frost that betokened some great effort of witchery. Warily, he came forwards to peer into the inner room. He gasped at what he saw.

‘Each wall possesses thirteen facets, adorned with special psycho-reactive alloys found only within the Eye of Terror,’ Oriax boasted as Vallax stared at the sharply angled walls. At the base of each facet, arrayed like the spokes of a wheel, were thirteen naked things chained to stout pillars. ‘The pillars are of wraithbone plundered from the vanquished craftworld of X’amot,’ the Fabricator said, but Vallax was more interested in the beings bound to those pillars rather than the columns themselves. At first glance, the things might have been mistaken for humans of the most degenerate and malformed stock, but a second look made it apparent that whatever lurked inside those twisted bodies was anything but human.

At the centre of the chamber, its surface etched in cabalistic symbols and framed with a ring of psi-circuitry, was a great disc of bloodwood. The black hue of the disc gave evidence that the timber had recently been fed, soaking up the spirit-energy of its victims. For such a mass of bloodwood, Oriax must have had at least a hundred ‘donors’. Murder on such a scale didn’t impress Vallax. What did impress him was the fact that he recognised this apparatus and could guess its purpose.

‘You’ve recreated the Daemonculum,’ Vallax said, glancing away from the inner chamber to stare at Oriax’s corpse-like face.

‘I’ve improved upon it,’ Oriax corrected him. ‘The sorcerers of the pesedjet are too mired in superstition to truly understand such power.’ The Fabricator’s claw stretched out, gesturing at the bloodwood platform. ‘Bring your squad to me, Vallax. Stand at the heart of the Daemonculum. I shall propitiate the thirteen daemons and harness their energies to transmit you where you need to be.’ Again, the static-laughter crackled through the sanctum. ‘Unless Rhodaan has developed a warp-eye, he will never guess your purpose or your objective.’

Vallax nodded slowly. ‘This will bring great glory to both of us,’ he said. ‘The Warsmith will be impressed and will reward me greatly. You will not find me ungenerous, Oriax.’

The Fabricator’s many arms spread outwards in a great spiral, his mechanical eyes glowing in the darkness. ‘It is enough that I help the brother who saved my life. That is all the reward I ask.’

Warily, the Space Marines of Squad Vidarna, Vallax’s infamous Faceless, stepped out onto the bloodwood platform. Their Over-Captain gestured with his chainsword, motioning Oriax to begin. The other Raptors dropped into a wary crouch, their weapons at the ready. Orders or no, they were uneasy about the Daemonculum and alert for the danger they sensed exuding from the bound daemons and the wraithbone pillars.

A burst of binary crackled from Oriax’s mouth. In response, a dozen Steel Blood whirled across the massive chamber, joining the Raptors upon the platform. Another burst of binary and several of the Fabricator’s flesh-drones lumbered out into the room. The servitors had been specially built for this task, equipped with ghastly mechadendrites that curled upwards from their backs to arc downwards over their shoulders. Each mechadendrite ended not in a hand, but in a great shackle of bronze. In their semi-organic natural arms, each flesh-drone bore an iron knife and a brass bowl.

Struggling in the grip of each set of shackles were the pathetic remains of human slaves. Like the servitors, they too had been especially prepared for their function. Legs and fingers had been surgically amputated to limit resistance, tongues had been removed to silence outcries that might disrupt the cadence of incantations. In stark contrast, drugs had been administered to heighten awareness in the terrified minds of the slaves, stimulants injected into their veins to strengthen vitality and frustrate the physical toll of terror on their bodies. It was important to the working of the Daemonculum that the sacrifices experience the magnitude of fear but be incapable of perishing from fright. Their deaths had another, more purposeful design.

A cabal of servitors surrounded the bloodwood discs, their armatures wrapped in heavy cloaks adorned with a profusion of archaic symbols – the arcane trappings of the pesedjet. Each servitor grasped a black candle in its claws, a candle rendered from human fat and with a wick that was only partially corporeal, having been exposed to the energies of the warp.

Oriax flicked a claw and the robed cabal began to intone a sibilant chant, a tonality that no human voice could arrange and no human mind could conceive. The sound of the immaterium was in that chorus, the whisper of empty spaces and endless darkness, the call of the hungry void. With another flick of the Fabricator’s claw the flesh-drones continued their march, each drawing itself before one of the thirteen facets. They turned so that they each faced a wraithbone pillar and the daemon bound upon it. As the slaves bound in their shackles struggled futilely in their grip, the flesh-drones stood still, obedient and waiting.

The chorus rose, now invoking the names of the god-daemons of the warp, the primordial forces beyond reality, the eldritch powers of Chaos.

In perfect, mechanised synchronisation, the flesh-drones raised knives and bowls. While the naked slaves tried to scream with the stumps of their tongues, the knives flashed out across their throats. The blood of thirteen murdered mortals sloshed into the bowls, some arcane energy magnifying the sound into the roar of a cataract. The stink of blood spilled across the Daemonculum and the ethereal cold vanished, switching in an instant to a hellish, sweltering blaze.

The daemons stirred in their bindings, striving to reach the bowls. Again, the flesh-drones froze, waiting upon the cadence of the cabal, oblivious to the maddened thrashings of the daemons only a few metres away. Curses and maledictions spilled from the fanged maws of the daemons, threats and entreaties, promises and pleadings for the placation of their abominable hunger.

Only when the choir reached a certain point in the incantation did the flesh-drones act. Sconces set into the roof began to spray a pungent incense into the chamber, a smoky vapour that streamed everywhere in only a few moments but, with unnatural trepidation, refused to stray across the bloodwood disc. Obscured within the smoke, the flesh-drones raised their offerings to the daemons. Unable to resist, the daemons lapped up the gory liquid with long, wolfish tongues, slurping noisily at their hideous repast.

It was some minutes before the daemons had glutted themselves, but the delay was inconsequential now. By accepting the offering when they had, the daemons bound themselves to the ritual, subjected their power to that of the Daemonculum.

A sickly yellow light slowly began to rise about the bloodwood platform. Through the glow, Vallax could be seen snarling orders at his Raptors, demanding their courage and restraint. It was the last view Oriax had of the Iron Warriors. In the next instant the glow engulfed them all, rising to blinding intensity.

All at once, the sickly light winked out, restoring the chamber to its normal, dingy illumination. Where the light had shone, there was nothing but the bloodwood disc. Five Iron Warriors and a dozen Steel Blood had vanished, evaporated from reality in the blink of an eye.

Oriax pivoted in his dais, stabbing a servo-arm at one of the switches on his command console. A section of wall within his sanctum slid aside, exposing a tiny observation room. From the dark space, the horned figure of Captain Rhodaan emerged, the demi-organic wings on his back fluttering nervously in such proximity to the Daemonculum.

‘You have seen?’ Oriax demanded. ‘You have observed?’

Rhodaan nodded, turning his head towards the bloodwood dais. ‘How do I know this device does what you claim? It stinks of witchery.’

Oriax recoiled into his seat, his face fairly dripping with scorn. ‘Any science which is incomprehensible to a small mind is decried as witchery,’ the Techmarine stated. ‘The deluded slaves of the False Emperor have bound their Imperium in chains of superstition and ignorance through such conceits. Our misguided brothers in the Eye have displayed kindred ignorance, hobbling themselves with fables about gods and magic.’ The Techmarine’s pincers folded inwards, pointing at the decayed cuirass. ‘Only I, Fabricator Oriax of the Third Grand Company, have displayed the intellect to understand. To truly understand. Witchery?’ he scoffed. ‘This is technology.’

‘Save your speeches, Fabricator,’ Rhodaan retorted. ‘You haven’t answered my question. How do I know this… technology… does what you claim it does? How do I know what has happened to Vallax and his Faceless?’

Oriax fixed his mechanical eyes upon the Raptor. ‘You don’t,’ he said in a steely hiss. ‘Perhaps it is all just smoke and mirrors.’ The Techmarine’s claw waved towards the walls of the Daemonculum. ‘Perhaps they are hidden in some little spy hole, observing you as you observed them.’

Rhodaan kept his gaze fastened on Oriax. ‘I was thinking more in the nature of disintegration.’

Static crackled from the Fabricator’s throat, a mechanised approximation of laughter. ‘I had thought you less ignorant,’ Oriax stated. ‘If I wanted Vallax dead, there are far simpler ways it could be arranged. Besides, what do you think the Warsmith’s reaction would be if he were to discover I vaporised an entire squad of Raptors without his permission?’

Rhodaan considered that objection to be a good one. Oriax presented an even better one a moment later.

‘You have already committed yourself, captain,’ the Fabricator reminded. ‘The transports have already left Vorago. You and your Raptors were not on them, any more than Vallax and his. The Warsmith would take this as an act of rebellion against his authority. You don’t need to be reminded what that would mean.’

‘Then they have actually been teleported into Dirgas?’ Rhodaan asked, still unwilling to believe what he had seen.

‘They are in Dirgas even as we speak,’ Oriax answered. To prove his point, the Fabricator pivoted and depressed several runes on his console. Immediately, several pict screens winked into life, displaying images of Squad Vidarna engaged in furious battle with mobs of orks in what looked to be a standard-pattern blockhouse.

‘They are in Dirgas,’ Oriax repeated. ‘But they are not exactly where they wanted to be. As my Steel Blood transmit the images, you will note, captain, an absence of fuel drums or anything else that might store the liquid pollutants the orks require to keep their planes in the sky. No, I fear all Vallax will find in this blockhouse are orks and more orks.’

Rhodaan watched the pict screens, studying the savage close-quarters fighting between Iron Warrior and ork. ‘They could fight their way clear and still reach the objective.’

‘Improbable,’ Oriax declared. ‘First, they would have to realise their mistake. That will take time because of the standardised layout of the blockhouses we’ve built across Castellax. Second, they will need to locate the correct blockhouse. Third, they will still need to win their way clear of the orks.’ The Techmarine gestured at Rhodaan with his claw. ‘Fourth, they will be too late, because even if they overcome the first three factors, Squad Kyrith will already have reached the target and destroyed it.’

‘You are assuming I will submit my men to your Daemonculum,’ Rhodaan observed.

‘As I have pointed out, you have no choice,’ Oriax said. He pressed another rune on his console. The flesh-drones lumbered away from the pillars and the bound daemons, shuffling back into the inner recesses of Oriax’s sanctum. In their stead, another detachment of thirteen flesh-drones marched towards the Daemonculum, fresh slaves shackled to their mechadendrites.

‘The moment the transports left Vorago without you, you were committed,’ Oriax continued. ‘Do not chastise yourself for your decision. If you had gone on the transports, you would have encountered catastrophe. Brother Uhlan, whom I believe you know, arranged to ensure you didn’t catch the orks by surprise. He planted an explosive charge on one of the transports, setting it to detonate when the squadron reached Dirgas. He was too cunning to leave the charge on your transport, where it might be found, but instead chose one of the janissary ships. The explosion, will, of course, alert the orks and the air defences of Dirgas have proven quite considerable. Formidable enough to deflate even Morax’s pomposity.’

The Raptor was trapped, and he knew it, but that didn’t make him like the situation any better. ‘How do I know you won’t deceive me as you did Vallax?’

‘Logic,’ Oriax stated. ‘If I deceive you, there is just a chance Vallax will reach the real objective. Neither of us wants that. The Over-Captain represents an older facet of the Legion, an atavism that keeps the Third Grand Company mired in the past. We must anticipate new leadership with new ideas if we are to evolve and progress and achieve our destiny. Iron Warriors such as yourself, Rhodaan, fresh and vital without the encrustations of ancient history clouding your vision. My Daemonculum is the key to that future, if you only have the boldness to use it.’

Rhodaan stared out across the macabre device. For all of Oriax’s protestations, it still stank of witchery and the preternatural, a thing of the Beyond. The daemons stirred in their chains, casting longing eyes at the flesh-drones and their captives.

‘The Daemonculum hungers,’ Oriax said. ‘The appetite of a daemon is never sated. They are manifestations of the warp, the void made manifest, shaped by the thoughts and beliefs of physical beings. It is wrong to think of them as actual beings in their own right, they are simply shadows cobbled together from ideas and fears. Without a material mind to give them form, they cannot take shape. They exist simply as energy, flowing through the immaterium. Yet, in our ignorance we cast our minds back to the blackness of superstition and call these entities daemons and invest into them all that is conjured by such a name. Are they daemons because of what they are, or are they daemons because that is what our prejudice and fear have made them?’

‘Save your philosophy,’ Rhodaan growled. ‘Whether arcane technology or the blackest sorcery, it matters not. You are right, Fabricator, I have no choice.’

Oriax swivelled behind his console, depressing runes on the board. ‘If the discussion is over, then you may summon your men,’ the Techmarine declared. ‘It is time you were away.’ The red lights in Oriax’s face dimmed as the Techmarine stared at Rhodaan.

‘I anticipate great things from you, captain,’ he said. ‘Do not disappoint me.’

Rhodaan stiffened under the mechanical gaze. ‘I will honour my oaths and my duty. Squad Kyrith will succeed in the mission Warsmith Andraaz has entrusted to us.’

The Fabricator shifted in his seat, his pincers flashing across switches and runes. ‘The mission,’ he hissed in a scratchy whisper. ‘Ah, yes, I had almost forgotten.’

Processing Omega was situated in the very bowels of Vorago, a gargantuan facility nestled beneath the central terminus for the intra-city mag-rails which conducted supplies throughout the city’s sprawl. The terminus was a shambles now, all but obliterated by the ork bombers and artillery. It was a blighted waste of rubble, desolate and abandoned, fires smouldering among the ruins unchecked, the dead lying abandoned and forlorn.

Five hundred metres below the surface, however, it was a very different story. Vast tunnels, a spider web of corridors and catacombs, were thronged with tractors and trolleys, push-carts and sledges, virtually every kind of vehicle that could be scrounged and scavenged. Masked men, their bodies draped in the ominous plastic dusters, marched through the gloom, indifferent to the heaped corpses they bore with them deep into the earth. Unlike the abandoned terminus, here, in the belly of Vorago, the dead were not forgotten.

Taofang stared from behind the goggles of his mask, watching in amazement as Yuxiang’s tractor emerged from the dark tunnel into the hellish light of a vast cavern. He barely noticed the sentries who passed them through, the guard posts and automated defence turrets flanking the mouth of each passageway. Instead, his gaze was captivated by the ghoulish scene awaiting the tractor at the end of its run. Ahead, like a nest of serpents, a profusion of conveyor belts stretched, each belt abutting a small loading dock. Taofang watched as gangs of disposers scurried about the vehicles being offloaded in the docks, using big meat hooks to fish corpses from the cargo beds. The bodies were dumped unceremoniously onto the belts, then whisked away across the cavernous hall.

Yuxiang parked the tractor in one of the docks. He looked back at Taofang and Mingzhou, riding on the machine’s running boards. Both of the janissaries had donned the uniform of disposers, Mingzhou taking that of Deacon when the overseer decided to stay behind in the tunnels. After all, he already knew what they would find at Processing Omega.

‘Are you sure you want to go on?’ Yuxiang asked, his voice muffled by his rebreather. The two janissaries glanced at one another, dreadful anticipation making its presence felt. They were soldiers however, their valour hardened under the cruel pogroms of the Iron Warriors. For them, there could be no fear, only death or survival.

Yuxiang nodded and emerged from the cab. Already a gang of disposers had assembled around the tractor and were quickly scooping out bodies and dropping them onto the conveyor. It was frantic, hurried activity inspired by the unreachable work quotas set by the Iron Warriors themselves. The very haste of the work made the disposers inattentive; none noticed when, after helping lower a few bodies onto the belt, Yuxiang and his companions drifted away one by one.

Taofang was the last to break clear. When he was out of sight of the work crew, he hurried to the maintenance shed where Yuxiang and Mingzhou were waiting. The former factory slave gave his companions one last chance to retreat, but their resolve held fast.

With a grim light in his eyes, Yuxiang reached down and slid back a manhole cover, exposing a slender iron ladder that descended into what seemed to be a pit of green fire. He hesitated a moment, steeling his nerve, bracing himself to revisit the horrors he had already exposed himself to. After a moment, Yuxiang climbed down the ladder, the two janissaries following after him.

They did not descend far, only deep enough that Taofang could slide the manhole cover closed above them. Arms wrapped about the rungs of the ladder, the three rebels hung suspended a hundred metres above an enormous room. For Yuxiang, the resemblance to a factory was unmistakable: the conveyor belts and winches, cranes and pulleys, gantries and scaffolds. Masked labourers shuffled about the vast installation while pallid servitors maintained their endless vigils at control points and cogitator-terminals.

‘This is where Castellax buries its dead,’ Yuxiang whispered in a haunted tone.

Far below, a nest of conveyors descended from the ceiling to spill the corpses from the unloading stations onto a series of lower belts. From there the mangled remains descended another twenty metres before they were unceremoniously dumped into a gigantic cistern, a vat of bilious green liquid that bubbled incessantly, spewing a scummy froth about each corpse as it dropped into the toxic lake. Bodies bobbed like bits of cork amidst the green filth, but as the liquid seeped into the flesh, the cadavers lost their buoyancy. Quickly they sank towards the bottom of the vat.

‘The chemicals in that lake will reduce a human body down to its constituent proteins within ten minutes,’ Yuxiang explained to the janissaries above him, repeating the hideous commentary he’d had from Deacon. ‘Only the enamel from the teeth won’t be reduced.’ He pointed with his hand to a great pipe jutting from the base of the vat. Through a narrow grate, a stream of green mush exuded onto another conveyor belt. Gangs of labourers stood to either side of the grate, removing at regular intervals a series of metal filter screens. The three rebels could see the white paste clogging the screens as they were removed, the only part of the human body that refused to be ‘processed’.

‘That sludge you see,’ Yuxiang said, nodding to the mush leaving the pipe, ‘will be further filtered, immersed in bio-secretions, amphetamines and adrenal-extracts. Everything a fighting man needs to maintain his alertness and aggression. Then it will be injected into tubes, ready to be distributed to the defenders of Vorago as protein-paste. Organic supplement for the synthetic diet.’

Taofang shook his head in shock, trying desperately to refuse the evidence of his eyes. He wanted to be sick. ‘They are feeding us our own dead,’ he groaned.

Beneath him, Mingzhou made a gagging noise, her body going limp for a moment, one of her boots slipping from the rung. Quickly she remembered herself, grasping the ladder before she could fall. She turned her gaze down upon Yuxiang.

‘You were right,’ she said. ‘The Iron Warriors have to be destroyed.’ She stared back at the bubbling vat.

‘Death is too good for the monsters who would do this,’ she declared. ‘But it is the only justice we can hope to bring them.’

CHAPTER XVI

I-DAY PLUS ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE

The ferrocrete halls of the blockhouse were alive with alien roars and the chatter of automatic weapons. Mobs of orks swarmed through the streets of Dirgas, converging upon the scene. After months away from the main fighting, their thirst for battle had reached the point of mania. News of a scrap in the very middle of the city spread like wildfire.

One after another, the Raptors of Squad Vidarna, Over-Captain Vallax’s infamous Faceless, died. Fighting their way ever deeper into the blockhouse, the Iron Warriors had become the centre of a storm of death. Hundreds of enemy corpses lay strewn through the chambers and corridors of the fortress, but they were losses the orks could easily afford. There were thousands to take their place. From the start, there had been only five Space Marines. It had cost them two comrades to penetrate as far as the manufactory.

Vallax spun around as Gressil was ripped apart by the lethal chatter of a grotesque combi-weapon. The Over-Captain regarded his underling’s sacrifice with a sneer and leapt upon his killer, an enormous ork encased in crude, blocky armour. The whirling edge of his chainsword screeched as it churned into the ork’s shoulder. Instead of gnawing through flesh and bone, however, it gouged a mesh of wires and cables. Lubricants and fuel spurted from ruptured hoses and pipes.

The ork grunted and lashed out with a monstrous power claw, the talons closing tight about Vallax’s sword arm. With a grinding groan, the pneumatic claw began to compress the vambrace, cracking the thick ceramite plate.

Vallax’s boots hammered into the ork’s chest in a futile effort to kick the brute away. The hulking monstrosity didn’t even flinch, deigning only to smile viciously at the Iron Warrior as it tightened its grip.

The Raptor squirmed within the ork’s clutch, clenching his teeth against the pain surging from his trapped arm as he twisted his body around. The arm was crushed to a pulp when the ork tightened its grasp. Vallax’s brain, conditioned to block out every magnitude of pain, ignored the mutilation, forcing himself to raise his good arm and bring the muzzle of his bolt pistol towards his captor’s face.

The organic side of the cyborg’s face was obliterated by the high-impact explosive shells, slivers of shrapnel and bone fragments flying from its destroyed skull. Instead of collapsing, however, the ork’s metallic body simply froze in place, its mechanics powering down, another dead machine in the maze of stamping presses and conveyors which littered the floor of the manufactory. A grotesque statue, the cyborg stood, the arm of its killer held fast in its frozen claw.

Emboldened by Vallax’s immobility, a swarm of gretchin came scurrying from their holes, eyes gleaming with murderous glee. They surrounded the trapped Iron Warrior, shots from their primitive slug-throwers and autoguns glancing off his power armour, clubs and axes clattering against his legs in a futile effort to pierce the Raptor’s shell. Snarling in rage, Vallax gunned down a dozen of the filthy slaveling xenos, but always there were more to replace those he killed.

Uhlan’s pistol suddenly roared, the report echoing across the manufactory. Gretchin burst beneath his shots, their weedy bodies blasted into gory pulp by the bolt-shells. Screeching in terror, the cowardly survivors broke and fled, darting behind presses and diving into gaps amidst the machinery.

‘That is the last of them, my lord captain,’ Uhlan reported.

Vallax glared at the half-breed, wondering how long Uhlan had waited before intervening. With the rest of Squad Vidarna dead, the mongrel could concoct any story to account for the Over-Captain’s death. Had Uhlan bided his time until he was convinced Vallax would survive with or without his help?

Vallax strained to free his trapped arm, growling under his breath. ‘Oriax’s Steel Blood was late as usual.’ He scowled as he thought of the spy-skulls and their notable failure to assist the Raptors. ‘The Fabricator’s usefulness to this operation begins to wear thin.’

Uhlan nodded. ‘Indeed, Over-Captain. The failings of his servitors are inexcusable. They should have found the fuel dump for us by now.’

Vallax wrenched the cyborg’s claw downwards, stretching his free arm so he could retrieve his chainsword from the floor. Thumbing the activation rune, he brought the weapon grinding against the metal wrist behind the claw.

The Over-Captain barely concentrated on what he was doing, his mind instead mulling over what Uhlan had said. It was true, the Steel Blood should have located the fuel dump by now. The blockhouses weren’t terribly complex, simply mirrored layers stacked eight and ten deep. A standard pattern repeated all across Castellax.

Vallax cursed as he made the connection. The blockhouses all followed the same blueprint, each floor plan identical to the next. There was the reason the Steel Blood had failed! The Daemonculum had transported them to the wrong blockhouse!

As that horrible certainty impressed itself upon his mind, Vallax heard the wail of one of Oriax’s Steel Blood. He looked towards the sound, watching as the metal skull came flying into the manufactory – a horde of orks rushing after it. The Steel Blood was sounding an alarm all right – but it was an alarm meant for the orks. The damned things had been alerting the aliens and leading them to the Iron Warriors the whole time!

‘Shoot the Steel Blood!’ Vallax snarled at Uhlan. The half-breed stared at him in confusion, then cried out as blood exploded from his ruptured chest. A harpoon of steel protruded from the stricken Iron Warrior’s breast. Even as Uhlan turned to fire on his attacker, the cable fitted to the harpoon snapped taut. He was thrown off his feet as the cable began to retract, dragging him across the manufactory towards the gun carriage that had fired on him and a grinning ork with a blowtorch gripped in its oily paw. Other aliens swarmed past the mekanik, loosing a fusillade of shells, solid shot and glowing plasma at the disabled Uhlan.

Vallax redoubled his efforts to cut away the cyborg’s wrist. Survival was doubtful now, but at least he could die fighting on his feet, like a true Iron Warrior, not slaughtered like Uhlan.

Even as he cut away the last string of cables, Vallax flattened beneath an impact against the back of his head. As he struck the ground he could see the crumpled wreckage of a metal skull lying on the floor beside him, its cranium caved-in by a high-velocity impact. Vallax imagined his helmet must have a similar dent.

The jaw of the damaged Steel Blood dropped open, the vox-caster spewing forth the synthesised voice of Fabricator Oriax.

‘This is the end, Over-Captain. Before you die, know that Captain Rhodaan even now secures the objective for the Warsmith. It is in another blockhouse, of course. The only thing in this one is death. Your death.’

