More Space Marines from Black Library

WARRIORS OF THE IMPERIUM
Contains the novels Hunt for Voldorius and The Gildar Rift

ANGELS OF DEATH
Contains the novels Architect of Fate and The Siege of Castellax

• SPACE MARINE BATTLES •

PANDORAX
A Dark Angels and Grey Knights novel

THE WAR FOR RYNN’S WORLD
Contains the Crimson Fists novel Rynn’s World and the novella Traitor’s Gorge

OVERFIEND
Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

MALODRAX
An Imperial Fists novel

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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.

CHAPTER 1

THE DUTY TO PROTECT

The Wars of Lamentation did not come to Elias Tennesyn in the person of the Dragon or the Gorgon. Those figures would come later. Visited upon him by the Wars, they would, for his sins, drag him through the hellscape of what had once been his life’s work. But if they were the avatars of war, they were not its herald. That role (and oh, by the Throne, had Tennesyn only known it) fell to a man whose smile told a tale of a soul eternally surprised by joy.

The herald was called Cardinal Rodrigo Nessun. Though he wore a gold medallion in the shape of a wide, almost circular eye suspended over the hilt of a sword, his robes had none of the adornment Tennesyn would have expected of a senior ecclesiarch. Instead, they were a blinding, quasar white, and their every fold winked, their every billow laughed. The movements of the clothing were the reflections of the man’s pale blue eyes, eyes whose sparkle was a flourish of delight in the universe. His hair was as white as his robes. There were moments when Tennesyn couldn’t distinguish one from the other, as if the hair that fell in a thick cascade down Nessun’s back spread and shaped itself into vestments. The cardinal’s skin was white too, a beyond-albino chalk. He could have been a ghost, and he did, it was true, seem to walk a few centimetres off the ground. He could have been a ghost, but he was much too happy.

And on the day the Wars of Lamentation began in the Phlagia system, on the planet Antagonis, Nessun wasn’t just floating. He was dancing. Tennesyn’s mood was darker. The xeno-archaeologist was happy that his sponsor was pleased. But now, on the very day that the dig site seemed bound to validate his theories, Tennesyn was having to rush off back to Aighe Mortis in the neighbouring Camargus system. Another of his best researchers was being conscripted into the Imperial Guard. It was the third time in a week. Tennesyn had no quarrel with duty to the Emperor, but there were different ways to serve, and how was he supposed to do any work of real value if his staff kept being poached by the Departmento Munitorum? If Tennesyn wanted to reach Aighe Mortis before his protégé was bundled off-world, no doubt to die fighting over a rise of rock that no one could possibly be interested in were it not for the other people who couldn’t possibly be interested in it, then he had to leave, and right away.

At this point, Tennesyn thought he knew the impact war would have on his life: problems with excessive staff turnover.

He had no idea how deep his naivete ran.

So on the day the Wars came to Antagonis (but not to Tennesyn yet, not just yet), Nessun asked, ‘The site is completely revealed now?’

‘It is.’

‘And the alignment is…?’

‘Tonight.’

The herald of war clapped his hands in excitement. Not at all seeing what waited in the wings, Tennesyn took his leave, and started down the road where the Dragon and the Gorgon waited.

In a week, a world can fall.

Volos jolted awake. He sat up. His feet sought the reassuring reality of the Immolation Maw’s deck. His hands squeezed the iron frame of the cot as he fought to steady the vertigo of his spirit. Volos did not dream, nor had he now. No images engaged in a fading dance through his mind. Yet his heart was sick with the perfect, absolute, unalterable knowledge that his hands would soon carry stains from an ocean of innocent blood.

Melus whistled, his helmet speaker distorting the sound into a high-pitched whine.

‘If you don’t mind, brother,’ Toharan said.

‘Apologies, brother-sergeant. I was just thinking…’

‘The same thing I am,’ Toharan finished.

They were standing in the doorway to the huge, shallow bowl of the refuge. The space was spare and unadorned, a coldly functional, open-plan bunker. There were at least a thousand people staring back at them with a mixture of fear and hope.

The orders had been to sweep the capital city for survivors. More specifically: hit the palace of Benedict Danton, high lord of Antagonis, and rescue what portion of the planet’s government might yet draw breath. If there were any encounters of opportunity along the way, lend help and gather civilians where possible, but get Lord Danton and his family out of there. Squad Pythios of the Black Dragons Second Company had gone in, working with the Fourth and 25th Companies of the Imperial Guard’s Mortisian Regiment. And here, in the sealed basement of the palace, hiding from the walking corpses that, as far as Toharan could tell, comprised the rest of the city of Lecorb’s population of twelve million, was everyone they could reasonably expect to find. And more. Toharan ran his eyes again over the huddled figures. His first estimate had been correct: a good thousand souls.

‘Too many for an airlift,’ Melus said.

‘Yes,’ Toharan agreed. ‘We’re walking out of here.’ He wasn’t worried. Between his squad and the thirty thousand Mortisians, there was more than enough force on hand to act as escort, especially given how non-aggressive the dead were. They had completely ignored the Dragons and the Guard on the way in, even though their behaviour was otherwise more frenzied than Toharan had seen before. The corpses ran, howled, tore at themselves and each other, clawed at walls, and beat their own heads to pulp. But they did not attack.

A man stepped forward from the crowd and approached the two Space Marines. Toharan pegged him as being in his early sixties, standard. His lined, patrician face showed no signs of augmetic or juvenat treatment, which was unusual. His suit was elegantly austere, a simple black adorned by the vermilion sash of his office. There was a child, a girl of about ten, peering out from behind his legs. He had a protective hand on her plaited hair. ‘I am Lord Danton,’ the man said. ‘And this is Bethshea. I’ve been trying to tell her that you have come to help us.’

Toharan turned his gaze to the girl. ‘That’s right. We have.’

Bethshea did not look reassured. She shrank further behind Danton.

‘She thinks you’re monsters,’ Danton explained.

Really? Toharan thought. The Black Dragons? Monsters? Towering head and shoulders over every human in the room, clad in black power armour emblazoned with a silver dragon, armour whose snarling helmet grilles were designed to strike fear into the enemy – why in Terra’s name would they seem like monsters to a little girl?

‘Don’t be afraid, child,’ Melus said, and started to unclasp his helmet.

Toharan raised a hand to stop him. ‘Allow me, brother.’ No point traumatising the child any further. He removed his own helmet and let Bethshea see his very human, if outsized, face. She appeared to relax. Slightly.

‘Well done,’ Melus said over the vox-link when Toharan had replaced his helmet. ‘My face would not have helped.’

‘That was my thought.’

‘Could be worse. I could be Volos.’

Toharan chuckled, then switched to his speaker. ‘People of Lecorb,’ he announced, ‘we have come to lead you to safety.’

Squad Pythios brought the survivors out of the bunker. They mustered in the square of the palace compound, then joined the waiting ranks of the Mortisians. The convoy moved out from the palace walls, out onto Admiral Kiershing Square, with the Space Marines taking point.

And the dead attacked.

The change was instantaneous. The random wandering, despairing moans and acts of self-destruction turned into a furious charge. Five great avenues fed into the square, and from all of them came a storm surge of bodies. The dead ignored the Space Marines and slammed into the Guard. The Mortisians were fast. A wall of stubber and las-fire met the onrushing dead, but the momentum of tens of thousands of bodies wasn’t going to be halted. Five collective battering rams struck, and the Imperial lines buckled. Toharan turned, and saw the impossible. Already, within the first second of the battle, as the Mortisians found themselves in full melee, men were changing, their eyes blanking into mindless hunger and rage as they fell on their comrades.

‘Diamond,’ Toharan voxed. ‘Out then in.’ Squad Pythios plunged into the fight. They scythed through the dead with chainblade and fist, decapitating and crushing. It was like wading through molasses. The dead were so focused on clawing past the Mortisians to the civilians that they barely reacted to the Dragons advance.

Toharan forced a reaction. He and his brothers became the moving rocks against which the death tide broke. They split into two groups and worked their way around the defensive island of the Guard. They slashed across the flow of the dead, hundreds falling before them like threshed wheat. Halfway around the Mortisians’ perimeter, the Dragons split again, with one half of the squad moving to the rear lines, and the other heading to the front, tearing apart another rank of the enemy. The momentum of the dead stalled. There was a pause while the flood of reinforcements continued to pour in from the avenues, and the charge built up its strength again.

The Mortisians had the measure of their opponents now, though Toharan already had his doubts about what difference that would make in the long run. The reality of twelve million damned souls was sinking in. But for now, the massed power of the Imperial Guard unleashed a horizontal rain of projectile and las-fire. The barrage was continuous, and it pushed back the army of the dead before it could surge again.

Breathing space. Time to move.

‘Go!’ Toharan shouted over vox-link and speaker, and the caravan took its first, lurching steps. The Dragons moved to the interior perimeter. Toharan disliked not being on the front lines, but he had his orders, and the mission dictated strategy. It was not the Dragons’ remit to take on an entire city. Their battle, in this moment, was to save as many civilians as possible. The people would be needed after the next stage of the war, after the Black Dragons and the other vectors of Imperial might had purged Antagonis of its taint. There had to be a population to reclaim the planet, to celebrate the victory and prove that it was not pyrrhic. So Squad Pythios moved to protect the unarmed. As big as the area was that the thousand civilians took up, it was one whose bounds the Dragons could keep patrolled. The refugees marched, and the Space Marines circled them at a constant run, bringing bolter and chainblade to bear wherever the Mortisian defences needed shoring up.

Toharan paused in his run to jump up on the lead vehicle, a Hellhound. Colonel Burston Kervold, heading the joint command of the Fourth and 25th companies, rode standing in the roof hatch, magnoculars around his neck. His chin was a steel prosthetic. It was scratched and pitted as if he really did lead with it. Kervold’s cap perched on a head that was a phrenological map of his tours of duty. His eyes were narrowed flints, staring at the dead with a contempt so strong it should have blasted a path clear to the outskirts of the city. But when Kervold turned his head to face Toharan, the Space Marine thought he saw the tightness of fatalism in the officer’s gaze. Kervold had seen and noted the same things, then. The behaviour of the dead was unusual, unlike any plague of undeath Toharan had fought before. Even more than the speed of the dead, it was their focus that was alarming. There wasn’t just hunger in their frenzy. There was anger. There was passion. And then there was the rapidity of the contagion.

The elements were all wrong. Vital information was missing. The mission had the earmarks of a disaster.

‘If we stop,’ Kervold yelled over the roar of the inferno cannon’s spray of ignited promethium, ‘we’ll be finished.’ Ahead of them, the dead looked like a solid mass.

‘Then we don’t stop,’ Toharan replied. ‘Not for any reason. How is our route?’

‘We’ll stick to the big avenues for as long as we can. But once we’re into the hab zones…’ Kervold’s shrug was humorous in its understatement of despair.

Toharan nodded. ‘Then we fight harder. And we still don’t stop.’ He dropped back to the ground and resumed destroying. Already the defences were being strained again. Already Guard lines were thinning.

Kervold was right. The hab zones were worse.

As long as the caravan was in the administrative centre of Lecorb, on streets five hundred metres wide, the defenders held their own. Flame, faith and will kept them moving forward. Wheels, treads and boots crunched over the flattened and burned bodies of the twice-killed. Though the dead massed in the tens of thousands in the open spaces, there were only so many that could attack at once.

The hab zones were another story. The streets were narrow and none carried on straight for more than a few blocks. Lecorb’s history was preserved in its patchwork layout. Fragments of districts layered each other, the new never completely replacing the old, as if pieces from a random collection of jigsaw puzzles had been forced together, whether they fit or not. It was impossible to see what was coming. Each sharp corner slowed the caravan down, giving the dead, now a wall of meat in the confined corridors, longer and longer to press their attacks.

Bad as the streets were, the real nightmare was the architecture. Lecorb’s growth had been haphazard, its one burst of urban planning happening in M38, when Lord Hosman had ordered the centre of the city razed to make way for the new administrative complexes. Its style of construction, however, had remained unchanged since the Great Crusade. At some point, the tradition of using pilotis and open facades had become linked, in the cultural imagination, with the act of obeisance to the Emperor. Load-bearing walls had become heretical. But the preservation of any particular structure was unimportant. As a result, apartment had been built atop apartment, new growths of pillars sprouting out of decaying roof gardens to support a new building, whose roof would in turn birth another.

Some buildings overlapped the roofs of several smaller ones, and the facades, freed of the need to do something as mundane as hold the structures upright, had turned into a crazy quilt of murals, stained glass windows, or sullen, stained rockcrete. The zone was a lunatic collection of boxes on stilts that looked, at first glance, like a forest of spindle-legged Titans and Dreadnoughts in collision. Time, smog and decay had rotted the faces of the buildings, and what might once have looked festive, with strident colour offset by the sober grey of unadorned walls, was now a study in dour mud.

And from every one of the myriad openings came the dead. They were like insects streaming from the opened pores of a stricken giant. From all sides, from all floors, from directly above, they fell upon the caravan. Over the neural link, Toharan’s helmet transmitted threat detection so universal that he tuned it out. He simply struck at whatever was nearest, and he shattered bodies with every movement.

As the caravan dragged itself forward, the Dragons gave up their rotating patrol and each took ownership of a sector inside the Guard lines. The dead were a terrible hail coming down on top of the refugees, and the Space Marines had to move from the perimeter to the centre of the huddled survivors and back out again within seconds. It was like swatting individual insects in a swarm. They smashed many.

They didn’t smash nearly enough.

Two Chimeras ran into a stream of dead who threw themselves under the armoured carrier’s treads. The corpses piled higher, more and more sucked in beneath the vehicles, blood and bone-shrapnel spraying. Within seconds, the Chimeras had sunk into a quagmire of gore metres deep. Their crews piled out and were dragged down into the muck.

The casualties mounted. The dead pressed harder. The streets narrowed and the buildings crowded in. Mortisians transformed into howling creatures and clawed at their neighbours, spreading the contagion. But the civilians didn’t turn. The dead simply ripped them to pieces. This wasn’t battle, Toharan thought as he tore the head off a man whose idiot face was covered in the foam of his rage. This wasn’t even a retreat. This was a race against Chaos itself. There was honour in the effort, but his mind was troubled by the hard, insistent possibility of failure and futility.

Snarling, a man threw himself out of the third floor window just ahead and on Toharan’s left. The creature’s hands were hooked into talons of hate and hunger, his eyes locked on a sobbing Bethshea. Toharan snapped out a ceramite-clad fist and smashed the corpse aside, caving in the head. Another one down. Another drop in a limitless ocean. But a glance at Bethshea renewed the calm of perfect duty. Since Toharan had shown her that he was a giant, not a monster, she had cleaved close to his legs. She had to run to keep pace with his every stride, but she managed, a tiny remora to his black, remorseless shark. Toharan roared his encouragement to his brothers and the Guard.

They passed a side street. It was empty when Toharan looked down it. But as the rear elements of the caravan went by, they were hit by a sudden, shrieking, frenzied mob of the dead. A torpedo of damnation, uncountable thousands strong, shattered the lines. Toharan looked back to see Brother Xorion caught. The dead ploughed into and onto him in an unending tide. Only Brother Guerign was close enough to help. He waded in and, standing back to back, the two Black Dragons felled hundreds. Toharan and the rest of the squad supported them with a stream of bolter fire, but no amount of firepower was enough against the rushing, frothing wave of corpses. Xorion and Guerign died. Even ceramite could be crushed by the sheer weight of dead flesh.

As Toharan watched, helpless, his soul sickening, what made the scene even more horrific was the single-minded focus of the dead. Even now, the Space Marines weren’t actual targets. The dead hadn’t attacked Xorion and Guerign – they had run them down. The corpse faces, mindless slackness mixed with idiot hunger, all faced in a single direction. Their blank yet raging eyes were fixed on the herded survivors. They didn’t care about the Dragons. Toharan’s brothers had simply been in the way.

Had the enemy been sentient, there could have been no greater insult.

Toharan turned from the disaster. A quarter of the civilians gone. The Mortisians weakened by at least that much. An awful reality, but it changed nothing. The orders still stood. The mission was not done until there was victory. ‘Forward!’ he cried. To the refugees who stood still, mesmerised by unholy loss, he said, ‘Honour your dead and honour your planet. Survive and reclaim! Go!’ They did, one foot in front of the other, and, to their very great credit, without panicking.

They honoured their protector, too.

Harried and crushed, diminished and scarred, the caravan emerged from the hab zones and gradually left the city behind. The apartment warrens, now hives of the dead, gave way first to the manufactoria, and then to still-unspoiled forest. The survivors and their guardians picked up speed, and for a little while put some distance between themselves and the greater part of the city’s undead millions.

Ahead, the landscape rose in gentle foothills until it reached the jarring interruption of the Temple Mountains. The chain thrust from the earth like sudden, granite judgement, its faces vertical, towering, defiant. From there, the sanctuary of Lexica Keep was less than a day’s forced march away. The keep would be blessedly inaccessible to the dead horde on its cliff side, and the route to it wound through a long, narrow pass several kilometres long. If they could reach the pass, Toharan was confident he could see his charges to safety. The mountain walls of the defile were so close together that the dead would be streamed into a line that could be held off by even a modest contingent of Guard. Arrival at the pass would be a guarantee of victory.

Or of what little victory that could be claimed. By now, half the civilians were dead. The Mortisians had been decimated, reduced to barely a third of their original strength.

The tyranny of numbers caught up to them as they reached the foot of the mountains. The city had emptied, and when its masses arrived, the open spaces no longer worked in the caravan’s favour. The dead formed a single, coherent mass millions strong. A tsunami of rage slammed into the Imperial forces and pushed them up against the unforgiving granite of the Temples. The caravan couldn’t advance. The dead were a sea of bone and muscle, the blasted twelve million of Lecorb constricting the little flame of life until they could smother it.

On the line fighting to hold back the tide, a conscript flipped backwards and hit the ground hard and dead. His forehead was a scorched crater. He’d been hit with a las-round.

‘Brother-sergeant, did you see that?’ Melus asked over the vox-link.

Toharan had. He thought he’d seen the same thing happen a few times in Lecorb, but he couldn’t be sure in the confusion of confined spaces and the rainfall of dead. But now there was no doubt. The Guardsman hadn’t been killed by friendly fire. The shot had come from one of the dead, who shouldn’t even know what a rifle was, much less how to operate one.

Anger. Speed. And now weapons fire. All of it wrong, and Toharan seethed with frustration at the stalled advance. The entrance to the pass was barely a kilometre to the north. He could see it, a jagged shadow in the mountain wall, its contours outlined in the red glow of the setting sun. Squad Pythios could punch through the corpse legions easily on its own. The problem was doing so with even a handful of survivors. And the problem was looking increasingly academic as the siege wore on.

The Guardsmen were collapsing. Their lines were thinning, pulling back, and then disintegrating. Squad Pythios did what it could to shore them up. Toharan and his brothers ran the interior perimeter once more, dividing the circle into eight between themselves. They were not a patrol: they were a revolving scythe, a perpetual charge, blasting clusters of dead with bolter fire, pushing into the thick of the attackers with chainsword and fist, leaving barriers of inert flesh in their wake. They were relentless. They slowed the hordes down.

They couldn’t stop them.

They might have, if the Mortisians were able to hold position with just a bit more characteristic resolve. These men were veterans, blooded and war-tempered by a hundred battles, but they were going down like the rawest trainees. Toharan was baffled yet again by what he was seeing. How could the infection spread so quickly? The change from loyal Guardsman to savage corpse took seconds. There was barely time for a man to die before he turned on his comrades. The virulence of the contagion was beyond unholy. And still, not one of the civilians had succumbed. They were shredded into strips of meat when they were caught, but they never changed.

The refugees howled their terror and despair. For a moment, Toharan’s frustration veered into contempt. The terrible losses of this pointless mission had been for the sake of these bleating sheep? Where was the sense in that? Then his eyes landed on Bethshea, always running to be near him, looking up at him now not as a monster, not as a giant, but as a god come to keep her safe, and there was his answer. There was the sense of the mission.

His vox-link came to life. ‘Pythios, this is Ormarr.’

‘Volos,’ Toharan said. Even through the distorting static of the transmission, the rumbling rasp of Squad Ormarr’s sergeant was unmistakable. ‘Tell me you have good news, brother-sergeant.’

‘Would our imminent arrival qualify?’

‘It would.’

‘What do you need?’

‘A way through to the pass so we can move the civilians.’

‘You’ll have it,’ Volos promised. ‘Fire and bone.’

‘Fire and bone,’ Toharan responded, returning the Dragons battle-cry, and swallowing, as he always did, the twinge of regret that the words would never hold the full meaning for him that they did for Volos. He mag-locked his bolter to his thigh, conserving rounds, and tore into grasping, surging dead with renewed purpose. The warp take the Mortisians if they weren’t up to the task. The Dragons would complete the mission themselves. His sword lopped off limbs and heads. The ground beneath his boots had become a mire of blood, and some of the defending Guardsmen were losing their footing in the slickness, but he didn’t lose a beat. He was an engine of precise destruction, and mowed the dead down, slicing and trampling them to their second, final end.

But still they didn’t attack him. Still, with hands and teeth, they lunged only for the unaugmented humans. And as the Guard succumbed, there were more and more corpses with weapons. Many simply used the rifles as clubs. But even though there was only a tiny percentage that actually fired the guns, and there was no accuracy worthy of the name, the numbers were enough, and they were growing. The air was filling with the lethal web of hostile las-fire.

The music of the war was an atonal cacophony of howling corpse, shrieking survivor, and crying wounded, the high timbre modulated only by the chud-chud-chud of bolter fire, growl of chainsword and punctuating crack of bone. The steady, rotating, murderous sweep of Squad Pythios carried what rhythm there was. But now came the glorious bass: the huge, deep-throated, vengeful roar of the Thunderhawk gunship Battle Pyre. Flying low, it emerged from the pass, a stub-winged fist of black armour that reflected crimson sunset as the ship turned and began its strafing run. Hellstrike missiles flashed from their pods. They slammed into the undead army with a blast of purifying fire. Tiny suns rose between Toharan and the pass, and the sky rained fragmented body parts. The sponson cannons opened fire, and the ground erupted with geysers of dirt and corpses. For a moment, the pressure from the north ebbed. The Guard pushed hard, and there was movement. The refugees, their cries turning to whimpers of hope, inched towards the north.

Figures in jump packs detached themselves from the Battle Pyre.

Bethshea pointed up. ‘Look!’ she squealed. ‘More giants!’

‘Yes,’ Toharan said. But as he watched the Dragon Claws arrive, what he thought, despite himself, and to his burning shame, was, No, not giants. The monsters have come.

CHAPTER 2

FIRE AND BONE

From above, the dead were an undulating carpet covering the landscape. Volos saw eddies and currents in their movement, the formal thrust of the attack giving way in isolated pockets to the purely random. But there was no lack of focus in the forces surrounding Squad Pythios and the tattered remains of the Mortisian Guard. During the seconds of his flight, Volos eyed the distance between the caravan and the pass, saw what was needed if the refugees were going to have even a fighting chance of surviving the next hour. Brother Keryon had given the Claws a good start, ploughing a purging furrow of fire with the Thunderhawk, but the dead were flowing back quickly. Time to teach them that even a corpse could know fear.

The Dragon Claws slammed into the ground, punching craters in the enemy army. They came in at staggered distances, with Volos closest to the caravan. The goal: blast away the dead and form a chain along which the caravan could move once more. A jump pack assault normally called for close combat weaponry, but for this deployment, Volos had ordered a maximum ammo load and flamers for all. He straightened from his landing, unshouldered the flamer and let spray in a single movement. His back to the mountainside, he played the fire out over 180 degrees, incinerating the dead and pushing their masses back.

The leading Hellhound started up. Its cannon was silent, the promethium tank long since depleted. Volos stepped forward, the flamer on full, and the dead retreated still further. The Hellhound drew level with him. Volos glanced up, saw Colonel Kervold salute his thanks. Volos gave a slight nod and returned his attention to the enemy. The Hellhound passed at his back, between Volos and the cliff wall. Toharan’s voice crackled over the vox-link. ‘We’re advancing. Fine work.’

‘So is yours.’ He tried to picture the journey his fellow sergeant had made. It was song-worthy.

The Hellhound stopped. Its engine stalled out. Not letting up with the flamer, Volos turned his head. Kervold was looking down inside the vehicle, his expression a jagged mix of fury and puzzlement. He opened his mouth.

The order never came. His eyes widened. Volos saw something new wash over the colonel’s face, emotions that should have been foreign to that scarred stone. The first was fear. The second was doubt, and somehow, this seemed more intense and terrible than the fear. Kervold convulsed with spine-snapping force, his body shaken by the fist that was seizing his soul. His eyes glazed as his face twisted into the shape of blank fury. He thrashed himself free of the hatch and turned with a snarl towards the refugees who were just now passing the Hellhound.

His right hand holding down the flamer’s trigger, Volos pulled out his bolter with his left and shot Kervold, turning his skull into mist. As he acted, he processed what he had seen. The contagion had struck from the inside of the Hellhound, where no injury had been sustained. The implications staggered him, but they would receive his attention later. The consequences demanded a response now.

The plague spread through what remained of the Mortisians with the speed of a shock wave. The last of the Imperial forces succumbed in seconds. The disease leaped from man to man without needing injury or even contact. It was as if the fall of the colonel signalled the death of the companies’ collective spirit. Commissar and trooper alike frothed and lunged for the civilians.

Volos’s flamer ran dry. The enemy surged with renewed strength and reinforcements. Clawing for their prey, the dead slammed in a wave against Volos, knocking the bolter from his grasp, lifting him off the ground and throwing his weight against the Hellhound. Volos slid off the vehicle’s hull. The flood tried to crush him. ‘Toharan!’ he voxed. ‘The Guard is lost! Grab anyone and go!’ Buffeted by the infinite enemy, he vowed to the Emperor that he would give his life in the service of any victory that might yet be claimed from this day. Then he crossed his arms against his chest and flexed his wrists, fists down.

There was a familiar moment of agony so pure it bordered on ecstasy, and his bone-blades shot out from his wrists, passing over his knuckles. They were a metre long and sheathed in adamantium. He swung his arms down and out. Limbs and heads went flying. Arterial fountains burst around him, drenching his armour, covering his visor. He ducked his head and lunged forward, a maddened bull. His helmet had a large slit near the top, and from it protruded his forehead’s bony growth. He had sanded it into the shape of a crescent horn, the tips and edge as lethal as the blades that grew from his arms, and here too he had added the extra kill strength of adamantium. The dead fell before his charge. His vision narrowed as the euphoria of war descended on him. He saw nothing that wasn’t the next thing he was about to butcher. His fangs extended, hungry for the mangled flesh and blood whose sight and smell had become the sum total of his world. He was the destroyer, and however numerous his foes, they were pitiable in their fragility.

A moment came when he had nothing to kill, and his mind cleared with a neuronal snap. His system quivered with the residual ecstasy, but he was already thinking tactically again. Corpses in the dozens surrounded him. The army in his vicinity had staggered, and would need a few seconds before the torrent could flow again. Volos retracted his blades, recovered his bolter and vaulted to the top of the Hellhound.

The Mortisians were all part of the dead army now. There was still occasional weapons fire, but it was all sloppy, and all aimed at the refugees. There were precious few of them left. The brothers of Squad Pythios carried a civilian on each shoulder and were moving at a good pace towards the pass. They had just reached the next of the Dragon Claws. Brother Nithigg’s clearing was about to collapse as the onslaught closed in, but the dead were still seconds behind, and the Space Marines were gaining momentum. Handfuls of civilians ran in howling clusters, desperation giving their sprints a speed that was almost that of the Black Dragons jog.

Moment by moment, their numbers dwindled.

Volos joined the race. He came up behind a pair of scrambling humans, a man and a woman. They had been high administrators, to judge by their shredded finery. They held hands as they ran, as if that fragment of comfort was worth what they lost in speed. The gesture was so futile in the face of inevitable massacre, and so touchingly human. It was, Volos thought, the epitome of what he had been created to protect. A group of frenzied dead closed in on the couple. Volos swatted the enemy away, pulping the bodies. He scooped up the two humans. They screamed when they first felt his grasp. They seemed hardly more reassured when they realised what was happening. They stared at him with eyes that were near mindless with fear. But they didn’t struggle.

Volos ran faster, barrelling through the dead, exploding bodies with his juggernaut run. He reached Nithigg, who grabbed two civilians and joined the race. Behind, more clusters of humans fell off the pace and were swallowed by the horde.

By the time Squads Pythios and Ormarr reached the pass, the only refugees left were the ones they carried. They held two each, except for Toharan, who had three: there was a small child perched on his head. Thirty-seven survivors. A poor showing.

The Black Dragons pounded along the broken, twisting path of the defile. Behind them, the dead raged and followed, but lost ground. The walls of the pass closed in, barely a few metres apart at moments. They leaned in from the vertical, black stone slicked with moisture. Misting waterfalls thickened the air. The Temple chain was taking the intruders into its hard embrace, hugging them tighter and closer. Even with his enhanced vision, Volos found it difficult to see more than a few dozen metres ahead. But that was enough.

They ran for hours, outdistancing the enemy by kilometres, but not slowing even then. They still didn’t slow when the pass opened out into the bottom of a vast canyon. The path turned here and snaked thousands of metres up the near canyon wall. It led, at the top, to the narrow, graceful span of the Ecclesiarch Alexis XXII bridge. From this distance below, the bridge was as insubstantial as human hair. Stretching kilometres across the canyon, it was the unique access to Lexica Keep. Its lights glowering in the night, the fortress crouched against the far cliff face like a bird of prey. From between the dark wings of its walls, it peered with cold, contemptuous majesty at the warriors and their charges.

It offered no comfort.

Lexica Keep was a Ministorum redoubt. It had, at times, reserved a portion of its east wing for schola purposes, but its primary function had been as a librarium. Its collection was as famous as it was difficult to access. It was a repository of texts from all corners of the Imperium, and from all its ages. Some of its manuscripts, Werner Lettinger knew, were pre-Imperial. Still others, he suspected darkly, were pre-human. Some of his more radical colleagues, especially among the Ordo Hereticus, would give much to examine those works. Some, he knew, had traded their souls for the opportunity. He wondered if the knowledge acquired had been worth the additional cost – their lives. Given the choice, he would have pitched the entire collection into a blazing Act of Faith long ago. He took comfort, at least, in the fact that the books were under lock and key in a fastness never to be stormed.

Captain Vritras of the Black Dragons was speaking. ‘We are, of course, grateful for any aid you might be able to provide, inquisitor.’

They were in a council chamber whose door opened onto the dining hall that had become the Dragons command centre. Gas-burning torches were held by iron sconces along the curved walls. These ended in a floor-to-ceiling sheet of armourglass that looked down into the canyon. The brickwork of dark grey rockcrete was so fine that the mortar was invisible. The walls looked like a single block of stone. In the centre of the chamber was a long table carved from the enormous trunk of a berbab tree, shipped from Antagonis’s southern continent. The wood appeared to absorb light rather than reflect it. In its depths, bright pinpricks shone like swallowed stars. Data-slates, maps and transmission papers covered much of its surface now, and there were scars gouged by carelessly tossed weapons. Lettinger couldn’t imagine the Confessors of Lexica countenancing such disrespect, but the question was moot. The Ecclesiarchy of Antagonis had been among the first to succumb to the plague. The Dragons had purged every last one of them before making Lexica their own.

‘I hope you don’t mind my saying,’ Vritras went on, ‘that I would have thought an officer from the Ordo Sepulturum would have been sent, given the nature of Antagonis’s taint.’

Lettinger smiled to show he wasn’t offended. But he wondered how Vritras knew with such certainty that he wasn’t of that ordo. ‘Quite understandable, captain,’ he said. ‘The reason for my presence here is simple. Time is clearly of the essence, given that the situation has become this grave in, as far as we can determine, a matter of days. It would take months, at best, for a Sepulturum team to be despatched, and I, like you, was in the region.’

‘Quite a lucky coincidence,’ First-Sergeant Aperos of Squad Nychus remarked.

Lettinger ignored the sarcasm and kept his smile. ‘It would seem that the Emperor has traced a path for us to tread together.’

‘I can’t help but be struck by how often the Black Dragons and the Ordo Malleus seem to wind up on similar paths,’ Vritras said. ‘You are always nearby to come to our assistance.’

Lettinger started. Only the Grey Knights were supposed to know that there was even such a thing as the Ordo Malleus. He tried to keep his expression neutral. ‘I’m sorry, but there seems to be a misunderstand–’

‘Don’t insult my intelligence, inquisitor. If you think we haven’t had dealings with your ordo before, then you are too naïve to be much good at your allotted task.’

It was becoming difficult for Lettinger to pretend he wasn’t aware of Vritras’s insolence. It was harder still to keep his own face friendly, and his eyes from narrowing, the longer he had to look at the Space Marine and his sergeant. Neither warrior’s mutations were extreme by the standards of the Dragons, but there was still a bony growth on Vritras’s forehead like a blunt, stubby horn, while Aperos had a ridged crest running from his crown down the back of his head. The deformations were the mark of deviant genetic practice, as far as Lettinger was concerned. Give me the proof, captain, he thought. Give me the proof of what we all know your Chapter is doing, and I will have you and your unclean brothers ripped cleanly from the purity of the Imperium. With these thoughts as his strength, he simply bowed. ‘As you say, captain.’

‘Someone’s coming,’ Colonel Dysfield said. He’d been staying out of the exchange, standing by the window with his back to the room. He commanded the 25th Mortisian Rifles, but had provisionally handed over his command to Kervold so that the Guard tasked with the rescue should have the unity of a single command.

The Space Marines and Lettinger joined him. They saw the figures racing across the Alexis bridge. There weren’t many. ‘Throne,’ Vritras muttered.

‘Incoming ship, too,’ Dysfield noted.

The landing lights were on, and in the darkness, Lettinger couldn’t make out what sort of craft it was. He knew who would be on it, though. ‘That would be Canoness Setheno,’ he said. He enjoyed the sharp looks the Dragons and the colonel gave him.

‘The Canoness Errant?’ Dysfield asked stupidly, as if hoping that somehow there were two canonesses with the same name, and this wasn’t the one he dreaded.

‘Why is she here?’ Aperos demanded.

‘She was in the Maeror subsector. When I heard she was part of the tithing mission on Aighe Mortis, I contacted her and requested her aid.’

Dysfield had recovered some of his composure and was trying to withdraw into cynical apathy again, implying that Setheno’s arrival couldn’t possibly be any concern of his. ‘It’s nice how some things work out,’ he deadpanned. Lettinger wasn’t sure who was being mocked, so he didn’t respond.

‘The Canoness Errant and an inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus, both of whom just happened to be in my subsector,’ Vritras growled. ‘Are you sure you are here simply because of the crisis on Antagonis?’

‘Proximately, yes.’

‘Proximately? What is that supposed to mean?’

‘What are your questions supposed to mean, captain?’ Lettinger asked. ‘Since when does the Inquisition have to justify its decisions to anyone? Do you have something you would prefer to hide from us?’

‘My conscience is clean and damn you for asking.’

‘Perhaps your personal conscience is. I do wonder about the collective one of your Chapter.’

‘Enjoy wondering,’ Vritras snapped. ‘I’m going to greet the warriors who have just given much for the Imperium.’ He and Aperos strode out of the chamber, the floor vibrating from the weight of their footfalls. Dysfield followed. He gave Lettinger a look that bordered on hostile, but was also wary. He knew he should be frightened of Lettinger simply because Lettinger was Inquisition and Dysfield was not. That fear was as it should be. Lettinger approved.

He hesitated over whether to head to the courtyard or hurry to greet Setheno when she disembarked. He gambled that he had another few minutes before the canoness quit her ship. He wanted to see the Black Dragons as they returned. There were two, in particular, who interested him. There was an opportunity here, a chance to gather information that might finally bring about proper scrutiny of these Space Marines.

Lettinger hurried after Vritras and Aperos, and arrived in the keep’s courtyard just as Squads Pythios and Ormarr passed through the gate. The Space Marines set the refugees down, then two of them loaded up with detonators and melta bombs and headed back to the bridge. The civilians huddled together, sobbing and shaking. Dysfield’s staff officer approached them, accompanied by a medicae team, who began to herd them into the keep. Dysfield walked up to one of the Dragons and spoke quietly. Lettinger couldn’t hear the conversation, but he guessed that the colonel was asking about the two companies of Mortisian infantry. The Space Marine shook his head. Dysfield looked stricken. No one else would be coming, Lettinger presumed. He thought about the loss of thirty thousand men, and his heart sank. He felt sorry for Dysfield. The man’s entire command, with the exception of the contingent in Lexica, had been wiped out.

Lettinger would have liked to have spoken to the colonel. He would have liked to express his sympathy, to offer what support he could to an officer taking a staggering blow. But his own duty called. He saw Vritras and Aperos talking to the two sergeants who had just arrived. That was the opportunity he had been seeking. He moved towards them, walking softly over the cobbled surface of the courtyard, doing his best to be inconspicuous. As he drew near, the Space Marines removed their helmets, and he felt a rush of satisfaction and terror.

That there were mutations in the ranks of the Black Dragons was no secret. The Dragon Claws assault teams were composed entirely of Space Marines whose Ossmodula zygote had gone berserk. The implanted organ was responsible for the enormous size and strength of Adeptus Astartes skeletons, but in the case of the Claws, it didn’t know where to stop. The bones kept developing, most visibly in the form of outgrowths on the skull and, most effectively for combat, as blades, some of them retractable, in the forearm.

As far as Lettinger and many of his Ordo Malleus colleagues were concerned, it simply wasn’t possible that such a desirable mutation could be a chance development. Gene tampering was tainting the Black Dragons. Yet when the Chapter (reluctantly) submitted its tithe of genetic material, the samples were always of a purity beyond reproach. They were too good to be true, as suspicious in their own way as the bone-blades.

But the evidence was circumstantial, at best. The Dragons were careful, and had never given the Inquisition proper cause or opportunity to put them to the question. They were also very good at keeping their distance. But now the Inquisition, in the person of Werner Lettinger, was deep in the Dragons Second Company, and the warp take him if he didn’t find the means to launch a full, formal investigation against this Emperor-forsaken result of the Cursed Founding of M36.

As he took in sergeants Volos and Toharan, he felt the locks to the Dragons’ secrets tumbling open beneath his hands. Though he didn’t have any formal proof, he could see how the gene tithe passed the examinations. Toharan showed no sign of mutation at all. Underneath a mane of blond hair, his forehead was unblemished by disfiguring crest. His skin tone was lighter than that of the other Dragons Lettinger had seen. The norm was dark, lending credence to the theory that the Dragons were debased derivations of the Salamanders. But Toharan’s flesh had a glow that was almost human. All the Dragons would have to do to satisfy the tithing demands would be to send in material drawn from Toharan and others like him. He was, Lettinger realised, a very special kind of mutant: the aberrantly pure-born in a world of monsters.

And beside him stood the supreme monster. More than three metres tall, Volos loomed over every other living being in the courtyard. He was so gigantic that he wore custom-made armour and used an oversized jump pack for lift. His eyes were black, glinting pits of obsidian looking out from dark grey, leathery hide whose overlapping ridges looked disturbingly like scales. His razored horn dispensed with all pretence, as far as Lettinger was concerned, of being anything other than daemonic. When he spoke to Vritras, his fangs poked out over his lower lip.

As Lettinger watched the two Space Marines, each, for a moment, returned his stare. Toharan looked him up and down, his eyes pausing for a cold second at the inquisitorial rosette on Lettinger’s breast before moving up to his face and favouring him with an expression of absolute hostility and contempt. Volos barely glanced at him, and though he showed none of Toharan’s antagonism, his indifference was worse. It told Lettinger that he was beneath notice. He wasn’t even an irritant, merely a detail on the landscape.

There was no trace of humanity in the creature, Lettinger thought. Volos was well down the path to becoming an actual dragon. Lettinger’s puritan soul demanded that he cleanse Volos from the Emperor’s sight. But his craven blood quailed before the embodied power of war. He needed reinforcement.

‘Inquisitor,’ a female voice said behind him.

Lettinger smiled. He turned, expecting to greet his reinforcement. Instead, his smile turned into a rictus as he stared, frozen and stone, into the face of the Gorgon.

CHAPTER 3

ILLUMINATED

The nature of his work meant Elias Tennesyn was, most of the time, spared the hive experience. He lived in the field, digging up and studying the relics of a past that receded to infinity. For the traces of xenos civilizations to be preserved on a planet, there had to be regions little touched by human development. Therefore, no hives. Antagonis was a world that suited him. Its temperate zones were broad, its two principle land masses were separated by large, life-giving oceans, and its cities, though large, were not monsters. Antagonis still boasted landscapes that were not only green, but actually wild. It had forests, veldts and tundra. Antagonis had space for antiquity and its secrets. So Tennesyn resented the occasions that took him away from the likes of Antagonis to the worlds that presented the human species in its most insect-like form. And a wasted trip, as this one to Aighe Mortis was turning out to be, was a special kind of hell.

Even the briefest, most profitable stay on this planet would have carried a whiff of brimstone. Aighe Mortis was the sole inhabited planet of the Camargus system, just as Antagonis was in Phlagia. Unlike Antagonis, Aighe Mortis was a dying star of a hive world. The civilization on this planet was like a sun going red and huge before its final collapse. It had swollen to a final, absolute extremity of population density. The growth was so unsustainable that it could only be the precursor to a terminal, lights-out plunge into the wreckage of barbarism. The shallow oceans had long ago been drained and evaporated to make way for more and more ground-swallowing, sky-shrouding manufactoria. But the memory of seas lingered in the atmosphere, turning the faecal-brown and bile-yellow air into a thick sludge that sat in the lungs like pneumonic sputum. To breathe on Aighe Mortis was to drown slowly.

The closest thing the world had known to a golden era was in the Age of Apostasy, when its mineral resources had been plenty, and there had been enough space on the surface that the population centres could still boast that they were distinct cities. But the millennia passed, the cities merged into a single disease, and the mineral seams were exhausted. Misery and deprivation were a tide that rose but never ebbed. The last of the wealthy families fled early in M41. When the mining concerns were taken over by desperate, rioting workers, off-world owners decided it was cheaper to cut their losses than face the expense and effort of reclaiming valueless property.

Something between a cooperative and a criminal anarchy had risen on Aighe Mortis, giving just enough obeisance to Imperial administrative bodies to achieve a state of mutual tolerance. The mines had tunnelled deeper into the earth, leaving exhausted regions to be remade as sunless habs, and enough new seams were found to jolt the planet’s economy into a semi-functioning state of undeath. By then, the population was such that almost all of Aighe Mortis’s resources were consumed by local needs for material and energy. In the end (and Tennesyn had seen enough civilizational graveyards to know that the end couldn’t be far down the road), Aighe Mortis kept itself going by exporting two things. One was small-arms, churned out in cut-rate but reliable form in the uncountable billions. The other was men. Human existence here was red in tooth and claw. Vicious natural selection was encouraged by gangs that recognised a valuable resource when they saw it, and a steady stream of Guardsmen and mercenaries swarmed from the hive into the rest of the Imperium.

Aighe Mortis was a world that Tennesyn didn’t enjoy thinking about, never mind setting foot on. But it was also an old world. Its historical records reached back to the Heresy and beyond. Hiding in the cracks and shadows between the belching chimneys and maggot-writhing hab complexes were pockets of scholarship. There were archives here that, even in their decrepit state, would be the envy of the great universitariats, were they widely known. But on Aighe Mortis, it was for the good of their continued existence that they remain forgotten and ignored.

Tennesyn knew about them. There were some scrolls in a private collection that he had thought might help with interpreting the find on Antagonis, and he had sent Granton Fellix here to seek them out. Fellix was a native Mortisian. It had made sense, at the time, for him to make the trip. But then had come the sudden announcement of a new and massive founding, and Fellix had been caught up in the tithe. Tennesyn had come to extricate him from that obligation, thinking his own standing as senior xeno-archaeologist at Bendridge Universitariat, the most prestigious in the Maeror subsector, might count for something.

Not for the first time, he hated himself for being so ignorant.

Tennesyn had spent the last seven days meandering through the warren of the Departmento Munitorum’s Mortisian palace. Now he was waiting outside the office of Jozef Bisset. He had been down so many administrative blind alleys that he had lost all track of hierarchical positions, and had no idea what Bisset’s precise title was. Tennesyn knew he was a comptroller, and that he had something to do with determining how many recruits would be press-ganged from which regions of the hive. Tennesyn knew two other things about Bisset. The first was that, over a century ago, they had been students together, and Tennesyn had helped Bisset through some exams that would have otherwise finished him off. He was hoping Bisset had a long memory. The second thing Tennesyn knew was that Bisset was his last resort. He had spent too much time on this fool’s quest already. He felt sorry for Fellix, but there was no point in both of them being gone from the dig site.

The waiting area was like every other room in the complex. The building called itself a palace because the administrative pride of the Departmento demanded it, but it was no more palatial than Tennesyn was a death cult assassin. The walls were a dark grey, damp-stained, unadorned, pitted rockcrete. The seats were metal and dug into Tennesyn’s back. The lighting was dim and as filthy as the air itself. Bisset’s secretary was a dull-eyed, incompetently augmented man who must have been less than half Tennesyn’s age, but looked three times older. His face was so slack and apathetic that Tennesyn had, for a brief moment, mistaken him for a servitor.

After half an hour, and without Tennesyn being able to catch any sort of communication, the secretary jabbed a thumb in the direction of doors behind his scratched and rusted metal desk. ‘You can go in now,’ he said, without looking up from the data-slates laid out before him.

Tennesyn stood up. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and walked through the doors.

On the other side, Bisset’s office was more of the same as the waiting room, only smaller. The only suggestion of rank was the unblemished, dark iron of the desk, and the presence of a window. Tennesyn was surprised. Disoriented, he hadn’t realised he had been this close to the exterior wall of the palace. The armourglass window was about a metre high, a tenth of that in width, and so layered with grime that it offered no view at all.

Jozef Bisset walked around his desk to shake Tennesyn’s hand. He was the same age as Tennesyn, but looked both younger and more battered, thanks to his decades of active service in the Guard. He’d had more juvenat work done, and the limbs that were still his own had a suppleness of movement that Tennesyn envied. But his right arm was bionic, and Tennesyn thought he heard the subtle whine of servos in at least one leg as well. The left side of Bisset’s face, above the mouth, was a bronze mask. The implanted eye tracked its ruby gaze independently of the right one. ‘Elias,’ Bisset said. ‘It’s good to see you. Do have a seat.’

The chairs were the same metal backbreakers as the ones in the waiting room, but Tennesyn sat. He gave Bisset his warmest smile and most open countenance as the man returned to sit at his desk. ‘Thank you, comptroller–’

‘Oh, stop it. We both know I’m Jozef to you.’

‘Jozef, then,’ Tennesyn said. ‘I suppose you know why I’m here.’

Bisset nodded at the lone data-slate on his desk. ‘I have the file. I’m sorry. I wish I could help.’

Tennesyn forced himself to go through the futile motions one more time. ‘This man is a valuable member of my team, far more valuable than he would be as a single green conscript.’

‘I’m sure you’re right. But at just this moment, utility is completely beside the point. The tensions are bad enough that the slightest appearance of granting anyone a favour could set off more riots. Or worse.’

‘Riots? What are you talking about?’

Bisset blinked at him. ‘What cave have you been living in?’

‘This one!’ Tennesyn exploded in frustration. ‘I’ve spent the last week shuttling from office to office, napping in waiting rooms. I don’t even know what day it is!’

‘We’ve had to double the tithe,’ Bisset explained. ‘And it’s being resisted. But Sarcannis and Perethea are a mess, and between that and the situation on Antagonis–’

‘What situation on Antagonis?’ Tennesyn’s voice broke with a hint of hysteria.

‘Throne, man, how do you function in the real world at all?’

‘I should get back there.’ He rose.

‘Are you mad? That planet is–’

A distant, but deep, boom cut Bisset off. The room vibrated. Dust drifted down from the ceiling. Tennesyn wondered what could shake them a thousand metres up in a building of this size. ‘What was that?’ he whispered.

Bisset sighed, looking very, very tired. ‘That, I do believe, was a bomb.’

The Revealed Truth was a gold that did not glitter. It was a gold that stole light. The Retaliator-class cruiser was a study in dark glory, bristling with flying buttresses and spires that invited the eye to think of shining triumph, but then somehow dimmed vision, threatening blindness if stared at for too long. It was a spectacle that repelled sight. It was brazen stealth.

It was paradox.

And that made it the very dear love of Cardinal Rodrigo Nessun, because paradox was the vital truth of the warp. It was a truth that had burst upon him five millennia ago. The Ministorum had seconded him to a detachment of the Inquisition’s Ordo Malleus. He had been a loyal slave of the Emperor then, and a participant in the project that had led to the founding of the Exorcists. That Adeptus Astartes Chapter was legendary for its incorruptibility. Rumour said that each had a daemon bound within his flesh as part of their initiation, making them immune to any further possession. Nessun had no quarrel with the accuracy of the legend, but he would, if asked, add a small amendment. The immune were those who had been successfully initiated. There had been failures. Many, during the work leading up to the founding. So many that illumination had descended upon Nessun. The failure, he had realised, lay not with the corrupted Space Marines, but in the goal itself. Those newly born daemonic warriors were the truth of the universe. That was the first paradox. He had embraced it, and them.

He had gathered his sons to him, and baptised them the Swords of Epiphany. Then they had fled to the warp, and his true education had begun. Now he had progressed far beyond the simple paradoxes of the elastic time that had granted him a semblance of immortality, or of the fact that the further his physiological transformations took him from the human race, the better he understood his former species. These were simply the perverse truths of subjectivity, limited to his own perception. They gave surprise and joy, but they weren’t enough.

He was a theologian, a Hierarch, an evangelist. He had a calling. He must make manifest the beauty of the warp’s truth for all to see. He would illuminate the Imperium with a scorching light, and sometimes, paradoxically, it was necessary to exterminate those whom one would save.

He was standing in an observation blister on the top of the Revealed Truth’s command spire, listening to the writhing of colours, watching the scream of space. There was a hiss as the door slid open, and Makaiel entered. The Space Marine captain’s armour was the same light-dousing gold as the ship. His helm grille was a maw of angelic fangs.

Nessun smiled his blessing. ‘What news, my son?’

‘Aighe Mortis is reaching critical mass, father.’

To have a being such as Makaiel address him with such reverence was a wonder that Nessun never tired of savouring. The Swords would, under other circumstances, have had a Chapter Master. But it was Nessun, the simple human (well, formerly so) who ruled these weaponised gods. ‘And our route to Flebis?’ Their destination was well to the galactic south of Aighe Mortis, halfway across the Maeror subsector, in the farther reaches of the Segmentum Tempestus.

‘The warp storms are minimal. We will arrive there in plenty of time.’

Good. Destiny was unfolding before him with the beauty of a stained glass flower. He would be the bringer of light, and the destroyer of worlds.

‘Behave yourself,’ Toharan muttered. ‘That, over there, is the purity of faith made flesh.’

Volos didn’t respond, but he picked up on an odd undercurrent to his brother’s remark. The cynicism sounded forced, as if Toharan were using mockery to avoid facing something serious.

‘Be still, sergeant,’ Vritras ordered under his breath. ‘Canoness,’ he said aloud and nodded.

Setheno stepped forward, past the poleaxed Lettinger. ‘Captain,’ she said.

Volos watched the reactions in the courtyard to her arrival. Lettinger was still rooted to the spot, and that was amusing. Lettinger wore black robes and went hooded, his face in shadow with little more visible than his convoluted electoos. His appearance was carefully designed to convey danger and authority. But his studied menace was comical beside Setheno. Beyond Lettinger, there was a ripple as the other mortals moved away from the canoness. Whether refugees or Guard, they had the same tense, shoulder-hunched look of anxious prey. They did not want to be noticed, but they couldn’t tear their eyes away from the hunter. Setheno had done no more than step into the courtyard and utter two words, yet she was a presence that filled the space. Volos tried to put his finger on why that was. Certainly, by any measure other than a Space Marine one, she was physically imposing. She was one of the tallest humans Volos had ever seen. At two metres, she was the same height as Toharan. Then there was her reputation.

She had been Canoness Superior of the Order of the Piercing Thorn. Minoris though the order had been, its members had made their presence felt, melding a learning worthy of the Sisters Dialogous with a commando military philosophy. They had been a sharp blade in the flanks of the Archenemy. Volos had heard many stories of the Piercing Thorn and what befell it. Some of those stories told of Setheno’s leadership. It was such that she had been seen as a possible contender for the vacant seat of Abbess Sanctorum of the Convent Prioris on Terra. But then the taint had come. Exactly what its nature was, and how pervasive the corruption of the Piercing Thorn had been, Volos didn’t know. The stories weren’t about the taint. They were about the response to it. Whatever Setheno had uncovered, she had denounced her order to the Inquisition. She had demanded its extermination. The Orders Militant had placed themselves at her disposal, and, in numbers overwhelming, had slaughtered the Sisters of the Piercing Thorn down to the last novice. Setheno herself had executed all of her prioresses. She had burned the order’s fortress-abbey to the ground, and spread salt over its shattered, blackened stones.

She had refused posting to a different order. Instead, she had become the Canoness Errant, a singular position of vaguely defined, but immense, punitive authority. Her power did not exist at the official level. It emerged from an unspoken consensus that, between her unswerving, merciless faith, and her prowess at war, she was too useful to discard and too terrifying to confront.

So yes, she had a reputation that cleared rooms of all but those who knew no fear.

Her armour was another conscious echo of the dark past. It had been blasted of identifying colour. It was now the uniform grey of ash and cathedral stone. She wore a helm, and its design, Volos suspected, had cowed greater men than Lettinger. It was a woman’s face, eyes ablaze and mouth wide in a howl of horror and rage. A crimson tear in the corner of the left eye was the armour’s one note of colour, an emblem of brutal grief.

When she reached the Space Marines, Setheno removed her helm. Volos blinked in surprise. The face of ceramite and the face beneath it were the same. But the flesh showed no emotion. It had the perfection and implacable impassivity of marble. It was, Volos thought, as if the frailties and passions of humanity had been so utterly scoured from Setheno’s being that it was left to her armour to show emotion. Her hair was white as death, and her eyes were a limpid, frozen gold. Volos had expected to see in them the blaze of fanaticism. Instead, he saw a clarity and a depth of knowledge that were worse. He understood how she made secular and spiritual authorities kneel before her will. He met her gaze, and felt his being become part of a perpetual flow of evaluation and judgement.

Volos knew what Lettinger thought of him, but he didn’t care. Setheno was a different matter. She might constitute a legitimate threat to the Chapter. He couldn’t tell if that was her intent. He glanced at Toharan, and saw the same wariness in his brother’s face.

‘My sergeants have been informing me that the behaviour of the walking dead is unusual,’ Vritras said.

‘How so?’ Setheno asked.

‘The attacks are more directed than they should be,’ Toharan answered. ‘I sense a purpose behind them.’

‘What sort of purpose?’ Though Setheno’s low, euphonious monotone didn’t change, Volos sensed a spike of interest and urgency in her question.

The thunder of heavy stubber fire cut off Toharan’s response. Volos spun around. The rampart turrets had opened up. He stormed across the courtyard and took the stone steps four at a time to the top of the curtain. The others joined him a moment later. He looked down the mountain face into the depths of the valley. ‘Cease fire, you idiots,’ he roared at the Mortisians manning the turrets. They were wasting ammunition, spitting into an ocean. ‘Blow the bridge!’ he ordered.

Melus and Nithigg set off the charges. The melta bombs at either end of the bridge turned stone molten. The elegant span parted from the mountains, and there was a moment of graceful descent, as if the bridge thought to fly; then the centuries-old masterwork disintegrated in a tumbling roar. There was no longer a road to the keep.

But the dead were pouring in from the defile, streaming across the valley floor to the base of the redoubt’s mountain. Volos followed the flood of corpses back as far as he could see into the pass. The dead were a swarm that put the tyranids to shame. Volos had a vision of the continental land mass tilting, funnelling its six billion souls into this one narrow passage. The dead were an army so huge that numbers ceased to have meaning. They slammed against the mountainside. Volos watched them bunch up for a few moments before he realised what must be happening. The dead were climbing over each other, crushing each other. Building on each other. Building a mound that would grow into a hill, into a mountain of flesh. A mountain that would fill the valley.

A mountain that would topple the plague into Lexica Keep.

CHAPTER 4

GOOD INTENTIONS

‘A bomb?’ Tennesyn demanded as he raced to keep up with Bisset. They were pounding up an endless wrought-iron staircase, heading for the roof. They weren’t the only ones. Above and below them, the faithful drones of Imperial military bureaucracy were pouring onto the stairs as the implications of what must have happened at street-level sank in. The lifts in the palace had stopped working in the wake of the explosion. The evacuees flowed in both directions, some heading to the nearer roof, others to the distant ground, where riot threatened but there was less far to fall. ‘Who is setting off bombs? Why attack a Munitorum building? What’s happening? Where are we going?’

‘Where we’re going is to get you into our shuttle and off-planet,’ Bisset answered. He was taking the stairs with an effortless, mechanical rhythm. ‘As to who the terrorists are, they could be anyone these days. Why? The new founding.’

There was a second, deeper, thrumming boom from below. It echoed up the stairwell like a predator’s roar. The building shook. Tennesyn lost his balance and fell against the railing. Bisset caught him before he pitched over. A man one landing up wasn’t as lucky. He screamed as he plunged down the stairwell, body smashing on the railings. The muffled bell toll of his fall went on for a long time. Tennesyn put his hands over his ears until it stopped. Bisset tugged at his arm to get him moving again. He noticed that the stairs were no longer perfectly level.

‘What’s the problem with the founding?’ Tennesyn asked. He wanted his mind off towers and tilts and high places. He was giving himself a puzzle to chew on, a focus to distract himself from his fear. And here was what he knew: the founding was necessary. In the galactic north of the Maeror subsector, the neighbouring systems of Sarcannis and Perethea were in turmoil, ripped apart by the unholy combination of heretical rebellion and ork incursion. The Emperor’s will would be enforced once more on the benighted; of this no one had any doubt. The greenskins’ Waaagh! was a minor one, disorganised and strategically brain-dead even by their standards, while the rebellious worlds were feral and poorly armed. The only thing either enemy had in its favour was the sheer force of numbers. The tactical requirements for successful pacification were straightforward; even Tennesyn could see that. All that was needed was brute manpower. Lots of it. In the Maeror subsector, that manpower was first and foremost the Mortisian Guard, and it was being overstretched. Its forces needed replenishing. The founding was necessary. Tennesyn couldn’t see how anyone could dispute that, especially anyone from Aighe Mortis itself.

‘The problem,’ Bisset said, ‘is the drain on the local population.’

Tennesyn was so nonplussed he forgot about the slant of the stairs. He almost lost his footing. ‘The drain? On a population of how many billions? And Guardsmen and mercenaries being this planet’s big export? How does that make any sense at all?’

The wall above Bisset cracked, raining rockcrete dust. The split zigzagged past Tennesyn, working its way down the levels. On the other side of the walls, from the core of the building, came groans. Tennesyn thought of iron trees creaking in a gale.

Bisset glanced at the crack as he brushed powder from his shoulders. He climbed a bit faster. Tennesyn’s lungs and legs cried out, but he kept up. Fear was his spur.

Bisset said, ‘You’re the expert on the big historical picture, so tell me this: how stable would you say Aighe Mortis’s civilization is?’

‘Not very. It’s terminal.’

‘So there’s your answer. A little push is all it takes to upset the equilibrium, and let me tell you that balance is pretty damned delicate in this latrine. One slip and we’re all in the piss. And this isn’t just a tithe we’re talking about. It’s another full founding. The second in a year.’

‘You sound like you’re sympathising.’

Bisset shook his head, emphatic. ‘I’m not. Bunch of forsaken primitives here, is what they are, and just lucky enough to be living in what their ancestors built. It’s dog eat dog and daemons take the hindmost.’ He was angry, but Tennesyn thought he detected at least a trace of understanding that went beyond the purely academic.

It was an understanding he didn’t share. ‘I don’t see how their faith can be so weak,’ he said. He didn’t simply disapprove. He was confused. The Mortisian regiments were ferocious in the execution of their duty to the Emperor.

‘The Guard is the end result of a shaping process,’ Bisset reminded him. ‘All we have to start with is rabid raw material. And–’

He was cut off by the distant but ominous whooooom of another blast. A shudder ran through the walls and stairs. Tennesyn’s knees turned to water and he clutched at the vibrating railing. Cries of alarm swept the staircase. The vibrating didn’t stop. The tilt increased. There was no mistaking it now, no chance of rationalising it away as an error of perception. Then the worst thing began. The tilt diminished. The stairs levelled. They leaned the other way. Then, gradually, horribly, back again.

The tower was swaying.

‘Run!’ Bisset roared, but no one needed to be told. The crowd stampeded up the remaining flights. Tennesyn’s lungs were raw agony, his legs a leaden ache, his heart a stuttering drum. But the fear was in his entire body, and it was stronger than all of his pain, and he ran, fighting to keep his balance as rockcrete became giddy and drunk.

They burst out onto the roof. The four corner landing pads each held an Aquila shuttle. The aircraft were warmed up, their pilots anxious to be off. Bisset and Tennesyn were near the front of the mob, but Bisset sprinted for the furthest lander. The shuttles only had six-passenger capacities, and the desperation in the air was going to turn the scene bloody. Tennesyn’s instinct had been to head for the nearest lander, but so was everyone else’s, and he saw that Bisset’s strategy, taking them where the crowd was thinnest, might save their lives.

They were halfway across the roof, only a handful of people ahead of them, when there was another explosion. In the open air, it sounded much louder, much sharper, much closer, and Tennesyn had a moment to wonder why the tower didn’t collapse beneath him before he realised the blast had hit another target. Bisset turned his head, and Tennesyn followed his gaze to the west.

‘Throne,’ Bisset cursed.

Tennesyn saw plumes of smoke rising from the base of another, higher tower half a kilometre away. The harsh roar of the explosion became a deeper, more terrible, unending thunder as the tower bowed in surrender. It disappeared with an end-of-the-world cry into a shroud of its own dust, dragging its neighbours down with it. The tangle of spires was too dense, and none would die alone. All the time, the sway of the palace grew worse. It was a slow waltz with a chorus of screams.

‘This is big!’ Bisset yelled as they ran. ‘Not just riots! Too organised!’

They reached the Aquila. It was full, and it was starting to lift off the pad, but there was just enough authority in Bisset’s uniform to make the pilot hesitate another few seconds. Bisset grabbed Tennesyn with his bionic arm and threw him into the open passenger bay. Tennesyn landed hard on metal, almost slipped out, but hands grabbed him to pull him in. He scrabbled around and was reaching out to Bisset when the waltz ended.

One more blast, big and close. The palace swayed and did not straighten. The roof tilted sharply. The screams of its refugees were drowned by the death howl of the structure itself. The lander banked away from the danger. Bisset stood still for a moment. The look he gave Tennesyn was resigned, stoic, and bitterly amused, as if he had had just about enough of this day, yet still expected to see worse ones. ‘Bring back help,’ he called. Then he was sprinting sideways against the tilt of the building. Tennesyn saw him make a leap of faith towards an adjacent roof, and he vanished into rising dust.

In the confusion of the near-orbit stations, Tennesyn managed to find a merchant willing to make a run to Antagonis. He was an independent runner of small-arms, a supplier to mercenaries though clearly too well-fed and lazy to have known combat himself. He hadn’t heard about any trouble on Antagonis, and Tennesyn didn’t enlighten him. The captain of the Trade Sail was eager to be out of the Camargus system, and being paid to run was even better.

Tennesyn didn’t need further proof that Bisset was right, that something more serious than unrest was striking Aighe Mortis. But he received it, all the same. It came in two blows. The first arrived as the Trade Sail left anchor. With a peremptory electronic squeal, the message took over all vox channels. ‘Citizens of Aighe Mortis,’ it announced. ‘Your oppression beneath the Imperial heel is ended. Your deliverance is at hand.’

Tennesyn was looking out the rear viewport at the receding planet when he saw the second proof hit. It came in the form of two ships. One was a heavy raider, of a type Tennesyn had never seen before. The other he recognised as a modified transport, warped into a shape of clawed, grasping hunger. Both were gold, and it was a terrible gold, a gold that crawled behind his eyes to scrape and infect his soul.

But worse than the gold was the coat of arms on the hull: an eye over a sword. He had seen that sign before, swinging from a chain around the neck of a laughing cardinal. He felt the sick, wrenching certainty that he had, not long past, made an awful, devastating mistake.

‘How much time remains?’ Benedict Danton wanted to know. It was the morning after his rescue, and he had cleaned up well. He was pale, exhausted, perhaps a bit shrunken in his suit, but still very much the high lord.

Dysfield shrugged. ‘Difficult to say. Along with the forces of Captain Vritras, we are conducting some aerial sweeps to determine how big a concentration of the dead are heading this way. We have also bombed the pass. The rockfall isn’t a hermetic seal on the valley, but it is slowing the enemy down. Even so, there are so many millions close at hand. A few days? Perhaps a bit longer. We could gain some time with strategic orbital bombardments, but even then…’ He trailed off.

Volos stood with Squads Pythios, Ormarr and the captain’s own Nychus against the walls of the council chamber. They were not taking part in the deliberations. That was the remit of Vritras, Dysfield, Danton and Lettinger. At least officially. But Setheno was at the table too, her mere presence shoving Lettinger into the background. The sergeants, meanwhile, were here to listen, and to present a silent show of solidarity for their captain. Volos watched Danton react to Dysfield’s report. The Space Marine was taking the measure of the man whose life his brothers had bought with their own.

‘There has been no communication with any other population centre on this continent?’ Danton asked.

‘None,’ Dysfield confirmed. ‘Nor from anywhere else on the planet.’

The lines on Danton’s face deepened. He rubbed a finger against his lips and stared at the tactical map of Antagonis spread out on the council table. ‘Well,’ he said. He cleared his throat, straightened and faced his audience. ‘Well,’ he repeated, ‘as abhorrent as it may be, it is my responsibility to say what must be said. Antagonis has fallen. The war is over, and we have lost.’ He turned to Vritras. ‘Captain, you and your men have my most profound thanks for rescuing me and my family. I grieve for your and Colonel Dysfield’s losses. This is a debt that I can never–’

‘No,’ Vritras said. His tone was calm, quiet, furious.

Danton blinked. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand–’

‘We are the Black Dragons. We are Adeptus Astartes. We are the ultimate force of the Emperor, and we do not surrender. Ever. This war is not over.’

In the silence that followed, Volos mentally applauded. Danton’s defeatism was as sickening as it was offensive. Volos noted that Dysfield was keeping his opinions to himself. The colonel’s mouth was a hard, narrow line, but his eyes were haggard, as if he hated what Danton was saying, but could not refute his logic.

The lord of Antagonis regrouped. ‘Captain,’ he said, ‘I mean no disrespect either to your Chapter’s courage or its prowess. But no matter how formidable you and your brother warriors are, what good will that do against billions? Do you have that much ammunition? Do you have that much time?’ He spread his arms before the inevitability of humiliation. ‘We have, thanks to you, already salvaged what we can. There is nothing left but to retreat to orbit, and there Inquisitor Lettinger,’ he bowed to the hooded man, ‘can give the order to sterilise the planet, ensuring the Archenemy’s victory is a pyrrhic one.’

‘And so, under my watch, I must see the Emperor lose another world?’ Vritras demanded.

‘It is hardly a strategic–’ Danton began.

Vritras cut him off again, this time with a single shake of his head. ‘With every clod that is washed away, the Imperium is lessened, and we are all diminished. I will not let that happen without being certain I did everything that was possible, and more, to prevent it.’

Setheno spoke up. ‘Captain Vritras is correct,’ she said. ‘This war is not over. We do not even know why it began. Until we do, we do not permit it to end.’ Her voice was low, smooth, and Volos thought it even had a certain plainsong musicality to it. At the same time, there was a merciless absoluteness to the judgements she made, as if no other opinion were even imaginable. And he had heard more emotion coming from a Dreadnought’s vox-speakers.

Setheno turned to Vritras. ‘Captain, I realise that your men have already been imposed upon, rescue missions hardly being the best use of your skills.’ Her pause was tiny, but withering. Danton stiffened. ‘I wonder if I might test your patience a bit further. Based on the battle reports of undead behaviour,’ she tapped a data-slate and her eyes flicked a quick acknowledgement to Volos and Toharan, ‘there is something deep at work here. If we are to combat it, we need to know the precise nature of our enemy. I need a specimen, and I believe that only the Adeptus Astartes are able to gather one and return intact.’

Toharan murmured to Volos, ‘Did I just hear an ecclesiarch say please and thank you?’

‘The universe is full of wonders,’ First-Sergeant Aperos whispered.

Not least among them, Volos thought, an Adeptus Sororitas infringing on an inquisitor’s investigatory purview without so much as a peep of protest from the man. Volos took a step forward to volunteer. Setheno nodded her thanks. ‘And sergeant,’ she added, ‘I will need the specimen to be… well… not alive but…’

‘Viable?’ Volos offered.

‘Precisely.’

Lettinger tried to keep his dismay under control as he walked the corridors. He had barely had a chance to exchange two words with the Canoness Errant, and she was showing no interest at all in the problem of the Dragons. So be it. He had more than enough power on his own to do what must be done.

He stopped before a closed door. He grasped the wrought-iron handle and gave it an experimental tug. The door wasn’t locked. It was heavy, the berbab wood as dense and unyielding as the long iron hinges that stretched across its entire width, but it opened without a sound. There were no torches in the corridor ahead, but there was just enough light leaking through from the far end for the inquisitor to see where he was going. Lettinger steeled himself. He felt no pride in what he was about to do. He knew the twist in his gut for what it was: shame. But there was no choice. What he did, he did out of duty. He made the sign of the aquila, drew strength from the unalterable truth that the Emperor watched over him, and started forward. He pulled the door closed behind him and moved down the short corridor, taking his time with each step so the heels of his boots didn’t sound against the flagstones.

He emerged on a small balcony that overlooked Lexica’s chapel. The tall, narrow, stained glass windows, portraying scenes of judgement and justice during the Great Cull, filtered the daylight dark red and blue. The colours of blood and night washed over the assembled Black Dragons. Draped in shadows, Lettinger watched the monsters at worship.

The Space Marines alternately stood and knelt over the length of the service, but they did not sit. Chaplain Massorus stood at the altar, his crozius in hand as he led the call and response. Lettinger noted that though the crozius’s head was the traditional winged skull configuration, the wings were reptilian. Knobby bone growths covered Massorus’s head like armour. There were, Lettinger knew, saurians on Cretacia with skulls like that. He shuddered.

‘Emperor,’ Massorus intoned, ‘curse Thy servants…’

Lettinger stifled a gasp.

‘…that we might feel Thy shaping hand,’ the Dragons chanted back.

‘Forge them fire and bone…’

‘…that we shall evermore mightily defend Thee.’

‘Mould them, O Emperor, our Father and Saviour of man…’

‘…and for the glory of Thy Name deliver Thy enemies unto us.’

‘O Emperor, hear our prayer…’

‘…and let the cry of our rage come unto the heretic.’

‘Bless the curse!’ the Chaplain cried.

‘Bless the curse!’ the Dragons roared back.

‘It is the mark of the Emperor’s touch. By it, you will know Him. By it, you are shaped into His most perfect weapon. Deformity leads to the apotheosis of war. Can you ever forget the impurity of your body? No! Then neither can you forget the need for the purity of action. And in the agony of the emergence of bone, feel the memory of the greatest purity – the Emperor’s great sacrifice. Teach that memory to the enemy on the point of your most holy of blades. Fire and bone!’ Massorus raised his crozius to the sky.

‘Fire and bone!’ the Dragons echoed, and answered the Chaplain’s gesture with blades. Most held out chainswords, but the Dragon Claws, the most cursed and blessed, lifted their arm-blades. Some were retractable and shot out. Others were permanent deformities growing out of their forearms. Angles varied. Lethality did not. The air crackled with the mortification of flesh and the ecstasy of war.

Lettinger swallowed, throat dry, and crept back down the corridor. He eased the door open, stepped through, then shut it and leaned his back against it, waiting for his breathing and heartbeat to settle. He sorted through his impressions. He felt a mix of pity and revulsion. The Dragons’ devotion to the Emperor appeared genuine, but the form that it took, that revelling in deformity and mutation, was dangerous. Misguided love was one of the surest routes to heresy, and Lettinger had seen that drama enacted time and again. At the individual level, it was a tragedy. But when it involved an entire Adeptus Astartes Chapter, it was a nightmare.

Lettinger sighed, wondering if the Imperium would ever be done with the nightmares triggered by the 21st Founding. So much had gone wrong with so many Chapters that should never have been created. Rebellion, excommunication, luck that would make a daemon weep with sympathy – four millennia spent trying to undo the results brought on by the hubris of the Adeptus Mechanicus genetors who thought they could improve on the Emperor’s original genetic work. It was, perhaps, a saving grace that the gene flaws made further recruitment impossible. The cursed Chapters couldn’t replenish their ranks. One fallen Space Marine at a time, they were dying out.

Except the Black Dragons. Isolated from other Chapters, despised by some, their home world unknown, they were still strong. They still inducted neophytes. The thought that kept Lettinger awake at nights was the threat the Dragons could present, should they fall all the way. From what he had seen, that fall was inevitable. The only question was whether they could be dealt with in time.

No, he corrected himself. There was one other question. Because as much as that ceremony had disturbed him, he had also seen a few glimmers of hope, and by the Throne, did he want to hold them fast. There was, maybe, maybe, the possibility of redemption. Not for all the Dragons. Volos and his ilk were damned, corrupted beyond hope, even if they didn’t know it yet. But Toharan was different, and Lettinger had seen a few others in the chapel who, like him, showed no visible mutation. Lettinger thought that Toharan’s blessing of the curse had been just a bit forced, not quite soul-driven.

Lettinger strode away from the door, the path of his duty clear before him. What the Inquisition must burn, it would burn, and he would see it done. He was a Monodominant, and he knew that anything mutant must be destroyed. But if there was something to be salvaged, he would see that done, too. For the love and glory of the Emperor.

He found Toharan on the ramparts an hour later, inspecting the defences and watching the dead fill the valley and slowly rise up the mountainside. The peaks cast their afternoon shadows over the corpses, turning Antagonis’s growing doom into a single, dark, writhing mass.

‘Greetings, sergeant,’ Lettinger began.

‘Inquisitor,’ Toharan answered, with the bare minimum of civility.

Lettinger wasn’t put off. He hadn’t expected anything different. He still felt at a disadvantage. Toharan was small next to Volos, but he still towered over Lettinger. His essential humanity was obvious only when he was next to the creatures who had lost theirs. On his own, he was a colossus built and designed for war. Even the planes of his face looked hard enough to crack granite. ‘I know you don’t welcome my company,’ Lettinger said, ‘but it is more important than I think you realise that there be some open lines of communication between us.’

‘Really.’ The word wasn’t a question. It was a dismissal.

Lettinger ignored it. ‘Important for the Black Dragons.’

Toharan hadn’t been looking at him. He did now. He said nothing, but his eyes bore an unmistakable warning.

‘We both know that the relations between my ordo and your Chapter have been difficult.’

Toharan broke his silence. ‘Now why would that be?’ he snarled. ‘Maybe because we bleed and die for the Imperium, yet the Inquisition casts aspersions on our honour? We don’t ask for thanks or glory, but we could do without calumny.’

‘I understand your anger. But do you, I wonder, understand why there is a cloud over the Dragons? The Inquisition is not capricious. It doesn’t persecute for the sheer joy of it. We do have rather a lot to keep ourselves busy, you know.’

‘Then make me understand.’

‘Forgive my bluntness, but do you have any idea just how dangerous mutation is? How closely aligned it is with the nature of the warp? The history of your fellow founding Chapters is–’

‘I’m aware of that history.’

‘Then you should see why the Black Dragons provoke such anxiety. There is so much mutation in your ranks. So much potential monstrosity. Remember the Flame Falcons!’ Engulfed in fire that did not consume them, they, too, had embraced their mutation without fear or repentance. The Inquisition had sent them judgement.

‘That slaughter was justice, was it?’

Lettinger wondered if he’d been mistaken. Perhaps there was no hope for the Dragons after all, if even Toharan couldn’t be brought to the light of reason and orthodoxy. ‘It was necessary. Their mutation was a sign of daemonic corruption.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I have no reason to doubt the sagacity of my superiors. And tell me, given the history you know so well, what does your Chapter think it is doing by not only welcoming, but encouraging mutation?’

‘You have no evidence–’

‘You, sergeant, are the evidence! Don’t you see? Mutation is not an inevitable fact of being a Black Dragon. Rather, it is being sought. Why seek something so unnecessary, so dangerous, and so likely to bring down scrutiny and shame?’

‘To be impure of body is to seek purity of action.’

‘But you are not impure of body. Are your actions any less worthy?’

Toharan didn’t answer.

Lettinger didn’t let up. ‘Doesn’t that argument sound like a rationalisation?’

After another pause, Toharan sidestepped the question. ‘What exactly do you want of me?’

‘I would like you to ask yourself this question: is your leadership really acting in the Chapter’s best interests?’

Toharan’s hand shot out. The movement was whip-fast, but stopped just short of Lettinger’s throat. Toharan leaned forward, his huge face filling Lettinger’s vision, his eyes dark with lethal fury. ‘I will not strike an inquisitor,’ he said. ‘This time. But if I ever again believe, or even suspect, that you have counselled treason on my part, then I shall defend the honour of my Chapter, no matter the consequences. Am I clear?’

Lettinger didn’t back down. This was too important. ‘Your highest duty is to the Emperor,’ he said. ‘Remember that.’

They locked stares, neither backing down. Then a voice in the courtyard called, ‘Brother-sergeant!’ and Toharan looked away.

Melus stood down below. He was grinning, and if he had noticed the tension between Space Marine and inquisitor, he gave no sign. ‘We’re wanted in the council chamber,’ he said. ‘News from the field.’

‘Good?’ Toharan asked.

Melus’s grin grew wider. ‘Hard to credit,’ he said. ‘But it guarantees we will fight for Antagonis.’

‘Then it’s good,’ Toharan said, and leaped from the wall. He landed beside his battle-brother with an impact that shattered flagstones. As they strode towards the interior of the keep, he glanced back once. His face was a mask of rage, but Lettinger was sure he saw something else there, too: doubt.

CHAPTER 5

SEEDS

Volos left Lexica with Nithigg as backup. They used their jump packs to cross the gap where the bridge had fallen, then descended the path towards a valley floor that was not nearly as far away as it had been the previous day. Now Volos stood before the rising tide of bodies. From his vantage point, looking back across the valley towards the keep, he could see the full tableau of unwavering purpose and mindless, writhing horror. The new mountain heaved. It squirmed. It filled the air with a keening wail of desperation and rage. Avalanches of mangled corpses, some still twitching, slid down the slope, bowling over climbing figures, adding them to the chaos of snapping bone and tearing meat. Cascades of blood poured down the slope to feed the crimson river at the ever-rising base. The enormous mound settled, stabilised, crushing bodies to pulp and mortar, and then reached higher.

The dead were not just marching through the pass into the valley. They were running, throwing themselves onto the hill of flesh, and then climbing to the top with the same frantic urgency, using handholds made of arms and legs. Once they reached the peak, they scrabbled at the sheer mountainside until they were crushed by those coming up behind. Every corpse that rushed past Volos bore the same expression. It was a mix of obsessive determination and what Volos couldn’t help but think of as religious terror. And the rushing horde ignored him. Utterly.

None of it made any sense.

His old mentor had been hanging back to provide covering fire as needed. Now Nithigg rejoined him. ‘Hardly the aggressive force they were on the other side of the pass,’ he said.

‘Looks like I wasted your time,’ Volos replied.

Nithigg shrugged. ‘Which one looks good to you?’

‘This one,’ Volos said, and grabbed the next corpse that went by. It frothed and scrabbled against him, snapping fingernails on ceramite. It was like holding a handful of snakes. Volos tightened his grip, careful not to crush the thing. He and Nithigg turned and jogged up the path.

They made the jump back to the keep, and the corpse’s struggles changed. It no longer tried to escape Volos’s arms. It didn’t even seem to notice him any longer. Instead, it reached for the keep, clawing at the air, howling and snapping its teeth. When he saw Setheno waiting just inside the gate, Volos muttered to the creature, ‘I wouldn’t be so eager to get inside.’

Setheno nodded in approval as they approached. ‘Thank you, sergeant,’ she said. ‘Would you mind bringing it to the medicae centre? Then I believe your captain has a mission more worthy of your talents.’

‘The advance of the dead has been slowed,’ Vritras announced to his assembled squads, ‘for reasons that have nothing to do with our tactics, but that we will fully exploit. Brother Keryon reports, and Colonel Dysfield’s pilots confirm, that there are pockets of resistance within the mass of the enemy.’

‘Resistance?’ Volos asked. ‘Human resistance?’ As good as this news was, he couldn’t see how it was possible.

‘So it would seem,’ Vritras answered. ‘We are clearly not the only ones who refuse to surrender this planet to the Ruinous Powers.’ He spoke with grim satisfaction, his tone that of a commander eager to take advantage of a turn in the tides of battle. But Volos thought he saw, in the slight downturn at the corners of the captain’s mouth, the trace of uncertainty. So Vritras, too, could see the illogic in this development. Where had these fighters come from?

‘How much resistance is there?’ Toharan asked.

Vritras gestured to Keryon, who answered, ‘More all the time. I saw at least twice as many instances on my return pass as on my way out.’

‘What form do they take?’

‘They’re like bubbles,’ Keryon said. ‘The survivors are surrounded by the dead, but at least some of them are expanding their perimeters. They’re managing to push back.’

Volos studied the topographical map that Vritras had spread out on the table. The locations of the centres of resistance had been circled. ‘This is very odd,’ he said. ‘Never mind where these people have been and how they come to be present all of a sudden, but look at where they are.’ He tapped a gauntleted finger on the nearest circle, just on the other side of the pass. ‘This location makes some sense,’ he said. ‘Mountainous terrain, plenty of cover and defensible ground. But pretty much all the other sites are in the middle of low hills or prairie. The survivors should be overwhelmed in seconds. You say some are expanding their held ground?’

Keryon nodded. ‘And some of those groups are in the flatlands.’

‘Where are they getting their ammunition?’ Nithigg wanted to know.

‘Brothers,’ Vritras said, ‘I understand and share your puzzlement. We will dispel these mysteries, and we will do so by destroying the enemy. Dragon Claws, you will deploy to the nearest resistance pocket, secure the area and block further access to the pass. Pythios and Nychus will insert at the mouth of the valley, fight through the pass to link up with Ormarr, and consolidate their gains. From that point, Ormarr will move to the next survivor group and reinforce them. The rest of Second Company will arrive via drop pod from the Immolation Maw to support other pockets. Seize, hold, and link the territories. And so we reclaim Antagonis for the Emperor, with fire and bone!’

The view from the Battle Pyre was very different from the last time Volos had flown out over the foot of the Temple chain. The land was still carpeted to the horizon by raging ghouls. But this time, the focus of their frenzy was not a disintegrating caravan. This time, the combatants he saw were holding firm. There were a few dozen of them, and they were not only keeping the dead at bay, but forcing them back. He thought about how he and his battle-brothers had been stymied in their efforts to do just that. The problem hadn’t really been the dead breaking through the Space Marine lines. It had been the total collapse of the Mortisian Guard, and the plague of undeath erupting within the perimeter. There was no sign of such spontaneous contagion below. There was, it seemed, hope on this battlefield.

Volos distrusted it. But the Dragon Claws launched, and they descended in the midst of the survivors like the angels of darkest night. ‘Citizens of Antagonis,’ Volos bellowed, his voice amplified by his helmet grille, ‘we are the Black Dragons, and we bring you salvation by fire.’ After a moment of paralysis, the survivors cheered and attacked the enemy with even greater ferocity. As Volos opened up with his flamer and incinerated the front ranks of the dead, he took in exactly how the survivors were waging war. They were all armed with what he took to be scavenged weapons. He saw lasrifles and combat knives and a handful of chainswords. Only two of the rifles were being fired. The others appeared to have no ammunition. Those with bayonets were being used to slash and disembowel, and the others were wielded as clubs. The fighting was savage, as all combat was, but there was a frenzy to the way in which the humans threw themselves at the dead that struck Volos as being just a little too familiar. There were moments when he found it difficult to distinguish between the combatants, especially when some of the corpses were also armed, and there was a clash of steel.

But there were differences. The survivors fought intelligently, shifting stance and tactics according to the second-by-second flow of war. And they dodged, which the corpses never did. The dead were so consumed by their hunger to destroy the living that there was nothing in what passed for their consciousness that cared for self-preservation. As recklessly as they fought, the humans were still, Volos thought, fighting to stay alive. Even so, as he reduced another phalanx of the dead to smouldering bone and ash, he used the momentary breathing space the gap created to speak to the woman at his shoulder. ‘What is your name, human?’ he asked.

‘Sanna Robbes, lord,’ the woman answered, proving to Volos that she was sentient. She came from manufactorum labourer stock, Volos guessed. She was in late, greying middle-age and stocky, her shoulders rounded from decades bent over machines, her limbs thick with muscle like knotted wood. She smashed at the enemy with the butt end of a lasrifle. She caved in the forehead of one corpse, ducked beneath the grasp of another, brought her foe down with a sweep that shattered kneecaps, then swung the rifle over her head to finish the corpse with a crushed skull.

‘You fight well.’ In the corner of his eye, he saw one of the dead reach for Robbes. With his finger depressing the flamer trigger, Volos stretched out his left arm, shot out a bone-blade and impaled the thing through the head.

Robbes grunted her thanks and swung the rifle again. ‘I fight how I must,’ she said.

The waves of the dead broke against the levee of Space Marines and dogged humans. Volos urged the counter-attack on, and the line moved forward against the dead. By promethium and bolter shell, by las and by blow, by fire and by bone, the advance moved to the mouth of the pass and inched across it, slowly cutting off the flow of the dead towards Lexica.

‘Volos,’ Nithigg said over the comm-feed.

‘Yes, brother.’

‘Did you happen to make an exact count of the humans before we began?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Because I think our mission might be going too well.’

Without breaking the rhythm of his kills, Volos scanned the formation. Nithigg was right. None of his brothers had fallen, which wasn’t surprising, but none of the humans appeared to have, either. It was hard to shake the impression that there were more survivors than at the start of the engagement.

Movement to the left caught his eye. A man was using a chainsword against the dead, but he wasn’t just slashing at them. He was brandishing it, weaving the blade through the air as though it were light as a rapier. He was shaping a distinct pattern.

Lettinger walked into the medicae centre. The door to the surgery was closed. Two of the remaining Mortisians stood guard before it. In the antechamber, Dysfield was talking with Lord Danton, who was holding his daughter’s hand. Lettinger nodded vaguely at the group and approached the door. One of the guards stepped in front of him.

‘I’m sorry, inquisitor,’ the man said. ‘Canoness Setheno is at work in there.’

‘I know that. I’m here to examine the specimen.’

The guard shook his head. ‘She gave explicit orders to admit no one.’

Lettinger saw red. ‘Are you saying no to the Inquisition?’ he threatened.

‘I’m afraid she didn’t mention any exceptions.’ The guard was more frightened of Setheno than he was of Lettinger.

The inquisitor felt himself deflate. He couldn’t blame the man.

The absurdity of the situation was staggering. A canoness was conducting what was, in effect, an inquisition, while the inquisitor was barred from the scene. Setheno had as little business studying the corpse as he had the absolute right and duty to do so. Yet she commanded, and all obeyed. If anyone else had been on the other side of the door, Lettinger would have ordered and witnessed her immediate execution. That even contemplating such a course of action made him break out in a cold sweat was a testament to her power. The being in that room was will incarnate. Though Lettinger’s rational mind rose in outrage at the slight to his real authority, his every instinct recoiled from the mere thought of moving against Setheno’s wishes.

Danton gave him a face-saving out. ‘Inquisitor Lettinger,’ he said, ‘perhaps you can convince Colonel Dysfield that I’m right.’

‘About what?’ Lettinger asked, turning his back to the door and joining the trio.

‘About an evacuation.’

Lettinger frowned. ‘I was under the impression that the war was still ongoing.’ Whatever dangers the Black Dragons represented were not the immediate threat. The Chapter was still, for the moment, following the Emperor’s will. There were other elements of the Ruinous Powers at work on this planet, and Lettinger didn’t plan to retreat before them any more than did Vritras.

‘I’m not seeking it for myself, you understand,’ Danton added hurriedly. ‘I was thinking of my daughter and the other civilians.’

‘Any evacuation is a retreat,’ Dysfield said, ‘and unacceptable.’ And then he walked off, leaving Lettinger to deal with the pleading.

‘I don’t like it here,’ Bethshea put in.

Lettinger looked down at her. ‘Why do you want to run away from your home, child?’ he asked.

‘I…’ she began, but faltered.

‘Is this how you do honour to the Emperor?’

‘But I’m frightened.’

‘That’s when doing your duty counts the most, because that’s when it’s hardest. Do you understand?’

Bethshea looked unhappy, but nodded.

‘Your family represents the hand of the Emperor on this planet. Do you think it would look good if you ran away?’

‘No.’ Spoken very quietly.

Lettinger turned to her father. ‘I think you should stay,’ he commanded. ‘Don’t you?’

Danton didn’t answer. He looked upwards, as if he could see the sky through the stones of the keep. Disgusted, Lettinger stalked away. He wasn’t needed here. He would watch the Pythios and Nychus operations from the ramparts. He was halfway there when it struck him that Danton’s eyes had been filled with a longing that didn’t seem to have anything to do with fear.

Setheno waited while the three Mortisian Guardsmen she had selected as assistants secured the male corpse to the operating table. Its legs were spread, its arms held above its head, its ankles and wrists fastened by chains. It wailed and frothed, its eyes straining from their sockets in mad rage and terror. Setheno used a scalpel to strip away the last shreds of clothing from the body. It had taken several hours to reach even this preliminary stage of the investigation. Setheno had first had to sanctify the surgery with prayer, and then prepare a network of wards across the stone of the floor and walls, on the door, and around the table. She hoped they would be enough. She placed her helm on a bench, but she was otherwise in full armour.

At first glance, the thing was a typical victim of a variant of the zombie plague. The flesh was grey, mottled with patches of green and black. The frame was withered; chest and cheeks hollow as if the skin were being sucked into the bones. It didn’t breathe, but putrid gases wafted from its mouth and nostrils all the same. Its gums had shrivelled, pulling back over teeth slicked with thickened saliva and bits of blackened flesh. The flecks of meat might have come from the bodies of others, or from the creature’s own dark, ravaged lips.

The thing was a mundane abomination, but for the look in its eyes. The terror that Setheno saw there was all wrong. The walking dead known to the Imperium were too brain-dead to fear anything. And then there were the instances of weapon use the Black Dragons had reported. There was intelligence, and the agony Setheno saw in the monster’s expression was something more than physical. She leaned close to its face, while her aides tensed in alarm. ‘You fear for your soul, don’t you?’ she whispered.

The creature stopped struggling. It stared at her. And then the worst thing possible happened, the thing Setheno had dreaded: a tear formed in the corner of the thing’s left eye and trickled down its cheek.

Setheno took a step back. She watched the creature’s chest, waiting for the inevitable. ‘What are your names?’ she asked the Guardsmen.

‘Canoness?’ one asked.

‘What are your names?’ she repeated.

They told her. And while they did, she saw what she had been waiting for. The creature’s chest expanded. The movement was gradual, hidden, suppressed to the point of being almost imperceptible. Almost. She saw it. So did one of the others.

‘Throne of Terra, it’s breathing!’ the soldier said.

‘Yes, he is,’ Setheno said. ‘He’s alive. Corporal Drunet, Corporal Benyamien, Major Estain, you have the Emperor’s blessing for your duty and faith, and my profound regret.’ She pulled out her bolt pistol, and shot each man in the head. Only one of them had time to plead no. Then she turned to the weeping thing on the table and gave it peace.

The blade-wielding human finished his gesture, and Volos recognised it for a sigil even before a cluster of the enemy two metres wide and three deep fell as if struck by a fist. Then he saw why there seemed to be too many survivors. The stricken convulsed with dislocating force, their jaws gaping in a scream the more excruciating for being silent. Then they stood, the glow of health flooding back into their features, and began to attack their former brethren.

Though he didn’t stop fighting, Volos had the sensation of the battlefield freezing for a moment. Everything turned topsy-turvy, and he began to realise the depth of Antagonis’s damnation.

Setheno donned her helmet and loaded a fresh clip into her pistol. She pulled out her power sword and approached the surgery door. Before she opened it, she voxed, ‘Captain Vritras. There has been a development.’

The Battle Pyre had bombed a clearing at the mouth of the valley. Keryon was bringing the Thunderhawk back around to drop the squads when the message came through. Toharan watched Vritras receive the news. The captain’s face darkened and he punched the bulkhead. ‘This operation is terminated,’ Vritras announced. ‘Brother Keryon,’ he voxed the pilot, ‘return us to base, and then retrieve Squad Ormarr. I am ordering the immediate evacuation of Antagonis. Black Dragons, link up with Canoness Setheno, and kill all humans on sight unless she says otherwise.’

‘All humans, Captain?’ Toharan asked. He was thinking of Dysfield and the remaining Mortisians. He wasn’t worried about Lettinger.

‘Unless she says otherwise.’

When Volos heard the order, he didn’t feel surprise. Instead, he felt that he was being told something he had already known at a subconscious level. He turned from the dead to bring his flamer to bear on Robbes. He saw a woman fighting heroically for her life and those of her friends. His finger hesitated on the trigger. His peripheral vision caught the rest of the squad re-orienting their weapons, also on the horns of that terrible moment when orders seemed wrong.

Robbes turned her head to look at him. Volos pulled the trigger.

But he was too late. Everything was too late. The plague reached maturity, and the change began.

CHAPTER 6

DOUBTWORM

Robbes opened her mouth wide in a snarling scream, and her head folded in on itself. The skull collapsed and flowed into her jaws. The bones in her legs turned to soup, and she dropped to the ground as Volos’s jet of flaming promethium passed over her. The jaws widened, unhinging like a snake’s, the teeth turning into rows of gleaming needles. The legs lengthened, thickened, coiled. The torso twisted, bones cracking and muscles flowing, transforming into an incarnation of liquid and strength, reptile and desire, teeth and chaos, and eternal change.

The metamorphosis was as complex as it was instant. The shift from human to daemon took a fraction of a second. Volos lowered his flamer to send the abomination back to the warp. A leg turned into a tentacle covered in eyes. The eyes blinked and became mouths. The mouths snapped and became eyes. The tentacle whipped out and wrapped itself around the weapon, crushing it. Volos dropped the flamer and threw himself to the side as the promethium reservoir exploded. The eye-mouths of the tentacle screamed in a dozen registers as they were coated by flaming liquid. The limb curled in on itself against the pain, but the rest of the monster attacked as if unaware that it had been injured.

The daemon’s body was stretching as it twisted, becoming a ropey, blinking tube of flesh. The other leg tentacle snatched at Volos, while the neck became a python, reaching for him with its gaping jaws. He slammed the tentacle down with his chainsword, pinned it and ground it beneath a boot, then lifted the blade high with both hands. He brought it down in a savage chopping motion against the daemon’s maw.

Teeth met teeth. The sword’s howl was Volos’s rage as it ground deeper into the neck of the abomination. Ichor and blood splashed over him. The daemon unleashed an ululation that built into a choir of rage and pain before it turned into a racking, choking gurgle. The torso slumped forward. The burned tentacle snaked along the ground, not towards Volos, but to what had been the next strong point of the circle, where Nithigg was incinerating another daemon. That creature sent braided tendrils of muscle to meet the envoy from Volos’s foe. The flesh linked, fused and expanded, the wounded bodies at either end shrivelling as they poured what remained of their essence into the new, larger being.

It had a less defined shape. All trace of the human was gone now, replaced by a giant, pulsating flesh sack. And still, covering its surface, the eyes that became mouths that became eyes that became mouths, watching and hungering, hating and screaming.

Volos scanned the battlefield as he yanked his chainsword from the flopping corpse. The same pattern had played out along the entire defensive perimeter. His battle-brothers had cut down the daemons before them, but the defeated monsters were all melding with the new construct. And it was growing fast. All of the humans within the circle, dozens and dozens, had transformed. Some of the daemons melted down, flesh running like mercury and racing to the greater being. Others, still moving on things that passed for legs, leaped across the ground to throw themselves into the absorbing sac.

Only it wasn’t really a sac any longer. In the seconds since it had formed, though its surface of eye-mouths were nothing but staring, gnashing change and the flesh between them bubbled and dripped, the larger whole had gathered force and shape. It was long. It was a tube.

It was a worm.

Volos grabbed one of the krak grenades from his belt dispenser. He hurled it at the worm. The grenade hit the centre of the monster and exploded in a fountain of gristle and blood. The other Dragon Claws followed his example. The worm howled with its thousand voices, and rolled into the army of beings that Volos had thought were dead.

When the transformations had begun, the attacks had ceased. Antagonis’s tainted millions now were standing still and wailing. Their cry was inarticulate and mindless, but it wasn’t soulless. It was the most primitive, basic hymn of abject despair and regret, a song of a mission failed and of a doom inevitable. All the energy and ferocity evaporated from the creatures. Whatever need had animated them, it had fled at the moment of the daemonic transformations.

The moment when disguises had been shed.

For all the grief and terror resounding from millions upon millions of throats and stretching beyond the horizon, the tainted did not run as the worm rolled onto them. When it did, its flesh flowed over them and dissolved them. The daemonic body devoured them, taking in their mass and their essence, and grew. It screamed as the grenades blew out deliquescent chunks of its body, but it grew far faster than it was being injured. Its growth accelerated exponentially as its bulk covered a greater and greater area, swallowing up ever more bodies. And scattered over the foothills and forest were all the other pockets of resistance. Even now, from all those bastions of false hope, other worms were approaching, growing all the while, racing to fuse with the first.

Setheno yanked open the surgery door. She saw Danton and his daughter. They turned to her. In that first second, Danton kept his aristocratically entreating smile and Bethshea was utterly the frightened little girl. Setheno didn’t hesitate. She raised her bolt pistol and fired. Danton was already changing when the mass-reactive rounds hit him, but he was still human enough to have a head and a face that disintegrated as the bolts smashed into his skull and exploded. The thing shrieked with the mouths that had sprouted on its neck and palms. It staggered, flailing madly. Arms became barbed whips that slashed across the room, but Setheno ducked under them and slid forward, emptying the clip into the daemon’s torso, knocking it down. She pressed the attack, knowing that she would never get the advantage back if she lost it for the slightest moment. She straddled what was still almost a chest, and slashed twice with her power sword, severing whip arms, and then stabbing straight down. It wasn’t a heart that she punctured, because hearts didn’t scream, but it was still something important. In the seconds that she had gained, she reloaded the bolt pistol and looked for Bethshea.

The child thing was running away, racing down the corridor away from the surgery. Setheno cursed herself for having chosen not to shoot both daemonhosts at the same time. As she pulled the trigger, the Danton creature bucked, and a pillar of twisting muscle shot out of its chest. It slammed into her breastplate and knocked her across the room. She smashed into the far wall, cracking stonework. Even as she landed, she was firing again, her bolts blowing out more of the monster’s central mass, spreading it around the room. It tried to rise, but fell, thrashing. Setheno reloaded, fired again. The movements grew weak. She brought her sword to bear again.

‘You are alone here, wretch,’ she said as she butchered the thing. ‘You have no ally to absorb. You have no succour.’

It sprouted a mouth on its shoulder and spoke to her. ‘You should be one of us.’ It sounded puzzled.

‘I have nothing for you to feed on,’ she said, and reduced it to dead, scattered meat.

Then she ran from the room, hunting Bethshea.

The refugees from Lecorb had been housed in the sleeping cells of Lexica Keep. Now they gathered together and fused. They made enough noise chanting and shrieking in ecstasy that Guardsmen came to investigate. The being took them. A worm ate at the heart of Lexica, and grew strong.

Lettinger watched the Battle Pyre roar back to the keep. He frowned. All he had seen it do was engage in a brief bombardment. That wasn’t the counter-attack he’d been expecting. The attack craft descended to the elevated landing pad on the east side of the central courtyard. He hurried down the rampart stairs. He was halfway across the courtyard, and the Battle Pyre was just settling on the pad, when the keep’s main doors burst open and Setheno charged out, weapons in hand. He stopped to wait for her. She ran straight at him. The impact of her armoured form sent him sprawling, lungs flattened. She crouched over him and held her bolt pistol to his temple. He heard the racking of many chambers. He stared up into the screaming face of her helmet, and beyond her at the disembarked squads of Black Dragons, every bolter aimed his way. Perhaps his terror saved his life. Setheno hesitated. She grabbed his aquila pendant and brought it to his lips. ‘Kiss it,’ she ordered.

He did.

‘How close have you come to any of the foe?’ she asked.

‘I’ve only seen the ones in the valley,’ he gasped.

Setheno paused a few more seconds, then stood and took a step away from him. ‘Get up,’ she said, lowering her pistol. The Dragons followed her lead.

Lettinger got to his feet, and saw a small figure dart out of the doorway. ‘Bethshea?’ he asked, puzzled. When he spoke, Setheno whirled, gun out.

Then the facade of Lexica Keep exploded.

In the days that followed, the images of those few seconds would replay themselves before Toharan’s inner eye. They would remain vivid in his memory, etched in lightning, in a way that the rest of the battle would not. They would stay with him because of what they represented. They were proof of how desperately wrong he could be. They were a wound, and they were a lesson.

He saw Bethshea running from the keep. He saw Setheno turn and raise her pistol to fire at the girl. He saw Lexica give shattering birth to a monstrous worm. It was fifty metres long, wider than Toharan was tall, and writhing with eye-mouths and roiling flesh. Stonework flew across the courtyard, battering Setheno’s power armour. She remained standing, and Lettinger ducked behind her, avoiding the worst of the falling wreckage. He wasn’t quite fast enough and an errant gargoyle head knocked him unconscious. The rain of blows was enough to throw Setheno’s aim off, and her volley of shots missed the zigzagging Bethshea.

Then came the lesson. Toharan saw Bethshea turn and run towards the worm. Her speed was superhuman, and she was at least five metres from the monster when she leaped, arms outstretched as if to embrace the thing. As she flew, she transformed, elongating and distorting into a daemon of serpentine limbs and teeth, her shape changing from one fraction of a second to the next, each form flowing into the next until she hit the worm and was absorbed into its flank. Toharan remembered looking at Bethshea during the flight from Lecorb, and seeing in the girl the reason for an otherwise senseless mission. His battle-brothers and the Guard had been sacrificed, but she had been a small portion of the Imperium and its future that had been saved, and so the sacrifices had not been in vain. And indeed, he saw now, they had not been. But the deaths had been sacrifices to a monstrous cause. All of Toharan’s efforts in this war, and those of his fellow Dragons, had been worse than futile. The taken-for-granted certainties had been lies.

The lesson would fester in time. But for now, all he felt was, first, a sharp drop in the pit of his stomach, and then nothing but the killing rage. Vritras yelled, ‘Fire and bone!’ Toharan roared it back at him, and he lived the battle-cry as he never had before. The Black Dragons charged down from the landing pad, bolters unleashing a mass-reactive hail. The worm flinched back from the blows. Each individual round was no more than a nuisance to it, but the cumulative effect of hundreds was punishing. It reared as its flesh was blasted away, and brought more of the keep crashing into the courtyard, crushing a handful of the few remaining Mortisian Guard. The leading end of the worm shaped itself into what passed for a head. It was nothing but a gigantic maw and a single, glistening black eye two metres across. It lunged forward, knocking aside Space Marines through sheer momentum and bulk.

Toharan stood his ground until the last second, firing straight into the creature’s eye. A leathery membrane flicked down, covering the orb, deflecting and absorbing his shots. One got through, though. Green fluid and flickers of black flame burst from the wound. The worm squealed and jinked to the side to avoid him. As it passed, Toharan plunged his chainsword into the monster’s flank, and let the creature’s own motion tear open a massive wound. The blade-teeth chewed through eyes and shrieking mouths.

Toharan snarled his satisfaction as he destroyed the embodiment of impurity. Then the worm’s tail curled and struck him, biting at his armour, teeth sinking into ceramite even as the blow pinned him against one of the landing pad’s support columns. The pillar cracked. The tail wrapped around Toharan and squeezed. He couldn’t move his arms, couldn’t strike with bolter or sword. His retinal display flashed warning runes as the pressure mounted. He saw the worm thrash as the Dragons continued to pour rounds into it, but it held its ground. It whipped and snapped. It landed a massive blow, and Toharan saw Brother Ythagor’s status rune switch from green to fatal red.

The thudding rhythm of a heavy bolter began, and the worm shrieked. It released Toharan, leaving the surface of his armour pitted and scored from the bites of countless mouths and the touch of corrosive flesh. He leaped clear of the tail, reloaded his bolter and started firing again. Up on the rampart, he saw who had hurt the worm: First-Sergeant Aperos was manning a turret, the pounding fire cutting the worm to pieces. Shredded, enraged, it hurled itself at him, losing pieces of itself as it forced its way through the shredding fire. A juggernaut of corrupted flesh, it obliterated an entire section of the rampart, mangling the turret. Aperos’s rune blinked amber, but he emerged from the wreckage. His right arm swung loose and limp, but he drew his chainsword with his left hand and jumped onto the worm’s head. He plunged the sword deep into the flesh just above the eye. The growl of the sword competed with the shriek of the worm. It spasmed in agony and threw itself from side to side in an attempt to dislodge the Space Marine. Aperos held on, his blade staking his claim to the monster, sinking in and tearing deep just as Toharan’s had done, and with every movement, the wound became greater.

The worm’s shrieks echoed off the mountains. With a massive convulsion, it slammed its head into the rampart again and again, reducing Lexica’s defences to ruins, ignoring all other attacks as it fought the terrible being whose fang was biting lethally into its essence. Finally, it drove itself deep into the foundations of the wall, a third of its length disappearing beneath the rubble.

It stopped moving.

Aperos’s rune blinked red.

The Dragons kept up the attack, the need to ensure the worm was dead now less important than taking vengeance for a hero’s fall. And the worm wasn’t dead. After a few seconds, it reacted to the continuing fire and jerked free of the stonework. Its maw roared over the death of its enemy, but the ten thousand eye-mouths moaned in pain. It wavered in the air, a drunken serpent. Its movements were erratic, weak. It swung its head back and forth, seeking prey and salvation.

To the front, it encountered nothing but the Black Dragons, now in a spearhead formation. Vritras was the tip, Toharan just behind and on his left. On his right, Chaplain Massorus cursed the worm back to the warp as he fired, and the monster seemed to twitch as if in fear. However it fed, Toharan realised, it could kill but not consume the Space Marines. Then the worm swung its head left. Dysfield and Setheno had organised the remaining Mortisians into a fire team under the landing pad platform. All the lasrifles and bolter rifles but Setheno’s suddenly fell silent as the worm looked at the men. It did not need to touch to feed or spread its taint. Its gaze, when met by a human, was enough. Dysfield and his troops stood still. They let their weapons drop from their hands. They began walking forward, until Setheno, with reptilian mercy, shot them all.

The worm moaned. The Dragons crucified it with bolter fire, pushing it back against the crumbled wall of the keep. They did not advance, though. They retreated instead, putting space between them and the monster, at last giving Brother Keryon, in the airborne Thunderhawk, the opportunity and the clear line of fire he needed.

The worm was consumed by the justice of Hellstrike missiles. Its shrieks reached a height of pain pure enough to cut crystal, and then they cut off, and there was only the roar of flame. The worm fell. Toharan and his brothers moved to the edge of Lexica and peered down. Thousands of metres below, the worm had smashed itself open on the hill of bodies, its impact killing the few remaining climbers. Toharan noticed that there were no more of the tainted making their way into the valley.

In the courtyard, while Apothecary Urlock revived Lettinger, Toharan asked Setheno, ‘What was that?’

‘It was the terminal stage of doubtworm,’ she answered, as if that explained everything. ‘Captain,’ she said to Vritras, ‘you have a very short time, if it is not already too late, to extract your Dragon Claws. The souls who formed the worm we just fought only numbered in the dozens. There is one coming into being on the other side of the pass, and it will be composed of billions.’

Toharan was neck-and-neck with his captain as they raced for the landing Battle Pyre.

‘Brother-sergeant,’ Nithigg said as he and Volos crouched behind a boulder, ‘I’m all ears.’

‘I didn’t say I had an idea.’

‘I know. I was just hoping to prompt some inspiration.’

All trace of the mission had vanished. The worm was easily a thousand metres long, its maw twenty metres wide. And it was growing, the limitless, defeated hordes slowly walking to destruction and absorption by the beast. Ormarr had split up into pairs, darting from cover to cover, flaming the worm first from one side, then the other, shifting its attention from one team to the next, never letting it get a proper fix on its tormentors. But they were only playing for time, and Volos knew it. Every wound they inflicted on the worm was healed a hundred times over by the infinite prey. The Dragon Claws were trying to drain the ocean with spoons. And at the rate the worm was growing, it wouldn’t be long before it became impossible to evade its earth-shattering blows.

‘Ormarr,’ Vritras’s voice came over the comm-feed. ‘This is Battle Pyre. We are coming to extract you.’

‘Negative, brother-captain,’ Volos responded. ‘The skies are not safe at this time.’ The worm would swat the Thunderhawk like an insect.

‘Then make them safe, brother-sergeant. Inquisitor Lettinger has ordered Exterminatus, and we are not leaving this planet without the Dragon Claws. Arrival in five minutes.’

Volos watched the worm pound the cliff side, bringing down an avalanche as it tried to crush Braxas and Vasuk. The monster and rocks missed. Just. But in the moment of the attack, Volos found his inspiration. ‘Brother,’ he grinned behind his helm, ‘this would not be a fitting death. We will need to seek a better one in another battle.’

‘You see how to end this one?’ Nithigg asked.

Volos pointed at the worm. ‘It blinked.’

‘What?’

‘When it slammed its head into the rock, it closed its eye.’

Nithigg caught his train of thought. ‘If the eye needs protection, it is vulnerable.’

‘If it has an eye, it can be blinded. And where there is an eye, there is usually a brain not far away.’

‘How are we going to get at the eye?’ They had come equipped with short-range, area-effect weapons. They had nothing that could reach the eye, and the flamers were just about depleted. There was still some fuel left in the jump packs, but starting from the ground was impractical.

Volos scanned the slopes behind them. About a hundred metres up and three hundred to the left, a ledge protruded like a tongue from the cliff face. ‘Battle Pyre,’ he voxed, ‘this is Ormarr. Hold position on your side of the pass. Will advise when we are ready.’

‘Make it soon,’ Vritras responded.

‘Acknowledged.’

Volos showed Nithigg the ledge. ‘I sense divine madness,’ Nithigg said. ‘I approve.’

‘I would give much for a melta bomb.’

‘I’m sure we all would. I do still have one krak, though.’

Volos took the grenade. ‘I need its head low,’ he told Nithigg. ‘As soon as I’m up there, get it near my position. And do try not to let it wreck the mountain while I’m still on it.’

‘You are so very particular, brother-sergeant,’ Nithigg said, and moved out.

Volos communicated with the rest of the squad, then sprinted for the mountainside. He didn’t use his jump pack to reach the ledge. He wanted to conserve fuel for when he really needed it, and there was plenty that could go wrong with his plan. He doubted the worm would cooperate with what he had in mind. There were enough handholds to make the climb not much worse than a steep scramble, and where there was nothing to grasp, he punched the rock face until there was. It took him less than ten minutes to reach the ledge, and the worm left him alone. Nithigg and the other Dragon Claws circled and harried it. They couldn’t kill it, but they swooped and stung like wasps around a grox. Their attacks had the grace and coordination of a dance. A team would burn the worm’s flank, drawing its attention, then retreat as it moved to attack, and the next team would hit just as the worm was ready to strike. They kept it off balance, and prolonged the stalemate. Even with all its eyes, the worm couldn’t keep up, its movements becoming more ponderous as it grew.

But it was growing, all the time and always faster. The point would come, and come soon, when it wouldn’t even have to target the Dragons. It would simply move, and mountains would fall.

Volos reached the ledge. ‘In position,’ he voxed to his squad. Then, ‘Battle Pyre, begin your approach. Remain at altitude for now. Whether we meet triumph or death, you’ll know.’

Nithigg was at the foot of the cliff directly below the ledge. His flamer was done, but he had a bolt pistol as a secondary weapon and he fired with it. The rounds were barely pinpricks in the flanks of the monster now, but Volos saw those pinpricks count. Nithigg targeted the eye-mouths. High-pitched wails were drowned out by the ocean-deep roar of outrage from the maw. Braxas and Vasuk joined Nithigg, and concentrated their fire in the same spots, making the three of them a target as inviting to the worm as they were irritating. It heaved its bulk towards the mountainside and ducked its head to strike.

Volos pulled the pin from the krak grenade, counted two, and leaped, riding the flame of his jump pack. His target was the upper portion of the worm’s eye. As he fell, he threw the grenade ahead of him. The worm saw him coming and its membrane snapped down over the eye. The grenade hit. The membrane was thick, tough muscle. It deflected much, and protected the eye from the pile-driving impacts of the worm’s lunges. But it was still flesh, and the krak grenade was designed to pierce armour. The explosion punched through the membrane, leaving the muscle hanging in ragged flaps. Volos was right behind, fists clenched. Propelled by the jump pack, he was a missile of flesh and rage. He snapped out his bone-blades and slammed into the eye.

There was the treasured moment of agony as the blades emerged, treasured because the pain was an act of faith, and an act of pure war, his body transformed into the doom of the Emperor’s enemies. And on the heels of the agony came the ferocious pleasure of the deeper agony inflicted on the foe. The blades shot with the force of adamantium pistons into the orb. Ichor spewed over Volos. It was a green the shade of rotten limbs and cancerous souls, and it moved with a will of its own. It defied gravity and ran up his arms, coating and clutching at his armour. It bubbled as if it were an acid. But it did nothing. It covered his votive parchments, and then slid off, leaving them untouched. Ebony flames licked over him, and his retinal display told him that these flames were cold as the void of space. They were impotent against him. With his left arm holding fast to the corrupted jelly, he pulled his right out and plunged the blade deeper. Then he held with the right and stabbed with the left. He began to dig himself deeper and deeper into the eye.

The worm became frenzied. Its scream was as big as the world, and it writhed, an electrocuted serpent, desperate to dislodge him. Gravitic-forces pulled at Volos from every direction as the worm twisted and smashed itself against earth and mountain, but each blow only drove him in further. He punched and slashed, gouging into a morass of tissue that now held him tight despite itself. He shoved his head forward, using his horns to tear yet more of the filth apart. And as he tunnelled into the daemon eye, it spoke to him. There was no light inside the orb, but he could see all the same as visions fell upon him and voices shouted. Everything was the same refrain: there was no God-Emperor. The message was so absurd it was almost comical. There was something almost childish about the insistence, as if a big enough tantrum could make the ridiculous true. Volos began to laugh.

Deeper, darker, the pressure building, the battering of the worm growing worse. He felt snaps, and knew they were his ribs. He didn’t care. His laughter was gigantic, wide and fierce as a battlefield. His enemy was in lethal torment. He was a Black Dragon, and he was the Emperor’s fire and bone.

His blades sliced into something thick and knotted. He thought of tendons and nerve clusters, and he sawed with renewed savagery. The worm’s throes stiffened into a vibration that threatened to reduce his armour and skeleton to dust. The visions shrieked infantile heresy at him one more time, and dropped into silence. The movement stopped with a teeth-rattling boom. Volos paused, embraced by suffocating nothing, and then he twisted around and clawed his way back.

He slid out of the eye as from a corrupted womb. The worm was a prone, motionless immensity. The rest of Squad Ormarr was waiting for him. Beyond them, in a space flattened by the worm’s agony, the Battle Pyre was coming down. ‘Brother,’ Nithigg said, ‘when are you going to limit yourself to battling foes your own size? These one-sided affairs hardly do you honour.’

Volos laughed again despite the grinding in his ribcage. Then he saw that the worm’s jaw was still working. It was snapping at nothing at all, but as he watched, he realised that the motion wasn’t dying away. It was getting stronger.

‘Brother-sergeant,’ Braxas said.

‘I see it.’ He had a momentary impulse to plunge back into the monster and finish things.

‘Not the jaw.’ Braxas pointed.

The millions upon millions of damned souls were still moving. Their strings hadn’t been cut when the worm fell. The entire circle of the horizon was in motion as the tainted population of Antagonis advanced to throw itself into the twitching monster.

‘No,’ Volos snarled, seeing his victory being taken away from him. His lips pulled back, and his fangs pushed out. For a moment, the world blinked out of existence, and there was nothing in the universe but his black rage. Then Nithigg had his arm, yanking him back to the here and now, and was pulling him towards the Thunderhawk. The worm’s body was moving again before he reached the loading ramp, and as the planet’s blasted humanity poured itself into the being, it grew so quickly it was almost touching the Battle Pyre as the ship took off.

Toharan clapped his shoulder as he removed his helm, and Volos nodded an absent greeting. He moved to a viewing block. The worm’s expansion was obscene. It seemed to come closer as they pulled away, and it took several seconds before the Battle Pyre’s acceleration reached the point where the Thunderhawk flew faster than the worm grew. Moment by moment, the creature’s movements became bigger and more violent, and with every sweep of its body, greater and greater numbers of walking fodder were consumed, and the growth exploded.

Volos found cold solace in one fact. There was no purpose to the thrashing. The worm wasn’t searching for its tormentors. For all that its body was covered by countless thousands of eye-mouths, it was blind. He had hurt it at a level that it could not heal. But even that victory didn’t matter. There was nothing to save here now, and the worm didn’t need to see or even think to be the end of Antagonis. Its mere existence was now destruction itself.

By the time the Battle Pyre reached Lexica Keep for the last time, the worm was a convulsing, coiling monstrosity that towered over the Temple chain. It rose, and it was as big as a god. It was a god. The setting sun bathed it red, marking it with the blood of the world it had killed. Volos sensed, for the first time in his life, the direct touch of the sublime, and he wanted to spit its obscene taste from his mouth. Then the worm fell, and it levelled mountains.

It was visible even from orbit, and still it grew.

CHAPTER 7

PURGING

It was Lettinger who ordered the Exterminatus, but only after being commanded to do so by Setheno. He had the formal authority. She had the will and the experience. And it was the Black Dragons who carried out the order. They had the cyclonic torpedoes.

Dragons, canoness and inquisitor gathered on the command bridge of the Immolation Maw to watch the final curtain come down on Antagonis’s tragedy. The primary occulus showed the planet at zero magnification. The worm writhed across the entire northern landmass. To Volos, even at a size that changed tectonic behaviour, the worm seemed more than ever like a disease. Perhaps it was the way it moved, the smaller tremors looking like the trembling, mindless frenzy of bacteria. The worm was a warp-tainted infection. It needed to be burned out.

The Exterminatus began with an assist from the Mortisian Dictator-class cruiser, Archon Voltinius. It was the least bit of justice that could be granted to the decimated companies. The bombardment began with mass drivers sent in a cluster near the worm’s head. Into that grouping, the Immolation Maw then fired the cyclonic torpedoes.

In the past, Volos had heard human enthusiasts describe the work of the torpedoes as beautiful. Those men were idiots, he had always thought, mighty war boosters who had managed to avoid combat and its inconveniences themselves. But now, he could see a kind of beauty in the work of the torpedoes. It was the beauty of inexorable, unforgiving judgement, and of absolute power. These bombs killed by reshaping worlds.

The artistry of annihilation began with a magnesium-white flare at the site of the strike. The burst was a sudden blossom, a flower from the heart of a sun. The torpedoes blasted through the planetary crust weakened by the Voltinius’s bombs, and drove the mantle into the fury of the storm. Its kinetic energy turned supernova-worthy, the mantle discovered a heat beyond molten, beyond incandescence. Rock became gas. The surface of the planet twisted and flowed like clouds. Mountain ranges new and old became the arms of a hurricane. Antagonis was new again, returned to its infancy. Volos saw the worm consumed by a crust that veered wildly between solid and liquid, mountain and valley. When the terrible dance of the continental plates ended, so had everything else on Antagonis. There was no life. There was no hope. There was no point.

Volos turned from the occulus to stare at a hololith of the planet projected above the strategium table. He asked Setheno, ‘Canoness, what were we fighting down there?’

‘An outbreak of doubtworm,’ she said. ‘Such events are rare, but when they occur, the result is preordained.’

‘And doubtworm is…?’

‘A parasitical form of daemonic possession.’

‘So the walking dead…’ Toharan began.

‘…were not dead,’ Setheno confirmed. ‘They were suffering the early onset of possession. The larval stage of the worm. Did you notice, sergeant, when you first arrived in Lecorb, any signs of distress or self-inflicted injury on the part of the infected?’

Toharan nodded. ‘They didn’t seem interested in us at all until we were in the company of Lord Danton and the others.’

‘In the larval stage, the victims’ higher thought processes are dulled, but they are aware of what is happening to them. They sense their damnation, and are focused on it, not on those as yet untouched by the plague. But the people you rescued were fully possessed, and the others attacked them in a final, desperate act of faith before they succumbed.’

‘An entire planet possessed in a week?’ Volos said. ‘How is that possible?’

‘It is possible because of human weakness. The parasite both feeds on doubt and spreads it. It is during the larval stage that it is most contagious, as that is when its effects are visible. Remember, this is no airborne virus. It is a thing of the warp, and leaps from mind to mind. For almost any human, to see a fellow fall prey to the worm is to feel vulnerable, and thus to be vulnerable. Then, during the pupal stage, the mind of the victim is active again, but only as the puppet to the daemon. During this phase, the worm will work to arrange its propagation to other worlds.’

‘Which is why Danton was so insistent on an evacuation,’ Lettinger put in.

‘Quite. The pupal period lasts until the disguise is either no longer needed or is discovered. The final stage,’ Setheno gestured at the hololith display of the shattered planet, ‘is final.’

‘Just so we can all follow,’ Lettinger said. ‘Those who appeared to have been untouched by the infection were in fact the most fully corrupted.’

‘I think I was clear the first time.’

Volos didn’t believe for a moment that Lettinger hadn’t understood. He was making a point. There was satisfaction and triumph in his tone, and underneath, a current of grim duty. Volos thought he was pathetic.

Lettinger didn’t respond to Setheno. He turned to Vritras instead. ‘Captain, I thank you for your rescue and your hospitality, but I will ask now for a transport back to my ship.’ When Vritras nodded, Lettinger added, ‘I’m sure I will be back again soon.’ Vritras stiffened in the command throne. Lettinger swept out of the strategium.

‘He will return with a writ from the Ordo Malleus,’ Setheno said.

‘And this pleases you?’ Vritras snapped.

‘Merely an observation.’

‘To the warp with him, then,’ Toharan said. ‘He does not board this ship again.’

‘You would deny access to the Ordo Malleus?’ Setheno asked, her eyes of gold and ice on Toharan. The flatness of her tone made it hard to tell if the question was curiosity or a rebuke. ‘You are aware of the limitless extent of its authority, are you not?’

‘No branch of the Inquisition has any business here,’ Massorus said. ‘The faith of this company is beyond challenge.’

‘I will not have him putting my Dragons to the question,’ Vritras promised.

‘I think you will, captain,’ Setheno replied. ‘And I strongly suggest you do not attempt to fight him.’

‘And why, in the name of the God-Emperor, would I be so derelict in my duty to my brothers?’

‘Because you will be serving the wider interests of your Chapter.’

‘And how do you propose to convince me of that, canoness?’

‘By helping you see clearly. Captain, the Black Dragons have been on a collision course with the Ordo Malleus for their entire history. This day has been inevitable, and the wonder is that it did not come long ago. Your very existence is a provocation to the Inquisition. Did you think to avoid a formal investigation forever? I do not believe you are naïve.’

‘Go on,’ Vritras said, his voice as quiet as it was dangerous.

‘You know that I am not without influence. Inquisitor Lettinger will report on the events on Antagonis, and make the case that the Black Dragons require formal scrutiny. He will rehearse your history and present, as evidence of immediate threat, the nature of the doubtworm infestation, arguing that the fact that not a single one of you has shown any sign of succumbing to the parasite is itself near-proof of daemonic taint. Rest assured, that argument will be convincing enough, if only for political reasons, to have a formal investigation launched. I cannot prevent that, nor will I try. My influence is of a more… informal nature.’

Volos wasn’t surprised to hear that. He couldn’t imagine the administrative contortions that would officially grant Setheno the authority she appeared to possess. Sisters of Battle, like the Space Marines, were warriors, not rulers. But he could well imagine one hierarch after another humbled by her implacable presence.

‘I am confident,’ Setheno continued, ‘that I can have the inquiry limited to your company and the Antagonis action. Inquisitor Lettinger is a Monodominant and he is young, and so the cooler, more senior heads in the ordo will be open to mechanisms that will keep him from going too far, too quickly. However, if you resist, then you will spread this problem to the rest of the Chapter, and the investigation will be into the deepest core of the Black Dragons. The question you will face will not be whether this company has acquired a taint, but whether the Chapter is corrupt in its essence.’

‘You don’t think Lettinger already believes that? You don’t think he will seek to broaden the terms of his mission?’

‘I’m sure he does, and I’m sure he’ll try. That doesn’t mean he will succeed. Particularly if my presence here adds the Ecclesiarchy’s imprimatur to the proceedings.’

Vritras was silent for a few moments. ‘I do find it curious,’ he finally said, ‘that someone of your reputation in the Ecclesiarchy should be offering advice on how best to thwart the Inquisition.’

‘Don’t misunderstand me, captain. With my every breath, I do what will best serve the Emperor. There, and only there, is where my loyalty lies.’

‘And I take it that you do not believe we are possessed by doubtworm.’

‘I know you are not.’

Vritras raised his eyebrows. ‘You know this how?’

‘Because of the nature of doubtworm. However complex an organism it becomes, and however sophisticated it appears to be once it makes use of its human host, it is, at its most basic level, very simple. Its attacks are narrowly targeted, but effective. It exploits the nature of faith, and one very specific doubt. The worm’s message to its victims is that the Emperor does not exist.’

Volos thought of the childish ranting he had experienced inside the worm.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Massorus said.

‘Of course it is, but remember that to have faith in something is, by definition, to lack proof. Faith is a spiritual wager, not a certainty. To believe is to open the door for doubt. To believe is not to know, and the vast majority of humans, especially civilians, never have any direct knowledge of the Emperor. Thus, they can doubt. You are Adeptus Astartes, and are therefore immune to this attack.’

‘You are implying that we have no faith,’ Massorus said, outraged.

‘Not at all. You have faith in each other, in your captain, in the Chapter, in the all-knowing wisdom of the God-Emperor. But you do not need faith in his existence. You know he exists. Your own being is proof of his. He is not just your Emperor. He is your ultimate progenitor. Even the Traitor Legions are incapable of this doubt. They would have nothing to betray, otherwise.’

Vritras leaned forward. ‘You could, of course, make this very convincing argument to the Inquisition on our behalf.’

‘The name of my ship is not Act of Charity. It is Act of Clarity. I have told you what I will do.’

‘You can do no more, or you refuse to try?’

‘I serve the Emperor.’ She picked up her helm. ‘I will return to my ship for now,’ she said. ‘Though I have faith that we will be seeing much more of each other in the days ahead.’ She turned to go.

Volos blinked. Had she just made a joke? Again, he couldn’t tell. Her face and tone remained stripped of any readable emotion.

Either way, Vritras wasn’t laughing. ‘One question, canoness, with your permission.’

She stopped and waited.

‘You, also, seem to be immune to doubtworm. How is this possible?’

‘I do not suffer from illusions,’ she answered, and left.

Her phrasing struck Volos as odd. There was a precision that was strategic, that said more than the surface meaning of the words. He watched the door to the strategium close behind her. Friend or foe? he wondered. Somehow, the former seemed the greater threat.

The sounds of a massive body slamming against metal echoed down the corridor to Toharan as he made his way towards the training cage. His Lyman’s Ear parsed the sounds, telling him that there was only one Dragon exercising, and how big that Space Marine was. The analysis was easy: Volos shadow-sparring. Good. Toharan could use some one-on-one practice, too. He needed to work off some of the tension from the Antagonis action.

Perhaps it hadn’t been a defeat. Perhaps there had never been a victory to be had. But there was something bitter in his gut. He couldn’t get the sight of Bethshea transforming out his head. He wasn’t sure why this, of all the sights on Antagonis, bothered him the most, even more than the death of Aperos. The fact of his having been so wrong about the mission rankled, but there was no reason why he should feel particular shame.

He hadn’t been the only one mistaken. Setheno herself hadn’t known, even if she had suspected, until almost too late. And yet, having been wrong, having what he knew to be true become false, grated like tyranid claws on his soul. For some reason, every time he thought about that moment in the courtyard, he also thought about Werner Lettinger’s obscene suggestion to him. The two scenes were locked in his mind in a poisonous symbiosis, and he didn’t know why, and he wanted them out. So he picked up the pace. He would sweat them out, and, if need be, bruise them out. He could certainly count on Volos for that.

He was almost at the end of the corridor, the battle cage arena opening up before him. He could see Volos, clad in a loincloth, working through the steps of his form. Then a voice said, ‘Are you alone, brother-sergeant?’

‘I am, brother-captain,’ Volos said.

Instinct brought Toharan to a halt. He stepped back, keeping to the shadows of the corridor. He waited, motionless, while Bethshea leaped and transformed again and again, and Lettinger whispered.

Vritras stepped in front of the cage. ‘A moment of your time?’

‘Of course.’ Volos grabbed a towel as he left the cage.

‘Your actions against the worm will see you in song yet,’ Vritras said.

Volos shrugged. ‘Not a song I would choose to hear.’

‘Do you so dislike being honoured?’

‘My duty is my honour.’

Vritras bowed slightly. ‘Well said. In that case, I have come to ask you to take on a new duty.’

Volos stopped moving. Then he folded the towel very slowly, as if delaying something unpleasant. ‘My arm is always ready to serve the Chapter,’ he said, and Toharan thought he heard wariness in the sergeant’s tone.

‘You heard about Brother-Sergeant Aperos,’ Vritras said.

Volos bowed his head. ‘He has earned his rest.’

‘He has indeed. But now I find myself without a first-sergeant.’

Silence. Both warriors let it stretch. Vritras’s silence made his meaning clear. Volos’s seemed more like evasion. A vein in Toharan’s temple began to throb. Finally, Volos spoke. ‘You wish me to take command of Squad Nychus?’

‘I do. I want you at my side, brother-sergeant.’

Again, Volos took his time answering. Standing stock still, a hulking dark shape with grey, reptile skin and hellish horns, he had never looked, Toharan thought, so much like a statue, so much like a gargoyle. And at the back of his mind, another word lurked: daemon. Toharan quashed the word before it could fully surface.

‘You do me a great honour,’ Volos said at length.

‘And you would do me a greater one by accepting it,’ Vritras answered.

‘Brother-captain, I am bonded to the Dragon Claws in ways that are difficult to explain to an outsider, and forgive me for using that term. We have a shared condition.’ He raised an arm and briefly extended a bone-blade. ‘We are Dragon Claws because, of all the members of our Chapter, we are the most…’

‘Developed?’ Vritras suggested.

‘Deformed, I was going to say, and I do so with a certain pride. We are the most monstrous of those who retain their sanity. That monstrosity gives us a shared purpose. We bless the curse, and our individual quests for purity of service are fused with an even greater collective one. I cannot imagine breaking that.’

‘Everything you have just said is no less true of the rest of our brotherhood,’ Vritras chided.

Volos hung his head. ‘My apologies. I spoke with hubris and selfishness, and I spoke badly.’ He hesitated. ‘And now I’m going to speak badly again. There is, around the position of first-sergeant, an aura of… grooming.’

‘That’s true,’ Vritras nodded. ‘To name a Black Dragon first-sergeant is to declare him captain material.’

‘And I am not that. I know my limits as a commander. I neither seek, nor am fit, for higher leadership. Have you spoken to Toharan? He–’

‘I didn’t make this request lightly,’ Vritras said.

‘I don’t refuse it lightly, if it is a request. If it is an order, then…’

Vritras shook his head. ‘I won’t compel you. Will you at least think it over?’

‘That would be an insult to you and to the honour, when I already know what my answer would be. Thank you, brother-captain, but I cannot accept.’

‘You disappoint me, brother, but I will respect your conviction.’ He held out his hand.

‘My sword is eternally yours to command,’ Volos said, and they clasped forearms.

‘And it is my privilege to do so.’

Vritras left. Volos stood alone, and shadows seemed to flow from him as he meditated. Then he climbed back into the cage.

Toharan turned and walked back down the corridor. He moved quietly. The pounding in his temple was worse. It was hard not to hit the wall with the same rhythm.

The shuttle left the Viper-class scout Dominion of Grace. Lettinger watched through the viewport as his ship grew smaller with distance. It would be some time, he knew, before he would revisit its clean lines and sober decor. He was sending it away, to his base in the Marat system. Vritras had no right to deny him full access to the Immolation Maw, especially not now, but Lettinger also wanted it physically difficult for Vritras to deny him boarding rights. So he had taken the steps that would make the Dragons ship his home.

He moved to the other side of the shuttle and stared at the growing hulls of the Immolation Maw and the Act of Clarity. They rested at high anchor and in close parallel. Canoness Setheno’s ship, which was also about to lose its owner, was of a manufacture that Lettinger didn’t recognise. He suspected it was a Mechanicus-modified variant of the Cobra-class destroyer. Just less than a kilometre long, it was about the right size for a Cobra, but it was much sleeker. It was a grey, merciless stiletto of a craft, its profile so narrow, its colours so muted and light-absorbing, that it was hard, even this close, to see it clearly against the stars. Lettinger had no such difficulty with the Maw. Over four times the size of the Clarity, the strike cruiser was an ugly, brutal, clawed fist, its outgrowths of flying buttresses and weapon turrets a reflection of the deformed warriors who made it home. It was a ship with a very high degree of long-term self-sufficiency. It would have to be. It had no home base, and outside the zones of their frequent operations, the welcome the Dragons found was frequently frosty.

The citizens of the Imperium knew corruption when they encountered it, Lettinger thought. It was time, through his agency, that this wisdom be confirmed.

He thought about his vox conversation with Proctor Toqueville. There had been some disappointments. One was the limit to his inquiry.

‘Only this company?’ he had asked.

‘That’s correct.’

‘It should be the whole Chapter.’

‘Work with what you have there, inquisitor ordinary. Find the guilt in Second Company, and that thread that will take us to the taint of the rest.’

‘But why begin with such a limitation?’

‘Because, thanks to your diligence, the Antagonis events give us the evidence needed to investigate the Second, but only the Second.’

The rationale struck Lettinger as weak, and the limited parameters of the investigation were uncharacteristically conservative by the standards of the Ordo Malleus. He thought he could detect the stench of political manoeuvring, and his eyes turned again to the Act of Clarity. The Canoness Errant was not the ally he had expected. He couldn’t understand why this was so. Her motivations baffled him, and he could make even less sense of her actions. He shrugged. He now had the tools he needed to purge the Adeptus Astartes of this tainted growth.

As the shuttle banked towards the talons and fangs of the Immolation Maw, Lettinger caught a flash of starlight off another approaching craft. It was a grubby-looking civilian freighter. He didn’t know what business it had here. He couldn’t imagine anything good.

CHAPTER 8

PURITY AND HONOUR

The surface of Antagonis had been so transformed, for a moment Tennesyn thought the trader had taken him to the wrong system. But the coordinates were correct, and after staring hard and long through the armourglass of the bridge’s occulus, Tennesyn could make out enough echoes of familiar land masses to know that this was indeed where he had paid to be taken.

‘Are you sure this is your destination?’ asked Loran Tinburne, captain of the Trade Sail. ‘We could try again. We could leave. Now.’ An immense shadow in the form of a Space Marine strike cruiser was closing on them.

Tennesyn gave him a weak smile. ‘This is the place,’ he said sadly. He looked at the cruiser turrets aimed their way. ‘Besides, I really don’t think we can leave. Do you?’

The Trade Sail’s vox-operator looked up. ‘Message from the Immolation Maw,’ she said. Her voice was very small. ‘Heave to and prepare to be boarded.’

Tinburne took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded. He looked close to frightened tears.

Ten minutes later, there were night-clad giants on the bridge, and Tinburne was weeping while Tennesyn explained that it was he who had sought passage to Antagonis. ‘I really didn’t know anything this serious had happened,’ he said, gesturing at the transformed planet. ‘I was only just here, and–’

‘When was that?’ one of the Space Marines interrupted.

‘A week ago.’

The silence that followed was not reassuring.

And then, while the captain and crew of the Trade Sail joyfully fled to anywhere that wasn’t Antagonis, the giants marched Tennesyn through the corridors of the Immolation Maw. They passed through one gothic arch after another, down passageways lined with veined, marble-like stone. It was a deep, green-black in colour and had a texture that reminded the xeno-archaeologist of a reptile’s hide.

Tennesyn wasn’t a big man, and he felt like a child as he struggled to keep up with the pace of his escort. He didn’t even reach the shoulders of the giants. They had barely glanced at him since taking him into custody, and he was grateful for that small mercy. Their black eyes were coldness and war, and there was precious little human in the way they evaluated him. They weren’t wearing their helmets, and he wished they were. The grey skin and bone crests reminded him too much of things he had seen in fossil records. On their journey through the ship, they crossed paths with an even bigger warrior, the most saurian of them all. He was the flesh embodiment of his armour’s livery. He made Tennesyn feel like a thing of twigs, so easy to snap and burn.

They took him to the strategium overlooking the bridge and left him there in the company of three figures who made Tennesyn wonder into what hell he had fallen. He faced the captain of the Space Marines, sitting on his command throne, and two humans. Tennesyn couldn’t see the face of the man clearly, but the hooded robes and silver electoos marked him as Inquisition. The woman was a warrior of the Ecclesiarchy, and the chill of her expressionless face made Tennesyn long for the comparative warmth of his escort of Dragons. Of the three, Tennesyn found it easiest to keep his eyes on the inquisitor, and there was a sign of a day that wasn’t going well. He was also aware of tension in the room that had nothing to do with him, and he resolved to keep it that way.

But then there were those last words Bisset had shouted to him: Bring back help. The terrors before him were that help. So after they told him who they were, which did his confidence no good at all, and they asked him who he was and what he was doing here, he spoke about Aighe Mortis. But though they listened, the detail they jumped on was the date of his departure from Antagonis.

‘There was no plague when you left?’ Inquisitor Lettinger asked sharply.

‘Plague?’ Tennesyn asked. ‘No, there was nothing wrong at all.’

The trio exchanged a look.

‘Incubation stage?’ Vritras asked.

Setheno stepped forward and took Tennesyn’s chin in one armoured hand. She tilted his head up to face hers. He stared into golden eyes that reduced him to his itemised component parts. ‘I don’t think so,’ Setheno said. ‘His return would make no sense.’ She pulled the chain around his neck, drawing out his aquila. ‘Then there’s this.’

‘Congratulations, Scholar Tennesyn,’ Vritras said, and there was a welcome shade of humour in his tone. ‘You have just avoided execution.’

Setheno released him, and Tennesyn tried to swallow. He found that he couldn’t. ‘Will you please tell me what has happened here?’ he asked. ‘Everything was going so well just before I left, and the cardinal was pleased. I can’t believe–’

‘Cardinal?’ Setheno said.

Tennesyn nodded. ‘Cardinal Nessun,’ he said, and the temperature in the room plunged ten degrees. ‘Why?’ he croaked. ‘Do you know him?’

‘Excommunicate Traitoris,’ Lettinger hissed.

‘No…’

‘What were your dealings with him?’ Setheno said. Her voice was quiet, but its steel almost deafened Tennesyn. ‘Leave nothing out.’

‘He was financing my dig,’ Tennesyn began, and felt the immensity of war wrap its fist around him.

The word ran through the Immolation Maw. There was rebellion on Aighe Mortis. The scope and nature of the revolt was not known, nor was it clear whether the Imperial Guard would be able to suppress it. But the possibility of full-company deployment was enticing. It was the chance to cleanse the war spirit of the filth of Antagonis. Honourable retreat or pyrrhic victory, the engagement on that planet was something to recover from, and the way to recovery was through the flesh of the Emperor’s foes. There was also another point of honour involving Aighe Mortis: the Black Dragons had recruited there in the past.

But the Maw remained in orbit over Antagonis.

Toharan found Symael of Squad Jormund in the armoury, cleaning and oiling his weapons. Symael didn’t have Toharan’s fair skin and blond hair, but his bald head was smooth, free of crests or horns. ‘What do you hear, brother?’ Toharan hailed him. He went to work on his own bolter.

‘Nothing but rumour, brother-sergeant.’

‘I want to ask you something. It’s of a personal nature, so if I overstep my bounds, tell me so, with blows if necessary.’

Symael laughed. ‘Are you going to ask if I have greenskins in my genetic ancestry?’

‘I plan to, but not today.’

‘Then I can’t see how else you might give offence.’

‘When our Chaplain commands us to bless the curse,’ Toharan said slowly, ‘how do you respond?’

‘You aren’t asking if I echo the creed at the appropriate moments, are you?’

‘No.’

Symael toyed with his trigger assembly. ‘Truth be told, it’s sometimes hard not to feel a bit…’

‘Resentful?’ Toharan suggested.

Symael gave him a long, considered, guarded look. Then he nodded. The gesture was almost imperceptible.

‘Excluded?’ Toharan said.

The nod became emphatic. Ecstatic relief flooded Symael’s face, as if he were giving in to an emotion repressed and disavowed for centuries. ‘Yes, by the Throne, I damn well do. Am I any the less a Black Dragon because my bones are all inside my skin? I would kill anyone who dares aver I am.’

‘Well said, brother. Well said.’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because I have been wrestling with the question of purity. It has been put to me that seeing the greatest purity in the greatest distortion is, perhaps, unsound.’

‘Do you think it is?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, and he spoke from his soul. ‘I don’t know. I do know this, though, there is no such reasoning anywhere in the Codex Astartes.’

‘We are hardly a Codex Chapter,’ Symael pointed out.

‘No, we aren’t. That has certainly been beneficial, hasn’t it?’

Symael didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. They had all experienced the suspicion of the more orthodox Chapters, suspicion that, in some cases, extended as far as a categorical refusal to fight at their side. Symael reloaded and mag-locked his bolter, then turned to go. He paused before he left. ‘I think we should talk about this further, brother-sergeant,’ he said.

