Contents

Cover

Title Page

The Beast Arises

THRONEWORLD

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Epilogue

THE BEAST MUST DIE

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Epilogue

About the Authors

A Black Library Publication

Fire sputters…
The shame of our deaths
and our heresies is done. They are
behind us, like wretched phantoms. This
is a new age, a strong age, an age of Imperium.
Despite our losses, despite the fallen sons, despite the
eternal silence of the Emperor, now watching over us in spirit
instead of in person, we will endure. There will be no more
war on such a perilous scale. There will be an end
to wanton destruction. Yes, foes will come and
enemies will arise. Our security will be
threatened, but we will be ready, our
mighty fists raised. There will be no
great war to challenge us now.
We will not be brought
to the brink like that
again…

THRONEWORLD

GUY HALEY

One

The Last Wall gathers

An armada of slab-sided warships glided in geosynchronous orbit a thousand kilometres over Phall’s equator, diverse heraldries proclaiming their masters. Bleached by harsh sunlight unfiltered by atmosphere, the yellow and silver, black, blue, crimson, white and grey of each Space Marine Chapter was nevertheless clear, defiant of the star’s glare. Void-deep shadow cut mysterious shapes onto the towering superstructures high on the ships’ spines. A million lights shone from their flanks. The craft were larger than cities; thousands dwelled within them, living out lives devoted to war. Great gun maws issued silent challenges to the fathomless interplanetary night. Hangar bays were black slots glimmering with coherence fields, ready to launch the vengeance of the Emperor at the foes of the Imperium.

Still Koorland feared it would not be enough. He counted and recounted the ships, calculating the combined strength of arms arrayed above the world. Ship tonnage, munition payloads, fighter groups, armed bondsmen, serfs and ship crews, all of it, not only the number of Adeptus Astartes, although they were the group he counted and recounted the most. Each time the mathematics of war came up short. The greatest number of Space Marines gathered in one place since the time of the Scouring, and still it was pitiful in the face of the orkish threat.

‘Truly, it is a sight to stir the hearts of men.’

‘It is, Brother Issachar,’ said Koorland. He moved away from the window to greet the Chapter Master of the Excoriators as he entered the observation deck. The mark of their shared heritage was clear to see – the fist that adorned Issachar’s dull white pauldron was the same as that upon Koorland’s yellow armour – but it was a kinship sundered. The ways of the sons of Dorn had diverged. Issachar’s fist was red, not black, and gripped in its fingers a doubled lightning bolt of yellow that Koorland’s lacked. The Excoriator’s armour was a mess of nicks and scratches, each one annotated in fastidious script detailing the manner and date of its earning. His exposed face was likewise abused, those stretches of skin not torn up by battle wounds ritually scarred.

Koorland’s own armour was battered, and he would not repaint it until his vengeance was won, but whereas his oath was exceptional, born out of grief, the practice of the Excoriators to preserve all hurts done to them was strange to him, as were the rituals of the others in the fleet: the Black Templars, the Crimson Fists, and the Fists Exemplar. Brotherhood brought them here to the gathering of the Last Wall – the successors of the old VII Legion amassed again as Terra was threatened. Despite their commonalities, fifteen hundred years had passed since the VII Legion had ceased to be, and these Chapters fathered by the same primarch had drifted far apart.

Was this how the Heresy began, Koorland wondered, brothers so distanced by circumstance that they ceased to recognise their own, and turned on one another? The man beside him shared his genetic gifts and a deep history. For all that, he was more a stranger than brother, someone to be greeted and feted at the Festival of Blades as an honoured guest, but one whose mind Koorland could never know. Surrounded by his warrior kin, the last of the Imperial Fists had never felt so alone, nor so exposed.

‘So many of Dorn’s sons gathered together in one place,’ said Issachar. Beneath the fearsomeness that his damaged armour and scarification bestowed on him, Issachar was a considered man, and he spoke softly. ‘The power concentrated here halts my breath. Such an army, such a fleet. With it, the stars are ours for the taking.’ Issachar stepped closer to the armourglass of the window gallery and spread the fingers of one scratched gauntlet upon it, as if he would seize that power for himself. He smiled at Koorland, the knotted tissue on his face distorting the expression into something ugly.

‘That is why the Legions are no more. And this is no Legion,’ said Koorland, ‘despite our numbers. At last count we are two thousand eight hundred of the line of Rogal Dorn. The Fists Exemplar are much depleted, High Marshal Bohemond calls in his crusades but they are scattered.’ He left unsaid the fate of his own brothers, slaughtered at Ardamantua. ‘Five companies of the Crimson Fists, eight of your brothers–’

‘The rest will come,’ reassured Issachar. ‘We grow in strength daily. Soon the Excoriators will be here in full, every last battle-brother and neophyte. I swear this to you. The Iron Knights have responded to the call, and make their way to join us.’

‘And then what? How many can we count upon? If all our brothers answer the call there will be fewer than four thousand of us.’

‘High Marshal Bohemond keeps his own Chapter numbers a mystery – how many of them might come? And we have yet no word from the Soul Drinkers. They are secretive but honourable, and will have set out in force the moment they received the call to the Last Wall.’

‘So five thousand, at best,’ said Koorland. ‘At the height of its power, the old Seventh consisted of over one hundred thousand warriors, and it was but one of eighteen Legions. How differently things would go were it still so.’

‘The breaking was done long ago, brother. That was then and this is now. I have always honoured the decision, as the primarch eventually did. But lately I have come to see the other side.’ Issachar gestured at the fleet. ‘Look at us, divided by tradition, overwhelmed by enemies, betrayed by the men set to rule over us. Unable to bring sufficient strength to bear to truly crush our foes, we push them out only for them to slink back when our attention is drawn elsewhere.’ He glanced uneasily at the triptych of tall bas-reliefs at the end of the gallery. The central depicted the Emperor surrounded by light, Black Templars at His feet, holding up their weapons. ‘Some of us are fallen into superstition.’

‘You do not know that,’ said Koorland, yet he agreed in his hearts. To him the image looked like supplication.

‘I look at our brothers’ decorations, their temples and their honours. They hide it yet they flaunt it.’

Koorland examined the carvings. He shrugged away his own misgivings. ‘Does it matter? Our Templar brothers are noble to a fault. A little headstrong, perhaps, but so was Sigismund of legend, and they say he was the favoured son of Dorn.’

‘All my life I have fought with honour and determination,’ said Issachar, ‘to uphold the rule of the Emperor. Let others worship Him, those we shield know no better. To them the Emperor must seem as a god. But our gene-fathers walked by His side, they were His sons, created by His knowledge, not by sorcery. To think on the Emperor as a divinity is to confer the same upon His children, and by extension onto their offspring. We are far from divine. Yes, lord Chapter Master, it matters.’

‘I am not Chapter Master, not truly. I cannot claim to have mastered myself, and I am all there is,’ said Koorland.

Issachar searched Koorland’s face a moment. ‘The honour was thrust upon you, but I adjudge you worthy of the rank, brother. We are equals, you and I.’

‘You do me a great honour by calling me brother. I shall attempt to command myself accordingly.’

‘We do not listen to you lightly, brother. We require a leader. The Imperial Fists are the senior Chapter. Your assumption of command saves much dissension and loss of time.’

‘I am a figurehead,’ said Koorland.

‘You are not.’

‘Then it is a pity Bohemond only listens to me when he feels he must.’

‘He has deferred leadership to you.’

‘Then why do we not attack?’ complained Koorland. ‘Terra itself lies under the shadow of the Beast’s moon and he plays for time, intent on attacking those nearest. His plan is strategically unsound.’

‘He plays for numbers.’

Koorland’s face creased with anguish. ‘His pride threatens us all. He would not be so headstrong had he not been forced to fall back at Aspiria.’

‘We are all hostage to our humours. You have lost much,’ said Issachar. ‘Do not let that colour your decisions.’

‘I have lost everything, and we stand to lose the throneworld itself! How could we bear that, if the walls of the Palace should fail and no son of Dorn is there to man them?’

Issachar gripped the lip of Koorland’s pauldron. ‘It is not yet gone. The moon has not attacked. The orks are unaware of our gathering. Once there are a few more of us, then we shall drive at them. Calm yourself. You are a Chapter Master now. There are politics to consider.’

‘Politics are what created this disaster.’

‘Politicians created this disaster, brother. Politics are a part of life, unpalatable as it is.’ Issachar slapped Koorland’s shoulder. ‘Come, why do we not test ourselves against one another? It is rare outside the Festival of Blades that our kind meet.’

‘This is no time for empty tournaments.’

‘That is not what I suggest. Let us hone our bladework, brother, so that we might better slay the enemy. It is rarely we of Dorn’s lineage cross blades, and there is a clarity that combat brings. It will help you, and be a great honour to me.’

‘Honour?’ said Koorland thoughtfully.

‘We will spar?’ said Issachar.

‘Not now,’ said Koorland. ‘Later. I must speak with Bohemond first. You mention honour, I will appeal to his. This delay has gone on long enough.’ Koorland strode out, brow furrowed.

‘Shall I come with you?’ called Issachar.

‘No, brother,’ Koorland shouted back. ‘This confrontation needs to be face to face, and accomplished alone. I cannot rely on my allies to carry me through. The High Marshal must see me as strong.’

Issachar approved. Koorland was learning.

Bohemond received Koorland warmly in his sparely decorated quarters. Away from the splendidly ornate public sections of the Abhorrence, the few private areas Koorland had seen were spartan, almost monkish. Bohemond’s rooms were no exception. Buried deep at the base of the ship’s command spire, they were windowless, lacking adornment. Bohemond’s plate was on a rack at the centre of a display of many weapons. A few trophies hung in stasis fields on the opposite wall. Weapons were the only indulgence the High Marshal permitted himself. A tall arch led through to his arming chambers, and through it could be glimpsed silent bondsmen going about their business attending to Bohemond’s other armours and equipment.

The furniture was plain. Documents of pressing importance were fastidiously arranged on the three tables. Koorland could not help but respect Bohemond more for this frugality.

His notion still hot in his mind, Koorland eschewed all formality and came straight to the point.

‘We will depart tomorrow,’ said Koorland.

‘I advise against it,’ said Bohemond. ‘We are too few.’ Bohemond’s robes were plain too, a bone-coloured habit covered with a black surplice, the Templar’s cross emblazoned in white upon the chest. Sigismund’s sword, the badge of his office, was as ever belted at his side, a bolt pistol on his opposite hip. Everyone in Bohemond’s Chapter, bondsman and brother alike, carried some sort of armament. The number of warrior bondsmen Koorland saw on the Abhorrence astounded him.

‘We have insufficient numbers to ensure victory, it is true,’ conceded Koorland, ‘but there are enough of us to make it a possibility. What we lack is time. Terra is threatened, High Marshal. Your plan to target the nearest moon is laudable, but formulated before the throneworld was attacked. We must act.’

‘Must we? What will you say when not only your Chapter is destroyed, Koorland, but most of four others? We must pick our battles carefully.’

‘There is only one battle we must fight. We are the Last Wall. We will not fall. Our predecessors did not fall on Terra when all seemed lost. We will not fall now.’

Bohemond’s face was a wreck, burned off by an ork psyker. Half was a metal mask, with a lidless augmetic eye. The rest was so scarred and lumpen he was almost devoid of human expression. ‘Spoken like a true son of Dorn. I applaud your sentiment.’ Bohemond poured himself a large measure of a spirit unfamiliar to Koorland. He proffered the bottle, Koorland shook his head, and Bohemond replaced it on the table.

‘Allow me, if I may, to draw an analogy.’

‘High Marshal, there is no time for stories–’

‘It will take but a moment.’

‘Very well,’ said Koorland.

Bohemond gestured to a pair of plain metal chairs, and they sat down facing each other.

‘Sigismund was a son of Dorn, and so highly favoured by the primarch that when my Chapter was founded under his auspices, he was granted one of Dorn’s favourite vessels – the Eternal Crusader – to be the lynchpin of his efforts to extend the Imperium’s reach. A great vessel, alas it languishes in refit in the shipyards of Cypra Mundi and will not be returned to us for twenty years. I feel its lack sorely.’

‘Your point, High Marshal?’

Bohemond downed his drink. He gasped in satisfaction. His mouth no longer closed properly, and so a dribble spilled from his riven lips. He wiped them unselfconsciously on a cloth he drew from his sleeve. ‘The Eternal Crusader represents the spirit of our Chapter and of our founder. Sigismund swore never to rest, that the Black Templars would not build walls but forge onward, performing the role the Emperor originally created us for – to unite the galaxy under the rule of man. Not to oversee its piecemeal dissolution under the guise of defence. The sons of Dorn are renowned as wall-keepers and castellans. Not so the followers of Sigismund – for us attack is the only form of defence. Our blades are our parapets, our tanks are our fortresses, and never are they more effective than in the advance. Walls are of no use if the enemy is permitted to live outside the gate.’

Away from the council of Chapter Masters, Bohemond was risking more, goading the Imperial Fist directly. Koorland refused to rise to the bait. ‘Then you think Terra is lost,’ he said calmly.

As Koorland expected, Bohemond did not answer directly. Instead he said, ‘Targets of greater opportunity present themselves to us, brother. We must strike now, and throw the orks into confusion. Should we kill three or four of their moons, they will be forced to deal with us. Strike at Terra, and we leave much of the Imperium to burn.’

‘And so Terra will be lost. What then of the Emperor?’

A strange look crossed the remains of Bohemond’s face. ‘The Emperor is eternal.’

‘At your waist, High Marshal, you carry the Sword of Sigismund.’ Koorland pointed at Bohemond’s great sword. ‘Within it is bound a fragment of Dorn’s own blade, broken in a rage when he failed to protect his lord. And yet you would willingly let the same happen again. Tell me, High Marshal, whose oaths are the more important to you? Those of your founder, who while a great warrior, the Emperor’s Champion, the first Templar, was still but a Space Marine? Are those of your primarch not of a higher order, forged as he was by the Emperor Himself, and set above the common run of humanity for its betterment? Do you deny your father in favour of his son? Will you honour your oaths?’

Bohemond’s gaze hardened. ‘Do you accuse me of hypocrisy, Koorland?’

‘I ask you to clarify your priorities, that is all. If there is an accusation of hypocrisy, it comes from within your own heart, and not from my lips.’ Koorland leaned forward. ‘We cannot always pursue the desires of our hearts, righteous as they might be.’ He paused. ‘You hold your Eternal Crusader as dearly as your oaths?’

‘Absolutely. Both ship and oaths were the gift of Dorn.’

‘But this, the Abhorrence that serves as your flagship while Sigismund’s craft repairs, is it a good ship?’

Bohemond’s eye narrowed. ‘It is a fine ship, a righteous tool of the Imperium.’

‘So you see, son of my father, the power of choice is not always ours to wield.’ Koorland bladed his right hand and brought it down in a slow chop to point at Bohemond. ‘At the gathering of the Last Wall at last watch today, I will command that we strike for Terra. And you will not demur, lord High Marshal, but heartily concur.’

Koorland turned on his heel and left before Bohemond could respond. Both hearts pounded hard in his chest, the secondary activated by stress levels he had felt at no other time outside conflict. Nevertheless, he permitted himself a smile.

The Black Templars would sail for Terra, or Bohemond was worth none of his regard at all.

Two

The Palace of the God-Emperor

Far from the gates leading to eldar lands, the children of Isha bent their efforts to their race’s salvation. The non-matter that made up the fabric of the tunnel was dim, sleeping. A minor branching to a nowhere world, none had trodden this path for many centuries, and it slumbered. The organic convolutions of the tunnel were barely wide enough to accommodate the party and their transport. It tapered away to nothing not far ahead, truncated by unnatural forces. A waysinger choir chanted interweaving melodies under the watchful gaze of Farseer Eldrad Ulthran, most ancient of his kind. Sorrow as thick as poison fog wreathed them all. To force an opening here spelled death to the eldar waysingers, and only a handful of their choir remained alive.

Shadowseer Lhaerial Rey waited with five more of Cegorach’s own for egress. The song rose and fell, become more complicated with every passing hundredth. The way remained shut. Dressed in their motley, the Harlequins made a play of lounging and preening as their kin expended their life force, a performance that celebrated through mockery the sacrifices of the others.

Though they seemed indolent, any who had seen the warrior dancers fight knew they could be up and moving, weapons in hands, in the blink of an eye. The other eldar – those on the path of mourning and service sent to bring the dying waysingers home, the warlock and the Dire Avengers sent to guard them – regarded the Harlequins with suspicion. Only the Dire Avengers showed no fear of them, but then they showed nothing at all.

The song of the waysingers faltered as another of their number collapsed, his soul fleeing into his waystone.

‘Sing your song!’ urged Eldrad Ulthran. He set his staff and bowed his ornate helm. The gems studding his wargear glowed with power as he poured more of his own might into the waysingers.

A gleaming slit ran down the side of the changeless stuff of the webway.

‘Your song is one of power and beauty. Success is within our grasp! Your sacrifice will be remembered for a thousand cycles,’ said Ulthran. ‘A final effort, brothers and sisters – your deaths bind a favourable skein for the fate of Ulthwé! Sing, and usher in the rebirth of our race!’

With a melodic shout, the last of the waysingers fell dead, her dying breath sung out to open the path. Twenty of them had paid with their lives so that Lhaerial Rey could do what she must do, and their corpses littered the webway. Those sent to watch over them radiated sorrow. Lhaerial Rey did not grieve. One day Cegorach would free them all from death.

The webway parted to reveal a dark and soulless place beyond.

Ulthran approached the shadowseer. Lhaerial leapt to her feet, performing an elaborate bow.

‘Take this token, given to me fifteen hundred cycles ago,’ said Ulthran. He held out a large, finely carved tooth hanging from a chain. ‘It will convince the mon-keigh of your deadly sincerity.’ Lhaerial Rey took the tooth and spoke her gratitude with a gesture. Ulthran pointed his staff at the portal. ‘Go! Go now! The door is open, but will not remain so for long.’

The webway spur convulsed in sudden peristalsis. The grav-barge that had borne the party there rocked, disturbed by shifts in the physics of that in-between realm. The attention of the Great Enemy pressed down upon the walls, whispering her seductive call to the annihilation of self that every eldar felt. The webway was damaged here, and perilous.

Lhaerial Rey’s troupe tensed. No other but a Harlequin could see it, the micro-shifts in stance and muscle.

The doorway peeled itself back, just wide enough to admit a single eldar at a time.

‘We dance,’ said Lhaerial Rey.

In a bright flurry of shattering silhouettes, the Troupe of Joyful Tears departed the webway.

The hall on the far side of the portal was of lifeless stone, part-panelled in wood killed a thousand light years away and brought in slow-drying agony across the stars. This world was as dead as its ruler. The stink of humanity lay thick upon it, the statues near the ceiling coated in dust, the shed skin cells of people five hundred cycles gone. The psychic effect was a hideous weight, thousands of years of human suffering pressing in on Lhaerial’s sensitive mind, and that was the least of it. Crushing the sensation of the dead of the Earth was the titanic presence of the Corpse Emperor.

Such power made Lhaerial’s mind reel, and for a moment her contempt for the creatures of Terra wavered. The mind of the Emperor was a mountain in the surging madness of the Othersea, blinding in its brilliance. The Great Powers circled this place like razorshark waiting out the death throes of a void-whale. That terrible presence held them back, and all His little servants were ignorant of it! Unease gripped her, that she would be noticed by the Dark Gods or their defier, and the fragile flame of her being snuffed out.

The feeling passed. The regard of the things of the Othersea was ossified, so long had they fixed their gaze on the Earth. The Emperor did not shift His regard. His attention was elsewhere, upon the blinding pyre of souls, navigation beacon of the mon-keigh. She had no indication she was seen. There was little relief in that. She had laughed in the face of She Who Thirsts, but the Corpse Emperor filled her with a sense of dread.

Few among the eldar could stand to be in such a place. To the left and right, she saw her fellows go through the same stumble and recovery, their sensitive minds disturbed. When the dance resumed, their steps were heavier than before.

The troupe ran through the abandoned hall, their light tread leaving no trace in the dust. They were spears of light arrowing through the dark, outshining the dim lanterns set into the vaulting overhead. Carved saints, comical in their anguish and pomposity, loomed out of the dark. They came to a heavy iron door rusted as red as blood. Gehennelith somersaulted, power sword slashing down. His blow delivered, he leapt aside as the sisters Tueneniar and Linead concluded the portal’s shattering with their shuriken pistols.

Lhaerial Rey was through first, her outline a shimmering cloud of diamonds. Gehennelith, Tueneniar, Linead, Barinamean came after, and lastly the death jester Bho, his dathedi spreading a cloud of ebon shards as confusing as a flurry of bats. Bho had his own reasons for coming, unknown to her. Whatever they were, she was glad of his presence.

A corridor stretched away, as dim and sepulchral as the hall they had left. A dead planet for a race that had doomed itself. Blue skies and seas, continent-spanning forests and millions of years of natural glory unsullied by crude humanity cried out to be remembered. It sickened her heart, she who had trod the nightmare ground of the Crone Worlds, who thought herself beyond such feeling. If Eldrad Ulthran himself had not requested her aid, she would never have set foot here.

Everywhere there was only silence, echoing avenues and empty rooms brimming with the self-importance of this race, so arrogant they had paved over the ground that fed them, uprooted the trees that nourished them and boiled away the seas that birthed them. Their crimes were lesser in scale than those of her own ancestors, perhaps, but their folly was worse for its crudeness. There was a majesty in the fall of the eldar, a glorious dance a million cycles in the making. Mankind was a moron chopping at the branch it stood upon. Black-hearted, close-minded, feeble-bodied. Humanity did not deserve to live. She danced out her hatred upon the flagstones as she ran.

Ulthran had chosen their insertion point well. The deaths of the waysingers bought them a stealthy entrance; these halls had been deserted for some time. The passing of their feet was as gentle as the pattering of rain on Terra’s extinct forests. The few maintenance drones they saw, ghoulishly fashioned from the skulls of human dead, they shot down.

It could not last. They burst through a creaking set of doors into a hall that ran for several hundred lengths. High desks marched up both sides in precipitous tiers, hundreds of shelves rearing up over those. More dead wood lit by feeble lights of soulless electricity. The rough scent of humanity was strong there. The place was in disarray, sheets of paper and vellum and plasticised hydrocarbons scattered all about.

They saw their first humans. Pallid things, lumpenly ugly even by the woefully low standards of the race. Several dozen cowered together beneath the desk tiers. Their dull, animal eyes were fixed on the dirty plex-glass of the ceiling a hundred lengths overhead. They did not see the Harlequins until they were practically past them, a kaleidoscopic zephyr that stirred their scattered papers.

Whole family groupings hid together. They had never seen the sun, Lhaerial could sense it. One of their young let out a mewling cry. Lhaerial’s domino-masked face whipped round, looking the human child full in the face. She raised her pistol, but her mind balked at activating it. The girl’s expression was suffused with a terrified wonder. Her eyes glistened at the beauty she saw. Lhaerial vaulted over a fallen lectern, and put her pistol up.

The Harlequins were already gone by the time the scribes began shouting. An alarm bell tolled out shortly after.

Rune signifiers shone on the map projected into Lhaerial’s mind by her wargear. They were closing on their destination, at the very edge of the administrative hives. Six thousand lengths or more to their target.

They emerged at speed into a metal cavern. Under steel skies a vast, decrepit parkland opened up, dotted with huge mansions, the fiefs of petitioner-barons and pensioned scrivener overseers. Light pipes directed weak sunlight into the park. Once it had been a lush place, but many of the trees were dead, skeletal things stark white in the gloom. Scraggly weeds dominated the few patches of day.

Through dirty-mouthed tunnels, ill-disciplined groups of soldiers in black streamed to oppose the Harlequins.

Gehennelith flipped effortlessly over streaking las-bolts, felling several of the humans with shots of pinpoint accuracy: one disc, one kill.

‘Dance their deaths and let us be on,’ ordered Lhaerial. ‘They are weak, but they are many, and we have stirred their ire.’

Truly she spoke, for already Tueneniar had become separated from her troupe mates. Bho’s shuriken cannon wailed as it spat out its deadly gifts. Men ran in terror as the shrieker cannon’s mutagens caused their fellows to explode.

+Make your own way, little dancer. Distract them so that I may complete our task. We shall meet again,+ communicated Lhaerial. +In Cegorach’s circle, if not in the flesh.+

Tueneniar sent her assent. She vaulted over the heads of her foes and onto the lowest balcony of a hanging garden that stretched most of the way to the glassed-out sky. In moments she was gone.

‘Shadowseer!’ said Linead. ‘We must all diverge, draw them away, perform alone for our audience and draw their attention away from you.’

‘Agreed.’ Lhaerial landed softly in the midst of a group of men. Five artful strokes of her sword slew them all. They fell away together, dead before they hit the torn grass. Las-fire converged on her position, but she was already away, running tirelessly towards her target. ‘Break the circle, travel your solitary skeins, my faithful. I shall see you before the Golden Throne of the mon-keigh Emperor, if that is what Morai-Heg has woven.’

Klaxons clamoured. Linead tossed a grenade through an ornate window. An explosion shook the mansion, spreading fire into its gardens. Lucifer Blacks poured into the area.

Lhaerial sprinted for the end of the park. A large block of men had taken up station there. They were forming lines, hoping to bring her down with massed volleys. A few took opportunistic shots as they organised themselves, but she effortlessly curved around them. Leaping and somersaulting, she soared high over the first ranks before they could give ordered fire. Hallucinogen grenades popped out of the fluted launcher on her back, bursting into gas clouds of scintillating colours among the humans. Their weak minds were instantly affected. She bent the hallucinations they experienced into illusions of awful nightmare, and they ran weeping before her.

Then she was away, and her fellows too, scattering like leaves in the wind, leaving the Lucifer Blacks flailing and disorganised. They trod solitary paths, save Bho, who followed her. As always he never spoke his mind, simply acted. Once again, she was glad of his presence.

Seven hundredths of a cycle later, an explosion rolled out down the endless tunnels and ways of the Imperial Palace, their planned diversion. She smiled behind the mirror bowl of her mask. Everything was going to plan.

Three

Krule’s dance

The Great Chamber of the Senatorum Imperialis was in pandemonium at the explosions in the Palace, moments after the departure of the ork ambassador. Fearing a new offensive against them, the nerve of the great and good of the Imperium broke. Prefectii and consularies wrestled with menials and aides as the exits clogged with human bodies. They scrambled over each other, trampling their fellows in their rush to escape.

Drakan Vangorich, Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum, grabbed Mercado and shook him.

‘Where are the eldar?’ demanded Vangorich.

Mercado looked at him dumbly. ‘The Viridarium Nobiles, five levels down.’

‘That’s only five kilometres from the Sanctum Imperialis.’

Mercado nodded. His eyes were still wide, his fingers limp around his vox-horn. Vangorich came close to killing the captain of the Lucifer Blacks there and then.

‘How many?’

‘Reports are confused–’

‘How many?’ spat Vangorich through gritted teeth.

‘A handful, seven or eight. Brightly coloured.’ The man was rallying himself. ‘I’ll direct all my men to the defence of the Throne Room, and inform Captain-General Beyreuth.’

‘I’m sure he’s well aware of this breach,’ said Vangorich. ‘Send your men, but they’ll be too late.’

‘Where are you going?’ called Mercado as Vangorich shoved his way through the crowd.

‘To deal with this myself.’ He lifted his sleeve to his mouth and spoke into the vox-bead hidden in a button there. ‘Krule, I need you. Now.’ He changed channels. ‘Veritus, if you can hear me, meet me at the Sanctum.’ No reply was forthcoming.

Vangorich headed for the ablutorials. Near the exits from the main chamber the press of the crowd was slackening as the cream of the Terran adepta flailed at each other in their panic to escape. At the centre the crush grew as men and women shoved their way down from the stacked ranks of seats. The Twelve had already gone from the High Table, whisked away by their bodyguards. At least, thought Vangorich, the Lucifer Blacks can do something correctly.

He wove his way through the crowd with smooth and occasionally violent efficiency, his habitual insouciant amble cast away in favour of a predator’s fluid movement. Many recognised him and did their best to get out of his way. Where they did not, he helped them along with fists and sharp elbows. By a wash fountain he depressed an insignificant cherub’s elbow. A hidden door slid open. Vangorich slipped into the tunnel it revealed. He hurried along its dark length, emerging into dim sunlight high on the south wall of the Great Chamber of the Senatorum Imperialis.

He hurried groundwards through a network of concealed maintenance ladders and catwalks. Overhead the ork moon hung pale in the washed-out sky. He glanced at it periodically. No activity there, for the moment. Perhaps the ork ambassador had not yet returned. What the result of his embassy would be was anyone’s guess. Events were getting ahead of Vangorich.

Still, he thought. One thing at a time.

At the bottom, Krule awaited him in the groundcar of a rich man. The blood of the prior owner was still wet on the dashboard.

‘We need to get to the Sanctum,’ he said.

‘The roads are blocked,’ said Krule, getting out of the car. ‘I know a way. We need to take the high-lines.’ He pointed to a transport hub some hundred yards away. Pods rolled automatically into the station from their wire tracks as calmly as if this were any other day.

They ran through the crowds spilling from the Grand Chamber into the plaza, and down onto the Daylight Way. The transit terminus sat in the shadow of the high wall. People bunched around the terminus, fighting to get onto its boarding platforms. Krule battered his way through, Vangorich behind him. They hurled the people clambering into a waiting pod aside. The crowd recoiled, then surged back towards the open door, until Krule caved in the face of the lead man with a deadly punch. The crowd shrank back again, and Krule slammed the door shut.

Vangorich activated the pod with his signum, and it rose rapidly on creaking cables, leaving the boiling crowds below.

Through yellowed plastek windows, they looked down on the Senatorum sector of the Imperial Palace. The highways were choked with the private vehicles of dignitaries and the nobility. Lesser streets were filled with civilians on their knees, wailing out panicked prayers and blocking the way for those trying to escape. Fights erupted, threatening riot. With nowhere to go, people simply ran back and forth madly, driven by adrenaline to do something, anything, in the face of the inevitable. The sky was crowded with aircraft and flocks of servo-constructs as thick as the crowds on the ground. The ork moon loomed high overhead, intent unknown, its brutal face frozen in mirth at the uproar it had caused.

‘Emperor help us if this is the best we can muster to save ourselves,’ said Vangorich. He was no believer in the faith, but it truly would take a god to solve this mess.

Beast Krule remained mute. It was weirdly calm in the pod, the violence beneath played out in silence. The wire the pod depended on headed up and down the multi-layered hives seemingly at random. Vangorich overrode the system, preventing the pod from halting. At transit stops horrified faces whipped by. The pod plunged on, drawn on by the vast, mountain-sized edifice of the Sanctum Imperialis. The heart of the Imperium grew, dominating everything, a prison and a lens for the might of the being trapped within. The pod shifted lines, following a high track that led up and up. The wrinkled skin of the city dropped rapidly away.

Krule stood. ‘Vent spire,’ he said, pointing to a cathedral-tower chimney that pointed vaingloriously at the attack moon.

The Assassins stopped the pod as it passed over a balcony jutting from the spire. They smashed the door and dropped down, broke their way into a maintenance portal, pushed their way past the herd of servitors who lived within the tower, and descended down into the upper levels of the endless inner hives of the Imperial Palace.

They descended many levels, flying down stairs, ignoring elevators and lift platforms, heading always for the chatter of military vox and reports of the intruders. Eventually, they found their prey.

Vangorich emerged into a machine hall thundering with the business of renewing the throneworld’s atmosphere, deep below the false metal surface of Terra. Stale air hooted down plasteel tubes, drawn by pistons driven by giant flywheels, to be bubbled through lake-deep tanks of ancient glass clotted with algae. On the gantries over them a sole, gaudy alien battled single-handedly against a company of Astra Militarum.

‘There!’ said Vangorich.

A hundred men were set against the eldar. They crept towards it along the grid of catwalks. Following any law of engagement, it should have been overwhelmed many times over. Corpses littered the mesh over the water, their blood staining the algae black. All of them were human.

‘We must question it,’ said Vangorich.

‘It will die before we can get to it,’ said Krule.

The eldar executed a flawless leap. Its form broke into a confusing trail of glimmering diamonds that twisted twenty metres over the soupy mess of the tanks. Its weapon hissed, and a stream of discs cut down three men before its feet touched steel again. The human commander shouted, directing his men to block the alien’s escape routes. Las-beams cut through the air, but the alien danced over them.

‘I doubt that,’ said Vangorich. ‘Those men are outmatched.’

‘Then I’ll see to it,’ said Krule.

The eldar pranced into a squad of Lucifer Blacks, slaying seven with its sword. Not one of them came close to landing a return blow. Vangorich grabbed Krule’s shoulder. ‘Beast, this is one of their warrior dancers. I thought them a legend, but evidently they are not.’

‘And?’ said Krule.

‘And be careful.’

Krule looked at him incredulously. ‘You’ve never warned me before.’

‘There is, as they say, a first time for everything. This is one of those times.’ Vangorich released his Assassin. Krule snorted dismissively.

Krule came at the eldar when it was only metres from a wide service vehicle exit. Three dirty yellow power loaders had been drawn across the exit to prevent the eldar’s escape, the gaps between jammed haphazardly with crates of algal feedstock. Soldiers fired wildly over their barricade, desperate to bring the killer down before it got among them. The eldar leapt out of the way of every shot with stunning agility, every flip and twist bringing it nearer. A final leap, a sword of bright silver glinting in the dim light. Shurikens whickered through the air. In moments the Guardsmen were dead.

Their deaths, though quick, gave Krule the time he needed to draw near.

‘Stop!’ he called.

The eldar halted, poised on the cab roof of a wheeled loader. It cocked its head at Krule. A white domino mask covered its face, one black tear sliding down the cheek over and over again. Close-fitting motley clad its body. For all the eldar’s otherworldly slenderness its limbs rippled with muscle.

Krule advanced. The eldar leaped backwards over his head, its body shattering into a blizzard of geometric shapes. The alien somersaulted through four complete turns as it flew, its true form barely visible as a fuzzy outline in a field of spinning diamonds. Krule’s chronaxic implants kicked in, chemical stimulants overloading his metabolism and sending his heartbeat into a continuous blur. His sense of time slowed to the point he could have slipped between the raindrops of a storm. The alien was still faster.

A hail of discs shot out of the alien’s pistol, the feed-mag disappearing upwards. Krule dodged three; a fourth sliced into his bicep, embedding itself in the adamantium reinforcing his humerus. He suppressed the pain, wheeling over in a scissoring cartwheel, driving his feet at the alien. The eldar leaned back so far his crest of hair brushed the bloodied floor. Krule sprang off his hands onto his feet, and aimed a devastating punch, but the xenos wove out of the way, spinning around and bringing its pistol to bear again. Krule slapped the gun off target just as a spray of deadly discs hissed from its snout. He evaded the humming power sword that followed. The eldar flipped backward over and over, firing as it went. Krule dived aside, a storm of shurikens following him. His eyes flicked to the creature’s broad girdle. Some kind of grav-belt.

The eldar spread its arms and flipped towards him, bouncing lightly from the catwalk guardrail. Krule charged at it, dropping to his side and sliding under a further fusillade of discs. He scooped up a lasrifle still sticky with blood, and fired. The eldar leaned casually out of the shot’s way and bisected the lasgun with its sword. The metal and plastek came apart with a bang. Krule fended off further strikes with the smoking butt of the gun. He swung at the flat of the eldar’s blade, more of his improvised weapon disintegrating with every parry.

The eldar cartwheeled at him, flicked its sword down into the ground and used it as a pivot to swing around the hilt, feet out, catching Krule full in the face. The Assassin staggered back, and the eldar moved in for the kill, but Krule was feigning concussion. As the eldar drove its sword at Krule he stepped sideways, shifting his stance so that he came outside the eldar’s arm. He grabbed the alien’s girdle, and tore it free. The eldar danced back, but not fast enough. Krule grabbed its sword wrist and slammed the heel of his palm into its elbow, shattering the delicate bone. It took the blow without a sound. The sword fell from its limp hand to dangle by its power feed. The alien rolled along Krule’s arm, until the two were as tightly pressed as dance partners.

‘You fight well for a human,’ it said in accented Gothic. The smooth golden snout of its weapon pressed under his chin.

A crack shattered the moment. The eldar fell, a smoking hole in its temple beside its mask.

Vangorich stood behind, his hand out, the ring of his digital laser exposed over his knuckle. He sucked at his flesh where the discharge had singed his skin and shook out his fingers with a pained expression.

‘I told you to be careful.’

Krule looked at his fallen foe. It seemed so fragile dead, its limbs thin as reeds, more like the doll of a rich upper-hive child than a creature that had lived and breathed. His hand went to the disc embedded in his bicep. He cut his fingers on it as he tried to pull it out, for it was lodged fast in the metal and bone of his upper arm.

Vangorich strode over to the dead alien. ‘These are their elite of elite. We were lucky to kill it.’

Krule left the disc where it was. He flexed his fist. ‘It hurts like hell.’

‘Do you know, Krule, one of the reasons I have always enjoyed your company is that you never say anything asinine like “I had it covered” or other such nonsense.’

‘I didn’t. I’d be dead without you.’ Krule spoke quietly. He was panting hard, and sweat and blood ran from his skin. He had never come this close to being beaten.

‘Quite. The question is, what is it doing here? I wanted to interrogate it. It’s a shame I had to kill it to save you, but I had no choice. I could not cripple it. Their weapons are mentally operated, so it was the head or it was nothing.’

‘You have my thanks.’

‘Save them. In not too long a time the ork ambassador will be back aboard the attack moon, and you may yet die today.’ Vangorich stroked at his scar in thought. ‘Only seven or so, Mercado said. That’s an awfully small number to try anything meaningful at the Palace, even for xenos as arrogant as the eldar. I am not so sure all is as it seems here. Come, we had better go, or there will be none of the xenos left to question.’

Four

Before the Throne

Lhaerial came to the outer precincts of the Sanctum Imperialis. Bho the death jester followed her, close as a shadow. For as long as they could they avoided combat, she clouding the weak minds of the humans where possible, detouring to avoid them where it was not. They followed half-forgotten conduits and filthy service ducts, coming ever closer to their target. The blazing light of the Emperor’s beacon grew in her mind’s eye, blotting out her limited ability to read the skein. Her future was a mystery to her now, and she must act cautiously.

One by one she felt the death songs of her fellows, fallen in solo dances with no audience to applaud. A black wave of despair rose in her heart, but she froze it. Sorrow could wait for a time when it could be turned into laughter, a celebration of her troupers’ joining with Cegorach.

There came a moment when they could hide no more, at the place where the architecture of the Palace opened up and became dominated by the vast avenues radiating from the Throne Room. The weak infantry in black were replaced by armoured giants, their golden plate draped in sombre black cloaks. Their species aside, there was nothing similar between the two breeds of warrior. These were the Adeptus Custodes, and few could stand against them.

Lhaerial had expected to encounter them sooner, for Ulthran had told her they guarded all parts of the Palace in the days when the Emperor lived. Time had made them cautious, and they gathered now only around the Throne Room of their lord, careful of what little mortal life remained to Him.

The secret tunnels turned away from the Throne Room, and Bho and Lhaerial were forced out. They avoided the main processional way and its progression of mighty, symbolic gates, taking a lesser avenue – still many hundred lengths across, the vaulting of the ceiling lost to smoke and distance. Only one gateway barred this avenue, at the entrance to the antechamber. Far away down the mighty road it hid in clouds of incense.

‘This way, Bho, come!’

The Adeptus Custodes waited for them, opening fire as they ran down the vast processional way. Hard projectiles of metal whined past them, shot from the tips of long-hafted weapons as heavy as Lhaerial herself. Primitive, as all the technology of the humans was, but deadly. Just one round, were it to hit, would obliterate her slender body.

They did not hit.

Lhaerial wove around the bolts. Bho fired from behind, his screamer cannon punching the genetically enhanced warriors from their feet. They were too mighty to be felled by the shot itself, instead dying painfully as the gene-toxins in the shrieker rounds rewrote their life code explosively.

‘Stop, stop!’ she called out in their ugly language. ‘My name is Lhaerial Rey,’ she continued, ‘Shadowseer of the Ceaseless Song. I come here at command of Eldrad Ulthran to deliver a message of great import to the Emperor of Mankind!’

Only murder dwelled in their hearts. A giant moved to intercept her, his great halberd whirling in buzzing arcs around his head. This one moved with a grace and speed she did not associate with the humans. She fought ferociously with him, trading parries and ripostes like for like, the sheer strength of the human shocking her. She saluted him before she took his head from his shoulders. ‘Friendship! Friendship!’ she cried out, Gothic’s coarseness an affront to her tongue.

More of them came at her, shouting angrily. That she was swinging her sword at them probably belied her words, she thought ironically, but she refused to die for their idiocy. She called out as she killed, over and over again. ‘My name is Lhaerial Rey, Shadowseer of the Ceaseless Song. I come here at command of Eldrad Ulthran to deliver a message of great import to the Emperor of Mankind. Friendship! Friendship! Cease your fighting!’

Bho shot down the last of them. Lhaerial vaulted the human’s writhing form.

‘The gate!’ she cried to Bho. ‘It is near!’ Incredibly, the gate remained open, a sign of the humans’ arrogance. A stream of Adeptus Custodes flooded forth.

The Harlequins sprinted on, launching themselves over the heads of those who came to oppose them; cutting down any who came within striking distance and ignoring the rest, Lhaerial expected a lucky shot to take her in the back at any moment.

‘My name is Lhaerial Rey, Shadowseer of the Ceaseless Song. I come here at command of Eldrad Ulthran to deliver a message of great import to the Emperor of Mankind. Friendship! Friendship!’

The warriors of the Emperor would not listen, and the nearer they came to the Throne Room, the more furious they became. She only hoped that if she could get to the centre of the warding circles that girdled the Palace for thousands of lengths, her mind could touch His.

The door came closer, monumentally huge. She had rarely seen its like in the realm of flesh and matter. Only in the webway were such things to be seen, and they were the works of long ago. It towered five hundred lengths high, covered in ornate carvings too small to be made out, and fashioned from precious materials harvested from the entire galaxy. Doubtless this adornment concealed armoured plating many lengths deep.

The doors began to close. She and Bho ran faster, veering towards the bastion guarding the left of the doors. As they neared she put away her pistol and flicked a small ovoid of warm wraithbone from a pouch at her belt. The gates were closing with the steady certainty of glaciers grinding down mountains. A line of Custodians barred the way in front of the gates, halberds levelled and firing. Bho slew three with wailing shots of his cannon. His skill was marvellous to see. He leapt and dived, somersaulting over its barrel. He fired all the while, unencumbered by the shrieker’s great length.

Lhaerial arced over a wall of crested helms, and tossed the device into a vision slit in the bastion. There was a mellow flash as it discharged, spraying the room with a burst of softly glowing microscopic constructs. They pattered onto the walls, burrowing into the fabric of the building and attacking its systems. Eldar technology millions of years old overwhelmed the simple machines of the humans without difficulty. Their motive mechanisms suborned by the superior craft of her race, the gates ceased their closing barely a length apart. She and Bho jumped, threading the gap as a blaze of shells exploded all round the door edges.

On the other side was a hall bigger than all but the widest craftworld domes. On the far side were the great gates to the Sanctum Imperialis, wherein languished the morbid Emperor of Mankind. Twin Titans guarded it, poorly fashioned to resemble hounds, and festooned with vulgar attempts at art. They started towards her clumsily, jogging across the court and opening fire. Bursts of shattered metal and rock jumped skyward. She somersaulted between the impacts as the Warhounds tracked her. The noise of their discharge obliterated all senses, and Lhaerial danced through the thunder. The war machines ceased firing as she sought shelter among the ranks of the enemy.

They were so close to their goal. Lhaerial could feel the lessening of the Palace’s psychic defences. They were nearing the centre of the wards. She called out with her mind to the Lord of Man. There came no reply, but lines of Adeptus Custodes running at them. The great gates were far away.

For a moment her heart faltered. She could not succeed. But she must try.

Bho was surrounded, attacking his foe with the great energy scythe affixed to the end of his gun. He slew four of theirs before he fell, shot from so many angles even his reflexes could not save him. As in life, he died silently. Lhaerial fought on, slaughtering her way through the humans as their war machines neared and slowed, stalking the edge of the melee. Were she to kill every one of the Adeptus Custodes, she would be obliterated immediately. Her progress slowed, the foe became too many; they were too accomplished as warriors. Their finest individuals would be a close match for her skills, and there were hundreds of them. She despaired. Her arms dropped.

‘Peace! Peace!’ she called.

She was brought down, wrestled to the floor by a dozen heavy arms.

Their leader forced his way towards her, his movements awkward with rage. He wore identical gold armour to all the others, but for a tall distinguishing plume of purple. Now would be the time to present the token, he was the one, but her arms were pinned and she could not move.

‘My name is Lhaerial Rey, Shadowseer of the Ceaseless Song. I come here at command of Eldrad Ulthran to deliver a message of great import–’

The blow was almost too quick for her to see. It struck her mirror mask hard, snapping her head painfully to the side.

‘Silence!’ roared the leader. ‘You come here shouting friendship as you slaughter your way towards the Lord of Mankind.’

A circle of boltguns pointed at her head.

‘And now you will die.’

‘Hold!’ cried Vangorich. He and Krule rushed into the antechamber of the Sanctum Imperialis, a space big enough to station an army in. Though there was no army, war had recently visited. To the right, halfway to the Ultimate Gate, beyond which sat the Emperor Himself, a dozen Adeptus Custodes lay dead on the ground, a single, skull-masked eldar among them. The mosaic floor was cracked and ruined. Craters in the walls guttered with burning metal, damage from Titan weapons fire. A circle of Adeptus Custodes surrounded something hidden in its centre. ‘Hold!’

Four warriors stepped into Vangorich’s path, their guardian spears crossed. Their massive armoured bodies formed a wall he could not see over.

‘Let me through! It is I, High Lord Vangorich.’

‘Grand Master Vangorich?’ shouted a commanding voice. The warriors parted, revealing their leader.

‘Captain-General Beyreuth! I must beg your indulgence. Do not execute the prisoner! We must interrogate it.’ Vangorich pushed his way into a forest of metal giants. Beyreuth waved them aside and he came to their captive: a female, by the shape of her. She was kneeling, beaten. Her clothes were brightly coloured and patterned, though dirtied with battle’s smirch. Her face was hidden by a featureless mask of silver, and this was flawless. A thicket of blades pointed at her, the bolters mounted on the backs of the spearheads ready to obliterate her at a word.

‘She has already tried to trick us with talk of parley,’ said Beyreuth. ‘I will not consider her release so close to the Golden Throne. Most of this breed are witches, who knows what she plans? She has breached the Emperor’s innermost sanctuary. For this insult she must and will pay.’

‘Parley? What did she say?’ said Vangorich.

The eldar spoke for herself, her voice thick with blood. ‘My name is Lhaerial Rey, Shadowseer of the Ceaseless Song. I come here at command of Eldrad Ulthran to deliver a message of great import to the Emperor of Mankind.’

‘Lies,’ spat Beyreuth.

‘Captain-general, please!’ said Vangorich.

‘You, the lord of killers, and you make a plea for her life?’ said Beyreuth. ‘Or is it only humans your kind kills?’

‘I understand you are angry, furious, but we must be cautious,’ said Vangorich. ‘Orks are in the sky, and these xenos come alone. What if she is telling the truth?’

‘I am being cautious. It is a lack of caution that led to the arrival of the orks. We cannot afford any further mistakes.’ He raised his hand.

‘I order you to stop!’ shouted Vangorich.

‘You are a High Lord, and a member of the Senatorum Imperialis, but your office is no longer numbered among the High Twelve. You have no authority to command me. None have, save the Emperor Himself.’

‘Then this will prove sufficient!’ called Inquisitor Veritus. The boots of his power armour rang on the mosaic floor as he stamped into the chamber, his Inquisitorial seal held high. Storm troopers fanned out either side of him, training their guns on the Adeptus Custodes.

‘I am Veritus, and I am of the High Twelve. By this sigil I wield the authority of the Emperor. While He cannot speak, the Inquisition are His voice.’

Beyreuth uttered something that might have been a sigh or a curse. He gestured, and his warriors stood back.

‘I am so glad you could make this latest emergency, Veritus,’ said Vangorich. ‘After you departed the Senatorum so dramatically, I feared we had lost your good offices permanently.’

‘Don’t be facetious, Vangorich.’

Vangorich twitched his eyebrows. ‘If I am facetious, it is merely because I find myself in a world governed by idiocy. I laugh, or I despair. You have arrived in the nick of time.’

‘I got your message. I had to gather my forces. I am here now.’

‘A reply would have been polite,’ said Vangorich.

The three men looked down upon the captured eldar. Vangorich’s spine shuddered as her faceless bowl mask looked back. A quiet power surrounded her.

‘Why should we believe your protestations of friendship?’ demanded Veritus.

‘I have upon my person a token,’ said the eldar, ‘given by the Primarch Vulkan to the Farseer Eldrad Ulthran during your recent civil war.’

Veritus looked to the Custodians.

‘You may take it out. If it is a trick, you shall die,’ said Beyreuth.

Lhaerial reached into a small pouch strapped to her thigh. From it she removed an object and passed it to Veritus. The inquisitor’s power armour whined as he reached for it.

He opened his hand. In it was a large tooth, capped with exquisitely worked gold.

‘A tooth of a Nocturnian salamander. It could be as you say. These creatures are found only on Vulkan’s home world. But how do I know this is not a trick, and that it was Vulkan who gave this to your master?’

‘I have no master save the Laughing God,’ said Lhaerial. ‘That token is all I have to prove my good intent. If you do not value it, then Eldrad Ulthran underestimated you. My task is done and my life is forfeit. I die laughing at the fools that would not listen to sense.’

Veritus growled deep in his throat. ‘The orks are at our door and an alien witch wishes to speak with the Emperor,’ he said. He folded his fist over the tooth. ‘We must take her away from here. It is not safe to have her kind so close to the Emperor.’

‘You are to take her to the Inquisitorial Fortress?’ asked Vangorich.

Veritus nodded. ‘Wienand is there. I shall deal with two problems in one.’

‘Then I suggest you hurry,’ said Vangorich. ‘The orks will move soon.’

Lhaerial spoke. ‘You have far less time than you realise.’

Five

Woman in the moon

There were mountains that walked, and people trapped beneath them. A looped segment of time that Galatea Haas could not escape played repetitively in her dreams. The Proletarian Crusade was trapped between two walls of grinding metal and stone, coming together with awful finality. A wave of blood bore down on her, carrying terrified screams that suddenly cut out.

Haas came awake with a jolt, hands scraped raw through gripping the rough stone of her resting place. She was hidden at the back of a narrow cranny, high up the wall of a tunnel more crevasse than corridor. Her ears strained to pick out whatever it was that had disturbed her from the constant noise of the attack moon. Clanking mechanisms pounded ceaselessly, unshielded and raucous. After the disaster she had passed through one of the orks’ machine halls, and her ears rang for hours afterwards. From the racket, it must have been only one of many hundreds of similar rooms.

Her flight from the doors was a jumble, a terrible memory broken into meaningless flashes of incident. Somehow, she had escaped. Drenched in the blood of the Crusaders, she had run through rough-hewn corridors and gaping natural caves. She was sure of discovery. Only her training and her will had kept her from succumbing to fear. But no one had found her, and eventually, exhausted, she had found this place, and fallen into a troubled sleep.

Something was close. She heard piping voices, far too high to be orks. Cautiously she put her head out over the lip of rock.

Three of the little creatures that served the orks were passing below, carrying small metal boxes and shoving at each other in malicious high spirits. The sight of them made her skin crawl. There was something worse about these beings than their masters. They were humpbacked and crooked. They rolled along with a sly gait. She imagined them stealing into homes in the dead of night, seeking out young to devour. Creatures from story, they seemed. Until yesterday she had had no idea they existed.

They were filthy, and they stank worse than the dirtiest man. How they smelled her over their own noisome reek was a surprise, but they did.

The leader stopped directly under her hiding place, its followers running into its back. They tittered horribly, provoking the leader to slap them into silence. It held up a finger for quiet. Nose twitching, it turned its head upward. Haas snatched her head back just in time.

The leader jabbered at one of the others. The second’s ears drooped and the third laughed at its comrade. An argument ensued, finishing in more blows. Quiet fell. A moment later, a dirty green head appeared over the edge of Haas’ hiding place. Its ears shot up in surprise as it saw Haas staring back at it.

The creature squealed as she swatted it with her shock maul. The weapon was designed for the suppression of civil disorder, but cranked up to full output it could deliver a fatal blow, and the slave orks were small. The creature flew against the wall, shrieking horribly. It impacted with a wet splat, and slid to the uneven floor, smoke pouring out of its ears. She levered herself out of the gap and fell between the other two.

They were poor fighters, but aggressive. They attacked together, raking at her with filthy fingernails, ripping the regimental uniform issued to her for the Crusade to tatters and scoring the skin underneath with burning scratches. She was fortunate that her enforcer’s armour protected her from the worst of it.

The leader went down, its pointed head sporting a new and fatal dent. The last gibbered and shrilled in the orkish tongue, flailing at her with arms that were too long for its body. Its pointed nose and ears flapped as it jumped onto her, trying to throttle her with grasping, greasy fingers. She gasped for air. Pointed yellow teeth snapped millimetres from her nose, spattering her with saliva. She fell backward to the ground, luck more than effort putting her maul in the right place. She slammed the butt into its eye. It screamed and reared up. She scrambled backward and caved its ribs in with a panicked swipe.

Panting hard, she pushed the dead creature from her legs. The energy of fear left her, and she struggled to get herself upright. Her head swam. She had not eaten since the Crusade had departed, and was so hungry she considered going through the slaves’ filthy clothes to find some morsel of food or drink, but was not yet so desperate that she could bring herself to do it.

Numbly, she stared at the corpses.

A noise made her start.

By a kink in the corridor, framed in dull ruddy light, a fourth creature stood staring at her with wide red eyes, ears flat against its head in fear.

‘Throne!’ she exclaimed.

The creature’s thin-lipped mouth worked wordlessly. Suddenly, it dropped its burden, turned on its heels and fled, squealing out a shrill alarm.

‘No, no, no, no, no!’ she shouted, staggering after.

The creature was fast, moving with a bounding scamper that she struggled to match. It cast terrified looks behind it at her, shouting without pause as it ran. Her throat burned with thirst and the polluted air of the moon, and the creature was gaining ever more ground.

Haas raced round a corner to see it diving through a crack between two armoured plates bolted to the rock. Haas threw herself after. Anything could be on the other side, but if the creature raised the alarm, she was dead anyway.

With relief, she saw it was all alone, quaking against a wall ahead, arms spread wide on the stone.

Hefting her maul, she approached.

A giant hand cuffed her across the back of the head, sending her sprawling face first into the rock. Stars swam in front of her eyes. She got to her hands and knees, blood flowing from her mouth. Something slammed into her neck. Wide metal jaws closed around her throat with a click. She grabbed at them futilely as she was hoisted high. Almost gently, the pole shifted around, bringing her face to face with the ork holding it.

Her captor regarded her with curious eyes glinting from eye sockets like caves. Its jaw was covered in a beard of bright but dirty hair, and more of the same crested its head. A single ivory fang, as long as Haas’ forearm, jutted from the left side of its mouth. The damn thing was smiling at her, its eyes twinkling with vicious humour.

It rumbled something in the tongue of the orks. Haas raised her maul. It shook its head and flicked a switch on the haft of its catchpole. A massive shock cracked out from the jaws, and Haas fell unconscious.

‘She’s coming round,’ said a man’s voice.

‘Be quiet, Marast, you’ll have One Tooth in here on us!’ hissed another.

‘Looks different,’ said the one called Marast. ‘She’s not one of us. She’s a standard.’

‘So? The galaxy’s crawling with them. Give her something to drink, for the Emperor’s sake.’

‘It means, Huringer, that we’re somewhere else, do you see? We’ve moved away from home,’ said the first irritably.

‘Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid!’ said Huringer.

‘Don’t be stupid, then. This armour too, enforcer or arbitrator, I’d say. But those badges aren’t like anything I’ve ever seen.’

A canteen was pressed to Haas’ lips. Warm, metallic water spilled into her mouth. She coughed, and swallowed gratefully. Her head felt heavy as a boulder, but she struggled up onto her elbows anyway.

There was not much light but it hurt her eyes. She was in a sweltering cell plated with metal. There was one door, a small grille at the top of it letting in a little light from outside. A little more came from a buzzing lumen globe dangling from a bare wire in the middle of the room.

Two odd-looking faces peered at her. She squinted until they came into focus, and pushed herself back in alarm when they did. Bald heads with pronounced eyes looked back, their owners crouching on unnaturally long legs.

‘What are you?’ she said. Her stomach rolled with nausea.

‘Oh, that’s charming. Very nice,’ said the one called Marast. ‘People, that’s what we are. If you don’t like us, we can call the orks. Maybe they’ll give you a waking you’d prefer?’

Haas blinked. They were human, of a sort, but stretched in the body. Her eyes strayed to their legs.

‘Guess she’s never seen a longshanks before,’ muttered Huringer.

Marast patted his leg with a thin-fingered hand. ‘That’s what we are. Don’t stare so – in here you’re the odd one out.’

‘You’re… mutants?’

‘Abhumans!’ said Huringer angrily. ‘We’re loyal subjects of the Emperor, same as you, lovey. Ain’t our fault our home’s low-g.’ He turned away from her pointedly.

Haas groggily got to her feet. The room was crammed with longshanks. They had arrayed themselves as best they could around the walls, backs to the metal, long legs drawn up in front of them.

‘Where are you from?’ she asked. Haas was aware there were sanctioned sub-strains of humanity scattered around the galaxy, but that was as far as her knowledge went. On Terra any deviation from the norm was a mutation, and a mutant was a criminal by default.

‘Orin’s Well,’ said Marast. ‘Greenskins overran the planet and took thousands of us up here. Seems we’re good for working on the moon. Most of it ain’t got no gravity generators. Doesn’t bother us as much as it bothers them. You?’

‘You don’t know where you are?’

Marast shook his head. ‘Not a splinter of an idea. Been down here slaving for weeks now. Not many of us left.’

‘Terra! You’re in orbit over Terra!’ She tapped the badge on her shoulder guard, much worn now, that marked her out as an arbitrator of the Imperial Palace, 149th Administrative District, General Oversight Division.

Marast’s mouth opened wide in amazement. ‘Terra?’ He made the sign of the aquila over his chest. Murmurs went up from his freakish compatriots. A few reached out to touch her. She shook their hands off and stepped over their fragile-looking legs to the door.

‘Don’t do that!’ hissed Marast. ‘You’ll have One Tooth in here on us!’

Something grunted outside. Haas threw herself against the wall as a bucket-jawed giant squinted into the room. One fang, a dirty beard. Her captor.

It banged on the door hard, making it shake in its mountings, and roared out a string of gruff alien words.

Marast crept to her side and pulled at her arm. ‘Don’t do that, don’t talk, don’t look them in the eye!’ he said fearfully. ‘If you do, they’ll hurt you bad, might kill you, take you… take you through there!’ He pointed at the wall.

‘What’s through there?’ asked Haas, dreading the answer.

Marast winced. ‘The meat pen.’

Haas could not help but look, her eyes drawn by a force outside of herself to the wall separating their holding pen from the room next door.

‘I can’t stay here. There must be a way out!’ she said.

‘Where to?’ said Marast. ‘Get out of that door and there are a million orks. Even if there weren’t, where would you go? Walk to the surface and toss yourself off into space? Although that’s better than the alternative, I suppose. But you can’t. The only way we’re getting off this moon is if someone comes and rescues us, and let me tell you something sad, lady arbitrator – no one’s coming, not for the likes of us. You keep your head down, work hard, and they mostly leave you alone.’

‘I won’t. I’m going to get out of here,’ whispered Haas.

Marast shook his head sadly. ‘Not once you’ve seen the gate, you won’t. It’s hopeless.’

‘Gate?’

‘The place they come through. A flash of light, and they’re there. As many orks as they need. There’s no army in the galaxy that can stop them.’

In the boundary zone between the Oort cloud and the dwarf planets parading around the edge of the Sol System, space convulsed. Vile lightnings cracked around a puckering in the fabric of real space. With a silent scream, the universe tore.

Hundreds of warships arrowed into reality, diabolical vapours spilling off their glowing Geller fields. Behind them boiled the cauldron of the warp, a pit of madness none should cross. Reality sealed itself in a blinding flash of non-light, shuddered, and was still.

‘High Marshal, my lord Chapter Master, we have arrived in the Sol System, praise be,’ announced Bohemond’s shipmaster. Other reports followed.

‘All decks report unproblematic translation.’

‘Warp engines powering down.’

‘Geller field deactivation in three, two, one. Geller field deactivated. All praise the Emperor, most holy Lord of Man.’

From the corner of his eye, Koorland saw Bohemond’s twisted lips mouth the words silently along with his bondsmen.

The High Marshal of the Black Templars strode along the sweeping command deck of the Abhorrence. Fans of workstations spilled down from the command dais at the centre. A window of armourglass a dozen metres across filled the front of the deck, showing the blackness of space. At this far removed, Sol was merely a bright dot, hard to tell apart from any other star. Koorland stared at it, searching for the dim flicker that would mark out the location of Holy Terra.

‘All Black Templars vessels, state arrival and status,’ commanded Bohemond. ‘Issachar, Quesadra, Thane. How do you fare?’

Cyber-constructs carrying holoprojectors swooped in on Koorland and Bohemond’s position, their projection gems bursting into life. The shoulders and heads of his fellow Chapter Masters assembled themselves in the air from striped pulses of laser light.

‘All my vessels report zero casualties, no damage,’ said Thane.

‘The warp was unusually calm. Not a single vessel lost,’ said Issachar.

‘Fortune is with us,’ said Quesadra.

‘Fortune has nothing to do with it! It was the will of the Emperor. He knows we come to aid beleaguered Terra,’ said Bohemond. ‘Time check reports a warp transition of four days. Unprecedented. Your judgement was well founded, Brother Chapter Master Koorland.’

‘I believe that was an apology, Brother Chapter Master,’ said Quesadra quietly.

‘My augur master has detected signs of recent fleet combat around Terra, minimal weapon discharge, and large informational exchange around the Martian noosphere. Where are the defence fleets? Why has Mars not mobilised its armies?’ said Thane.

Koorland looked past the floating light spectres of his brothers.

‘What are our orders, Imperial Fist?’ said Issachar.

‘The attack moon still orbits Terra,’ said Koorland. ‘We cannot let this insult stand. Brothers of the Last Wall, adopt attack formation,’ he said. ‘We make for the ork moon without delay. Send messages to Mars and Terra that we have come. As soon as we are close enough, open lithocast communications. We must learn how Terra can be held to ransom so easily.’

Six

Dance’s end

Lhaerial sat in the middle of a spherical room in a pool of brilliant light, bound by ankle, calf, and thigh to a high-backed chair. Her hands were imprisoned within a metal cylinder and pulled up over her back, so that she was forced forward, an uncomfortable position that seemed not to trouble her. Her mask had been taken from her, and her slender, pale-skinned face was visible, flawless but for a single black tear tattooed beneath each of her huge brown eyes. A male interrogator paced up and down in front of her, hands sweeping in expansive gestures, lips working hard. Veritus had the vox-link disengaged, and so Vangorich could not hear what he shouted at her. Instead they watched a pantomime: the angry enforcer, the apprehended villain.

‘Shockingly young-looking, isn’t she?’ said Veritus. He and Vangorich stood behind a pane of psychically warded, one-way armourglass.

‘Yes,’ said Vangorich. He was fascinated by the eldar, never having seen one in the flesh before.

‘And beautiful. I see it in your face, Vangorich, even in a cold-hearted killer like you.’

‘I am not blind to beauty,’ said Vangorich.

‘Better to be!’ said Veritus. ‘Beauty is the cloak of many an enemy. Do not be deceived.’ Veritus removed his hand from his chin and gestured at Lhaerial, the servo-motors aiding his ancient body burring softly in the quiet of the observation suite. ‘She could be ten thousand years old. Only the most ancient of them show signs of ageing at all, and I hear that some never age a day. They are immortal, kept alive by black alien arts.’

‘They are not immortal, inquisitor.’

Veritus spun on his heel, face darkening. Wienand stepped into the room, elegantly attired as always, her features set under her steel grey fringe. A few fresh lines had come to mark her face since the start of the crisis, yet still she seemed young to bear so much responsibility. The black matt metal door to the observation suite slid silently closed behind her. Vangorich glimpsed a pair of Inquisitorial storm troopers standing at guard outside. They had not been there when he and Veritus had arrived. Protection against Veritus.

‘If you had thought to consult me, then you would be better informed, Lord Veritus,’ said Wienand. ‘If you weren’t seeking my death.’

Veritus and Wienand stared at one another with hard eyes. Vangorich was hopeful of a rapprochement between the two, as matters were bad enough without the Inquisition falling to war with itself. But if there were to be one, there was little sign of it as yet.

‘Yes,’ said Veritus with a cold smile. ‘They are your area of expertise. I would expect nothing less than a deep understanding from someone who has so freely collaborated with the enemies of the Imperium.’

‘Not all xenos are our enemies, unless we choose to make them so. They can be useful to us. Allies.’

Wienand stepped up to the glass to stand next to Veritus.

‘You are tainted by your association, Wienand,’ said Veritus. ‘You should not be here. Should I be on my guard in case you attempt to free her?’

‘What would you do if I did? Never trust them, but do not let hatred blind you. The eldar have aided us on many occasions.’

‘They are manipulators, they use us for their own ends,’ said Veritus.

‘Then we must manipulate them back!’ said Wienand. ‘Better that than open war.’

‘Is it?’ said Veritus. The inquisitors stared fixedly into the room, neither looking at the other as they argued. Vangorich was trapped in the middle, witness to a sour lovers’ tiff.

Vangorich held up his hands. ‘Please. Stop.’

The inquisitors took his rebuke without comment, to Vangorich’s relief. Even he couldn’t fight his way out of the Inquisitorial Fortress. But there was plenty of time for one or both of them to turn against him, he thought. ‘Wienand, it is good to see you again.’

‘You too, Drakan, although I think very little of the company you are keeping.’

‘Can we not concentrate on the matter at hand here?’ said Vangorich wearily. ‘What’s an assassination attempt or two between friends?’

‘So speaks the Assassin,’ said Wienand.

‘He has a point, Wienand,’ snarled Veritus, then calmed. He turned to face Wienand but did not look her in the eye, instead gazing fixedly over her shoulder. ‘Maybe I acted hastily, but things had come to a shocking pass and–’

‘You did not agree with my actions as Inquisitorial Representative, very good. You had recourse to options other than murder and usurpation!’ she interrupted.

‘We had no time!’ said Veritus. ‘You would not have gone quietly, and we would have fought as stupidly as the fools in the Senate, jockeying for power as the Imperium burned around us.’

‘So my death was a matter of expediency? How very comforting.’

‘Yes.’ Veritus sighed. ‘I am old, Wienand. So much older than you. I have seen so much stupidity. I could not take a chance.’

‘And now I am stupid.’ She aggressively sought out his eyes with her own. ‘Did you not think just to ask? No?’

Veritus’ aged lips pressed thin, going grey.

‘Tell me then, Representative Veritus. How goes your management of the crisis?’ said Wienand.

Vangorich cleared his throat. ‘This glass, it is psychically blocked, is it not?’

The inquisitors looked over his head.

‘Really,’ he said, ‘I have spent many long years perfecting an air of unimportance, I am used to being ignored, but this is too much. Answer me! Veritus? Is this glass warded?’

‘Yes, yes of course,’ snapped Veritus. ‘Why?’

‘Because if you stopped glaring at Wienand there, you’d see that our prisoner is looking right at you, and she finds something amusing.’

Wienand shook her head dismissively and returned her attention to the prisoner. ‘Have you actually spoken to her yet, Veritus, or did you just plan on killing her too?’

‘Not yet!’ said Vangorich lightly. ‘How about we attempt that right now? There is no time like the present.’

Veritus cleared his throat. A phlegmy, old man’s sound. ‘Very well,’ he said.

Wienand, Vangorich and Veritus entered the room, the inquisitors still eyeing each other warily. The interrogator ceased his questioning, bowed and withdrew without a word.

‘At last you come out!’ said the prisoner. ‘So pathetic are your attempts at masking that any child of my people could better them without effort.’

The three humans lined up in front of the prisoner. She stared at them contemptuously. The removal of her mask had brought a marked change in her manner. She had become more aloof, more cautious, more direct in speech, but it had only sharpened her defiance.

‘It is time to discuss your message,’ said Wienand.

‘As I told your friends, I come in peace.’

‘I have a strange appreciation of the word myself,’ said Vangorich.

‘You are a murderer. I smell blood on you,’ Lhaerial said.

‘Quite,’ said Vangorich. He found the anger in her quite beguiling. ‘My point is, arriving armed and shooting is not covered by any definition of peace.’

‘Would you have listened?’ she said.

‘Probably not,’ said Vangorich.

‘Drakan,’ said Wienand, ‘this is our prisoner.’

‘Of course, of course, please, inquisitors. Inquire.’

‘You are a psyker?’ said Veritus.

‘And what is that?’ Lhaerial said.

‘A witch, a seer.’

She nodded. ‘A seer of the shadows.’

‘Then let it be known I am warded against your powers,’ said Veritus.

‘I know your mind regardless,’ said the eldar.

‘Tell me of your mission,’ said Wienand.

‘I already have,’ said Lhaerial.

‘Again,’ said Wienand. ‘To us.’

‘I should repeat myself? And then you will ask me again, and again, and you will attempt to hurt me. You are so primitive. I do not know why Eldrad Ulthran wishes to save you. The galaxy would be a cleaner place were you to be exterminated.’

‘You lack the power for that now,’ said Wienand, surprisingly gently. ‘And I think when your kind did have that might, something stayed your hand.’

Lhaerial cocked an eyebrow and gave a sudden, savage smile. ‘Maybe. Doubtless you think our positions reversed? You cannot hurt me. I am Cegorach’s.’

‘She speaks of one of their gods,’ explained Wienand.

‘Do not be so sure, eldar,’ said Veritus dangerously. Wienand held up her hand behind her irritably.

‘Tell us,’ said Wienand. ‘The last time.’

Lhaerial closed her eyes. They were so big, thought Vangorich.

‘I was to deliver a message to the Emperor, not to you.’

‘Tell us what was in this message. We are the representatives of His will,’ said Wienand. ‘The Emperor cannot be spoken to, He is entombed.’

‘You think we do not know this? Eldrad Ulthran, greatest seer of all, entrusted me with this task. I was chosen because I am a seer, I have opened my mind, the old ways are mine. I do not fear She Who Thirsts.’

‘He cannot be reached even psychically,’ said Wienand. ‘It has been tried. You would have died. You must tell us.’

‘What was the message? A threat?’ challenged Veritus.

‘Foolish mon-keigh!’ hissed Lhaerial Rey. Her eyes snapped open. ‘No threat! The Emperor and the farseer are known to each other. Though they long diverged from friendship, they are not yet opposed. Your dead Emperor is the only hope, for us all, man and eldar alike. This current crisis will pass. The roar of the ork will subside, while the real threat grows. You, the one who calls himself Veritus, you know this to be the truth. I know what you have seen.’

Veritus stepped back, appalled.

‘You are fools to yourselves,’ spat Lhaerial. ‘You are right, old one, and she is right. There is more than one answer to every question. Listen! The ork moon will not last here.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I bring news also of a gift. A force of your Space Marines have gathered in great number, and make their way here. Even now, they pass the red world of this system. Eldrad Ulthran and the seers of Ulthwé worked long and hard to quell the storms roused in the Othersea by the orks, the better that they might come to you. This gift is given freely, because we hope with all our hearts you shall prevail over the ork.

‘Listen to our pleas. Do not let the orks distract you, nor any other threat arising from the temporal realm. The gods of the Othersea will not stop until this galaxy is their plaything. The threat they pose is millions of cycles old, the actions of your Warmaster but the latest act in a war that has raged since the time of the old races. For the lifespan of stars my people have opposed them. You are naive if you think Chaos defeated. I have been sent with this one message – do not neglect the Dark Gods, for it will mean the annihilation of us all.’

‘Do you suggest that only mankind might save the galaxy?’ said Veritus wonderingly.

Lhaerial shifted her gaze to Veritus, and her hard eyes made him flinch as if she saw something in his mind and reflected it back upon him. ‘The idea appeals to your vanity? You were correct in what you were saying, through there. You are a tool to us. Our people ruled the stars when this world was ruled by reptiles. Many came against us – the soulless ones, the krork at the apex of their might, in comparison to which this latest folly is laughable, the cythor and a thousand other races so terrible your intellects could not contemplate them. Even your own ancestors and their unliving legions at the so-called height of their mastery. We defeated them all.

‘To you we seem a sorry remnant, a ragged glory fading into the void, but we are not yet extinct, inquisitor. What is a few thousand cycles of weakness when set against millions of power? You fell yourselves, your empire is a pathetic mockery of what your kind once had. Mark my words well – unlike you we shall be mighty once again. We would prefer it if there were still a galaxy to rule when we are ready to return.’

Wienand pursed her lips and shook her head regretfully.

‘You do yourself no favours,’ she said. ‘I am trying to help you.’

A fanatical light shone from Veritus’ eyes as he looked at the eldar. ‘Now that is a threat,’ he said. ‘Listen to me, alien. I know the truth of it, awful as it is. There is one path to peace, and that is when every last world is under the hegemony of mankind.’

Lhaerial smiled. Her teeth were very small, perfectly white. ‘You are mistaken. You safeguard our heritage, until the time comes for the Empire of Ten Million Suns to rise once again. For that reason alone we vouchsafe your continued existence. The Primordial Annihilator is our common enemy. Our kind coexisted before the fall. We have no quarrel with you.’

Veritus stepped menacingly close to the eldar.

‘The Debari incident, the Veridanium massacre, the fall of Outremer, the burning of Choidenmirn.’ He counted off atrocities on golden metal fingers. ‘All these were perpetrated by your species against ours, and in the last five hundred years.’

‘Not all of my kind are of good heart, just as not all of yours are.’

Veritus laughed. ‘You claim to represent the world-ship of Ulthwé? All of those were actions of that faction against the Imperium!’

Lhaerial managed to shrug, despite her binding. ‘The worlds of Ulthwé that you trespass upon, doubtless they thought the punishment necessary.’

‘Then how can we possibly trust you?’ shouted Veritus.

Lhaerial looked into the ancient inquisitor’s face. ‘How can we possibly trust you? We only have each other, for now at least. We can stand apart and die alone, or we might persist together.’

‘This is intolerable!’ snapped Veritus.

‘Calm yourself, Veritus,’ said Wienand. ‘Listen to what she is saying – she is right. We must listen to her. If they truly wanted to harm the Emperor, they would have come against us differently, if it were in their power to do so. I believe her. She speaks the truth.’

‘You are corrupted by their influence!’ said Veritus. ‘Van der Deckart told me all about your actions on Antagonis in concert with these creatures. They are fundamentally untrustworthy. Your dealings with them are grounds enough for execution!’

‘On whose authority?’ said Wienand.

‘I am the Inquisitorial Representative,’ said Veritus. ‘On my authority.’

‘You are the Inquisitorial Representative by nefarious means. I am the incumbent, you are the impostor. And we are not in the halls of government now. We are among our own kind. You are not popular in this fortress, Veritus. I have many supporters here.’

‘I have many also,’ said Veritus warningly.

‘I should kill you now.’

‘Stop!’ Vangorich stepped between them. ‘Is this really the time?’ he said, looking at the prisoner. Lhaerial Rey’s head hung, unconcerned at the humans’ conversation.

‘Oh, this is the perfect time for this conversation,’ said Veritus. ‘The eldar is going nowhere, and this room is among the most heavily warded in all the Fortress, a good venue for the most private of affairs.’ His hand rested against his pistol.

‘Don’t! Don’t draw that! Listen to yourselves!’ said a pained Vangorich. He pinched the bridge of his nose and breathed through his teeth. ‘Ordinarily I would have no qualms if the two of you wished to pit the Inquisition against itself. Your agency has interrupted legitimate operations of mine so many times I have lost my patience with it. A reorganisation would do it and me a world of good.’

‘We impose the will of the Emperor, Drakan,’ said Wienand. ‘Our word is law.’

‘And I exist to ensure that people who say such things as a matter of habit do not take matters into their own hands. Isn’t it nice that we can all get on so well together?’ Vangorich said drily. ‘We do need to get on with each other. Frankly, you two and I are the only ones who seem to be keeping their head in all of this mess. Can you not put your differences aside? The future of the Imperium depends on it. Is it really that inconceivable that you both might be right? That Veritus here is correct to be wary of the alien.’

Veritus began to speak, but Vangorich raised his voice and spoke over him.

‘And that Wienand is right in the utility of the xenos? Neither of these viewpoints are essentially contradictory. Perhaps, indeed, it is time to consider a certain amount of specialisation? Take a lead from my temples. One must select the correct tool for the job. This is a big galaxy – no one man or woman can hope to be fit for every task, even if they carry the Emperor’s seal. In your division you are behaving no less blindly or selfishly than the High Lords.’

Veritus worked his jaw. Wienand stared down her nose at him.

‘So,’ said Vangorich. ‘Who’s first?’

‘Very well,’ said Wienand. ‘I shall agree to a detente.’

‘Veritus?’ said Vangorich.

Veritus sneered. ‘And hand back power to you, I suppose? Your record so far has been pitiful, Wienand.’

‘On the contrary. You shall remain as the Inquisitorial Representative,’ said Wienand. ‘My return will raise questions. Open signs of dissent within our ranks will weaken our position. Matters are too delicate to confuse further with my return. The Inquisition must present a united front, outwardly at least. I shall be able to act more freely against the High Lords if I remain dead.’

Vangorich smiled in relief, interleaved his fingers and cracked his knuckles.

‘Well then!’ he said.

‘Surprised, Veritus? You see, my lord,’ said Wienand, ‘it is not only you who has the interests of the Imperium at heart.’

‘Excellent!’ said Vangorich. ‘We must begin work immediately.’ He ushered them towards the door.

‘Be hasty,’ said the shadowseer. ‘Already the Primordial Annihilator works against you.’

Vangorich got one final look at Lhaerial Rey before the door sealed, locking her away forever.

Seven

A conversation with Terra

During their voyage across the Sol System, Koorland found his few moments of peace in the practice cages. With Issachar he sparred constantly, both of them guests of Bohemond. The physical exertion of combat pushed aside his grief and his anger. When not fighting, the lords of the Chapters conferred and feasted, making their plans against the orks.

The Last Wall made all speed through the Sol System, sailing past mighty Jupiter and its glowering storm spots, on towards the asteroid belt and past it to the inner planets. From fleeing mercantile craft they first received detailed news of the situation at Terra, and of the disastrous Proletarian Crusade.

The Sol System was ordinarily alive with shipping travelling from the Mandeville point to Terra. The Last Wall saw few vessels. Those ships that had come to the cradle of mankind had aborted their journeys, and lurked unsurely around the outer planets. The captains of the ships and the lords of minor colonies around the gas giants relayed further details. The moon had arrived at Terra unopposed, they said, crushing the throneworld’s orbital defences without trouble. The Navy was mostly absent. When the Crusade had been called, the minor Imperial Navy presence held back while millions of Imperial citizens were slaughtered. Worse still, the ships of Mars remained in port, the red world’s armies mustered but inactive. Astropathic messages to both Terra and Mars went unanswered.

Koorland’s outrage grew. During the hours of swift travel from the Mandeville point to the inner system he remained in the cages. His sword clashed off Issachar’s twin axes. He fought instinctively, mind elsewhere. Several questions troubled him, and the answer to them all was more troubling still – the High Lords, the High Lords, the High Lords.

He grunted hard, and swung at Issachar. The Excoriator dodged.

‘My lords.’

Koorland drove another hard attack at Issachar, all his anger and frustration behind it.

‘My lords!’

Issachar caught Koorland’s blow upon crossed axes.

‘A messenger,’ said Issachar, nodding past their locked weapons. He and Koorland were stripped to the waist. Issachar’s torso was as scarified as his face, his flesh a coded manual to the rituals of his Chapter.

Koorland stepped back. Sweat poured off them both. A Black Templars bondsman stood by the doors, framed by the cage bars.

‘The High Lords have made contact, my lords,’ said the bondsman. He wore the weapons of a warrior, and had the physique to match. His attitude to Koorland was deferential without servility. There was pride in the hearts of the Black Templars’ men; they did not creep about as the servants of some Chapters did.

‘No news from Mars?’ said Koorland. He wiped down his face and naked torso with a towel handed to him by an arming servitor, and stepped out from the practice cage.

‘Alas, we have heard nothing from them, my lord.’

‘Continue our attempts to raise them. Have your astropaths and vox-officers make the implication the Last Wall may alter course to put into orbit around the forge world and investigate their silence. That will focus the tech-priests’ attention,’ said Koorland. ‘Have my armour prepared. I will speak with the High Lords garbed for war.’

‘Shall I inform my liege Bohemond?’

‘I shall speak to this representative alone,’ said Koorland.

‘My lord,’ said the bondsman, and departed.

‘If the High Lords contact us, we can rest easy that there is at least authority still upon Terra,’ said Issachar.

‘Yes, but whose?’ said Koorland. ‘And if the old authority, how effective can it be? The High Lords have proved nothing but their own incompetence.’

‘You are learning, Chapter Master Koorland.’

While in the arming chamber Bohemond had provided him, Koorland was informed that the representative of the High Lords was now present via lithocast. Koorland did not hurry. Arming servitors and bondsmen clad him in his armour, polished now but still bearing the marks of the conflict on Ardamantua. While the men worked silent around him, bolting him into his battleplate, he thought on what he must say to the lords of all the Imperium. Politics. How he loathed them, all the worse as he lacked the detail to make an adequate tactical plan. Idle fantasies of usurping them and replacing their corrupt rule with that of the Space Marines played through his mind. But Space Marines were no less fallible than mortal men, and far more dangerous for the belief many of them had in their own rectitude. The galaxy had suffered enough already because of transhuman arrogance. He chastised himself inwardly. Issachar’s sentiments were infectious. He could not succumb to them.

The last clasp of his armour fastened with a snap. The bondsmen oiled Koorland’s hair, set a cloak of rich red velvet about his shoulders, and he departed for the Chamber of Audience, high up on the Abhorrence’s superstructure. As befitted its purpose as a tool of diplomacy, the chamber was cavernous, possessing enough holoprojectors to accommodate the remote meetings of many hundreds of men. Only one awaited him, the slight phantom of an unremarkable man in the room’s centre, his full-size lithocast eerily lifelike.

‘My lord, my apologies for keeping you,’ said Koorland. The room swallowed his voice whole. His footsteps echoed sharply from the ornate walls.

The representative of the High Lords waved away the apology. He was plainly dressed, small.

‘These are trying times. I have not been waiting long. Rather, it is my own eagerness to speak with you that brings me to the lithocast chamber ahead of you, Second Captain Koorland.’

‘I am Chapter Master now,’ said Koorland.

‘Ah,’ said the man. His face expressed his concern, the long scar cutting across it wrinkling oddly. ‘Your losses were grave, we understand. Tell me, were there other survivors?’

‘They are dead,’ said Koorland icily. ‘You do not understand, I think. They are all dead, every one of my brothers. I am the last of the Imperial Fists. When I fall, the Chapter shall be no more.’

‘All of them are dead?’ said the man softly.

‘All.’

The man nodded. ‘I feared as much. On hearing of your survival, some of my colleagues were more hopeful that others might have been retrieved, but…’ His demeanour changed. ‘We are forgetting ourselves, Chapter Master. I have yet to introduce myself. I am Drakan Vangorich, head of the Officio Assassinorum, and one of the High Lords of Terra, though sadly not one of the Twelve.’

‘You? You are the Lord of Assassins?’ said Koorland.

‘You cannot hide your incredulity. That is understandable.’ The man’s slight pleasure offended Koorland. ‘You have yet to grasp the diplomatic niceties of your new role. I do not look like a master of murderers, and intentionally so. If I looked like death himself, I would be performing my job poorly, would I not?’

‘Why have you been chosen to speak with me?’ Koorland’s mind raced. Battle. He must see this as battle. There were tactical considerations in the choice of his words. Koorland chose to be blunt. ‘Is this a warning?’

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose there is a warning in what I’m saying to you, Chapter Master,’ said Vangorich amiably. ‘But not the kind you are thinking of. Doubtless you believe my communication is meant to convey the power of the High Lords. At my command are killers who would tax and quite probably kill even you, should I command it. And it is true, the arrival of your fleet has caused as much consternation as it has celebration. But my warning is not of that sort. I ask that you pay attention to what I said regarding my appearance. Things are so very rarely as they seem.’

‘You are speaking obtusely.’

‘I really am not,’ said Vangorich.

‘Then tell me plainly, what is the High Lords’ message?’

‘There’s the crux of it. I am reasonably confident the High Lords’ message would be that you stay far away from Terra. They’d say this because you will provoke the orks, who for the four days since their ambassador was sent to us have done nothing. In fairness, the High Lords may genuinely fear provocation. What they really fear, however, is the threat to their power your – several thousand, is it? – Space Marines pose. Even at this late hour, they scheme still, and you are forcing them to act in concert. Nothing is more apt to form a concord among them than a challenge to their power from within the Imperium. A shame they do not categorise this ork invasion similarly. Terror is at the forefront of their minds, but behind it self-interest, ambition and envy still slide over one another, poisonous as serpents.’

‘I do not understand,’ said Koorland. ‘I requested, politely, that you speak plainly. Do not make me demand.’

Vangorich pointed at Koorland somewhat impishly. ‘A little steel I see there, Chapter Master. Good. We are sorely in need of a man with steel. You must also learn a certain flexibility of mind. You see, I am not speaking to you on behalf of the High Lords at all. I am currently at the Inquisitorial Headquarters. I am afraid I am very much on a frolic of my own.’

‘I was expecting instruction. Plans. Disposition of the enemy.’

‘Very commendable. Instruction I can manage. I have with me one of my colleagues, Veritus, the Inquisitorial Representative to the Senatorum Imperialis, and one of the High Twelve. He and I unfortunately do not constitute a quorum, but Veritus has something our fellows in the Senatorum lack. He speaks with the voice of the Emperor.’

The hololith blinked. A second figure appeared on the focusing platform alongside the one projecting Vangorich. An indefinably ancient man, encased in a suit of golden power armour.

‘I am Veritus, the Inquisitorial Representative, and one of the High Twelve,’ said the newcomer. ‘Will you heed my command, Chapter Master Koorland? Will you obey the word of the Emperor Himself?’

Koorland’s relief at having made contact with some authority was undermined by the uneasy feeling a trap was opening before him. The Chapters were autonomous but even they could not deny a direct order from a High Lord. He must tread carefully. ‘State your orders, inquisitor.’

‘By the power vested in me,’ said Veritus, ‘the High Lords command that you bring your fleet immediately to Terra and smash the attack moon out of the sky.’

‘And why do you think we have come here, inquisitor? Has the Imperium become so divided that the sight of a fleet of Space Marines in response to a direct threat within the holy system of Sol inspires fear, and not relief? Our intention is to destroy the orks,’ said Koorland. ‘It is our only purpose.’

‘Then our aims accord,’ said Veritus guardedly.

‘Well, that was very dramatic,’ said Vangorich. ‘But there is some business to attend to. You will require help, lord Chapter Master. You must go to Mars, and winkle Fabricator General Kubik out from his hiding place. Set his feet on the path to war. The man sits in his palace surrounded by one of the mightiest armies in the galaxy, and he does nothing. We will advise you in what you must say to him.’ Vangorich glanced at Veritus. ‘But first, it is time to tell you exactly what has transpired since the tragedy at Ardamantua. Steady yourself – you will not be pleased by what I have to say.’

Eight

The calculation of suspicion

Kubik addressed Koorland from the heart of the diagnostiad, the clicking mind of Mars. A kilometre-wide sphere excavated from the ground in untold ages past, its sides were a hive of thousands of individual cells, each containing the body of a magos wired directly into the Martian world-core. Their whispering never stopped. Once placed inside a cell, a magos left only when his unnaturally long life was worked out. Dark patches on the wall marked out an expired follower of the Omnissiah, like dead elements on a pict screen. Sometimes they might go for months without notice until servitor teams carefully cleared brown bones, failed cybernetics and ruined robes from the cavity, and prepared it for a new occupant. It was a networked mind, far more powerful than any cogitator in the galaxy. Retaining but a fragment of their individuality, the magi became one in thought and intent; the diagnostiad had known no dissension within itself for hundreds of years.

There were few honours higher in the priesthood than to be elevated to the diagnostiad. To join the world-engine at the heart of the Martian empire was to commune with the Omnissiah himself.

The office of Fabricator General was one of those few higher honours. Surrounded by thousands trapped in the ecstasy of mechanical undeath, it was an honour Kubik preferred.

Kubik’s throne was a mighty affair, replete with data sockets, cogitator interface points, servo-skull docks and other, more esoteric devices that provided Kubik with a direct link to the mind of Mars. Backed by a giant brazen plaque depicting the machina opus, the throne occupied a dais raised on a spine in the heart of the sphere, a tall needle alight with the sparkings of the Motive Force, and set with the polished bones and preserved cybernetica of his predecessors. Like the arcane knowledge of the tech-priests, Kubik’s throne was founded on the bones of the past.

At the Fabricator General’s insistence, Koorland spoke with Kubik from a private lithocast chamber aboard the Abhorrence. A perfect, life-size image of the Chapter Master was projected by his throne in a manner that meant only Kubik and the diagnostiad could see him. No other sentient was present in the sphere, and yet secrecy reigned even there. The instinct to hoard knowledge was the most powerful a tech-priest possessed. Their mastery of technology was second only to their paranoia.

‘Well met, Chapter Master Koorland. Your return to Sol is timely. Without your arrival, Terra would surely be lost.’ Kubik selected a near-human voice from his editicore recollections, a rich, commanding voice, suggestive of masculinity and confidence. Entirely unlike Kubik’s original voice, now hundreds of years lost.

‘Greetings to you, Lord of Mars,’ said Koorland, and bowed. ‘We, the brothers of the Last Wall, come before you to ask for your aid and your wisdom.’

The Space Marine was being deferential. Kubik wondered who had schooled him.

‘We move immediately upon the attack moon,’ said Koorland. ‘Surprise is our most potent weapon. We will fall on them, and smash them from the skies.’

‘So thought Juskina Tull, and her Proletarian Crusade ended in disaster.’ Kubik’s sub-processors kept his voice neutral, injecting elements of superiority, irony and calm into the vox-output.

‘We are the hammer of the Emperor, not a desperate rabble. We shall destroy the orks.’

‘I can only applaud your confidence, Chapter Master, but I insist on caution.’

‘And I can only query your lack of action,’ said Koorland.

‘It is no mystery,’ said Kubik. ‘Our ground forces are substantial here on Mars, but our fleets are not suitable for actions of this kind. We have few vessels within the system in any case. To throw our lot in with Juskina Tull would have resulted in the loss of valuable military units that might be better used elsewhere.’

‘What of your weapons arrays, your machines of great art? Surely there is something capable of destroying the moon upon Mars.’

‘Indeed,’ said Kubik. ‘And using any of the Greater Weapons would have posed unconscionable risks to Holy Terra. Would you have us destroy the throneworld to save it?’

Koorland gave Kubik a look the Fabricator General found unreadable. He queried the diagnostiad via mind shunt.

<Voice analysis and facial muscle configurations suggest he is close to speaking freely,> spoke the diagnostiad into Kubik’s mind. It addressed him with a single voice. <He believes you to be dissembling. We calculate a ninety per cent probability that he has been in contact with others within the system. Primary suspects – Grand Master Vangorich, Inquisitor Veritus.>

‘Let us not point the finger, Chapter Master,’ said Kubik. ‘This war has taken us all by surprise. You have a good chance of success. In aiding you I will not be casting my military away needlessly, so you I shall aid. That was your intention in contacting me, yes? To ask for my help, and not cast aspersion and accusation?’

Koorland nodded curtly. ‘Yes, my lord. That was my intention.’

‘Good. Five regiments of skitarii will accompany you, and attendant support. I will pledge also seven cohorts of the Legio Cybernetica. The Basilikon Astra will transport them, and provide heavy supportive fire. Alone, or in support of the Merchant Fleets, our warships would have stood little chance. With your battlefleet, they can operate within acceptable parameters of survival.’

‘I desire to speak with Phaeton Laurentis and Eldon Urquidex,’ said Koorland. ‘They are known to me, and I would confer with them.’

‘Urquidex, Laurentis? I am not familiar with them. One moment please.’ Kubik made a show of calling up their information. ‘Ah yes, minor biologians. Unfortunately, both magi are occupied with other duties.’

‘Another time, perhaps,’ said Koorland. ‘You have our thanks, Fabricator General. While the Imperium stands together, it shall not fall.’

‘Mars will not allow that to happen. We are united, as always.’

<He suspects you lie,> whispered the diagnostiad.

‘When will your forces be ready?’ asked Koorland.

‘Chapter Master, I called the Taghmata of Mars weeks ago in anticipation of reinforcement. Our military is already prepared to sail as soon as I give the word. You insult me and the oaths of fealty and alliance Mars holds in sacred compact with Holy Terra. We have stood ready to sail to Terra’s aid since the very first. We could not act alone, nor would we support the fool’s crusade called by Juskina Tull.’ Kubik stood from his throne, mechadendrites and other, subtler supplementary limbs waving in displeasure.

‘You have my apologies, Fabricator General,’ said Koorland. ‘No implication was meant. Your aid is generous, and will save the lives of many of the sons of Dorn.’

‘Transmit me your marshalling coordinates. I will despatch the Taghmata, and place the Prime under your direct command. I have only one request.’

‘That is, my lord?’

‘Any and all materiel and technology taken in the battle must be collected by my subjects, and delivered here to Mars.’

‘For what purpose?’ asked Koorland.

‘Its study is vital to the defeat of the orks.’

‘I will agree to this, in exchange for all information pertaining to the ork threat you have already gathered.’

‘We have provided what we know to the Senatorum,’ said Kubik smoothly.

‘There are explorator fleets all over the Imperium,’ said Koorland. ‘Many of your forge worlds have been attacked. I have seen some of the intelligence you have gathered. It seems a little… thin.’

‘It is all we have,’ said Kubik. ‘Delivery of materiel will speed our analysis. We shall share what we learn when we have learnt it.’

Koorland stared a long moment at the Fabricator General. ‘Very well, but we shall oversee the transfer.’

‘Agreed,’ said Kubik.

‘We will speak again soon, on the day of our victory.’

Koorland’s image vanished as Kubik cut the link. The whispering of the diagnostiad members rose and fell like the rush of wind in the leaves of a forest. Kubik took to his throne again, and commanded it to descend. Gracefully it sank away, bringing Kubik to rest upon the only flat surface in the sphere, and the only part free of the cavities of the diagnostiad’s cells – a platform a hundred metres across, a raised road of Martian bronze leading across it to a huge pair of doors, guarded by a phalanx of stooped cyber-constructs. Kubik glided out of his throne. The doors opened before him. Outside stood the primary members of the Synod of Mars, waiting on his orders. Bowing profusely, they took his commands.

Eldon Urquidex was marched alongside Magos Laurentis up the Channel of Motivational Energies as Performed by the Flesh, a broad processional way laid out in mimicry of the internal workings of a cogitator’s logic boards. They were deep within the forge temple of Olympus Mons. Passages left at irregular intervals, each one guarded by bio-constructs and barred by heavy grilles known as the Gates of Logic.

The Channel was the largest road in a three-dimensional labyrinth, and the main route taken by supplicants to the Synod of Mars. The edifice had been constructed aeons ago during Old Night by a Fabricator General of questionable sanity, the legacy of costly experiments to mimic the ineffable deductive powers of pure energy through the medium of humanity. Techna-liturgia moving around the circuit were supposed to operate in a manner similar to the sub-atomic particles of the holy Motive Force. It had not of course worked, but where it had failed as a computational device, it succeeded as art, and remained a sacred place.

The Channel bored through the mountain in a las-straight line to the audience chamber of the Fabricator General, and Urquidex was worried.

Urquidex’s mechanical face was misleading. Behind the steel and the telescopic eye stalks lurked a very human brain. Not so long ago, Urquidex would have welcomed an appointment with Kubik as an opportunity to secure advancement with the Synod. Manipulation, flattery, spurious logic – these tools were Urquidex’s to deploy as easily as the fine manipulators on his additional limbs. That was before he became a traitor. Fear chilled the fluids in the tubes of his augmetics. Urquidex had worked himself to the centre of Kubik’s plans, and had come to disagree with them entirely. With news of the Last Wall’s arrival at Sol, and their dash for Terra, Kubik’s intelligence core and native brain alike would be slaved entirely to political scheming. It would take the slightest misstep to expose Urquidex. What small patches of skin remained to him were slick with the unpleasant excretions of anxiety.

The heavy tread of Kubik’s cybernetic guardians rang ominously on the metal plates of the Channel. Everything Urquidex saw, his nerves imbued with a sinister aspect. Servo-skulls and vat-constructs darting through the air became spies following his every movement. The chants of magi and electro-priests droning from the factory-chapels and techno-basilicae carried counter-melodies of accusation. The hisses and whines of holy manufacturing processes barely concealed their contempt for him. Laurentis, his emotions so heavily circumscribed by the surgery necessary to save his life after Ardamantua, lurched along placidly on his tripedal motive assembly, the thoughts whirring through his rebuilt brain secret from all.

Urquidex was no Ultima Mechanista, wishing away his humanity; for him and the members of his sub-cult, balance was to be sought between mechanical and organic. For was not the flesh nothing but the wet machinery of the Omnissiah? Finding such a balance was a cause of much worry to Urquidex. He thought back to Ardamantua, torn between the cold logic of the Subservius’ mission and the horror he had experienced at the annihilation of the Imperial Fists. Ruminating on that weakness, he envied Laurentis his new-found detachment.

Too soon they came to Kubik’s audience chamber. The doors were a pair of cogs set in series, one bearing a skull, the other a mechanical face: the machina opus split into two wholes. The cyber-constructs stopped and slammed their power glaives into the metal floor.

With mouthless voices they announced the magi’s arrival. ‘Magi Biologis Eldon Urquidex and Phaeton Laurentis request audience with his high logician the Fabricator General of Mars.’

Urquidex found that rich. There had been no request, they had been summoned. He would rather be anywhere than in Kubik’s presence today. Did Kubik know? Had that giant intellect uncovered his involvement with the agents of the Officio Assassinorum?

The doors rolled apart in opposite directions. Urquidex and Laurentis were ushered in. The audience chamber was designed to intimidate. On his best days, Urquidex found the vast space, crisscrossed with giant, crackling power conduits and humming with data-streams emanating from the diagnostiad, to be unnerving, and today was not one of his best days. Urquidex steadied himself and put his emotional feeds on temporary hold, redirecting his thought processes through the far steadier mechanisms of his intelligence core.

‘O mighty and most wise Fabricator General Kubik! Prime of primes, artisan without compare,’ said Urquidex, spreading his multiple limbs and executing a complex obeisance. ‘I am your humble servant. State your bidding, and I shall comply to the letter, without the error of signal loss or personal interpretation.’

Laurentis said nothing, but executed an awkward three-legged curtsey, his single organic eye blinking incongruously in the centre of his facial mechanisms.

Kubik sat in a high-backed, ovoid chair that floated a metre above the ground on a snapping grav-field. The dusty smell of high-energy discharge washed out from it as he floated forward to stop not far from the two biologians, the repulsor unit of the chair buffeting at their robes.

