WARHAMMER 40,000

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

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

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

They are not my hands.

This fact is forgotten by my brothers – inexplicably, it has always seemed to me. The hands are strong, to be sure, and have created great things for us all, but they are not mine. And that counts for something.

They forget that the silver on my arms comes from a beast that I vanquished. It is the mark of a great evil that I ended, and yet it persists within me. It is alien, artificial; an uneasy corollary to the superlative physical frame given to me by my father.

I would struggle to remove it now. The problem is not one of surgery, for I have no doubt my father’s chirurgeons could remake me entirely if he gave them the command. No, I will not remove the silver from my flesh because I have learned to depend on it.

The fault is with my mind. I rely on the augmentation given to me by my metal gauntlets, so much so that the flesh beneath them is now little more than a memory.

It is a crutch, this silver. A day will come when I will strip it from me, lest I lose the power to master myself forever. Already my Legion’s warriors replace their shield hands with metal in my honour, and so they too are learning to doubt the natural strength of their bodies. They must be weaned off this practice before it becomes a mania for them. Hatred of what is natural, of what is human, is the first and greatest of the corruptions.

So I record it here: when the time comes, I will strip my hands of their unnatural silver. I will instruct my Legion to recant their distrust of the flesh. I will turn them away from the gifts of the machine and bid them relearn the mysteries of flesh, bone and blood.

When my father’s Crusade is over, this shall be my sacred task. When the fighting is done, I shall cure my Legion, and myself. For if fighting is all there is, if we may never pause to reflect on what such devotion to strength is doing to us, then our compulsion will only grow.

Already I see the madness that path leads to, and so I shall excise the silver from my hands. In doing so I shall weaken myself and my sons, but nonetheless it must be done.

The hands are strong, and have created great things, but they are not mine.

– The Neimerel Scrolls attributed to the Primarch Ferrus Manus

PROLOGUE

Captain Ulens Arela of the 12th Shardenus Imperial Guard Levy looked at the data flickering down his augur display and learned a little more about the manner in which he would die.

Some solid information existed amid the welter of static, but not enough to plan anything like a suitable response. One word – Territo – emerged again and again. That was, presumably, what the invaders were calling themselves. Other statistics lodged in his mind, mostly deployment patterns and landing vectors for the first wave.

They hadn’t bothered with much encryption, so Arela’s cogitative support had managed to crack a good deal of the traffic flitting around in low orbit. None of it reassured him, and most of it pointed to a swift and certain outcome.

On the basis of all he’d seen and heard, Ulens Arela guessed that he and his regiment had less than an hour before the end. That thought sat relatively well, given what he’d experienced over the past year. During that time he’d come to appreciate that death was hardly the worst thing that could happen to someone. As it transpired, there were many worse things, and he’d seen a few of them up close.

So he stared into the green strobe of the augur screen with little more than wry resignation on his scarred face. He issued no orders, and the three hundred men crouched in Bunker F45 gave no indication that they expected any. They could all hear the thud and crack of orbital munitions detonating, and they could all feel the tremble in the earth as the city’s defensive grids opened up. All across the ash plains of the Helat, they knew that millions of men, bunched together in similar bunkers and blast-trenches, would be feeling the same things, thinking the same things, fearing the same things.

Arela couldn’t know with any precision what was going on in the skies above him. Shielded by metres of rockcrete, he couldn’t see the heavy outlines of the troop landers as they slowly descended through the atmosphere. He couldn’t see the paths of the tracer rockets as they streaked down to cover their descent, though he could feel the impacts where they hit close to the bunker. He couldn’t see the enemy gunships as they spiralled down between the larger ships, strafing along the attack corridors and knocking out fixed artillery positions.

He knew enough, though. The augur readings gave him an idea of what Territo consisted of, and the force it represented was almost indecently overwhelming.

Are they confused as we are? he thought idly. Do the men in those carriers understand any more about this war than we do? Would they worship the Emperor, as we do, if they could just have things explained to them?

Most significantly of all, Arela didn’t detect the launch of the one craft among the many hundreds making planetfall that lay on an intercept course with F45’s grid position. It would have been astonishing if he had done so, given the dense and growing volume of launches breaking out across the stratosphere. By then the invaders’ assault craft had descended and were disgorging atmospheric flyers like bloated insects ejecting their teeming young. Far above them, capital ships maintained static positions in high orbit and provided a hammering rain of supporting fire.

Amid all of that, a lone vessel – an angular, heavy-set gunship in black livery – made its way planetwards, ducking and spiralling though the orgy of explosions and las-fire. Its course was erratic, programmed to evade targeting locks faster than they could be imposed. Like everything tearing towards the Helat it burned with violent atmospheric entry fires, making it look like an angry meteor.

Only when the gunship came within five kilometres of F45 did its trajectory pick up on the augur’s warning matrices. A line of red runes blinked into life. Arela slammed his blast-visor down and glanced at the power-pack on his lasgun.

‘Incoming,’ he murmured into the vox, and the three hundred men within the bunker mirrored his actions. Their movements were calm and precise, just as he’d trained them to be, and the echo of three hundred visors snapping into place ran around the enclosed bunker.

‘Positions,’ said Arela.

Against his expectations, he found that his heart-rate had picked up. He ran his finger along the trigger of his lasgun. It felt smooth from frequent use.

The bunker, like all the rest overlooking the Helat, had been built to a simple design. A central hexagonal chamber, no more than three metres high and roughly thirty metres across, had been sunk into the dense igneous rock of the Helat’s surface. Two-metre-thick layers of reinforced rockcrete enveloped the chamber, reinforced with bands of adamantium binding. On four sides of the bunker, narrow slits in the rockcrete had been bored at shoulder height, allowing the men inside a clear fire-arc over the ash plains to the east. The remaining two sides were buried in the steeply rising landscape as it broke and buckled up towards the city approaches. Tunnels ran underground, eventually linking up with the network of subterranean chambers that riddled the land as far as the Vannon Gate, though the blast doors leading to them were sealed and wired to blow.

No escape back towards the hives would be permitted; the frontline was to be held for as long as possible. Arela understood that perfectly, as did the men who lined up along the four firing walls, slotting their lasguns into the apertures and watching for the first targets to emerge.

Arela, seated on a swivelling steel chair in the centre of the bunker, oversaw their movements with satisfaction. Pict screens surrounded him, mounted on a lattice of metal struts.

‘Primary target inbound sector 5-6,’ said Arela calmly, watching the data on his augur refresh. ‘Keep an eye on your sensoria – we’ll get more of them soon.’

The floor vibrated as surface-to-air batteries cracked into life above the bunker. Arela switched to an external pict-feed and watched trails of ship-killer rockets stream up into the sky.

The gunship came in closer, fast and sheer, rolling away from clouds of exploding chaff and banking steeply. Arela’s sensors got a brief lock on it, just long enough to watch it dip to ground level and hover for a second on a thunderous carpet of engine-discharge. Then it lifted off again, thrusting powerfully back into the air amid a buffet of sensor-confusing static before the rocket launchers could get a decent fix.

‘So here we go,’ he said, watching the fuzzy outlines of landed troops emerge on the scanners – six, seven, maybe more – and clarify on the pict. ‘Let’s give them a welcome.’

Las-beams snapped out from the bunker, spiking across the smog-darkened battlefront. All along the hundred-kilometre-long front it was the same, and the augur soon clogged with feedback. Landers and troop carriers were making planetfall all across the plains. Some of them ran into hostile fire and exploded, scattering their contents across the ash, but plenty more were getting through.

Arela adjusted the dials on his instruments, trying to get a better picture. He could see men striding out of the murk towards them. The outlines were big. Huge. They didn’t seem to be in any hurry. Ten of them clarified on the sensoria, each one clad in plates of black armour. Their eyes shone red in the ash-gloom.

‘Throne,’ he whispered, still speaking over the comm, looking at the outline of their bodies and feeling suddenly cold. ‘Drop them.’

The concentration of las-fire from Bunker F45 was dense and well-aimed. A whole thicket of white bolts flickered out from the firing slots. It wasn’t panicky or random – it was straight out of the Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer.

It wasn’t working. He saw one of the incoming giants stumble under a concentrated volley, but the rest shrugged off hits as if they were minor irritations. They kept coming, striding with eerie slowness, advancing across the crater-pocked landscape like armoured ghosts.

Arela switched views, zooming in for a closer look. Even as he did so, the single warrior who’d stumbled resumed its march.

‘Keep firing!’ he snapped, watching as the volume of las-beams dropped and became more ill-directed. One of the giants came within a few metres of the bunker’s walls and dropped down beneath the lip of a blast crater. A second later, a rain of heavy impacts broke out across the leading edge of the rockcrete shielding. Huge blocks splintered, buckled and broke open, spinning into clouds of destruction as a maelstrom of projectiles hit the shielding and detonated.

‘Hold position!’ Arela ordered, getting up from his throne and drawing his own weapon. ‘The first man to stop firing gets–’

He never finished. A huge explosion rocked the chamber. Men flew back from the firing slits, careening through the air as an entire section of shielding blew inwards. The air filled with the noise of screams, the shudder of more munitions going off and thick blooms of powdered rockcrete.

Arela crashed back into his chair before rolling away from it and across the floor. He heard more frantic snaps of las-beams before they were doused by a deluge of fire from much bigger, much noisier weapons.

He looked up. One wall of the bunker was demolished and the bodies of its defenders lay across the rubble. Those of his men who’d survived the explosion were now backing away from the breach, firing steadily.

Through the gap came a monster, nearly three metres high and encased in night-black power armour. Las-fire flickered from the curved surfaces of its battle-plate without making much impression. The monster carried a blunt-barrelled gun in both hands and fired in smooth, sweeping figures. Waves of explosive projectiles rippled across the enclosed space of the bunker, blasting apart the lines of defending troops.

Arela staggered to his feet, feeling groggy. He took aim and fired back at the monster, only to see his las-beam fizzle harmlessly against its breastplate. He adjusted his aim, going for the exposed cabling at the junction of its arm and chest, but another massive explosion threw him from his feet.

He went down hard, nearly blacking out as his helmet cracked against the floor. A hot trickle of blood ran down his temple as he pushed himself back up. For a moment, clouds of dust and bolter fire obscured what had happened, and he looked stupidly out through a cracked visor across the scene of desolation.

He saw two more monsters emerge from the swirling dust, firing their huge weapons steadily as they advanced. They picked off his men with silent efficiency. Some of the defending troops broke, racing across the half-ruined chamber to get to the doors at the rear, but they didn’t get very far. Arela saw most of them torn clean in half as projectiles punched clean through them before exploding like grenades.

He dragged himself to his feet again, his head light and his stomach churning. It had all happened so quickly. Dimly, he could hear the thunder of battle across the plains outside. Huge, grinding noises made the earth shake beneath him, and he could only guess at what kind of war engines had been landed.

One of the monsters turned from the slaughter to look in his direction. For a second, Arela stared right into its deathmask face. Two red eye-lenses stared back at him, glowing like twin embers in the smoke. The creature’s vox-grille – a downturned, contemptuous snarl of metal – glinted in the light of explosions going off.

Arela ran straight towards the monster. With nowhere to go and no chance of survival, he opted for one final act of defiance. As he ran, he fired his pistol and drew a rapier from the scabbard at his belt.

For all its bulk, the monster was fast – breathtakingly fast. Before Arela had taken another stride he found himself lifted up from the ground, clenched at the neck by a massive black gauntlet. He gasped for breath and his legs kicked out uselessly. His captor squeezed, and Arela dropped his blade. His vision blurred, and it was all he could do to look his killer in the eye.

‘I fight... for the Emperor,’ he gasped, blurting it out as if that fact could alter anything.

A metallic growl issued from the monster’s vox-grille.

‘You do not,’ it said, squeezing his neck and breaking his spine. ‘We do.’

Arela’s lifeless body fell to the ground with a thud. The monster turned its huge armoured shell around, watching impassively as its battle-brothers finished off the remaining resistance. The white hand device on its shoulder guard shone in sharp relief amid the judder and whirl of muzzle-flashes.

‘Target secured,’ came Brother Arran’s voice over the comm.

Arela’s killer – Brother-Sergeant Naim Morvox of Clave Arx, Clan Raukaan of the Iron Hands – nodded curtly before turning and striding back to the breach in the bunker wall. From beyond the broken heaps of rockcrete and human flesh the sounds of battle raged unchecked.

‘Next,’ said Morvox, and stalked back out into the storm.

I

PLANETFALL

CHAPTER ONE

Magos Ys leaned back in her throne and placed a polberry into her mouth. The skin of the fruit broke open across her tongue. Receptors lining her prosthetic tongue fed a data report containing material she had no interest in – acidic content, hazard breakdown, nutritional value – all of which she ignored. It did, however, taste pleasant.

<Link established.>

The notification flickered across the screed of information in her immediate noospheric vista, flagged up, as she’d requested, with a priority marker.

<Thank you,> she canted back. <Visual, please.>

Ys sat in the centre of an isolation chamber deep in the heart of the Adeptus Mechanicus liaison vessel Factor Balance. The chamber’s metal walls were illuminated by suspended lumen-globes on low output. The space between them scarcely made room for its few contents – a single ironwork command throne, a hololith pillar with ivory scrollwork around the rim, a physical nodelink and a Vandire-epoch tripod table holding a brass bowl of polberries and a goblet of emreva.

Ys wore the deep crimson robes used by high-ranking magi. Hers were voluminous and covered all of her body save for the ends of her fingers. A cowl hung over her face, obscuring the extent of her augmetic alteration and making her look, to a careless eye, almost human-normal.

She reached over to the bowl again with a six-fingered claw. As she did so the link from the Mechanicus heavy engine-carrier Erasmus fed through to the hololith pillar. A wavering outline in translucent green spun into existence over the ivory. It flickered, sheared, then stabilised into a man’s face.

<Welcome, princeps,> Ys canted, chewing.

The face of Firax Lopi, commander of the Praxes battle-formation of Legio Astorum, nodded. His eyes looked a little glassy.

<How are you?> asked Ys.

<Tired,> canted Lopi. <Apologies – translation from Cyledes was uncomfortable.>

<I am sorry to hear it. Shall we do this another time?>

Lopi shook his head.

<No, no. I am grateful for you taking the trouble.>

<I will be brief, then. This is what you need to know.>

Ys blinked a report of the current Imperial deployment into the noosphere, fed directly from the ship’s war-data collation facility.

<The Contqual subsector is still contested,> she canted. <Rauth’s strategeos are confident of bringing the suppression to completion during your tour. Orentas and Valon capitulated during the last standard month, freeing up resources for the final assault on Shardenus.>

<Shardenus?> asked Lopi, sending a sceptical glyph along with the databurst. <Already?>

<Indeed,> canted Ys. <Rauth has marshalled his forces effectively.>

Lopi ran his hands through his cropped hair. The movement made his hololithic outline flicker.

<Commander Arven Rauth,> he canted. <The Iron Hand.>

Ys indicated a positive.

<What is your assessment of him?> asked Lopi. <My data is inconsistent.>

<I am not surprised,> canted Ys. <He divides opinion. Have you fought alongside the Iron Hands before?>

<No.>

<Then you will quickly determine the issues. The Iron Hands are an interesting subject for psychological study, and Rauth conforms to type. Do not expect flexibility. He is careful with his objectives but careless with his assets.>

Lopi frowned, and couched his response in a disapproval-formation.

<He will not be careless with mine,> he canted. <Perhaps it might be worth reminding him just what it takes to deploy a battle-formation at such notice.>

<We could,> she replied, <but it would make little difference.>

Ys felt the stirrings of what she might once have recognised as amusement.

<This is all you need to know about Rauth,> she explained. <He will never stop. Once set on his course, he will neither deviate nor slacken. I do not believe this to be a trait unique to him; I believe it to be a characteristic of the entire Chapter. A result, perhaps, of over-reliance on augmetics.>

The last point was delivered with an irony indicator, to which Lopi responded with a smile.

<Understood,> he canted. <Though, in my limited experience, that sounds like most Chapters.>

<Perhaps. I will leave you to make your own judgement.>

Lopi blinked and suppressed a yawn. Ys could see the fatigue lying heavily on his features and decided to bring the briefing to a speedy close. There would be much work ahead of them both before the Praxes formation would be ready for deployment, and bringing five Titan war engines and nine mechanised skitarii battalions to theatre amounted to a significant logistical headache.

<The forces for the Shardenus operation are set,> she canted. <Rauth has overall command of the Territo battlegroup and also leads a full clan of Iron Hands.>

<Clan?>

<Chapter-specific designation, analogous to a Codex company: 136 Space Marines and 23,451 mortal auxiliaries deployed on five vessels including the strike cruiser Kalach. Four other clans are engaged throughout the subsector on other suppression missions, though from what I can gather they engage in little communication with one another.>

Lopi absorbed the information carefully.

<And the rest?> he asked.

<The Guard contingent is led by Lord General Raji Nethata. As we speak he is in the process of landing 127,000 troops, mostly drawn from the 126th Ferik Tactical. He also has command of two battalions of Harakoni drop-troops and seven battalions of heavy armour, plus the usual Naval support. I have uploaded the details to the core.>

<What do we know of Nethata?>

<A long service record, marked with seven distinguished commendations. Seventeen engagements are recorded with Martian involvement, and the tech-priests registered no complaints. Aside: I find myself admiring his mettle. He stood up to Rauth on several occasions during pre-deployment, and that is, I suspect, not easy for an unimproved human to do.>

Lopi raised an eyebrow.

<No doubt. So they have been at odds.>

<Sporadically. As I said, Rauth is careless of those he serves alongside. Casualty rates among the Guard have been several points higher than normal.>

<But Rauth’s methods,> canted Lopi. <They obtain results.>

<Undeniably,> replied Ys. <Nethata appears to display concern for his men. He does not like seeing them used as expendable adjuncts to Rauth’s enthusiasm.>

<How touching.>

<Is that sarcasm, princeps?> Ys reached for another polberry. <That is not like you.>

<Apologies. Perhaps I do need some rest. I will digest this information carefully, though – it has been useful. I see that, as ever, our Imperial brethren have their little issues to work through.>

<We all do, Firax.>

Lopi looked directly at her.

<That is true, magos,> he canted. <You will have your work cut out keeping an eye on them all. Let us keep in close touch, the two of us; we may find ourselves awkwardly positioned if we are called on to adjudicate.>

Ys sent a complex prefix to her response which indicated that there was no need to worry, and that she had already given the political side of her assignment a great deal of thought, as had the hierarchy back on Mars, but that she understood his concern.

<Noted,> was all she explicitly canted. <Everything, as always, will be kept under review.>

Fires still raged across the Helat. The wide ash plains east of Shardenus’s principal hive cluster burned with a web of crimson trenches, making it look as if the crust of the planet had been scored open to expose the magma beneath. Skeletons of downed troop carriers and tangled tank-traps smouldered amid the torn-up earth, fanned by the warm wind that carried the ash.

New structures were already being built among the wreckage. Massive constructor vehicles had been landed – mobile gantries, corkscrew-nosed excavators and earthmovers with segmented tracks and swaying extractor claws. Pits were dug, power plants installed, medicae facilities erected, blast walls lowered, artillery points established. Constant streams of atmospheric landers descended from the orbital carriers bringing munitions, stores and troops with them. Among the columns of lifters wheeled the attack craft of the Imperial Navy – blunt-nosed Marauder bombers trailing with gouts of smog, Lightning fighter escorts screaming along in tight formations, Vulture gunships lurking over construction sites with their fuselage lights blinking in the gloom.

With the first-stage assaults over, the Imperial commanders were gathering the enormous forces at their disposal in readiness for the assault on Shardenus’s hive spires. Planetfall had been achieved with acceptable losses, mostly due to the fire unleashed by Navy destroyers from orbit as well as clinical strikes launched by Iron Hands tactical squads.

No one was under any illusion that the next stage would be as easy. The spire cluster of Shardenus Prime was void-shielded, ringed with artillery-studded walls and stuffed with millions of defenders. That fortress was the principal target, the nexus of the entire campaign, the linchpin upon which the fate of a dozen worlds and billions of lives rested.

Lord General Raji Nethata lifted a pair of gilt-edged magnoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus. His view swept across kilometres of territory, seething with troop movements, before rising up from the plains to the Helatine Massif, across the industrial wasteland of the Gorgas Maleon and finally halting at the gates of the spire cluster itself.

Gigantic turrets rose high into the smoggy atmosphere of Shardenus. They looked less like human dwelling places and more like immense, fractured mountains of iron. Each gothic pinnacle of the conurbation reared up, terraced and pitted, in jagged lines of black against a rust-red sky.

It was a vision of hell, a smog-choked nightmare of hyper-industry and contamination. Even on maximum augmentation, his magnoculars revealed little detail on the flanks of the distant spires, but Nethata knew full well what went on within the dark metal walls of those gargantuan structures. He knew that millions of men and women lodged there, rammed into hab-units like rats stuck in a sewer. He knew that they worked fourteen-hour days in humming, clanging manufactoria, churning out lines of munitions and machine parts. He knew that they retired after those periods, exhausted, for scant rest in tiny rooms that stank of stale urine and were illuminated by flickering, insect-choked lumen-bars.

Above all, he knew that the core activities of humanity – eating, sleeping, making love, laughing, dreaming – were only fitfully remembered in there. Those people lived a half-existence of stress and drudgery, sustained in life only by the Imperium’s endless, ravenous need to keep them on their feet long enough to produce more raw material for the galaxy-wide war machine.

Such souls had ceased to be individuals worthy of pity or consideration. They were components – ingredients – in the eternal feast, a feast upon which mightier forces gorged themselves.

Nethata knew all that. He’d seen the same acts played out across a hundred worlds, all wreathed in smog like Shardenus, all home to nothing more than toil and despair.

What lifts a man above that station? he thought to himself, peering through the lenses at the far-off object of his army’s coming wrath. What makes his life more than a futility?

He put his magnoculars down and snapped the lens-covers closed. From his high vantage point on the command post’s observation platform he looked out over the slowly forming shape of his army. Men, thousands of them, marched in columns across the ash plains, each one clasping a lasgun to his chest.

When he takes up a weapon. When he resists. Then, he is exalted.

‘Sir?’

Nethata snapped out of his introspection to see Slavo Heriat standing before him.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Rauth desires your presence,’ said Heriat. ‘Within the hour, if possible.’

Nethata clamped the magnoculars to his belt and turned away from the view. He faced Heriat, and said nothing for a while.

The two figures looked very different. Nethata was a short, vigorous man, still powerfully built and bullish despite two centuries of active service. His skin was the colour of burnt umber and his hair was as black as oil. His chin jutted forwards, giving him a belligerent, officious air, though when he spoke his voice was soft. His accent was that of his home world, the high-gravity planet Moal, something he’d not lost in all the years of campaign across the void. He wore the olive green uniform of the Ferik Tactical, neatly adorned with an array of Imperial decorations across his broad chest. A heavy urlwool cloak hung down his back, pinned at the shoulder with a stylised bronze aquila.

Commissar-General Slavo Heriat stood nearly a head taller than Nethata and was as lean and taut as a hunting hound. His flesh was a smooth pale grey, except around his eyes and nostrils where the skin had sunk into redness. Sores indicating the congenital condition skietica clustered at the edges of his thick-lipped mouth. He wore the long black leather coat favoured by his peers in the Commissariat, complete with orthodox high-peaked hat and iron-grey chest aquila.

A casual observer might have expected two such men to be at odds with one another, driven to disagreement by their obvious divergence in character and disposition. Such an observer would have been entirely wrong; for reasons that never strayed far from either of their minds, they were inseparable. For a hundred years they had been like hilt and shaft, like blade and scabbard, like trigger and barrel – just two parts of the same weapon.

‘I have an observation, Heriat,’ said Nethata.

‘Do you, sir?’ asked Heriat.

‘I do. The men we kill on this world believe, fervently, that they are fighting for the Emperor.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen the same reports,’ said Heriat.

‘What do you make of it?’

Heriat’s expression was uninterested.

‘They are mistaken,’ he said. ‘Such error is fatal.’

‘So it is proving,’ Nethata said. ‘And yet, it is strange, all the same.’

Nethata looked back out across the ash plains, over to where his forces were mustering ready for the assault to come. Huge areas of cleared land were covered with prefabricated barrack-complexes. Columns of armoured vehicles, stained black from the ash, crawled slowly to the front.

‘This world is governed by powers who wish the ruin of humanity,’ he said. ‘My psykers froth at the mouth and warn me of horrors growing in those spires, and even I can feel it.’

He looked back to Heriat.

‘Why do they not sense it?’ he asked. ‘Why can’t they see what masters now rule over them?’

Heriat maintained his chilling, impassive stare. His eyes, red-rimmed and ringed with darkness, were as empty as a dead man’s.

‘It takes time to corrupt a world,’ he said. ‘And do not fool yourself – how many of our men understand why they fight? They follow orders. They believe what we tell them. I make sure of it.’

Nethata frowned.

‘I do not like that,’ he said. ‘The death of heretics brings me joy; the death of the ignorant does not.’

‘I have agents in the hives, already working,’ said Heriat. ‘If we can persuade them, they will rise up and join us; if not, we will kill them. In either case, their souls will be saved.’

Nethata smiled.

‘So clear,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘So clear.’

‘That it is, sir,’ Heriat said. ‘Better the ignorant die than the guilty live.’

The commissar glanced down at the chrono lodged in the armour of his forearm.

‘Rauth is waiting,’ he said.

Nethata lost his smile.

‘Yes, you said,’ he replied, remaining where he was and looking over to the spires on the horizon, knowing what horrors would be necessary to break them. His expression was bleak. ‘He can wait a little longer.’

Several kilometres south-west of Nethata’s command headquarters, a cluster of buildings had been raised from the ash. Like everything else on the Helat, they were prefabricated units – created in the forges of void-going starships and lifted down to the surface by a procession of landers. The buildings were unlike the ferrocrete bunkers of the Imperial Guard – their surfaces were clean and finely tooled, unmarked by regimental devices or fleet designations. No windows marred the symmetry of the outer walls, which glistened darkly in the dull red light of Shardenus’s smog-wreathed suns.

Though each structure had stood in place for less than a local diurnal cycle, they looked as if they had been there forever. Ash blew against the heavy foundations and slipped over the molecule-smooth outer finish.

A flyer descended sharply towards the largest of the buildings, its landing lights whirling through the smoggy air. The flyer was as black as the structures below it, and was also without insignia or decoration.

With a single belch of neon-blue flame it slowed its descent and hovered over a bleak landing strip. Squat landing braces extended smoothly from their sheaths, flexing as the flyer made contact with the ground. Its main engines cut out, and a wash of smoke and steam slewed across the apron.

As soon as it was down, a number of figures emerged from the surrounding buildings. None of them were fully human. Some had traces of visible flesh in isolated patches; others looked entirely metallic. All moved on tracks and had complex motive units strapped to their backs. Most had more than two arms, each of which terminated in a variety of tools, weapons and interface nodes. Before the flyer’s engines had fully wound down they began to fuss and tinker all over it, opening up service hatches and attaching refuelling tubes. Their impassive faces – little more than riveted plates of steel – gave nothing away as they worked.

In the wake of the servitors came five much larger figures – all over three metres tall and clad in the gigantic curves of Terminator armour. Four of them wore matt-black battle-plate with signs of heavy use on the ceramite. They carried double-barrelled boltguns and their helm-lenses glowed rust-red. Each wore a skeletal white hand device on their left shoulder guard and a skull-inset cog-wheel on their right. Imperial aquilae had been picked out in gunmetal-silver across their chests.

The fifth figure, in the lead, was clad similarly. His servos let out a low, grinding machine-hum as he moved. Like the others, every facet of his plate was painted a dull black, only relieved with stark white Chapter markings. Coils of tubing and clusters of pistons nestled amid the smooth curves of ceramite. Its armoured shell had been stripped back in several places, exposing panels of polished metalwork beneath.

None of those figures displayed any flesh. They looked like immense mobile statues, cast from chunks of black onyx and augmented with steel.

They came to a halt as a hatch in the side of the flyer opened, sending fresh gouts of steam tumbling across the ground. A single figure emerged from the hatch. He was clad much like the others, though his battle-plate was a dark blue – almost nightshade – rather than black. He carried the white hand device on his left pauldron alongside the skull-and-coronet sigil of a Chief Librarian. His head was buried under an iron cowl, encrusted with dark crystals and an array of slender probes.

He nodded to the lead warrior – a brief gesture, barely perceptible amid all the interlocking layers of ceramite and cabling.

‘Lord clan commander,’ he said.

His voice was throaty and machine-filtered. His vowels were flat and the consonants tinny, as if the mortal vocal cords within had been stretched out and lodged within a mechanical audio-augmetic.

‘Telach,’ replied Clan Commander Arven Rauth, and his voice, though possibly a shade more resonant, possibly deeper, sounded almost the same. ‘Translation was efficient?’

‘It was.’

Rauth nodded again, satisfied, and turned away from the flyer. His escort parted to allow him to pass. Telach walked alongside Rauth, and the two giants crunched heavily towards the waiting shelter of the Iron Hands’ command complex.

‘How stands it?’ asked Telach.

‘Satisfactory,’ replied Rauth.

The two warriors spoke in Tergiza, the Medusan dialect used by all of Clan Raukaan. Little emotion was conveyed by that language, which, by human standards, used exceptionally rigid grammar and vocabulary.

‘From orbit, deployment looks complete,’ said Telach.

‘It is not. I have been promised Titans. More troops need landing. We have labour ahead of us.’

Heavy blast doors ground open before the two of them, and the warriors passed out of the swirling wind and into the sterile interior of the command complex. Orange strip-lumens glowed softly from metal walls, picking out the austere mesh of the construction material and highlighting its utilitarian finish. The Iron Hands’ boots clanked against the floor as they walked.

‘The last time I consulted you,’ said Telach, ‘doubt existed over the pattern of the attack.’

‘No doubt,’ said Rauth, dismissively. ‘Never any doubt. The mortal commander objected. His objection was considered and rejected.’

Telach’s blue helm-mask turned slightly in Rauth’s direction. It was the only expression of surprise he gave away.

‘The mortal commander objected?’ he repeated.

‘Yes.’

‘He is a brave man. What was his case?’

Something like a vox-distorted grunt escaped Rauth’s helm.

‘A brave man?’ he said. The two of them reached the end of the corridor and turned left. The environment become several degrees colder as they went, and the orange light grew deeper. All around them, the faint whirr of machinery hung in the air. ‘He ought to be. He was still wrong.’

Rauth paused before a set of heavily built doors. He raised his helm-mask towards a skull-shaped roundel in their centre and a beam of red light briefly flickered across his lenses. Something clunked from within the doors’ housing, and they slid back to reveal a hexagonal chamber beyond.

‘Come,’ said Rauth. ‘There are things you should know.’

The two of them entered the chamber, leaving their escort behind them on the other side of the doors.

The room was large, with enough space to accommodate fifty inhabitants with similar dimensions to Rauth. The ceiling arced upwards, braced by steel struts. Each of the six walls was blank and undecorated, made of the same dark metal as everything else in the complex, and there was no furniture of any description. In the centre of the chamber was a low pillar, also hexagonal. A metal skull, highly polished, lay on it. Rauth and Telach stood on either side of the pillar, facing one another.

‘You came in from Orentas,’ said Rauth.

‘I did,’ said Telach.

‘That world is now pacified.’

‘It is. I judged that my presence was now required here.’

‘If you had not come, I would have summoned you.’

‘Then our thoughts are aligned.’

‘They are.’

The two of them spoke quickly, tightly, efficiently. Combined with the bizarre timbre of their vox-output, the effect was rather like two cogitators locked in a closed loop with one another. For such massive figures, the sound was strangely fleeting and insubstantial.

‘We control seventy-two per cent of the Contqual subsector,’ said Rauth. ‘The enemy is withdrawing across all active zones.’

‘Except this one.’

‘Including this one. Planetfall was achieved cleanly. They can no longer project force beyond the hive limits.’

Neither figure moved while they spoke. They stood rigidly, shoulders back, feet braced. The ambient orange light seemed to sink into the matt surface of their armour and disappear.

‘You should be pleased,’ said Telach.

‘You asked about the mortal,’ said Rauth.

‘Raji Nethata. I studied our data on him.’

‘He objects to the pace of the assault. He advocated alternative tactics, vocally, in our strategic briefings.’

‘What does he want?’ asked Telach.

‘Shardenus is a world of hives,’ said Rauth. ‘These here, the Prime cluster, constitute the governing centre of the planet. Many others exist across the northern continent. They process the planet’s food and weapon stockpiles. He wanted to attack them first, to starve Shardenus Prime of supplies and wait for it to weaken.’

‘They would be softer targets.’

‘Yes. They would be destroyed in a month.’

‘Then why reject it?’

‘Time. I cannot wait for the principal hives to grow hungry.’

Rauth gestured, fractionally, with a single finger. A three-dimensional schematic of the Shardenus Prime hive cluster emerged over the skull, picked out in lines of bright orange. It rotated gently. As it did so, deployment runes and attack routes were overlaid, one by one.

‘The hives can be taken by direct assault,’ he said. ‘We attack – here – and maintain a constantly moving front – here. The central hive will fall once the outer spires have been compromised.’

Telach looked at the schematic. Behind the black mask of his hood, it was impossible to read his expression.

‘We have the weapons, the numbers, for this?’ he asked.

‘We do.’

Telach hesitated before replying.

‘I see why Nethata objects,’ he said. ‘His forces will be ravaged.’

‘Some will suffer. We will suffer. All suffer who uphold the will of the Emperor.’

‘Why the requirement for speed? What is in those spires?’

‘I do not know,’ replied Rauth. His voice was as flat as ever, deadened by the blunt syllables of Tergiza. ‘But I can guess.’

‘And you cannot discuss this guess with mortals.’

‘No. That is why I need you.’

Telach looked down at the rotating schematic, and said nothing. The wire-frame outlines of the hive spires reflected in his red helm-lenses.

‘You have changed the least, out of all of us,’ said Rauth. ‘I do not pretend to like what you do, but I am not fool enough to discard it. The forces we have encountered thus far are deluded but not mutated. As we progress, that will change. Within the central spires, only we will be able to fight the defenders. In the very centre, where the corruption started, perhaps only you will.’

Telach bowed.

‘I am your servant,’ he said.

Rauth inclined his head a fraction.

‘A comm-signal from Khatir,’ he announced. ‘Nethata is here.’

‘He will not like your plans any more than he did before.’

A faint noise escaped Rauth’s heavy helm-mask, perhaps a vestigial expression of amusement from lips no longer accustomed to expressing much at all.

‘He is mortal,’ said Rauth. ‘He does not have to like my orders; he only has to follow them.’

CHAPTER TWO

Valien crouched low and sniffed the air. It tasted the same as hive-air on any other world – caustic, recycled, thick with the stink of close-packed humanity.

He pressed himself against the sloping wall of the tunnel, blending into the darkness. The lumen-strips running along the length of the ceiling were defective and flickered badly. From somewhere far below came the sound of machinery working, and the hum of it made the tunnel walls vibrate to the touch.

Valien pulled the synthskin clear of his inner wrist, exposing his locator. Schematics of the Capitolis hive complex spun into hololithic detail in front of him, glowing softly in the dim light. He got his bearings quickly.

Level 54, Sector Aleph, Melamar Secundus spire. Seven routes back to safe-point.

The air stirred ahead of him. Valien extinguished the hololith and slipped the fabric of his black boiler-suit over his forearm. He pushed himself clear of the tunnel wall and let his toned body fall into a slouch. His keen eyes sank down into a hollow look of boredom and his supple cheeks slackened.

Three figures entered the tunnel from an access hatch at the far end. Two of them carried standard-issue sidearms. The third, a woman, wore the uniform of a junior arbitrator and looked bulky in her armour.

‘You,’ she said through a helmet filter, sweeping a torch beam across him. ‘Function and tasking.’

Valien saluted clumsily, forcing his highly attuned physique to mimic poor conditioning.

‘Talex volenta,’ he said.

‘What?’ she asked, pointing her laspistol in his direction. ‘Say ag–’

Valien flicked his arm out, revealing the palm-sized needle gun. He shot the woman cleanly through the joint between her helmet and neck-guard. Her visor sprayed with blood and she went down messily, choking and gasping. Before her escorts had time to react he fired again, sending needles into their unprotected faces. They toppled on top of one another, leaking blood in thin streams from tiny puncture wounds.

Valien stowed the needle gun. The tunnel fell silent. For a few moments Valien remained perfectly still, watching for further interruptions. One of the defective lumens flickered, but otherwise nothing moved.

He relaxed and let his eyes run over the pile of bodies in front of him. Blood ran in trickles from the woman’s neck and onto the mesh-metal of the tunnel floor. As soon as he saw it, a pang of desire ran through him. He crouched down low, sniffing. A familiar aroma of sweat and copper filled his nostrils. His heartbeat picked up and his nostrils dilated.

It had been too long. Even given all his training, all his discipline, it had been far too long. He battled against his instincts for a little longer, knowing that to indulge himself would only make the withdrawal symptoms worse in the days to come.

He gave in. Like an animal, he lowered his head towards the trickles of blood and extended his tongue. The taste sent shivers of pleasure through his body. He forgot the filth around him and allowed himself to enjoy the moment. He licked again, sucking the hot liquid to the back of his throat and savouring the thick texture as it slipped down. He closed his eyes, and smiled.

‘You.’

The voice startled him. He snapped his eyes open, instantly coiled for attack.

Careless!

‘Talex volenta,’ he snapped, whipping the needle gun into position.

Four figures had entered the tunnel from the same access hatch and stood about five metres away from him. They wore transparent visors, and Valien could see expressions of horror on their faces.

‘Relex amantis,’ said one of them, and Valien instantly relaxed.

He stood up, wiping a stray line of blood from his lips. The tiny muzzles of his needle gun slipped back into his gauntlet.

‘Respond quicker next time,’ he said. ‘I almost killed you.’

The man who’d given the code-phrase pulled his helmet from his head. He had dirty, sandy-coloured hair.

‘What were you doing?’ he asked, staring at the bodies on the floor.

‘Give me your name,’ said Valien, sharply.

The man finally dragged his eyes away from the corpses and looked Valien in the face.

‘Lieutenant Alend Marivo,’ he said. ‘9th Platoon, 3rd Company, 23rd Shardenus Imperial Guard. These are men from my unit. We have more waiting, spread out through the lower levels. All we need are orders.’

‘Good,’ said Valien, giving him a cold smile. He was aware of what effect his unusual features had on ordinary men, and he liked it. ‘Take me somewhere secure, and you shall have them.’

The hab-unit was as dirty and foetid as every other hab-unit in the lower Melamar Secundus sector. Shula Khadi had no idea when it had been built. She had no idea when the hives themselves had been built – as far as she was concerned, they might have stood forever.

She sat on her hard bunk and ran her fingers through short, dark hair. Khadi felt grimy and unwashed. A thin film of dirt caked her cheeks, the kind of soot-coloured dirt that every machinist on Shardenus wore perpetually on their skin. She didn’t have a scheduled slot in the hygiene station for another two days, and even then she knew she wouldn’t be able to scrub it all off – it would take more than five minutes of standing under a lukewarm trickle of recycled water with a handful of foamy dermacleanse to scour the filth of the hive from her flesh.

Occasionally she dreamed of being clean. She dreamed of a hypothetical state in which her clothes were free of lice, her skin was free of sores and her hair was glossy from cleanliness rather than shiny with grease. She knew that such a state was possible from the holovids on the communal picts, in which manicured speakers from the information departments delivered exhortations to the workers to improve faltering production rates. The speakers in those picts had tight, clean faces and crease-free uniforms. Khadi guessed that they lived somewhere at the top of the Capitolis, up in one of the domes that she had only ever seen from a distance through the hazy murk of the planet’s atmosphere.

No one Khadi knew had skin like they did. All other workers in the Roll Yard manufactorium were as dishevelled and pallid as she was, and many were worse. That didn’t stop her dreaming, though, and nor did it stop her making the most of the precious hygiene slots when they came. Then she scrubbed and scraped and rubbed until her fingers were raw.

It was important to have standards, even on a hellhole like Shardenus. That was how you kept it together, kept your chin up and your eyes clear and didn’t end up in the forced labour asylums where the ranting crazies were shipped, never to come back.

A sharp hiss broke her train of thought as the door to her hab-unit slid open. She pushed herself from her bunk, irritated at the interruption. Private time was scarce in a hive, and despite the lack of working locks on almost all of the unit doors, most people respected the sanctity of it.

Marivo walked in. He had a strange, half-sick look in his eyes. The lieutenant was still in uniform – the slate-grey tunic and breeches of the Shardenus regiments – but he’d taken his helmet off. He looked at her distractedly, as if he’d done something terrible or dangerous and couldn’t quite get it out of his mind. His blond hair had been pressed down from helmet-wear, and looked greasy.

‘What?’ Khadi asked, putting her hands on her hips.

She didn’t like Marivo. It wasn’t so much what he did as what he was. In normal circumstances a Guard officer wouldn’t have given a machinist a second glance, and for all that he pretended such things didn’t matter now, they still did.

‘I made contact, Shula,’ said Marivo. ‘He was where he said he’d be. We’re getting our tasking, and I need you with me.’

Khadi felt her stomach twist with worry. So this was it.

‘You did?’ she said. ‘What’s he like?’

Marivo shot her a wry smile.

‘He’s… he’s odd. I don’t know. We’re assembled in the refectory – you can see for yourself.’

He didn’t move. Marivo looked nervous, which was unsettling. Khadi had never seen him look nervous before – for all his faults, the man wasn’t a coward.

‘This is what you wanted,’ she reminded him, not inclined to make him feel any better. ‘This was your decision.’

Marivo pressed a button on the panel beside him and the door hissed closed. The two of them stood in the tiny chamber, between them taking up most of the available room between bunk and door. His hard face looked almost haggard under the brutal strip-lumen.

‘You picked up the transmissions too,’ he said, accusingly. ‘You heard the same things I did. This is our duty.’

‘I know we need to get more organised,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know what they intend to do once it gets in here. I’m as scared of them as I am of everything else.’

She ran her hands through her hair, and saw that they were shaking.

‘I know what you think,’ she said. ‘You think the Guard will get in, put things to rights and recognise those who helped them do it. I hope you’re right, I really do, but I’m not like you. I prefer to keep my head down so it doesn’t get shot off, and it doesn’t matter much who’s holding the gun.’

Marivo shook his head disapprovingly.

‘Careful,’ he warned. ‘That’s–’

‘–dangerous talk. So it is.’

She slumped back against her bunk. Debating with Marivo exhausted her.

‘But there’s no point in discussing it,’ she said. ‘You’ve made contact with them, so that’s that. What do they want us to do?’

‘Like I said – we’re being briefed in the refectory. And I need you there.’

‘Why?’

‘You know why.’ Marivo smiled grimly. ‘I need someone who understands the underhive, someone who can talk to the others. I have trouble… sinking to your level.’

It was meant as a joke, but it fell flat and Khadi felt a spike of anger kindle inside her.

‘Get out,’ she said.

Marivo’s face fell.

‘Look, I’m–’

‘Just get out,’ said Khadi. ‘I’ll come when I’m ready.’

She turned away from him, her cheeks flushed.

‘If I’m that important to all this,’ she said, ‘then I’m sure he’ll wait.’

Marivo strode down the corridor from Khadi’s hab-unit to the refectory, and his fists clenched. She made him angry. He’d tried everything to get along with her, from flattery, to indifference, to banter, to the kind of commanding tone he’d used with his platoon, and none of it had any effect.

He understood, and had always understood, why she and other manuals felt the way they did. The conspirators – as they called themselves when feeling flippant – were a mix of social strands that would never have been tolerated in less straitened times: Guard officers, machinists, gangers, medicae, hive officials, transit operatives, all shoved cheek-by-jowl and in constant fear of discovery.

Khadi, however, seemed to have a personal grudge against anyone not raised in the grime-swilling depths of the lower levels with the gang-tattoos and limb deformities to prove it. She’d been there right at the start, back when the rumours started coming out of the Capitolis that things had gone wrong. She’d run agitprop through the manufactoria floors at huge risk and had recruited half a dozen new conspirators even before official admissions had come over the communal vids to announce that something had changed.

Marivo still didn’t know what had motivated her. His own ideals were simple – adoration of the Emperor, loathing of the heretic, the kind of thing he’d had drilled into him over seven years of active service in the local regiments. As for Khadi, a gutter-dwelling creature from the unlit bowels of Melamar Secundus, who knew what had provoked her into rebellion against the hive authority? Perhaps she’d always wanted to strike back against her betters. Perhaps, indeed, that was what motivated most of the lowlife that clustered around the conspirators like an airborne contagion.

Ever since Marivo had been pulled into the brotherhood he’d tried to work with her. He’d recognised her qualities immediately – the fierce, semi-savage expression that spoke of well-deep resolve, her physical toughness, her clear vision of what needed to be done. Khadi would have made a fine Guard recruit if things had been different. Maybe she knew that. Maybe, deep down, that knowledge was what made her so damned prickly.

He reached the end of the corridor, over where the last of the lumen-strips gave out and the walls became patchy with old, caked grease. The floor was sticky and smelled of fish.

A green light flickered across a narrow grille in the door in front of him. He held still, feeling a prickle across his skin as the security beam ran a facial scan.

‘Refectory’s closed,’ came a voice from behind the door.

‘It’s me, Relat,’ said Marivo impatiently. ‘Open the door.’

The door pulled back to reveal a large chamber beyond. The refectory’s benches had been pulled together into a rough semicircle. Forty men and women sat at them, though none of them were eating. Most were manual workers and wore pale blue tunics and overalls. A few military uniforms were visible. A single black-visored arbitrator sat at the back in silence. Marivo slipped along to a vacant spot and sat like the rest of them.

They all faced a single figure in shabby work fatigues. He stood, shoulders back and hands clasped loosely in front of him. His skin was grey like a rad-gen worker. His features were indefinably odd, possibly hermaphroditic, or simply effeminate. Despite his shabby appearance his posture indicated a wiry and capable physique. He carried himself with an unconscious, almost arrogant, poise.

Marivo looked at him carefully, wondering if any of the blood he had seen him drink remained on the man’s chin. It didn’t, and he almost regretted that it didn’t.

‘You do not need to know my name,’ the man said. His voice was as strange as everything else about him. ‘I serve the Emperor, though, and you, by your presence here, have demonstrated that you serve Him also. The masters of this world no longer serve the Emperor, and so have become our mutual enemy. You have the chance to become heroes of the Imperium, and so should consider yourselves blessed beyond measure – few mortals ever have such a chance to serve.’

Marivo knew the man’s name; or, at least the name he’d given when they’d stumbled across him. Valien. A codename, presumably, one that changed with every assignment. He served under the Commissariat, so he said, and was an assassin. Not a Temple assassin, but from a death cult – Talica, he called it.

Marivo didn’t know what a death cult was, but he certainly knew what the Commissariat was.

‘Perhaps you think you understand what has been happening on Shardenus,’ said Valien. ‘You do not. For months you have been fed lies by your masters. Let me tell you the truth. The whole Contqual subsector is in rebellion, and has been in rebellion for a long time. Even now the armies of the Immortal Emperor are spread out across whole star systems to combat the contagion. As you sit here listening to me, millions of men are fighting across a hundred battlefields. They are fighting and dying, just as you will soon be called to fight and to die.’

Valien clearly enjoyed the sound of his own voice, and he placed a theatrical relish on each phrase.

‘The forces of treachery are being routed. Contqual is returning to the bosom of the Emperor, planet by planet, hive spire by hive spire. Shardenus is the last world to resist. Here, where the contagion began, the fighting will be fiercest. Some of your comrades will fight to resist the invader, believing themselves loyal. Others know the truth and will fight for the perversions they have carved out for themselves.’

A faint hiss from the back of the refectory announced the presence of a latecomer. Marivo glanced over to see Khadi entering, and looked away just as quickly.

‘The guilty will be punished,’ said Valien, looking as if he relished the prospect. ‘You will be acquainted with many of those destined to die. If so, harden your hearts. The fate of traitors is death, and the fate of assisting traitors is death. Very soon the Angels of Death will be here. When they come, all deception will be cast aside and the true nature of those whom you have been serving will become clear.’

The man’s voice lowered.

‘I will not say: do not be afraid, for to fear is to be human. But those who are coming have no fear.’

Marivo listened intently, waiting for the moment he knew was coming, the moment when he would discover what manner of celestial warrior had been unleashed to drag his world back into the ranks of the faithful.

‘We are fortunate indeed,’ said Valien, his grey mouth twisting into a smile. ‘Be joyful, faithful of Melamar Secundus, for it is the Iron Hands who have come to Shardenus.’

CHAPTER THREE

Nethata looked up.

Nothing. The sky remained swilled with ash and engine fumes – endless clouds of filth and oily exhaust remnants. The smog blew in eddies driven by the hot wind.

He looked down. The huge landing site was ready, cleared of lesser vehicles and as pristine as anything else on the planet. Lights flickered along its edges – on, off, on, off. Around its margins, seven thousand troops stood to attention, arranged in regimental formation and in full dress uniform.

Nethata adjusted his cloak. With a squeeze of his ring finger he shot a miniscule dose of tranquilox into his bloodstream. He didn’t need a heavy slug, but every little helped – dealing with Rauth was enough to give any man headaches.

‘They’re late,’ said Heriat.

‘They’re never late,’ said Nethata.

The two men stood on a dais at the southern end of the landing site, twenty metres high with a shallow flight of stairs leading to the summit. A red carpet had been draped across the top level, already dirty from drifting ash.

‘I wonder how old that is?’ said Nethata, idly.

‘Sir?’

‘For how many thousands of years have men greeted visitors on red carpets? Why do we still do it? Do you know how difficult it is to source the stuff in a warzone?’

Heriat didn’t reply. He turned his dead-eyed gaze back to the landing stages.

Nethata rolled his shoulders. They felt tense, despite the tranquilox. He was having to gland more of it every day and the reliance had begun to bother him. Not that he could have told Heriat about that, of course.

The summit of the dais held twenty men and women. Six were senior regimental officers from the Ferik battalions, by far the largest contingent of Imperial troops on Shardenus. They stood stiffly, ignoring the temptation to wipe flecks of ash from their faces. Among them were two company commanders from the Galamoth Armoured detachments, pale-skinned with black rebreathers over their mouths and nostrils. Yris Aikino of the Harakoni Warhawks stood well apart from the others, clad below the neck in carapace armour, his red hair in dreadlocks. The others – the Master of Navigators, the Psyker Primaris, Naval attachés, Administratum scribes, the usual roster – all held their hands to their mouths and tried not to breathe too deeply.

Only one member of Rauth’s contingent had deigned to attend. A lone Iron Hand stood at the back of the company, silent and brooding. Aside from the briefest of greetings to Nethata, the warrior had said nothing since arriving.

As he endured the wait, Nethata found himself musing on the possibility that the dais construction might fail to take the weight of the monster’s power armour and bring them all down in a tangled heap. Despite everything, that would amuse him.

Above them, the clouds parted. The wind changed direction, as if suddenly buffeted from above.

‘Ah,’ said Nethata. ‘Here we go.’

Heriat noticed the change as well, and whispered something into a comm-link embedded in his collar. Down at ground level, seven thousand troopers adjusted their stance and checked that they were in the correct position.

The clouds directly above the landing platform glowed like hot embers. A low growl broke out, distant at first, then stronger and more reverberating.

‘In all my years in service,’ said Nethata, ‘I have never seen one of them make planetfall.’

‘I have,’ said Heriat.

‘Is it worth the wait?’

Heriat shrugged.

‘You’ll be the judge of that.’

The clouds parted. A shaft of hot, red light lanced down, striking the landing site in the centre. The growl of massed engines grew to a roar. Even with aural dampeners operating, Nethata found the wall of sound impressive. For the troops down below, it must have been painfully loud.

The wind picked up, pulling at his cloak and ruffling its fur lining. A gale swirled around the dais, flinging ash in all directions. The shaft of light grew in size, turning into a column of thundering, trembling flame. Other shafts joined it, until five mighty pillars of fire streamed down from the heavens and on to the wide ferrocrete arena below.

Moving with stately precision, five gigantic mass conveyors broke through the tormented cloud cover and descended planetwards on a shimmering cushion of heat-wash. Five vast engines threw immense quantities of promethium-blaze into the atmosphere, and even from many hundreds of metres away Nethata could feel the raw heat of it against his skin. Above the roar of the engines the structure of the landers themselves rose up in bronze and gold and crimson. The skull and cog insignia of the Adeptus Mechanicus was engraved into the sides of each one – ten metres in diameter and surrounded by strobing banks of lights. Above each insignia was another device: a black sun ringed with a coronet of electrical brilliance.

In stark contrast to the drab, functional vehicles of the Imperial Guard, these vessels were majestic creations. Every surface was covered in baroque bronze imagery – angels, demigods, mythical beasts, arcane machinery of long-forgotten provenance.

The earth beneath Nethata’s feet vibrated like a drumskin. Huge waves of heat from the engine discharge rolled over the dais, prickling his skin. He could see soldiers in the front ranks down on the plain struggle to hold their positions, craning their necks to take in the massive vessels as they descended.

With a heavy, echoing crash, the lead conveyor touched down. It sat heavily on the landing site, rising up like some towering edifice from the ferrocrete. Flames from its colossal exhausts rippled away, and the throbbing roar from its engines slowly began to wind down.

Once on the tarmac, the lander’s shape and purpose could more clearly be discerned. The ship was nearly twice as tall as it was deep and wide. Almost all of its bulk seemed to be taken up with a single immense load-bay. Tiny lights flickered at the very summit of the mass conveyor where, presumably, the bridge and control functions were housed.

The forward-facing flank of the ship was wreathed in steam. Despite that, two words could be made out across its surface, graven in High Gothic letters five metres high.

‘Legio Astorum,’ said Nethata, reading out loud. ‘They enjoy advertising their presence, do they not?’

Heriat let slip a wry smile.

‘If I had such toys to play with,’ he said, ‘I would too.’

Nethata laughed.

Once all five vessels had touched down and the deafening engine noise had died away, nothing happened for a full seven minutes. The conveyors settled on their landing braces and the smoke and steam of the descent gradually drifted away. The honour guard of mortal troops waited patiently, none of them uttering a word.

Then, without warning, a long, jagged crack ran down the front of the lead vessel. It was followed by a series of echoing clangs from within, then the throaty sound of fresh machinery gearing up. Smoke poured from ducts along the vessel’s sides, and the crack slowly began to widen. Warning klaxons sounded from somewhere near ground level and a series of floodlights burst into life.

‘Here it comes…’ murmured Heriat, watching the spectacle as intently as everyone else.

Nethata felt his heart-rate pick up. Having served on so many campaigns, he was used to the sight of war machines in action. It was something else, however, to see the mysteries the adepts of the Machine-God employed in order to bring their divine engines to war.

The crack widened further. The flank of the conveyor parted to become two doors, each propelled outwards by banks of enormous pistons.

Two gigantic treads were revealed at ground level, each one many metres across and clad in thick blast armour. Nethata’s eyes moved upwards, scanning across two colossal leg columns, corded with pistons and segmented into huge panels. Above those massive legs was an armoured torso, angular and multi-faceted. Atop it all was a skull-like head, crowned with a dim row of cockpit lights protruding from under hunched, sloping shoulders.

It was vast – almost indescribably vast. Enormous weapons – multi-barrelled and snub-nosed – hung from housings on either side of its flattened torso. Two more were mounted atop its armoured back like the dorsal spines of an animal. Steam cascaded down its flanks like cataracts down a mountainside.

Warlord, thought Nethata. By the Throne, it’s big.

With a grind and shriek of metal, the doors settled into their open position. Clouds of smog and smoke subsided across the landing site.

Nethata watched, and waited.

The warning klaxons died out. Lights flickered into life along the machine’s cockpit, and the acrid stink of void shield generators bled out into the air.

It didn’t move. Nethata knew that the god-machine would not take a single step for several hours; not while the machine-spirit within was sluggish from the orbital drop. Days might pass before it would be ready to deploy on the battlefront.

But it was alive. Nethata could feel it, as could every other soul lined up to greet the lead Titan of Battlegroup Praxes. The Warlord-class engine Terribilis Vindicta had come to Shardenus, ready to march alongside four other Titans of the fabled Legio Astorum.

A sharp snap ran through the air, followed by the hiss and boom of vox-projectors powering up.

‘Lord General Raji Nethata,’ came a broadcast voice from the Titan, so loud that it made the men on ground level visibly shudder. ‘Battlegroup Praxes, of Legio Astorum, the Collegia Titanica. Permission requested to deploy.’

Nethata smiled. The formality was unusual and the courtesy unexpected. Rauth had summoned the engines to Shardenus, and if any permissions were required then they should have been directed to him. Perhaps the princeps – whoever he or she was – was signalling a desire to respect the sensitive divisions of power within the Imperial forces. Or perhaps, as Rauth had not been able to attend, they merely addressed the most senior officer in front of them.

When he replied, his voice was similarly augmented, sent to a hundred relays placed across the landing site and audible from every corner of it.

‘Welcome to Shardenus, princeps,’ he said. ‘No permission is necessary; we are honoured to have you marching with us.’

At that, a wave of cheering broke out from the troops assembled on the fringes of the landing site. The demonstration of enthusiasm was hardly spontaneous – Heriat had made it quite clear to the company captains what kind of reception he expected for the Legio – but it was genuine all the same. Guardsmen were reassured by the presence of Titans. Unlike Space Marines, whose actions seemed to have little to do with their safety or protection, Titans were always visible, looming over the battlefield ready to unleash a hurricane of destructive hellfire at the enemy.

Nethata turned to Heriat, a satisfied smile on his lips. As he did so, the regimental commanders on the dais around him broke into shouts of acclamation.

‘Yes, I think it was,’ he said. ‘Definitely worth the wait.’

‘I wish to ask you a question,’ voxed Brother-Sergeant Naim Morvox over a private channel.

‘Now?’ replied Iron Father Hervel Khatir.

‘Apologies. I am aware this is not a good time.’

‘Quickly, then.’

Morvox took a quick look around him. The other members of Clave Arx were hunkered down, just as he and Khatir were, beneath the jagged lip of a blast crater. Even at such close proximity to one another their black armour made them almost invisible against the rutted surface of the Gorgas Maleon. The warriors of his clave remained perfectly immobile, like discarded machines left to rust in the wind.

‘The assault on the hives will come soon,’ said Morvox, turning back to Khatir. ‘Why are we not preparing for that? Mortals can do this work.’

Khatir didn’t reply immediately. Morvox stared into the Iron Father’s helm-mask, sensing nothing of the mood underneath.

Perhaps Khatir no longer had moods. The Iron Father had been inducted into the Chapter a long time ago, and Morvox knew that much of his body would be augmetic. Some of those changes were surface-visible: an evidently bionic right leg and lower right arm. Like all members of the Chapter, his left hand had long been replaced with a mechanical facsimile, and it was likely most of his internal organs were either vat-grown substitutes or full-metal analogues.

Eventually, the Iron Father turned away from him, saying nothing. That was the only answer Morvox required.

I should not have asked the question, he thought.

Khatir snaked carefully higher up the crater slope, grinding his boots through the ash as he went. The sight was incongruous – like watching a giant ironclad beetle burrowing its way across a patch of broken earth. Once at the top, a faint whirr gave away subtle adjustments to Khatir’s bionic optics.

Morvox shuffled his way to Khatir’s side. Moving slowly, he lifted his helm above the crater’s edge, and let his helm filters sort through the clouds of black dust in front of him.

Ahead, no more than two hundred metres distant, was the object of their assignment.

The Gorgas had once been a thriving industrial zone, jammed with overspill manufactoria from the main hive cluster. Morvox remembered absorbing the tactical data while aboard the Kalach with the rest of the clave: 2.3 million inhabitants (estimate); 87 per cent employed in heavy/mid-heavy industry; 12 per cent military levy; prodigious, if irregular, production quotas; minimal protective establishment.

It had been that last fact that had doomed it. Once Territo’s Navy blockade had commenced the fire from orbit had been relentless. With no voids to speak of, the Gorgas had been turned, within hours, into a havoc of burning metal and exploding incendiaries.

An orbital barrage of such magnitude left little behind it but dust. Morvox looked carefully from left to right at the results, unconsciously absorbing the terrain detail and assessing the best route across it.

Metal struts lay in twisted, skeletal piles across the pitted earth. A few walls remained in place, though most had been blasted apart, leaving empty, gaping spaces open to the elements. Promethium fires still burned in isolated patches, fed by the parchment-dry air and desiccated soils.

On Morvox’s left flank lay the ruins of a standard-pattern Ecclesiarchy chapel. The outlines of prefab stone angels were still visible lurking in the rubble, and their empty, cracked eyes gazed up at the heavens from where punishment had come.

On his right, by the look of the wreckage, had been a collection of old hab-units. The blocks must have once been six, maybe seven, storeys; now they were little more than indeterminate heaps of debris with the occasional steel doorframe poking up from the ruin.

2.3 million inhabitants.

Concentrate.

Directly in front of the crater was the target – a defence bunker, semi-buried by debris. Two of its turrets still looked operational. Morvox zoomed his helm-display in on them, judging fire capacity and arc coverage.

‘Two active fire-points,’ said Khatir, confirming. ‘Swivel-mounted cannons. Some small-arms from the walls.’

Morvox swept his gaze across the visible sections of the bunker walls, noting where long slits allowed the occupants to launch defensive fire. Like all the bunkers dotted across the Gorgas, the structure was hexagonal and low-profile. Morvox knew the basic pattern from experience: a central chamber within, containing anything up to a hundred troops, would lead to a connecting tunnel network behind.

‘Anything else?’ asked Khatir.

‘No,’ said Morvox. ‘That’s all we need.’

The Iron Father nodded, and Morvox signalled the attack plan to the rest of the squad in the crater below.

‘Twin-flanks, standard split,’ he voxed. ‘We’ll take the doors.’

The Iron Hands moved instantly, none of them uttering a word but silently hoisting weapons into place and creeping up the slopes of the crater. The tactical squad split into two groups, the squad’s support weapons dividing between them. Morvox watched Brother Gergiz hoist a lascannon on to his shoulder just as Brother Sulzar did the same with the huge bulk of a missile launcher. Despite the weight of their weapons the two specialist Iron Hands moved nearly as quickly and smoothly as their unburdened brothers.

Morvox made a final assessment of distances before glance-checking his own bolter.

‘Forty-five seconds,’ he voxed to the group. ‘Suppression on twenty.’

The two teams clambered over the edge of the crater, one heading left, the other heading right. Skirting wide and ducking under the plentiful cover of the ruins, they slipped into the darkness on either flank.

Morvox and Khatir remained in the crater. The Iron Father didn’t carry a ranged weapon in his hands, but that didn’t make him any less dangerous than Morvox: his mag-locked thunder hammer and gauntlet-mounted flamers made Hervel Khatir a daunting prospect up close.

Morvox watched his chrono carefully, barely noticing the runes on his proximity scanner showing the two halves of his squad getting into position on either side of the bunker.

Twenty seconds came up. Heavy weapons fire suddenly streaked out into the smog. A las-beam snapped out from Gergiz’s position, as wide as a man’s arm, and cracked into the bunker’s left side. At the same time, a missile screamed across from the right, impacting in a booming crash. Bolter fire followed, heavy and accurate, splintering and shattering the bunker’s outer armour.

One of the turrets, already damaged by the missile impact, was knocked out by the torrent of bolter rounds. The other one swung around to target the source of the lascannon blast. It unleashed a hail of return fire, but Morvox didn’t need to consult his display to know that Gergiz had already moved on and was readying for another strike.

A volley of las-beams shot out from the bunker. The aim from the men within was reasonably disciplined, but they couldn’t hope to hit much at such range and with such poor visibility. More bolter rounds impacted on the edges of the firing slits, cracking the lips of the rockcrete.