Vallax struggled to rise, but found that his legs refused to respond. Learned in biology as well as mechanics, Oriax had guided his Steel Blood to the precise location to deliver maximum damage upon the Iron Warrior. The impacted helmet had delivered a paralysing blow to Vallax’s spine.

Panic filled Vallax’s hearts as he realised the extent of Oriax’s treachery. He could hear the orks rushing into the room, rushing to seize their helpless prey.

‘You found me like this in the crystal-swamps,’ Oriax’s voice droned. ‘I should have died, but for you. Now, I avenge that crime.

‘Die, Vallax, and may the Chaos Gods show your spirit the same mercy you showed me.’

Alarms wailed overhead as the orks began another strafing run against the defences of Vorago. Fighters came screaming down, the chatter of their guns chewing holes in the firmament, sending slivers of ferrocrete dancing into the night. Janissaries and overseers scrambled into the shelter of bunkers and pillboxes while slaves cowered in their firing pits. The anti-aircraft crews, chained to their batteries, had no option except to stay at their posts and try to bring down the alien attackers.

Taofang watched the carnage unfold from the black mouth of a service tunnel, his lasgun held close to his body beneath the folds of his duster. He waited for the height of panic and confusion, watching to ensure that none of the Iron Warriors were going to put in an appearance and bolster the valour of their minions by giving them something more terrifying than orks to fear.

‘We should move now,’ Taofang said, turning to stare back into the gloom of the tunnel. Clustered around the tractor were a score of men, haggard-looking slaves for the most part but with a few janissaries and renegade disposers among the mix. It was easy to spot the ones who were armed and the ones who weren’t. The armed men had a vicious gleam in their eyes, the unarmed ones simply had weary resignation. They wouldn’t be very useful in a fight – not until they felt that they had a real chance to strike back. Guns would give them that confidence. Guns were the objective of tonight’s excursion onto the firebreak. Yuxiang had built a small army by removing ‘dead’ men from the walls, but if they were to fight, they needed weapons and ammunition. Far more than could be scavenged from the firing pits.

‘Are you certain this is smart?’ Deacon asked in his anxious voice.

‘The height of the ork attack,’ Taofang stated, his tone brooking no argument. ‘The soldiers will be keeping their heads down while the planes are overhead. They won’t stir from their shelters. That means we’ll only have the ones in the command post to worry about.’

Yuxiang fixed the janissary with a sombre look. ‘You know there will be no option but to fight?’ he said. ‘We can’t try to reason with them. Sway them to our cause. There isn’t time.’

Taofang nodded, his expression grim. He glanced over at Mingzhou, locking eyes with the sniper. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Anybody in that command post is no comrade.’ He patted the barrel of his lasgun. ‘Colonel Nehring has had this coming a long time.’

‘Ever since Gamma-Five,’ Mingzhou agreed, a cold smile on her face.

‘We saw a lot of good men die at Gamma-Five,’ Taofang said. ‘I’ve a mind to watch a few bad men die for once.’

Yuxiang lifted his arm, gazing back at the men around the tractor, looking to see that each of them was watching him rather than distracted by the ork attack. In his turn, the factory slave fixed his attention on Taofang. Even when an ork bomb exploded somewhere above the tunnel, shaking it and sending trickles of dust raining down, he didn’t allow his attention to waver. When the moment came, every second that followed would be invaluable. Yuxiang was determined to squander none of them.

By his turn, Taofang maintained a tireless vigil at the mouth of the tunnel, watching as the few janissaries still in the open at last abandoned their posts and went scrambling for cover. Except for the dead and dying, the top of the wall was almost deserted now. He started to turn, started to give the nod to Yuxiang so he could signal the other rebels. It was the hint of motion from the corner of his eye that spun Taofang back around. Frustration boiled up inside him as he watched a trio of janissaries come sprinting into the tunnel.

Until now, even in the height of the attack, fear of the tunnel had kept the soldiers away. No man courted the places of the dead and the service tunnel stank of the disposers and their morbid work. That some of them should overcome their dread now, just when the rebels were set to act sent black despair flooding into his heart. It was as if all their plans and hopes were nothing more than the cruel jest of…

Taofang shivered, unwilling to finish the thought. The Iron Warriors visited the most horrible punishment upon those slaves they found practising the Imperial creed, paying homage to the so-called God-Emperor of Mankind. It was whispered among the Scorpion Brigade that there were other gods beside the Emperor, monstrous things which even the Iron Warriors grudgingly paid homage to.

In his mind, Taofang could hear the mocking laughter of invisible horrors. Having come so far, many of the rebels would never find the courage to reach this point again. Gambling their lives on this adventure, they would cherish the reprieve, hold each hour given back to them as precious and sacrosanct. No, when they retreated back into the tunnels, there would be no coming back.

The janissaries came rushing into the dark opening, their faces pale, their bodies shivering from the ordeal of battle. One of the soldiers recoiled as he saw Taofang standing inside the opening, shocked and disgusted by the sudden appearance of a disposer. His fright passed quickly, a nervous chuckle starting to rise as he turned to address his comrades.

The soldier never spoke the words on his tongue. As he turned, a bright beam of crimson light slashed through his head, searing through helmet and skull alike. The slaughtered janissary collapsed in a heap, a new shock stamped forever in his dead eyes.

Mingzhou’s shot threw the two survivors into action. One of the soldiers snapped his lasgun to his shoulder, years of remorseless training allowing him to almost instinctively pick out the direction of the shot. Before he could fire, however, the janissary was lying on the floor of the tunnel, an ugly hole burned through his stomach.

Taofang stared down at the wounded man, smoke rising from the hole where he had fired his hidden weapon through the plastic shroud of his duster. He felt no pity for the stricken man, for all that they might have fought shoulder to shoulder only a few weeks earlier. Because of this man and his comrades, Taofang had been ready to retreat before the battle was even joined. Until that moment when Mingzhou shot and restored his perspective. Now he felt ashamed of his reluctance to do what had to be done, his hesitance to be as ruthless as his enemy. Morality was the refuge of those without the strength to triumph.

Burning light cracked from Taofang’s lasgun, burning another hole through his duster as it stabbed down into the face of the wounded janissary. It was a moment he knew he would carry with him always, the moment when something died deep inside him, to be replaced by something else. Something strong and cold and terrible.

‘What about the third one?’ Yuxiang cried, rushing up to the mouth of the tunnel.

Taofang glanced about. Unlike his comrade, the third janissary had chosen flight over fight. He could be seen dashing across the wall, his boots barely touching the ferrocrete in his haste. If the soldier had kept his wits about him, the rebels would have been undone, but in his panic the janissary simply rushed blindly past bunkers and pillboxes filled with comrades. At any one the survivor could have stopped and sounded the alarm, brought enough armed men swarming into the tunnel to obliterate the tiny gang of rebels.

Only moments ago, Taofang had felt the claws of some unseen force wresting opportunity from them. Now, as if by the same capricious intent, an equally incredulous circumstance was handing that opportunity back to them.

‘Head for Nehring’s bunker,’ Taofang shouted to Yuxiang. He ducked back into the tunnel as an ugly ork plane flashed across the firebreak, dropping a bomb against the superstructure. The explosive impact nearly knocked him from his feet.

‘What are you going to do?’ Mingzhou demanded, her hand tight about his arm, her eyes sharp with concern.

Removing the lasgun from beneath his duster, Taofang checked the power level. ‘I’m going to get him,’ he declared. ‘Catch him before he spreads the alarm.’

Mingzhou clung to him as he tried to leave the tunnel. ‘Stay here,’ she told him. Before he could react, the sniper was darting out onto the wall, throwing herself into the shelter of a bomb crater. An ork fighter went screaming overhead, a little line of tracers skipping across the ferrocrete only a few metres from the woman.

She didn’t even react to death dancing at her side. Tossing back her crimson hair with a roll of her neck, Mingzhou aimed down the sight of her lasrifle.

‘She’ll never make it,’ Yuxiang groaned.

Inwardly, Taofang shared Yuxiang’s doubt. The janissary was over two thousand metres away, darting from side to side to avoid the attacking ork planes. It was absurd to believe anyone, even one of the Iron Warriors themselves, could hit a moving target at such range.

A moment later, the situation was made even more dire. Seeming to stir from his panic, the soldier glanced about wildly, looking for a bunker to dart into. He found one, only a dozen metres away. Spinning around, the janissary raced towards the fortification.

In that brief moment as he turned, the janissary doomed himself. Mingzhou could read his intention as clearly as Taofang, she could see the refugee’s objective. Aiming along the route he must take, the sniper pulled the trigger of her lasrifle. A beam of red light stabbed out, whisking into the janissary. The soldier didn’t even cry out, he simply crumpled to the ground.

Mingzhou leapt up and sprinted back into the tunnel, the lasrifle cradled in her arms. ‘Let’s go visit the colonel now,’ she suggested.

Leaving Deacon and a half-dozen rebels to bring up the tractor behind them, Yuxiang led the rest at a run across the firebreak. Ork aircraft still filled the skies, fumes from their crude engines spilling down over the wall. As one of the fighters came streaking down, its guns spitting, the rebels scrambled for cover. Three of the men, former slaves who had been rescued from the pits, were caught in the fire, their bodies shredded by the heavy-calibre slugs spewing from the xenos guns.

The rest didn’t have the luxury of considering their dead. Rushing past a bombed-out pillbox, the rebels converged upon the grey bulk of Nehring’s command post. In the lead, Taofang hesitated before the armoured door, one last hideous thought occurring to him. So far there had been no sign of Iron Warriors on this section of wall. The reason might be that they were inside the command bunker.

‘Something wrong?’ Yuxiang asked.

Taofang looked at the slave, saw the eagerness and exhilaration on the man’s face. No, he decided, they had come too far to be cheated now. There was no good to come from voicing his fear now. Whatever was on the other side of that door, they would face it together.

Taofang leapt down the short string of steps between the doorway and the bunker proper, surprising the sentries huddled there for protection against the orks. The stock of his lasgun opened the cheek of one sentry, a shot from the barrel settled the second. Maintaining his momentum, Taofang hurdled the bodies and dashed into the anteroom beyond.

Here, too, he found surprised and disordered men, a rabble of soldiers who had taken to the anteroom for shelter. They gapped at him as he stood in the doorway, his duster spattered in the blood of his recent foes, the barrel of his lasgun shifting between them. One of the soldiers reached for his own weapon and was cut down instantly by Taofang’s laser. For a moment, shock held the other soldiers immobile. Before they could recover, Yuxiang and the other rebels came swarming into the anteroom, firing as they came.

Sounds of the massacre must have drifted into the control centre beyond the anteroom, for the heavy steel door slid back and a scowling lieutenant came storming through the portal. The officer had woefully misjudged the situation, however. Thinking he only faced some squabble amongst his men, the lieutenant was unprepared for the scene of carnage, or the victorious perpetrators of that havoc.

Before the officer’s scowl could collapse into shock, before his hand could even reach for the pistol holstered at his side, a crimson beam from Mingzhou’s lasrifle punched a smouldering hole through the lieutenant’s forehead.

‘Death to the Iron Warriors!’ Yuxiang shouted, pushing past the dying lieutenant, making for the closing portal behind him. The battle cry was taken up by the dozen rebels who had made it this far, all save Taofang, who wondered if one of the superhuman fiends did indeed await them on the other side of the door.

The sizzle of lasguns hissed through the air as the rebels burst from the anteroom. The cries of dying men echoed through the confines of the command centre, mixing with the dull rumble of ork bombers being transmitted across exterior vox-casters. Tech-adepts crumpled at their stations, their archaic robes scorched by las-bolts; engineers wilted to the floor, their overalls stained with their life’s blood; officers collapsed across their consoles, their black uniforms folding around them like shrouds.

There was little resistance. Beyond a few sidearms, the occupants of the command centre were unarmed, outgunned even by the sparse arsenal the rebels had possessed at the start of their attack. Now, equipped with weapons looted off the anteroom dead, the rebels overwhelmed Colonel Nehring’s staff. After a few furious minutes of carnage, barely a half-dozen officers were still alive, their hands raised in defeat, pleas for mercy rolling off their lips. It would have been a different story if one of the Iron Warriors had been present, but thankfully the oversized command throne reserved for a visiting legionary was vacant.

Yuxiang prowled through the wreckage, wincing as sparks from a damaged Steel Blood flared across him, burning his scalp. Intent upon the dead men sprawled on the floor, he hadn’t noticed the hovering servitor. A las-bolt tore into the floating skull, sending it careening across the room to smash itself against the thick ferrocrete wall. Taofang uttered a caustic laugh.

‘It’s a waste of time looking there,’ the janissary barked. ‘There’s only one man we need, and you won’t find him with the dead!’

Mingzhou marched to where the little knot of prisoners was being held. Her face bore a vindictive smile as she grabbed the breast of one man’s tunic and pulled him away from his fellows. The officer’s dusky skin was beaded with sweat, his eyes wide with fright. They grew still wider when he heard the sniper shout to her comrades. ‘Here is the colonel! Always trust him to leave the dying to other people.’

Yuxiang and Taofang stared coldly at the terrified officer. ‘This is the man who can get us weapons?’ Yuxiang asked.

Colonel Nehring licked his lips, his eyes shifting from one man to the other, trying to gauge which of them was in command, to which of them he needed to appeal to save his life. Something about Taofang’s posture made it seem like the janissary was in charge, but one look into the soldier’s eyes was enough to make Nehring cringe. There was hate in those eyes, hate that wouldn’t be placated.

‘I am in command of this entire section,’ Nehring said, turning towards Yuxiang. ‘If you desist now… I will… will not report this to the Iron Warriors.’

Mention of the dreaded Space Marines brought gasps from some of the slaves, but if Nehring mistook fear for timidity, he was sorely mistaken.

Yuxiang buried the butt of his lasgun in the officer’s belly, driving the breath from his body, smashing the arrogance and authority from his attitude. ‘You will get me guns,’ Yuxiang told him. ‘That is the only thing I want. Not threats. Not promises.’

Coughing, trying to suck air back into his lungs, Nehring nodded in submission. ‘What… whatever… want…’

As the officer started to rise, the sizzle-crack of a lasgun rasped through the room. Nehring cried out in agony, sprawling to the floor as the smoking wreckage of his knee failed under his weight. He landed hard, teeth chipping as his jaw smacked against the floor. Howling in pain, he clutched at his leg.

‘We don’t need his lies or his mouth,’ Taofang growled, aiming his lasgun downwards, sending another bolt sizzling through the back of Nehring’s hand. ‘The supply caches are actuated by retinal scan.’

Nehring’s dark skin grew pale, a panicked yelp escaped his bleeding mouth. Desperately he groped along the floor, trying to drag himself to shelter. His effort was thwarted when Mingzhou’s rifle slammed down against his other hand, breaking every finger.

‘Gamma-Five,’ the sniper hissed down at him. ‘You made quite an impression on everyone who was there.’ She drove the rifle into his ribs. ‘Unfortunately, most of them aren’t here to thank you for your selfless leadership.’

Yuxiang rounded on Taofang. ‘Kill him and get it over with,’ he demanded. The janissary shook off his restraining hand.

‘We’ll need his eye,’ Taofang declared. He reached down to his boot, drawing a wide-bladed combat knife. ‘We need his eye to actuate the retinal scans.’ He paused, glaring down at the terrified, whimpering officer.

‘We need his eye,’ Taofang repeated. ‘But I think I’ll take the whole damn head.’

The ork’s snarling face burst into blobs of meat and splinters of bone as the churning blade of Rhodaan’s chainsword bit through the alien’s horned helm. Like a poleaxed grox, the huge ork slammed to the floor, its stumpy fingers still tugging at the triggers of the stubbers clenched in its paws. The Iron Warrior kicked the twitching corpse from underfoot, giving him space to confront the rest of the xenos horde.

The eerie power of the Daemonculum had pierced the walls of reality, translating Squad Kyrith from Oriax’s sanctum deep beneath the Iron Bastion to the ork-infested city of Dirgas. In the blink of an eye, the Space Marines had been teleported across an entire continent, shifted across the face of Castellax. Whatever the Fabricator’s protestations, the thing still stank of witchery to Rhodaan.

Rhodaan spun around, opening the belly of a howling ork rushing at him with a crude axe, a shot from the Raptor’s plasma pistol melting the skull off a second alien marauder. As the two creatures collapsed before him, Rhodaan lunged across their bodies, taking the attack into the midst of the alien mob. To an untrained eye, the tactic might seem reckless but it was actually a calculated exploitation of the savage xenos mindset. The ork was a creature which gloried in battle, eager to fight. At the same time, its society was one of strict hierarchy, the strong dominating everything weaker than themselves. An ork quickly understood its place in the hierarchy, deferring to the more powerful of its breed until such time as it felt itself strong enough to challenge its betters and raise its own position.

Given even the briefest pause, an ork mob would automatically adjust itself, instinctually deferring to the leaders and allowing their biggest and strongest the right to sate their blood thirst. By denying them that instant for adjustment, Rhodaan wrong-footed the aliens, put them off balance, made them hesitate ever so slightly. Before bringing its shock maul down, a scar-faced ork glanced to make certain its boss wasn’t nearby. That fraction of a heartbeat was all the delay Rhodaan needed to open the brute from belly to groin.

Beside him, Pazuriel and Baelfegor wrought havoc among the aliens. The orks were pure primal savagery, raw undisciplined force. They attacked with a simple, fearless brutality – an undiluted appetite for battle that wasn’t confused by consideration of tactics and strategy. Against a lesser foe, the very recklessness of the attack would have been overwhelming. Against Iron Warriors, however, it was a recipe for slaughter. Primitive might against the cold precision of tactical warfare. Beasts born for battle against men who had been trained, conditioned and engineered for war. Nature versus the deadly progeny of a thousand arcane sciences.

Even if the orks had possessed minds capable of understanding, the Iron Warriors didn’t allow them the time to understand just how woefully outclassed they were.

‘All charges in place,’ Brother Gomorie’s voice crackled across the inter-squad vox.

Rhodaan smiled inside his helmet, blasting the growl from a huge ork warrior with a blazing beam of plasma. The report was welcome news. Any chance Vallax and his Faceless had of stealing triumph from Squad Kyrith was quickly evaporating.

Oriax had been as good as his word. The Raptors had materialised within the ferrocrete halls of the blockhouse Biglug was using to stockpile the horde’s aviation fuel. Secure in their control of Dirgas, the orks had positioned their sentries on the perimeter of the blockhouse, to keep their own kind from sneaking in and stealing fuel. There had been no provision for guards inside, no thought that the Iron Warriors might pose a threat to them so deep inside their own stronghold.

If not for a pack of xenos scavengers that had managed to sneak into the blockhouse, the Raptors might have achieved their objective without alerting the enemy at all. Rhodaan was tempted to attribute their encounter with the thieves to bad luck, but it was too much of a coincidence to be so easily dismissed. He could still feel the chill of the Daemonculum clinging to his armour, the mephitic vapour of the warp. How might that lingering taint affect them? How might perverse warp entities amuse themselves by violating laws of causality and probability? Was it coincidence that had caused the scavengers to stumble onto Squad Kyrith? Was it simply bad luck that had allowed a few of them to escape and spread the alarm?

Ill fortune or daemon-engineered doom, Rhodaan didn’t care. Whatever fates conspired against him, he would defy them with his every breath. Let the gods of Chaos plot and scheme, they would not cheat him of his glory.

‘Set the charges for five minutes,’ Rhodaan growled across the vox. The chatter of a heavy stubber forced him to duck behind the bulk of a support pillar, chips of ferrocrete flying in every direction as the ork gunner tracked the Raptor across the storage chamber, oblivious to the cocktail of fuel spilling from ruptured drums and barrels.

‘Add thirty seconds,’ Rhodaan amended, the aiming reticule in his optic display picking out the ork gunner from the mob of lesser aliens. It was a big brute, its leathery chest bared to expose a network of wire piercings that formed the leering visage of an alien glyph. The weapon it carried was a massive automatic stubber, so massive that even a Space Marine would have thought twice before trying to fire it from the hip the way this monster was. That the ork could do so and maintain some rude semblance of accuracy was more a testament to its brawn than the mental agility required to compensate for the weapon’s recoil.

Rhodaan seized one of the fuel drums stacked near his refuge, hefting the burden in an underhand shift, sending it wobbling across the floor. The ork shifted its aim, barking with laughter as its bullets shredded the drum. Sparks and burning drops of fuel blossomed from the disintegrating drum, lighting upon the floor. Pools of fuel blazed into hellish fury, racing through the chamber, throwing walls of flame in every direction.

Many of the orks howled in alarm, scattering before the flames. The brute with the stubber maintained its murderous barrage with stubborn ferocity, blindly sending bullets slamming through the obscuring flames.

From the midst of the fire, a vengeful figure of ceramite and plasteel came hurtling at the ork. Fire dripped from Rhodaan’s power armour, smouldered against the blood-slick pinions of his demi-organic wings. Thrust ahead by his jump pack, the Raptor smashed into the surprised alien, the heavy stubber shattering beneath the Iron Warrior’s impact as he crashed into the ork.

The brute was sent reeling, stumbling across the chamber, slipping in the burning fuel. Arms flailing, the ork collapsed into a pool of liquid fire. Anguished howls rose from the creature as it thrashed among the flames.

Rhodaan didn’t relax. He had seen the stubborn vitality of orks too often.

The brute sloshed painfully in the pool, then rolled onto its back. Through the pain and blinding fire, the ork was able to focus upon its attacker. Its body wrapped in flames, it lunged up from the floor, meaty paws clenched into burning fists.

The Iron Warrior met the monster’s attack with a sweep of his chainsword that sent the roaring head bouncing across the floor. He sidestepped as the burning body came hurtling after him. It staggered on a few paces, as though unaware that its guiding intelligence was lying on the floor. The fists abruptly fell to the ork’s sides, its shoulders slumped. Almost in slow motion, the headless corpse dropped to the ground.

‘My error,’ Rhodaan said across the vox. He stared at the burning corpse. ‘Twenty seconds.’

‘We shall require all the time we can get for extraction,’ Uzraal said, the sizzle of his meltagun audible across the vox.

Rhodaan was already in motion, turning to address the threat presented by a new mob of orks rushing at the Iron Warriors from the far side of the chamber. Ignoring the flames and the threat of explosion, he grabbed a burning fuel drum and threw it into the midst of the aliens. A blast from his plasma pistol detonated the drum like a bomb, splashing the mob in burning promethium. A half-dozen orks collapsed in fiery agony; the rest, many of them with burning clothes and singed skin, scattered.

‘Through this pack,’ Rhodaan ordered, dropping one of the fleeing aliens. In the corner of his helmet’s visual display he could see the layout of the blockhouse. The lift would be nearby. In his mind, he could picture the aerial reconnaissance images provided by Morax’s Air Cohort.

There was no guarantee of outside help; even if Vallax and Uhlan hadn’t initiated any treachery, the valour of Flesh was uncertain. The Raptors couldn’t count on them to brave the defences of Dirgas to reach the blockhouse. Certainly not in the time allowed to them. No, Squad Kyrith would have to attend to their own withdrawal, an eventuality Rhodaan had prepared for.

‘We fight our way to the roof,’ Rhodaan told his Raptors.

‘And then?’ Pazuriel demanded. Rhodaan could just see the other Iron Warrior from the corner of his vision, shooting down orks with bursts from a hand flamer. Against the backdrop of a burning fuel dump, there was something almost ridiculous about the scene.

Rhodaan scowled inside his helmet. He was depending on the orks to act true to form, aggression overruling caution. Otherwise, they were all going to die.

‘Reconnaissance shows several vertical lift aircraft parked on the roof,’ Rhodaan said. ‘We fight our way up there and steal one of their planes.’ A touch of black humour crept into his voice, humour that had nothing to do with the alien warriors he continued to gun down as they rushed at him through the flames.

‘Be attentive for anything that looks like a pilot,’ Rhodaan said. ‘Whoever finds one better have a strong omophagea.’

There was a chorus of disgusted groans across the vox-channel.

Rhodaan smashed his way through an axe-wielding ork, then brought his chainsword down, slashing the arm off another charging alien. ‘Content yourselves, brothers,’ he said. ‘An ork’s brain isn’t a big meal.’

CHAPTER XVII

I-DAY PLUS ONE HUNDRED AND SIX

Rhodaan stared in revulsion at what passed for controls in the ork aircraft, feeling the pit of his stomach drop out. He’d hoped the alien aircraft would be simple enough for them to fly out of Dirgas. It was simple, he had to admit that much, but it was so simple he didn’t see how the xenos could make it fly. How they were going to was a question he hoped Gomorie’s gruesome snack would answer. He’d been the lucky Raptor to catch the ork pilot on the launch pad, though Baelfegor’s reluctance to close with the xenos might have contributed to Gomorie’s opportunity. No Iron warrior shirked his duty, but there were some objectives it was more appealing to leave to another battle-brother.