‘Magos Biologis Eldon Urquidex, Magos Biologis Phaeton Laurentis.’

‘Prime of primes, alpha of alphas,’ said Urquidex.

Laurentis said nothing.

‘Tell me,’ said Kubik. ‘What do you know of Second Captain Koorland of the Imperial Fists, lately returned to this system?’

Urquidex’s mechanical body parts sagged with relief. ‘Whatever you wish to know, Lord of Mars.’

Kubik’s chair turned, its energy field spitting, and he performed a slow circuit around the magi.

‘Laurentis first, you spent much time with him on Ardamantua.’

‘He was kind,’ said Laurentis, his vocal modulator thoughtful. ‘Honourable.’ Laurentis paused. ‘Fabricator General, it is often wise in such circumstances as these, where mismatch exists between the relative hierarchical status of two participants in an exchange, to provide an opinion not necessarily held by the responder. To give informative discourse couched in the subjective language that tallies with the result the interlocutor wishes to hear. I calculate you wish to hear the bad, but I cannot voice it. He saved my life.’

‘Speak the truth. Flattery compromises logic,’ said Kubik.

‘I will say nothing against him,’ said Laurentis. ‘He is, in common parlance, a hero. After my transformation, he threatened Magos Urquidex with violence should additional damaging circumstance befall me.’

‘And why is this remarkable?’ asked Kubik. ‘The primary purpose of the Adeptus Astartes is to safeguard and promote the persistence of the human race. They are made to be that way, as predictable as the energy output of a lasgun.’

‘It is possible he was following his indoctrinative programming,’ conceded Laurentis. ‘But I believe he genuinely wished to help me personally.’

‘Intriguing. An altruist. An uncertain modifier to my calculations.’

‘There is more. He was also… sad,’ said Laurentis, as if struggling to recall what the word meant.

‘And you, Urquidex? State your initial observations and hypothetical deductions.’

‘He was most persuasive,’ said Urquidex unctuously. ‘Unafraid to offer violence to further his aims.’ Urquidex remembered being slammed into a wall. Most unpleasant. ‘I found him driven. He will not be easily controlled.’

Kubik’s subsidiary vocalisers made a dry clacking laugh. His primary voice remained thoughtful and cold. ‘Do not second-guess my intentions, Urquidex.’

‘I only think on the progress of the Grand Experiment, and how the arrival of the Last Wall will affect that progress,’ said Urquidex.

‘You and I are not dissimilar,’ said Kubik. ‘We are both biologians, even if our specialisations differ. Our creed is a self-evident truth – to abandon humanity entirely is a self-defeating exercise. Logic is a tool best utilised by a thinking, feeling organism, not an end unto itself. The end is knowledge, not logic as some of our brethren believe. Logic gives us a framework to understanding, but it does not provide insight. Without insight I could never have become Fabricator General nor could I survive the political processes of the Senatorum Imperialis. Logic is not the only mode of thought necessary to true communion with the Omnissiah. The flesh is weak, but the machine on its own is weak also.

‘Let the cults of expunging strip away their humanity and decry us as modus unbecoming. We must never forget the even split upon the Omnissiah’s own sigil, skull and cybernetic. A sentiment the magi of the Ordo Biologis can only agree with, is that not so, Laurentis? Before your unfortunate wounding, you had few augmentations.’

‘A choice I made to remain better attuned to subtleties of biology, Fabricator General,’ said Laurentis. ‘I have lost so much to the orks. I see more clearly now, but what was taken from me was not given willingly. I cannot imagine giving up so much of gross human feeling as a conscious act. What little emotion remains is coloured throughout with regret.’

‘Your skills as a dialogian remain. Do you still possess the necessary knowledge and mental subroutines to act as an effective translator?’

‘I remain first and foremost of the xenology sub-order,’ said Laurentis. ‘Linguistic expression is a part of my ability, not the whole.’

‘Nevertheless, it is your linguistic ability I enquire after,’ said Kubik. Upbraiding so heavily cybernised an adept as Laurentis for pedantry was pointless.

‘My linguistic skills are two-point-three-four per cent more efficient than they were,’ said Laurentis. ‘What I have lost in instinctive appreciation for the modes of speech, I have gained in rapid pattern recognition.’

Kubik swept around the magi again. ‘Then you are to report after this meeting to Artisan Trajectorae Augus Van Auken at Pavonis Mons. There is a new project of grave importance being undertaken, vital to the war effort and to the success of the Grand Experiment. The full suite of your abilities are necessary. I have been forced by this Koorland into committing a portion of the armies of Mars to the attack on the ork moon. No matter. It shall afford us the opportunity to acquire new materials for study, and a great number of experimental subjects for Van Auken’s undertaking.’

Urquidex’s logic streams shivered with misgiving at this revelation of a new experiment. His implants seized upon the statement and trapped it in data crystals embedded in his thorax for later parsing. His initial hypothesis suggested something bad.

‘Perhaps my abilities might also be useful, my lord?’ said Urquidex. ‘I too have experience with Veridi giganticus.’

‘You are to remain upon the Grand Experiment. Your investigations into the effects of the ork teleportation technology upon biomatter are invaluable.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Urquidex.

‘We must be careful,’ said the Fabricator General. ‘The feuding of factions within the High Lords leaves us with no choice but to consider the ultimate divorce of our interests. There are those that suspect and work against us. Guard yourselves against them.’

A poor-quality hololith engaged, projecting a bubble of light that resolved itself into a live pict feed. In a grainy aerial view dogged by frequent cutouts and signal dispersion a woman was making her way across red sands, a breathing mask supplementing the thin Martian air.

‘This individual is not as she appears,’ said Kubik. ‘The diagnostic covens came across erroneous data-transfer protocols. Her code signum proved to be falsified.’

‘Who is she?’ asked Urquidex.

‘She is an operative of the Officio Assassinorum. I have been watching her for some time. Vangorich’s killers are elusive, but not invisible. We observe her from a high altitude aether-drone, and she knows nothing of it.’

The woman made her way across a landscape cluttered with ancient fragments of broken machinery. The view swung around. The hive factories of Tharsis piled themselves up behind her.

‘Sicarian assassin clade 950-Alpha-Xi, execute target,’ commanded Kubik.

The woman stopped, alert to peril not yet visible to the magi watching the pict feed. She cast away her red robe, revealing a close-fitting combat suit and a pair of bulky pistols strapped one to each thigh. She drew them both, aimed them in opposite directions, and opened fire. The action proceeded without sound. She ran, arms outstretched and rock steady, guns blazing. Her head flicked back and forth, identifying new targets, her guns ready to follow. Urquidex was certain every shot was a kill.

‘Assassins are skilled, but she is one, and we are many,’ said Kubik.

An assassination clade of Sicarian ruststalkers skittered into the pict field, over twenty of them, converging on the Assassin from all sides, their long legs nimbly picking their way over the rough ground. Always seemingly on the verge of toppling over, their darting movements instead propelled them towards their target with staccato purpose, blade limbs held out to impale and slice. The Assassin upped her fire rate. Sicarians dropped, their breached pressurised armour shooting out streams of gas, spindly augmetic limbs folding in on themselves. They came closer and closer, unconcerned with their own deaths, determined only on hers. The Assassin halted, still firing, but she was surrounded and could not escape.

The Sicarians pounced on her. With a flurry of cybernetic limbs, it was done. The Assassin lay dead on the ground.

The pict view abruptly veered as the aether-drone sped away on some new task. The sky filled the image, before fizzling out.

‘So end those who would profane the holy grounds of Mars,’ said Kubik. His chair swivelled back and rose up high so that he could look down on the magi. ‘You two have proved yourselves to me. This will be but one of a cell. We must redouble our vigilance. Spies are everywhere. We will not be thwarted so close to success.’

Urquidex struggled to control his telescopic eyes. The left developed a tic, the lens minutely focusing and refocusing. He knew very well there were more of them. He was in regular contact with one.

‘Yes, prime of primes,’ Urquidex said.

He needed to speak to Yendl immediately.

Nine

The Last Wall attacks

The ork moon hung over the holy orb of Terra, a rock that threatened an imminent drop, shattering the bland grey surface of mankind’s home.

But it was no longer master of the void. Space Marine ships stood off outside the range of the moon’s gravity weapons, arrayed in attack formation. Seven mighty battle-barges, more than a dozen strike cruisers, scores of lesser attack ships. Behind them sheltered the huge Adeptus Mechanicus ark and factory ships, their metal bellies full of cybernetic armies ready to wreak cold vengeance upon the orks.

There was one other ship of significance in the heavens. The mighty Naval vessel Autocephalax Eternal stood at high anchor, treacherously doing nothing.

‘Signal the Autocephalax Eternal again!’ said Koorland. He stood upon the highest dais of the Abhorrence, staring at the coward Lansung’s flagship through the centre of the grand oculus.

‘She is still not responding, my lord Koorland,’ reported one of Bohemond’s bondsmen.

Koorland watched the other vessel as his own fleet flew past it.

‘Anchored there, doing nothing?’ said Bohemond. ‘The High Admiral will answer to me himself!’

‘Ignore it,’ said Issachar over the fleet vox. ‘There is more at play here than warfare. Some political move on the part of the High Admiral.’

‘Begin the attack,’ said Koorland.

In precise formation, the combined fleets of the Last Wall attacked the orks while Lansung’s battleship looked on. Coming in three echelons, they speared deep into the moon’s attendant flotilla, obliterating everything they came across. Ork cruisers and captured Imperial vessels burst into short-lived blossoms of fire as wide spreads of torpedoes and projectiles smashed into them. Space Marine interdiction fighters sped out from their battle-barges, driving off ork fighters that came out to meet the fleets. Adeptus Mechanicus war arks came behind, shielded by massed arrays of arcane energy projectors. On board waited the Taghmata of Mars. Cybernetic fighter drones, piloted by disembodied human brains, swarmed in close support, shooting down ork rockets and vessels that came too close.

The moon was vast, a planetoid hooked from its home and outfitted in an undeniably orkish manner. Craters had been bored out, turning them into caverns with deep black interiors studded with lights, the outer infrastructure of buried hangars poking out from them into the brilliant shine of Sol. Roughly built towers, docks and other carbuncular constructions scarred the surface. Its giant face leered at Terra, so the Space Marines saw it side on – beetling brows as large as continental shelves turned skyward, a false mountain range of a nose, a complicated mess of scaffolds and buildings a hundred kilometres long that made up the jutting lower lip. Things of greater scale existed in the galaxy, but none of them had been built by the orks.

Koorland stood at a command podium on the bridge of the Abhorrence. With the plan in motion, he deferred command to the individual Chapter Masters.

‘Drive towards them!’ ordered Bohemond. ‘Smash them aside! Burn them all!’

Koorland watched with a more sober eye, adjusting his plans and counter-plans as the battle unfolded. Part of him wished he were aboard Issachar’s vessel, but Bohemond had shown him great hospitality, and Koorland feared the headstrong Black Templars might stray too far forward in their desire to join with the enemy first if not supervised.

‘Stay back,’ said Koorland. ‘We are at the extremity of the ork gravity weapons’ effective range.’

Bohemond made a noise in his throat, but did not disagree openly.

‘Maintain distance. Stick to the plan. Destroy the fleet. Make them come to us,’ said Koorland.

The leading Space Marine ships came within lance range. Broad beams of energy striped the sky, impacting with the ork flotilla with devastating effect. Many ships detonated the moment they were hit. In response, a large part of the ork fleet surged forward.

‘An ork cannot resist provocation,’ said Castellan Clermont, Bohemond’s second. ‘All batteries prepare to open fire! Bona Fide and Ebon, maintain protective formation.’

The moon awoke to the attack, coming alive with a frenzied sparkling as a million guns opened fire.

‘This is no threat!’ said Bohemond savagely. ‘We alone might have bested the moon at Aspiria had dePrasse not withdrawn himself! Now the orks face the combined might of four Chapters. They shall not prevail! Attack, attack, abhor the alien!’

The leading munitions of the ork moon hurtled into the Space Marines’ echelons, void shields flaring with impact flux as they struck the staggered lines of ships. More powerful weapons slashed out from tottering citadels, wavering energy beams that cut into the smaller vessels. An escort dropped out of the Fists Exemplar line, venting atmosphere from its cracked hull in white clouds.

‘Stay on course! Bring the retribution of the Emperor to the fleet. Kill them all!’ Spittle flew from Bohemond’s ruined mouth as he spoke. Koorland could barely credit they were of the same gene line, so overpowering was the Black Templar’s fervour.

‘My lord,’ spoke the Black Templars Techmarine, Kant. His lips were stapled together – some show of contrition, Koorland had been told, although for what the Black Templars would not reveal. His voice was a miserable metallic drone, soullessly issuing from twin vox-speakers either side of his neck. ‘The ork moon exhibits a spiking of power.’

‘All hands, prepare for gravity attack!’ shouted Clermont.

An erratic flashing blinked in the moon’s hollow craters. From pylons set about the face, squirming ribbons of energy rose, binding themselves into a thick cord. A sufficient build-up of power achieved, it snapped out like a whip, shearing through the orks’ own vessels before flicking along the Excoriators arrowhead coming up below the Black Templars’ line of attack. One attack cruiser took a direct hit, void shields giving out simultaneously. It imploded, the prow and stern folding up around a middle compressed to vanishingly small size. For a moment it sailed on bent double, carried forward by momentum, before exploding, buffeting the ships coming behind it with the wash of its breached reactor.

‘This is a new weapon,’ voxed Thane. ‘I have not seen its like before.’

‘Some kind of gravity lash,’ said Quesadra.

‘Such power!’ hissed Bohemond.

‘They are gathering to fire again!’ warned Kant, the faintest hint of emotion creeping into his machine voice.

Once more the flickerings essayed from the towers on the surface, once more they gathered and shot out. Again the lash targeted the Excoriators fleet, grazing the fore section of the Remembered Sin, Issachar’s flagship, as it dissipated into a kaleidoscopic spray of particles. A portion of the Remembered Sin’s hammerhead prow collapsed into glittering clouds of smashed metal and air. The Remembered Sin was twisted into a spin, as if swatted by a god.

‘Issachar!’ demanded Koorland. ‘Status!’

‘We live,’ replied the Excoriator. Alarms whooped in the background. ‘But we will not survive another hit like that. We must get in closer, attack the moon directly. If we can strip away its weaponry, we shall stand a chance. Push through the fleet.’

‘I concur!’ shouted Bohemond. ‘All ships, onward! Arm cyclonic torpedoes. Target the moon.’

It irked Koorland that he did not confer with him first, but he held his silence.

‘Fire control, liaise with the others,’ said Koorland. ‘Find a mutually acceptable firing solution. Multiple hits will give us the best results.’

‘Yes, lord Chapter Master,’ replied Bohemond’s bondsmen.

The Abhorrence’s engines opened up, pushing it with indomitable power towards the moon.

The sky around Terra was thick with debris. Shattered orbital fortresses and defence platforms floated in shoals of wreckage, making sailing hazardous for both sides. Ork fighters, keen to engage with the approaching ships, impacted with them in flashes of boiling fire. The Space Marine pilots, more cautious, better skilled, were taxed to the limit streaking through the metal-choked vacuum. The bigger ships could not avoid the debris, and all across the Last Wall void shields flashed and curled with impact flux.

‘Gravity lash arming,’ droned Kant.

‘Firing solution agreed, all fleets report readiness.’ The bondsmen manning the gunnery station looked to Koorland.

A number of impact points flashed up on the hololith of the ork moon. Koorland nodded.

‘All ships, open fire,’ he ordered.

Cyclonic torpedoes, each larger than a space fighter, slipped free of the launch tubes of twenty battle-barges and strike cruisers. Their engines flared, and they powered towards the moon with building speed, passing the emissions of the gravity lash coming the other way.

Now they were closer, the lash struck with redoubled violence. The tip of it took the battle-barge of one of the Black Templars’ subsidiary crusades in the centre. The lash writhed and coiled about it like a python, collapsing the ship’s midsection so comprehensively that the remains of the prow and stern drifted free of each other. The stern detonated with the sunburst of reactor death, engulfing its escort vessels in nuclear fire. The lash had not done: it twitched through the crusade’s ships, smashing two more of them into nothing before finally dissipating. When it shut off, a single vessel remained, heavily damaged. It was targeted by a flight of ork destroyers. Fire sped between the crippled Imperial ship and its predators, but there could be only one outcome. The ship disappeared, replaced by a perfect circle of brilliant light that winked out as quickly as it bloomed.

Bohemond roared at the oculus, slamming his fist into his palm. ‘They will pay all the more dearly for that!’ he yelled. ‘Prepare to fire a second volley of torpedoes.’

The first launch had reached the moon, slamming all over the surface. Explosions lit up tits face with domes of fire and light. The moon shook under the impact. Tall plumes of ejecta reared up, gnarled fingers reaching for the Space Marine ships.

‘Ready to fire again!’ reported gunnery command.

‘Hold!’ ordered Koorland as Bohemond raised his hand. ‘Wait for the others.’

‘Koorland,’ said Bohemond.

‘Wait!’ commanded the Imperial Fist. ‘We are most effective working in concert. You will wait!’

Shorter-ranged grav-weapons began their assault on the fleet. Clouds of energy bubbles projected at the ships crushed all those they touched. Long-ranged reverse tractor beams tore pieces from hulls or pushed vessels off course. For all the havoc wreaked on the moon’s surface, there were hundreds of thousands of weapons still, of all types, unleashing their full power on the approaching vessels. Void shields throbbed, and across the fleets they failed with oily pyrotechnic displays. Battle-barges shook under the barrage. Several of the smaller vessels were destroyed.

By now the fleets were close to the moon, deep in the debris field. Here were thousands of captured Imperial vessels, many undergoing crude refits. The broadsides of the capital ships boomed constantly, blasting ork craft and pirated Imperial ships to pieces. Destroyers duelled with fast ork attack craft, and everywhere tracers of anti-interdiction fire streaked the sky.

Icons flashed across Koorland’s station. Vox-confirmation came in from the rest of the fleet.

‘Now. Now open fire, High Marshal,’ said Koorland.

‘Do as he commands, open fire!’ roared Bohemond, but his men had already responded.

More torpedoes raced towards the moon, pounding into the surface. The weight of fire issuing from the moon lessened.

‘Brother Kant, is the gravity lash disabled?’

‘Negative,’ said Kant. ‘They are charging to fire again.’

‘My lords! We have reports of multiple boarders across the fleets,’ reported the vox-master. ‘Teleport attack.’

‘They will have taken these craft the same way. They will not find us so easy to overpower,’ said Bohemond. ‘Seal the bulkheads! Weapons free. Activate corridor defences.’

‘It is done, my lord.’

Koorland pressed his knuckles into his command station. ‘Bring the fleet around, get us between Terra and the face. The pylons have to be brought down.’

‘Too late!’ shouted Kant.

The gravity lash arced directly towards the Abhorrence. The bondsman at the helm shouted, ‘Evasive action!’ and the ship plunged as quickly as it was able. The ribbon of gravitic energy raced over the command tower as it slipped down, shearing into the engine stacks of the battle-barge as they presented themselves.

The ship lurched madly as the gravity wave perturbed its course, throwing men everywhere, an effect that worsened enormously when the beam cut into the stern. Koorland slammed against his command post and fell over it, the effects of the ork weapon making a mockery of the Abhorrence’s grav-plating. He fell down a deck that was suddenly vertical, skidding along the metal towards the back of the ship. Somehow, he got his feet under him and activated his maglocks. He lurched upright painfully, standing perpendicularly to the upended gravity. Men flew past him, dragged towards the artificial gravity well of the lash.

The ship rolled violently to port. Through the oculus, Koorland saw the Bona Fide burning engines hard to clear the stricken vessel’s path. With a further mighty wrench to portside, the beam shut off. Gravity returned suddenly to the correct vector. Bondsmen slid down the back wall. Unsecured articles fell from the ceiling. Alarms blared, tocsins sang. The lights had gone out, replaced by the murky red of emergency lumens. Men groaned in pain. A dozen of them did not get up, but lay still.

Throughout it all, Kant had remained stoically anchored in place by his master augur array. ‘We have lost our port engine assembly, my liege. There is heavy damage across all decks in the aft section. Several of our tower superstructures are no more. Multiple casualties among our bondsmen and servitors.’

Bohemond picked himself up from the floor. Bondsmen medicae teams hurried in to help their stricken comrades.

‘Get us back on heading. Continue attack run.’

‘Gravity weapon charging again.’

‘My lords!’ called a bondsman at the auspex centre. ‘My lords, we have the energy signature of a large fleet approaching from Terra’s nightside.’

‘It cannot be the Imperial Navy. The Autocephalax Eternal stands off, and there are no other Naval vessels in the system,’ said Bohemond.

‘There was no warning of orks on the far side of the throneworld,’ said Koorland.

‘Gravity weapon is close to full charge,’ warned Kant.

‘Brace!’ shouted Clermont. The lightning discharge built, and Koorland prepared for the worst.

The attack never came. The face side of the ork moon appeared to change shape, redrawn by a swift painter working in blinding light. The oculus dimmed itself at the sudden fire, and the Space Marines saw the moon’s face deformed by a dozen atomic blasts.

From out of the maelstrom a fresh fleet came sailing, jet-black silhouettes set against the destruction they had unleashed.

Adeptus Astartes vessels.

A powerful, sonorous voice burst over the vox.

‘This is Chapter Master Malfons. The Iron Knights respond to the call of the Last Wall. We apologise for our tardiness, but we are here. The sons of Dorn stand together. Awaiting orders.’

‘The gravity lash is disabled,’ said Kant. ‘Auspex indicates eighty per cent of all ork surface weaponry non-functional.’

‘Malfons!’ shouted Bohemond. ‘Well met, brother!’

‘Continue attack run,’ ordered Koorland. ‘All fleets converge. Establish blockade pattern. Iron Knights, support the Fists Exemplar.’

‘Understood and confirmed, Chapter Master Koorland. And Koorland?’

‘Yes, brother?’

‘You have our regret at your loss. Moving in to support the Fists Exemplar now.’

All around the moon, the night of the void turned to mottled day as the Space Marines broke off their charge to the moon, and dealt death to the remaining ork fleet. Caught within expertly intersected fields of fire, the ork vessels and captured Imperial mercantile ships were torn to pieces.

‘Now the real work begins. What will you do, brother?’ said Bohemond with an appraising look. ‘Join the fray, or remain here? You are the last of the Imperial Fists. Perhaps you should not risk yourself.’

‘Who will lead the attack? You?’

‘If you so command, then I will gladly lead,’ said Bohemond.

Koorland examined Bohemond’s scarred face, but could not read the fragment of expression displayed there.

‘All fleets of the Last Wall, prepare to board the moon,’ Koorland ordered. ‘Adeptus Mechanicus arks, the way is clear for you to move in and begin your deployment.’ Koorland turned to Bohemond. ‘I will lead an attack party myself.’

Bohemond gave him a wild look. ‘In that case, brother, I have a gift for you.’

The ork bombardment had ceased, and now the halls of the Abhorrence resounded with the activity of men. As bondsmen and the servants of the Black Templars’ forge ran towards the vessel’s damaged sections, squads of Space Marines jogged towards their drop-halls and the embarkation deck.

In Bohemond’s personal arming chambers, silence held sway. The cowled bondsmen still went about their business as if nothing had occurred, checking Bohemond’s collection of weapons for upset and damage, and setting right that which had been disturbed. Bohemond led Koorland through his spartan dayroom, through a small weapons workshop, an ammunition store and thence into his innermost sanctum, an octagonal room lined floor to ceiling with weaponry. Most of it was of fine Imperial make, adorned with emblems of the shield and the Templar cross, honour chains and shackles coiled carefully onto pegs beneath each mount. Intermingled were a number of weapons of alien make, of all types from the obvious to the obscure of purpose.

‘You are surprised?’ said Bohemond, when he caught Koorland examining the xenos devices. ‘These are my trophies, many taken from worthy opponents, unclean though they were… But there would be no honour in employing the weapons of the alien against the alien. What I have for you is of far nobler origin.’ He pointed to an alcove where waited a large object covered with a white silk shroud, black Templar crosses repeated hundreds of times over it in an interlocking pattern. Bohemond nodded at one of his arming bondsmen. The man came forward and tugged the shroud free.

Underneath was a suit of Terminator armour, painted in the bold yellow of the Imperial Fists.

‘This suit is one of the very first of the Indomitus armours manufactured,’ said Bohemond, indicating the familiar planed helm and heavy-gauge chest plating. ‘Its name is Fidus Bellator, and it was fashioned in the closing years of the great Heresy war.’ He looked at Koorland. ‘I doubted you, Koorland. I cannot deny it. I have yet to be convinced you are suitable to lead the assembled might of the Last Wall. Yet you have proved yourself in other ways. You are confident, sure of purpose, tactically astute. You are worthy of the rank of Chapter Master, and so I may yet change my mind. In recognition, and in friendship, I give this to you.’

‘I do not know what to say, High Marshal,’ said Koorland wonderingly. Much of his Chapter’s supplies and materiel had been destroyed around Ardamantua, though there would of course be armour and weapons still aboard their great star fortress of the Phalanx and in their barracks on Terra. But were there any Terminator suits left? He doubted it. They were all lost, along with the First Company.

‘Then say nothing,’ said Bohemond. ‘The armour is not dishonoured, for Fidus Bellator has borne these colours before. Once it resided in the armouriums of the Phalanx. If it makes it easier to accept, let us agree that I do nothing more than return it home.’

‘You do me a great honour. I cannot repay you.’

‘I do,’ agreed Bohemond. ‘And you can repay me. Repay me with glory, Chapter Master. Avenge your brothers.’

Ten

The gate

An electric buzzing supplanted Koorland’s senses as his substance was projected through the warp. His body diffused, becoming a tingling sensation and little else. Thought fled as his consciousness momentarily disconnected from reality, but it did not cease – rather his sense of self became something else, a raw awareness without thought, a thing of feeling. Rationality was inconceivable. Time was irrelevant. There was only being, nothing else.

A wall of pain interrupted his contemplations. His body passed out of the warp, his wargear and flesh rearranging themselves into solid forms. A blaze of light and rush of vapour, and he was striding forward, gun raised, into a roughly hewn chamber cluttered with ramshackle machinery and orks. A subsidiary power nexus for the surface energy weapons, its destruction would knock out several dozen energy cannons, or so their Adeptus Mechanicus allies had informed them.

The xenos recovered quickly from their surprise at Koorland appearing in their midst, abandoning the tasks they were about at the machines, and launched themselves at the Space Marine with a ferocious roaring. Their weapons rebounded from his Terminator armour without effect. Koorland gunned them down with his storm bolter, blasting them into bouncing pieces. Ork slave creatures squealed and ran from him. Rushing air behind him signalled other successful teleports. The sensorium of his borrowed suit pinged into life, triangulating his location, linking up with the auspex suites of his ad hoc squad.

‘Teleport successful. Target achieved. Strike Team Slaughter, respond,’ he voxed. He could not turn easily in the massive armoured suit, not without presenting his back to the doorway.

‘Moscht here,’ spoke a voice into his helm. The Space Marines sounded off, their squad icons and vital signs flicking into life upon Koorland’s helm display.

‘Ulferic here.’

‘Donafen here.’

‘Arbalt here.’

‘Holde here.’

Two Black Templars, a brother of the Fists Exemplar, an Excoriator, and an Iron Knight made up his small command.

‘Zero casualties,’ said Koorland.

‘Praise be,’ said Ulferic and Arbalt.

Koorland ignored their odd expression of piety. ‘Thus far, our Adeptus Mechanicus allies have been proven correct. According to their information, the primary target is this way – power generators for the ork gravity weapons. Let us ensure they never fire again. Move out and engage.’

Koorland went first, the others close behind. The combat chatter of other Terminator squads crackled in his ears. Three hundred Terminators worked their way through the tunnels. The moon shook with impacts from the surface, shortly joined by the detonation of demolition charges nearer to hand. Data-screed and vox-reports kept Koorland abreast of the battle, so much information it took the superior mind of a Space Marine to comprehend.

‘Target Gamma destroyed.’

‘Report heavy fire, sector nineteen forty-three.’

‘Target Zeta damaged and on fire. Proceeding to secondary objectives.’

Koorland’s squad stamped through corridors carved from grey stone, primitive deck plating buckling under the weight of their armour. Squads of orks burst from doorways, weapons blazing. Their large-calibre bullets ricocheted from the thick plates of the Terminator suits in showers of hot sparks. Return fire cut them down. As they passed each rathole and stinking entrance, Holde of the Iron Knights poked the nozzle of his heavy flamer down it and sent a jet of shrieking promethium inside. Burning ork slave creatures ran out, screaming. Soon the twisting corridors were choked with smoke, and the Space Marines switched to artificially enhanced views of their environs.

They approached their target. The corridor widened into a cavern, floored erratically with platforms of poorly cut metal. Rough doors as numerous as maggot holes in a corpse riddled the chamber sides. A four-storey-tall machine buzzed and crackled in the middle of the cavern, topped by a rotating arrangement of three glass balls as big as light tanks whose innards writhed with peculiar energies.

‘Our primary target is ahead of us,’ voxed Koorland. ‘Destroy it.’

‘First, a little bladeplay,’ said Arbalt, pointing across the uneven cavern floor.

From an entrance on the far side, hundreds of orks pelted into the room, howling guttural xenos war cries, each one desperate to be the first to kill. Gunfire hammered down at the Space Marines from the tiered galleries ranged up the walls.

Koorland raised his gun and his power sword in salute. ‘For the Emperor,’ he said.

The Terminators opened fire.

In her dreams, Haas laboured. An eternity had passed since her arrival, and whether it was days or aeons long, she could not tell. There was no marker to judge by, no day-night cycle. It was never dark and it was never truly light. Food and water came rarely and erratically. The orks were capricious in everything, sticking to no schedule or plan. They let the prisoners sleep at random times for periods that could have been minutes or hours. Without a chronopiece, there was no way of knowing.

During their ‘day’, she and the longshanks were shackled together and marched a short distance from their cell to the lift platforms leading to the giant hollow in the heart of the moon. There they were whipped and beaten and forced to move supplies under conditions of erratic gravity. They worked in the shadow of the orks’ crackling gate, a spasming vortex of green fire whose flarings spat out raw materials, goods, food and always more and more orks. The noise from it was terrifying, a constant thunder that boomed deafeningly loud with every fresh transit.

It was there that Haas was dragged to work, and there she returned during her brief nightmares.

The ork gate shimmered over her head, bathing the sandy floor of the transit cave in painful light. An ork was coming, the one they called One Tooth, for the single ivory fang jutting over his lip. She kept her head down, not wanting to be noticed. But One Tooth was coming for her, growing to incredible dream-size.

‘Too little, too runty,’ it said. Tiny slave things scuttled around its feet, repeating its words mockingly. ‘Far too weak! To the meat room, take it to the meat room!’

A huge hand, horny with callouses lined with old blood, reached down for her.

She came awake screaming when it touched her.

‘Shhh!’ said Marast, touching his lips with a single long finger. ‘Quiet! Something’s happening.’

All around the dim cell the longshanks were stirring, unfolding spindly limbs from their uncomfortable sleeping positions and looking towards the door.

‘What?’ said Haas. Gunfire and shouting came from outside, down on the prison cavern floor.

An explosion rocked the room, followed by a storm of gunfire.

‘What’s going on?’ shouted Marast. The other slaves screamed at the noise.

‘The orks!’ said Haas. ‘They’re being attacked!’ She was up on her feet, adrenaline keeping her exhaustion at bay. She crept towards the door. The light of weapons discharge strobed through the viewing slit. She stood on tiptoes to look through.

‘Get her away from there!’ hissed Huringer.

‘What’s happening?’ asked Marast.

‘Can’t see. Wait…’ Haas shrieked and threw herself backwards as a pair of glaring red eyes appeared at the slit.

The ork rumbled aggressively in its alien tongue. Keys jangled, and it flung the door open.

The ork swaggered in, kicking the longshanks aside with bone-crushing force. Battle noise flooded the room. The ork slaver ignored it, his head swinging back and forward, nose snuffling. Haas scrambled back, until her back was against the wall by the door. The ork caught sight of her and pointed, gabbling in its uncouth language. A blind, stupid hatred of such intensity shone in its eyes that Haas was pinned by its gaze, unable to move.

It said something and smiled evilly. As it had in her dream, it reached massive hands out for her.

A series of bangs resounded round the room. The ork’s chest blew out messily, showering Haas with viscera. She covered her face instinctively. A final shot rang out, bursting its head, and its huge corpse toppled towards her. Haas scrambled aside to see a giant warrior in black-and-white armour shove itself into the cell, bringing part of the doorway down. It was some kind of Space Marine, garbed in armour Haas had never seen: tall, high-backed, the helmet roughly square and formed of brutal angular plates, arms protected by massive shoulder guards. A second stood in the door, watching his comrade’s back.

‘Thank the Emperor! We are saved, saved!’ shouted Marast. He flung his lanky body at the feet of the Space Marine, clutching gratefully at the feet of their saviours. The longshanks wept, disbelieving of their salvation.

The Space Marine nudged Marast away with its enormous boot.

‘Non-standard human phenotype identified. Loathe the mutant. Terminate.’

Haas curled up and clapped her hands over her ears as the Space Marines opened fire with their terrible weapons. The longshanks did not even have time to express their surprise before their fragile bodies were pulped by mass-reactive shells. The gunfire went on forever, the individual reports merging into one rolling booming. When it stopped, Haas was amazed to find she still lived. Her hands shook as she took them from her ears. The longshanks had been obliterated, reduced to a gory slick that dripped from the walls.

Her ears hurt agonisingly and she cried out. The Space Marine swung its blocky helmet in her direction, pointing its bolter at her. She screamed again, and the Space Marine moved his bolter away from her. When he spoke to her it was muffled, as if her ears were stuffed with fabric.

‘Human survivor located. You, come with us.’ The warrior pointed a massive articulated finger at her, the segments sparking with a power field. ‘The Emperor protects.’

Hundreds of dead orks lay in piles around the cave, by the burning machine, on the floor, on the walkways, in cell doors. A handful more of the Space Marines in the massive armour stood at the far end, weapons smoking. Their liveries were all different. Haas only recognised the bright yellow of an Imperial Fist. From the rear of the cavern Space Marines in more familiar armour were flooding in, dozens of them, drawn from the same Chapters as those in the oversized wargear.

One of her rescuers walked away on another errand, the high, hunched back of his armour swaying, the walkway rocking dangerously under his weight. The other shepherded her down rickety stairs to the cavern floor, bringing her together with a few bewildered humans like herself. They were guided to where the Imperial Fist stood, directing the incoming warriors into defensive positions.

‘Chapter Master Koorland, human survivors,’ said her rescuer. The chamber shook with a titanic impact somewhere high above. Grit pattered down from the roof.

The Imperial Fist, Koorland, finished giving his orders to warriors in bare metal armour discoloured by heat, and others in battered gear annotated with careful script.

‘State your names,’ said Koorland to the survivors. ‘Be quick. If you have anything worthwhile to tell us of the ork moon, reveal it now. We cannot tarry.’

Haas began to speak. A tracked ammunition train came clanking into the chamber, drowning out her voice. The larger warriors stumped over to it, moving slowly but with purpose. Servitors opened hoppers in the train’s sides and began rearming weapons, while others with specialised tools for limbs ran diagnostic checks on the Space Marines’ armour and effected minor repairs. Others in the giant battlesuits were arriving from elsewhere, and these were also attended to. The noise in the chamber was deafening, warriors shouting, heavy footsteps booming off uneven deck plating. The other rescued men and women said nothing, other than babbling thanks and praise. The Imperial Fist turned from them, as if he had never expected to receive anything of use from them.

Haas tried again.

‘Your men! They killed the longshanks,’ she shouted.

The Chapter Master turned back.

‘What?’ His voice was hard and inhuman from his vox-grille, the bright yellow helm unreadable. Haas was terrified, but her instinct for justice was strong.

‘Others. I was imprisoned with them. They helped keep me safe, and your men killed them.’

‘You are?’

‘Arbitrator Galatea Haas, Imperial Palace 149th Administrative District, General Oversight Division. I survived the Proletarian Crusade.’

‘Is this true, Arbalt?’ Koorland asked of Haas’ rescuer.

‘The female was domiciled with a number of aberrants,’ said Arbalt, his contempt plainly audible through the distortions of his vox-grille. ‘Non-standard humanoid phenotype. They did not deserve clemency.’

‘They told me that they were permitted abhumans. Longshanks,’ said Haas.

‘Longshanks? That kind are not mutants,’ said Koorland. ‘Arbalt, Ulferic. No human is to be harmed, no matter their type, not before you report to me.’

‘As you wish, Chapter Master,’ said Arbalt emotionlessly.

‘Convey this information to all your fellows,’ he said angrily. ‘While you are under my command I will not countenance the needless slaying of innocents.’

Arbalt gave an awkward bow, his movements restricted by his suit. ‘My lord Chapter Master.’

‘You may go,’ said Koorland to the humans.

‘There is more,’ said Haas. ‘The orks. They have a… a device, not far from here. A gate.’

Koorland looked down at her. His helmet’s muzzle and odd faceted panels made him look like an animal made of metal. ‘A gate?’

‘Some kind of teleportation device,’ said Haas. ‘Troops and weapons come through it all the time.’

Koorland motioned for a Space Marine wearing rust-red armour, a bulky servo-arm folded on top of his pack. ‘Send word to the Adeptus Mechanicus. We have intelligence of interest.’

‘Immediately, Chapter Master Koorland.’ The Space Marine hurried away.

Koorland called another to him. ‘Fetch this woman food and water. Now.’ Only then did he give his full attention to Haas. He tilted forward a little and projected a rough hololith from a device integrated into his suit.

‘This is a three-dimensional representation of the immediate surroundings,’ he said. ‘Show me where this “gate” is…’

Eleven

Servant of the Beast

The moon ceased shuddering. The fleet’s efforts to strip the weaponry from the surface were concluded, but throughout the interior Space Marines fought desperate close battles against hordes of green monsters, protecting Adeptus Mechanicus salvage teams and xenologists while they stripped whole caverns of machinery. The orks, though contained, did not diminish in number.

The woman Haas had been correct. Through a grainy pict image relayed from the eyes of a servo-skull probe to a portable augur station, Koorland, Bohemond and Thane saw the orkish gate in operation. The skull looked down from a ledge high overhead. The angle was odd, the picture a striated, brown monochrome, but the poor quality of the image could not disguise the scale of what they witnessed. The orks had carved a chamber four kilometres across to house it. Bizarre machines crowded the walls, crackling with potent energies. Within the circle of the machines, piles of crates, scrap, lesser machines and weapons occupied the flat, gravelly floor. Fat cables snaked away through the materiel crowding the chamber, plugging the gate into the machines.

The gate itself was made up of three metal horns, as tall as Titans, curving up from a crudely made platform suspended some metres above the cavern floor. Steel hawsers, chains and ungainly clamps held them in place. They wobbled even so, perturbed by the energies they contained. Constant, dancing light jumped at the centre. Every few minutes, the light shone brighter, almost whiting out the pict, and yet another mob of thick-shouldered, tusked greenskins stomped out onto the platform, hefting their weapons, eager to fight.

‘The moons. They are not simple spacecraft as we assumed,’ said Koorland. ‘They are bridgeheads. It is no wonder the planets attacked have been so easily overwhelmed.’

‘Where have they learned technology of this power?’ said Bohemond. ‘With each encounter we uncover further disquieting information. Is there no limit to their ingenuity?’

‘We have not seen this before,’ said Thane. ‘What has changed?’

‘Fascinating,’ said Kant. ‘Their mastery of the gravitic sciences must be connected with this. There is potential here. It is said the eldar possess something similar, a sub-spatial network that enables communication between their scattered worlds.’

‘Such an ability in the hands of the orks is an unwelcome proposition,’ said Koorland. ‘This must be what Kubik was so keen to secure.’

‘I concur with his desire,’ said Kant. ‘The orks are epidemic. These machines can only make that situation worse. This is surely the reason for the Beast’s success. We must capture it, study it. Then we might counter it.’

They watched as another rabble of orks marched out of the flashing tunnel of light.

‘While they keep their tunnel open, we cannot defeat them,’ said Thane. ‘Terra will become an eternal battleground. The orks will replenish their numbers as ours dwindle. The gate must close, the moon must fall.’

‘It can be done,’ said Bohemond. ‘If that sybaritic coward Lansung can best one, then it should be a small matter for us.’

‘The agreement with Mars was that the moon must be taken,’ said Kant. ‘This gate is the greatest prize of all.’

‘No,’ said Koorland. ‘The gate must be destroyed.’

‘We shall see to it,’ said Bohemond.

Kant agreed dolefully. ‘It saddens me, but I can only concur. Maybe some knowledge might be gleaned from the wreckage.’

‘I suggest massed Terminator assault,’ said Bohemond. ‘Only by meeting them with the First Companies and Sword Brethren of our orders can we hope to prevail. Once we attack the gate, the orks will be stirred to heights of fury. We might fight our way there, but escape? Teleportation will be the only viable means of extraction.’

‘Thane?’ asked Koorland.

‘There are multiple plans that would result in the destruction of the gate, but I cannot conceive of another that would not result in an unacceptable toll of gene-seed and life. Teleportation through so much mass and shielding as the moon possesses can only be realistically achieved by those in Terminator plate. We would lose many power-armoured brothers. Bohemond’s suggestion has great merit.’

‘What is your proposition, High Marshal?’ said Koorland. ‘Form a cordon, fight our way in?’

‘From multiple directions,’ said Bohemond. He called up a wireframe diagrammatic of the moon, displacing the pict feed from their augur screen. Much of the ork satellite had been mapped by deep auspex, but there were large areas shaded in red, lacking detail. ‘Our Chapters hold large parts of the moon. The ork reinforcements must be using these tunnels here to come to their fellows’ aid direct from the gate.’ He indicated three straight tunnels, wide as highways, that led from the gate chamber to the surface, where they exited from the apertures of the moon’s giant ork face. Dozens of lesser ways threaded from them, riddling the crust and deeper interior.

‘We must divert their attention,’ said Thane. ‘These orks are strange, and apt to use many unusual technologies, but look at them. Projected from the other side of the galaxy, they come out roaring and snorting, hungry for war. Whatever new tricks these beasts have mastered, they remain orks.’

‘Orks cannot resist a direct challenge,’ said Bohemond. ‘Provoke them, and we may direct their fury as we might. Let us send word to the fleet and land our armoured vehicles. Deploy them in the tunnels – that is a lure no ork could resist. They will die before the guns of our tanks while we attack from the rear.’

A taskforce-wide vox-blurt signalled the beginning of the attack. Across the main triple highway into the core the massed tanks of five Chapters advanced. In the subsidiary tunnels to the sides, hundreds of Space Marines fanned out to stop any orks who might choose an alternative route around the advancing Land Raiders, Razorbacks and Predators. The moon rumbled with new detonations as vital passageways were brought down, blocked with millions of tons of rock and metal. At the peripheries of the territories held by the Chapters, Space Marines prepared for the moment the orkish reinforcements would be cut off. Thereafter they were to drive forward, trapping the remaining greenskins.

There would be slaughter, Koorland was sure, but the cost in gene-forged blood would be high.

The Terminators worked their way into position around the gate as the orks took the bait, advancing up the main tunnels where they hurled themselves at the advancing Space Marine tanks. The armour worked its way forward purposefully, slowly, the tunnel resonating with the reports of their weapons and the howling of orks.

Koorland fought alongside Thane and his bodyguard of Terminators. Through a labyrinth they proceeded, slaughtering orks wherever they found them. The corridors rarely ran straight, and where battle was met it was a vicious, close-quarters affair. Koorland’s freshly painted armour was soon a mess of nicks and scratches, the bright yellow stained dark red. His sword was caked from tip to pommel in blood baked black by its power field.

‘This feels good,’ grunted Thane, smashing an ork’s head deep into its shoulders with his power maul. ‘On Eidolica, we kept them back as long as we could, slaying them with our guns. Tactically proper, but where vengeance is involved, I prefer to see my enemy’s face close.’ He let out a shout as he smashed another ork down. Koorland cut the hands from his own opponent with a single well-placed blow. The ork roared its anger and battered at him with bloody wrists. Koorland spared a single round from his storm bolter to end it.

‘Close-quarter melee conserves our ammunition,’ said Thane at the sound of the gun. ‘We are going to need it.’

They rounded a corner. The corridor opened up onto the floor of the gate chamber. Thousands of orks were pouring from the flaring mechanism.

‘There are so many. It is as Eidolica was,’ said Thane.

‘So it was on Ardamantua also,’ said Koorland. ‘An endless tide. Let us stop it up. Time to announce ourselves!’

Thane strode into the chamber, selected a tall crackling machine for his ire, and smashed its casing with his power maul. Sheet metal caved in, exposing the flashing innards. Another blow arrested its processes explosively. Fire belched from the array of pipes on the top, followed by a greasy cough of smoke.

‘Destroy the machines! Destroy them all!’ roared Thane.

‘Interrupt the power supply,’ said Koorland. ‘Close the gate.’

Five more machines died before the orks noticed their attackers. Piggish, ugly faces turned at the sound of the destruction. Without breaking stride, a portion of the orks streaming from the gate up the tunnels changed direction, and charged at the new threat.

‘Now is the proper time for the expenditure of ammunition,’ shouted Thane. ‘First Company, fire!’

Forty of Thane’s Terminators formed a bowed line centred on him, while the others fanned out and destroyed the machines. Their guns spoke with one booming voice. Storm bolters on full automatic blazed a streaking hail of fiery darts. Assault cannons spun up to firing speed, spitting out a torrent of bullets. Where bolts met orkish flesh, they penetrated and exploded. Orks staggered on with horrendous injuries. Many required two or three further shots to down. Where they encountered the furious sweep of the assault cannons, they were cut in half. The orks stumbled and fell, or were blown backwards in bloody chunks. Stacks of supply crates were shredded. Munitions within them detonated. Shoulder-launched cyclone missiles exploded in tight clusters, tearing red holes in the ork hordes. The enemy tumbled over the corpses of their fellows, piled high by their own momentum, a line of ruined flesh at the edge of the Space Marines’ range. Still they came.

All over the cavern, explosions roared upward as other Terminator groups entered the hall and set to work. Koorland headed implacably towards the nearest of the gate horns. He smashed down an ork that had made its way through the torrent of fire. An electric fizzling crackled across the chamber as a tall, horizontal wheel covered in bronze balls came off its mountings. Green lightning jagged out into walls, floor and machinery. Another huge boom, and another. Gouts of fire rolled upward.

‘Company, change ranks!’ yelled Thane. His first line, their ammunition exhausted, stepped back, smoothly changing places with another line that stepped forward, storm bolters already chattering. There was no interruption to the wall of death the Fists Exemplar dealt out.

Koorland and his entourage were beyond the edge of the firing line, and the orks came more thickly. They brought them down, smashing their way towards the horn. Koorland cut the cables running along the floor. Fires blazed everywhere, tinged with green, choking black smoke billowing from them, moving strangely in the erratic artificial gravity of the gate room. The gate stuttered, its light and its buzzing interrupted. Orks passing through during this intermission were torn in half.

‘Press on, press on!’ roared Koorland. The flow of orks lessened. The gate blinked off again, longer this time. Koorland emptied his magazine into an important-looking machine, blasting it to bits.

The gate went out. The orks roared as one. All around the chamber they were facing lines of Space Marine Terminators. At measured pace, the Space Marine lines converged, trapping the orks between them. The sons of Dorn suffered their losses, but for every champion of humanity that fell, twenty orks died. The orks flooding up the tunnel towards the tank line milled about, unsure which enemy to engage. They surged back and forth, before finally switching direction and running towards the Terminators.

At Thane’s position the guns of the second line clicked empty. No third line existed to replace them. The orks clambered over their heaped dead, and charged into the Space Marine ranks.

A cacophony of weapons hitting thick battleplate announced the meeting of orks and Space Marines, followed by the banging of matter annihilated by disruption fields as the Adeptus Astartes swung their power fists.

‘Onward, to the gate horn!’ ordered Koorland. Orks pulled at his arms, thick green fingers slipping from his gory armour. He shook them off. The horn towered over him. He pulled out the melta bomb maglocked to his thigh, twisted the flask handle, and slapped it into place. Two more Terminators followed, attaching their own bombs. Across the smoking, empty platform, Koorland saw Bohemond and Issachar’s warriors doing the same, Malfons himself attaching his bomb to the third horn.

‘Charges placed,’ voxed the lord of the Iron Knights.

‘Withdraw,’ voxed Koorland. ‘Prepare for extraction. Our work here is over for today. Initiate teleport countdown.’

On his chronometer, five minutes flashed up, and began to tick down.

‘Terminator groups, withdraw to predesignated teleport coordinates.’

All around the chamber, the Terminators backed away, always facing the enemy. The orks were greatly reduced in number, but thousands remained, and their fury only grew as their ranks were further thinned.

At three minutes, ten seconds until teleport the gate flared again. Through the flickering light stepped the largest ork Koorland had ever seen. Not even the warlords of the great tribal migrations he had fought against compared with it. It was taller than a Space Marine Dreadnought, an axe as big as a Rhino’s side in its hand. Red eyes glowed with feral intelligence above a row of close-packed teeth as long as sabres. Upon its head was a thick helmet, adorned with a spread of horns as long as power swords. Around it were thirty or so other orks, smaller than their leader but every one a terrible warrior in its own right.

The giant ork shouted out an incomprehensible stream of xenos words, and the orks fighting the Space Marines began to rally themselves, pulling back into better order, firing their guns at the Terminators.

‘What by the Emperor is that thing?’ voxed Malfons. ‘Is it the Beast itself?’

‘Whatever it is, it is a worthy foe,’ said Bohemond.

The orks redoubled their attack as their master stepped off the gateway platform. Its monstrous bodyguard swaggered after it, wargear and weaponry uniform only in their brutality. As they stepped down, more orks were revealed behind. Some bore banner poles of iron fists clutching spanner icons. All of them wore harnesses and aprons stuffed full of tools, and their weapons were bizarre combinations of heavy axes and wrenches. These ran across the platform, jumping off the sides. They headed for the wrecked machines, dozens of slave assistants rushing after them. The leader beast roared and gesticulated, pointing to the worst damage. Now some of the orks retreated, forming a cordon, blocking the Terminators’ way to the specialists. Behind a line of warriors twenty deep, the mechanicians set to work. The rest of the orks roared and charged. The two lines of Space Marines met, and smoothly reformed into a circle.

‘They are repairing the machines,’ said Malfons.

‘Ignore them!’ ordered Koorland. ‘They have not seen the melta charges. When they do, they will not have time to disarm them. Teleport in two minutes, twenty seconds. We must prevail until then!’ Koorland swept his power sword across the front rank of orks, cutting several in two with one swipe. The rest surged on over the toppling bodies of their friends, driven on by the crowd behind and their own insatiable battle lust.

‘Hold them back! Hold them back!’ roared Koorland.

Two minutes to teleport.

The circle of Space Marines shrank. For all the thickness of their armour, they were heavily outnumbered.

The great beast lofted its axe, and brought it down with a powerful swing to point at Koorland. Shouting more orders, it bore down on the last of the Imperial Fists with a plodding charge, head down, its bodyguard forming an arrowhead behind it.

Koorland slew his last opponent, and prepared to meet it.

Those Space Marines still possessing ammunition opened fire. For a few vital seconds mass-reactives shattered thick armour plates, blew divots of green flesh from massive muscles, then the ork charge hit home. The orks towered over the Space Marine elite, and knocked them staggering. Chainaxes rose and fell, hacking through reinforced adamantium and ceramite by dint of raw orkish strength. Boxy power klaw blades squealed through hardened metal, snipping off heads and limbs. The Space Marines fought back, smashing the orks with their power fists, caving in their ribs and crushing their faces into bloody mist.

The leader came at Koorland, and the Imperial Fist had the fight of his life on his hands.

Thirty seconds to teleport.

The ork was twice Koorland’s height, broader than a battle tank. Koorland sidestepped its lowered head, but was caught upon the thing’s shoulder and sent stumbling backwards. His armour’s gyroscopic stabilisation systems protested as they fought to keep him upright. The ork recovered swiftly, swinging its massive axe out and across at Koorland’s chest height. It hit his plastron, the impact of the blow shaking him inside his armour. The eagle upon his chest was wrecked, the metal detail pressed and smashed into itself as if it had been crafted from soft lead. The ork reared up, raising its axe before Koorland could react. The weapon hurtled down, fast as a comet. Koorland pivoted awkwardly, pushing the mobility of his armour to its limit to raise his sword in an overhead parry.

His weapon met the cruel head of the axe with a titanic boom. The axe head exploded into spinning, white-hot shrapnel. The force of the blow was such that Koorland was driven to his knee. When he lumbered back upright, he found his own blade was a blackened shard. He had no time to order his armour to disconnect the power feed and discard it. The beast was on him again, its skin studded with the smoking remains of its axe.

Twenty seconds to teleport.

The ork reached down, grabbing both of Koorland’s arms in its gargantuan fists. It lifted him up, armour and all, pulling his arms apart. Koorland’s armour sang a litany of alarms. Red flashed all over his helm display. Metal groaned, and hot pain stabbed into his wrists, elbows and shoulders as the joints began to part.

The cavern filled with golden light as the melta bombs went off in stepped detonations, micro-fusion devices slagging wide rings of the left gate horn. Sectioned into pieces, the device slid apart, spraying gobbets of molten metal into the orks around the teleport gate. Then the second fell, and the third, tearing metal shrieking, severed power lines lashing back and forth with frantic energies.

The pressure slackened as the leader ork looked back at the ruin of the gate. Suddenly Malfons was there, greatsword blurring through the air. The Chapter Master moved with an agility in his Terminator armour that Koorland had never witnessed before. The ork dropped Koorland and kicked at Malfons, knocking the Chapter Master backwards, and snatched a fresh axe from its belt. It followed up with a powerful blow at Malfons.

The axe was of simple metal, but the strength of the ork was such that it bit deep into the ceramite cladding of Malfons’ pauldron. The Chapter Master shouldered the ork aside, weathered a second strike, and swung his blade hard. The weapon cleft the ork’s chest armour, slicing deep into muscle. With a howl of fury, the ork backhanded Malfons before he could attack again. Helm lenses shattered, Malfons faltered. An instant was all he gave the ork, but the creature grabbed it. The ork stamped down on Malfons’ leg, pinning his foot in place, then it reached forward and clamped its fist around the Chapter Master’s head.

As teleport blur smeared his sight, Koorland saw the ork rip Malfons’ head free with one mighty wrench. Then he was in the blacklight glare of a teleport chamber, gas gushing all over him from the internal piping, and in his helm a voice announced, ‘Teleport successful.’

The doors opened, and he clumped out. All around the deck, Black Templars emerged from other chambers. In several, dead warriors lay slumped in armour summoned back by the undeniable call of the Abhorrence’s machine-spirits.

‘Bohemond, Thane, Issachar, Quesadra,’ voxed Koorland. ‘Malfons is dead.’

Twelve

In pursuit of vengeance

The Black Templars cruiser Obsidian Sky shook as it came out of the warp, realspace engine stacks already burning bright. Five hundred metres of burnished black metal trailing the dying energies of the empyrean, it accelerated before the rift had closed, waiting on no nicety of post-transit protocols.

‘Translation complete, Dreadnought-Marshal. We have arrived in the Klostra System,’ called out Shipmaster Ericus.

The vision slit of Magneric’s Dreadnought blazed, and it stood tall, pushed upright by actuators and hydraulics. Magneric was awake in an instant.

The Dreadnought-Marshal stumped around, the shoulders of the machine that housed his ruined body swaying. Relics of his earlier life rattled on the walker’s armour.

‘All hands to combat stations. Initiate full auspex scan. Open hails, send out our challenge. We shall not hide from them, call out their doom!’ His voice boomed from his vox-speakers, brash as a Titan’s war-horn.

‘My lord, I am receiving a large amount of transmissions–’ began the ship’s Master Divulgatus from the craft’s long vox-desks.

‘Excellent!’ roared Magneric. His power fist rotated in anticipation of the coming fight. ‘All brothers, prepare for battle. Master Egredorum, prepare our transports. Track the source of the enemy’s transmissions, we engage immediately.’

‘But, my lord!’ protested the Master Divulgatus. ‘The transmissions are not those of the traitors, they are all ork.’

‘I have multiple enemy contacts, half a million kilometre range and closing,’ spoke the Master Augurum at the auspex array. ‘Again, all ork energy signatures.’

Castellan Ralstan stepped forward to stand at the elbow of Magneric. ‘Half a million kilometres?’

‘It is at extreme range, my lord, but there are large numbers of them.’

‘Marshal Magneric?’ said the castellan.

Magneric let out a frustrated growl. ‘How many times must our quarry slip through our fingers? Orks! I was informed that the Klostra System was the base of Kalkator’s Great Company. Who shall atone for this failure in intelligence?’

‘My lord, if I may,’ said the Master Augurum, ‘the auspex array is picking up residual vox-echo here, reflected from the system’s radiation belts. There was a traitor presence on the planet until only a few days ago. No civilian messaging, all of it is Fourth Legion battle-cant.’

‘Then it is over,’ said Ralstan regretfully. ‘The orks have done our duty for us. To our next crusade, brothers.’

‘No!’ bellowed Magneric, his torso spinning dangerously fast. The huge block of his sarcophagus leaned over, bringing the machine’s glass eye level with the face of his second-in-command. ‘It cannot be so, the Emperor has marked out Kalkator to die by my fist and my fist alone! I feel it. We departed Ostrom hot on the heels of Kalkator’s dogs. If there is no longer sign of battle here, then they must have departed. Send for Honoured Navigator Pholax. I will speak with him as to their likely destination. In the meantime, have more power diverted to the auspex arrays. If by some small chance the greenskins have cheated us of our vengeance, I will be sure of it before moving on.’

‘And the greenskins themselves, Magneric?’

‘You would have us fear a few thousand orks?’ Magneric boomed.

‘A few hundred thousand, my lord,’ corrected Ralstan. He held out his hand towards the massive doors leading to Magneric’s inner sanctum. ‘Perhaps we might continue this discussion on strategy in private?’

‘Very well,’ grumbled Magneric.

The command deck shook to the tread of his armoured feet. They went within Magneric’s chamber. The doors hissed shut, and immediately they were isolated from the command deck Magneric rounded on Ralstan.

‘You challenge my judgement? I, Magneric, hero of the Heresy? I, who remain in command despite my entombing? Who kept my own name when interred, when all others give up theirs?’

‘Marshal,’ said Ralstan calmly. ‘It is my role to challenge you, as you well know.’

‘“Nothing worthwhile is done without challenge, best to overcome it before plans are enacted,”’ quoted Magneric.

‘So said Sigismund,’ said Ralstan.

‘I do not quote our founder in support of your case, but against it!’ said Magneric. ‘Our plan was agreed, your opportunity to object has passed.’

‘Perhaps. But lately you have taken against my naysaying, whenever performed.’ Ralstan paced the empty expanse of the chamber. It had been stripped of everything, right back to the metal of the understructure, to accommodate the huge sepulchre the Dreadnought occupied when resting. Magneric refused to go to the forge-tombs, wishing to remain close to the centre of command at all times. ‘I must again protest against your decision not to heed the High Marshal’s order to return. The Last Wall has been invoked, and we should lend our strength to it, not spend our time harrying these traitors. There are greater issues at stake.’

‘Our way is not that of the wall! Sigismund’s oath is paramount. We are crusaders, not wall troops.’

‘This is different, my lord.’

‘It is not! We have the Iron Warriors at bay, we cannot allow them to dig themselves in, or we shall never pry them from their hiding place. We have to strike now. When they are finished, we shall embark upon this new crusade.’

‘Magneric, your feelings are blinding you,’ pleaded Ralstan. ‘Vengeance is noble when enacted for the good of the Emperor. You seek vengeance for your own sake. You should rest. Frater Astrotechnicus Baldon told me that you are six months overdue a maintenance sleep.’

‘So you speak for the scullions of Mars now!’ boomed Magneric.

‘You do our Brother-Techmarine dishonour to speak of him so.’

‘And yet you question my honour!’

‘I speak as your friend, your pupil, your admirer, my lord,’ said Ralstan. Magneric’s choler was becoming increasingly hard to douse, and Ralstan had to fight to hide his own ire. ‘Your tomb was never intended to remain active for so long a time.’

Magneric’s massive power fist came up and pointed threateningly. ‘You undermine me, Castellan. Do not do so again.’

‘At least speak with Chaplain Aladucos. If you will not hearken to me, listen to him.’

Magneric turned awkwardly, the short legs of the Dreadnought stamping clangorously on the deck. ‘When I have Kalkator’s severed head in my fist, when I have squeezed his treacherous brain into a paste, then I shall rest. Not before! By the Emperor, no matter what you or the others say, I have sworn my oath and I will honour it!’

The doors opened wide, and Magneric stamped back onto the bridge. Ralstan sighed with dissatisfaction, and followed.

Dzelenic IV had once had a name of its own. Now, it was marked upon the stellar charts of the Imperium by system and number alone. Kalkator was among the few who remembered what its inhabitants had called it, for he had witnessed its destruction.

A landscape of utter desolation slid beneath the keels of the Iron Warriors Thunderhawks, the Meratara in the lead. They flew over a dry ocean basin subsumed into the wasteland of dunes that stretched from pole to pole. The seas were long since gone, stripped away by titanic weapons during the war against the False Emperor. Kalkator remembered it as a pleasant world, civilised and green. The forces of Terra had put paid to that.

The exposed ocean floor took a step up, marking the position of the ancient coast. The Thunderhawks swung around to the south, following the grim cliffs, footed only by a sea of dust. Savage storms blew up in what remained of the planet’s atmosphere, turning the air orange with a perpetual haze.

City ruins sprouted from the dunes, emerging suddenly from the blurred sky, the only signs that anything living had ever been there at all. The long rectangles of docking piers extruded far out into the vanished sea, still visible beneath their shrouds of sand.

‘North here, to the landing fields,’ ordered Kalkator.

‘As you command, warsmith,’ confirmed the pilot, Lerontus.

A space port dominated the plain behind the city. Flat, dull grey landing aprons were swept clear by the ceaseless wind. A dry river bed wound past it towards a range of hills, exposed as the vein of a flayed corpse. Craters marred the ground, distinguishable only by their infill of windblown sand. Further cliffs edged the plain, the product of millions of years of geological processes that had been halted in an instant of fire.

‘There, to the west. Set us down,’ said Kalkator.

The Meratara’s ramp opened into a covering of powder soft as silk. The planet’s death scream played still as constant gales, and over the last millennium they had worn the debris of the world’s destruction to a fine loess. Kalkator donned his helmet before venturing outside, and bade his men do the same – the air would choke them by itself, but it was one peril among many. The ozone layer of Dzelenic IV had been stripped away, and the surface was bathed in stellar radiation from its parent star.

Behind the Meratara three other gunships squatted in the abiotic dirt of the dead world, engines cycling. The Iron Warriors had been caught too often recently to take any chances. Fifty Space Marines formed up beside the warsmith, a worryingly large proportion of his much diminished Great Company. They waited expectantly as Kalkator scanned the cliffs. The world was changed beyond recognition, its past topography a sketch in the dirt of its present. He could not see the entrance to the facility.

‘Are you sure it is here, my lord?’ said Caesax. ‘This place is deader than a tomb. The cache could have been destroyed, or looted, or buried in a million tons of dirt.’

‘Silence,’ said Kalkator sharply, for he was well aware all that Caesax said was possible. ‘You forget yourself.’

‘Yes, warsmith,’ muttered the other.

Caesax was close to what Kalkator might call a friend. Friendship was weakness. Brotherhood was all. Caesax’s familiarity had encouraged him to test those boundaries recently.

Kalkator needed to keep him under control. They were all looking at him. Since Klostra had fallen, the hostility of his Great Company had grown. Although none yet outright defied him, how many of them could he truly count on, should it come to it? Best not to consider that eventuality. Deliver them victory, and they would follow. The iron of their loyalty would not be tested.

He finally found the worn aquila carved into the rock face, defaced fifteen centuries ago and further worn away by the ravages of the raging atmosphere. It was not where he had expected to find it. Kalkator had lived long enough to know that nothing was constant, not even stone. Not even iron.

‘This way,’ he said. He pointed with his left arm, the bionic. Let them see the iron in him clearly displayed. He marched through the debris of the world, a mix of desiccated biological matter and coarse sand torn from the bedrock, this material not yet aged enough to lose its sharp edges. Dzelenic IV’s death was still fresh in planetary terms.

The sun came out from behind a flag of dirty yellow cloud, not vapour, but more detritus lofted high into the atmosphere. The star glared on them weakly, a sallow circle of light. Kalkator’s warsuit informed him of climbing radiation with a series of idle clicks.

His men were still watching as he reached for a piece of stone. Remarkable, how the craftsmanship had held. The block stayed seated in position, its secret unrevealed.

He grasped it with both hands and yanked hard. The stone came free from its place with reluctance. He let it fall into the soft regolith. A lifeless panel lay behind, sticky with ancient oils and caked in microscopic particles. Kalkator reached out his arm, an interface dendrite snaking from his vambrace and into the access port. The small screen embedded above the key panel flickered green, then went out.

Kalkator stood back as a section of the cliff ten metres broad by four high receded with an almighty grinding clunk, and began a slow tracking to the right. Behind was a dark hangar, the smooth rockcrete floor and walls kept pristine by the planet’s arid air. The door got halfway open before the power failed. Stacked pallets of transit crates covered in dirty plastek shrouds receded into the shadows in neat rows.

Dust was already snaking in from the outside when Kalkator issued his command.

‘Empty it. Take everything.’

Collustrax pushed his way through another corroded door. Away from the hangar the complex was in bad shape, exhibiting seismic damage from the world-death. He passed down a stretch of corridor whose walls were shivered by cracks, his suit lights picking out ribbons of dust. He paused by a dessicated corpse dressed in the Imperial Army uniform of a regiment a thousand years forgotten. The bones of the man were still cloaked in skin, but so tight and dried they appeared to have been wrapped for transport in flaking plastek. When he toed the corpse the head rolled free.

He looked at the skull a moment, then stamped it flat.

‘Section Lambda-8 clear,’ he voxed. ‘Nothing to report.’

The next door was jammed shut. He kicked it to pieces, his heavy boots powering through the corroded metal. It became loose, and he wrenched it free. An avalanche of dust poured out around his knees.

The corridor beyond was wider, an antechamber to a larger hall perhaps. It was also bathed in light, and three-quarters full of sand. He raised his bolter and carefully covered the room. The ceiling was cracked from side to side by a wide crevasse that evidently reached the surface, for daylight penetrated all the way into the complex here, and dust whispered down in sheets. The door on the far side was buried in it.

‘I cannot proceed further, the roof is breached and the corridor blocked with sand. It would take a day or more to dig through. No sign of supplies here.’

The vox crackled in response. ‘Return to the hangar, brother.’

‘Confirmed, sergeant,’ said Collustrax. He keyed his vox off. ‘A waste of time going further.’

He turned about and headed back the way he had come, deeper into the base. Doors he had opened before in his sweep hung wide. Most rooms were empty, those that were not held nothing useful to the Iron Warriors. Corpses, paper that fell to pieces when disturbed, dead cogitators.

He strode on with purpose, making no attempt to go quietly. There was no one to hear him.

Suddenly he stopped and backed up. He looked down, the lights attached to his suit bathing the floor in wan yellow light. The dust was scuffed by his passage, but there was something else.

Another set of footprints overlaid his own.

He shut his light off, brought up a thermal overlay on his helm display. The corridor reappeared as a grainy pict of false colour. His own footprints were a dull blue against the near black of the floor. The interloper’s were a fading green, more recent.

‘Sergeant Ostrakam. Collustrax. I’ve found something.’

‘Report.’

‘There’s something in here with us. Footprints. Booted, large.’

The second line of footprints went into a room Collustrax had investigated on the way up. He moved against the wall, and leaned in, bolter first.

‘Nothing there.’ He stood back again. ‘I will–’

A ringing blow against his helmet sent him sprawling into the wall. A blackened knife blade skidded off the metal. Collustrax jerked his shoulder back, meeting a solid body that barely gave. He swung around, but a meaty hand grabbed his pauldron and hurled him against the opposite wall. A huge ork stood over him, a pair of primitive light-intensification goggles strapped over its eyes. With calm efficiency Collustrax brought his bolter up to blow out its heart and lungs, but his assailant grabbed it and ripped it out of his hand with amazing strength, stamping Collustrax into the ground as he sought to rise.

‘Orks! There are orks in the complex. There are–’

The ork drove down with its knife, a piece of metal as long as a man’s torso and thick as three fingers. For all its unwieldiness the ork used it deftly, and the ridiculous breadth of it was ground down on one side to a wicked edge.

The point caught in the seal where his helmet joined his breastplate and was driven through it by brute strength, into the space behind Collustrax’s collarbone. The ork threw itself forward with its full weight, pushing the sword-length knife in with both hands so that it pierced both the Iron Warrior’s hearts.

For Collustrax, the Long War was over.

Sergeant Ostrakam saluted Kalkator. ‘My lord Kalkator, Brother Collustrax is slain by orks. The complex is compromised.’

Kalkator regarded the emptying hangar. They had recovered perhaps half of the supplies, armour spares, bolt-rounds, weapons. Most of it was sealed in oil-filled containers, and perfectly serviceable. Kalkator tallied what they had recovered mentally, deciding if they could afford to leave the remaining supplies.

‘Any word from the Palimodes?’ he called to his master vox-operator. ‘What news from orbit?’

‘I cannot raise the ship, my lord.’

Why would this be easy? One cruiser lost, two outposts, half his Great Company. Kalkator’s week had been disastrous.

‘Caesax! Take half the company, secure the hangar rear. Derruo, take four squads outside. Shift the landing site ten kilometres out, somewhere clear where we can’t be ambushed. Meratara will ferry the supplies, let the others take them to orbit. Unloading and reloading will take extra time, but we cannot risk the gunships, and a few more crates of supplies is better than no more. As soon as you raise him, have Attonax send down more servitors and brothers to speed the extraction, both here and at site beta. Ostrakam, what indication of numbers?’

‘None, my lord. None of the other scouts report anything. It will not be alone.’

‘They never are,’ said Kalkator. ‘We have no indication of an infestation of the planet. It may be a scouting group. Send my order to Attonax. Intensify scans of the surrounding void. If there’s a ship out there, we must find it. In the meantime, redouble our efforts. I want every scrap of usable materiel stripped from this depot and aboard the Palimodes before they find us.’

‘Too late, my lord! I have Attonax.’

‘Patch his vox-feed through to me.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Attonax’s voice came through crisply, boosted by the nuncio-vox of Kalkator’s master operator over the angry grumble of the planet’s tortured magnetosphere. ‘Fifteen contacts emerging from the shadow of the third moon, my lord. They have seen us.’

‘No more?’

‘No, warsmith. It appears to be a scouting group, ork pirate scum looking for easy kills or planets to plunder. They are weak, and will not be on our position for two hours, give or take.’

Gunfire sounded from deep in the complex. Reports of ork engagements on three fronts came in on a sudden wave of vox-noise.

‘We will not abandon the supplies! Attonax, keep the planet between you and the orks. Begin evacuation immediately. Everyone else to the rear of the hall.’

Kalkator unclipped his pistol and unsheathed his sword. His servo-arm unfurled as he strode past the serfs sweating in their rebreathers as they dragged out supply pallets on pneumatic jacks. ‘I tire of running from these creatures.’

Thirteen

Iron and faith

Like a shark following the scent of blood in the water, the Obsidian Sky came hard out of interplanetary night, streaking towards the fourth planet of the Dzelenic System, the battle there lighting up its auspexes and augurs.

‘Well?’ said Magneric.

‘We have them in our sights, Marshal,’ reported Ericus eagerly. ‘There are orks here, but a paltry number.’

The oculus was closed for battle, and so Ericus ordered the hololith lit. The display burst into life, bathing the faces of all aboard the command deck in dancing light. Auspex data crowded a true pict of the planet. A strike cruiser stood embattled in the sky over the dead world. Explosions in miniature flared in the space of the bridge as ork attack craft detonated messily.

‘Behold, the Palimodes,’ said Ericus.

‘I recognise it of old,’ growled Magneric. ‘At last, Kalkator shall face justice!’

‘Your orders, my lord?’ asked Ericus.

‘We should stand back and watch the orks destroy them,’ advised Ralstan, ‘then slay the surviving orks. That would be the most tactically astute action. We might then locate the Iron Warriors on the surface, and deal with them at our leisure. If we attack now, we shall find ourselves with not one foe, but two.’

‘And afford Kalkator the luxury of escape?’ bellowed Magneric. ‘No! The craven traitors will surely flee as soon as they catch sight of us. We will attack both ground forces and the Palimodes simultaneously. Prepare all drop-craft. We assault the surface immediately. Sword Brother Rolans?’

Sword Brother Rolans stepped forward, the black of his armour thick with the red crosses of the Black Templars veterans. ‘My lord Dreadnought-Marshal,’ responded Rolans.

‘Take one-third of the crusade. Choose your own men. Equip them for ship-to-ship combat. I bestow upon you the honour of assaulting and taking the Palimodes.’

‘It will be done gratefully, my lord,’ said Rolans.

‘Master Ericus, you will drive through the orks attacking the Palimodes, and bring the ship within boarding range. We shall take back their ship, purify it, and re-induct it into the rightful service of our Lord the Emperor.’

‘Praise be!’ shouted the Black Templars and their bondsmen.

The shout of praise was silent on Ralstan’s lips. Misgivings plagued him.

‘My lord,’ he said tentatively. ‘I beg of you not to attack two enemies at once. Let them expend their strength upon one another. See here, Magneric. The orks are deploying aircraft and personnel to the surface.’

Ralstan had the hololithic display zoom in to a fat ork carrier craft. Its sides were riddled with hangars and launch tubes. From these a steady stream of smaller ships issued, turning downwards into the planetary gravity well. ‘If there are no orks on the ground yet, soon there will be thousands.’

‘The orks are of no concern!’ roared Magneric. He turned his massive suit of armour on his lieutenant. Magneric raised his vox-amplifiers to maximum. ‘All battle-brothers proceed to drop-craft. Heed my commands, gunnery control. Upon flyover of the Iron Warriors’ planetside positions, find and target the transports of the traitors. Destroy the ships. Strand the Iron Warriors, so that we might face them blade to blade. They will taste our anger – no swift demise in fire for them! I will see them beg for forgiveness. Kalkator will not escape me this time. Shipmaster Ericus, move to engage the Palimodes directly.’

‘As you command, my lord,’ said Ericus.

‘My lord Magneric…’ said Ralstan.

‘Castellan Ralstan!’ said Magneric, his metallic voice enthused by the prospect of battle. ‘The way prescribed by our founder is always forward! We shall not hang back like jackals while the lions fight! You have your orders. With me unto battle, bold soldiers of the Emperor! We shall destroy these paltry orks, and take the Palimodes, and return to our Chapter with it as a trophy of war! I go now to ready myself for drop in the basilicus.’ He leaned over Ralstan, and lowered his voice. ‘I will brook no more dissent, castellan, be warned.’

Magneric thundered out of the command deck.

‘By the will of Magneric, make so his orders!’ commanded Ralstan. Forcing down his own disquiet, he began to make preparations for planetstrike.

A squawking of surprised messages burst from the vox-station as the Obsidian Sky slid down towards the Palimodes.

‘Master Divulgatus, silence that noise.’

‘Aye, shipmaster, initiating wide-band vox-jamming now.’

Ericus leaned forward, the weight of the cables plugged into his neck shifting on his shoulder. ‘We will pay no heed to the words of the traitors. Open fire on the orks and prepare to clear the way. Prow lance batteries to mark these targets and fire upon my command.’ He indicated his priorities on the hololith. ‘Primary gun batteries sweep the flanks. Spinal turrets fire at will. Scour the void. We shall shield Lord Magneric’s landing and then proceed to take the Palimodes.’

‘Drop-tubes loaded,’ reported the Master Egredorum.

The ship’s void shields flickered as the first of the orks noticed their new foe, and turned their guns upon them. Energy beams hit out first, cutting like searchlights across the dark. Across the command deck, bells tolled gently, bringing soft notice of the clouds of deadly projectiles following on behind.

Ericus settled himself into his command throne. He reached out and grasped his sword; a servant of the Black Templars always fought with a weapon in his grasp.

The command deck, rarely full of needless chatter, took on a focused air. Orders and commentary were the only words spoken. Servitors sighed and muttered quietly. Cogitators clacked in their housings. The crew of the ship was minimal, most of the work done by mind-wiped servitors or vat-born things that had never known a name, plugged directly into the ship’s systems. The fifty unaltered men who manned the command deck were sombre with the privilege bestowed on them.

‘Range to the Palimodes six thousand kilometres and closing,’ relayed the Master Augurum.

‘Open hangar bays and drop-tube shielding. Drop countdown commencing in three, two, one. Mark.’ The number 120 appeared on the hololith and began to rapidly count down, its colouring turning from green to red as it approached zero.

‘Turret pins released,’ said the Ordinatum Secundus. ‘Main ordnance ready for firing. Lance batteries one through four are charged and await your command, Master Ericus.’

Fifty years had passed since Ericus had fallen at the second obstacle in his bid to become a member of the Black Templars. Despite his high suitability, his genetic code proved incompatible with the Chapter gene-seed. The memory of that day haunted him forever, and yet here he was, armed and glorious, a mighty warship at his command. The lives of his masters were under his care. There was no greater duty.

‘For the glory of the Emperor, launch,’ he said.

‘Praise be,’ intoned the crew as one.

The distant rumble of rockets firing vibrated the deck plating. The ship shifted infinitesimally at the release of such large amounts of mass.

‘Correctional thrusters firing,’ reported the Master Egredorum. The ship pushed back against the jettisoning of its drop-vehicles. ‘Our lieges are away. Five minutes to touchdown. Praise be.’

Light flared in the hololith as an ork assault craft exploded. The Palimodes, shields twinkling with orkish fire, had rotated about its centre, presenting its stern to the Obsidian Sky. This was a ship’s most vulnerable aspect, but they were close to the horizon – one good burn would put them out of sight, leaving the Black Templars entangled with the orks.

‘The Iron Warriors are running. Proceed towards the Palimodes,’ ordered Ericus. ‘We will accomplish Magneric’s orders. My lord Sword Brother Rolans, you may prepare your boarding party. Helm, run the traitors down.’

Kalkator gripped the ork’s head in his servo-claw and squeezed. The thick skull cracked, deforming the ork’s already hideous alien features. Still it fought on, until Kalkator jammed his bolt pistol into its mouth and blew the back of its head off.

The last few pallets were being removed hurriedly from the hangar, the rest having been dragged out under fire. Ork bodies lay about the hall, intermixed with luckless serfs and servitors caught in the crossfire. Otherwise, casualties were light. Kalkator had lured the orks into the hangar, where they were pinned between carefully planned fields of fire and gunned down without mercy.

The orks were odd specimens. They had the look of infiltration specialists to them, executed in that clumsy, slightly comical way the orks had with everything they did. Their weapons were oversized, the camo patterns they wore jarring, but their faces were blackened, their weapons burned dark, and their equipment – nightsight goggles, grenades, charges and the like – seemed serviceable enough. As his scorn rose, he reminded himself they had successfully infiltrated the complex.

Kalkator had his squads report in. No more contacts with the enemy were reported.

The orks were dead. After several dispiriting days, Kalkator’s spirits were uplifted.

‘Bordan, raise the Palimodes!’ he ordered. ‘All squads prepare for immediate extraction.’ He strode out of the hangar back into the pale day of Dzelenic IV. The last of the supplies were being loaded into the Thunderhawks, the undersides of the ships glowing orange with repeated, rapid ascensions and re-entries.

‘I cannot raise the Palimodes, my lord,’ said Bordan.

Kalkator tapped his gun impatiently against his leg. ‘Then try again.’ The space beyond the clouds was lit occasionally by the false-lightning of low-orbital battle. ‘Surely they have not been overwhelmed?’

‘No, my lord, there is a blanket denial broadcast preventing communication.’

‘From the orks?’ said Kalkator.

‘I cannot discern the location of the broadcast, my lord. It could be the orks.’

‘Or…’ said Kalkator. He fell silent a moment. ‘Magneric,’ he whispered. ‘We will ascend and deal with the problem at source. Board the transports!’

Kalkator marched up the gangway of the Meratara, his serfs, weaklings before his armoured form, scurrying out of his way. His warriors fell back out of the emptied complex, covering their fellows squad by squad. For a moment Kalkator was transported by the efficiency of his Great Company, back to a time when they fought for a master other than themselves.

He slapped his palm against the ship, quashing his nostalgia. Iron Warriors ran up the ramp as it closed. The engines whined loudly. Turning from the dead world, Kalkator went to the flight deck.

‘Lerontus.’

‘My lord,’ acknowledged the pilot.

‘Remove us from this place.’

The ground dropped away, rapidly becoming a hazy caramel nothingness, a void that could contain anything. Kalkator stared at it, remembering the world it had been.

A sudden jolt brought him back to the present.

‘Incoming fire!’ shouted Lerontus.

‘Origin point?’

‘Orbit, Lord Kalkator! Lance strike!’ Lerontus grunted and heaved hard on his flight stick. A beam of coruscating energy stabbed down, glassing the ground one hundred metres ahead of them. The Meratara bucked as it rode out the shock wave. The Adamantine was not so blessed. Its starboard wing trailed streamers of fire, loosened panels shaking in the airstream, and it began a rapid emergency descent. Lerontus dodged the damaged craft, sending the Meratara leapfrogging over it and accelerating ahead, leaving the Adamantine to disappear into the haze-cloaked dunes. Another blast seared through the sky, carving a pillar of clear air through the smog. Thunderous shock waves boomed out after each strike.

‘Standard suppression pattern,’ grunted Lerontus, piloting the Thunderhawk through the agitated air. ‘The orks are copying Imperial fire protocols.’

Kalkator’s boots locked to the floor, and he bent forward to peer out of the top of the Thunderhawk’s canopy.

‘They are not orks. That was a precursor barrage to a drop assault,’ said Kalkator. He pointed upward to where the clouds swirled around the track of the orbital strikes, discharge-lightning crawling along their undersides. The beam strikes cut out, and the sky lit up with multiple flashes. ‘Magneric must be hot with fury at my continued liberty, if he tries to hit gunships in atmosphere with lance fire,’ he said. ‘If he tracked the others to the Ostrom System, he will have gone to Klostra, and from there, he will have come here.’

‘Sounds like Magneric,’ said Caesax. ‘He is tenacious.’

‘It is Magneric, almost certainly,’ said Kalkator. ‘He has dogged my footsteps since the end of Horus’ war. I hear he continues his crusade from beyond the grave. So you can imagine, Caesax, it will take more than an ork Waaagh! to dissuade him.’

‘I do not need to imagine it, my lord. They are coming.’

Bright meteors burst through the clouds, streaking groundward to the east. They came down rapidly, their snowy vapour trails scoring the yellow-brown sky. ‘We must leave. I will see if Vorstrex and his command can be recovered.’ Kalkator switched his vox-channel, seeking out the downed Adamantine. He cursed at discovering the range of his battleplate’s vox insufficient, and switched his communications feed through the Thunderhawk’s own systems.

A wider world of sound greeted him: the garbled chatter of the Black Templars’ communications, overlaid atop the hissing of the dead world’s voice. He scanned through multiple channels, seeking out his comrades.

A blip, and a tumble of shouted squad communication burst into his earpieces.

‘Vorstrex, this is Kalkator. Respond.’ There was no reply. Kalkator tried again, without success. It was clear the leading sergeant of the men aboard the Adamantine could not hear him. Kalkator heard him shouting urgent orders. The banging of bolter fire crackled over the vox, and with it he heard the roaring of orks.

‘It appears there are now orks also upon the planet in large numbers,’ said Kalkator leadenly. ‘They attack Vorstrex.’

‘There is more, warsmith,’ said Lerontus. ‘Enemy gunships have deployed and will move against us. They will be deep enough into the atmosphere to begin pursuit and intercept within five minutes.’

The tactical display of the Thunderhawk was crowded with icons denoting the Black Templars forces. Out of the window, curling contrails pulled away from the gracefully curved descent lines of the drop pods.

‘Five of them, and we are just the two,’ said Kalkator.

‘Long odds,’ said Caesax.

‘I have endured worse. Alter course. Put some distance between us and the Black Templars. Head for that ruin.’ Kalkator pointed at a squat building jutting from the sands some ten kilometres away. ‘We shall make our stand there. Let them blunt their ire upon a sea of orks. When they are done, our guns shall be waiting.’

‘Prepare forward lance batteries!’ commanded Ericus. ‘Spinal turret array stand by for my command. Reopen the oculus.’

‘Compliance,’ mumbled a servitor. Motors grumbled as they pulled the massive blast shields back from the window.

Ericus looked from the oculus to the hololithic tactical display. On the display the Obsidian Sky’s immediate environs appeared crowded with combatants, swarms of green signifiers clustering around both Imperial and traitor vessels. Through the armourglass of the grand window, space appeared anything but: a huge expanse of black, the light of the stars outshone by the albedo glare of Dzelenic IV. Near space sparkled with dancing motes, all that was visible to the human eye of their xenos enemies. Beyond this shifting cloud, the Palimodes was a punctuation mark of light.

The command deck was a murmur of idiot servitor queries and reports, overlaid with the terse, efficient battle talk of the Chapter servants.

‘We are within optimum range, shipmaster. Shall I give the order to open fire?’

‘Negative. Hold fire. We will not be drawn into a duel, but shall force our munitions down their throats at point-blank range. Then we shall unleash our masters upon the traitors aboard.’

‘As you command, shipmaster.’

A bell rang. Servitors gabbled moaning alarms. ‘Multiple orkish contacts closing from planetary east,’ reported the Master Augurum.

‘Steady as she goes,’ ordered Ericus.

‘Range two thousand kilometres and closing. We are gaining on the Palimodes,’ said the Master Augurum.

‘Wait for it!’ demanded Ericus. He leaned forward in his command throne, leather gloves squeaking on each other as he massaged his hands over his sword hilt.

‘Shipmaster! More orkish vessels approach from planetary north. Interceptor and bomber wings launched. They’re coming in fast. Contact in twenty seconds. Nineteen, eighteen…’

Alarms clamoured. ‘Alert, alert,’ groaned a choir of hissing mechanical voices. ‘Boarders detected. Decks ninety-seven, forty-two and six. Alert, alert, boarders detected.’

‘Long-range teleport, origin unknown,’ said the Master Augurum.

‘Was there any warning?’ snapped Ericus.

‘Negative, sir, they just came out of nowhere.’

‘Seal all bulkheads. Serjeants-at-arms are hereby given permission to open the armouries and distribute weaponry to the ship crew. All Chapter warrior bondsmen stand ready. Armsmen to the affected sites,’ said Ericus.

‘Shipmaster, this is Sword Brother Rolans.’ Rolans’ sonorous, transhuman voice rolled out across the command deck. ‘We shall postpone our boarding attempt. It will avail us naught if we take the Palimodes and our own vessel is overrun by the orks. I am moving to engage boarders.’

‘Allow my men to take care of the problem, my lord,’ said Ericus. ‘We are within boarding torpedo range of the Palimodes.’

‘There are too many,’ countered Rolans. ‘Your men will be destroyed. We will show them the Emperor’s displeasure at first hand.’

‘Very well, my lord,’ said Ericus, but Rolans had already gone.

‘Bomber wing approaching. They have launched torpedoes.’

A flight of crude orkish fighters soared over the spine of the Obsidian Sky, chased by streams of glowing tracer fire. A moment later the ship shook. A score of bombers hurtled past, weaving between each other recklessly as they dodged the Obsidian Sky’s anti-interceptor fire. One disintegrated into a cloud of glowing scraps. The rest were away.

‘Damage control?’ asked Ericus.

‘Nothing to report. Negative impact,’ said the Master Divulgatus.

‘Shields?’

‘The void shields took the brunt of it, shipmaster,’ said the Master Scutum. ‘All reading within optimal limits.’

‘Shipmaster, the northern and eastern groups of orkish ships are gaining.’

‘What is your command, sir?’ asked the Master Ordinatum.

Ericus glanced at the tactical displays. Ork ships closed on two horizons, coming fast and low around Dzelenic IV. Four cruiser-class in each group. The Imperial ship had the advantage of range; orkish projectiles were inaccurate and unreliable at distance. Up close they would be devastating.

‘Emperor forgive me, I pray that Lord Magneric shall understand my actions, and be merciful,’ said Ericus quietly. ‘Abort attack run on the Palimodes! Provide gun crew with new orders, Franzek. Kill the orks. Destroy their ships before they can close.’

‘Conveying new firing solutions to all batteries. Solutions conveyed. Open fire.’

The Obsidian Sky quaked under the release of its guns. Lance beams burst through space. Cannons spoke, scattering high-velocity chaff around the vessel in a razored net that caught ork fighters and rent them to pieces.

‘Port broadside, engage eastern ork group. Thin their numbers,’ ordered Ericus.

‘Aye, sir!’

The ship rocked as the port guns fired. Twenty seconds later, the lead ork cruiser of the eastern group flew into the mass of projectiles. It burst apart at the seams, flickering energy and fire crawling over the broken pieces for a moment before it went dark. The aft of the hull spun away, connecting with the cruiser following and severely damaging it. The remaining two ork cruisers clumsily split, getting in each other’s way.

‘Shipmaster. We have two cruisers coming at us astern!’

‘Come about, port side,’ ordered Ericus. ‘Batteries and lances stand ready.’ The ship’s engines rumbled and metal sang at the sudden course correction, played upon by the gravity of the planet and its own momentum.

A klaxon blurted out a mournful wail. ‘New contacts appearing everywhere! Behind the moon, from near space… Dozens of them. They must have been waiting, engines dark. We’re surrounded!’

‘A trap?’ said Ericus incredulously. He stared at the hololith as augur data was fed into its cogitators. New contacts sprang into life, bright red, a net around his ships. Ork ships now approached from three quadrants at once, only the Palimodes standing between them. ‘Port battery open fire on northern group. Keep them off the stern,’ Ericus commanded.

‘Fresh ork cruiser group coming aft!’ shouted the Master Augurum.

‘Palimodes is mirroring our movement and is coming about also!’ added his second.

The Palimodes’ main engine stack dimmed. All along its sides flared the ice-white sparks of braking jets. The nose dipped, carrying it to the very edge of the atmosphere. As it dived, it lumbered around and turned on its side a little, ignoring the swarm of ork attack craft pressing it from all sides, and presented its full broadside to the oncoming prow and keel of the Obsidian Sky.

‘They’re preparing to fire!’ called Franzek.

‘Up thirty degrees. Concentrate anti-interceptor fire to ventral aspect, support anti-munition cannons, or they’ll tear the guts out of us!’ shouted Ericus, half rising from his seat, his link cables tugging at his augmetics.

Cannon muzzles ripple-flashed up the length of the Palimodes’ port side.

Glinting shells sped across the void.

‘Time to impact five, four, three, two, one…’

‘Brace, brace, brace!’

No impact came. Ericus glanced at the display. Red reticules spun past the icon denoting the Obsidian Sky, heading into the ork ships chasing them. They blinked rapidly before impact. The ork ship icons flashed, and vanished.

‘They are firing on the orks!’ reported the Master Augurum.

Space was alive with explosions and the burning light of high-energy weapons fire. The main hololithic display blinked thickly with yet more orkish attack craft.

‘Close oculus shutters. Replace holo-display with true representation of the battlespace. We will concentrate our efforts on the orks. See if you can raise the shipmaster of the Palimodes. If they are not going to fire upon us, we will offer them a truce, for now.’

‘Marshal Magneric, shipmaster…’

‘I am shipmaster,’ said Ericus. ‘It is my responsibility. Rather he has a ship to return to and a shipmaster to execute, than no ship at all.’

Fourteen

The dead of Mars

Clementina Yendl disembarked from the transit tube, the dusty windows of the station affording her a view of the facilities clustered about Pavonis Mons. Low volcanic slopes rose imperceptibly, a bulge in the land that somehow managed to attain fourteen kilometres of altitude at its apex. Much of the mountain’s shield was covered with manufactoria of immeasurable size, stepped ranks that marched ever upward until they passed out of the Martian atmosphere and into the airless void. One of the great Tharsian forge temples soared over its attendant factories, in its shadow the barracks of a Titan Legion. Pavonis Mons looked like the rest of Tharsis, but there was a sombre air about this part of the Tharsis quadrangle, and rumours of a secret buried deep. Yendl knew it was more than hearsay. Yendl knew a lot of things. No data-stream was safe from the infocyte.

She passed down the platform and out through crowd-flow barriers. Machines inside the baroque pillars kept watch on the teeming citizenry of Mars. They read her implants, chiming acceptance of her signum codes. Yendl hurried down steps, arms hugging her data-slate to her chest in perfect imitation of a lowly acolyte late in performing her errands.

Wide doors opened into a wider hall. A curved plex-glass roof, its panels thick with the leavings of the last great dust storm, showed the pale blue of the Martian sky fading to yellow towards the horizon. A thick brown line of smog trapped by atmospheric temperature striation formed an artificial boundary between them, dividing one from the other definitively.

The stairs plunged deeper into the Martian world-city down a square shaft, and Yendl followed them for dozens of flights. A barrier divided the stairs into two, the left side for those going down, the right for those coming up. Cyber-constructs buzzed through the air, using the shaft’s middle as their own highway.

Only lower-ranking followers of the Omnissiah used the steps, but they numbered in the billions, and examples of all of Mars’ strange humanity could be seen there. Clanking servitors carrying giant burdens caused chokepoints, slowing the descent to a crawl, their monotasked minds ignorant of the curses and shouts of those they delayed. A file of electro-priests passed upwards singing a buzzing electric song to their god, their blinded eyes and tattooed blue skin all but concealed by the grey robes and hoods they wore. Adepts of less humble station clattered about on skittish spider sedans, using the weight of their machines to push through the throngs. Yendl pushed also, muttering to herself angrily about delays and systems failures, often checking the chronograph set into the upper lip of her data-slate with a frown.

‘Please, please, let me through,’ she said, ‘or Magos Saultis will be angry with me again!’

Hers was but one of a million small problems harboured by those tramping the stairs, but a few allowed her to pass. She slipped around them, vox-augmetics chittering effusive binharic thanks into the noosphere, and vanished into the crowd. Just another lowly adept, one among teeming multitudes.

Ordinarily Yendl would not have drawn even this small measure of attention to herself. Her temple’s way was to watch, rarely to act, to blend seamlessly into whatever place they found themselves in. To be a face in a crowd that no one would remember.

Time was short. Tracking phages were close to sniffing out her data-thieves parasiting the Martian world-mind. Verraux had arranged to meet with her the day before, but had not arrived at their rendezvous or contacted her since. Given a few more hours Yendl could have divined her fate with certainty, but she did not need to. Red Haven had been compromised.

Already she had begun to compile probable vectors for their discovery. Urquidex was the most prominent, but not likely, for the information he had provided her had been extremely sensitive. If she survived this mission, she would pay him a visit, after Pavonis Mons.

The Martians had hidden their intentions well, but not well enough. Another experimental undertaking had been established in the volcano’s laboratoria. The same encrypted signifiers that were attached to the matter transportation experiments had been buried deep within the encoded data packets regarding this new development. Vast amounts of something were being delivered, but she had yet to ascertain what. The noosphere would only give up so many of its secrets. Yendl was forced to act, her task given greater impetus by Verraux’s disappearance.

At roughly the level of Mars’ original surface, now buried under a kilometre of plascrete, Yendl’s exit from the stairs presented itself, one of many hundreds of large archways. She had to fight her way from the stairs, deftly enough to get free of them and through the door, but not so well that she drew attention to herself. She stiffened as she approached the hollow eye sockets of a bioscanner servitor guarding the way.

‘Proceed,’ it said leadenly to an adept ahead of her. ‘Proceed,’ to the next. ‘Proceed.’ A pale green scanning beam passed over her face. ‘Proceed,’ it said. The man behind her pushed impatiently.

She hurried away, an endless litany of ‘Proceed’ following her down the corridor.

Yendl went deeper into the hive factories of Pavonis Mons, following obscure ways until she was mostly alone on dusty paths trodden only by slack-mouthed servitors and a few robed adepts. None of these furtive figures challenged her. There were thousands of sub-cults and power structures within the Adeptus Mechanicus, a failing she was singularly thankful for.

She came to her last legitimate path, a narrow alleyway whose sheer sides stretched away into dark obscurity high overhead. She paused by a sealed access door, her hood over her face. A sole servitor stumped on by, power plant whistling. She waited until it had disappeared into the gloom. Sure she was alone, she acted quickly, prising open a maintenance hatch and stuffing her adept’s robes inside where they fell into the unknowable spaces between the walls. Her body beneath gleamed with shiny synskin. Pouches crowded her thighs and waist. At her hips were a pistol and a trio of long stilettos. Her posture straightened, her augmetics reconfigured. The tech-adept was gone and the Assassin was revealed.

She primed her data-slate for a full wipe, waited for its compliance light to blink green, then snapped it in two. She withdrew the memory crystal and ground it to powder under her heel. The remains of the data-slate followed her robes, rattling away from discovery. She scooped up the powdery remains of the crystal and dusted half of that down the hatch also, retaining the rest for disposal elsewhere. It was perfectly possible the means to reconstitute the device existed somewhere within the vaults of techno-arcana that covered Mars. Her disguise dealt with, she flexed her fingers, extruding feathered access probes from her digital implants. The door slid open noiselessly, revealing an access corridor lit by dull yellow lumen panels. Glancing around herself one last time, she slipped out of sight.

Crammed into a tiny ventilation duct, Yendl watched a storage hall through a grille. Yet another twenty-wheeled hauler pulled up to a hissing halt. Tracked lifters manned by the implanted torsos of servitors swarmed it, acting in concert to lift the massive transit container from the flatbed and take it away to be stacked. Unburdened, the transport drew away, its place in the loading bay taken by another. Yendl frowned. She scanned the warehouse, and saw nothing more threatening than servitors of various kinds trudging about their endless labours.

She shuffled back along the ventilation conduit on her hands and knees, seeking out a point of egress. There were no hatches or large panels that could be prised free. She probed in the semi-darkness at the joins between the plates, eventually finding a tiny access portal less than a third of a metre on each side. The bolts securing it she undid in short order, and it fell to the floor two metres below with a quiet bang.

Taking a deep breath, Yendl forced her arm out and pushed her head after, the lip of the metal scraping her forehead as she twisted to fit through. Shoving with her toes, she attempted to push herself out, but she would not fit. The corridor her head protruded into was deserted, but clean, and clean meant heavily trafficked. From the corner of her eye she could see the end, a doorless aperture opening directly into the warehouse. She had to get in there, to see what was in the containers.

Taking another, deeper breath, she made her muscles in her back spasm violently, dislocating her shoulder.

Now she could fit.

Yendl wriggled through, blanking out the pain as her shoulder emerged through the hole. She let her left arm flop down. With her upper torso out, the rest slithered out easily. She executed an inelegant somersault and landed on her feet. She waited, poised, one hand on the pistol at her waist. The bustle of the warehouse continued uninterrupted. Holding her shoulder, she went to the wall, then slammed it into the metal. The bones relocated themselves with a painful pop. She rotated her shoulder. A good reset – the discomfort was manageable.

Drawing pistol and blade, she crept noiselessly into the warehouse.