‘Five seconds,’ announced Morvox, more out of habit than necessity – Khatir had already readied two grenades.

By then the defensive fire had split into two. Las-beams shot out to the right and left of the bunker, frantically searching for targets hidden in the wreckage around it. The remaining autocannon turret managed to get a few more shots away before the weight of incoming bolter fire broke it open. Its barrels exploded with an echoing crump, sending shrapnel spinning high into the air.

‘Zero,’ said Morvox, and both he and Khatir exploded into movement.

The two Iron Hands broke from the edge of the crater and charged straight towards the bunker. As soon as they emerged into the open, the suppressing bolter fire from the hidden Iron Hands on both flanks altered direction, aiming higher and avoiding the leading edge of the bunker wall.

Khatir and Morvox went quickly, veering and weaving around the plentiful cover, each with primed grenades in hand. Neither uttered a word – they ran silently, burning up the ground between them and the bunker walls like a pair of Medusan night-ghouls. The defenders inside the bunker concentrated their fire on the enemies they knew about, firing volley after volley out to the left and right flanks.

Morvox reached the bunker doors first and slammed his body into the wall to their left. At shoulder height was a narrow slit through which the defenders could fire. Morvox threw his grenade through the gap and crouched down.

As it went off, Khatir reached the other side of the doors. He shoved one of his own grenades through the firing slit on his right even as scream-laced explosions from Morvox’s grenade broke out from inside the bunker. The doors bulged outwards, but held.

Khatir mag-locked his final grenade against the damaged doors, and crouched away from the explosion just as Morvox had done.

The two blasts went off together, wrapping the doors on either side in a crippling embrace of rolling flame. The door-metal buckled, cracking along its length.

Even before the blast-shock had died away, Khatir and Morvox had risen to their feet. They dropped shoulders in unison and crashed straight into the reeling barrier. The tortured metal shattered under the heavy impact.

Morvox straightened up and swept his bolter round in a low arc, scything through the dazed ranks of defenders ahead of him. Khatir opened up with his flamers, flooding the narrow space in a curtain of blood-red immolation. The claustrophobic interior was immediately filled with a riot of colour, noise, screaming and panic.

Morvox strode into the heart of it, calmly picking his targets. He sent short bursts of bolter rounds into those few defenders still capable of mounting some kind of resistance. Any who somehow got through his barrage were met with the embrace of Khatir’s flamers.

Unleashed into combat, the Iron Father was a terrifying prospect. He went slowly, purposively, doling out streamers of fire from both clenched fists. Flames wrapped around his coal-black gauntlets, echoing the red of his helm-lenses. The visible metallic extensions to his armour, each of them looking like arcane torture devices from a lost age of nightmares, reflected the swirling patterns of destruction.

The two Iron Hands cleansed the bunker interior with cool efficiency. Neither spoke – they killed in silence, working from one side of the chamber to the other, purging the crowded space clean of life.

As they neared the far side, the remainder of Clave Arx joined them inside. Their heavy boots crunched through flak-jackets, armour plates and bones as they strode across the carpet of the slain. Just like Morvox and Khatir, they went silently.

Morvox reached another set of doors at the far end of the chamber.

‘Fierez, Malloch: secure the bunker,’ he voxed, reloading his bolter. ‘All others, with me.’

As Morvox spoke, Khatir strode up to the doors. He grabbed them in both hands and wrenched them open, pulling one clean from its frame. A tunnel led steeply down beyond, lit sparsely by faulty strip-lumens. Ten metres down the tunnel was another closed doorway.

Khatir paused for a second. Morvox could see the tell-tale flicker of his lens-mounted augurs as they ran a scan of the space beyond the closed doors.

‘Multiple targets on the far side,’ he reported. ‘Take it out.’

Sulzar stepped up, his missile launcher loaded and mounted on his shoulder. The rest of the clave withdrew, and Sulzar pressed the trigger.

A muffled explosion cracked out, and the entire tunnel disappeared in a maelstrom of dust and splintered metal. A cloud of earth flew back up through the open doorway, covering Sulzar in a layer of filth and blooming out into the ruined bunker chamber. The lumens in the tunnel smashed, throwing it into near-complete darkness.

Morvox strode into the breach, not waiting for the debris to clear. His helm compensated for the low-vis, picking out targets amid the gloom. He saw two bodies reeling towards him, and sent bolter-rounds through both of them.

‘Caution,’ came Khatir’s voice over the vox. ‘I have residuals on the–’

Even as the Iron Father spoke, another body emerged from the clouds of dust. Morvox fired at it, but it shifted left, moving quickly. In its wake came another one like it – a humanoid figure, moving strangely, leaping from the tunnel walls like a simian and apparently unharmed by the explosion.

The one Morvox had missed lurched up towards him with a blade in its left hand. Morvox had a brief impression of two glowing eyes hurtling towards him before he lashed out with his gauntlet, crunching his armoured fist into the creature’s face and sending it tumbling back the way it had come. He spun on the ball of his right foot, backhanding its companion into the tunnel wall. As the creature bounced and crumpled down to the floor, he got a better look at it.

It was human-shaped, though slightly bigger than the soldiers who’d manned the bunker’s main chamber. Close-fitting armour enclosed its limbs, though the head was uncovered, revealing grey skin and luminous purple eyes. For a moment he thought of the xenos genestealers he’d faced on Terarga, but then he saw the marks of mutation and recognised features that had once been human.

More of them raced up the tunnel, and Morvox heard the whine of Khatir’s flamers gearing up. He pressed himself back against the tunnel wall just as a storm of blue-tinged flame thundered past him, slamming into the oncoming mutants and withering them instantly. They screamed and thrashed as they burned, tearing at their popping eyes and rolling on the ground in agony.

Khatir strode past, feeding the conflagration. Morvox fell in behind the Iron Father. With Khatir in the lead, the clave swept down the length of the tunnel and broke through the demolished doorway at its base.

Beyond it was another chamber, ten metres across and cut roughly from the earth. Cables hung from the ceiling, fizzing angrily and throwing bizarre flickers of light across the space. Cogitator banks, destroyed by the missile blast, vomited showers of sparks across the floor as their machine-spirits dissipated. A series of pict screens around the edge of the room showed nothing but static.

Several more mutants sheltered there, some carrying projectile weapons, but their presence was an irrelevance. In the centre of the room lurked something else – a bloated monster of a man, over four metres tall and sickeningly obese. Folds of milk-white blubber, glistening with sweat, trembled as the creature swung its flabby arms around it. Its chins wobbled as its jaws opened, revealing several rows of teeth and a black flailing tongue. Its eyes were entirely white-less, and what remained of its podgy legs had folded under its massive bulk, broken and useless.

As the Iron Hands burst into the chamber, it whipped two flails sharply across at Khatir. The lashes were studded with dozens of spiked balls that detonated when they struck the Iron Father’s battle-plate, dousing him in a hail of tiny spore explosions.

Khatir staggered, and the gouts of flame from his gauntlets faltered.

Morvox took aim and fired. The round punched deep into the creature’s flesh with a wet pop – and disappeared. No detonation rang out, and the monster merely winced as its blubber closed over the wound.

‘Blades,’ ordered Khatir, unlocking his thunder hammer from his back with a flourish. Its disruptor field rippled along the killing edge, piercing in the dusty darkness.

Morvox complied, stowing his bolter and unsheathing his own weapon, a wide-bladed short sword with a serrated lower edge.

Then the Iron Hands got to work, punching and slicing with their weapons, moving in concert and spreading out to evade each other’s blows. Sulzar and Gergiz discarded their heavy weapons and went after the lesser mutants, leaving the remaining nine to attack the primary target.

The creature lashed out wildly, flinging its flails in whistling arcs. Every time one of the spiked barbs connected bursts of spores would explode from the impact. The particles clogged in airways and between armour-edges, burrowing deep and eating through metal like acid.

Morvox drove in close for a decisive stab and took a flail across the face of his helm. The force of the blow knocked him back a pace and his lenses clouded, swarming with spores. He jabbed out blindly and felt his blade bite. The edge sank deep into what felt like tar and was nearly pulled free of his grip. He hauled it out as his vision cleared, just in time to see the wound he’d inflicted close up.

He tensed, ready to dive back in. Only then did he see Khatir make his move. The Iron Father leapt high, propelled sharply upwards by his power armour, his hammer held above his head and pointing down.

The creature swung round, almost getting a limb in the way, but didn’t move fast enough. Khatir swooped down onto it, plunging his hammerhead deep into the creature’s neck. As he slammed the weapon down, the disruptor flared into crackling brilliance.

The creature screamed, its head locked back and almost severed clear by the wound at its neck. Khatir dragged the hammer down, using his momentum to carve a long, jagged rent from throat to chest. The disruptor field ripped the monster’s blubber open, revealing a throbbing, bloody pulp within.

Morvox powered forwards, swiping his blade as he charged. The other Iron Hands did likewise, ignoring the threat of the flails and jointly stabbing their swords deep into the flesh of the lurching mutant.

Clear fluids pumped out of six separate wounds, spraying across the black shells of the Iron Hands’ armour. The monster shrieked with pain, but its resistance swiftly became enfeebled. Lines of oil-black blood ran down from its eyes as heavy slabs of fat and sinew slapped to the floor.

Khatir crunched deeper with huge, shuddering blows. A flail came down across his exposed breastplate, but he shrugged it off. With a final whirl, he spun his thunder hammer around and switched back across at the creature’s bleeding neck. The head of it passed straight through, decapitating the monster with a flurry of blood, pus and fat. Its bulbous head flew through the air, eventually landing with a moist smack against the dirt floor.

The rest of its body twitched for a moment, still upright, before it slumped in on itself, subsiding in a slow-moving welter of sliding, toppling blubber.

Morvox withdrew from it carefully, watching for sudden movement.

None came. The remaining mutants had been killed, and the chamber fell quiet again. The last echoes of the fighting died away, to be replaced by the gentle bubbling of the monster’s collapsed innards.

Khatir stalked over to where the creature’s head had fallen, and picked it up.

‘I will take this back,’ he said. ‘Lord Telach will wish to study it.’

Morvox nodded, letting his sword fall so the fluids on it could run free of the metal. As he did so, he noted autopsy readings scrolling across his retinal display. No life signs remained; the bunker had been cleansed.

‘By your leave, then,’ he said. ‘Objective secured.’

Khatir mag-locked his thunder hammer and held the mutant’s head by its hair.

‘Leave given,’ he replied.

Khatir looked at Morvox then, switching the vox to a private channel.

‘And, brother-sergeant,’ he added, ‘I trust you now see why this task was not judged fit for mortals.’

Morvox felt a spike of self-reproach. Khatir spoke, as always, with almost zero inflection, though the admonishment in his voice was clearly detectable.

‘I do, Iron Father,’ Morvox said, returning Khatir’s unreadable gaze. ‘Be assured, I will not question again.’

CHAPTER FOUR

They called it sky sickness. Khadi suffered from it, and hated it.

She clenched her jaw tight, trying to press out the squirm of nausea and keep her feet. She felt sweat prick at her temples and hoped it didn’t show.

It usually passed. It was at its worst during the first few minutes, when a lifetime of being cooped up inside the claustrophobic interior of a hive suddenly gave way to the horrible, unnatural sight of sky above one’s head.

She forced herself not to look down, where she knew the man-made canyon of terraced buttresses dropping swiftly over hundreds of levels would give her vertigo, nor to look up, where the arching vision of boiling ash clouds would make her feel even sicker. Khadi stared straight out, all the way across the yawning divide between Melamar Secundus and the target defence tower on the walls.

Marivo didn’t seem to have noticed. He leaned against the iron railing, magnoculars clamped to his face, moving the lenses slowly up and down, left and right.

Just the two of them were there, stuck halfway up the precipitous southern flank of the hive spire on a forgotten service balcony. The wind clutched at them, moaning and whining around the smoggy heights. Pinprick lights from the cluster shone out into the gloom, above them, below them, far off in the distance, all of them weak and indistinct.

‘I can see what he means,’ said Marivo. ‘This can be done.’

He handed her the magnoculars.

‘I pinned the location,’ he said. ‘Take a look, and tell me what you think.’

Khadi unclenched one hand from the railing and snatched the magnoculars. Moving stiffly, she looked into them, following the marker Marivo had left on the display.

Her eyes were drawn to the defence tower. It stood high up on the outer walls of the hive cluster, over five hundred metres away. Looking down on it from such a height afforded her a view of its transit tubes snaking out across the poisonous, filmy expanse of industrial wasteland between the spires.

‘What am I looking for?’ she asked.

‘A way across,’ said Marivo. ‘Valien showed me schematics. We can’t get through the transit tubes to the tower – they’ll be guarded too heavily. We move across the wasteland at ground level.’

Khadi felt her gorge rising as she moved the magnocular view down by a fraction. The defence tower looked very small through the scopes, though she knew that it was anything but. It housed massive batteries of defensive weaponry – lascannons, plasma cannons, heavy bolters, missile launchers. At the heart of it all were six volcano cannons, truly gigantic las-weapons designed for the express purpose of taking down super-heavy targets.

Shardenus Prime possessed many such defence towers, all spaced out along the hundreds of kilometres of perimeter wall, fully manned and bristling with ordnance. To the best of her knowledge the guns in those towers had never been fired in warfare, though the deafening monthly practice barrages launched by Guard commanders assured her that they were in fine working order.

‘The wasteland,’ she said, dryly. ‘We’ll last a few minutes, no more.’

‘Valien’s got us breathing gear,’ said Marivo. ‘He’s got us environment suits, weapons, auspexes, the lot. It’s not that far.’

Khadi put the magnoculars down and looked away from the dizzying view. As she turned her head she caught a brief glimpse of the smog-wreathed heights of the Axis Primus hive, and it made her feel worse.

‘You ever been down there?’ she asked, glaring at Marivo in challenge. ‘Rebreathers? They’ll clog before we get halfway. That’s why they built the transit tubes. It’s why they insulate the hives – if that stuff ever got inside…’

Marivo snatched back the magnoculars.

‘Throne, do you ever lose your mood?’ he asked, flipping the lens-caps closed and stowing the device away.

‘Not when I’m stuck with you.’

‘You don’t have a choice about that.’

‘Don’t remind me.’

Khadi pushed herself away from the railing and pressed her body back against the nearside wall of the balcony. Marivo remained perched out on the edge, sticking his head out into the void and swaying against the wind.

‘That’s what he has in mind,’ he said, speaking to himself as he worked through the plans. ‘We travel through the wasteland – they won’t expect us to be able to. Break in, place the charges, get back.’

Khadi listened to him speak. His voice carried an almost boyish enthusiasm. He looked so clean cut, with his cropped military hair and clean-shaved chin.

‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘Simple.’

Marivo shot her an irritated look.

‘Yes, it is,’ he snapped. ‘I can see a way to make this work.’

She fumbled her way towards the balcony doors, trying to keep the shaking in her hands from view.

‘We will all die down there,’ she added, not wanting to meet his eyes. ‘They’re all trained killers, and some of them are… worse.’

Marivo reached out and grabbed the edge of the door, preventing her from opening it.

‘Some of us are trained killers too,’ he said quietly. ‘I thought you were comfortable with that.’

‘Just open the door,’ said Khadi.

Marivo held his ground for a few seconds longer, then released it, shaking his head briefly in disappointment.

Khadi almost said something else then. She almost apologised, and almost tried to explain how bad the open sky made her feel, and almost explained how conflicted the coming war made her, and almost admitted how scared she was of it despite all her surface bluster.

Marivo wasn’t listening. He went back to the railing and started making calculations for the coming raid.

Khadi left him there and went through the open doorway, back into the close, stinking warmth of the hive tunnels.

Telach bent low over the apothecarion table, gently pulling apart the mutant’s flesh with a silver flenser. His helm-display, overlaid with medicae feedback runes, zoomed in on different areas, automatically panning for significant phenomena.

For a moment longer he kept looking, observing the way the mutant’s bloated cells had fused together into straggling ganglia. Even now, many hours after the creature had died, low-level metabolic activity still existed amid the swamp of semi-dried body fluids and membranes.

Telach felt his concentration begin to slip. He withdrew his flenser and stood up straight. He rolled his shoulders, feeling the resistance from his armour as he did so. At times his battle-plate felt like a second skin; at others, it felt like a monstrous burden.

He pondered removing it. That would free up his arms to act without the interference of the suit’s nerve-muscle interface, but the procedure would take time and distract him further from the task at hand.

Telach remembered when he’d first donned power armour. Back then, more than two hundred years ago, he’d been a raw neophyte with only a standard stint in Raukaan’s Scout detachment behind him. The honour had been overwhelming.

Then, as the long years had passed, more and more of his flesh had been cut away and replaced. The itch, he called it – that nagging, persistent desire to strip away the weakness of organic matter and replace it with mechanical components.

Such augmentation had made him better. It had made him faster, stronger, less prone to fatigue, more capable of endurance.

It had also eroded the distinction between his body and the armour that encased it. Some sections of his torso-cladding were now difficult to remove without the supervision of an Iron Father, so he rarely did so.

He could imagine a time when he and his armour would never part. He could imagine a time when the idea of removing his plate would be as ludicrous as taking off the skin he’d been born into. Already his bodily functions were almost perfectly discrete, locked within the complex embrace of ceramics, metals and plastics.

Telach suspected that Rauth was locked inside his Terminator plate, fused into it as perfectly as a heart lodged within a circulatory system. The clan’s Iron Fathers certainly were, as were many of its sergeants.

Was that a bad thing? Was it not simply the logical outcome of everything his Chapter believed in?

Perhaps one day he would think so. But just then, standing alone in the apothecarion of the command complex on Shardenus with the dissected head of a dead mutant in front of him, Telach couldn’t quite imagine himself ever truly believing it.

You embrace your corrupted flesh, he mused, looking at the eyeless slab of cold meat on the table. We shun it. Which of us, I wonder, has the worse affliction?

‘Lord Telach.’

Telach snapped back into the present, immediately aware of the impropriety of his thoughts. He might have been more tired than he’d admitted to himself.

He took a moment to compose himself before turning to face Rauth. The commander was accompanied by Iron Father Khatir, the one who’d brought the disembodied head in for study.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Rauth.

‘Perfectly, lord,’ said Telach, feeling his muscles pinch as he moved. ‘I was contemplating the nature of the mutant.’

Khatir looked down at the mutant’s flayed face. His helm-mask was disfigured with streaks of discolouration, as if acid had been thrown across it.

‘Mutation has but one nature,’ he said.

Telach felt a flash of irritation. Iron Fathers had the luxury of looking at the galaxy through an invariant lens. Librarians, who cast their souls adrift on the warp and witnessed the depths of changefulness there, could have no such comforting illusions.

‘The change is advanced,’ said Telach, addressing Rauth. ‘Tissue corruption is near-absolute. Morphic functions are well established. The specimen has been corrupted for many months.’

‘Can you be more precise?’ asked Rauth.

Telach had expected the question. Always, always, the quest for precision; it was pathological with Rauth, just like the itch.

‘Not with certainty,’ said Telach. ‘I will say this: if the specimen is typical, then mutation will be endemic in the spires.’

‘The bunker’s other defenders showed no signs,’ said Khatir.

‘To be expected,’ said Telach. ‘Plague spreads from the head down. We will encounter more mutants the closer we get to the Capitolis. The troops sent to defend the Helat and the Gorgas Maleon are the least tainted, the ones the traitors were happiest to see eliminated.’

‘So what was this thing doing outside the walls?’ Rauth asked.

‘I do not know,’ said Telach. ‘Perhaps stranded when the barrage began.’

‘No,’ said Khatir.

Both Rauth and Telach turned to look at the Iron Father.

‘It was a warning,’ he said. ‘To intimidate the mortals – the enemy wishes to show them what awaits them, what can happen to them if they are taken alive.’

Rauth thought about that, then nodded.

‘Accepted,’ he said. ‘We must prevent the Guard storming the remaining Gorgas bunkers – prepare kill-teams from Raukaan to eliminate any that still exist.’

‘What purpose would that serve?’ asked Telach. ‘We cannot shield them from this – once the mortals are inside the Capitolis they will see horror in plenty.’

‘By which time it will be too late to retreat,’ said Rauth. ‘I do not want them losing their nerve before the walls are taken.’

‘Nethata isn’t stupid,’ said Telach. ‘He has psykers on his staff and agents inside the hives – he knows almost as much as we do.’

‘I do not care what Nethata thinks he knows,’ said Rauth, as impassively as ever. ‘The attack on the walls is imminent, and I want the mortals kept out of kill missions until then. I will tell him so myself, just to be sure.’

Rauth looked down at the remnants of the mutant’s face. The contrast between the commander’s helm-mask – heavy, dark, synthetic – and the fleshy remains on the table could hardly have been more marked.

‘These things will terrify them,’ he said. ‘For as long as possible, I wish them to fear nothing but us.’

Valien paused for breath, hugging the shadows. He could feel his heart beating, and let his mind dwell on that for a while. He enjoyed the sensation of it. In moments of stillness he could imagine it throbbing within his ribcage.

Casket of blood, he thought. Sacred, essential. Made in the image of the Emperor’s immortal heart which bleeds for all Mankind.

He crept a little further along the deserted corridor until he reached a bulkhead. The lights were sparse and dim, barring the metal in shadows. Somewhere up ahead, a circulation fan turned slowly within its wire cage, dragging stinking air out of the snaking corridor network and into vehicle-sized purifiers.

Purifiers. The term has no meaning in here. Everything was corrupt even before the traitors turned.

He shuffled behind the bulkhead and sank to his haunches. Even his stimm-enhanced muscles needed rest, and he had been on his feet for several days.

He wore the uniform of a Shardenus arbitrator, one of the many thousands charged with maintaining order in the bulk of the cavernous hive structure. In normal circumstances he might have needed to work on the disguise a little, but with the spires under imminent attack and the interior in a state of fevered mobilisation, he stood little chance of being discovered.

He unbuttoned the top button of his synthleather jacket and breathed a little more freely. The air in Melamar Secundus’s upper levels was marginally less nauseating than the faecal stink of the bowels, but it still made his throat ache. Shardenus had a problem with its air supply, something he’d reported back on many times to his superiors since penetrating the outer limits. Some of the filtration towers were vulnerable, and he’d fed the coordinates of those he knew about to Heriat. If they could somehow be destroyed, then the incoming rush of toxic gases from the wasteland zones would kill more of the defenders than lasguns would.

Heriat hadn’t responded. Perhaps he wasn’t interested in conquering a poisonous hellhole; perhaps he actually wanted to take Shardenus intact.

Valien withdrew a tube from under his suit and took a frugal sip of nutrient-rich liquid. He felt the familiar cocktail of relaxants, restoratives and clarifiers swim into his blood. He pulled his helmet off and let his head fall back against the warm metal of the bulkhead. For a moment he remained perfectly still, propped up against the walls, just another piece of detritus lodged in the crannies of the vast, creaking hive structure.

Words from the Talica creed crept into his consciousness.

From blood we came;

In blood we persist;

To blood we shall return.

Valien found it increasingly hard to reconstruct what his life had been like before Talica had taken him. He’d always had a peculiar gift for killing, as well as a fascination for the mechanics of the human body that had long drifted into the macabre even as a teenager.

He’d heard it said that the mark of a psychopath was a taste for tormenting animals. Valien found that notion interesting, seeing as how he’d started with people. Animals were wary and had no concept of despair; humans, on the other hand, were overly confident and had almost infinite capacity for anguish. They could be tricked so easily – a promise of food, or sex, or simply a kind word whispered in the shadows. Once snared, they were far more fragile than any animal, since they could imagine more. Valien had always used that against them first, conjuring up careful horrors while they still had use of their eyes and fingers, telling them in exacting detail what was going to happen before he went to fetch the gadgets.

Only now that the truth had been revealed to him did he see quite how empty such a life had been. Evil, according to the well-worn trope, was a banality, the mark of something lacking rather than something to be proud of. He’d needed better direction back then, a channel through which to apply his boundless thirst for secret suffering.

Talica had given that to him. Talica had taught him the mysteries of the divine, and Talica had snatched him away from the futility of indulgent violence.

After that he’d killed for a higher purpose, schooled in the arts of the Cult and beholden to its precepts. He’d carved a bloody path across a dozen worlds, assuming whatever subtle form was needed and bringing the Emperor’s silent vengeance to a thousand heretics. He’d still killed, but for a purpose.

Every so often he’d taste blood on his chin and remember the old days. When that happened he would reach out, palms sweaty, for the chins of his victims, lifting them up so they could see the eyes of their killer and hear the words he’d hiss into their ears. The smell of their bodies, mingled with the sharp stench of their fear and the machine-oil tang of spilled blood, would take him right back to where he’d started. In such a state he was capable of doing terrible things.

No mortal man was perfect. If he occasionally strayed from the path of righteousness then he was always sure to pay the appropriate penance once back at the temple. The Emperor had walked in human flesh once, and Valien felt sure that He understood the temptations placed in a man’s way.

He licked his lips, half-ashamed, half-aroused. He could still see the girl’s face from an hour ago in his mind’s eye, the one from the foundry level – pleading, incredulous, terrified.

No mortal man was perfect.

He felt a twinge as the secure comms bead at his neck throbbed. He took a quick look up and down the corridor, checking that it was empty. Once certain, he withdrew a tiny communicator from his collar.

‘Valien,’ he said.

‘Heriat,’ came the reply. ‘What’s your status?’

‘Melamar Secundus, Level 451, north-east sector.’

‘Update?’

‘Not much,’ Valien said. ‘Seven cells ready to go. I can disable another tower myself, so you should get a clear run.’

‘Negative,’ replied Heriat. ‘Give the cells free rein and switch to secondary tasking.’

Valien paused, calculating what he’d need to rearrange to make that possible. He was still embedded deep in the Melamar spires, and hadn’t computed exit routes in detail.

‘Understood,’ he said. ‘Timing?’

‘Move as soon as the cells are primed.’

‘What’s the rush?’

‘Nethata’s finalising attack plans,’ said Heriat. ‘He wants our agents away from the front before we come in.’

‘Fine by me.’

‘What’s it like in there?’

Heriat sounded genuinely curious, and Valien smiled to himself.

‘You’d like it,’ he said. ‘They’re scared. Lots of traffic between here and the central spires.’

‘Marks of corruption?’

‘Increasing. Melamar’s only partially tainted, but the closer you get the worse it becomes. Plenty of mutants coming through the transit tunnels. Unit cohesion’s still good in the garrisons, so you’ll get a fight.’

‘Oh, we know that,’ said Heriat, wearily. ‘So how are you?’

‘Me? I’m fine.’

‘Physical condition? Anything you need to report?’

Valien paused.

What is he talking about?

‘Uh, no. Absolutely not.’

The feed gave out for a moment, as if Heriat had muted it. A few seconds later he broke back in.

‘Then you have new orders,’ he said. ‘Shunted into your system – study them and signal back if anything’s unclear.’

‘I’ll take a look,’ he said, intrigued. ‘Anything fun?’

‘I doubt that,’ said Heriat. ‘Good luck.’

‘I didn’t think you believed in–’ said Valien, before realising the link had been cut.

He turned the communicator over and flicked a switch. His tasking scrolled across a holographic field in front of him, spelling in out in precise, military-format detail what Nethata expected of him.

Valien absorbed the order stream quickly, realising immediately what it meant.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see.’

Rauth stood in the hexagonal audience chamber within the Iron Hands’ command headquarters. The space was empty, just as it had been when he’d briefed Telach. A low snarl of machinery thudded away under his feet, buried somewhere in the forges and armouries on lower levels. The light in the chamber, as ever, was set low, mimicking Medusa’s harsh environment.

Medusa and Shardenus shared certain characteristics. Both worlds were shrouded from the warmth of their suns by thick layers of cloud cover. Both had been formed from dark, unforgiving soils. For an Iron Hand, coming to such a place felt like coming home.

Rauth was not immune from such feelings. Over centuries of near-constant warfare he’d managed to purge almost all vestiges of sentiment from his semi-mechanical frame, but he still took a degree of pleasure in Shardenus’s smog-dark skies and acrid air. His long service had taken him to all manner of worlds, some with water-clear skies, some covered in sparkling oceans, others bursting with vegetation, but it was the dark worlds that spoke most clearly to his soul.

When Rauth had been a mortal child, back in the twilight depths of his long memory, he’d heard tales of the Immortal Emperor and His infinite realm. Sitting in the interior of his clan’s land engine, Rauth had imagined all of the Emperor’s worlds as other Medusas – frost-cold, steel-hard, shadow-dark.

It had seemed to him then that the default state of humanity was to exist amid such scouring winds and clutching shadows. Only later had Rauth discovered that his home world was regarded by most of the Imperium as a place of dread and obscurity. Back when he had possessed greater human facility, that knowledge had stung his pride. Now that his emotions had been bled out of him by the slow working of his augmetics he cared very little what the ignorant masses of humanity thought of his heritage.

Nothing changed the truth: Mankind, as guided by the Emperor and the example of Manus, flourished in the face of hardship and became flaccid in the face of comfort. Medusa bred humans capable of achieving perfection, of transcending their structural weaknesses, and the Imperium would be a better, stronger place if all its worlds were Medusas.

A light flickered on top of the pillar in front of him. Rauth extinguished it with a gesture, and the doors to the chamber slid open.

Nethata walked in and the doors closed behind him. He came across to the pillar and stood facing Rauth. He was in full dress uniform, as he always was when responding to a summons.

Perhaps he thinks I’ll be impressed, thought Rauth. Or perhaps it is to bolster his courage.

Rauth took in the rows of medals on the man’s chest, the iron skulls marking valour in battle, the expensive sword and the marksman’s pistol.

He can have no idea how little I care. He could come here naked and we would discuss exactly the same things.

‘Clan commander,’ said Nethata, bowing.

Rauth could sense the man’s unease. His shoulders were tense, his jawline tight, his knuckles a fraction less dark than the rest of his skin.

‘Lord General,’ said Rauth. ‘Thank you for coming.’

‘We don’t have long before the main assault.’

‘No, we do not.’

As ever between them, the conversation was awkward. Rauth didn’t deliberately make their meetings difficult, but it had become hard to remember how humans lubricated their dialogue with courtesies and irrelevances.

‘I wished to see you for this reason: a change to the plan will be made,’ said Rauth. ‘My brothers are to be deployed on the Gorgas. Your troops will form the spearhead against the hives.’

Nethata blinked at him, taken back.

‘Without support?’ he asked.

‘Without support,’ confirmed Rauth.

Rauth studied Nethata’s reactions carefully, in the same way a magos might study the flow of electrons across a transmission wafer. The man was struggling to remain cordial.

‘Our assault plans have been made with the expectation of your involvement,’ Nethata said, speaking carefully and guarding his language. ‘There is little time to change them.’

‘I know,’ said Rauth. ‘That is why I asked you to come as soon as things changed.’

‘What has changed?’

‘The threat level from the remaining Gorgas bunkers is higher than calculated. They must be purged before we advance.’

Nethata couldn’t hide the disbelief from his face.

‘Bunkers? How many can there… Lord, I do not–’

‘Once that work is done, the Iron Hands will join you in the hive.’

‘Then the assault must wait,’ said Nethata. ‘Until your strength can be deployed, it must wait.’

‘It will not wait,’ said Rauth.

For a moment, the two figures stood facing one another, silent, staring into each other’s eyes. Rauth was implacable, immovable, massive. In contrast Nethata looked as frail as a skeleton, but he held his ground.

‘The Titans, then,’ he said. ‘We must have heavy support.’

‘The Titans are not ready,’ said Rauth. ‘You have two battalions of drop-troops – the Harakoni – plus ample artillery cover.’

‘Ample?’ Nethata shook his head as he snorted out the word. ‘My lord, I do not–’

‘You can debate this all you wish, Lord General; the decision will not alter. As we speak, my brothers are moving across the Gorgas, rooting out residual resistance and saving your men from that dangerous task. When their work is done they will return to the main assault, and we shall recalibrate.’

Nethata drew in a deep breath, looking like he was considering objecting further, just as he had done over the choice of landing sites, over the timetable of the advance, over the tactics of frontal assault rather than siege. Eventually, though, his square shoulders slumped a little.

‘I see that your mind’s made up,’ he said. Rauth noticed that Nethata’s fists were still clenched, and that the veins on his neck were as tense as machine cords. ‘You will forgive me, lord, if I leave immediately. If this assault is not to be a bloodbath – a farcical, terrible bloodbath – then I must make changes.’

‘By all means,’ said Rauth calmly. ‘But do not delay the assault. Its timing must remain as previously determined.’

‘You ask too much,’ said Nethata, bitterly. ‘I will record a formal protest in the campaign logs.’

‘And what will you protest about?’ asked Rauth. ‘That warfare was conducted? That men died?’

Nethata let slip a grim smile.

‘That men died needlessly,’ he said. ‘That they could have gone into battle supported by the might of your warriors, but were instead thrown at the enemy alone.’

‘Nothing I do is needless,’ said Rauth, ‘but your language is becoming intemperate. You have your orders. Go now, and ensure the assault is a success.’

Nethata glared back, holding his position for a moment longer.

‘It will be,’ he said, his eyes glittering darkly. ‘You will see the mettle of my men, and perhaps, once you have seen what they are capable of, you will be less free with your demands and remember that they are human. Like you used to be.’

Rauth felt his eyebrow, the organic one he still retained, raise. He didn’t have a ready answer to that.

Nethata didn’t wait for one, but turned on his heel and stalked out of the chamber. The doors opened and closed for him.

Rauth stood silently once he was gone, pondering the mortal’s words. Then he stirred himself and activated a private channel to Khatir.

‘Iron Father,’ he voxed. ‘Are the transports prepared?’

‘They are, lord,’ came the reply.

Rauth extended his left gauntlet, feeling the artificial sinews within slide smoothly across one another. Even mechanical limbs needed to be flexed.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then come with me – we shall hunt together.’

CHAPTER FIVE

Lopi looked across the wastes of the Helat through eyes that were, and yet were not, his own.

He smiled, but only his organic lips moved. The gigantic frame of Terribilis Vindicta could not smile, though it registered and fed back the emotions of its princeps in other subtle ways – a flicker across motive sensoria, a brief tremor in the drive feeds.

<So,> he canted. <How’s it looking?>

Yemos, the moderati plugged into the station in front of him, ran pudgy fingers over the manual controls. A thicket of iron rods protruded from the back of his shaven head, each one connected to input nodes dotted around the frame he sat in.

‘Drive system integrity normal,’ Yemos said, speaking out loud in Lucius-dialect Low Gothic. ‘Powering nicely.’

Lopi gripped the sides of his command throne, feeling streams of information flow into him through the jacks. Cables extended from his hands, his feet, his chest, the back of his neck. He noticed a residual soreness from the connection under his left ear, and rolled his head around trying to shake it off.

<Sensori?>

Killan, plugged into his station just like Yemos, swung his pedestal seat across the semicircle of his array station, scanning the multitude of signals coming into the Titan’s battery of auspices.

<Interference to engine-left,> he canted, frowning at a row of orange indicators. <Just not shaking it.>

<I’m sure you will,> said Lopi, tolerantly. Killan was a perfectionist even by the standards of the Mechanicus, and would spend whole days hunting down minor sensor-ghosts if he ever had the leisure. <Anything else?>

Killan shook his head, and the bundle of wires attached to his skull wobbled.

<Remarkably clean, considering.>

Lopi felt a glow of warm satisfaction. As soon as he did so, the immense, sunken presence of Vindicta’s machine-spirit made itself known. It rolled up into Lopi’s consciousness like some beast of the oceans gently rising through layers of frigid water.

Awake again, Lopi thought, not bothering to shield it from the consciousness pressing up against his own. Alive again. Together again.

He shifted focus, slotting more explicitly into the pseudo-visual world of the Manifold. The Titan’s own perceptions merged with his, folding into an amalgam of real-world visual stimuli and overlaid battle-data.

I feel you.

Vindicta’s engines, buried somewhere far below in the war machine’s vast torso, drummed in response, making the bronze-inlaid walls of the cockpit tremble.

Lopi held his left hand up before his face, watching as the real flesh, as insubstantial as an x-ray, passed through the miasma of targeting information, engine-health feedback and other sundry aspects of his host’s mechanical life.

<Princeps Firax Lopi,> canted Remona’s voice then, sounding amused. <Are you not walking yet? Is something wrong?>

Lopi chuckled. He liked Remona. She was young for a Warlord-class princeps but was as gifted as he liked to think he had been at the same age. Even as he recalled her chestnut hair and coral-pink eyes in his imagination, he saw her engine, the Meritus Castigatio, striding into his visual field.

<Ahead of me, once again,> he canted, watching the progress of her Titan with admiration.

Castigatio was a handsome machine, barely three hundred years old and as trim as a starship’s prow. Everything about it was pristine, glistening, rigid. The flames of Legio Astorum’s livery adorned the thick plates of its armour, vivid against the dreariness of the ash around it.

It stood seven hundred metres away from him, surrounded by swarms of skitarii and servitors. A towering cage of scaffolding rose up around it, dotted with cranes and weapon-hoists. Gradually, moving slowly, the battle-engine was leaving it behind. Signal lights winked from its cockpit and gun-mounts, piercing through Shardenus’s dirty skies.

<For now,> replied Remona, weaving an impish algorithm around the binaric core of her reply. <You’ll catch up.>

Lopi felt Vindicta’s frame vibrate then, as if the spirit of the Titan had heard the jibe and responded to it.

<Steersman,> he canted, excluding Remona from the exchange, <we are being embarrassed. How close to traction are we?>

Jerolf tutted irritably, shaking his head.

‘I could use another hour,’ he said in his thick Martian accent. Jerolf was a strange one, and hard to deal with, but his origins on the Red Planet gave him a certain cachet among the crews. ‘I was not aware this business was some kind of race.’

As he spoke, as if to emphasise the point, war-horns from the formation’s three Warhound battle-engines – Ferus Arma, Quis Odio, Gaius Thyrsus – blared out across the Helat. They were moving in formation, less than two kilometres away, rolling in their distinctive lupine fashion across the plains. Lopi noticed, with some satisfaction, that they were already travelling at something close to battle-pitch. Once armed, blessed and provisioned, they would be ready for deployment.

<Take your time,> said Lopi, in too good a mood to worry about Jerolf’s general misanthropy.

The vigour of the war machine infected him. He could sense the staggering levels of power coiled up in the engine’s limbs. Even before the weapons had been charged and loaded he felt the potential for extraordinary violence vibrate from every rivet and bulkhead. Having served with the Legio for nearly two hundred years, ninety of those as princeps of a Warlord, he knew just what a god-machine like Vindicta was capable of.

‘No, it’s fine,’ said Jerolf, shunting a series of brusque commands into the Warlord’s core instruction buffer. ‘Take it out. Show them how it’s done.’

Lopi shunted a confirmation query to Yemos.

<We are clear, my princeps,> replied the moderati. <We are clear whenever you wish it.>

Lopi sank deeper into the Manifold, blurring the distinction between himself and the machine.

You heard them. Stretch your legs.

A shudder ran through the structure of the cockpit, triggered by immense energies suddenly being released. Somewhere a long way down from Lopi’s position, the last of the gantries retracted. He had the fleeting impression of a gaggle of tech-priests scurrying away from the Titan’s heavy treads before his pseudo-visual field resolved into a three-dimensional cacophony of target-runes, approach vectors and proximity indicators.

<Walk,> Lopi canted, prepending the command with a softening binary requestor.

Down on the plain, a single tread lifted, trailing ash behind it as it rose into the air. The movement was stiff, arthritic, as hundreds of tonnes of adamantium and steel were propelled upwards in the stately simulacrum of a human foot moving.

Lopi felt the movement as if his own body were shifting, and a thrill of pleasure shuddered through his system.

Vindicta’s right tread crashed back down to earth. The Titan’s entire structure rocked forwards into the stride.

One step; the first step taken by the Titan since landing on Shardenus. The earth under its huge foot cracked open, and the ash settled over its enormous splayed metal toes.

Cheers rose up, from the crew in the cockpit, from the skitarii stationed in the engine’s echoing chambers, from the tech-priests clustered around the cyclopean scaffolds. Lopi could hear Remona’s clear laughter and the blares of acclamation from the distant Warhounds.

They were excited, rapt by the sight of the divine engine grinding into animation. He was excited too, as excited as he ever was when the long dormant periods were over and he could take his place back on the field of battle, clamped and plugged into the helm of a towering, semi-sentient god-machine.

Such excitement was dangerous. Getting lost in the bellicose soul of a war engine was always possible, and the wise princeps knew when to maintain his distance.

But Lopi was also wise enough to know when he could allow himself a little slack. Such moments were the compensation for every sacrifice he’d ever made, and a reminder of what joy, what transcendent bliss, was possible in the service of the Omnissiah.

<Take us out, full stride,> he transmitted to the moderati happily. <I feel playful today. Now let us see what the beast will do.>

Heriat strode across the apron, and the ash-heavy air swirled around his long synthleather coat. He would have been more comfortable wearing a rebreather but had eschewed such visible signs of weakness: the men needed to know that their commissars were suffering alongside them.

He forced down a cough as he breathed in more of the foul air. His throat had been inflamed and sore ever since planetfall, which was something he welcomed. Skietica – the condition that would eventually kill him – had symptoms of anaesthesia in its final stages, so the fact that he was capable of feeling pain meant that he was also capable of living.

That was a good motto. Perhaps he should find a way to weave that into one of his addresses to the troops.

Since the first landings, the Guard’s Helat base of operations had grown into a sprawling city in its own right. Barracks and hangars had sprung up in every direction. Defence towers dotted the landscape, each crowned with a knot of multi-barrelled AA weapons. A perimeter fence had gone up, crested with razor-wire and interrupted at thirty-metre intervals with infantry-shredding auto-
cannon stations.

Seven separate airfields operated throughout Shardenus’s twenty-one-hour diurnal cycle. Four of them were devoted purely to cumbersome supply lifters moving between the fleet in orbit and the forces on the ground. The remaining three had been reserved for military aircraft, and were crowded with Valkyrie and Vulture gunships, arranged wing-tip to wing-tip along kilometres of rockcrete apron.

Heriat strode past rows of Valkyries, observing their state and weapon patterns carefully. Each flyer had a crew of servitors attending to it, working tirelessly and silently on the laborious tasks of refuelling, systems checking and missile loading. The noise of their main-drive engines idling already made the ground vibrate; when they geared up for lift-off, the din would be deafening.

The lines of Valkyries extended as far as he could see, and the far end was eventually lost in the haze of ash. Placed together, such massed firepower looked close to invincible, and Heriat felt a brief flush of martial pride in what had been assembled.

The feeling didn’t last long. He also knew how formidable the hive defences were. Shardenus Prime had stood for several thousand years and seen off several significant threats in that time, so the architects of its defences had had plenty of time to learn their business.

He approached the waiting ranks of Harakoni Warhawks, making the sign of the aquila as he did so.

They stood in ranks four deep, wearing the armour that would take them into combat. The pilots wore standard black fatigues with open-faced helmets and minimal blast-protection. The drop-troops had been kitted out in full carapace armour. Their helmets were ungainly from rebreathers and armoured lens-arrays, and they carried heavy grav-chutes on their backs.

As Heriat drew up before them they shouldered their weapons and stamped to attention. Their commander, Aikino, stood in front, similarly kitted out for the attack run. Somehow he’d managed to cram his dreadlocks into his helmet.

‘At ease,’ he ordered, saluting Aikino with a clenched fist to the shoulder. His voice rang out across the apron, transmitted by tiny augmenter relays in his suit collar, and the troops complied instantly.

‘Soldiers of the Emperor,’ said Heriat calmly, not needing to shout to be heard. ‘I envy you. You are honoured with the first strike of this glorious campaign. Of all the many regiments of the Imperium present on this world, it is the Warhawks who will carry the fight to the enemy.’

As he spoke, he watched for subtle signs of fear from the men. None were apparent; they stood tall, unmoving, listening intently.

‘You know your task,’ said Heriat, picking out men at random and fixing them with a level stare. ‘Break the walls, create a breach for the others to come through. Such work is dangerous: some of you will not return. You are seasoned veterans, an elite among Guard regiments, and so we trust you. Your comrades in the Ferik Tactical and Galamoth Armoured and the skitarii of Astorum trust you. Without this spearhead, their assault cannot succeed.’

Heriat didn’t mention the Iron Hands; it would have been pointless to do so. He began to pace in front of them, casting his discriminating eye over the ranks, looking for waverers.

None yet.

‘You all have your battle-plans. As we speak, our cells within the hives have been activated and the defence towers are under attack from within. Galamoth artillery trains have been brought forward and will advance in your wake. The storm will strike you hardest, and you must rise to meet its challenge, but you will not be alone.’

Heriat allowed his voice to rise; to strengthen, to encourage. He was capable of fearsome levels of intimidation when the occasion demanded it, but this was not one of those times.

‘The Emperor will be with you,’ he said, channelling his own devotion and trusting that the men before him shared his faith. ‘Those who die will be martyrs, and those who live will be heroes. Accomplish this, and this world will return to the ranks of the faithful, to the greater glory of the eternal Imperium of Mankind.’

He stood back and raised his fist to the sky.

‘Ave Imperator!’ he shouted.

Ave Imperator! came the massed response, a roar of hundreds of men muffled behind masks and visors.

‘Death to the heretic!’

Death to the heretic!

‘Harakonari an tellika refala!’

The last sentence was in Konndar, the dominant dialect on Harakon. Heriat wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, but had been assured by his ethnographic staff in the Commissariat that it was suitably rousing. Something to do with loyal spouses at home.

Tellika refala! they roared with real enthusiasm.

Then Heriat turned to Aikino and gave him a curt nod.

‘That is all, colonel,’ he said. ‘Take your stations.’

Aikino returned the nod.

‘They’ll fight well, commissar,’ he said.

Heriat paused.

‘What I just said.’

‘Sir?’

‘It didn’t mean what I thought it did, did it?’

Aikino smiled.

‘I doubt it. Do you want to know what you told them?’

Heriat considered it.

‘No.’

From somewhere under Aikino’s helmet came a rebreather-filtered laugh. It was a gritty laugh, full of the sardonic resignation of a career soldier.

‘For the Emperor, Commissar-General,’ said Aikino, clasping his fist against his breastplate.

Behind him, the Valkyries’ engines began to whine up to full power. The Warhawks broke ranks, team by team, and jogged over to their aircraft. For them at least, the waiting was over.

‘For the Emperor,’ said Heriat, returning the salute and wishing he had Thunderhawks to send into combat alongside them. ‘In His name, bring them pain.’

‘For the Emperor,’ said Marivo, plunging the handle down and watching the service doors slide open. ‘Move fast, follow my lead.’

Then he set off, keeping his head low. His breathing echoed noisily in his enclosed helmet, made worse by the filtration apparatus lodged below the visor. The armour Valien had sourced was cumbersome, made clumsier by its extra blast-cladding and stringent environment filters.

He ran out from the open service entrance and down a long ramp. A labyrinth of long-disused buildings extended out ahead of him, all of them intersected with hissing iron pipework and cabling. The open sky yawned away above his head, and for a moment the sudden absence of covering made him feel ill. Marivo swallowed, going through the routines that warded sky sickness.

Behind him came the rest of his squad: twenty of them, most of them Guard troopers from his own regiment, some gangers, a couple of junior arbitrators. Khadi was among them somewhere, though he had no idea where; the soldiers of the squad all looked same in their sealed armour.

They had broken out of Melamar Secundus hive at ground level. Marivo had never gone so far down before, and he had to admit that Khadi’s expertise in the claustrophobic, sewage-clogged underhive tunnels had been invaluable. Behind them, the spire’s huge bulk reared away skywards.

The air of the wasteland hit him like he’d run into a wall. It was thick with a foul miasma of industrial pollutants, powerful even through his helmet’s filters – a mix of sulphur, spent promethium and metallic corrosion. Visibility was no more than twenty metres or so, and everything he could see was wreathed in a haze of dirty browns and greens.

‘Keep close!’ he hissed again over the vox.

A quick look over his shoulder confirmed what he’d suspected: some of his men were managing their heavy las-packs well and running well; others, the civilians no doubt, were already struggling to keep up.

Holy Terra, he swore to himself. We’ll be lucky to make it there at all.

He swung back round, feeling the cables looping under his firearm slowing his movements. His boots struck the broken tarmac awkwardly as he ran and his breathing sounded hoarse and ragged in his earpiece. His head began to ache, and a bitter, chemical taste lodged at the back of his throat.

The defence tower wasn’t far – less than a kilometre if they went efficiently – but the disused ground between it and the Melamar spire was like a maze and strewn with half-hidden obstacles. The roads that had once existed were choked with refuse and slimy with pools of glowing liquid. Marivo skirted around a huge pipe housing and jogged down a long alleyway, flanked on either side by long-abandoned power generators.

As he went he recalled the route he’d worked out with Valien, running through the turns and switchbacks in his mind. The elevated transit tube – the route any sane person would have taken, if it hadn’t been so heavily guarded – would be coming up shortly, and he looked up, hoping to catch site of the reinforced corridor above them. His eyes watered as he did so, and a blur of nausea washed over him.

A huge flash of red lit up the sky, running from the perimeter walls up into the cloud cover. A rolling, grinding boom followed on, making the clouds of pollution shake and disperse. The ground trembled.

Some of Marivo’s men lost their footing and fell into the slime below, cursing and coughing.

‘What was that?’ came Khadi’s voice over the vox. She sounded both terrified and nauseous.

Another boom echoed out, followed by several smaller explosions.

‘The wall guns,’ said Marivo grimly. ‘It’s started.’

He grabbed the shoulder guard of a man who’d fallen.

‘Keep going,’ he said, dragging him to his feet and kicking him back into a run. ‘They’re not aiming at us. We have to keep moving.’

He hoisted his gun back into firing position and resumed his own run. The sound of the hive cluster’s defence grid opening up above them was disorientating. More explosions followed, seemingly from every direction, and the sky stayed red.

Then, at last, he saw the transit tube above him. It flew across the tangled mess of the wasteland, twenty metres up into the murk of the smoggy sky. The tube itself was at least seven metres in diameter and ringed with re-inforcing bands of adamantium. It was far out of reach, and too strong to be damaged by small-arms fire.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘We follow that line.’

He ran along the route of the transit tube above him, using its bulk to shield the squad from prying eyes above. More industrial units passed by in the fog of contamination around them, all of them derelict and gradually sinking into the acid-drenched earth around them. He heard his breathing get even worse, and the pain behind his eyes turned from a throb into a sharp stab.

He heard Khadi’s words echo in his mind.

Rebreathers? They’ll clog before we get halfway.

He kept running, trying to ignore the burn, keeping his head down and drawing breaths as sparsely as he could manage. His squad came with him, stringing out as they struggled with the atmosphere.

It took longer than he’d imagined it would, but eventually the defence tower loomed up out of the murk. It soared hundreds of metres up into the sky, blunt and angular, clad in plates of thick armour and crowned with a brace of lascannons. The tower had been built into the huge perimeter wall, which curved upwards away from them into the night.

Marivo skidded to a halt, sweeping his lasgun around in search of targets. His squad did the same, drawing deep, wheezing breaths. A few of them fell to their knees, struggling to inhale.

‘Get up!’ Marivo ordered, strapping his weapon to his armoured thigh and taking a melta charge from his belt. ‘Stay on your feet or you’ll never get up again.’

His men organised themselves into a semicircle at the base of the tower, facing outwards and aiming their weapons nervously. Nothing moved in the wasteland around them, but the barrage over the walls above intensified, filling the air with the crackle and spit of cannon discharge.

Like many of the structures within the hive cluster, the base of the tower was too polluted to be used regularly; the inhabited levels were all higher up. The armour plating near the ground was corroded and cracked, just as Valien had informed them. The agent had also assured them that he’d weakened an old service hatch during his last infiltration, and that meltas would be more than sufficient to blow a way in.

You’d better have been right about that.

Marivo ran his auspex over the tower’s foundations, searching for the trace signal left at the required position. His head was hammering by then, and his throat felt like he’d swallowed a handful of iron shavings.

‘I have it,’ he growled over the vox, sounding more like an animal than a man. ‘Ten seconds, on my mark.’

His squad withdrew away from the tower’s base. Marivo set the timer on the charge, and clamped it against the outer lip of the service hatch. Once done, Marivo and the others retreated clumsily, tripping over their own feet as the effects of the toxins increased.

Marivo saw the timer count down in his wrist chrono in a series of blurry outlines. Once it reached the limit, he crouched down on his haunches, covering his head.

A thick crump bloomed out through the air, barely audible over the rumble of ordnance erupting further up the walls.

‘Let’s go!’ Marivo cried then, leaping back up to his feet and breaking into a run. This was it. ‘Go!’

Aikino hooked himself to the rail running along the ceiling of the Valkyrie’s crew-bay. The metal around him hammered from the cycling-up engines, filling the air with a dense wall of white noise.

‘Get in!’ he roared over the comm, watching as the rest of his squad ran up the rear ramp and shackled themselves into position. They pushed past him and shuffled further down the bay, leaving him in the position of first-jump, just the way he liked it. All of them were kitted for the drop, with their lasguns strapped across their chests and grav-chutes clamped to their backs. ‘Go, go, go!’

The pilot of Valkyrie assault carrier TV-782, known to its crew by the daubed scrawl of Kelemak Queen below the cockpit, triggered an acknowledgement rune on the crew-bay ceiling and gunned the VTOL engines into life. The gunship lurched into the air, cushioned on a raging layer of engine-wash. The noise level in the crew-bay reached new heights, shaking the rivets in the panels.

Aikino looked out of the open ramp as the gunship slowly gained altitude. He saw the apron shrink below him. Other Valkyries were already airborne, turning around on columns of smoky downdraft before dipping their noses and thrusting off into attack runs. He counted more then twelve of them in the air before the rear ramp began to close and obscured his view.

Aikino leaned back against the pressed-metal wall and activated a comm-link to the pilot.

‘Get us in front,’ he said over the crackling feed. He could hardly hear himself speak. His heart was thudding strongly, and he could almost feel the adrenaline pumping around his system. ‘I want to be first.’

‘Yes, sir,’ came the reply from the cockpit, and a huge thrum blew up from under the Valkyrie. Aikino felt the switch from thrusters to aerial drives, and the aircraft tilted into its attack position.

‘This is it!’ he roared, addressing the other soldiers crammed up against him in the shaking crew-bay. His voice sounded tinny from inside his blast helmet. ‘Fifteen minutes to target! Check your weapon! Check your chute! On my word, follow me down!’

The men ran their checks, just as they had done on the ground, and just as they had done a dozen times beforehand in the hangar. They swayed with the rolling movement of the gunship as it accelerated, barely needing the support of their shackles. Their movements were tense but unpanicked – they were Warhawks, as at home in the air as they were on the ground.

Aikino looked down at his own weapon, a short-stocked lasgun with the words retalla mire allek scratched along the charge casing.

‘Kill or be killed,’ he mouthed, speaking the words in Gothic. ‘Can’t come quickly enough.’

CHAPTER SIX

Marivo lurched forwards, aiming for the magma-edged hole in the wall in front of him. The stench of the airborne poisons raged around him, leaving sticky residue on the inside of his helmet. He grabbed the shaft of his lasgun while he ran and hefted it clumsily, struggling not to trip over the trailing cables to the power-pack on his back.

Then, almost without realising it, he was in. The interior of the tower enveloped him. He was plunged into darkness, and it took a few moments for his helmet to compensate.

The toxic fog around him thinned a little. He saw other members of his squad break into the space alongside, coughing and staggering. Smoke rose from the breach in the tower’s walls, and it glowed angrily where the metal skin had been melted by the charge.

The lowest chamber was utterly dark, half-submerged and home only to disused crates of supplies and mechanical parts. The power generators – their target – were on the next level up.

‘Quickly!’ hissed Marivo, trying to find a way up amid a flurry of whirling helmet-lumens.

He started to move again, nearly slipping on the wet floor. The toxic air began to mingle with the cleaner atmosphere of the tower, making his headache worse.

‘I see it,’ said Khadi from over to his right.

She was already climbing, scampering up a metal-mesh ladder like a rat out of a sewer. The rest of the squad followed her, all eager to get higher up as the chemical fogs rolled past them.

They clambered up on to the next floor, shuffling along a narrow gantry before reaching a sealed blast door at the end.

‘Stay back,’ ordered Marivo, reaching for another melta charge. ‘Rennu, Bredfar – cover it. Noffe and Klieter – make ready to go in.’

Marivo crouched down, clamping the charge against the blast door and setting the timer. Then he withdrew as far back as he could, pressing himself against the near wall.

The charge blew, cracking the door and knocking it from its hinges. As the clouds of smoke cleared, Rennu and Bredfar inched forwards, aiming their guns at the chamber beyond. The sound of generators could be made out – a low, grinding hum. The chamber was lit with a dull red glow, and the cloudy outlines of gigantic power units could be glimpsed through the open door.

‘Let’s go,’ said Marivo, staying low as he advanced towards the chamber. Noffe and Klieter followed tightly behind him, keeping their guns held close to their chests.

Marivo slipped inside, staying as close to the floor as he could. Ahead of him were the generators – five massive machines over ten metres tall and cased in pitted bronze cages. The red glow came from the coils within them, throbbing angrily with the energies needed to power the heavy weapons above.

The rest of his squad fanned out between the generator cages, reaching for their charges and preparing to clamp them in place.

‘Quicker,’ urged Marivo, taking his own charge – the last of the three he’d carried – and priming it.

He locked it to the case of the generator in front of him, just as the rest of his squad did. Their work done, they began to filter back towards the gantry outside, jostling past one another in their eagerness to get out. Marivo hurried them up, counting them out impatiently, hearing the whirring of the melta charges winding down all across the narrow chamber.

A door hissed open somewhere up above. Marivo looked up and saw another metal gantry running around the walls of the generator chamber, up near the ceiling. It quickly filled with soldiers. A klaxon started to blare.

‘Get out!’ he cried, firing one-handed up at the gantry.

He managed to get a single shot away before a whole torrent of las-beams burst towards him. He felt one impact sharply on his shoulder guard, and he flew backwards through the air, landing with a crack on the ferrocrete of the floor. His head bounced from the impact, sending black spikes into his vision.

He heard the faint snap of other las-beams – those of his men still inside the generator room, returning fire. Marivo dragged himself into cover, crouching in the shadow of a generator as the hot white bursts of light rained down from above. He heard muffled grunts of pain as some found their targets. Ahead of him, Noffe went down while trying to get to the open door.

He had no time left. The charges had been set, and only seconds remained on the counters. Marivo hurled himself out of cover, scuttling for the open door on all fours. Las-beams snapped and flickered around him, pinging from the reinforced metal floor.

He reached the threshold, only for a shot to pierce his shoulder, lancing through the gap between his torso plate and shoulder guard and tearing clean through muscle. He cried out, crashing into the doorframe as his body spasmed in pain.

Marivo’s head snapped up. Above him, dozens of soldiers took aim. Others were already racing down ladders from the gantry level, swarming into the generator room.

‘Holy Throne…’ he breathed.

Trecic Makda pushed down on the control column and felt the Kelemak Queen thrust cleanly through the air. He took the gunship up into the exit corridor, watching the scopes carefully as other Valkyries fell into formation above and around him.

The gunships looked ungainly in the air, like a pack of hooded carrion birds flapping awkwardly away from a disturbed meal. Once in formation, the aircraft thundered out over the Helat, keeping low to the ground and trailing huge strands of smoggy backdraft. Mindful of the colonel’s instruction, Makda pushed further ahead, outpacing the lead gunship and taking point.

‘Kelemak Queen,’ came a distorted voice over the comm from the ground tower. ‘Hold position. Repeat: hold position.’

Makda laughed, and poured more power into the drives. The Valkyrie swooped into full acceleration, drawing ahead of the closest stragglers by more than a ship’s length. The rest of the squadron fell in behind him, resolving into a loose wedge shape and sweeping fast across the Helat landing sites.

‘Do we have escorts yet?’ asked Makda, looking around him.

‘On their way,’ replied Fionash, his navigator, from the secondary cockpit. ‘Take a look.’

Makda glanced down again at his short-range sensoria. He saw waves of Valkyries departing the Helat in straggling lines, each one carrying a lethal cargo of drop-troops. More of them lifted off every second, filling the sensor display with clusters of glowing pinpricks.

Just as he was about to look back up he saw the signals of the Vulture escorts come into range and pull alongside the troop-carrying Valkyries.

‘About time,’ he muttered, watching the heavy-weapons vessels slide into flanking positions.

Makda keyed in the approach trajectory, and the landscape swept under them with increasing speed. The Kelemak Queen surged past the perimeter walls of the Helat encampment. As they crossed the limits, the Ferik’s defensive batteries opened up with a pyrotechnic send-off.

‘Nice of them,’ said Makda, flicking a series of switches on the control panel to stabilise the gunship’s course and bearing. Then he looked up, out through the grimy front window of the cockpit and ahead into the murk of the sky.

The Helat was rapidly falling behind. The Gorgas Maleon rose up on the horizon, studded with still-burning wreckage. Beyond that, dark and immense against a blurred horizon, were the artificial mountains of Shardenus Prime.

Makda felt a sudden lurch of nervousness twinge in his stomach.

‘That’s… big,’ he breathed, checking the sensor readings to make sure he was on the right course.

Fionash chuckled over the comm.

‘Watch yourself,’ she said. ‘Incoming.’

By then the Valkyries had reached their full attack velocity. Moving in concert, the waves of gunships thundered over the pitted landscape of the Gorgas, sweeping in long, broken lines. None of them had fuselage lights on, and in the gloom of Shardenus’s perpetual twilight they looked like hordes of dark-winged spectres racing in for the kill.

The terrain up ahead of them broke into sudden, silent fire. Hard neon lights flared out from the perimeter walls of the hive, joined a fraction afterwards by the crack and bang of their discharge. Las-beams flickered past, lancing between the racing Valkyries like spears of starlight.

‘Hold your positions…’ murmured Makda, driving the gunship lower. Soon the Valkyrie was barely skimming the tops of the Gorgas ruins, weaving around the taller debris as it roared into range. The other pilots did the same, and their craft hurtled along at near ground-level.

Shardenus Prime reared up massively ahead, growing quickly. Makda saw the lights studded across the hive spires twinkling in the night like jewels. He saw plumes of red-tinged smoke rising lazily from the foundries, curling around the vast knees of the hive clusters.

‘The defence towers are up,’ said Fionash, her voice flat. ‘They’re all up.’

Makda pulled the gunship around the broken shell of a ruined tower. The barrage of fire from the hive ahead was intensifying.

‘Marvellous,’ he muttered, just as the first gunship was hit.

A stream of tracer rounds found its target, striking a Vulture on the right turbine intake. The flyer’s engines exploded instantly, cracking open the armour from within and sending the fuselage tumbling over and over. The pieces crashed into the ground and ploughed a trail through the ruined buildings below.

‘Flak increasing,’ said Fionash coolly.

‘You noticed?’ growled Makda, struggling with the control column as explosive bursts detonated around him. A missile shot past on his left side so close that its flaming trail bathed his wing in smoke. Another Valkyrie went down, its cockpit blasted open by a direct hit. It spun wildly out of control, crashing into another gunship and engulfing both of them in a huge fireball.

Makda felt sweat break out across his forehead. The perimeter wall drew closer, lit up in every direction by anti-aircraft fire. Las-beams and plasma bolts danced out at him in flickering, eye-wateringly bright stabs of light, punctuated by juddering lines of fire. Something exploded very close on his left flank and the gunship bucked and rolled drunkenly, nearly crashing straight into the side of an old industrial complex as it swept onwards through the rubble of the Gorgas.

‘Throne,’ he swore, fighting to bring the Valkyrie back into line. Out of the corner of his eye he saw three more gunships take direct hits and blow apart in mid-air. The volume of fire from the walls kept getting thicker – far too much to evade for long.