The cockpit was a glass-faced box squashed onto the nose of the bomber, having every appearance of being welded onto the fuselage as an after-thought. As though the orks had built the rest of the plane and then realised they’d missed out any way to control it. The control panel was a crude box, its face pitted with a few dials and levers, an enormous and clunky-looking steering column, several vulgar-looking patches of graffiti and a bank of buttons that was missing at least three of its number with a fourth dangling from the panel by a few wires. A pair of huge foot pedals rose from the floor, one of them bolted flat by a strip of sheet metal, the other flapping limp in its fastenings. A huge copper pipe stretched along the side of the compartment, its surface pitted and scored in dozens of places, greasy rags wrapped about the worst of the ruptures. Rhodaan winced at the heavy promethium smell rising from the pipe, realising with alarm that it was some element of the plane’s fuel system and that once the craft was in motion, it would start leaking all over the cockpit.

Still, Rhodaan couldn’t even consider that to be the most alarming element of the ork cockpit. There was the little drawing of an arrow, for instance, scrawled across a strip of hide and nailed to a section of the fuselage above one of the levers. Whatever the meaning of the arrow, the direction it was pointing didn’t correspond with the direction the lever could be moved. Then there was the little box rising from the floor beside the pilot’s couch. It looked like a primitive clutch, a single control rod that could be slid into different positions to control the craft’s speed. Little las-marks seemed to denote the velocity the craft would make in each position the clutch was thrown. At some point, an ork had welded a piece of pig-iron over the groove, locking the clutch into its highest speed. The Space Marine lost no time tearing the bit of pig-iron from the groove.

Gomorie wiped his mouth and placed his helmet over his head. The mangled skull of the ork pilot fell to the floor. The Iron Warrior stalked towards the controls, trying to manoeuvre around the bulky couch. From outside, the chatter of bolters rose.

‘More orks on the roof,’ Pazuriel reported over the vox. Along with Uzraal and Baelfegor, he was maintaining the perimeter the Iron Warriors had established around the aircraft. ‘If we’re going to leave, we need to do it soon.’

Gomorie’s hands closed about the top of the couch. Viciously, he ripped it clear from its moorings and ejected it from the cockpit. His path clear, he pushed past Rhodaan and stared at the controls.

‘Can you make any sense of this hodgepodge?’ Rhodaan demanded.

Gomorie nodded. ‘Have our battle-brothers embark, lord captain,’ he said. His finger pressed one of the buttons on the panel. When nothing happened, he pressed it again, this time hard enough to make it sink into the panel. When the plane still failed to respond, he smacked the side of the panel with his fist. Abruptly, the aircraft shuddered into life, the rumble of its awakened engine, the tremor of its activated pistons pulsing through the fuselage.

‘Squad Kyrith is aboard,’ Pazuriel’s voice announced over the vox.

The crack of bullets and shells against the plane’s fuselage lent an immediacy to Pazuriel’s words. There was no one outside to maintain the perimeter. In a matter of moments, the orks would be swarming over the plane.

‘Now or never,’ Rhodaan told Gomorie.

Gomorie stood confidently before the controls, the mag-clamps in his boots lending him more stability than the crude pilot’s couch ever could. ‘It is not a complex system,’ he declared. He lifted one of his feet and brought it towards the pedal that had been bolted almost flat to the floor. ‘All you need do is feed the engine…’

As soon as Gomorie touched his foot to the pedal, the ork plane roared forwards, leaping from the rooftop like a hound loosed from its chain. Rhodaan was sent reeling, his helmet crashing against the low ceiling of the cockpit. Gomorie wrapped his arms about the steering column, more to keep himself upright than to direct the craft.

‘Slow this obscenity down!’ Rhodaan roared.

Gomorie brought his foot smashing down on the other pedal, but it simply flopped limply against the floor. He turned and looked at Rhodaan. ‘That should have been the brake,’ he reported. ‘It seems the pilot took it upon itself to disable it. The ork didn’t want to appear timid to its fellows,’ he elaborated as some of the alien’s memories stirred in his mind.

Rhodaan felt his hearts hammer in his breast. ‘How do we land without brakes?’ he demanded.

Again, Gomorie focused upon the mental images from the ork’s brain. ‘We crash,’ was his far from encouraging response.

Enginseer Heroditus focused his gaze upon the wondrous vision. Despite the emotional weakness, he regretted the atrophy of his organic eyes. Cybernetic implants were too stable, unable to cloud with tears of awe and devotion. Unable to exhibit the proper respect such a sight demanded.

Above him, on the causeway, being lifted upon stout titanium chains, was the graceful casing of Vindex Lartius, every inch of its shell lovingly inscribed with liturgies of power and catechisms of revenge. Dozens of purity scrolls fluttered in the sluggish breeze of the underworld’s archaic filtration cycle, the lead seals binding them to the warhead embossed with the cog symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Vindication was coming, was nearly at hand. Justification for their years of subservience to the traitors, atonement for their debased survival. The works of the arch-enemy would be swept away. Castellax would be cleansed of its contagion.

‘The walls shall be broken. The gate shall be opened,’ Logis Acestes declaimed, his face upturned, watching Vindex Lartius slowly rising towards the distant ceiling.

‘The xenos shall be the Omnissiah’s instrument,’ Heroditus agreed.

Logis Acestes turned towards the enginseer and bowed. ‘The orks will destroy this place. They will break apart the works of the enemy, smash them to bits, pull them asunder. Nothing shall be left. The profanations of Castellax will be purged by the brute.’

Heroditus felt an upswelling of regret, a flicker of doubt that nagged on the edge of his consciousness. ‘Must this be the way?’ he wondered aloud.

‘The grace of the Machine-God is wisdom,’ Acestes answered him. ‘Do you despair because Castellax is to be scoured by the alien? Would you pray even now for the armies of the Imperium, the Adeptus Astartes themselves, to descend upon this world as saviours? That is compassion, emotion, illogic. The failings of flesh.’ The tech-priest drew back the sleeve of his synthfibre robe, exposing lean rods of steel and cable, the mechanical semblance of bone, muscle and vein. ‘We purge ourselves of flesh to become closer to the Machine-God. To remove from us the distractions and temptations of organic existence. To gaze with unclouded eyes upon Knowledge.’

The vox-casters built into Acestes’s chassis crackled to life. He turned away from Heroditus, addressing the dozens of other tech-priests ministering to the ascension of Vindex Lartius.

‘Castellax must be purged, razed in the fires of the foul xenos,’ Acestes pronounced. ‘Perhaps you would prefer liberation from the enemy by our fellow man. That is weakness. That is selfishness. That is, itself, faithlessness and betrayal. The fear of flesh is to die and that fear cries out against what we know we must do. Castellax cannot be saved. Castellax must not be saved! The works of the arch-enemy must be annihilated, all those who laboured upon them, all those who gazed upon such profanations of technology must be exterminated. Nothing must be left!

‘Liberation,’ the word came as a hissing sigh from the speakers. ‘What could such a thing have accomplished? Destroy the Chaos Marines, but leave their works intact! Bear these violations against the Machine-God back into the Imperium, allow their taint to spread, their unclean concepts to corrupt! No!’ The word boomed like cannon-fire from the speakers. ‘Better the xenos with its axes and hammers. All must be consumed! All must be destroyed!’

Acestes raised his arms in appeal to Vindex Lartius. ‘Only through total extermination can we honour our oaths to the Omnissiah!’

Heroditus bowed his head as the crackle of a Lingua-Technis prayer streamed from Logis Acestes. What the tech-priest said was true. Castellax had to be destroyed. Nothing could be allowed to survive. Fabricator Oriax and his perversions could be allowed no legacy. It all had to end here, beneath the alien paws of the orks.

The enginseer focused for a moment on the binary chant he was transmitting to the sentinel-implants buried within his own body. Oriax’s little cybernetic spies. A flicker of irrational fear swept through him. If the spies weren’t dormant, if they weren’t disrupted by the chant… But, no, it was absurd to think their conspiracy could have come so far if the Fabricator was aware of it. Oriax would have alerted the other Traitor Marines long ago.

Still, as he watched Vindex Lartius ascend, Heroditus couldn’t escape the persistent sense of alarm, the illogical feeling of unease that refused to be subdued by reason or probability.

This close to achieving their aims, Heroditus worried that something would interfere. That at the last moment the Iron Warriors would reach out and snatch their victory from them.

The bulky plane shuddered, waggling its wings, threatening to unbalance and spill itself into a sideways roll. Rhodaan clenched his teeth, reaching out and sinking the fingers of his gauntlet into the scrap-work fuselage, bracing himself against such an accident. The ork bomber was barely aerodynamic as it was, the slightest attempt at any sort of aerial manoeuvring was liable to bring it down. After their bold escape from Dirgas, to end up scattered across the desert in the wreckage of a xenos plane was too ignoble a doom to countenance.

‘Brother Gomorie,’ Rhodaan growled at the cockpit. ‘Keep this flying junkyard stable!’

‘The controls are erratic, lord captain,’ Gomorie apologised. ‘There is no regulation to their degree of responsiveness.’ The Raptor made a disgusted hiss. ‘The xenos must be mad to fly…’

‘I do not care about xenos or their madness,’ Rhodaan stated. ‘Just get us back to Vorago in one piece.’ He turned away from the cockpit, watching Pazuriel manipulating a box-like contrivance across the belly of the bomber.

‘It is almost ready, lord captain,’ Pazuriel said, rummaging about in the guts of a primitive relay. Wires ran from the cabinet-like device to either wing of the bomber. It had been a hazardous operation, rigging lights to the wings while the aircraft was in flight. There was no standardisation to the materials the orks had employed building the plane, allowing the wings several patches built from diamagnetic alloys. Uzraal had nearly been lost when his boot slipped on one of the treacherous spots, only the speedy employment of his jump pack preventing the Raptor from being dumped into the Mare Ossius.

Yet the lights were essential. Their escape from Dirgas had been remarkably smooth once they seized the bomber and Gomorie consumed the knowledge of its pilot. Most of the ork gunners manning the city’s defences were restrained enough to avoid shooting at their own aircraft and those few who were more bloodthirsty confined themselves to the odd, hasty pot-shot.

The poor communications among the orks had allowed the Space Marines to fly away in the xenos’s own plane, but Rhodaan knew there would be a much different situation when they reached Vorago. There it would not be the besieging orks who would be a danger, but the guns of their own defences. Deadly, precise and coordinated, a lone bomber would be easy prey.

Somehow, if they were to survive, Rhodaan had to inform the Iron Bastion of their identity. Towards that end, he had implemented a two-fold plan. The lights on the wings were set up to flash a constant signal, a stream of visual binary that any of Oriax’s servitors would be able to understand and relay. The machine-men would inform the Iron Warriors of their observation and the plane would be allowed to land.

However, that plan relied too much on chance and proximity to make Rhodaan comfortable, so he was counting upon it as a back-up contingency. His main hopes were vested in Pazuriel’s current labour. The bomber had been outfitted with a vox, a primitive crystal set intended to receive the babble of ork transmissions littering the atmosphere of Castellax. A confusion of military commands and visual braggadocio it had taken time to refine the transmission stream into something that would stand out from the general discord. If the signal could be rendered powerful enough, it would be noticed by the mamelukes in the Iron Bastion monitoring ork communications. The hazard, of course, was that they wouldn’t be able to drown out the other transmissions from any great distance. Like the flashing lights, they would need to be in close proximity to Vorago to be heard.

How close? That was the big question that bothered Rhodaan. It would do them little good to be identified as Iron Warriors just as their plane went diving down in flames.

The distant boom of guns rose to reach the bomber, an instant later the fuselage was rattling from the sound of flak clattering against it.

‘Some overenthusiastic xenos,’ Uzraal grumbled from one of the plane’s gun turrets. He leaned away from the glass viewport, waiting until the clatter against the fuselage subsided. ‘Don’t those stupid animals understand we’re on the same side?’ he added in a surly hiss.

Baelfegor looked aside from his own station. The side of the Iron Warrior’s armour was stained red, his shoulder spitted by a sliver of flak that had punched its way into the bomber during their flight from Dirgas. ‘We could drop a few bombs on them. Then they might believe us.’

Uzraal shook his fist at the other Raptor and swung back into his station. It had been his suggestion that the bomb load be dumped shortly after they were away from Dirgas. It was a sound decision, the ork ordinance was volatile and unstable, just the sort of thing they could do without if forced into a crash landing. Even so, the other members of Squad Kyrith delighted in taunting their battle-brother over the decision.

‘Nearing Vorago now,’ Gomorie announced from the cockpit, at once silencing the banter between Uzraal and Baelfegor.

Rhodaan marched to the fore of the plane, staring at the black sprawl of Vorago, watching as the besieged city emerged from the clouds of dust and smoke that obscured it. Seen from this vantage, he found a new appreciation for the havoc the orks were inflicting. Except for the Iron Bastion itself, hidden behind its void shields, there wasn’t a section of the city that hadn’t been pounded by the enemy. Hundreds of fires burned unchecked, whole districts were blackened rubble. About the perimeter walls and firebreaks, swarms of alien warriors clamoured and fought, striving to pierce the defences and rampage through the unconquered city. There seemed to be many more of the orks than Rhodaan remembered. He wondered how many reinforcements the horde had received in the hours since he’d been transported through the immaterium by Oriax’s sinister Daemonculum.

The flak that had peppered the bomber was, as Uzraal said, haphazard fire from the orks. As yet they were still too distant to take fire from Vorago’s defences. Yet that would change very quickly. Rhodaan could see the black, vulture-like shapes of ork planes flying above the city, could see some of the same suddenly blazing into brilliance as they were burned from the sky.

‘Brother Pazuriel!’ Rhodaan shouted. ‘Start transmission! If our brothers believe us to be orks, we will be shown no mercy.’

‘All is in readiness, lord captain!’ Pazuriel yelled back. ‘Light flashes have commenced and I am making vocal transmission now.’ The Raptor removed his helmet and placed the crude ork vox-transmitter up to his lips. The alien device would only recognise the loudest tones and could somehow differentiate between organic and synthetic emanations. In a thick, deep tone, Pazuriel snarled into the fat vox handset the code Rhodaan had decided upon. Something simple and direct that not even the lowest mameluke could fail to recognise and interpret.

‘Iron within!’ Pazuriel shouted. ‘Iron without!’

The war cry of the Iron Warriors, a chant none but the Space Marines were allowed to utter. The monitors within the Iron Bastion couldn’t misinterpret the message. The broadcast would be instantly relayed to their battle-brothers. The plane would be given safe passage into Vorago.

The distance continued to decrease, the walls and ruins of Vorago becoming larger and more distinct. Still all Rhodaan could hear from behind him was Pazuriel’s voice repeating the battle cry. He looked through the glass, watching the flashing lights bolted to the wings. If the vox failed, then their only chance to be identified was by the sequence of lights. Rhodaan kept his eyes fixed upon the starboard wing, watching the sequence run and then repeat.

As the stolen bomber neared the reach of the batteries on the perimeter wall, the crackle of a voice from Pazuriel’s receiving set brought Rhodaan away from the cockpit and back into the hold. He stared down at the vox, listening as the subservient voice of Flesh addressed Pazuriel.

‘Unknown aircraft,’ the slave said. ‘You are requested to terminate transmission and switch to a secure channel.’

Pazuriel’s face contorted into a scowl of frustration. ‘If we had the apparatus for secure transmission, would we be fiddling with dark-age broadcast,’ he snapped.

There was silence for a moment, then the slave was back. ‘Unknown aircraft. Please transmit your Castellax Air Cohort identity code.’

‘I’ll shoot that flesh-maggot when we land,’ Uzraal promised.

‘Not if I get my hands around its neck,’ Pazuriel growled back, then returned his attention to the vox. ‘We are Iron Warriors returning from a raid against Dirgas. We weren’t issued a daily identity code. This is an ork plane without means to process any code even if we did receive one.’

The slave transmitting from the Iron Bastion was either stubborn or afraid of straying from his training. ‘Unknown aircraft. Do not approach the city without proper identity confirmation.’

Rhodaan could hear Pazuriel’s knuckles crack as he clenched his fingers around the stem of the handset. ‘Listen, Flesh. Do I sound like an ork?’

A moment of silence, then a reluctant answer. ‘No.’

‘Is there any human on Castellax who would dare say “Iron within, Iron without” except an Iron Warrior?’

The answer this time was soft, almost timid. ‘No.’

‘Then that means this plane is full of Iron Warriors, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes… my lord.’

Pazuriel grinned in triumph. ‘So what should you be doing?’ he demanded.

‘Clearing you to land and telling the defence batteries to hold their fire.’

‘Get to it,’ Pazuriel snarled, smashing his fist into the receiver and shattering it into wreckage.

‘Was that wise, brother?’ Baelfegor asked.

Pazuriel lifted his helmet and set it back on his head, locking it into place with a twist of his arms. ‘Perhaps not, brother,’ he replied. ‘But it was immensely satisfying.’

Rhodaan glowered at the other Iron Warrior. ‘That was foolish and impulsive,’ he reprimanded Pazuriel. ‘Neither are qualities worthy of the Legion. I will determine suitable penance.’

Chastened, Pazuriel bowed before Rhodaan. ‘Of course, lord captain,’ he said.

Rhodaan turned away, marching back to the cockpit. Once more he stood at Gomorie’s shoulder, watching as the bomber flew towards the perimeter wall. They were within range of Vorago’s guns now. At any moment, they might expect the chatter of anti-aircraft batteries. Rhodaan glanced at the wings, assured himself the lights were still flashing their signal.

The moment passed. The bomber flew over the outer wall, into Vorago proper. Carefully, Gomorie manipulated the bulky steering column, even his enhanced physique taxed by the strength required to control the instrument. No mere human could have possessed the brawn the orks demanded, only a Space Marine could match their alien strength.

The bomber’s wing tipped, the plane shuddered into a slow turn, banking towards the Iron Bastion. Still the guns below presented no menace. The bold gambit had succeeded. Squad Kyrith was returning in triumph to Vorago!

Suddenly, the ramshackle plane shook furiously, flames erupting along its side. Baelfegor cried out, his armour pierced by shrapnel. He lurched away from the gun turret, using his combat knife to saw away at the projecting slivers of steel.

Again the bomber was shaken, wobbling in the sky. Rhodaan glared through the cockpit glass, trying to find whatever ork pilot through suspicion or simple perversity was firing on them. As near as he could see, the sky around them was clear.

From the corner of his vision, upon one of the firebreaks, a puff of grey smoke. An instant later, the bomber lurched drunkenly, its starboard wing holed by flak. One of their own batteries! One of their own anti-aircraft emplacements was firing on them!

Rage boiled inside Rhodaan’s breast. Treachery. That was his first thought. If Pazuriel’s transmission had been discounted or failed to be relayed, then every gun in the city would have tried to bring them down. For only a single battery to turn against them…

The hand of Vallax, or perhaps Uhlan! The Faceless might have left provision in case Squad Kyrith returned before them. A convenient accident that could eliminate Rhodaan without anyone the wiser.

‘How bad are we hit?’ Rhodaan snarled at Gomorie.

Gomorie looked up at him, his infected hand lengthening into argent claws. ‘This rubbish shouldn’t have been airborne before we started getting shot at,’ he said.

Rhodaan braced himself as another salvo of flak slammed into the bomber, pitting its belly. ‘Can you get us out of range?’

‘That depends how well they can track a falling target,’ Gomorie replied.

Rhodaan took a second to digest that report. ‘Open the bomb-bay doors,’ he ordered. Gomorie stabbed his silver claw against one of the many buttons littering the control terminal. He stared at it a moment, waiting for an indicator to light up. He stabbed it again, then pounded on the terminal in frustration.

‘Never mind,’ Rhodaan said. He drew his chainsword from his belt, thumbing the activation stud. Marching down the cabin, he snapped orders to the other Raptors. ‘Make obeisance to your jump packs. We free-dive in ten seconds.’ He could hear the other Iron Warriors invoking the machine-spirits of their wargear as they trooped after him, a strange admixture of respectful appeals and callous threats. Whatever was necessary to make the machines function in the crisis.

The chainsword bit into the locked bomb-bay doors, sparks flying as its churning edge sawed through the hinges. Wind roared through the plane as one of the doors ripped free.

‘Bomb-bay doors are open!’ Gomorie shouted over the vox.

Rhodaan growled back at him. ‘No, the doors are gone. Lock those controls and get back here. Unless you’d prefer to go down with the plane.’ Rhodaan gestured with his thumb and Uzraal dropped through the opening, the thrusters of his jump pack activating as he fell, turning his plummet into a controlled dive. Baelfegor followed, blood streaming from his impacted armour. Rhodaan watched the Raptor descend, waiting expectantly for the glow of his jump pack’s thrusters.

The glow never appeared.

‘I’ll kill that filthy flesh-maggot,’ Pazuriel cursed. ‘I can’t understand how they failed to identify us.’

Rhodaan motioned him through the door. ‘I think they knew exactly who they were shooting at,’ he announced over the squad vox-channel. ‘Keep that thought with you on your way down and when we avenge our battle-brother’s wasteful death.’

Vallax awoke to pain. It felt as though a dull knife was slowly sinking into his brain. The pungent stink of promethium, melted plastic, burned hair, corroded metal and fresh blood all assaulted his senses, striving to overcome the one stench that overpowered them all. The midden-heap scent of ork.

The Space Marine could tell his helmet had been removed by the cloying caress of foul air against his skin. The recyclers in his helmet would never have allowed such a concentration of filth to impact his senses. He could feel the dull, lethargic stirring of the air around him, the faintest hint of motion against his skin. Allied to the closeness of the smell, Vallax knew he was inside a room somewhere, a room with only the most rudimentary circulation.

Vallax opened his eyes, the action sending a sliver of pulsating agony through his skull. He was in a room, but such a room as would make Algol’s private abattoir seem a quiet place of contemplation. A riotous array of hooks, pincers, blades, saws, chisels and mauls hung from the corroded walls. Shelves displayed a weird collection of jars, bottles, boxes and bags each stuffed with a deranged assortment of bones, limbs and organs. Flies buzzed about the more exposed parts of the collection, glutting themselves on the rotting flesh.

Beside the macabre collection, a long workbench equipped with a pneumatic grip and a small furnace, an assortment of gears strewn about its surface. Oversized claws, piston-driven legs, even a box with steel jaw bones, lay piled around the bench. A crate of scrap metal loomed against the wall, several pieces jutting from the mess appearing to be recycled implants from ork cyborgs. Vallax recognised the power claw that had crushed his arm lying towards the top of the heap. Hulking against the side of the crate, wheezy snoring noises hissing through its speakers, was the mechanical mass of a killa kan, its murderous arms hanging limp against its hull while its entombed pilot slept.

Gritting his teeth, Vallax managed to turn his head. The motion sent a shudder of perfect agony cascading through his skull, the dull knife seeming to press deeper into his brain. The Iron Warrior resisted the clamour of his nerves, forced his head to turn still farther.

What he saw was a ghastly ork, its apelike body draped in a filthy coat of blood-stained white. The alien’s head had a squashed, flattened appearance rendering its broad face somehow toad-like. Above its enormous, toothy grin, the ork’s beady eyes lurked behind a set of tiny glasses with frosted lenses. The monster was ignoring Vallax, puttering about with a tall, box-like device that seemed to be a graveyard of dials and diodes. Electricity arced between horns set about the machine’s superstructure, dancing between them in random leaps.

The ork fumbled with the machine, then delivered a vicious swat to its side as the alien’s patience exploded. Angrily, it started to rip out a wire running between the side of its head to the machine. The wire resisted the ork, however, and before it could complete the operation, its beady eyes noticed Vallax’s awareness.

Clapping its paws together, its toad-like grin opening still wider, the ork returned to its machine, turning dials and smacking its sides.

Suddenly, it seemed as if the inside of Vallax’s head had been set on fire. He clenched his eyes closed, feeling a stabbing agony rippling through his optic nerves. Strange images flashed through his mind, a deranged panoply of confused impressions of savagery and violence. Prominent among the nightmarish discord were images of orks strapped to tables, screaming as their bodies were carved to ribbons by a grinning greenskin surgeon.

The ork paused, peering at him intently. Then the creature’s body began to shake, a braying bellow howled through the room. Vallax struggled to move, but was unsurprised to find that his limbs were securely chained, lashed to some crude metal armature. Even so, his pride refused to accept that he was helpless, that all he could do was sit there and let an ork laugh at him.

Then the Space Marine saw his reflection in the ork’s glasses. He had expected to see himself bound, laid out upon some sort of standing frame. What he hadn’t expected was to see his head bare, battered and shaved. He hadn’t expected to see a section of his skull missing, the living brain standing naked and exposed. The dull knife sensation was explained now. There was a dull knife stuck in his brain, wires fastened to its hilt streaming back to the ork’s weird machine.