Another of the great weaknesses of the Martian empire was that so many of its citizens were mindless drones. Such an eagerness to lobotomise played into the hands of the likes of the Officio Assassinorum, whose operatives could move far more freely than on other worlds within the Imperium; the servitors simply ignored anything that fell outside their programming. The warehouse was crowded with cyber-constructs of all kinds. She dodged between them as they rattled about, and went to the door of one of the shipping containers. The lock was sigma grade, heavily shielded. She could get it open, of course, but that would bring with it a risk of detection, and would take time.

She looked about. They could not just be stacking containers somewhere they must be unloading them. From where she was situated she could see no open containers or other types of servitor that might lead her to her goal, so she looked upwards. The stacks were tall and she would fare better from the top. Holstering her pistol and placing her knife between her teeth, she clambered up the smooth side of the transit containers. Once up, she ran and jumped from stack to stack, always landing silently, gun ready for interception. A hunch drew her to the rear of the warehouse, and there fortune favoured her.

At the foot of the stack, the doors to a container were open. A file of servitors carrying something like casualty biers were marching inside, their stretchers empty, and returning with them full – massive, bulky objects hidden in white plastek sacks. These servitors too seemed to be unsupervised, so she leapt from the top of the containers, weak Martian gravity allowing her to fall several metres with the lightest of impacts. She hurried to the line of servitors and fell in beside them. As usual they ignored her. They trudged towards a door out of the warehouse, where a dingy corridor led away. A quick slip of her knife opened one of the sealed bags, and she bent down to peer inside, still moving alongside the servitors.

Inside was the naked corpse of an ork. The smell of it was staggering, and she switched to breathing through her mouth. A fat pink tongue lolled between dagger teeth of yellow ivory. Its red eyes were half closed, lifeless and dull. Massive craters pocked its flesh, and the left arm was missing. Bolt-wounds. She stepped back, letting the flow of servitors pass her as she moved back up the line to the container. Inside were dozens of shelves arrayed like bunks, transit webbing hanging loose over the sides where they had been emptied. At the rear of the container a refrigeration unit blinked running lights from red to green and back again. White vapour, smelling strongly of methalon, pooled on the floor.

Yendl ran through the calculations in her head, balancing up the size of the warehouse with the number of containers and transit cradles… She drew in a sharp breath.

Over ten thousand orks.

‘What by the Throne do they want ten thousand dead orks for?’ she whispered. She had to inform Vangorich. She had to make contact.

Yendl sneaked through the comings and goings of servitors. There were so many she almost did not recognise the skitarii for what they were until it was too late. So much metal melded to flesh. Telling the autonomous servants of the priesthood apart from their slaves was nigh-on impossible.

At the last second she noticed them, diving behind a container as a bullet buzzed past her face, setting her internal rad sensors screaming.

‘Halt! Halt! Unauthorised personnel, halt!’ screeched a harsh metallic voice. Iron feet pounded the plascrete of the warehouse floor, coming at her from both sides of the container stack.

The first skitarius found an energy blast waiting for it. Yendl had studied the endless variations of the cybernetic warriors exhaustively, and knew the weak points of each. It was thrown backwards by the blast of her pistol, an exotic relic of the great Heresy war, tangling the legs of the one coming behind it. Yendl was already moving backwards, directly into the path of those coming up the other side. She sidestepped the next bullet coming for her, a movement that brought her around the barrel of the skitarius’ gun. She grabbed the stock, preventing the cyborg from repositioning its weapon, shooting the one behind with her pistol, then the one behind that. The gears of the skitarius’ mechanical arms clicked with effort to push Yendl aside, but her slender augmetic arms were supplemented with hidden fibre bundles, and her stance was immovable.

Two further skitarii rounded the rear of the container. The first’s visor met her elbow, driving shattered glass and metal into its brain. The second got a bullet from the gun of its comrade when Yendl pivoted on the spot and yanked hard, mashing the trapped skitarius’ finger against the trigger. Only that one remained. She wrenched the gun away, threw the skitarius aside and shot it three times, in the chest, head and reactor unit.

She made sure they were all dead and their datacores shattered, then she was away.

Alarms rang. Before anyone could respond, Yendl had gone.

A steady procession of foot traffic flowed along the Trans-Tharsis Highway’s pedestrian strip. The lights of giant vehicles blurred past in a roar of colour and sound.

Clementina Yendl arranged her new disguise, a robe taken from a menial now dead and never to be found. She adjusted her posture, becoming once again the low-ranking adept, her augmetics adopting the twisted pose of bionics more hindrance than help. Transformed, she slipped from a side door in an unassuming block and joined the crowds. She had gone less than three kilometres before she became aware of the servo-skull following her some metres behind. Yendl was too well practised to reveal she had noticed. She picked up speed. The skull did likewise, a constant presence amid the confusing whirl of aerial constructs going about their duty.

She selected an ambush site. A one-man lift ascended to a gallery hanging from the lower floors of a kilometre-long hab complex. A covered walkway led off into the building there. She ascended the lift, and went down the alley. Sure enough, the skull followed. A junction beckoned, and she took an abrupt left.

When the skull came, she was waiting with her cloak, whirling it out like a net and catching the device mid-flight. She hauled it to earth, her strength overcoming its anti-gravity field and bouncing it from the floor. She wrestled it into submission, and freed it from the cloak. A standard model, bronze-plated ancient bone, long tendrils of interface cabling hanging from its rear. By the standards of Mars, wholly unremarkable, and unarmed. It stopped struggling.

‘Message, message, message,’ gargled the skull, its glass eyes flashing.

‘Speak,’ said Yendl.

A click sounded as a vox-feed engaged. ‘I have been searching for you everywhere.’

‘My well-placed friend.’

‘The very same,’ said Urquidex. He sounded agitated.

‘I hope for your sake this feed is encrypted.’

‘Of course!’ he snapped. ‘But we must be brief. The privacy of this channel cannot be guaranteed for long. One of your colleagues has met with an unfortunate end and the secrecy of your cell is compromised. It will take the diagnostic covens a little time to retrieve the information from the cortex – organics are so much less forgiving than mechanisms – but they will.’

‘She is dead? I had guessed,’ said Yendl.

‘Yes. I am sorry.’

‘Sorrow helps nobody.’

‘I have other news,’ said Urquidex. ‘The Fabricator General has embarked on new work. I do not know what. I am attempting to find out.’

‘Orks,’ said Yendl.

‘What?’

‘Thousands of ork corpses are being delivered–’

‘To the laboratoria of Pavonis Mons?’

‘Yes,’ said Yendl. ‘I have come from there. I was seen.’

‘Disaster!’ said Urquidex.

Yendl let the servo-skull free. It bobbed level with her eyes.

‘Tell me something I am unaware of,’ she said. ‘Tell me what they want with so many dead orks.’

‘I do not know,’ said Urquidex. ‘Kubik told me himself, Magos Van Auken heads a work as important as the Grand Experiment.’ He paused. ‘I delay all I can, but cannot do so indefinitely. I cannot stop the Grand Experiment.’ A faint crackle sounded on the connection. ‘Danger comes. I must go. Stay alive. I will attempt contact soon.’

The skull flew away, becoming one among hundreds hurrying through the tunnel. Yendl lost sight of it quickly. She was not so naive as to believe she could disappear so easily.

Fifteen

Lord Guilliman’s decree

The day after the attack on the ork moon, the Space Marines of the Last Wall prepared to receive Lord Guilliman Udin Macht Udo with as much ceremony and pomp as if he had in truth been the primarch himself.

They waited on the embarkation deck of the Abhorrence in full wargear. Udo’s magnificently decorated shuttle pierced the integrity field of the portal majoris and came in to land upon the golden aquila painted specially for the purpose at the centre of the deck. The landing ramp descended, disgorging fifty Lucifer Blacks in gleaming wargear. They jogged down an avenue of Space Marines made up from members of every company of every Chapter in the Last Wall. Fists Exemplar stood with Black Templars beside Iron Knights. Crimson Fists waited proudly alongside Excoriators. With these representatives of each Chapter, there were nigh-on one thousand Space Marines present on the deck.

At the end of this aisle lined by ceramite stood the commanders of the Chapters: the captains and Chaplains of every company, headed by their leaders High Marshal Bohemond of the Black Templars, Chapter Master Issachar of the Excoriators, Chapter Master Quesadra of the Crimson Fists, Chapter Master Thane of the Fists Exemplar, First Captain Verpall of the Iron Knights, and Koorland, Chapter Master and last member of the Imperial Fists.

The Lucifer Blacks stamped shining boots in thunderous march down the ranks of Space Marines. They spread themselves out along the length of the way from Udo’s ship to the Chapter Masters until they formed a cordon one man wide. Then they rotated ninety degrees to face into the avenue, their final stamp echoing away into the empty spaces of the embarkation deck. For all the Lucifer Blacks’ stern martial polish, there was something faintly ridiculous about this show of defence, as if all of them together could possibly hope to halt even ten of the transhuman warriors, should they decide to kill the Lord Guilliman.

Koorland pushed the implied insult to the back of his mind. More politics. Udo was making a show of his authority.

To a fanfare of silver clarions, Udin Macht Udo came down the ramp of his ship, surrounded by attendants and high-ranking officials of the Adeptus Terra. The train of his cloak was held from the ground by six blind auto-praisers whispering ceaseless prayers to the Emperor. Udo wore all the panoply of his office, a rich uniform stiff with brocade and frogging, a chest full of honours and medallions. Servo-skulls buzzed out in a cloud over his entourage, and swooped off in every direction. Cyber-cherubs came after, four spreading out to hold a cloth of gold two metres over the Lord Guilliman, two more swinging censers which billowed oily blue, perfumed smoke.

This parade came to a halt before the Chapter Masters. The sons of Dorn got down on one knee, and bowed their heads.

Udo clapped his hands and smiled.

‘Rise, rise, loyal servants of the Imperium! You, the mighty sons of the Emperor, return to your Father in the time of need, and you have not disappointed Him.’

The Space Marines got to their feet, dwarfing the Lord Guilliman. Unperturbed, Udo motioned for a cybernetic servant bearing a velvet-covered tray, on which were arrayed multiple honour badges. A hooded adept came after, and began to clamp the badges to the Chapter Masters’ armour. ‘In recognition, this mark is designated the Defence of Terra. You shall be permitted to display it upon your armours and banners for evermore.’

The adept approached Koorland gingerly. With unsteady hands he placed the award upon the bottom corner of his pauldron. The man was shaking with fear. Koorland looked over the head of the adept at the crowd of servants behind Udo. There were four auto-scribes, quill arms scratching down an account of the event upon spools of paper spilling from chest boxes. There were others making records – servitors with pict-capture units for eyes and vox-thieves for mouths. Several of the servo-skulls hovered in place, glass eye-lenses fixed on the Space Marines. They watched also, doubtless capturing the ceremony from other angles.

Another way to show power, thought Koorland. He comes aboard our ships, a statement of ownership. He wondered how many times these images would be displayed on the pict screens of the Palace, in places like the Fields of Winged Victory, in the innumerable squares and plazas of Terra. How many times the news-criers would shout out Udo’s generosity, how many priests would read of how the lords of six Space Marine Chapters demonstrated their allegiance to Terra on their knees before Udin Macht Udo.

‘And now, brave defenders of the Imperium,’ Udo said, holding his hands high in seeming blessing. ‘We must convene a council of war. The ork is not yet defeated.’

A projection of Terra rotated lazily over a chart desk set into the middle of the strategium table, the ork moon its unwelcome companion. Through a long galleried window the same scene could be seen in reality. The gathered might of five Chapters sailed in tight formation around the moon. Wings of interdiction fighters shone bright as polished badges as they swooped over it, their numbers and flight paths reproduced as graphical ideograms over the light image.

The Chapter Masters sat around the massive table. Udin Macht Udo occupied a tall throne at its head, built up so that he might look the Space Marines in the eye. Behind him a broad-winged bronze aquila glowered down from the wall, its one-eyed glare mirroring Udo’s own.

‘Those vessels taken from the Merchant Fleets that we could not retake, we have destroyed,’ Quesadra was saying. ‘Our combined forces inflicted significant damage throughout the moon. Our estimates are that two-thirds or more of the orks were killed. The outer surface has been stripped of weaponry. For the time being, the moon poses no significant threat. Chapter Master Koorland’s expedition into the moon’s core damaged a device that proved to be a long-range teleport array. Without it, the orks cannot reinforce themselves. They are cut off. This intelligence is of the highest significance for the prosecution of the war. The moon–’

‘The moon is not only an attack vessel, but a form of spatial gateway. I was informed by Fabricator General Kubik this morning,’ said Udo dismissively. ‘It has been noted. New strategies are being formulated. The question for now is, was it permanently disabled?’

‘We do not think so,’ said Thane. ‘The power supply was severely damaged, but deep auspex scans show continued power fluctuations. The possibility remains that they may repair it.’

‘And then the problem will be as it was before, hundreds of thousands of orks moving in to directly attack Terra,’ said Issachar. ‘The capabilities of the gateway are unknown. They may be able to bring in replacement materiel and ships. The throneworld remains vulnerable.’

‘There remains only one solution,’ said Koorland. ‘We must attack again.’

An aide handed Udo a data-slate. He squinted at it a while, leaving the Chapter Masters to wait, then handed it back.

‘No,’ he said forcefully. ‘Second Captain Koorland of the Daylight Wall Company, you will not attack again. Not yet.’

‘We will leave it there?’ said Bohemond incredulously. ‘The Last Wall has been called! We come to Terra’s aid, and you would deny the Emperor this victory?’

‘Lord Bohemond,’ said Koorland. ‘Please. Hear the Lord Guilliman out.’

‘Listen to the second captain, he has some wisdom,’ said Udo.

Issachar’s face darkened. ‘Koorland is a Chapter Master of the Adeptus Astartes, Lord Guilliman,’ he said. ‘He sits here with us in brotherhood. It pains me to remind one of your exalted rank.’

‘I do not require your assistance,’ said Udo. ‘Koorland is no Chapter Master. By the customs of his own order, if not directly nominated by the passing commander, potential successors to the office of Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists must be selected by the consensus of the Chapter’s Chaplains and wall captains, and those favoured with nomination voted for. In Koorland’s case neither of these criteria have been met.’

‘How could they be? He is the only one,’ growled Bohemond. ‘The last Imperial Fist.’

‘Would the same stand if he were the last surviving neophyte?’ said Udo. ‘I think not.’

‘He has been recognised as Chapter Master by us, the lords of the other sons of Dorn,’ said Issachar. ‘He has led us in battle. He is worthy.’

Udo spread his hands, neither dismissing or conceding the point. ‘Far be it from me to deny the will of so many mighty heroes. Terra could conceivably allow such a selection, if it proved to be in the best interests of the Imperium.’

‘The affairs of the Adeptus Astartes are our own!’ said Bohemond.

‘But they are not, High Marshal,’ said Udo patiently. ‘They are yours as far as any of the other adepta’s. You are, first and foremost, servants and subjects of the God-Emperor, Lord of all Mankind – a species of which, although your alterations perhaps stretch the classification, you are still a member, High Marshal. Your Chapter forgets this fact a little too often. Your fleets are unaccountable, rumours persist of an excess of warriors under your command, and your actions have stirred up previously quiet xenos races too many times.’

‘We serve the Emperor,’ said Bohemond, ‘not bureaucrats. Ours is a sacred mission.’

‘We are the agents of the Emperor’s will,’ countered Udo. ‘Not some officio to be ignored.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Your wilfulness gives us pause. This gathering of yours was neither called for nor authorised. Now we have three thousand Space Marines in orbit over the Golden Throne itself. What are we to make of that?’

‘In the face of your incompetence we save the throneworld, and you come to accuse us of treachery?’ said Quesadra in disgust.

‘You are the largest force of Space Marines assembled since the Heresy,’ said Udo. ‘We must be left in no doubt as to where your allegiances lie. Your success is welcome, and applauded. But your unannounced arrival here in such strength has the Senatorum Imperialis in uproar.’

‘If the Senatorum had proved a little more effective in governing, and a little less in pursuing the interests of the senators, then we would not need to be here at all, and my brothers might yet live,’ said Koorland quietly.

Udo pulled a face. ‘You see, it is words of that sort that fan the flames of my fears. Is that a threat, second captain?’

‘We have no interest in usurping the Senatorum!’ said Koorland. He rose from his seat. Issachar grabbed his wrist, but Koorland pulled free. He leaned over the table. ‘Is this why we were left alone to die upon Ardamantua, because you are afraid of us? Did you expend the lives of the Imperium’s staunchest defenders in political calculation?’

‘I doubt much thought went into it at all, brother,’ said Verpall. ‘That is the root of the problem here.’

‘Yours is a simple breed,’ said Udo. ‘Bred for war. You think on nothing but matters of combat and honour. I have seen contempt for the common man too many times in the face of a Space Marine. You think yourselves intelligent, and you are, but you forget too often you are made for conflict, and conflict invariably follows in your wake. Leave the subtleties of government to those better suited, as the Emperor intended.’

‘My lord Malfons died to preserve your office,’ said Verpall. ‘Do not insult us again.’

‘There, you see. A veiled threat. Another statement that forges my opinion the harder. You must listen to me. Do as I say and we shall have no difficulty between us. Tomorrow, we will proceed to the surface where you will be feted as the saviours that you are. Then, in the Senatorum Imperialis, you will renew your oaths of fealty to the Imperium. Then you shall be acknowledged as the Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists, Second Captain Koorland, with the full will of the Senatorum. After which, we shall formulate plans – with the backing of myself, the Lord Commander Militant, Lord High Admiral Lansung and the others – to end this crisis.’

The Chapter Masters looked to one another. Quesadra drummed three crimson fingers on the table, click click click.

‘What of the moon?’ asked Koorland.

‘Kubik desires it to be left intact.’

‘So Terra dances to Mars’ tune now?’ said Bohemond.

Udo gave him a hard stare. Bohemond returned it. ‘We have convened a meeting of the High Twelve,’ said Udo. ‘There its fate will be decided.’

‘I urge you, my lord, it must be destroyed,’ said Koorland.

‘Whether or not it will be is a matter for the Lords of Terra. You will maintain your blockade until the Navy gathers in sufficient force to take your place. If you perform this task, none shall set foot upon the moon. The Fabricator General has agreed to withdraw his armies for the time being. The moon is under your custodianship. Beyond that it is no longer your concern,’ said Udo evenly. ‘You have pulled the orks’ teeth. Bravo. It is time to let the organs of government decide the best course of action. Know this, lord Chapter Masters, this fleet of yours cannot be allowed to remain whole. Your Chapters shall each receive individual orders. With your might properly directed, we shall end the threat of this Beast once and for all. There shall be no more need for such,’ he lifted a hand, ‘charming displays of confraternity.’

The Space Marines shifted uneasily.

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Koorland hesitantly. ‘When you order its destruction, we shall be on hand to aid you in your task.’

‘There is one last item I must inform you of,’ continued Udo. ‘We cannot allow the news of the destruction of the Imperial Fists to be made public. Your return, Koorland, will be the proof of the indomitability of the Adeptus Astartes of Dorn’s line. You shall return from the dead to great fanfare, the orks cannot defeat you and so forth. I shall have a suitable story provided. You are only one, and that presents a problem. To circumvent this, each of you will provide from among your number Wall Guardians to man the Palace as the Imperial Fists always have.’

‘They are not Imperial Fists,’ said Quesadra.

‘They shall be dressed in the livery of the Imperial Fists,’ said Udo. ‘The populace shall know no different.’

‘Our men will never give up their colours!’ exclaimed Issachar.

‘There will be no honour? No mention of my brothers’ sacrifice?’ Koorland’s face went pale. ‘This is an outrage!’

‘This is politics, captain,’ said Udo. ‘In the aftermath of the moon’s arrival, to inform the people that the Imperial Fists are nigh-on extinct will send a wave of terror throughout the Imperium. Worse would be rumours, for they are pernicious and far harder to deal with than the shock of an announcement. Not a single word of this disaster must become public. You have my sympathy for your loss, captain, but there are practicalities to consider.’ Udo stood, holding up his hands to forestall disagreement. ‘You must forgive me. I return to the surface now. I have much to arrange.’

The Lord Commander bowed sharply, leaving the Space Marines to stare after him as his aides and constructs filed out in his wake.

‘We will not break the fleet,’ said Bohemond.

‘We cannot defy him,’ said Quesadra.

‘We can,’ said Verpall. ‘How can Udo possibly enforce the order? If we did refuse he could do nothing. He would be forced to back down and concoct some story that cast him in a favourable light.’

‘More politics,’ spat Bohemond.

‘I cannot condone that course of action,’ said Koorland. ‘It is close to heresy.’

‘We have no choice,’ said Issachar, ‘if we are to save the Imperium.’

‘A sentiment that has been voiced before,’ said Koorland. ‘Be careful of your thoughts, brother.’

Sixteen

The welcoming of heroes

The Praetorian Way resounded to cheers as the Space Marines marched from the East Gate Landing Hall towards the centre of the Imperial Palace: over three thousand of them, more than had been on Terra at one time for hundreds of years. Millions of citizens lined the route, waving flags bearing the badges of the Chapters. They roared and screamed their approbation, ecstatic at the sight of so many of the Angels of Death. The attack moon loured at them, its porcine face expressing a fury it was impotent to act upon. Aircraft shrieked overhead, pumping coloured smoke into the hazy atmosphere. Laud hailers sang out hymnals and prayers, and servo-skulls bearing vox-projectors roared out the names of the most distinguished battle-brothers, while others recited the Chapter histories of the Space Marines.

Giant screens along the route showed picts of dead orks and burning ships, intercut with the faces of Koorland and his fellow lords, their names and honours written in bold text beneath their images. Music blasted from a hundred places, until the words and melodies were unrecognisable as coherent sounds; they were sonic fragments, an overwhelming cacophony that outsang the loudest battle.

Never had Koorland heard a million voices scream as one, either in adulation or in pain. He went bareheaded at the High Lords’ request, crowned with a laurel wreath. Let the people see their saviour, they said. He envied the twenty sham Imperial Fists marching behind him, their helms locked in place, their audio dampers working at maximum capacity. Koorland kept his face forward. So many people, so many faces, all of them calling his name. Scented flakes of paper rained down on them from every side. It was intoxicating, and it should not be so. He had performed his duty, that was all. He would not allow himself to indulge his emotions. He would not allow himself the folly of pride.

They passed from tightly clustered buildings and into the killing field before the Palace walls. Four kilometres of bare rock, open to the sky. Daylight Wall dominated it, tinted a delicate rose by the rising sun. The Praetorian Way meekly burrowed its way through the East Gate, little more than a wormhole in the fabric of the wall in comparison to the defence’s massive size. The wall was stupefyingly tall. Here Koorland’s gene-seed ancestors had fought and died, protecting the Emperor from the gravest enemy of all. What he and his fellow Chapter Masters had accomplished was nothing by comparison. He reminded himself repeatedly of his own insignificance as they approached the soaring buttresses, towers, gun emplacements and gigantic statuary.

The crowds in the killing field were no less vocal, but free of the resonating plascrete canyons of the outer district the noise was bearable. Daylight Wall, in many senses his wall. Koorland had not seen it for so long. The East Gate reared up, mighty now he was before it, its revealed scale making the wall all the more titanic. The reflected heat of the early sun bounced from it, glinting from the polished armour of the Space Marine column. Koorland’s wargear gleamed newly. Not even his intention to keep his battle damage on show until his brothers were avenged had survived Udo’s blunt realpolitik. Issachar’s Chapter were the battered exception, their creed demanding they mark their wounds well.

Koorland marched towards the gate where the multi-lane Praetorian Way became a straight tunnel through the wall. To be coming home like this, alone, the bearer of half-truths and propagandic distortions, blunted the glory of their triumph over the orks. The moon was still in the sky. The wall stood strong in the face of its aggression, but scarring from its attacks opened up gaps all over the Palace’s skylines. Despite these reminders of vulnerability around them, the Senatorum Imperialis would doubtless go back to its infighting.

The blackness of the gate tunnel swallowed him, and the crowd’s jubilation was silenced. Shame dogged his footsteps and determination drove him on.

This state of affairs could not be allowed to persist. It was a thought that would not be quieted all the way through the giving of honours and renewal of fealty that took place in the Senatorum Imperialis at the end of their march.

After the ceremony was over, the highest of the high were ushered into a giant hall clad in ornately carved tiles of malachite and onyx. There an interminable feast began, bookended by pompous speeches. The food was quite exquisite, but Koorland was so invested in his problems he found himself insensible to the flavour. He filled himself as he had been trained to long ago, shovelling delicacies into his mouth to fuel his transhuman metabolism as if they were the lowest gruel. There were so many ingredients in each dish that a confusing amount of information flooded his brain via his neuroglottis, further darkening his mood.

After the feast came the reception, a grand and tedious party where Koorland was besieged by a stream of dignitaries that would not stop flowing. Their mouths dripped honeyed comments, a request or criticism behind every one. Koorland politely listened to his interlocutors, insisting he had no say in the policies of the Senatorum Imperialis, and that he had no intention of parlaying the assembled Chapters’ might into political influence. ‘I am a servant of the Emperor,’ and its variations became a phrase repeated as often as a battle catechism.

The High Twelve and many of the greatest of the lesser lords kept themselves distant from him. Those that attempted an approach shied away under Udo’s glowering. When Vangorich appeared at his side it was so unexpected that Koorland did not at first recognise him.

‘Good evening, Chapter Master,’ said a wiry man. He surveyed the room, not lifting his face to look at the Imperial Fist. Koorland prepared himself for the usual back and forth of insincere small talk and relentless probing, but something made him hesitate in returning the man’s greeting. He was armed only with a goblet of wine and a sardonic manner, but there was something about him, a mixture of poise, alertness and confidence that the others lacked and that signalled he was the most dangerous man in the room. Then he looked up, held out a hand, and Koorland knew him.

‘Drakan Vangorich,’ said Koorland.

Koorland’s giant fist engulfed Vangorich’s hand and they shook in the civilian manner, palm to palm.

‘I recognise you from our discussion. I thank you for your… recent good wishes.’

‘I am only happy they were well received,’ said Vangorich.

‘How could I not heed you? You are dangerous,’ said Koorland.

‘My, you are blunt. You don’t think these other fine ladies and gentlemen are?’ said Vangorich.

‘Not in the same way as you,’ said Koorland. ‘Not immediately. None of them would stand a chance against me in combat, but I suspect you might. And you also possess their political power. There are several of the greatest lords of the Space Marines in this chamber, but I think you are the most dangerous of us all.’

Vangorich shrugged slightly. He was small by unaltered human standards, and minute by those of the transhumans.

‘Correct again, Chapter Master. I suppose I am exceptionally dangerous. Shall I tell you another difference between myself and my fellow High Lords? You and I, Koorland, are on the same side.’

‘We are all on the same side,’ said Koorland. ‘The orks are on the other.’

‘Oh, Chapter Master, please!’ Vangorich tutted. Koorland noticed that when the Assassin spoke he hid his lips from prying eyes behind his goblet. ‘Don’t play the naïf with me. I’m a remarkably good judge of a man’s mood no matter their type. A necessary skill in my role. It is plain that you are not pleased nor are you satisfied by what you see here on Terra.’

‘I am not,’ admitted Koorland. ‘My brothers are all dead. I hold the men and women in this hall responsible.’

‘You are not alone in doing so. There are others of us who are frustrated by the failure of the Senatorum to contain the orks. Now that, Chapter Master, is why we are on the same side. I am sorry, by the way, about your brothers. There was one, Daylight, who was a passing acquaintance of mine.’

Koorland looked down at Vangorich hard. Daylight had been his company representative on Terra. ‘I have had enough of barbed words hidden in flattery. If you seek to goad me, I advise you to seek your sport elsewhere.’

‘I mean nothing ill by it,’ said Vangorich. ‘I will not say Daylight was my friend, but I spoke with him every day and I always regarded him well. He was an honourable man. It is a shame he realised his dream of going to war. It proved his end.’

‘War is our purpose. To die in battle is an honour.’ As Koorland said the words he doubted them. He remembered the devastation on Ardamantua. There had been little honour won there.

‘How refreshing,’ said Vangorich. ‘These others here, some few of them might hold such noble sentiments. Juskina Tull,’ he pointed out a tall woman in a complicated dress. She held herself aloof, and her face was blank of emotion. ‘She, for example, for all her delusions in initiating the Proletarian Crusade, her motives were at least pure – in part. Many of the rest of them cannot even claim that. They do not see beyond their own concerns, or they actively promote their own interests. Naturally, they all invoke the Emperor, and the good of the Imperium. But frankly it never ceases to amaze me how convenient it is that the will of the Emperor coincides with the aims of every High Lord, no matter how contradictory their statements appear when set one beside another.

‘See,’ said Vangorich, pointing. ‘The Provost, Zeck. He is perhaps a little overly concerned with his office. He is very good at his job, but too good to be effective on the council. Lord Commander Militant Verreault is at odds with Lord High Admiral Lansung, and is in Udo’s pocket. The telepaths Anwar and Sark are occupied so much with their own, vital efforts to keep the Imperium together that they are too easily swayed by quick solutions, whereas the Paternoval Envoy Gibran cannot be swayed at all.’ As he spoke, he indicated the High Lords one at a time. ‘Lansung is a brilliant military commander, but of all of them he is the most responsible for this sorry mess.’

‘His ship stood back while we attacked,’ said Koorland.

‘As it did when Tull’s Crusade went forward. I cannot think why. He has perhaps lost his self-belief. I’m sure his own follies were driven by the idea that he was the best man for the job. That only he knows the way to extend the Imperium’s reach. But his manoeuvring was nearly the end of us. They all think that they alone know the answer. Confidence and zealotry, a terrible mix. He hoarded his fleet when he should have attacked, all for the chance at an office he will now never hold. The Inquisition seeks to repair the machineries of government, but cannot agree with itself and falls to infighting.

‘The fat man there in three countesses’ worth of jewellery is Mesring, the Ecclesiarch. A less holy man I have rarely met. And let us not forget Kubik, of course, hiding away on Mars up to no good. He’s turning into something of a threat to the Imperium, between you and me. All the signs suggest he seeks to assert the supremacy of Mars over that of Terra.’ He sighed and waved his goblet around him, taking in all the dignitaries, toadies, servers, servitors and every other human being in the room. ‘A room full of agendas does not make for happy governance. It is, all things told, a sorry mess of a game.’

‘I cannot see this as a game, Grand Master.’

‘But it is a game, Koorland,’ said Vangorich. ‘A very serious game, but a game nonetheless.’

‘If all the pieces are compromised, then what is left?’ said Koorland.

‘What is left is you and I,’ said Vangorich, tapping a finger against Koorland’s chest eagle. ‘So we best hope you are successful in hauling our collective skins out of the fire. I do not wish to see the time come when the Imperium has to rely on the Grand Master of the Assassinorum. We are gardeners, we Assassins. A snip and a prune. We are not intended for the wholesale remodelling of government, or, the Emperor forfend, the wielding of power.’ He smiled innocently, his scar twisting his face. Unlike Udo’s disfigurement, it somehow made the Assassin appear even more genial.

For a man who protested his lack of interest in power, thought Koorland, he seemed remarkably adept at wielding it.

‘Ah, my goblet appears to be empty,’ said Vangorich. ‘This evening, I feel like drinking. This week has been taxing.’ He rested a hand on Koorland’s vambrace, and said sotto voce, ‘Let us continue this some other time.’ Vangorich sauntered off, greeting men and women with a warmth shot through with insolence.

Thane came to his side. The Chapter Masters had been besieged by coteries of adepts, some of whom were there at Udo’s behest to keep them apart. But when a Space Marine in full battleplate chose to move through a room, people had no choice but to quickly remove themselves from his path.

‘I tire of their flattery and wheedling,’ said Thane.

‘This room is a vipers’ nest,’ said Koorland.

‘Aye, and Grand Master Vangorich is the biggest snake of all. Be wary of him, brother.’

‘A life of war, of bolt and blade, was preferable to this,’ said Koorland.

‘I agree. But Issachar has it right. We have a different kind of battle to fight now.’ The supplicants kept their distance from the Chapter Masters’ quiet conference, all save one: the fat man sealed into ceremonial ecclesiarchal robes so encrusted in jewels they were thick as battleplate, Ecclesiarch Mesring. He came over, sweating under the weight of his robes of office despite the four hollow-eyed, shaven-headed acolytes holding his train. A whole host of others trailed him: priests, scribes, and petitioners anxiously awaiting a moment to speak with him.

Mesring interrupted the Space Marines impolitely. ‘Chapter Masters! I come to offer my thanks. You do the Emperor’s duty. He is pleased.’

Koorland turned from his conversation with Thane. ‘You are Mesring, Ecclesiarch of the Adeptus Ministorum?’

Mesring was taken aback at Koorland’s feigned ignorance, but rallied well. ‘A grandiose title for a humble role. I am fortunate to interpret the Emperor’s will.’ He bowed stiffly from the waist, his chins wobbling with the effort. ‘And it is glorious to stand before His favoured servants, His holy sons.’ His pale flesh gleamed, and he slurred his words despite his manners. Koorland suspected he was drunk.

‘Your garb tells another story than humility,’ said Thane. ‘You tell me the Emperor is pleased? Who are you to know?’

‘You gainsay the will of the Holy Emperor?’ said Mesring.

‘Your religion means nothing to me,’ said Thane. ‘My Chapter follows the tenets of the Imperial Truth, set down by the Emperor during the Great Crusade. How quickly you have forgotten it. We are not holy. Do not treat us as such.’

‘One thousand five hundred years is a long time, Chapter Master,’ said Mesring. ‘The Imperial Truth is all but forgotten. The scriptures tell us that the Emperor conceived of it as a necessary lie. The very name is an exercise in irony. Only in death has the Emperor cast off His corporeal cloak and revealed Himself to us in His true glory!’

‘I disagree,’ said Thane. ‘Your cult profanes His memory with idolatry.’

‘When will the Adeptus Astartes see the light?’ said Mesring. ‘It troubles me, my son, that the Emperor’s own angels deny the truth.’

‘We are not angels!’ snorted Thane.

‘You were among those who urged the populace to take the oath of crusade?’ said Koorland.

‘I did, I did! As was only right.’

‘It proved to be wholly wrong,’ said Koorland. ‘A rash move that risked provoking the orks, and cost the lives of millions, while you and Tull and the others who promoted it remain alive and well.’

A flicker of consternation crossed Mesring’s face. ‘Then it is good that you are here now, to fight them on our behalf.’

‘Aye, that is what we are, priest – warriors,’ said Thane.

‘One day, I hope to bring all our mighty warriors into the truth of the faith. Some are perhaps more amenable than others.’ His gaze strayed around the room, looking for someone. He smiled secretly to himself.

‘Then go and speak to them,’ said Thane. He glared menacingly at Mesring until the Ecclesiarch made his excuses and left.

A surge of anger built in Koorland’s chest. The men and women around him had been scheming while Terra burned. The temptation to sweep it all aside was great.

‘I am done here,’ he told Thane. ‘I return to the fleet. The Senatorum is broken, all the High Lords invested only in their own advancement. I have heard the name of the Emperor invoked by every charlatan in this house. This cannot be allowed to continue.’

With that he departed the room, the crowd parting hurriedly before him.

Seventeen

War in the dust

Magneric stamped over the gritty ruin of Dzelenic IV, assault cannon blazing. Orks filled the surface from horizon to horizon. More came thundering down from orbit in rickety landing craft, little more than balls of scrap that bounced to a halt on the ground before bursting into pieces. Sometimes they fell apart to reveal their mangled occupants, but more often than not mobs of howling greenskins came running out, shooting their weapons into the air. Magneric ploughed through them unconcerned, killing them without thought, the eye of his Dreadnought fixed upon the low ruin the Iron Warriors had occupied, visible over the ridge of a dune. By the gunfire flashing out, Kalkator still lived.

The ammunition counters in Magneric’s display blinked to orange as his assault cannon ran to below half capacity. The view Magneric had of the outside world was grainy, bleached out, striped with the lines of inferior pict capture. Reticules danced over his view, highlighting targets of priority, data-screeds and numerical data further crowding his vision, but he saw well enough to kill.

His flesh body floated in the sarcophagus at the machine’s heart. He was dimly aware of it, the hurts that it still suffered, the limbs that it lacked. It did not trouble him. Others given the singular honour of internment spoke of disassociation, a feeling of distance from the world of the living and a weariness that became harder and harder to bear. Magneric did not feel this. He considered the metal behemoth he dwelled within as his own flesh and blood, an extension of his will. Magneric refused to sleep like the others, and retained his rank and his own name, for Magneric had hatred to drive him onward. Kalkator was the wellspring and the object of this fury, an emotion pure in its heat and ferocity. Magneric lived for Kalkator’s death.

‘Kalkator! Kalkator! I will come and end you!’ He caught an ork in his power fist and crushed it flat, hurling the gory remains back into its fellows and bowling them over. Those that got back up again he gunned down with a spray of fire from his storm bolter.

‘The Emperor has decreed that I slay you, traitor! I am coming for you!’

Magneric was the ebon spear point of an unstoppable blade. His warriors came in his wake, driving through the orkish attack. Behind him Chaplain Aladucos chanted hymnals in praise of the Emperor, encouraging Magneric’s warriors to greater acts of violence. The Black Templars gunships duelled with ork fighters overhead. Three lay in smoking ruin four kilometres behind their advance. Magneric’s own craft sent a column of black smoke climbing skyward, but it did not matter. Only to go forward, to slaughter the foes of the Emperor, to continue the crusade to conquer the galaxy in the name of mankind!

Death was all that mattered to Magneric.

Let Baldon wheedle at him to rest, let Ralstan admonish him for his lack of maintenance slumber. He would sleep when the stain of Kalkator’s existence was wiped from the galaxy.

‘Onwards, brothers, in the name of the Emperor! Strike down these animals and carve a path towards those who betrayed the Lord of Terra. Feel His holy wrath. Kill the ork that we might strike down the traitors! Wash the sands of this dead world with their blood, and then let us away, and conquer, conquer, conquer in the Emperor’s name!’

Magneric surged on, batting orks from his path, until the rabble thinned and gave out. The crowd was behind him. He shot down the last few orks between him and the dune, gyros shifting within his body to compensate for the slip of the sand. He came over the crest, and looked down at the Iron Warriors’ last desperate redoubt.

It had been a building of unguessable height. The top part had been sheared away in the cataclysm that had destroyed the world, leaving sprouts of tangled rebar jutting from crumbling nubs of rockcrete. Three floors alone remained, set in a slight hollow scoured out by the actions of the wind blasting around the building, the bottommost level half-buried in the sand. The ruin had few windows, and one door. Perhaps that lack of apertures was why it had stood a thousand years in the face of howling winds while others around it had been worn down to angular patterns in the sand. The sole entrance was on the side facing Magneric, choked to the top with windblown dust. He rumbled with satisfaction. The traitors’ last Thunderhawk had come down hard a quarter of a kilometre away, ploughing up shattered concrete from the barren fields of the desert. The wreck smoked still. The Iron Warriors were going nowhere.

The glint of steel in the ruddy sunlight revealed Iron Warriors manning the building. A ring of dead orks three deep surrounded it, staining the dust black with their blood. None had come within twenty metres of the position and lived. The building was angled, knocked to one side by seismic upheaval, its rockcrete scoured rough by the dead world’s unforgiving weather. Cracks spidered it on all sides. As battered as Kalkator’s Great Company, it was nevertheless a serviceable fortress, and the Iron Warriors were far from beaten.

Magneric paused, revelling in the moment before he would crush his foe. Behind him the howl of the orks quietened, and the hard clatter of weapons fire abated. His sergeants, Chaplain and castellan all voxed him reporting the same thing from all fronts: the orks were withdrawing.

Laughing in triumph, Magneric stamped forward, sending crescents of sand skidding out in front of him, to stand at the edge of the killing field.

‘Kalkator!’ he boomed. ‘Kalkator! Come out, come out! You are caught! The orks retreat, and you face only me and my judgement. You are run to earth. Come out from your den and face me not as an animal, but as the noble warrior you once were. Ask for mercy, repent your sins against the Emperor and I shall absolve you of your transgressions with a swift death!’

Silence. Magneric’s vox clicked.

‘My lord,’ said Ralstan. ‘The orks have scattered, but I have reports from Ericus that there are many, many more inbound. The Obsidian Sky has been unable to engage with the Palimodes and is beset on all sides. Further ork craft are approaching. Be quick with this. We must leave!’

A noise of dissatisfaction rumbled from Magneric’s vox-emitter. ‘Kalkator! Answer me!’

This time a voice sounded from the building in reply. ‘Magneric! So high must I be in your regard, that you chase me for a thousand years and more, into the teeth of the greatest ork Waaagh! since Ullanor!’

‘Kalkator!’ boomed the Dreadnought. His pneumatics hissed, and the great block of his right shoulder shifted, lifting his assault cannon high. The barrels spun once, and halted. Magneric’s targeting array danced over the ruin, picking out the Iron Warriors in green outlines. Kalkator was not among them.

‘You are looking well. Iron without suits you.’

‘I am unmoved by your mockery,’ boomed Magneric. ‘Come out so that I might kill you!’

Other Black Templars gathered on the dune, kneeling down to take cover behind its ridge. Ralstan directed some of his warriors to fan out to the left and right to surround the building. They were respectfully silent. Kalkator and Magneric were veterans of the Heresy war. To hear them speak was to hear echoes of that awful conflict.

‘I ask for parley!’ shouted Kalkator.

‘You shall have none!’ roared Magneric. ‘I bring only the mercy of death, not a desire to speak.’

‘Then let me rephrase my offer,’ said Kalkator. ‘Three lascannons are pointed at your sarcophagus. If you refuse parley, or if you accept it and attempt to kill me, then I will have them open fire and burn whatever sorry scrap of flesh still exists within that machine.’

Silence fell. Evening was coming. The sinking sun, invisible behind its shroud of dust, pushed Magneric’s shadow out so that it fell upon Kalkator’s redoubt, grey and inflated in the scattered light.

‘Our auspexes detect a massive concentration of orks coming towards our position,’ said Kalkator. ‘Thousands. You are merely seventy-three warriors. You cannot hold them. I am quite content to sit here and watch them butcher you. But there is another way.’

‘My lord, he is correct,’ said Castellan Ralstan. ‘As Ericus informed us, orks are landing in number to the west. What are your orders?’

‘Do you hear them coming?’ goaded Kalkator.

‘My lord!’ said Ralstan.

Magneric roared. ‘Very well! Parley!’

‘Swear upon your honour you will not harm me,’ said Kalkator.

‘My acceptance of your truce is my bond! An oath is not required,’ bellowed Magneric indignantly.

‘Nevertheless, say it,’ said Kalkator.

‘You have my word,’ said Magneric proudly.

Kalkator emerged on the roof of the building, standing up from whatever hiding place he had been skulking in. ‘Then let us talk,’ he said.

For the first time in centuries, Kalkator stood facing Magneric. Caesax and his vexillary flanked the warsmith, the banner of his Great Company rippling in the cooling wind. Magneric’s Sword Brethren made a shallow arc about him, Ralstan at his side. Hatred glared out from eye-lenses set in black and iron-grey armour.

After a moment’s thought, Kalkator reached up and unsealed his helm. He lifted it from his head, and looked upon the Dreadnought with unmoderated eyes.

‘It is good to see you, Magneric.’

Magneric’s sole glass eye stared unblinkingly back. Upon his sensorium feed, reticules locked onto Kalkator’s vulnerable points glowed red and screamed that he should destroy the traitor.

‘Do not seek to play upon old affections!’ he snarled, his vox-emitters expressing his sentiment as an inhuman machine growl.

‘We found ourselves on opposite sides of the war,’ said Kalkator. ‘I do not see why that should invalidate our friendship.’

‘You turned on everything we fought for! You betrayed the Imperium, and cast your lot in with the Dark Powers of the universe. You have ruined mankind.’

Kalkator’s lip curved. ‘We did betray the Emperor, if such you can call abandoning the service of a liar who concealed the truth of reality from those who loved Him, who used our Legion carelessly. You might call it betrayal, freeing mankind from the fetters of oppression, allowing the strong to prevail, showing our kind the real meaning of a power that is accessible to all, not just those self-appointed guardians who hide their purposes behind untruths and oppression.’

‘You are the oppressors,’ said Magneric. ‘Your words are false.’

‘The sons of our lowliest slaves might one day join our Legion. And if they are imbued with our iron, then they shall stand strong, knowing fully in their hearts that they serve the most honest masters of all – themselves. It is you who is mistaken, dear Magneric. You Imperial Fists and that braggart father of yours. You are blind to the truth.’

‘I am Imperial Fist no longer,’ said Magneric, ‘but a Black Templar, and I am party to a greater truth. The powers of Old Night have deceived and corrupted you.’

‘And what new truth is this, I wonder?’ said Kalkator, gesturing at the relics hanging from the Dreadnought, and the texts painted upon his armour.

‘Devotion to the only one who might save us all from the hell of the warp. It was always thus.’

‘I say you are wrong,’ said Kalkator. ‘You say I am wrong. We could stand here all day and argue who is right and who is not while the orks come over that dune and hack us into pieces. Let us agree that both of us wish mankind to survive, only that we differ in the method.’

‘You are self-serving. Evil. The Emperor offers genuine salvation to the human race.’

‘Be that as it may, I do not think the orks are going to listen to your sermonising as long as I have.’

‘I will not fight alongside you again, Kalkator.’

‘Are you ashamed, Magneric?’ said Kalkator. ‘Is that why you pursue me so recklessly? I remember a time when our comradeship was lauded as an example of how our Legions could set aside their differences and find brotherhood.’

‘A trust and bond you betrayed.’

‘I could say the same of you. We fought together, Magneric. We must do so again. The alternatives are poor. We can kill each other now, or let the orks slay us one after the other. Together, we have a chance. Together, we might leave this world.’

‘A few hours ago, you might have made your escape. But the orks fill the skies. You lack sufficient flight support to break free,’ gloated Magneric. ‘Your gunships would never make it to the surface to extract you.’

‘Air cover would be part of the price of our cooperation,’ said Kalkator. ‘We fight together, we leave together. You allow us to depart the system, and then if you really must you can continue this wasteful pursuit for another thousand years.’

Ralstan voxed the Dreadnought privately. ‘As much as I hate to say this, my lord, the warsmith does have a point. Together our numbers are doubled. Nearly one hundred and fifty Space Marines against the orks, we will prevail.’

‘They no longer have the right to name themselves Legiones Astartes!’ roared Magneric for all to hear. He stamped from one foot to the other. ‘They are traitors, nothing more!’

‘We are Space Marines, Magneric,’ said Kalkator. ‘Deny it all you will, but the same gifts your warriors possess are ours too. We must fight together, or we will all perish.’

‘Never!’

‘Think how much more good you will be able to do if you survive to continue your foolish crusades. How many xenos will live if you die, how many human worlds will call out for protection from the predation of mankind’s foes and you will not be there to answer? Neither of us want mankind to fall. Today we have a common enemy. Communicate your agreement with the Obsidian Sky, and I shall command the Palimodes to fight alongside your ship. If they do not stand united, your craft will never make it to the surface either. Do not be a fool, Magneric. Remember our battles, and how often I was right then. I am right now.’

A long moment passed. No words were forthcoming. The two lines of Space Marines faced each other silently.

Kalkator shook his head, and replaced his helm. ‘You are making a grave mistake. I will return to my warriors, and we shall–’

‘Wait!’ said Magneric, his voice low and distorted, the aged vox-equipment popping. ‘I reluctantly agree. We will fight side by side, one more time. Hear me, warriors of the Black Templars!’ He rotated from side to side, addressing all his followers. ‘No member of our Chapter is to harm the Iron Warriors until our treaty is sundered. So swear I, Magneric, Marshal of the Kalkator Crusade. Ralstan, command Ericus to aid the Iron Warriors ship. Have him provide me an estimated extraction time.’ Magneric bent down, his sarcophagus slit glowing in the failing light. ‘We will leave this world together, Kalkator, or not at all. Do not think to betray me.’

‘You have my word that I will abide by the terms of our agreement,’ said Kalkator, ‘more for the sake of our old friendship than for anything else. Now come! Bring your warriors into the redoubt. We must make our preparations.’

Eighteen

Red Haven minus one, plus one

Water, so rare a commodity on arid Mars, ran wastefully from a loose pipe connector. Orange slime furred the join, a mix of rust and biological contamination that hung half a metre down the wall. The water ran down this trailing, slimy beard, dripping silently into a slick puddle more algae than moisture. This patch of errant water was the only distinguishing feature of the pressure-release chamber Yendl waited in. Rust streaked the walls. A dead servo-skull, perhaps the drone that was supposed to report on damage like the leak, lay dusty in the corner. No sign of water flooding was apparent; evidently no pressure release had been needed in this part of the system for a long time. It was unremarkable, overlooked. The ideal place for the cadre to meet.

Yendl was tense but calm. The sense of imminent discovery had lessened. She had a new identity, assumed at the cost of another’s life. The orange robes of a mid-ranking data-tech cloaked her stooped body, her limbs twisted into a new shape. Even waiting for her fellows she maintained the disguise.

Yendl blinked. Mariazet Isolde was suddenly there in the round door drain at the base of the chamber ramp. Her face was new, polymorphine-warped, but in the company of Yendl she did not keep up the rest of her pretence. She moved as an Assassin, without sound, every footstep deliberate, her body the acme of poise. She joined Yendl. They did not speak. Haast was the last member of Red Haven to come.

‘You are tardy,’ said Isolde.

‘I was followed,’ said Haast.

‘Did you lose them?’ asked Yendl.

‘Better than that,’ said Haast. ‘Wait.’

She disappeared for little over a minute, then returned carrying a man, gagged and bound hand and foot, over her shoulder. He was larger than her, but she bore him easily. Haast dropped him on the rockcrete. Hard.

‘He’s been trailing me a week now. I decided it was time to find out who he is.’

‘Verraux is dead,’ said Yendl. Haast nodded, her eyes fixed on her prisoner.

‘That I suspected,’ said Isolde. ‘I have had no word from her for some time.’

‘I was nearly discovered,’ said Yendl.

‘Are we further compromised?’ asked Isolde.

‘They look for me, but cannot find me,’ said Yendl. ‘My information gathering suffers – I must find new access to the Martian noosphere. They are watching the old ways.’

‘That is acceptable,’ said Isolde. ‘Tybalt?’

‘He is hidden still,’ said Haast. ‘I moved his cryo-pod a week ago and checked on it before coming here. No signs of detection.’

‘Then matters could be worse,’ said Isolde. ‘Let us deal with this one while we wait for the message.’

Haast bent to the man’s head and ripped his gag free. He looked at the three Assassins confidently.

‘We work to the same goals,’ he said without preamble. ‘I mean you no harm. You can release me.’

‘We will be the judges of that,’ said Yendl. ‘Who are you, who do you work for?’

‘Whoever I’m told to be, but I’ve been ordered to reveal my purpose should my life be threatened by you.’

‘I’d say it is threatened,’ said Isolde, her hand straying to her knife.

‘I can only agree,’ said the man.

Isolde squatted down next to him. ‘Your name is Raznick. You work for Wienand.’

‘Now how did you come by that information?’ said Raznick.

Isolde tapped her head. ‘Memcore implant. I have a record of every Inquisitorial agent active in the Sol System.’

‘The ones you know about,’ said Raznick.

‘I know about you,’ said Isolde.

‘Wienand’s dead,’ said Haast. ‘You’re out of a job.’

‘Is she now?’ said Raznick.

‘What is your mission?’ asked Yendl.

‘Observation, nothing more. I was told to keep an eye on you, make sure Lord Vangorich doesn’t have you do anything rash.’

Isolde scowled. ‘You of the Inquisition, the keepers of the Imperium. Amateurs.’

‘Maybe I wanted to get caught?’ said Raznick.

‘Right,’ said Isolde. ‘Because you want me to make a hole in your brain. Clever.’

‘Shh!’ hissed Haast.

Suddenly, all three members of the Assassinorum cell had pistols in their hands and trained on the drainage door. A faint skittering came up the enclosed canal outside. Isolde moved to the bottom of the ramp. They waited as the pattering grew louder.

A rat appeared in the door, weirdly long-limbed and long-bodied, a Terran animal adapted to the lower-gravity conditions of Mars.

‘It is here,’ said Isolde, holstering her weapon. The rat remained stock still as she bent down and picked it up. It immediately sank its teeth into the web of her thumb.

Blood welled from the bite as she returned to the others and offered the rat to them. Yendl and Haast allowed it to bite them.

‘Red Haven gathered,’ said Isolde.

‘Red Haven confirmed,’ said the rat, and expired in Haast’s hands.

Yendl extended a fine cutting tool from her augmetic hand and sliced the rat from jaw to the base of its tail. Haast spread the belly. Inside, the rat was mostly cybernetic, a tiny mechanism surrounded by meat. Haast retrieved a silver ball from a housing at the centre. It bleeped, and a recorded message began to play.

‘Red Haven. This is Grand Master Vangorich. I have received Yendl’s troubling information regarding Kubik’s new experiments. Our suspicions that he is working entirely for the good of Mars and not the Imperium as a whole are being sadly borne out. We must prepare contingencies for a final solution.

‘Yendl, gather information on this new venture. Find out what the Adeptus Mechanicus want so many ork bodies for, and what they are doing with them. Prime your noospheric plague phage for release. If the Adeptus Mechanicus make their move, we shall decapitate the priesthood and destroy its informational network. Haast, hand over the care of Tybalt to Isolde. You are the most talented infiltrator in the cell. I want you to watch Kubik night and day. Build up a complete picture of his every habit. Operational level detail to be collated and submitted to me by the end of next week via the usual channels. Once you have this, Haast, you and Isolde are to find a suitable deployment site for Tybalt, and secrete him nearby. Isolde, begin preparation to infiltrate Kubik’s household as soon as Haast has performed her task. I want all three of you in position. One Assassin may be stopped, four cannot be.’

‘He’s going to assassinate the Fabricator General of Mars? He’s overstepping his office,’ said Raznick. ‘Can’t you see that? Let me report to my superiors! If you go through with this, it will mean civil war.’

‘Preparation does not betoken execution,’ said Isolde. ‘Preparedness is the watchword of the Officio Assassinorum.’

‘We’re going to have to kill you, Raznick,’ said Haast.

‘Your task is great, but you have my utmost confidence,’ Vangorich was saying. ‘The survival of the Imperium hangs by a thread. No matter your duty, I know you will perform it without question. I know you will succeed.’

‘Raznick’s death was the only outcome,’ said Isolde. ‘Did you think we might let him live, Haast?’

‘No,’ Haast said.

Raznick sank resignedly into the floor. ‘Just make it quick,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ said Isolde. ‘Suffering in this instance is of benefit to no one.’ She took a small knife from an arm sheath. Its blue steel edges began to vibrate once it was drawn. ‘Present your throat,’ said Isolde. ‘It’s the quickest way.’

‘Vangorich hasn’t finished yet,’ said Yendl. ‘Leave it.’

‘Finally,’ said Vangorich’s recording. ‘There is an Inquisitorial agent by the name of Raznick who has been assigned to follow you. If you have not already killed him, do not harm him. Make contact with him. It is in the interests of the Imperium that the Inquisition and Officio Assassinorum work together. Inquisitorial Representative Veritus has placed the Inquisition’s assets on Mars at our disposal. Raznick is the key to them.’

Isolde bent down to Raznick and cut his bonds. The ties offered no more resistance to the blade than smoke. He sat up and rubbed his wrists.

‘Today is my lucky day,’ he said.

‘Good hunting, Red Haven,’ concluded Vangorich.

Haast dropped the ball. It hit the plascrete. She stamped on it hard, breaking it into pieces.

‘Well then, my ladies,’ said Raznick from the floor, ‘what is our next move?’

Nineteen

Witch

In tight formation, the Palimodes and the Obsidian Sky drove through the ork fleet, brothers once more, if but for a while. Ramshackle ork craft were blasted apart at close quarters by punishing broadsides issuing from the ships. Spinal lances stabbed out, vaporising smaller craft and raking long, glowing rents into the sides of the others.

On the command deck of the Obsidian Sky, the Black Templars bondsmen went about their duties efficiently. Ericus sat tensely in his command throne, reading the ebb and flow of battle through augur and implant. ‘Palimodes, you are drifting ahead,’ said Ericus. ‘Maintain formation for maximum concentration of fire.’

Attonax responded, vox only, his voice crackling as much with anger as the constant, thumping roar of the orks’ broadsides. ‘I am not yours to command.’

‘If you wish to see your master returned to your vessel, you are,’ said Ericus. ‘By all means, we can go back to our previous bellicosity instead if you wish. If not, regain formation.’

The Palimodes slipped back, rolling a few degrees as attitude jets adjusted its trim.

‘That’s better,’ said Ericus to himself. ‘Proceed forward,’ he ordered. ‘We’re close to breaking out of this.’

A flight of ork attack craft swooped down for an attack run on the prow of the ship, guns spitting. A storm of anti-fighter fire tore them apart. The Obsidian Sky rocked as a massive projectile impacted on the void shields, overloading a power conduit high up in the command deck’s ceiling. Sparks showered down.

‘Master Scutum, report!’

‘Port void shield is down.’

‘Get it up. Intensify port fire. They’ve barely scratched us, we’ll make it through. Twelve degrees to port, helm, steady adjustment. Get me a good line on the target. Palimodes, prepare for synchronised fire.’

‘As you say, shipmaster,’ responded a surly Attonax.

The last obstacle in their path tracked across the hololith with the Obsidian Sky’s course adjustment, an ugly brute of a ship created by collision rather than construction. Much of the front half was made up of a crude, toothed beak, like that of an oceanic predator. This deliberate design gave way to a humped mass of rock studded with cannons and towers. Behind that the drive section sprouted a collection of tubes jutting off in multiple directions.

‘Prepare to diverge, Attonax. We’ll take the underside, you the top.’

The ork ship was coming about, its mismatched engines erratically flaring.

‘Too easy,’ said Ericus.

An impact shivered the Obsidian Sky. Ericus kept his focus upon the cruiser.

‘Second wave of boarders reported, teleport. Multiple contacts on seven decks.’ The Master Augurum looked back to his instruments. ‘I have high-energy emissions close by. They’re coming for the command deck.’

Gunfire, feeble and popping compared to the thunderous rolls of the ship’s main batteries, sounded from outside. Men shouted in the distance, competing with the joyous roaring of orks at war.

‘Secure the deck. Close blast doors. Let free the spirits of our weapon emplacements,’ commanded Ericus. Red lights spun and flashed. A harsh klaxon heralded the sealing of the command deck. ‘Lord Rolans will deal with our uninvited guests. Every man aboard this deck must save his thoughts for the destruction of our target. The lives of our masters depend upon success. Do not waver from your purpose!’

The ork ship came closer, dominating the hololith. ‘Open the oculus once more, let’s set eyes upon the vessel. Gunnery, prepare for fire. Charge lances. Hold broadsides for passing. Attonax, Palimodes to perform the same, confirm.’

‘As you say, Ericus. One day I will make you regret ordering me around so.’

‘Perhaps you have a better plan?’

Attonax remained silent.

‘All hands, prepare!’ commanded Ericus.

The oculus shutters slid open. Bright planetshine chased away the dimness of the bridge. The ork ship was above them relative to the pull of the Obsidian Sky’s grav-plating. Its dorsal aspect faced the planet, the Palimodes cutting between it and the hazy caramel of Dzelenic IV’s atmosphere. In life it was even uglier than upon the hololithic tactical display, a mechanical parody of a diseased void-whale, its stone and metal skin pocked by cosmic impacts, back crooked. It was far from defenceless for all its primitive construction, and a hundred guns of all sizes spat orange fire from every side.

‘Prow up twelve degrees. Master Scutum, concentrate shield replenishment on prow. Gunnery, on my mark. Target amidships. Tear it in two.’

The underside of the ork ship moved down across the oculus as the Obsidian Sky pointed itself directly at the planetary equator. The fire from the other ork ships had slackened off, most having been destroyed, the rest fleeing in disarray.

‘Fire lances!’ ordered Ericus.

‘Firing lances!’

Five energy beams stabbed out from the Obsidian Sky. The ship was still moving upwards relative to the ork cruiser, and they carved a deep wound of molten rock into the asteroid that made up the middle section of the craft. The Palimodes opened fire a second later. Turrets sheared off and floated away to join the debris cloud of the battle. Fire and the explosions of touched-off munitions stores burst from across the surface. The ork cruiser continued firing. Obsidian Sky’s forward void shield blazed and winked out, and the mass projectiles cast out by the ork ship slammed into the vessel’s armour. Rumbling troubled the Obsidian Sky, and Ericus was obliged to shout.

‘Roll to starboard, eighty degrees! Increase forward thrust. Prepare to fire starboard weapons batteries. Palimodes, we shall go first. Hold back, or we shall hit each other.’ Only hours before, that was exactly what they had been trying to do. Now the two ships fought together as if they had been part of the same fleet for decades.

The ork ship slipped out of direct view. The surface of Dzelenic IV filled the oculus, nothing but debris from the battle between the Obsidian Sky and the rescue of the Marshal. Ericus watched the target upon the hololith for the perfect moment to strike.

‘Fire starboard battery!’ he yelled.

A ripple of shock waves shook the vessel as its main guns fired. ‘Give me a visual feed!’ shouted Ericus. The hololith representation was replaced by a pict feed from the starboard-side pict-eyes. Hundreds of shells slammed into the ork ship, each bursting into a perfect sphere of atomic fire. Then the Obsidian Sky was past. Ericus ordered a rear view projected, so that he could watch the Palimodes’ attack run. It came in the wake of the Obsidian Sky, unleashing its own salvo as the fires from the first were blinking out. Another blooming of atomic destruction followed. The Palimodes sailed past as the ork ship broke into multiple pieces, trailing gas and corpses.

A cheer went up from the command deck. Behind the Obsidian Sky the ork fleet was a shattered mess of metal, stone and frozen atmosphere. The sound of fighting outside the blast doors was subsiding.

‘Raise Lord Magneric and Lord Castellan Ralstan. We shall launch extraction craft as soon as they command,’ said Ericus.

From every window, boltguns fired, cutting down orks by the dozen. Time after time the orks attempted the walls, only to be thrown back. Breaching teams were targeted by disciplined Space Marine fire. Heavy weapons were neutralised, tanks and guns eliminated by long-range lascannon shots. The swarms of orks hurling themselves at the walls were further thinned by grenades and careful flamer bursts. Large-calibre ork bullets took chunks from the ancient rockcrete. Rockets spiralled in on corkscrews of black smoke, leaving smoking craters in the walls, but none could penetrate the building.

‘Slay them! Slay them all!’ roared Magneric. Unable to go within, he stood behind a berm of rubble torn from the desert sands by the Iron Warriors. His men fired from behind him, killing those orks that posed a threat to the ancient, while Magneric himself selected targets on the basis of size. The bigger the ork, the more likely they were to receive the attentions of Magneric’s assault cannon.

Within the building, Kalkator paced the buckled floors, shouting encouragement and curses at his men. Ralstan shadowed his every step, alert for treachery, but there was none. The Black Templars and Iron Warriors were thoroughly intermingled, fighting as one force. Ties to the old Legions were forgotten, treachery was put out of mind. They fought together as Space Marines, born of the same science, equipped with the same weaponry and armour. Blood and battle removed the differences between them. Ralstan’s misgivings were swamped for a while by martial pride. His desire to show the Iron Warriors who were the greater warriors had him exhorting his brothers to greater accuracy, smoother fire, wiser target selection.

‘Do not fear, my brothers!’ he shouted. ‘We shall meet them blade to blade soon enough. Kill them now at distance, lay their vile xenos hides low into the dust of this world. When they are bloodied and enraged, then shall we test ourselves against them!’

‘If this were a larger force, or better equipped, we would perish here,’ said Kalkator to Ralstan.

‘Maybe you would. The Black Templars will not be bested!’

‘A larger ork attack annihilated two of my worlds,’ said Kalkator, ‘and reduced my Great Company to this sad remnant. You speak from ignorance. You would have died.’

‘Never!’ said Ralstan. ‘Not while the Emperor watches over us.’ He left Kalkator, irked by his sniping, and went up onto the roof. Joy at battle filled him. Afterwards, he would have more words with the Marshal about disobeying the call to the Last Wall, but for now the reality of battle was a clean wind, scouring his soul and his thoughts of doubt. If they could not battle the orks with the rest of their Chapter, so be it. Here was the chance of great slaughter!

He looked out over the ork horde. There were thousands of them, but there was some truth to what Kalkator said. These were pirates, opportunists ranging ahead of the main fleets. They had little heavy equipment, and their fleet was locked in battle with the Palimodes and the Obsidian Sky. If there were an attack moon, the situation would be different. A scouting group, he thought. And still there were five thousand orks and more.

A bright flash drew his eyes heavenward. Night brought no thinning of the dust clouds that hid the face of Dzelenic IV, but when the sun had gone the weapons discharge of the void battle raging overhead replaced its light.

‘Ship death,’ said Ralstan.

The vox hissed in his ear.

‘Castellan Ralstan, Marshal Magneric, respond. This is the Obsidian Sky.’

‘Castellan Ralstan responding, shipmaster.’

‘Yes, my lord.’ Ericus sounded exulted, pleased. Ralstan heard victory in his voice. ‘The ork fleet is shattered. We are free and able to bring you back aboard. Is this your desire?’

Ralstan wanted to say no. Every warrior’s instinct told him to remain and slay until no ork breathed upon Dzelenic IV. With difficulty, he replied. ‘Begin extraction immediately. We are surrounded by orks. Extend air cover to the Iron Warriors gunships. Escort them down.’

‘My lord?’

‘An oath was taken,’ said Ralstan.

‘Thunderhawks are away,’ said Ericus. ‘Prepare for evacuation.’

Ralstan watched the sky. In twenty minutes gunships would come screaming from orbit, scouring the orks from the building. Then one short flight awaited.

After that, they could drop this pretence at alliance.

A change came over the orks. Their cries of frustration became barbarous cheers, starting in the east, running out until all the filthy masses of them cried and beat their chests. Ralstan hurried over to the east corner of the building. There, at the back of the ork force, shone a sickly light in the dark. A hush fell over the orks. At some signal invisible to Ralstan, the xenos drew back from the building, leaving a wide area free of everything but their dead.

A familiar pressure troubled his skull. Thunder cracked in the distance.

‘Witch!’ he spat in disgust.

The psyker came escorted by burly orks in heavy armour. A dozen more scrawny examples capered and danced behind him. The witch was peculiar in appearance, even for an ork, carrying no gun or heavy cutting blade, only a long copper staff chained to his wrist in a manner similar to the oath bonds of the Black Templars’ weapons. Upon his chest hung a breastplate of ribs strung together. Bone fetishes and shiny scraps of metal dangled from his tusks and ears. He wore a huge greatcoat, filched from an ogryn by the looks of it. He was wholly incongruous, a whimsical creature in marked contrast to the brutal practicality of the other orks, but that he was a being of great power was not in doubt. A nimbus of green energy haloed his head. Fizzing sparks spat from his mouth when he roared, sending his insane followers into paroxysms of laughter.

The orks parted to let him through, and he strode forward, twitching and cackling, his massive minders gimlet-eyed by his sides.

Magneric reset his ocular magnification to standard.

Through his vox-link, Magneric listened to his castellan confer with Kalkator. ‘Have your men take it down,’ said Ralstan.

‘I have already commanded them to do so.’

‘Lascannons will do no good,’ interrupted Magneric.

‘We shall see,’ said Kalkator. ‘Heavy support, open fire.’

The shot was a clear one, a straight line down an avenue of orks directly to the psyker. Three beams of ruby light leapt down this path, aimed precisely at the ork. They struck home with terrible power, enough to cut a Land Raider in two. A second light burst from the psyker in response, meeting with that of the cannons and obscuring the witch. When it dissipated the psyker strode on, laughing madly, its dancing followers somersaulting and leaping about in ecstasy.

‘Again!’ snapped Kalkator.

The ork raised his hand, waved it up and down sharply. A jet of energy flicked out from it, singeing the ground. Where it rolled over dead orks they jiggled and danced, momentarily animated by the psyker’s might. The jet grew broader and brighter the closer it came to the building. It made no sound as it bore down straight upon the weathered walls.

‘Down, down!’ yelled Ralstan. Power-armoured warriors scrambled to get out of the way as the blast hit the building. It connected silently, passing ethereally through the walls, then the ork clasped his hand and ripped it backward, and the rockcrete of the building sundered. The ruin shook with the force. Atomised rockcrete sprayed outward in a cloud. Where the energy touched Black Templar or Iron Warrior, they convulsed and fell dead. Armour collapsed, helmets rolled free, allowing the liquid remains to pour onto the ground. In a second, the dynamic of the battle changed. The walls were breached, the way was open to the orks.

They heard the indrawing of breath coming from the horde.

‘Waaagh!’ they bellowed. ‘WAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHH!’ The orks broke into a run, coming at the hole in the wall, heedless of the hundreds felled by booming boltguns.

‘We cannot hold this building,’ voxed Magneric. ‘We must attack. If their witch falls, they may withdraw. It is our only chance of survival.’

‘We will be slaughtered,’ said Kalkator. ‘We must only hold out for another handful of minutes.’

‘We will be dead. The gunships downed. The witch must die.’

‘Then we shall fight with you, Magneric. In honour of the times before,’ said Kalkator.

‘No,’ said Magneric, stepping over the low wall of his emplacement. The orks were only fifty metres away, and coming in fast from all sides. ‘There is one defence proof against this sorcery, and that is faith,’ said Magneric. ‘Black Templars, to me!’

The Black Templars abandoned their positions by the Iron Warriors, leaping from windows and rooftop, rushing to join their Marshal.

‘Cover us,’ said Ralstan to Kalkator, jumping outside, his armour absorbing the shock of the six-metre drop.

‘Iron Warriors!’ shouted Kalkator. ‘To the breach! Clear the way for the Black Templars, or we shall all perish.’

Twenty

Faith and iron

The Black Templars lined up on either side of their Marshal, already firing. Sword Brethren ran to form an escort around him.

The orks closed. Flamers sang their deadly song of fire, incinerating dozens. Several came through, skin blazing, still ready to fight. These were felled by shots from the building, or died upon the waiting swords of the Templars. When a space was cleared the Black Templars opened fire again with long-practised discipline, rapid bursts of mass-reactives that together made an impenetrable wall.

Magneric lifted up his vox-amplifiers to their maximum. ‘Let none survive! Destroy them all! He that feareth the witch has conceded defeat, even as his boltgun sings still in his hand! Attack, attack!’

The Dreadnought led from the front, his assault cannon blazing. At a run he slammed into the press of orks, smiting them with his power fist. His assault cannon glowed hot, blazing through the last few thousand rounds in a glorious sheet of searing death, felling orks in a wide swathe. Those closest to the rotating barrels of the cannon were blasted apart, a fine mist of flesh and blood bursting from them. As far as forty metres from the Dreadnought, orks were torn to pieces, limbs and heads scattering.

Sweeping back and forth, Magneric carved a bloody road to the ork psyker. The fire of his Black Templars and the Iron Warriors in the building behind him kept them from surging back in. Behind him his men advanced, firing relentlessly. Magneric made straight for the witch, bashing any greenskin that came between them off its feet, lofting them high over the heads of the others. His last rounds cut down the creature’s bodyguard, but no more. Bullets sent true at the witch were deflected as the lascannons had been, or exploded with bright, green flashes. The psyker gibbered and pranced, waving its copper staff above its head in challenge. Its lunatic entourage ran past him, fingers hooked to tear at the Dreadnought. From behind, a trio of crude walkers waddled up to intercept the Marshal.

Magneric’s assault cannon ceased firing. Warning chimes sang in his sensorium – ammunition depleted. The five-digit counter for the weapon’s rounds glowed red: five large zeroes.

‘Thou shalt not escape my wrath!’ roared Magneric, and pressed forward. Orks surged in to fill the gap, readily as water flooding back. But Magneric was already moving, his short legs pumping, shifting the great bulk of his armoured tomb into an unstoppable run. Orks were barged aside by his mass, slammed to paste under his armoured tread. The biggest of them were flung away, bones shattered. Nothing could stop him.

Behind Magneric the brothers of the Black Templars continued their advance. Ordinarily guarded in their new faith, they sang their hymns to the Emperor openly, chanting prayers never heard upon the lips of a Space Marine. Flamers sent out rolling clouds of white-hot promethium, melting the orks by the score as they sought to regain lost ground. Where they passed between the cones of fire, they were met by bolts that slew and maimed. The press of greenskins was so great that the Templars could not keep them back forever, but they had no intention of doing so. This was a prelude to the real struggle. The rage of Dorn burned hot in them. Let their brother Chapters plan and fortify. That was not their way.

‘Sigismund!’ they shouted. ‘For the glory of the black cross! For the Emperor, holy Lord of Terra! Praise be!’

Five rounds of disciplined fire, and they let out a deafening war cry. ‘No fear, no regret, no mercy!’ They drew their chainswords and axes and charged, singing glories to the Emperor as they ran, surging past Magneric into the horde of orks.

Deep within the crowding adamantium of his towering tomb, the hearts of Magneric lifted at what he witnessed. He pressed on, Sword Brethren to his left and right. Volleys of bolter fire punched orks from their feet. The greenskins beat around him, unstoppable as the sea. He was a rock, and their fury was spent harmlessly on the metal of his skin. The Templars clove through them swiftly and surely, men o’war defying the tempest.

‘The Emperor protects!’ boomed Magneric. His storm bolter chattered its approval of his piety. ‘Blessed be the Lord of Mankind! Lift up your spirits, my brothers. Regard that which is true and eternal. Praise be to the God-Emperor, praise be to the saviour of humanity! Praise be! Praise be! Praise be!’

‘Praise be!’ scores of voices shouted back.

Strange lightnings crackled around the forces of the orks. Writhing bolts of power leapt skyward, punching rippled holes in the clouds. Tendrils of energy rose from the greenskins’ heavy faces, the fury of their vile breed feeding the powers of their sorcerer. Screaming curses, the weirdboy swept down his staff, and a beam of green warpfire vomited from his mouth, incinerating the orks that stood between the witch and the Dreadnought. No machine nor man could stand up to such raw power, and the weirdboy cackled through the fires at the doom his gods had unleashed upon his enemy. But the green fire hit an invisible barrier, splashing outwards in a writhing of broken might. The Dreadnought was unharmed.

‘I do not fear you!’ roared Magneric. ‘For the Emperor guides my right hand! His regard is ever on me, and His glory cloaks me. Behold the radiant might of the Lord of Terra! Behold the power of His champion! Abhor the witch, deny the witch, destroy the witch!’

‘Praise be!’ shouted the Black Templars.

The weirdboy shrank backwards. He lifted his hands to the air, calling up a storm of eldritch power from the warriors around him. Spectral light brought an early dawn to the battlefield, greenish and sinister, a howling maelstrom building that tugged ork wraithforms partially free of their bodies, hungry for their souls. The orks howled the louder, and began to chant. ‘Gork! Mork! Gork! Mork! Gork! Mork!’ a guttural rumbling that grew faster and faster until the names blurred into one. ‘Gorkamorkagorkamorkagorkamorka!’

The psyker was only metres in front of Magneric, arms held to the sky, his demented face lit by blazing white-green power. A whirlwind of abominable psychic energy raced around and around him, sparks of it spearing from his eyes, ears and mouth.

One of Magneric’s attendant Sword Brethren was cut down by his foes, his sword arm grabbed, bolter torn from his hand, his helm wrenched from his head. Another disappeared into a firefly swarm of sparks, disintegrated by a bizarre energy weapon. The others found themselves surrounded, and fought back to back. Their line was disrupted, leaving Magneric to go on alone.

The three walkers moved in front of Magneric as he closed upon his target. The first died, its cylindrical pilot’s compartment crushed by a single swing of Magneric’s four-fingered power fist. Magneric barged its remains aside, spraying lubricant and blood. The second swiped at him with cruel shears, grabbing at the stilled barrels of his assault cannon. The blades squealed on metal. Magneric wrenched himself free, rotating his torso to slam his fist again and again into the smaller walker. On the fourth strike, its primitive power plant detonated. Magneric stepped through a roiling cloud of fire to see the last machine stumbling away. He let it go. The psyker was before him.

‘Gorkamorkagorkamorkagorkamorka!’ chanted the orks. The psyker’s power drove them into a frenzy, and they hewed and cut and threw themselves again and again at the Black Templars, dragging many to their dooms.

‘This ends now,’ said Magneric. ‘O Emperor of Terra, lord of the stars! Once more cast Your protection about me, so that I might slay this enemy of Yours.’

‘Praise be!’ answered the Black Templars. They were few, but the strength of their faith made them sound legion.

He strode forward. A beam of light blazed from the psyker’s eyes, splashing to nothing before it could touch Magneric. The Marshal leaned forward, grabbing the weirdboy’s head. Energy leapt uncontrollably from the thing’s cranium, earthing itself in his armour.

‘So perish all unclean witches,’ said Magneric, and shut his fist, crushing the ork’s skull.

The vortex about the ork burst outward at the moment of its death, slamming into Magneric with such force that he came close to toppling backward. Green lines of power stabbed out, spearing orks.

And the orks died.

They fell by the hundred, heads exploded by psychic feedback, or their souls torn from their bodies. They dropped as the shock wave raced over them. Walkers clanked to a halt. Vehicles ran out of control or skidded and toppled over.

The light dissipated. Lightning chased itself across the skies.

Magneric turned from side to side. Half of his warriors were dead; the rest stood in a sea of corpses, black armour battered, scrips and robes bloody, but alive nonetheless. There was not a single ork left standing on the battlefield.

‘The witches,’ rumbled Magneric, and his voice was as thunder upon the suddenly silent field. ‘Their witches are their weakness! My brothers, the Emperor shows us the way! He delivers us victory, and in His beneficence reveals the road to final triumph! This is why we were sent here, this is why He brought us to Dzelenic Four. Praise be!’

As one, the Black Templars got to their knees, clasped their hands about the hilts of the swords, drove the points into the earth and bowed their heads.

‘Praise be!’ they shouted, and the faith in them burned twice as bright at their deliverance.

Kalkator took refuge from the energy wave as it hit the building. When it passed he stood, and to his amazement found himself looking down upon a field of dead orks. The Dreadnought marched across the corpses towards the fort, bellowing pieties, surrounded by his warriors singing hymns for the Emperor. Magneric stopped below the walls and angled his glacis upward.

‘What is this?’ said Kalkator. ‘The cult of the Emperor as god has grown so strong it has you in its clutches?’

‘What of it? I will not deny my faith! See, warsmith.’ Magneric raised a mighty metal fist and rotated upon his waist gimbal, showing the devastation of the battlefield triumphantly. ‘How can you deny it? You have witnessed the glory of the Emperor first hand, and that the strength of the Emperor is paramount over all things! Even sorely wounded upon His Golden Throne, He wields a power that cannot be denied! Nothing can stop Him, nor those who serve Him truly with faith within their hearts. One day He will rid the galaxy of all evil, for unlike the creatures you threw your lot in with He is just. Justice comes for you, Kalkator, the Emperor’s justice, and all your wicked betrayers will be destroyed for your treachery. Look upon this battlefield, look upon the slaughter. This was done by His will alone. That is why we follow Him.’

Kalkator gripped at the parapet, looking down on the enemy who, so long ago, had been a friend.

‘I am genuinely at a loss for words. Do your loyalist brothers know you have caught the madness of the puling herds and have turned your back upon the Imperial Truth, the lie you fought so hard to protect? That you are casting it aside for the greatest heresy of all?’

‘The Emperor protected us with His lie,’ said Kalkator. ‘He protected us further by denying His godhood. We have had the scales lifted from our eyes. He is a god. The proof is around us everywhere, here on this battleground.’

Lights appeared in the sky, growing brighter. The Thunderhawks were coming.

‘You are abandoning everything you vowed to honour, and you call me a traitor?’ said Kalkator. ‘Such irony is a rare thing, Magneric. Do all your warriors follow this insane creed?’

‘Each and every one,’ said Magneric proudly.

‘Then you are treading the same deluded path as Lorgar. How will the other Space Marines look upon this great naiveté? Common humanity already worships the Emperor, and I say again, against His express wishes. All that is, Magneric, is an expression of their weakness and desire to be dominated, and proof of the Emperor’s desire to be worshipped despite His protestations. It appears Lorgar was but a little too early with his devotion. What would your Emperor make of you now? Would He hold out a hand for you to kiss while you grovel upon your knees? Or would He smash your face in with a mailed fist as He did to Lorgar?’

‘We would take either gladly,’ said Magneric, ‘if it meant our Lord would walk among men once more.’

Engine noise rumbled. The extraction craft approached, seven of them, and began to set down one after the other in the wreckage of the field. Kalkator’s Thunderhawks opened their hatches, and his men began to leave the building. The Black Templars made no move to stop them. They remained kneeling, heads bowed in prayer as the Iron Warriors passed between them.

‘Such devotion. Perhaps the Emperor is a god, after all, if He can inspire sane men to worship Him so,’ said Kalkator.

‘Embrace this truth, and your soul will be saved!’ said Magneric eagerly.

Kalkator laughed. Before he left the roof to join his warriors aboard their craft, he shouted down to Magneric. ‘I am not going to convert to your pathetic creed, Magneric. For if I cannot trust a man who lies, I trust a god who does so even less.’

Ralstan came to Magneric’s side, his wargear dripping gore. Kalkator’s gunships were taking off and heading for the sky. The Black Templars were preparing to leave, honouring their dead with silent prayer as they gathered up the wargear of the fallen and extracted gene-seed to safeguard against the future.

‘We could order them shot down as soon as they break atmosphere,’ said the castellan.

Magneric’s torso tilted backwards, watching the Iron Warriors gunships recede, becoming glowing balls of fire rising high into the night.

‘No. Let the hunt begin anew. We honour the oaths we make in battle, castellan, or we are no better than they.’

Twenty-one

Three partings

Kubik arrived in the temple of the diagnostic covens as the interrogation was ending. In a chamber deep underground, the dead Assassin was suspended from the ceiling, hands and feet fully enclosed in manacles. Portions of her skin had been removed, exposing bloodless muscles. Spaces in her anatomy hinted at the devices removed from her body. A domed helmet enclosed her head, studded all over with conical spikes from which curled multiple silver wires.

A lone genetor interogatis worked the machines probing the dead Assassin’s brain, accompanied by coil-handed servitors whose sole purpose was to adjust the magnetism of two tall field modulators.

‘Ah, Fabricator General, you arrive in time for the climax of my investigation. Most of the information I have extracted has been through the memorandum parsers. It should be ready soon. Bear with me as I finish this final interrogation.’

The genetor was a repulsive thing, a skinny flesh torso supported on limbs of slender sliding rods. His voice was papery, eager. He was a man who enjoyed his repellent work. ‘One moment, and I shall have the information you desire.’ He returned to his howling machines.

Kubik waited behind a buffering screen, lest his own bioelectrical field destroy the data being culled from the woman’s memory. He did not have to remain there for long. The machines cut out. A wet crack preceded the withdrawal of the helmet from the woman’s head. Wormy cyber-tentacles wriggled from her skull, dripping matter. The corpse shuddered.

‘I have all the raw data,’ said the genetor interogatis. ‘It will take a little while to transpose the last few fragments into binharic instructions my cogitators might process, and thence to image and sound…’ The genetor trailed off, absorbed in his task. Kubik waited twelve minutes. ‘There, I have it.’

‘Show me,’ said Kubik.

‘The image quality will be lacking, Fabricator General,’ said the genetor apologetically. ‘The woman was fresh, but drawing information from an unmodified brain is always the hardest. Editicore processors are the best, but even the least intelligence core can offer up a mind’s secrets. Alas, here we must rely on the primitive wiring of the flesh.’

He threw a lever with one three-fingered metal hand. An elliptical screen flickered on the wall.

‘There. The most recent memory I could recover, and I believe the most relevant. To go through her entire life will take time, even those few fragments that survived her death. But I think this will be helpful, great prime.’

Kubik ignored the prattling of the genetor, and watched the picts run, a jumble of images in no particular order. A lesser mind would have made no sense of them, but Kubik’s augmetics automatically recorded the images, and began to re-edit them into something approaching usability. He watched a scene from a few days ago, the gathering of an Assassin cadre. They stood around the loading ramp of an automated haulage barge in an obscure section of the Olympian landing fields. Where exactly, Kubik could not tell. There were five of them. The dead girl, three more on foot, one in a cryo-containment unit. Kubik seethed to see them meeting in the shadow of his own seat of power. The images jumped, running out of sequence, the scene changing to the vagaries of imperfect human recollection.

Four Assassins remained at liberty. Five was an unusually high number for one cell. Kubik had sat in the Senatorum for hundreds of years and had been involved in the authorisation votes for several high-level assassinations. One Assassin could topple the government of a world. But five? Deployment of such a number within the Imperium was reserved for the holders of the very highest offices, those who could call upon substantial resources – rogue admirals, corrupt cardinals, the renegade lords of star systems, or perhaps even a High Lord of Terra…

Kubik appraised the images, using what little he knew of the Officio Assassinorum to fit the operatives with the temples. The metronomic tick of his augmetic regulators stuttered when he identified the Eversor Temple adept within the cryo-containment pod, a creature so violent it had to be kept in suspended animation.

A further jumble of images showed him Vangorich on the ramp of the ship. Vangorich had been on Mars – he had come to Mars on one of Kubik’s own vessels! Kubik’s anger rose. The cell had been deployed by his direct order. This was no routine mission.

The images played one last time, and faded out.

‘That is the extent of it, my lord. There is no more,’ said the genetor.

‘Your efforts are noted,’ said Kubik, and departed the chamber without further word. He had seen enough.

Five Assassins. There could be only one explanation. One reason to deploy such a powerful cadre on Mars. Was there not only one target of sufficient power and value? Only one so well protected that five of the most deadly killers in the galaxy would be required to ensure certain death?

Himself.

Vangorich intended to kill him.

The auditorium seemed bigger than ever to Mesring. The masses of worshippers within the nave of the vast subterranean cathedral seemed to stretch away into infinity, a sea of hopeless souls beseeching him for salvation. Vat-cherubs and psyber-birds jostled for space with servo-skulls in the incense-choked air. The breathing of the crowd was a soft wind.

Mesring was sweating long before the sermon was done. The free-floating vox-horns and vox-pieces on ornate stands crowded in on him. He stumbled through his second homily, cutting short the service with a hurried blessing when his tongue thickened and stuck in his mouth halfway through the third.

The ranks of cardinals at the back of Auditorium Oratio stage stared as he lurched past them.

‘Your holiness?’ one asked.

He ignored her, banging through the doors, his Frateris Templar guard catching him before he ploughed into the corridor wall opposite. Head spinning, he left the Auditorium Oratio and blundered along thick carpets towards his private exit. By the time he had left the Basilica Vox Imperatorum, he had difficulty walking, staggering past his sedan chair and the waiting servitors. Three lesser priests gently turned him around and put him inside. The box lurched as the servitor bearers engaged their wheels, carrying him swiftly down the five-kilometre corridor to his private apartments. His Frateris Templars fell in beside the chair, running alongside in escort.

The sedan took him deep into the heartlands of the Ecclesiarchal hive, up long ramps to the side of the mountainous staircases leading to his palace. It drew to a halt outside the main gates in anticipation of his dismounting, but the Frateris Templar runners shouted to the guard, ‘Open the gates! Open the gates! The Ecclesiarch is taken ill!’

The sedan rolled on, into the entrance hall, lofty as any cardinal world’s cathedral. The crowd of sextons, servants, vergers, ushers and savants parted in confusion as the chair rolled through them, interrupting the nightly ritual of the Ecclesiarch’s retiring. The vestal choirs on the stairs sang on, but their efforts were unappreciated, the sedan whisking past them swiftly.

‘The Ecclesiarch is unwell!’ called the Templars going before it. ‘Make way, make way!’ Murmurs of consternation went through the army of holy men and women waiting upon their lord.

The chair rushed along lengthy galleries to Mesring’s private chambers. Outside doors clad in gold his guards helped him from the chair. He pushed them away, nearly falling inside as the doors were opened for him.

‘Call for the medicae!’ shouted the Templar’s prior. ‘We shall have a healer with you soon, my lord. For the Emperor’s sake, get him to his bed.’

‘No, no,’ mumbled Mesring. ‘No medicae or hospitaller. It will pass, it will pass.’

‘Your holiness–’

‘I said no healers!’ he yelled. A stinking belch followed, half retch. ‘It will pass. Rest, rest, I need rest.’ He summoned enough strength to waver inside. ‘Leave me!’ he shouted to the gaggle of savant priests awaiting his return. Mesring tore at his heavy robes, ripping his cloak and mitre off, throwing them on the floor without a care. ‘Hot, hot! Too damn hot!’ he bellowed as he yanked madly at the multiple layers of his liturgical dress. Priests hurried to his side to aid him, and he slapped one down as he reached to undo the laces of his vestment, sending him reeling. ‘Leave me be!’ he spluttered.

His violent staggering had the acolytes sent to attend on him retreating with fear. With the strength of desperation, he ripped his vestments, scattering a planetary lord’s ransom in jewels across the floor. His priests scurried to retrieve them.

‘Out, out! Get out!’ he shouted. His throat was thick with phlegm, voice clotted. He could not think, he could not stand. He staggered on through his fleeing servants, wrenching his surplice over his head, throttling himself with its laces. Nearly naked, still he was too hot!

He came to his bedchamber, and shouldered the doors open. Food had been left out for him, a tall ewer of wine, all the plate of gold and platinum. He crashed into the table, sending delicacies over the carpet. ‘Where is it?’ he said. ‘Where is it?’ He trailed off into tears, and sank to his knees into the wet mess of his dinner, weeping freely.

He stopped. An awful voice whispered to him from the covered gallery running around the walls where, for a hefty sum, the most pious lords and ladies might watch Mesring’s ceremonial rising in the morning. When he peeked over the tips of his fingers, seeking it out, the statues of the stonework shifted and leered at him, shaking their heads in disapproval.

‘I’m not drunk, I’m not drunk, damn you! How dare you judge me, so-called saints! No man is perfect. Am I not but a man? You sit there on your lofty walls, dead and gone, safe in the Emperor’s light. It is I who must endure this world of pain and perfidy, where every smile hides a sharp tooth eager for blood, every promise is a lie. I am poisoned by Vangorich! Manipulated by Wienand. Emperor save me. Damn you, Vangorich! Emperor cast you into the warp! I… I…’ He shook his head in confusion, got to his feet where he stood swaying, peering at the mess he had made.

‘Why, what happened, what happened? The antidote, the antidote. I must have it. Yes, that is why I am here.’ He swung around, his arms flying out from his sides, lumbering to a richly carved Lectitio Divinatus box on an ancient dresser. His extremities tingled painfully, and an awful burning had set up in his stomach. With numb fingers he pawed at the box catch, opening it on the fourth try. He began to cry again as he fished out a smaller box hidden inside – the jewelled skull of a holy innocent.

At the bottom of the skull box were a half-dozen tiny crystals. He tipped the box up, spilled half. Wailing loudly, he dabbed at the carpet with a wet finger, desperate to recover his treasure. He sucked his finger. The crystal dissolved, flooding his mouth with a vile acid taste that made his stomach roil, but the unpleasantness was passing, and was followed by blessed relief. He leaned against the dark wood of the dresser as first his queasiness subsided, then the spinning in his head. Relief spread out to his fingers, the numbness and pain seeping from him.

He sat slumped for some time, before recovering himself. Groaning, he got up. His room was a catastrophe. In his hand rested the small box. With woozy eyes he focused on it. There were five crystals left inside. Each dose was good for five days, five times five was twenty-five. Such a simple calculation to count out a man’s life! Wienand was dead. His chances of getting more antidote were remote. He could tell no one, not without seriously compromising his position. Who would have faith in him if he were revealed to be so fallible?

Lucidity was fleeting. The poison would start its work again soon enough, and he was gripped by anxiety. He looked up to the many faces of the Emperor carved into rare woods in the friezes of his room.

‘Where are You? Why don’t You help me?’ he whispered. ‘Have I not served You faithfully? Put forward the interests of Your church where I could? So if I took a little pleasure for myself, it is nothing to the work I have done for You!’ He got onto his knees and lifted a hand, clawed as if it gripped his heart and he would offer it to his god. ‘Help me!’

The Emperor, His face so placid and commanding, looked everywhere but at Mesring. He gazed upon scenes from the past so distant no one could name them any more, a dead god unaware of His own irrelevance, dwelling on glories that would never be seen again.

A sharp pain stabbed through Mesring’s head. ‘You are weak! Self-absorbed! You denied Your godhood to the people who loved You, You used us, You use us still!’ His eyes strayed eastward, and he cringed in the direction of the great dome of the Throne Room. When no reprisal came he huffed in contempt. ‘But the orks, the orks!’ He lifted a finger skyward. ‘They are above Your Palace, and You do nothing! Why do You not smite them from the sky?’

A jangle of phantom noise shattered his thoughts. He blinked at the swaying images crowding his thoughts, his fellows gathered around his bed, jeering at him. The antidote had yet to complete its work.

‘It is because the Beast is stronger than You!’ he shouted.

Mesring got to his feet, and casting accusing looks over his shoulder, he went to the window of his chamber, flinging shutters wide that had remained closed for years. Acrid air flooded in. The Imperial Palace was a sea of lights shoaled by spires of metal and stone. Two moons shone down on it. Full of fear, he lifted his eyes heavenward. The ork moon’s brutal face stared down at him. Mesring met its gaze. The attack moon was surrounded by the pinprick lights of the Space Marine fleet. Surrounded by the mightiest warriors in the Imperium, and still it shone! He feared its great strength.

Strength. Undeniable, present, immanent, so unlike his deaf god.

There was something worthy of his respect.

Koorland waited to meet Thane alone in a minor shuttle bay of the Abhorrence. He stayed out of sight, watching Thane’s bondsmen go over their small craft. Vapour curled from its engines as the pilot put them through their pre-flight warm-up, while two others went over it carefully, checking its surface and various devices inside and out. There were so many tasks the servants of a Chapter performed. They were invisible most of the time, but without them the Space Marines would not be able to function. If he were truly the Master of a Chapter, he would have to acquaint himself with their activities to a level he had never considered before.

The lord of the Fists Exemplar entered the hangar flanked by two of his honour guard. They reacted quickly when Koorland stepped out of the shadows, training their boltguns upon him.

‘Koorland?’ said Thane. ‘What are you doing skulking about down here?’

‘I wished to speak with you before you departed. Privately.’

Thane looked over his shoulder at his men and nodded to them. They lowered their weapons and went into the waiting vessel.

‘What do you need to say to me that could not be said in front of the others?’ said Thane.

‘Nothing of great import,’ said Koorland. ‘I wanted to wish you well. You and I are in a similar position, both of us elevated to Chapter Mastery by the deaths of others.’

‘Your tragedy is greater than mine, brother,’ said Thane. ‘My Chapter survives.’

‘As does mine, so long as I live. I must use however much time is left to me well.’

‘A noble aim, brother,’ said Thane.

‘I wanted to impress upon you a need for great care. Not against the orks, but against hubris. Issachar is agitating that we should go further. The Last Wall has shown the efficacy of a large force of Space Marines gathered together. He has not done so yet, but it will not be long before he openly advocates the reformation of the Legion. I know you are sympathetic to his opinion. You must reconsider.’

‘I see it coming,’ Thane agreed. ‘Our own gene-father was against the division originally. He relented only to prevent further civil strife in the Imperium.’ He paused. ‘What if Lord Dorn were right all along? Perhaps Lord Guilliman was the one who was wrong. What if he divided the Legions in a panic, and it has been to the detriment of the Imperium ever since?’

‘A primarch does not panic.’

‘How can you be sure?’ said Thane. ‘They are all gone.’

‘We cannot countenance such a move,’ said Koorland.

‘Nevertheless, Issachar makes a compelling case,’ said Thane. ‘With our resources pooled, we can expand our numbers, bring the old Seventh to life in full, not this shadow. There are thousands of us here, but we are less than three hundredths of the full might of Dorn’s original Legion. Imagine what we could accomplish with ten thousand, fifty thousand, even a hundred thousand warriors? This entire war with the orks would never have arisen in the first place, but been crushed before it even began.’

‘That is exactly why Roboute Guilliman split the Legions. His foresight was great. Such power in the hands of one man, no matter how well intentioned, is dangerous. Our actions would undoubtedly start purely, but how many wrong decisions would it take for our successors to go astray, not realising their mistakes until it is too late and the Imperium once more burns in the fire of schism? The primarchs themselves did not manage to avoid that path. We will become tyrants, no matter our desire. The High Lords were put in place by the Emperor. We have no right to defy His wishes.’

‘That is the propaganda of the High Lords.’

‘It is the truth,’ said Koorland.

Thane exhaled heavily. ‘Then something must be done to return them to their original purpose. They are ineffective, divided. Their intrigues have brought the Imperium to its knees.’

‘Listen to the discussions between we Chapter Masters, who are brothers. Are we any different? We work in concert now, but already disagreement is on the horizon. I agree, something needs to be done. I will not bow to Udo’s demands and split the fleet before this crisis is resolved, but once it is, we must set the Senatorum in order, and go our separate ways.’

Thane thought a moment. ‘Maybe you are right. Power is seductive.’

‘Before that comes to pass, we have much to do. Udo presents us with a problem. Your departure will allay his fears for a while, but we must be prepared for strong resistance when you return. An increase in our numbers will anger him.’

‘I do not envy you, re-entering that snake pit.’

‘I am learning. Gather our brothers. I will deal with the High Lords. Find the Soul Drinkers, Brother Thane. Take our tidings to every Chapter that will listen, but when you return, do so in good conscience,’ said Koorland. ‘The Emperor set us above men, but He never intended us to rule over them. The moment we forget that, the Imperium is doomed.’

Thane and Koorland clasped arms, true brothers in every sense.

‘I will do as you suggest, Slaughter,’ Thane said, using Koorland’s wall-name. ‘You have proven yourself worthy of your office. There is wisdom in you. I will think on you often, brother, and hope it is not tested too sorely.’

Thane went to his shuttle. Koorland watched as the craft’s engines built to a throaty roar and it took off on four columns of fire. Angling its propulsion units backward, the shuttle sailed out of the hangar, through the integrity field, and into space.

Bells pinged. Servitors came out of their coffins to make the hangar good again, waving the nozzles of suppressant units about them in search of non-existent fires. Their limited awareness satisfied, they clomped back to their alcoves, leaving two others to buff the scorch marks from the decking. There was none of the bustle of the embarkation decks and major docks in the bay. Surrounded by the living corpses of the servitors, to Koorland it felt like a morgue.

He walked over to the hangar slot, and stood upon the edge of space. All around Terra sailed the Space Marine armada. Naval ships had been joining them daily, the mighty Autocephalax Eternal, that had so cravenly held back from their assault, sailing proudly at their head. At the centre of the blockade, circled by vigilant frigates and destroyers, the ork moon hung balefully, the great insult to Terra.

Koorland stared at the moon. The insults would keep coming from all quarters. Soon Udin Macht Udo would demand the Space Marines fleet redeploy. To defy the Lord Guilliman might well be as foolish as to cast himself through the field. Koorland looked down past his feet, past the lip of the hangar bay, into the yawning depths of space.

Sometimes, he thought, victory requires a leap of faith.

ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

DAVID GUYMER

To learn without thinking is dull, to think without learning is dangerous.

– from the teachings of the Ancient Confucian

One

Immaterium – Phall transit, 544. M32

Combat lighting cut uneven diagonal strokes across the command deck of the Fists Exemplar battle-barge Dantalion. She creaked and groaned like a submersible descending into the deep, uncharted black. The real space cocoon of her Geller field rippled under the eddying pressures of the empyrean.