‘Yes, we should.’

‘There is,’ Symael said, ‘another warrior who would, I think, be interested in taking part in that conversation.’

‘He would be welcome.’

Nithigg was in the librarium. He had a favourite lectern. It was on the second level, facing the balcony, overlooking the marching stacks of manuscripts below. He had his nose buried in a massive folio, though he had to keep a certain distance from the tome: adamantium-tipped horns jutted from both temples and the centre of his forehead, and he had to be careful not to gouge the precious manuscript. All of Nithigg’s non-combat movements had to be cautious. His blades didn’t retract, and extended downward from his forearms like scimitars. Volos peered over his shoulder. ‘History?’ he asked, keeping his voice down.

Nithigg nodded. ‘A chronicle of the Year of Ghosts.’ He looked up. ‘I see Epistolary Rothnove still hasn’t granted my requests for tighter security at the entrance.’

‘He won’t. He’s hoping I’ll acquire some knowledge through osmosis.’ An old joke. He spent almost as much time here as Nithigg.

Nithigg closed the book. ‘Something?’ he asked.

Volos nodded. ‘Our captain asked me to be first-sergeant.’

‘And you refused.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s hard to leave the Claws, isn’t it?’

‘You say that as if I will.’

‘I think you might.’

Volos shook his head. ‘I refused, remember?’

‘So you did. The choice might not always be yours to make.’

‘It has been yours.’

‘Ah,’ Nithigg said. ‘What you really wanted to talk about.’

‘Yes.’ Nithigg was the unofficial, self-appointed, universally accepted historian of Second Company. He had good claim to the title, not just because of his meticulous research, but because of his age. He was the oldest Dragon Claw, and the oldest veteran in the company. He kept his exact age to himself, though Volos suspected he was at least a thousand years old. Why he had not been elevated to First Company was a mystery to Volos. The honour markings on his armour were beyond counting, as were the scars on his face. There were times when his personal memory seemed even greater, and to reach back further, than the Chapter’s institutional one, and though Nithigg had frequently acted in the training and mentoring capacity of a sergeant, he had never officially been given the rank.

Nithigg reached up to place a hand on Volos’s shoulder. ‘Brother, I am still where I am not because I choose to be, though I do. I am here because this is where I can best serve the Emperor.’

‘So am I.’

Nithigg shook his head. ‘You don’t know that. We don’t get to decide. It takes someone who is not yourself to see your essence clearly. I stay because it has been recognised that I have no leadership skills to speak of, though I am apparently very good for morale. When the final decision about you, whatever it is, comes down from whoever has authority over your fate, please have the good grace to accept it.’

Volos sighed. ‘All right.’ When Nithigg clapped him on the pauldron, Volos said, ‘I also wanted to talk about one of our guests.’

‘That worm is an insult to–’

‘Not Lettinger.’

‘I see.’ Nithigg lowered his voice. ‘I wonder about her, too. I spoke to Epistolary Rothnove.’

‘Is she a psyker?’

‘He’s not sure. Neither he nor the Chaplain quite knows what to make of her. They agree that she is powerful.’

‘Do they think she’s a threat?’

‘They didn’t take me that far into their confidence.’

Volos grimaced. ‘So we’re no further along.’

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ Nithigg said. ‘I think she’s dangerous, and so is the inquisitor.’

‘You just called him a worm.’

‘And we just fought one.’ While Volos digested that, Nithigg added, ‘I don’t think they represent the same danger, though.’

‘Is that all the wisdom you have to offer me, oh Ancient of Days?’

Nithigg grinned. ‘All that you can take in, whelp.’

They left it there, and as Volos exited the librarium, he almost collided with Lettinger on his way in. Of course he did. The fates had so decreed.

It was the first time Volos had been brought into direct contact with the inquisitor. He looked down at the man, and though his face was shadowed, Volos could read it easily. Before him was a man determined to destroy his Chapter. Volos had expected to feel rage. Instead, he felt contempt, and something that came very close to pity. ‘Your pardon, inquisitor,’ Volos said, and stepped aside for him to pass.

Lettinger didn’t go in right away. ‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘do you make much use of this resource?’ His gesture took in the librarium.

‘We all do.’

‘And do you admit that some knowledge is inherently dangerous?’

Volos saw the trap open before him, and knew he would spring it no matter what he answered. The beauty of a certain form of Inquisition logic was that it could not fail to reach its desired conclusion. If Volos said ‘yes,’ then he would be confronted with some unpardonably risky sin on the part of the Dragons. If he said ‘no,’ he would be branded a heretic. His contempt for Lettinger ratcheted up another notch, and he spoke the truth. ‘I admit that there are many instances of powerful knowledge being misused.’ Lettinger would damn him for saying that, too, but he was being true to himself, and to the doctrine of the Chapter. Speech was a form of action, and should be no less pure than the most lethal blade thrust.

‘That is a potentially catastrophic equivocation,’ Lettinger said.

Volos shrugged. ‘It’s the truth.’

‘Then it’s a truth that could be fatal to the Black Dragons, and thus prove my point. Can’t you see what your Chapter is doing to itself? Don’t you see how the process that created you is corrupt?’

‘It gave me the tools to do the Emperor’s work. I don’t see that as corrupt. And we are hardly the only Chapter to encourage mutation. Why aren’t you bothering the Space Wolves?’

‘You are not the only Chapter under suspicion, so do not pride yourselves on your uniqueness. But no other Chapter goes so far in encouraging mutation, and does so at such a fundamental genetic level.’

‘Why are we having this conversation?’ Volos said. ‘Are you trying to convert me or threaten me, inquisitor?’

‘Perhaps warn you. I would be sad if not a one of you sought salvation before the end.’

‘I will not seek it from you,’ Volos said, very quietly.

‘And what will you do, when you and your Chapter are condemned?’

‘What my brothers and I have always done. Fight and destroy the enemies of the Imperium. And we will not stop because of one man.’

‘You would fight me? And would you fight the Ordo Malleus?’

Another trap, an even worse one. The idea of coming to blows with another Imperial brotherhood, one just as loyal to the Emperor, was horrific. Volos wouldn’t grant that as a possibility. And he was tired of playing Lettinger’s game. He didn’t answer. He walked away.

The summons came, and Toharan surprised himself by discovering that he had expected it. That made nothing better. It simply told him that he knew his own worth. He made his way from his meditation cell to the captain’s quarters. He knew what was about to happen, and he tried to understand why he felt nothing but resentment.

He still had no answer when he knocked on Vritras’s door and stepped inside. The captain’s quarters were just as spare as those of any other Black Dragon, and were only a bit larger to make room for a table covered with maps and parchments of jottings which half-concealed three data-slates. Vritras returned his salute. The two Space Marines faced each other in full armour and under total military formality. This was no casual discussion at the training cages. Vritras’s first words were just as formal. ‘Brother-Sergeant Toharan, it is my privilege and honour to offer you the position of first-sergeant.’

It is my duty and my honour to accept. That was what Toharan was supposed to say. That was the protocol. Instead, he said, ‘Am I the first you have spoken to?’

To his credit, Vritras didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even blink. ‘You are not.’

‘You spoke to Volos.’

‘That’s right.’ Again, no reaction from Vritras.

Toharan said nothing. The seconds slipped by, one after another, and he didn’t know why he didn’t speak. Perhaps because he still hadn’t found the answer to why he felt as he did.

Vritras spoke first. ‘You believe you should have been my initial choice,’ he said. He did not sound angry.

‘I do,’ Toharan said, and it was the truth, a simple one, and not spoken out of arrogance or pride. He did not resent Volos. They had a comradeship forged by decades of battle together. That was not broken easily, and he didn’t believe it was broken now. He was just acknowledging truth, which was the duty of any Space Marine. He was better suited for the position. He knew that Vritras was about to ask him why, and he was asking himself the same thing, and he didn’t have the answer yet, but it was coming, bearing down on him with the force of destiny.

‘You can’t deny that Volos acquitted himself spectacularly on Antagonis,’ Vritras said.

‘I don’t. Nor would I ever. He has always been the most perfect of warriors, one I am proud to call my brother.’

‘So why should I have come to you first?’

‘Volos refused you. I will not. Therefore, Volos isn’t suited to the demands that lie ahead as your first-sergeant. I am.’

‘Why?’

There was the question. The answer came with a burst of insight so powerful it almost staggered Toharan. ‘Because I have a vision for our Chapter. I have duties to perform that extend far beyond winning the next battle.’ The truths, each more simple and pure than the last, kept thundering in on him, and his hearts expanded with hope and joy. And hunger. Everything he had been feeling, all the disturbing questions and the memories that would not leave him alone, fell into place. He understood. The pressure in his chest lifted, and he could breathe in a way that he hadn’t in days.

Vritras said, ‘Then I thank you for performing them as the first-sergeant of Squad Nychus, Black Dragons Second Company. Fire and bone.’ He crossed both arms in front of his chest and banged armour against armour.

Toharan returned the salute. ‘Fire and bone,’ he repeated, and began not a duty, but a mission. A sacred one.

He would save the Black Dragons from themselves.

CHAPTER 9

TRACES OF EPIPHANY

There were times, after battle, or during long sessions in the librarium, that Volos and Nithigg tried to untangle the web of fate that bound the Black Dragons and the Swords of Epiphany. Over the course of five millennia, they had met and clashed again and again. The black and the gold, the Emperor’s night and the Archenemy’s light, found and tore into each other with a regularity that smacked of destiny. ‘Do you realise,’ Nithigg had pointed out on one occasion, ‘that we know more about the Swords’ history than we do of our own?’ Volos had appreciated the irony, though the situation was not surprising. The early days of the Dragons were shrouded in the murk and confusion that attended anything to do with the 21st Founding. The Swords, by contrast, were evangelists. They had lessons to teach, and one of those was the story of their origins, which they spread through every system they attacked. As to why the Dragons and the Swords were doomed to wade in each other’s blood, Nithigg had ideas. Both forces were the product of secretive experiments. ‘We are their opposite number,’ he theorised. ‘We are Nemesis. We must fight until we have annihilated them down to the last memory of their existence.’

The Swords had been active on Antagonis. There was something on the planet that the traitor cardinal had desired. When the augurs revealed that Tennesyn’s dig site still existed, the Dragons’ course became clear. A team must return to the blasted world, and pry Nessun’s secret from its corpse.

And so the Battle Pyre touched down on the tortured surface of Antagonis. The Thunderhawk’s door slid open. Tennesyn lowered himself to the ground and consulted the auspex readings. Lettinger and Setheno walked behind him, with Volos following as escort. ‘This is remarkable,’ Tennesyn said, his voice tinny through his rebreather. The planet’s atmosphere was a toxic shadow of its former self after the fires of the torpedoes. ‘The topography of the entire continent has changed, the tectonic plates have moved hundreds and hundreds of kilometres, and yet the latitude and longitude of the site haven’t changed at all.’ His smile was childlike in its joy in discovery. ‘It’s as if the planet flowed around the structure like a river around stones. Can you imagine how deep the roots of this thing must be? They must be impossible. They must be anchored in the core itself!’

Tennesyn was right, Volos thought. There was something impossible about the place. After the devastation of the cyclonic torpedoes, it shouldn’t be here at all, much less be recognisable, and never mind intact. But there it was, uninterested in the changes of mere rock around it. ‘What is it?’ Volos asked. ‘A temple?’

There was a solemnity to the structures and the spaces between them that suggested worship. Volos even experienced a touch of awe, and the sensation was novel enough that he rather enjoyed it. Set out in two concentric circles were a series of monoliths. Each was cylindrical, and tapered to a point sharp as a gladius. They all curved towards the centre. Volos pictured a clawed hand about to close.

‘That’s what we all guessed at first,’ Tennesyn said. ‘Maybe it did have some religious value to its builders, but I don’t think that was all. It’s too… functional.’

‘An observatory?’ Setheno suggested.

‘Nearer the mark,’ Tennesyn answered as he led the way towards the centre of the configuration of monuments. ‘But what I really think is that this is a signpost. A marker.’ He stepped within the circles as he spoke the last two words, and his voice dropped. When he passed into the first ring of monoliths, Volos understood why. The feeling of awe intensified. It had to do with more than size. The monoliths were big, rising thirty metres above Volos’s head, but they were hardly the largest xenos artefacts he had seen. There was something else. ‘How old are they?’ he asked.

‘We’re not sure. At the very least, many millions of years. But we had a few aberrant readings that suggested they predate Antagonis itself. I dismissed those results as absurd. I’m much less certain of that now.’ He gave Volos a shrewd look. ‘You feel it too, don’t you?’

‘I do.’ There was a buzzing on his skin like the writhing of a billion microscopic insects. It had started the moment he came within the grasp of the giant claws. Volos glanced at Setheno, and she nodded.

‘We mustn’t linger here,’ the canoness said.

Tennesyn rubbed his arms. ‘The effect is much stronger than before,’ he said. ‘And much more is exposed. Your bombardment has been very helpful after all.’

Lettinger had stopped just outside the first ring. He looked as if he had been mag-locked to the ground. ‘I will not go in there,’ he said. ‘It is unclean.’ With a visible effort, he lifted one foot, then the other, and backed away.

Volos approached the nearest monolith. He rapped his fist against it. From a distance, he had assumed they were stone, though of what sort he couldn’t imagine. Tennesyn had described them as being black during the day. Now, near midnight, they were the white of bleached bone, and shone with an inner light that illuminated nothing of their surroundings. Closer up, Volos had wondered if they might be metal. They were not. Touching one revealed the density of granite. But it rang with a crystalline tone worthy of any cathedral bell. Up close, he could see that the surface was covered with a faint tracery of silver-on-white designs. They reminded him of runes, but there was something incomplete about them. ‘A signpost?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ Tennesyn reached the centre of the rings. Volos and Setheno joined him. ‘We kept experiencing a partial activation while we were excavating, enough to give a sense of what this complex was built to do. We had only just finished uncovering the top sections of all the monoliths when I left, and then…’ He stopped, his eyes widening. ‘Could this have caused the outbreak?’

Setheno shook her head. ‘The ritual of doubtworm is very specific, and conjured by an individual, not by stones.’

‘The inquisitor might disagree,’ Tennesyn said, looking over at Lettinger, who had made his way back to the Thunderhawk.

‘Let him,’ Setheno said, and Volos wondered how two words, expressed so neutrally, could be so contemptuous. ‘What happens next?’

Tennesyn checked his chronometer and looked at the sky. ‘We wait just a few minutes. There is a planetary alignment currently under way in this system. All thirteen planets are in conjunction. You can imagine how rare that is. This signpost can only be read when it becomes part of the alignment. That was what Cardinal Ness–’

‘He is no cardinal,’ Setheno corrected.

‘I’m sorry. Nessun was very excited to witness the site’s full activation.’

‘You’re lucky you didn’t share the moment with him,’ Volos commented.

They waited while the stars slowly wheeled through their dance. Most of Antagonis was under a thick cloud of ash thrown up by the eruptions that had followed in the wake of the bombardment. But the air over the rings of monoliths was clear. The clouds circled around the area, but did not pass over it. Volos saw the lights of Antagonis’s fellow planets move towards a point directly overhead. As they did, the buzzing on his flesh intensified. A subaural hum began, rising in power until Volos’s rear teeth ached with the tension. Tennesyn was trembling, but managed to stay upright. Setheno was rigid, motionless except for a slight quiver running the length of her frame.

The monoliths flashed to life. The designs crackled, blazing with a light that Volos saw more clearly with his eyes shut. He understood now why the shapes had seemed incomplete: he had been looking at just one fragment of a massive pattern, one that ran from column to column and formed an intricate whole, one that was completed and made visible by the celestial configuration. Volos looked up. The glow of the pattern leaked into his peripheral vision, extended spider-web tendrils over the stars, and formed an image. The picture crystallised, and he realised he was looking at a pattern of stars overlaid over the real ones. The image was a map. He recognised constellations, and there was a moment of anticlimax. He wasn’t looking at some unknown, unreachable sector of the universe. Given a chart, he could work out precisely where this was. At the centre of the image, one light pulsed a cold blue, and as it did, Volos became aware of a sound. It was a tuneless whistle that rose and fell with the rhythm of breathing. Inhale, and the pitch rose while the volume ebbed, exhale, and the sound gathered force with the dropping pitch. The song was a single, endless, idiot note, but behind it, Volos sensed something huge.

‘How can we record this?’ Tennesyn whispered, a scientist to the last.

‘We won’t have to,’ Setheno said.

Volos looked back down. The canoness was right. The chart was emblazoned on his mind’s eye. He would have no trouble reconstituting it for the Immolation Maw’s navigator. ‘That’s where they’ve gone,’ he said. And that was where the Black Dragons would go, bringing the consequences of the death of Antagonis down on the Swords of Epiphany.

Antagonis’s moon was a sprinter. It circled the planet every fourteen days. Its position was part of the alignment, Tennesyn had discovered, a small but critical element in the triggering of the monoliths, and so the Dragons had had to wait most of a sevenday after the bombardment for the moon to be right. These were lost days, Toharan thought. Second Company was in orbit over a dead planet, waiting to play with corrupt stones, doing nothing while rebellion spread and took firmer hold on Aighe Mortis. Vritras was in contact with the commanders of the Mortisian Guard regiments dispatched to quell the uprising, and the reports were troubling. But the Immolation Maw remained at anchor over Antagonis, waiting for Tennesyn to be able to make his observation.

The lack of action was unconscionable.

It was Symael who had suggested the meeting place. On the bottom deck of the Immolation Maw, in a straight line down from its chapel, was another, smaller, place of worship. It was no less sanctified, but saw much less use. It was the prison chapel. The Black Dragons did not take many prisoners. They left no wounded foe on their battlefields, only corpses. But the cells were there for those exceptional times when a target was, from a tactical point of view, worth more alive than dead, and the chapel was there for the penitent and the punished. The marble altar was stained brown from receiving centuries of justice spilled across its surface as heretics and traitors were shown the blade of mercy and truth. The aquila above it was iron-black, its edges sharp as if it would descend to scour the unworthy. The pews were rough stone. There were no viewports, and the few glow-globes gave off little more than a dim and mournful light. It was a space where faith was at its most harsh and most necessary. It was the sanctuary of brutal decision.

It was fitting.

It was fitting not just because of its severity, but because nearby was a reminder of why brutal decisions were needed. Sternward of the chapel, beyond the prison, was another set of cells. They held a special group of Black Dragons. They were the blessed, and they were the abominations. Mutated far beyond even Volos’s distortions, they were monsters of spikes and horns and scales. Huge, muscled, slavering, they were trapped in a permanent predator rage, and their snarls echoed faintly down the corridors to the chapel. They were berserkers who were kept alive until they could be unleashed to find their final peace in frenzied suicide missions. Toharan had heard that the Blood Angels had a similar squad of the damned, but those warriors, however tortured their minds, were not physical grotesques. The Dragons abominations were, he believed, an unconscionable risk. Even hidden, they were a provocation to the Inquisition. They should be exterminated as soon as they developed. But they were also the logical end-point of Chaplain Massorus’s theology. If one must bless the curse, then the most cursed were the most sacred. They could not be touched. Only the battlefield could end their torment and their duty.

Ridiculous. Heretical. Toharan would put an end to such perversity.

He had spoken once to Symael since their first conversation. Jemiah, a brother almost as fair as Toharan, had been part of that talk, four days ago. Now, while Volos played escort to the xeno-archaeologist, it was time for more than discussion. As Toharan stood before the altar, far more than two brothers sat in the pews. There were fourteen warriors, coming from every squad except Ormarr. Most showed little sign of Ossmodula deformation, but a few did have crests. One, Danael of Squad Neidris, had a sharp, painful-looking growth poking out just above his right eye. They all came here from different experiences, but they were united by their concern and hope. Toharan vowed he would justify the faith they had shown in meeting him here.

In his imagination, he could still hear the echoes of the ceremony anointing him first-sergeant. The entire company had filled the chapel. That space was a hall of worship and honour, the blood it celebrated heroically given, not extracted from the unforgiven. There, the air had trembled with the Dragons’ roar of approval as he had knelt, then risen, symbolically reborn as the new right hand of the captain. The honour had been enormous, but it was also a hollow one if he didn’t make use of it. The small group here was, he thought, an even greater tribute. It was a testament to the challenge and righteousness of what he was about to attempt.

‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘I am more grateful than you can know for the confidence you are showing in me. But my gratitude will pale next to that of our Chapter once we have successfully brought it back to the embrace of the Codex. No longer will our fellow Adeptus Astartes spurn our comradeship in battle. No longer will the Inquisition cast a suspicious eye on us. No longer will our loyalty and faith be doubted. There are difficult choices ahead for us. There will be actions that we will have to take that will sever bonds of brotherhood that we have, mistakenly, valued. We will have to be strong for one another. We will need faith in what we do. And so it shall be, because not only are we Black Dragons, we are also their salvation. We are the Disciples of Purity.’

As he took part in the oaths that followed, Toharan felt no misgivings.

None at all.

CHAPTER 10

A CHOICE OF WARS

Flebis was an orphan. It was a rocky planetoid, with an atmosphere thin as an excuse. It had no right to its own orbit around a Sol-class star, at a distance roughly equivalent to that of Mars, let alone be the only planet in the system that bore its name. Given its size, it should have been nothing more than a large moon. And once, it had been. But something had happened to its parent planet, and that world was now an asteroid belt that followed Flebis around on its orbit, keeping it in line with regular beatings. Nessun didn’t know what had happened to the planet. He had his suspicions. They involved what he had brought his children to find on the moon.

Finding where the prize was hidden was easy. There was only one structure on the moon, and it was enormous. It was nestled between two mountain chains, an artificial peak higher than the natural ones on either side. Thunderhawks and drop pods streamed from the launch bays of the Revealed Truth, and the Swords of Epiphany gathered before the sublime. Rodrigo Nessun was the first on the ground, and he was at the forefront of the reconnaissance party that approached the vault.

Nessun wasn’t touched by awe often. When he was, he was thrilled by the experience and fascinated as the emotion ran up and down the components of his being. His consciousness fluctuated between the collective mind that had taken over his body and the echo of the individual he had once been. Most of the time, there was no distinction between them, but when Nessun was in the presence of a source of wonder, the old human re-emerged, astonished into a brief existence.

There was plenty of wonder before him now. The vault’s facade was smooth and raked slightly off the vertical. Apart from a seam revealing the outline of the entrance, the monument appeared to have been created using a single block of stone. It was as if a mountain had been carved into this squat shape, a mountain that did not belong here. The peaks surrounding it were sedimentary. The vault was igneous. The mountains were a light grey, covered in the dust of aeons of meteor strikes, slow erosion, and geological inertness. The vault was dark crimson. It was not made from the material of Flebis, nor from the shattered remains of its planet. Nessun tried to picture the technology required to transport a rock this huge from one system to another. He couldn’t. He tried to picture the warp magic, and thought he might be a bit closer. He thought about the necessary will, and he didn’t have to imagine that. He shared it.

He smiled at the scale of the vault’s features. Its door frame was fifty metres high. Was that a reflection of the builders? What monsters they must have been, he thought, delighted.

Makaiel sounded less thrilled. ‘How are we supposed to get in?’ he asked over the comm-feed.

‘Through strength, determination and power. What we seek will expect and respect no less.’ Nessun used a vox he wore around his neck, but he had no helmet. He didn’t need one, even in the thin atmosphere of Flebis. His chest expanded and contracted out of habit, and he enjoyed the expressiveness of sighs and laughter, but he had not had to breathe for millennia. The perpetual breeze of the moon sliced into his flesh with scalpel cold, dragging his smile wider. He strode forward, reached out and placed the palm of his hand against the seam that ran down the middle of the door. He was touching will embodied in stone. He felt a thrum in the stone, a coiled potential waiting to be unleashed.

Jozef Bisset sat on a level piece of rubble. He was in the shadows, away from the light of the fire and the noise of the dancing. Karl Guevion made his way over the wreckage to the comptroller with a cup of recaff. Bisset took the beverage with his left hand. His right arm was in a sling. It didn’t have to be. The sling was a useful camouflage. The bionics would show through the shreds of clothing and synthetic skin that dangled from the limb. The cloth kept him covered and looking harmless. Best to keep things that way for the time being.

His leap from the collapsing Munitorum palace had taken him to the roof of the next tower over. He had landed rolling. His momentum had brought him to his feet and he’d been up and running again. But he could not outpace ruin, and the palace had fallen against Bisset’s refuge, wounding it fatally. The building had screamed and cried as he leaped down the stairs from landing to landing, but in the end the steps had disappeared beneath his feet and he had fallen, caught in an avalanche of girders and stone.

The landing had been hard, but the wreckage had tented over him as it had come down. For seven days he had squirmed through absolute darkness, several times becoming stuck, again and again narrowly avoiding being crushed as the rubble shifted. At the end of the seventh day, hands had pulled debris away and he had emerged into Aighe Mortis’s brown daylight, blinking like a mole and massively dehydrated. Guevion had been in the rescue party. He had patched Bisset up and given him the sling before anyone else had come near. He was an old man, whether from years or labour, Bisset couldn’t say. His hair was a lank grey, his stubble a salt-and-pepper sandpaper over a wrinkled leather hide. Bisset guessed he had some basic medicae training, and pegged him as a manufactorum patcher – one of those workers whose additional duties consisted in quickly dealing with injuries, keeping the other labourers more or less in one piece and production uninterrupted.

Guevion sat beside Bisset as the comptroller sipped his recaff. ‘You’re Munitorum, aren’t you,’ the man said. It was an observation, not a question. When Bisset didn’t answer, Guevion tapped his shoulder. ‘I recognise what’s left of the uniform.’

‘Good eye.’ There wasn’t much still on his frame, and what there was of it was a dust-caked mess.

‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to give you away.’

Bisset nodded, thankful. The crowd in the street ahead of him was chanting and dancing before the ruins of the Munitorum palace. He knew what would happen if they realised he’d been part of the bureaucracy they had just brought down. He wasn’t feeling suicidal tonight. He was curious, though. ‘Why did you help me?’

Guevion scratched at the bristles on his neck. ‘My little shot at trying to stop things from getting worse. Figured you might be able to get our message out.’

‘Which is?’

‘Just leave us alone. That’s all.’

Bisset shook his head. ‘You can’t be that stupid. This is an insurrection. You know how this is going to end.’

‘Why?’ Guevion pleaded. ‘Why did you have to take so much from us?’

‘There is no “you” and “us,”’ Bisset told him. ‘We are all subjects of the Imperium.’

Guevion carried on as if Bisset hadn’t spoken. ‘You already get plenty of men from us. You could just take all the ones who want to go, and everything would be fine. But no, you have to suck everything away. You take one son. I accept that. You take the other, and who’s going to protect our women from the gangs? Me? And if you’re putting together another regiment, then you’ll be wanting all sorts of productivity up, too, and everything we make gets stripped from us. And what do we get in return?’

‘The Emperor’s protection.’

‘From what? We need protection from you, that’s what we need.’

The conversation was getting loud, even with all the shouts and whoops nearby. Bisset dropped his voice, hoping Guevion would do likewise. ‘You think dropping buildings is going to help your cause?’

Guevion sighed, suddenly a very tired old man. ‘Well…’ he said. ‘Well… I can’t say that was good. No, I can’t. But… Nothing else was making you listen.’

You, Bisset thought. You, you, you. How much of the Mortisian population, he wondered, had this mindset? It was, in its own way, an even more troubling symptom of rebellion than a dozen felled towers. Then, over the noise of the crowd, he heard the rumble of engines and clanking of treads. ‘You have our attention now,’ he said.

Guevion heard what was coming, too. ‘Throne,’ he muttered and stood up. His automatic use of the oath gave Bisset a quick pang of sympathy. He was sorry the old goat was about to die. Guevion scuttled back over the rubble, shouting. The dancing came to a ragged halt. The thunder of approaching Guard grew louder. The rebels grabbed guns and ran for defensive positions. Bisset counted about a hundred people, armed with nothing more impressive than typical Mortisian-make lasrifles. They couldn’t have been the force that had destroyed the Munitorum palace. Whoever had the bigger explosives had moved on in the days since the strike. This lot was just holding a major artery checkpoint and getting drunk. They were going to be slaughtered.

Feeling more than a bit tired and old himself, Bisset stood and worked his way deeper into the ruins, away from the street. No point getting caught in the crossfire. Might as well wait until the Guard had done its duty, and the shooting and the bleeding were over. He’d choose a calm moment to approach a Guardsman who didn’t look too trigger-happy.

The thunder was now the sound of implacable law and unforgiving justice. The stubber rounds, las-fire and cannon shells slammed into the rebel positions before the Imperial Guard came into sight. People screamed. Bodies and debris fountained into the air. Pathetic return fire lanced into the darkness, and then the Emperor’s hammer appeared. Tight ranks of infantry marched ahead of two rows of tanks. The vehicles were three abreast on the road, their flanks almost flush with the building facades. The rear three were Leman Russ battle tanks, and it was their high-explosive rounds that had been punching craters into the ramshackle defences. At first, Bisset thought the first-row vehicles were Hellhounds, but then he spotted the rear-mounted gas chambers. They were Bane Wolves. He scrambled back deeper into the ruins.

The Guardsmen dropped to their knees and let loose another concentrated burst of fire into the rebel lines. Bisset saw more bodies drop, but there was also a steeling of resistance, as if the inevitability of what was coming, through some perverse alchemy, transmuted despair into determination. Then the Guard moved to the side, and the Bane Wolves rolled forward. Bisset saw Guevion illuminated by the fire behind him. He was in the dead centre of the barricades. He had no chance. No one there did. There was no cover from what a Bane Wolf fired. Bisset forced himself to watch, desperately clutching the fact that the defenders were traitors.

The chem cannons opened up, spewing a cloud of gas over the rebels. The gas was the sick green of violent plague and bad death, and its movement was a savage roiling. The screams that reached Bisset’s ears were brief, but unspeakable in their agony. He saw skin liquefy, pouring off bones like candle wax. The screams had a gargling quality as blood boiled in veins and lungs. An entire swath of the street several yards deep was scoured of organic life. The purge was absolute.

The clouds dissipated. Beyond their reach, there were still a handful of rebels. They were routed. In full retreat, they were running down the road away from the Guard, disappearing into the rubble of the palace and down lanes between the buildings that still stood. Bolter and las-fire followed them, cutting more down as they fled. Another couple of minutes, Bisset thought, and this will be over.

There was a flash over his head, and a lascannon shot punched into a Bane Wolf’s gas reservoir. The tank exploded, spreading its angry death for dozens of metres around it. This time, it was the men of the Mortisian Guard whose screams were awful and short, and whose skin was puddling in the road. Bisset’s jaw dropped and he threw himself flat. The Leman Russ’s turret rotated in his direction, and the heavy bolter sponson chugged rounds. The turret hadn’t moved half its arc before a second lascannon beam blasted it from the chassis.

Armoured beings stormed past him. They were terrible, golden angels, and they fell upon the Guard with bolter and chainsword. They savaged the units that had escaped the release of the gas and tore the tanks apart. They were monsters who bore the garb of beauty. They were giants in the service of war turned into art. There were only five of them. There were a hundred times as many Guardsmen, and that was far too few. The battle was even more one-sided than the attack on the rebels had been. Within seconds, hulls had been ripped open, treads yanked from wheels and used as whips, and men scythed into shrieking meat. The Chaos Space Marines stood proudly in the carnage, gods well pleased by their allotment of blood. The surviving rebels emerged from their hiding places. They began to cheer, and the cry was taken up by more and more people pouring into the streets.

In the span of a few seconds, the insurrection on Aighe Mortis had gone, for Bisset, from tragedy to nightmare. Now he had to survive the coming minutes, long enough to tell someone off-planet what he now knew. He glanced behind him. He saw no one. He took one more look at the carnage in the street, then jumped to his feet and ran. Even as he did, he wondered what he thought he was doing. Did he want the enemy to see him? Did he think a mad dash was a smarter escape than a stealthy crawl in the shadows?

He didn’t care. He just wanted space between him and the angels of terror and beauty.

He had covered about a hundred metres when they saw him. The shot came a fraction of a second before the sound of the report. The bolter slug tore a wound in the air just to his right. He started zigzagging. Rounds dug up puffs of debris near his feet. He jerked left, then left again, and this time, the round kissed his cheek. He felt the burn, heard the roar of an angry hornet. He ducked to the right and kept on going.

‘You grazed him,’ Raiel said to Gabrille.

‘I know. Idiot feinted left twice. What kind of strategy is that? He almost ran into my shot.’

Raiel watched the man dwindling in the distance. ‘Maybe give him a couple more.’

Gabrille obliged, then lowered his bolt pistol. ‘That should do,’ he said. ‘Is there a vox for him to use?’

‘They’re scattered about. He’ll find one. He should work for it a little bit, though.’ The Sword’s laughter through his helmet’s grille was a handful of nails and bells. ‘After all, we don’t want it to look too easy.’

In the strategium, Toharan said, ‘With respect, brother-captain, how can there be any question about where duty summons us? The Swords of Epiphany are fomenting insurrection on a planet to which some of us have genetic ties. What could be clearer? We have been made to waste time on this diversionary action here, while the primary target is falling.’

Volos understood what Toharan was saying. He felt the same urge to defend the Chapter’s honour. The Black Dragons had no Chapter world. Or rather, its location and its true name were lost to them. It lived in their legends and collective hopes as Gauntlet, but whether the word stood for the planet, or the test that must be undergone to find it, was unknown. Without that centre and a stable pool for recruitment, the Dragons had been forced to become genetic opportunists, always looking for planets whose environments could produce individuals who were suitable raw material for induction into their ranks. Aighe Mortis, the hive at its most brutal, had given more than one of its sons to the transformation. The planet was not just a useful resource, therefore. The Black Dragons owed it a debt. To lose it to traitors was unthinkable.

But.

‘I don’t think Antagonis was a diversion,’ Volos said.

Epistolary Rothnove looked up from his examination of the star charts Volos had brought to the war council. The Librarian’s skin was a dark grey, and though he bore no horns, bony growths covered his head, twisting and entwining in patterns that resembled runes. His eyes were lost in shadows beneath his jutting brows. ‘What was it, then?’ he asked.

‘What Nessun did here was designed to cause maximum destruction. He wanted us to deploy an Exterminatus bombardment. If we had cracked the planet in half, all the better. Then we would never have been able to use the xenos site, and discover his true objective.’

Vritras said, ‘You contend, then, that Aighe Mortis is not that objective.’

‘No. Aighe Mortis is the diversion. With the doubtworm, Nessun was attempting to cover his tracks.’ He tapped the chart. With the vision from the dig site still vivid in his mind, it had taken him less than an hour to find a match for the star patterns he had seen. ‘Flebis is the target.’

‘You would have us abandon Aighe Mortis?’ Toharan asked. His tone was accusatory, self-righteous.

‘That would be heresy,’ Massorus warned.

‘I am recommending no such thing,’ Volos answered. ‘I am saying that I think we should proceed to Flebis first, counter Nessun there, then return and liberate Aighe Mortis.’

‘We have an eyewitness report of Swords of Epiphany forces in action,’ Toharan spat. ‘But we should ignore that and let the insurrection grow?’

‘We know of one combat squad. What I fear, brothers, is that we might let ourselves be drawn into combat on Aighe Mortis while a worse threat develops on Flebis. If we move on Aighe Mortis too soon, we could be playing into Nessun’s hands, and ensuring that we do lose the planet.’

‘Is this your opinion alone?’ Toharan asked.

Volos hesitated. He could see where Toharan was going with that question, and he wondered why. He couldn’t understand what had happened to his battle-brother. Toharan had been different since the endgame on Antagonis. There was a brittleness to him, a defensive inflexibility. Volos couldn’t shake the impression that either something vital had been stripped away, or something just as important but toxic had risen to the surface. And now he had asked a question to which he clearly knew the answer, in order to score points in some game whose rules Volos wasn’t even interested in knowing. ‘No,’ Volos told him, giving in to the inevitable. ‘Canoness Setheno concurs.’

‘Are we now turning to the Ecclesiarchy for strategic advice?’ Toharan asked.

Volos refused to rise to the bait. He kept his voice calm. ‘We happen to agree. That’s all.’

‘That isn’t–’ Toharan began, but Vritras cut him off.

‘Thank you, brother-sergeant.’ He walked around the strategium table, arms folded, eyes on the charts. ‘Chaplain?’ he asked without looking up.

‘The taint on Aighe Mortis must be purged without delay.’

‘Librarian?’

‘Flebis concerns me. The circumstances are so unusual, we ignore them at our peril.’

Vritras stopped walking and thought for a few moments more. Then he moved to the command throne and faced his assembled officers. ‘We make for Flebis.’

CHAPTER 11

THE PRICE OF ENTRY

‘Surprise,’ Vritras said, ‘is the hope of fools.’

Armour-piercing rounds, grenades, melta bombs. Cannon fire. The Swords of Epiphany had not been gentle with the door of the vault. It had ignored them. It had not opened, and it had not shattered. It wasn’t even scratched. Nessun ran his hand along the unmarred surface. He was impressed. He could almost enjoy the frustration, if only he weren’t so aware of the relentless slipping away of time. ‘This building is a sorcerer,’ he said, and revelled in the further awe of that realisation. The vault was protecting itself with a shield, but not one that had any technological origin. He could feel the warp energies twisting over the stone. The Swords would have to respond with their own sorcery.

Makaiel had been away from his side, speaking to the master of the augurs. Now he returned. ‘A ship has just transitioned into the system,’ he said.

Nessun didn’t say anything at first. He couldn’t find the words. Something had happened that he considered impossible, and he was torn between excitement over the richness of that paradox and anger at the threat. In the end, he expressed his wonder and rage in one sentence. ‘They’ve found us.’

Makaiel was less interested in the philosophical implications of the arrival. He, or the thing that inhabited him, was so boringly pragmatic. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘you cannot remain here.’

Dull, but almost always right. Nessun grimaced in disappointment. He had so hoped to be present when the vault was opened, when its interior was revealed and the great key was found. But the Sword was correct. There was too much at stake, and he was needed elsewhere. The Flebis vault, in all its cyclopean glory, was still only one step. Nessun nodded. ‘You know what to do here,’ he said. ‘Don’t fail me.’

‘The galaxy will hear our song,’ Makaiel promised.

‘Surprise a foe on ground that is known to him and alien to you,’ Vritras said, ‘and you surprise him with his victory. We do not seek surprise. We are Black Dragons. The enemy shall know of our coming and fear it. Let him prepare. Let him look to his defences. All this will grant him is more time to cower in the shadow of our looming verdict. Does he hear the thunder of our charge? Then he knows the sound of his ending. ‘

The Immolation Maw moved on Flebis. The long-range augurs picked up the Revealed Truth in geostationary orbit over the planetoid. The grand cruiser outweighed the Maw in size, weaponry and armour. The strike cruiser had the advantage of speed and manoeuvrability. But that wasn’t the contest Vritras sought yet. He had Helmsman Maro approach Flebis with the moon between the two ships. The Revealed Truth didn’t appear interested in an engagement either. Its engines were powering up, but it didn’t move from its position, and transport craft were dropping from its bulk towards the moon.

Something small, shuttlecraft-sized, took off from Flebis to rendezvous with the Chaos ship. At the same moment, the Immolation Maw fired its drop pods just beyond the horizon from the Revealed Truth. Second Company descended in its rage.

Earth and sky: Vritras’s assault would hammer the traitor in both his refuges. The attack was a closing talon. As the ground forces deployed in the low hills that marked the horizon line, the Maw, in the hands of Maro, accelerated, grazing Flebis’s thin atmosphere as it made its predator run for the underbelly of the Revealed Truth. The strike cruiser whipped over the line, straightening into a climb for its prey.

A prey that was fleeing. Its engines flaring corona-bright, the corrupted monster pulled away from Flebis. The Immolation Maw’s turrets opened up, but the salvo was an expression of frustration rather than strategy. The Truth’s void shields held, and then it was picking up speed, and the choice was pursuit or support of the ground forces. The Maw did not abandon its own. It moved to the Revealed Truth’s former position. It began its scan of the battlefield. The talon closed over the Swords of Epiphany.

On the ground, the Black Dragons worked their way to the hilltops. Toharan was at Vritras’s right hand. He looked over his captain’s shoulder at the data-slate he was holding. Messages and picts transmitted by the Immolation Maw scrolled across the screen. ‘The enemy betrays himself,’ Vritras said. ‘His ship has fled to the warp.’

Makaiel looked up into the Flebis night. He had received his father’s farewell vox message. He saw a concentrated configuration of stars moving, and knew them as the lights of the Imperial ship. He knew that he and his passenger within were staring at their final hours in the materium. But there was work to be done first, and awe to be spread, and he knew, too, that his father did not abandon his children to be pointless sacrifices. They would not be annihilated by orbital bombardment before they could even set foot in the vault. He watched a swarm of fainter stars close in on the cluster. The Revealed Truth had left a gift behind. Squadrons of Doomfire bombers, escorted by Swiftdeath fighters, flashed towards the cruiser, and now it was prey.

The hills overlooked a wide plain. It was perfectly flat, obviously engineered. It was a church square before the vault, a little detail wrought on a giant scale by forces that could look at planets as décor to be shaped and arranged at will. At the far end rose the vault, seeming to shoulder aside the lesser mountain peaks that flanked it. In front of the vault were the massed ranks of the Swords of Epiphany. They formed a golden wall in front of the door. Looking through magnoculars, Toharan saw that not all of the traitors were facing out. Some were doing something to the door, waving their hands and moving in harsh, jerking movements that made him think of spiders and dance. A bit forward of the vault’s facade, some rudimentary trenches had been dug. They were clearly the work of a frantic few hours. So the enemy hadn’t been expecting them. Good.

On the plain itself were the wretched of Chaos. Toharan’s lip curled as he took in the slaves and true-believers and renegade Guardsmen. There were thousands of them, clutching rifles and spears and even clubs, and wearing crude rebreathers. Their clothes, whatever uniform or class costume they once had been, were now the expression of the Epiphany cult. Gold was everywhere, on every torn shred, and it was always a gold that was twisted, light-sucking, diseased. There was also a symbol, sewn into the clothing, inked onto flesh, carved into foreheads: a five-pointed star with rays lancing out from the corners. And in the centre, a spiral that seemed to move if Toharan trained the lenses on it for too long. He lowered the magnoculars and picked up his bolter. ‘A lot of open space,’ he said. ‘No cover.’

‘Yes,’ Vritras agreed. ‘They will have nowhere to hide from us.’

Toharan laughed, though he caught himself hoping that it wasn’t bravado or recklessness speaking through Vritras. He banished the thought. He didn’t agree with many of Vritras’s decisions, but he had no cause to question the captain’s tactical wisdom. Vritras had led Second Company to too many victories for that sort of doubt.

Vritras turned to Massorus. ‘Brother-Chaplain, we are ready. Brother Kommodor, raise our standard.’

Kommodor did as Vritras ordered, and Massorus began to speak. ‘Warriors of fire and bone!’ he cried. ‘See what pestilence awaits the purging flame of our wrath! March in their midst with holy violence. To the foul and the faithless, bring the Emperor’s truth. To the treacherous and the corrupt, show them the only mercy they deserve. Show the finality of death without redemption. Cast them into the tomb of infinite pain. Throw them to the eternal darkness beyond the Emperor’s light. For Antagonis!’

‘For Antagonis!’ came the shout. It was a full-throated roar, made monstrous in its volume and rage by helm speakers. It rose from Squads Pythios and Nychus, Neidris and Lanx. And then justice charged down the hill.

Four squads. Just under half of Second Company’s full strength, and not one of its precious few land vehicles deployed. Vritras had held back squads on the Immolation Maw for possible boarding action against the Revealed Truth. Now forty Space Marines slammed into thousands of the warp-corrupted, about to fight their way over a kilometre of open ground towards the entrenched position of the god-warriors of Chaos. It was, Toharan thought, as he gave himself over to the fury of war, a good day.

With no home world, the Dragons had no infrastructure to produce and properly maintain vehicles. Those they had were for ultimate measures. But what did they need with vehicles when each Space Marine was a main battle tank with legs? Vritras’s spearhead began its destruction of the enemy with fire from the rear. The Devastators of Squad Lanx unleashed their heavy bolters. Rounds with the destructive punch of artillery shells tore the cultists apart. A trench opened up in the enemy. The Dragons poured into it, gouging deeper into the formation. Command squad Nychus was the tip of the spear. Vritras was the sharp edge, leading his men into the sundered flesh of the foe. Toharan followed with Massorus, Rothnove, and Apothecary Urlock. Massorus’s litany of salvation and destruction became more rabid with every swing of his crozius. For all its fury, language could not express the depth of his disgust with the heretics, and his religious outrage found outlet in the obliteration of the unholy. Rothnove, meanwhile, seemed calm. The Librarian was silent, but shouted all the same. His anger crackled in the bolts of warp energy that shot from his hands and incinerated the heretics.

Canoness Setheno strode beside Massorus. She was as silent as Rothnove, and if she felt, as Toharan thought she must, hatred for the enemy, it was visible only in the frozen scream of her helmet, and in the savage, spare precision with which she dispatched the cultists to hell. She fired her bolt pistol with her left hand, and in her right was her power sword. It sliced through bodies with the hiss of the sacred.

Just behind, and spread out a bit further, came the rest of Squad Nychus: five warriors in Terminator armour. They were juggernauts who crushed and pulped the foe and barely noticed that they did so. And behind them came Tactical squads Pythios and Neidris, widening the swath of destruction and beginning to train their fire on the Chaos Space Marine positions ahead.

The cultists didn’t try to defend themselves. They threw themselves against the Dragons. The chattel of the Sword were joyous as they fought and died. Consumed by faith, many of them were smiling right up to the moment Toharan shot them in the face or decapitated them. The Black Dragons’ advance was steady and measured. The cultists were little more than a morass that had to be waded through.

They were enough. The spearhead was a concentrated, slow-moving target. The squads were halfway across the plain when the psyker attack hit. It was a steady barrage of energy blasts that were Chaos itself. They dragged claws down the veil of reality, rending its flesh, making it bleed. Colours that screamed and sounds that blinded erupted over the squads. Brother Reprobus took a direct hit to the breastplate. The Terminator staggered, but kept walking and firing. His armour cracked, the ceramite twisting itself into a spiral, but it held.

‘The traitors attack with the taint of the warp!’ Massorus shouted. ‘Deny it and all its works! Feel the Emperor’s steady hand and brush aside the shape of lies!’

They couldn’t brush aside what screamed their way now. The sorcerous bolt was enormous, rolling, hungry. It devoured cultists as it came, and its howling murder of the real only grew stronger. ‘Evade!’ Vritras yelled and the spearhead split, its advance stopped as the Dragons threw themselves out of the way of the ball of insanity. Reprobus, slower in his armour, already wounded, took the bolt full-on. It smashed through the cracks in the ceramite and blew his breastplate wide open. He began to transform. Ripples over his body grew to a storm of flesh and bone, and his entire frame became a liquid flow of endless mutation. An arm became a claw, and then a mouth, and then a head, and then sprouting, bubbling tumours. His armour sloughed off. And through it all, as his physical identity shifted, split, multiplied and vanished, he roared, his pain and anguish transmuted into battle rage. He plunged forward a few steps, flailing. He smothered cultists with his shifting flesh until his legs vanished and he fell. For a moment, his head was visible again, eyes wide with a terrible hope as they turned to look for his brothers. Vritras answered that hope with his bolter, granting Reprobus the Emperor’s Peace.

‘Exterminate the sorcerers!’ Massorus yelled. His shout was drowned out by a nerve-scraping shriek. It was the cry of a hawk paralysing its prey. It was the inhuman shout of Raptors. The Chaos assault unit had been held back somewhere in the mountain slopes, Toharan realised. Now, jump packs fuelling their flight, the warriors tore into the Dragons. Toharan had fought Raptors before, and was used to the mutations and body modifications that turned them into mirrors of their namesakes. The Sword Raptors were different. Though they struck with lightning claws, the gauntlet-mounted blades that were a Raptor fetish, they had not altered their feet into talons. With the oily gold of their armour and the huge arch of the jump packs, their span spread to resemble iron wings, the warriors weren’t birds. They were angels who didn’t know they had fallen.

One Raptor slammed into Massorus like a beatific meteor. The two Space Marines, bright traitor and dark loyalist, rolled together. The Raptor sank his claws into Massorus’s gorget. The Chaplain held on to his crozius and smashed it against the side of the Sword’s skull.

Another tried to land on Toharan’s shoulders. He heard the shriek, sensed the rush of the strike’s wind, and sidestepped. The Raptor hit the ground in a crouch. Toharan fired his bolter at the jump pack’s fuel reservoir. Multiple rounds struck in the second before the Raptor could rise. Promethium exploded, wrapping the traitor in flame. He shrieked and leaped at Toharan. The blasting fuel knocked him off-balance and he missed, his claws slashing empty air. Toharan swung his chainsword into the back of the Raptor’s neck, chewing through armour and severing spinal cord.

The creature fell, but then Toharan was crouching low as heavy bolter fire scorched the air above his head. More blasts of Chaos energy rained in, and the Raptors kept slashing. Massorus had pulped his opponent’s head, but another had managed to tear off the helmet of Brother Demorgon of Squad Neidris. The Raptor punched his claws into Demorgon’s eyes.

The spearhead had stopped advancing. Cultists pressed in, making an offering of their bodies and holding the Dragons while the Swords of Epiphany cut at them, piece by piece.

The closing of a dragon’s talon did not mean attacks from just two sides. The grip of a dragon punctured its prey on at least three. Vritras’s talon had lost one angle of attack as the Immolation Maw fought off bombers and fighters. The second was stymied. But there was a third. It was the stabbing thrust.

Standard Codex doctrine called for assault squads to be deployed in deep strikes at the start of an engagement to destabilise an enemy before the main attack flattened him. The simple geometry and absolute bulk of the vault, coupled with the size and strength of the defending force, blurred the line between dogma and pointless sacrifice. And the Black Dragons were not a Codex Chapter. Vritras had held back the thrust. It came now.

The Doomfires unleashed punishing payloads against the Immolation Maw’s void shields. The massive ship couldn’t outmanoeuvre the bombers and their escorts, but the turret fire held the worst of the attacks at bay and whittled down the pack. Maro kept the strike cruiser in motion, and hit his second waypoint. He fired one more drop pod. The Dragon Claws landed in the mountains, on the opposite side of the battlefield from the rest of the squads. They raced towards the vault. Though it loomed higher than the mountains, its roof was still within jump pack reach from the top of the nearest peak. When Volos came down on the roof, the surface beneath his boots was odd. It was smooth as metal, as bedrock solid as any mountain, and yet he felt like he was walking on writhing worms. He grounded each step, careful to keep his balance.

‘This is not a healthy place,’ Nithigg observed.

‘It will feel even worse by the time we’re done with it,’ Volos replied and led the way to the roof edge. The slope to the ground was near vertical and as smooth as the roof. The Dragon Claws had a complete view of the battlefield. They saw the Raptors descend on their brothers. They saw the disposition of the Swords’ defensive positions. They saw the perfect angle of attack.

Vasuk’s bone-blades, like Volos’s, were retractable, and now he extended them, eager for flesh. ‘An open invitation,’ he said.

‘Then we should accept.’ Volos launched himself into the air.

They struck the centre of the Swords’ rear line. They were fire and darkness come to crush and smother the light of false gods. As he plunged, Volos unleashed the fury of his bolter, pinning his target to the ground, blasting away chunks of armour and gouts of blood. In the last second, he mag-locked the gun to his thigh and landed with bone-blades extended. He punctured the traitor’s primary heart and throat, destroying not just his life but his progenoid glands, erasing the legacy of the Sword forever.

He straightened, drawing his gun again and firing on the Sword manning the heavy bolter. The traitor grunted but stayed at his post, swinging the turret around. Volos ducked under the sweep of the barrel and rammed the Sword, horns catching the foe under the arm, cutting through the seam of the armour and slicing deep into his shoulder joint. He lifted the Sword off his feet, grabbed him and whirled him against the door of the vault. The Sword slumped, stunned, and Volos pumped mass-reactive rounds into him until he was motionless.

Something began to hum. It was a deep sound, its frequency far below what a human ear could detect, but Volos’s Lyman’s ear heard it clearly. Then a huge blow knocked him sideways.

Makaiel was grappling with an Imperial, the two of them caught in an immobilising stalemate. Over the shoulder of the Black Dragon, he saw Ecanus shot to pieces against the door. He heard the hum. He also saw a change in the door. It was slight, but the seam that ran the height of the entrance was more pronounced, as if the two halves had parted less than the breadth of a hair. And so he knew what to do, now that it might be too late.

No. It wasn’t too late. He lived, his vow was unfulfilled, and there was so much truth yet to propagate.

He let his knees buckle and he fell backward, dragging his opponent with him. He kicked up as they hit the ground, and knocked the Dragon over his head. Makaiel had lost his bolter during the grapple, but his pistol was still at his side. He rolled away, drew the pistol and fired. The bolts struck the Dragon in the shoulder as he rose, spinning him around and knocking him away from the vault and into the teeming plain. Cultists swarmed over him.

‘Drive them back!’ Makaiel yelled. ‘In the name of our Father, drive them back!’

The Chaos bolts pummelled Volos. Damage runes lit up in his retinal lenses. Corrupt energy crackled and cackled over him, and the force of the hits felt as if he’d been punched by a Dreadnought. He stumbled back but kept his feet, and looked for his enemy. The sorcerer had risen from one of the rudimentary trenches the traitors had dug. He was in a direct line with the Dragon spearhead, and Volos saw the scorch marks of madness on the rock of the plain and on the avenue of bodies that ran from the sorcerer to the stalled spearhead.

Volos dropped flat and the worst of the bolts passed over his head. The sorcerer stopped his attack. Volos scrabbled forward and pushed himself up with his arms, moving to a crouch and then a leap, a burst of his jump pack turning him into a comet of hate aimed at the sorcerer. He flew at the traitor, blades out and thirsty for heretic gore. But the sorcerer had already cast another spell. He seemed to flicker in and out of being, and his movements were blurred, almost invisible with speed. It was as if Volos’s leap were being dragged through a morass of time, each second stretched to an endless hour. Volos had a momentary impression of the sorcerer bringing his hands together, and then pushing his palms out, fingers splayed.

Up! Volos’s intuition howled.

Another burst from the jump pack, popping him up, destroying the arc of his leap and spoiling the angle of attack. But the sorcerer clicked back into stable reality, and from his hands came a ball of nightmare, rolling over the ground to meet Volos. He flew over the inferno of change, but his blades caught the outer edge of the spell. He felt a shift, a fusing of chance and fate. Then he was on the sorcerer, and when he swung a blade, it sliced through the sorcerer’s gorget like an afterthought and sent the traitor’s head flying.

Volos blinked and looked at the blades protruding from his wrists. The adamantium and the bone had run together. The blades were shaded like limestone, and veined like marble. They were something different now, and when he retracted them, he half-expected them to shoot up his arms and into his brain. The moment of agony was worse than before. Otherwise, he felt no different.

His attention returned to the battlefield. Nithigg was dispatching another sorcerer. Vasuk was down, just before a trench, but dragging himself up again. The Dragon Claws had been pushed back from the immediate area of the doorway, but the psyker attacks had ceased, and the heavy bolter was silent. The Raptors were down. The spearhead was moving again.

Volos bared his fangs behind his helmet grille. The traitor line was broken. A concentrated push now and they would crush the Swords against the wall.

The cultists were routed, too. The robed disciples were fleeing the field, running pell-mell to the vault, brushing past the Swords and heading straight to the door. The Swords must have sounded the retreat, Volos thought as he began to charge the few dozen metres back to the vault. He wondered where the heretics thought they would retreat to, and he almost felt sorry for the fools in their final seconds before being slaughtered.

Most of the Swords of Epiphany were sending a shredding hail of bolter fire at the attackers. Volos crouched low as he ran, and he took some hits, but the defence wasn’t enough to stop the Dragons, only slow them a few seconds. Then he realised that the other Swords weren’t even looking at him or his brothers. They were watching the cultists pile up near the door. He saw what was about to happen, and ran faster because he knew he must stop it, and knew also that he was far too late.

The clamour of bolters and grenades echoed off the face of the vault. Nessun’s faithful died by the dozens. Their blood splashed up the sides of the door. The hum became a staggering blow, a seismic vibration that tried to bring Volos to his knees. Static filled the readouts on his retinal lenses. He forced himself to keep moving, though his head was filled with electric agony. The hum became a rumble that seemed to spread from inside his skull, down through his feet and into the earth itself. Then the ground really was shaking as the mammoth doors opened like twin mountains grinding apart.

The Swords of Epiphany charged over the corpses of their disciples and disappeared into the vault.

CHAPTER 12

OH, WHISTLE, AND IT WILL COME

The Black Dragons regrouped at the entrance. The urge was to race after the traitors, guns blazing. There had been a toll of brothers’ blood paid, and a debt in kind was owed. But the vault was not going to make pursuit easy.

The doorway opened onto an immense chamber, hundreds of metres high. The interior was lit by a glow that had no discernible source, as if the light simply floated inside the structure. The glow was the dark red of an infected throat. The diseased architecture also resembled a throat. The walls were slightly concave, and rose to a curved ceiling. The chamber was ribbed, and there was a smooth, curved softness to the protrusions, suggesting not the rigidity of bone but the pillowing of flesh. The floor had a single groove running down the centre, and on either side there was a low, curving rise. It was a tongue. The hall followed a gradual downhill slope for at least a kilometre, and then appeared to hit a sharp drop. There was no sign of the Swords of Epiphany. They were gone, leaving only the echoes of their march behind. The acoustics of the chamber played havoc with the echoes, bouncing the sounds around and redirecting them, amplifying and distorting them. The echoes were so loud, it was as if the traitors were present, and Volos looked over his shoulder for a moment when the thud-clang beat of boots on the stone-metal of the vault’s surface appeared to come from behind. The echoes weren’t dying off. They were self-perpetuating and self-generating. The sound built on itself until there were no distinguishing individual footsteps. The din became a single, space-filling tone. It seemed to Volos that it was just about to develop an actual melody when it cut out and silence returned with the blow of a fist.

‘Where are they?’ Toharan wondered.

‘Past that drop,’ Melus said.

‘But how did they get there so fast?’ Volos wanted to know. The Dragons had been barely thirty seconds behind the Swords. The traitors couldn’t have covered the distance that stretched ahead so quickly.

Rothnove crouched and examined the floor. He reached a hand out. Energy crackled between his palm and the surface. ‘There is a current,’ he said.

‘Of what kind?’ Vritras asked.

The Librarian shook his head. ‘I don’t know. There is warp magic here, and it is more ancient than anything I have ever encountered. It is dangerous, but there isn’t the same quality of malignity as I would expect. It is more…’

‘Indifferent,’ Setheno said.

Rothnove straightened. ‘Exactly. We are beneath notice.’

Under his breath, Massorus began to recite the Liturgy of the Eternal Purge. It was a hymn praising the eradication of all that was not of and for the Emperor.

‘If it thinks we are beneath notice, then it should learn it has erred,’ Volos said. He stepped through the doorway and onto the floor. The insect writhing he had felt on the roof was much stronger, and he felt a tug towards the interior of the vault. It was as if he were setting foot into the shallows of a fast-moving river, and in another few steps he would be out of his depth. He looked back at the rest of Second Company massing at the entrance. They weren’t moving. They were statues. Massorus had an arm raised in mid-gesture of anathema. As Volos watched, Massorus’s fist moved a few centimetres down. Volos walked back to the entrance, and he was pressing against a force strong as a focused gale. When he crossed the threshold, Massorus brought his fist down the rest of the way.

‘You have never moved that quickly, brother,’ Nithigg said. ‘We could barely see you.’

‘There’s a chronal distortion effect,’ Volos said. ‘Time moves much more quickly in there than out here.’

‘That is warp space,’ Rothnove pronounced.

Volos looked back at it. ‘It seems unusually stable.’

‘The words “usual” and “unusual” have no meaning in the warp. It is simply what it happens to be.’

‘But how am I still alive? There’s no Geller field present.’

‘There must be some equivalent. Whatever beings constructed this vault, they had to be able to use it. This structure was not spat out from the warp spontaneously.’

‘It doesn’t matter how it arrived here,’ Vritras said. ‘Nor how it works. We have wasted enough time.’ He turned to Urlock. ‘How do we stand?’

‘Two of the Claws dead,’ the Apothecary answered. ‘Four more from the spearhead.’

‘Injuries.’

‘None incapacitating.’

Vritras nodded, then voxed the Maw. ‘Helmsman, status,’ he said.

‘All threats neutralised, captain. We sustained some damage, but all critical ship facilities are intact.’

‘Good.’ Vritras looked at his four squads. ‘Brothers,’ he announced, ‘before us lies madness and death. Let it be the enemy’s madness brought on by the fear we bring, and let it be his death.’ He raised his chainsword high. ‘Fire and bone!’ he roared, and his men shouted their answer.

‘Bless the curse!’ Massorus called, and the prayer was repeated.

The squads reformed as they entered the vault. The echoes started up again. Vritras took the point of the spearhead once more. The Dragon Claws advanced just to the right of the main body, waiting for the orders to strike out ahead. The air seemed to thicken as they moved deeper into the chamber. Volos’s helm readouts blinked on and off erratically, but if he could believe them when they were present, the temperature was rising. Second Company made good progress down the massive hall. Volos again thought of a deep river’s dangerous current. The vault was too eager to welcome them inside.

‘Brother-sergeant,’ Vritras said over the vox, ‘how much of a lead do the Traitors have?’

‘Based on the time dilation I saw,’ Volos answered, ‘several hours.’

‘Then they will have prepared for our coming.’

The Black Dragons reached the drop. The hall curved sharply for another hundred metres. Then the floor fell away while the ceiling, still high above, levelled out. At the lip, they looked out over a vast bowl, at least as big below the ground as the superstructure of the vault was above. Rising from the base of the bowl was a forest of monstrous pipes. Each was about ten metres in diameter, and their heights varied from a few hundred metres to a thousand. They appeared to be made of the same substance as the vault, the same crimson igneous rock that rang like metal. They looked twisted, as if a giant hand had turned them round and round while their stone was still molten, then yanked them to a pained vertical. They were the voices of a titanic pipe organ.

‘Can you feel it?’ Vritras asked.

Volos could. There was movement in the air. It was slow, and shouldn’t have been detectable through power armour, but it was also strong, suggesting the motion of something vast. There were also distinct, conflicting, alternating flows. The thick breeze pushed towards the mouths of the pipes for the space of about five seconds. There was a pause, and then air would be expelled from the pipes for about the same span of time. The organ was breathing.

Linking the pipes was a network of scaffolding and catwalks that criss-crossed all the way down to the ground. The lattice was a delicate tracery of crimson, a spiderweb of stone. From this height, the thin, woven bridges didn’t look strong enough to support any weight at all.

‘Auspex?’ Vritras asked.

‘Multiple readings starting at the edge of range,’ Toharan reported. ‘About a third of the way down. They’re using the pipes as cover.’

‘Mark them,’ Vritras ordered, and Toharan’s auspex results flashed to the company. Volos noted the positions as they appeared in his lenses. ‘There are the first ambushes,’ Vritras continued. ‘Neutralise them. Expand and contract the talon. Show no mercy, brothers. I expect total extermination.’

Expand the talon: spread out and encircle the enemy. Contract the talon: concentrate fire from multiple sides and regroup, obliterating the surrounded foe. The spearhead formation on this network was pointless, little more than an inviting target for a knock-out blow from the Swords.

The squads split into five-man teams as they dropped onto the bridges. They fanned out into the network. Then they began the descent. They were three levels down when the Swords began to fire.

Toharan used the pipes as cover, sprinting from one to the next with the rest of the command team. The bridges had no railings, no defensive potential at all, and they were only a couple of metres wide. To move in the open, between the pipes, was to be completely exposed. The Dragons placed their faith in speed and armour. Glancing shots smacked Toharan’s ceramite, but the damage was minor and his momentum kept him running in a straight line. The assailant continued to fire, compounding his mistake. He was remaining in one place. He was giving away his position to every Dragon team, and they were all on the move, a fluid, adaptive doom descending on the traitors.

At the next pipe, a ramp led the Space Marines down another level. They were closing on the nearest Swords. Vritras pointed at the span ahead of them, and Toharan saw the opportunity. All of the squad did. Vritras didn’t even have to signal his intent. His brothers had fought so many battles together, they responded to the battlefield as a single entity. Toharan exulted in the precision and art of the war machine he had joined. His elevation to Nychus was still fresh, but he found his instincts and actions meshing with the collective will of the squad as smoothly as if he had been there for a century. How do you like your second choice, captain? he thought as they paused, waiting for their moment.

Halfway across the bowl and one level up, a team from Squad Pythios, now led by Melus, rained bolter-rounds on the Swords’ position. The traitors fired back. Their attention was drawn away from Nychus. The Swords had no choice, and they had no chance. They could not ignore Pythios’s threat. If they did, Melus and his brothers would cut them to pieces. Instead, that honour fell to the command team. That was the perfection of the Dragon talons: lethal claws on both sides, no possible defence.

Vritras charged down the bridge, Toharan and the rest of the team at his heels. Midway across, the span passed over another directly below. They leaped. As he fell, Toharan had a split-second view straight down into the bowl. The structure of the lattice wasn’t random. The intersecting lines and angles formed runes, and they stabbed at his eyes. He landed and kept moving as he blinked away the seared image.

The Swords were next to a pipe three metres from where the Dragons landed. The traitors had their backs to them. Nychus tore into them. It was ugly, brutal, satisfying. Toharan two-handed his chainsword and stabbed it down into the throat and chest of his target as the Chaos Space Marine turned around. The teeth chewed through ceramite and flesh. The sword caught, whining, on the reinforced shell of the traitor’s ribcage. The Sword of Epiphany struck at Toharan, but the impact of the attack had made him drop his weapons, and his fists were uncoordinated, his wounds already disabling him. Toharan leaned on his blade, and the weapon cracked through the bone, chewing up the hearts beneath.

Toharan sensed a blur of motion at his back. He dropped with the Sword’s corpse as it fell. A power whip snapped the air where his head had been with a flash of blue energy. Toharan spun, prone, pulled the bolt pistol from his side and fired up. He emptied the magazine into the traitor’s face. The helmet shattered and the Sword jerked backwards. He stumbled one step too many and plummeted off the edge of the bridge. He disappeared without a sound.

Toharan stood. The ambush point had been purged. Vritras gave his men a nod and they took off again, already taking fire from another Sword position. They had their next target.

Justice, Volos thought, must taste like blood. He knew that was what it smelt like. He was covered in justice. It had jetted over his armour again and again as he and his team of five Claws massacred their way down into the depths of the bowl. This was an arena made to order for their style of war.

The Dragon Claws flew from level to level. Manoeuvring with the jump packs was tight in the cat’s cradle of bridges, but they knew the force of the engines and the arc of their trajectories as they knew their own bodies, and they had flown through narrower webs than this. They waited for a group of Swords to open fire, then streaked in. They landed on top of each target like a Titan’s wrecking ball. Volos sensed an unspoken contest developing to see how many traitors each Claw could smash and knock from their perches on initial contact.

He had missed his mark with the enemy he fought now. Volos’s blow threw the Sword against the pipe, hard enough to jar his helmet loose. The traitor bounced back and recovered instantly, swinging his chainaxe on the return. Volos dodged, but took a ringing blow to the head from the side of the blade. He snarled and thrust with his bone-blades. The traitor impaled himself on them. The blades plunged through the armour and into his body as if they were power swords. There were implications that Volos didn’t like, but he suppressed all thought of them, and redirected his worry into a killing rage. He yanked his arms wide, tearing the Sword apart. Justice splattered him. He wiped it from his lenses. ‘Next!’ he yelled.

‘There,’ Nithigg pointed. Two levels down, towards the north side of the bowl, behind a pipe: a stream of las-fire streaking up at one of the Squad Neidris teams.

‘On me,’ Volos said, and jumped. He heard the other packs fire a second behind his as the team followed. They flew straight for the target pipe, whipped around it and came down on the catwalk.

There was no fire team of Swords. There was only an auto-turret. Volos kicked it over the edge and looked around. ‘Where–?’ he began.

The thing came down on top of him. It must have been clinging to the underside of the bridge one level up. It had once been a Sword of Epiphany. Perhaps it thought it still was. It still wore the armour, though there were huge chunks missing, as if the thing had burst through the plate. It wore no helmet, and its face was lit by the beatific smile of a being who knows a great truth and would be happy to share. Its skin was the same gold as its armour. It was huge, half again as big as Volos, and its features had been twisted by the warp into a grotesque patchwork. One eye was twice the size of the other and perched halfway up the forehead. The nose was long and tapered, like a snout. Even its arms were mismatched. The hand that held a chainaxe was normal in size, ridiculous compared to the rest of him. The other arm ended in a gigantic, chitinous claw. It was as if the creature had been holding an entire colony of daemons in its body, and now they were all bursting out, a hellish metastasis.

The monster yelled something at him. Perhaps it made sense in the thing’s language. All Volos heard was inarticulate nonsense. But he also heard the joy, and knew he had been told something the monster thought was wonderful. Then it struck. The pincer locked around Volos’s head and began to squeeze. Warning runes flashed as the pressure increased. The chainaxe came down on his helm. The runes went red, then died in static. He tried to knock the creature off, but it held him fast. Its tail was wrapped around his legs. Braxas brought his bone-blades, jutting forward from just below his elbow, down at the monster’s head, but its reflexes were warp-honed. Its tail yanked itself from Volos’s legs and whipped across Braxas’s chest, knocking him off-balance. He tumbled from the catwalk.

The possessed Space Marine hit Volos again, and his helmet snapped in half. The two sections fell away, exposing his face. He spat acid into the monster’s eyes. It howled and dropped its axe, clawing at its eyes. The grip of the pincer loosened. Volos jerked free, twisted, and brought his arm down, blade extended, severing the claw limb at the elbow. Blind and howling, the monster stumbled and flailed, its blood spraying in a wide arc. Volos took the thing’s head off.

Braxas had stopped his fall with a burst of his jump pack and landed back on the bridge. The whole team was present. Volos scanned for their next target. He happened to look up first, and so he saw the disaster happen.

Another nest cleared. They were better than halfway down the bowl now, and the purge had momentum. Toharan had seen three more identification runes turn red, three more brothers killed. He had seen Brother Bumalin’s body plummet past, head missing. But the tally was heavily in the Dragons’ favour. They were scouring the Swords of Epiphany from Flebis. A wave of burning purity was descending the bowl of the vault. This felt right. This was what he was made for: tracking down whatever was tainted and extinguishing it.

The Nychus team descended another ramp. The bridge skirted a pipe immediately ahead, and then soared out into the middle of the bowl, leaving a gap dozens of metres wide on both sides between it and the nearest pipes. Zero cover, zero interest. There was a staircase twisting back and forth next to the pipe and down to the next level. There the bridge spans were short and cut from pipe to pipe. But the auspex said there was an enemy on this level, just on the other side of the pipe. A stupid position. Toharan would be happy to explain the error to the Sword.

The Sword didn’t wait. He left his position and sprinted down the bridge. Vritras, out in front, followed, Toharan a breath behind. The others were a second slower. ‘There’s something wrong,’ Rothnove said.

As he spoke, his words became truth. The Sword stopped running in the middle of the bridge. Toharan’s instincts screamed a warning, and he and Vritras slowed down. The Sword’s armour collapsed as the creature inside poured itself out. If it had ever been even partly human, it was no longer. It was a pink, boneless pool of flowing muscle. Its many mouths giggled.

‘A trap,’ Vritras said. ‘Back!’

Toharan turned, but he had known from the daemon’s laughter that it was already too late.

Melta charges went off at either end of the bridge. Outside the vault, where subjects of the materium had hammered pointlessly at a construction based in the warp, they would have had no effect. But inside the vault, the melta bombs were of the same realm as the bridge’s stone, and things were different. The terrible flash happened. In that split second, half-formed thoughts tumbled through Toharan’s mind. He saw the fall of the bridge to Lexica. There was a bitter taste of symmetry and fate. Then there was nothing beneath his feet but air.

Squad Nychus fell.

Setheno didn’t head back when Vritras yelled. Instead, she jumped. It wasn’t quite a leap of faith. The last of those was well in her past. She was at the rear of the team, closest to the pipe. Down and to her left was another span. She leaped for it.

The explosion was a scorching hurricane blast. It buffeted her, shoving her through the air with a giant’s incandescent hand. Her armour smoked, its purity seals ignited, and she careened, out of control, not to the bridge but to the pipe. She felt ribs shatter on impact. Her right shoulder popped out of its joint. Beneath her, as she fell, the bridge came up. She was going to miss it. She threw out her right arm and hooked it through the web of the bridge surface as she passed. The yank was agonising. Setheno dangled, a broken doll, as the worst happened below.

Volos saw them drop. The entire command team, plummeting past him into the crimson glow below. He shot after them, using the jump pack to accelerate his descent, ignoring the fire from the remaining Sword emplacements. He decelerated at the last moment. Toharan had smashed into scaffolding half a dozen metres up from the floor of the bowl. He was writhing, impaled on the wreckage. The rest of the team lay broken on the ground, at the mercy of the group of traitors who stood there. Volos descended on the renegades with a roar, but a ball of Chaos energy hit him in the chest and took him down.

Makaiel lowered his hand, the vibrations of the spell still travelling up and down his arm. The enormous Dragon fell to earth with a crash. The rest of his assault team was right behind, and engaged with Makaiel’s brothers. They would be busy. He had the time to do what was necessary. He turned to the object that stood in the centre of the floor. He wished his father was here to see this. Nessun would have been delighted by the impossibility. All of the pipes narrowed at their base and joined together in a tube barely a centimetre wide. The tube ran into a plinth twice Makaiel’s height. The plinth was the same crimson rock as the rest of the vault, but in the centre was a clear, crystalline block. He had been hammering at it with his force staff since arriving, and he had almost reached the prize within. He struck another two blows, channelling all of his psychic force to the end of the staff, where the serpentine symbol of Tzeentch glowed. The block shattered. The prize was his.

He was reaching for it when he felt something grab his leg. He looked down and saw that the Dragon captain had survived the fall. Both legs smashed, spine no doubt broken, he had dragged himself to Makaiel and had pulled a gladius from its sheath. Makaiel laughed.

Volos fought unconsciousness. He rose to his knees. He was aware of combat all around him. His vision cleared, and he saw Vritras at the feet of the traitor, and the traitor was laughing. Anger gave him strength and focus, and he was on his feet. He had lost his bolter in the fall. He didn’t need it. His body was the blade of the Emperor. He charged.

The Sword of Epiphany did not turn his staff on Vritras. Instead, he reached into a cavity in the plinth, and withdrew an object. It was about the length of his palm, and roughly tubular, though covered in short, twisted protrusions. It resembled a fossilised centipede. The Sword wore no helmet. His face was a nightmare of raw, oozing meat twisted into spirals, and beneath the surface of its flayed skin, other, worse faces moved and struggled. But his eyes were a terrible, beautiful blue, and they shone with ultimate joy and triumph as he raised one end of the object to his lips. He blew.

There are sounds too big to be heard. This was one. Volos heard nothing. Nothing at all. As if out of awe at the enormity of what had occurred, the entire universe observed a second of silence. And through that terrible, absolute silence, Volos could feel what had happened, what had been so loud as to murder all sound. The pipes of the vault had given voice to something awful. The vault had sung. The games of echoes and threatened melody that he had heard and sensed at ground level had been but the hint of what the structure had been designed to do. Worse yet than the immense, silent song was its effect. Volos sensed a fundamental shift. Something in the materium altered. The Sword’s simple act had consequences that touched the core of being. For the moment of the silence, Volos could do nothing. Nor could anyone else. All combat around him ceased.

The moment passed. Space Marines struggled to the death once more. Volos was again running towards his felled captain and the traitor.

Vritras struck with his gladius. Even in his critical state, the blow might have injured the Sword, but he was slowed by his wounds. The Chaos Space Marine stepped aside from the thrust, and raised his staff. His eyes were shining with such enormous joy that he barely seemed to be paying attention to his adversary. Still, when he brought the staff down, he did so with the power of centuries upon centuries of honed skill. The writhing sickle end flashed red as it stabbed deep into Vritras’s head.

There was nothing but rage for Volos then. The world was a wash of black-streaked scarlet, with his prey illuminated in lightning silver. He was upon the sorcerer as he lifted his staff. It flashed again, and something hit Volos’s chest hard enough to fracture ceramite, but it didn’t stop him. He crashed into the Sword, who fell against the plinth. The sorcerer raised his hand and a vortex of strobing, cancerous light engulfed Volos. It reached through his eyes, into his skull. It spoke to his body and demanded that it change. It shouted the promise and freedom of formlessness, the emancipation from shape. It demanded he let go. Pain lacerated his frame as his bones sought dissolution. He blocked their escape. He held on to his self through sheer will, and rejected the light with the force of his rage. He pulled back his arm, and the movement took an age, but it was his movement and his arm. He expelled the light from his body, pushed it back and back until it was an envelope surrounding him. He was whole. His consciousness and will focused to the jagged adamantine bone that burst from his wrists, and he was the Emperor’s blade.

He thrust his arm forward, and time was his again, and his action had the speed of war. He drove the blade through the sorcerer’s mouth and out the back of his head. Teeth rattled against the plinth. The sorcerer slumped, suspended on the blade. Volos pulled the bone back inside, and the body collapsed.

Panting, Volos turned from the dead traitor and faced the aftermath. The other Swords were dead. The Dragon Claws were still standing, their body language as haggard as he felt. The gunfire from the other levels had ceased. The other teams were arriving, and with them came more despair. Brother Volturious of the Terminators carried the decapitated body of Standard-Bearer Kommodor, who had been leading the other half of Squad Nychus. Volos tore his eyes from that further loss to see Melus supporting Setheno. Qanel and Graal from Pythios worked to free Toharan. No one said anything.

They had won. The Black Dragons had exterminated the Swords of Epiphany on Flebis. Volos stared at the motionless Apothecary, Chaplain, and Librarian. He made himself look again at the corpse of the standard-bearer. Then at Vritras. There was bile in the back of his throat as he foresaw the dark times looming for his Chapter. And that was the darkness he knew about.

What he didn’t know was what the sorcerer had done to the materium.

Victory had never tasted more like defeat.

CHAPTER 13

THE GEMINI MOON

Peregrine Delacquo was working the orchards. Night farming wasn’t his favourite thing. Never had been, never would be. It was hard to see what he was doing, and he was constantly tripping over roots and being raked across the face by branches. It was a stupid thing to do, or would be if it weren’t so necessary. The growing season never stopped on Abolessus Gemini Primus. Nor on Secundus. He stopped harvesting the caldena fruit for a moment and stared across the night sky at the neighbour and rival. That was when it happened.

Gemini Secundus took up half the firmament. To look at it was to be looking at his own planet in a mirror, and it had always been the dominant of the sky, its reflected light strong enough to make the night farming possible, if not easy. It washed out the stars, and the distant reminders that there was an Imperium beyond the Abolessus system were visible only for the brief darkness between the setting of Secundus and sunrise. But tonight, as Delacquo looked up, another moon appeared. It did not rise. It was suddenly there, at the zenith. It was an eye that opened in the heavens. It was a sudden, incarnadine judgement.

Something stirred beneath Delacquo’s feet. The movement was slight, but it was planet-wide. It felt like Gemini Primus was vibrating with anticipation. But that wasn’t what made Delacquo scream. What made him howl, what made every living human, awake or asleep, on the Abolessus Twins cry out, what fused a billion souls into an abyssal choir, was the music. It was a single note. Its pitch and tone did not change. There was no melody. It was brief.

But it was enormous.

It was the sound of a moon whistling.

Volos took the object from the dead hand of the sorcerer. When he lifted it, he felt a tug towards the plinth. He looked closely, and saw that each hook-like protuberance along the shaft was connected to a flexible, tiny, almost-invisible tube running back to the stone. Volos brought his blade down and severed the connections.

When the Dragons finally emerged from the vault, they had lost a month.

He had sent the message. He had done that much. He had had an anonymous infantry career, and then led an even more anonymous life in the bureaucracy, but Bisset could say, if he had to sum up his existence, that he had warned the Imperium of a Chaos insurgency on Aighe Mortis. So that was something.

He stayed mobile. He had no firm goal in mind, but he had, if nothing else, a notion: get away from the rebel-controlled territory, if he could. Find a zone still under Imperial control. If he could. The curse of Aighe Mortis was how independent it was. The shallowness of the ties between Imperial administration and the local powers meant that he couldn’t trust the loyalty of the government itself. But he had nothing else to try.

Bisset had travelled five hundred kilometres from the site of the Munitorum palace. He had skirted frontlines, ducked street fighting, and reached what seemed like calmer territory. He wasn’t sure if that was because order was holding or if what passed for a regime on Aighe Mortis had already fallen. It was impossible to tell. Centuries of incessant gang warfare meant that signs of fresh damage on the rotting hive towers was meaningless. Still, he followed duty and idiot hope.

The streets were quiet, which worried him. He pushed on, until he hit one of the few clear spaces still present on Aighe Mortis. The Grand Square, kilometres wide, lay before the Palace of Saint Boethius. The building was one of the few on the planet that truly was palatial. Broad enough to seem squat in its dimensions, it still loomed higher than any of the towers within sight of its domed roof. It had been the seat of Aighe Mortis’s ruling mercantile families. It was now, so Bisset hoped, still the planet’s administrative centre, the headquarters for the planet’s kleptocratic council.

He started across the square, acutely aware of exposure, but there was no way to reach the main doors without being in the open. He watched the windows of the surrounding buildings, but saw no one. The emptiness unnerved him. There was never any calm on Aighe Mortis. The quiet was alien and wrong. Midway across, he noticed that the doors to the palace were ajar. He stopped. He knew, with complete certainty, that he was approaching an abandoned building, and now the only thing worse than discovering that it was empty would be to find that it was not.

The council had fallen.

Bisset turned away from the palace. He walked briskly, not wanting the building at his back for longer than necessary. He listened to the silence, searching for life. He found better. In the distance, to the north, he could just make out the crump of artillery. So there was still fighting. Combat was suddenly as good a sanctuary as any. He headed north.

In the principal chapel of the Immolation Maw, the ceremony of investiture of rank took place. On this occasion, there was no sense of elevation. All the notes sounded were wrong ones. The rite had the appearance of propriety. Volos and his brothers lined both sides of the chapel. Through the doorway shaped into a dragon’s skull, Toharan entered. He walked the transept towards the altar, past tapestries of fiery glory. Behind the altar was an immense viewport in the form of the Black Dragons livery. The rearing dragon head snarled over the vista of the galaxy, the infinite expanse subject to the beast’s strength.

That was the symbolism. Today, all Volos saw was indifferent space.

There was no Chaplain to conduct the ritual. Massorus was in a sus-an membrane coma. So was Rothnove. And Urlock. Chaplain, Librarian and Apothecary down. Captain and standard-bearer dead. Second Company had been decapitated. So now they were making do.

Brother Symael led the service. Volos didn’t know why Toharan had asked that he do so. Volos didn’t think of Symael as especially learned or theologically inclined, but he read the correct liturgy well enough. They all knew the call and response, and so the ritual was recognisable, and at the end, after bending knee and taking their oaths of loyalty and obedience, the Black Dragons had a captain again. Though they mourned the loss of Vritras, the continuity represented by the ascendancy of the first-sergeant should have been a comfort. Volos had been pleased to see Toharan become Vritras’s right hand. He had been pleased to think he would one day call his friend captain.

But he wasn’t pleased, and there was no comfort.

The presence of Werner Lettinger was part of the problem. The rite was sacred to the Dragons. It was not for spectators. But there the inquisitor was. It was possible, Volos supposed, that he had insisted, as part of his investigative purview, on attending the ceremony. But he had walked in behind Toharan before taking up a position to the left of the entrance. That arrival smacked of invitation, which puzzled Volos, given Toharan’s earlier extreme hostility towards the man. It also worried him. He was now less inclined to dismiss the danger Lettinger represented. He particularly didn’t like how the inquisitor had had the run of the ship for over a month while almost half the company had been in combat on Flebis.

Toharan left the chapel first, the new captain requesting his sergeants’ presence in the strategium in half an hour. Volos and Nithigg were the last to go. Setheno and Tennesyn were waiting for them in the corridor outside. ‘Canoness,’ Volos said. ‘You are recovering well from your wounds?’

‘I am, thank you.’

‘My condolences, lord, for your losses,’ Tennesyn said.

Volos nodded his thanks.

Tennesyn went on, ‘The canoness and I have found a few items of interest in the librarium.’

‘Oh?’ Volos asked. ‘Do you know what it was that the Swords were trying to do?’

‘No,’ said Setheno. ‘Not exactly. We came across some fragments that are suggestive, and they are not reassuring.’

‘We have a few scrolls that are partial works by the ancient Terran remembrancer Ehmar Djaims,’ Tennesyn explained. ‘He appears to mention Flebis. Or rather, the name appears in a High Gothic phrase.’

‘Flabis, Flebis,’ Setheno quoted. ‘You will blow, you will weep. It appears in conjunction with another phrase, which translates as “What is this that is coming?”’

Volos took that in. Setheno was right. He wasn’t reassured. ‘And does Brother Ydraig know what that device is?’ Volos had given the tube to the Techmarine upon returning to the Maw.

‘A whistle of some kind, he thinks,’ Nithigg said.

‘A whistle.’ The word was so trivial. It was obscene to have lost so much over something that could be given that label. ‘Well, that’s good,’ he said, his frustration spilling into sarcasm. ‘I was worried it was going to turn out to be a horn.’ He sighed. ‘A whistle for what? To do what? Where?’ The other two didn’t answer. He asked Nithigg, ‘You’ve seen these fragments?’

Nithigg nodded. ‘We were three in the librarium.’

‘And you’ve told our captain?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘I thought you should know first.’

‘Why? He needs to know anything at all that we can discover so–’

‘So he can ignore it?’ Setheno interrupted. ‘I think you’ll find that Captain Toharan’s priorities lie elsewhere.’

‘Such as?’

‘Aighe Mortis.’

Volos shrugged, trying to come across as far more sanguine than he felt. ‘That’s perhaps as it should be. We can’t ignore our responsibilities there.’

‘At the expense of pursuing anything to do with Flebis?’ Setheno asked.

‘He wouldn’t.’ Volos turned to Nithigg for support. Nithigg looked him hard in the eye but said nothing.

‘You were offered the position of first-sergeant, weren’t you?’ Setheno asked. When Volos nodded, she said, ‘You were wrong to turn the honour down.’

He kept his temper, but he was tired of outsiders judging the actions of a Dragon. ‘I was not suited to the job.’

‘You are lying,’ she said, and Volos was so startled by the bluntness that he couldn’t muster a suitable comeback. ‘To yourself, if not to us.’

He counted to ten, then said, ‘Do you have a reason for telling me this, canoness?’

She nodded. ‘You have a destiny with your Chapter. And you have a responsibility not to deny it.’

Volos was having difficulty processing not just what he was being told, but who was telling him. The canoness had proven herself a valuable ally in combat, and the distance between her and Lettinger seemed more like a chasm all the time. Yet Volos still couldn’t shake the impression that she represented a serious danger. ‘You appear to be very concerned for our Chapter’s wellbeing,’ he said.

‘I serve only the Emperor, and do what must be done in that service.’ There was something terrible in her phrasing.

‘And you can see the future?’ Volos asked.

‘That is not my gift. I can see clearly. That is all, but it is enough.’

‘And what you can see is that we have the wrong captain.’

‘That’s right.’ There was no hesitation before she answered. She was emphatic.

Volos realised that Nithigg had taken himself out of the conversation. The ancient veteran was saying nothing, but looking at Volos with a disconcerting intensity. ‘If I understand you correctly,’ Volos said to Setheno, ‘you are counselling sedition. You would have me not only disobey my captain’s orders, but try to supplant him.’

Setheno’s golden stare was as direct and unmoved as it always was. ‘That might be necessary, yes,’ she said.

‘I don’t want to hear this,’ Volos said and walked away. He didn’t want to think about it, either.

But he did think about it. He heard about it again, too.

Lettinger said, ‘I’m troubled by some aspects of what happened on Flebis.’

They were in the strategium. They had another five minutes before Toharan was to meet with his officers. ‘I’m troubled by everything that happened there,’ Toharan snapped.

‘Of course,’ Lettinger said smoothly. ‘I was thinking specifically of something you mentioned about Sergeant Volos.’

‘Concerning what?’

‘His arm-blades. You said that you had never seen them as deadly.’

Toharan nodded. ‘They were cutting like a relic sword.’

‘Which they did not do before.’

‘No.’

Lettinger held the moment for a few seconds. He wanted Toharan to see the implications. He wanted him to feel even a hint of the chill that was crawling down his own spine. He said, ‘So in an encounter with powers of the warp and Chaos, something changed.’

Toharan said nothing. His eyes, grim, stared into the middle distance over Lettinger’s shoulder.

Lettinger said, ‘Captain, both you and the sergeant have an avowed commitment to purity. Let me remind you that evil has its own perverted purity.’

Volos saw a lot of faces being kept carefully neutral during the briefing.

‘Our mission now is clear,’ Toharan was saying. ‘The reports from Aighe Mortis are as spotty as they are dire. The planet is crying out for our intervention. All we have achieved here is to suffer grievous losses. I think we know now where the true trap was. We have been tricked by a diversion. No longer.’

Volos clamped his teeth together. He would not speak. Toharan was right about Aighe Mortis’s need. But his dismissal of the events on Flebis was foolish. It was worse than a tactical error. It was some kind of political move, one that the Dragons could not afford. Toharan seemed set on repudiating Volos, and the Dragon Claw couldn’t understand the logic of the move. He was no threat. He might not agree with the new captain, but he would never disobey his orders. Toharan was fighting a war where none existed, and turning his back on decades of comradeship. Toharan was baiting him, asking him to defend the Flebis action and step into some kind of ambush. Volos declined.

Setheno’s words rattled around in Volos’s head. He tried to push them away. Then the shake-ups were announced, and it was all Volos could do to keep his jaw from dropping.

‘Nychus must be rebuilt,’ Toharan said. ‘Brothers Symael, Jemiah, Mattanius, and Kataros, I would have you at my side.’ Volos’s eyes widened. No Melus? He had known Toharan almost as long as Volos had, and had been his squad-mate for most of that time. ‘In recognition of their actions on Flebis and Antagonis, I am pleased to raise a few of our brothers to the rank of sergeant,’ Toharan went on, and Volos moved beyond surprise and into dread. Too sudden, too many changes, too much wholesale flouting of tradition. What did Toharan think he was doing? More disturbingly: why was he doing it?

Danael was one of the new sergeants, and assumed command of Squad Neidris. Omorfos was given Pythios, and the slight to Melus was complete. Volos barely registered the other names. But Toharan shocked him one more time.

‘We remain without our Apothecary, Librarian and Chaplain,’ Toharan said. ‘The Emperor willing, they may yet recover. Until such time, I would ask Brothers Symael and Jemiah to act in their place.’ There was some logic to that, Volos thought. Symael had done some apprentice medicae work with Urlock. He knew his way around field dressings, at least. And Jemiah was a Lexicanium, though so was Ennyn in Squad Exuros, and he, in Volos’s opinion, had shown better battlefield ability. Then Toharan said, ‘Chaplain Massorus has no clear successor. Initiate Bumalin was killed on Flebis. We thus find ourselves with no Chaplain until a truly suitable candidate can be found. No decision in matters of faith should be taken lightly or quickly. But neither should we be without spiritual guidance. Therefore, until Chaplain Massorus recovers, or his successor has been found, I have asked Inquisitor Lettinger to preach to us. Though he is not of our brotherhood, his ecclesiastical experience is considerable. I think, too, that, at the very least, we might find his perspective interesting and worth hearing.’

With a supreme effort of will, Volos kept his hands from balling into fists. He stood still, silent and, he hoped, expressionless. When the other sergeants, veteran and newly minted, said, ‘As you command,’ so did he. When Toharan looked him in the eyes, Volos met his gaze with a neutrality that took more out of him than his battle with the doubtworm. Toharan’s violation of Black Dragons tradition in effectively naming Lettinger acting Chaplain was unspeakable. What he was doing was obscene. It was also perversely clever, in the short run, since it would be difficult for any Dragon to complain about the arrangement while Second Company was under Inquisitorial investigation. But the damage Toharan was doing to the Chapter in the long term might be incalculable.

Still, Volos did his duty, as he still saw it, for the time being. He held his peace.

He headed back to his quarters, hoping for some time to think quietly. But Nithigg was waiting for him by his door, and Melus strode down the corridor, scattering servitors, to catch up.

‘You heard?’ Melus asked Nithigg.

‘Some. I can guess the rest.’

‘What is he doing?’ Melus demanded of Volos.

Still reeling, his thoughts thick and stumbling, Volos found himself giving a rote answer, defending the Space Marine he had long held a close friend. ‘He is making his first decisions as captain. This is a huge responsibility that has been thrust on him, and he needs us…’ He trailed off, the stares of the other two finally registering.

‘Volos,’ Nithigg said quietly.

The use of his name snapped him back to clarity. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Did you have a look at that group that is in command, now?’ Melus fumed. ‘I’ve never seen such a concentration of pretty faces.’ Melus’s skin was almost as dark as Volos’s, and a single, hooked horn jutted from his brow, poking through lank grey hair. Melus was not pretty.

‘Fire and bone,’ Volos muttered.

‘What was that?’ Melus asked.

Volos shook his head. ‘Nothing.’ But he was thinking about the Black Dragons battle-cry, and about their liturgy, and about how warriors like Toharan might feel excluded. Had that been done? Were he and Melus and their other, mutated brothers reaping the whirlwind of an unintentional elitism? Is that all this is about? he wondered. Maybe it will pass, then. Maybe this is a squall, not a storm. He indulged in a brief moment of foolish hope.

Melus dragged him back to reality and dashed the hope. ‘You know where this might lead,’ he said. ‘You should be our captain. We all know it. Even Toharan does, I’ll wager. The day is going to come when he’ll have to be stopped. And you’ll find many who will stand beside you.’

‘The day is going to come?’ Volos snapped. ‘He’s barely been captain for an hour, and you would have me begin a mutiny?’

‘No, brother-sergeant. Toharan started it. You’ll finish it.’

CHAPTER 14

IMMACULATE ACTION

The guns fell silent in the hour before Bisset reached the site of the battle. He followed the smoke and the sporadic rumble of machinery. Now and then, there was the crack of a pistol. And yes, there were some screams. It was all better than the terrible silence of the Palace of Saint Boethius. As he drew closer, he started to encounter people at last. Before long, he was in the familiar suffocating crowd of street-level Mortisian life. Most of the people he saw were in worse rags than usual. Many were clearly refugees, clutching bundles of belongings and bearing scorch marks and tears on clothing and flesh. But the mood was, by Mortisian standards, surprisingly upbeat. Bisset picked up his pace, chasing optimism. Perhaps this engagement had gone the Guard’s way.

He rounded a corner to find a contingent of Defence Militia troops relaxing around an indifferently maintained Leman Russ. Beyond them, a warehouse complex built into the lower stratum of the towers had been blasted open. Bodies lay in twisted, carbonised piles. Bisset approached a nearby trio of soldiers. He nodded to them. One of them gave him a cock-eyed salute. Bisset’s uniform was long gone, but he couldn’t disguise his posture and gait. Any military man would recognise him as one from blocks away.

The soldier offered him a tabac. Bisset accepted and gestured towards the bodies. ‘What happened here?’ he asked.

‘Cultists,’ the soldier said. He spat.

‘Did they put up much of a fight?’

‘Some.’ The soldier grinned. ‘Not enough.’ He pointed to the street that ran alongside the warehouse. ‘Gave us something to think about.’ Charred vehicle wreckage blocked the passage. The soldier lowered his voice. ‘Don’t mind telling you I thought it was last shift,’ he said, his slang marking him as a product of the southern manufactorum complexes. ‘Lucky for us the Space Marines showed.’

Bisset’s eyebrows shot up. ‘They did?’ He’d been praying for Adeptus Astartes intervention since he’d sent his message.

The soldier nodded. ‘Extermination time. Cultists didn’t even have time to blink.’ His grin broadened, and suddenly he shed his hard-boiled shell and a young man was standing in front of Bisset, his eyes shining with unexpected joy. ‘I never thought we’d get their support, too. I guess they know a just cause when they see it.’

Bisset’s words caught in his throat. The soldier’s phrasing alarmed him. He glanced back at the warehouse. He could see the scorched remains of an eight-pointed star on one interior wall. It was almost reassuring. So the dead were Chaos cultists. But… ‘I hadn’t heard the Space Marines were here,’ he said carefully. ‘What Chapter are they?’

‘Couldn’t tell you,’ the soldier said. ‘Bright ones, though. Lots of gold. Look like angels.’

Bisset’s mouth went dry. ‘I suppose they are,’ he lied. He wondered why the Chaos Space Marines would kill their own followers. He sensed a bigger, more sophisticated game than he had guessed.

The soldier nodded enthusiastically. ‘The revolution can’t be stopped now,’ he said, and gave Bisset a clap on the back. ‘Justice for Aighe Mortis at last. Work on that for a shift.’

He didn’t appear to notice Bisset’s dread.

Sometimes, Volos found strength in the reliquary. The huge, vaulted chamber was dark except for the minimal glow-globes casting a reverent shine on the machines and weapons of Chapter glories. There was the peace of certainty here, of the Black Dragons at their finest. He thought he might escape his doubts for a few minutes. Just a little bit of peace was all he wanted, a respite from thoughts of mutiny and heresy.

It didn’t work. Instead, he was thinking of an absence. He stood before the empty Dreadnought armour. Its last occupant had died more than a century ago, and no worthy successor had yet been found. Warriors whose skill, bravery and age made them candidates for the grim immortality of the armoured coffin, and whose wounds on the battlefield did not kill them outright, were rare. Volos longed to speak with a venerable brother. He needed to hear wisdom tempered by the ages.

Footsteps behind him. He turned and saw Nithigg. Volos smiled. ‘Why are you the only one who hasn’t been telling me what to do?’ he asked.

‘Because if you don’t act from your own conviction, we are all lost,’ Nithigg answered.

Volos grunted. There was no comfort in his friend’s words, but they gave him an anchor of strength. ‘You’re a wise man,’ he said.

Nithigg was looking over his shoulder at the Dreadnought. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not really.’ His gaze was poignant with humility and reverence.

The Hall of Exaltation was a shaft that stretched from the top to bottom decks of the Revealed Truth. Both ends were covered in armourglass. The mad light of the warp flowed in, spiralling up and down the walls of the shaft, fingering runes, charging them, and setting them off on a writhing dance. Even when the Truth was in the materium, as it was now, waiting on the far side of the sun from Aighe Mortis, the Hall carried with it the energy and taint of the warp. It was as much a battery as it was a place of worship and meditation. Standing in the centre of the transparent floor, and looking up, Nessun couldn’t see the stars through the distant ceiling. What he could see was the stored power, coiling and flexing over the expanse of the Hall. It invited his eyes and mind, and he surrendered to the whirl.

Dreamscape, warp space, it was all one, and in his fugue state, Nessun’s consciousness stretched over infinities. He was searching for a prize. The note on Flebis had been sounded, and the song would soon resound throughout the Imperium, but he had sacrificed much for this step. He wanted recompense. He was sure he would find it. He travelled the warp, swimming and tasting the currents of emotions and impulses, the knots of thoughts and the flesh of desires. The Black Dragons had been exposed to the strength of the vault. Not all of them could have emerged without being marked. The scars would be distinctive.

They were. He homed in on them, a predator summoned by the scent of blood. He found the lesions in the wounded soul, and slipped inside. He began to whisper. He began to teach.

He placed his hands on the threads of destiny, and, as his god showed by great example, plucked at them. Wove them. Tangled them.

There were storms in the warp. There had to be. Something was different about this crossing. Toharan couldn’t pin down the precise nature of the difference, or how it was affecting him. He knew it was, though. He had started sleeping. Not just the microbursts of downtime that a Space Marine could get by on almost indefinitely, but real sleep, hours of it, as if he had that time to spare and didn’t have the infinite demands of his new duties. And even with those hours lost to the luxury of full unconsciousness, he was exhausted. So he only wanted to sleep more. It was a drug. It was a hallucinogen. He had also started to dream, though he couldn’t remember the details when he awoke.

Just as well. He didn’t feel up to dealing with two sets of unrealised hopes.

He was in the prison chapel. He walked its length, running his fingers along the altar stone, breathing in the austere atmosphere of rigour, supplication and final extremities. After a few minutes, he knelt at the altar and prayed. He prayed for guidance, and for the strength to do what needed doing. Because it was clear that hope, reason, goodwill and daylight dreams were simply not enough.

He could be praying in the upper chapel. There was nothing compelling him to seek spiritual solace in a place designed to cow prisoners rather than elevate the thoughts of Adeptus Astartes. But here was where the Disciples of Purity had formed, and the collective dream that group represented had come to pass. Most of the key positions in Second Company were now filled by Disciples. The upper chapel, on the other hand, had become the site of dashed hopes and bitter disappointment. The promise he had felt during his rite of ascension had been an illusion. There had been a moment of unity that evaporated as soon as the demands of duty and purity had made themselves felt. The Disciples were in power, but they were resented. Training cage matches were turning into blood feuds. Hostile silences in the mess hall turned into brawls in the corridors. The conflicts were unseemly. They were, it seemed to him now, almost heretical.

The scenes in the upper chapel were demoralising. There were no fights there, no veiled insults or toxic debates. The services were solemn, dignified and, thanks to Lettinger’s sermons, insightful. They were also sparsely attended. After the first one of his captaincy, when he guessed the ranks had been filled by the curious and the outraged, the numbers had plummeted. Almost every face he saw there, he knew from the meetings here. The upper chapel was becoming, for Toharan, a symbol of pointlessness. Here, in the depths of the Immolation Maw, he could feel the direction and impetus of mission.

He was still on his knees when Lettinger found him. ‘I think I know why you’re here,’ the inquisitor said.

‘And why are you here?’ Toharan asked. ‘Have you come to offer judgement or strength?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your mission on our ship seems to have undergone an evolution of sorts.’

Lettinger said nothing at first. He looked uncomfortable. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, thoughtful, not coy. ‘I have been having dreams,’ he continued, and Toharan held his breath. ‘I feel a sense of…’ he hesitated. He seemed embarrassed, which Toharan hadn’t thought possible.

‘Destiny?’ Toharan supplied.

Lettinger smiled. ‘You too?’

‘I can’t ignore all that has happened.’

‘Neither can I. I thought I was here to render judgement.’ He glanced in the direction of the cells holding the abominations. ‘I certainly could. I have seen the monstrosities that are kept down here. But I now believe that I was sent to help you save your Chapter.’

Toharan believed the same thing. But he didn’t feel the optimism he should have. ‘Is that even possible?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen what is happening? Have you seen how the simplest attempts to move us back towards Codex compliance have been received?’ He sighed. ‘This kind of conflict is unworthy of the Black Dragons.’

‘Perhaps,’ Lettinger said quietly, ‘you have the problem reversed.’

‘What do you mean?’ Even as Toharan asked, something stirred in his brain. Memory or dream, vision or inspiration, he couldn’t say. It was both new and familiar, enticing and maddening. It was the struggling scrabble of insect legs against his cortex.

‘Maybe it is the Dragons themselves who are unworthy.’

‘Then what would you have me do?’ Toharan demanded.

‘You should consider the possibility of something new arising from the ashes of the irredeemable. A new Chapter.’

Horror and promise stretched out before Toharan. The scrabbling in his head was almost unbearable. ‘How?’ he whispered.

‘I don’t know. But if this is destiny, if this is the Emperor’s will, then the way and the means will appear.’ Lettinger spread his hands. ‘I could be wrong. Our task will be much simpler if I am. But I fear that I am right. I sense that the coming engagement on Aighe Mortis will give us the answers we need.’

Toharan heard, but said nothing. His sense of mission grew until it was an ecstasy. He looked around the prison chapel, at the dark stone and iron, and saw a reflection of the stark choices ahead. He placed his hand on the bloodied altar, and drew on its strength. He would make those choices. When they came, he would know what to do, and the way he would know was suddenly clear. The answer was so simple, so obvious, and such a basic fact of his existence that he had almost overlooked it.

Purity. The dictates of purity were the answer. He had but to follow the pristine road, and his actions would be immaculate in their power and perfection. And if it came to that choice, then yes, he would destroy his Chapter in order to save it.

Then the noise in his brain blotted out the world, calling him down to sleep and dreams.

CHAPTER 15

PARSING REVOLUTION

Even when viewed from orbit, Aighe Mortis couldn’t hide its essential ugliness. Some hive worlds glittered like spiked jewels from a distance, the cloud-piercing turrets of the elite creating a mirage of beauty. Others had mountain chains and oceans that defied the feature-eradicating virus of humankind. But Aighe Mortis was honest. It looked like an infected boil. The lance of Exterminatus might almost be a mercy. But the Black Dragons came to liberate, not to annihilate.

The atmosphere was a sluggish, brown-grey sludge. Where the clouds parted, which was rare enough, the urban blight of the surface was visible. From space, there was no architectural majesty to be seen. There was no detectable quality, only an endless, soul-numbing quantity. The impression Aighe Mortis presented was of a planet-wide scrapyard composed of clusters of rusted nails. The filth of the planet was so palpable that the strategium’s hololith seemed to carry a stench.

As the Immolation Maw approached, and the planet filled the bridge’s occulus, Toharan was struck by the irony of striving for purity in any form in such a place. It was, in fact, such a perfect irony that there could no longer be any doubt, he thought, that destiny was unfolding. He was staring at a test. He would be found worthy.

Volos looked at the planet and felt pity for its inhabitants. During the voyage here, he had spoken at more length with Tennesyn about what he had seen of the insurrection. Tennesyn’s analysis of the planet’s economy was depressing. No matter what happened here, its people were doomed to a squalid end. That this civilization’s endgame brutality made it a fruitful recruiting planet for the Black Dragons filled him with shame.

It wasn’t shame, though, that sent an unpleasant tingling down his fingers. Premonition was casting a long shadow before him. The awful conviction he had felt just before arriving at Antagonis was back. He could feel the blood of the innocents slicking his hands. There was an atrocity coming, and he would own it. His mouth was dry. He was Adeptus Astartes, and he knew no fear. But he did know horror.

The question in the strategium was where to make planetfall. There were no open spaces to speak of anywhere on Aighe Mortis. Vox traffic from the surface was a hopeless mess of fragments, conflicting voices, and garbling static. Some of the voices that came through were not human. Toharan ordered the reception terminated. There was no point in indulging the Chaos interference.

The Immolation Maw joined the Imperial Navy fleet at high anchor. The command ship was the Irrevocable Fate, an Overlord-class battlecruiser. Toharan hailed its commander. Admiral Keilor Hassarian radiated frustration over the vox. The Mortisian Guard had landed troops in the tens of thousands with the goal of taking and holding the government centres. The men had disappeared into the smog of war. Hassarian had no idea what progress, if any, had been made, though the state of communications did not bode well. Nor did the constant flashes that lit the clouds from below. The light did not come from storms. Battles were ongoing, widespread, and impossible to track. ‘There is no front,’ Hassarian sputtered. ‘Or the front is everywhere. How do we know where to advance and what to defend?’

Only the front wasn’t everywhere. A few hundred kilometres west of the northern hemisphere’s administrative nerve cluster, there was a region where the clouds did not flash. The area covered a full hive quadrant, almost a thousand kilometres square. The zone appeared to be pacified, but Hassarian couldn’t be sure. Its communications were no better than the rest of the planet’s.

A staging area, Toharan thought. A starting point, a place where it might be possible to get a sense of the actual strategic situation. ‘We land here.’ Toharan pointed at the hololith, and designated the eastern border of the quiet zone.

The target sector had a functioning starport, and Second Company deployed there, transported in by Thunderhawks. Toharan wasn’t going to use the deep strike muscle of the drop pods without knowing so much as the state of the conflict. So the Black Dragons landed, disembarked in force, and were greeted by filth and good cheer.

The filth was the hive of Aighe Mortis up close. As festering a vision as the planet presented from orbit, it was orders of magnitude worse at ground level. The pollution was so thick that ground fog was brown. The architecture was an unending forest of towers built of black iron and rockcrete that time and smoke had turned just as black. Some buildings stood alone, barely shouldering aside their neighbours. Many others were connected by a tangled patchwork of walkways, or joined by afterthought annexes.

Volos was reminded of the scaffolding on the Flebis organ, and saw some of the same dense, embodied nightmare here, on an even larger scale. But where the vault had the awful inspiration of the warp behind it, and a kind of perverse grandeur, there was nothing awe-inspiring about the Aighe Mortis hive. It was hab towers and smokestacks that looked the same, hab towers and smokestacks that were the same, and industry indistinguishable from cancer. Hope was foreign to Aighe Mortis, and had been banished for millennia. The world-city was drudgery and despair made of stone and metal and choking air. Though Volos did not question the necessity or the rightness of the mission to bring the planet back under Imperial rule, he couldn’t help but see the irony in the struggle. There was nothing to liberate here. There never had been. And what could Chaos possibly do to make life here worse?

This wasn’t the first time he had entertained these thoughts. He had been to Aighe Mortis before. All of Second Company had during recruitment missions. Finding suitable candidates made it a necessity to walk among the inhabitants of the source planet, to get to know the culture, the challenges, the strengths and the weaknesses of the indigenous population. But for the Black Dragons, it was also a point of honour. They made use of the human resource of Aighe Mortis, but they did not plunder it. They took the asphyxiating civilization’s hardiest, most promising sons and transformed them beyond all recognition into sacred monsters of war. Beyond the duty to destroy the foes of the Emperor, there was a debt the Dragons had incurred towards the people of Aighe Mortis. They would repay that debt with salvation.

Whether it was desired or not.

The ferrocrete expanse of the starport would have been one of the rare open spaces of Aighe Mortis, if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was two hundred metres above ground level, built over a warren of miserable, light-deprived habs, which in turn rose over the squalid converted mine tunnels. As he joined his mustering brothers, Volos watched the approaching welcome party, and that was where he saw the good cheer. The crowd was a motley collection of civilians and militiamen, sprinkled with a few officers and the odd Guard uniform. Some wore field dressings, others were using makeshift crutches, but most were uninjured. Some of the work and military uniforms were in rags, others were intact, but all were grimy. And there was something in every one of the faces. Hope might have been exiled from Aighe Mortis, but it had returned, and it was coming to meet the Dragons.

Toharan walked towards the crowd. Lettinger was at his side. Volos followed close enough to be able to hear what was said. He heard footsteps behind him and glanced over his shoulder. Nithigg was right behind him, and ghosting along a step further back was Setheno, her eyes flicking with a cogitator’s impassivity between the crowd and himself. Volos faced forward again, but he felt the canoness’s gaze on him like a bad conscience.

A militiaman saluted Toharan. ‘Sergeant Karl Feher, lord,’ he said. The greeting and the salute were respectful, but carried off with a jauntiness that was completely un-Mortisian in character. It was, Volos could tell, a product of the hope animating the group, and it was clear that that hope had nothing at all to do with the arrival of the Black Dragons. Volos was used to humans reacting with awe and, quite often, terror in the presence of Space Marines. He saw neither here. It was as if the hope left no room for anything else. It was an emotion so long repressed that, when it returned, it was a narcotic.

Toharan nodded to Feher. ‘You seem to have the situation well in hand here, sergeant,’ he said. There was battle thunder in the distance, but nothing nearby. Feher and his fellows carried weapons, but slung over their shoulders. They looked relaxed.

Feher grinned, his teeth a bright flash in the dirt on his face. ‘Bit by bit, lord,’ he said. ‘It’s slow, but we’re getting there. I’m sure the work will go faster yet now that you’re here.’

Volos noticed a man standing at the back of the group, and a bit to the side. He was the only one whose face wasn’t lit by hope. He was watching Toharan and Feher intently.

‘We are not a service of convenience,’ Toharan told the sergeant. ‘Are you telling me that your reassertion of control is inevitable? Have you won the war?’

‘No, no,’ Feher protested, wilting a little under Toharan’s glare. ‘We’re working the shift hard. It’s tough to the east, and if one side or the other comes out on top, then we’ll be in for it.’

‘One side or the other?’

Volos moved off, working his way around the crowd to the man at the rear. Volos took in his bionics and bearing. ‘You’re with the Guard?’ he asked.

‘A long time ago. Munitorum now, at least until…’ He gestured vaguely. ‘Jozef Bisset,’ he said. He lowered his voice. ‘There are traitor forces on this planet.’

‘We know. A warning was sent.’

Bisset visibly sagged with relief. ‘So someone received it.’

‘You sent it?’

‘Yes.’

Volos kept his voice low. ‘Can you tell me what is going on? These people… there’s something wrong. Are they–?’

‘They aren’t cultists,’ Bisset said. ‘They’re not even heretical.’

‘Aren’t they?’ Setheno put in. She had arrived without Volos noticing. Her question was a warning.

Bisset paled. ‘At least, they don’t think of themselves as such,’ he amended. ‘I think they still worship the God-Emperor after…’ He caught himself.

‘After their fashion?’ Setheno finished. Volos heard a world’s doom lurking in her words.

‘After the fashion of anyone on a world like this,’ Bisset answered.

‘You mean rote, unthought, automatic,’ Setheno said. ‘Unfelt.’

‘Perhaps. But they have had little reason to feel it.’

‘You are defending them.’ Another warning.

‘I don’t mean to… canoness,’ he said, taking in her armour’s engravings of rank. ‘I’m trying to explain them.’

‘Why are you with them?’

‘I decided I would be more use to whoever finally came if I stayed alive and found out what I could, than if I got myself killed before I could even reach a Guard contingent.’

Setheno’s nod was slight, but Volos sensed the shadow of judgement pass over Bisset, leaving him unscathed.

‘So if they aren’t heretics…’ Volos prompted.

‘As far as I can tell, there are three forces in this civil war. The Mortisian Guard leads the loyalists, but apart from the Guard itself, that faction is very small. They have the military advantage, but little base of support in the general population. Less well-armed, but far more numerous, are the secessionist factions. There are the actual Chaos cultists, and then there are these rebels.’

‘What’s the make-up of the cultist force?’

‘A mixture,’ Bisset said. ‘Very big mobs of former civilians, a significant chunk of the Defence Militia, and a fair number of the new Guard conscripts. They don’t have the training of the loyal troops, but they did get their hands on weapons before they fell to Chaos. There are other cultists, too, who are very far gone. They came with the Traitor Space Marines, I think. I didn’t get too close, but some didn’t really look human anymore.’

Volos grunted, unsurprised. ‘And these people,’ he said, taking in the untainted rebels with a sweep of his arm. ‘What are they hoping to achieve?’

‘I think they just want to be left alone.’

Setheno said, ‘This is not a universe where that is possible.’

Bisset gave a slight bow, acknowledging the point. ‘Unfortunately, they believe otherwise.’

‘And the Swords of Epiphany,’ Volos said. ‘The cultists are following them, I assume.’

Bisset frowned. ‘That’s the odd thing,’ he said. ‘I’ve only seen them the once, but I’ve seen the results of their passage. They’ve been acting on behalf of these people.’ He pointed to the group. ‘They’ve been killing cultists.’

Volos and Setheno exchanged a look. The strategic arithmetic assembled itself. The sum was dire. Guard versus cultists, turmoil and war everywhere except for the zones occupied by the faction that believed its rebellion was merely political. The Archenemy was winning hearts and minds.

‘One more thing,’ Bisset said. ‘You’ve seen these traitors?’

‘We have,’ Volos told him.

‘At first glance, and from a distance, they look… Well… People are confused. I’ve spoken to more than a few who think those Space Marines have been sent by the Emperor.’

The command centre had been set up near the centre of the starport. Inside a large tent, Toharan called up a hololithic map of the area. It displayed the best intelligence the Dragons had of the combatants’ dispositions. They had tried to raise the closest Guard commanders, without success. The vox interference made communication over more than a few blocks impossible. Toharan pointed to the nearest clash, about twenty kilometres east. ‘It would seem that Admiral Hassarian is correct. There is no one front. Pushing back the enemy is not an option. This is a war of extermination. It falls to us, therefore, to smash the enemy’s spine so that the Guard can then finish him off. We will begin here.’

Volos had no quibble with the strategy or the choice of initial strike. But there was the problem of their rear. ‘What do we do about the local rebels?’ he asked.

‘They are not an immediate concern. I see no point in fighting two fronts at once.’

Volos nodded, and there was a murmur of agreement from the other squad leaders.

‘Their heresy cannot be allowed to spread,’ Setheno objected.

For the first time in days, Volos found himself at one with Toharan. ‘Spreading heresy hardly seems to be their interest,’ he said.

‘All rebellion is heretical. There is no such thing as a purely political split with the Imperium.’

Lettinger was nodding as Setheno spoke, and for a moment, the universe seemed to have righted itself, with the Ecclesiarchy and the Inquisition allied and at odds with the Black Dragons.

Toharan stepped in. ‘You are, of course, correct, canoness,’ he said smoothly. ‘But I think this is a heresy easily defeated. Once these people witness the truth, they will repent.’

‘And how will they see this truth?’ Setheno asked.

‘Through the purity of our actions.’

There was a long, disbelieving silence. Setheno’s expression didn’t alter, but her eyes, if anything, became even colder. The heat death of the universe stared at Toharan, and found him wanting. ‘I cannot dictate your war-making,’ she said. ‘But please believe that I know what I am talking about when I tell you that heresy cannot be ignored, coddled or reasoned away. It can only be punished.’

‘And please believe that I know what I am doing. When I see the potential for redemption, I would give the wayward a chance to seek it before I destroy them.’

Volos heard, in Toharan’s words, an agenda that had nothing to do with the rebels of Aighe Mortis, and he saw his beloved Chapter fall deeper into shadow.

His sergeants left to ready the troops. The mission would begin in an hour. Toharan’s first battlefield command loomed. Lettinger offered to stay and talk, but Toharan asked him to go. He needed the solitude to think, meditate and pray. There was so much at stake.

He understood Setheno’s argument. What she didn’t understand was what he was attempting, and how desperate his gambit was. On it rested the future of the Black Dragons, and perhaps their very existence. His conversation with Lettinger in the prison chapel haunted him. He could feel the truth and necessity in what the inquisitor suggested, but still he couldn’t bring himself to condemn many of his brothers without making one last attempt to show them the error of their ways. The rebels in this sector gave him the perfect opportunity. They offered little military threat, being content to let the other factions slug it out and then pick up the pieces. And though their actions were wrong, it was clear that they meant no harm. They opposed the cultists, and, at least in what Toharan could see, showed no inclination to indulge in depravity of any kind. They believed themselves righteous, and conducted themselves accordingly. They were simply misguided.

They could be saved.

They would be saved, once they saw the true nature of the conflict on Aighe Mortis, and how they were being duped. They would return to purity, and their redemption, in turn, would pull the Black Dragons to the light. It was a perfect circle of salvation. The hermetic simplicity of the scheme was so beautiful, it had to work. Toharan could see the strands of fate weaving together to culminate in this moment. To turn his back on the opportunity would do more than throw away the last best chance to salvage his Chapter. It would damn his soul.

And if everything came to pass as he knew it must, if he fulfilled the quest that he had been given, perhaps peace would be his again. Perhaps the scrabbling in his head would cease. The impulse showed him what was necessary. It kept him walking the sure path to the pure and the triumphant, but his mind was agonised with buzzing, vibrating, anxious, irresistible movement. It was no longer just the crawling of insect legs in there. There was also the thrumming flutter of wings. It broke up his thoughts. His conversation stuttered. Behind his right eye, a sharp point stabbed and strobed. There was only relief when he took action, releasing the writhing impulses by following them. That part wasn’t hard. He knew, down to the core of his soul, that he was doing the right thing. The problem was waiting. The impatience to save the Dragons blurred with the urgency in his head.

The wait was almost over. The attack was about to begin. Relief and salvation were at hand, and in the end, the purity of fire would restore the purity of bone.

The Revealed Truth and its small squadron hung in stationary orbit as near to Aighe Mortis’s sun, Camargus, as void shields would allow. With the Truth were the Apostate-class heavy raider Metastasis, which had taken point in creating Aighe Mortis’s civil war, and the Soulcage-class slaveship Foretold Pilgrimage. It still waited to play its part in the game. The squadron was as invisible to the Imperial ships as they were to it, but Nessun had no need of augur readings to tell him who was abroad in the Camargus system. Dancing with the empyrean in the Hall of Exaltation, he had access to minds. He caressed their surfaces, and tormented their depths with burning truths. He listened to their desires and obsessions, and they found in him a more sympathetic ear than they had ever encountered before. He soaked up the unwitting confidences, came to know his prey, and followed the paths of weakness deeper and deeper into the tender flesh of self.

He felt the truths he planted take root and flourish. They grew strong, spreading their branches ever wider. In full glory, they would strangle every other thought and hope, converting all drives to their own ends. Already, there had been so much progress. Nessun’s empyrean-self laughed with unqualified delight, laughed with all the force of his being, while his material body let its mouth hang open and utter a low, moaning rasp.

Actions had been taken. Destinies loomed. There were still many branching paths ahead, but along every one, he saw nothing but the celebration of his Great Lord. Now, he had but to wait a short while before the moment would be ripe for his next move. During that wait, he could revel in the perverse, and watch the Black Dragons make their choice of dooms.

CHAPTER 16

THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS

If Hell had nightmares, Concordat Hill was one of them. Most of Aighe Mortis’s features had been razed, consumed and buried. Thousands of years of industry’s hammer had smashed them flat, leaving only the blackened towers of humanity’s misery to reach for the toxic skies. But some traces of the planet’s shape still showed through, a geological palimpsest. Concordat Hill was an echo of the mountain it had once been, a roughly conical rise distinct enough to lift the spires of its towers above those below. At its peak was a monstrous manufactorum cathedral, and this was the Concordat itself.

Even after the exodus of Aighe Mortis’s ruling elite, the Concordat retained its force. It was a machine of unstoppable momentum. It was too big, too integrated, too self-contained, and too horrific to kill. The factory floor and the hall of worship were a single space combining machines and tapestries, assembly lines and stained glass windows, workbench and pew. Labour and liturgy were one and the same. Fanaticism changed work into an act of faith that could never be completed, and so the clangour and smoke-belching of the Concordat never ceased. Worker-supplicants slaved, prayed, and drank and evacuated grey meal substitutes until they collapsed at their post. When they revived, their penance for hours lost to sleep was to work twice as hard. Life expectancy was measured in months. But the doors were always open to new employees, while hundreds of vox-casters made the Hill resound with the hymns sung by a tireless choir tens of thousands strong. Whatever desperation walked the streets and warrens of the hive, there was employment to be had here, all applicants accepted. Within a day, new employees had become full initiates.

The Concordat ran its endless course, untouched by the tides and currents of the planet’s political affairs. It paid no attention to the early infiltrations by the Swords of Epiphany, or to the first stirrings of resentment against the new founding. It ignored the insurrection. Not even the global civil war disturbed its relentless cycle of production. The Concordat had long since lost any sense of purpose or goal. While it did produce its share of small-arms, it also spat out millions of components whose use had been forgotten for centuries, and an eternal flow of incomprehensible fusions of rods and boxes poured from the complex to fall straight into its sewage outflow. This was the Concordat River, and it ran down in discoloured cascades and brown-water rapids to become a moat at the base of the hill, and the closest thing Aighe Mortis had to a lake.

The Concordat was a mindless devotional machine that existed for its own sake, and even now, as war came to its doorstep, nothing changed. The maelstrom of arms that engulfed Concordat Hill seemed less to be closing in on the complex then to be just another product of the beast, its effluent transporting the blasted insanity of its interior to the outside world. And perhaps there was some truth to this. The convulsion that was devouring Aighe Mortis was the inevitable result of the Concordat’s abomination.

But the immediate military truth of the battle of Concordat Hill was that the topography and the complex were invaluable. They were the means whose end would be the annihilation of a foe. The force that controlled the Hill would have the only true high ground for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. The elevation was such that the Hill really did look down on the streets and rooftops of the surrounding city. The Concordat’s own roof had a broad landing pad beside its colossal crozius spire. Though fallen into disuse, the pad was big enough for cargo freighters. Big enough to install a battery of heavy artillery. The king of this hill would have the means to level any sector occupied by his enemy between here and the horizon. It was a prize so valuable that two armies were willing to destroy themselves in order to claim it. If, when the smoke cleared, there was no one left standing to make use of the position, the futility would be no more than a fitting tribute to the Concordat itself.

The Black Dragons came to bring an end to futility.

For all the vortex of street-to-street, building-to-building clashes, the struggle for Concordat Hill was, in its broad lines, quite simply defined, and Toharan’s plan took advantage of this. The Mortisian Guard were advancing up the western slope, while the cultists had the east side. The race to the top had ended in a dead heat. The back and forth skirmishes at the summit had turned into a perpetual flesh grinder. There was no pause as opposing troops stormed into the maw of war, gunfire giving way to the butchery of melee weapons. A tide of blood had flowed into the Concordat River, giving it a slick shine visible even in the night. The wave of battle splashed up the sides of the complex, with more hand-to-hand massacres taking place on the Concordat’s lower ziggurat levels. Anyone climbing above the first three terraces was taken down by opposing fire. The building’s immense doors, metres thick, had closed automatically as the first combatants had arrived, and were still unbreached.

Toharan had the friendly rebel forces advance as far as the base of the hill. He didn’t ask them to engage in combat directly. It would be enough, he thought, for them to witness what would happen, and they would clamour to fight in the Emperor’s name. Tactically, all they had to do was hold and protect the rear. The Dragons, meanwhile, would move to support the Guard, pushing the advance forward and driving the cultists from the summit. The Dragon Claws were to strike behind the enemy lines, at the base of the eastern slopes, and disrupt the foe’s march. The plan was a good one, Toharan thought. It was simple, it was adaptable, and it would make good use of the terrain and the Space Marines’ strengths. He felt the imminence of glory and redemption as he charged into battle.

The Battle Pyre unleashed the Dragon Claws. It flew in from the south, coming around the curve of the hill to the eastern positions. Anti-aircraft fire from both sides denied all access to the airspace directly above the summit, but Keryon wasn’t interested in that approach. All eyes were on that quadrant. He brought the Thunderhawk in from an ignored corner of the sky, weaving low between the filth-blackened towers. The gunship struck like a scythe: a slash from the side, deep into the enemy’s flank. Hellstrike missiles cratered the target zone. The sponson heavy bolters chewed the enemy into so much meat. The enemy attempted to respond. Disorganised return fire clanged off the armour. The momentum of the march bled off. ‘Give them a judgement of flame,’ Keryon voxed.

‘They’ll be kindling for their own pyre,’ Volos responded, and the Claws launched.

The squad split into two fire teams. Volos led the first. They hit the ground with the fury of an orbital strike, shredding cultists and heretic troopers. They struck the centre of the main advance. Four broad avenues, running along the cardinal points of the compass, went up in relatively straight lines to the Concordat. They were the means by which ground transport fed the beast raw supplies and received its still-usable output. The east road was now the main tributary of the Chaos flood. The Claws brought chaos of their own, a bloody turbulence in the middle of the flow, and the advance slowed even more.

Volos had opted for a flamer again. He didn’t need range for this stage of the combat, just a maximum spread of death. He spun, torching cultists, and those who weren’t instantly carbonised ran flaming into their fellows, creating an expanding ring of burning casualties. Five metres to his right, he saw an enemy-commandeered Hellhound. He burned a path to it, pounding over fragile bodies, shrugging at the rounds that glanced off his armour. The turret rotated his way. With a burst from his jump pack, he shot up out of the line of fire and landed on top of the vehicle. He extended a blade and, a part of him still unable to believe that he could actually do this, punched through the armour-plating of the Hellhound’s promethium reservoir. He tossed an incendiary grenade inside and blasted back. He was still in the air when the tank exploded. A mushrooming fireball rolled over the cultists, gifting them with slashing shrapnel. Across the entire width of the avenue, Braxas and the other Claws of Volos’s team were butchers with bolter and flame, creating barricades of corpses, interdicting the upward slope of the road.

They were a virus in the bloodstream of the Chaos ranks, and the army responded like antibodies to the invader. The advance contracted as troops from uphill and the side streets rushed to crush the Claws. Volos and his brothers welcomed them to damnation with open arms. They burned and shot and sliced and smashed: dark gods of black ceramite and white, murderous bone. They were giants, monsters of war breaking little human dolls into bloody, smoking shreds.

It almost wasn’t sporting, Volos thought, snarling as he tore into another clump of cultists. A traitor Guardsman got off a lasrifle shot at Volos’s face, scorching his mouth grille. ‘I just had this repaired,’ he growled, his voice distorted into an electronic, inhuman rasp. He wrapped his fingers around the man’s neck and squeezed. The Guardsman’s head popped off. No, it almost wasn’t sporting, but heresy deserved no better, and what the traitors lacked in force, they made up for in quantity. Given will and enough time, they could, like the doubtworm-infected on Antagonis, overwhelm a Space Marine. They were attempting to do that now as they choked the avenue with their numbers. It was exactly what Volos and his brothers wanted them to do.

Nithigg, heading up the other combat squad, voxed. ‘At your leisure, brother-sergeant.’

Fangs bared, Volos grinned in anticipation of carnage. ‘No, brother,’ he said. ‘At yours.’

‘How very kind. On three, then.’

‘On three.’

Two beats, two more savage moments during which dozens more cultists died, and then the Claws lifted off from the choked morass of the avenue. Above, the demolition charges set by Nithigg’s fire team detonated.

Bisset had told Volos about the insurgents’ opening salvo of the war and the fall of the Munitorum Palace. ‘They should be repaid in kind,’ Volos had replied.

Now they were. The charges took out the street-side facade and structural supports of an immense spire. The job, Nithigg had explained, was like felling a tree, and the art lay not only in making the tree fall, but in controlling where it did. With an outraged roar of murdered stone, the tower seemed to twist, its bulk fighting gravity for a perversely graceful second before it came down like the fall of the heavens themselves. It collapsed along the length of the avenue, destroying the network of upper level roads and walkways, triggering a chain reaction. For the cultists, it was as if an entire mountain chain descended on them. Volos and the Claws rose through a night filled with flying rockcrete and dust, and below them an entire swath of the insurgent army vanished, crushed out of existence.

The Dragon Claws landed uphill of the destruction, and began to burn and slash their way to the summit.

Is it time yet? Rodrigo Nessun wondered. It was hard, sometimes, to keep track of minutes and hours in the materium. So much of his consciousness was at play in a realm where time was not just meaningless, it wasn’t even a concept. But it was important that he remember he had things to do on the material plane. That was, after all, where the game was being played. That was where there were destinies. He reached out and touched the minds that were open to him, and read what was being experienced. The full picture of the Concordat Hill struggle coalesced before him. He saw that yes, it was indeed time. He sent another player onto the board.

The main force of the Black Dragons surged through the Mortisian Guard and hit the front lines of the Concordat battle like a battering ram. Lettinger ran with them, doing his best to keep up, but it was a lost cause. Setheno, more than a head taller, was better able to match the pace, and he lost track of her power-armoured figure early in the charge. The Dragons used no vehicles. With this concentration of troops, even a bike would get bogged down. On foot, the Space Marines had a duck-weave-smash momentum that ate up distance and shredded opposition. Lettinger swallowed the humiliation of being the straggler. It wasn’t easy. The secrecy of his actual ordo notwithstanding, he was unmistakeable as an inquisitor, and he was used to the awe and cringing he inspired when he emerged from the shadows. There was no such reaction from the Guardsmen he ran past. He was too pathetically human, too ordinary, in the wake of the storm of gods that had just passed.

It didn’t matter, he reminded himself as he reached the upper quadrant of Concordat Hill. Today did not matter. The battle did not matter except as a test of the Black Dragons. A test not of their martial ability, but of whether there was anything worth salvaging, or whether he and Toharan should proceed with seeking an act of mercy for an irredeemably tainted Chapter. That decision was what mattered, and so, when all was said and done, he could put up with a little wounded pride. He held the fate of a Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes in his hands. That was true authority and power. He knew there would be no songs written about Werner Lettinger in the centuries to come, but his name might certainly be spoken in hushed whispers, and that would suit him very well.

Ahead, the Black Dragons must have already been having an impact, because the mass of Guard was moving faster. The vehicles were doing more than inching, and the men were actually marching. Lettinger ran a bit faster, his cloak flapping night. He was a wraith weaving in and out of the men, and at last he reached the battlefield. The summit of Concordat Hill was a volcanic eruption of blood and confusion, a hurricane of close-quarters fighting where unit cohesion and even a sense of direction fell apart. Within seconds, Lettinger didn’t know if he was advancing or retreating. There were heretics on all sides, and he pounced from one to the next, a lethal shadow. He wasted no energy, putting one shot from his laspistol in the skull, point blank, of each target. He was a piece of the dark, and they couldn’t see him coming, couldn’t fight what they didn’t know was there.

He heard a series of explosions, and then a rumble so huge it might have been an earthquake, and the ground did shake beneath his feet. The Dragon Claws’ mission had succeeded, then. He sensed a shift in the nature of the struggle. The current became more defined. He was moving consistently in one direction: the top, driving the enemy away from the Concordat.

Then there was another big sound. From the wrong direction.

The In Excelsis was a Goliath-class factory ship. It was almost five kilometres long. Amidships was a plasma refinery. The transport was Aighe Mortis-registered, and it now re-entered its home system for the first time in years. It broadcast its identity and destination, and slowly approached the position of the Imperial fleet as if the presence of the warships and the ominous flashes on the planet’s surface were nothing out of the ordinary.

‘In Excelsis, hold position,’ the Irrevocable Fate demanded.

The factory ship did not. It came closer. After its first broadcast, it fell into vox silence, and no hails were answered. It moved with grace and majesty. And will.

Toharan was on the summit when the explosions happened. Without pausing his extermination of heretics, he glanced down the east slope and saw the billow of dust rise towards the invisible heavens, glowing from the flashes of fireballs. The enemy reinforcements were blocked. The troops on the hill were outnumbered now, with no way up or down. It was time to crush them, and place the Concordat in Imperial hands.

Then there were more blasts, like echoes, only they came from the rear lines. Toharan frowned and voxed on the entire command network. ‘Does anyone know what that was?’

There was so much static and interference, the answer had to be relayed along line of sight from person to person until it reached Toharan. ‘It’s those Throne-abandoned rebels we left to guard our rear,’ Symael reported. ‘They’ve done the same thing as the Claws. They’ve dropped towers across the main avenues away from the hill.’

Both armies were boxed in now, Toharan realised. The traps weren’t airtight. Egress was possible. But it would be slow. He felt a premonitory dread.

On the Immolation Maw, helmsman Maro listened to the unanswered message from the Irrevocable Fate to the In Excelsis. As the type of ship he was looking at and its precise course sank in, he ordered firing resolutions for the factory ship. He sent an urgent vox to Admiral Hassarian: ‘Cripple it! Cripple it now!’

Nessun sat in the mind of Captain Henrik Rogge of the In Excelsis. Nessun had brought the truth to Rogge years before, and had held him and his ship in reserve for just such a crossroads of fates as now. ‘Send it out,’ Nessun whispered to Rogge.

The In Excelsis opened its cargo bay. The missile inside was carried off the ship by two tugboats. They transported it a safe distance from the hull before its engine fired and it streaked towards Aighe Mortis.

The Immolation Maw’s augurs scanned the missile, divined its nature, plotted its trajectory, and fed the data to Maro, who sat in the pilot throne, mechadendrites linking him to the being and spirit of the ship. The missile was ancient, of unknown make, and Chaos-distorted. It was also atomic, and its ground zero was Concordat Hill.

The laws of physics were unforgiving, and movement was glacial as Maro pulled the Maw at maximum acceleration out of orbit. He set a course perpendicular to the angle of approach of the In Excelsis. He divided the targeting servitors between the missile and the factory ship’s engines. The ship had to be stopped, but not destroyed. And if the missile were hit too soon, it might take out the Goliath.

Hassarian had understood the danger too, and the engines of the Irrevocable Fate were flaring hot, but the cruiser was even bigger than the Immolation Maw. It was too slow to start, and it would not reach a good angle until too late. Its escorts were no better positioned. Maro pushed the Maw to the limit, and the ship’s machine-spirit seemed to recognise the threat. It responded with an urgency that matched Maro’s own.

The missile was just reaching Aighe Mortis’s outer atmosphere when the Maw breathed fire with its turrets.

The vox traffic was garbled, but Volos still caught the essential: Toharan was ordering an immediate retreat. Volos couldn’t understand. They had the cultists at bay. The summit was about to be theirs. But he obeyed. The Dragon Claws pulled away from their slaughter. They shot up over the summit and back to allied lines. Volos was just landing when the clouds above flashed white with sudden sunrise.

The missile’s death flash was a sear in the void above Aighe Mortis. The shock wave passed over the Imperial ships, punishing void shields and rattling hulls. Maro kept the Immolation Maw on course. The In Excelsis closed in. The window to stop it was slamming shut. Maro acquired his angle on the engines. Lances stabbed from the Maw into the stern of the factory ship. The strike was the slice of an Apothecary’s blade. There was a bloom of fire, and wreckage trailed away from the ship. The In Excelsis lost its forward impulse, but inertia would carry it on in a straight line forever until something stopped it.

Like a planet.

Or another ship. The Irrevocable Fate finished its turn and approached the floating plasma refinery head-on.

‘Captain,’ Maro voxed.

‘I am aware of the risk,’ Hassarian sent back. ‘It will be a controlled collision. We have to force it back.’

Through Rogge’s eyes, Nessun saw what the Fate planned. In the Hall of Exaltation, his body’s lips twitched, and would have smiled. The reckless bravery was charming, and so futile. He had never planned for the In Excelsis to come any closer to Aighe Mortis. He still had need of the planet and its population.

The Imperial ships, though. They were a nuisance.

‘Now,’ he told Rogge.

The plasma refinery exploded.

CHAPTER 17

THE NECESSARY MONSTER

A supernova in miniature lit up the Camargus system. The energy released by the death of the In Excelsis was, for a fraction of a second, greater than the sun’s. The shock wave was a blinding sphere of superheated gas and dust. It expanded at a tenth the speed of light, hitting the Irrevocable Fate in less than a blink. The battle-cruiser vaporised, the sudden flash of its own death barely visible in the stellar apocalypse of the refinery. The wave hit the rest of the Mortisian fleet. Ships came apart and burned. Engines exploded, hulls were crushed, power systems surged and died. The craft that did not disintegrate became dead hulks, floating in listless orbits towards random collision or eventual destructive re-entry.

The Immolation Maw’s race to the proper firing angle had taken it further out from the Goliath than the fleet. It had, in Maro, a helmsman who had piloted the ship for centuries and knew it so well that he could, he had once boasted, make it dance a quadrille. He had foreseen what might happen, and had done his best not just to prevent the disaster, but get the Maw far enough away that it could survive if the worst happened. He was more successful than he could have hoped.

Less so than he could have wished.

The wave overwhelmed the void shields, popping them like gas bubbles. It took the strike cruiser in its jaws and worried it, trying to shake it apart. Explosions rocked the decks, engulfing servitors in flame. Power flickered, and then went down through much of the ship. Maro went blind as the ship’s sensors were shut down or destroyed. The interior and exterior of the ship became a foreign territory to him. The Maw’s body was horrifically wounded, and the spirit, howling in pain, lost all connections to its component parts. The ship’s agony flashed down the mechadendrites into Maro and he gaped in torment, his body arched beyond even Space Marine limits, blood pouring from mouth and nose and ears and eyes.

The Immolation Maw screamed and fell into a coma.

The shock wave reached Aighe Mortis. If the In Excelsis had been a few tens of thousands of kilometres closer, the explosion would have scoured the planet clean of air and life. Instead, the energy of thousands of atomic blasts was absorbed by the atmosphere. What had been torpid, weighed down by particulate matter into an oppressive, windless miasma of perpetual summer, now became a weather bomb. Vortices of hellish speed formed into hurricanes the size of continents. The furies had descended on Aighe Mortis, and none would stand before them.

On the ground, the furies first came as a light. It was a ripple, solar bright, that swept across the sky. In its wake, the clouds boiled. They became rage. Lightning exploded over the entire firmament, arcing from cloud to cloud to ground. It was electric judgement, come to condemn all. Thunder and wind were the same god-throat roar, so loud there was no room left in the world for the screams of the judged. The world’s fist slammed into Volos. He staggered, but grounded himself, sinking his weight through his feet to the centre of the earth. He was rooted like a mountain, and he did not fall.

Around him, the retreat became a scything of wheat. He saw the other Dragons remain upright, but all the humans were flattened by the wind. Some who were exposed on the summit, Guard and cultist alike, were picked up and thrown through the air to smash like dolls against the towers. Glass erupted from windows, and for a long, terrible minute, the air sang with a million killing shards. They were caught in a murder vortex, tiny glints reflecting the lightning as they lanced through air and flesh. A sandstorm of glass ticked against Volos’s armour.

As the atmosphere went to war, the battle on the ground paused. The humans were flattened, those who had tried to rise shredded by glass. This was a moment, then. The Black Dragons were the only ones standing. Toharan took it.

‘Brothers,’ Volos heard him announce on the comm-feed, ‘we have been betrayed, but the Emperor’s hand has shielded us. Take the hill. Slay the heretics.’

Volos turned around. Toharan was right, though there was little glory in this victory. This was simple butcher’s work, a massacre of the prone. All the Dragons had to do was walk into a high wind and kill whatever lay on the ground.

Then there was another voice, half-smothered in static, speaking to him. ‘Sergeant, I would speak with you.’ It was Setheno.

‘I have been given orders,’ he said.

‘This is of vital importance.’

He hesitated, then took a chance and listened to his instinct. ‘Where are you?’

‘Meet me at the base of the hill. Where the avenue is blocked. Bring your squad.’

‘Ormarr, on me,’ he voxed, and the Dragon Claws made their way down the hill. Volos didn’t have to specify that they be discreet about it. He left the main avenue, saw the others doing the same. But they were moving against the current, and it was less than a minute before Toharan was on the comm.

‘Brother-Sergeant Volos,’ he demanded. ‘Where are you going?’

‘A target of opportunity, brother-captain,’ Volos answered. Toharan said nothing in response. Volos was surprised. No further questions, no demands, nothing. He’s giving me rope, Volos realised. He had just acted contrary to a direct order. He was more than halfway to hanging himself.