The ork gestured with its thumb. Vallax followed the gesture, noting for the first time a rabble of orks clustered about the hatchway leading into the hideous surgery. They were big, brawny types, utterly unlike the squashed surgeon, yet each of them seemed reluctant to trespass on his domain.

Somehow, Vallax found he knew what the monsters were. Kommandos, orks that possessed a strange capacity for strategy and tactics, especially infiltration and ambush. The surgeon was called a painboy, his name was Gorflik and he was held in a weird alchemy of respect and outright terror by the orks of Waaagh! Biglug.

The Iron Warrior’s mind reeled. How did he know this? What obscenity were these filthy xenos perpetrating on his brain?

One of the orks in the doorway, a massive monster wearing camouflaged leggings and a long leather storm coat, the remains of a peaked cap squashed about its cranium, leaned across the threshold and growled something at Gorflik. Vallax could tell from the painboy’s reaction that the growl had been some sort of command. The ork in the coat was called Kaptain Grimruk, boss of the kommandos gathered in the hall.

Gorflik chuckled, adjusting the dials on his machine. Immediately, Vallax felt burning torment flare through his skull. Images were again rising unbidden, not the surface thoughts of the ork, but memories of his own. He could see the Iron Bastion in his mind, could see himself mentally prowling through its halls.

Immediately, Vallax knew the purpose behind this torture, the fiendish function of Gorflik’s machine. Before his thoughts could solidify, Vallax crushed them down with his ferocious will. Over and again in his mind he repeated the war cry of the Legion. Iron within! Iron without!

A snarl of disgust from Gorflik told Vallax his ruse had worked. He had built the mental equivalent of chaff inside his head, blocking the ork from the information it wanted: the layout of the Iron Bastion. The secret routes into and out of the fortress. The ork’s enraged thoughts came storming back across the wire. In his mind, Vallax could see the beast interrogating other captives. When they resisted Gorflik the way Vallax had done, the painboy took steps to break their defiance.

Gorflik reached to his head once more, pulling out the metal prong which connected the wire from the machine to the ork’s brain. Without bothering to clean the probe, the painboy let it fall and started towards the assemblage of cutters and saws Vallax had noted earlier.

The treacherous Oriax had certainly arranged a merciless and ignominious death for him, but as Vallax watched the ork pick out its tools, vindictive determination steeled him for the ordeal. Whatever happened, he would endure. The orks would never break an Iron Warrior. They would kill him first.

But before that happened, Vallax intended to be free. There were things he had to do before he died and it would take more than millions of orks and thousands of kilometres of polluted wasteland to stop him.

Oriax would rue his treachery.

Chains swayed in the fitful breeze created by the atmospheric modulators, clashing against one another in an eerie clangour. The dull, raw impacts as the objects dangled from the stout hooks formed a weird percussion to accompany the sound. The robed mamelukes scurrying about in the dingy, scarlet light which filtered down into the hall shivered with each note of the macabre orchestra, a shiver that owed nothing to the clammy temperature of Algol’s domain.

Each man knew the Iron Warriors regarded him as nothing more than Flesh, something weak and disposable. Skintaker Algol was worse. He found Flesh amusing and spared few opportunities to indulge his perverse humour. His demesne within the Iron Bastion was littered with the wreckage of men and women who had the misfortune to attract his attention. Through deed, misdeed or simply a tragic uniqueness of appearance, once the Skintaker’s eye was upon them, there was no escape.

Algol sat upon an adamantine chair, listening to the sound of the swaying chains and the dull thumps of the things hanging from them. The Iron Warrior’s eyes were half closed, his face contemplative. Around him, eyes averted from their ruinous master, a gang of slaves mended the gruesome cloak of human skin.

The heavy lids slowly pulled back, exposing the sadistic eyes. Algol smiled coldly as he studied the broken bodies suspended upon the hooks, masses of meat and muscle stripped of skin. There was discord among his grisly chimes. He suspected one of the older components was beginning to give out. It would need to be replaced. Judging by the lack of harmony, he’d require something of about seventy-three kilograms. Less the weight of five litres of blood and two square metres of skin, naturally.

Slowly, Algol lowered his gaze, contemplating the creature standing beneath the chains rather than the creatures suspended above it. Unlike the mamelukes, the flesh-drone didn’t shiver in the chill of the chamber, despite the ice-crystals forming on its pallid skin. True, the face writhed and contorted in various expressions of agony, but that was some extravagance of Fabricator Oriax rather than anything induced by Algol.

The Skintaker found that fact a source of vexation.

‘You may speak now,’ Algol decided, settling back in his chair. He studied a chronometer fashioned from a human skull. ‘The orks should make another push against the perimeter at dawn. I intend to be there to meet them.’

The flesh-drone gave no notice of Algol’s depreciatory tone. All it did was open its mouth and allow the voice of its creator to issue from the speaker implanted in its throat. ‘I am unaccustomed to waiting upon the hedonist indulgences of an inveterate sadist,’ the voice of Oriax hissed from the speaker.

Algol rose from the chair, striding towards the servitor. ‘And I do not grant audiences to a decaying meat-puppet,’ he snarled. ‘If you want to speak with me, stir from your sanctum. I’ll leave what’s left of your mouthpiece where you can salvage it.’

The flesh-drone retreated before the angered Space Marine. ‘Wait, Algol!’ the voice entreated. ‘What I have to disclose will be of interest to you.’

The Iron Warrior hesitated, doubt flickering through his eyes. ‘I will listen until you bore me, Fabricator.’

The flesh-drone eased its way back across the room, chains glancing from its lobotomised cranium. ‘Would you be interested in a cell of rebel Flesh?’ Oriax asked.

Algol didn’t bother concealing his smile, his fingers straying across the folds of his cloak. ‘I have heard claims that some of your minions have strayed from their oaths of loyalty,’ he said.

‘I bring you more than slave gossip and rumour,’ Oriax declared. The mechadendrites fastened to the flesh-drone’s torso unfolded, exposing the gleaming metal skull of a Steel Blood. The gruesome cyborg rose from the servitor’s claws, hovering in the chill air of Algol’s abattoir. The lens in its left eye socket began to glow, throwing a three-dimensional image onto the floor. In exacting detail, the Steel Blood transmitted a view of Colonel Nehring’s command post as it was being overrun by Yuxiang’s rebels.

‘I always keep several sets of eyes around places of interest,’ Oriax explained. ‘The Flesh destroyed one of my Steel Blood that was inside the command post, but they didn’t discover this one.’

‘You believe these maggots are connected with the renegade tech-adepts?’ Algol asked.

The flesh-drone shuffled forwards. ‘These ones are well-organised and well-prepared,’ Oriax explained. ‘There might be someone more capable behind them.’

Algol rose to his feet, chains brushing against his shoulders. ‘I will inform the Warsmith. Detach a combat squad from the walls. We will track down these overbold worms and bring them to account.’ His eyes seemed to glow in the crimson murk. ‘They will tell all before I have finished with them,’ he promised.

The rasp of a mechanised sigh rattled from the flesh-drone’s speaker. ‘You disappoint me, Algol,’ Oriax said. ‘I thought you were more confident in your abilities. An entire combat squad to deal with a few dozen Flesh? The Warsmith will laugh at you for such excess… if he doesn’t shoot you for cowardice.’

‘Do not tempt me, half-warrior,’ Algol snarled at the servitor. ‘No organism alive mocks my valour! I have strode across the battlefields of a thousand worlds, brought death to a million souls. None can question my prowess!’

‘Prove it,’ Oriax’s voice rasped from the servitor. In one swift motion, Algol pounced upon the flesh-drone, ripping its head from its shoulders with his bare hands. Angrily, he dashed the mangled mess of flesh and metal against the wall.

Despite the outburst, Algol found he hadn’t silenced the voice of Oriax. The Fabricator’s words streamed now from the mouth of the Steel Blood.

‘I came here to offer you the glory of smashing these rebels on your own, with none to share in it. Think how well the Warsmith will look upon the Skintaker then.’

Algol dropped the headless husk of the flesh-drone and stared at the hovering Steel Blood, doubt in his gaze. ‘Why would you bestow such a boon upon me?’ he wondered aloud.

‘I never forget my debts,’ Oriax said. The optics of the Steel Blood glowed a little brighter as the transmission continued.

‘There are services you rendered me in the crystal-swamps…’

CHAPTER XVIII

I-DAY PLUS ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY

Remnants of the Castellax Air Cohort streaked through the brown smudge of sky, guns roaring as they strafed the orks massed before the walls of Vorago. Bombs rained down upon the scrap-work alien machines, obliterating them in showers of smoke and fire. Each sortie brought death to thousands of the invaders.

It wasn’t enough.

Watching the sorry spectacle from the battlements, Captain Rhodaan could only shake his head at the futility of the air attack. The time for such tactics was long past. Like some grasping miser, Skylord Morax had held the strength of his air force in reserve. Rhodaan could easily imagine the other captain’s intention. It was obvious to anyone with the least degree of observation. Morax had been waiting for this moment, when the enemy came on in full strength, to make the final push against Vorago. Then he would unleash the carefully husbanded might of his Air Cohort against them, breaking their attack and the siege in one fell swoop.

Morax’s plan was typical of those who allowed their contempt for a species as primitive and uncouth as the orks to cloud any appreciation for their capabilities. Because the orks weren’t subtle, because they were crude and simple and direct in their approach to warfare, many commanders made the same mistake. It was the sin of pride and arrogance. Something didn’t need to be clever or complex to kill. It only needed to be strong.

The orks were strong. It offended Rhodaan to admit that, but there was no other way to say it. Where any other army would have broken under Morax’s aerial assault, the orks had held fast, using great dozers to clear away the wreckage and maintain their attack. No thought was spared for their dead, no fear displayed that they might be the next to die. With stupid stubbornness, the orks threw themselves towards one purpose and one purpose only: attack.

With each sortie, the Air Cohort’s strength bled away. Flakwagons and missile launchers took their toll, bringing down several fighters with each pass. Ork planes claimed their share as well, punishing each intrusion by the humans and pursuing them far out into the wastes. Morax had issued orders against any pilot leading orks back to the Air Cohort’s underground aerodromes, and for many of the escaping planes the sight of an ork on its tail was a death sentence whether the xenos caught it or not.

By this stage in the siege, the sorties had become nothing more than the empty posturing of a commander in disgrace. Each time the Air Cohort sallied forth they encountered ever heavier concentrations of flak, ever more numerous swarms of ork planes eager to score a kill. The last few squadrons had barely even started their runs against the alien ground forces before they were compelled to withdraw.

Through his restraint, Morax had allowed the skies of Castellax to belong to the orks. Now, when he wanted to take them back, the Skylord was discovering that it was too late.

Rhodaan turned his gaze from the skies, focusing instead upon the perimeter wall. His section boasted some two thousand Flesh, a mix of factory slaves and janissaries, as well as the Space Marines of Squad Kyrith, minus the dead Brother Baelfegor. In his stead, Brother Merihem had been placed under his command. According to Sergeant Ipos, Rhodaan was the only officer capable of even a marginal degree of control when it came to the Obliterator.

The Raptor knew that fragile control had nothing to do with him, but rather owed itself to Merihem’s unsettling fascination with Gomorie and his struggle against the corruption infecting him. Whenever there was a pause in the fighting, sometimes even in the heat of battle, Merihem would stop and stare at Gomorie, his tiny face spreading in a mocking smile. Rhodaan wasn’t certain he wanted to understand the Obliterator’s humour.

‘The xenos are mustering for another push.’ Uzraal reported over the inter-squad vox. He had been stationed within the command post for this section of the perimeter, providing him with access to the intelligence being transmitted down from the Iron Bastion. ‘The big battle fortress is taking up position on the flank of the main ork encampment. Several thousand orks are disembarking and rushing to reinforce the assault troops around the walls.’ There was a pause and Uzraal’s tone was tense when he continued his report. ‘The xenos are unloading three walkers. Intelligence categorises them as “stompas”.’

Rhodaan felt his blood chill as he heard Uzraal’s statement. Stompas were gigantic ork war machines, somewhere between the hulking dreadnoughts and the Titan-like gargants in size. It was fortunate that the aliens hadn’t been able to construct any of the city-crushing gargants, but the presence of the smaller stompas was still a crisis in the making. Turning his gaze in the direction of the ork camp, Rhodaan focused the optics in his helmet to maximum magnification.

True to Uzraal’s report, he could see the huge, clumsy machines lumbering away from the cyclopean battle-fortress, staggering from side-to-side like drunken mutants. The stompas stood taller than the perimeter walls, scrap-metal effigies of the ork physique. Where their arms should be, immense gun carriages and power claws swung on crude armatures. Even from this distance, Rhodaan could see the scaling ladders bolted to the hulls of the primitive machines. Like all ork strategies, the deployment of the stompas was simple and direct. The aliens would march their machines right up to the walls, then use the ladders to swarm up their hulls and drop down onto the battlements. With Morax’s Air Cohort routed from the sky, there was little the defenders could do to interfere.

‘Lord captain,’ Pazuriel’s voice crackled over the vox. ‘Should we prepare to assault the walkers?’

‘Negative,’ Rhodaan answered almost automatically. ‘We might stop one of them, but while we were doing it, the others would be free to reach the wall.’ His tone was grim as he made that assessment. ‘Uzraal, relay our situation to the Bastion. Ask Ipos for further orders.’

‘I already have,’ Uzraal answered. ‘He says our position has been determined to be critical to the overall defence. We have to hold, regardless of opposition.’

Rhodaan didn’t deign to respond. Furious, he strode to the battlements, sending a burst of bolter-fire into the orks massed below, venting his frustration upon alien flesh. Critical to the overall defence? That assessment aroused his suspicion. He couldn’t forget the reception Squad Kyrith had received on their return. Upon investigation, the battery that had fired on them was found to be littered with dead janissaries, victims, it seemed, of a malfunctioning servitor. That, Rhodaan felt, was far too convenient. Everything smelt of some hidden adversary trying to cover his tracks. The senseless order to hold the perimeter against impossible odds carried the same stink.

Over-Captain Vallax hadn’t returned from Dirgas. It was assumed that he and his Faceless were casualties. It was as well, because if he had made it back to Vorago, Rhodaan felt he would need to look no further for the enemy trying to stab him in the back.

Pain had become its own reality. Dull and throbbing or sharp and burning, pain had risen to consume Over-Captain Vallax’s senses. It pulsed through the corridors of his mind, pounded through the marrow in his bones, crackled down every nerve. Never had the Iron Warrior been subjected to such suffering, even during the extensive battery of surgeries that had transformed him so long ago from a mere human into a legionary.

The ork painboy had done everything its sadistic brain could conceive to break Vallax. Anything merely human would have been killed ten times over by Gorflik’s tortures. Vallax, however, remained steadfast, defying the ork. ‘Iron without. Iron within.’ The mantra of the Legion drummed through Vallax’s psycho-conditioned mind, demanding fealty to his oaths, loyalty even the Chaos gods could not break.

The room was filthy with Vallax’s blood. His tormentor’s green hide was mottled with splotches of gore. Shreds of the Iron Warrior’s flesh were caked about the vivisectionist instruments stuffed in the ork’s work belt, strips of his skin clung to the assemblage of saws and knives arrayed about the little table resting beside the cross-frame. Only the little glasses gleaming from Gorflik’s face remained clean, their sheen reflecting each atrocity visited upon the Raptor’s body when Vallax stared at the ork.

He accepted the burden of his wounds with pride. The more he suffered, the stronger his determination to defy his tormentor. The ork could ruin Vallax’s body, but it could not ruin his honour.

Far more agonising to Vallax than the violation of his flesh by the orks was the profanation of his armour. From where he was bolted to the cross-frame, he could see the segments of his power armour strewn across a workbench, lying in the dirt and filth of Gorflik’s surgery. Sometimes, when the painboy tired of Vallax’s defiance, it would retreat to the workbench and tinker with his armour, opening its ceramite shell to fiddle with the mechanisms within. It had made the Space Marine’s hearts crack to see the brutish alien pulling fibre bundles from the hollowed out vambraces, dumping the synthetic muscles onto the floor like so much trash. It had made his blood boil to watch the brutish alien tinkering with the breastplate, defiling it with crude tools. Often the ork would withdraw from the room in the midst of its sacrilege to consult with Kaptain Grimruk when the beast was lurking about the doorway. Always, after such conferences, Gorflik would return to the workbench with a notable attitude of excitement.

Vallax knew better than to throw himself into a rage. Fastened to the frame, all his fury could accomplish was the amusement of his captor. Instead, the Iron Warrior buried his anger deep inside himself, letting it fester in his hearts, letting its strength burn in his veins. Like pain, anger was power, fuel for the Space Marine’s indomitable will.

Slowly, with a cold deliberation that bespoke his iron discipline, Vallax worried at his bonds, sliding his body back and forth, weakening the grip of the bolts binding him to the frame by enlarging the wounds around them. He was careful in his efforts, always waiting until Gorflik’s vigilance was at its lowest ebb – when the creature was lost in the thrill of administering its tortures or busy with Vallax’s power armour.

After weeks hanging upon the frame, Vallax was held to the bars only by the grip of his fingers and toes. Grimly, he bided his time. He knew that his prison had been moving, could feel the vibration shivering through the frame, see the sway of the chains and tools hanging upon the walls. There could be only one destination, the only objective the orks had yet to conquer on Castellax: Vorago.

Black hate surged through Vallax whenever he thought of the city. It was there, buried deep beneath the Iron Bastion, that he would find the one who had betrayed him to the orks, the one who had so carefully engineered this fate for him. Every torture, every humiliation and indignity inflicted upon him – all of it was another score to settle with Oriax. Revenge sustained Vallax when duty and honour threatened to fail him. He would see the Fabricator pay for what he had done, would cherish the sound of his screams as he cherished the memory of the Warmaster’s voice.

Gorflik’s surgery was buried inside some vast machine, perhaps one of the ork battlefortresses. Every second he could feel the motion coursing through the deck, Vallax knew he was drawing closer to his own objective. In the name of revenge, he clung to the frame and endured the tortures.

It was only when the room grew still, when the rumble of motion vanished, that Vallax knew the time to act was near. Now he kept his attention on Grimruk and the camouflaged orks, who were often in the hallway outside the surgery. The Iron Warrior’s body had suffered hideously under the attentions of the painboy. He was under no delusion what his chances would be against one ork, much less a dozen. To have any chance at escape, he had to wait until Gorflik was alone and unobserved.

His wait wasn’t a long one. Never very disciplined, the orks in the hallway showed a marked disinterest in their vigil once the battlefortress stopped and they reached their destination. Faintly, from beyond the walls, Vallax could hear the crump of artillery and the crack of gunfire. Somewhere outside there was a furious battle being fought, one the ork guards desperately wanted to be a part of. One after another, they began to desert their post until at last there were no more leering faces peering at him from the hallway.

Vallax’s body grew tense, his savaged muscles burning as he flexed and tested them. Gorflik’s back was to him, the alien once more probing the components of his armour, vandalising it with primitive tools and perverse mischief.

Clamping his teeth tight, Vallax kicked out with his leg. The limb flashed from the cross frame, ripping clear of the bolt that had once pinned him in place. The wet, slippery noise of the metal bolt sliding through his flesh brought Gorflik spinning around. There was an almost comical expression of wonder on the ork’s face as its brain tried to come to grips with what it was seeing.

The need for caution gone, Vallax opened his mouth in an inarticulate howl and tore himself down from the frame, using his already freed leg to push away and turn his fall into a dive. Gorflik bleated in confusion as the Space Marine’s mass slammed into him, smashing the alien back against the workbench.

Blood streaming from his newly opened wounds, the Larraman cells in Vallax’s veins struggling to seal his injuries, the Iron Warrior wrapped a mangled hand around the ork’s throat, choking off the frightened bark the alien started to utter. With his other hand, he reached for one of the ceramite sabaton lying on the bench just behind the reeling ork’s ear.

Gorflik flailed in Vallax’s grip, one meaty paw clutching at the hand around his throat, the other digging into his filthy coat for an instrument that looked more bayonet than scalpel. Viciously the ork stabbed the blade into his enemy’s chest, penetrating the black carapace and digging into the fused ribcage beneath. Before the painboy could finish driving home his attack and put his full weight against the blade, Vallax cracked the armoured sabaton against the creature’s skull. There was a gratifying crunch of bone, a pungent reek of alien blood.

The ork continued to struggle, but its strength waned each time Vallax brought the ceramite armour smashing into the side of its head. Again and again he struck the alien, relenting only when the thick skull collapsed and Gorflik’s body fell limp.

Vallax staggered back, glaring down at the monster. Almost absently he noticed the surgical blade still embedded in his chest. With a savage wrench, he pulled it free. Vindictively, he brought the razored edge down to the ork’s forehead. In a single downward sweep, he slashed the keen blade across the leathery green flesh, slicing away the painboy’s face in a dripping sheet of skin.

The Iron Warrior rose from his victim, casting a wary glance at the doorway then at the killa kan standing in the corner of the room. The sounds of the brutal struggle had gone unnoticed. No guards appeared in the hallway. The gretchin pilot implanted inside the miniature dreadnought continued to snore. For the moment, at least, his escape was unnoticed.

Hastily, Vallax gathered the segments of his armour from the workbench. It sickened him to see the abuse they had suffered. Many of the intricate mechanisms built inside the suit – neural connectors, protein injectors, servo-motors, air purifiers, synth-muscles – had been ripped out with indiscriminate zeal. The interfaces that would bind the armour to the black carapace implanted beneath Vallax’s skin were gone. Their loss, above all else, troubled the Iron Warrior. Without the interfaces, he would be unable to properly manipulate the power armour. Instead of wearing it like a second skin, it would be a dead weight dragging him down and straining his endurance.

The Iron Warrior glared at the piles of vandalised components strewn about the surgery. Strain or not, he wouldn’t abandon his armour to these brutes. His decision made, he began fitting the ceramite segments about his body. It felt strange, without the synth-muscles and servo-motors assisting him when he moved, to have the armour reducing rather than enhancing his strength and agility.

Except for his helmet, every piece of Vallax’s armour was represented on the workbench. Soon, he resembled an Iron Warrior once more, encased from neck to foot in sleek ceramite plates. He scowled as he felt his head, the exposed section of his brain feeling raw and somehow withered. Resolutely he wrapped his fingers around the metal probe, pulling it free with an agonising tug. The Space Marine glared at Gorflik’s machine. Choosing an ugly hammer from the tools at hand, he lost himself for several minutes in smashing the dead ork’s invention into so much scrap.

When he finished, Vallax scolded himself for such excess. Dropping the hammer, he stepped away from the ruined machine and turned to the crate of weaponry and recycled cybernetics. It took him a few minutes, but at last he dragged free a boltgun that appeared in working condition. A few minutes more and he had the weapon separated from the cyborg arm it was bolted to.

As a last gesture, Vallax bent over the dead painboy, stripping the coat from the ork and wrapping it around his head like a turban to protect the grey tissue of his exposed brain. He stole towards the hallway, peering outside to assure himself there had been no alarm. The corridor was deserted, the door on the other side of the hall shut. No orks moved upon the stairway at the head of the passage.

Checking the chamber of his scavenged weapon, Vallax swept into the hall and sprinted up the stairs. He knew he would have to fight his way clear of the battlefortress, that an army of enemies lay between himself and the Iron Bastion. Between himself and his revenge. For the moment, at least, the Chaos gods smiled upon him and he was unobserved.

Vallax’s head pulsed with the each step as he raced for the stairs, strange sensations rippling through his body. Despite the dank, sweltering humidity he had felt a moment before, his flesh prickled with a sudden chill. A tart taste filled his mouth, blues and blacks leapt out in painful vibrancy in his vision. His ears shuddered under the impression of brutish laughter.

The Iron Warrior fought down his treacherous senses. Nothing would stop him from reaching the Bastion and his revenge. Not even his own infirmities.

The tractor came rumbling down the murky tunnel, its lights dimmed and hooded to prevent their gleam from carrying too far into the darkness. Corpses were piled high in the bed, carrion recovered from the battlements. Dozens of tractors were making the circuit between Processing Omega and wall, trying to keep the battlements clear of the mangled waste of war.

Yuxiang smiled beneath the ghastly snout of his mask. In the confusion and carnage, no one was paying attention to the disposers. They weren’t watching them with the same degree of vigilance as usual. The lack of supervision allowed the rebels to scavenge weapons and ammunition from the dead, stuffing their plunder deep beneath the bodies where no one would look.

Combined with what they had stolen from Colonel Nehring’s supply cache, Yuxiang estimated they had enough weapons and ammunition to equip three hundred men. As yet, of course, their numbers weren’t even close to that size. Including the two slave-recruits hiding in the cargo bed with the bodies, the rebel force was only fifty-four strong. But they were strong. They were determined, committed men and women who would fight to their last breath against the tyrannies of the Iron Warriors.