From null-shielded podia positioned around the principal deck to form an apotropaic symbol, cherubic serfs of the Chapter Librarius sang warp-soothing verses. The vaulted, cathedral-like space had been designed as much for its acoustics as for its strategic value, for indeed what were the choristers but another aspect of defence? Within hermetically walled-off command turrets, operations serfs worked efficiently under grainy pools of light. Shotgun-wielding Chapter armsmen, in grey carapace armour devoid of insignia, watched over their bodies. The chorus soothed their doubts and girded their souls. Reinforced by the confessional susurrus of muted conversation and the continual lifting up and setting down of hardline communication units, the song echoed down the mighty support pillars to the cogitation tiers below. Mindless though they were, even the servitors and the clicking, whirring, humming machine-spirits they tended had their contribution to make to the chorale.

The refraction field that blanketed the blast doors powered down, and the metre-thick, silver-rebarred adamantium parted with a pneumatic hiss. A dozen multilaser cradles and frag-launchers pivoted to cover the kill-zone that ramped upwards from the doors to the deck.

That was the sum of the reaction generated by First Captain Zerberyn’s arrival on deck. Fortunate then that he felt no need for the acclaim that Koorland and Thane received from the masses.

Zerberyn was humble, considered, austere: an Exemplar in his founder’s example.

Deactivating the priority summons, he stamped up the ramp with a whine of actuators and power servos, a pale-faced giant encased in armour of unpainted grey ceramite. He was pale, because he was the mortal child of a world whose light could kill. He was a giant, because his gene-fathers had seen the worth of making him so.

He ascended the deck at the same time as the blast doors resealed and the refraction field snapped back to full power. He felt the auto-turrets disengage their lock on him and return to sentry protocols.

‘Report, shipmaster.’

The crippled shipmaster stood stiffly in the middle of a ring of terminals in the vox-turret. His posture was no affectation. The augmetic brace that clad his entire right side in a metal skeleton and allowed him to stand did not also allow him to bend. He worked at attention, he ate at attention, he slept at attention. He glanced at the analogue chrono face mounted on the turret wall. It read 05:17. Still on Terran time.

‘I hadn’t expected you so soon.’

‘Your summons was flagged “priority” .’

As if to protest, Shipmaster Marcarian opened the corner of his mouth that still functioned, an eyelid flickering withlocked-in frustration, and stumped forty degrees about to face the vox-liaison. She was identically outfitted to the serfs she spoke for: glittering void suit, bulky headset, sidearm clamped under the rest of an armoured console chair. There was nothing to differentiate rank. Not on a Fists Exemplar ship.

The shipmaster worked saliva through his palsied mouth. ‘05:07, ship time, Vox logged receipt of an Adeptus Astartes distress beacon. Lexicography haven’t yet purified enough of the signal corruption to retrieve the message.’

‘The Navy abandons systems wholesale at the rumour of an attack moon in a neighbouring sector. Worlds burn, our own amongst them, the Throneworld itself is besieged, and hourly we receive a plea for deliverance. And you summon me for a distress beacon?’

‘I trust you weren’t called away from anything too pressing?’

Zerberyn looked down over the blinking lights of his gorget softseal.

Marcarian swallowed with difficulty. ‘Just curious.’

‘I was in the Locutory with Brother Columba. The sergeant and I were debating the meanings of Guilliman’s extended proverbs.’

The shipmaster produced a smile. ‘I’ve not yet had the chance to congratulate you on your promotion to captaincy of the First. The command crew held a vigil in your honour.’

‘I chose not to attend.’

‘Vardy brought amasec.’ Marcarian’s good eye wandered towards the spiralling waves on the vox-liaison’s screen. ‘We were able to provision a crate on Terra. The lord sergeant would be a worthy First Captain, but he’s a hard… task… master…’

Zerberyn’s eyes drilled parallel holes into the side of the shipmaster’s head. The man cleared his throat.

‘We have something,’ said the vox-liaison, crisply.

‘Go ahead,’ Marcarian breathed. ‘Please.’

‘It’s definitely Last Wall.’

It would have taken one even more attuned to Space Marine physiology than the two mortal crew members to note the tightening muscles of Zerberyn’s neck. The Last Wall was an abhorrence to him. The mere conception of it would have been affront enough to Guilliman’s legacy, and that it was his own primarch that had done so sickened him. It had been Oriax Dantalion himself, the visionary who would later found the Fists Exemplar, who had persuaded Dorn of the wisdom in Guilliman’s solution. And now the Fists Exemplar had discovered that the primarch was not persuaded after all.

Zerberyn had argued the case with Thane at Phall, as he knew Dantalion himself would have done had he still lived, and had done so again on Terra. Another might have viewed his subsequent elevation in spite of all that had gone before as evidence of Thane’s magnanimity, but Zerberyn knew him better. It was an insult. The First had already been culled of its finest to reform Koorland’s shield corps. He was captain of the First, but the First was a company of new recruits and stubborn ideologues like Columba, who would rather lay down their arms and let destruction find them than don the black fist of Dorn once more.

‘What does it say?’

‘I wouldn’t advise listening to it. There’s a verbal component but it’s been heavily corrupted by the transition to the empyreal phase. But I do have coordinates.’

‘Is it Phall? I told Thane that Koorland was premature to depart while the Soul Drinkers and the bulk of the Black Templars were still to be contacted.’

The vox-liaison shook her head. ‘No. The latest navigation estimate puts us at least several weeks from the rendezvous coordinates. It’s not Terra either.’ She pivoted her chair and called up a screed of data to her terminal. Gloved fingers dancing over the keys, she transformed it into what Zerberyn recognised as a four-dimensional coordinate plot. ‘It’s close by, originating from an orphan star in the Sycrax Cluster. A red giant called Vandis.’

‘Is Thane or anyone else receiving this beacon?’

The officer sucked in her teeth, frustrated as much with herself as with the difficulties imposed on her by warp physics. ‘I don’t know.’

Zerberyn looked up to where the main viewscreen hung suspended from a plasteel gantry, reassuringly blank save for a purity seal on a fuzzy grey background. It was blustery with static, interpretive in its not-quite-random swirls of the buffeting energies of the warp.

With superhuman speed of thought, he collated the available variables, assembling them into a plan of action that he then challenged with every conceivable scenario. He took the additional half-second required to satisfy himself that any ship in the Fists Exemplar fleet in possession of the same information would reach an identical conclusion.

He had no love for his distant gene-brothers, but like it or not they were the Last Wall. The Imperium stood only while they held firm, and as the Arch-Heretic himself had annihilated the last great ork empire at its root, so too would Zerberyn burn the Beast from the very ground on which he lived.

This, he promised to himself.

‘Contact the Alcazar Remembered or any other ship you can raise, and transmit a data-burst containing the beacon coordinates and our course of action.’

‘Which is?’ said Marcarian.

‘Prepare for immediate real space translation onto the origin of that beacon. All stations to battle readiness. All weapons systems and shield arrays to be engaged the second we emerge.’

The shipmaster nodded stiffly and began to relay orders to the relevant stations, which in turn disseminated them through the ship down their hardlines. The murmur of voices became a clamour.

‘To run blind into a battle is folly,’ Marcarian murmured, for Zerberyn’s ear alone.

‘I know well the lessons of the Codex Astartes, shipmaster.’

Marcarian bowed his head. ‘Let me at least recommend that Excelsior be sent in ahead. She’s Rubicante-class, designed to operate through the worst distortions of the Flux. Her vox-array should be more than powerful enough to reach us, even here.’

Zerberyn duly considered the shipmaster’s counter-proposal. Coordinating the actions of a fleet the size of the Fists Exemplar’s through the immaterium would be fraught at best. Who could say what was listening? Or worse, what truly answered. He could not even say with certainty where Excelsior or the Alcazar Remembered were, or that they had not already emerged into the materium at Phall.

It was possible that Dantalion would return to Phall in a month’s time and find that Excelsior and the rest of the fleet had never left.

Zerberyn’s thumb rolled over his bolt pistol’s holster lock. It was Umbra-pattern, lacking the refinement of post-Heresy models, the various augmentations and integrations that had come with subsequent improvements in power armour design, but it was good at what it was made for and always would be. Purity through utility: that was how one proofed oneself against the unknowables of the galaxy.

He made his decision.

Guilliman’s writings spoke often of the importance of recognising the least worst option and seizing it.

‘Take us in.’

Vandis System – Mandeville point

Zerberyn felt a squeeze on his brain as though something were trying to get in. He heard whispers, and ignored them. He saw things – things he could not ignore so easily. He saw Dantalion.

Zerberyn was a relative neophyte, a recruit of the Chapter’s Eidolican era. He had never seen Oriax Dantalion, but he knew with the conviction of his genetics that it was him. Zerberyn did not speak, nor was he spoken to, but just watched as Sigismund, Alexis Polux, Demetrius Katafalque, and then Rogal Dorn himself turned their backs on the first Exemplar one by one. Zerberyn felt anger, but he was helpless to express it to these titanic figures. Without appearing to transition, Dantalion’s armour had ceased to be gold, but it had not become the unvarnished grey of Zerberyn’s own.

It was gunmetal and bronze.

Translation was complete, but this part was the worst. Those few seconds after the warp drives had powered down and the Geller field had collapsed, but the empyreal sheath remained raw and unhealed, thin enough to touch the other side with one’s mind, and for the waking nightmares that dwelled there to, if only for a few seconds, touch back.

The vision faded as the materium resealed, and Zerberyn dwelled on its lies no further.

Klaxons screamed proximity alerts and a dozen different types of weapons lock. Alert runes cycled amber and red. Their warnings went unheeded for a few critical seconds more, the unimproved brain chemistries of Dantalion’s mortal crew requiring that extra time to recover from the ordeal of translation.

Zerberyn killed an automated low-shield sounder with a gauntlet-mash that deactivated several other warning icons and cracked the terminal.

‘Steady as she goes,’ Marcarian drooled, straight as a cane, stiffened by his augmetic brace and implant while those around were still slumped with harrowed expressions in their chairs. ‘Cycle plasma coils. Navigational shields to full power. Void shield generators to cover all quadrants. Weapon grids online. Full spectrum sweep and re-initialise main viewer. Someone find me the source of that distress beacon.’

A dulled chorus of ‘Aye, sirs’ answered him. A string of light impacts trembled through the massive vessel’s hull as the main viewscreen wiped its purity seal and shivered online. It was a default forward shot: the gothic grey armour of Dantalion’s prow. A squadron of supercharged ork fighter-bombers streaked across it, trailed by a line of explosions.

‘Shields,’ said Zerberyn.

‘Void banks to charge in three… two… one.’

A resonant harmonic thrummed over the systems’ noise and the cherub-serfs’ chorus. The fighter-bomber to the rear of the orks’ chaotic formation was swallowed up by a ball of fire as Dantalion’s port-forward void shield manifested within its fuselage and ripped the craft to pieces. A wave of static washed across the viewscreen. Zerberyn focused. His occulobe organ was designed for low-light conditions and hyperfine details, and it autonomically filtered the visual noise.

The murderous red glow of the stellar giant, Vandis, flooded the shot and robbed the void of stars. In their place, he saw explosions, propellant burns and a glittering shoal of red-lit predators. It was a void fight, and a major one. He counted at least two hundred ork cruisers, possibly more. Pre-translation inertia carried them towards the battle at several hundred kilometres per second.

‘Ship contacts!’ came the shout from the strategium, a second behind. The liaison serf there held an internal vox-horn to his ear.

‘Ours?’ said Marcarian.

‘Too many!’

A flare lit the viewer, something massive-yield thumping the forward shield hard enough to shake the deck plates of the command bridge.

‘Try to raise the rest of the fleet,’ ordered Marcarian. ‘If they haven’t joined us then we don’t stand a chance.’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘They will be here,’ said Zerberyn. ‘If even one ship received our transmission then they would have signalled also and the probability of a third vessel receiving would be doubled, and so on, exponentially. We are in the only place that any brother in receipt of those coordinates could be.’

‘We should at least be prepared to withdraw. Permission to re-actuate warp drives and lock-down for an emergency translation.’

‘Granted. Caution is always the wisest course when others fail to present themselves.’

‘Very good, lord captain.’ Marcarian stumped off to distribute orders.

‘Find me that distress beacon, shipmaster.’

‘Come and look at this, lord captain.’

Marcarian was standing by the chart desk that dominated the strategium turret. The base unit was an illuminated table, above which a wavering hololithic grid chart was displayed. A golden aquila dead-centre represented Dantalion. She was surrounded by a cloud of unidentified blips, trailing back towards the bloated, crimson wire-frame that represented the Vandis star. The intervening grids filled fast with ship markers, like a spreading infection reviewed on rapid playback. The banks of time-lapse and repeater screens that surrounded the desk were walled with static.

‘Disregard the orks for now,’ Marcarian commanded the strategium liaison. ‘Authorise removal of the necessary coding wafers and route the spared cogitation capacity to parse Last Wall identifiers.’

‘Do you not want targets?’ asked Zerberyn.

‘Scanning for Last Wall signals will identify both the source of the distress beacon, and our own fleet if they are here. That should be our first priority.’

Zerberyn offered his silence by way of agreement. Before a void fight with a Death Guard flotilla had wasted his right side and earned him his command, Marcarian had been Augur Master aboard the Grey Ranger. He knew his system.

‘I’d also recommend mobilising the First. The orks have shown themselves to favour long-range teleport actions.’

It was then that Zerberyn realised that at some point during the translation cycle he had drawn his pistol.

‘We are ready for them.’

All Adeptus Astartes fleets employed the same classes of ship, but the modular design allowed for variations on the basic STC. Fists Exemplar warships differed from those of their cousins in many ways, but principal among these was the manifold layers of dedicated psychic shielding they employed. They were built for void-war, purposed to patrol the storm-wracked region of wilderness space afflicted by the Rubicante Flux. In addition to the cherub-serfs that filled every inhabited section with song, choristers from the Chapter Librarius psychically conducted the chorus from chambers specifically designed for their warp-soothing acoustics. Every one of Dantalion’s millions of consoles was worked with monomolecular silver wires. Her ballast chambers were filled with the scent of candlewood and samphyr, silvic oil and rose cedar. Even the very halls of the ship were arranged into the schematised form of potent protective runes and a good portion of her orbit-to-ground firepower had been retrofitted with psychic null generators.

She had been designed to fight the enemies of Man and triumph in regions of space where other ships could not enter, and only deep-survey barges of the Inquisition sailed with greater protection against warp-borne assault.

‘But again, granted. Have them deploy at your discretion.’

‘Bright skies…’ someone exclaimed.

Zerberyn followed the staring faces to the main viewscreen. Someone amongst the veteran crew zoomed the screen’s visual feed and placed a bracket around a patched-up old colossus. Almost three times the mass of Dantalion, it looked like an Imperial Navy battleship. It was heavily damaged and, so it appeared, either partially or carelessly rebuilt. Its aft section was almost completely crumpled, and had been fitted with a monstrous engine housing almost as large as the rest of the ship that filled the void behind it with cones of chemical fire. Construction scaffolds spread from the hull like a beetle’s wings. Fires burned on several decks.

‘Oberon-class,’ Marcarian confirmed. ‘Or she was.’

The big vessel yawed into the lower quadrant of the main viewer, drifting across the plane of the solar system with a trail of gnat-like ork fighters in pursuit. ‘Approaching on an intercept vector.’

Whatever their current naval supremacy, the orks would always make use of what they found. Zerberyn could almost respect them for that.

‘No serial codes, no auto-transmissions, no response to hails.’ Marcarian limped through the strategium desks, looking over shoulders at the read-outs. ‘I’d say it’s an ork ship.’

‘Of course it is an ork ship. That much is clear.’

‘Still no sign of Last Wall transponders on our scans, lord captain,’ said Marcarian, stiffly. ‘All hands ready for emergency translation at your order.’

Zerberyn brought the barrel of his pistol to his gorget ring and tapped it as he thought, watching the zipping ork fighters wind about the nearing battleship like surgical thread through a wound.

‘Lord captain, I think that–’

‘I commend you your unfettered thought, it improves us all,’ Zerberyn spat, quoting from the Oriax Variorum. The ship slid into full view, Dantalion gunning for it amidships. Zerberyn aimed his bolt pistol at the viewer.

‘Kill that ship.’

Two

Terra – the Imperial Palace

The shuttle deployed its landing struts for its final descent stage onto Daylight Pad Theta, the light void craft wobbling in the crosswinds generated by the perpetual grind of the Palace hive’s colossal cycler fans and the sheer volume of air traffic. Transorbital lighters were picking up and setting down in a near-constant flow, crowding the Palace’s skyline: red and purple and black and gold, a swirling plasteel snow of new conscripts pressed into the Navy’s proudest regiments. To navigate a shuttle through either obstacle, let alone both, was a task closer to reading the Emperor’s Tarot than landing a void craft. To even make the attempt took the superhuman reflexes and unshakable confidence of the Adeptus Astartes.

Koorland, Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists, looked up to watch the shuttle’s approach.

Waves of promethium heat beat down on him, and the roar of the angling turbofans rippled his lips and cheeks, but his eyes stayed open despite the onslaught. The Templar crosses emblazoned on white panels on the shuttle’s nose and underwing appeared to resize as aerofoils made minute adjustments. Jets of air from lateral stabilisation thrusters held it level. Roused from torpor by the approaching lander and flushed of soporific neurosedatives, servitors bonded to caterpillar-tracked motive assemblies moved haltingly forwards against the jetwash. Lengths of bright orange vulcanised hosing played out behind them, the oil-washed outlet valves supplanting superfluous hands and emerging from artificially gaping mouths flanked by mind-wiped stares.

The shuttle touched down within the innermost ring of blinking guidelights, and eased onto its landing struts. The roar of its turbofans became a whine and gases hissed from heat flues and radiator grilles, equalising pressure and temperature across the shuttle’s glowing heat-shields. One of the servitor units sprayed the shuttle with super-cooled carbon dioxide vapour. Another trundled underneath, frozen gases crystallising its slack features, and nozzled its wrist adaptor over the shuttle’s filler pipe. It emitted a guzzling noise, smoking under the white hiss of venting gases.

Either side of Koorland, an honour detail of human (and another of not-quite-human) troopers endeavoured to stand crisply at attention, despite the successive waves of engine heat and coolant that came at them from the middle of the pad.

The men were all tall and hard-faced, in black uniforms with red piping and frogging, armsmen of the Navy’s symbolic flagship, the Royal Barque. Each wore the Royal Barque’s forbidding ensign on their shoulder in place of the usual regimental insignia, a sheathed cutlass and a pair of ceremonial red gloves. They were the Navy’s elite protection detail, and only the highest-ranking admirals and most influential of visiting dignitaries warranted such bodyguards. In this instance, the subject of their care was Rear-Admiral Pervez Leshento of the Tiamat-class battleship Dies Dominus. The name was High Gothic for ‘Lord of Daylight’. An extraordinary coincidence, or Lansung was honeying Koorland’s gruel a little thickly.

On the other side were the skitarii of the Basilikon Astra, the exploratory fleets of Mars: visored, cloaked in dark, energy-dense robes worn over a bio-augmented flesh-carapace and an assortment of techno-esoterica. Koorland doubted that the cyborgised warriors suffered the extremes of heat and cold gushing out from the shuttle pad, but the jetwash was certainly fighting them over their heavy cloaks. The commander of the maniple was a magos explorator named Benzeine. He was wrapped up to his throat in deep red robes woven with the machina opus. From the odd, twitching motions that occasionally stirred these robes, they were to protect the sensibilities of those he moved amongst rather than for his own benefit. Hololithic equations hovered about a millimetre in front of his black-chrome facial dish from a miniaturised projector embedded somewhere amidst the array of fluttering sensors.

The Taghmata of Mars had fulfilled their obligations in the Last Wall’s assault on the ork attack moon, limited though they were, and the Fabricator General was not about to relinquish control of that orbiting planetoid of xeno-tech now.

As Koorland waited, a pair of hypersonic Lightning interceptors rocketed overhead, the second surfing on its leader’s contrail. An expanding, rolling boom rattled the ornamental flak turrets of Dawn Spire and the leaded windows of the Walk of Heroes on the other side of the killing ground. The golden vexillum of the Daylight militia that flew from the plasteel-plated turrets of the Cathedral of Saint Clementine the Absolver bent after the passing fighters. Koorland looked up to catch them but even his genhanced eyes were too slow.

Instead, distorted by stained plex-glass and cracked UV-shielding, he saw the ork moon. Its cratered face glared down through a tangle of piping as if it always knew exactly when and where to look to find him. It was far smaller than Terra’s own moon, but hanging in geostationary orbit just a few hundred kilometres above the Sanctum Imperialis it appeared ten times larger. The larger vessels of the blockading fleet – Autocephalax Eternal, Dies Dominus and Abhorrence being but three – were visible from Terra, like clouds passing slowly over the face of the hostile alien planetoid. Koorland himself knew no fear, but despite the visual reassurance, he could well understand the terror the ork moon instilled in people.

Even those who would never see the sky could feel its power over their world.

A tremor passed through the mountainous bastion of Daylight Wall. Unsecured maintenance hatches rattled. Fern-like communications vanes hummed, the indelicate side-to-side motion transformed into harmonic vibrations. The mighty fortifications moved, as they had been designed to move under tectonic stresses or the crushing overpressure of an artillery bombardment, but their superficial facades crumbled, tank-sized chunks of ornamental masonry crashing down into the killing fields and the under-hives. Cabling tore – electrical, hydraulic, plasmic – and ionised gases and pressurised fluids sprayed photochemical ejecta into the Palace twilight.

The shaking eased. The shouts of rescue and repair units filtered up from below.

Things were not, at least, as dire as they had become on Ardamantua. The Last Wall and Basilikon Astra’s bombardment had obliterated the attack moon’s weaponry along with about ninety-five per cent of its crust. No, this was not a weapon. This was simply the seismic shock of having a lunar body suddenly transposed into near orbit.

He looked across the fretted robes of the skitarii, dazzling the air with arcane symbology, to where Daylight stood on the opposite side of the platform with his back against the steep drop to the Palace. The Fists Exemplar battle-brother who had taken the name, formerly Seventh Captain Dentor, looked good in his new livery, as much as it pained Koorland to compel his brother to wear it. He knew the value that the warrior’s home Chapter placed on outward humility and inward pride. The golden spear and shield he carried were not the same as those borne by his namesake, for they too had been victims of Ardamantua’s destruction, but had been selected for him from the Chapter’s armouries on the basis of being a good enough likeness to fool anyone who was not a son of Dorn.

To his dishonour, it did feel good to share his wall with a brother again. And Lord Udo had been right. The populace appreciated the sight of Imperial Fists on the walls.

Daylight nodded the all-clear, and Koorland returned it.

In a squeal of hydraulics, the shuttle’s boarding hatch lowered. The ramp struck the platform with a dull metallic thump, flexing and rattling as if in the grip of another quake as the power-armoured High Marshal of the Black Templars emerged through the coolant vapours.

Bohemond’s face was a burned ruin, scorched by the witch-fire of an ork psyker in a battle long before the present uprising. Half of what remained was a metal mask as emotive as the chrome plate of the magos explorator, but the other half was what struck terror into mortals and transhumans alike. It was flesh, but it could not be called a face. Looking at it, you could see where flesh had run, where it had resolidifed as he beat the greenskin witch to death with his bare fists, and the new form it had taken.

Koorland was not above a slight feeling of intimidation. Whatever he felt was amplified in the mortal soldiery tenfold. The idea that they might offer any protection at all against even the one Space Marine was laughable.

The High Marshal carried Sigismund’s sword in one gauntleted fist, drawn, the long blade angled away from him and towards the ground. The other hand he presented, palm up, and waited for half a second while a warrior bondsman in bone-coloured flak armour and black surplice slapped a data-slate into it. It looked as though he was about to launch into some kind of prepared speech.

But Koorland had come to know him better than that.

‘The last coordinates of every Black Templars, Crimson Fists, Excoriators and Iron Knights ship in the blockade fleet, and the codes to our defensive installations in the base’s interior.’ Bohemond’s mouth no longer closed properly and the expression he made was a loathsome sneer. ‘I advise you to memorise them. By the High Lords’ decree, there remain enough orks in the deeper levels to occupy your surface teams.’

Bohemond looked from Benzeine to Leshento, waving the slate back and forth in his giant’s hand as though hoping the two men might fight each other to be the one to have it. Neither would have dared. With a scowl, the High Marshal tossed the slate dismissively into the hands of one of the Royal Barque soldiers.

The information could have been delivered by data-burst, but the wheels of Terran bureaucracy were greased by such petty ceremonies.

The skitarii and Navy men filed out. The single Adeptus Arbites enforcer guarding the steps down to the fifth tier battlements saluted the magos explorator and the rear-admiral. Koorland was uncertain what she was there for. He smiled slightly.

His protection, he presumed.

As the last of the men disappeared down the steps, Bohemond strode across the platform and clasped Koorland by the forearm. Koorland returned the pressure on the High Marshal’s elbow guard.

‘It is good to see a friendly face, brother.’

‘Is that a joke?’

Koorland grunted, amused, but no longer seemed to feel like smiling. They released each other’s arms and stepped back, almost wary. ‘You have not come around to Udo’s edict, I take it,’ Koorland said.

‘If he wishes to disperse the Chapters, then I say let him try and make us.’

‘Mind what you say, brother. Your anger at the High Lords’ ingratitude is understandable. I share it. But it is because of thoughts like these that we must disperse.’

‘I do not care about their ingratitude,’ Bohemond muttered darkly. ‘It is their ineptitude that concerns me.’

‘If it will keep the Council on my side then having you and the others join the Fists Exemplar at Phall is a small price.’

‘And if the orks simply lie in wait for such an opening? There could be millions yet in the attack moon’s core, biding their time, and as the Mechanicus did not permit us to delve deeper we cannot say for certain that we destroyed the only teleportation device they have.’

‘Phall is little more than a month away at worst, and fifty Space Marine veterans is no token force.’

To be counted amongst a Space Marine Chapter’s finest was no small thing, and from the First Companies of the Fists Exemplar, Black Templars, Crimson Fists, Excoriators and Iron Knights, Koorland had reconstituted the shield corps. Daylight. Hemisphere. Tranquility. Bastion Ledge. Ballad Gate. Zarathustra. Lotus Gate. He meant no disrespect to the Lucifer Blacks, who had stepped up to fill the Imperial Fist-sized breach in Fortress Terra, but they were not Space Marines. War would undoubtedly come again to the Imperial Palace, and when it did, then like the Arch-Traitor before them, the orks would meet walls defended by the sons of Dorn.

‘Can you hold for that long?’ said Bohemond.

‘It is ground, brother. I can hold it.’

Bohemond revealed his twisted grin, as if he were showing off a knife, and he nodded across Koorland’s shoulder. The enforcer had approached and halted about two metres away and threw a salute.

‘I know you, enforcer,’ said Koorland.

The part of the woman’s face that was visible between her chinstraps and visor seemed suddenly to glow. It was a look that Koorland had become wearily familiar with amongst the Palace’s mortal defenders. The sort of look reserved for saints and saviours. ‘Galatea Haas, lord, and,’ she rolled her shoulder to show her rank stripes, ‘it’s proctor now.’ She bit her lip, as though worried she might have offended her transhuman lord by wasting his time with something as trivial as mortal hierarchies, then added, tentatively: ‘You remember me?’

‘I seldom forget,’ said Koorland. ‘Thank the Emperor for designing me thus.’

‘I… I will.’

‘Praise be,’ Bohemond murmured.

‘Can I help you, proctor?’

‘Yes, lord.’ She snapped another salute and held it. ‘The provost-colonel demands the return of Daylight Pad Theta to the Adeptus Arbites.’

‘Tell her no.’

Haas smiled. ‘Thank you, lord.’

With a growl, Bohemond turned his back on the woman who reached barely as high as his elbow and made to head back to his shuttle.

‘They demand your protection, but only so long as you do not inconvenience their little fiefdoms. I leave you to it, brother, and may I never find myself embroiled in politics again.’

Koorland nodded his agreement. ‘From my shuttle, I saw rioters outside of the Great Chamber itself. I am not surprised.’

‘They should be put down,’ rumbled the fourth Space Marine present, Eternity, standing at the near edge of the platform opposite Daylight. ‘The expression of such dissent within the Palace grounds is a capital sin.’

The Black Templar who had become Eternity had demanded that wall and that duty, had insisted that he be the last line between the Custodes and the rest of the universe. He, more than anyone, served as a reminder that an Imperial Fist was more than just the colours that he wore. Haas looked towards the towering wall-brother, a sudden wariness, fear even, causing her face to tense, as if she had heard this particular Black Templar’s voice before.

‘Go to them then, brother,’ said Koorland, turning to meet the glowing red lenses of Eternity’s helm. ‘Let them see that they are safe, that it is an Imperial Fist that walks amongst them.’ He glanced to Haas. The woman was almost shaking, worse than when she had been rescued from the orks’ captivity. ‘Let them all see.’

Three

Terra – the Imperial Palace

The Great Chamber had been the institutional heart of Terra for as long as Terra had been the heart of an Imperium of Man. At capacity, it could hold half a million citizens. It was a coliseum, a public arena of awesome scale, built to the grand demands of Unitarian dreams. The restoration work enacted in the aftermath of the Great Heresy had been largely sympathetic, cosmetic re-imaginings of the occasional mural where a pict of the original could not be found or showed an inconvenient contradiction to the Creed notwithstanding.

Vast tiers of empty seating surrounded a central dais. Twelve large chairs were spaced evenly across its centre line, backed by the heraldic banners of the twelve great pillars of Imperial government. A speaker’s podium, raised by the spread wings of a golden aquila, glittered under the triangulated beams of focused lighting. The dais rotated almost imperceptibly, and a more potent metaphor for the pace of decision-making by said great pillars of Imperial government Vangorich could not imagine.

The last vestige of representative and accountable governance stood at the far east end of the chamber: a statue of the great Rogal Dorn, raised in commemoration by his brother, the first Lord Guilliman. The primarch watched the council of the day with an expression of infamous severity.

Drakan Vangorich was not a man given to idle dreams, but the thought of what a living, breathing primarch would make of the small men trying to fill their superhuman boots gave him a little pleasure.

‘Order, please,’ said Tobris Ekharth, Master of the Administratum, reading tiredly from the data-slate in his hands. His voice mumbled back to him on a time-delayed echo from the vox-casters set up around the vast auditorium. Small-arms fire in the distance – but not all that distant – broke up the carefully calibrated augmitter system with pernicious static. ‘I’m sure that the situation is under control… I…’

He blinked myopically at a second data-slate on the lectern in front of him, then bent to listen to some aide unseen behind the beam-bright podium lights and visibly pulled himself together.

‘I’ve been made aware that the situation is well in hand. If you could all now please access your agenda packets, cryptex key kappa-tribus-septum-septum-omega, and once we’re all here we can begin.’

Scattered around the swathes of empty seating, lesser lords and meme-serfs approved by the Administratum’s increasingly stringent vetting lists peeled the security tape off their packets and tapped in the cryptex key.

Vangorich did as everyone else did. As a man of medium height and medium build, dressed in black with oiled-back black hair like any aide or staffer present, he was adept at discouraging notice. His skin shared the pale tone of the trillions who lived their lives on lightless Terra, his few features of note being his dark, wide-set eyes and a tiny scar that bridged the lower part of his face between jaw and chin.

He had, of course, memorised the contents of an unredacted version of the package, and his agents had furnished him with the cryptex key to the final document as soon as it had been disseminated amongst the High Twelve.

It had been a hundred years since a Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum had been seated amongst that number, but one grew accustomed to certain privileges of access, particularly if one possessed the means to retain them. Indeed, Vangorich considered it the patriotic duty of his office to keep his finger, as the saying went, on the Senatorum’s pulse.

Scanning the ninety-seven-page abstract, he flagged up the most glaring omissions from the original agenda. It was always an amusing mental exercise to attempt to deduce who was responsible for removing what.

A complaint from the Admiralty on the costs imposed on them by the transfer of the blockade from the Last Wall to the Navy? Fabricator General Kubik. Too easy. The Fabricator General would accept any cost to get his mechadendrites on the orks’ technologies, particularly if it could be loaded onto another.

A demand for civilian evacuation of the cathedral world Madrilline? Lansung. Why discuss what you no longer had the ships in range to deliver?

A motion to restrict Chapter Master Koorland’s ‘disruptive’ access to Naval facilities, and, reading between the lines, the Lucifer Blacks? It had the patrician fingers of the Paternoval Envoy all over it. Smiling archly, he skimmed ahead. The only downside was that Helad Gibran no longer owed him a favour. He held the page and frowned in thought. Here was an interesting omission.

A report of mass starvations in Albia Hive. Basic provisioning was the duty of the Administratum, but he didn’t think that Ekharth had the spine for this kind of backroom politicking. Juskina Tull of the Chartist Captains, perhaps.

He glanced up to the dais.

Juskina Tull looked waxen under the podium lights, haunted by an enfolding horror that was so much worse from the other side of her glassy stare. Host to a magnificent gown of tented lace and emeralds, she had barely moved in half an hour. Just a telling blink of the eyes whenever the screams became loud enough, near enough, to escape the weapons fire. She wasn’t hearing screams. She was hearing cries for blood.

No.

Definitely not Tull.

The other lords were still working their way to their seats.

Gibran, Paternoval Envoy of the Navigators, and Sark, the otherworldly Master of the Astronomican, were ushered into their allotted seats by plush-liveried Senatorum staff. Spread in his chair at the opposite end of the dais, Anwar of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica watched his fellow abhumans with a deep, probing gaze. The uncanny walked down Vangorich’s spine with fingers of ice. Seated beside the Imperium’s most powerful sanctioned psyker in full Astra Militarum dress uniform, the Lord Militant, Abel Verreault, attempted to make small talk.

A choir of cherubs and servo-seraphim hovered around the carved Albian oak podium doors. Beneath the dragonfly chirr of hymnals, Ecclesiarch Mesring and Lord Admiral Lansung entered together. Lansung had lately taken to porting his great bulk around with the aid of a silver cane, but his physical deterioration was barely noticeable beside that of the Ecclesiarch. Mesring looked feral. His hair was wild. His surplice was unpressed and clearly the same that he had worn to the previous week’s session. There were purpling wine stains in his beard. The two men were arguing heatedly about fleet deployments to the Tang Sector, something that continued well after Senatorum aides had adroitly manoeuvred them to non-adjacent seats.

Provost-Colonel Chabil Sarrihya rolled her eyes as if despairing of the behaviour of children, checked her wrist-chrono augmetic, and continued pacing. Her superior in the Adeptus Arbites, Vernor Zeck, had unilaterally absented himself from Senatorum business once civil disobedience had spilled into the Sanctum Imperialis, and had preferred not to return since. His deputy had no resort to such sanction and knew it. So she paced back – clipped turn – and forth in front of Fabricator General Kubik. The representative of Mars was almost as still as his counterpart from the Merchant Fleets, mechadendrites tapping on his chair’s arm interface in binarised counterpoint to the Provost-Colonel’s steps.

Ekharth’s timid appeal for order earned him a sharp look from Udin Macht Udo.

The Lord Commander of the Imperium, commander-in-chief of its incalculable assets of war and peace, simmered lamely in his grand throne. The slow pinkening of his face was accentuated by his shaved head, and the way the darkening turned the old scar that crossed the left side of his face and neck and through his milky eye an almost luminescent white. Though separate from and above any single military arm of the Imperium, he wore the starched white grand admiral’s uniform of his previous career in the Navy. It practically burst with medals and overcompensation.

It was pathetic.

Only the Inquisitorial Representative was still absent.

‘I suppose we could always just execute them all,’ suggested the woman seated at Vangorich’s right.

‘A little extreme, perhaps.’ A passing thought temporarily brightened his mind. ‘But tempting.’

Commandant Ursula Cage of the Schola Progenium was a striking woman. As the joint senior commissar, she was a feared individual. The utilitarian lines of one of Terra’s ancient noble houses shaped her face. Her hair was the shade and texture of gunmetal. She sat forwards, barely on her seat at all: summary justice in potentia.

‘Name me one who doesn’t deserve it.’

‘Verreault means well.’

With a short, hard laugh, Cage reached inside her greatcoat’s breast pocket and handed him a data-slate. It was a high-level briefing document with an Astra Militarum ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ stamp emblazoned across each page. The kind that were intercepted, copied, and subtly rerouted to Vangorich’s desk about ten thousand times each day. He seldom read them personally. He made an exception for this one.

It was the usual bad news – worlds lost or, suddenly unresponsive, presumed so – but there were bright spots if one looked hard enough.

Some dogged defending of an ice world called Valhalla had checked one front of the orks’ push into the Ultima Segmentum, and a small force of Ultramarines had successfully disabled an attack moon in orbit of Calth. Added to the one brought down by Admiral Lansung at Port Sanctus, and another by a combined force of Blood Angels and Novamarines, that made three confirmed kills.

Three. In a galaxy-wide incursion. No wonder they were losing. He didn’t need another classified internal document to tell him that.

‘The orks are getting sophisticated,’ murmured Cage. ‘Their choice of targets suggests a network of supply lines, resource processing centres and communication hubs that we’ve not seen before.’ She smiled coldly. ‘Or so the Progenium Tacticae tell us.’

‘This wasn’t in the unredacted agenda packet.’

She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Everyone knows orks can appear intelligent in battle. I know. But in war?’ She shook her head. ‘The Lord Militant would have been laughed out of the Senatorum.’

Vangorich glanced over his shoulder as a squad of Lucifer Blacks in enamelled black carapace powered up their shock glaives and ran for the main doors. They were wearing yellow armbands. Vangorich had never seen anything like that in the regiment before. He filed a mental note to look into it.

‘Why are you showing this to me?’ he asked.

The Lucifer Blacks thumped through the transport-sized oak doors. Suddenly, the sound of bolter fire was very close indeed.

‘Operational freedom,’ said Cage. ‘I have a certain amount of leeway. There are Progenium schools in the orks’ path, Tempestus regiments that the Lord Militant doesn’t know about, but you? I’m willing to bet you have agents in the area so deep even they don’t know who they are.’

‘This reputation of mine will get me into trouble one day.’

‘I was told you had a sense of humour, Grand Master. One of many things I disapprove of.’

‘And who told you such a thing?’

‘Wienand.’

‘You’ve spoken to Wienand?’

She ignored his question. ‘We can’t beat the orks without them.’ She nodded towards the lords on the dais. ‘But with organisations like ours we can slow them down.’

‘Leave it with me,’ Vangorich murmured, noncommittal, passing the slate back to the aide sitting in the pew immediately behind him.

Then, along with several hundred others in a hall built for half a million, he turned towards the sudden acrimony spilling from the dais.

Udo was rising, pulling the creases from his uniform in a clink of brass, and then glaring milkily from his throne.

The Inquisitorial Representative had arrived. Both of them.

Lastan Neemagiun Veritus walked up to the dais with a clunking, power-armoured stride. His antique battleplate was white, filigreed with theurgic symbols and possessed of its own wanton animus by fluttering papyrus scraps. The man himself was shrunken and pallid. His armour’s gorget seals sucked and wheezed about his thoat like a ventilator. At his shoulder, walking briskly and without augmentation, came a woman with short, pale grey hair and a face far younger than her eyes.

Vangorich had never considered her appearance to be anything other than ordinary until just then, and the kick of his emotional rebuke surprised him.

‘Wienand,’ he breathed.

Udin Macht Udo puffed out his medals. ‘The names of all Senatorum aides are to be pre-submitted to the Administratum for approval.’ Lips curled back, he turned his dead eye onto Ekharth, who quickly blathered his agreement. ‘Inquisitor Wienand will have to leave.’

‘She is not my aide,’ said Veritus, his voice like sand. ‘She is the Inquisitorial Representative.’

‘Not any more, Veritus. You are.’

‘Until the Inquisition decides otherwise,’ said Wienand smoothly.

Veritus had an undeniable gravitas, an automatic authority brought on by age and ceramite, but Wienand spoke with a reasoned clarity that the Senatorum had been missing for too long. ‘And now it has been decided that Lastan and I both will best represent our organisation at this time.’

‘Outrageous!’ spat Mesring, jumping from his chair like a feral cat. ‘This is a grab for power.’

‘Agreed,’ came Kubik’s unsubtle vocalisation.

Wienand spread her hands peaceably. ‘The Inquisition still has one vote on this council.’

‘But two voices,’ whispered Anwar, silkily.

‘United,’ said Veritus. ‘As it is time we all were.’

The Provost-Colonel was speaking urgently into a vox-pin in her cuff. Lansung appeared to be nodding slowly in agreement.

A hush had fallen over the auditorium, all eyes on Udin Macht Udo as the Lord Guilliman turned and strode stiff-backed from the podium.

‘Well, sir,’ said Beast Krule, pushing his thick arms over Vangorich’s seat back and secreting the commissar’s data-slate into one of several concealed pockets. ‘I’d say that makes things interesting.’

Four

Mars – Pavonis Mons

Two masked, metal-skinned skitarii marched Eldon Urquidex’s awkward frame down the long, smearily-lit corridor. The clump of their stride rattled the loose, metallic floor and swished the hems of their robes. The tough, energy-damping weave of their garments did odd things to the incident light, darkening their deep crimson hue to just a shade above black. These were alphas, veterans drawn from the numberless battle maniples of Mars and augmented according to that status. The best.

The transorganic soldiers’ long march brought them to a door, airlock-solid, guarded by another fearsomely augmeticised warrior-build in dark robes and wielding a brass-plated heavy rifle that bristled with deadly technologies. An arc rifle. Perfect for the close-range, narrow-quarters combat that a probability engine might envisage for the labyrinthine laboratorium subplex of Pavonis Mons. The best.

The dim red glow of the guard’s visored sight washed over Urquidex. Sour air, five parts per million perspiration, five hundred parts engine grease, rasped in and out of his cognis filters. The guard brought around his rifle in a nightingale murmur of high-tech servos and synthetics. At that range, with that weapon, with those cortico-sensory enhancements, aim was unnecessary.

They weren’t going to kill him.

Easier to have done it in any one of a hundred different places before now. The three-hour cage descent into the post-industrial hive of Pavonis crater. The skim pad, dust-blown and radiation-scoured, nothing beneath it for miles but stratified piping and still-radioactive sludge. Aboard the dust skimmer, laser-etched with the signum of the 1014 Noctis Maniple, that had swept him over the ancient rust sands and light harvesters of the Martian desert. Or even right there in his plug station in the Noctis Labyrinth where they had come for him. Who would have tried to stop them, or cared if he had been summarily executed even as he ordered his files? The locum trajectorae? His fellow adepts?

As well to expect an impassioned defence from the tech-servitors.

They weren’t going to kill him.

The Assassin, Yendl, must have been unmasked and now Van Auken wanted to interrogate her accomplice in person: that was the only explanation that made sense. Urquidex forced his dry mouth to swallow. His thoughts were of nerve endings and pain receptors: trillions of microscopic sensors, thousands of kilometres of insulated wiring, all evolutionarily perfected by the goal of rendering the hominids of his direct antecedence sufficiently risk-averse to perpetuate Eldon Urquidex. But now, no further.

The guard bared his metal palm to the judgement of the reader by the door. There was a clunk, a ripple through the creaking substructure, then a gasp of air as the doors cracked ajar and then shunted apart. His escorts led him through. They were not unkind.

Force was mass, velocity, and an exponent.

Kindness did not factor.

The chamber on the other side of the door was a short octagonal cylinder, like an expressionistic version of an antique eight-shot’s firing cylinder portrayed through geometry. The ceiling and main walls were a ridged metal, some kind of supplementary ventilation system running along the recesses. The floor was the same loose, rattling metal slats as it had been outside. The angled slants joining the horizontals to the verticals were of a browning armourglass.

‘Stop here,’ grated the skitarius to his right.

He stopped there.

The two skitarii backed away through the door. The guard simultaneously lowered his own weapon and punched the control panel to bring the doors to a shuddering close. Urquidex stared at the solid plasteel for a moment, feeling an utterly illogical sense of panic on watching the two skitarii leave, as if they had been not colluders in his captivity, but protectors, the only thing standing between him and death.

He shivered, the tensile fibres bonding his digitools directly into his nervous system causing them to twitch accordingly. Unsure what else to do, he swallowed and shuffled around to face the opposite door.

There was a clank, as if he had triggered something with his movement, and an intense ultraviolet light flooded in through the armourglass. He grunted in pain. His instinct was to turn away and he did so, optics down, but the light was coming from everywhere. It was purple, piercing, retina-burning, but at the same time little more than bleedthrough, an augur ghost at the edge of his perceptual range. The effect was at once vivid and watery. Biologis adepts designated the treatment as ‘soft’ decontamination: degrade any biological contaminant, while leaving precious technologies intact and without chemical residual.

Urquidex retracted his telescopic eyestalks and dialled their sensitive optics shut, burying his face in the folds of his robes for good measure. He could feel his exposed flesh begin to heat. This biological contaminant did not consider the procedure nearly as soft as it once had.

At the same time, he became aware of an urgent hiss. Some kind of gas was being delivered into the chamber through that secondary ventilation system. His heart rate spiked, a fight or flight reflex that perversely then delivered the command for his lungs to draw deep. Ozone, he realised, sensing the epithelial sting on the lining of his nose. Urquidex felt his UV-reddened skin begin to burn.

The lights shut down abruptly. The hiss stopped.

Cautiously, Urquidex re-extended his eyes. He could still smell ozone, a sore-throat tightness down the back of his mouth.

‘Proceed, magos.’

The voice was female, piped into the chamber like gas through the walls.

A clunk sounded from the far end of the cubicle, followed by a whoosh of evacuating air. Urquidex winced as it flowed over his sunburned flesh and the door ground open. His ears popped under the change in pressure.

A biologis laboratorium, then: the design adhered to schemata laid down by arch-magi from an era before the Dark Age of Technology, and to Urquidex was more familiar than his own surgically modified face. A slender needle of curiosity pricked his skin of fear. Such a place was an unlikely venue for an interrogation, or even an execution.

He walked through the door to be met by another skitarius. This one was female, that much of her original body plan evident even through her heavy robes and obtrusive techno-refinements, and was covering the door with an arc pistol. Her left hand had been retrofitted with a combat glove with an integrated transonic razor. Urquidex absorbed those prosaic details at a glance, for her most unique feature was too stunning to devote time and attention elsewhere. Head to toe, the skitarius had been physically remodelled in dazzling silver. Other agencies of the Imperium exploited that precious metal for its anti-psychic properties, but the Adeptus Biologis archives retained many fragmentary references to its ancient bactericidal application.

She watched him sceptically, and Urquidex, fearfully, said nothing.

‘Stand down to readiness level, Zeta-One Prime,’ came the deep, breathy voice of Artisan Trajectorae Van Auken, each word enunciated with a puff of mechanical diaphragms.

Eldon stiffened and froze.

The artisan trajectorae emerged from the incense pall that cloaked a bank of shuddering ruminators. His spindly shoulders were slumped under the weight of a servo-harness and multitools, and his forehead had been broadened and deepened with the installation of a thick plasteel plate. He emitted a hiss of pistoned air and dismissed his sterile and glittering adjutant with the flex of a mechadendrite.

‘You have no questions, magos? Do you forget the Eleventh Universal Law?’

Urquidex answered by rote. ‘The universe is uncertain until it is observed.’

‘Your locum trajectorae expressed concerns regarding your state of mind. It was her conclusion that you were distracted, that the Grand Experiment was in some way insufficiently fulfilling.’

Urquidex opened his mouth, but there was no subjective rebuttal to the locum trajectorae’s objective conclusions. He remained silent, mouth dry. Van Auken knew. The thought ran round and round his higher functions like a scrapcode algorithm on a recursive loop.

‘You are frustrated by the lack of progress,’ Van Auken continued for him. ‘I understand. It is not your proper specialism. You have been unable to devote your full energies to this grand task.’

‘Yes, artisan,’ he said carefully. ‘But my lapse of purpose is inexcusable.’

‘Indeed so, but the Fabricator General has another task more meritous of your talents, magos.’

The artisan trajectorae turned and for the first time, Urquidex took a proper look at the glorious scale of the laboratorium.

Instruments filled the floor, spaced apart from one another, as machines of their type were known to be jealous of their status within the schemata, and could be cantankerous when the proper attention was not afforded them. Adepts of the first level chanted soothing psalms, scattering the straining machines with crystals from their aspersoria, carbon dioxide produced and sanctified in the manufactories of Marcotis Temple. Even so, electrical smoke seeped from the instruments’ backs and pooled on the metal tiles. Wheezing scrubbers did their best to filter the pollutants from the air.

Servitors clumped from instrument to instrument carrying plastek plates indented with tiny wells containing organic serum. Attendant techno-magi received the sample dishes, commended them to the all-seeing attentions of the Omnissiah, and fed them into the machines under their care. And through the semi-transparent plastek view-plates that overlooked the sterilisation chamber, the exact repetitive routine was enacted over and over, identically laid out levels stacked one atop the next high into the smog layer.

‘Samples are brought to this laboratorium from across the Imperium,’ said Van Auken. ‘You can understand the demand for secrecy. And for biological integrity.’

Urquidex nodded.

A magos was loading a set of plates into the ornately inscribed chrome housing of a prognosticator, triggering seizures of clacking and shuddering and frenzied bursts of laser light. In parallel, hundreds of sequence graphics sputtered up on the networked displays. Each was an assemblage of coloured lines representing As and Ts, Cs and Gs, and Xs. After about half an hour of chewing noises the machine expelled the spent samples and emitted an insatiable peal for more data.

‘You hope to find a solution to the Grand Experiment in their genetic code,’ said Urquidex. ‘It won’t work. Veridi giganticus’ genome is structurally unstable. It is a mosaic of recombinatorial sequences and mobilisable elements, continually on the cusp of one speciation event or another. Veridi giganticus should not be at all.’

‘It is your specialism, magos, not mine, and I do not pretend to understand it. But no, that is not our goal.’

With his human hand Van Auken directed Urquidex’s attention to a neighbouring screen. This one was packed with moving code lines, the backing cogitator plugged via a heavy-duty shunt into a run of cabling that disappeared into the ceiling. The system’s program wafer had the machine data-mining the Martian noosphere, pulling up astropathic logs, engagement reports, every bit of data relevant to the Veridi giganticus samples that came with a grid stamp and a time stamp, and then cross-referencing them against the sequence output.

A map.

The artisan trajectorae was making a map.

The very genetic instability of Veridi giganticus was the way in. A population would be expected to accumulate sequence alterations over a very short period of time. As they moved on and established new populations, those unique alterations would be carried forward and added to, and so on. With enough samples those changes could be tracked back. The Adeptus Biologis did it all the time. Mapping the spread of viruses through hive worlds, extrapolating the evolution of newly discovered Homo subspecies at the request of the Inquisition. Thus was the grace of the Omnissiah made manifest in the base material of Its organic machines.

Urquidex could see sample tags referenced to Ardamantua, Undine, Malleus Mundi. Hundreds, thousands of names: worlds from the breadth and span of the Imperium. The ork incursion was more widespread even than he had realised.

‘You are looking for the orks’ home world.’

‘One successful test does not complete the Grand Experiment. Phobos has a diameter of twenty-two kilometres. Mars is more than three hundred and ten times larger. In effect, the Grand Experiment has become an issue of scale.’

‘Scale…’

Urquidex tested the word, measured it, weighed it. The Grand Experiment had not stalled because of him or Yendl. It was a technical problem. Yendl was probably still alive, going over his last communiqué and wondering what had become of him. He swallowed, his sudden relief somehow more powerful even than his fear had been, and clasped his hands behind his back to obscure his quivering digitools.

‘Veridi giganticus has somehow managed to overcome the discontinuity between efficiency and scale,’ said Van Auken. ‘Or otherwise devised a solution to circumvent the Omnissiah’s constants.’

‘It sounds as though you admire them for it.’

‘They are a superbly constructed species, individually adaptive, collectively diverse. They are an apex species, magos, as once we were. There is much to re-learn from them, and yes, we are not above admiration. We have narrowed their point of origin to six or seven candidate sectors. A few thousand systems at the galactic core of Ultima Segmentum.’

Urquidex’s mind spun out a stream of hurried calculations. Stars came fast and close in the core and a few thousand systems need not, comparatively at least, cover a lot of space. A search of it would still be a massive logistical undertaking, but compared to the galaxy as a whole…

‘Has the Imperium been informed?’

‘The Fabricator General will apprise them if and when the timing is opportune. The Imperium is more than Terra, magos, and humanity is more than the Imperium. We must learn how Veridi giganticus operate their technology. You were there on Ardamantua. The Eleventh Universal Law applies. You have observed Veridi giganticus. They are not unknown to you.’

Eldon nodded mutely, numbly. The instruments before him continued to gorge on the galaxy of data they were being fed. Too much to smuggle to Terra. Far too much. He had to find the world.

One world. One word.

That, he could get to Yendl. And to Terra.

Five

Vandis System – Mandeville point

Targeting solutions crowded the lower right quadrant of Dantalion’s main viewer, coloured box reticules jostling over the vid-feed of the cannibalised Oberon-class battleship. Energy sources. Weapons arrays. Structural weaknesses. Void-suited strategium serfs worked furiously to keep the display updated as the two vessels sailed into weapons range. Lobbed shells blistered Dantalion’s forward shields. Fire broke out between them as the two warships closed and slowly, slowly, began to turn apart. The Oberon-class dropped to port, Dantalion climbed to starboard, both ships manoeuvering to present the massed firepower of their broadsides. Banks of hardlines provided wired communications between Dantalion’s command deck and the thousands of weapons hardpoints, loading bays, and cogitators throughout the two-kilometre-long battle-barge. Breathless operators called in status reports.

‘Prow beamers charged and locked.’

‘Macro-cannons trained to target.’

‘Launch tubes alpha through delta report cyclonic warheads loaded and ready at your mark.’

‘Hold torpedos,’ Shipmaster Marcarian commanded. ‘Macro-weaponry and beamers only until we have the measure of their shields. Steady as she goes.’

‘Fire weapons!’ Zerberyn snarled.

‘Firing, aye.’

White-hot beams of stellar fury drilled from Dantalion’s fusion batteries at near-light speed. The gap between the two ships had narrowed to a few thousand kilometres – an almost terrestrial scale, a space of particle fire and scrambled fighter craft – and the barrage hit almost instantaneously. The first beam strike overloaded the Oberon-class’ jury-rigged void shield array. The second lanced through the outer hull, and set off chain explosions within the superstructure. The fusion beamers fired in sequence. Each blast lasted split seconds before the collider cells had to be removed to be cooled and recharged, but the relative velocities and opposing vectors meant that those snap shots were sufficient to gouge through hundreds of metres of armour cladding.

Spewing drive plasma and the atomised constituents of its outer hull, the Oberon-class sailed under Dantalion’s belly, the battle-barge yawing over its blistered prow.

‘Ventral batteries report locks.’

‘Fire!’

Sustained firepower chewed up the cannibalised vessel’s dorsal plating. Atmospheric decompression ignited like the pilot light of a super-heavy flamer. Edged with greens, yellows and purples from vaporised hull elements, fire erupted into the void. For all Dantalion’s killing might, however, the honour of the ship-kill and the steel plaque on the wall of her shipmaster’s cell fell to another.

‘Shipmaster Akienas, of the Paragon, hailing,’ Marcarian exclaimed, panting with short bursts of relieved laughter. ‘It’s the fleet.’

The cheers of those on the command deck followed the aegis frigate Paragon as she cut across her parent ship’s nose. Engine stacks on full burn whited out Dantalion’s viewer and for a moment the escort passed close enough that the electromagnetic distortion generated by the interplay of the two sets of shields whined over every open channel.

Zerberyn did not cheer. He had never doubted, and there was little to celebrate in seeing others catch up to one’s certainty.

The escort sailed under as Dantalion went over. The dying Oberon-class battleship cruised between them, trailing plasma discharge and colour distortions as Paragon opened up. Anti-fighter batteries walked down her centre line at devastatingly close range. They struck something critical, an unsecured mega-weapon or a main plasma chamber of the drive core.

The battleship detonated like an atomic warhead.

Dantalion blazed inside her shields like a model voidship in a lightning cage. Paragon’s layered shielding failed simultaneously in an explosive moment of brilliance that rivalled the birth of a star. Her starboard side buckled under forced compression. Bent plates spewed atmosphere, and she skewed off wildly on a new trajectory.

Unshielded ork fighter-bombers that had been emptied out of the Oberon-class’ flight decks were simply obliterated. Muzzle-flash explosions dotted the cloud of attack craft that had been racing in behind. The survivors broke off their run under the barrage of Dantalion’s flak guns and scattered, weaving a craze of propellant tails behind them.

‘Track them, shipmaster, see where they go,’ said Zerberyn. ‘Move to cover Paragon and raise Akienas.’

‘Helm, new heading,’ Marcarian relayed. ‘Put us between Paragon and the orks, siphon power to starbord shields, mobilise reserve gunnery teams to dorsal, starboard and ventral flak batteries.’

The command deck, already a hive of purpose, set about the new orders with a well-drilled efficiency.

‘Aye sir, new heading. Plotting turn.’

‘No response from Paragon.’

‘Reading catastrophic damage to her primary transceiver array. Trying to contact her machine-spirit.’

On the main viewer, the wreckage of the Oberon-class slowly dispersed.

‘The beacon?’ said Zerberyn, impatiently.

‘Nothing yet, lord.’

‘Lords!’ The elated cry came from the vox-liaison. She tore off her headphones, and leapt out of her chair. ‘Fists Exemplar ships incoming. Chastened. Angel Astra. Unbroken. It’s the whole fleet.’

‘Bright skies,’ Marcarian murmured, and closed his good eye.

‘Show me,’ said Zerberyn.

The vid-feed in the oculus switched to a view dorsal aft. There were bits of coiled wire, ice-encrusted cosmic dust that had accumulated around the communication vanes, and macro-turrets around the edge of the image. Beyond the fuzz, a dozen iron-grey splinters hung in space, ranging from aegis frigates a few hundred metres long to mighty strike cruisers a kilometre in length and bristling with armament enough to waste a planetary hemisphere. Explosive shells and high-energy plasma spat between them and the loose agglomeration of ork cruisers that had strayed this far from the main battle area.

The most likely theoretical was they were a picketing force set to guard the Mandeville point. To what end, Zerberyn could only speculate, but if he was indulging in theoreticals then he might further suppose that it was to ensure that whomever it was currently engaged by the main ork battlegroup did not escape the system.

More warships translated in all the time, cutting through the empyreal sheath like knives through black silk. Each new arrival brought a burst of vox-chatter that gabbled from the vox-turret hardlines and bled into the general commotion. Void-suited tacticians hurried to update the strategium desk, while vox-personnel spoke on two, or sometimes three, lines at once in an effort to impose the pre-formulated formation protocols on the emerging fleet.

It had been for just a few short decades that the Fists Exemplar had called Eidolica their home, but for seven centuries prior their home range had been the Rubicante Flux. Their fleet was sizeable. With the exclusion of the Black Templars, whose numbers were a secret guarded even amongst brothers, the Fists Exemplar provided over half of the Last Wall’s naval power.

Zerberyn was not of a mind to let them forget it.

A huge shape slid into main view, high on Dantalion’s z-axis.

Serfs from every station rose in unison to clap and cheer it. It was a battle-barge, Dantalion’s sister ship, but even more heavily armed. Kilometre after battle-scarred kilometre of adamantium-grey crenellations bristled with macro-batteries like the armour studs on a chrono-gladiator. Gothic spires rose from its central bulk, counterbalanced by smaller ventral towers. Launch tubes, flak turrets and antennae arrays vied with the asteroid-pitted statues of warrior angels aboard the immense dorsal spine. A volley of torpedo launches from her broadside tore a slow-turning ork crusier to shreds. Dantalion rocked with the energy discharge.

‘Alcazar Remembered,’ Marcarian confirmed with one half of a smile.

‘Welcome the Chapter Master,’ said Zerberyn in a voice that offered little of the kind. ‘Transmit our tactical data to the flagship.’

The vox-liaison frowned as she retook her seat, refitted her headset, and swivelled back to her console. Zerberyn joined her at her station.

‘A priority transmission,’ she reported. ‘It’s coming through some intense interference, but it’s definitely Last Wall.’

‘Our beacon?’

She shook her head as she worked. ‘The coordinates don’t tally. The beacon was being transmitted from a near-stationary position much closer to the Vandis star. This signal is new, and it’s coming from the system’s edge.’ She stood and shouted at the liaison working auspectoria, then dropped back into her seat as the requested read-outs squirted across to her system. ‘Residual warp backwash from twenty to twenty-five vessels suggests a recent inbound translation. An hour old, maximum. Multiple radiation sources, plasma discharge, particle spread suggestive of hostile tractor locks on ships running full ahead.’ She spun her chair towards Zerberyn and leant back to look up to him. ‘It’s a Black Templars fleet, my lord, inbound on the beacon at ninety degrees to our position. Auto-identifiers name the signalling ship the Interdictor.’

‘Can I speak to them?’

‘I can’t guarantee you’ll hear every word.’

‘Put it on.’

The woman flicked a switch, and angry static roared from the turret’s augmitters. The sounds of alien voices blizzarded across the channel, bleedthrough from neighbouring frequencies, some breathless prattle that ran and ran and ran.

Gorkamorkagorkamorka.

‘Castellan Kasemund,’ scratched the interference-punished voice of a Space Marine. Zerberyn could pick up only odd words of what followed. ‘Crusade… recall… Phall… retaliation beacon… cruiser, Obsidian Sky… venerable…’

The castellan stopped speaking as static erased his words like ripple patterns on a beach as the moons pulled the tide higher.

Gorkamorkagorkamorkagorkamorka.

‘They must have been in the materium when they received Obsidian Sky’s transmission,’ explained the vox-liaison. ‘Most likely they would have received the complete message.’

Zerberyn nodded his understanding. ‘Your strength and situation, brother?’

Gorkamorkagorkamorka.

‘Eleven ships… Crusade… spear in the belly… boarded… push us hard… not show the xenos our backs.’

The spit and pop of bolter fire imposed itself over the background crackle, but neither that nor the orkish chatter could quite disguise the Black Templar’s uncomplicated disdain for the alien.

‘Lord captain, sir,’ mumbled Marcarian. ‘Auspectoria confirms several hundred large-mass warships, twice that in escorts and support craft. It’s inconceivable that one ship could have survived.’

‘And yet the battle rages on.’

Zerberyn thought back on the picket fleet the orks had positioned to hold the Mandeville point, and presumably the other that the Black Templars had broken through. The incredible mobilisation of materiel to run down one ship.

It was the work of a moment, a moment in which the command deck buzzed with a thousand and one operations.

‘Bulwark and Faceless Warrior coming astern.’

‘The orks are pulling back their fighters. They’re breaking off.’

‘Orders from the Chapter Master to hold this line while Noble Savage takes Paragon under tow.’

The image on the main view had switched again, this time to a starboard shot. Dantalion’s broadside lit up with detonations as her macrocannons opened fire in unison. Zerberyn felt the battle-barge pushed several metres to port. Void flares and feedback flashed across the viewer as Dantalion traded fire with a pair of brutish ork battlecruisers, box-jawed with weapon blisters and extraneous plating. The astern battlecruiser came apart under a volley of prow lances and void torpedos as Bulwark slid into position.

There was some reason the orks wanted to keep the Obsidian Sky inside this system.

‘I have them,’ cried Vox. ‘Obsidian Sky and one other vessel. Her spirit resists divulging her identity, but energy profiles and mass ratios suggest an Adeptus Astartes cruiser.’

The turret augmitters fizzed with vox-corruption. ‘Incoming… Throne… massive… protects–’

‘Castellan? Castellan?’

Gorkamorkagorkamorkagorkamorkagorkamorka.

‘Cut it off.’

The augmitters hissed like the animated dead, and then went silent.

‘Should I apprise Alcazar Remembered, lord?’ asked Marcarian.

‘Of course, but first signal to Bulwark and Faceless Warrior.’

‘To what end, lord?’

An appalled exclamation drew Zerberyn and his shipmaster’s attention towards the chart desk before he could answer. Strategium serfs backed away from it as though afraid that it was one of them that had damaged it. A small portion of the display had been blacked out: a sphere of unidentifiable darkness moved slowly through the glowing hololith field towards the highlighted wedge of Black Templars ships, ork icons disappearing as though swallowed by a black hole.

‘The incoming vessel that the Interdictor reported,’ Zerberyn concluded.

Marcarian looked to him, aghast. ‘What kind of monster does it carry?’

‘Contact Bulwark and Faceless Warrior. Advise them to break formation and follow us.’

‘But lord, Thane’s orders–’

‘Are subordinate to an Exemplar’s judgement. We must protect the Obsidian Sky.’ Zerberyn glanced back to the chart desk, the auspex shadow that was slowly spreading across it. He could almost hear the challenge of the Beast roared across light years. ‘We must engage that ship.’

‘Try again,’ commanded Maximus Thane, Chapter Master of the Fists Exemplar. ‘I want my ships back in formation.’

‘They’re not responding, lord Chapter Master.’

‘Is Zerberyn ignoring me?’

‘It’s the interference, lord. It’s getting worse and Dantalion’s already out of contactable range. I’m not getting a reply from Bulwark or Faceless Warrior either.’

Maximus Thane leaned forward, one hissing, armoured boot up on the seat of his command throne as though being seated was a transient luxury that he might abjure at a moment’s notice.

In the auspectoria turret below, void-suited serfs bent over the crowded scanner table, wielding protractors and slide rules with the prowess of champions at the Festival of Blades, calling out number strings to their colleagues mobbing the chart desk at the neighbouring strategium turret. The blisters of colour-coded ork markers at the desk’s extreme range were beginning to drop off the hololithic display, and operators shouted across one another in their efforts to explain why.

To Thane it resembled a planetary transition; a slow-moving disc that temporily blanked out a small portion of its parent sun.

Compared to the mortal men and women under his authority he was an armoured giant, face stern, battleplate grey as weathered bedrock, enthroned within a cathedra of moulded steel and shock-responsive hydraulics. From the various read-outs and data-displays that sprouted from the armrests, he could monitor every major function of the ship from shield strength to engine efficiency to oxygen pressure. His oversight was total, his command absolute. He was brilliant, naturally, but tactical aptitude could be found at every level of the Chapter. There were plenty, also – Zerberyn or Dentor (Daylight now, he reminded himself) to name but two – with greater prowess at arms. But there were none more stubborn, even amongst the elite ranks of his peers, and his perfectionist streak was as sharp as the high polish of his combat knife.

‘My line of battle, shipmaster. Send forward Grey Ranger to hold Dantalion’s position.’

‘Orders already relayed, lord.’

Shipmaster Weylon Kale was an old hand. He had served in the Crantar VII compliance, duelled ships with Archon M’awrr, and was even rumoured to have been aboard the old Alcazar Astra as a young subaltern during the Eidolican Crash that had cost the Chapter the great Oriax Dantalion. Clasping his hands behind his back, the shipmaster turned to regard the main viewer that dominated the far prow-end of the command deck.

The large multi-screen display currently showed the unaugmented glitter of space and occasional sweeps of static. Without magnification, even a void fight between capital-class warships could lose itself in the deep black between stars. Vandis was the simmering red backdrop to most of the displays. The sun’s surface churned, boiled, vented off the last of its fading heat. It was near enough to the fight to force the orks’ battleships into a looser than usual formation to avoid arcing ejections of coronal matter, an uncommon display of self-preservation that Thane took into tactical consideration. One corner of the display had been given over to a view of the dead Oberon-class cruiser. The frigates Chastened and Noble Savage drove through the debris field, shields stuttering, as they slowly drew the wreck of Paragon out under tow.

A keystroke from Thane reformatted the subscreen to a schematic view of the Fists Exemplar fleet.

Frigates were moving ahead of the main fleet assets to present a picket of anti-fighter and anti-torpedo capability, but had already become mired in close fighting with the orks’ own screening ships. The cruiser Grey Ranger was moving up as ordered to provide close support. Scrolling updates reported shield hits, weapons fire. Of the light ships, only the specialist frigate Excelsior held back, escorted by a pair of attack-dog-like frigates of her own. His fingers brushed the data-display again. The view zoomed out to show three golden aquilae, led by Dantalion, veering off towards the second, smaller Black Templars force that was stuck in the mass of ork warships like a splinter in a grox’s belly.

A low-yield, shield-diffused impact trembled through the hull.

‘What is Zerberyn thinking?’

Kale turned, hangdog face tilting to find Thane’s above the command throne. ‘I would not care to theorise as to the First Captain’s thoughts, my lord. But Dantalion’s last data-burst reported the coordinates of Obsidian Sky and something about an ork flagship of some kind incoming. From his current vector I’d suggest he’s attempting to flank this ship or perhaps lure it away from the Black Templars.’

‘He’s forced my hand.’ Thane shifted in his throne so that both boots were grounded and he was leaning forward. He steepled his gauntleted fingers and growled. ‘So we might as well act before we lose three more ships for no gain at all. Deploy the fleet, shipmaster, attack formation. Objective, the Obsidian Sky and her mysterious escort.’

Without a word, Kale turned on his heels, pointed across the deck to the vox-liaison, and produced a ‘go’ order with a nod. The dozen or so crew-serfs staffing the tiered, organ-like switchboard sprang into activity, routing wires, establishing vox-contacts, all under the close scrutiny of a red-robed tech-adept and a young-looking subaltern named Teal.

‘Dutiful, reporting ready.’

‘Guilliman, reporting ready.’

‘Unbroken, reporting ready.’

‘Grey Ranger, sir,’ said Teal, breaking the litany and looking up from the control board to relay the message herself. ‘The signal’s breaking up, but she’s reporting heavy shelling from beyond the range of her auspex. Requesting permission to break formation.’

‘The orks cannot be actively targeting her at that kind of range,’ said Thane. ‘Permission denied.’

‘Fishing,’ murmured Kale. ‘Hoping for a bite.’

‘And they shall receive one. Instruct all ships, forward on us.’ Thane clenched both gauntlets on his throne’s armoured rests and rose. ‘Ahead full, shipmaster, weapons free.’

Alcazar Remembered was a dominant beast. Her deck plates trembled with the power output required to sustain her formidable array of weapons systems and shields. She did not purr; she growled. It was difficult to stand aboard her as her engine stacks were fired to capacity and not share something of that invulnerability.

Her killing spirit vibrated through Thane’s boots, into the core of his being like the might and will of the primarch himself.

‘Sir.’ The call came from the liaison working at auspectoria. ‘We have visual on Obsidian Sky.’

‘On screen.’

The images currently cycling through the main viewer cut out. The panoramic shot that replaced them was badly pixellated, as though translated from an image intended for a much smaller display. Blizzards of static swept across the screens at intervals. But there was no mistaking what they were seeing. A hush descended. Hazard and proximity alerts continued to bleep. Consoles chirruped for attention. Crew serfs pulled headsets from their ears and stared up at the screen in horror. Thane realised his hand had moved across his mouth.

It was the Obsidian Sky. They were watching her final moments.

In the cold silence of full magnification, a sequence of explosions blossomed from her port stern. Shields were gone. Bits of enamelled black outer hull glittered around her, held to her mass like a miniature ring system around a gas giant. The image shook slightly and fuzzed, as if the force of the blasts had somehow carried over the feed. The static bomb faded slowly. Tracers spat back and forth over the display. Sitting above Obsidian Sky and, relative to Alcazar Remembered, behind it, was another Adeptus Astartes cruiser. Their hulls were as close together as though conducting a last stand: two old warriors, back-to-back and beset by foes. A torpedo hit blasted a chunk from its dorsal spire. A tortured flare of combusting atmosphere raged into the airless void, spraying Obsidian Sky with metal fragments.

Thane leaned to the edge of his throne, elbows to the thigh plates of his armour, chin to his ceramite-clad knuckles.

Impossible.

‘Traitors of the Fourth.’

The inconceivability of it brought a shiver to Thane’s heart. He felt short of breath, his chest felt tight. The bald fact of what he was witnessing, that which was verifiable, that which was practical, simply could not overcome his disbelief in it.

Thane tightened his hold on the brass grip-studs. Focus on the immediate.

His voice, when it came, was the exemplar of strength.

‘Signal Obsidian Sky.’

‘I can’t, my lord,’ cried Teal, little trace of that invulnerability in her tone now. ‘The interference is too intense.’

‘Forward grids.’ Kale’s voice, coming from somewhere, some universe where Black Templars and Iron Warriors did not fight side-by-side. ‘Keep those fighters off our shoulder.’

‘Reduce magnification,’ said Thane. ‘Can you show me Interdictor and the main Black Templars fleet?’

‘Aye, sir.’

The screen blinked to a broader view.

A dozen Black Templars vessels of various classes came into active view, the swollen chromosphere of Vandis highlighting lance arrays, fins and turrets in bitter red. They moved in an arrowhead formation, the blunted point pushing towards Obsidian Sky and the Iron Warriors cruiser, but were blocked off and encircled by ork ships. Debris clouds filled the gaping holes in their formation. Ork gunships, muscular and tusked, surrounded them, bristling with firepower. A Black Templars destroyer was in the final stages of disintegration, a bite taken out of its belly by the boarding claw of a monstrous ironclad. All inertial control lost, the two ships slowly spun around their conjoined axis as the void fight raged around them. The thump of explosions lit the screen, energy lances and the spent heat of solid rounds filling the display like embers rising off a fire.

And closing in on their position, casting a shadow light-minutes long, was a vessel that dwarfed them all.

‘Hellsteeth.’

Thane was not sure who said it. It seemed to hiss out of the internal communications, out of the unattended speakers and microphones of Vox. He had seen the ork attack moon that had demolished Eidolica, and the even larger war-engine that now loomed over Terra. They had been massive, but they had been moons. The gut accepted that they would be huge, even if the mind knew them to be constructed. They had been planetary bodies. He had processed them on that scale.

This was different. The behemoth hoving into view in pursuit of the Black Templars fleet was a ship. To be precise it was a carrier, fighters and destroyer-sized warships streaming from cavernous flight bays in its underside. It made the Eternal Crusader look like a corvette. Even the Phalanx would have been dwarfed.

Thane had no frame of reference for it.

A contemptuous slice from an axial beam weapon sheared through the aft of the rearmost Black Templars cruiser. Some kind of gravitic conversion beam, it crushed the entire aft section as though it were parchment scrap. The sudden spike of hypergravity flipped the warship nose to stern, torsional stresses cutting through what was left like a gladius through a ration can and spilling its contents into space.

Thane had never seen a weapon like it. Nothing the Imperium could produce came close. A sail-like array of adjusting fins, turning wheels, shivering wires and enormous copper rods rose from the ork carrier’s bloated hull. A wash of strange, green-tinged energy sparked through the array towards its vertex and seemed to radiate into space. Thane’s throat clenched.

Witch.

‘All Black Templars identifiers are in,’ said Auspectoria. He spoke quietly, mournfully, eyes on the on-screen tableau. ‘Nine ships, and debris mass-equivalent to about fifteen more.’

Thane counted quickly.

‘I see ten ships.’

‘Nine ships, my lord. There’s a delay. The feed is being relayed from Excelsior. Our systems can’t penetrate the interference.’

The carrier fired again. A full spread of crude but devastingly effective torpedoes blasted another cruiser to pieces.

Nine.

‘Can she relay a hololith signal? Can she get me Obsidian Sky?’

‘I… I think so.’

‘Then do it!’

Shipmaster Kale moved purposefully towards the strategium board. Another impact to the forward shields almost threw him the final metre, forcing him to steady himself against the metallic rim of the console’s bulk housing. An armsman in grey carapace bodyplate and with a pump-action shotgun hanging from a shoulder strap hurried to help him. Kale thanked him with a curt nod, then gestured him back to his post.

‘Should we also attempt to raise the…’ the shipmaster looked uncomfortable, ‘other ship, lord?’

‘No!’

Thane practically spat the word. The idea alone was abhorrent.

‘When circumstances change, my lord…’ said Kale. His wish to recite his Guilliman vied with awareness of his position relative his superhuman Chapter Master. He restricted himself to just that opening line, and a poignant arch of his eyebrow.

‘Some circumstances don’t change,’ said Thane. ‘Some walls can never come down.’

‘Sir. My lord.’

They both turned. It was Teal.

‘I have the Venerable Dreadnought-Marshal Magneric on vox.’

Six

Vandis System – Mandeville point

The image within the wire hoop of the cable-fed, spring-mounted hololith projector was dark. Had it not been for the drizzle of static and the occasional side-to-side flicker of the shadow shapes within it, then Thane might have concluded that Excelsior had lost the signal. The cold blue glow of the frequency-tether bulb confirmed otherwise. Primary power aboard Obsidian Sky was out. Even bridge lighting was down.

Illuminated under periodic fountains of sparks, he could make out Magneric. The hard, angular definition of his armour shone like a faceted work of jet. Silver cuneiform picked out the edgework of black, battle-scarred ceramite plates. But this was not the moulded plate of a battle-brother. It was the immense armour housing of a Dreadnought’s sarcophagus.

‘Do I address the Venerable Magneric?’ spoke Thane, forgetting for a moment, in his reverence, where he was. ‘I studied your actions in the defence of Terra as a neophyte. The sally that silenced the Fourth Legion’s guns is legendary, even if it cost you your life.’

‘The Emperor lights our true path!’ the Dreadnought thundered, shouting Thane down as he still spoke as though he had not heard, or had listened and deemed it irrelevant. His speakers were pitched to a frightening volume, his words stretched and distorted by the interlink as though delivered through a pipe. ‘Not once but twice. Twice!’

The image dissolved into drizzling static and the audio went with it. For a moment, ork gibberish pushed hard onto the line, and then the hololith returned, albeit for several seconds without sound. The Venerable Dreadnought must have been similarly affected by the break in the link but, judging by the flutter of the scriptural parchments that lay over his speakers, he spoke yet.

‘Praise be!’ the Dreadnought boomed, rising to full volume in a grind of static. ‘Praise be!’

Thane turned enquiringly to Teal.

‘There’s nothing I can do, lord. The interruptions are at their end.’

The command deck shook under a series of escalating blows, and Thane gripped the handrail that encircled the hololith plate. Mass-explosions and slow disintegrations lit the screens of the main viewer as they cycled through shots of the Fists Exemplar fleet. An aegis frigate came apart under a sustained torrent of macro-fire, its hull flaking away like rust. An ork warship vanished in a ball of light. Another lost its shields in a spasm of current, then was engulfed and destroyed. The cruiser Angel Astra split down her centre, metal shearing and snapping and spinning into space, coming apart before the ork assault ship that was ploughing into her spine. Light attack craft burst and died, indistinguishable from static.

‘Magneric. Magneric!’ Static rippled through the loop-array like blast debris in a warpstorm. He waited for a response for as long as he felt he could keep his attention from the needs of his own ship. And then, half-buried in noise, like the blip of an emergency transponder to alert a searching friend that the debris hid survivors, came the voice.

‘The Emperor guided us to Dzelenic Four and showed us the way to victory. Seven centuries I pursued the traitor that calls me friend, and it was for a purpose. Praise be!’

It sounded as though that final coda was carried by other voices in the background, but it was impossible to be sure. To add to the orks’ interference, there was a disconnect of several seconds between what Thane heard and what he saw. Holding a dialogue with the most considered of Fists Exemplar would have been difficult, but it was abundantly clear that carrying on a conversation with the Venerable Black Templar even under the most ideal of circumstances would have been a challenge.

‘Victory, Dreadnought-Marshal?’ he urged. ‘Victory over the orks? Is that why they pursue you in such numbers, for information that you carry?

‘Abhor the witch, deny the witch, destroy the witch!’

Thane tightened his grip over the handrail, hung his head, closed his eyes, and let out an exasperated growl. The shiver of shield-diffused detonations ran through the metal and into his palms.

‘Our faith in Him is our armour,’ Magneric continued, unabated. ‘His divinity is the sword in our hands. Alas for the weakness of my Navigator’s faith, his mind was destroyed when the witch craft pulled us from the warp. Loathe the mutant!’

Thane left the hololithic projection to its diatribe. The Black Templars’ fundamentalist beliefs were subject to hushed discussion among the Successor Chapters, but were nominally a secret nonetheless. To hear them declared so brazenly by a veteran of the Heresy War made Thane uneasy.

Nonetheless. ‘Whatever the Venerable’s state of mind, shipmaster, it is clear to me that he has something of value,’ he said aside to Kale. ‘Anything that the orks work so hard to keep from me is something that I want. Release emergency power to main drive and forward shields. Ram the alien from our path if you must. Divert the necessary power to tractors and teleporters.’

‘No!’ Magneric’s time-delayed static-hiss rumbled from the array like thunder. ‘The Emperor protects.’

‘I do not understand. You sent out a signal for aid.’

The Dreadnought’s bulk pivoted against the enshrouding darkness, turning sufficiently far from his hololith’s field of capture to boom something at a crew serf without Thane’s hearing. ‘I am sending your ship my sarcophagus’ vid-log of the battle. May it lift your heart, brother. Use it gloriously.’

Thane looked to Kale, who looked in turn to the vox-liaison, Teal. She frowned. ‘Data exload from Obsidian Sky confirmed but we’ve received nothing yet.’ A few tense moments passed. ‘Wait… Data packet received, not by us, but by the Interdictor.’

Thane thumped the handrail. ‘Who did he think that he was talking to?’

While he marshalled his frustration, Kale had crossed to the strategium and reformatted the viewer to a split screen. Individual screens on the left-hand side continued to flick between shots of the Fists Exemplar fleet.

The frigate picket was coming apart under an intolerable weight of firepower. The Dauntless, Champion and Noble Savage were destroyed. The Grey Ranger was burning, backup generators spitting emergency power into space.

The right-side screens had been combined to run a single, near-real-time feed of the second Black Templar crusade group, crudely overlain by a black grid showing the divides between the screens. They were barely moving at all now, held up in a mass of ork warships. Dantalion and her accompanying cruisers were just sliding into field, enveloped in an oil-on-water pattern of void-shield discharge as the three massive ships sailed into the orks’ heaviest ordnance. Arriving from the opposite direction, the ork carrier crunched into the rear of its escort fleet, spitting out a volume of fire equivalent to an entire Navy battlegroup, weird power squirming over its ramshackle sail. Another black cruiser blossomed into fire. From the vid-feed alone, Thane could not be sure that it was not the Interdictor.

‘Zerberyn gets himself into the right place at the right time once again. Can we get a message to him?’

‘No, lord. The carrier’s blanket denial broadcast grows exponentially more severe as you approach.’

‘Do we have any ships unengaged?’

‘Paragon is more-or-less intact and has drive power restored.’ Kale consulted a display. ‘And Excelsior and her escorts.’

‘Transmit new orders to those ships. Intercept Dantalion with orders to escort Interdictor from the battle and prepare for immediate translation: return to Terra with all speed, it is nearer than Phall, and hope that Magneric carries information of worth. Dispatch Guilliman to accompany them.’

‘Respectfully, lord, she’s the second most powerful ship in the fleet.’

‘I expect a degree of insubordination from my First Captain, shipmaster, I do not expect it from you.’

The old shipmaster clipped his heels. ‘Aye, lord.’

‘Use it gloriously, brother,’ came Magneric’s voice through the distortion. ‘Praise be.’

‘Hold firm, Dreadnought-Marshal. Your brother, Bohemond, saved my Chapter from my stubbornness on Eidolica and you can expect the same today. Whether the Emperor wishes it or no. Magneric? Magneric!’

The projector emitted an angry hiss. A whiff of ozone. Gabbling voices. The detector picked up the orks’ gibberish frequencies and reconstituted the random noise in eerie repeat patterns and oscillating waves.

The link had been severed.

They had lost Magneric.

Seven

Vandis

The lighting on the command deck of Obsidian Sky plinked on and off, on and off. Half-second flashes of artificial light slid across machine-smooth black metal and the stiff, liveried corpses that lay across them. Plastek console frames stuffed with broken glass flashed back, each jagged piece a lens showing a reflected snapshot of a dead ship. Coolant gases spumed into the chamber from a damaged radiator assembly in the ceiling, filling the area with a vaporous, sub-zero froth.

At the aft section there was a raised platform, above which flew a white banner bearing the Sigismund cross and a blood splatter in the lower left corner. It was ringed with displays and terminals, all dead. Castellan Ralstan had taken an exploding oxygen pipe in the face. He lay on his front on the steps down to the main bridge, armour cracked and burned, arm drawn up as if to conceal the ruin of his head. Light and shadow came and passed: on, off. Shipmaster Ericus was fetched up against the aft bulkhead as though someone had shoved him against it and put a bullet through his forehead.

Down a level, into the main deck, the bodies lay more thickly. Some had been crushed under falling panels or buried under shattered glass, and now lay staring up like dead men frozen under thin ice. They had been electrocuted, burned, cut by glass shrapnel and bludgeoned by high-mass debris, most while still strapped into work station chairs. One had been reduced to a carbonaceous smear on the seat leather by a catastrophic overload of his auspex. The console was still sputtering, sparking and fizzing into the nitrogen mist.

‘Boarding torpedoes incoming,’ mumbled the Master Ordinatum, Franzek, as though drawing each word one at a time from his head. Blood matted his hair and ran down the side of his neck. His eyes were glazed. The harsh lighting intermittently exposed his blanched face. On, off. On, off. ‘I’ve never seen so many at once.’

‘Faith is the first victim of thought. Keep firing,’ Magneric answered with a metallic rumble, stepping back from the hissing hololith projector.

Dead too.

‘Firing… aye.’

Targeting grids were dead. Auto-loaders were dead.

The gunnery chief was arming whatever had been already loaded and launching it manually, as fast as his shell-shocked nervous system could still manage. Each shot sent a shudder through the ship, a nail recoil-driven into the hull. Inertial stabilisers were dead too, but the crew, what remained of it, no longer even recognised the shaking. By sheer mass, Magneric stood immovably in the middle of the command dais.

‘We deny the alien this ship, until the Emperor gives us our leave to rest.’

‘Ave Imperator,’ they replied.

It was inconceivable that Obsidian Sky could destroy every last torpedo, but they could thin their numbers. And miracles happened, Magneric knew. The hull squealed in torment, shaken, this time from without, as though being attacked with a drill.

‘We shall know no fear!’

With a sudden lurch, the drilling stopped. Seconds elapsed without an explosion. The crew held their breath, and held onto their brace positions. They knew what a torpedo hit felt like.

‘Sound the general alert,’ boomed Magneric.

‘Aye.’

The bondsman covering at the main drive station – Cecillia – staggered from starboard to port, thumbed open a transparent plastek cover to expose a red key in a slot, and then turned it. The flickering light was immediately shot through with red. The effect was bitty, hazard-striping the debris-strewn deck as dull red lights glowed from broken screens.

Internal sensors were dead. Communications were dead.

Without them, necessity had demanded the command crew be creative. Power utilisation profiles indicated active terminals in all sections. Oxygen saturations pinpointed signs of life at muster points on all decks. Kaplin, at Operations, had breathlessly suggested retrofitting a pair of servitors to link up as a two-way communicator, but there had been no time to implement it. Now, Kaplin was directing that reckless enthusiasm into the pump action of a Mk IX shotgun. He took position on the steps near the late castellan, a slightly crazed look in his eyes.

Magneric stamped through an about-face. The assault cannon mounted on his right shoulder ran through a sequence of test cycles. His immense power fist rotated, clicked and reversed, like some kind of puzzle clock. He trained the spinning gun barrel onto the magnetically locked blast doors that sealed off the command deck from the rest of the ship.

He could almost feel the xenos aboard his ship, the way a man of flesh and bone would feel the tasteless, textureless, odourless itch of a radiation dose. This new breed of greenskin was a dangerous foe. They fought tactically, acted coherently: if they had forces to spare to claim his crippled ship then he could only assume they would do so exactly as he would in their place. The command deck would be the priority target. Then the enginarium, gunnery control, the flight bays.

It was useful however to remind oneself that they were not men. They were still orks.

‘Rolans,’ he voxed, attempting to raise the battle-brother barracked in the deck below with a squad of Black Templars and two platoons of armsmen serfs. ‘Sword Brother?’

A light crackle of static filled his acoustic register.

The carrier had somehow managed to kill off helm-to-helm vox. Until then, Magneric had thought that unblockable.

Cold gases swirled. The lights rattled, and blinked. On, off. On, off.

On…

Time stretched, bloated. The blast doors seemed suddenly a yawning distance away, although his own triple-grid spatial positioning system insisted that their relative positions were unchanged. It was as if, in this chamber alone, the laws of the universe had been relaxed, the space between particles expanding even as the particles themselves remained exactly as they were. Making room.

Off.

There was a pop, like a broken vacuum seal, and an ork burst out of the vapour cloud as if it had been hidden there all along and slammed into the middle of the main deck. The flickering light made the sudden appearance of its gruesome mass even more unreal. It was the monster that stalked the unevolved lobes of the human brain, fear centres unchanged since Homo sapiens sapiens first emerged from the forests and onto the plains of prehistoric Terra. And now, two hundred millennia and half a segmentum removed, they still recognised a beast.

The ork bared yellow fangs and roared.

Kaplin roared back, mad with horror, and swung about, leading with his shotgun. There was a boom. Scatter shot from both barrels tore up the ork’s black-and-white body armour and riddled its heavy jaw with pellets. It bullied through, tusked mouth wide like a dog thirsty for the rain.

Feet spread and mag-locked to the deck, Magneric’s torso swung one hundred and eighty degrees and obliterated the ork’s skull with a point-four-second burst of fire. Exit wounds and ricochets wasted the surrounding consoles, but the wellbeing of his ship was no longer a priority. Better to deny it to the alien.

‘Deny the alien! Kill the alien!’

More orks charged through the mist and onto the command deck, and by the strobing light men began to die.

An axe split Franzek’s head like a gourd before the dazed man even realised he was in danger. Seated beside him, Merrel punched his belt release buckle and rose, drawing his sidearm. A thunderblast from a brick-like stubber dropped him back down, printing the ruined contents of his chest over the console. The ork belted its pistol, hauled Merrel’s remains from the station and, leaving its axe where it was buried in Franzek’s head, stabbed a wedge-like device with a blinking base into the unit. The surviving screens immediately went haywire. Cecillia was ripped, chair fittings and all, from the main drive station and hurled screaming across the chamber. Her body broke so hard against the stainless steel aquila mounted over the prow in place of a viewscreen that she put a dent in its wing. Flinching from the meat-slap sound, Kaplin screamed a homily ad-libbed with wild obscenities and nonsense as he backed up the steps. He pumped his shotgun, spitting out a pair of spent casings, and then fired, whizzing the air with shrapnel and exploding a lumen fitting in the ceiling.

They were outmuscled, outgunned. The bondsmen of the Black Templars had never been so outclassed.

Venerable Magneric advanced at a measured pace, stitching the air with short, ultra-precise bursts of assault cannon fire. He shredded an ork in identical, almost uniform checker-pattern body armour with a point-three-second salvo, then pivoted, tracked, locked – and fired. A point-seven-second burst chewed through armour and skin and riddled the main drive terminal with bone.

With an implosive clap of displacement, an ork teleported directly into his path.

Magneric did not know what manner of thoughts filled the mind of an ork. Words? Images? A deep, ancestral dream of destruction and slaughter? He had never considered it. He regretted that failing now, for whatever the creature had expected to encounter when it had stepped into its ship’s teleportation portal, a Black Templars Dreadnought in the throes of battle rage had not been one of them.

The expression on its beast face was beyond price.

Magneric’s power fist punched into the ork’s chest and lifted it from the deck like an eel on a spear. Concentric rings of adamantium teeth spun in opposing directions like propellers, blending the ork in its entirety and spraying its vaporised remains.

The remaining orks took cover in pits and behind bulkheads, and fired back with noisy bursts of stubber-fire.

Keeping low, Kaplin ran to Merrel’s blood-sprayed terminal and took cover behind the dead bondsman’s chair. He tugged at the blinking spike that the ork had left embedded in it. He could not move it a millimetre.

‘Some kind of denial shunt,’ he yelled, ducking onto his haunches behind Merrel’s chair as bullets flew overhead. ‘It’s opened the outer doors to the flight bays and disengaged the cohesion fields.’

Torpedoes. Assault boats. Teleport commandos. An assault on all fronts, coordinated, and with overwhelming force. Magneric despised his enemy enough to be impressed.

Obsidian Sky was not like the ships of his former VII Legion brothers. A vessel like the Fists Exemplar flagship was a mobile fortress, constructed for the projection of force and the holding of territory. Obsidian Sky was not built to be defended. She was a blade, a tool of incision and conquest.

Stubber-rounds spanking off his metal skin, Magneric launched a full spread of grenades from his power fist’s underslung launchers. Primed for airburst, the withering frag-storm blew the orks’ improvised shelter open. The survivors, black-and-white bodyplate glittering with fragmentation shards, he mowed down with an almost hot-blooded relish.

It was moments like these when it still felt good to be alive.

His assault cannon wound down with a squeal, nitrogen condensate hissing to vapour on contact.

‘Um.’ Kaplin stared mutely at the console beside his. ‘Shipmaster Attonax of the Palimodes has been trying to raise us, Dreadnought-Marshal. They… express their intent to depart with the Fists Exemplar.’

Pistons in the back of Magneric’s legs retracted with a hydraulic wheeze, and tilted him back to face the ceiling. What remained of his flesh body after the fall of Tranquility Wall floated in an amniotic sac deep within the metal behemoth that interred him. For centuries, fury alone had driven him on. It was a living thing, that fury, in a way that he no longer was, pure and unsullied. Immortal. Others granted the highest honour of service beyond death required prolonged periods of rest between deployments, but not him. His rage denied him. He had retained his rank. He had retained his name. His fury too had a name: Kalkator. But now it seemed that it had no further to take him.

‘You seek to escape me at the last, Kalkator? By the Emperor’s decree, never! As we agreed, traitor, we escape together or we die together.’

His chassis pivoted towards Kaplin. ‘Status of engines?’ he demanded.

Kaplin swallowed and hurriedly picked his way through the debris to the main drive station. It took him a moment to interpret the unfamiliar read-outs. ‘Partial thrusters only.’

Magneric’s mind retreated to the cold space, that particular aggregation of cyborganic interfaces where his sarcophagus’ inscrutable machine-spirit met the quiet luminosity of his own immortal soul. The place where the Emperor breathed His will into his interred remains and gave them not just life, but spirit.

‘It will suffice. Set a collison course for the ork carrier and fire thrusters.’

‘Sir?’

‘Are my speakers impaired?’

‘No, venerable lord,’ Kaplin answered crisply, setting down his shotgun to prod the new coordinates into the unfamiliar set of controls. An urgently blinking light back at the communications station caught his eye. He leaned across. ‘It’s the Palimodes again, I think.’

‘Ignore it. Forwards. Always forwards. Let the fireball destroy us all!’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘Then–’

Magneric turned back to the blast doors.

He could hear weapons fire. Not the dispersive blooms of the armsmen’s shotguns, nor the explosive noise-makers of the orks. It was the focused double-blasts of mass-reactive rounds.

Space Marines.

With a pneumatic hiss the blast doors slid open. The ten-centimetre-thick insulated barrier removed, the frozen air filled with the roar of bolter fire. Two Black Templars, firing from the hip, were covering each other’s withdrawal down the long corridor towards the command deck. At the far end, a mob of orks in neat black-and-white checked plate and horned helms advanced behind a bank of massive shields fitted with eye slits and what looked like heavy flamers.

The auto-defence turrets were dead.

The Space Marines’ shots blazed across the rank of shields. There was a deep-chested huck, like a cleared throat, and a launched grenade flew over the shield wall and went off under the Black Templar currently providing overwatch. The explosion peeled away his power armour and slammed him, broken, into the bulkhead. His comrade was thrown flat, but immediately pulled himself up on his elbows to rake the shield line on full-auto. The orks pushed on, impervious to anything lighter than a heavy bolter.

Their slow advance revealed, squatting on the deck behind them, an abhorrence almost reminiscent of a orkish tech-priest. Except that was impossible.

The orks had always possessed a native affinity for low technology, but nothing as specialised as this. The alien adept sat within a hulking ring of bodyguards, beside a maintenance hatch that it had clearly just blasted open using the plasma cutter grafted to its left arm. The panel’s internal controls were connected to a slate-like device in the ork’s hands and by a set of jump leads to the enormous power pack on its back. But even that abomination lost all power to offend beside the giant standing over it as a man would stand beside a dog.

Its brute size and vibrating, piston-driven fighting suit were impressive, but what struck Magneric at once was the realisation that the white and black plates bolted on as a dermal layer were ceramite. It was Adeptus Astartes power armour. Crusade Armour. Mark II. Magneric recognised the colours and the emblem that stamped them, though he doubted whether anyone who had not lived through those times now would.

White and black. Like the orks in the command deck. Like these orks here. Likely, it was the progenitor design, a scheme that the orks had come to associate with power and strength.

Luna Wolves.

Magneric could think of only one world upon which an ork could have come upon so infamous a relic.

With a battle cry last heard in the flesh at the gates of Holy Terra booming from his speakers, Magneric stamped forward, blocking the blast doors with his armoured bulk.

‘I am Magneric of the Black Templars. I denied the Palace of my God to His wayward sons. I deny it to you, xenos.’

A torrent of assault cannon fire chewed across the orks’ shields and drove them back.

‘Magneric denies you! Kaplin! Fire thrusters!’

Eight

Vandis

Gloriously unrefined firepower unfolded about Alcazar Remembered like butterfly wings, carving open ork ships, murdering their shields and leaving them to perish in her wake in puffs of fire. She had the look of an angel, but she was a gladiator. The void was her arena. The frigates Chastened and Unbroken were the first to shoot through in her wake. Explosions lit the debris field; lance beams and fighter contrails, shield flares and shelling.

The orks’ mass carrier pivoted its main gun.

It was a huge bronzed barrel the length of a capital ship, fed with masses of brightening plasma coils and finned by that sail-like radiator array. With a flash of energised plasma it fired.

Thane’s data-display screamed an alert as an immense gravity spike crunched through Unbroken. The command deck shook, like a bomb shelter under sustained shelling. It was smoke and klaxons, shouts, squeals of metal pushed to the limits of tolerance. The main viewer crackled with static, showing ships and ordnance and flying debris screwing off-course and spraying out in all directions. Dutiful was snatched in by the pull of Unbroken’s suddenly swollen mass and slingshotted back. Following in on maximum drive, there was nothing that the cruiser Bastion of Arete could do to avoid her. Destruction was instantaneous and total.

‘Starboard void banks nearing saturation,’ said Weylon Kale, not shouting – never shouting – but terminally close. His voice was hoarse from breathing smoke and his eyes were raw. The old shipmaster had slotted in at the strategium to replace the section liaison, who lay spread out on the deck under a fire blanket, only hands and third-degree burns showing.

‘Increasing capacity with backup generators,’ the serf beside him screamed back.

Kale turned to Thane.

‘They’ll hold a few minutes more, but against a shot from that…’

‘The Fists Exemplar do not leave their own behind.’

‘My lord, at what cost?’

Thane stood tall as the deck around him trembled. It was a sense of duty, the stubborn grit that was so much a part of him, that stayed his course. Could anyone but a son of Dorn feel that overriding sense of obligation that the gene-seed of their primarch-progenitor imparted? The noble Ultramarines? The Dark Angels? Could they even understand it?

Thane doubted it. He doubted it.

‘We are the Last Wall. There is no further to fall back.’

‘Still no response from Obsidian Sky,’ said Teal, voice wavering up and down with the hits to the shields and the shaking of the deck.