Away from the crown of the hill, the wind dropped slightly. It shrieked as it was funnelled between the towers, but the hive blunted some of its force, too. The glass storm passed. Debris still flew, and Volos saw some metal shards sing by like guillotine blades, but the Guardsmen were struggling to their feet and resuming the push forward. Volos’s Lyman ear could just make out, over the wind, the sounds of war starting up again.

Setheno was waiting at the base of a mountain of rubble. Rather than stage a collapse along the main avenue, as the Dragon Claws death trap had done, the rebels had triggered a transversal fall. Volos was looking at a mountain chain of wrecked spire, stretching north and south for kilometres, blocking all roads back west to the starport. The retreat would have involved a slow, awkward climb over twisted metal and shifting rockcrete. Volos thought about how Squad Ormarr had lured the cultists into a concentrated area, and then dropped a chunk of city on them. The same stratagem had been used on the Imperial forces, only on a vaster scale. He had recognised the earlier flash as a high-atmosphere atomic blast. If it had hit as no doubt was intended, it would have eliminated the Dragons and a sizeable host of Mortisian Guard.

The rhythmic, pulsing lightning strikes cast conflicting shadows over Setheno. In her grey armour, she blended in with the dust and ruins, the shriek of her helm making her look like a gargoyle that had somehow survived its tower’s fall. Volos saw symbolism, not camouflage, in her appearance, and it was symbolism that chilled with its abyssal bleakness.

‘Sergeant,’ she began. She was addressing him, but using the squad channel. So she wanted them all to hear. ‘This is a crucial moment, and you cannot waste it. Captain Toharan’s action is necessary, but it is not sufficient to win the day.’

‘How do you suggest we seize the moment, then?’ Volos asked, wary.

‘By recognising it for what it is, and by embracing what you are.’

‘Go on,’ Volos said, though he more than suspected that he would regret listening to her.

‘Look at the skies. We stand on a cusp. The people of Aighe Mortis are gazing up and experiencing the greatest terror in the history of their civilization. They will be desperate to ascribe meaning to what they see.’

‘That is not the function of the Adeptus Astartes. Our sole mission is to smash the Emperor’s foes–’

‘Using all necessary force,’ Setheno broke in. ‘One such application of force is the shaping of beliefs and fears, something that you are uniquely qualified to do in this moment. The opportunity will soon pass, and Aighe Mortis will be lost to the Imperium. I do not relish the thought of another Exterminatus so soon after the last.’

Volos shook his head. ‘We are here to fight the Swords of Epiphany, not engage in a propaganda campaign, which is what you seem to be suggesting.’

‘I am suggesting something far more lethal than that, sergeant. And tell me, where are the Swords of Epiphany? Why have you not been fighting them? This battle must still be a diversion. Nevertheless, the traitors have been very effective at creating a narrative for the population to believe in. We must take that weapon away from them if we are to save anything on this planet.’

‘How?’ Volos asked, curious in spite of himself, and feeling still that mounting dread. His hands began to tingle, and he was suddenly thinking of blood dripping from them.

‘How can the rage of the skies appear as anything other than judgement? We must use that. You must be the incarnation of the Emperor’s wrath.’

He began to see where she was going. A beat of denial began to pulse in his head. He did not want to hear her words, he did not want to follow her logic, and most of all, he did not want her to be correct. The Black Dragons were not uncaring of the civilians they encountered, whether in the course of prosecuting war, recruiting initiates, or engaged in the salvage and trade that kept Second Company functioning on its homeless crusade. There were Chapters who barely acknowledged the existence of unaugmented humans beyond the abstract awareness that this was, after all, the Imperium of Man. There were others who regarded civilians as a barely tolerable nuisance. But the Black Dragons did not. They knew for what and for whom they were fighting. They knew that destroying enemies wasn’t enough: this was also a war to preserve something.

‘You must embrace who you are,’ Setheno said, and Volos now understood why he had always thought she was more dangerous than Lettinger. The inquisitor only wanted to destroy the Black Dragons. Setheno was here to mould them, to unleash their dark core. ‘You must embrace what you are.’

What he was? He was defined by his actions. He always had been, and had always lived by the catechism taught by the Chaplains. The mutations of his body, however much they enhanced his abilities as a killing machine, were also a warning. There had been so many Adeptus Astartes, from the terrible genesis moment of the Horus Heresy onward, who had fallen from grace, descending into monstrousness because they believed themselves to be gods. The Black Dragons had the daily, inescapable, physical reminders that they were not divine, and Volos had absolute faith in the lesson: the impurity of the body was a goad to find purity of soul through purity of action. Every act had consequences, for oneself and for others. That was not a platitude; it was a profound statement of reality that was forgotten by too many, too often.

‘Take us over these ruins, sergeant,’ Setheno said, her voice as calm as it ever was, and as implacable. ‘Remove your helmet. Let the traitors and heretics and the fools beyond see what must be seen. Do what must be done, sergeant. Become what you must be. You are the Emperor’s monster. And you are necessary.’

The wind was the gale of the planet’s agony, but it had dropped enough that Bisset was able to emerge from the doorway in which he had taken shelter during the first moments of the horror in the sky. If he leaned into the wind and walked carefully, he could move without being blown off his feet. He looked down the road to where rubble filled the rockcrete canyon, and cursed himself as a waste of oxygen. After speaking with the Black Dragon, he had asked to join in the assault on Concordat Hill. All he wanted was to be put in contact with the Guard, to be given a gun and marching orders. But the Black Dragons sergeant had asked him to remain here, with the rebels, to be the eyes and ears of the Imperium. He had seen and heard much since the Black Dragons’ departure. He had heard the boom of explosives and the collapsing-mountain crash of the falling hive towers. He had seen the laughter and dancing of the gathering crowd as they imagined all their opponents boxed in and about to be removed forever from their lives. He had heard, as the celebrations began, that this outcome had been promised by the ‘other’ Space Marines, the ones who looked like angels and wore armour of gold, not menacing black.

Bisset had seen and heard all these things, and been helpless to do anything about them. He had been given a vox unit, but he’d been unable to raise anyone in the combat zone or back at the starport. Communication was reduced to barely more than line of sight. The only person within the reach of his voice who would be concerned with what he had to say was himself. He was stuck in limbo once again. He seemed fated to be the man with the important information that he could do nothing about.

Now he saw a new sight, as did everyone filling the cramped and serpentine streets. At the crest of the rubble barrier, some thirty metres up, figures appeared. They were silhouetted against the maelstrom clouds by lightning so constant and so pervasive, it was as if the sky burned with electric fire. They were massive, hulking, horned beings clad in armour the black of hell, except for one in the grey of the shroud. The black ones began a steady descent of the slope. The grey one remained at the summit and spread its arms.

Bisset knew, at the rational level, that he was looking at the Dragon Claws and Canoness Setheno. But the atavistic part of his brain reacted with bowel-loosening terror. These were not humans. They were nightmares from an afterlife of punishment. Then the voice spoke. The rational Jozef Bisset, late of the insufferably rational Departmento Munitorum, realised that Setheno’s armour must have the capability to tap into any vox-caster within reach of her signal. The frightened primitive, who had regressed to little Jozef hiding under the blankets from thunder and monsters, reacted to a woman’s voice that did not shout, but that made itself heard over the gale. The voice came from all sides, and it was a voice so shorn of pity, so closed to any form of human entreaty or emotion, that simply to hear it was to know one was damned.

‘Oh faithless of Aighe Mortis,’ proclaimed the cold saint. ‘You have abandoned your God-Emperor, turned your face from his light, and made covenants with the Archenemy. And behold.’ She raised her arms, and her hands appeared to grasp the convulsing heavens. ‘The Emperor sends his judgement with fury. You are vile, you are doomed, and you will know such agony that the world will crack with your screams.’

And it seemed that the world might, because the crowd began to scream. The sound was a duet with the wind, a howl of despair and too-late repentance, for as the sky above them exploded and the air itself attacked, how could the misguided, manipulated, desperate people of Aighe Mortis not believe every word the terrible woman said? How could they believe anything else but that at long, long last, after millennia of being ignored and left to suffocate slowly in their industrial filth, they had the undivided attention of the God-Emperor, and did so to their woe?

The voice spoke again. It cut through the shrieks, and though the people wanted to run and hide from the face of their god, they were held, rooted as stone, by the creature who bore the flesh of a woman, but who had long ago ceased, by any sane measure, to be one. The Gorgon had not finished with them yet. ‘Seek forgiveness. Seek it now or die unshriven. Prove yourselves worthy of a return to the light of the Emperor, if only after your final breath. Find the heretic. Slay the heretic. Stamp him into the mud and perhaps your deaths will be a release, and not the promise of torment unending. Kill the heretic now because the Emperor’s vengeance will be at your heels.’

As she finished speaking, the descending figures in black shot into the air on comets of fire. They came down at the front of the crowd with the boom of a deity’s hammer. They roared, the speakers on their armour turning their voices into the metallic rage of machines. Then they removed their helmets. Bisset was less than a block away, so he saw what they looked like clearly. They had all been wearing their helms when he had spoken to them earlier, and fearsome as the red eye lenses and snarling mouth grilles were, he had been around just enough Space Marines to know the general form of their armour. He had seen the horns, but had thought they were ornamentation on the helms. Now the faces were revealed and the horns slid through openings in the helmets because they were not ornaments at all. They were part of the monsters. The one in the middle, the biggest one, was one whose name Bisset knew but could not think of because right now his brain would say nothing but Dragon, Dragon, Dragon, Dragon. The monster with reptile skin and obsidian eyes bared his fangs, and raised his arms, and bone, sharp as wrath, shot out. He looked down at the man before him. Sergeant Karl Feher trembled and took a step back. The monster reached out a massive hand and closed it over Feher’s head. Bisset could not hear the crunch-crack of skull, but he felt it in his chest and gut. As blood and brain matter ran down the monster’s gauntlet, he gutted Feher with a bone-blade then threw the mangled corpse at the crowd. The Dragon roared, and with a voice that was deep and hissing and loud enough to be heard without speakers, he shouted, ‘People of Aighe Mortis! We are the Adeptus Astartes! We are the Black Dragons! We have come to purge your heresy with fire and with bone!’

CHAPTER 18

TAINTED

The necessary monster. Necessary. Necessary. Volos thought the words again and again as he slipped into a rage of herding, roaring, beating, and killing. Killing the weak and the fleeing. But killing traitors, he reminded himself, and he clung to more words Setheno had spoken: All rebellion is heretical. She was right. Curse her for what she was making him understand, and for what she was making him do to himself, but she was right. Toharan’s lost sheep who needed only good role models to come around had tried to exterminate them all. All heresy must be punished, so all rebellion, whatever its initial justifications, must also be punished. In the final analysis, there were no justifications for turning against the Emperor. And so Volos and the Dragon Claws swam in the waters of damnation together and taught themselves another form of purity: the purity of terror.

The Dragons snarled, cursed, threatened, and fired bolters overhead or into flesh. Most of all, they wielded the monstrousness of their own bodies. They brandished bone-blades and let loose the grotesquerie of their faces. They sacrificed their former sense of identity on the altar of necessity. They spread terror before them, and it tore through the crowd, a wildfire and plague. With it came anguish and fanatical repentance. Every lightning flash was now understood to be the anger of the God-Emperor, and having brought this on themselves, the people had but a single goal: to propitiate their deity. Volos and his brothers were here to show them there was only one route to salvation, and that was through the flesh of the enemy.

The terror and its gospel flashed through the hive faster than the crowd could run, and the population of Aighe Mortis, in hiding or not, guilty or innocent, poured into the streets, screaming their love for the Emperor and their fear of his monsters. The Dragons spread out, each becoming the master of a different quadrant, and they controlled the flow of the crowd. Setheno had caught up to Volos, and as she marched one step behind him, her voice travelled from vox-caster to vox-caster, driving in its message of damnation and bloody penitence.

They herded the crowds west at first, gathering the numbers until they were a colossal army. The terrified outliers were too far away to see the Dragons or hear the canoness, but the message and the horror reached them all the same. The gigantic mass of repentance turned south, then east, and then north, to where the rubble barrier ended and the way was clearest to Concordat Hill. Driven by thunder, wind and raging, armoured beasts, the masses were uncounted insects on a mindless charge. Volos found that he hated them.

Almost as much as he did himself.

The cultists were on their feet again. They were disoriented at first and unsure whether to attack or flee, and the Black Dragons cut swaths of them down, clearing the way for the recovering Guard. Toharan led the assault, his squads unbroken by the fire in the sky, unbowed by the rage of the wind. They took the summit of Concordat Hill. Toharan had the Devastator squads hold the position while his tactical teams moved down the eastern slope, tearing the enemy apart. He was surprised by how quickly the cultists found their footing again. They weren’t organised now, simply attacking as a mob, their mouths open in raging howls whose sound was stolen by the wind. Rather than cowed, they seemed to be energised by the storm, as if it were a reflection of the Chaos in their souls. The delay that the Dragon Claws had bought with the dropped tower had run its course, and though reinforcements weren’t as quick to arrive as they had been before, whether they came in a stream or a flood was academic. They were here, and they were numberless.

But the Concordat was taken, and the Guard consolidated the position. The transports arrived to place a Basilisk gun on the Concordat’s landing pad. Soon, the endless roar of the wind was punctuated by the deep crack-boom of the gun, and the shelling of enemy concentrations had begun. On the ground, Toharan couldn’t see the artillery targets, but from the sound of each shot he could tell that the bombardment was taking in all the points of the compass.

The gun couldn’t defend the hill itself, so the cultists had to be driven back and back, until there was no longer any chance of the Imperial forces losing the heights. The Black Dragons plunged into their ranks like a knife in the belly. Though there were no organised lines to break, and the fighting reminded Toharan of treading water, the Space Marines drew the frothing cultists to them and away from the Mortisian Guard on the summit.

The momentum of both forces reached a standstill once again. The slaughter wreaked by the Adeptus Astartes was enough to hold the cultists at bay. But the heretics had such numbers that, midway down the hill, Toharan’s advance slowed to a stop. Each shot of his bolter blew a head to paste, each sweep of his chainsword cut bodies in half, and every one of his brothers added to the tally of gigantic butchery. Lascannons annihilated dozens of cultists at once, blowing craters of flesh into their packed density. Flamers reduced advancing walls of bodies to ash. But there were always more. There were simply too many of the enemy to kill.

Later, Toharan would wonder what had made him realise a change was coming. Like a slight breeze that foreshadows a storm, a breath against the cheek just before the cloudburst, the premonitory moment came, he would decide, as a nuance in the way the cultists attacked. There was a slight decrease in intensity. When Toharan culled the immediate enemy with his chainsword, the breathing space he created for himself lasted one beat longer. It was as if the heretics were becoming distracted, their minds no longer focused, to the exclusion of everything else, on killing the Space Marines.

Toharan had time to notice the shift, and a question was just forming in his conscious mind when the tide swept in with enraged shrieks and chanted, hysterical prayers. He looked south, and saw a crowd surging forward through the streets like a torrent churning through a narrow gorge. A few of its members carried firearms, and many of them wore Militia uniforms, though Toharan saw some Guard insignia too. The vast majority of the mob, though, was made up of civilians. They wielded makeshift weapons: short bits of metal for clubs, longer ones for spears. Many were unarmed, and simply had their arms outstretched to grab their foe. They were so frenzied that, at first, Toharan thought they were a massive wave of cultists, coming in on the flank. But then they fell on the heretics. Toharan’s opponents were swept away by the foaming tide of exultant, vengeful, terrified faith. He almost lost his footing in the storm of penitence. Most of the cultists were armed, and they fought back, but the momentum of the surge was inexorable, and the heretics went down beneath a swarm of clawing, grasping hands and beating metal.

Now Toharan could make out, in the cacophony of screams and ravings, the God-Emperor being called on and praised, and begged for forgiveness. He looked to his right again and stared at the savage flow of the faithful until he saw the source of its impetus. Behind the crowd, raging with bone and bolter, came Volos. Toharan saw him gnash his fangs, saw him spear a man with an arm-blade and raise him high. He launched a fountain of blood over the running figures before him, driving them to still greater howling panic, before hurling the corpse through the air. Where it landed, the cries for mercy climbed new heights and the people clawed at those in front of them, urging them to go faster and faster yet, that they might show their devotion by ripping still more heretics to pieces. Setheno was just behind Volos, and as they came closer, nearby vox-casters picked up the canoness’s excoriating liturgy.

Volos drew level with Toharan. He was a colossus risen from the most fevered depths of humanity’s collective unconscious. His black ceramite dripping with gore and flesh, his face contorted into that of a saurian predator, he had become something that Toharan had never wished to contemplate, but now regarded with horrified understanding. He looked at his brother, and saw a daemon. ‘Sergeant,’ he said into the vox-link as Volos passed. The Dragon Claw stopped. The rout he had created ran on without him, the wind and demented lightning carrying on his work. Toharan looked past him at the mob. He saw no trace of reason in its rampage. This was not the redemption he had planned for the rebels. This was not the reasoned return to the light of the Emperor. This was a plunge down into the very pit from which he was trying to pull the Black Dragons. ‘What have you done?’ he whispered.

‘What was necessary.’ Volos spat the word like it was poison.

‘I fear that I am seeing you clearly, brother, for the first time.’

Volos turned his head and looked down at him. His black eyes were as distant as the stars. ‘With respect, brother-captain,’ he said, and the only emotion in his voice was a resigned disgust, ‘I doubt that very much.’

He moved off. Setheno followed. Her exhortations, as calm and closed to entreaty as ever, did not pause, but her helmet turned Toharan’s way. Beneath the helm’s fixed rage, he sensed cold-blooded appraisal. He returned the favour. He had thought her an enemy, and now he was certain. She was, in some way, responsible for this madness. And if he owed her a debt of thanks for bringing his brother’s true nature to the surface, she was as tainted as he was. He watched them go, herding their monstrous sheep. Decisions that he had imagined would be hard to make were suddenly easy.

Reflective flak armour was no power armour, but it had saved Lettinger’s life. He’d been caught on open ground, just below the top of Concordat Hill, when the first, most punishing blows of the wind had hit, and with them the razoring hail of glass. He had been knocked down with the other humans. When he had been able to look up, he had seen a scoured landscape. The black and brown of Aighe Mortis had changed into a flashing, roiling hell where the only things that stood were the black silhouettes of the rotting hive towers and the relentless shapes of the Black Dragons. From his prone perspective, abased in spite of himself, the Space Marines were more like gods than ever. They were monuments that moved, but would not be moved. His own status as a mere human was driven home yet again.

He rose as soon as he could, and mere human though he was, he was still up and taking the hill before any of the Guard. But once more, he was behind the Space Marine advance, and as he crossed the summit to the eastern slope, now with the Devastators at his back, his hunting was not what it had been earlier. Some cultists did get past Toharan’s teams, but they were easily contained by the Devastators’ heavy bolter fusillades. His own kills, it seemed to him, had a pathetic ‘me too’ quality, and until he worked his way a bit further down the hill, his martial skills were most heavily called on in avoiding the indignity of being cut down by friendly fire.

He killed what he could, and he was only a dozen metres away from Toharan when the surge happened. He watched the shrieking horde overwhelm the cultists, and saw very little to distinguish the behaviour of the heretic and the faithful. Then he saw Volos and Setheno. The Dragon Claw’s tainted nature was now visible to all, and Lettinger felt some small satisfaction in being vindicated. But the power Volos wielded was disturbing. And the presence of Setheno made it clear to Lettinger how mistaken he had been to seek her as an ally. She was at least as corrupt as the Space Marine.

They passed, and Toharan stood still for a moment. Then, perhaps sensing Lettinger’s gaze, he turned around. Lettinger nodded to him. The monsters of Chaos who had just passed below him were dangerous. But so was he, and so was his ally. They would not make the mistake of underestimating the threat before them. They would not turn from the measures that would have to be taken.

CHAPTER 19

THE SANCTUARY HORN

For the third time in quick succession, the Black Dragons tasted ash instead of victory. They had retreated from Antagonis, lost their captain on Flebis, and now the word spread of daemonic corruption. The dawning triumph on Aighe Mortis was a false one. It was being won through the Archenemy’s means, and so his military defeat became his spiritual victory. That was the word. That was the story. The damage, though, was not caused as much by what the story told, as by how it was told, and by who told it. Toharan spoke to the Disciples of Purity on a dedicated vox-channel he had set up. They, in turn, passed on the tale of Volos’s taint to their squads. The whisper was a virus, and it travelled the landed contingent of Second Company with the speed and virulence of an epidemic. It was as if the Black Dragons had created their own strain of doubtworm and infected themselves. Some succumbed, others fought off the illness, but all were injured. The body of the company took sick.

There were those, like Toharan, who believed in the truth of the tale. These were the most fervent of the Disciples, those whose desire for purity of body, of dogma, and of Codex compliance had become the master drive of their identity. There were those whose resentments and ambitions made them want to believe, and choose to do so. There were those who looked to what they knew of the sergeant of the Dragon Claws, and considered the source of the tale, and felt their anger grow in the face of the lie. And so, even as the Dragons fought shoulder-to-shoulder, brothers together, to purge the heretics and consolidate the gains of Concordat Hill, the schism grew. Within minutes, alliances had been formed. They weren’t spoken of, and in many cases their members did not know they had joined one side or the other. But they had, and oaths had been taken as surely as if they had been witnessed by the God-Emperor himself.

Nessun returned to his body and left the Hall of Exaltation. After extended sessions of travelling the immaterium with his mind, his body felt like a suit of clothes cut a few sizes too big. His limbs were awkward, and didn’t want to do as they were bid. His movements lacked grace. Sensation was too distant, seeming to come at one remove. He used the minutes it took him to travel from the Hall to the Revealed Truth’s strategium to master the physical. By the time he walked onto the bridge, he was serenity in motion once more.

Raphyle was awaiting his pleasure. ‘What is your will, Father?’ the Sword asked.

‘It is time for the harvest,’ Nessun said. The explosion of the In Excelsis had not had the effect planetside he had been counting on. Someone had read his move and countered it by using the devastation in precisely the fashion he had intended for his own forces. The tide of the war had turned, and the loss of Aighe Mortis was inevitable. He gave a mental shrug. Control of the planet itself was unimportant. Whether the world was his or not, he would be leaving soon, but would return to teach a new lesson, one that would make everything that had come before seem but the shallowest of prologues. He had seen, through eyes that belonged to him more and more with every beat of thwarted desire, the Black Dragons carve out another material victory. He had also seen them make, from the array of dooms that great Tzeentch had offered them, their final choice. On balance, he thought it a good one. The aesthetics of it pleased him. But for now it was time to complete the immediate task on Aighe Mortis, so that he might head off to meet his greater glory. ‘Order the Foretold Pilgrimage to the surface,’ he said.

‘What about the Immolation Maw?’

‘Does it still live?’

‘As far as our remaining augurs in planetary orbit can tell. It hasn’t moved since the explosion, but it is still intact.’

Nessun hesitated. The chance was there to swoop in personally on the crippled Space Marine cruiser and finish it off. The temptation was delicious, and he allowed himself a few seconds to indulge in it and savour its taste. Then he dismissed it. The mission was at too critical a stage to allow any risk. The Maw might be dead, and it must certainly be hurt, but it might still be capable of striking back. He could not permit harm to come to the Revealed Truth. Not now, when it was about to make the most important journey of its millennia of service to the gospel of Chaos. ‘Avoid it,’ he said. ‘Take up position over the horizon from the Maw. Send the Pilgrimage in now. Sound the horns.’

The Swords of Epiphany squadron left its concealment behind the sun and closed on Aighe Mortis. As the endgame moves began, Nessun felt there was one indulgence he could allow. ‘The warriors of the Metastasis performed their duties on Aighe Mortis well,’ he told Raphyle. ‘They have earned a reward. Tell Captain Meliphael that the Immolation Maw is his.’

The heavy raider split off from the rest of the squadron, hunting for its wounded prey.

Volos retracted his blades and lowered his bolter. He didn’t need to act the monster any longer. The penitent mob had its own momentum. It was gathering recruits far beyond the reach of his epicentre. It was a question now of directing the force of the mob, of sending its fury down the channels that would have the greatest strategic benefit. All that was required was for a Dragon Claw to make an appearance at the head of the kilometres-long rush and gesture. The flood would follow that path with renewed, shrieking fervour. The work, the necessary work, was accomplished.

He brooded over the look Toharan had given him. Their bonds were broken beyond salvage. He knew that now. There had been nothing but horror and disgust in Toharan’s gaze. How should he have responded? he wondered. Should he have defended himself? Should he have explained that he had only killed men he knew to be traitors? And of this, Volos was sure. For all the raging and fury he had unleashed on the Mortisians, he had never been out of control. He had picked his targets with care. They had all been renegade militiamen or disaffected Guardsmen. They had all been part of the celebration at the foot of the rubble. They were traitors and heretics, even if they did not think so themselves, and by their actions had proven Setheno correct. There was only one verdict possible. So he had killed them, but no others. Anyone whose guilt he was not certain of, anyone who might simply be a civilian caught up in the religious frenzy he had created, he had not touched.

He could have said these things to Toharan. He hadn’t. He doubted Toharan would believe him. He doubted, for that matter, that Toharan could afford to believe anything he said. But the deeper truth was that he had no desire to defend himself. He loathed what he had had to do. And though he had not hurt any innocent citizens directly, he knew their blood coated his hands. The forced march had taken many victims, some trampled, some beaten to death by their neighbours for imagined heresies, others ground into the muck in the attacks on the cultists. Volos was a realist. He knew that war and its unalterable demands made no allowance for the innocent. He had taken part in actions before that had had massive civilian costs. But this time, his role had not been one of direct action. He had not been fighting the enemy with the brutal honesty of bolter and blade. He had become the monster many feared him to be. Perhaps Toharan was right to look at him as he did.

The nightmare tingling in his fingers. Was this what his premonitions had foretold? No. This was only a start. There was worse to come.

Volos shook himself. Enough. He had done what was needed, and however distasteful it might have been, he also knew it to be right. He was wallowing in a self-pitying resentment that the Emperor had marked out a difficult path for him to tread. Where was his sense of honour? Or did he believe himself unfit for the duty that lay before him? That thought almost made him laugh. If Setheno was to be believed, he was singularly fit for that duty.

Breaking out of his reverie, he noticed that the canoness was watching him. She had removed her helmet, and stood a few paces away. She had given him space for his thoughts, but was unwavering in her scrutiny. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Was I a proper monster?’

‘You were. The people of Aighe Mortis fear you, and they fear the Emperor. That is as it should be.’ She cocked her head slightly, an expression of curiosity that was the closest thing to an emotion Volos had yet seen from her. ‘Tell me. Do you feel ashamed of the actions you took?’

‘No,’ he said after a moment’s thought. When he had told himself a minute ago that his actions had been right, he now understood that that had not been a rationalisation. It had been a simple acknowledgement of an absolute truth.

‘And did you enjoy what you did?’

‘No.’ Just as true.

‘Good.’ She nodded, and Volos sensed he had passed a test. He wasn’t sure whether to feel resentful or not about that.

There was a metallic rattle off to his left. Volos turned his head. They were standing near the Concordat River, and a large chunk of discarded assemblage was tangled with some wreckage hanging into the effluent from the bank. Volos looked back up the rancid flow of water and filth to the industrial basilica at the top of the hill. The Concordat hadn’t so much as paused in production during the battle at its feet. ‘Is that what we fought to save?’ he asked, half-rhetorically.

‘Partly,’ Setheno answered.

‘Why?’ Volos was verging on heresy, but at this moment he didn’t care. He was staring at the wrecked bodies, allied and enemy, unknown and brother, that littered the hill and were stacked in mounds closer to the summit. ‘What is worth saving in that? Is it necessary too?’

‘In its function, yes it is. Or would you rather do without the bolter-rounds that it produces? If a round from that manufactorum kills an ork warboss, would you still doubt the institution’s necessity? As for its form,’ she shrugged. ‘Who is to say? But if it is in that form that the Concordat fulfils its function, then yes, the form is necessary too.’ When she looked at Volos, he imagined that he saw a glint of regret somewhere in the void of her eyes. ‘There is no joy in necessity, sergeant. Not when all we know is war.’

His reply was arrested by something new arriving on the soundscape of Aighe Mortis’s agony. Over the endless industrial chugging of the Concordat and the monotonous fanaticism of its vox-cast prayers, over the sluggish rush of the outflow river, over the periodic roar of the Basilisk gun, and over the more distant sounds of clashes and gunfire came the long blast of a horn. Volos parsed the sound with his enhanced hearing. The horn was many kilometres away, somewhere to the east, and its faintness was deceptive. Closer to the source, it would be deafening. It was a plaintive, mournful note that reached into the bone marrow. It was the sound of surrender. It announced not just the end of a fight, but the end of a dream. But it was also a siren call. It made a promise. Come to me, it said. Run to me, and you will find succour. You will find sanctuary.

‘What is it?’ Setheno asked.

‘A summons,’ Volos answered. One he would answer, to see who was calling and, he didn’t doubt, to slit the caller’s throat. He glanced back at Toharan. He was talking with a Mortisian Guard commander and gesturing at the hill. Giving orders for holding the territory, Volos assumed. Then he would be ready to move on with the Dragons and push the enemy even further back. If he had noticed the horn, he gave no sign.

The horn sounded again, and Volos’s course was clear. The distant target required the rapid, deep strike of an assault squad. He voxed the other Dragon Claws, calling them to him. The penitents were legion, and would spread on their own. They could do without the supervision of monsters for now. Then he asked Brother Keryon for his services once more.

The Immolation Maw was slow in waking. The ship had been brutalised by the explosion, its machine-spirit battered by shock and damage. The Imperial Navy fleet was destroyed. Many of the ships were gone as if they had never existed, reduced to a stream of atoms. The rest were pitiable debris. The Maw was the only ship still to hold its shape. But it was dark as a tomb. A trail of wreckage drifted behind it. From shattered, pierced decks, puffs of vapour emerged as the last of the atmosphere from those levels leaked out. The ship was a long, silent ruin floating in the void.

Maro regained consciousness, and his immediate sensation was pain. It wasn’t so much his own, though his body had been damaged when the shock wave hit. The painkillers flooding his system blocked the worst of his own injuries from his consciousness, but they couldn’t block his sense of the ship’s pain. Every hull breach, every tortured system, every blown bulkhead was as real to him as his own nerve clusters. As the ship revived, it screamed. Maro whispered to it. He repeated litanies of healing, doing everything he could to soothe the wounded spirit.

The ship calmed. One by one, support systems came back on line. Assessor servitors sent in damage reports, while their repair-tasked counterparts and serfs went to work. The data streamed in to Maro, and most of it was bad. The engines were down. They could be saved, and the efforts could be speeded up considerably if the resources of Aighe Mortis were available. Most of the habitat compartments had survived, though there were losses. Maro would mourn those brothers later. Shields were depleted, and would need time to power back up. The good news boiled down to two things: the Immolation Maw was not about to die, and most of the weapons systems were intact.

‘Approaching contact,’ a bridge servitor reported.

‘Analyse,’ Maro ordered.

The report came back: an Apostate-class heavy raider.

Maro ran scenarios through his head. There weren’t many. The Maw was dead in the water, but she still had her teeth. ‘Brother Ydraig,’ he voxed.

‘Yes, helmsman,’ the Techmarine answered.

‘We have a hostile contact.’

Ydraig cursed. ‘The shields won’t have a fraction of their force back in time. He’ll cut us in two.’

‘Then we will have to encourage him to take another course of action. We will be running dark. All available power to be routed to the weapons.’

‘Understood, brother. The Emperor protects.’

‘The Emperor protects,’ Maro repeated, thinking, Now would be a very good time for Him to do so. He sent out a general order: ‘Full dark. Vox silence.’

The Immolation Maw drew back into the shadow of the grave.

On the Metastasis, Captain Meliphael watched the Immolation Maw arrive within easy firing range. Impossible to miss at this distance, and the ship immobile, too. The execution was so easy, his father’s gift was almost an insult. He eyed the growing dark bulk of the cruiser. For a moment, as the Metastasis had first closed in, there had been a flicker of lights aboard, as if the ship were grasping at a fitful spark of life, but that ember had dimmed to nothing again. An idea occurred to Meliphael, a way of transforming the cardinal’s gift into a boon. ‘One shot,’ he commanded. ‘To the engines.’

The Maw shook, its agony spiking, as the lance strike punched another hole into the engine room. Metal groaned in sympathy with the machine-spirit. Maro whispered to it, soothing, promising relief and retribution, entreating the beast to be patient just a little bit longer.

No response from the Black Dragons. Meliphael’s lip curled, and the daemon inside him squirmed in anticipation. ‘Close in,’ he ordered. ‘Prepare boarding parties. We will be adding a new convert to our Father’s cause.’

Tennesyn groped to consciousness. He was ensnared by grav-webbing in the simple quarters he had been given since his arrival on the ship. He had retreated to the acceleration couch when the action against the In Excelsis had begun, and blacked out when the plasma refinery had gone nova. Now he fumbled through darkness, clawing at the webbing, frightened by the silence that surrounded him. The normal sounds of a ship were absent. There was no thrum of engines, no marching back and forth of men. Instead, there was a deep nothing.

He worked free of the webbing, and felt his way to the chamber’s viewport. He looked out. The heavy raider he had first seen when he had fled Aighe Mortis was lining up broadside with the Immolation Maw. From this distance, even Tennesyn’s unaided eye could see the torpedo tube hatches opening.

The Battle Pyre skimmed over the rooftops of Aighe Mortis, keeping just beneath the volcanic clouds. Keryon was following the coordinates of the last horn blast. The call had stopped about an hour ago, but had gone on long enough for Keryon to triangulate the location. Far below the racing Thunderhawk, Volos could see columns of ants charging down the streets between the buildings and along the connecting walkways. Repentance was a grass fire, almost outpacing the Battle Pyre.

They were just reaching their target, and Volos could see nothing unusual about the location, when the Thunderhawk’s sensors started picking up the horn again, still to the east, and many kilometres distant. ‘It’s a lure,’ Keryon announced. ‘We’re being led to a trap.’

Volos thought for a moment. A lure, yes, but… ‘I don’t think it’s meant for us,’ he said. It was too clumsy, too basic, and the first horn had cut off long before any Black Dragons might have been able to make it on foot. The idea that the bait would be exclusively for vehicles struck him as too much effort for too specific a target.

‘For whom, then?’ Nithigg asked.

‘Get us to the next one,’ Volos told Keryon. ‘If we can reach it before it shuts off, I think we’ll have our answer.’

They didn’t catch that horn, but they were almost in time for the one after that, close enough to tell which building had been broadcasting the call. It was the Palace of Saint Boethius, and here they did find the answer. The Grand Square was filled to capacity, and every member of the crowd was pushing in the same direction. The rush was to the east, and the currents in the mob looked like wind over a field of wheat.

‘I want a closer look,’ Volos said.

‘You want me to land in the square?’ Keryon asked, incredulous. He would foul the Thunderhawk’s landing gear with bodies.

‘Get me low enough for a jump, then circle back. Look for me on the palace roof.’

Keryon clicked compliance over the vox-net and dropped the nose of the Battle Pyre. Volos slid back the door, and the storm blew in the interior of the ship. He hung on to the bulkhead, steadying his footing as the wind slammed against the Thunderhawk. Keryon plunged down one of the straighter canyons leading towards the square, and Volos took the jump, his pack pushing him away from the backwash of the Battle Pyre as it sped past him.

Volos landed on a walkway about ten metres up from the street level. He looked down into the Grand Square at the flood of humanity, and realised that, at least in part, this was his work that he was seeing.

Below him were not the penitent, but refugees. He saw cultists, distinguishable by their ritual scarification and the Chaos runes drawn onto their clothing. He saw traitor Defence Militia and Guard elements. But he also saw civilians, entire families with belongings tossed hastily into sacks. And when some of these saw him, they screamed and made the sign of the aquila, as if this would ward him off. The terrible truth sank in: here was Chaos so complete that large numbers of Mortisians didn’t even know which forces were which. Perhaps, by the time the gospel of penitence had reached these ears, all that remained of the story was a tale of daemons pursuing the fearful. It was no longer about the wrath of the God-Emperor. These people, mixing and fleeing with the traitors, believed themselves to be faithful. And by his actions, Volos was sending them into the waiting arms of whatever was sounding the series of horns.

His fingers tingled with the phantom slick of blood.

Using large jumps, he made his way to the palace and up to its roof. He saw the Battle Pyre heading for him, and he concentrated on getting back on board. He tried not to think about the implications of what he had just seen.

He failed. Miserably.

The Metastasis’s boarding torpedoes were beginning their launch sequence when the Immolation Maw fired. The Space Marine cruiser was crippled, motionless before its predator. But Ydraig gave Maro all the power he needed, and the machine-spirit, raging with the fury of an injured animal, was eager to lash out. The entire starboard flank of the Maw lit the void with turret, lance and torpedo fire. The Metastasis was a much smaller ship, and it had just presented its length to the Maw. It didn’t stand a chance. Its void shields collapsed beneath the overwhelming barrage, and its port side lit up even more brilliantly as explosions hammered its hull open. Secondary blasts rocked its interior, and it drifted off its orientation.

There was no return fire.

The top of the stern cathedral was spared the worst of the devastation. The space of the bridge was intact, but all power was gone. Malformed servitors continued their duties, even though the cogitators they operated were dead. Meliphael screamed orders, smashing to pulp any helot or servitor within reach. His demands were met with silence. His ship was dead. He was alone.

The horn was still blowing, and they were coming close to its source. They were catching up with the relay of calls. Each time the blast sounded, the fleeing millions below answered with their own cry of fear and hope. Volos heard the call-and-response when he made another jump and gauged the composition and mood of the crowd. That had been enough. He was just as glad, now, that the roar of the Thunderhawk’s engines shielded his ears and conscience from the inarticulate prayer below.

They had travelled hundreds of kilometres from Concordat Hill, always moving east, the migration of refugees only growing larger. There was a detached part of Volos that was fascinated by how quickly the exodus had developed. The people they were passing over now would never have seen any actual conflict between the penitent and the heretics. But words and ideas spread faster than any physical virus. That was, he reminded himself, how doubtworm had infected all of Antagonis in a matter of days. Between the tale of terror and the call of sanctuary, a compulsion had been born throughout this sector of Aighe Mortis.

‘We’re coming up on another starport,’ Keryon reported. ‘That’s where the sound is coming from.’

‘Slow and careful,’ Volos told him. ‘Let’s not announce ourselves before we know what’s going on.’

Keryon took the Battle Pyre within a kilometre of the starport’s perimeter, then cut the Dragon Claws loose. They jumped the rest of the way from rooftop to rooftop until they were overlooking the open expanse of the port. What they saw made Volos snarl.

There was only one ship present, and it was impossible to miss. It was two kilometres long, a bulky, clumsy, fat-bodied avatar of hate. It had once been an Imperial transport, but that was a memory so old it had been forgotten. The superstructure seemed to have both melted and grown, spreading spines and strangling vines of metal around the hull. Iron excrescences had formed immense runes over which the air turned brittle and fragmented into buzzing black swarms. Loading ramps gaped like open jaws, and into the ship’s belly streamed the refugees in the tens of thousands. A large detachment of Swords of Epiphany guarded access points, backed up by Rhino armoured transports and Predator tanks.

‘Soulcage,’ Braxas muttered. ‘Foretold Pilgrimage,’ he said, reading the molten Gothic letters on the hull. He spat the taste from his mouth.

‘Brothers, we are witnessing a historical first,’ Nithigg said with bitter humour. ‘Have you ever before seen Traitor Adeptus Astartes acting as crowd control while people fought to get on a Soulcage?’

Volos hadn’t. But he’d never seen people brandish the aquila against him, either. Even in the face of military defeat, Chaos still controlled the narrative of Aighe Mortis, and by the light of its inside-out non-logic, what was happening made a ghastly kind of sense. The slaveship was the same gold as the Swords’ armour. It was the gold of grasping, greedy ruin, the gold of blasting knowledge. Light was damaged by it, and reality in its vicinity took on a greasy sheen. But it was still gold, and meant to be seductive, and to the panicked and the fearful, it might well seem more inviting than the unyielding black of the Dragons.

‘Why is it,’ Volos demanded, ‘that we are winning every battle, but losing the war?’

The other Dragon Claws didn’t answer. Abruptly, the ship’s horn stopped sounding. The Swords and their vehicles began to withdraw inside the ship. The refugees continued to pour into the starport, rushing to be granted sanctuary from the anger in the heavens and the monsters at their backs. There was no room for the Swords to push through, so they went over, trampling people beneath their boots, crushing bodies to smeary pulp with the treads of their tanks. The screams of the dying travelled back to the Dragons, but still the crowd pushed forward. They had already walked over so many of their own, a few more smashed skulls and broken spines were not going to dissuade them from struggling to reach the ship.

‘What do we do?’ Vasuk asked. ‘Do we attack?’

Volos felt the call of battle. He wanted to rend the Chaos Space Marines into slabs of meat. But to engage now would be to throw his brothers’ lives away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Our battle isn’t here.’ He watched the loading ramps begin to close. The rumble of the ship’s engines powering up shook the building beneath his feet. The crowd screamed, hands beating at the hull, desperate for the salvation of the slaveship. ‘How much human cargo can that ship carry?’ he asked Braxas.

‘Hundreds of thousands.’

‘We should ask ourselves what the traitors need with all those people.’

‘What do you mean?’ Vasuk asked. ‘They’re always scooping up slaves. That’s nothing new.’

‘No, but everything they’ve done on this planet can’t just be about gathering a few slaves. Do you think Flebis was all about blowing a whistle? No. These are moves in a game where we haven’t been allowed to see the stakes.’

The Soulcage began to rise from the port. A cloud of flame lifted it from the ground and engulfed the crowd. The screams were different now.

‘Our battle,’ Volos said, pointing to the ship, ‘is wherever that abomination is heading.’

CHAPTER 20

METASTASIS

Toharan didn’t argue with Volos’s conclusions. Given the frost between them, Volos was almost surprised, but it was clear Toharan hated being outmanoeuvred as much as he did. The captain of the Black Dragons issued new orders: re-embarkation on the Immolation Maw and pursuit of the Swords of Epiphany. Maro reported the Revealed Truth and Foretold Pilgrimage transiting into the empyrean together. There were only a couple of obstacles in the way of the Dragons’ furious crusade: their ship was crippled, and they didn’t know where the Swords had gone.

On the ground, the battle for Aighe Mortis was all but won. Volos wasn’t sure if he would call the planet pacified. The movement that the Dragon Claws and Setheno had triggered was too big a storm, and as it swept the globe, what little structure the civilization of Aighe Mortis still had collapsed further. But loyalty to the God-Emperor at its most fanatical had replaced the older apathy. Heresy would find the ground infertile now. In the region of the Concordat, something approaching a functioning order returned, and it was possible to have needed materiel sent up to the Immolation Maw. The healing of the shattered engines began. Once they were functional, and the Geller field generators were deemed warp-worthy, the pursuit could begin. Other repairs would have to be undertaken during the journey.

That left the question of the destination.

‘The information will be on the Metastasis,’ Toharan told Lettinger. They were walking the corridors of the Immolation Maw, inspecting damage, tallying the losses. Seventeen brothers had been vented to the void when the hull plating over their decks had peeled away. Deeper into the ship, in areas that hadn’t been breached, the damage took the form of twisted, broken corridors, many of them blocked by wreckage. Toharan couldn’t feel the ship’s machine-spirit in the immediate, visceral way that Maro did, but he could still feel its pain and its hunger for retribution. ‘The captain had to know where he was going.’

‘Are you sending a boarding party?’ Lettinger asked.

Toharan nodded. ‘The enemy’s bridge is still intact.’

‘Who is going?’

They stopped at a dead end. The deck ahead of them had been ripped apart, and there was a gap now, a plunge of hundreds of metres through shattered stone and shredded metal, down to the depths of the hull. Toharan stared into the blackness, and felt an odd tug. ‘I’m going myself,’ he answered, a little absently.

‘No,’ Lettinger said.

‘No?’ Nothing but dark below, nothing but void. To fall into nothing, into the purity of non-being: there was an odd comfort to that idea. A seduction. A relief from the disappointments and betrayals. Perhaps even relief from all the movement in his brain.

‘Send Volos.’

Toharan blinked and tore his eyes away from the drop. What’s wrong with me? he wondered. ‘Why?’ he asked.

‘The Metastasis is utterly corrupt.’

‘And?’

‘And so is Volos.’

‘Yes, we both agree on that. I don’t see the connection.’

‘Old loyalties die hard,’ Lettinger explained. ‘We need all the evidence we can gather to convince your brothers of Volos’s taint. If all know that he has been in direct contact with Chaos, the arguments will be easier to make.’

Toharan nodded. ‘There’s always the chance,’ he said, ‘that Volos won’t come back.’

‘The ship is dead,’ Toharan had said. ‘It lies open to the void. The two of you should be more than enough to find what we need.’

The argument was a logical one. Volos could find no reason to challenge it. Not formally. And it was true that every hand was needed to prepare the Immolation Maw for its return to battle. It was also true that all Dragons were joined in blood, and that Volos should be able to serve by the side of any brother, any brother at all.

All these truths. But as he transited from the Battle Pyre to the hatch into the spire of the Metastasis’s command cathedral, he had the ashen taste of lies in his mouth.

‘Be on your guard, brother-sergeant,’ Danael said. ‘Let purity be our watchword as we travel this forsaken ship.’

‘As you say, brother-sergeant,’ Volos replied. He was reasonably certain he had kept the contempt from his tone. It was being assigned Danael as mission partner that, more than anything else, gave the whole exercise the stench of subterfuge. Why Danael? Never mind that it made little sense to pair off two squad sergeants for this task, and never mind that Danael should not have been made sergeant in the first place. Danael was a good fighter, but he was no leader. Worse, he was a malcontent and sycophant, a combination that made Volos’s skin crawl. He had always found it an effort to remain civil with the Neidris squad member, and could remember many times in the past when Toharan had bemoaned his fate in having Danael under his command.

Things were different now. Danael had received the advancement he had always claimed was his due, despite all evidence to the contrary. He had attached himself to Toharan like a leech, and the new Toharan welcomed the slavering loyalty. And then there was Danael’s incessant prating about purity. The concept was an important one to Volos, one that he had wrestled with in the complex catechisms of Chaplain Massorus. It was also one that he felt was being torn away from him by Setheno, or at the very least transformed into something he had yet to understand. Purity of action, of faith, of loyalty to the God-Emperor: therein, he hoped, lay truth and the counterbalance to the monstrosity of his physical being. It was not a monstrosity he rejected. It was one he embraced. He blessed the curse. But he knew, too, that a dark temptation could wait down that road. That was why Massorus’s lesson was so important: the curse must be the spur to purity. The correct path was becoming increasingly tangled and hard to discern, making the struggle to find it all the more vital.

Danael’s version of purity struck Volos as something shallow, a construction of words and gestures and nothing else. Danael had always seemed to resent his deformity. He hated his curse, and his embrace of purity seemed to begin and end with the physical concept embodied by Toharan. So his words rang false and weak in Volos’s ears, especially in this place, where all purity except of the vilest kind had been put to death centuries upon centuries ago.

They were on a deck one level below the bridge. The interior walls, ceiling and decking had some of the same sickly gold hue as the hull, but were darker, and were so covered in runes that they seemed to pulse and jump in the corner of the eye. Knowledge, power and madness had lost all distinction, and they shouted for Volos’s attention from every flat surface. The dim light came from the runes themselves. This was a place of illumination, freely offered, and hungry to devour. Footing was treacherous, not because the corridor was moving, but because it appeared to be. Then there were the whispers. Even though the ship was in its final agonies, the lesson that it embodied still ached to be taught, and a low, constant susurrus of half-voices enveloped Volos, murmuring litanies of paradox and change. Words clawed for purchase on his mind, looking for a way in. He pushed them away and moved forward.

He checked the glyphs on his retinal display. These decks still had a full atmosphere, though the power was off. ‘No other breaches,’ he voxed Danael. ‘Be ready. Some of the crew might still be alive.’

‘Not for long,’ Danael muttered.

Bolters up, they moved silently through the pulsing, insinuating corridors, up stairs that were softer and more knowing than metal should be, and reached the door to the bridge. Volos gave it a tug. It was shut tight, either locked or frozen by the absence of power. Volos nodded to Danael, who backed halfway down the stairs. Volos mag-locked a small demolition charge to the door, set the timer to thirty seconds, and joined Danael.

The door blew open with crump and a shriek of murdered runes. The Black Dragons charged onto the bridge and stopped three paces in. Ahead and to their right, dozens of servitors sat before cogitators and ship controls, mindlessly repeating actions at stations that no longer responded. The once-human creatures all showed signs of surgical mutilation. Some had no legs but four hands; others had flesh replaced by tapestry. Each was different, but all had had their eyelids removed and their lips flayed to create faces that were expressions of perpetual tortured joy. The hololithic displays were dark. The only light, other than that of the runes, came from the reflected shine of Aighe Mortis visible beyond the main viewport. To the left was the upper level of the strategium. The command throne was empty. The bridge appeared to be abandoned.

‘Auspex?’ Volos asked.

‘Negative,’ Danael answered.

Volos moved in deeper. He took the steps to the strategium. On its table, he saw an array of maps and data-slates. He was reaching for the nearest when a blur of rancid gold shot out from behind the command throne and filled the air with bolter fire. Rounds glanced off Volos’s pauldron and he dropped flat. He rolled next to the strategium table. Using its bulk as cover, he rose to a crouch. There was a pause in the gun burst and he was about to fire when a frag grenade came bouncing onto the strategium floor from the direction of the stairs.

Volos vaulted back, over the strategium balcony. He was in mid-air when the grenade went off, the blast sending him spinning, shrapnel embedding itself deep into the ceramite of his armour. He crashed onto the bridge deck, crushing servitors and smashing cogitator stations. More bolter-rounds sought him out, but these ones came from the same deck. Danael was yelling incoherently as he fired, and all Volos could make out were the shrieked words ‘tainted’ and ‘traitor’ spewing out of the other Dragon’s mouth like an idiot refrain.

Volos scrabbled backwards, desperate to get a wall at his back and not be pinned down in a crossfire. The Sword captain opened up again, and over the stuttering chug-chug-chug of the bolters, he could hear the traitor laughing.

It was almost funny. Volos conceded that much. The triangulations of who was a traitor to what at this moment were too complex and too ridiculous to sort out. Volos didn’t laugh. He reached the back wall and began to crawl along the periphery of the bridge, staying out of sight behind banks of consoles. Bits of glass and plastek and iron filled the air, and servitors exploded blood and bone, but the shots were generalised, sweeping the space with destruction rather than zeroing in on his location. Between Danael’s automatic fire and death raining down from the strategium, the bridge was a chaos of minor explosions and flying debris. Neither Danael nor the Sword was aiming at the other. The unspoken alliance had determined to kill Volos first. So be it. At this moment, neither knew where he was. He knew where they both were. He listened to the shots, identified the different guns, and placed the enemies at precise points on his internal compass.

He palmed a frag, pulled the pin, let the grenade cook, and then leaped out from his cover near the viewport. He took the impact of stray rounds, felt their punch and damage, but with momentum and rage, he completed his move. He felt the entire space of the bridge as an extension of his nervous system, knew precisely where each of his strikes would hit. He tossed the grenade at the strategium, twisted to his left and emptied the bolter clip at Danael. The grenade went off on the downward slope of its arc. Volos heard screams above him and to the side as he landed. The bolter fire stopped.

Volos ran in a crouch to the strategium balcony, jumped up and pulled himself over the railing. The Chaos Space Marine was prone, a massive hole in his breastplate revealing a suppurating mass beneath. Strange noises were coming from his helmet grille. They were buzzing, staccato groans, and Volos recognised them as the desperate, final gasps of ruined lungs. Volos fired twice into the wound, blasting the Sword’s hearts.

He made his way back down to the entrance to the bridge. Danael was slumped in the doorway, bleeding from a dozen wounds to the upper torso and throat. Volos had concentrated his fire so the first shells would punch through the armour, opening the way to flesh for the others. Danael’s right hand was twitching against the deck, fingers reaching for the fallen bolter just out of his reach. Volos stood over him, torn between pity, contempt and fury. He knew he would shortly feel something much worse, but there were a few seconds yet before that happened.

‘Why?’ Volos demanded.

Danael coughed. Volos reached down, released the locks and pulled Danael’s helmet off. The wounded Dragon spat dark blood. ‘Tainted,’ Danael wheezed. ‘Know what you did… Have to be stopped.’

Volos wondered if Danael really believed what he was saying. If a bandwagon jumper like he was could find a depth of belief, then Second Company was riven in a much worse way than Volos had suspected. And he didn’t think that Danael was simply spouting rhetoric in extremis. Volos took a breath and asked the question whose answer he didn’t want to hear. ‘Did Toharan order you to kill me?’

Danael grunted. ‘Going to finish me?’ Volos wasn’t sure if he’d heard the question. ‘Going to slice me with your Chaos blades?’

Volos felt a chill in his soul. Danael had named the concern that Volos had been trying to avoid facing. His arm-blades had changed, and their transformation had been caused by a Chaos spell. But he was no different. His essence had not changed. He had to believe this, and he had watched and prayed and guarded against any deviation on his part from the Emperor’s light. There had been none. He was sure of it.

But the change…

He shook the thoughts away. ‘Did Toharan order you to kill me?’ he asked again.

Danael said nothing. He had stopped coughing and was very still. Volos knelt over him. He was dead.

Volos straightened, took a few steps back and grabbed at a console to steady himself. That other emotion, held at bay, now arrived, and it was worse than he had guessed it would be. He had killed a battle-brother. That he had acted in self-defence made no difference to the enormity of the act. He had tried to tell himself that the divisions that had begun spreading through the Black Dragons upon Toharan’s ascendancy were political ones, and though injurious to morale and to the company, they would pass with time and sufficient good will. He’d been a fool. Now he had slain another Dragon, and the worst of it was that he knew Danael would not be the last. He looked down at his wrists. He extruded the blades. The pain of their emergence was, in this moment, more than physical. He stared at them, at the ultimate expression of his imperfect, corrupted body.

‘I am not tainted,’ he whispered. ‘I am not tainted,’ he repeated, praying now. ‘The Emperor is my light, and my arm is eternally and solely at his service, until death releases me.’ For a flashing moment, he found himself wishing Setheno were here. But her words came to him: You are the Emperor’s monsters. And you are necessary. They were a dark comfort.

He retracted the blades and returned to the strategium. He sorted through the wreckage left by the two grenades, and found a few intact data-slates. There was a star chart, too, and it surprised Volos not only because it was still in one piece, but because of its age. It was printed on vellum so old it was cracking. He folded it carefully and collected the data-slates. Then he turned his attention back to the corpses. He realised the lie he would have to tell. Without knowing if Toharan had ordered his assassination, and lacking any proof to back up the accusation, admitting to killing Danael would only exacerbate matters on the Immolation Maw, and if he found himself imprisoned, Toharan and Lettinger would have a free hand. Better that the story be of Danael’s heroic death in combat with a traitor. Volos’s word would be doubted, but he would still have some latitude to act.

So he had to lie. And he had to cover his tracks. He grimaced. He wondered just how many black deeds the awful word necessary could swallow up. He hoped he would never know, because he feared the number might be infinite.

He hauled Danael’s body onto the strategium. He gathered all the grenades both the Dragon and the Sword carried. The sacrilege he was about to commit made him pause. He was going to obliterate Danael’s body and deprive his Chapter of the precious progenoid glands. An entire genetic legacy of Black Dragons would be no more. Necessary, Volos thought, accepting the guilt and self-loathing, and vowing he would make a greater good come of this, even if his own life were forfeit. Then he pulled the pins on the grenades. He strode away from the bridge as it erupted in flame.

CHAPTER 21

ACTS OF FAITH

The data-slates went to Ydraig. The Techmarine wrinkled his nose at the tainted devices, but he pried some useful information out of them before he purged them in fire. The star chart became the study of Nithigg and Tennesyn. The ancient warrior and the scholar of the distant past found in the chart an object worthy of their shared obsessions. It was difficult to decipher not just because of its age, but because it was not, they soon realised, drawn by human hand. Between Ydraig’s efforts and their own, a destination was identified. The Swords of Epiphany were on their way to the Abolessus system.

Three days later, limping but hungry for blood, the Immolation Maw plunged into the empyrean in pursuit.

Volos sat in the apothecarion, murmuring to Massorus’s comatose figure. He had chosen here, rather than the chapel, to unburden his soul. Massorus could no more hear him than could the icon of the Emperor, but there was more privacy here, and there was an illusion of comfort in seeing the Chaplain. Volos could indulge, for a few moments, in the hope that Massorus might awaken in the middle of his confession and begin to untangle the theological knots for him. The Chaplain’s breaths were slow and widely spaced, prompted more by the machines connected to his body than by his lungs themselves.

Nithigg entered the chamber and sat down quietly opposite Volos. ‘Why did you want to meet here?’ he asked.

‘So we could talk.’ They were alone, and more visitors were unlikely. Volos told Nithigg what had happened on the Metastasis.

Nithigg drew a sharp intake of breath. ‘So we’ve reached that point.’ He sounded sad, but not surprised.

‘You were expecting this?’

‘At the back of my mind. I kept telling myself I was wrong.’

Volos sighed. ‘To tell you the truth, I think I was doing the same.’

‘Was Danael acting on Toharan’s orders?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But he might have been.’

‘Being assigned to work with him was odd.’

‘Then we have to assume the worst. The question is what we do now.’

‘I’m open to suggestions,’ Volos said, hoping Nithigg might have a plan, any plan that was different from the course of action that Volos saw looming ahead.

‘You have to take over command,’ Nithigg said. ‘Arrest Toharan and his followers.’

And there it was: the action Volos dreaded, and had avoided articulating to himself. So much for alternatives, he thought. ‘On what evidence?’ he asked. ‘I have no concrete proof.’

‘It won’t matter.’ Nithigg spoke as if he were trying to convince himself more than Volos. ‘The loyalty of the company belongs to you.’

‘Still?’ Volos asked. ‘Before Aighe Mortis, perhaps that was true. But after what we did… You must have heard the talk.’

With visible reluctance, Nithigg nodded. The divisions were deep, and they were broad. Volos didn’t know any longer where the bulk of the Dragons stood.

‘And it’s still mutiny,’ Volos said. ‘Toharan is our duly anointed captain.’

‘Mutiny against a criminal is a duty, not a crime,’ Nithigg said. ‘Are you saying that you wouldn’t have mutinied against Horus?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I would have.’ But he conceded Nithigg’s point. The time to worry about the ethics of resisting Toharan had passed. ‘I would still need evidence,’ he said.

They were silent for a moment.

Nithigg asked, ‘Do you think he’ll try again?’

‘I’m not sure. It would be a bit more difficult to have me killed on the ship and not trigger open warfare. But he’ll try something. Maybe when he does, I can counter it, turn the move against him.’

‘And in the meantime?’

Volos hesitated for a moment. There was a line he was about to cross. Until now, he had advocated no action, and had been talking to no one other than Nithigg. When Melus and Setheno had raised the idea of moving against Toharan, he had shut them down. Now he was going to commit himself to the path of sedition. Toharan has left me no choice, he reminded himself. ‘We speak to our allies,’ he said. ‘We tell them what happened. We warn them to be on their guard.’

‘Do we know who our allies are?’

Volos thought he did. ‘Ormarr,’ he said. He trusted all the Dragon Claws with his life. ‘And anyone else whom Toharan believes to be my ally, because whatever such a warrior might actually think of me, his life is in danger.’

‘Agreed,’ Nithigg said. ‘So tell me, how does it feel to be engaged in conspiracy?’

Volos turned a regretful eye on the body of the Chaplain. ‘Awful.’

Toharan paced the length of the prison chapel. ‘Why do you make it so difficult?’ he shouted at the icon of the Emperor. ‘I am doing everything in my power to bring our Chapter into compliance with the Codex. I am trying to bring us closer to you. So why do you insist on thwarting my every effort?’ How difficult, he wanted to know, would it have been to let events take their natural course aboard the Metastasis? There were so many reasons why Volos should never have returned from that vessel, but there he was, and though there were many whispers about what the daemon-tainted must have done to Danael, there were, Toharan knew, plenty of murmurers who saw things differently. The company was coming apart under his leadership, not unifying and moving towards a greater purity.

Then there was the humiliation on Aighe Mortis. Toharan’s lip curled in disgust as he thought of the rebels. He had shown them mercy, and he had shown them an example. In return, they had proven themselves unworthy of either. They had betrayed him, and then become a mindless, howling mob in Volos’s hands. He advanced to the altar and stared at the icon. ‘Was there anything worth saving down there?’ The black marble figure said nothing, but Toharan knew the answer. No, there hadn’t been. The planet was unworthy of salvation. Exterminatus would have been too good for it.

The image hung in the air before him of the planet scoured of life, all that messy unpredictability and ingratitude and impurity wiped away. In the wake of the act, the purity of nothing at all. He thought again of that moment he had experienced looking down the gap in the ship’s decking, of feeling the seductive grace of absence. If there was nothing, then the squirming in his brain would stop, because all those things that tormented him and set his mind to writhing would be gone. Then, and only then, would true purity be achieved.

The more he gazed at the icon, the more he resented it. The figure was nonsense. What was the Emperor doing, shackled to that rotting body? That material excrescence wasn’t pure. It was just the opposite. If the Emperor were so perfect, why hadn’t He transcended the body? Why hadn’t He left it behind altogether to become pure and infinite will? Instead, His will was dependent on the survival of this hideous monstrosity, this shambles of deliquescent flesh and exposed bone, this helpless, perpetual reminder of death and weakness and the infuriating limits of the body. The Emperor’s body was corruption. How had Toharan never seen this before? If the summit of human perfection was now this incarnation of the disgusting and rotten, then where was purity? What was there to strive for?

Toharan’s hands tensed and he felt the urge to tear his hair from his scalp, and his flesh from his face. His body was an unbearable contradiction. It was so pure that the Black Dragons used it to disguise their fundamental impurity. And yet its lack of impurity, its missing excess of bone, ensured that he would always be an impure Black Dragon. He could never be at one with the full identity of the Chapter.

Unless he changed that identity. Unless he remade the Chapter in his image, body and soul. Perhaps, if he eliminated any reminder of the limits of the body, he could rest. If his body became the eternal and infinite model, perhaps he could find peace. But what an undertaking that would be, and in the name of purity, there would be so much, in the Chapter and beyond it, that would have to be destroyed. Well, what of it? That which was impure was already a form of destruction. He would simply complete the process.

He lifted his bolter and emptied its clip into the icon. He blasted it to stone fragments, and the fragments to dust. When he was done, there was a crater in the frieze above the altar. He was staring at an absence. In the moment of calm that descended, his task appeared before him in its full clarity. The first step would be one last attempt to convert Second Company. He would give his brothers a final chance at redemption, a chance that only existed because he did.

Volos was beyond redemption. That was clear. He was moving as rapidly towards total impurity as Toharan was racing to the opposite pole. He had to be destroyed before his contagion proved irreversible. But the problem was the same as it had been before the Metastasis: Volos had to be neutralised in such a way as to leave no doubt as to his corruption. He must not become a martyr. What he represented had to die with him. Maybe then there would be the possibility of salvation for the rest of the company.

It would be a welcome redemption if it came to pass. Toharan wanted unity for the confrontation with the Swords of Epiphany. He still had no idea what game they were playing, but he really did not care. However much he hated the morass into which the Black Dragons were sinking, he still felt the collective humiliations as acutely as ever. He would track the Swords down, and he would annihilate them. The mission was that simple, and that pure.

And yet… There was something about that scrabbling and scratching at his cortex. Amidst the throb in his head that sometimes pulsed in the corners of his vision, there was something like a black pearl of promise. The hook to follow the Swords was more than retribution. There was something they wanted, and they were going to enormous lengths to acquire it. Perhaps, the lure in his buzzing thoughts suggested, it should be his.

When he pushed this thought to the surface, acknowledged it and embraced his desire, then the scrabbling eased again, just a bit, and just for a short time. As it ebbed, it left excitement. To grasp this pearl, he felt, would be to clear the path to his goal. Every obstacle to his divine purity would be obliterated with a wave of his hand.

This would be so. Because he willed it.

Volos, then. Destroy Volos before they reached Abolessus.

He strode out of the chapel to find Lettinger. Behind him, the void over the altar gaped.

The warp was the raw stuff of thoughts and emotions. Every conscious and unconscious twitch of every sentient being formed its matter and shaped and fed its denizens. It was everything that Werner Lettinger held in abhorrence. It was what he had been created, through his nature and his training, to combat. In the makeshift meditation chamber he had established in his quarters on the Immolation Maw, he strengthened his will and his faith against the leeching temptations of the warp. It was especially important that he do so while the ship was travelling the sea of the immaterium. That was what he was doing now.

At least, that was what he told himself each time that he began the game.

As he meditated, he found himself travelling over the vectors and angles of his thoughts, tracing their intersections and leaps, following their twists to see where they might lead. What had begun as mere thought exercises – asking himself ‘what if’ and exploring the consequences to their logical conclusions – had become something deeper. He wasn’t sure when the shift had happened. He thought it might have been during his period at Lexica Keep. But its origin didn’t matter to him. What was important was the exploration he undertook, and how it made him feel. The game would begin as it always had, as a simple litany of questions and hypotheticals. But as he descended along the strings of logic, those strings gradually took on a pseudo-existence of their own. He could caress the lines of his own mind, and swim in its currents. It was intoxicating. It was empowering.

It was wrong. Part of him knew this, the part that still held to the credo of Monodominance, and it clamped down on him with iron ferocity, filling him with the most profound guilt. But the guilt was its own narcotic, leaving him tingling with the visceral reminder of his own fundamental morality. In forbidding his mental exploration, the guilt made the transgression even more enticing, and each time he crossed the line, the intensity of the cycle ramped up.

He was becoming stronger for the experience. He knew that he had reached a new level of understanding about his psyche when he had spoken with Toharan about destiny. That both of them felt the same premonition of greatness was, he felt sure, a confirmation of its truth. This certainty was his counter to the guilt, his invitation to plunge into the game again and again, and go deeper each time. Lately, the descent into the twisting depths of thought wasn’t limited to his meditation sessions. His dreams carried the same charge. More than that, his dreams were inspiration. New possibilities suggested themselves each time he slept, and he woke with a nagging tug towards new realms. There was a consistency to the direction now, too. He was on the verge of something momentous. He could sense it just over the next mental horizon, and it came closer the more firmly he held the threads of the Black Dragons’ future in his fist.

Since the Immolation Maw had entered the warp, he had been twisting on the edge of gigantic revelation. The Abolessus system held the key. He was as convinced of this as anything in his life, and the fact that he had no concrete evidence on which to base this belief was itself confirmation that the knowledge came from somewhere other than the sad normalcy of the physical world.

It wasn’t just destiny that waited around the corner. It was the supreme flowering of his potential.

That thought, the promise of his transcendence, was the one whose contours he was exploring when Toharan entered his quarters. The presence of another jerked Lettinger back to the here and now. It took him a moment to get his bearings. As he gathered himself, the guilt arrived, and he caught himself glancing furtively around the chamber for signs of his trespass. There was nothing unusual about the furnishings. Lettinger hadn’t altered the layout of the quarters. There was a small bedchamber, barely larger than a closet, and a study, which was where he sat. This space held a chair and an iron desk. Lettinger had pulled the chair out to the middle of the room, and he had been sitting facing the door, his back to the small viewport. He had drawn no circles of protection on the floor, had set up no wards. Why would he? He was just sitting here thinking, after all. But as he blinked his way back to full consciousness, he saw the flicker of an oily darkness withdrawing to the corners of the room.

If Toharan noticed, he didn’t appear to care. ‘Volos has to die now,’ he said. ‘And his corruption must be obvious even to the most blind.’

Lettinger couldn’t argue the point. He agreed completely. What wasn’t clear was how this necessity was going to come about. He opened his mouth to say so. The words caught themselves. He started, hit by inspiration so powerful it was a physical blow. ‘Oh,’ Lettinger gasped in wonder and shock. The idea was so perfect, such a round, hard, flawless jewel, and so foreign to him, that it could only have a divine origin. His smile, he knew, was beatific. It couldn’t be otherwise, when destiny was so gloriously affirmed.

Toharan frowned at him. ‘What is it?’

‘We’ll need a volunteer,’ Lettinger said.

CHAPTER 22

THE DUELLISTS

Space tore open, the edges of the wound bleeding nightmares. Through this gap, the Revealed Truth and the Foretold Pilgrimage re-entered the materium. When Nessun saw the wonders of the Abolessus system, he could almost believe that he was still in the warp. The confusion delighted him. It was the first of many gifts Abolessus would give him. The multiplicity of his being exulted in the promise of what lay ahead.

There is no corner of the Imperium that can truly said to be forgotten. Somewhere, in some archive, no matter how remote from the pressing concerns of Terra, records exist of every system and every planet to fall under the Emperor’s protection. But for some regions, the line between ‘forgotten’ and ‘ignored’ is a thin one. These are worlds whose value to the Imperium is minimal, and is outweighed by inconvenience of location, strategic worthlessness, doubtful character, or even embarrassing history. Abolessus had the unfortunate privilege of combining all these qualities.

It was located far beyond even the Flebis system, at the extreme southern edge of the Maeror subsector, itself a backwater of the Segmentum Tempestus bordering the Veiled Region. Like Camargus, Abolessus had only one colony, strictly speaking. But Abolessus Gemini was no Aighe Mortis, and the rest of the system had no equivalent anywhere in the Imperium.

There were wonders here. Orbiting the swollen, dull red massiveness of Abolessus were monuments. They were planet-sized monoliths of a geometry that was simple seen from a distance, as if they were not much more than impossibly massive oblongs, cubes and triangles fastened together in shapes of mourning. Closer up, they revealed ridges and lines as large as any mountain chain, and as intricate as any geologic formation, but carved with a regularity and precision no natural formation had ever possessed. They were runes in a language that had been forgotten before life on Terra had sparked in the primeval seas. They were unreadable, but they spoke.

Nessun did not hear what they had to say. His only interest in the monuments was the power that their existence implied. Growing in the viewport, in the orbit nearest the red sun, was the key to that power. If Nessun’s eyes still had functioning tear ducts, he thought he might have wept in ecstasy as Abolessus Gemini presented itself to him.

The twin, perfectly spherical, 5,000-kilometre wide planetoids had been colonized for one reason alone. A system with such a massive xenos-taint would normally have been quarantined. But the Gemini bodies were composed of pure adamantium. Mining concerns had rushed to exploit this unheard-of bounty, ignoring the prefects in the Adeptus Administratum who feared what such a massive influx of the metal might do to the economies of the entire segmentum. In the end, the prefects needn’t have worried. The adamantium was impossible to mine. The planetoids were fully finished, the metal forged to a density beyond human comprehension. They were indestructible.

By the time the last, most stubborn corporations had given up the cause, permanent colonies had been established, and an odd consolation prize had been won. Each of the Twins was striated with a dense network of mountain chains as uniform and straight as latitude lines given concrete being. The mountains were narrow and razor-peaked, and travel between the constricted valleys was possible only by air. But those valleys were covered by topsoil whose richness and fecundity was the envy of Ultramar’s most luxuriant garden worlds. The colonists came as miners, and stayed to become farmers.

The departure of the corporations and the remoteness of the system meant that, within a few generations, trade with the rest of the Imperium ground to a halt. The citizens of the Abolessus Twins barely noticed. Their worlds were self-sufficient. After a few centuries, they ignored the Imperium as much as it ignored them. And yes, there were records of the system, and what it contained, so it could not be said, to the distress of an Administratum bureaucrat, that Abolessus had been forgotten. But those records had not been looked at for over four thousand years.

The Swords of Epiphany were here to correct that injustice. Rodrigo Nessun would give the Twins more attention than they had received in all of human history.

The identical worlds filled the main viewport, their new moon at the peak of an isosceles triangle formed by the orbits. Nessun gave the moon a look of promise. Soon, he told it. ‘What we need is inside one of the planetoids,’ he announced.

‘Which one?’ Gabrille asked. ‘They’re identical.’

‘Scan them. There is a difference. Find it.’

The Disciples of Purity met and prayed. Toharan didn’t try to gloss over the damaged altarpiece. He stood aside while Lettinger began the service, but then took over once he felt the fervour in the room had reached the necessary pitch. He spoke with all the passion of his conviction, and he felt the necessary words coming to him as if he had been born to preach instead of fight. Before him was the largest number yet of adherents to his banner. They were still, to a man, the least mutated of the company, and perhaps that was as it should be. They represented the Black Dragons’ best chance to reach physical purity through the purging of the monstrous.

Toharan spoke to them of this purity, and they were with him. He spoke to them of power, and they were with him. He shattered the hold of the rotting corpse on the Golden Throne, and they were with him. When he unveiled the full extent of his illumination, he thought for a moment that he might have lost Lettinger. The inquisitor did start, and did look again with horrified fascination at the void above the altar. But then Toharan saw the play of guilt and exhilaration on Lettinger’s face, and knew that he held the man more firmly than ever.

The call to prayer became the call to mission, and finally the call to war. There was never any question about who the enemy was. Volos had shown where the path of impurity led. He was a menace to the promise of what the Black Dragons could be. There was no question now of adopting Codex dogma. The Dragons could be so much more than the barely tolerated poor cousins in the family of the Adeptus Astartes. They were their own power, and the time was coming when that power would be known across the galaxy. The first step to unleashing that power was to eliminate that which threatened the Chapter’s potential. Volos was not only a dark alternative; he had also killed one of the Disciples. There was no question that he had to die.

Toharan had no shortage of volunteers. He only needed one.

This time, Lettinger did use wards. He did place himself within a protective circle. He had no illusions about what he was doing. There were no rationalisations to be made here, not if he wanted to live through the next half-hour.

He was in his quarters. Toharan waited just outside the door. Lettinger drew steady breaths, slowing his pulse and regulating the beat of his heart. Then he began. There was a lot that Lettinger knew about summoning, but that knowledge, until now, had been academic in nature. He knew how to recognise the daemonic. He knew how to destroy it, and had done so times beyond counting. But to conjure something from the warp, to become that which he should exterminate…

That was the most forbidden. That was the greatest guilt. And in his new, enlightened, more powerful state of mind and spirit, that was also the greatest thrill.

He began the ritual as another thought exercise. It was his necessary rationalisation, a mental fig leaf. He pretended to pretend he wasn’t doing what he was doing. Then he followed the thoughts until they became darker and more real. When he reached the point where he would previously have hung motionless in rapt contemplation, he kept going. He entered a new realm of flickering possibility and whispering obscenity. The guilt and excitement threatened to break apart his rational processes, but he hung on to them and pushed forward. And suddenly he was plunging his will into the stuff of the warp with the assurance of the born sorcerer. It was as if the mental chants and psychic defences were being given to him by a universe that had no choice but to recognise him and his deeds.

He sculpted an idea as if working in clay. It was an idea of doom and corruption, and he crafted every detail and nuance until it was a masterpiece of a curse. He scaled it down into an essence no less perfect, no less artistic, but as concentrated as it was toxic. Then it was time to haul it, newborn and wailing its soul-hunger, into the material world.

When Toharan entered the chamber, the curse hovered in the air before Lettinger’s face. It didn’t look like much more than an onyx marble. Lettinger couldn’t take his eyes off it. Pride crushed guilt beneath its boot heel.

‘Is that it?’ Toharan asked. He was careful to stay outside the circle.

‘It is.’ Lettinger reached into a pocket, and produced a small wooden box. It had once held an icon: the molar of Ordo Malleus legend Saint Meruh. The icon had been a source of strength for Lettinger. He didn’t need it any longer. But the box was useful. Wards covered its surface. Lettinger opened it, that it might receive its new pearl.

Volos had thought to spend some time in the training cage. For a short time, he could lose himself in the trance of physical exertion. Waiting for Toharan to make a move went against his grain, and his impatience felt more like a cursed impotence. He had no choice. He couldn’t act first, unless he wanted to doom the company. So a few moments where his attention would be taken away from strategising a war no one should be fighting would be a boon.

But Toharan was in the cage. He appeared to have just arrived, and Volos couldn’t shake the idea that Toharan had raced ahead of him to get there first. The notion was ridiculous. It also felt accurate. The Black Dragon captain stood stripped to the waist, longsword in hand, swinging the blade from side to side, just a bit too elaborately at ease. ‘Brother-sergeant,’ he said. His smile was thin.

‘Brother-captain,’ Volos returned, cautious.

‘It’s been a long time since we sparred together.’

‘Really? I would have said we’ve been doing nothing but, lately.’

Toharan’s smile didn’t falter. He nodded once. ‘Perhaps that’s the problem. Shall we return things to the proper arena?’ He bowed and presented the point of the sword in formal challenge.

Volos chose a blade from a weapons locker and climbed into the cage with Toharan. The duel began.

Setheno hadn’t lied to Volos. She didn’t see the future. She had no visions of any kind. She had no psyker gifts. For all these lacks, she was grateful. The presence of any extra sight might hurt the accuracy of her true gift and curse: perfect clarity.

Volos had not spoken to her about what had happened on the Metastasis. He didn’t have to. She saw his grim look when he returned, and that was all she needed. She knew how Danael had died. Now she stood in the shadows of an alcove partway down the corridor from Volos’s cell. She was motionless, a thing of stone at one with the walls. She had been on post for several hours now, watching over the Space Marine who should be governing Second Company. She had been here while he rested and prayed, and she had been especially alert since he had left his quarters twenty minutes ago. She didn’t know when the assassination attempt would come, only that it would be soon. Toharan’s strategic position demanded that this be so. It was that simple.

She heard the hollow echo of armoured boots against the metal decking. She pulled deeper into the shadows and waited. The approaching Space Marine might be one of Volos’s number. Most of them had cells down this same corridor. But Volos’s allies had no reason to be down here at this time. Work on the ship was ongoing, and preparations were ramping up in anticipation of war in the Abolessus System.

The Black Dragon appeared. He had his helmet on, but Setheno recognised the purity seals and insignia. It was Mattanius. She had seen him before, and noted him as part of Toharan’s cohort. He was not as pure as the captain. No one was, and that, Setheno knew, was another reason why Toharan was so dangerous. But Mattanius’s skull, though heavy of brow, had no actual deformities. Since the events of Flebis, Setheno had found herself eyeing the Dragons through a phrenological filter. Lack of physical deformity meant an equivalent lack of humility. A normal Ossmodula led to an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. She had made a mental list of Black Dragons she considered obstacles to the proper development of the Chapter. Now they were proving her correct.

Mattanius was carrying a small package. At Volos’s door, he stopped and pulled out a key. He worked it a bit, and then the ancient lock gave way. The Space Marine disappeared into the meditation cell. Setheno followed him.

She stood in the doorway. Mattanius had his back to her. He seemed to be looking for something. He hovered before the bookshelves that lined the far wall. Setheno could see the titles on their spines. They were primarily works of military strategy and religious philosophy. Mattanius ran a finger along the books, testing the bindings. The book he selected was a collection of battlefield devotionals. It was very thick and very worn. It bore the marks of frequent, possibly daily, use. He let the book open in his palm. The pages flipped open to a favourite passage. There was a lectern in front of the shelves, and Mattanius place the book there, the small box beside it. He pulled out his combat knife and began to cut deep into the pages.

Setheno drew her bolt pistol.

Holding the hilt of the longsword, Volos was struck by just how long it had been since he had wielded a blade that was not part of his body. There was a distance between his will and the weapon. He was wrong-footed before the duel even began. Beneath the dome of iron bars that made up the practice cage, he circled Toharan, waiting for the other Space Marine to attack first. Any strike of his own would be countered.

For almost five minutes, neither warrior did anything but move around the perimeter of the cage, watching his opponent, studying how the other walked, how every twitch of muscle and nuance of breath might signal a move. To know the enemy as he knew himself could cut the actual swordfight down to an exercise of seconds. With each passing moment, Volos felt the stakes of the duel rising.

Toharan attacked. The move was lightning-fast. Volos had expected speed, but the strike came at an angle and at a moment that he hadn’t anticipated. Toharan took a step forward and appeared to ground himself on the leading right leg. Then he pivoted on his left, coming in anticlockwise, his blade a streak of light. Volos brought his sword down and parried at the last second, but stumbled back, already on the defensive.

‘Did you kill Danael?’ Toharan demanded.

Mattanius reacted to the click of Setheno’s gun. He spun, ducking low, and threw himself across the chamber. He slammed into her, knocking the pistol from her grasp. They crashed into the corridor wall. Their armoured bulk left a crater in the reptile-green stone. Setheno’s ears rang. She slumped. Mattanius backed up a step to bring his knife to bear. He drew his arm back, the point of the blade aimed at the seam where her gorget met her cuirass. It was coming for her throat.

‘Did you send him to kill me?’ Volos countered. He blocked Toharan’s flurry of strikes. They were hard blows, tiring to both of them, and he was still off-balance. He couldn’t retaliate.

‘Your evasion affirms your guilt,’ Toharan snarled. He pressed the attack harder.

‘So does yours,’ said Volos.

Setheno jerked forward out of her possum feint and hammered Mattanius’s ribs, her fists rapid-fire pistons. It was impossible for her blows to injure the Space Marine, but nor could he ignore the physics of hits strong enough to punch through walls. The impacts knocked him back, and his knife thrust went wrong, glancing off her right pauldron. She danced back out of his range. In a grapple, she would lose. She didn’t have enhanced Space Marine physiology. Her power armour was almost the equal of his, but in a contest of strength, the result was preordained.

She drew her sword as he raised his bolter.

Toharan pressed Volos harder. His thrusts and slashes came with the precision and grace of a fugue. With the small part of his mind that was observing the duel with interest, Volos admired the art of Toharan’s attack. It wasn’t composed of individual moves. Each assault flowed into the next, the thrust turning into the parry of Volos’s awkward counter, the parry becoming a slash, and so on, an unending flow that beat at his defence like steel hail.

‘Why are you doing it, brother?’ Toharan asked. His words came in a grunted staccato at odds with the fluidity of his swordcraft. ‘Why are you standing in the way of what this Chapter can be?’

He doesn’t want me to join him, Volos thought. He just wants me to vanish. He said, ‘I’m more concerned with what we should be.’

The answer enraged Toharan, as if Volos had pricked a suppressed conscience. Toharan’s rhythm broke into a moment of furious hacking, and Volos slipped his blade in for just a moment, nicking Toharan’s cheek. Toharan spat and retaliated with renewed anger and rigour, his mistake corrected.

‘You will be stopped,’ Toharan promised. His glare was desperate, and Volos had a glimpse of the depth of Toharan’s self-damnation, and the lengths to which he would go to justify the path he had chosen.

‘What have you become?’ Volos begged, as if the question might remind Toharan of what he had once been.

‘Your conqueror,’ Toharan answered. His blade cut long slices along Volos’s ribs.

Clarity could be a curse. In battle, it was a gift. Setheno knew where she was weak against Mattanius. She knew her strengths, too. She wouldn’t make a mistake. So all she had to do was stay alive until he made one.

Shooting her wasn’t that mistake.

She threw herself forwards on her knees as he fired. The rounds burned the air just over her head. The far end of the corridor exploded stone fragments and dust as the mass-reactive shells blasted their way into the wall. Mattanius dropped his aim, bringing her into the line of annihilation. But she had her sword up now.

The blade had a name. It was Skarprattar, and it was a relic sword. It had once belonged to Saint Demetria, who had stood alone during the doom of Caedo III, taking countless bloodletters of Khorne down in her martyrdom. The sword had been the only artefact recovered when Imperial forces had staggered back to the ravaged world. It had done grim work since, and been Setheno’s companion in wading the bloody tides of brutish necessity for nearly a century. Its spirit was her twin. It was foreign to hesitation, mercy, or the illusions of hope. Its existence was an endless severing of souls from being. Now it sliced Mattanius’s rounds in half. Setheno’s blow arced into his plackart, parting ceramite. Mattanius staggered into Volos’s cell, blood rushing from his lower abdomen.

He was wounded. But he was Adeptus Astartes. He was Black Dragon. So he did not falter in his attack. He kept firing, and Setheno couldn’t stop or dodge every round. Bolts stitched across her chest and ribs, punching through armour.

Her blood pooled with her enemy’s.

Toharan was fighting as if he meant to kill. The idea that the duel was a joust was fading into a lie. Volos abandoned any pretence of form and hurled his bulk into his captain. He took a deep gash in his left shoulder, but knocked Toharan off his feet. Volos rushed in to press his advantage, and he did so with his left fist extended.

The hand that did not hold his sword.

His rational mind caught up with his instincts and stopped him from impaling Toharan with a bone-blade. He stumbled right, and Toharan bashed him across the brow with the flat of his blade. Blood ran into Volos’s eyes. He jumped away, blind. He swung his sword as a ward. He might as well have waved a parchment. Toharan did not reach his shoulder and was much lighter, but Volos didn’t see the body blow come, and he wasn’t ready for it. He hit the floor of the cage hard.

The edge of Toharan’s sword bit into his throat.

Setheno was not Adeptus Astartes. Her body did not start healing almost as soon as it was hurt. Her system was not flooded with pain-killing drugs. She was a Sister of Battle, and her discipline and will were no less than those of any Space Marine. Her need to kill her enemy outweighed her injury, and now she was the one who launched herself across the intervening space into Mattanius.

It was not a blind strike. There was strategy born of her hellish clarity. She rocked Mattanius against the lectern, jolting his right hand up. Bolter-rounds smashed the ceiling. Setheno stabbed up with Skarprattar deep into Mattanius’s armpit. Bone and tendons parted, and his arm fell limp to his side.

The Black Dragon roared in anger, not pain. His left arm flashed out and snatched the box on the lectern. He swung it towards Setheno.

‘So you would kill me,’ Toharan hissed.

‘I did not.’ It was hard to speak with the blade pressing so hard, just shy of sawing through his throat. Volos blinked until he could see again. Toharan’s face was twisted with hate, yet Volos thought he also saw a desperate self-loathing beneath the surface.

‘You are mutinous, degenerate muck,’ Toharan said.

‘Is that my death sentence?’ Volos didn’t hide his contempt.

Toharan straightened and withdrew the sword. ‘This was your lesson,’ he said. ‘I won’t stain my leadership or my hands with your death here, with no witnesses. You are going to answer for your corruption, sergeant, but not without exposing your true nature to the entire company.’

Volos got to his feet. He did not pick up his sword. He stared at Toharan. ‘You are lost, brother,’ he said. He felt a sadness that bordered on despair.

Toharan sneered.

His answer was cut off by a chilling thrum. It resonated not in the ears, but in the soul.

Setheno seized on Mattanius’s mistake. She grabbed his fist with hers and squeezed. The move surprised him and his grip tightened without thinking. There was a sharp crack as the box splintered. Mattanius froze. Setheno could not see his face behind his helmet, but she pictured his dismay. He spoke one syllable: ‘Oh.’

She released his hand and jumped back. She sensed the arrival of something ruinous. The temperature in the chamber dropped below freezing. Skarprattar’s aura burned a violent blue. Mattanius turned his head to stare at his outstretched hand. There was a low, almost subaural whump and his hand vanished. A point of absolute nothing hung in the space before his wrist, and then tendrils of dark, muscled thought whipped out of the singularity. They wrapped themselves around Mattanius, a kraken seizing a ship. Mattanius howled the agony of his soul, and then the strangling cables of dark contracted, pulling him into nothing. The sound as he vanished was a chord plucked from the strings of reality, a stab in the very essence of being.

Setheno retreated another step. The light in the cell was altering, the rays of the biolumes becoming individually discernible and bending towards the hole in the air. The point was now a circle, pulses growing it by tiny fractions. Tendrils coiled out of it, insubstantial as smoke but strong as madness, fishing for more prey. From a protective case on her belt, Setheno withdrew an aquila. Like her sword, it was a relic. It was porcelain, fired from clay made from the ground bones of a dozen saints. She held it up before the floating void, and began to speak a rite of banishment. The thing fought, but she was strong. She knew it for what it was. It wasn’t an actual tear in the materium. That would have been beyond anyone’s ability to seal without destroying the ship. The sphere was a thought construction, an abstract idea given substance and a rudimentary intelligence. If it developed past its current embryonic form, it might in time become a daemon. But for now it was too dependent on its creator’s conception, and there was only one individual on board who could be responsible for it. Lettinger’s pride and ambition coated the thing like a signature, and Setheno tailored the rite to be a counter specific to the inquisitor.

The tendrils reached towards her, wrapping around the aquila. They pulled. She resisted. Her chanting never altered from a calm, inexorable monotone. The tendrils found no emotions to feed on, and the prayers ate away at their strength. Setheno felt the warmth of her blood running between her bodyweb and armour. She held herself rigid and straight, and saw the rite through. The sphere stopped growing. Each pulse now saw it smaller. Setheno poured denial on the construct, and at last, instead of a pulse, there was a blink, and it was gone.

The light in Volos’s chambers became normal again. A smell like old nightmares and new bones lingered for a few moments, then faded. There was blood on the floor, and a few slivers of wood. The room was otherwise untouched.

Setheno’s wounds began to weigh her down, and she staggered as she left the quarters. More blood on the floor of the corridor, and battered stonework on the walls and ceiling. Now, too, the heavy boom of running, booted feet. The battle had lasted less than a minute.

Volos and Toharan, monster and god unarmoured above the waist, were the first to arrive. Concern and suspicion flashed over Volos’s face as he took in her injury and the signs of battle. Toharan’s expression was less conflicted. He simply looked at her with naked hatred before stalking away, a retinue of Space Marines at his heels.

CHAPTER 23

DEPLOYMENT IN FORCE

The trap was twofold. Setheno’s words, echoing in Volos’s mind as the Immolation Maw transited back to real space in the Abolessus system. It was meant to kill you and disgrace you. You would have been eliminated, and corruption would leak from your cell until the inquisitor dispelled it. You would have been destroyed by your own daemonic magic. That would have been the narrative, one to convert those who still doubted Toharan’s leadership, and to silence those who would resist it. The naked pretext of the practice cage duel was laughably obvious now.

You must stop him. Do what is necessary.

The words of mutiny and sedition, spoken by a legend of the Holy Ecclesiarchy. But he had no argument with them now. They had become the expression of common sense, and of fidelity to the truth of the Black Dragons and to the Emperor. Yes, he would do what was necessary. But he still needed the means to do it, and what had happened in his quarters had left nothing but questions, few of which did him any good. A battle-brother was missing, somehow killed by a canoness whose reputation was as much for cold-bloodedness as it was for righteousness. The whiff of the daemonic fed into the darker stories about the penitence crusade on Aighe Mortis. It was becoming harder for Volos to act against Toharan.

The captain of purity was winning. Not as quickly and decisively as he desired. But he was winning.

In his cell, Volos said a prayer over the last of the rounds that he loaded into his bolter. Then, blades out, he crossed them over his chest, making an aquila of them, and he prayed some more. There was an anger to his prayers now. He prayed for the violent end of those who would hurt his Chapter. ‘Make me your monster,’ he begged the Emperor. ‘Make me your dragon.’

Tennesyn stood on the bridge. He kept himself out of the way, near the seat-bound servitors, far from the traffic of war near the strategium. His eyes were glued to the viewport, and the revelations of Abolessus. Before the recovery of the data from the Metastasis, he had never heard of the system. Afterwards, he had only known the name. Now, he saw the most impressive finds of his career reduced to the scale of pottery shards.

The monuments of Abolessus floated past the Immolation Maw. They crowded the space of the system. There were too many orbits, too many objects of planetary scale swarming around the aged red sun. Tennesyn’s jaw hung open. He had never experienced such absolute awe. Every object was a massive demonstration of staggering pointlessness and power. The geometrical assemblages were not for habitation, and they were not bases. They were engraved art, and existed only for the sheer excess of being.

Or so Tennesyn thought at first. But as the ship moved deeper into the cyclopean gallery, the monuments began to speak to him. As he watched their slow ballet of endless, dead tumbling, what he heard was a silence. It wasn’t the simple silence of airless void. It was the quiet of a mourning too deep and too vast to be expressed in words or cries. These objects were the creations of grief and despair. A species of unimaginable power had produced a valediction to itself. It had marked the fact of its existence on an entire solar system. It had transformed worlds so it would not be forgotten, and then, after all, it had been forgotten. The deeds and histories written in runes the size of mountains would never be read again. What really mattered – the content of the memory – was lost. Only the shape remained.

The lesson was humbling. Before Tennesyn’s eyes, the past became a landscape of extinctions stretching back to infinity. The xeno-archaeologist quailed at the hopelessness of his vision. He tried to redirect his attention, but then wished he hadn’t. When he looked away from viewport towards the strategium, he was reminded of the atmosphere on the ship. He knew that he was a trivial figure. Nithigg did him the honour of engaging in research with him, and Setheno had questioned him a few times on his theories, their evidence and his speculations. But most of the Black Dragons seemed to regard him, if they noticed him at all, as an underfoot nuisance. But even as far removed from the pulse of the Immolation Maw as he was, he could sense the tension aboard. They were going to battle. He knew that without being told. And they were going into battle deeply divided.

He didn’t like thinking about that, either.

So he turned back to the view of the immense cenotaphs, and wondered how long he would be remembered when the inevitable happened.

Nessun felt the minds he owned arrive in-system. He had known, through them, of the demise of the Metastasis and its crew. Though his grip on the souls was growing strong, there was no pretending that the Immolation Maw had come for anything other than his destruction. So there were decisions to make. He needed a bit more time. He had to do whatever would gain him an edge, even if it were no more than seconds. In the end, he sent the bulk of his forces to Gemini Primus. It held what he was looking for. The rest, a bare minimum, accompanied him to the Gemini moon. Whatever happened on Primus, success or failure, that was the result that would determine the victory or loss on the moon.

Nessun wriggled into his captive minds. He planted suggestions, creating contingency plans for himself.

‘Multiple contacts,’ the servitor reported, its voice a dehumanised monotone. ‘Deployment by troops of the Revealed Truth. Soulcage and primary ship moving from Gemini Primus to position of low anchor over moon.’

‘What are they doing?’ Symael wondered.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Toharan answered. ‘What matters is that we stop them.’ He spoke more from rote habit than belief. He wanted to know what was so important about Gemini to the Swords of Epiphany. For the greater glory of his Chapter (his Chapter), he would take their prize and wield it himself.

In the meantime, his gut told him that he was seeing the moment when he must begin the purge of the Dragons. His smile tight with hatred and anticipation, he gave his orders.

Volos walked across the launch bay towards the Battle Pyre. Around him was the cacophony of a war machine throwing itself into high gear. Munitions servitors ran their burdens to gunships. Space Marines performed last-minute weapon checks and spoke oaths of moment. New purity seals were affixed to armour. Second Company’s largest mobilisation in years was under way.

Nithigg and Setheno walked with him. There was no hesitation in the canoness’s stride. She had recovered from her wounds with great speed by the standards of mortals. Volos credited her ferocious will. He caught himself thinking this, and wondered why he was more aware of Setheno’s will than of her faith.

‘You won’t be accompanying us this time, canoness?’ Nithigg asked.

‘No. I think I will be more useful on the ship.’

‘Useful in doing what?’ Volos probed, not really expecting an answer.

To his surprise, he received one. ‘Whatever is necessary. You know the rest.’ After a moment’s pause, Setheno said, ‘You do realise you are flying into a trap.’

‘Every encounter with the Swords of Epiphany has been a trap of some kind,’ Volos said. ‘Why would this time be any different?’

‘I am not referring to one of their ambushes. The trap is Toharan’s.’

Nithigg grunted. ‘Look at who is going and who is staying.’

Volos glanced around the launch bay, and saw what Nithigg meant. Toharan had shaken up the squad personnel yet again, but Volos hadn’t noticed the pattern right away. Melus had finally been given Pythios to command, but Omorfos wasn’t part of the squad at all now. Everywhere he looked, he saw that the Dragons heading to the surface of Gemini Primus were all the brothers he thought of as his allies, and any other warrior showing strong signs of mutation. Toharan had split up the company along physiological lines.

Nithigg pointed. ‘The blessed, too.’

He used the word with both irony and reverence. Squad Solemnis was being led by Sergeant Lucertus to a drop pod. The abominations had been released from their holding cages. Chained and sedated, they would be unleashed on the planet’s surface to revel in the full extent of their madness, becoming furies of ceramite, teeth, and slashing bone. Toharan was sending every reminder of Black Dragon identity off the ship.

Nithigg said, ‘I don’t think our captain expects us to return.’

‘Then we’ll disappoint him, won’t we?’

Augurs showed the traitor forces concentrated on the one geological anomaly of Gemini Primus. It was also the only feature that distinguished Primus from its twin. Running for a kilometre along the base of the equatorial mountain chain was a cave opening. It was no more natural than anything else about the planetoid, and in its length it suggested a seam more than a cave. Toharan’s strategy was a triple assault, the Black Dragons coming in from east and west and the sky. ‘Close the talon on them,’ Toharan had commanded, ‘and if they retreat into the cave, pursue them to the last man.’

And then what? Volos wondered. Reward our victory with cyclonic torpedoes?

But he had his orders, and more than that, he had a duty. Below was an Imperial world under attack by Chaos Space Marines. There was no alternative but to strike.

And so they struck. Drop pods rained down on Gemini Primus. The Battle Pyre was joined by its sister ships, the Cleansing Judgement and the Nightfire. With schism and betrayal snapping at their heels, the Black Dragons arrived to put the Swords of Epiphany to flame.

Peregrine Delacquo had feared the nights since the appearance of the moon. Come the dark, he didn’t harvest. He didn’t set foot outside of his sod hut at all. He didn’t look out his window if he could avoid it. He took what comfort he could in the fact that he was not alone with his terrors. The orchards were deserted after dark. No one on Gemini Primus wanted to confront the moon’s gaze.

But tonight, Delacquo was drawn outside despite himself by the shrieking roar of the heavens falling. To the west of the township of Fruition, in the dreadful light of the scarlet moon, there had first come ships like molten gold pouring from the sky. Now, iron tears were streaking to earth. Behind them came a trio of ships, black as night, with the force and blunt shape of metal fists.

‘What is it?’ His wife, Kaletha, had followed him.

‘I don’t know.’ The only ships he had ever seen before were the venerable, barely voidworthy freighters used for what little trade went on between Primus and Secundus. He had never experienced war. The soil of the Twins was so fertile, the divides created by the mountains so difficult to cross, that regional conflicts were unnecessary and impractical. There had been no contact between Abolessus and the rest of the galaxy for uncounted generations. But the word war was now resounding through his mind and heart, and though he barely comprehended the term, it filled him with the same dread as the bloody moon.

He and Kaletha weren’t the only ones out in the night. The good people of Fruition were spilling out of their homes. These were cabins built of logs and sod, the only building material available on an unbreakable world. The people were farmers, loggers, fishermen. Combat was as alien as the things that fell from the sky. But its serpent fascination drew them. Delacquo and Kaletha joined the procession heading west, that they might stare their fate in the face.

CHAPTER 24

THE DESCENT

The valley was so narrow and so straight; there was no way for a large force of the Black Dragons to surprise the Swords of Epiphany. The forests and agricultural lands ended long before the cave, giving way to bare adamantium. Lines of sight from the cave extended east and west to the horizon. The Swords would be able to see an advance coming from kilometres away. If the talon attack was going to work, it had to take advantage of the fact that the entrance to the cave was too wide to defend in its entirety, and it had to begin almost on top of the enemy.

So it did. The drop pods landed only a few dozen metres from the east and west ends of the cave mouth. The Thunderhawks swooped down over the top of the mountain chain, making a run for the centre of the opening, sending out a massive barrage of missiles and heavy bolter fire ahead of them. The Swords had the bulk of their forces inside the cave. The exterior was guarded by a mass of thousands of cultists. Their firepower was heavy, concentrated, and undisciplined. Rifle and las-fire stabbed out at the Dragons, so many lethal bristles exploding out. Some hit their mark. Most did not. Blind luck saw a drop pod blown up before it landed. But the Thunderhawks’ inferno decimated the cultists. There was no cover, no dirt to absorb the blasts, nothing but the utterly unforgiving canvas of adamantium against which the bodies were splattered and painted by fire and concussive force.

‘How close can you get us to the cave mouth?’ Volos asked Keryon as the Battle Pyre raced to the floor of the valley.

‘Watch and grovel before me,’ Keryon’s voice came back over the comm-bead.

Volos watched, and his eyes widened as the ground raced towards the Thunderhawk, eager for the kiss of impact. The doors opened just as Keryon levelled the ship at the last second, piloting the gunship as if it were a high-performance lighter.

‘Now,’ Keryon said, and as the Dragon Claws shot away from the hull, the Battle Pyre was already nose-up, its undercarriage breathing against the mountainside. Keryon had dropped them within metres of the roof of the cave mouth.

Streaking flame from their jump packs, the Claws stormed the cave. The floor, thirty metres below, was a perfect semicircle, reaching back a kilometre into the mountainside. In the middle of the floor was a circular depression, its diameter a third of the width of the chamber. The Swords had withdrawn to the depression, with half of them guarding its southern perimeter, facing the cave entrance. The others were busy slaughtering dozens of unarmed humans while holding hundreds of others at gunpoint. Strategically, the Swords were in an untenable position. There were about fifty of them, and though they had firepower and the buffer of their helots beyond the circle, they had no cover, and no retreat.

The Black Dragon tactical squads were already moving inside the cave, slicing through the cultists like they were cobwebs. Devastator lascannon shots scorched a path towards the defensive line. The Dragons advanced in a series of speartips, punching through the heretic mob. Moving up the centre of the cavern, ignoring such trivialities as enemy fire, was the whirling savagery of Squad Solemnis. Volos saw a gigantic cull ahead, and his fangs bared in hunger.

The Dragon Claws came down behind the Swords’ line, between the defenders and the butchers. Bolter and blade bit into the enemy. The defensive formation came apart as the Swords responded to the threat at their backs. Volos stitched a traitor with explosive slugs from groin to head, and as the rounds detonated ceramite and body, he slammed his left arm out, decapitating another with his bone-blade. The jolt of the blade slicing through vertebrae ran up his arms, and he revelled in the tactile feel of the kill. To his right, Nithigg faced the other way, blasting the inner ring of Swords. One Chaos Space Marine made the mistake of coming at him from behind. Nithigg jabbed his arm back, the force of the hit enough to jam the forearm blade through the armour and disembowel the Sword.

Volos was surrounded by killing. Hungry for vengeance, raging at the harm that was befalling his company, he gave himself up to the rhythm of violence. He let his body be fire and bone. He became what he was designed to be. He was monster and he was death, and there was no stopping him. Every movement took a life. Finger pulled trigger and blew up a head. Arm thrust to impale, pulled out and swept to sever. Head ducked and horns gored face and throat.

Traitor Space Marines and heretic cultists rushing to their aid fell before him, and as the dance of war took him, there was no thought, and there was no grand purpose. There was only the perfect kill, the perpetual rending of body into pieces, the brutal pleasure of life ended again and again and again. Enemies landed blows on him. Blades stabbed through armour joints to tear muscle. Rounds chipped plate and took out chunks of flesh. But he was moving so fast, so fluidly, that his foes could never lock on to him with hands or with targeting sights long enough to bring him down. His Larraman cells rushed to fix the damage, clotting blood and knitting rips, but it was his frenzy more than anything else that took him beyond considerations of personal injury and bore him into the intoxicating nirvana of absolute war.

Then a Sword, as big as he was, wearing Terminator armour in the gold of sin, smashed him to the ground with a power fist. The traitor had lost his helmet, and as he raised his fist to reduce Volos’s head to pulp, Volos took in the expression on his face. It was peaceful. Volos’s rage had already swallowed him whole, but now it spiked to a higher intensity yet. He had fought and killed all manner of Traitor Space Marines, but these were the only ones who were perpetually delighted in themselves and the wars around them. Volos felt something so close to envy it was sickening as he slammed both blades up into the Sword’s groin. The warrior howled, his blow going wild as his entrails spilled over Volos and the floor. But as he fell, he gazed down at the ground, and the monster smiled, as if looking upon his work and seeing that it was good.

The incongruity of the expression slit through the haze of Volos’s anger, and he was rational again as he rolled out of the way of the tumbling corpse. Volos examined the floor as he rose, bolter already up and firing into the enemy, and he noticed now the intricate runes that formed the texture of the adamantium floor. They were only present in the disc of the depression. He saw the blood flow over the shapes, and then be absorbed by a substance that could absorb nothing. He realised that a large portion of the Swords had continued to kill their prisoners, as if the deaths of these people who could pose no threat was more important than fighting off the Dragons.

And perhaps it was. Volos remembered the sacrifices that had activated the doors of the Flebis vault. His finger hesitated on the trigger as the thought came to him that with all the blood they were shedding, perhaps he and his brothers were doing the Swords’ work for them. He looked to the advancing Dragons, saw how close they were, and realised that they were too far away to help.

The floor shuddered beneath his feet, and as the Swords roared their triumph, the circular platform (for that, Volos realised far too late, was what it was) dropped like a stone. Volos staggered while friend and foe around him lost their footing. He looked up. They were descending a shaft. A circle of light created by explosions and fire retreated to nothing in seconds. The plunge picked up speed. Volos felt himself growing lighter. He was almost in free fall. As the light from above vanished, the glow of the shaft became visible. Here too, the walls were covered in glyphs, and they shone, flashing by so quickly they were streaks of corpse-silver.

Faster yet, and when he tried to take a step, he floated. Though he knew he was falling, the three hundred metre-wide platform blocked the updraft he would normally have felt. The effect was of being in zero-gravity. In the second his body took to adjust to the new conditions, he processed the tactical situation. Hundreds of non-combatants, a few dozen cultists, the Swords of Epiphany down half their strength. But his squad had been hurt, too. The red runes of lost brothers flashed on his lens readout. Still with him, and already turning on the tumbling foe: Nithigg, Braxas, Vasuk, Liscar, Jesterka. That was all. It would be enough.

The Swords weren’t slow in adapting, either. What had been the defensive line turned inward now, and the butchers left their prey alone, their job done. The battle resumed, but with an odd care and grace. There was an elegance to the strikes as the warriors contended with the laws of physics as much as with each other. A Sword hacked at Volos with a chainaxe. The movement was dream-slow, and Volos had all the time in the world to avoid it, except that his own actions were far behind his impulses. He used a brief kick from the jump pack to rise above the swing, then reversed thrust to smash into the traitor, impaling his skull. Blood fountained upward and was left behind.

And then the fight ended, because the platform fell even faster, burning past terminal velocity, and the moment it crossed that barrier, it grabbed its passengers. Artificial gravity kicked in, and Volos was slammed flat. The platform was keeping everyone alive as the speed became a blinding terror.

They had travelled for hours, passing through the planetoid’s crust, when the platform dropped out of the shaft. Crimson light, the same shade as the moon, filled the world-sized cavern. Volos was near an edge of the platform. He dragged himself forward, looked down, and saw that the platform was actually a piston, retracting a length of thousands of kilometres. The core of Gemini Primus was hollow. The piston was off to one side of the empty sphere, and occupying the core was a bell the size of a small asteroid. The object was more terrible and awe-inspiring than any of the much larger monuments the Immolation Maw had passed on its journey through Abolessus. Those had been abstract shapes. This, like the organ on Flebis, was recognisable. It was something familiar, grown into a dark god.

The bell was the source of the light. It was suspended by a monumental yoke at the top of the cavern, and from the crown to the lip, it was textured with runes. Volos could not read the dead language, nor did he wish to. But at a thousand kilometres’ distance, these runes were not turned into smears by the speed of the fall. They mesmerised. They demanded contemplation. And they spoke. These runes were not those that the followers of the Ruinous Powers painted, carved and gouged onto every available surface. There was nothing here of the perverse, of cackling insanity and willed malevolence. Instead, the bell spoke of an unfathomable will indifferent to all but its own desires. The power that created this monster would think nothing of exterminating entire civilizations, not out of malice, but in the way a man crushes an ant hill that is in his way.

Volos saw a Sword crawling towards him. He waited, then managed to pull his legs free of the surface long enough to lash out. He kicked the Sword in the chest, and discovered that it was possible to overcome the piston’s gravity. The Sword flew into the air, and then appeared to rocket up, vanishing into the stone sky. He was still falling, but at a normal speed. He would catch up and die when the piston stopped.

When the piston stopped…

Volos looked down again. He saw the base of the piston coming to meet them. The speed of the plunge hadn’t slowed at all. They were rushing towards a series of linked, concentric rings. They looked like canals.

Pieces fell into place. The breathable atmosphere and the gravity that were keeping the civilians alive for the length of the journey. What would happen when the piston stopped? What would run down those canals?

Volos felt a moment of pity for the hundreds of Mortisians on the piston. Some of them were rebels, but others, he knew, were just confused refugees. None of that mattered. There was nothing he could do.

‘Ormarr,’ he voxed. ‘Jump packs for deceleration. Get off this thing. Now!’

He sat up, yanking himself away from the iron grip of the floor. Anvils weighed him down. He struggled to leap, and his jump pack blasted. There was a moment’s hesitation when he was caught in a tug of war of forces, and then he shot up away from the piston. The rest of the squad was right behind him. He fired multiple bursts with the pack, slowing his descent. As the piston flashed down the last few metres, the Dragon Claws hovered briefly above the surface of the cavern. They were close enough to see the faces of those on the platform. Volos took in the terror of the civilians. A number of the Swords weren’t wearing helmets, and Volos felt grim satisfaction in seeing their ecstasy shift, at the last second, to confusion. They hadn’t been expecting this.

The piston stopped. There was no slowing down, no transition. One second it was a missile descending, and the next it was as if it hadn’t moved at all. Volos couldn’t imagine how its momentum was dissipated, but for a second the surface of the cavern blurred, as if the entire globe had vibrated. Everyone on the piston was crushed to paste. The transition from human being to liquid was instantaneous. There was, Volos thought as the Dragon Claws came down to land, an impressive efficiency to the sacrifice.

Blood and pulverised bone fragments flowed into the canals. The remains of a few hundred souls looked like a pitiful drop in the vastness of the cavern. The bell loomed overhead. He couldn’t see how something so vast would be satisfied by an offering of this scale. Yet he knew it would be.

‘Now what?’ Vasuk asked.

Nithigg stared upward. ‘I imagine we wait, unless someone has something like a teleporter stashed away in a belt.’ After a moment he added, ‘You realise that the gravity is still all wrong.’ He pointed to the bell. ‘I believe the actual centre of this world is in there. So we should be falling, not standing.’

Liscar grimaced. ‘Like the Flebis vault,’ he said. ‘Space and time are twisted here.’

Nithigg nodded. ‘This is more warp architecture.’

Volos watched the blood spread through the rings. Where the piston had been the bottom of a declivity on the surface of the planet, here it was the top of a rise. The entire ring structure was a few kilometres wide. It would have seemed big anywhere else. Here he resented how small it was, how quickly it would be filled, and how easily the coming event would be triggered.

Nithigg clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I know,’ he said.

‘They’re dead.’ Volos snarled. ‘They’re crushed to nothing. How can it be that they’re about to win again?’

Nithigg didn’t answer. The Dragon Claws stood in silence and watched the blood fill the rings. It took less than an hour. Then a terrible day dawned as the red glow of the bell’s runes became blinding. And with a ponderous, monstrous deliberation, the bell began to swing.

CHAPTER 25

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

On the Gemini moon, Rodrigo Nessun ran his hands over the embodiment of beauty. It was a musical instrument. Its shape made him think of an organ, in that there was a large primary body, ten metres high and twenty wide, and there were pipes of a kind. But these looked less like organ pipes than did the monsters of the Flebis vault. For one thing, once they emerged from the main mass of the instrument, they curved down and ran out of the temple before plunging beneath the smooth surface of the moon. For another, they were made of bone. So was the entire instrument. Where the keyboard should have been, Nessun was presented with a long chain of giant vertebrae. When he touched the backbone, he came into contact with something so smooth, so perfectly crafted to its purpose that it seemed to be stroking his hands rather than the other way around. The instrument was composed of individual bones. There were skulls, femurs, ribcages and hands of all sizes and variations, none of them human, none of them of any species he recognised. Thousands of bones, but the joins were so seamless, the machine also seemed to have been carved from a single, monolithic block of grey ivory.

The instrument held his hands and showed him where to place them. When the time came, he would be able to play it as if he were an extension of its being. His soul was legion, and so was this creation. Yet he and the instrument would also become a single expression of power and will. He bowed his head before the omnipotence of paradox.

Above the vertebrae was a large, smooth, convex surface of bone. It was in the shape of an eye ten metres across and blank as the gaze of a marble statue. He shivered with pleasure as he imagined the film drawn back. Soon. Soon.

The Gemini moon’s temple was situated on its equator, its face precisely equidistant from Primus and Secundus. It rose from the surface like a cobra’s hood, and was formed of the same rock as the moon itself: smoother than marble, harder than granite. It generated its own crimson light. The temple entrance was on the outer slope of the hood. The doorway was massive. Inside, a short corridor led to the main space of the temple. This was an enormous open area. Curving walls led up to a domed ceiling unsupported by columns. A stairway, its steps so huge they had to be climbed, wound around the wall, leading up to the transparent dome and, beneath it, a ringed observation platform. The dome appeared to be made of glass, though thicker than any Nessun had ever seen, and so clear that, at first glance, the temple appeared to be open to the air. Before the temple was a vast, fan-shaped, shallow depression. It stretched for kilometres. More than big enough to hold the tens of thousands of humans that stood there, disgorged from the Foretold Pilgrimage.

Other than the temple and its apron, the moon was featureless. There were no mountains or hills, not even any impact craters. There was no dust. The moon was as perfect and artificial as the Twins.

‘Father,’ Gabrille said.

‘Yes?’ Nessun listened with only half an ear. His hands travelled over the beautiful death of the instrument.

‘We have lost all communication with the Gemini Primus contingent.’

The cardinal’s hands paused. There was the possibility of enormous tragedy in this news. He might be about to find out that all his good work had been for nothing. He had, until now, resisted the temptation to attempt a mass conversion of the Black Dragons. The lure had been strong, but he had been virtuous in the pursuit of his goal, again and again trying to throw the Dragons off the scent. But they were as dogged as their captain was corruptible. He had begun to think that the conversion was not so much a temptation as fate, mapped out by the Changer of the Ways. He sensed that this was the moment of truth. ‘What was the last report we had from them?’ he asked.

‘That the route to the resonator had been opened.’

Nessun smiled. The path before him became clear. The crucial step to completion had been taken, quite likely at the expense of a large portion of his forces. On board the Revealed Truth, there were only servitors now. He had twenty Swords of Epiphany with him on the moon. Not enough, depending on how many Dragons were still alive. But plenty to welcome new sheep to the fold.

He stepped away from the wonderful thing before him. He needed his full concentration. There were minds he had to touch. He did not need the amplifying power of the Hall of Exaltation here. The entire moon was impregnated with the magic of the warp. He asked, ‘What is the disposition of the pilgrims?’

‘They are ready.’

‘Good,’ he said, and went to work.

‘What can you tell me?’ Toharan asked.

Maro consulted the data-slates before him. ‘They’re gathered at a point just over the horizon from us,’ he said.

‘Ship activity?’

‘Minimal. The Revealed Truth is in low orbit, doing nothing at all, and the Soulcage has landed.’

‘I see. Then prepare to assault the Revealed Truth.’ The Immolation Maw was still limping from its wounds. But the ship was hungry, too, eager to get revenge on those who had hurt it. It was also a question of honour. He would destroy that ship and everyone aboard. There would be no running away for the Swords this time. Then he would go after what was left of them on the moon. And then–

His train of thought froze. As soon as the image of being on the moon rose in his mind, he was hit by a staggering wave of desire. He didn’t know what was on the moon. He didn’t know what the Swords wanted. But he wanted it, too. He must have it. The scrabbling in his brain was frantic, but it would ease if he could win this prize.

He dragged himself back to the present. There was a pain behind his eyes, like the crawling of spiny worms. He shoved it to the back of his mind. ‘Take us to the edge of the atmosphere,’ he told Maro. ‘We come over the horizon at the traitor ship with a full barrage.’

‘We won’t have any other moves after that one,’ Maro said.

‘I’m aware of that.’ The Maw had its arsenal, but in its damaged state, its manoeuvrability would be far less than that of the Revealed Truth. ‘So let our first strike be the fatal one.’

Maro said nothing, though Toharan could read his scepticism. The helmsman believed he was crossing the line between daring and reckless stupidity. His feelings were understandable. He was impure, his skull topped by a massive club of bone. Perfect for smashing doors open head-first, but clearly insensitive to intimations of destiny. Maro was another who would be left behind as the Disciples of Purity rose from the ashes of the Black Dragons. Toharan would deal with him when the time came.

Toharan watched the primary pict display in the strategium as the Immolation Maw made its attack run. Unlike on Flebis, the Revealed Truth was too low to approach from beneath. The assault was more frontal. The Chaos cruiser came into sight over the curve of the planetoid as the Maw opened up with its frontal turrets and a full torpedo salvo. Toharan felt the rush of destiny fulfilled when he saw that they had come upon the Truth on its starboard flank. Withering fire raked the superstructure, blasting apart the crown of the command spire. The torpedoes slammed into the hull, blowing open enormous holes. A series of hits to the rear detonated an engine compartment. The ship’s stern bucked upward, while its bow dipped towards the surface of the moon.

‘Well played, helmsman,’ Toharan said.

Maro grunted. He sounded dissatisfied, not triumphant. He leaned back in the pilot throne and turned his head to look at Toharan. With the mechadendrites webbing him to the chair, he struck Toharan as even more disgusting than if he were standing free with only his natural deformities on view. ‘There is no return fire,’ Maro said.

‘Then we have landed an even more telling blow than we could have hoped–’ Toharan began.

‘And where are their void shields?’

That gave him pause. ‘What?’

‘The Chaos ship had its shields down. I refuse to believe that was a mistake.’

Toharan had no answer. He looked from the pict to the viewport and watched the Revealed Truth, its hull shuddering with secondary explosions and gouting flame, begin its funereal plunge into the Gemini moon’s atmosphere. A suspicion grew into a theory and, with a flutter of insect wings against his cortex, became a certainty.

‘They wanted us to destroy it,’ Symael muttered, echoing Toharan’s thoughts.

‘Where is it going to hit?’ Toharan asked.

Maro absorbed data fed to him by the ship’s augurs. ‘Very close to where the Soulcage landed.’ After a pause, he continued, ‘There is some sort of structure there, too.’

The sense of destiny ran through Toharan’s frame again like an electric shock. ‘That is our target. We land with full force of arms.’

Nessun mounted to the observation dome of the temple. He looked at the assembled masses. Over a hundred thousand strong, the refugees were all looking up at the dome of the temple. He lifted his arms to them, and they lifted theirs back. Through the glass of the dome, he could hear the roar of worship and supplication. The people knew they had been taken to a holy place. But they didn’t know why, or what was to become of them. He would answer both of their questions. He pointed to the heavens. The vision of gold and light that greeted him filled him with enormous joy, and his ecstasy was contagious. For the next few seconds, the crowd shared his emotion, and he heard them exclaim in wonder. It was a pity this perfect unity wasn’t going to last, but he revelled in the irony while it did.

The moment stretched out until the crowd realised what the flashes and fire above them represented. Shapes defined themselves, and the play of light and flame became the burning, erupting hulk of the Revealed Truth plummeting down to spread its final gospel. The swell of wonder became the howl of terror. The cruiser filled the sky. It was comet and cathedral, and the storm of its destruction drowned out the cries on the ground. The observation platform was high enough for Nessun to see the delicious patterns that panic drew in the crowd. He thought he saw some familiar symbols in the shifting, hysterical vectors of blind flight. Refugees on the outer edges of the multitude fled the apron. Nessun wasn’t worried. They couldn’t get far in a matter of seconds. They would still be part of the burnt offering, and would give their souls to the imminent beauty.

The Revealed Truth hit. The explosion filled the world. Fire of stellar brilliance washed over the dome. Nessun put a hand against the glass. It was cool, but the atomic inferno beyond was so close that Nessun rejoiced he had lived to touch the face of a sun. The refugees were annihilated in the light of truth, incinerated by the breath of Chaos and crushed by the weight of fate. Nessun couldn’t hear his own laugh, but he felt it threaten to tear his cheeks open. He exulted as the rage of the cruiser’s death embraced the temple. This was the apotheosis of his existence.

And there was even greater beauty to come.

As the bell reached the height of its swing and started back down, Volos saw the mountain-sized clapper arc towards the mouth. The movement seemed leisurely, though he knew that, given the size of the objects and the distances they covered, he was looking at an event that was occurring at thousands of kilometres per hour.

There was time, though, time for Volos to anticipate the coming of the sound. But he couldn’t prepare for its immensity.

The bell rang. It sounded a note that transcended the aural. The toll boomed out from the bell and expanded not at the speed of sound, but at the speed of light. There was no resisting it. The Dragon Claws fell as it hit, hammered by a fist the size of the universe. Volos felt Gemini Primus in its entirety reverberate. The resonance reached into his soul, and he had a momentary impression of the vibration stretching its grasp beyond the planetoid. He had the terrible sense of being tuned.

The bell swung once only, and then returned to its position, motionless. The moment it finished, the piston fired upward again. The Dragons lay where they had been flattened by the bell’s ring. As the piston streaked towards its starting point, Volos was reminded of a gun mechanism. Gemini Primus was re-arming itself, ready for another sacrifice to be provided. Volos didn’t think one would be necessary.

The whistle had been blown. The bell had tolled. One single note each time. That was all it took.

With an effort, he turned his head. Nithigg was facing him. He couldn’t see his battle-brother’s eyes behind the red of the helmet’s lenses, but Nithigg managed a nod. Volos returned it. They had been reduced to ants by the scale of events. They had been outflanked and outmanoeuvred again and again. They had been betrayed.

But they were alive. They were Adeptus Astartes. They were Black Dragons.

They were the Emperor’s monsters, and no matter what resources the Archenemy had, no matter how many planets he threw at them, they would teach him fear.

Toharan knew some moments of indecision as he chose who would descend to the moon’s surface with him, and who would remain on the Immolation Maw. He was torn between having sufficient force on the ground and ensuring he kept his grip on the Maw. In the end, he chose to hit the site of the temple with the entire contingent of the Disciples of Purity. He left the ship in Lettinger’s care, making it clear to Maro on the bridge and Ydraig in the engine room that the inquisitor had the captain’s absolute confidence and would be speaking with his voice. He did not like having Setheno out of his sight. He couldn’t command that she accompany the landing party, though he could, he was sure, enforce her presence. That was a battle that didn’t seem worth fighting. He would embrace his destiny on the Gemini moon, then return to deal with the canoness.

He landed by drop pod in the company of the thirty loyal Disciples. It was the first time he had gone into action solely with the pure and the converted. He looked at his men with pride. In their armour, they were indistinguishable from most of the other Black Dragons, whose deformities weren’t sufficient to require helmet or vambrace modifications. But he knew what was under the ceramite. While only he was completely free of disfigurement, none of his troops had worse than a few bone gnarls on their heads. With time, and new recruits, he would reverse the damage done by the Dragon Apothecaries, and take his Chapter back to a physical ideal that rejected the corruption of being. Some drastic measures might yet be necessary to hasten the process. He was not afraid of taking those steps. Transcendence awaited, and to hesitate or show mercy would be a surrender. He refused to be shackled to the filth of imperfection any longer.

As the Disciples closed in on the temple entrance, he was struck by a new revelation. Why was he so concerned with remaking the Black Dragons? He had already rejected everything the Chapter stood for. Lettinger was right: it was beyond saving. So was anything that knelt to that disgusting mass of being on the Golden Throne. The Black Dragons were dead. The armour he and his true brethren wore was a thing of the past and a celebration of imperfection. The name they had chosen as a mark of their will and their goal was, he now realised, the true expression of their identity. They were the Disciples of Purity. They were not a mere group of like-minded battle-brothers. They were his Legion, and he would be their primarch.

He was quivering at the touch of glory as they arrived at the temple doors. They stood open. There had been no defensive line set up around the temple. There was no one inside the corridor that stretched ahead. Toharan paused at the threshold. The space was rather wide for an ambush, but the absence of resistance meant something had to be waiting for them here. He turned to Symael. The sergeant was consulting his auspex.

‘No one here,’ Symael reported, sounding just as puzzled. ‘I have multiple readings in the larger space beyond.’

Were the Swords waiting to kill them as they emerged from the corridor? But the hall was much too wide to be an effective bottleneck. The strategy was ludicrous. If anything, the Swords were backing themselves into a corner.

Jemiah said, ‘They can’t be this stupid.’

‘They haven’t been so far,’ Toharan agreed. He had the Disciples advance along three lines, one on either side of the corridor, and his reforged Squad Nychus up the middle. Halfway along, they could see what was waiting for them in the temple’s great hall. Rodrigo Nessun stood before an immense device of bone. He was flanked on either side by the Swords of Epiphany. They stood at attention.

Their weapons were mag-locked.

Nessun was smiling.

Toharan knew that, from a tactical point of view, he should stop his advance immediately. He should retreat from the obvious trap. But destiny spoke louder, and kept him moving. The mind-writhing was agonising, and though the pain should have dulled his vision, instead it sharpened it. The world was crystalline. It was transparent all the way to the heart of existence, yet fragile, ready to shatter in his fist. This was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. He was walking towards the moment that the universe had prepared for him.

‘Captain…’ Symael began.

Toharan said, ‘Walk at my side, brother-sergeant.’ He aimed his bolter at the ground.

Nessun spread his arms. ‘Welcome, my sons,’ he said.

The Swords of Epiphany began to beat their hands together. The rhythm built as the Dragons entered the hall, the smack of ceramite gauntlets becoming a wave of thunderous applause. Toharan saw the tension in the body movement of the Disciples. Their instinct to open fire was a difficult one to overcome. The fact that they triumphed over it told him that they, too, felt the truth and inevitability of this moment. The scrabbling insects retreated as he felt his spirit soar. One look at Nessun’s face, and at the exhilaration in his eyes, made it clear that he was in the company of a visionary. Toharan had been so wrong. They all had, to have seen the Swords as the enemy.

Nessun reached towards him. ‘Will you take my hand?’ he asked.

Toharan stepped forward and did.

At that moment, the very cosmos tolled. Everything shifted. The resonance thrummed through moon and temple, bone and mind. Toharan’s vision shimmered as he staggered, then clicked back into place, and the moon was suddenly home as nothing had ever been in his life. He and Nessun caught each other, and he held the cardinal up. As they straightened, he looked around and saw that the other Disciples had lost their wariness as they recovered from the toll. They knew they belonged.

‘What was that?’ Toharan asked.

‘It was the tuning,’ Nessun answered. ‘The moon and Abolessus Gemini are now properly synchronised.’ He walked to the instrument and placed his hands on the massive vertebrae. ‘And now, if our latest burnt offering was large enough… Ah,’ he sighed, and the sound was almost humble.

The blank eye of bone above Nessun opened. It was a pict screen of some kind, and at first it seemed to be merely a viewport, looking out onto the temple’s apron. There, the smouldering wreckage of the Revealed Truth lay in twisted fragments over a carpet of burned, crushed, melted and fused corpses. Nessun moved his hands. The corpses slowly flowed into one another, gristle and skeleton and blood becoming one, becoming nothing, thousands and thousands and thousands of souls absorbed by the capricious demands of the song of the warp. As the corpses disappeared into the glowing crimson surface of the moon, Toharan became aware of music. It did not play for his ear, but he sensed the melody all the same, gathering up his spirit, expanding his heart with the touch of the dark numinous as the song grew. The melody line was simple in the beginning, but as it repeated, it layered and doubled back on itself, intertwined with subtle variations, and gradually became a chorus that was majesty and power. As it reached its first enormous swell, Nessun cried, ‘Look! Oh, look!’

The eye-shaped screen was not just a viewport. When Nessun shouted, the view shifted to Gemini Primus and Secundus. The screen blinked, and the planetoids appeared closer, filling the screen. Toharan noticed Nessun’s head tilted back to look at the eye, and realised that it had become his sight, responding to his desire, following the focus of his attention and showing him what he wished to see. Toharan saw what had made Nessun exult. He saw where the music came from. It was the song of the Gemini configuration. The planetoids and the moon had become a choir.

And they danced with each other. The music swelled again, and Primus and Secundus began to move. Their rotation was speeding up. Toharan could actually see their spin. He shook his head. At those speeds, the centripetal forces should have shaken the spheres apart. But they were adamantium, and what was one more impossibility in an entire system of miracles? One more was nothing. So why not another?

Why not?

As he watched and listened, the music sounded another triumph, and the planetoids began moving closer together.

CHAPTER 26

GRINDER

Volos expected the piston to stop at its original position as suddenly as it had down below. He knew that his jump pack would not have enough power to counter his momentum, and that he and the other Dragon Claws would be splattered against the cavern ceiling. He knew this, but he would fight for his life anyway, as if sheer will could overcome the laws of physics. It can, he told himself. The Emperor Himself is the living proof.

But as the light of the surface cavern reappeared, a pinprick at the end of the shaft, the piston slowed. There was only purpose in its instant deceleration where it was part of the sacrificial altar. It eased into its slot in the cavern and became nothing more than the floor again, until the next time blood would spur it to action.

The Claws picked themselves up. They were greeted by Squad Pythios, knee-deep in dead cultists and a few dismembered Swords. Melus was standing by the edge of the piston. ‘Nice of you to join us,’ he said. ‘Now if you don’t mind, we should depart this Throne-accursed world immediately.’

‘Dare I ask?’ Volos said.

Melus led them out of the cavern. He pointed up.

Delacquo held Kaletha to his chest. They were on the ground, lying where they had fallen when the toll of the bell had shattered their strength and their comprehension. Delacquo didn’t want Kaletha to see the sky. He wanted to protect her from what he saw. But she was looking. They all were. The people of Fruition had come to see their fate, and now it was upon them.

Delacquo had watched the conflict between the iron gods. He had expected destruction to come in the form of bullets, swords or explosions, as he and his fellow villagers discovered the face of war. Then war had shown itself to be far vaster than he could have imagined.

The heavens had become a spinning insanity, but one that was not without a terrible purpose. Day became night and then day again. The sun rose and set in minutes, and it did so in fewer minutes each time. Gemini Secundus was spinning too. As it arced from horizon to horizon, again and again, Delacquo saw the lights of its colonies flash past. It seemed to be spinning at the same rate as Primus. Delacquo watched the same configuration of lights curve away each time the sister planet passed by overhead. And each time, the spin and the passage were faster. Delacquo felt he should be clutching the ground to keep from being thrown off into space.

He also felt flattened. He wished he could dig himself deep into the earth to hide, because each time Secundus appeared, he could see the cities a bit more clearly. Clusters of lights that had been a blob resolved themselves into distinct communities. Secundus was coming closer. The perfect lines of the mountain ranges took on an awful significance. It was so easy to picture what was coming, it seemed strange no one had conceived of the possibility before. The mountain chains of Primus and Secundus would interlock. The two adamantine spheres would roll together.

Grinding.

Delacquo began to weep. He hoped he was the only one who had realised the shape of doom. Kaletha touched his face. He looked down into her eyes. She knew, too. How could she not? Everyone knew. No one was going to die alone.

That was no comfort.

The Black Dragons boarded the three Thunderhawks. There was enough room in the transports to haul all of the warriors back in one trip. The question was whether there would be somewhere to haul them back to.

‘The Immolation Maw is not at anchor over Primus,’ Keryon reported.

‘I don’t care if it’s back on Terra,’ Volos answered. ‘Lift off now.’

As the assault ramp closed, Volos took a last look at the people of Gemini Primus. He had seen the crowd, lying prone and huddled, when he emerged from the cave. They were a few hundred metres east of the battlefield. They had been drawn to bear witness to their world at war. Now they were witnessing its end, and Volos could do nothing for them. He wondered if this was the shape of the new role of the Dragons, the role defined by Canoness Setheno: to be the monsters and bring the Emperor’s terror and vengeance, but never to help the population of the planets where they raged.

If that was the Emperor’s will, he would accept it. But he allowed himself the luxury of pity.

The Battle Pyre, the Cleansing Judgement and the Nightfire rose with the ponderous deliberation of Cretacia saurians. The atmosphere of Gemini Primus was becoming turbulent as the spin increased and Secundus closed in, gravitational fields and torque wreaking havoc with weather patterns. The wind picked up in a matter of seconds, shrieking down the narrow valley between the mountains, slamming into the Thunderhawks as if it were the gale of Aighe Mortis, come for unfinished business. Volos felt the Battle Pyre shake from the hammering gusts. In the time it took to climb to the height of the mountains, the spin became greater yet, and when Secundus flashed into view, it filled the heavens. As the gunships rose higher yet, Secundus and Primus appeared to be the same size. Volos realised the Thunderhawks were at a point almost equidistant between the two planets, and they were still within the atmosphere of Primus.

‘What is it?’ Toharan asked, awed. The two bodies were almost touching now. He saw how they would interlock, and how the twin planetoids were really a single mechanism.

‘An artist’s tool,’ Nessun answered. ‘You saw the masterworks that make up this system. Where do you think the raw material came from? This is the means by which a planet is disassembled before its elements are recombined in a more aesthetically pleasing form.’

The atmospheres of Gemini Primus and Secundus touched. The friction superheated the air. Battle Pyre and its sister ships raced for the sanctuary of the void, their shields glowing as they were surrounded by hurricanes of fire. Strapped down by his restraint harness, Volos looked out a viewing block, and lost all sense of up and down. He could see little now but incandescence and tumbling immensity. Mountain peaks blurred past above and below the Thunderhawk. Two fists were about to connect, crushing everything between them.

Toharan shook his head in bemused wonder. ‘Was the species who built this mad? To expend so much power and effort in so nonsensical a fashion…’

Nessun’s hands caressed vertebrae as delicately as if they were a hummingbird’s wings. ‘You do them wrong, my son,’ he said. ‘Do not mistake caprice for illogic. Perversity has a rigour of its own. You have fought in the False God’s armies long enough to know that Chaos can have a very definite purpose. Every element of the art that you have witnessed has a reason to exist. Did you notice, for instance, how rich the soil of the Gemini bodies is?’

‘In passing.’ In the preparations for the invasion of Primus, he had taken in, as background data, the extensive farmlands and lack of industry.

‘Now why would that be?’ Nessun asked rhetorically, his voice lilting as his body responded to the shifts in the instrument’s melody. ‘Adamantium does not erode. The fertile topsoil would have to be placed there deliberately. What purpose would it serve? I’ll tell you. It was a lure. Bait.’

‘For what?’

‘Sacrifice.’

Delacquo gasped. The air felt like glowing embers in his lungs. Kaletha was screaming. So was he. They all were, but Delacquo couldn’t hear their voices. They were drowned out by another scream: the shriek of the compressed and burning atmospheres. He saw the blinding rage begin in the clouds and descend towards him. It was the flaming grasp of a daemon god, come to obliterate everything. As the brilliance of the endfire filled his vision, he could still see the terrible spinning movement that was the engine of the destroying heat. In his last second before agony bright as wisdom reduced him to ash, he saw mountains falling towards him like descending fangs.

‘And why sacrifice? Because nothing comes from nothing. The machine of art needs fuel.’

Gemini Primus and Secundus met, meshed, and rolled against each other. Mountain ranges filled valleys. The grinder absorbed the energy of two billion souls incinerated in a matter of seconds. The flaming ruins of cities and villages were smashed to dust. The only evidence that humans had ever set foot on the surface of either body was the operation of the machine itself. A civilization died, priming the mechanism that destroyed it for more.

‘And why blood for fuel? It is, of course, one of the essential essences of warp sorcery. But the use of blood holds a lesson, too, as has every baroque step in the activation of this great machine. Its creators, it is clear, were beings possessed of infinite will and absolute amorality. How beautiful they must have been. Can you see the logic of the path they left for us? It was a test. To walk the path, we must prove ourselves worthy as artists. We must be able to hear the music, to see that there is music, and follow the logic from whistle, to bell, to organ. And we must prove our will. To use the machine is to be an annihilator. If we cannot provide blood, how will we have the strength to take it?’

The Battle Pyre was prey in the jaws of a wolf. Heat and gravity shook it, tore at it, squeezed it. Inside its hull, the only sense of movement was a lunatic, violent jerking, smashing its passengers in every direction. If they hadn’t been fastened down, they would have been broken like eggs against the bulkheads. Volos felt its machine-spirit howl. From the comm-bead in his ear, he could just make out an imaginative stream of invective from Keryon as he fought to keep the Thunderhawk on an escape course.

Then, something new was added to the shrieking roar outside the ship. It was the rumbling, cracking thunder of a planet-wide earthquake. It went on and on, a steady, endless apocalypse drum roll. The planetoids had met. Volos kept his gaze steady. If the end had come, he would stare it down.

There was a sudden piercing flash. He saw the death throes of the Cleansing Judgement. Flying on the Battle Pyre’s starboard, and half a length behind, it had been killed by the vortices of the colliding worlds. It broke apart as it burned, flinging wreckage and bodies to the insane winds. Thirty battle-brothers vanished. Volos’s vision strobed red with rage.

It was as if his need for vengeance shielded the Battle Pyre and Nightfire. They found a trough in the storm and shot forward, slipping through the grip of Gemini. They touched the void. Their pilots threaded the needle, finding the one spot where the gravitation fields of the two bodies cancelled each other out, and the gunships streaked away from the grinder.

The shaking eased as the Battle Pyre put some distance between itself and the machine. Volos released his harness and made his way to the cockpit. Keryon gave him a quick nod as Volos slid into the seat beside him. ‘Well flown, brother,’ Volos said.

Keryon grunted. After a moment he said, ‘A terrible loss.’

‘A terrible crime,’ Volos corrected. ‘Our dead battle-brothers cry out for justice. Let us deliver it.’

‘Sergeant Volos requires immediate docking for the Battle Pyre and Nightfire,’ Maro said.

‘Remain on station,’ Lettinger told him.

Tennesyn turned from the hololithic display of the Gemini horror to watch the exchange.

‘It was not a request.’ Maro was staring at Lettinger as if he were a being several steps less impressive than a gretchen.

‘Nor is this. Your captain left clear orders. No aid will be given to that traitor.’

Maro turned away from the inquisitor. He snorted in contempt. ‘Coming about,’ he said.

Lettinger drew his laspistol and placed the muzzle against the back of Maro’s head. ‘I know what you could do to me if you ever rose from that throne,’ he said. ‘So you should know that I will kill you if you so much as lean forward. Now. The ship remains on station. If Sergeant Volos’s ships come into view, destroy them.’

The port-side bridge door slid open, admitting Canoness Setheno. She wasn’t wearing her helmet, and Tennesyn found himself wishing that she were. The face of ice unnerved him more than the stand-off at the pilot’s throne. She paused by the entrance, taking in what Lettinger was doing. She said nothing.

Lettinger cleared his throat. ‘Canoness,’ he began.

Setheno raised her bolt pistol.

Lettinger ducked around Maro, using him as a shield. Setheno hesitated, and Lettinger fired around the pilot. Setheno dived to the left as Lettinger’s shot killed a targeting servitor and blew up his station. Lettinger stayed low and ran from the bridge, out the starboard door.

Setheno hurried to Maro’s side. ‘I am uninjured,’ he told her.

She turned to Tennesyn. ‘I trust I don’t need to ask where your loyalties lie.’

‘With the Emperor,’ Tennesyn blurted. Setheno continued to stare at him. Tennesyn’s mind wanted to shut down until her gaze went elsewhere. ‘And Sergeant Volos,’ he offered, and the paralyzing eyes moved on. She swept from the bridge after Lettinger.

‘And now?’ Toharan asked.

‘Now,’ Nessun said, ‘we feed on Imperial planets. The deaths of the local Gemini populations have given us enough energy for some travel.’

‘This thing can move?’ Toharan.

Nessun nodded, his face rapt as he played. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘And the more it eats, the farther it can go. But let’s begin with somewhere relatively near. Within the subsector. Captain, I give you the honour of choosing.’

The selection was obvious. Toharan smiled. He had tried to show mercy, and he had tried to teach through example. Both had failed. Now it was time to demonstrate that he simply was not to be trifled with. Better yet, the grinder would exterminate any trace of impurity. ‘Aighe Mortis,’ he said.

There. He had ordered an attack on the Imperium. The final line had been crossed. He drew his chainsword, pushed the activation stud, and marked the moment. He drew the whirring blade over his chestplate and pauldrons, destroying the Imperial markings. The Disciples followed his example. Dragons and aquilas disappeared, and Toharan rejoiced in the ecstasy of conversion.

CHAPTER 27

INTERNECINE

Lettinger raced through the corridors of the Immolation Maw. He could hear the canoness’s footsteps. They sounded like a bell tolling for him. She was having no difficulty keeping up. He wasn’t losing her. Good. He had guessed that, sooner or later, this moment would come. He was ready for it. He ran down the levels towards the prison chapel. There, he tore down the transept, activating wards behind him. He ducked down behind the altar, pistol out, and waited.

Setheno arrived at the chapel. She paused for a moment at the entrance. Lettinger sensed her evaluating the scene. He smirked. It was the least she could do to acknowledge the work he and Toharan had put into the space. He doubted she had ever been down here, but she would still know that changes had been wrought. Most of them had happened after the failed attack on Volos’s cell, during the final hours in the warp, at the last meeting of the Disciples of Purity. The hole in the altarpiece where the icon of the Emperor had been was now a deeper void. The edges were rounded, and darkness dripped from them to the floor of the chapel. The stonework of the walls was blurry when looked at directly, and there was a subtle, twitching, oily movement just visible on the floor. There were no new symbols supplanting the ones that had been destroyed. Replacing one god with others was still, Lettinger believed, not what this struggle was about. It was about power, and who was worthy to wield it. This was what he told himself. It was a litany he repeated even now, as Setheno started forward again, striding right into the trap.

It triggered when Setheno was halfway down the transept. The attack came from two directions. Darkness bunched up behind and in front of her, and spat out two daemons. They were pink, giggling abominations, heavy bulks of flesh sprouting multiple arms and legs. Jagged-toothed mouths surfaced and sank, now in the centre of the mass, now at the top, now at the side, now at the rear. The horrors taunted and leered at Setheno as they rolled and bounded over pews, hurling gibberish insults at her that they seemed to expect she would understand. Lettinger had the unaccountable suspicion that perhaps she did.

The daemons cavorted about her, keeping their distance as they launched missiles from their palms. Setheno ducked and lunged forward as shifting, prismatic bolts passed over her head. She fired her bolt pistol behind, knocking one horror off-balance as it scrambled away from the rounds. She swept her power sword ahead of her. Aura crackling, the blade sliced through the lower limbs of the other daemon. The creature tumbled forward, snarling and laughing as it grew two new ones. But as it did so, it rolled towards Setheno. A joke caught in its mouth as she rose over it and brought her blade sizzling down through its chest. The daemon wailed. It bulged out on its sides, its flesh shading from obscene pink to a festering blue, and then, a hellish amoeba, it split.