‘Holy Throne of shitting Earth,’ he spat, driving the Kelemak Queen as fast as he could. ‘How long till we hit the target?’

The ground raced under them, passing in a blur of tangled metal. For all that, the towering hives looked hardly closer than they had been a minute ago.

‘Forget about it,’ snapped Fionash, stress evident in her voice. ‘Maintain attack speed.’

Makda kept swearing. The whole structure of the Valkyrie shuddered as explosions went off around it and the hurtling wind tore at it.

He gripped the control column so tightly he felt like his finger-bones would crack. His rocket-launchers finally acquired a target, and he loosed them both, watching as they streaked off towards the walls. Then he opened fire with the multilaser mounted on the hull. Even as he swept the gunship low over a debris-strewn ridge, firing all the while, he felt the shockwave of another Valkyrie being blown into pieces.

We are going to die, he thought bitterly, feeling shards of shattered armour-casing clatter against his own hull. We are – all of us – going to die.

Nethata leaned over the circular tabletop, staring intently at the hololithic projections shimmering in front of him. He was tense, and the figures he was seeing made him tenser.

‘The armoured divisions,’ he said. ‘Moving too slowly.’

All around him in the command bunker, senior officers, aides and servitors moved from console to console, inputting commands or staring at tactical reports from the front. Close to fifty men and women jostled for space in the low-ceilinged, poorly lit space.

‘Orders to increase pace relayed to Galamoth commanders,’ reported a steel-faced servitor on the other side of the hololith table. ‘Dispatch received: They are hampered by terrain.’

Nethata shook his head, stifling the urge to swear pointlessly at the automaton.

‘Those corridors should have been cleared,’ he snapped, watching as the signals from another half-dozen Valkyries blinked out of existence. The waves of gunships streaking towards the hive cluster were being thinned out rapidly. Close to a quarter of them had already been destroyed before they even reached the walls, and it was clear that the volume of fire from the defence towers was only increasing. ‘Sweet Emperor, get the Ferik up faster.’

The main regiments of Guard troops were making heavy weather of the advance. Their targets were arranged along the south-eastern walls of the hive complex, between the Vannon and Rovax Gates and south of the gigantic Melamar hives, but everything was happening too slowly, and the gunships were dangerously exposed. In the absence of the Titans and the Iron Hands, the whole shape of the assault looked enormously fragile.

‘Reserve wings sent into the assault, as ordered,’ said Refede Gropis, overall commander of the air assault units. ‘All Vultures are now in the air.’

‘Any towers down?’

‘No.’

Nethata suppressed the urge to gland a shot of tranquilox. He felt sweat burst out across his forehead. If all the defence towers remained intact, then those Vultures would be shot out of the sky soon enough.

‘Divert all forces to the attack zone,’ he ordered, never lifting his eyes from the dancing array of lights on the hololith. ‘Maintain speed. We need one breach. Just one.’

Gropis bowed, and hurried away to transmit the order.

Nethata didn’t watch him go. He gripped the side of the table tightly, feeling his blood press against his temples.

Damn you, Rauth, he thought, trying not to imagine how much help the Iron Hands would have been, nor what obscure tasks they were engaged in. Damn you to the Eye, all of you.

Marivo felt hands grab him by his shoulder and neck, hauling him through the doorway and out into the darkness of the gantry beyond. Even as he was wrenched out of harm’s way, he felt the heat of bolts as they crackled into the space he’d just occupied.

‘Come on!’ came Khadi’s voice. It was urgent and nervy.

Marivo struggled awkwardly to his feet, gritting his teeth as the wound in his shoulder flared up with agonising pain. It was all he could do to stay conscious.

Khadi sprinted off ahead of him, careering along the gantry towards the ladder. Marivo limped after her, feeling his arm go numb. He had an overwhelming urge to slump to his knees, to collapse in a heap, to give in to the pain. Then he heard footfalls behind him, echoing out from the generator room as the guards hurried after them. He stumbled along the gantry, sliding down the ladder to the level below, feeling his useless arm slap painfully against his side as he stumbled onwards.

His fractured and smeared visor made it hard to see much. His shoulder felt like a wet hunk of semi-cooked meat and his throat was raw and bleeding. He staggered out across the basement floor, his vision beginning to blur, expecting at any moment to feel the hot stab of a las-bolt in his back.

He reached the breach in the outer wall again. The sick feeling in his stomach grew even worse, and he recognised the bitter stink of chemicals in the air. It had been bad enough the first time, but now his visor was cracked and his armour compromised.

Then, from behind and above, he heard the muffled crack of the charges going off. Taking a deep breath, he plunged out into the toxic filth once more.

The sickness hit again. It was almost like plunging into a sea of poison. He gagged, tripped, almost falling to his knees. More muted explosions bloomed out, far above him.

He started to run. Somehow, even though he reeled around and crashed into the shells of the buildings around him, he stumbled his way out of the danger zone. His rebreather wheezed like a old dog at the end of its life, barely thinning out the soup of spores in the air before they were sucked into his mouth.

He saw the flash of light before he heard the noise of the biggest explosion. The light swept out in front of him, a vivid surge of neon-orange that dragged his shadow out across the ground. Then came the deafening crash of the blast wave as it smashed through the defence tower from the inside.

Marivo half-turned as he ran, looking up over his shoulder. The tower still reared up massively, dark against the dark of the sky, but it was burning. Gouts of flame shot out of rents in the walls, bulging from where ammunition deposits had ignited. A colossal pall of smoke rolled up the broken flanks, flecked with red-hot fragments of burning metal.

Even as he watched, more explosions took root higher up, barely muffled by the distance. He remembered Valien’s briefing then, just as if the agent had been standing by his shoulder and whispering the words to him all over again.

The generators are on level one. Hit them hard enough and the explosions will reach the ammo dumps. After that, the whole tower’s as good as gone. It’s simple; just move in fast and get out before they know what’s happened.

Marivo turned away from the burning tower, feeling his awareness slide into sluggish torpor. His tongue had swollen in his mouth and was sticky with viscous saliva. Breathing was difficult – like pulling porridge through a sieve. His wounded shoulder throbbed agonisingly, and he felt blood slip down the inside of his armour.

He started to run again, barely knowing which direction to head in, alone in the wasteland. He’d lost sight of the rest of his squad, all of whom were no doubt running as hard as they could for the sanctuary of the hive. He stumbled and staggered as fast as he could, his jaw clenched and his eyes half-closed. As he went, a single thought ran through his mind, over and over.

I did the job; now to survive. I did the job; now to survive.

The explosion lit up the night sky hard to port. Makda saw it immediately, and banked hard.

‘You’re off course,’ warned Fionash.

‘Oh yes,’ said Makda, feeding the Valkyrie’s engines every last scrap of power he could find.

The Kelemak Queen screamed over the last remaining tracts of the Gorgas, careering past a long strand of smouldering machinery. The perimeter wall of the hive raced towards them. It curved high up into the air – two hundred metres tall and dwarfed only by the colossal spires beyond it. The parapets were alive with las-fire and bolter crashes – the night was lit up with them – and every passing second saw another Valkyrie go down in flames, flailing and rolling into the devastation of the Gorgas wastes.

‘Jekkil squadron, following squadrons, lock to me,’ shouted Makda over the open comm.

Ahead of him, directly where the Valkyrie was heading, a defence tower was collapsing in a riot of breaking masonry. Ferrocrete bulged outwards, broken open by huge orange explosions within.

Its destruction opened up a narrow corridor between the curtains of incoming fire. Small-bore projectile weapons still shot through the night, but the space overlooked by the toppling tower was free of the worst of the devastating barrages.

‘Here it comes!’ cried Fionash, sounding almost hysterical. ‘Here it comes!’

Makda yanked the controls hard, pulling the Valkyrie up from its ground-hugging attack run. The gunship swung up sharply, just above the parapet level, roaring along on a booming cloud of engine exhaust. Heavy incoming fire whistled past it, only barely missing the wings. Other surviving gunships followed Makda’s lead, sweeping up in his wake at full tilt, their turbines whining and shedding long curls of smoke.

‘Fionash!’ shouted Makda. ‘Coordinates!’

The Kelemak Queen shot up above the walls, just beyond where the defence tower was crumbling into a heap of broken masonry. The bulk of the hostile fire abruptly gave out as the gunship broke the perimeter. Makda slammed on the air-brakes and prepared to activate the VTOL lifters.

‘Down now!’ cried Fionash, sending a marked schematic to Makda’s sensor array. ‘You’ll overshoot!’

Once over the wall-top, a vast panorama of the hive cluster opened up in front of them. A gigantic hive spire towered over them to their left, part of a binary cluster. Other spires stood further off, wreathed in underlit clouds of smog and ash. The biggest of them, only part-visible past the outer ring of hab-blocks, had virulent streaks of purple light leaking from the highest pinnacle. Shardenus Prime was more than a city – it was miniature world, self-contained and immense.

Directly below them was the parapet level of the walls – a long, flat strip running along the top of the immense barrier, over thirty metres wide and studded with gun-points and elevator access hatches. Flak from smaller batteries flared up at them, strafing the gunship and knocking chunks out of its armour plate.

‘Taking her down,’ said Makda, cutting out forward momentum and switching to the VTOL drives. The gunship rocked on its axis as the wing-mounted thrusters blasted into life.

By then more Valkyries had broken through and were dropping low over the parapet. A single Vulture flew with them, strafing the anti-aircraft positions dotted along the top of the walls. The noise of its heavy bolter was audible even over the massed roar and boom of the defensive batteries maintaining their volleys out into the expanse of the Gorgas.

‘Prepped to deploy,’ reported Fionash, her voice still shaky. ‘Five… four…’

The gunship lowered itself over the flat parapet like a ghoul descending over its prey. With thirty metres to go Makda pulled a lever to open the rear ramp.

‘You’re in,’ he announced over the crew-bay comm. ‘Now give them hell.’

He held the Valkyrie in a shaky hover at twenty-five metres, ignoring the flak bursts going off all around him. Some of the heavy fixed artillery further along the walls was beginning to be brought round, ready to pick off the gunships that had broken through the perimeter. The air was still full of tracer fire, broken by the heavy shadows of more Valkyries thundering overhead.

One by one, the men in the crew-bay jumped from the open hatch. Makda saw Aikino go first, kicking away from the Valkyrie and plummeting rapidly. His grav-chute kicked in only a couple of metres from the wall-top, cushioning him before he hit it. The others followed, plunging down onto the parapet like stones. Once the last one had exited, Makda fed more power to the thrusters and pushed the Valkyrie back up higher. As he did so, he swung the ship’s nose back round, ready for the perilous journey back out over the Gorgas.

‘Mission accomplished,’ said Fionash, sounding breathy but slightly less panicked than she had done earlier.

All across the breach in the defences, gunships were breaking in and unloading their troops along the parapet, hovering on labouring engines and waiting for the signal to turn around and head back.

‘Don’t relax yet,’ warned Makda, preparing to ignite the forward thrusters again. ‘We’re still in a whole heap of–’

The rocket hit them from below, punching up out of the shadows and cutting clean through his left wing. Immediately the Valkyrie banked sharply, and the engines broke into a screaming whine.

‘No!’ screamed Fionash. ‘No! No! No!’

The Kelemak Queen swung round madly, spinning on its axis like a gyrocopter. The tail-fin hit the inside edge of the wall and sent the carrier spinning over itself and falling fast on to the wasteland beyond. Makda hauled the controls back, wrestling with the column and trying to generate more lift. He saw the smog-streaked horizon race up towards him horrifyingly fast.

‘Bail!’ he roared, watching powerlessly as the chemical-fogged wasteland on the other side of the walls swam up closer. ‘Get o–’

At the last moment, Makda found a burst of extra power, and the ship lurched forwards, hitting a transit tube and ricocheting clear. It corkscrewed twice on its ventral axis, picking up momentum as it went. When it finally collided with the leading edge of the Melamar Primus spire it drove a deep rent through layers of rockcrete, carving open protective armour plates and exposing two levels of a hab-complex to the corrosive elements.

The shell of its fuselage burst into flame – a brief flash of sun-white brilliance – before the remnants collapsed into a shower of flailing debris.

Its wreckage shot through the flaming air, just a tiny part of the colossal pyrotechnic display unleashed by the incoming airborne assault, before falling gently to the earth like ash-rain.

Aikino’s grav-chute gave out just before he hit the parapet, and he slammed down hard. He recovered his poise quickly and let the anti-grav motors idle, using the mild push to help right himself.

The rest of his squad came down around him, cutting out their chutes and brandishing lasguns.

‘We’re out of position,’ said Aikino over the comm, glancing down at his locator. ‘Give me a moment.’

He looked up, trying to get his bearings. His platoon had come down onto the parapet as planned, but a long way south of their planned location. On the far side of the wall – a long, long way down – was a wide expanse of semi-derelict buildings boiling with a yellow-green fog of pollutants. Beyond that lay the hive spires themselves, rising high into the firelit clouds of smog.

The sky was a riot of colour, picked out by las-discharge and solid munitions explosions. Valkyries hung in the sky all along the walls, dozens of them, dropping their contingents of troops even as they were rocked by incoming fire. The few Vultures that had managed to penetrate the perimeter circled the dropsites, hammering back at the defensive gun-points with salvos from their nose-mounted heavy bolters.

The walls stretched off into the distance, running north-south. Most sections were still studded with active defences, with the only major breach being the one they’d just flown through. A destroyed gunnery tower listed badly just a few hundred metres away, leaking flame and smoke, but all the others were still active.

‘That’s our target,’ he said, pointing out the next operative defence tower, north of the one that had been destroyed to allow their entry. ‘We need to widen that flight corridor.’

He started to run across the roof. His men fell in behind him. Aikino switched his vox to a brigade-wide channel.

‘All Harakoni on wall sections,’ he ordered. ‘Assault tower to north of breach. Let’s take it down.’

He got nearly halfway towards it before the first resistance emerged. The big guns were still aimed outwards, hurling massive amounts of las-fire, rockets and heavy bolter rounds at the incoming Valkyries, but the thick walls were well-garrisoned and stocked with extensive anti-infantry gun-points. As the Harakoni troops closed in on the tower, grey-uniformed soldiers swarmed out to meet them, emerging from hatches in the parapet floor and hunkering down behind bulkheads and strongpoints. The entire width of the parapet was soon engulfed in a firestorm of las-beams from all directions, punctuated by the bounce and crack of hurled frag grenades.

Aikino skidded to a halt behind the cover of a low ferrocrete wall – a minor surface feature on the otherwise flat roof of the walls. He primed a grenade, took a breath, then threw it over the top. He waited for the sound of the detonation then broke from cover again. As he ran, other Warhawks joined him, charging straight at the enemy and firing in disciplined volleys.

‘For Harakon!’ roared Aikino, feeling adrenaline pumping through his body and relishing the rush of combat at last.

For Harakon! came the massed cry of the Warhawks, tearing into battle alongside him in a wave of fury.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘We have a breach,’ announced Gropis, sounding more nervous than pleased.

Nethata gripped the edge of the tactical display table, watching the myriad shifting points of light suspended over its surface. Everything was in motion, overlapping with plotted attack vectors and support lines. Watching the carnage, he felt no satisfaction at all; the attack was barely hours old but was already unravelling.

‘So I see,’ he said, watching the location marker blink on the walls just below the Melamar Secundus spire.

The first wave of Valkyrie attack carriers had gone in. Nearly all the troop carriers had been destroyed, either on their long attack runs or during their attempt to return to base after dropping their contingent of men. The reserve wings were already committed, hurtling straight into the line of fire and taking just as heavy casualties. Tactical feeds estimated up to a thousand Harakoni Warhawks had been deposited along the parapets – enough to attract the attention of the hive cluster’s garrisons, but not enough to sustain a position for any length of time.

‘How long before the Galamoth are in range?’ he asked.

‘They are, lord. Barrages have begun.

‘And the ground troops?’

‘Almost.’

Nethata balled his fists, as if to strike the table in front of him. Space Marines would have been able to punch holes in the perimeter far more effectively than mortal drop troops. They were tougher, faster, cannier, and they didn’t panic.

‘Tell the ground commanders to abandon caution,’ said Nethata. ‘I don’t care what their casualties are – they must close on the breach and commence the assault.’

Orm Vilese, the commander of the Ferik main battle divisions, raised his bald, milk-white head from the tactical pict screens.

‘The Warhawks are pinned back,’ he said. ‘Until the walls are secured, a ground assault would be a massacre.’

Nethata whirled around, almost losing control. Before he could reply, another voice interjected.

‘We are committed now, my lord Vilese,’ said Heriat, entering the room silently, dipping his head under the metal door frame. ‘It would be an act of cowardice to withdraw.’

The presence of the Commissar-General had its usual effect on the regular officers – to a man, they stiffened a fraction, instantly looking warier. All of them, Nethata included, knew the powers of the Commissariat during combat operations.

‘Quite right, Commissar-General,’ said Nethata. ‘We cannot withdraw. Tell the Ferik units to pick up the pace, or I am sure Heriat here will be pleased to deliver the orders in person.’

Vilese nodded brusquely, stifling his objections, and turned to carry out the instruction. Silently, with a few furtive glances at Heriat, the rest of the command staff moved to enact the Lord General’s will.

Nethata looked at Heriat. He didn’t bother to hide the enormous frustration he felt.

‘One tower,’ he said bitterly. ‘One. We placed a lot of trust in your agent.’

Heriat looked calmly over at the tactical display, and the green light from the table reflected from his pupils.

‘Trust in the Emperor’s will,’ he said.

Nethata looked at his friend’s face for a moment, irritated by the man’s certainty. It was ever thus – he would drive himself into a state of inner rage, working without pause to orchestrate every aspect of the campaign, while Heriat, the man charged with maintaining discipline in the face of the onslaught, remained serene.

There were times that Nethata envied that capacity, and times when he hated it.

‘Any communication from the Iron Hands?’ he asked, knowing the answer already but making a point by asking the question.

Heriat smiled thinly.

‘Do you want me to chase them?’

Nethata snorted, and turned back to the table. Even as he did so, locator markers from the Harakoni forces installed on the walls blinked out. The beachhead, imposed at such cost, was already being whittled down.

‘Get that support up faster,’ he growled, speaking to the entire chamber. ‘Throne of Earth, if we don’t get the Ferik into position within the half-hour, I’ll send you out to do the job for them.’

Aikino limped towards the gun-point, feeling blood run down the outside of his thigh.

‘Forward!’ he shouted, doing his best to rally his remaining men.

The battles across the parapet had become furious and bloody. Clusters of Warhawks fought on, though many were pinned back behind scanty cover. The grey-armoured defenders of Shardenus had poured from the access hatches like insects driven from some underground nest. They fought fanatically hard, as if something had been done to them to drive fear from their psyches.

Aikino saw over a dozen of them scamper between two low barricades just ahead of his position. Although superficially smooth, the surface of the parapet was pitted with trenches, bulkheads, pipework and other pieces of cover. It made assaulting across it a nightmare.

He reached a metre-high wall section and crouched down low against it, ignoring the burst of pain in his leg.

‘Air support,’ he rasped into the vox. ‘What have you got?’

Nothing but static came back over the link. The few Vultures still flying over the walls were fighting a desperate battle to maintain their positions. The air was criss-crossed with anti-aircraft munitions, and it made the whole sky flare up with a dull, angry light.

‘Anything?’ asked Gerran, his lieutenant. The man squatted beside him, his helmet dented from where a glancing las-beam had nearly taken his head clean off. Behind Gerran waited the rest of his platoon, plus a few stragglers from other units Aikino had picked up.

‘We have to get to that tower,’ said Aikino, squinting into the distance and gauging the distance between their position and the objective. ‘We get two of them down, and those gunships will have a clearer run.’

Gerran looked doubtfully out across the parapet. The tower was still two hundred metres away across a stretch of wall swarming with enemy troops.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘How?’

Aikino smiled grimly.

‘The usual,’ he replied, before switching his vox-channel to open. ‘All troops, coordinate assault on my mark. Homda and Lopert, flank around to the left. Anyone still fighting on the right flank, do what you can. Stand by.’

Aikino grabbed a frag grenade from his belt – his last one – and primed it for detonation.

Gerran did the same.

‘Sir?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘Good luck.’

Aikino looked at him for a second, taken aback.

‘You too, lieutenant,’ he said, awkwardly.

Then he tensed, readying for the burst out from cover.

‘Mark!’ he shouted, hurling his grenade and sending it arcing high into the air.

All across the contested section of the parapet, grenades from other units soared out from clusters of cover. Set to short delays, some burst into clouds of fragment-ation before they’d even landed. The others skittered across the ground before exploding in chaotic whirls of shrapnel.

Aikino pushed himself to his feet and broke into a run. He felt his heart pumping. Out of the corner of his eye he saw other Warhawks doing the same, tearing over the broken terrain with abandon.

Las-beams flickered out, eerily silent amid the crash and thunder of the warfare around them. Defenders staggered out from their positions, their armour cracked or ripped away by the frag blasts. The Warhawks picked them off expertly, gaining ground rapidly.

Aikino reached the barricades he’d seen earlier. He ran at the gap between them before launching himself into a dive along the ground. He skidded, carried along by his momentum. He felt the heat of las-beams lancing just above his back.

Coming to a stop, he rolled to one side and opened fire. Cries and grunts of agony rose up from the troops in front of him, and half a dozen went down under the las-fire.

Then the rest of his unit arrived, pouring through the gap and opening fire with abandon. The defenders, outnumbered and reeling from the wave of grenades, fell back.

‘Keep going!’ roared Aikino, getting to his feet and starting up the charge again. ‘Cut them down!’

The Warhawks ran rampant, sweeping across the parapet and drawing closer to the massive defence tower ahead of them. Aikino kept it fixed in his sights. The push had gained them about twenty metres.

‘Sir!’ came Gerran’s voice over the vox, out of breath. ‘Left flank, heavy incoming!’

As soon as the lieutenant finished speaking, a swathe of bolter fire sprayed across the width of the parapet. Aikino flung himself to the ground, falling heavily on his wounded leg. Gerran did the same, but a series of shrieks from further back told him some others had not reacted quickly enough.

‘Where in hell did they come from?’ he blurted, crawling forwards on his belly and craning his neck. ‘How many of the damned…’

Aikino trailed off as he got a clear look ahead, out over the remaining ground between his men and the defence tower.

More defenders were massing. He saw gun crews struggling with tripod-mounted heavy bolters and lascannons. He saw fresh squads of troops in pristine armour emerge from access hatches and take up position behind bulkheads. Further back, he saw troop carriers bearing Shardenus insignia land on the parapet, unloading more men and materiel.

He looked over his shoulder, back towards the ground won by the Warhawks. The remaining Vultures still hovered, giving sporadic air support to the troops on the parapet. Every patch of ground won was coming under heavy fire from replenished ranks of defenders. The beachhead established on the walls, always fragile, was being ground back, pace by pace.

‘Here come more of them,’ said Gerran, gesturing out over the toxic wastes between the spires.

A squadron of Shardenus garrison heavy lifters, escorted by wings of stub-winged flyers, was heading towards their position. Aikino took a look at the lead craft. It was big enough for at least two hundred troops, and there were more behind it.

‘We’ve drawn them out, at least,’ he said, smiling wryly.

Then, as soon as he’d spoken, he realised what that meant.

‘That’s what we’re here for,’ he said out loud, shaking his head as he realised the truth.

Gerran shuffled forwards. The firefight was still raging all around them, and the Warhawks’ advance was in danger of stalling.

‘Sir?’ he asked, a note of urgency in his voice. ‘What are your orders?’

Aikino laughed bitterly.

‘It doesn’t really matter what my orders are, lieutenant,’ he said. ‘We’ve already done what we were meant to.’

Aikino checked the charge on his lasgun. Enough for a dozen or so more shots before a recharge – as if that mattered.

‘I don’t under–’

‘They knew we couldn’t take down these towers,’ said Aikino, speaking with the dry finality of a man whose death is very close. ‘But they knew we’d do enough damage to pull defenders from the other sectors.’

The sky across the western horizon suddenly lit up, far more brightly and more intensely than the sky above the parapets. Something very, very big had just gone off on the far side of the hive cluster, many kilometres away, beyond the spires that loomed over them.

‘What was that?’ asked Gerran, sounding startled.

Aikino looked carefully, letting his helmet visor do the work of filtering and magnification. Even with such aids, he couldn’t make much out. He could guess, though. Right at the end, he reckoned he knew just what was going on.

‘That’ll be our allies,’ he said, dragging himself up to his feet and preparing to charge towards the enemy lines. ‘That’ll be the bastards who were meant to be fighting with us.’

He broke into a run. Ahead of him lay ranks of enemy soldiers, well dug-in and waiting for him. Seeing his charge, others of the Warhawks broke cover and joined in the assault. Gerran came with them – he was a good soldier, one that Aikino would be sorry to lose.

They were all going to die. Every loyal trooper on that parapet sector, sooner or later, was going to die.

Aikino lowered his lasgun, ignoring the incoming beams as they whipped past him. He picked his target, and took aim.

He didn’t feel bitter. The adrenaline of combat still surged through his system, just as it should have done. He was a warrior of the Emperor, and there was no better way for a warrior to go. At least he understood.

‘For Harakon!’ he roared, firing all the while, running into the oncoming storm as if nothing could hurt him.

And behind him, valiant and doomed, the charging squads of Warhawks took up the battle-cry for the last time.

For Harakon!

‘What just happened?’ asked Nethata, looking at the tactical feed with disbelief. ‘Do we have troops over there? Why are we getting signals from that sector?’

His commanders said nothing. All of them stared, just as he was doing, at the hololith hovering over the main table. Each of them was perfectly capable of reading the situation. On the south-east sector of the hive cluster walls, the battle raged just as it had been doing for over an hour. The beleaguered Harakoni drop-troops defended the areas of the walls they’d taken, though their territory was being inexorably whittled away. Beyond the walls, out in the Gorgas, the Ferik tactical brigades were struggling to make much headway. Heavy munitions were dragged up into position only to be destroyed by the defence towers on the walls. The main assault on Shardenus Prime, for all its speed and daring, was foundering in a bloody mire of destruction.

None of the commanders were looking at those signals. All of them were looking at a whole array of light-points that had just appeared on the opposite side of the hive cluster, moving fast. They’d come out of nowhere, as if summoned from the ash of the plains. Without warning, those signals had rushed up from the western hinterland zone, overlapping with the walls on the far side of the hive complex.

‘No information, lord,’ said Vilese eventually, inclining his head to listen to an incoming datafeed from the long-range augur crews. ‘I don’t have anything.’

Nethata whirled around, barely suppressing an urge to hurl blunt objects at his command staff.

‘No information!’ he shouted, feeling the veins on his neck stick out. ‘No inform–’

His tirade was interrupted by a burst of static over the comm-feed.

‘Lord General,’ came the unmistakable metallic rasp of Clan Commander Rauth. ‘Maintain your assault. Disregard losses. We have engaged the enemy across sectors 9-6 on the south-west Melamar quadrant. We do not need assistance. The sacrifice of your men is acknowledged.’

The feed went dead, preventing any sort of reply.

The chamber fell silent. Only the servitors kept working at their stations, oblivious to the aura of shock hanging in the room.

‘They used us,’ said Nethata eventually. ‘We were a… diversion.’

Heriat nodded.

‘So it seems. What are we going to do?’

Nethata didn’t reply immediately. He carried on staring at the tactical hololiths, watching as men under his command died. He knew he’d have to make a decision quickly – the battle for the walls was agonisingly poised, and hesitation would doom more of his troops to a pointless death.

Even so, he found himself frozen, locked between rage and disbelief.

One thought ran through his head, again and again, blotting out all other considerations. It nagged at him, stopping him from making up his mind, stopping him from giving his commanders the words they needed to hear.

They used us.

Naim Morvox swayed against his restraint harness as the Thunderhawk carrier Tjeslak thundered into range. All around him his brothers stood silently, each lost in contemplation before the bloodshed to come.

The interior bulkheads rattled as the gunship streaked through walls of flak, but none of the warriors in the crew-bay so much as moved. Each one wore his helm, just as the Iron Hands always did, masking their emotions entirely. For all Morvox knew his squad were reciting litanies of hatred to themselves, or running through the attack plans a final time, or simply freeing their minds of unnecessary clutter. They were like ancient statues to him, cold and featureless.

‘Deploy in twenty seconds,’ came the voice of the pilot over the comm.

Morvox prepared himself, blink-clicking his retinal display into life and watching the bow-ramp for the first sign of movement. He knew they’d be coming in fast, far faster than any mortal drop-troops could have managed, and getting the timing right would be imperative.

The Thunderhawk passed through a patch of heavy turbulence – the corona of an explosion, perhaps – and the floor bucked like a living thing. The Iron Hands adjusted stance automatically, maintaining both their positions and their strange, expectant silence.

Morvox knew that other Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes went into battle differently. He’d served alongside many of them: White Consuls, Flesh Tearers, Death Spectres. Each of those Chapters had launched into combat with cries of rage ringing from their vox-casters, invoking the names of the Emperor and their primarch to stoke their battle-fury.

The Iron Hands were different. All Medusans were different, raised on a world so choked with scouring winds that opening one’s mouth to shout anything in battle resulted in nothing more than a mouthful of grit.

So they prepared in silence. They trained in silence. When the moment came, they would disembark in silence, keeping the comm free for essential battle signals. When the Iron Hands went to war, the only sound was the low machine hum of power armour.

The Thunderhawk reeled again, hit by something along the right-hand stretch of fuselage. Morvox adjusted his stance fractionally.

‘Location achieved,’ announced the pilot calmly. ‘Manus guide you.’

The Thunderhawk swerved in mid-air, rapidly slowing as its mighty air-brakes kicked in. The front ramp shot down with a hiss of hydraulics, ushering in a storm of hot, dry wind from outside. The carrier was still travelling fast. The outside world, glimpsed through the lowered bow-ramp, was a speeding whirl of fire, smog and shrapnel.

Morvox severed his flight harness and crashed down the ramp.

The surface of the hive wall parapet lay ten metres below him, approaching fast. Las-beams and heavy bolters scythed out in all directions, aiming for the squadrons of Thunderhawks hovering over the parapets. Those shots that made contact fizzled out on the gunships’ heavy plate armour or reflected wildly out into the sky.

Morvox kicked free of the ramp and leapt out into the air. As he plummeted, dragged down quickly by his heavy armour, he had a brief vista across the whole plane of the hive cluster. Several spires rose up in the east, wreathed in burning ash clouds. Beyond them, out on the far perimeter, he could see the effects of heavy bombardment. A major engagement was taking place on the eastern wall sectors, and the sky above it was deep crimson like an angry wound.

Then he was down, crashing into the rockcrete surface of the parapet and cracking the slabs with his boots. The rest of Clave Arx crunched down around him, falling from the heavens like vengeful avatars of the gods.

The Thunderhawk shot overhead, banking sharply and bringing its cannon to bear on the fixed anti-aircraft points. Morvox started to advance, striding in silence towards the first of many low ridges he could see carved out of the flat expanse of the parapet. Las-fire and solid rounds flickered out at him, and he ignored them. His clave fell in alongside him, laying down bolter volleys in careful, disciplined bursts. The squad progressed steadily, soundlessly, moving methodically through the ash-wind like red-eyed golems of Terran legend.

Morvox reached the first line of cover and crashed straight through it, smashing aside loose blocks of ferro-crete. On the far side, a dozen mortal troops scattered, firing behind them as they fled. Morvox picked them off with single bolter shots, one by one, advancing all the while.

Across the parapet, Thunderhawks were dropping other claves into the battlezone. They all did the same thing – advanced steadily across the walls, heading for the defence towers and the access tubes that led further into the hive cluster.

The defenders attempted to rally in the face of the assault, dragging up a tripod-mounted heavy bolter and swinging it round into position. Morvox gestured to Gergiz, and he let rip with a withering torrent from his own heavy bolter, shredding the emplacement and cutting its crew into blood-flecked pieces.

The Iron Hands kept advancing, never speeding up, never slowing down. They stormed across each defensive perimeter they came to, cutting down any who stood in their way. The enemy troops were too sparse and too disorganised to put up any resistance – with the multiple assaults taking place in the eastern wall zones, all reserves had been deployed elsewhere.

A part of Morvox regretted that. He found himself wishing the defence was a little stronger, a little more worthy of his strength at arms.

Such thoughts were human thoughts, though, residues of his old Medusan self. Before long, he knew, his only thoughts in battle would be those of efficiency, of completeness, of slaughter in the pursuit of perfection. Until then, he allowed himself his fleeting regrets.

The main defence tower loomed before them, already burning from the strafing runs of Raukaan’s Thunderhawks.

‘Brother Sulzar,’ said Morvox, indicating the heavily barred gateway to the tower.

Sulzar stepped up and took aim with his shoulder-mounted missile launcher. A krak projectile screamed off towards the gateway, exploding with an echoing howl as it broke through the outer shell.

Morvox stalked towards the smoking ruins, scanning for targets. His helm lenses picked out three semi-conscious bodies in the rubble, which he ignored; others in his squad would dispatch them.

He broke into the tower, clanking down a long corridor lit with stuttering lumens. The interior space was already filled with the noises of battle – echoing bolter bursts, the thud of falling bodies, the screams of the dying. Other Iron Hands squads had penetrated the building at different levels and were already cleansing it, floor by floor.

Morvox reached the end of the corridor where it intersected with a larger chamber. A dozen defenders, each clad in close-fitting grey armour and with blank metal facemasks, attempted an ambush. One of them hurled a short-fuse grenade right at Morvox’s chest while others opened fire from the shadows.

Moving with sudden, whip-sharp speed, Morvox shot the grenade almost before it had left its owner’s hand, igniting a massive explosion that ripped the man apart. Then Morvox was amongst the remainder of the group, finishing them off with his armoured hands. He smashed one half-dazed trooper full in the face, shattering his helmet-mask and driving deep into the flesh and bone beneath. He broke the neck of another with a savage backhand, and crushed the chest of a third under his boots.

It went on. His armour slick with blood, Morvox ploughed through the rest of them, lashing out with precisely weighted movements. A few snap-shots glanced off his armour; they left little more than scorch-marks on the ceramite.

They passed into a mezzanine level beyond. He and his battle-brothers fired their bolters rarely, preferring to take the mortal fighters apart at close range to save ammo. As the press of combat grew fiercer, Morvox mag-locked his boltgun and drew his blade. The serrated edge shimmered softly in the gloom – a thin red light like the last dregs of sunset.

‘Locator reading,’ he ordered over the comm, slicing open the back of a retreating defender and shaking the flaps of flesh loose from his blade.

‘Two levels down,’ replied Fierez as he threw a soldier headlong into the wall, breaking his spine with a wet snap. He consulted his auspex. ‘Clave Prime is on schedule.’

Morvox grunted with satisfaction and kept going. The mezzanine platform hung over a deep shaft running up and down the centre of the tower. A wide metal stairway snaked around the interior of it, hugging the walls on all four sides. The few defenders who had escaped the initial assault were already fleeing down the stairwell, any pretence at resistance given up.

Morvox followed them. More noises of combat rose up from the base of the shaft, echoing from wall to wall. Furious volleys of bolter fire interlaced with fresh shrieks of fear and agony, and lightning-white muzzle flashes shot up from the depths.

‘Prepare bolters,’ he ordered, sheathing his sword as he descended through the levels. ‘Ranged fire, controlled bursts.’

Two levels down, another corridor branched off from the stairwell, brightly-lit and paved with polished tiles. It led swiftly into a much larger chamber, one with a broad domed roof with a whole cluster of hovering glow-lumens under the eaves. The space beneath it was huge – large enough to accommodate hundreds of men. The walls had been decorated with panels celebrating ancient victories of the Imperium picked out in bronze, and an austere iron statue of Rogal Dorn – Shardenus’s patron primarch – stood proudly under the roof’s apex.

There, it seemed, the tower’s defenders had chosen to make their stand. Barricades had been hastily assembled all across the wide floorspace, each one manned by dozens of grey-armoured troops. Two squads of Iron Hands had arrived before Clave Arx, coming up from the levels below, and battle had already been joined. Las-beams and solid rounds swept across the open space, crashing into the walls and knocking huge chunks out of the bronze reliefs. The noise was ferocious, echoing in the enclosed chamber and resounding from the dome above.

‘Right flank,’ ordered Morvox, assessing where best to deploy his forces. ‘Close combat, standard pattern.’

The Iron Hands broke instantly into a new style of fighting, as if a switch had been thrown somewhere deep within their black-armoured shells. They charged straight at the nearest defenders. Despite the massive size of their power armour, the rate of acceleration was tremendous. Clave Arx tore across the short distance to the barricades, swerving with uncanny accuracy around the lines of incoming fire.

Once they reached the barricades, bedlam was unleashed. Still in complete vox-silence, they ripped up the ferrocrete barriers with thundering blasts of bolter fire. They cracked open the mortals’ armour with vicious, sweeping blade movements. They lashed out with fists, crunched down with armoured boots, unleashed hurricanes of heavy weapons fire. They ripped through the resistance like a swollen storm-wave crashing into an unprepared coast.

For all that, resistance still remained. The three squads of Raukaan were outnumbered many times over by the massed ranks of mortal defenders. Rows of armour-piercing lascannons had been installed at the rear of the chamber. In sufficient volume, even the humble lasguns carried by the individual troopers could cause damage. The preternatural agility and prowess of each Space Marine was needed just to prevent them being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of incoming fire.

Morvox whirled out of one attack and into another, before seeing a lascannon beam crash into the plate armour of Brother Malloch. The warrior was hurled from the ground in a fountain of cracked ceramite and blood, smashed backwards and dragged along the floor. An instant later, Gergiz silenced the lascannon crew with a savage burst from his heavy bolter, but more existed to deal out the same level of punishment.

At last, thought Morvox, crunching his way through a whole platoon of flailing mortals. We have our fight.

His objective lay ahead of him, on the far side of the domed chamber. Huge circular blast doors protected the entrance to the access tunnels leading into the heart of the hive cluster. Once the gateway had been taken, the rest of Shardenus Prime would open up before them, ripe for conquest. The defenders knew that just as well, and fought like daemons to hold the Iron Hands back.

It will not help you, thought Morvox, dropping to one knee and loosing a bolter round at a charging defender before twisting round to crush the torso armour of another. Nothing can help you now.

Then, from behind, came an almighty crash. A corona of blue-white energy flared out across the chamber, lashing like storm lightning. Writhing strands clamped on to the mortal troops – dozens of them – and lifted them bodily into the air. Their bodies spasmed in sudden excruciation, and they screamed like animals led to slaughter.

Morvox didn’t need to turn to see who had just joined the fight. He did anyway, just for a second – another human weakness.

Clave Prime had entered the chamber. Chief Librarian Telach was with them, his entire battle-plate lit up with crackling energies. Warp lightning slewed across the midnight-blue of his power armour, shimmering like the raw stuff of stars. The Librarian’s whole facemask was lit up with it, and his helm lenses burned with a furious, majestic incandescence.

Beside him came the greatest warriors of Raukaan, unleashed in their full, terrible glory. Imanol, Veteran Sergeant of Clave Prime, resplendent in massive Terminator armour, barrelled into combat like some great Mechanicus war engine. His entourage, enhanced with elaborate bionics across their night-black battle-plate, were scarcely less fearsome.

Dominating them all was Arven Rauth, cracking the ground beneath his imposing Terminator-clad bulk, wreathed in a lambent aura of electrical discharge. In one hand he carried a power axe, in the other a storm bolter, and his helm lenses flashed the colour of raw heartblood.

Alongside him came Iron Father Khatir, as intimidating a presence as any of them, his gauntlets bleeding waves of blue-edged flame. Alone of all the Iron Hands in that place, Khatir broke combat-silence, roaring a deafening, vox-amplified challenge as he crashed into combat.

‘Traitors of Shardenus!’ Khatir roared, and the echo of his battle-cry resounded from the dome above, shattering its lumens. ‘Judgement has come to this world! Surrender and your deaths will redeem you! Resist and your souls will be damned!’

Morvox felt his heart-rates spike, stirred by the familiar exhortations of the Iron Father. Ever since his induction into the Chapter the machine-filtered voices of the Iron Fathers had guided him into war, stirring the residual human passion for killing and channelling the enormous destructive capacity of his genhanced frame.

He turned back to the slaughter, knowing that its climax was near. Against such assembled forces the mortal defenders of the hive would soon be swept away, leaving the access tubes clear of resistance. After that, the assault would carry on remorselessly, hab-block by hab-block, spire by spire, manufactorium by manufactorium, until the entire world was scoured of the taint that infected it.

For the honour of Manus, he mouthed, feeling the splash of fresh blood against his helm-mask. Now we make our presence known. From here, from this place, until the end and the victory, let the killing be unbounded.

II

UNDERWORLD

CHAPTER EIGHT

Nethata tried not to look too hard at the woman in front of him. No matter how often he met adepts of the Machine-God in person he felt an almost irresistible urge to scrutinise their panoply of implants, to guess which parts of their bodies were real and which were augmetic.

It was a foolish, discourteous instinct, and he knew it. For all that, it was hard not to stare.

‘Thank you for coming to see me, magos,’ he said, settling into his stiff-backed chair.

Magos Ys inclined her head slightly, and the crimson cowl obscuring her face slipped a little lower. The chamber around them, located high up in the Guard’s Helat base of operations, was roughly circular and offered a wide view of the plains below through a set of curved windows. Troop movements were visible in almost every direction – columns of armoured vehicles, Sentinel formations, squadrons of flyers taking off for the front. Over in the far north-west horizon, the burning outlines of Shardenus Prime could just be made out.

‘A pleasure, Lord General,’ she replied. ‘I could hardly expect you to meet me in orbit with matters balanced so delicately.’

Nethata gestured to the table beside her. Bolofe, his Master of Protocol, had covered it in things he thought a servant of the Mechanicus would expect to find – fruit, mostly, beside a decanter of Martian emreva.

‘We’re all right conducting this in Gothic? I can ask for servitor mediation if you wish.’

It was impossible to read Ys’s mood with her face covered, but Nethata thought he caught a flicker of a metal smile somewhere in the shadows.

‘That is kind, but I am perfectly happy to speak in Gothic.’

Nethata bowed to acknowledge the courtesy.

‘I received word from Princeps Lopi that his Titans are available for deployment,’ he said. ‘I repeat our thanks. With the perimeter breached, we will have need of their heavy weapons soon.’

‘I am glad,’ said Ys. ‘And you are to be congratulated – my adepts inform me the assault on the hives goes well.’

Nethata suppressed a sour expression.

‘The walls have been compromised west of the Rovax Gate,’ he said. ‘The main assault along the eastern walls, the one led by my regiments, was withdrawn after taking heavy losses. No Warhawks were recovered. Two days later, we’re still patching things up. I’m not sure that counts as “going well”.’

‘But the breakthrough was made. Surely that is the important thing.’

Nethata found the magos’s smooth, subtle voice disconcerting. No hint of machine filtering discoloured it. It was human; almost too human, if such a thing were possible. He knew that Ys was almost entirely machine, just like the senior Iron Hands, though at least in their case one couldn’t miss the ostentatious display of mechanical alteration.

‘Let me be candid, magos,’ he said. ‘I trust this meeting is in full confidence?’

‘Always, Lord General.’

‘So,’ said Nethata, drawing a breath. ‘There have been differences of emphasis between me and Clan Commander Rauth over the assault. I’m sure you’re aware of that, but now that your assets are coming under his purview, I thought we should discuss it.’

As he spoke, he tried to gauge something of Ys’s reception, but it was futile; like talking to a mute servitor.

‘I am concerned about the way this war is being fought,’ he said. ‘We lost thousands of men establishing a temporary breach in the walls, in my view with no justifiable cause. Guard losses are one thing – I’m capable of arguing the case for my own men – but your battle-formation… well, that is something else. I can’t speak for you.’

‘We would not expect you to,’ said Ys.

She folded her legs. The movement was as supple and fluid as a normal human’s, though Nethata noticed the glint of dark metal under the hem of her robes before they settled.

‘They didn’t tell us anything,’ said Nethata. ‘We launched our assault knowing nothing of their positions, of their intentions. They used my men to concentrate defenders along the eastern wall sections while they came in from the west. Even now they commandeer units under my direct command, driving them alongside their own advance, wasting them in their haste to press on towards the Capitolis.’

He shot Ys a frustrated look.

‘They are – forgive me – impossible.’

The magos reached for her glass and raised it to her cowl, taking a sip before replacing it.

‘I appreciate your candour, lord general,’ she said. ‘And I understand your situation, since we have fought alongside the Iron Hands for millennia. Perhaps you know of our close association, perhaps not. In either case, given those ties, I am surprised that you have sought to take me into your confidence over this.’

Nethata pressed his fingers together, fully aware of the need to go carefully. He knew how close the Mechanicus was to the Iron Hands. That didn’t make his approach to Ys pointless, just dangerous; in any case, he had precious few other allies to turn to.

‘This is not a question of insubordination,’ he said. ‘I serve the Imperial cause, as I know Princeps Lopi will, but I have tried to reason with Clan Commander Rauth on many occasions and have got precisely nowhere. He is blind to considerations of caution, of bloodshed, of waste. All he cares about is speed – the need to break the spires as soon as possible. If he has a sound tactical reason for that, then he hasn’t chosen to share it with me.’

Nethata unclasped his hands and placed them in his lap, resisting the temptation to look down at them. Ys’s empty cowl was hard to stare into for long.

‘I am not a weak man, magos,’ he said. ‘I have led men into battle for over a hundred years, and have taken many hard decisions. But this is…’

He trailed off, remembering the sacrifice of the Harakoni Warhawks, all to expedite the Iron Hands’ own hidden advance.

‘…inhuman.’

Ys said nothing for a moment. She sat easily in her chair, not touching the fruit and liquor at her side, watching him.

‘Let me tell you something about the Iron Hands,’ she said eventually. ‘You may think that you know what to expect of them, but I assure you that you do not.’

She leaned forwards a little.

‘Since we are speaking in confidence, I can make you privy to things many in the Imperium have long forgotten – it will help you to understand. The Iron Hands are human, lord general. Perhaps they do not like to think of themselves in quite that way any more, but they are, and they share in the full range of blessings and curses of that exalted state. One condition in particular is theirs: an ancient condition which even now, with all the techno-chirurgical advances available in our glorious Imperium, resists any attempts at a cure.’

Nethata listened carefully, lulled a little by Ys’s smooth, cultivated voice. He had not expected a discourse.

‘Psychological states exist in which a healthy subject comes to harm himself,’ she said. ‘He lets himself waste away through neglect, or cuts his own flesh, or desires to have limbs amputated where no wound has been inflicted. The image he has of his body is distorted, and it is difficult for others to understand such an impulse, since they can have no insight into what he sees when he stands before a mirror.’

Ys spoke in a measured, confident manner, as if her speech had been long prepared.

‘The body of a Space Marine is the most perfect human form ever created,’ she said. ‘Even our skitarii, given every augmetic aid known to us, do not compare to it in power and facility. You can imagine what degree of mental trauma would be required for a human to give up such a gift, to mutilate himself and replace his priceless gene-forged heritage with mechanical parts.’

‘Forgive me, magos,’ said Nethata, ‘but your own kind are not exactly immune to that.’

Ys nodded, and Nethata had the same impression again – the impression that under her cowl she had just smiled.

‘We take ordinary bodies and make them better,’ she admitted. ‘We do so because we desire to improve on what we were born with. The Iron Hands cannot make their bodies better, since they are already perfect. Nevertheless, still they amputate their limbs in favour of metal parts and aspire to the state of machine-hood. Why? Because they fear their flesh, lord general. They look at it in the mirror of their minds and they see something loathsome. It is difficult to understand such an impulse, since, as I said, we can have no insight into what they see when they stand before the mirror.’

Nethata pursed his lips, considering what he was being told.

‘So the augmetics,’ he said. ‘It’s because… they can’t help themselves?’

‘Something like that.’

‘All of them? They all feel that way?’

‘The condition gets worse the longer they serve. Some of them recognise it, others do not. Eventually, yes, it claims them all.’

Ys turned away from him. She looked out through the windows, over to the horizon where the spires burned.

‘There is a myth, a rumour, still repeated on Mars, that their Lord Primarch knew of this weakness and wished to purge it. I have seen scrolls, purported to be written in the hand of Manus, that state the matter clearly. Who knows if such things are genuine? Even if he intended it, he died long before he could accomplish it. And so we have the present situation: the Iron Hands no longer place trust in their gene-wrought perfection.’

Once again, the irony of being told such things by a mostly-metal adept of the Mechanicus impressed itself on Nethata.

‘Why are you telling me this, magos?’ he asked.

‘To help you understand them. They do not see the universe in the way that you do. When you advocate courses of action that seem prudent – to slow the pace of the attack, to conserve strength, to protect your exposed flanks – they see only weakness. It reminds of them of their own weakness, and so they recoil from it.’

‘When they risk the lives of my men, I must speak.’

‘Quite so. But choose your words and your tactics carefully.’

Ys turned away from the view of the battle and looked at him from under the shadow of her cowl.

‘They only respect strength,’ she said. ‘Do not argue from the need to preserve life; argue from the need to destroy it. Appeal to mercy, and they will disregard you. Appeal to reason, and they will disregard you. Appeal to the weakness of your men, and they will disregard you. They understand sacrifice, duty and resolve. Nothing else.’

Nethata stared at his own hands. For the first time, he thought they looked old, despite all the rejuve he’d invested in over the years. He flexed his fingers, watching the way the muscles moved.

‘Your words give me little comfort,’ he said. ‘I had hoped that, with your support, those instincts might be controlled.’

Ys shook her head. It was a perfect idiomatic human gesture, though Nethata suspected that she only adopted such mannerisms because he was there.

‘You cannot control the Iron Hands,’ she said. ‘It is dangerous to try. The best you can hope for is manage them; even we of Mars have had to learn how to do that. They need us for the augmetic devices we make for them, but we are not foolish enough to believe that our relationship is one of master and servant.’

Ys rose from her seat in a single, lissom movement. Nethata got to his feet more clumsily. The audience, so it seemed, was at an end.

‘You were right to speak to me, lord general,’ she said. ‘I will reflect on your situation and see whether anything can be done. Princeps Lopi is an experienced commander; I shall instruct him to remain in close contact with you.’

‘I’m grateful, magos,’ said Nethata. ‘And I hope you don’t think–’

Ys raised a hand, and for the first time Nethata had a clear view of her metal-encased claw slipping clear of her sleeve.

‘It does not matter what I think,’ she said. ‘Your devotion to your men commends you.’

Ys leaned closer, and a faint aroma of ceremonial incense rose from her robes.

‘If you remember only one thing I have told you, lord general, remember this,’ she said. ‘They only respect strength. Forget that, and it will kill you.’

Valien crept forwards slowly, hugging the wall, taking extreme care not to lose his footing. The shaft below yawned away from him, hundreds of metres down. He saw a light blinking on and off in the depths, and wondered what kind of machinery existed so far down, and how anyone ever managed to get close enough to it to service it.

He cleared his mind. Losing concentration would kill him.

Valien edged around the side of the shaft, clinging on the narrow ledge and shuffling slowly. He’d removed the last disguise he’d been wearing in favour of a black bodyglove woven with lightweight armour panels. His bulbous head was enclosed in a sheer layer of sensor-repelling synthskin, and his eyes were protected by an environment-reactive visor. Various weapons, mostly small and esoteric in design, clustered around his belt.

If he encountered spire guards now they wouldn’t hesitate before shooting him. That was fine; the time when adopting disguises was likely to help him had gone.

He reached the far side of the shaft and stepped lightly into the tunnel on the far side. For a moment, a brief, thrilling moment, he felt his centre of gravity hang over the void, teetering on the lip of oblivion.

Then he was over, crouching down on the floor, his heart beating harder than usual.

Vertigo. With all the neurosurgery I’ve had, you’d have thought they could have fixed that one thing.

Ahead of him was a long, twisting corridor, barely high enough for him to walk down without stooping. The walls were black and caked with accumulated filth. Old mechanical workings, mostly broken and filmed with rust, covered sheets of metal panelling. The place smelled fungal and claustrophobic.

He didn’t know how far in he’d come. Even with the use of retinal-mounted chronos and locators it was all too easy to lose one’s sense of where one was. Everything was dark, wet and echoing – kilometre upon kilometre of meandering service tunnels and access tubes and maintenance shafts and drive pits and utility gantries, all of it full of stinking air and distant, echoing clangs.

Most of the ways he went were deserted, long forgotten by the inhabitants of Shardenus Prime. He crept through old generatoria, still humming with power, abandoned sewage ducts and mechanised tunnels used only by sightless servitor-piloted drones.

When he saw living men, he killed them. He crept up on them in the dark, keeping even his breathing silent, unleashing his needles into their soft, unwary flesh. When the killing was done he’d drink their blood, feeling hot pleasure wash into his system as he gulped it down.

Then Valien would bless the name of the Emperor, the Master of Mankind, the living god who gave him his powers over life and death. He would speak reverently in the hidden tongues of the Talica death cult, remembering the spare beauty of the temple on Ghanreta Tertius where he’d been trained. He’d remember the way the light had come through the stained glass of the inner chapel, casting a halo on to the stone floor in the shape of a human heart.

At times, the memory of that place would make his eyes prick with tears.

From up ahead, somewhere in the maze of tunnels and access shafts, he heard a noise. It was faint, very faint, like the brush of leaves in foliage.

Valien crept forwards, dropping almost to all fours and letting his fingers drift against the floor in front of him. He picked up speed, sweeping soundlessly along the silent, shadowy routes through the heart of the hive.

The noise grew as he drew closer to it. It was nebulous, diffuse, muffled by the effects of the labyrinth.

He reached the end of the tunnel. The ceiling gradually lowered to meet the floor, causing him to sink onto his belly and snake forwards. He felt the press of metal above and below him, and tried not to think too closely about how many thousands upon thousands of tonnes of spire structure stretched away above his tiny, burrowing body.

The tunnel ended abruptly at a sheer cliff-edge. Ahead of him, a vast cavern lined with soaring pillars carved its way into the heart of the spire foundations. Looking right and left, he couldn’t see where it began or where it ended – each extremity was lost in a haze of smog and shadow. Looking straight ahead, he could just make out the other side: a sheer face of soot-black iron, banded with gothic ornamentation and studded with mechanical workings. Faint lights blinked in the gloom like lost sentinels adrift on a huge, black ocean.

The noise came from far below, over a hundred metres down. Valien perched on the lip of his precarious vantage, and absorbed the information.

Men were marching. They were organised into platoons, and the platoons into companies, and the companies into battalions. They went slowly, almost mechanically, arranged in close, grey-clad ranks. The noise of their massed boots striking the ground swirled and echoed up in the cathedral-like space, drumming and booming in the cavern above them.

Valien extended his face a little further out, carefully checking his balance. He narrowed his right eye, and felt the auto-enhancement filters in his cornea do their work. His view zoomed in, overlaying cartographic data sequestered alongside his mission orders.

The men were heading south-west, out of the central hives and towards Melamar Primus where the fighting was. They were well-equipped, with thick plated armour and what looked like non-standard-issue lasguns. He saw grenades hanging from their belts, and savage blades. They wore full-face masks with rebreathers attached, obscuring their faces entirely. Only the officers, marching ahead of their troops in command squads, had any exposed flesh on them.

Valien swept his gaze over to them, recording the pict-sequence in his earlobe-mounted buffer for transmission into the grid. He concentrated on one man, a bulky figure at the front of a large contingent with a swaggering, rolling gait. His skin was entirely grey, like dregs of ration-gruel. Even by the standards of a sun-starved hive like Shardenus, that colour was unnatural.

Valien zoomed in closer. The man’s eyes were white-less, like the black orbs of an animal. Faint pink lesions throbbed at his collar, pulsing with a life of their own. A tattoo had been gouged into his forehead, though Valien couldn’t make out much of its shape.

Valien withdrew his optical enhancements and sat back inside the tunnel lip. As he did so, he heard the rumble of tracked vehicles. He waited, utterly motionless, until the tanks came into view, rolling along slowly in the wake of the marching men. He saw a variety of a standard Imperial heavy armour – Leman Russ tanks, Malcador mobile fortresses, Chimera troop carriers, Medusa fire support platforms. Each vehicle had been defaced with grey and purple icons that made his eyes itch. Imperial aquilas had been gouged off the armour plate. The tanks ground their way along the cavern floor, shrouded in choking clouds of smoke.

As he watched, he fed observed details into a comm-pulse unit for transmission.

Estimate: >12,000 infantry; 8 armoured brigades; 2 engineering brigades. Observed heavy weapons squads, infiltrators, sniper units. Advancing down major arterial route [F56] from Capitolis to silos under Melamar Primus. Arrival at front within five standard hours. Endemic physiognomic corruption. Transmit to all field commanders within zone of operations. Originator: Valien TDC, Ferik special attachment. Timestamp: N07:44:56.

It was a substantial force, just one of many detachments of defenders he knew were moving from the inner zones of control up to the front line. As the invaders cut deeper into the heart of Shardenus Prime, more re-inforcements would be called up and shipped down the huge transit arteries within the depths of the hive cluster. Such gigantic caverns had been delved to permit the movement of bulk goods carriers between spires; they were just as useful for allowing the movement of armed divisions.

Valien watched until the last of the heavy armour had trundled off into the dark. He felt a qualm of disquiet as he considered the numbers that Nethata had at his disposal. From what he’d seen, Shardenus Prime was well-defended, well-resourced and very hard to make quick progress through. For all the bravado of the Imperial commanders, he couldn’t see a quick way to force a result.

Additional: I reiterate supposition that air supply is a weak link. The spires and transit routes are sealed; breaking seals will make atmosphere unbreathable. Transmitting coordinates of filtration stations uncovered during survey: the Capitolis perimeter may be vulnerable.

He shuffled back down the tunnel, drawing away from the cavern and back the way he’d come. After an uncomfortable few minutes of cramped struggle, the roof of the tunnel lifted sufficiently for him to twist around and creep along on all fours. He went quicker then, flitting in the dark until he met an intersection and changed course.

After that he resumed his silent, watchful progress. With every step, that watchfulness increased. He recited Talica litanies of concentration, keeping his mind alert and his senses pitched.

He knew that the danger he was in increased the further he went. With every passing metre he was headed further away from any possible help and deeper into the heart of the corruption. Soon, he knew, the tunnels would start to open out into inhabited areas of the cluster again, areas where he’d have to use all his conditioning and guile to remain hidden.

And after that, the Capitolis: the cluster’s central spire, immense and unknown. No sensor array had succeeded in penetrating its depths, and no agents had managed to get through the perimeter. Its flanks were lit with a strange, lurid light – a violent purple that bled out into the night sky like blood in water. Whatever had corrupted Shardenus lay within that spire, slowly exerting its control across the whole cluster.

Holy will of the Immortal Emperor, grant me nothing more than life and strength enough to bring justice to Your enemies.

For a moment, Valien paused, pondering the words he recited to himself so freely. Though the formula was set, he’d never given much thought to the concept that he might die in the pursuit of his objectives. It was always a background consideration, something that was often statistically likely, but which until then had never impinged greatly on his thinking.

It occurred to him with unusual force that the odds of coming out of the Capitolis alive were slim. No other agents had managed to do so, and they had been operating in the days before full-scale hostilities had commenced. With the spires on full alert and crawling with increasingly mutated defenders, the odds of doing so were even less favourable.

Perhaps his reversion to blood-drinking was clouding his judgement. It was weak, to give into such primal urges, and unworthy of the trust his masters had placed in him. He’d never given pause to consider the odds before, not when an assignment was under way, and he knew that it was a bad time to start.

Still, for whatever reason, he couldn’t shake the sensation.

Nothing more than life and strength to bring justice to Your enemies.

He sloped off down the corridor, slipping into the pools of darkness, forcing his mind to return to the task at hand. His fingers curled up into fists, cradling around his drawn needle gun.

Then he was gone, lost in the dark, a single figure heading deeper, ever deeper, into the heart of the hives.

Marivo coughed up blood, and the world swam into something like focus before him.

For a moment, he felt very little. Then he felt a lot, and none of it was good. His shoulder throbbed with repeated waves of pain. His throat felt as if he’d been lost in the ash-wastes for weeks without water and his tongue was swollen in his mouth. Every joint ached, and the skin across his face felt taut and dry. He tasted bile at the back of his mouth but couldn’t swallow it away. His eyes watered. He blinked, and it felt like grit had been rubbed under the lids.

‘Where…’ he croaked, trying to lift his head. ‘What…’

Someone came over to him, cradling the back of his neck and lifting a cup to his lips. Brackish water spilled into his mouth.

Marivo couldn’t do much more than passively let the liquid absorb. As it seeped down, he managed to swallow. The movement made his throat flare, and fresh tears started in his eyes.

‘Who…’ he rasped as soon as the cup was removed, breaking off in pain.

Wherever he was, it was dark and cold. As feeling returned to his battered limbs he gained the impression of lying on a long, hard table. He wasn’t wearing his armour, though he was still in the olive-green uniform Valien had provided for him. Its cloth was dirty and stiff with blood; presumably his.

‘Awake, then,’ came a familiar voice.

For an instant he couldn’t put a name to the voice. He tried to lift his head again. Despite the fresh blur of pain behind his eyes, he managed it.

‘Khadi,’ he croaked. ‘Where are–’

‘Do not speak,’ ordered Khadi, pushing him back down to the table.

She was still in her armour, minus the helmet, and looked fairly brutal in the dim light. Marivo could see other figures moving around in the dark beyond her, but couldn’t make much out beyond that.

‘We are in Melamar Secundus,’ she said, keeping her voice low. ‘Right at the bottom. Keep your voice down.’

Marivo tried to piece together his memories. He had the distinct feeling he’d been drifting in and out of consciousness for a while. Fleeting, dreamlike images remained in his mind, like outlines burned onto a retina: dragging himself out of the toxic soup, coughing his guts out; crashing into the walls of a tunnel, deafened by explosions in the air outside; feeling hands grasp at his collar and pull him away; whispered voices in the dark.

‘How long?’ he asked.

‘Two days. We had to keep moving. You’ve been given some sedatives, and some anti-inflammatories, but we’ve run out now. That’s why you’re awake. Sorry.’

Khadi didn’t sound sorry. She sounded distracted and irritated, as if he’d done something, somehow, to offend her.

Marivo tried to move, and found that he could. His limbs responded to his commands better with every passing second, though his mind was still sluggish and numb.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘What do you remember?’

Marivo took a deep breath, and it made his throat sting.

‘The tower,’ he said. ‘We brought it down. I took a hit. We were getting out, and I was running – I thought you’d gone on ahead.’

‘I had,’ said Khadi. The sound of her voice was flat, as if she were regretting a decision she’d made. ‘Maybe something about your damn Guard training got to me. Leave no man behind – isn’t that what you say?’

Marivo had to concentrate to follow what she was saying. Only some of it made sense to him – the events after he’d been hit were jumbled in his mind.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘What’s–’

‘What’s our status?’ she finished for him. Even in his weakened state, Marivo found her constant speaking over him annoying. What was wrong with her? ‘I’ll tell you. We got back into shelter just as almighty hell broke out on the walls. For a while I thought we had more guards after us, but they weren’t stupid enough to try to cross the wasteland, and anyway they were needed on the walls pretty soon. Your spy was right – as soon as the tower went down, there were soldiers everywhere, coming over in drop-ships and landing on the walls.’

Marivo felt relief flood through him.

The Guard. At last.

‘So what happened?’ he asked.

‘They got the shit kicked out of them,’ said Khadi. ‘The whole thing was a bloody mess – guess they didn’t have the numbers, or the backup, or whatever. We didn’t hang around long enough to watch.’