‘Keep sending.’

‘Aye. Lord, the Iron Warriors ship, Palimodes, is signalling. They’re expressing their… gratitude.’

Thane gripped a little more fiercely to the handrail than the shaking of the command deck made necessary. ‘Acknowledge it. Order them to decelerate and come about on our heading. They can draw some of the fire off our flanks while we move in to recover the Obsidian Sky.’

The subaltern keyed in the message and hit transmit. There was a tense pause.

‘Response,’ snapped Teal. Her face went pale, her eyes moving as though scanning a large block of text. She swallowed. ‘They respectfully say no.’

‘No?’

‘The essence of it, lord.’

Thane mastered the tic of annoyance that threatened to break the resolute set of his jaw. ‘Then let them go. Any word from Zerberyn?’

‘No, lord, but Auspectoria reports Dantalion and a number of vessels breaking off and heading for the Mandeville point.’

‘Chapter Master. Come and take a look at this.’ Kale called Thane over to the strategium and directed his attention to the analytics at his station screen. The information was similar to that displayed in hololith over the chart desk, but more readily formatted into digestible data-scales, while the two-dimensional output was easier on unaugmented eyes. As of right then, it showed a fuzzy black cross surrounded by ship debris and power signatures denotive of bording torpedoes, updated every few seconds by a sonar-like sweep of code. ‘We’re approaching Obsidian Sky.’

‘Good. Now get these orks off my viewscreen and show me.’

The viewer blinked from split-screen to a single image of the bloated mass carrier. The sweep of its upper and aft sections were edged red, the sun eclipsed, its dark side lit by the fires and weapon lights of the dwarfed capital-class ships in its shadow. From the speed and angle of drift, it was clear that the image was unaugmented real-time. Rolling with the hits to his shields, Thane made his way back to the command throne and punched up a magnification of Obsidian Sky.

The screen changed, zoomed, and suddenly there she was, gliding like a disguised backhand knife under the carrier’s side. Collision course.

‘Raise Magneric,’ Thane roared, voice-amplification pushing maximum and whining with feedback. ‘Now!’

‘No response,’ Teal cried back.

‘Cut power to main drive. Thrusters, full reverse.’

Wordlessly, Kale carried out the command, liver-spotted old hands fluttering over the array of controls. Thane felt a g-force surge run through the already straining ship, but it was too late.

Not with all the legendary stubbornness of Rogal Dorn himself could he fail to see what was to come next.

The carrier had left the Black Templars vessel for dead until then, content to dispatch boarding torpedoes and assault pods, but now the few dozen kilometres between them erupted into a lava stream of shells and explosive rounds. The two ships were already too close together for primary weapons, but even under that restriction the volume of fire that the ork’s command ship was capable of putting out was staggering. Obsidian Sky’s armoured prow simply dissolved, as if the ork ship were projecting an energy field that was causing it to dematerialise on contact. But Obsidian Sky was just too much ship, even for the mass carrier, to completely obliterate with defence batteries alone.

The space narrowed to under a kilometre.

Her bow had been burned to a flat stump. There was a cauterising flare as ship met shields.

‘Venerable…’ Thane breathed.

With sublime slowness, Obsidian Sky plunged into the carrier’s port side.

It was not slow. Thane knew that. But the scales and distances involved made a nonsense of any human notion of speed. The shorn, void-exposed inner bulkheads of Obsidian Sky’s forward section were folded in and crushed, driven deeper into the carrier’s crust by failing thrusters. Her hull began to deform, ripples spreading back as her starboard thruster blew out. Drive plasma flaring out into space, Obsidian Sky tilted, ground in, and then finally crashed sideways into the larger ship.

Thane winced from the first spark of the explosion, a pure white nucleus of destructive energy swelling up from Obsidian Sky’s drive core. It lasted a fraction of a second, then rushed out in a flash that washed the entire viewscreen white. As if to compensate for the glare, deck lighting dipped. Terminals surged, arced and blew out in serial cascades of sparks. The blast front hit seconds behind the electromagnetic surge, and slammed Thane back into the command throne.

Shaking his head clear of shield saturation alerts and the low whine of decompression warnings, Thane reached up for the command throne’s grip studs and pulled himself back up. His multi-lung took over his breathing as his chest filled with smoke and his blood acidity spiked. He felt the sudden burn of frustrated anger. They could still have seen the Obsidian Sky and her crew clear; instead Magneric had almost destroyed them all.

‘Report,’ he called out, but everyone was still pulling themselves together or nursing flickering consoles like primitives around a fire.

A pair of serfs at auspectoria hurriedly shared notes and drew some quick adjustments to the pattern of curves and vectors on the scanner table. At the same time, the main viewer began to clear and a rough cheer went up from the command crew. The mass carrier was listing, a massive hole blasted out of its side. It was possible to make out distinct decks within the almost perfect hemispherical cutaway, lights twinkling behind the debris cloud and coherence fields like stars within a nebula.

‘Obsidian Sky is down,’ reported an auspex serf. ‘Two Black Templars ships still intact. Cruisers. One of them is the Interdictor. Dantalion, Bulwark, and Faceless Warrior are with them.’

‘The ork ships, my lord,’ said Kale, the swirling colours of the strategium chart desk like racing storm clouds across his face. ‘They’re assuming new headings, moving off from the carrier.’

Thane sank back into the command throne and summoned a pared-back copy of the strategium read-outs to his data-display. The orks were disengaging, breaking for the system perimeter. But why? Why run? Even with their leviathan flagship crippled they had the Imperial forces grossly outgunned.

‘I am seeing some unusual immaterial extrusions centred around the ork carrier,’ Thane said.

‘Teleporter activity,’ Kale explained. ‘High volume over short distances.’

‘It is unlike orks to evacuate. Or to run.’

‘This leadership caste we’ve been hearing about?’

Thane cupped his chin in his hand as the deck around him shook. But why run?

The movement in the viewer was so subtle that it took even Thane’s sharpened senses a moment to pick it up. The carrier’s fin-like primary weapon was cleaving through the wreckage field. Thane saw coils charging, energy gathering in glowing capacitors along the massive cannon’s length. For a moment, he was looking straight down its barrel. Alcazar Remembered was too big to move out of the way. Anything else was a stubborn act of futility.

An ember struck up within the splayed bore of the cannon, vibrating, caged within a magnetic field. Coming from within that debris cloud it looked more like a birthing sun than a weapon. Thane saw a glint, the tip of the sunbeam that lanced towards him, then it blinked like a shooting star as the beam shot across the bows.

A miss. Thane eased his grip on the armrests and let out a breath. In their panic, the orks had wasted their shot. That was his first instinct, based neither on evidence nor on past experience, and as such he was unusually loath to relinquish it, even once it became clear that the carrier wasn’t cutting off the beam. In fact, it was intensifying.

Vandis.

At first, the red giant seemed to shrug off the beam boring into its surface, but after a few seconds, a dark sunspot began to form around the drill site. Bubbles of core matter broke the surface as the sunspot began to sink. It became a blister, then a bruise, a black canker that bored deeper into its parent body and pulled more stellar matter in. The bottomless black of its event horizon garnered a halo, brilliant, burning white.

The accretion disc of a black hole.

Thane slowly rose, watching with a very raw, very human awe. The orks had transformed one of the most stable and intransigent forces in the universe into a weapon, and simply to keep Magneric’s information from reaching Terra they were using it to demolish a star.

A star!

What could any man – even an angel of death – do in the face of such reckless power?

The carrier itself, the most massive ship by far, was the first to feel the effects. Already backsliding, it stopped firing as its cannon was yanked out of alignment, and then slowly bent. In its shadow were two more Black Templars cruisers that had been disabled and seized by grapnels rather than destroyed. Drifting and helpless, they began to come apart. Hull plates crunched, compacted down, atmosphere squirting out as hardpoints tore loose and spun away to be devoured by infinity. Chastened, just sliding into tractor range, drove her reverse engines to maximum and just about managed to remain still. She came about in order to bring her main drive to bear. Thane saw what her shipmaster was trying to do, but manoeuvring thrusters couldn’t compete with the black hole’s pull and she was dragged, side-on, until gravity overwhelmed structural integrity and she blew in a hideously compact explosion.

A shuddering groan passed through Alcazar Remembered.

She was more powerful than her frigate escorts, more than the Black Templars cruisers, but she was also larger, more susceptible to the gravity waves lashing at her hull. Each shudder came with a bang, as though the bulkheads were having their rivets pulled and then being physically snapped. A barrage of high-intensity radiation blinded the viewscreen and killed shipboard communications.

‘Full reverse!’ Thane roared, a string of bolts bursting along a seam from the bulkhead behind him on a scream of inrushing air. ‘All hands prepare for emergency translation! Get us out of here now!’

Nine

Terra – the Imperial Palace

Vangorich knew that his rivals on the Senatorum, and even some of his friends, such that he possessed, had his apartments under surveillance. In recent days it had come to the point where there was rarely a moment in which the agents of two or more lords wouldn’t pass each other on the street. The increasingly erratic behaviour of the likes of Mesring and Zeck had exacerbated matters. The staged attempt on Veritus’ life had certainly not helped.

Even at this early hour, the artificial twilight of the Palace was thronged, the sun as removed from the reality of these people’s own small lives as the love of the God-Emperor of Man.

There was the catering shift bound for the Imperial Fleet College of Strategy, extravagant in pressed white shirts and black tails. Talking quietly amongst themselves, they paused just outside the gated compound while one of their number crossed the street to buy a pack of lhos from the kiosk. Then there was the pretty young girl – fifteen, maybe sixteen – selling soap and devotionals from a stand beneath a humming bronze extractor unit. She smiled pleasantly, chatting to the workers gathered with their bowls under the electrical warmth. There was the street confessor, the work detail that had been picketed on top of the deactivated transformer substation for the better part of a week, the two-man unit assigned to the corner by the Adeptus Arbites to pre-empt that particular ‘flashpoint’, the scrivener hawking his services, the servitor detail carting steel barrels of imported water for the Administratum silo in the neighbouring ward. By comparison, the street sweep working around the Navy men’s feet was a little obvious, if only because it was such a classic.

And if nothing else, Vangorich appreciated vintage.

That was not to say there were not times when an out-of-the-way office deep in the labyrinthine quiet of the Inner Wards was appealing, but it generally suited him to be seen where tradition expected the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum to be. It kept everybody honest, and prevented misunderstandings.

And so it was that the appearance at the gate of a man of medium height, medium build, and middle years caused more of a stir than so nondescript an individual might rationally expect to generate.

Vangorich was happy enough to let those agents make their reports. Partly because it would be a phenomenal waste of energy to stop them all, but primarily because at the time that his body double was deactivating the security system, he was sitting quite comfortably in the eighth level suite of a fortified tower overlooking Bastion Ledge, several lines of latitude away. The armourglass window offered a limited view of the Water Gardens and of the sunrise over the Imperial Palace. At least two-thirds of the offering, however, was taken by the automatic weapons arrays, surveillance jammers, and psychic null-generators that cloaked the compound. The Inquisition was commendably zero-tolerance in their attitude to security.

‘Some wine?’ he asked, leaning across the low-slung reception table and proffering the bottle.

‘Thank you, sir, no,’ said Krule, raising his hand. ‘Never while I’m plotting.’

Vangorich smiled and reset the bottle on the table.

It had a yellowing label inscribed in a curling script too obtuse for Vangorich to make out. He doubted it was actually Terran, but it looked old. Rigil Kentaurus perhaps, or Prospero. The Inquisitorial Representative’s suite had suffered a reversion to the minimalist since Wienand’s brief departure. The soft furnishings had been retired, or rearranged for more efficient effect. The priceless artworks and artefacts that had adorned the walls and tabletops were now warehoused in whatever vast silo the Inquisition must employ for such purposes. It was remarkable what a cull at the top could accomplish.

He took a sip from his glass.

Fruity. Woody. It smelled floral, the way he imagined a functioning ecosystem must smell.

‘Where were we?’

‘Mars, sir.’

Vangorich knew that, of course. He had an eidetic memory, a product of extensive training and cognitive therapies, and of certain genetic gifts. The same could have been achieved with implants, but they had their own drawbacks. Keeping track of the byzantine comings and goings of the Officio was not a simple matter of memory capacity in any case. It needed a human touch.

‘How many operatives do we still have there?’

Krule picked up a slate from the several spread over the table between them.

‘Red Haven cadre. Saskine Haast of Temple Vindicare. Mariazet Isolde of Temple Callidus. Clementina Yendl of Temple Vanus. Tybalt of Temple Eversor. And Raznick of the Inquisition if you choose to count him as one of ours.’ He read on a way. ‘It looks like Yendl had managed to cultivate a useful resource on the Mechanicus’ project to replicate the orks’ teleportation technology, before she lost contact. We’re assuming the worst, I presume?’

‘The official line from his supervisor is “reassigned”. Yendl’s looking into it, but it’s not the end of the world. Her pride is a little scratched, but there are other avenues of investigation under way.’

‘Translating a planet,’ said Krule, lowering the slate and gazing out of the window. ‘Damn, that would be a thing to see.’

‘The trial data is all in Yendl’s intelligence log. The so-called Grand Experiment is proving as much a dead end for Kubik as it is for us.’

‘But if it could be made to work…’

Krule let the implications hang. They were so encompassing, so fundamental, that it was difficult to take the necessary step back to see them. Assimilation of the orks’ propulsion technology would strike at the very pillars of Imperial stability. With such a power, the Mechanicus would be able to move anything, anywhere. The Adeptus Astronomica would be no more, the Navis Nobilite cast down at best and persecuted by a vengeful Inquisition at worst. The fleets of Mars would render the Navy and the Chartists obsolete at a stroke.

Schism. On a scale not seen since the Age of Strife.

Vangorich nodded darkly.

‘Merely pointing out, sir,’ said Krule, breaking the sombre mood, ‘if this intelligence log were somehow to find its way onto Sark or Gibran’s desk then you’d have all the Senatorum backing you could want to take Kubik’s head.’

‘If it comes to it, but safer to keep something so inflammatory to ourselves if possible. I gather that Haast and Isolde have managed to successfully integrate into Kubik’s household on Mars. What about when he is here on Terra – habits, and so on?’

Krule picked up another report from the stack.

‘A creature of routine, as you’d expect. Getting to him shouldn’t be an issue. The problem would be the windows available. He doesn’t seem to sleep, keeps to public places by and large, and he’s always accompanied.’ He shrugged, apologetic. ‘They don’t give much consideration to privacy.’

‘What about when he travels?’

‘Mechanicus lighter operating out of Daylight space port. The Mechanicus provides their own pilots and ground crew as well as a skitarii cohort. Knowing the Mechanicus, it’s probably better armed than it looks.’

Vangorich conceded that with a slight tip of his glass.

‘Just how formidable is the Fabricator General, assuming that an example needed to be made?’

‘Assuming?’ Krule sat back, crossing his muscular arms behind his head along the back of the low couch, as comfortable in someone else’s private space as only a man his size could be. ‘I could take him.’

‘Have you ever killed one of the Mechanicus?’

‘You’d know if I had, sir.’

Vangorich smiled.

‘Have you, sir?’ Krule asked.

Vangorich considered a moment. No one else would have dared ask their Grand Master such a question. It mooted the possibility that ‘no’ could be an answer. Another person might have raised it privately out of concern for Vangorich’s professional competence, but not Beast. He knew better.

‘No,’ he admitted.

‘Do you want me to set things in motion?’

Vangorich took a deep breath and shook his head, staring at the slush pile of slates, info-logs, and reports. Selecting a member of the Senatorum Imperialis who had acted with sufficiently witless culpability to warrant death was not difficult. It was, to borrow his favourite Navy aphorism, like launching a torpedo and hitting space. No, the challenge, the surgical art, was to identify that member whose untimely removal would most effect improvement in the rest.

He released the breath. Slowly. Deliberately. He massaged the stiffness from his neck.

‘Udo,’ he said after a few seconds. ‘Tell me about the Lord Commander.’

Krule rummaged for the relevant slate just as a minor earth tremor rattled the pile on the table. Only Vangorich’s cat-like reflexes spared the Inquisition’s carpet a wine stain. The hivequake lingered for a few seconds, and then passed. Vangorich transferred his glass to the other hand and lapped wine from his wrist, then stood and moved to the window. An orange glare lit his face. A hab-block was falling away from the Palace skyline, gutted by the ignited gases that were spraying from its exposed, ancient piping. Even through the reinforced armourglass, Vangorich could hear screaming. The long, hapless whine of tocsins spread slowly across the Imperial Palace.

Something had to be done.

He turned to find Krule checking a security alert on his wrist chrono. Krule silenced the audio sounder, then drew a bulky plasma pistol from the concealed holster inside his jacket. He rose quickly and quietly from his chair, gestured to Vangorich to take cover behind the table, and moved out of line from the door, pistol raised and trained.

Doing as he was bidden, Vangorich dropped onto one knee.

He hooked one arm over the table, partially to shelter his face behind it if need be, and pulled the silenced, slender-barrelled hellpistol he carried from his boot. He took aim at the door and glanced at the access panel on the wall beside it. An amber light was pulsing across the display, left to right and occasionally spiking in the middle, like a heart rate monitor. An intruder should have triggered a red alarm. Amber meant that someone with Inquisitorial clearance had entered the suite, effectively placing the automatic weapon turrets and intruder denial systems built into every staircase and corner space into a temporary ‘standby’ posture. Vangorich’s office had all the specifications. The intruder had ninety seconds to provide the correct form of physical identification and the required codes to one of those access panels before things started to get anxious.

The panel display turned to green and flatlined.

Vangorich cleared his mind, stilled his heart. His field of view became the doorframe.

There were, as his own interest in the matter proved, plenty of individuals on Terra with the motive and means to rid themselves of the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum. Vangorich doubted there was a security system built that the adepts of the Mechanicus could not break. Lansung and Verreault undoubtedly commanded personnel with the skill set required to break a triple-aquila-rated secure facility, but neither struck Vangorich as desperate enough to try. The Ecclesiarchy, too, maintained a cadre of highly trained and conditioned operatives, and against the warp-touched abilities of the Navis Nobilite and the Imperium’s sanctioned psykers, even the Inquisition’s defences would come out second best as often as not.

Were any of them the match of Beast Krule?

Vangorich doubted it.

The door handle dropped with a click, and the door swung open.

Vangorich eased himself a little lower against the table and relaxed into the trigger. He angled his body for a headshot. Unless they were really, really good, he would get at least one shot.

As it turned out, he didn’t.

With a hiss of air cyclers and magnetised joint hydraulics, Veritus strode through the open door. He came with a waft of cinnamon-scented oils and a hint – a disguised nasal sting – of preservatives. His cream-coloured power armour blinked with indicator lights and protective runes; it had been rubbed down with powdered silver and fluttered with freshly transcribed papyri. The Inquisitorial Representative’s mummified face managed to express enough surprise to stay Vangorich’s hand.

‘Drakan? What are you doing in my apartments?’ Veritus’ voice was a dry wheeze, like a legacy recording from a scrivener-cherub left to decay over a thousand years of storage.

Vangorich lowered his pistol to the table and stood as the door slid smoothly shut behind the inquisitor. He shrugged.

‘It is the most secure location on Terra.’

‘So my aides were at pains to point out to me.’

‘If it helps, I was informed equally reliably that you’d not be returning from the Inquisitorial Fortress until tomorrow. An attack moon in orbit is just one more excuse for a slip in standards, isn’t it?’

Veritus smiled slightly, an odd, grisly re-interpretation of human amusement. He looked tired, Vangorich realised. More worn out than he had ever seen him. It was as if the Inquisitorial Representative had merely dropped by his suite with no grander intention than a few stolen hours of peace and quiet.

Vangorich wondered if he still wore that armour, even when he thought he was alone.

‘You are slipping, Drakan,’ said Veritus. ‘Udin Macht Udo convened an emergency meeting of the High Twelve last night.’

‘He did what?’

Veritus glanced sideways at Krule. The Assassin had lowered his plasma pistol, but only marginally.

‘Have him put it away, Drakan. You have my assurance that I could do it for him just as easily.’

Krule raised an eyebrow, but nevertheless stowed and reconcealed his weapon at Vangorich’s nod.

‘Shall I leave you, sir?’

‘Thank you, Krule.’

Veritus peered down over the lip of his high gorget collar as Beast Krule moved past him and ducked out. Again the door slid shut and clamped. The hiss of air breathed against the inquisitor’s brittle lashes. His expression was unreadable.

‘The Lord Commander proposed a motion to suspend the Inquisition from the High Twelve.’

‘He did what? Has he completely lost his mind?’

‘Perhaps. But for once, leveller heads prevailed. Only Tobris Ekharth and Mesring backed it.’

‘The Ecclesiarchy I could almost understand supporting a move like that, but Ekharth?’ Vangorich swore. ‘Does that man even have a nervous system of his own?’

‘The Lord Commander was most aggrieved.’

‘I’ll bet.’

‘The High Twelve is fracturing, Drakan. They could be coherent, at least, when they knew that Udo could pander to their interests, but now there is that.’ Veritus pointed skyward. He didn’t put a name to it, as though it was a daemon that could be summoned by stating it. ‘The paralysis, the disbelief – it was no different when Horus brought the armies of Chaos to Terra. No one, perhaps not even the Emperor Himself, believed that it could happen, even after it had already begun. Terra survived the Siege that followed only because Rogal Dorn united a factionalised military, and wielded them with one will.’

‘You’re talking about a primarch.’

‘I am talking about strong leadership. The High Lords would back it if they saw it.’

Vangorich shook his head sadly. Another age, another class of man. One could not simply replace a demigod. There wasn’t one man amongst the Imperium’s countless trillions who could even come close.

But who said it had to be a man? What if it could be something more?

‘We can speak more at the Senatorum tomorrow,’ said Veritus tiredly, angling his body pointedly to open a path to the door. ‘I trust that you can find your own way out.’

‘I did find my way in,’ said Vangorich, surfacing from his thoughts and making to leave. He paused inside the doorway and turned back.

‘Where is Wienand?’

‘You betray your care, Drakan.’

‘Or reinforce your preconceptions.’

A genuine smile stretched at Veritus’ face. ‘She works towards the common end, as the Emperor’s Inquisition always will.’

‘And your… guest?’

The suite was cloaked with a counter-surveillance manifold, both technological and arcane, and was covered by a psychically generated blanket of silence. But even with only Veritus in the room and Krule outside who could possibly overhear, it felt unwise to mention their xenos captive by name. It was like Veritus and the ork moon. Naming the thing gave it a life beyond one’s control.

‘Helpful,’ said Veritus, simply.

Vangorich let it go. He had more pressing matters on his mind.

Beast Krule was waiting in the foyer, sitting on the edge of a woven aluminium chair. He unfolded himself as Vangorich walked towards him.

‘Problems?’

Vangorich shook his head. ‘Does Esad Wire still have his uniform?’

‘He’s been off duty for a long time. Even in KVF Sub Twelve that kind of absence without leave gets noticed.’

‘You won’t be going back to Tashkent. I want you to find the Provost-Marshal.’

‘I can do that, sir. What made you decide on him?’

‘Nothing so terminal. I need you to deliver him a message. Tell him he has my guarantee that he’ll want to be at the Senatorum tomorrow.’

Ten

Sycrax Cluster – unknown

First Captain Zerberyn came round to the squeal of plasma tools and the smell of sparks. The emergency lighting was low and sporadic, the shadows long. Wired multilaser cradles hung from their rails, limp and unpowered, and flecked with white specks of flame-retardant spray. The rough shape of Marcarian’s head passed between Zerberyn and Dantalion’s ceiling. The light nicked the shipmaster’s steel frame.

‘We made it,’ Zerberyn croaked.

His throat was bruised. Talking felt like trying to swallow a rank pin.

He grunted and rolled his head, his eye at floor level, and looked along the deck plates to one of the command turrets. Sparks sputtered from torn electrics. A team of serfs in full-body protective gear and rebreather kit attacked a fallen bulkhead with a plasma torch. Charged filaments of waste plasma crackled and sprayed. The stuttering light silhouetted a robed figure casting cleansing oils around the cut site, reciting a psalm for the ship’s forgiveness and fast healing. A giant amongst those lesser mortals in his unmarked battleplate, Veteran-Sergeant Columba was bent into the heart of the plasma spray, pulling away chunks of debris in his gauntleted hands and hurling them over the edge to clang in the cogitation pit below.

‘Vox,’ Zerberyn recognised. ‘The last thing I remember… I was at Operations. Your crew allowed the dorsal void bank to overload.’

‘An inevitable consequence of going into battle with a numerical, strategic, and technological disadvantage, lord captain,’ slurred Marcarian, stumping clumsily into his field of view. ‘An emitter overload when we translated out threw you down the walkway and struck your head on the rail. You’ve been out for just over an hour.’ He shrugged apologetically, or tried to. ‘I’m not sure exactly how long. The chronos are out.’

With a groan, Zerberyn made to pull in his elbows and draw himself up.

Nothing moved.

In consternation more than concern, he jerked on his arms, then his legs, but neither moved a millimetre. He could feel them, a pins-and-needles tingle across his various points of contact with the ground, but he couldn’t command a single muscle to twitch. It was as though the servo-muscular connections to his armour had been severed. Without power assistance and nervous control, half a tonne of bonded ceramite was little more than an ornate null-sensoria tank, the kind used to prepare neophytes for the experience of mucranoid hibernation.

Indignity piled upon indignity.

‘I cannot move.’

Marcarian gestured across his body with an open palm. Zerberyn rolled his head the other way, and met the leering half-skull of Mendel Reoch.

The Space Marine’s armour was bone-white and bore the modified double-helix of the Apothecarium on the shoulder pad. All well within the diktats laid down in the Codex Astartes, and Zerberyn therefore felt obligated to approve, but, as with the Chaplaincy black, it seemed inimical to the Exemplar spirit. An alternative variable was that Zerberyn simply did not like Reoch. And he did dislike his Second Company brother, with a self-sustaining passion. Binoptics glowered dully from the eye-pits of the organic upper half of the Apothecary’s face, the lower part constructed by the ugly fusion of an iron grille to the son of Dorn’s once-noble cheekbones. The reconstructive work was so extensive, so obtrusive that given the Apothecary’s long service and skill its unsightliness could only have been intentional, as if Reoch had deliberately cut back his face to bare cold metal, and a darkness he no longer wanted to conceal.

‘You will heal. Your paralysis is induced and temporary.’ His voice was a grizzle of vox-corruption. His optics glimmered with every intonation. ‘I have noted an alarming tendency amongst our Chapter brothers to not lie still when commanded to do so.’

Zerberyn held Reoch’s unblinking, back-lit stare.

‘Flush it out of me. Now.’

Reoch sighed. ‘I blame Oriax Dantalion. He persuaded the primarch-progenitor to adopt the Codex Astartes and now every Exemplar believes himself a martyr to his own special wisdom.’

‘Except for you of course, brother.’

‘I am an Apothecary,’ said Reoch. The diamantine drill-bit of his narthecium gauntlet revved and reversed. A spring-loaded injector attachment clicked out of the reductor, cycled through various combinations of syringes and needles until a hyperfine carbon tip slotted into a slender glass vial, locked, then extended forwards. The plunger drew back into the apparatus, slowly filling the syringe with a milky fluid as the Apothecary leaned in. ‘I always know best.’

Zerberyn clenched his jaw and tilted his head to expose the vulnerable fibre bundles and cabling hidden beneath the gorget ring. He felt a sharp pain as the hypodermic squeezed between the vertebrae at the top of his spine, and then a rush of cold. He gave an involuntary gasp, then shuddered as the sensation passed down his spinal cord and dispersed into his peripheral nervous system. He wriggled his fingers and this time they moved, gauntlet servos whirring as armoured digits rolled clumsily in and out, up and down. On impulse, he shifted his hand to fumble over his weapons belt.

His fingers closed around the grip of his bolt pistol and squeezed. Fingers, wrist, shoulders: the sensation of being bundled up in a skin-tight carapace of thick wool began to recede. An Umbra-pattern bolt pistol’s uncompromising menace left no place in its proximity for that kind of uncertainty.

He sat up slowly.

A tangle of twisted and torn walkways crisscrossed the command deck, smoke and dust rising from the cogitation pits with each slow grinding whup of fans. The strategium display was static, the encircling image-boosters and visual feeds hissing noise. The main viewer crackled with electromagnetic distortions, flickering with augur traces and warp energy residuals that stained the eye with afterghosts. Everywhere the frail bodies of crew serfs lay under blood-lashed metal.

Anger, real anger deep in his transhuman belly, filled him with excoriating fire.

A Chapter-strength deployment, the might of the Fists Exemplar fleet, had been brushed aside. Ship to ship, man to man, the Adeptus Astartes would always triumph, but the weapons and technologies that the Beast could call on were just too powerful. Dantalion transported the bulk of the First Company, a few squads of the Second, Seventh and Tenth. What had happened to the rest of the fleet? Bulwark, Faceless Warrior? Alcazar Remembered? Could the Fists Exemplar have been reduced to little more than the First Company and a handful of squads from three others?

There had been no other option. Any other commander of the Fists Exemplar would have taken the same decision as him.

‘How did this happen?’

‘We were not as worthy as we considered ourselves to be,’ answered Reoch, clenching the reductor back into his narthecium as he turned and walked away.

Marcarian stepped back to allow Zerberyn to stand up, the Space Marine’s genetic gifts just about compensating for the dizziness and slight lack of motor control that lingered in his system courtesy of Mendel Reoch. The bruising round his neck restricted his range of motion, but breathing at least came easier now that he was upright.

‘What is our status?’

‘The orks took out the system. The whole damned system. We were lucky, if you’d call it luck. We were already heading out, and were able to make an emergency translation before we suffered too much heavy damage.’ A ruptured power conduit running through the ceiling sprayed the walkway with sparks and made the shipmaster flinch. ‘The rest we suffered during,’ he shouted, as the hiss of sparks died down. ‘I saw the Interdictor make it out ahead of us. I also saw Grey Ranger crushed like she was nothing.’ He was silent a moment. ‘My first ship.’

‘Did any other ships manage to escape?’

‘No sign yet, but it’s only been ten minutes or so since we emerged. Systems are still coming back online and we’re still assessing the damage. And…’

He gestured to the wreck of the vox-turret.

‘Suggestions?’

The Fists Exemplar hierarchy was no different to that of any other Codex-compliant Chapter, but the lines were enforced with a stringency seldom seen elsewhere. They were notoriously free and independent thinkers in their founder’s mould: not the barbaric affectation of the Wolves of Fenris, nor the solitary temperament of the hunters of Mundus Planus, but a mentality born of absolute conviction their personal infallibility. It was, when properly managed, their greatest strength.

‘The Codex would suggest we resume our original heading,’ said Marcarian. ‘If anyone made it out of Vandis then they could be anywhere in the subsector. Rejoining the Last Wall at Phall would be their most logical destination.’

‘I doubt the ship would survive such a journey,’ Zerberyn grunted as he stood. ‘Walk with me to Vox.’

There was not a lot to see. Zerberyn picked up a headset from a console. Foam covered it. The loop of wire by which it was plugged into the terminal pulled taut as he drew it to his face, a child’s toy in his massive gauntlet.

‘Where is the woman that was stationed here?’

Marcarian nodded to the work crew. Their plasma torch was making rasping, shallow cuts into the bulkhead that had sliced the section in half. And Marcarian’s vox-liaison too, by the looks of it. The hiss and whine of spent plasma was strangely reminiscent of the white noise leaching from the transceiver set, as if there was some cosmic confluence of which Zerberyn, for all his gifts, could never be anything but unaware.

‘A shame,’ he said, and meant it. She had been competent.

Marcarian toed aside the twisted aluminium frame of a console chair, taking the ivory sliders and brass dials and deftly recalibrating the board. Zerberyn pushed the left headset earpiece up against his corresponding ear and listened.

White noise whispered from the set. Static. Which was a misnomer in many ways. It implied a steady state, something unchanging, but the sound crying through Dantalion’s receiver arrays was anything but steady. It crested and fell, hissed and crackled, and precipitously dropped or rose in pitch. It was cosmic background noise, stellar radiation, energy bleed from unshielded power sources – which, on the command deck just then, must have numbered anywhere in the high thousands. It was almost like voices, whispers at the very edge of straining.

‘Stop!’

A horrible sensation chased down Zerberyn’s spine, similar to the feeling of the counteractant that the Apothecary had injected into him but a hundredfold worse for having no discernable material source. As if a soul could feel rotten. As if static had the taste of copper and smoke. He tightened his grip on the physical surety of the headset and turned to Marcarian.

‘Dial it back.’

The shipmaster did so. The noise dropped away, to be replaced by a sound in his head like knives on the wind. It was a voice.

+Dantalion… Dantalion, respond.+

‘The system is fried,’ Marcarian was saying, a vox-wraith in his other ear. ‘It’s the receiver. It can’t distinguish signal from noise.’

‘Do not touch the controls,’ Zerberyn snapped. He felt sick. Not physically of course – his gifts prevented that – but he felt spiritually spoiled. He twisted around the headset’s microphone bulb and spoke into it. ‘Is that you, Epistolary? Is this Guilliman?’

A sound like laughter prickled the static.

+My name is Kalkator, Warsmith of the Fourth Legion, in command of the cruiser Palimodes.+

Zerberyn froze. He wanted nothing more than to tear the headset from his face, but it was as though the absolute cold of the void had soaked into Dantalion’s antennae, run through her wires, and iced the muffler to Zerberyn’s ear.

‘I do not speak with traitors,’ he hissed.

+Then just listen. You are in danger here. Your jump has not taken you far from the ruins of Vandis. Your vessels Paragon and Intrepid are in the Corus System. Paladin of Rubicae is in Randeil and Vindicator in Quaillor. Guilliman and Excelsior are in the Ooran System. None more than an hour from an ork fleet. And trust me, Dantalion, they are coming.+

‘Trust you…?’

Marcarian was looking up at him, uncomprehending. Some horror in his eyes made the bruised skin at the back of Zerberyn’s neck creep. He spoke again into the pickup.

‘How do you know the coordinates of our ships? How are you reaching us?’

+Favours given, favours owed. Do you really want those kinds of answers, Exemplar?+

‘What of the rest of the fleet?’ he said after an uncomfortably extended pause. ‘What of Alcazar Remembered? What of the Interdictor?’

+You are the last to emerge and I had almost given up on the possibility of any more of your ships making it from the warp intact. My ship made it to the Mandeville point and was primed for translation when Vandis was destroyed. The empyrean buffered her systems against the star’s death throes.+

‘An escape paid for in the blood of my brothers. No depth of space could obscure from me the warmth you show your allies, Iron Warrior.’

The voice dropped into the seethe of static. Zerberyn could hear the crackle of emotion.

+There was a time when Magneric and I were thought closer than brothers. Our bond was stronger than I expect you to understand, forged by the glories of an age you cannot conceive. I found his faith contemptible, his obsession with me pitiable. Magneric would be even less fulsome in his remembrance of me were our fates reversed, but I will remember him as a brother. Do you think your Imperium the sole proprietor of a finite store of grief? We are not so different, you and I.+

‘How so?’

+Did pragmatism not lead you to abandon your own Chapter Master?+

‘We did not see the Alcazar Remembered destroyed.’

+I did not see the Emperor slay Horus, but I know that it was so.+

Zerberyn snarled. ‘Do not ever forget it.’

+For one who chooses not to speak, you are as lyrical as any scion of Sanguinius. I asked you to listen, now listen. There is a system less than three hours from you – Prax. It was a garrison world of the Iron Warriors at the height of the Great Crusade and if there is a single world within ten light years that the orks’ advance into Segmentum Solar has not already destroyed, then it will be that upon which sit Perturabo’s walls. If we can muster our assets over Prax, then we might all have a chance of going our separate ways.+

This time, Zerberyn managed to pull the headset off.

His chest felt tight, but hollow, as if his armour plate was wrapped like a mummy’s bindings around an over-inflated skin. He smothered the headset pickup in his gauntlet, and turned to Marcarian.

The cruiser Paladin of Rubicae transported the Fifth and the Ninth, while the mighty Guilliman held the bulk of the Second as well as elements of the Third, Fourth, Tenth and most of what Dantalion didn’t carry of the First. Three, maybe three hundred and fifty brothers. Add the firepower of the aegis frigates, Paragon, Intrepid and Vindicator, and the support frigate Excelsior, and it was clear that one run-down traitor cruiser presented little by way of a tangible material threat.

And of the other kind, that less physical peril?

He licked dry lips, mentally crunching variables he had never before now had cause to quantify or weigh relative to others. He attacked his scheme of action from every angle, however improbable, assessing with force the firmness of every assumption on which it was founded until what remained was a bastion of solid calculation and impregnable logic.

He was an Exemplar.

Infallible.

He returned the headset to his ear and uncovered the pickup.

‘Send me the coordinates.’

Eleven

Prax – approach

Dantalion slid out of warp space into the dust-banded outer reaches of the Prax System like a jammed magazine ejected from an overheating boltgun. Proximity alert tocsins added a deep basso two-tone to the symphonic chorus of alarms. The auspex was still powering up, but proximity detection was a passive system, its workings founded upon the innate sense that certain metals possessed for metal. At the same time, triggered automatically by the completion of the translation cycle, the command deck’s blast shutters were rolling back.

Crew-serfs and Space Marines looked up from rebooting consoles and covered their eyes. The starlight was hard and bright, the guide lights of a monster voidship burning like a meteor shower off the bow. The garish yellow vessel was several times more massive than Dantalion and of eccentric design. Modules stuck out from a long central body, like landing booms on a seaplane but coming out at all angles and in various shapes and sizes. The slender main body widened at the neck to give a bulbous prow and, towards the stern, grew by stepwise tiers towards a garishly hazard-striped housing for the fierce orange cones of the drive exhaust. Sitting atop the drive housing, adding half again to the height of the stern, was a crescent moon, bent and crooked into a vile facsimile of a grinning orkoid face.

‘Thrusters!’ called Shipmaster Marcarian. ‘Hard port. Decompress starboard launch bays and fire macro-batteries. All the push we have.’

The ork ship pulled away slowly, port thrusters burning hard to win some traction over the vacuum. A lumpen module, riveted plates hatched yellow and black, swung out towards Dantalion’s starboard-side viewing ports, close enough for Zerberyn to see the alien pictographs scrawled onto its side. Then, the ship winked out, something darker than space rushing out to envelop it. Torpedoes and other mass-weapons winnowed through the hole left in real space.

‘Another ship inbound,’ called the seated hardline operator reporting from auspectoria. ‘Throne, they’re everywhere. Two thousand kilometres in-system. And another in convoy, the exact same spacing again.’

Zerberyn snarled. ‘As if surrendering ourselves to the Imperial Fists is not betrayal enough, we must contend with Iron Warriors treachery. Charge weapons and prepare to fire.’

‘Wait,’ said Marcarian, looking out of a port-side viewport at the next incoming ship. ‘No torpedo apertures, no flight decks, no weapon batteries that I can see except a handful of flak turrets, no energy spike on our scans to indicate they’re powering them up. I think that ship is unarmed.’

‘When did you ever see an unarmed ork ship?’

‘My point exactly. Helm, move us out of the path of the traffic. Five hundred kilometres to port. Auspectoria, commence scans for our brothers.’

‘Ayes’ acknowledged his instructions. Dantalion swung deeper into her portside yaw. The ork ships held true to their course.

‘Arrogant xenos,’ Zerberyn muttered, watching the unaugmented view through a viewport. The image booster screens around Strategium continued to snow. ‘They lack even the good sense to alter course to avoid our weapons.’

‘We are one ship, lord captain, and a damaged one at that. I would posit that they don’t consider us a threat.’

‘Then I posit that we purge them of that unwise presumption.’

‘Lords.’ Auspectoria again, the operative already swivelling his chair back around to point to the sensorium feed being relayed in précis to his monitor. Zerberyn and Marcarian joined him. The Space Marine towered above the two serfs, looking over the sloping bank of hardline wires into the din and confusion of the recovery work still ongoing around them. ‘Receivers are picking up a lot of vox-chatter. Numerical sequences, auto-broadcasts. Well over ten thousand ships, most of them concentrated here.’ He tapped the screen with his fingernail. ‘The third planet.’

‘Prax,’ said Zerberyn.

It was a guess: the last avenue of retreat for reactionaries and for mortals impelled to wage total war on inscrutable xenos-breeds and demi-gods. But it was an educated one.

‘Prax,’ the operator duly confirmed. ‘Archives list it as an agri-world and subsector governance hub. Limited orbital and dry-dock facilities, but nothing to permit shipping on this scale. Whatever the orks are using to coordinate so many vessels, they brought it in from elsewhere or built it themselves.’

‘Look at the disposition of these ships,’ said Marcarian, leaning over the serf’s shoulder to float his fingertip over the display. He turned to Zerberyn, ear-stud catching the green of the screen, and grinned. ‘Did your duty ever take you along the Eukrist Corridor, galactic east through the Flux with a layover at Angels’ Wake Munitorum star port?’

‘Humour me, shipmaster.’

Marcarian’s nerveless lips hung a smile. ‘It looked like this.’

‘A supply hub? An ork Administratum?’

‘Except orks don’t think that way,’ Marcarian continued. ‘They exploit the worlds they come to and then move on. Like at Ardamantua.’

‘They are building,’ said Zerberyn. A smile, slow and angry, began to spread and he turned it on Marcarian. ‘He must be close. The Beast. If not here, then somewhere near.’

Marcarian stumped again to the viewport and looked out. ‘I wonder what that symbol means. That crescent moon shape on their ships. Some kind of merchant class, do you think?’

A handset in the partially restored vox-turret blinked and chimed. The new duty liaison took the missive standing up and turned to face Zerberyn.

‘Incoming transmission from Palimodes, and from Guilliman. Coming through the hololith grid.’

Zerberyn was surprised to feel disappointed. In turbulent times, it was reassuring to know that the galaxy continued to rotate and the traitors would forever be traitors.

‘Patch them through,’ Marcarian ordered, and turned to face the display.

Power built up within the arcane suspension of coils and valves with a succession of etheric metal bangs, as though the device’s spirit railed against its reactivation so soon after translation. Tech-serfs stroked power distribution sliders and capacitance dials in a bid to soothe its anguish, and coaxed the weary machine to compliance. Two faces took shape within the loop projector. The face to the left of the static divider, cowled within a high grey hood, was familiar, even if the penetrating eyes looked pained and the ancient face drawn. Epistolary Honorius of Guilliman greeted Zerberyn’s image with a nod.

That other face, however…

Unconsciously Zerberyn drew himself to his full, impressive height, resolved to meet the image’s gaze like a Space Marine.

The stranger was dust pale and cadaverously thin, as though the withdrawal of the Emperor’s love had left him withered and bitter. His hollow cheeks made his sharp jawline cruel, and accentuated his high brow to something arch and not quite fully human. His eyes glinted like nails under the unforgiving light of his ship’s hololith projector.

‘It is good to talk face to face at last,’ said Kalkator.

Zerberyn had expected the traitor’s voice to match the forsaken character of his appearance, but it was surprisingly rich and powerful. It was a voice Zerberyn could well imagine sharing a field with the primarchs.

An unworthy flutter of jealousy – no, worse – of curiosity, disturbed the calm beating of his hearts.

‘Indeed, you are as pleasing a sight as the great garrison world of your forsaken brothers.’

‘It has been a long time devoid of our care,’ Kalkator replied. ‘Had this world still been defended by my brothers, then the situation would have been different.’

‘Had these worlds still been loyally defended by Iron Warriors,’ said Epistolary Honorius, eyes far away and long ago, ‘then many things would be different.’

‘It will have to serve, regardless,’ said Kalkator, turning back to Zerberyn. ‘Your ship will not survive another transit through the warp. Not without repairs. And mine will not survive without yours.’

‘We are sending a navigation packet,’ Honorius continued, gesturing to something or someone off-capture.

Marcarian limped to the nearest functioning terminal and activated it, telemetrics and data-icons turning his pale face green. ‘The eighth planet. An Ouranos-class ice giant with a ring system in a near-perpendicular orbit. The coordinates are for a geostationary position above the northern magnetic pole, inside the rings.’ He smiled, impressed. ‘I’m afraid the diffraction index of the magnetosphere and the rings is too much for our auspex.’

‘The orks’ no less,’ said Kalkator. ‘If their technical prowess extends beyond firepower and propulsion then they have yet to show it here.’

Looking across the image of the Traitor Space Marine, Zerberyn addressed the other figure. ‘What is your condition, Epistolary?’

‘If you ask after me personally, then I must confess I have been better. The ork psyker aboard that carrier was uncommonly powerful. His effect on me was… intense. But I will recover. With Thane’s foresight Guilliman and Excelsior exited the battle at Vandis with minimal damage, but Paragon, Courageous and Implicit will require extensive repair. Of Paladin of Rubicae and Vindicator there remains no sign and no word. We had almost given up hope on you also, First Captain. We have been waiting for several hours.’

Marcarian gestured for and promptly received a data-slate, then tapped at it before turning to Zerberyn. ‘Real time confirmed and verified: translation plus twenty-two hours and eleven minutes.’ He handed the slate back to the serf. ‘See that Dantalion’s timepieces are updated.’

Zerberyn let out a rough breath.

If the orks’ teleportation capability ameliorated just some of the uncertainties of warp transit then it would be a decisive technological edge, far more so than the gravitational weaponry they had deployed at Vandis. The vagaries of the warp were the rate-limiting factor in any galaxy-scale endeavour. Fleets heading towards the same point from equidistant systems could never be relied upon to arrive even within days of one another. An astropathic message cast into the immaterium from Terra could make it to Alpha Centauri in a week or in a month, and could as easily reach distant Occludus first. It turned keeping track of thousands of active fleet and military elements and an evolving tactical situation played out over segmenta into a logistical nightmare: a challenge that would tax even the mind of a primarch.

‘If we are to remain here, then we must take advantage of the opportunity this presents us,’ said Zerberyn. ‘Orks do not settle, orks do not trade, and yet here they are. We must find out what they are up to here, and in such numbers. The orks appear content to ignore us for now.’

‘A desirable state of affairs given our current condition,’ Kalkator cut in.

‘Is there anything you can discern here, Epistolary?’ asked Zerberyn through gritted teeth.

‘The Emperor has granted me no further insight since our departure from Terra, but I have had little opportunity to meditate on the matter these last few days.’ Honorius sank back into what looked like a command throne and closed his eyes. ‘You have rank, First Captain. I am minded to agree with the warsmith, but I will support any decision you make.’

‘It is made, Epistolary.’

Kalkator emitted a long-suffering sigh. ‘On your own head be it.’

‘I do not ask for your approval.’

‘Good. Because I withhold it, little cousin. But Prax is our world, and if you insist on this course then I too must insist on accompanying you to the surface. Our chances of survival will not be aided by the deaths of you and your warriors.’

Zerberyn glowered. And why not? The greatest impossibility conceivable in his existence, as the decree of Roboute Guilliman and the legacy of Oriax Dantalion had always defined it, had already been borne out with the reformation of the VII Legion. Where was the line now? One more broken rule? Two? Was there still a line?

‘One squad each.’

‘Agreed.’

Kalkator’s pallid features drew into a smile. Zerberyn met the warsmith’s gaze, as cold and grey without as his true armour within.

Twelve

Terra – the Imperial Palace

Drakan Vangorich knelt at the shrine to light a candle. There were more to choose between than would ordinarily be the case. The handful already lit burned low, wicks struggling to hold their heads above ever deepening pools of molten wax.

The chapel ordinary was an austere stone cell lacking even a window to distract one’s mind from communion with the God-Emperor. It was generally used by Palace servants and householders for their daily observances, but Vangorich found its asceticism useful. It made him look humble, civilised and discreet. He was, in fact, all of those things, but no one ever lit a candle or left a coin in a collection bowl to affirm their own virtues to themselves. It was an elaborate masquerade, a game in which no one played the part that their costumes dictated, a performance each and every day of his life so that the ever-circling Palace spies might see the Vangorich that Vangorich wished their masters to see. In so doing, he had allowed himself to become almost as hollow as the part he played.

Some habits were hard to break. Even now, with a twenty-four hour curfew of the entire Inner Palace in preparation for the day’s Senatorum business, he maintained the charade of piety.

Vangorich blew out the lighting taper and dropped the smouldering tip into a jar of sand.

Despite his reputation, he was not a creature of solitude. Any number of unfortunate incidents could befall an individual when he was alone. He was in a position to know. Krule was, of course, no more than thirty seconds away, and he himself was by no means defenceless. A man did not rise to become Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum without possessing skills, but he also knew how far those skills could serve him. This was not a galaxy that rewarded the hubris of men.

Suddenly, he felt the unexpected and rather uncomfortable need to pray. He was a faithful man, of a kind, observant through rote if not from a true spirituality. He appeared to pray because it served him to be seen to pray.

As he generally made these shows of devotion prior to Senatorum meetings – the better to make oneself receptive to the will and wisdom of the God-Emperor – his thoughts had often revolved around upcoming business. Intelligence briefings on unredacted leaks of pre-agenda packets, comprehensively war-gamed conversational cues to feed the High Twelve. Often, but not always. The Imperium was vast, the Officio ever-busy. There had always been something with which to occupy his mind during a peaceful spell.

And yet for all the occasions that he had knelt here in this chapel and closed his eyes for the spies and vid-capture drones, he had never gone so far as to actually pray. It had never seemed necessary to carry the deception that far. He closed his eyes again.

This seemed to be the way most people went about it.

After a minute or two of stray thoughts, he became aware of the entry of another through the doorless stone arch that led into the chapel from the base of Daylight Wall.

His powers of observation were attuned rather than enhanced, a product of training, conditioning and – over the course of his career – natural selection. On this occasion however, no special talent was required. It was difficult to tread softly when one was half again the height of a normal man and encased like a warrior-knight of ancient Terra in plasteel and ceramite.

‘There is a curfew in force in this area, citizen,’ said Koorland, his voice, even unaugmented by helm or speaker, resonant and compelling.

Vangorich turned. He remained on his knees.

The Imperial Fist was magnificent in his armour. He was strength and grace, the expression on his face that which a small child might perceive upon a domineering but ultimately protective father. Through superhuman breadth alone he projected an aura of invincibility. Vangorich knew this to be false, but even so he felt it, and could understand why so many had faith in the power of the Adeptus Astartes to be the wall between humanity and its enemies. Koorland was a sight to stir the soul, to excite the subliminal with imagery of angels and immortals and god-kings armoured in gold.

‘As a matter of fact I was just thinking about that,’ said Vangorich. ‘It’s reassuring that the Senatorum retains some ability to function when their best interests are served, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘My apologies, Grand Master,’ said Koorland, recognition easing the sternness from his features. ‘This is a simple shrine. Had I realised that you prayed here I would have made allowances.’

‘I’m surprised you recognised me,’ Vangorich smiled. ‘There are people I see every day who wouldn’t remember my face. It’s something I’m rather proud of.’

‘My apologies again,’ Koorland returned, humourless. ‘I do not forget a face.’

‘Or anything else, I suspect. I have a gift for recollection myself, though nothing like yours. You surpass me in almost every way conceivable, don’t you? As you were designed to surpass us all.’

‘I fight and serve, that is all. But,’ he crossed his arms, dazzling by candlelight, ‘you did not seek me out to deliver a compliment. And you did seek me out, Grand Master.’

Vangorich conceded a shrug, and then stood.

‘I find myself struggling with what to call you. Plain “Koorland” doesn’t quite do your position justice. Chapter Master no longer seems entirely appropriate either.’

‘You could call me Slaughter.’

Vangorich felt that he was expected to smile, and did. The Imperial Fist did not.

‘A pleasure speaking with you, Grand Master,’ said Koorland, turning away.

‘The defence of Terra permits no rest, does it?’ Vangorich called after the Space Marine’s broad shoulders. ‘Your diligence in preparing the Palace’s defences has been inspirational. Given the circumstances.’

‘I hold,’ said Koorland, face half turned over the black fist that emblazoned his left pauldron. ‘That is my duty. The circumstances are never irrelevant, but they will never change that fact.’

‘When I walk the Palace grounds I see Space Marines on the walls again. I realise that they can never replace the Imperial Fists, and yet Daylight, the others, the symbol they now wear…’

Koorland’s gaze dropped almost imperceptibly, brushing the curve of his pauldron plate – the black fist on its white field.

This time Vangorich’s smile was his own and quite genuine. Guile and discretion were the principal tools of his Officio, but there always came the time when an operative had to step out of the shadows and show the knife. Metaphorically, of course. But the good ones, the really good ones, could time their move so perfectly, manoeuvre their weapon so expertly, that they never wound up with blood on their hands.

‘You have been an inspiration even to them, lord. And the regular forces even more so. The Lucifer Blacks have worn, well, black, since before the Unification Wars, but I believe I have seen some yellow starting to appear these past weeks. They worship you, and I’m not speaking figuratively – you are as close to the God-Emperor as any of them will ever come.’

Koorland turned back. ‘I do not serve for accolades.’

‘Higher words of praise were never spoken within these walls, trust me. But from whom do you think those soldiers would rather take their orders? Some distant lord who hasn’t set foot beyond the Inner Palace since greasing his way out of the Navy, or one of the true defenders of humanity?’

‘I fight, I serve and I hold. That is all.’

Vangorich tilted his head back and looked pointedly up. A hairline fracture ran across the chapel’s ceiling, a millimetre incontinuity where the latest round of tremors had moved the north wall marginally westward relative to the south. This was a minor shrine, frequented by nobody of importance but the Grand Master of a shadowy Officio that few higher authorities much cared for. The repair detail was mired in the bureaucracy of the Administratum.

‘We need more from you. If the orks tire of our dithering tomorrow and launch their assault, what will happen? Can you hold Terra without the full backing of the Astra Militarum? Let’s say that you can, that you do, and that we are all still here to conduct the hunt for the Beast that you have been calling for. Do you really want to do it fighting the Navy, the Astropathica, and the Administratum every step of the way?’

Koorland said nothing. It was an opening, and Vangorich took it.

‘You do wish to confront the Beast?’

‘A firm defence is central to the avoidance of defeat, but a strategy of containment will never win a war. The Siege was the greatest defensive action in history, but it was the Emperor’s defeat of Horus that finally ended the Heresy.’

‘Politics is very much like war,’ Vangorich agreed softly. ‘Sometimes the only solution is to strike for the figure at the top.’

‘I serve the Imperium loyally,’ Koorland returned, shocked, angry.

Sometimes a failing organ needed to be shocked, Vangorich thought.

‘Have you paused recently to ask yourself what the Imperium really needs?’

The Imperial Fist fell silent, his eyes running deep.

Vangorich offered a slight bow and left the transhuman to his thoughts. He was not nearly important enough that the Senatorum would wait on his arrival, and Koorland had a lot to think about.

Thirteen

Prax

The matt-grey Thunderhawk gunship Penitence descended hard on the planet’s night side, ventral thrusters blasting up a tsunami of dust as the assault craft levelled out and dropped its troop doors. Dust billowed through the open hatch, whipping through handgrips and cargo netting and smothering the armoured forms of Veteran Squad Anatoq. With the enhanced senses of smell and taste granted by his neuroglottis, Zerberyn sifted the storm of particulates. Small stones. Dead soil. Bone chips. Blood. It chopped up the twelve helmet beams and the weak pastel glow of wall-mounted panels, banging and rattling inside the troop compartment.

‘Quickly in and quickly out,’ voxed Veteran-Sergeant Columba over the squad channel, one hand wrapped around a ceiling handgrip.

The sergeant was an iron-faced ascetic with ice water in his veins and heart of leaden grey. A narrow view of the Fists Exemplar creed of humility had led him to turn down the captaincy of the First more than once, and he had publically rebuked Koorland over the offer of a position in the reformed shield corps of Terra. Zerberyn liked him.

The narrow beam of his own helm light cut half a metre into the swirl, catching the whipped-up grit as if by surprise, stripping it from uniform night-black to white and grey and bloody brown. A crowd of gold runes representative of his squad slid around the periphery of his internal faceplate display, the gunship’s shaking, under the force of its own engines, unsettling the runes’ positions. The boarding ramp railroaded out into the dark. He could see neither the ground nor the end of the ramp.

‘We are Exemplars,’ he said into his helm vox. ‘No wall stands against us. No wall can stand beside us.’

‘You all know your objectives,’ Columba concluded.

Zerberyn led them into the vertical jetwash, running, a servo-powered leap plunging him into a rippling funnel of dust. For a moment a combination of his battleplate’s powered systems and the updraught of disturbed earth made him fly. Then he fell, five metres, half a tonne of ceramite slamming two-footed into dry earth. Suspensor grids dispersed the impact force throughout his armour, plates shifting, crunching to a crouch, then with a counter-whine of servos he came up, disengaged his pistol’s mag-holster and whipped the weapon up.

He could not see a thing. Dust devils gyrated between the ground and the gunship’s thundering exhausts, sieving the landing lights from above. Blinking runes in his helm display and the vibrations picked up by his boot sensors told of veteran-brothers thumping into the ground around him.

They fanned out from the drop zone, murky giants with boltguns raised and aimed.

Veteran-Brother Donbuss was triple-checking the belt feed to his heavy bolter and covering the advance from relative high ground. Antille dropped to one knee, hand to where his ear was underneath his helmet, the long antennae of a shoulder-mounted vox-booster whipping above him. Each Space Marine’s battleplate was independently vox-capable, but the volume of near-orbit communications noise and the signal diffraction of their own fleet’s place in hiding necessitated the booster should they need to raise their brothers around the eighth planet. Apothecary Reoch stood nearby holding his narthecium at arm’s length, sampling the wind for toxin traces or pathogens. It was almost impossible to kill a Space Marine by such means, but a reasonable excess of caution won more wars than abandon ever had. Veteran-Brother Karva was the twelfth and last down, pivoting on the spot as a promethium tank dropped through the darkness and catching it in the crook of his arms.

Zerberyn voxed up to the Thunderhawk that his squad was deployed, received two brittle clicks through his microbead in response, and then felt a slam of downwash.

With a tremendous roar of thrust, the gunship rose, re-angling its engines for horizontal flight, and pulled away. The dust storm began to settle, stones and larger debris falling to leave dried organic matter zipping about. It cleared the air enough for Zerberyn to see Penitence turning for a fly-past of the planet’s principal city, Princus Praxa, and its Crusade fortress approximately two hundred kilometres east across the daylight meridian.

A second gunship circled in low. Its metallic bodywork was embellished with unorthodox modifications: battle honours, ablative hull plating and variant weapon loadouts – not all of it was of obvious human make. The star-backed iron skull of the Iron Warriors stared grimly from its tailfin and nose section. Keeping low, it banked left and began to steadily climb, mapping the terrain with a pair of sweeping spotlights and searching for an appropriate drop-zone of its own.

Zerberyn processed his surroundings without thinking about it.

Left, a diagonal line of wind power converters, bi-blades, chomping sombrely through the dark. A greasy metal water tank, empty, riddled with holes, fenced off with wire that had been cut and trampled. Brother Tarsus advanced, boltgun sweeping the row of quietly whumping turbines.

Right, looming rockcrete-walled slurry pits, surrounded by dirty metal outbuildings. A petrochem generator. A silage tank, round-walled and massive. One of the sheds was a machine store. It was open, an upswinging outer door half-covering a weather-beaten wheeled truck. The vehicle was a rusted contraption of belts, pulleys, and funnels, with an articulated pallet lifter at the front end painted to look like an orkish mouth. It had a canvas top and a blood-splattered rear fender. Its tyres were flat. Brothers Galen and Borhune took firing positions, Karva moving up to cover the units with his heavy flamer. Behind, nothing, according to the Thunderhawk’s deep augur scans – just over-exploited pastureland and dust.

Ahead, the objective.

His enhanced low-light vision described the structure in sharp detail. It was a massive, industrialised agricultural unit, with dust-tanned steel walls and barred windows. A large, rectangular glyph of a twisting serpent had been graffitied over the upper storey windows. It was an ork structure, but it was only as Zerberyn closed and metrics gathered in his helm display that he realised that every feature was about twenty-five per cent too large for human standard. The dirt drive leading up to the main door was churned with tyre tracks and strewn with bone meal, dung and what looked like scraps of clothing.

He loped forwards at an easy run. Brothers Hardran and Nalis followed up behind, flanking and covering the upper storeys and secondary entrances with their bolters. Tosque and Columba kept pace, the former maintaining his aim on the door with a bulky combi-plasma.

The unit frequency crackled in Zerberyn’s ear.

‘Galen. No contacts.’

‘Tarsus. Same here, brother-captain.’

‘Reoch,’ voxed the Apothecary, voice double-distorted and animal. ‘I am reading high soil concentrations of antibiotics and human growth hormones. I cannot say why, but I see no danger.’

‘Vigilance, brothers,’ Zerberyn replied, unslinging his thunder hammer.

His predecessor had favoured the purist elegance of the power sword, but long before the moment he had been granted his pick of the Chapter armoury Zerberyn had known what he would select. The weapon was dormant in his grip, quiet, and would remain so until the moment of impact. And when that moment came, whatever it was on the end of it, Zerberyn meant for it to die. Such was the thunder hammer’s pragmatic beauty.

Up close, the main door looked solid. Heavy plastek, proofed with an oily black sealant coating, hinged outwards and reinforced with armaplas crossbars. For an unmodified trooper, forcing access would have proven a complicated and time-consuming matter.

But not for him.

He dropped his pauldron plate and crashed his leading shoulder through without breaking stride. Shrugging off splinters, he straightened and scanned the room.

It was dark, cut off from the light of the stars and the ships massed in orbit, too dark even for the light-scavenging cells of his occulobe. His helm light beamed across riveted walls, ventilation grilles, moving onto a staircase against the left-side wall. The beam tracked it up to a mezzanine level, shadows of the square-sided balusters stretching out towards the rear wall and then angling sharply back across it as the beam moved on.

Hardran, Nalis and Borhune spread out, their own helmet beams dispersing through the cavernous space.

Zerberyn could hear murmuring, weeping, the strained sound of many, many bodies breathing. He sniffed. Even through his battleplate’s rebreather apparatus he was getting the smell of something rancid.

His helm display busied his vision with floating markers. The position, facing, and condition of his squad showed as glowing gold numerals. Box reticules closed over objects of interest – an atmosphere conditioner, a swaying chain connected to some kind of overhead wash unit – furnishing them with a full tactical overlay of range, angles and threat recognition. Reticules floated against the dark, open, uncertain, as his helm light swept over a chain link enclosure.

Eyes glittered dully in the beam.

‘What is it, brother?’

Tarsus. Zerberyn barely registered the vox-scratch in his ear. He grunted in disgust.

‘Animals.’

Fourteen

Prax

The man looked up into the glare of Zerberyn’s helmet beam with distant eyes. His pupils constricted to pinpricks and he recoiled from the light with a grunt, but did not otherwise appear to notice the giant in front of him. He was bruised, shorn, naked, but unusually fat. This was not the maltreatment Zerberyn would have expected from an alien conquerer. There was no brutality here. Injuries aside, which looked to be postural from remaining in one position for too long, rather than inflicted, the man looked as well-fed as any planetary governor.

Zerberyn moved his light on: blank faces luminesced under the beam, then returned to darkness and indignity as it passed. There must have been close to a hundred hemmed into the stall. There was no room for them to move, even to sit. The floor was perforated metal, for drainage, but the sheer volume of waste had clogged the pores and solid effluent heaped up in lumpen mounds over toes that were turning black with poor circulation and disease. The stink was infernal. Despite everything that he was, Zerberyn felt himself back away. Slavery and squalor he had encountered on many worlds. This was something other. Something worse.

‘There are more ahead,’ called Nalis.

‘Here also,’ said Hardran, voice echoing from the stalls away to the right.

‘There must be thousands,’ breathed Tosque, clumping forwards from behind, tracking the creaking stillness of the second level with his combi-plasma.

‘Tens of thousands,’ growled Columba.

Zerberyn spoke into his gorget pickup. ‘Reoch. I need you in here. Bring Brother Antille.’

An affirmative burred through his vox-channel. He killed the squad frequency and looked around again, easing his finger around the trigger of his pistol. Reticules wobbled across his visor, searching for something to target.

‘Detecting movement,’ said Columba, his vox dialled down to a low bass. He pointed up to the second floor.

‘More stalls, perhaps,’ said Zerberyn.

Columba shrugged.

‘Hardran, search the upper level. Tosque, secure the stairs and cover him. Nalis, run a circuit of the perimeter.’

The veteran-brothers nodded; in battleplate and deep shadow it was an ominous, inhuman gesture. Apothecary Reoch entered just as Nalis left. The glow of his binoptics intensified as they adapted to the gloom. Antille ducked through the splintered portico after him, vox antennae twanging against the lintel beam.

Mendel Reoch meanwhile continued to the stalls.

There was a piston shock, flesh punctured, a breathless gasp.

The Apothecary’s narthecium punched a sampler into the nearest captive’s jugular. The man moaned piteously, legs wobbling, but the press of filthy bodies held him steady.

Zerberyn hovered his helm light over the man’s gasping mouth, his curiosity piqued by something he had seen there. As well as having no hair, the man also had no teeth and, now he checked, no fingernails: nothing with which he could conceivably do harm to himself or another. A rare and unsettling cocktail of pity and disgust settled in his gut like one of Reoch’s analgesic slimes. His roving beam paused on the face of a woman who opened her mouth placidly as though conditioned to associate light with water or food. There was something branded onto her cheek. Zerberyn moved closer. She remained as she was, mouth wide and waiting, even as Zerberyn enclosed her head in his gauntlet and turned it gently to the side.

The brand was that of a snake.

The man under Mendel Reoch’s ministration gave one last grunt as the Apothecary’s narthecium retracted.

‘There are dangerously high levels of synthetic growth enhancers, testosterone, and other steroids in his blood. I would need to return him to Dantalion’s apothecarion for more thorough investigations.’

‘Take him and one other and begin what tests you are able. I think we have what we came for. Raise the gunship,’ Zerberyn added to Antille. ‘We need evacuation for these two test subjects.’

‘That deviates from the mission schematic, brother-captain.’

‘The fault is ours,’ said Zerberyn. ‘We failed to anticipate the possibility of survivors. As you were ordered, brother.’

‘Brother-captain!’

Straddling the top step and the next floor, Tosque swung his combi-plasma and helmet beam down onto whatever the veteran-brother had spotted amongst the stalls.

Zerberyn, Columba and Reoch instantly had pistols raised.

A human, unfettered and clothed, withered under the spotlight. Like his domesticated brethren, he was shorn and branded and denuded of teeth. Unlike them he had two off-white molars stapled into his brow. They reminded Zerberyn of rank pins, or the long-service studs that the veterans of other Chapters employed. The man licked his lips nervously, hugging a rusty pail to his chest as though to hide behind it. It slopped with a reddish-brown gelatin that Zerberyn initially hoped was waste but which, judging from the hanging mouths in the stalls to either side, he had the appalling suspicion was food.

The man bared his gums, squinting between Tosque and the others.

Then he screamed, shattering the night quiet like an intruder alarm.

It lasted half a second before mass-reactive rounds from four different weapons explosively ripped his body to pieces, vaporous parts of him filming the surrounding stalls.

The human cattle, mouths agape, began slowly to lick their lips.

Zerberyn held his breath as the echoes died. Chains and hoses clinked and swayed. Lips slurped. Tosque covered his angles warily. Columba calmly moved to cover another angle of approach through the maze of stalls. Zerberyn checked his visor display. Ident-runes shuffled across the display: there was Tarsus to his left, Galen and his team spreading out through the cattle sheds, Hardran in the plane above.

Nothing. He allowed his battle readiness to ease.

An enquiring grunt sounded from deeper in the complex. It was porcine, feral. Tension returned immediately to Zerberyn’s grip. The battle for Eidolica was fresh in his memory, the savage grunt-speak of the alien a repugnance he would remember until death relieved him of his duty.

‘Contacts!’ he roared, stepping away from the stall and aiming his bolt pistol into the swaying, clinking, snarling dark.

His beam hit something green. Metal winked from an axe-blade, tooth caps, the lead-hued base of tribal body art. He spared a passing split-second of a thought to the human cattle all around, packed in so close he could feel their body heat. He dismissed the minor variable. There was no longer any hope for them.

He fired.

The bolt-round exploded in the ork’s face, blasting the brute back and down against a partition wall. Reoch and Columba pushed forwards with him in lockstep, a perfect firing line, pistols blazing. From above, Tosque opened up with a strobing burst of fire, stitching a line of eviscerated ork green and human pink across a row of stalls. Without warning, the veteran-brother checked his fire, turned, and opened up on the second floor. Answering fire from stubbers and shooters bracketed the Space Marine’s armour and chewed into the steel wall behind him. He held firm, breaking up the incoming fire with controlled, even bursts of bolter fire.

A triumphant cry filled the unit vox, then cut off. Hardran’s rune blinked from gold to black in Zerberyn’s visor. Red threat icons, generated by his suit’s auspex, boiled around the edges of his display.

A firecrack bang hit the side of his helm with something hot and wet.

He staggered back until his genetic gifts could eliminate the aural shock and reassert his sense of balance. Reoch was down, a bullet in his temple. Zerberyn stepped over the downed Apothecary, solid slugs spanking off his battleplate.

Heavy stubber fire was thundering down on him from the second level. By weight of numbers and brute resilience, a mob of orks had taken the overhang that looked over the factory floor and forced Tosque onto the stairs. The veteran was firing point-blank now, descending backwards, ceding the stair step by step.

The orks were huge, bare-chested, arrogant in their simplicity. In a moment of clarity, Zerberyn saw them for what they were. They were the greenskins’ exemplars.

With a furious cry, Columba fired up his chainsword. The sergeant stepped up onto the air-cycler set against the stair-side wall and jumped across the walkspace, reaching the opposite side stall where he kicked, a servo-assisted release of superhuman force that drove his power-armoured bulk crashing through the metal balustrades and into the orks piling down the stairs. Blood sprayed across the wall, and for a moment it was impossible to distinguish the howls of the orks from that of Columba’s chainsword.

Reoch’s mouth-grille chewed out gravel sounds as he shook his head and rose with a slur of motorised joints, freeing a frag grenade from the clutch at his hip. He pulled the pin and lobbed the charge overarm onto the second level.

The explosion blew out the handrail, smashed the orks’ lacklustre fire discipline and brought down part of the ceiling. The Apothecary turned his half-metal grimace on Zerberyn. His face was a bloody mess, the bullet trapped between the metallic struts that secured his augmetics to the bone.

‘Retrograde aberrations,’ he snarled.

Zerberyn yanked the Apothecary behind him as an ork wearing serpentine tattoos and what looked like human-skin shorts kicked through a stall door and charged. Its axe clanged against Zerberyn’s raised vambrace. Steel on ceramite, it never stood a chance. With a loud crack the haft splintered, the head spinning aside, but the strength behind the initial blow was phenomenal and sent Zerberyn reeling.

A bolt-round punched through the ork’s ribcage and blasted half its chest out through its back. A second round blew out the other half before a third in quick succession detonated between its eyes and finally killed it in its tracks. Brother Antille lowered his boltgun, the muzzle steaming hot.

‘Gunship inbound. Five minutes.’

Zerberyn nodded gratitude and opened a vox-link. ‘Pull back to the landing zone and regroup.’ He turned to Reoch. ‘Select your subjects, Apothecary. They are to be the lucky ones after all.’

The bloodied Apothecary lowered his pistol and stalked to the nearest stall to obey.

Antille hefted his boltgun to cover Reoch while Zerberyn slowly backed up, laying down fire to enable Tosque and Columba to break away and withdraw. A resounding clang pulled Zerberyn’s attention back towards Reoch and Antille.

A ventilator grille banged against the wall and a double-jointed runt of a creature, the serf caste called gretchin, slid on its backside out of the shaft. There, it freed up the stubber in its lap and let rip on full-auto. Ricochets sprang between Reoch and Antille’s heavy battleplate, but the runt’s aim was not nearly so discriminate. The bullet spray perforated the stall partition and several men and women took hits. They mewled like stricken animals, unable even to fall over as they died.

Zerberyn dragged the creature out by the head and crushed its skull with a mild application of force.

Reoch, a bald, plump female over one pauldron and a male over the other, indicated that he was ready.

Columba and Tosque joined them, the latter raking what was left of the second level with suppressive fire while the sergeant, grey plate a gory black, squeezed off snapshots at anything that so much as threatened to be green.

The four Space Marines formed a closed cage around the Apothecary, the orks hurling themselves against the wall made by the sons of Dorn and finding it unbreakable.

‘Out,’ Zerberyn yelled over the doubled thunder of bolter fire, anchoring the retreat as, one by one, his brothers followed Reoch out.

Exiting one firestorm, and entering another.

Fifteen

Prax

Orks crowded the agri-plex’s windows and chutes, pumping the loading yard between the buildings with high-calibre shot. Crude rocket-propelled grenades screamed through the air like kamikaze bombers and blew great spumes of earth from the road. Zerberyn and his brothers gathered around Reoch and his charges and returned fire, picking their targets, always retreating towards the landing zone. An off-spherical grenade crashed through the corrugated roof of one of the cattle sheds and gutted it with fire. Zerberyn raised his arm against the pelting shrapnel and tried to instil some sense into what had happened to his battlefield.

The fighting was too intense and widespread to be the work of his squad alone, and if the Iron Warriors had entered the field then he would surely know about it.

He could see Brother Tarsus. The veteran was firing from behind the thick metal legs of the water tank, minimising himself as a visible target. Brother Donbuss and his heavy bolter, meanwhile, were still watching over the landing zone, outdoing the orks’ combined firepower both for sheer destructiveness and for noise. The belt-fed torrent of high-explosive anti-personnel rounds left twisted metal and pulverised plate wherever the orks sought to establish a firebase.

Karva announced his presence some distance to the right amongst the slurry tanks with the mighty whoomph of his heavy flamer. An expanding mushroom of promethium wash sent burning debris pattering onto the surrounding roofs like hailstones. Glottal shouts and more crude gunfire answered back. Staccato bursts. So far, so well enough within the mission schematic that Zerberyn had established during descent. At the same time as those flames were dying back however, a flurry of las supercharged to the red end of the energy spectrum spat between various silos, and even from the dust desert that surrounded the oasis of rusted tin and steel.

There was movement beneath the wind turbines.

Human troopers in moulded black carapace and dust-bowl fatigues were hurrying towards the main structure, providing rolling overwatch. Another two squads, twenty men and support weaponry, advanced more deliberately through the silos, flushing out lone orks and gretchin workers ahead of them with grenades and disciplined volleys of hot-shot. Zerberyn had seen skitarii units move like that. One will, one intent. For what looked like unaugmented human soldiers, their unit discipline was exemplary.

A mechanised growl pulled Zerberyn’s attention to the ramshackle ork tractor in the machine shed that he had marked on his initial approach.

With a trembling of its rust-brown frame, it powered back out of the shed at speed. It lurched into a handbrake spin, flat tyres skidding up dust, tarpaulin roof ballooning, then jumped forwards. There was an ork at the wheel, a dark-skinned patriarch with a leather eye patch and a massive jaw, firing one-handed out of the driver’s side window with a twin-linked stubber. A gang of squealing gretchin packed the rear container, holding on to the metal sides or to the single ladder that ran up the back, and blazed wildly in all directions. A bullet punched a trooper from his feet, reflex pulling a wild burst of las skyward as he fell. His squadmates spread out into the thin cover of the various silos and raked the careening vehicle with las-fire.

A fireball lit off under the truck’s rear exhaust, flipping the vehicle over and into a roll that ended with it on its side and white with dust.

‘Beautiful,’ said Columba, drilling a dazed-looking gretchin that staggered from the up-ended rear compartment with a bolt-round.

Zerberyn shot his gaze back towards the silos and the unexpected aid streaming from them. An officer and his bodyguard were running towards Zerberyn’s position, heads down, while the remaining troopers laid down suppressive fire.

On approaching the towering Fists Exemplar captain, the officer pulled himself straight, transferred the second of the two hellpistols he was carrying to his off-hand, and threw a sharp salute. Half the fingers of his hand had been replaced with augmetics. The horror of burned flesh that had cost him that side of his face and eyesight was old enough to have scarred and yet looked to have received little or no medicae attention.

‘Major Dannat Bryce. Seventeenth Gammic Dragoons.’ He spoke in an easy yell that carried his voice over the explosive chatter of gunfire. His damaged face glowed, flushed with supreme self-righteousness and the Emperor’s love. ‘And as pleased as you might expect to see you here, my lord.’

‘Astra Militarum?’ asked Zerberyn.

Bryce gave what was, by its own unfortunate necessity, a crooked smile. ‘You have something that needs doing, you call on the Astra Militarum. You have something that needs done then you call for the Seventeenth.’

‘Militarum Tempestus,’ muttered Columba. ‘Scions. There was a battalion of them deployed to the compliance campaign on Crantar Seven.’

‘We spotted two more gunships, one from another Chapter,’ said one of the major’s guards earnestly. A big man, only a foot or so shorter than Zerberyn, and from the weight of his gear some kind of mission specialist. Zerberyn guessed ordnance. ‘Are they hitting other targets? When can we expect the rest of the liberation fleet?’

‘You’re out of line, sergeant,’ snapped Bryce, then turned to Zerberyn with an apologetic shrug. ‘We’ve been a long time outside of chain of command, my lord.’

‘How long?’

‘I lose track. Several months. We’re here on a Commissariat Special Objective – slow the orks down in whatever way we can and prepare the ground for reconquest. Weren’t you informed?’

‘Months?’ said Zerberyn, ignoring the question. ‘Then you can tell us about the orks’ activities here.’

‘We could. Do you have time for a detour?’

‘We have time.’

‘Then we can show you. There’s an orbital command substation twelve hours east of here as you head towards Princus Praxa.’

‘Advise that we explain on the way,’ barked a female trooper with the coarse voice of a lho-stick lifer and the frosty exterior of an ice world. She was looking at the slate monitorum set into the back of her left gauntlet. It showed what appeared to be heat sources over a grid. A solid mass of them were congregating directly ahead, while still more continued to spill in from the edges. ‘The orks are regrouping inside the agri-plex, and Sergeant Cullen reports two vehicle squadrons inbound with flyer support.’

Bryce turned questioningly to Zerberyn, who nodded. They could spare another twelve hours. And he could already hear the sound of approaching engines. He doubted whether they could all be extracted by air before ork reinforcements arrived, and he would be loath to leave a useful force of Imperial soldiery to the captivity of the greenskins. The human chattel currently held within the agri-plex were another matter. They were, he had concluded, a neutral variable, neither an asset to the success of his mission nor a hindrance, and could thus most usefully be ignored.

‘Antille,’ Zerberyn voxed. ‘Contact Kalkator and inform him of the change in plan. Tell him to be quick, we have ork aircraft inbound.’

‘As you say, brother.’

Zerberyn removed his helmet with a hiss of demagnetisation and focused his hearing on the incoming petrochem growl, his Lyman’s ear isolating it from the din and sharpening it.

It was the distant but rapidly closing roar of a Thunderhawk’s combat engines.

Zerberyn looked up at the moment that the Iron Warriors gunship Meratara came down behind the line of wind turbines, losing itself in the dust thrown up by its underwing exhausts. The bi-blades spun until they blurred, droning, superfast, chips of metallic debris spanking off the blades. Turbofans angling to hover, the gunship’s box jaw pivoted towards the agri-plex and opened up with its full forward arsenal.

Zerberyn cursed, shoved Bryce to the ground and crouched over him.

‘Defend the Apothecary!’

Turbo-lasers, heavy bolters and lascannons chewed through the structure with a sound like a woodsaw biting on steel. Men and transhumans alike broke from combat and threw themselves down as a quartet of hellstrike missiles whistled from the Thunderhawk’s underwing hardpoints and into the agri-plex. Explosions blossomed along the building’s width, spread low like demolition charges rigged, primed and detonated in sequence, triggering a chain collapse that brought its metal walls crashing into dust and fire.

Zerberyn, still crouched protectively over the lightly concussed Tempestus Scions commander, turned his face into the heat storm. Bits of metal and burning cinders streamed down like a scene from the last days of the Siege. Massive warriors, veterans in ornate gunmetal and bronze, moved through the pyroclastic rain and brought bolters to bear.

‘Arise, little cousin,’ said Kalkator.

The warsmith’s deep voice resonated harshly from the glowing vox-grille of his horned helmet. His baroque Mark III power armour was embellished with hooks strung with barbed wire, weird devices, and campaign citations from a hundred worlds rendered lifeless by war a millennium before Zerberyn had been born. His left arm was a bionic of superb integration and design, the product of a craft lost to all but a few.

Dazed, Bryce looked from one Space Marine to the other, his mouth making confused, soundless shapes.

The twin barrels of Kalkator’s combi-bolter were trained between Zerberyn’s eyes.

‘My gunship has room enough for your squad. Take what you came for and leave before the orks come back for vengeance.’

‘You are a soulless traitor, Kalkator. There were people in there.’

‘It is a war of survival we fight. I wage it as though it is one I intend to win. We received your update, were you not about to abandon them?’

‘There is a difference. Your own survival, I am convinced you treasure. But not mine, nor theirs.’

Zerberyn pointed to the Scions scattered about. A good number had gone to ground amongst the battered silos as soon as the agri-plex had gone up and most of them had visual augmenter beams dancing over the Iron Warrior’s armour. Had the Imperium seen fit to educate even its best with a fuller knowledge of its history and its foes, then things would have become very ugly very fast.

‘Truer words were never uttered by a bastard of Dorn,’ said Kalkator. ‘But at this moment my fate is dependent on yours.’

‘Our mission is unfinished. These men speak of an operation of some kind being conducted on the surface nearby, a data trove of the orks’ activities that is within our grasp if we can move faster than word of our presence here.’

‘Arise,’ Kalkator growled again. His gauntlet finger slid across his combi-bolter’s trigger like a whetstone over a sickle. ‘I will kill these men before they can lead you to your death.’

‘You would have to kill me to do it.’

‘Do you think you would be the first?’

Zerberyn met the ruby glare of the warsmith’s gaze without fear.

The Iron Warrior grunted with frustration and lowered his weapon. Even for a near-immortal, transhuman monster like Kalkator, time was finite and precious – as rare as an ally.

‘The gods curse you, you and the stubbornness of your stock. Very well, we will go with you one step further. Apothecary,’ he barked at Reoch. ‘You may keep your cargo aboard my gunship for safekeeping.’

Zerberyn’s triumphant smile faded.

Through the dust sent rolling out from underneath the Thunderhawk’s idling turbofans, there came the rolling snarl of engines. Headlamps pierced the cloud, and for a heart-stilling moment Zerberyn thought that the orks’ relief force was on them already, but then the slab-sided gunmetal shapes of a squadron of Iron Warriors bikers drove snarling through the murk. Wide rubber tyres with deep, spiked treads chewed the loose ground as they took position by the wind turbines.

Behind them marched a second ten-man squad, who fanned out, adopting a staggered firing line of bolters and siege weaponry, shielding the ponderous advance of a final three Iron Warriors behind them. They were huge, armoured like tanks, and bound in razor wire. Terminators. The colossi stomped into position behind the Traitor Space Marines, Tactical Dreadnought suits purring and belching black smoke as they redressed the aim of their combi-bolters towards the Militarum Tempestus men.

Zerberyn’s smile returned as he found himself oddly pleased by this restoration of a cosmic truth.

‘One squad each, is it?’

‘As your precious Codex tells you, little cousin: if your enemy has one squad, bring two.’

Sixteen

Mars – Pavonis Mons

Nictitating membranes flickered across the empty, machined eyes of Zeta-One Prime. It was the cold, infinitely patient stare of a reptile, a chamaeleonidae watching a fly. Urquidex tried to abstract her from his consciousness, but the cold sense of her silver presence on the back of his neck was an order of magnitude worse. He shivered and pulled up the collar of his robe. Presumably, the skitarius’ build had been designed to elicit exactly that kind of biological response. Cold-blooded to warm. Predator, prey.

He glanced up from the half-translated cartogenetic instructional he had been reading line by line from storage wafers into the data reliquary. At least, that was mostly what he had been doing.

Genetic readers rumbled as they worked at their endless task, laser diffraction painting the eddying smoke with hazy lines of rainbow colours. The thudding steps of laboratorium servitors and the lilt of chanting hung with the dry fumes. A pair of initiate adepts drifted through it, there but, in some crucially contextual way, elsewhere, red-robed ghosts of flesh and cabling.

Zeta-One Prime was the only thing that was still. She stood while Urquidex sat, watching, her arc pistol holstered under her hand.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked suddenly.

‘I am instructing the cognis units to equivalate sequence and textual data with galactic grid references.’

‘Again?’

‘It must be done each time. The repetition is important.’

The skitarius fell silent a moment.

‘The first time you performed this task it required fifteen minutes and eleven seconds. You have been at this terminal for sixteen minutes, magos.’

With an effort, Urquidex suppressed the anxious tic of his digitools. They made him look guilty. The skitarius’ membranes flickered, some kind of sub-binaric code familiar to the deep biologics of his hindbrain.

I know.

He swallowed, tasted acid.

‘How much longer will this task require?’

‘I…’ He glanced at the reliquary’s scratchy, chrome-edged rune display, the lines of machine code that, though he could comprehend barely one symbol in five, he still knew betrayed a lot more than a cartogenetic instructional. He was resting a great deal on the faith that no mere skitarius, however elevated, would have been initiated into the First Circle of Information. ‘Two minutes.’

‘You have one.’

‘But–’

‘The artisan trajectorae apprised me of your sub-optimal performance in your prior duty designation. I will not tolerate the same here.’

‘But–’

‘Fifty-two seconds, magos.’

Biting his tongue and begging the machine’s clemency for such discourteous haste, he recited the final lines of the instructional via the data reliquary’s stiff ivory keys. As he worked, his digitools slid indepently over the tiers of keys.

‘I am close.’

The runes hovered in the machine’s active buffer, the noospheric equivalent of short term memory, for about five seconds before the detailed instructional he was inputting with his other hand swept them away.

‘How close?’

The question illuminated the electronic firmament. The data-strings were inelegantly composed, the syntax of quantum bits crude and, though the final form was legible, evidence of an inexpert hand.

But Clementina Yendl was no adept.

It had only taken a few days after his transfer from Noctis Labyrinth for her to locate him once more, and though Van Auken’s laboratorium was too well isolated for them to meet in person, they communicated. From her he had learned of the orks over Terra and more, sensed the urgency of her cause in the haste with which she ‘spoke’. He had not asked who she really was or whom she really served. Perhaps because the experience of trusting another person, of believing in their cause, was too precious to risk with such questions.

‘Three days,’ he sent back. ‘Two days if I do not purge the prognosticators of scrapcode, but the accuracy of our results will suffer.’

‘If you had to leave Mars now, could you finish?’

‘Now?’

‘Magos?’ said Zeta-One Prime, making him start.

He had not intended to speak aloud.

‘Stand by,’ he said, trying to make a dry mouth sound confident.

Disconnecting from the data reliquary, he hurried through the whirring stacks of cogitators. The kick of his robes disturbed ankle-deep engine smoke. His heart was pounding though he wasn’t sure why. A fly being watched by a chamaeleonidae.

Surrounded by trembling apparatus, a quiescent hololith table gave off a stilted glow. Urquidex connected himself through a series of peripheral nervous plugs. His fingers were sweating and it took several tries.

He was aware of Zeta-One Prime watching. For now, just watching. This action was abnormal, and the abnormal made her wary.

With a sympathetic impulse, he bade the hololith to awaken.

A three-dimensional map of the Imperium of Man shimmered into being. To his telescopic optics it was a heat map, data-dense regions showing through as yellows and reds, spiral arms separated by dark bands of nothing. Urquidex willed the data-vision to change. Hotspots and stellar landmarks dispersed, to be replaced by the branching lines of a phylogenetic tree. Except that ‘tree’ was too fleshbound a metaphor. Two-dimensional. It was more like the growth of a bacterial colony on a nutrient plate or the filamentous spread of a fungus. Offshoots extended into every segmentum of Imperial space, expanding outwards in three dimensions from a common root somewhere in the galactic core. The data represented it as an amorphous zone, grey and ill-defined, unpleasing on the diligent eye. The uncertainties were being continually smoothed away as the sequence mapping progressed, but it still covered hundreds of light years of congested space, thousands of worlds. His own cortex might be capable of processing it. He shook his head.

It was too complex.

‘Install a high capacity cable-link between the hololith and the data reliquary.’

‘To what purpose?’

‘Because I require it,’ Urquidex snapped, heart fumbling, and then with what he prayed was proper urgency rather than panic, ‘Please. Every second increases the likelihood of data degradation.’

He was aware of the interlink the instant that it was made. It was an erupting singularity of blinding connectivity, light and sound, thought and sensation, that even through the remove of a peripheral plug-in was almost overwhelming. He shunted the upload to a cortical machine sub-consciousness and did his best to disregard it.

‘The orks originate somewhere in the galactic core. It is a dense area. It will take time to isolate the exact world.’

Silence from the machine. The data galaxy spiralled, spiralled.

‘Yendl?’

Nothing.

‘This deviates, magos,’ said Zeta-One Prime, overcoming a pre-programmed fear of these machines and their workings with obvious reluctance. ‘If there is a problem then I am obligated to inform the artisan trajectorae.’

‘No. There is no need for that.’

He looked up.

The skitarius was up close: not angry, she was incapable of that, but as anxious as her emotional clamps allowed her to be. She radiated an artifical cold that needled around Urquidex’s implants and into the bone. Behind her, a woman in plain red robes approached. An initiate adept with a data-slate for inspection.

Odd.

The initiates worked on independent projects. They had never reported to him before.

The crack of a las discharge rang out like a hammer striking a nail. Zeta-One Prime jerked forward. There was another shot and she stumbled into the hololith, making the image shake. Ionised smoke uncoiling from the las-burns to her silvery exoskeleton, she began to turn.

The initiate struck her across the face with the data-slate. The slate bent in two in an eruption of sparks and knocked the skitarius back into the projector. A sharp kick into the shin dropped her onto her knees. A laspistol came up in the initate’s other hand and pushed up against the back of Zeta-One Prime’s skull. With laser clarity, Urquidex noted that the selector had been switched to full auto.

The skitarius’ head lit up like a soldering iron and she slumped to the ground, head slagged and fused to her shoulders.

A blurt of interrogative binaric came from behind the cogitator stacks and the second initiate came running.

The first was already dropping, minimising her profile even as she cast aside her emptied laspistol and with mercuric grace drew Zeta-One Prime’s arc pistol. The running initate was armed with basic digital weaponry and spat low-powered laser bolts from his extended arm as soon as he spotted the fallen skitarius. They all missed.

The female took her moment, aimed and then fired. A crackling fist of electricity punched the initiate from his feet and slammed him into the brass cladding of a codifier.

Urquidex gaped.

‘Not later,’ said Clementina Yendl, manually tearing his plug-ins from the hololith projector. The abrupt separation was as extraordinary as the connection had been, and almost wiped him out with pain.

‘Now.’

Seventeen

Prax

The orbital command substation was an immense agglomeration of cylindrical towers dish arrays and landing platforms that in better days would have serviced light jurisdictional compliance craft responsible for inspection and enforcement of orbital traffic. The facility was surrounded by a crumpled wire fence, and was all just within sight of Princus Praxa’s outer walls. The city was a thumb’s-width smudge on the horizon, a coppery pall of particulate pollution that glimmered like living crystal from the final-stage escape boosters of orbital lifters.

The orks, as Major Bryce had explained it, utilised the substation’s communication nets to complement their own orbital operations.

Zerberyn could have inferred that much for himself from the sheer concentration of firepower that the orks had embedded there in its defence.

Pot-bellied howitzers thrust out of sandbagged redoubts. For such large, crude-looking artillery pieces they had a tremendous rate of fire, thumping out explosive shells and sending up rockets of dusty topsoil amidst the Fists Exemplar advance. Machine cannons screamed as they ripped up new trenchlines.

Scrap metal drizzled over Zerberyn’s armour. Dust clogged the glowing lenses of his helm.

The bombardment was a variable that, having already plotted the optimal angle of attack at the onset, he could no longer influence and so spared no further thought to.

A combat squad comprising one-half of Veteran Squad Anatoq moved with him over the broken ground in a line, their even spacing the resultant practical of Brother Donbuss’ best theoretical of the howitzer shells’ blast radius. The five Space Marines were flickering gold auspex traces in Zerberyn’s faceplate display, periodically broken up by dust diffraction and blast compression fronts. They fired sporadically, conserving ammunition, the soundless flashes of muzzle-flare in the cacophony primarily to give the orks something to aim at other than the true source of the attack.

With their genhanced low-light vision and complementary auspex overlays bolstering their awareness, the Fists Exemplar guided the lighter Tempestus Scions in. Patched in to the humans’ platoon frequency, Zerberyn listened in on their chatter as he picked a path through the stick bombs, tube-charges and tripwires that his auto-senses’ threat-recogition protocols called out from the general detritus.

Even had these men been Space Marines, Zerberyn would have been impressed by their vox-discipline. There was none of the braggadocio and backchat that he was accustomed to hearing on mortal units’ channels. Just target advisories, calm requests for recharge packs or medicae assistance, and mapping updates that were followed immediately and without question. Zerberyn had not yet seen the Scions truly tested, but if they achieved nothing else today then they had already accomplished a feat that was practically unheard of.

They had impressed an Exemplar.

‘Unidentified heat source on your eleven,’ voxed one, their system clear as a bell.

The heat source saw Zerberyn the moment that Zerberyn saw it, and fired a moment later. A Devil Dog flame tank, hull down and scarred enough by battle-damage to justify Zerberyn’s initial appraisal that it had been derelict. An ork in an ill-fitting flak jacket and a red bandana lifted its head above the hatch and shouted.

He would submit himself for proper penance when the battle was done.

A melta beam lanced from its turret gun in a howl of deconstituted atmosphere and passed a foot over Zerberyn’s shoulder, incinerating half of the following Scions in an instant. Heat washed over him. He hit the ground, rolling into the cover formed by the scrap and craters surrounding the substation as the tank’s glacis-mounted heavy bolter opened up.

‘Mine, cousin.’

An Iron Warriors Terminator strode directly into the firing line. His monstrous battleplate soaked up the glacis-mount’s magazine as mass-reactive rounds from his own combi-bolter spanked across the Devil Dog’s gunner slit. A disruption field thrummed into life around the clenched fingers of his power fist as the Cataphractii disappeared again into the fog of war.

‘Tarsus, Galen – pincer left,’ voxed Zerberyn, rising and clapping dust from his bolt pistol. ‘Tosque, Nalis, Borhune: right.’

His squad knew their duties, but it always paid to keep their wiser-than-thou individualism in check.

‘Jaskólska,’ he went on, switching to the Scions’ channel, addressing the female trooper he had spoken with briefly at the agri-plex. ‘We have you covered.’

‘Our gratitude, lord captain.’

The surviving Scions, no grief, no complaint, took off at a full sprint. They were bug-eyed by the full covering and rebreather apparatus of their omnishield helms. The greenish glow of visual augmenter beams from their hellgun scopes webbed the air like a haywired security grid.

Zerberyn followed, finding the troopers spread out in a semicircular firebase formation, Sergeant Jaskólska and the unit sapper in the process of mag-locking the final melta bombs to the substation’s Dreadnought-sized main doors.

‘Clear!’ yelled the sapper with considerable, long pent-up satisfaction, and then activated the det-charges via his slate monitorum.

White fire rolled out from the doors with a searing roar. Zerberyn felt a passing discomfort in his eyes before his auto-senses adapted to the supernova glare and filtered out the more damaging wavelengths. He was stepping into the breach with weapons ready while the Scions still had their arms over their helms’ visors.

The gunmetal floor tiles glittered like a starfield, littered with flakes of glass that a moment ago had been dust. Opposite, a security desk sat behind a reinforced shatterglass screen, the window turned almost completely white with cracks. On various walls, the torn corner scraps of instructional posters fluttered as the vestibule breathed in, exchanging the oxygen that the melta bombs had consumed for smoke from outside.

He shot and killed an ork that pushed its way in through an interior door, then another, and another. Shot, kill; shot kill. Purity through utility.

More were coming, discernably different from the savage fighters he had encountered on Prax thus far. Another greenskin sub-type, perhaps. Another clan. Their alien features were encased in horned helms, obscene musculature clad in thick body armour decorated with an optically striking black-and-white checker pattern. There were too many, and the number of entrance corridors was too great, for even transhuman reflexes and Space Marine armament to hold them at bay.

Zerberyn swung his thunder hammer as he charged headlong into the pack. The timed-release detonation vaporised the first ork’s torso, pasted its legs in two long red streaks back the way it had come, and lifted the half-tonne brute behind it off its feet, sending it crashing through the shatterglass screen. Another, hard and green and slabbed in armour, came in across his swing. It roared, all aggression. He roared back, vox-amplified to a crippling pitch, as the ork slammed into his turned shoulder and bulldozed him into the wall.

Nalis and Borhune arrived in a storm of bolter fire that shredded the ork. Following in their wake came Jaskólska and her Scions, lighting up the room with full-auto bursts of hot-shot las. Powerful though the Scions’ hellguns were compared to the standard Guardsman’s lasrifle, each monstrous greenskin took several point-blank blasts to put down, and several more to finish off.

The last ork crunched onto the glass-strewn tiles, crisped like meat held too long against the heat.

Zerberyn disinterred himself from the dented wall and opened a channel.

‘Columba, Major.’ He masked the twitch of his lip and swallowed his distaste. ‘Kalkator. Entrance secured. See that the perimeter is held and join me in the control room.’

‘A pity our fathers were such adversaries,’ voxed Kalkator. ‘Together, their sons would have been unstoppable.’

‘In some other universe, perhaps,’ Zerberyn returned, and then, aware that Bryce was also on the channel, added a poisonous, ‘cousin.’

That was an explanation that he did not want to have to give. Not now. And not to Marshal Bohemond when they finally rejoined the muster at Phall.

He scowled.

First Captain Zerberyn of the Fists Exemplar did not answer to the Black Templars.

‘This facility’s data stores had better be worth it.’

‘This way, lord captain,’ said Jaskólska smartly, unaware that the warning had been intended for himself.

Glass ground under her feet as she eased open an interior door and stepped over the greenskin corpse that had been holding it ajar. Zerberyn followed, then Nalis, Borhune, Tosque and Galen. Tarsus remained behind to hold the vestibule, directing the remaining Scions into fire points behind upturned tables and security lockers.

A short corridor led to a metal staircase. It looked like something that would have been used by lower-grade servants and perhaps as an escape route during emergency drills. Access doors onto exterior walkways stood on each tier, bloody handprints on the emergency release bars. A pair of panicked-looking gretchin came clattering down the escape and straight into two precise blasts from Jaskólska’s hellgun. They rolled down, the sounds of bolter fire ringing back through the stairwell’s metal frame as Zerberyn and the major pushed through another door and into a control room.

The terminals were still active, continuing with their operators in absentia to plot the blips and curves of an intensely crowded near-orbital space. Empty, bloodstained chairs were set up along curving desks, blinking, chirping workstations facing an armourglass window. The view was of an endless beige plain of desertified pastureland. A railroad cut across it, trailed by a dust road. Both ran from the substation to Princus Praxa. Zerberyn manually operated his helm’s magnification selector. It was no substitute for a pair of magnoculars, but it bought him a blurry three- or four-fold zoom – enough to make out the mottled grey industrial stacks crowding the city’s outer walls. The chimneys pumped out a grimy, ochre smog that hazed almost everything else within it. Even the high adamantium-ceramite walls of the Crusade-era citadel that dominated the settlement’s heart were little more than a gothic, crimson shadow.

‘What is that smoke?’