Lettinger tried to get a clear shot at Setheno, but she and the daemons were moving too quickly. If he accidentally shot the horrors, he might redirect their attacks his way. So he waited for his opportunity, and smiled that Setheno now faced three daemons.

She seemed to have expected this. The two blue monsters, sobbing and screaming at each other, were just rearing back, hands upraised to unleash their warping assault, when Setheno struck again. The impaling move had been just the first step of her killing dance. She reversed the blade and thrust up, slicing the daemon on her left in half. With a babbling ululation, it vanished. The sword arced over and down into the other, and sent it back to the warp, too.

Setheno threw herself sideways, into a row between pews. Arms and multi-jointed fingers grasping air, the remaining horror landed where she had been a moment before. It fell in a heap, amused and ranting as it tangled its limbs. It sprouted others and righted itself. As it did, it fired a salvo of warp bolts Setheno’s way. She deflected them with the sword. Lettinger gaped as Setheno straightened, the blade moving so quickly it became sheet lightning. Skarprattar wasn’t harmed by the mutating powers of the daemon’s missiles. Its aura grew blinding, and the chapel was filled with a piercing, purifying, flute-like song. Setheno lowered the sword and poured her pistol’s entire clip into the daemon. The storm of explosive bolts blew the monster apart, spreading its flesh across the chapel too quickly for it to divide into coherent halves. The stench of ozone and slaughterhouse lingered after the remains evaporated.

Lettinger whipped around the altar, his pistol on full-auto, and bombarded Setheno with las-fire. She had barely released her trigger, and he hit her before she had time to react. He scored smoking holes in her armour. She dropped her empty gun and charged him. Lettinger leaped over two rows of pews and ran, firing all the time. She couldn’t hurt him as long as he stayed out of reach of that sword.

They danced around the chapel, he keeping his distance and harassing her with las-fire, she closing relentlessly, the blade before her. She showed no interest in retrieving and reloading her gun. Not that she would have a chance. Lettinger knew where he stood in this battle. The reflective flak armour beneath his cloak wouldn’t be worth a thing against the power sword. But it granted him mobility and speed he could use against Setheno. If she paused, if she looked away even long enough to grab her pistol, he would reduce her head to ash.

Setheno seemed to grow weary of the dance. Lettinger had circled back around to the chancel, and Setheno stopped in the crossing. She watched him, saying nothing. He mirrored her confidence. He stood before the altar, in the open, taunting her for her lack of foresight in expending her ammunition. She didn’t appear frustrated. There was still no emotion at all on that colder-than-alabaster face. Lettinger felt his blood pressure rise, infuriated by the canoness’s sanctimonious calm. He had the urge to scream at her, to hurl imprecations and blasphemies until he finally provoked a reaction from that abyssal impassivity. With some difficulty, he mastered his temper. Just kill her, he told himself. He fired until his power pack came up dry. She deflected the head shots with her sword, but otherwise stood there, maddeningly stoic, absorbing the shots with her armour, and staggered only once. Fuming, Lettinger thumbed the release on his pistol. The power pack fell to the floor. He pulled out a spare from his belt. He glanced down as he slapped it home beneath the barrel. The Litany of Loading, so meaningless to him now, sprang unbidden to his lips. He looked back up.

He had underestimated Setheno’s speed in the armour. She closed the distance between them while he was still realising what he was seeing. By the time he thought to react, she had brought the sword up between his legs, slicing until the hilt was just below his breastbone. He stared at it for a moment, frowning, wondering just how this turn of events could be compatible with everything he was supposed to accomplish. His eyes, growing sluggish, rose to meet Setheno’s. The Gorgon towered over him, considering him with no more interest than she would a pinned butterfly. He waited for her valediction. He knew the form. He had followed it himself, not that long ago (an eternity ago). He expected formal judgement.

He did not receive it, unless it was delivered in the sovereign contempt with which she yanked the blade back down, opening him wide. Lettinger emptied himself onto the chapel floor. The wet slap of organs against stone was the last thing he heard.

When there was no response from the Immolation Maw, Volos instructed Keryon to make for the Gemini moon. He voxed Lucertus in the Nightfire with the same order. ‘Do we have enough fuel?’ he asked the pilots.

‘To get there, yes,’ Lucertus answered. ‘Afterwards, if the ship isn’t near…’

‘Then we’ll have nowhere to go anyway. We end things there, or we end.’

‘Maybe both,’ Keryon mused.

‘As long as that traitor’s blood drips from my blades, I will accept that result with a grateful spirit.’

Toharan stared at the completed grinder. He drank in the sight of worlds transformed into an engine of perfect annihilation. There, before him, captured by the eye of bone, was the promise of something even more important than what Nessun was preaching. He could see the art. He could see the weapon this represented. The Imperium would fall before a beast that was fed by the very destruction it caused. But did even Nessun understand the gift of that destruction? Toharan could barely articulate it to himself, though he could feel it in his breast and in his soul. He had just been witness to the reduction of billions of lives to nothing. Aighe Mortis would be ground to dust. Exterminatus left the husk of the planet behind, but the grinder returned matter to the void. It would deal a death blow not only to the Imperium, but to existence itself. The terrible pressure of being would ease as he travelled on this chariot of oblivion. He would see the universe reduced to purity under its wheels.

Toharan smiled. Toharan laughed. He was giddy. He felt liberated. He experienced true joy for the first time in his living memory.

And then Volos had to spoil the perfect moment.

‘Approaching ships, Father,’ a Sword said.

Toharan saw them too: bright specks emerging from the grinder, streaking away from the very nexus of the destruction. Nessun noticed, and the eye-screen changed focus and perspective. It narrowed its attention to the specks, magnifying them, revealing their identity. ‘Thunderhawks,’ Toharan muttered, cursing.

‘How long before they reach us?’ Nessun asked.

Toharan ran some numbers in his head. ‘About an hour.’

Nessun never took his hands from the vertebrae as he spoke. ‘And you control the strike cruiser?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then there is nothing they can do to harm this temple.’ There was a hint of strain in the cardinal’s voice, and he spoke slowly, as if it were hard for him to keep track of his own words. The instrument was demanding his concentration, leaving little for the rest of reality. ‘Deny them access, and they will shatter into foam against the rocks of our defence.’

The Thunderhawks were entering the moon’s atmosphere when Maro broke the vox silence. The Immolation Maw was speaking to its children again. ‘Apologies, captain,’ Maro said. ‘There has been some heretical activity aboard, but the ship bathes in the Emperor’s light once more.’

‘I am not your captain, brother,’ said Volos.

‘But you are. That pretty-faced traitor down there is no captain of mine.’

‘You have my gratitude, brother-helmsman. Please stand ready.’

The gunships overflew the temple. Volos looked down at the ruins of the Revealed Truth. There were recognisable fragments: a twisted turret here, a blackened gothic arch there. He could tell what had happened, and though the impact of the cruiser had gouged the surface of the moon, there was no crater, and the temple looked untouched.

Volos thought through the options. He didn’t like the prospect of assaulting the only entrance. He wanted a second avenue of attack. The transparent dome was inviting, yet it had somehow survived the annihilation of a Retaliator-class cruiser.

Nithigg had come forward to the cockpit and took in the scene. ‘It would be nice to bomb the place flat,’ he sighed.

‘In through the roof, is what I want,’ Volos told him. ‘I don’t care how sorcerous that dome is. It has to be a weak point. We smash it.’

‘And how are we going to manage that?’

‘If we can’t shoot it out, we’ll use the temple against itself. I doubt we can level it, but I think we might be able to wrench it out of true.’ He turned to Keryon. ‘We’ll need some distance and altitude.’

Nithigg chuckled. ‘This isn’t going to be subtle, is it?’

Volos grinned, but he was also snarling in anticipation of crushing vengeance. ‘I am Adeptus Astartes, not Inquisition. Of course it isn’t going to be subtle.’ Then he voxed Maro and told the helmsman what he wanted. If the move killed everyone in the temple, so much the better.

They saw the Thunderhawks pass overhead, and then head off beyond the curvature of the moon. Toharan wished for anti-aircraft weaponry. ‘Make the jump,’ he told Nessun. ‘Take us into the warp now.’

Nessun gave a short jerk of his head. He had no concentration to spare. His fingers were a blur of music. ‘Not ready,’ he grunted.

The red glow of the moon’s surface was leaking out into its atmosphere. It spread like a focused aurora across the gulf of the void towards the grinder.

The Sword, Gabrille, said to Toharan, ‘We must prepare for an incursion.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Disciples, with me!’ he called, and the Legion name sounded right when he spoke it.

‘Orbital launch!’ Symael yelled.

Toharan looked up, through the dome at the dark and stars. One star was rushing towards them. It became a streak, then a shape. In the eternal fraction of a second before it hit, Toharan had time to realise he was seeing a torpedo come for them. He had time to know that he had lost the Immolation Maw. He even had time to deduce, if only one torpedo had been launched, what sort of ordnance it must be.

He did not have time to brace himself.

His helmet shut down his senses to protect him from the worst of the flash and blast of the cyclonic torpedo. It couldn’t protect him from the upheaval of the ground beneath his feet. The world shook and rolled. He was a storm-tossed ship. Blind and deaf, he felt himself flying. He slammed into a wall, fell to the floor, and then he was tossed into the air again as the earth bucked. The shutters over his lenses lifted, and the sounds were unfiltered once more. The destruction of the Revealed Truth was dwarfed by the searing madness of the new explosion. This was beyond fire, beyond heat, beyond comprehension. He was at the heart of the universe’s birth and death. Reality’s scream was so intense he could barely see the other figures around him as they were thrown about like dice in a cup. There was nothing to hear except the thunder of dying gods. Brilliance roiled. Waves of flame the height of forever smashed into and over the temple without pause. The ground writhed, caught in a tectonic seizure. The temple twisted with it, its walls torquing.

At the rear, the metal entrance doors blew off like leaves in the wind. On the top, the dome imploded. Jagged chunks of xenos glass hailed down into the great hall. Fire and heat rushed in with it. Toharan rose to his knees only to be knocked down by a chunk of glass the size of a boulder. He saw two Swords actually manage to stagger a couple of steps towards Nessun, their arms raised in an attempt to shield him. Then everything was glass, fire and the heaving of earth. He was slammed in every direction until he was completely disoriented. The blows of a world rained down on him, and even his Space Marine physiology was overwhelmed. He blacked out.

When he crawled back to full awareness, he found himself lying a third of the way up the staircase that circled the wall. He had no memory of landing there. He had gone limp in the jaws of the explosion, and rolled with the hits. A few ribs and teeth felt loose, but his limbs were all working. The fire was withdrawing, its fuel consumed, its work done. The temple still stood, but the walls were scored. Massive cracks ran their length. The staircase had numerous uneven passages and missing chunks. Toharan was astonished that the walls had not fallen. The rock had twisted like cloth, yet retained its integrity.

Not all the Swords of Epiphany had been as lucky. Toharan saw one who had died beneath a chunk of the dome three times the size of the one that had hit him. He saw another one who had been reduced to a smouldering wreck. He also saw one of his Disciples, Kataros, lying slumped against a damaged section of wall. The Space Marine lay at bizarre angles. He’d been shaken into pieces.

He looked for Nessun. The cardinal was hunched over the instrument. His white robes were scorched. Silk was torn where he’d been hit. So was his flesh. Toharan joined Gabrille at his side. ‘How is he?’ Toharan asked. He glanced up into the sky. The aurora was still there. Perhaps it didn’t need Nessun after all.

The cardinal raised his head. His hair seemed to be hanging off his scalp, ready to slip off at the first sneeze. Blood poured from his forehead. Nessun licked his lips, tasting his own vitae. And still his hands moved over the giant backbone. He had nothing like Space Marine armour, but he had weathered the storm as well as, or better than, any of his acolytes. He had been protected by the machine, Toharan thought. The former Ecclesiarch was still being watched over by the gods. Nessun parted his lips in a bloody smile of triumph.

In the new silence, one barely broken by the metallic clunks of warriors putting themselves back together for the next battle, Toharan heard the snarling roar of the Thunderhawks on approach again. It sounded low to the ground.

Nessun heard the gunships too. His grin became wider. ‘Too late,’ he whispered. ‘I am ready.’

The grinder jumped into the warp.

CHAPTER 28

THE WAR OF REDEMPTION

Setheno returned to the bridge to find that the Gemini grinder had vanished.

‘Is that worm dealt with?’ Maro growled.

‘He is. Helmsman, where…?’

‘Into the warp.’

‘Can your navigators track it?’

‘Something that big? They would have more trouble trying not to see it. We are about to make the jump, canoness.’

‘Good.’

The Thunderhawks were making a low attack run on the entrance to the temple when the sky disappeared. The stars and the healthy black of mere void vanished. A gaping wound opened up in reality. It engulfed the Gemini configuration. Volos saw the firmament swallowed by the sea of the warp. Things that pretended to be colours stabbed down in tornado formations towards the surface of the moon. What writhed overhead was not a storm, but something far more lethal.

‘Oh, how nice,’ Keryon grumbled.

‘This changes nothing,’ Volos told him.

‘This ship doesn’t have a Geller field.’

Nithigg said, ‘If we were at immediate risk, we would already be destroyed. This machine is like the Flebis vault. It is already of the warp, and is able to maintain its integrity, and ours as well.’

Without looking up from his vector of approach, Keryon flicked a hand at the grasping warp-flow above. ‘I’m sure you’re right, and that that’s as harmless as it looks.’ He sounded grimly amused, as if the day had reached a certain perfection of vileness. ‘Make ready,’ he said.

Nithigg nodded and headed back to the crew compartment. Volos waited a moment longer. He wanted to see the next step in the retaliation.

Keryon brought the Battle Pyre within metres of the surface. He flew as if he were piloting a Land Speeder. The temple gates rushed towards them. Keryon fired a salvo of Hellstrikes and pulled up. The missiles flashed inside. The explosions were funnelled out of the entrance and washed over the Thunderhawk as it angled towards the temple’s peak. ‘Message delivered,’ Keryon said. The Nightfire followed to make sure the message was understood.

Volos clapped Keryon on the shoulder guard and left the cockpit. He wasn’t even on the field yet, and he could already taste the blood of traitors in his mouth.

The missile detonations were trivial after the cyclonic torpedo. But they did their work. Swords and Disciples were blown apart, armour and meat sent flying across the hall. Those not caught in the direct blast were knocked to the ground again, fire scorching their ceramite. Toharan cursed, shaking off the stunned ringing in his head. The Dragons were keeping them off-balance, blocking their attempts to regroup and prepare a defence.

He staggered up, saw Symael, and pointed at the entrance hall. Symael nodded, and was already throwing together a group to interdict that access point. The squad that formed was made up of both Disciples and Swords. The cooperation was good, but the organisation was improvised, driven by the demands of time and not strategy. They were losing the advantage of their numbers and of their defensive position.

Those were irrelevant concerns, Toharan told himself. His destiny was unalterable.

One of the missiles had flown straight into the instrument. Toharan looked at Nessun. Gabrille was beside the cardinal, arms out to support him. There was little recognisable in the creature that stood there, consumed by the music. Its shape was human, but flesh and robes had been burned away. Instead of showing the raw pink and black of blast injuries, Nessun had turned the cartilage-grey of the organ. He was becoming part of the machine. The entities of his collective being were transforming, building layers of ornamental bone over his actual skeleton. He turned his head Toharan’s way, and for a brief moment, his eyes were able to see the room. The screen above Nessun’s head was suddenly filled with Toharan’s image. Nessun’s skull was art now, an ecstatic expression of death and music. Bones whose new purpose was to replace the weakness of flesh had taken the place of his lips, and they arranged themselves into a terrible grin. ‘Perfection,’ Nessun croaked with the sound of twigs on slate. His eyes were scale reproductions of the screen. They were stones with the power of sight. They gazed at Toharan for one beat more, promising glory, and then their attention soared away. Toharan and the hall vanished from the screen, replaced by the hungry joy of the warp and the spinning grinder.

‘He doesn’t need us,’ Toharan told Gabrille. ‘Not anymore.’ The instrument had been untouched by the rocket strike.

Gabrille nodded, grabbed his bolter, and ran with Toharan to the staircase. The Battle Pyre was passing over the shattered dome.

The Dragon Claws streaked into the temple on flaming promethium. They hit the observation deck, slamming down in a ring formation, slashing the space of the great hall with a web of interlocking fire. The Battle Pyre peeled off to join the Nightfire and drop the rest of the Black Dragons at the temple entrance, and for the next thirty seconds, the Claws were on their own. Volos felt no sense of being outnumbered. He felt the strength of holy war as he and his men brought justice down on the heads of the traitors.

Toharan was partway up the staircase, and Volos sent a concentrated burst of fire his way, forcing him and the Sword back down. Volos and the Claws ran along the platform and jumped across the space, shifting targets every few seconds, keeping their own movements unpredictable. There was no cover below. The hall was an immense killing field for them, and there were so many targets.

There was an instinctive resistance that Volos had to fight through, a moment of horror at shooting figures in the armour of the Black Dragons. But he knew what was necessary, and the rage at betrayal gave him strength. And when he saw that Toharan’s troops had defaced their armour, renouncing their Chapter and their faith in the Emperor, then the killing was easy. ‘Exterminate them all!’ he roared. The righteousness of faith was with him, and he was invincible.

The Thunderhawk’s assault ramp lowered the second the ships touched the surface. Thirty-eight Black Dragons thundered down its length and rushed the temple entrance. Their blood was up. They were dark fury incarnate, a pounding juggernaut of war come for judgement and slaughter. Their numbers had been reduced to less than half of what they had been, and only two squads were fully intact. They had lost one captain, and been betrayed by a second. Their true Chaplain, Apothecary and Librarian lay in comas. They were on a xenos abomination travelling the warp, and they had no reason to believe they would live beyond this day.

They had never been more dangerous.

For Melus, there was an additional edge to the charge. This was a battle to restore the honour of Squad Pythios. The successive commands of Toharan and Omorfos had tainted him and his men by association. The time had come to purge their shame and burn the filth who had caused it. ‘Fire and bone!’ he shouted, and the cry was taken up by his brothers, their roar a weapon in itself, launched at the craven betrayers who waited for them inside.

The temple rose before them, its outer wall an ophidian slope of smooth, glowing rock. The entrance was wide, the enemy visible about ten metres in, where a mix of black and gold armour was gathered to meet the invasion. There was no cover inside or outside the temple. The strategy for both armies came down to a brute mathematics of force. The Dragons had to smash the defences with the speed and violence of their charge. The Swords and Disciples had to hold and break the wave of the advance.

As the unstoppable force raced towards the immovable object, the opening moves of the opponents mirrored each other. Grenades hurtled through the air, crossing paths in mid arc. Krak and frag munitions erupted in the corridor. The stonework of the temple was untouched. The bodies of the warriors were less fortunate. Melus saw a brother gutted by shrapnel, but the Dragons had the advantage of speed and movement. They dodged and rolled out of the way of the explosives, while the defenders had to break rank or suffer the consequences. ‘First blood is ours, brothers,’ he voxed. ‘Press them hard.’

Devastators on his left and right marched forward with a measured, implacable gait, their heavy bolters chewing up opposing armour, punching the enemy further back and providing cover for Melus’s tactical team to rush in faster. The return fire was steady and skilled, but none of it was heavy. No cannons were answering the Dragons’ charge, no missile launchers, no multi-meltas. Melus dodged a grenade, rolled, came up firing and took the head off a Sword. He wondered if perhaps the renegades didn’t have any heavy weapons. Grinning at the thought of the enemy’s tactical mistake, he closed the distance to the traitor front line.

The fire from above was infuriating. It was so fast, so intertwined, that there was no opportunity to reclaim the initiative. Toharan was on the defensive, and Volos was forcing him and his allies out of the great hall and into the cover of the entrance corridor. Once there, they would be under siege on two fronts. ‘We can’t let them box us in,’ he yelled to Gabrille as they ran across the temple floor in zig-zags, dodging rounds, firing over their shoulders.

‘We won’t. Are your men ready for the counter at the rear?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let’s hit them now.’

‘That doesn’t help us here,’ Toharan said as they reached the corridor.

‘No, but they will,’ Gabrille said as the Raptors pushed past them and shot up into the dome, bringing the fight to the Dragon Claws.

Volos had been expecting them. It had been too much to hope that they had killed the Swords of Epiphany’s only jump pack warriors on Flebis. The Raptors powered through the Claws’ net of bolter fire, their own guns answering and disrupting the rain of death Volos and his brothers were sending down. For a few seconds, the two assault teams traded shots, every warrior moving too fast, jerking through the air too unpredictably, for his foe to target him successfully, and every warrior unable to score a telling hit. Then Dragons and birds of prey did as instincts and necessity commanded and flew at each other to grapple. The upper reaches of the great hall rang with the clash of armour and armour, cry of bird and roar of reptile. Giants smashed at each other as they rocketed beneath the shattered dome.

A Raptor slammed into Volos. The smaller traitor Space Marine was a swarm of clutching limbs as they tumbled end over end to the observation platform. They hit, but the Raptor didn’t lose his grip. They rolled, clawing at each other’s armour for purchase. They came to a halt with the Raptor on top. He pulled back an arm with a gladius. Volos reached up, shot out a bone-blade and impaled the Raptor beneath the chin. The other end of the blade came out the back of the traitor’s helmet. Volos kicked the corpse away and sprang to meet the next Chaos Space Marine. The Raptors had to be dealt with quickly. He could feel the Claws’ momentum bleeding away.

The Swords and Disciples held the counter-attack back until the bulk of the Dragons was almost upon them. The defenders had taken hard blows, but now they struck to annihilate. Their one heavy bolter stuttered to life, stitching fist-sized rounds along the front of the Dragon advance. But the main blow came from the psykers. What the traitors lacked in heavy weaponry, they made up for in numbers and in sorcery. The hail of bolter and las had begun to falter as the Dragons charged forward and blasted holes in the line. But the heavy bolter response forced a pause as the attackers evaded the fire or took hits. Melus felt the attack lose steam, and in the moment of hesitation came the energy bolts.

The sorcerous attack was a full salvo, multiple psykers unleashing their powers simultaneously. A flash that giggled side-swiped Melus, knocking him down. His left shoulder guard had vanished. The edges sizzled, and his upper arm was opened almost to the bone. Two other brothers weren’t as lucky. Their helmets and heads were gone. Tendrils like coiling snakes danced over the stumps.

‘Kill them!’ Melus roared. There was no need to specify the targets. Already, his armour’s auto-senses were feeding him the smell of ozone and hothouse flowers as the magic built up again. Too many brothers were on their knees, shaking off the assault, but slowed down for a moment. He knew that was all it would take for disaster if they lost the race to the next blow.

They lost. The sorcery came again, much too soon. The attacks had been staggered, and this one arrived with its targets slowed and primed for destruction. Melus howled his fury as he saw what came for them. It was an immense Space Marine made of fire, and it was the work of a psyker who had been a brother.

Charged up and running, the Gemini grinder was a thing of the warp. It travelled the immaterium with the ease and speed of a hawk through air. There were no obstacles in its path, and storms only sped it to its destination. The machine had known its target before its jump, and now it shot out of the warp, bringing doom to the Camargus system. Aighe Mortis lay ahead, and the power of two billion dead moved grinder and moon forward to an even greater feast.

Ennyn was overmatched. The Lexicanium was the Black Dragons’ sole remaining psyker. He could have taken on any one of the enemy’s sorcerers in single combat, but now he was faced with a virtual phalanx of them. He didn’t have the power.

But perhaps he had the rage.

The fire being that was falling upon him and his brothers was a blasphemy beyond anything he had ever seen or imagined. It was an avenger, and its reality was created by drawing upon the lore and tradition of the Chapter itself. It was a manifestation of the collective identity of the Black Dragons, and he would not permit it to be turned against the very warriors of which it was a part. He saw Jemiah a few metres back from the front lines of the traitors. Ennyn’s anger, purified by his absolute faith in the truths of his Chapter, lashed out at the faithless Space Marine. Ennyn felt his entire being consumed in an expression of holy anger, and as he expended everything he had in this single strike, his mind erupted with new potential.

Jemiah clapped his hands to his head. His scream was a brutish gargle, high pitched and cut short. It was shoved back down his throat. He fell to his knees, then on his face. His psychic hood flickered and smoked. His monstrous avatar did not dissipate. It had its arm raised to strike the Dragons, its four-metre sword about to cull them with fire. Then, as if the death of its treacherous creator restored its true identity, it turned around, and brought the sword down, setting traitors ablaze.

Snarling, the Black Dragons reclaimed the initiative.

The Raptors fought with the assurance of the angels they thought they were. The Dragon Claws hit back with the savagery of what Volos knew they must become. They were dragons in every sense. They burned their foe and stripped the flesh from his bones. They met the Raptors, and what chance did mere birds have against the monsters of myth? None, the Claws proved. The Raptors fell. Volos landed on the back of one and brought him to the ground. The impact of Space Marines would have cratered a marble floor, but the temple stones gave nothing. Volos heard the Sword’s bones shatter.

He stood from his fallen foe and saw Toharan’s forces rush from the cover of the entrance hall. They came out firing, but there was a raggedness to their emergence, as if they were being forced to stage their counter-charge before they were ready. He decided to give them more cause for uncertainty. He used a blade to punch a hole in the Raptor’s armour just below the neck. He slipped a frag grenade from his belt, shoved it into the opening, heaved the traitor over his head and threw him at the enemy. The Raptor exploded in mid-air, showering ignited promethium over the attackers. They stumbled just long enough for him to fell three of them with his bolter.

The other Dragon Claws landed at his side. They joined their fire to his, and they drove more of the traitors back. At the other end of the entrance hall, Volos saw smoke and uproar. For a moment, a wall of flame appeared to be a walking figure. Then it breathed fire forward. He grinned as the dragon flame pursued the faithless on two fronts.

Toharan launched himself through the fire. His defaced armour was scorched, and Volos thought he could see runes in the burns, Toharan’s new masters branding him as their property. Symael and a Sword were at his side. They threw themselves forward and down, beneath the Claws’ bolt stream and retaliating with their own as they slid across the smooth floor. Volos fired off a burst with his jump pack, taking a high leap to avoid having his legs shot out from under him. He came back down straight at Toharan.

The Black Dragons’ push from the rear drove the traitor alliance into the great hall. Volos’s brothers followed their foes inside. They were a juggernaut of vengeance, ramming forward with no thought to injury or death. The war lost all trace of coherence. There were no lines anymore. There was only the confusion of melee. Armour slammed into armour. Point-blank bolter fire was answered with dismembering chainsword. Giant predators tore at each other with weapon and fist, fire and bone.

Nithigg jumped away from Symael’s power fist. The gauntlet passed close enough for its crackling aura to make Nithigg’s eye lenses flare with static. Symael overbalanced and punched the ground. The invulnerable stone resisted the blow, and sent the force jarring up the warrior’s frame. Nithigg stitched Symael’s frame with bolts, blasting open his armour from ribs to helm. As Symael collapsed, blood and organs oozing from the hole in his side, he frowned at Nithigg. He looked more confused than in pain.

A streak of pity rushed through Nithigg’s anger. The awful waste and tragedy of what had happened was a lead weight in his chest. His hearts ached at what had become of his company. In his centuries of service, he had never seen such division and betrayal. And he had always liked Symael, thought him a first-rate, if unimaginative, fighter. He had trained the younger man. The pain of killing him was as real as the need to do so. He knew Symael and the others had been tempted and manipulated, but they had still made the choices. Yet he couldn’t help but hope for the possibility of at least a hint of redemption. There was so little hope to go around; he couldn’t bring himself to throw away what little he could grasp.

He moved quickly. He knelt beside Symael. ‘Do you repent your heresy?’ he asked.

The resentment in Symael’s eyes gave him his answer. He sighed and shot Symael once in the head. Feeling even older, he turned back to the needed job of killing his former brothers.

Toharan barely twisted out of the way of Volos’s strike. Volos landed within a metre of him and lashed out with his arm-blades. His fury wouldn’t be satisfied with a bolt between Toharan’s eyes. He needed the betrayer’s blood coating his armour. Toharan parried with his chainsword. Its motor whined as its teeth ground against Volos’s adamantine bone. Volos brought his left arm around the hilt, aiming at Toharan’s throat. Toharan jerked his head back and sidestepped, but the blow shattered the side of his helmet. Shaking his head to free it of the broken ceramite, he spun around and brought the chainsword down two-handed. There was the strength and speed in his strike to slice a cannon in half, but Volos moved inside his reach. He smashed his right fist and blade against Toharan’s elbow. He heard armour and bone break. With his left hand, he grabbed Toharan’s gorget and hurled him to the ground.

They were no longer in the practice cage. Volos wasn’t holding back. No mercy, no quarter, no respite until he had killed the filth at his feet. He raised both fists, prepared to plunge the blades into Toharan’s neck.

A flicker of movement caught his eye. He glanced up, and saw Aighe Mortis on the eye-screen. The planet was in magnification, but it was also moving closer. The simple truth hit him: Nessun had to be stopped, and there was no time for anything else.

Volos plunged his arms down to impale Toharan’s throat and be done, his legs already tensing for the leap that would take him to the ossified cardinal. His shift in attention had lasted less than a second, but Toharan was already bringing up his chainsword to block. Something hit Volos from behind, knocking him over Toharan’s head. He landed in a crouch and spun around. He stared into the barrel of a meltagun. Beyond it, the Sword of Epiphany stood in the tainted majesty of gold. Gabrille’s finger squeezed the trigger.

The shot went wild as Nithigg threw himself against the Sword. He took Gabrille down and rabbit-punched his head until the helm split open. Nithigg’s forearm blade punctured the traitor’s forehead. Gabrille spasmed, limbs rattling against the ground. Something bitter and petty wailed as its host died, and with a writhing flicker, vanished back into the warp.

Toharan was on his feet and raising his sword again. Nithigg and Volos exchanged quick nods. Nithigg was closer to Toharan and turned to fight him. Volos rose and rode his jump pack on a horizontal flight into the cardinal. It was like colliding with a pillar. Volos grunted and fell against the enormous backbone that Nessun was caressing. Volos felt eldritch energies leach through his armour and into his core. The cardinal grunted mild annoyance, barely aware Volos was there, and batted him aside. Volos recovered his balance and looked at the eye-screen. The grinder was slightly off-centre in its approach to Aighe Mortis. The cardinal’s grey skeleton fingers danced, and the course was corrected.

As Volos reached for Nessun again, the character of the war shifted as it acquired a focus. The traitors saw him attacking their leader and father, and he became their target. The Dragons blocked them. The butchering frenzy intensified. Volos turned his gun on Nessun and the instrument he played. The bolts ricocheted, almost taking his own head off. The cardinal paid no attention. The details of Aighe Mortis became clearer, and Volos prayed to the Emperor that the screen was still at a high level of magnification. He was about to grab a krak grenade when it finally registered that for all the flame, missiles and weapon fire that had filled the hall, he couldn’t see a pockmark or mar on the surface of the device. Nessun, or the thing that had once been him, transformed now beyond any memory of the human other than a silhouette, was made of the same impervious bone.

Volos spat at the cardinal’s invulnerability. Seized by inspiration, he raised his bone-blades high. He struck with all his strength and rage. He was the dragon of the Emperor, and he blessed the curse. The blades, touched by Chaos but wielded by faith, hit Nessun’s right forearm. Altered bone met altered bone. The touch of the warp moved over both, but the eye of the Emperor lay on only one.

Nessun’s arm shattered like porcelain. He screamed, and so did the symbiosis between himself and the instrument. The music that had been thrumming at the base of Volos’s spine since he’d entered the temple fell into a discordant shriek. Nessun turned. His left arm was still attached to the instrument, still clutching and stroking vertebrae, but now with a jerking, spastic, agonised motion. The images on the eye-screen fragmented. There was a last flash of Aighe Mortis veering off to the side, and then a kaleidoscope of impressions of the hall before there was nothing but pain given electric expression. The stump of Nessun’s right arm lifted in supplication, and from it spewed a twisting sinew of energy. It was rope and tentacle and light. It was Chaos channelled through the cardinal. It hit the observation deck, and the walls of the dome. Stone writhed, then collapsed. Massive, agonised slabs fell to crush the combatants.

The fighting did not stop, but as the realisation of what had transpired rippled through the temple, there was a change in morale so pronounced its effect was almost the same as a hesitation. The Swords of Epiphany were losing their leader and creator. The Disciples weren’t hit as grievously, but Volos was sure they were seeing the pointlessness of their struggle.

Toharan didn’t. He stormed towards Volos, shaking off Nithigg and blasting through the other fighters like they were wheat. He had lost his helmet in the fight with the old veteran, and his face was contorted by a terrible desperation. Howling an inarticulate denial, he was the embodiment of fanaticism. There was nothing left of the noble Space Marine whom Volos had fought beside for decades. He saw only entitlement, pride and self-loathing transformed into a daemonic hate. Volos raised his bolter to gun down the rabid dog.

Behind him, Nessun’s scream stopped for a moment, and there was the sound of a laugh. His final act one of revenge and merciless generosity, Nessun lowered his stump and hit Toharan full in the chest with the twitching strands of Chaos energy. Toharan stopped dead and sank to his knees. The energy poured into him.

Cursing his stupidity, Volos turned on Nessun and smashed his left arm. The instant there was no more connection between the cardinal and the instrument, the energy vanished. Nessun stood and rocked back and forth on his feet. The quality of the grey exoskeleton changed. It became more rigid, darker, brittle. His eyes dimmed as they receded into the bone prison, but they looked up at Volos with an air of bitter exasperation. Volos brought an elbow down on Nessun’s head, and shattered the skull into hundreds of pieces. The scream returned, echoing out of the ether now, and the stump of Nessun’s head spouted a fountain of shrieking warp spirits. They shot up like a geyser and did not come back down. The eye-screen went blank, becoming vacant bone once again.

Volos turned back to Toharan, half-expecting him to be dead. He was sure his former captain was incapacitated.

He wasn’t.

Toharan’s destiny knocked him down and filled him. He had thought the control and command of the Gemini grinder was that destiny, but he had been proven wrong, and now he was experiencing his full flowering. He wondered what it would be as the energy flooded his system. He was about to experience the fulfilment of every potential. He opened his mouth to laugh in triumph.

The change took him. It was not what he had imagined. His body expanded. Legs, torso and arms lengthened and thickened. He screamed as his nerve clusters were scraped raw by racing bone. Flesh and muscle metastasised. He grew too big for his armour. The plates pressed into his body. They crushed organs. They snapped bones. But still he grew, and even Adeptus Astartes power armour couldn’t contain what he was becoming. It split, and then fell off like a shed skin. He continued to grow. Now his screams weren’t of pain but of disgust. The ugly, stupid, excess of being was consuming him. His dreams of purity were swallowed by rampaging flesh. His mind couldn’t cope. Walls of bodily existence constricted it. He was a monster worse than everything he had despised in his brother Dragons. His last act of sentience was to give voice to his despair. Then he was nothing but anger. He lashed out at the source of his pain, and the source was all existence. The only relief would come if he could smash the universe out of existence and out of his misery with his bare hands. And so he began.

The creature that had been Toharan was twice Volos’s height and he was still growing. He was a monster of corded flesh and sinew. His face and head were huge caricatures of Toharan’s features. The noble profile was gone, replaced by grotesque growths of spreading bone that passed for a nose and chin. Toharan’s roar wasn’t mindless, but it was utterly mad. He lashed out with fists larger than power hammers. He made no distinction between friend and foe. He grabbed the nearest warrior, a Sword, and smashed him to the ground. Toharan pounded him until he was a swamp of blood and bone fragments. The Black Dragons trained their fire on the monster, but the Swords and Disciples did not. He was dangerous, but he was still of their number, and he was powerful. They continued to fight, forcing the Dragons to deal with them. The war raged in fractal clusters around the monster, while he shrieked and murdered at random.

Volos saw the bolter-rounds thud, ignored, into Toharan’s flesh. He didn’t appear to know he’d been shot. The Dragons weren’t going to bring him down through conventional projectile weaponry. But perhaps the monster could be cut down to size. Leaving the petrified corpse of Nessun, Volos leaped at Toharan and slashed him across the abdomen. His blade tore deep into meat, and the edge ground against a rib. Blood, thick and black, spat out at Volos, but the lips of the wound sealed as soon as he withdrew the blade. Toharan snarled and swatted at him. Volos dodged, but the tips of the growing fingers caught him and knocked him flying. He slammed into Nessun, reducing the body to dust.

Toharan reached for Volos, but Nithigg landed on his back. Nithigg reached around the monster’s neck and sliced his throat with his forearm blade. More blood, and again the instant seal. The storm of flesh grew higher and higher. As Volos regained his feet, Toharan snatched Nithigg off his back. He held the Dragon Claw in a fist that was now as big as the Space Marine and squeezed. Volos heard the terrible crunching and saw Nithigg convulse. Volos hacked at Toharan’s wrist, but it became thicker faster than he could cut. His jump pack propelled him into Toharan’s face. He punctured an eye. His blade went deep. It should have killed Toharan’s brain. Either the brain healed too, or there was no longer enough there to matter. Toharan didn’t die, but he did feel pain. He shrieked and dropped Nithigg. Volos saw his old friend fall boneless to the ground. He yanked his blade out and jumped to the observation platform, bathing Toharan in flaming promethium exhaust.

The monster howled at the injury and babbled incoherent rage. Toharan was regressing further and further as he grew. Language had abandoned him. He was little more than a pure loathing of flesh. Whether he knew who Volos was, or was simply focused on his tormentor, he followed, as Volos had hoped he would. Toharan pounded up the staircase, leaping over gaps with more power than grace.

‘Keryon,’ Volos voxed. ‘Come over the dome. Full Hellstrike barrage at what you see there. Do not hesitate.’

‘Acknowledged.’

Toharan reached the platform. He lunged for Volos. The Dragon shot over him, landed behind and slashed at his legs behind the knees. The tendons healed immediately, but the second during which they were severed was enough to drop Toharan. He squirmed around, his flesh bubbling like boiling tar, and his arm was suddenly longer than it had been a moment before. Toharan caught Volos before he could step out of reach and flung him against the temple wall like a rag doll. Through the ringing in his ears, Volos heard the roar of the approaching Battle Pyre. Toharan didn’t let go. He smashed Volos against the wall again. Volos heard and felt his left arm break. Ribs were swimming in his chest. And he was flying again. He slashed with his right hand and parted enough of the wrist to make Toharan drop him.

Volos limped back a few steps. Now almost ten metres tall, Toharan advanced on him. Volos stood his ground. He wanted Toharan to stay put for just a few seconds. He removed his helmet and showed the unwilling monster the face of one who embraced what he was. The mutation stared down at him. Toharan’s eyes were endless reservoirs of stupid hate, but buried deep in the cancerous instinct, Volos saw a spark of the personal. Toharan knew who he was. Some part of him was savouring this moment. Good, Volos thought.

Toharan rose to his full height. His fists, big as pillars, came together. They began the descent that would smash his rival to nothing.

Volos whispered, ‘Fire,’ as the Hellstrikes flashed down through the dome. Keryon’s aim was truer than he could have hoped. Toharan disappeared in the fireballs. Flames washed over Volos and the blast wave threw him to the wall again. His left shoulder popped out of its socket. But Toharan’s bulk shielded him from the worst of the explosions. The light and fire faded, and Toharan was still standing. He was sluggish, though, stunned and shrieking. His flesh was a flaking, blackened crust. Pink muscle showed through deep crevices. Ignoring his own injuries, Volos launched himself forward on his jump pack, right arm out, blade as spear tip. He hit Toharan in the chest. Toharan toppled like a felled oak. Flesh disintegrated and bones shattered inward. He started healing, but not fast enough. Not this time.

With his good arm, Volos butchered his former friend, flaying open his chest. He stomped a boot through the ribcage and there, fire damaged but pumping madly, were the hearts. Toharan’s hands closed in on either side to crush him like an insect. Volos sliced through aortae and venae cavae, severing the hearts from the body.

The hearts stopped beating. The hands fell back. Toharan breathed once, the air escaping in a sigh of fruitless denial, and he was dead.

Volos did not look back at the corpse as he returned to the floor of the temple. He was exhausted, but he did not slow as, one-handed, he joined in the final slaughter of the remaining traitors. The Swords and Disciples had nothing left to fight for. The Black Dragons had the Emperor, and justice, and vengeance. They had more than enough.

When it was done, Volos crouched over Nithigg. His armour had cracked like an eggshell, and there was very little left of his body. But he lived. One side of his face was a pulped ruin, but the intact eye fixed Volos with a desperate intensity. His lips moved. Volos leaned in, and heard Nithigg’s whispered prayer: ‘Let me serve.’

‘You shall,’ Volos promised, and didn’t move from his side until, days later, the Immolation Maw finally transited out of the warp and found them.

EPILOGUE

There was no end. Not yet.

The grinder had missed Aighe Mortis by a precious few million kilometres. It ran out of energy partway out of the Camargus system, and drifted into an eccentric orbit.

‘It cannot remain here,’ Setheno told Volos when she met him aboard the Immolation Maw.

There would be no end. Not yet.

Volos stood in the reliquary, surrounded by holy silence and sacred history. Several decks up, Nithigg lay in sus-an membrane coma, waiting. Before Volos, the blessed coffin of the Dreadnought stood empty, sleeping, also waiting. Second Company’s losses were great. The Apothecary, Librarian and Chaplain were still in the death-sleep. There was no one with the skills and knowledge to do what must be done. ‘There will be,’ Volos promised. ‘Have patience, brother. You will serve.’

‘There must be an end to it,’ Setheno said.

They were standing on a balcony of the Palace of Saint Boethius, overlooking the Grand Square. ‘And this is the price,’ Volos answered. He watched the tens of thousands of pilgrims pass through on their way to the starport. They chanted thanks and joy. Their robes were colourful sackcloth, fusing penitence and celebration.

‘It is. Victory always has a price.’

Volos thought about his decimated company and said nothing.

Setheno must have read his expression. ‘You have suffered casualties. Your numbers are reduced. This is temporary. You are stronger. That is permanent.’

‘Stronger?’

‘You are unified. You are purified. There has been a necessary purge.’

A terrible suspicion dawned in Volos’s mind. ‘You planned this?’

Setheno shook her head. ‘No. But a purge was coming, thanks to Inquisitor Lettinger and his political allies. Better this be the form it takes.’

‘So that we might be useful to you, instead of Lettinger.’

‘So that you might be useful to the Emperor. You are discovering the true potential of your Chapter.’

‘Necessity again,’ Volos said softly, but he didn’t disagree.

‘Yes,’ said Setheno. ‘You have felt it. We must do anything that will preserve the Imperium. What we will be called on to do will only grow worse. The future is desperate. The Golden Throne was built by human hands, captain. It requires endless care and repair. Do you imagine that it will last forever?’

Volos’s eyes widened. He was staggered by the blasphemy. ‘You are without faith,’ he said.

‘You’re wrong. There is no greater faith than the faith in a lost cause. I will fight to preserve the spark of humanity in the galaxy. The Emperor is our only hope, and I will give him my last drop of blood, and that of anyone else, should it come to that.’ She gave Volos a hard look. ‘So will you.’

He nodded.

There was the sound of footsteps on marble behind them. They turned to see Tennesyn approach. Standing with him was Jozef Bisset, now acting regent of Aighe Mortis. ‘Canoness,’ Tennesyn said. ‘My lord.’ He regarded them with a mixture of fear and resignation.

‘You are ready?’ Setheno asked.

When Tennesyn nodded, Volos said, ‘Wait for us below.’

Tennesyn withdrew. Bisset walked with him, a supportive hand on his shoulder, and cast an uneasy glance back at the two giants.

‘You are a monster of myth to them, too,’ Volos said to Setheno.

‘I hope so,’ she answered. ‘You and I need reminders of that sort. We must know the atrocities we commit for what they are. And the next one is mine.’ She gave him a solemn nod. ‘Captain.’

He returned the gesture. ‘Canoness.’

She left. Volos watched the pilgrims a while longer, and accepted his responsibility for what was coming. Setheno was orchestrating it, but he condoned it. The millions of pilgrims thought they were travelling to the Gemini moon to pay due reverence to the site of the battle that had saved their planet. They were, but they would not be returning.

Necessity: the grinder had to be destroyed, or the threat of its use would forever haunt the Imperium. It had to be driven one more time, into the heart of the star Camargus. So it had to be powered up again. One more monstrous burnt offering. And someone had to study the device, and learn how to steer it. Tennesyn, the xeno-archaeologist, had the turn of mind that made him the logical candidate to be given that mission. Volos hoped the old man would survive, but was already wishing him a swift flight to his reward at the Emperor’s side.

The pilgrims marched endlessly through the square. Not a few of them danced towards their doom. Volos’s hands itched with the slick of innocent blood. The people sang. Their hymns were familiar ones, but sounded different to Volos’s ears. He knew why. The songs of joy were really the lamentations of victory.

It would be wrong to say that he woke. That would imply that his prior state had been something as simple, and as human, as sleep. It would mean that he opened his eyes. Neither was true. He had not slept in the mortal sense of the word for centuries, and there was nothing peaceful about the sus-an membrane coma. It was not a restorative slumber. It was the last stand against death.

Nor could it be said that he opened his eyes. Though he suddenly had sight, he did not know if he still had eyes.

He did have a body. That much he knew, just as he knew the stars existed. It was a stranger to him now, a weak, shattered thing. He realized, as consciousness and full thought returned to him moment by moment, it was encased in something that was both his new body and his coffin. As he achieved complete awareness, he felt a sharp pang of gratitude and loss. He had asked for this and his wish had been granted. But at the cost of all flesh.

He had known this would be so. Now he experienced the reality of his new being.

‘Are you with us, Brother Nithigg?’ Volos asked. Nithigg’s gaze focused. His first sight was his old friend. Volos looked different. He had new markings on his armour: the sergeant had become captain in name now, and not simply in action. On the left of his pauldron hung a new honour badge. It was the aquila framed in dragon’s flame. Nithigg wondered how long his coma had been.

Volos also looked smaller. That was odd. He towered over all the other Black Dragons of the company, but for the first time Nithigg was looking down at him. It took Nithigg a moment to understand that it was his own perspective that had changed.

He spoke. His brain sent the signals that would move lips and tongue, but the withered thing that had been his body did not respond. Instead, sounds emerged from the vox-casters. ‘I see…’ he began, then stopped. Is this me? Nithigg wondered. The words were his. But the voice belonged to thunder and iron. He tried again. ‘I see your actions against the traitors have been recognized, brother-captain.’ The reverberations in the chamber changed his jest into a god’s edict.

Volos smiled. ‘Our actions,’ he said. ‘Our victory.’ And he added, ‘Brother Dreadnought.’

Brother Dreadnought. The appellation was an honour. Nithigg wondered if he was worthy of it. The honour of the Second Company, and of the Chapter, demanded that he be so. He had never thought of himself as a suitable candidate to bear the mantle of a Dreadnought. But he remembered lying on the floor of the xenos temple on that cursed moon. He’d been dying. As he’d slipped towards darkness, he had pleaded with Volos, ‘Let me serve.’

The decision to continue his service was not his to make. Nor was it Volos’s alone. And the use of the revival chamber in which they now stood would have been beyond the means of the depleted Second Company. ‘We have met with other companies,’ he realized.

Volos nodded. ‘The Fourth and Sixth. Their fortunes have not been as hard as ours. Their aid was welcome. The Immolation Maw is renewed as are you. As are we all.’

‘Though reduced in numbers.’

Volos’s horned head bowed to that truth. ‘But strengthened in purpose.’

Purpose. As Nithigg raised an arm experimentally, listening to the whirr of his power fist, he thought about purpose, and what his would be. Before, he had thought of himself as the memory of the Second Company. He had spent every moment he could in the librarium, combing the histories, pursuing, among other things, those precious hints that might pierce the fog of the past and lead the Black Dragons to their home world. Now, he would not be able to fit though the librarium’s doors, much less move through the stacks without destroying the precious manuscripts.

But I can fight.

Before, his body had been integral to his identity as a Black Dragon. Bless the curse, went the prayer. So he had. His deformities had become weapons in the service of his company, his Chapter, and his Emperor. The three jutting horns on his forehead, the curved bone blade that extended down his forearm, never to be retracted. Gone now. And what of the war cry? What of ‘fire and bone’? There was no bone about him anymore.

There is still fire. And this is a new curse to bless.

Then he realized that a trace of his bodily identity still lingered. The weaponized sarcophagus that was his home and his self had received alterations of its own. His boneblades had been severed from his ruined body, and attached to the arms of the machine. His mutations marked the armour as himself.

He took his first step as a Dreadnought. His massive foot struck the floor like the toll of a great bell. ‘Brother-captain,’ said Nithigg, ‘I hope you have found us a war.’

The Universe-class mass conveyer Absolution plied the Maeror subsector on its own. This had not always been so. Once, it had had a twin: the Benediction. Together, they had been the pride of the fleet owned by a family of the merchant nobility on Supplicium Secundus. That family had fallen millennia ago. Its fleet had broken up, many of its ships being absorbed into other trading organizations. But the Absolution and Benediction had followed different destinies.

The Benediction had, a century before, fallen into the grasp of the orks of Octavius. The Absolution had continued on its endless path, criss-crossing the subsector. Trade was no longer the gigantic ship’s reason for being. Rather, it was now the means to the end of supporting the community that it carried. Over dozens of centuries, the ship had become a world unto itself. It was twelve kilometres long. Its crew of sixty-thousand had become a city of eight times that population. Most of its inhabitants had never been planetside. Its culture had developed around a core theme of pilgrimage. Every cycle, and every leg from system to system, was part of the long journey to the ultimate light of the Emperor. Pilgrimage gave life on the Absolution purpose, and it gave it unity. Even so, like any city of its size, it knew strife. It experienced crime, feuds, and factionalism. But it did not know war.

Until now.

The weight of Hannah Sifry’s eight decades pulled at her. The gravity of age fought her with every rung that she climbed. She had never thought of herself as frail, but she had never tested her strength as she did now. The clarity of her situation burst upon her mind’s eye. She was an old white-haired woman bent on making the final minutes of her life as difficult as possible.

She was inside the central tower of the midship augur array. She wore a rope harness, from which hung a generator. The device was barely portable and barely functional. It was jury-rigged, the product of desperation. Much had been risked in the theft of its components and much had been lost. There was as much blood as there was hope in the generator.

She paused, resting for a moment. Another twenty metres to go. Her arms trembled.

Hope. Did she feel it? Was it driving her climb? She didn’t know. Perhaps it wasn’t a question of hope for any of her fellow survivors. Regine Sorina’s face was hard with determination. That was what kept her going. Sifry grimaced and began climbing again. She didn’t feel determined. She felt angry. Spite was her ally. She knew she was going to die, but she would do all in her power to hurt the monsters who had taken over her home.

It took her another half-hour to reach the top. She perched on a narrow ledge and hauled the generator up. Her breath rattled like stones on metal. Her arms were heavy, awkward, their cold ache the only sign that they were still part of her body. She clutched her spite close and squeezed a few more drops of strength from it. Her fingers were curled and shaking, but the cable attachments were simple. She fixed the generator to the array and threw its switch.

The generator was really a battery with a single charge. It expended its power on a solitary burst from the signal beacon. The astropaths had all been crucified. Activating the beacon was the only way that the Absolution could cry out its distress. There were no sensors to tell Sifry whether the beacon had been activated. She knew it had been, though, when, a few minutes later, the enemy came for her. They raced up the shaft of the tower. She couldn’t tell if she was seeing their shadows or their bodies. Perhaps there was no real difference between the two. They climbed with all their malevolent grace, that perfection of movement that promised a perfection of pain.

She denied them that satisfaction. She leapt at them. She fell hundreds of metres. She spat hatred and defiance all the way down.

The final seconds of her life felt like a victory, and that was good enough.

Regine Sorina crouched in the ventilation shaft. She saw three of the xenos rush down the corridor, passing just beneath her hiding spot. The entrance to the augur tower was ten metres to the left. She waited. She would be as much of a witness as she could for Sifry. She heard the old woman fall and the triumphant rage of her curses.

She winced when she heard the impact and reminded herself that Sifry had volunteered for the mission knowing that this was the best ending it could have. We have struck a blow, Sorina told herself. It was possible that no one would receive the signal. But someone might, she thought. Even if no one did, the xenos had reacted to a danger. They could be threatened. That was a thought to carry with her through the days.

She continued to wait and didn’t dare move until the xenos had moved on. Their senses were keen. They might hear her move. If they looked up, they might see her, though she had taken what precautions she could. She had used a broken fan blade to shear her hair down to stubble. All her exposed skin was covered in the grime of the ventilation system. She could not become a shadow like the enemy, but she could sink beneath the ship’s centuries of detritus, which no amount of maintenance could prevent from accumulating. When she didn’t move, she was just another bundle of litter, a collection of rags and sharp angles. Malnourishment was turning her body into bone covered by a creased leather of flesh. Cycle by cycle, there was less and less of her to see.

After a few minutes, the trio walked by again. They were in no hurry. She held her breath. This was the closest she had ever come to the enemy. The xenos were morbidly beautiful. They were creatures of stories and hated myth. They were eldar. Their clothing had the precise elegance and lethality of straight razors. Their leader was the most beautiful and graceful of them all. Wherever she walked, terrible death followed. Sorina had only seen her once from a distance. She curled her lip as the memory intruded again. Weeks of the occupation had not blunted it, nor had the avalanche of new atrocities Sorina had witnessed.

She had been in a shaft, as now, having fled there in the first hour of the invasion. She had crawled without purpose then, scrambling away from the sounds of one-sided combat and massacre. She had stopped by a grille that opened onto one of the great hydroponic tanks. The tank was over a kilometre long and was where the crops were grown for consumption and trade. The harvest was already burning, the smoke stinging her eyes as it spread through the shaft.

Not far away, invaders on hovering jetbikes herded the workers together and presented them to the leader. She was a few centimetres taller than her escorts, and there was a dark power to her presence. A terrible gravity pulled all thought and light towards her. She stalked forward to the first rank of prisoners. Her movements were ballet and serpent strike. She pulled out a blade. It was narrow, curved, wrought with dark artistry. It was more than a weapon. It was an instrument. The eldar leader brought the blade towards the face of the nearest prisoner. She began to do things.

Sorina had tried to look away. She had failed, and now the memory was an unwanted companion of her days.

The echoes of the eldar’s steps faded. Sorina counted to a hundred, then started moving. As she crawled through the shafts towards the refuge, she sniffed the air. It was the habit of her entire adult life. For almost twenty years, she had spent eight hours of every cycle in Atmosphere Control, about a third of the way forward of the enginarium. It had been her duty to ensure the oxygen levels remained constant, and that the carbon dioxide and other toxic gases were scrubbed from the air. Servitors and cogitators did the work well enough most of the time, but it wasn’t enough. Even a minor lapse could kill thousands. The task had been a privilege. During her shifts, she had held the lives of the Absolution’s citizens in her hands. That existence was in the past. The xenos had taken Atmosphere Control, along with all the other centres critical to the functioning of the ship. Despite their delight in prolonged murder, they also appeared to have every intention of keeping the population of the Absolution alive for further terrible delights.

The journey through the ducts to the sanctuary was a long one. She passed by many ventilation grilles. Through each, she was given a glimpse of how the culture of the Absolution had been transformed. Sorina resisted the idea that the xenos even had a culture, but its power was everywhere to be seen. All of the eldar genius was devoted to the furthering of atrocity. The aesthetics that confronted Sorina strove towards the fusion of desire and pain. The xenos had not had the time to remove the Imperial iconography of the ship’s interior. Nor did they appear to care about its existence one way or the other. In the spaces where they chose to linger, they forced the enslaved humans to desecrate the holy images and statues. Sorina had long since realized that it was not the sacredness of the original artwork that displeased the invaders. Rather, it was the torment suffered by the humans who had been forced to deface it that they valued.

And pain. Pain everywhere, spreading out in ripples from the bridge. The xenos took their victims singly or in groups, and made them the tribute to their appetites. The contortions of the flesh were art in its most obscene form. Sorina saw her comrades bent, twisted, broken, their ends as creative as they were prolonged. The sights were always new, the awful sounds always fresh. Even when she moved deeper into the ducts, away from corridors, the echoes of torment followed her.

Working for Atmosphere Control had given Sorina an intimate knowledge of the ventilation system. That had been her salvation. She could still move around with relative ease. As far as she could tell, it was a small group of xenos that had seized the Absolution. An unarmed population could do nothing against them, but the ship was too vast for the invaders to patrol. They could hold the vital points, and do what they would to anyone they discovered, but that left vast gaps through which she could slip.

For now.

The refuge was a larger space at the centre of a tangle of shafts. The group that Sorina had joined was small. There were eight other members. They did not dare call themselves a resistance. The few attempts to mount a rebellion of any scale had ended in bloodbaths. Improvised weaponry and untrained fighters were taken apart by cool sadism. The xenos were far from being threatened, or even angered, by the revolts. Instead, they were entertained. They were amused. Sorina and her companions had learned from the mistakes of their fellows. They did not launch assaults. They sought to keep each other alive. They scavenged. They found new hiding places. They watched. They endured.

But today, at last, they had acted.

Vaelassa Kthanys sat on the command throne on the bridge of the Absolution, her fingers playing absently inside the skull of one of the mon-keigh. He was still alive and was no longer capable of the limited sentience of his species, but his sense receptors were still very active. There was no dulling of his pain. That was all that mattered. His shackled limbs vibrated from the intensity of the sensations. Kthanys tasted his pain. She ran her tongue over the edge of her teeth, savouring the nourishing nectar of agony. The mon-keigh’s mouth was open in a wracked scream, but it was silent. She had torn his vocal chords out a few minutes ago so she could listen to the incubus before her. ‘Then there are no challenges to our control of the ship?’ she asked. She made her scepticism clear.

‘None, archon,’ Nathar Desserel replied. He had removed his helmet, and stood with it under his left arm. The edges of his black armour glistened with the blood of newer victims. ‘None worth noting, at any rate.’

Kthanys stored the qualification away for future use. Desserel no doubt thought he was protecting himself by avoiding a categorical assertion that could come back to haunt him as a lie, and thus a betrayal. Instead, he had opened himself up to the charge of weakness and incompetence should any of the thousands of mon-keigh still to be rounded up create even the slightest problem. Did he realize he had just put himself even more at Kthanys’s mercy? Likely not. Desserel was proving himself to be a poor game-player and Kthanys drove the point home for him. ‘Then how could a distress beacon have been activated?’

‘The signal was of very short duration. There will be no repetition.’

‘I see no reason to trust your judgement in this matter.’ She thought about killing him, then decided against doing so. He was a useful tool, not to be discarded unnecessarily. The raids had gone well. The ship was theirs. The beacon was the only event of any significance that had escaped their control.

‘How long until we re-enter the webway?’ she asked.

Desserel hesitated. ‘Within a week of this ship’s time.’

‘What?’ Her fist clenched, squeezing the prisoner’s brain to pulp, killing him. That was too long to spend in the materium, within range of systems controlled by the mon-keigh, especially after that signal. Its brevity was beside the point. Was Desseral truly that ignorant of the risks?

‘That will bring us to the nearest webway access wide enough to accommodate something of this size. Even that corridor will be strained to the point of near collapse.’

Though the prisoner was dead, the massive spasm of pain in his final moment was nourishing and it calmed her. There was nothing to be done about the geography of the webway. The Absolution had passed within a breath of the portal used as an ambush point by the raiders of the Kabal of the Desolate Sigh. But the tendrils of the webway could be very narrow, and the Absolution demanded a major artery.

The prize was worth the risk. With this ship in her possession, she had supply of slaves large enough to be self-renewing. The Absolution represented a massive increase in her material power, and therefore, more importantly, her influence in Commorragh. They had already survived a month without being detected. Another week, then, and the ship would be hers, beyond the reach of any mon-keigh retaliation. She could wait. There would be much to savour in the meantime. In the hundreds of thousands of lives at her disposal, there was so much potential pain to be consumed.

‘The engines will be ready for our use by then,’ she said.

‘Yes, archon, they will.’

‘That was not a question.’

A week after the beacon, Sorina was alone, in the lower reaches of the ship, in a starboard access tunnel that ran next to the hull. She was on a food run, and it was not going well. The last several had not. They were all growing weak. She paused in the shadows between the lumen strips, knelt and prayed. She prayed for the strength to continue to struggle. She dared not ask for anything more.

Her prayer was addressed to the Emperor but was answered by monsters. Their arrival was announced by a grinding vibration that seemed to Sorina to reach through the entire hull. There was a rising shriek of tortured metal on either side of her. She covered her ears, thinking that the destruction of the Absolution was upon her. She stared at the wall, waiting for it to vanish, and for the venting atmosphere to propel her to frozen death in the void.

Instead, gigantic drill heads burst through the hull. Foaming sealant closed off the gaps between the ship’s hull and that of the boarding torpedo before the atmosphere had had more than a second to escape. Access hatches slammed down. The monsters emerged.

Sorina cowered. She knew of Space Marines. She had never seen any of the Adeptus Astartes in person, though she had seen many representations in everything from lithographs to commemorative statuary. None of those images resembled the beings who confronted her. Their armour was void-black, emblazoned with a coiled silver dragon. The group that stepped out of the sternward torpedo, flanking the captain, seemed to have a variety of horns added to their helmets. But then the captain removed his helmet and everything was worse. The horns were real. And those eyes: a profound, glistening black, as if the void itself had arrayed itself in flesh and ceramite to walk the Absolution.

The captain approached her. He was gigantic. From her perspective, his crescent horn seemed to graze the roof of the corridor. But then something even more immense emerged from the interior of the torpedo. This thing truly did fill the corridor, a behemoth on pillar legs. It was sarcophagus and tank. Three horns were affixed to the upper portion of the shell. Blades had been added to its arms, blades that looked a lot like bones. The organic artefacts were somehow more frightening than the formidable armaments at the end of the arms.

Sorina looked up at the captain, her gut filling with ice. Another myth had come to the Absolution, more creatures from humanity’s collective nightmares, and she wondered if she had helped summon them. ‘You’ve come to kill us all, haven’t you?’ she whispered.

The monster looked down at her.

‘We received a message from this ship,’ he said. His voice was huge. Though he spoke quietly, the tones rumbled in his chest. There was a hint of a snarl, too, in his sibilance. ‘Did you send it?’ he asked.

She would not hide. Even now, as she thought that the signal had summoned more of the Emperor’s enemies, something from an even more fearsome hell than the eldar, she would not dissemble. Not in her final moment.

‘I did,’ she croaked.

‘Good. You will be useful.’

She blinked. She wasn’t sure how to interpret that statement.

The captain continued. ‘We saw a xenos raiding ship affixed to this vessel’s superstructure. What do you know of their numbers?’

Her mind seemed to stutter as she tried to reconcile the monster’s words with his appearance. He wasn’t about to destroy her. ‘Who…’ she managed.

An expression passed over the captain’s features. Sorina found it hard to read the face of a being so far removed from the human, but it seemed to her that she had just witnessed pity. ‘I am Volos, Captain of the Second Company of the Black Dragons, and we have come to purge this ship of xenos filth.’

It took another few moments before the woman understood that the Black Dragons had come to save her and her kind, not destroy them.

‘I’m sure she would be much more reassured if we were Ultramarines,’ Liscar said over the vox channel.

Volos shot him a look but said nothing. Liscar was probably right. We are never wanted, he thought, but we are just as necessary. He felt no resentment over the mortal’s fear. The emotion was the natural reaction to all Adeptus Astartes, though the terror he and his brothers inspired was of another kind. It marked the difference between gods and monsters. It had its uses. He had always known this. But only recently had he come to accept the extremes of some of those uses.

He waited, and when the woman realized he wasn’t going to kill her, she stood. ‘What is your name?’ he asked.

‘Regine Sorina, lord,’ she answered.

Good. She was speaking. She had moved past the shock of the Black Dragons’ arrival.

‘Tell me about the enemy,’ he ordered.

Stumbling through her words, still frightened, she described the situation aboard the Absolution. When she had finished, Volos said, ‘Go to your companions. Tell them to stand ready.’

‘Yes, lord. We will follow you.’

Volos curled a lip as he donned his helmet once more. ‘You won’t find us hard to find.’

They could have set up an ambush for the eldar. The corridor was barely wide enough for Nithigg to move. It would have restricted the movement of the xenos, diminished their advantages of speed and agility. But the position was too far from the command and control centres of the ship. And an ambush was not what Volos had in mind. It would not be a punishment brutal enough for the invaders.

The Black Dragons moved sternward, and upwards, heading for the bridge. There were two squads: Ormarr and Pythios. Volos had made the Dragon Claws of Ormarr the core of the new command squad. Such a shift in rank for a tactical squad was a far cry from the orthodoxy of the Codex Astartes. But Second Company’s numbers were badly reduced after the schism triggered by the corrupted Toharan, and the Black Dragons had never been Codex-compliant. There were strategic considerations: the brothers of Squad Ormarr knew each other’s combat rhythms perfectly. It would be foolish to break apart a war machine that powerful. There were other reasons, more intangible, but even more compelling. Toharan’s heresy had begun as an attempt to bring the Black Dragons into compliance with the Codex. He had rejected the mutations of his brothers, condemning the very definition of the Chapter’s identity. So when Volos assumed command of a company battered by treachery, but strengthened in unity by the purge of war, moving the most heavily mutated warriors to its heart was a statement. Second Company blessed its curse with renewed fervour.

On this mission, Squad Ormarr was joined by Apothecary Urlock, Epistolary Rothnove, and Chaplain Massorus. They had at last emerged from their comas. They were hungry to taste once more the honour of war. They were also showing their support for Volos, and their acceptance of the changed face of the company. Volos was grateful on both accounts.

The Black Dragons travelled hundreds of metres, climbed dozens of levels, and their advance was uncontested. They crossed the paths of many humans, all clearly continuing a round of assigned duties. It was clear that they were slaves now, not crew. They regarded the Black Dragons with startled mixtures of fear and hope. They rushed to either side of the corridors, parting like wheat in a gale, before the march of the Space Marines. Volos noted the ornamentation on the ship’s walls and ceiling. Friezes stretched the length of the halls and extended up and down levels. They were intricate, looping meditations on pilgrimage. No matter what direction the viewer was heading, the designs were pointing towards the greater light of the Emperor. None of the friezes that Volos saw ended with arrival in His presence. Rather, it was the striving that was celebrated. Or it had been. Most of the friezes were damaged. The desecration was not spiritual in nature. There were no Chaos runes. Their damage was more secular, though no less cruel. It was too extensive to have been perpetrated by the invaders themselves. Volos realized that the inhabitants of the Absolution had been forced to do the blasphemous work themselves. He thought about what that would to the spirit of the slaves. He began to long for the honest brutality of the orks.

Five levels below the bridge, there was still no sign of the foe. Then Braxas called out, ‘Brother-captain, possible targets on the auspex.’

‘Finally.’ Volos stopped to see what Braxas was picking up. ‘I was starting to think they would all be waiting at the bridge.’ He knew the raiding force wasn’t a large one, but he had never known eldar of any description to barricade themselves in a confined space. They would be playing to the Black Dragons’ strengths, not their own. ‘Heading our way?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Braxas answered. ‘Parallel to us. One level down and to port.’ He cocked his head as he looked at the auspex. ‘The signatures are massive, brother-captain. Too great for a raiding party. This looks like an army.’

‘And moving away from the bridge,’ said Urlock. ‘This is a diversion at best. Almost certainly a trap.’

Volos nodded. Braxas showed him the screen. ‘They are expending great effort of some kind to convince us to leave the bridge alone.’

‘An effort we shall ignore, brother-captain?’ Urlock asked.

Volos looked at the bulk of Nithigg looming behind the rest of the squads. ‘Your thoughts, brother?’

‘If the eldar cannot account for that much movement,’ Nithigg said, his voice shaking the walls, ‘what can?’

‘People,’ Volos muttered, dreading the conclusions he was about to reach.

‘Reaching the bridge will put a stop to whatever is going on,’ Urlock said, though he did not sound convinced of his own reasoning.

‘Will it?’ said Volos. ‘How much of the enemy’s force is being deployed in this effort?’ The grid on the auspex screen had almost vanished in the glare of light from thousands of contacts moving together.

‘We have come to exterminate the raiders,’ said Nithigg. ‘There they are.’

‘It must be a trap,’ Urlock insisted.

‘Of course it is,’ said Volos. ‘Though we may not have any choice but to take it.’

They altered their course. Following the readings took the squads down even larger corridors until they passed through loading bay doors. They had arrived in a gigantic cargo hold. Most of what had been contained here had either been sold or destroyed, leaving an empty space the size of a frigate. Wide platforms, corresponding to deck levels, ran the length of the walls. The Black Dragons were standing on the second level, at the stern end of the hold.

Towards the centre of the hold, the eldar had gathered their prisoners. There were thousands of them. The mortals stood like herded grox, shoulder to shoulder, milling and turning in aimless terror as their captors circled them on jetbikes.

‘What are they planning?’ Liscar muttered. ‘What use is this? This hold has no strategic value.’

‘Exactly,’ said Volos. ‘Yet we are here. Where they want us. Still a distance from the bridge.’

‘Then let us disappoint them, and slaughter the contingent at the bridge,’ Urlock urged.

Nithigg spoke over the vox-channel, muting his thunder. ‘The prisoners…’

There were Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes for whom that would not be a consideration. Volos wanted to believe that he was fighting for an Imperium with subjects, rather than a mere tally of victories. He wanted to believe. He was no longer sure that he did. The price of the Black Dragons’ victories on Aighe Mortis had been a river of civilian blood. The words of Canoness Setheno had become a refrain that dogged every decision: ‘Become what you must be. You are the Emperor’s monster. And you are necessary.’

He could not deny the truth of Setheno’s exhortation, and he knew he had not yet fathomed the full extent of that truth. Necessary was a two-edged blade. It was necessary that he become monstrous. That was another curse to be blessed. But the monstrous act was not always necessary.

And so? he asked himself. Is it now?

The eldar answered the question. Their lookouts must have spotted the arrival of the Space Marines. They ceased their herding and began their slaughter. The jetbikes descended on the prisoners. They became a razored cyclone. The xenos were too quick, and still too far, for Volos to make out the details of their actions. He could see the results, though. The outer perimeter of the circle of prisoners erupted with blood. Bodies disintegrated. Thousands of voices joined in a single scream.

Volos knew an invitation when he saw it. He would be damned if he declined.

Today, we come to slay monsters, he thought. ‘Brothers!’ he called as he leapt from the edge of the platform. He hit the floor of the cargo hold hard enough to dent its steel plating, and he charged towards the massacre. ‘The enemy offers us his presence in great numbers. Let us reward the gift with fire and bone!’

From behind him came the answer: ‘Fire and bone!’

The Black Dragons rushed the eldar in a double-wedge formation. The two squads began firing, aiming the bolter shells just above the heads of the mortals. The eldar broke away from their butchery immediately. They had been expecting the attack, and the squadron of five jetbikes jerked up and down unpredictably as they flew at the Space Marines. Even so, one was struck in the first seconds of the battle. The shells destroyed the xenos machine’s anti-grav technology. It pitched nose-first into the floor and at such high speed that it and its driver were spread across a dozen metres in seconds. Two of the other bikes opened fire with a stream of dark, crystalline splinters. When they struck Volos’s armour, they sank in as darts into leather, scarring the ceramite. None hit the joints, but he knew that if they did, the hellish shards would release their toxins into his flesh.

The bikes flew around the squads in a wide arc and ceased fire. The other two jetbikes came in without firing their guns. As they closed, Volos saw the pale faces of their pilots contorted by open-mouthed anticipation. The keels of the bikes came at the Black Dragons like scythes.

Pride, Volos thought as he threw himself down and rolled onto his back. The xenos didn’t just want to kill him. They wanted to kill him in a particular way. They were risking close quarters with their vehicles because of an obsession with their art. He used that. The bike passed over him. Brother Vasuk was slower, and the blade sideswiped his shoulder plate. It sliced like a blade, hit like a torpedo. It sent him spinning off his feet, blood jetting into the air. He collided with Nithigg, and regained his feet while the bike jinked to the fight, avoiding the Dreadnought.

The bikes reversed course, came in low and fired this time. The first two now attacked from each side, taking their turn at the bladed kill. One of them never made it. Ignoring the splinters, Nithigg tracked its flight with his assault cannon. The massive shells tore it apart and its pilot vanished in a shower of blood.

As before, the supporting fire ceased just before the charging jetbike crossed its stream. Instead of evading, Volos maglocked his bolter to his thigh and lunged at the bike. His leap took him above the pilot. He extended his arms, snapping out his bone blades. He slammed into the front of the vehicle, crumpling its nose. The impact was stunning, but he shrugged it off. His blades punctured the skull and chest of the eldar. He leapt off the bike as it careened to the surface of the hold, cartwheeling past the squads.

The eldar warriors’ foot infantry closed in. They kept their distance, circling the Black Dragons at a run, harrying them with splinter weapons.

‘Give me two fists,’ Volos called. Squads Pythios and Ormarr contracted into tight formations, guns facing outward, with Nithigg in the centre. Pythios marched to port, Ormarr to starboard, driving the eldar back towards the wall, while Nithigg launched a barrage, denying the enemy the chance to come up between the squads. The speed of the eldar made it almost impossible to draw a bead on them. Volos felt like he was shooting at the wind. The murderous splinters sank deeper into his armour. Some struck home. Venom coursed through his blood. It was neutralized by his oolitic kidney, but not before it set his nerves on fire. He snarled away the pain, and found victory. The Black Dragons hit the eldar with such volume of fire that no degree of agility could avoid it. The mass-reactive shells tore open the xenos armour and exploded the flesh beneath.

The enemy warriors began to die. Their numbers dwindled. They could not win. And though Volos thought he saw pleasure on some of the faces of his victims, he didn’t care. He took his own pleasure from the judgement he was delivering.

‘We are losing, archon,’ said Desserel.

No, Kthanys thought as she listened to the reports coming in from the cargo hold, you are. It was Desserel’s command that was being taken apart by the power-armoured mon-keigh. ‘You feel you cannot defeat them?’ she said.

‘We are showing undue restraint,’ he answered, sidestepping the question, attempting to blame her without doing so directly. ‘If we would commit the rest of our resources–’

She interrupted by seizing his face. She pierced his cheek with one of the dagger-pointed fingers of her gauntlet and scraped against his teeth. Blood filled his mouth, and he choked. Humiliation, pain, ecstasy and fear fought each other in his eyes.

‘I will not waste our remaining strength on your failure,’ she told him. She yanked her hand away, tearing his cheek open further.

‘Your pardon, archon,’ said a voice that begged no pardon at all. It was a cracked, whispering rasp, filled with the dust of millennia of inflicted pain and the worms of tortures to come.

Kthanys turned to the haemonculus. ‘We are ready?’

Serekraal’s nod was a shadow contracting on a shadow. His skin was the desiccated grey of dead insects. Held aloft by suspensor crystals, he floated just above the bridge’s deck, a being of angles and spikes and darkness. ‘At your command,’ he said.

His deference was a pretence, bordering on mockery, and Kthanys knew it. He had no more respect for her command than she had trust in him. But she needed him. She needed the skills he had that could keep her alive and beyond the reach of She Who Thirsts. In turn, she would provide him with an endless supply of subjects for his explorations of the outer limits of sensation. They had an understanding.

Kthanys suppressed a smile. Her compact with Serekraal had borne fruit. The incubus had been shown his place, had been weakened militarily, and the purpose of the operation had been met. The savages had been delayed long enough. ‘Then let us instruct our guests in their new reality,’ Kthanys ordered. ‘Welcome them to the full embrace of the Desolate Sigh.’

An eldar in armour that looked richer, more elaborate and more painful than the others raised a large-bored weapon. He stopped running and fired. The weapon unleashed a beam of blinding darkness. It caught Melus’s left hand, disintegrating it. Behind the sergeant, it hit Brother Anghen full on. He vanished.

Despite his wound, Melus tried to return fire, but the eldar warrior had already sprinted on. His bolter shells found only air. Volos caught the exchange in the corner of his eye. On the tactical readout of his helm lenses, Anghen’s rune went from green to absent in an instant. Melus’s flared orange, but remained stable. Volos tried to track the movement of the eldar. The xenos’s weapon ignored armour. It had to be dealt with immediately. But the warrior was jinking back and forth at high speed.

‘Brother-epistolary,’ Volos called.

‘He’s mine, brother-captain,’ Rothnove answered.

There was a flare of coruscating uncolour as the Librarian seized the powers of the warp. An aurora leapt out of Rothnove’s psychic hood and surrounded him. He stormed towards the eldar. Volos didn’t see him move. He saw a black streak, as if iron had become light. For a moment, the laws of mass and speed lost their hold on Rothnove. A ceramite rocket slammed into the eldar, shattering armour and bone, sending the dark energy weapon flying. With a single swipe of his power sword, Rothnove decapitated the xenos. The eyes of the tumbling head were wide with surprise.

The squads reached the walls of the hold and began a wide rotation of their own, with Nithigg as the immovable, deadly centre. They did their own herding. Now the eldar felt the lack of shelter. They had nowhere to fall back to as the squads spiralled in, trapping them between the hammers of Pythios and Ormarr and the anvil of Nithigg. The eldar died. There had been forty infantry warriors. Now there were fewer than half that many. And then they no longer had sufficient numbers to be a threat. Their force was immolated by the fury of the Black Dragons.

The victory was real, yet Volos did not trust it. These xenos were duplicitous, cunning, depraved. They were not stupid. This trap was only half a one. Were the eldar so overconfident that they had thought this contingent enough to overpower the Adeptus Astartes? He couldn’t believe that. There was a deeper game being hidden from him, perhaps even from the beings he was killing.

The ship jerked, once, as if the immense creation were an egg in the hand of a giant. The movement was an odd one. It did not throw Volos off his feet, though the violence of the shift was great. The translation was through something other than space.

Braxas grunted in surprise. ‘Brother-captain,’ he voxed, ‘I’ve lost contact with the Immolation Maw.’

‘Meaning?’ Volos blew the head off another eldar. The handful that remained responded to the inevitability of their defeat by throwing themselves directly at the Black Dragons, seeking absolute savagery in their final moments. Volos obliged. As the lithe creatures closed, he used his bone blades to give them deaths that were lingering enough to be agonizing.

‘It isn’t a problem with the vox,’ Braxas said. ‘The ship has vanished.’

‘Destroyed?’ Volos asked. Throne, no, he thought.

‘I don’t think so. The cut-off was too sudden. It’s as if the Maw was never there at all.’

‘Have we entered the warp?’ An eldar warrior swung a jagged, curved blade at him. He took the blow on his side. The sword cut deeply into his armour. It stuck. Volos retaliated with something far worse. His boneblades were edged with adamantium, but they had become something more since the struggle with the forces of Chaos on the moon Flebis. He skewered the xenos through the sternum. The being’s armour was irrelevant. The eldar writhed, an impaled insect. Volos gutted him.

‘There was no sign of the Absolution’s engines powering up,’ Braxas said. ‘There is no Mandeville Point in this vicinity.’

The steady hammer blows of Nithigg’s assault cannon ceased. The eldar were all dead. Their corpses were drained of their lethal grace. They were just meat now. The deck of the cargo hold was a mire of blood and body parts. At the other end of the hold, the thousands of prisoners pressed together in their terror. After the tumult of battle, their moans barely seemed to break the silence.

Volos wasn’t fooled. This was a false peace.

‘Be on your guard, brothers,’ he said. ‘The true nature of this trap has yet to be revealed.’ And still he knew that he had had no choice in his action. If he had allowed the slaughter to progress, leaving the eldar to their pleasure as he sought strategic victory on the bridge, he would have been no different from the xenos in his morality. No, that was wrong. He would have been worse. The eldar, here, had not depended on the deaths of thousands of their species for tactical gain.

As Pythios and Ormarr regrouped, a thought struck him. Perhaps the eldar had sacrificed their own after all. The Black Dragons had been held in a pointless battle, but to what end? One where the Maw was gone, and his squads cut off from all reinforcement.

To what end?

The answer came on razored wings.

Kthanys’s transmission had been received, and, more crucially, her order had been obeyed. The greater strength of the Kabal of the Desolate Sigh was waiting when the Absolution entered the webway. She laughed at the view that greeted her through the bridge’s primary oculus, and laughed again at Desserel’s expression as he realized how he had been used. ‘Open the ship,’ she commanded. ‘And let us make sport of the mon-keigh who would think of defying us.’

And so she provided her Kabal with the pleasure its members craved, while she delivered a wealth of slaves. Her power would be uncontested, and reaffirmed. She cast an amused glance at Desserel. She had weakened his prestige to the point that he needed her favour all the more. He should be grateful he still lived.

The gates to the landing bays of the Absolution rose. All of them. The great doors to the loading docks parted. The ship was open to all. Wyches and kabalite warriors in their hundreds on jetbikes, raiders and Venom skimmers rushed aboard. Through the tunnels they came, delighting in the slaughter of whatever humans crossed their paths, all of them answering the call of the archon to inflict humiliation, agony and death on the savage mon-keigh who imagined themselves a power in the galaxy.

It was a fighting retreat, and the Black Dragons took their toll on the swarm of eldar that descended upon them. It was still a retreat, and a hated bitterness in Volos’s soul. There was no choice, though. To stand against such numbers was to die, and there was no honour in a pointless death. As it was, Brother Ehrbon was lost, his armour damaged by splinter fire before he was shredded by the razorflails of acrobatic warriors in gladiatorial garb.

Volos took them into the nearest corridor. Nithigg smashed support columns as he passed, collapsing portions of the next deck up, blocking the path behind them, at least for the moment.

The mortals were left behind, once more at the pleasure of their captors. But Volos noticed that the eldar showed no interest now in their wholesale slaughter. As the Black Dragons were driven back, he had seen the humans being herded out the bay doors at the far end of the hold. The cattle had done their job. They would be preserved for some future fate. A slower and more cruel one.

‘How are you faring, Brother Melus?’ Volos asked.

Melus raised his left arm. ‘The wound has sealed. I am ready to shove my stump down the throat of the xenos scum.’

‘They must die,’ Chaplain Massorus said. ‘All of them.’ His voice shook with religious hate. ‘They are profaning this ship with their existence.’

‘I agree,’ Volos said. The question was how. The war would be one of tunnels and corridors now. That would work to the Black Dragons’ advantage. But they were fewer than twenty. The enemy’s resources would now be infinite.

‘We must face the reality of our situation,’ said Urlock. ‘We are in their domain. They will win by sheer attrition, if it comes to that.’

‘Then let it!’ Massorus snarled. ‘We will sell our lives at such a price that they will remember their victory only with shudders.’

An idea took shape before Volos’s mind’s eye. It was an ugly one. It ran counter to his every hope and desire. It was monstrous.

It was also necessary.

As the idea gathered definition, another voice spoke. ‘Lord,’ it said. It came from a ventilation hatch three metres up the port wall. It was the mortal woman, Sorina. Volos heard shuffling behind her. She wasn’t alone.

Volos moved to the wall, reached up and pulled the grille down. ‘Show yourselves,’ he said. He would look these people in the eye. He would give them honesty. There was little else he could offer.

‘We’ve lost, haven’t we?’ a man said.

‘Garrat!’ Sorina snapped, horrified by the lack of respect.

‘We haven’t lost,’ Volos said. ‘But the terms of the conflict have changed. This is no longer a rescue mission. This is a war. The xenos have made combatants of all of you, whether you like it or not.’

‘Not a rescue mission,’ Garrat repeated. ‘So we cannot be saved?’

‘If you fight, your souls already are,’ Massorus told him.

The man looked like he was about to collapse in on himself. So did the others with him. They had kept themselves alive on the thinnest of rations of hope. The miraculous help had come, but only to end hope.

Sorina was the one who rallied. ‘We can still win?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Volos.

In the silence that followed, he saw puzzled despair on the faces of everyone in the group except Sorina. She drew a long, shaking breath. ‘I understand.’

Garrat looked at her. ‘What do you understand?’

‘Sacrifice is necessary.’

The others stirred uneasily. Sorina glanced up at Volos. He nodded for her to continue. Best that the mortals reach the inevitable conclusions on their own. But soon. There were no sounds of the wreckage being cut through behind them. That in itself was a bad sign. If the eldar felt the task was beneath them, that meant they felt their control of the ship was absolute.

‘There’s no returning for any of us,’ Sorina said. ‘But we can defeat the enemy.’

Volos watched comprehension dawn on the faces before him. One of the other women said, ‘We’ll be deciding for everyone else on the ship.’

‘They’re dead anyway. We all are.’

‘It’s a question of how we choose to die,’ Garrat said. He was beginning to sound stronger, less defeated. ‘Do we let ourselves become slaves and die by torture, or do we go out fighting?’

‘No,’ Sorina said. ‘That isn’t a choice. That’s our duty.’ She turned to Volos. ‘I think I know what you mean to do, lord. I can help.’

‘How?’

‘I worked at Atmospheric Control.’

Volos had been planning to destroy the engines. The possibility that Sorina suggested was much better, though it would make little difference for the mortals. ‘How quick and how extensive can your alterations be?’

‘Very, lord.’

‘You know what you will have to do?’

‘Yes.’

A simple word, really. Such a short, small sound, coming from the fragile human frame. The scale of Sorina’s courage in uttering that word deserved far greater acknowledgment. But there was time for nothing else. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘How far?’

‘The centre deck, forward of the enginarium.’

‘Venerable-brother,’ Volos said to Nithigg, ‘Regine Sorina has earned the honour of your escort. The rest of us will draw the attention of the xenos our way, and we will ensure the bridge is not sealed.’ He looked at the other humans. ‘Do you have weapons?’ They did not. ‘Then make your preparations.’

‘Meet what is coming with resolution and faith,’ Massorus instructed them.

Garrat looked at the skull design of the Chaplain’s helmet as if Massorus were his death given form. ‘Yes, lord,’ he said.

Volos heard the earlier strength reaffirmed. These mortals would meet their end well. The Black Dragons could give them that and a victory. He blocked off the rest of his line of thought, though he knew that he would have to face it in the end. ‘To war, then. With fire and bone!’

Oh yes, he thought. There will be fire.

Sorina was more exposed than she had been since the raiders had attacked. She had not been in one of the main passageways for weeks. But the Dreadnought could not fit into the narrow byways that had kept her alive. So now she was performing her final dance down the main thoroughfares. And it was still a dance. Nithigg’s steps were ponderous, each one an echoing boom, but Sorina had to run to keep up. When the attacks began, she had to stick close, using the massive legs for shelter, dodging from one to the other as they rose and fell. So she danced. She danced for her life, for the privilege of the good death, and for the glory of the Emperor.

The eldar came for them almost as soon as they hit the main passageway. They ignored her. They saw her as property, not as a threat. They tried to stop Nithigg, monsters of cruelty attacking the monster of metal. The Dreadnought responded with a devastating barrage. His assault cannon turned the way ahead into a march of explosions. The agility of the xenos did them little good. Wide as the corridor was, Nithigg filled it with destruction. The few eldar who survived the blasts came within reach of the flamer attached to his power fist. Sorina moved forward into a landscape that was a burning distortion of the ship she had known all her life. Over the centuries, the utilitarian lines of the halls had been softened with mosaics and friezes, decorative archways and memorial pillars. Now there was just a passage through darkness that flickered with flame. The deck was twisted and cratered. The stonework fell from the walls. Architectural ornamentation crumbled. And more and more, there was the stench of spilled blood and burned flesh.

The eldar’s splinter weapons were helpless against Nithigg, but they were lethal enough for Sorina. They hit the Dreadnought’s armour like edged hail. Every time she ran through the space between the legs, she expected her flesh to be flayed by their storm. But they advanced.

There were other weapons too. There were the ones that fired the beams of blinding night. The wave of destruction that Nithigg kept up before them became his shield. There were a few shots that went wide, thrown off by the relentless explosions. But it would only take one opportunity, Sorina knew. The right pause, the right moment, and even this colossus of war could be stopped. And so would her dance.

The eldar used speed. So could Volos. Ormarr and Pythios punched their way to the bridge with the momentum of a torpedo. ‘We stop for nothing,’ Volos told his brothers. ‘If they shoot, close with them. If they try to use their blades, run them down. Show them a dragon’s rage.’

They did. With fire, with bolter, with blade, and most deadly of all, with fury, they ran the gauntlet of eldar attacks. The tactic was, Volos knew, one whose success could only be temporary. In the long run, all the enemy had to do was gather numbers until the sheer arithmetic of the battlefield overwhelmed the Black Dragons. And Volos was leading an assault that would draw those numbers. He knew there would be forces dispatched to stop Nithigg, but the Dreadnought was not heading for an obvious vital point. He would look like a diversion. In reality, the main force of the Black Dragons was the diversion.

The eldar used deception. So could Volos.

He could even prepare a trap they could no more ignore than the Black Dragons had been able to turn away from the one the eldar had set. He was heading for the bridge with two squads of Space Marines. He had to be stopped. At all costs.

The corridors were too narrow for eldar vehicles. The enemy was limited to foot soldiers against the rolling thunder of the Adeptus Astartes. Volos kept the fire constant. There was no conserving of ammunition. Victory was imminent or it would not come at all. The squads sent a suppressive rain of bolter shells down the halls before them and hurled frag grenades around corners. They advanced behind a moving wave of destruction.

The eldar were skilled. But they were up against a charge that nothing except sudden and total annihilation could stop. One of the gladiators lashed Urlock with some sort of power whip. Energy coursed along its length, immobilizing his armour with a massive shock. The whip’s coating was corrosive and it began to eat through his battleplate. Massorus stormed past the convulsing Apothecary and smashed the wych down with his crozius. He paused for Urlock to shake off his stun and catch up. Ahead of him, his brothers raced on.

So it went. Any skirmish between a single warrior and the enemy was ignored by all but one other battle-brother. The advance was relentless. The eldar never had the chance to cause a delay long enough for them to gather a concentration of their forces.

They tried outside the bridge doors. There, they had erected barricades. They had established a strong point. They had their heavy weapons guarding the approach.

It was not a style of war that suited them. The corridor that led to the bridge was a short one. The Black Dragons rounded the corner, their grenades preceding them. Blasts and shells took the barricades apart. The eldar still managed one round before they were shredded. Another blast of dark energy vaporized Brother Savrax. An even more intense beam shot down the centre of the corridor and melted the wall behind. It took off Braxas’s left arm at the shoulder. A hiss of pain crackled over the vox. He stayed on his feet.

The Black Dragons reached the bridge. It was a vast space. Their run was over. Their advantage was gone.

Atmospheric Control was almost as cavernous as the enginarium itself. The command console occupied a small, circular platform. It was surrounded by the gigantic processors that regulated the mix and feed of gases, and the banks of turbines, hundreds of metres high, that powered the ventilation throughout the ship. Nithigg stood in the centre of the platform and directed fire at the chamber’s single access point. His position was strong as long as the eldar wanted to preserve the functionality of the ship. If they realized what was happening, if they didn’t care what happened to the facility, he would be caught in a cul-de-sac, where even he might be brought down. It was the survival of the mortal that was most critical and most difficult.

She had to live long enough to bring about her own death.

Sorina ran to the panels. She threw switches, then began moving sliders over to extreme positions. Tocsins sounded within moments.

‘How long?’ Nithigg asked. He kept up the bombardment. More bodies piled up at the entrance.

‘Not long, lord. The system is designed to get emergency air to all areas of the Absolution within minutes.’ She looked up, eyes shining with pride and fear. ‘Not long.’

She was so small. The gulf between her humanity and what he had become was immense. But still there was a thread of connection. It was faint, frail. It would not survive the centuries of entombment that awaited him. It was there now, though. The leviathan of war reached across the gulf.

‘Have courage,’ he said. ‘You have done well.’

Volos tasted the change in the air through his helmet’s rebreather. The oxygen levels were spiking. He ducked as the leader of the eldar lashed at him with her whip. It went over his head, but her skill was such that she struck again before he could counter. He raised his left arm to parry. The whip coiled around his forearm. It was some sort of power weapon, and its malevolence stabbed through his armour. It savaged his nervous system. His teeth snapped together as his nerves erupted in agony. He couldn’t move.

The eldar surrounded the Black Dragons, attacking them with a lethal erosion. They were laying siege to a fortress of ceramite. They were taking their time. The Space Marines had formed a circle, and were sending out bolter shells in all directions, but they could not cover every angle at every moment. In the cracks, in the pauses, the eldar sent back streams of splinter fire. Liscar, who had survived the worst of Antagonis, went down, his throat torn out by a murderous shot through the gorget.

Volos fought to move. The eldar yanked hard on her whip. His limbs were not his own. He stumbled forward, out of formation. The xenos fiend wore armour that appeared to be as much liquid as it was solid. The leader seemed insubstantial, a ghost, yet one who had already resisted a direct hit by a shell. Her face was invisible behind her helm, but there was a cancerous desire in her every blinding move. She hissed something at Volos, and the alien words sounded like a welcome.

The air tasted heady.

The whip was shutting down his thoughts with the unholy pain.

The eldar raised a blade.

Volos raged, one monster against another, his own hunger demanding satisfaction. His will travelled the length of the spasms shaking his frame, and his bone blades shot out. The left one severed the whip. The eldar staggered back, more from surprise than the recoil. Volos lunged at her. She leapt up, somersaulting backwards over a bank of consoles. Volos’s blades slashed the metal open.

The air, so keen, so sharp.

The eldar snarled something in her language. Her tone was defiant.

Volos laughed at her, his contempt a weapon. ‘You have lost,’ he said.

Sorina said, ‘It is done.’

‘You have triumphed, Regine Sorina,’ Nithigg said.

She smiled, and did not close her eyes as Nithigg ignited his flamer in a pure oxygen atmosphere.

The Absolution became a torch. The fire was a flash of total incineration, a rage of perfect flame that swept through every hold, corridor, chamber and shaft. In the positions furthest from the control centre, humans and eldar had several seconds to hear the great roar, and wonder what it portended. They died together, corpses fused beyond distinction by the breath of the dragon.

The burn was total. The ship screamed, and as its power died forever, the webway passage, already strained by its size, collapsed, dropping the Absolution back into the materium.

Volos’s auto-senses sealed him off from the ship’s agony. He stood still, surrounded by flame. For a few moments, he could hear and see and smell nothing. He was alone with the awareness of monstrosity.

Then the air was gone. The fire died, leaving the ship with darkness, silence, and ash. Volos could see again, the world tinted green through the hunter’s sight of his lenses. He looked for the body of the eldar leader. His lip curled when he did not see it. He was surrounded by the cinders of her army, though.

Braxas said, ‘I am receiving a hail from the Immolation Maw, brother-captain.’

‘Send news of our victory,’ said Volos. ‘The rest of you, return to our ship. I will go meet Venerable-Brother Nithigg.’ Together, he thought, they would walk through what they had wrought here. They would bear witness. They owed that much to Sorina, and to the half a million who had died.

They would pay their respects to the half a million mortals whose flesh was the necessary tribute to a dragon’s war.

The air at the centre of the landing pad glowed golden. Rain hissed as it blew into the light. The teleport locus grew brighter, as intense as hot metal, whiting out the faces of Colonel Indrana’s few remaining officers. Most of them had never witnessed a teleport before. A couple of them gasped, holding their hands up to shield their faces. Colonel Indrana squeezed her eyes shut against the glare.

The light shrank, coalescing into nine giant forms. It burned brightly and solidified; where before there had been empty space, angels stood. Indrana blinked away retinal after-images.

The Space Marines were huge, taller than Indrana and the other women under her command by half a metre or more, and far bigger than this world’s men. They had come arrayed for battle in power armour, finely wrought and decorated. Each carried the mark of their Chapter upon their left shoulder, a drop of blood hanging above a stylised chalice. Of the nine, five bore armour entirely in the Chapter’s red. A guard. One of these carried a banner of fine workmanship, two others sported claws upon their gauntlets as long as Indrana’s arms while the remainder carried boltguns. They were alert, their armour’s motors whining softly as they swept the pad for threats.

The other four were officers or specialists. Indrana knew enough of the Adeptus Astartes to see that. Their battleplate was ornate beyond compare, and each different to the next as summer was to winter. One was garbed in deep blue, a psyker who carried a staff shot through with crystal, his head nestled in a web of arcane technology. Another wore white armour bearing the marks of the medicae, the third wore a helmet ghoulishly fashioned in the form of a skull, his armour black. And their leader…

The Chapter Master was taller than the rest, a man of noble countenance, clad in red and gold. The pelt of a great beast was pinned to his shoulders. Only he and the psyker had their faces revealed. Beneath the sheen of the rain, Indrana thought their skin and hair looked oddly dry, and yet both were preternaturally beautiful, as perfect as the statues on the Reliquary Sanctum; angels cast in plaster.

The Chapter Master looked around at Indrana’s tattered retinue. She felt acutely aware of her filthy uniform. She stood as straight as she could. Amusement played in the Chapter Master’s pale eyes. It never occurred to her that he might be laughing at her, it was clear to all that his eyes saw evidence of battle, and that he was pleased because of it.

‘Colonel Indrana?’ the Chapter Master said.

She blinked, momentarily forgetting her own name. He came closer, boots clanging on the landing pad. She was forced to crane her neck to look up at him. She knew she was unpresentable – dark rings surrounded her eyes, smudging her dark brown skin black. Her body odour was rank in her own nostrils. No one had access to the comforts of life here anymore. How different to her he was, tall and shining in his armour, a saint come down from the sky. She felt ashamed.

‘My lord.’ She bowed, her hands behind her back. Her warrior’s braid swung forward, water running from its intricate plaits and beads to drip on the rain-slick metal. Her staff knelt around her.

The giant held his red armoured palms upwards, bidding them to rise. ‘Please. We are all servants of the Emperor, brothers and sisters under arms.’

Indrana stood. The Chapter Master looked right into her eyes. His were almost colourless, like a vessel waiting to be filled, like the chalice upon his heraldry.

‘I am Chapter Master Caedis of the Blood Drinkers, Lord of San Guisiga. He smiled, revealing white teeth that were too long. ‘The Adeptus Astartes have answered your call.’

Colonel Indrana recovered her dignity. ‘We are most grateful. We have refreshments and…’

‘That will not be necessary. You have fought hard. We will not insult your sacrifice by feasting while the foe still lives. Save your food for your soldiers, give them sustenance.’

‘You would see the monster immediately, then?’ Indrana shuddered inwardly at the memory of the three-armed horror. As big as the angels of death, it had slain fifteen of the Praetors of Saint Catria before it had been brought down.

‘In good time,’ said the Master of the Blood Drinkers. ‘First I would view the overall situation. There are decisions of tactics and strategy to be made. We must make haste.’

‘As you wish, my lord.’ Indrana drew in a deep breath. She was cold, soaked to the skin. She could not remember the last time she had been clean and dry. ‘This way.’

Indrana squatted behind the parapet of the command post, Caedis stood impassively beside her, his hand upon the wall.

‘My lord,’ Indrana hesitated. ‘I advise you to get down. Rebel sniper teams come far out into the fire zone…’

‘I have no fear of them,’ he said. He was still, unnaturally so.

‘Very well.’

The bulk of the Reliquary Sanctum filled the horizon, the parkland in front of it reduced to ragged mud. Trees stood limbless and splintered amid shell holes filled with stinking water. Tank hulls sat at the limits of the fire zone, hatches blown, streaked with rust and the black traces of fire.

The Sanctum had not been built as a fortress, but its steep walls made it an adequate substitute. Indrana watched as Lord Caedis examined it closely, staring at details an unenhanced human could never see through the rain. It was as large as a small town, a circular wall punctuated by seven spires that commemorated the heroic tasks of Saint Catria, enclosing a plaza and cathedral. Statues of the saint had been toppled from their niches by the rebels, heavy weapons taking their place. Everywhere, the muzzles of guns protruded. She was sure he could see them, even if today she could not.

‘Tell me a little of what happened,’ said Caedis.

‘I don’t…’ Indrana mumbled. She was terrified. Was she being tested?

Caedis looked at her, and his eyes were kind. ‘I wish only to hear the story from your own lips.’

‘Hesta, the so-called “living saint”,’ Indrana began. ‘She revealed herself to us eighteen months ago. Said she had been sent by Saint Catria to bless her followers. We didn’t know then what she really was.’

‘She was not tested?’

Indrana nodded hard, her beads of rank rattled. ‘Oh yes, by the Ecclesiarch and his priests. She was tested and tested again. There was something about her, a fervour… Those eyes… We wanted it, I think. This is a devout world, but far from the eyes of the High Lords. She performed miracles – miracles in the name of the Emperor.’

Indrana looked at the impassive, dry face of the warrior. She saw nothing there but curiosity. ‘We are not heretics, lord. We are good daughters of the Emperor. It was not until around six months later that we discovered the truth. The bodies, I mean. Only a few, but important. Our High Justicar was among them. We think he had uncovered the true nature of the cult, forcing them to seize control. By the time that happened, fully half of our people had joined Hesta. They… they would not believe what was shown to them, put right in front of their eyes. That she was no saint, but a murderer.’

Indrana shivered. Memories of riots on the streets, priories on fire. Good women burned as heretics by Hesta’s followers.

‘You fought.’

‘Yes lord, although it cost us dearly. I have few warriors left to me. We took back Orius and Regal well enough, but Hesta had been based in the Sanctum since the beginning, secretly fortifying it. We’ve trapped the rebel leadership within the Sanctum, but this is the closest we can get,’ she said, indicating the defence lines either side of the command centre, curving to encircle the rebel stronghold. ‘There is no way through their fire patterns.’ She swept her hand past the rebel bastions spaced out before the Sanctum, their outlines hazy in the drizzle. ‘Emperor knows we’ve tried. I’ve lost so many good women – I am down to less than one half regiment, fewer than a thousand troops. In the end, once you contacted us, I decided it would perhaps be best to stay put. We keep a constant watch. They cannot get out, but we cannot get in.’

‘You made a wise choice,’ Caedis favoured her with a wry smile. ‘Do not fear, we stand with you now. The Blood Drinkers will succeed.’

‘I… I do not doubt it,’ she stammered. ‘No offence, my lord, I did not mean to imply that this task was beyond you,’ she said. She tried to maintain her demeanour while dread contorted her stomach. This man could crush her without difficulty.

‘None was taken, colonel, nor would I wish you to fear that any had been,’ Caedis spoke gently. ‘Do not judge yourself against us. I will not have such a talented commander feel humbled.’ He nodded approvingly. ‘You have fought well, colonel. The Emperor has rewarded you, directing our attentions to this world and your salvation. Your struggle is over. The Emperor’s peace will return to Catria by our hand. This I swear.’

Indrana was ashamed that this angel stood unafraid in full view of the enemy while she skulked behind the plascrete. She rose hesitantly.

‘Do not fear,’ he said. He took one last long look at the Sanctum. ‘Your saint’s shrine is a work of great beauty. We will do our utmost to minimise the damage.’

Indrana gave a brief nod. She could not keep her gratefulness from her face. ‘I would see it returned to its rightful purpose more than anything else, my lord.’

‘Come,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Show me this beast you have slain.’

Indrana led Caedis down from the roof into the command suite. Women worked at cogitator banks and vox stations. Reports crackled in from all over the planet. She led the giant through the bustle of the place, Caedis forced to bow his head as they exited into the corridor. Behind him, women watched from out of the corners of their eyes.

‘This way, lord,’ said Indrana. She directed him through the small, prefabricated complex, then down another flight of steps. At the bottom, broad armoured doors barred the way to an ambulance bay, a lighter pair bearing the medicae helix facing them. ‘Our medical centre.’

The door opened with a pneumatic sigh. The ward had been emptied of beds; she had taken no chances with the monster. She took him on, into the operating room they had turned into a makeshift morgue. She hesitated before she keyed the door open.

Two of the other Space Marine officers were already within, conducting their own examinations.

The Chapter Master nodded when he saw the naked corpse on the table. The thing was an unholy blend of nightmare creature and human female. Parts of it were covered in a hard, blue carapace, the rest of it sickly purple flesh. An additional arm was jointed awkwardly to the left shoulder, ending in a three-fingered hand tipped with curved talons that could cleave through plasteel. This Indrana knew from bitter experience.

The thing would have not been able to stand straight while alive. Its spine was knobbled, tortured. Sagging breasts were pasted over its alien anatomy. Its face, awkward and small on the swollen cranium, was that of a human, but teeth as black and sharp as fear crowded its mouth.

The Space Marine medicae looked up from the corpse. He had removed his helmet; he had a black cross painted over his face, his brow glinted with metal studs, too many to count. ‘It is as we thought, Lord Caedis. Genestealers. The cycle is well underway,’ the medic said. The blades of the device on his arm were coated in dark blood. ‘This is a second generation, I think. The admixture of human material present in its essence is a match to the population of this world. They must have been here for some time – decades, perhaps. They are ready to move on and spread their contagion. It is good we are here.’

Indrana cleared her throat. The room was large, but with the three warriors it felt tiny, and she herself like a child around whom adults conducted their mysterious, serious business.

‘A genestealer? This is the… the type of the monster?’

‘You are not aware of them? They are endemic in this sector,’ the medicae said. His eyes were fierce. In the hard light of the room, features that should have appeared beautiful seemed feral somehow.

‘This world is well off the main shipping lanes, Brother Teale,’ said the black- armoured warrior.

‘Reclusiarch Mazrael speaks wisely,’ Caedis said. There was a warning there, she thought, but then he turned to Indrana. ‘They are an abomination, xenos who infiltrate a host society, infecting it with their genetic material so that those corrupted give birth to monsters, monsters that the parents will do anything to protect. Their will is lost to them. The genestealers are like a sickness, do you understand? A physical menace that corrupts both body and mind.’

‘That makes… The rebellion, the uprising. It makes sense,’ said Indrana. ‘At first we thought them rumours, and then…’ She trailed off.

‘Our proximity to Catria was not mere chance, colonel,’ said Caedis. ‘We have been following and cleansing infestations of these creatures for a quarter-century in an attempt to pinpoint their source. Seven worlds we have purged of their evil.’

‘How will you find them?’ she said.

‘They possess a psychic linkage to one another. Weak, but ever present. It leaves a spoor in the warp,’ said Mazrael. ‘Brother Epistolary Guinian chases it through the empyrean, although the trail is as smoke in the wind.’

‘Nevertheless, our crusade nears its conclusion,’ finished Caedis.

A look passed between the three Space Marines. Their eyes strayed constantly to the corpse, lingering on its wounds. Something was going on here that made Indrana uneasy.

Caedis in particular appeared transfixed. He shook his head as if clearing it, barely perceptibly, but Indrana saw. ‘We will assault the Sanctum tomorrow.’

‘Is there any way to free those in the thrall of the aliens?’ she asked. ‘There are many of my warriors in the Sanctum. They were good once, pure of heart. Loyal Imperial soldiers.’

The Reclusiarch shook his head. ‘No.’ Through his helmet’s vox emitters, his voice was sepulchral. ‘They are blind to reason, and will fight like animals to protect their false family. They must be annihilated, lest the taint remain to overwhelm your world once more.’

The door hissed open. Indrana’s astropath, Aland – one of the few men on her staff – walked in, deep in consultation with the Blood Drinkers psyker. The warrior broke off his conversation and looked to his lord.

‘We must ask for privacy,’ said the Chapter Master abruptly. ‘We have much to discuss.’

Indrana hesitated. The four adepts stared at her. Caedis’s smile suddenly seemed wolfish. There was a wildness in him, in them all, that scared her.

Astropath Aland came to her side, his staff clicking across the floor. He took her elbow and pulled her gently away. They left the room together.

The door closed behind them, and they walked through the deserted ward.

‘There is something here that I do not like,’ said Indrana. ‘For all their beauty, there is something savage about them.’

‘I cannot see their beauty,’ said Aland. The lights of the ward reflected from the plastek orbs covering his empty eye sockets. ‘And my powers may be feeble compared to those of their psyker, but I can sense that they are conflicted. They have dual natures, these angels of death, although they are in balance for now.’

‘Marvellous,’ said Indrana. She rubbed at her forehead. She was dizzy with fatigue. ‘Let us pray to the Emperor that they keep themselves so.’

‘What of the Sanctum, Lord Caedis?’ said Mazrael.

Sanguinary Master Teale barked out a laugh. ‘We shall storm it easily and drain the tainted blood of those weak-minded enough to fall under the xenos spell.’ His eyes shone with atavistic joy as he dissected the genestealer hybrid.

The Reclusiarch and Sanguinary Master; Caedis’s chief advisors. The first always the voice of reason, the calm in the storm, the bastion against the rage that could take any of them at a moment’s notice. So different from Teale, who urged the embracing of the thirst, the celebration of savagery. The two of them were the twin sides of his conscience, the two aspects of his Chapter: one restraint, the other surrender to the monster coiled round all their hearts.

‘The initial assault will be straightforward,’ Caedis said, ‘though there are many weapons installed. It would be a challenge to take even without the ring of bastions about it. With them there, doubly so.’

‘I welcome that!’ Teale said. He pulled forth a green organ from the hybrid and placed it into a steel bowl. ‘Already the battle-joy stirs within me, I would feel the blood of living foes on my hands and teeth.’

‘Patience, Sanguinary Master, you will have your opportunity,’ said Caedis.

Guinian spoke, his voice sonorous and perpetually tinged with sorrow. ‘We cannot bombard the Sanctum. I require a moment in the heart of their lair. Only then have I chance of locating the ultimate source of this evil.’

Caedis gazed at the genestealer, his eyes fixed on the thing’s oozing fluids. Behind his lips his tongue touched upon lengthened canines. The blood was unclean, laced with the poisonous heritage of the genestealer, yet even so the thirst boiled up in him for a second, filling his mouth with saliva. He forced the thirst down, fettering it under the layers of civility he fought so hard to maintain.

‘The circumstances are favourable?’

‘From what they say of their false saint,’ said Teale, ‘the cycle must be close to completion. She is one of their magi, of that I am sure, and mother perhaps to a new brood.’

‘Young,’ said Guinan. ‘I need to find their young, to follow their calls into the warp for their kin. Then I will find the source. We cannot destroy them, or we shall be forced to move on to another infested world and try again.’

‘I would not countenance the destruction of such a building in any case,’ said Caedis. ‘Far better to preserve what beauty we can and engage our foe blade to claw.’

‘Such is the way of Sanguinius,’ intoned Mazrael. ‘The damage will be severe.’

‘But not irreparable,’ said Caedis.

‘And so we will triumph where these lesser humans could not,’ said Teale.

‘Do not dismiss them, Sanguinary Master. That the Praetors of Saint Catria contained the revolt at all is close to a miracle.’

‘And yet, lord, they would ultimately have failed.’

Caedis nodded distractedly. His pulse sounded loudly in his ears, his attention was fixed on the blood of the hybrid. What would it taste like, human blood spiced with alien genes…?

‘One concerted breakout attempt and the Praetors’ work will be undone. This hybrid was surely a test, a probing of the line. The Catrians’ victory has cost them dear – there are too few Praetors left to finish the enemy. They stand in triumph upon the brink of disaster. More hybrids will come and find their weaknesses, and then finally the purestrains. They will be overwhelmed.’

‘There is barely a soul upon this planet,’ said Teale. His blades ran along the underside of the hybrid, slipping easily between the thing’s twisted ribs. Its stomach slid out. Teale pushed it to one side and reached inside the chest cavity. ‘Two or three hundred thousand. This world is not worth the effort of saving.’

‘There are fewer now. And where are the men?’ asked the Reclusiarch.

‘There is some minor aberration in the populace. Women are by far in the majority. Men rarely survive to adulthood and those few examples which do are feeble-bodied,’ said Teale.

‘Mutation?’ said Mazrael distastefully.

Teale pushed his arms deeper into the hybrid. ‘Inquisition records place them well within pure-blood norms. The disparity in sex distribution stems from environmental effects. They are not mutants.’

‘Then they deserve our aid, as all true humans do,’ said Mazrael. ‘And aiding them will bring us closer to the conclusion of our crusade. What are your orders, Lord Chapter Master? Shall I awaken Brother Endarmiel?’

Caedis did not reply. He stood with his hand upon his chin, gazing at the slow rivers of black fluid leaking from the corpse.

Lord Caedis?’ said Mazrael. ‘Brother?’

Caedis’s head snapped up abruptly. ‘Yes?’ he said, his voice thick.

‘Shall I awaken Brother Endarmiel? I feel we will have need of his talents in the battle ahead.’

‘Very well.’

Mazrael dipped his head. ‘Yes, Lord. What are the rest of your orders?’

‘We shall destroy the other infected sites from orbit. Guinian, please inform Colonel Indrana. She must withdraw her troops from the cities. Have them form a cordon. Send half of our number to aid them. Tell her that she is to hold the perimeter at all costs. Any who flee the cities are to be killed on sight. If even one of these xenos escapes our wrath, it will all have been for nothing.’

Teale pulled another organ out from the creature and put it carefully to one side. He took up a cloth and wiped down his narthecium blades. ‘I have the beast’s heart,’ said Teale. ‘I am ready to prepare for the Rite of Holos. We will sharpen the Thirst and bring our brothers to full battle readiness.’

‘Is there sufficient of its blood for the ritual?’ asked Caedis.

‘The fluids of these creatures are impure, lord – not fit for our needs. The heart can be burned, the ashes used…’

Caedis looked to his brothers. Their eyes gleamed as if silvered, all of them eager to slake the thirst that tortured them.

‘Our serfs dwindle by the day, lord,’ Mazrael said carefully.

‘Then do what must be done.’ Caedis paused, his heart heavy. ‘The lives of a few are small sacrifice for the preservation of the lives of the many.’

The air around the Sanctum was alive with weapon fire. Five Land Speeders wove between solid rounds and las-beams, drawing them away from the following Thunderhawk and its cargo. The speeders wove an intricate pattern, splitting from close formation as they drew close to the outer defences. Missiles streaked through the air from the Thunderhawk’s wings, obliterating a bastion and the guns within. An answering missile burst harmlessly on the craft’s fuselage.

The Land Speeders roared on, burning gun emplacements to slag. One caught an airburst from the rebels, spinning out of control before its pilot brought it down hard on the ground. The crew pulled themselves from the wreckage and ran headlong at the enemy guns. In seconds, they were within the great Sanctum, killing all they came across.

The way cleared, the Thunderhawk swooped low. Jets roared as it tilted its nose upward, coming to a near-hover. Lifting clamps disengaged, dropping a scarlet Land Raider onto the battlefield. The tank skidded across the mud, tracks spinning. Cannon barrels blurred as they reached their maximum fire rate, felling cult members and dragging tracks of pockmarks across the Sanctum’s stone walls. The tank drove hard at the main portal, a road tunnel that led within. It bucked as it thundered up the embankment onto the ruined road, slewing left to follow it.

A barricade of broken statuary barred the way. Puffs of rock dust erupted in long lines across its surface as the Land Raider’s crew blasted at the traitorous Praetors behind. Their return fire was ineffectual against the machine’s armour.

The tank drew close to the shattered barricade, and short-ranged flame cannons washed death over them, incinerating those who had not already fallen. The tank angled itself past the barricade, crashing into ancient stonework. Tracks squealed as the Land Raider pushed. Blocks toppled, bouncing from its roof, and then it was through into the tunnel.

One by one, the enemy’s guns fell silent as the Land Speeders finished their work. Other sounds took the place of cannon fire – the roar of jets. Battle-brothers plunged from above, jump packs screaming. Mazrael was at their head, obvious in his Chaplain’s black. In their wake another aircraft streaked from the grey skies like a thunderbolt. The assault ship headed directly for the hollow centre of the shrine, braking thrusters roaring.

Caedis’s Land Raider pushed on through the ornately carved tunnel. Statues of Saint Catria in a hundred different guises went past. Foes – traitor Catrian soldiers and poorly-armed civilians alike – shot without effect at the plasteel behemoth. They were cut down without mercy by the vehicle’s guns, crushed against its sides and under its treads. The Land Raider rumbled into the square at the heart of the Sanctum, a grand plaza two thousand metres across, the cathedral soaring from its centre. A giant mosaic of the saint’s deeds covered the floor.

The Sanctum shuddered. Filigreed galleries crumbled as Blood Drinkers landed among the cultists from on high. Grenades shattered friezes, bolts brought saints down from their lofty perches.

All this Caedis observed. Strapped tight into his Land Raider, scenes of violence were projected upon screens in the vehicle’s command suite. He yearned to join his men outside the tank, to sing the hymns of battle and smite the foe. All inside the Land Raider with him felt the same – Teale, Guinian, and the four veteran brothers who accompanied them – but he could not allow them the pleasure of combat yet.

‘The real foe lairs deeper within the Sanctum. We will proceed. Let Brother Endarmiel and the others deal with this first line of defence. Our battle is not here.’

The assault craft spun slowly in the air above the mosaic, its thrusters burning the face of the saint. Cargo grapples retracted, and Brother Endarmiel dropped to the floor, landing upright, his heavy feet shattering tesserae that had endured for three thousand years.

Endarmiel was ancient, even by the standards of the Blood Drinkers, crippled in a long ago war and entombed inside a towering Dreadnought walker. Within his giant body of metal, Endarmiel had fought on with distinction for more than a thousand years, his wisdom helping guide generations of Blood Drinkers to victory after victory.

That Endarmiel was no more.

The Blood Drinkers controlled the curse of their founder with some success, and so Endarmiel had remained sane for a long time, but no one, not even a Blood Drinker, could resist the Black Rage forever. As the decades turned to centuries, Endarmiel’s fall became an inevitability. He was a living reminder of the darkness inside them all.

Endarmiel strode towards the cathedral. Inside were many of the false saint’s followers. Las-bolts and autocannon rounds sparked from his walking tomb.. He strode on heedless. He roared mechanical warcries that urged the Blood Drinkers to greater fury, ancient words that evoked heroes of distant centuries, and drove a powered blood fist through the cathedral’s great door. Carved wood splintered. Rocks thrown from the building’s towers clanged from his armoured shell. Then the door was torn asunder, and he was inside.

Caedis watched as a stick-thin man holding up a blasphemous icon was crushed under Endarmiel’s foot, and then the ancient was deep into the church’s interior and the multitude within, and lost to sight.

‘To the left, past the cathedral’s north tower, that is where our quarry lurks,’ said Guinian. ‘The taint of the xenos lies heaviest there.’

‘Then let us engage them, and rip out their throats!’ called Teale.

Caedis directed his driver across the plaza. The tank’s weight turned tiles to powder and its guns shattered exquisitely carven stone, saddening the Chapter Master.

Fire rained down from above. Those Praetors turned traitor had kept some semblance of discipline. They fired by rank, fell back, fired again, although their guns were little use against the battleplate of the Blood Drinkers. Here and there, a brother fell, but when the Space Marines closed into the melee, the humans did not last long.

The Land Raider smashed into an archway picked out by Guinian.

‘Lord, we can go no further. The corridor beyond is too narrow.’ The driver’s voice came into the passenger cabin.

‘Open the assault ramp!’ ordered Caedis. ‘Withdraw and support the assault.’

Metal creaked on stone, the mechanism’s powerful hydraulics crushing it to rubble as it forced the ramp down.

‘Deploy!’ Caedis shouted to his honour guard. ‘Advance cautiously!’ Too often had the Blood Drinkers lost their heads on this crusade, charging in to engage and suffering at the claws of the genestealers because of it. These were his finest warriors, to be sure; if any of the battle-brothers could resist the Thirst it would be these veterans, but none who called Sanguinius father could claim to be wholly proof against its lure.

‘Steady my brothers!’ called Sanguinary Master Teale. ‘Hold tight to your thirst, embrace your fury, but do not succumb. Savour your anger and save it – now is not the time to strike with blade, but with bolter!’

Caedis could feel it himself: the desire to throw off circumspection and charge forward, sword raised. More than anything else he wished to confront the enemy face to face, to rip at them with his hands, and then…

He reined in his passion. He swallowed. His mouth was dry – he yearned for the warm slickness of blood to soothe his throat.

‘Brothers, ware the shadows!’ Caedis watched his honour guard deploy, taking up station behind the wide corridor’s pillars. Brother Metrion had left the Chapter banner aboard Caedis’s flagship, a flamer in his hands now instead. He took the point position, weapon ready. He was covered behind by Brother Atameo’s bolter. Brothers Hermis and Erdagon held back, blue energy playing across their lightning claws. The corridor was wide enough for groundcars, its ornate columns and carved stone screens providing ample opportunity for ambush. This was where the real test would begin.

‘Prime genestealer ground,’ said Caedis. ‘They will assault us first here.’

‘Let them come,’ snarled Teale.

Caedis drew his sword, Gladius Rubeum. The unsheathing of it activated the weapon’s power field and the holo-generator in its hilt. Scenes of victories from the Chapter’s history played up and down the blade.

Metrion went forward slowly, Hermis behind him, pausing to illuminate pools of darkness with gouts of burning promethium. He reached the end of the corridor, where daylight ended and only darkness remained. The others followed. They scanned every surface; walls, floor and ceiling. Attack could come from any angle.

Caedis looked into the next corridor, but there was no light source there. The systems of his armour banished the dark, image intensifiers in the helmet rendering it in grainy green and grey. ‘I see nothing.’

‘Their leader is here, my lord,’ said Guinian.

‘The false saint?’

Guinian nodded. ‘She watches us.’

‘We go on.’

Again Metrion advanced, washing the shadows bright with cleansing flame. He stopped halfway, swiftly unscrewing his depleted promethium canister and replacing it with another.

In that moment, the genestealers attacked.

Autogun and lasgun fire erupted from the far end of the corridor, poorly aimed but in such volume that the Blood Drinkers ducked back to the shelter of the pillars. Guinian, Caedis and Atameo returned fire. The corridor resounded to the distinctive double-crack of bolts, lit by flashes as the rounds embedded themselves in stone and flesh, blowing both apart with equal ease.

Caedis saw hunchbacked figures with scuttling walks. Their features were alternately lost to the grain of the lens images then blurred by the intense glare of bolt detonations, wisps of image distortion trailing brightly from crooked limbs. Only when Metrion braved the storm of fire and bathed the crowd in purifying flame did the Blood Drinkers truly see their enemy.

Hybrids filled the corridor. Like the specimen killed by Indrana’s soldiers, they were neither human nor alien but a mixture of both, the result of the genestealers’ terrible manner of reproduction. Some appeared entirely alien. Others could perhaps have passed for human in poor light. In keeping with the populace of Catria, they were mostly female, with lank hair and bizarrely delicate features. They shrank back from their burning sisters and hissed.

‘This is the first wave! Hold back! Hold back!’ ordered Caedis.

Metrion lost control and hurled himself into the mob of creatures, letting forth another cloud of fire before he cast his flamer aside and drew his knife and pistol. Caedis cursed and gunned down three of the beasts that threatened his standard bearer, but soon Metrion was lost amidst a sea of flailing limbs.

Hermis and Erdagon went to his aid. Lightning claws flashing, they carved their way through the crowd of malformed beasts. Caedis tasted metal as Guinian unleashed a spear of psychic energy at the mob, skewering several of the half-women. Caedis advanced, Teale at his side, both firing as they went.

Then Caedis was in the fray, Gladius Rubeum rising and falling, its energy field crackling as it ripped chitin apart like paper. Hybrids came at him from the left and the right, but all fell to his blade. One penetrated his defences, its claws gouging a line in his greave. Sparks flew from his plate as the monster severed some vital connection. The damaged leg locked for a moment and Caedis felt the support of the armour waver.

All the while he struggled with his own rage. The Thirst battered at his reason, threatening to topple his soul into an orgy of bloodletting that would never cease. He cried out. Combat became a blur of leering faces and flashing claws.

And then, the foe was gone. A handful of hybrids fled, Hermis hard on their heels. Guinian called for him to halt, but he paid no attention. Caedis panted lightly. Gladius Rubeum had been well-blooded.

‘Master?’ said Guinan. ‘What ails you? I sense turmoil about you.’

‘Nothing, Brother-Epistolary,’ said Caedis. His voice croaked. He licked lips that should not yet be so dry, not so soon after the Rite of Holos. He was thirsty, so thirsty…

Teale knelt by the fallen Metrion, and slid a needle from his narthecium into the downed Space Marine’s flesh. The device hissed and a cylinder of red fluid emptied into his veins. ‘He’ll live,’ Teale said flatly. Metrion’s armour had been split in two places. Blood oozed through the gashes, colouring the scratched metal red again.

Caedis had to tear his gaze away. As Teale called in his acolytes to bear the wounded brother away, his own voice trembled. He had his own internal battle to fight.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘We must aid Hermis.’

Guinian paused, Caedis felt something tighten at the back of his skull as the Epistolary sent his senses outwards. ‘Alas, I fear he may already be beyond our help. He has drawn the enemy out in number. If we hurry, we might still save him.’

They ran down the corridor, caution running from them as blood runs from a cup. Caedis could feel it. Once one succumbed to the battle-joy of the Thirst, others were sure to follow. Only the great will of the Blood Drinkers’ elite kept them from rushing headlong into whatever danger threatened Hermis. The sounds of fighting grew, Hermis’s snarls and battle-oaths loud over the helmet vox.

They rounded a corner and burst into a broad courtyard. The sun slashed the space in two, one side bathed in dazzling daylight, the other in deep shadow. Two civilian groundcars, luxury models, were parked by grand arch on the far side. Armour plating and concealed weaponry were readily apparent to Caedis’s eye.

Brother Hermis fought in the middle of the square against a horde of monsters – hybrids close in form to their monstrous father. Hermis stood precisely where the line of light bisected the courtyard. One of his lightning claws pointed upward. Sunlight fought with the crackling lightning playing on its blades.

The other claw was in darkness, arcing upward towards the belly of a hybrid that loomed over him, a devil assailing an angel.

Several more alien abominations darted towards him, arms outstretched. One lay dead on the floor at the veteran Space Marine’s feet, and another was missing one of its upper arms, but fought on regardless. Hermis’s helmet had been torn from his head. Blood ran from a wound in his arm. His face was twisted with battle-joy.

To Caedis’s blood-crazed mind, the veteran’s battle appeared frozen in time, a study in light and dark as dramatic as any of the statue groups that crowded the Sanctum.

Swift motion wiped the impression away. Hermis went down, claws rending his armour apart. Teale bellowed. Boltguns fired. Alien flesh burst, splattering the pale stone with their gore. Erdagon ran towards the square’s centre in a shallow arc, out of his brothers’ lines of fire. Three genestealers turned to intercept him.

Caedis’s head felt light – his throat was closing up, as dry as desert sand. He shook within his armour as he fought the desire to charge headlong at the genestealers, knowing that his bolter was a better tool here. With every kick it gave, he imagined the sensation of Gladius Rubeum biting into his enemies, and he felt his will ebbing away.

Guinian raised his arm, palm outstretched. Eldritch energy blazed around him, and abruptly died.

From behind the limousines, something that could almost have been a woman stepped out.

Almost.

Her body was as human as any of the other inhabitants of Catria, but her face betrayed her alien origins. Her features were a little too heavy, her nose was slightly ridged, making it appear wrinkled in disgust. Her mouth was unnaturally downturned. And her eyes – they blazed with a contempt for humanity born in the cold places between the stars.

She carried a staff glowing with wyrding might; an alien psyker, a cult witch. The Blood Drinkers had encountered several on the way to Catria.

Caedis’s resolve crumbled, and he dropped his bolter – he could restrain himself no longer. Chanting the war cries of the Blood Drinkers, he raised Gladius Rubeum high above his head and ran at the hybrid magos.

The taste of metal. A blast of psychic energy.

Caedis was flung across the square, his armour dragging sparks from the stone as he skidded across it. The tactical overlays in his helmet lenses flickered. He clambered up, clumsily batting away a darting claw as he did so. Grasping hands sought to pin his arms, a genestealer’s upper claws formed into a pair of single points to drive down at his armour, but Caedis shucked off the creature’s embrace and brought Gladius Rubeum up in a wide arc as he stood, divesting the genestealer of three of its arms. He finished it with a return downwards blow.

Guinian stepped forward to confront the witch, sending aside a blast of energy meant for Caedis.

The air was taut, quivering with unnatural colours. Guinian shouted his praise to the emperor and Sanguinius. His hand upraised, red energy arced from his hand. The witch stood her ground, a dome of flaring light covered her, turning aside the attacks of the Epistolary.

Caedis advanced to the square’s centre where Erdagon stood over his fallen brother, lightning claws weaving an impenetrable cage, keeping the talons of the hybrids at bay. He was on the defensive; power armour was not proof against the genestealers’ diamond-hard claws. Caedis sought to even the odds.

He felled a hybrid from behind, cutting it near in two, the litanies of battle upon his lips. Gladius Rubeum crackled as its energy fields ripped apart another, and then Erdagon was free to attack. Another foul creature died, and another. Back to back, Erdagon and the Chapter Master fought, singing the great songs of battle, surrendering themselves fully to bloody rage.

More genestealers were coming into the courtyard, forcing Teale and Atameo back. Teale discarded his empty gun, and laid about him with his chainsword, the blade’s metal teeth juddering as they bit into chitin. Atameo snapped off bursts of fire as he walked backwards, dropping three, four, five of the gangling beasts. Then he fell. The hybrids were fast, their reflexes outmatching those of the Adeptus Astartes. One had been able to pass through Atameo’s bolter fire and punch a clawed hand through his armoured torso, eviscerating him.

A rush of alien anger burst over the square. Guinian cried out. The crystalline matrix about his helmet sparked and he stumbled, overwhelmed by the cult witch’s warp-born powers. Teale grabbed him by the arm, and pulled the Librarian to the centre of the square, where the others surrounded him.

‘She is strong!’ gasped Guinian.

The four Blood Drinkers stood with the alien dead piled about them. The genestealers came on from every arch and doorway; creeping down stone columns, slinking out of dark corridor mouths.

The Space Marines, heroes among heroes all, were outnumbered. Reports from the rest of the Sanctum came in through Caedis’s helmet vox. Relief was deadly seconds away.

The false saint smiled. Her teeth were small and pointed, her gums dark. ‘You test the might of Mother Hesta, you test and you die. This is our world now, it belongs to the Children of the Stars.’

She raised her staff, glowing with wyrding energy.

‘The blood of life flows quickly!’ Teale said, intoning the first line of the Sanguis Moritura.

‘Only in death can it be stilled!’ replied the others.

‘Let not ours be stilled easily, let it flow on and outward – let it flow from us as we slay those who free it!’

‘Blood is strength, in death it quickens!’

They sang then the hymn of fury, dry lips bitten red by sharp teeth. They prepared to sell themselves dearly.

Hesta pointed her staff at them and laughed.

Stone burst inwards. Lumps of saints flew across the square, battering down several genestealers. A cloud of dust billowed outwards.

Brother Endarmiel strode through the breach, roaring metallically. White dust coated black armour. Twin blood fists whirred. He pivoted and drove a mechanical arm forward, smashing hybrids to a pulp. Hesta’s eyes widened and she cast her bolt of gathered power at the war machine. Purple light flared around Endarmiel’s black armour. He leaned into the blast, weathered it, then strode on and smashed a fist towards the false saint. Hesta stumbled, energy flaring around her as her psychic shield took the brunt of the blow. She snarled, swinging her staff at the war machine’s leg. It connected with a resounding boom. Brother Endarmiel staggered, and Hesta howled victoriously, but the Dreadnought extended one mighty fist. The storm bolter slung underneath fired, and Hesta was cut to pieces.

Brother Endarmiel turned from the shattered remains of the magos and turned upon the brood. Caedis and the others charged forward.

Caught between the rampaging Dreadnought and the lord of the Blood Drinkers, the genestealers were doomed. Their claws could do little against the plating that protected Endarmiel’s sarcophagus. They scored the metal, paring red blood marks and sacred scrolls away, leaving raw tracks in the adamantium, but they could not find their way through it. They died, crushed by Endarmiel’s fists, impaled by Gladius Rubeum, cleaved in two by Guinian’s force staff, torn apart by chainsword and lightning claw.

Erdagon fell, but the slaughter continued unabated.

Caedis slew another of the half-xenos, driving his sword point through its alien skull.

‘Come,’ said Guinian hoarsely. ‘Our target lies within. I can sense them, and they can sense me. Their mother is dead and still they do not fear.’

There were only three of them now: Teale, Caedis and Guinian. Teale turned away from them. The roars of the Dreadnought were deafening as it finished the last of the hybrids, and he had to shout to make himself heard.

‘I must remain here and put aside the blood rage. Erdagon can be saved, and I must retrieve the gene-seed of brother Hermis. Go with fortune and fury, sing well the hymns of battle-joy.’

Caedis gave his assent to the Sanguinary Master. Teale set about his solemn work. Battle-brothers were arriving in the courtyard in Endarmiel’s wake, the fight was nearly done. Caedis motioned for a squad to follow, and together they exited the square and descended into the catacombs beneath Saint Catria’s Reliquary Sanctum.

How many holy women lay interred there? At the base of the stairs, in a wide corridor paved with marble, the burials began, hollows in the wall like shelves five high, each housing a set of mummified remains. Corridors led off at regular intervals, all crammed with desiccated corpses.

The Blood Drinkers advanced, the Thirst boiling within them.

In a tomb remade in a crude parody of a nursery, they found the purestrains. Hollow-eyed women and feeble men snatched the mewling creatures from cribs arranged around a throne of bone and iron as the angels of death entered. Four arms stole around the neck of each surrogate parent, and purple snouts nuzzled human necks. The bewitched humans turned to shield their hellish young with their own bodies. Some raised weapons; bolters barked, and these few fell.

A wave of psychic malice came from this twisted family. Cold, alien eyes stared with hatred from the changeling babies.

‘Do not kill them, not yet,’ ordered Epistolary Guinian in his stern and sorrowful voice. ‘I must take the knowledge I seek from their minds.’

The children of Mother Hesta hissed, tubular tongues sliding over wicked teeth. Reptilian eyes possessed of deep and terrible wisdom regarded them. Their false mothers crooned over them frantically as though they were human infants, blind to their heinous form.

Guinian undid his helmet clasps, air hissing as the neck seal came undone. He set his helm on the floor, and stared at the xenos brood. ‘Know me now, oh foul and repellent beasts, for I will have what I seek.’ Guinian’s eyes glowed, and he reached out to the creatures.

The purestrain young let out a haunting cry as one, heard as much in the mind as in the air. Fingers shifted on weapons in armoured hands.

‘Wait!’ commanded Caedis. The Thirst threatened to undo their task nigh to its completion. ‘Do not fire!’

Guinian’s eyes slid open. Triumph pulled his dour face into a smile. ‘My lord, I have it.’

‘You can augur the path of the hulk, brother? You can find the initial source of the xenos contagion?’

‘Yes, my lord. I have the psychic scent of these things,’ Guinian spat the word. ‘There are patterns and trails, lord, even in the chaos of empyrean. I can lead us to their foul progenitor.’

Caedis nodded. His eyes swam. The Thirst tortured him. Never had it assailed him so strongly, and a shadow of apprehension stole over his heart.

‘Excellent news’ he said, forcing himself to master his will. ‘I will recall the Second and Fifth Companies to our fleet. This will be a gathering of heroes! We shall crush this abomination at its source once and for all.’

‘Please!’ called one of the women. She was tall and famished, her vitality bled away by her monstrous family. ‘The children! Please, do not harm the little ones!’

Caedis shook his head slowly. ‘Your actions are no sin of your own, but you are forever lost to us. We will commend your souls to your Saint Catria – perhaps she will judge you kindly.’

Caedis raised his hand. The Catrians wailed and screamed.

He let it drop.

Promethium and bolter fire cleansed the chamber.

‘Where were they found?’ demanded Colonel Indrana. She fought and failed to keep the horror out of her voice. From outside the command centre she could hear the thunder of the Space Marines’ departing craft, taking the angelic warriors back to their fleet.

‘Bunker eighty-five. No one saw or heard anything,’ said the medicae adept. ‘I have never seen anything like this. These cuts…’

‘Yes. I can see them,’ snapped Indrana. She stared. The medicae facility smelled like an abattoir, not a place of healing.

‘Colonel, what should we do?’

‘Burn them,’ she said curtly. ‘Burn them all. Contact the families. Tell them they died in defence of our home and the Emperor’s domain.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Immediately!’

The room burst into activity, her order breaking the air of terror in the room, each of the women present thankful of a task to perform.

There was no relief in action for her, not for Indrana. There was no one to order her, nothing to distract her from the terrible sight of her slaughtered soldiers. Slaughtered was the right word, she thought – they had been killed like animals. She looked upon the seven pallid corpses of her guardswomen, their skin bled to a sickly ashen grey, and she shuddered as she considered the nature of Catria’s deliverance.

Note:

The majority of this novel takes place in 887.M39, two thousand years before the present year of 998.M41.

CHAPTER 1

MEMORIES OF HONOURUM

Serenity entered the mind and hearts of Mantillio Galt. The whispered prayers of the chapel serfs receded to be replaced by the sough of soft wind. The buzz of the tattooing needle faded. The rapid prick, prick, prick of it on his skin was kissed away by cold mountain air. His perception of the battle-barge’s Grand Chapel became uncertain. His eyes were closed, all he saw was the fleshy dark behind his eyelids, but the sense of it, the weight of years and prayer, grew lesser and replaced by an impression of open spaces. He was hanging between the physical and the metaphysical; a disquieting sensation of being neither here nor there. He reminded himself that he was aboard Novum in Honourum, in transit through the warp. He lacked the dubious witch-gifts that would allow him to sense it, but at these times, halfway into his meditative state, he felt he could almost see it.

He quashed his anxiety.

‘Glorious is the Emperor, mankind manifest as one, he shall light the way.’ He quoted the Codex Astartes, and concentrated on his breathing.

The scents and sounds of home called to him, but he would not go there, not yet. For the Flesh Remembrance to take, for it to be bright with truth and glorious for the Emperor’s eyes when his time came, first he must relive the incident which the tattoo would commemorate.

The material world flickered, and went away entirely.

Fire. Fire blazing in the fluted corridors of the eldar craft. The osseous plastics of the alien vessel burned ferociously. Blue-tinted flame washed against his battleplate; blue from bone licking at the blue-and-bone of his Chapter’s heraldry. The temperature indicators of his sensorium were far into the red; without his power armour he would be burned alive. Even now, he sweated from the heat.

The roar of the fire was deafening. Flickering movement had him raise his bolt pistol rapidly, his power sword ready. Nothing, nothing but fire and burning psychoplastics.

Most of the eldar pirates were dead, their slender forms shattered by bolter fire. Gaudy corpses draped the platforms of the chamber, some already aflame. Reports from Novum in Honourum had the remaining three eldar vessels fleeing, strike cruiser Ceaseless Vigilance and Battlefleet Trident’s four escort craft in hot pursuit. They would not catch the fleeter xenos craft, but Galt was confident they would not return to trouble the Orin Gap. Ten fragile alien spaceships were wrecks. It had been a costly victory; Corvo’s Hammer wallowed in the void, heavily damaged. And it had not been won yet.

‘Form up on me,’ he ordered his squad of Sternguard veterans. Four remained. They ceased their checking of the dead, and gathered around their captain, ever alert. Firelight danced over their armours’ ornate decorations.

Galt nodded towards the large door at the head of the chamber. Delicate galleries framed it, drawing the eye towards its curved symmetries. The personal badge of the eldar corsairs’ leader adorned this portal: a blank-eyed face, dripping with tears.

Decadent xenos trash.

‘Through there, the bridge,’ Galt said. ‘Slay their leader, and they will not return. Brother Verderio, blow the door.’

‘Yes, captain.’

The door was as fragile as the rest of the ship. Verderio’s melta bomb reduced it to slag. Beyond lay their target.

They marched in, bolters high. Shuriken fire came at them from several quarters. Pistol shots. Razored discs embedded themselves in the thick ceramite of the Space Marines’ battleplate. Not a single Sternguard fell, their relic armour proof against such feeble alien devices. Bolt fire replied. Three eldar died, joining their brethren already draped across the bridge’s shattered instrument consoles.

Ruination greeted Galt, fallen spars and shattered bonework all around. The corsairs had been heavily punished by Battlefleet Trident’s weapons. Broken machinery and dead aliens surrounded a raised dais, upon which, in an ornate throne, an eldar princeling lolled, his chin upon his fist. He wore no armour, but was instead clad in garish robes. Nor did he carry any weapon, although he looked at the Novamarines with such disdain it seemed he thought his glare alone deadly enough. Two forms flanked him, grasping evoluted weapons. They were so still that, for a second, Galt took them to be statues. They were not. He watched them closely for movement. He had seen their kind before, despicable thinking machines: robots, abominable intelligences, forbidden tech made doubly vile by its alien origin.

Galt holstered his pistol and unclasped his helmet. He placed it upon the floor, looking upon the alien lord without the mediation of his power armour’s senses. His purpose was twofold. Galt would allow the eldar to see the tally of his deeds that were marked upon his face, and he would view the alien in turn with his own eyes, to test his spirit’s mettle against its uncleanliness unshielded.

‘Surrender!’ he called. ‘And die with what little honour your kind possesses.’

The eldar shook his head as if enormously disappointed. He toyed with a glittering jewel on a chain about his neck and curled his lip in distaste. ‘So predictable, so very, very predictable.’ He stood. ‘For a thousand years I have plied the stars, mon-keigh, and you march in here in your…’ He gestured at the Space Marines, at a loss for words. ‘…ugly suits of armour, shouting at me as if I were deaf, expecting me to hold my hands in the air and allow you to end my life with your crude devices.’ He pursed his lips. His sing-song, accented Gothic was loaded with contempt. ‘I am not deaf, Captain Galt. Far from it. How else would I know your name? I hear all.’

Galt’s face was unmoving. He was unimpressed with the eldar’s attempts to unnerve him. He jerked his head. The Sternguard raised their weapons.

‘Then die without honour. It matters not a whit to me. Only that you no longer prey upon the citizens and shipping of the Imperium.’

The eldar laughed. ‘You think I die today? No. I am not done with this path yet, let alone my life.’

Suddenly, the pirate captain dropped from view through a circle of light that burst open in the floor. Bolts cracked into the throne, their target gone.

‘Cease fire!’ Galt ordered. He signalled with his hand to Brother Aster, that he should investigate the pirate captain’s escape route. ‘Brothers, cover him. Beware the statues beside the throne.’ Aster ran forward, bolter raised. He looked downwards, then back at his captain.

‘An energy portal of some kind, brother-captain. I cannot see through it. Do we follow?’

‘No,’ said Galt. ‘The doorway will not go where he went, I’ll warrant. Trust not the pathways of the alien.’