Marivo’s relief drained away as soon as it had arrived, replaced by a sensation that felt as if his insides had hollowed out. For weeks, for as long as he’d been persuaded that something rotten dwelt in the Capitolis and needed to be resisted, he’d believed that everything would turn once the Guard arrived. He’d seen the landers come down from orbit, waves of them – back then, the invasion force had looked unstoppable.

He let his head fall back. He felt sick, and it wasn’t from the toxins still fizzing in his airways.

‘Then it’s over,’ he said.

‘No it isn’t,’ said Khadi, activating a microlumen and examining the wound in his shoulder. ‘Something else has happened. There’s fighting everywhere, over in Melamar Primus, along the wall sectors out west, spreading fast.’

Marivo narrowed his eyes, trying to concentrate. Khadi’s face was drifting in and out of focus.

‘Any signals? Valien gave me secure comm-lines, with passwords.’

Khadi laughed. It was an empty, caustic sound.

‘If you can get close enough, you can try it,’ she said. ‘Why do you think we’re down here? It’s bad further up. They’re burning everything. Everything.’

She flicked the microlumen closed. The light briefly illuminated her face. She looked gaunt.

‘We have to regroup,’ said Marivo, struggling to drag himself up on his elbows. ‘I have idents for the other cells. They’ll want our positions – we’ll coordinate, form a front.’

Khadi stared down at him. Her expression was a mixture of disbelief and contempt.

‘You haven’t seen what we have,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘It’s impossible.’

With a huge surge of willpower, Marivo hauled himself into a sitting position, swinging his legs over the side of the table he was lying on. He saw the other figures in the darkness crowding round, some listening to the exchange, others pretending not to. To the extent he could see them, they looked exhausted and ragged, clad in broken plates of armour and cradling poorly bandaged wounds.

‘So what is it?’ he asked, genuinely curious despite his annoyance. ‘What is the actual, specific problem?’

‘We can’t contact anyone!’ she blurted out, letting her exasperation show. ‘We can’t do anything – they’re the Angels of Death, just like that freak told us, and they’re killing anything they see. And the Capitolis has sent more troops to fight them, and they’re not human anymore. They’ve got grey skin and black eyes and… other things. It’s hell up there, and they’re ripping the whole spire apart.’

Her voice began to shake. She jabbed a finger at him, and Marivo saw how it trembled.

‘You started this! You let that monster manipulate us! What do you think they’ll do, when they get here? Thank us?’

She laughed bitterly.

‘They won’t even know it was us that took down the tower. They’ll do to us what they’re doing to everything they come across. They’ll kill us, Marivo. It doesn’t matter which side does it; we are all going to die.’

Marivo looked her in the eye. He could see how close she was to breaking. He’d seen it in men under his command many times, and knew how delicate the tipping point was.

He didn’t reply immediately. He let his eyes flicker to one side, seeing the crowd of faces in the dark, all waiting for him to speak.

With a spasm of hot pain, he pushed himself from the edge of the table and stood shakily on his own feet. A wash of nausea and dizziness passed over him, but he ignored it.

‘If you stay here, then you’re right – you’ll die,’ he said. ‘They’ll get down here eventually, and no excuses will be enough to save you when they do.’

He turned to the other figures in the room.

‘You all know what’s happened here,’ he said. ‘The spires have been taken by traitors, and the Emperor’s Angels won’t stop until this whole place is cleansed. We have a choice: we can hide from them, hoping that – somehow – they’ll overlook us, or we can join them and fight.’

He looked back at Khadi. She looked vulnerable suddenly, standing with her grimy cheeks and dilated pupils. He no longer found her irritating. A strange feeling of protectiveness, of needing to take charge again, came over him.

‘I have codes,’ he said. ‘If we still have working comms, I can use them. We can link up with the other cells, find a way to get together. And then, back to the front.’

Khadi snorted.

‘You’re in no condition to fight,’ she said.

‘I will be,’ he replied, hoping that was true. ‘How about you?’

Khadi looked back at him, defiant but brittle, and said nothing.

CHAPTER NINE

<Glory to the Omnissiah! Unremembered death to the foes of the Machine-God!>

Princeps Lopi was still in a good mood. He strode forwards, locked within the throne at the heart of Terribilis Vindicta, crushing piles of charred metal beneath his enormous tread housings.

Ahead of him ran the Warhounds, their snouts held low, their weapon-arms cocked to fire. They loped across the ruined cityscape of the Gorgas, striding through all but the most persistent ruins. Vindicta came along behind at a more stately pace, walking in tandem with Castigatio.

The immense, ruined pillars of the south-facing Rovax Gate loomed before them, crowned with wrecked turbo-laser housings and a vast ranked battery of disabled heavy bolters. The gate housing reared up over three hundred metres into the sky, a riot of gothic statuary and Imperial iconography. The words Imperium Gloriam Orbis Terrae could be made out over the lintel, set in iron amid panels of red-veined marble. Below that banner were the words Shardenus Primus Ostium Rovax.

The gate was open. Colossal doors, each fifteen metres thick and nearly two hundred high, had been drawn back fully to allow the triumphal entry of the god-machines to the battle-front. The devastation beyond was visible through the portal. Some flames still clung stubbornly to the edges of the gateway, rippling like hot banners in the wind.

‘My princeps, should we call the hounds back?’ asked Yemos, sounding a little embarrassed to ask the question. ‘It is general precedence–’

<Quite!> agreed Lopi, shunting a general stop order to the Warhounds. <Well said. Can’t have the whelps getting in there before us.>

The Warhounds came to a halt, pausing before the sweeping walls of the hive cluster and lowering their snouts further in deference.

Vindicta strode on, eating up the ground. Lopi could feel the perfection of its systems, the enormous energies humming from its central reactor towards the motive and weapon arrays. He flexed his fingers, and the Warlord’s cannons swivelled on their mountings.

<Be alert,> Lopi canted, knowing that every member of the crew was already straining at the leash to get into action. The days spent fitting, servicing and blessing the mighty engine had been a trial to endure; now, at last, the work would find its reward. <Once we’re in, I want full sweeps – something may be lurking in the wreckage.>

Vindicta drew closer to the gates, walking with its ponderous, lurching gait. A Warlord Titan in motion was a curious mix of grace and awkwardness. Gravitic stabilisers locked in the lower leg segments struggled heroically to limit the damage done by the machine’s unimaginably heavy tread, but still the earth beneath its feet was annihilated with each movement. Every heavy step made the upper torso sections sway in recoil, so much so that the Warlord’s progress looked more like the infirm tottering of an old man than the confident progress of a warrior in his prime.

<And here it comes,> Lopi said. <Yemos, if you please.>

Vindicta strode through the gates, chewing up the remnants of traitor armour under its heels. At the moment the threshold was crossed, Yemos let off the war-horns in celebration. The braying noise exploded out from the amplifiers, ringing out across the interior of the hive complex.

<And now let us see what we can see.>

A vista of desolation opened up before the crew. Immediately ahead of them was a wide open area known as the Maw, a kilometres-wide expanse of empty parade grounds, low-profile manufactoria and disused generatoria. A wide avenue ran directly between the gates and the closest of the hive spires, cutting through the urban tangle, clad in ferrocrete slabs and lined with iron pillars. Statues of Imperial saints and heroes had been interposed between the pillars, some of them reduced to little more than rubble by the fighting, some of them more or less intact.

Imperial standards bearing the marks of the Ferik Tactical Guard units dotted the landscape, marking points where objectives had been taken. Lopi knew that the entire Maw had been cleansed following pinpoint raids by Iron Hands squads, and that the real fighting lay ahead – in the two gigantic Melamar hives and beyond.

He raised his head, and the entire cockpit of the Warlord inched a little higher on its pistons.

Melamar Primus dominated the northern horizon, a steep pyramidal structure of towers, walls and interconnective buttresses. The whole spire was burning, locked in the agony of a thousand firefights across its many hundreds of levels.

<A closer look at the hive, please.>

Killan complied, zooming in on the reeling structure ahead and picking out the key battlegrounds. The noise of weapons fire, repetitious and echoing, rang out across the Maw. The cracks and booms were dulled by distance, but the effects of the detonations were plain to see. Beyond Melamar Primus nothing was clearly visible – a huge pall of oily smoke curtained the buildings beyond.

<Full stride,> canted Lopi, assessing the terrain ahead. He felt the machine-spirit of Vindicta growling at the back of his mind, stung into life by the smell of promethium and cordite on the air. <Give me targets as soon as you are able.>

The Titan lurched onwards, demolishing whole rows of shattered buildings as it came. Behind it, the similarly domineering profile of Castigatio lumbered through the gates, followed shortly afterwards by the three roving Warhounds. The smaller war engines pulled ahead again, driven to seek out the nearest action by their restless MIUs.

‘Incoming transmission,’ reported Killan. ‘Medusan origin. Do you want to take this now?’

<Of course.>

A hololith pillar rose from the floor in front of Lopi’s casket, atop which a ghostly image rippled into solidity. It was a Space Marine helm, as black as night and covered in metallic implants. It didn’t move.

<Princeps Firax Lopi,> canted Arven Rauth in perfectly inflected binaric. <Your arrival is acknowledged.>

Lopi smiled again. For some reason, he couldn’t seem to stop smiling. His spirits sang with the thrilling, overwhelming power at his fingertips, and the blunt greeting of the Iron Hands’ commander only amused him further.

<Acknowledged in turn, clan commander,> he transmitted back. <We are eager to take the fight to the enemy. Any requests?>

He didn’t say orders. The Mechanicus didn’t take orders from Imperial factions, not even if they came from the Adeptus Astartes. The bonds between them were at once stronger and weaker than those between commander and commanded, and as subtle and ancient as the Imperium itself.

<Progress is steady,> replied Rauth. <We are troubled by armoured units in sector 7-6 [data appended]. Consider that objective a priority.>

Lopi looked down at the hololith pillar, struck by the pointlessness of transmitting the perfectly static image of a helmet over a lithfeed.

<Understood,> he responded. <We’ll take a look. Omnissiah be with you, clan commander – fight well.>

The helm-image remained in place for a moment, but no reply emerged. Then it blinked away and the feed cut out.

Yemos turned to Lopi, his eyebrow raised.

‘To the point,’ he said.

Lopi laughed.

<Indeed,> he canted. <Take us in.>

The Warlord’s pace immediately picked up. A low, grinding roll echoed up from the enginarium chambers as the motive trains ramped up power.

The Melamar Primus spire rocked closer with each stride, gradually unfurling itself in its full, austere glory. Like all the spires of Shardenus Prime, it was huge almost beyond comprehension.

<Targeting?> canted Lopi.

<Enabled,> Jerolf canted back, furiously busy at his terminal. <You have control, princeps.>

The lesser spire of Melamar Secundus loomed along the right flank, burning just as furiously as its sister. Large sections of its protective outer armour had been stripped away, as if whole gunships had been flown directly into it.

The Warhounds raced ahead, all three of them sweeping towards the wasteland between the spires. Vindicta’s sensors picked up massive levels of toxicity at ground level, and Lopi saw mist-banks of green-tinged chemical smog clinging to the forest of abandoned buildings in the gaps between hive towers.

‘Range closing,’ reported Killan, looking into an augur-pict intently. His fingers ran absently over his terminal controls all the while, constantly panning, rotating, augmenting and decluttering. ‘Multiple targets on the threshold. Ah – I can see their problem.’

In the narrow gap between the two Melamar spires, several groups of traitor armour had taken up position and were hurling shells into a sector of Melamar Primus that flagged up on the grid as occupied by loyalist forces. Lopi picked out a whole line of Basilisks recoiling as their payloads were unleashed. Each of them bore strange symbols in purple and grey on their armour plate, ones he didn’t like to look at for too long.

<Let us give them something to ponder,> said Lopi, watching through the Manifold as the ground targets came within range. <Do we have a solution?>

The tanks ahead must have detected the incoming Titan group, but they hadn’t made any detectable move to withdraw. Perhaps they underestimated the range of the Warlord’s cannons. If so, it was a costly mistake to make.

Lopi felt the shells slot into the barrel of his arm-mounted quake cannon like blood running through his veins. He stretched out his right hand, and the gigantic weapon swung up into firing position.

Praise to the Omnissiah, he recited. Praise to Him who built the machine, who dwells within the machine, who sustains the machine.

‘Targets fixed,’ announced Yemos. A note of eagerness – raw and vital – infused his normally placid voice.

And so perish all who blaspheme against the holy standard templates of humanity.

Lopi opened his eyes, letting real vision fill out the shifting splendour of the Manifold.

Guide the dread hand of Your servant.

<Fire,> he canted, envenoming the order with a binaric ruination glyph.

The Warlord’s massive quake cannon erupted. A huge explosion rocked out, echoing from the walls of the still-distant spires. Vindicta’s chassis swayed back, reeling from the enormous force unleashed. A stream of dirty black smoke twisted away from the firing arm, streaking across the wasteland towards the armoured positions.

The round crashed into the enemy position, burying the lines of tanks in a storm of fire and earth. A huge pall rose into the air, lit from within by crimson explosions as fuel tanks detonated. The noise of the impact – a massive, echoing roll and boom – followed, resounding from the walls of the flanking spires. A ragged blast-wave radiated out from the epicentre, tearing through what remained of the forces on the ground and flattening everything in its path.

Lopi watched the devastation with satisfaction, still smiling. Nothing, but nothing, was more exhilarating than piloting a machine of Vindicta’s destructive potential into combat.

<First kills,> he canted, smoothly navigating through the Manifold for secondary targets. <Close in, half-stride.>

Around him, the remaining Titans opened fire, hurling a barrage of spitting, roaring, crackling energy into the enemy ranks. The sky filled with the growl and thunder of terrifying weaponry being unleashed. The earth cracked and the ash clouds boiled. The Warhounds, given their head at last, charged ahead, letting loose with their ferocious arm-mounted weapons. Castigatio emerged from Vindicta’s shadow, powering up its own massive frontal array for firing.

Across the devastation of the Maw, already scoured into patches of molten metal by the predations of the Iron Hands, the god-machines of Legio Astorum strode into the inferno, and on their shoulders came the storm of the Omnissiah’s wrath.

Telach closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall. The power generator on his back hampered his movements. He felt confined, feverish and claustrophobic. Nearly two days of fighting against a seemingly endless tide of corrupted mortals had taken its toll on his spirit, and his head throbbed within its psychic hood. Unlike his battle-brothers who fought only with physical attributes, Telach drew on the powers of the warp, and the effort required to tap into that capricious well was significant.

From somewhere far up ahead he heard the heavy, repeated noises of combat. Nowhere in the hive was free of it – most levels of the Melamar Primus spire were contested, and the crash of explosions and drum of bolter fire echoed down the long corridors and up air-ducts.

Every Iron Hands squad was active, spread out across the labyrinthine interior. When he chose to, Telach could see them all in his mind, arranged like dots of starlight amid the huge backdrop of the hive spire. The younger the warriors were, the brighter their light burned. The veterans of the Chapter, those like Khatir and Rauth, only shone dimly in the dark, like the afterglow of a lumen after the power has been cut.

He knew why that was. Perhaps only the Chapter’s Librarius really understood the price the Iron Hands paid for their physical enhancement.

What would happen, Telach wondered, if an Iron Hand ever achieved the perfection he craved? What would happen if, by some miracle of bioengineering, the very last fragments of organic matter were stripped from his metal skeleton? Would he register at all on Telach’s map of souls, or would he slip into nothingness, lost in the background coldness of the material universe?

Perhaps, if so, then that would not be something to mourn. No one could deny the power given to the Chapter by its continual quest for augmetic self-improvement. The Iron Hands believed, perhaps even correctly, that no force within the Imperium was as resolute as they were. More deadly warriors existed, they acknowledged, more violent, more flamboyant, faster and more devout, but none that possessed the capacity to endure as they did, to weather any storm with infinite stoicism, to keep going even when the enemies ranged against them had no limit.

They took pride in that belief. All of them, from the rawest Medusan neophyte to the revered ancients in their Dreadnought sarcophagi, carried that pride in their beating hearts, using it to drive them onwards to new feats of endurance, of devastation, of resistance.

Pride, thought Telach. Perhaps that is the last emotion to go when the final soul-flicker has been extinguished. We have, after all, purged everything else.

‘Librarian.’

Telach opened his eyes and saw Rauth coming towards him. Despite the enormous weight of armour he carried, the commander approached with stealth. His battle-plate was smeared with lines of blood and charred with las-burns. A hot stench of ammonia hung in the air around him; an after-effect of his power sword’s disruptor field being shut down.

‘Commander,’ Telach acknowledged, bowing his head.

He felt guilty even though he knew he had nothing to feel guilty about. Telach knew his limits, and knew how much more his powers would be needed in the days to come. He needed rest at regular intervals, just for moments, out of the constant grind of ceaseless sector-by-sector, room-by-room combat.

For all that, he still felt guilty. Rauth made everyone feel guilty, as if he carried some kind of secret knowledge within his metal cranium concerning every time the warriors under his command had ever been weak or mistaken or foolish or remiss.

‘Are you wounded?’ Rauth asked.

‘Preparing for the next assault,’ Telach replied, truthfully enough.

He felt like adding justification for that, knowing it would not make him feel any better.

My eyes are already bleeding. The skin over my scalp is blistered and my lips are cracked. You have no conception of what you ask of me, nor what you ask of anyone else.

‘I need your services,’ said Rauth. ‘The Titans have engaged the enemy in the Maw. We need to accelerate the advance.’

Telach knew what was required immediately, and pushed himself away from the wall. His muscles protested, and he ignored the pain.

‘Location?’ he asked.

Rauth stowed the power sword against his armour.

‘After cleansing the two Melamar spires, we must advance straight to the Capitolis. I have no intelligence on the transit routes. Give me your insight.’

Telach let his mind go blank and closed his eyes. He planted his staff on the ground and leaned against it, feeling psychic energy run up and down the shaft.

‘By your command,’ he said, beginning the mental ritual that would cast his mind beyond its physical shackles and into the miasma of the aether.

Telach took a long, shallow breath, forcing his primary heart to slow its combat-ready beat.

Then, slowly, he opened his mind’s eye. The world around him – the sounds and scents of the hive spire – slipped away, to be replaced by a phantasmal world of translucence and ephemera.

+I am transcended,+ he pulsed, speaking directly into Rauth’s mind. He no longer had full control of his physical lips, and the visions he saw did not come from his mortal eyes.

As if from far away, he heard Rauth’s voice answer him.

‘The transit tunnels. They are all I need to see.’

Telach let his consciousness drift out of his body. He felt it pass through the layers upon layers of ferrocrete and adamantium above, drifting northwards. Everything was abstract, fleeting, picked out in watery lines over a gulf of darkness. Flickering images of living souls glowed within that darkness – fighting, fleeing, charging, dying. Even as his own soul soared above them, Telach could hear the icy hiss as men were cut down, releasing their quintessence into the metaphysical melange of the waiting warp.

He broke free of the hive’s confines and looked down, from above, over the entire hive cluster. In every direction he could see the ghostly outlines of troop movements. He saw mortal men marching in endless ranks, filing out of the clot of darkness at the centre – the Capitolis – hundreds of them, driven onwards by faceless creatures with corruption clogged in their veins.

Those men were no longer like the ones they’d fought out on the Helat, or across the Gorgas, or even during the first days of the assault on the Melamar spires. Telach could feel their debasement keenly; they were mockeries, cruelly altered by whatever power had taken root in Shardenus.

+Reinforcements continue to move from the Capitolis,+ he sent. +Many of them. They will not die as easily as those we have faced.+

He let his psychic self sweep onwards, out beyond the northern reaches of the Melamar Primus spire and out over the wasteland beyond. He heard the dull crump of heavy ordnance, and saw the massive outlines of Titans striding into battle. He saw armoured columns from both sides rumbling towards the front. He saw gunships sweep into contact, stuffed with troops or loaded with cluster bombs. Ever since the Iron Hands had broken through the outer walls, the fighting had spread like a virus within a body, flooding the arteries and heading for the major organs.

Telach felt himself falling. He drifted down slowly, caught by the eddies in the warp and guided by them.

North-east of the Melamar spires stretched another wide region of abandoned industrial wastes. Clouds of toxic fog rolled between the old manufactoria walls, green-tinged like the glands of a corpse. The Shardenus complex, like many he’d seen, was a series of towering islands amid a sea of noxious filth.

+Zones north of Melamar are empty. As you suspect, enemy forces being conveyed underground.+

Telach fell further. The ground rushed up to meet him, and his insubstantial echo-form sank clean through it. He felt a chilling sensation as he bored down through layers of earth, metal and aggregate.

He emerged into a huge underground tunnel, as dark as the void save for regular bands of gently blinking guidance lights. The tunnel yawned away north-east, cutting straight through the earth under Shardenus Prime and heading towards the central spires of the Capitolis.

+Numerous fixed artillery points,+ sent Telach, sweeping up the length of the tunnels and observing carefully. +Defence lines established every five hundred metres. I see trench construction, deployment of heavy weapons groups.+

Wide-gauge rail tracks had been dug into the tunnel floors. Massive land trains ground their way back and forth, adding to the cocktail of greasy smoke that hung permanently in the roof space. Telach saw the souls of mortal defenders burning like stars in the gloom. Unlike the souls of the loyalists, those souls glimmered with a purplish light, shot through with the refracting power of the aether.

+Supplies still arriving,+ he sent, watching the unloading of a whole series of tracked artillery pieces from the cavernous interior of a land train. +Their defences are formidable.+

He looked ahead, peering through the shrouds of filth in the air. Even the psychic projections in his mind were fouled by it.

+I approach the junction with the Capitolis spire. I will attempt to penetrate the outer level.+

A massive gateway swept up out of the shadows, circular in shape and studded with defence lasers. The land trains passed through blast doors five metres thick.

As he attempted to follow them, Telach sensed a pressure exerted against him. He felt suddenly hot, as if he’d strayed into a furnace.

He came to a halt, hanging like a ghost above the gateway, watching the land trains trundle back and forth below him.

+Resistance encountered. I shall persevere, masking my presence.+

Telach pushed on, drifting through the gates. A huge chamber extended out on the far side – some kind of enormous dispatch depot, stuffed full of armaments and supplies. Automated cranes swung to and fro, pulling materiel from towering stacks and loading it on to the waiting land trains.

The pressure in his mind grew.

Telach pushed deeper in, feeling the character of the air change with each passing metre. The atmosphere became sweltering and moist, like the depths of some tropical world on the eve of monsoon. The noises of battle preparation echoed strangely in his psyche, distorted and stretched out. He felt nausea blossom at the back of his throat – the throat that still lay kilometres away in the depths of the Melamar hive.

+I am in the Capitolis, just beyond the subterranean gates,+ he sent, pushing the message through with difficulty. +The presence of the arch-enemy is evident. It is waiting, gathering its strength. We have not seen the extent of it yet.+

Telach swam up towards the terminus of the giant chamber, seeing more tunnels leading away and up into the centre of the colossal hive spire above. As he drew closer to them he saw how the stone walls on either side had been tortured and warped. The faint impression of faces stared out from the structure of the walls, each one fixed in an expression of agonised pain. Fluid dripped from the ceilings above him, glimmering with a pale pink lustre. He heard screams, or something like screams, resounding out from far away.

Then something else made itself known. Telach recoiled, falling back down the length of the chamber.

+An intelligence stirs. I will withdraw before–+

He felt another mind brush against his. The touch was gentle – the merest scrape of consciousnesses – but it sent him crashing back into the tunnels beyond the gateway. For an instant, he was aware of something vast and ancient rushing up to meet him, like some bloated creature of the deep ocean sweeping out of the abyss to feed. He caught an impression of two eyes, burning like coals, and a wide, broken mouth, all of it hanging in the dark.

Telach’s control began to slip. Nausea exploded within him, choking him and making him gag. He fled, the tunnels passing by in a blur of confused movement. Even as he rushed back to his mortal body, back to where his physical form would afford him some level of protection against whatever dwelt in the Capitolis, he heard the creature’s voice.

It rang out in his mind, as seductive as honey, but sadistic and immeasurably, infinitely cruel.

‘I remember you being stronger,’ it said.

Telach gasped, and his eyes opened. The psychic link broke, and his projected self snapped back into its mortal bounds.

He cried out, and staggered to his knees. Blood burst from the veins on the backs of his hands, running hotly down the inside of his gauntlets. His head exploded into pain, so intense that he nearly lost consciousness.

Rauth grabbed him by the gauntlets, forcing him to remain upright.

Telach gagged, and his staff fell to the ground.

‘What did you see?’ asked Rauth.

For a moment, Telach thought he’d lost the power of speech. It took a while to recall how to make his lips move properly.

He saw the red eyes still, hovering over the deep shadow like sentinel flares. Their scrutiny, even for the briefest of periods, had been ravaging.

‘You were right,’ he rasped, spitting the words out.

Rauth looked down at him. His helm-mask glinted in the dark. His lenses were red too, like pale imitations of the monster he’d seen.

‘Can we force passage through the tunnels?’

Telach didn’t know. He couldn’t concentrate on the question. His mind spun out of control, whirling around the image of those eyes.

Rauth pulled him to his feet roughly.

‘Librarian,’ he said. ‘Can we force passage through the tunnels?’

Telach stared back at him, groggily, and said nothing. He felt a line of drool run across his chin.

‘It will speed the assault,’ said Rauth. ‘Can it be done? Answer me.’

Rauth’s command had a clarifying effect. Telach felt some of his self-control return, and with it an awareness of the pain spiking all across his body.

‘How much faster?’ he asked.

‘The Capitolis has heavy wall defences,’ said Rauth. ‘The tunnels will be quicker to take, if we can force them, but only you have seen them.’

‘Then do it,’ said Telach, swallowing a slug of bile and blood. His heart-rate was returning to normal, though the echo of his visions remained. ‘Order it now. Bring everything forward.’

Telach looked away from Rauth, wondering exactly what the words he’d heard meant.

‘Be aware, though,’ he said ‘The presence in the Capitolis: we have fought it before.’

CHAPTER TEN

Nethata sat back against the juddering walls of Malevolentia’s command chamber and tried to ignore the vibrations radiating up his back and legs. The noise and movement inside the Baneblade was constant. Everything stank of engine oil, human sweat and munitions.

The command chamber was small and cramped, despite the enormous size of the vehicle around it. Most of Malevolentia’s bulk was taken up with its drive motors, armour plating and weapon systems, and even the Lord General’s personal unit, fitted out on Mars three hundred years ago to his predecessor’s specifications and given every conceivable enhancement, wasn’t much different.

The tank crashed through something resistant outside – a barricade line, perhaps – and the floor tipped up by ten degrees before righting.

Nethata gripped the sides of his chair grimly.

‘How soon before we reach the front?’ he asked.

Heriat looked up from the data-slate he’d been consulting. The Commissar-General sat opposite Nethata, less than two metres away, also strapped into a seat. He’d donned a rebreather and eye-mask, just as Nethata had, and it made him look even more skeletal than usual.

‘Soon,’ he replied. ‘These things aren’t built for speed.’

Nethata nodded curtly, trying to curb his impatience.

His bad temper, which had persisted throughout the Shardenus campaign, would not shake. Every response from a subordinate riled him, and he had to work hard to maintain a facade of calm in front of them. He was sleep-deprived. The constant demands of ensuring that supply lines were kept open, units properly deployed and reserves put in place all took their toll. He’d spent the early days of the assault resisting the urge to gland tranquilox, but lately he’d used more and more. Whenever he gave in, it made him irritable – it was a sign of failure, the erosion of a commitment he’d made a long time ago.

Arven Rauth filled his waking life – the implacable, inscrutable, infuriating Rauth. Getting tactical information from the clan commander was next to impossible. One moment, Rauth would demand the redeployment of whole regiments of Ferik regulars for some obscure purpose, the next he’d issue a formal protest at Nethata’s request for a single Iron Hands squad in return. Every time a detachment of Guard troops was assigned to Rauth’s command it took horrendous casualties, to the extent that Nethata had started to wonder whether his men were being gunned down by his own side.

‘Any reports from your agent?’ Nethata asked, trying to find something else to occupy his mind.

Heriat shook his head.

‘Not for a while.’

‘He didn’t achieve what we hoped for,’ said Nethata.

‘Some damage was done,’ Heriat said. ‘We always knew it would come down to brute force in the end.’

‘So it always seems to,’ said Nethata.

‘If you have a problem with that, sir, perhaps you should consider a change of career.’

Nethata smiled painfully.

‘I certainly need to change something,’ he said.

The restraint harness dug into Nethata’s chest as Malevolentia rocked and juddered its way across the broken terrain. Not for the first time since planetfall, he felt shackled, locked inside a massive system he had no hope of controlling.

And that, of course, was the core of the problem, the source of his mounting frustration. Nethata was an Imperial commander, used to having the final say over the lives of millions of men and thousands of companies. He’d always carried out that duty soberly, mindful of the many and varied factors involved in the proper conduct of war. Every order he’d issued as lord general had been made in the full knowledge that he bore the ultimate responsibility for the consequences of his actions.

They were his actions, his orders. His men.

‘I need to change something,’ he said again, this time a little more forcefully.

They only respect strength.

He snapped his restraint harness buckle open and stood up, holding on to the chassis around him for balance. Heriat looked up at him in surprise.

‘Something I can help you with?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Nethata, making his way shakily over to the access hatch leading to the crew chambers. ‘Not this time.’

He slammed his fist into the door control, and the hatch grated open. On the far side, crammed into the narrow cockpit, four crew members worked at their stations. The tank’s commander, wearing a rebreather mask just like all the troops deployed across the toxic hell of Shardenus’s wastelands, made a hasty aquila as Nethata clambered inside.

Nethata looked past him, out through the narrow viewfinder ahead. A brace of dirty pict screens hung down from the low ceiling, each giving more grainy detail of the world outside.

He saw a wide open space – the Maw, he believed it was called – dotted with ruined buildings and smouldering piles of rubble. In the distance he saw the ash-shrouded outline of the closest hive spire, mottled with a throbbing network of flame. Beyond that he could just make out the angular shapes of two Warlord Titans striding through the smoke. Lines of tracer fire criss-crossed the scene, followed by the dull thud and crack of projectile rounds. The entire northern horizon was on fire.

‘Status,’ he said, watching the picts intently.

‘On course for rendezvous with Galamoth 4th and 9th, lord,’ replied the tank commander briskly. ‘All vehicles in formation.’

Nethata nodded. He saw the signals on the auspex indicating the presence of a huge number of heavy tanks in convoy behind Malevolentia, all fully armed, fully fuelled and fully crewed. In their wake came support vehicles, troop carriers, mobile artillery.

‘Your coordinates came from Clan Commander Rauth, did they not?’ asked Nethata.

‘They did, lord.’

Nethata looked out of the front viewfinder again. To the east of the principal hive spire stood a smaller structure – a lesser spire, relatively intact along its southern face. Enemy positions lodged high up in the walls had not been the target of Rauth’s assault, and still mustered a volume of fire on his right flank. If Nethata had been in overall command, he’d have moved to neutralise that threat before pressing on towards the centre of the cluster. That would have been the prudent thing to have done.

‘You have new coordinates, commander,’ he said, leaning over to consult the principal logic engine before inputting them. ‘We shall join with the Galamoth as planned, but that flanking position cannot be allowed to persist.’

The tank commander looked back at him. His movements betrayed his nervousness.

‘Uh, lord, are you–’

Nethata shot him a cold smile.

‘Perfectly. Make sure that the entire column receives the new coordinates. Do not disappoint me: the smaller outposts must be silenced.’

Without waiting for a reply, Nethata made his way over to a set of looped rungs in the walls. He climbed quickly. With every step he took he felt his spirits lift. He remembered how life had been in the early days of his service – commanding tank battalions, crawling around in the machine’s innards, sacred unguents caking his hands and face, working from engagement to engagement with only the raw thoughts of aggression and survival to occupy him.

I have forgotten where I came from.

Nethata hauled the release lever down and the top hatch sprang open. A hot blast of smoggy air rushed down onto him. He pulled himself up, emerging from the armoured cocoon of Malevolentia and out into the open wind.

The ash started to coat him in seconds. He smelled the acid tang of toxins as the tank tracks tore them up from the earth beneath. Devastation lay all around him, curving in a wide, broken swathe across the northern horizon.

Nethata felt his heartbeat more strongly, fuelled by the thudding vibration of the immense vehicle beneath his feet. He felt the enormous power placed within his hands, the destructive potential he had been solemnly charged with directing, and it thrilled him.

‘I will show you strength,’ he breathed, gazing out at the secondary spire and already relishing its destruction. ‘I will show you mortal strength.’

A crackle broke out in his earpiece, followed by Heriat’s concerned voice from the chamber below.

‘We seem to be changing course, sir,’ he said. ‘Is everything in order?’

Nethata smiled.

‘It is, Commissar-General,’ he replied. ‘Perfectly so.’

Rauth strode through the fields of death, feeling blood and viscera sluice down his armour as he went. His tread cracked the ground and bones beneath him, leaving a trail of shallow footprints in the raw ferrocrete. Above him, broken lumens flickered intermittently, making the narrow chamber look like an erratic stop-frame vid-feed. The walls, just like his armour, were streaked with blood.

On either side of him came four Terminator-clad warriors of his retinue, the elite of the clan. Their power weapons shimmered like stars in the void.

They crunched their way through a thick layer of burned, twisted and ruined bodies. Corpses stretched away fore and aft, interlocking and overlapping into a carpet of cadavers. Some wore the olive-green of the Ferik Tactical; others the pearl-grey of the old Shardenus regiments. Some of the flesh was pink and human; some mutated almost beyond recognition.

The chamber, narrow and enclosed, was a killing ground. Rauth had known it would be when he’d ordered the mortal soldiers to take it. If time had not been pressing, he could have circumvented the choke-point and assaulted it from above, below or behind. Time, though, was the one thing he didn’t have, and so the humans had been hurled into the gaping jaws of the hive’s defences, cracking them open, chamber by chamber.

The tactics were effective. Led by individual squads of Iron Hands, the regiments of the Ferik Imperial Guard had hacked, bludgeoned and shot their way deep into the heart of Melamar Primus, tearing a path directly through the centre of the hive and driving the traitors back.

As Rauth swept his gaze across the floor of the chamber, he saw just how many of the mortals had paid for their zeal with death. Hundreds of bodies lay immobile in the chamber. The rough surface of the floor was viscous with a thick layer of mingled blood, sticky and glistening in the on-off light.

The fighting had been savage. Appropriately savage.

Ahead of him, one of the bodies moved slightly. Rauth’s helm visor zoomed in on it automatically, drawn by the gesture.

He paused. All around him, his retinue stopped walking. All four behemoths stood silently, towering over the twisted field of corpses in silence.

One of the mortal soldiers was still alive. Rauth’s armour sensors picked up his life-signal pulsing weakly. Moving cumbersomely in his heavy plate, he stooped over the stricken Guardsman, letting his helm’s augmenters pick out the man’s outline in the flickering gloom.

A pair of eyes looked up at him from the floor. They were wide and red-rimmed. The man’s helmet visor had been shattered, exposing a blotchy, bloody face within. He breathed in shallow gasps, and pink foam collected at the edges of his swollen lips.

For a moment, the two warriors looked at one another. Rauth saw the enormous chasm in the mortal soldier’s chest where a las-beam had punched through. He saw snapped ribs sticking up from a pulpy mass of charred muscle. He saw organs trembling within, glossy where the intermittent light flashed across them.

Rauth looked at the flesh at the edge of the wound, noting how it tried to repair itself. Blood was already clotting, pooling like oil and coating the ragged fringes of the opening. The man’s heart laboured, pumping more blood around what remained of his body. It would not be enough – the injury was mortal.

Still, though. The man was fighting.

Rauth looked deep into the man’s eyes. For some reason he found himself unwilling to do what was necessary. He drew his gauntlet up and pressed a finger lightly against the man’s temple.

He waited a second longer. The man knew what was coming, and seemed to accept it. He stared straight back up at the Iron Hand, somehow maintaining eye contact, unable to speak, his fragile breathing growing just a little more urgent.

Then Rauth pressed his finger home. The movement was gentle, like cracking an egg-shell. The mortal shuddered, then fell still. Blood pumped from his wounds, but sparse breaths no longer issued from his gaping mouth.

Rauth withdrew his gauntlet and slowly stood up. His retinue made no movement.

Nethata’s words came back to him then, like a ghost-echo on a faulty audio recording.

You will remember that they are human. Like you used to be.

It was hard to recall a time when Rauth’s existence had been anything like the fragile, bloody one led by the mortal Guardsmen he led into war. They were ephemeral, those men; like short-lived insects destined to breed, fight and die. By contrast, Rauth knew that he was functionally immortal for as long as his warrior skills proved equal to those he faced in battle. He would never feel his muscles atrophy, nor the grip on his weapon weaken. If a las-beam somehow penetrated a Space Marine’s primary heart then his posthuman physiology would compensate immediately. In Rauth’s case, the centuries-worth of bionic implants that riddled what remained of his mortal frame would keep him going, keep him fighting, keep him existing.

Such had been the case for hundreds of years. Over the slow passage of time he’d only felt himself grow harder, colder, more unyielding.

Did it matter, that he’d virtually forgotten what it was like to possess mortal frailties? Would it have made a difference to his strategy, had he been able to fully recall his old capacity for terror, for fear, for weakness?

He remembered the words of Raukaan’s old Iron Father, the one who’d plucked him from the howling wastes of Medusa and started him off on the process that would slowly bleed away his humanity.

In times ahead, he had said, your mortal mind will return to you like a ghost. It will whisper to you, telling you that you have become a monster. A thousand voices will tell you this. You will be tempted to believe those voices.

Rauth lifted his gauntlet up and looked at it. The mortal’s blood glistened from his fingertip.

They speak the truth, though you must not heed them. Some truths are ruinous, and some deceptions necessary.

Rauth remembered how he’d felt when hearing the words for the first time. He’d not listened. He’d never listened, back in the days when his passions ran hot and his spirit raged against the symbols of authority.

And what if they strike near the mark? What then? Some men, we believe, must become monsters so that all of humanity does not become so.

Rauth found himself wishing then that Telach was close, and not closeted away with his three Codiciers in preparation for the main assault through the tunnels. He couldn’t confide in Khatir – the Iron Father was little more than a weapon.

He cast his mechanical gaze across the bodies of those slain under his orders, and felt the ghost of the past whisper to him, just as he had been promised that it would. Its voice was comforting even as it mocked him.

You have become a monster.

His comm-feed crackled into life. Rauth’s thoughts abruptly broke off, and he let his gauntlet fall.

‘Lord,’ said Khatir.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘Melamar Primus is secured,’ said Khatir. Rauth could hear the crash of bolter fire in the background, tinny and obscure. ‘Tunnel approaches are now under assault. I assume you wish to lead the attack beyond.’

‘I do,’ Rauth replied. ‘I will be at your position shortly.’

‘Very well. Interim orders?’

Rauth hesitated. His thoughts, normally so acute, felt sluggish. Telach’s words about the presence in the spires being something they had fought before preyed on his mind. The Chief Librarian had been unable to give him any further insight on what that meant, but it was clear that the normally stoic Telach had been unnerved by what he’d sensed.

Under Rauth’s immense, unmoving shadow, the dead Guardsman stared up at him with empty eyes.

‘Ensure the heavy support is in place,’ he said finally. ‘And contact Princeps Lopi.’

Rauth began to walk again, striding through the layers of mingled gore and bone. As his limbs moved once more, he felt some of that sluggishness recede. His boot crushed the skull of the man he’d given the Emperor’s Mercy to, and he barely noticed it.

‘Telach has warned us of what lies in those tunnels, and I will not enter them unprepared,’ said Rauth, pulling up tactical overlays on his helm display as he walked. Activity helped him, and he felt his blood stirring. ‘I want all claves assembled, and I want the Librarians deployed, and most of all – and this is what you must impress on Lopi – I want the Titans.’

Rauth contemplated the destruction that would bring, and something within him almost smiled.

‘We will send the Warhounds in,’ he said. ‘Right under their feet. If that doesn’t break their spirit, nothing will.’

<Incoming fire, hard-right,> canted Yemos. <Losing cohesion on shoulder-leading voids.>

<You’re getting emotional, Yemos,> replied Lopi, registering a trace of irritation at his moderati’s frequent regular status-feeds. <Just bring us about as ordered.>

Lopi sank deeper into the pseudo-world of the Manifold, soaking up the streams of symbolic data as they flooded towards and over him. He was satisfied, and still buoyed by the sheer thrill of sharing consciousness with Vindicta.

The Warlord Titan had made its way across the open space of the Maw and through the narrow gap between the Melamar Primus and Secundus hives. Striding through the valley between sheer walls on either side, it had waded through whole detachments of heavy armour, crunching the wreckage beneath its feet and grinding the smoking remnants into the ash-soil.

The enemy had nothing with which to fight back. Their tanks were too slow and too bogged down in the morass of semi-derelict buildings to respond adequately. Only its ferocious wall-mounted artillery packed a big enough punch to trouble the war machines of Astorum.

<Fix on Castigatio,> he ordered, partly to keep Killan occupied, and partly because he worried about Remona.

He shouldn’t have worried about Remona. Castigatio’s princeps was as capable as he was, and seemingly impervious to fear. She had a kill-tally far in excess of what would be expected of one her age, and she knew her machine well.

Still, he worried. He worried about all the men and women in his formation, just as he fretted over the spirits of the god-machines they inhabited. They were like family to him; like his children, or his siblings. When they suffered harm, he felt the pain of it.

‘Engine Castigatio is seven points to rear-left,’ replied Killan, his fingers busy at his console. ‘Bogged down with fire-lines still lodged in the flanks of Melamar Primus, but making progress towards our position. The blessed machine is intact and moving well.’

Lopi shook his head, trying to loosen his tight organic muscles.

<Full stride,> he canted, feeling the massive pistons sunk into the Warlord’s angular thighs pick up the pace. He swivelled his right-mounted gatling blaster into position and made the appropriate range calculations. <Let’s silence that incoming fire, moderati, then press on. Commander Rauth is not the patient sort.>

Vindicta slewed round, rocking on its central axis. Its left leg planted firmly, crushing an abandoned industrial building as if it were made of rotten synthwood. The soaring edges of Melamar Secundus filled the forward viewers, laced with promethium fires. As ever on Shardenus, the air was thick with smog and ash, cloaking everything in a dirty haze. The Warlord’s sensoria picked out the sources of the heavy las-fire – seven separate positions high up on the hive’s exterior battlements – and presented Lopi with a range of firing responses.

<Standard suppression,> he canted to Yemos. <We don’t need to–>

The rocket hit Vindicta just below the neck-joint. It screamed out from a position high up on Melamar’s north-west facing terraces, trailed by a thick line of ink-black smoke. It came in fast, curving slightly as guidance cogitators locked on, and exploded in a riot of colour and noise across the forward voids. For a second, all views were replaced with a fuzzy hail of static. Vindicta staggered backwards, reeling from the detonation.

Lopi was hurled against the side of his throne, and the distinction between the real world and the Manifold blurred uncomfortably. Klaxons went off from somewhere deep in the Titan’s innards, and he sensed the sharp tang of engine oils suddenly loosed into the cockpit’s atmosphere.

<What in the name of–> he started.

<Major impact, major impact,> canted Killan, shaking his head. <Mars, that was big. Do they have hunter-killers?>

Some of the sensor screens flickered back online. Lopi righted himself, pushing back against the throne’s iron arms. The Manifold hurled information at him, and he could feel Vindicta’s machine heart growling away in outrage.

‘Frontal voids down,’ reported Yemos. ‘I need a few moments, my princeps.’

‘Came in too close,’ muttered Jerolf, struggling to retain traction as the Warlord’s massive drive systems absorbed the blast-wave of the rocket. ‘Should pull back.’

<No time,> replied Lopi, gesturing with his right hand and bringing the gatling blaster round. <No time for anything but this.>

He unleashed the multi-barrelled gatling, pouring the Warlord’s latent anger into the assault. As he did so, he felt Vindicta’s spirit surge up within him, roaring and raging.

The engine rocked back on its stabilisers, juddering from the torrent of fury pouring from the rotating barrels of the immense gun-mount. Heavy projectiles hammered into the sides of the hive spire ahead, scything through the outer armour and ripping it into a hail of torn-up ferrocrete.

Lopi suddenly became aware of the full presence of the Titan within him. The ancient, vengeful soul of the machine swam up from the murky depths, taking control of its weapon systems and powering them up.

<My princeps…> Lopi heard dimly. The voice might have been Yemos’s.

<Vindicta!> Lopi roared, knowing his cry would be screamed from the war-voxes and sent echoing across the battlefield. <Vindicta!>

He was losing control. The sensation was wonderful.

The gatling blaster cut a swathe across the hive walls, tearing through whole hoppers of ammunition in seconds. Lopi felt fresh loops being shunted up through the auto-loader systems and slamming into place. Every crashing impact sent new shivers of sensation rippling through him.

<More,> canted Lopi with relish.

The rest of the Warlord’s weapons broke into action. Beams lanced out from the shoulder-mounted turbolasers, streaking through the roiling clouds of smoke and smog like starship contrails. The enormous quake cannon powered up, whining with accumulated energy before sending its payload thundering out into the atmosphere. When it struck the hive edges, the whole structure seemed to shudder. Gantries collapsed, walls were demolished, buttresses blew apart in cataclysmic eddies of destruction.

<More.>

Vindicta disappeared behind a maelstrom of colossal energies. Everything opened up, flinging terrifying levels of power out at enemy fire-positions high up on the walls. The noise was deafening even within the confines of the cockpit, and several sensoria panels overloaded with sharp, fizzing pops.

<Princeps!>

Yemos sounded alarmed. Lopi could have laughed. Rooted deep within his consciousness, he heard the echo of Vindicta’s soul chuckling away. The sound was semi-human, as if the imprint of some long-dead mortal princeps had been stamped onto it in ages past.

It is alive. It thirsts for destruction. It is alive, and I am its avatar.

<My princeps, the target is destroyed,> canted Yemos, his voice urgent. <We are wasting resource on this. You must stop.>

The sound of his deputy’s voice amused Lopi as much as it irritated him. He continued to unleash hell on the spire-flank, watching as the outer layers dissolved into a cascade of dust.

<My princeps!>

Then he stopped.

Lopi slumped a little, panting. The aftershocks of the barrage died away slowly, resounding out across the industrial wasteland between the spires. Smoke rolled down the artificial cliffs of the hive spire, lined with the angry red of incendiaries going off. A huge pall of dust and debris sank to earth with eerie slowness, gradually revealing what Vindicta had done.

Lopi became aware of the silence within the command chamber. With some difficulty, he extracted his awareness from the Manifold. Vindicta’s spirit clutched at him, trying to drag him back into the embrace of rage. He felt an almost overwhelming urge to power the weapons up again, to keep firing, to destroy everything in his path.

Yemos was looking at him, aghast. Jerolf was still muttering away at his station, and Killan was busy trying to bring a whole bank of sensoria online.

<They have to learn,> Lopi canted to his crew, feeling suddenly like he needed to explain himself. The ghostly presence of Vindicta’s machine-spirit began to retreat, sullen like a beaten dog. <They have to learn what happens when they dare to raise their hand against us.>

Yemos looked unconvinced. He bowed his head slowly, never letting his eyes drop from Lopi’s.

‘We are now low on solid ammunition, princeps,’ he said. ‘I shall make arrangements for early resupply. We cannot do that again any time soon.’

Lopi didn’t feel sorry. His only regret was that the glorious devastation had to end. With the withdrawal of the god-machine’s bellicose presence, though, it was easy enough to see that the moderati was right.

<We shall see,> he canted, sliding back into the shallows of the Manifold and assessing the results of his outburst. <As I say, they have to learn.>

The pict screens gradually cleared of dust and smoke, driven east by the hot wind. Lopi gazed out on what he’d done, and allowed himself another a brief frisson of pleasure.

Melamar Secundus was a pyramid of fire. Huge rents had been gouged out of the hive’s protective plating, exposing layers of hab-units within. Flames the size of Thunderhawks rippled up the precipitous edges, fed by the wind and spilled promethium. Secondary explosions rocked the spire from within, spewing out gobbets of smoke and sparks. The fire positions, including the location from which the missile had been fired, were black holes gouged deep into Melamar’s heart.

The spire had been ravaged. No las-beams now flickered from its turrets. Across whole swathes of its outer surface, it was as charred and dead as a lump of carbon.

Witness the hand of the Omnissiah, traitor, mouthed Lopi, casting his gaze across the horrific damage. Deep down now, almost beyond his ability to detect, the soul of the machine was still chuckling.

He enjoyed hearing that sound. Vindicta was precious to him. All the engines of the battlegroup were precious to him – if they suffered harm, then his retribution would be terrible.

<My princeps,> canted Killan. <We have a priority request from Rauth. He requests tasking for the Warhounds: two points north of Primus, below ground level in the transit tunnels, dataset shunted into your feed now. Fire support only. Do you have a response?>

Lopi couldn’t wipe the smile from his face. Vindicta’s metallic laughter thrummed at the back of his head.

<Let them go,> he replied, barely considering the new data scrolling down through the cascading miasma of the Manifold. <Let Rauth use them to cover him if he wants – Castigatio and I have bigger prey to stalk.>

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Morvox heard the las-discharge first, and blink-clicked an audio copy into his helm’s scratch buffer.

Out of all the warriors in the clave, Morvox always heard things first, despite the fact his aural implants had never been properly upgraded. One day, he supposed, he’d report to the apothecarion and request the removal of his Lyman’s ear for an iron-banded replacement from the forges. Until then he used the organs he’d been gifted upon Ascension. For the time being, he was proud of his aptitude, though he knew that at some point in the future he wouldn’t be.

‘One of ours?’ Morvox voxed to Fierez.

Fierez’s helm was distorted by a bulbous mass under the left cheek: an inbuilt long-range auspex, lodged like a tumour amid the cabling of his battle-plate.

‘Negative,’ Fierez replied. ‘We are the only clave still in Secundus. All others are heading for the muster zone in Primus.’

Morvox ran a basic check on the audio recording, filtering the faint sounds through his suit’s cogitators and digesting the results.

Las-fire, concentrated bursts, several hundred signals, closing fast.

For a moment, he hesitated. He had orders to return to the access points north of Melamar Primus and join the muster for the coming tunnel assault. He was itching to follow those orders, since he knew the real fighting would soon take place there – chasing down bands of heretics in the fringe hives had become of peripheral importance.

The hesitation was only slight – four seconds, as recorded by his armour chronos.

‘We purge this, then go,’ Morvox said, gunning his chainsword into life.

The clave started moving. They strode out, going quietly and shifting into standard formation: Morvox at the apex, flanked on either side by three boltgun-wielding battle-brothers, with Sulzar and Gergiz bringing up the rear.

The chamber around them was much the same as every chamber they had fought through over the past few days – dark, cramped, stinking, decrepit. The few working lumens were covered in a layer of grime and threw out barely enough light for a mortal to see by. Ruined equipment was strewn across the narrow floors, smashed and trampled in some earlier engagement. Blast marks ran across the metal-mesh walls, the signs of las-fire or solid-round impacts.

Morvox paid his surroundings little attention. For him, the interior of Melamar Secundus had ceased to be anything other than a backdrop to a series of forgettable, dismal battles. He didn’t mind the endless gloom, or the hot air that wheezed arthritically through clogged filtration units, or the perpetual stink of human sweat and faeces, or the pools of blood on the floor, oozing gently into the overloading san-trenches. Such things were little different than his upbringing on one of Medusa’s titanic land engines – if anything, the claustrophobic, sepulchral surroundings made him feel at home.

He minded the tedium of the combat, which he knew was nothing more than a place-filler for the fighting to come. Nethata’s Guardsmen were more than capable of mopping up the resistance remaining in the twin Melamar hives; the blades of the Iron Hands, by contrast, should have been reserved for sterner tests.

‘More signals closing,’ reported Fierez, shunting a schematic of the chamber layout ahead into the clave’s internal grid. ‘Six hundred, all concentrated in the upcoming node.’

Morvox glanced at the summary display, quickly taking in all he needed to know. He strode all the while, passing from the narrow chamber into a long, semi-ruined corridor with a shattered ceiling and sewage frothing across the floor. His shoulder guards scraped against the walls on either side as he stomped through the slurry.

‘What are they firing at?’ he voxed, already assessing how best to bring the coming slaughter to a quick conclusion.

‘Each other,’ said Fierez.

The corridor terminated in a locked doorway. Long bloodstains ran down from the top of the frame to the floor. Noises of battle were clearly audible from the far side. Morvox heard a single human voice, louder than the others, roaring with anger.

He pointed his bolter at the lock mechanism.

‘Let’s get this over,’ he said, and fired.

Even before the shell had hit, he was moving.

The door exploded away, hurled through the air and into a close press of bodies beyond. Morvox followed it in, bolter in one hand, chainsword in the other. A mortal soldier stumbled into his path, blinded by flying shrapnel from the door’s implosion, and was cut down by his spinning chainsword blades. Another tried to get to his feet in front of Morvox, hurriedly bringing a lasgun to bear. Morvox backhanded him, hurling him five metres away before the man landed with the crack of breaking bones. Several more troops staggered away, covering their eyes and scrambling to get clear. Morvox loosed three rounds into their retreating backs, felling them instantly, before stalking after more.

By then the other Iron Hands were through the door. They fanned out into the chamber, laying about them with calm, methodical precision. Muzzle flare from their bolters lit up the scene ahead of them in angry flashes.

Morvox never stopped moving. He soaked up the detail of his surroundings in precise stages, killing all the while, using his bolter sparingly and cutting broad swathes with his chainsword.

The chamber was mid-sized – a refectory, by the looks of the broken steel tables and long benches scattered across the bare floor. The lumens had been smashed, plunging the place into near total darkness.

The soldiers were Shardenus regulars. They had dug in behind rows of upturned tables with their backs to the door and had been resisting incoming las-fire from the far end of the hall when they’d been disturbed. Bolts still shot out from that direction, spitting across the refectory in intermittent blazes of colour.

Morvox felt a glancing impact on his breastplate and rocked back on to his heels. He lashed out savagely with his gun-hand, crunching in the skull of a reeling mortal. Then he mag-locked his bolter and strode forwards through the lines of overturned tables and startled soldiers.

‘Hold position,’ he voxed on the tactical channel to the rest of the clave. ‘Something strange is going on here.’

More las-beams arced out through the darkness, though few were aimed at him – the whole melee had descended into confusion. Behind Morvox, the Iron Hands moved with dreadful, inexorable power, hacking and blasting their way through the hapless Shardenus soldiers with contemptuous ease. The whip-crack of las-fire was soon mingled with the wet crunch of breaking bodies and the intermittent thud of bolter fire.

Morvox strode down the length of the refectory, casually smashing aside any mortals who blundered into his path. The remaining Shardenus troops had started fleeing by then, dropping their weapons into the mire and searching frantically for some kind of refuge. A few of them wept like children, terrified by the night-black giants in their midst despite all the marks and sigils of protection carved into their suppurating flesh.

Las-beams continued to flicker out from the far end of the refectory, many of them poorly aimed. Morvox walked straight into the heart of the incoming torrent, grunting as his plate was hit by several more beams.

A lumbering figure blundered into his visual field: a mutant, dressed in the remnants of a Shardenus Guard uniform, running blindly away from him. He was far bigger than most of the others and was decked out in plates of loose-fitting carapace armour. In place of his right arm he had a forest of writhing, stubby growths, each ending with a curved hook.

The mutant screamed as he ran, and the sound of it somehow cut through the cacophony around him. He took several las-beams to the chest as he blundered onwards, but they seemed to fizzle out before they did any serious damage. A trail of glowing spores streamed out in his wake, shimmering with phosphorescence.

Morvox went after him, catching up quickly and hauling his chainsword back for the swing. As the blade was about to plummet down into the mutant’s back, something made him hold back.

‘For the Emperor!’ came a voice, as clear and unsullied as daylight.

Morvox stayed his hand, just in time to see a mortal dart out in front of the mutant. The man’s head was bare, and a line of blood ran down his temple. His unruly blond hair swung around his face as he shoved a lasgun right into the mutant’s distorted torso. He fired, and the point-blank blast halted the creature in its tracks, sending it reeling backwards, chest smoking. Before the man could reload, the mutant lurched back into the attack, punching out with its hook-handed arm and aiming at the man’s neck.

Had it landed, the blow would have taken the man’s head clean off. By then, though, Morvox had seen enough. He swept his chainsword round in a wide arc, carving straight through the creature’s upper body. The whirring blades dragged through the corrupted flesh, churning it up and throwing gobbets in all direction.

The mutant screamed, and Morvox jerked the blade down, tearing through ribs and organs. With a throaty cry of agony, the mutant broke into a death-spasm, flinging its tortured limbs out and shuddering in time with the rhythm of the cycling teeth of the chainsword.

Morvox wrenched the weapon free and let the mutant collapse to the ground. Then he turned to face the other one, the lone soldier with the blond hair. For a second, he let the chainsword blades whirr on – his instincts were to keep killing. In truth, that was all he ever truly wished to do.

The man’s expression halted him. It was ecstatic. His eyes, full of defiance and determination, shone in the dark like jewels. Morvox could see evidence of wounds all across his body, especially around his shoulder, where blood had seeped through bandages.

Behind that man, arranged in ranks three deep, were other fighters, all of them decked out in variants of Shardenus military uniforms with the insignia removed. A woman stood just beyond the blond-haired man. Behind her, hundreds more had taken their positions, each with a lasgun in hand. They were all staring at Morvox, everything else forgotten in the face of the giant standing before them.

‘Praise His immortal name!’ cried the blond-haired man, falling to one knee before Morvox and making the sign of the aquila.

Morvox glanced down at him, uncertain how to react. From behind him, he could hear the final sounds of butchery as the Iron Hands finished off the remaining Shardenus soldiers.

‘Who are you?’ demanded Morvox, letting his chain-sword run freely, still poised to use it.

‘I am Alend Marivo, lord,’ replied the man, his face transported with excitement, as if some long-planned scheme had just come to fruition. ‘Of the 9th Platoon, 3rd Company, 23rd Shardenus Imperial Guard. Loyal to the Throne of Terra, as are those who serve under me.’

He rose to his feet again, showing no fear of the whining chainsword held just a hand’s breadth from his face.

‘We are ready to serve, lord,’ said Marivo, looking directly at Morvox as he spoke. ‘What are your orders?’

Still Morvox hesitated. The only indigenous mortals he’d seen in the Melamar hives had been traitors or civilians, and both had been slaughtered in droves. The man before him was neither. He showed no trace of fear; only expectation.

Morvox let his chainsword gutter out. As the blades slowed, flecks of torn flesh dropped to the floor.

Morvox considered the question. He knew the scant forces under Marivo’s command would be of little consequence in the battles to come. A few hundred troops, each armed only with las-weapons, would be little more than a hindrance to the main battlegroup – their rations and supplies alone would probably outweigh any military benefit they could bring.

And yet.

‘How long have you been fighting?’ Morvox asked, trying to modify the machine-growl of his voice so it didn’t sound like a threat.

‘Since you made planetfall, lord,’ said Marivo proudly. ‘We brought down a defence tower when the airborne assault began. Since then we’ve been harrying the traitor forces, aiming to join with you, just as Valien instructed.’

‘Valien?’

‘Your agent, lord,’ said Marivo. ‘Surely you know?’

Morvox grunted, and stowed his chainsword. By then his clave had finished their work. They came to join him. At the sight of more armour-clad monsters striding through ankle-deep pools of still-steaming human gore, even Marivo swallowed.

‘What now, brother-sergeant?’ asked Fierez, barely looking at the mortals.

Morvox ignored him. He ran through the options for an unusually long time – five seconds – before reaching a conclusion.

‘You will come with us,’ said Morvox to Marivo. ‘All of you. The spearhead is in the Primus hive. You will be given your orders, and will deploy accordingly.’

The Guardsman nodded. His eagerness was palpable.

‘By your command,’ he said. ‘We wish to serve again, all of us.’

Morvox regarded Marivo coolly. Once, perhaps, he would have found such dedication to duty admirable. He had served with mortals before, and had witnessed great heroism as well as abject wretchedness. Back then, he had felt that heroism required some kind of reward, some kind of encouragement. In a darkening galaxy, the mass of humanity needed support as well as censure. To abandon them, to use them for some greater purpose; that had seemed careless at the least, callous at the worst.

Morvox found he could no longer summon up such thoughts. As he looked at Marivo, he saw only the pathetic eagerness, the naivety, the lack of power. The man looked too fragile, too weak. Too fleshy.

A sensation like an itch broke out across the back of his neck.

‘You will do your duty,’ Morvox said, and turned away.

Nethata glanced at the auspex readings, and allowed himself a glimmer of satisfaction.

‘Maintain course,’ he voxed to Malevolentia’s commander. ‘We have them now.’

Since close-range hostilities had broken out, Nethata had withdrawn from the main turret and hunkered down with the rest of the tank’s crew in the main command unit. Malevolentia had been kitted out with high-gain scanner equipment, giving him an overview of the entire warzone. He and Heriat pored over it, studying flickering motes on rotating hololiths, plotting ingress routes, marking weaknesses in the ever-extending supply lines.

‘We are still some distance from Rauth’s coordinates,’ said Heriat. His voice was even – he was just stating the fact.

‘I know that, Slavo,’ said Nethata, affecting unconcern.

Even as he spoke, he recognised how much of a strain it put on him to disobey a direct order.

No, that was not right. He was disobeying nothing, and the relationship between Rauth and the Guard was not entirely simple. The Adeptus Astartes was a separate branch of the Imperial military machine, a vast, sprawling force of trillions that encompassed a million worlds and battlefields. The Guard did not answer to them, and they did not answer to the Guard. Only convention and expedience made Rauth the overall commander of the Shardenus operation; the vast majority of Territo’s resources owed their direct allegiance to Nethata.

And so it was perfectly within his rights to take his time responding to Rauth’s summons. Nethata had freedom of manoeuvre, the right to exercise his judgement, a duty of care over his men.

The Ferik were his men. In the normal run of things he looked out for them – ensured they got their supplies in decent time, were well-equipped and supported, didn’t end up being driven into useless dead ends. He had stood by long enough while Rauth had herded whole companies of prime soldiery into ruinous, bloody gunfights. He’d seen the casualty rates from the Melamar front, and they had stuck in his gullet.

The tank battalions were different. Nethata had maintained full control over them, just as he had with the long-range artillery pieces. They were his weapons, ones over which the Iron Hands, now they were fully occupied with spire-fighting, could not easily lay claim.

So he didn’t disobey; not quite. He just took his time in responding. A warzone was a complicated place, and the targets before him just kept lining up.

Malevolentia rocked as its enormous cannon fired. Nethata didn’t need to look at the tactical display to know how devastating the impact would be. The enemy didn’t possess tanks of the same calibre, though they had plenty of units capable of troubling the rest of Territo’s convoy. In the broken wasteland between the hives, the fighting had become thick and difficult.

‘The Warhounds are leaving,’ said Heriat.

Nethata only half-listened, still held rapt by the dancing lights over the hololith pillar. He could see his forces, company by company, forcing their way north alongside the burning flanks of Melamar Primus. In the distance, even more immense, were the walls of the first Axis hive. Beyond that, out of range of all useful sensor readings, was the Capitolis, the ultimate target.

‘This is the right approach,’ said Nethata, talking to himself. ‘Rauth would see it too, were he not so pig-headed.’

Shardenus Prime was, essentially, a ring of subordinate spires arranged around the Capitolis in the centre. Only one element of that protective circle had been broken – both Melamar conurbations were shattered and smouldering. Nethata could see that a direct approach across the wasteland in such conditions would be a mistake of an elementary nature. An invading army, out in the open, would find itself sandwiched between the huge guns mounted on the Capitolis walls and supporting fire from the unharmed Axis, Hierat, Ceres, Temnos and Phelox hives. Even the mighty Iron Hands would suffer in that scenario.