‘The people of Prax,’ said Major Bryce, appearing in the door ahead of Columba and Kalkator and a handful of Scions. ‘And a billion more from off-world, brought here to be… rendered.’

Zerberyn turned from the window as Columba strode past. The veteran-sergeant ignored the panorama entirely, thumped through the glazed metal doors onto the main staircase, and then blazed down the corridor with his bolt pistol to a riot of high-pitched screams. Kalkator joined Zerberyn at the glass. Jaskólska moved warily aside, some deep conditioning of her training causing her to half-raise her hellgun and slip behind a desk. The Iron Warrior disengaged his helmet’s seals and removed it, nose wrinkling as he took it under his arm and gazed across the plain towards the fortress that Perturabo had built. His eyes were pained, distant, his primarch’s glories dust.

‘You have seen it?’ said Zerberyn to the major.

‘Throne, have I seen it,’ muttered Bryce, hugging his carapace as though the armourglass provided no protection against the winds of the plain. ‘The smell of the tanneries stays on you for days, and the screams of the children…’

‘You are only human. It is understandable.’

Bryce nodded, grateful for that. He pointed to a humming stack of cogitator units that stood against the wall behind a clear plastek barrier. ‘The data-cache.’

‘I am no priest of Mars, major.’

‘I suggest we pull up the unit and take it with us, First Captain.’ Brother Antille walked over, shadowed by the smaller form of Bryce’s vox-officer-cum-adjutant, Sergeant Menthis, and greeted Zerberyn with a curt nod. ‘I can bear the weight, and see it safely loaded aboard the gunship. Once we return to Dantalion Forge-Brother Clathrin can conduct the necessary rites of retrieval.’

‘Do it.’

‘Everything the orks have done from here will have been automatically stored by the system,’ said Bryce. ‘Thousands of ships take off and land every day, and even more are unloaded from orbit. You’ll be able to learn what the orks are doing from that, I have no doubt.’

‘I can tell you what the orks are doing,’ said Kalkator, turning his nailhead stare on Zerberyn, ignoring the Scion utterly. ‘They are feeding an empire.’

Zerberyn looked again at that crimson pall. As if the thermosphere wept blood. If his transhuman biology had retained the ability for him to be physically sick, then he would have been so. By the Emperor’s wisdom, he was forced to keep his disgust internal; it stewed in his gut, suffused him, a familiar outrage trembling in the marrow of his bones.

Feed.

‘You saw the number of ships in orbit, little cousin,’ said Kalkator. ‘The industry of Prax could be supplying offensives against hundreds of sectors.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘You know what I am suggesting.’

‘You did not want to be on this planet. Now you are talking of reconquering it.’

‘Orks do not settle, they burn. They took no prisoners on Ostrom or Klostra or on Eidolica. I could not have known that this would be here.’

‘There must be ten thousand orks in that city, defending a Fourth Legion citadel. There is no combination of variables that can sum forty men and fewer than thirty Adeptus Astartes into a schema of victory.’

With a scowl, Kalkator replaced his helm over his head. His armour resealed with a clank of magnetic clamps. The next words he spoke came directly through Zerberyn’s helmet channel.

‘Forget the citadel. The fortress is but the surface of a complex of subterranean bunkers that runs beneath the entire city. The entrances are concealed and gene-locked. We can take the citadel, and hold it long enough for our ships to land additional forces to cleanse the planet.’

Zerberyn closed his eyes and considered. The parameters of the modified mission schematic would recommend utilising the substation’s communications and landing capability to apprise the fleet and call down Thunderhawk extraction to remove the data-cache to safety, and then most likely destroy the facility on their departure. But there was merit to Kalkator’s argument. He opened his eyes and met the warsmith’s glowing, red-lensed stare.

That horned mask was hiding something, he felt certain, but the Iron Warrior was too altered from his exalted origins, his manner too void of humanity, for him to guess what.

‘We need only get into the city,’ said Kalkator.

Zerberyn’s eyes followed the line of the railroad, across the plain and into Princus Praxa’s bleak industrial heart.

There was merit.

He nodded, feeling an adrenal buzz suffuse his muscles as his body prepared itself for the combat promised by that red horizon. It felt good.

The fightback began now.

Eighteen

Terra – the Imperial Palace

The Praetorian Way was the primary arterial between Anterior Six Gate and the Great Chamber. Fortified senatorial habs and basilicae soared above like mountains, bristling with rusted autocannon turrets and the roosts of angels, their stone faces teared by acid corrosion. Lumen globes mounted on posts lined the way, glittering like an honour guard drawn from the span of the Imperium. Brass filters shaped the light into continents and oceans, each a commemoration to the world of an Army regiment destroyed in defence of Terra. Kilometre after kilometre, they stood vigil against the deepening twilight. Lord High Admiral Lansung had intended to climax his victory march here following the Navy’s triumph at Vesperilles, and over the course of the Siege both loyalists and traitors had exploited the arterial to move their war machines between inner and outer Palace.

Now it was locked down.

Barriers and visored enforcers stood on the ramps and slip roads. Like clockwork, a black Adeptus Arbites armoured transport would cruise down the centre lane with exhortations to good order and obedience booming from its loudspeakers.

It was a rare sight then, if not an unprecedented one, when a squadron of Imperial Fists Land Raiders roared onto the flyway.

They pulled away from the towers, moving in convoy. The cut light sharpened angular lines to a golden edge. The immense power of their engines rumbled into the angels’ eyries above, and ruffled the forever-twilight of the ornamental canopy of the Night Garden below.

The Land Raider was a beast of war, one of unique inelegance in the armouries of the Angels of Death, but unrivalled in the execution of its singular function. The bonded layers of its composite armour were as near to impenetrable as the artifice of man could make them, the tank front-loaded with firepower and battlefield superiority. It was the ground-to-ground equivalent of a drop pod or a boarding torpedo, its role to deliver Space Marines into the violent, still-beating heart of battle with crushing force. Its armour, armament and machine temperament suited it equally to rolling over troops, armour and even the fortifications of an enemy in order to gain its target.

The lead vehicle pulled up before the gilded stone portal of the Senatorum Imperialis.

Sponson lascannons tracked back and forth over the imposing defensive structure as two more vehicles rolled out alongside it. The fourth and last, an ultra-rare example of the siege-breaking Achilles variant, heaved to a stop behind the other tanks. Its hull-mounted thunderfire cannon and sponson multi-meltas zeroed in on the gate.

The Imperial Fists were dead. Ardamantua had ended them. But their serfs, the Phalanx, their Chapter houses here on Terra, their armouries, vaults and frozen gene-stocks – all still remained. The Chapter was mustering its strength for one last, defiant shout.

The Achilles revved its engines, wrecking-ball frame leaning into its forward brakes.

Its ultimatum was explicit.

The Lucifer Blacks lieutenant in command of the guard detail appeared in the embrasure window of the guardroom above the gate. His hand was clamped to an earpiece and he was speaking urgently into a wired vox-unit mounted on the guardroom wall.

Koorland popped the cupola hatch of the Achilles, then stepped off the roof of the tank and onto the road. Chapter serfs in gold tabards, wielding lasrifles and ornamental blades, were pouring out of the troop hatches and running forwards to secure the slowly opening gate. Following them from each transport came an Imperial Fist.

An Excoriator, a Crimson Fist, a Black Templar and a Fist Exemplar.

Or as Koorland knew them: Hemisphere, Absolution, Eternity and Daylight.

They were each proud of their own heritage, of the distinctions that had arisen between them and their brothers over a thousand years. But it was a learned pride. It had been inculcated into them since their rebirth, nurtured by ritual and rote. Now they had been called home, brothers again, and that meant something deeper than words. Each of them wore the brilliant yellow of the Imperial Fists and carried the black fist on their pauldron. Eternity had devoted the full left half of his breastplate to a particularly prominent example and scraps of yellow cerecloth fluttered from the hilt of his longsword.

They fell in behind Koorland, armed, intense, each the very best that a human being could become, and together five proud sons of Dorn marched on the Great Chamber.

The Senatorum was in recess.

Lesser lords in military dress and civilian frippery mingled in an anteroom around refectory tables laden with canapés, sipping on recaff and talking in hushed tones about the prior session’s business. The air trilled with privilege and the clink of glassware. Servitor cherubs hovered under a fresco of the Emperor delivering the Imperial Creed, weaving between columns and vid-capture drones bearing reams of parchment. A steady stream of dignitaries hurried from the ablutorials, hands still wet, and made for the waiting doors to the Great Chamber. A polite chime sounded through the vox-casters set up in the vaults, sounding the recall to session.

It all stopped as Koorland and the Last Wall strode past.

The Space Marines towered over the human lords like god-kings out of legend. A few hundred Lucifer Blacks, officers of the Adeptus Arbites and Palace Defence Forces, as well as liveried attachés of the High Lords, watched from various discreet corner rooms and side corridors, but stood off. Whether out of fear of his brothers or hesitation over stepping on another’s jurisdiction, Koorland could not care.

He turned to face the doors.

They were vast, oak, inlaid and fretted with silver from which an energy-nullifying protection field hummed. They were also open. Koorland focused his hearing on what lay beyond. His Lyman’s ear cued him to the strains of Ecclesiarch Mesring delivering the commencement blessing.

‘Bestia, qui in sapientia.’

As the Adeptus Astartes’ adherence to the secular Imperial Truth minimised direct contact with the Ecclesiarchy, he knew little of the forms and practices.

‘Benedicat serviamus in regens et nos iterum.’

But even to him, the Ecclesiarch’s address sounded strange.

‘Ave Veridus est.’

There was no time to dwell on it further as the Space Marines passed through the open doors and into the Great Chamber.

The tiered auditorium was almost empty. Row upon row of flipped-back wooden pews surrounded the central dais and a woolly throng of minor dignitaries milling around their seats. As Koorland was expecting, Ecclesiarch Mesring had the podium. There was an unkemptness to his hair and dress and an almost feral fervour in his eyes as he spoke, his voice coming asynchronously from the vox-casters positioned around the chamber.

Lord Admiral Lansung and Fabricator General Kubik were the only two presently seated, the pair sniping at one another across the intervening chairs. The others moved around the main platform, stretching their legs and taking sips of purified water, half-listening to the aides, analysts and codifiers that pursued them around the base of the dais.

It was Lansung who saw Koorland first.

His face blanched as Hemisphere and Absolution spread out around the standing galleries on the outer edge of the chamber and swung their bolters to cover the dais. As well he might – the fat fool’s politicking had done more to end the Imperial Fists than any ork or Chrome. People began to cry out and went to ground amongst the pews. Daylight and Eternity hung back, spear and sword raised respectively, as Koorland marched down the aisle.

A huge statue of Rogal Dorn stood to one side. He faced the aisle, the personal guarantor of safety to all delegates to this chamber, but his gaze was turned towards the dais, ever in judgement of the successors to his god-like brothers and father.

There, Koorland stopped.

There were other doors into the Great Chamber, other aisles to the dais, but Koorland had studied his battlefield and knew what terrain it had to exploit. His armour shone bright and perfect under the lighting directed onto the statue, and the impact of standing so outfitted before his own primarch, he who was the very symbol of this chamber’s endurance, was wholly deliberate.

Udin Macht Udo pulled the Ecclesiarch from the podium. He took the lectern bar in both hands and glared into the stage lights over the fan array of vox-pickups. His braided grand admiral’s uniform was luminous white and glittered with medals, power and pomposity in bald measure. His scarred face was pink and furious, his maimed eye gleaming like a pearl in oyster flesh.

‘This assembly has heard your petition, Koorland, and dismissed it. We legislated the immediate dispersal of your Last Wall to their Chapters. Is this your idea of a coup? Will the Imperial Fists forever be remembered for the failed overthrow of the government of Holy Terra?’

Koorland took a moment to centre himself and to allow the lords to clamour down.

Instinctually, he scanned the chamber for Vangorich, an ally, but if the Grand Master was present at all then he was hidden amongst the lesser lords. His battleplate sensors called back no hostile targets. Another reason to prefer the battlefield. The words of Roboute Guilliman came to his mind then, written an age ago, at a time when such a future seemed possible for the then Legiones Astartes.

‘Space Marines would excel in peace as they excel in war, for the Emperor has crafted them to excel.’

And more even than that: he was an Imperial Fist standing his ground.

‘My duty is to the defence of Terra, and the persecution of the enemies of Man.’ Koorland did not need a vox-caster array. He did not shout, but his voice, engineered for the infinite warzones of the stars, boomed to every corner of the auditorium. ‘You call yourselves a government, but right now, Udo, what I see before me are enemies of Man.’

The High Lords’ protestations of shock and outrage served only to emphasise the schism between them. The imposing Provost-Marshal Vernor Zeck was nodding along with Koorland’s words, and sharing a glance with the equally thoughtful Inquisitorial Representatives. On the opposite side of the divide, Mesring cried murder, apostasy and worse. The Lord Commander bared his teeth and laughed.

‘You should have brought more men.’

‘Daylight,’ Koorland called. ‘What was your personal tally of kills from the siege of Eidolica?’

‘Nine hundred and eight of the greenskins, brother. A long night fought over the promethium flats of my home, and then when the sun rose and my armour burned and my bolter ran dry and my chainsword died, I killed with my fists alone as the orks sought to take the caves of the Great Basin from me.’ He turned to look at Eternity. ‘I would have killed nine hundred and eight more to hold it had my brothers’ Thunderhawks not retrieved me.’

‘Eternity. Your count from Aspiria.’

‘Thirty.’ The Black Templar turned the hawk-like beak of his helm towards his Fists Exemplar brother. ‘Though I was disadvantaged by the orks sending only their best to take my vessel. I had minutes rather than days, and nothing but my gladius with which to do it.’

Koorland smiled. Daylight’s rough chuckle filled the brothers’ private channel.

‘I command the might of the Imperium itself,’ snapped Udo.

‘Perhaps it is too grand a task, for one mortal to govern in regency of the Emperor of Man.’ Koorland selected his words as he would select targets, and from the impotent flush that came over the Lord Commander, he could see they had found their mark. Even Udin Macht Udo could not attempt to deny the truth of them. ‘By genetic birthright, and for the Imperium of Man that He built, I claim the title of Lord Commander. Stand aside, Udo, that you may serve Him without further impeachment of your honour.’

Udo sneered.

‘I will back the Angels of the Adeptus Astartes,’ growled Zeck, almost reverently, and Koorland was thankful that the Provost-Marshal had chosen this day to end his exile from the Senatorum. ‘If you can restore order to our streets and sanity to this…’ his voice trailed off, contempt showing through the symphonic grate of his augmetised throat, ‘assembly, then you will have my support.’

‘And we,’ said Veritus. The Inquisitorial Representative clumped across the dais in cream-coloured power armour to take his stand beside Zeck. The two lords were giants – to Koorland’s eyes, in more ways than one. ‘As once we rallied behind your Father in Terra’s darkest hour, we will follow you now.’

With Wienand joining her co-representative, the High Lords slowly, hesitantly, shuffled themselves.

The Paternoval Envoy, Gibran, was the first to go to Zeck’s side, then Sark, Anwar and Lord Militant Verreault. Lansung hauled his bulk out of his chair and, with an almost apologetic look to the pulpit, joined them. Even Juskina Tull seemed to snap out of whatever fugue state she had been occupying to join the drift. Tobris Ekharth wilted under Udo’s stare, moving like a man with a powering conversion beam trained on his shoulder blades, but with a smile growing lighter with every step he took.

Only Mesring and Kubik remained. The former looked on as though the goings-on of his peers were beneath him. The latter might have had his consciousness diverted to some other host for the duration of the recess for all the reaction he gave.

With a defiant growl, the Lord Commander gestured to the detachment of Lucifer Blacks that were just then entering through the north precept. They moved in, shock-glaives powered, but faltered at the sight of Eternity, his two-handed sword as long as they were tall.

More Guardsmen filed in from the east behind Koorland, blades lowered threateningly, bands of light striating the enamelled black of their armour.

‘Remove this man’s weapons and escort him from my chamber,’ snapped Udo.

The ranking Lucifer Black, an angle-drawn lieutenant with a soft beret cap in lieu of a helmet, walked towards Koorland. He pursed his lips, his toughened stare sliding off Koorland’s pauldron plate to the High Lords and back again. He threw a salute and then dropped to one knee with head bowed across his chainsword. There was a yellow ribbon knotted around the hilt.

‘It’s my honour to serve you, Lord Commander.’

Udo was boiling, good eye bulging, but he had nothing left to say.

‘You are a powerful man by your own reckoning, Udo,’ said Koorland. ‘But to my brothers and I, you are just a man. Stand down. You are done.’

‘I made this council. Lansung? Mesring? I made them.’

‘Provost-Marshal,’ snapped Koorland. ‘Please remove the former Lord Commander.’

With a crack of servo-muscular knuckles and a grin of steel, Zeck stalked forward. Udo drew himself up as if meaning to stare the cyborgised Provost-Marshal down, as he had so many others in his years of rise and rise. Then at the very last, he appeared to wither inside of his plush white admiralty jacket, in his deflation visibly shrinking by half an inch. He dropped his head. Zeck’s augmetised hand clamped over his shoulder, and aside from a whimper of pain he didn’t make another sound as the Provost-Marshal led him from the dais and into the arms of the waiting enforcers.

Koorland held his sword aloft and shouted, cheers beginning to spread through the Great Chamber and into the antechamber beyond as the reality of what the lords had just witnessed or heard sank in.

‘The next time an ork sets foot in this chamber, it will be met by the Last Wall!’

The chamber buzzed with new excitement. Koorland’s twin hearts were thumping.

The fightback began now.

Nineteen

Prax – Princus Praxa

The locomotive rattled along the damaged track, steadily slowing as it curved towards Princus Praxa.

The ork pressed up against the inside of the carriage window squeaked slowly down until Zerberyn arrested it with a firm hand to the back of its neck. A buckled sleeper jarred the carriage and touched acid to the raw tendons in his arm. These orks had been allowed to grow large, as great perhaps as those fought by the primarchs on Ullanor, and the continual buffeting made it feel heavier. With a grunt, he drew the brute back into place just as an ork sentry post flashed across the window.

Scrap metal, painted red. Belt-fed combi-weapons in huge, gauntleted hands. Then columns, bullet-chewed ferrocrete blinking past as the locomotive passed under the terminus’ flat roof. Sunlight receded, replaced by spotty lumens and the drum fires scattered over the platforms and access ramps.

Gangs of gretchin and the occasional leather-clad ork were busily loading and unloading. Zerberyn expected to see human slaves performing the greenskins’ labour, but what few humans he saw were in chained lines being fed out of dusty locomotives and into corrals. Moving in the opposite direction were big industrial storage drums, light weaponry and vehicles, and agricultural machinery. Orks in rugged yellow battlesuits showing off sneering moon glyphs oversaw the import and export with a brutish efficiency that any crude hierarchy would recognise. In another setting, Zerberyn might have been watching Administratum troopers extorting a local militia. Some kind of lumpen, enamelled currency changed hands.

The march of columns slowed as the locomotive squealed towards an empty platform.

A ten-strong mob of orks in thick red bodyplate followed the engine in, streaming down a frozen escalator from a pedestrian flyover. Some kind of boss, broader than the rest by half a metre and as dark as a Predator’s treads, waved a clenched fist for them to spread out and they did. At a barked command, two pairs clattered forwards to cover each of the carriage doors. Half of the mob hung back on overwatch.

It was organised. Professional. Not at all like orks.

Zerberyn drew his bolt pistol carefully. Columba and the rest of Veteran Squad Anatoq prepared themselves, keeping hold of the orks they hid behind with elbows, shoulders, whatever was practical.

The Tempestus Scions crammed into the vestibule and underseat areas out of sight, calmly activated their weapons’ visual augmenter beams, flexing fingers, rolling shoulders, working space enough for each man to move when the moment came. The rising hum of hot-shot packs resonated through the carriage’s metal fittings. Major Bryce angled up the reflective edge of his slate monitorum to the window and grimaced.

‘Bloody Axes,’ he hissed. ‘That’s what we call them, for the symbol on their armour. Always kill them first.’

‘Noted,’ said Zerberyn, disengaging his bolt pistol from its mag-holster.

The locomotive heaved onto its brakes and then cried shrilly to a halt. The Bloody Axes came running in, two by two. Zerberyn checked the countdown timer he had programmed into his helm display. It was locked on 00:00 and had been for half a second.

‘Brother Donbuss, are you sure that the greenskin munitions you recovered were–’

A second sun rose over the pasture desert, white and furious, light burning up the track like a runaway train. Bryce grunted and slid back under the window, but Zerberyn’s auto-senses protectively filmed over a split second ahead of time. He saw the orks on the platform turn in surprise towards the thermonuclear explosion on the horizon, then clutch their eyes and stagger out of their ordered overwatch formation.

‘Now!’

Zerberyn yanked the release cord.

The doors shuddered apart, far enough for him to force his right arm through to the pauldron and open fire. A single mass-reactive explosion ripped the shoulder from a bellowing Bloody Axe. He tracked left, fired again as its fellow brought up its gun blind, and dropped it with a spitting rupture in its chest.

At the same time, Scions in full omnishield glare protection popped the roof escape hatches, swinging up plasma weaponry and hot-shot volleyguns and raking the platform with fire.

Zerberyn got his fingers between his pauldron plate and the doors and pushed them open. He jumped two-footed onto the platform, cracking into it. A Bloody Axe flailed for him with eyes closed. A headshot exploded it, just as the window behind him shattered.

Arriving at his own decision to move now rather than wait for his captain, Columba simply fired through the window on full-auto. Propellant trails criss-crossed the platform. Mass-reactive kill-shots painted it red. With their lighter profiles, the Scions climbed easily though the broken frames. Bryce was first onto the platform, emptying a charge cell into the Bloody Axe boss’ body armour, and then scrambling behind a pillar as the blinded ork let rip with a racketing burst of fire.

Kalkator executed the creature with a single bolt-round between the shoulder blades.

The warsmith stood on the platform by the doors of the rear carriage. He threw a mock salute. The orks at that end of the platform were dead. Traitor Space Marines were disembarking to take up firing positions over the shredded remains while, in a gnarl of corrupted motors, the three Terminators formed up into a line, a wall, and advanced on the steps up to the flyover. The escalator was a natural choke point and, drawn by the gunfire, orks were already piling bodies and heavy guns up behind the bent crush barrier at the top.

Tactical Dreadnought plate had been built to withstand the worst a hostile galaxy could give out.

It withstood this.

‘Major,’ Zerberyn boomed over the screams and thunder of abused plasteel. ‘Do you know where my cousin is leading us?’

‘Yes, lord – streetside access.’

Zerberyn looked around quickly. The station was a maze of platforms, overpasses and panting locomotives that echoed with bestial shouts and weapons flare. Engines thundered through, not frequently, but at a speed and irregularity that made the tracks a genuine hazard, even for a Space Marine.

‘Do you know an alternate route?’

‘I do, lord.’

‘Then take it. We will force the direct route. Columba, take a five-man combat squad, go with him.’

With a metallic growl, the veteran-sergeant jumped into the tracks in the direction that Bryce and the Tempestus Scions were moving. Donbuss, Borhune, Nalis and Tarsus fell in with him, squeezing off controlled bursts at the orks on the far side whenever the locomotives screeching between them left space for a shot. Zerberyn turned to the Iron Warriors.

The Terminators walked into a gauntlet of missiles, bombs and explosive rounds like a vehicle’s dozer blade churning up a minefield. Kalkator and the Traitor Space Marines moved up behind them, taking snapshots over the massive head and shoulder armour of their Cataphractii brothers.

Zerberyn accorded their efficiency a grudging admiration.

Goaded beyond their febrile discipline, the orks poured over the crush barriers with a roar. Bodies exploded, ripped apart by mass-reactive rounds. The muzzle flashes of rapid-firing combi-bolters strobed in the narrow space. Beasts howled. Piped laughter boomed from helmet speakers.

Tough alien flesh met ceramite composite like knuckles flying into a riot shield. Against men, against lesser orks, the line of Terminators would have been enough, but since the death of Eidolica, Zerberyn had never seen orks like these.

A brute in black-and-white bodyplate, almost of a size with the Terminators, hammered its axe into the lead warrior’s gorget protector and bulled him aside. It roared, axe stuck in the Terminator, heaved a Traitor Space Marine up over its head and hurled him off the stair. It took a combat knife under its armpit, grunted, and elbowed the Iron Warrior so hard his plastron buckled under it. Then, severed fibre bundles sputtering with his armour spirit’s fury, the Terminator came about and pulped the rampaging ork with the crackling discharge from his power fist.

But the line had already given.

Zerberyn killed two orks with two shots. Neat. Perfect. A third he demolished with a hammer blow. Tosque and Reoch closed in alongside. Too close for bolter work, the veteran-brothers made a wall of their knives.

‘Break them,’ barked Kalkator. His chainsword chewed messily through an ork’s leg while the full-sized bolter held steady in his bionic grip kicked out bursts of semi-automatic fire into the pack. ‘Would you have our cousins think us weak?’

Growling their rancour, the Terminators slammed back into line and pushed on with visceral determination. In a blizzard of bolter fire they took the crush barrier. Traitor Space Marines spread out onto the walled flyover in both directions and immediately started firing.

‘Brother Karva, rearguard,’ said Zerberyn.

Restricted in the use of his heavy flamer by the close fighting, Karva had held back on the platform until then. Antille came up with him, firing from the chest.

‘Agreed, brother-captain.’

‘Cataphractii forward. Brothers to the flanks. Grind them under your heels.’

‘Iron within!’ blurted a heavily augmented warrior of the Chosen.

‘Iron without!’ came the return, and a shiver ran down Zerberyn’s spine.

They started forwards, like a phalanx from the Age of Bronze re-enacted from a treatise on ancient tactica. Shields forward, shields side, spears up, advancing as one.

As Guilliman had once written: man never changes, so war never changes.

Cutting themselves a path with bolter and power fist, the Iron Warriors and Fists Exemplar ground through the walkway and spilled out onto a pillared concourse of polished stone. A painted fresco showing the IV Legion liberating a verdant world lit the ceiling with vivid metallics. Engaged columns, rounded in the classical High Crusade style and carved in the likeness of unhelmed Legiones Astartes, looked in from the walls. A huge baroque timepiece hung from the ceiling’s central vault. It was broken, too badly shot up even to make out the time of death.

Orks were pouring in through the large streetside doors ahead, as well as from subway accesses and smashed-up refectory rooms to either side. The space was too open for the Space Marines to take them as they had before and so they charged for the doors, firing from the hip as they ran. Sluggers and bolters chewed old stone pillars to the bone and blasted them apart.

Zerberyn and Kalkator moved together into a storm of lead so intense it was like pushing against a falling wall. Where one was forced to let up to slam a clip into his bolter, the other emptied his to cover him. Where one engaged with thunder hammer or chainsword, the other was there at his side.

It was as the Iron Warrior had said: together, they were invincible.

Zerberyn cleared the doors with a thunderstrike of his hammer and chased Kalkator into the street, pistol tracking like a restless auto-targeter.

The grand old buildings were grizzled by gunfire, their ornate blackwork twisted, pierced and scarred. The road, wide enough in this world’s heyday for a squadron of Leman Russ tanks, was filled with vehicle wrecks and blockaded at either end with garishly painted trucks and stacks of burning tyres. A fine red rain fell, gelid and horrible. He had expected it to be warm, but it wasn’t. He looked up. Blood vapour and chemicals pumped from the city’s rendering plants hazed high above street level, obscuring the chimneys and the higher rooftops. Over the rumble of running engines, he could hear a frenzied, guttural chant. He focused his Lyman’s ear, cutting away the immediacy of combat.

He had heard it before, splitting the skies of Eidolica like thunder.

The Beast.

It was everywhere, booming through some kind of public address system rigged up all over the surrounding streets. Another transmitted recording no doubt, but the thought that the ork could be near filled Zerberyn’s chest with fury.

‘This way, little cousin.’

Hugging the station’s columned frontage, Kalkator turned right and kept running. Iron Warriors and Fists Exemplar followed in ones and twos, staccato bursts of bolter fire stippling the walls and barricades.

The warsmith dropped down by the rear of an agricultural sixteen-wheeler that was blocking the way. A mob of orks fired down from its iron roof, laughing, grisly by firelight. Space Marines stepped up and raked the truck in turn.

Heedless of the firefight, Kalkator closed his bionic fingers around the truck’s rear bar and strained. The massive vehicle began to tilt. The gunfire abruptly ceased as eight of the transport’s wheels were pulled away from the ground. A metallic growl strained through the warsmith’s helmet grille as he heaved the truck over and onto its side.

Iron Warriors poured through the breached barricade, laughing bitterly as they gunned down crushed and dazed orks where they lay. Tosque unpinned a frag grenade and rolled it between the wheels of the abutting vehicle. Blast debris blew out around their ankles as the Fists Exemplar followed in. Brother Karva hosed the street with promethium. Zerberyn was the last.

Looking back, he saw scores of ramshackle ork bikes manoeuvering through the roadblocks at the street’s opposite end. From the vandalised tenement habs across the way, portcullis-like sheets of metal were being withdrawn over windows and doorways. Orks roughly jammed ammo feeds into newly uncovered weapon emplacements. Seriously outfitted heavy infantry – Bloody Axes and Leering Moons – and a chugging walker that looked like a Dreadnought rumbled into the street.

Stowing his thunder hammer, Zerberyn crouched by the truck’s rear bar and took it in both hands, intending to block the way behind them. The ligaments rose up on his neck until his entire upper body shook. He let go with a gasp – the vehicle was immovable.

‘Karva, Reoch,’ he called, the strongest in his command. ‘Aid me, brothers.’

A missile screwed over their heads before either of the Space Marines had moved. The warhead’s on-board guidance spirit jinked it between wrecks and debris, and then slammed it through the flame-effect front fairing of an ork attack bike. An implosive krak detonation ripped out its fuselage, drew fire back in through its exhaust, and sent what was left of the sidecar rocketing spectacularly into the air.

‘Emperor’s speed, brother,’ voxed Sergeant Columba.

Zerberyn saw the green-lit armoured profiles of Tempestus Scions taking position amongst the ribs and angels of the station’s roof. Hot-shot and support weapon fire lashed across the wide road.

‘Many thanks,’ Zerberyn replied.

‘Give them to the major. He will make better use of them.’

‘Can you see Kalkator?’

‘To my shame.’

‘Then cover us until we are clear, then circle back and follow. I will praise you both in person.’

Columba gave a snort and signed off.

The road beyond the barricade was lit with drum fires, stripped-down vehicles of sub-human make abandoned around craters in the road. Greenskin dead exhibiting signs of mass-reactive trauma lay splattered and strewn. Zerberyn wiped chilly red condensate from his helm lenses. Drums of the sort he had seen being loaded onto trains bound for the agri-plexes were piled high in pyramidal stacks outside of warehouses. Where those outbound vessels had appeared empty, a handful of these were leaking a gelatinous paste where bolt-rounds had punctured them but not hit sufficient mass to detonate. Intermingled human skins were staked up under glowing electrical heaters. Tanneries. An acidic urine stench infused them and wafting out into the street with every flap and ripple of slow-curing flesh.

The sound of gunning engines dragged him back.

The last of the Iron Warriors were disappearing into an alley. Antille was there, waving for the rest of them to hurry.

Zerberyn slammed his shoulder into the tipped truck, with his brothers’ help sending it squealing back into place in the barricade. He backed away, clapping rust from his gauntlets, and shoved Karva and Reoch after their traitor allies.

The alley was narrow and desperately dark, wide enough for an Iron Warriors Terminator, but only just. The walls were crowded with metal escape ladders that vibrated with every bass grunt from the Beast’s augmitter network. Blended waste trickled through open sewage channels, carrying nuggets of bone, the occasional finger. Moments before, Zerberyn had thought he had seen the basest point to which human by-product could be rendered. Now, crashing headlong through knotted waste sacks and refuse drums, he was rudely re-educated.

Kalkator’s vanguard had just cleared the alley when a pair of spotlights hit them from behind the row of habs. No, not spotlights.

Headlights.

There was a squeal of tyre rubber, a turbo-charged petrochem roar, and then an armoured troop truck smashed through the two Traitor Space Marines at point and straight into the wall. The lamps flickered. Masonry pattered over the crowded troop compartment. Orks in thick, spiked armour and enclosed helms fired their guns in the air, the rear wheels still revving up swirls of red dust as the fighters piled out into the alley.

Zerberyn kicked in a side door partially hidden behind a pair of bins.

‘This way!’

He ran through into what looked like a processing plant or manufactory. Karva followed, the pilot of his heavy flamer flickering blue in the utter dark like a serpent’s tongue, then Reoch, Galen and Tosque, and finally Antille, covering the rear with tight bursts of bolter fire.

There were small windows high up in the two long walls, but these had been crudely boarded up and painted over in thick, primary colours. The skylight over the centre of the manufactorum floor had been successively stained red. It was like trying to look out from inside an artery.

The veteran-brothers activated their helm lights.

The beams stabbed up into towering lines of heavy machinery, chopped through steel ladders, and dug into the dark to glint back off meat hooks and ceiling-mounted suspensor platforms. The line was still running, conveyers clattering away unidentifiable chunks of gristle and flesh into the dark.

Surrounded by horror, Zerberyn almost forgot the Iron Warriors.

Firing on full automatic now, the Traitor Space Marines retreated inside. A warrior with a tusked helm and hellishly embellished battleplate tore a frag grenade from a clutch at his belt, leaving the pin behind, and then launched it through the open door. The confined frag blast stormed both ways down the alley and blew scraps of flesh and debris into the manufactorum. At a command from Kalkator, another slammed the door while two of his brothers dragged over a pallet loader laden with drums and jammed it up against the frame.

Zerberyn quickly cast about for another way out.

‘We can carry on, further into the complex,’ said Kalkator, striding over and clearly reading his intent. One crimson lens on his helm was fractured and flickered crazily, while grey sealant gel welled up from breach points in his battleplate like a fungal infestation. The unpainted ceramite cloaking his apostate colours made him, just for a moment, appear almost noble. ‘The bunker’s entry point is not far, but we cannot fight every ork in this city to get there.’

‘Where is it?’

‘And lessen my value to you? I am too old to be a fool, little cousin.’

‘Then go,’ said Zerberyn, ejecting a spent clip from his pistol and locking home another. Not many left now. They would have to count. ‘My brothers and I will hold them here.’

He expected Kalkator to argue. A brother of the Fists Exemplar would have, for it was as deeply in their nature to be martyrs as it was to be contrary. True to his Legion’s harsh reputation however, Kalkator accepted the willing sacrifice with a nod of his horned helm and a flicker of his shattered lens.

‘Theron,’ he growled. The most elaborately armoured of the Terminators turned in answer to his name, in a shiver of razorwire and painful iconography. There was still an axe embedded in his gorget’s fibre bundles, restricting his helmet’s range of motion. There had been no time to address it. ‘You and your brothers will remain. You will follow the Fists Exemplar’s orders as though they were mine.’

Zerberyn’s eyebrow arched. Honour from an Iron Warrior? He doubted it. More likely, the Cataphractii-pattern suits would simply slow the rest of Kalkator’s force down.

‘From honour cometh iron!’ the warsmith bellowed, backing off and summoning his warriors to follow.

As the last of the Iron Warriors moved past him, Zerberyn brought his bolt pistol to cover the alley side entrance they had left behind. This is my ground, it said in his genes’ selfish voice, the voice of every Imperial Fist that had ever occupied a fort or defended a hill. I hold it. To stop running, to turn and hold: tactical necessity it may have been but that was not why it felt right.

Tosque joined him, then Reoch, Karva, Galen and Antille, pauldron to pauldron to pauldron in an unbroken circle. Corners were weaknesses. The sturdiest redoubts had none.

A scuffling came from the alley, of steel boots and bulky weapons hitting bins. Zerberyn focused his hearing to gauge their numbers, but was immediately distracted by something else. Engines. Vehicles were circling the structure, disgorging troops. Zerberyn could hear them hammering up to the walls.

‘Fists Exemplar,’ cried Zerberyn, aiming for the door behind the rough barricade. ‘The First Wall.’

A rapid beating like that from a crooked fan rotor droned overhead and the circle of Fists Exemplar was suddenly bathed in red light. Zerberyn looked up and squinted into the floodlight shafting in through the skylight. He scowled into the glare, shifting his aim upwards even as the shadows it had disgorged dropped towards the glass.

The orks were coming.

Twenty

Prax – Princus Praxa

The skylight shattered.

Zerberyn looked up, slowly, torturously, time stretching elastically into glittering stillness as his superhuman perceptions processed the sudden sensory overload. A million bladed reflections of himself looked out in all directions. Floodlights glared white, beaten into slices by the rotating wings of a hovering aircraft. He could hear the thump of its engines, suspended in time as its downwash held it in the air. Shards of glass the thickness of his hand tumbled. He saw it all. The ceiling had not been shattered evenly. Twelve discrete points of impact penetrated it, huge black-armoured bodies punching through the skylight and trailing glass like bullets fired into water. He began to shift his aim upwards, his brain gunning towards full speed.

‘–clear!’ cried a vox-fragment as glass cascaded over the manufactory floor.

Tosque and Antille pulled into the cover of an overhead crawlway. Galen hit the ground. Still tracking his aim skywards, Zerberyn dropped to his haunches and covered his head with his arms. Glass broke against his battleplate like a thousand blades. The weight of it pushed him down. His ears filled with a crystalline rush, and he could see nothing but fragmented light and edges. He glimpsed Brother Karva. The veteran was bent backwards and backing up, squaring his chest to the onslaught to shield the volatile promethium tanks on his shoulders. Zerberyn could do nothing but yell an unheard warning into his vox-bead as a shard of reinforced glass the size of a Rhino’s troop hatch came blade-down through the faceplate of the Space Marine’s helm and staked him to the ground.

Zerberyn rolled, glass caltrops disintegrating, just as a pair of armoured boots crunched down where he had been.

It was an ork, three metres tall and almost as broad, clad in moulded black armour of some dense, energy-deflecting ceramic. Its shovel face and clawed hands were painted in black stripes. The metal parts of its multi-barrelled custom shooter had been rubbed in soot. Even its tusks were darkened. It punched the bright red release buckle of the line harness it was wearing, cables whipping up towards the broken ceiling, then levelled its weapon in one brute fist.

Zerberyn did likewise. Too slow.

The ork’s upper body vanished in a splatter of green vapour. An Iron Warriors Terminator pumped a torrent of combi-bolter abuse through its remains, turning ponderously as solid rounds spanked off his baroque battleplate.

‘Brother-captain. The door.’

With a thunderous crash of spilling drums, the metal door from the alley shoved back the barricade and orks in spiked black-and-white armour pushed through. The lead ork roared, slugger spitting out lead even as it kicked aside a barrel. Zerberyn put a bolt-round between its eyes. Antille and Galen accounted for a further one each. Tosque hosed the entryway with fire, but the orks charged into it, unloading their bulk magazines as they came.

What he would not sacrifice for Karva’s heavy flamer right now.

Apothecary Reoch stood by the veteran’s remains, his narthecium’s sampler deep into his brother’s gorget softseals and the progenoid sacs in his throat. Off-hand, he blasted one of the ork drop-troops off its feet with a bolt-round in the gut. It would take a long time for a wound like that to kill an ork. Zerberyn suspected that the Apothecary knew that.

‘Exemplars, to your duty!’ Zerberyn roared, bolt-pistol executing one bloody headshot at a time. ‘We are the wall that stands forever!’

A blast of rubble buried whatever reply he might have received.

An articulated wrecking arm smashed through the street-side wall, the ork dreadnought Zerberyn had seen outside of the terminus station stamping itself a bigger hole. It resembled a uranium waste drum painted with yellow-and-black chevrons. Its other arm was fitted with a screaming buzzsaw, burning promethium dribbling from a dangerously crowded platform of grenade launchers and flamer weaponry. A bestial cry boomed from its speakers as it swung out its wrecker arm to knock in what was left of the wall.

In a growl of engines, a refurbished Salamander command tank climbed the rubbled wall and slammed onto its glacis suspension on the manufactory floor. Glass splinters chinked across the floor or simply exploded under its mass. It growled menacingly, heaving with excess engine power, hull-mounted heavy bolter grinding about to maximise its threat angles. Its original dust-bowl camouflage had been patchily done over in red, a pair of crossed axes painted onto the side. A troop compartment that should have housed a full forward command squad of Praxian militia was filled by a single enormous ork. Its armour was blood red, massive plates swollen around a gnarled head wired in to some kind of vox-apparatus.

Zerberyn ejected his clip and slammed in a fresh one containing armour-piercing vengeance rounds.

Kill the Bloody Axes first, Bryce had said.

With an alien roar, the big ork boss took the firing toggle of the Salamander’s pintle-mounted storm bolter and blazed at the Terminators as the vehicle beneath it filled the air with fumes. The cry was answered by something more palatable, but just barely.

They were human mouths.

Soldiers in what looked like local militia fatigues, with crossed axes daubed over their flak vests and unit identifiers branded into their shaven heads, charged over the broken wall after their tank. Las-fire lashed the rumbling production line and by sheer volume forced the Fists Exemplar into cover. A las-bolt scorched Galen’s faceplate and sent him stumbling behind a conveyer.

Tosque moved protectively in front of his brother, took aim at the Salamander and, with a furious blast of white heat, unleashed the single-shot plasma charge of his combi-weapon. The crackling discharge struck under the light tank’s armour skirt and shredded its tracks. Links flapping, it slewed off to one side and crashed into a giant steel hopper that fed one part of the conveyer network. The mistreated hopper split up the side and spewed thousands of litres of partially-cleaned bone fragments and flesh scraps over the revving tank.

Reoch growled some choice words of approval. Zerberyn did not register them. In his horror – no, in the white roar of his fury – he had not taken a shot since the arrival of the human troops.

More were running in behind the wreck. Battalion strength. Maybe more. They had no hair, no teeth and their bodies marked with brands and maltreatment. This was humanity’s fate. This was why the orks waited for Terra’s surrender rather than simply levelling the world as they had Ardamantua, Eidolica, and a thousand others. They did not want another conquest.

They wanted a client race.

A trillion times a trillion, the citizens of the Imperium were numberless beyond count. As individuals they were negligible, to a certain mindset disposable even, but as a whole they were humanity. They were the gene-seed of Holy Terra, where He dwelt in His incorruptible glory.

Unbidden, the image filled his mind of the xenos breaking Eternity Gate, sweeping through the Sanctum Imperialis, and hauling the Emperor from His Golden Throne.

No. No!

He would virus-bomb every last world more than a week from Terra if that was what it took to end this. He would do it personally.

With a wordless snarl he advanced into the las-storm, flipping his pistol’s shot selector to rapid fire and mowing armour-piercing rounds through the lightly-armoured troopers. Troopers? Traitors. The outcome was bloody overkill and better than they deserved.

Around him, meanwhile, the orks’ pincers closed.

Tosque and Antille stood back-to-back, rocks of rugged grey where reds, yellows and black-and-whites crashed over, and with Exemplar stubbornness refused to give ground. Inhuman voices bellowed. Servos screamed. Bolters were abandoned now in favour of knives and fists.

Reoch pulled Galen to his feet. The latter shook a jam from his bolter, then emptied what was left of the clip into the onrushing horde. The first to reach him went down with a boltgun smashed through the side of its skull, but after that there were too many mobbing in to be sure what was being done to whom.

The battle-brother’s rune in Zerberyn’s visor display went dark.

Only the Iron Warriors were still firing. The Terminators were mobile firebases, arms outstretched, wrist-mounted combi-bolters kicking out a remorseless torrent of firepower whether there was an ork in front of their tusked helms or not.

A jet of flame flooded over the Terminators, burning promethium lighting the Traitor Space Marines up like devils as the orks’ dreadnought stomped towards them.

Beating a gold-armoured ork into the ground with a downwards smash of his hammer, Zerberyn shoulder-crushed through the mob of traitor auxiliaries to peel off three shots into the advancing dreadnought. Mass-reactive rounds splashed across a barrier of rigid blue force an inch above the walker’s yellow-and-black plate.

His heart sank.

A void shield. How could something that size generate the power to sustain a void shield?

He was dully aware of the low-calibre hits stinging his armour. System alerts rather than true pain. His adrenal glands were working too hard to let him feel that. His multi-lung had taken over long ago, pumping furiously to purge the acidity from his muscles.

The orks had taken his world from him: he would rather be damned than let the orks take this one too. But, using his battle instinct and survival, he allowed himself to consider that there might be no victory. The orks were too overwhelming, too powerful, their advantages too great even for the Adeptus Astartes to overcome.

A massive fireball rippled over the ruptured skylight.

A burst of fire from a quad-linked heavy bolter cut in from a high angle with a sound like a loose chain being mechanically spun around a crank. The ork’s ’copter peeled open and finally exploded, showering the packed melee with metallic debris. The dull grey wedge of a Thunderhawk gunship banked right and over to skirt the fireball, then descended hard towards the skylight with autocannon fire from some neighbouring building lighting its aerofoil.

Zerberyn’s vox-bead crackled.

‘Leonis, First Captain, piloting Penitence. We picked up something you left behind.’

Gold icons blinked into being on Zerberyn’s visor display as Sergeant Columba led the charge down the Thunderhawk’s troop hatch. The veteran jumped, landing two-footed in a howl of suspensors with his chainsword buried deep into an ork’s shoulder and spraying the contents of its chest over his plastron. He pivoted on the spot. A kick delivered on the underside of his boot sent a fighter in black-and-white jags cannoning through two more. Donbuss, Borhune, Nalis and Tarsus thumped down around him, a hail of hellgun fire clearing space for them to work.

Militarum Tempestus Scions pounded along the upper level catwalks, coming down roof access ladders, pumping round after round of hot-shot las into the charging greenskins. Firing on the move with a hellpistol in each hand, Major Bryce took his own advice, cutting through the Bloody Axes and their human line troops. The expression twisting his burned face was wrathful. Zerberyn understood the man all too well.

Brother Donbuss’ heavy bolter spoke with fury. Not having witnessed what Zerberyn had a moment before, the veteran-brother identified the most prominent threat and opened up on the dreadnought. The air became thunder. Shell casings showered the ground with gold. The ork walker’s void shield rippled and flared, massive force and equally massive counterforce waging full-spectrum warfare across its cylindrical frame. The dreadnought abandoned the Terminators and came about.

It extended its saw arm and, with a sound like a long tube swallowing a grenade, launched a pair of sizzling stick bombs towards Columba’s combat squad.

Donbuss took both blasts full in the chest. His plastron held together but crumpled badly, sealant gel and hypercoagulants mingling in the ruptures. The impact savaged his faceplate, tearing his helm half away. The force lifted him up and slammed him into a machinery stack. The rest of the combat squad were peeled apart and thrown to the ground like toys.

Inarticulate savagery raging from its speakers, the dreadnought stamped about and smashed a Terminator across the manufactorum with a swing of its wrecker arm. The Iron Warrior crashed through the opposite wall. Loosened masonry tumbled in, a pyre licked with promethium flames.

Zerberyn cursed. An ork covered in snake tattoos went down with a headshot. Throat punch. Headbutt. Hammer shock blasted a hole. He strode into it, his armour coated with copper glaze, following his own tracer of automatic fire.

A thick-shouldered ork in Bloody Axe colours shrugged off the bolter fire and ignited the jump pack strapped to its back. It rocketed into the air on an arc of flaming liquid propellant, and landed on a catwalk. The platform juddered under the sudden impact. Tempestus Scions fell away, firing point-blank. The ork laughed it off and set to with its powered axe.

The Scions’ wargear was impressive, but it was not power armour. They were good, but they were not Space Marines.

A second ork, and then a third, fired up jump packs to get in amongst the Scions. Bryce’s increasingly hoarse orders got lost amongst the screams, the crack of bone and power discharge. Several of the armoured troopers broke and risked the four-metre drop to take their chances on the ground.

It was no better.

The surviving Terminators had hurt the dreadnought. It flailed, tangling its arms in chain pulls and surrounding itself with a swinging flock of lift cradles and pallets, crying molten iron. A Terminator stove in the dreadnought’s mid-section with a blow from his power fist. Even as he tore the crackling gauntlet free, an ork grappled him from behind. The brute dug its claws into the gorget softseals and hauled back on the Iron Warrior’s helmet. Fire sprayed from his gauntlet-mount as he was drawn down and under.

Brother Galen traversed back out of the melee, slumped, riding the juddering conveyer deeper into the manufactory like a corpse into the crematoria. Reoch was crouched over him. His binoptics were a fell green in the fyceline haze, his bolt pistol an unwavering source of white light.

From above, the roar of the Thunderhawk’s turbofans momentarily muted the din. Glass fragments and shell casings blew out in ripples, tied to the cycling of its engine fans as it pulled away. A squadron of single-prop biplanes buzzed after it with flak spitting from their painted muzzles.

Zerberyn raised his hammer high, mentally dialling his gorget vox-booster to maximum. Iron Warriors and Fists Exemplar together. They had held long enough.

‘Fall back. Everyone. Back to the gunship.’

A feral roar threatened to drown him out, and he looked back to the breached wall. An ork of truly monstrous scale, dark skin powdered with gold, crashed through the breached wall recently vacated by the dreadnought. Its muscular frame was bolted into an electric-shock yellow fighting suit half again Zerberyn’s size. Pistons wheezed. Valves screeched. Black smoke pumped the air. At first glance it was a typical ork build. Closer inspection, however, revealed a powered suit of surpassing artisanship. The plates were glossy and smooth, lines straight, edges perfect. Alternating power fields surrounded the ork with a sharp ozone burn. It flexed the arm-width digits of a three-clawed power fist, auto-loaders churning ammo belts through a massive ten-barrelled combi-weapon.

‘You die. Now.’

Its bastardised Low Gothic was kicked out of its chest, like air from a dead man’s lungs, and Zerberyn was too stunned to respond.

It had spoken. Orks did not speak.

It started to run, beating aside a steel drum that then punched straight through a support stanchion and brought an empty section of crawlway crashing down. Zerberyn ran to meet it. The ground between them trembled. He drew back his thunder hammer and roared his hatred.

They clashed like bolt-rounds hitting each other in mid-air.

Zerberyn’s thunder hammer came down on the ork’s thigh brace. The local power field blew out and the metal squealed under the stress. The ork steam-rollered through him, snatching him up in its power claw and driving him through the light metal casing of a machine stack.

With a roar like laughter, the ork dragged him from the wreckage and swung him about as though he were promethium jelly on the monster’s claws.

Even for his transhuman physiology, the g-force was tremendous. Black spots appeared in front of his eyes. He unloaded his pistol into the ork’s upper torso power field until the hammer struck an empty chamber. He had no more. Screaming, he hawked up acid from his Betcher’s gland and spat it into the ork’s face. Green smoke sizzled from its jaw, but it did not feel it.

The ork tightened its grip. The power fist’s disruption field burned off his armour layer by layer. Ceramite creaked, crunched, split. He may have screamed again. He was no longer sure. He lashed out with his thunder hammer.

He did not know what it hit, but it hit something.

The ork bellowed in pain, and the next he knew he was flying with all the power of that immense battlesuit behind him.

He passed through something metal-lined and hollow, hit the ground in a mangle of limbs and bounced once, twice, then skidded. His battleplate tore up sparks from the ferrocrete surface. He slammed up against a wall and flopped down. He saw Reoch, Antille and a number of helmed Scions, but the anonymously-armoured humans swam together.

Then the ten-centimetre-thick plasteel doors that he had just slid though clamped onto his trailing greave.

‘Reverse it,’ growled Reoch.

‘I’m trying!’ came Antille’s voice.

Zerberyn grunted, willing his mind to stop spinning, and pulled on his trapped leg. It did not move. Dirty smoke was beginning to pour out of the door’s pneumatics.

From the other side of the door, there was a bellow of fury. The ground began to shake as something massive took a run-up. Reoch inserted the fierce muzzle of his Umbra-pattern pistol into the gap between the doors. The Apothecary fired on full-auto, bolt pistol beating against the metal frames like a hammer drill.

The doors continued to try and close.

Zerberyn gave one last roar, then spasmed back to the floor in agony as the heavy plasteel cracked bonded ceramite and armaplas like steel pliers on a nut, and snapped his strengthened tibia roughly in two. His genhanced neurochemistry prevented the pain from disabling him, but it was still as close to intolerable as he had ever known. His conscious brain protectively shut itself down for a moment, his twin hearts racing to pump an endorphin rush of pain-suppressing hormones into his bloodstream.

The doors stalled about half a leg-width apart.

Zerberyn looked up, saw the sheathed chainsword hanging from Major Bryce’s hip.

The Scion read his look, unhitching the blade and thumbing the power. Adamantium teeth revved hungrily.

‘Forgive me, lord.’

‘Hurry up and do it.’

Bryce hacked down. Zerberyn roared as the motored blade ate through armour and flesh and from there into bone. Arterial spray turned his battleplate red. Chipped bone rattled everyone’s armour, flying through a pall of bitter ceramite dust. Vibrations tore through his bones. Tears welled up in the Scion’s eyes. The dust.

The human lacked the strength to finish it.

With a growl, Reoch pulled the man aside and stamped down on the back of the chainsword, driving it through Zerberyn’s leg until it stalled in the ferrocrete.

Zerberyn panted in release. His eyes blurred. His skin tingled with the effects of pain-suppressants. The Apothecary kicked Zerberyn’s severed foot out from between the jammed doors. They slammed together, just as something huge bent them out of shape from the other side.

Reoch dropped down beside him and bent immediately to work, using his narthecium’s plasma cutter to cauterise the amputation. Zerberyn grunted. His physiology was adjusted to the higher pain threshold now, and he barely felt it.

Brother Antille and the handful of Scions crowded around them. That was all.

‘Sergeant Columba, and the others?’

‘Through the back wall, following Penitence’s locater beacon,’ said Antille. ‘We were cut off from them, and so intended to follow…’ he glanced sideways at Bryce, ‘our cousins.’

Zerberyn nodded. He would have come to the same conclusion in his brother’s place. It was reassuring.

The door shuddered as something hit it. The discharging power of a disruption field caused it to fold in.

Zerberyn reached for his bolt pistol before remembering that it was empty.

‘Faster, Apothecary.’

Twenty-one

Prax – Princus Praxa

Zerberyn limped down the unlit manufactorum hallway, leaning into Brother Antille’s shoulder to support himself on his remaining foot. The darkness was near absolute, leavened only by the green beams of the Scions’ visual augmenters. It was enough to make out the old blood and las-burns on the walls. The Praxians here had fought. Bestial cries and gunfire echoed through the abandoned rooms. He tried to inject some haste into his stride, but he had yet to adapt to his altered anatomy. A human would have been killed by blood loss or systemic shock by now, but his superiority over human norms was scant consolation.

After several minutes, the rattle of orkish fire growing nearer, the corridor took a ninety-degree turn.

In place of the wall that should have been in front of them, however, was a brick pile. There had been a false wall here. Behind it, illuminated now by the six Scions’ targeting beams, was a blast door that clearly had no due place in an agri-processing facility, large enough to admit a Space Marine in Tactical Dreadnought Armour. It looked like solid adamantium.

And the Iron Warriors had left it locked behind them. Reoch stepped forward and laid his gauntlets on the door. He turned back. His augmeticised face was a glowing skull in the gloom. He shook his head.

Unbreakable.

‘What now?’ Antille murmured.

Swallowing a curse that he could not afford to let the Scions hear, Zerberyn looked away from the door, manoeuvering himself towards the rune-numeric console mounted just inside the frame. Set into the terminal alongside the keypad was a palm scanner.

Kalkator had said that the base’s concealed entrances were secured by a genetic lock. There was genetic variation enough between the IV and their hated cousins of the VII to differentiate them with a fine enough scan, but Kalkator had also said that this fortress was built early in the Great Crusade. And that had been a different time, a time when his gene-ancestors and Kalkator might without rancour have called one another friend and brother.

For long seconds he hesitated, then removed his gauntlet and pushed his palm to the reader.

A red bar backlit the panel and scanned upwards. The light disappeared. Zerberyn tensed. There was a rumble of magnetic seals decoupling and the metal-on-metal scrape of disengaging locks. Zerberyn let out a breath as the blast door slid open.

‘From honour cometh iron. Have admittance, son of my brother.’

The voice was a scratchy, ancient recording, but retained some of the power it must once have held in flesh. It was strength, indomitable iron, something that time and worse than time could never fully corrupt. Zerberyn shivered, uncertain whether he had just been given a rare gift or the darkest curse.

‘Was that…?’

‘To what circle of damnation has he led us?’ said Reoch, his voice a whispered, almost reverential growl.

Visual augmenter beams painted the wall behind the blast door with green bands. It was a circular chamber about the same size as the interior of a drop pod, large enough to accommodate twelve Space Marines in full battleplate. Controls blinked in a variety of different colours. Diodes indicated up and down. Only the ‘down’ was illuminated, a soft white. It was an elevator.

With a nod to Antille, Zerberyn led them in.

Bryce and the Scions flowed in behind him, with Reoch entering last. The Apothecary examined the selector panel. The different levels of the complex were each indicated by an ivory button marked, from top to bottom, with an incrementally decreasing numeral. Reoch shrugged and punched the lowest button.

Zerberyn would have made the same choice.

Exemplars in action and in intent. Exemplars in forethought.

The blast doors whined shut and the elevator plunged into a descent. It was practically freefall. An atmospheric insertion by drop pod could not have been quicker, and the elevator’s depth indicators flashed down in a matter of seconds. Deceleration was equally drastic. The Fists Exemplar had been engineered for high-velocity strikes, and even Zerberyn, with pain pulsing from his severed nerves, remained standing. The Scions, however, were thrown to the ground and scattered to the four walls.

Through force of willpower, Bryce managed to crawl out as the doors hissed open, threw up on the panel-steel floor and rolled onto his back. Reoch plucked him from the ground by his webbing. Zerberyn and Antille shuffled out together.

They were on a wall-bracketed companionway at the equatorial line of a vast, spherical chamber. Vermillion alert lights strobed cyclically over the polished steel walls like the daylight terminator of a planet spinning out of control around a harsh red star. He looked down over the handrail. Far, far below, contained within concentric rings of adamantium and brass, was a tank of water so cold that Zerberyn felt moisture crystallising on his face even from where he was stood. Gas bubbled through it, but the water moved strangely, sluggishly.

‘Heavy water,’ murmured Antille, the acoustics lending themselves to the soft-spoken. ‘Used in atomic weaponry.’

Turning up, Zerberyn saw pistons as wide as the legs of a Reaver Titan slide in and out of solid metal jackets with a rhythmic, grinding thunder. Cabling hung from everything like cargo webbing.

‘Three minutes to mark,’ came a dolorous warning from all around.

With Antille a willing crutch, Zerberyn hurried around the companionway to the nearest of several catwalks that projected out over the water tank. He limped down it. Reoch and Bryce followed a short distance behind.

Suspended at the chamber’s core was an instrumentation platform of some kind. Banks of cogitators and command compilers filled it, tangling into the descending mess of cables with more wires of their own. There was Kalkator, unarmed, helm mag-locked to his thigh, his face dully illuminated with code projected by the surrounding screens. A pair of Iron Warriors Chosen were there with him, similarly unarmed and occupied with operating their systems. The rest must have been engaged elsewhere in the facility.

‘What is this?’ said Zerberyn, a gauntlet finger pointed accusingly at Kalkator.

‘You know what it is, little cousin.’

‘Two minutes to mark.’

‘Exterminatus…’

Kalkator smiled thinly. ‘Nothing so incomplete. Perturabo always believed in complete solutions and he raised his sons in his image.’ He indicated the interface in front of him. Lines of unintelligible green code filled the display, surrounded by a mass of coloured wires, switches and dials. There were prominent features, however, that Zerberyn instinctively recognised as a firing sequence. ‘Nothing will remain of Prax but an asteroid field.’

‘You talk of the absolute destruction of a habitable planet.’ Bryce’s eyes were wide and unfocused, but the wrath in his voice was tight as a laser. ‘There is no graver affront against the Emperor.’

Ignoring the Militarum Tempestus man, Kalkator looked Zerberyn’s beaten battleplate up and down. The warsmith noted the way he leaned against his brother, the raspiness of his breaths, and his gaze lingered on the stump of Zerberyn’s leg.

‘Neither of us wishes for a galaxy in which the greenskins dominate, mankind just one more diminished race cruising the Halo Stars or trapped within their fortresses in the Eye of Terror. Conventional warfare will not defeat this enemy. The orks are too organised, too powerful and too fast. This world could supply billions. Even if we could take it we are too far from reinforcements to hold it. The orks would have an attack moon in orbit in days. You know this. If we are to hurt the orks then we have to hit them hard.’

‘Chapter Master Thane could request an Exterminatus,’ said Zerberyn, shaking his head. ‘But even he would not authorise the ultimate sanction on a whim.’

‘Authority?’ said Kalkator, chalky features twisting in disgust, disappointment. ‘I was led to understand that your Chapter was the first of the Imperial Fists’ successors, that you carried the blood of visionaries. Your brother Chapters must despise you for your wisdom.’

‘Such is our burden.’

‘Thane is dead,’ Kalkator pressed. ‘Magneric is dead. Your founder, Dantalion, is dead. It is the way of the galaxy to renew itself to ever lesser degree and here, now, it is just you and me, cousin.’ His hand hovered over the reader. His gauntlets were locked to his hip beside his horned helm. ‘I am warsmith of a Grand Company, a rank equivalent to that of Chapter Master. I hold seniority and the larger force. By the principles of your Codex Astartes, the decision is mine to make.’

Something inside Zerberyn snapped. He shoved Kalkator back from the command console.

‘You quote the Codex to me? You are a traitor, Kalkator. Legion Excommunicatis. By Guilliman’s laws I should kill you now, and then deliver myself to the Inquisition in chains for allowing this travesty to have continued for so long.’

‘But you won’t. Not yet. Your Imperium needs us. It needs this.’

Zerberyn clenched his fists and forcibly lowered them.

Kalkator was right.

The same infernal logic that had led to the creation of the Last Wall led now to this. It felt inevitable, and no more wrong now than it had been amidst all the good intentions and necessary evils at Phall.

A pained laugh, the bubbling hurt-filled revelation of a man who had just witnessed the dark side of the universe and returned not quite sane, pulled their focus from one another.

Unnoticed, Bryce had slipped away from Reoch and had a hellpistol in each hand. One aimed between Kalkator’s eyes. The other at the dented ceramite providing incomplete coverage of Zerberyn’s primary heart. There was no indication that he faced down lords of mankind whom he had fought alongside bare moments before. He knew only conviction, the galaxy partitioned clearly into that which fell within the Emperor’s light, and all else.

Zerberyn wondered if any Exemplar had ever thought that way.

‘Move away from the controls, my lords,’ said Bryce. The honorific emerged like a term of disparagement, a placeholder that he had yet to consider an alternative to.

Zerberyn noted the other Tempestus Scions staggering out along the companionway above, groggy but disciplined. And with no uncertainty whatsoever in their aim. One of the Chosen reached for his mag-locked combi-bolter, but a wave of Bryce’s hellpistol across his warsmith’s eyes persuaded him to move his hand away.

‘Don’t fire,’ Zerberyn ordered the Iron Warriors, raising his empty hand, and turning back to Bryce.

‘Traitor, is it? Your Imperium, is it?’ Bryce laughed again, humourless, and tightened his grip. ‘What is an Imperial world filled with the Emperor’s subjects to such as you?’

‘I am no traitor,’ Zerberyn snapped.

Bryce’s burnt mouth became a disbelieving sneer.

‘One minute to mark.’

‘I am an Exemplar,’ Zerberyn shouted. ‘My word is that of Rogal Dorn himself. This is the only way.’

Zerberyn saw the man respond to his words, watched the expression on his face change as he tried to process the complex variables. He saw the expression set. He saw the tension that gripped Bryce’s trigger finger, and reacted on instinct.

Zerberyn’s gauntlet snapped out faster even than he could think, enclosing Bryce’s augmeticised right hand. A slight squeeze crushed the Scion’s bionic up to the wrist. Bryce closed his eyes and screamed, dragging his second shot wide of Kalkator’s shoulder.

‘Please, major–’

The Scion’s skull detonated before his eyes, plastering his face in sticky red gore. Half a second later, the arm went slack and slumped in Zerberyn’s grip, but he did not think to let go. Stunned, he stared past the headless corpse. Kalkator was there, his bolter up and hot.

‘No!’

Hot-shot lashed the command hub with the savagery of truth. Wires were shredded and housings scorched, thousand-year-old cogitator units going up in fountains of sparks. The Chosen stepped past Zerberyn and opened up with a thunderous outpouring of explosive rounds.

‘No!’ Zerberyn yelled again, louder, caged by red spears and noise.

Antille jerked as though electrocuted. A searing lance angled across his back spun him half around and threw him into an interface that exploded underneath him. The veteran flew back on a nimbus of charge, rolled over the outer rail and, a minute later, splashed into the super-cooled heavy water.

‘Mark.’

The announcement was a death knell.

‘No.’

Kalkator pushed his unarmoured palm to the interface and spoke a command in a language that Zerberyn had never heard. The timbre of the deeply submerged atom engine plunged, felt through longwave vibrations in the gut rather than heard. The grinding sound of deep, mechanical reconfigurations reverberated from the walls of the spherical chamber, amplified by its acoustics so that, standing there at its core, it sounded like being inside a mechanical chronometer as it geared up to strike a long-awaited millennial bell.

The gunfire ceased. Even the Iron Warriors held their bolters close and looked around with unease.

The last surviving Scion took advantage of the lull to look down over the companionway handrail to the bubbling water below. Zerberyn felt he recognised him– the vox-officer on Bryce’s command squad during the agri-plex raid.

Horror dawning, the Scion dropped back, raising a hand to the vox-boost selector behind the cheek-guard of his omnishield. ‘Sergeant Jaskólska, Menthis. Evacuate now. Now! Raise the Commissariat and tell them that the Fists Exemplar have–’

A tight burst of bolter fire drowned out the rest.

Kalkator set his bolter down on the terminal as Trooper Menthis’ remains splashed across the curved wall. ‘I have your gunship on auspex,’ he said, as though the past minute had not just consigned billions to execution. ‘On an escape vector.’ He examined the read-out of a scorched sensorium console. ‘And Guilliman inbound.’

‘Has Penitence made contact with the fleet?’

‘I do not know. How much do you think the humans heard?’

‘I do not know.’

‘If word gets out–’

‘I know.’

Avoiding Kalkator’s eye, Zerberyn thumbed the activation switch of what, though arcane in design, looked to be a vox-unit. A garbled overlay of orkoid cant and system noise scratched through. It sounded like voices. Columba. Tarsus. Leonis. Jaskólska. Ghosts, drawn to him through electromagnetic snow.

His brothers would be made to understand that the destruction of Prax had been necessary for the greater good, if they heard it first from him. They shared a singular vision, a rare gift for reason. But Issachar? Quesadra? Bohemond?

The Inquisition?

His hand moved of its own volition, knowing even before he did it what needed to be done. Punching Last Wall protocols into the cryptex key, he hit transmit. Long seconds of alien traffic and accusing voices filled the line.

‘What are you doing?’ said Reoch. The metallic grille that covered his lower jaw made him look like a muzzled beast.

‘What any brother in possession of the same set of facts would have to.’

‘Are you sure, brother?’

Zerberyn did not answer.

He was a descendent of Oriax Dantalion: the answer was obvious.

The comm link hissed open, butchered by static, but the direct voice on the other end was recognisably that of an Eidolican serf.

‘Guilliman receiving. Last Wall codes recognised. Is that truly you, lord captain?’

‘It is, and–’ He silenced the pickup and turned to Kalkator. ‘How long do we have?’

‘Five to six hours before it is done. Thirty minutes before we no longer want to be standing on this planet.’

Zerberyn nodded and reactivated the unit. ‘And requiring immediate extraction. Repeat, immediate.’

‘Understood, lord captain. Thunderhawks are undergoing final flight checks now. I will transmit the pilots your coordinates.’

Eyes locked to Kalkator’s unflinching gaze, Zerberyn spoke again into the receiver.

‘Penitence has been commandeered by local traitor militia. Do not establish contact, and under no circumstances are they to be permitted to board.’

Kalkator nodded. He knew what it meant to betray a brother.

Zerberyn closed his eyes.

‘Shoot them down.’

Twenty-two

Prax – orbital

Zerberyn stood at the viewport of Palimodes’ starboard observation gallery, a hand’s width from his own dead-eyed reflection, and forced himself to watch the planet die.

Grey-brown continents and green seas were now wreathed in smoky black. The stratosphere had already burnt off as surface temperatures passed a hundred Celsius and carried on climbing. The thin band of residual atmosphere stuck to the riven crust like tar. A hex-like grid of magmic fractures smouldered through the pall, fault lines, the crust splitting, less a world now than rocky islands floating apart from one another on a molten sea. Bouts of volcanism racked the major continents on which mountains still stood, each an event of epochal destruction rendered into a non-event by the periodic eruptions that ejected billions of tonnes of mantle into orbital space. A glowing cloud shrouded the planet, metals, minerals, voidship fragments, churned by its hundred-thousand-kilometres-per-hour flight and its own increasingly erratic spin. Its nickel-iron core was destabilising. Magnetic distortions caused rocky accretions to blast apart at random, like targets on a practice range, and sent the massive ork container ships caught up in the destruction spiralling between orbits with plasma tails streaming in their wake.

Kalkator had spared no detail of the likely progression. Had he not been as forthcoming, then Zerberyn would have insisted.

The planet-cracker had been fired directly into the planet’s mantle through a kilometres-long shaft sunk a thouand years before for this sole purpose. From there the warhead had slowed, drilling through a further thousand kilometres of semi-molten rock to its long-programmed detonation site at the interstitial layer between core and mantle.

Within that narrow variance of pressure and density, it had detonated.

Zerberyn had never devoted much prior thought to the complete destruction of a planetary body, but he could see that it had been enacted with a ruthlessness and a precision of detail the equal of anything that he could have brought to the task. A detonation within the core itself would only have wrecked the world’s magnetosphere, rendering it uninhabitable for decades, while at a shallower site in the mantle the resultant tectonic recoil would have been a slap on the wrist compared to what was taking place now.

The boundary layer. It had to be there. And it had taken exactly the thirty minutes that Kalkator had said it would.

The core’s greater density reflected the seismic shockwaves back upwards like sunlight hitting an ocean’s waves. The effect on the surface was cataclysmic. Tremors had become quakes and quakes upheavals that tore the world asunder, crust and core between them amplifying the seismic waves and rebounding them until the entire globe rang like a bell and the crust was a shattered ruin.

That was what Zerberyn was watching now: the penultimate phase.

He wondered how many souls had been on Prax. Ten billion? A hundred billion? It was the one variable amongst the specifics of time and forces, and it ate at him.

‘Back from me, abomination,’ he snarled, kicking back with the stump of his leg.

The servile construct screwed back on its single caterpillar track, trailing the measuring tape with which it had been sizing his foot for prosthesis. Its head was a small human skull with a parchment covering of mummified flesh, suspended above a whining motive unit by an articulated metal spine. Its ears were large, encouraged to grow along a cartilage matrix the better to receive spoken commands. Its eyelids had been removed, its mouth stapled shut. It stared at him blankly until Zerberyn, unnerved by the emptiness he saw reflected in its eyes, turned back to the viewport. With half his weight on an iron crutch, he allowed the servitor to return to fuss about his foot as if nothing had transpired.

‘My Apothecaries could furnish you with an augmetic far superior to anything your own might have access to,’ said Kalkator.

Zerberyn chose not to reply. Bad enough to have been picked up by the traitors’ gunships in the first place.

‘I will think about it. But not now.’

‘Does watching make it better, or worse?’

‘It is an act of penance.’

He could feel the warsmith’s sneer. It had a vibration all of its own that carried it across the rigorously atmosphere-controlled viewing gallery.

‘One day, Kalkator. One day you and I will be called to account for every life we destroyed here today.’

‘Not destroyed, little cousin. Sacrificed.’

In absolute silence, a flash of amber light rose up from the planet’s core and engulfed it. It happened in a split-second. Zerberyn grunted, eyes narrowing against the sudden, short-lived glare. By the time his vision recovered Prax was gone, a fading red stain on his retinas.

Sacrificed for the Imperium.

He hoped that the reward would be worth it.

Twenty-three

Terra – the Imperial Palace

The vid-recording was grainy and poor, the field dark, the capture soundless. The borders fluctuated, spawning flurries of black snow that intermittently cloaked the figures in central view.

There were two of them. The first was clothed in heavy vestments, the skin grafts and bionic attachments of his face swollen out of proportion and stretched around a curve to fill the round of the visual feed recorder’s lens. The second was standing back, visible in profile as she glanced intermittently over her shoulder. She was a woman, slighter than the first figure, robed in Martian red and bodiced with bronze plates, her face masked by filtration tubes and optic sensors. One arm was appended with a bionic brace that twitched with digital manipulators and beam cutters and in the other she handled an arc pistol with uncommon adroitness. She looked tense. Her rebreather apparatus made it impossible to make out her lips, but from the movement of her exposed cheekbones and neck, it was clear that she was saying something. The distended curvature of her companion’s mouth opened and closed in response.

Green bars tracked the movement of his lips. Runes flickered, superimposed over the bottom of the screen, as linguistic algorithms struggled and failed to provide a translation.

The front figure turned slightly, a digital black ghost image hanging in the air for several seconds after. He said something more. The woman replied.

‘–recording yet?’

Audio as bitty as the image scrunched up from nothing to fill the feed. The laboured in-out rasp of the man’s breathing, too close to the pickups, the rhythmic sigh of industrial machine noise.

‘I… I think so,’ he said, tapping at a console.

The woman drew him back. Their afterimages mingled for a moment, before the uncooperative recording device cleared the bandwidth confusion and showed just two figures once again.

‘Grand Master. This is Clementina Yendl of Red Haven, transmitting from Pavonis Hive. With me is Magos Biologis Eldon Urquidex.’ She gestured behind her. The figure nodded at his name. ‘I regret that this will be my last report. The Mechanicus know where the orks are coming from. They have had a good idea since Ardamantua at the least and probably before that.’ She glanced over her shoulder, then turned back, speaking more urgently. ‘My attempt to extract the magos and bring this information to you has failed. I can only hope this transmission reaches you before the Mechanicus shut down this section. Urquidex.’

The magos looked up sharply. The fear in his face defied the resolution quality.

‘Tell them what you know.’

He stepped forwards, then checked back as a phosphor flash lit up the background image and a loud bang crumpled through the audio.

‘They’re h–’

Koorland studied the frozen image in the data-slate: the magos looking over his shoulder in horror, the woman blurred in the act of aiming her pistol. He set the slate face down onto the large, figured wooden table, pushing aside the stack that had accumulated there over the course of the morning. Without the slightest change to his grim expression, he glared into the imagined distance.

The Cerebrium overlooked the Palace roofscape from the heights of Widdershins Tower, atmospheric and orbital craft crisscrossing the fortress skyline. Tech-crews hung in cradles from deltaform lifters in the mottled khaki of the Departmento Munitorum, servicing defensive installations that had not experienced proper maintenance since the last great programme of rebuilding instigated by Roboute Guilliman in the aftermath of the Siege. Pot-bellied troop transports shipped in Astra Militarum regiments from Triton, Ganymede, Venus, and from training bases throughout the system. Shining like a lake under sunlight undiminished by any semblance of an ozone barrier, armour units massed in the thousand-hectare rockcrete square of the Fields of Winged Victory. Lastan Neemagiun Veritus, the Inquisitorial Representative, had told him that the Emperor Himself had watched Horus Lupercal’s first landing boats come down from this very spot.

Koorland certainly felt something from the ancient Albian oak panelling and book-lined shelves. Power. Responsibility. An almost spiritual bond to his genetic heritage. But he had selected the room as his private study in large part for the view, an instinctual desire to take and hold the high ground.

Drakan Vangorich stood patiently, hands curled over the back of one of the twelve chairs tucked under the table, eyes narrowed against the sunlight streaming through the open shutters.

‘How long have you had this recording?’ Koorland asked.

‘Moments. I brought it to you as soon as I received it, lord.’

‘Your expediency is appreciated.’

‘I trusted you to do the right thing with it.’

‘Is there any more?’

‘What I know, you’ve just seen.’

Koorland clenched his jaw. If the recording had divulged the location of the orks then for the sake of unity he would have contented himself with that, and put the Adeptus Mechanicus’ actions down to simple heel-dragging. He would have dealt with them later, content in the knowledge that there might be a later. Now, that deal was off.

‘Is the Fabricator General still in the Palace?’

‘I believe that his personal shuttle departed from Daylight space port with his entourage about,’ Vangorich smiled thinly, ‘moments ago.’

Koorland sat back and scooped up another slate. It was one that he had already read and memorised earlier in the day, the sort of detail to which the human High Lords had likely never devoted themselves. He looked through it, thinking, without needing to read it again.

‘Some good news?’ asked Vangorich.

‘Astropath logs from Oort Base. Alcazar Remembered translated into the system two hours and fifteen minutes ago, immediately relaying a request to Mars for docking codes and emergency repair. A request that one hour and three minutes ago was granted with a berth cleared for them at Demus Manus port in the orbital ring. You have more than this one operative on Mars, I presume?’

Vangorich hesitated a moment.

‘Yes.’

‘Then activate them,’ said Koorland, tossing the data-slate into the pile. The Adeptus Mechanicus would give up the location of the Beast, one way or the other.

Mars – Pavonis Mons

Urquidex pounded his hands against the keypad and screamed into the receiver. The terminal was dead, remotely powered down. He bashed the keypad like an infant who had lost patience with a screen-locked data-slate and cried out in frustration. They had been so close. He spun around at the sound of a roughly human-sized metallic object hitting the floor, and flinched back against the console.

Clementina Yendl struck the attacking skitarii like a flurry of las.

The robes of her disguise made a whip-like crack with every punch and kick, and five augmented warriors were already down. Number six dropped, neck twisted around until it snapped, and she leapt over him, sliding her foot between the legs of the unit alpha as he swung a spitting taser goad. A flick of the knee sent the skitarii alpha crashing down. His weapon skittered across the floor. Yendl was already up, hooking the other leg over his shoulder and punching his arm in half at the elbow.

The alpha gave a vox-synth shriek.

With a glance over her shoulder, she ripped off her rebreather mask and took out a charging skitarius with a discus throw. Long braids of greying hair tumbled free. Blood trickled down her face from the mask’s intramuscular attachment sites. Her eyes burned with a destructive focus.

A bolt from her arc pistol sent a red-robed skitarius shivering to his knees with blue-white tendrils of electricity coursing through his body. A cyborg soldier ran at her with the stock of his rad-carbine raised like a club. She turned it on the angle of her forearm, took it from him, then spun on her knees and gutted the skitarius with a swipe of her manipulator arm. Bile and battery acid jetted from his midriff in an arc as he was spun aside.

Urquidex had never seen anything like the Assassin in his life.

An entire squad of skitarii vanguard, the techno-elite of Mars, and she had dispatched them in the time it had taken him to turn around. He almost dared to believe that they would make it to her ship and off-world after all. Almost. His mind didn’t even have the time to trigger the necessary endorphin release to let him feel it.

A stream of hyper-velocity white phosphor burned up the space where Yendl was standing. Indiscriminate shot melted through the corridor walls, the floor around her and the ceiling above. One incandescent missile punched through the right side of her chest and shattered the console. Metal and plastek erupted into white fire. Urquidex dropped to the ground, screaming, bringing up his digitool to protect his face.

Even to his own ears, his screams were nothing compared to Yendl’s.

The wound in her chest sizzled. Molten fat dribbled. She beat madly at the chemical fire and threw herself against the wall, pink smoke billowing from her mouth until her lungs were gone and there were no more screams. She flopped to the ground, eyes horrifically wide, twitching like a tortured fish.

Several seconds of agony later, Clementina Yendl died.

Through optics smeared with flesh vapour, Urquidex watched the immense cyborgised construct that had killed her rumble into view. A Kataphron Destroyer. It grumbled forward on a pair of huge tracks, the amputated head and torso of an armour-plated battle servitor providing the basic neural guidance it needed to move and kill. Its eyes were dull, mindless, its lips sutured into a rictus grimace of unfelt pleasure. The heavy weaponry grafted to the stumps of its arms pivoted from Yendl’s smouldering corpse to Urquidex.

The magos narrowed his optic apertures and pleaded with the Omnissiah for a swifter end.

‘Not him.’

The Kataphron growled to a halt and from behind it, gliding under a stinging swarm of mechadendrites, came Artisan Trajectorae Van Auken. As always, Urquidex found himself cowed by the adept without the need for anything so evolved as words or threats. He looked furious, the physical embodiment of machine power. A squad of skitarii vanguard marched in lockstep to his extended stride, red-robed, the arisen shades of the comrades they uncaringly stepped across. Their eyes glowed like coals behind their steel masks.

‘You disappoint me, magos,’ the artisan trajectorae sneered, his servo-harness adding its own snapping words of contempt. ‘You will never know how much.’

From somewhere, Urquidex found the courage to stand.

‘The soul is the conscience of sentience.’

‘The Tenth Universal Law,’ said Van Auken. ‘The misinterpretation of the Omnissiah’s wisdom is a common failing amongst the Adeptus Biologis, and no excuse for treason against the blessed machine.’

With a brusque flick of a mechadendrite, the artisan trajectorae summoned the skitarii. They surged forward. Two claimed Urquidex by either arm and pinned him back over the still-sputtering console. He could feel the heat against his back, then on his face as an augmeticised hand pushed the side of his head into the plastek.

‘The Imperium will be coming,’ he hissed through the metallic fingers covering his mouth.

A smile parted the artisan trajectorae’s Neanderthal jaw.

‘Magos Biologis Eldon Urquidex, the Adeptus Mechanicus sentences you to servitude imperpetuis. I will personally ensure that only the very heaviest of armaments be grafted to whatever the metasurgeons deign to leave of you. It would be undesirable for your body to perish too swiftly.’

Urquidex struggled against the augmetised grips that restrained him, screaming for the clemency of white phosphor. Van Auken glided back.

‘You have done nothing but accelerate an outcome considered inevitable since the inception of the Grand Experiment. The Imperium will come, and they will not find the legions of Mars unprepared.’

Somehow, Urquidex’s struggles freed an arm.

He lashed his digitools across the throat of the skitarius holding his other arm. Blood splashed his rebreather, and for a moment he was free. He spun around, screaming into the vid-recorder as cold hands dragged him away by his robes.

‘Ullanor! The Beast arises on Ullanor!’

THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

DAVID ANNANDALE

Prologue

Caldera – Torrens

The horde was a lava flow. It was composed of muscle and machine, but it had all the power of molten rock. It covered the landscape. What it swallowed was destroyed forever. And it was unstoppable.

The jaws gaped. They were wide enough to engulf the world. And there was hunger in them to devour his family.

On the ramparts of Torrens, Emil Becker jerked the magnoculars back and forth. He saw jaws. He saw corded arms and snarling faces. He saw the tracks of huge machines. He saw the movement of titanic, brutal power. At full magnification, the lenses could only show fragments of the enemy’s bodies and weapons. Blurred hints of the totality of violence.

The orks were already that close.

Becker lowered the magnoculars, losing detail, seeing instead the size of the horror, a huge upheaval smashing through the jungle. He could feel the wave heading towards the wall. Towards his settlement. Towards his family.

Terror was a spike in his throat. He tried to swallow it down.

On his right, his daughter said, ‘So many.’

‘Yes.’ He glanced at Karla. Her face, like his, was covered in dust from work in the tunnels below – as good a form of camouflage in the night as any other.

Her teeth showed white in the dark as she smiled. ‘Caldera tests us again, father.’

Becker looked out at the howling, grinding night again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not Caldera. Not this time.’

He understood the convulsions of the land. That was the birthright of every Calderan. The eruptions and earthquakes were the language of the planet, its sermons and its rages. Life was eternal vigilance, eternal expectation of the coming of flame, rock and ash. The pride that came with survival was the reward for being a citizen of this world.

Caldera destroyed its children, but it did so without malice. It was violently alive, and to die in its embrace was no tragedy. It was the basic reality of the world.

What advanced towards the settlement of Torrens was also violently alive. There were even sounds carried over the wind to Becker that resembled joy. It was a joy alien to Caldera and to humans. It was the joy of destruction. There was malice out there.

Approaching fast.

Torrens was a mining settlement built into the rocky western slope of a basalt plateau. At the base of the slope was jungle that stretched to the west almost as far as the capital, Laccolith. Much of Caldera was blasted rock, but here, after it had been destroyed before the coming of Imperial colonists a millennium ago, the jungle had returned, the ground fertilised by the ash from the twin volcanic peaks to the north that marked the beginning of the Ascia Rift valley.

Torrens was walled, its plasteel barrier more substantial than any of its housing. The fortifications kept the violent fauna of Caldera at bay. They would do nothing against the life that roared towards Torrens now.

The orks flattened the jungle in their advance. Their huge tanks and towering walkers smashed through trees, and behind them came the infantry. The beasts covered so vast an area that they must have numbered in the tens of thousands. The flames from the exhausts of their machines illuminated the undulations of an enormous mass. A flood of destructive muscle, come to butcher and burn.

There were still lights on in Laccolith. Becker could see the glow of the city at the horizon. It was dirty with smoke. The vox-transmissions from the capital were sporadic and filled with terror, but at least they were a sign of life. The greenskins had not razed the city and killed everyone there. Not yet. He didn’t understand why that was. What could have pulled the orks away from their prize? Not the trivial presence of Torrens.

Boredom? Becker wondered. Laccolith’s population was in the millions. Total eradication would slow the orks’ march of conquest.

The guess was a weak one. And what did it matter? The orks were coming here. Torrens would not delay them at all. It would afford the horde a diversion. An amusement.

Becker looked to his left and right. The entire length of the wall was lined with miners. Hundreds of them, every able-bodied member of every clan. There were plenty of lasrifles to go around. Caldera’s indigenous life forms mandated vigilance and armament. There were two autocannon turrets, one at each end of the west wall. The citizens of Torrens would stitch the jungle with las and shells. As long as Becker kept his gaze on his comrades, he could believe in their strength. But when he looked west again, the futility of their show of determination sank in.

‘How long do you think we can hold them off?’ Karla asked.

Becker shrugged. ‘What’s your guess?’

‘Until they kill us.’

‘Sounds right.’

‘Maybe they won’t notice us,’ Heinz Wenlandt said. He stood on the other side of Karla, a tense shadow. He was over forty, like her, but sounded twenty years younger. Not in a good way.

Karla snorted. ‘Dreamer.’

‘Why?’ Wenlandt begged. ‘We’re not in their path to anywhere.’

‘Neither is the jungle,’ Karla said.

‘We are their path,’ said Becker.

The orks proved him right a few moments later. Even though the wall was still beyond the range of their rifles, the infantry started shooting. Then the tanks and huge walkers opened fire. Their cannon shells streaked for Torrens, slashing the night with trails of flame. Becker’s shoulders hunched as the destruction shrieked out of the darkness. Shells hit the fortifications. Others arced further and landed in Torrens itself.

In the second before the blasts, Becker shouted and pulled the trigger of his lasrifle. He had no targets. He had only the will to fight before he died. Then the plasteel beneath his feet shook. The air filled with flame. The central portion of the wall exploded, a storm of wreckage punching backwards through the colony. More shells blew away chunks of the upper portion of the ramparts. The ork volley hammered the barrier to a slumping ruin.

Becker coughed, eyes and throat stinging with smoke. The skin of his neck felt baked from the proximity of the fireballs. The parapet sloped sharply to his right and he held on to one of the outward-curving spikes of the crenellations to keep from falling. Between the concussions of the shells came the screams of the wounded. Many more were already dead. But the rest were fighting. The citizens of Torrens clung to the parapet, clambered over still-settling wreckage, and rushed forwards to the battered wall to lash the enemy with bursts of las. Karla was still at his side, burning through her gun’s power pack, her temple bleeding from a glancing hit by shrapnel. Wenlandt was pale, shaking, his face sheened with sweat and fear, but he was shooting too.

We’re still fighting, Becker thought. Even less than a minute into the battle, that felt like a victory. They would fight until extinction. He would die clutching that pride.

The orks streamed from the jungle. At their head were troops on bikes and in trucks. Freed of the trees, the vehicles raced over the gentle slope of scree towards the rise of the wall. Their engines screamed their hunger. Filthy smoke billowed in the night. Blinding headlamps jerked up and down as the speeding machines bounced over rocks. Dazzled, Becker could not guess at the numbers, but the roar was deafening. The infantry ran close behind, and the heavy armour continued its bombardment.

The green tide was almost on Torrens. Becker fired, knowing he could not miss, and knowing his courage had no effect. At least the struggle left no room for grief.

And then the lead truck exploded. The fireball caught bikers, turning them into rolling, out-of-control torches. They careened into other vehicles. Another truck blew up, close by but not involved in the mounting collision. A bike rose suddenly and hurtled through the air. It crashed into more riders.

The ork advance stumbled. The flames grew higher. Silhouetted by the fire was a towering armoured figure wielding a gigantic hammer. He swung it into the grille of an oncoming truck, and the front of the vehicle crumpled as if it had slammed into a mountainside. The truck flipped end-over-end, flattening bikers and its own occupants when it crashed back to earth. The ork infantry swarmed the warrior. He obliterated them, each of his blows as devastating as an artillery shell. Ork chieftains larger than the warrior went down as quickly as their underlings.

With a great, sweeping attack, the warrior hacked a clearing through the foe. For a moment he stood alone, surrounded by corpses and wreckage, framed by fire. Becker saw him more clearly: the huge reptilian skull on his shoulder-plate, the obsidian skin and the profile of unyielding nobility.

The warrior spoke, and his voice boomed over the barbaric snarls of the greenskin war machine. ‘Children of Caldera! You fight with spirit! Fight on, and know you do not fight alone!’

In the next moment, the heavy shelling shifted its target from Torrens and fell on the lower slope. The warrior vanished. The ground became a single explosion, an eruption that went on and on until Becker’s ears were bleeding. One of the ork walkers, a twenty-metre-tall monster of shambling metal plates and weapons, its head a maw of jagged savagery, towered over the blasts and fed them with an unceasing stream of cannon fire, destroying hundreds of greenskins in the attempt to kill the single defender.

Becker’s heart clenched, hope extinguished just as it flared. But he didn’t let up with his rifle, shooting into the fire, and then into the smoke as the barrage finally ended. The warrior had won Torrens a few more seconds of existence, and he was grateful for that. He obeyed the hero’s last command. He fought on.

The ork monster took a thundering step forwards. Then it stopped. Its weapon arms jerked. The colossal chainblade on the right stopped whirring. Smoke poured out of the shoulder. A few seconds later, the left cannon limb’s shots went wild, and then it too shut down. The machine rocked back and forth, vibrating with internal explosions. Its chest blew out with a massive gout of flame, sending huge slabs of metal flying hundreds of metres through the air. The interior of the walker was an inferno. The giant warrior emerged from the ragged gap in the chest. He leapt to the ground as the machine died behind him. It was immobile now, nothing more than a gigantic furnace.

The warrior turned once more towards Torrens and raised his hammer in salute. Then he pounded across the scree, heading north. He slammed through an ork phalanx that was coming up in the wake of the barrage.

Becker’s finger still squeezed the trigger, but he was barely aware of doing so. Jaw agape, he stared as one miracle succeeded another. The warrior could not have survived, but he had, and now he was single-handedly changing the course of the flood. The greenskins lost interest in Torrens. Engines ground, infantry howled and the horde altered its course. It rounded on the warrior. It pursued the being that had hurt it. Minor streams of orks still climbed the slope, but now the miners faced a war, not extermination.

‘What…’ Karla began, but could not finish.

Becker shook his head. He had no more words for an answer than she had for a question. He did not know what he had seen. But he felt the brush of legend.

And the awe born from a glimpse of eternity.

One

Mars – Pavonis Mons

The Alcazar Remembered was at low anchor, in geostationary orbit over Pavonis Mons. Thane sat with his Fists Exemplar veterans in the troop hold of the Thunderhawk Honour’s Spear. The company was descending in a show of force, leading with multiple gunships and tanks. There had been no overt resistance from the Adeptus Mechanicus. So far.

The gunship shook. Thane tapped the vessel’s vox. ‘I trust that wasn’t hostile fire, Brother Preco,’ he said to the pilot.

‘Just turbulence, Chapter Master,’ Preco responded. ‘But I’m receiving another hail.’

‘More turbulence,’ said Abbas, sitting across from Thane.

‘More than likely,’ Thane said. ‘Patch it through, Brother Preco.’

The vox-speaker crackled, and the voice that emerged sounded like static shaped into syllables. ‘This is Artisan Trajectorae Augus Van Auken. Approaching vessels, you are not authorised to make landfall on sacred Mars. You must reverse course at once.’

‘I am Chapter Master Maximus Thane of the Fists Exemplar. My orders come from Chapter Master Koorland, Lord Commander of the Imperium. His authority supersedes any you might claim, and over the Adeptus Astartes you have none at all.’

‘You should not force a confrontation.’

‘I have no intention of doing so. Turn Magos Biologis Eldon Urquidex over to us, and we will depart upon the instant.’

There was a pause before Van Auken spoke again. Thane pictured gears realigning in the cold mind of the Mechanicus priest. ‘You must leave at once,’ he repeated, as if Thane had made no demand.

‘We shall speak once we have landed,’ Thane said pleasantly, ignoring Van Auken in turn. ‘Face-to-face conversations are more conducive to an understanding, don’t you think?’ He shut down the channel. To Preco, he said, ‘No further communications until we land.’

‘Understood.’

Thane became aware of a deep stillness to his right. He turned to look at Aloysian. The only sign of the Master of the Forge’s concern was the rhythmic opening and closing of the vice jaws of one of his servo-arms. The movement was slight, barely more than a vibration. It stood out against the absolute immobility of the rest of his form.

‘You are troubled, Master Aloysian,’ Thane said, speaking the obvious. How could the Techmarine not be? The mission was creating a conflict between his oaths of loyalty.

‘I am.’

‘We are not seeking war with Mars.’

‘But we may find it.’

And then what? Thane almost asked, but stopped himself. It would not do to imply a lack of trust. Instead, he said, ‘That would amuse the orks greatly. I don’t propose to give them that satisfaction. I will do everything in my power to avoid bloodshed. You have my word on that.’

Aloysian’s nod was slight. ‘I believe you, Chapter Master. But will the Mechanicus make the same effort?’

‘You are better placed to answer. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ Aloysian said. ‘The greater the secret possessed by Urquidex, the more desperate the priests of Mars will be to keep it to themselves.’

‘And the more vital it becomes for us to learn that secret.’

‘Precisely. So where, Chapter Master, do you see the way to avoid war?’

Honour’s Spear shook harder, hammered by the Martian wind storms. Thane accepted the interruption gratefully. He had no answer for Aloysian.

The gunship broke through the smog-choked clouds of Mars. Thane looked through the viewing block and beheld the Pavonis Mons complex reaching up for him. Somewhere in that vastness, Urquidex was being held. The volcano was almost four hundred kilometres wide, and monolithic Mechanicus architecture covered its surface completely. The slope of Pavonis Mons was a gentle one, taking hundreds of kilometres to rise fourteen, but the colossal edifices and manufactoria turned it into a twisting, spiked, aggressive prominence. The fifty-kilometre caldera sprouted a cluster of gigantic chimneys, each the size of an Imperial Navy battle cruiser. They vomited the waste of Mechanicus industry into the sky, a more noxious and violent eruption than the volcano itself had ever produced.

As Honour’s Spear descended, the details of the structures became clear. Towers that Thane had taken for manufactoria were single machines, thousands of metres high. Some rotated around each other in a slow, majestic dance. Others were the pistoning ribs of an inconceivably gigantic beast. They connected to the monstrous buttresses and vaults of the manufactoria proper, of the habs for tens of millions of servants of the Omnissiah, and of laboratoria the size of hives.

‘How will we find our quarry in that?’ Abbas asked.

‘The terrain is not unknown to me,’ Aloysian said quietly.

‘I hope we will not have to seek him,’ said Thane. ‘I hope he will be brought to us.’

‘A faint hope,’ said Aloysian.

Thane made no answer. Below, the immensity of the Pavonis Mons complex stretched its iron claws upwards.

The gunships and transports came down at the edge of the space port at the base of the south face of the mountain. Alarms wailed from the towers of the port and the spires of the complex spilling off the slope and onto the surrounding plain. The Thunderhawks disgorged troops and vehicles, then rose to fly overwatch for the company. Thane organised the deployment with an eye to a maximum display of power. The battle-brothers marched at the head of the column. The Rhinos, empty except for their drivers, brought up the rear. In between came the tanks: Land Raiders, Predators, Vindicators and Whirlwinds. There was the strength here to flatten a city, and there was more to come. But Pavonis Mons was more than a city. Thane hoped the initial threat would be enough. He would escalate it as required, though he hoped he would not have to do so.

But Aloysian’s logic was sound.

The column rumbled away from the space port. It followed the main transport avenue running from the space port to the Tharsis Gate. Embedded in the immense walls encircling the base of the volcano, the Tharsis Gate was the primary access point to the Pavonis Mons complex, both above and below the surface of Mars.

Cathedral warehouses and cloud-piercing manufactoria lined the avenue’s sides. Webs of monorail tubes ran overhead, forcing the Thunderhawks higher. Ochre dust blew down the canyons between the structures. A sea of Mechanicus serfs and monotasked servitors parted ahead of the Fists Exemplar, a thousand thousand pedestrians and transports funnelling into cavernous cargo and work bays, or melting into narrower streets held in perpetual night by the shadows of the towers. From the jutting rise of the complex came an angry red glow. Cataracts of molten ore fell hundreds of metres from spouts to receptacles. Thane gazed at what he had come to bend to his will: a great mechanism, too large for the eye to encompass, too powerful for even its operators to comprehend. A mountain of metal and stone rumbled and groaned.

And it cried out.

The sirens whooped, Mars warning of invaders, Mars preparing for war. At the other end of the avenue, where it opened up into the kilometres-wide Square of the Infinite Reach before the Tharsis Gate, Thane saw the Mechanicus forces gather, and then move.

‘Where did they come from?’ Raalega asked. The Tharsis Gate was shut fast.

Aloysian spread his servo-arms, taking in the industrial sprawl on all sides. ‘From everywhere,’ he said. ‘There are thousands of concealed access points just in this quadrant. The Mechanicus will reach what must be held, and provide no route for the enemy. So Mars will always be defended.’

The two forces came together in the Square of the Infinite Reach. Electro-priests and skitarii walked just ahead of Kastelan robots and their datasmiths. The robots were lumbering monsters, twice the height of their controllers. Their forms had a kinship to Space Marine power armour, but their heads were smooth eggs of metal, faces replaced with grey plates. Huge cannons rose over the metal skulls from the carapace: incendine combustors. Their power fists crackled with red and blue energy.

On the flanks rolled servitor tanks. The Kataphron Destroyers and Breachers were tracked behemoths, built up around things that had once been human. The only remnants were the shaved heads, snarling, bestial, pallid and blank-eyed, attached to machinic torsos wielding cannons and hydraulic claws.

Onager Dunecrawlers clanked up along the road at the rear of the column. Insectoid limbs carried reliquary hulls armed with eradication beamer cannons. The Dunecrawlers swivelled their weapons back and forth, aiming over the Mechanicus. Some were monitoring the Space Marine tanks. Others were tracking the movements of the gunships.

More forces were joining the Mechanicus column. Thane saw individual units emerge from manufactoria and hatches opening and closing in the surface of the roads and the square. Aloysian was correct. For the Adeptus Mechanicus, the terrain was porous, offering innumerable means of closing with an enemy. But to the foe, the ways would be shut or death traps. There was only one entrance that might conceivably be stormed and secured: the Gate.