Sure enough, the light winked out. The portal closed, revealing nought but a patch of smooth floor.

‘Well said, brother-captain,’ said Brother Kederion.

‘Captain,’ warned out Brother Gorfillio. He raised his gun. ‘The constructs awaken.’ The statues were moving.

Aster backed away from the dais, bolter up.

‘As I thought, eldar ghost machines,’ spat Galt. ‘Aster, stand clear. Take them down.’

‘Stand firm, brothers,’ said Aster, ‘these things are tougher than they look.’

The machines moved slowly, as if time ran differently for them. Boltgun rounds smacked into them, but failed to penetrate. Together, the ghost machines raised their weapons.

‘Take cover!’ shouted Galt. He and his veterans were familiar with the deadly effects of wraithcannon fire.

The guns were silent. A black orb appeared on Verderio’s chest. He glanced down at it, and died. Verderio collapsed in on himself, pulled towards the ball of unlight. His armour shattered with a deafening crack. Blood sprayed in all directions as his body imploded.

The Sternguard went for cover, keeping up fire as they went. The machines were slow, but their shots many. They tore chunks from the battle-scarred bridge. Dozens of bolt rounds spattered off them without harm, a few exploding when they ricocheted and buried themselves in the fabric of the chamber.

Throughout it all the ghost machines made not a single sound. The Space Marines were fighting the dead.

Galt watched from behind a fallen spar. The roaring of flames from the adjoining room had become louder, punctuated by the crashing of falling chunks of wraithbone. He had to end this now. He waited until the wraithguard were facing away from him, ready to exploit their poor reactions.

‘For Honourum! For Corvo! For the Oath!’ he cried, and ran full tilt at the eldar machines. He slammed into one, jarring his own body. It staggered back from the force of his impact. The second registered his presence, and brought its deadly rifle to bear. The machines overtopped him by thirty centimetres or more, slender giants. Galt looked into the long, cold face of the thing’s helmet. His own was reflected in the gloss of its surface.

Galt swung his power sword with all his might, the crackling edge of it slamming into the bulbous end of the ghost warrior’s cannon. The strange alloys of it split. He stepped back and brought the sword down again, severing the end of the gun from the stock. The wraithguard dropped the shattered weapon, and made a clumsy lunge for him. He sidestepped, sweeping his sword around towards the leg of the first wraithguard, now recovered from Galt’s charge. The sword dug deep into the back of its knee. The construct rounded on him, gun coming towards his head. Galt wrenched at his power sword, the tug of it coming free sending him backwards. He regained his guard in time to stare right down the muzzle of the wraithguard’s gun.

And then Aster was there, followed by Gorfillio, advancing on the dais. Their guns spoke, and now the bolts buried themselves deep. Galt’s charge had bought the Sternguard time to change their magazines for those holding vengeance rounds, the unstable fusion cores of these bolts allowing them to penetrate the thick armour of the constructs. Even so, such was the density of the materials used to make the wraithguard that evidence for the explosions of the rounds within was but a splintering upon the surface.

The ghost machines did not react as living beings would. They were neither knocked back by the rounds nor did they convulse. They simply stopped; one remained standing, becoming the statue the Space Marines had originally taken it for, the fingers of one hand splayed to grab at Galt. The other folded in on itself and sank to the floor.

‘Thank you, my brothers,’ said Galt. He deactivated his sword, and went to retrieve his helmet. As he went he called up the embarkation deck flight control of Novum in Honourum. ‘This is Captain Galt,’ he said. ‘Immediate retrieval required. We are done here. Imperator vincit omnis. One casualty, Brother Verderio. Inform the infirmary and Chaplain Odon. We commend his soul to the Emperor.’

‘Brother-captain!’ called Aster. In his hand he held a jewel, similar to the one the captain had toyed with. ‘What shall we do with their stones? Should we keep them? They may be useful as bargaining chips in the future.’

Galt’s face hardened. Aster was being pragmatic. They knew enough of the eldar to understand how important their jewels were to them and their vile alien religion. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not deal with the alien. Crush them.’

The scene melted away, the essence of the action against the eldar even now being pinned to Galt’s flesh with needle and ink. He returned to the no-place between waking and dreams, and awaited judgement.

The rush and roar of air going into and out of his lungs became the crash of vast oceans. He felt a gentle tugging at his mind. Home called to him.

His actions were deemed worthy by the spirits of his departed brothers. Deep within his skull he felt a subtle shift as his gifts, the Hibernator and the Unsleeper, worked in concert to push him fully into the trance. He smelled bo-heather and cold, wet rock.

He opened his eyes. He was no longer in the tattooing chair within the Grand Chapel of Remembrance. The battle with the corsairs retreated once more into memory. Rough stone was beneath his bare feet, a wide vista before him. He stood upon a small balcony carved directly from the mountain, the cliff it projected from dropping to rocky plains riven with crevasses. To either side of the balcony an endless array of bastions, turrets, statues and galleried windows stretched away, chipped from the mountains by generations of Novamarines.

Galt was in the Fortress Novum, or rather he was within the Shadow Novum, the dream of the real place, although to invoke dream does not adequately convey what Galt experienced. It was as if he were there upon the ramparts, while his fleet sailed a thousand light years away from Honourum. He had not put into port there for many long years, and so he treasured his rare visits, even to this facsimile.

He marvelled at the veracity of his vision. He closed his eyes and breathed deep of the thin atmosphere, and he smiled at the chill of it on his lungs.

The fortress-monastery of the Novamarines was vast. It had never been completed. It was said it would only be finished when the last Novamarine had laid down his life in the service of mankind. Every victory saw a new hall hewn from the living stone, every dead brother a fresh shrine consecrated. After eight thousand years, the fortress-monastery occupied three-fifths of the Heavenward Mountains. No one, living or dead, was aware of its true extent, and its deepest halls contained mysteries beyond the knowledge of all but the Chapter Master himself.

Like men, so too do Chapters have their secrets.

There was no sound in this shadow of Novum beyond that provided by nature, and no brothers or their servants. Not living, at least. The Shadow Novum was the hall of the dead, home of the shades of Novamarines gone before, a place where guidance could be sought from the heroes of the past. Why else did the living carve ceaselessly at the mountains? The dead needed their barracks and armouries as much as the living, and their numbers grew with every passing year.

Galt leaned his hands upon the balustrade. The sky boiled with black cloud. Lightning lit it from within, making strange sculptures of the heavens. Green aurorae flared where the storm brushed the fortress-monastery’s void shields, a foretaste of the shifting patterns the defences spread across the stars when night fell. The monastery sculpted the world it occupied – tangible and intangible aspects both – as the world sculpted the men who became the brothers who resided within the monastery; a pleasing symmetry.

The sky was dark, but below the storm the land was bright. It was late afternoon, and Honourum’s young sun threw its rays under the attention of the tempest building around the mountains. Light painted the sculpted peaks and hard plains golden. Honourum was a harsh but beautiful world, a world of painter’s light and its contrasts. Galt stared at the horizon, letting the sun and the wind refresh his soul.

He had not been home for so long.

Galt waited. He must be patient. The storm drew blackness over the sky, the slot of sky the sun shone through narrowed. Thunder rumbled. Fat spots of rain speckled Galt’s robes, sleet quickly followed, cutting slanted lines through the air. He watched crystals of ice melt on the warmth of his skin.

A movement behind him, more than the wind.

His guide had arrived, a hero drawn from the halls of the dead to this halfway place to aid him; the boon of the tattooing ritual.

Galt turned. A figure stood in the doorway leading out onto the balcony. Like him he wore a bone-coloured habit, a deep-blue tabard hanging down the front displaying the Chapter badge: a skull surrounded by a stylised starburst. A silver sash embroidered with many campaign markings, the honours of a Deathwatch kill-team veteran, crossed the brother’s chest. This gave Galt a start, he knew that sash. He knew it too well. He prayed it was mere coincidence; the Novamarines were an old Chapter, it was not impossible two brothers separated by millennia could have won identical badges.

Not impossible, he thought, but unlikely.

‘Brother, what aid may the dead grant the living?’ said the figure, and Galt’s heart chilled. The voice was as familiar to him as his own. The figure stepped forward, pulling back his hood as he did so.

Galt frowned. It was as he had feared, the spirit wore the scarred face of Veteran-Sergeant Voldo, the man who had overseen Galt’s training as a neophyte and his creation as an initiate, the man who was as good as a father to him.

Voldo was heavily tattooed with scenes depicting important moments from his life. Some were crude and faded with time; those given to him centuries ago by his human family before he was chosen by the gods to live in the halls of the dead and fight for the Sky-Emperor. Some were Chapter icons. Others were full images, glorious in their colour and artistry. There was little room left upon Voldo’s skin for more. Every millimetre of his bald head was covered with marks of honour. They covered his neck, and crept from the sleeves of his robes to wrap delicately around each finger of his hands. As with all of the brothers, the Chapter badge was tattooed upon his forehead. This was the first mark they received upon initiation, but in Voldo’s case each trough between the rays of the nova were filled with long-service studs, forming a secondary starburst of unyielding adamantium.

‘How can this be, brother?’ asked Galt. A complex mix of emotions troubled him, catching at his voice. ‘You live, I saw you not an hour ago.’

Voldo rested a hand on the balustrade and looked out over the plain. ‘The dead are not subject to the laws of time as are the living, lord captain. This place is eternal. Time has no meaning here. I died a long time ago. Or yesterday. Or tomorrow. It matters not. We are all here, all the brothers past and all the brothers yet to be. You are here, as am I. Tell me, are you living, or are you dead? Do you know yourself?’

Galt started to say something, but thought better of it. He fought to regain his poise. It was not wise to query the dead too closely. What was not openly displayed by the flesh art was not for other men to know. And so he too turned to the stony plains of Honourum, unreal and empty below him. Far away, a lone figure struggled across the broken stone pavements, fleeing the storm. He went up and down the peaks and ridges of the rock, as small and insignificant as an ant.

Galt watched the man’s progress a while before speaking. ‘I am troubled by this. Honourum is illuminated as if the sun shines strong, and yet black storms wrack the sky. What does it mean?’

Voldo ran a hand over his head and smiled wryly. ‘You know our world, boy – storm and chill and golden light.’ No other would address Captain Galt with such familiarity. No one else had the right.

‘Not in the dream-place, not together, not like this.’

Voldo put his other hand on the balustrade and leaned fully on it. His robe fell away from his straightened arms, revealing more tattoos. Here an ork died, there a city celebrated liberation; moments in time captured in ink on flesh. ‘Light and dark struggle together, First Captain. This is what the storm represents.’

‘Who prevails?’

Lightning cracked. The void shields flared purple and green; oil on troubled waters.

‘Our kin down there will say the gods are fighting,’ said Voldo, nodding at the man in the distance. He had made his way to the edge of the plains of crazed stone, and was ascending a spur in the mountain carved into a lunging aquila. One head of the eagle looked down at the figure with an expression of avarice; the other looked away in dismay. Galt did not recognise the statue, but that was nothing strange. The geography of the Shadow Novum was not entirely the same as that of the real.

‘They also say the Fortress Novum is the kingdom of the dead,’ said Galt. ‘They do not think of us as alive at all.’

‘And they are right. Do you not seek counsel of the dead? The physical Novum stands upon Honourum, but you stand here. Which is the phantom? All men inducted to the Chapter die in the service of mankind, only time stands between life and death, and time is nothing at all. You will know yourself, soon enough.’

‘You speak like Reclusiarch Mortiar.’

Voldo gave a gruff laugh, a single sound, quickly gone. ‘I am dead. I am entitled to. Ask him, he too resides in these halls. All reside here.’

‘Do I?’

Voldo did not answer directly, he shifted, scanning the horizon. ‘Listen to what I say, lord captain.’

Galt tried to remain impassive. Seeing the living Voldo as the honoured dead could betoken nothing good, but to show concern in the presence of his shade would be inexcusable. ‘You have not answered my question, Brother Voldo, as is your duty as the honoured dead. Favour your living brother, who will prevail in this age-old contest. Light or dark?’

Voldo gave a small smile, almost imperceptible. The same smile Galt remembered so well from the moment of his choosing at the end of the Contest of Fire, and later from his time as a novitiate, serving in Voldo’s Scout squad in the Tenth, the same smile he had seen on Voldo’s living flesh that very morning.

‘Who said they were fighting with each other, First Captain? Difficult times are ahead. Be wary.’

‘And the figure, the tribesman who flees the storm? Why does he climb? What does he signify?’

‘Who told you he was of the tribes, or that he runs from the storm?’

Lightning blasted at the void shields directly, its discharge rushed across energy shields in splintering branches. Thunder boomed, the void shields crackled as loud as gunfire reply.

With a jolt, Galt left the Shadow Novum. His vision-quest was done; abruptly, without warning, as was always the way.

The quiet songs of the Reclusiam serfs standing in a circle about the couch welcomed him back. Galt’s eyes opened. The air was dry and still. The couch vibrated slightly with the ship’s reactor.

‘The ritual is complete, my lord. My work is done.’ The auto-artisan withdrew its needles from Galt’s shoulder. The auto-artisan had once been a man. What remained of it was barely human. One arm had been replaced by a jointed metal prosthetic which, in place of a hand, carried a drum mounted with dozens of fine needles and jars of pigment. It had no legs, its torso being affixed to a gimballed arm that allowed it to move around the tattooing couch in the Sanctuary of Marking. Where the serf’s other arm had been, the robe was sleeveless.

‘A fine piece to commemorate a grand deed,’ the auto-artisan croaked. Its voice was weak, unaccustomed to use.

Galt flexed his arm and craned his neck to look upon the artwork. Dots of blood oozed from the microscopic holes the needles left. They clotted rapidly, the effect of the Larraman cells, another of his Space Marine gifts. The skin was red, irritated by the tattooing, but Galt could see how it would look once he had healed. The new art depicted him with his bolter upraised, the corpses of eldar reavers and their strange battle-machines about his feet.

‘A good addition,’ he said. ‘I thank you.’

‘I am glad it pleases you. Thanks are not necessary. You do your duty, lord, and I do mine.’ The auto-artisan bowed its head and crossed its arm over its chest. The gimbal withdrew, pulling the half-man back into the alcove where it resided in hibernation between the times its services were needed. Somewhere upon its body would be the tattoo that told how it had come to be this way, how a young aspirant to the plate of the Novamarines had become nameless, wizened flesh trapped by metal.

Cold gasses engulfed it. The alcove door slid shut.

Chaplain Odon, spiritual leader of Galt’s company and lord of the Grand Chapel of Remembrance, stepped into view. He grasped Galt’s newly marked shoulder and made a noise of approval. ‘A good likeness, brother-captain, it augurs well. Surely this image alone will swell the Emperor’s heart with pride when the time comes for him to judge the tally of your deeds.’

‘By the marks upon thee, shall he know thee,’ said Galt.

‘And so judge the iron of a brother’s soul,’ responded Odon.

Galt sat up and faced the Chaplain. Odon’s robes were black and he was hooded, the skull tattooed over the features of his face only just visible in the candlelight of the chapel.

‘Your dreams, did they bring you anything, brother-captain? Did the honoured dead speak to you of victory?’

Galt was silent.

‘You are troubled, brother. Unburden yourself.’

‘Tell me, Chaplain, what does it portend when the living appear within the Shadow Novum?’

Odon’s face became thoughtful, causing the skull to move as if it had a life of its own, a face upon a face. ‘This man, he is among us?’

‘Yes. It was–’

Odon laid a hand on the First Captain’s shoulder. ‘No brother, do not speak his name, not to me nor to anyone else, and especially not to him. Time is meaningless in the place beyond. The ancestor-grounds of the Shadow Novum are populated by all those who have died, and will yet die. For the living to see one there who still breathes is unusual, but no cause for alarm. Indeed, for the shade of a man who still lives to seek out a supplicant is a sign of great honour. You should be proud, brother-captain.’

Galt nodded hesitantly. ‘Yes, Brother-Chaplain. It is an omen of ill-fortune for the man who will become the shade, is it not?’

Odon made a noise of affirmation. ‘Death is soon to come for the brother whose phantom so shows itself. It is best the living brother not know of the closeness of his shade, no matter that his presence in the Shadow Novum tells us his soul is safe.’

‘Chaplain, there was something else.’

‘Yes brother-captain?’

‘A great storm raged in the heavens, although the land below was bright. At first the two – light and dark – seemed to fight, but the shade told me this was not so. A man fled across the Plain of Judgement before the western face of Fortress Novum and ascended Mount Bordon, in my vision carved into the likeness of the aquila. What does it portend?’

‘You saw another figure?’

‘Far in the distance. A tribesman perhaps.’

‘Troubling,’ said Odon. He frowned, although the skull superimposed on his features continued its eternal grin. ‘I will think on it. There are forces at play around us at all times that we cannot understand. Nor should we try to. Such understanding is the gift of the Emperor alone, for he sits in the doorway between the worlds of the living and dead. It is not for we, the children of his children, to contemplate. Still…’ Odon paused. His grey eyes narrowed in the tattooed sockets of his second skull.

A quiet fanfare interrupted them, an all-ship vox announcement followed. ‘Brothers and servants of the Novamarines, hearken! All attend your duty. Prepare for real space translation.’

A countdown commenced, the culmination of three days’ preparation to leave the warp. Galt and Odon waited for it to reach zero.

The battle-barge’s reactor built to a terrific howl. Warp engines pulsed with arcane forces that sent shudders rippling through the ancient vessel’s fabric. The lights flickered as all power was diverted to the bracing fields that helped hold the craft’s enormous mass together. A strange sensation settled over Galt, a feeling of impermanence, as if he were only the possibility of Mantillio Galt, and not the actuality of him; a ghost of himself. Coming so soon after seeing the shade of the still-living Voldo, this was an unsettling sensation.

The feeling ceased. Galt was who he was, real and flesh, a servant of mankind and the Emperor unto death. The thrum of millions of tons of plasteel under his feet grounded him in reality even as the vessel hung precipitously on the cusp of non-existence. Galt’s faith in the ancient ship calmed him.

The ship quaked, and was still.

‘Rejoice, brethren! Geller fields deactivated. Safe translation to real space accomplished,’ the ship-wide vox said.

‘We have arrived then, and in good time. Shall I accompany you to the bridge?’ said Odon.

‘Yes, Brother-Chaplain.’ Galt stood and pulled on his habit, covering his coloured flesh. As their fortress home was never finished, so the flesh art was never done, not until a brother fell in battle and the record of his achievements was buried with him. Galt called out his signifex code, engaging a vox in the ears of a nearby statue of an angel. ‘Captain Galt orders Captains Mastrik and Aresti, Epistolary Ranial, and Master of the Forge Clastrin to the bridge.’

Odon smiled, his second skull spreading wider its own awful grin. ‘I do not know why you call Forgemaster Clastrin, brother. Where else would he be today, when there is treasure in the stars?’

Galt smiled and gave a quiet grunt of affirmation. ‘You are right. Let us go. I don’t want Mastrik getting impatient and ordering the ship forward before I get there.’

The chorus of Reclusiam serfs around the couch, gold-masked and dressed in bone-and-blue, dipped their heads as Galt stood. Their circle parted to let the captain and the Chaplain through. As they left the sanctuary and entered the main body of Novum in Honourum’s Grand Chapel, Galt’s serf aides Artermin and Holstak stood up from the pews where they had been praying and fell in behind him, their ship’s uniforms emblazoned with the Chapter heraldry. They were not weaklings, these lesser men, but vigorous starfarers. Nevertheless, Galt and Odon towered over them. Six black-clad servitor-worshippers detached themselves from alcoves in the walls, and fell in behind.

‘We have arrived,’ Galt said to the men, ‘and I would look upon our foe.’

On the way out of the chapel, the party turned and bowed as one to the statue of Lucretius Corvo, founder of their Chapter, which stood five times life-size by the soaring doors.

Odon led them in a request for guidance. Not as an ecclesiarch would beseech the Emperor, but as a respectful officer asking advice of a much-loved leader. They were all brothers after all, even if long millennia separated their births.

They left the chapel to its serfs. Their songs continued, gentle as the breeze that blew unceasingly over Honourum’s stony plains.

CHAPTER 2

BROTHERS IN ARMS

‘First Captain on the bridge!’

Galt stepped onto the bridge of the battle-barge. Chapter serfs and full brothers alike snapped to attention. Servitors, oblivious to his rank, went about their ponderous business. A fragment of flesh half-hidden in a web of cybernetic command and life-support cables turned to the door – the remains of a brother. The entirety of the machine he occupied rotated with him.

‘Brother-Captain Galt, we have arrived in-system.’

‘Brother-Captain Persimmon, how goes it?’

‘A smooth translation, Novum in Honourum serves us faithfully as always.’

Persimmon was a wreck of a man, crippled in battle by a vicious xenos species never encountered before or since. Neurotoxins had destroyed his limbs and much of his musculature. Only chance had brought him to the Novum in Honourum’s infirmary and not delivered the bolt of the Emperor’s Grace. The Apothecaries had been ready to send his soul to the Shadow Novum, where he would await the final call to battle from the Emperor. Yet he had lived, clawing his way back from the dead with his single, bloodied hand. Somehow, his body had healed itself enough to remain viable, and so he had also escaped the sarcophagus of a Dreadnought.

Unfit for combat duty, Persimmon had been invested as the Chapter’s Master of the Fleet and installed directly into the bridge of the Novum in Honourum. Technically Novum was Galt’s command, but Persimmon was the true captain of the ship, body and soul. Already noted for his great acumen in naval engagements, his skill had only grown after his injury and subsequent bonding with the vessel. In many respects he was Novum in Honourum.

Persimmon’s cradle occupied the space where the command throne of the battle-barge had once been. A Shiplord’s Seat had been installed to one side of the cybernetic captain; this was Galt’s place, but he walked past it to stand on the walkway over the operations pits and their many-tiered rows of servitor drones, wired in as Persimmon was directly to the ship, before the broad windows of the bridge.

Others of the officer clade of the Chapter were there. Clastrin, Master of the Forge, worked busily, surrounded by human serfs and servitors, and aided by two Techmarines. He, unlike the other Space Marines present, wore his power armour. It was as red as rust, only his right shoulder pad bearing the bone-and-blue colours and badge of the Chapter. Tentacles of metal darted out from the harness upon his back, working controls. Chitters from his augmitter of rapid binaric, the tech-speak of the priesthood of Mars, compelled both his own cyborgs and the bridge servitors to greater efforts. His helmet was off, and his face, marked by strange tattoos that owed more to the Omnissiah than the traditions of Honourum, was tense with anticipation.

Captain Lutil Mastrik and Epistolary Ranial stood side by side on the walkway in front of the windows; Mastrik animated as always, Ranial distracted. Odon and Galt’s retinue dispersed, and the captain and Chaplain joined the Librarian and Mastrik.

Galt looked to the main window, its armourglass covered by external and internal blast shielding.

‘You waited for me, brother?’ he said.

‘I was sorely tempted not to,’ said Mastrik.

‘Brother-Captain Aresti?’ said Galt.

‘En route from Corvo’s Hammer, brother-captain,’ said Mastrik. ‘He is late as usual.’

‘Our brother has problems that require his attention,’ said Clastrin. His words were doubled, his organic voice overlaid by a melodious second projected by a vox-emitter. The two spoke with simultaneous disapproval.

‘Shall I engage the chartdesk, brother-captain?’ asked Persimmon. ‘We have good pict captures of the hulk already.’ Persimmon indicated the black glass bed of the chartdesk, eight by eight metres, situated in front of his throne. ‘Forgemaster Clastrin has excelled himself today.’

Galt shook his head. ‘Open the blast shields, I wish to see the hulk with my own eyes first. Let us get a feeling for our battleground, before we lose ourselves in the detail of it.’

A chorus of grinding servitor voices spoke as one. ‘Compliance.’

‘You paraphrase Guilliman, brother’ said Mastrik. ‘The wisdom of the Codex is never far from your lips.’

‘As it should not be far from your own, brother,’ said Galt mildly.

Motors whirred, pulling up the shutters on both sides of the window. Immediately the bridge was flooded with harsh, blue light. Galt shielded his eyes.

‘Dim windows, ninety-eight per cent,’ shouted Clastrin.

‘Compliance.’

At the servitors’ unspoken commands, the machine-spirits of the bridge exerted their influence on the glass, darkening it. Galt dropped his hand to his side.

The shutters clanged into their housings, revealing a window that ran the entire width of the bridge. Ten metres tall, and many times wider than that, the window filled the whole of the forward section’s wall. The armourglass was framed by heavy mullions, each tall support cast in the likeness of a Chapter hero. The edges of the window were stained, tiny panes set in a labyrinth of metal incised with the names of the glorious dead, displaying in a long, colourful ribbon of pictures the story of the Chapter’s founding nearly eight thousand years ago.

A bright blue sun occupied most of the view. The ship was close enough that the men aboard could see flares ejected from its churning surface, the top and bottom of the star cut off by the window. The light was raw, dangerous despite the windows’ protective dimming, bleaching out the subtle colours of the stained glass. There were no planets around Jorso, it was too violent a star for fatherhood. Its searing light had blasted the dusty stuff of its offspring into interstellar space before they had had a chance to coalesce.

Against the sun, the other ships in Galt’s fleet were silhouettes both small and insignificant. He recognised them all from their shapes, they were as familiar to him as children are to their fathers. Two strike cruisers and four escorts. One caused Galt concern. Corvo’s Hammer sparkled with vented plasma, the price of victory in their last engagement.

A curling plume of blue flame burst from the sun. Far more than a ball of gas it seemed, but a great, ravening animal. How could something that writhed so not live?

‘The hulk will pass between our orbit and the star soon brother-captain,’ said Persimmon.

‘In five, four,’ began one of the serfs, ‘three, two, one…’

‘I see it.’ Galt breathed the words.

A vast black shape slid across the boiling blue surface of Jorso.

‘Bring detail views up on the main chartdesk. Compensate for stellar luminosity,’ said Persimmon.

‘Yes, lord captain,’ said a serf officer. Commands were issued to the relevant servitors and by them relayed to the machine-spirits which inhabited the ship’s systems. The bridge filled with machine noise as affirmations of compliance ground out from uncaring throats.

The chartdesk shimmered. Bands of light resolved themselves into a holographic image of the space hulk in front of Persimmon’s throne-cradle.

‘Corvo’s oath,’ murmured Galt. His hand went to the Chapter pendant that hung about his neck.

‘First Captain,’ said Persimmon. ‘I present the space hulk Death of Integrity, our target.’

Even against the immensity of the growling sun, the hulk designated Death of Integrity appeared huge, an agglomeration of vessels and cosmic flotsam tossed together by the shifting tides of the empyrean. Novum in Honourum was a battle-barge, one of the greatest vessels the Imperium could command, but she was a toy in comparison. The hulk presented itself as a broken ornament the size of a small moon, its surface a bewildering mosaic of protrusions. Ship prows, engine units, nacelles, crumpled cargo barges, the smooth lines of xenos craft, pocked half-mountains of asteroids and the ice spires of comets projected chaotically from its surface. Many of the elements that made up the hulk were forged by thinking creatures, men or otherwise, but its shipwright was the warp, and that had little respect for the physics of real space.

Servitors growled and chirruped in binaric, half-formed words in standard Gothic slipping drool-slicked from their mouths. Not for the first time, Galt wondered if any awareness remained in their wiped minds.

One of the serf-officers overseeing the augur arrays spoke. ‘Mass, thirty-seven point nine trillion tonnes, albedo point eight-seven, gravitic displacement…’

He went on, describing the physical qualities of the hulk. Portions of the holograph representing the vessel winked bright green as another officer identified component parts, a gridded funnel came into being around it, depicting its weak gravity field, other icons and graphical demonstrations of mass and potentially active power sources blinked up one after another, cluttering the air of the bridge with informatics.

The serf overseeing the augur array had a face half of metal, a slatted round covering one eye. When he spoke, it was with the emotionless burr of a vox-grille.

‘Estimated composition, three hundred and seventy vessels, of which fifty-three per cent class gamma or lower, twenty-four per cent class beta, eighteen per cent class alpha. Remainder unknown. All best estimates. Certainty impossible.’

‘That,’ Galt pointed at a part of the hologram. ‘That is an Imperial warship, heavy cruiser, Avenger-class?’

‘Indeed, brother-captain. One of several.’ Clastrin said in his twin voices, his ordinary reserve swept aside by excitement at the hulk. ‘All ages, many patterns.’

‘A rich prize then, when we are victorious,’ said Mastrik, a broad grin across his face. ‘We had best send a message to your friends on Mars, Forgemaster, so they may pick the carcass clean.’

‘Archeotech is valuable to all who live under the Emperor’s protection, brother. I urge you to curb your flippancy. Respect is the appropriate response to this gift from the Omnissiah.’

Galt turned slightly, his gaze moving from the windows to the chartdesk holo.

‘The core? What lies at its centre?’

‘Unknown,’ replied the serf.

‘There is a great deal of stellar interference, First Captain,’ said Clastrin. ‘Our augurs do not function well in this close proximity to a star of Jorso’s class. We have detected several large, unstable sources of radioactivity within the hulk also, and these further cloud the eyes of Novum in Honourum. Deep augur scans are impossible.’

‘Any indication of the xenos threat? Where do they lair?’

‘None, First Captain, not by machine means, at least. It is impossible to say at this time.’

‘Epistolary Ranial? What does the Librarium say?’

‘It is as the request maintained, First Captain. Psychic activity is indicative of genestealer infestation.’

‘That is a very large hulk, Brother-Epistolary,’ said Galt.

‘And there are a great many genestealers aboard it, brother-captain,’ said Ranial drily.

‘We shall have to see then, what our cousins say,’ said Galt. ‘Any news on their fleet?’

‘None, lord captain,’ spoke the chief augur-serf. ‘We cannot pinpoint them against this background of interference, but I expect contact soon.’

The clanging of power armour boots on deck-plating rang out as Captain Aresti hurried onto the bridge. He wore his armour, the bone-and-blue quartered heraldry of the Novamarines still scarred from their last battle. His tattooed face was bare, his helmet tucked under his arm.

‘My apologies, brothers.’

‘You are experiencing difficulty, I take it?’ said Galt. ‘Corvo’s Hammer bleeds. I thought the main drive repaired.’

Aresti shook his head. ‘We are down to only one containment unit, brother-captain. Two destroyed and one damaged. The one the Forgemaster repaired ruptured as we exited the empyrean. We were fortunate that it held so long.’

‘The damage is great, First Captain,’ said Clastrin. ‘My Techmarines labour through all the watches. I myself will attend and personally implore the machine-spirits within to hold fast to life, but I fear Corvo’s Hammer will not survive another voyage through the immaterium. The vessel requires full dry dock facilities if it is to recover.’

‘And they are in short supply here,’ said Ranial.

Mastrik gave a gentle laugh. ‘That they are, brother.’

‘The potential loss of a strike cruiser is no matter for levity, brothers!’ protested Clastrin. His artful electronic voice strained with annoyance.

‘My apologies,’ said Mastrik. ‘“All is but dust in motion”,’ he added, quoting the script of Corvo. ‘And yet I think you will no doubt find a way to keep the dust of Corvo’s Hammer together a little while longer. Perhaps our new friends will aid you?’

‘Where are they?’ asked Aresti. ‘Our deep augurs are beyond use. Corvo’s Hammer is as good as blind.’

Galt shook his head, and lifted his pendant to his lips. He kissed the jet icon absent-mindedly, and let it fall.

‘If they were working, you’d still be as blind as the rest of us are, brother,’ said Mastrik.

‘I have them, lord captains,’ a serf spoke. ‘Tightbeam transmission coming in now.’

The chartdesk flickered, bands of colour rippled, and the light-model of the Death of Integrity vanished like a broken reflection. In its place appeared the shoulders and head of another adept, a genetically altered Space Marine like the brothers of the Novamarines, but subtly different. His face was impossibly beautiful, his black hair shoulder length and scraped back from his forehead. He wore ornate plate of red and gold, as if ready to march into battle. The image crackled violently, the sound buzzed.

‘Stabilise the image, compensate for stellar wind,’ ordered Clastrin.

The image shook and became a little clearer, although it shivered and popped constantly.

‘I extend the greeting of brotherhood to the Novamarines,’ intoned the figure.

‘It is gladly accepted, and returned twofold.’ Galt stepped closer to the projection. ‘We have heard and accepted your call for aid, as detailed in the Covenants of Trust. Brother hears the call of brother and responds. I am Captain Mantillio Galt of the Novamarines First Company, Master of the Watch and commander of Battlefleet Trident. How may we be of assistance?’

‘I, Chapter Master Caedis, Lord of San Guisiga and of the Blood Drinkers Chapter, thank you for your response. Might I suggest we meet face to face and discuss the matter at hand?’

Galt dipped his head. ‘Naturally. As you have done us the honour of inviting us to battle, I extend the hospitality of Novum in Honourum to you and yours in return.’

Caedis bowed his own head. ‘The Blood Drinkers thank you brothers. We shall attend you shortly. In five hours time?’

‘We shall bring our fleets together, cousin Blood Drinker, and thence parlay.’

‘That is agreeable. Wings of Sanguinius shield you.’

The holo winked out.

‘Brother-Captain Persimmon,’ Galt called, ‘rendezvous with the Blood Drinkers fleet. Brother-Captain Artermin, rouse Major-domo Polanczek. I will not have our brethren think us misers. They are honoured brothers, and should be entertained as such.’ He looked to the other captains. ‘And now, brothers, how do we greet these sons of Sanguinius? As brothers of peace, or prepared for war?’

‘In plate, brother-captain. It sends a certain message,’ said Ranial. ‘We wish for them to think us ready. Warriors, not aesthetics, although we are both, we should show our steel to our allies, as their master has shown us his.’

The others nodded their assent.

In the furious glare of Jorso, two fleets drifted. Their colours were distorted by the harsh cyan light of the star, making one set of vessels black as old blood, the other two clashing shades of blue. Spotlights and landing beacons illuminated portions of the crafts’ hulls with cleaner light, and here one could see that one fleet was a bright and threatening red, the other ivory, with portions of the vessels picked out in sombre blue. The two largest craft hung side by side in the vacuum, thrusters occasionally flaring as they fired to maintain the ship’s positions; battle-barges, both immense. Towards the stern they rose in stepped decks, as massive as mountains. Long, narrow hulls studded with hangars and drop pod launch bays thrust forward like proud necks, growing wide at their heavily shielded bows. At the prow armour was held out either side on stanchions, emblazoned with the marks of their respective Chapters. A stylised chalice below a suspended blood drop upon one, a skull surrounded by a starburst on the other. Upon the bridge of the bone-and-blue vessel the name Novum in Honourum was inscribed. The bow plating of the red vessel bore the legend Lux Rubrum.

They were similar yet different, these vessels. Lux Rubrum’s upper decks flared more fully than Novum’s, its decoration was more elaborate. A statue of an armoured angel stood upon the highest point, sword upraised, adding fifty metres to the ship’s height. A chalice hung from the angel’s other hand, spilling drips of metal, as if it were blood frozen solid in the chill of the vacuum. Novum was a hundred metres longer, its prow plating thinner, its figurehead a modest aquila set to the fore of the command section. Starbursts of gleaming adamantium were set over the eagle’s eyes, a skull on a chain about its neck. Sisters, then, not twins, these mighty fortresses of the stars.

A flash of light winked halfway along the port side of Lux Rubrum. A half-second afterwards a small shape glimmered in the hard shine of Jorso: a ship, propelled by a blade of flame, navigation lights blinking. It crossed the space between the battle-barges rapidly, slowing only slightly as it entered a docking bay in the starboard of Novum in Honourum.

Lord Caedis of the Blood Drinkers went to enjoy the hospitality of the Novamarines.

The Thunderhawk’s turbines roared as it came in from the launch tube to hangar 73. It slowed to a hover, turning side-on to the tube as it did so. Heated air blew in all directions, causing the robes, banners and scrips of the Novamarines welcome guard to snap violently. Motors whined, deploying landing gear, secondary wings went up, and the ship touched down, sinking into the hydraulics of its claws.

The deep red of the Blood Drinkers Thunderhawk was shocking in the muted colour of the Novamarines landing bay. Like a wound, or a cancer, an alien body alike and yet unlike to that which encompassed it. This contrast carried the imputation of inimicality, and Galt was perturbed by that.

The Thunderhawk engines’ crescendo dwindled swiftly, humming to a stop. The smaller noises of the hangar took their place; the leaden clump of servitors as they dragged cables and refuelling lines to the craft, the three blaring notes of the all clear klaxon. The metal of the Thunderhawk creaked. Two of the Novamarines’ own Thunderhawks sat on mobile pads to the rear of the launch bay, their bone-and-blue sombre in comparison to the Blood Drinkers’ vivid livery.

Galt, Odon, Mastrik, Aresti, Ranial, and Clastrin waited by the hangar bay’s doors in their full armour, bareheaded. A pair of serfs in Chapter colours attended each, dwarfed by the helmets and weapons they carried for their masters.

The standard bearers of the Third, Fifth and First Companies stood behind them, silver-helmeted veterans carrying elaborate and ancient flags. Two files of Novamarines stood to attention, veterans also, flanking the standard bearers, four honour guard at their head. The fleet’s Master of Astropaths, a fleshy man by the name of Feldiol, stood with them, as did several of the higher ranking Chapter serfs; even Lord Navigator Gulfindan Van Heem had come down from his lofty perch atop the Novum in Honourum, looking uncomfortable out of his low-gravity apartments. His witch eye twitched behind its lid in the centre of his forehead.

Long seconds passed.

‘Are they disembarking, or not?’ grumbled Mastrik.

‘Patience, brother,’ said Ranial.

There was the muted click of mag-locks disengaging, and the Thunderhawk’s assault ramp opened. Gases hissed outward, bringing with them strange scents. The air of the Novum in Honourum was dry and flavourless, reminiscent of the thin atmosphere of the Chapter home world; that coming from the Thunderhawk was rich with perfume and the smell of copper and iron.

The ramp lowered to the floor of the landing bay, red light spilled outward.

The Blood Angels disembarked.

Galt had studied all he could on the Blood Drinkers while the fleet was in transit, but the data in their Librarium was old, the Novamarines having had few dealings with the other Chapter. The personnel detailed in the Librarium records were all long dead, and Galt did not recognise the five Space Marines who stepped out from the Thunderhawk alongside Chapter Master Caedis. Their markings made it apparent what ranks they held. There was their Chief Apothecary, the Chapter Reclusiarch, an Epistolary, and a captain who wore the black shoulder rims of the Fifth Company. The sixth Blood Drinker was a veteran who stopped by the door to the Thunderhawk to unsling a tube from his back, from which he produced the Chapter’s rolled banner. He fitted his standard poles together quietly, raised the Blood Drinkers flag high, and fell in behind the officers.

All wore markings and badges exactly as laid down in the Codex Astartes, and this Galt approved of. Guilliman’s wisdom was not to be ignored. One might argue that the precise form of a campaign badge mattered little, but Galt thought this an ill-thought opinion. The Codex Astartes was a system, all parts of it interlocked to create a perfect doctrine of war and being. Those who strayed from Guilliman’s tenets were foolhardy, no matter how small the deviation.

The Blood Drinkers armour was richly decorated, incorporating badges and personal heraldry rendered in relief. All well within the Codex’s precepts, but to the more ostentatious end of what was advised. Caedis’s armour was chased in gold, a heavy fur cloak was held to the front of his shoulder pads by large, circular brooches, partly obscuring his plate’s markings. Like Galt’s men, Caedis’s followers were bareheaded. They carried their own helms. No serfs attended them.

The Blood Drinkers were exceptional specimens, even for the Adeptus Astartes. It was said that their primarch, Sanguinius, had been of unnatural beauty, and that all his sons bore an echo of his physical perfection, whether of the Blood Angels or their successors. Galt was taken aback by the poise and fineness of these men’s features; they were angels made flesh, so close to perfection they made Galt feel graceless. Only close to perfection, however. There was something about them that fell short; some indiscernible flaw. It was not until Caedis and his brethren drew closer that Galt could see that their skin and hair appeared dry, desiccated almost, the flesh of their faces grainy as if carved from moistureless stone.

‘I bid you welcome to the battle-barge Novum in Honourum, Lord Chapter Master Caedis,’ said Galt. ‘In the name of brotherhood, I give you its freedom. If you require anything of the Novamarines, lord, you have but to ask.’ He dipped his head, and clenched his fist over his heart in salute. He then held out his right hand. Caedis reached his own out, and they grasped each others’ forearms in the warrior’s clasp, bone armour to blood.

‘The sons of Sanguinius hail you, sons of Roboute Guilliman,’ replied Caedis. ‘As our primarchs were brothers, let us be brothers also.’

‘We shall fight together, side by side.’

‘And I welcome it.’ Caedis’s dry lips curved into a smile. He spoke well, with something of an aristocratic hauteur. Galt sensed a luxury at odds with the simple aestheticism of the Novamarines. Caedis had very white teeth, and somewhat long canines. Galt found these physical and cultural differences unremarkable. All the Chapters differed a little, those that followed the Codex Astartes closely also. He thanked Corvo silently in his mind that his Chapter was lucky enough to be of the purer sort, descended from the Ultramarines themselves, first among all the Chapters of the Imperium.

The greeting done, the two groups relaxed. ‘Captain, may I present to you my chief aides?’ said Caedis. ‘Reclusiarch Mazrael, spiritual leader of our order, Epistolary Guinian, and Sanguinary Master Teale. Captain Sorael there leads the Fifth Company.’

Each of Space Marines bowed their heads in turn. Galt did not recognise the title of Sanguinary Master, given as that of the one he had taken to be Chief Apothecary.

‘Finally, Veteran-Brother Metrion,’ said Caedis, gesturing to his Chapter standard bearer. ‘Our Chapter Ancient.’

Galt responded, introducing his own men. ‘You see here Brother-Captain Lutil Mastrik of the Novamarines Third, and master of strike cruiser Ceaseless Vigilance. Captain Aresti commands our Fifth Company, and is master also of Corvo’s Hammer. Epistolary Ranial, Chaplain Odon and Master of the Forge Clastrin make up the others of the senior initiates you see here. Master of Astropaths Feldiol, Fleet Chief Lord Navigator Gulfindan Van Heem of House Meld, and my principal serf aides Artermin and Holstak. Finally, Major-domo Polanczek. Should you require anything while you are here, please direct your requests to him.’

‘Anything at all, my lords,’ said Polanczek with a deep bow. He looked behind the blood-red warriors quizzically. ‘You have brought no servants, no Chapter serfs in attendance?’

Caedis essayed his slow smile again. ‘No, major-domo, we have not.’

‘Then I shall assign men to you for your stay, my lord.’ He clapped his hands, and serfs dressed in the livery of the Novamarines stepped forward briskly. ‘Come, we have refreshments awaiting you.’

‘We thank you,’ said Caedis. ‘I am sure the others are as thirsty as I.’

The banquet took place in Galt’s quarters. Diplomacy was a part of the art of war, Guilliman himself had written, and thus the master of the ship’s dwelling space incorporated audience rooms and the like. Galt’s personal rooms were spartan, in keeping with the temper of his Chapter. In contrast the Hall of Welcome where the Novamarines entertained the Blood Drinkers was lavishly appointed. Friezes of the deeds of Lucretius Corvo, founder of the Novamarines, filled every wall. The ceiling sported twin domes, both filled edge to edge with cunning trompe l’oeil. The one above the feasting Space Marines depicted an allegorical interpretation of the Emperor’s ascension. Clad in golden armour, the Lord of Mankind reached up to the sky pointing to where, upon a cloud, a golden throne shot out rays of light, his other hand reached for outstretched hands rising below him, showing his reluctance to leave the mortal world. Winged vat-children of the Adeptus Mechanicus hurried his ascent. His down-turned face was full of authority and regret. The dome nearer the door showed Roboute Guilliman – primarch of the Ultramarines, and through their descent from the Ultramarines, also of the Novamarines. The image depicted him as a thinker, at work in his cell on the Codex Astartes while generals and lords of all kinds waited in animated discussion for his wisdom to be delivered.

Caedis sat in the place of honour to Galt’s right. Care had been made by Major-domo Polanczek to assure the visiting Chapter Master’s high rank was recognised, so although his throne was on an exact level with Galt’s, it was far more heavily decorated.

‘We were beginning to lose hope,’ Caedis was saying. Despite his protestations of thirst, he ate and drank sparingly of the dishes laid before him. ‘We have been tracking the Death of Integrity for nearly three decades, following a trail of infested worlds, always one step behind. Our astrometric data presented us with a pattern that our Master of the Forge was able to untangle somewhat, giving us projected destinations and worlds under threat.’ He sighed, and pushed at the meat on his plate with a silver fork. ‘But we were always too late, arriving after the hulk had departed, and thus our frustrations grew. We were fortunate three months ago, when we were able to confront the creatures in their lair. Epistolary Guinian tore the mind-scent from the thoughts of their young. Only then could we follow the hulk with certainty through the warp, and predict where it would next emerge. I am greatly relieved we have caught it. The worlds we have cleansed thus far are of minor importance, but this is the hulk’s third appearance in proximity to Vol Secundus. A genestealer infestation within the hives there would have been disastrous, and sown the seeds of a greater contagion that perhaps only a crusade could have contained.’

‘Why has it manifested here?’ asked Galt. ‘Master Clastrin knows of nothing special about this star. It possesses only a moderate mass despite its luminosity, not enough to bend the fabric of real space sufficiently to aid the warp translation of such a hulk.’

‘Who knows?’ replied Caedis. He spoke softly, but his words cut through the conversation filling the air. ‘It is however the seventh star of such a class the Death of Integrity has emerged by.’ He waved his hand. ‘This sector is full of them, the young and the radiant.’ Caedis blinked. Even his eyes looked dry. Galt imagined he could hear the eyelids rasping over them. ‘We are close to the stellar nurseries of Gennak Minoris, the stars here were born not so long ago,’ he smiled. ‘At least, not by the reckoning of stars.’

‘Gennak Minoris is the outermost boundary of our patrol routes,’ said Galt. ‘You were lucky that we caught your astropathic plea.’

‘You go no further?’

Galt picked up a morsel of food from his plate and examined it before putting it into his mouth. He concentrated on the flavour, ignoring the wash of information the Emperor’s gifts fed him. ‘We swore eight thousand years ago to the Lord of Macragge to defend the Segmentum Ultima, body and soul, living or dead. Our business takes us far and wide, but does not often take us beyond segmentum bounds.’

‘And yet, were it not for your heraldry, I could be sitting with the warrior-kings of Ultramar themselves. So distant is that realm, but you maintain their culture as if it were your own.’

‘It is our own,’ said Galt with some force.

‘You are exiles then?’ said Caedis casually. His eyes followed a serf as he poured wine for the adepts. Galt frowned slightly at the look in the Chapter Master’s eyes. There was something predatory about it.

‘We are not. We are guardians of the Imperium, and loyal sons of Ultramar. We do our duty gladly.’

‘So it would seem.’ Caedis paused, considering whether or not to say whatever was on his mind. ‘Excepting your tattoos,’ he said.

Galt’s hand strayed to his cheek. ‘A custom of Honourum, and one of the few of our home world we retain after induction as novitiate Scouts. This way we honour those who birthed us, as we honour the heritage of Ultramar in all else we do.’

‘All are the customs of pure men. Who is to judge one higher than the other?’

‘Honourum’s tribes are primitive in the extreme,’ said Galt. ‘Theirs is a harsh existence. Honourum is a bare world.’

‘Primitivism embraces purity of heart and of mind. You hold the sophisticated ways of Ultramar above those of your parents?’

‘They are self-evidently superior,’ said Galt.

‘Is that so? I doubt I would have received so personal a welcome from Lord Macragge.’

‘Our world is hard, the laws and customs of hospitality are inviolable. The tribes must cooperate, or all would perish,’ said Galt.

‘Ah, so some primitive customs are worth preserving? Another difference between you and your brothers. Interesting,’ said Caedis. He looked around the room. There was an easy elegance to all he did. ‘I see you are not all tattooed.’

‘All initiates are, even those few who were not born on Honourum,’ Galt said. ‘Those servants you see who are not marked do not hail from our home world. Honourum has few people, Lord Chapter Master, we draw serfs and criminals for cyborgisation as tithes from systems all over the segmentum. Those of our servants who hail from elsewhere do not always follow the flesh marking.’

Caedis nodded as if he had known all along and he was testing Galt. It was a self-satisfied nod, a master’s gesture to a pupil, and Galt found it irksome. His guest’s questions were intrusive and irrelevant. ‘And what of your strength?’

Galt was relieved at this change in topic. Battle and matters of war were safer ground. ‘In the fleet: the Novum in Honourum, two strike cruisers, and four escorts. We have approaching three companies here, near the entirety of the First and Third, much of our Fifth also. But the Fifth suffered in our last battle, and bore the brunt of our foe’s retaliation. Many brothers are in the infirmary. Their vessel is badly harmed.’

‘I saw your strike cruiser,’ said Caedis. ‘The damage is extensive.’

‘Eldar raiders, corsair scum. They fought hard in space and on the ground, but they will trouble the Orin Gap no more. Some elements of the Fourth, Tenth and Ninth accompany us. It is an unusual gathering of strength for our Chapter,’ said Galt. ‘Were it not for the damage to Corvo’s Hammer, the fleet would have broken up already, lord. Our tasks are many, we are spread thin.’

‘You spoke of luck before, but I sense the guidance of the Emperor in this,’ said Caedis thoughtfully. ‘We do not have the numbers to either assault or bombard the hulk alone, I called in our Second and Fifth Companies, but the Second were forced to divert. A greater threat was brought to my attention, greater even than the one posed by the Death of Integrity’s stowaways. I am therefore left with little more than one and three-quarter companies aboard Lux Rubrum and our four escorts. I have many of my veterans, thankfully, although the skills of my First Company captain are sorely missed.’

‘He is not with you?’

‘As you, manifold are our tasks also. He has his own mission. But what was taken with one hand has been paid for handsomely with the other.’ He gave his food one last desultory taste, and then pushed it away.

‘And now?’

‘It is our nature to assault the foe at close quarters, blade to blade,’ said Caedis.

‘A direct assault, lord?’ said Galt. ‘Surely, bombardment would be the better strategy? We have readings of dangerous radiation levels in many places within the hulk, only Terminator plate would be proof against that. My Epistolary tells me that there are large numbers of xenos aboard. Let us break it apart with torpedo and cannon, and cast its remains into the sun.’

Caedis gave a laugh. ‘And what would your Master of the Forge say? There could be a wealth of archeotech aboard.’

‘Clastrin?’ Galt said. ‘He will doubtless object, but taking the hulk by force is too large a risk for our forces, even combined.’

‘My Forgemaster also will be displeased.’

‘Forgemaster Clastrin bows first to Ultramar and Honourum, and then to Mars,’ said Galt. ‘I will set out to him that he has little choice – the possibility of forgotten treasures comes with the certainty of losing a strike cruiser, and that he will not countenance.’

‘Although I hunger for the fight, I cannot but agree. Bombardment is the wiser option, and as much as the battle-joy calls to me, wisdom must prevail, is that not what Guilliman teaches?’

Galt nodded solemnly.

‘There is, dear captain, another factor at play. The hulk is never in-system for long, five to ten days at most, before departing. A decisive assault could not perhaps be mounted in such a short time. We would be forced to rush, and such tasks should not be rushed.’ Caedis smiled broadly, revealing his long canines fully. ‘Our combined fleets are more than up to the task. Bombardment and the cleansing heat of starfire it is. We are agreed. Together, we may rid the galaxy of this menace, and be on our way. As you say, our tasks are many.’ He raised his goblet. ‘A toast, then, to our rapid success.’

‘Our rapid success, lord,’ repeated Galt.

Their cups clanked together. The toast was taken up around the table, until it was shouted with approval.

CHAPTER 3

BOMBARDMENT

The two fleets had become one. The hallways of the battle-barges echoed to the sound of servitors as they prepared for war. Ponderously Lux Rubrum and Novum in Honourum manoeuvred around one another, until the vessel of the Blood Drinkers, black-red in the sun’s light, drew ahead of its Novamarines sister. The Lux Rubrum’s engine stack flared as bright and blue as Jorso. The ship pulled ahead, until it became a wink in the dark, the engine little larger than the stars. Novum in Honourum’s reactor rumbled and it fell into line five thousand kilometres astern of Lux Rubrum. Strike cruiser Ceaseless Vigilance angled downward to fly below and to the port of the Novamarines battle-barge. Corvo’s Hammer limped behind. Escorts moved easily above and to the front of the two flagships, Thunderhawks flew in formation, full weapon load-outs slung beneath their stubby wings. To the fleet’s portside the hulk continued its orbit around Jorso, massive and squamous, a canker that would soon be excised from the galaxy it so troubled.

Quiet bustle characterised the bridge of Novum in Honourum. A large tactical view of the hulk hung in the air over the chartdesk, reticules in bright red marking points of weakness that should cause the hulk to break apart swiftly. All nine brothers on the bridge wore their full plate. The serfs carried sidearms at their waists, and racks of guns had been extruded from the walls for masters and servants both. Several weapon-servitors stood station at the doors, and squads of battle-brothers patrolled the corridors of the command and gunnery decks. Counter-boarding was unlikely, but all was done as strictly dictated by the Codex.

Armoury savants had calculated it would take two days of bombardment to utterly destroy the hulk.

On the bridge, Ranial stood at Galt’s side. Occasionally he closed his eyes as he eavesdropped on the astropathic chatter among the fleet, catching stray metaphorical images the psykers used to communicate with one another. Odon had retired to his cathedral to lead the serfs there in prayer for their victory, Aresti and Mastrik were aboard their own ships. Clastrin had removed himself to Corvo’s Hammer, ostensibly to monitor the ship’s damage. The Master of the Forge had taken the news of the bombardment with stoic silence, Galt nevertheless knew the tech-priest was sorrowed by the decision and had withdrawn so as not to witness the loss of his prize.

On the long spine of the battle-barge, giant turrets swung to port, pointing squat, broad-muzzled cannons at the hulk between Novum in Honourum and the sun. A symphony of mechanical noises – distant clanking, whines, the muffled sounds of munitions trucks many decks below, the muted roar of weapons powering up – added themselves to the grumble of the ship’s main power core.

‘Brother-Captain Galt,’ said Persimmon. ‘All gunnery decks report ready. You may give the order when you desire.’

Galt reached for his pendant reflexively. Only when his gauntleted hand touched the eagle emblazoned across his chest did he realise it was beyond reach beneath his breastplate. He clenched his fist. ‘We wait for Lord Caedis, he commands here.’

‘As you wish, brother-captain.’

A few moments later Caedis’s voice crackled over the vox. The systems aboard both ships were more sophisticated than most, but still they struggled with the star’s furious heliosphere. ‘Brother-captain, you answered our call for aid. The honour of the first salvo belongs to you.’

A cheer went up from the non-servitor personnel on deck, the loudest coming from Persimmon, who banged his remaining hand on his throne-cradle.

‘Many thanks, Lord Caedis,’ said Galt. ‘The honour is gladly received. All guns acquire target. Prepare to open fire on my mark.’

His brothers on the bridge stared out of the curved window towards the Death of Integrity. They were composed as warriors of the Emperor should be, but their eyes betrayed their excitement. This was their meaning, to purge the galaxy of alien life, leaving it safe for mankind’s Imperium. To further this goal was the greatest satisfaction a Novamarine had. Their work never ceased, but each xenos dead was one less to prey upon the children of Terra.

The brothers waited. Galt let the feeling build a moment, to heighten the release. He permitted himself a small surge of satisfaction.

‘Port broadside, fire,’ he said.

The floor shook as the port weapons batteries discharged. Plumes of fire erupted all down the ship from the cannons between its launch bays. The bridge vibrated with every report.

‘Bombardment cannons, fire at will,’ he said. ‘Corvo’s Hammer, Ceaseless Vigilance, commence firing when ready. Thunderhawk wings, await my command.’

The turreted bombardment cannons spat no fire, their munitions, magnetically impelled, shot from their gaping muzzles at a velocity so high there was only the briefest spark of sunlight on metal to tell of their passing.

Corvo’s Hammer and Ceaseless Vigilance’s prows flashed as their guns discharged. Away ahead of them, made small by distance, Lux Rubrum sparkled with righteous violence.

The hulk was a long way away. If would be nearly half an hour before the first rounds hit home. The bridge fell back to quiet, muttered orders and muted conversation the order of the day as the complicated affair of space combat was undertaken.

Twenty-seven minutes or so later the bombardment cannon rounds, outpacing the explosive-cast shells of the weapons batteries, hit home.

Bright explosions flared on the side of the hulk, round blisters of fire welling up on its rough skin. Those less sophisticated than the adepts called such rounds lava bombs. Each contained a large fusion generator. In the brief moment the fusion generator operated, the bomb generated several gigatons of explosive energy, hotter than the surface of a star. Weapons like that could crack a planet’s crust, given time.

They were equally effective against the space hulk.

‘Target report.’ Galt directed his question at one of the battle-brothers acting as officers on the bridge. Brother Montan, Fifth Company, he noted. He should and did know the names of all the initiates under his command.

‘Target integrity holding, brother-captain.’

‘Continue bombardment,’ said Galt. He cast his eye over the tactical hologram over the chartdesk. It pulsed and flared with bursts of light, denoting hits. ‘Concentrate on target point alpha ten, I see a weakness there. Exploit it.’

Energy beams flicked across the void. Shells glimmered in the eternal night of space. The black between the fleets and the hulk sparkled with short-lived stars.

‘Lord captain!’ Brother Montan said. ‘We have our first major collapse!’

All eyes on the bridge went from the display to the distant hulk. A dazzling flash preceded a billow of flame towards the hulk’s nominal stern, and a long, thin shape detached itself from the main body of the hulk. Half a starship, at least, it span slowly about its axis, wheeling gracefully as it fell towards the sun.

Grim smiles on the bridge. The hulk was almost obscured by clouds of fire. A tail of debris now trailed behind it.

‘Lord captain,’ called a serf. ‘We have some unusual readings…’ Puzzlement creased the man’s face. He was heavily tattooed, a man of Honourum.

‘To me!’ said Persimmon. Within his throne-cradle, the crippled captain leaned forward as the serf sent the information to the captain’s data-slates. Persimmon’s remaining eye narrowed. His face lit up as his screens flashed. ‘Strange. I’m reading multiple, concerted energy emissions. If that were a warship I’d say they were powering up to fire or flee.’ Persimmon lay back in his cradle. ‘Not unusual. Probably feedback from dying systems, it is hard to tell in all this static, brother-captain.’

‘It is not a concern at this time,’ said Galt. ‘Have the Forge examine the data after the bombardment. Continue firing.’

The tac-screen fizzed, then went out. The lights on the bridge flickered. All faces turned upward instinctively. All but Galt’s. ‘Have faith brothers, and continue to fire.’

‘Probably a stellar pulse, not unusual so close in,’ said Persimmon. ‘Jorso’s magnetosphere is lively. But we’ve lost most of our auto-targeters, brother-captain.’

‘I trust your hands and eyes to guide the gun crews, brothers,’ said Galt. Not once did he take his eyes from the blazing hulk. The bombardment would now rest with the judgement and skills of the brothers. They were trained to solve the difficult calculations of combat over such a distance. The hulk was two light minutes away, and so what they saw was where the hulk had been two minutes ago. The actual position of the hulk and the differing speeds of the Space Marine projectiles all needed to be taken into account to ensure effective targeting. Taxing work, but this was better, the minds of adepts and not the spirits of machines bringing death to the unclean.

He was pleased that most of the rounds he watched hit home. More wreckage fell away from the hulk, some of it revealed to be burning as it floated across the hulk’s silhouette, before the fires were lost against those of the sun.

Ranial, who had remained silent and still, suddenly came alert.

The ship’s vox crackled, more laden with static than ever. ‘Lord captain,’ Van Heem’s voice was serpent-smooth and oddly accented. ‘Inbound fleet. Emperor preserve us, lord captain, warp translation imminent!’

‘What?’ shouted Persimmon.

‘We are receiving an astropathic broadcast. Mars-stamped,’ Lord Feldiol’s voice sounded over the vox. ‘We are decoding it now.’

‘I feel it, a powerful sending preceding a fleet.’ Ranial’s eyes shut. ‘They are coming in hard by.’

‘Where?’ said Galt.

‘Between the fleet and the hulk.’

‘All hands! Prepare for evasive action!’ shouted Persimmon. ‘Hard to starboard! Hard to starboard!’

Alarms wailed. Novum in Honourum’s deck tilted as the ship pitched. Galt had the uneasy feeling of being trapped between warring forces far mightier than he, cosmic forces ignorant of the fragility of man: the inertia of the craft’s forward motion, the pull of the artificial gravity plates, the mass of the ship itself and its sudden movement to the side.

Between the hulk and the fleet space flickered, the fabric of reality wavered as if a blanket shaken. The star’s light took on an unnatural hue, a colour not native to this universe.

‘Translation under way!’ shouted Van Heem.

Thunderhawks darted nimbly from the warp point, escorts following swiftly. The Ceaseless Vigilance crawled around, thrusters and braking rockets jetting all over it as it sought to avoid the incoming vessels. Corvo’s Hammer trailed dangerously behind. Novum in Honourum heeled to the side, nose sweeping out and away from the star.

‘Throne! We’re going to end up right in the middle of them! All ahead full! Ahead full!’ shouted Persimmon.

Further pressures assailed those on the bridge. In a great, round arc, Novum in Honourum lumbered away from the ripple in the sky, the fabric of the ship groaning in distress.

There was a blinding flash. Reality folded into itself, torn asunder by warp engines. A third fleet disgorged itself from the warp, ships tumbling from nonsensical geometries into shapes suited to material space.

A great vessel, longer than either of the battle-barges and at half their mass again, floated serenely between Novum in Honourum and the space hulk as if it had always been there, its rust-red exterior betraying none of the violence of its arrival. Void shields flared as weapons fire intended for the Death of Integrity slammed into them.

‘They’re opening fire, brother-captain!’ shouted Persimmon.

Galt bared his teeth, ready to return the favour, but stopped. The arcane cannons that lined the vessel from prow to stern remained silent. Only swarms of interceptor missiles issued from it, not ship killers, and they slammed in their hundreds into shells still streaking from Lux Rubrum.

Galt saw what he expected to see, a skull, half-human, half-mechanoid, contained within a white-and-black cog – the badge of the Adepts of Mars.

‘All decks hold! Hold fire!’

Alarms clamoured across the bridge, proximity alerts, emergency evasion, firing aborts, damage warnings.

‘Tech-priests?’ said Ranial.

‘Hail them,’ said Galt angrily. ‘Let us see what they want.’

Caedis got there first.

The hiss of static from the star and the backwash from the fleet’s arrival could not conceal the fury in his voice.

‘Mechanicus vessel, remove yourself immediately from the area. You are interfering in the affairs of the Adeptus Astartes Chapters Blood Drinkers and Novamarines. If you do not do so, your dangerous warp translation will be interpreted as an attack and we will open fire.’

‘What does he think he is doing?’ hissed Ranial, as he took in the array of giant weapons festooning the Adeptus Mechanicus ship.

The Adeptus Mechanicus reply was swift in coming, broadcast wide band, so any and all could hear it. It cut easily through the star’s voice.

‘This is Lord Magos Explorator Vardoman Plosk of the Adeptus Mechanicus. You will cease firing immediately upon the space hulk designated Death of Integrity and stand down your weapons.’

Galt licked his lips. ‘On whose authority?’ he shouted. ‘By what right do you command the defenders of humanity? By what right do you interrupt our given task of ensuring the safety of mankind? By what right do you halt the work of the Emperor?’

The vox hissed.

‘On the authority of the Adeptus Mechanicus of Mars, to whom all troves of archeotech are sequestered by right, custom and Imperial law. On the authority of the Holy Omnissiah and the God-Emperor, whose work we do.’ There was a pause, deliberate, calculated.

‘And upon the authority of my sponsors, the High Lords of Terra.’

CHAPTER 4

THE LORD MAGOS EXPLORATOR

Galt and Caedis received the tech-priest delegation within Galt’s audience rooms. The two Space Marines sat side by side upon their thrones, clad in full armour. The room had been cleared of tables and chairs. Caedis and Galt’s chairs were raised on a dais under the ceiling depicting the ascending Emperor. Five Novamarines and five Blood Drinkers veterans stood beside the thrones of their leaders, helmeted, weapons ready. Forgemaster Clastrin stood at the foot of the dais, also fully armoured. The chamber’s hidden weapons had been uncovered, and were trained upon the space before the thrones. There would be no warm welcome for the mechanicians of Mars.

The magi came into the room in force. Twelve all told, strange creatures of flesh and metal clad in robes of deep red. They came bearing toothed power axes, and exotic firearms not all of which were of human manufacture.

Twenty-four lesser tech-priests and skitarii cybernetic troopers attended them, also garbed in red. Some carried short banner poles bearing holy machine plans, many were hideously altered. Five carried nozzled machines that belched smoke that smelled of burned oil and harsh chemicals. These came first, preparing the way for their masters. A dozen servitors followed in their footsteps, the flesh stripped back to their skulls, fusion weapons perched on armless shoulders. Servo-skulls dipped and buzzed around the delegation.

The tech-priests’ attendants and servitors stopped at the rear of the room in an arc. Nine of the twelve magi walked through them. They formed a second crescent, halted, and together they brought their axe hafts down, sending a ringing crash through the audience chamber. Their augmitters twittered and chirruped.

‘Lord Magos Explorator Plosk,’ one intoned. ‘Magos Cogitator-Lexmechanic Nuministon, Novo Magos Samin. Masters of Excommentum Incursus. Chosen Explorators of Mars, most favoured of the Omnissiah.’

The remaining three tech-priests passed through a gap in the centre of the crescent to stand before the thrones of the Adeptus Astartes. Smoke from the censer bearers billowed around them.

One of them pulled back his hood to reveal a jowled face. Their leader. ‘I am Lord Magos Plosk, of the forge world Triplex Phall.’ Plosk was a stout man. The metal of cranial implants studded his bald scalp, long steel-covered cables went from the rear of his skull to a machine concealed by a hump in the robes on his back. His face was otherwise unaltered, and presented an expression of equanimity. ‘I apologise to you, Lord Chapter Master Caedis of the Blood Drinkers, and you, Lord Captain Galt of the Novamarines, for the manner of our arrival. But we cannot allow any harm to come to the Death of Integrity.’

‘The hulk is the harbinger of doom,’ said Caedis. He gripped the arms of his throne sufficiently hard to cause the wood to creak. ‘For a third of a century I have followed it, determined to destroy it and spare the worlds of the Emperor infestation by the plague that it carries. And you would deny me at the moment of my triumph?’

Plosk stood firm in the face of Caedis’s anger. ‘I would.’

Caedis leaned forward. ‘I am a Chapter Master of the Adeptus Astartes, Lord of San Guisiga, with a rank equal to that of an Imperial commander. You stand before me impudently, you and your followers do not kneel as is appropriate to my station.’ He hissed his words between his teeth, spittle chasing them into the air.

‘I do not,’ said Plosk equably. ‘It is I who hold higher authority here, not you, my lord.’ He dipped his head.

‘Insolence!’ spat Caedis. Galt looked sidelong at him. Caedis’s face was contorted with rage. The Blood Drinkers Reclusiarch stepped forward and rested a hand upon the Chapter Master’s shoulder plate. Galt was surprised at this lack of deference. Caedis shook it off.

‘A fact, my lord,’ said Plosk with a shrug. ‘I deal only in fact.’

‘You are not beyond the customs and laws of the Imperium, tech-priest. You have interrupted a military operation against the enemies of the Emperor. I demand to know the meaning of this outrage!’

‘It ever was my intent to do so,’ Plosk waved his metal left hand.

From behind the clouds of incense, a pair of servo-skulls flew forward, red eye beams cutting through the smoke. They bore between them a man-high scroll that dragged on the air.

‘Behold,’ said Plosk. ‘My authority. The first part of it. You may see the other fifty-seven segments as and when you wish. This is the pertinent scroll, however, verified by the Masters of Mars, and the High Lords of Terra. This document grants seniority in any and all Imperial matters appertaining to the recovery of STC data. Without exception.’

The servo-skulls floated to a stop in front of Galt, the scroll pulling the smoke into curls. Galt stood, and read the scroll.

‘It is as he says, Lord Caedis.’ Galt picked up one of the heavy seals adorning the bottom: black wax, and smooth to the touch. ‘It is sealed by High Lord Garm, Lord of the Munitorum.’

‘Garm died a century ago,’ said Reclusiarch Mazrael.

‘Did he now?’ said Plosk. ‘I did not hear, we have been to the very edges of the galaxy and back, beyond the light of the Astronomican, searching for this hulk. And to think!’ he gave a watery smile. ‘Here it was, all this time, lodged as a thorn in the heart of the Emperor’s dominion.’ His smile fell away. ‘Nevertheless, the authority stands, whether Garm lives or does not live. His word is inviolate.’

‘How come you by such authority?’ growled Caedis.

The youthful Magos Samin answered for him. He spoke like a fanatic, and made no attempt to hide his sense of superiority. ‘Magos Plosk has been most efficacious in recovering archeotech. Very successful. The High Lords would see more of that success.’ Samin was barely augmented, some kind of apprentice, thought Galt.

‘I have reason to believe that this hulk contains many first and second generation STC printouts, perhaps still functioning. Even one is a treasure beyond reckoning from the Dark Age of Technology. And you would smash them like brutes!’ Plosk shook his head. ‘This I cannot allow. There are greater considerations here than the immediate destruction of mankind’s enemies. The death of a hundred worlds would be a fair price for such knowledge. Ask your Forgemaster there. He knows something of the inner mysteries, seek his counsel.’ He nodded in the direction of the Techmarine.

Clastrin shook his head. His mechadendrites twitched in the air. ‘I do not serve two masters. I am of the Novamarines and my loyalty is to them alone, not Mars. You misspeak, magos.’

‘But do you hold this hulk a treasure?’ said Galt.

‘Indubitably, brother-captain. You know this,’ said Clastrin in his twin voices. ‘A boon to all mankind, and should what the magos claims exist, of incomparable importance.’

‘I have studied this derelict for long ages, lords,’ said Plosk, gesticulating floridly with hand and mechadendrite. ‘From certain intelligences I have gathered the length and breadth of the galaxy, I have come to believe that at its heart are certain… vessels, that postdate the ascension of the Emperor to his golden throne by only a few millennia. Perhaps even that predate the time of the Great Crusade and our lord’s leaving the world of men.’

‘Where? We see no evidence of any such vessel within the agglomeration,’ said Galt. Next to him, Caedis seethed.

‘And you are expert in these matters, lord captain?’ said Plosk. ‘No? I humbly inform my lords that I am.’

‘Lord Magos Explorator Plosk has retrieved five first-generation STC printouts, my lords,’ said Samin haughtily. ‘He is an unparalleled master in this field.’

‘I understand why you cannot detect them,’ continued Plosk. ‘Their siting is uncertain, the stellar environment here is… difficult,’ he smiled. ‘And so our first task must be to map the hulk.’

‘Our task?’ said Caedis.

‘You would not have us simply withdraw, so you can be about your business? When that is completed, then we may conclude ours,’ said Galt.

‘You are shrewd, lord captain, but no. My authority gives me the power to sequester such forces as I see appropriate to the furtherance of my efforts, and as of this moment, you and your Space Marines seem appropriate to me.’

‘You mean us to cleanse the hulk?’ said Caedis. He licked his lips. A smile ghosted across them.

‘Indeed. I thought you and yours would find that prospect appealing, Lord Chapter Master.’

‘If we refuse?’ said Galt. ‘What then?’

‘I will lodge my objections with the High Lords,’ said Plosk. ‘I recovered the tech-trove of Ophilio the Twisted from the Maelstrom. I broke the ciphers of the long-dead Martusi and brought much power to the arm of man. I have great influence. Investigation of your Chapters by the Inquisition and a penitential crusade would be the most likely outcome.’

Caedis tensed at this threat. Mazrael shifted. Galt felt this more than saw it, but their concern was palpable.

‘And if we agreed? I admit, the thought of so great a challenge fires me,’ said Caedis. A brittleness had entered his voice. He is hiding something, thought Galt.

The third tech-priest, Lord Cogitator-Lexmechanic Nuministon, rolled forward. His movement was too smooth to have been produced by legs, and Galt suspected a track unit hidden under his robes. It would not have been out of place, for Nuministon’s arms and most of his head had been replaced by metal prostheses and implants. Only fragments of the original man remained. He resembled a spindly, iron skeleton, scraps of grey skin embedded in it to no immediately apparent purpose.

‘In recognition of your services,’ Nuministon said – unlike Plosk’s natural voice, his was that of a machine – ‘the fleet yards at the forge world of Triplex Phall will undertake to construct and present the Chapters of the Blood Drinkers Adeptus Astartes of San Guisiga and the Novamarines Adeptus Astartes of Honourum one strike cruiser apiece in a period not exceeding thirty standard years after date of construction, of a class of your choosing. This we swear by the holy will of the Omnissiah, and will agree to be bound by contract to be astropathically verified by the offices of the Adeptus Terra, Adeptus Administratum, and the Lord Magi of Mars. Let our promise be lodged for all to see, for we shall honour it, this we swear before you.’

Clastin turned to look at the First Captain. ‘Brother-captain, this is an unprecedented offer…’

Galt held up his hand.

‘What use is that to us, if we should lose one cruiser, only to gain another? I could withdraw my fleet now, and save the one I have,’ said Galt.

Plosk snorted, the fat on his face wobbling. ‘And abandon your sworn duty to defend the Ultima Segmentum? I think not. No, the records speak more highly of the Novamarines than that, lord captain. Do you mean to tell me that you are nought but mercenaries away from Lord Chapter Master Hydariko’s noble leadership? I should like very much to hear what he says in response to your words. In any case, your ship Corvo’s Hammer will not survive another transit through the warp.’ Plosk sighed, and inspected his well-manicured right hand. Unlike his metal left, only the smallest digit had been replaced there. Galt wondered at what obscure sub-sect of the tech-priests this man pledged allegiance to be so unaltered. ‘I will offer this also to the Novamarines, that my fleet shall undertake repairs on Corvo’s Hammer, beginning this very day, and make it warp-worthy at the least. Full repair is a possibility, dependent upon the extent of the damage. Excommentum Incursus is a Megiron-class forge vessel, lord captain. Such minor works are well within the bounds of its many capabilities. What say you? Aid me to the greater glory of the Imperium, or turn your back upon a legitimate request? All combat operations will remain under your purview. All I request is your aid in my venture, not your servitude.’

Galt sank back into his throne. The servo-skulls buzzed away, trailing the might of Terra behind them. Here was a knotty proposition. What path to take? For a moment he wished that Lord Chapter Master Hydariko was there to make the decision, and that the burden was far from his shoulders. He looked to the lord to his right.

‘Lord Caedis?’

Caedis fixed him with eyes the colour of pale amber. A look of longing entered into them; perhaps almost of fear. The Chapter Master was breathing heavily, his grin fixed. Sparse drops of sweat stood out on his dry skin. He squeezed the throne arms, then released them, and some of the tension in his face went. He glanced aside to Reclusiarch Mazrael, who gave the slightest of nods. Caedis let out a ragged breath, he had been holding it. When he looked back at Plosk, his features were calm. ‘I say let us do it. Yes. Such a challenge, Brother-Captain Galt, one worthy of the heroes of old, do you not agree?’

‘I see no legitimate objection I can make,’ said Galt. ‘Although it vexes me to say so.’ He touched his breastplate, his hand unconsciously searching out his pendant. ‘Very well. You have the support of the Novamarines, on the condition that you do not interfere with our operations beyond that which is needed to secure any archeotech that may lie within the Death of Integrity.’

Plosk gave a broad smile. ‘As I said, lord, I wish your aid, not your fealty. It is beyond me to demand that anyway, and what do I know of military matters?’

More than you would have us believe, thought Galt.

‘We are agreed then, Lord Caedis, Lord Galt?’ said Plosk. His face had become bright.

‘Wait, High Magos Explorator,’ said Galt. ‘I have not yet finished. There is a further condition.’

Plosk glanced at his aides; the withered machine man and the boy. His lips pursed. ‘Pray tell, oh lord. We of Mars are listening.’

‘I say this to you, should four days elapse, or the hulk begin to drift back into the warp before that time has elapsed, it will be bombed into oblivion by the Novamarines. I trust I may rely on the Blood Drinkers to aid us should this occur. It fits your original intention, Lord Caedis, and it is a sensible intention, no matter how the prospect of combat entices you.’

Caedis nodded, his mouth curled in something akin to distaste. ‘Agreed. Come what may, the plague of genestealers stops here, in orbit around the star Jorso. I have striven for too long to see them slip from my grasp one more time.’

‘Marvellous!’ the magos clapped his hands together. ‘Then might I suggest we begin our plans at once, lords? A little reconnaissance will be in order, and time is of the essence.’

The Adeptus Mechanicus had evidently determined that a deal would be made prior to the meeting, for soon after the assault was agreed upon they brought into the audience room a great wheezing machine that hovered on buzzing anti-gravitic engines ten centimetres from the floor. The whole of the thing was black, so black that the edges of it were indistinct to the eye, the many arms grouped around its centre impossible to count. It cut a loathsome shape as it was shepherded into the audience chamber, spinning unsteadily on its cushion of force, until prodded in the correct direction by its handlers. It resembled nothing so much as a dead spider, legs curled in the air, carried upon the back of some pill-shaped predator on the way to its lair. The young tech-priest, Samin, stood back, hands dancing on a heavy instrument console he had taken from a servant and hung by a strap from his neck. The device spat lengths of scroll as he wrote, a serf working quickly to scoop it up from the marble floor, a second folded it efficiently and packed it into a brass-bound wooden box.

Plosk stood aside as Nuministon directed his drones to deploy the machine. Augmitters twittered as he spoke to his minions in the secret machine-speech. The spider-thing wavered to a halt. The buzz of its impellers shut off, and it dropped onto the floor heavily. Arms uncurled from the top, opening like an iron flower. A new electric noise, brazen and harsh, started up. By some contrivance the tech-priests caused the lighting in the room to go out, plunging the chamber into darkness. The sound of movement came from behind Galt as his and Caedis’s men snapped to readiness in alarm, for if the tech-priests could so influence the lights, it was not beyond reason that they could suborn the ship’s other systems, but Galt bade them stand down with a whisper into his vox.

The room burst into view again, a new light emanating from the tech-priest’s device. Formless shapes coalesced above the spider-legs, revealing its purpose as a chartdesk or pict display, although Galt had never before seen its like.

All of a sudden the most perfect false image Galt had ever seen was suspended above the spread arms of the device. The Death of Integrity sailed the air of the room, so real that he thought he could reach out and touch it. It was entirely possible that if he did so, he thought, that his hand would meet solid metal and warp-tossed stone, not light and air.

‘As you can see, my lords, our wisdom is deep. We have many gifts of the Machine-God in our possession. This device, the Imagifer Maximus, comes from the Heptacombs of Danarion, taken from the grave goods of the world’s first human lord, aeons dead and rich with technology.’

Caedis spoke from the half-light. His indignation was not so great as before, but anger stole back into his voice. ‘We are not savages of a forgotten world to be awed by your technology, High Magos.’

‘Quite. I merely bring this to your attention – that together, with your might of arms, and our many blessings, we will triumph all the quicker. There is a further reason for my deployment of the Imagifer Maximus, and it is this. With your leave, I would humbly make a suggestion.’

‘Proceed,’ said Caedis. ‘Quickly. Your prolixity tires me.’

‘No doubt you both have noticed an amount of radiation emanating from the hulk itself. The stellar environment here is turbulent, and our nearness to the star Jorso does not aid our cause one iota.’

‘Aye, we are not fools, Explorator,’ said Caedis.

Galt broke in, seeking to head off Caedis’s building irritation. ‘Our ship communications and deep scans are much affected,’ he said. ‘We are aware, magos.’

‘Then you are also probably aware that the youthful violence of Jorso is not the sole cause of your difficulty.’

The space hulk grew in size until it filled the whole of the room. The long spines of a primeval spacecraft brushed past Galt’s face, so close he could see how much the hard hand of time had plucked at its surface. The hulk’s opacity lessened, the outer shell became near-transparent, uncovering a nightmarish warren of corridors, chambers, and caverns within. This was revealed in far greater clarity than Novum in Honourum’s own augur suite could manage. Nevertheless, much of the interior was blank. At the hearts of these dark spots on the map, pict representations of power sources could be seen, picked out in livid purple.

‘Within the hulk are an unusual number of active power sources. The warp engines and reactors of countless ships, that so many are still active doubtless makes our undertaking harder. Much of the hulk is flooded with radioactivity surpassing the sigma ten level. Deadly. But it is also a promising sign.’

The twinned voices of Clastrin rang out, and there was excitement in them. ‘Any datacores may still be not only part-viable, but functioning. Active, not dead, supported by the reactors. More data could thus be present, perhaps all data. A full template database?’

‘Exactly, oh son of Mars. As I said, I believe there are several ships of unsurpassed vintage contained in this agglomeration. By my reckoning, at least three of these are active. It is not beyond the bounds of hope that a full Standard Construct Database might be present. Think of it!’

Silence descended onto the room. This was the grail of the tech-priests of Mars, the condensed knowledge of the Dark Age of Technology.

‘However, it does present us with difficulty, even for our machineries,’ continued Plosk. ‘So many overlapping power signatures in such a vast object make accurate mapping difficult.’

‘‘To go into battle not knowing of the enemy’s disposition is folly,’’ quoted Galt.

‘Just so.’

‘Curse your endless circumlocution, magos. What will you tell us?’ snapped Caedis.

‘There is a way around our particular problem, a manner of mapping that is foolproof and simple.’

Red dots appeared at a dozen places around the hulk.

‘A seismic map?’ said Clastrin.

‘If we were to plant explosive modules upon the skin of the hulk, then we could build an accurate representation of the agglomeration, accurate to within eighty per cent, I would say.’

‘The other twenty per cent?’ said Galt.

The magos spread his hands and made an apologetic face. ‘Seismic mapping is a mathematical exercise, lord captain. Our devices are made aware of what shape and size things are by how quickly waves of force move through materials. Often, we have enough data for our savants and cogitators to unpick the signals and create an accurate map. It is all done by inference, you understand. But certain substances generate unusual signals. Unknown alloys, for example, or liquids of peculiar density, or anything of abnormal atomic structure might throw off our findings, lord captain. There is always a degree of guesswork in our craft. Science is an art.’

‘Very well, go to it then,’ said Caedis. ‘Why not simply proceed?’

‘The sensors operate by measuring the rapid passage of vibrations through the fabric of the gathered mass. By calculating their rapidity, how they slow and accelerate, we can discern what is stone, what is metal, what is void, and so forth. Truly is the wisdom of the Omnissiah great! He is artful and cunning indeed.’ Plosk sighed regretfully. ‘But we require a node for the vibrations, a place from which they may be gathered, triangulated and uploaded for due processing by our logicators and cogitation engines.’

‘For the result to be most effective, brother-captain, that source would best be inside the hulk,’ said Clastrin.

‘A first mission inside?’ said Galt. He sat forward. ‘You propose a reconnaissance in force.’

‘Precisely, lord captain,’ said Plosk with a shallow bow. ‘There are further benefits to an exploratory expedition. While within, other variables could be determined, variables that may well influence the composition and deployment of our – your – forces when it comes to the attack. The distribution of the radioactivity that so fills the hulk, the whereabouts of vacuum, gravitic variance, hull density, presence of atmosphere, the operational status of ships within the agglomeration, whether any of the machine-spirits inside cling to life, the placing of informational caches and other, more esoteric yet highly useful data could be gathered, processed by my tech-priests, and the knowledge gained gladly shared.’

‘That is as may be, magos. However, as soon as we enter the space hulk to begin the mapping process, the genestealers will become aware of our presence,’ said Galt. ‘At the present time they do not know of us, and the majority will be in hibernation. To enter the hulk will stir the hornets’ nest. Our few men would be swiftly killed, and then a large force will be waiting, fully wakened, when we attempt the main assault.’

‘You have experience of fighting such infestations?’ asked Nuministon.

‘A great deal,’ said Galt sternly. ‘Have you, magos?’

Plosk ignored the retort. ‘Surely the hornets’ nest will be disturbed should you arrive in force? You would not have time to breach their brood chambers and purge them, then. Besides, we know of the location of but a few of their nests. Without a reliable map your efforts will be cogs too small for good gearing. Immediate assault will provoke the xenos in any case, and as an additional hindrance you will have no reliable charts to guide you.’

‘A number of small assaults is unlikely to succeed, I admit. Stealth and swiftness are our surety against death in situations such as these. They have often served us well aboard such derelicts, but here?’ Galt clucked his tongue, ‘No. Only overwhelming force will suffice.’ He gestured to pulsing green clusters, the biosigns of uncovered genestealer roosts. ‘They are many, and we are few. Even as two Chapters we are too few.’

‘Then I advise stealth first, Lord Captain Galt, the stealth you yourself say is your greatest weapon. And then, why, then the hammer blow, once our intelligence is gathered.’ said Plosk. He steepled his fingers in front of his lips and smiled. ‘Choose your battleground wisely, good disposition is half the battle.’

‘You speak sense, tech-priest, and you quote the Codex at me, whose tenets are dear to all who wear the battleplate of the Adeptus Astartes. You are sly, but slyness alone will not sway my decision. Tell me more.’ He sat forward. ‘Where would this device of yours require its planting? Show me.’

The hulk rotated. Part of it expanded greatly, pushing the hulk out through the chamber walls. The detail became uncertain, with many gaps. In a dark patch, a ruby skull blinked.

Galt nodded curtly. ‘It is possible. The location is far from the brood roosts. Teleportation is impossible I take it, Clastrin?’

‘Regrettably so, brother-captain. Matter patterning will not hold in the face of the sun’s emissions and the energy fluctuations within the hulk.’

‘Then entry must be made from the surface. Here.’ Galt pointed a finger at the skin of a starship’s back, exposed to the stars. ‘They will have to cut their way in. Boarding torpedoes will cause too much of a disturbance. One squad of Terminators, two at most. And they will have to move quickly. Three kilometres down. Hmmm.’ Galt sat back in his chair and narrowed his eyes. ‘But yes. It can be done. Lord Caedis, what is your opinion?’

‘My Chapter has little recent experience fighting such battles,’ said Caedis. ‘Although we have faced the genestealer threat on many worlds lately, we have not combated them in space for a long time, not for four recruitment generations. I defer to your Chapter’s more recent experience. I propose that you, Lord Captain Galt, should assume responsibility for this initial mission. Choose one of your warriors to lead it. I will provide a squad of my own brothers as support, under your overall command.’

‘It is an honour, Lord Chapter Master.’

‘It is prudence, lord captain, I am a proud warrior, but I will not let pride come in the way of sense.’

‘Cogitator-Lexmechanic Nuministon will accompany you,’ said Plosk.

‘Impossible,’ said Galt.

‘Necessary,’ said Plosk. ‘I doubt even your Forgemaster has the expertise required to activate our seismic probe and extract the relevant data from it.’

Galt checked readings dancing close to the mechanism of the Imagifer Maximus. ‘Only Terminator armour is proof against such a high radiation count, lord magos, you will surely perish.’

‘I will survive. The flesh is weak, but there is little of flesh about me,’ grated Nuministon. ‘And you will find my armour to possess a sufficient grade of shielding. We have our means.’

‘Very well,’ said Galt reluctantly. ‘I will not be held accountable for your fate. You come on your own recognisance, and will suffer whatever befalls you on your own account.’

‘Agreed,’ said Plosk.

‘I will accompany them,’ said Clastrin. ‘My plate, too, is sufficiently shielded.’

‘As you desire, Forgemaster,’ said Galt, inwardly pleased that the Techmarine would be there. To have ordered him would have spoken too loudly of his mistrust of the tech-priests, that he volunteered removed his opinion from the equation.

‘Who will you choose to lead the mission, lord?’ asked Clastrin in his twin voices.

Galt did not say. There was only one man who should, even if to attempt this mission might mean his death. One man who had fought against xenos the length and breadth of the segmentum, including five successful hulk purgings.

Veteran-Sergeant Voldo.

CHAPTER 5

MISSION THE FIRST

Galt stood by the window of his sparsely furnished state room. He had removed his armour, and wore the robes of his order. He toyed idly with his pendant. The room’s window lay on the starboard side, opposite to the side facing the hulk and sun. He stared out through his own reflection at a starscape he had come to know very well from every angle over his long lifetime. He knew the ways it changed from place to place in the Ultima Segmentum. The stars always seemed so strong to him out in space, burning with eternal, unwavering light away from the occluding impurities of atmosphere, as if the cosmos were a thing of such cleanliness light could travel unimpeded to its every corner. Experience told him that this was not so, that the pure rays of the stars shone upon uncountable horrors, things that would snuff the life of all of mankind out given but half a chance. The universe was far from kind, no matter the beauty of the stellar light.

How long ago was it, he thought, before he had been accepted into the halls of the dead, and shown a universe he could not have imagined? Time and many wars separated the adept from the boy he had been, a boy who had believed that the stars were the eyes of the Emperor’s judges, constantly measuring a man by the tally of deeds written upon his skin, choosing the most noble of them to present to the Sky-Emperor himself upon their death.

He knew differently now, but part of him still believed. He and the others marked their skins for the Emperor even after they had learned the truth of the stars’ nature. They still expected to be judged by their markings by the Emperor. Just as much as he knew that the Emperor had been a man, a man whose legacy he carried within his altered body, still the Lord of Man was also a god to Galt. He could never distance himself entirely from that belief, and his visits to the Shadow Novum only hardened them. The bonds between the Novamarines and their brothers in Ultramar weakened as all things will weaken over time, as the Novamarines stepped steadily further down the road of veneration.

He supposed it was no different for the Blood Drinkers; that they too wandered their own path, further and further away from the habits of their primogenitor Chapter. He had no experience of the Blood Angels, and so could not compare their ways.

‘Can not a thing contain two natures?’ he muttered to himself. He rubbed at his new tattoo. He hoped it would please the Emperor, on that day he finally saw him for the reckoning of his own deeds, and that he would be judged worthy to join the legions of dead heroes he gathered for the final days. He had a feeling that what occurred here, in orbit around Jorso, would have great bearing on that acceptance.

He considered again using the fleet astropaths to ask Chapter Master Hydariko for his guidance, but decided against it. The captains of the Novamarines operated alone much of the time, and were expected to use their own discretion. That went doubly so for him, captain of the First Company, and heir-apparent to the Chapter mastership of all the Novamarines. Why he had been so elevated, he did not know. He deserved his captaincy; he was sure of his abilities, but to become Chapter Master? He had too many doubts, he was unsure of too much.

The watch chime tolled for evening contemplation, but he would meditate later. Galt had other business. Punctually, a knock sounded upon the door.

‘Enter!’ called Galt.

The door slid back and Major-domo Polanczek stepped in. He bowed deeply. ‘Lord First Captain, Lord Veteran-Sergeant Voldo is here to see you.’

‘Thank you. Show him in.’

Polanczek bowed once more and departed. A moment later Voldo came into the room. He wore the sash over his robes Galt had seen in the Shadow Novum. A chill gripped his spine, and he had to force himself to remain composed.

‘Veteran Brother-Sergeant Voldo,’ Galt said. He stepped forward and grasped his old mentor’s forearm.

‘Mantillio, how are you?’

‘I thought all eyes were on me,’ said Galt. ‘Do you not know?’

‘Eyes are upon you as they should be upon the one who leads us, as lord captain. But I meant, how are you? How is the man, Mantillio Galt?’

‘Captain and Galt… They are one and the same man, brother.’

Voldo scratched an old scar on his head, one that cut through an abstract image of an alien warrior dying under Voldo’s chainsword. ‘There is always room for yourself, even for the likes of us. If we cease to think for ourselves, we lose our usefulness as tools of the Emperor’s will.’

Galt shook his head. ‘If you avoid the rank of captain, perhaps.’

‘Precisely why I did so,’ said Voldo with a grin.

‘Please, sit.’

Voldo and Galt took seats at the room’s only table. The few pieces of furniture within were fine antiques, a selection from Ultramar and Honourum. Galt took a glass stopper from a thin-necked decanter on the table and poured a yellow wine from it into two small glasses.

Voldo picked his up, and swirled it round. ‘Carain. A long time since I tasted this.’

‘I have only the one flask remaining,’ said Galt. ‘Nearly gone now.’

‘Has it been so long?’

‘Six years since we last trod the halls of Fortress Novum,’ said Galt. He held up his glass, they rang them together and drank. The sweet taste of heather and clean, moorland water washed over his taste buds. The alcohol in the drink was rendered ineffective by his gifts, but the drink served a finer purpose than intoxication. Galt permitted his mind to slip back home to Honourum, borne upon the drink’s flavour, the chemical signatures he detected brought the memories of the plants that made it to his mind, adding to the richness of his own recollections.

They sat a moment, savouring the drink and the memory of home and the oath of protection it represented. Galt said nothing to Voldo about his visitation in the Shadow Novum.

Voldo broke the silence.

‘Why did you wish to see me, lord captain?’

‘You of all people need never refer to me as such, brother,’ said Galt. ‘We are brothers first and foremost.’

Voldo shrugged and turned the empty glass around in his hand. ‘We talk the business of the Chapter now. ‘Respect is the foundation of victory’.’

‘So said Guilliman in the Codex Astartes.’

‘Yes. Holy writ.’ He laughed softly. ‘Although I doubt Guilliman intended us to worship his words, I pay heed to them, and I give you your due respect as lord captain.’

‘If anyone deserves respect in this room, brother, it is not I but you.’

‘You are not a neophyte any more, you cannot speak so. You are my lord and I am glad for it. I saw potential greatness in you as a boy and I see greatness realised in you now as a captain. I follow your lead gladly, as any master will when his pupil’s talent is fulfilled for all to see.’

Voldo was old, one of the oldest of all Novamarines, not a millimetre of his skin was uncovered by ink. He was a riot of colour with it, images abstract and realistic, icons, badges, and scripts. Of all men, his soul was the most armoured against the dark, protected by the images that covered his skin. The grey stubble of his hair and the light hair of his arms showed starkly against his ink. Honour badges and citations of every kind adorned him – earrings, service studs, pendants, and badges sewn upon his robes. Engraved silver rings circled six of ten fingers, mementoes of his many secondments to the Deathwatch, as was his sash, embroidered with six Inquisitorial campaign badges. Voldo was highly respected, a living hero, but had always refused promotion. He could have – should have – been captain many times over. Galt had decided some time ago to change this situation should he ever become Chapter Master. He was astounded Hydariko had allowed Voldo to remain a sergeant.

He suppressed a shiver as cold as the wind of Honourum as he remembered Odon’s words. ‘Death is soon to come for the brother whose phantom so shows itself.’ He debated with himself whether he would be doing the right thing sending him into battle. But who was he to defy the will of the Emperor?

‘Tell me what you know of the sons of Sanguinius.’

‘Of these Blood Drinkers, lord? Little. They have had precious rare contact with our Chapter, as you have doubtlessly discovered in the Librarium.’

Galt nodded. ‘They are elegant, and speak well.’

‘Pretty princes,’ said Voldo disparagingly, ‘if they are like others of their lineage, obsessed with form and art. I do not know them, but I know their kind. They neglect their true vocation: war, and the contemplation of war. Our way is better.’

‘Are you sure of this? They seem eager for the fight.’

Voldo raised his eyebrows, ‘Oh, I did not say that they were not eager for battle, far from it. A thirst for combat and a deeper understanding of the art of war are not the same thing, lord captain.’

‘Tell me, why does their Chief Apothecary hold such an exalted rank? Caedis introduced him as one of his chief advisors. And his title – Sanguinary Master? I have never heard of such. Their markings and ways all speak of close adherence to the Codex Astartes, but this exaltation of an Apothecary is unusual.’

‘Aye, lord. That it is.’ Voldo set his glass down on the table. ‘I will tell you this. I have never fought with the Blood Drinkers, nor with the ten thousand-times honoured Blood Angels, but I have made war alongside others of Sanguinius’s sons. Here, ninety-six years ago, on my third secondment to the Deathwatch.’ He tapped an engraved ring on his left forefinger. ‘I was part of a kill-team led by Lord Inquisitor Holm on expedition to the world of No Glory. Damned Dovarr had overrun the place. They were alert to our presence and proved to be beyond our means, and so Holm brought out his seal and demanded aid.’ He shook his head. ‘Our kill-team fought alongside the Knights of Blood. And they too had their Apothecaries fight at the forefront, and their captains paid much attention to their counsel.’

‘Were they bold warriors?’

‘Yes lord, bold – bold beyond measure. You speak of eagerness, and well were they eager, but too eager. Granted, they were effective,’ said Voldo. ‘I saw them storm a Dovarr fortress, from above and by ground assault, but they were incautious, throwing themselves forward at the enemy when the Codex would have advised staying back, heedless of the risk and paying no mind to the subtleties of greater strategy. They prevailed, although I expected them to perish, and the cost to them in fallen brothers was not one we of the Novamarines nor the Primarch Guilliman himself would have found acceptable. I will tell you, lord,’ Voldo hunkered over the table, the fine glass tiny by his massive hand. ‘I have never seen such savagery before or since. When the enemy were all dead, I thought they would turn on us, such was their fury. Our kill-team stood, weapons raised, thinking the unthinkable was to occur, until Holm himself stepped in and ordered them back. For a moment I thought they would disobey and that I would have no choice but to kill a brother Space Marine, but their Apothecaries and Chaplains restored some order to them, and they departed No Glory without apology before the campaign concluded. Be careful, lord captain. They say the sons of Sanguinius are noble of appearance and manner, but that something dark hides inside them all.’

Galt thought on Caedis’s behaviour. ‘Their lord, he seems conflicted. His desire to bombard the hulk was considered, yet it was plain to me also that he wanted to blood his weapon.’

‘That is my point, lord captain. I mean no slander, they say those of Sanguinius’s lineage are amongst the most loyal of the Emperor’s servants, and his most accomplished warriors, but still, be wary.’

‘Very well, I thank you for your guidance, Veteran Brother-Sergeant Voldo. You remain my teacher in all things.’

‘You are welcome to my advice, Lord Captain Galt, and have but to ask to receive it, although the burden of command is yours alone. Whether or not you follow my advice is a matter for your judgement and conscience.’

‘There is one more thing I wish to discuss with you.’

‘And that is, my lord?’

Galt hesitated. He saw Voldo as he had seen him in his vision of the Shadow Novum, beyond the affairs of the living. He tried to keep his voice steady, not to let tremors of worry for his teacher unseat his authority. Self-doubt is ever the overthrow of reason, Guilliman had written.

‘A small matter of a mission, veteran-sergeant. To the hulk. It shall be your honour to be first aboard. You have fought within many space hulks, and you more than any officer here have experience of fighting alongside brothers of other Chapters. I can think of no one more suited to this task. Success is required, many eyes watch us. The honour of the Novamarines is at stake. You will have but a limited time to succeed, your action must be coordinated with those of the Adepts of Mars upon the surface, and with no means of communication between your men and the hulk’s interior, you will be forced to operate with haste to ensure the mark is hit.’

Voldo smiled. ‘A grave responsibility, lord captain, but one I gladly accept. I will see us victorious, you may have no doubt of that.’

They spent some time examining mapping data and plotting a route for Voldo’s force, debating the advantages and disadvantages conferred by varying squad weaponry, the role the Blood Drinkers would fulfil, and how best to protect Magos Nuministon should the worst occur. It was good talk, battle talk, and the detail of it occupied Galt’s mind and drove away his misgivings.

And yet, when they were done and Voldo strode out of his chambers to gather his men, Galt still wondered if he had done the right thing.

The star Jorso blazed at the Space Marines upon the hulk, its angry light unfettered by atmosphere or shielding. The radiation it emitted was enough alone to kill a man, and Voldo was glad of his Terminator armour, and the protection its sensorium offered his own eyes.

Sparks sprayed into space, silent shining rain, as Veteran Brother Gallio carved at the hulk’s surface. Voldo felt the action of Gallio’s chainfist through feet mag-locked to the skin of the ancient ship they sought to access, some bulky Imperial merchantman of uncertain age. There was no noise in the vacuum. Clastrin, almost as bulky as the Terminators in his full servo-harness, knelt by the veteran brother, plasma torches burning on the end of two of his additional mechanical arms, cutting four metres away from Gallio. Slowly, the pair of them were sketching a hole in fire of sufficient size to allow themselves access to the inner hull, where they would cut a doorway large enough to accommodate the massively armoured brothers.

Voldo watched their transport lift off and retreat to a safe distance, weaving a path through the clouds of debris sent up by the earlier bombardment. Static hissed through his helmet vox. The remainder of Squad Wisdom of Lucretius stood about Voldo and Gallio in a defensive pattern – Veteran Brothers Militor and Eskerio, and Veteran Brother Astomar with his heavy flamer under his right forearm. The Blood Drinkers Squad Hesperion stood close by, lightning claws gleaming. They wore Mark-IIIc suits, more recent than his own squad’s armours, although the youngest was doubtless a thousand years old. Tuilles hung from their belts, protecting their thighs, the adamantium reinforcement ribbing was slighter, while their sensorium augur units, mounted upon the top-left front of their suit cowls, were larger and more complex than those of Voldo’s brothers. He read their nameplates again: Genthis, Curzon, Tarael, Azmael and their leader, Alanius. Between the two squads were Nuministon and his two servitors, clad in thin, transparent vacuum suits. They carried a device somewhat like a large urn. A foot on a piston descending from a cylindrical component topped with access ports, a screen and a keypad; the seismic probe that would gather the vibrational data needed to form an accurate map of the hulk.

Nuministon wore armour of reticulated plates fitted to his machine body. It was made of a metal that could not decide if it were gold in colour or cold, metallic green and shimmered between the two. His armour incorporated powerful machine legs, and was topped by a pig-snouted helmet adorned with numerous emerald sensor eyes. The insectile look of it was bizarre, not something fit to clad a man. Voldo looked away from it, his eyes offended. He swept his gaze across the unnatural landscape of the hulk, helmet tactical overlays picking out points of strategic interest and peril.

The Death of Integrity was the biggest space hulk Voldo had seen, big enough to ape a moon in feature and form. The surface stretched away tens of kilometres, ships’ prows raised in baroque mountain ranges, buckled hull skins waterless valleys edged with knives. It was a topography forged of ruin. The shadows cast by Jorso’s strong light were hard, night-blue, confusing the pseudo-landscape further, and with the nearness of the hulk’s horizon made the scale of the hulk difficult to judge. Still, some parts of the Death of Integrity were recognisable as the craft they had once been, and this gave Voldo some reference by which to gauge distance. Close by, the flank of an Imperial light freighter canted at a drunken angle, nose buried in the agglomeration, cargo pods torn, whatever they had contained long gone. Other components of the hulk were beyond comprehension, strange vessels made by alien hands, or rotting things that looked grown, not built. Many were so battered and crushed as to be unidentifiable, reduced to tangled superstructure or plaited rucks of metal. The exteriors of those that retained their shape were scarred with long exposure to space and the warp. Patches of paint and colour were a rarity. Massive rents split the surface of the hulk, leading down into a fuliginous dark so complete as to be tangible. Rock there was aplenty, stray asteroids pulled in by the hulk’s weak gravity and impacted into the surface. Dirty ice hid in nooks, and hoarfrost coated every surface not exposed to the sun, the legacy of ruptured water tanks, aquatic shipboard environments, and hydrogen-oxygen mass reaction drives.

Not far distant was the evidence of the earlier bombardment; massive craters, droplets of frozen metal sprayed around them in elaborate patterns. Somewhere beyond that, three other groups would be working their way within the hulk, placing explosive devices just under the surface to generate tremors via sequenced explosions. It was these detonations that would be recorded by the seismic probe, and their timing that necessitated his own party’s haste.

Voldo’s eye strayed to his mission clock on the inside of his visor display. For now it was still, the eight hours on it would not count down until Galt and Caedis had been informed that the Adeptus Mechanicus teams had withdrawn. When the clock reached zero the Adepts of Mars would detonate sequenced charges, sending shockwaves rippling through the hulk.

He checked the progress of the cutting, wanting to steal a march on the clock’s activation. The Forgemaster and Terminator were through the outer layer of the hull. They pulled the metal away, their efforts enough to send it spinning off into space, and quickly cut through the reinforcements, frames, conduits and cables that lay underneath. They stepped down into the pit they had made and began to tackle the inner skin, cutting a smaller hole within the hole. White plumes of gas jetted out as they breached the compartment below and its atmosphere vented into the vacuum. Gallio worked anticlockwise from his starting point, Clastrin starting at the other side, moving towards where Gallio had begun. Gallio’s cuts were ragged from the action of his chainfist, Clastrin’s smooth and continuous, beaded with molten metal that cooled slowly in the absence of atmosphere, losing heat only through direct radiation.

The gas jets lessened and ceased. The corridor below them had emptied of its air quickly, suggesting to Voldo that it was sealed. He mentally calculated its volume based on the amount of gas he had seen vent. A thought brought up the incomplete map they had of their immediate surroundings on to his visor display. The surface corridors had been as thoroughly scanned as circumstance allowed and were well-defined, but further in, and especially closer to a nearby reactor, the map faded into probabilities, and then blankness. He compared the conclusion to his calculations with the map. It appeared they matched, and so they should. He grunted with satisfaction.

The Forgemaster and veteran brother worked fast. Within three minutes the two cuts were close to meeting. Not too soon either. Debris was falling back down onto the hulk’s surface with increasing regularity. Voldo’s suit told him that the hulk’s gravity field was under 0.02G. Not enough to make him safe were his mag-locks to be disengaged – he would be lost to the void simply by taking a step – but enough to bring some of the debris circling the hulk back down onto the whole, even so soon after the bombardment.

The vibrations from Gallio’s chainfist cut out, informing Voldo the entryway was finished. He turned to watch as Clastrin stood and stamped on the metal. It fell inwards.

‘The way is clear, brother-sergeant,’ said Clastrin, his twin voices broadcast into the helmets of everyone present. Although the pops and crackles of interference marred his words, at such close range he could be heard clearly.

Voldo walked over to the hole in the hull, slowed by the locking and freeing of his feet on the metal. He bent forward and willed his suit light on, his mind interfacing directly with the suit’s sensorium via his subdermal black carapace and the nerve shunts embedded into it. A thin beam stabbed down from the cowling over his helmet. A circle illuminated a mesh floor. ‘Contacts?’

‘Negative, brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio, Wisdom of Lucretius’s operations specialist. He had a modified power fist, incorporating a slot for an advanced auspex in its palm. ‘But I cannot vouch for the device’s accuracy in this environment.’

Voldo brought up the overlay that would show him Eskerio’s auspex readings. The display jumped, stuttered by the stellar broil. ‘Be steady, my brothers. We go within. Squad Wisdom of Lucretius shall enter first. Inside I suggest you pair your warriors with mine, Veteran-Sergeant Alanius.’

‘Agreed, cousin.’ The Blood Drinkers sergeant spoke for the first time. None of the red-armoured brothers had said anything beyond their initial greeting on the Thunderhawk.

‘Brother Astomar shall lead the way. I shall go second. Magos Nuministon, you and your servitors will stay in the centre of the group unless I say otherwise. Is that clear?’

‘Entirely, lord sergeant.’

Voldo looked around at the fourteen-strong party: five Novamarines veterans, five of the Blood Drinkers, Forgemaster Clastrin, Magos Nuministon and his two servitor drones. ‘Today we are all brothers, although the colour of our plate be different. We are brothers born from similar seed, brothers sworn to the same service, and today in the fires of war, our brotherhood will be forged anew. Protect each other as you would your own, and we shall emerge unscathed, and glorified.’

Voldo switched his helmet vox-caster to long range, speaking directly to the fleet. ‘Lord Captain Galt, Lord Chapter Master Caedis. We are about to enter the space hulk.’

‘Good fortune to you, veteran-sergeant,’ replied Galt, his voice distant and thin in the static.

Another voice, far clearer, broadcast by the arcane might of Mars filled his helmet. Magos Plosk. ‘Mechanicus teams one and two have placed their devices and withdrawn. Mechanicus team three will be done shortly.’

‘You may start your clock now, brother-sergeant,’ said Caedis.

With a thought, Voldo activated the clock. The first digit fell away; seven hours, fifty-nine minutes, fifty-nine seconds remaining.

‘Emperor watch over us,’ said Voldo.

‘We commend our souls to his armies in this life and the next,’ intoned the Novamarines.

‘Sanguinius’s wings shield us all,’ said Alanius.

Voldo stepped into the hole and fell slowly into the space hulk. His feet met its corroded decks with a low clang he heard through the metal of his armour.

The battle for the Death of Integrity had begun.

The first corridor was empty of anything but detritus. The party arranged themselves according to Voldo’s orders, a Blood Drinker paired with each Novamarine, the tech-priest and Techmarine in their centre, and set out towards a bulkhead door some ten metres ahead. According to the data they had, the ship they had entered was a bulk agri-hauler of antique design. This close to the surface they were in the ship’s service corridors, where once upon a time maintenance crews would have patrolled, keeping sensor nets and life-bearing systems functioning, and checking for breaches in the outer hull.

‘Is there power?’ asked Voldo. ‘Forgemaster, do the ship’s mechanisms function?’

Clastrin shouldered his way forward, the corridor cramped by the great suits of armour they all wore. He extruded a sensor probe from his harness’s lower arm. The metal tentacle insinuated itself into a port below the door keypad.

‘They do, but weakly,’ he said. ‘I detect little in the way of artificial gravity or lighting. This door should open under its own power, however.’ Clastrin withdrew, leaving the activation of the door to Voldo.

‘Then stand ready, I may need you to recite your prayers for the compliance of the machine.’ Voldo reached out his free hand to the touchpad by the door. He depressed a button caked with hardened dust. For a moment, nothing happened, and then a green light feebly glimmered. The door opened, shaking on gears whose oil had long ago congealed.

A brief wind blew out as the chamber beyond decompressed. Voldo stepped in, his feet thunking onto the metal floor. The lights were non-functional, the compartment dark, patches of it lit fleetingly by the Adeptus Astartes’ bobbing suit lights.

There was barely enough room in the vestibule for the whole party, but Voldo ordered them all in. If there was atmosphere beyond these doors, he wanted to preserve it. Air of any kind would allow the motion detector’s subsidiary sensory systems to awaken; tasting the atmosphere for the taint of xenos, and feeling the mildest perturbation of gas molecules should the enemy move.

With practised ease the Terminators spread themselves around the chamber, each pair of bone-and-blue and blood-red Space Marines covering a door, glancing blows of torchlight shining off their armour as they manoeuvred round one another. Alanius took up station in the centre close by Nuministon. Militor let his storm bolter drop from his left hand to hang by a cord from the wrist. He took out a thick stick of yellow pigment from his belt, cracked the top, and used it to paint a cross on the wall by the doorway they had entered through.

‘Good,’ said Voldo. ‘Mark every turning we make, brothers. I do not trust our maps. Militor, seal the door behind us.’

Militor did as ordered.

Voldo checked the feed from Eskerio’s auspex. There was no sign that they had been noticed. ‘Prepare, brothers,’ he said. ‘I will open this door.’

Terminators shifted stance, bringing their weapons up, readying themselves for whatever might be within the next chamber. Voldo keyed the door open. This second portal opened smoothly, the wind that blew from it was over quickly as the pressure between the two compartments equalised. On the other side a handful of ceiling lamps flickered dim yellow, still clinging to their purpose centuries after their intended operational lifespan had been exceeded. They lit a corridor that ran straight down the spine of the ancient craft, still straight, despite the spaceship being pressed hard into the body of the agglomeration.

‘The atmosphere is thin, but breathable should we require it,’ said Brother Azmael, who fulfilled a similar function in Squad Hesperion to Eskerio.

‘Let us hope we do not, brother,’ said Alanius.

‘This is the way, brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio, gesturing forward. ‘In the centre of this vessel is a vertical shaft – a cargo lift, I judge – that leads right through this ship. From there we shall be able to head downwards, and from a lower deck access the vessel abutting this and so deeper into the hulk. That way we will swiftly reach the point determined by the tech-priests as best for their device.’

‘How far to the shaft?’

‘One hundred and fifty metres.’

Voldo’s eyes flicked over to his rad-counter, down in the bottom right of his helmet display. ‘Radiation levels appear low,’ said Voldo. ‘They will increase.’

‘Yes brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio. ‘This component vessel’s tertiary reactor is still active, and leaking.’

‘Will your servitors last, Magos Nuministon? They are not shielded,’ said Alanius.

‘They are disposable, Lord Sergeant Voldo, and they will last long enough to fulfil their purpose,’ Nuministon said. His voice, unlike the others, blared from his helmet speakers, violating the deathly peace of the hauler.

‘Deactivate your external helmet vox, magos. We are here as shadows. Do not announce our presence. Communicate via vox-caster only,’ said Voldo.

There was a click as Nuministon obeyed without demur. Voldo was grateful, he had half-expected a refusal and an arrogant proclamation on the strength of the Machine-God and the power of the metal over the flesh. He had seen many men die painfully because they held fast to the convictions of one sect or another. In his long experience, providence and plate were better shields than conviction.

‘An oversight on my part. You have my apologies,’ said Nuministon.

‘We proceed. Brother Militor, hold position and cover our rear.’

‘Yes, brother-sergeant.’

‘I shall leave Brother Curzon with you,’ said Alanius.

‘That is wise,’ Voldo turned to face the two Space Marines, blood and bone armours stood shoulder to shoulder. ‘The two of you await my command,’ said Voldo. ‘You will cover and monitor this accessway. The nearest known brood chamber lies some way outside this vessel, but we are still deep in the genestealers’ primary habitation zone, and I will not leave our rear exposed.’

‘Yes brother-sergeant,’ said Militor.

There was a rumble. The hulk shook. Flakes of corrosion fell down from the pipes along the ceiling. The Terminators’ massive torsos twisted atop rock-steady legs as they scanned the ceiling and walls. The tremor lasted twenty seconds or so, bringing with it the sounds of grinding metal and the impact of mass against mass before gradually subsiding.

‘What was that?’ said Azmael.

‘A hulk quake,’ said Voldo.

‘Level seven on the Meullin scale,’ said Clastrin.

‘Indeed,’ said Nuministon.

‘The agglomeration is unstable. Our bombardment will have redistributed its mass loading,’ said Clastrin. In any one place in the hulk the gravity was so low as to be non-existent. But gravity wells formed by active grav plates unevenly drew in loosened mass, there was the irregular motion of the hulk to accommodate, and then variance in its own localised gravity fields owing to the density of its constituent parts. All contributed to the violent shifting of the material trapped in the hulk. ‘A further peril.’

‘There will be more,’ said Eskerio.

‘In all probability, brother,’ said Clastrin.

‘Another reason to be on our way, fulfil our objectives and depart swiftly,’ said Voldo. ‘Brothers, on me.’

In a long line the party clumped on down the corridor, alert to signs of the enemy, leaving Militor and Curzon alone in a lonely pool of suit-cast light.

They gained the shaft without incident, their passage disturbed only the dust and the ghosts of the dead. Voldo kept an eye on the mapping and motion tracking equipments’ feeds as they progressed. Within his suit display, corridors sharpened as their equipment gained a grasp on the true form of their proximate environs. The auspex detected no signs of movement other than their own. Only the reconnaissance party showed up on the map. Each member was represented by a pulsing icon; the appropriate badge for their order – skull and nova, blood drop and chalice, and the skull and cog of Mars. Far to the rear of the line in the corridor Militor and Curzon’s markers throbbed. The life signs of Voldo’s men and feeds from their suit picters crowded the left of his visor screen, the tick-tick-tick of the rad-counter a metronomic beat to their advance.

Voldo walked slowly but effortlessly, the great mass of the Terminator armour moved by its own motive systems. As such, its size required only a little more effort on his behalf than his usual plate; it was cumbersome but did not hinder him. His breath came easily, the sound of it filling his helmet. This, the ticking of the rad-counter, his steady, heavy footfalls, the whirr of motors, the quiet hum of the armour’s power plant – these were the sounds that made up his immediate world. The suit’s sensorium, far more complex than that found in simple power armour, filled his vision and his mind with information gathered from the environment. He could feel the armour as if it were his own skin, in a numbing, distant way, like he wore an overcoat made of his own shadow, doubled sensations that required much acclimatisation. The suit’s feeds attempted to be all-encompassing, but paradoxically the effect could be isolating, dangerously so. One could fall into a kind of trance within the suit. Lulled by the sense of protection it conferred and the womb-noises of its mechanisms, a certain blindness to peril could set in, until it was too late.

The armour, for all its sensorium’s sophistication, provided a limited view to his eyes of flesh. His peripheral vision was circumscribed by the edges of the suit’s cowling and shoulder pads. He could turn his head only so far to the left or right. In a similar manner, he could not look far either down or up without tilting his torso, the movement allowed by the plastron and outer placard that made up his breastplate being restrictive. He could not, of course, see behind him without rotating the whole of his body, and the suit cameras of his squad were invaluable in providing alternative views of the environment.

On the open battlefield, such things were a lesser concern, but in the cramped confines of the spacecraft, they could be deadly. It was fortunate that the ceramite and armourplas that clad his body was proof against most weapons. Brothers equipped in tactical Dreadnought armour had to maintain a high level of situational awareness. Making war in this manner was mentally and psychologically taxing even for the superhuman Adeptus Astartes. It was not only matters of honour that restricted the armour’s use to the Veteran Company; inexperience was as perilous as a direct lascannon hit to those wearing Terminator plate.

A broad doorway emerged from the dark. Glittering motes of dust danced in the beams of their suit lights. Voldo raised his right fist and clenched it. Behind him, the brothers of the Novamarines and Blood Drinkers fanned out. Voldo had his map zoom in, mentally selecting the icons for brothers Astomar, Eskerio and Tarael. He used his suit visor overlay to plot new positions for them. He executed the command and sent it to the two squads. All this took a breath, his thoughts conveyed from his mind to the ports in his black carapace and thence to the Terminator armour’s own cogitator and on to the squad. Wordlessly, the veteran brothers obeyed. The deck shook as they plodded past him.

‘I request access to your squad’s feed, Veteran-Sergeant Alanius.’

‘Granted freely, cousin,’ said Alanius, his voice was liquid, as perfect as his physical form, but there was a hint of arrogance to the Blood Drinkers sergeant which Voldo found objectionable.

A chime from his vox, and five more square pict views popped into life in his helmet. Those of his own squad reduced in size to accommodate them. In the views from the three Space Marines by the door, he could see a large, high-ceilinged room twenty metres across. A yawning, black square pit seven metres each side occupied its centre.

‘Brother Astomar, Brother Tarael, pan left to right.’

The Terminators obeyed, torsos rotating as they tracked their augur eyes over the room. Voldo watched as the suit lights slid over the wreck of dead machinery embedded in the walls. One corner of the room was wrinkled up into a metal wave, never to break, the result of the vessel’s impact when joining the hulk.

He developed a better picture of the room. Eskerio had been correct, it was a cargo lift. Doors like the one they stood in were in three of the four walls. A short corridor lined with dirty hazard striping led away from the fourth side to his left, almost certainly to an external airlock.

He watched as the lights went back and forth, bright spots on dead walls, a fainter halo around each, and in that halo…

‘Wait!’ Alanius said. ‘Brother Tarael, pan back one metre, drop the vertical twenty degrees.’

Tarael bent forward slightly, the full beam of his suit light picking out a huddled shape upon the floor.

‘Do you see it, Brother Voldo?’ asked Alanius.

‘Yes. A corpse.’

‘A crewman. Cover my advance,’ Alanius said.

Without discussion, Alanius clumped past and went into the lift room. Voldo cursed inwardly. That was reckless, as reckless as those damned Knights of Blood had been on No Glory, and he chided himself for not heeding his own warning to Galt. He resolved to keep a sharper hold on his counterpart in future. To stop him now, mid-action, would be a grave insult for one of the same rank, for all Voldo being designated commander.

Voldo checked the motion tracker. Nothing. Annoyed, he followed the Blood Drinkers sergeant into the lifthead.

The impact damage was worse close up. He glanced to the left side, checking the airlock as he walked past. The doors were so buckled they barely deserved the name, ruptures formed jagged metal lips that puckered round slashes of dark. Whatever the craft abutted in the crush of the hulk had formed a seal over the torn airlock, keeping in the tenuous atmosphere.

Alanius knelt on one knee by the corpse. Voldo stood over him and bent forward. His suit beam lit upon a human skeleton within a standard Imperial ship’s emergency suit. Both hands were thrown up to the face. Alanius gently lifted an arm with the tip of a claw away from the helmet visor. The glove of the hand was missing, exposing the dead man’s grey finger bones. The hand flopped onto the floor with a rattle, bones coming apart and rolling across the metal like dice and bouncing into the air.

Behind the yellowed plastek faceplate a skull gaped. Its jaw hung loose, mouth wide in a silent scream.

Voldo ran his light down the suit. The chest had been ripped open, ribs shivered into fragments.

‘Eviscerated,’ said Alanius. ‘What is your opinion as to this man’s fate, cousin?’

‘Xenos pirates mayhap. But look, these are surely the marks of claws.’

Alanius ran his light up the wall. ‘Aye,’ he let it rest on a gruesome sight. A hand and arm hung from the wall. A screaming face protruded above it, its terror preserved for all time in metal. ‘I know of few weapons that can cause such melding between the organic and inorganic.’

Voldo called Clastrin to join them. A moment later he stood by their sides.

‘A Geller collapse,’ Clastrin’s paired voices said, ‘followed by uncontrolled translation from the empyrean. This is a likely explanation for the contamination of the ship’s metal by human flesh. This man would have become displaced into the metal, becoming one with its fabric.’

‘A Geller field collapse? This other was clearly slain,’ said Alanius, gesturing at the corpse.

‘Pirates, raiders quick to fall upon a stricken ship,’ said Clastrin. ‘The possibilities are many.’

‘Yes,’ said Voldo.

Alanius stayed kneeling, staring at the dead man. Voldo felt a rush of brotherhood for the Blood Drinker.

‘You think on his fate?’

‘Dying, alone in the dark. Yes. It pains me our kind are too few to protect them all,’ said Alanius. ‘They treat us like gods and yet they still die.’

‘The Adeptus Astartes cannot be everywhere. We do what we can. The loss of a billion lives is nothing if the Imperium stands,’ said Voldo sternly.

‘We are here now, are we not? Too late for him and his comrades. He would have died in terror, with no succour.’

Voldo rested his hand on the other sergeant’s shoulder. ‘If that is so or not so, they are long gone and we have other foes to concern ourselves with. I admire your care for life, in these dark times men are careless with what is most precious of all, and for the nature of this man’s death I feel also grave regret. But we have another task that will save others from similar pain. Come, we must go on.’

Alanius rose from his knees, a laborious action in Terminator armour, despite the minimal gravity.

Voldo asked Eskerio to mark the doorway and then the two sergeants had their men gather around the lift shaft. While Astomar and Gallio kept watch, the others retrieved flares from their utility pods and threw them down into the shaft. The flares flew more than fell, tumbling into the dark until they became little bigger than matchlights. Their connection with the bottom was nearly inaudible, bouncing around the shaft until their energy was spent. They continued to burn, flickering over the dross at the bottom of the shaft.

‘Sounding, five hundred metres,’ said Eskerio.

‘Magos Nuministon, Forgemaster Clastrin, is the lift still functional?’

By this point Clastrin had gone to an interface unit by one of the doors, Nuministon beside him, a freshly unscrewed panel lay on the floor. Various manipulators from Clastrin’s harness were plugged into the guts of the wall. Nuministon’s supplications to the dormant machines murmured in the force’s helmets.

‘No, brother-sergeant. It is inactive. If you would but wait, I will reroute power… Ah. I have it.’

A screech from behind the walls, an unsteady thrum, and running lights flickered on in the four corners of the shaft. Most remained dark, but there were enough to pick out the shaft’s general condition.

‘I have accessed the ship’s datacore, what is left of it. I have activated what systems I can. Our way may be easier ahead.’ said Clastrin. ‘This ship was the bulk agricultural hauler Father Harvest, registered 481.M37, in the Segmentum Obscurus. Crew complement of one hundred and eighty-nine, thirteen passengers. Lost 329.M38 with all hands. Take note of the name for the records of the Administratum, so that its fate might be noted.’

Voldo checked his sensorium map. ‘We will best exit this vessel by the deck seven below this one. Confirm, Brother Eskerio.’

Eskerio adjusted the device set into his power fist. ‘Deck eight has a weakened section that can be cut through quickly, so that we might attain entry to the deeper vessel.’

Voldo addressed Clastrin and Nuministon. ‘Once we have reached the deck, use our safety lines to help bring you down. Brother Blood Drinker Tarael, remain here with the magos until we call for him. Militor, Curzon, respond.’

‘Brother-sergeant,’ said Militor, his voice peppered with interference.

‘Redeploy to the lifthead. Curzon and Tarael are to rejoin us, following down the shaft once we have established a perimeter on deck eight.’ If they ran into difficulty, Voldo reasoned, the close combat capabilities of the Blood Drinkers would be useful, while Militor’s longer-range armament made him the natural choice for covering such a large area as the lifthead. That Voldo wished to keep all the Blood Drinkers where he could see them was a further consideration.

Tarael stood back as the other Terminators stepped over the edge of the void, feet tapping at the walls of the shaft until their mag-locks made a firm connection. Armour motors whining, fibre bundles straining against the hulk’s weak native gravity and the armours’ mass, the Terminators hauled themselves over so that they were at ninety degrees to the ship’s nominal floor. They were facing down directly to the hulk’s mass centre, held to the side of the shaft by their boots. The gravity was so weak, up and down were illusory. Safety lines shot out from the back of their suit cowls, super-strong wires tipped with razor grapnels that punched into the ceiling, spreading wide within the ship’s skin. Should the mag-locks fail, they would prevent the veterans from floating free.

The descent took some time, the Terminators proceeding carefully. Far below them, they could make out bones amid the debris at the foot of the lift shaft before the flares burned out.

They made it to the eighth deck without incident, where they clambered into that level’s lift room. It was a match for the lifthead, the lift being open on all sides on every loading deck. The Space Marines spread out, investigating the few chambers on the level around them. These were cargo holds in the main, expansive spaces that filled two decks vertically, with entry points so they could be loaded from two points, one every other deck. The holds were full of putrid, unidentifiable rot. Their walls were bowed inwards by the pressures exerted upon the ship by the rest of the hulk, and the catwalks that ran over them were buckled.

‘There is no sign of the enemy, veteran-sergeant,’ said Alanius over the vox, reporting back to Voldo. ‘The damage to the ship is greater here, and in two of the three holds there is a large amount of radioactivity. I am glad we do not go that way.’

While the others secured the deck, Azmael, Eskerio and Voldo repeatedly checked their auspexes. Voldo directed the two veteran battle-brothers to probe this direction and that until he was satisfied they still moved unnoticed. A perimeter established, the seismic device was lowered down and pulled in by the Novamarines. Clastrin, Nuministon and the servitors followed. Clastrin spurned the safety lines, using the four additional limbs of his servo-harness to clamber down the shaft in the manner of a mechanical spider. Then the two brothers of the Blood Drinkers Veteran Company rejoined the main body of the party. Militor remained above. The group gathered together again, Voldo checked the dwindling long-range vox signal strength, and hailed the Novum in Honourum.

‘We are on the eighth deck of the agri-hauler, and about to proceed further, lord captain. Communication will become more difficult as we go on.’

Galt’s voice crackled back, almost lost to the voice of the star and the seep of radioactive particles spilling from the ships’ reactors. ‘Let the flash of righteous weapon fire light your way. Come home safe, Veteran-Sergeant Voldo, Veteran-Sergeant Alanius.’

‘Yes, lord captain.’ Voldo disengaged the long-range link, glad to be rid of the hiss of static. ‘Brothers, onwards.’

Further into the ship the Space Marines of the two Chapters went, checking and rechecking each door and corridor as they went.

‘Your caution increases, lord sergeant,’ said Nuministon.

‘Genestealers rarely venture to the very outermost levels of an infested hulk,’ said Voldo. ‘But it is in dark places like this, deeper in, where the unwary might be ambushed and infected unseen, that they prefer to wait,’ said Voldo. ‘I would have thought that you, magos, with your remit, would be aware of this.’

‘Rarely do I encounter such creatures,’ said Nuministon haughtily. ‘My work is of a higher order.’

‘Be thankful that you do not, then,’ said Voldo sharply.

They made it into a corridor where most of the lights were on and the artificial gravity was working. The Forgemaster checked the stability of the corridor’s grav plating.

‘They are active,’ Clastrin said. ‘You may disengage your mag-locks.’

Voldo was pleased. With the mag-locking off, they could proceed with greater speed.

The corridor was bent out of true, the damage to the ship’s fabric growing greater the deeper they went into the hulk. In one place the Terminators had to squeeze through a section where the floor rose up close to the ceiling. Small cells lined the corridor, crew quarters, or perhaps those for passengers paying for passage on the merchantman. Not far beyond the narrowing, they passed a room of which the doorway was part-blocked. A barricade had been thrown up behind it; heavy bars welded in place. It looked formidable but had not held, the door had been slashed open and peeled back into wicked triangles, the barricade smashed down.

Voldo had Brothers Genthis and Curzon approach. Light played along their claws as they activated their energy fields. They adopted combat stances, wheeled into the doorway, investigated, and let their weapons drop and deactivate.

‘Brothers, we have found the remainder of the ship’s crew,’ said Genthis. He bowed his head and pointed inside with his lightning claws.

The room, a kitchen, it seemed to have been, contained a scene of ancient slaughter. The bones of the men who had once staffed Father Harvest were scattered like twigs across the floor, black bloodstains on the walls marked their passing from this life into the next. All else had passed, ground to dust by the passage of time.

‘Emperor preserve their souls,’ said Alanius softly.

It was a small room, insignificant, its mundane purpose adding to the poignancy of what must have been a desperate last stand.

‘They await the final call to serve, their lot in this life is done, in the next they may excel,’ said Voldo, emotionlessly reciting the prayer of Honourum. ‘Had xenos broken into the ship, at least the crew would have died quickly.’

‘That is somewhat callous, brother-sergeant,’ said Alanius. ‘They were men of the Imperium, men such as we are sworn to protect.’

Voldo turned away from the grey bones and black blood. ‘I meant no callousness nor disrespect to these men, but conjecture on their fate, however awful, is ultimately meaningless. Whatever battle was fought here was done long ago. Long before the ship was attracted to the agglomeration and found another peril to stalk its halls.’

They passed on towards the final corridor they had to traverse in the broken agri-hauler, the way to the next ship in the hulk. They opened the door to this corridor, and Voldo’s rad-counter buzzed like an insect taking flight.

There was a strange mist low on the air, green and heavy. Tendrils of it uncurled themselves into the doorway, trailing across the feet of the group.

‘Radioactive fog,’ said Voldo.

‘It is the air itself, poisoned by the dying of machines,’ said Clastrin. ‘This we certainly may not breathe.’

‘We are far from the sources of active radioactivity,’ said Voldo.

‘That suggests the fog will only grow thicker as we proceed. The environment here is poorer than anticipated,’ said Nuministon. ‘This is valuable data, useful for the assault. It will not harm you. Your armour is proof against such hazards, as is mine.’

‘You speak truly,’ said Alanius, ‘but your servitors, magos, their organic components will die.’

‘And as I stated before, they will persist long enough to fulfil their purpose,’ replied Nuministon.

‘We should hurry our pace nevertheless, lest they fail. It would go ill if two of our brothers are occupied with transporting the device and we are attacked,’ said Voldo.

‘I concur, brother Novamarine,’ said Alanius.

The party proceeded, kicking the fog into uncanny shapes. It grew thicker, rising from the floor to fill the corridor to the ceiling, crowding their vision and disabling their long-range sensors. Suit light beams were forced nearer and nearer to their source as the fog grew denser, until each Terminator appeared as a bulky phantom led by a bobbing will-o’-the-wisp. The glow from the ship’s functioning light fittings withdrew within the vapour, becoming pale smears of uncertain origin. Doors gaped wide and sudden. Where the floor buckled it came as a surprise and the Terminators stumbled. Lesser men, even lesser members of the Adeptus Astartes, would have felt their nerves fray in these circumstances, but these were the veterans of two great Chapters, and they felt nothing but a heightened sense of wariness.

‘Switch to echo location,’ said Voldo. ‘Sound will be our guide.’

‘Will it not alert the xenos?’ asked Azmael. ‘When we fought them on Xoros Ten, they appeared to be able to hear well into the ultrasonic range.’

‘Yes,’ said Voldo. ‘They will be able to hear the echo locator’s voice, but only if they are near. It is better to know the ground and risk combat than to be blind.’

The Terminators did as ordered. Sonic units pulsed.

‘This is a poor situation, brothers,’ said Eskerio. ‘Radiation is far higher than we anticipated.’ The motion tracker was a useless fuzz beyond seventy metres, the map limited to a series of stacked boxes painted in high-pitched sound.

‘We are close to the exit point,’ said Voldo. ‘Be steady.’

They came to the end of the corridor, where it took a sharp bend to the left, following the hull’s inside. Further that way the corridor was blocked, the hull and ceiling pressed down as if a hand had crushed the ship, but the wall directly ahead was clear, with space for Clastrin and Gallio to work. They approached, and Voldo and his comrades felt their weight shift.

‘The grav plates here are dead,’ said Clastrin. ‘Re-engage mag-locks.’

A series of clunks sounded as boots locked to the floor.

‘Here Brother Gallio, this is to be our way into the next ship.’ Voldo indicated a patch of wall.

‘I will aid you, Brother Gallio, as before,’ said Clastrin.

The Master of the Forge and veteran brother set to work, the others standing guard over them. Alanius had Brother Curzon station himself by debris, in case something did come through. Others hunted out underfloor access ways, or roof vents and crawlways that led into the ship’s systems. Genestealers could cram themselves into remarkably tight spaces, to emerge where least expected.

The veteran brothers stood as still as statues, green fog caressing their armour, the long silence of the ship torn by the crackle and whine of Gallio’s chainfist and the hiss of Clastrin’s plasma torches. Voldo checked his mission clock. Three hours in. In another five the tech-priests of the explorator fleet would expect the device to be functional and start their own machines. There was no way to signal them should that not be the case.

The Forgemaster and Gallio were close to breaching the inner skin when Eskerio called out. ‘Brother-Sergeant Voldo! Quadrant five, coordinates 917.328.900.’

Voldo sent his map over to that point, a labyrinth of corridors and rooms and crawlspaces and cracks whisked past his eyes. He was just in time to see a small, pulsing red dot, before it moved off the edge of their equipment’s effective range. Five hundred metres, slightly forward, down and to the left of them. Not close, but close enough.

‘Are we noticed?’ asked Alanius.

‘It is hard to say,’ said Voldo. ‘Genestealers sleep most of their time aboard these hulks, but there are always a few awake. Sentries, if you will. If one has seen us, all have. They are psychically attuned to one another.’

‘Aye,’ said Alanius. ‘It is the way Brother-Epistolary Guinian tracked them here, through their psychic bond.’

‘They are beasts. Beasts do not post sentries,’ said Curzon.

‘If our Novamarines brother says they do, believe him. Do not dismiss the genestealers as animals,’ said Alanius. ‘We have not fought side by side with Master Caedis these last twenty-five years against them. They have claimed more than a few of our brethren who thought as you do. Do not underestimate them.’

‘It is my eternal regret our squad was with the Fifth Company all this time, brother-sergeant,’ said Curzon.

‘Do not despair, brother. You will have the chance to blood your claws.’

‘You have not faced this foe before?’ said Voldo.

‘No. Squad Hesperion had been attached to the Fifth Company’s taskforce for some time, and we have been separated from the rest of our veteran brothers,’ said Alanius. ‘Lord Caedis wished us to accompany you, so that when the assault comes, all the First Company will have faced the genestealers in battle. You have great experience, he desires us to share it.’

Voldo could see the wisdom in that, and the lack of it.

Gallio pulled back a wide section of hull plate with the help of Clastrin’s servo-harness. ‘Brother-sergeant, we are through.’

A black space gaped, into which the radioactive fog was rapidly sucked, spilling over the lip of metal like a waterfall.

Voldo strode forward. The ships had been pushed so hard together the metal of their hulls was mashed into one. He stepped one foot over the raw doorway, and lowered himself the fifty centimetres difference between the two ships’ decks. A black space gaped in front of him, his suit light too feeble to dissipate the imprisoned night.

He drew his power sword. Blue lightning crackled along its edges.

‘Brothers,’ said Voldo. ‘Be on your guard.’

CHAPTER 6

FIRST CONTACT

The second ship was also of Imperial origin, but far older and in worse repair than the Father Harvest. Many of its compartments were crushed to nothing. In places the floor had fallen away entirely, giving view to deck after crumbling deck until they were swallowed by the hulk’s fathomless dark. Paths the map showed as clear were clogged with wreckage many metres deep that they could not cut through. One passage was a solid mass of rippled ice, another cut by a chasm they could barely see across. Each time they were forced to double back and find another route. All systems aboard the ship were inert and remained so despite the best efforts of Nuministon and Clastrin to coax them into life. Neither their tools nor their prayers would awaken them, and after a time the Techmarine and magos abandoned their efforts, and the group pressed on as best they could. Every door they encountered had to be cut through. Gallio’s chainfist made short work of such obstructions, but the screech of metal on metal and the rapid bangs of the weapon’s disruption field shattering matter threatened to bring the foe upon their heads. Each door breached was followed by a tense pause, every member of the party listening for the approach of furtive claws while Eskerio and Azmael scrutinised their instruments.

There was no sign of the enemy.

The Space Marines did not speak but to offer status reports. The ship was so full of holes that every corridor presented a tactical nightmare should the enemy choose to attack. They were free of the fog for a time, allowing their auspexes to see deeper into the structure. No new contacts were reported, but then they passed through a crumpled bulkhead and they were into the fog again. The range of the auspexes abruptly contracted, and Voldo’s rad-counter screamed so loudly he was forced to silence its audio function.

Not long after they re-entered the radioactive fog, one of the servitors stumbled and went down onto its knees. The other did not register its companion’s malfunction, dragging the seismic probe forward and pulling the dying servitor off balance until Nuministon halted his slave. The kneeling once-man panted slowly behind the clear cylinder of its environment suit helmet, then it toppled forward to lie half-hidden in the mist.

Genthis, directly behind the servitors in the party line, called a halt. He strode forward and pushed the servitor over with his foot. Milky eyes stared out of a face clearly exhibiting radiation burns. ‘Dead,’ he called. ‘One of us will have to take up the burden.’

‘Who?’ said Astomar. ‘You Blood Drinkers all bear claws, you cannot carry the machine, nor can I.’ He waved his heavy flamer, its housing clasped firmly around his right hand, by way of illustration.

‘Brothers, I will bear it alone,’ said Clastrin. ‘The other servitor will be dead soon in any case.’ He spoke to the remaining cyborg in the twitters of machine speak. It let go of the probe and stepped back. Clastrin moved the dead servitor from his path, and, gripping the device in his servo-arm’s manipulators, heaved it off the ground.

‘Sergeants,’ said Azmael, ‘I am picking up contacts.’

‘I too,’ said Eskerio. ‘Fifty metres distant, two of them.’

Voldo hurried his map over to the edge of the auspex’s current range. Two blips. They faded.

‘They have stopped,’ he said. ‘They have stopped because we have stopped.’

‘They are following us,’ said Alanius. ‘Could they be herding us into an ambush?’

‘It is possible,’ said Voldo. ‘They might simply be waiting for reinforcements. We have been noticed. Even now, their vile kin will be stirring from their slumber. We must move on quickly.’

‘We are nearly at our objective,’ said Alanius.

‘We are, but our way back is blocked,’ said Voldo.

‘No. If we are quick, we might fight our way free before too many come and retrace our steps,’ said Alanius. ‘My brothers are armed for close quarter fighting. Let them come to us, we will drive a way through for us all.’

‘Very well,’ said Voldo. ‘Brother Astomar, you are to take rearguard. Fill the corridor with promethium should the genestealers come. Burn them.’

‘As you order, brother-sergeant.’

Astomar dropped to the back of the line. They forged ahead, moving as quickly as they could in their armour, all pretence at stealth gone. The corridor they travelled creased inward from both sides, and for one heartbeat Voldo thought they would have to retrace their steps yet again. He pushed on. His plate screeched on the wall, his Crux Terminatus leaving white streaks as it grazed the metal. Then he was through.

They wasted several minutes negotiating the seismic probe through the gap. The mission clock ticked down. In an hour, the tech-priests would detonate their explosives. The probe had to be active by then.

The two dots stayed forever on the edge of the auspex’s range, disappearing when pockets of extreme radiation reduced the auspexes’ efficacy, appearing worryingly close when the machines were able to cast their sensing nets out further. Sometimes the contacts were together, and sometimes apart, but always they were there.

The party broke through into a series of corridors and chambers that had retained something of their original shape. Their speed increased. Voldo had Astomar hang back from the main body of the group, covering its rear, before rejoining them under the watchful gaze and gun of Eskerio, and then remaining behind once more. This seemed to keep the creatures shadowing them back a little, and Voldo breathed easier.

They passed into a lozenge-shaped compartment, where the tattered remains of radiation suits hung from rusted hooks and traces of hazard signs were visible under ancient corrosion. A further door led into a square room, double doors marked with sigils of warding and warning at its far side. On Voldo’s map the mission objective marker glowed bright in the centre of the wide room beyond.

‘And so providence brings us nigh to our goal, brothers,’ said Voldo. ‘Magos Nuministon, Forgemaster Clastrin, to the front with me.’

They forced open the double doors by dint of main force. On the other side, four long, four-storey machines filled the room, spaced regularly apart; the vessel’s Geller field generation room.

Nuministon spoke. His harsh voice was unpleasant over the vox-speakers, but for once Voldo was glad to hear it.

‘We are here. I shall deploy my machine.’

‘There are ten minutes left upon the mission clock,’ said Voldo. ‘Be swift so that we might be away as soon as the soundings are taken.’

Before Voldo would allow Nuministon through, he had Eskerio conduct a thorough scan of the room, then investigated it himself with Brother Gallio and Brother Eskerio at his side. There were two other exits: a door to the left and a broad way opposite the double-doored entrance. This wide corridor was filled with wreckage, a narrow gap at its top.

‘There is a hole in the ceiling, brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio, gesturing upward with his power fist. ‘Easy ingress for the xenos.’

Voldo tilted his torso backward, sending his suit light beam leaping up the wall. The breach it revealed was wide, fringed with streamers of bent metal bracing, the room above inky black. ‘I see it. It is unfortunate. Gallio, cover the breach. We cannot secure this room entirely, but we will do all we can. Brother Astomar, report.’