‘We’re starting to look like an army,’ Taofang commented. The janissary was marching beside the slow-moving tractor with Mingzhou walking at his side.

Yuxiang digested that observation, feeling a strange pride at the compliment. As a slave, he had despised the soldiers who exacted the dictates of the Iron Warriors, had loathed everything that smacked of war and violence. As a rebel, however, he appreciated the need for violence and understood the value of martial discipline and training.

‘It doesn’t matter what we look like,’ Yuxiang observed philosophically. ‘What matters is how we fight.’

‘Leave that to us,’ Taofang said, wrapping an arm around Mingzhou’s shoulder. ‘Every man you bring down from the wall will be trained by two of the…’ The janissary’s words broke off, his body growing tense. Reaching a hand to his face, he pulled down the gas mask and stared in alarm at the tunnel ahead.

Beneath the glow of an overhead lamp, a body lay sprawled, dressed in the tatters of a scavenged uniform. It was the sort of uniform the rebels had been issuing to their new recruits. How the man had come to be here, so far from their hidden refuge was a question that was of less importance to Taofang than what had brought the man to his current condition. For there was no question that he was dead, his arm nearly ripped from its socket, a pool of blood staining the ground around his prostrate form.

‘I think that’s one of ours,’ Deacon exclaimed from the other side of the tractor, his voice pitched with excitement.

Yuxiang brought the tractor to a halt. As he started to emerge from the cab, a chilling sight strode into the little circle of light cast by the lamp. It was the figure of an enormous man, his already gigantic frame further bulked by the ornate ceramite power armour that encased his body. The helmet that enclosed his head was cast into the snarling semblance of a skull and from his shoulders hung a ghoulish cloak of flayed human skin.

Algol the Skintaker. Not a soul on Castellax could fail to recognise the most sadistic and terrifying of the Iron Warriors, by reputation if from no more direct an encounter. Watching the slavemaster stalk into view from the darkness was like seeing Death manifesting itself. Yuxiang trembled at the wheel of the tractor. From the corner of his eye, he could see Taofang shivering in his boots.

Only Mingzhou kept some measure of reason in her head. ‘He’s over twenty-five hundred metres away,’ she assured them. ‘Someone with the best lasrifle on Castellax couldn’t pick off a target from that range. We have to get out of here before he can close the distance.’

As she spoke, Algol raised his arm, the graceless bulk of a bolter clenched in his fist. Without pause or hesitation, the Space Marine fired. From the other side of the tractor, Deacon screamed and fell, his chest ripped to splinters by the bolter’s explosive shell.

‘Get on and keep down!’ Yuxiang shouted to Taofang and Mingzhou, throwing the tractor into reverse. It had barely started to move before Algol fired again, the legionary’s shots smashing into the engine block. Smoke and steam erupted from the shattered engine.

The slaves hiding in the cargo bed rose and tried to run. As each tried to leap clear, he was picked off in mid-air by a shot from Algol’s bolter, their mangled bodies flying across the tunnel.

Mingzhou dropped down to the ground, rolling under the carriage of the tractor, aiming her lasrifle at the distant Space Marine. As she squinted down the sight, she cursed. ‘No one can shoot like that,’ she swore, pulling back the trigger and sending a crimson beam of light flashing down the tunnel. Hundreds of metres from its target, the beam faded into nothingness.

The flash of light caused Algol to pause. The skull-faced helm tilted to one side, peering more intently at the tractor. Almost casually, the Iron warrior adjusted his grip on the bolter, tilting the barrel downwards ever so slightly.

‘Mingzhou!’ Taofang screamed at the sniper. ‘We have to get out of here!’ Yuxiang leapt down from the cab and added his voice to the janissary’s.

‘Get to cover!’ Mingzhou shouted back. ‘He can’t hit me under here unless he gets close! And when he does, I’ll put a hotshot through his skull!’

The bolter cracked again. Taofang cried out as he watched Mingzhou’s body jerk up and strike the underside of the tractor. Her body slumped back against the ferrocrete paving, blood streaming from her shattered flesh. Instead of closing upon her and coming within range of the sniper’s rifle, the Iron Warrior had fired his shot into the floor several metres in front of the tractor, deflecting his shot so that it arced beneath the vehicle and struck the woman hidden there.

‘She’s dead!’ Yuxiang shouted, trying to drag Taofang away. The janissary pulled away, his hands tightening about the stock of his lasgun. Yuxiang watched incredulously as the janissary began marching down the tunnel towards Algol, the crack of his lasgun echoing through the tunnel as he advanced, oblivious to the distance between himself and his enemy.

Yuxiang knew there was nothing he could do to help Taofang. The janissary was marching to his death, a fate he seemed now to welcome. Algol, with sadistic amusement, held his fire, allowing the doomed man to advance down the tunnel knowing he could strike the soldier down any time he wanted.

Yuxiang turned and ran into the darkness. Survival, the will to live, thundered through his veins, urging him onwards. Behind him, he could hear the steady crack of Taofang’s lasgun, the reports receding into the distance. Finally, as the reports became faint, he heard the boom of the bolter one last time.

He was alone in the maze of tunnels now and somewhere behind him, coming after him as surely as Death, was the Skintaker.

A susurrus of binary echoed through the catacombs, a staccato of pious devotion and supplication filled the darkness. Cowled heads were raised, mechanical eyes were bright with the fervour of zealous anticipation, cybernetic claws were twined in prayer.

Above the conspirators, who had risked all to assemble it, who had offended their own strictures to cobble it together, the warhead of Vindex Lartius hung upon its chains. Like the eidolon of some techno-barbarian cult, the great bomb beamed down upon them, seeming to revel in their adoration. Its machine-spirit would soon claim its function, the purpose to which it was formed. The perfect fusion of purpose and destiny that only the divine machine could achieve.

If it was still possible, Enginseer Heroditus might have felt envy for the purity of Vindex Lartius. Its essence hadn’t been violated and abused by the obscenities of the Iron Warriors. It hadn’t been coerced into labouring for the foul achievements of Fabricator Oriax, the arch-heretic of Castellax. It was clean of the blasphemy with which every man in the catacomb had desecrated himself.

Every man save one. Logis Acestes had never submitted to enslavement, had never allowed himself to be subjected to profane servitude under Oriax. He had hidden himself, bided his time until the opportunity to strike back at the heretics was presented to them by the grace of the Machine-God.

Of them all, only Acestes was clean enough in spirit and purpose to sing the psalm that would arm the warhead, to press the rune that would detonate Vindex Lartius and bring the purifying fires of annihilation to the lords of Castellax. It was an honour of which only Acestes was worthy. Only he could lead them into redemption.

The tech-priests maintained their Lingua-Technis chant while Acestes mounted the causeway and approached the gilded cabinet in which was housed the sacred rune of detonation. He folded his hands together, bowed his head in an attitude of reverence. A soft hiss of binary crackled from his vox-caster, a sonic pulse that swept through the cavernous chamber.

Instantly, the chorus of the conspirators was silenced. Heroditus struggled to speak, but every relay and servo within his body refused to respond, locked into fail-safe redundancies from which they wouldn’t stir. His eyes, the only parts of him that were organic and therefore mobile, rolled in their sockets. His optic sensors observed that the entire congregation had been gripped by the same affliction. Frozen in place, solemn and silent as steel statues, none of them could even give voice to his distress.

Heroditus felt his mind shudder, aware that it was not simply motion that was denied to him. All functionality had been restricted. The orisons of distraction, the subroutine of deception he had been feeding into the spy-implants were no longer running. The implants, if they continued to function, if they weren’t afflicted by the plague-protocol, might even now be alerting Oriax to what the conspirators had achieved. The Iron Warriors might even now be descending upon this place to dismantle Vindex Lartius.

Fear, that most ancient and primal of emotions, coursed through the enginseer’s brain. Coming so close to fulfilling their purpose and achieving redemption only to have it all snatched away from them at the very edge of countdown! If he still possessed tear ducts, Heroditus knew he would have wept for the malicious cruelty of fate.

Then hope stirred within him, rushing through his brain without the impetus of a valve-pump to speed it along. Upon the causeway, Heroditus saw motion! Logis Acestes was raising his head, was staring across the other tech-priests, studying their predicament. Victory and redemption were still within their grasp. It needed only one voice to sing the psalm of activation, one hand to depress the rune of detonation!

Acestes gazed out across the conspirators, the lenses of his optics pivoting within the sockets of his skull. From his speakers, a voice boomed down, but it was not the voice of the logis. It was a voice that had become even more familiar to the tech-priests during the long centuries of occupation. It was the voice of the arch-heretic. The voice of Fabricator Oriax.

‘We come to the end of all things,’ Oriax’s words crackled from Acestes’s speakers. ‘Your craft and efficiency in achieving your purpose have been exemplary. I knew when I first conceived this plan that your productivity would be more zealous were you to labour under an appealing delusion.’ Acestes lifted his arms, extending them outwards to better display his robed chassis. ‘Towards that end, I revived your Logis Acestes from the dust of dissolution, crafting a replica of his semblance and infusing it with a simulacra of his mentality. You should feel honoured. Seldom have I worked so diligently upon one of my flesh-drones.’

Heroditus felt the magnitude of the Fabricator’s betrayal come crushing down upon him. Not for an instant could he question the evidence of his senses. Through the deception of Logis Acestes, Oriax had preyed upon their faith and defiance, had exploited the embers of rebellion burning inside them. Like some daemonic maestro, he had conducted the conspiracy from the very beginning, directing its every move.

‘The time is at hand,’ Oriax pronounced. ‘The full weight of the ork attack descends upon Vorago. Now the Iron Warriors will be annihilated. Vindex Lartius shall break the walls and the horde shall pour in, overwhelming the traitors. The Third Grand Company will be blotted from existence, Warsmith Andraaz will die in disgrace knowing all his achievements perish with him.’ The static crackle of Oriax’s laughter hissed from Acestes’s speakers.

‘I tell you all of this, so that as your spirits are hurled into the void, you will understand,’ Oriax said. ‘Like the orks, you have been a useful tool. I would feel uneasy allowing you to die under the delusion that your sacrifice has been for your Omnissiah and your False Emperor. Understand, as I activate Vindex Lartius, that you perish not as martyrs, but simply as pawns of Oriax!’

The Fabricator’s words rang in Heroditus’s audio relays as he watched the replica of Acestes reach into the gilded cabinet to depress the rune which would annihilate them all.

CHAPTER XIX

I-DAY PLUS ONE HUNDRED
AND TWENTY-ONE

Rhodaan brought the churning edge of his chainsword slashing across the snarling face of his adversary, sending a spray of green flesh and yellow tusks spurting across the wall. The ork crumpled, its fingers still tugging at the trigger of its pistol. Rhodaan kicked the twitching corpse out of his way and lunged at the next alien he had marked for slaughter. There was no shortage of choices. With each breath, dozens of orks were leaping down from the rusty shoulders of the stompa, howling with bloodlust as they dropped to the wall. The huge scrap metal hull of the war machine loomed high above the wall, its massive guns lobbing shells into the city, its spotlights blazing like the eyes of a mad god.

The death cry of an ork shrieked through the audio relays in Rhodaan’s helmet as he opened its guts with his sword and vaporised its chest with a blast of plasma. The Iron Warrior dismissed his mutilated foe, spinning around to catch another ork in mid-drop. The alien’s bullets glanced from his power armour, but the teeth of Rhodaan’s grinding sword caught it squarely as it fell, cutting it open from groin to throat. The severed halves of the ork flopped about its killer’s feet, greasy alien ichor spraying from its organs.

There was no pleasure in killing the orks, however many Rhodaan slew. The deaths were meaningless, devoid of any tactical significance. The fact that the stompas had reached the wall rendered the situation untenable. If the Iron Warriors artillery had been able to stop their advance or if Morax could have assembled enough of his strike-bombers to make a direct assault on them, then perhaps the walls could have held. But none of these things had happened. Caught in a fixed position, compelled to rely upon the fire support of mere Flesh, the Space Marines were engaged in a war of attrition now. No tactics, no strategy, not even martial discipline and superior weaponry. Everything was boiling down to a question of simple numbers. With perhaps forty Iron Warriors spread out amongst the entirety of the defences, the numbers favoured the orks by several orders of magnitude.

Rhodaan clenched his teeth as he incinerated the face of a charging ork. Reason railed against the absurdity of the commands coming from the Iron Bastion, yet there was no denying the voice was that of Sergeant Ipos, the Warsmith’s seneschal. What they amounted to was ‘hold and die’, the sort of command dispatched to replaceable Flesh, not to hardened Space Marines. Certainly not to Raptors, the elite of the elite.

Spinning to cut the legs out from under a monster ork with a steam-powered industrial claw welded to its forearm, Rhodaan wracked his mind for some way, some excuse, to discard the orders he had been given. Some way to save himself and his Iron Warriors.

‘Lord captain,’ Brother Uzraal’s voice crackled over the vox. ‘The seismic index of the stompa’s bludgeons has increased ten-fold.’ Stationed within the janissary command post for this section of the perimeter, Uzraal was able to access directly the various intelligence filtering into the headquarters. Among that intelligence was the data being transmitted by the stability cogitators buried deep inside the perimeter wall. From the very start of their attack, the stompas had employed their gigantic claws to pound the wall. Now, it seemed, their barbaric efforts were finally beginning to wear down the ferrocrete.

‘Estimated time before collapse?’ Rhodaan inquired as his chainsword severed the roof of an ork’s skull. The alien froze in its tracks, staring stupidly at the stew of blood and brains dripping down its hands. The Iron Warrior finished it with a thrust that crunched through its ribs and pulped its heart.

‘Collapse within the next rotation,’ Uzraal reported, ‘but we can expect fractures before then. The entire front façade will probably shear off.’

Through his boots, Rhodaan could feel the steady tremor of the stompa’s claws pounding away, a tattoo of destruction that was relentless and implacable. The aliens didn’t care how many of their own perished when the wall came down, that was of no consequence to them at all. What mattered was breaking through this obstacle that had defied them, seeing it smashed down and brought low. Even the orks, Rhodaan thought bitterly, understand that fighting for control of the wall is pointless.

Turning to parry the assault of a screaming ork wielding an electrified mattock, Rhodaan suddenly found himself catapulted into the air, his armoured body spinning end over end as he was hurled far into the smog-choked sky. The air around him was thick with huge chunks of ferrocrete, twisted slabs of metal, gory strips of meat that could only dimly be recognised as belonging to either humans or orks. The audio relays in his helmet emitted only a soft buzz, their dampeners overwhelmed by some terrific sound.

The demi-organic wings fixed to Rhodaan’s jump pack snapped open, turning his aerial tumble into a controlled descent. He was forced to shift and weave through the cascade of debris, nearly being swatted from the sky by a jagged lump of metal he slowly realised was the claw from one of the stompas. It had been sheared off at the joint, tons of steel hurled hundreds of metres into the sky. The force required to do such a thing was incredible, almost unbelievable.

Rhodaan had a full appreciation of how unbelievable a moment later. The filters in his helmet’s optics pierced the thick clouds of smoke and dust, revealing the shattered landscape below. Where the firebreak abutting the perimeter wall had stood there was now just a jagged crater. Hundreds of metres of wall had been obliterated by some tremendous subterranean explosion, the force of the blast crippling the stompa attacking the nearby section, flinging it like a tinker toy to lie floundering on its side, its massive feet churning futilely at the empty air. How many thousands of orks and Flesh had been annihilated outright in the blast, Rhodaan couldn’t say, but he could see their bodies strewn about everywhere. Scattered survivors, dazed and confused, crawled about the ruins.

The Raptor’s mind whirled. Was it possible the orks had sent sappers underneath the wall, that the brutish xenos had managed to infiltrate the complex underground defences of Vorago to plant some planet-cracking bomb under the city? It was a theory that repulsed Rhodaan, yet what other explanation was there?

Increasing the magnification of his optics, Rhodaan forgot his questions about why and how. Beyond the blast, a vast horde of orks were gathering, drawn like moths to the violence of the explosion. At the moment, the aliens were confused and indecisive, but as soon as the smoke cleared they would know what to do. They would see that the blast had obliterated the wall, leaving the interior of Vorago wide open.

‘Squad Kyrith,’ Rhodaan snarled into his vox. His helmet’s external audio receptors were still buzzing from the detonation, but the internal relays were still functional. ‘Report!’

‘Brother Gomorie. Thrown clear. I am two kilometres from your position, lord captain.’

‘Brother Uzraal. Coordinating the Flesh in opening the collapsed passage into the command post.’

Rhodaan waited, but no reply came from Pazuriel. Another of his formidable Raptors squandered in a wasteful death. A sudden thought came to him as he considered the reduced strength of his command. ‘Brother Merihem?’

The Obliterator’s voice hissed across the vox. ‘I function,’ the monster growled. ‘My position is five hundred metres from your location. Allow me a space for my diagnostics to recalibrate.’ Over the vox, Rhodaan could hear a grisly sucking sound, like boiled flesh being stripped from raw bone. Whatever adjustments Merihem’s corrupt body was making, he didn’t want to know.

‘Orders, lord captain?’ Brother Gomorie asked.

Rhodaan stared grimly at the wall. The orders he had been given by Sergeant Ipos were to hold their position, but their position didn’t exist any more. It had been annihilated in the blast. A cold smile formed on his face.

‘Fall back to the Iron Bastion,’ Rhodaan decided. ‘Use your jump packs. We will rendezvous at central command.’ A murderous edge crept into his voice. ‘I think I’m going to discuss strategy with Sergeant Ipos.’

Uzraal’s voice crackled across the vox. ‘Lord captain, the Flesh here want to know what assistance they can render us. Shall I execute them for their impertinence?’

There was a touch of eagerness in Uzraal’s tone that Rhodaan didn’t feel like indulging. ‘Negative. Save your ammunition. We may need it.’ As he gave the command, his mind turned again to Merihem. The Obliterator’s ability to generate his own ammunition would be beneficial if the monster’s talents could be properly harnessed. He had a feeling that something was terribly wrong back at the Bastion, something he would need every resource to confront.

‘Brother Merihem, what is your situation? Can you make your way back to the Bastion?’

The Obliterator’s hiss crackled across the channel. ‘I am partially extracted from a three-metre deep impact crater. There is a damaged manufactorum ten metres to my west, a smashed Air Cohort fighter fifty metres to my north and a squad of janissaries with a disabled truck one hundred metres to my south,’ Merihem reported.

‘Can you commandeer the transport from the Flesh?’ Rhodaan asked.

The Obliterator’s amusement rippled through Rhodaan’s helmet. ‘Do you think they can stop me, lord captain?’

Rhodaan ignored the question, staring instead at the ork horde. The smoke was clearing now and the aliens were able to see some of the damage that had been done. Already, excited orks were jabbering at their fellows, sometimes punctuating their words by firing a burst into the smoke. It wouldn’t be long now.

‘Squad Kyrith, withdraw to the Bastion,’ Rhodaan ordered. ‘Vorago is lost.’

As he ignited his thrusters and soared across the devastation, his helmet’s external audio crackled back into life. Behind him, Rhodaan could hear the orks give voice to a mighty roar, a bestial cry that had heralded carnage and atrocity across an entire galaxy. He didn’t need to look back to know the horde was rushing into the breach. That semi-articulate roar told him the orks were on the attack.

‘Waaagh!’

Darkness. It had become the entirety of existence, a blackness so all-encompassing that it assumed its own voice. The voice of darkness, roaring through the ears, bellowing its malignance with a thunderous dirge.

No, Yuxiang corrected himself, it was not the darkness that roared and raged, it was the thing which lurked in that darkness. The armoured devil who stalked him through the catacombs, calling out to him with the amplified boom of vox-casters. The fiend whose sadistic taunts pursued him through the empty tunnels, mocking him for his audacity.

What was a man except weak, frail Flesh? How could mere Flesh hope to defy Iron? What hope had worms who rose against gods?

He had killed them all. Algol boasted of the ease with which he had tracked the rebels back to their refuge. He sneered as he described the death of each rebel Yuxiang had recruited. None of them had any chance. Fifty armed men against one legionary? The fight was over before it began.

The Skintaker had hoped for an amusing diversion when he descended into the tunnels to hunt his prey. He had hoped the rebels would put up some manner of defence, at least display enough cunning and ingenuity to give Algol pause. The Space Marine hadn’t even broken a sweat, hadn’t even bothered to tune out the transmissions from the Iron Bastion so he could focus entirely upon the hunt. Yuxiang’s rabble had been pathetic, laughable. Children playing at soldiers.

Yuxiang clung to the wall, sucking in the stagnant air, feeling the industrial pollutants singe his lungs. He’d discarded his gas mask and duster long ago, as well as anything else that would weigh him down and tax his endurance. The lasgun had been the last thing he’d cast aside, but he knew his reluctance to part with it had been absurd, giving in to his fear. There was no chance he could fight the Space Marine, Algol could pick him off any time he wanted. If Yuxiang ever allowed the Iron Warrior to get so close as to offer him a chance to shoot, he knew the giant would finish him before he could get off a shot. As though a measly las-bolt could pierce the ceramite armour encasing the monster.

No, all he could do was run. All he could do was delay the inevitable, to draw out the chase. Eventually exhaustion would overwhelm him or Algol would grow bored. Then it would all be over. Until then, all Yuxiang could do was run, to selfishly cling to each terror-soaked moment left to him. Even when death was so near, a man clung to life with a miser’s greed.

‘Your friends are all dead, little one,’ Algol’s voice thundered from the darkness. ‘They have all left you. Left you alone. Left you to me.’

Yuxiang drew another lungful of polluted air and pushed himself away from the wall, mustering his strength for another effort. One hand trailing along the wall, allowing him to keep his bearings, he raced ahead into the darkness. He could hear the monster laugh, the sound echoing through the corridors.

‘Tired? Is the Flesh growing weak?’ Algol mocked. ‘And you thought you could stand against Iron? That is such an insult that I think I will take my time. I’ll start the knife at your throat and you’ll beg me to dig it a little deeper and end your misery. I’ll stop and listen and make you think maybe you have earned mercy. Then I’ll set to work again and you’ll know it will be a long time before I allow you to die.’

Yuxiang tried to block out the Iron Warrior’s thunderous voice as Algol described outrage after outrage, a litany of torture that only a devil incarnate could conceive. Desperately, he drew upon unknown reserves of strength to push ahead, unreasoning fear goading him towards an escape he knew was irrational to hope for. The legionary had superior strength and endurance, enabling him to far outlast Yuxiang. The optics in his helmet allowed him to see in the dark while Yuxiang could only grope blindly down the passages. Even if he didn’t have the benefit of night vision, the Iron Warrior could track the slave by scent alone, his olfactory senses heightened to the sensitivity of a canid.

No, there was no escape from the horrors Algol described in chilling detail. There was only one thing Yuxiang could do. That was to cheat his tormentor of his victory.

To do that meant to silence that urge to survive, to cling to each moment left to him. Yuxiang gripped the knife in his boot, the combat knife Taofang had given him when the janissary had seen Processing Omega and joined the rebellion. He fingered the knife now, running his thumb along its edge. The keen blade cut the skin, drawing a bead of blood from his finger.

Yuxiang knew Algol would be able to smell his blood. The Iron Warrior’s cruel imagination would guess what his prey was about. Through the corridor, the sound of the armoured giant’s rushing steps rumbled like the roar of a train. Yuxiang pressed the blade against his throat, determined to do what he had to before the legionary could stop him.

Then the world came crashing down.

There was a sound like the cracking of a mountain, a wave of hot air that smashed down from the roof, mashing Yuxiang against the floor. He could feel the ground jumping beneath him, the walls shivering beside him. The stink of ferrocrete dust filled the air, blotting out even the industrial stink of pollutants.

Consciousness threatened to abandon Yuxiang, but he stubbornly forced it to maintain its hold on his mind. The knife had been knocked from his hand by the tumult. Yuxiang desperately groped about in the darkness for the lost blade, still intent on denying Algol his victory.

The blade remained elusive. Each heartbeat, Yuxiang expected to feel the Skintaker’s hands close about his throat, lift him from the ground and shake him like a ragdoll. Then the real torture would begin.

By degrees, even through the panic rushing along his spine, Yuxiang became aware that it was becoming brighter in the tunnel. A sickly stream of daylight was filtering down into the passage through a jagged fissure in the roof. Some colossal explosion had caused the ceiling to fracture and come apart. Great chunks of ferrocrete lay strewn about the tunnel, several of them having missed Yuxiang by only a few metres. He wasn’t sure if that was anything to be grateful for. Crushed under tons of rock would be preferable to what Algol intended.

Then, through the veil of dust, Yuxiang saw something that made his heart stop. He could see the skull-like helmet and the ceramite armour of his tormentor, the hideous cloak drawn across the fiend’s shoulders. It was a moment of pure horror as he stared into the blazing optics of the Skintaker.