The Tharsis Gate was a hundred metres high and wide, and at that it was half the height of the wall. An engraving of the divided skull of the Cult Mechanicus occupied the Gate’s entire surface. There was no seam, no sign of whether it parted down the centre or rose into the wall. Thane bore no illusions about opening it from the outside. The Fists Exemplar would have to pierce it.

The Mechanicus column grew as it advanced. It was a mechanised serpent of crimson robes, crimson plate, articulated metal limbs, pulsing energy and coiling mechadendrites. There was so little of the human in the display before Thane that war seemed not unthinkable, but inevitable. He thought of what Koorland had told him of Fabricator General Kubik: that the High Lord appeared to regard the ork attack on the Imperium with the detachment of an outside observer. He spoke as if Mars were not threatened, as if the orks were more fascinating than dangerous, and as if the Cult Mechanicus had an alliance of convenience with the Imperium, and nothing more.

At this moment, Koorland’s concerns had the ring of grim truth.

The Fists Exemplar and the Mechanicus stopped with less than fifty metres between them.

‘Point-blank range,’ Abbas voxed over a private channel.

‘Yes,’ said Thane. At this distance, the combined fire of the two armies could leave nothing but a huge crater. They were edging towards a catastrophe beyond war. ‘We must tread carefully.’ He switched to the command network. ‘We are not here for battle,’ he said. ‘Keep that foremost in your minds, brothers. There will be no weapons fire without my express command. The situation is fragile. We will not be the ones to engage first. But we will complete our mission.’

‘Chapter Master,’ Abbas said, ‘does the Mechanicus understand the concept of the bluff?’

‘Do you think that’s what we’re doing?’

‘No. But I hope our opponents are.’

At least Abbas had not used the word enemies.

From the towers of the manufactoria, and from the Martian war machines, vox-casters spoke from all sides. They surrounded the Fists Exemplar with the inhuman tones of Van Auken. They were the voice of a single priest, and that unity, amplified hundreds of times, gave the artisan the same authority as if he had been Mars itself.

‘In the name of the Omnissiah, go no further. Turn back now.’

If there was something Thane could count on in the present volatility, it was the precision of Van Auken’s words. He had never known an adept of the Mechanicus to use language carelessly. Van Auken had commanded, but he had not threatened. He was reserving a small space for manoeuvring.

Thane would have to make him back up. He used his vox-grille to speak, to broadcast his response to the Mechanicus warriors and to Van Auken. ‘We have our orders. They are the same as yours, from the Lord Commander of the Imperium, and in the name of the Emperor. Release Eldon Urquidex to our custody.’

‘In the name of the Omnissiah, go no further. Turn back now.’

The perfect, mechanical repetition. It might as well have been a recording. Thane knew it wasn’t. Perhaps all Van Auken had left was escalation. As did Thane.

‘Chapter Master,’ Aloysian voxed. ‘Is one magos worth the cost we are facing?’

‘Would you abandon our mission?’ Thane glanced to his left. The Master of the Forge was in the front line, a visible reminder to the Mechanicus of the fused alliance between Mars and Terra.

‘I am not suggesting dereliction,’ said Aloysian. ‘I am weighing the consequences. Which would cause more damage to the Imperium – the loss of Urquidex, or war on Mars?’

‘Your logic is faulty, Master Aloysian. The information Urquidex possesses may outweigh any disaster here.’

‘We don’t know.’

‘No. But we know our orders. We know our oaths of moment.’

Aloysian was silent.

‘I appreciate your situation,’ Thane said. ‘But…’ He trailed off and waited.

Aloysian grunted. It was a very human sound, a rare expression of emotion from the Techmarine. ‘I know what I am,’ he said. ‘I am Adeptus Astartes. I am an Exemplar. My duty is clear, Chapter Master.’

‘I have no doubt it is. I will still spare us war if it is at all possible.’

Aloysian shook his head. ‘It will not be.’

Still, I will act as though it is, Thane thought. ‘This confrontation is senseless,’ he boomed to the Martian warriors. ‘We all serve the same Imperium. We all serve the Emperor. Will you turn your back on the Imperium in its moment of peril? I will not believe this of the priests of Mars. And now we will pass.’

He began to walk forwards. ‘A steady advance,’ he ordered the company. ‘Slow. Give them time to move back. Weapons at ready, but do not address targets. We go forwards, we do not stop, but we do not fire. Acknowledge.’

Clicks came back to him over the vox.

The Fists Exemplar advanced. The space between the forces shrank.

Van Auken watched the vid-screens and hololith tables. He was in a command centre below the surface, near the core of Pavonis Mons. The screens covered the walls. Feeds updated themselves every second. Targeting data from the Dunecrawlers changed as they tracked gunships and tanks. An auspex-mechanic sat before each column of screens, summarising and condensing the slivers of situation into bursts of code, their signals running through the cogitators and into the Artisan Primus’ mechadendrites plugged into the master console. Moment to moment, he had a near-total awareness of the entire territory running from the space port to the Tharsis Gate.

‘They are advancing,’ transmitted Sicarian Princeps Tynora 7-Galliax.

‘I am aware of this development.’

‘Understood, Artisan Primus. The delay between the situational change and your orders prompted my erroneous conclusion.’

It was possible to discern a veiled insult in her explanation. Van Auken ignored it. ‘Do not allow them to pass.’

‘What means are authorised?’

‘The mass of our forces. Do not engage.’

‘Unpredictable contingencies raise the likelihood of combat to near-certainty.’

‘The Adeptus Astartes are highly disciplined. The possibilities of intemperate error are concomitantly reduced.’

‘Accepted without optimism. Query: is the risk an efficient use of resources?’

‘We have not yet ascertained the degree of the heretic Urquidex’s knowledge. Once the full extent of the damage has been ascertained, he will be mind-wiped. The Adeptus Astartes may claim him at that point. Until then, his threat outweighs all others. Premise: the Fists Exemplar are also fully conscious of the consequences of war. Their data is also incomplete. They can conceive of no escape for Terra from the orks. Theorem: conflict here while orks are over Terra will be avoided as an absolute evil.’

‘Counter-hypothesis,’ said 7-Galliax. ‘Lacking alternatives, they will stop at nothing.’

‘Possibility evaluated and dismissed,’ Van Auken said.

He watched the two forces come together. With all the variables clamouring for his attention, there was no room for doubt.

The Mechanicus closed ranks. There were only a few metres between Thane and the line of skitarii.

‘They don’t want to let us through,’ said Abbas.

‘We shall have to convince them otherwise,’ replied Thane

The solid wall of Fists Exemplar closed the gap. The Adeptus Astartes towered over the skitarii vanguard troops. The armour of these warriors was heavy by Mechanicus standards – they were more substantial and less insectoid than many of their comrades. They were still dwarfed by the Space Marines.

The Fists Exemplar did not pause. They pressed forwards, steady and inexorable as the tide. Thane kept his bolter against his chest, barrel angled up. He was not attacking, simply advancing. Skitarii rifles were pointed at him. He pushed into the barrel of the vanguard warrior before him. He took another step, forcing the other to choose between taking a step back, firing, or engaging in melee combat. The skitarius stepped back. So did the rest of the line. The Fists Exemplar moved forwards again.

Then a command must have been issued. The retreat halted, the Dunecrawlers, Breachers and Destroyers manoeuvring to form a wall of metal. The Fists Exemplar could overwhelm the skitarii physically, but they would not be able to push past the Mechanicus heavy armour without using their own.

The chances of avoiding war shrank still further.

Thane had no choice; the mission demanded he advance. He decided to take the risk of raising the stakes. He would make those augmetic eyes blink yet.

He raised Weylon Kale on the Alcazar Remembered. ‘Shipmaster,’ he said, ‘begin the drop.’

‘So ordered, Chapter Master.’

‘They have the physical mass to force us back,’ 7-Galliax reported.

‘Hold as long as possible,’ Van Auken said. ‘When the heavy armour comes into play, fire warning shots.’

7-Galliax’s reply was cut off by a binharic squeal from one of the auspex-mechanics.

Van Auken processed the data. He felt stirrings of something that went beyond concern. Auto-regulators sought to contain the disruptive effect of his nervous system’s injection of adrenaline. ‘Correction,’ he said to 7-Galliax. ‘We have detected launch flares from the Adeptus Astartes battle-barge. All units begin warning fire. Do not hit the Adeptus Astartes. Be prepared to fall back and establish barrage fire that they cannot cross.’

The Fists Exemplar slowed. They leaned into the skitarii, their block of strength edging closer and closer to outright combat, but they did not train their guns. The tanks rolled up behind them.

Aloysian said, ‘Stalemate is inevitable.’

‘It won’t last long,’ Thane answered.

‘That is the source of my concern.’

‘Patience, Master of the Forge. Look to the skies.’

The streaks of the drop pods appeared a few moments later. They cut through the Martian atmosphere like bloody claws. There were four of them, carrying the rest of the veteran company’s strength to the field.

In the next instant, the Mechanicus forces began to shoot.

‘Hold fire!’ Thane shouted over the vox. Trigger discipline held, long enough for the Space Marines to realise the energy beams were passing overhead. ‘The...’ He caught himself. He had almost said the enemy. ‘The Mechanicus seeks to intimidate. We are not at war.’ Broadcasting again, he called to the skitarii and tech-priests, and to Van Auken, wherever he was. ‘We are not at war,’ he repeated. ‘Do not force a battle none of us would choose. Be one with us. Be one with Terra and against the orks!’

The only response was continued fire. It turned into a canopy of devastating energy. Even perfect precision could not stop it from shearing the facades of buildings. Rockcrete disintegrated. No wreckage fell. The sheer volume of the destructive beams took everything they hit apart at the molecular level.

The strobing flash of the beams played havoc with Thane’s optics. He blinked off the filters and kept pushing, driving the skitarii vanguard back towards the wall of their heavy armour. He looked up to the sky, and through the interweaving beams he saw the drop pods hurtle to the ground, coming down behind the Mechanicus forces, between them and the Tharsis Gate, catching them in a vice. Thane heard the impacts, felt the shake in the pavement. He felt the pressure mount on Van Auken.

The disaster, when it happened, seemed inevitable, an event every soul on Mars should have predicted. Thane saw it unfold with sickened dread and helplessness. Two of the Dunecrawlers rotated their hulls to send their fire over the drop pods. They did so as the last of the entry vehicles came down a few seconds behind the others. What happened was chance, not error. The terrible alchemy of war.

Because this was war. It had been from the moment Koorland ordered the Alcazar Remembered to Mars.

An eradication beam struck the final drop pod. It vaporised the outer shielding. The drop pod’s retro thrusters exploded. Thane saw the flash, the billow of flame, and the pod tilt over. Off course, it fell to the east beyond his sight, behind the canyon walls of the manufactoria. The crash of its landing was deafening.

‘Hold fire!’ Thane ordered. ‘Hold fire!’ The company obeyed, but he didn’t know if the Fists Exemplar in the fallen pod were alive, and if they were receiving. The proximity and intensity of the energy beams was interfering with vox-traffic. The voices of his brothers were disappearing in storms of static and dropped audio. He heard nothing from the damaged pod.

And then there were more explosions. There was bolter fire. A rocket slammed into the hull of a Dunecrawler.

No, Thane thought, despairing. The worst was unfolding. His wounded brothers thought they had come under attack and were responding.

The Mechanicus answered. The Dunecrawlers lowered their guns and fired towards the rear. Overhead, the canopy of destruction descended.

No room to manoeuvre now, no avoiding the worst. No more pretence. No more hope.

‘Open fire!’ Thane commanded.

Fists Exemplar and skitarii struck at each other in the same instant. The close quarters worked in favour of the Space Marines – their armour was stronger than that of the skitarii. Their mass-reactive bolt-shells shattered breastplates and helmets, blowing up the circuitry and flesh within, and the first ranks of the vanguard went down. Radium carbine bullets hammered against Thane’s armour, but his plate held against the poisonous rounds. His auto-senses warned of a massive increase in airborne radiation; if he had not been wearing his helm, his skin would already have begun to cook.

The Fists Exemplar had the momentum of the first seconds, but the Mechanicus had the overwhelming numbers. The temptation was to drive forwards while they could, but Thane knew better. The Space Marines could not depend on their power armour to see them through the enemy cohort before the heavy guns came to bear. The wrong push now would be disastrous.

Or more disastrous. He pushed the thought away, focusing on the need to survive the next few seconds, and to fight for the completion of the mission. He could not afford to consider the wider consequences of what was unfolding.

‘Fall back,’ he ordered the company. ‘Tanks, take the lead. Punch our way through.’ He swept his bolter back and forth as he started to walk backwards. The Fists Exemplar’s hail shattered Mechanicus warriors. Clouds of metal shrapnel erupted. The tanks drew level with the Space Marines. Their cannons roared simultaneously with the shriek of the enemy’s energy blasts. The Predator Roma’s Cry blew a hole through the centre of a Kataphron Breacher with its autocannon, and the servitor’s head jerked backwards in a memory of mortal agony. It was avenged a moment later when Roma’s Cry was hit by a Destroyer’s plasma culverin and a Dunecrawler’s eradicator. Energy crackled. Metal melted and evaporated. Roma’s Cry surged forwards, its fate and that of the battle-brothers within already determined. It crushed skitarii beneath its treads before it exploded. The fireball was huge, power plant and munitions destroyed in the same instant. Thane used the wall of flame as cover and moved to the right side of the avenue.

‘On me,’ he called to his brothers. ‘Flank them.’

The tank battle became a firestorm of shells and energy blasts. The explosions were continuous, filling the street. Behemoths of war hurled destruction at each other from ranges no greater than a few dozen metres. The Fists Exemplar moved through a storm of flame, smoke, convulsing energy and whirling shrapnel. The foot soldiers of both forces made way for the tanks, and the vehicles picked up speed. Even at such close range, some shots went wide, devastating the manufactoria on both sides of the avenue. Thane led his company towards a structure that was more avalanche than shelter.

‘Thamarius,’ Thane voxed to the sergeant leading the drop pod landing. ‘What is your situation?’ He called twice more before Thamarius answered, barely audible over the raging interference.

‘The Gate is holding strong, Chapter Master. We’re trying to break through with melta bombs, but it will take time. Our position is vulnerable.’

‘Hold fast, brother-sergeant. We will approach from the eastern flank.’

‘We may need more desperate means to defeat this barrier.’

‘Understood. But we are not there yet.’

If Thamarius answered, his words were lost in the static.

A Kastelan robot loomed out of the smoke. It fired its incendine combustor and a flood of ignited promethium washed over Thane’s company. Raalega took the brunt, the high-powered stream burning through the seams of his armour. It filled his helmet. Flesh and metal turned molten. As he fell, he hurled a krak grenade at the robot, slagging the behemoth’s left foot. The robot staggered, the sudden swing of its gait almost crushing the datasmith at its side. The priest died by bolter fire a moment later but the robot still advanced. Deprived of the guidance of its datasmith, it was governed by the last instructions programmed into it. It would walk and burn all before it until it was destroyed or ran out of fuel.

Bolter fire pummelled the robot. The impacts made it jerk as it walked, but its attack was untroubled. Thane ran through the flame, his heat and rad sensors shrieking red. He stepped around the robot’s heavy tread, wiping burning promethium to clear his vision, and trained his bolter on the barrel of the combustor. The gun burst. Its fuel ignited at once, shot skywards, and blew up the robot’s power pack. Thane jumped back, away from the worst of the incinerating flood. The robot burned in its own life force, stopped walking and slumped forwards, arms hanging limply. Immobilised, it became a metal silhouette in a lake of fire.

The company passed through an archway and into the manufactorium. Two of its huge chimneys had fallen, crushing the upper storeys of the central structure. The Fists Exemplar entered a ruin of iron and rockcrete, the ground level a shattered jumble. Some columns still held up the vaults for a few metres, while others had snapped like bone, and the space between the floor and thousands of tonnes of rubble was less than two metres. Shattered pipes sprayed superheated steam and burning gases through the space. Torn electrical cables as thick as Thane’s arm sparked and twisted like agonised snakes. Forges thirty metres high, cracked open, spilled molten slag across the floor. The manufactorium was a death planet in miniature, and it offered the best route to break through to Thamarius and the interior of Pavonis Mons. The heavy weapons of the Mechanicus could not enter here.

‘This complex is highly unstable,’ Aloysian said.

‘I don’t plan on staying,’ said Thane.

‘And Van Auken could decide to bring it all down on our heads.’

‘More reason for speed. And to keep him distracted.’ Thane voxed the gunship pilots. ‘We must escalate, brothers. Keep the focus of the Mechanicus on the street.’

‘Acknowledged,’ said Preco, from among the answer clicks.

The Thunderhawks screamed over the avenue, unleashing streams of heavy bolter and lascannon fire, and flights of hellstrike missiles. The tank battle raged on. The roar of destruction was unending, the curtain of flame from the explosions impenetrable. Thane led the way through the burning and the wreckage of the manufactorium. The Fists Exemplar climbed over and under rubble, battering their way through iron doors knocked askew in their frames and through walls crumbling under strain. Behind them, collapses multiplied. A mountain was settling over their heads.

They advanced well beyond the level of the Mechanicus’ front lines in the avenue. Thane estimated less than a hundred metres separated them from the final approach to the Tharsis Gate.

There was no resistance.

As they reached an open space whose floor was covered in congealing metal, Aloysian said, ‘Chapter Master, where are the skitarii?’

It was too much to expect all the infantry to be caught up in the struggle in the road. ‘Auspex?’ Thane called.

‘Nothing…’ Kahagnis voxed from midway down the phalanx.

Thane did not like the hesitation. ‘Why are you uncertain?’

‘The readings are erratic. The interference is severe. When we–’

And then nothing descended. Nothing was white noise on the vox, white noise on the optics, and a shrieking howl. Blood filled Thane’s mouth and ears. Pain stabbed into his eyes with the thousand shards of a broken mirror.

Somewhere, there was a hum. It vibrated beneath hearing. It was sharper than a blade.

And then the smell of blood. The smell of butchery.

Two

Terra – The Imperial Palace

The ork moon attacked Terra with its presence. It was blockaded and nothing could emerge, yet its reality alone was enough. It orbited the planet, renewing fear across the globe as the people turned unwilling eyes up to witness every moonrise.

And the High Lords dithered. The High Lords schemed. At the sight of them, gathered on their dais, Koorland’s cheek muscles twitched with contempt and anger.

As he walked into the Great Chamber, the Imperial Fist’s boots crunched on the powdered marble fallen from the ceiling. Every time he entered the Chamber, he saw less of the space’s glory, and more of the damage. It was no less a symbol of the state of the Imperium than it had ever been. Friezes were cracked. The r ubble of the collapsed seating tiers had not been cleared away. The fractures in the dome turned the fresco of the Great Crusade into a bitter satire.

The damage to the huge statue of Rogal Dorn was minimal. The primarch was unbowed. He gazed down on the High Lords’ dais, and Koorland thought he read disgust in the lines of his face and in the implacable eyes. How could the Praetorian not be dismayed by what the High Lords of Terra had become?

Koorland shared that disgust. But he also shared in the shame. By ousting the Lord Guilliman, Udin Macht Udo, and becoming Lord Commander of the Imperium in his place, Koorland had erased the distance between himself and the High Lords. He was of their number now. Their failures were his too, compounding his others.

The Imperial Fists, gone except for himself. And yes, he had acted, yes, he had united the Successor Chapters. Yes, the sons of Dorn once again stood on the ramparts of the Imperial Palace. But to what end? The ork moon’s tumorous presence was still in the sky, a perpetual reminder of the beast that was bleeding the Imperium. The Council was as fractious as ever. And now, instead of progress towards even a hint of a way of moving against the orks, the fault lines in the Imperium were growing into chasms.

A poor showing.

And he had turned the running of the blockade over to the Imperial Navy. The move was necessary. The Last Wall could not be held in one place, unable to turn where the war called. Even so, the decision felt like a bad one.

Koorland mounted the dais and stopped before Kubik. The Fabricator General of the Adeptus Mechanicus was seated. He did not rise. His optics hummed as they adjusted to Koorland’s proximity.

‘There has been an astropathic message from Mars,’ Koorland said. He held a strip of vellum before Kubik. ‘Fighting has broken out. But I expect you knew that.’

‘The result was calculated at a high level of probability,’ Kubik answered. His mantid limbs unfolded, long metallic fingers taking the parchment. He examined it with little interest before returning it to Koorland. ‘You are reporting the expected, Lord Commander.’

The others in the room were less sanguine.

‘How bad is it?’ asked Drakan Vangorich, the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum.

Most of the people in the chamber inspired Koorland with contempt, but Vangorich was an exception. If he had been no more successful than Koorland in forcing a consistent, successful defence against the greenskins out of the Council, his efforts had been heroic. Koorland respected him. He was wary of the man, but he trusted his wisdom.

‘I have no details yet,’ Koorland said. ‘I’m waiting on the arrival of vox-transmissions.’

‘Mars is currently fourteen-point-two light minutes from Terra,’ said Kubik.

‘Yes.’ Koorland rounded on the Fabricator General again. ‘How much damage will be done in the time it takes for new orders to be sent and received?’

If Kubik was bothered by the implications, he gave no sign. ‘You have sent armed troops onto the sacred ground of Mars,’ he said. ‘Your losses are regrettable.’

‘Regrettable?’ Tobris Ekharth shouted. The Master of the Administratum sounded querulous rather than forceful. His outrage was tinged with panic. ‘None of the other Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes have seen fit to trouble themselves with Terra–’

‘The ork attacks are occurring throughout the Imperium,’ Vangorich interrupted, his tone both grim and calm. ‘We have reports of the Ultramarines engaging another attack moon over Tarentus. The Blood Angels–’

‘I don’t care about Tarentus!’ Spit flew from Ekharth’s lips. ‘I care about Terra! And where are our Space Marines? They’re battling the Adeptus Mechanicus! That is not regrettable. It is catastrophic! Is this what you call leadership?’ he demanded of Koorland. ‘You have led us into civil war!’

Ecclesiarch Mesring gasped. Inquisitorial Representative Lastan Neemagiun Veritus rose from his seat. ‘Do not use those words again,’ he hissed at Ekharth.

Koorland had difficulty gauging Veritus’ age, but he was old, his body withered inside the bulk of his power armour. His movements had energy, though, and Ekharth recoiled, leaning back as if he could push himself through his throne and away from the inquisitor.

‘The Imperium will never know civil war again,’ Veritus said. His voice was calm, measured, yet it cut the air with claws. ‘That is impermissible. To imagine otherwise is heresy.’

Mesring breathed in sharply again. Cultural memories a thousand years old pressed in on the Great Chamber, casting long shadows.

Trembling, Ekharth said, ‘Then what is it?’

Koorland was surprised the Administratum lord found the courage to push back even that much against Veritus.

‘It is something that ends now,’ Koorland said. He was still facing Kubik.

‘It is a skirmish,’ said Kubik. ‘It will end soon.’ The mechanical buzz of his voice was without intonation. He might as well have been a servitor reporting data. ‘What will you do?’ he asked Koorland. ‘I do not think you will continue to send troops after the current contingent is rendered non-viable.’

‘You have little faith in the Adeptus Astartes,’ Koorland said. ‘You think you know how this struggle will end? You are wrong.’

‘The arithmetic is beyond challenge. One company against an entire planet.’

Koorland shook his head. ‘Fabricator General Kubik,’ he said, ‘planets have fallen to a single company before. Do not mistake this for a skirmish.’ He looked at Ekharth. ‘And it is not a civil war.’

He paused. He stopped himself before he gave in to his anger. He would have liked to drag Kubik off his seat and batter the insectoid priest. He would have liked to force compliance. There was no telling how much harm the Adeptus Mechanicus had done already with the secrets it was fighting so hard to keep. But such actions would be futile, and they would ensure an even greater tragedy on Mars.

‘Fabricator General,’ he said, calm now. ‘Are you still a High Lord of the Imperium?’

Brother Scuris came apart. He was a few metres to Thane’s left. As Thane tried to clear his eyes and head, he had a vague impression of lunging, skeletal shadows that seemed to have emerged from the air itself. They wielded blades and claws, and they cut through Scuris’ armour as if it too were a shadow. Scuris’ arms fell to the ground. Blood sprayed from his gorget. Up and down the line of the Fists Exemplar, vitae jetted in powerful fountains, the massive hearts of the Adeptus Astartes warrior pumping blood far into the air. It misted the atmosphere of the room.

Thane’s vision split, doubled, blurred. He made out a line of hostiles approaching from the far end of the room. There were flashes from gun muzzles and projectiles slammed into Thane’s chest-plate. They hit with the stopping power of heavy stubbers. And everywhere there were the rapid shadows of the enemy already upon the Fists Exemplar.

The vox was a ringing howl. Communication was impossible. Defence and retaliation were not. Thane fired, sweeping his bolter in a wide parabola before him. He stepped backwards. He could not trust his agonised senses. He could trust his brothers.

Through the static came the heavy pounding of bolters. Thane’s shoulders locked with his brothers’. The Fists Exemplar formed a circle, striking back with a devastating volley. Shells punched into the walls of the manufactorium, chewing through the shadows and the advancing foe. Rockets hit the line. The Space Marines struck back at stealth with overwhelming brute force.

The white noise began to break down as the beings generating it were annihilated. Thane’s vision cleared. He saw the broken line of the Sicarian infiltrators. With their hemispherical skulls atop bodies whose limbs were narrow articulations long since absent of flesh, they were scarabs of war. They still came forwards, firing stubcarbines, broadcasting neurostatic waves, but the cumulative strength of the neurostatic assault was no longer enough. The genhanced senses of the Adeptus Astartes magnified the damage of the wave. They also adapted faster.

The lethal shadows, too, now had shape. Ruststalkers. The skitarii assassins had the same slender build as the infiltrators. They moved like razors. At close quarters, their transonic blades sliced through ceramite as easily as flesh. Unlike the infiltrators, the hum they broadcast rode up and down the frequencies, finding the vibrations to slip through the molecules of armour and bone.

But they had to get close. The Fists Exemplar pushed the skitarii back with a mass-reactive storm. Enemy bodies burst into shrapnel. Mechanicus warriors disintegrated. Shapes fell to the ground: shapes that looked like warped, metallic ruin, and yet they bled.

‘Through them now!’ Thane yelled.

He jogged forwards again, still shoulder-to-shoulder with his brothers. The Fists Exemplar became their name incarnate: a massive ceramite fist rushing into the foe, shattering the advance. Infiltrator rounds cracked Thane’s breastplate. He was running through hammer blows, but his own blows were harder. His force was unstoppable.

Half-molten slag cracked and shifted and gave way beneath his heavy steps and his boots sank into viscous heat, but he kept his footing. He kept his momentum. The Exemplars were a single entity, a battering ram come to shatter the enemy line.

More infiltrators fell. The stiletto jab to Thane’s forehead and the subaural sapping of his spirit itself faded. The vox sputtered back to life with the roar of the Space Marines’ anger. The ruststalkers closed with them, needling in like filaments to a magnet. Some of them danced between the shells. Some of them struck home with their blades. Thane heard brothers’ snarls cut short. He also heard high-pitched bursts of squealing binharic as the assassins were taken apart by retaliatory fire.

Thane hurled a frag grenade. The skitarii had little flesh for the shrapnel to pierce, but the blast fountained metal over them, melting joints and incinerating circuits. A ruststalker leaped in front of him, slashing at his helmet with its chordclaw. He jerked his head back. The claws scraped across his grille. With his right arm, he swung his chainsword diagonally down through the assassin’s neck, cutting through cables. It severed a cybernetic spine. The ruststalker’s head flew off, and Thane trampled over the body.

The Fists Exemplar collided with the infiltrators. They attacked with fury and with sheer mass, turning the Sicarians into scrap metal. The remaining ruststalkers retreated, vanishing back into the shadows.

‘Are you still holding, Thamarius?’ Thane voxed.

‘Barely,’ the sergeant answered. He sounded winded. ‘Still not through the Gate.’

‘We are almost with you.’ There was a doorway ahead. Beyond it, a narrow corridor, and the Martian daylight. The end of the manufactorium and a short run to the rear of the Mechanicus lines and the Tharsis gate.

The huge fist kept moving.

‘Our losses–’ 7-Galliax began.

‘Are known and registered,’ Van Auken interrupted.

‘We have been unable to stop the Adeptus Astartes advance through the Dolentes complex.’

‘We are fully aware.’ Van Auken’s optics skipped from vid-screen to vid-screen, processing the unfolding disaster. Extrapolated results were even grimmer. He had to shut the conflict down and do it quickly. The long-term consequences were as uncertain as the near-future ones were definite. They were also coming no matter what steps he took to stop the Fists Exemplar. There was no peace to preserve now. The political ramifications were beyond his concern. He was sending constant updates to Terra, for the use of the Fabricator General, but whatever Kubik decided had no bearing on the immediate situation. ‘Reinforcements are arriving,’ Van Auken told 7-Galliax. ‘Expect significant structural and personnel impacts.’

‘Acknowledged. We are the Machine. Let it be inevitable and manifest.’

Short-term collateral losses to the Mechanicus were regrettable. They were also ongoing. The war had to be stopped by a massive concentration of force. Sufficient escalation would stop uncontrollable escalation.

There was pure certainty in the move he had to make. Its success was less certain.

He watched the vid-screens, processing the data of the war he was trying to stop.

He realised he was experiencing desperation.

‘Your query’s answer is self-evident,’ Kubik said. ‘If I were not a High Lord, I would not be present. We would not be having this conversation.’

The Fabricator General’s answer was somewhere between being literal in the most mechanistic sense and an equivocation. Koorland hoped Kubik’s cold evasion was a sign of uncertainty. You still have nerves in there, Koorland thought. I think I struck one.

He pressed harder. ‘Your actions force my question. You have every right and duty to act in the defence of Mars, but not at the expense of the Imperium. We are not two powers. We are one. Or are you really contemplating secession?’

‘The speculation is absurd,’ Kubik said.

Koorland did not expect emotion in Kubik’s voice, so he was not surprised by the flat absence of outrage or passion. What surprised him was the momentary pause. A single metallic finger tapped once against the right arm of the throne. Something Koorland had said had jolted the Fabricator General. He had hit too close to home.

Secession? The Mechanicus wouldn’t be that mad.

And if they were?

Koorland leaned closer to Kubik. ‘What do you think is happening on Mars?’ he asked. ‘What do you think will be the consequences of the path you have chosen?’

‘The Mechanicus does not walk this path alone, Lord Commander. You are the one who sent an armed force to Mars.’

‘You forced my choice. Fabricator General Kubik, there is war on Mars as we have this debate. Even now the damage must be considerable. It will be worse. If there is no ceasefire, the struggle will continue until there is victory. Think of the cost. Think how far the consequences will reach. Perhaps this will not be civil war.’ He shot a glance at Veritus, who glowered but kept silent. ‘But Mars will be weakened. The Imperium will be weakened. Is that your desire? How much destruction will you embrace?’

No answer from Kubik, except in the tapping of his finger. It marked time, each click of metal on metal the passing of another second, another moment lost to the cascading destruction.

Messengers burst into the Great Chamber from separate doors. One ran straight for Koorland. The other was a Mechanicus acolyte.

Kubik’s finger stopped tapping. His telescoping optics flicked from the approaching acolyte and back to Koorland.

They waited in silence for the news.

More moments lost.

A few metres from the exit of the corridor, Thane halted. At the same instant, Thamarius voxed, ‘Chapter Master! Mechanicus reinforcements!’

‘I see them, brother-sergeant.’

Dunecrawlers – squadron after squadron of them, a swarm of massive arachnid walkers, moving in with a ponderous scuttle into the port area. Their eradication beamers were swinging towards the manufactorium.

‘They will leave nothing but a crater,’ said Aloysian.

Van Auken’s voice resounded across the battlefield. ‘Adeptus Astartes, surrender immediately. You have thirty seconds.’

Thane gestured the company back. He opened a channel to the Alcazar Remembered. ‘Shipmaster,’ he said. ‘I need a single bombardment cannon salvo with immediate effect at these coordinates.’

The messages were subluminal reports. As Koorland learned the full details of the battle’s beginning, he received word on the vox of another astropathic communication. It was one whose translation had posed no difficulty. There had been too much urgency in the signal from the choir aboard the Alcazar Remembered, the message too brief and simple to permit misunderstanding.

‘An orbital attack has begun,’ Koorland said.

Kubik rose. ‘End it,’ he demanded.

‘That lies with you,’ Koorland responded.

Imperial Fist and Fabricator General faced each other. The seconds ticked by in silence. The rest of the High Lords watched and said nothing. Hundreds of millions of kilometres away, destruction rained from the Martian skies.

The Dunecrawlers turned their beams on the manufactorium. The Fists Exemplar retreated from the disintegrating collapse. Walls evaporated behind them. The upper floors plummeted. The rubble that fell through the beams vanished. Tonnes of rockcrete and iron and plasteel made it through. Thane crouched against the side wal as slabs came down at an angle. Ruin pressed down on the company. He pushed upwards, straining against the weight that sought to crush him. The pressure grew as more and more of the upper structure fell.

‘Stand fast, brothers!’ he called, shouting over thunder. ‘Our retaliation approaches.’

‘It’s getting lighter,’ Kahagnis said.

‘Do not rejoice,’ Aloysian warned.

The shrieking hum of the eradicator beams drew nearer. They were stripping away the layers of rubble. Soon there would be no shelter.

Daylight appeared over Thane’s head.

He roared and turned to face the Mechanicus armour. And so he was in time to see the streak from the sky. The bombardment cannon’s shot struck the centre of the Square of the Infinite Reach. Auto-senses shutting out the glare, Thane crouched in the vanishing ruins. The blast was light and fire and the concentrated wind of a thousand hurricanes. It blew over the Fists Exemplar, who sank into their positions, clutching shattered foundations. Torn and burned fragments of the Dunecrawlers flew overhead, leaves in the wind. The wind still blowing, the glare barely faded, Thane called the charge.

Smoke and dust everywhere. In the avenue, the heavy armour struggle continued, but the Mechanicus forces, closer to the blast, had been decimated. The Space Marine tanks gained ground. Before the Tharsis Gate, there was now a wasteland with a crater a dozen metres deep at its centre. Its slopes were a landscape of unrecognisable metal fragments and broken stone.

‘Thamarius,’ Thane called as the Fists Exemplar descended the slope.

‘Still here, Chapter Master. Just.’

‘Are you in?’

‘Almost.’

Weylon Kale broke in. ‘Chapter Master,’ said the shipmaster, ‘we are under attack.’

‘How many Mechanicus vessels?’

‘Many.’

Koorland took a step back from Kubik. He spread his arms, taking in the damage to the Great Chamber. ‘Is this what we are coming to?’ he asked. ‘Will we turn the Imperium into a broken, fractured, divided shadow of what it should be? Is this how we honour the Emperor?’ He filled his lungs with air. He filled his being with righteous anger. He bellowed his denial and his loyalty in a single word: ‘No!’

The shout reverberated across the Chamber. The High Lords looked at him in silence. He saw terror in some, shame in others. Vangorich gave a slow nod of approval. Something glimmered in Veritus’ eyes and Koorland had the impression it was something like hope. He was surprised to see the old inquisitor was still capable of the emotion.

Kubik was unreadable. He had no face in the human sense. He was perfectly still.

I have your attention, Koorland thought.

He spoke to the High Lords. His voice carried to the seating tiers, to the spectators who still came to the battered room. If the minor lords and functionaries were still jockeying for political favour, their efforts must have been the result of habit rather than belief by this point. Their numbers were greatly reduced. Many had died in the Proletarian Crusade. Others had been too terrified to return in the wake of eldar and orks being present so deep in the heart of the Imperial Palace.

Koorland spoke to be heard by all. But most of all he spoke to Kubik. ‘The Imperium is tested as it has not been since the Emperor ascended to the Golden Throne,’ he said. ‘If we fail this test, we fail through disunity. We fail the trust the Emperor has placed in us. If division defeats us, we deserve no better. And if we fall, in the name of what? I stand for Terra, and I stand for Mars. Because I stand for the Emperor. I stand for the Imperium. I will walk the ramparts of the galaxy, I will repel all enemies. I know my duty.’ He dropped his voice so that only Kubik could hear. ‘Do you?’

The Fists Exemplar melted their way through the final metres of steel, and the Tharsis Gate was breached at last. The passage was just wide and high enough for the battle-brothers to pass through in single file. To the rear, the tanks had broken the last of the Mechanicus lines and were forming a defensive perimeter around the Gate, preserving the egress once Urquidex had been located.

‘Taking fire,’ Kale reported from the Alcazar Remembered.

‘How long can you hold them off while remaining at anchor?’ Thane asked, pausing at the entrance to the breach.

‘As long as you need, Chapter Master.’ Kale’s answer was an acknowledgement that there was no choice if the mission was to succeed.

‘Our thanks, shipmaster.’

A new wave of tocsins sounded. The wailing was desperate, the tone final.

Standing at Thane’s shoulder, Aloysian said, ‘They will not let us profane Pavonis Mons. They will destroy the complex with us.’

‘I hope you’re wrong,’ Thane said. But as he spoke, immense turrets rose to the east and west, driven upwards by pistons thick as the limbs of Titans. They supported eradication beamer macro-cannons. With glacial majesty, barrels wider than Thunderhawks began to turn and angle downwards.

Aloysian was right. The Mechanicus was ready to atomise the invaded quadrants of the Pavonis Mons complex layer by layer.

The Predators and Whirlwinds unleashed salvoes of cannon fire and missile flights at the turrets. Void shields flared with the impacts.

Thane voxed Kale as he followed Aloysian down the melted tunnel through the Gate.

‘Shipmaster,’ he said, ‘I need an area-wide bombardment.’

Thane felt the mission goal recede into the mists of war. Closing in was only ever-more terrible destruction.

‘Duty,’ Kubik repeated. The Fabricator General spoke slowly, pausing between the syllables, as if anatomising the word. He stood.

‘I believe in the honour of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ Koorland said. ‘I believe in its fidelity to the Emperor.’

Another silence. Not a total one. Koorland listened to the clicks and whirs and electronic humming of Kubik’s form. He imagined he was hearing the sounds of indecision, of logic circuits closing to form a pattern of choice.

Kubik said, ‘Your belief is not misplaced. I am cognisant of all my duties.’ His words were as free of human inflection as ever. There was no trace of the organic in their buzzing enunciation.

And they were filled with sudden resolution.

Kubik turned to the Mechanicus acolyte. ‘Priority extremis message: cease fire.’

Koorland tapped his vox-bead, connecting him to the master of the astropathic choir. It was no longer a question of stopping the war in time. The question was whether there was anything left to stop.

‘Target zone acquired,’ Shipmaster Kale voxed from the Alcazar Remembered. ‘Firing on your command.’

Beyond the Tharsis Gate, the Fists Exemplar found themselves in a vast structure that was both hall of worship to the Omnissiah and pathway nexus – the Grand Passage of the Fulcrumite. Galleries beyond number rose toward a vault a thousand metres away. A web of maglev tracks, dozens of levels deep, led away in all directions. The main corridor, wide enough for a phalanx of Baneblades to travel down, split in the far distance, with the right-hand branch sloping beneath the surface of Mars. The air was dark with black, oily smoke.

The rockcrete arches echoed with the bone-shaking heartbeat of machinery. The sharp, whistling crackle and thunder of energy discharges would have punctured mortal eardrums. The tocsins sounded here too, and yet the innumerable servants of the Omnissiah continued along their appointed tasks. They moved in their red robes on their insectile limbs, mechadendrites waving, travelling without panic, their goals unaltered by the fates decreed by their superiors.

The order to fire caught in Thane’s throat. He was about to lay waste to a vast region of Pavonis Mons, the explosive destruction easier for the Fists Exemplar to survive than the absolute, surgical scouring of the eradicator beams. And if the attack took out the turrets, the Mechanicus would come back with an even more devastating attack. The conflict was a firestorm. It was nothing he could stop. It had caught the Fists Exemplar and the Adeptus Mechanicus in its consuming winds, and there was nothing anyone on Mars could do to stop it. All they could do was feed it.

Fire, he thought. But he hesitated again. In the second he had delayed, the turrets had not fired. The towering walls of the Passage were intact. The region had not been stripped down to its component molecules.

Someone else was hesitating.

‘Chapter Master?’ Kale asked.

The Fists Exemplar pounded down the passage. They had no direction to pursue except down. The war had no direction except more.

But there was hesitation.

Thane had no choice. He had to seize the advantage before Van Auken did. Before the Mechanicus vessels overwhelmed the Alcazar Remembered.

‘Fire,’ he said.

But then Kale was shouting something. It took a few seconds for the words to register. ‘Astropathic communication, Chapter Master! Immediate ceasefire! Cease fire!’

The message Thane had abandoned hope of receiving. The message he wished for above all others. And for that reason, he had to distrust it.

‘Authenticate it,’ he said.

‘Authentication in progress.’

He must fight until he knew the order truly came from Koorland. That was his duty.

But Van Auken wasn’t firing either.

He placed his trust in hope. ‘Hold fire,’ he told Kale.

Three

Terra – The Imperial Palace

In the quarters he had taken for himself in the barracks of the Last Wall, Koorland played through the recording of Thane’s interrogation of Urquidex yet again. He had already watched it until he had memorised every moment of the encounter. The war had ended before the command to turn Urquidex into a servitor had been carried out, but only just. His left arm was missing. The digits on his right moved only very slightly. His skull bore the scars of preparatory procedures.

But Urquidex spoke clearly. And his words shook Koorland. The first time he heard them, he thought he was dreaming. He replayed the vid-capture, and then did so again. And again, wishing he did not have to believe what was said.

Kubik entered the Cerebrium. Koorland was already there. The Space Marine had chosen the location for their meeting, the room at the top of the Widdershins Tower having been virtually unused since the arrival of the ork moon. Most of the High Lords found the presence of the moon, visible from the casements, too much to bear. The Great Chamber preserved an illusion of security, though that mirage was now badly fractured.

Kubik did not share the same reluctance. He welcomed the chance to observe the ork base. There was always the chance, if the air was clear enough, of witnessing an alteration on its surface, of processing some form of significant data.

Kubik evaluated the stance of Koorland. He was not sitting at the circular table, but standing beside the casement that gave the best view of the ork moon. The smog was thick this evening, but the glow of the sphere was still bright. It was visible through the cover as a sickly smear. Kubik assessed the chamber and Koorland’s position in it as symbolic. This had been Udin Macht Udo’s preferred chamber of governance. The empty table, the abandoned room – signifiers of necessary changes. The sight of the moon – a reminder of the need for those changes. Koorland was demonstrating political acumen.

He was also showing Kubik considerable courtesy in keeping the meeting private.

‘I have received the report of Magos Biologis Urquidex,’ Koorland said.

Kubik inclined his head slightly. ‘It is fortunate he survived the hostilities.’ As he spoke, he evaluated his reaction to his own words. A few hours earlier, he had been ready to order Urquidex’s immediate termination rather than allow him to release the secrets he knew. Now, he discovered that he was telling Koorland the truth. He was speaking without irony. He was glad the secret was out. Its weight had been greater than he supposed. This was surprising, and required finer parsing.

‘The Adeptus Mechanicus has been attempting to replicate the ork teleportation technology.’

‘This is so.’

He and Koorland were avoiding the greater subject. They were beginning with something trivial in comparison. The truth was so enormous, it had to be approached gradually.

‘And you have been successful?’ Koorland’s tone was neutral. Kubik would have expected anger and judgement. His estimation of the Space Marine grew by another notch.

‘We have,’ he said. ‘We transferred Phobos to the opposite position of its orbit.’

Koorland said nothing for a moment. ‘This is xenos technology,’ he observed.

‘It is.’ He tilted his head. ‘Would you have us discard this possible advantage? Are there means we should not employ to win this war?’

‘I’m glad to hear you are engaged in this battle, Fabricator General.’

And this was indeed so. It was as if there had been static interfering with Kubik’s perceptions. He had viewed the struggle against the orks as if it were a sideshow, one that concerned him and the Mechanicus only to the degree that it provided interesting and useful technology. The outcome had seemed irrelevant.

He had been wrong. The magnitude of his error was disturbing. It was contrary to his sense of identity that he should be capable of a miscalculation so gigantic and so blinkered.

‘The Adeptus Mechanicus has the same interest in the defeat of the orks as the rest of the Imperium,’ he said.

‘What do you hope to achieve with the teleporter?’ Koorland asked.

Kubik had been expecting this question. He had prepared his answer in the same instant he had given the order to release Urquidex into the custody of the Fists Exemplar.

‘The Phobos test is promising, but some considerable distance from the goal. The goal would be to use the weapon of the Veridi giganticus against them. We postulate it should be possible to teleport the battle moons away, possibly destroying them in the process.’

Koorland raised his eyebrows. ‘That is very promising.’

‘We are very far from this achievement. The mass of Phobos and the hostile bodies is not comparable, and the distance Phobos was transported was negligible.’

He was feeding Koorland a mixture of truth and outright lies. The limitations he described were accurate. The goal was not. There was no sign that the range of the device could reach beyond the near orbit of the astronomical body on which it was based. To teleport the ork moon away, it would be necessary to install the instrumentation on its surface. What had been constructed on Mars spanned many kilometres. To be used elsewhere, it would have to be transported in massive sections and rebuilt. Such a project would be difficult enough without being attempted in a warzone. And not only was the machine incomplete, it had not been duplicated. It must remain on Mars. Kubik would not compromise the means of the planet’s escape from the Sol System.

And yet.

He spoke the lies, and it was difficult to do so. He caught himself beginning to speculate about other possible uses for the technology, ones that did not involve the escape of Mars. He detected a sensation in his chest that had been so long unfamiliar to him that he did not recognise it at first.

It was regret. He was conflicted. The uncertainty was new, and distressing. Since his ascension from the limitations of the flesh, his being had been defined by a perfect focus and a precision of purpose. Now the phantoms of his shed humanity were reaching for him, summoned by Koorland and the fact that Kubik’s allegiance could not be reduced to Mars alone.

If Koorland doubted Kubik’s explanation about the teleporter, he gave no sign. He was more concerned with the other truth.

The time had come to speak of it.

‘Ullanor,’ Koorland said.

The word hung in the air like the toll of a great bell.

‘Yes,’ Kubik said.

‘The origin point of the greenskin invasion is Ullanor.’

‘Yes,’ and though he had known for some time, Kubik could manage no more. The truth punched though the protective coldness of the machine to the human core he retained. The world belonged to a realm other than mere reality. It was a legend. It marked the pinnacle of the Imperium’s glory, and the origins of its tragedy. It existed as a myth. It should not exist as a destination. And the thought of it being overrun by greenskins was beyond obscene. It was absurd, a fever dream.

‘There is no doubt?’

‘None.’

Kubik wished there were, and he knew Koorland did too.

Koorland sighed. ‘You must have known what we must do. Why keep that information secret?’

‘We keep secrets very well in the Adeptus Mechanicus. It is a vital skill. Necessity has made it into a way of life.’

‘You mean you are now secretive by instinct.’

‘Instinct is foreign to the machine,’ Kubik said. ‘It is more accurate to say that secrecy is our default condition.’

‘You have not yet answered my question.’

‘The secrecy was subject to ongoing evaluation. Revelation depended on many variables. The progress of efforts against the Veridi. Visible levels of determination within Imperial forces and leadership. The means to act.’ All of this was accurate, but there was more. The retreat into cold evaluation had also been an attempt to turn away from the import of the truth. ‘Query, Lord Commander – what will be the effect of the propagation of this knowledge?’

Koorland grimaced. ‘Turmoil,’ he said.

Kubik opened his right hand, spreading his multi-jointed fingers wide, suggesting the spread of disorder. ‘A site of such significance become home to the xenos invader. The populace will not receive the news calmly. Nor can one expect the information to remain within the circle of the High Lords.’

‘True,’ said Koorland.

‘I do not believe the rest of the Council will react well.’

‘You are correct. But there comes a point where secrecy serves no purpose. The truth must be confronted.’ Koorland gestured to the casement and the glow of the ork moon. The light of Terra’s fall spread over the roofs and spires of the Imperial Palace, a slick the colour of bleached bone, and of final defeat. ‘The truth confronts us, after all. Relentlessly.’ The Space Marine’s face twisted in hate and horror.

Kubik’s cool fascination with the base had crumbled. It can end us all, he thought. The Veridi can end everything.

Kubik inclined his head once more. ‘Do you have the determination to take the course of action this information dictates?’

‘I do.’

‘And the means?’

‘Not yet.’

Koorland thought about the means. He thought about the path he must walk. The thoughts were painful. They were reminders of what he had lost, of the burden he had shouldered, and of his own unworthiness and presumption. It was arrogance enough to put himself at the head of all the Imperial Fists Successor Chapters. The course upon which he was preparing to embark was sheer hubris.

But he had no choice.

He remained in the Cerebrium long after Kubik had departed and thought through his next steps. When he doubted, he looked out at the moon, and at the empty round table in the centre of the chamber: the adversary and the absent leadership. He was still there when word reached him over the vox that the Alcazar Remembered had returned and made low anchor over Terra.

Koorland made his way from the Cerebrium to the space port beyond the Daylight Wall. On his orders, the ceremonial purpose of the space port had been discarded. Reserving the facility for the most privileged dignitaries was pointless, now that orks had walked its rockcrete landing pads. Koorland was more interested in the time saved by having his officers reach him in the most efficient way possible.

The Thunderhawk Honour’s Spear touched down with a surge of retro thrusters. Thane pulled back the side door and jumped out. He had worked on his armour during the return from Mars, and it was clean again, shining in the arc lights of the space port. There had not been time yet to repair all the damage, though – it was pitted and scarred from the conflict at Pavonis Mons. Koorland eyed the marks of fire and thought: We have done this to each other. The Imperium fought itself. Are the orks laughing? They must be.

‘Chapter Master Koorland,’ Thane said when he reached Koorland. He crossed his arms, slamming his hands against his chest-plate in an aquila salute.

‘It’s good to see you, Chapter Master Thane,’ Koorland returned.

‘I had my doubts that we would meet again,’ said Thane.

‘Understandably.’

They walked back towards the Daylight Wall.

Thane said, ‘I wish the mission had resulted in information that was less grave.’

‘It is information that we can act upon. So we are better off than we were before.’

‘The Interdictor and its escort are still unaccounted for?’

‘As is the information they carry, yes.’ The Black Templars had learned something that could be used against the orks, but Koorland had to face the real possibility that the knowledge had been lost to battle or the warp.

Thane nodded. ‘There is something else I must tell you.’

‘Yes?’

‘I hesitated.’

‘When?’

‘Moments before the order for the ceasefire came. I was about to call down a full orbital bombardment.’

‘I’m grateful you did hesitate.’ Koorland spoke with feeling. It was important Thane believe him.

Thane seemed unconvinced. ‘The day was saved by chance. The battlefield conditions dictated immediate action. I did not take it.’

‘And you would feel you had done your duty, if we were left with nothing to salvage on Mars and a growing war with the Mechanicus?’

‘Of course not. But the principle remains.’

They walked down a vast colonnade, their boot steps echoing off marble. Above them, for hundreds of metres, were layers upon layers of galleries. Guards in the livery of the Lucifer Blacks stood to attention as they passed.

‘No son of Dorn should owe his victory to luck,’ Thane continued.

‘Perhaps not,’ said Koorland. ‘But it is mere chance that I am alive. It could easily have been one of my brothers. Or none of us. Your hesitation served us well. Relentless advance is not enough in the battlefield, you know this as well as I. Sometimes we have to listen to our instincts. The disorder of war demands that we adapt and improvise. I take it you doubt your fitness to be Chapter Master.’

Thane looked ahead stonily. ‘Perhaps.’

‘I think the complete absence of such doubts is simply arrogance.’

Now Thane’s lips creased in a grim smile. ‘High Marshal Bohemond would disagree.’

‘Quite possibly. The fact remains that you made the right decision, and averted a greater disaster. Accept your victories, brother. We need them.’

Thane nodded. Koorland wasn’t sure if he was convinced, but he seemed content to let the matter drop for the moment. ‘And what do we do with what we have discovered?’

‘We go to Ullanor.’

Thane’s intake of breath was sharp. He must have known what I would say, Koorland thought. Just as he had known what he would say in response to the question Thane was bound to ask. Speaking that sentence, though, giving voice to the thought, made him realise the immensity of what he was contemplating.

We go to Ullanor.

Those words should have been inconceivable. But so was the ork occupation of the world. And so Koorland had to confront an impossible reality with an impossible act.

‘If that is where these orks are coming from, we are not in a condition to bring the battle to them,’ said Thane.

‘I know. We can’t go alone.’

He said nothing else until they reached their destination. Outside the chamber of the astropathic choir, other warriors of the Last Wall waited. Daylight, Eternity, Absolution and Hemisphere – once of the Fists Exemplar, the Black Templars, the Crimson Fists and the Excoriators, now they saluted Koorland as their new Chapter Master. They were a union come to support the summoning of an even greater one.

‘Thank you for attending, brothers,’ he said. The words were inadequate, but there were none equal to the gratitude he felt. He had lost his Chapter, yet another, equally his, had come into being.

‘The step is necessary,’ Hemisphere said.

‘That won’t make it popular,’ said Koorland.

‘Ah,’ said Thane. ‘I see.’

‘Wait for me,’ Koorland said to the five Space Marines. Then he pulled open the bronze doors, and went inside to begin the impossible act.

The ork moon was in orbit over Tarentus, circling closer. Gravity storms shook the agri world. From the huge maw of the battle moon, greenskin landing ships poured in an unending cataract. They descended through Tarentus’ atmosphere, met from the ground with volleys of skyspear surface-to-air missiles launched by Hunter battle tanks. They were challenged in the air by flights of Xiphon interceptors. In the near orbit, the fleet hurled its fury at the moon. It was the largest gathering of Ultramarines vessels in the living memory of the brothers of the Chapter.

They were holding the ork invasion, but only just. Greenskins were making landfall, but they had not broken out into the wider regions yet. However, the gravitic effects of the moon were disrupting everything the Ultramarines threw at it. They had fought the orks to an eroding stalemate, and the orks had the numbers and resources on their side.

On the bridge of the battle-barge Caracalla, Chapter Master Odaenathus watched the sear and flame of the war through the oculus. His fists were closed tight. He was holding the thought of defeat at bay. Unless he was able to shift the conditions over Tarentus in dramatic fashion, the conclusion that faced him was unavoidable. There would be no surrender, but the fate of the Imperial Fists haunted his thoughts. The unthinkable had already transpired.

And the parchment in his right fist announced it was about to happen once more.

‘Chapter Master, I have Captain Macrinus for you,’ said the Master of the Vox.

‘Private feed,’ Odaenathus said. He stepped back from the rail overlooking the bridge, moving deeper into the strategium. He kept his eyes on the oculus as he tapped the bead at his gorget. ‘Brother-captain,’ he said, ‘you have heard the call from Terra.’

‘I have, Chapter Master, but I’m not sure my astropaths have interpreted it correctly. Ullanor?’

‘The reading of my choir is the same. There is no mistake. Captain Macrinus, you are ordered to disengage immediately and make course in the Chalcedon for Terra.’

Macrinus hesitated. ‘Can the situation here afford the loss of a strike cruiser?’

In answer, a gravitic stormwave struck the Caracalla. A fist shook the massive ship and the hull shrieked. The bridge yawed back and forth. The artificial gravity fought for stability in the violent flux, as mortal serfs and servitors fell from their seats, skidding across the deck. A small gravity blister appeared on the starboard wall. Metal domed and burst upwards, catching a servitor and tearing its body apart.

Odaenathus stood firm. He felt his ship’s pain, and he also felt its anger. ‘Shipmaster!’ he called.

‘Reversing course!’

‘Maintain fire,’ Odaenathus said. ‘Keep them busy taking down our ordnance. Some may yet get through.’ To Macrinus he said, ‘Your absence will be hard. But the Ultramarines were late coming to the aid of Terra once. It will never happen again.’

‘It will not,’ Macrinus agreed. ‘So ordered, Chapter Master. We leave for Terra. Courage and honour.’

‘Courage and honour, captain.’

The Caracalla groaned again as another wave hit. The departing strike cruiser left a gap in the barrage. The ork weapons reached through it, lashing at the fleet.

‘Take us back, shipmaster,’ said Odaenathus. ‘Pull back but keep hitting.’

Ullanor, he thought. The name sounded in his thoughts like a cathedral bell. The echo of history was a dark one. He hoped he was not listening to a death knell.

The Caracalla rang once more, struck as by the hammer of a god.

The Ultramarines. The Dark Angels. The Space Wolves. The Blood Angels. Koorland had called them all.

No, he thought. You did more than call. You summoned.

He was walking with Drakan Vangorich. After Koorland had spoken to the High Lords again, he and the Grand Master had climbed the seating tiers until they reached the gallery beneath the dome. Some of its columns had fallen. The floor was uneven and fissured, but its path around the circumference of the Great Chamber was still complete. No falls of rubble forced them to turn around.

‘I assume this is about the call to the other Chapters,’ Vangorich said.

‘Yes. I know you’ve been working hard to make the Council respond with something like sense to the crisis.’

‘You’ve seen what success I’ve had. None.’

‘You have an understanding of the problems, though. Of why there is no unity.’

Vangorich nodded. ‘Too many egos. Too many agendas. Too many leaders, and too many of them weak. Their weakness infects the whole. Everyone struggling for supremacy, even when the situation makes that struggle an act of madness, even when we all know better. You were right to unseat Udo. The Council needs a clear leader. You can see the benefit already. You brought Kubik around.’

‘And what happens when I am not here?’

‘A reversion to form.’ Vangorich sounded disgusted. ‘Your influence won’t last without your presence, I’m afraid. You’ll be leading the attack on Ullanor, of course?’

‘Of course,’ he said, the words sharp with doubt.

‘You don’t think you should?’

‘My position is already one based on great presumption. I pronounced myself leader of the united Successor Chapters of the Imperial Fists, declaring my right to command other armies when I am the only one of mine remaining. Now I propose to do the same for the sons of other primarchs. The overreach is stunning, isn’t it? And I don’t even know if the call will be answered.’

‘I think it will be.’ Vangorich paused. ‘Might I offer some advice?’

‘I’ll be pleased to hear it.’

‘Leadership is symbolic as much as anything else. You are not leading the united Successors despite being the last Imperial Fist. You are leading because you are the last.’

‘I doubt that will be enough to sway the Space Wolves.’

‘It won’t,’ said Vangorich. ‘You will have to grow your symbolic worth.’

‘Is that all?’ Koorland looked between the columns, at the vast space to the floor below. I am elevated beyond my station, he thought. He had sought to ease Thane’s doubts while his own had been gnawing at him with greater and greater force. He was not a politician. He belonged in the battlefield. And now he was proposing to invade a legend, at the head of a coalition he had no claim to command.

‘I know,’ said Vangorich. ‘Simple enough, isn’t it?’

Koorland grunted. He stopped walking. He gazed on the dais below. Twelve thrones, twelve competitions. He had, for the moment, beaten the High Lords’ attempts to co-opt him to their own ends. He wished he could say he had risen above them. He saw himself in one of the thrones, a small figure, dwarfed by the space of the Chamber, insignificant in the eyes of the colossal beings depicted in the fresco above him. ‘Thank you, Grand Master,’ he said to Vangorich. ‘What I have to do is clear.’

‘If not how to do so. I’m familiar with that burden. You have my sympathies and my hopes, Lord Commander.’ Vangorich walked away.

Lord Commander. The title grated each time he heard it. It was a grimy necessity. Chapter Master was better, even though it had come to him drenched in tragic irony. Master of a Chapter of one.

There was more than one, now. The Last Wall was a reality. The title did not fit as ill as it once had. He still doubted it would be enough.

Movement to his left. He turned his head. A shadow approached, then resolved itself as Lastan Veritus stepped into the light coming between the pillars from the Chamber. ‘I don’t have to ask if you overheard,’ Koorland said.

‘It is my duty to do so.’

Koorland bit back a retort. He would not give the inquisitor anything to use for his own purposes. ‘What do you want?’

‘I have made clear my concern that the attention given to the struggle against the orks is distracting us from the battle against the true enemy.’

‘Abundantly so.’ He controlled his temper. ‘I find it curious to consider a force capable of destroying an entire Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes a distraction.’

‘I have not come to argue. I concede that the ork occupation of Ullanor is troubling in the extreme. The threats may be more entwined than I suspected.’

Now Koorland fought to master his surprise at the conciliatory tone.

‘Ullanor,’ Veritus repeated. His ancient face creased in pain. ‘The gravity of this…’ He trailed off.

‘Words are inadequate,’ said Koorland.

‘They are. I agree with your course of action, Chapter Master. You were right to send the call. But you are planning to attack a myth.’

‘I am.’

‘Maintaining unity of purpose and of force will require leadership the equal of the task. Only a myth can conquer a myth.’

‘I am well aware that I am no myth. Do you propose to make me one?’

‘No.’

‘Then I fail to see the point of this conversation. There is no myth to lead us.’

‘You are wrong. There is one.’

‘Oh?’ Koorland was sceptical. ‘Does this myth have a name?’

‘He does. Vulkan.’

The dome of the Chamber began to spin. Koorland shifted his stance to steady himself. He looked up. There in the frozen image of the Great Crusade were the figures of the loyal primarchs. He saw Vulkan, hammer upraised. Reality was turning fluid. In his mind’s eye, Vulkan descended from the fresco, called into being by Veritus.

Ullanor. Vulkan. The names of a cataclysmic past. Names that had been legends for a millennium. But one already had re-emerged into lived history.

Koorland focused his gaze on Veritus with effort. By invoking myth, the old man seemed to have moved into its realm. He was less real, and more formidable. There were immense depths here, to be approached with extreme caution.

‘And where will I find him?’ He had no doubt Veritus would have an answer.

‘On Caldera. Fulfilling an ancient oath.’

Four

Across the Imperium, Caldera

The warp convulsed. It shrieked around the Sanguinem Ignis. An agony of non-matter and raging nightmare clawed at the strike cruiser’s Geller field. The immaterium attacked with the fury of a wounded beast and the integrity of the field cracked.

‘Translating!’ Shipmaster Laeca warned. ‘Brace, brace, brace!’

‘This is no Mandeville point,’ said Sergeant Marbas. He steadied himself against the port-side wall of the strategium.

Captain Valefor grasped the command pulpit. ‘The immaterium has had enough of us,’ he said. On the pict screens that surrounded the pulpit, the cascading runes were angry red. To try to understand the warp was to try to reason with madness. But in jagged brushstrokes the image was forming of a wound in the warp, and the Sanguinem Ignis was the target of the immaterium’s vengeance.

The translation was brutal. The vessel passed from the unreal to the material in a single, severing blow. Workstations across the bridge burst into flames. A shriek ran the length of the hull, an intertwined cry of the vessel, the warp and the void together. Another scream joined it, coming from the vox-casters, and Valefor knew it for the cry of the Navigator. He felt the jolt of the transition. The shadow of non-being slashed through him and was gone, as if a monomolecular blade had cut him in half, then healed him on the instant.

Reality settled. The scream faded. The bridge was filled with the cacophony of alarms, but there was deeper silence. The engines had stilled.

‘Damage!’ Valefor demanded.

‘Warp drive integrity intact,’ Laeca answered. ‘But power to the engines–’

She was cut off by the thunder of multiple impacts. They hammered the ship even as the auspex officer reported multiple hostiles.

The oculus snapped open. The pict screens adjusted to the new inputs, and Valefor saw what was coming for them.

The Sanguinem Ignis had translated in the wake of an ork attack moon. The greenskin base had suffered damage in its journey through the warp. A quarter of its southern hemisphere had been sheared away and an explosion like a solar prominence arced out of the wound. Molten fissures spread over the rest of the sphere. But it was still at war. Immense bays were open on all sides, and the ork fleet emerged in a swarm. Three cruisers were closing with the Blood Angels, their forward guns firing. The shells were huge, dense, and solid. Mass and velocity were all they needed to tear a vessel apart. The Sanguinem Ignis’ void shields flared in protest.

A second wave of cruisers was turning to follow the first. With them came a cloud of smaller vessels, insects zeroing in on carrion.

‘The enemy’s injuries are severe,’ said Marbas.

‘But its fleet is intact. Our fight is not here,’ Valefor said. ‘I want a retreat, shipmaster. Engines full. And recharge the warp drive. Gunners, weapons free on the nearest enemy vessel.’

The engines powered up anew. The deck began to vibrate once more as the strike cruiser began its turn. The view in the oculus shifted with majestic slowness. The blunt-prowed, brutal predators closed, their fire crossing paths with that of the Blood Angels. A cross-hatching of destruction lit the void.

‘The greenskins might repair that moon,’ Marbas said.

‘They might,’ Valefor agreed. ‘I know we stand a chance of destroying it, brother-sergeant. I also know the price we would pay.’

Ork shells pounded the starboard hull. A void shield collapsed.

‘Launch bay five destroyed,’ a servitor intoned.

The screen on Valefor’s right began to list casualty reports.

Marbas joined Valefor beside the pulpit. ‘We are paying a price now.’

‘I have no doubt we will pay more. Our duty is to reach Terra. Our sacrifices must be to that purpose. Sanguinius made his ultimate sacrifice there. Our duty and our tribute call us there in turn.’

The Sanguinem Ignis gathered momentum. Valefor eyed the pict screens. He felt the fires racing down the corridors as if his own veins were burning. We do not end here, he thought. Not here, in the void between systems, cut down by a wounded enemy, in an encounter with no strategic meaning.

Sacrifice must have meaning. Hope for more was a luxury the Blood Angels had banished long ago. But they would not accept less.

The oculus image adjusted as the Sanguinem Ignis turned its back on its pursuers. Its torpedoes punched through the prow of the lead cruiser. The massive head of the beast appeared to swallow the explosions. Metal swelled, and chain reaction blasts burst through plate dozens of metres thick. The front half of the ork vessel became a volcanic eruption. Its engines drove it onwards into its own conflagration. A roiling comet of plate and incandescent gas rushed forwards, as if it would catch the Blood Angels in its expanding death. The other cruisers sailed through the lethal corona. The smaller, lighter ships sped past the behemoths and raced ahead of the Sanguinem Ignis.

‘Forward perspective,’ Valefor ordered.

The oculus blinked, accepting the feed from the bow of the ship. The greenskins were establishing a cordon. Individually, the ships were no match for the Sanguinem Ignis. Together, they were a formidable barrier. Their guns unleashed a storm of fire. Brilliant, murderous day came to the void. The Blood Angels answered with a frontal bombardment. Ork ships were vaporised.

More replaced them.

The Sanguinem Ignis picked up speed. Guns firing on all sides, it plunged into the gauntlet.

The city was slag. It had once covered half the surface of the moon, a hundred million citizens working the forges of its manufactoria. They were dead now. Habs and industry were gone. There was only an iron cemetery, a field of twisted wreckage and molten shapes that stretched to the horizon. The forms were the death of metal. The ground crunched and rang beneath Asger Warfist’s steps. All was black, except for the grey rain of ash from the sky.

The northern half of Fabrikk was destroyed. There was nothing left here to fight over. But there had never been anything the orks wanted from the start. They had come to destroy. They had come to take the moon.

‘Is this what victory looks like?’ Hakon Icegrip asked the Wolf Lord.

‘I don’t care what it looks like. I care that the enemy never sees it.’

The war had shattered Fabrikk. It was barely more than a ruin orbiting its gas giant. There were still some viable settlements near the southern pole, but their output would never be more than a shadow of what had once been. It would take very little for what small population remained to abandon the moon.

They would not, though. Even if it took force, they would remain. Fabrikk’s true value was not the weapons and vehicles it produced, but its location. It was one of the systems ringing the Eye of Terror, a strategic base that could never fall from the Imperium’s grasp.

The Space Wolves would not allow it.

Asger brought his packs to a slag heap that had once been the lead manufactorium of Fabrikk. They could hear the tramp of feet and the rumble of ork vehicles on the other side. The hunt was almost over.

‘For Russ!’ Asger shouted.

‘For the Wolftime!’ the packs answered.

They stormed over the rise. They descended on the ork horde, and they were fury and claw. They were the wind of Fenris, slashing into the ork flanks. To the south, the gunship attack continued, driving the orks forwards. To the north, Predator cannons held them back. And now Asger cut the enemy in half.

The struggle had worn both forces down to ragged cores of rage. The attack moon in the region was two systems over, the target of multiple Great Companies. The invaders of Fabrikk had left the moon and come in a fleet of cruisers. Their numbers were huge, but they were not unlimited. The orks and the Space Wolves had pummelled each other with orbital bombardments. The front lines had raged back and forth over Fabrikk, until there was nothing left of the city and the forges. All that remained was the battered armies. And now it was time for one of them to be exterminated.

The orks welcomed the Wolves. The two forces clashed as if this was their first encounter. Savagery met savagery. Asger fired bursts from his bolt pistol in a wide arc as he charged, punching through plate and muscle, crippling and maiming the brutes closing with him. He followed up with the wolf claw on his right fist, slashing throats, disembowelling. The orks pressed in harder, trampling over the bodies of their dead. They were all massive, blunt weapons of muscle and bone. The entire campaign had been against these orks, the largest Asger had ever encountered. Many of them dwarfed him. None were faster. He equalled them in ferocity and surpassed them in hate.

At his sides, Grey Hunters tore into the xenos. Bolter and blade, bolter and blade, the alternating swipes of massive paws. The Space Wolves ripped apart the ork force. The greenskins turned inwards. They rushed to impale themselves on the claws of Asger’s attack.

The numbers and the size of the orks worked against them. Everywhere the Space Wolves fired, there was a target. The greenskins could not offer massed fire in return without decimating their own ranks. As the packs tore deeper and deeper into the phalanx, the outermost ork chieftains brought heavy weapons to bear regardless of the cost and the battlefield exploded. Asger moved through fountains of flame and shrapnel and bodies in fragments. He roared, charging faster through the enemy. Directions ceased to have meaning. There was only eruption and blood. He knew the pack moved with him. Information about lost brothers flashed before his retinal lenses. The acknowledgement of loss would come later. For now the deaths were a goad.

Fire in the air. Fire in Asger’s blood. He was a blur in armour. He was a maddened beast. His lips were pulled back, his teeth bared for the taste of the blood of prey. He smelled it through the filter of his battle-helm’s grille. He smelled butchery.

‘Yes, Brother Hakon!’ he yelled over the vox. ‘This is what victory looks like!’

More fire, cleansing, liquid flame, pouring over the orks. The Space Wolves maintained close formation, tightening it when they took casualties. They were a cohesive blade in the maelstrom of violence. Overhead, the gunships closed in, cannons raking the ground. Asger abandoned himself to the kill, his world reduced to the roar of engines, the smoke of burning flesh and vehicles, the crimson spray of severed arteries.

It ended. The blood ceased to spurt. The smoke began to clear. Thunderhawks came in for a landing, and their engines cut out. Asger stood with his brothers on a field that was as dead as it had been before the battle. When he walked, he stepped on bone as well as slag. Torn flesh was draped over the jagged stumps of foundations.

Now he processed the losses. He whispered the names of the fallen brothers. There were many, added to the even greater list taken by this campaign.

This skirmish.

Adrenaline and rage leaked away. His wounds throbbed. He registered the toll ork shells and blades had taken on his armour. Exhaustion pressed down on his shoulders with the weight of a mountain.

But there was also the message. It had been transmitted during the battle. There had been no time to listen to it. No time to hear the name.

Ullanor.

The packs gathered the wounded and the dead. They stood before him, awaiting the next deployment. Asger’s exhaustion was mirrored before him in every warrior, yet they were all ready. They knew what he knew. They knew this had been a skirmish.

‘Will we be rejoining the Great Wolf?’ Hakon asked.

‘No. He is sending us to Terra. We are called to gather there, and then to make for Ullanor.’

‘Our brothers need us,’ Kaden Stormtree protested.

‘I know they do,’ Asger said. The outcome of the battle against the attack moon was far from assured. The Great Wolf’s reluctance to issue the command was clear in the tone of the voxmission.

‘Is Terra so helpless?’ Hakon was disgusted.

‘Our duty is to answer the call, and our duty is doubled,’ said Kagen Direfrost. The Wolf Priest stepped forwards, then turned to face the Great Company. ‘The true call is to Ullanor. The spirits of too many of our brothers have fallen in the shadow of the times spawned on that world.’

‘Perhaps there,’ Asger said, ‘we will rip out the heart of the Beast.’

He was called away from the bridge. Adnachiel was surprised, but he kept his face neutral. The moment was a poor one to return to his quarters, but that was where the serf said he would receive the communication, and so the Master of the Fourth Battle Company of the Dark Angels nodded and strode from the bridge. The nod was mostly for the benefit of his brothers, assuring them that they would know what was necessary in due course.

Adnachiel’s quarters were monastic. The small chamber was dark, a single lumen globe shining on a desk in one corner. The rest of the space was empty, a place of black stone and meditation. He closed the iron door behind him, strode to the desk, and picked up the vox-unit. It was not linked to the company network. Instead, it had a single line that received transmissions only from other equivalent units on other ships. It was a means of dialogue between Company Masters, and only between them.

Adnachiel thought he knew whose voice he would hear. What surprised him was that he was not speaking to the Grand Master of the Deathwing from the bridge of the Herald of Night.

‘Master Adnachiel,’ said Sachael.

‘We are coming to your aid, Master Sachael. We are entering the asteroid belt now. We have your position marked. We will attack from the orks’ rear within the hour.’

‘No. Reverse course. Do not let the enemy detect you.’

‘I don’t understand.’ The battle-barge Reprisal had been cornered by a large ork fleet as it attempted to close with the attack moon nested in the Astorias Cloud. If the system had ever had planets, they were fragments now. The asteroid belt was wide and dense, and mineral-rich. Some of the planetoids were so near to one another that mining concerns had linked them with webs of plasteel, facilitating passage and arresting the chance of collision. The ork gravity weapons had turned Astorias into a killing field. Planetoids smashed into one another. Webs became lethal tethers, yanking the bodies together. The Reprisal had attempted to close with the ork station through the maze of Astorias, but it had been caught by the fleet while still on the far side of the system’s star. Sachael was holding, but trapped. He had called for aid. The Herald of Night had answered.

Now the answer was being refused.

‘We have new information,’ said Sachael. ‘Proceed to Terra. Answer the call for aid. There will be a joint operation.’

‘With whom?’

‘The request was sent to the Blood Angels, Ultramarines and Space Wolves as well as ourselves.’

‘The Space Wolves.’ Adnachiel liked what he was hearing less and less. ‘Terra,’ he continued. ‘The Inquisition could be involved in that appeal. Its agents are thick as maggots on a corpse on Terra.’

‘We are aware of this, Company Master. But we are called. We will not fail Terra a second time. There is more. The combined forces are destined for Ullanor.’

An ill omen. The past reaching out to the present to carve new wounds. Even so, Adnachiel understood now. Over and above the principles of honour, there was a mystery that could not be ignored. The past was danger and tragedy, but it must be confronted. ‘Is there evidence of any–’

Sachael cut him off. ‘We know nothing of that kind. All we know is that we are going to Ullanor, and this cannot be mere chance. Your vessel is not in combat. You must go.’

‘And you?’

‘We will survive, or we will not. That is not your concern.’

‘The sacrifice of my brothers is always my concern.’

‘Believe me, I have no intention of being such a sacrifice.’

‘I believe you, Grand Master.’

Sachael broke off. Just before the connection ended, Adnachiel heard the grumble of blasts in the background, and a sound like a heavy wind.

Fire.

He returned to the strategium. He gave the orders for the new course. And he told his command squad of their destination. None of his brothers said anything. There was no need. The significance of Ullanor was enough.

As the Herald of Night veered off from the Astorias Cloud, the Master of Auspex picked up inbound hostile squadrons. The strike cruiser had been detected.

Good, Adnachiel thought. If he had to fight his way out of the system, he might draw enough of the enemy to ensure there would be no sacrifice.

Not yet.

The Imperium came to Caldera. Koorland and the Last Wall were aboard the Alcazar Remembered with Thane’s veterans. Flanking the Adeptus Astartes vessel were two of the Imperial Navy’s grand cruisers, Absolute Decree and Finality. Their troop holds carried regiments of the Lucifer Blacks. There were other regiments too, patchwork commands made up of the remains of the Orion Watch, the Jupiter Storm, the Granite Myrmidons, the Auroran Rifles, and more. They were the reserves of the Imperial Guard regiments that had been left behind at the time of the Proletarian Crusade. Their comrades had died in humiliation and futility. Koorland’s mission offered the possibility of restored pride as well as the hope of a myth. The reserves still on Terra were little more than a token now. It would be up to the Imperial Navy, led by Lord High Admiral Lansung’s battleship Autocephalax Eternal, to hold off an invasion.

On the bridge of the Alcazar Remembered, Thane said, ‘Your thoughts appear troubling.’

‘I’m thinking about an attack in our absence.’

‘You don’t like the odds of the High Admiral fighting it off?’

‘Do you?’

Thane grimaced.

The Autocephalax had become a symbol of failure and tragically empty gestures. Imperial Navy reinforcements had arrived in force. Koorland respected the power of the vessels shielding Terra. But he knew what the orks could do.

There had been little time to make repairs to the Alcazar Remembered. The Decree and Finality bore scars too, as did their escorts. But there were many vessels in the fleet that were undamaged. They had come from Mars, a gigantic mobilisation ordered by Kubik. The scale had pleased Koorland, and also taken him aback. Kubik had been eager to send the Mechanicus to Caldera, and Koorland wondered if he should read a desire for redemption in the Fabricator General’s rush to cooperate.

Pict screens lit up with data on the enemy dispositions. The attack moon was visible in the oculus, surrounded by ork vessels except for the face it showed to the planet. Another large fleet was positioned some distance from the moon and was sending landing ships down. Koorland watched the distant flares of engines descending to the atmosphere. That, he thought, is what the process of infection looks like. He burned to purge the disease from Caldera.

We can’t, he reminded himself. Keep focused. We are here to find the myth. All this strength is so we can accomplish that single task.

‘Auspex,’ Thane called from the command pulpit, ‘any traffic from Caldera?’

‘It’s fragmentary, Chapter Master,’ said the officer. ‘Short bursts and lots of static. Nothing coherent, but there are attempts. The interference is severe.’

‘It would be,’ Koorland said. He was looking at what the moon was doing to the planet.

‘Yes,’ Thane agreed. ‘Is that what happened to Ardamantua?’

‘No. This is different. So is that moon.’ It looked misshapen, even by the crude standards of the greenskins. It was not a sphere. It was a thick crescent.

Thane ordered a magnification on the planet’s agony.

The moon lashed Caldera with gravity whips. The atmosphere below it was a boiling cauldron of red and black and grey. Huge masses emerged from the storm and rose towards the moon.

‘Are those mountains?’ Thane asked.

‘They might be,’ said Koorland. ‘They are now.’ He followed the flight of one of the rock formations. It slowed as it approached the moon, then merged with the larger body. Now the shape of the moon made sense. It was incomplete. The orks were building their battle station by yanking up chunks of Caldera’s crust.

‘If we could destroy it before its construction is complete…’ Thane muttered.

‘Yes,’ said Koorland. ‘If we could. If we would not expend our strength in doing so. Destroying that moon would be a diversion. One we had fallen into. It would do nothing for the wider war. It would not get us to Ullanor.’

‘Agreed. So where does the search begin?’

Koorland thought for a moment. Then he asked the auspex operator, ‘Is there any pattern to the traffic you are detecting?’

‘Most of it is concentrated near the capital, Laccolith.’

‘What are you thinking?’ Thane asked.

‘Orbital defences are down. The orks have a free hand here.’ He moved to the strategium table. It displayed a hololithic map of the eastern hemisphere of Caldera. ‘Laccolith is very close to being beneath the secondary ork fleet.’

Thane joined him. ‘But not directly.’

‘No, which is odd. And there are still signs of life, however slight.’

‘I’ve never known the greenskins to leave anything functioning in a population centre they attacked.’

‘Exactly. This is anomalous.’

‘And so as good a starting point as any,’ Thane concluded.

Koorland pointed to the ships launching the landings. ‘That is our target. Punch through and make our own landings, disabling the ork invasion in the process.’

‘That will buy us some time to search.’

‘So I hope.’

Koorland turned from the display to the oculus, and watched the orks steal the being of a world. The scale of the engineering feat was staggering. It was only right that a legend should exist on a world where the impossible was already at play.

‘Is this channel secure?’ Egon Broumis asked.

‘Yes,’ said Illaia Groth. ‘I’m taking this in my quarters.’ The captain of the Finality sat at her desk and watched the hololithic representation of her counterpart on the Absolute Decree. The image jumped and flickered, but she could read the worry on Broumis’ face well enough. He was a few years older than she was, but his greying, jowled features were misleading. He looked like a well-fed Administratum official. There was little to suggest he was the veteran of dozens of engagements, but Groth had served as his lieutenant before achieving her own command of the Finality. She knew what Broumis was worth. It was out of respect for him that she had consented to take this communication without the admiral’s knowledge.

‘What do you think of Rodolph?’ said Broumis.

Zdenek Rodolph, the admiral in command of the Imperial Navy fleet escorting the Adeptus Astartes mission to Caldera. Younger than either Broumis or Groth. The son of privilege and the ward of powerful connections, Lord High Admiral Lansung not least among them. He had reached his rank with less than a quarter of the field experience of the captains. And now he had been picked by Lansung to lead the Navy on this endeavour.

‘Too early to tell.’ Groth shared Broumis’ concern. ‘We haven’t seen him tested.’ She shrugged. ‘He knows his way around a bridge.’

‘I’m not reassured. This crucial mission is in the hands of an untried politician.’

Groth’s concern took another direction. ‘What are you thinking?’

Broumis hesitated. ‘That we may have to be prepared… to take extraordinary measures.’

‘That’s mutiny.’

Broumis shook his head. His image broke up, then re-formed. ‘That’s not my intention. But if he leads us to disaster, we have to be ready, even if we’re executed for the actions we take. This is too important.’

‘The decision isn’t ours to make.’

‘Do you trust the judgement of the people who did make it?’

Groth said nothing.

‘I’m not suggesting you walk onto the bridge and shoot him,’ said Broumis.

‘Good.’

Broumis sighed. ‘All I’m asking is that we remain watchful. That we act as the battle and the needs of the mission dictate.’

Groth looked off to the side. ‘I should be on the bridge.’

‘Will you think about what I said?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘That I can guarantee.’ She ended the communication before Broumis could ask her what she meant.

She would not have been able to answer.

The Imperial attack began with a single shot, long before the ork fleet came within conventional range. It was made by a weapon the battle-barge had been modified to contain. The hull of the Alcazar Remembered hummed as the coils of the weapon’s gravimetric impellers charged. The gun was the length of the ship. The projectile was the size of a Titan. The battle-barge’s enginarium corps struggled to maintain even a minimum of stable power to the ship’s vital sectors. The strength of the void shields dropped. Across the bridge, every pict screen except those at the weapons station went black. Aloysian was in the enginarium, appraising Thane of the ship’s condition second by second. The weapon would be dangerous to use if the Alcazar was undamaged. Firing it now was madness.

Everything about this war is madness, Koorland thought. If our acts must be too, let their madness be a grand one.

Even this weapon could not pierce the protection the orks generated around the moon. But their fleet was vulnerable. Any ship was vulnerable.

The hum became a tremor. A spine-knotting whine grew. Koorland felt the entire ship reduced to a single purpose. There was nothing but the gun, nothing but the shot.

‘Now,’ Thane said.

The nova cannon fired. As the shell travelled the length of the barrel, it accelerated to near the speed of light. Its kinetic energy built up to a level defying measure. It shot out of the Alcazar Remembered. At the moment of recoil, power failed across the ship for a full second. The bridge went dark. Koorland waited in the blackness, picturing the flight.

The hull groaned as the ship snapped back to its normal state. Power returned. Vox-casters sprang to life with competing damage reports.

In the oculus, a star screamed through void towards the orks. The Alcazar had fired less than a single light-minute away from the fleet but the greenskins had detected the arrival of the Imperial ships. Some of the cruisers were pulling out of low orbit to meet the challenge. However, the formation was still concentrated.

Devastation was an art. The timing of the warhead’s detonation was crucial. Caldera was in the line of fire, and the blast would devastate the surface if it went off too late. The nova cannon was not a weapon suited to precision.

Aloysian had taken charge of the arming. He promised accuracy. Thane trusted his judgement, so Koorland did too.

The star flashed into the centre of the ork fleet, and then there was light, the light of creation’s birth and death, the light of a pure and searing end. It filled the oculus. Filters shielded the bridge from its full power, and still Koorland’s lenses snapped shut. They opened again after a few moments, and the light had become the fury of a sun. The shockwave travelled back through the Caldera System, striking the approaching Imperial fleet. It hammered void shields. The Alcazar Remembered shook with the thrum of its passage.

The raging sun became a fireball thousands of kilometres in diameter. The light faded to red and its effects became visible. The ork vessels at the centre of the blast had vanished. Others were reduced to fragments. Giants tumbled through the void, dark shells lit only by the pulse of internal explosions. One cruiser seemed to be intact and still moving to engage the Imperial force. As Koorland watched, its bow and stern halves separated, drifting off into the darkness. Other ships still had power. They tried to escape the fireball, dying before they emerged from its reach.

The fire dissipated, leaving a dull glow behind. It backlit a cemetery of colliding fragments and massive tombs. There was no counting how many smaller ships had died.

It was a blow that had broken entire enemy navies. Here, it left behind an armada. Haloed by flame, venting gases, bristling with ballistic anger, the orks left the orbit of Caldera. They came on in a single, massive wave.

They encountered a storm of Imperial torpedoes launched in the wake of the nova cannon. The fleet from Terra formed a wide spear tip, leading with the Alcazar and the grand cruisers. The Mechanicus vessels spread out on either side. Lance and cannon fire streaked towards the orks. Even clustered, they covered a wider area. But the line had thinned.

The two forces closed, running into the teeth of each other’s weapons. Evasion was pointless. There was only the hope of shields standing up long enough for the spear to punch through the wave.

A massive ork battleship angled in on a direct collision course with the Alcazar. Its prow was a battering ram a thousand metres wide and three times as long. The Absolute Decree and the Finality joined their fire to the battle-barge’s. Lance fire, rockets and torpedoes struck the ram. The accumulated blasts wrapped the battleship in flame. It came on, now on course for a head-to-head collision with the Alcazar. The three great ships hit it with a fury that could turn hive cities into craters. The ram was solid metal, as dense as a single ingot.

Four Mechanicus vessels, faster but more lightly armoured, pulled ahead of the body of the fleet, flanking the ork ship. Batteries of eradicator beams sheared into the sides of the prow where it fused with the ram.

The barrage of the Imperial ships heated the ram red.

Escorting Brute ram ships, tiny beside the battleship, flew into the Mechanicus vessels. Ork and Imperial ships disappeared, their explosions washing over the leviathan.

Seconds before the collision, the centre of the ram turned white and split. Explosions rocked the battleships further to stern. The entire vessel seemed to swell before Koorland’s eyes, as if it were a monster taking a breath before consuming its prey.

The intake of breath never ended. The ship continued to expand, driven apart by the internal pressure. Incandescence outlined gigantic plates. The battleship turned into a dying roar of flame, and the Alcazar Remembered plunged into the furnace of its death. The oculus showed nothing but the inferno of an erupting, disintegrating war machine.

The battle-barge emerged. Before it now were only smaller enemy ships, which fell before the Alcazar’s withering fire. On the sides, the movements of the remaining ork ships became disordered as they tried to manoeuvre for a counter-attack. The vessels changed direction without coordination. There were collisions. Imperial broadsides punished the orks further. The fleet maintained formation, its salvoes a continuous, disciplined wave of devastation, radiating outwards. The greenskin vessels, already damaged by the nova cannon, came apart.

The armada disintegrated. It became small packs of minor predators.

‘The main body of the enemy is responding,’ said Thane.

Koorland checked the hololithic display. The lines of projected trajectories were reaching out from the position of the attack moon. Estimated velocities and points of intersection floated next to each line, adjusting every few seconds as new readings came in.

‘They won’t abandon the moon completely,’ said Koorland.

‘They won’t have to.’ The estimated number of ships kept climbing. Already the fleet was almost the size of the one the Imperial ships had decimated.

Koorland compared the estimated time of arrival of the enemy against the time to launch point. The difference was just enough. The Imperial forces would make planetfall before the void war was re-engaged. ‘All landing ships stand by,’ he said. He looked at Thane. ‘Vulkan awaits us.’

The spear had punctured the wave.

Five

Caldera – Laccolith

The city had suffered catastrophic damage. Many of its towers had fallen. Others canted, ready to topple, or leaned against smaller buildings. A pall of smoke hung over Laccolith. Entire districts had been gutted by flame. Rocket and artillery craters marked the city with the footsteps of monsters. The outer walls had been annihilated. Their traces remained as heaps of rubble dotting Laccolith’s perimeter. There was nothing shielding the city from the jungle, and saurian predators roamed the streets.

But the city was more than a shell. Koorland was amazed by what he found. There was still a population prepared to fight. The people had not been enslaved or exterminated to the last soul. They emerged as the Imperial forces established their staging ground in the eastern sector of the city.

The space port was a ruin. The control tower had taken a direct hit from an orbital strike, and where it had stood was the centre of a deep crater which occupied almost a third of the port’s area. A small fleet of lighters had been reduced to blackened, twisted corpses. The rockcrete landing zone was pitted with shell impacts and strewn with wreckage, but it had also been built to withstand the tectonic violence of the world. It was still a large, open, relatively level area. It would serve.

Koorland had his command tent set up at the edge of the crater, out of the way of the landers and manoeuvring vehicles. He and Thane met with General Marga Imren of the Lucifer Blacks and Tech-Priest Dominus Alquist Arouar. The Lucifer Blacks made up the largest contingent of the Astra Militarum cohort, giving Imren supreme authority over the combined Guard regiments. She was visibly uncomfortable in the presence of Arouar. There was little of the Adeptus Mechanicus leader that suggested he was human at all. His body was a collection of multi-jointed limbs and metallic tentacles. His silhouette defied the eye. It recalled an ancient avian, stooped, but moved with the floating, scuttling grace of the arachnid. In her dark uniform, Imren had the rigid posture and cold pride earned by the regiment that supplied the Imperial Palace’s honour guard. She was the human at its most disciplined. Arouar was the human at its most absent.

‘This position is barely defensible,’ Imren said.

She was right. Holding off the natural predators of Caldera was a simple matter. An ork attack would be something else again.

‘We are not here to defend Laccolith,’ Koorland said. ‘This is the point from which we launch our assault, and that will be as soon as we have a target.’

‘The strategy of the Veridi giganticus is puzzling,’ Arouar said. His voice box clicked and whistled with snatches of binharic. He was poised over the strategium table. It displayed a map of Laccolith, the surrounding region, and what had been recorded of the greenskins’ positions during the landings. ‘Their behaviour is anomalous.’

‘Everything about these orks is anomalous,’ said Thane. ‘That is their norm.’

‘Agreed. However, many of their non-normative actions are unusual because of their advanced technology, considered strategy and intelligent responses. Characteristics strange in the Veridi, but logical by any other sentient measure. The ambassador caste contradicts our understanding of the race, but not the conduct of war.’ His left arm unfolded. He spread his hand, telescoping its digits until they corresponded approximately to the various ork armies marked on the map. ‘Here I observe behaviour both anomalous and nonsensical. The Veridi have abandoned Caldera’s capital, its pillage incomplete. There are no significant population centres in the directions they are pursuing. There are no targets of strategic worth.’

Imren said, ‘They aren’t conquering the planet. They’re tearing it apart.’

‘But they must have had some reason to come down,’ Koorland mused.

‘The primarch?’ Thane asked.

‘I refuse to believe they knew about his presence here before we did.’

‘And yet Ullanor…’

Koorland shook his head. ‘Even so, that is a leap too far.’

Thane did not pursue the point.

‘I agree the supposition cannot be supported,’ Arouar continued. ‘I would suggest their presence on the surface of Caldera is connected to the use of the planet we have already observed. This is the first time we have seen the construction of an attack moon.’

Koorland found the speculation unsatisfying. ‘Even if Laccolith was a target of opportunity, why abandon it before they were finished with it?’

‘Quite.’ Arouar made a fist and spread his fingers, suggesting a purposeless radiation of the ork hordes.

‘Puzzling,’ said Imren. ‘Does it help us with our mission?’

‘I don’t know,’ Koorland admitted. ‘I won’t discount its significance, though. We should also speak with local survivors.’

He met with several of them a few minutes later. They were escorted onto the base by a squad of Lucifer Blacks, and waited outside the command tent. Their uniforms were almost as ragged as their bodies, patched with strips of leather and reinforced with scrap metal. The insignia of the Laccolith Defence Militia were still visible: two converging spears creating the silhouette of a volcano. One man had carved the lines into his forehead, wearing his pride on his flesh. They were young, but their faces were lined with the sudden age of brutal experience.

‘I salute you, citizens,’ Koorland told them. ‘You have resisted well. You are alive, and so is your city.’

‘Thank you, lord,’ the man with the carved forehead said.

‘How did you drive off the orks?’

‘We didn’t,’ said a woman. ‘We were saved.’

‘By whom?’

The mortals shared a look of religious awe.

‘We don’t know,’ the first man told Koorland. ‘We only saw him at a distance.’

‘He wore power armour,’ Koorland guessed.

Blank silence from the mortals.

Koorland tapped his chest-plate. ‘Like mine.’

They all nodded.

‘But greater,’ the woman said. ‘He is a giant. Taller even than you, lord. And he cannot die.’

More nods. More awed looks.

Curious, Koorland asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘He fought so many. He should have died. I saw an entire hab fall on him.’

‘A rocket landed where he was standing,’ the scarred man said.

Every one of them had witnessed these and other moments that would have meant death for any being who fell within these mortals’ conception of human.

‘He never died,’ the first woman said. ‘We all saw him die, and we were always wrong. He always returned. Never close to where we thought he’d died. Always somewhere else. In the end, he drew the greenskins away from us.’

‘They didn’t care about Laccolith anymore,’ said the scarred man. ‘They went after him. Their entire army.’

Koorland pictured Arouar’s hand gesture over the map. The illogical pattern now made sense. He thanked the group. They left to continue rebuilding Laccolith’s defences.

And if we find the primarch, Koorland thought, and we depart with him, what happens to these people?

He knew the answer. There would be no one guarding Laccolith. All of its walls had fallen. And as the orks sent more and more of the planet’s crust into orbit to join the attack moon, the point could very well come that volatile Caldera tore itself apart.

He turned around. Thane was a few steps away. His face mirrored Koorland’s thoughts.

‘We’re fighting to save the Imperium,’ Koorland said.

‘I know. I have to wonder when the sacrifices will be enough.’

‘They are all too great.’

The Finality’s starboard broadside took out the midsection of the ork cruiser as it turned to make a ramming charge at the Absolute Decree. Admiral Zdenek Rodolph savoured the moment. He saw the greenskin vessel’s own ammunition reserves trigger still larger explosions. The upper portion of the hull blew outwards. The ship continued on its trajectory, bleeding flame and wreckage, its shape distorted as if being devoured by a greater beast.

‘Come on, damn you,’ Rodolph muttered. ‘You know you’ve been killed. Die.’

The engines had been ruptured by the spreading catastrophe. They erupted now, swallowing the rest of the ship with light of their destruction.

Rodolph grinned. And then the proximity alert tocsins wailed. Captain Groth yelled, ‘Portside! Brace!’

All too late. An ork frigate in full disintegration slammed into the side of the Finality’s command structure. The impact hurled Rodolph over the command pulpit. He bounced off a workstation. His right arm snapped and he landed on the deck with his limb twisted at the elbow and folded beneath his body. Slabs of plasteel from the bridge’s vault plunged to the deck, crushing equipment and officers. Power flickered, then surged. Electrical fires started in the smashed stations.

‘Admiral!’ Groth called. She helped Rodolph to his feet. His breath hissed through clamped teeth as his arm swung loose.

‘Get me back up,’ he said. He coughed, breathing smoke and pain.

Groth led him back up the stairs to the pulpit. As she did, the auspex master warned of more vessels incoming.

‘Bring us above the Decree,’ Groth ordered. ‘We’ll shield each other.’

The edges of Rodolph’s vision greyed. The rhythm of the grand cruiser’s barrage was muffled. He tasted blood in his mouth. This was more than a broken arm.

Someone was giving a damage report, but he couldn’t make out the words.

‘Are we…’ he started to say.

‘Still in the fight, admiral,’ said Groth.

Rodolph leaned against the pulpit. He gripped the aquila’s wing with his left hand. ‘Get me Broumis,’ he said. The feel of the iron in his hand grounded him. His head spun, but he could think.

A moment later, the captain of the Absolute Decree was on the vox.

‘Our position is untenable, admiral,’ Broumis said. ‘The orks are…’ An explosion drowned his words.

Rodolph could guess the rest of the captain’s sentence. ‘Agreed. We’ve done our duty here. The forces have made planetfall.’

‘You can’t be calling a retreat,’ said Groth.

‘No. An attack. Set course for the ork moon.’

Broumis was silent for a moment. ‘Admiral,’ he began.

‘I understand the consequence of my order, captain.’

‘Understood.’

Rodolph exchanged a look with Groth. She nodded, and relayed the command.

On the oculus, a swarm of ork frigates closed in.

‘And if the forces on the planet find the primarch,’ Groth said, ‘how will they leave?’

‘If the fleet is destroyed in this location, they are no better off. We have to try to change the conditions of the war. At the very least, we’ll keep the ork fleet occupied.’

More ork torpedoes shot through the defensive fire. The void shields held, but the kinetic energy of the hits still translated through them into a shudder that rocked the Finality. Rodolph winced and kept his feet. He clutched the aquila hard enough to cut his palm. His blood ran down the wing. ‘Let me speak to the Alcazar,’ he said. His vision was blurring again. ‘Someone get me some stimms!’ he shouted. He would not go dark before the ship. He would not. He would–

He blinked, and Weylon Kale was on the vox. Rodolph shook his head, trying to clear it. A junior officer arrived with stimms. Rodolph downed them. His vision sharpened, but so did his awareness of troubling movement in his chest. He swallowed back another taste of blood, then told Kale what he had ordered. ‘The Alcazar Remembered is not under my authority, shipmaster,’ he said. ‘But I hope you see where necessity lies.’

‘You want us to pull out of formation and remain on station.’

‘Yes. I believe most or all of the greenskin fleet will follow us in defence of the moon.’

‘I do understand,’ said Kale, though his reluctance was clear. ‘The success of the mission is paramount.’

The approaching ork frigates were joined by more. The Finality and the Absolute Decree led the Imperial fleet towards a wall of ships.

‘It is,’ said Rodolph. ‘You have our thanks.’

‘We will add our fire to yours for as long as the conflict is in range.’

‘My hope is that that will not be for long.’

The fleet moved toward the jaws of the enemy, leaving the strength of the Alcazar Remembered behind.

Early afternoon.

The Storm Eagle Deathblow streaked over the Calderan landscape. Hemisphere flew just below the cloud cover. Koorland sat in the dorsal heavy bolter turret in place of a servitor. Below him was the jungle, its canopy torn by the huge wounds of the orks’ passage. He wished for more altitude, and the ability to see more territory at a glance. But the clouds pressed down, weighed by ash and smoke. Any higher, and he would see nothing at all.

A short while ago, in the command tent, Koorland had said, ‘They’re searching for their enemy. We have to find him before they do.’