No, the right thing to do was to take out the subordinate hives, one by one, to clear the way forward. At the least, Axis could be destroyed. Nethata had the means to do it – the tanks, the guns, the troops – he just needed time.

He also knew, of course, that Rauth had a problem with time, but that was his issue to deal with.

‘Sir, the Warhounds are heading west.’

Nethata maintained concentration on the tactical display. His forces had spread out, company by company, hammering the enemy back, clearing the way for the assault on Axis. Ahead of them, twenty kilometres distant, the two Warlord Titans were bludgeoning spire-based targets with vicious abandon.

‘Why?’ he asked absently.

‘I don’t know,’ said Heriat. He had reproach in his voice then. ‘Should we not make some attempt to find out?’

Nethata looked up. He didn’t like hearing disapproval from his advisor. They had been through too much together for that.

‘You have something to say, Slavo?’

Heriat looked evenly at him. The man’s skin had got worse during his time on Shardenus. How much longer, Nethata wondered, did he have? Heriat’s continued existence was something he had a direct interest in; something, after all, that he’d paid heavily to extend.

‘This is a dangerous game,’ Heriat said. ‘Rauth is not a man to be toyed with.’

‘He is not a man at all.’

‘He will wish to know why our course has deviated.’

‘When he asks, I will tell him.’

Heriat’s sore-laced mouth pursed.

‘I understand, sir,’ he said. ‘I understand why you’re doing this. Think, though, how far you can take this, and all for pride.’

‘Pride?’

‘Examine yourself,’ said Heriat. ‘Please. You’ve achieved everything a mortal could hope in the service of the Imperium. What test could remain, except, perhaps, defying the Emperor’s elect?’

Nethata felt his cheeks flush with anger.

He held Heriat’s gaze a little longer. Further down in the cramped command chamber, he heard men go about their business, affecting not to hear the strained conversation between their superiors.

‘Is that truly what you think this is?’

Heriat didn’t blink.

‘Not wholly,’ he said. ‘Like I said, examine yourself.’

Nethata felt an uncomfortable pang then, right in his torso, like nerves before the first experience of combat.

They only respect strength.

Perhaps that was it. Perhaps this was just some futile trial of wills, human versus transhuman. He’d always told himself it was about the lives of his men, the integrity of the Ferik Tactical, the triumph of ordered military planning over a headlong dash into disaster.

Heriat knew him about as well as any man alive. He knew his foibles, his weaknesses, the little tics and habits a man picks up over centuries of service.

That didn’t mean he was right.

‘We’ll maintain course,’ said Nethata at last, affecting more certainty than he felt. ‘Once we’ve blunted the long-range guns on Axis, we can head back to Melamar. Rauth can wait a little longer – if he objects, I shall speak to him myself.’

He let his eyes fall away from Heriat’s soft, critical gaze.

‘This is about tactics, Slavo,’ he said. ‘This is about prosecuting this war the way it ought to be prosecuted.’

He turned back to the tactical display. The three Warhound Titans under Princeps Lopi’s command were indeed heading west, away from the larger Warlords and towards the northernmost point on Melamar Primus. Deployment runes from the Ferik brigades under Rauth’s supervision clustered at the same location, deep underground.

Nethata knew he should query that. He should have queried it earlier, back when the first signals began registering. That, though, would require opening a vox-channel to Rauth, something he wanted to postpone as long as possible.

So he shifted his attention back to the columns of tanks and tracked guns, watching as they ground onwards, driving a wedge north-east and slowly coming within range of Axis’s long-range weaponry.

‘They only respect strength,’ he breathed, watching the lights on the hololith dance like ghosts.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Recall the principal lessons.

Naim Morvox mouthed the words to himself slowly, just as he had done many times before. He felt his chapped lips move against one another, brushing against the steel wire that ran down the edge of his jawline and into his helm gorget.

Only the spirit is pure.

The mind may be swayed, the body may fail.

Only the soul cradles vengeance purely.

Become the weapon of the soul.

His clave stood behind him. He could hear the hum of their armour – a tinny, sparse sound in the darkness. The life-signs of his troops registered on his lens display as nine Medusan sigils, badly rendered by the Martian creators of his suit’s visual system. For all that the fabricators of the Red Planet professed to understand the psyche of the Iron Hands, they still fell short where it mattered.

Where the mind hesitates, overcome it.

Where the body fails, replace it.

Aspire to the condition of the Primarch.

Emulate his union with steel.

He stood in a gigantic hall at the very base of Melamar Primus. The ceiling was lost in darkness – it could have been over a hundred metres up. Colossal pillars of ferro-crete soared up into obscurity, marching in long ranks along the immense width of the chamber.

Never waver.

Never retreat.

Never doubt.

Morvox turned his head slightly, casting his gaze behind him.

High up the walls, ancient inscriptions had been carved into stone panels. Most were unreadable, scrubbed near-clean by the wearing millennia. Morvox could still make out a broken passage over on the far right – majoram portam ad Capitolis Shardenus – though only because his helm lens magnified the resolution.

The flesh is weak.

The weak shall be purged.

What remains is strength.

The hall had once been an embarkation hub for the transit tunnels running under the wasteland between the Melamar hives and the mighty Capitolis spire. Before war had come to Shardenus, it would have been swarming with workers, each destined for the heavy grav-trains that ran into the heart of the megapolis. In recent days the area had echoed with the crash and thunder of weapon discharge as Rauth’s forces had driven the last of the defenders from their positions.

The flesh is weak.

What remains is strength.

Now only loyalists remained. They stood in ranks of thousands all across the vast floorspace, company after company of them. Morvox could sense their exhaustion – the fug of stale sweat rising through the hall, a product of days-long combat in the stinking pits of Melamar. Some wore the olive-green of the Ferik, stained with blood and oil; others the black of the Galamoth Armoured. Irregulars from loyalist Shardenus units stood at the rear, still wearing their old pearl-grey fatigues. For all Morvox knew, the mortals he’d saved in Melamar Secundus were among them, ready to enter action once more on behalf of the Emperor.

Tank columns ran up the centre of the space, their engines idling and filling the air above them with fumes. Rauth had assembled hundreds of vehicles for the main assault, drawn across the entire width of the front line, lowered from the wasteland surface on industrial elevator shafts and sent roaring down the transit passages towards the muster points. Morvox knew that many more had been due to arrive – the second wave of heavy armour, commanded by the mortal Nethata. They hadn’t come, though he had no idea why.

Beyond the tank columns, towering high into the gloom at the back of the army, were the three Warhound Titans. More than anything else arrayed in that hall, they radiated an aura of complete dominance. They stood immobile, hunched on two backwards-jointed legs, weapons hanging low from broad, sloping shoulders. Their blunt heads, fashioned into the snarling muzzles of dogs, glowed with orange illumination from cockpit lights. They reared up over the troops below, standing sentinel, frozen into attitudes of poorly contained aggression.

The Mechanicus tech-adepts had barely been able to squeeze the Warhounds into the embarkation chamber’s precincts, even after thousands of tonnes of masonry had been demolished to give access from the surface and the full ingenuity of the Martian war machine had been employed to bring the sacred engines into the perpetual twilight of the hive underworld.

But there they stood, hissing steam gently from colossal limb-joints, issuing a low, thudding growl from their huge drive units. Once down into the enormous underground caverns, they somehow seemed more massive, more intimidating.

Morvox knew their names. Gaius Thyrsus, Quis Odio, Ferus Arma. He could respect such power. As a Medusan, as an Iron Hand, as a servant of the Imperium, he relished the sight of it.

The flesh is weak.

What remains is strength.

He turned his head back, away from the massed ranks of waiting soldiers, armour and war engines.

In the vanguard, surrounding him, were the Iron Hands of Clan Raukaan. Nine claves stood ready, each arrayed in night-black power armour and with their weapons held ready. Morvox’s own unit, Clave Arx, stood third from the left, as rigid and unmoving as all the others. Their red eyes glowed in the velvet dark.

In the centre was Clave Prime. Rauth was there, as were Khatir and Telach. Three subordinate Librarians stood with the clan commander, their dark blue armour wreathed in subtle flickers of aether-light. None of them moved. None of them spoke.

Huge doors soared up before them all, over thirty metres high and braced with thick bars of adamantium. The doors had been closed by the last of the defenders before they had retreated into the tunnels, then welded shut and braced with supporting buttresses on the far side. The Imperial aquila that had once adorned the door faces had been defaced and daubed with purple stains, but was still perceptibly there.

On the other side of those doors were the tunnels themselves, kilometres-long and crammed with defending troops.

Morvox felt his primary heart beating, long and slow. Despite days of near-constant fighting, he felt alert, aware, prepared. The task ahead would be the sternest test of Rauth’s strategy, and everyone assembled in the hall knew it.

+Warriors of Raukaan.+

The voice in his head was Chief Librarian Telach’s. Morvox knew that the same voice was being heard by every member of the clan.

+I have seen what lies beyond these doors. At the far end of the tunnels, where the tunnels meet the foundations of the Capitolis, the gates are still open. Through them spill creatures of the arch-enemy. Those gates are our objective. Any other considerations are secondary.+

None of the Iron Hands responded. Each absorbed the information silently, remaining as still as the air around them.

+Whatever Khatir says to them, the mortals will wither before the creatures in those tunnels. Let them wither. Reserve your wrath for the enemy. We must take the gates.+

An image of the Imperial Guard officer’s face – the one called Marivo – flashed across Morvox’s mind then. He remembered how hard the man had been fighting, how determined he’d been, how the blond hair had framed his eager eyes.

We are ready to serve, lord.

Morvox pushed the image to the back of his mind. Telach’s sending echoed in its place.

Let them wither.

‘Loyal fighters of Shardenus!’ roared Iron Father Khatir, a single voice in the immense space. He, alone of the Iron Hands, had turned fully to face the assembled war host, and his eyes burned red. His tarnished battle-plate glinted in the endless shadows of the Melamar underworld as if edged with faint lines of steel.

‘The test comes! Glory in it! Glory in what is to come!’

His voice resounded from the high places, amplified by war-vox relays in his helm. It thrummed up from the ground, echoed from the pillars, rushed out into the void beneath the enormous, unseen roof spaces.

‘Hate them,’ he thundered, raising his lightning claws high. His blades shot out, sheathed in fire. ‘Hate those who have sullied this place. Let your anger burn, let it make your blows strike true. With every stride you take, their corruption weakens. You shall be the instruments of Shardenus’s salvation. You will be the immortal heroes of this world!’

Morvox remained still. The words washed over him. He could hear a low murmur of assent from the men standing behind him.

He knew what was happening. Khatir’s voice, laced with subtle neuro-markers, would be stirring them. Their tired limbs would be feeling lighter. Their slack jaws would be tightening, as would the grip on their lasguns.

Morvox was hardly immune to the affect. He felt his heart-rates pick up. His blood flooded with adrenaline, primed to send him into full battle-readiness. All across his body, augmetic nodes ran final introspections, priming themselves to contribute properly to the totality of his killing power.

‘For those who have turned from the Emperor’s holy light, there is nothing but death!’ Khatir fed his claws with more flame. The rippling, blue-tinged tongues wrapped around the metal of his armour. ‘And beyond death, annihilation. For the traitor has forgotten the first and holiest truth: that the Emperor protects His own.’

At the utterance of those words – the Emperor protects – the ones that every child in every city on every planet across the boundless Imperium knew, the mortals stirred into a low growl of assent.

‘And those who die this day will be martyrs!’ thundered Khatir, curling one enormous claw into a fist. ‘Their souls will cleave to the Master of Mankind, joining in union with His holy presence. Those who waver, those who falter, those who retreat, they will be traitors, no better than those we have come to slay.’

The growl turned into a wave of angry muttering. The men were roused. Khatir’s neuro-oratory was doing its work. Morvox narrowed his eyes, impatient for the signal to advance.

‘Take no backward step!’

Khatir clenched his other fist.

‘Show no pity!’

His eyes blazed.

‘Show no weakness!’

Flames raged across his ceramite, engulfing him and flaring like the corona of a dying star.

‘For the Emperor: death to the traitor!’

Death to the traitor!

The response was deafening. Men thrust their fists into the air, roaring out their defiance and hatred. They stamped their feet, and the echo of it lashed out like a blast-wave.

‘Death to the heretic!’

Death to the heretic!

‘Death to the witch!’

Death to the witch!

Khatir flung his arms out wider and fresh flames arced up high, writhing like the necks of dragons.

‘By He who rules in glory,’ he roared, letting his mighty voice reach a fresh, blistering crescendo, ‘follow me, and bring oblivion to them!’

His final words rang around the hall like the report of a nova cannon, vast and booming. Men surged forwards, chanting in unison, driven into a frenzy of bloodlust.

Then the charges blew. Whole lines of thermo-explosives went off at once, cascading down the centre of the colossal doors, showering the Iron Hands standing below them with debris. The crack and echo of the detonation rocked the doors, and one gigantic panel buckled inwards.

Morvox tensed, ignoring the detritus raining down around him, ready for the charge that would carry him over the threshold and into the tunnels beyond. Behind him, the mania reached new heights.

DEATH! DEATH! DEATH!

More explosives crashed out into the dark, blazing along the doors’ joints. From the far side, in the cavernous tunnels beyond, something like screaming rushed out.

With a final, rolling boom, the final batch of charges exploded, shattering what remained of the doors in an orgy of flame and magma. The entire structure dissolved into a crumbling, sliding, toppling mass of ferrocrete, adamantium and steel.

Behind Morvox, thousands strong, the war host of Territo surged towards the breach, hurling invective at the enemies they couldn’t yet see, desperate to rush through the walls of flame and into the unknown horror beyond.

+Now,+ sent Telach, giving the signal. +Now.+

Morvox broke into a run, bounding towards the smouldering remnants of the gate. All the Iron Hands did the same, responding instantly and accelerating to full speed. They swept onwards like onyx ghosts in the flame-licked dark, as silent as death-masks, power weapons shimmering amid the clouds of smog and ash, bolters primed and ready to bring death to the faithless.

The flesh is weak.

Morvox mouthed the words as he ran, feeling his boots crush the broken slabs underfoot. Beyond the vast maw of the doorway, under the cavernous shadow of the tunnels beyond, he picked out the first of his targets.

He took aim.

What remains is strength.

+Daemonspoor.+

Morvox suppressed the ghost of a smile when he heard Telach’s mind-voice. The Chief Librarian didn’t control his emotions as completely as the other members of the command clave, and his relish for the upcoming test was poorly hidden.

Morvox swung round on the ball of his foot and fired a bolt at point-blank range into a flabby-cheeked mutant. Before the spinning fragments of bone and flesh had fallen to earth he was already moving, striding through the ranks of the enemy and laying about him with his chainsword. The curve of the tunnels soared away above him, echoing with gunfire. His clave stalked alongside him, fighting in the calm, methodical way that was the hallmark of the warriors of Medusa.

The mortals they were up against had changed since the first days of combat. On the outer walls and in the upper levels of Melamar Primus the defenders of Shardenus had been almost fully human –faint mutation here and there had done little to break the pattern. Down in the tunnels, the full extent of the city’s corruption was becoming apparent. Some men had been turned into giants, bursting from their armour in folds of fleshy muscle. Others had been elongated, or given writhing tentacles instead of arms. Morvox had seen mutants with grotesquely enlarged jaws, or bulbous eyes like insects, or hooked claws dripping with luminous venom. In the flickering dark, lit by explosions and las-flares, they looked like the jumbled dreams of some insane vivisectionist.

The mutants felt no fear. They kept advancing forwards their attackers in steady, fearless waves. Some of them still carried lasguns, and fired them coolly and carefully, aiming for armour-joints and tank-tracks. Others wielded a bizarre array of alternative weapons – heavy multi-barrelled projectile guns, cutting blades like meat cleavers, whips studded with spiked balls of iron. Their eyes, nostrils and mouths glowed with witchlight, as if they were illuminated from within by vials of corpse-gas. Their stretched-tight skin was white, like porcelain, and laced with scars and sores. Some went helmetless, exposing bizarre tattoos and piercings across their twisted faces.

Morvox jabbed his chainsword into the gut of an oncoming mutant. He barely had time to watch the whirling blades carve their way through the plate armour before he’d swung his fist round and unleashed another bolt into the neck of an onrushing cultist. Then he withdrew the blade and lashed it upwards, just in time to meet the leap of a snake-headed warrior in close-fitting carapace armour. Every jab, parry or shot ended the tortured existence of another corrupted soul.

Progress down the tunnels ground to a crawl. The initial burst through the gates had been met by heavy return fire from the barricades beyond. The defenders had been well prepared and supplied with banks of fixed artillery. The Iron Hands had crashed through the first series of barricades, but more lines of defence existed beyond that, banked up every five hundred metres down the long transit route. The tunnels were huge, and the main routes were interconnected by many dozens of service tunnels, allowing bands of the enemy to loop back round and attack the flanks of the invading army.

Rauth’s elite forces cared nothing for that. The mortals were capable of soaking up the mutants’ counter-assaults, even if it meant them dying in swathes. The Iron Hands’ principal target was the far end of the tunnel, still kilometres away – the underground gates to the Capitolis. Enemy troops surged through that open portal, clogging up the tunnels with fresh ranks of horrors and replacing those who died under loyalist blades.

Just as they had done since the beginning of the campaign, the Iron Hands pressed on remorselessly towards that goal, heedless of anything else until the task was complete. Each clave worked independently, strung out across the full width of the tunnel, carving deep paths through the lines of defenders and leaving carnage in their wake.

Morvox strode onwards, kicking out with his armoured boot and shattering the chestplate of a struggling mutant on the ground. A brief space opened up before him, and he took the opportunity to make a long-range shot, taking the head off a lascannon operator working nearly fifty metres distant. An eyeless horror sprang up at him from the shifting shadows, screaming with inhuman bloodlust and scrabbling up at his helm. He disembowelled it with a casual sweep of his chainsword before jerking the weapon back round to punch through the torso of a raging mutant with lashing flails for arms.

‘Neverborn,’ voxed Fierez in warning, though his voice was barely audible over the whirr of his blades.

Morvox nodded, dispatching a dog-faced mutant with a bolter round and smashing another aside with the butt of his weapon. He’d already felt the same thing – a tang of anticipation at the back of his mouth, as if the saliva were souring. The hairs on his remaining flesh had risen, and his secondary heart had broken into a steady beat.

‘Stand fast,’ he voxed on the command channel. ‘We take them together.’

He’d barely finished speaking when the first of them appeared. It came down the tunnels like a howling wind, screeching as it came. Then more emerged, wheeling and diving like raptors. They didn’t register as targets on Morvox’s helm display – just patches of distortion that his instruments couldn’t track.

His real eyes could see them, though. He saw their pale limbs thrash through the darkness, and he saw their long hair stream out behind their slender faces. He saw their eyes, glistening like jewels, and their long fangs flashing with silver light.

They looked fragile. For all the latent horror they carried in their wake, they looked as if they’d snap clean apart in the face of a well-aimed blade stroke.

Morvox knew how dangerous that impression was. The ephemeral presences were only half corporeal – their true nature resided in the miasma of the warp. They were daemons: immortal intelligences born from the liquid tumult of mortal emotions. Their temporary physical form could be harmed but their essence could never be destroyed, no more than the thoughts and desires that gave birth to them could be destroyed. They were immortal, eternal, spawned in the darkest recesses of the human imagination and imbued with the malice of infinite invention.

They hurled themselves out of the tunnels, wailing and laughing with fractured voices. Dozens of them had come, some holding hands like mortal children, others spiralling through the air with the grace of acrobats.

The daemons drove the mortals mad. Whether traitor or loyalist, the effects were much the same – delirium, screaming, dislocated laughter, paralysis, uncontrollable spasms. Their spoor was intoxicating, maddening, wholly irresistible and utterly hateful. Men ripped their visors from their faces as the daemons swooped towards them, and the expressions on their faces were both rapt and horrified.

Morvox watched the neverborn swoop and whirl, and felt none of that. The human capacities that would once have made him weak before such monsters had long since bled away. He could no longer suffer from the lusts and desires that they preyed on, nor could he feel the true impact of their baleful presence on his psyche. To the extent he felt anything towards them, it was disgust. They were the embodiment of everything his Chapter loathed – flesh, seductive and soft, coursing with rich, warp-spun blood and flushed with the promise of forbidden pleasures.

‘Bring them down,’ he ordered, tracking the nearest of them with his bolter and opening fire.

Khadi felt like screaming. She’d been screaming for real just a few minutes ago, yelling out her devotion to the Emperor like she’d never doubted anything about Him, His angels or His Imperium in her short life. Her fists had been up in the air like all the rest of them, clenched tight and ready for use in what was to come.

Then the doors had opened, and hell had come through them.

She’d run to start with, jostling with the others in Marivo’s unit, anxious to get to the front quickly and bring her weapon to bear. Everyone around her had been the same – bullish, eager, pumped with aggression and bravado and fragile confidence.

She’d seen Marivo go first. He’d always been the keenest and the fastest. The encounter with the Iron Hands had reinforced his world view, restoring the confidence that had been briefly knocked by his injuries and the slaughter of the Warhawks. He’d bellowed with defiance, holding his lasgun in one hand while sprinting forwards with the rest.

She’d stayed close behind him all the way in. The rousing words of the black-armoured giant had still been echoing in her mind back then. If she’d been a bit more wary, a bit more experienced, she might have guessed that she’d been manipulated, and that her battle-mania was at least partly induced, but the whole embarkation hall had been roused into a frenzy – thousands of soldiers, all of them desperate for nothing but killing, and that had a powerful effect.

So she’d pushed herself as hard as anyone, maintaining her position in the company near the front, watching for the first sign of action with anticipation.

It was the noise that had got to her first. In the confines of the tunnels, the din had been thunderous. The Iron Hands had crossed the threshold first, and the crash of their massive weapons unloading had sent a wave of ear-ripping energy slamming around the hall. Then the first ranks of mortal troops had charged through the breach, adding blinding volleys of las-fire. By the time the tanks had ground their way to the threshold, things had got truly deafening. Huge barrels had opened up in concert, blazing and thundering and filling the air with a choking smog of bitter smoke.

Still she’d run, coughing and stumbling and trying to keep her weapon primed for use. The gates had drawn nearer, vast and intimidating, looking even more fearful as flames from earlier explosions licked up the huge columns on either side of them. She’d seen men go down around her, tripping and losing their precarious footing in the headlong rush. Those men had been trampled into the ferrocrete by the ranks coming behind them who could not have stopped running even if they’d wanted to. The entire army, company by company, had swept its way into the tunnels, and its dreadful momentum was by then utterly unstoppable.

She nearly screamed first when the Warhounds unleashed their weapons. The report of the first Titan’s colossal arm-mounted guns lashed around the echoing chamber, and it felt like the entire hive spire was rocking on its foundations. Then the next one fired, and then the third – huge, blistering columns of preternatural energy, lighting up the eternal gloom of Shardenus’s underworld like the blaze of starship engines.

She risked a quick look over her shoulder to see the Warhounds striding into battle. Seeing them in motion astonished her – awkward, tilting, stalking along like the daemons of legend and rumour, only they were daemons of iron and adamantium and as tall as hab-blocks.

Khadi told herself then that they were on her side, that their anger was directed at the enemy, that their machine souls were blessed and sanctified by the Immortal Emperor and were therefore no threat to her. Still, they made her blood chill.

She turned back, frantically trying to keep her place amid the rush and roar of the charging army. When her company gained the line of the broken gates she almost didn’t notice – her ears were ringing from the noise and her vision was blurred and streaked from the array of flashes, flares and explosions.

‘For the Emperor!’ someone cried, possibly Marivo. Then they broke across the barrier.

Khadi nearly fell while clambering across the twisted and jutting mess of ironwork. She nearly lost her grip on her lasgun as she pushed her way past the burning remains of a troop carrier, its tracks still grinding even after the chassis had been turned into an empty shell of molten slag. She nearly broke her right leg falling down the steep drop on the far side, down into the pits where the grav-trains had once plied their ceaseless rotary journeys, and nearly blinded herself staring straight into the site of an incendiary detonation just metres away.

She felt her heart hammering and her throat constrict. She felt her panic return, stiffening up her limbs and making her gorge rise and her pulse race.

Ahead of her, the tunnels yawned away into the far distance, huge and criss-crossed with bright lines of tracer fire. Soldiers swarmed across the base of them like insects. The mass of men stretched from side to side of the enormous space, carpeting it in a sheet of glinting helmets. Rockets, mortars and lascannon blasts arced overhead, hurled down into the depths of the tunnels by the slowly advancing tank columns. Every so often the Warhounds would fire, and eye-watering bursts of energy would lance overhead, briefly outshining all else.

Khadi forced herself to concentrate, to keep her feet, to maintain position. From far ahead she could hear the volume of screaming and shouting getting louder. Bolter rounds thudded in constant streams, drowning out the whisper-quiet discharge of the thousands of lasguns.

Her mistake was to look up, out beyond the crash and press of battle and into the high vaults of the transit tunnel.

Up there, high above the clash of mortal arms, things were in the air. They swooped down from the roof, laughing with voices like the massed shrieks of animals. Khadi caught glimpses of purple – like long cloaks rippling in the wind. She saw pale limbs flashing in the dark, far too long for mortal limbs. She saw curved scimitars, and long claws snapping.

One of them looked at her. One of them, high up, sweeping over the battlefield like a twisted goddess of nightmarish legend, locked eyes with her for the briefest microsecond.

In that moment, barely more than a thought-space long, Khadi saw what manner of creatures dwelt in the underworld of Shardenus.

Then she screamed for real. She screamed until her throat was hoarse, dropping her weapon and burying her face into the slime and stink of the ground beneath her. She forgot everything around her. Her hands shot out, and she clawed at the ground, as if somehow she could burrow deeper and escape the terror.

Around her, men did the same. She could hear them – weeping, raging, crying out like children.

Dimly, like a memory of a dream, she heard Marivo’s voice shouting something out. He was still on his feet, then.

It didn’t matter. She’d seen the nature of the enemy. She’d seen what was waiting for them. She’d seen the first fragments of the nightmare in the Capitolis coming for them.

After that, nothing mattered at all.

Clave Arx opened up with its bolters, blazing out across the darkness of the tunnels. All across the battlefield, the other claves did the same, letting rip with tight volleys of bolter rounds. For a few scant seconds, the daemons danced their way through the hurricane of projectiles, weaving around the lines of fire with staggering agility and poise. Some sped off into the heights, shooting skywards like loosed rockets.

Others hurtled earthwards, spinning and tumbling into range with smooth, careless smiles on their deadly faces. They crashed to earth, rolling and skidding amongst the grappling armies and scattering men in all directions as they landed. Then the screaming began in earnest.

‘That one,’ said Morvox, breaking into a run towards the nearest fallen daemon and stowing his bolter. From long experience, he knew that blades would cut deeper than bolts.

As one, the clave charged towards it. The daemon rose from the ground to meet them, hurling the broken bodies of mortal troops away from it with casual, whiplash movements. Blood sprayed after the tumbling corpses, fizzing hot and trailing with purple smoke.

The daemon laughed. It was taller than the mortal men around it, shaped in the likeness of a human woman but with an unearthly purple sheen running across its skin. Warp essence flickered across its lilac flesh like quick-
silver, catching the light and refracting it dazzlingly.

It shouldn’t have been beautiful. Its legs were bent backwards like an animal’s and its arms terminated in huge, crab-like claws. Its long, straggling hair moved of its own accord, as if ruffled by the winds of unseen worlds. Its face was stretched into a thin, grotesque parody of a mortal woman’s beauty. Blood ran down its chin, spilling over the ornate armour that clung to its otherwise naked body.

And yet it was beautiful. Even Morvox, elevated into an existence of pure violence, could sense that. The neverborn had been created from desire, and desire still lingered over it like the stench of death on a corpse.

As he ran towards it, the daemon ripped the entrails free of the last of the mortal soldiers it had burst in amongst. The man, still alive and impaled on its extended claw, arched his back and cried out in agony before dropping heavily back to the ground. The daemon licked a length of stringy gore from its claw, turned to the approaching Space Marines, and grinned.

Fierez got into range first. He fired a series of rounds from his bolter while still charging, each of them perfectly aimed at the creature’s head and body.

The daemon evaded the bolts, flickering between them like a broken vid-pict image. It waited for Fierez to come to it, grinning all the while and opening its claws. The Iron Hand mag-locked his bolter, still running, and drew his power sword. The blade ignited immediately as the disruptor roared into life.

Then he stopped, dead, arms poised for a blow that never came. Purple flames rippled across his armour, pooling in the joints and bursting out through his helm lenses. The daemon leapt atop him, squatting obscenely on the Space Marine’s static shoulders. With a theatrical flourish, it plunged its claw down, cracking open Fierez’s helm and burrowing deep within.

A flash of aether-born light shot out, sweeping from the epicentre like the blast-wave from a void explosion. Fierez’s armour shattered, exposing both metal and muscle beneath.

By then Morvox was in range, and he leapt towards the creature as bolter fire from his battle-brothers slammed out, pursuing the daemon as it bounded away from Fierez’s tottering form. The daemon skipped through the lines of fire, shifting in and out of focus as it danced around the lethal torrent.

‘Blades!’ roared Morvox.

He would be next. He was closest, and fastest. The daemon knew it too, and looked back at him to gauge his mettle.

For a split second, they locked eyes. The daemon’s were dark, like pools into the void. Morvox’s were semi-bionic and ringed with metal. Neither were remotely human.

Then the daemon blew him a kiss, somersaulted high into the air, and swept down towards him with the light of killing in its ethereal face.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Valien heard the mortal’s whimper before he saw him. He crouched down, stilling his own breathing, letting his aural augmetics do the hard work for him.

Twenty metres away, stationary, alone. Easy prey.

Going slowly, silently, Valien crept forwards. He stayed low, almost on all fours, hugging the shadows. Semi-consciously, he withdrew his needle gun and switched the poisonous nerve agents in the syringes for paralysis inducers.

His shoulder grazed against the low ceiling. The corridors around him were little more than service tunnels, tight and twisting. Valien knew he was inside the foundations of the Capitolis spire, though he didn’t know much more than that. He’d left the long transit tunnels behind, hugging their walls, diverting into the ancillary maintenance capillaries to slip past the huge armies that had been installed in the central caverns. After that he’d squeezed through a whole network of tiny feeder conduits, wrestling his stringy body through gaps that should have been big enough only for rats.

The dark was almost total. His false-vision retina compensated, fleshing out the detail of his surroundings in lurid brightness. The nature of the structures around him had changed. Previously bare metal was covered with a thin layer of growths, many of which shone in the dark with a pale phosphorescence; others were painful to the touch, as if they harboured stingers under their pulpy surfaces. The air had become hotter and more humid; when Valien turned his environment filters off he could taste a trace of sweetness in it, like rotten fruit.

Valien moved off, picking his way over pools of fluid on the floor. A few metres more, and he caught sight of the source of the sounds.

The man had slumped against the tunnel walls, his head low and his hands hanging listlessly. The sobs that came from his open mouth were barely audible; just miserable accompaniments to his breathing. The mortal’s head was bare and he wore no night-vision visor. That made him practically blind, which was all to the good.

Valien checked his proximity scanner for other signals, of which there were none. Then he sprang, leaping forwards and bounding down the tunnel like an animal.

Amazingly, the man saw him coming. He pushed himself free from the wall and tried to stumble away. Valien caught him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him back. The needle gun fired once, twice in the dark, then withdrew.

The man convulsed, shivering. His back arched and his hands clenched, then he went limp. He fell back into the position he’d been in before, his eyes staring and his open mouth slack.

Valien squatted before him, and gave his prey a good look.

The man wore Administratum robes, though they were so dirty and ripped it was hard to tell what his function had been. From the look of him, he had once been relatively handsome, with the smooth and hairless skin that only came with expensive rejuve treatments. He had thin lips, a high forehead and a hooked nose; perhaps aristocratic blood, or he’d just fancied looking like someone born to a high station.

No longer. Even with the colour-distortion inherent in his augmetic vision, Valien could see that the man’s skin was almost pearl-white. Lesions ran from the corners of his mouth down to his throat. Pustules clustered at the edges of his eyes, and they glowed in the dark just like the spores that clung to the tunnel walls.

The man’s eyes glared at him, held open by the paralysing agents coursing through his bloodstream. Valien was good at reading men’s expressions, a skill he’d honed carefully in his years in Talica, and he had no trouble working out what his victim was thinking.

The man was deranged by fear. He was not just scared of Valien – he was terrified of everything. He had the look of someone who had been hunted for a good while, someone for whom the entire world had long been transformed into something utterly unrecognisable.

Valien rolled his shoulders, relaxing muscles that had been held tense for a very long time.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

The man didn’t reply. He stared back, and a line of sweat trickled down from his temple.

Valien adjusted his needle gun, and a fresh syringe slid out from the firing mechanism.

‘You have nothing to gain by not talking,’ he said. ‘Though you still have a few things to lose.’

Valien reached forwards and pressed the needle into the man’s throat. The man winced, and tears of pain started from his eyeballs. His pupils were heavily dilated – unnaturally so, which perhaps explained why he’d been able to see Valien coming.

Valien withdrew the syringe and rocked back on to his haunches.

‘You now have loquazine in your system,’ he said. ‘You will feel a compulsion to talk; do not fight it. I ask again, what is your name?’

The man resisted for a moment longer. Then something seemed to crumble inside him. His eyes went dead.

‘Venmo Kilag,’ he said, speaking with some difficulty through stiff lips. ‘Master of Ledgers, class tertius, Capitolis.’

‘What are you doing here, Adept Kilag?’

The man called Kilag shot out a despairing look. If his hands weren’t paralysed, he might have buried his face in them.

‘Escaping,’ he said.

‘You haven’t got very far,’ said Valien.

‘No.’

Valien smiled.

‘Where were you trying to get to?’ he asked.

‘Anywhere,’ the man said. ‘Anywhere.’

‘Anywhere but the Capitolis?’

‘Of course the Capitolis.’

‘Why would you do that?’

Kilag’s face creased up, despite the powerful dampening effect of the drugs.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, still looking terrified.

Valien lost his smile.

‘Just answer the questions,’ he said.

Kilag’s eyes lost focus, as if he were drifting off into some kind of reverie. What little light remained in his fatigued eyes dimmed further.

‘We didn’t know,’ he said, hardly audibly. ‘We didn’t know. They looked like they always had done, right up until the end. Holy Throne, I–’

Kilag shuddered miserably.

‘I have seen terrible, terrible things,’ he said.

‘We all have.’

‘Months ago,’ Kilag said. ‘For a while, none of us noticed. We knew the governor’s staff had changed. Someone new had arrived – what was his name? But it was all so, so… routine.’

Valien flexed his fingers idly. He toyed with the idea of jabbing his fingers into the man’s eyes, just for the sensation.

‘You were lazy,’ Valien said. ‘Corruption was among you for months, spreading from world to world, and you chose not to see it. You turned your faces away.’

‘Yes,’ said Kilag, and another tear ran down his smooth cheek. ‘We did, we did. Oh, Holy Emperor, we were all to blame!’

‘Tell me of the Capitolis.’

Kilag’s hands began to shake.

‘The walls,’ he said, his voice weak. ‘They have put… things in the walls. We were all changing, subtly changing.’

He looked down at his hands. Sores were visible across his palms.

‘Something is happening in the Apex, right at the top,’ he said. ‘Men who go up there do not come back. We hear screaming, all the time, even when the nox chimes have gone off and everything is locked down.’

‘And the Guard regiments?’ asked Valien. ‘All corrupted?’

Kilag tried to laugh, but couldn’t generate enough movement in his throat to summon up more than a croak.

‘Everything is. There’s nothing left.’

‘Who is in charge?’

‘I don’t know! I don’t know. But there are angels up there, and they laugh at us.’

‘Angels?’

Kilag’s face took on a strange, almost demented, look of rapture.

‘Ah, yes,’ he said, and the foam trembled on his lips. ‘Angels. Those ones, they have hell in their eyes – layers of hell, all piled on top of each other. We scream, we scream, and they laugh at us.’

Valien drew a fresh needle from its sheath, tiring of the man’s babble. Kilag seemed to see what was coming, and a broken grin cracked across his face. A film of blood collected under his nostrils.

‘Are you going up there?’ Kilag asked, looking eager to know. ‘Up into the Capitolis?’

Valien nodded.

‘I’m going ahead,’ he said. ‘The Emperor’s armies are hard on my heels. Soon this whole place will be purged.’

Kilag’s nostrils flared, and the shaking in his hands grew worse.

‘You have not seen what I have seen,’ he said.

‘Not yet,’ agreed Valien, filtering the toxins into the needle.

Kilag moved fast. He should have been incapable of it, but still he moved. He sprang up, pushing himself free of the walls and straight at Valien.

Valien nearly let himself be caught. He scrambled out of the way at the last moment, ducking under Kilag’s flailing hands. He felt the adept’s fingers snap shut just above him, clutching at air.

‘I will save you!’ screamed Kilag, coming after him.

Valien crunched back into the wall of the tunnel behind him, cricking his neck against the curve of it. The narrow space hampered him, and his weapon arm caught under a jutting length of metal.

Kilag’s face swooped after him. The man’s jaws were open, and his rotten teeth glittered in the dark.

Valien shrank back, too slow to prevent Kilag’s hands gripping him around the neck. The adept’s thumbs pressed into his throat, squeezing hard. Valien gagged, still unable to free his arm. The adept’s strength was astonishing – he should hardly have been able to move, let alone wrestle with a trained killer of Valien’s calibre.

‘I will save you!’ Kilag shrieked again, clambering on top of Valien and pushing him down into the filth. His eyes blazed with fervour, and he squeezed harder. Valien recoiled as the man’s foul breath wafted across his face. ‘You will not go!’

Valien relaxed the muscles in his arm, and his wrist came free. He snapped it round, punching the tip of the needle gun into Kilag’s back.

For a few seconds, nothing changed. Valien felt himself begin to lose consciousness, and stabbed again. A terrible fear surged up within him.

So strong! How is it possible?

Then the grip on his throat relaxed. Kilag looked suddenly uncertain, then nauseous. Yellow fluid ran from his nostrils.

‘Do not go!’ Kilag cried, and his hands released Valien.

Kilag rolled over, withdrawing into a foetal position like a crushed beetle. He started shaking violently.

Valien shoved his way free, breathing heavily, keeping his gun in position. A sharp pain broke out behind his eyes.

Throne, that was too close. What has been done to him? How is he so fast?

Kilag stared up at him. The man’s expression was imploring.

‘Do not go there,’ he said.

Valien stared back. Kilag’s voice had become lucid again, despite all the junk coursing around his bloodstream. The adept’s face was drained of colour, and a dreadful expression of warning hung over his harrowed features.

‘You have not seen what I have seen,’ he said, and his voice trembled with fear. ‘Your soul is intact. For the love of the saints, of the Holy Primarchs, of all the blessed souls of sacred Terra, do not go in there.’

Valien remained silent. Something in the man’s pleading chilled him.

Then Kilag’s face changed again. The horrified expression of warning melted away. Blood replaced the fluid weeping down his mouth and chin, and his hands unclenched into open claws.

His mouth, puffy and bleeding, split into a wide smile. His eyes glowed pink, as if lit from behind.

‘Your soul is mine, assassin,’ came a voice from Kilag’s lips that wasn’t his – a throaty rasp, mottled with loathing.

Valien moved. He drew a knife from a sheath on his thigh and struck out, flicking the blade back and forth across Kilag’s neck.

The man’s face was smiling even as his decapitated head hit the ground. Kilag’s eyes stayed glowing for a few moments, dwindling like embers in the shadows. Then they died out, and the tunnel sank into darkness.

Valien stayed poised for much longer, waiting for his breathing to come under control. His blood coursed around his body, pumped by his thudding heart. He could feel a film of sweat on the palms of his hands.

For the love of the saints, do not go in there.

Still he didn’t move. It felt as if his limbs had been given a transfusion of adamantium. His pulse remained high, his fingers trembling.

You have not seen what I have seen.

Slowly, the fear ebbed. Valien looked up ahead, along the narrow tunnels where his objective lay.

The Capitolis waited for him. He had to find a way up to the top, a path through all the many hundreds of levels, avoiding the mutants and the filth and the living metal. He would have to remain hidden. He would have to be more careful, less arrogant.

Valien looked down at the pool of blood collecting under the headless body of Kilag. Another time he might have stooped to drink, but he knew what the poisons in Kilag’s system would do to him if he did.

He stowed the needle gun, brushed his suit down and recalibrated his visor. He was thirsty, hot and tired. Then he left Kilag’s body behind and began to lope soundlessly along the tunnel, stooping as before. His black-suited outline melted quickly into the endless dark of the underworld, disappearing like memory.

Soon, nothing remained but the cooling blood of the adept on the floor, the faint bubbling of his body expiring, and a pair of red-rimmed eyes, open in death and still locked in terror.

<I have lost contact with the Warhounds, my princeps.>

Lopi’s head jerked up, snagging on the cables in his neck. The inflections in Killan’s binaric shunt were minor-negative.

<Last location?> he replied, only half focused on the conversation. Vindicta, still engrossed in the fighting around it, maintained its barrage of long-range fire throughout, acting semi-autonomously.

<Two points north of Melamar Primus,> replied Killan. <Stationed at the subterranean embarkation hub. But they’ve moved – they’ve got into the assault.>

Lopi felt suddenly uneasy. He’d granted Rauth operational control of the Warhounds on the understanding the three Titans would work as fire support platforms for the main body of troops. He hadn’t expected them to be taken into the front line.

<I thought–>

<As did I, princeps.>

The dull rumble and crack of unleashed weaponry from below barely registered. His mind began to race.

<Get me a link to Rauth,> he canted.

<Negative,> replied Killan. <All forward units out of sensor range. They’re a long way underground.>

<Any Iron Hands in range, then.>

<None remain in range. He has committed his entire force.>

Lopi looked out across the wasteland ahead, his view mediated by the Warlord’s visual relays. By then the immense bulk of Melamar Primus was a long way behind him. Vindicta and Castigatio had made steady progress out into the industrial filth between the outer ring of spires and the central summit of the Capitolis. The northern face of the three Axis spires loomed closest, flecked with slow-burning fires and dotted with artillery placements. The last of Axis’s protective tank divisions was near destruction, after which Lopi had planned to advance into the spire complex itself.

<Can you boost the signal to the engines?> he asked. A nagging sense that he should have been more careful wouldn’t go away. Magos Ys had warned him, after all.

Killan worked hard at his console for a moment, and Lopi felt the subtle shifts of power coursing through Vindicta’s transmission systems.

<No success,> he canted after a while. <What are your orders?>

Lopi began to feel angry – with himself, mostly. It was a dangerous emotion to entertain while at the helm of a god-machine in the full throes of war-fury.

He said nothing. Yemos and Jerolf remained active, keeping an eye on Vindicta’s weapon status as it created more carnage at ground level. Lopi remained dimly aware of the fruits of their actions through the feedback mechanisms in the Manifold – crushed vehicle carcasses, demolished wall sections, torched bunkers full of cremated, half-mutated defenders.

It took a lot to make a princeps feel vulnerable.

<This is unacceptable,> he canted at last, realising that his fists had clenched. <I must speak with Rauth. I must protest.>

As he canted, he felt the dull rumble of Vindicta’s machine-spirit. It didn’t want to stop killing. It never wanted to stop killing.

Jerolf looked up from his station quizzically.

‘We can’t,’ he said. ‘Not now.’

Lopi unclenched his fists slowly.

<We are Terribilis Vindicta,> he canted. <We can do anything we want.>

He summoned up schematics of the battle theatre, and they whirled up at him through the overlapping skeins of the Manifold. He saw himself at the epicentre of a huge map of interconnected trajectories. The lines indicating Rauth’s progress were faint, and trailed off at the edge of auspex range. For all that, it was clear enough where he had to be – he’d gone into the tunnels, and he would be somewhere under the wasteland between the Melamar spires and the looming edifice of the Capitolis.

<Bring us about, steersman,> he canted, still part-immersed in the swathe of sigils and rune-clusters. Vindicta continued to mutter away at the back of his consciousness, and he ignored it. <I’m shunting you new coordinates – send the same set to Castigatio.>

Jerolf looked for a moment like he would protest, but bit his tongue. Killan and Yemos kept their heads down, already busy with the calculations needed to extract them from the active firefight.

Lopi felt the enormous treads of the Titan start to shift on to the new trajectory, and his growing sense of unease abated a little. Deep down, though, he remained angry – angry, and worried.

<I’ll prepare a summary for Magos Ys – see she gets it promptly. After that, make all haste.>

Vindicta’s mood was getting to him. His face creased darkly.

<And keep the weapons online.>

Heriat swung round in his seat to face Nethata.

‘We have another comm,’ he said. He let some reproach bleed into his voice. ‘It’s been relayed, stored in a buffer for delayed transmission.’

Nethata nodded absently. Malevolentia rocked as it crushed something big beneath its tracks, and both men rocked with it.

‘I know what it says,’ said Nethata.

‘You can’t keep ignoring them,’ said Heriat, irritated.

Nethata lifted his head from the short-range auspex display.

‘Any change?’ he asked.

‘Rauth has ordered his forces into assault,’ said Heriat. ‘He’s advancing along the tunnels towards the Capitolis.’

Nethata looked briefly surprised.

‘Underground? I thought he took the Warhounds?’

‘They’re underground too.’

Nethata let slip a low whistle.

‘Throne,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe Lopi let him do that.’

‘I’m not sure the princeps knows.’

Nethata turned back to the auspex display.

‘So he’s taking the direct route,’ said the commander. ‘I should have guessed. He’ll lose thousands, just as before.’

‘It’ll be fast.’

Nethata shook his head wearily.

‘Do you understand this obsession with speed, Slavo?’ he asked. ‘Tell me if I’m missing something.’

Heriat looked at Nethata carefully. He’d always admired the man’s flexibility, his willingness to change course when the circumstances demanded it. That was something that he himself found difficult – a commi-ssar’s training cultivated a rigid mindset, one more suited to following a restricted set of commands to the letter.

Heriat had long been aware of the limitations of that way of thinking, even as he’d worked hard to purge the emotions from his psyche that endangered it. It was one reason why he’d never sought a command position in the regular military – he knew that he’d have run an army in the way he ran the Commissariat, something that would never have brought the results that Nethata’s imaginative, instinctive command had done.

Heriat, by contrast, would have followed Rauth’s orders completely. He’d have sent the armoured columns into Melamar Primus for the muster on schedule, and by now they’d have been filing into the tunnels in support of the vanguard units.

If Nethata had been any other man, Heriat would have overruled him long ago. Still, though, he resisted the urge. Nethata was not any other man, and that was all that kept things together.

‘I do not,’ he said, feeling the sores around his mouth jostle like a reminder of that. ‘I do not need to understand. Rauth is in supreme command; when he issues the order, you are bound to obey.’

Nethata met his gaze steadily.

‘We are making progress,’ he said. ‘The Apex hive is on fire. Our tanks have already destroyed the outer defences, and I can deploy troop carriers within the hour. All standard procedure tells me I am doing the right thing. Tunnels or not, Rauth will regret pushing on to the centre before taking out the periphery.’

His voice shook a little as he spoke, but his eyes remained dark and unmoving.

‘This is Imperial Guard doctrine, Slavo,’ Nethata said. ‘That is what we are bound to obey. It is what you are bound to enforce.’

‘You have a creative interpretation of my job.’

Nethata smiled.

‘Creative?’ His smile faded quickly. ‘Are you having doubts?’

Heriat didn’t reply immediately. He knew his expression would give nothing away – he’d worked hard at perfecting the stony, unflinching expression he knew the men expected of him. He looked the same when he was pinning medals on officers’ breasts, and he looked the same when he executed those who’d deserted their posts.

For all that, he felt torn inside, pulled apart by two old, immovable loyalties – one personal and contingent, one impersonal and eternal.

‘If I ordered you to turn back, sir, invoking Commi-ssariat’s privilege,’ he said, speaking slowly, ‘would you do it?’

Nethata pursed his lips.

‘Is this a hypothetical question?’

‘I don’t know. Is it?’

The two men sat facing one another for some time, neither one speaking, neither one yielding.

As he waited, Heriat felt the slow grind of Malevolentia’s enormous motive units as it thrust deeper into the warzone. He heard the distant crump of artillery discharge, and the endless percussive thuds of the tank groups unleashing their payloads against the reeling flanks of the Axis hive spires. He knew that, far underground and to the north-west of their position, similar firefights were taking place under Rauth’s direct control.

We should be there. We should be at the speartip.

‘Let me ask you a question in turn,’ said Nethata, and his expression was strange – hurt, perhaps, or merely playful. ‘If you invoked such privilege, and I resisted, what would you do?’

Heriat felt the weight of the bolt pistol at his belt. He knew from experience that he could draw it far quicker than Nethata could respond. That was what it was for – the enforcement of discipline. That was what he was for.

‘You didn’t answer me, sir,’ said Heriat.

‘Nor you, me.’

Another awkward silence descended. That time, Heriat looked away first. Another comm-signal scrolled across his console, flickering red in the gloom of Malevolentia’s command module.

‘Lopi’s withdrawing his Warlords,’ he said, half-relieved at the distraction, half-annoyed by it. ‘He’s heading for the Melamar muster-point.’

Nethata smiled.

‘Perhaps he is learning, in his own time, what Rauth is capable of.’

Heriat didn’t return the smile.

‘We should join him.’

Nethata glanced down at the tactical displays, showing the progress his tank divisions were making against the Axis hives. Heriat studied the same data, and saw how carefully executed the advance had been. Nethata had used his resources skilfully, opening up a separate flank and damaging the enemy’s power to encircle.

He remembered his words about pride, and regretted them. Nethata had acted within the spirit of the Guard’s doctrine, if not the letter, and the battlefront leading to the Capitolis looked far healthier than it had done only hours previously.

‘We’ll pull back when the last of the artillery points has been taken down,’ said Nethata at last. He looked up. ‘You’re right, Slavo. You’ve always been right. We’ll join up with Rauth for the assault on the Capitolis – he’ll need our guns for that.’

Heriat nodded. He realised how close his hand had strayed to his sidearm, and slowly moved it away.

‘That puts my mind at rest, sir,’ he said.

Nethata looked equivocal.

‘Good,’ he said.

Nethata turned to the cogitator array before him. His fingers moved expertly across the brass-lined input columns, each one of which controlled the movements of whole tank formations.

‘Perhaps, though, while I attend to this,’ he said, making it sound like an afterthought, ‘you could arrange a hololith-feed to Princeps Lopi?’

Nethata’s expression was busy, already absorbed in the preparations needed to conclude the barrage and consolidate his forces with Rauth’s. For all that, Heriat had known him too long to miss the signs of lateral thinking, of external planning, of triangulation.

‘I think,’ said Nethata, keeping his eyes down, ‘that he and I will have much to discuss.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The daemon was fast, far faster than Morvox. It was strong, too, and commanded subtle magicks of deception and disruption. The creature moved in a haze of misdirection – one moment darting in for the attack, the next spinning away back into the dark.

Morvox remained methodical, watchful, wielding his blade two-handed and maintaining his guard as he fought. He could feel the aura of intimidation emanating from the daemon, but it made little impact on him.

The positions of his battle-brothers flickered across his retinal display as he fought. They were all busy with their own battles; close by, but not close enough to intervene. More daemons had come since Fierez had died, dropping out of the vaults like carrion birds and dancing into combat. The mutants seemed to draw strength from them, and they clustered around the lithe, spectral figures like supplicants.

Morvox saw the claw come in – a blur of movement – and parried with his own blade. The two substances, one physical, the other quasi-physical, hit each other with a shower of witchlight. He felt the shock of the impact, and compensated instantly.

He started moving again before the pressure had released. He switched back with the blade, whipping it though the air in a fencer’s motion, forcing the creature up and away.

It smiled at him as it pirouetted out of danger. Its lilac skin shimmered in the dark, leaving trails hanging in the air like drifting pollen.

+Medusan,+ it sent, and its voice was lilting like a child’s.

Morvox ignored the taunts, the whispered half-truths as the daemon fought him. They were juvenile goads, trivial insults, the kind of thing a human would have grown out of upon reaching adulthood. The daemon was immortal, as ancient as the stars, and yet when it spoke, it spoke like a child.

It pounced back at him, flinging out a cloud of spiralling purple motes as if casting a net across him.

Morvox spun around, using his momentum to bring the blade across. The daemon veered out of its path – only just – and danced away again, laughing.

+Do you know the name Fulgrim, Medusan?+ it asked, never once moving its lips, letting its lethal claws snicker back and forth, toying with him.

Morvox wasn’t drawn in. He didn’t follow the pattern, and stuck to his own methods. He stayed close, trusting to his armour, trusting in his systems, keeping his movements efficient. He lunged suddenly, point-first, nearly taking the monster’s leg off, then restored the wall of defence.

+Fulgrim lives still,+ it sent. +I have seen him. I have loved him. He has whispered truths to me, ancient stories, tales of old wonder.+

The daemon came at him, claws criss-crossed but swinging open. It checked at the last minute, aiming to get past his guard. Morvox corrected, pulling back half a step, giving him the space he needed to block.

+Fulgrim killed a man, once. More than a man – a demigod, a paragon.+

Morvox allowed himself a flicker of dry amusement. He knew what the daemon was trying to do, but he was neither a Space Wolf nor a World Eater, forever a hair’s breadth away from some berserk rage. He had been given over to the machine-spirit; he was a process, a procedure, a single link in a greater whole.

So he didn’t rage. He didn’t launch into a frenzy of killing energy, nor roar out the name of his slain primarch as if it could somehow gift him the power to kill more swiftly.

He fought on, smoothly, precisely, rocking around his centre of gravity and letting his thousands of augmetic implants do their work.

Aspire to the state of the primarch.

+His name was the Gorgon then, though maybe you have forgotten that. What else have you forgotten, I wonder? What secrets have been lost to you?+

The daemon smiled, and swooped in close again. Morvox let it come.

+My lord Fulgrim beheaded the Gorgon. Did you know that?+

Morvox adjusted the grip on his blade, feeling the iron sinews of his left hand close tight. Servos in his upper thigh primed, storing energy for the burst to come. A series of adrenal adjusters below his rib-cage activated, matched by spike-nodes implanted under the skin of his neck.

+I have seen his head.+

The daemon saw the opening, preparing for the plunge in.

+It is still screaming.+

Morvox moved. His genhanced frame burst forwards, suddenly shifting into blinding, explosive speed. A nanosecond later his bionics did their work, powering up and boosting his response further. His blade blurred as it shot out.

The daemon stopped smiling just as the killing edge swept up, tilting out and slicing through its neck-flesh.

The chainsword flashed with the sudden release of warp energy, sending out a shockwave that nearly sent him reeling. Aetheric-residue lashed out, curling over his armour plate and scorching it. The daemon screamed, and its voice took on its true form – age-withered, fractured, composed of thousands of strands.

Morvox felt the brief burst of power ebb, and jerked the blade down, putting his full weight behind the movement. The sword carved its way through the daemon’s body, shattering the armour fragments covering its torso and unwinding the unholy wards that kept it together.

For a moment longer, it still lingered on the mortal plane, staring at him in mute astonishment.

+You–+

Morvox pulled his fist back and lashed out. His gauntlet crunched into the daemon’s face, hurling it high and breaking its back. Then he went after it, working with both blade and gauntlet, cutting and hammering until the creature’s body was ruined.

He stood over it for a moment, feeling his hearts hammering. What remained of the daemon shimmered on the floor, glowing softly as the animating power within it dissipated.

‘You talk too much,’ he said.

Then he was moving again, striding back towards his battle-brothers who were still fighting. As he went, Morvox blink-summoned a tactical map on to his retinal display, showing the positions of the entire clan.

The Iron Hands had pushed far down the main tunnel, outstripping the nearest mortal regiments and leaving them behind. Despite losses from the daemon attacks, the army’s progress was continuing. Its cohesion, though, was fracturing – the regular troops couldn’t keep up with Space Marines. Every stride took the Iron Hands further away from the main mass of the army, which had become bogged down further back, locked in a bloody tussle with the nightmarish forces dug in along the tunnel’s lengths.

‘Lord,’ he voxed to the command channel, isolating Khatir’s comm-signal. The Iron Father was fighting nearly three hundred metres away. ‘We are losing contact with the mortals. They are slowing.’

A long hiss of interference sounded over the comm-link, punctuated by bolter fire and muffled explosions. When Khatir responded, his voice was typically acerbic.

‘Noted,’ he voxed. ‘Continue on present tasking.’

Morvox looked over his shoulder, back down the smoke-choked tunnel to where the mortal ranks struggled. Even his enhanced eyesight could make out little.

‘Request permission to lead Clave Arx back to rally,’ he voxed. ‘We are losing them.’

Something like a choke came down over the link. He could hear the sounds of massive energy bursts, and guessed that was Telach in action.

‘Negative,’ ordered Khatir. ‘Continue on present tasking.’

Morvox hesitated for a moment longer. He could see other members of his clave in combat close by. The shriek and chatter of daemons had not gone away, and more would be coming soon enough.

‘The neverborn, lord,’ he voxed, making one last attempt. ‘We have not contained them – some have got past our line. You know the mortals cannot fight them.’

A long fizz of static sounded on the comm-link. If he’d been a neophyte, Morvox might have thought that Khatir was considering the request. But he wasn’t a neophyte, he was a brother-sergeant of the Iron Hands, and he should have known better.

‘Continue on present tasking,’ came the response, and the link cut dead.

Morvox stood still for a little while longer. The glowing runes of his helm’s tactical display danced in front of his visual field. He could see a line of Iron Hand claves fighting their way along the tunnel, drawing nearer to the open gates at the far end through which the enemy still poured. He could even detect the portals themselves, shrouded in fire and smog, and knew that Rauth would be carving his way towards them, unencumbered by secondary objectives or considerations of mortal casualties.

Aspire to the condition of the primarch.

Then the scream of the daemonic broke out again, close by and moving fast. Morvox starting moving, striding back to where his brothers fought on. He watched his helm display cycle through proximal targets, and sensed the spoor of the nearest neverborn in his lone organic nostril.

More cultists were already stumbling towards him, purple light bleeding from them like blood from wounds.

He tried to forget the face of the man he’d saved.

Aspire to the condition of the primarch.

His arms felt strangely heavy. He hadn’t quite learned to forget faces. They still resonated with him, summoning up remnants of emotion, of hesitation, of humanity.

The mortals cannot fight them.

Unable to shake off his uncertainty, he shifted back into the mechanical patterns of movement that had sustained him in the Emperor’s service for all his postmortal life. The action of fighting banished doubt. It purified the soul, and cleansed the body.

As the daemons sang in the vaults above him, Morvox took up his chainsword, assessed the tactical priority, and stalked back into combat.

Princeps Yreg Nomen of the Warhound Titan Ferus Arma felt a flicker of unease.

He felt the first stirrings of that unease even as he brought his war engine closer in to the enemy, hammering retreating ranks of debased troops with volley after volley of mega-bolter rounds. The tunnels were big, easily big enough to accommodate a Warhound Titan under their immense curvature, but it was still an uncomfortable, claustrophobic place to wage war.

The Manifold was overrun. He was getting far too many signals to be processed adequately, and most of them flagged up as anomalous. Everything else, including across the realview ports, was miserably unclear and the sensoria were badly fogged. He’d have done better with his old human eyes.

<Can’t we clean this up?> he canted, flavouring the binaric push with annoyance.

‘Working on it,’ replied Bonnem, one of his two moderati. ‘Something’s just made it worse.’

Nomen grunted, and swung Arma’s head around. The cockpit slewed through the airborne grime, and only patches of the terrain ahead showed up clearly.

<Try a Hertzen-Aymar filter,> he suggested, knowing his layman’s opinion would probably be rejected by Bonnem, but trying it anyway. <These are mostly particulates.>

Bonnem shook his head, making the cables jutting from the back of his skull clatter.

‘If it was that, I’d have fixed it,’ he muttered. ‘Want me to drive?’

Nomen smiled, bringing Arma’s left arm inferno cannon into play. As he did so, the Warhound’s machine-spirit growled its metallic approval. Below him, a whole horde of cultists had abandoned their positions and were fleeing back down the tunnel away from him.

Nomen gauged the distance, calibrated the burn, and fed it power.

The flamer sent a jet of blazing promethium streaking out and washing over the retreating gangs of foot-
soldiers. They ignited in a series of roaring, fizzing fireballs, writhing as they fell to earth.

The torrent of flame guttered out, and Nomen shifted his attention back to the mega-bolter. Those few of the enemy who managed to escape the flames were mown down by scything barrages of projectiles.

The exercise of power was always reassuring. It eased the link between his mind and that of the engine’s, and made the business of piloting much more pleasant than it otherwise could be.

He brought the gun barrels up for reloading. In the brief lull, he let the Manifold feed him what information it could. Nomen had lost contact with the Iron Hands, who had pushed on up the tunnels with surprising speed. In their absence, the three Warhounds had formed the lynchpin of the Imperial advance, forming mobile firebases around which the mortal troops and tank columns could rally.

As the infantry units had ground their way along the tunnels, however, that pattern had begun to break down. Losing his sensoria readings had been the start of it. Then, one after another, he’d lost signals from the accompanying armour. It had started to feel like he was fighting alone in the dark, for all the information he was getting. The outline of the tunnels still registered – when he lifted the Warhound’s head, its forward-facing lumen beams exposed the curved ferrocrete ceiling above – but more or less everything else was a mess of static-fuzz and feedback.

It was demeaning. A war machine of Arma’s pedigree and refinement had no business being underground.

Nomen felt the reload process complete, and geared himself up for renewed action.

<Full stride,> he canted, idly monitoring his weapon heat-levels as the Warhound lurched back into a walk. <I know it’s filthy out there, but give me what you can.>

‘Multiples, bearing 5-6, coming up slow,’ replied Bonnem, working hard to make some sense of what he was getting. ‘Enemy advance steady.’

He turned in his command throne, craning up to look at Nomen with some concern.

‘From what I can see, my princeps, we’ve got a lot of units going backwards,’ he said. ‘We’re almost blind here. Recommend we pull back until I can clear this up a bit.’

Nomen felt the twinge of unease again. What was that?

<Negative, moderati,> he canted, rolling his shoulders against the painful interface nodes in his flesh, putting it down to a faulty input buffer. <We have our orders.>

The clouds of smog cleared a little directly ahead, exposing a ragged line of loyalist troopers pinned down by a steady stream of enemy fire. Just as Bonnem had reported, it looked like they were on the back foot and in a state of disarray. Something registered further out as well – a shimmer on the grid, moving fast, looking for all the world like a sensor artefact.

<Let’s clear this out,> he canted, giving something to Bonnem to work with. <Try to raise Odio or Thyrsus again – I don’t like not knowing their positions.>

Then he swung the mega-bolter down, opening fire in a long, controlled burst. The advancing traitor line was blown apart in a whirling hail of exploding stone and fire. The noise was tremendous – a hammering, thrumming, thudding roar of pure mechanical rage. Bodies were thrown high into the air, torn into limbs and ragged scraps of armour. The screams of the dying were almost inaudible behind the wall of noise created by the vicious, sustained barrage.

Nomen let the torrent cease, and prodded the Titan into forward motion again. Below him, the loyalist troops he’d saved scrambled to get out of the way. Clouds of ash and smog continued to thin ahead of him, revealing part of the long tunnel wall ahead. He could see a little more light, which was encouraging. Something up ahead, out where the sensor artefacts had formed, was glowing lilac.

‘No response from supporting engines, my princeps,’ reported Bonnem. ‘I begin to suspect vox-jamming. Repeat: we should withdraw.’

Nomen ran his cable-tied fingers across the arm of his throne, grazing the controls casually. The spectral presence of Ferus Arma was at the forefront of his mind, fresh from the kills that stimulated its ancient consciousness. Whenever he felt that mind press against his so acutely it was hard to heed calls to pull back from combat.