The moment passed and was replaced by incredulous jubilation. Yes, Yuxiang could see the Skintaker’s head and shoulders, but he couldn’t see anything else. The rest of the Space Marine was buried under a pile of rubble, great masses of ferrocrete and steel girders. One plasteel rod, projecting from the debris, was coated in blood too bright to belong to an ork or unaugmented human. The sight of Algol’s blood drowned Yuxiang’s fear. The monster was mortal after all!

Slowly, Yuxiang approached the pile of rubble, a twisted plasteel rod clenched in his hands. He stared down at the trapped Space Marine, feeling the arrogance and contempt burning behind the optics. He could see Algol struggling to move, straining to push the masses of ferrocrete and steel off his body. A disjointed, fragmented growl rasped from the damaged vox-casters, allowing Yuxiang to hear only every other word in a steady stream of threats and invective.

Yuxiang was no artificer, no craftsman trained in armourcraft. What he knew were machines, the presses of the factory. There was one simple rule to any machine: it was weakest where its moving parts were. Studying the trapped Space Marine, Yuxiang noted the slight gap between gorget and helmet designed to allow the legionary to turn his head. A cold smile formed on Yuxiang’s face. He lifted the jagged twist of plasteel with its sharp point.

‘This is how it ends,’ Yuxiang told the imprisoned devil. ‘Sometimes even the worm gets its chance. Sometimes even a god dies at a man’s hand!’

Vengefully, Yuxiang drove the plasteel stake into Algol’s throat, worrying it around in the wound until all the Larraman cells in his body couldn’t stop the bleeding. As Algol’s blood tried to seal the wound with scar tissue, Yuxiang’s vicious attentions tore them open again.

Bit by bit, the Skintaker was bleeding out. It was a slow, humiliating death. The sort of death Algol had revelled in bestowing.

The irony of his own destruction only made Algol’s humiliation more complete.

Even locked inside his immense suit of Terminator armour, the sound of the wailing daemons clawed at Warsmith Andraaz’s ears, scratching at his mind with icy talons. He could feel their unnatural essence pawing at the core of his being, hungrily caressing that eternal spark ecclesiarchs and philosophers called the soul. He felt the urge to submit to the profane violation, to surrender himself to the call of Chaos.

The Warsmith’s scarred face hardened. His tyrannical will exerted itself, driving back the temptations threatening to lure him to distraction. Chaos was a force, a power, a cosmic energy to be tapped and harnessed, exploited and dominated. Let the Word Bearers and Thousand Sons wallow in their bog of superstition and slavery. Let the World Eaters and the Emperor’s Children surrender their very identity to ruinous gods, allow their minds to be devoured by daemonic desires. The Third Grand Company would remain pure. The Third Grand Company would remain steadfast. They would not lose focus upon the Long War. They would not forget the reason for their hate. It was theirs, it belonged to them. They would share their revenge with no one, mortal or god.

Andraaz cast his gaze across the Daemonculum, watching as the flesh-drones brought their offerings before the chained daemons. He could feel the throb of infernal power racing through the bloodwood platform, smell the ethereal taint of warp energy as it gathered in the chamber. Weird coruscations of light crackled between the pillars, plays of brilliance that were at once all colours and none at all.

The Warsmith flexed his fingers, the scythe-like talons of the power claw fitted to his armour unfolding in response, energy rippling down each blade. He could feel the ancient weapon’s eagerness, its thirst for battle. Soon, he promised it, soon it would be sated. It would rend and tear, rip and slash until the very end, until the last breath had been crushed from his body.

He turned his gaze from the daemons and their bloody repast, looking instead upon the five armoured giants standing beside him on the bloodwood dais. The Rending Guard, veterans of Isstvan and Olympia, victors of a million battles. Each of the Iron Warriors was entombed within a hulking mass of ceramite and titanium, their archaic Terminator armour festooned with gilded skulls and runic script. Oaths of blood and honour bound them to the Warsmith, joined their very souls to serving Andraaz faithfully and without question. They would lay down their lives for the Warsmith.

Today, they would.

Andraaz stared hard at his Rending Guard, burning every spike and rivet adorning their armour into his memory. They had served him well down through the millennia, been his strong right hand in every conflict. Never had they failed him. A flicker of guilt tried to find its way into the Warsmith’s hearts as the thought came to him that he had failed them in the end. Andraaz dismissed the idea. He was Warsmith. In a very real way, he was the Third Grand Company. The Iron Warriors under his command were there to serve and obey. He owed no obligations to them. They would fight and they would die to bring glory to Andraaz.

Today, they would die. Andraaz had decided that when he led the Rending Guard into the depths of the Iron Bastion and into Fabricator Oriax’s sanctum. With the breaking of the perimeter wall and the firebreak, there was no longer any question of holding back the xenos scum. Castellax was lost. The Iron Warriors might hold out for a few more months in the Bastion, but the end would be the same. There was no hope of victory now.

All that was left to them was to seize a final chance at glory. To make the orks pay dearly for their triumph. A butcher’s bill that would make even the aliens tremble.

In defeat, Andraaz would seize the only honour left to him. He would meet the ork warlord on the battlefield. He would slay the beast that had brought doom to his world.

Across the chamber, Andraaz could see Fabricator Oriax, the Techmarine’s mechanised manipulators flying about the oval control console arrayed about him, depressing glowing runes and turning bronze dials. The original Daemonculum had required a coven of thirteen psi-witches to control it. Through his machinery, the new Daemonculum needed only Oriax.

The Warsmith’s gaze hardened as he considered the Techmarine and his creation. How long had the Daemonculum been operational? How long had Oriax deceived him about its capabilities? Andraaz had been aware for many decades that the Fabricator was obsessed with the Daemonculum, but he had never suspected how deep that obsession ran. Oriax seemed unduly possessive, as though he had forgotten that the device, and the Fabricator himself, belonged to Andraaz.

If he hadn’t needed Oriax to control the Daemonculum now, Andraaz would have shown the Techmarine what it meant to deceive a Warsmith. Circumstances, however, had made him essential to Andraaz’s final chance for glory. The Fabricator’s Steel Blood had located the ork warlord, Biglug. The warlord couldn’t afford to miss the final battle for control of Castellax, if he did then he would lose his hold over the other orks and some other alien would rise to challenge him. Biglug had to participate in the final attack and Oriax’s Steel Blood had spotted the xenos monster leading a mob of his fellows into the breach. Even now, the servitor-spies were monitoring the ork warlord, transmitting updates directly to Oriax’s sanctum.

Biglug had been cagey throughout the campaign, keeping himself away from the battlefield. Perhaps now he felt the Iron Warriors were broken, that they could pose no further threat to him. The ork was due for a grim surprise.

The Daemonculum would transport Andraaz and the Rending Guard directly to the warlord’s position, teleporting them past the thousands of orks closing upon the Iron Bastion. When Oriax completed the arcane sequences and activated the eldritch machinery, Andraaz would step through the warp and meet his destiny.

Warsmith and warlord would meet and to the victor would belong the final glory.

Slaves scattered as the three Raptors stormed into the communications centre. Uzraal tossed the mangled body of the janissary officer who had tried to stop them at the door. The Flesh had been posted there on orders from Sergeant Ipos. The man’s sense of duty had brought him a hideous death. The other janissaries wisely chose to stand down.

Rhodaan’s wings fluttered irritably as he cast his gaze across the hall. The pict screens bolted to the walls displayed scenes from all across Vorago, scenes of the orks rampaging through the ruins. Here and there, pockets of Iron Warriors could be seen, desperately trying to hold sections of the wall. Rhodaan’s blood boiled as he appreciated the dilemma his battle-brothers faced. Annihilation or disobedience. For an Iron Warrior, it was a difficult choice to make.

With every passing moment, however, Rhodaan was convinced he had made the right choice. Upon reaching the Iron Bastion, the Raptors had sought out Warsmith Andraaz, only to learn from his major-domo that he was absent. Along with his bodyguard, the Warsmith had disappeared. He had left no word of either his destination or his intentions. In his absence, the Warsmith had left Sergeant Ipos to coordinate the city’s defence.

That germ of information had brought the Raptors into the communications centre, smashing their way past doors and guards to reach the heart of the Bastion. The Warsmith had left before the explosion that ripped through the walls. That meant the suicidal, irrational orders to hold and die had come from Ipos alone. Rhodaan intended to have a few words with the seneschal. Then it was his intention to peel Ipos out of his power armour and start removing each of the traitor’s implants with his bare hands.

‘Where is Ipos?’ Rhodaan growled over his vox, his voice booming from the speakers in his horned helmet. The terrified Flesh didn’t answer, but a few of them turned anxious eyes towards the armoured nexus at the centre of the room. That told Rhodaan everything he needed to know.

Resembling a multi-faceted cyst of titanium, the nexus was designed as a final control point in the event the Bastion was invaded. Within the armoured tomb, communications could be maintained even after the rest of the tower was lost to the enemy. Designed to resist an army, it was intended as a refuge that could operate for weeks on its own.

Rhodaan glared at the armoured nexus, studying its structure. If he had been intent on capturing it intact he would have found the proposition daunting. However, despite his desire for answers, he was too practical to insist on taking Ipos alive.

‘Melta bombs,’ Rhodaan ordered. The Flesh in the communications centre watched in horror as Gomorie and Uzraal approached the nexus, planting the deadly explosives in the few relays projecting from the armoured shell. One of the humans screamed, the sound initiating a panicked exodus. The Space Marines ignored the Flesh fleeing past them, focused only upon their objective.

‘Ipos,’ Rhodaan snarled over his vox, using a general frequency that any Iron Warrior would be able to receive. ‘You have betrayed the Third Grand Company. I will give you a count of five to come out and answer for your treason.’ Expectant silence brooded in the communications centre as the Raptors waited. The door of the nexus remained sealed.

‘Die like a traitor dog then!’ Rhodaan roared. He brought his gauntlet down in a slashing gesture. Gomorie depressed the activation stud on the detonator he held.

Star-fire blazed from the nexus as the melta bombs exploded, the shock of the blast ripping through the communications centre with the fury of a hurricane. Cracks snaked across the floor, rubble rained down from the ceiling, pict screens warped and shattered. Smoke billowed from toppled control terminals and communication relays.

The Raptors strode through the devastation like armoured gods marching through Armageddon. Before them, the nexus was broken, a deep crack crawling down its face. Gomorie walked to the titanium shell, slid his fingers into the crack. With a tremendous heave, he sent the broken section of the shell crashing to the floor.

The interior of the nexus was a shambles. Machinery lay in tangles of wire and conduit, shattered bits of pict screen lay strewn across everything. Amidst the wreckage, his armour breached and torn, was the hulk of Sergeant Ipos.

Vindictively, Rhodaan moved to drag the corpse from the debris. As he approached, however, he noted the ugly burn at the centre of the dead Iron Warrior’s chest, a mark that looked to have been inflicted by a close-range plasma discharge. What was more, it was an old wound, at least several hours.

Rhodaan recoiled in alarm as he heard Sergeant Ipos’s voice rising from the wreckage, enjoining the Iron Warriors on the walls to maintain their positions. He stared at the dead Space Marine for an instant, then noticed the servitor lying a few metres away. The flesh-drone was broken, its steel legs snapped from its pelvis, its chest crushed by a section of titanium plate. But it still possessed a semblance of functionality, enough at least to continue issuing orders to the Iron Warriors.

Orders in a perfect imitation of Sergeant Ipos’s voice.

How long had the seneschal been dead? Who had set the servitor in his place?

Rhodaan’s hearts turned cold. He had a feeling he knew the answer to both questions. It answered many things, such as the renegade gun battery that had fired on them when they returned to Vorago.

The squad vox-channel crackled, the steely voice of Brother Merihem rumbling through Rhodaan’s helmet. ‘I have secured the transport hangar,’ the Obliterator reported. ‘The Flesh could not stop me. When you have finished your business with Ipos, the survivors will enthusiastically put themselves at your command.’

Rhodaan smiled at the sound of Merihem’s voice. He had worried that the Obliterator would forget his purpose and try to seek out Andraaz on his own. There was bad blood between the two and with everything collapsing around them, duty to the Legion might not be enough to restrain the monster. Rhodaan needed him, coherent and obedient, if he was to have any chance at all of bringing the Third Grand Company’s betrayer to task.

‘Hold position,’ Rhodaan ordered the Obliterator. He turned to Gomorie and Uzraal. ‘Establish communication with our battle-brothers. Tell them to disregard their last orders. They are to extract themselves from Vorago in whatever way they can. Tell them… tell them to rendezvous at the Oubliette.’

The two Iron Warriors scrambled among the debris to find a working relay. Rhodaan watched them for an instant, then turned his attention back to Merihem. ‘The situation is more complicated,’ he told the Obliterator. ‘Make your way to the grand hall. We will rendezvous with you there.’

‘I obey,’ Merihem answered. ‘And I am bringing along a complication of my own. I think it will amuse you. Give me a few minutes to discipline the surviving Flesh.’

Rhodaan could hear the first screams across his vox before the Obliterator shut off his vox-bead. Yes, it was a good thing the monster was on his side.

And a very bad thing for the battle-brother who had betrayed them all.

Rhodaan hoped Fabricator Oriax liked his sanctum because very soon it would become his grave.

Vallax brought his shoulder smashing against the metal grille, feeling its rusty surface crumble under the ceramite plate. He hesitated, turning his head to stare back down the industrial sewer. Even without the augmentation afforded by his missing helmet, his superhuman senses pierced the darkness like the sharp edge of a knife. He could hear the slosh of the slow-moving sludge running through the passage, smell the caustic vapours rising from the mineral waste, see the streamers of corrosion dangling from the roof of the tunnel, feel the sluggish draught created by the sewer’s recycling systems. Concentrating on his senses, he waited. His hearts slowed, his body tensed as he anticipated the howl of orks, the rush of blood-crazed aliens down the tunnel.

After a few breaths, the Iron Warrior was satisfied. Nothing had heard the impact against the grille. Turning, he brought his shoulder smashing against the obstruction once more.

The oversized drains connected to every factory in Vorago, a network of sewers that stretched deep beneath the city. Nothing human could survive in the stagnant, toxic air. Only the small multi-lung implanted in every Space Marine allowed Vallax to breathe the poisonous filth. Even so, the Iron Warriors had been thorough in their construction, implementing numerous baffles and obstructions throughout the sewer. Experts at siege warfare, they had applied that same knowledge when it came to constructing their own defences. Vallax knew there were other, more lethal diversions hidden in the tunnels, traps the recognition code being transmitted by his armour disabled as he neared them.

The grille gave way beneath his shoulder and Vallax thrust the crumpled mess of rusty bars into the sludge. He studied the intersection that opened beyond the tunnel, taking a moment to orient himself. Unerringly, he set himself upon the northward passage, the tunnel that would guide him back to the Iron Bastion.

It had been a dangerous route that led him into the sewers. His escape from the battlefortress had been at the edge of catastrophe every step of the way. He had lost count of the orks he’d slaughtered in the confusion of corridors and passageways, the other aliens he’d killed while stealing through the ork encampment. Many times, he had wondered if he would be able to overcome the perils of his ordeal. Always the thought of Oriax sustained him. Vallax couldn’t die beneath the paws of the orks. Not while the Fabricator was still alive.

Vengeance. It was a purity of purpose that had sustained the entire Legion for ten thousand years. Now, Vallax drew strength from sacred vengeance, cherished it as he cherished his personal honour and martial pride. Oriax would suffer for what he had done. When Vallax finished with him, the maimed Iron Warrior would truly wish he had perished in the crystal-swamps.

Bloody thoughts driving him onwards, Vallax stole through the polluted tunnels. He didn’t see the camouflaged shapes moving through the darkness, following his trail in the sludge, didn’t hear the low grumble of ork lungs choking down the toxic air, didn’t smell the sour-stink of alien flesh in the synthetic draught.

CHAPTER XX

I-DAY PLUS ONE HUNDRED
AND TWENTY-ONE

A weird flash of green light strobed through the Iron Bastion as the Raptors ran down the tower’s stairs. It was an after effect of munitions striking the void shields. The orks had brought some of their heavy artillery into the city and turned it upon this last point of defiance. Rhodaan could tell by the rich jade hue that the force field could withstand much more than the aliens were firing at it. Perhaps if the orks concentrated their fire they could bring the shields down, but such restraint was going to be hard for their warlord to impose now that the brutes could smell victory.

The Iron Warriors had several hours to do what they needed to do before the shields were reduced to even three quarters of their present strength. That suited Rhodaan fine. When he got his hands on Oriax, he didn’t want to feel rushed.

Brother Merihem’s techno-organic bulk awaited them in the grand hall, looking immense even beside the towering pillars that supported the vaulted ceiling fifty metres above. Patches of the Obliterator’s armour undulated like the surface of a troubled stream.

‘I have done my duty and waited, lord captain,’ the Obliterator said, his pallid face spreading in a steel smile. His body pivoted at the waist, spinning with an unsettlingly machine-like motion. He pointed a clawed finger at one of the pillars. ‘Others have waited too. Though their sense of duty had to be encouraged somewhat.’

Rhodaan saw a lone Iron Warrior standing beside the pillar. He recognised the elaborate armour at once and though his face was concealed behind his helmet, Rhodaan was certain that Skylord Morax’s expression was anything but happy.

‘You sent this… abomination… to…’

Rhodaan glared at the outraged Morax. ‘I sent him to secure transport for our extraction,’ he corrected the Skylord. ‘Finding you was just an unexpected bonus.’

‘Captain Morax was preparing to quit the Bastion,’ Merihem explained. ‘He seemed intent on commandeering all available transport.’ The Obliterator’s little face arched forwards in a weirdly boneless fashion to stare at Morax. ‘He had a considerable amount of bric-a-brac he wanted to take away with him.’

‘Supplies to sustain my forces while I conduct a guerrilla war against the orks,’ Morax protested. As he moved, Rhodaan could see the stiffness in the Skylord’s body, the way he favoured one leg over the other. Whatever Merihem had done to subdue him hadn’t been gentle.

‘The Speaker is versed in guerrilla tactics?’ Merihem marvelled.

Rhodaan didn’t need to hear anything else. Abducting the Speaker revealed Morax’s intentions plainly enough. The Skylord was going to bury himself in one of his underground aerodromes and use the psyker to send a message to Medrengard. Once that was done, he would be able to sit back and wait for a relief force to come and drive the orks from Castellax.

It wasn’t a bad plan. Rhodaan decided he would adopt it just as soon as his business with Oriax was completed.

‘He says the Warsmith left to confer with the Fabricator hours ago,’ Merihem reported. Morax was quick to elaborate the point.

‘Andraaz took the Rending Guard with him, all wearing their Terminator armour. I could hear them reciting the Olympian Death March as they descended into the sub-cellars.’

‘Do you think the Warsmith knows about Oriax’s treachery?’ Gomorie asked. ‘Maybe they’ve gone down there to stop him.’

Rhodaan shook his head. ‘No, if the Warsmith knew Oriax was a traitor he would have stopped the false orders being transmitted to our battle-brothers. There was some other purpose in their going to the sanctum.’

‘The Daemonculum!’ Uzraal exclaimed. ‘Oriax must have offered to use the Daemonculum to get the Warsmith to safety.’

Again, Rhodaan shook his head. ‘The Warsmith wouldn’t run,’ he stated resolutely. ‘The Rending Guard were singing the Death March. No, it wasn’t escape Oriax offered them. It was a chance to die with full honours.’

‘But Oriax is a traitor,’ Gomorie objected.

Skylord Morax limped away from the pillar, drawn by the Raptor’s statement. ‘If that is true, then the Warsmith is in danger.’ He looked from one Space Marine to another, sensing the suspicion staring back at him from behind each helmet. ‘Whatever you may think of me, I am an Iron Warrior. I know where my loyalties lie. I would have left the Warsmith to seek a hero’s death, but I won’t abide murder at a traitor’s hand.’

‘What can Oriax do?’ Uzraal asked. ‘The Warsmith has the Rending Guard with him. They are more than a match for a crippled Techmarine.’

Rhodaan didn’t answer at once, instead dashing towards the lifts that would conduct them to the sub-cellars and the Fabricator’s sanctum. The other Iron Warriors rushed after him, the limping Morax trailing behind the Raptors, the hulking Merihem following behind Morax.

‘If the Fabricator gets them into the Daemonculum he can teleport them anywhere on Castellax,’ Rhodaan explained. ‘Maybe even off-world. Power claws and Terminator armour won’t help much if the Daemonculum drops them into the planet’s core or deposits them in orbit around the sun!’ The thought of the Warsmith suffering such an ignoble death was obscene to Rhodaan. Loved or hated, as Warsmith, Andraaz’s death had to be a thing of glory and consequence, not a farce engineered by a cold-blooded manipulator. Such a blemish on its honour would never cease to haunt the Third Grand Company.

Rhodaan fairly leapt into the cage, his fingers depressing the activation runes as Merihem lumbered across the threshold. The Obliterator lurched forwards, almost slamming into the opposite wall, as the mag-lift hurtled downwards.

The green flashes from the void shields faded as the elevator descended past the surface, dropping down into the foundations of the Bastion itself. The hum of the field generators surrounded the Iron Warriors as the cage passed into the sub-cellars and the labyrinth of tunnels that formed Oriax’s domain.

The first thing Rhodaan noticed when the cage doors opened was the hellish crimson glow cast by the hazard lights set into the ceiling of the crypt-like receiving bay. The second thing he noticed were the broken servitors strewn across the floor and draped across cargo containers. His third observation nearly took his head off as a bolt-shell whistled through the exposed cage and detonated against the wall behind him.

‘Cover!’ Rhodaan roared, lunging from the cage and throwing himself behind one of the steel cargo boxes. Uzraal and Gomorie kept close to the sides of the cage as they provided covering fire for their captain.

‘So the usurping lapdog comes rushing to defend his master!’ The hatefully familiar voice echoed through the bay. ‘Why am I not surprised?’ A bolt-shell slammed against Rhodaan’s refuge, blasting a chunk of steel from the crate and sending shrapnel spraying in every direction.

Vallax! Rhodaan had given up the Over-Captain as dead, an earlier victim of Oriax’s treachery. Understanding the full measure of the Fabricator’s lies, Rhodaan felt a pang of guilt for his own complicity in the Techmarine’s schemes. Even his hatred of the Over-Captain wasn’t enough to accept the magnitude of Oriax’s betrayal.

‘We have all been betrayed, Vallax!’ Rhodaan called out. ‘The Fabricator has lied to us all. Through his deceit, many of our battle-brothers lie dead.’

Another bolt-shell slammed into the crate, driving Rhodaan from his shelter and sending him leaping behind the hull of a cargo lifter. Shells tore into the floor around him as he was momentarily exposed. Thankful as he was, he was surprised at Vallax’s poor aim.

From the mag-lift cage, the metallic bellow of Merihem thundered across the bay. The hulking Obliterator stormed from the cage, both of his arms formed into the blocky feeds of dual storm bolters. Vallax shifted his aim, firing at the charging monster. Merihem’s exposed bulk was too great a target to miss and slivers of his techno-organic armour sprayed from the explosive impacts.

Rhodaan seized the opportunity offered by Merihem’s distraction. Powering over the top of the cargo loader, he used his wings to dive down upon Vallax’s position. The Over-Captain’s marksmanship might be compromised, but there was nothing wrong with his reflexes. He was aware of Rhodaan’s move the instant the Raptor cleared the loader, darting back behind the cover of a cargo container as his enemy fired.

Rhodaan adjusted his dive, throwing himself forwards, crashing down into the lip of the container and sending it crashing down into Vallax. The Over-Captain was startled, but hardly surprised, catching the container as its fell and shifting his body so that the heavy steel box rolled away from him rather than directly down onto him.

In his manoeuvre, however, Vallax was compelled to drop his weapon. Rhodaan was surprised to see that it was a battered, almost unrecognisable boltgun of Imperial manufacture, defaced with ork glyphs and with an absurdly large blade welded beneath the gun barrel. Where and why the Over-Captain had acquired such a weapon was a mystery to him, though hardly as perplexing as Vallax’s own condition. A quick glance showed the sorry violation of Vallax’s power armour and the mutilation committed against the Iron Warrior’s head.

Vallax rounded upon Rhodaan, grappling with the other Raptor before he could bring his plasma pistol to bear again.

‘The Fabricator didn’t expect me to survive,’ Vallax snarled at Rhodaan. ‘But I endured. I escaped the orks. I returned. I bring doom to Oriax.’

‘We share common cause,’ Rhodaan growled back. ‘Oriax has betrayed us all. He plots against the Warsmith. Even now it may be too late to stop him.’

Vallax strained against Rhodaan’s grip. Without the assistance of his armour’s servo-motors, the Over-Captain could feel himself being overcome, but the stubbornness of hate refused to let him relent. ‘We share nothing,’ Vallax spat. ‘Oriax’s death belongs to me!’