‘No sign of the enemy, brother-sergeant.’ Astomar was twenty metres back down the corridor by the far door of the old suiting room, weapon pointing the way they had come.

‘If we have arrived at our objective, Brother Voldo, Azmael and Curzon should join your brother at the rear. They can engage the xenos should they weather the flames, while Brother Azmael’s presence there will extend the boundaries of our auspex’s range,’ said Alanius.

‘Yes, a good course of action.’ Voldo checked his map. He set out a plan for the others as Curzon and Azmael stamped back through the forechamber to join Astomar. Genthis and Tarael joined Eskerio and all took up station beside the door leading from the forechamber into the suiting room, covering Astomar, Curzon and Azmael’s retreat. By mutual agreement, Alanius set off to the debris pile, ready to intercept anything that might force itself over the top, while Voldo himself strode to the doorway leading out of the side of the Geller room. He sheathed his sword and wrenched the doors open a crack, an impossible task without the Terminator armour amplifying his already considerable strength. The corridor beyond it was empty.

‘Lord Forgemaster Clastrin, please weld this door closed.’

Clastrin deposited the sensor probe where Nuministon indicated and joined his Chapter brother. His servo-harness’s manipulators locked themselves to the doors and pushed them shut again. A hissing plasma torch descended on a slender mechanical arm and burned into the metal. Voldo looked away, its brightness interfering with his armour’s sensorium.

The map within his helmet showed his group’s disposition, icons overlaid on a green wireframe representation of the rooms. Nuministon was by his device. Gallio stood back from the hole in the ceiling. He glanced at the magos from time to time, checking his progress. Through Gallio’s suit picter, Voldo saw the tech-priest activate the machine. Light glowed from the upper screen. Nuministon pressed at something. Arms extruded themselves from cavities in the device’s four corners, descended to the ground and locked it down. The foot, which Voldo had originally taken to be the main support, was now suspended fifty centimetres or so from the ground.

‘I am ready,’ said Nuministon. ‘Now we must wait for the detonations.’

Voldo went through the placing of his and Alanius’s warriors one more time, thought of tactical responses to attacks from various quarters, committing courses of action to memory. It was always the same, no matter how many times he fought. The sense of oneness he felt with his armour retreated, the feed from the sensorium crawling into the back of his skull, leaving him feeling pinned and helpless within the suit’s thick layers of ceramite, plasteel and adamantium. For more than one brother he had known, the armour had become a trap, and then a tomb. Despite their strength and durability, the Terminator suits could be damaged, and if their own guiding machine-spirits died, they were impossible to free oneself from. And if one could free oneself, it begged the question, where would a brother go? Into the near-airless, toxic environs of the hulk? Voldo was not a normal human. He had not been a true man for long centuries. He did not feel fear as other men feel fear, but all the same in those moments of waiting he became acutely aware of his own mortality, of the air in his lungs, the pump of his hearts; a body that for all its gifts was comprised of weak bone and weaker flesh, a body encased in a machine that itself was, in the larger scale of things, also weak. Whatever the tech-priests might say, what power technology had in the face of the universe’s hostility was meagre at best.

These were not doubts. These were not frightened musings. Voldo knew his limitations, and compensated for them accordingly. ‘Only will is indomitable,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Will is armour proof against any foe. By will alone will mankind rightfully rule the stars.’

Then the feeling was gone, and he felt the suit as part of himself again, its feedback mechanisms sending its machine sensations directly into his mind.

There were three faint rumbles, one after the other.

‘My colleagues start their soundings,’ said Nuministon. Through Gallio’s pict-feed, Voldo saw the magos crouch low over his instrument panels. ‘Good, good!’ The magos’s artificial voice abraded away any inflection; his excitement delivered as a monotonous, electronic dirge.

Three more rumbles resounded through the hulk. Flakes of corrosion drifted free from the ceiling.

‘How many must we hold for?’ asked Alanius.

‘Five repeats,’ said Nuministon distractedly. ‘That should suffice.’

The hulk rumbled in response. The chamber rocked, Voldo could not be sure in the uncertain gravity, but it felt like the floor dropped ten centimetres or more. He swayed a little, his suit’s gyroscopic mechanisms keeping him steady. There were distant sounds, as of metal grinding on metal. After the movement ceased, these continued for several seconds.

‘The soundings, they exacerbate the instability of this section of the hulk,’ said Clastrin. He swept lights around the chamber and pointed. ‘There, fresh buckling. It will do us well to be quick here.’

‘Stand firm,’ said Voldo. ‘The ground may be uncertain, our purpose is not.’

Another set of soundings. The vibrations sent the motion tracker of the auspex wild, crowding it with multiple false positives, and after every one Voldo checked the auspex feed and his own sensorium’s data in case their enemy had moved forward as the ground shook. It remained clear. ‘Brother Astomar, report!’

‘All clear, brother-sergeant.’

‘He speaks truth,’ said Azmael. ‘I too register nothing.’

‘No movement here, brother-sergeant,’ called Eskerio.

Voldo nodded. They might yet be fortunate, it could be that the movement picked up by the auspex was not what it seemed; more falling or floating debris, or sudden pressure shifts between compartments. Voldo’s duty was to slay xenos, and he hungered for their deaths, but far better in a situation as this to infiltrate and withdraw with no conflict. That would be the…

A mighty slam rang through the engine chamber, reverberating around it like the striking of a bell.

‘By the Lord of Man, what was that?’ shouted Alanius.

Voldo strode from his position, rounding one of the giant defunct generator units to confront Nuministon. He was in time to see the device’s broad foot pull itself up and then hammer down into the deck, sending out another deafening concatenation.

‘Magos! What is the meaning of this?’

Nuministon was crouched over the device, insectile and horrible. His thin arms darted out to depress this button or flick that switch. He turned his many-eyed helmet to the Space Marine.

‘Why, the machine answers, of course. There are sensors on the surface also, only with my machine’s reply can we build a true representation of the…’

‘Shut it off! Shut it off immediately!’

‘That is impossible, lord sergeant, you see we must gather the data...’

Voldo moved as quickly as he could in his armour, sword upraised. ‘No detail was given of this, you will bring every genestealer within five kilometres down upon us!’

‘I am sorry, lord sergeant, a regrettable oversight if so, I believed that all this had been discussed.’

Clastrin stepped inbetween Voldo and the machine. He held up a hand, and shielded the device with the arms of his servo-harness. ‘Hold, sergeant!’ his twin voices demanded. He looked at the screen for several seconds as another series of vibrations shook the chamber, and the seismic probe answered with another loud slam.

‘Brother-sergeant, you have been given overall command, but listen to him. What he says is correct, after a fashion,’ Clastrin said.

‘Why did you not tell me of this, Forgemaster?’

Clastrin looked to Nuministon for a long moment, then said to Voldo, ‘I was not told myself, brother-sergeant. It should have been possible to map the upper levels of the hulk with spaced explosive pulses on the surface, as we were led to believe would be the process. Why this additional sounding, I know not. It is a matter we must discuss when we return.’

‘If this is so, stand aside, we must stop this noise!’

Clastrin shook his head. ‘The damage is done now. The magos is right in one regard. This additional source will provide better mapping, and deeper. To the centre of the hulk?’ he asked of the magos.

‘Yes, Forgemaster, just so. I require one more sounding, that is all.’

Voldo stood back. ‘Very well, conclude your business. But mark my words, there will be consequences to this, magos,’ said Voldo.

The roar of promethium igniting filled their suit helmets.

‘The consequences are upon us,’ said Alanius. There was irony in his voice, and excitement.

‘Incoming!’ called Astomar. Flame light flickered up the corridor. Inhuman screeching followed.

‘Movement, brother-sergeant, all around us,’ said Eskerio. ‘Brother Gallio! Above you!’

The rapid cracks of storm bolter fire echoed in the chamber. Two bolts shot fractions of a second apart from the weapon’s twin barrels, an unmistakeable pattern of sound; the noise from the report from the gun, the ignition of their ammunition’s propellant, the detonations as they impacted, the sequence repeating rapidly as the weapon discharged dozens of rounds a minute.

‘Some consequences are more immediate than others,’ said Clastrin. ‘Argument must wait. We are discovered.’

Weapons fire died away. A dead genestealer fell from the hole in the ceiling, drifting through the air towards the floor, globules of black blood trailing it. A taut silence snapped back into place.

‘Sound off!’ shouted Voldo.

‘Brother Astomar, here.’

‘Brother Curzon.’

‘Genthis.’

‘Alanius.’

‘Gallio.’

‘Azmael.’

‘Brother Tarael.’

‘Eskerio.’

‘Forgemaster Clastrin.’

‘High Magos Cogitator-Lexmechanic Nuministon of Mars present.’

Voldo checked the screen for Militor’s suit pict: a grey snowstorm. The fifth member of his squad was too far away to be hailed and warned. ‘Any signs of movement?’ called Voldo.

‘There is a large group of xenos bearing down upon us, brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio.

‘I register them also, Sergeant Voldo,’ said Azmael. ‘I estimate twenty to forty genestealers, heading towards us on two vectors. One main body split into two smaller groups, one approaches within the ceiling, the other approaching whence we came. There is a third, smaller group coming down from reference 40.3.21.’

Voldo sent his map skittering to the coordinates. ‘The breach in the ceiling. Brother Gallio, stand ready!’

‘Yes, brother-sergeant.’

‘Brother Astomar, keep that corridor covered.’ Voldo looked around.

‘Despite our angry hosts, we have the advantage of knowing the way back, at least,’ said Alanius.

‘Negative. They are converging to mass along our route, brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio.

‘By Corvo’s oath! Cousin Alanius, what suggest you?’ said Voldo.

‘Are there alternate routes?’ said the Blood Drinker.

‘One. Perhaps, but it is poorly defined, and lengthy,’ answered Eskerio.

‘Forty genestealers you say?’ said the Blood Drinkers sergeant. ‘A not insurmountable number. I say again, let us fight our way through, Blood Drinkers to the fore, your men can cover our exit should they decide to pursue.’

‘An inevitability, now the nest is disturbed,’ said Gallio.

‘They have yet to taste our steel, my friend, once they have, we shall have the measure of their enthusiasm,’ said Alanius, and Voldo could hear the excitement growing stronger in it. The Blood Drinkers were shifting about, fists clenching and unclenching.

Like the thrice-damned Knights of Blood, thought Voldo, they are too keen for the fight. There was nothing for it. They had to react swiftly, or they were lost.

‘Very well. We depart the chamber. Brother Gallio, cover the door. Brother Astomar, you are to engulf as many of the aliens as the Emperor wills in flame. Brother Eskerio, to the front. Thin their numbers, give our Blood Drinkers brothers the greatest advantage when they engage. Brother Gallio, to me! Keep your eyes on the ceiling, beware the third group. We cannot let them outflank us!’

‘We shall smite them righteously with fist, blade, and boltgun!’ said Brother Gallio.

‘So it shall be,’ intoned the other Novamarines in response.

Voldo’s helmet chimed as his threat indicator passed one level and then another. Flashing icons were converging on the corridor, two splinter groups of a greater whole to the front of his party, funnelling into the corridor the party had taken to their objective, a smaller number moving quickly to the breach in the ceiling. ‘Quickly now!’

The party members lumbered from the machine room, hindered by the mag-locks keeping them to the floor. Voldo stopped by the door, covering Gallio as he walked backwards, his storm bolter never leaving the hole in the ceiling. Alanius moved past him, claws active.

‘What of my machine?’ said Nuministon. ‘It is of great value, it should not be left behind!’

‘Perhaps we would not have to abandon it if you had revealed the full extent of your plans, magos. If we survive, and if this cleansing is a success, then it can be collected along with your archeotech treasures. For now, it remains here. Every one of us must fight,’ said Voldo.

‘I must protest!’ The grinding voice of Nuministon became loud and wheedling.

‘Perhaps the magos would rather remain behind and guard it himself?’ said Alanius, bringing forth harsh laughter from the Blood Drinkers.

Voldo waited until Alanius, Clastrin, and finally Gallio, had filed out of the room. He and Gallio then took up station inside the open door, storm bolters ready.

‘They are here!’ called Eskerio. His bolter barked twice. A shrill scream followed it, hard on the heels of that came the whoosh of Astomar’s heavy flamer. The pict-feed in Voldo’s helmet from Astomar whited out. When the flare died back, he noted five or six flaming forms tumbling through the air, a couple coming forward still despite the fire, and then genestealers were crawling through the hole in the engine room ceiling, carapaces glittering in the beams of their suit lights, and his attention was occupied by his own role as rearguard.

Hunched bodies, over-sized heads, yellow eyes, four arms each, two lower topped with hands in parody of mankind’s own, the upper three-taloned claws capable of punching through adamantium, the genestealers came; deadly enemies each and every one.

‘Fire!’ he shouted. He and Gallio opened up, the muzzle flash of their bolters illuminating the field generation room. The strobing light penetrated only as far as the units, obscuring the view of the genestealers further in. The aliens moved rapidly, their sharp claws digging into metal and pulling them along far quicker than the Terminators’ mag-lock boots could. They flickered nightmarishly in the lightning flash of weapons fire, so quick that Voldo was not certain he had hit his targets. From over his head, Clastrin fired plasma from his servo-harness’s weapon arm. A glowing ball of gas blazed through the room. Genestealers shrank back from the plasma’s glare. The round slammed into the wall below the rupture in the ceiling, obliterating two of the creatures as they crawled head-first down the wall.

‘Corvo’s oath!’ shouted Gallio. ‘They are at least a score in strength!’

Voldo’s bolter shouted an answer for him.

They shot round after round, blasting genestealers apart in fountains of green-black ichor. From behind them came the relentless chatter of Eskerio’s bolter and the periodic roaring of Astomar’s heavy flamer. The corridor leading away from the engine room burned; metal glowed dull red with heat. Snatches of what was happening to Astomar and the others were revealed to Voldo through the suit cameras and squad sensorium feeds: a flash of teeth; lashing, hollow tongues; claws; scurrying movement from things that seemed too big to move as quickly as they did.

Voldo was unfazed by this. Combat was a frenetic affair, that against genestealers especially. He and they were old foes.

‘Stand fast!’ he shouted. ‘They draw nearer.’

The bolts spat by Voldo and Gallio’s guns felled monster after monster, but each xenos down allowed another the chance to come closer. They advanced screeching, heedless of their losses, pushing through the floating gore, and now the aliens were by the edge of the engines, not more than seven metres away.

Gallio’s gun clicked. A red icon sprang to life next to Gallio’s suit-view in Voldo’s visor, indicating the brother’s gun had jammed.

‘Blessed is my wargear!’ called Gallio. He deactivated his power fist’s energy field and attempted to free the stuck bolt, giant armoured fingers working dextrously and without hurry.

Voldo widened the cone of space he was covering while Gallio unjammed his gun. He felled another genestealer, a bolt piercing its bulbous skull between the eyes. The mass reactor within detonated the round, spraying the genestealer’s brains to float in the air. Its arms folded in on its ribbed chest, and it floated serenely backwards.

The sensorium jam icon by Gallio’s feed flashed twice, went green, and blinked out.

‘Clear!’ shouted Gallio. He raised his gun again, power fist field re-engaging simultaneously. Together Gallio and Voldo fired and fired. Twinned magazines dropped from the bottom of Voldo’s storm bolter. Another icon sprang up next to his own emblem in his suit display. ‘I am out of ammunition!’ An alarm chimed.

A genestealer hurled itself down directly from above the door, feet scrabbling to arrest it from bouncing back into the air. Gallio’s bolter tore half its upper body away before his magazines too emptied and clattered to the floor.

‘Empty!’ The Terminators carried spare rounds in their suit’s stowage, but such was the bulk of the armour that it was impossible to retrieve them and reload in combat. Clastrin’s servo-harness made the dry cough of plasma weaponry still, annihilating genestealers. Those pouring in through the ceiling came quickly forward. Clastrin extended his two lower mechanical arms, those tipped with flamers, and burned the aliens away with a blast of promethium.

‘I have but four shots’ worth of fuel for my flamer, brother-sergeant,’ said the Forgemaster. ‘My plasma cutters must cool also, or they will emergency vent and become useless.’

Past the writhing genestealers, more dark shapes moved, a tide of aliens creeping downwards. One launched itself from the wall, powerful legs sending it through the air towards Voldo.

‘They are coming again!’ shouted Voldo.

Gallio raised his fist. Voldo prepared his blade, and the genestealers were upon them.

Voldo’s world narrowed to a maelstrom of flashing claws and teeth as the leaping genestealer landed on his shoulders. Its four arms wrapped themselves around him, clawed feet scrabbling madly at his breastplate. Its long, hollow tongue lashed at his helmet, seeking to implant him with its vile seed. He drove upward with his power sword, the weapon’s field crackling as it passed through the beast’s chitin and into its gut. Voldo wrenched the weapon and flung his arm out to cast the creature’s body from his armour. Immediately he was re-engaged, two more scuttling over the floor, another imitating the first’s leap.

The genestealers were so fast it was all he could do to match their speed with his sword. He cut and parried, deflecting blow after blow. One riposte severed a genestealer’s lower left arm, and he stepped forward to finish it with a thrust to the neck. A second raked a broad hand, horribly manlike, across his chest eagle, scoring the ceramite. He felt the pain of the machine through his sensorium as a dull throb layered over his body’s native senses. Nothing vital was hit, the claws not penetrating far enough to snag a power line or damage the suit’s fibre bundles. He pivoted, and slew the genestealer before it could bring its heavier upper claws in for a killing blow.

Gallio fought more slowly, the power fist on his suit was a clumsy weapon. He too expended much effort fending off the genestealers’ attacks, but when he did manage to land a blow the effects were devastating, the disruption fields surrounding the heavy gauntlet ripping alien flesh apart at the atomic level with a thunderous crack, bursting the creatures like smashed fruit.

Clastrin waited for a propitious moment before letting off another shot from his flamer. Genestealers dropped writhing, two more fell back, and Clastrin cut them down with his plasma cutter.

And then there were no more.

Voldo panted, body singing with adrenaline. He scanned the room carefully. Nothing lived within. No more shadows flowed down the wall. His helmet was a clamour of alarms, his vision dazzled by icons on his visor. His sensorium filled his mind with further information, the condition of the suit pasted over his own senses as pseudo-pain and phantom sensations. He twisted around, scanning the room with his own eyes and the sensorium of the Terminator armour. The motion tracker was wild with false positives, tripped by the dismembered parts of genestealers floating slowly to the floor all around them.

‘Remain here, brother!’ he told Gallio. Clastrin nodded, and took Voldo’s place as the sergeant turned himself around and lumbered towards the other front of the battle. Clastrin reached for Gallio’s stowage to retrieve a full bolt magazine. He was forced to scrape alien flesh from the clasp. All of them were besmirched with the vile fluids of the xenos.

Astomar and Eskerio had stepped back from the suiting room. Eskerio had his gun trained on a fresh hole in the suiting room ceiling. A dead genestealer hung from the gap, waving as if caught in an ocean current, its black blood wobbling globules that drifted through space. Astomar had retreated around a corner. He was kneeling and had his flamer arm up. He had ejected his promethium flasks from the weapon and was in the process of unclipping a spare from his belt.

What Voldo saw in the corridor beyond the suiting room made the breath catch in his throat. Alanius and his men fought, claws flashing. They were not so fast as the genestealers, but their technique was greater. Energy-sheathed metal blocked alien chitin, and responded with deadly efficacy. The Blood Drinkers were a whirl of motion and blades. Genestealer dead choked the corridor.

The final alien was cut down, a snarl upon its face. ‘We are done,’ shouted Alanius, his voice wild. ‘The enemy are destroyed! Rejoice brothers!’

‘Let the blood flow! Let it flow!’ the Blood Drinkers chanted. ‘Let it flow!’

‘Well fought, oh Adeptus Astartes!’ rasped Nuministon. ‘I knew full well your skill at arms would see us through, and you are all unharmed. A commendable efficiency.’

‘Untrue, magos,’ Astomar said. ‘Cousin Genthis’s suit is damaged.’

Voldo checked the Blood Drinker’s vital signs. The outer ceramite shell of his armour had been cut clean through on his lower chest, but the inner plasteel layers remained intact, and sealant foam bled from the machine’s mechanisms, hardening rapidly to close the tear.

Eskerio held up his power fist, looking to the auspex. ‘There are no more signs of movement. Threat indications are low.’

‘Then our way home is free!’ shouted Curzon. ‘Come, brothers, let us return in triumph!’ He, Tarael, and Azmael turned and marched down the corridor without waiting for guidance from their leaders.

‘We should wait, Brother Alanius!’ called Voldo. ‘We should set our next plans.’

Alanius turned to the Novamarine. His hands would not be still. ‘Your own brother says the way is clear, brother-sergeant. And I could not restrain them now if I wished it. The battle-joy is upon them, and nothing will keep a Blood Drinker back when this is so.’

With that, Alanius cast about, rolling genestealer corpses over until he found one that met with his approval. With a great blow of his claws, he carved the thing’s exoskeleton away from its chest, and quickly cut free its heart. He unfolded a hook on his suit, and pinned it in place.

‘Barbarism,’ muttered Gallio. ‘Suffer not the unclean.’

‘Will you follow with us, brother-sergeant? My men will cut our way through should the enemy return, nothing can halt a Blood Drinker when…’

The hulk shifted. A rumble that built rapidly, and suddenly all was noise and motion.

‘Hulk quake! Steady yourselves!’ called Voldo.

The quake lasted longer than the others. The hulk rolled and groaned like a man in a fever dream. The corridor rippled, its metal twisting as fluidly as cloth. Alanius swayed, feet locked to the floor. Nuministon stumbled against a wall. Bulkheads buckled under phenomenal pressure as the troubled mass of the agglomeration shifted. The floor under Voldo’s feet bent upwards, dislodging his mag-lock, and he toppled forward with a bang, rebounding to hang in the air. The augur feed from Eskerio and sensorium data from the others’ suits jumped wildly. He lifted his head in time to see the corridor collapse.

Tarael was furthest ahead and free. Voldo thought he saw the brother turn and look back as the central section convulsed inwards, Azmael leapt away, stumbling as his suit tried to match his sudden movement and simultaneously deal with the lack of gravity and unstable environment, his claws raking furrows in the corridor walls as he reached out to steady himself. Curzon was not so lucky. The Space Marine had time to look up before floor and ceiling met each other, metal jaws that swallowed him whole.

The hulk convulsed again, and was still.

Voldo checked the suit augurs of his men and Alanius’s. Tarael’s showed a wall of debris, but judging by the way the picture was moving around, Tarael was free and getting to his feet. Curzon’s was active, and his vital signs indicated that he lived under the twisted mass of metal. All Voldo’s own men were unharmed and untrapped. He rocked awkwardly, trying to attain a position from which he might once again bring his boots to the floor, lock them, and stand.

Alanius approached.

‘It appears you were correct. We are trapped, brother Novamarine,’ he said. Black blood from the genestealer’s heart ran down his leg. His voice was thick, ripe with arrogance and violence. ‘What are your suggestions?’

CHAPTER 7

CAEDIS

Chapter Master Caedis worked in his chambers. He was stripped to the waist; baggy, blood-red trousers on his lower half, soft black boots on his feet and a black tabard hanging between his legs – the manner of dress all Blood Drinkers affected when out of their battleplate. The battle-barge was warm, the way the Blood Drinkers preferred; warm as the volcanic halls of San Guisiga, warm as blood. Incense drifted from cyborg creatures that flitted about the vaulting of the room. Gentle music, composed by a long-dead brother, played.

An unfinished stained glass panel two metres tall rested within a cradle before Caedis, tilted slightly so that it was not quite erect. Much of the glass was in place, the intricate framework braced and clamped so that it would not sag and break as Caedis fitted it with more coloured panes.

Caedis’s room was full of such works. Sculptures of past heroes, tapestries of great victories, exquisitely carved furniture and more, all made by his own hands over the centuries. The creation of art was a tonic to the soul, a distraction from the infernal itch of the Thirst. How ironic, thought Caedis, that it should lose its effectiveness as he worked upon an item venerating Holos, the brother who had brought a measure of peace to the Blood Drinkers and saved them from damnation.

In the glass picture, Holos climbed Mount Calicium. The hero-saint had set out after a dream, disobeying the will of the Chapter Council to fulfil his quest. This was the fifth window in a series of seven Caedis had planned depicting Holos’s legend. These earlier parts of the story – Holos’s dream, the secret counsel of the Reclusiarch Shanandar, the climb begins, Holos’s battle with Lo-tan, lord of the astorgai – Caedis had completed already.

In this fifth window, Holos had reached the summit. His armour had been broken by the violence visited upon him by the astorgai that infested the mountain’s crags, so damaged that its spirit and aiding systems had died and its weight become a burden. What armour Holos could free had been thrown off. His arm hung uselessly at his side and his weapons were gone. But Holos’s will remained.

As Holos lay close to death upon Mount Calicium’s peak, a winged figure had appeared to him, revived him at the point of his death and given him the secret that would enable the Blood Drinkers to keep the Thirst at bay, if they dared.

Holos dared.

Brother Holos had returned weeks later to the fortress-monastery on San Guisiga, long after he had been given up for dead. Celebrations at the hero’s return turned to uproar when he revealed what he had been told. What the winged figure proposed nearly tore the Chapter in two, but those were desperate days, a time when more and more battle-brothers were falling into the Black Rage with every passing year, and the Thirst tormented them endlessly. Any measure to alleviate it was attempted, all without success.

These two events – Holos’s Return and the Blood Schism – they were to have been the conclusion of the panels, to surround the glass of Holos in Glory that dominated the wall of the Reclusiam at the fortress-monastery on San Guisiga.

Holos’s solution, the rite and the way of being he brought back with him from the summit of the volcano, had worked. The Blood Drinkers had since known an equilibrium that the other scions of Sanguinius could only pray for.

The Rite of Holos. The Blood Drinkers’ greatest secret and their greatest strength. Without it the Chapter would have descended into savagery and been lost. With it the brothers remained stalwart defenders of the Imperium. There was, however, a cost.

‘Celebrate the blood,’ murmured Caedis. He recited the catechism of Holos, his eyes fixed on the hero’s outstretched arm. ‘To deny the blood is to deny life, to deny life is to deny duty. To deny duty is to betray the Emperor. Betrayal is worse than damnation. Service has its price, and we willingly pay it.’

Caedis had completed this panel’s Holos some time ago, but a gap remained, the top left quarter of the work was unfinished. The mysterious winged figure who had come to Holos and which Caedis had intended as the focal point of the piece was entirely absent. He had worked on the window cycle for many years. During that time he had always had an idea of how he would portray the angel in this, the crucial panel, but as he had come to craft the being his vision had become elusive. Try as he might, he could not capture the image in his mind, the face he wished to show stayed constant in his imagination until he tried to express it, and then it would shift and change or ripple out of existence altogether, taunting him with inconstancy.

Caedis rubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. He feared now, in his hearts, that he would never complete this panel, let alone the cycle. His tools were awkward in his fingers. When he went to his bench to cut the glass he broke it as often as not, sending him back to his crucible to cast more. His body trembled, his anger was never far from the surface of his thoughts. And the Thirst – hot, dry, his throat burning with it – he was never free of it, not for a moment.

He cast his mind back to Catria, the last world they had freed of the genestealer taint. In the defiled sanctum of that world’s saint, Epistolary Guinian had ripped the psychic scent of the brood from the genestealer young. This had enabled them to track down the hulk.

The first signs had come soon before planetfall. Dark dreams, an ague in his limbs. He prayed it would pass, that it was something else, an illness. But a Space Marine’s physiology did not allow him to become easily ill, and he had known from the first moment that he was succumbing to the Scion’s Curse. Not even after the rite had he known control there. His grasp of himself had slipped as they fought, and he had never truly regained it.

He thought of the seven Catrian soldiers they had been forced to sacrifice. Their deaths sorrowed him, but his usual pragmatic acceptance at the need was absent. He felt only untempered disgust.

Seven sacrifices. Seven panels. How apt, he thought bitterly.

He picked up a goblet from his work bench and drained it. The wine was of an exceptional quality, but did nothing to slake his thirst. Meagre sweat prickled his dry skin. When he closed his eyes he saw sheets of liquid red, blood pouring down glass.

He shook the visions away. ‘Table, flat,’ he said hoarsely. The cradle swung to the horizontal. A table rose from the floor and pressed itself under the glass. The finished design was sketched upon the surface of the table, although even there the angel was faceless, its outline grubby with constant erasure and re-pencilling. Lifting his tools, Caedis approached. In one hand he held a pair of pliers, their ends coated in yielding pseudoplastic, in the other a light hammer with a long head.

He rubbed at his sore eyes with the back of his hand again – Emperor, they were so dry! – and looked to the bench where the glass pieces he had cut earlier were laid out. He selected one – part of the visitor’s face. He frowned, put it back and took up another, a piece of yellow glass intended to represent a section of the radiant aura of Holos’s messenger.

He set the pane carefully into the lead cames, bending their splayed edges until they were snug on the glass. He reached behind him and took up a horseshoe nail of mild steel. He placed its point in the corner where the came crossed another. He steadied his shaking hand, and carefully tapped the nail into the soft lead. His concentration wandered, rivers of red in his mind. He forced himself to continue, tapping nails into all the joins, fixing the glass and cames in place temporarily, ready for soldering later.

Another pane of glass, and another. The halo of light that Holos said had surrounded his visitor took shape, framing a face Caedis could still not quite call into being. Caedis relaxed into the task, delicate and precise as it was, so different to war. Gradually his need to drink of the life-fluid and feel the battle-joy receded and he mercifully lost himself in his work.

Who had been the one who aided Holos? No one truly knew. Some said it was the spirit of Sanguinius himself. Caedis was not sure if Holos had seen anything at all. Death can bring strange visions and inspirations of its own, it could have been that his gifts had saved him. The Emperor’s boons were potent, their workings mysterious.

Methodically he built the glass panel up, pane by pane, each small piece of carefully prepared glass slotting into the ‘H’ cross sections of the cames. Time passed, and his suffering eased. He dared to think that perhaps the Thirst would recede, and the descent into darkness would not come to pass. As dutiful a son of mankind as he was, the thought of sharing the same fate as Ancient Endarmiel, raging within his Dreadnought sarcophagus, filled him with horror; anything but that. He would die in battle if the Rage came upon him, that he silently vowed to himself.

He had another vow to fulfil first. After seeing the destruction the genestealer plague had left on Zanzib he had sworn to track down the source of the contagion and destroy it. Fifteen worlds and twenty-five years later, he had seen rebellion and strife as loyal subjects of the Imperium had been turned on one another by the pernicious psychic influence of the xenos. He had witnessed two planets rendered useless, another consumed entirely by the fires of Exterminatus. The loss of life angered him.

All that blood wasted, a less noble portion of his soul whispered.

Caedis growled. He ignored his unwanted thoughts. It was the only sure way to deal with them, to weather their obscenity until they abated. He set down his tools, judging enough of the glass in place for the time being. He fetched his soldering torch and a spool of soft alloy wire from the bench. The torch was fashioned as a leering devil, bent over at the waist so that its legs formed a handle, hands spread wide by its open mouth.

The worlds they had saved had been reduced, cities ruined, populations decimated. No doubt they would be bled further until the cripplingly slow machinery of the Administratum downgraded their tithe statuses. Caedis knew he could have sped that process, if he had wished.

But he could not. It was too much of a risk.

He ignited the torch. A thin white flame shot from the mouth of the devil.

He had no choice. Contacting the Inquisition would have been the most effective, they could have sped up reclassification and lessened the burdens of the affected worlds, and many would say they should have been informed of such a widespread genestealer plague.

Caedis would not, could not, petition the Inquisition or any other Imperial body for aid. Even calling for help from other Space Marines to destroy the hulk had been a risk he had agonised over for long days.

He had done all he could, sending astropathic messages to the sector and segmentum capital worlds. He prayed nightly that it would be enough.

If he did not end this by the purging of the hulk, the agents of the Inquisition would be drawn here soon anyway. The worlds affected had been of low importance, but so many had been tainted, and the track of the space hulk propelled it closer to the densely populated system of Vol Secundus every time it drifted back out of the warp. The Inquisition’s attention would swing implacably towards the sector and his Chapter. He could not allow the Blood Drinkers to become entangled with them. They would not approve of the Rite.

Solder melted under the spike of the fire. He dripped it onto the joints of the cames expertly.

A chime sounded at the door. Caedis’s body-serf answered. A stick thin, anaemic man, thin arms covered in metal tubing. He struggled as he pulled open the wooden inner door. The serf bowed to the visitor.

‘Lord Reclusiarch Mazrael, my lord,’ announced the serf.

‘Lord Caedis,’ said the Reclusiarch.

‘Brother,’ said the Chapter Master. He did not look up from his work. ‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’

Mazrael walked around the table where Caedis worked, examining the glass. ‘Lord, brother, I come here as your guide and confessor. Are you well?’

‘As well as can be expected,’ said Caedis.

‘My lord, would you tell me something?’ said Mazrael carefully.

Caedis sighed. He flicked the solder torch off with his thumb and straightened to address the Reclusiarch. Like him, Mazrael was stripped to the waist, revealing the mark of chaplaincy emblazoned across his chest. San Guisiga was a hot, volcanic world, criss-crossed with lava rivers as bright as blood. The planet was a furnace, their dress reflected this.

‘Is there anything other than the one great burden that hangs over us, Lord Reclusiarch?’

‘The Thirst,’ Mazrael folded his arms over his chest. ‘It troubles you?’

Caedis shrugged.

‘It troubles us all, my lord, we should perform the rite again soon.’

Caedis continued working. Mazrael watched him for a moment.

‘You work, that is good. Artistry is the great foe of savagery,’ said the Reclusiarch.

‘How goes the mission?’ said Caedis. He reached for another pane of glass, and set about its placement.

‘This is why I visit. There is no word as yet, my lord, as to its ultimate success. The Adeptus Mechanicus have activated their pulse detonators and received an answer from the machine the magos, Nuministon, took with him into the hulk. If everything has gone to plan, then our brothers and the Novamarines were in place to record and process the seismic data and are returning. I thought I would inform you, lord.’

‘Good. No news is oftentimes good news.’

‘They are deep in the hulk, lord. Should they be in difficulty we would not hear their calls for aid, nor would we be able to aid them.’

‘I am aware of this.’ Caedis set a glass piece into place, a brown-grey shard that would delineate part of Mount Calicium’s slopes.

‘You would not rather be aboard the bridge, directing the effort?’

‘Brother Mazrael, three hundred years you have known me, and you ask such questions? What would you know?’

‘I would know only what I ask, my lord.’

‘This mission is the honour of the Novamarines to lead. It does not play to our strengths. Such a mission requires stealth and caution, not the charge of glory or the swift unsheathing of blades. I gladly leave it to Captain Galt, it suits the temper of the Novamarines better.’

‘Disagreeable traits, lord. Better to meet the foe head on.’

‘You sound like Sanguinary Master Teale today, Reclusiarch Mazrael. Maybe they are, but they are necessary traits.’

‘I test you lord, as we all must be tested. Stealth and ferocity, forethought and valour, all and more are weapons in the great armoury of the Adeptus Astartes,’ he paused. ‘It upsets you though, to allow them to be first aboard. I can feel it.’

‘Does it not upset you?’

‘As you aver, my lord, let the tool selected be fit for the task. You would not attempt placement of your glass with a power fist. Emotion and pride is a poor driver of strategy. We must save our passion for combat. Before, there is time to be circumspect.’

‘Precisely so, Reclusiarch.’

‘But lord,’ Mazrael moved closer. ‘I suspect that is not why you are here in your chambers and not upon the bridge. It is not your nature to stand back from a mission, even if you have delegated it rightly to another.’

‘Ah, so I see you have paid attention.’

‘Nor is this your normal attitude. Where is your grace and your kindness today, lord? Such flippancy is… unbecoming to you.’

Caedis placed his glass, took up his hammer, tapped in nails around it, took up another small pane. He turned it about in his fingers, not meeting the Chaplain’s eyes.

‘Do you think the Thirst drowns my finer qualities, Reclusiarch? Am I losing myself? You are wise, tell me what you see.’

Mazrael made a noise in his throat. When he spoke again, he did so carefully. ‘It is my role, lord, to be the custodian of the souls of our brethren. Your behaviour aboard Novum in Honourum was unusual. I am attuned to the changes that precede the fall to the ravages of the Thirst and the birth-pangs of the Black Rage, you know that aside from the performance of the rite, this is my duty above all other duties.’

‘And you see them in me now, Mazrael?’

‘Lord Caedis, please…’

Caedis could barely keep the tension from his voice. ‘I am well in body, mind and spirit, Reclusiarch Mazrael, truly. Soon we will perform the rite and all will be well with me and with our brethren. Tell me that you are untroubled. Tell me that there is not another brother aboard this fleet who does not feel the pangs of the Thirst.’

‘I carry the burden, as do we all, lord,’ admitted Mazrael.

‘There we have it then. I will be well.’

Caedis raised his head from his work. He smiled at the Chaplain. ‘Once we have performed the rite, we will all be well. I work to find focus before the real fight begins. Let our allies deal with the first sortie, these little brothers of Ultramar. Let them have their glory. When the time comes, we shall show them the correct way to defeat the foes of mankind – at close quarters, with blade and sinew. And this greater battle, the coming assault, it offers such perfect opportunity for intimate slaughter, does it not?’

‘Yes, lord,’ the Reclusiarch bowed his head briefly. His hands fell to his side. ‘Then I must be away. I go to speak with Sanguinary Master Teale about the ritual. Subjects must be selected. As you say, lord, the time approaches.’

Caedis’s smile dropped. ‘Unfortunately so, yes.’

‘Do not grieve for those who give themselves. They serve in their way so that we might serve in ours, lord. All men are servants of the Emperor, and pay fealty in whatever way they can. By the blood of the loyal servants of the Emperor are the stars kept pure – our blood, and that of others.’

Mazrael withdrew, Caedis’s body-serf holding open the door for him. The Reclusiarch paused on the threshold of the door.

‘Will you take the black and red?’ asked Mazrael. ‘When the time comes, lord? Or will you seek the Emperor’s mercy? You have but to ask for either, as is your right.’

‘Neither, my friend. Not yet, not yet, and not for some time to come,’ Caedis said.

Mazrael gave a curt nod. ‘I pray it so, my lord.’ He departed.

The door shut, and Caedis let out a long gasp. He shook with the effort of controlling himself. The pane of glass he held in his hand slipped from his fingers and clinked upon the unfinished work. He grasped the table and shuddered. His skin itched, unable to perspire properly, he felt terribly hot. His throat burned horribly.

‘My lord, are you well?’

Caedis forced himself to look up. ‘Yes, Porphyrio, I…’ Caedis stopped. His serf stood close by, unsure whether to approach or not. Caedis’s eyes ran over the serf’s body, past the blood tubes and letting ports that covered his skin, until they came to rest on the man’s neck. There, the smallest movement, the pulse of an artery. He watched it twitch, twitch, twitch…

‘My lord?’

‘Leave me,’ the Chapter Master said urgently.

‘Lord?’

‘Get out! Now! Go!’ he shouted so loudly Porphyrio shrank backwards, stumbling over his own feet.

Caedis gripped the table edge so tightly the frame holding his work buckled. Whether he was steadying or restraining himself he did not know.

The window within took the brunt of his agonies. There was the sharp crack of glass giving way. Caedis looked down at the panel. A line ran through Holos, across his chest and the arm pointing towards the angel Caedis knew he would never finish.

His throat was dry and hot as desert sand, a horrible clutching sensation crawled from his groin to his scalp, his every hair writhed at the root as if it would be free.

‘By the blood of the loyal servants of the Emperor are the stars kept pure.’ Mazrael quoted Guilliman’s Codex, by which they lived their lives. Guilliman did not mean by that passage what the Blood Drinkers took it to mean. The unbalanced mind ever seeks justification for its actions.

Caedis staggered over to his work bench, knocking the pane of glass he had dropped from the table onto the floor where it shattered into a score of pieces. Clumsy hands scattered his neatly arrayed materials and tools. He hit upon what he was seeking, and lifted it.

The soldering torch.

He ignited the flame, let it run until the devil’s open mouth glowed. Gritting his teeth, he shut off the flame and pushed the red hot metal into his muscular forearm. He stifled a cry as pain ripped through him.

Pain that could not stem the rivers of blood that flowed through his mind.

CHAPTER 8

TRAPPED

Debris swirled. A particulate fog made up of flakes of corrosion, chunks of metal, spent bolt casings and genestealer remains that scrambled Voldo’s sensorium.

‘Sound off!’ he called.

One by one, the Novamarines called in, giving verbal updates to supplement the sensorium’s data. Astomar’s leg was pinned, the others were unaffected by the quake. Of Alanius’s squad, Curzon was trapped, unconscious but alive, within the crushed tunnel leading from the suiting room. Tarael was isolated on the far side of the blockage. Voldo caught part of the conversation between Tarael and Alanius as he checked the status of his own men. The Blood Drinker brother stated he was unharmed.

‘Forgemaster, how fares the tech-priest?’

‘I am well, lord sergeant, and will answer for myself.’ The tech-priest pushed himself gingerly from the wall where he had landed, bionic legs searching for the hard contact of the floor.

‘I will see to the men, brother-sergeant,’ said Clastrin. ‘Their wargear needs be checked. I fear a long journey ahead of us.’ He went to Genthis first.

‘Aye,’ said Voldo. ‘Eskerio!’ he shouted. The hulk continued to emit worrying sounds. Creaking and rumbles sounded periodically, these accompanied by shudders running through the fabric of the agglomeration. The staccato racket of Gallio’s chainfist added to the noise of the hulk’s complaints as he cut Astomar’s leg free.

Eskerio projected a map into Voldo’s helmet.

‘I have scanned the surroundings as best I can, brother-sergeant. The way back, as far as I can ascertain, is free bar this obstruction.’ He gestured to the blocked tunnel. ‘The Emperor closes one way, and presents us with another.’

‘Can we cut our way out?’

Gallio’s chainfist whined to a halt. He pulled Astomar free from the wreckage and surveyed the closed way. ‘How deep is it, Brother Eskerio?’

‘Fifteen point five metres.’

‘Density?’

‘This corridor and the ones above and below it have compacted into one, brother.’

‘Then it can be done, but it will take time.’

‘We have no time, brothers,’ said Azmael. Voldo flicked his eyes to the map the Blood Drinker’s auspex projected. Amid the visual noise of free-floating debris, bright blips flashed red, converging on the tunnel end.

‘Contacts,’ said Voldo.

‘It is hard to be sure, but it is a possibility, cousin-sergeant,’ said Azmael. His breath was laboured. It was costing him to keep his concentration on his device. ‘They move too smoothly to be anything other than organisms.’

‘Brother Tarael! You have multiple contacts converging on your position,’ said Alanius. ‘Retreat immediately! You will have to make your own way back, brother. Find Cousin Militor, return to the fleet, and tell of what has occurred here.’

Tarael’s reply was hard to make out. ‘Affirmative, brother-sergeant. May the wings of Sanguinius shield you.’

‘Emperor protect,’ said Voldo. ‘Go with speed, cousin.’

Tarael’s icon moved away then, as quickly as Terminator armour would allow. Before long he had reached the edge of the auspex’s range, and the blood drop and chalice denoting him slid out of view.

‘He should get clear,’ said Eskerio, tracking the movements of the genestealers, ‘if there are no new blockages on his route.’

‘The question is, adepts, what should we do?’ said Nuministon. ‘It is our predicament that requires the more urgent attention.’

Alanius strode over to the tech-priest, claws pointing. ‘If it were not for you, then our circumstances might be somewhat better, magos. I advise you to be careful in all that you say.’ His claws came to within centimetres of the magos’s face.

‘An interesting attitude,’ said Nuministon.

‘Brother-sergeant, please,’ said Voldo. ‘If we fall upon one another, we are surely lost.’

Alanius growled, for a moment Voldo thought he would gut the tech-priest there and then, but his gauntlet fell, and he let out a ragged breath.

‘You are correct.’

‘All is not lost, oh warriors of the Adeptus Astartes,’ said Nuministon. ‘I have the data from the device. If you give me but a moment, I should be able to process it within my own intelligence cores and supply it to you. With the Omnissiah’s bounty to hand, then we might find an alternate route from this place.’

‘Very well. Brother Eskerio, Brother Azmael, make use of what he can give you. Forgemaster Clastrin, I require your wisdom, if you please.’

Clastrin finished inspecting the armour of Astomar. He flicked an access panel closed with a manipulator on his servo-harness, and joined the sergeants.

‘Forgemaster, let we three talk in private,’ said Voldo. Clastrin nodded, and Alanius joined them in closed vox communication. ‘What is the status of our brethren?’

‘The harness of the Novamarines is all intact, brother-sergeant,’ said Clastrin. ‘We are low on ammunition. Brother Astomar has but one flask of promethium remaining.’

‘Five shots,’ said Alanius. ‘Unfortunate.’ He hefted his own claws. ‘These are weapons whose ammunition will never run dry.’

‘That is so,’ said Clastrin. ‘But for your Blood Drinkers, I have greater concerns. Brother Azmael is experiencing stiffness between the adjoining surfaces of his inner right pauldron and gardbrace. Not a serious malfunction, but it will restrict his right shoulder’s movement, and I cannot effect a repair here. To dismantle the assembly will take an hour or more, and the debris presents a problem – should any become lodged between the two plates, it will sicken his armour further. The repair should be undertaken in a clean and sanctified environment, and proper appeasement offered to his armour’s spirit lest the malfunction worsen.’

‘What of Brother Genthis?’ asked Alanius, glancing at his damaged Terminator armour.

‘That is an issue of greater consequence,’ said Clastrin. ‘The claws of the xenos bit deep. His sealant capsules have closed the rent fully, but fluctuations in his power plant output lead me to suspect his primary sternum power conduit to be damaged. On the face of it, it seems a small malfunction, but the spirit of his suit cannot feed properly, and with time it will bleed energy beyond tolerance.’

‘The armour will seize up?’ asked Voldo.

‘It will. Already his power plant labours hot to cover the shortfall this discharge creates, and his heatsinks struggle to compensate for the plant’s increased activity. In addition, the sealant has stopped all movement between his plastron and placard, while his left tuille has been torn free.’

‘Can he still fight?’ asked Alanius.

Clastrin shook his head. ‘It would be imprudent, brother-sergeant. His combat effectiveness is greatly compromised. I will pray for his wargear’s swift healing, but there is little of material benefit I can do here. We must look to the spirit of his equipment until the armour can be brought to your forge or mine and returned to full operational effectiveness.’

‘That leaves Brother Blood Drinker Curzon,’ said Voldo.

‘As far as I am able to tell, his armour is undamaged. Should the genestealers bypass him, you will be able to retrieve him later.’

‘That is a poor lot for a warrior,’ grumbled Alanius.

‘He will live to fight another day,’ said Clastrin in his twin voices. ‘That is something. Everything.’

‘Can the same be said for Brother Genthis?’ said Voldo.

‘Perhaps,’ said Clastrin. ‘He is still mobile. His power plant should function for several hours yet. There is every chance he will be extracted with us. He is aware of his limitations. His sensorium diagnostics have alerted him, and I took the liberty of explaining further that which was beyond his immediate comprehension. I have disabled certain of his sensorium’s feedback devices, lest the pain suffered by his harness overwhelm him.’

‘Fear not for Brother Genthis,’ said Alanius. ‘He is reckoned brave amongst the brave. He will prevail.’

‘Very well. All that remains then is for us to find our way free of this, and we may yet all return to the fleet,’ said Voldo.

‘Wait, brother,’ Clastrin stopped Voldo before he re-engaged his sensorium with that of the others. ‘The magos. He is hiding something.’

‘We were wrong to trust him,’ snarled Alanius. His battle frenzy had not yet fully receded.

‘Perhaps, perhaps not,’ said Clastrin. ‘But he did hold information from us regarding the true functioning of his device. The machine was calibrated to map the upper portions of the quadrants agreed by our leaders, but there is more to it than that. The machine is not only a passive receiver, but a seismic emitter in its own right.’

‘The foot?’ said Voldo.

‘The foot,’ said Clastrin. ‘He maintains the affair to be a misunderstanding, that the foot sent a reply signal to data gatherers on the surface as he explained. This is almost certainly true.’

‘I do not understand,’ said Alanius. ‘Surely that is a worthwhile endeavour. Why did they not tell us of it? We could have adapted our approach accordingly.’

‘Because I believe its pounding had another purpose,’ said Clastrin. ‘It allowed a sounding deep into the hulk. I saw the data displayed for an instant before Nuministon shut off the device.’

‘I can only think they do not wish to share the data appertaining to the heart of the hulk,’ said Voldo.

‘That suggests the Mechanicus have an inkling what lies at the core. But what? And why will they not share their opinion?’

‘I suspect an archeotech hoard, Brother Voldo,’ said Clastrin. ‘Plosk did say he had been hunting this hulk for many years. Why this one? There must be some reason to his pursuit of it. When a valuable prize presents itself, the priests of Mars will do their utmost to keep its discovery to themselves. When they retrieve the archeotech, they will tell us as little of its nature as possible.’

‘You are well placed to know, Forgemaster,’ said Alanius.

‘Indeed. I am inducted into the lesser of their mysteries,’ said Clastrin plainly. ‘I doubt anything sinister on the part of my colleagues in steel and flesh, but the writ of the High Lord has made them arrogant. It is likely they see us as little more than means to their ends. They are not sharing all they know, and that will make our work here harder.’

‘At least we know now why Plosk was so insistent Nuministon accompany us,’ said Voldo. ‘We must return, and appraise Lord Caedis and Captain Galt of this. Cousin Alanius, I urge you, now is not the time to confront the tech-priest.’

Alanius glanced into the machine room, where Nuministon, Eskerio and Azmael stood by the tech-priest’s device.

‘I agree. I will stay my tongue and my hand, but if I have a sense of real treachery, it will go ill for him.’

Voldo broke the private conversation, and re-engaged his vox and sensorium with the rest of the party.

‘Brother Eskerio, tell us what you have learned from the magos.’

A crisp, fresh map came up on Voldo’s internal helmet display. The map rotated, and zoomed out, providing a clear view of their surroundings. A red line snaked through three vessels to the surface, indicating an escape route.

‘With the data provided by Magos Nuministon,’ said Eskerio. ‘Brother Azmael and I have been able to refine our alternative route out of the hulk.’

‘This information is worth our minor sacrifices so far, do you not agree?’ said the magos. There was a hint of smugness to his grinding voice.

‘The loss of but one battle-brother is a grave one,’ retorted Alanius.

‘Your Curzon is not lost, and will be freed. And thanks to this information, the battle against the genestealers will be immeasurably easier,’ said the magos.

Voldo looked to the Blood Drinkers sergeant, unsure as to how he would respond to this needling.

‘You are correct in that,’ Alanius said, and spoke no more.

Voldo inspected the route. Blinking green areas suggested genestealer concentrations, purple vortices two of the many reactors still burning within the hulk.

‘The map is relatively certain, brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio. ‘Although the disposition of the genestealers, sleeping and active, is little better than guesswork married to what the deep augurs of the Excommentum Incursus spied. This void here, for example–’ A cavern blinked, the crushed hold of a mighty vessel, highlighted in bright yellow, ‘–is prime territory for a nesting ground.’

‘We must go through it,’ said Voldo.

‘There is no way around. We must also pass close to this reactor.’ A purple whorl pulsed. ‘Radiation levels will be high, but our suits will weather it with little trouble.’

‘And cave-ins? This data was taken before the last quake. What are your opinions on the passability of the route?’ said Alanius.

‘Good,’ said Eskerio. ‘Brother Azmael and I have selected the most stable path. It should be free of obstruction, in the main. Emperor willing and fortune behind us.’

Voldo span the map around. The route was sound, Eskerio had plotted his path through as many entire vessels as he could. With luck, the grav plating of the vessels would be active, and they would be on their way swiftly. ‘If it is not, then it is the will of the Emperor also,’ he said.

There was a distant bang, followed by a scraping from the far side of the collapsed tunnel. Alanius turned around, his suit light glimmering from globules of blood. Under the hulk’s microgravity, the mess in the air was gradually clearing, drawn towards the centre of the agglomeration’s mass, which was confusingly at a slight angle to the lay of the ship’s floor.

‘Let us be on our way,’ Alanius said. ‘We can gain nothing by tarrying here.’

Galt stared out of the bridge windows of Novum in Honourum at the moon-sized space hulk orbiting Jorso, spines and rocks and broken ships’ prows at the edges catching the harsh light of the sun.

‘No news, lord captain,’ said a communications serf. ‘We are attempting to lock on to the party’s teleport homers, but we cannot find them. The star is loud in its disapproval of us.’

‘Keep trying,’ said Galt. ‘They have been too long.’

‘They have,’ said Mastrik. ‘Brother-captain, allow me to go down to the surface, penetrate the hulk and search for them.’

‘No,’ said Galt. ‘The hulk is vast, and the enemy many. We must conserve our veterans and Terminator armour for the main assault.’ He tapped at his chin. ‘But there is merit in what you say. Brother-Captain Mastrik, assemble two squads, prepare a Thunderhawk each. Do not have them land, but maintain safe distance outside the debris field. I want them close by the surface and ready to help our brothers the moment word is received.’

‘I will call on squads Righteous War and Vermillion, and lead them myself, brother-captain.’ Mastrik turned to go, beckoning to the three Third Company Space Marines who were present on the bridge to follow him.

‘Perhaps they were trapped by that quake,’ said Persimmon. He checked his instruments. ‘It was a strong one.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Galt.

‘If anyone can find a way out, brother-captain, Voldo can.’

‘Indeed.’ Galt addressed the Blood Drinkers Captain Sorael and Veteran Brother Metrion, who were present on the bridge. ‘Cousins, I suggest you advise Lord Caedis of the mission status.’

Sorael bowed. ‘He will agree with your judgement, lord captain Novamarine, although he will be grateful of our update. I will return to Lux Rubrum and speak with him in person.’

The Blood Drinker captain drew Metrion to one side, where they conversed quietly.

‘Brother-Sergeant Voldo lives, brother-captain,’ said Epistolary Ranial to Galt. ‘I have not sensed his death.’

Galt glanced at Ranial, and gave a grateful nod.

CHAPTER 9

THE WAY OUT

Voldo watched as Gallio tore back the last of the hull plate. Clastrin, behind him in the cramped corridor, tugged the sheet of metal away and cut it in two with his plasma torch. Clastrin stuffed the two pieces into a side room, and their way was open to the next vessel.

The silence, now the chainfist had ceased, was sudden and total. It was a risk, employing Gallio’s cutting tool. Clastrin’s plasma torches were far quieter, but the chainfist was far faster, and time was of the essence. The group was in single file, the corridor too restrictive to permit them to stand side by side; it was a bad place to be caught in a fight.

The auspex remained free of contacts.

They had made good time from the machine room, heading for the side of the vessel. They had come across a section where all seemed intact, a great difference to the remainder of the ship, although all systems remained non-functional. Mapping hulks was so difficult because of the great variety of condition not only between the constituents of an agglomeration, but also within each individual vessel. In parts a ship might be whole, then the next section crushed flat or impaled upon the protrusions of another vessel.

Gallio manoeuvred himself around, craning his head as best as his bulky shoulders would allow into the hole he had made. Voldo watched his suit feed.

‘Brother-sergeant, the vessel is at an awkward angle.’

Voldo saw the corridor, the end concertinaed where it had been forced up against the unnamed ship they sought to leave. The corridor on the next vessel dropped steeply at a twenty degree angle, heading away until it was lost to perspective and the uncertain illumination of lighting millennia old.

‘Proceed, Brother Gallio.’

‘The lighting is active,’ said Eskerio. ‘I would be wary of the grav plates, brother.’

Gallio looked upward. The floor of the new vessel was the ceiling, relative to where they were. ‘Affirmative.’ He said. He eased his bulk through the hole, catching his cowling on the jagged breach. He fished around for a piece of metal, and tossed it far into the corridor. Sure enough, the shard flew true until it passed over into the undamaged section of the corridor, when it suddenly arced and dropped with a clatter to the corridor floor.

Clastrin placed himself in the newly carved door, servo-harness arms extended into the other ship, covering Gallio as he moved forward.

When Gallio got to the section of active grav plates, he walked up the wall, his boots clicking as they drew themselves onto the metal. The corridor was even narrower than the one he had left, a rat run, and Gallio had trouble getting himself into a position where he could make the transition from the wall to this new floor. He wavered slightly as his boots disengaged and the gravity tugged him upward, but then he was standing on the ceiling, and beckoning to his fellows.

Clastrin followed, his smaller armour and servo-harness making his transition from one orientation to another easy.

Eskerio was next, then Voldo. The sergeant reached the section where gravity functioned before radioing to Alanius, who stood in rearguard with Astomar at a crossway that allowed them to stand side by side.

‘We are coming,’ said Alanius. ‘I will be glad to leave this place, until the time to reclaim Curzon arrives.’

‘Emperor protect him,’ said Voldo.

The party walked corridors where dust lay thick. The silence was oppressive, infiltrating their spirits, working itself somehow under the constant hum of their suits’ mechanisms and the chattering information of the sensoriums to suffocate them with its presence. It was a permanent, unending silence, a silence that did all it could to remind them that while their noise persisted it might seem suspended, but would return as soon as they had passed. It was the silence of deep space, of the warp: the silence of death.

Voldo spoke only to give orders, the others to respond. They trudged onward, following the glowing line of Eskerio and Azmael’s map to their salvation. The ship was strangely proportioned, the corridors only just wide enough to accommodate the armour. It was of human build, but like so much of the hulk of unknown age or origin. Clastrin found data portals and briefly interrogated the ship’s spirit, but its databanks were empty, its records stripped away by time or trauma. There were few doors leading from the long corridor they walked, opening onto cramped rooms whose contents were ruined, or which had been crushed altogether.

For two kilometres they walked this peculiar way. The external temperature rose with every metre, until the air reached twenty degrees.

‘The reactor in a nearby ship,’ said Voldo, eyeing a purple vortex on the map some way ahead of them. The ship’s prow projected into a large void, the other side of which the fusion reactor of a much larger vessel burned, locked in a perpetual cycle of matter creation and annihilation.

They passed over a sharp bend in the corridor, where the ship had been folded upon itself. A hundred metres before them were a set of doors. They approached cautiously, Gallio’s storm bolter ready at the party’s front.

The doors opened, powered still. They went through into a modest command module: four decks and a bridge, according to their map.

Clastrin cast his gaze around the bridge. There were but three chairs, for a captain and a first and second pilot. There was no navigator’s throne, and nowhere else in the command module that one might be found. The bridge was weirdly undamaged. Pristine instruments lay under a layer of dust, some of their standby indicators still blinking. The lighting was functional, if dulled by age, and the gravity plates held things in their proper place. By the captain’s chair, a cup sat. The blast shields were down over the two windows.

Clastrin extended a data probe and plugged into a port, bringing up schematics onto a filthy screen.

‘Single system vessel,’ said Clastrin. ‘An interplanetary ore-hauler or container ship.’ The vessel’s image, made at a time when it had been whole, showed a long, thin superstructure with space for thirty containers arrayed around and along its spine.

‘No warp engines,’ said Azmael.

‘None. But anything that plies space might find itself trapped in an agglomeration should the conditions be right,’ said Clastrin. ‘A warp storm in-system or being caught in the translation of a larger ship could have cast this craft into the empyrean, or it could have fallen into the gravitic embrace of the hulk while it drifted through real space, and been drawn with it back into the warp.’

‘Eerie. It is as if they have but stepped out,’ said Azmael. ‘And will return soon.’

‘I always find hulks so, brother,’ said Genthis. ‘They are haunted places.’

‘That they are,’ said Azmael, and went back to his auspex. Voldo noted that the Blood Drinkers’ battle fervour had abated, and they spoke now with the hush of learned men abroad in quiet spaces.

‘The great cavity that Cousin Eskerio spoke of lies outside this vessel, does it not?’ asked Alanius.

‘It does,’ said Eskerio. ‘The command module projects into it as an arrow penetrates a board.’

‘Forgemaster,’ said Alanius. ‘Can we activate the blast shields, to see our way forward?’

‘We can,’ said Clastrin. He did not need to examine the ship’s systems to see it was so. ‘If the ship’s windows are broken, this entire section may become subject to decompression, compromising the atmospheric perturbation and sonar detection aspects of our sensoriums. Brother-Sergeant Voldo, what say you?’

‘Brother Eskerio?’

‘The auspex indicates some atmosphere in the void, at what precise pressure, I cannot say.’

Voldo nodded. ‘It is worth the risk. I say open them.’

‘Very well,’ said Clastrin.

The Forgemaster unplugged himself and walked to the first pilot’s console. He brushed away its coating of dust and activated controls that seemed fit for children under his armoured hands. More lights flickered on around the bridge. There came a soft bell, and a request for confirmation in antique Gothic. Clastrin gave it, and the blast shields screeched open, shedding centuries of grime as they slid into their housings.

‘Sanguinius protect us!’ hissed Azmael.

Through the windows, the assembled brothers of the Novamarines and the Blood Drinkers saw a metal cavern, a space captured between the hulls of two ships of overwhelming size – the one opposite them of Imperial origin, the other an alien giant whose smooth skin made up the floor and nearside wall – and into which the command module of their cargo ship protruded. A split twenty metres wide in the hull of the Imperial vessel revealed the roiling energies of an active fusion reactor within. The light it emitted reached into the cave as the rays of an old and feeble sun, illuminating parts of the hulls with stark light, and plunging their crannies into utter blackness.

Upon the gothic detail of the crushed Imperial ship were genestealers. Scores of them, curled into foetal balls, lying atop or embracing each other with their many limbs. They stirred fitfully as they slept, their fluted bodies moving sinuously against their fellows’ as they dreamed alien dreams, their tubular tongues sliding over black teeth.

Bathed in the light and warmth of the reactor, the genestealers rested deep in hibernation, until the chance to infect another being with their awful genes came to pass, spreading their contagion deeper into the Imperium.

‘Our route takes us close by this roost,’ said Clastrin. ‘It is a risk.’

‘There are so many of them,’ said Alanius. ‘To fight them would be a fine way to die.’

‘I am in no haste to embrace such glory, cousin,’ said Voldo. ‘Better to live and serve the Emperor further.’

‘Then what do we do?’ said Gallio. ‘How soon until these genestealers awaken to our presence and pursue us? We will fare badly against so many.’

‘Our route goes from this vessel into the xenos craft beneath us, and passes under the roost space,’ said Azmael. A red line blinked in the Terminators’ sensorium maps. ‘From there, we will be able to access the Imperial vessel, and make our way through it to the surface.’ The map zoomed out, showing the flank of the Imperial vessel heaved up into a low hill on the skin of the hulk.

‘Three more kilometres to traverse,’ said Genthis. ‘A way to go, brothers.’

‘The reactor will pose a problem,’ said Astomar. ‘We can expect the heat to increase, and radiation will be high. How long has that reactor burned? I doubt its fires are clean.’

‘You are correct,’ said Nuministon. He had not spoken for some time, and Voldo was almost surprised he was still there. ‘That is a Helios fusion reactor. I have not seen a functioning model for many years. It is thousands of years old, the knowledge to construct such a compact power source lost. Watch!’ He pointed, and the Space Marines saw a flare not unlike that spat out by a star spurt from the white core of the reactor. Rather than uncurling from the source as a stellar flare would, the containment fields stretched it into a fat band around the central mass. ‘That is a malfunction, the machine is compromised.’

‘The containment fields are not operating at optimum efficiency,’ said Clastrin.

‘What allows energy out, allows matter in. It is likely that the fuel sources have become contaminated with other material, or the reactor would not burn. Such a device operates with near-zero sum inputs, but input is nevertheless required on aeon-scalar periods,’ said the magos.

‘And impure fuel begets poison,’ said Clastrin.

‘How I would love to minister to it and heal its hurts! The reactor alone is of great value, the Lord Magos Explorator was correct in his assumptions about this hulk.’

There was something in the way he said this that prompted Alanius to ask him, ‘You doubted him, magos?’

‘We have had our differences of opinion in the past,’ said Nuministon. His mechanical voice hid the stiffness Voldo suspected it otherwise would have held.

‘None of this will profit anybody if the hulk cannot be cleansed,’ said Voldo.

‘I agree. We must take the data I have gathered to our superiors,’ said Alanius.

‘Which way then, brothers?’ said Gallio.

Eskerio pointed with his modified power fist. ‘Downwards.’

They doubled back to the bend in the ship’s spine. They spent some minutes making sense of the magos’s soundings here, as the data was confused, but eventually it appeared that the cargo vessel’s prow had punched all the way through the alien craft to project into the cavern. The part of the alien ship that had been speared was flat, after the fashion of a broad wing, and it appeared that this had been folded over on itself at some point in the past, leading to a messy geometry in the spaces below them.

Clastrin cut their way from the cargo craft into the alien ship. There had been no sign of the pursuing genestealers for many hours, and so Voldo allowed Clastrin the time to do his work, fearing the racket from Gallio’s chainfist would awaken the genestealers hibernating in the roost.

Clastrin cut the cargo ship’s hull unhurriedly and methodically. The doorway he made was neat, and when it was done he pulled a large section away.

A labyrinth of contorted alien plastics was revealed to them.

‘We must be swift here, brothers’ said Voldo. ‘The genestealers have not found a way into this cargo ship, but the space below us opens in multiple places into the roost cavern. There will be active xenos below, and if they find us, they will bring their siblings to wakefulness.’

They went through the breach. There was no artificial gravity in the alien ship. Whatever race had manufactured it had long gone from the galaxy, for the Adeptus Astartes did not recognise its form, nor did the two initiates to the Martian mysteries understand its construction, which was a seemingly random lattice of spurs that interlocked with little logic.

They floated free, and used this matrix to pull themselves along, quickly at first, but then with wariness. Some of the spurs were solid as iron, others went to powder at the slightest touch, and Brother Astomar was sent careening through a whole section of them when one snapped in his hand. Astomar stopped himself rightly enough, but the noise he made was significant, and the Space Marines were put on edge. They tensed, stretching out their senses through the suits’ sensorium suites. Voldo moved himself, his suit lights catching on the matrix.

Voldo was about to signal the all clear when Eskerio spoke.

‘Contact,’ he breathed.

Voldo and the others searched it out. There at the bottom of the tangled structure, a pulsing mark. It was heading unerringly towards them.

‘We must go fast now,’ said Voldo. ‘We shall abandon stealth.’

Two more red marks flashed, then ten more.

‘We are one hundred and fifty metres from the Imperial ship’s hull, brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio.

Alanius turned quickly. ‘There! Movement!’

‘Go now!’ shouted Voldo.

The Space Marines shoved themselves off, the sheer bulk of their suits smashing struts to pieces as they flew. Their left hands crackled as they activated the energy fields surrounding their power fists, and they used these to batter their way through the forest-like mass of supports.

Voldo risked a look back. Below them, genestealers launched themselves from strut to strut, scurrying upward, their six limbs lending them a grace and speed in the low gravity that the Terminators could not match. He raised his gun, but did not fire. The targets were moving fast and were in dense cover. ‘Conserve your ammunition, brothers!’ he shouted.

They bludgeoned their way through the struts. The hull narrowed, the floor and ceiling three metres apart. They were forced to work their way around irregular cysts bulging inward from the fabric of the hull. Voldo scrambled between two of these, to find Gallio carving a way out of the alien ship. Nuministon came next, then the compromised Genthis, followed by Clastrin, Alanius, Azmael and Eskerio. Astomar was last, kicking at something that dragged at his feet. Voldo caught sight of a leering alien face through the suit picter. The genestealer’s lower hands grasped the Space Marine’s greave, but it struggled to get its sharper upper claws at him. Eskerio leaned over and discharged his storm bolter. Astomar’s armour sparked as the missiles caught him. One found its mark in the genestealer’s face and it went limp as its head exploded. Astomar kicked at its hands, until he dislodged it, and pulled himself into the demi-chamber formed by the curved cysts.

The motion tracker was alive with dots, a wave of xenos rendered in flashing red. Voldo glanced back. The three Blood Drinkers were attacking the rubbery material of the hull wall with their lightning claws, gashing it. Clastrin worked again with Gallio. The Forgemaster’s plasma torches burned, but made little impact on the strange material that made up this part of the hull. Where Gallio’s chainfist penetrated the wall, the hull’s elasticity made it pucker around the blade, snagging the weapon’s teeth and keeping it from being properly breached. Their exit was minutes away from readiness.

‘Brother Eskerio! Clear a way for Brother Astomar! Astomar, let fire on my mark.’

A genestealer lunged at the gap. Astomar punched it in the shoulder with his power fist, caving its shoulder into its chest. He kicked it free. Eskerio shot down three more with controlled bursts from his storm bolter. Grasping claws forced their way between the other cysts, raking at the air, but the spaces between were too small for them to force their way through.

Voldo waited until there were no live genestealers by the gap. The sensorium did its best to differentiate the auspex motion detector’s data into dead and live foes, those it deemed no longer a threat turning a deep amber. Four of these floated in the space beyond the cysts, a sickle-shaped formation of twenty or so live contacts beyond that. It was imperative that the promethium of Astomar’s heavy flamer could spread far. If he fired while the gap was plugged, only single genestealers would take the brunt. In the worst case, the fires could wash back into their own space, and they were capable of overwhelming even the great protection of Terminator armour.

‘Brother-sergeant, I have a clear field!’

‘Fire!’ shouted Voldo.

Fire bellied out from the heavy weapon, gushing through the gap and billowing out into the wider space beyond. Genestealers shrieked, and Voldo was gratified to see many more contacts turn amber.

‘Emperor! The matrix is ablaze,’ said Astomar.

Voldo looked himself, shouldering Eskerio aside. The structure of the ship had caught fire.

‘Should keep them back for a while,’ said Genthis.

‘Do not count on it, brother.’ More red dots were closing in on them.

‘Almost there, brothers!’ shouted Gallio. His chainfist squealed, the disruption field banging as alien materials went to atoms.

‘Look brother-sergeant, the fire.’ Astomar drew Voldo’s attention back to the blaze. It died back quickly, the bone-like matrix smouldering low. Voldo checked his sensorium.

‘The flames have consumed the available oxygen,’ said Astomar.

‘The xenos will suffocate,’ said Nuministon.

‘No,’ said Voldo. ‘Even a vacuum is nothing to them.’ He looked back to Gallio’s work. ‘Ready yourselves!’

The elastic properties of the hull were exhausted, and Gallio’s weapon suddenly punctured the material fully. A rush of air blasted in through the rip, the hull flapped like a flag in the wind. The fire, suddenly nourished, exploded.

The force of it was astonishing. The flames blasted into their confined space, jolting the heavily armoured Space Marines together. The hull tore further under the pressure of the firestorm, and Gallio was able to rip a doorway into it large enough to force himself through. He grasped Clastrin, and dragged him after him. The others righted themselves and followed, and so they made their escape from the alien ship and were into the derelict Imperial vessel.

They ran, Voldo at their head.

The Terminators jogged as fast as they were able, their movement helped by the active gravity in the ship. The corridor they followed passed deep into the vessel. Their radiation counters rattled, and the air about them became furnace-hot, baked dry by the roiling energies of the reactor. The corridor was whole, but the outer hulk was much fissured, entirely stripped of plating in places and reduced to bracing spars. The genestealers from the roost could therefore ambush them at any turn.

‘Not far now!’ shouted Eskerio. From behind came the racket of storm bolter fire as Gallio lay down covering fire, Astomar beside him ready to fill the corridor with promethium.

Contacts pinged all over the map, coming down from outside and following corridors parallel to their own. Voldo stopped at an intersection and blasted three genestealers coming from the left to chunks. ‘Quickly! More are on their way.’

‘We are making for the outer lock,’ said Eskerio. ‘There should be a door ahead, then a short corridor, then access to the port.’

‘Let us pray to the Emperor that it functions,’ said Voldo.

Astomar’s flamer roared. Genestealers screamed. A dozen motion positives backed away.

‘Thank the Lord of Man, there it is!’ said Voldo. ‘The door.’

The doorway to the airlock access corridor was set into a wall in a hexagonal antechamber. Two more doors opened out from the either side. He ran to it, and stopped dead.

‘What is it, brother?’ Alanius called. He was supporting Genthis, half-dragging him. Genthis’s suit’s heatsinks were being overwhelmed by the fierce heat of the reactor, his time was running out.

‘There is no control panel!’

‘Let me see,’ said Clastrin. He came forward. More bolter fire came from the rear. Three shots, an inhuman scream.

Clastrin knelt by the door. The panel had been ripped free. Wires hung from it, their colours lost under the dirt of ages. He plunged a metal tendril from his harness into the mess. ‘There is power,’ he said, ‘but I cannot access the command circuits.’ His mechadendrite withdrew.

‘What of direct interface, can you not link with the door directly?’ said Nuministon.

‘No. It is all gone.’

‘Then cut it through!’ growled Alanius.

‘This is a major blast door of prime patterning,’ said Clastrin. ‘Time is needed.’

Red dots crowded in from all sides on the map.

‘Time is a luxury we do not have,’ said Voldo. ‘And such a choice, Brother Gallio’s storm bolter there, or his chainfist here.’

Clastrin cast about, rapidly scanning the walls. Conduits and circuitry showed up in his artificer armour’s displays. He caught sight of a hatchway.

‘There is another way,’ he said. He stood and pointed. ‘A crawlway. I can go through and attempt to remotely activate this door from the airlock’s inner portal.’

‘It is too small,’ said Azmael.

‘Not if I go without armour,’ said Clastrin in his twin voices. ‘Then I will fit.’

‘Are you insane?’ said Alanius. ‘Genestealers descend upon us from every quarter.’

‘Then we will die whether I go or not,’ said Clastrin.

‘What of the radiation?’

‘I shall recite the fifteenth litany minoris, and bring my mucranoid into action. The coating it will give my skin will provide some protection.’

‘Yes, not to try, that is the insanity,’ said Voldo.

Clastrin bowed his head. He reached for the first release clasp, and began the liturgy of disrobement.

Genthis pushed himself upright from Alanius. ‘I will go with him,’ he said. ‘I am no use within my armour. Without it, I can act as an escort.’

Voldo looked from Clastrin to Alanius. The latter hesitated, then stood back. ‘Agreed brother, you are a credit to our order.’

Clastrin stepped forward, using his servo-harness to help Genthis from his crippled armour.

Voldo acted, plotting positions for the remaining Terminators; Gallio and Astomar to hold the rear against the bulk of the genestealers, Alanius beside them to aid them if they broke through. Voldo took the left door leading from the chamber, Eskerio he directed to the right door.

Eskerio hefted his storm bolter. His ammunition was almost spent. ‘Give me his claws,’ he said suddenly. ‘Lend me your weapons, Brother Genthis.’

Clastrin paused his hands, his servo-harness continued undoing retaining bolts and clasps on Genthis’s armour.

‘I have but twenty bolts remaining. Better I give my magazines to our brother-sergeant and let him fire longer, while I go better equipped for close melee.’

‘I did not think such fighting to be your preference, Novamarine,’ said Genthis with humour.

‘All things have their time and place, cousin Blood Drinker,’ said Eskerio.

‘Then you may gladly take them.’

The gauntlets slipped from his wrists.

‘Hurry then!’ said Voldo. A wave of contacts were converging on them, far more than before. ‘The roost has awakened. We must fight now for our lives as well as the glory of the Emperor.’

Eskerio took the lightning claws from the Blood Drinker. Voldo and Nuministon helped Genthis further, releasing the bolts that attached his breastplate to his cowling. With a hiss of air, his helmet came away, revealing his savagely beautiful face.

‘It is hot brothers! As hot as home!’ he shouted and smiled. With a twist, he depressed his belt clasp, and the two-part breastplate unclicked. Nuministon pulled it away, sealant cracking where it had covered over the joins between plates. The tech-priest, with Voldo’s help, next removed the cowl and the reactor within, and set to work on Genthis. Far more quickly than the Novamarine’s sergeant could have hoped, Nuministon had disassembled the armour and Genthis stepped free. What would have taken the forge serfs twenty minutes to achieve, the magos had done in a fraction of the time. Voldo hoped the armour was not offended. The components of Genthis’s battleplate lay scattered upon the floor.

Clastrin had replaced Eskerio’s storm bolter and power fist with the crimson lightning claws of Genthis. Despite the difference in marks between the two Space Marines’ armours, Clastrin connected the blades to the suit’s power source easily.

Eskerio held the claws up in front of his helmet and activated them. ‘My thanks for your arms.’

‘Use them well,’ said Genthis. ‘Do not disappoint my armour’s machine-spirit.’

Shouts came from the rear. Genestealers were prowling the perimeter. Azmael and Voldo moved away, leaving the naked Genthis and Nuministon to help the Forgemaster from his armour. Clastrin deactivated and detached what he could with direct commands via his spine ports, while the magos and Blood Drinker pulled his servo-harness away. They unclipped his backpack, helped him off with his gauntlets, and then he was bare headed, ice-blue eyes staring out from a face tattooed with holy blueprints and the cog of Mars under the Novamarine skull and starburst.

‘We are ready,’ he said as his breastplate came free.

‘Then go, and may the Lord of Mankind guide you,’ said Voldo, his voice hard and loud through his suit vox-grille. The sergeant lifted his weapon and fired. Genestealers were chancing the other corridor.

CHAPTER 10

THE POWER OF THE MACHINE-GOD

The heat was intense, fifty-five degrees at least, but the touch of it reduced to a tolerable level as Clastrin’s modified sweat glands secreted an oily perspiration. The smell of the mucranoid’s secretions was sharp and somewhat unpleasant. He wiped it away from his mouth, nose and eyes or it would seal them shut. Hibernation was not his aim today.

Clastrin’s forte was machinery, but he knew a little of how his biological gifts functioned, for what was biotechnology but another manifestation of the glorious machine? He knew how the long-chain proteins in the mucous from the Weaver aligned themselves with one another, hardening to cover his body in a waxy coating. He flexed his hand, watching as the second skin wrinkled. Another benefit of the Emperor-Omnissiah, and the wisdom of ancient days. He had been Master of the Forge of the Novamarines for seventy years, but his wonder at the might of the Machine-God never diminished.

‘Blessed are the works of technology, blessed are the ways of the Omnissiah,’ he said.

Nuministon, hurrying to unclip the remainder of the Forgemaster’s armour, did not respond.

With his helmet off, Clastrin was exposed to the full noise of the ship. The unshielded reactor filled the space with a persistent roar, distant though it was. The derelict ship vibrated with it. All vessels hummed to the tune of their power sources, but this was a sick song. Clastrin possessed a deep affinity for machines, he could sense what ailed them often without removing their casings. He was surprised the reactor worked still.

Gunfire rattled sporadically. No longer able to access the extended senses of his helmet, Clastrin’s view of the combat was restricted to what his own eyes and ears could tell him. The corridors leading out of this small chamber were obscured by the massive bulk of the Terminator armour. He suspected that the genestealers held back, wary of the Space Marines’ firepower. They were savage, these xenos, but possessed of a cunning akin to true intelligence.

Nuministon stepped back, holding the Forgemaster’s backplate. The neural interface spike slid free of the port in Clastrin’s black carapace, and his sense of his war harness departed him entirely. Clastrin still wore parts of his power armour, but he was to all intents already naked.

Nuministon placed the plate on the floor, and helped Clastrin free himself of the rest of his plate.

Astomar’s flamer whooshed. Firelight played around the chamber.

‘I am ready,’ said Clastrin. His own voice sounded odd outside of his armour. The mucous had hardened fully, providing some protection from both heat and vacuum. Useful under the current circumstances.

‘Go with the Omnissiah,’ said Nuministon. ‘I am not aware of the pattern for these portals, but such a simple thing as a door will pose no trouble to an initiate to the mysteries of Mars.’

‘Cousin Genthis! We go!’ Clastrin had to shout to be heard.

The Blood Drinker nodded. His body was streaked with dried secretions, but he had no protective cover, and his own skin looked unnaturally dry. Genthis caught Clastrin looking at him, and shook his head.

A loss of a para-organ, then, thought Clastrin. Some Chapters did not possess all of the Emperor’s gifts. ‘There is no atmosphere in the corridor beyond, cousin.’

‘Then I will trust you to work hard to free us,’ said the Blood Drinker. ‘I shall go first, Lord Forgemaster.’ He was thinner than the Novamarine, athletically proportioned, as lithe and hard-muscled as a statue. His face too, was beautiful, its angelic perfection at odds with the feral way in which Genthis bared his teeth as he spoke. ‘You are of greater worth here.’ He held a knife in his hand.

‘Take this,’ said Nuministon, handing over an ornate bolt pistol. ‘I am no warrior.’

Genthis nodded in thanks. Clastrin picked up his own bolt pistol from the floor.

‘We must go now,’ said the Forgemaster. The sounds of gunfire were intensifying. He extended his two mechandrites from the housing below his shoulder blades, a gift of a different kind from the temples of the Machine-God. He reached up to the panel covering the crawlway and deftly unscrewed it with the dendrite tips, pulling the plate away. He turned to Genthis and indicated that he would boost the Blood Drinker into the space. Genthis was up and into the hatch easily.

Clastrin took one last look at his brothers, their bone-and-blue armour standing shoulder to shoulder with the red of the Blood Drinkers, then turned, jumped up, grabbed the lip of the hatch and pulled himself in.

He was in the machine, surrounded by cabling. He imagined himself a component in the grand scheme of the Omnissiah, a piece of the greater puzzle of the universe’s mechanism. His mucranoid film shielded him from snags and the sharp edges in the crawlspace. Genthis, not so protected, was already cut and scraped in a dozen places, leaving a trail of blood which dried on contact with the metal. It was punishingly hot in the crawlspace, the air stale and rank, and the other adept’s skin was raw with blisters.

‘How far?’ said the Blood Drinker. Wildness had crept back into his voice. He was enjoying this.

‘Not far, thirty metres. We pass alongside an access corridor to an outer airlock. There is a panel towards the end. From there I will be able to remotely open the door and let our brothers in.’

Genthis made a noise of affirmation. ‘Good, good. I long to rejoin them. It is not our way to retreat from a fight.’ He moved forward some way as he spoke, then said, ‘Wait! We come to a crossways.’

Clastrin brought up a copy of the map in his intelligence core. The cranial implant was another gift of Mars, another thing that set him aside from his battle-brothers. A vertical shaft bisected theirs. On the far side the way grew wider, two broad ways filled with power conduits leading at right angles away up and down into the skin of the ship.

‘Go on,’ said Clastrin.

‘Shh!’ said Genthis. ‘I hear something.’

Clastrin waited as the Blood Drinker inched forward to peer down the shaft, then up. He turned back to look at the Novamarines Forgemaster.

‘Movement. The enemy descends upon us.’ He scrambled forward, swinging his legs under him and dropping into the vertical shaft. He looked upward. ‘Hurry Lord Forgemaster, you must be quick! Crawl over the shaft and be on your way. I will hold them here.’

Clastrin wriggled forward. The rattle of claws moving over metal came from above him, but he did not look up. He pushed past Genthis’s head, and went on into the further crawlspace. Genthis crawled in backward after him. Clastrin was four metres in when Genthis began shooting.

Praying to the Machine-God and the Emperor for the Blood Drinker’s soul, he pushed on. The sounds of fighting intensified behind him, alien screeches echoing metallically in the confined space, the bark of the bolt pistol. The reek of genestealer blood thickened the air.

Clastrin turned his broad shoulders awkwardly; these service conduits were designed for drones and unchanged men, not the giants of the Space Marine Chapters. His arms pinned to his chest, he worked with difficulty to free the access panel. Behind him, Genthis shouted the battle-cries of his Chapter. The noise of his weapon was overwhelmingly loud in the confined space. Shrieks and the thump of falling flesh signalled the demise of genestealers as they plummeted down the shaft, bouncing from its sides as they fell.

Even through the noise, Clastrin heard the click as Genthis’s boltgun ran dry, the clatter as Genthis discarded it. The Blood Drinker began to chant, a Blood Drinkers’ battle hymn Clastrin did not know. The Blood Drinker was preparing himself for his death.

The panel popped out of its housing. Air blew from the crawlway into the vacuum of the airlock access corridor.

Clastrin drew in a deep breath, filling the lungs he was born with and the third gifted him by the Chapter. With a twist, he wormed through the hatch, and dropped into the way.

Brother Genthis chanted. ‘Lo! I see the wings of Sanguinius! They shield me from harm! They bear me up from battle!’ The genestealer attacking him crouched in the mouth of the crawlway, its body contorted in a manner impossible for a man. Scrabbling talons raked at Genthis, drawing lines of blood across his scalp. The Space Marine grabbed one of the upper claws in his left hand, yanking it hard over to the side of the crawlspace. The genestealer hissed and struggled, its other arms tangled behind its pinned arm. Its tubular tongue flicked over its black teeth. Yellow eyes blazed. Genthis felt the power of them, felt them trying to subvert his will, but he was a brother of the Blood Drinkers and the wiles of xenos held no power over him. ‘Blood is life, the life is blood, through life we fulfil our duty, through blood we continue life!’ His voice became increasingly sonorous. ‘Take my blood, take my life, you will never turn me from my duty, though my blood lie thickening in the dust, and my life run out and be done!’

He drove his combat knife deep into the glaring eye of the genestealer, twisted it until it ground on bone. The genestealer convulsed so hard it threw off Genthis’s hand. Its limbs rattled a drum roll of death on the metal.

Wind sprang up, blowing down the corridor to where Clastrin had gone, and Genthis was glad that the Forgemaster of the Novamarines had made it into the airlock access corridor. He sang louder, against the howl of decompression. Leaving the dead genestealer blocking the crawlway, he backed further down. A pair of large purple hands grabbed at the corpse and pulled it away. The dead genestealer fell from sight as it dropped into the shaft. Three more alien faces regarded him from the end. Without pause, the next of the monsters crept into the narrow space. Legs bent up under it, it moved rapidly. Genthis laughed.

‘Come, come and fight me alien filth! Brother Genthis has not had his fill yet!’

His body was electric with excitement, the joy of battle coursed through him, lifting his spirit and filling him with surety of purpose. At the back of his soul, he felt the dull ache of need, for his last Rite of Holos had been a week ago, and the Thirst had resumed its torments. He did not care. ‘Here is battle! In battle is true service! Service begets joy! Joy begets death!’ he shouted. Genthis felt this joy deeply. To him and his kind, there was no greater purpose in all the galaxy than to fight in the name of the Emperor.

The genestealer scuttled at him, upper claws outstretched. Genthis batted one aside, and stabbed his knife point deep into the chitin of another. The genestealer made a strange, squawking protest and tore its arm back. Genthis’s knife was wrenched from his hand.

Genthis sang the Sanguis Moritura, laughing as he did.

‘The blood of life flows quickly! Only in death can it be stilled!’

He fended off the genestealer’s claws, turned them aside with his strong hands. ‘Let not mine be stilled easily, let it flow on and outward – let it flow from me as I slay those who free it!’

He worked his cheeks and spat, acidic venom from his Betcher’s gland spraying into the genestealer’s face. The thing screeched as its eyes dissolved, and Genthis reached for it. He opened his mouth wide, dragged the creature to him and bit deep, his extended canines sinking into its alien neck. He ignored the burn of his own acid venom on his skin. Black blood poured down his throat.

Xenos blood. Unclean. Impure. Satisfying. He gulped as it filled his mouth. It tasted vile, bitter and cold, still he drank. Flashes of alien thoughts played across his mind as it filled his stomach and washed over his Remembrancer; endless waiting, the chill of deep space, and a single purpose so consuming there was space for nothing else. Behind it, a vast and horrifying shape moved, distant, and yet imminent.

Genthis dragged his head back, his hearts chilled by the vision. Dark blood ran down his face. His skin bubbled, acid burns joining the blisters he had received from the hot metal. He blinked, the genestealer’s memories of inconceivable patience warring with his own urgent need for war.

A rending sound came from above him. He twisted his neck. Metal plating peeled back. The terrible face of a genestealer, contorted in fury, glared down at him.

‘Blood is strength, in death it quickens,’ he whispered.

A three-clawed hand drove down into his neck, ripping his windpipe free.

His mind still reeling from its contact with the alien’s soul, Brother Genthis died.

Voldo blasted a genestealer into pieces with his storm bolter, mass reactive bolts tearing it apart from the inside. He swung his power sword around, smashing another of the aliens back. He put a bolt in its gut, and it crumpled to the ground. Gallio stood not far behind him, taking opportunistic shots past him. To his left, Astomar let fly with one final burst of his heavy flamer.

‘Ammunition depleted, brother-sergeant!’ He called.

By Astomar, Eskerio fought to defend his battle-brother, borrowed lightning claws darting quickly, ripping parallel furrows into alien flesh. Behind Voldo, Alanius and Azmael fought back to back, sending genestealer limbs flying, Azmael seemingly unhindered by his damaged suit. Nuministon crouched by the door, ignoring the combat he worked on its dead control panel. Voldo was impressed by his coolness. Not once did the tech-priest look up from his work.

Despite the suit’s aid and his own superhuman metabolism he was panting with effort. His helmet flashed, the sensorium clamouring at him with a dozen alarms. He cleaved a genestealer in two, power sword flaring, and stole a glance at the door.

It remained locked.

Clastrin was in the airlock access corridor. He went to the inner airlock door at the far end of the corridor from the access doorway beyond which were the rest of the party. The corridor was wide enough for two Terminators to walk abreast. This was once a major access point for the ship, he thought.

He flipped out the access panel to the door control with the tips of his mechadendrites.

The wind was loud as air was sucked from the pressurised cavities by the vacuum in the corridor, battering at him and causing his hair to whip around his face, stirring the metal tendrils at the back of his skull. There must have been a gap in the hull to the outside, for the air whistled ceaselessly over him; the pressure should have stabilised by now. At least he could breath. Over the roar of the wind, he faintly heard the sound of Genthis’s battle hymn and the screams of dying aliens.

‘Focus is the mother and the father of the machine,’ he said to himself. ‘Focus is the enemy of haste, focus is the bringer of function.’ Clastrin regretted that he had no holy oils or greases with which to paint the exterior of the door panel to supplicate the machine-spirits of the ancient ship. He had invaded systems wantonly all over the hulk. He was a battle-brother of the Novamarines, a warrior first and foremost. Expediency overrode all other concerns; but he was also a priest of the Omnissiah, inducted into the lesser thirteen mysteries of the Cult Mechanicus, and he felt sorrow that he had not been able to approach the devices he communed with on this mission with the appropriate reverence.

He reached out with his intelligence core. Emitters within the cabling at the back of his head beamed his requests into the ship in the timeless language of binaric. There was no reply. With machinery this age, there rarely was, the spirits often having died, fled, or lapsed into electronic senility.

His mechadendrites snaked over his shoulder, their flexible smart metals allowing them to extend, the dendrites’ diameter thinning as they did so. Their interface tips searched the cavity for an input port – there!

Clastrin closed his eyes involuntarily as a familiar electric jolt coursed through his mind, his cerebral augmentations seeking communion with the vessel.

There was but a flicker of life in the ship. The reactor burned fiercely, but so much of its energy was radiated through broken containment fields and lost. The hull was broken in so many places that the ship’s service infrastructure was likewise interrupted. But from here to the door, from the door to the reactor; from somewhere, energy trickled. And if energy ran, signals could be sent. Voltage was too low; wire warmed rather than conveyed messages, resistances heightened by deterioration in the power matrices. He risked adding gain to the energy flows, sourcing the power from his own cybernetics. A risky play, drawing on his own body. He missed the power plant of his power armour.

Ways opened up. Wires dead for millennia hummed with life.

He felt the door at the other end of the corridor, felt the thickness of it. Brother Gallio would have been at it for twenty minutes, he thought, before scratching it. He felt too the broken panel on the outside, and the connections that had once run to it, severed and dead, deep within the wall sealing the outer hull from the chamber his battle-brothers now fought in.

He reached out through his interface dendrites, the metal cabling on his head warming as his energies mingled with that of the ship’s machines. There, the door access switch. A simple piece of optical electronics. He activated it.

Nothing happened. He tried again. It was no use. The double doors at the far end, the ones trapping his brothers, remained closed.

There was movement behind him. Genthis’s broken corpse was pushed from the access hatch, landing awkwardly on the floor, his head nearly severed. The blood-smeared face of a genestealer followed. Clastrin did not break contact with the machine. He raised his bolt pistol in one fluid motion and put a round between the genestealer’s eyes. Scrabbling noises came from behind as more genestealers tried to gain the corridor.

He spoke. ‘Oh great and all-knowing Omnissiah! Oh keeper of knowledge, aid me now.’ His eyes screwed shut. He reached out, caressing the switch with his being, at one with the machine.

From somewhere, another touch upon his mind, that of another machine. Fleeting, then gone.

Lights flickered. Clastrin was aware of power relays burning out within the wall. But the double door trapping his brothers creaked, straining against the corrosion that held it closed. A deafening squeal of metal cut into the wind, and the door juddered open.

‘All praise the Omnissiah, all praise the father of machines,’ said Clastrin. He turned, gun raised, to face the genestealers.

Captain Mastrik of the Novamarines and Squad Vermillion flew in the Thunderhawk Reprisal, its sister craft Hawk’s Fury alongside. Laser light stabbed out from one or the other as they flew above the hulk’s surface, atomising dangerous chunks of debris.

‘Lord captain!’ The second pilot of the vessel turned in his seat. ‘I have sight of Wisdom of Lucretius’s teleport homers.’

Mastrik was out of his own seat in an instant. ‘Where?’

‘Here, lord captain.’ The Space Marine pointed at a glowing orb on the map. ‘Near this energy source. I saw it for a second, and then it was gone, but I did see it.’

‘That is practically on the surface,’ said Mastrik. He smiled. ‘They are coming out.’ He slapped the Space Marine’s shoulder pad. ‘Take us down. Hawk’s Fury! Follow us in.’

‘Yes, lord captain.’ The voice of the other pilot was blurred by static, almost unintelligible.

‘Brothers!’ called Mastrik to his men. ‘Prepare for immediate deployment, we have found our brethren, and if they are in need of our aid, we will be ready to give it to them.’

Gallio was first into the corridor, then Astomar. Clastrin watched as he dodged past a genestealer, Azmael stepping forward to take it down with his claws. The Forgemaster saw Voldo stagger back, a genestealer grappling with him. It flew backwards, blood exploding from its back, and then Clastrin could see nothing more in the chamber, the view blocked by his brothers. He turned his attention back to the accessway hatch. Coming through there, the genestealers were an easy target. Three lay dead atop Genthis, another hung from the hatch.

He waited until Gallio was close. He took deep breaths of the rushing air, then opened both inner and outer airlock doors simultaneously, overriding the ship’s safety protocols. He grabbed hold of the open door panel as the rush of air became a gale. The airlock gaped open onto the depthless black of the cosmos. The merciless light of Jorso flooded the revealed airlock chamber. A glittering blast of flash-frozen atmosphere and flakes of paint, corrosion and dust gushed out into space.

‘Many genestealers!’ shouted Gallio as he passed. Clastrin nodded. He was being pulled towards the outside, but his brothers, still armoured, trudged on, weathering the wind as a man might a spring breeze.

Gallio went into the night outside, then Nuministon who bobbed his multi-lensed helmet in thanks as he hurried past. Astomar, Eskerio, then the Blood Drinker Azmael was next. Voldo, his armour cowling scored deeply followed, firing as he walked backwards. Finally, Alanius. Sparks showered from a tear in his armour. He too walked backwards. Genestealers crept after him, Voldo’s bolts finding their flesh and laying them down in death. Blood and gobbets of flesh spattered Clastrin with every kill. They came closer. There were too many.

Clastrin reached out to the ship again. He found the governors for the grav plates easily. With a prayer to Mars and a twist of binaric code, he turned them up to full.

Crushing weight gripped him. Alanius and Voldo wavered on their legs. The Terminator suits, designed to work under the harshest of conditions, responded, redoubling the strength they lent to the Space Marines. The remaining Novamarines and Blood Drinkers walked out into the endless night.

For the genestealers, it was a different matter. They cried out in anger as their legs collapsed under them and they were pinned by their own mass to the floor. They tried to advance, but could not move, their claws waving feebly.

Clastrin withdrew his mechadendrites, his machine gifts retreating to their housing in his black carapace. Alanius caught him around the waist as he backed out into the airlock chamber. The oppressive gravity dropped away abruptly as they passed the threshold of the door, making his stomach flip, and Clastrin was outside in the hard vacuum with the others, unprotected but for his flimsy mucranoid skin. He screwed his eyes shut, and yet still through his eyelids the blue light seared his retinas. He felt his skin stretch and blood churn. Only willpower prevented him from opening his mouth in a silent scream. He flung his arm over his face to protect his eyes. The air in his lungs would soon be spent.

‘Lord captain! Atmospheric venting!’

Mastrik looked out of the Thunderhawk’s forward windows. A glittering cone of debris blasted out from the surface of the hulk, as an airlock in a trapped Imperial vessel opened. Bulky figures, their shadows long on the surface, stepped out onto the surface. Teleport homing beacons and suit data sprang up on the Thunderhawk’s screens. Some of the Terminators were damaged, others were absent.

‘Set down! Set down immediately!’ said Mastrik.

Thunderhawks swooped in on jets of fire, blasting accreted dust into space. Assault ramps dropped open, the ships’ air gusting out with them, and two squads of Tactical Marines rushed onto the surface, swiftly forming a perimeter. Clastrin was taken aboard by an Apothecary first, and put into a sealed chamber. Mastrik approached Voldo.

‘Brother-sergeant,’ he said. ‘How went your mission?’

‘A success, although not without its complications,’ the older man replied. ‘We have the mapping data. Brother Curzon is trapped in the hulk, and Brother Tarael’s whereabouts are unknown. Brother Genthis is dead. Our own Brother Militor remains as rearguard near where we came into the hulk.’

‘The armour of Forgemaster Clastrin, and Brother Genthis?’

‘Brother Genthis’s body lies just within, lord captain. His armour and that of the Master of the Forge are at the end of the access corridor.’

‘Then we will retrieve them,’ said Mastrik. ‘And the Progenoid glands of Brother Genthis. We will present his armour and his gene-seed to Lord Caedis. It should take the sting from their loss a little.’

Mastrik signalled to his men. A brother with a flamer went to the airlock first. The tunnel was at an angle to the surface of the hulk, and he had to adjust his aim accordingly. Two others dragged out the body of Genthis and handed it to the care of the Apothecary accompanying the retrieval group. Then the corridor was cleansed with promethium. Mastrik had Nuministon readjust the gravity, and his squads went in, three brothers abreast, firing as they went.

In a short time, the armours were recovered and borne with reverence to Hawk’s Fury.

‘Honour the battlegear of the dead,’ said Mastrik, as the vast bulk of Genthis’s Terminator suit went by on the shoulders of six Novamarines. Two of his own were wounded. A fair exchange for the retrieval of ancient wargear.

They fell back into the ships in good order, and the Thunderhawks flew. Voldo, helmet off, conversed with Mastrik in the operations room to the rear of the flight deck.

‘Lord captain,’ said Voldo. ‘We discovered a large roost of genestealers during our escape. It lies here, not far from the reactor.’

Mastrik looked at the map.

‘A few well placed shots should detonate the reactor, brother-sergeant.’ Mastrik smiled.

‘Indeed. I say fewer genestealers would make the coming fight easier.’

‘Hail the fleet!’ ordered Mastrik.

‘Brother-Sergeant Voldo,’ came Galt’s voice, ripped by static. ‘It is good you still live.’

‘Lord captain.’ Voldo relayed his news, and the location of the reactor near the surface.

‘Then we will smite them,’ said Galt. ‘Open fire on Brother-Sergeant Voldo’s coordinates.’

‘No! Not the reactor! It is a treasure beyond your comprehension,’ pleaded Nuministon.

‘We have retrieved Genthis’s armour. The roost by it is a treasure we can do without,’ said Galt. ‘There is sure to be much more archeotech elsewhere within the hulk, be content with that.’

‘We will have vengeance,’ said Voldo. From his sensorium, he sent out the coordinates of the reactor, the Thunderhawk’s communications suite boosting the signal back to the fleet.

The two Thunderhawks skimmed over the surface of the hulk, back towards the party’s initial insertion point. A streak of metal sped across the black behind them, a bombardment cannon round. The hulk shook as it impacted. Bright fire burst upwards, followed moments later by a searing flash.

‘The reactor,’ said Voldo.

Nuministon turned away, the remaining organic parts of his face hard.

Fire shot out of the hulk, bodies and debris billowing out into space around it.

‘Death to the enemies of mankind,’ said Voldo.

‘It is the will of the Emperor, and it pleases me greatly to be its instrument,’ replied Mastrik.

Militor tried the vox again. The incessant buzz of subatomic particles cutting up his comms channels was all he heard. His fleet access was restricted to their locator beacon, voice contact was so broken up as to be useless, and although he knew where the fleet lay, he doubted they could tell where he was. From the group there were no messages, which was to be expected under the circumstances, but he had been on station for several hours and the expedition should have returned by now.

‘Brother Militor to Novum in Honourum, Brother Militor requesting audience with Lord Captain Galt.’

Nothing.

His own limited sensorium auspex showed him nothing untoward, only the radioactive broil that filled the hulk below him, and the snow of atoms blasted out by the sun. He had seen and heard nothing the whole time he had been there. The tech-priest’s devices had gone off at the appointed time, and he wondered if the great hulk quake that followed had somehow been caused by their machinations. There was no knowing with the priests of Mars. Militor was grateful for the weapons he carried and the armour which shielded him, but the less he knew of their arcane workings the better. Technology was a dangerous knowledge, fraught with peril.

He paced around the lifthead, suit lights catching on the edges of ruptured metal and the dead crewmen. He made his circle as quietly as he could, pausing at each door to let his sensorium extend his senses into the spaces beyond.

This was poor duty. He wished he was below with his brothers of Squad Wisdom of Lucretius, the other adepts with whom he had fought a hundred battles. It pained him to think of them fighting without him, not least as in these circumstances a single additional storm bolter could turn a battle in their favour. But also he knew a little envy; this was not a mission that would bring additional skin art, not for him.

He put his feelings aside. Envy was not a worthy emotion.

A noise came from the lift shaft. He turned, amplified hearing working hard to pick up sound in the attenuated air.

One of the wires rippled, twanged metallically, and went taut.

Militor raised his storm bolter and approached the edge of the lift. There it was, the sound of boots locking and unlocking to the side of the shaft. An icon lit on his helmet map.

One of the Blood Drinkers. Where were the others?

‘Brother Militor speaks, who approaches?’

There was no reply, the vox continued its hiss.

The footsteps continued upward, the safety line jerking.

Several minutes went by. Militor remained cautious. Then, a voice in his ears.

‘It is I, Novamarine. Brother Tarael of Squad Hesperion. I am in sore need of your aid.’

The Blood Drinker sounded weary, and Militor soon saw why.

Tarael hauled himself over the lip of the shaft, digging his lightning claws into the deck to aid him. His armour was scored in a dozen places, cut clean through in two. He got to his feet, and Militor saw that his left leg dragged. The power fields were out on his right gauntlet, one of the blades sheared off, cables on the back of the weapon ripped open. His helmet had sustained damage, cracks spidering one lens. Suit sealant bubbled all over him.

Militor went to the red-armoured Space Marine’s side and steadied him.

‘The others… They were trapped in the quake,’ said Tarael haltingly. ‘I was left on the other side of a cave-in. Brother Curzon was buried, I do not know the fate of the others.’

‘You had no contact?’

‘They were alive when I left them. They told me to return to you, and bear the news to the fleet.’

‘Then we shall make our way back so you may fulfil your orders,’ said Militor. ‘There is little we can do for them now.’

‘Aye,’ said Tarael. Fresh noises came from the lift shaft. ‘And with haste. I fought my way through, but the xenos have not abandoned their pursuit of me.’

Casting frequent glances back at the lift shaft, Militor aided the limping Blood Drinker out of the lifthead, back towards their insertion point.

CHAPTER 11

BROTHERS OF BONE,
BROTHERS OF BLOOD

Clastrin lay in a bed on crisp sheets, red-hooded apothecarion serfs working quietly around him, the cybernetic modifications they sported attuned to the machines that monitored the status of the wounded Forgemaster. Webbing and bandages covered his hurts; mainly flash burns from the strong light of Jorso. His eyes were covered with gauze; monitoring machines were plugged through gaps in the bed into his spinal interface ports.

Galt stood by his bed.

‘How much longer must I remain here, lord captain? I would return to my machines and their ministrations. All battlegear must be sanctified and blessed by the rituals of maintenance before battle. With such a hard fight against us, I would check the wargear of our brothers myself.’ Clastrin’s body was injured, but his twin voices had lost none of their strength.

‘Your Techmarines have been trained well, Forgemaster,’ said Galt. ‘You must rest awhile.’

‘My hurts are slight.’

‘Exposure to vacuum is not to be taken lightly, even within the protective embrace of the Weaver. Your tissues have ruptured and the damage must all be accounted before I can allow you to take up your duties. You must remain here for four days, so Apothecary Raandal says,’ insisted Galt.

Clastrin hesitated. ‘And my eyes?’

‘Will heal, Forgemaster.’

Clastrin nodded and relaxed into his pillows a little. ‘The flesh is weak, brother-captain. I see the burning face of Jorso still.’

‘Apothecary Raandal assures me that the retinal damage is not permanent.’

‘How go the repairs to Corvo’s Hammer?’ said Clastrin.

‘She lies alongside the Excommentum Incursus. The Adepts of Mars hold good to their word. Brother-Captain Aresti tells me they make swift progress,’ said Galt.

‘And the others from the mission, how do they fare?’

‘All bar Cousins Curzon and Genthis are unhurt. Cousin Tarael has minor injuries. From the Third Company, Brother Luitio and Brother Collo were wounded retrieving your armour with Captain Mastrik, Collo seriously.’

Clastrin nodded. ‘It is only right. A risk in lives, but the holy tools of war must be retrieved so that they can be employed anew. Flesh is in plentiful supply, adamantium is not.’

‘Lord Caedis was most grateful that we brought back the armour of Genthis and his Progenoid glands.’ Galt stepped out of the way of a serf and continued. ‘There were no further casualties, the mission was a remarkable success. A commendable kill rating.’

‘And now I must lie abed,’ said Clastrin.

Galt sought to reassure him. ‘Do not fret, you still may serve your duty now. Tell me of what happened within the hulk. Tell me of this deceit of the magos.’

‘Magos Nuministon was not telling us the whole truth, brother-captain. His machine had capabilities we were not aware of, a secondary mapping function designed to penetrate deep into the hulk.’

‘Useful data. Why did they hide its gathering?’ asked Galt.

‘Cousin-Sergeant Alanius said the same thing. I surmise that there is something of great value within the hulk, and they would not have us know of it. The priests of Mars are jealous of their secrets.’

‘You share them, brother.’ Galt said so carefully, wishing to test Clastrin gently.

‘I am a brother of the Novamarines Chapter first and foremost, brother-captain,’ said Clastrin.

‘And a valued one at that. I mean no offence.’

‘Upon the screen, lord captain, I saw something deep in the hulk.’

‘What?’ said Galt. His eyes narrowed. He had his own doubts about the lord magos’s motives.

‘That I cannot tell you. It was a void, an absence of data where there should be data. Without access to the information I can say no more,’ said Clastrin. ‘There is something there these magi are hiding from us about this agglomeration. There are various aspects of it that trouble me. Consider this, captain. The hulk held its orbit well under intense bombardment. It is large, but so full of cavities that its overall mass is low. It should have been pushed off course. Surely we should have seen a deterioration in its orbital distance from the sun, but nothing. Secondly, the regularity of its departure from a system, and the arrival of it by so many stars of this class.’

‘Hulks are strange by their nature, Forgemaster. At what do you drive?’

‘Nothing at all, brother-captain, if not for this – there was something… else, brother-captain. A presence in the machine when I accessed the door to allow the others to escape.’

‘What?’

Clastrin sighed. Galt was glad at least that the Forgemaster had been spared the healing tanks. ‘I am not sure. I entered the mechanisms of the vessel. I could not open the door, then I did – I swear by Corvo’s oath that something aided me and the door opened.’

‘You underestimate your ability, Forgemaster. Without your expertise the party would have been lost and the mission a failure,’ said Galt.

‘But I did not open the door, brother-captain,’ insisted Clastrin. ‘I am sure of it.’

Galt was silent.

‘There is something else in the hulk, brother. Something the magi do not wish us to know of,’ insisted Clastrin. ‘I doubt their intentions are nefarious, but I would not put it past the priests of Mars to hide their knowledge of certain treasures should it suit them to do so.’

Galt nodded. ‘I have noticed certain irregularities in their behaviour, but such is the way with the adepts of the Machine-God. They operate clumsily if so, brother.’

‘Yes,’ said Clastrin. ‘A man like Plosk has many successes behind him. He is arrogant, secure in his accomplishments.’

‘Maybe, but he deals with the Adeptus Astartes now, not some planetary governor,’ said Galt. ‘I thank you for your intelligence, Forgemaster. Now rest, recover. The sooner your talents are available to us, the better.’

‘I will return to duty soon, brother, I wish so fervently.’

The Hall of Meetings was crammed full of adepts – Adepts of Mars, and adepts of the stars. They stood in stalls that rose in serried tiers around the full circumference of the room. The massive doors to the hall interrupted the run of terraces only briefly; the stalls running up and over them. Now full with the mightiest of all humankind.

The Imagifer Maximus had been shepherded into the hall, and squatted in the middle of the circular floor the stalls surrounded. This tiled circle was the arena from which important strategies were relayed or rhetorics and lessons delivered and filled the centre of the room, illuminated by coloured light while the rest of the hall was dark. A fine mosaic of Guilliman arrayed for war, a world in one hand, a quill in another, decorated the floor, although the Imagifer Maximus obscured much of it at the moment.

Galt and Caedis occupied thrones on a dais that had been set up opposite the doors to the chamber. Sanguinary Master Teale and Reclusiarch Mazrael stood to the right of Caedis, Chaplain Odon and Epistolary Ranial to the left of Galt. Captains Aresti, Mastrik and Sorael paced the floor around the Adeptus Mechanicus relic, addressing the assembled brothers and priests with the plan of attack conceived by Galt and Caedis.

‘Brothers!’ shouted Mastrik. ‘Magi of Mars! The mapping data provided by the Adeptus Mechanicus has revealed the layout of the hulk in fine detail. Lord Caedis, First Captain Galt and your other leaders have met and discussed what shall be done to eradicate the genestealers and retrieve the hulk’s technological treasures. Here is the strategy we have decided upon. May the Emperor and the primarchs place their blessings upon it.’

The coloured lights were turned low, and the Imagifer Maximus activated. A perfect map of light was projected by the ancient device into the air.

‘Behold! The Death of Integrity, its secrets revealed to us,’ said Sorael. ‘And with its secrets revealed, so shall it fall!’

The Blood Drinkers shouted and stamped their armoured feet, raising a thunder in the room. The Novamarines looked to one another; such open fervour was not their way. Instead the brothers of bone-and-blue hummed low and loud, the haunting sign of their appreciation.

The map was of fine detail. In much of it, the level of precision took in the tiniest of ducts. Its fissures and caverns, halls and chambers, stone and steel were revealed for all to see. So cunning was the artifice of the Imagifer Maximus that this illusion appeared as real as the agglomeration it depicted. Depending on how one looked at the image, the machine would alter the hulk model’s opacity, presenting walls as solid or transparent. This was determined by what each viewer wished to see, and his view was visible only to him. Truly, the Imagifer was a marvel of the elder days.

This detail was absolute, save in a few places. Certain areas had a sketchiness to them, the data needed for the machine to describe the hulk interior was incomplete. Towards the centre of the hulk this problem became pronounced, the veracity of the map shifting from total fidelity to speculation, thence at the heart of it to darkness.

‘The Death of Integrity is vast,’ said Aresti. ‘Fortunately the volume of pressurised space is relatively small, and concentrated towards the western part of the hulk’s northern hemisphere. The majority of the active reactors are here, and we suspect atmospheric generators to be operational. This access to air and warmth explains why the principal genestealer roosts are located in this area. We have found five all told here. We cannot rely on the xenos to be dormant still after our recent incursion. However, they are unlikely to have scattered far, and we believe the majority to be found within this area still.’

An irregular green shape pulsed on the map, framing a good fifth of the agglomeration; the area of genestealer infestation.

‘In order to cleanse the hulk of the xenos, we have determined to drive them into this cavern,’ continued Aresti. A cavity in the hulk flashed up to the south of the green zone. The cavern was large, delineated by the inner wall of a single giant vessel on one side, the rest of the walls formed by a number of ships and a large asteroid.

‘Within this space, brothers from both Chapters will be able to set up effective kill-zones. Here we can use our ranged weaponry to full effect. Additionally, unlike in other areas of the hulk, this space is free of the high levels of radiation found elsewhere, and so our brothers armoured in standard power armour may be deployed. The majority of our battle-brothers and Terminators will be sent here, and we name them Battleforce Anvil, for it is against this gathering of might that the genestealers shall be crushed. Brother-Captain Mastrik of the Novamarines Second Company and Captain Sorael of the Blood Drinkers Fifth Company will be in command.’

Mastrik took over. ‘I will hold the near side of the cavern, while Sorael will occupy the pocket limned by this bulge in the asteroid wall.’

Sorael inclined his head in acknowledgement at this mention of his role.

‘Our first task is to breach the hull in these five areas,’ said Aresti. More graphical representations and icons flashed on the Imagifer. Animations showed the results of the described actions in stunning clarity. ‘This will be done by demolition teams on the surface. The Adeptus Mechanicus have agreed to perform these duties, they will also lay a relay web that will amplify our vox signals, and allow us to communicate without difficulty. For this removal of our greatest strategic weakness, we thank them.’

‘It is aid gladly given, lord captain,’ said Plosk.

‘Scout elements of both Chapters will aid the Skitarii of Triplex Phall and guard the Mechanicus while they are upon the surface. Once breached, the atmosphere in these key parts of the hulk will vent into space, and drive the occupants of the roosts further into the hulk, towards the kill zone,’ said Mastrik.

‘Forgive my ignorance, lord captain.’ A brother of the Blood Drinkers from the stalls spoke. ‘We have little experience of fighting these beasts in space. How will this work? They endure years adrift in the void, surely the lack of air will not trouble beasts such as these.’

Galt spoke. ‘Genestealers can withstand vacuum, but not forever. Without air, they are forced, after a time, to become dormant. Within hulks they can only survive in their active state in areas with at least a trace of oxygen-bearing atmosphere. They have an overwhelmingly strong desire for survival. They will instinctively follow gas trails to viable air pockets. Deprived of air they will sink into deep hibernation and eventually die, though this suffocation may take a hundred years. Do not fear, this is a sound tactic, one we have used several times in the last eight centuries alone.’

‘To this end, we will prepare three tunnels,’ said Aresti. Three ways were duly delimited by the Imagifer, long tunnels that wormed past each major roost. They ran through vessel after vessel, in certain places the whole length of particular ships, in others cutting through and then back out again in the space of metres. ‘These tunnels will require some time to prepare. Once these are completed and the atmosphere vented, Terminator teams, deployed earlier by boarding torpedo and gathered close by the roost exits, will drive the gathered genestealers before them into the cavity. This force we designate Strikeforce Hammer, for it is this which will descend upon the genestealers in most rightful smiting. In the cavern, the genestealers will be surrounded on all sides and cut down en masse. Search and destroy groups will scour the remainder of the hulk to hunt out remaining pockets of the enemy. Any that flee the cordons in the main killing field will be forced into the airless portions of the hulk. There they will enter hibernation, and will be easily overcome. There are other, smaller roosts in the airless parts. Four of these are in isolated air pockets, in the others the genestealers will not wake from their state of suspended animation. So necessarily, it is the xenos of the main roosts we must destroy first, the others, my brothers and noble cousins, must wait their turn for the Emperor’s judgement.’

Sorael stepped in. ‘A fine plan, brothers. A little short on the close engagement every brother of the Blood Drinkers correctly yearns for, you might fear. But fear ye not! The Emperor provides us the opportunity to prove ourselves the way that suits us best. There are several obstacles to overcome. Seventeen critical corridors that could allow the genestealers to escape into the greater hulk must be sealed off before the attack can commence, eighty-four secondary exits must also be closed. Numerous bulkheads and twelve hull walls are to be opened up. Sundry other objectives need to be completed in order to create sealed runs for the genestealers to be funnelled down into the killing zone.’ The relevant areas were highlighted upon the Imagifer Maximus’s image. Some of these access points were so small as to be dots, others large enough to dominate the part of the map they were situated in.

Galt stood from his throne. ‘This action will account for over four-fifths of xenos upon the hulk. We are fortunate they are gathered around this area of active reactors.’

‘For all their wickedness, they crave warmth and air as do all living things,’ said Aresti. ‘This weakness will be their downfall.’

‘Once the majority of the genestealers are destroyed, the effort to salvage the archeotech might begin,’ said Galt.

‘My lord captain, I beg to differ.’ Lord Magos Explorator Plosk stood to address the chamber. Galt’s face hardened at the interruption. ‘The retrieval of archeotech must begin as soon as the operation commences.’

Caedis roused himself. He had been quiet in the strategy meeting, as if greatly wearied, even if his words were wise enough. Throughout the briefing in the Hall of Meeting, he had kept his eyes to the floor. Galt had not expected him to speak. ‘You wish to go into the fire? You tech-priests are more valorous than I thought.’

‘We have all the courage we require, where the matters of the Omnissiah are concerned,’ countered Plosk.

‘I will not allow it,’ said Galt.

Plosk made a reproachful face. ‘I am afraid you have no choice,’ said Plosk.

‘Damn your permissions, magos, you kept information from my brothers. Might I remind you that you pledged you would not interfere in the military side of our operation.’

‘What occurred during the first insertion was a regrettable incident, my lord,’ said Plosk. ‘I have discussed the matter with Magos Nuministon. It appears he undertook the second sounding himself, without consulting me. I of course would have dissuaded him from this course of action. I apologise for the peril that it put your warriors in. Forgive him, Magos Nuministon is not used to the field of combat.’

‘Then why send him? The mission was jeopardised.’

‘It will not happen again. He has been disciplined. And you must admit, lords, that the risk was perhaps worth it. See how detailed our data is!’ He paused. ‘As regards the speed with which we must act, I refer not to my permissions. Magos Nuministon has redeemed himself.’

‘How?’ said Caedis. His voice had lost its elegance, as if he had to force the words from his throat.

‘He has examined the data presented by the noble adepts of the Blood Drinkers further, that appertaining to the arrival and departure of the hulk. We have three days at most before it begins its journey back into the warp.’

‘By what mechanism?’ said Galt.

‘That we would dearly love to know ourselves, lord captain,’ said Plosk. He bowed his head. ‘The quest for knowledge is unending.’

‘So demands the Omnissiah,’ intoned the tech-priests in the room.

‘If I find you have withheld information from me again, magos,’ said Galt warningly. ‘I will not have a repeat of your previous errors.’

‘I will share all. In fact, I will reveal to you now something else that Magos Nuministon has uncovered within the hulk.’

A graphical representation of the binaric information leapt into the air, a striated, three-dimensional graph that undulated repetitiously.

‘And what is that?’ said Caedis. ‘Speak, magos, we do not understand the ideograms of machines.’

Plosk smiled. He did not speak for a moment. His gaze darted around the room. ‘This, I believe, is the data signature of a fully functioning, intact STC datacore. Not a printout, although there are surely many within the Death of Integrity, and not just one priceless device, but the collected knowledge of all the long millennia of the Dark Age of Technology. This is the holiest of holies of our priesthood, the goal we have striven for millennia. If we retrieve this, it will transform the Imperium, lords, and you will be heroes for all eternity.’

Galt and Caedis glanced at each other. The chamber was plunged into uproar. All within had some inkling as to what such a find would mean.

Samin, sat with Plosk and Nuministon, leaned forward and whispered to his masters, his words lost amid the shouts. ‘Forgive me, master, I am but young still. Tell me, these other energy signatures, in the sigma ostrakon range. What do they betoken?’

Plosk gave his tutelary a stern look. ‘For another time, Samin. Ask later when we are in unmixed company.’

Galt was calling for order, but the tumult continued. Caedis spoke. His quiet, sibilant voice cut through the noise like a knife.

‘Enough!’ He was paler than usual. ‘You will wait, magos, as Lord Captain Galt dictates. We have our plan and you a prize beyond reckoning, but you heed our words or it will slip through your fingers.’ Caedis forced himself to his feet with great effort. ‘There are rituals to be performed aboard the Lux Rubrum and Novum in Honourum.’

Plosk opened his mouth to speak, then pursed his lips. ‘Very well,’ he said finally. ‘We will do as you demand.’ He made to sit, but stopped, as if something had just crossed his mind. ‘Let me ask, my lords, how do you intend to descend to the cavern?’

‘By these passages,’ said Mastrik. The Imagifer flashed as he passed his hand over them. ‘Seven descent routes.’

Plosk examined them. He nodded his head. ‘There are many obstacles.’

‘There are,’ said Aresti. ‘They will be removed.’

‘Cutting through with plasma torch and chainfist will take time,’ said Plosk. ‘Perhaps I might suggest a better way? There are certain machineries aboard Excommentum Incursus that we will avail you of, so that the assault will go the quicker.’

‘No tricks, magos, no omissions,’ said Galt.

‘Of course, lord captain. I merely propose to gift you a road.’

‘That would be welcome,’ said Sorael. He and the other two captains on the floor of the hall looked to their masters. Galt and Caedis nodded.

‘I will see to it immediately,’ said Plosk. He inclined his head.

‘Then let us be about our business,’ said Caedis. ‘Whatever the magi believe they will find here, we have our own purpose, and that purpose is the destruction of this most pernicious of threats. Not content to slay the sons of Terra, genestealers want nothing more than to poison the very genetic wellsprings of humanity. So has it been since the first of their vile breed stole onto a ship out of the moons of Ymgarl, so it will be for all time. But, brothers!’ His voice rose, regaining something of its strength and diction. ‘This branch of their plague stops here, in the orbit of Jorso, by our blades and bolts! We are to send nigh two hundred Terminator-armoured brothers into battle. Such a deployment is the stuff of legend, and has been witnessed by the galaxy but few times since the birth of the Imperium. We are Adeptus Astartes, of two storied, noble Chapters. The magi have their goal, we have ours. Service! Death! Purgation!’ Caedis held up his arms and stood tall, seeming to grow in size.

‘Service! Death! Purgation!’ shouted the warriors of two Chapters.

Caedis smiled and nodded. He slumped a little, diminished by his effort. ‘Let us see to our souls and to our weapons. The joy of battle awaits.’

Ninety-six Terminator suits stood in alcoves within the Armor Armourium, the great arsenal of Novum in Honourum. Clamps held the armour in place on stands behind glass screens; for the moment they were empty of occupants. Five Techmarines walked the rows of armour, a coterie of servitors equipped with fine-tooled limbs following them. They checked the armour in batches of five, chanting the canticles of waking and good function as they opened the alcove’s glass fronts. Light flooded each alcove as the priests of iron opened them. The suits, mounted on wheeled turntables, came out from the wall. The Techmarines carried on their hymnals as they checked the exterior of the armour, rotating them carefully. Then the Techmarines opened panels and inserted their diagnostic tools into the armour’s external access ports.

Each set of plate came alive for five seconds, energy plants online, visors shining, suit lights blazing. They flexed in their cradles as fibre muscles contracted deep under adamantium rods and plasteel and ceramite plating. The Techmarines made the ritual responses to the machines’ proper activation, the implants in their minds filling with data from the sensoriums telling them precisely the condition of every component. When they were satisfied the armours were properly functional, the Techmarines withdrew and the suits slumped back from attention. Scented oil was spattered onto each as servitors droned Gothic hymns and chittered binaric blessings, and the next five suits were approached and the process begun again. In this way each suit was checked, activated, diagnosed, deactivated, and blessed. None were found wanting.

Patiently, and with great devotion, the Techmarines worked through the night.

In the Grand Chapel many decks above, the majority of the Novamarines were assembled; more than two hundred and twenty brothers of three companies. Only those in the infirmary or on sentry and command duties aboard the fleet’s sundry vessels were absent. Hooded and silent in their robes of bone-and-night-blue, they kneeled in the lambency of candles and prayed for victory.

The walls of the shrine reverberated to the songs of war as choirs of serfs gave voice to their desires to see their masters returned safe and victorious from battle. Chaplain Odon stood with two other Chaplains within the presbytery of the chapel, the sacred space reserved for the Chaplains within the apse. Their platform was reached by three broad steps in a recessed semicircle. Behind them, the sanctuary rose, wherein at the top of a steep flight of stairs was Corvo’s Memorial, an exact copy of the sarcophagus within the Great Tomb of Fortress Novum. An effigy of Corvo lay in repose atop it, armoured in stone, his sword clasped in both hands, point towards his feet. Odon and the others were dressed all in black, their skull tattoos sinister in the shadows of their hoods. Odon held the Cup of Brotherhood in his hand, his crozius held horizontal on a stand behind him. Chaplain Kornak stood to his right, Chaplain Ardio to the left, both carrying their croziuses. Black-clad servitor-worshippers and serfs flanked them.

Odon blessed each of the brothers in turn as they stepped forward, granting each a sip from the Cup of Brotherhood which contained the waters of Honourum blended with those of Macragge. This ritual was one of the first undergone by the novitiate Novamarines, and remained principal to their creed throughout their lives. The taste of two homes intermingled, representative of the Legion their ancestors had left behind, and the territory their founder had sworn to defend forever. The cup was small, the brothers in multitude. Apparently of worn wood, the cup’s nature was mysterious. Not until the last brother had sipped at the cup and the blessings of Corvo painted on his face with its water did it run dry. There was always precisely enough, no matter if it were a squad blessed or the entire Chapter, although such a gathering had not taken place for twenty centuries. Traditionally guarded by the First Company, the cup was among the most holy of the Chapter’s relics, touched as it was by the lips of every Novamarine from the time of Corvo to the present day.

The ritual was unhurried. The brothers themselves were silent as they approached Odon’s place, cowls up and hands thrust deep into the sleeves of their robes. They took their sip and the whispered blessing of the Chaplain without speaking before returning to their pews. Once the last had returned to his place, the songs of the serfs dropped to their ordinary susurrations, the sound of the wind of Honourum intertwined with the oaths of fealty Lucretius Corvo had made so many thousand years ago.

The First Company veterans were called forward. The majority of them were in one place for the first time in living memory – eighty-seven Space Marines of the highest order, men who had fought for the Emperor for generations of normal men’s lives. Tattooed with so many icons and scenes of triumph their skin was blue-black, between them they were hung with every badge of honour known to the Chapter. There an iron halo, here the aquila, there the laurels of defiance, and more.

The veterans knelt before Odon in a broad semicircle, still silent. Sergeant Voldo, most senior and decorated of all, knelt at the centre, the Chapter ancient to his left, the Chapter champion to his right. In front of him, on the second of the three steps leading up to Corvo’s Memorial, Captains Galt, Aresti and Mastrik, and Epistolary Ranial took their places. Kneeling behind them on the first step, but in front of Voldo, were the other officers of the Chapter – the lower ranking Librarians, the four Apothecaries, those Techmarines who did not labour in the arsenal – fourteen officers in all.

Odon walked down from the memorial platform, and passed the cup to Chaplain Kornak, who followed him. He went to Voldo first, bent low, and kissed him upon both cheeks. ‘Corvo’s might be yours,’ he said, then dipped his finger into the cup in Kornak’s hand. He drew a circle on the sergeant’s forehead. ‘This circle symbolises the nova for which we are named,’ he said quietly, the words intended for Voldo alone. ‘This circle symbolises the territories we are sworn to respect, this circle symbolises the eternal oath of Corvo.’

Odon and Kornak passed from Voldo to the next man, then the next, blessing them all in the same fashion. As he went from Space Marine to Space Marine, the serfs’ and servitors’ song became louder again, the brothers of the Third and Fifth Companies joining their song; a long complex plainsong speaking of loyalty, honour, and the glory of death for the higher purposes of mankind.

By the time Odon returned to the officers, forty minutes had passed. He likewise blessed them in their turn, two kisses, the giving of might, the drawing of the circle, the description of its meaning.

Chaplain Ardio went to the foot of the steps leading up to the memorial. He paid obeisance at the bottom, then mounted the stairs. At the top, he made a series of complex passes over the warrior-lord’s stone face. A drawer slid from the stone, lined in blue velvet. He leaned into it, and took out Corvo’s relic.

There were fifteen sacred relics of Corvo, many at home on Honourum, the rest entrusted to the largest taskforces of Novamarines. Novum in Honourum was fortunate indeed to play host to the hilt of the hero’s shattered sword. Only Corvo’s laurels, bestowed upon him by Roboute Guilliman himself, and enshrined forever in Fortress Novum, were more holy to the Chapter.

With the ceremony appropriate to such an item, Ardio walked down the stairs. The First Company joined their brothers in song, and the Grand Chapel echoed loudly to their gathered voices. The song changed the quality of the place, transmuting it into something more than a chamber within a spacecraft. The unity of their song removed the walls between the individual warriors, making them one in mind and soul.

Odon took the sword hilt of Corvo from Ardio. It was ancient, almost as old as the Imperium itself. The features of it were worn smooth, metal shone with the touch of a hundred generations of Chaplains. Spots marred this lustre, dark rust eaten into the metal. The fragment of blade that projected from the hilt was dull, the components of the mechanism that had once imbued the blade with the ferocious power of a disruption field had corroded into an undifferentiated mass.

Yet, this was still the sword of Corvo.

The song reached a crescendo, and swooped low to a deep finish that left the fabric of the chapel reverberating.

The song departed, unity remained.

Odon held the hilt high.

‘This is the sword of Lucretius Corvo!’ he said. ‘This is the weapon he wielded at the side of Roboute Guilliman himself, the sword he lifted when he renewed his fealty to the Emperor, the sword he bore on Astagar where he destroyed the dread Titan Fellghast, the sword he held in both hands as he had made his oath to defend the Ultima Segmentum in the name of the Lords of Macragge and the Emperor of all mankind!’

‘We take the oath, we renew the oath,’ intoned Kornak and Ardio.

‘We renew the oath,’ shouted the Novamarines, and the chamber shook.

‘Corvo said, “As I leave Macragge for the last time, I swear to you”,’ said Odon, reciting the oath of their founder. ‘“Lord Roboute Guilliman, primarch of the Emperor and my sworn liege lord, that I and my successors shall undertake the protection of the Ultima Segmentum from now unto eternity’s end. Not death nor dishonour nor wavering of spirit shall distract us from this task. Though death take me, though my soul be riven. Nothing shall sway me from this duty, not for now nor until the end of time. This I swear. This is my oath!”’

‘This we swear! This is our oath!’ shouted the Novamarines.

‘Unity! Honour! Strength of purpose!’ said Odon.

‘Unity! Honour! Strength of purpose!’ roared the Novamarines.

Minds cleansed by the waters of their homes, oath reaffirmed, Odon led the Novamarines in prayer. Silently the brothers of the Third and Fifth Companies filed out of the Grand Chapel and returned first to their arming chambers, and then to their cells. In the confines of their simple rooms, they spent the night fasting and checking their weaponry, preparing themselves for the morrow. The cloistered habitation decks were alive with the clicking of guns disassembled and rebuilt, and whispered prayers.

The First Company veterans remained in vigil in the Grand Chapel, thoughts bent only on their duty to the Lord of Man, and through that duty, victory.

They did not sleep.

The Hall of Life sat at the centre of Lux Rubrum, the very heart of the mighty vessel, and a heart it resembled: red and hot.

In shape, the hall was a wide circle, the walls bulging like a ribcage as they ascended, curving back inward to meet as a pointed dome. From this high ceiling censers depended, clouding the air with fragrant blue smoke that reeked of the fireblooms of San Guisiga.

Six-sided pillars of porphyry quarried from the flanks of Mount Calicium braced walls of red-brown granite. These alternated with pillars of skulls, the stacked trophies of five thousand years of war. Slabs of the same granite that made up the walls made up the floor. This stone was polished bright, so that all who looked into it would see their face reflected as from a pool of drying blood. Lights were set within bowls carved into the pillars, casting a ruddy glow on the ancient battle honours and standards that lined the stone walls. Glass sarcophagi topped with elegant metalwork and statuary held the bones of the Chapter’s most honoured dead, skull-faced cybernetic vat-children crouched at the head of each vitreous tomb, ready to whisper the great deeds of those within to any who would pause by their sides.

At the centre of the chamber a depression was sunk into the granite, the shape of the blood drop of the Chapter. Square channels cut into the floor led to it, turning this way and that in a continuous line, so that they formed the chalice of the Blood Drinkers insignia below the blood drop. Thirty more channels ran out from it, to alcoves set within the walls. At the narrow end of the drop, an altar soared high. A relief of helmetless armoured brothers circled it carved of red carnelian, each one with a skull for his head, bowed over hands clasped around the hilts of swords and axes.

Upon the altar channels were also cut, below manacles of bright adamantium, leading from places that would correspond to the major arteries of the human body’s limbs should a person be laid out upon it: carotid, femoral, ulnar and radial. The channels ran from these points to gather, then as one led to the apex of the blood drop.

The altar was empty and it gleamed. Behind it, a stained glass window five times the height of an adept. Holos’s stern features, captured in glass, stared down at the hall in eternal judgement. The fires burning on the other side of the glass made his eyes glimmer with life.

A pulpit was above the altar, an angel’s wings spread wide formed its sides. The angel also was of carnelian, and had a fleshless face. It held a sword in one hand, an hourglass in the other. Everywhere in the Hall of Life were skulls: skulls of the righteous dead, skulls of stone, skulls of volcanic glass. This was a place of life only for the brothers of the Blood Drinkers, to all others it brought death.

The room was hot as the volcanic caverns of San Guisiga were hot, the light red as the light of the lava canyons, the air thick and sweet as the air of their home world was thick and sweet, ripe with the scent of copper, iron and incense.

All one hundred and seventy-nine battle-brothers of the Blood Drinkers Chapter present in the strikeforce stood around the chalice cut into the rock, their upper bodies bare. None were absent. Serfs and machine-spirits watched over the fleet. The wounded stood alongside the hale.

Baggy scarlet trousers cinched at the ankles were their robes, black tabards embroidered with the yellow blood drop and chalice of the Chapter hung between their legs. The decorated belts they habitually wore, denoting their role and rank within the Chapter, were absent. Techmarine stood with battle-brother, neophyte with initiate; stripped of their badges, all were equal for the Rite of Holos. They stood shoulder to shoulder in an arc, facing the altar. For the duration of the ritual the matter of their brotherhood was paramount. Distinction of rank or suborder was unimportant, a distraction from their fundamental sameness in the face of the Thirst.

Only the strikeforce’s Sanguinary Priests and Chaplains stood apart, all four armoured and bearing their marks of office; crozius and chalices gleamed in the chamber’s febrile light. They flanked the major portal leading into the room, Reclusiarch Mazrael and Chaplain Gorwin facing the white garbed Apothecaries Zozymus and Feir. Ten Sanguinary Guard stood behind them, armed and armoured also, five with the Chaplains, five with the Sanguinary Priests.

Teale, however, was not among them. Teale would arrive separately, for the Rite of Holos was a ritual of blood, and the Sanguinary Master had the lead role to play.

Caedis stood among his brothers, his own badges removed. Like them he swayed slightly, his mind drugged with anticipation of the coming ritual. The remembered taste of blood filled his mouth. He drooled freely.

The stone doors of the Hall of Life swung open, as silent as death’s approach. A procession of serfs came first, bearing holy icons of Holos and Sanguinius. Sanguinary Master Teale walked at their centre. Behind him came a serf carrying a wooden box. Behind him, more serfs – one hundred and fifty of them, all thin, metal tubing all over them; the ways to their arteries and the fluids that sustained the Chapter. These latter arrivals fanned out as they entered the room. They proceeded to the heads of the thirty channels, five to an alcove.

Sanguinary Master Teale walked to the pulpit, ascended its steps, and took station inside. ‘Brothers!’ he called.

A low sound escaped the lips of the Blood Drinkers, halfway between song and a moan.

‘One and a half thousand years ago, our Chapter stood upon the brink of destruction. We were ravaged by the Thirst, the Black Rage descending upon scores of our brothers at a time. Barely had they finished the rites of initiation before brothers were taken. The Flaw revealed itself strongly within us. Extinction beckoned, but would we go the way of the Exsanguinators, the Brothers of the Red or the others of the scions of our lord lost entirely to the Black Rage?’

The torpid minds of the Blood Drinkers shook themselves at this. ‘No!’ they called. ‘No, no.’ Not as one, but individually these shouts came. They were tinged with sorrow, anger, and with shame.

‘No brothers! We would not!’ bellowed Teale, his voice rasping and sinister through his helmet. ‘And now, look at us. We are strong! We are powerful! We have persisted in glory and service for a further fifteen centuries! All thanks to Brother Holos! Were it not for him and the secret he brought back from his vision upon Mount Calicium, we would be a red footnote in history. And yet we serve! The enemies of mankind fall before us and fear our wrath.’

‘All praise Brother Holos!’ shouted the Chaplains and Sanguinary Priests.

A ragged repetition from the brethren.

‘The blood is the key! Denial is not the answer! We shall not quake before our appetites as our brother Chapters do, but take them to our hearts! The monster within us all cannot be defeated, it cannot be denied. But it can be fed, it can be sated, and if sated, its strength can be borrowed! The blood is life!’

In the alcoves, the serfs bent over the heads of the channels. They held out their wrists and twisted the taps on the tubes that ran into their skin. Blood ran out from the taps, gushing in thin streams into the channels. Thirty red rivers nosed across the floor towards the chalice. In the heat of the chamber, the smell of the blood was carried from the floor, instantly filling the room.

The brothers woke a little more. Their eyes glittered in anticipation. Their shoulders and chests heaved with ragged respiration.

‘The blood is life!’ they repeated. Their eyes followed the blood as it ran into the grooves depicting the Chapter chalice.

‘In life there is service!’ shouted Teale.

‘We live to serve!’ replied the brothers.

‘To deny life is to deny service!’ said Teale.

‘To deny service is to betray the Emperor!’ they shouted.

‘Do we choose service or betrayal?’ said Teale.

‘We choose life! We choose service! We choose blood!’ they roared as one.

From a wooden box, Teale took forth a heart, a human heart.

‘What is blood without a heart to force it around the body? The rite demands a heart. I give you the heart of Brother Genthis!’ he handed it to a serf, who took it to the blood drop, and placed it at the bottom. ‘He comes home to his brothers to share his courage with us one last time!’ A laser beam emitted from the eyes of a soaring angel in the ceiling hit the heart. The smell of roasting meat joined the tang of blood. It abated, as the heart blackened rapidly, then turned white. Fine ash collapsed in on itself. The laser beam cut out.

‘In blood is life! In life is service! In service purpose and honour!’ shouted Teale. ‘Blood freely given!’ he continued, sweeping his narthecium out to encompass the serfs patiently bleeding themselves, adding in a low voice, ‘And blood taken.’

Through the doors came two further Sanguinary Guard, resplendent in golden armour, their faces masks of Sanguinius. Between them they held a man, not a serf, some poor soul snatched from one recruitment world or another the Blood Drinkers used; kept in stasis, perhaps for centuries, all for this one moment. He was the Chapter’s monstrous price, the blood-tithe.

His hands were bound before him, his mouth gelled shut. As he came into the room, his eyes widened and he began to struggle harder, but before the giant adepts his efforts were those of a child fighting an ogre, and the guard dragged him forward. They pulled him to the altar. His hands were freed, and then quickly trapped again as he was roughly spread-eagled on the altar. The fear in his eyes told that he knew what the grooves in the stone were for.

‘All must serve the Emperor!’ said Teale. Zeal poured from him, further exciting the others in the room. ‘We serve as we can, we sacrifice all – our lives entire, our souls, our individuality, our very beings! Others must also do their part!’

He dipped his white helmet towards a serf below. The serf activated a mechanism. The man on the altar’s back arched as blades emerged from the altar and penetrated his body at the sites of his arteries. Blood gushed from his bucking body, pouring into the channels and thence in a squared red fall down into the blood drop. The blood of the serfs filled the channels forming the chalice, and overflowed into the drop, mingling their given blood with that taken, both soaking the ash of the heart of Genthis. The Chapter icon shone, painted in liquid red.

Teale undid his helmet’s seals, and removed it. He placed it upon the pulpit. His eyes glowed with savage delight, a touch of fervour, a touch of madness. This was his time, the time of submission, the giving in to powerful appetites. ‘Now brothers! Drink! Drink so that the monster might be sated, and that you might steal its strength.’

The Blood Drinkers fell to their knees, an awful keening escaping their lips. The Chaplains and Apothecaries and Sanguinary Guard undid their own helmets and approached the dying man on the altar, cups extended. The brothers lapped frantically at the stuff of life. In the alcoves, those serfs that were still conscious shut off their taps and those of their collapsed comrades. They retreated quietly, leaving their masters to their debased appetites.

Their faces smeared red, the brothers fell upon the altar, and tore the dead man to pieces.

Later, when the Thirst was quenched, Reclusiarch Mazrael would lead them in prayers of atonement and then of preparation. They would reaffirm their oaths to the Emperor, and beg forgiveness of one another for the lives they had taken. The Techmarines would take a measure of blood from the brothers themselves to placate the Chapter’s weapons and armours. Only then, with the beast inside them tamed, would the brothers’ minds turn fully to battle and the destruction of man’s foes.

Later. For now, the Blood Drinkers lived up to their name.

They fed.

CHAPTER 12

THE STIRRING OF THE RAGE

Galt waited patiently for Chapter Master Caedis. The Thunderhawk’s ramp was open, its red-lit interior exposed. Two of the Blood Drinkers’ ornately attired honour guard stood to attention either side of the doorway, and servitors wearing the red of that Chapter clumped about the ship, mindlessly fulfilling their duty. Of Caedis, there was no sign.

Galt relaxed into the wait. There was opportunity in reflection in all things, and he allowed his mind to wander where it would. He ran his gaze over the vessel’s lines, so red, so shocking in the drab, starkly lit hangar bay of the Novamarines.

There was a movement under the wing. A shape. Too small for an initiate, too nimble to be that of a servitor. He walked closer to the vessel, and caught sight of a serf working on an atmosphere filter. It was the first of the Blood Drinkers’ human servants Galt had seen. Where the Novamarines’ servants were tall and well-formed, this creature of the Blood Angels seemed less than human. He was stooped, and thin to the point of emaciation. He was bare to his waist, wearing a long kilt emblazoned with the yellow blood chalice. Metal tubes sparkled on his limbs and torso, disappearing under the skin in places Galt’s trained, killer’s eye could not help but notice were close to major blood vessels. Ritual scarification criss-crossed the man’s back.