<I have given you my answer, moderati,> canted Nomen calmly. <This is just the beg–>

Something shimmered across the sensor array, ghosting like concentrated interference on a pict screen. Nomen terminated the datastream and sank into the Manifold.

Then he saw it.

‘Incoming!’ shouted Bonnem. The skein of the Mani-fold distorted – even the spatial indicators warped out of alignment, making a mockery of its orientation capabilities.

<Get me data!> Nomen canted, swimming through a sludge of inconsistent readings and feeling his unease rush back like a wave of nausea.

The first one hit hard, coming out of the dark like a missile.

Nomen didn’t see much of it – just a pair of eyes, swimming fast out of the gloom, glistening like jewels.

‘Hard about!’ Bonnem roared, and the thing hit the frontal voids.

Shields screamed from the impact, shivering and spraying sparks out like a krak discharge. Arma rocked back on its legs, causing the servos behind the plate armour to hiss and buckle.

<I need targets…> said Nomen, trying to bring the mega-bolter up fast enough. He opened fire, feeling like he was aiming at ghosts.

Another one streaked in, diving and wheeling through the lanes of fire. Nomen saw something like a woman’s legs kicking, as if the thing was swimming through the air. He tracked it manually, spraying bolter rounds wildly. Something must have connected – he heard a thin wail, and glowing trails of plasma splattered against the voids.

For a second, the horrendous sense of dread eased. Then two more signals whistled into range. The Manifold buckled, sheared, and started to go dead. It couldn’t track them fast enough.

‘They’re using themselves,’ muttered Bonnem, frantically working to divert power to the void generators. ‘Themselves.’

The two apparitions hurled themselves into the shields, spiralling free of the increasingly erratic bolter fire. A fraction before impact, Nomen caught sight of a face – a woman’s face – snarling with glee, lit up by muzzle-flashes and some strange kind of inner light. The face looked ecstatic.

Then it disappeared in a riot of colour and flame. The shields shuddered under the dual impacts, and warning klaxons broke out from the chamber beneath the cockpit. Violet lightning arced across the Warhound’s shields, crackling and lashing.

<We need fire support,> canted Nomen to his sensori as several of the fixed picts on his console shorted out. <Where are the Iron Hands?>

<Out of range,> replied the sensori, working as manically as Bonnem. <All out of range.>

More blurs of movement materialised ahead of them, crystallising in the swirl of the tunnel’s darkness and hurtling into range – five of them, then six.

Nomen felt Arma’s machine-spirit raging. He felt the blind, furious lust for the kill rearing up, coursing through cabling and metal sinews.

Part of him shared that battle-drive. The other half was getting terrified.

<Full power, forward voids!> he roared, goading the Titan into a stumbling walk. If he had to meet these devils in combat, he’d meet them going forward.

He levelled both weapon-arms at the apparitions, and fired. A lethal mix of solid rounds and flame surged out.

A chorus of fractured screaming broke out, and three of the creatures caught fire as they plunged through the raging curtain. Their immolated bodies slammed hard against the reeling voids, sending shockwaves running across the energised surface. Nomen saw a mutilated corpse tumble down the translucent barriers, disintegrating as it fell. Its limbs – what remained of them – were lithe, oddly alluring even in destruction.

He kept firing, kept pouring his anger and fear out into the night. More shrieks echoed out, and fragments of flesh spun into the Warhound’s path.

<Omnissiah!> Nomen roared, feeding more fury into the barrage.

Then the ammo-counter clicked empty on the mega-bolter. At the same time, the inferno cannon reached critical temperature, and guttered out. For a few precious seconds, the wall of reactive shells and flame gave way.

<Reload!> cried Nomen, augmenting the command with urgency markers. He felt his heart hammering in his chest. <Reload!>

The creatures made the most of the brief window, shrieking and laughing as they came. Nomen saw them properly that time – a dozen of them, maybe more. They came in the wake of their destroyed sisters, corkscrewing and diving through the heaps of smog. He watched their fangs glitter in the night.

More time!

He felt the ammo-belts feed into the mega-bolter’s chambers with a thick clunk. He brought the barrels round, willing the Warhound’s servos to drive them faster.

More time!

The first of them hit him at full tilt. He saw it break across the voids. He saw its limbs break and its claws snap, and the forward view rippled like water.

Another came in close by, laughing like a girl. It dived right into the shield-matter, snapping with lightning-laced talons. It was destroyed, blasted into atoms by the voids. The backdraft washed across the Warhound, halting its forward momentum and causing it to stumble. The shields trembled, flickered, and shivered out.

The binaric sign for [weapon ready] flashed up in the remnants of the Manifold, and across his malfunctioning console, and lights rippled down the flanks of the mega-bolter housing.

Nomen issued the fire commands manually, and braced for the recoil.

It never came. An apparition pounced onto the Warhound’s weapon-arm, ripping the mega-bolter’s cabling apart from its bracing rods. Another two swarmed across the inferno cannon housing, tearing at its slender barrels with their fangs. Reinforced metal was flayed from the underlying structure like flesh from a bone. More horrors clamped on to the massive guns, ripping, tearing and biting.

Bonnem got up from his seat, clumsily unhooking his neural implants. His flesh was as white as bone. He reached down for a sidearm with trembling fingers.

Nomen felt the machine’s pain as if it had been his own. Spikes of pure agony ran up his forearms, paralysing his hands and clamping them to the arms of the command throne.

<Resume your station, moderati,> he commanded, though he couldn’t keep the raw fear out of his voice. Arma’s agony had flooded into him, like molten lead bubbling through his bloodstream. He kept issuing the command to fire, over and over, but nothing responded.

Then the left cockpit window smashed, and broken armourglas flew across the confined space. Shards tore into Bonnem’s face, shredding the skin. The sensori, still plugged into his station, issued a panicked shriek.

Nomen tried to rise. He tried to pull free of the cables shackling his hands and his head. He only stopped when he saw what was coming through the broken window, and something primordial within him recognised the futility of doing anything further.

The daemon’s outline glistened with light. Its flesh was glassy, as if still half embodied in another place. Blood as black as ink ran down from deep wounds in its flanks. Its eyes were like wells into nothingness, and its sleek face was pulled tight into a mask of delighted cruelty.

As it came to kill him, its smile was almost kind.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Khadi stumbled in the dark, tripping and using her hands to keep her going. A long line of drool hung down from her chin after she’d vomited until her stomach had locked in cramps. Her left hand throbbed from being burned in a plasma bloom, and she didn’t dare unpeel the remains of her glove to see what kind of mess was under the synthleather.

Exhaustion made her movements erratic. She caught her foot on some long, semi-buried shaft of metal and crashed to her knees. She stayed there for a moment, panting, shivering, staring.

She had no idea where she was. The constant hammer of heavy weapons disorientated her. Bright lines of las-fire continued to lance down the tunnel in both directions. Men’s voices echoed from the vaults, and explosions flared out starkly in the ash-choked dark.

I saw them come.

She’d moved beyond the initial horror of seeing the daemons and passed into a kind of numb shock. Only luck had kept her alive since that first glimpse of them. She’d fired her lasgun a few more times after that, responding automatically to the flicker of las-fire from out of the dark, but had no idea whether she’d hit anything.

I saw them take it apart.

The Warhound had provided some respite. It had loomed up from the gloom, guns blazing, surrounded in a haze of energy, resplendent with the blue and gold of its livery. She’d seen its weapon-arms fire, demolishing the lines of mortal troops in its sights. She’d seen it stride out: invincible, indomitable, the very image of the Imperium’s imperishable might.

I saw them come.

Then the… devils had swooped down on it. She’d covered her face and buried it in the mud and dirt, shouting out loud to drown out the sound of their approach.

They’d screamed as they’d flown in, like demented souls fresh from murder. The sound of them coming had made her want to slit her throat, to gouge her eyes out – anything, anything to make them stop laughing.

She’d managed to look up once, given a flicker of hope by the sound of the god-machine’s mighty weapons firing again.

Surely, her rational mind had told her, surely even the devils couldn’t stand against that.

Her last sight had been blurred by darkness, smog and weapon discharge, but it had been enough: they had been crawling all over it, like hornets around a spider, gorging themselves on it, ripping into it, tearing up the ancient metal in slivers and hurling it aside. She’d seen one of the pilots being taken out, dragged from the cockpit window. He’d been shrieking like a maddened animal, and his primal fear had echoed out into the endless dark.

She hadn’t watched after that, but his screaming had continued for a long time. She’d crawled away, dropping to all fours, barely able to think at all. Her mind raced, filled with thoughts of wrongdoing, shame, horror, fear. Every shallow deed, every casual lie, rose to the surface like scum on boiling water, crowding out her waking mind and making the very air she breathed a nightmare.

They hadn’t come for her after that– they had other, more worthy prey.

So she’d shivered in the dark alone, cowering, drooling, shaking.

The shadow rose above her silently. She didn’t notice it at first – it was just one more clot of blackness in the shifting, flickering war-hell of the tunnels. When she finally felt the presence close by, she didn’t even lift her weapon. She looked up with the expectation of finding death at last, and was disappointed to see that she wouldn’t be getting that.

‘Khadi,’ said Marivo. ‘Shula Khadi.’

He was unsteady on his feet, but his lasgun was still in his hand. She could see the charge meter flashing for near-empty. His visor was broken, exposing part of his haggard face.

She looked up at him stupidly, too weak to say anything. Her hands shook, and she let them.

He squatted beside her. His movements gave away fatigue – he was no longer striding out with the light of the Emperor in his eyes.

‘Badly hurt?’ he asked. A long way down the tunnels, fresh explosions blossomed, briefly flooding the scene in bright orange light. Then it faded away, replaced by the flickering dark once more.

Khadi didn’t know how to reply. Physically, she’d been worse. Mentally – that was different.

I saw them come. I saw them take it apart.

Marivo looked hard at her, lifting up her chin with his fingertip and staring directly into her eyes.

‘Can you move?’ he asked. ‘We need to pull back. We need to get out. Can you move?’

She saw the daemon’s eyes hovering in front of her, like a mirage. They stayed there, even when she closed her eyes and screwed them tight. Those eyes made her want to scream, though she’d already done so much of that that her throat was hoarse and raw.

Marivo grasped her shoulder, shaking her a little. His movements were urgent, and a little too quick. He was scared too.

‘Shula, look at me,’ he said. ‘Look at me. They’ve got the Warhounds. They’re tearing up the tanks. We have to pull back.’

Somehow, then, swimming from somewhere deep inside, Khadi felt a smile flicker across her chapped lips.

‘I’m beginning to like you, Marivo,’ she said, stuttering over the words. Her throat constricted as she spoke, as if the muscles had forgotten how to work properly. ‘You’re learning.’

Marivo didn’t smile.

‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘Really. But now we have to move.’

Khadi coughed up more phlegm, and felt Marivo steady her as she got it out. It tasted bitter, as if she’d swallowed engine lubricant.

‘You could go,’ she said, feeling the worst of the shakes begin to ebb. ‘I’ll slow you down.’

Marivo looked over his shoulder, like a hunted beast. The explosions from down the tunnels were coming nearer. With the Warhounds out of action and the Iron Hands seemingly careless of how much their allies suffered, they were horribly exposed.

‘You will,’ he said, grabbing her breastplate and hauling her up. He grunted with the effort of it. ‘Throne, you really will.’

She didn’t resist. Once she was on her feet she found she could stand, just as long as she leaned on him.

Khadi couldn’t see what Marivo’s expression was. The small patch of exposed flesh around his chin looked bloody, like he’d taken a heavy blow there. His breath came in tight, shallow bursts.

‘So what’s the plan?’ she asked.

‘Plan?’

‘You always have one.’

Marivo laughed – a bitter, choking snort that cut off quickly.

‘Is that right?’ he said, dragging her along with him.

Together, they crept along the shattered grav-train tracks. Tracer fire shot out above them, lighting up the ferrocrete of the tunnel roof. Munition booms, fuel-cell detonations, human screams, daemonic screams, all of them followed, resounding in the vast, enclosed spaces overhead.

Khadi clung on tight to Marivo, gritting her teeth, trying to squeeze the nightmares out of her mind’s eye.

‘I’ll work on something,’ said Marivo, panting as he dragged her along. ‘For now, just try to keep walking.’

Telach looked up. The real world overlapped with the psychic one in a shifting, sliding blaze of false colour.

The vast subterranean gates to the Capitolis, the terminus of the long transit tunnels, stretched away above him, massive and imposing. Huge pillars of adamantium reared up from the floor, banded with granite and carved into exotic swirls. Stone and metal glimmered in the dark, outlined with shrouds of corpse-light that flickered and swayed rhythmically.

Daemons wheeled and dived in front of the gates, tearing through the air like flocks of raptors. Dozens of them had come through the portal and into the tunnels, shrieking and throwing themselves into combat. As they passed, auras of madness lingered in the smoggy dark. The physical elements themselves seemed to recoil from their presence, leaving eddies of ash hanging in the air like the wash of ships in oil-fouled water.

Some were downed by the hail of bolter fire that rose up to greet them. Others veered their way through the barrage and came crashing to earth, only to meet the massed blades of the claves. Their death-screams echoed up into the shadow-shrouded vaults, bouncing from the pillars and running down the grav-train tracks.

But daemons, even lesser daemons such as these, were more than a match for individual Iron Hands, and their capriciousness in battle was for a purpose. As Telach knew, but few other mortal humans did, daemons never died. Their fragile physical forms could be shattered, banishing their essence back to the shadow world that spawned them, but respite from their malice was only temporary.

So it was that the daemons opened themselves to risk so casually. For eternal beings such as them, birthed at the dawn of mortal sentience, the price of temporary dissolution was low. Every time one of their bodies absorbed the leading edge of a mortal blade, another one of their dread sisters was given space to dart in and deliver a true killing blow.

And when such inhuman weapons struck home, the Iron Hands died truly. Their bodies were durable, cast from genhanced sinew and buttressed with grafted bionics, but still they died. For every daemon that was sent howling back into the abyss, another human warrior took a mortal wound, or was ripped apart by snapping claws, or was prevented from coming to the aid of a brother.

Throughout it all, the claves fought silently, grimly, mechanically. They stayed in close formation, matching the daemons’ chaotic rage with stoic resolve. They used their blades with precise, limited movements, and withdrew again when the work was done. Bolters were fired sparingly once the creatures had dropped to ground level. Every battle-brother knew that daemons were undone better with the weapons of eternity – swords, knives, axes, fists.

Telach watched the brutality unfold – two mingled furies locked together in an close-pressed, desperate orgy of committed bloodletting. Slowly, painfully, the ground was won. Unlike the earlier fighting conducted against the masses of mutated human troops, this time the Iron Hands took heavy casualties. Each step was paid for in blood, but the claves remained resolute. They ignored the dead and fought their way up towards the towering gates.

Khatir kept up his battle-cries during the grinding progress, his vox-amplified exhortations ringing out against the distant walls. His flamers lit up the dark, glowing magma-red and reflecting dully from the ebony of his shoulder guards. He advanced in tandem with Rauth and Clave Prime’s Veteran Sergeant Imanol. Even the daemons, those spirits of infinite contempt and mockery, shied away from them. When they eventually summoned the resolve to attack, Rauth smashed them aside with great sweeps of his glittering power sword. The blade shone like ice against velvet, electric blue and blazing with disruptor energy.

Even that light, though, paled beside the brilliance of Telach and his three acolytes. The four Librarians stood apart from the main host, stretched out across the full expanse of the cavernous space, wreathed at all times in coruscating fire. Bright white flames raged over the nightshade-blue of their battle-plate, at once as hot as pitch and as cold as the void. The psykers were like pillars of fire in the night, and aether-born matter streamed towards them like glowing dust pulled into orbit around forming stars.

The daemons knew well enough just how much the Librarians could hurt them. Alone among the warriors of the claves, Telach and his brothers controlled the very substance that gave them form. They could pull apart the hidden tapestry that underpinned the world of matter and extension. They could hear the secret dissonances in the aether, the dissonances that prefigured coming storms of warp magick. They could create devastating eddies of their own. They could perceive the souls of the living and the dead around them, overlaid onto the skein of physical perception like a targeting grid.

Of all of them, Telach was the greatest. His power was the most complete, the most subtle, the most thorough, the most deadly. His mind strode across the planes of the warp with calm certainty, drawing dark energy from across the veils of reality and directing it, screaming, into the world of mortal existence. Throughout the long march along the tunnels, he had deployed his cold fire judiciously, protecting his brothers from the worst predations of the daemon horde and throwing the unholy creatures back towards this, their last redoubt. He had been immense, immutable, inviolable, a spark of dazzling clarity amid a battlefield of filth, horror and fear.

And now the gates loomed before him, vast and corrupted. Telach could see the imprint of tormented souls in the metal and stone. He could hear their screams, locked in the very stuff of the hive spire, condemned to a living death amid the foundations of the immense Capitolis spires.

He could see the open doors, each one embossed with bronze and iron. He could see the portal through which the horror still emanated. He could see the ancient engravings over the massive lintel – Turris Capitolis, Shardenus Primus Exultans – and the foul sigils that had been scrawled across them.

Beyond the doors, he could see the beginning of the Great Stair – the gigantic passageway up into the hive towers beyond. He could feel the close warmth coming down from that opening, as if generated by the coals of a huge fire that had been burning for days and was only now coming to its full pitch of consuming heat.

Telach could see all those things, far more acutely than even his fellow Codiciers in the clan, and the rank sickness of it all resonated like a virus coursing through his bloodstream. His temples throbbed from the constant effort of maintaining the psychic shield around him. His hands bled freely from the summoning of warp-born fires. His muscles ached, his eyes pricked from tears, his mouth bled under his heavy blue helm.

And yet, the goal was close. The ruinous charge down the transit corridors was at its end, and now only the gates themselves remained to be taken.

Telach bowed his head for a moment, gathering his strength. Screams and the laughter of daemons passed, for a moment, into the background. He let the current of the warp sweep up into him, surging from the depths of his consciousness and into his waking mind. The power rose quickly, like dark waters pooling in the shaft of a well.

No machine could do this.

The words came to him unbidden, like a memory unearthed at random. He discarded them.

By the Immortal Hand of the Emperor, the Master of Mankind.

Telach recited those words reverently, concentrating on the task of gathering warp energy to himself. He knew the daemons would sense the build-up. Very soon they would streak towards him, heedless of the protective aegis swirling around him.

Let them. Such bravado will only hasten their mortal deaths.

He opened his eyes, and the world of the senses rushed back in. His heart-rates picked up. The myriad systems in his psychically-charged armour activated. His breathing deepened. The aether pumped through him, roaring and frothing at the bonds he had set on it.

Gift me the power of that which is the doom of the weak. Gift me the power of that which our uttermost enemy calls home.

Telach’s fingers began to leak warp power. It spilled from his gauntlets like pearls, smashing on the floor below and letting out flickers of glimmering witchlight. The massive potency was hard to contain, even before it reached the full level of devastation.

Gift me the power which is the true and just inheritance of Mankind, his destiny, his calling, his birthright to rule.

Telach lifted his head again. The gates towered over him. The screaming of the souls embedded in its structure reached fever-pitch – a chorus of agony arranged in mockery of the holy chants given every waking hour in the cathedrals of the boundless Imperium. Daemons, having sensed the danger, hurled themselves towards him, pulling free of combat with the Iron Hands in their midst and streaking in his direction. Their faces no longer laughed, but were pinched with fear.

They knew what he was about to do.

Telach knew what he was about to do.

For all the pain he was in, for all the pain he knew it would bring him, he still smiled.

For the honour of the Throne, for the honour of Manus.

The smile broadened.

Now you die.

He flung his arms wide, and raw warp fire exploded out from them. Beams of piercing white light shot towards the gates, rippling and thrumming with uncoiled intensity. Two columns of aetheric-fire, snaking like tornados, lashed out from his hands and smashed into the doors of the gate.

The daemons plunged into it and were torn apart. They detonated like frag-charges, scattering across the tunnel vaults in showers of blazing sparks. Telach’s columns of fire roared out – undiminishing, thundering and rushing with the force of eternity.

It was agony. Even as the awesome power coursed through his body, Telach could feel it destroying him. He could feel his remaining flesh cauterising, curling away from the augmetics that riddled it. He could feel his hearts burst messily, flooding his chest with blood and drowning him from within.

The sensations were illusions – visions of what would come should he fail to control the torrent of otherworldly flame – but they hurt him nonetheless. It felt for all the world like a part of him was dying; perhaps on some other plane of existence where the divide between warp and materium was less certain, perhaps nowhere else but in his mind.

More. Give me more.

The columns of crackling energy wrapped themselves around the open doors. Like two enormous flaming tentacles, they began to pull them closed.

The daemons stepped up their frantic attacks. They tore towards him like bullets, crackling and burning as the warp-fire rushed through them.

One nearly got to him. It detonated just metres from his unprotected face, shrieking like an animal as the rush of cold flame roared through it.

Telach remained unmoving. His arms were flung wide, channelling the vast power roaring through him.

I am the conduit. I am the process. I am the vessel.

Slowly, grindingly, the doors began to close. The screams of the trapped souls in the metal reached a fresh crescendo. The Iron Hands stepped up their withering assault, launching fresh salvos of bolter fire into the fervid atmosphere. His Codiciers sent out warp fire of their own, cutting down the daemons even as they rallied for a final, frantic assault.

Telach felt his strength began to ebb. He tasted fresh blood. His heartbeats picked up again, thudding like a drum deep within his rib-fused chest.

Not yet. Just a little more.

The fires lashed out, snaking around the edges of the doors. The gap between them narrowed down to a red-tinged slit. Telach began to cry out. He heard his own voice as if from far away, muffled by the crashing tides of the aether around him.

The spire was resisting him. The stone, the metal, the ferrocrete – it was mustering against the power ignited at its base. Whatever dwelt at the summit had corrupted every part of the gigantic structure, like a cancer spreading down from the diseased head, and now the Capitolis itself was alive.

When he felt the full extent of that power, Telach felt his strength falter. He remembered what he’d seen when his soul had been cut loose.

I remember you being stronger.

+No!+ he roared, blazing his defiance psychically. +No. No.+

Then he let loose one final time, feeling the power of the immaterium tear through him with the raging force of a hurricane. Fresh aether-fire surged out, thrashing and writhing, clamping onto the doors and hauling them together.

They closed with a huge, echoing clang. As soon as the metal crashed together, the baleful presence from above lessened.

Telach cut the raging inferno loose, and fell to one knee. Warp essence tore free of him, curling out into the dark like a whiplash, before exploding in a multi-coloured nova against the hot metal of the closed gates.

The daemons, those that had survived the Iron Hands’ onslaught, launched into a final vicious assault, knowing they were cut off now and at the mercy of Emperor’s Angels. Still they came on, fearlessly, devastatingly, with the fire of the warp in their eyes.

Telach drew in thick, heaving breaths. His real-world sight became blurred. He fell forwards, dizzy, and had to put out a hand to stop himself pitching to the floor.

Every muscle in his body glowed with pain. Even his bionic implants had been stressed, and he could feel the heat in the mechanical components as they wound down.

It was a dangerous time. Drained of energy, bereft of the warp-drawn aegis that protected him, his body and soul were vulnerable to the daemons.

He looked up, ignoring the bite of pain in his neck muscles, readying to use his force-staff in self-defence.

He needn’t have worried. Ten huge silhouettes of power armour surrounded him. He heard the roar of Khatir close by, driving his acolytes on to ever greater feats of arms. The daemons still rushed towards the bringer of their torment, shrieking with frustrated anguish, but had no chance of penetrating the cordon around him.

Telach felt some of his strength return. He swallowed, and tasted the blood in his mouth. Moving slowly, panting with the effort, he regained his feet.

Rauth broke from combat then, turned, and lumbered over to him. The commander’s armour was streaked with blood and purple fluid; an unholy mixture of mortal and immortal essences. In his absence, Imanol’s warriors maintained the protective shield.

+The gates are closed, lord,+ Telach sent. His mouth was still too raw to move.

‘Indeed,’ said Rauth. He sounded neither pleased nor disappointed, despite the fact that the tunnels had now been sealed from further enemy reinforcement. As ever, his tone was impassive. ‘What is your status?’

+I will live.+

‘Good.’

Rauth looked out, over Telach’s shoulder and back down the long, gaping maw of the tunnels. Moving more gingerly, Telach turned to look the same way.

‘What do you see?’ asked Rauth.

Telach grimaced, and gathered his farsight once again. The effort of summoning it felt like ripping sinew from bone.

+We have taken the tunnels, lord,+ he said, letting his senses sweep back down the length of them. +Once the residual enemy is dispatched, they will be secure.+

His vision rushed onwards, racing across scenes of devastation.

‘And the mortals?’

Telach’s mind-sight passed over the wreckage of three Warhound Titans, each one burning and gutted. They stood in the darkness like braziers, wrapped in unwholesome, purple-tinged flames. He saw whole companies of men lying butchered amid the slime of the tunnel floor. He saw lines of tanks, broken and tilted and with their armour plate defaced. Survivors still fought with traitors along the entire length of the transit routes. In the wells where the grav-train tracks had been sunk, blood lapped at the gutters like the tide against the shore.

+Heavy fighting,+ he sent.

Rauth nodded.

‘When the last of the neverborn are dissipated, the claves will relieve them,’ he said. ‘Those that survived will be re-formed and will accompany us into the spires.’

Telach let his mind-sight sink back behind his physical eyes.

Thousands have died. Tens of thousands.

He blinked heavily, and fresh blood ran down his cheeks.

+Was this the only way, lord?+ he asked, almost without meaning to. He caught himself too late, and found himself looking up into the blank deathmask of Rauth’s Terminator helm.

Rauth paused for a moment before responding. From behind him, the noises of battle began to diminish as the remaining daemons were destroyed.

‘Every mortal who dies frees up a Space Marine to kill,’ he said. ‘We cannot shepherd them all. Do you object?’

Telach felt sick, and knew exactly why that was. He had overexerted himself already, and knew that the greater challenge was still to come. He was in no condition to think clearly or cogently about the tactical situation. He was in no condition to think clearly about anything.

‘No,’ he said out loud, wincing as the flesh of his lips cracked. ‘Forgive me. I need just a little time, to recover.’

Rauth continued looking at him. As ever, the clan commander gave nothing away, sealed inside his massive sarcophagus of sable armour. Only the low grind of his power generators gave away the fact that he was alive at all.

‘They were acceptable losses, Telach,’ Rauth said. ‘Do not lose your nerve. The final assault will come soon, and I will need you.’

Telach bowed stiffly.

‘By your command,’ he said.

Acceptable losses.

‘Do you require an Apothecary? An Iron Father?’

Tens of thousands.

‘An Apothecary?’ asked Telach. He looked up, high into the vaults where the last of the daemons were pinned down by bolter fire. Their sweet stink lingered in the air, hanging alongside the reek of blood and charred metal.

The nausea in the back of his throat intensified. He couldn’t shake the blurriness of his vision, nor the resonance of screaming in his ears.

It would be good to be rid of such things. It would be good to lose the organs and the glands that made him feel that way. It would be good, perhaps, to see the world as Rauth did – lines of force, resistance, possibility – and nothing else.

‘No, not an Apothecary,’ said Telach, and his words slurred from mortal exhaustion. The battle for the tunnels was over, and they had won it, but he took no pleasure in it.

‘For what I have become,’ he said, ‘for what we have become, what good would that be?’

III

THE MACHINE-SPIRIT

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The ash clouds over the Iron Hands’ Helatine command complex buckled and glowed, quickly moving from black to a dull ember-red. Warning lights flickered on across the landing stages, tracing out a hexagonal figure on the wind-blasted rockcrete. Automated defence turrets swung into position, extending their barrels and activating a shimmering level of void shields twenty metres above the ebony walls of the facility.

Nearly as soon as the defensive measures had taken effect, the systems shut down. The gun barrels slumped into dormancy. The void shields rippled away, leaving the landing stages exposed and unprotected.

The clouds continued to boil and churn. The ember-red glow turned a deep crimson, then orange. A whole swathe of ash was blown free, exposing a thundering column of flame dropping down slowly through the atmosphere. Seven circles of fire hove into view, each one a thruster for a descending lander.

Master of Thralls Gerod Siirt watched the vessel’s approach from behind several layers of blastproof plexiglass. A steady stream of runes told him that his systems had been breached and that something subtle and difficult was preventing his servitors getting them back up again. Fearful aides hovered close by him, all dressed in sheer black robes and sporting esoteric bionics across their pale faces, none of them daring to pass on any further bad news.

None of them, to be fair, could have told him anything he didn’t already know. Siirt’s own internal systems, including a hard-plugged auspex array that was finer than that possessed by most non-military starships, gave him better information than all of them put together.

From this, he knew several things.

First, that the lander had come down from high orbit, above the level where the Medusan strike cruiser Kalach and its scorts held anchor. For this to have been possible, it must have been capable of concealing its presence with considerable guile – the instruments on board the Iron Hands capital ship were a match for almost anything else in the Imperium.

Second, that the lander did not belong to the Imperial Navy, which had maintained its presence further out. Nothing possessed by Admiral Malfia would have been capable of making planetfall so stealthily, nor of shutting down the base’s automated turrets.

Third, that Siirt’s defensive systems would not become operational fast enough to prevent the landing. The craft would touch down unopposed with its weapons at full pitch and its own shields intact. Such actions were not those of a friendly power.

Fourth, that the energy signature of the lander’s engines was of a distinctive type. Siirt had seen similar patterns before on previous campaigns, and so recognised the vessel as being of the Mechanicus. A quick check on his internal cogitator’s memory banks run against three pict-shot profiles of the vessel confirmed its identity: lander UJ-I8 (Spectre class, heavily modified), listed as complement on special liaison vessel 778, designation Factor Balance.

Siirt knew enough then to guess that something serious had taken place, and had time to regret the fact that the entire Adeptus Astartes capability of Clan Raukaan was deployed in theatre. The clan’s seven Dreadnoughts in hibernation aboard the Kalach would take days to summon, as they had never been intended for on-world deployment. The command complex was full of Medusan auxiliaria, many of whom had bio-enhancements and augmetics on a parallel with skitarii, though if the Mechanicus vessel were powerful enough to interfere with the defence grid remotely there was no telling whether that force would be nearly enough to hold the complex.

Such were the thoughts running through Siirt’s mind as he watched the lander touch down in the centre of the landing stage. He made no move to restore power to the autocannons mounted on the walls surrounding it, nor did he attempt to open a channel for comms.

‘Two squads,’ he voxed to his resident troop contingent, turning away from the viewport and walking towards the reception chambers below. ‘Station all available others overlooking the vessel. Make them obvious.’

As he moved down to the reception levels, the two squads of thralls he’d requested fell in behind him. They were all dressed in matt-black carapace armour with blank visors and angular shoulder guards. Each trooper carried a heavy-gauge lasgun and had steel augmetic traces littered across their battle-plate.

They were all Medusan, all battle-hardened, and all heavily altered by the tech-chirurgeons. In normal circumstances, such soldiers would have been capable of taking on virtually anything. In normal circumstances, Siirt would have trusted them to keep him alive for a very long time.

‘Any signal from the front?’ he voxed back to the command chamber as he walked.

‘Negative, master,’ came the reply. ‘Clan Commander Rauth remains out of range.’

‘Keep trying.’

Siirt strode down the short corridor to the blast doors, watching diagnostic readings from the complex’s sensoria scroll down his retinal display. The defence grid was still dormant.

Just days earlier, he’d overseen the preparations for the arrival of Lord Telach on the same landing stage. Then, of course, Siirt, had stayed very much out of sight, and it had been Rauth and his retinue who had walked out onto the apron to meet him. Siirt didn’t like being out of the shadows. He was a Medusan mortal; like all his race, he disdained the harsh light of exposure. His home world was too dark, too cold, to relish anything other than concealment.

He paused before the doors, collecting himself. From the far side, he could hear the dull thud of a landing ramp hitting the ground and the slow whine of engines running down.

‘So,’ he said to himself. ‘Let us see what we will see.’

He gestured, and the doors slid open. The foul air of Shardenus gusted in, spreading ash across the low-lit corridor floor.

Twenty-five figures waited for him, clustered under the slowly cooling bulk of the lander. Twenty-four of them were skitarii. As usual with the servants of the Mechanicus, their appearance was heterodox – collections of artificial limbs, implanted weaponry, metal faceplates or tank-tracks in place of legs.

The twenty-fifth was different – a human female, average height, slim build, clad in a long russet cloak with a theatrical cowl draped over her face.

Siirt bowed. As he did so, his men silently fanned out on either side of him. Their positions, weapon-states and armour integrity all registered on his retinal display as tiny red sigil-clusters. He had no doubt that the woman in front of him commanded similar data on her own pet warriors.

‘Magos Ys,’ said Siirte. ‘This is unexpected.’

‘It should not be,’ replied Ys. Her voice was smooth and unruffled, though an undertow of quiet anger marked it. ‘Where is Commander Rauth?’

‘He is engaged in operations.’

‘Summon him.’

‘I cannot. Contact cannot be established at this time.’

‘You must have some means.’

‘The clan has undertaken operations deep underground. We have not been able to send or receive comm-traffic for two standard days.’

The magos didn’t respond immediately. Siirt thought he heard a low clicking from under the woman’s cowl, then she walked towards him. He detected the trace sounds of his men priming their weapons, and issued a mental pulse warning them to remain calm.

‘Do you know what has happened to my war engines, Medusan?’ asked Ys. Her voice had lost any pretence of civility.

‘I do not, magos.’

‘Then you are blind as well as stupid,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you do not appreciate how precious such things are to us.’

Siirt remained perfectly still. He could almost taste the tension on the air. The magos gave off subtle signal traces of aggression, some of which he could pick up with his inbuilt instruments.

She was extremely angry.

‘I have not seen this data,’ he said.

‘I have spoken to my princeps,’ said Ys. ‘He has been in touch with Lord General Nethata, who has his own reasons for doubting your commander’s judgement. For a long time I have urged restraint, but all tolerances have their limits.’

‘I know nothing of this,’ he said.

‘Yes, so you say. Are you capable of saying anything else?’

‘The sensor impressions we have confirm that the current action is over,’ Siirt said, keeping his tone neutral. ‘I expect a full report from the front within the next few hours. After that, according to the schedule I have, the assault on the Capitolis spire will commence, and full comms may be re-established.’

‘The next few hours.’

‘Yes.’

‘I am troubled that you think that is, in any sense, satisfactory.’

The magos reached up and pulled her cowl back. It revealed a slender, elegant face entirely composed of interlocking plates of metal. Her eyes glowed red, just like the lenses of an Iron Hand’s battle-plate. The sigil of the Mechanicus was embossed on one cheek and the winged griffon emblem of her forge-guild on the other.

Somehow, the effect was more troubling than the mix of flesh and metal that Siirt was used to seeing. Ys was the complete article.

‘My skitarii will deploy here before setting out,’ she said. ‘I shall resolve this situation myself, since those in the field have proved so woefully incapable of doing so. If he will not come to me, I shall come to him. I do not care where he is, nor how busy his duties make him – we shall talk.’

Siirt swallowed.

‘That is not permitted, magos,’ he said. ‘The combat zone is proscribed to non-military personnel. We can accommodate you here until communications are re-established, after which a hololith transmission can be routed directly to your private chambers.’

Ys looked at him frostily. Her red eyes blazed through the smog of drifting ash, glinting from the metal plates around them.

‘Is that your final word?’ she asked.

Siirt tried to hold her gaze. From somewhere, he could sense a power build-up, and blink-commed a warning to his men.

‘It is.’

The burst came too suddenly. Siirt felt massive, acute pain in his temples, and clapped his hands to his head. He could hear the terse grunts of his men as their neural implants crackled and they fell to the floor. He staggered, stumbling forwards, gagging from the pain. The world seemed to reel, and he reached out to break his fall.

Then it was over. Ys reached out, catching him before he collapsed. He looked up groggily and found his face a hand’s breadth from hers. He was sweating, his heart racing. Something very powerful had been unleashed, something that, just as before, was capable of reaching right into their systems and rendering them helpless.

If it hadn’t made him feel so bad, he might have admired the artifice of it. How much did the Mechanicus know of Medusan machine-protocols?

‘I recommend a more helpful attitude,’ said Ys, holding his arm firmly in her metal fingers. ‘More skitarii will be landing shortly, and I do not expect them to be impeded.’

Siirt looked up at her red eyes, unable to speak. He was close enough to smell ritual incense on her robes. In the background, he could hear the sounds of his men struggling to breathe.

Ys brought her face even closer to his, leaning forwards as if she wanted to whisper some intimate conspiracy between them.

‘I shall speak to him,’ she said, her voice low. ‘Even if all the forces of the Annihilator stand between us, I shall speak to him. And when I do, as the Omnissiah guides my hand, he will listen.’

The gates to the Capitolis were shut. Their ornate, gilded surfaces still swam with witchlight, flickering out into the darkness of the tunnels in slowly ebbing swirls.

With the banishment of the daemons and the destruction of the remaining enemy troops, the cavernous space before the portal had slumped into darkness once more. The stench of cordite and blood still lay heavy in the air. The cries of the dying and the wounded echoed eerily in the vast spaces, rebounding from the rockcrete walls like the forlorn wails of spectres.

Rauth looked up at the immense baroque doors, ignoring the clangs and booms of activity around him. Every instinct within him urged him to break them down and surge on up into the spires beyond. That, for the time being, was impossible, even for him. Telach’s closing of the gates had given them the breathing space they needed to regroup. The claves, freed from battling the last of the daemons, had already stalked back down the length of the tunnels, slaughtering any residual traitors they came across and corralling the surviving mortals into fresh columns for renewed assault.

The respite would only be brief. They consolidated, just for the moment, gathering their strength again, rounding up those mortals who could still march and giving the Emperor’s Mercy to those who could not.

Rauth no longer felt much at all for those who suffered. He certainly didn’t despise them. The itch, as Telach referred to it, that loathing of human frailty, had ceased to have much purchase on him since the last vestiges of his own mortal frame had been flensed away. In truth, he had little idea how much organic matter remained, locked away in pockets within his giant mechanical skeleton. A brain, perhaps some spinal matter, progenoids; not much else.

For all their weakness, though, the mortal troops were necessary. Nethata had not answered the summons. Rauth didn’t know why. Perhaps fighting out on the surface had been heavier than expected; in any case, it was not good enough. The Guard under the Lord General’s command would be needed for the final push if the Iron Hands were not to be bogged down by the sheer volume of enemy troops within the Capitolis. Just as before, the human contingents would be needed to tie up the enemy assaults, freeing the real warriors to strike up at the pinnacle.

The summit was where the nightmares lay. Telach had divined that much, at least – whatever he’d sensed was there, growing in power with every passing heartbeat.

As if summoned by Rauth’s thoughts, the Chief Librarian lumbered up then. Rauth turned to face him. Telach’s shoulders looked slumped even under his heavy battle-plate, and he radiated fatigue. His armour still snaked with curls of opalescent energy, but the dazzling radiance that had blazed earlier had, for the time being, gone out.

‘When will you be ready to fight again?’ asked Rauth.

Telach straightened.

‘Whenever required, lord,’ he said.

‘That will be soon,’ said Rauth. ‘You know it must be. Tell me, what waits for us in there?’

‘I do not know. The spires are shielded from me.’

‘Then guess.’

Telach hesitated. He drew in a deep breath, and Rauth heard his damaged vox-grille rattle.

‘The neverborn,’ said Telach at last. ‘They used a proscribed name: a fallen primarch, now lost to the Eye. Perhaps they do so to mislead us, or perhaps they taunt us with the truth. Sometimes they speak the truth even when they would be wiser not to – they have strange natures.’

Rauth nodded.

‘I heard the same name,’ he said. ‘But it is not him that waits for us. If it were, we would be dead already.’

‘Indeed,’ said Telach. ‘Perhaps a creature in his power, though, one who nurses a special hatred for us. When we enter the spire I will know more. Beyond that, I will only say this: it is not yet manifest. Time is against us, lord. This pause must be a short one.’

‘You do not have to tell me that,’ growled Rauth, gazing hungrily back up at the sealed doors. ‘I long for nothing else but to get in there.’

Telach let slip a grim laugh then. Perhaps, out of all of the senior Iron Hands in Raukaan, he was the only one still capable of such a thing – a residual, infinitesimal, sense of irony.

‘Be careful what you wish for,’ he said.

The walls were alive. Metal, once as inanimate and as cold as ice, had sprung into fluid life. Riveted bracings curled around the base of pillars and crept over the lintels of doorways. As the bracings moved they let out a faint noise – a hiss, punctuated with bubbling pops as the structure flexed and rippled.

Mesh-steel floors undulated like hide stretched across a drum. Growths punched up through the surface, shiny and phosphorescent. The air shimmered with curtains of gauze, drifting aimlessly as idle currents ran down the winding passageways.

A heartbeat rang out, long and slow, underpinning the steady chatter of the vaults above. It welled up out of the depths, sonorous and echoing. As it beat, the curtains in the air trembled, spilling tiny points of glistening dust onto the skin-floor.

Old coolant pipes had burst free of the walls. They gurgled with dark crimson contents. Further along, where the corridor tilted and swivelled round to the right, blood-coloured fluid spilled freely across the floor. It sank into the drum-hide surface in a foam of pink, bubbling as it was devoured.

It was hot, almost unbearably so. Heat radiated from the living walls, making them drip with moisture. Even so high up, there was no escape from it. What remained of the corridors, the service tunnels, the transit shafts, the meeting chambers, the chapels and pleasure gardens – all of it was soaked in soft, cloying, sticky heat.

Voices echoed down the corridors, faint and broken. A child sobbed, over and over again, lost in the maze of pulsing, throbbing matter. Women whispered or hissed; men laughed too hard, as if making up for some unutterable, dreaming horror with hollow mockery.

Valien never saw the owners of those voices. He trod along the soft, fleshy ways, stumbling in half-blindness, trying not to hear them. At every corner he would pause, believing that someone was waiting for him just on the other side. Whenever he staggered around it, though, another foetid artery would await him, empty and seamy and stuffed with spores. The place was at once deserted and full; both empty of bodies and singing with souls.

The walls closed in on him. Where they had once been dirty, dark and cold they were now glossy, organic and hot to the touch. Breathing remained difficult. Valien’s suit’s systems were giving out – he could feel his atmospheric filters clogging with spores. Sweat had collected in his boots, and his bodyglove was sticky with it. Dehydration had given him a persistent, sick headache, and his dry tongue was swollen in his mouth.

He knew that he was somewhere very high in the spire of the Capitolis. He had taken the difficult way up, the circuit-ous route. It would have been quicker to have cut across to the vast, roofless chamber that ran up the very centre of the spire, to the colossal spiral stairway carved from marble and lined with steel that curled up and up around the adamantium spine of the Capitolis. That was Shardenus’s glory: the Great Stair, an immense series of gilded steps that climbed for hundreds of metres without break from the filth of the earth to the smog of the heavens.

That way had been guarded, thronged with mutants, cultists, dead-eyed warp beasts and shuffling spawn, and so he had been forced to find the dank, twisting, hidden ways up, the ones that had been abandoned, forgotten or closed off. His world became a dark procession of cramped, clammy tunnels, each one dripping with fluids like bodily organs. The walls themselves trembled like flaps of skin, and the air stank with the musk of living matter. The dark, gothic majesty of a world’s command centre had been perverted, turned from austere stone and metal into a nightmarish image of flesh, bone and blood.

Only once did Valien see evidence of what the Capitolis had been like before corruption had come. He stumbled at the end of a long, dizzying climb up a series of tortuous capillary tunnels, falling to his knees from light-headedness as he reached the top and clambered into a tiny, deserted chamber. Ahead of him, only a metre or two away, was a column of carved onyx. The column was surmounted with a statue. A grave, mournful face stared back at him out of the dark, rendered in thick sweeps of a sculptor’s chisel.

He’d seen the same figure many times before. The likeness was a standard one, propagated by the Ecclesiarchy and sanctioned in the manuals of all the artisan guilds. A near-identical statue had stood in the Talica shrine on Hespera, the one in which he’d undertaken his final training. It was Rogal Dorn; the Lord Protector, Saviour of Terra, master of the Fists, the golden son standing resplendent in his armour at the dawn of Mankind’s eternal reign across the stars.

Alone among the paraphernalia of the upper spires, that statue remained untouched. Pools of glistening liquid fermented gently at its base. Tendrils crept up the polished surface of the pillar, straining to reach the figure at the top and choke it.

Valien looked at it for a long time. In the past, in other places, he’d found the selfsame image preposterous. He’d mocked the angular jawline, the narrow eyes, the rigid, clenched expression of resolve. For a cynical man in a cynical profession, such caricatured defiance had always struck him as faintly ludicrous.

No longer. Valien found himself remembering the stories he’d been forced to memorise in the schola, of Dorn’s tortured progress through the webs of madness spun by the Arch-Traitor in the final battle for Terra, alone and surrounded by the raw stuff of Chaos.

As he recalled the texts, the legends, the myths, he managed a faint smile.

So it was for you, so it is for me.

Valien got back to his feet, trying to ignore the soft sucking sounds his boots made on the trembling floor.

But you were a primarch, the exemplar son of a living god.

He started to stumble onwards again. As he did so, his fingers strayed to his chest. He ran his fingers over the indentations just below his heart.

And I am the lowest of your Father’s servants; a criminal and a blood-drinker and a sinner given the tasks no right-thinking human would undertake.

The ambient heartbeat echoed in his thick, clammy head. Another tunnel snaked away from him, blurry and lost in heat-haze. He limped down it, following nothing but instinct, remembering almost nothing of the orders Heriat had given him. A drive older than all others, older even than base survival, goaded him on.

Curiosity. Now, after all this, I will find out what evil has been gestating here. He saw no mortals. He had not seen a living soul since Venmo Kilag, far down in the abyss of tunnels in the Capitolis’s bowels. If he had been feeling less sick, less faint, he might have speculated on the fate of the millions of men and women who had once inhabited such a huge spire and were now nowhere to be seen. He might have wondered what terrible magicks locked their voices in the air, making them speak as if still alive and moving through the corridors. He might have paid a little more attention to the strange faces half-buried in the shifting skeins of the walls and the floors, or the way the ceilings bulged, or the long trails of blood that led to the transit shafts.

When my curiosity is sated, I will do what I came for.

Valien crept onwards, wheezing in the thick air, pushing spore-veils aside with his shaking hands.

I will carry out the order.

He hardly knew where he was going. He was blind, weak and disorientated, and the last of his mortal strength was ebbing. For all that, he retained a certain confidence. As surely as if the Emperor Himself were guiding him, he knew he was coming to the heart of it. Even at the end, bereft of senses, his faith remained absolute.

I will accomplish it.

He crawled on.

And then, only then, will I die.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

For a while at least, the guns had fallen silent. The wasteland between the spires had reverted to a bleak, toxin-infested swamp, untroubled by the grinding passage of tank groups or the tread of Titans. Hot winds blew across the tangle of blasted buildings and roadways, pulling ash across the evidence of fighting. Smouldering wreckage started to coat with a thin layer of coal-black filth.

The twin Melamar hives had finished burning. Their precipitous outer walls were broken and black, and a thousand columns of smoke rose lazily into the gloomy sky. To the east, the Axis spires still raged with untamed fires. Immense gashes had been cut into the flanks of the conurbations, glowing with fringes of magma-hot metal.

To the north, the vast structure of the Capitolis stood inviolate, half-lost in the haze of distance. Its mighty walls rose high, pristine and surmounted with ranks of gun batteries. A soaring mass of domes, gothic buttresses and blackened turrets thrust above them, undamaged still, glowing with light from within. Far up, sweeping towards the summit, the lights altered in hue, going from red to purple. The uttermost pinnacle was hidden by drifting shrouds of ash, but the intense and unnatural glow bleeding from it couldn’t be hidden.

Nethata looked upon the vista on Malevolentia’s bank of pict screens, rotating the angles slowly, marking the destruction his forces had wreaked. Heriat sat opposite him, watching as position runes and scrolling databursts recorded the deployment of the assets under the Guard’s control.

Malevolentia had come to rest atop a low rise in the centre of a ruined industrial facility in the heart of the wastes. The space around the tank had once been a storage yard for chem-transporters. A few of the old vehicles remained intact, clustered around the edge of a rutted concrete rectangle. They were dwarfed by the gigantic machine standing in their midst. Its engines still laboured, producing a thick pall of smoke from its rear stacks. The ground behind it was shattered where it had crashed through the yard’s perimeter fencing.

‘The final groups have reported in,’ said Heriat eventually, concentrating on the screens in front of him.

‘And?’

‘All squadrons intact. Some losses from counter-attacks during the withdrawal from Axis, but within your predicted parameters. The targets around us can no longer muster significant return fire.’

Nethata grunted with satisfaction.

This is the way to wage a war. Careful, judicial, logical.

‘We will move again soon,’ he said.

‘Indeed,’ said Heriat. ‘Refuelling and supply are already under way.’

Nethata was reassured by his progress. He still had formidable forces at his disposal. Taking account of the mobile artillery pieces, the heavy armour and the rapid-reaction troop contingents, he had sole possession of an army in its own right. He was weak in air support since the debacle of the first attack runs, it was true, but then the enemy was deficient in that area too. Despite Rauth’s mismanagement of Territo’s substantial resources, enough remained to give him hope that the campaign could yet be salvaged.

‘Has Princeps Lopi made contact?’ Nethata asked.

‘He has.’ Heriat’s voice sounded almost grudging. ‘Do you wish to acknowledge?’

‘Of course,’ said Nethata. ‘Why didn’t you say? And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to take this alone.’

Heriat looked surprised at that.

‘As you wish,’ he said stiffly, unstrapping himself from his seat and clambering upwards out of the narrow command chamber. The hatch slammed shut behind him, sealing Nethata in.

Nethata swivelled around to face the chamber’s hololith pillar, keying in the authorisation on a copper-plated panel. He didn’t like giving Heriat orders like that. It felt disloyal, almost impertinent, but the man was a commissar, and the things he had to discuss with Lopi were delicate.

I shall make it up to him, he thought. I shall make all this up to him when this madness is over, and everything shall go back to the way it was before.

The hololith column rose up from its base, grinding on old gears. Nethata smoothed his crumpled uniform and adjusted his position. No one looked their best after days cooped up in a Baneblade, but the little things were still important.

A luminous face laced with cables and metal jack-nodes flickered into being above the pillar, shifting and crackling with interference.

Nethata bowed.

‘Princeps Lopi,’ he said, addressing the lithfeed. ‘I am sorry this is the first time we have spoken face-to-face. We should have done so properly before.’

The princeps didn’t respond initially. Though it might have been an artefact of the long-range hololith transport, it looked for all the world like he had recently been crying.

‘I felt them,’ said Lopi.

The words left his mouth awkwardly, as if he’d spent so long using binaric that Gothic had become uncomfortable to him.

Nethata hesitated. He wasn’t sure he’d heard him correctly.

‘As I say, I’m sorry if–’

‘I felt them.’ Lopi’s voice was broken and halting. As he spoke, his eyes wandered. He hardly seemed to register Nethata’s presence. ‘I felt them go, one by one.’

Nethata suddenly started to doubt the usefulness of the conversation.

‘I can see that your grief is still acute, princeps,’ he said, speaking carefully. ‘Perhaps it would be better if–’

Suddenly, Lopi’s gaze snapped into focus. He looked at Nethata, and something like embarrassment rippled across his augmented features.

‘No, I am sorry.’ His right cheek twitched. ‘I would not expect you to understand. You see, we feel one another. We are one another. You are alone. We are many. Their voices, they linger. But it should not affect my judgement; I apologise.’

Nethata studied the flickering feed carefully. The princeps was in a bad way. From all the files Nethata had scanned, Lopi was an experienced commander, a veteran of dozens of engagements; he should have been used to death in battle.

Then again, Shardenus was a strange place. The corrosive, decaying atmosphere had a way of getting to you. The adepts of the Mechanicus were an odd breed, too – perhaps the deaths of their war engines really did affect them.

‘You have my deepest condolences,’ Nethata offered, unsure whether anything he could say would make much difference. ‘I believe I understand your position – I have lost men, too. Both our armies have suffered more than is needful. That is why I hoped you would wish to talk, to find some kind of… accommodation.’

Lopi’s fractured face looked steadily at him.

‘What do you mean?’

Nethata cleared his throat awkwardly.

‘I mean this,’ he said, embarking straight into the case he had long prepared. ‘The clan commander feels nothing for the souls under his command. I have argued from the start that his pace is too fast, that it risks exhausting our forces before our goal can be achieved. Those arguments have fallen on deaf ears, but now, perhaps, I am not alone in sharing them.’

Even through the shifting, shimmering layers of the lithfeed, Nethata could see that Lopi was interested. Cautious, but interested.

‘Explain exactly what you mean, Lord General,’ Lopi said. ‘I do not have the time for hints.’

Nethata felt his pulse begin to pick up. He was committed now.

‘We have had communication from Rauth,’ he said. ‘He has wasted the forces under his command in an attempt to take the transit corridors quickly. The Warhounds, as you know, have been lost. My Guard regiments fighting with him have been reduced to a fraction of their former numbers. His own Space Marines have taken heavy losses. No satisfactory explanation for this has been forthcoming. Perhaps it is pride, but he will admit no criticism of his tactics.’

Lopi said nothing, but kept listening.

‘He needs us, princeps,’ said Nethata. ‘He needs my armour, and he needs your engines. I have already received orders to bring all my forces into range for immediate assault on the Capitolis. If your sensori has not already received similar requests, he will soon.’

‘I have not been taking communications,’ said Lopi.

‘Well, when you do,’ said Nethata, ‘that will be the content of them. But here is the thing: we – you and I – we are not subordinates, ripe to be ordered into whatever massacre is lined up next. We are commanders of noble forces. We deserve consultation. We deserve respect.’

Lopi’s grainy face looked wary.

‘You are under his command, general,’ he said. ‘I am bound by bonds of allegiance. Are you proposing what I think you are?’

Nethata smiled.

‘Mutiny?’ he asked. ‘No, nothing like that.’

He realised his fists had clenched tightly against the arms of his seat, and gradually relaxed them.

‘I propose holding our ground, that is all,’ he said. ‘We wait here, out in the wasteland. We do not advance. We keep our guns – all of them – here in reserve. If he wants them, he will have to come to us. He will be furious, for sure, but what can he do? Only talk. Listen. Compromise.’

Lopi’s expression was hard to read over the fuzzy lithfeed.

‘You seem to have everything worked out,’ he said.

‘I do,’ said Nethata. ‘I want the Axis hives taken out. I want raids on the remaining peripheral spires, taking out their long-range weaponry. I want time to resupply and regroup the ground forces, and I want an agreed strategy for the taking of the Capitolis. I will commit no further resources under my authority until I have assurances of their usage.’

Lopi started to reply, but Nethata kept speaking.

‘One more thing, please, before you respond,’ he said. ‘Know that I am no craven, nor am I a traitor. I have fought a lifetime for the Emperor and know the price of warfare. If I thought it necessary for victory, I would sacrifice my regiments, and myself, a thousand times over. But I am also no butcher, and do not throw the Imperium’s finest weapons – its mortal souls – needlessly into the fire. Rauth will listen to us if you join me. He will have to. He will be forced to see the sense of it.’

Nethata thought then of his meeting with Magos Ys, and remembered what she had told him.

‘This is the only way,’ he said. ‘We cannot hope to persuade, except by the withdrawal of what he needs. They are machines, the Iron Hands; they are monsters, and their minds are closed. They only respect strength, and together we will be strong enough.’

Nethata stopped talking. He sat motionless, waiting for Lopi’s reaction.

The princeps didn’t respond. His face hung expressionless over the column, shaking and breaking up in the low, filmy light.

Nethata didn’t dare to press him. He waited. Only when he began to wonder if the audio feed had somehow been compromised did he speak again.

‘Princeps?’ he said. ‘Did you hear me correctly?’

Lopi looked back at him. There was no mistaking it this time – trails of tears marked his cheeks, glistening where they had collected on his exposed augmetics.

‘I have heard your words, Lord General, and considered them,’ he said.

Another agonising pause, and then he spoke again.

‘We stand together,’ he said.

Nethata felt a wave of relief flood through him.

‘I am glad to hear it, princeps,’ he said, smiling despite himself. ‘This is the right decision; this is where the tide turns.’

He had to fight to stop himself smiling. Now, all things were possible. Now the battle could be conducted on sensible terms.

‘This is where we remember our dignity,’ he said.

Morvox stalked through the foetid transit tunnels, striding across the scenes of ruin. Smoke rolled lazily across the floor, sinking into wells and blast craters. A faint tang of musk still clung to the blackened and broken landscape, mingling with stronger smells of charring and decay.

Clave Arx had spread out thinly, each warrior heading out into the shadows to hunt down the last of the enemy and retrieve the remaining mortal forces for the renewed assault. In addition to Fierez, two battle-brothers of Arx had been slain before the doors were closed and the combat had ebbed at last. Once their progenoids had been recovered and their armour taken away, none of the surviving members of the clave made any mention of them. They went about their duties just as they always did – silently, efficiently.

Morvox didn’t question that. He felt no grief for the warriors’ passing: they had been weapons, instruments of the Emperor’s vengeance, and death in battle was something that would come for all of them in the end.

Only mortals grieved. Morvox watched them as they trudged along the tunnels around him, lined up in ragged columns, their eyes dull and their expressions slack. Some them had the staring looks of men in shock; others were plainly terrified, as if the deep shadows still held creatures that could harm them. Many had to be threatened with execution before they would get back to their feet. The occasional hard bang of bolters from further down the immense transit corridor indicated that those threats were carried through.

Morvox paused for a moment, watching a line of dishevelled Ferik Guardsmen make their way out of the gloom and towards the gates. He found himself strangely absorbed by them, just as he had been by the fighters in the Melamar hive. Their movements were clumsy. They went slowly. Their killing potential was negligible; only in huge numbers could they hope to turn the course of battles.

Something about them captivated him. The sensation made him uncomfortable.

Once, on Medusa, vanishingly far into his past and long before he’d begun the journey from mortal childhood into superhumanity, Naim Morvox had broken his left arm. He had done it while working in the burning hell of his land engine’s enginarium. The pain had been sudden, eye-watering in intensity, and he’d struggled not to scream.

Then he’d seen the wound. He’d seen his white bone protruding from between torn muscle. He’d watched his blood well up in the gash, hot and thick and nearly black. He’d felt faint, and had slumped back against the drive housing.

After that the crew had come for him. They had given him sedatives and stitched his arm up and strapped up the wound. A week later he’d been back at his station, proud of the scar and proud of the residual pain.

Every so often, even much later, he remembered how he’d felt before they had come for him. He remembered the strange fascination of the broken skin, the meat-red muscle, the oozing fluids. He hadn’t been able to look at it – it had made him feel sick. He hadn’t been able to look away from it either.

That was how he felt then, on Shardenus, looking at the mortal soldiers making their way back to the front. They fascinated him in the same ghoulish, repulsed way that his mangled forearm had fascinated him.

I am going mad, he thought. They are what we live to protect. They are the Imperium. I am going mad.

‘Brother-sergeant.’

Morvox whirled around, startled out of his thoughts.

Iron Father Khatir stood before him. Morvox bowed, ashamed to have been surprised by Khatir’s approach – moving power armour was not the quietest thing in the galaxy.

‘Iron Father,’ he acknowledged. ‘I thought you were with the clan commander.’

‘I was,’ said Khatir. ‘Now I am here.’

As soon as Khatir said those words, Morvox knew what was coming next.

‘Earlier, I was dis–’ Morvox began, attempting to get his penance in early.

‘Twice, you have questioned an order,’ said Khatir. His even tone was no different than it ever was, but somehow the words carried an undertow of menace. That was what the Iron Fathers could do – they could shame, inspire, cow, infuriate, all with words alone.

Morvox saw Khatir’s gauntlets glint in the darkness, ready, as ever, for use. For a second, he imagined them flashing up, bursting with flame, ready to strike at him.

‘I am shamed by it,’ he said, careful to speak only the truth.

‘I see that,’ said Khatir. ‘I have been watching you, brother-sergeant. I have been watching you ever since we fought together in that bunker. Just now, I watched you as you paused in your duty. I saw you stand in these tunnels, and I imagined what thoughts were going through your head.’

Morvox felt a brief stab of resentment, and swallowed it down. It was hard to be talked down to, even by an Iron Father.

‘I will work harder,’ he said. ‘I have been remiss.’

‘You have. But I know what ails you.’

‘You… I…’ Morvox struggled to find the words. ‘What ails me?’

Khatir made no move towards him. He made no gesture of reassurance, nor of condemnation. He stood in the midst of the tunnels, surrounded by the ravages of war, and spoke as quietly as he always did.

‘The beast is most dangerous when closest to death,’ he said. ‘The beast within you is dying, Morvox. It is lashing out. This is a perilous time for you. You are caught between two worlds.’

As the Iron Father spoke, Morvox felt as if something was stirring within him, writhing in his innards like a snake. It indeed felt like some sinuous animal had coiled around his hearts, squeezing against them like a noose.

‘You are changing,’ said Khatir. ‘You are losing the last remnants of your past. You can fail here. I have seen others fail, and it is not something I wish to see again. There is no place within the Iron Hands for failure.’

Khatir lifted his gauntlet and rested it heavily on Morvox’s shoulder guard. The gesture was a bizarre one for a Medusan to make, and Morvox resisted the urge to recoil. He didn’t know whether it was meant to convey reassurance or act as a threat.

‘You still remember pity,’ said Khatir. ‘You look at the cattle who serve alongside us and you mourn their deaths in service. You wish to nurture them, to explain what we are doing, to help them understand. But they will never understand. Even our brothers in other Chapters, those rare ones who are our equal in devotion, even they cannot understand as we do.’

As he listened, Morvox felt the twisting sensation within him grow worse.

‘They have no future,’ said Khatir. ‘The universe holds no place for them. Only the strongest will endure, and nothing is stronger than the machine.’

Morvox had heard such things said many times, but for some reason the words stabbed at him harder then. He didn’t want to listen to them – they made him feel sick. He didn’t want to stop listening to them either.

‘A time will come,’ said Khatir. ‘It will come for you soon. You will forget pity, and you will see the weakness we carry within us. Then you will understand the need to change, to improve, to excise that weakness.’

Khatir exerted pressure on Morvox’s shoulder.

‘Until that time comes, remember who you are. Do not fail. Never question an order again.’

Morvox looked directly up at the Iron Father’s facemask. He couldn’t decide whether the visage was horrific or benign. He felt the weight of the gauntlet on him, heavy like the bonds of death.

‘I will not, lord,’ he said. ‘Never again.’

Columns of men were moving. They didn’t march with the assurance they had done, back when the Iron Father had roused their spirits with his exhortations of duty and sacrifice. They were hunched, sullen, exhausted, terrified.

Marivo watched them pass before dropping back out of sight. The interior of the tunnels echoed with the thud of their boots. Loudspeakers blared out orders, one after the other, all of them demanding more duty and more sacrifice. He barely listened to them – they had become little more than background noise.

He slumped back against the grav-train track housing – a trench barely a metre deep – pressing himself against the cracked ferrocrete wall. His boots slipped on the viscous slime underfoot. He didn’t look too closely at that; it had a familiar stench.

Khadi squatted beside him, breathing heavily. She had barely made it into the shelter of the wall’s shadow. Her physical strength was recovering, but her resolve had crumbled. On the long trudge back from the front line she’d broken into bouts of random sobbing, interspersed with sudden explosions of rage. He’d seen such things before, but that had been on long, arduous campaigns of warfare. The assault on Shardenus had been going on for a matter of days, but already troops were losing their minds from stress and exhaustion.

The trench gave little shelter – just a slightly deeper shadow against the whole mass of spotlights, tracer beams and moving vehicle headlights. Still, it had given him what he needed: a breathing space, a chance to collect his shattered thoughts about what had happened and put them in some kind of order.