The sudden roar of Merihem’s guns startled the two combatants. For an instant, Rhodaan feared the Obliterator had lost any sense of purpose or duty and opened fire on the other Iron Warriors. The pained howls of orks sounding from the far side of the bay told a different story. For an instant, he glanced away from Vallax’s scarred face, watching instead as a mob of orks dressed in camouflage came charging from one of the maintenance tunnels.

‘So, you escaped from the orks,’ Rhodaan sneered at Vallax. ‘They used you, fool! You’ve led them past the Bastion’s defences.’ He could see the horror on Vallax’s face, horror that drowned even his hate. Loyalties and oaths that had been burned into the Space Marine’s psyche echoed Rhodaan’s words, crushing individual thought and emotion beneath the shame of dishonoured obligation.

Rhodaan thrust Vallax away from him with a disgusted shove. Even when he had plotted against the Over-Captain, he had felt a certain respect for him. Now there was only loathing. Any Iron Warrior who could so blind himself with hate as to be used by orks was beneath contempt. ‘Gomorie, Uzraal,’ Rhodaan growled into his vox. ‘Establish a perimeter. Try to keep the xenos at bay while Brother Merihem and myself attend to Oriax.’

The two Raptors came rushing from the cage, firing as they went. Anguished howls rose from the ork kommandos unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of their shots. Captain Morax limped after them, furiously cursing his lack of a weapon.

Rhodaan stared grimly at the little cluster of Space Marines. That they could hold back the orks wasn’t in doubt. What troubled him was his force’s resultant reduction in strength. He had been counting on the other Raptors’ support when they confronted Oriax. There was no telling what sorts of defences the Fabricator had installed in his sanctum.

‘Take them with you,’ Vallax said, his voice low, his tone chastened. The Over-Captain pointed to the scavenger bolter lying on the ground. ‘I will hold back the xenos scum.’ His eyes glistened as he stared into Rhodaan’s snarling mask. ‘Please, brother, allow me this chance to atone for the hurt I have done the Legion.’

Rhodaan lifted the bolter from the floor, handing it to the Over-Captain. He didn’t have the luxury of doubting Vallax. There wasn’t time for that. ‘Hold them as long as you can, brother,’ he said. Vallax nodded, then turned and began firing at the kommandos.

‘Brother Gomorie! Brother Uzraal!’ Rhodaan called out over the vox as he darted among the crates. ‘A change in plan. Over-Captain Vallax will engage the xenos. You will fall back and support Brother Merihem and myself in breaching the Fabricator’s sanctum.’ The restoration of his Raptors to the raiding force instilled a new confidence in him. Even if it was for the last time, he felt good to be leading Squad Kyrith into battle.

‘What about me?’ Captain Morax’s voice hissed across the vox.

Rhodaan smiled. ‘Try to keep up,’ he told the Skylord.

Corrosive gas spewed from vents set into ceiling and floor, while titanium panels slid out from the walls to seal either end of the corridor. The glowing, yellowish vapour sizzled as it settled against the Iron Warriors power armour, stripping away the smooth veneer and bubbling against the raw ceramite beneath. Rhodaan could well imagine that the gas was specially created to penetrate power armour. He didn’t like to think what it would do to mere flesh and bone.

‘Brother Merihem,’ Rhodaan snapped, pointing his gauntlet at the titanium panel blocking the way ahead.

The Obliterator surged forwards, his armour steaming as the gas billowed around him. Merihem’s left arm rippled, its mass contorting into a nest of slender metal shafts tipped with blocky focusing arrays. A mechanical whine sounded from his shoulder as he swung the multi-melta towards the titanium panel and unleashed its hideous energies against it.

For an instant, the panel glowed white hot, then it cracked and crumbled, smashing to the floor in a heap of smouldering cinders. The Space Marines rushed through the opening, heedless of the heat continuing to rise from the edges of the hole. Streamers of gas clawed at them as they escaped the trap, as though trying to draw them back with phantom fingers.

Beyond the corridor was a small anteroom, devoid of all adornment. Rhodaan’s suspicions rose to the fore. Every hall and passage leading to Oriax’s sanctum had been trapped, testing the Iron Warriors’ mettle every step of the way. Even for Space Marines, Rhodaan considered it almost miraculous they had suffered no casualties in their approach. Now there was this room, with its deceptive tranquillity. What hidden menace lurked here?

Rhodaan glared at the walls. No, he was tired of playing by the Fabricator’s rules. ‘Brother Uzraal,’ he growled into the vox. ‘Melta bombs. North wall.’

Uzraal checked the dispenser on his belt. ‘Two left,’ he reported.

‘That should be enough,’ Rhodaan said, motioning Uzraal to proceed.

Morax grabbed Rhodaan’s shoulder, spinning him around. ‘There’s no cover,’ he objected. ‘We’ll be caught in the blast.’

Rhodaan removed the Skylord’s hand. ‘Better than whatever Oriax has prepared for us,’ he stated. ‘If you haven’t noticed, his traps are worse the further we go. It’s time we stopped doing what he expects us to do.’

Uzraal came dashing back to the other Raptors, the bombs placed against the wall. They dropped down into a crouch, covering their heads. Morax looked at them for a second, then hastily followed their example. Merihem turned his back to the wall, the metallic morass of his body coalescing into thick armour plates.

The detonation of the bombs was deafening. Again, the external audio relays in his helmet crackled and went silent, shielding him from the worst of the din. Chunks of ferrocrete and bits of plasteel glanced from his power armour. The optics in his helmet dropped filters across his vision to penetrate the dust boiling from the ruptured wall. When he saw what was beyond the breach, Rhodaan clenched his fist in vicious jubilation.

Behind the anteroom was a chamber Rhodaan recognised, a place he had been once before. By blasting their way through the wall, they had bypassed the labyrinth of halls and passages and penetrated directly to the heart of Oriax’s domain.

They were in the sanctum.

As soon as he stepped through the breach, Rhodaan knew they were too late. He could feel the clammy, unnatural clutch of warp energies that saturated the sanctum. Turning his gaze towards the chamber that housed the Daemonculum, he could see the weird afterglow emanating from the bloodwood dais. He could see the flesh-drones marching away from the bound daemons, the dead husks of their offerings swaying limply from their mechadendrites.

The Daemonculum had already been used, and recently. Warsmith Andraaz and the Rending Guard were gone, transported to whatever fate Oriax had chosen for them.

‘You are fortunate, Captain Rhodaan,’ Fabricator Oriax’s voice crackled through his sanctum, echoing from a hundred vox-casters. ‘I was aware of your intrusion into my domain, but I wasn’t at liberty to give your trespass my full attention. Other, more pressing matters required my undivided devotion. One does not draw upon the forces of the warp simply by flicking a switch. Neither are those energies so easily dismissed.’

Rhodaan spotted one of the macabre Steel Blood gliding towards him, its optics glowing crimson in the darkness. A blast from his plasma pistol sent the skull-like machine crashing to the floor. ‘You have betrayed the Legion and the Warsmith,’ Rhodaan accused. Another Steel Blood came diving down towards him and quickly shared the fate of its predecessor. ‘You have forgotten your duty, forgotten your honour!’

‘Forgotten?’ There was a static crackle as the Fabricator laughed. ‘I have not forgotten them. I have simply evolved past such archaic conceits. Duty, honour, loyalty. As a Legion, we should have cast them aside long ago. There is only one thing that is of consequence in the galaxy. Knowledge. That is the only true power. The genesis of creation and destruction.’

From behind him, a third Steel Blood hurtled towards Rhodaan, diving at the base of his helmet. Before it could strike him, however, the metal skull flew apart in a burst of sparks and flame. He could see Gomorie standing just beyond the breach, staring at his corrupted hand, a hand that had now fused itself around his bolt pistol and was slowly absorbing the weapon into itself. The other Iron Warriors pressed past Gomorie. There was a look of vicious amusement on Merihem’s little face as he passed by.

‘This way,’ Rhodaan told the others, guiding them through the nest of machinery and around the periphery of the Daemonculum. If the uncanny device truly demanded Oriax’s attention, then the Fabricator should be seated behind the same command console he had used when transporting Squad Vidarna and Squad Kyrith to Dirgas.

‘You think you have come here as my executioners?’ Oriax’s voice bellowed from the vox-casters. ‘Your ignorance pains and upsets me.’

Morax cried out in alarm as the wall beside him suddenly dropped away. Through the opening lumbered the hulking flesh-drones Oriax employed to feed the Daemonculum. Dead slaves still shackled to their mechadendrites, the cyborgs struck with the steel talons that replaced their natural limbs. The Skylord reeled away, mashing the head of one servitor with the fist of his gauntlet.

‘You are here to die,’ Oriax declared. ‘All who share the secrets of my Daemonculum will die. I shall share that power with no one!’

Merihem swung around, his left arm rippling as it transformed into a heavy flamer. Sheets of fire engulfed the flesh-drones, immolating their organics, shorting out their electronics and melting the fibre-plastic nerve-bundles that provided them with motion. The flesh-drones stumbled on a few paces, then crashed in burning heaps.

‘The superstitious pesedjet never understood what they had,’ Oriax crowed. ‘It was left to me alone to unlock the secrets of the Daemonculum, to understand its power and its potential!’

A second phalanx of servitors emerged from behind the walls. Rhodaan left the other Iron Warriors to attend to them. There was only one enemy they had to kill, and he intended to kill him. Across the periphery of the Daemonculum, he could see the Fabricator behind his console, the Techmarine’s confusion of artificial limbs flying across the rune-panels.

Fighting down the revulsion that filled every atom of his being, Rhodaan drew his chainsword and charged across the Daemonculum. He could feel the bound daemons grab at him with ethereal tentacles, struggling to draw his blood to them, to consume the vibrancy of his soul. Their siren wails thundered through his body; begging, threatening, entreating, promising. Only his obligation to the Third Grand Company gave him the will to resist, the strength to plough through their invisible snare. Purity was anathema to the creatures of the warp and nothing was more pure than vengeance.

‘Warsmith Andraaz would not allow me to continue my work,’ Oriax’s voice droned from the vox-casters. ‘He was impatient to exploit the Daemonculum’s power. He didn’t appreciate the need to understand its secrets, to know how it worked.’

Rhodaan leaped across the boundary of the Daemonculum, using Eurydice to propel him straight across the sanctum to Oriax’s command console. There was a look of almost comical incredulity on the Fabricator’s face as he looked up and saw Rhodaan’s chainsword slashing down at him.

‘I don’t care how it works,’ Rhodaan snarled at the traitor. ‘I only care how this works!’

Suddenly, a fist of steel slammed into Rhodaan, hurling him away from the console. He crashed into a ring of pict screens, smashing them into shatters beneath his armoured weight. It was the Raptor’s turn to stare incredulously at his foe. Oriax was stepping from behind his console, his withered legs thickening with each step. By contrast, the Fabricator’s left hand began to shrivel, assuming a more natural size than that of the fist which had sent Rhodaan flying.

The optics sunk into Oriax’s face fixed themselves on Rhodaan’s sprawled figure. ‘That,’ the Fabricator hissed, pressing a mechadendrite to the wound in his forehead where the edge of Rhodaan’s sword had grazed him, ‘was inconvenient.’

When Warsmith Andraaz emerged from the Daemonculum, he found himself in a wasteland of rubble and torn bodies, wrecked machines and ruined buildings. In the distance, rising from the ruins, he could see the spire of the Iron Bastion, its structure illuminated by eerie green light as ork artillery shells impacted against the tower’s void shields. Everywhere the howls of orks filled the air, the triumphant roars of beasts gone mad with the thrill of victory.

The Warsmith’s power claw crackled with energy as he brought its talons shearing through the greenskinned alien standing almost at his very feet, gawking at him in amazement. Ribbons of orkoid flesh exploded into the air as the claw’s field shredded the alien. Andraaz raised the storm bolter in his right hand and sent a salvo of explosive shells slamming into a mob of orks trying to pry their way into a disabled tank. Alien blood sprayed across the hull as the Iron Warrior’s shells tore the vandals apart.

‘Biglug!’ Andraaz shouted, his voice thundering through the rubble, hurled down the streets by his armour’s vox-casters. ‘Show yourself, you craven vermin!’

The Warsmith’s armour was rattled by a fusillade of bullets and shells, orks springing from the rubble to assault the hulking Space Marine. Andraaz’s Terminator armour withstood the motley barrage, the Warsmith’s storm bolter sending a far more lethal response slamming into the greenskinned aliens. ‘Concentrate fire on the larger groupings,’ Andraaz growled into his vox. ‘We’ll try to draw out their warlord.’

Only silence answered the Warsmith. He sent a last salvo ripping through a mob of yellow-garbed orks, then turned to snarl a reprimand at the Terminators behind him. What he saw sent a rush of blood pounding through his hearts. The Rending Guard were there, but they couldn’t answer him. The reason they couldn’t answer was that they hadn’t quite made the transition through the Daemonculum as cleanly as the Warsmith. In fact, from the appearance of the gory puddles of flesh and ceramite, it looked as though they’d emerged from the transition inside out.

A fierce bellow sounded somewhere down the street. The rattle of small arms crashing against the Warsmith’s armour lessened. At the sound of a second bellow, they stopped altogether.

Andraaz turned away from the bloody mush that had been his retinue, turned his enraged gaze upon the creature at the end of the street. It didn’t matter that the ork had nothing to do with their deaths, the alien would pay for the Rending Guard just the same.

The alien was gigantic, easily the biggest ork Andraaz had ever seen. It was like a living Dreadnought, its arms as thick around as tyres, its legs built like ferrocrete gambions. The brute’s thick neck was as wide across as a man’s chest, the lantern jaw hanging down from its face was stuffed with yellow fangs the size of bayonets. Slabs of pig iron, steel, titanium and armaplas had been cobbled together into a rude sort of armour to match the ork’s mammoth frame. The ork’s arms were bare to the shoulder, exposing a riot of primitive tattoos and scars. The monster’s face, what little of it was visible under its horned helm crunched down around its ears, was similarly marked. Beady red eyes gleamed from behind the vented visor that hung from the rim of the helmet.

A bandolier of chains crossed the ork’s torso, festooned with hooks from which a collection of trophies rattled against each other. Andraaz recognised the yellowed skull of a genestealer patriarch, a cracked cranium segment ripped from an eldar wraithguard. Ork skulls clattered against kroot jawbones. The Warsmith scowled as he noted the helmets of Space Marines mixed among the trophies, those of rebels and loyalists alike. His anger swelled as he found that he recognised one of the helmets as belonging to Over-Captain Vallax. Beside the Iron Warrior’s helmet was the grinning death’s head of a Steel Blood.

The ork lumbered forwards, growling orders at the aliens around it. A mob of scarred brutes trailing behind it fell back but kept their weapons at the ready.

Biglug, for Andraaz knew this beast could only be the ork warlord himself, stared at the Warsmith for a time, like a fighting dog taking in the scent of its opponent. The ork’s massive paws tightened about the heft of the power axe he carried, the promethium generator fastened to the weapon’s shaft belching black smoke as it strove to maintain its energy field.

Suddenly, Biglug threw back his head, barking with laughter. He grunted something in his crude language and pointed at the slop-heap that had once been the Rending Guard. The aliens in his retinue took up their warlord’s laughter, the mockery spreading to the lesser aliens scattered about the ruins.

Andraaz felt a rage such as he had never known flare up inside him. He had come here prepared to die, to fall in battle to this xenos rabble, but he was damned if he would be laughed at by them.

‘Iron within! Iron without!’ the Warsmith roared, charging down the street at the laughing warlord. Shells from his storm bolter smashed into the brute’s armour, their impact only slightly lessened by whatever field generator protected the monster. Biglug staggered back under the impacts, blood gushing from an arm pitted by one of the shells. The mob behind the warlord surged forwards, but the monster turned on them, howling in anger and chopping one of them down with his axe.

Far from being frightened by Andraaz’s bold attack, Biglug exulted in it. The warlord raised his arms to the polluted sky and bellowed his own war cry. Then he was charging down the street, ignoring the bolt-shells slamming into his armour, intent only upon closing with his foe, matching his axe against the Warsmith’s claw.

The Warsmith rushed at the alien monster, one final victim before the dark claimed him. One last sacrifice to the pride of Andraaz, Lord of Castellax.

CHAPTER XXI

I-DAY PLUS ONE HUNDRED
AND TWENTY-ONE

Obliterator! The realisation struck Rhodaan like a physical blow. Oriax was an Obliterator!

The Fabricator must have sensed Rhodaan’s shock. He grinned at the prostrate Raptor, holding his right hand up so that Rhodaan could have a clear view of it as Oriax willed it to change. Metal bubbled up from the pores in his skin, expanding to engulf the entire hand. More and more silvery metal oozed up, thickening the hand until it was a massive cudgel. Still the transformation wasn’t complete,. The cudgel lengthened and flattened, expanding until it took on a hammer-like shape.

‘One does not stare into the abyss unchanged,’ Oriax said. ‘A little bit of it comes back with you, changes you.’ The static crackle of his laughter echoed through the sanctum. ‘Perhaps as I studied the Daemonculum, it was studying me in turn.’

‘You are infected,’ Rhodaan spat at the Fabricator.

The grin crumbled into a scowl. ‘I am enhanced, more than what I was. More than what Vallax pulled from the crystal-swamps of Tarsis.’ Oriax glanced at the mammoth hammer on the end of his arm. ‘Andraaz was most obliging. He brought me souvenirs from every campaign fought by the Third Grand Company.’ He stalked towards Rhodaan, raising the hammer. Energy crackled about the weapon, sending arcs of electricity snaking across the sanctum. ‘This, you should remember. Before the virus claimed it for its own, this was a thunder hammer. It belonged to the Silver Skulls you helped annihilate on the planet Karkus.’

Rhodaan waited until the Fabricator was only a few steps away, until Oriax lifted the hammer and was about to strike. At that moment, he sprang into action, blasting Oriax with his plasma pistol and using the thrusters of his jump pack to burst from the tangle of collapsed machinery.

The burning ball of plasma seared through Oriax’s hand, sending fingers clattering across the floor. As the thunder hammer came slamming down, it pulverised the machinery but failed to strike the Raptor as he propelled himself away. Everything worked almost as Rhodaan had hoped. It was the mechadendrites that brought him to calamity. The artificial arms, like the rest of Oriax’s wargear, had become infected by the Obliterator virus. Like his armour, like the thunder hammer, they had become a part of the Techmarine’s corruption.

Striking like some jungle serpent, the mechadendrites shot at Rhodaan as he burst from the wreckage. Coils of plasteel and titanium wrapped themselves about the Space Marine, driving him first against the ceiling, then smashing him to the floor. The short blast of propellant wasn’t enough to defy the wiry strength in the tentacles. Dazed by the impact against the ceiling, arms pinned to his sides by the coils, Rhodaan could only watch helplessly as the mechadendrites dragged him back to their master.

Oriax’s hammer was twisting and changing once more, becoming thin and narrow. His other hand bubbled and steamed, the techno-organic substance of his body reeling from the bite of superheated plasma.

‘You only delay the inevitable,’ Oriax scolded his captive. ‘Castellax is doomed. The orks will destroy everything.’ He turned his head and stared at the Daemonculum, beads of oil dripping from his optics like black tears of rapture. ‘No one will learn the secrets of the Daemonculum. They shall perish here, with us!’

Rhodaan struggled for breath as the coils began to tighten. ‘The orks are inside the Bastion, Oriax. Do you want the xenos to take your little toy?’

The coils tightened as Oriax hissed his contempt. ‘It would be disappointing if the orks didn’t come. I took great pains to bring them here. First with the deep range scouting probes to establish contact with them, to give them the bait to draw them here. You have to be careful with orks, give them information too openly and they distrust it. Make them work too hard to gain it and they become bored and kill their prisoners. It took great patience to train Flesh to withstand just the right amount of torture.’

Rhodaan stared in disbelief at the Fabricator. ‘You lured the orks here? The entire invasion was your doing?’ His fists clenched at his sides, his body thrashed in a futile effort to break the bonds that held him. ‘Why?’ he demanded.

‘I already told you,’ Oriax said. ‘The Warsmith was going to take my Daemonculum away from me, let others defile it. I couldn’t let that happen. Better that Castellax should burn, that the Third Grand Company should be no more, than the unworthy be allowed to share my knowledge.’ Oriax tilted his head to one side, his optics glittering as he watched Rhodaan being crushed in his grip. The arm that had been a hammer now churned into life, a whisper of light flashing from its tube-like extremity.

‘A monofilament wire,’ Oriax explained. ‘A little something to remember the dying eldar race. In a moment, I will project this wire through your helmet’s right optic. Then I will use it to puree you inside your own armour.’ The icy grin was back on Oriax’s face. ‘I just thought you might like to know.’

‘No!’ The word roared through the sanctum, rumbling across the broken machinery. Oriax swung around, the Fabricator’s brow knotting in concern as his optics focused upon the hulking monstrosity marching slowly across the floor of the Daemonculum.

Rhodaan felt a surge of relief rush through him. Brother Merihem. Once again, the Obliterator had arrived at just the right moment to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. As he marched across the bloodwood platform, Rhodaan could see Merihem’s body sway, his legs struggling with each step, as though he strode through an unseen mire. How hungry Oriax’s daemons must be to turn their attentions upon an Obliterator! For a moment, the Raptor wondered if Merihem would be able to resist the temptations roaring through his mind, the siren call of the imprisoned daemons.

Merihem’s will was stronger than the daemons, a will forged in iron and hate. The pale little face glared at Oriax, the steel teeth shining in a cold smile that gave even the Fabricator pause.

‘Why do you stand against me, brother?’ Oriax asked. He extended his hand, displaying its oozing mush of flesh and metal for Merihem to see. ‘We are truly brothers. We share the blessings of the machine made flesh and the flesh made machine. These others,’ the Fabricator shook Rhodaan in his grip, nearly breaking the Raptor’s neck, ‘are nothing to us. They are no different than the Flesh from which we were chosen. They are the clay from which the true Iron Warrior may rise. Those like us, who are truly iron within and iron without.’

Merihem lumbered forwards, dragging his feet clear of the bloodwood and the spectral clutch of the daemons. ‘I care nothing for the Legion,’ he growled. ‘I care nothing for the kinship of false brothers who betray their oaths.’ His steel smile became even more vicious, the little black eyes twinkling in the pits of his face. ‘What I care about is that trash in your hand. I want him.’

As he heard the Obliterator’s growl, Rhodaan knew he listened to the voice of Death. The monster had warned him when they left the Oubliette that there would be a reckoning. He had been a fool to ever think Merihem could be trusted, that a beast like him could ever be bound by such noble concepts as duty and honour. The abomination had simply been biding his time, waiting for the moment when Rhodaan stood at the edge of victory before he struck in order that his revenge might be even more complete.

‘You are not here to avenge the Warsmith?’ Oriax demanded, his voice crackling with doubt.

Merihem took another lumbering step forwards, the claws of his left hand splayed in a gesture of murderous readiness. ‘I am here to avenge myself,’ he declared. ‘To avenge my exile and imprisonment. To avenge the denial of my purpose, the squandering of my potential. To avenge centuries abandoned in the darkness, locked away like some keepsake. To avenge the shame of my condition. If the Warsmith was here, I would peel the flesh from his bones and drink the blood from his torn hearts.’ Merihem’s black eyes glared into the lenses of Rhodaan’s helmet. ‘Since Andraaz is not here, I shall content myself with his lapdog, the mongrel who brought my disgrace so long ago and left me to rot in the dark.’

The monster shifted his gaze to Oriax. ‘Stand aside, “brother,” and I will show you what it means to hate.’

The Warsmith’s claw came slashing across the ork’s chest, energy flaring in a nimbus of cobalt as the blades struck the power field generated by the alien’s armour. Andraaz grunted in pain as electrical feedback crackled down his arm, searing every nerve. He bit down on his pain and forced his talons through the power field. For an instant, the field resisted, then as the attack persisted, the scythe-like blades went tearing into the ork’s body.

Biglug reeled back, howling in surprise as much as pain. Tatters of armour flopped from the gashes left behind by Andraaz’s power claw, blood bubbled from the ork’s torn flesh. Trying to defend himself, Biglug brought the power axe chopping into the Iron Warrior. The ceramite surface of the Terminator armour shuddered at the impact, but the Legion’s artificers had maintained the artefact well. Biglug’s energised blade barely penetrated a few millimetres despite the monstrous brawn behind the attack.

Andraaz fired his storm bolter into the ork’s roaring face, the rounds smashing against the force field that protected the brute. The assault did, however, distract Biglug, keeping his tiny brain occupied while the Warsmith brought his claw shearing through the ork’s leg.