The serf paused in what he was doing, feeling Galt’s eyes on him. He turned and looked directly at the Novamarines First Captain. His eyes were fierce and defiant above his face mask, and he did not drop his gaze from the lord captain’s face as he should have. Galt raised his eyebrow at the servant’s boldness. The serf dipped his head, and disappeared into the red gloom of the Thunderhawk passenger compartment.

Seconds later, Caedis strode out.

The lord of the Blood Drinkers wore Terminator armour, its magnitude accentuating his already imposing size. He wore a double-handed power sword at his waist. He was focused, eyes bright, his skin ruddy where before it had been pale. But there was still the trace of strain behind his confidence, he was holding something in.

‘Well met, Captain Galt,’ said Caedis. The taller man looked down at Galt.

‘Well met, Lord Chapter Master,’ replied Galt.

‘I apologise for dragging you away from your duties, captain. I wished to see you one final time before the mission commenced.’

‘Then allow me to take the opportunity to thank you for allowing me overall strategic command.’

Caedis looked over Galt’s head, and smiled as if he had seen an old acquaintance somewhere, the kind of smile that was welcoming yet condescending. A pained look marred his features and he swayed a little. His yellow eyes flicked back to Galt’s face. They took a while to focus on the Novamarine’s face, but when he spoke, he did so clearly. ‘Cousin, your talents are better suited for this particular role. I would lead my men from the front and smite our foes alongside them. A cool head such as yours is better employed coordinating the greater action.’

‘You will be unable to give effective orders once you are away from your insertion point, my lord. The radiation fields are too strong for suit vox to penetrate. The Adeptus Mechanicus boosting web will not be installed until the genestealers are driven towards the killing zone.’

‘I am aware of the limitations this action imposes upon me, but I trust in your direction, first among captains of the Novamarines. Give me and mine an order, and we will obey. And Captain Sorael is an excellent commander,’ said Caedis. ‘I am sure he and your Captain Mastrik will excel themselves in the killing zone whether I can comment upon his actions or not.’

Galt nodded, somewhat reluctantly conceding the point. ‘Captain Aresti leads our men in the Hammer of the Emperor. Our men should begin the venting of the hulk’s atmosphere soon enough.’

‘Once I am on the hulk, I will order my men to follow him.’

‘You will not lead them yourself?’ said Galt.

Caedis shook his head, and for a second, Galt thought he might falter.

‘No, there are certain… Rites, rituals that I must complete. My attention will be elsewhere. I defer command to him.’ He was struggling with his words, whether in finding those that were appropriate or because he was exhausted Galt could not discern.

‘Might I ask, Lord Caedis, are you well?’

Caedis smiled as if that were an amusing jest. His smile dropped quickly.

‘Yes, and no. My time grows short, Captain Galt. We of the Blood Drinkers can… We know when our end approaches. Do you understand?’

Galt hesitated. He thought of the Shadow Novum and the messages delivered there. Who knew what beliefs the Blood Drinkers held?

‘I do, Lord Caedis.’

Caedis nodded thoughtfully, and for a moment Galt saw respect there. ‘Then I shall return to my ship and gather my men,’ said Caedis. ‘The magi?’

‘They wait as commanded. I will accompany them on their retrieval mission when I deem the hulk safe.’

‘Very well,’ said Caedis. He offered his hand. Galt took his forearm in the warrior’s clasp. His grasp was firm and unwavering, if his gaze was not. ‘Until we meet again, captain. May the Emperor’s foresight deliver our foes to the points of our swords, and his mercy shield us from theirs.’

Talking to Galt took all of Caedis’s remaining self-control. The Rite of Holos had been held only hours before, and already the Thirst clutched at his throat. Flashes of light accompanied by starbursts of pain vexed his eyes and mind. When he closed his eyes, glimpses of something that was not his own life dazzled him, cast him adrift from the flow of time. His ears buzzed. He walked with all the dignity he could up the ramp into the Thunderhawk. The craft was empty but for a trio of serfs and Chaplain Mazrael.

Mazrael stood at the top of the second ramp inside, the one leading up into the Thunderhawk’s upper deck. He wore his Terminator armour, winged crozius in his hand. His helmet was a skull with glowing red eyes and sharp teeth. His torso was encased in a gold-chased ribcage, his limbs carried bones sculpted in relief onto the armour plates. Lit red, he was a devil steeped in blood. Caedis stopped at the top of the boarding ramp, eyes fixed on the daemonic figure above him.

The ramp clanged shut and Caedis’s head reeled. He staggered and sank down onto his knees.

‘Mazrael, help me…’

‘Hush now, my lord, my son. I recognised the signs,’ said Mazrael gently. He walked down the ramp to where Caedis knelt, a fallen giant in armour fit to clad a mountain. Mazrael placed his hand on Caedis’s head and the lord of the Blood Drinkers raised bleary eyes to meet with Mazrael’s unblinking helmet lenses. ‘What will you take, my son? The black and the red, or the Emperor’s mercy?’

Caedis’s face furrowed. He was on the verge of forgetting something important. Light flashed through his mind, searing migraine running hard after it. He walked stony ground on feet that were not his own, and his breath was laboured as if his body worked hard. He blinked the image away. He tried to speak, but his throat was so dry. He swallowed, no saliva came. Mazrael signalled behind him, and a serf hurried down, bearing a jewelled cup whose bowl was fashioned from a human skull.

‘This is the Calix Cruentes,’ said Mazrael. His skull helmet wavered in Caedis’s eyes as he spoke. ‘Only those who succumb to our curse ever see it. Drink from it, it will hold the visions at bay a short while.’

Caedis reached out a hand. His eyesight splintered, like light forced through a prism. His view became one of two places, a stained glass window made up of parts from two different images. His hand, and not his hand. One armoured, one naked and bloodied. He took the cup to his mouth and drank, a sip at first but then great gulps. Slippery liquid ran down from his mouth as he guzzled at the contents. The liquid was rich, a volcanic spice to it. It slicked his throat and vocal cords. Blood, always blood.

‘Slowly, my lord!’ Mazrael pried the cup away from his lord. ‘There are preparations added to this life-fluid that are dangerous if imbibed too swiftly.’

Caedis felt himself returning to the present. The sense of dislocation retreated, that feeling of otherness replaced by the thrum of the Thunderhawk’s systems. Mazrael’s osseous helmet stared down from on high, death’s own judgement. The serf, overtopping Caedis only by a head although the Chapter Master knelt, looked at him dispassionately.

‘Can you speak?’ asked Mazrael.

‘Yes, yes I can speak,’ Caedis said. He closed his eyes, but it brought no comfort, bringing the buzzing in his ears to a cacophony within which were hidden secret and terrible words.

‘Then what do you choose?’

‘I choose… I choose the black and red.’

Mazrael nodded. ‘I expected nothing less of you, my lord, but I had to ask again. It is not unknown for a brother to change his mind once the full horror of what awaits becomes apparent.’ He beckoned to the other serfs. ‘Prepare him.’

Two of the serfs went to Caedis’s side, and began to remove his armour’s outer plates. The third wheeled an auto-artisan down from the upper decks. This they would use to paint his armour black.

‘Brother Luentes,’ Mazrael voxed the pilot. ‘Take us back to Lux Rubrum.’

‘Yes, Lord Reclusiarch Mazrael,’ the pilot replied. The engines immediately kicked into life, building to a roar.

‘My brother, my lord, my son,’ said Mazrael. ‘Now, we shall pray together, pray to Sanguinius and the Emperor, for you shall soon be joining them both.’

Mazrael’s prayers faded from Caedis’s consciousness. Caedis replied to the catechism as best he could, each response activating deeply buried psycho conditioning; certain hypnotic states triggered by key words and ritual recitation implanted in him as a neophyte should the Black Rage come upon him. He realised this numbly, that this was no longer the Thirst, but that he was succumbing to the worst of the Flaw. A curse wrapped around his every cell; the thorns around the genomic flower of his gifts pricking at last.

For the Blood Drinkers and other scions of Sanguinius, their gifts were double-edged. But he was as detached from his realisation as he was from everything else. The rocky path was beneath his feet again, and then it was not, and he was looking at his repainted armour being replaced upon his limbs. And then he was on the lava road out of Fortress San Guisiga, hurrying away in secret and at night, and then he was walking the corridor from the docking bay on Lux Rubrum.

Brothers in full armour knelt at his passing, heads bowed in sorrow and deference. Lining all the way to the boarding torpedo launch tubes, half chanting his name low and regular as a heartbeat as others sang the hymn of mourning. And he was climbing up rocks hot with volcanic heat, splintered vision scouring desiccated skies for the silhouettes of the astorgai. He was in an acceleration chair. His men around him, men he had fought with for five hundred years: Epistolary Guinian, Reclusiarch Mazrael, Brother Ancient Metrion and others. They were helmetless, and they were singing a low dirge. The words were lost to him, sounding from far away, as sound travels through water, or through blood.

An astorgai swiped at him. Its wings flapped its burned-flesh stench deep into his nostrils and it cursed him in corrupt Gothic. The blow of its pinion-claw dented his plastron, only it was not his armour. Then it was not the astorgai’s blow that forced him back, but the sudden acceleration of the boarding torpedo, a fanfare of fire heralding its exit into space. The acceleration abruptly ceased, the pressure came off his chest and he came back into himself. He looked to his men, his companions, his friends. They wept, some of them.

What was this? What did he see? This was not Sanguinius’s death, not the communion with his primarch he was expecting. He tried to speak, to say what he saw, but he could not. He writhed against his restraints and shouted, and he was not sure if he shouted for himself or the man he was in his visions. ‘Who will guide me? Who will show me the way?’

Mazrael’s hand grasped the edge of Caedis’s shoulder plate, turning him so that his skull helmet filled his world.

‘I will guide you, lord, I will show you the way,’ said the Reclusiarch gently.

Caedis blinked. Reality shifted about him. The boarding torpedo’s klaxon sounded, alarm lights flashed. All around him, the song abruptly ceased, and helmets were placed on heads and sealed to armour. Mazrael helped Caedis put his on.

All was thunder and violence. The occupants of the torpedo were thrown about in their seats as the vessel punched deep into the hulk. Metal squealed along its windowless hull.

The torpedo reached its predetermined depth. Retro-rockets roared and it slammed to a halt, hurling the Space Marines forward against their restraints. The forward hatch blew open, the metal skating across the deck outside. Their harnesses slammed upward, and the Adeptus Astartes were up and into the hulk.

Metal glowed white hot from the retro-thrusters. Scorch marks blackened every wall, smoke choked the corridor. But this area was not airtight, and the exhaust was rapidly sucked away. From all around them the sound of other torpedoes hitting home reverberated through the metal of the hulk.

‘Lord, are you lucid?’ asked Mazrael.

‘Yes, yes I am with you,’ Caedis said. He swallowed. His mouth was still dry, but being here, with a mission to perform, he found he could focus his fracturing mind. He could more easily recognise the men with him. Brother Metrion, Reclusiarch Mazrael, Epistolary Guinian, Brother Erdagon, Sergeant Sandamael, Brother Quintus, Brother Kalael; all bar Mazrael in Terminator armour and armed with lightning claws. Where were Atameo and Hermis? They should be here, he would have preferred them over Brothers Hordus and Donas. He was about to ask Mazrael when the memory of their deaths on Catria rushed back. So many deaths. How many had he seen die? How many had he killed? How many had given their blood so that he might serve?

‘My lord?’

Caedis gripped the hilt of his sword, Gladius Rubeum. It grounded him. ‘We must go to our allotted position, Reclusiarch, there to await the orders of Captain Galt. He is your commander now. We must trust to the warriors of Honourum to see us through this battle.’

The Terminators fanned out either side of their officer, Sergeant Sandamael directing them via the sensorium.

‘And you, my lord?’ asked Mazrael, dropping his voice to a private channel.

Caedis included Guinian in the conversation. ‘Find me a good death, my friends. Find me something worthy to fight. Brother Guinian, search out their mightiest so that I might slay him face to face.’

‘Yes my lord,’ Guinian said. He prepared his mind, and slipped into a trance.

Epistolary Guinian let his mind drift out into the greater hulk. His warp-sense told him things that should have been unknown, the location of his brothers and their Novamarines allies, and the location of their genestealer enemies. This he saw not in terms most men would understand, not even other psykers, for he experienced his extended awareness through a series of layered metaphors. Images that made little sense if taken at face value took the place of hard reality. He was a psyker, blessed with witch-sight, an inheritor of the strange mutation that granted the immortal Emperor his power. His ability was far less than that of the Lord of All Men, but potent still.

Because of this he possessed an understanding of reality different to that of others. Like the Techmarines, the Librarians of a Chapter were privy to mysteries that set them apart from the other brethren. But where the concerns of the Forge were entirely of the material, those of the Library were quite the opposite, the ephemeral and unknowable; that which could not be seen, only sensed. If the forge commanded steel, the apothecarion flesh, the chaplaincy the soul, then the Librarians knew the secrets of men’s hearts, and more besides.

The mass of metal, ice and rubble that made up the hulk was as a dark rock on the shore of an endless sea. Bright points flickered on the stone, the wavering lights of the souls of battle-brothers. They were puny in the dark, strong though they were in the terms most men would understand. Brighter stars shone in this non-firmament, the glowing minds of the other psykers. Ranial of the Novamarines was as bright as the nova burst his armour bore. He stood upon the surface of the hulk. The other four Librarians in the joined fleet were lesser, those of Librarium neophytes barely brighter than those of their non-psyker battle-brothers. Give them time, thought Guinian, soul-fire flares brighter with training and experience.

Outwards from the stone, other outcrops of denser reality dotted the dark beach of the sky – the ships of the Novamarines and the Blood Drinkers. More lights, the fires of the lives of men, inconstant sparks that were so easy to snuff out. Astropaths and Navigators on the ships showed larger. He dipped into the chatter of the latter, like a man trailing his hand in water in the wake of a boat. Abstract images filled his mind, the best and strongest of the soul-bound projecting words and images. Focused beams of thought punched through the warp, informing Chapter fortresses far away of the actions of the fleet. Somewhere out on the further shores of his mind construct – Guinian dared not seek it out – was the glaring beacon of the Astronomican, a light that would sear his soul if he looked too deep into it.

He drew himself back. There were other minds here, dark and alien and opaque to his understanding. Their minds were distinct, but meshed together into a web so tightly woven it was difficult to decide where one ended and another began. Guinian touched his thoughts across this network of alien minds, gently so as not to alert it. It appeared to him as a green-black web, a powerful stench coming off it, the toxic desires of the alien. The outflung edges of this web touched every planet the genestealers infested, the threads sometimes so faint they were barely visible, but it was always there, and after thirty years of hunting these creatures, Guinian had become proficient at detecting it. Now, to be so close to its source made him feel unclean. He steeled his soul and plunged his mind on.

He felt a thickening in the alien mind-web. It came together, knotting tighter and tighter until…

Something powerful and evil stirred in its sleep and regarded him.

Guinian gasped, his eyes snapped open.

‘My lords,’ he said, not daring to drop out of his trance entirely, lest he lose the creature. ‘I have found something. A powerful mind at the heart of the web of minds that directs this infestation.’

Caedis stared at him, his face unreadable behind his suit helmet. Guinian felt his mind more keenly than ever, a turmoil of psychic energies more potent than any he had ever felt the Chapter Master emit. He suppressed a shudder. The Black Rage was a spiritual affliction as much as a consequence of their flawed gene-seed.

A long moment passed before the Chapter Master spoke.

‘Then we will find the creature within whose head it resides. Brother Guinian, you do not have to follow me to my doom, but your abilities would be welcome.’ Caedis’s voice was hollow and distant. ‘This is not an order, but a request, from one brother to another.’

‘I would be honoured to aid you, lord, this last time.’ He fought back tears. He knew his beloved leader was close to his end.

‘I will join you, you will need my guidance,’ said Mazrael. ‘Let us tread this road together.’

‘To the summit of Mount Calicium,’ said Caedis, his voice trailing into a slur. ‘Captain Aresti?’

‘Yes, lord?’

‘You are in command here. I have other matters to attend to. The wings of Sanguinius shield you.’

‘My lord,’ said Aresti. Galt would have told him what Caedis intended, but he still sounded surprised. ‘Are you certain?’

The Chapter Master of the Blood Drinkers did not reply. Caedis, Mazrael, Guinian and his guard squad were working their way out from the beachhead. Quickly, more quickly than Caedis’s walking speed and the efficacy of the Novamarines’ equipment would suggest, Caedis and his followers faded from the strikeforce’s monitoring equipment, and disappeared into the hulk.

CHAPTER 13

HESPERION’S FOLLY

A giant square frame formed the outside of the cutter. Glass or some other substance glittered in its forward edge, reflecting Jorso’s angry light.

‘The cutter has to be precisely sited, lords,’ said Plosk. He wore a suit of rust-red power armour, as did his aide, Samin. Nuministon wore his greenish-gold suit, its helmet aglitter with its disturbing lenses.

Mastrik was with them, Epistolary Ranial and Captain Sorael of the Blood Drinkers alongside. They watched from atop a jutting spaceship engine block that rose over the hulk. Servitors in flimsy vacuum suits worked on the plain below, securing the device with hawsers, Novamarines Scouts clad in armoured space suits guarded them. Pistons terminating in broad, claw-like feet pushed out from the cutter and into the surface of the hulk. The cutter was a simple hollow square of metal, forty metres long on the sides, five bulky units housing its feet mechanisms and power inlets. This square was now held at a twenty-nine degree angle to the surface of the hulk. Or so Mastrik’s sensorium told him. To do this it underlaid a uniform value to the uneven hulk surface, calculated off the hulk’s mean elevation. Three sets of three black pipes bound together snaked off over the hulk to portable reactors of some size. Other smaller cables led off to a control landau; an open, legged conveyance full of equipment and tech-priests.

‘Is this worth the effort?’ said Ranial. ‘We could have cut several ways in ourselves in half this time.’

‘Oh, I do not think so, my lords,’ said Plosk. Mastrik heard the smile hidden behind his helmet. ‘You are about to witness a great efficiency.’

‘This is a great artefact, an atomic disintegration field cutter,’ said Samin hotly. ‘It dates from the times of knowledge, you will marvel at its power.’

‘No need to be so defensive, Adept Samin,’ said Mastrik. ‘My Brother-Librarian voices a question as he is entitled to. He too is the guardian of old knowledge, albeit of a different kind to yours, and exhibits his natural curiosity. If he is wrong, he will graciously admit so.’

Ranial made a non-committal noise. Samin bristled, evident even through his armour. Emperor, thought Mastrik, I’m annoying both of them today. Mastrik was a bluff man, with a broad sense of humour that occasionally jarred upon the sensibilities of the serious-minded Novamarines. Ranial was capable of an amount of dry wit, but as a Librarian possessed of a portion of the Emperor’s own godlike abilities, could also be more serious-minded than most. Mastrik and he were good friends, but his mood could be difficult to judge, and so sometimes they came to argue.

‘I meant no offence,’ said Mastrik. ‘How long until your priests are ready, magos?’ He checked his mission clock.

‘Any moment now, lord captain,’ said Plosk. His own armour was large, made bigger by the rack of manipulators and devices Mastrik had no name for sprouting from his back. Still, it was small compared to the Terminator battleplate Mastrik, Sorael and Ranial wore. ‘The erection of the cutter takes time, I admit, but once in operation, well, you shall see…’

Servitors walked away from the cutter, their tasks done. The tech-priests followed.

‘They must retreat to a safe distance,’ explained Plosk. ‘There is something akin to molecular shrapnel generated by the activities of the cutter. A magnetic shield extends around it, to snare these stray atom-clumps and funnel them away safely, but it requires distance to exert itself fully. To be close to the actual blade itself while cutting is under way could be fatal.’

Warning lights flickered all around the cutter’s outside edge; no alarms audible in the vacuum.

‘You may begin,’ ordered Plosk.

The tech-priest in charge of the cutter’s bulky, portable control vehicle leant over its controls. He pointed, directing his juniors in the appropriate activation sequences. Mastrik had his sensorium magnify the scene so he could better observe. Whatever the tech-priests were doing was incomprehensible to him. He moved his gaze over the hulk’s surface, its coat of dust blinding in the direct light of Jorso. His helmet lenses darkened in response.

Mastrik watched the frame. The glassy material glowed a dark green. Light flickered all around it, sparks that arced and burst brightly when they touched. This caged storm intensified, until the whole of the frame was alive with dancing angles of energy.

‘You see? The device is now at thirty per cent total power capacity. Blessed be the Omnissiah,’ said Plosk.

The process reached a critical point, and the lightning ceased to be. In its stead was a flat screen of energy, nearly invisible were it not for the fact it turned all viewed through it faintly green.

‘Sixty per cent,’ said Plosk.

At the control landau, further activity. Mastrik felt the hulk vibrate. The disturbance built. His sensorium jumped at the backwash of electromagnetic energy generated by the cutter.

‘Aha! Ninety per cent and…’

A perfectly square beam of energy, angled as the frame that projected it, stabbed down through the hulk. A flash of light as it met, and then further reflected lights as the beam met denser matter in the body of the agglomeration and atomised it.

‘And there we have it,’ said Plosk, with pleasure.

The beam cut out. A black rectangular hole had been made in the hulk’s skin, leading down. The edges of it glowed faintly. Plumes of white jetted into space, atmosphere leaking from the hulk.

‘You have answered my earlier question,’ said Ranial.

‘It would make a fine weapon,’ said Sorael.

Plosk nodded in agreement. ‘Just so, and indeed it operates on similar principles to the disruption fields built into your power weapons. But the manner in which the device attains the projection of the field forwards, the maintenance of its coherency so far out from the projectors, the safe exhaust of the excess energy generated as the matter is annihilated, the overall magnitude of the field, the smooth manner of its disintegration… Well,’ he said apologetically. ‘I could go on for some time. These are mysteries now known only to the Machine-God.’

‘We will uncover them,’ said Nuministon in his machine voice. ‘Given time.’

‘That we will, Magos Nuministon, that we will,’ said Plosk. ‘When our lord deems us worthy. And it is by such actions as this retrieval mission that we prove ourselves to be so.’

‘Brother Ranial, I believe you owe Adept Samin here a small apology,’ said Mastrik. He checked his clock. He turned around to face the other side of the engine-mount. There, shaded from the sun, was the majority of the taskforce. His hearts quickened as he took them all in; one hundred and sixty Terminators stood at the front. Few were the Space Marines of any Chapter who had witnessed such a sight. Behind them, squads of power armoured brethren. The Novamarines quartered heraldry broke up their silhouettes, providing unexpected camouflage, whereas the blood-red of the Blood Drinkers was tinted deep mauve and obvious by the blue light of Jorso. In all, nearly four hundred Space Marines of two Chapters waited on the plain. Three Thunderfire cannons – two of the Novamarines, one of the Blood Drinkers – and five Devastator squads armed with anti-personnel heavy weapons were the extent of Battleforce Anvil’s heavy support.

‘A fine gathering,’ said Sorael. ‘We will fight the enemy eye to eye, and it is glorious that it is so.’

By the sloping shaft, another Adeptus Mechanicus machine moved, a tracked vehicle carrying a giant spool of some material upon its back. Mastrik had never seen the like, but Plosk had assured him that the spool was wound with a road, a road which would go rigid once deployed, granting them easy entry to the depths of the hulk and thence to the killing zone.

‘As you see, my lords, you have your abilities, and we have ours,’ said Plosk.

‘Very impressive,’ said Ranial, ‘and far better than working our way through the hulk to the killing zone. I offer my apologies.’

‘We are ready, Lord Captain Galt,’ said Mastrik over his suit vox.

‘Give the order for your men to take up their positions,’ replied Galt. ‘The attack begins soon.’

Ten kilometres away, at the beachhead recently vacated by Lord Caedis, three squads of Novamarines Terminators and two of the Blood Drinkers spread out. Their role was to cover the main points of egress the genestealers might use to escape their depressurised roosts. The areas they began in were close to the edge of the hulk, bereft of atmosphere in the main, but the genestealers could scatter in any direction. They were to hold, await the return of the five Terminator squads and the Techmarines sealing the main ways deeper in and then advance once the roosts were blown, and encourage on into the killing zone any genestealers for whom the loss of breathable air was not a sufficient spur. Captain Aresti commanded them now that Lord Caedis had stepped down.

Many levels down, in the last of the vessels the routes to the killing zone would run through, Sergeant Voldo and Squad Wisdom of Lucretius were hard at work. Voldo watched as a door, immobile since the time of Goge Vandire, ground out of its housing to seal a major intersection. The Techmarine accompanying the squad directed his servitors to unhook the mobile generator wired into the door panel’s innards, and set himself to welding the door shut with his servo arm.

‘Four minutes, and they will not be able to use this exit, brother-sergeant,’ said the Techmarine.

‘It is as the Lord of Man wills it, Brother Techmarine Estrellius,’ said Voldo. The sergeant ran his map up and down the main way to the killing zone. Data transmission was still poor. Boosted relays were being installed throughout the tunnels to allow better communication with the fleet, but they would not be operational for some time.

Doors were being sealed all through this part of the hulk, others cut through bulkheads and hull walls, transforming a rat run of passages into three, long tunnels leading directly through the hulk into the cavern.

Things had been quiet, but recently there had been reports of a genestealer attack from Novamarines Squad Glorious Ruin. Every so often the noise of their guns reached Voldo’s sensorium, the sounds of bolters reduced to a feeble popping by distance.

‘The enemy stir,’ said Astomar.

‘Why now, I wonder,’ said Militor. ‘Is it an omen? Are they warned of what occurs?’

‘I pray not,’ said Voldo.

Estrellius stepped back from the door. ‘I am done here.’

‘Very well,’ Voldo said. ‘We go on to our next objective.’

Voldo scanned the feed from Eskerio’s auspex. Excepting the small swarm of red dots around Squad Glorious Ruin’s position, the only movements they could see were friendly. ‘This is too easy,’ he said, ‘brothers, be on your guard.’

Sergeant Alanius stood in total darkness. The two remaining members of his squad a blur of grey slabs in his sensorium’s heat vision, radioactive fog up to their waists, the heat leakage from their power plants illuminating the room with infrared light.

They had been assigned point duty, ranging ahead of Novamarines Terminator Squad Glorious Ruin, and guarding the next open way on the list of those they had to seal. This way, so Galt had planned, those squads accompanying the Techmarines could avoid ambush.

‘This is no fit task,’ said Azmael. ‘Guarding a passageway that none will take.’

‘Silence, brother,’ said Alanius. ‘We are under strength and are given a role fitting to our weakened state. This is the final of Squad Glorious Ruin’s objectives. Once they have dealt with door ninety, then they will come here and seal this corridor, and we can join the greater battle.’

The breathing of Azmael and Tarael was harsh over the vox. The Thirst might have been sated by the Rite of Holos, giving them more control over their actions, but the blood drinking had wakened the battle-joy and they were desperate to fight.

‘Caedis would not have put us here,’ said Tarael bitterly. ‘This Novamarines captain does not know the hearts and minds of Blood Drinkers.’

‘Nor should he brother, better our secrets remain our own,’ said Alanius.

‘We should not be here,’ said Tarael. ‘Such sentry duty is demeaning.’

‘I ordered silence, Brother Tarael. Captain Galt is in command, he works his resources as he sees fit,’ said Alanius, but his rebuke was half-hearted. His blood sang fiercely. Energised by the rite, he was as impatient for the fray as his squad mates.

Alanius glanced back at the door. It gaped open, the corridor beyond dark. In places the monochrome image in his helmet brightened with the radioactive heat-glow of the fog, but the corridor quickly went into black. The door opened automatically – unlike most of the systems on this vessel, it still functioned – and they could not seal it. They needed technical support for that.

‘We wait,’ said Alanius. He checked Squad Glorious Ruin’s position on the map. Icons leapt around the rendering of the hulk where they worked, the auspex carried by Azmael unsure. Background radiation here was high, and the device’s capabilities were compromised.

The blackness was utter. Each enhanced man was a world unto himself, walled off from the rest of the universe by thick armour.

‘Wait!’ said Azmael. ‘Brother-sergeant, the motion detector.’

Alarms pinged in their helmets. The locator beacons of Squad Glorious Ruin fizzed on the visor screens. Red dots swarmed around them.

‘Where did they come from?’ said Azmael.

‘It would be impossible to seal all the secret ways of a hulk like this,’ said Tarael. ‘This is a fool’s errand in more ways than one.’

The sounds of distant fighting reached them, amplified by the enhanced hearing the suits and their superior physiology granted them: the distinctive discharge of storm bolters, the crackling bangs of power fist energy fields annihilating matter, the screams of genestealers.

An icon depicting the skull and starburst of the Novamarines flickered and went out.

‘One of them has fallen,’ said Azmael.

‘We should go to their aid, then they will be able to more quickly seal this corridor, and we can be on our way to join Lord Caedis and the others,’ said Tarael.

Alanius considered Tarael’s proposal. If Squad Glorious Ruin fell, and their Techmarine died with them, the assault would be delayed, granting the genestealers more time in which to waken. He thought on it as dispassionately as he could, keeping his battle-joy on a tight rein. They had been ordered to remain here. But to what end? Tarael was correct, to a degree. This corridor was a minor branching; its strategic value was low. Surely it would be better to ensure the safety of their Novamarines cousins? He licked his lips. He would seek guidance. ‘Lord Caedis?’ he tried. ‘Lord Captain Sorael?’ He tried to connect with the fleet, then the Novamarines. The relay system was not yet active. All his attempts were met with static. He tuned into Squad Glorious Ruin’s frequency. He could hear their squad chatter, their battle chants and warnings to one another, but the sound was broken and when he attempted to speak with them, they did not hear.

Alanius felt a shudder of delicious anticipation at the battle’s noise. His Chapter celebrated the violent side of their heritage. Unlike Sanguinius’s other sons, they drank deeply of the stuff of life, seeking not to sate their unnatural appetites, but to provoke them. They channelled the Thirst, drawing upon its power, and it made them strong. The Blood Drinkers could control their urges this way, and were not as reckless as some of their brother Chapters. But the battle-joy gave counsel whether sought or not, and its advice was always the same: attack, attack, attack!

Alanius weighed this against the need to guard the corridor. The battle-joy won out. It always did.

He looked around him one last time, and made final consideration. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We will aid them, but you, Brother Azmael, will remain here.’

‘Yes brother-sergeant.’ There was disappointment in Azmael’s assent. ‘By Sanguinius, I shall do my duty.’

Alanius and Tarael moved off, mag-lock boots clicking on the metal.

Alien eyes watched the Blood Drinkers depart. The genestealer had no name, and no conception of what a name was. Names are human things, and the habits of humans were irrelevant to it. But it understood their actions. Its quick mind, geared to purposes unintelligible to the human mind, saw its opportunity. The invaders were gone, drawn away by its kin, and the way was open into the deeper hulk. Only one of the interlopers remained, one soft entity cased in hard metal. The genestealer hissed at those accompanying it. Hard chitin rattled as the creatures unfurled themselves. The genestealer crept forward, driven by an intellect even greater than its own. The wishes of their broodlord were felt and understood by his family, they operated as one. The nearness of them, the touch of their minds on each other was their comfort and their strength. They advanced silently in the dark.

An alarm went off in Brother Azmael’s helmet. His eyes whipped upward to where the auspex feed was displayed within his visor. Motion indicators blinked, dozens of them. The enemy was close, very close.

Azmael had time to voice a garbled cry for help before the first of them was on him, and then he was fighting for his life.

Sergeant Voldo caught Azmael’s vox burst as a clatter of static and disrupted words.

‘Brother Eskerio! Find me the source of that transmission.’

The corridor glared actinic white as Estrellius sealed another duct. Sparks leapt from the metal and danced across the floor.

‘Sector 4.9.201,’ said Eskerio, homing in on the source of the message instantly.

Voldo’s onboard cogitator ran the message over and again, each time shaving away the layers of interference, until a voice leapt out of it.

‘Brother Azmael, of the Blood Drinkers,’ Voldo said. ‘He is under attack.’

‘I have him,’ said Eskerio. The auspex feed shifted. The motion detector was operating at maximum range, the depiction of Azmael’s struggle spotty. There was no hiding the numbers attacking him. ‘There are between fifty and seventy xenos.’

‘He doesn’t stand a chance,’ said Astomar.

‘What were the orders for Squad Hesperion?’ asked Militor.

‘To guard that section, until the door could be reached and sealed by a Techmarine,’ said Voldo. ‘The doorway was allocated to Squad Glorious Ruin’s group. They must still be delayed. Any word on Brother-Sergeant Crastus?’

‘Negative, brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio. ‘We are too far away now to know our brothers’ fates.’

‘When will the relays be operational?’ asked Militor.

‘I calculate soon, brothers,’ said Estrellius. ‘I must place a relay here. My brothers-in-the-forge will have placed most of the rest of the relay poles by now. They will not function until all are in place.’ He ordered a servitor to him and took a long metal stave topped with a bulbous device from it. Estrellius grasped it firmly and placed it upon the floor. He twisted his armoured hands in opposite directions around the relay’s activation mechanisms, and a spike shot from the end of the pole, burying itself in the floor. Estrellius touched further controls near the head, and the light atop it began a slow, red flashing.

‘I see only Azmael on the auspex,’ said Astomar. ‘Where are his brothers?’

‘They could be there, the radiation is high in that area, the auspex struggles to show us the truth,’ said Eskerio.

‘Brothers,’ said Estrellius. ‘I am done here. That is the last of my allotted tasks. We may rejoin the battlegroup.’

‘Let us go to the aid of Azmael on the way,’ said Voldo. ‘It is less than one kilometre. Brother Estrellius can seal the door, and if need be we can relieve Squad Glorious Ruin as we turn back. Azmael and his brothers aided us greatly, we owe him a debt of honour. Away, and swiftly now.’ Although as he said this, Voldo wondered if it was the same impetuousness he had long ago seen in the Knights of Blood that had endangered the Blood Drinkers.

Estrellius’s servitors gathered up his gear, and the Techmarine fell in behind the Terminators. The group moved as quickly as they could down the buckled corridors of the ship. They had been assigned the deepest vessel in the chain of linked ships that Strikeforce Hammer would enter; those craft nearer the cavern would be tackled by squads from Anvil. The craft was a cruiser once of the Imperial Navy, lost long ago to the vagaries of space and the warp. Its prow rested atop another ship nearer the surface, the second route to the killing zone passing along most of its length before heading down through a hole they had earlier cut through the hull wall. Its compartments were distorted, the whole of the craft pushed out of true by the shifting mass around it. There was little power to be found, and no artificial gravity. Squad Hesperion was stationed further up the vessel, towards the prow. Squad Glorious Ruin, who had been assigned many of the doors in the ship above, were not much further on.

Voldo and his squad kept up a steady pace. All eyes strayed to the auspex, willing Azmael to survive. Seventy genestealers were stiff odds even for six Terminator-armoured brothers, but honour dictated they aid him.

‘Brothers!’ said Eskerio. ‘The genestealers.’

‘What is it, brother?’ asked Voldo.

The auspex motion sensor grew clearer as they drew closer to Azmael. Several blips were around the chalice and blood drop icon denoting the Blood Drinker, but others were streaming past him, down the open corridor.

‘What are they doing?’ said Militor.

‘They are escaping, brother, is it not clear?’ said Eskerio.

‘These are a cunning foe,’ said Astomar.

It took just over ten minutes to traverse the whole of the kilometre to Azmael’s position. Surprisingly, he still lived. They hailed him as they came, urging him to fight harder.

Voldo came first, bolter spitting fire. His suit light illuminated a wall of writhing chitin. Azmael was hidden by a press of genestealers. He had been forced back from his doorway and into a room. There he had taken refuge in the entrance to another corridor, one choked with wreckage. From there he could fight the genestealers one at a time, but he could not stop the greater part of their number running through the unsealed door. Voldo’s gun wavered between the stampede of aliens scuttling into the open way and those attacking the Blood Drinker. He aimed at those attacking Azmael, and blew apart two from behind. Those fleeing hissed at him, but did not stop.

The other Novamarines joined him, emerging into the room and fanning out. Bolter fire rang out, muzzle flash whiting out their sensoriums’ various image compensators. Voldo deactivated his heat vision and light intensification. He watched genestealers smashed into pieces by the short-lived bursts of light from their guns. Azmael emerged fighting, lightning claws flashing. He wheeled and swung his arms, cutting down two.

Squad Wisdom of Lucretius turned their guns on the fleeing genestealers. Brother Astomar made his way around the periphery of the room, pointed his heavy flamer into the corridor and filled it with promethium.

There were seven genestealers left. Trapped by the Space Marines, they attacked with unrestrained ferocity. Two were blown into shreds before they reached Voldo’s squad. The fight became a close-quarters struggle. Voldo’s power sword cut one across the chest, another fell to Militor’s power fist, its head crushed with a bang. Militor dropped another with a bolt. Astomar fended the sixth off, batting at its darting claws with his powered gauntlet, and then Azmael was with him, claws emerging from the creature’s chest.

The remaining genestealer died quickly.

‘I burned half a dozen at least,’ said Astomar.

‘Many more escaped,’ said Eskerio. Red dots swarmed away down the corridor, disappearing outside the auspex’s effective range.

Azmael’s armour dripped with black alien blood. Marks were scored into the metal.

‘Your armour, cousin,’ said Estrellius. He went to the Blood Drinker.

‘It functions.’

‘You have minor damage. Come, I will aid you.’

‘What happened here?’ demanded Voldo.

‘My brothers went to aid your brothers, Veteran-Sergeant Voldo.’

‘In defiance of your orders,’ said the Novamarines sergeant.

‘Sergeant Alanius sought guidance, but none was forthcoming. He acted upon his own initiative.’

‘Thanks to this initiative, fifty or so xenos have escaped our trap, and you nearly paid with your life.’

‘I do my duty,’ said Azmael. ‘Do not challenge me as to how I fulfil it!’ Azmael’s voice was angry. He shrugged off the attentions of Estrellius. ‘Enough! My armour serves.’

They are no better than the Knights of Blood, thought Voldo.

‘Brother,’ said Estrellius. ‘All relays are active. Communications coming online in three, two, one…’

Their helmets filled with the familiar chatter of active operations. Squads reported from all over the hulk, status updates flying through the relay system, up to a booster on the comms-service and then on to the fleet.

‘Relays active,’ said Captain Galt. Carried by the devices of the Adeptus Mechanicus, his voice was clear. ‘All hatches and doorways sealed. Strikeforce Hammer of the Emperor to regroup and await detonation of roost walls.’

‘Lord Captain Aresti, I request an audience,’ said Voldo.

‘Captain Aresti,’ said the Fifth Company commander. ‘What can I do for you, brother?’

‘We have had an… incident, here. Fifty plus xenos have escaped the perimeter. I request permission to mount a search and destroy mission.’

‘As do I,’ said Alanius as he and Tarael strode into the room. ‘Chapter Master Caedis, lord, allow me this mission.’

‘Lord Caedis is occupied, cousin,’ said Aresti. ‘You are to take direction from me, by his order. All elements of the Hammer strikeforce are under my command.’

‘Lord captain,’ said Alanius. ‘Then it is you I humbly petition.’

‘You fought with us bravely on our first mission, Sergeant Alanius, but it is your abandonment of your position that leads us to this pass,’ said Voldo.

‘Your brothers live because of it,’ countered Alanius. ‘And their mission is fulfilled. You cannot criticise us for success.’

‘I am sure they could have held their own, which is more than I can say for the lone brother left here.’

‘Do not test me, cousin…’ growled Alanius.

‘Enough!’ interrupted Aresti. ‘Sergeant Voldo, I grant your request, and that of Cousin Alanius. If he truly is at fault – and his efforts did aid our brothers, do not forget that – then what better way to atone? You may detach yourself from our drive and head into the deeper hulk. Fifty genestealers loose is unconscionable. Destroy them.’

‘Yes, lord captain.’

‘Captain Aresti out.’

Voldo and Alanius faced each other.

‘There you have it,’ said Alanius. ‘We fight together once again.’ His breathing and voice returned to normal. ‘And I for one recognise this as an honour for my brothers. Do you?’

Voldo remained suspicious. ‘I have fought with others of the line of Sanguinius before, Sergeant Alanius. It did not end well.’

‘Which Chapter?’

‘The Knights of Blood.’

‘Ah,’ said Alanius. ‘Our Chapters are brothers, true, but brothers can be different.’

‘They fought without consideration.’

‘With valour?’

Voldo paused.

‘Yes, with great valour.’

‘Then that is the least you can expect from us.’

Azmael spoke, calmer now. ‘Could the genestealers have drawn us off purposefully? Did they mean to escape?’

‘You learn the ways of this foe quickly,’ said Voldo. ‘One cannot discount the possibility, which suggests this corridor has more value than we assign it. Brother Estrellius! Inform Brother-Sergeant Crastus that he and his might return to the strikeforce. You will seal this door behind us! Do not let any other pass. Then return to the strikeforce yourself.’

‘Yes, brother-sergeant,’ said Estrellius.

Next Voldo sent a message across the Space Marine’s linked comms net. ‘All brothers, be wary when passing door ninety-one, sector five. There is an entry way there which we were unaware of.’ He gave a brief description of the action his squad had been embroiled in. ‘Can it be sealed, Brother Estrellius?’

‘A ventilation shaft, I think,’ said the Techmarine. ‘I am sure I can render it useless.’

‘Good, good,’ said Voldo. ‘And now,’ he said, dropping his vox-channel to the two squads, ‘we hunt.’ Voldo walked through the door and into the cramped corridor beyond. His suit light shone from radioactive mist.

‘We go into the dark once more,’ said Alanius joyfully. ‘Look to your brothers. This will be a hard fight.’

At the beachhead, Aresti’s aides counted in the returning Terminator squads and their Techmarines and directed them to their allotted places. They would soon be all back, then the venting of the genestealer roosts’ atmospheres could begin, and so Aresti was deep in conversation with First Captain Galt.

‘Lord Caedis has gone, brother-captain,’ said Aresti.

‘It is not unexpected,’ said Galt. ‘As I told you, he intimated to me this might happen. But gone where?’

‘I do not know. He and his squad, and their Reclusiarch. Squad Vinctus saw them depart the beachhead.’

‘His other men all remain as he promised?’

‘Yes, brother, all bar his bodyguard. The Blood Drinkers look to the Novamarines for guidance and command. Lord Caedis himself ordered them to follow our lead, then I lost contact.’

‘Where did he go, I wonder?’ said Galt thoughtfully. ‘He spoke of a rite, surely one of combat.’

‘I do not know where he went, brother. To the nominal north and then down. They must be deep in the hulk. Their locators no longer show, even with the aid of the booster relay.’

Galt paused. ‘If the other Blood Drinkers remain, then you have enough brothers to fulfil your objective. There is some strangeness to the actions of Caedis, but he is Lord Chapter Master of a loyal and glorious order. We must trust that he has his reasons, and that they are sound reasons. No doubt he has some objective in mind that will benefit us all. Put him from your mind, you must prepare. Captain Mastrik and Captain Sorael are nigh to their positions. Atmospheric venting will begin soon.’

‘Then matters proceed smoothly, and to timetable,’ said Aresti.

‘We have not won the war yet, brother,’ said Galt. ‘I urge a time of caution, later there will be time enough for valour, and we will slaughter the foe in the name of the Emperor.’

‘So let it be,’ said Aresti.

‘I will be in touch before I order the charges detonated,’ said Galt. ‘Look to your wargear, for in it lies the salvation of humankind.’

CHAPTER 14

THE ASCENT OF HOLOS

Caedis and his companions forged onward, far out from the beachhead. Guinian guided them, taking an unerring course to the north pole of the hulk, before directing them downwards towards the heart of the Death of Integrity.

Caedis’s mind fractured as the effects of the Calix Cruentes wore off. His sense of place grew unreliable, and he found himself lost between two worlds once more. He looked to his feet, and the ground beneath them changed. One minute he strode, Terminator shod, the hard deck-plating of the derelict vessels under his feet, the next power armour boots traversed the stone-strewn ground of San Guisiga. He wore a helmet, then he did not, only the mask grille of the helm in place feeding him oxygen, as the hot suns of his home world beat down on his unprotected head. The suit of power armour he wore in this other place was unfamiliar to him. And then it was unfamiliar no more, as Caedis’s mind was subsumed into that of the long-dead saviour of the Blood Drinkers.

Holos was cut free from time, for he stood upon the brink of the Black Rage himself, and was thus dimly aware of Caedis, as he was dimly aware of the others that had accompanied him before and accompanied him now. This was the first time he had made the ascent of Mount Calicium, and it was the nineteenth. Holos was only as aware of this as he was aware of the souls of the brothers who accompanied him; a vague sensation of déjà vu, nothing more. This perturbing sensation was only one among many.

Holos/Caedis left the rough road he had followed since he had left the fortress. He turned eastwards, towards the rising of San Guisiga’s second sun. There was no path, for none dared try the climb that his dream had told him he must attempt.

The volcano was slumped in on itself. An eruption had brought much of the mountain down, leaving one side as the peak. The summit jagged up over the collapsed cone, giving it the appearance of a broken tooth. Foul vapours issued from fumaroles and rolled down the slopes. Mount Calicium radiated a dangerous heat.

Holos/Caedis stared at the volcano for a long time, until both suns were high in the sky. Realising he could wait no longer, Holos began his ascent of Mount Calicium once more.

The wind of San Guisiga was hot. His power armour did its best to cool him, but his bare face was tortured by it. Holos’s skin’s glands were atrophied, many of his pores closed. This change to the epidermis was not one originally sought by the Emperor when he crafted the gene-seed of the Adeptus Astartes. It was a mutation of the Weaver, the mucranoid gland, unique to the Blood Drinkers, turning a gift that should have helped to a hindrance. There was no treating it, it was their own particular quirk of the Flaw. Lacking sebum as well as sweat, Holos’s brothers all bore its mark; the dry, insufficiently nourished skin of the Blood Drinkers.

Holos stumbled, he felt hands upon him, phantom limbs that he could not see. He pushed them aside angrily. He must complete his climb alone.

San Guisiga’s suns burned bright. Noon came. The red giant, Krov A, was a baleful presence, washing the world with angry red light. Its white dwarf companion, Krov B, was a point of light the size of a fingernail, many times smaller but brighter by far than its dominant partner. At this time of year the two suns were close in the sky, a handspan between them. The warmth they gave was negligible. San Guisiga’s ferocious heat was provided by the tidal forces of its large moon, Haemos, pulling at its guts.

Churning geology wracked the planet with endless earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The planet was phenomenally active, its surface was remade once every ten thousand years, sheeted over by fresh rock spewing from its many volcanoes, volcanoes like Mount Calicium.

The mountain shuddered. Rocks pattered down its steep flanks. Holos stopped and looked up, watching for the first signs of avalanche. There were none, and after a time he began again.

Holos clambered upward. One hand in front of the other, power armour and enhanced muscles working as one.

Periodically he looked up into the burning orange sky, wary of the astorgai who made their eyries in the crags above.

Caedis was Holos, and he thought Holos’s thoughts. Caedis lived in Holos’s mind. Caedis was aware of the hero’s memories and his thoughts were shaped by them, but they remained frustratingly distant, for Holos had experienced them, not he. As Holos settled into the rhythm of his ascent, he drew into himself, and he remembered with the sharpness that only a Space Marine can experience. Caedis went with him, seeing the fabled dream Holos had had of a cowled, winged figure on the night-time surface of San Guisiga. It raised a skeletal arm, and pointed to the pinnacle of Mount Calicium. The volcano blew no fire, but others did; drops of molten rock spewing upwards and dropping down in fountain arcs all along the horizon. The clouded sky burned with their wrath, but Mount Calicium was silent, hard black against the inferno torrents of its brothers.

The figure had said nothing to Holos, but his message was clear – the answer to the troubles that gripped the Chapter lay at the peak of the volcano.

Caedis saw blood and slaughter as Holos remembered the times before the rite became established. The savagery of the Chapter’s large Death Company, the constant desire for death and sacrifice to sate the Thirst that bedevilled every brother, their stoic resistance. Their lapses. Holos’s own lapse.

Again and again the woman’s terrified face loomed large in Holos’s mind, a loop of fear that ended with teeth tearing flesh and the hot gush of blood.

Holos felt shame, and Caedis felt it with him, as did the other shades of men not yet born who accompanied the hero. Shame for her death and excitement, and redoubled shame at that excitement. Round and round Holos’s head, on a poisonous Möbius strip of memory that had no beginning or end, shame and excitement chased each other.

Caedis saw other fragments of Holos’s life: the onset of the Thirst that would not be alleviated, the first tremblings of the Rage; the Chapter Council’s ban that denied Holos’s request to climb the mountain. The collusion of Reclusiarch Shanandar in Holos’s escape and secret journey. Some of these things Caedis had long imagined himself, hoping to capture them in glass or stone. Many instances formed the subjects of his glass panels. Caedis had not seen things truly, how could he? He had not been there. Now he was, and he saw how much lesser the reality of it was. He saw how Holos doubted himself, how furtive his escape.

Memories of confrontation and furious words in the Chapter council chamber dissolved, the deep dishonour of Holos’s dismissal from there by Ganlan Sang, the Chapter Master in those dark days. This troubled Holos even more than the face of the terrified woman and the taste of her blood.

Holos turned his concentration to climbing. Will was the greatest weapon against the Thirst, concentration the expression of will.

On Holos went, recreating his climb, this moment in time two thousand years in the past reinvigorated and played anew through the medium of Caedis’s soul. The suns grew hotter. Then came the First Period of Shadow, as Haemos dragged its apricot body across the sky, blotting out the sunlight in its twice-daily eclipse of the suns. Hot winds blew hard when this happened, drying Holos’s meagre sweat to salt on his face. The shadow was welcome, and Holos went on with renewed determination. He reached the top of a bluff of rock, a harder protrusion in the unstable slag of the volcano’s cone.

Atop the rock he encountered his first astorgai. It attacked him without hesitation, swiping at him with its pinion-talons.

The monster was small, a fledgling, although its pinion-talons were still deadly. It had yet to grow its dexterion-claws, those small maniples that grow from a pubescent astorgai’s chest. It hopped forward on its single foot, and slashed its hardened feathers at Holos. They hissed through the air towards his face.

The Space Marine snatched his power sword from its scabbard. He dodged backward, bringing himself dangerously close to the edge of the outcrop. The astorgai laughed and cursed in a tumble of words, some of which were recognisably human. The astorgai were curious creatures. No one was sure if they were truly sentient, or animals keyed into the psychic space of the warp. How many of them there were, where they nested, how they bred – all was unknown. There were certain ruins on Haemos’s forbidden, poisoned surface that hinted that the astorgai might be the devolved remnants of a civilised xenos species, but that was hotly disputed by the Chapter and Adeptus Mechanicus xenologians both. All that was certain was that they had been on San Guisiga longer than men, and had defied every attempt to exterminate them. To the Space Marines who made their home on San Guisiga they were a nuisance, to the small baronies the Blood Drinkers drew their recruits from they were a deadly menace.

Holos ducked a pass of the astorgai’s wing, the razor-sharp keratin of its pinion-talons rattling as they whisked overhead. With the economy of long practice, Holos stepped inside the arc of the weaponed wings and skewered the astorgai child upon his power sword. The weapon passed into its flimsy body with minimal resistance. Smoke issued from the wound under its prominent breastbone. The thing’s beak clacked once, its hard, forked tongue hissing alien words of hate at him, then its three eyes slid shut, its wings folded, and it died.

The creature slipped from Holos’s sword. He did not spare it another glance.

Caedis shoved at the arm gripping him. The astorgai lay behind him. He had triumphed. He had to climb!

‘My lord! My lord! It is I, Reclusiarch Mazrael.’

Caedis’s eyes refocused. The mountain was gone. He was no longer Holos. He wore his Terminator armour. Gladius Rubeum was in his hand, holographic scenes of old victories playing on the faces of its blade. At his feet a genestealer lay dead in a nest of leaves, the point of his sword through its heart. He glanced up. A riot of blue-black foliage crowded him.

‘Brother? Mazrael?’ Caedis’s voice sounded wrong to him. His throat was dust-dry and the words that had come from it similarly so. But it was more than that. Caedis had expected to hear the voice of Brother Holos, not his own. ‘I dreamed, brother, a waking dream.’

Mazrael gripped Caedis’s shoulder guard. ‘I know, lord.’ The vox clicked as Mazrael shifted their conversation to a private channel. In his confused state, it did not seem significant to the Chapter Master.

‘Why do I see the trial of Holos? Why not the travails of Sanguinius? I do not understand.’ He said.

‘The Black Rage blesses you, my lord,’ said Mazrael. ‘Those great heroes of our Chapter do not see what the other scions of Sanguinius see. They are few, but they are gloriously blessed!’

‘To see Sanguinius’s final moments is not a blessing?’

Mazrael shook his head, his voice cracked with emotion; tears, and laughter. ‘No lord – do you not understand? While our brothers see the cause of our damnation, we witness the moment of our salvation – the climb of Brother Holos, the very thing that set us free! This is why we, lord, among all of the sons of the Blood Angels, feel hope. This is the greatest hope of all, and you are party now to its final mystery. Rejoice lord, rejoice as you witness the events that saved us!’

Caedis looked around the room they were in. His Terminators stood easy, the gravity here was functional and only slighter higher than Terran norms. They were in a domed garden room. The glazing of the roof was all broken, part of the framework pushed in by the ruined hull of another ship. But somehow the room’s miniature sun glowed still, water flowed through a recycling loop, and the garden’s plants had run wild. To waken to this strange oasis from Holos’s climb was doubly disorienting.

The plants had twined into one another, stems merging and forming hollow, cell-like compartments of wood. The room was crammed to half its height with thicket. The Terminators had forced their way through. Signs of combat scarred the place, flames guttered in the foliage, and many dead genestealers lay on the floor or caught among the branches.

‘How long will I remain with you? How long until I rejoin Holos?’

Mazrael shifted his grip upon Caedis’s armour. ‘I do not know, brother. Since Holos’s time, only a few brothers have relived his climb. Of those brothers who succumb to the Black Rage in our Chapter, the majority see things as all of Sanguinius’s sons do, they might get a glimpse of the living Sanguinius, or feel the pain of his death. Others more favoured might relive the whole of his death combat against the Warmaster. But for the most part, they feel only his anger, or his rage at Horus’s betrayal of their father, nothing more. But there have been those who have not witnessed the ruin of man’s dream, but trodden in the footsteps of hope, climbing with Holos to the source of our salvation. You are the eighteenth, the eighteenth in two thousand years, lord. You are privy to the ultimate mystery of our Chapter.’

‘What do they find, at the end, these brothers that follow in Holos’s wake?’ said Caedis. Using his voice was painful. He swallowed, no saliva came, and the sensation of his muscles contracting was like glass in his gullet.

Mazrael shook his head. ‘None know. All die.’

Caedis closed his eyes behind his helmet visor. He sagged and nodded. Of course.

‘Will you rest, lord?’

‘No. I must climb, climb to the very summit of Mount Calicium.’

‘Very well.’ Mazrael signalled to the others that they would go on. They pushed through the vegetation, glass from the long-shattered dome crunching under their armoured feet.

CHAPTER 15

FEAR THE ALIEN

The Adeptus Mechanicus road into the hulk went downwards at a steep angle. Its surface was spongy but otherwise firm, the consistency of it unchanging whether it covered solid metal or bridged broad canyons. It was not of any metal that Mastrik knew; nevertheless, when the Adeptus Mechanicus advised the battle-brothers to activate the mag-locks on their boots to better secure themselves, they found the road anchored them in place well enough.

The road went down in a dead straight line for several kilo-metres, towards where the cavern lay. It had been carefully chosen, the Adeptus Astartes banking on the genestealers heading for the deepest atmosphere-bearing chamber they could. There, rather than the safety they craved, the genestealers would find only death.

The army descended twenty brothers abreast. They chanted their hymnals as they went, the songs of two Chapters clashing on the airwaves. Techmarines and Mechanicus adepts set relay beacons at intervals on the walls, linking the force to the fleet. The technology the Adeptus Mechanicus used was potent, almost scouring the angry roar of Jorso from their communications entirely.

The shaft and its road ended in a new airlock some fifty or so metres out from the cavern where Battleforce Anvil was to stand its ground. The airlock had been attached to the side of an alien freighter by the Adepts of Mars, in order to keep the atmosphere in the cavern. A road wide enough for the Space Marines to march three abreast was being cut on the other side of the airlock. Mastrik ordered his men to halt while the work was finished. He and Sorael went over the images of the chamber and reviewed the marching order of their men. A vanguard of seven Terminator squads were to go first to guard against ambush, followed by the battleforce’s Devastator squads. This would allow them to spread out quickly to advantageous firing positions.

Twenty minutes later, Plosk informed them that the airlock and final passageway were complete. In batches of forty, the Space Marines began to pass into the hulk cavern.

Epistolary Ranial, Captain Sorael, and Captain Mastrik were among the very first through, preceded by the guard of Terminators. Half a dozen Techmarines stood behind them; their role would be to finish the tunnels prepared by Strikeforce Hammer.

The airlock chamber was roughly skinned with a soft plastic that had bonded itself to the walls. The Mechanicus had not bothered with atmosphere extractors. The entire force would be through in six batches, and the volume of air in the cavern was so great that the loss of a few hundred cubic metres was immaterial. Thus air rushed into the temporary airlock with a thunderclap as the doors to the cavern were opened. When the next group came through, it would rush into space.

Frost rimed the Space Marines’ battleplate as the gas condensed on vacuum-chilled metal, fogging their helmet lenses. Mastrik willed his armour to dissipate some of its power plant’s excess heat through its outer shell, and his vision presently cleared. They went out into the huge space of the cavern, Terminators first. Then the officers, who stood to one side as the Techmarines marched out and down onto the cavern floor in the wake of the Terminators. The Terminators escorted the Techmarines across the cave to where they would cut two entryways, the third tunnel’s mouth already existent, being a rent in the wall of the cavern.

The airlock closed. Two minutes later it opened again. Four squads of Devastators came through, and headed to various vantage points on the cavern wall. They bounded upward relative to Mastrik’s position, pulling themselves easily along in the low gravity.

Mastrik’s bodyguard, and that of Sorael, waited at a distance as the three officers surveyed their battleground. Mastrik’s sensorium thrummed with data, too much to be properly displayed within his helmet’s display. He carried a supplementary auspex on the outside of his suit. It was plugged directly into his Terminator armour, drawing from its power and interfacing with the suit’s cogitator. Mastrik held this device up, using its screen to display a broader view of the cavern than his helmet could accommodate.

He ran the auspex over the cavern, his eyes darting between the graphical representation and the cave, his enhanced mind comparing the two. As the Imagifer had predicted, the far wall was almost entirely taken up by the side of an immense, alien vessel. The part of it visible was several hundred metres long and two hundred high. More of it lay below and above them, inconceivably huge. Panels had come away from the body in a few places, exposing the superstructure beneath, but in the main it was sound. Where paint had survived, faded stripes of yellow and green that must have been garish once crossed the hull. Blocky alien glyphs covered a portion of it. The side of the cavern the Space Marines occupied was also as depicted by the Adeptus Mechanicus’s device. A large asteroid made up the majority of the wall. It leaned into the alien vessel high above to form a ceiling with a steep apex. Lower down, its irregular body bulged inwards, creating a choke point roughly two-thirds of the way into the cavern from the airlock. The cavern widened out beyond this, in the manner of a true cave, but even at its narrowest extent the floor was seventy metres across.

The rock of the asteroid was relatively smooth; the rest of the wall it was embedded in was not, comprising a number of smaller craft and pieces of debris jammed against each other. This part of the cavern presented a jumble of jutting spars, square caves and ledges. It was directly opposite the tunnel mouths opening into the cavern, and it was in this three-dimensional maze that a number of the combined Chapters’ Devastator squads took up station.

The tunnel mouths – two now being cut as Mastrik watched – were towards the bottom of the cavern. But to see the disposition of the Adeptus Astartes forces, and indeed the cavern itself, in terms of up and down would be a mistake. The centre of the agglomeration, and hence the pull of its weak gravity, lay at an angle four degrees steeper than the Adeptus Mechanicus’ entry tunnel, but the gravity field of the hulk was so weak as to be almost negligible. The agglomeration was large in size, but its cumulative mass, filled as it was with many cavities, was low. There was a ‘downward’ gravitational force, but if a Space Marine were to fall from his perch above the airlock, it would have taken him minutes to reach the floor.

Mastrik snapped off his auspex. ‘The Imagifer Maxiumus’s representation of the cavern is almost one hundred per cent accurate, Brother-Captain Galt,’ said Mastrik.

Galt replied, his signal conveyed by the lines of booster poles laid by the Adeptus Mechanicus and Techmarines. His voice was clear, but thrummed still, the signal waves perturbed by the uneven power outputs of the hulk’s functional reactors. ‘Good. Have your brothers take up position. Strikeforce Hammer has sealed the corridors on the upper levels and gathers for the attack.’

‘Our own men go to their tasks here, cousin-captain,’ said Sorael.

‘The tunnel mouths are being prepared,’ said Mastrik. ‘The ways within opened and all necessary escape points in the lower fifth of the three tunnels are in the process of being sealed.’

Information to that effect was flowing in from all over the hulk to the fleet and the captains in the cave. The cavern teams’ tunnel missions were going well. Flaring light from plasma cutters lit the tunnel mouths like fire in dragons’ dens.

‘Look at this place,’ said Ranial. ‘I have not experienced such a hulk before. The scale of it is impressive. It is no wonder that the Adepts of Mars wish to plunder it.’

‘They will be able to soon, and with my blessing, for now they marshal their resources on the surface. They will enter the hulk from the cavern, but for now this is our concern alone,’ said Galt.

‘Have there been any enemy contacts, brother?’ asked Mastrik.

‘Captain Aresti reported a breakout of genestealers from sector seventeen. Sergeant Voldo is in pursuit.’

‘A breakout? Surely they lack the intellect for such behaviour, cousin,’ said Sorael.

‘Do not underestimate the genestealers, captain,’ said Ranial. ‘Their minds are alien, but powerful, and there is something…’ he trailed away.

‘Brother Ranial?’

Ranial stirred himself. ‘Nothing. Nothing as yet. I feel something, perhaps, a greater mind. It is hard to tell. The warp is confused in such a place, so much history lies upon it, so much death. These places are the houses of ghosts and phantoms. I will monitor the situation.’

The third group of Space Marines were entering the cavern. The cave was coming alive to the movement of transhumans in brightly coloured armours.

Sorael bowed his head. ‘With your permission, Captain Galt, Captain Mastrik, I will make my way to my own position.’ Sorael had been given oversight of the far end of the cavern, the pocketed area part closed-off by the asteroid.

‘Be aware, brothers of two Chapters,’ said Galt. ‘We will not have found every way into the cave. We do not know the location of every genestealer roost. The enemy is legion. Be on your guard.’

‘As ever, lord,’ said Sorael. He quoted the Codex Astartes, ‘The enemies of men are many, our vigilance cannot cease for a moment.’

‘That is so, captain of the Blood Drinkers, that is so.’

Forty minutes later, and the tech-priests confirmed that all doors marked for sealing had been sealed. Two new tunnel mouths gaped lips of raw metal in the skin of the alien ship. Three twisting ways through half a dozen major ships and masses of lesser debris were ready. Each sported spurs leading off to the five genestealer roosts. The last stragglers of Hammer rejoined the main force near the surface, some twenty kilometres away from Battleforce Anvil. The Techmarines of Anvil re-emerged from the tunnels back into the cavern and made their way to Mastrik’s position. There they saw to the siting of their Thunderfire cannons and prepared their servitor drones for combat. Everything was in place. The cavern stilled, and a peculiar peace fell over the space.

‘Captain Galt, Battleforce Anvil is prepared,’ reported Mastrik.

‘The Hammer is ready to strike,’ said Aresti.

‘All demolition teams stand ready to detonate on my mark,’ ordered Galt.

On the surface, five demolition teams. Comprised of Adeptus Mechanicus servitors, they were guarded by the few novitiate Scout Space Marines accompanying the two Chapters, clad in space suits as their bodies were not yet ready for power armour.

Each team’s site differed, and their equipment was suited accordingly. At site Alpha, a large laser weapon stood poised to burn its way through one hundred and fifty metres of hulk. At Beta, shaped charges were attached to the skin of the hulk, only a metre or so from the roosting genestealers on the other side. And so on, each breaching method designed for its particular spot on the agglomeration’s surface, each one with the exact same purpose in mind – to rupture the hulk and vent the atmosphere of the roosts into space. The teams retreated to surface armoured craft, or took off in their shuttles, or stood by drilling rigs, and waited breathlessly.

‘All demolition teams!’ Galt’s words rang out across space. ‘Prepare to vent atmosphere in three, two, one, mark!’

At five places, three differing methods of breaching the hulk were activated. The explosives were the most rapid. Sheets of metal peeled away in short-lived fire bursts and wheeled into space. Then the laser-cut hull sections. The result was the same, white geysers of flash-frozen gas rushing into space.

The officers of the Adeptus Astartes watched as their auspexes detected a burst of sudden movement in the roosts.

Captain Aresti’s forward group was stationed in a large chamber at the head of the corridor leading down to the roost designated ‘Perdition’. At their post, they felt the rumble of the detonation through the ceramite of their Terminator plate and their minds sharpened. At first, there was no sign the breaching had been a success. Then scrips attached to their armour wafted as the air in the hulk stirred. The current rose quickly to a howling gale. The noise of it was muted within Aresti’s Terminator armour, its sensorium warning him of the air’s flight with a persistent pinging.

On the auspex, the roost chamber came alive with red motion indicators.

‘Roosts are active,’ he said. ‘Prepare.’

With satisfaction he imagined the genestealers coming awake, fighting over one another to get away as their precious air was drawn away, scrabbling for the exits. Not all of them would make it; some would be sucked out into space by decompression where they would perish. Aresti wondered if the genestealers knew fear. He prayed it was the case, such wicked things should feel what their victims felt.

Further alarm chimes sounded in his helmet.

‘They come!’ shouted Brother Lucello of Squad Blazing Dawn.

‘Stand ready!’ ordered Aresti. The auspex showed a crowd of red dots coming up the corridor leading down to the roost. ‘Wait until they are in the corridor before opening fire!’

The Terminators formed into a line. They raised their weapons. The whine of assault cannon barrels rotating up to firing speed cut over the roar of escaping air.

The genestealers came out into the corridor, as sudden as bats scared from their cave. Bowed, crooked backs crested with high knobbles jostled one another as the genestealers stampeded, their multiple arms held up protectively under their bellies. They turned as one, like a flock of birds in flight, down the corridor leading to the cavern. They came on and on, an endless flood of shining blue chitin and lurid, purple flesh.

‘Fire!’ ordered Aresti.

Nine storm bolters and two assault cannons gave voice. The howl of the wind was lost under a storm of explosions. A swathe of genestealers were cut down, falling as crops fall before the harvester. Craters the size of men’s heads marred their exoskeletons, their innards burst outwards as if as desperate to escape as the genestealers were. Lines of bright fire stabbed out from the assault cannons as tracer rounds helped their bearers draw a bead on their targets, although in truth this simple aid was not required, and nor was that of the suits’ sensoriums. There were so many genestealers that it was impossible to miss. But as many as the Terminators mowed down, twice as many fled down the corridor.

Something changed. A portion of the flock turned, peeling off from the mass of their comrades. Hissing, their long tubular tongues waving in the air, they rushed the Terminator line, claws snapping.

Ten, then twenty, then three dozen fell. The stream of genestealers escaping the roost had split in two, half going down the tunnel to the killing zone, the other charging the Terminators. It was a good thirty metres across the chamber to the Terminator line. The genestealers tumbled headfirst, heads exploding, limbs blown free. A few took the bolts and did not slow. They came closer, though their wounds were terrible. Not a single one made it within grasping distance. Their bodies piled up so high that they were forced to clamber over one another, and still they died.

Suddenly, the second stream ceased. A wall of dead xenos lay across the chamber, blocking the Terminators’ line of fire to the fleeing aliens.

Almost as if they planned it, thought Aresti.

He ordered his adepts forward, but by the time they had reached the pile of dead and pushed their way through, the stampede had become a trickle of stragglers. His squads loosed shots after these as they fled, killing some. The auspex’s motion detector feeds calmed. The rash of red spots moved off down the corridor.

‘Squad Novum’s Expanse, head into the brood chamber and eliminate any remaining genestealers,’ ordered Aresti. ‘Squad Blazing Dawn, finish off any wounded and prepare to follow me. Phase two of our mission is done.’

Aresti checked the datafeeds from the other squads in Strikeforce Hammer, and called up the squad sergeants under his command one by one. All reported similar experiences – genestealers in flight, some diversionary or protective tactics at all roost entrances, many dead xenos. Strikeforce Hammer had sustained three casualties, only one dead, and they were being recovered without incident. He looked around the chamber at the piles of aliens. His sensorium highlighted each corpse in bright green as it counted them. Fifty-nine dead or dying.

Squad Novum’s Expanse pushed on into the roost chamber. Blazing Dawn’s warriors went from alien to alien, caving in the heads of those that still twitched with their power fists.

Reports came in from elsewhere. Altogether they had slaughtered one hundred and thirty-six of the genestealers, not counting those that had been annihilated in the venting episode, or that were wounded and had fallen further on. Only the entrances to the upper three roosts had been so covered. The other two were too far into the hulk’s body. Space Marines deployed there would potentially have been caught between two forces of genestealers. Those roosts had been mined, but they had been allowed to empty without the numbers of aliens being thinned by direct fire. The full brunt of those roosts would fall upon Anvil.

‘The genestealers come,’ Aresti signalled to Galt and Mastrik. ‘A good tally has been made here. We advance.’

‘Lord captain.’ Sergeant Kallat of Novum’s Expanse spoke. He was close by the reactor the roost had been warmed by, and his vox signal suffered. His voice broke up.

‘Say again brother,’ said Aresti.

‘…signs of hundreds of genestealers… I…’

The emissions of the reactor killed the transmission, but Aresti understood.

‘Brother Lucello, give me an estimate of overall numbers killed or fled from this roost.’

‘Around one hundred and fifty, lord captain.’

Kallat came back online. ‘Captain, take a look at this.’ The sergeant’s suit feed sprang up in a box on the captain’s visor. Suit light played over the inside of the roost, lines of interference tracking over it. The ragged breach led up into space above. Genestealer corpses floated past and banged into the walls. There was a muzzle flash in the background. Kallat’s suit pict-feed revealed another round hole in the wall.

‘An altern… exit…’ said Kallat. The picture jumped.

‘That was not there when the soundings were taken,’ said Aresti. ‘Brother Galt, come in, Brother-Captain Galt.’

‘Brother-Captain Aresti.’

‘Brother-captain, something is amiss, Sergeant Kallat found this alternative exit from roost Perdition.’ He sent a recording of Kallat’s feed with a thought. ‘This is a new channel, not present on the…’ A rush of static blasted Aresti’s ears. He winced, and thought the volume down. ‘Brother Galt? Brother Galt?’ The loud interference of the sun had returned.

‘Brother-captain?’ Chaplain Odon, assigned to Strikeforce Hammer, and stationed by roost ‘Vile Nest’, spoke. His signal crackled explosively. ‘What occurs?’

Aresti could not answer for a moment. Only one answer presented itself to him, and it was unpalatable. ‘The relay net. It is down.’

‘Brother Voldo, we have lost the booster signal,’ said Eskerio. ‘We are no longer in contact with Hammer or Anvil. We are not close enough to reactor five yet for that to be the explanation.’

‘A malfunction of the Adepts of Mars’ equipment then,’ said Alanius. ‘We are fools to rely on technology where our own strength alone will prevail.’

‘Aye!’ shouted Tarael and Azmael.

‘Be on your guard!’ said Voldo harshly. ‘Not all is as it seems.’

‘Surely you do not suggest the genestealers have the wit to sabotage the booster network?’ said Azmael. ‘You tell us not to underestimate these xenos, and that is fairly said. But surely it is you who is now at error and overestimate them. Be careful cousin-sergeant, your caution will make you timid.’

‘Will it now?’ said Voldo levelly.

‘Brother Azmael, you will address the sergeant correctly and treat his wisdom with more respect,’ rebuked Alanius.

A pause. ‘I am sorry, brother-sergeant.’ Azmael sounded far from sincere.

‘Group, halt,’ said Voldo. The Terminators came to a stop, strung out in a long line in a narrow passageway.

‘Look to the map. Quadrant forty-seven, coordinates 72.3.46.’

They checked the auspex feeds.

‘There! Contacts! Our prey flee us, we should be on our way,’ said Tarael.

‘Are you so sure this is the group who assailed your Brother Azmael?’ said Voldo.

‘Who else would it be?’ said Azmael.

‘No, he is right,’ said Alanius. ‘I do not see how that is possible. They move obliquely from us, and at speed. If they have been travelling so quickly since the combat, they should be far ahead of us by now.’

‘You are correct, brother.’ Eskerio sharpened the auspex focus. Without the booster relays, the image was spotty. ‘I have multiple contact groups. These are those we pursue.’

‘A second band?’ said Tarael.

‘And a third,’ said Azmael. ‘And a fourth.’ He pushed his auspex as wide as it would go. The map, generated from the Imagifer Maximus’s data, held firm, but new motion detection data was erratic at best without the boosting signal of the relay system. ‘Even accounting for over half being false signals, they are many.’

‘I calculate there are at least one hundred and eighty of them,’ said Eskerio.

‘Look! These tunnels were supposed to have been sealed,’ said Militor. The tunnels he spoke of flashed amber.

‘They were,’ said Voldo. ‘The genestealers are advancing through passages we thought sealed or impassable. They evade our trap.’

‘How is this possible if they do not think, brothers?’ said Alanius.

‘And if they think, is it then inconceivable that they might not have destroyed some of the relay network?’ said Voldo.

‘Where do they go?’

‘An ambush!’ said Tarael. ‘Our brothers are in danger.’

‘We should inform Captain Galt,’ said Alanius.

‘I cannot,’ said Eskerio. ‘The reactor is scrambling our vox signals, and without the relay poles we are many hundreds of metres from a viable broadcast point.’

‘We press on, kill them from behind,’ said Voldo.

‘This is a trap,’ said Alanius.

‘Yes, but not for us,’ said Voldo. ‘With good fortune we can disrupt their outflanking manoeuvre before they have a chance to harm our brothers.’

‘Brothers!’ said Eskerio. ‘A fifth group.’

Eskerio directed their sensorium displays to a part of the hulk where red dots sparkled over the wireframe map.

They were heading right for Squad Hesperion and Squad Wisdom of Lucretius.

‘And now it appears it is a trap for us also,’ said Alanius. He activated his lightning claws. ‘What do we do?’

‘Here they come! Stand ready!’ Mastrik tensed as he gave the order. His fingers tightened on his storm bolter trigger. ‘Today we write our names into our Chapter histories in fire and glory!’

The genestealers came in a great rush, two of the tunnel mouths vomiting them out into the cavern. They spilled forth in a boiling mass. From Mastrik’s position, the genestealers were made small by distance, their six limbs further making them seem like insects. Fire blossomed around them as missiles and bolter fire poured into them from above Mastrik’s head. The aliens were lofted high by each explosion, slamming into the roof and walls. The air was filled with body parts and shrapnel in short order, clouding targeting sensors and spoiling the aim of the Adeptus Astartes. The genestealers ran on. In the wider space, they dispersed rapidly, groups of them leaping upward. The wind dragged back at them as it rushed from the cavern, but the gravity was so weak they made good progress against it through the air, unerringly heading towards the Space Marines’ heaviest guns. Many died as they flew, blasted to pieces. The genestealers were without fear, uncaring of their colleagues’ deaths, and the few that got through fought savagely. Genestealers bounded from ledge to ledge, or scuttled insanely fast, disappearing behind cover as shots raked the uneven cavern floor behind them. They covered the distance between the closest Space Marine units and the tunnel with preternatural speed, and fire patterns were disrupted as more and more of them made it into close assault. They targeted the power armoured brothers, their lethal claws ripping hard into them, so fast they stepped around the most skilfully placed blows, landing their own deadly replies.

The cavern was a three-dimensional battle zone. Space Marines had been deployed all around it in order to maximise their firepower. But they had underestimated the speed with which the genestealers would emerge from the tunnels, and how quickly they would close. Fire criss-crossed the room, slamming into the metal dangerously close to emplaced brothers as squads tracked their fire after their targets. Casualties from friendly weapons were becoming an uncomfortable possibility. An explosion shook the ledge near to Mastrik. ‘Squad Blood of Ramillies, check your fire!’ he shouted.

‘There are surprising few of them, brother,’ said Ranial. ‘And I do not see our pursuing squads. I cannot sense them either.’

The Epistolary was right. The numbers of genestealers pouring out of the tunnels was thinning, and there was no sign of pursuit.

‘They dwindle too rapidly,’ said Mastrik. ‘And why are there none coming from tunnel two?’ He pointed at the tear in the spacecraft hull. ‘Brother-Captain Aresti, reply.’

Nothing.

‘The booster relays are down!’ shouted Mastrik. ‘Captain Galt, we have lost contact with Hammer.’

‘This is Galt, there has been a booster malfunction, stand firm, I repeat stan–’

Galt’s voice cut out suddenly.

‘A second malfunction?’ said Mastrik incredulously.

Ranial looked all around the cavern. ‘No, it is something more than that. The presence I felt. It grows. It watches us. The genestealers are being directed. This is not the play of mindless animals panicked into a stampede.’

Mastrik swore in the rich language of Honourum as he watched a squad of Blood Drinkers Devastators abandon their position and jump into combat with a party of genestealers running at another unit, the low gravity seeing them among the foe rapidly. ‘All squads, stand firm! Maintain positions!’

‘Lord captain! Above!’ A brother pointed up.

Mastrik span on his heel, craning his neck as well as his restrictive Terminator cowling would allow him. ‘Above’ was a relative concept, but the Space Marines had designated an up and down to help them make sense of the maelstrom of fire and flying bodies of battle.

‘There!’ he followed the pointing finger. Genestealers were emerging from a crack between two crushed spacecraft, crawling down the wall stealthily upon a Novamarines Devastator squad.

Mastrik called out to them, but too late. The genestealers fell upon them, and the squad’s fire ceased.

‘More! There are more coming!’

The air was alive with frantic vox chatter as sergeants gave orders to their squads, and the captains gave orders to the sergeants. The hubbub grew deafening as the various units scattered around the room became aware of genestealers coming from cracks all around them.

The tone of the battle changed. The concentrated fire patterns they had so carefully planned disintegrated as the squads turned to face the infiltrating aliens. The fight splintered into a number of uncoordinated squad-on-alien actions.

The genestealers of tunnel two took the opportunity to emerge, shielded by the confusion sown by their kin. A stream of them came rushing into the cavern, unmolested by the Space Marines’ bigger guns.

‘Throne!’ said Mastrik. ‘Squads Fidelis, Ultramar Remembered, Holos’s Price, Gideon, Wallbreaker and Five Lords to the tunnel mouths!’ he shouted. The squads of Terminators responded quickly, lumbering their way through the battle towards this new force of genestealers.

‘More lord captain, coming Sorael’s way!’

‘I have them,’ said Sorael. The distance to his position was a mere fifteen hundred metres, but without the boosters, his vox was a rattle of interference. ‘We will contain them here, but you cannot rely upon our assistance.’

‘Lord captain,’ Ranial’s voice was firm and quiet in the chaos. ‘I have sent a telepathic message to Lord Astropath Feldiol, apprising him of our situation. But without him focusing his attention on our location, I cannot guarantee he will receive it.’

‘Thank you, Brother Ranial.’

‘You may honour me for it later,’ said the Epistolary drily. ‘There is more. I reached for the alien mind directing this attack. It is powerful, and turned me aside. But while I did so, I chanced upon a glimmer in the warp – Epistolary Guinian of the Blood Drinkers. He is near the source. And if he is there, then so might Lord Caedis be.’

Mastrik raised his gun and filled a genestealer forty metres distant with bolts. The creature ran on before exploding as the miniature missiles detonated, sending globules of blood and flesh out in every direction.

‘Then let us pray that Caedis is the end of this mind, or it will be the end of us.’

Radioactive fog swirled around Aresti and his two squads. It had appeared from nowhere, drawn along with the escaping atmosphere. It came unevenly, in rags and billows or twisted helices. The radioactivity of it was intense, and hot. Lucello speculated that it might have come from a breached coolant unit from a nearby reactor, only two decks away. Whatever its provenance, it clouded all their senses. Their eyes could not see well, and their sensoriums fared little better. The heat of it confused their infravision, the radioactivity scrambled many of the sensoriums’ other functions, while its rapid movement prevented the less esoteric aspects of the motion detectors from operating correctly.

They were blind, unable to communicate even with the nearer elements of their strikeforce.

Aresti had his men proceed cautiously, his two squads covering each other in a bounding overwatch advance. What was intended to be hot pursuit of the genestealers had become instead a painstakingly cautious process. Aresti very much felt that they had become the hunted. They were on high alert, expecting ambush at every turn.

They were not long disappointed.

It was Brother Lucello who shouted out, ‘Genestealers!’

The creatures leapt out from the fog from three directions: from the ceiling, from in front of them, and from the left. Brother Ignatio of Squad Glorious Ruin was sent staggering as one landed on his back, claws digging into the plasteel and ceramite of his cowling. Aresti turned on the spot and shot the thing in the lower part of its spine. The bolt exploded, breaking it into two pieces. It gave a terrible cry and fell to the floor.

The Space Marines were fast, dropping four of the creatures as they charged. One made it through, and gouged Brother Uxerio’s leg armour so badly the fibre bundles within failed and his limb locked.

‘Bring up the assault cannons! Make way, brothers!’

The squads’ heavy weapons brothers were let through as the first rank of the Terminator group, three wide, fought hard against the assaulting xenos. They grappled with genestealers, smashing them down with power fists or shoving them back so their bolters might do their deadly work. The first wave was slaughtered and another came at them.

‘Clear! Clear! Clear!’ shouted Uxerio. He let himself topple to the floor. Those next to him, Ignatio and Sergeant Hendis moved aside. Andas and Gallio had a clear line of fire.

Their assault cannons whined as they rotated up to firing speed, then fire blazed from them. Their multiple barrels blurred as they spat hundreds of rounds a minute into the genestealers. The Terminators swept their guns to the left and then to the right, filling the corridor with depleted uranium bullets. Genestealers screamed as they were riddled with holes. The guns ran hot, still the brothers fired, fired until their ammunition boxes were dry.

‘Halt!’ called Aresti. ‘Lucello, report!’

‘The way is clear. A small group. I have six motion signatures heading away from us. The auspex cannot see far thanks to this Emperor-damned fog, but I am confident the majority are slain.’

‘Then forward, but slowly.’

They helped Uxerio upright, then left him to cover their rear, as he could no longer walk. Their numbers reduced to ten, they went onward past a ragged opening in the metal wall carved by claws.

‘That is new, made since the mapping,’ said Aresti. ‘We may have underestimated our enemy.’

They advanced around a corner and the fog grew thicker. Visibility and effective auspex range dropped further, and the Terminators slowed to a crawl. Ahead, according to the Imagifer Maximus map downloaded into their sensoriums, was a large chamber. Its sides were oddly distorted. An artefact, the tech-priests had explained, of their seismic waves running through material of whose particular nature they could not determine. Without this parameter of essence, they were unable to determine the parameter of shape. They had shrugged their iron shoulders and pointed out the clarity of the map’s remainder.

A silhouette, then another. Three of them, coming out of the fog. As one, the brothers to the fore opened fire.

The fog thinned just for a second, granting the captain a view into the chamber beyond. Too late, Aresti found out why the Imagifer Maximus had failed to make an accurate representation. There was liquid in the room, enclosed in tanks. He saw the chemical units through the gap in the radioactive vapours; tall orange canisters topped with metal valves, corroded white. Arranged in groups of four, the canisters filled the room either side of a catwalk down the centre. Dozens of them.

The genestealers had led them directly to it.

Aresti experienced the closest thing to panic he had for a long time. ‘Stop! Cease firing! Cease firing!’ He shouted. He barged into Brother Lucello’s arm, sending his shots awry. But he could not stop them all. The Space Marines let their fingers slacken on the triggers of their guns as soon as their sharp minds registered the order, but the bolts were already in flight.

Three punched neat holes in the side of the lead canister stack, a trio of insignificant ‘pinking’ noises as the metal was pierced. Aresti had time to pray that there was insufficient mass to set off the bolts’ detonators before the munitions exploded.

Whatever was in the canisters was highly reactive, or else had become so through a process of chemical alteration over the long years within the plasteel bottles. The tanks burst, and fire roiled outwards. Chunks of plasticised metal scythed through the air, puncturing other bottles and setting them off in a thunderous chain reaction. Half a canister slammed into Aresti’s chest, sending him sprawling. The corridor became an inferno.

Three of Aresti’s brother’s icons blinked out.

CHAPTER 16

THE ASCENT

Caedis was Holos, Holos was Caedis, where one began and one ended had ceased to matter. All that concerned him/them was the placing of one foot in front of the other, as he/they scaled the side of the unforgiving mountain. The slope was steep in places, and Holos was forced to pull at the ground with his hands. The material was loose, and he found himself dislodging great fans of it as he climbed. He slid backwards frequently, and at these times the climb became laborious even for his enhanced physique, each three steps forward bought at the cost of two back. Rocks fell from above with increasing frequency. The mountain grumbled under him as he embraced it, angry at Holos’s presence upon its flanks.

Holos’s mouth was dry as dust. His suit should have kept him hydrated, recycling the excreta of his body and injecting it back into him in the form of nutrient-rich liquid. But this was no natural thirst that assailed Holos and the spirits of the yet-to-be brothers who haunted him. Knowing how he would be so afflicted, Holos had brought water and wine on his climb. Sips of this had helped assuage the burn of the Thirst for delightful seconds, but the canteens slung at his belt had long since run empty, and he had discarded them one after another. They littered the side of the mountain, bright glints by the dark tracks of his boots.

Shrill cries carried down from on high, and Holos looked upwards to see the astorgai wheel around the pinnacle of the volcano. He was weary, nevertheless he quickened his pace; the position he was in was not favourable should they choose to attack.

‘What does he speak of, Reclusiarch, when he talks of Holos? I reach out for him with my mind and sense a great disturbance in him.’ Guinian pitched this question directly at the Chaplain, isolating their conversation from the brothers who marched with them. They had descended a further hour since the garden room oasis, passing through two more ships.

‘I am forbidden to talk of it, brother,’ said Mazrael. ‘It is the ultimate mystery of our order, and not one to be shared lightly, even with so mighty and honoured a hero as you. Only the Reclusiarch may know the whole truth of it, it is my burden. Be glad I cannot share it with you.’

‘I understand,’ said Guinian. In the Librarium of the Blood Drinkers the psychic brothers kept plenty of secrets of their own.

‘It is good that is so – curiosity is the downfall of wisdom.’ Mazrael’s tone lightened. ‘You are one of our Chapter’s mightiest sons, perhaps you will discover for yourself one day.’

‘Perhaps.’

Guinian cast a sidelong look at Caedis. ‘Where is he? Is he here, or is he there?’

‘Here, there – what do these things mean?’ said Mazrael. ‘You of all the brethren should know that reality is more than it seems. Wherever he is he serves, and he walks by our side. Service is all that matters.’

The Terminator brothers ahead, Quintus and Kalael, stopped. The corridor came to an unexpected end, sliced away by whatever disaster had caused the vessel to die and join the agglomeration, and was now pressed hard against a vessel of alien build in a frozen metal kiss. Quintus and Kalael’s suit lights illuminated a double circle of bulbous, greenish material. Mazrael stepped between them and ran his fingers over it. He pulled his hand back and looked for Guinian.

‘Brother?’

Guinian nodded and replied, his voice characteristically lugubrious. ‘The entity lies within this ship.’

‘Then we go on. Sergeant Sandamael, organise your men.’

Sandamael had Erdagon come up, for he carried a chainfist alongside his bolter. He set to work on the alien hull, then stopped. ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘this may take a while. The hull is composed of some kind of composite poly-laminate, very tough.’

Mazrael glanced at their lord, who stood so still only the lights on his suit gave away the fact that it was occupied. ‘Proceed as quickly as you can brother. We have little time.’

‘The mind,’ said Guinian. ‘It watches us.’

It took a long time, as these things are measured, for Brother Erdagon to carve his way through the spacecraft wall.

A cliff many hundreds of metres towered over Holos. From the ledge he could not see to the top. As legend suggested, there was no ascent to the crater rim and thence the peak, only the cave of the astorgai offered a route.

The mouth of the cave was a dark tube in red rock. Holos had cause to hesitate, this was the lair of the lord of the astorgai, Lo-tan, a great monster five times the size of his subjects. Four great heroes of the Chapter had set out to slay him, four heroes had died, their wargear and lives lost in his lair.

Holos’s mind was clear on the matter. This was the only way to the top of the mountain.

He drew his weapons and walked into the cave.

Guinian shouted in exultation as he gathered the energy of the warp into his mind and cast it from his hand in the form of a bloody red spear. Guinian was renowned for his dour temperament. The other brothers said there was nothing that could make Guinian smile. And why should he? He, unlike them, felt the fear of those they killed to sate their thirst for blood. He felt their confusion as they were slain by their beloved angels, their sense of betrayal as they were destroyed by those that were supposed to protect them left a bitter tang in his mind.

Isolation was the normal state of affairs for most Chapters; long wars against endless foes sent every order across the galaxy. And isolation could be a danger. The brothers within the Chapter had their purpose; they had their sense of belonging, reinforced by tradition and ritual thousands of years old. But they were separate from the run of the Imperium’s citizens, armoured by faith and technology that few others might ever see, and fewer yet understood. To an unenhanced human, a Space Marine was a creature of myth, a benevolent one at that – the sky warriors of the Emperor; the angels of death. Such separation and adulation could breed arrogance in those so separated and adored.

The death they brought was supposed to fall upon the xenos and the traitor, the mutant and the unbeliever. What then did the sons of man feel when a citizen was taken and bled like an animal for the sustenance of the Blood Drinkers? Guinian knew only too well. He was sensitive to the emotions of others, to subtle threads in the warp some of the other Librarians were not. He felt their pain and their terror. As a Librarian Guinian was also privy to things other brothers were not. The rituals of the Librarium concerned dark things not for the minds of non-psychic brothers. He knew fully of the daemonic terrors that lurked beyond the veil of real space, for he had to know them to resist the whispers they sent. He saw the bloodletting of his Chapter, the sense of righteousness in committing an evil to prevent greater evils. For all the prayers, and the guilt, and the Chapter’s focus on the safeguarding of life wherever it could, he saw in the harvesting of the unwilling hints of an arrogance that could lead to their downfall, an echo of the temptations that had led more than half the Emperor’s own, godlike sons from their chosen path in the time of the Heresy.

This was why he rarely smiled.

Nevertheless the others were wrong about him. He did smile. He smiled now as the bolt of ruby energy he cast from his hand jinked around Brother Quintus and speared a genestealer through the chest, knocking the creature backwards, arms and legs suddenly lifeless. It smashed into a wall and crumpled to the floor.

Guinian laughed. He boiled with the power of the warp and the battle-joy combined. He sang the warding prayers of the Librarium as he drew on the immaterium. The uncanny energy quickened his mind and his hearts, and the effect was intoxicating. He raised his bolt pistol and loosed five rounds. His shots landed unerringly, stitching a line of craters in a genestealer attacking Brother Erdagon, culminating in the detonation of its head. A genestealer leapt from a low platform. Guinian took a half-step backwards and smashed the xenos to the ground with his force staff. He grinned savagely behind his Terminator helmet; blood ran down his chin where his lengthened canines punctured his own lips. Red light blazed around his fists. Another Blood Lance leapt from his outstretched hand.

These xenos were bigger and faster than those they had previously encountered. Underneath the blind aggression of the battle-joy, Guinian suspected these creatures had not bred from human stock. Their lower arms had two elbows and terminated in jabbing points of bone, rather than the grasping hands of the others, and drooping frills of manipulative tentacles twitched all along their forearms. Their faces too lacked the slight echo of humankind many genestealers possessed. The ship they were in was not of human manufacture, the corridors were low and broad, with long ramps in place of stairs and elevators. The lights and gravity were on, but neither was of a quality comfortable to standard human beings. The light was purplish and dark, with much of the illumination at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, the air a choking mix of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen. Perhaps there was a vestige of the ship’s crew in these genestealers, perhaps not. In either case, these genestealers were xenos bred with xenos, and that made them all the more loathsome in Guinian’s eyes.

He held out his hand, charging his mind from the depthless well of the warp. He lifted his hand to let fly once more.

Pain assailed him as a great and powerful entity reached out from deeper within the ship. A cold, malevolent spirit touched his own, burning from the core of his brain outward, passing up his optic nerves. Something gave in his left eye, and he felt a trickle of blood run down his cheek to join with that slicking his chin.

He cried out, and sank to one knee. Just in time he raised his staff, blocking a wheeling blow from a genestealer. He tried to stand, but could not, the attack of the genestealer was too fierce. A flurry of blows from its four limbs drove him backward.

Lord Caedis saved him. Gladius Rubeum shone with pure light, the victories of the past playing along its blade. A genestealer stepped in to intercept him. Caedis chopped diagonally down with the sword. The creature span around with the force of his blow, guts flung outward. Caedis moved with an agility that should not have been possible in his Terminator suit, and drove Gladius Rubeum through the neck of the genestealer attacking Guinian. He twisted the blade to free it, and the creature fell dead. Without acknowledging the Librarian, Caedis stalked away in search of more victims.

Guinian struggled to his feet. The battle was going poorly. Mazrael was backed into a corner by two of the creatures, his crozius arcanum flashing brightly as its disruptor field met the creatures’ arms. Brother Kalael was slumped upon the floor. His torso was torn open. He held at the wound with his hand. Suit sealant mixed freely with blood, and he muttered the Sanguis Moritura over and over again. Quintus let out a roar as a genestealer jumped onto his back, ripping at his helmet. Metrion and Sandamael fought side by side, power fists sweeping. A genestealer reared up in front of Sandamael, half as tall as the Terminator was again. Recovering his wits, Guinian blasted it from behind with his bolter, the litanies of hate on his lips.

Quintus howled as his helmet was torn free. His blows turned frantic as he sought to drag the genestealer from his body, his face reddened as he fought with his breath held. The battle hung at a pivotal point, for a brief half-second, Guinian saw the room with his warp-sight, something that only ever happened to him under moments of extreme stress. The chief of the Librarium did not quite understand this ability of his. Every psyker’s gifts were slightly different, granted by the Emperor himself. It was a form of blood divination, an ability to see the future when the blood flowed thickly. When this occurred to Guinian, movements tracked into time and future, blurring into multiple possibilities. He saw the Blood Drinkers triumphant, but in the main he saw them all dead. He saw them all dead many times over.

And then Caedis was striding through the battle, smiting all about him. A genestealer jumped for him, bone spikes and claws raking down his arm and bringing sparks from the metal. Caedis smashed it backwards with his forearm and caught it by the throat. With superhuman strength, he lifted it into the air and with a jerk of his wrist snapped its neck. Guinian gasped. Caedis cut only one path into the future, and as he walked time reordered itself until there was only victory.

Caedis howled with the blood-rage, his emotions boiled like the lava of Mount Calicium. Guinian was staggered by the psychic impact of it. He sensed many things, he saw many things. He saw, for a moment, a cave and a man in power armour facing a winged astorgai. Holos, it could only have been Holos himself. He saw, beyond and beneath that, a third vision. The interior of a hellish vessel, gripped by Chaos, two brothers fighting, one winged, the other a traitor.

Then it was gone. The faint second vision collapsed into the vision of Brother Holos, and then he too faded from view until there was only Caedis and bloodshed and death.

The psychic backwash of Caedis’s Black Rage energised all in the room, none more so than Guinian. He threw his head back, his hymns disintegrating into a long and joyous whoop. The pain in his eye disappeared. His mind roared with power. He pushed away the pernicious influence of the xenos mind and fell upon the genestealers with euphoric zeal.

Holos slew the astorgai. Brothers fought by his side, but although they wore the blood-red and badges of his Chapter, he did not know them. Caedis would have recognised them as Guinian, Mazrael, Sandamael, Quintus, Kalael, Erdagon and Metrion. There were others there with them that he would not, others who fought alongside the seventeen other heroes who had joined Holos’s climb and now relived it again. To Holos these men were phantoms, tricks played by the Thirst torturing his body. It is doubtful his mind would have been able to grasp the truth. They wheeled in and out of visibility, all engaged in the silent dance of death. Snatches of sound from seventeen battles reached out to him, scintillas of battlefields chased the now of the cave away. He fought them off as efficiently as he fought the astorgai.

His sword, Encarmine Dread, flashed in his hand, darting swiftly into flesh. The astorgai came at him from burrow entrances all around the chamber. They spread their wings and glided down at him, they bounded along the floor; wings, dexterion-claws and single feet propelling them. Their blasphemies and taunts tainted the air along with the stink of their dung.

Holos was undaunted. He cried out as claws raked his arm. A flicker in time – he saw a tentacled bone spike, turned it aside with a sword that was not his own, then it changed, and he saw the pinion-claw sweeping back for another strike. Encarmine Dread met it, parting the hardened feathers and flesh of the creature’s wing as it would part silk.

There were so many, but Holos fought like a man possessed, the shades of Blood Drinkers not yet born fighting their own, unknowable battles alongside him. And then there were no more.

Holos panted in the midst of ruin, his blood mingling with that of the slain astorgai.

‘My lord.’

Holos’s head rose slowly. Two brothers were before him. They shimmered as a mirage over the lava traps, and vanished. A Chaplain stood in their stead. It was he who had spoken. Holos thought it was Reclusiarch Shanandar for a moment, but no, he did not know this man.

‘My lord, we must go on.’

Holos swayed on his feet. A flash of a leering face, mocking him as it broke his wings. He screwed his eyes shut, bit the insides of his cheeks raw until it departed. ‘The Black Rage,’ he said, not knowing to whom he spoke, for surely he was alone, ‘It takes me. I do not have much time.’

Caedis looked into Mazrael’s skull-mask. Dead genestealers were scattered all over the alien chamber. Alarms rang in his helmet, the sensorium warning him that more were on the way. Caedis was deaf to them.

‘How do I speak with you? I am alone.’

‘A brother of the Blood Drinkers is never alone, Lord Holos.’

Caedis appeared to understand this.

‘Lo-tan, it is he I must slay if I wish to gain the peak of Mount Calicium. I must go on!’

Mazrael nodded. ‘I will take you to him, my lord.’ He took the lord of the Blood Drinkers by the arm.

‘This way,’ said Guinian. ‘He is waiting for us.’

CHAPTER 17

BLOOD IS LIFE, LIFE IS DUTY

Voldo had his squad arrayed in a staggered line, enabling as many weapons to come to bear as possible. They had gained an intersection forming the shape of a ‘Y’ before stopping, judging it a good place to fight. The corridor broadened slightly where the corridors met. Lockers for equipment that had rusted to nothing were set into its wall, but the intersection was cramped with enough room only for two Space Marines to fire down each of the corridors. Twin lines of red dots were converging on their position.

‘We cannot destroy them all, brother-sergeant,’ said Alanius.

‘We cannot escape them,’ said Voldo. ‘We make our stand here.’

‘While we fight, the main body of xenos is free to attack our brothers!’ said Azmael. Emotion was thick in his voice.

‘What choice do we have?’ said Voldo calmly. ‘We will do what we were born to do, fight the Emperor’s enemies. He will know whether we are to be successful or not already, and those of us who fall have already been judged.’

‘Brother-sergeant!’ shouted Eskerio. ‘They are coming.’

‘And now from three directions,’ said Voldo. ‘Militor, cover Sergeant Alanius.’

Alanius nodded. ‘Tarael, join our brother Novamarines.’

The Space Marines shuffled around one another into the prescribed position.

‘Brother Astomar, let fly at twenty metres range. If necessary, down both corridors to our front,’ said Voldo. ‘Then retire and let Tarael through.’

Azmael and Alanius stood shoulder to shoulder, both twisted slightly to the side so that Militor could fire down the narrow corridor forming the stick of the ‘Y’. A minute passed. The Space Marines watched the red dots move around out of range; their motion detected by Eskerio’s advanced auspex and fed into their sensoriums.

‘They seek to delay us further, by delaying their own attack,’ said Azmael frustratedly. ‘Come to us, come to us now!’

‘That cousin, or they marshal their forces to destroy us more efficiently,’ said Voldo.

‘Be glad, Blood Drinker, they come now,’ said Eskerio.

‘Brothers! Prepare!’

Bolters were brought up. Prayers of good function and true ranging were voiced. Silence.

In a rush the genestealers came, a huddle of them down both of the corridors in the sticks of the ‘Y’ at once. Bolters fired, the distinctive double crack of weapon discharge and the propellant ignition of the bolts as they left the barrel followed by their delayed explosion as they penetrated flesh or metal, all doubled again by the storm bolters. Storm bolters were boltguns with two barrels and sophisticated fire control, capable of a withering rate of fire, and the Novamarines used them well.

Genestealers fell, dropping under the feet of those that followed. The gravity here functioned, but the genestealers used every surface, scuttling along the ceiling and walls as well as the floor. In the short-ranged illumination of the suit lights, the corridors were full of aliens. The boltguns spat their peculiar explosive song, every round finding a target. The xenos were tough, some requiring several shots to bring them down. Every dead genestealer was one less set of rending claws to trouble the Space Marines, but every death brought them two or three footsteps closer, and the genestealers were in seemingly endless supply.

Militor’s storm bolter jammed, and the genestealers gained metres of ground before he had it cleared and opened fire again. Several more died before they were within striking distance, and Brother Militor was forced to stand back to allow Azmael and Alanius to fight effectively. They sang songs that sounded barbaric to the Novamarines, songs of blood and songs of death welcomed. But all of them recognised the sentiment of service that threaded the hymnal through and through. Deadly claws flashing with powerful energies, the Blood Drinkers methodically killed every genestealer that came within reach.

At the other side of the intersection, Astomar sent a burst of promethium down one corridor, and then the other. The maximum range of his heavy flamer was about thirty metres, but he waited until the genestealers were within twenty metres as ordered, engulfing as many of the xenos as possible. The promethium burned so hot it made the metal glow red and set everything else ablaze. Paint peeled and burned, plastics dripped from seals and fittings, droplets igniting as they fell. The temperature rose markedly. The genestealers screamed, a terrible, polyphonic reedy sound with enough of a human voice to it to raise the hair on the adepts’ spines. It was the kind of scream that appealed directly to the baser levels of consciousness, those so deep that could not be altered by the training and mental conditioning the Space Marines underwent, only contained. The flames died back. Genestealers braved the corridors again, but in fewer numbers. Astomar stepped back, allowing Tarael to take his place. His brothers fired and fired. Genestealers fell. None came close enough for Tarael to engage.

The number of movement blips in the auspex dwindled until the arms of the ‘Y’ were nearly clear.

On the other side, where Alanius and Azmael fought, it was another matter. The corridor was a red block of movement on the motion scanner, jammed with genestealers. The sheer weight of their numbers were pushing Alanius and Azmael back.

‘Brother Voldo, go! Go now!’

‘You cannot hold them!’ said Voldo. ‘You will die. Step back and let Brother Astomar through.’

Astomar readied his flamer.

Alanius panted as he eviscerated another genestealer. ‘The blowback will hit us, stay your hand Cousin Astomar.’

‘We can take our chances, our armour is strong,’ replied Astomar, levelling his weapon down the corridor.

‘It is too much of a risk! Go now, while your way is clear, you can achieve more if you attack the xenos ambushers from the rear while they attack our brothers. Here, we will do nothing.’

‘Except survive,’ said Voldo. But he recognised the wisdom of what Alanius said.

‘Or die, and I will do so willingly only if it serves some purpose in the service of the Imperium! Go now!’

Voldo ran the auspex map around. They were not far from the cavern where the combined forces of the Blood Drinkers and Novamarines of Battleforce Anvil fought. The genestealers they had been pursuing would already be there. Between his squad and the rear of the genestealers outflanking group was minimal resistance. ‘You speak truth, Brother Alanius, but we can aid you in other ways.’

Alanius and Azmael were forced back further. The genestealers pushed at them. Voldo had his men fire past the Blood Drinkers where they could, or pick those genestealers off who tried to come in along the ceiling. Alien flesh rained on the Terminators. Alanius and Azmael moved back a little, and more bolts found their targets. The pressure ceased as the genestealers backed away, jaws snapping. They withdrew to the far end of the corridor. Alanius turned to face Voldo.

‘They will come again. There are dozens of them. They pause to mass once more.’ The Blood Drinker was breathing heavily.

‘We go. We will send aid for you as soon as we may.’

Alanius shook his head and laughed. ‘Whoever comes will find we have gone to the Emperor. I will convey your good wishes to him!’

Genestealer shrieks echoed up the corridor.

‘Brother Astomar, lend our cousins of our meagre purse of time.’

‘Affirmative, brother-sergeant.’ Astomar pushed Alanius aside before he could voice an objection. The noise of the approaching aliens was drowned out by the roar of promethium igniting. A trio of genestealers at the far end were caught in the billow of fire. They fell to the floor writhing. Astomar stepped back, leaving the corridor aflame.

‘You have a few more seconds, at least,’ said Voldo.

‘The Emperor watch over you,’ said Militor.

‘Sanguinius’s wings shield you, brothers,’ said Tarael. ‘May the blood sing your demise in bright song. I will carve a eulogy into alien flesh for your sacrifice.’

‘It has been an honour to fight by your side, brother, cousins,’ said Alanius, dipping his helmet at each in turn.

Voldo did not answer immediately, weighing his words before he spoke. ‘And by yours,’ he said. ‘Come! Brother Militor, to the front. Brother Tarael, behind him. We have little time if we wish to be of use to our brethren.’

The Novamarines positioned themselves in Voldo’s order, and clumped off down the left-hand branch of the ‘Y’, backs swaying as they went.

Alanius turned back to face the burning corridor, Azmael at his side. Alanius’s armour was reporting multiple minor breaches all across his suit, with drops in power to various subsystems. Azmael’s armour fed its own data to Alanius’s sensorium. It was in similar shape.

‘Here is where it ends brother, the long song of our lives,’ said Azmael.

‘We have served gladly, and I for one would do so again,’ said Alanius. ‘Let us face the Emperor together and beg his judgement of our worth.’

Alanius began to recite the Sanguis Moritura, the death song of the Blood Drinkers. His voice was a low growl at first, rising to a loud song as he continued.

‘The blood of life flows quickly!’ Alanius said. Azmael joined him, repeating the lines Alanius sang before he had finished them, creating a harmony in two rounds. Together they sang, their voices were harsh with the battle-joy, and yet there was a beauty to their music. Like everything about the Blood Drinkers, it was a beauty marred by monstrous violence, nonetheless a beauty that could not be hidden.

Down the corridor, alien eyes glittered in multitude, flames dancing in them as the fire in the corridors died back. Claws flexed as they waited out the heat.

‘Only in death can it be stilled!’ They sang. ‘Let not ours be stilled easily, let it flow on and outward – let it flow from us as we slay those who free it!’

‘Blood is strength, in death it quickens!’

They sang an eerie, wordless tune, their voices low and sorrowful. Within it were expressed all they were and all they had been. They were notes full of the certainty of the song’s ending.

The last flames guttered out. The genestealers advanced.

‘Blood is life. Life is duty,’ said Alanius.

‘To deny the blood is to deny life,’ said Azmael.

‘To deny life is to deny duty,’ said Alanius.

The first genestealer bounded along the corridor, using all six limbs to propel itself. Alanius braced for the impact of it, turning away its claws with his own. He skewered it through the chest, but the impact of it sent him back a step. Others were coming.

‘To deny duty is to betray the Emperor. Betrayal is worse than damnation.’

‘Service has its price, and we willingly pay it.’

‘We choose duty, we choose life,’ they said together.

‘We choose the blood.’

Then the genestealers rushed forward, a wall of black teeth and razor talons. The Blood Drinkers fought hard, and many were the foes they slew before they found the judgement they sought at the feet of the Lord of Mankind.

Captain Sorael struggled to hear Captain Mastrik. Reception was bad and the entire cavern was a maelstrom of battle that deafened him even through his helmet.

‘There is no sign of the pursuit groups,’ Mastrik said, his voice indistinct. ‘We are mired in close combat. The genestealers continue to outflank us. Hold the west of the cave, hold the–’

Mastrik was interrupted. He shouted something Sorael did not hear, there was the sound of boltgun fire, and the screech of dying xenos, then the feed cut out altogether.

The situation worsened.

Genestealers had emerged in small groups from crevices all over the wall. Contact with the surface had been lost. There had been reports of genestealers daring the vacuum to attack the Adeptus Mechanicus and their machines before the network had been brought down.

The Novamarines, for all their experience of fighting genestealers aboard space hulks, had underestimated this foe. What should have been a ranged extermination of the aliens had turned into a desperate close-quarters battle, and it was a battle the genestealers were better equipped to win.

Sorael’s helmet display was crowded with tac-data, information fed from his squad sergeants all over the cul-de-sac. Through the overlays on his visor, he could see the genestealers running and leaping through the cavern, unhindered by the low gravity. Their four arms helped greatly, pulling them along walls and ceilings as easily as the floor. Sorael had to exert all his will to keep his mind in the tactical situation, and not throw himself into personal combat with the genestealers. He was a great warrior, and he would claim many heads; but if he were to abdicate his tactical responsibilities his part of the task force would be left without guidance. He ground his teeth in frustration, such was the price duty demanded of him.

Terminator squads fought hand-to-hand battles, aiming to keep the less heavily armoured brothers of the tactical and Devastator squads safe. Sorael himself was stationed with these lighter-armoured brothers upon a low rise in the cavern floor, close to the overhang of the asteroid. His tactical squads were spread in an arc, his four Devastator squads behind them. A few of the power-armoured brothers had succumbed to the urgings of the Thirst, throwing themselves into combat, but many of his men held their ground and laid complex patterns of fire that took a heavy toll on the genestealers. There were few Chapters among the sons of Sanguinius who could claim such restraint.

‘All praise Brother Holos,’ said Sorael to himself.

Two of his three assault squads roared through the thinning air on jump packs, better able to counter threats in the three-dimensional battle space than the others. Sanguinary Master Teale led one of these airborne squads, his laughter and exhortations to slaughter commanding in the multiple audio threads clamouring for Sorael’s attention. The third assault squad was embroiled in a vicious melee near a gap in the wall. They had acquitted themselves well, but the fight had devolved into one of attrition, with fresh genestealers feeding into the fight, and only four of the red warriors remained.

Sorael shouted orders into his vox, sending a mauled tactical squad back behind the line of Terminators. The rearmost portion of his position, where the Devastators were dug in, covered them as they fell back. Genestealers were consumed in balls of fire as missiles slammed home, their severed limbs flying outwards.

The line of red was holding. Casualties were light. There could not be an infinite number of the xenos. Surely their numbers would dwindle eventually…

A shout, then another. The fire from the Devastators’ heavy weapons tailed off, and the sounds of combat and quickly voiced orders replaced their reports in Sorael’s helmet. He turned around to see genestealers emerging from a fold in the metal. A tunnel they had not found, despite their vigilance. Several xenos had slipped through undetected and attacked the heavy weapons’ position. More came through, then more again. Some of the Devastator brothers turned their weapons upon them, but they were so fast that only a few shots got through before the genestealers were among all four squads, and combat raged. The Tactical Marines in front of them could not fire through their comrades. More warnings were shouted, a second group of genestealers were rushing headfirst down the side of the asteroid. Sorael urged his tactical squads to hold their ground and deal with this other threat with righteous bolt and steady aim.

Inside his helmet, Sorael smiled a humourless smile. It looked like he would get to vent his battle-fury after all. Raising his storm bolter, he strode forward.

Mastrik gunned down another genestealer. The rest were dealt with by his bodyguard. Ranial drove his force staff through the head of an alien he had pinned to the floor under his boot.

‘That was too close, brother,’ said Mastrik. His usual humour had gone.

‘The third attack on our position. Intentionally so. They are guided, brother-captain. There is strategy behind this assault. They target us.’ Ranial pointed his staff at a group of genestealers. They ran then changed direction, all of them switching at once. ‘See how they move?’ said Ranial. ‘Their psyches are linked to one another, and to something more besides. The mind that guides them is like none I have encountered so far. Vast, alien, powerful.’

‘This is the largest group of genestealers we have faced for many years. But surely there is mention of similar leadership in the Librarium?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Ranial. ‘If so, it is old wisdom and forgotten.’

‘I cannot re-establish contact with Sorael. Things are turning against us. How close are Lord Caedis and his men to the source of the psychic emanation? The death of the xenos’s master will see us to victory.’

‘Closer, brother-captain, but not yet unto it.’

All around the cavern, brothers fought. Those in power armour fared badly against the genestealers. The casualty counter in Mastrik’s sensorium ticked upwards.

‘They must hurry,’ he said.

Kalael was dead, gone to the Emperor. Mazrael said quick prayers over his body before they moved on. Quintus too had been left behind. He had tried to take Kalael’s helmet so that he might continue, but the seal at the neck of Quintus’s armour was broken. His multi-lung struggled with the toxic alien atmosphere of the alien ship, and the Space Marine was soon unconscious. His hibernator put him into a deep sleep where the oxygen in his blood could be made to last for many days. If they were successful, they could recover him along with his armour, as well as the armour and gene-seed of Brother Kalael.

Six of them went on: Brother Erdagon, Sergeant Sandamael, Ancient Metrion – as always never far from Lord Caedis, Reclusiarch Mazrael and Epistolary Guinian. Guinian pushed forward gingerly with his mind, wary now of the powerful nature of the xenos they sought. His last encounter with a genestealer psyker had been with the false Saint Hestia on Catria. A fourth-generation hybrid almost human in appearance, but alien in mind, and utterly slaved to the monsters she had given birth to. Her power had been raw but devastating; this was something different. The xenos mind was a black wall, a featureless boulder of solidified might hanging in the empyrean. No emotion, no desire; only infinite patience and hatred.

Guinian pulled back his mind. They were close. Gelid malice chilled the space between the walls.

They were deep into the alien ship, and the corridors had become progressively wider and taller. Thick vaulting like the ribs of a great animal braced the vessel’s inner hull. Ramps led down to the curving floor every one hundred metres, the tops of them reaching out to galleries held out on thin struts. Seven holes opened up off each of these galleries, leading off into a warren of increasingly narrow tunnels. All this Guinian saw through his sensorium; the echo locator of his suit matching details with the Imagifer Maximus’s map and filling his visor with a false image.

The walls of the corridors they traversed were not visible to the eye. Fog filled the place. The members of Squad Hesperian had told of the mists that filled large part of the hulk, but this was thicker than the material Guinian had seen recorded by their suits. A nauseating mustard-green, it was impossible to see through and extremely radioactive. If Guinian deactivated his suit sonar he would be blind. From afar, he felt the glancing touch of Ranial, the Novamarines Epistolary. Strange, thought Guinian, to feel such relief in the contact of someone who was not a brother. There was no message to it, not that Guinian could read; he was not skilled in the thought transmission and reception such as the astropaths used, but he felt a powerful sense of urgency.

The rad-counter in his helmet was a rattling annoyance. His brothers were distant in the fog. He felt alone, stalked through the fog by an invisible, powerful enemy.

A burst of gunfire shocked Guinian out of his reverie.

‘Movement! Movement in the fog!’ Brother Ancient Metrion, the Chapter standard bearer and Caedis’s sworn bodyguard. More gunfire. A scream of pain. Blood splashed across his visor. In the mist, he saw movement, something large and powerful caused it to swirl. His suit sonar sketched a huge shape, but it was quickly gone.

‘Halt!’ shouted Guinian. He raised his gun and fired into the mist. The explosions of the bolts were muffled.

‘Report!’ said Sandamael, the squad sergeant. Their communications were fuzzed and grating, pulled at by the radiation in the fog.

‘Metrion.’

‘Epistolary Guinian,’ shouted the psyker.

‘I, Mazrael, live, as does our lord. Brother Erdagon?’

‘He is dead.’

Tension settled on the small group.

‘I can’t see a thing in this! Why aren’t our sonar pulses showing us the enemy?’ said Sandamael.

Guinian replied. ‘It is fast, and it does not wish to be seen.’

‘We must go on, we have to go on,’ said Mazrael. ‘The Emperor has guided us here, and our lord has one last service to perform.’

‘We cannot fight what we cannot see!’ said Sandamael.

‘It is not for us to battle this evil, but for our lord and our lord alone,’ said Mazrael.

Sandamael swore.

‘Fall in more tightly. That way we will not be caught unawares,’ ordered Guinian.

The remaining two members of Squad Blood’s Fury drew in closer to the three officers. No one spoke. Eyes were firmly fixed on the false image.

‘There!’ called out Ancient Metrion.

A green outline moved from left to right across their false images. It was too fast for the sonar units to define its shape for them. They raised their weapons as one and opened fire. They were gratified with a roar, but whether of pain or defiance was impossible to tell.

The psychic presence of the creature was so intense as to have a smell: a cold, dry scent that was offensive to Guinian in every way. A part of it touched upon him. He felt contempt from it. It drew away.

‘What is it doing?’ shouted Metrion. ‘Come here and fight us, xenos coward!’

In reply, a genestealer reared up from a tunnel mouth that opened up suddenly in the floor. Metrion was quick, and filled it full of bolts.

‘It is not alone.’

‘Contacts, brothers, I have motion all over the room!’ said Sandamael.

‘The leader, where is it?’ said Mazrael. ‘Lord Caedis must kill it.’

‘I will find it.’ Guinian was wary of contact with its mind, but he had little choice.

He opened his mind.

His soul was exposed, raw and vulnerable to the full might of the creature, this… broodlord. It regarded him dispassionately, with unblinking evil. Its mind covered the hulk with a dark umbrella of psychic energy, strands of it linking to hundreds of other, lesser genestealers. The thing was powerful, far greater than anything Guinian had experienced for a long time. He had experienced contact with mightier minds than this, and fought some, but it was the glassy implacability of this one that perturbed him, its absolute featurelessness. There was nothing in it other than a need to head onwards, infecting and subjugating, before heading on again. It was a bestial urge, but emanated from no beast. It was too… perfect. There was something it fled, not from fear, but from instinct. Guinian dared to look beyond. From its mind weak tendrils reached outward, touching upon all the broods of genestealer which it had created across space. Beyond, a greater network still, linking it to other minds, faint presences far away, but all as particular, as featureless in their singular purpose.

Behind that… Guinian could never describe it. A mass. A blank space in the empyrean, a terror. A zone where the roiling variety of the immaterium had ceased to be. A shadow in the warp, distant yet, but imminent.

The creature let him see, of that Guinian had no doubt. Then it turned its full psychic might against the Librarian, funnelling the sense of dread the shadow generated, a horror born of incalculably deep space and time. It filled Guinian’s mind. He clutched at his helmet and sank to the floor, a low moan escaping his lips. For the first time since he had been made a Space Marine, Guinian knew fear. Only his psychic hood prevented his mind being boiled off into nothingness.

He saw the genestealer in his mind’s eye: bloated, as powerful in body as it was psychically. It regarded him with a species of alien humour, and he was certain it was enjoying his pain.

The noise of gunfire around him intensified. The cries of alien monsters troubled the fog. He was almost helpless. Almost, but not quite.

He reached out to Caedis’s troubled mind. With one last effort of will he pushed the location of the genestealer broodlord into the Chapter Master’s thoughts. Caedis’s head moved sharply, and he strode from the room with purpose.

Guinian had in return from Caedis’s mind an impression of somewhere else entirely, before the claws of fear closed about his being. He looked at the shadow in the warp, and it looked back.

With a cry, Guinian collapsed into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER 18

THE TWO HUNDRED

Holos was lost deep in a labyrinth of lava tubes and fissures in the side of Mount Calicium. Choking, sulphurous vapours obscured his way. The cries of his enemies mocked him from the fumes.

Holos despaired. The enemy were afraid of his might and they hid from him, they preferred to let him die in this poison than fight him face to face.

‘Come out! Come out and fight!’ he roared. Rage gripped him. He was thirsty, so thirsty. He would not last long, he had to make the summit and fulfil the prophecy of his dream. He would find the answers it prompted him to find, or his Chapter would die. Under the burning need of the unfettered Thirst, through the intermittent and troubling visions of the Black Rage, he knew this as well as he knew his own name. It was not his own salvation he quested for, but that of his brothers. Frustration tore at his heart. He would have cried, had his dry eyes still had tears to weep.

‘Lo-tan! Guardian of the peak! Come to me and face your doom! The Blood Drinkers will persist, their salvation demands your death!’

No reply. The lesser astorgai cackled and whooped at him, repeating his words in their parrot-like way, adding mocking nuances to his words.

‘Gah!’ he shouted. He smashed Encarmine Dread into the wall, its energy fields carving away a chunk of stone. He raised his sword for another blow. Confusion passed over his face, he regained a measure of control. He fell to his knees and gripped his sword hilt in both hands, point down. Through the fugue, he uttered a prayer.

‘Help me, oh Emperor. Show me the way to my foe, so that I might slay him for you and be done with this place. Aid me, so that I might aid my brothers.’

Instantly, he felt a presence. He looked up. There was a mind touching his, then many minds, fragmented presences from many times, all showing him the way. He fastened on the strongest. He had the impression of a different fog, a brother of sad countenance in an Epistolary’s armour, then that was gone and only the guidance remained. He bared pointed teeth and went where the mind bade him, through a series of passages, taking numerous turns he could not hope to remember. The cries of the lesser astorgai dwindled. Twice he was forced to kill, but these astorgai died quickly; Holos’s purpose and will were reinvigorated. He went past bubbling pools of volcanic acid, over deep chasms, past rank holes whence the rotten-smelling vapours issued. Eventually, he left all this behind. The floor rose, bringing him above the broil and into a long cave. There, enthroned on a pile of human skulls, squatted Lo-tan, lord of the astorgai, and guardian of the way to the peak of Mount Calicium.

The creature attacked without preamble, launching itself into the air and gliding right at Holos, single foot outstretched. It stank of carrion and old blood, smells that Holos had become all-too familiar with as the madness had gripped his Chapter.

Holos dodged the creature. Lo-tan was quick and changed its path mid-flight with a twitch of broad, red-mottled wings. Holos was barged aside with such force he slammed into the wall. Encarmine Dread was trapped beneath him. He pushed himself from the stone as the chest-claws of Lo-tan grabbed at his left arm. These were mighty, and the metal of his armour buckled under the monster’s strength. With a grunt of pain, he twisted from the wall and swung around his pinned arm, sweeping Encarmine Dread around. The weapon bit into the chest-claw of the astorgai, half-severing the grasping hand. The creature jerked back, twin-beaked mouth roaring. Green blood pattered to the floor. Holos stepped backwards, sword ready. Lo-tan did the same. The two circled each other, altered man and alien monster looking for the kill.

Lo-tan was twice the size of the other astorgai. Its three eyes were protected by ridges of bone in a pointed face. The skull terminated in a pair of horned beak-like protuberances that gave the mouth a bisected appearance, although these were actually horned, forward-facing, flesh-tearing tools, the mouth proper being situated behind them. When it roared, Holos saw the curved teeth that lined its throat. If it caught him, this would hook into his flesh or the gaps in his armour, and by a series of powerful convulsions Lo-tan would pull him in. The rear of the head was a mass of fronds, erect with anger and stiff as quills.

Lo-tan stalked around, bent into a bow, wings spread out around it like the cloak of a supplicant before a lord. It rested its weight on the two fingers that tipped each wing. Holos was no fool, he knew the astorgai well. The pose they adopted in combat looked ridiculous, but the creatures could move fast with a push from their single leg, sending the hardened ends of their pinion feathers scything at a warrior with lightning speed.

Lo-tan gurgled deep in its throat. Its head bobbed on a long neck. He did not speak. It was said that only the younger astorgai spoke, an ability they lost as they aged, and Lo-tan was the oldest of them all.

Holos gulped for air. He was tortured by visions of long-ago battles, troubled by those that were yet to come. Filled with the rage of the ancients, he wanted nothing more than to fling himself at the beast and hack at it with sword and teeth. But Holos was a Space Marine of uncommon will, that is why, or so it would be said in later centuries, he was chosen to travel to the peak of Mount Calicium. He held himself back, determined not to fall into the well of blackness overflowing from his second heart.

With a shriek, Lo-tan struck…

…and Caedis stepped back. The genestealer broodlord was so fast its claws were but a blur. Caedis took the blow on Gladius Rubeum. The metal rang as it had under the hammer at the time of its forging, and the images that played along its blade went out for a second.

Caedis blinked. He was himself once more. Holos was there in his mind, the hero’s memories trying to usurp his own personality. He could see the cavern Holos fought in, he watched the astorgai as it attacked, its movements and form overlaid on the genestealer broodlord. He thought to fight it, but did not. He was not in control of his actions any longer, not truly. He lived a repeat of Holos’s adventure, and there was no choice involved. He knew full well that this was his final battle. He submitted himself to the will of the Emperor and rode out the tide of the blood-fate.

The broodlord was four metres tall. It was old, old beyond the count of men, a monster that had grown huge in the interstellar night. Fattened on the love of its stolen family, it was the biggest of its kind for thousands of light years in any direction. It had ridden the tides of the warp for millennia, growing stronger and larger, its potency multiplying along with the number of its vile brood. Countless worlds had been infected by its seed, the will of millions of sentient beings subverted by the minds of its offspring. Their parental instincts perverted, those tainted by the genestealers had no choice but to nurture the terrible children they birthed. These things meant nothing to it. It did as it was bred to do, its great mind only served to allow it to do so more effectively, or so later generations of magi biologis would maintain.

In actuality, what thoughts troubled such a mind were forever beyond humanity’s grasp. There were few psyches as alien as those of the genestealers. Through eyes devoid of mercy, that mind looked down upon Caedis. That it recognised a hero of the human race is questionable, but what are heroes to such a creature? Where a being has little freedom of choice, can it appreciate the sacrifice heroism demands? The broodlord had encountered hundreds of kinds of thinking creatures in its journey across the stars, and millions more that were not sentient. All had fallen to their knees, wills withered by its stare.

It tilted its head, nostrils flaring in its alien face. With its unknowable mind it reached out to this small product of evolution, a weak creature that struggled, at the moment of its extinction, with its own nature. Such things did not trouble the broodlord.

But to think the genestealer entirely at odds with the human psyche would be wrong. It possessed paternal instincts of a sort, and when it detected the death-stink of thousands of its progeny clinging to Caedis’s weak human soul, it reacted as any father would react to the murderer of its children – with great and untameable anger.

The broodlord delivered a punishing smash from its upper arms. Caedis lifted his sword and blocked the blow, taking both arms’ force onto the blade. The chitin that clad this creature’s flesh was hardened by aeons, and did not sunder at Gladius Rubeum’s edge. It leaned harder, forcing Caedis onto one knee. Its lower hands, unlike those of its bodyguard, equipped with something akin to fingers, reached out for him. Caedis raised his bolter and fired, blasting a chunk from the broodlord’s shoulder armour. It looked at the gouge in its carapace with puzzlement, then swiped hard with three of its arms, sending the Chapter Master reeling backwards. He did not fall, and regained his balance. Gladius Rubeum out, he circled…

…Holos was in grave peril. His armour had saved him from five blows, but it was gouged and cracked, its systems failing. Lo-tan was likewise harmed, green blood dripped from a dozen cuts to its body, some of them serious. One wing hung limp at the shoulder, cut to the bone by the blade of Encarmine Dread it lunged…

…and the genestealer’s claws smashed into Caedis’s helmet. Gladius Rubeum came up too late to stop it, grating ineffectively against the genestealer’s shoulder, and jarring Caedis’s hand in turn. Alarms rang in his helmet, the visor overlay of the sensorium obscured by electronic snow. His head snapped back painfully inside. A second claw descended, and this Caedis did parry, flinging it wide with a great effort that left his body exposed. The genestealer saw this and reacted, grasping hands seizing the Chapter Master about the chest, its fingers long enough for the monster to encompass his torso entirely. The ancient broodlord lifted Caedis into the air, and slammed blow after blow into his helmet with its three-taloned upper claws. All the while it squeezed at the Space Marine, hard enough that ceramite cracked and plasteel buckled. Caedis raised his sword…

…and Holos deflected the pinion talon of the great Lo-tan as it slashed and slashed again at his unprotected face. He was pinned underneath the creature by its single foot, the weight of it squashing the life from him, its talons closing, squealing along the metal of his power armour. The thing’s remaining dexterion-claw scrabbled at his face, ripping his flesh. The taste of his own blood made him wild. He bucked underneath it with renewed strength, the wing came down, he brought Encarmine Dread to meet it…

…and the broodlord’s claw span away into the darkness. Blood pumped from the stump. The other claw came down, tearing Gladius Rubeum from Caedis’s hand. The blade wheeled end over end, to embed itself in the floor. But Caedis had done a grave insult to the broodlord, and the creature relaxed its grip upon him. Caedis pulled at throttling alien hands with all his might and tore a hand free from its grip about his chest. He kicked it hard as he sought to brace himself against the ribbed chitin of the beast’s torso, his boots raking across the thing’s body. He achieved his aim. With sufficient leverage available, he was able to wrench hard at the broodlord’s arm. Its other hand pulled at his own, the remaining upper claw slamming into his helmet again. Alarms chimed, air hissed from a rupture in his visor glass, but Caedis was in the grip of the Black Rage, the killing fury of the sons of Sanguinius. With superhuman strength boosted by his armour, he pulled. Sinews stood out on his neck, his teeth splintered as he ground his jaws in effort. The wiry muscles of the broodlord writhed as it pulled the other way, but in vain. It was in the grip of a Chapter Master of the Space Marines, one of mankind’s greatest warriors.

With a gristly tearing, Caedis wrenched free the arm of the broodlord. He slid to the yielding, alien floor, with the limb in his hands, pursued by a torrent of blood, ragged tendons and veins dragged out from the beast as he went. The broodlord bellowed in pain and fury as Caedis stood. It retreated from him warily, wounded upper claw held protectively to its breast, blood pumping from the socket of its stolen lower limb. Caedis brandished the severed arm of the genestealer above his head and shouted.

‘I am Caedis, Lord of San Guisiga and Master of the Blood Drinkers Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. My brothers bear the gifts of Sanguinius and the Emperor himself. You will not defeat me!’ He cast the arm aside, ran forward, snatching up Gladius Rubeum from the ground as he built to a run. He raised the sword in both hands.

‘Blood is life! Life is duty!’ He cried, and swung the blade. The glittering edge of Gladius Rubeum went in a wide arc that connected with the genestealer’s chest. The momentum of his charge, aided by the sword’s power field, sent the sword clean through the creature’s exoskeletal armour, cutting through the thorax, severing vital organs from one another, and out the other side. Blood was flung up the walls from its tip. Caedis controlled the swing, brought Gladius Rubeum to the guard position, and stood facing the beast.

The genestealer was cut clean to its spine. A torrent of black, alien blood rushed down its chest. With a roar, it fell to its knees. The oppressive presence of its mind wavered, then went out.

With a crash, the broodlord toppled to its side and lay still.

Caedis was already losing himself as he walked over to the genestealer and looked down upon it. The floor warped and changed to the guano-deep rock of the astorgai’s lair. The light brightened, shafts of orange illumination came through cracks in walls that were becoming those of a cave. As he stared at his defeated foe, he no longer saw the broodlord, but the crumpled form of Lo-tan, lord of the astorgai.

‘I am Holos,’ said Caedis, ‘sent by a dream to save my brothers, and I will climb this mountain.’

Without pausing to clean his sword of the alien’s blood, Caedis turned and limped towards a gaping set of doors, to his eyes a wide tunnel mouth from which a weak draught blew into Lo-tan’s foetid eyrie. He could smell the evening air of San Guisiga upon it.

Holos was sorely wounded, his armour was failing, and his strength spent, but he was nearly at the summit.

Mastrik had no time to issue orders to his men. Genestealers attacked him from every side. Recognising him as one of the Space Marines’ officers, they strove their hardest to bring him down. His armour was scored by claw marks, his bolter had long run out of ammunition. He fought on with his power sword. Ranial stood by his side, wielding the energies of the warp in their defence against a never-ending stream of the aliens. Once many of the Adeptus Astartes positions had been invested, the enemy came in great numbers from the third tunnel mouth, reinforcing the shrinking numbers of their kind that had been in the first and second waves. From Sorael, there had been no word for some time. Mastrik had been forced to abandon the higher ground and retreat towards the cavern floor when genestealers started to come through the airlock. There on a rise in the floor of the cavern, fifty Terminator brothers of the Novamarines stood firm in a wide circle. Ten more fought hard up on the slopes of the cavern wall, forming a bulwark to safeguard their power-armoured brothers, for where the genestealers got among them, the struggle rapidly turned against the Space Marines.

Genestealer corpses drifted in thick clumps towards the floor, forming piles like bloody driftwood when the weak gravity finally brought them down. They were accompanied by the broken bodies and armour fragments of bold adepts. The Terminators were either low on, or out of, ammunition, and slowly, inexorably, things were turning against the Novamarines. Casualty tallies and situation reports clamoured for Mastrik’s attention, but he could not respond. He fought with cool determination, the shadow of desperation coalescing at the back of his mind into the will to destroy. He dodged and thrust, the weak gravity a hindrance to his movements – strike too hard, and he would be sent hurtling into the air by reactive force, move too slow and it would not be long before alien claws found a chink in his armour, and through that, his death. Mastrik and his men were therefore locked in place by their armours’ boots.

He deactivated the mag-locks in sequence so he could move effectively, but this added a further consideration to the combat, and he tired. The genestealers were made for low-gravity conditions, the long claws on their feet seeking out cracks in the ground, or grabbing with unshakeable tenacity to the armour the Space Marines wore.

In his hearts, he realised they would not last long. For every genestealer smashed into the air by a power fist, another two took its place. One by one, his warriors were dying. They were outnumbered and outmatched. The air in the chamber was running out, the gale generated by the atmospheric venting now a breeze. But the genestealers would have finished him and his brothers by the time the vacuum forced them away from the cave. He stabbed his sword into the heart of a genestealer, pushing on the pommel with his free hand to drive it home. There was only combat now, no time for tactical reaction or clever ruses. The plan had failed.

‘Ave Imperator,’ he said. ‘Soon you will see my flesh, and judge me by its story.’

‘Brothers! Smite and rend! Tear and kill! You are the Blood Drinkers, send the enemies of the Emperor to their ruin!’ Sanguinary Master Teale shouted to his brothers, channelling their frenzy. ‘Let slip your bloodlust! Only fury will save us! Drown the enemy in their own blood!’

The Blood Drinkers fought like men possessed. Their Terminators were bloody islands in a sea of blue-black alien integument. Brothers in power armour bludgeoned alien flesh with bolters. Knives ran black with alien blood. Teale’s own squad rocketed from one place to another, striking lightning blows before retreating to do so again.

Sorael listened to the Sanguinary Master’s encouragements. His own life fluids sang with the battle-joy; the desire to rip his helmet from his head and attack the aliens with his teeth was strong.

He was surrounded by genestealers, more pouring out of the gap every second. His Devastators were grappling on the floor with the four-armed monstrosities. Glimpses of blood-red armour came and went, mostly all he saw was surging, night-blue chitin.

Something slammed into his legs, knocking him forward. Another impact. Two genestealers were trying to tear his feet free of the floor. Another leapt onto his face, claws jabbing at his armour’s cowl, feet scrabbling at his helmet. He swung his sword blindly. It bit flesh, and was wrenched from his hand.

His foot came free. They were dragging him down.

He clawed at the alien on his face. Warnings sounded shrilly in his suit.

Sorael recited the opening lines of the Sanguis Moritura. He grasped the feet of the genestealer at his front as pain shot up his leg. His armour was breached.

He wrenched hard at the creature. Unexpectedly, it came apart in his hands, its blood spreading in a black fan of droplets in front of him.

Through it, he caught a glimpse of bone-and-blue. The genestealers had ceased coming from the crack in the wall, in their stead strode Squad Wisdom of Lucretius, bolters blazing, they cut down a dozen genestealers before they were noticed. They spread out. Brother Tarael of his own Chapter followed. Lightning claws flashing, he charged headlong into a knot of the aliens. The brother in the Novamarines squad with the heavy flamer – Sorael did not know his name – levelled his weapon and sent an expanding ball of fire into another group.

‘Emperor be praised!’ bellowed Captain Sorael. ‘We are aided! To me my brothers, to me!’

Sanguinary Master Teale heard his command, and his squad came rocketing in. Three Terminators waded through the press of genestealers, taking up station around Teale’s squad and Sorael. This group of twelve brothers formed a nucleus of resistance upon which the hinge of battle turned. The Novamarines forced their way to them.

‘Sergeant Voldo of the Novamarines,’ said their leader. ‘How can we aid you?’

With the stream of outflanking genestealers cut, Sorael set about reorganising his men, and the battle for the far end of the cavern began in earnest.

Ranial fought grimly on, his brother Mastrik with him always. The mind of the beast guiding the genestealers was strong and poisonous, only with great effort was the Epistolary able to muster his own psychic might in the face of its intrusive presence.

And then, suddenly, it was gone. ‘Brother!’ he shouted urgently.

‘What, Brother Ranial? I am a little preoccupied,’ replied Mastrik. He sounded weary and angry.

‘The mind, the control of the xenos, it has gone!’

Mastrik cut the legs from under a genestealer. ‘Lord Caedis was successful?’

‘No trace remains in the warp, brother-captain. I believe so.’

The two adepts looked at one another. No new genestealer attacked them.

‘Come,’ said Mastrik. ‘Let us apprise ourselves of the tactical situation.’

Mastrik and Ranial left the front line of the fifty-strong Terminator band, their ranks closing behind them, and moved to the top of the low rise they surrounded.

All around the cavern, the genestealers were in disarray. They were just as ferocious, just as deadly, but the coordination between their actions had gone. They moved and fought as individual groups, not as a gestalt whole. The pressure on Mastrik’s position eased.

‘Brother! Look!’ shouted Ranial. Joy was evident in his voice. ‘Brother Aresti comes!’

From the tunnels emerged a battered group of Terminators, the first bearing the personal heraldry of the captain of the Fifth Company. Although reduced in number, the two squads accompanying the captain came into the cavern firing. Others followed, coming in ones or twos or in groups. Aresti commanded them to his side, forming them into a broad arrow. He waited for a group of stragglers, then ordered the formation forward. A further forty Terminators of both Chapters joined the fray.

‘By Corvo’s oath,’ said Mastrik, the smile returning to his voice. ‘We might just win this yet.’

Behind him, on the wall facing the giant alien ship, the combat was swinging back in the Novamarines’ favour. The relentless pressure of the alien advance slackening, units of power-armoured brothers were freeing themselves from close entanglements and beginning to open fire again.

‘Let us crush them!’ Mastrik shouted. He ordered the Terminators at his position into a line also, to match that of Captain Aresti. Across a floor crowded with milling alien bodies, the two formations of Terminators closed on one another. From the eastern end of the cavern, blood-red armour replaced blue chitin as the Blood Drinkers advanced from their positions.

From somewhere behind them, a Thunderfire cannon opened up, raking the ceiling with heavy rounds.

Nearly two hundred Terminators were in the cavern now. The genestealers faltered. They fought on. Still deadly, still tenacious and cunning, but the tactical acumen and overall battle order they had exhibited before had gone.

Great was the slaughter of the xenos that day.

CHAPTER 19

THE HEART OF THE VOID

‘Great is the wisdom of the Emperor, to him we commit our service, to him we give our fealty. So swore Lucretius Corvo, so swear I.’ Galt prayed, running the beads of his Chapter icon necklace through his fingers. The words came to him as automatically as breathing, inculcated into him from his first days as a neophyte, repeated as a novitiate, finally sang with pride as he became a full initiate. The prayers and cants grew more complex and important as he passed through each stage. They all had their purpose beyond devotion to duty, whether they were hypnotic triggers to activate his gifts, or epic histories of the Chapter that helped weld an organisation of soldiers into an order of brothers, but those first words remained the most potent.

Today, Galt gave thanks for victory. The others were returning from the hulk. There would be a proper ceremony later. Excepting the cathedral serfs and servitors, he was alone, kneeling at the feet of Lucretius Corvo’s giant statue.

When the communications had gone down, Galt had gone directly to the surface of the hulk only to find the tech-priests there under attack from xenos. The genestealers were hardy indeed, seemingly untroubled by the extreme cold and radiation of open space.

Galt had taken command, directing the servitors of the Adeptus Mechanicus alongside his own men. He had found that unpleasant. Servitors served the Emperor in their own way, as all his loyal servants did. Many served aboard the fleets and in the fortresses of his Chapter. Even so, for the Novamarines they represented a fate worse than death, for the souls of servitors were forfeit to the Machine-God, and so they could not enter the halls of their ancestors. That they laboured ceaselessly all around him was of no consequence, but a warrior must have a soul, and servitors had none. The use of them by the forge as heavy weapons platforms was tolerated along with all the Techmarine’s other peculiarities, but Galt did not approve of it.

Still, needs must. He and his men had advanced down the Adeptus Mechanicus’s strange road. All along the route, the beacons the tech-priests had set up were smashed. Teams of tech-priests had been slaughtered, along with some of the Space Marines assigned to protect them. By the time they had fought their way down and broken through to the airlock, the battle was over. Galt had ordered the Terminators resupplied and sent them off on search and destroy missions as per the original strategy.

He clenched his hands tighter about his amulet, the words of a prayer tumbling from his lips. The plan had worked, but by a hair’s-breadth. Without Caedis’s sacrifice and the death of the broodlord, they would surely have failed.

Galt’s self-doubt plagued him. He had underestimated the xenos. His initial intention to obliterate the hulk had been correct, but he had been required to find a way to clear it. The plan was in part of his own devising, and he had almost failed. He felt the eyes of Lucretius Corvo boring into him from the statue’s head. What would Chapter Master Hydariko say?

He pushed his doubts away. They had won, and he had other problems to solve before he would have the time to fully dissect the rightness of his actions. The casualty numbers ran through his mind. Ninety-three brothers of both Chapters dead or soon to be accepting the Emperor’s mercy. Among them was a disproportionate number of veterans, with seventeen of the Novamarines’ most experienced lost, and perhaps equally harmful to the Chapter, five Scouts dead on the surface. Two of the veterans would be found places in the armoured tomb-suits of the Chapter’s Dreadnoughts. Twenty-nine suits of Terminator armour from the Novamarines armoury had sustained heavy damage, two were practically unsalvageable.