Marivo had seen whole companies of loyalist troops swept away. While the daemons had swooped down on them from above, no effective resistance could be mustered. Only luck had saved him. Somehow he’d kept out of the worst of the massacres, dragging Khadi behind him and firing only when he’d had to. His old injuries had started to play up again, and his shoulder had blazed with pain, hampering his aim and making his eyes water.

Then the Iron Hands had returned, marching back down the tunnels and laying waste to all before them. They had been as terrifying as anything else. They had killed, and killed, and killed. Until then he’d have sworn that nothing could stand against a daemon, but they had. They had never taken a backward step. Even as the unholy monsters had ripped into their sacred armour and plunged glowing claws into their exposed flesh, they’d kept on fighting.

All of this Marivo had watched, staying hidden amid the stink and the corpses, holding on to Khadi and keeping his hand clamped over her helmet’s mouthpiece in case the sobbing started again.

If you could fight those monsters, he’d thought, why were you not by our side when it might have done us some good?

As the worst of the horror and the fear subsided, that question burned in his mind. It made him angrier the more he pondered it.

So it was that he didn’t rush to join the shuffling rows of men making their way along the tunnels and back to war. An instinct deep within him told him that he ought to, that his oaths of office in the Guard bound him to service and that refusal to move when ordered was a betrayal, but he resisted it and stayed hunched in the shadows, his arms around Khadi in an unconscious embrace of protection, his lasgun primed to fire at anyone, from either side, who got too close.

‘What are we going to do?’

Khadi’s voice was little more than a whisper. Marivo glanced down at her. Her tear-stained face looked fragile. Her armour didn’t fit her properly; it never had.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

There was little point in pretending otherwise. He didn’t have a plan, and he hadn’t been able to come up with one on the dangerous and wary flight back down the length of the tunnels. All he had left was anger, fear and fatigue.

Khadi pushed herself away from him and craned her neck up above the lip of the trench wall. Her movements were tentative, but at least she was able to move again.

‘They’re still moving,’ she whispered. ‘I can see Iron Hands. They’re rounding up anyone still on their feet.’

‘I know,’ said Marivo, remaining where he was.

Khadi turned back to him, looking scared.

‘You don’t want to go back to them?’

She wasn’t being sarcastic, but she might as well have been. The words stung Marivo, like a mockery from the past.

Half of him did. The old half of him wanted nothing more than to drag himself back over the wall and report for service, just as he had done in the Melamar spire. His lasgun charge was low, but they would probably find a pack for him, and maybe a replacement helmet. Enough men had died, so there were sure to be spares.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

Khadi slipped back down beside him. Her hands were trembling.

‘I can’t go back there,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Throne, I can’t go back. We’ve done our bit. We’ve done so much.’

Marivo nodded slowly.

‘We have,’ he said.

Khadi leant towards him.

‘Could we get out?’ she asked him, her voice suddenly urgent. ‘This place is still in a mess. We could do it.’

Marivo had thought much the same thing. He didn’t know exactly how far down the tunnels they’d already come. In the dark, the wreckage and the confusion there was no way of telling.

‘Maybe,’ he said, not wanting to give her too much encouragement. ‘If they see us try, they’ll kill us.’

Khadi smiled weakly.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But others must have got out. It can’t be that far. We can get back into Melamar, lie low. There’ll be people alive in there, survivors, waiting it out, just like there were before.’

Marivo stayed silent. The struggle within him intensified.

‘And what then?’ he asked, speaking to himself as much as her. ‘What if we made it? How long do you think it’ll be before they catch us up?’

He looked at his hands, feeling weak and tired.

‘They never stop,’ he said.

Khadi grasped his hands then and held them in hers. The movement was sudden, unexpected. Marivo almost snatched them back, but didn’t.

‘Marivo,’ Khadi said. She looked at him, for the first time, like she was looking into the face of someone she could respect. ‘We’ve done pretty well, I reckon, to get this far. Come with me. Forget about your duty – look where that’s got us. We could make it, the two of us. Shardenus is a big place.’

Marivo looked up at her, startled. He had never heard her speak like that before. For the first time, he heard the strength in her voice.

‘We don’t have much time,’ she said. ‘I’m going. I’ve decided.’

She got to her feet, swaying a little as she found her bearings.

‘What will you do?’ she asked, looking at him anxiously. ‘You have to choose now. Come with me – we can make it.’

Marivo couldn’t take his eyes away from her. His mind cycled through the options, over and over, just as it had been doing for the last half-hour. Just as it had been for the last half-hour, the choice remained impossible.

Khadi looked over her shoulder, itching to go. From somewhere deep in the tunnels, the sporadic thud of bolter fire could still be heard.

‘Come on,’ she said, getting ready to make her move. ‘What’s it to be?’

Marivo remained still for a fraction longer. Then, finally, he stirred himself. He felt no confidence in his choice, but at least he’d made it.

‘All right,’ he said, hoisting his lasgun into position. ‘Maybe I do have a plan.’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Valien crept on all fours along the conduit. The tunnel was barely big enough to squeeze down, and it pressed against him tightly. Yielding flesh slid over him, lubricated by a layer of thick, glistening slime. He had to go slowly, pausing often to catch his breath.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He’d used up the last of his suit’s stimm-shots. Whenever he stopped moving for any length of time he’d start shaking from fatigue. He didn’t know where he was exactly, except that there was nowhere else to go, nowhere to keep climbing to. He’d reached the end.

A purple light glowed at the end of the tunnel. He pushed himself towards it. With each push of his legs he got a little closer, and the sensations within him intensified. He felt phlegm rise in his throat, and swallowed it down.

The walls around him began to yield a little. The tunnel opened out as his hands pressed against it, exposing a narrow orifice at the end, just a few metres away. Through the trembling lips of the orifice, Valien could see nothing but a swirling cloud of purple.

He hesitated. The weight of dread in the air had become so heavy that he almost couldn’t move. Every physical action required a huge effort of will.

It is in there. If I go in there, I die. It is in there.

The prospect of his own demise chilled him a little. He’d expected it to be quick – at the end of an arbitrator’s power maul, perhaps, or locked in heroic combat with a similarly skilled agent of the arch-enemy.

You do not deserve any of that. Not for the sins you have committed.

Valien licked his parched lips, and shoved himself forwards. The slick walls of the tunnel slid over him, leaving trails of glistening slime on his armour. His forehead pressed against the trembling lips of the orifice. The gap was barely wider than his shoulders.

He closed his eyes for a moment.

Blessed Emperor… he began, before trailing off.

He could no longer remember the words.

He opened his eyes again, took a spore-filled breath, and pushed his head through the gap.

Immediately, he knew where he was. From his know-ledge of the spire’s schematics, he recognised the shape of the governor’s audience chamber, right at the top of the administrative palace. There was no mistaking the room laid out before him – it must have been over a hundred metres in diameter and perhaps twice as high, and nothing else in the upper spires was remotely as big.

He had emerged high up one of the inner walls. Below him, he could make out a glittering carpet of slime strewn across what had once been marble flagstones. It looked like incarnadine vomit.

The remaining walls of the chamber soared up far above him, terminating in a sheer pointed arch. Chandeliers hung on iron chains from the ceiling, each one emblazoned with crystals and burning with lilac fire.

The chamber was octagonal. Five of the walls, including the one Valien had emerged from, had been constructed from dark stone, fluted and ornamented in the Imperial Gothic style. Most of that decoration was now covered in a thick layer of translucent ooze which glistened warmly in the light from the chandeliers and dribbled obscenely over the faces of sculpted angels.

The remaining three walls were made of armourglas and formed part of the outer skin of the spire. The huge windows looked south, out across the wasteland between the hives. Though his view was clouded by the filth in the air, Valien could just make out the hunched outlines of the Melamar and Axis hives on the southern horizon.

It was an odd thing to see. He’d been active in Melamar Primus only days previously, creeping through the corridors and goading its inhabitants into action. Back then, he’d been in confident control of all his considerable faculties; now, he was only a finger’s width from expiring.

His gaze dropped back into the chamber itself. Before Shardenus’s ruling classes had turned to corruption, Valien imagined that the space would have been austere and elegant. The workmanship of the panes was impressive. The statuary, what remained of it, was imposing. It would have been a fine location to receive ambassadors, Imperial officials, trade delegations.

Now the place had been turned into a carnival of grotesquerie. Facets of the glass swam with filmy matter. Mouths opened and closed obscenely between the flexing stonework. Dripping protuberances snaked out from pools of bubbling froth, lashing back and forth as if searching for prey. Twisting lines of burning incense rose up from the floor, each one a different colour – purple, crimson, cobalt, cadmium. Coloured smoke merged and melded, turning the air of the chamber into a vaguely blood-coloured murk.

The chamber was full. A chorus of murmuring emanated from its occupants, thousands of them, all arranged around a tall throne in the centre of the marble floor. As far as Valien could make out, they were all naked, all bare-headed, all covered in tattoos and splattered purple sigils. They swayed in unison, rippling in time with an ever-present heartbeat that ran through the bones of the structure around him.

Valien didn’t look at them for long. Their murmuring made him feel nauseous, and he had to grip the edges of the orifice to keep himself in place.

He knew where he’d have to look next. He’d been putting it off, forcing his gaze to skirt around it, trying to avoid the inevitable. As surely as if it possessed gravity of its own, however, the throne demanded his attention. With his heart still hammering, Valien let his eyes rise until he was looking at it.

The very act was painful. No figure sat in the throne. The seat was made of obsidian. It was strangely angled. Light reflected from it in unpredictable ways, making it look at once bone-dry and blood-wet. Incense-heavy air shimmered above the empty seat, trembling with every beat of the immense heart. The effect was like heat-haze, or hallucination, or dreaming.

Valien squinted, trying to make some sense of it. He couldn’t latch on to anything. Every time he tried to focus, the image would slip away. Trying to fix on to the shimmer over the throne was like trying to control ball bearings on a metal sheet.

He clenched his fists and hunkered down, peering through the narrow gap and pushing his head out further. His eyes narrowed. He switched off his augmetic implants, resorting to his natural sight alone.

The distortion over the throne clarified a little. Even attempting to look at it made his head throb. Tears started in his eyes.

He saw something, just for a moment. It was just an impression – a fleeting after-image of a ghost presence, like a hololith spinning into being or a retina-burn after an explosion.

It was man-shaped, but far bigger even than a Space Marine. Valien saw tatters of dried flesh waving as enormous arms thrashed out. He saw the glint of armour rimmed with bronze, and harlequin patches of intense colour on ancient ceramite. He saw long, curved claws made of metal, and clusters of jewels hanging from clanking iron chains. He saw the remnants of a face, a once beautiful face, now a rag-tag collection of stitched sinew and gristle held together by steel clips and nutrient tubes. He saw two eyes, burning through the curtains of incense like plasma bolts.

He felt his grip slipping, and one hand dropped from the edge of the orifice. A gasp of pure horror burst out of his lungs, overriding all his psycho-conditioning and neural training. The world shifted around him, shaking and blurring. He could feel himself losing his precarious footing.

He pulled his eyes away – it was difficult – and tried to right himself. Waves of sickness washed over him, dragging at his frail, fractured consciousness.

He reached down to his chest again, searching out the indentations below his heart, beginning to make preparations.

As he did so, the daemons came. He didn’t see where they came from – they seemed to swim up out of the air itself. They screamed at him, hurtling towards the orifice like loosed bullets homing in on a target.

He saw the first of them just before the end, just before it came to take him.

It was beautiful – so, so beautiful.

He tried to reach down again, to do the thing he had travelled so far to do, but it snatched him away too quickly.

He felt its talons lance through his shoulders, punching through the flesh under the bone and hooking him out. Musk, maddening and potent, clogged his nostrils, accentuating his sudden, shocking agony. He felt himself lift, borne aloft by a violent kick and carried far out into the open. Dimly, as in a dream, he heard mortal worshippers bellow their rage at him.

The daemon’s claws ripped through him, tearing up his already tortured flesh and flaying layers of armour like falling leaves. Then, its work done, it dropped him.

With his last flickers of awareness, Valien saw where he was headed. The empty throne rushed up to greet him, replete with the fractured, semi-manifest horror that it cradled between its arms.

Before he hit it, he only had time to do two things. The first of those was to scream.

Rauth felt anger course throughout his veins, as rich and virulent as he had ever felt it. His armies were assembled again, ready to storm the gates, and his residual capacity for fury had been rekindled. It was not a good time to hear bad news.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked, keeping control of his voice with difficulty. ‘What do you mean, he wants to discuss terms?’

‘He has ordered his forces to remain where they are,’ said Khatir. ‘He says he will not commit them until certain conditions have been met.’

They stood at the base of the enormous gates to the Capitolis spire. Only Telach and Dozeph Imanol were with them; the rest of the claves stood in their assault formations across the huge expanse of the gates’ antechamber. Ranks of mortal soldiers stood behind them, thinned out since the last muster but still presenting a formidable force of arms.

Khatir was as angry as Rauth. Imanol, the Veteran Sergeant of Clave Prime, said nothing. He lurked silently on the fringes of the discussion, his Terminator plate crusted with blood and the residue of the daemonic. Telach too was silent. His exhaustion was palpable.

‘I will flay him,’ said Rauth, balling his immense fists.

‘He can be compelled,’ growled Khatir. ‘Give me leave to go.’

Rauth’s instincts were the same. He had a brief, satisfying mental image of tearing through Nethata’s scant defences and seizing control of the precious armour under the mortal’s control. It could be done.

He turned to Telach, suppressing a burning desire for revenge.

‘What of the Capitolis?’ he asked.

‘Still nothing, lord,’ said Telach. ‘It is closed to me.’

‘You said the presence was growing,’ said Rauth. ‘How much time do we have?’

‘Hours,’ he said. ‘Maybe less. Thousands of souls have been fed to it; the veil between the worlds is weak now.’

Rauth took a deep, long breath. The wounds he had sustained were raw still, but their pain was welcome.

‘We need Nethata’s armour,’ insisted Khatir. ‘We need those tanks.’

Imanol nodded slowly.

‘You are right,’ he said. ‘The enemy is numerous; we will not kill them quickly enough.’

Rauth felt fresh frustration boiling within him. The entire campaign had been arranged around the union of forces – the numerous mortals to soak up the bulk of the enemy’s rage, freeing the Iron Hands to strike out at the real danger, the spirits of the arch-enemy that no unmodified human could take on.

‘What does he think, that we made our choices for no reason?’ Rauth thundered, struggling with the urge to lash out and crunch his gauntlets into the fabric of the doors. ‘Does he think we do not suffer? Does he think that we do not absorb our share of pain?’

‘He is weak,’ said Khatir. ‘Let me destroy him – I can deliver you the armour we need.’

‘We do not have time,’ said Telach. ‘He is out on the wasteland, and we are down here – we must assault the spire.’

‘We cannot succeed without them,’ said Imanol.

For a moment, Rauth felt paralysed, hung between two equally unacceptable options. Part of him burned to crack open the gates that very moment, to tear into the spire and burn his way up to the summit, damning the consequences of failure. Another part burned to take vengeance for Nethata’s treachery, to drag the mortals to heel and compel them to do their duty.

For a veteran Iron Hand, raised on a world of cold and shadow and gifted the terrible gene-legacy of his austere primarch, that, in the end, was all there was: wrath and duty. If any other human state had once held sway in his psyche, it was now long forgotten – the slow burn of transformation had done its work, and the last of the weaknesses of the past had gone.

The rest is strength.

‘We will withdraw,’ announced Rauth, and the words were bitter on his synthetic tongue. Once the decision had been made, he felt the first stirrings of full combat readiness pricking across his enhanced nervous system. ‘We will move quickly, back out into the wastes, and take the armour by force. Then we will assault, our numbers restored, and break the spires. We can do it, if we leave now. No hesitation, no restraint.’

Rauth turned his helm towards Telach, and the ceramite curves glinted in the dark.

‘And for the traitor Nethata,’ he said, ‘no mercy. No mercy for any of them. Everything about this world is weak and perverse – when our task is accomplished here, I will scour it. A thousand years, hence the fate of Shardenus will echo throughout the Imperium. Men will look to our actions here and know the price of weakness. This shall be the example. This shall be the demonstration.’

Those last few words came out like an animal growl. He began to move, to stride back down the tunnel towards Nethata’s position. His fury was unabated, and he knew it would burn on throughout the fighting to come. Khatir and Imanol both approved – they understood.

Only Telach remained silent.

‘Wait,’ the Librarian said, holding up a hand.

Rauth almost didn’t listen, but something in the tone of Telach’s voice gave him pause.

‘Listen,’ said Telach.

Rauth stopped, and listened.

Above, far above, something enormous had detonated. Rauth’s enhanced hearing picked up the muffled crashes of gigantic explosions from the far side of the gates. His helm’s auditory filters worked quickly, bringing him detailed information on the location, size and magnitude of the blast.

Auspex data started to flood into his tactical systems – target runes, comm-signal ranges, psychic concentration nodes, power build-ups. The explosions kept on going. They were getting bigger.

He turned to Telach, his fury forgotten for a moment.

‘What is that?’ he asked.

Nethata walked along the ridge towards the first of his armoured columns. His entourage followed closely, holding their lasguns ready and going watchfully. The men had been taken from the remnants of the Ferik’s First Company and were as good as any of the troops still under his direct command. They were seasoned by several campaigns and gifted with the best equipment he could find, but still they went nervously, as if expecting attack at any time.

Nethata didn’t share their trepidation. Five hundred metres away, the huge outline of the Warlord Meritus Castigatio loomed up through the ash, monumental and imposing. Even when stationary and mostly powered down, it was a fearsome prospect. Lopi’s other war engine, the Terribilis Vindicta, stood immobile at the other extreme of his army’s long formation of mechanised units, watching over them protectively.

It was hard to imagine anything taking on such a concentrated collection of firepower. Space Marines were impressive, to be sure, but they weren’t invincible, and Nethata knew that if Rauth had any sense he’d use the opportunity presented by such defiance to behave with a little more respect.

Nethata looked away from the Titan and out over the wasteland. The landscape around him was a picture of devastation. Old, rusting industrial compounds mouldered in the corrosive air, gently worn away by the acids at their base and the toxins in the air. A vast expanse of low-level buildings stretched away north, wreathed in a faint smog of ash and dust, only broken by the immense bulk of the Capitolis spires on the northern horizon.

Nethata knew that he was safer in the sealed confines of Malevolentia. Even with his elaborate environment suit working at full capacity, the poisonous air of Shardenus made its presence felt; without such protection he’d have long since been dead. He liked to inspect his formations in person, though. He’d always done so in the past when he could. A hololith tactical could only tell you so much – you learned more by looking into the eyes of your company commanders, seeing whether they were prepared, assessing their stomach for the coming fight.

For the most part, he’d been reassured by what he’d seen on his impromptu inspection. The Ferik and Galamoth regiments had taken losses in the fighting across the wastelands, but they also knew what had happened to the Harakoni on the walls, and to those units taken by Rauth into the Melamar hives and the tunnels. They knew which commanders were likely to get them killed quickest, and which ones were likely to give them a semblance of proper support.

Nethata reached his destination – a small, semi-derelict control tower overlooking the heart of his carefully arranged army. He kicked the door open and ascended the stairs quickly, eager to get the overview he wanted before returning to Malevolentia for final preparations. It would probably be his one chance to see the entirety of his forces laid out before him.

He reached the top level quickly – an abandoned comms room with broken plexiglass in the panes and a bank of smashed cogitators along one wall – and leaned out over the cracked sill to get his overview.

His tanks were arranged in their battle groups in a long, broken line along the ridge ahead of him. They stretched out in either direction running east-west, their engines idling and sending a film of fresh smog into the already thick air. It was a significant force – over two hundred Leman Russ main battle tanks in varying configurations, backed up with Basilisk artillery pieces and Chimera troop carriers. Sentinel walkers prowled around the fringes, looking fragile under the enormous shadow of the two Warlords. To the south lay the burning Axis hives; to the north was the gigantic Capitolis spire. Everything in between swam with a green-tinged toxic soup, washing over the abandoned buildings like an inland sea.

Nethata let his gaze run down the length of the army, looking out for units out of sequence. For a while, he saw nothing untoward. He was about to go back down the stairs when he saw the first of them start to move.

A squadron of Leman Russ battle tanks powered up their engines and lurched forwards, all twelve of them, grinding over a straggling barbed-wire thicket before setting off down the long, broken highway ahead and out into the swirling chemical mist.

Nethata watched them go, momentarily dumbstruck. He hadn’t given an order to advance. He hadn’t given an order to do anything.

‘Heriat,’ he voxed over the comm. ‘Do you know anything about–’

Before he’d finished the question, another unit set off. Then another. Before long, whole sections of the defensive line had broken into movement. Nethata felt a chill run through him. He turned and ran down the stairway, back to where his entourage was waiting for him.

His comm-channel began to fill up with queries. Group commanders of stationary units sent urgent requests for clarification. Group commanders of moving units kept their channels offline. Nethata wasn’t interested in any of them; there was only one man who he wanted to speak to.

‘Commissar-General Slavo Heriat,’ he voxed again. ‘Respond immediately. We have multiple unauthorised movements. Respond immediately.’

Nethata raced along the ridge, back to where Malevolentia had been left. His escort struggled to keep up with him, weighed down by their sealed environment suits and heavy weaponry.

‘Respond, Slavo,’ he ordered, getting testier the longer he was kept waiting. ‘This is–’

He stopped when he entered the chemical facility yard. Malevolentia was gone. One of the walls on the northern edge of the space had been entirely demolished, and tell-tale tracks in the concrete told him exactly where his command vehicle had gone.

A lone Ferik watch officer, swathed in an orange chem-suit, waited for him in the centre of the yard.

‘What is happening here?’ demanded Nethata.

The officer saluted smartly.

‘Your orders, lord,’ he said. ‘Squads detailed to rendezvous with the Iron Hands have begun deployment. I thought–’

It was as if the world had suddenly given way under Nethata’s feet. He felt briefly dizzy, and glanded a quick burst of adrenaquil. He hadn’t needed to do that for a while.

‘When did this happen?’ asked Nethata, his mind racing.

How many units has he taken? How did he organise it? When did he do it?

The watch officer checked his chrono.

‘Ten minutes ago. I assumed these were your orders – the authorisations checked out. Oh, and the Commissar-General left this for you.’

The officer handed something to Nethata, who absently took it. Only when he looked down did he see what it was: Heriat’s bolt pistol.

For a moment, he had absolutely no idea what to do. He stared at the pistol stupidly, his mind locked in a vice of shock.

Heriat. Of all of them. I should have listened. I should have been more careful.

Nethata was still standing there, still too shocked to make any decision, when the explosions went off. Even from so far away, they crashed out across the wasteland like the immense, crushing reports of nova cannons.

Nethata looked up sharply, stung out of his paralysis by the sudden barrage of detonations. To the north, out on the edge of unaided sight, the summit of the Capitolis spire was being ripped apart. The explosions kept on going, lighting up the northern horizon with huge, rolling balls of fire. It wasn’t the tanks – they were still far too far away.

Nethata turned to the watch officer, hardly bothering to hide his surprise.

‘What is that?’ he asked.

Heriat felt the rhythmic drum of Malevolentia’s engines semi-reassuring. The promise of mechanical reliability made his decision feel slightly less capricious, slightly less shabby. Even though he’d known what had to be done for several days, and even though he’d spoken to his selected company commanders over an even longer period of time, when he’d actually come down to it the action had made him feel wretched.

If it had been anyone other than Nethata, he wouldn’t have hesitated. If it had been anyone other than Nethata, he’d have long since had enough of the minor slights, the disregard, the monomania. A lifetime’s friendship wasn’t easily thrown away, though, and in the event it had taken outright treachery to push it over the edge.

Heriat’s life was as full of certainties as other men’s were not. Nethata evidently didn’t view his actions as treasonous. A casual glance at the Guard conduct manuals or the precepts of the Adeptus Terra would have corrected that impression. Rauth was the senior commander on Shardenus; short of an order from the Imperial authorities themselves, all loyalist forces on the planet were bound to follow his orders. It didn’t matter whether those orders were wise or foolish, enlightened or despotic. That was the nature of commands; you followed them.

The Imperium was nothing without discipline. Everything else – loyalty, fervour, duty, friendship, devotion – it was all nothing without the iron fist of control. Humanity, as the Commissariat knew well, was a wayward species. It had to be protected from itself. When it wavered, it had to be corrected. When it doubted, it had to be conditioned. When it faltered, it had to be punished.

Position runes danced across the command console’s forward sensor array. Heriat looked at them carefully. Nearly half of the companies under Nethata’s command had broken rank and followed his orders. That was encouraging. All of those he had approached had been persuaded by his arguments – or his threats. Those he had judged too close to Nethata to accept the possibility of betrayal would now have to examine their options – would they remain behind in a diminished rump of a fighting force, or would they advance with him, fulfilling their duty to the Emperor and to the Guard?

Heriat sat back in his seat and issued the command to release his vox-message to Rauth. Soon the clan commander would know that he still had mortal allies willing to do what was necessary for victory. Heriat himself knew perfectly well what was required of him, as he had been the one who had listened in detail to the increasingly angry missives from the Iron Hands command group over the past few days. He knew where his tanks were to be deployed, and what role they were to play. Valien’s transmissions had been useful in that respect, as had the schematics he’d sent before all comms had died.

Heriat knew perfectly well that the forces under his command, including Malevolentia, would be destroyed within a few hours of coming into range of the Capitolis’s defences. All of this was understood. Nethata and he did not disagree on the practicalities of the situation; it was the principle that was at stake.

And yet, for all his certainty, Heriat did not rest easily in his seat. A perfectly certain man would not have handled things the way he had done. A perfectly certain man would have carried out the ultimate sanction – he would have killed Nethata at the first sign of treachery and taken over command from the very beginning.

The fact that he hadn’t done so was evidence of failure. Heriat had left the bolt pistol for Nethata to find, knowing that he would understand the symbolism.

It wasn’t as if, in all conscience, he’d had any choice. Heriat couldn’t have killed Nethata. Not since the transplant that had saved his life after the action on Goetes IX, staving off the ravages of early-stage skietica and keeping him alive for another fifty years. The price Nethata had paid for that donation, made in a filthy battlefield medicae station under constant fire, had been high – for all the miracles of the chirurgeons’ art, he had been condemned to spend the rest of his life addicted to a cocktail of high-strength glanded narcotics to compensate for what he had given up.

Perhaps all that adrenaquil and tranquilox had begun to affect Nethata’s judgement at last – it would not have been the first time. If so, then Heriat’s sickness had been the cause of Nethata’s sickness, and applying the final sanction would have made his actions even more wretched than they already were.

Heriat felt the sores around his mouth itch painfully, and resisted the urge to scratch. His expression remained stony. The flesh, as Rauth would no doubt have relished telling him, was weak.

‘Commissar-General, we have sensor readings from the spires,’ came a vox from Malevolentia’s command chamber.

Heriat stirred from his thoughts. The forces under his command were still some way from their final positions.

‘Put them through,’ he said, switching the screen on his console to a forward vid-feed.

Just as he did so, he saw the explosions go off. Even from so far away, they burst through the audio transmitters with a static-fuzzed crash.

Heriat started, stung by the sudden barrage of detonations. Picked out in grainy detail on the pict screens, the summit of the Capitolis spire was being ripped apart. Auspex data started to flood into his tactical systems – target runes, comm-signal ranges, power build-ups. The explosions kept on going, lighting up the northern horizon with huge, rolling balls of fire.

Heriat slumped back in his seat, watching the damage unfold.

‘What is that?’ he asked.

The daemon’s claws ripped through him, tearing up his already tortured flesh and flaying layers of armour like falling leaves. Then, its work done, it dropped him.

With his last flickers of awareness, Valien saw where he was headed. The empty throne rushed up to greet him, replete with the nascent horror that it cradled between its arms.

Before he hit it, he only had time to do two things. The first of those was to scream. The second was to activate the explosive implanted in his chest.

He didn’t feel the explosion. It was so huge, so powerful, so destructive, that he was reduced to atoms in an instant. He didn’t see the enormous pool of fire surge out from his destroyed body, sweeping across the corrupted audience chamber and shattering the immense panes of glass in a rain of silver. He didn’t see the external walls of the spire blow out into the atmosphere, showering burning stone and metal down the long flanks of the upper hive. He didn’t see the secondary incendiaries in the cluster ignite, sparking the inferno that would reduce the entire governor’s complex to rubble and crack open the powerful shields that protected the Capitolis from sensor probes and psychic attack.

None of that mattered, for he had fulfilled the order given to him by Heriat at last.

Penetrate the Capitolis, he’d been commanded. Find out what’s in there, report back with visual records. We need to see what’s waiting for us inside.

He hadn’t been able to send visual records. For a long time his instruments had been deaf and mute, and he’d been crawling silently though the dark like an insect. Only the final resort, the devastating explosive core that every Talica operative had implanted in their chest cavity, had the capability to achieve that goal. Only that device had retained the power to blow open the walls of the Capitolis and expose the horror within.

And so, even in his dying scream, a sliver of satisfaction penetrated Valien’s consciousness. He knew, as he died, that he had reported back as best he could. He knew that if any loyalist troops still fought their way towards the Capitolis they would now be fully aware, in exact and terrifying detail, just what was waiting for them inside.

It might not have made up for his many sins. Nothing, perhaps, could have done that; but it was a contribution, a small act of penitence.

In a way, it was restitution. In a way, it was enough.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Telach felt his mind flood with visions as soon as the explosions broke out. He didn’t need to let his mindsight roam free – the images crowded into his waking consciousness in a mad, overlapping rush.

All of the Librarians felt it. He could see his three Codiciers – Nedim, Malik, Djeze – reeling from the sudden deluge. Even the non-psychic battle-brothers responded.

Daemonspoor. Huge, huge daemonspoor.

Telach lifted his power staff high, and pure warp lightning licked along the shaft. Anticipation surged through his body.

‘No time remains,’ he said, turning to Rauth. ‘Forget the mortals – we must fight this.’

Rauth hesitated, caught between his stated course of action and the sudden change in events.

‘What do you see?’ he asked. ‘Tell me quickly.’

Telach’s hearts were already thumping hard, fuelling his body for the imminent fighting ahead. Now that he knew the nature of what awaited them in the spire, all room for debate had ended.

‘A rift,’ he said. ‘A gateway between realms. It is almost open. This world stands on the edge of damnation – we have not been fast enough.’

Still Rauth hesitated. Telach felt impatience rise up in him. He knew why Rauth resisted giving the order – the Imperial forces were in disarray, riven with discord and rebellion. Even if all of Nethata’s forces had been committed to assault alongside them, their chances of taking on what waited for them beyond the portals were slim. Even Iron Hands couldn’t kill that fast.

Khatir ignited his claw-flamers with a flourish.

‘Is there any other way, Librarian?’ he demanded.

Telach looked squarely at him.

‘There is not,’ he said. ‘Whatever else happens, I am going up there.’

Just as he was about to stride off towards the gates, a crackling comm-signal broke through on the command channel. Even with the destruction of the shielding surrounding the Capitolis, it was faint and broken. All those in the primary clave picked it up.

‘Priority signal for Clan Commander Rauth from Commissar-General Slavo Heriat of the 126th Ferik Tactical. Lord General Raji Nethata relieved of command due to insubordination. Remaining Galamoth and Ferik armoured divisions heading for deployment coordinates to follow in transmission 5-78, tactical outline appended. Bombardment to commence immediately. The Emperor protects the faithful.’

Rauth turned to Telach. As he did so, he ignited his power blade, and its ice-blue surface blazed in the dark.

‘So there is mettle in humanity yet,’ he said. ‘So be it. Open the gates.’

Telach immediately fed power to his staff. Warp essence burst out strongly, flooding the chamber before them with dazzling electric-white light. Each of the Codiciers did the same, sending snaking lines of energy lancing up towards the sealed portal.

‘Warriors of Raukaan!’ roared Khatir, striding up to the doorway with his arms aloft. ‘Now comes the final test!’

The claves responded instantly. They drew blades and slammed magazines into place. Many still carried horrific injuries, and nearly all had sustained damage to their armour plate. Of more than a hundred Space Marines who had entered the tunnels, less than seventy remained.

Telach felt the massive doors tremble. He had closed them with layers of wards against the daemonic, all of which took time to unravel. As the psychic barriers came down, he could hear the howl of the creatures on the far side. They were already clawing at the metal.

‘We will take them with speed!’ cried Khatir, sounding as eager for the fight as he ever did. ‘Advance! Pause for nothing! Destroy all in your path! Show no restraint!’

Telach unbound the last of the wards. A great, echoing crack ran down the length of the gilded doors. The shrieks of the daemons rose in volume, and the bronze surfaces buckled.

Rauth strode up to the portal, taking the position of honour. In one hand he carried his storm bolter; in the other his shimmering power-blade. Clad in his heavy void-black Terminator plate, he looked immense. Clave Prime formed up around him, each warrior massive and silent.

Telach could feel the pent-up energy coiled inside them all. He knew what was about to come.

The Iron Hands had fought in the manner of their Chapter doctrine – cold, methodical, remorseless. Now the urgency of the task had become fully apparent, as had the scale of the abomination before them.

Such straits demanded the casting-off of fetters, the abandonment of control. Only rarely did the sons of Manus abandon their meticulous way of war and adopt the ancient rage that lay deep in the gene-heritage of all the Adeptus Astartes.

When that happened, there were few forces in the galaxy capable of resisting it: ten thousand years of anger, of rage, of bitterness, all concentrated into a single, machine-augmented storm of vengeance.

Now the storm was coming. Now Shardenus would face the wrath of iron.

Telach crashed his staff onto the ground, shattering the rockcrete. Above him, the massive doors burst open with a booming crack. Sheets of aether-light rushed out, spinning into the dark. Lightning snapped across the widening gulf as the heavy doors ground slowly inwards. Shrieks and screams echoed from within.

‘For the Emperor!’ roared Khatir above the gathering tumult, sending gouts of vivid flame streaming high into the poisoned air.

And then, for the first time since the bloody campaign had begun, the Iron Hands responded. The sound of their massed battle-cry, hurled up defiantly into the vaults, was deafening, outmatching the screams of the neverborn, outmatching the low grind of the opening gates, and echoing through the bowels of the Capitolis like the coming of the gods themselves.

For the Emperor! they cried, sweeping up to the portal in a tide of darkness, charging into the maelstrom with murder in their eyes, blood on their armour and death kindling on their blades.

Morvox ran hard. A Space Marine in full battle-plate was a huge object weighing many tonnes; at speed, his momentum was formidable.

He leapt through the portal at the head of his clave. Seven of them remained from the fighting in the tunnels, and two of those – Gergiz and Kozen – carried serious injuries. They all ran at the same pace, hitting the ground hard with heavy armoured treads.

Beyond the gates, the Great Stair snaked away into the preternatural darkness, winding around a core of solid granite. It spiralled upwards, immense and majestic, curling like a massive python about the structural core of the hive spire. That core was gigantic – over sixty metres in diameter and lined with basalt pillars and mammoth iron bracings. Eyeless angels perched along its width, gazing sightlessly out over the enormous vaults. The Stair swept upwards around the core, vanishing into a dark haze as the marble-lined steps wound ever higher. It was surrounded on all sides by a vast gulf of emptiness, breached only by a web of flying buttresses and high arches that spanned it, branching out and forming a sprawling lattice linking the stairway to the rest of the hive. On the far side of the abyss, the vast inner walls of the hive spire stood, shrouded in shadow and smoke.

The Great Stair had once been an empty place, clothed in darkness and disturbed only by the whispers of adepts shuffling from intersection to intersection along its immeasurable length. Now the warp itself burst out from the walls at all levels. Enormous growths snaked down from overhanging gargoyles, luminous and clutching. Screams echoed down from the high places, bouncing and refracting from twisting structures of living, weeping metal. Blood swilled down the stairs, frothing and boiling as the Iron Hands crashed up through it. Angry, violent lights wheeled and flickered in the vaults above, turning the echoing spaces into psychedelic, hallucinatory nightmares.

‘For the Emperor!’ roared Morvox, giving in to the urge to cry out, to vent his fury and his violence. Once unleashed, the dam-break of emotion could not be pulled back. The long repression of his animal spirits had done nothing to degrade the primal fury he was capable of – it had only isolated it, smothering it with layers of cold, calculating restraint. Now that it had gone, his wrath rose up, choking in his gorge. He could feel his body respond strongly, spiked with a rush of adrenaline and combat-stimms. The urge to slay was so strong that he felt that his hearts would burst from it.

Horrors came down at him, careering down the stairwell with fangs drawn and eyes glistening. A grotesque mutant, its stomachs spilling open with writhing lengths of sinew-flails, barrelled into his path bearing a force-hammer. Morvox beheaded it with a vicious sweep of his chainblade and kicked its body away, barely breaking stride.

Snake-faced figures leapt from the distant walls, sailing through the hazy atmosphere on gauzy membranes, spitting venom as they came. Morvox charged into them as they landed, firing from his bolter with tight precision. Three went down before he came in blade-range, each one taken out with head-shots. Before the skull-fragments had hit the ground he was among the others, punching the chainsword out and dragging it round in huge, unstoppable arcs. Blood and viscera surrounded him like a holy aura, flying high into the clammy air as his limbs moved.

His clave were equally lethal. The Iron Hands powered upwards, sprinting forwards, crashing through resistance with blunt, brutal force, pivoting on heels and bringing weapons into contact with crushing, shuddering violence. They slammed into knots of squealing mutants, cracking them open, hurling them apart and dealing death with savage purity.

But mutants were not the worst of the dangers under the arches of the soaring Capitolis. The spire had been steeped in the baleful powers of the warp, and everything within it sang with hatred, malice and madness. Huge flagstones cracked and disintegrated with no warning, opening up chasms and hurling warriors down into hidden depths. Sorcerous flames blazed out of gargoyle-faces, catching even on ceramite armour and raging across it. Translucent creatures, studded with blood-rimmed eyes and curtains of flesh, sprang down from hidden caches between the soaring pillars, careering through the gore-streaked air and clamping on to the facemasks of warriors with hooked fingers. The winding core of the Capitolis had been turned into a maelstrom of spines, hooks, barbs, flails and toxins.

Morvox ran on, leaping over a rearing creature with glowing eyes, crushing its face with his boot. He spun around, unleashing a burst of rounds into the stomach of a lurching monster with six lashing arms before plunging his chainsword deep into its stinking folds of blubber.

‘Maintain speed!’ roared Khatir from far up ahead, his voice resounding strangely from the warped architecture. ‘Purge the unclean! Slay them all!’

Morvox didn’t need to be told. Every Iron Hand sprinted onwards, thundering through the obstacles ahead. Whenever one was felled, another took his place. As inexorable as the workings of some giant, many-sectioned machine, the sons of Manus lashed, crunched, crushed and cut their way higher, ever higher, into the screaming heart of darkness ahead.

And as they climbed, the broken soul of Shardenus responded. Hurtling down from the living domes of glass and adamantium, wailing with joy and fury and wheeling high above the shambling press of mutants, the daemons came, and in their wake came terror as pure, hard and eternal as diamonds.

‘Fire!’ cried Heriat, shouting through the vox as if that could somehow make the shells strike home stronger. ‘Fire at will! Bring them down!’

All along the line, a hundred Leman Russ tanks opened up, and the wasteland disappeared in a huge plume of dirty smoke. A fraction of a second later, a vast, rolling boom cracked out, echoing between the distant burning spires. Long trails lanced out through the air, straight as gun-shafts, before slamming into the soaring walls of the Capitolis.

The tanks had ground to a halt south of the precipitous spire walls and had deployed in a long semicircle out in the chemical-shrouded wasteland. Toxic mist swirled thickly all around the immense foundations of the mighty hive, and shells left long ripped lines in it as they roared off to their targets.

The colossal hive towered above them, dwarfing all else and filling their viewfinders, but it was already burning. Explosions at the summit had spread, dropping like flaming tears from the distant pinnacles. A massive gouge ran down from the top of the pyramidal structure, still burning at its edges, revealing the innards of the structure within. Like an insect nest broken open by searching fingers, the exposed levels swarmed with madness. Mutated figures, tiny in Heriat’s scopes, dropped from the open wounds in the structure, screaming as they plunged to their deaths.

More explosions registered on his sensoria, this time coming from within the hive. Only one explanation existed for those readings – the Iron Hands had launched their assault from within. They were tearing their way up the heart of the spire, moving at astonishing speed. Heriat found himself wishing he could have seen them fight in there – the sight of Space Marines unleashed on prey was something that remained in a man’s mind forever.

‘Maintain fire-rates,’ he ordered, watching on his range of screens as the barrage repeated itself.

The cramped chamber rocked around him as Malevolentia opened up with its main cannon. Heriat watched the shell thunder out and crash into the walled flanks of the Capitolis. An entire section of metal and stonework crumbled into a dust-cloud of ruin where it impacted. More shells followed, blasted high by the Basilisks as they opened fire.

Even with aural protectors and inside the reinforced shell of the enormous vehicle, the noise was monstrous and unending. Shell after shell, round after round, mortar after mortar sailed through the air, punching lines through the curtains of ash and exploding against huge bulwarks of ferrocrete and adamantium.

The spire’s defenders – such as they were – initially seemed to have been caught off-guard. Many of their massive wall-mounted cannons had been destroyed in the opening flurry of fire, as if their commanders had been distracted by the cascade of destruction descending from above.

Now, though, the response had picked up. Lines of cannons on the parapets swung round and down, picking out the exposed formations of loyalist armour. White beams of las-fire and hammering torrents of heavy bolter fire scythed down from the burning ramparts, cracking into static Leman Russ plate and breaking it open. The Capitolis’s cannons were huge – as large as those that had been mounted on the outer perimeter – and each direct hit utterly destroyed its target. Heriat saw one group of three Basilisks taken out by a single shot, blasted to fragments of metal by the enormous fireball created on impact.

In standard military terms, the situation was hopeless. Heriat’s forces were exposed, out in the open, hidden only by clouds of toxic matter. A prudent commander would have withdrawn before the carnage overwhelmed him. A prudent commander would have demanded to know why the two Warlord Titans, the only things big enough to take on the spire’s enormous guns as equals, were standing immobile out in the wasteland and taking no part in the action. A prudent commander would have done something, anything, to ensure his survival in the face of such withering, deadening fire.

But Heriat’s task was not to survive. Neither was it to destroy the spire from the outside – he had nowhere near enough firepower for that. His task was simple and specific. All his guns were aimed at a small fraction of the Capitolis’s vast expanse. His commanders zeroed in on their coordinates with ruthless efficiency, ignoring the havoc wreaked among their ranks and doing nothing to lessen the dreadful impact of returning enemy fire.

Heriat recalled the text of Valien’s last full dispatch to him. He’d replied to it, congratulating the agent on the work he’d done in recovering detailed plans of the Capitolis perimeter. He had no idea whether his reply had found its mark; he hoped it had.

Whether he’d known it or not, the data Valien had sent had been invaluable. The atmospheric filtration units studded high up on the walls were heavily guarded with massive walls of armour-cladding and surrounded by heavy weapon turrets. Their gigantic rotating blades were hidden behind adamantium mesh screens and set far back into the cyclopean flanks of the hive. They were well-guarded, well-hidden and there were dozens of them. Without Valien’s coordinates, destroying them would have been hopeless; even with them it was painfully hard.

But they could be taken down. Many units were already on fire, collapsing into ruin as the armour plate around them cracked and flexed. As they did so, the raw toxins of Shardenus Prime’s hellish hinterland were sucked up, churned around, mixed with poisonous fuel-fumes, then flushed directly into the deep innards of the hive via the capillaries and tunnels of the spire’s enormous circulatory system.

The Capitolis was a body, a single immense organism. Heriat was poisoning it.

A massive explosion rocked Malevolentia’s chassis as something detonated close by. Lines of dust ran down from the ceiling of the command chamber, spilling across a cracked pict screen and fouling the image. Scores of runes scrolled across the remainder, feeding him screeds of data on positions, fire-rates, damage taken and units lost.

The tank-lines were exposed and unsupported. They would do well to last another hour. Two, at most. That was all the time they had.

‘Fire!’ Heriat shouted down the comm, spitting his defiance into the mouthpiece. ‘Throne of Earth, bring them down! I want to see them choke!’

Rauth crashed upwards, lashing out through a whole swathe of clutching tendrils. Everything in the core of the Capitolis had been turned into a clinging, writhing forest of stone and flesh – columns flexed like lungs, taking in air and expelling it with soft breaths. Overhead lumen-banks burst open, revealing nests of worms that fell to the stairs with wet slaps. Wall-sections burst at the seams, vomiting clusters of writhing growths that spilled across the swimming floors; spiked creatures exploded out of suspended cogitator housings, thrusting out through broken valve-shafts and exploded bronze cages.

Rauth swung his fist round, bludgeoning a swaying spawn as it shuddered away from him. He went after it, driving it to the edge of the sweeping Stair. It clung on, trembling even as its spiked tentacles flailed at him. He slammed out a final time with his blade, severing the horror’s flesh and sending it crashing through the stone railings and out into the void beyond. It tumbled away into oblivion, wailing as it went.

Rauth powered on upwards, hearing the crunch and thud of his fellow warriors as they hacked their way along the endless Stair. As they went, screams followed them from the very structure of the spire’s core. Living humans had been buried inside the pillars of the hive, or melded with the marble flagstones underfoot, or hung from huge iron chains over the bottomless abyss.

Rauth had seen such blasphemies before on other worlds and knew their purpose. Mortal agony echoed in the parallel realm of the aether, quickening spirits of ruin and weakening the bonds that held them distinct from the world of the senses. The Capitolis had been turned into a shrine of pain, an altar on which human suffering would be turned into debased glory.

If he’d been capable of nausea, Rauth would have been sickened by it; as it was, his emotional range had been drilled down to a narrower spectrum. In the absence of shock, pity or terror he simply fought on, channelling his rage into physical destruction. Clad in the huge baroque edifice of Tactical Dreadnought armour, he became a demigod of devastation. When living barriers reared up at him he tore them down. Abominations flung themselves at him, tearing at the ever-moving plates of ceramite and scrabbling for purchase, and they died, cut apart by the crackling edge of his blade or ripped open by tight bursts of bolter rounds.

Khatir remained close to him, striding with cold determination through the melee. Imanol was near too. Telach had forged ahead, accompanied by his Codiciers. The Librarian had been wreathed in a corona of ice-white fire, lighting up the paths of darkness in stark illumination and propelling him upwards with terrible, ferocious speed. Anything that got close to him, mutant or daemonic, exploded in tatters of charred flesh. He had passed on far ahead, out of reach of help, a lone bright star amid the filth and misery.

Rauth forced himself to run harder, his boots cracking the floor beneath him. Terminator armour was enormous, prohibiting the lightning-quick movements of his battle-brothers, but it was still capable of driving him onwards at a furious pace.

He knew the need for haste. Even though he had none of Telach’s gifts he could still sense the burgeoning horror waiting in the levels above. An ambient heartbeat was everywhere – shuddering down sinuous coolant tubes, reverberating up circulation shafts, thrumming across the steps they ascended. Its owner was coming quickly, fighting its way into consciousness like a foetus grappling through the fluids of the womb.

He hadn’t been quick enough. Despite everything, despite the sacrifices, the relentless assaults, the focused attack on the centre of the contagion, he hadn’t been quick enough.

Rauth had enough humanity left to feel guilt for that. He had enough humanity to feel shame, and frustration, and anger. He had none left for fear, for despair or for resignation: he would fight until the last moment, straining every muscle and overloading every bionic in his system to counteract the evil that had been birthed at the pinnacle.

Aspire to the condition of the primarch. Aspire to the union with steel.

He crashed onwards, decapitating a howling mutant that swung down from a thicket of cables with one hand while disembowelling another with a casual punch of his storm bolter barrels.

A daemon hurtled towards him, bounding down the twisting stairs like a feline.

Rauth winged it with the storm bolter, blowing a section of its trailing leg clean away. It shifted, slipping sideways with impossible speed. Rauth’s armour matched it, compensating for the sudden motion with a thousand tiny servo movements. He swung his blade round in a sparkling arc of ice-blue lightning.

It tried to evade again, but misjudged. Rauth’s weapon bit deep, and its disruptor field exploded into a snaking, lashing orb of expelled energy. The daemon screamed, throwing its head back and baring lines of fangs. Rauth pushed deeper, working the blade hard, carving through the unholy flesh. He ignored its raking claws, even when they sliced through his own plate and bit down to the metal workings below. The two of them – beast and man – grappled together for a while longer, each gouging chunks out of the other, rocking back and forth and breaking open the wide marble steps beneath them.

Then the light in the daemon’s eyes faded. Its broken body collapsed onto the floor. A rushing like storm winds built up, followed by a sharp snap. Rauth drew his sword back and kicked his left boot forwards. The heavy serrated sole crashed down on the creature’s head, cracking the bone.

Rauth let himself look down at the vanquished daemon for a moment. Its lithe body was twisted into contortions, the lilac skin broken in a dozen places.

He applied force, and his boot shattered the daemon’s skull, grinding the warp-woven bone into dust.

Then he was moving again, lumbering up the winding path towards the uttermost summit. As he went, he saw more creatures of the dark heading towards him, each with an equal desire and capacity to slay. They clogged the way ahead, clawing and racing to be the first into contact with him, swarming down the corridors like insects. They threw themselves into his path, uncaring of their own debased lives, only concerned with slowing the progress of the Angels of Death for long enough. Simply pushing through the close-packed crowd of them took too long – there were too many, too many.

We are running out of time.

‘Onwards!’ Rauth roared, his voice thick with frustration. ‘Break them!’

Nethata watched the Capitolis burn. Out in the wasteland, he could see Heriat’s forces taking heavy punishment. Every time a Leman Russ was reduced to smouldering metal scrap by a las-beam, a pang of terrible shame stabbed at him.

They are my men. They are my machines.

He knew what the Commissar-General was doing. He had seen Valien’s dispatches, and saw where Heriat was aiming. Nethata admired his precision under fire. For all that he had been betrayed, for all that Heriat’s actions had destroyed his own position, he couldn’t muster much more than wry admiration in response.

Heriat had been right. Nethata had always known, in his soul, that his actions had been folly. The Imperium never tolerated dissent. Its very being lay in the absence of dissent, the lack of mercy, the dispassionate application of discipline. It had been foolish, imbecilic, to think that he could have proved the exception.

Nethata sat in the chassis of one of the few tanks left to him, commandeered from its Galamoth commander less than a hour ago. The tiny command space in comparison to Malevolentia made drawing up acceptable tactics difficult – he had poor control of the comm-network, and a number of commanders were still unable to speak directly to him on secure lines.

The delay had given him time to think, at least. His initial response had been to go after Heriat, to aim his remaining guns at Malevolentia and try to disable it. In his initial fury, had been able to, he would have done it.

Then the attack on the spires had begun, and the carnage had escalated quickly. Even as Nethata had rushed to assert his control over the resources he still had left, wall defences had opened up and started destroying Heriat’s Basilisks.

Nethata’s dreams of an orderly, measured attack lay in ruins. All loyalist forces save those under his immediate command – just over a hundred battle tanks with supporting troop carriers – were fully committed, locked into a death-grapple with an enemy that could no longer be withdrawn from.

That presented him with two options: he could pull his own forces back, retreating ignominiously from the front in the hope that he’d be able to salvage something to use at some later point, or throw his lot in with the man who’d only just betrayed him.

It didn’t take long to reach a decision.

‘We advance,’ he ordered, addressing the squadron commanders over the division-wide channel. ‘Take up positions alongside the Commissar-General. Follow his fire-pattern and take his orders. Emperor be with you. Emperor be with us all.’

The tanks started moving immediately. Despite the obvious danger, none of the commanders liked standing idly while their comrades were in action ahead of them. Columns of Leman Russes began to grind their way north, crashing through the maze of shattered buildings and breaking out onto potholed, cracked highways between them.

Nethata watched them go through tiny viewports on the tank’s hull. As the tanks made their way towards the battle-front he felt his failure weigh heavily on his shoulders. Physical pain, deep-seated and acute, throbbed in his lower torso, but he resisted the urge to gland.

I should feel pain for this. I should feel guilt, and I should feel shame.

The tank’s commander, a man named Hiert Lerdian, turned to face him.

‘Are we going in, lord?’ he asked.

The tone of his voice was reproachful. Just like the rest, he didn’t enjoy seeing other men charge into action ahead of him.

Nethata checked the readings on his auspex again. The screen was filthy with ash.

‘Have you raised Princeps Lopi yet?’ he asked.

‘Negative. The comms protocols are complex. We are trying.’

Neither of the Warlords had moved. They remained static, like ancient statues of a long-dead civilisation watching over the gradual destruction of the world around them. For all Nethata knew, the god-machines might have been in contact with Heriat, or Rauth even, but he no longer had the means to raise them himself.

Nethata put the auspex down.

‘Keep trying,’ he said.

‘And us?’

Nethata looked out of the viewport again, out to where the spires burned.

He knew his life was forfeit. He was tempted to give the order to retreat south. He might have been able to get to the gates, then out across the Helat to the command bunkers. Shuttles would still be berthed there, ready to take him up into orbit and the safety of the fleet. Once aboard a Naval warship, even Rauth would not be able to get at him easily.

‘Lord, are we going in?’

It would be difficult, but it could be done. Perhaps, despite all he had done to earn the clan commander’s wrath, something – his life at least – could still be salvaged. Maybe negotiations could be made.

You cannot control the Iron Hands. It is dangerous to try.

He smiled again; a hooked, wry gesture across his blunt face.

‘Yes, we are going in, commander,’ said Nethata, gripping the edges of his seat, ready for the lurch and roll of the tank’s movement. Everything on the northern horizon was aflame. For as long as he looked at the Capitolis, he felt like he was looking at the end of the world. ‘Seal us up, and bring us close. We’ll add our fire to theirs. Perhaps we can do some good out there.’

He felt the engines start up. The hull of the tank shook violently, and smoke belched into the crew compartments.

‘Perhaps we can yet make amends,’ Nethata said quietly, speaking to himself as the crew busied themselves with their duties. ‘Perhaps there is still time.’

CHAPTER TWENTY

Marivo had made his choice, and Khadi had made hers.

When she’d left, scampering down the tunnels like a sewer rat, he’d felt a sharp and unexpected pang of regret. He’d wanted something a little more pronounced to mark their separation; an acknowledgement, however slight, that they had shared something of a strange bond over the terrible days of the insurrection on Shardenus.

He had saved her life. She had saved his. They had both killed men in the name of the Emperor and lived to witness the Angels of Death in furious, terrifying action. He felt that was worth more than a weary nod, a quick look up, and a brief hand on his shoulder before she’d gone.

That was what he’d got, though. Perhaps there had been no time for anything else. Or perhaps, as was more likely, Khadi had never felt more than a fleeting affinity for him. Any illusion that the two of them had begun to feel some shared sense of purpose, a bond of comradeship even, had been just that – an illusion.

For all that, Marivo couldn’t quite shake the image of her tired, scared, dirty face. He held it in his mind as he ran, gripping his lasgun with white-knuckled fingers. Focusing on a picture of humanity in all its ordinariness helped stave off the imminent madness for a little longer.

After she’d gone, he’d gone back to the front, just as he’d always known he would. He’d reported for duty and picked up recycled weapons and armour components. The visor he’d been given had been much better than the one he’d used before, save for the smell of sweat and blood inside.

He’d followed the Iron Hands in with the rest of the mortal troops. He’d watched the gates open, and had felt the cold waves of horror sweep across him again. He’d seen the Space Marines charge through the gap, and he’d heard them shout their battle-cry.

The sound of that had jolted him out of his fear-struck stupor. Before then, even when the daemons had been among them, the Iron Hands had fought in silence. Hearing them roar their defiance in metal-edged unison had daunted him rather than inspired him. It had reminded him just how much he was an insignificant part of all that was unfolding – a mere speck of humanity thrown between the contests of gods and daemons.

Then the orders from the sergeants had broken out, and the remnants of the mortal forces sent into the spires alongside the Iron Hands had begun to shuffle forwards. A mix of uniforms – pearl-grey, olive, black – had jostled alongside one another, a product of hastily reconstituted units and regiments. Marivo had broken into a tumbling run along with the others, trying to keep his feet as he’d passed under the enormous lintel of the gates, trying to keep his senses as the thunderous crash and echo of warfare broke out around him once again.

Now past the gates and still climbing, he couldn’t remember what had made him give up the chance to escape. It hadn’t been fear of being discovered. It hadn’t been faith in the inevitable success of the Imperial Guard – events in the tunnels had shattered any beliefs he’d once had in that respect.

Perhaps it had been nothing more than stubbornness; an inability to change his essential nature even in the face of such extremity.

Marivo charged up the enormous stairwell alongside the others. He only had fleeting glimpses of the vast chasm around him – huge, arching roofs covered with hanging growths and throbbing tumours, pillars soaring away in the muzzle-flash-lit dark, gothic arches framing furnaces beyond. Snatched fragments of screams rang out, some of them human, some of them unearthly and bestial. Violent bursts of gunfire hammered out from further up the Great Stair, matched by the roar and growl of flame weapons igniting.

Marivo felt his lungs burn. The air was hot and bitter, like ashes drifting above a bonfire. Las-fire flickered in the dark, angling in all directions. His boots crunched through what felt like body parts lying on the ground – broken ribcages, crunched torsos, fractured skulls. He nearly pitched onto his face, but was held up and driven onwards by the press of bodies around him.

Just as before, the Iron Hands advanced faster than the mortals could. They had their own objectives, ones that had not been communicated to him or anyone else. That was fine by him; he knew his role. Every man around him knew his role – to do as much damage to the enemy as he could before the end came. If that end drew just one blade away from the Angels of Death then it had achieved its purpose.

Mutants began to crash in amongst them then, howling and shrieking as they careered down the many spans that bridged the gulf between the spiral stairway and the inner walls of the hive. Some still carried ranged weapons; most used improvised blades or the distorted growths bursting from their ruined frames.

Marivo saw one come at him – a burly horror with round black plates in place of skin – and fired. His first shot went wide, but the second connected. The mutant stumbled, and another las-blast finished him.

He kept running. Men alongside him fell and were left behind, choking in the bloody murk that ran ankle-deep and rolling down into oblivion. He kept firing. Two more mutants went down to his shots.

He’d always been a good marksman. He’d been proud of that, back when his life had consisted of training drills and off-world exercises. He could shoot.

Another one came charging across to the stairway, sprinting along a slender connecting bridge and leaping over the stone railing.

The creature’s face was stretched obscenely. Its teeth punched through its own cheeks, extending out and up like the tusks of an ork. It pounced at Marivo from the shadows, thrashing a dirty-looking goad at his stomach.

Marivo swung his lasgun round, squeezing off a single shot. It glanced against the creature’s oncoming arm but didn’t stop the goad. The blunt blade slipped under his armoured breastplate and burrowed deep into his stomach.

Marivo gasped, but kept moving. He ripped the blade free and smashed the stock of his weapon into the mutant’s face. It staggered backwards, lurching towards the edge of the stairway. Marivo limped after it, swinging his gun like a club and bludgeoning it closer to the drop.

It saw the danger, and tried to lunge at him again with the goad. By then, though, Marivo had been able to spin his lasgun back the right way round. He fired, and the shot blasted the creature clean over the railing. It tumbled out into the void, shrieking wildly before its plummet carried it out of earshot.

Marivo slumped against the railing of the stair, his hand clamped to his bloody stomach. He leaned against the stone. All around him, men and mutants grappled with one another.

Feeling dizzy, he let his head swing around. He looked out over the edge of the stairwell. The void fell away into blackness below him, vertiginous and yawning, and he realised how high he’d come already.

When he saw the green bloom race towards him from out of the depths, he had no idea what it was. He watched it puff out like algae in water, swimming out of the darkness and swirling up in broad, milky swathes.

Only when it hit him did he recognise what it was. He remembered the toxic fog of the wasteland, how it had nearly killed him before. He crashed to the floor, trying not to breathe in and knowing he would have to. The air around him flushed green as clouds of chemical fog raced up the core of the spire, billowing and boiling like thunderheads before a gale.

Marivo tried to rise, staggering forwards, then crashed to earth. He could feel blood run down from his eyes, and his skin begin to burn. He began to lose consciousness, but somehow managed to roll himself onto his back. He heard other bodies crash to the floor with wet thuds. He heard both men and mutants dissolve into fits of coughing.

His vision went cloudy. The sounds of gunfire receded, becoming muffled and echoing.

Marivo had no idea how the spire’s seals had been breached. He had no idea whether it had been intentional or not. Before he died, though, he did realise something that he guessed might be important: those of mortal flesh and blood, whether pure or mutant, could not fight for long in such conditions. They would die as the chemical filth filled their lungs. Only those encased in armour and with the physique of demigods could tolerate it.

The Emperor’s Angels.

Marivo let his head fall back. He gazed directly above him. As he did so, clouds of green-tinged fog rushed over him, sweeping up the Great Stair and curling around the core.

Bolted to an overhanging bulkhead, only five metres above him, was a standard-issue Imperial aquila. Marivo had seen thousands of such emblems during his service, and that one was no different. It was streaked with purple fluid and cracked from solid-round impacts, but it was still intact. Somehow it had survived the desecration, a tiny portion of Shardenus’s dignity still unbroken.

That gave him comfort. The image had been with him since childhood, defining him, giving him purpose. It was the emblem of his life. It was the emblem of all their lives. Now, at the end, it watched over him with blind, impassive eyes, unfurling its angular wingspan across the scenes of devastation.

‘Holy Throne of Terra…’ he breathed, beginning the catechism that would guide him to the Emperor’s side.

He knew he had achieved very little. He had killed a few traitors, and gathered a few more loyalists to his side. He had followed the orders he’d been given, even at the end when he’d had the chance to get out. Whenever he could, he’d stayed on his feet, fighting on, standing up to horrors that were far in excess of his limited powers.

He didn’t know whether that made him a hero or a fool. He knew what Khadi thought.

‘Holy Master of Mankind…’ he rasped, coughing.

He never finished. His jaw fell open, his lasgun fell from his hands, his chest stopped moving. All around him, traitors and loyalists slammed to the stairs, retching and scratching at their throats.

And so it was that, flat on his back, his unseeing eyes staring towards the heavens, Alend Marivo died the way he’d always known he would: his uniform on, his blast-visor down, and with image of the eternal Imperium gazing down upon him.

Telach sprinted up the stair, flanked by his three Codiciers. His breath came in deep, ragged gasps. Warp fire trailed from his armour in long glowing streamers, and the head of his staff flared like an imprisoned sun. The gap between the Stair’s edge and the bulk of the hive around him narrowed dramatically, closing down to nothing more than a few metres. He saw the curve of arches soaring towards their keystones, and knew the end was close.

Light streamed from the joints in his battle-plate, leaking out from the incandescence within him. He was burning himself up, bleeding with summoned psychic fire that consumed him even as he used it to kill the creatures that blocked his progress. The agony of it had long since ceased to plague him. It drove him onwards, keeping his purpose pure, goading him into ever greater feats of endurance.

Only he knew the full measure of the monsters being birthed in the spire above. If the rift opened, many more abominations would spill through, condemning Shardenus to a living hell of madness. The lesser daemons they had fought since entering the tunnels required only trivial sorcery to spin into being. The ones that were coming demanded sacrifices of worlds: they were devourers, the shrivers of souls, the bringers of torment.

One of Fulgrim’s sons. And he has fought us before.

Telach kept running, leaping up several steps at a time. Warp creatures crashed against his psychic shielding, burning away at the touch of the dreadful aegis around him. With every impact, a little of his strength was chipped away, a fragment of his power dissipated.