Or at least such had been Andraaz’s intention. As he brought his power claw slashing down, the Warsmith was aware of a strange, all pervasive crackle of static. Dimly he recognised it as a pulse of binary. The servo-motor in his arm seized and shut down, refusing to complete the murderous strike. From a supercharged engine of destruction, the left arm of the Warsmith’s armour had become an inert lump of metal. If his reactions were any slower, his reflexes less honed by the battlefield, Andraaz’s equilibrium would have collapsed under the transformation, the dead weight of his raised arm and its suddenly thwarted momentum dragging him down to the ground. As it was, he pivoted, swinging his entire body around to prevent such a disaster.

In preventing his fall, Andraaz exposed himself to his foe. Biglug howled with delight as he lunged at the Iron Warrior’s unprotected back, the power axe slashing through the sensorium relays and diagnostic bundles running along the left side of the armour. There was a stabbing pain along Andraaz’s spine as the axe sheared through a mass of fibre-bundles, sending electricity crackling from the compromised machinery.

Andraaz swung back around, firing his storm bolter into the alien’s body. Against the point-blank barrage, even the force field was overwhelmed. Biglug snarled in pain as explosive shells smashed into his armour, sending splinters of plasteel and armaplas flying. The brute was staggered by the onslaught, but even this wasn’t enough to subdue his savagery. As he reeled back, Biglug twisted his power axe around, hooking the edge of the head in the adamantium ribs that supported the Terminator’s thick layers of ceramite and plasteel. The Warsmith stumbled forwards as the ork dragged him after it.

Andraaz resisted Biglug’s pull, digging his feet in the shattered earth, using the full weight of his Terminator armour to defy the ork’s brawn. Pivoting in place, he turned the ork’s exertions into a lumbering swing, flinging Biglug into the broken wall of a processing plant. The xenos’s impact was like that of a cannon, chunks of ferrocrete crashing down about the ork’s head. The Warsmith added to Biglug’s ordeal, raking his body with shots from his storm bolter. With a loud wail and a strobing burst of light, Biglug’s force field fizzled, smoke rising from the overwhelmed mechanism.

The Warsmith smiled coldly and took a lumbering step towards the staggered Biglug. Andraaz lifted the storm bolter, picking a spot between the brute’s beady eyes to deliver the killing shot.

Before he could fire, Andraaz heard the binary shriek crackle through his armour’s sensors. The massive Terminator suit froze in mid-step, the limbs locking in place as their motivators powered down. The Iron Warrior struggled to move by sheer force of his muscles alone, but even his superhuman strength was unequal to the effort.

The ork warlord extracted himself from the rubble, shaking his head as he tried to clear away the cobwebs. He glared at Andraaz and smacked a meaty paw against his alien chest in a token of violent challenge. Snarling, the ork rushed towards the Warsmith.

Biglug hesitated when the Iron Warrior failed to move or respond in any way. The ork actually took a few paces backwards, his eyes darting from side to side in search of a trap. Finally, his gaze turned to Andraaz once more. He cocked his head to one side, scratched at his jaw with a stumpy finger. Then, angrily, the ork slapped his hand against his chest once more, as though daring the Warsmith to shoot him again.

Still, Andraaz couldn’t move, the binary pulse was paralysing the machine-spirit of his armour, imprisoning him inside. He howled in frustration, wracking his brain for some way to force the armour to act.

The ork warlord’s fragile patience wore out, his desire for a good fight overwhelming his suspicions of a trap. Roaring with fury, Biglug charged the dozen metres between himself and Andraaz. He brought the power axe smashing down in a brutal sweep that shattered the Terminator’s shoulder and nearly sheared the Warsmith’s arm from his body.

Biglug jumped back, bracing himself for the Iron Warrior’s counter-attack. When his enemy still failed to move, the warlord stood straight and barked at Andraaz, cursing and jeering the Iron Warrior who refused to fight. Contemptuously, Biglug brought the butt of his axe cracking into his foe’s head, unbalancing the Terminator and pitching him over into the dirt.

Falling, Andraaz had a good view of the trophies lashed to Biglug’s chest. He could see the Steel Blood chained there beside Vallax’s helmet. The skull’s optics were aglow, its jaw open to expose the speaker buried in its mouth. Andraaz knew the source of the binary pulse that had paralysed his armour, had made the machine-spirit betray its master. He knew that the shameful death of the Rending Guard had been no accident or malfunction.

Biglug hooted with contemptuous mockery as he brought his axe smashing down into the prone Terminator, each blow sending tremors through the thick ceramite plates. Blow after blow, the alien was battering his way through the armour and to the defenceless Space Marine trapped inside.

Warsmith Andraaz had thought to make a heroic end for himself, but Oriax had arranged things differently. The orks would remember him, all right, but not as some mighty foe who had stood proud upon the battlefield. Andraaz would be the arrogant coward, who in the end had cowered before their warlord and not even put up a fight when Biglug started to pull him piece by piece from his ruptured armour.

Andraaz hadn’t liked the orks laughing at him, but they would be doing it for a very long time.

Merihem’s steel grin widened, stretching from ear to ear, his little black eyes glaring malevolently from the ghostly pallor of his face. The Obliterator clenched his claws, each finger bubbling into a little chainblade. Rhodaan struggled in Fabricator Oriax’s grip, trying to reach his belt. He might not be able to stave off death, but he wouldn’t go down like this, butchered like a grox by a subhuman abomination.

The monster began to descend from the Daemonculum when there was a sudden blast of bright light. Merihem’s chest exploded in a pool of bubbling metal and molten meat. The Obliterator staggered, swinging around and firing his autocannon across the chamber. Uzraal, his meltagun still smoking from its violent discharge, dived behind one of the wraithbone columns.

‘Now, while it is weak!’ Uzraal shouted.

In response, Captain Morax and Brother Gomorie came charging across the bloodwood platform. Clenched in their arms was the frame of a flesh-drone, its mechadendrites extended, frozen into position at the moment of the servitor’s destruction. The effect was like a three-metre long lance and the two Iron Warriors drove it straight into the wound Uzraal’s meltagun had blasted in Merihem’s body.

The Obliterator’s corrupt essence had already started to flow back into the injury, fibres of steel and flesh knitting back together. The lance stabbed into Merihem’s regenerating chest, piercing clean through the monster. He swung around, his tiny face pulled back in a sneer.

‘Laugh this off, obscenity!’ Morax cursed. The Skylord’s hand smashed the power plant still fixed to the flesh-drone’s frame. The two Space Marines hastily released their improvised spear as thousands of kilowatts of electricity crackled down the servitor’s frame.

Merihem shrieked in agony as the discharge seared his body, burning through every synapse and wire. The Obliterator lunged forwards, his chainclaw catching Morax, the whirring blades chewing into the Skylord’s armour. Merihem lifted his prey from the floor, glaring into the lenses of his helmet. ‘Clever worm,’ Merihem spat. His other hand began to shift, reforming into the crazed confusion of the ork combi-weapon he had absorbed in the wasteland.

Bolt-shells smashed into Merihem’s back, driving splatters of liquid meat from his regenerating wound. Merihem pivoted, aiming his new weapon at Gomorie. There was a frown on the Obliterator’s face as he blasted Gomorie with the full malignity of the combi-weapon. Crude, unpredictable in its original state, the ghastly virus in his body had refined and stabilised the weapon, allowing it to reach its full potential. Gomorie’s armour shredded under the impact, his body tossed through the air to crash at the foot of a wraithbone pillar.

‘Such wasted potential,’ Merihem commented. ‘I had expected better things for you, little brother.’ The Obliterator clenched his fist, bringing the sawing chainblades tighter about Morax’s body. The Skylord flailed in his grip, blood streaming down his legs as the blades ripped into his flesh.

Another blast from Uzraal’s meltagun slammed into Merihem, reducing his shoulder into a steaming morass of metal and muscle. The Obliterator’s arm went limp, dropping Morax to the floor. Vengefully, Merihem sent a salvo from his combi-weapon chasing after Uzraal, but again the Raptor was behind cover before the monster’s aim could come true. Maintaining an incredible rate of fire, Merihem chased Uzraal across the Daemonculum, ravaging the arcane machinery with each burst.

‘It seems I will not have to depend on the orks to destroy my Daemonculum,’ Oriax observed with bitterness. He turned his attention back to Rhodaan, savouring the Raptor’s struggles. His eyes narrowed as he focused them on the wings of Eurydice, a covetous gleam creeping into them.

‘I have long admired your archaeotech,’ Oriax said. He extended his hand, caressing the closest wing. His palm was already collapsing into a liquid mash, spreading to coat the demi-organic pinions. ‘You don’t mind if I take it. You won’t have any further use for it, I assure you.’ A touch of amusement flickered on the Fabricator’s face. ‘When they are mine, do you think I’ll fly?’ he asked.

Rhodaan glared back at him. ‘I think you’ll burn,’ he snarled, slamming his hand against the Techmarine’s chest. The magnetic clamp on the haywire grenade he’d removed from his belt locked on to Oriax’s armour. The Fabricator was just able to look down at the device before it sent its pulse flaring through his body.

The same discharge roared through Rhodaan, conducted into him by the Fabricator’s grip. As he was hurled away by the electrical shock, he slammed into one of the pict screens, feeling it shatter behind him in a shower of crystalline shards. Every nerve in his body felt like it was on fire. Half the systems in his armour had shorted out, the optics in his helmet flickering through different colour spectrums. Agony rippled through his muscles as he lifted his hands and removed his helmet. Groggily, Rhodaan regained his feet.

As terrific as the effect of the haywire pulse had been upon him, Rhodaan had been spared the grenade’s full fury. The Fabricator had borne the brunt of the discharge. Oriax stood shuddering and writhing amid the wreck of his console, his mechadendrites spasming in an insane display of claws, pincers and drills. The metallic substance of his corrupt body undulated, throbbing like a pool of lava. His face was frozen in a silent shriek of agony.

Defying the pain in his own body, Rhodaan lunged across the chamber, snatching his chainsword from where it had fallen. Fury flung him at the Fabricator: the fury of the betrayed, the fury of the loyal for the disloyal, the fury of a warrior against a comrade who has forsaken his duty.

‘This is how you die, traitor!’ Rhodaan shouted as he brought his chainsword hacking into the paralysed Oriax. He never understood the strange look in the Fabricator’s eyes or the terrible irony that he should be struck down in such fashion, defenceless and without honour.

Rhodaan’s chainsword bit into Oriax’s head, slashing through his mouth and cleaving the skull along the jawbone. The roof of Oriax’s head went spinning off into the darkness, while the rest of his mangled body simply slumped to the floor like a broken toy. Electricity continued to sizzle through the corpse as the haywire grenade expelled the energies of its power plant.

The victorious Raptor stared down at his handiwork for a moment. Again, he reached to the floor, retrieving his plasma pistol. One traitor had been settled. Another was still to be reckoned with.

Sheets of flame billowed across the Daemonculum, pursuing Uzraal as he strove to elude the monster. Merihem had given up trying to shoot the Raptor, instead adopting the muzzle of a flamer to burn the Iron Warrior from his hiding places. There was a murderous grin on the Obliterator’s face as he stormed across the charred planks of the bloodwood platform.

‘You will die,’ Merihem promised. ‘All flesh will die. In the end there will only be iron!’

Uzraal threw himself from the cover of a pillar as a stream of fire came rippling towards him. The wraithbone blackened and charred under the blast, emitting an eerie wail of inarticulate agony. The stream of fire shifted, searing along the wall as it chased after the Space Marine.

‘Run, rabbit!’ Merihem roared. ‘Cower like all flesh. Hide from true strength. Hide your face from true power!’

A ball of superheated plasma slammed into Merihem’s arm, burning it clear to the bone. The stream of fire erupting from the flamer was choked off as ruptured hoses sent the same fire spilling across Merihem’s body.

‘For a homicidal sociopath,’ Rhodaan spat at the burning monster, ‘you talk too much.’ The demi-organic wings on his back flexed as he marched out into the Daemonculum and watched the Obliterator burn. Before he had taken more than a few steps, he was using Eurydice to leap into the air, hovering above the line of bolt-shells ripping into the floor.

Wreathed in flame, Merihem came storming across the chamber. The Obliterator had abandoned the flamer, reforming his arm into a combi-bolter. If anything, he presented an even more grisly sight, the pallid flesh of his face burned and charred, bits of steely bone protruding from the cracked skin. One eye had been fused closed beneath a shapeless lump of burned meat. The other glared balefully at the hovering Rhodaan.

There was no need for words as Merihem raised his weapon and aimed at the captain. Mere words could not have expressed the hate boiling inside the Obliterator’s breast. Mere words could not have voiced the cold defiance of the doomed Raptor.

As Merihem’s weapon started to spit its rain of death upwards, the Obliterator was struck from the side and dashed to the floor. His techno-organic body shifted as he fell, pivoting so that he might glare at his attacker. All emotion had been burned from the monster’s face, but there was shock shining in the black depths of his eye.

What had struck the Obliterator down was a creature even bigger and more massive than himself. Steam sizzled from its scaly hide, strange coruscations of light flashed from its pores. Thick ropes of wiry grey hair hung from its limbs, weird runes crawled across its flesh. Great horns stabbed from a narrow forehead like some gruesome crown. A face inhuman and fiendish, pulled into a long muzzle of fangs and tusks, leered with diabolic malignity. For all the horror of the entity’s shape, to the Iron Warriors the most horrible thing of all were the fragments of broken, shattered ceramite clinging to it, scraps of armour that bore the heraldry of their own Legion.

Struck down by Merihem, dying beneath the wraithbone pillars, Rhodaan could only wonder what obscene promises the daemons had made to Gomorie. That his battle-brother had accepted was all too evident. A quick glance at the pillars showed the withered husks of the daemon-hosts lying limp and abandoned in their chains.

If the daemons had promised Gomorie the strength to overcome Merihem, then they had exceeded their vow. As the possessed Space Marine loomed over the fallen Obliterator, it brought its talons slashing down, ripping great goblets of molten metal from Merihem’s body, flinging the corruption in every direction. Very quickly, the charred platform was becoming littered with lumps of molten ooze.

Despite the havoc inflicted upon his body, Merihem did not submit to the daemon’s abuse. With a fierce bellow, the Obliterator surged up from the floor, his chainclaw ripping into the daemon’s steaming flesh. Gobbets of ichor and flesh flew from the churning blades. The Obliterator brought his other arm around, blasting the creature point-blank with a full burst from each barrel.

The daemon was sent reeling backwards, strewn across the platform. The terrible energies of the daemons alone were ripping apart Gomorie’s body, dissolving it with each breath. A mortal shell could barely contain the energies of a single daemon, even that of a Space Marine was unable to play host for long to the abomination that had poured into Gomorie’s flesh. As the fiendish creature drove through Merihem’s barrage, it seemed to be corroding from within, its substance dripping away with each step.

Rhodaan didn’t wait to see what the result of this ghoulish contest would be. Tightening his grip on his chainsword, he dived down upon Merihem from behind, adding his velocity to the downward sweep of his blade.

The chainsword crunched down into Merihem’s charred skull, burying itself in his neck. Rhodaan left the churning blade embedded in the Obliterator and pressed the muzzle of his plasma pistol against the wound. Grimly, he pulled the trigger and sent a blast scorching through Merihem’s head, incinerating the abomination’s brain.

The withering fire from the Obliterator’s guns fell silent. The hulking mass of metal and meat staggered forwards a few paces, Rhodaan’s sword buried in the wreck of his head. Then, with a great crash, the monster fell, slamming through the charred bloodwood panels and hurtling into a sub-cellar far beneath the Daemonculum.

‘Rot in agony,’ Rhodaan spat at the fallen beast. He thumbed a grenade from his belt and tossed it into the cellar. With something like an Obliterator, there was no such thing as being too careful.

Turning away from the pit, Rhodaan braced himself to confront the daemon. There was no knowing what the creature would do now that their common enemy was vanquished. There was no knowing if it would feel a sense of kinship simply because Gomorie had been an Iron Warrior.

His caution was unnecessary. Before Rhodaan’s eyes, the battered, broken body of the daemon began to collapse. Perhaps, with their promise fulfilled, the daemons were withdrawing back to the warp. Certainly after all the centuries bound to the Daemonculum, it was understandable that the entities might have experienced enough of mortal reality for a long time.

In the space of only a few heartbeats, the daemon was nothing more than a pool of greasy putrescence from which the odd bit of ceramite plate protruded. It was a miserable legacy for a battle-brother who had died so well. The daemon’s dissolution hadn’t even left anything to bury.

Uzraal marched across the chamber and joined Rhodaan beside the greasy morass. He stared down at the muck, then looked up at his captain.

‘What is your command, Grim Lord?’ Uzraal asked.

Rhodaan stared at the other Raptor, wondering if the fight had driven him mad. Only the Warsmith was addressed that way. As he stared at Uzraal, however, understanding came to Rhodaan. If Oriax’s plot had worked, then Andraaz was dead. There was no question that Morax was dead. So were Gamgin and Nostraz. Algol was missing and far too unbalanced to lead anyone. That made Rhodaan the last of the Third Grand Company’s captains. As Over-Captain, Vallax was outside the line of succession, expected to function as the Warsmith’s second-in-command, not his heir. Even if he survived, Vallax couldn’t become Warsmith.

Uzraal was right, Rhodaan realised. Except for the orks, he was now Lord of Castellax, commander of the Third Grand Company. Or whatever was left of it.

‘Fall back to the hangar,’ Rhodaan ordered. ‘We will rendezvous with the other survivors at the Oubliette.’

Rhodaan cast a last, contemptuous look at the shattered ruin of the Daemonculum. They had suffered much because of this fiendish creation and its crazed master, but the Third Grand Company would endure. They would rise from the ashes stronger than before. Under his leadership, they would recover and return to fight the Long War.

Turning from the Daemonculum, Rhodaan marched towards the inner recesses of the sanctum, Uzraal close behind him. ‘We’ll use the maintenance tunnels to make our way back to the upper levels. I want to be away from here before the entire Bastion is crawling with orks.’

It was some hours before Kaptain Grimruk and his kommandos made their way into the wreckage of Oriax’s sanctum. The lone Iron Warrior in the receiving bay had put up an impressive fight, impressive enough that Grimruk had taken the dead Space Marine’s head as a present for Warlord Biglug.

The orks began to fan out through the sanctum, ripping down anything that looked portable, smashing anything that looked like it wasn’t. Grimruk paid them scant attention, prowling among the wreckage, kicking over the disabled husks of servitors and flesh-drones. It was only when the kaptain drew near the Daemonculum itself that he became more attentive.

There was a strange energy, a sense of power and danger emanating from the chamber. Grimruk removed the peaked cap from his head and scratched his leathery brow. Privy to Biglug’s inner councils, Grimruk knew that the warlord was searching for something on Castellax, some weapon that would make Waaagh! Biglug mightier than Waaagh! Kogtoof. The problem was, none of the orks knew exactly what it was they were looking for. They’d captured immense stores of weapons and ammunition, even put some of the captured humans to work making more. The fleet had been expanded with captured ships. Despite the millions of ork dead, Waaagh! Biglug was already more powerful than before the attack on Castellax.

Still, Biglug insisted there was something special, something secret hidden somewhere on the planet. As his body recoiled from the Daemonculum’s emanations, Grimruk wondered if this was the weapon the warlord was looking for. He would have the mekboyz come down here to have a look at it.

Grimruk glanced across the sanctum, watching the kommandos pulling the place apart. He looked again at the Daemonculum, feeling the evil of the thing oozing across his leathery skin. The ork growled angrily. He didn’t like this sensation that the device stirred in his mind, this feeling of fear. What Grimruk didn’t like, he destroyed. Biglug would get over his disappointment.

Howling orders, firing his weapon into the machinery to set the kommandos an example, Grimruk began the demolition of Oriax’s Daemonculum.

EPILOGUE

I-DAY PLUS THREE HUNDRED
AND FIFTY-SEVEN

Warsmith Rhodaan studied the holographic display being projected above the obsidian table. Several of the Iron Warriors’ deep-space observation satellites had escaped the orks, being too small to attract their attention when they still had entire ships to chase around the system. Most of Admiral Nostraz’s fleet had been captured by the xenos, rearmed and repaired in the Iron Warriors’ own shipyards. It was a final indignity for the lords of Castellax to endure, but Rhodaan was determined that others would soon share his pain.

A large part of the ork fleet was already gone, though he suspected the aliens hadn’t planned it that way. A few months after the fall of Vorago, the orks had hastily assembled their fleet midway between Castellax and its sun. It was a typically orkish manoeuvre – impulsive and utterly lacking in preparation. The most junior naval captain would have cringed at the wild, haphazard action and at the dozens of collisions resulting from it.

The vanguard of the ork fleet, however, was too impatient to wait on those ships too slow or too damaged to join them. Under the impatient urging of Biglug himself, no doubt, the ork ships had pushed ahead with their strange operation.

What happened next would have astonished anyone who had not seen the Daemonculum in operation. One instant the ork fleet was there, the next a hundred of their biggest ships were gone, as though they had simply winked out of existence. Sensors detected warp energies, but without the telltale signature of a warp gate, allowing that one could have been opened so deep within a planetary system. Moreover, there were a few dozen wrecks floating about that hadn’t quite made the transition with Biglug’s ships. From the satellite representations, the wrecks looked strangely twisted and mangled, as though caught in a tug-of-war between Titans.

Biglug was gone. For several weeks, the remaining orks fought amongst themselves as they tried to find a new leader. Rhodaan never did learn the name of the new warlord, but it showed an unusual streak of humour for a xenos, calling its warhost the ‘Rustbustas’. Rhodaan would have liked to feed the creature its own organs for that joke.

Instead, Rhodaan decided to feed the orks something else. Scavenging resources wherever they could find them, the surviving Iron Warriors of Castellax began assembling vox-transmitters all across the planet, staffing them with whatever Flesh they could find. The slaves were charged with transmitting distress signals, not to Medrengard, but to Obestrus, the nearest inhabited world controlled by the Imperium. There was no chance that the low-powered signals would actually reach Obestrus, but that wasn’t important. What was important was for the orks to discover the direction those signals were being sent.

It didn’t take long. The orks were growing bored since the fighting on Castellax had ended. With the vox-signals promising another world nearby to sack, the aliens threw themselves into a frenzy of activity. Ships were repaired, stores transported off the planet, ork warriors loaded onto transports and ferried up to the waiting fleet. Before they were done, every ork on Castellax would be up there, ready and eager to take the fight to Obestrus.

Through the orks, the weapons of the Iron Warriors would strike the Imperium. They would decimate their armies, cripple their fleets and devastate their worlds. It was revenge by proxy. And while the Imperium sent its resources to deal with the orks, they would leave other sectors exposed and vulnerable.

The Iron Warriors would find those weak points. The Iron Warriors always found an enemy’s weak point. Maybe it wouldn’t be the Third Grand Company, but the Iron Warriors would be there to prosecute the Long War and remind petty humanity that the sins of their past were still with them.

For in all the galaxy, nothing endures like hate.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

S P Cawkwell is a freelance writer based in north-east England. Her SF work for Black Library includes the Silver Skulls novels The Gildar Rift and Portents, and the Architect of Fate novella, Accursed Eternity. For Warhammer, she is best known for her stories featuring the daemon princess of Khorne, Valkia the Bloody.

Darius Hinks’s first novel, Warrior Priest, won the David Gemmell Morningstar award for best newcomer. Since then he has carved a bloody swathe through the Warhammer World in works such as Island of Blood, Sigvald, Razumov’s Tomb and the Orion trilogy. He has also ventured into the Warhammer 40,000 universe with the Space Marine Battles novella Sanctus.

Ben Counter is one of Black Library’s most popular Warhammer 40,000 authors, with two Horus Heresy novels to his name – Galaxy in Flames and Battle for the Abyss. He is the author of the six-volume Soul Drinkers series and The Grey Knights Omnibus. For Space Marine Battles he has written Malodrax, and has turned his attention to the Space Wolves with the novella Arjac Rockfist: Anvil of Fenris and a number of short stories. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit which has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England.

John French has written several Horus Heresy stories including the novellas Tallarn: Executioner and The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Templar and Warmaster. He is the author of the Ahriman series, which includes the novels Ahriman: Exile and Ahriman: Sorcerer, plus the short story ‘Hand of Dust’. Additionally for the Warhammer 40,000 universe he has written the Space Marine Battles novella Fateweaver, plus a number of short stories. He lives and works in Nottingham, UK.

C L Werner’s Black Library credits include the Space Marine Battles novel The Siege of Castellax, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang, the Brunner the Bounty Hunter trilogy, the Thanquol and Boneripper series and Time of Legends: The Black Plague. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Architect of Fate copyright © 2012, Games Workshop Ltd.
The Siege of Castellax copyright © 2012, Games Workshop Ltd.
All rights reserved.

This edition published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover illustration by Jon Cave.

© Games Workshop Limited 2012, 2014. All rights reserved.

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All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-78251-744-3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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