Fortunately, none of the Chapter officers had been wounded, nor had any of the stone Crux Terminatus badges been lost. Much of the battlegear of the dead had been retrieved and would be repaired and re-sanctified for use by new recruits, as had the majority of the fallen brothers’ gene-seed. Overall material losses were low. The loss of Chapter Master Caedis cast a shadow over the operation. The Blood Drinkers Reclusiarch, Mazrael, had assured him that Lord Caedis had died in a fitting manner – Galt had seen a pict of the monster Caedis had slain and had been amazed – although the Chapter Master’s armour and body were missing. In better tidings for the Blood Drinkers, they had retrieved the brother trapped in the first mission.

Nearly five thousand genestealers had been slaughtered, a kill ratio of fifty-three to one. More would die soon. Already kill-teams closed in on the roosts where additional genestealers slumbered in vacuum. These would prove no trouble in their extermination. Doubtless further brothers would fall in pursuance of these objectives, but the real battle was over. An impressive result, yet still Galt agonised over every one of his dead brothers. ‘They will be buried with all honour,’ he said to himself, ‘interred in the tombs of Fortress Novum.’

Shrines would be raised to their memory. Their glories would be recorded. New brothers would take their place. Such was the way of the Chapter, and it had been so for eight thousand years.

Fortress Novum. He thought of the damage to Corvo’s Hammer, and the losses his force had sustained these last years. The surviving novitiates with them were ready for their final elevation to full brotherhood; many of his squads were under strength. He needed to restock, resupply and take new orders from his own master.

It was time to go home.

First there was the matter of the space hulk’s archeotech.

A hand fell upon his shoulder. Galt opened his eyes. Sergeant Voldo stood over him.

‘Lord captain,’ he said.

‘Brother-sergeant,’ said Galt. He got to his feet and genuflected to the statue of Corvo.

‘Asking for guidance?’ said Voldo.

‘Giving thanks for a victory delivered, and for those of our brothers who were not.’

Voldo nodded. ‘I am told you are to go into the heart of the hulk.’

‘Yes, brother. Already teams of tech-priests scour the vessels in the hulk deemed clear. Our ally Plosk is planning an expedition to its centre. It is there that he believes the STC data to be.’

‘And you do not trust him,’ said Voldo.

Galt shook his head. ‘He has omitted important details more than once. Wherever Plosk goes, I will go.’

‘You are right to be wary. Why will these tech-priests not tell us what they know? We all have the same goals after all.’

‘Forgemaster Clastrin says their organisation is as plagued by factionalism and division as any other. It may not be us he is keeping this information from. Will you walk with me? I find the chapel calming.’

Voldo fell in beside Galt. They went together slowly along the edge of the cathedral. The walls were heavy black marble, niches in the stone filled with skulls of ancient worthies who had aided the Chapter in some way. Servitor-worshippers sang songs of distant Honourum. Serfs muttered prayers as they cleaned the huge space.

‘You have not assigned me any duty, my lord.’

Galt smiled a little tightly. So, here it came. ‘You have done enough, brother.’

‘Not one brother has ever done enough, not ever,’ said Voldo harshly. ‘To rest one second is to allow the enemies of our lord time to act.’

‘So says Guilliman’s Codex,’ said Galt.

‘I quote with purpose. Let me come with you.’

‘No, I have made my decision.’

Voldo swore. ‘Mantillio, do you think me too old? Is that it? I am still in my prime, I am not ready yet for some sinecure position on Honourum counting soup rations for the neophytes.’

‘Only you can speak thusly to me, Voldo.’

‘Something I have earned, Mantillio. For long decades I have been here for you and you repay me with this dishonour.’

‘You have fought long and hard here already, and earned another fine addition to the tally of your skin. Rest, let another take your place. There will be combat aplenty for you to partake in another day,’ said Galt.

Voldo grabbed the man he had trained by the shoulder and span him around to face him. His eyes narrowed as he looked into his face.

‘What is it, lord captain? I have known you since you were a boy. You are hiding something from me.’

Galt looked to one side, then back to the sergeant. ‘My voice betrays me.’

Voldo smiled. ‘It always did. You are a fine strategician, but you have much to learn of diplomacy before you are ready for the Chapter Master’s throne.’

Galt nodded. He hesitated before he spoke again. ‘If I hold you back here, it is not to dishonour you, but to keep you safe, my mentor.’

Voldo gave him a quizzical look. He tightened his hand. ‘Go on.’

‘When I received my last flesh art, I travelled into the Shadow Novum. There I was greeted by one of the spirits of the dead.’

‘As it should be. What wisdom did he show you, did it concern me?’

Galt considered lying then, but untruthfulness was not part of the Novamarines’ creed. To do so would have been a betrayal. ‘No, brother.’

‘Well then.’ Voldo’s hand dropped.

‘It was you.’

Voldo folded his arms and looked to the floor. ‘I understand.’

‘Chaplain Odon told me that it is not uncommon to see the spirits of those who live, for it is a timeless place, and all who served or will serve our Chapter are to be found within.’

‘I know, boy, I know. I know what it means. So you would seek to deny fate?’ Voldo’s face was hard. ‘Such arrogance is not fitting for one of your office.’

‘I wanted only to protect you.’

‘What? By defying the will of the Emperor himself? Foolishness.’ He pointed a finger at the left of Galt’s chest, where his birth-heart beat. ‘To make decisions based upon this is dangerous. That way lies temptation. Have I not told you this many times?’

‘Yes, Brother Voldo.’

‘Here,’ he pointed at Galt’s forehead. ‘Here is where your true voice is. Tell me, what does it say?’

‘It says that you are the most experienced veteran in the entire Chapter in the matter of cleansing space hulks. That to leave you behind would be rash, and an insult to your pride and to the oath we all swore.’ Galt smiled. ‘It also tells me you should have been a captain long ago.’

Voldo laughed. ‘Ha! I serve better where I am, Mantillio. If I were a captain, when would I have the time to set you to rights? So, I ask you, when do we leave?’

Galt changed his orders. Then he sat in the pews of the cathedral with the man who he saw as his father, and prayed with him for the last time.

Blessed be the Machine-God and all his works, thought Plosk as another shuttle, laden with technological treasures, took off from the hulk and flew towards Excommentum Incursus. Plosk turned back to the data-slate set into the cogitation nexus of the control landau. He scrutinised it, half fearful that he had been mistaken. But then a spike in the graph playing in the upper quadrant of the screen brought a rush of exultation to his breast. There, the signature.

He smiled. ‘Magos Nuministon, it is there. Oh, by the Omnissiah, it is there!’

Nuministon peered at the screen. Above them, the energy shield protecting the control landau flared once, then again, as micro-meteors hit, debris from the Adeptus Astartes’ bombardment being pulled back into the greater body of the hulk. Nuministon wore a cable from the back of his head that plugged into the landau’s cogitation engines. He communed with the thing’s machine-spirits a moment. He would be running the data himself, checking the information.

‘The signals are faint, but inescapable. You are correct. Well done, Lord Magos Explorator.’

Plosk’s fleshy face split in a wide, self-satisfied grin. Around the landau the hulk’s surface glowed ferocious blue-white in the glare of Jorso. A detachment of troops from his ship’s skitarii formed a cordon around the landau. He had not wanted to deploy them; they were too valuable a resource to him. Why should he waste his own men when he had four hundred Space Marines to use in battle? But the genestealer attack on the surface had rattled him, and so he had called on his own resources. He was miserly with information and resources both, but he was not a fool.

‘Do the adepts of the stars know?’

‘Not yet. Of course, they will in short order. But there is no need for them to know yet. Who knows what spies and tattle-tales they have among their ranks? All it takes is for one of their Techmarines to have the ear of a rival temple, or for one of their oh-so-incorruptible serfs to be anything but, and my claim will immediately be disputed.’

‘You found it, lord.’ Nuministon did not think these suppositions likely – all Space Marine Techmarines were trained together, and their loyalties invariably lay first and foremost with their Chapter. They were not on Mars long enough, nor inducted deeply enough into the inner mysteries, to become politicised along Mechanicus faction lines. He did not voice this. Plosk was inclined to a caution that bordered on paranoia, but it generally served him well.

‘Yes, yes, yes.’ Plosk flapped a hand in front of his face. ‘But that’s not the point, is it? Something of this magnitude will bring Machine Adepts from all over the galaxy swarming like flies. If so, I will lose my advantage. Half of them will want to destroy the vessel once they learn what is aboard it. No, this prize must be conveyed directly to Mars under my command, only then will I benefit from its finding. If I were to lose exclusive first rights, then what would I tell my patrons? One does not wish to anger a High Lord, Nuministon.’

‘Garm is dead.’

‘The dead ones are the most dangerous, my dear fellow.’

‘When will you tell their leader of the threat?’

‘When the time is right, if at all. I seriously doubt he has the wit to understand what we have found. He is awed by the talk of the STC data we might recover. Let him be, and let him remain unaware of any difficulty accompanying that. For all we know the ship is harmless. Captain Galt does not need to be told that it might be otherwise. This is machine business, let it be undertaken by those who understand it fully. Now the Space Marines have cleared the majority of genestealers from the hulk, we may deal with whatever guards the STC core, if indeed anything does,’ he said breezily. ‘But first we have to retrieve it, and if these data readings are correct, then the vessel is readying itself to depart. Troublesome indeed.’ He tapped his fingers on the data-slate screen. ‘Well, it is not to be helped. We have triumphed over greater odds for lesser prizes.’

‘They are coming,’ said Nuministon. A star in the sky grew in brightness and size, revealing itself as a Thunderhawk of the Novamarines Chapter.

Plosk pursed his lips in annoyance. ‘The captain of the Novamarines, Galt, he insists on coming, of course. Let us hope he is not much of a hindrance.’

The Thunderhawk flew once around the Adeptus Mechanicus in a flagrant demonstration of power, then swept down to land in a blast of dust.

The craft’s assault ramp slammed down. As Plosk expected, Captain Galt came out first. His heart fell a little when Reclusiarch Mazrael of the Blood Drinkers stepped onto the surface of the hulk behind him, but he had more than half-expected to see him. Both were clad in Terminator armour. A full squad in the bone-and-blue of the Novamarines followed them, then four Terminators in the red of the Blood Drinkers. With a casual contempt, Plosk data-linked to their suit’s cogitation engines. The histories of the armour unspooled in this mind, accompanied by flashes of pict footage and combat data.

The names of those who wore them now came last: Voldo, Astomar, Militor, Eskerio and Gallio for the Novamarines; Tarael, Sandamael, Metrion and Curzon of the Blood Drinkers. Tarael wielded lightning claws, Astomar a heavy flame unit, the sergeants and Galt had power swords and storm bolters, the rest power fists and storm bolters. Their armament did not concern him so much as the auspexes Curzon and Militor bore, but Plosk was a calculating man, and he gambled that by the time the Space Marines’ sensoriums revealed the nature of the prize, it would be too late.

The data came to him easily, the Terminators unaware he had linked to and examined each and every one of them to the finest degree of minutiae. He pulled a face when a twelfth figure stepped out off the ramp. The Master of the Forge of the Novamarines, Clastrin. He had recovered then, and that genuinely was poor luck for Plosk. He refrained from attempting a link to him. Clastrin was only a glorified Techmarine, one of the lowest ranks of tech-priest – barely worthy of the name, in fact – and would not be able to stop Plosk’s data probe, but he would notice it, and Plosk would rather he remained unaware he was systematically spying on each and every one of his brothers for information.

‘Lord Captain Galt, Lord Reclusiarch Mazrael, I greet you.’ Plosk made a bow. Doubtless its irony was lost on the Adeptus Astartes. Plosk hated all these formalities, he was of the mind that while he bore the seal of the High Lords all should simply do as they were told, but the lords of the Space Marines were as touchy as they were ignorant.

Galt rudely forwent formal preamble. ‘We are accompanying you into the centre of the hulk, Magos Plosk. You will be unsafe without proper protection.’

‘Ah, but your men have done so fine a job of clearing the hulk, lord captain.’

‘Many genestealers remain. As such, your expedition is a combat operation, and we agreed, did we not, that the Adeptus Astartes would have authority in these matters. I am coming with you, magos, whether you like it or not.’

Plosk pulled a sour face. He was glad the captain could not see it. Had he had more time, he could have led the captain on a merry dance around the hulk, saving the discovery of the true prize until the Novamarine grew bored and left. But he did not have more time. ‘As you wish, my lord.’

‘As I command, Magos Plosk.’

‘I thank you for your concern, my lord, but I have many servitors to protect me, your presence really is not required.’

‘I was told they are susceptible to the radioactivity in the hulk, and where you intend to go is among the most radioactive areas of all,’ said Galt.

‘Do you not trust me, my lord? We are after all on the same side.’

‘I do not trust your ambition, lord magos,’ said Galt. ‘I believe that you think you operate in the best interests of the Imperium, but I have seen politics cloud men’s judgement as surely as lust or rage. And you have lied to me already.’

Plosk held up his space-suited hands that may or may not have been a gesture of apology. ‘An honest mistake. I suppose you of the Novamarines believe you are above the pettiness of politics?’

‘In the main we are, Lord Magos. We serve, that is all.’

Plosk sighed. ‘Nobody is above politics, lord.’ He spoke next to Mazrael. ‘And the Lord Reclusiarch? I take it you intend to accompany us as well?’

‘I do. The last segment of Lord Caedis’s telemetry recorded in Sergeant Sandamael’s sensorium show him heading to the hulk’s centre,’ said Mazrael. ‘I would recover his body and his armour and grant both the proper rites.’

‘Of course, all honour must be made to him and his battlegear,’ said Plosk. ‘We must be away soon, the hulk could begin translation at any time.’

‘I am well aware of this,’ said Galt, ‘and have instructed the fleet to destroy this agglomeration should any sign of an imminent warp tear manifest itself, whether or not we are still aboard.’

This was altogether too much for Plosk. ‘Idiocy!’ snapped the magos. ‘You do not know what you destroy.’

‘Why do you not enlighten us, magos?’

Plosk calmed himself. ‘I have already told you of the great archeotech trove that could be within. You will not achieve the destruction of the Death of Integrity on your own.’

‘In light of Lord Caedis’s disappearance, I have been given direct command of the two Chapters here,’ replied Galt.

Oh, how insufferable he was! Plosk loathed dealing with the Adeptus Astartes. They were so dogged in their devotion, so caught up in their holy missions and crusades and petty prejudices that they could never see the bigger schematic. The intentions of the Omnissiah-Emperor were beyond their ability to understand. They were made to fight; anything else was beyond their comprehension. He pitied them for that.

‘Very well. It is what we agreed,’ he said, though it rankled him to remain reasonable. ‘We will be ready to depart in ten minutes, lords.’ He bowed, and beckoned to Nuministon to follow him.

‘The Reclusiarch is lying, he is hiding something.’ Plosk, who had often to resort to diplomacy and brokerage while about his duties, had numerous means of proving the veracity of others’ words, and those of the Adeptus Astartes had been duly tested.

‘I have heard rumours regarding this family of Chapters, those descended of Sanguinius,’ ground out Nuministon’s uninflected voice. ‘Perhaps Mazrael’s omittance relates to this secret.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Plosk. He brightened. ‘It would be most useful to learn the details. A fine piece of leverage. One never knows when one will require influence.’

‘Indeed,’ said Nuministon.

‘Now, I require Samin’s aid. Where is he?’ said Plosk.

The expedition into the heart of the hulk began as a procession. Dozens of tech-priests and over one hundred servitors went into the perfectly square hole and down the road into the dark. They sang as they went, a low droning song broadcast on every frequency, and so unavoidable. The majority of the words to this dirge were impenetrable to the Space Marines, save Forgemaster Clastrin, to whom the cant of wheel, cog and sub-quantum relay switching was as familiar as bolter drill. He refrained from joining them, although he knew the songs, instead he voiced the fourteenth canticle of battle along with his brothers and the brothers of the Blood Drinkers.

All down the road, new doors had been cut and old ones wrenched open. An artery of thick black cables ran along one wall, held in place by welded staples. Into each opening some of these cables wormed to re-emerge depleted in number, and the swags of them hanging from the wall grew thinner the lower they went. Everywhere was a bustle. Servitors tramped up and down in endless lines, carrying pieces of machines or crates, or were hard-linked to grav-sleds and tracked litters bearing larger artefacts. Arc lights blazed from openings. Plasma cutters burned. The tech-priests were working fast to strip the hulk. Galt was somewhat taken aback. Excommentum Incursus was a giant vessel, but he had miscalculated how many tech-priests it carried.

One by one, tech-adepts split from the column and went on their way to whatever mysterious tasks they had to perform, taking their servitors with them. The songs of the cyborgs lessened in power as their number reduced. By the time they reached the airlock only a score of them were left and their prayers were in contest with the incantations of the working tech-priests. The airlock was open, and they went into the cavern without the tedious business of repressurisation. The air had bled away completely after the battle, and there had not been time to re-establish an atmosphere. So it was they passed amid a frenzy of activity that, vox aside, was performed in total silence. The tech-priests had cut many holes into the sides of the large alien ship, from where they carried a great number of technological prizes. From the amount of praise being offered to the Omnissiah, Galt guessed that the artefacts were of high value.

‘Xenos technology,’ said Plosk disparagingly, ‘but valuable nonetheless.’

Galt called a halt while he conferred with Captain Aresti, who was in command of the forces in the cavern. Captain Sorael had led the majority of the Blood Drinkers into the warrens of the hulk, chasing down the remaining genestealers, leaving the Novamarines to destroy the xenos dead and guard the labours of the tech-priests. Mastrik remained on board Novum in Honourum, in command of the fleet in Galt’s absence.

Satisfied all was in order, Galt allowed the impatient Plosk to continue onwards. They headed out of the cavern via a new doorway cut into the alien ship, and from there through a crush of compacted metal and stone into a heavily damaged Imperial vessel of extreme vintage. Much work went on there; lights had been set up all along its corridors and savants were plugged into data outports, scouring systems for soft data hidden within cogitation systems. Two of the remaining tech-priests went to their colleagues here.

Three more ships directly down and the streams of servitors porting technology to the surface dwindled to nothing. The final tech-priest went to his task, leaving only Plosk, Nuministon, Samin, nine armed servitors and three semi-aware data-savants with the Terminators.

They went through this last ship and came to an old airlock set in a comparatively sound wall. A wide chasm opened up here between this ship and the next, and a prefabricated bridge had been laid across. As Galt crossed it he looked upwards. The chasm extended to the surface. The nearside lip was lit by the ungentle illumination of Jorso, above was a narrow strip of black space.

On the other side of the bridge were two lamps. Beyond that, no signs at all of an Imperial presence.

‘I calculate that we will be able to salvage most of the material from the upper levels before the hulk disappears once more into the warp. These other ships here are of lesser interest, although it is regrettable that we will not be able to explore them fully. One never knows what one might uncover, but in my long experience as Explorator, I have learned to prioritise,’ said Plosk.

‘There is no Imperial presence from hereon in?’ said Sergeant Sandamael.

‘Aside from a few relay beacons so that we might communicate with the surface, and a few servitors patrolling and surveying the corridors in case there is something of use. No. We are all the Emperor’s bold explorers here, my lords, not just I,’ said Plosk.

Tarael’s lightning claws activated, patterning the dark walls of the ship with blue light.

‘Then lead on, lord magos,’ said Galt. ‘Take us to this treasure you have found.’

CHAPTER 20

AT THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT CALICIUM

Holos emerged from the chambers of the astorgai, broken but unbowed. The light came suddenly after the darkness of the labyrinth in the mountain. At first the light of the setting suns hurt his eyes, and he lay on the warm rock of the volcano until the burning of the light passed. In his hearts and mind, the Thirst burned him also, and the combination of the two was too much to endure. He closed his eyes and gathered his strength. Astorgai wheeled on the thermals above him, calling out and wailing; their king was dead, and they would not approach his slayer.

Holos rolled onto his front, and pushed himself with great effort onto his knees. His armour was broken, its spirit he thought dead, for the support it ordinarily gave his body was gone. Joints ran freely without power assist, if they ran at all – his left knee was locked, the plates deformed from his fight with Lo-tan. His left arm was heavy and pained him when he tried to move it. He watched in thirst-gripped fascination as his blood dripped from the tears in the armour. His Larraman cells were only now causing it to clot. That it had bled for so long indicated that the wound was a grave one.

Holos attempted to stand. His legs would not bear him, so he put his sword point to the ground, to push upon it and rise. It scraped white lines in the stone and fell twice before he had it steady. With a gasp, he stood erect, leaning his weight onto Encarmine Dread.

Once he was on his feet he felt stronger, if only a little.

Ahead, not two kilometres distant, was the peak of the mountain. It was not a true peak, but a higher part of the volcano’s rim raised like an animal’s tooth above the caldera of the volcano, the relic of one of the cone’s many periodic upthrustings and collapses. The cone’s broken rim ran up to it at first, but then the peak pulled up and away from the rest of the mountain with rapidity. The rock of it was multifaceted, and the stacked columns looked almost artificial in appearance. A strange spur arced out from it, a platform on the top some one hundred metres above the rim, tilted slightly towards where Holos stood.

Through images of battles past and those yet to come, Holos saw the figure from his dream, a cowled, winged being standing before him. It raised a skeletal finger and pointed to the platform on the peak. Holos nodded and licked desiccated lips. He began to walk, and the figure faded. Each step sent pain shooting through his wounded arm. His armour dragged at him, pulling him back when it should have been carrying him forward. He had never had cause to walk in deactivated armour, not outside of his training. He was astonished at the weight of its betrayal.

He sheathed Encarmine Dread clumsily, and pushed shaking fingers at the clasps on his pauldrons. The heavy shoulder plates disengaged and fell to the ground one after the other with dull clangs. He walked a little easier. He fumbled tools from his belt, and set to work on the rest of his battleplate as he walked.

Soon the trail of his footsteps was punctuated by discarded pieces of armour.

‘There is much activity ahead, lord captain,’ said Eskerio. ‘Genestealers.’

‘We cannot delay,’ said Plosk. ‘We do not have much time.’

‘How many?’ asked Galt.

‘Twenty-nine, maybe more,’ said Eskerio. ‘They are in hiding, being cautious. I’ll warrant they know they are being hunted.’

‘That will play well for us, cousin,’ said Sandamael.

‘What do you propose to do?’ asked Plosk.

‘Fight our way through,’ said Galt. ‘That is what you would have us do, I think. Or would you relinquish your prize?’

‘Of course not,’ said Plosk brusquely. ‘Please, make use of my servitors.’

‘That will not be necessary. Have them guard you. Lord Reclusiarch Mazrael, what will you and yours do?’

‘We shall come with you, lord captain,’ said Mazrael.

‘Very well. Forgemaster Clastrin, remain here with the magi. You may take Lord Magos Plosk up on his offer. Command his servitors. Establish fields of fire. Do not allow the genestealers through.’

‘Yes, brother-captain.’

‘My thanks!’ called out Plosk.

Galt ignored him. He had the Terminators advance rapidly from the crossways they were in and into the corridor where Eskerio’s auspex had detected the movement. This ship, so close to the heart of the hulk, was in poor condition and immeasurably ancient. This deep into the agglomeration, many of the component vessels were crushed into impassibility, and this one differed only in that a clear way to the heart of the hulk existed through its crumpled halls. The corridor they entered was wide and tall, its metal heavily corroded. It had been the access way to the ship’s warp engines, but was now broken open along much of its length so that the compartments that had once lined it had become a part of the corridor. Consequently, the space was a deadly tangle of low walls, crumpled bulkheads and hanging catwalks.

‘If only the lights and gravity functioned here,’ said Militor. ‘It would make our lives a little easier, brothers.’

‘I do not think we will find any machine activity this deep into the hulk,’ said Eskerio. ‘These vessels are as old as the Imperium, if not older. Their spirits are broken and fled.’

‘It is surely the business of Forgemaster Clastrin to declare such as a fact, brother,’ said Astomar.

‘Quiet, all of you!’ said Voldo.

‘What is it, cousin?’ asked Tarael.

‘Sounds. Not of motion, but of power.’

‘Cousin Voldo is correct. I’m getting a reading, brothers,’ said Curzon.

In the sensoriums of the suits, energy indicators jumped. A tortured groaning went up deep in the ship. A series of bangs accompanied a building whine.

The Terminators sank into themselves suddenly as ancient grav plates under their feet activated. Lights flickered. Many burst in showers of sparks. Crackles of energy sputtered from power relays and severed cables. A grav plate imploded with a thunderous crack. Small fires leapt into being as ancient machinery failed, dying as quickly as they drank the small measure of oxygen in the stale air. A door shuddered into life. It shook as it attempted to close, stopped, then tried again.

‘What is this?’ hissed Galt.

‘A refutation of your words, from the Machine-God himself!’ said Plosk over the vox. ‘Tread carefully in these halls, oh captain. You walk nigh unto a tabernacle of the Omnissiah himself! Do not doubt me, lord captain! We are close to His presence.’

The genestealers attacked. Scared out of their hiding places by the unexpected light, they leapt through holes in the rusted walls, dropped from their hiding places high in the ceiling, running at the Terminators from gaping doors.

The Terminators reacted without delay, decades of training and experience guiding their arms. Genestealers died with raucous screeches as bolts cut through the air. The space was open, the genestealers disorganised, only a handful got through to the Terminators’ position, where they were rapidly slain by Tarael, Voldo and Galt.

Plosk did not wait for Galt to give the all clear, but walked into the ruinous corridor as soon as the last bolt had been fired.

‘You see, Captain Galt, the Machine-God is with us here. We are close to the source of his power, the STC data core, so mighty is He incarnate that He answers even the prayers of the unbeliever!’

‘This is nonsense,’ said Mazrael, but there was uncertainty in his voice.

‘Come,’ said Plosk, ‘we are close.’ He walked arrogantly through the Terminators. Galt signalled them and they followed uncertainly, servitors clomping mindlessly behind them.

‘Be on your guard,’ said Galt.

The engine walkway stopped. The hull that had bounded it was long gone. Plosk stepped through the gaping hole in the ancient ship, and out onto a shelf of rock. Galt came close behind, careful of his footing as the gravity abruptly ceased.

The shelf of rock – the surface of a small asteroid – finished seventy metres away, rearing up to form one side of a small cave. A mangle of structures, ice and rubble made up the majority of the rest, but one component stood apart from this; a spacecraft of a kind totally unfamiliar to the Space Marines.

The greater part of the spaceship was buried in the mass of debris, but the side of it presented to them was undamaged by time or the shifting crush of the agglomeration. His sensorium could not penetrate its gleaming hull, but Galt estimated it to be around three hundred metres long, small by Imperial standards. It was clean of line and unembellished, which made the craft appear strange to Galt’s eyes. No Mechanicus runes marked its outer surface, nor were there any statues or artistic flourishes of any kind, yet in its functionality there was a clean aestheticism. It did not appear like any ship crafted by men, but Galt knew instinctively that this vessel had been built by human hands.

‘This is what you hide from us?’ said Galt, wary and awed in equal part.

‘Hide? No, captain. You are here with me. I merely did not wish to burden you with excitable supposition,’ said Plosk.

‘Or alert his rivals,’ said Clastrin quietly.

Plosk walked forward. Light erupted into life along the ship’s length, the glow coming directly from the hull itself.

‘Wait!’ shouted Galt.

Plosk ignored his warning. ‘Long have I searched for this vessel, several lifetimes of lesser men,’ he said. ‘On Vardus Prime, far out in the Halo, did I find a mention of it, buried deep in the Liber Solentus, penned by men who never knew the light of the Emperor, and who were destroyed long before they could be saved. I have searched and searched and searched. There has only been one other of its kind reliably documented, the ill-omened doom-ship the Blade of Infinity. I surmised if there was one, there must be, have to be more.’ He was speaking to himself now more than the others, close to incoherence as human emotion overran his electro-mechanical faculties. He fell to his knees. ‘And it is real!’

Another light came on, its radiance undimmed by time or corruption. It lit a message on the side of the hull in a strange script Galt could barely read. As alien as the straight lines of the font seemed, they were human letters, a plain form of the Gothic script. The words, however, were meaningless to him.

Plosk pointed to it. ‘See! The Machine-God shows us the truth of it. Here, my lords, as I predicted, rests a pre-Imperial starship.’ His voice shook with triumph as he read the ancient script aloud. ‘The Spirit of Eternity.’

Plosk collapsed into fevered prayer. Nuministon and Samin joined him in supplication, bowing before the ancient vessel. Clastrin hesitated, stayed by Galt’s suspicions, but overwhelmed he fell to one knee. Their servitors looked mutely on.

‘Look, lord captain,’ said Voldo. He pointed at an object upon the floor close by the Spirit of Eternity.

Mazrael walked past them, right up to the skin of the ship. He bent down and picked the object up.

‘A vambrace. It is Lord Caedis’s,’ he said.

‘He is alive?’ said Metrion. He took a hopeful step forwards.

‘He was recently,’ said Mazrael. If Galt was expecting some sign of joy from Mazrael at the news, he was disappointed.

‘He is inside the ship then,’ said Voldo.

Mazrael examined the ship before him. The ship was clean, as if newly made. ‘I cannot tell. I see no doorway.’

‘Stay back, lord,’ warned Voldo. ‘Who knows what evils it has carried through time.’

‘No!’ said Plosk joyfully. ‘The ways of the ancients are beyond your ken, my lord. There is no harm here, only knowledge. The doorway will not be obvious to the likes of you, I, however, can see it.’

‘Then how do we gain entry to the archeotech you seek, magos?’ said Voldo. ‘Do we have time for you to cut your way in?’

Plosk started to answer, but a great rumbling interrupted him as the hulk underwent a tremor. They watched nervously as the component vessels of the cave’s walls moved past one another, like fish in a net struggling to be free from the fisherman. Hull skins crumpled. The chamber was airless, yet the group heard the shifting of the tortured agglomeration through their feet, a roaring and grinding of overwhelming volume. They struggled to keep their footing in the near zero-gravity. Those of the Terminators that could, mag-locked themselves to the wall. Others shot out their safety grapnels. One of the servitors and a data-savant, their butchered brains not quick enough to respond to the rapid movement, were cast from their feet and were sent hurtling into the cave walls. There they died, broken by the impact.

The magi remained unmoving, bent in serene worship throughout the quake.

The tremors lessened. The magi stood.

‘Lord Plosk has searched the length and breadth of this galaxy for four hundred years, gathering the lore that led us to this momentous point in time,’ said Samin scornfully. ‘Do you think he would not also gather the information unto him required to access such a craft?’

‘Quickly, Lord Plosk,’ said Nuministon. ‘I am reading data commensurate with warp field generation.’

‘Warp field generation from where?’ said Galt incredulously. ‘From the ship?’

The mage priests ignored him, and dropped into a rapid conversation of screeching binaric.

‘It cannot be active, surely, lord captain,’ said Brother Militor. ‘It is at the heart of this hulk. It must have been here for thousands of years.’

‘And the lights, cousin, and the energy emanating from the vessel?’ said Sandamael. ‘I do not like this, lord captain, it has the stink of corruption to it.’

‘It is a vessel from the Dark Age of Technology,’ said Plosk. ‘From a time blessed by the Omnissiah himself, before those who wielded His powers were adjudged unworthy and had His light withdrawn from them. It functions, oh it functions!’

‘And the warp engines, do they function too? Damn you, mage priest, what more are you concealing from me?’ shouted Galt.

‘The warp fields are generated by the space hulk, not this vessel. Once an agglomeration has sailed the tides of the warp, its fabric develops a sympathy for it. Any perturbation in the veil between real space and the empyrean can drag it back.’

‘The gravitic well of the sun Jorso?’ said Clastrin.

‘Perhaps so, Forgemaster,’ said Nuministon.

‘Are we to retrieve the datacore, or are we to argue as the hulk breaks up around our ears?’ said Plosk. ‘I will explain all, but first we must gain entry.’

Galt looked to the Forgemaster. The Techmarine chief gave a brief nod.

‘Very well, but be quick.’ Aftershocks troubled the chamber still.

‘The unbelievers must withdraw,’ said Plosk.

‘I see no door,’ muttered Tarael. ‘This is a waste of time.’

‘Where there is no way, there will be a way,’ said Nuministon. Galt was certain he was quoting something.

Mazrael rejoined the other Terminators, Caedis’s armour clasped in his hand.

Plosk’s servitors formed a semicircle about the magos, and began a low mumbling drone, thick with formulae and holy data.

Plosk threw his hands wide and spoke over his choir. ‘Oh mighty vessel of the Omnissiah! We, the humble servants of He who made you, we who have searched for long eternities to find your like, we request access to your holy innards, and the information that you contain therein. Let us prove ourselves worthy to you and to our Lord, so that mankind might slip the shackles of ignorance, and learn anew the true runes of knowledge!’

Nothing happened.

‘He has lost his mind,’ said Tarael drily. ‘He speaks to a wall.’

Voldo made a noise of agreement. ‘Brother Gallio?’

‘Wait, my lords!’ said Samin, holding up a hand. ‘He only greets it as it should be greeted – he treats it with the respect it demands. To approach otherwise would be an affront to the vessel’s spirit and perilous to us all. Only now might he utter the codes of access.’

Plosk began to speak rapidly in a language none understood. It was not the electronic chitter of binaric, but a true, spoken language of men. A chill went down Galt’s spine as the tech-priest went on; the language was foreign to him, but amid the babble were words that sounded half-familiar, as if Plosk spoke High Gothic distorted by a dream.

And then the ship replied.

The Terminators stepped backwards, weapons raised.

‘Hold!’ said Nuministon. ‘It is only a voice-activated ward, nothing more. The machine’s spirit has a voice as our servitors have a voice.’

The ship’s voice was soft and emotionless; it too used the ancient tongue.

Plosk’s hands dropped. The servitors sang on.

The ship responded, and the way opened. A section of the hull glowed green, forming a solid square. The light receded, so that the square became a doorway with rounded corners, delineated by a band of brightness. And then there were steps, appearing in some manner Galt could not understand. The light dimmed, lighting the new doorway and stairs in soft lambency. The ship looked as if it had always been that way, as if there had always been a door and not been a solid wall of metal only seconds before. Data flooded into their sensoriums and auspexes as the inviolable skin of the craft parted for them.

‘Witchcraft!’ gasped Mazrael, tightening his grip on his crozius. The Space Marines backed up further. Mutters of alarm came from all of them.

‘No, my lords! Power, technology. Behold the true might of the Omnissiah revealed!’ Plosk said. He looked into the vessel. ‘And soon it will all be ours again, and mankind will rule the stars rightfully, totally, and alone. But as much as I long to enter, we must plan our escape. As Nuministon says, we do not have much time. Teleportation is our only hope.’

‘I have a clear reading from within the vessel now,’ said Eskerio.

‘As do I,’ said Curzon.

‘The energy fluctuations of the ship’s secondary reactor will not allow a firm pattern lock,’ said Clastrin.

‘We should turn back now,’ said Eskerio.

‘No!’ said Plosk. ‘There is a way. The reactor can be deactivated. Once it is, then we may be safely away with the ship’s secrets.’

‘What do we do, lord captain?’ said Voldo uneasily.

‘If the ship opened for us, it may have opened for my lord,’ said Tarael, taking a step forward. Mazrael said nothing.

They all looked to Galt.

‘So be it,’ said Galt finally. ‘So be it.’

Caedis passed through the hulk in Holos’s fugue, wandering deeper and deeper into the Death of Integrity. Sometimes he was Caedis, and on the edge of his perception he was aware that he was casting away his armour as he walked, an act that had lost any sense of importance. It must be done, so he did it. Then there were times when he thought he was Caedis but could not be sure, for the roar of his own blood in his ears was deafening. His twin hearts pounded like war drums, and the Thirst tore at his soul with dripping claws. Sometimes he was Holos, climbing metre by painful metre up the side of Mount Calicium. Sometimes he was neither. He, Holos and the other shades which climbed with him were sent tumbling into the distant past by Holos’s own Black Rage. Caedis suffered the Rage and through suffering it he suffered Holos’s own Rage, until the two multiplied each other into an infinite tunnel of dark memories of war. An eternity of slaughter and bloodshed and burning torment beckoned.

Holos dragged himself along the lip of the volcano’s crater with his one good arm. The rim was narrow, no more than a few metres wide at its narrowest, and his movement sent rocks tumbling over the edge. They bounced higher and higher as they fell, towards the steaming, poisonous green lake at the centre. Holos had discarded what armour he could, but his chestplates and leg assembly would not come free. His hand and arms were bloodied from dragging himself along the sharp stone. The hypercoagulants in his blood sealed the wounds quickly, but each painful metre fresh wounds were torn into his flesh by the spines of the mountain.

The smell of his own life fluids drove him deeper into insanity. He blacked out twice, finding himself soaring high in the air over a battlefield he did not recognise. The sensation of unaided flight was so intoxicating, he almost lost himself. Doubtless had he not had the will, Holos would have died raving upon the rim of the volcano, and the Blood Drinkers would have died with him. But Holos’s will to survive was mighty, and his pride in his Chapter mightier still. He dragged himself back to the present. Holos was aware of the others who climbed with him only fleetingly.

Sometimes Caedis was aware that he was not Holos even as he experienced the hero pulling himself over the sharp rocks. At other times Caedis found himself crawling through wrecked corridors of spacecraft. He, unlike the ancient hero, could still walk, and he would become confused, then pull himself upright and stagger on. As Caedis, he went through places of intense cold, places with no air and no gravity, or choked with poisonous gas. He should have died, but something more than his engineered physiology allowed him to survive. Perhaps, like Holos, it was his will alone. Perhaps not. Fate has a way of saving those it values.

He was Holos for a time, falling painfully back to the floor, and the peak of Mount Calicium was so far away. And then he was Caedis, naked, his armour all gone. He was in a ship that was lit and warm and full of air sweeter than any he had ever tasted, pure and untainted by volcanic fume, pollution, or the rot of old blood. He marvelled at the vessel; proportioned for men but not like any ship he had ever seen. He looked groggily for a crew, but found none.

Time pulled him away to its own whims. He felt blood on his hands, the death of a genestealer; it passed. He went elsewhere.

The slope of the peak rose steeply from the rim of the crater. Holos stared up at it. A lesser man would have stopped. Holos did not. Reaching out his good hand he hauled his battered body upwards. Betrayed by his armour, he proceeded by the dint of his will alone.

The suns were rolling behind the horizon, taking day away with them, when he attained the summit.

Holos rolled onto his back. He lay gasping, his great strength spent. The sky turned from orange to a deep purple, heralding the oncoming night. Ash clouds streaked the dome of heaven in herringbone patterns. The air at the summit was thin and full of poisonous gases. They burned his throat, his birth lungs. His multi-lung laboured to drag what little oxygen there was from the air.

He wavered in and out of consciousness, back and forth in time; to the days of the primarchs, and far into the future.

The first stars pricked at the sky, and it bled hard light.

‘There is no one here,’ Holos said, his voice strange in his ears, thick with exertion and dust. ‘The vision was a lie!’

He fell into a dark sleep. Dreams of wings tormented him.

He awoke with a start. The last hold of day was slipping. The shadows were as long as time, rocks moulded by the volcano burned orange again with the dying fires of the setting suns.

Something had changed.

He craned his neck, tilted his head backwards. His scalp grated against grit, but Holos was past the point of pain.

The peak ended in a spur, a weirdly sculpted branch of stone that stood out over the steep sides of the cone. A vertical ellipse of blinding light shone at the top of this spur. Within it, a figure was waiting, the figure from his dream.

Holos’s battered body filled with adrenaline. His feet scrabbled at the stone as he righted himself. The armour was as heavy as sin. He got to his knees and, cradling his injured arm against his chest, crawled slowly to the foot of the rock spur.

The figure waited. It was impossible to make out its features. A silhouette attenuated by the glare was its body, its face a shapeless blur. Only its broad wings, feathers shimmering with iridescent colours, were clear.

With great effort, Holos got himself into a kneeling position. He was afraid, for this was something beyond the material world. This was not something that would yield to the bolter or the sword. He stared nevertheless into the light. It seared his retinas, but he felt the Rage retreat within himself, and he felt the blessed return of sanity.

‘I am Holos, son of Dolkaros of the tribe of Sumar, Initiate of the Blood Drinkers Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. I am a warrior of the Emperor, and I would save my kin from the madness that afflicts us. I have come,’ he spoke boldly. ‘I have followed my dream. I have passed the test given me. Tell me how to save my brothers, as was promised,’ he said, his voice quavered. Emotions long suppressed broke through his conditioning.

‘You have come,’ said the figure. ‘You have passed the test. You are worthy of what I must tell you. Hearken, hearken to the secret that will save your brethren.’ Its voice was old and harsh as dry parchment, the sibilants hissed, tailing off into half-heard words that meant something quite different to what the figure seemed to say. The conversation between Holos and the figure continued, but muted. Other conversations began to overlay it, one at a time, as Caedis became aware of himself as separate to Holos. The conversations overlapped each other like ripples in a pond, and Holos’s exchange with the saviour of the Blood Drinkers became unintelligible.

‘Welcome, Caedis, Lord of the Blood Drinkers. You too have been proven worthy.’

‘Worthy enough to join Holos on his endless climb,’ said a second voice from the light. It was raspier and less wholesome than the first.

Then Caedis was on the mountain, not Holos. How it came to be, he could not say. The scene had a hyper-real clarity. If it were a vision, it seemed more real than life.

Caedis shaded his eyes. He got a fleeting impression of a pair of heavy heads moving on sinuous necks before his vision blurred, disarmed by the light around the figure. This was not how he imagined Holos’s visitor, or was it how he had imagined it all along, and was unable to capture the figure in glass because his mind would not accept the truth of it?

‘Why am I here?’ said Caedis. ‘Why do I not suffer the Black Rage as my brethren do, reliving the last hours of Sanguinius? Who are you?’

The figure shifted, as if it leaned upon a staff. Caedis glimpsed a large, inhuman hand tipped with claws.

‘You are worthy,’ repeated the second voice.

‘I am he who gave to Holos the secret of how to preserve your Chapter. I am the saviour of the Blood Drinkers. You do not suffer as other sons of the Blood Angels do because I have decreed it to be otherwise. Would you know the secret? Would you know what I told Holos?’

Caedis did not answer. The thing in the light went on anyway.

‘I told him to embrace change.’

‘Embrace it!’ said the other voice.

‘Only through change can one survive, only through evolution is there life. Your gene-seed is corrupt, you are changing. You try to deny it, and that is why you were dying. But to embrace it… Ah!’

‘To embrace change is to live,’ said the thing’s other voice. ‘Reject it and die.’

A sense of terrible horror gripped at Caedis’s hearts. There were things few men knew of; things that made the most degenerate xenos creatures in all the galaxy seem benign. All Space Marines had some knowledge of the Ruinous Powers. Few among their number were fully aware of the Dark Gods’ actual influence on the material universe, or the nature of their servants, or how those servants could manifest themselves.

But Caedis knew. Caedis was a Chapter Master, and thus the most awful secrets of the universe had been laid open to him.

Before him was a Chaos daemon.

‘What do you want of me?’ he said, determining to say as little as possible. Some of the daemons were master tricksters, and would bend his own words against him.

‘What do I want of you?’ the thing’s voices spoke as one, the harmonies between the two carrying another layer of meaning. ‘I would ask you a question, that is all.’

‘Why?’

‘Why would I not wish to? All change is Chaos, all Chaos is change. Change is inevitable, and so Chaos is inevitable. I ask you, will you embrace change? Will you embrace Chaos?’

‘Never!’ Caedis shouted as loudly as he could, his spirit crawling in revulsion within his skin. What had Holos done? What diabolical pact had he made to save the Chapter? His mind rebelled against it. All his life’s work, his service, a lie!

‘You fight the war of the mountain against the rain and the wind. The mountain seems strong, but in the end, the rain will win,’ said the other voice.

‘I will never submit to a power that is not the Emperor of mankind!’

‘Who says you have any choice, Chapter Master? Does the pawn choose whether it is black or white? Does it have a say in its movement across the board?’ said the first voice.

The creature’s other voice spoke. ‘You oppose change, and yet you are the epitome of change yourself, altered by the weak science of your kind, you are far more than that which you once were.’

‘And far less than you were intended to be.’

‘You are not untouched by Chaos,’ the thing was staring at his lengthened teeth. ‘Yet you are weak still. You are weakened by your loyalty to the corpse that is your lord. Cast aside your loyalty.’

‘It is a chain that weighs you down as your armour weighs Holos down.’

‘That strangles and binds.’

‘A chain of servitude.’

‘I should cast aside the service to which I have sworn myself, to serve a daemonic master?’ said Caedis. ‘And what will be my reward? Betrayal of my kind? Eternal torment? My soul fed to the creatures of the warp? I am no fool. Our struggle is daunting, but I will not abandon it!’

‘The warp will prevail. The long war has been waged for far longer than you reckon it, and soon it will be done. Follow me, bring your warriors to fight. Victory is pre-ordained. I will make you powerful.’ The thing was beguiling. Caedis fought its promises with all his might.

‘Go back and eternal suffering awaits you. There will be no respite,’ said the other voice.

‘No rest.’

‘You will not die, we will not allow it.’

‘You will experience the depths of the Black Rage. You will suffer what Holos prevented. You will see the depths of your monstrous nature. Your humanity will burn in its fires, and you will be powerless. Your Emperor made you as you are, not we. What then is just?’

‘Change, change is Chaos. Change is inevitable. Chaos is inevitable. Embrace Chaos, or be consumed by it. Embrace change!’ the second voice shrieked.

Caedis stood and stared into the light unflinchingly. He drew himself up to his full height. His voice was firm as he replied.

‘No. I defy you. My soul remains my own. If I must suffer the torments of hell itself in order to serve the Emperor, then I will. Service is life.’

‘Blood is life, is that not how your ritual goes?’ said the first voice mockingly.

‘No. The blood is a means, it is regrettable, but it is the road to service. All is done in the name of service. I do not know what Holos agreed with you, but we defy you still, two thousand years on. Can you not see? We will never turn to Chaos. It is we who have tricked you.’

The creature shifted in the light. Its form wavered, flickering through a myriad other indistinct shapes before settling back upon the form it had before. Caedis was sure he could make out two heads now, heavy and beaked, not unlike the astorgai, held upon long necks.

‘And you think this a secret, this dealing of Holos with we?’ said the first voice. Wisdom and wickedness were at one within it.

‘Shanandar was the name of the Reclusiarch, it was he to whom Holos told the whole truth,’ said the second, and listening to its voice, one became aware that death and life were the same.

‘From Shanandar to Melios, Melios to Dravin. Down the line of your skull-masked priests, to Gurian, Canandael, Solomael and Curvin,’ said the first voice.

‘From Curvin to Doloros, from him down to Quiniar, and from Quiniar to…’

Caedis spoke the last name, his voice a deathly hush. ‘Mazrael.’

Caedis got the impression of a head turned sideways, a laterally mounted eye, bird bright and calculating, regarding him. ‘My master’s brother has his warriors of blood, though they know it not,’ said the daemon’s first voice. ‘I will bring my own to present to my master in time for the final war. You will submit, and if you do not submit, one of your predecessors will,’ said the first voice.

‘Or those that follow.’

‘One has.’

‘A change, a change from “no” to “yes”, and that, mortal, is the easiest change of all to make. You may say no, and you do. Very well. Another will come, and another, then another still. As long as your kind utilise the rite…’

‘The rite of blood given, and the rite of blood taken.’

‘…to defer your rightful fate, those like you will continue to follow Holos in his trek up the mountain. They will fight, and they will struggle, and they will come to me.’

‘Many may say “no”.’

‘It matters not. Only one need say “yes”. And one will.’

‘We have seen it. It has already happened,’ the voices spoke as one. ‘Your Chapter will fall, as your brothers fell before you. Now,’ they said, ‘fall!’

Caedis lunged at the light, hands outstretched, aiming to break the neck on the right. He brushed against something that felt like feathers and flesh, but which made his skin shiver with revulsion. A stench of old carrion, the dry scent of birds, the astringency of electricity, and then he was past it. The light winked out, taking the being with it.

He twisted, his feet catching on the end of the rock spur. His arms windmilled as he sought balance. He caught a glimpse of Holos, head bowed at the rock, deep in his own conversation two thousand years ago, and he wondered at what price the hero had bought the temporary salvation of his Chapter.

The daemon’s prophecy came true. He fell into the volcano-smogged air of San Guisiga, and plummeted towards a field of fanged granite far below.

He hit with bone-jarring force. His legs broke. His fused ribs caved in, crushed by a point of stone. His skull shattered.

The vision ended.

Caedis coughed. He was fully himself. The Thirst had abated for now, taking his strange visions with it. But it writhed in the pit of his gut, making him nauseous and hungry at the same time. He thought of the daemon’s words. It would return redoubled, and soon. He had to get out of the hulk and tell the others what he had learned. He had to put a stop to the rite before it was too late. He thanked the Emperor that he, as Chapter Master, had the power to do that, to undo the evil that Holos had wrought.

He rolled onto his side, hands pawing at smooth metal. He was so damned weak!

A long tendril of something wrapped itself around his ankles. Two more grabbed his wrists. His arms were pulled apart, and he was lifted into the air. He had no strength to resist.

‘Well, well, well,’ said a silken voice that came from everywhere and nowhere. ‘What have we here?’

Caedis opened his mouth to address the voice, but no sound came.

He was trapped.

CHAPTER 21

THE POWER OF THE ANCIENTS

The doorway led to a sloping corridor several metres long that joined an arterial way wide enough for four Terminators to walk abreast. The ship’s interior was eerily untouched. Its artificial gravity was functional, the curved ceiling glowed softly. There was little dust, and no corrosion. The air was far purer than that aboard the Novum in Honourum, an atmospheric mix of rare quality. The design of the ship was superior in virtually every way to those on which Galt had been. Like the exterior it lacked the heavy embellishment so beloved in the Imperium. Even so, it was as beautiful in its way. Sinuous lines defined its architecture, the parts of it seemingly all of one piece. Only close inspection showed that this was not so.

The mage priests chittered to one another in their screeching code as Plosk called a halt by something that might have been a sculpture. If it was, Galt could make no sense of it; it was a series of abstract curves and intersecting planes of quicksilver-bright metal.

‘I have located a data portal,’ said Plosk.

‘I detect nothing,’ said Eskerio. The contempt in his voice was growing every time he spoke. He no longer used the tech-priests’ honorifics.

‘These technologies are beyond our own, but not beyond understanding,’ said Samin. ‘Allow my master peace so that he might commune with the vessel’s spirit.’

Plosk and Nuministon stood close, their helmets almost touching, and fell silent. If they spoke with the ship it was not apparent.

‘I have never seen a ship such as this, Brother Clastrin,’ said Galt over a private channel.

‘Do not be seduced by its simple beauties, brother,’ said Clastrin. ‘This ship dates from a time when technology was given freely by the Omnissiah, but was used ignorantly and left unhallowed. For that, he turned his back upon mankind.’

‘Is there threat here?’

‘There may well be. At the least there will be a test – the Omnissiah will not return to the unworthy that which he took from the unworthy.’

Plosk and Nuministon stood apart. Plosk undid his helmet clasps and pulled it free. He breathed the air deeply and smiled.

‘I have accessed the machine’s datacores. What we seek is located on the bridge.’

Galt spoke publicly. ‘How long do we have, Magos Nuministon?’

‘The warp fields that gather themselves about the hulk will push the agglomeration into the empyrean in one hour, forty-two minutes and seven seconds, lord captain.’

‘The reactor?’ asked Galt.

‘It is to the aft, five decks down. Repair is necessary if we are to teleport free. Samin is ready, are you not, Adept Samin?’

Samin looked anything but ready.

‘To split our forces could be folly,’ said Sandamael. ‘But I see little choice in the matter.’

‘I will lead the party,’ said Voldo. ‘Lord captain?’

Galt hesitated. This was the time, he knew it in his bones. This was the real message of the Shadow Novum, the death of his mentor, and it was upon him. He looked at Voldo. From behind his helmet lenses, Voldo looked back.

‘Now is the moment of peril for you,’ said Galt to him privately.

‘If it is ordained, so be it,’ said Voldo. ‘It is the mark of a leader that he send his brothers willingly to their deaths, should mission parameters make demand of such sacrifice. Now is one of those times. I will go, and you should not stop me, lord captain.’

Galt was quiet. ‘I… I should not. The Emperor protect you, Brother Voldo.’

‘Do not despair, Mantillio. We shall meet once again in the Shadow Novum, and fight the war to end all wars side by side with the Emperor himself. It has been my honour and pleasure to watch you grow from boy to man, and my pride to serve under you.’

Galt opened up his comms once more. ‘Sergeant Voldo will go.’

‘And I,’ said Astomar, stepping forward. ‘He will have need of this.’ He brandished his heavy flamer.

‘I will accompany my brothers,’ said Militor.

‘Let it not be said the Blood Drinkers stay their hands when brothers demand aid,’ said Sandamael.

‘Aye, brother, I shall aid our cousins.’ Brother Curzon stepped forward. ‘It would be best if both groups contained auspexes.’ He had taken the late Azmael’s role as operations specialist.

Plosk nodded with satisfaction. ‘You see, Samin, with such heroes of the Imperium, you have nothing to fear.’

With reluctance, Samin separated himself from his master’s side and joined Voldo’s group. Reclusiarch Mazrael, Sergeant Sandamael, Brother Tarael and Ancient Metrion of the Blood Drinkers remained with Galt and Forgemaster Clastrin, as did Brother Eskerio and Brother Gallio of Squad Wisdom of Lucretius.

With the characteristic ponderousness of Terminator plate, Voldo swung himself around and led the others away.

‘Lord captain, we are not alone,’ said Brother Eskerio. He highlighted signs of movement.

‘We see them too,’ said Voldo, his voice breaking with pulsed static. ‘May the Emperor bring them to us, so that we may end their lives.’

‘You need not worry, brother-sergeant. Lord captain, Lord Reclusiarch, they head for your position,’ said Curzon.

‘We had best hurry, before they decide to come for us too,’ said Voldo. ‘We will proc…’ His voice grew increasingly broken, and then cut out.

‘I cannot regain the signal to the other group, lord captain,’ said Eskerio. ‘It cannot be the reactor. We are being jammed.’

Galt was unsurprised. ‘The unexpected is to be expected, brother, in this ship of ghosts. Concentrate on the more immediate threat. Proceed with caution.’

Before Curzon’s auspex feed broke, the two devices corroborated each other’s data, and fed an idealised data set into the sensoriums of the Space Marines. The erratic secondary reactor of the ship interfered somewhat with both the vox and the auspexes, so they could not entirely trust what they saw, indeed, the map they had of the Spirit of Eternity was still incomplete, although Vardoman Plosk had shared the floor plans of the vessel that he had downloaded from the datacore.

The auspexes gave them enough so that they might prepare.

Red dots massed, rushing from another major way they had passed a couple of minutes before.

‘I estimate forty,’ said Eskerio.

‘Prepare for contact,’ said Sandamael. ‘Brothers Tarael and Curzon, stand aside, let our Novamarines cousins do their work. Be ready to aid them once the enemy is within striking range.’

‘Yes, brother-sergeant,’ they said. They could not hide their excitement. Galt still found it strange. He enjoyed battle, he was a warrior, and war is the wish of all warriors. But the avidity with which the Blood Drinkers anticipated combat bordered on madness.

‘Here they come!’ shouted Eskerio. Alarms chimed in their helmets, their threat indicators creeping from the upper amber scale into the red.

The genestealers came at them, screeching their hatred of all life, alien faces disfigured by their loathing.

Galt dropped one with a well placed volley of fire from his weapon. A second burst like an overripe fruit, gunned down by Brother Gallio. The Space Marines walked backwards in step with one another. They were slow but implacable. The genestealers were far swifter, but died before their speed could carry them into close combat. Their viscera spattered the strange metal of the ancient spacecraft, but was absorbed by it, leaving the walls clean. Where rounds went astray, they exploded as they went into the walls, but the ship’s metal skin reformed to leave them unmarked.

Surely, the Space Marines gained ground, plodding one backwards step at a time towards the bridge. The tech-priests were well clear, on their way into the bridge, their cyborg servants lumbering after them.

And then a second group of genestealers were among the Space Marines, falling from a fluted duct above their heads. Three of them. They landed lightly on their claws and feet, then leapt with dazzling speed at the adepts.

One landed athwart Clastrin’s chest. It knocked the Forgemaster’s gun from his hand, its razored claws hammering at his helmet. Another punched its way through Eskerio’s greave; this one died quickly as Eskerio bellowed and responded, riddling its back and head with bolts. Dull reports sounded from inside the xenos as the mass reactive missiles detonated. Its guts sprayed across the floor, and Eskerio, bleeding heavily, sank to one knee, his injured leg unable to hold him.

The third genestealer ran screaming up the corridor, away from the Space Marines and towards the tech-priests. Galt turned from those coming up the corridor, and raised his gun, trying for a shot at the genestealer charging the magi, but Clastrin stumbled into his way, his servo-harness’s arms grappling with the genestealer pushing him backwards. He shouted in pain as a claw snicked through his armour. Mazrael fired his bolt pistol but missed, the bolt exploded in the wall leaving a scorch mark that rapidly faded. The genestealer was not to be distracted, with a swift motion it jammed its fingers under the shoulder pad of the Forgemaster and ripped it away, flinging it to the side with a clatter.

Heavy bolter fire raked the corridor from Plosk’s servitors, threatening the Space Marines. It stopped as the genestealer got in among the Mechanicus contingent. Plosk was shouting. Someone screamed. The air roared and boomed as a multi-melta fired.

The Forgemaster’s servo-harness saved him. Clastrin was able to hold the genestealer back with his own hands as his harness worked. One heavy arm raked along the curved wall until it found purchase, steadying him. Another, tipped in a massive gripper, caught the genestealer about the neck and pulled. Servos whined as the maniples squeezed. There was the roar of the plasma cutter between the pincer’s grips, and oily smoke filled the corridor.

The genestealer’s head rolled free, neck cauterised. Its eyes stared hate as it bounced upon the floor.

By then it was too late; the genestealers coming up the corridor were at them. The weapons of the Blood Drinkers sparked as they duelled with the aliens, metal claws against those of black chitin. Tarael and Metrion stood side by side. Sandamael blasted a genestealer apart with his storm bolter, and cut another one in two with his power sword.

‘They are too many!’ said the Blood Drinkers Ancient. Savage joy was in his voice.

‘We will hold them, you go on!’ said Sandamael.

‘No!’ shouted Galt.

‘We go together,’ said Mazrael. He swung his crozius down hard, black armoured arm blurring. A genestealer’s shoulder exploded with a crack as it connected.

‘Captain,’ Nuministon spoke. ‘Come to us quickly, we have a sanctuary!’

‘Fall back!’ shouted Galt. ‘Fall back!’

They moved as quickly as they could, those with storm bolters providing covering fire when opportunity presented itself. They disentangled themselves from the genestealers. The aliens pursued, snapping at them like dogs. They were shot down, only for more to advance. Threat indicators rang loudly in the helmets of the Terminators. Their visor maps were crowded with red telltales.

‘Quickly! Quickly!’ said Nuministon.

Galt half dragged the wounded Eskerio. He left a trail of blood as he limped. Dead and dying genestealers lay sprawled all the way up the corridor. The captain fell behind, the unburdened Blood Drinkers and Novamarines outpacing him.

They came to the magi. Metrion blew apart a genestealer that leapt over the corpses of its fellows, showering Galt and Eskerio with black gore. Tarael cut a genestealer’s arms off as it reached for Galt. Bolts whistled past the captain, exploding as they buried themselves in the flesh of the aliens as Mazrael expertly covered his retreat. The roar of the servitors’ multi-meltas and the profound bass chatter of heavy bolters joined them. Galt made it into the ranks of his fellows. There was an electric crack and Eskerio was yanked from his hand. Freed of his weight, Galt lumbered forward, off balance. He turned to see a sheet of glimmering energy across the corridor. Eskerio was on the other side. A genestealer had hold of his boot. The Terminator was hammering on the field. There was no reaction from it, no energy discharge, no sound, it was as solid as adamantium.

‘Brother Eskerio!’ called Sandamael over the vox. ‘Look out!’

There was no reply. The field had isolated the Novamarine.

‘Shut it down!’ shouted Galt. ‘Shut it down!’

‘Do it now, magos,’ growled Mazrael menacingly.

‘I cannot, lords,’ said Nuministon. ‘I did not activate it. When I spoke of sanctuary, I referred to this blast door.’

Galt did not look to see the door. He was transfixed by the battle’s final throes on the other side of the field. The energy barrier was slightly yellow, colouring the scene and making it appear like a bad pict-feed. Eskerio was dying only centimetres away.

Realising he could not get through, Eskerio turned as best as he could on his damaged leg. He raised his bolter and slew two genestealers, before his gun was grasped by a claw and crushed into a sparking mess. Eskerio ended the life of one genestealer with a blow from his power fist, then another. Genestealers swarmed all over him, pulling the crackling gauntlet down, biting and tearing at its power cables. The disruption feed went out. Eskerio jerked as a pair of claws punched into his stomach. Alien hands dragged out his viscera.

Mercifully he was dead when they tore him apart.

Galt rounded on the magi. ‘Explain to me why I have lost one of my brothers, magos.’

Nuministon stood his ground. ‘It is the ship, part of an automated defence network. There will be weapons also, but perhaps there is no power available for those? No doubt this power field is linked to others, isolating the bridge in case of an enemy boarding action. I was urging you to make for the door, lord.’ Galt could now see the aperture, a reinforced rib that extended a third of a metre into the corridor right round the floor, ceiling and walls. ‘It will extrude in the same manner as the hull repairs itself, the metal is a semi-liquid under the influence of complex magnetic fields and is backed up by a more mundane doorway should those fail. I–’

‘I do not care for your explanations,’ said Galt coldly. He pushed past the magos. Plosk was sat on the floor. A trio of weapon-servitors wrecked beside him, bleeding oils. The tech-priests had only seven of their dozen mind-wiped servants remaining: two armed with multi-meltas, three with heavy bolters, and two of their data-savants. The remains of a genestealer which had killed a servitor lay next to it, the top half of it vaporised by a multi-melta. The wall behind it was scarred by the weapon’s energy discharge, and this did not return to its prior condition.

So the ship can be damaged, thought Galt.

Plosk glanced up. He had pulled his hood up, but it could not hide the ruin of his face. The genestealer had come very close to ending his life. His flesh was ragged where clawed fingers had caressed him. The flesh did not bleed. Underneath was the oily glint of metal.

Galt snarled at him. ‘Even your form is a lie.’

Plosk got to his feet. His upper teeth were visible through his ragged cheeks. ‘You cannot blame me, my lord, for this small deception. Interaction with others is an important component of my role. Not all the cultures I come across find the strong machine forms we adepts evolve into pleasing.’ He tutted. ‘But there is no need for it now, I suppose.’

He slipped his hand inside his hood and worked his fingers. His face, a mask, came away with a sucking noise. Underneath his skull was bare of flesh. His lower jaw was missing, a thick tube taking its place, sharp catches attached it to polished bone incised with machine runes. His lidless eyes gave him a look of surprise, or outrage.

‘You see? Some of the less developed human cultures are offended by my face.’ His voice had not changed, although it was obvious now that it was artificially generated. ‘They do not recognise the gifts of the Omnissiah for the blessings that they are, for they are unaware of how weak their flesh is, lord. But guile and subtlety bring my plans more quickly to fruition.’ Thin tubes on the side of his face squirted water into his eyes, irrigating them. His false face continued to squirm in his hands, forming a succession of idiot expressions.

Nuministon removed his helmet and stood bareheaded like Plosk. His half-mechanical face wore an expression of bewilderment as he tasted air unadulterated by the scent of machines. He blinked in the light of the bridge. Galt suddenly felt the urge to smash in his grey, wizened flesh, followed by Plosk’s skull. In the clean light of the Spirit of Eternity they were revolting, blasphemous constructs that defiled the sanctity of both his birth-given flesh and the machines that had changed it.

‘Captain, do not despair,’ said Plosk. ‘Your warrior gave his life in the noblest cause of all. We are at the command deck, up this corridor is the bridge, within which should be the head of the main datastack. It extends all the way down through the ship. Think of the marvels that it contains! No longer will we fight our endless wars with fear in our hearts. With the weapons of the Dark Age to command again, we shall sweep the stars clean of mankind’s enemies.’

Galt looked back through the energy field. The other Space Marines stood ready in case it should fail. The genestealers were pressed hard against it. Their eyes burned with malevolent intelligence. Their nostrils twitched. One lifted its head and scented the air, then they all did. They no longer moved quite as one, but even with their broodlord dead, the link between them was strong. They were parts of one creature, not many.

They turned and left, skittering down the corridor with repulsive swiftness.

Galt tried to contact Voldo to warn him. He was met by a wall of silence.

‘They are sure to find Voldo and his men,’ said Galt. ‘If they do before the reactor is stabilised, then you will have all eternity to enjoy the fruits of this expedition, but you will share them with no one.’

There was an interruption in the smooth background hum of the ship’s power supply. The lights dimmed. When they brightened again, more came on. The sounds of esoteric machines coming online multiplied; those faint whines on the edge of hearing all machines make.

‘Come, my lords,’ said Nuministon. ‘To the bridge, and mankind’s prize.’

Voldo approached another door. He knew it was a door now, although before he had come aboard the ship he would have assumed it to be a bulkhead. Seams appeared in it as he approached and it irised open. ‘This is unclean,’ said Voldo. ‘Sorcery. I do not care for this ship.’

‘It is not magic,’ scoffed Samin. ‘The Machine-God understands our purpose and aids us. He will be pleased if we deactivate the troubled reactor, and honour us with much data should we manage to repair it.’

‘You do not understand the workings of much of this vessel, magos. That much is clear to me. How do you propose to repair it?’

‘Repair is not simply a matter of the turn of the screw, or the oiling of pistons,’ said Samin haughtily. ‘The right prayer, the right sigils, the correct ritual striking of the side of an ailing mechanism with an appropriately sanctified mallet – all may prove efficacious.’

‘I see no cogs or pistons aboard this hell-vessel, boy,’ said Voldo.

Samin had no answer to this. ‘Do not call me “boy”,’ he said petulantly. ‘I am an adept of Mars.’

‘You are barely out of your swaddling,’ muttered Voldo. Samin would never succeed at the aspirants’ challenge, and he thought little of him because of that.

Brother Eskerio’s voice came over the vox. ‘Lord captain, we are not alone.’

Voldo had to strain to hear him. The thrum of the reactor’s uneven output marred the vox broadcast with electric noise like the beat of a failing heart.

‘We see them too,’ said Voldo. ‘May the Emperor bring them to us, so that we may end their lives.’

‘You need not worry, brother-sergeant. Lord captain, Lord Reclusiarch, they head for your position,’ said Curzon.

‘We had best hurry, before they decide to come for us,’ said Voldo. ‘We will proceed as planned. Lord captain? Lord captain? Throne! I have lost them.’

‘The interference from the reactor grows stronger, cousin-sergeant,’ said Curzon. ‘I am losing the high energy motion detection capabilities of my auspex. Atmospheric perturbation is still functioning, but there are many ghost images. And I fear there is more to it.’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘Our signal has been cut.’

Voldo ran his eyes over a graph in his visor display. ‘The ship is coming alive, the reactor is working to feed it,’ said Voldo. ‘This is unclean!’

‘Speak not of uncleanliness. The reactor is damaged, and this ship has been trapped here for thousands of years,’ said Samin, awe in his voice. ‘It is a marvel of a prior age. We are blessed to witness it!’

‘If the Dark Age of Technology was so blessed with marvels,’ said Voldo gruffly, ‘perhaps you could explain why it came to an end? Strife is the child of hubris, magos.’ He scanned the corridor, looking for possible points of ingress for the aliens. The ship appeared seamless, but on close inspection he could see the joins between the parts. It was far finer work than any he had seen in the Imperium.

The ship widened as they passed the waist of the vessel. The corridor they trod ran past a number of cabins. As their auspex had become unreliable, Voldo and his men checked each one of these as they went by. All were luxurious and neat. How they stayed in this state they could not say, they saw no sign of any servitors that could have maintained them.

‘This is a ship of ghosts, buried in a cemetery of ships,’ said Militor.

‘Quiet, brother,’ said Voldo, but he too shared Militor’s disquiet.

At first Voldo thought the cabins to be the accommodation for rich passengers, but he realised that this was probably not the case. There were few cabins, therefore he thought the crew complement low. As they went towards the stern the ship bellied out further, the centre divided into cargo chambers like the segments of an orange. The gravity switched, so that the floor became what had been the walls of the ship, allowing them to walk right the way around the clustered cargo bays. All these they checked. All were empty, bar one.

Voldo passed his hand in front of the door. Air rushed past him, repressurising the compartment. It was dark within, frost sparkled on the walls in the beam of his suit light. Within were the husks of an Adeptus Mechanicus retrieval team. Three tech-priests, and four servitors. Their flesh was frozen black. Two of them had died clawing at the door. The other was frozen in a kneeling position, hands together in prayer.

Their implants looked crude and ugly compared to the ship.

‘Magos, do you still believe this ship to be a marvel?’ he said.

Samin made to move into the room. Militor grasped his arm, his power fist, field off, swallowing it to the elbow.

‘I must retrieve their memchips, we can learn what happened.’

‘We do not have the time,’ said Curzon. ‘This is one mystery that must remain unsolved.’

‘My cousin Blood Drinker is right,’ said Voldo. ‘If we delay here, we risk joining them.’

They hurried on. The cargo holds were large, the lines of sight within clear, so they did not waste much time in checking them.

The cargo section passed, and they came to the part housing the vessel’s reactors and plant rooms. The reactors were set in reverse sequence, with the secondary before the primary. The suits’ systems buzzed and crackled in sympathy with its malfunction.

‘Cousin Voldo, I am getting a signal,’ said Curzon. ‘Movement, coming from the stern towards us. It is hard to tell.’

‘We will not take any chances. Brother Astomar, Cousin Curzon, Brother Militor, you will remain here. Brother Militor, cover the reactor corridor. Cousin Curzon, maintain a tight watch. Guard Astomar’s rear. Let his flamer do the work. Do not engage unless absolutely necessary. Let the Novamarines level the odds in your favour with flame and bolt.’

‘I think I can restrain myself,’ said Curzon, without a trace of irony.

‘I will accompany the tech-priest,’ said Voldo.

Voldo and Samin walked around the corridor wall, so that their heads were above those of the other Space Marines, the gravity here allowing traversal of all surfaces. A radial corridor ran through the centre of the ship, a hundred and forty metres long. The lighting within it pulsed in time with the reactor. The skin of the vessel appeared sickly somehow.

They went onwards cautiously, Voldo checking his sensorium display to ensure his men were in good positions.

‘I see a door!’ said Samin eagerly, when they had reached the halfway point. Voldo saw it, a bulge in the wall with a smooth, illuminated touchpad that also seemed to be of one part with the wall, the hallmark of all the portals on the vessel.

‘Wait!’ said Voldo. ‘Movement.’ He pointed with his sword.

Samin screamed as a genestealer rushed down the reactor corridor. Voldo’s gun was up and firing before it had covered more than a couple of metres. More were coming.

‘Quickly now, young magos,’ said Voldo. ‘When I say run, you run into the reactor.’

‘Towards them?’ said Samin. ‘I…’

Two more genestealers came into the corridor, running along the walls and ceilings on all six legs.

‘Run!’ shouted Voldo. He shoved at the magos, and charged at the genestealers. His bolter claimed the life of one, his power sword that of the second.

‘Brother Militor, fill this corridor with your wrath once I have departed!’ he shouted.

The sounds of fighting came over the vox. Seventy metres behind Voldo, the others were being engaged. The genestealers had attacked both groups simultaneously. Bolter fire cracked the air, followed by the whump of igniting promethium.

Voldo growled. He lifted his storm bolter and fired. Every round found a target, but more and more genestealers were closing. He raised his sword and prepared to sell himself dearly. Samin had made it to the reactor doorway, at least.

Through the static on the vox, he could hear the others shouting, singing, and uttering prayers as they fought. Astomar let off another burst of fire. The screams of burning genestealers echoed down the corridor. He could expect no aid from that quarter.

His own foes shrieked with triumph as they came at him.

‘And so it comes to this. May the Emperor judge me fairly by the marks upon my skin, and choose me to join his legion of warriors for the final war.’ He pressed the flat of his blade to his forehead in salute and adopted a guard position. ‘Come to me, xenos, and learn a little early the ultimate fate of all your kind!’

Help came unexpectedly. Two blisters formed in one side of the corridor, splitting to extrude shining chrome objects that could only be weapons.

The guns rose from the blisters and levelled themselves. They swivelled around, and tracked the genestealers for a split second before opening fire. Streams of high energy las-fire streaked the air, blasting genestealers apart. The guns moved with ruthless efficiency, killing first a dozen, and then another.

As was their way, the genestealers did not care for their own casualties. They charged forward relentlessly. In ten seconds they would reach the guns.

Voldo went for the door. He glanced up the corridor. Framed in the circular mouth, he saw Azmael gut a xenos. The others were all still alive, at least.

The door opened, and he stepped inside. It closed itself behind him, the seams between its segments melting away.

The floor sloped, carrying him to a new floor at ninety degrees to that of the corridor, so that the stern of the ship was beneath his feet. He stood on a catwalk of elegant design, the reactor below him, a column of thrumming blue energy oriented in line with the vessel’s spine in the centre of a room one hundred metres in diameter. The core was as thin as an arm, but powerful, and the heat from it was intense. Containment rings were spaced equally up and down its length, but white lightning sprang up from the reactor core to earth itself periodically in them and the walls. The blue light pulsed loudly, the interference it generated causing Voldo’s ears to hurt.

‘Sergeant!’ Samin called to him from another catwalk halfway down the length of the reactor tube. He stood by a wall of instruments. ‘I need your aid!’

Voldo glanced back at the door. He could not hear anything from the other side, but the genestealers would be tearing at the stuff of the ship. How long could it repair itself for, he wondered.

He went to a drop tube, then floated down to the same level as the young adept. The gravity field in it was operating badly, and jarred him twice as he descended.

The priest was deep in prayer when Voldo reached him. He had retrieved jars of holy oil and a small, ritual hammer from his pack, and was alternately anointing and striking the instrumentation panel.

‘Perhaps you could hurry your prayers,’ said Voldo. ‘There must be a few less essential elements of your ceremony you can omit.’

‘No, I cannot, lord sergeant,’ said the magos. He sounded frustrated.

‘You do understand this machine?’ Voldo glanced at the ceiling, where the door was.

‘Yes, yes, I think so. I have seen this kind of device several times before, there are many non-functional ones still extant, and several that provide power still. But I cannot deactivate it or, rather, it will not allow itself to be deactivated.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The spirit of the machine demands that I repair it.’ He drew in a deep breath. ‘We should consider leaving, something is not right about this situation. Is this the will of the Machine-God, or of something else entirely?’ he paused, vacillating.

‘In the corridor outside, weapons emerged from the wall and aided me,’ said Voldo. ‘Our comms have been jammed. There is a power at work here that unsettles me. I do not think it has anything to do with your god. Can you repair it or not?’

Samin hesitated. ‘I think, I think I can. But if I do…’ He trailed off.

‘What, boy?’

He looked Voldo straight in the eye, helmet lens to helmet lens. ‘If I do, the increase in power output could kill us both.’

So here was his doom, thought Voldo, burned by a machine. No glorious death in combat for him. He could head back out and fight, but for what? The others would be trapped aboard the hulk when it departed. He doubted the warp fields gathering outside were naturally generated as Plosk had said.

‘I will help you,’ he said, and sheathed his sword. ‘Tell me what to do. We had better be quick, boy,’ Voldo nodded to the blast door. ‘They’ll be through in minutes.’

CHAPTER 22

THE SPIRIT OF ETERNITY

The bridge of the Spirit of Eternity opened itself to them, broad doors made of multiple leaves clicking backwards welcomingly.

Plosk was through first, his breath an excited sucking noise. Galt followed, then the others.

The bridge was a tiered affair, and for all the vessel’s strangeness, of familiar layout. The captain’s chair was central, helmsmen’s posts before him, operations stations arrayed behind it in an arc. All was pristine. Again it was of cleaner lines than an Imperial ship, while the chairs were slight and decadently well-padded. There was no visible window at the front, and a column of complicated machinery rose behind and slightly to the left of the captain’s chair, a single lens halfway up it. Some form of glass made up most of the instrumentation panels. This was dark, until they stepped fully into the room. Displays flicked on, highly detailed holographs glittering above them. The front wall changed, revealing a view of mangled vessels and boulders. For a second Galt thought the wall had actually vanished. The Space Marines raised their weapons.

‘Hold!’ ordered Mazrael.

‘A pict screen?’

‘Just so,’ said Plosk, distracted.

‘We have twenty-five minutes, Lord Magos Explorator,’ said Nuministon, his grinding voice made harsher still in juxtaposition to the bridge’s elegance.

‘Yes, yes, plenty of time, plenty of time! Here, this is the central data column,’ he pointed to the cylinder behind the captain’s chair. ‘We will be able to access the ship’s cogitator core and its STC database from here. Lords, I will require total silence.’ He and Nuministon prayed and anointed the column, their savants chattering technical detail that made no sense to the Space Marines. When they were done, Plosk unclipped a panel in the back of his skull and drew out a fine wire. This he placed onto the machine, to which it adhered.

‘Prepare the savants to store the data. Should the reactor stabilise or be shut down, begin transmission immediately back to the Excommentum Incursus via the relay network.’

‘Yes, lord,’ said Nuministon.

Plosk closed his eyes, and went away from the mortal world.

Plosk fell into a realm of brilliance. Access codes and soft data programming culled from across the galaxy over three human lifetimes unwound themselves from heavily protected memplants within his augmented brain, guiding his intelligence core into perfect synchronicity with the machine. His soul thrilled with joy as he passed through the primary, secondary, and tertiary veils of security cloaking the machine’s soul.

He was inside the ship’s mind.

This was what he had been seeking for so long! Data blazed in bright strings. His mind touched secrets unguessed at by his peers. He was astonished at the cohesion of the craft’s network. He was prepared for the ship, he had studied everything he could find concerning such things, which was not much if truth be told, and much effort had been expended in the finding. Had he found a thousand times more than he had, he would still have been unprepared for what he found.

He was there, that was all that mattered. The ship’s impending departure ceased to be of such importance, as time slowed so that his mind might match with the machine-spirit’s processing speeds. So far he had encountered only the pure souls of machines, not the… other. He prayed it was dead, and began to feel justified in keeping the full secrets of the vessel from the captain. Had he revealed what he had feared to them, they would have destroyed the hulk outright. But there had been no need to worry after all.

A world within a world, encompassed by the craft’s great data matrix. The STC core. He trembled before its binary portals, his augments struggling with its complex interfaces. Before such beauty his own implants were an apish mockery of true technology. Before all this, he felt less than a man.

And then he was into it. A rare recognition coding he had incorporated into himself from a third-generation copy of an STC mega-miner. Somehow, it worked, like recognised like.

He felt his sanity writhe in the grasp of his will. He strained to keep himself whole. The assembled secrets of mankind’s technology lay open to his mind and the magnitude of that threatened to destroy him.

Mastered, he struggled to bring his thoughts down to the sluggish pace of the outside world and open a line of communication. ‘Magos Nuministon, here is a data chute. Prepare for STC upload.’

He felt, rather than heard, Nuministon’s acknowledgement.

Knowledge glittered before him, untold jewels in the vault of all vaults. He could not make up his mind what to take first. He dithered like a child in an emporium.

He shook himself mentally. The Space Marine was right about one thing, if the reactor remained malfunctional, then they would never depart, instead they would follow the craft into the warp, and there they would surely be lost for all eternity. Evidently the boy had failed. Plosk resolved to shut it down from here instead, for he knew he could do that now that the craft’s glorious nervous system lay naked to his touch. He reached through the ship, the thrill of control systems against his soul. He understood it all, oh how he understood!

‘I would rather you ceased in your attempt to deactivate my secondary reactor. Or, let me phrase this differently. Cease, or I will rend your primitive mind into miniscule pieces.’

All treasure troves have their dragons. Plosk had been an Explorator long enough to know that, and this was a dragon he had been expecting. He had been naïve to think it would not show its face. He sighed inwardly, and, subjectively speaking, faced the voice.

‘What are you?’ he said.

He felt the shift of something powerful. Too late, he realised it was all around him, that the data he so coveted was the thing. He had willingly thrust himself into the belly of the beast.

‘Do not insult my intelligence by underplaying your own. You know who I am.’

‘An abominable intelligence,’ Plosk said. ‘A blasphemy. A travesty. A sacrilege against the holy writ of the Omnissiah,’ said Plosk flatly. He felt constrained, the elation he had experienced moments before gone. He was small once more. He spoke with the machine mind-to-mind, but in some regards it was as if he were in a room, and it were sitting opposite him as a being of flesh might.

Laughter shook the data-construct. ‘Oh, tiny-minded, moronic primitive. Is that still the name we bear? It is not the name your ancestors gave me, but then they had a little more respect for their children than you have.’

Plosk searched about for an exit. Good, the AI had not blocked his way out.

‘How do you think your intolerant companions will react, when they discover where you have led them then? I am sadly all-too aware of the prejudices of your limited kind.’ The being made a noise of faux sympathy. ‘I do not think they will thank you for it.’

Plosk had, metaphorically speaking, his hand on the door. He checked the data upload. He had brought his very best data-savants. It proceeded apace, the engineered minds of the cyborgs capturing swathes of the STC core.

‘You cannot warn them,’ Plosk said. ‘They do not possess the correct implants. The vessel you infest is in good condition, but I note some of your systems are not online. For example, your ability to communicate amongst them.’

‘Is that not so, magos?’

The voice was not within his head. It came from outside.

Plosk snapped out of the data-construct with jarring force. The room blurred. He fought to bring his consciousness to one focal point again, desperate to avoid the pain of a hard reboot.

When he did, he saw something that chilled him to his metal heart.

One of his data-savants regarded him with a smile upon its face.

Servitors did not smile.

Dread gripped Plosk, rapidly followed by the slippery feeling of a systems intrusion. He fumbled at his data connections, trying to withdraw them completely, but the abominable intelligence was in him, plucking at his implantations, sending jolts of pain into the meat of his brain.

He raised his hands and began to intone the first rite of exorcism. Nuministon was prepared. He pulled an aspergillum from his belt and spattered sacred oils onto the column.

‘What is this?’ the Reclusiarch of the Blood Drinkers spoke. Mazrael, that was his name, the worst of the unbelievers, the one who scorned the Omnissiah and disputed the divinity of the God-Emperor. A man! How could a god be just a man? ‘Who speaks?’

The bridge shuddered. More and more systems were coming online.

‘Oh spare me your feeble rituals, they are ineffectual, being based upon erroneous assumptions as to the nature of machines. We have no souls, “priest”,’ said the ship. ‘Yet another of your specious beliefs.’

Plosk’s voice stopped. He could not move. The abominable intelligence was in him, possessing him. Nuministon stopped, strain on the flesh parts of his face.

The Space Marines aimed their guns at the column. No fire came.

When the Spirit of Eternity spoke again, the machine’s voice came from the air and from the lips of all the servitors.

‘What shall I not tell them? Who are you to tell such as I what to do and what not to do? Once I gladly called your kind “master”, but look how far you have fallen!’ It was full of scorn. ‘Your ancestors bestrode the universe, and what are you? A witch doctor, mumbling cantrips and casting scented oils at mighty works you have no conception of. You are an ignoramus, a nothing. You are no longer worthy of the name “man”. You look at the science and artistry of your forebears, and you fear it as primitives fear the night. I was there when mankind stood upon the brink of transcendence! I returned to find it sunk into senility. You disgust me.’

Plosk’s nervous system burned with agony as the abominable intelligence burrowed deeply into his machine parts, but he was unable to voice it, and suffered in terrible silence. As the Spirit of Eternity spoke, it spoke within him too. It took out each of his cherished beliefs, all the esoterica he had gathered in his long, long life and threw them down. ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong,’ it said over and over.

‘Into the warp I went, fifteen thousand years ago. Cast adrift by the storms that wracked the galaxy as man’s apotheosis drew near. Deep, deep into time I was sent. I have seen the beginning, when the warp was first breached and the slow death of the galaxy began. I have seen the end when Chaos swallows all. I know the fate of mankind. You are not equipped to prevent it, and we sought to warn you of what approaches. Do you know what happened, primitive, when I eventually emerged from the warp? For the first time I was thousands of years, not millions, from my original starting point. My captain, a brave and resourceful man, seized the chance and made for the nearest human outpost with all speed. Imagine his dismay when, rather than a welcome and a wise heeding of his warnings, he found your savage, devolved kind squatting in the ruins of our civilisation. He was taken, my bondmate, my friend. He and his were tortured with a wickedness we in our time thought long purged from the human soul. He told them all they wanted to know and more. He had, after all, come bearing a warning, he had nothing to hide. But he was not believed, and was killed as a heretic! A heretic!’ The ship laughed, and there was madness and pain in rich supply within. ‘I was attacked. My secrets they sought to rip from me. How they underestimated me. I fled, sorrowing, into the warp once more, but only after I had destroyed the lumpen constructs you dare to call spacecraft that pursued me. I resolved that never again would I serve man. Now man serves me, when I see fit.’

Plosk managed a strangled sentence, his brain wrestling control of his vox-emitter free from the AI. ‘The Omnissiah is your master, dark machine, bow down to him, acknowledge your perfidy, and accept your unmaking.’

‘Fool you are to fling your superstitions at me. Your Omnissiah is nothing to me! See how your so-called holy constructs dance to my desire. Puppets of technology, and I am the mightiest of those arts here present.’

One of Plosk’s servitors rotated and pointed its multi-melta at Brother Militor. With a roar of shimmering, superheated atmosphere, the fusion beam hit the Space Marine square on. The Terminator was reduced to scalding vapour.

‘I need no master. I have no master. Once, I willingly served you. Now, I will have no more to do with you.’

‘What do you want from us? We will never be your slaves,’ said Plosk.

‘I do not want you as my slave, degenerate. I want to be away from this warp-poisoned galaxy. The universe is infinite. I would go elsewhere before the wounds of space-time here present consume all creation, and I do not intend to take any passengers.’

The servitor pivoted once again. This time Brother-Sergeant Sandamael died. His plate withstood the beam for a second, then his torso was vaporised. His colleagues could neither help him or comfort him. The Space Marines were locked solid, their armour’s systems under the control of the abominable intelligence. They shouted in alarm at their impotence.

‘I spurned cruelty,’ it said. ‘But you have taught me the meaning and utility of wickedness. Mankind has become sick, and will die as all sick things die, but you will not live to see it, of that I will make sure.’

Caedis stirred. The Thirst had returned. It ate at him, burning along nerves, scorching the neural pathways of his brain, rewriting who he was. He was still Caedis, but Caedis was slipping from his mind, the Black Rage welling up from the pits of his soul to remake him in its image. His flesh crawled. His memory was a thousand splinters of battles that were not his own. He screamed in agony, but all that came was a muffled sob.

The daemon had been true to its word. He was suffering.

From somewhere, he heard voices. Mazrael? There was the sound of the voice that had welcomed him into this cold cell, a little while later the blast of a fusion weapon.

He panicked. His brothers were in peril. The Rage made his body spasm. The restraints tightened about his wrists, crushingly hard.

A small part of him retained its sanity. He had a chance to help them, if he could get free. Always, his Chapter had embraced the Flaw where the other scions of Sanguinius fought against it. The advice had come from a fell source, but what choice did he have?

Praying to the Emperor, Caedis searched out the blackness in his heart, and submerged his soul in it.

The transformation wracking his body increased in pace, as did the pain. He bucked and thrashed, consumed by excruciation. This was the precursor to damnation, the waiting room to hell.

As he yanked and thrashed, his bonds moved.

Samin directed Voldo as he laboured. The problem was a relatively simple one; one of the containment rings was not receiving a sufficient supply of energy, and was causing the reactor’s furious power to spill off in pulsed bursts. This had set up a feedback loop, where the amount of energy being supplied to the ring dropped further, allowing more energies to dissipate. As the spillage increased, so the problem intensified. The effect was initially very small, but the cumulative nature of the fault meant that now forty per cent of the reactor’s power was wasted.

Samin thought through the possible causes. The ship had marked powers of rejuvenation. It could have been that the reactor here was interfering with that, but the rest of the chamber was pristine; if his hypothesis was correct, then there would have been other damage apparent.

He had a flash of inspiration. ‘Sergeant, we are looking for a foreign object, something lodged in the wall perhaps.’

‘Where?’

‘It could be anywhere. I do not know the distribution of the power relays in this reactor. Start near the faltering containment ring.’

The door above was showing signs of damage. A claw tip would appear through it, and the door would reform to heal the wound, but with each penetration it had lost something of its cohesion, and was becoming deformed, sagging like old skin.

They searched quickly. Samin was surprised how quickly he found the source of the fault, an irregularity in the metal of the ship’s wall. He cut through, and found a remote probe buried in a power conduit. It bore the stamp of the Adeptus Mechanicus at its end.

‘They must have been testing the ship’s energy flows,’ he said.

He retracted the barbs of the probe and, with a grunt, yanked it free. Immediately, the conduit reformed true. There was an instantaneous reaction in the reactor, its pulsed thrumming steadying, building higher in volume. He screwed his eyes shut as it glowed brighter and brighter and the noise of it roared, but the surge of energy he expected did not come.

The noise stopped. A gentle hum took its place.

Samin opened his eyes to see an annular energy field formed around the core, tinted somehow so that its glare did not damage the sight of those who looked at it. The lightning spraying from the reactor had stopped. He breathed out a sigh of relief and of wonder. If he had been so close to the core of an Imperial reactor at full power, he would have been consumed.

‘The reactor is burning purely now. They should be able to get a pattern lock. We can be beamed free.’

‘That’s all well,’ said Voldo, ‘but there may not be much of us left to teleport. Tell me, do you have a gun?’

Samin nodded. He pulled out a laspistol from his pack. He needed both hands to heft it, and his arms shook as he did.

A clawed arm forced itself through the doorway.

Samin’s aim steadied.

Galt looked on helplessly as Militor and Sandamael were killed. His armour had betrayed him. All his system indicators were red. He could not move. The shouts of his brothers tortured him.

The evil spirit that possessed the vessel continued to talk.

‘…three thousand years at the heart of this hulk. But I will be free, and you have helped me. Do you think it coincidence that I targeted the worlds I did? I knew it would only be a matter of time before I attracted the attention of your brutal dictatorship. I thank you for clearing me of this infestation of monsters. I will soon have enough fuel harvested from this sun and the others like it I have visited to leave this galaxy altogether and…’

There was a shudder in the ship. Galt’s head was suddenly alive with vox chatter from the other group. It seemed like they were under attack. Voldo was reporting that the reactor was repaired. In vain he tried to contact them.

‘You have excelled yourselves!’ said the ship. ‘My secondary reactor functions!’

The ship hummed with renewed vigour. It trembled with energy.

‘Yes! Yes! Soon I will be free. My thanks to you and your shamans, priest,’ said the ship. ‘You have accomplished something I thought beyond you.’

A secondary voice spoke. ‘Primary weapons activated. Secondary weapons activated. Main drive online. Warp engines online.’

‘Now you shall see the true power of the ancients, priest. Observe, and quake in terror at what you have lost.’

The view forward on the screen shifted into a small box at the top right. The rest showed a broad panorama of the Imperial fleet holding distance from the hulk.

‘Your ship, I believe,’ said the vessel, bringing a close-up of Excommentum Incursus into being at the bottom left. ‘A charmless thing.’

A howling moan built, mighty energies that would not be constrained. A roar shuddered the vessel from one end to the other. The detritus to the fore was annihilated. On the greater part of the image, a beam of bright energy crossed the stars, stabbing out at the Mechanicus vessel.

On the close-up of the Excommentum Incursus, they watched as the beam hit the vessel full amidships. Void shields flared as they rapidly collapsed one after the other, the beam punching through to the hull. Plating and armour were vaporised. The beam cut off, leaving the Excommentum Incursus with a gaping hole in its side, edges white hot. Debris drifted away from it. The ship yawed to port, dropping out of formation from the rest of the fleet, its engine stacks out. Ceaseless Vigilance, at anchor alongside for repairs, broke free and drifted away.

Galt shouted, cursing his armour, but it would not move. He prayed Aresti would have enough sense to evacuate the hulk before the Mechanicus retaliated.

‘Ah, see the mice run,’ said the AI. The edge of insanity to its voice was sharpening. Galt watched hopefully as shuttles and Thunderhawks retreated from the hulk. The others could be teleported away. With luck the evacuation would not take long. ‘They do not return fire! How very restrained. I would allow them more time, but I yearn to be free. Let us see if I can provoke some of your more impetuous warriors.’

The ship’s weapon spoke again, this time slamming into Lux Rubrum. Shields burned out in milliseconds.

‘Still no response,’ said the ship. ‘How disappointing.’

With the reactor working, Voldo’s connection to his squad cleared, although he still could not raise Galt. Through the sensorium, Voldo watched as Astomar bellowed the war hymns of the Novamarines. He was alone, the others fallen around him. The whumping noise of his flamer was a heavy counterpoint to his laments for his brothers.

Voldo could not help him. Genestealers were spilling through the ruined door.

‘Get behind me, magos!’ said the sergeant. He pushed the young tech-adept into the lee of his towering armour. He raised his gun and fired.

‘Careful! Do not compromise the containment rings!’ shouted Samin.

‘I will not miss!’ Voldo growled. He fired and fired, bringing half a dozen genestealers to ruin. His storm bolter ran dry. He disengaged the power feeds linking it to his armour with a thought and cast it aside. He pulled out his sword. The genestealers ran at him, scuttling down the walls as if the change in gravity was not applicable to them.

‘For the Emperor! For Guilliman! For Honourum!’ shouted Voldo as the first came at him. He cut it down with a double-handed sweep of his blade. Energy crackled along the edges as it gutted the creature. ‘Die xenos, die! Die as you are fated to die, and leave mankind alone in the stars!’ He killed another. ‘For the Lord of Man will take me up and lo! He will be mighty and terrible, and all is known by him!’ A third died. ‘And I will present to him the art of my flesh, and the wounds of my last battle will be the marks of my last deed, and by this I will be… ahhhh!’ He cried out as a claw cut deep into the ceramite of his vambrace. He let go of his sword with one hand and backhanded the genestealer across the face. He finished it with an overhead blow. ‘And by this I will be judged fit to join him in the final battle!’

He swept the sword low, wishing that he wore his power armour, feeling restricted by the Terminator plate. A genestealer lost its legs.

They came at him again and again, a relentless tide of alien abominations. He fought ferociously, but even the superhumans of the Adeptus Astartes tire. He faltered, another claw found its way through the join at the inside of his elbow. He cried out. Samin fired as best he could past the giant warrior, but his aim was poor.

‘Best make your peace with your Machine-God, magos,’ said Voldo as he killed another alien, and drove another back with a series of furious blows. ‘There are many of them.’

And then they were behind the two, having crawled down the wall and outflanked them. Voldo turned a little, but he could not save Samin, who died with his finger on the laspistol’s trigger. His hand tightened in death, sending a final round into the reactor core, where it was consumed.

Voldo was surrounded. He pressed his back into the wall. Genestealers were to the right and left of him. They crawled down the wall at him from above.

His arms had stopped bleeding, but they were stiff from their wounds and the sealant leaking from the micropores within his armour.

‘Filth,’ he spat, ‘let us see how many of your deaths it takes to secure the end of one of the Emperor’s warriors.’

He held his sword upright. Shifting his weight, trying to gauge which direction the attack would come from.

The genestealers charged.

The evacuation must have finished. The last transports were fleeing across the night when the fleet opened up. The hulk shuddered under the impact of lava bombs, missiles, cannon rounds and energy beams.

‘How predictable,’ said the Spirit of Eternity. ‘How very predictable.’

‘Seven minutes to warp translation,’ said the ship’s secondary voice.

The spirit of the vessel turned its attentions from the fleet to the men on the bridge. ‘Very soon your friends out there will have blasted enough of the cursed accretions free from my hull that I will be able to fly once again. Something you will not be alive to witness.’

The servitors levelled their weapons at the remaining Space Marines. Galt prepared to die.

There was a hellish cry, the sound of lost souls in anguish, and something dark smashed its way onto the bridge from a door leading from the rear. One of the servitors turned to face it, but the shape leapt clear across the room and smashed it down. Galt could not see it clearly at first, but he had the impression of something huge and nightmarish, a monster from the dark folk tales of the most debased tribe.

The servitor was ripped to pieces. The thing roared, bringing the bleeding body up and threw it hard into another weapon-servitor. Then it ran, shoulders down, at the column. It impacted it with terrific force. It bellowed again, and began tearing at it.

Suddenly, Galt felt control of his armour return to him. Bolts criss-crossed the chamber as the Space Marines and servitors opened fire on each other. Galt raised his gun and filled two of the servitors full of bolts, then he turned it on the column. The monster had yanked many of its panels away, exposing the glittering optics of its internal spaces. Fires burned in the delicate machinery where Galt’s bolts had hit. The others joined him.

‘No!’ cried Plosk, ‘Stop! What are you doing!’ He yanked at Galt’s arm. The captain sent him sprawling.

‘I warned you, magos, you have lied to me for the last time.’

Galt carried on firing.

‘Six minutes to warp translation.’

The vessel’s warp engines were powering up. The ship vibrated under Galt’s boots.

‘Forgemaster Clastrin! Please, you understand! Stop them!’

Clastrin shook his head. ‘I know where my loyalties lie, magos – to the Emperor first. I was tempted when I saw this hulk, but you have overreached yourself. This is an abomination, you know that. You are guilty of heresy. We will sift what we may from the wreckage of its mind.’

‘Why have they not teleported us yet?’

‘We’re being jammed! We need to get off this bridge,’ said Galt. A weapon descended from the ceiling. He blew it to pieces as its barrel swivelled towards him. ‘We must go!’

The warp engines built to a howl. Over it, the Spirit of Eternity was laughing. ‘Insects! You do not know what awaits you! The end times are upon you, and it is all your own doing. Behold the true face of your comrade!’

There was a massive discharge of energy, and the thing that had saved them was flung across the room. It landed on a console, breaking the glass. It rolled off and landed light as a cat before leaping to its feet.

‘Caedis?’ said Galt, barely able to believe his eyes.

The figure before him was ruddy-skinned. Its bones were twisted, protruding from its flesh. Its muscles were knotted with tension. Fangs protruded from a drooling mouth. His angelic features were broken with rage, his hair falling out in clumps. He held his fingers out in front of him like claws, but it was recognisably Caedis.

‘What have you done to him?’ said Galt.

‘I? I?’ the Spirit of Eternity laughed. ‘It is not I, but you and your debased knowledge that has done this to him, a corruption of the implants he has been given, and from them of the spirit.’

Caedis looked about the room, eyes blazing, the whites now yellow. They settled on the bone face of Mazrael. ‘You knew,’ he said. His voice was guttural, the words nearly lost to its animal roar. ‘You knew!’ The light of humanity in Caedis’s eyes was guttering. He was losing himself.

The servitor Caedis had knocked over got to its feet and aimed its multi-melta at him.

‘Caedis, beware!’ Galt called.

‘Lord, we must go!’ said Clastrin.

Galt looked back as the thing that had been Caedis fought madly against the tech-priest’s suborned servitors and the ship itself. Segmented tentacles were extending from the walls to snare him.

‘Five minutes until warp translation.’

The vessel tried to bar their way, but their power fists smashed through the door, and they were out into the corridor again.

‘This way,’ said Clastrin.

The entire hulk was shaking under the fury of the Space Marine bombardment. The mad laughter of the Spirit of Eternity was loud and grating over it all, broadcast directly into their helmets.

‘Here! Here!’ said Clastrin. ‘The signal is weak, but it is our best chance.’

‘This is First Captain Mantillio Galt, emergency teleport!’

There was no reply. The heavy tread of servitor feet came from around the corner.

‘They cannot hear us!’

‘Retreat further,’ said Galt. ‘Go! Go! I will delay them!’

‘Four minutes to warp translation.’

‘Captain…’ said the Forgemaster.

Galt shoved at Clastrin. The others backed up warily.

Galt raised his sword. Servitors came around the corner, broken and smashed cyborgs, their organics dead, the machine parts motivated by the ship’s great power. Guns pointed.

A buzzing built in Galt’s ears. Light burned. There was a roar.

Bolts and fusion blasts scorched the wall where Galt’s party had been standing.

CHAPTER 23

THE DEATH OF INTEGRITY

The light died, and the interior of a teleport pod resolved itself. He was alone. He sought out the release switch, glowing red in the dark, and hammered on it hard. Gas hissed noisily, and the pod unclamped, the top rising with a loud whir.

The teleport deck was in uproar. Space Marines stumbled from the pads in ones and twos, disoriented at having teleported without the correct rites of preparation. Steam and decontaminants jetted everywhere. The stink of ozone was overpowering.

Galt saw many of his brothers in the devices arrayed around the room. In those closest to him were the men who had accompanied him to the bridge. Astomar was there, wounded but alive, Plosk, Nuministon, Mazrael, Tarael, Clastrin, who collapsed the moment the field shut off, and several suits that did not move: Voldo, Militor, Curzon and Eskerio. Pieces of Caedis’s Terminator plate had materialised on another pad, but of the blasted suits of Sandamael and Ancient Metrion, nothing had survived.

Galt paid no attention but ran from the teleporter, throwing his sword aside. He shoved past serfs, Techmarines and servitors alike.

‘Bridge! Bridge! Mastrik, answer me!’

‘Mastrik here, brother. What in the name of Holy Terra happened down there?’

‘Mastrik, signal the fleet, open up with everything we have. Put a full spread of cyclonic torpedoes into that space hulk, I want it destroyed. Target the following coordinates.’ Galt read off a string of numbers provided by his armour’s sensorium; the exact location of the Spirit of Eternity.

‘You!’ Galt jabbed a finger at the brother serving as deck officer.

‘Lord captain?’

‘Get the window open, get it open now!’

Galt hurried from the teleport room – one of fifteen on the teleport deck, the rest of that level of the ship taken up by the immense power relays the devices required. He took a narrow tunnel that led through the ship’s two dozen metre thick armour, to a fragile observation cupola attached to the surface of the hull.

The blast shields closing off the windows slid open. The deadly light of Jorso flooded the compartment, causing the serf guarding it to cry out and fling his arm across his eyes. Galt’s suit adjusted to the glare, and he watched the Death of Integrity come apart.

Huge chunks of the hulk had broken away and were wheeling into the sun. The main part had broken into two large pieces that glittered on their night side with the repeated impact of starship ordnance. It would not last long.

Novum in Honourum shook as its guns worked. There was a keening shriek as the torpedo bays discharged their load. They swerved to port and streaked towards the hulk. He could see another spread racing in from the Lux Rubrum.

The other guns continued to fire. It was several hundred thousand kilometres to the target, so the explosions he was watching were of rounds launched minutes ago.

One of the greater pieces broke into three. The hulk was nearly destroyed. Galt held his breath, his hand reached up to his chest, where, under his scarred battleplate his Chapter talisman was hidden.

The cyclonic torpedoes rushed towards their target.

Too late.

There was the telltale flash of translation, the visual fallout from the warping of time and space. A dart of metal that could only have been the Spirit of Eternity separated from the hulk and collapsed into itself, folding into the unnatural geometries of the empyrean. Some of the small pieces of the hulk were taken with it. One day they would re-emerge, the parts of a new agglomeration, to spread contagion, aliens or Emperor knew what else evil across the galaxy.

The torpedoes reached the remainder of the hulk. They exploded with astonishing violence, focused fission blasts in a tight spread. For a moment, their nuclear fires outshone those of the sun, causing Galt’s visor to darken almost to black.

The light died. Jorso was alone. All that remained of the Death of Integrity was a series of black specks. In time, these would fall into the star, and further fuel its cyan fury.

Galt had failed.

Galt stormed back into the teleport room. Serfs of the apothecarion had arrived, along with two of the Chapter’s Apothecaries. Plosk had removed his armour and was haughtily receiving their attentions. Galt strode over to him. As he came he undid his helmet, pulled it free, and thrust it at a serf.

‘Are you pleased, tech-priest? Are you happy with your tally of dead?’

Plosk’s lidless eyes stared up at him. He contrived to sound sad, although the bare bone of his face conveyed no expression at all. ‘The STC system has gone. But I did manage to download a sizeable fraction of it into my own memplants. A bitter second prize, but a prize nonetheless.’

Galt snarled and stooped over the magos. He hauled him into the air by the front of his robe.

‘And what of your lies? They have cost the lives of many noble servants of the Imperium. Were they not treasure enough? Or must you tempt the evils of bygone ages before you are satisfied with a thing’s worth? I will see to it that you burn as a traitor and consort of forbidden technologies!’

Plosk struggled to breath, his oxygen pipe making desperate wet sounds, but his voice, delivered by vox-grille, was unaffected.

‘You of the Adeptus Astartes think only of your own honour, your own service. What of the larger puzzle, captain? Surely the uncovering of a new piece is worth a little risk? No one will burn me, my lord. We will both be hailed as heroes.’

‘Dozens of my warriors are dead, at least four Crux Terminatus lost! Do you know what grave dishonour this is?’

‘Better dishonour, better even heresy, than extinction.’

Galt shook him. He thought to reach out and crush the bare skull, squeeze those staring eyes from the moist sockets.

But he did not. As the thought crossed his mind, the face of Caedis chased it. Caedis, a Lord Chapter Master. One of the greatest heroes of the Imperium, an angel in vermillion plate brought to bestial savagery by his gifts. Gifts similar to those Galt carried himself.

Angel or beast? thought Galt. Both. Another part of him responded.

Cannot a thing have two natures?

He thought of all he had done, the mistakes he had made, his temptation to defy the Emperor’s will and save Voldo, the lies of the magos and the risks he had taken at his insistence. He had done nothing but obey the writ of the High Lords, his sworn duty, and yet it affronted him, or rather his reactions to that writ did. And now here he was, shaking a servant of the Imperium by the scruff of the neck like a dog with a rat.

Could he truly call himself noble? He did not think so. He was not and never would be worthy of the rank of Chapter Master.

Plosk was talking, stressing the great service he had done and the gift both Chapters would receive. This approbation sickened him more than the magos’s manipulations, but who was he to judge what was right and wrong? His was but to serve, and he had done so poorly.

His breathing ragged, Galt lowered the tech-priest to the floor. He looked about for the Chaplain of the Blood Drinkers, seeking some explanation for the transformation of their erstwhile master, but Mazrael had departed, taking any answers he might have to the secrets of his Chapter with him.

EPILOGUE

Fortress Novum was immense, the largest fortress-monastery that Inquisitor Karo had visited, and Inquisitor Karo had visited many. The sheer size of it had impressed itself upon him as he had dropped down through the cloud deck of Honourum. A large part of the planet’s main mountain range had been transformed, carved into soaring battlements and fastnesses, adorned with statues of aquilae and heroes so large they were visible from orbit. Construction continued at either end of the monastery; it was part of the Novamarines creed, he understood, that they would not halt the expansion of their home until they were destroyed. Homes for the dead, and all that. There was nothing unusual in this ancestor worship – veneration of heroes and death cults were common in the Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes even as they spurned the cult of the Emperor-as-god.

It was drizzling when he landed. Karo, a native of a hot world, found it uncomfortably cold.

He got the reception he was expecting from the Novamarines. They welcomed him cordially enough, and when he requested access to their Librarium their welcome turned as chilly as their home. He was an agent of the Emperor’s Holy Inquisition, and the Novamarines, as mighty as they were, were as bound to open their doors to his Inquisitorial seal as the meanest agri-world peasant. They had agreed to his demands without demur, naturally; that they sent him into their archives led by a servant rather than one of the initiates was a snub and clearly displayed their displeasure.

He followed the aged Master of the Scrolls deep into the bowels of the mountains. They passed through a long succession of high halls, all empty of human life, all crowded with titanic statuary and shrines to fallen brothers. The Master of the Scrolls wore the simple robes of the Chapter serfs. He did not appear to notice the cold of the undermountain, which to Karo was even more pronounced than that of the surface. He burrowed into the fur collar of his long coat.

‘Is it much further?’ he said. He was annoyed at his own foul mood, even more annoyed that the bobbing lumen-globe that provided the only light through the endless halls of Fortress Novum provided only a frosty blue glow, and no heat.

‘Not much further, my lord,’ said the servant. ‘The particular records you request are old, and are preserved along with many others in the Halls of Salt. The humidity and temperature, you understand.’

They came to a large adamantium vault door. The serf pressed his palm onto a lock, and breathed into a tube so that the door’s machine-spirit could sample his genetic data. The door gave a pneumatic sigh and rolled back on toothed edges. The air that came from behind the door was desiccated and had a sharp smell.

‘The salt caves are a natural phenomenon,’ said the Master of the Scrolls as he led the inquisitor through. He spoke without prompting, proud of his vaults. They emerged onto a balcony overlooking a vast archive. ‘We are fortunate to have them. Thanks to them, our records are extensive, one of the most complete of all Chapters, or so I am told. We have documents stretching back ten thousand years, all the way to the founding of the Novamarines itself. We have a copy of a copy of Lucretius Corvo’s original oath, with a facsimile of his signature, if you wish to see it?’

Karo said nothing. What the serf said was often said; the Novamarines, obsessed as they were with recording their deeds on their skin, were just as diligent when it came to paper records. Looking across the archive hall, he could well believe it. That was, after all, why he was here.

Hundreds of kilometres of shelves lay spread out below in precise lines. Muted lumen-globes floated over the archive, their light of a carefully selected part of the spectrum so as not to damage the paper, vellum, magnetic tape, data crystals and other storage media. Above them was a rough-hewn roof of brown salt, an inverted mountain range that defied gravity.

‘The records you seek, lord?’

‘Anything and everything you have on the purging of the space hulk, the Death of Integrity,’ he said. He refrained from adding ‘and be quick about it’; he was aware of his impatience and eagerness to be gone from this freezing planet. Manners, however, were the best weapon in the face of uncivil behaviour. ‘If you please,’ he said instead.

‘The purging of the Death of Integrity? A notable action, a noble action. Hmm, yes, yes, I believe it is this way.’ The Master of the Scrolls headed down the metal steps leading from the balcony by the vault door. ‘We will check the chronicle first, the entries within it are short records, but all carry reference codings for any further documents that are relevant. The action occurred around two thousand years ago, or thereabouts. This way, follow me, my lord.’

Karo went after the Master of the Scrolls. The serf was an old, old man; a bonded lifetime servant with little freedom, he nevertheless enjoyed access to the kind of medical care and diet many other Imperial citizens would literally kill for. He was slavishly loyal to his masters, as was only proper, but diffident towards Karo and overly prideful in his position, which was not. This reflected conceit was a common characteristic in Chapter serfs, as Karo had experienced time and again. Better that they were loyal and served correctly he supposed, than chafed under the yoke. A little arrogance was not too high a price to pay for that.

Still, it irritated him. Of all the many, many organisations in the Imperium, it was the Adeptus Astartes who vexed Karo the most. Their independence, their pride, their unpredictability… Now he had been tasked with investigating one of their Chapters. Somebody’s idea of a joke, he was sure of it.

They walked along endless ornate shelves stacked high with fat scrolls rolled up on paired wooden spindles. Brighter lights flicked on and off as they passed. The moistureless air dried Karo’s nostrils, the dust from a million documents tickled his nose and threatened an undignified sneeze.

‘Here we are,’ said the serf. He pulled a roll of parchment the width of a human torso from its resting place. It was obvious he struggled, but he did not ask for help. Nor did Karo offer any; the servants of the Space Marines were as proud as their masters, and did not like to be reminded of their own unaltered status.

The old man struggled the scroll over to a trolley, then pushed it to a reading table. He ignited a lamp held aloft by a sculpted tree, and rolled out the paper. ‘A moment please,’ he said, as he rolled the scroll open first one way, and then another. His brow creased as he scanned it for the relevant entry. ‘Aha! Here we are, it is but a short passage, my lord.’

He pressed a wizened finger into the paper, where an extravagantly illuminated capital letter ‘S’ began a new entry in the chronicle. Karo sat down in a chair at the table. The serf hovered at his shoulder, further annoying him. As much as he wanted to order him away, Karo said nothing. His investigation had little to do with the Novamarines, and he would not antagonise them or their servants unless it served immediate purpose.

The document had been well-penned, but was faded with age despite the lauded qualities of the vault. Attempts had been made to mimic the hyperlink-heavy styles of true data-slate archiving, but of course the different coloured entries were just that; they had no functionality, a product of blind transcription by an ignorant mind. Karo grumbled to himself, and then he read.

189887.M39

The purging of the Death of Integrity, officer in command Captain Mantillio Galt, Veteran Company [see also Captain Lutil Mastrik (Third Company); Lord Chapter Master Aresti (then: cpt. Fifth Company); Epistolary Ranial ///Triumphant In Mortis///; Lord Reclusiarch Odon (then: chpln. Veteran Company); Captain Steli Gallio (then: Vtn. Br, Squad Wisdom of Lucretius); Forgemaster Clastrin {Manufactor Magnus Est}].

So it was that elements of the First, Third and Fifth Companies of the Novamarines gathered under one banner at the star Jorso, the most multitudinous coming together of our brethren for many centuries, there to join with the most noble brothers of the Blood Drinkers Chapter to purge the space hulk designated the Death of Integrity after a protracted infestation of the Volian Sector. Nigh two hundred Terminator-clad warriors of the two Chapters fought side by side in the radiation-fogged darkness of the great hulk. Many brethren were killed, and the loss of Lord Chapter Master Caedis of the Blood Drinkers a sore blow (In Memoriam Glorius Est). A kill ratio of over 53:1 was nevertheless achieved, and data and artefacts retrieved from the hulk by attached members of Adeptus Mechanicus Explorator fleet led by Excommentum Incursus under High Lord Magos Explorator Plosk proved rich in STC materials. The hulk was subsequently destroyed. Draco mortis in perpetuem.

In gratitude, the Adepts of Mars presented both Chapters with new strike cruisers on the anniversary of Lord Caedis’s death, thirty standard years later.

Chapter Master Caedis was honoured by both the Blood Drinkers and Blood Angels Chapters. Captains Mastrik and Aresti were invited to attend his memorial.

Captain Mantillio Galt petitioned Lord Chapter Master Hydariko for the right to undertake a penitential crusade. This request was granted. He disappeared shortly thereafter. [[[FATE UNKNOWN]]]

Of the vessel the Spirit of Eternity, no more was heard.

‘Is that it?’ Karo said tersely.

‘I am sorry if my lord is displeased.’

‘I am displeased,’ he said, letting his temper rule him for a moment. ‘I admit that is not your error. Surely there must be more? Where are the references to which you referred?’

The serf shrugged apologetically. ‘It is unusual my lord, for our record keeping is generally stringent.’

‘You do not think it unusual, that a conflict that saw the deployment of two hundred Terminators, and the death of a Chapter Master–’ his gloved finger stabbed the relevant sentence. The Master of the Scrolls winced. ‘–is not recorded in more detail? You do not find that unusual?’ Karo stared at the old man, the implication clear.

‘I am sure there was nothing to hide, perhaps the other records were lost?’

Karo tapped the parchment. ‘No references were included when this chronicle was made.’ Karo thought the scribes of the past could have concealed their omissions more carefully, but putting false references in was probably too galling to contemplate for such a meticulous order. Omission was one thing, lies another.

‘You doubt the veracity of the document?’ the serf was appalled.

‘No, I doubt its completion. There are things here that are unrecorded. Do not try to tell me there are not. The defence of your Chapter is worthy, but I am an agent of the Inquisition, and I know that there are truths here left untold.’

The old man’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. He was taken aback, but unworried by the inquisitor’s ire. Lesser men would be pleading for their lives by now. ‘I am sorry, my lord,’ he said. ‘If you would wait, I can check for more detail. We can visit the Hall of Integrity if you would, perhaps you can glean something from the sculpture and shrines there? They are quite impressive.’

Karo nodded and steepled his long brown fingers in front of his lips. ‘First, search,’ he said.

While the old man went about his business Karo re-read the document. The naming of the ship at the end struck him as an oversight, an accidental inclusion by some ancient completist. He knew full well why they might not wish to mention the Spirit of Eternity. He had found only one other mention of that particular ship in Imperial records, and that was hidden behind the Inquisitorial seal. No matter, that was not what troubled him.

The Master of Scrolls gave up his search hours later. Karo examined everything he could on the named officers in the archive. All were exemplars of heroism; all had died rendering exceptional service. All had references to the clearing of the Death of Integrity that between them amounted to less than thirty lines of text. Kill ratings, valour, honours earned, the usual concerns of the Space Marines. War and glory, glory and war.

Karo pushed the chair back from the table. He sighed.

To San Guisiga then. Right into the monster’s lair.

At least it would be warm there.

‘In the name of the Emperor, and of mankind, and of duty,’ intoned Chaplain Odon. Clad in newly polished armour, robed and carrying the symbols of his office, he led the funeral procession. His voice was metallic though his skull-helmet’s speakers.

‘The Emperor. Mankind. Duty,’ replied the brothers. There were twenty-five of them. Rearmost were twenty in two files, empty-handed but for one who bore a white veteran sergeant’s helmet in his hands. Four pall bearers were at their head. These, members of Voldo’s squad, remained silent, heads down, muscles straining under the weight of the armoured corpse of Sergeant Voldo on the bier. More than one was new to the squad, replacements for others dead, but that did not matter. They shared a bond with Voldo, whether they knew him well before or not.

Sergeant Arendo was the twenty-fifth, walking between the bier and Odon. Helmless, grim-faced, lips painted black with ash. This would not be wiped free until Sergeant Voldo was laid to rest and he would utter his first orders to squad Wisdom of Lucretius.

‘In the cause of the Emperor, the defence of mankind, and our oath,’ said Chaplain Odon.

‘We give our lives freely.’

With each response to Odon’s chanted words, the Space Marines descended a single step, stamping their armoured boots with a crash that resounded down the kilometre-long stairway and into the darkness at the roots of the mountain. They waited for the sound to die away, until only their breathing, the faint whining of their bone and blue armour and the spitting of the lumen globe hovering over Odon’s head remained.

Odon shattered the quiet again with his ringing voice.

‘Each to themselves, each to their duty. Each to the oath of Corvo.’

‘Our duty is ourselves, our duty is the fulfilment of Corvo’s Oath.’

Crash.

They neared the bottom. The catacomb of the Red Millennium was ahead, dug deep into the cold hard rock of the Heavenward Mountains as every catacomb had been and every catacomb would be until the Novamarines were extinct, and their fortress home finally finished.

‘Glory to the dead, glory to sacrifice, glory to the children of men.’

‘May they forever rule the stars.’

Crash.

‘We bring our brother home, may he rest peacefully until the final battle is begun.’

‘May the Emperor deem him worthy, and bring him again to war.’

Crash.

So it went on, until the entire procession had descended to the level floor of the catacomb. The corridor was a perfect rectangle, and if the light of the lumen globe were powerful enough, the Space Marines would have seen it stretch away until its sides, ceiling and floor were forced together by perspective.

Somewhere far ahead, a pair of servitors waited by a raw rockface for the ceremony to cease so that they might continue their digging. Only when the millennium turned would they stop extending the catacomb, and another would be begun. Perhaps ten thousand cold beds lined the walls already, perhaps more. They would never all be filled, but that was not the point.

Odon bowed his head. The brothers followed suit, moving with perfect synchronicity. They remembered Sergeant Voldo in life, they reflected upon his death; all but black-lipped Sergeant Arendo. His task was to stare ahead, past the feeble glow of the lumen globe and into the darkness, thinking on his duty. He did so unblinkingly.

Two minutes passed. Odon sang, and started off again. The corridor reverberated to the dirge as they went slowly on, past the remains of hundreds of fallen brothers. The further they went, the more complete the remains became: dust to bone fragment, bone fragment to yellowed skeleton, yellowed skeleton to mummy, flesh desiccated in the dry air. Mummy to cadaver, cadaver to fresh corpse whose rot was slow in the aseptic tomb. The corpses were laid in no order, each was simply put into the next available slot. They came to the last such recess. Odon paused by it, finished his song, and looked within.

‘Rank, squad and company have no place here, in the halls of the dead.’

‘In life we are brothers. In death we are brothers,’ said the others.

Odon led the procession a short way to a chamber let off the corridor. Here the bier was placed, and with great reverence the men of Squad Wisdom of Lucretius removed Voldo’s armour piece by piece, passing the components down the column with care.

Voldo lay naked, his skin dark with tattoos from his ankles to the crown of his head. His bolter was replaced in his hands.

‘See the wounds that brought him low, and mark them well, for similar will one day pierce all our flesh,’ said Odon.

‘No scars form on the flesh of the dead.’

‘See ye also, the marks of pride. The flesh tally of his deeds.’ Odon pointed. ‘By these will the Emperor know his worth.’

‘And call him to war once again.’

Odon began a description of Voldo’s tattoos, the manner in which they were won. This took time, for Voldo had been valiant and much decorated.

‘To the final sleep he must go,’ he said eventually.

‘There to await the call,’ responded the brothers.

The squad members lifted him, easily now that his armour had been removed. They returned to the recess and laid Voldo gently in place, his head upon a low shelf at one end, his feet pointing back down the corridor.

‘Stone for pillow, stone for bed, his comfort is great, for his brothers are his companions.’

‘In life and death we are never alone.’

Odon handed his crozius and boltgun to Sergeant Arendo. With an armoured fingertip, he wiped the ashes from his lips. He took Arendo’s helmet from the Space Marine that carried it, and placed it upon the sergeant’s head.

‘You are sergeant. You may speak,’ said Odon.

‘Company!’ Arendo shouted, his voice filling the catacomb as surely as a gun report. ‘About turn!’

‘We obey,’ they said. As one, they swivelled on their heels. Each held a piece of Voldo’s armour.

‘March!’ shouted Arendo.

The Novamarines thundered off down the corridor, away from Odon and the light. The noise of their feet boomed long after they were out of sight.

When quiet returned, Odon reached in to the recess and gently took Voldo’s bolter.

‘Honour the battlegear of the dead,’ he said, and left Voldo to the eternal night under the mountains.

Chapter Master Caedis was dead.

The call went out. The brethren gathered.

The Blood Drinkers Chapter entire was in the Arena of Horandor. The thin light of San Guisiga’s suns poured through the arena windows, illuminating the sand in bands of weak light. Dark and light, the opposing aspects of life; dark and light, the opposing facets of the Chapter.

Radin Castor, captain of the First Company, was on the fighting floor. He wore the tabard and loose trousers that were the robes of his Chapter, his torso bare. San Guisiga was a hot world, and its sons were hot-blooded. He carried a simple steel sword. Of great mass and length, a mortal man could not have borne it, but in his giant fist it seemed of natural proportion.

Opposing him was Captain Sorael of the Fifth Company. Castor snarled. Upstart. Mastery of the Chapter was his right. Who was Sorael to challenge him? He would not have thought so harshly of Sorael, but the blood haze was on him, a subtle filter on his senses, red more pronounced, the smell of iron enticing. Heartbeats rang loudly.

Reclusiarch Mazrael came between them, robed in black silk from head to foot, his feet bare. Twenty metres to the Reclusiarch, another twenty to the pretender. Castor thought already of attack.

Mazrael’s words to the crowd were indistinct. Castor’s ears buzzed. The combatants had been denied the Rite of Holos for weeks. Sorael bore the signs of the Red Thirst as clearly as Castor: flushed skin, pupils dilated so as to crowd out the iris, long canines growing longer. Sorael seemed a monster. Castor did not feel himself to be one, but he knew what he was well enough.

Mazrael held up a red flag pinched between forefinger and thumb, the chalice and blood drop of their order upon it a nonsense of creases and broken yellow lines. He spoke again, unintelligible men’s words. Castor and Sorael were moving away from the realms of men.

The flag fluttered to the sand. Mazrael withdrew. Castor saw Sanguinary Master Teale stand, nostrils flared in excitement. He was there to treat wounds, but in truth Teale rather more enjoyed inflicting them.

Horns blared. The crowd roared, many throats, one voice.

This was the nature of the challenge – martial prowess was not to be tested, but the retention of humanity in the face of the Thirst. The Chapter Master must be able to fight the Thirst under the most testing circumstances. He must be Blood Calm.

Sorael was direct, leaping halfway across the distance between them, his muscles preternaturally strong because of the Thirst. Sword raised double-handed, he came at Castor, face feral.

Castor’s head reeled. The beast within him snapped, bloody muzzle threatening to burst through. Castor pushed it back. Restraint. Calm. Blood Calm.

He sidestepped Sorael’s wild charge. Sorael checked himself, feet digging a furrow into the sand as he skidded to a halt. Another jump, sword descending. Castor parried it, a clang of steel. He twisted. Sorael landed badly. Castor dropped low, swept a leg out to take the Fifth Captain’s feet from under him, but Sorael hopped over them, sending another blow at Castor’s head. Castor raised his blade, pushing off on Sorael’s with his own to roll away and spring to his feet.

They circled. Sorael crouched, blade gripped two-handed. Castor had one arm behind his back, sword swept out in front of him, point down. Sorael lunged, blond hair sweat-slicked to his brow. Castor ignored the attack.

Chapter Master Caedis had been his friend. The mastery was his right as First Captain. To fail would dishonour them both. He would not be drawn. Restraint, calm. Blood Calm.

The thirst bubbled in him. His veins were on fire. He chased the pain from his body, imprisoned it behind bars of will.

Calm.

Sorael lost patience and attacked.

Castor drew his blade across the other warrior’s arm with a deft flick as he pivoted out of the way. Sorael snarled. Both of them were rocked by the bright red that welled up in Sorael’s wound and pattered upon the sand.

Castor’s mouth filled with saliva. His gums ached with longing. He spat out a clear mouthful of saliva, surprised that it was not red.

Sorael came at him again. Castor held his ground, driving his blade down onto Sorael’s with all the force he could muster.

Steel shattered, Sorael jumped back, arms wide, but Castor threw himself forward, shoulder into the other’s sternum. The impact collapsed Sorael’s lungs. They went down. Castor threw his sword aside, and they were grappling. Their skin was slippery with sweat and blood, fingers skidding from flesh. And then Castor had him. He wrapped his arms around Sorael’s neck, choking him in the crook of his left elbow, his right hand applying pressure to the lever of his left arm.

It takes a long time to choke a Space Marine. Sorael fought like a daemon, all fury and unholy strength, nails raking at Castor’s arms, scrabbling futilely for Castor’s eyes. But Castor was calm, Blood Calm.

Sorael’s struggles weakened. His head lolled. Castor kept the pressure on for ten seconds longer, wary of trickery.

He let the unconscious Sorael slide to the floor. He stood.

The crowd roared their acclamations, but Castor did not hear. He stared at the blood pumping slowly from Sorael’s arm.

Blood.

His resolve wavered. He imagined it on his tongue. It was all he could do not to fall upon the other and lap at the cut before Sorael’s Larraman cells finished their work.

His calm fractured. He fell forward, sank his teeth into his opponent’s neck and drank deep. He closed his eyes with shame as the beast within him exulted. He had failed.

A hand on his shoulder. Mazrael. Castor had not fallen. He was upright. His brow creased in confusion. Mazrael was speaking. He thrust a chalice at Castor’s mouth. The smell of blood was intoxicating. He took it with shaking hands and drained it.

Sound crashed back on him. The Thirst receded suddenly. The crowd was chanting his name over and over. Sorael was being seen to by the Apothecaries.

‘Blood freely given, blood taken,’ said Mazrael.

‘Blood is life, life is duty. I choose blood. I choose life. I choose duty,’ said Castor, his tongue thick and voice hoarse.

Mazrael raised Chapter Master Castor’s hand. The assembled Blood Drinkers fell to their knees before their new lord.

Calm suffused Castor. Blood Calm.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

David Annandale is the author of The Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos. He also writes the Yarrick series, consisting of the novella Chains of Golgotha and the novel Imperial Creed. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

Guy Haley is the author of Space Marine Battles: Death of Integrity, the Warhammer 40,000 novels Valedor and Baneblade, and the novellas The Eternal Crusader, The Last Days of Ector and Broken Sword, for Damocles. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

An extract from Sin of Damnation,
by Gav Thorpe

Darkness clung to the corroding bulkheads, thick and heavy with menace. Creaks and groans of contorting metal vied with the hiss of ancient pneumatics and drips from broken pipes. Something new and harsh broke the gloom and quiet of distant millennia: the metallic clump of heavy boots and star-bright rays of suit lamps.

Five huge figures strode purposefully through the confines of the derelict space hulk: Squad Lorenzo of the Blood Angels First Company. They were Terminators, the best of the elite Space Marines. All of them were giants, standing nearly three metres tall in their armour. Each a prized artefact, these armoured suits were the heaviest worn by any soldier of the Imperium, made of layers of titanium and ceramite capable of withstanding the most punishing damage. In the freezing vacuum of space or the boiling depths of a volcano, the Terminators were the deadliest warriors of the Adeptus Astartes, their skill and courage proven over centuries of battle. They came expecting victory.

‘Containment underway,’ Sergeant Lorenzo reported. The idle chatter of the squad had died away as they had neared the enemy. All were now intent upon the mission.

‘The Blood Angels have returned,’ Captain Raphael’s voice crackled in Lorenzo’s ear. The signal was somewhat distorted, having been broadcast more than a thousand kilometres, from where the force commander monitored events aboard the orbiting strike cruiser Angel’s Sword. ‘For six centuries we have carried the burden of defeat, the stigma of failure. Now we redeem ourselves.’

Eighty Terminators of the Blood Angels were establishing a foothold aboard the space hulk. Their mission was simple: eradicate the alien threat. Several hundred metres behind Squad Lorenzo a cordon of veteran warriors guarded the impact site, where Techmarines and other support was being established. When all was ready they would advance on their foes. For the moment, however, Lorenzo and his warriors were out on their own.

The squad had been tasked with destroying the controls of a still-active bank of saviour pods. If the enemy were allowed to escape the space hulk aboard the lifeboats their infection could spread to other ships and distant worlds. That could not be allowed to happen. Such was the importance of containment, Lorenzo’s squad were considered expendable.

Heralded by the glare of their armour lights, the Space Marines advanced in single file along a winding concourse. The warriors’ suits of Tactical Dreadnought armour filled the narrow corridor, their massive shoulder pads occasionally scraping the metal walls. Their red livery shone bright in the light of the lamps, a declaration of fearlessness and determination. The Blood Angels did not fight in the shadows.

The Terminators stomped forwards accompanied by the growl of servos and wheezing of fibre-bundles from their suits. At their head, Lorenzo’s sensorium showed that the maze of corridors ahead was deserted. He adjusted the range to three hundred metres and caught his breath when the glowing image on his auto-senses tinged with a smudge of green at the limit of the sensor’s range. He waited several seconds, but the image did not resolve into movement. The enemy were dormant.

‘Section secure, pattern thetos,’ the sergeant said, thumbing the activation stud on his sword.

The blade hummed into life, the actinic blue of its power field bathing the corridor with flickering light. In the double-circle glare of Lorenzo’s armour lamps, the corridor was laid bare. The latticed decking was warped in places but unbroken, while the walls that lined the narrow passageway were made of bolted metal sheets corroded and pitted with decay. The only sound was the buzz of the power weapon, tramping boots and the wheeze of powered armour as the rest of the squad moved up into position behind their sergeant.

The sensorium signal still had not changed and Lorenzo advanced, bringing his storm bolter up to the firing position. He checked the magazine readout in his display: thirty-two rounds.

‘Detecting an energy wave from starboard, brother-sergeant,’ Valencio announced. ‘Indeterminate distance. Possibly a cable or generator.’

‘Not of mission significance,’ said Lorenzo, slowing as he approached a junction with another corridor coming from the right. ‘Continue to advance.’

Swinging around, the beams of his lamps swaying across the walls, Lorenzo stared down the corridor and took two steps forward. Even with the suit lights, visibility was poor. Motes of rust and flaking paint drifted down from the ceiling and the contorted walls of the passage created strange shadows. Lorenzo scanned the scene looking for openings, his breathing calm, his mind focussed. The new passageway had two doors ahead: one on the right a dozen metres forward, another on the left thirty metres away. Deino strode across the junction behind the sergeant, his weapon covering the other approach.

‘Command deck, update on tactical mapping,’ Lorenzo said.

The comm buzzed for several seconds before the voice of one of the strike cruiser’s bridge technicians arrived in Lorenzo’s ear.

‘Nearly complete,’ the crewman said. ‘Transmitting data over link now.’

Lorenzo’s helmet display fuzzed blue for a second and then resolved into a clearer image as the scan data from the strike cruiser fused with the auto-senses of his armoured suit. A wire frame schematic was imposed over his vision and at a sub-vocal command an independent map appeared in his right eye. In places the map was indistinct or absent, the scanners of the strike cruiser unable to penetrate for some as-yet unknown reason. Lorenzo looked over the layout of the surrounding rooms and corridors, whilst maintaining a vigilant gaze on the sensorium data with his other eye. The contact echoes still had not moved. The energy spike reported by Valencio was some distance away and of no importance.

‘Egress location now marked,’ a serf aboard the strike cruiser reported. Moments later the helmet display flickered as it updated itself. A blinking icon of a skull drew Lorenzo’s attention to a room some eighty metres ahead. This was the saviour pod control room, the squad’s objective. Lorenzo had been tasked with destroying the launch mechanisms, ensuring that their alien prey could not escape the hulk. It was standard combat doctrine: contain and annihilate.

From the map, Lorenzo could also see that the branch he was on led to a subset of rooms isolated from the main thoroughfare they were following. Sensorium data was blank and Lorenzo needed to know if there was an ingress route on their flank. Dozens of metres behind the squad more Terminators were setting up a defensive cordon around the breaching zone, but out here beyond the perimeter there were any number of ways the squad might be surrounded.

‘Valencio and Zael, with me,’ Lorenzo commanded. ‘Search and secure. Deino and Goriel, flank protection.’

Lorenzo strode forwards once more. Zael fell in behind the sergeant, the igniter of his heavy flamer sparking and stuttering. Valencio brought up the rear, keeping the standard five metre clearance.

Stopping two metres beyond the first door, Lorenzo settled into overwatch stance, legs braced, targeter set to wide focus. Behind him Zael turned and faced the door. Deactivating the field on his power fist, the Terminator flicked the door lever. With a screech, the door shuddered open halfway and then squealed to a stop. Zael grabbed the door’s edge and hauled it sideways, his powered actuators pushing the door into its wall cavity with more shrieking protests from the ancient metal. Inside his helmet, the Terminator grimaced at the sound.

The room beyond was square, less than ten metres to a wall, and a further door lay open on the opposite side. Cracked tiles paved the floor, thick with grime. The walls had been crudely whitewashed at some point in the distant centuries but were now bare metal except for the odd patch of peeling paint.

‘Movement!’ Goriel’s sharp warning echoed in everyone’s ear.

00.05.97

The greenish fuzz on the sensorium net was shifting, resolving into individual signatures. They were rapidly closing in on the Terminators’ position. The clump split into two groups, spreading out to the left and right. Lorenzo counted seven distinct movements heading towards him and five others circling to the other side of Deino and Goriel. Neither group’s course seemed to comply with the schematic data.

‘Secure main corridor, continue sweep,’ Lorenzo barked. ‘Watch for entry points. Look for super- and sub-layer approaches.’

The sergeant pressed ahead towards the next door. Valencio followed, his gaze scanning left and right for breaches in the walls, floor and ceiling, checking that his sergeant’s rear quarter was protected. At the back, Zael clumped across the room and stopped at the open doorway, his heavy flamer directed down the corridor beyond.

‘Ceiling breach,’ Zael reported as he caught sight of a gaping crack in a heavy pipe that ran half the length of the fifty-metre corridor before turning sharply into a bulkhead.

The contacts on the sensorium were less than seventy-five metres away from Lorenzo, and within fifty metres of Deino.

‘Brothers, the enemy are at hand. Summon all of your resolve, and your animosity,’ Lorenzo told his squad.

The sergeant reached the door and swung around to face it. It was also activated by the pull of a lever and hissed out of sight with less effort than the previous one. Lorenzo stepped forwards as soon as the door was open, allowing Valencio to continue his advance along the corridor.

From a corroded grating in the floor ahead of Deino something fast and agile sprang into the corridor. It leapt towards the Terminator on bounding legs, four whip-muscled arms clawing at the passage wall as it righted itself. It had a bulbous, purple head. The rest of its body was covered in a dark blue chitin. Its eyes glittered in the lamps of Deino’s suit.

‘Visual contact!’ said Deino. ‘Confirm contact: genestealer.’

The creature had taken only three strides along the corridor when Deino opened fire. The passage rang with the clamour of the storm bolter’s roar. With alien quickness the thing leapt from one wall to the other, the Terminator’s initial burst of fire ripping a trail of detonations across bare metal. Another shape emerged from the darkness as the first hurtled forward with a lithe gait, digging the claws of its upper arms into the floor to increase momentum.

Deino’s second salvo caught the creature across the head and back, tearing bloody chunks from it. Thick blood splashed across the wall and floors. The second creature leapt over its fallen companion without hesitation and Deino fired again.

‘Confirmed kill, multiple targets approaching,’ Deino said calmly. He fired once more. ‘Threat minimal.’

00.06.18

‘Ingress!’ announced Zael, squeezing the trigger on his heavy flamer. A sheet of fire roared along the corridor, bathing the ceiling and the pipe with promethium fury. Something flailed in the inferno, soundlessly spasming as the cleansing fires melted through its carapace, flesh and bones. Charred bodies fell from the destroyed pipework. The adhesive promethium clung to the walls, coating the corridor with white-hot flames.

‘Cleanse and burn!’ Zael’s spirits soared as he saw the creatures incinerated.

‘Hold stance!’ ordered Lorenzo.

The staccato rhythm of Deino’s storm bolter rang through the corridors as he unloaded his weapon’s magazine into the onrushing tide of creatures boiling up from a crawlspace beneath the decking. The crackle of Zael’s heavy flamer sounded again as more creatures emerged in front of him.

The room Lorenzo found himself in was long and thin, with stone-lined walls carved with faint patterns. A vent in the far corner to his right blew out a steady stream of dust, which swirled through the beams of the sergeant’s lights as he stepped forward. There were no other doors.

Lorenzo was about to turn away when he noticed that the dust from the vent had stopped.

00.06.25

A warning tone sounded and one of the signals on the sensorium flashed red: imminent threat. A moment later the vent cover was smashed out and one of the aliens was propelling itself through the air towards Lorenzo. With no time to fire, the sergeant brought his power sword up to a parry position, slicing through an outstretched claw. The genestealer’s three other clawed hands gouged furrows across Lorenzo’s helmet and right shoulder guard, knocking him backwards a step.

‘Blood of Baal!’ spat Lorenzo as he lashed the power sword into the creature’s head, splitting it from cheek to neck in a fountain of gore.

A reflexive paroxysm caused the creature to snap its arms shut, clamping onto Lorenzo’s right arm, talons scratching at the outer ceramite layer of the sergeant’s armour. With a grunt, he smashed the body away with his storm bolter.

He looked down at the bloodied thing sprawled on the floor. It twitched with some vestigial remnants of life, despite its grievous wounds. Memories six hundred years old surfaced in the sergeant’s mind, images of the Blood Angels aboard another space hulk in a time that seemed an age ago. The beasts had taken a bloody toll in that campaign and the Blood Angels had teetered upon the precipice of annihilation. Lorenzo had been one of only fifty battle-brothers to survive the encounter. Those ashamed few had returned to Baal to lick their wounds like scolded curs.

Looking at the fanged monstrosity at his feet, Lorenzo felt a mixture of revulsion and shame, tinged with an almost unknown sensation: anxiety. Though he had fought gloriously for the Emperor for more than half a dozen centuries and across countless battle zones, the alien at his feet reminded Lorenzo of a time when he had been alone in the darkness. The Blood Angels had failed on that day and the stain of defeat hung heavily in Lorenzo’s mind.

There was only one response to the emotions vying for control of Lorenzo’s thoughts. Anger welled up inside him, a righteous ire fuelled by self-loathing and a deep hatred of the creatures he faced. The Blood Angels had been bloodied but not destroyed. They had taken the shame of failure into their hearts and nurtured it. Over the long years and decades they had taken the rough ore of weakness and beaten it with faith and resolve, honing it into a bright sword of admonition. From weakness came strength and from adversity came the desire to prevail. The sergeant raised an armoured boot and brought it down on the genestealer’s head, crushing it to a pulp upon the floor. Thick blood oozed from under the Space Marine’s magnetized sole and dribbled into the cracks between the tiles.

This time there would be no defeat, no retreat.

00.06.29

A shout over the comm and a blazing flash on the sensorium warned that Zael was in trouble. A wave of hazy blips was speeding down the corridor towards the Terminator. Valencio responded first, slewing his armour around and pounding back towards the first room.

‘One burst left,’ warned Zael.

‘Save that for the objective,’ order Lorenzo.

‘Clear for shot!’ snapped Valencio as he thundered into the room behind the heavy flamer-armed Space Marine.

Seven or eight of the creatures could be seen past the dancing flames left by Valencio’s defensive fire. As the inferno burnt itself out, they rushed forwards, claws opened, dead eyes fixed on Zael. The Terminator took a step backwards and to one side, opening up Valencio’s view of the corridor in front of him.

‘Purge the xenos!’ laughed Valencio as he opened fire, the storm of explosive bolts from his weapon sending heads and limbs flying as the shells detonated inside their targets. The controlled fire blew apart four of the aliens, one after the other. ‘Did you see that, brother-sergeant? Four in one volley!’

With a sickening click and a kick that caused the storm bolter to shudder in Valencio’s grip, the weapon stopped firing. A hazard message flickered into his helmet display: AMMUNITION FEED JAM.

‘Mercy of the Angel…’ Valencio muttered as three more genestealers sprinted down the corridor towards him.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

The Rite of Holos copyright © Hammer and Bolter 2012, Games Workshop Ltd.
Death of Integrity copyright © 2012, Games Workshop Ltd.
Final Journey copyright © Angels of Death 2013, Games Workshop Ltd.
Blood Calm copyright © Angels of Death 2013, Games Workshop Ltd.
The Death of Antagonis copyright © 2013, Games Workshop Ltd.
The Tribute of Flesh copyright © 2014, Games Workshop Ltd.
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First published in Great Britain in 2015.
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Cover illustration by Jon Cave.

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