He’d gone faster than the others, using his psychic gifts to propel him. Only Nedim, Malik and Djeze, similarly wreathed in layers of fire and capable of using their powers to sustain them, had been able to keep up. Telach had blazed a trail up through the high places, using his warp-summoned powers to speed him onwards. Even he had not been able to outrun the clouds of toxins that had rushed up the central core, sweeping through the ranks of mutants before them and laying them low. Now, with the swarms of traitor creatures thinned out, every step, every boost, took him a little closer to the conflict that waited.

He had to be quicker. He ignored the stress-warnings from his armour, and he ignored the blood swilling in his boots, and he ignored the growing tears in his muscles. He kept going, ever upwards, ever higher, carving a path through the vaults of darkness like a spear of starlight surging up through layers of shadow.

When he finally broke through, it came as shock. He thundered onwards, tearing along the broken marble stairwell. He reached a ruined segment – a jumbled heap of fallen masonry and metal struts, as if a whole section of wall had been blasted inwards, clogging the way ahead. There was no way around – it seemed as if the entire spire had collapsed in on itself, closing up the abyss between the core and the rest of the structure and forming a massive clot of semi-molten, tangled ferrocrete.

Telach picked up the pace, accelerating towards the wall of ruin. By the time he hit it, he was moving at massive speed. He burst up into the wreckage, burrowing through it and throwing the lumps of detritus aside like a leviathan emerging from the deep. He felt his Codiciers follow him, burning and destroying as they came. His momentum carried him straight through, barging away plasteel beams and hurling cracked blocks of masonry aside. He heard huge crashes as rebars and rockcrete arches crashed down into the stairwell below, bouncing and disintegrating as they whirled into the abyss.

Then he broke out, bursting into the open on the far side. The layers of broken hive-structure gave out at last. Above them was a sky formed of boiling ash clouds and flickering orange lightning. Telach shrugged off the debris in dusty clouds, emerging into a scene of pure desolation.

He clambered higher, pulling himself free of the well he had bored through the broken metal, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

The pinnacle of the Capitolis was gone. Whole towers, domes and structures had all gone, blasted apart in a storm of incendiary fury. What remained was a blunt, unstable, half-collapsed plateau at the very top of the hive. It was comprised of molten metal and broken pillars, riven with crevasses, still flickering with windswept flame, open to the elements and buffeted by the endless, driving ash.

Telach spun round, searching for the enemy that he had sensed for so long. His Codiciers pulled themselves free of the wreckage and joined him, their fists crackling with opalescent energies.

The plateau was big – four hundred metres across, at least – but was as uneven and treacherous as any blast site. Over to Telach’s left, a huge gouge plunged down the southern face of the spire, still burning furiously and sending rolling plumes of smoke drifting across what remained intact. Everything was black, scorched into carbon by the furious firestorm that had swept through the upper levels.

Far, far below him, down on the wasteland between the spires, Telach could see a long, ravaged formation of tanks bombarding the lower levels of the hive. Further out, almost lost in the smog and ash, were the two enormous Warlord Titans. They didn’t move, and no lights glinted from their cockpits. He briefly wondered what they were waiting for.

He began to move, striding out across the wreckage of the Capitolis’s pinnacle. It felt as if he’d emerged high atop some mythical pillar of the gods, thrust up from the mantle of a burning world and exposed to the gaze of the angry heavens. He could still sense corruption around him – it stuck in his nostrils, draining his strength and dragging on his muscles.

Then he saw the rift. It must have been enclosed once, hidden inside one of the Capitolis’s highest chambers and surrounded by the instruments of ritual. Now those chambers and those instruments were gone, blasted apart in an orgy of fire, and the portal was out in the open, cast upon the uttermost summit of the shattered hive spire.

To mortal eyes, it was almost nothing. An absence more than a substance, it hovered seductively on the edge of sight like a vid-feed artefact or a distortion on an auspex readout. Telach couldn’t focus on it; any attempt to do so made his eyes ache. Only the elements at its edge could be seen truly – a vague circle of flickering, wavering witchfire, ten metres across, hovering several metres above the plateau of ruin.

His psychic senses told him more. They told him that the rift was nearly complete, that the skeins of matter holding the structure of the universe intact were stretched very tight. Enormous forces clustered on the other side, ready to pour through the gap. He could hear the claws of the neverborn as they raged at the remaining resistance, scraping the veils of perception aside one by one. Daemons beyond number were clustered on the far side, ready to turn Shardenus into a nightmarish, eternal play-world for their obscene desires.

Telach strode up to the portal, feeling its unholy essence radiate across him. Out on the plains below, men continued to die, and fires continued to rage. His Codiciers followed him, each of them kindling fresh psychic fire from their force-staffs. They had the power to destroy it. The damnation of Shardenus would be halted.

By your grace, he said to himself, preparing for the challenge of closing it. We are in time.

He raised his staff.

Then, behind him, ten metres away, nearly on the edge of the dizzying drop, a pile of masonry stirred.

Telach almost didn’t turn. His first thought was that it was a lesser daemon that had followed them up, one that his acolytes were capable of dealing with.

But he did turn. Some note of disquiet made him look away from the rift and over to where the rubble was moving.

Claws extended from the wreckage, long and curved and made of black metal. A fist followed them, encased in horribly damaged armour. A spiked curve of pauldron broke free, scattering detritus as it rose.

Then the head emerged. Telach saw it thrash back and forth, shaking off the debris around it. He saw patches of skin, yellow with age and daubed with streaks of rouge, stitched together over a gaunt frame of jutting bone. He saw milky eyes set deep within ravaged cheeks. He saw curls of aether-light spill over its scalp, coursing across the tortured surface like streams of tears.

With an echoing roar, the creature pulled itself free of the wreckage, and uncurled itself. Lightning snapped and fizzed around it, lancing down from the heavens as if drawn by its unholy presence.

It was a giant; almost three times the height of a Terminator-clad Space Marine. It was a huge, shambling mess of armour plates, bulbous tumours of weeping flesh and gaudy, vivid swirls of decoration. Clusters of jewels hung from its breastplates in iron chains, clanking together as the monster moved. Flayed skin hung from its shoulders in long tatters, swirling about it in the ash-wind like grotesque purity seals. A motley collection of trophies had been bolted on to its immense frame, fighting for space amid glistening, overspilling muscle-bunches. Bodily fluids, pungent with foul aromas, sluiced across the chaotic landscape of ceramite and metal.

The creature stretched out, extending two enormous lightning claws, turning the blades and delighting in them. Witchfire crackled around it, licking and snaking up from the blasted plateau. Telach could sense the terrible hearts beating within that grotesque outer shell. He could feel the furnace of daemonic energy deep within, boiling and raging and only barely contained by the physical bonds set around it.

The monster had once been human. It had once been like he was – an Angel of Death, a Child of the Emperor.

The daemon looked down on Telach and the Codiciers. It recognised what they were. Its gaze was deranged, out-of-focus. When it smiled, patches of stitched flesh broke away from its skull, bursting free of their sutures.

‘Exquisite,’ it said.

Morvox thundered upwards, thrusting aside the living flesh that reached out to ensnare him. Filaments grasped at his armour and pulled tight before snapping. Snarls and blooms of chemical-laced fog rushed by, surging up from the abyss below and streaking up towards the summit of the stairwell.

‘Onward!’ roared Khatir, only just ahead of him.

The Iron Father’s flamers were raging just as strongly as they had been in the early stages. The mutants had ceased to be a threat – the toxic atmosphere had felled them in droves, freeing up paths ahead of the Iron Hands’ spearhead. The marble floor was carpeted with their broken bodies, bloated with fumes and with blood pouring from every orifice.

Morvox struggled to keep up with Khatir’s furious pace. The Iron Hands had spread out during the long pursuit up the Great Stair, many of them waylaid by daemonic attacks or dragged into combat along the many tributary spans. The thick chemical fog made reading locations difficult, even as it allowed them to race up the spiralling stairway far faster than before.

Morvox no longer knew how far behind his clave had fallen: their life-signals on his helm-display had gone, and damage to his right lens clouded the results further. His bolter had long since run out of ammunition, so he carried his chainsword two-handed, swinging it around him like a mace.

Even though the mutants had been eliminated, the daemons were still present. Impervious to the poisons in the air, they leapt from the inner walls of the spire and sailed over to the Stair, shrieking as they came.

Gergiz had been taken down by one of them; it had sprung from nowhere, grappling with him in an obscene parody of an embrace before tipping them both over the edge of the precipitous shaft. Morvox had seen other warriors ripped apart by them, crippled by claw-strikes, reduced to smoking, fizzing hunks of metal and ceramite by the rapid flicker of warp-fast blades.

‘Cleanse the unclean! For the Emperor!’

Khatir’s entreaties remained strong. He’d driven inexorably upwards, blazing a trail through the dark heart of the hive like a firebrand thrust into the night sky. Only now was his voice becoming cracked, the amplifiers in his helm stretched to their limit.

Something snapped out at Morvox’s shoulder then, thrusting out from the darkness. He lashed round, and his chainsword ploughed into what looked like a forest of human hands reaching out from the slough of filth that covered every surface of the Stair’s core. He hacked at them viciously, quickly turning the mutated muscles into a bloody, twitching soup of severed flesh.

Once free, he burst back into motion, sprinting hard to catch up with Khatir.

‘Purge the mutant!’ came the Iron Father’s roar from ahead, suddenly cut short by the heavy rush of flamers.

Morvox redoubled his pace, thundering around the curving sweep of the Stair, brushing aside the fronds of corrupted matter that still grabbed at him.

He rounded the corner and saw the Iron Father’s body twisted on the ground, crushed up against the inner core of the stairwell. Over it squatted a lesser daemon, its face alive with glee and covered in blood. Two of its sisters lay in the mire beside them, their heads severed and their skin blackened.

Morvox kept going, crashing into the daemon and carrying them both clear of Khatir’s body. It arched its back and broke free of him, pouncing to one side and swivelling around, ready to launch at him with its claws. Morvox lunged out with his chainsword, driving the blades diagonally across the creature’s body. The daemon screamed, thrashing against the whirring edges, before spinning away. Morvox went after it, thrusting out and hacking back, driving it towards the edge. He caught it again, snagging his chainsword against its body and churning through lilac flesh.

It screamed in agony before crashing through the stone railing and tumbling out into the void. Cut apart by Morvox’s blades, it dropped like a stone, wailing away into nothingness.

Morvox spun back round, hurrying over to the Iron Father, stooping over him and searching for signs of life.

They were there – very faint, just on the edge of detection.

‘Lord, an Apothecary,’ he said, stilling his chainsword and running a medicae scan over Khatir’s blood-soaked torso.

Khatir’s fist shot up. His gauntlet seized Morvox’s forearm. The grip was savage.

‘Go,’ Khatir rasped, and fresh blood bubbled up between his helm and breastplate. ‘The summit. Do it.’

Morvox hesitated. Khatir was not yet dead. Given time, given treatment, he might live.

‘I do not–’

The grip on his arm started to weaken.

‘Still, you question,’ growled Khatir, his voice degrading into a throaty mess. He sounded desperate. ‘Continue on present tasking.’

Something about the Iron Father’s voice made Morvox recoil then. For a moment, he couldn’t understand what it was.

Then he felt the old disgust rise up in him. He heard the sound of blood welling up through flesh, slipping over the mechanical components embedded there and fouling their operation. He saw the Iron Father’s raw muscle, exposed under broken armour plate, glistening wetly in the dark.

Khatir’s hand slipped from Morvox’s armour and thudded to the ground.

It will come for you soon. You will forget pity, and you will see the weakness we carry within us.

Morvox didn’t say anything more. He pushed his way from Khatir’s cracked armour and turned away. Already, from up ahead, he could hear the shrieks of the neverborn. From below he heard the thud of his brothers’ boots as they charged onwards. He started to move again, first striding, then running heavily.

Weakness.

Morvox gunned his chainsword back into life, and the sound of the lethal, mechanical parts moving lessened the nausea in his stomach.

I am surrounded by it. It is everywhere.

As he ran, he felt a nagging, itching sensation plaguing him. It made him angry. It made him want nothing more than to fight, to forget, to lose himself.

I will not succumb. I will transform.

Morvox charged along the corridor, following its line as it climbed ever higher. As he went, leaving the crippled body of the Iron Father far behind him, the cries of daemons grew louder and nearer.

I will purge it.

He picked up his pace. He relished destroying them. He wanted nothing more. When the first of them came into view, he felt like grinning.

The rest is strength.

The monster lurched into battle, crushing the brittle landscape of ruin beneath its feet. It moved with none of the sinuous grace of the lesser daemons – it was a patchwork creature of scraps and ancient relics, locked together by sorcery and its own infernal will. As it moved, whips of purple light slapped and slipped around it, bouncing from the shards of old, clattering battle-plate.

It grinned as it advanced, and its sutured face stretched. Iron teeth, each of them filed to points and dripping with viscous saliva, flashed through the drifting smog. Its eyes stared ceaselessly, bleary with malice and madness. Its lightning claws snickered back and forth, grinding against one another as the horror flexed its tattered muscles.

Across its enormous torso hung the remnants of an old breastplate, burst open by the glossy flesh beneath. An Imperial aquila had once adorned it, picked out in gold, but was now almost entirely obscured by baroque adornments and freshly-lacquered panels. Some of its residual armour had been painted a vivid purple; other pieces glowed with lurid pastel shades.

As it crashed towards Telach and the Codiciers, it gurgled with bubbling laughter, and strands of saliva hung in loops from its sagging jaw.

‘Perfect,’ it slurred, lingering on the word as if it had some significance for it.

Telach felt his hearts sink. He knew he had enough power to seal the rift. He might have had enough power, acting in concert with his acolytes, to fight the daemon-creature, though that was uncertain.

He could not do both. Even as he prepared to meet the onslaught he could sense the rift weakening further. Every heartbeat brought it closer to rupture.

+Strike together,+ he sent to the Codiciers, watching carefully as the three of them fanned out across the plateau. Each one of them held their force-staff two-handed, and eddies of psychic essence reflected dully from their dark battle-plate. +Say nothing, heed nothing.+

He could sense their tenseness, their readiness. All of them had passed beyond the possibility of fear, but they could still recognise the magnitude of the horror they faced.

The Emperor protects, he mouthed.

Nedim was the first of his acolytes to lash out, sending a spitting column of silver energy straight at the daemon. It exploded as it impacted, showering the plateau with smoking, spinning trails of sparkling residue.

Malik followed him, dousing the daemon in a welter of shimmering energy. Then Djeze released, joining the streams of coruscating warp-fire in a triangle of snaking, surging force.

The daemon rocked back on its cloven hooves, thrashing its arms through the deluge and hurling gouts of the silvery matter in all directions. A cry of tortured ecstasy escaped from its lips – an amalgam of many voices, many of them human-like, some of them indescribable. It waded onwards amid the storm of coruscating energy, lapping it up and letting it crash across its broken armour.

Then it burst through the oncoming tide, shrugging off the attacks and letting them break across its flesh like rainwater. It plunged towards Nedim, swinging its claws in slow, pendulous motions. As it lumbered into range, fragments of its haphazard body began to break away, flaking free like scales being dragged from the hide of some enormous saurian.

Telach waited until the last moment, until the creature had gained enough momentum to be unable to pull back.

+Unleash,+ he breathed.

An inferno of blazing silver leapt into existence, exploding in a raging storm of blinding light. The warp essence was dragged up from Telach’s very soul – the raw stuff of the aether, fashioned into lethal energy by the Librarian’s art, turned from a seething morass of formlessness and into a focused, deadly weapon.

Telach felt it thunder out from his staff, making the length of it shiver and his arms tremble. Light spilled from his eyes, from his open mouth, from the palms of his hands. The roaring maelstrom made the joints of his armour burn white-hot. He felt his whole body respond, caught up in the immense, consuming tide of power as it escaped from him.

The snaking barrage hit the daemon full on, sending it staggering back again. Its legs bowed, and it reeled away from Nedim. More unearthly cries of savage pleasure escaped from its mouth, and its long tongue flailed out wildly.

Telach took a stride forwards, maintaining the ferocious assault.

Burn, abomination. Go back to the realm that created you. Be undone. Be banished.

Djeze and Malik advanced with him, summoning up their own flurries of silver-edged bolts and hurling them at the retreating torso of the daemon.

The creature was wounded. Gouts of purple blood ran down its limbs, boiling as the silver flames evaporated it. More slivers of its bizarre armour were blown away, spinning off into the backwash of psychic power that streamed away behind it.

But it was no lesser creature of darkness – it was a prince of pain, a master of the dark wells of a mortal’s mind, and its command of sorcery was a match for all but the greatest champions of Mankind. Moreover, its movements were not those of a creature trying to evade the punishment.

It revelled in it. It wanted more.

It crouched down, hacking up laughter from its ruined gullet, continually bludgeoned by the rain of warp matter. Then it pounced, swinging into the air with a huge thrust of its gigantic legs. Its hooves crushed the metal as it landed, then it kicked off again, lurching and swaying through the torrential fire, racing towards Nedim and shrieking with splintered laughter. Its claws flickered through the air, jumping from one position to the next like out-of-sequence frames on a vid-pict.

Telach adjusted the trajectory of his assault, aiming to knock the monster back again and clear of the Codicier, but the daemon was too fast, too powerful. Nedim braced himself and swung his staff upwards to meet the daemon’s talons, planting his feet wide apart for the impact of the claws.

It never came. Somehow, the metal spurs seemed to shift out of position, causing Nedim to miss the parry and stumble forwards.

It was enough. The daemon grabbed him by the throat and lifted him high into the air. Telach and the others came in closer, hurling bolts of crackling warp fire. The bolts hit it hard, and it reeled away again, still clutching its prey. Nedim, held up one-handed, slammed his staff down into the daemon’s face, aiming for its eyes.

Again, the blow should have connected, but – impossibly – the creature’s grinning face had already moved. It dodged the impact and flexed its arm, throwing Nedim high into the air. For a fraction of a second the Codicier hung powerless above the laughing daemon, his limbs outstretched and his staff out of position. Then the monster thrust up with both its claws, plunging its blades through Nedim’s waist.

The Codicier was torn in two, his torso rent cleanly apart in a bloody flail of gore and broken ceramite. The pieces crashed to the ground, followed by a rain of wet slaps as his eviscerated entrails followed him down.

The daemon swung around, doused in blood and buffeted by the roaring, spitting streams of silver fire from the remaining three Librarians. It threw its tortured head back and uttered a gargling cry of triumph, soaking up the furious volleys of warp matter as they exploded against its flanks.

‘Magnificent!’ it bellowed, revelling in the carnage it had caused even as it suffered under the torrents of forking energy. Blood ran down its scarred chin, and its long tongue lapped it up. ‘Give me more, Gorgon-spawn! Give me more!’

Malik and Djeze each withdrew steadily, maintaining the lines of blistering force from their staffs, unwilling to be caught within strike-range of the creature’s claws.

Telach felt a cold dread pass through him. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the rift pulsing. The empty space between the ring of witchfire had distorted further, as if it were bulging outwards. The daemon-creature’s presence in the world was drawing the others towards it. For the first time, he saw shapes on the other side – writhing shapes, pressing up against the thinning walls of matter.

+Do not withdraw!+ he ordered the Codiciers, feeding more energy to his crackling staff and breaking into a run towards the towering daemon. +It can endure this fire. Move in – get closer.+

As he ran, the last bolts of warp energy crashed into their target. Telach withdrew his power to the staff itself, coating it in a sheen of magnesium-white. The length of it blazed with sudden brilliance, transforming into a force-weapon of concentrated luminescence.

‘For Manus!’ he roared, breaking into a rare battle-cry as he lumbered heavily into range.

The daemon lurched towards him in turn, swaying and giggling even as its cloak of flayed flesh crisped away in the deluge.

‘Manus?’ it laughed, frothing at the mouth with insane glee, bringing its talons into position and clanging them together. ‘I was there when he died, Iron Hand.’

Then it broke into a shambling, rocking charge, thrashing its arms as it came in a whirl of blades and blood.

‘We killed him,’ it mocked, bursting through the sheets of aether-flame. ‘We will kill you.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Mechanicus crawler made its way slowly across the Gorgas, rocking and swaying as it crunched through the remnants of civilisation. Ahead of it, vast and magnificent even in ruin, reared the burning spires of Shardenus Prime. Lightning flickered across the heights, leaping down from swirling bands of cloud. The pinnacles of the spires blazed furiously, shining like blood-red beacons across the landscape of desolation.

Ys looked at it impassively. Her throne was hoisted on suspensors and remained reasonably level during the passage, but even the slightest jolts annoyed her.

She was ashamed, and she was still angry. Progress was too slow, and the chances of achieving what she needed to achieve diminished as every minute passed.

She glanced at the signals from her skitarii escorts. Some of her tracked units had pushed ahead, looking for a faster way through the wreckage.

They wouldn’t find one; her cogitators had plotted the most efficient route on the basis of detailed schematics. She would have to be patient. She would have to sit, immobile, locked inside the huge metal shell of her mobile fortress, and wait for the kilometres to pass.

I will kill him for this, she determined, gripping the sides of her throne with metal fingers. The judgement is just; Mars will understand.

She sat on the throne, watching through the noosphere projections as the spires drew slowly nearer, marking where the Iron Hands had broken in and gauging where their fighting must have taken them.

Her resolve hardened; it couldn’t come quickly enough.

I will kill him.

Telach leapt into the air, using his servo-powered legs to catapult him upwards. As he hurtled towards the daemon he swung his staff round, lashing out at its unholy flesh.

He had to move quickly. For all its shambolic appearance, the creature was the fastest enemy he had ever faced. Its blades whirled around him in a flickering, wavering dance, sometimes seeming to shift in and out of existence entirely. The gaudy array of grotesquerie was a distraction, masking a terrifying level of power within. Its muscles, bursting out from behind cracked armour plate, were a terrible mix of genhanced, warp-wound strength.

Even as he fought for his life, conscious that the rift was growing with every second, desperate thoughts raced through Telach’s mind. He had been party to lore forbidden to most; he knew the names of ancient traitors from the old Legions. He knew much of the history of his Chapter, even fragments of those forgotten days, millennia distant, when primarchs had walked among mortal men.

He did not know enough. The lore was incomplete. He did not know the name of the creature he faced.

Telach’s power staff crashed against the daemon’s claws, hurling fresh gouts of warp fire in all directions. Its talons swept back towards him and Telach veered away, smashing its forearms aside with his staff.

The creature’s hide ruptured, exposing a flickering skein of kaleidoscopic sinew. Fresh purple blood burst out, popping and cascading over the glowing matter beneath.

By then Djeze and Malik had closed in again, wielding their lightning-crowned staffs and hammering them into the daemon’s body. Their skill was prodigious, their bravery absolute, their commitment total. They fought as all the Emperor’s Angels did – brutal, fast, deadly. Their bionics made them stronger again, bolstering the momentum of every blow and speeding up their reactions by precious nanoseconds. The power of the aether rushed to their aid, enveloping them in curtains of consuming fire, flaring out with each staff-strike and raging against the unholy aegis surrounding the daemon.

It wasn’t enough. For all their speed, the creature of Chaos was faster. For all their strength, it was stronger. For all their warp-mastery, it was far, far more steeped in the sorcery of the immaterium.

It punched out with its taloned fist, rocking Telach back on his heels and denting his breastplate. As he tumbled away, he saw talons whistle round, cracking into Djeze’s helm. The acolyte went reeling, stumbling backwards across the tilted, broken landscape.

Then the daemon switched direction again, swivelling effortlessly. For all its demented, carefree laughter, every move it made was judged with deceptive precision. Malik charged in, bringing the tip of his staff down and releasing another torrent of spitting argent fire.

The barrage sprayed across the daemon’s leading leg, sending a stream of purple blood splattering across metal and ceramite, but the move had been foreseen. Before Telach could close in again, before Djeze could regain his feet, the daemon opened up its gauntlet.

The movement was perfect. Lilac energy exploded on impact, ripping through the ash and sending a resounding snap across the plateau. Malik was hurled through the air, careering wildly away from the explosion, his staff broken and his armour smoking. Even as he was cast aside, the daemon opened up its other fist, hurling a flaming ball of purple warp matter sailing after him. The second explosion was greater than the first – a monumental boom that engulfed the stricken Iron Hand in a welter of raging, consuming destruction.

His armour broke open, exposing the flesh within to the pure power of the warp. Telach heard Malik scream briefly before the Codicier landed heavily, colliding with the charred girders of the plateau. The sound was cut off by a sickening snap, and Malik’s limbs fell limp. A length of adamantium rod the width of a man’s forearm protruded from his cracked chest, impaling him to the summit of the spire.

By then Telach was moving again, wielding his force-staff two-handed. He rammed it down on the daemon’s tattered thigh, plunging the tip through the sorcerous muscle and burning it up with crackling warp fire. It reacted instantly, sweeping its claws around to knock him clear. Telach ducked, feeling the killing edges sweep above him by a finger’s width, before thrusting the staff upwards, aiming at the monster’s heart.

A little faster, and he would have done it. The daemon parried the blow just in time, bringing its gauntlet across to lock against the staff. It grasped the metal, squeezing it tightly and forcing it away. Telach pushed back, feeling his arms burn under the enormous pressure. He felt blood and sweat run down his temples.

The daemon leered over him, drooling from cracked lips.

‘Excellent,’ it crooned, piling on more weight. ‘I shall relish bleeding you last of all.’

Then Djeze roared back into combat, his gauntlets streaming with psychic energy. The Codicier leapt high, vaulting over a ridge of smouldering masonry and jabbing down with his staff. The blazing tip of it hit hard, driving deep into the daemon’s armoured shoulder. Opalescent fire surged out, crashing across all of them in a glittering, torrential deluge.

The daemon released the pressure on Telach’s staff and was beaten back, laughing all the while. Strips of skin from its sutured face were ripped away, revealing bloody muscle tissue underneath. More armour fragments were blasted clear. It roared with pleasure from every bloody wound it received, revelling in every impact and fresh bite of warp flame.

Freed to move again, Telach swung his staff around, building momentum. He unleashed a fresh torrent of crashing, roaring destruction, adding his fire to Djeze’s in a brutal, spitting conflagration. Under the twin assaults, the daemon withdrew further, limping awkwardly, thrashing its limbs wildly amid the deluge as if swimming through it.

Telach pursued, sending bolts crashing into its retreating torso. Both Librarians unleashed all they had left, emptying themselves against the daemon. The air itself seemed to carve open, riven apart by the elemental forces loosed through it. Stabs of lightning intensified, drawn by the enormous clash of energies, crackling and snapping around them like solar flares.

Even that was not enough. The daemon slowly regained its balance, and its demented laughter morphed into something more sinister, more purposeful. It pushed back against the veils of silver fire with bleeding hands. It lowered its broken pauldrons and strode forwards, step by step, back towards the two Iron Hands.

It had been badly hurt – a long gash ran down its disintegrating face, making its jaw sag horribly. A smoking hole had been torn in its midriff just below the shattered aquila, exposing blackened, pulsing organs within. Its tongue flickered back and forth, snaking across exposed bone and metal plate.

‘This has been exquisite,’ it gurgled.

Then it lunged, bursting through the crackling arcs of warp lightning, sweeping towards Telach like an avenging angel. Djeze intervened, and was blasted aside, thrown down with a contemptuous swipe of a bleeding gauntlet.

Telach planted himself, holding his staff before him and feeding it all the power he could muster. A glimmering shield formed in front of him, and he felt his armour servos stiffen against the coming impact.

The daemon thundered into him, wrapped in a glowing nimbus of purple flame, its claws sweeping back and forth in a blur of blinding movement.

Telach parried furiously, though the force of the blows nearly shattered his forearms. He was driven back, stumbling as the massive creature hammered at his defences. The shield before him buckled, ripped, and then splintered. He felt a fist thud heavily into his flank, cracking his armour and breaking the bionics beneath. He spun away, only for talons to rake down his helm. His right eye-lens cracked, and a rapier-thin claw gouged into his eye-socket.

Telach tried desperately to summon up psychic power, but his staff was ripped away from him. He punched out, clenching his gauntlet and going for the daemon’s chest. The daemon’s right claw shot down, taking his left arm off at the elbow. Its blades sliced cleanly through the metal workings of Telach’s armour, breaking the pistons and gears in a cloud of electric discharge.

Telach fell heavily, crashing on to his back. He felt his consciousness waver, and blood ran down the inside of his helm like oil. He struck out blindly with his right hand, and missed. He felt huge, warm fingers grip his throat, pressed against the armour of his gorget and pushing inwards.

Telach’s left eye blinked blood away, and his vision briefly cleared. The daemon’s face hung over him.

Its skin was hanging from its bones, suspended by stray lines of surgical wire. Blood ran freely down across its hide, pooling and bubbling in the folds of flayed flesh and shattered armour pieces. Jewels clanged on their twisted chains, each of them lit from within by twisting flames. Some of them were round and smooth, with the sheen of xenos artifice on their surfaces.

The daemonic face swung lower, and fluid dripped from the exposed flesh onto Telach’s helm. Its breath stank of incense and musk.

‘You have forgotten so much,’ it said.

Telach looked into its rheumy eyes, knowing the end had come. He was pinned. His hearts thudded in unison, going into overdrive just to keep him alive.

‘You do not know who I am,’ said the daemon-creature. Its voice was suddenly petulant. ‘You do not even know the names of your brothers I killed. Why have you forgotten so much? Why do you not remember?’

Telach felt fresh blood wash hotly across his torso, and his vision briefly went dark again. He concentrated furiously, trying to stay conscious at the last, determined to meet his death with his eyes open.

‘I do not need to know your name,’ he rasped. ‘You are just another traitor.’

The daemon roared with anger. It curled its claws into fists and slammed them into Telach’s body, denting his armour and beating the Librarian further down into the crushed and twisted terrain.

‘Santar knew!’ the daemon screamed. ‘He knew who I was! He knew that it was Julius Kaesoron, First of the Emperor’s Children, who had beaten him! You are shadows of what he was! You are sick! Where is the sport in fighting such diminished creatures?’ It drew its talons back higher, poised to attack, and fire ran along the length of the claws.

‘Ferrus would weep,’ it said, ‘to see what you have become.’

Telach blearily watched the points plunge down at him. He saw his distorted reflection in the metal as the polished edges rushed towards his neck.

The blade that saved him came out of nowhere, and crackled with a blue disruptor field. It locked with the daemon’s claw just above Telach’s helm, throwing glittering illumination across his battered armour and holding firm.

‘He never wept,’ came Rauth’s machine-growl.

Then the clan commander threw the daemon’s claws back up from Telach’s neck, strode across his battered body and launched into combat.

Nethata was slammed against the wall of the tank’s cockpit, and his head bounced painfully from a metal bulkhead.

He pushed himself back into his seat, regretting having released the restraints only minutes earlier. He pulled the strapping back across his chest, and the tank’s tilting floor rocked back to something like horizontal.

‘What was that?’ he snapped.

‘Our escort,’ replied the tank’s commander. ‘They’re finding our range; I’m moving up.’

The tank’s chassis swayed again as the engines coughed and growled. Nethata twisted around in his seat, squinting into his auspex and trying to make sense of the readings that flooded across the tiny screen.

If he’d been in Malevolentia he’d have had a whole bank of pict readouts to look at. He’d have had dedicated comms units, and tactical overlays, and everything else a field commander needed to coordinate a massed armour advance.

But Malevolentia was gone. It had taken a terrific amount of punishment before it had succumbed. Its armour was the best in the formation, and had absorbed a number of direct hits before the end.

Heriat had just kept advancing through all of it, even when the whole roof of his vehicle was on fire and the main cannon had been knocked out. Nethata had watched it all unfold on a tiny, grainy vid-feed all the while, powerless to intervene.

He’d tried to open up a comm-link. He’d not wanted to try to persuade Heriat to withdraw – that would have been pointless. He’d not wanted to berate him, nor query his motives, nor demand control of his army back, all of which would have served no purpose either.

To the extent that he’d had any plan at all, he’d wanted to say that he understood, and to assure him that the two of them needn’t die as enemies. He’d wanted to relive, just for a moment, some fragment of the shared memories they had accumulated over many long, difficult years.

Perhaps Heriat wouldn’t have listened. In any case, the link hadn’t worked – either Malevolentia’s systems were damaged, or he was being blocked.

So Nethata had watched, mute, as the final beams of light had shot out, piercing the super-heavy’s armour plate and striking at the engines within. The end had not been quick – more shots had been needed to ignite the fuel tanks that finally brought the machine to a flaming, shuddering stop.

The tank’s heavy bolters had kept firing the whole time. The engines had stayed running, pushing it ever closer to the semi-ruined walls of the Capitolis. Before he eventually died, Heriat had done more damage to his targets than the next ten units combined. Nethata knew that if any annals of the campaign on Shardenus were ever compiled, Heriat would be recorded as a hero, just as he himself would be painted as a traitor.

He couldn’t argue with that, even though it made a mockery of his decades of decorated service. Such was the price of giving in to pride, of forgetting what the place of individuals was within the boundless war machine of the Emperor.

Nethata tried to shake such thoughts from his mind. He turned his attention back to the auspex readings. Even from the limited data he had, he could see that the remainder of the loyalist armour was destined for Heriat’s fate. Dozens of filtration towers had been taken down. Large sections of the hive walls had been demolished, setting off chain reactions within the spire that broke the atmospheric seals. Still, though, the defending gun positions were intact, and their rain of fire had barely lessened.

They had done all they could. Nethata considered whether to issue the order for withdrawal, wondering whether his troops would still take his commands. With their final task achieved, he still entertained the possibility of escape, of getting back to the fleet and away from Shardenus before the vengeful clan could catch up with him.

Even as he weighed his options, three new readings appeared on the extreme edge of his auspex range. One of the signals was very strange, like nothing he’d ever seen before. The other two were more familiar – Warlord Titans, heading towards the Capitolis at speed.

‘Lopi,’ he breathed, gauging the distance and trying to work out how long it would take them to reach the Capitolis. ‘At last. What has kept him?’

‘Did you say something, lord?’ asked the tank commander, turning round in his seat.

Nethata put the auspex down and looked at him. The game wasn’t over yet; not quite.

‘We’re going back, commander,’ he said. ‘Full reverse, and then follow the coordinates I give you.’

For a moment, the commander resisted. Just as before, he was unwilling to leave the fight.

‘I must protest,’ he said. ‘We are fully engaged.’

Nethata ran a finger along the edge of the bolt pistol he’d been given by Heriat. It was a commissar’s weapon, a weapon designed to enforce discipline. He didn’t plan on using it, but it was nice to know he had it, just in case.

‘Protest all you want,’ said Nethata calmly. ‘Then follow my orders. I don’t care who drives this thing, but one way or the other I will rendezvous with those machines.’

Telach fought for breath. Rauth had driven the daemon back, grappling with it in a brutal melee and pursuing it across the plateau. Telach had been left behind, broken in the wreckage. His cracked helm fed him a whole series of damage markers, though he could barely see them through the screen of blood in his one working eye. The pain where his arm had been severed was ferocious, even though more bionics had been ripped away than actual flesh.

Amid all of that, though, Telach’s overriding emotion was dread – not for himself, but for the portal he had been unable to close. ‘More Iron Hands were emerging from the spire below, but Telach knew they would be able to do nothing against such an arcane threat. He dragged himself away from where his brother warriors charged into battle against the daemon-creature, hauling his broken body one-handed across the knife-sharp detritus of the plateau. All around him the elements whined, tearing at his broken armour and clogging the rents with hot ash.

Despite the blood clotting over his eye, he could see it well enough. The witchfire at its rim was now raging like the world’s fire, red and angry. In the centre of the circle, the air itself was pulled back and forth, flexing like an amniotic sac. The creatures on the far side were obvious now, at least to one with his perception of the immaterium. Even as Telach watched, a clawed hand shot through the barrier, breaking into the universe of the senses in a cascade of multi-hued light.

No time remained. His staff was broken. Summoning the rituals of banishment was beyond him. All he had was himself – his own soul, pregnant with psychic power even as his body collapsed into oblivion.

He had always been prepared to make such a sacrifice. The likelihood of it coming down to such extremity had always been high.

Telach crawled on, feeling the tangle of metal and rubble beneath him rake at his exposed body. Shattered fragments of his breastplate ripped away, torn from the carapace beneath and dragged from their connector nodes. A mix of organic muscle and bionic components fizzed and ripped, mixing blood and lubricant freely.

The portal flexed further. Another inhuman arm reached through, gripping the rim and pulling it taut. The sound of hissing laughter broke across the barrier, growing in volume.

Telach kept going. He was dimly aware of a rising crescendo of bolter fire. Some of it crashed into the portal itself, aimed by those who had no real conception of what they were shooting at. They couldn’t hurt it by mechanical means – if the thing had been susceptible to such damage then it would have been destroyed when the atomic had gone off.

Only one power had the capacity to destroy the rift – the human mind, born out of a mortal cranium, locked in a skull of bone and steeped in psychic power. That, at least, was one organ the Iron Fathers had never tried to replace.

Telach hauled himself to his feet, ignoring the sharp waves of agony that radiated through him. He tottered towards the portal, fighting to keep conscious, to keep one leg moving in front of the other. As he went, he began the process of unbinding.

It was hard to do. Every discipline of a Librarian’s training focused on retaining control, of keeping the vast psychic potential within him under severe censure. Failure to do so resulted in the release of pure warp energy into the universe, creating vortices of unpredictability that threatened to destroy everything around their centre.

He limped closer, feeling the last shreds of physical control leave him. His secondary heart gave out with a hot, agonising burst. His consciousness frayed at the edges, making it seem like he was stumbling down a long tunnel of blurring, overlapping images. He felt a storm of psychic power bursting out from his inner core, roaring up from the depths of his mind and crashing through the barriers he’d spent a lifetime erecting.

The daemons on the far side of the rift saw him coming, and knew what he was doing. They clawed ever more frantically, trying to prise the last elements of the portal open, screaming obscenities and sending images of eternal torment directly into his reeling mind.

By then Telach had reached the edge of the rift, and his mind had almost ceased to function. He was deaf to the physical world and immune to its sensations. He burned from within with a furious white fire, one that bled from his soul in a torrent of destruction even as it sucked at the burning rim of the rift.

He was losing himself, dissolving into a rage of psychic essence, his very being dissipating into a flood of burning, consuming aether.

Telach’s last act was to throw himself forwards, plunging into the swirling vortex of energies in an almighty blaze of full-spectrum light. He heard a massive explosion as if from far away, booming like the crash of surf on a distant shore. He felt the portal buckle and rupture around him, spinning apart as the energies of his dissolution reacted with it. He felt his own body ripped apart as the laws of the universe violently reasserted themselves.

Then he heard a vast sound, roaring like thunder, before it died away. A sensation of falling overtook him.

He passed through, rolling into nothingness.

It went dark, and everything stopped.

Then there was something like light, and something like time.

In his last moments, Telach knew he had destroyed it. He knew that because the world of Shardenus had gone. The entire universe had gone. In its place was a shifting, swaying abyss of infinite possibility. He didn’t see it – he had no eyes left to see anything – but it persisted before him. He had awareness still, a measure of sentience, but nothing else.

For a moment, it was staggeringly beautiful. He drifted amid its primordial majesty like a pearl tumbling across the face of the ocean.

Then they came for him, howling out of the depths. He had frustrated them, and he was adrift in their realm.

In its last seconds of existence, the soul that had been Telach knew what fate awaited it. It was exposed. It would be consumed, and its agonies would be as infinite as the pleasures of those that feasted upon it.

But just then, for a fragment of what passed for time in that place, before the neverborn swam up out of the seething face of eternity to feed, it basked in the fading knowledge of what it had done.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Rauth swung his sword wildly, making no attempt to lend finesse to his blows. He launched his blade around him in huge, vicious arcs, leaving long trails of disruptor energy hanging in the air behind. With each blow, he took another step forwards. Stride by stride, he bludgeoned the daemon back.

The creature staggered away from him, barely meeting each incoming thrust. Rauth hacked and parried with abandon, moving with terrible speed. His armour had taken a ferocious battering during the ascent and plates hung from their mountings like discarded trophies. The ceramite across his left leg had been ripped away, exposing linked steel pistons in place of flesh and bone. His storm bolter had long since been discarded, and now he fought like a warrior of ancient legend, sword in hand and with an aura of righteous fury blazing from his blade.

As he pressed forwards, the familiar thunder of bolter fire broke out from behind him. Those of the claves who had survived the horrors of the interior were breaking out onto the plateau, loosing what ammunition they had at the retreating form of the daemon. They fired in constant torrents, each bolt slamming into the retreating creature and bursting through the lilac skin.

If it had been intact and in the full glow of its unnatural strength such impacts would not have troubled it, but it had been mauled by the attacks of the four Librarians. The power holding its sinews together was unravelling fast, and every swipe of Rauth’s blade, every detonation from a reactive shell, dragged it closer to physical oblivion.

It raged back, slashing at Rauth with its claws, lashing out with an equally ragged loss of control. Rauth grimaced as his right shoulder guard was shattered. His movements became even faster, propelled by hundreds of subcutaneous motors working in concert.

Rauth whirled his blade round, building up momentum for a final, heart-bursting lunge. As he swung the blade into position, a massive explosion burst out from behind him. Jets of crimson fire shot across the sky, streaking far out above the wasteland below. The air seemed to shudder, as if the elements themselves had been ripped out of alignment before snapping back into place. The entire pinnacle rocked, and more crevasses opened across its jagged surface.

Rauth was thrown onto his face, hitting the ground hard. He heard crashes and cracks as others of his contingent were similarly floored. A violent gale screamed across his body, tearing at the extremities of his damaged plate. Huge chunks of broken masonry and cracked metal were flung over the edge of the ruined spire-top, catching fire as they tumbled through the engine-hot atmosphere and disintegrating into rains of flaming dust.

He knew then that Telach had destroyed the rift. In its absence, the winds of Shardenus howled and raced.

Rauth rolled over heavily, powered by his damaged armour, knowing the danger. The portal was gone, but the daemon remained. He looked up – and stared right into its face.

The creature hung low over him. It had been wounded badly by the sudden withdrawal of its ethereal support. Its patchwork face ran with dark blood. Under the skin was a whirl of latticed light, throbbing and pulsing like electrical currents in a cogitator housing. The wind tore at it, lifting up the edges of its broken skin. Its eyes were filmy and its jaw hung slack.

It staggered, almost losing its footing. One of its arms was limp, riddled with bolter wounds and bleeding torrents of virulent blood. Huge chunks of flesh, steaming with heat and plasma, had been gouged from its bloated torso and lay on the ground, slopping in pools of bubbling fluids.

As Rauth lay prone beneath it, the daemon drew its lone claw back, keeping the tips of its blades pointed at the Iron Hand’s torso.

It was coming apart. Soon it would be hurled back from the mortal plane and into temporary oblivion, but it clung on, persisting in the world even as its physical shell collapsed around it.

‘I would have made this world a paradise,’ it said, its voice choked with blood and saliva.

Rauth struggled to move, but the daemon kept him pinned.

‘You have ensured it remains a hell. Perhaps you are proud of that.’

The creature’s face twisted into disgust. It looked repelled, not just by Rauth, but by everything, by the whole edifice of ruin around it, by what the galaxy, what its place within it, had become.

‘We are both sick, son of Ferrus,’ it said, ‘but only I know it.’

Then it plunged its claw down, fast as a bolt-discharge. It ploughed through Rauth’s breastplate, breaking open the ceramite and driving through it. The metal talons travelled straight through Rauth’s chest and out the other side, cutting and tearing as they went.

Rauth’s back arched. The daemon grinned savagely, and twisted the blades.

‘Enjoy this,’ it said. ‘Feel your hearts burst.’

Then Rauth’s own blade shot up, plunging deep into the daemon’s flickering, weeping neck. The power field over the sword detonated in a lashing corona of energy. The daemon screamed, and tried to withdraw.

Rauth wouldn’t let it. He surged to his feet, keeping his sword extended, pushing it deeper into the creature’s unholy flesh. The daemon’s claws broke off as it wrenched away, torn free of the gauntlets and remaining lodged in Rauth’s chest. The Iron Hand fought on regardless, ignoring the metal protruding from his torso and working his own weapon again with heavy, crushing strokes.

The daemon lost its footing, crashing down hard against the serrated plateau. Rauth pursued it mercilessly, hacking at its flailing limbs, carving into the juddering flesh and smashing apart the remnants of its ancient armour.

Finally, he stood over its heaving chest, gazing down at the obscene scrawls on its crushed battle-plate. The daemon-creature looked up at him, surprise and hatred written across its otherworldly face.

Rauth gripped his power sword in two hands, feeling its power thrum along the metal edge.

‘You forget who you’re fighting, son of Fulgrim,’ he said, drawing the weapon high. Despite himself, despite all that had happened, a crooked grin spread across what remained of his face. ‘It’s a long time since I had hearts.’

Then he plunged the blade down, severing the daemon’s head from its neck in a single, terrible blow. Its animating spirit was banished, expiring with a sharp, acrid snap that spun out from where the blow fell. Its grotesque body, hacked and impacted by a thousand blows, slumped into stillness. Blood still ran from the gashes across its frame, bubbling softly as it sank into the charred metal beneath.

Rauth looked down at the carcass. He could hear the sounds of his warriors making their way over to his side. He ignored them.

The daemon’s face was shrinking away, dissolving like flesh in acid. The sutures came loose, freeing up flaps of skin and exposing firmer, older flesh beneath. For a moment, before the last of the gaudy, rouged-streaked embellishments fluttered away, something like elegance was revealed – a taut, aristocratic visage, cruel and intelligent.

There were some in the Imperium who might have recognised that face. Some lords of the Ordo Malleus might have identified the features of one who had been First Captain of the III Legion, who had fought alongside gods in the age of wonder when the Imperium was forged, who had strode across the bloodied plains of Laeran, of Isstvan, of Terra, and who, after the ruin of a traitor’s hopes, had been slowly changed by the wearing horror of the Eye. They might have known what hopes had once been placed in him, how admired and feared he had been, and just how far into madness he had fallen at the end.

Rauth knew none of that. He watched his enemy disintegrate, taking neither pleasure nor pity from the spectacle. The creature’s words lingered in his mind, troubling him for some reason that he found hard to pin down.

We are both sick, son of Ferrus, but only I know it.

Then the face was gone, collapsed into blood and muscle as its animating spirit dissipated.

Dozeph Imanol drew alongside him. The sergeant of Clave Prime had taken a massive wound to the head on the charge up through the centre of the spire, shearing his helm casing away and revealing a bloodied skull beneath. On his return to Medusa, no doubt the entire cranium would be replaced by metal.

‘Did you discover its name?’ he asked.

Rauth shook his head.

‘What does it matter?’ he asked.

He limped away from the corpse. As he went, he pulled the creature’s claws from his chest, dislodging a host of flickering, crackling bionic parts as he did so. The loss of them was not entirely trivial – his helm display was blank, and he’d lost filtration through his vox-guard – but he could live without them for the time being. His three mechanical heart-analogues, each one placed in a different location within his armour and protected by multiple layers of adamantium binding, still beat firmly.

He looked around him, waiting for his breathing to return to a more sustainable level. Telach was gone. A lone Codicier had survived but looked to have sustained heavy injuries. Less than thirty warriors of Raukaan had made it to the summit, and all of them had been similarly ravaged by the ascent through the spire. They stood silently, waiting for their next set of orders.

None of them said a word. There were no cries of victory or defiance.

Rauth limped over to the edge of the plateau. Far below him he could see the remnants of Nethata’s tank columns slowly withdrawing across the wasteland, still suffering under fire from the Capitolis walls. Clearly traitor forces still remained within the hive, and the fighting was not yet over. Of the daemons, however, there was no sign.

‘What are your orders, lord?’ asked Imanol, his voice crackling with distortion.

Rauth looked back over to where the rift had been. Its guardians were destroyed. Those mutants that remained would be hunted down, chamber by chamber, before the entire Capitolis was purged with flame.

After that would come the punishment. After that, the populace of Shardenus Prime would be held in judgement for their sins, for allowing malice to root itself amongst them and for failing to resist when the time of testing came. Judgement would come to them; when it did, it would be swift, austere and complete.

‘Shardenus has been saved for the Imperium,’ announced Rauth, looking out beyond the steaming outline of the daemon-corpse and across the burning wasteland. The Melamar spires to the south smouldered amid the boiling mists of toxic fug. Above them dark clouds raced still, underlit with sporadic bursts of lightning. ‘When our remaining work is done, its loyalty will be unmatched. We will remake it. We will refashion it as an exemplar.’

‘I relish it, lord,’ said Imanol.

Rauth could tell that he did. Imanol had good instincts – a firm grasp of the sacrifices that needed to be made in order to do what was necessary. When the time came, he would make a suitable successor as clan commander.

‘Then we have labour ahead of us,’ said Rauth, turning away from the vista of devastation. ‘Prepare your weapons and follow me down.’

Rauth strode back towards the shaft leading into the spire’s interior, preparing once again for the fighting to come.

‘Leave no mutant alive,’ he ordered, activating the disruptor on his force-blade. ‘Preserve any mortal loyalists still living – we still have need of them.’

As he neared the edge of the steep way down, a dark expression kindled on his helm-guarded features.

‘Except for Nethata,’ he growled, starting the long climb down into darkness. ‘Should you find him, bring him to me.’

Nethata adjusted his his chem-suit a final time before climbing out of the Leman Russ. He clambered down the ladder from the open hatchway, feeling the toxin-laced air pull at him.

He walked out across the ash, his boots crunching through the thin layers of drifting embers. Behind him, a kilometre to the north, the Capitolis burned. Huge explosions continued to surge through the enormous superstructure, making the earth beneath him tremble.

Ahead of him stood the two Warlord Titans. They had come to a full stop, and towered over everything within fire-range. Seeing them up close was awe-inspiring – he had to crick his neck just to make out anything above their massive knee-joints. Their cockpit lights glowed dimly amid the shrouds of ash, and their gigantic weapon-arms hung, de-powered, from their mighty shoulder housings.

Between the Warlords stood a tracked vehicle – a steep-sided armoured crawler with the emblem of the Mechanicus emblazoned on its flanks. Columns of dirty smoke poured from vents along its sides, making the dark metal even darker.

As Nethata approached it, a ramp lowered slowly from the crawler’s blunt forequarters, touching heavily onto the earth with a low hiss of pistons releasing.

Nethata halted, waiting for Ys to emerge. He knew it had to be her, even though he’d had no confirmation of her arrival. Though unexpected, the development gave him hope – Lopi must have been in touch with her. The princeps, seeing the way things were going, must have passed on the reports of the Warhounds’ destruction, triggering her descent from orbit.

As Nethata waited, he marvelled at the twists of fate. He knew Rauth was furious with him, and that the fury of the Iron Hands was only ever satisfied by a single result. The Mechanicus, though, was a different matter. Nethata was fully aware of the links between them, and the knowledge Ys had of Rauth’s protocols and machine workings. If anyone could stand against Rauth, if anyone could hope to act as a bulwark against the Iron Hands, then it was her.

A squad of skitarii lumbered down the ramp, spilling out into the wasteland with their bizarre array of inbuilt weapon systems and external bionics. Behind them came Ys, striding out with human-like fluidity. Her cowl had been pushed back to reveal the strangely organic curves of her metal face.

‘Magos,’ said Nethata, bowing. ‘I am glad to see you again.’

Ys stood before him. Her expression, as always, was impossible to read.

‘I don’t know why that should be so, Lord General,’ she said, and her voice was cold.

It was then that Nethata knew that he’d miscalculated.

‘Has Princeps Lopi not informed you?’ he asked. ‘We had an agreement – an arrangement. He promised me that–’

‘Princeps Lopi has been relieved of his command,’ said Ys.

As she spoke, a team of skitarii dragged a body down the ramp and hurled it onto the ground. The flesh on it was milk-pale and covered in metal-rimmed input nodes. As it hit the ground, its head fell back.

Nethata recognised Lopi’s face despite what had been done to it.

‘He acted outside the boundaries of his jurisdiction,’ said Ys. ‘The penalty for that is the same for us as it is for you.’

Nethata looked up at her severe face, and knew then that it was over. The Warlords stood impassively above him, gazing northwards with their vast machine eyes. They looked like vengeful giants. For a few moments, Nethata had dared to believe he could use them to shield himself; that the Mechanicus would honour its compact.

‘I do not understand,’ said Nethata, knowing that protestation was useless but finding himself unable to avoid the attempt. ‘He told me that Rauth had betrayed him, that if we stood together then we could force him to come to terms. You yourself, you told me that. You told me that they only respect strength.’

Ys’s expression didn’t change. There was no sympathy there, no compassion, nothing but a steady, machine-cold glare.

‘Yes, I told you that, Lord General,’ she said. ‘I told you that to warn you, and you should have heeded it. The strength of the Iron Hands is far beyond your strength; you could never have stood against them, and you were foolish to attempt it. Lopi was also a fool, and he has paid the price. The Warlords will walk on the Capitolis, and I will aid Commander Rauth in his cleansing of it. Perhaps, in that small way, we will recover a portion of honour. For you, for Lopi, there is nothing.’

Nethata watched the magos’s lips move, and it felt like watching his own death sentence being read out. The ceaseless wind blew ash across her cloak, dragging on the fine fabric and staining it black.

‘Then you are here to kill me,’ he said. He wondered briefly whether he could reach his bolt pistol in time, and quickly discarded the notion.

Ys shook her head. The gesture was so impeccable, so graceful.

‘I have taken care of my own,’ she said, gathering up her robes and preparing to return to the crawler. ‘Your fate is not in my hands.’

Then she turned, and walked back to the ramp. Nethata watched her skitarii follow her. When they were inside, the crawler was resealed and began its steady movement again.

Nethata watched it go. Then he watched the Warlords grind into movement. He watched them stride out north, stalking across the shattered terrain with their massive, earth-crushing treads.

Then he was alone again, save for the lone Leman Russ tank he’d withdrawn from the front line. As he pondered what kind of protection that offered him, he almost laughed.

He looked north, following the route of the Titans towards the Capitolis spires. The whole structure raged with flame and smoke. Clouds raced across the distant summit, swirling and breaking open. Lightning still flickered down the smouldering flanks, though it had lost the lilac hue it had had before.

Something had changed. The spire still loomed up massively, a monument of decaying grandeur riddled with blast-gouges and semi-ruined gothic ornamentation, but it no longer carried the spectre of abject horror that it had done. A pall of fear had lifted from it, replaced by the grimy tang of spilled promethium, molten metal and soot.

Nethata knew then that Rauth had been right. Something had been waiting for them in the Capitolis. The Iron Hands had been prepared to sacrifice everything they had to destroy it, and they had succeeded. They had been prepared to make the calculations he hadn’t.

He felt sick.

‘Lord?’

The tank commander’s querulous voice was another irritation. Even at the end, even with the ruin of all his hopes, still the reminders of his failure intruded.

‘What is it?’ he replied absently, staring up at the Capitolis.

‘What are your orders? Where are we going?’

Nethata didn’t reply immediately. He afforded himself the luxury of thinking back over his lifetime’s many glorious conquests. Jeriul XI, the Refaloa Stars, the Adjmena agri-belt. None of those would now be remembered – scholiasts would painstakingly amend the records, substituting the names of more suitable commanders. The only world left next to his name would be this one: Shardenus.

He wondered how long it would take Rauth to find him. Despite everything, the thought of dying at the hands of the clan commander rankled.

Nethata began to unhook the catches at his neck, unfastening the seals that kept him isolated from the lethal air of the wasteland. He felt the links unclip with tiny snaps.

There was still one thing he could do; one aspect of his fate that remained within his hands.

‘We are going nowhere, commander,’ he said absently, disconnecting his rebreather and wondering how long it would take him to die.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

How long, Khadi wondered, did it take to punish a world?

Perhaps they would only stop when every last mortal life was extinguished. Perhaps that had always been their goal. For a long time Khadi had thought that was what they were planning. In the weeks after her escape, as she’d made her way back to Melamar Secundus and headed down into the hidden catacombs in search of safety, it had seemed that they would stop at nothing less than that.

After leaving Marivo in the tunnels, she’d gone as quickly as she could through the ruined chambers of the war-torn hive. It hadn’t been easy, even during the chaos of the residual fighting and resupplying. Troops had been moving up to the front all the time, though none of them looked to have enough spirit to report a deserter.

She hadn’t been alone, either. The terrible carnage in the tunnels had broken the spirit of many others, and some of them had formed into ramshackle bands as they’d slunk back into the shadows and slipped down hidden tunnels.

Khadi hadn’t liked to look at the others, though she’d thought of Marivo often during the long flight home. It sometimes felt like his spirit was mocking her, or chiding her, or somehow informing on her to what authorities now remained.

Khadi knew he wouldn’t have done that, not even if his sense of duty had tempted him to. Right at the end, she’d learned to appreciate his character a little more. Perhaps she would never have truly liked him; they were too different, too far sundered along the long line of Imperial hierarchy.

For all that, though, moments of their association still came back to her. She remembered how it had been to drive the mutants back in disarray, shouting out her allegiance to the Emperor and watching them fall, one by one, under a hail of las-beams. She remembered how she’d felt when the Iron Hand, the one with flame-wreathed fists, had spoken to them before the gates to the tunnels.

Whenever she thought about those things for too long, though, it made her feel sick, and she forced herself to concentrate on the present.

The present was squalid enough. She was hunched in the corner of a tiny, metal-lined room. It was perfectly dark save for a sliver of light at the base of the door. The floor swam with filth that seeped through her worn-out boots as she squatted.

She was cold. She’d long since got used to the perpetual shakes and the blurred vision. Melamar’s ruined infrastructure was still mostly offline, which meant that the air was almost unbreathable and drinking water was scarce. She hadn’t eaten properly for days, and the chances of finding more food where she was were slim.

It was the same for all the others. She’d been surprised how many there were, lurking in the underworld of the hive; thousands of them, their faces drawn with hunger, their eyes hollow with despair. Somehow they’d managed to escape the worst of the fighting, neither succumbing to the mutants nor the loyalists.

She’d pushed her way through them, not wanting to get too close and hoping she saw no face she recognised. They had been heavy with disease, most of them, and if they hadn’t been so weak and terrified then she might have been scared of them. It was only later that she realised how she must have appeared to them – still in armour, holding a well-used lasgun and with blood all over her.

Eventually she’d managed to get away, finding ways down into levels where even they didn’t go. She’d found a home in the dark, a place to gather her shattered spirits, to wait for her energy and resolve to return.

They never did. The days passed. She got hungrier and weaker, and her scavenging trips to the old refectoria turned up less and less of use. She saw bodies everywhere, slumped face down in the flickering gloom, wasted away from plague or exhaustion.

If Marivo had still been with her, she would have shown him those bodies, and the masses of refugees who still huddled in the depths of the spires. She would have explained to him that these people were the backbone of the Imperium, the ones who kept it functioning during the long centuries of toil and privation. They understood nothing of the certainties he’d cherished. Even right at the end, most of them would have had no idea why war had come to Shardenus, nor have been able to tell the traitor forces apart from those who had come to liberate them. Each army would have been equally horrifying to them – just two sets of monsters, each one intent on killing as much as possible, destroying as much as possible, punishing as much as possible.

In those circumstances, she would have argued, who could blame them for hiding away, for turning a blind eye to the growing tide of corruption, for keeping their heads down?

Khadi liked to imagine what Marivo would have said in reply. She liked to imagine him tongue-tied, finally aware of the harsh reality of the underworld, unable to respond with some glib piety or other. Most of all, she liked to picture him admitting to her that she’d been right, and that they had never stood a chance right from the beginning.

They won’t even know it was us that took down the tower, she’d told him. They’ll do to us what they’re doing to everything they come across. They’ll kill us, Marivo. It doesn’t matter which side does it; we are all going to die.

Her thoughts came to an abrupt halt then. Something heavy boomed out above her. She shrank back, pressing her body up against the metal wall. The boom was followed by a series of heavy crashes, each one echoing down long tunnels before dying away.

She felt her heart beat faster. She hugged her knees, and resisted the urge to rock on her haunches.

She knew what was coming. She’d gleaned enough information from the others to know that the Angels of Death had finally turned their attention to those who had been too slow, too scared or too confused to make the appropriate level of sacrifice for Shardenus. She knew that they’d spent two whole weeks scouring the Capitolis, cleansing it with fire. Then they’d moved on to the outer spires, sweeping through them one at a time, delivering their justice, executing those who hadn’t resisted the traitor with enough fervour.

Khadi wondered how they knew who had been a hero and who had been a coward. Surely it was almost impossible to tell, except for the fact that most of those who’d joined them, like Marivo, were dead.

So it was that she’d speculated that they were killing everyone, perhaps in some petulant rage against the perceived weaknesses of mortal men. She’d heard other figures bandied around, too – one old man who’d escaped from the Axis hive across the wasteland and had nearly gone blind from the poisons reckoned they were killing one out of every three survivors they found.

‘One out of three,’ he’d rasped, struggling to breathe from his bleeding mouth. ‘They’re making an example, to stiffen the resolve of other systems.’

He’d laughed then, coughing up blood in the process.

‘We will be famous,’ he’d said, and Khadi had seen the tears in his eyes. ‘They will whisper our name on a thousand worlds.’

More booms rang out from above her, followed by a long, resounding series of dull thuds. For a moment, Khadi thought they were mortars going off. Then she realised they were boot-treads, clanging against the hollow metal. They got closer.

She tried to get to her feet, but her legs were too shaky. She stumbled, and fell to her knees into the slime. When the door slammed open, flooding the chamber with light, that was how she appeared – on all fours, wrist-deep in filth, her greasy hair hanging lankly down over her face.

Khadi looked up, squinting against a strong lumen beam. The Iron Hand towered over her. For a moment, she thought she recognised him. He looked exactly the same as the one that had rescued her and Marivo, the one who had demanded that they follow him to the tunnels.

Then again, they all looked more or less the same.

‘I fought for you,’ she said, getting to her knees. Her eyes began to adjust to the light, and she blinked heavily, sending tears down her cheeks.

The Iron Hand lowered his boltgun. He hesitated for a moment, holding the weapon steady. It looked to Khadi like he might have been running some kind of ident-check through his internal systems.

‘I was with Alend Marivo, of the Guard. We both fought for you.’

The Iron Hand remained unmoving. His helm lenses glowed blood-red in the shadows. He looked more like an daemon than an angel.

Perhaps, thought Khadi, that was what was required. Perhaps the galaxy had become so mired in horror that only such warriors as these could stand up for humanity.

She resolved to say nothing further then. She fixed her gaze on the monster’s trigger finger.

And if that is so, she thought, then we have lost already. If that is so, then our survival means nothing.

She didn’t notice when the finger tensed, sending the bolt directly into her body. Death was almost instant – a brief punch of bone breaking on impact before the explosive shell detonated within her heart.

Khadi’s lifeless corpse fell to the ground with a splash. The monster stood over her for a long time. The white hand device on its shoulder guard shone in sharp relief in the lumen beams of its brother warriors.

‘More life-signs, further down,’ came Brother Rydek’s voice over the comm.

Khadi’s killer – Brother-Sergeant Naim Morvox of Clave Arx, Clan Raukaan of the Iron Hands – nodded curtly before turning and moving back into the corridor. From behind him, the sound of crunching boots and synthetic armour-hum echoed in the narrow passages.

‘Advance,’ said Morvox, and stalked back out into the darkness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Wraight is a writer of fantasy and science fiction, whose first novel was published in 2008. Since then, he’s published books set in the Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40,000 and Stargate: Atlantis universes. He doesn’t own a cat, dog, or augmented hamster (which technically disqualifies him from writing for Black Library), but would quite like to own a tortoise one day. He’s based in a leafy bit of south-west England, and when not struggling to meet deadlines enjoys running through scenic parts of it.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Jon Sullivan

Maps by Rosie Edwards and Adrian Wood.

© Games Workshop Limited, 2012. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-0-85787-666-9

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