‘How will we do that?’ Hemisphere had asked.

‘That’s the question. Let’s observe what we can of separate ork forces. I hope we’ll know what we are looking for when we see it.’

‘I hope you’ll forgive me, Chapter Master, but the thread of hope is a thin one.’

‘It’s all we have. The anomaly is promising, though, and consistent with the reports of the surviving militia. So take us to the orks, Hemisphere. We’ll begin with a lateral cut across the columns as we find them. I’ll let you know if any warrant a second pass.’

‘So ordered.’

Now Hemisphere flew in an outward arc towards the westernmost ork position. The greenskins were not hard to find. The swathe cut through the jungle by each horde was massive, and the force itself was visible from a great distance. First there was dirty smoke on the horizon, and then the shapes came into view: the silhouette of a walker, then the lower hulks of battlefortresses. Then the smaller tanks and trucks. And around the vehicles, the riot of the infantry. Hemisphere skirted the eastern edge of the horde. Its movement was confused. The path of destruction leading to this location followed a straight line, but now the march seemed to have stalled.

‘They don’t know where they’re going,’ Hemisphere said.

‘No, they don’t.’

The orks were milling about, direction lost. There was what looked like the beginnings of a shift to the north-east, but some of the army was still trying to push west.

The overflight of the Deathblow renewed the orks’ purpose. The gunship was outside the range of the infantry’s weapons, but they fired anyway. It was within the reach of the anti-aircraft guns. Solid ordnance and energy beams struck at it.

‘They’re no use to us,’ Koorland said. ‘Take us to the next.’

Hemisphere angled the Storm Eagle away, pushing the thrusters. The gunship left the orks behind long before the guns could take its measure.

Koorland thought about the confusion he had seen and what the militia soldiers had told him about Vulkan’s appearances in Laccolith. ‘The primarch was here,’ he said. ‘But no longer. They’ve lost their quarry.’

‘We should watch, then, for similar patterns of behaviour with the other cohorts,’ said Hemisphere.

‘Yes. As soon as you see that symptom, move on. No point in giving them a target. And we don’t know how much time we have. These armies won’t remain separate for long.’

Hemisphere flew east, angling towards the north as he picked up another swathe. The orks he and Koorland found were as confused as the first army. The gunship flashed over them, not slowing, the brief glance all Koorland needed. These orks reacted quickly. Some of the surface-to-air fire came very close.

‘They were expecting us,’ Hemisphere said.

‘Yes,’ said Koorland. ‘They’re communicating well. More of that damned coordination they’ve developed.’

They flew past two more armies. More confusion, more chaotic pulling in two directions. Koorland saw a new pattern. The tension in the hordes was always between whatever route they had been following initially, and the north-east.

‘They’re receiving reports they don’t know whether to believe,’ he said. ‘The evidence of their senses conflicts with the communications from the other groups.’

‘If this is Lord Vulkan’s doing,’ said Hemisphere, ‘the strategy is brilliant. He’s single-handedly divided the greenskins into multiple, smaller groups that have no idea where they’re going. I wish we knew how he was doing this.’

‘By being true to his myth,’ Koorland muttered.

‘I missed that, Chapter Master.’

‘Nothing, brother. I wish I knew too. But I think we know where we’re heading now.’

‘We do.’

The Deathblow flew north-east.

Ahead, the jungle thinned as the land rose. The land, fertilised by frequent falls of volcanic ash, gave way to the barrenness of hardened lava flows. Further north, Koorland saw two massive cones with smoke pouring from their peaks, lit by lightning and the angry red of molten rock. The next force of orks were between the gunship’s position and the two volcanoes, still in the jungle and striking directly towards the peaks. This was the largest horde so far. More warbands were arriving at the rear, perhaps groups that had broken off early from the other mobs. The movement here was assured and violent. Koorland saw a bright flash towards the head of the advance.

‘Brother Hemisphere,’ he said.

‘I saw it, Chapter Master. They’re fighting something.’

Hemisphere turned the Storm Eagle towards the north.

And flew straight into a massive anti-aircraft barrage.

The orks had been waiting for them. Charging forwards to attack their unseen target, racing ahead with the single-minded ferocity and speed of their race, they had still prepared for the Deathblow’s appearance.

Hemisphere threw the gunship into evasive turns and rolls. Koorland raked the ground below with the turret’s heavy bolters, and energy bolts lashed the grey late afternoon. A lightning storm reached up from the ground to surround the Storm Eagle. The orks had assembled a battery of energy cannons, and they had waited until Hemisphere had flown within the ring of cannons before opening fire.

Hemisphere vectored the thrusters downwards. The engines shrieked with strain as the gunship shot up and banked south. A crackling beam punched a hole through the centre of the port wing and the engine stuttered. Speed bled away and the gunship dropped. Hemisphere released the wing-mounted stormstrike missiles before the ork fire could blow them up.

The gunship spiralled downwards. Koorland saw the ragged jungle canopy rush towards them, spitting ordnance. His bolter fire felt like nothing more than symbolic defiance.

Hemisphere regained control of the Deathblow. The gunship levelled off and skimmed just above the trees, brushing them. A gale of leaves and broken branches surrounded it. The orks lowered their fire, but the ship had dropped faster than they could adjust their aim. Hemisphere stayed low, strafing the ground ahead with the twin-linked assault cannon. Koorland turned his guns the same way. They unleashed an annihilating barrage ahead of them. At this speed, at this proximity, the land and the ork army were a blur. There was no chance to aim. Koorland had a brief glimpse of artillery guns ahead, and then they blew up. The Deathblow streaked into a wall of burning plasma.

Then they were through the anti-aircraft ring. Hemisphere angled the ship up again, putting distance between it and the orks. Energy beams arced after them. A rocket screamed by the turret canopy and exploded just off the port wing. The blast wave buffeted the Storm Eagle. The engine stalled again, but Hemisphere kept control of the flight. He dipped the nose, sacrificing altitude for speed, then angled hard to port, and the ork fire went off to the side.

‘I’m satisfied we’ve found our target,’ Hemisphere said.

‘So am I.’ These orks were not marching or searching. They were at war. They had an enemy. Koorland opened a vox-channel to Thane. ‘We have our target. I’m sending you the coordinates. Begin the mobilisation now.’

The Imperial advance was rapid. The orks had paved the way, destroying the jungle as they advanced, flattening all obstacles. Adeptus Astartes, Astra Militarum and Mechanicus contingents moved north on the trail the enemy had left. In less than two hours, the smoke of their vehicles was in sight. Even so, Koorland wished for more speed. He had no proof Vulkan was battling the front lines of the greenskin column. And if the primarch was there, how long could the struggle continue?

He forced the questions aside, placing them with his doubts. There was a clear path of action open to him, so he took it. Since the disaster of Ardamantua, he had been faced with one hard decision after another. Each time, the choice had been clear. Each time, the outcome uncertain.

They all still were.

But now there was the immediacy of the mission, and the fury of an assault. And for the first time since Ardamantua, he had the prospect of seeing the orks bleed.

Koorland rode with a squad of the Last Wall in one of the Rhinos the Fists Exemplar had turned over for the company’s use. The transport was in the front line of the advance. He sat in the top hatch, watching the jungle ahead, tracking the progress of the combined effort of the Adeptus Astartes, the Astra Militarum and the Mechanicus. He was closing on the orks with the power to topple worlds.

He kept the assault force in a tight fist. He assumed the orks knew the attack was coming, so planned to render their information useless with a massive, overwhelming blow. The army advanced at the speed of its infantry. Gunships flew overwatch. Tanks held their fire until the last minute. Hemisphere took the Deathblow up again, maintaining a cautious distance until Koorland ordered the attack.

‘What can you see?’ Koorland asked him.

‘The rearguard is still moving forwards. The horde’s direction is unchanged from earlier.’

‘They aren’t turning to fight us?’

‘It seems not. Either they aren’t aware of our approach or they don’t care.’

‘Then it’s time they did.’

Still he waited, until he caught his first sight of the rearmost orks. He could not hear their snarls over the clanking roar of the Imperial transports and tanks, but he saw the ferocity in their movements. They were rushing to fight an enemy thousands of metres ahead of them, ignoring the one approaching from behind.

Koorland switched to the combat network. ‘Now!’ he said.

A new volcano erupted in the Calderan jungle. Its eruption was focused. Its devastation was controlled. It was a thing of metal and ceramite, of promethium and particle beams. It was flesh and machine. It was the fury of the Imperium come to punish the xenos.

The artillery barrage reached ahead of the rearguard. Predators, Whirlwinds, Dunecrawlers, Basilisks and Wyverns fired at once. Beams, mortars, rockets and shells struck the targeted region, and a second Imperial volcano erupted in answer to the first. The middle distance turned into a firestorm that rose to the clouds. Silhouetted fragments of ork bodies and vehicles tumbled through the flames. The thunder of the salvo was like the planet itself cracking in two.

As the tanks and artillery vehicles continued the bombardment, the infantry charged the rear of the ork column. Fists Exemplar and the Last Wall poured out of Rhinos and Land Raiders. Behind them came the skitarii and the Guard. Assault squads rode jump packs ahead of the main charge and came down in the midst of orks, between the walking barrage and the battering ram of the infantry.

I am Slaughter, Koorland thought. His wall-name had been stolen from him by that terrible voice over Ardamantua. Now he reclaimed it. He struck the orks with a wall of battle-brothers and a hurricane wind of mass-reactive shells. He had brought annihilation to the enemy. He had brought vengeance. ‘I am Slaughter!’ he shouted, his bolter on full burst, and he saw a measure of justice for his murdered brothers in the butchery he unleashed.

The Imperial advance was fast, but measured, disciplined. Las, shells, electrical arcs and plasma bolts hit the orks in an unbroken wave. The assault squads spread ripples of ruin and confusion. Hundreds of metres of the enemy column collapsed into anarchy. Wherever the orks turned, they were cut down. They fought back, but there was no coherence to their response. There was order only in the manner of their deaths. The infantry charged in conflicting directions. Trucks and warbikes were caught in the crush, unable to manoeuvre, their wheels spinning over the bodies of the fallen until rockets and grenades turned them into flaming coffins.

Further on, the massive shapes of two vast walkers bulked against the sky, higher than the flames. Gunships attacked them in squadrons. Flying through the anti-aircraft fire, the Imperial flights strafed the walkers with lascannons and heavy bolters. The walkers lumbered to retaliate. They brought their heavy weapons to bear on departing aircraft only to be hit from another flank by the next squadron. As the gunships passed the walkers, they looped back to launch missiles at the ork tanks.

Koorland felt the momentum of the campaign. It was a beast upon the land, tearing into its prey. It was also a mechanism of violence, crushing the enemy with implacable precision. Three branches of the Imperium’s might fought as one, their collective forming the sinews of the beast, the gears of the machine. This was the unity so absent in the Great Chamber. The competing agendas that had led to the madness on Mars were gone. The corrupt self-interest of the High Lords and the divisions they fostered threatened the Imperium as much as the orks. But here, now, the servants of the Emperor did their duty. In this moment, the fall of the greenskins seemed inevitable, no matter how far they evolved or how advanced their technology.

The stench of the war reached Koorland through his helmet grille, the humid mix of rotting vegetation, burnt fyceline and spilled blood. In the distance, barely audible over the clamour of the battle, the saurian carnivores of Caldera snarled their fury. They were displaced. Predators far worse than they were at war.

A battlewagon reared over the bodies of infantry. Smashing the living and the dead beneath its wheels and treads, it thundered towards the front line of the Last Wall. Koorland and Daylight ran at it, splitting left and right. Its gunner swung the cannon after Koorland. The shell exploded behind him, and then he was too close. Orks leaned out of hatches, hammering his armour with shots. He turned towards the vehicle’s front at the last second, leaping up to grab the top of its siege shield. He clung with one hand and threw a frag grenade through the driver’s slit in the armour. On the right, Daylight slapped a krak to the side.

The slit spat flame and the battlewagon veered wildly. Koorland jumped away from the shield as the krak grenade went off, melting through the rear treads and the hull. The vehicle’s fuel ignited and the blossom of fire lifted the back of the wagon as it slewed. It rolled, crushing the orks in its turrets. It became a tumbling mass of shredding metal and flame, killing the orks still in its path. The Last Wall parted to let it pass.

On the flanks, the Sydonian Dragoons moved up, racing forwards on their Ironstriders. The legs of their bipedal steeds were long enough that they could have stepped effortlessly over the heads of the enemy. Instead, they smashed greenskins down with each stride. The dragoons held their taser lances pointed low. With the Ironstriders moving at full gallop, the lances stitched lines of chained incinerations.

And the rifle fire was unstinting. There was no standing against the Imperial storm. The counter-charges were brief and shattered before they could begin. There was only one direction the orks could go. They took it.

They fled.

‘The enemy is in retreat,’ Koorland shouted. ‘Drive it into the ground!’

The Imperial machine pursued. The speed of the orks surprised Koorland. Even allowing for the gap in their ranks created by the artillery, they had seemed too densely packed.

‘Hemisphere,’ he voxed, ‘tell me what you see.’

It took a moment for the pilot to answer. Koorland heard him grunt and a background burst of energy. Further ahead, the orks were still lashing at the aircraft. ‘There’s a gap between the bulk of the horde and the struggle involving the front lines. I couldn’t see it before. I think they only slowed down when we began the assault. But they’re catching up quickly now.’

Unease gnawed at the edge of triumph. But the odd greenskin strategy changed nothing. Koorland led the pursuit without pause, chewing up the rear ranks of the enemy, the cannons pounding the centre of the horde.

The jungle thinned, then ended. The ground became rockier. The terrain sloped upwards, turning into craggy foothills in advance of the two volcanoes. The horde retreated even faster. The mounted mass abandoned the slower infantry. The orks fought to climb aboard the trucks and the tops of battlewagons. Bikes and overloaded vehicles roared up the slope. The gap between the two armies widened.

Unease became alarm.

‘Stop their flight!’ Koorland ordered. ‘Land Speeders to the fore. Dominus Arouar, we need your fastest troops!’

And Hemisphere was shouting in his ear. ‘They’re not retreating! They have camouflaged positions. They–’

A new thunder of cannons drowned Hemisphere out. The orks’ heavy tanks burst from their concealment. The walkers, damaged but still fighting, turned away from the harassing aircraft and aimed their massive guns downhill. From the heights, they dropped the sky down on the Imperial forces. Koorland heard the shriek of high-explosive shells, and then he was in the air, lifted off his feet as the ground hurtled skywards. His battle-brothers and the rest of the strike force vanished in the flare of crimson and coruscating green.

He landed on his back, cracking stone. He rolled and surged to his feet.

‘Force them back!’ he voxed. ‘Artillery, take out the tanks! Our cannons outnumber theirs.’

Through the smoke and blasts, he saw the Last Wall and the Fists Exemplar climbing with him. The formation was ragged, but the fire still constant.

And the ork infantry had stopped retreating. It was digging in, returning the Imperial salvoes with a vengeance.

‘Keep advancing,’ he heard Thane order the Fists Exemplar. ‘Keep the initiative.’

Wreckage everywhere: Ironstriders twisted and smoking, mortals turned into meat, their uniforms so burned and soaked in blood there was no identifying their regiment. Through the dead and through the meteor storm of the ork barrage, the Imperial forces advanced.

Keep the initiative.

We never had it, Koorland thought.

The shadow of Ardamantua fell on him. Though he marched up the slope, though he weathered the shots scoring and pitting his armour, though he led an attack that was still disciplined, still coherent, still powerful, he felt the sickening knowledge of imminent disaster.

It was Hemisphere who first saw what was coming. It was his voice that became the messenger of doom.

‘Chapter Master! Major ork forces closing from the east and west!’

Uphill, the ork cannons paused for a moment. Wind cleared the smoke, and Koorland could see the scale of the counter-attack.

No, not a counter-attack. A trap.

To the left and to the right, armies fully as large as the one to the north closed in.

An ocean of savagery came to drown the Imperial machine.

Six

Caldera – Laccolith

Smoke. Fire. Volcanic rock turned into a shrapnel whirlwind. Crashing waves of xenos muscle, blades and rifle fire. The slope caught in a hurricane of war. Directions becoming meaningless. The world disintegrating, reduced to the clamour of violent death. The vox a torrent from all the elements of the strike force.

‘Heavy weapons hitting us from the west…’

‘… the east, the east, the east…’

‘… suppressive fire on those tanks…’

‘… pushing us back…’

‘… maintain formation or I’ll shoot you myself…’

‘… consolidate Dunecrawler line…’

‘… lost…’

‘… close that gap, by the Throne, close–’

The screams of dying mortals. Chattering binharic dissolving into feedback whines. The grim calm of battle-brothers falling into sudden silence.

The choir of disaster.

The Last Wall closed ranks. The company became a ceramite barrier. Bolter shells and streams of flaming promethium slammed against the orks, exploding and incinerating flesh. At the northernmost tip of the Imperial advance, Koorland’s veterans held the ork infantry at bay.

‘They will not pass, Chapter Master,’ Eternity promised.

‘It is we who must pass,’ Koorland said. ‘Artillery,’ he voxed, ‘sustained fire to the north. All other forces, protect the artillery. We must advance!’ Their goal was almost in sight, beyond a few more ridges.

But the upper slope was hidden by ceaseless explosions. The fury of the Imperial guns thinned the ork infantry. The small-arms fire coming from the heights diminished. But the salvoes of the ork cannons were unceasing. Greenskin heavy support from the east and west now bombarded the slopes.

On the Imperial flanks, the ork infantry crashed against the Imperial forces. They broke the charge of the dragoons. Lumbering monsters in thick plate armour hurled their bulk against the legs of the Ironstriders. They toppled the steeds, then fell on the riders with power claws and killsaws, crushing metal, tearing flesh.

Skitarii could still bleed.

‘Gunships,’ Koorland called, ‘we need those artillery placements taken out.’

‘We are attacking,’ Hemisphere replied. ‘Their anti-aircraft fire is much stronger than we supposed. Two Xiphon interceptors and a Thunderhawk already lost.’

Koorland cursed. He marched forwards into the roiling flames. Overhead, eradicator beams lanced at the enemy as the Dunecrawlers manoeuvred through the Astra Militarum and skitarii infantry. The energy vanished into the maelstrom before him.

The Last Wall’s line advanced. The battle-brothers on the flanks held back the rampage of the ork infantry. Faster than they died, the greenskins kept coming, wave after wave. They ran over their dead and stormed through the explosions. In the brute savagery of the charge, Koorland saw a dual threat. Beyond the sheer power of the massed attack, it was also the reason humanity underestimated the greenskins again and again. This way of war was barely beyond the animal. It was what he would have expected of a pack of saurians. There was no way these savages could be capable of complex strategy.

No way they could have outwitted and outfought and humiliated the Imperium again and again.

No way they could have destroyed an entire Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes.

No way they could have trapped the strike force. Not when he had already witnessed their capabilities. Not when he knew better.

The taste of failure was bitter. The taste of shame was ash. Koorland swallowed them both. He gave himself to rage. He would not let the mission fail.

He marched into the vortex. There was no other option. There was no other path open. No choice.

He advanced as though will alone would defeat the reality before him.

It was like walking on the surface of a sun. Solid ground was an illusion. Koorland walked into eruption, into the kinetic fury of war embodied.

He was that fury too. He was the vengeance and the justice of the Imperial Fists. He was the Emperor’s war given flesh. He roared his challenge to the enemy.

The storm of war answered him with its greater voice. It mocked him. It hurled him back.

A cannon shell landed a few metres ahead. The blast knocked him to his knees. A volley followed, and everything before him vanished. The earth erupted, and he was tumbling through the flame. He landed hard. He slammed his fist into the slope, punching through rock to arrest his slide. He stood. On either side, his battle-brothers were recovering.

They had been pushed back down the hillside. The storm marched down towards them, eating the slope, a volcano opening its jaws to swallow the Last Wall.

Koorland’s retinal lenses were a riot of death and warnings. They were a single message. The way forwards was barred to him.

The stimms coursed through Rodolph’s bloodstream. They boosted his adrenaline. His eyes were clear. He could think. He’d taken several shots of painkillers and his body was distant to him, its pain merely information transmitted through heavy interference. He stood, but he did not know how long that would be possible. He was leaning against the pulpit, his left hand still locked around the aquila as if it had been soldered to the iron. His blood flowed from his palm. His breath rattled like stones in a canteen. His body was broken. He knew this. It would not last long.

‘Admiral,’ the medicae tried again.

‘I’m not interested, Feld.’

‘Without treatment–’

‘No time. Go be useful elsewhere. That’s an order.’

Plenty of wounded for Feld to tend. More all the time. Rodolph had tuned out the news of the Finality’s wounds and the casualties in the crew in the same way he had blocked the weakness of his body. All that mattered was the war outside. What mattered was what he and his cruiser could do.

The Finality and the Absolute Decree ploughed through the ork ships as through an ocean in full gale. The Imperial fleet was moving closer to the attack moon, but it was shedding ships. The two cruisers reinforced each other with their salvoes. There was never a pause in the barrage and the orks could not get close enough to ram, but their torpedoes took a toll. And the escorts were dying. The orks came at them in overwhelming numbers and picked them off one by one.

The upper right of the oculus flared. Just beyond its view, something had died.

‘The Protocol of Judgement is gone,’ said Groth.

Another of the Adeptus Mechanicus frigates. Half of the Martian fleet had been destroyed.

‘Admiral,’ voxed Broumis on the Absolute Decree. ‘There’s a gap in the enemy formations.’

Rodolph looked at the tacticarium screens. He saw what had drawn Broumis’ attention. Below the ecliptic and to starboard, only a single ork cruiser appeared. Rodolph exchanged a look with Groth.

‘Too easy,’ she said, but she had the oculus trained to that region. The greenskin vessel had taken severe hits. Its bow was cratered. One of its engines was dead. It had been left behind by its escort, which was closing with the destroyer Lord Commander Celadion. Beyond the ork cruiser was a clear run to the attack moon.

Inviting.

Three torpedoes shot through the defensive fire and struck the Finality in the stern. Rodolph felt the impact vibrate through the deck and travel up his spine. His knees sagged. As the void shields flickered, teetering on the edge of cascading failure, his body reached out for him and tried to drag him down into the mire of its pain.

He gritted his teeth. Groth was speaking. He forced himself to hear.

‘Negative,’ she was saying to Broumis. ‘The enemy concentration around us is too great. We can’t break through to that gap.’

‘I can.’

The Decree was running below the Finality, while the bulk of the ork fleet had risen above it.

‘We can make the run,’ Broumis said. ‘If you can hold them, we can smash that cruiser and reach the moon.’

‘The instant you try, the entire fleet will turn from us to you,’ Groth objected. ‘We’re only holding our own because we’re together. Divided, they’ll finish us.’

‘We’re finished anyway. What are we doing except delaying the inevitable by a short period? Our sacrifices will be in vain.’

‘Captain Broumis,’ Rodolph said. Speech was difficult. His tongue was as distant from his command as the rest of his body. Did Groth notice the delay between his thoughts and his actions?

He blinked the absurdity away. He dragged his palm over the aquila, pulling the wound open, jolting himself with another burst of pain. He would need more stimms soon. ‘Captain,’ he said again, ‘delay is the value of our sacrifice. The success of the mission will be decided on the surface of Caldera, not by what we do here.’

‘If we destroy the moon, we will be guaranteeing victory planetside.’

‘You’ll never get close enough,’ said Groth. ‘The gravity weapon will tear you apart.’

‘We’re already closer than should be possible. All of the weapon’s energies must be being used in the construction. The moon is vulnerable. Admiral, you must give the order.’

I will do no such thing, you insubordinate fool, Rodolph thought. When Groth turned to stare at him, he realised he hadn’t said the words. ‘I wuhhh…’ he said. His tongue was clumsy. It was too big. How could it fit into his mouth?

His left hand went numb. He could no longer feel the pulpit. He looked down. He saw his fingers open. He willed them closed. They disobeyed. His hand fell to his side. His knees folded. He slumped forwards. The eagle’s heads rushed to meet him. They cracked his skull. His vision filled with swarming dots of black.

Was he still falling?

No, the ship was shaking again. He was lying on the floor of the strategium. His ears were filled with lead, but he thought he heard Groth’s voice.

Yes, he did. She was bending over him, her lips were moving. She was shouting, first at him, then at someone else. Who would she be talking to?

Broumis?

Yes, Broumis. Who was doing something foolish. Who must…

Who must…

The swarming black covered his eyes. Deal with Broumis later. Perhaps he would sleep. But it was so cold.

Electronic shrieking. Those tocsins again. Not as loud as they were. That was good. Easier to sleep.

Sleep.

Then he was awake, gasping, adrenaline surging again, fire racing up his left arm and through the back of his neck. His heart hammered at his ribcage. He sat up fast. His temples throbbed.

Feld was kneeling beside him. ‘He’s back,’ the medicae said to Groth. ‘But I can’t give him another dose like that.’

‘You’ll dose me like that for as long as we have a ship,’ Rodolph snarled. He took Groth’s proffered hand and got to his feet.

The pict screen to the left of the aquila showed the dispositions of the fleet. The runes beside the representation of the Absolute Decree began to flash. The ship’s orientation was changing.

‘Broumis!’ Rodolph yelled. ‘Do not break formation!’

‘Your wounds are severe, admiral. You were unable to articulate your orders a few moments ago. You have been incapacitated, and are no longer able to command. By virtue of seniority, I am now the ranking officer in this fleet. I must take the actions that stand the best chance of leading to victory for the Imperium.’

‘You’re grandstanding, Broumis!’ said Groth. ‘There’s no glory to be had here!’

‘Hold them off us, captain. Those are your new orders. Keep their attention for as long as you can.’

‘Don’t be insane!’

‘He won’t listen,’ Rodolph said quietly. The runes on the screen kept changing. The angle between the two grand cruisers was growing. The Absolute Decree was pointing her bow down towards the ork vessel and the attack moon beyond. ‘No choice now,’ he told Groth. ‘Do as Broumis says.’ He was too exhausted to feel the rage that should be his. ‘Do what you can.’

He moved to one side of the pulpit, making room for Groth.

She stepped forwards. ‘Helm,’ she said, ‘make for the primary cluster of ships at fifteen degrees starboard. Weapons stations, concentrate fire on the lead cruiser.’

The vox clamoured for Rodolph’s attention. It was Princeps 4-Syndesi, commanding the Mechanicus ships. ‘Admiral Rodolph. We observe trajectory alterations. Please advise of tactical revisions.’

‘This is Illaia Groth,’ the captain answered. ‘I am speaking for the admiral. The Absolute Decree is proceeding alone. Form up on the Finality. Keep the enemy’s focus on our positions.’

‘Requesting elaboration. What is the purpose of the manoeuvre?’

‘To hold off disaster as best we can, princeps. Captain Broumis is proceeding against orders.’

‘Clarification accepted. Requesting our negative estimation of the approach be noted.’

Rodolph straightened. Groth let him lean forwards to answer. ‘Our estimation is the same.’

He leaned against the pulpit once more. He winced as the shell and torpedo hits became more numerous as the Absolute Decree put distance between the cruisers, making them both more vulnerable.

‘Hull breach in launch bay sigma,’ Groth said.

‘I don’t need to know,’ Rodolph gasped. ‘When we die, we die.’ He nodded at the oculus. ‘Show me what Broumis is doing.’

The orientation of the view changed. Most of the attacking ships vanished. The Absolute Decree appeared in the centre of the oculus, its engines flaring hot. Nearly eight thousand metres of war leviathan turned away from the fleet, almost twice the size of the ork cruiser coming to meet it. No other ork vessels joined the duel, and the struggle was a brief one. The Decree’s armament overwhelmed the orks’ guns and shield plating. Long before it could attempt to ram, the cruiser broke in half. Broumis kept up the barrage. The enemy ship disintegrated in a chain of plasma flares.

The path to the attack moon was clear.

‘Was he right?’ Rodolph wondered. He hadn’t doubted his decisions until now. But Broumis had far more experience. Rodolph’s strength was slipping away. Perhaps he was no longer fit to command.

‘No,’ said Groth. She widened her stance, standing firm against the hammering jolts to the bridge. ‘He was wrong.’

‘He’s getting through.’

‘The enemy’s mistake is too obvious.’

The Absolute Decree moved towards the moon. It picked up speed. All its batteries trained their fire on the target. On the surface of the moon, bright flowers blossomed.

Pinpricks.

‘Cyclonic torpedoes,’ Rodolph muttered.

As if Broumis had heard, two fateful streaks shot from the cruiser’s bow.

Rodolph held his breath. Now he hoped he and Groth were wrong. He hoped Broumis’ disobedience would save them all.

Groth was shaking her head.

‘Why not?’ Rodolph asked.

She pointed. Objects scattered throughout the near space of the moon glinted. ‘Orbital defences,’ Groth said.

A few moments later, a web of las-fire cut short the flight of the torpedoes.

More pinpricks from the Decree’s guns flickered on the surface of the moon, assaults so trivial they were ignored.

Broumis voxed them again. ‘I have ordered ramming speed. In the name of the Emperor, we surrender our lives.’

‘No!’ Groth called. ‘That won’t be enough to pierce the crust. Captain, turn around. It isn’t too late.’

‘The planetside face,’ Rodolph said. ‘The incomplete portion of the moon. It might be vulnerable.’

‘My thanks, admiral,’ said Broumis.

When Groth looked at him, Rodolph said, ‘It is too late.’ But perhaps there was a last chance to make Broumis’ gambit work.

The Absolute Decree accelerated. Its orientation changed again. Its bow began to turn towards Caldera, preparing for the swing around and into the target.

‘We can’t even see that face,’ Groth said.

‘We know what we can see is invulnerable. What else is left to try?’

She remained unconvinced. ‘You believe the ship can manoeuvre through that?’ She pointed at the huge masses of crust rising from Caldera. They were larger than the Decree.

‘What else is left?’ Rodolph repeated. The Finality was pummelled again. He heard a weapons officer confirm another ork vessel destroyed. Rodolph was in the midst of an end-game battle, but his awareness shrank to the oculus and the ponderous movements of the grand cruiser. Broumis had doomed them all. The war would end sooner because he had broken rank. All that mattered now was the tattered hope he had become.

The Absolute Decree moved closer, reaching a lower orbit than the moon. Broumis was in position to make the run at the unfinished region.

‘Why is he not being attacked?’ Groth asked.

Rodolph’s blood chilled. He would have liked to believe the space around the Decree was empty because the rest of the fleet had drawn the attention of all the enemy ships. But these orks did not make such monumental tactical errors. Not even the orbital defences were firing.

Not a single shot.

Only the moon, the Absolute Decree, and the void.

And the mountains. The flying mountains.

‘No,’ Rodolph whispered.

‘Why couldn’t we see?’ Groth said, agonised. She called to Broumis. She tried to warn him. Rodolph didn’t hear what she said. For him too, now, there was only the moon, the ship, the void. And the mountains.

It was, he realised, not a question of Broumis having to avoid the terrible masses.

The doom began in the form of a single pulse of light. A corona around the moon. The surface seemed to ripple, perception distorted by the intensity of the gravitic wave. An invisible hand grasped the rising chunk of Caldera. The rock was over twenty kilometres across, the size of a small planetoid. The grip whipped the mass away from the moon, and into the path of the Absolute Decree.

The cruiser’s orientation shifted once more. The movement was slow, minute, futile. There would be no evasion.

A mountain range smashed into the Absolute Decree. The cruiser shattered like glass. The fragments of its hull spread apart with awful grace, backlit by a billowing inferno. The warp drive erupted. Killing light filled the oculus, consuming the meteor. The shock wave travelled ahead of the hurtling fragments of ships and rock, washing over the fleets and moon. The Finality shuddered in the midst of holocaust. Rodolph saw the names of smaller ships vanish from the pict screen. After the light, darkness taking ally and foe alike.

But there were still so many orks. Even as ships collided with the wreckage of others, the armada kept attacking.

The darkness reached into the bridge of the Finality. It wrapped its fist around Rodolph’s head, squeezing, trying to force him into the night of despair and unconsciousness.

‘Keep fighting,’ he whispered. He clutched the aquila for strength. He clutched it for hope.

All he felt was cold iron.

Through the creeping dark of his pain, all he saw was the final approach of an enemy with the power of a god.

She almost didn’t see the battlewagon. A chance parting of the smoke, the luck of her glance to the east. The ork tank was some distance from her position. If not for the fires of burning vehicles, it would have been invisible in the falling night. But Imren saw it, and she saw the flash of its gun. Instinct said down. She dropped through the hatch of the Chimera.

A second later, the shell tore through the roof of the tank. It destroyed the turret. A burst of flame reached into the interior. Imren protected her head with her arms, and the sleeves of her uniform caught fire. She beat them out against the inner hull, blinked through pain and smoke. Her gunner was dead. The command table was shattered. But the Chimera was still moving.

‘Nissen!’ she called out. ‘Tell me it’s you driving!’

‘It is, general!’ Nissen shouted back from his compartment.

‘Do you still have vox capability?’ The equipment around her was ruined.

‘I do.’

‘Then you’ll relay my orders. For now, keep going.’

Imren grabbed the ragged edge of the roof and pulled herself up. She looked around at the state of the rout.

The Imperial forces were in full retreat. They had abandoned any thought of advancing. They were racing for Laccolith and the hell of urban warfare. There was no advantage to be gained, no siege to prepare, only the flight and the play for time.

This was wrong. All of it. She had come to Caldera to restore honour. She wished to repair the name of the Lucifer Blacks, guardian regiment of the heart of the Imperial Palace, battered by the eldar incursion and the brazen arrival of the ork ambassadors. Even more crucially, the pride of the Astra Militarum needed to be rebuilt after the disaster of the Proletarian Crusade. The mission to Caldera represented the first true hope for the Imperium since the start of the war.

A false hope, it now seemed. An illusion of perfect cruelty. The orks were invincible.

She looked forwards. Laccolith was somewhere ahead in the dark. It had to be close, but there was no illumination in the city. She would have little notice of its proximity until she crossed the remnants of its wall.

On all sides, the combined regiments raced through the shattered jungle. The retreat was a flight. The strategy was sound – the only course of action was to reach the urban battlefield ahead of the orks, seize it, and use the terrain to slow the enemy down. But the sense of the tactic did nothing to mitigate the humiliation. All she saw was defeat, the combined forces of the Emperor running for their lives from a triumphant, mocking foe.

The orks pressed in on either flank. The Imperials were using the cleared swathe of the jungle. The greenskins had to smash their way through the trees and dense vegetation again in an effort to keep up. They were doing well, scorching the earth with flamers, splintering trunks with the siege shields of tanks and trucks. The jungle slowed them just enough. Imren thought the strike force would reach the city in time.

Our only success will be to run from a fight, she thought.

Imren’s Chimera had been at the front of the Astra Militarum ranks during the advance. She was towards the rear during the retreat. The greater mass of infantry and vehicles streamed ahead of her. In the distance, she caught glimpses of heavy, reptilian bodies flashing in headlamp beams.

‘Nissen,’ she called. ‘What’s happening at the front?’

After a pause, the driver answered. ‘Saurian attacks, general. Packs of the beasts. They’re hitting the infantry.’

Caldera was turning on them, Imren thought. It was mocking their defeat.

Streams from the great river of the ork hordes stabbed into the ranks. The troops fought back, hitting the enemy with all the rage of savaged pride. The night around her was lit by the streaks of las and tracer fire. Three orks ran straight for the left side of the Chimera, grabbing the hull. The turret gone, Imren climbed up onto the rear portion of the roof, which had been spared the impact of the shell. She held on to a spike of twisted metal with her right hand and fired her plasma pistol into the upturned faces of the orks. She returned their snarls with her own, her hate as brutal as their joy. She burned the head off one. As it fell, it knocked one of its fellows off the hull. Both disappeared under the treads.

The third slashed at Imren with a machete. She reared back, lost her footing and fell. Her pistol clattered into the troop compartment. She kept her grip on the spike. Its jagged edges cut through the leather of her gloves. Her boots struggled to find a hold on the side of the hull.

The ork jumped on top of the Chimera. It crouched over her, grinning, its foetid breath making her eyes water. It raised the machete over its head.

Imren pulled on the spike with all her strength. She bent her arm and hauled herself up, grabbed the greenskin’s harness with her left hand, and dropped back. The sudden weight overbalanced the ork and it plunged forwards. The spike rammed through its eye and cracked out the back of its skull.

Imren climbed up the corpse. She pulled the head off the spike and pushed the body off the Chimera. She stood on the roof, her breath coming in growling heaves and looked out at the jungle, and the cauldron of struggle and flight. She saw the broken towers of Laccolith emerge from the darkness. She filled her lungs with the torrid air, with the fyceline-and-burnt-flesh stench of defeat, with all her despair and rage, and she roared.

The war answered back.

There was no line to hold in Laccolith. There was no keeping the orks out, or forcing them back. There was only the hope of bogging them down. To break up the concentration of the horde, and tangle them in the canyons of rockcrete.

A play for time. Nothing more. It wasn’t good enough. There was no end except a delay of extermination.

Koorland led the Last Wall down a narrow avenue. They had less than a minute’s lead on the orks. The artillery barrage of the city had already begun. A shell destroyed the upper portion of a hab on the right. The street filled with a cloud of powdered wall.

Marching beside him, Eternity said, ‘We can ambush them here.’

‘We keep moving,’ said Koorland. ‘We wait for word from Hemisphere.’

The word came when the Last Wall was deep into the dust cloud. And Hemisphere gave Koorland what he needed.

‘Chapter Master,’ the pilot voxed, ‘I managed another pass towards the target position. A portion of the ork army is still there.’

‘Did you see what they’re fighting?’

‘I couldn’t get near. Most of their anti-air is concentrated near that position.’

They really don’t want us to approach, Koorland thought. He opened a channel to the other commanders. ‘Our original target is still viable. The orks are using their full strength because they are desperate to prevent us from reaching it.’

‘They have been successful,’ said Arouar.

‘They have also given us the opportunity to turn that success into failure. They are following us into Laccolith.’

‘How does that help?’ Imren asked.

‘We must hold their army here while a small force makes an aerial insertion up the slope.’

Thane said, ‘The Thunderhawks will await you at the space port.’

‘We’ve defeated these orks before!’ Thane called to his company. ‘We won on Eidolica! Today, a delay is a victory.’

The Fists Exemplar had taken the main avenue cutting through the centre of Laccolith. It was the fastest route to the space port, and the most inviting path for a large force. The ork super-heavies were most likely to take this route, so the avenue was the one most important to deny to the enemy.

‘We don’t know the greenskins have any idea what Koorland is attempting,’ Aquino had said as they set up the ambush.

‘We don’t,’ Thane had agreed. ‘Should we underestimate them yet again?’

Now, Aloysian answered Thane’s shout. ‘Let the delay begin, Chapter Master.’

The Techmarine had worked fast. Under his supervision, it had taken less than five minutes to plant the demolition charges. The greenskin horde thundered down the avenue, lured by the harassing attacks of the Predators. The Adeptus Astartes tanks backed up, still firing, until they crossed the kill-zone. On either side of the street, the foundations of hab-blocks exploded.

Already weakened by the initial fighting in Laccolith, the towers collapsed, falling towards each other. They came down on the front ranks of the orks, crushing them beneath thousands of tonnes of rubble, filling the street with an avalanche of rockcrete and dust. The wall of wreckage was a dozen metres high. The assault squad landed on its peak and rained fire on the orks below. The rest of the company attacked from the structures on either side, trapping the greenskins in a lethal dead end. Gunships flew low on the avenue, raking the enemy with cannons and heavy bolters, missiles tearing into the greenskin tanks.

The orks stopped. The infantry began to pull back.

‘Do they think we’re stupid?’ Aquino voxed.

‘Keep hitting them,’ said Thane. ‘But keep a distance.’ He would not lead his men into a counter-ambush.

‘Only the infantry is pulling back,’ Aloysian said. ‘The heavy guns are moving forwards.’

At the end of the avenue, a walker and three battlefortresses advanced. Before the infantry was fully clear, they opened up. The barrage was monstrous. The Fists Exemplar pulled back as the street erupted, explosions hammering the avenue from a point fifty metres forward of the company, all the way to the barrier. Rockets slammed into the facades of the habs, bringing more buildings down. The collapses forced the Fists Exemplar into the open. Taking to the shelter of the craters, they maintained their fire on the enemy, but Thane could no longer see what effect, if any, they were having. He was shooting into explosions.

‘Pull back to the other side of the barrier,’ Thane ordered. ‘We’ll welcome them again there. Gunships, covering fire. Break this barrage.’

Aloysian slid into the same crater as Thane. ‘They’re concentrating their bombardment on the road.’

‘It’s working for them. They’re making it hard for us to move. Let them amuse themselves. At least they’re not advancing.’

‘If this is victory, it has a displeasing shape.’

‘Our victory conditions are the success of the mission.’ The truth of the words made them no less bitter. Aloysian was right. At this moment, the idea of locating the primarch felt abstract. Compounded humiliation was a reality.

Aloysian’s attention had shifted back to the orks’ tactics. ‘Why the road? The enemy has done nothing without reason.’

Thane looked behind. His battle-brothers were climbing over the rubble. ‘Let’s go,’ he said to Aloysian. ‘If they have a reason, it will do them no good in our absence.’

He made for the barrier, running through the barrage. On his left, Brasidas took a direct hit. The Space Marine vanished. The mist of his blood splashed against Thane’s helm. The ground shook with impacts. Fissures spread from crater to crater.

Too late Thane realised what the orks were doing.

With a massive tremor and a howl of shattering rock, the avenue gave way. It fell into the honeycomb of lava tunnels below. Weakened by the pounding of the bombardment, the tunnels collapsed too. The chain reaction spread. A gorge opened up, running through the centre of Laccolith. It swallowed the barrier. The ground vanished beneath Thane’s feet. The Fists Exemplar plunged into the depths.

Thane dropped twenty metres. He bounced off jagged ledges and landed on an uneven field of broken stone. The force of his fall punched through rock. He stood, servo-motors in his armour catching and whining. He looked up at the sheer walls surrounding the company. There was no sure route out.

He heard the bombardment stop. The rumble of engines replaced the roar of guns. The orks were closing in on the trap they had created.

The company drew together. Thane made for the tanks, but the fall had disabled the heavy armour. The tanks were immobilised. Even if they could manoeuvre, none could be extracted from the gorge except by airlift.

However, not all of the vehicles had been wholly destroyed in the fall. Some, at least, still had working guns.

‘Tactical squads,’ Thane voxed, ‘get to street level. Do what you can. Gunships, concentrate on the super-heavies. Hold them off. Destroy them if possible.’ He turned to his brothers. ‘We can fight or we can climb.’

‘Is that a choice?’ Kahagnis asked.

‘Not really.’ Unless they climbed, annihilation was inevitable.

He climbed on top of the nearest functioning turret. It belonged to the Predator Scion of Roma. ‘Let enough of us remain with the tanks to hold the enemy at bay. The rest of you, make for the far wall. Reach the top, then cover our retreat.’

His brothers rapped their fists against their chest-plates in salute and left. There were five guns that could be used. Venerable Brother Otho stayed as well: the Dreadnought could not climb, so he became the mobile artillery. The Whirlwind Citadel’s End could still move, and Aloysian took its controls with Scuris operating its rocket launcher. The bulk of the company retreated. The rear of the canyon was five hundred metres to the south. The collapse was deep, narrow and less than a kilometre long in total.

‘We are in a barrel,’ Aloysian voxed.

‘I know it,’ Thane replied.

The orks moved their super-heavies into position. The walker arrived first. It towered over the lip of the canyon. Its squat, conical shape having none of the majesty of the Titans. It was power embodied in its most brutal, savage form. In the excess of its massive cannon and the clusters of turrets, Thane nonetheless saw a mocking kind of genius. The behemoth was the ork spirit of war: crushing feet, crushing limbs, and crushing weaponry. Thane looked up from the perspective of the Imperium trampled beneath the boots of the greenskins.

Hatred fuelled his first shot.

The Predator’s shell exploded against the walker’s armour. The hit would have reduced battlements to powder. A crater smoked in the ork machine’s carapace. The beast’s cannon arm swung downwards as if the blow had meant nothing.

The gun barrel was as long as a Rhino. The shot was like a meteor impact. The shell struck the ground just ahead of Scion of Roma and the explosion lifted the front of the tank up, flipping the Predator onto its roof. Thane leapt from the turret in mid-arc. He landed and scrambled out of the way of its fall.

Thunderhawks and Xiphon interceptors strafed the ork machines. Secondary turrets on the walker retaliated, while the primary arms remained pointed down. The massive totemic head, its eyes lit crimson, appeared to gaze into the canyon, unperturbed by the aerial assaults. Imperial autocannon fire took out smaller tanks. The battlefortresses and the walker maintained their positions and the steady bombardment. Dense clusters of anti-aircraft fire reached for the gunships.

Scuris unleashed the Whirlwind’s battery of rockets, enveloping the head of the walker in flame. Its next shot went wild. As pulverised rock rained down on him, Thane pounded over the floor of the canyon. He jumped on top of Citadel’s End as Aloysian drove forwards. The Techmarine headed for the cliff nearest the orks, below the range of the walker’s cannon.

Battlefortresses and the smaller battlewagons arrived at the lip of the gorge. Infantry set up mortar positions and a deluge of fire fell upon the Fists Exemplar. The canyon became the boiling crater of a volcano. Identification runes flashed red and then black in Thane’s retinal lenses. More brothers dying. A double explosion to the rear was another tank, blown up by a direct hit from the walker’s huge cannon.

‘Brother Aquino, what is your progress?’ Thane voxed.

At the head of the battle-brothers climbing the south wall, Aquino said, ‘Halfway there, Chapter Master. They haven’t–’

Thunder and static howl cut him off. Electrical arcs fired across the gorge, stabbing at the vertical face. Thane heard the rumble of further rock falls. Another rune blinked and died.

Citadel’s End fired again, but this time Aloysian targeted the top of the cliff instead of the ork machines. He created his own avalanche. The walker rocked forwards as the ground fell away, but its operators moved one of its huge legs in a great dragging step backwards and it staggered away from the edge. One of the battlefortresses wasn’t fast enough. It pitched down, engine screaming, treads spinning uselessly as it fell. It turned on its side, then into a ponderous roll, hauled by its own tremendous mass. It fired again in mid-flight. The shell hit the cliff wall just above Citadel’s End. Aloysian reversed, jouncing the Whirlwind off boulders and a cloud of dust billowed over the tank.

Thane left the roof. He ran through the dust to the darker mass of the battlefortress. It had landed upright. The treads were destroyed and its wheels threw up sparks as they tried to find traction on rubble, but its three layered turrets rotated southwards. They roared. Thane stared straight ahead. He refused to acknowledge further losses. He would not permit them.

Behind him, Citadel’s End fired again, eating at the ground of the ork positions, forcing them back. An energy gun exploded, filling the night with an emerald glare.

Thane pulled a melta bomb from his belt and ducked beneath the lowest cannon, scrambled over the spiked cylinder the fortress used as a siege shield, and climbed its hull. Firing his bolt pistol through a viewing slit, he was rewarded with a whining snarl of pain. He slapped the melta bomb to the top cannon, the largest, where the barrel met the turret. Then he jumped to the ground in front of the tank, daring the greenskins to take their anger out on a single enemy.

They took the bait.

The melta bomb flared then ate through the turret and barrel. The gun fired, and the battlefortress self-immolated. Molten heat reached for Thane. Burning chunks of hull spun past him.

This was a much better shape of victory.

He turned back towards Citadel’s End. Even as he did, the orks settled into new positions and hit the canyon with another massive salvo.

‘Aquino!’ he shouted.

No answer.

He called again. Aquino answered, his voice tight with suppressed pain. ‘They’re blasting the cliff away from us, Chapter Master. Progress is slow. We are taking losses.’

‘I have faith in you, brother.’

But he didn’t in the situation. The orks were bringing forwards even more mortars, even more large guns. The foot soldiers lined the circumference of the gorge, shouting with laughter. Thane only saw them in glimpses between the eruptions and the flames. They were celebrants exulting over the pyre of their foe.

Thane would fight. Aloysian would fight. Aquino and the others would fight.

And they would die.

The vox scratched for his attention – a transmission on the wider command network. He caught up to the Whirlwind once more and opened the channel.

‘Tynora 7-Galliax,’ a mechanical voice said. ‘We are approaching your position, Chapter Master Thane.’

‘Your news is welcome, princeps.’

‘Our manoeuvre is thanks to yours, Chapter Master. The principal strength of the Veridi giganticus was drawn to you. The pressure on us was relieved. We come to return the favour.’

She spoke, and then new light tore the night. Blinding phosphor blasts illuminated the ork positions and burned the infantry. The perfect razor yellow of eradicator beams cut in from east and west, burning through the flanks of the enemy armour. Two battlewagons disintegrated. Their blasts took out the energy cannons nearby. The destruction spread.

‘All guns target the cliff top,’ Thane ordered.

Citadel’s End, Brother Otho and the immobilised Predators fired within seconds of each other. Concussive hammer blows tore a huge chunk of the ground away. The new avalanche stole the road surface from beneath the orks. The battlefortresses ceased fire as they reversed course, backing over the retreating infantry.

The walker took another step back. This time, it was too slow. The surface of the road collapsed beneath it. The walker plunged head-first, firing one more time as it dropped. The wild shell punched another crater behind Thane.

The canyon roared and echoed as the leviathan’s fall triggered another avalanche of rock and gravel. The monster came to a stop at the base of the canyon, half-buried by the slide. Its cannon arm was immobile. The left arm waved its gigantic saw. The blade buzzed in the air, hungry for targets. The body shook with internal explosions, but still lived.

‘Finish it,’ Thane ordered.

The guns of the Fists Exemplar lowered their aim. They fired as one, a choir of rage and vengeance. They targeted the head, which protruded well beyond the rock fall. The walker’s armour could not withstand such a concentrated assault, and the head blew apart. The devastated neck opened into an abyss of darkness and monstrous engineering. An inferno billowed out of the chasm as the machinery tore itself apart. The walker shook harder and harder as something vital and tremendously powerful was breached. Thane took cover behind a boulder.

The monster’s death shattered the night of the gorge, killing the dark with burning day. It pulverised the rock that had buried the walker. Stone shards flew across the canyon with hurricane velocity. They whined over Thane’s position like a swarm of insects.

Thane rose when the glow of the blast faded. Still more of the cliff face had collapsed. There was a slope now to the north. Too steep for Citadel’s End, but not, perhaps, for the Dreadnought.

‘Venerable Brother Otho,’ Thane called.

‘I am with you, Chapter Master.’

Aloysian and the other battle-brothers who had manned the guns left the vehicles. Together with Thane, they mounted the slope. When they reached the top, they found the rest of the company already engaged. In the midst of the broken city, the Fists Exemplar hammered the front ranks of the orks while the  Mechanicus attacked the flanks. The orks pulled back, infantry falling, vehicles destroyed. The battlefortresses were more powerful than any single one of the Imperial vehicles deployed on Caldera, but they were not invulnerable. A line of Kataphron Breachers closed with the fortress on the eastern side of the avenue. Their torsion cannons turned the matter of its armour against itself, three simultaneous hits tearing its flank open. Brother Scaevola launched a rocket through the gap. The battlefortress died, fire pouring from the viewing slits of its turrets.

The command network was a cacophony of voices. The heaviest ork force was before Thane, but the army was so massive it was fighting across the city. There was desperation in the communications from the Astra Militarum. The mortals were fighting building to building. They were being taken apart.

They are still serving, Thane told himself. They are slowing the enemy.

And here, now, in this sector of Laccolith, the orks were losing ground. This was no feigned retreat. The orks raged. They hurled themselves at the Imperials, but it was their turn to find themselves in the kill-zone. The street hampered the movement of their massed numbers. The fire from in front, from the sides and above broke each wave of assault.

Thane saw a real victory taking form.

And then the form changed, dissolved, became terrible. At the far end of the avenue, ork reinforcements arrived. More battlefortresses. Two walkers.

The earth shook with their approach.

Seven

Caldera – Beyond Torrens

The Thunderhawks Honour’s Spear and Triumph of Himalazia flew over the city. Koorland sat with Preco in the cockpit of Honour’s Spear. Through the viewing blocks, he had a disturbingly complete view of Laccolith’s agony. Rocket contrails, interlocking las-fire and explosions lit the night. The eroded skyline crumbled more with every second. The orks purged entrenched positions by razing entire regions. Preco avoided the walkers and the heaviest concentrations of enemy forces, and Koorland saw how much the manoeuvre cost him.

‘You believe you are abandoning your brothers,’ Koorland said.

‘I understand the importance of the mission.’

‘Your understanding has no bearing on your instincts, brother.’

‘No,’ Preco said after a minute. ‘It does not.’

‘You are not abandoning them. They are buying us the chance of victory. If we fought for them now, we would be throwing away their effort.’

‘Their sacrifice, you mean.’

‘Yes. Their sacrifice. A price your Chapter Master is willing to pay. If we are successful, I hope we will bring an end to the cost. Whatever happens, he has my thanks, as do you.’

Preco gave him a curt nod. ‘As I said, I understand the necessity of this course of action. It is still difficult.’

I know what it is to lose brothers, Koorland thought. He said nothing. His losses did not matter in this moment. It was important that Preco express his unease in leaving the field while his company fought. Important to acknowledge that pain, so the Exemplar could focus all the more keenly on the goal ahead.

Take us to the primarch, Koorland thought, and we will end this war.

The Thunderhawks climbed. The inferno of Laccolith dropped away. Preco swung around the worst of the struggles, and even then, crackling anti-aircraft energy slashed at the gunship.

‘They want us contained as badly as we wish to hold them,’ Koorland said.

‘A good sign,’ said Preco.

They left Laccolith behind. They flew east, then angled north as they approached a plateau. Fires guttered below. Koorland caught a glimpse of a ruined wall. Another settlement below, then, passed too quickly to tell if anything remained of it.

Preco used the twin volcanoes as beacons. Sporadic fire continued to track them from the jungle.

‘They’ve left sentries,’ Preco said, veering sharply to starboard as another gun targeted them. ‘Since when do orks stay behind when the main army moves?’

‘Since Ardamantua. Since these greenskins arose. Expect the worst always, brother. I’ve seen the worst, and I still underestimate their tactical acumen.’

Honour’s Spear and Triumph of Himalazia passed over the scarred jungle and onto the rocky terrain beyond. Ahead, the night raged. Gun and cannon fire. Bursts of flame. There was war there, on a smaller scale than in Laccolith. But no less brutal. No less desperate.

Koorland hoped the orks were as desperate as they seemed. The force left behind would have been enough on its own to take a militia-defended city. When the flames rose high, Koorland saw the silhouettes of tanks, the rush of warbikes. A large mass of infantry.

The Thunderhawks drew nearer. The confused actions of the orks became clear. There was no front line. There was no position they were attacking, and no opposing army. There were circular movements. The orks centred their attacks on a point, and the point kept moving. It cut slashes of destruction through the ork formations. Massive concussions, greater than any artillery shell, rippled out from that point.

‘Is that…?’ Preco began. He spoke softly, awed by something that could not yet be seen.

‘It must be,’ Koorland said, just as quiet. ‘That is where we must strike.’

‘We can’t land.’

‘We are prepared.’ Koorland had ordered the two squads of the Last Wall to equip jump packs. ‘Come in as close and low as you can. We’ve had enough of attacking them from the outside. This is the epicentre. The enemy has expended great effort to keep us from there. Let the orks’ defeat begin with that failure.’

Preco dropped the nose of the gunship. The black shapes of the foothills rushed in.

Koorland voxed orders to the troops in both Thunderhawks. ‘Open the side doors. We jump into the midst of the cauldron.’

A line of energy cannons opened up at the foot of the last slope. They put up a coruscating wall of destruction.

‘They really don’t want us here,’ Preco grunted. Beams cut into the port side of the hull. Honour’s Spear slewed away, engines howling as Preco strained against the controls.

Smoke entered the cockpit. Koorland blinked through the squad readouts on his lenses. The runes were steady green across the board. To port, the Triumph of Himalazia was too close to the barrage. With no room to evade, it flew straight through the beams. Flames haloed its engines. It was flying, but dropping fast.

Preco looped the Spear around and pummelled the ground with autocannon rounds. A bright flash on the ground created a narrow gap. Preco took it. The gunship flew through the curtain of anti-air fire. It shuddered violently in flight. Koorland watched the yoke buck in Preco’s hands.

‘How long can you stay aloft?’

‘For as long as necessary. You’ll have air support.’

‘My thanks again, Brother Preco,’ Koorland said. He pulled the door of the cockpit open and joined the squad for the leap.

The Last Wall plunged to earth. The two squads leapt from the Thunderhawks, jet packs streaking fire. Their bolters were on full burst all the way down. They cut orks down during their flight, and landed with the force of vengeance. Koorland shattered the spine of a greenskin warrior, the impact of his mass and velocity snapping the brute’s armour. He stomped on the struggling ork’s head, crushing it against jagged volcanic rock.

The Last Wall created a crater of flesh. The squads stood in a hole in the midst of the horde. The orks had been charging a few dozen metres to the north. For a moment, there was still a wall of xenos might between Koorland and the moving target. Confusion took hold as the orks came under attack from two points in their midst. Some of them turned to face the Last Wall. Others stayed focused on their first enemy.

For a moment.

A few seconds during which Koorland knew, but could not see, that he had reached his target. He knew what he was about to encounter, but the knowledge had no true weight. There was no visceral understanding. There could not be. He was still on one side of the barrier that separates belief in a legend from its experience.

He fired into the orks separating him from the legend. He and his brothers charged into the mass.

Koorland began to cross the barrier.

The moments passed. Belief met reality, and the shockwave killed dozens of orks.

Something struck a battlewagon. Koorland could see the upper portions of the hull from his position. There was the sound of a single blow and the vehicle stopped dead. The rear jerked upwards, as if the forward section had been driven into the ground. A concussion wave radiated outwards from the tank’s position. The battlewagon exploded. Orks flew through the air. Koorland staggered as the wave hit him, a sudden hurricane. The blow scythed the enemy before him.

The space ahead of the Last Wall was clear. Surrounded by bodies, lit by the flames of the burning tank, the legend was there.

Time stuttered. Koorland’s senses grappled with awe. His existence before his transformation into a Space Marine was a blank. The history of that earlier being was lost. So now, for the first time in his memory, he experienced what an unenhanced mortal felt at the sight of the Adeptus Astartes.

Vulkan was a colossus, more pillar than man. He was an icon carved of granite and night, immovable as a mountain, ferocious as lava. The deep green of his armour’s scales made him a reptile sprung from the dreams and fears of humanity’s past. The forged flames of its design made him the fire of a planet’s core. The skull of one beast adorned his shoulder guard. His cloak was the hide of another. He was a slayer of myth, and he was myth incarnate. His massive hammer pulsed and crackled with energy. Koorland could not imagine lifting it, never mind wielding it. He found it even more impossible to picture anything, be it ork, voidship or world, that could survive its strike.

It was all Koorland could do not to fall to his knees. He was not alone. He was surrounded by the stunned immobility of his battle-brothers.

They did not forget their training and leave themselves vulnerable to the enemy. They were frozen for the space of a single intake of breath, and the orks in their vicinity that still lived were incapacitated for much longer. But oh, the time of that breath stretched to infinity. Though Koorland had witnessed a moon open its jaws and roar, it was only now that he felt the true touch of the sublime. A breath, and his life was in a point of culmination. His existence was already divided into two irreconcilable halves by the destruction of the Imperial Fists. Now it broke in two again. This time, the far side of the crevasse was filled with the fiery light of glory.

The breath, and then war.

No words passed between Vulkan and the Last Wall. They would come later. Now there was the necessity of battle. Koorland looked up at the drake-helm and the infernal red of its lenses. Vulkan inclined his head in a nod. Then destruction came to the foothills of Caldera once more.

The orks closed in. They fought against a storm. The Last Wall formed a circle. They became a fist, a mailed gauntlet. The horde broke itself upon its spikes. Bolter shells punched through armour and flesh. Streams from flamers incinerated brutes who tried to close within melee distance. Monsters in piston-driven armour burned in their metal shells. They died standing, and became obstacles in the path of their kin.

Vulkan swung his hammer. Each blow was a meteor impact. The night flashed with the weapon’s wrath. The earth trembled before its power. Braced now, Koorland kept his footing. The orks struggled forwards but were swept back again and again, and each time their ranks thinned. The terrain itself began to change. The battle shattered hard ridges to dust. Rivers of blood poured over arid stone. The softer lines of broken bodies covered the jagged shapes of rock. The stench of death, burned and wet, reached through Koorland’s grille. His frame vibrated with the pounding beat of the hammer. His blood rejoiced, caught by the rhythm of righteous annihilation.

‘More!’ Vulkan bellowed at the orks. ‘Send more! Still more! Will you never be enough?’

The strength of twenty Space Marines and a single primarch shattered the orks’ assault. The force that had remained to fight Vulkan had contained him, but no more. The orks had been unable to achieve victory. Now they could not avoid defeat. As the infantry numbers diminished, the greenskins tried to conquer through swiftness. The vehicles had more room to move. They could pick up speed, or as much as the rough terrain would allow.

They died all the more quickly.

Squads of bikers roared by in strafing runs. Koorland and the Last Wall lowered their aim, stitching the sides of the bikes with shells. They blasted through wheels, exploded fuel tanks. They turned the bikes into somersaulting death traps. Rolling balls of steel and fire collided with other drivers. It was destruction built on destruction. Vulkan swung his hammer sideways. The blow went through a bike and its rider without stopping. The ork machine might have been made of air.

To Koorland’s astonishment, mortals joined in the fight. They were a small group, no more than a score. They wore ragged mining clothes and wielded lasrifles. They used the folds in the earth as cover, ducking down each time the hammer came down. They clutched the ground, weathering the wind and the shockwave, then popped up again to shoot at the orks. The few greenskins they brought down had no impact on the struggle. Their presence and their survival was a miracle. They fought for their planet when the only hope of victory lay in the hands of others.

They were a wonder.

Koorland looked at them with a kind of joy.

Four battlewagons circled the fight. Then they converged, riding over the ridges at such speed they almost overturned. Their turrets blazed at Vulkan. They were in each other’s line of fire, and stray shells fountained earth before them. Two of them were burning as they closed in. Koorland pulled a krak grenade from his belt. He turned his attention from the slaughtered infantry to assist, but the tanks were already there.

Vulkan disappeared in the nexus of shell bursts. The glare faded, revealing his massive form leaping at the nearest battlewagon. A mountain sailed through the air. He landed on the front of the tank and his boots drove through its armour. The vehicle veered to the left. Vulkan raised his hammer over his head with both hands and brought it down, crushing the upper turret. The shockwave made Koorland’s head ring. Metal cried in agony, and Vulkan was already charging at the next tank as the first exploded.

Koorland fought. He brought the enemy down. He was not distracted by Vulkan’s actions. Yet he bore witness. And afterwards, when he thought of the battle, he could barely remember his own role. There was room in his memories only for the sight of a primarch’s wrath.

Vulkan ran into a battlewagon at full speed. The impact halted the tank and its forward hull crumpled. The giant of myth took the vehicle apart with two blows, and their thunder was so huge, the ammunition blasts that followed were mere echoes.

The orks did not retreat. The last two battlewagons hurled themselves at the legend, and to oblivion. The legend was indestructible. The legend was bedrock and magma. He was tectonic strength and tectonic fury. Koorland had a vision of this world having given birth to its champion, of Caldera itself striking back at the orks in retaliation for the wounds it had suffered at their hands.

The storm passed. The enemy lay dead. The rounded, wide peak of the hill and the slopes on all sides were a vast open tomb. For the first time since the war began, Koorland looked upon defeated orks. The first small measure of justice for his slaughtered brothers had been exacted. Shattered and broken bones, all burned black, blended with each other in twists of pain. The flames in the corpses of vehicles burned low. Night returned, but not full dark. With the glare of war gone, a dimmer, more diffuse glow asserted itself. It came from the clouds. They reflected the glower from the craters of the volcanoes to the north.

And beyond them, much further, was the great bleeding of Caldera. The stolen crust still rose to the skies. At this distance, the huge masses were little more than angry red sparks falling upwards. But the light of their blood still reached this far.

The surviving mortals gathered behind Vulkan. There were fewer than when Koorland had first seen them. That any lived at all was almost beyond comprehension. They were an embodiment of hope.

Vulkan faced north. He removed his helm. His face was as dark as obsidian, hard as granite, noble as marble. His eyes were black with an anger more ferocious than the snarl of his helm. But when they turned to Koorland and the Last Wall, the anger was not for them. They were curious. And wary.

Koorland bowed low and dropped to one knee. So did all the brothers of the Last Wall.

‘Rise,’ Vulkan said, his voice deep as mountain roots. ‘I see the insignia of the Seventh Legion.’ He paused, frowning as if confused by the sight of the gathered warriors. Then he blinked. The frown passed as if the question had evaporated. ‘You are honoured sons of Dorn,’ he said.

Koorland stood.

‘I thank you for joining me in this struggle,’ said Vulkan. ‘Though I don’t imagine your presence is a coincidence.’

‘No, lord,’ Koorland answered. ‘We came in search of you.’

Vulkan cocked his head. ‘And you knew where to find me. I wonder how?’

‘Inquisitor Lastan Veritus told us where to look.’

‘Veritus.’ Vulkan spoke the name slowly. ‘I see.’ He looked thoughtful, not puzzled.

‘The Imperium has need of you, Lord Vulkan,’ Koorland said.

‘Does it.’ The primarch grunted. ‘I’m sure that is the belief.’ He raised his head, looking skywards as if he could see the stars. ‘I am doubtful. There will come a time when I must return.’ His voice was hollow. ‘There will come a war. This is not that time, or that war.’

‘Orks have stood in the Great Chamber of the Imperial Palace. An attack moon is in orbit over Terra. The worlds of the Imperium burn at the hands of an enemy who has made its home on Ullanor. If not now, if not for this war, then when?’

Vulkan’s eyes blazed. ‘Ullanor?’

Koorland nodded. He gestured to the warriors of the Last Wall. ‘Already, extreme measures have been necessary. The Successor Chapters to the Imperial Fists fight under a single command.’

‘Successor…’ Vulkan began. Again there was a moment of confusion, quickly dismissed. ‘Your command?’ he asked.

‘Yes. It is my burden and my honour as the last Imperial Fist.’

Vulkan’s eyes hardened. ‘Explain yourself.’

‘On Ardamantua, the orks exterminated my Chapter. Only I survived.’

Vulkan looked off into the distance. Koorland wondered what grim mysteries the primarch contemplated.

‘Ullanor,’ Vulkan said again. Deep beneath his calm, Koorland heard a stream of pain. The world’s name would be a more terrible echo of triumph turned to ashes for the primarch than for any other living human. ‘The Emperor destroyed the ork empire on that world.’ Though Vulkan spoke quietly, his voice still resonated through Koorland’s frame.

‘Now they have returned,’ Koorland said. ‘And threaten to destroy the Emperor’s work.’

Vulkan turned his attention to the other Space Marines. ‘Tell me who you are.’

‘We are the Last Wall,’ Eternity said. ‘We answered the call of Chapter Master Koorland. Terra will not fall on our watch, and the Imperial Fists will not vanish.’

‘So,’ Vulkan said to Koorland, ‘you maintain your charge, and rebuild that which has been shattered.’

‘I must.’

‘Yes. I have known your burden.’ He nodded to himself. ‘So. Tell me what you wish of me.’

‘Other Chapters are gathering on Terra as we speak.’ Koorland hoped that was true. ‘Lead us all to Ullanor. Under your command, we will destroy the Beast.’ He gestured to the Thunderhawks coming in to land. ‘We can depart immediately.’

‘No,’ said Vulkan.

Koorland tried to articulate a response. He had imagined not finding Vulkan. He had been forced to imagine the possibility of another defeat. He had not imagined the primarch’s refusal. His awe began to give way to anger.

Vulkan spoke again before Koorland could retort. ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘I accept Terra’s need. I will never turn from my duty to my Father. But my duty is here too.’ He raised his arm. He pointed north, to the distant pulse of a world being taken apart. ‘I will not abandon Caldera. I swore an oath to protect it, and that oath is a thousand years old.’

‘Lord Vulkan,’ Eternity said, ‘there is little time.’

‘There never is. That changes nothing.’

‘Will you sacrifice Terra for Caldera?’

Vulkan stared at Eternity. The fire of his gaze was cold, and as hard as judgement. He took a single step to the right, putting the mortals in Eternity’s direct line of sight. ‘You have seen the people of this world. You have seen them fight. You have seen their spirit. Will you abandon them?’

‘No,’ Koorland said. ‘We will not.’ The primarch was right. To abandon the spirit shown on Caldera to oblivion would be a crime. ‘We will fight for Caldera, and we will fight for Terra.’

Vulkan’s judgement turned his way, and Koorland experienced his second victory of the day.

‘Yes,’ Vulkan said. ‘I have seen the calculus of expediency. I have seen its cost. And its corruption. This world too is the Imperium. We will not save the Emperor’s work by consigning a portion of it to destruction. That is the wrong sort of sacrifice. One that is not for us to make.’

‘Lead us, lord,’ said Koorland. ‘We will follow.’

Sacrifice, Zerberyn thought. He stood in the librarium of the Dantalion. Around him were the chronicles of the Fists Exemplar. Tomes and parchment and data-slates reached back a millennium and more, to the very founding of the Chapter. Zerberyn was in the midst of recorded honour and pride, struggle and victory. And sacrifice.

He thought of the sacrifices he and his brothers had made over the centuries. He thought of their recent ones. And he thought of the sacrifice he had imposed on others. On other loyal servants of the Imperium. And upon its citizens.

He was before the great armourglass viewport of the librarium. It was a tall oval, reaching from deck to ceiling. The battle-barge’s position would have been a low-anchor orbit over Prax, if Prax still existed. Zerberyn gazed at the emptiness that was his work, the nothing that was his burnt offering upon the altar of victory.

My crime, he thought.

His chest burned with guilt and anger.

‘That is a lesson,’ said a hard voice. It grated like an iron door. It seemed to carry its own echo, as though there were two speakers, the second voice coming from within the first, slithering into the real from a squirming abyss.

Zerberyn looked over his shoulder as Kalkator walked down the central aisle of the librarium. The Iron Warrior stopped a few paces away.

‘You’re returning to your ship?’ Zerberyn ignored what Kalkator had said. It was too close to a thought he had had been struggling to repress.

‘We are. I believe we are of one mind on matters of immediate strategy.’

‘Yes.’ Kalkator and his command squad had come aboard after the death of Prax for joint planning. The short-term necessities were clear. The original purpose in coming to Prax had not been achieved. Both ships still needed repair.

‘I’m sure you have doubts.’

Zerberyn grunted. ‘You might say that.’

Doubts? How could he have anything but doubts? Unthinkable events were succeeding each other without pause. Traitor Space Marines walked the corridors of a vessel commanded by the sons of Dorn. They were not prisoners. They were not under guard. They had been invited, and they left freely.

And now the Fists Exemplar were going to follow the Traitors. Kalkator had made contact with an outpost under Iron Warriors control. Communications were fragmentary, but it appeared the planetoid had not yet come under ork attack. It was the best destination, despite a journey through the warp that would be longer than ideal, given the damage to the vessels. Kalkator said he could guarantee safe harbour for the Fists Exemplar. Zerberyn could not offer that from an Imperial base.

He wondered if even his ship alone could approach such a port with impunity. He thought not. Not now.

‘Are you questioning your choice?’ Kalkator asked.

‘Of our destination?’

‘No.’ Kalkator nodded to the viewport. ‘Of your actions.’

He should turn his back on the traitor. He should not answer at all. If he must answer, he should say No. Whatever that implied, at least it would not reveal indecision. Doubt. Weakness. Instead, he obeyed the spirit of the perverse, and he confided in Kalkator.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How could I not?’

To Zerberyn’s surprise, he was glad of his response.

‘Exactly,’ Kalkator said. ‘How could you not?’ His scarred lips parted in a grim smile. He was a gargoyle, and worse. Zerberyn had seen him fight. He knew the brutality that lurked within the Iron Warrior. But the smile was one of understanding. ‘What were your options?’ Kalkator continued. ‘Kill your allies, or leave the world to the orks.’

‘The choice was impossible.’

‘Yet you made the correct one. The orks have lost a world, along with resources and supplies.’

Zerberyn glanced at the absence of Prax. ‘The population…’ he began. He stopped when he heard Kalkator snort.

‘What of them? Are they better off dead than under the orks?’ It was clear Kalkator found Zerberyn’s expression of concern ridiculous. His logic, though, was sound. ‘Die quickly or slowly. Those were their options. You gave them mercy.’ He snorted. ‘They were weak and didn’t deserve it. You were generous.’

‘The choice was impossible,’ Zerberyn agreed, trying to quieten his doubts.

‘I believe you have a better understanding of us now, then.’

‘What do you mean?’

Kalkator’s smile turned bitter. ‘You should come aboard the Palimodes. Peruse our librarium. Enlighten yourself. Learn the history of the Fourth Legion. It is a chronicle of impossible choices and thankless wars. While the other Legions reaped the glory and the murals, we struggled in the mud. Again and again and again, the hard decisions and sacrifice. Always sacrifice. And for what? Tell me honestly. You just struck an important blow for the Imperium. Do you expect gratitude?’

The answer came easily. ‘No.’

‘Condemnation, perhaps?’

Again, no hesitation. ‘Yes.’ He had ordered the killing of loyal forces.

‘And were you wrong?’

‘No.’ To his shock, even this answer was easy. No, he was not wrong. There had not truly been a choice at all. He had done what the war had made necessary. His doubts became anger at the injustice of being condemned for preserving the Imperium.

‘No, you were not wrong,’ said Kalkator. ‘And neither were we, time after time after time, until we finally realised our sacrifices were meaningless.’ He seemed about to say something else. Instead, he shook his head. ‘I must return to the Palimodes. We will speak again.’

Kalkator left. Zerberyn watched him go, thinking of sacrifice, feeling his anger grow into rage. Just before Kalkator disappeared through the librarium door, Zerberyn thought he heard the Iron Warrior’s voice once more. He could not have, because the sound seemed to be at his shoulder. It was less than a whisper, and more profound than a shout. It was a single word.

Brother.

Eight

Caldera – The Ascia Rift

‘They need more time?’ He was bleeding. His ship was bleeding. Rodolph started to laugh. Pain ripped through his torso and he stopped. At least his vision cleared again.

Groth was in vox-contact with Weylon Kale. ‘Yes, admiral,’ she said. ‘The shipmaster has heard from Chapter Master Koorland. They have made contact with the primarch.’ While she spoke, she kept her eyes on the tacticarium screens and the oculus. Another Mechanicus ship exploded, taking an ork attack ship with it but leaving a gap in the Finality’s flanking escort. ‘Full fire starboard,’ Groth ordered.

Rodolph reached for the vox-unit. ‘Shipmaster Kale,’ he said, ‘why is the strike force not extracting?’

‘The campaign is not finished,’ Kale answered. ‘The primarch is leading an assault to take Caldera back from the orks.’

Impossible, Rodolph thought. He stopped himself before speaking. He realised he was confronting two different impossibilities in Kale’s words. Purging the world of this ork army was one. Before long, the greenskins would destroy what was left of the Imperial fleet. Then there would be nothing to prevent overwhelming reinforcements from reaching planetside. The second impossibility was the presence of Vulkan.

He has been found. Rodolph had believed in the necessity of the mission. He had not believed in its success.

Vulkan has been found.

The impossible was true. His duty, therefore, was simple. He looked at Groth, who was waiting for him to perform that duty. He had no doubt she would have him declared unfit if he did not. She would be right to do so.

‘Tell Chapter Master Koorland we fight until victory,’ Rodolph told Kale.

‘Gladly. The Emperor guide your hand, admiral.’

Rodolph straightened. His heart skipped and hammered, strained by the stimms, yet he felt stronger. He swallowed his blood, tasting iron, tasting determination.

An ork ram ship punched through the corvette Sainted Blade. The Blade’s midsection disintegrated, her remains exploding just as the greenskin vessel was leaving the corpse behind. The blast was too much for the ram ship’s weaker rear shielding. Explosions worked their way forwards along its hull. The ork ship maintained its course for the Finality’s superstructure even as it began to come apart. It streaked over the battleship’s stern and travelled over the hull, slowing but inexorable.

‘Raise the bow!’ Rodolph shouted.

There was no evasion possible. He had his choice of disasters. He sought the lesser one.

The Finality lifted. Rodolph watched the oculus. The movement was imperceptible at first. The ram ship ate up the distance to the superstructure. Too slow, the admiral thought. He braced for the fire and the end.

Visible movement. Graceful. Massive. So gradual. The ram ship’s flight was low, very low. The spires of the hull made contact with the belly of the ork vessel. That was enough. Its nose dropped. Barely more than a fireball of travelling metal, it came down onto the Finality’s hull, striking a few hundred metres from the base of the superstructure.

Rodolph held the command pulpit and leaned against it just before impact. He remained standing as the hammer blow resounded through the battleship. The depth of the tremors told him how deep the wound was. The oculus showed everything forward of the superstructure disappear in the expanding firestorm. Across the bridge, the dull voices of servitors overlapped as they called out damage reports. Groth, face grim, tapped at the tacticarium screens until a clear summary emerged. Rodolph watched the casualty figures hit the tens of thousands and keep climbing. Power was down across two-thirds of the ship. The void shields collapsed. For close to half a minute they remained down, and ork cannon shells opened more gaps in the armour. When they returned, the shields were at less than forty per cent of their strength.

A rent half a kilometre wide had been torn in the hull. Atmosphere poured into the void. Bulkheads could not seal. Amidships, the top ten decks vented completely.

Still the casualty numbers climbed. Vacuum killed some fires. Others kept spreading, finding more air to burn. Rank upon rank of weapon batteries went dead.

‘Steering?’ Rodolph asked.

‘We still have it,’ said Groth. ‘Barely.’

And he was still standing, breathing and thinking. Still commanding. Barely. That would suffice too.

‘Maintain course for the greenskins’ moon,’ Rodolph said. He took a rattling breath. He vowed he would remain conscious until his vessel’s dissolution. ‘Keep them worried.’

Laccolith groaned with war. It burned. It cried out to wrathful night.

The Fists Exemplar split up, racing along the sides of the avenue towards the walkers. The Mechanicus guns angled their beams towards the monsters’ heads. Along the rooftops of the buildings that still stood, and on the crests of rubble mounds, the skitarii gathered and attacked the ork infantry. The walkers fired to the left and right, bringing down more structures. The power of the ork machines was overwhelming. Yet there could be no retreat from them. There was only attack.

We fight for time, Thane told himself, conscious of how little remained to him. Each second is a victory.

Then the walkers stopped firing. They took a step back. Thane blinked. It was as if the leviathans were retreating before the Fists Exemplar.

‘Chapter Master…’ Aloysian said.

‘I know, brother.’

The walkers turned around. Footstep by thunderous footstep, they headed back down the grand avenue. Beyond them came the snarl of vehicle engines pushed to the limit. The infantry was on the run. The orks were leaving Laccolith faster than they had arrived.

‘How can this be a retreat?’ said Aloysian.

‘It isn’t.’ Thane understood. ‘They’re racing to stop the Last Wall.’

The Honour’s Spear and Triumph of Himalazia flew between the Ascia Rift’s guardian volcanoes. Lava flowed sullenly down the slopes of the peaks. Their eruptions were a slow, constant release of pressure, preventing greater cataclysm. Beyond them, the rift opened up. It was a canyon thousands of metres deep, and less than two thousand across at its widest point. The Ascia valley floor was bright with the light of xenos industry.

Koorland stood with Vulkan at the open side door of the Thunderhawk. His eyes widened as the gunships dropped lower and the details of the construction became clearer. ‘Have they done this only since the assault began?’

Vulkan nodded. ‘I would have known, otherwise. They must have used more troops here than in the invasion itself.’

‘Did they know you were here?’

The idea the orks knew more about the location of the primarch than did the Adeptus Astartes was appalling. He forced himself to ask it. He must not consider anything beyond the reach of this enemy.

‘Not before they arrived, I think. I was aware of something happening in this region first. Then the attack on Laccolith began.’

‘The invasion was a distraction?’

‘An effort to keep me from here, at the least. A successful one until now.’

Koorland felt the scale of the conflict and the tactics on Caldera sink in further. Millions of orks deployed to counter a single warrior. And the orks had known to do this.

‘Still lower,’ he voxed Preco. ‘Get their attention.’

The ork facility occupied the full width of the rift. It ran for dozens of kilometres north and south. Conduits, each ten metres thick, plunged into the bedrock and ran into power junctions the size of manufactoria. Chimneys rose half the height of the canyon. They spewed smoke and ash. Their mouths glowed red. Koorland stared. He pointed. ‘Are those chimneys doing what I think they are?’

‘Yes,’ Vulkan replied. ‘They are dagger wounds in the flesh of Caldera.’ His anger smouldered like the magmatic light from the chimneys. ‘The orks have pierced the crust. They are using the energy of this world to power its own destruction.’

Even more immense conduits ran from the junctions towards a towering central point in the distance. The grand nexus was twice again as big as the other structures. To Koorland’s eyes, it was simultaneously manufactorium and a single machine. Its conical form suggested the ork versions of the Titans, but many orders of magnitude larger. It had extrusions resembling arms, but instead of cannons, the articulations released energy one moment, and in the next fed the searing light back inside its metal walls.

Pulsing arteries of incandescent blue and green and white ran from the nexus and up the rift walls. Koorland followed them with his eyes. Lining the top of the canyon, at the end of each line of power, were flaring, arcing points. After some flashes, he could just make out the shapes of huge energy coils.

Everywhere he looked, he saw the generation and deployment of inconceivable force. The engineering violated any principles he knew, yet it worked.

‘What is this?’ he finally asked.

‘The means of murder,’ Vulkan said. ‘Power is created and controlled here. It flows north.’

Koorland understood. ‘This is part of their gravity weapon.’

It was how the orks were taking Caldera apart and sending its pieces up to become part of the attack moon. The technology required a planetside base as well as the device used on the orbital base. The orks were not simply lashing the planet with their gravitic whips. They were controlling the ascent of the masses.

‘You will doubtless see more evidence of the crime further to the north,’ said Vulkan.

The passage of the two Thunderhawks was rapid, and it took several seconds for the orks to react. Turrets sprang to life across the installation. Vehicles and troops mobilised in the spaces between structures and conduits. Preco dared the fire and took the Honour’s Spear even lower, flying between chimneys. The anti-air fire was cautious by ork standards. They were taking care not to destroy their great machine.

It was moments later, with the nexus looming closer, that Koorland learned just how fast the orks were reacting to the incursion. Thane contacted him on the command network. ‘The orks are pulling out of Laccolith,’ he said. ‘They’re heading back north at full speed.’

‘Good,’ said Koorland. ‘They’re afraid of what we’ll do.’ The huge moves of the game were occurring once more. An entire army mobilising to deal with two aircraft. At last, the Imperium had the initiative in the war, forcing the orks into a reactive mode.

‘We are in pursuit,’ said Thane.

‘Good.’ Koorland relayed the news to Vulkan, then contacted Arouar. He described the installation.

‘Impressive,’ the tech-priest dominus said. ‘The possibilities it offers are considerable.’

‘Not for data collection,’ said Koorland. ‘The only focus here is the pursuit of victory. I hope there is no chance for misunderstanding.’

There was a slight pause. Then Arouar said, ‘None.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Any contribution the Mechanicus can make would be welcome.’

There was no pause this time. Koorland thought Arouar was speaking more quickly, the pace of his inflectionless words increasing with excitement. ‘We are a long way from having mastered the gravitic technology of the Veridi giganticus. Nonetheless, we know enough for me to hypothesise an intervention. It is the primarch’s purpose to break the Veridi control over the weapon?’

‘It is.’

‘Then I urge you, Lord Commander, not to destroy the installation itself. We will attempt a field experiment.’

‘Thank you, dominus. I know you will reward our trust.’

‘We will, Lord Commander.’

The nexus loomed closer, a hulk of dark metal, furnace blasts of flame, and explosive energy. The Thunderhawks came in even lower, below the range of movement of many of the turrets. They angled away from the front of the nexus, heading for the eastern edge of the installation, then turned north again just before the cliffs.

Vulkan looked at Koorland. ‘Fight well, son of Dorn,’ he said. ‘Your actions honour his name, and I will tell him so.’ He stepped out of the door before Koorland could ask him what he meant.

The primarch dropped into the night, a dark meteor of noble wrath.

Vulkan hit the earth fifty metres from the nearest conduit. He was in the darkness outside the installation, and the searchlights were all trained on the departing gunships. The rumble of industry and the bedrock groans it elicited from Caldera had covered the sound of his impact. He crouched in the small crater of his landing, motionless as a boulder, and waited. The conduits rose from the rock for twenty metres, then ran straight into the nexus. Its near wall was half a kilometre away. He caught glimpses of the ork forces mobilising for its defence as they passed underneath the conduits. Their numbers were difficult to gauge from his position, but he knew they would be high, and the physical defences of the nexus would be considerable. The orks had devastated a continent to keep him from the rift. The most sensitive point in the canyon would be protected like nothing else in the system except the attack moon itself.

The Thunderhawks passed from his sight. The wait stretched. Vulkan was patient. He could wait centuries for the fated moment of action. On this night, though, he felt the impatience of anger. The moment of Caldera’s salvation approached, but still the planet bled, still the monstrous act of engineering continued.

But it ends tonight. Let that suffice for now. And it did. He must wait for the necessary turn of the war, and so he would. He found his way back to calm through his anger. He had much practice in this. Necessary calm was forged and tempered as surely as any weapon, and hardened into cold, unbreakable steel.

Over the centuries, Vulkan had not been unaware of the currents at work in the Imperium. The divisions, the corruption, the Emperor’s dream turning black with ash. Vulkan’s disgust vied for pre-eminence with his grief. When Terra called for help, it was hard for him to hear his Father’s voice. He heard the cries of politicians, of petty connivers and their toxic power games.

Father, don’t you see what is happening? Why do you do nothing?

But the orks had returned to Ullanor. That was grave beyond the comprehension of any Terran mortal.

Then there was Koorland. In his voice, Vulkan heard something better than the squalling of the High Lords. He did hear the echo of his Father, in Koorland’s absolute allegiance to preserving the work of the Emperor. The last Imperial Fist had come to Caldera at the head of a force that united Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes, the Mechanicus and the Imperial Guard. There was unity of purpose, and commitment to that purpose. And Koorland was capable of seeing that this purpose extended beyond immediate, rigidly defined goals. Vulkan declared that Caldera must be saved, and Koorland agreed. He agreed because he understood why this was necessary. Vulkan saw something precious in the new Chapter Master. Emerging from destruction, he had forged something strong. Koorland embodied a form of hope.

So Vulkan waited, and he prepared for the final battle for Caldera, and the greater war that waited beyond.

The Thunderhawks dropped the squads of the Last Wall at the northern end of the installation, flew on, then turned back to provide air support, joined by Hemisphere in the Deathblow. Koorland began the assault on the installation’s defences.

The wall was high and many metres thick. It was a patchwork of iron, plates and girders slapped together with speed and so much excess that the barrier would have stopped almost any artillery barrage. The Ascia Rift narrowed again here, and the ground rose steeply, choking off the canyon for several kilometres before opening up again. A large force would be caught in a bottleneck, movements hampered, working against itself.

Against the squads of the Adeptus Astartes, the wall was worse than meaningless. It was a liability. They punched their way through its base with melta charges. The Thunderhawks and the Storm Eagle hammered its ramparts with assault cannons, tearing apart the first of the ork defenders. The gunships strafed the wall repeatedly, holding the greenskins’ attention and preventing them from dealing with the threat below. In less than a minute, the Space Marines were inside the wall, out of reach of the enemy. The cannon fusillades continued, drawing the horde to that point, to the visible threat, away from the control nexus.

‘Minimise the damage to the wall,’ Koorland ordered the gunship pilots. ‘We want to keep it intact.’ It had been built to keep attackers outside the facility. Now it would keep the orks inside.

Two more melta bombs, and the tunnel was complete. Its sides glowed, still half-molten, as the squads reached the downslope exit they had created. Before them, the orks were already massed in the thousands. The canyon was wider on this side of the wall, though still narrow enough to reduce the orks’ advantage of numbers. The horde was deep and furious, a river of brute energy flowing between the towering conduits and sparking generators. The orks met the Last Wall with a hail of shells and fire.

Koorland and the front row crouched to give their brothers behind a clear field of fire. His squad sent focused streams of bolter fire into the foe. At the same time, Aloysian used his plasma cutter servo-arm to begin a second tunnel that began at right angles to the first, then turned south again to create a second exit. Both squads hit the orks, turning foot soldiers to bloody pulp as fast as they ran up. The orks had small targets. The Space Marines had a tide of xenos flesh before them. Every shot hit.

‘No heavy vehicles,’ Eternity grunted. He exchanged magazines so smoothly there was no interruption to the rhythm of his fire.

‘Not yet,’ said Koorland. ‘Hard to bring them forwards on this slope. They’ll be waiting for us further down.’

‘And for once they’ll be trying to move around structures they don’t want to damage.’

‘Exactly. Let them wait, or come to us.’

The orks closed in on the wall. The mass of infantry reached its base. The Space Marines pulled back a few steps inside the tunnels. The orks had no line of fire without exposing themselves. They took the risk. The greenskins charged the breaches again and again, dying every time. The war became a portrait of grinding immobility. Blood flowed over the rocky ground, and bodies burned. Deeper into the facility, engines roared with frustration. Guns beyond Koorland’s sight launched shells to no effect. They could not come close enough for targets, and the orks still believed they must preserve their wall.

Keep believing that, Koorland thought. Until we’re ready to destroy you with truth.

Vulkan waited. He was an unmoving shadow in the night, a stone among many. He read the flow of the green tide. He heard combat break out to the north. The howls of the orks moved further and further in that direction.

Vulkan waited. He was part of the landscape. There was no threat to the orks here. They had no reason to linger. The danger came from Koorland. The greenskins must protect their great machine from the enemy knocking on the wall.

Vulkan waited. Minutes passed. They turned into an hour. Combat raged, and he took no part, the better to prepare a terrible blow.

Vulkan waited. He thought about the main force of orks in Laccolith. He visualised the brutalised landscape between the city and the Ascia Rift. He pictured the news of the attack on the installation reaching the army. The response. The desperate drive back. He calculated the time of arrival. He listened to Koorland’s updates on the battle. Eventually, the orks would decide to bring down their wall. He found the balance between the charge coming from the south and the siege in the north. He located the fulcrum of the war. The point upon which a hammer would shatter a blade with a single blow.

Vulkan struck.

Nine

Caldera – The Ascia Rift

Vulkan rushed the gate of the command nexus. He held the great hammer Doomtremor high over his head. Alarms whooped with savage, rusted voices as he approached. The immense cone shimmered, its shape flickering and distorting as its protective force field pulsed and surged. Within the field, before the gate, a line of orks in heavy armour raised chainaxes. They braced for combat, but their jaws were open in mocking laughter. They did not expect a lone human to pass through the field.

Vulkan hit the invisible barrier with all his velocity, all his mass, and all the strength of his hammer. The orks learned that energy itself could scream. The force field flashed white. The shriek of a hundred tortured generators pierced the air. Vulkan raised Doomtremor with both hands then brought it down again before the glare had faded. The shield howled red, then violet. The orks at the gate covered their eyes, dazzled by the brutality of light.

Vulkan was relentless. With each blow of the hammer, the earth shook. Thunder cracked reality into hard, broken edges. The shockwave radiated across the installation. Conduits crumpled at its passage. They burst, spewing geysers of fire.

Boom. Boom. Boom. The beat of judgement, of the end of feral empires. Vulkan swung, channelling all his fury. He swung, and he was the anger of Caldera. His cloak billowed in the hurricane of his creation. He swung, and half a kilometre away, the tremors unleashed by his wrath felled a chimney. The tower swayed. At its base, stone crumbled and iron snapped. The chimney came down, dropping vertically and then forward, crushing generators below it. The night exploded with unleashed, coruscating energy. Lava flowed from the shattered base, spreading across the canyon floor. A dull orange-red glow lit the sides of surrounding structures.

The damage spread, but the nexus resisted. The power in the installation did not falter. Vulkan had not expected it would. Ork construction piled excess upon redundancy. It would take an even greater cataclysm than this to destroy the great machine. Control was what he would wrest from the hands of the orks.

Strike. Strike. Strike. A terrible accumulation, the rhythm unbreakable as the laws of the universe. At the edge of his vision, Vulkan saw orks rushing at him. The greater part of the defenders were at the wall, dealing with Koorland’s incursion. Perhaps now they had realised they had been diverted. Perhaps they would turn from that battle and head back towards the centre of the complex. They would be too late to disrupt his attack. Those who remained were too few to make a difference. They were not even a distraction. The shockwaves knocked them back. The tremors hurled them to the ground.

Doomtremor flashed, its rage the extension of Vulkan’s soul, and it shattered the force field. A prismatic explosion surrounded the nexus. The gigantic arms jerked, their energy arcs rising to the clouds in their agony. A cluster of explosions opened a rent along the top third of the cone. The night became a howling strobe of light and dark. The installation roared. An invader had breached its defences. A great danger had come.

Vulkan had come.

He strode forward. Each step was grounded. He felt the heart of Caldera reach up through his feet, through his body. The world embraced its avenger.

The orks charged. They were as tall as Vulkan and even more massive in their armour.

‘This world is under my protection,’ he snarled. ‘Trouble it no more.’

He swung the hammer sideways. One blow was enough. Armour shattered like eggshells. Bodies burst and burned.

Behind him, howls of distress and anger from more defenders, too few and too late. The chorus of alarm engulfed the complex. It was the fanfare of xenos defeat.

The primarch stood before the gate. He slammed the hammer against its centre. The iron slab, ten metres high, flew apart.

Vulkan entered the nexus. It was composed of a single vast space, a cathedral of riotous technology. Banks of coils the size of plasma drives rose toward the inner peak. Energy arced between them, creating a crackling web intense enough to fry half a continent. Huge cables from the exterior fuelled the banks with still more energy, while conduits fed the heat of Caldera’s mantle to the machine. At the centre of the cone was a pillar half the height of the structure, and fifty metres wide. It supported the control mechanisms. Scores of orks moved back and forth between monumental levers and dials. A huge greenskin engineer stood above them all on a dais, surrounded by a tangle of sparking machinery. There, Vulkan thought, was the heart of Caldera’s martyrdom. That was what he had come to destroy.

He took in the disposition of the nexus and his target in a fraction of a second. The ork engineer evaluated him in the same moment. Vulkan took a step forward, and the inner defences activated.

The turrets had a precision Vulkan had never encountered in orks before. The need to preserve the control nexus governed their function. They caused no damage to the machinery. There were dozens of them, and they all fired on the primarch. If their rotation brought the precious mechanisms within their line of fire, they fell silent until their guns had a clear bead on the primarch once more.

They hit him with a torrent of energy beams. The concentrated strength of a gas giant’s thunderstorm exploded against his chest. It forced him to take a full step back. He planted his legs and leaned into the attack. His breastplate began to glow. Lightning surrounded him as he moved forward against power that would have incinerated a Leman Russ. One step, then another. He held Doomtremor before him. It absorbed many of the hits, its head flaring and sending the excess energy outward. Vulkan directed it at the engineer. The ork’s personal force field flashed in turn. The beast raged as the onslaught did no more than slow the primarch.

Vulkan advanced. His armour’s interior temperature rocketed upward. He was inside an active volcano. A mortal’s flesh would have started to burn. He marched on, implacable, a continental plate on the move. He passed between the immense coils. He was midway towards the pillar.

He realised the ork engineer was not shouting. It was laughing. The beast pulled a lever.

The weight of a planet fell on his shoulders. He withstood the crushing force for several seconds, and then it brought him to his knees. The ork had turned the gravity weapon against him. The greenskin hurled mountains at the sky, and now it forced Vulkan down. His lungs flattened. Drawing a breath was an act of supreme strength. He growled, denying the force that sought to grind his bones to dust. He would not capitulate. He would rise. He would advance.

A power that had destroyed worlds held him fast.

Then it reversed.

He flew upward. The invisible hand whipped him against the slanted wall near the top of the cone and the impact dented the metal beneath him. Unseen mountain walls came together with him in between. His arms were flat against the surface. He strained to bring them forward. It was all he could do to keep his grip on Doomtremor. The ork laughed again, adjusted the controls, and slammed Vulkan to the floor, a meteor slaved to the greenskin’s will. Before Vulkan could get his bearings, he was flying once more. The battering and speed blurred his sense. Whether he was smashed against the wall or the floor, the crushing never relented. It grew stronger. He felt the crack of bones.

He was trapped in the fist of Caldera, the planet’s own strength turned against its will to destroy its defender.

The command nexus was visible from the wall. The structure was kilometres away, but its bulk loomed over everything around it. Now it flashed and pulsed. It cried out under the primarch’s assault. The orks reacted to its agony. The paused in their struggle to reach the breached defences. Koorland’s force kept up their bolter fire, killing dozens more in the moment of the pause. The orks milled about in momentary confusion, then began to retreat down the slope. They turned their back on the Last Wall.

‘They realise we are a diversion,’ Aloysian voxed.

‘Then we must be more than that,’ Koorland answered, speaking to the full squads. ‘The primarch must complete his mission. Ours is to keep the orks away from the nexus. We must be the threat they cannot ignore. Stop them, brothers. At any cost.’

With a roar, the Last Wall charged from the tunnels. The Thunderhawks and Storm Eagle flew low down the rise, cannons and missiles hitting deep into the ork ranks, angling in for runs at the tanks. The two squads of veterans ploughed into the enemy rearguard. ‘Forward!’ Koorland shouted. ‘We are the gladius! Stab it into the heart of the foe.’

Bolter fire annihilated the flesh ahead of him. The squad formation was narrow: two warriors abreast, sending punishing fire out on all sides. They were running downhill, with the urgency of desperate rage. The greenskins fell like chaff in the wind, before them and to either side. For a few more seconds, the orks tried to ignore the Space Marines, but too many were dying. Their speed was hampered by their numbers. The Last Wall moved faster by killing obstacles. Koorland’s double gladius strike sank deeper and deeper into the horde.

The orks began to turn again. The wound was too deep for them to ignore. The green tide sought to close over the heads of the Space Marines.

Koorland slowed to a stop. With bolter and chainsword he killed his way through muscle and iron. His foes lost distinction. It was as if he fought a single ork, killing it endlessly. He fought according the needs of each second. Block a descending axe with his blade. Shoot the brute through the chest. Turn and blast another through the head as it tried to flank him. Absorb the blow on his right. Retaliate with chainsword grinding through chest and heart.

The rage of the orks grew. Perhaps their desperation too. The infantry close in began to drop, killed by the gunfire of the ranks behind. A hail of heavy-calibre bullets pounded the squads. A rocket struck the ground a few metres to the right. It was almost a direct hit on Absolution. The blast shattered his helm and he staggered, his face badly burned. Eternity supported him and he kept fighting.

‘Brothers,’ Koorland called, ‘we fight for a greater purpose and a greater victory. Hold the foe, and the primarch will save Caldera. Salvation here means salvation for Terra. And that is a victory beyond sacrifice!’

As he spoke, he felt the truth was speaking through him. Sacrifice was a given in the existence of the Adeptus Astartes. It was the inevitable end of duty. There was no regret in such an end, but there was in meaningless sacrifice. That was no small part of the shadow of Ardamantua. The Imperial Fists had been thrown away. Their annihilation had served no purpose beyond the amusement of the Beast.

So he had thought.

He saw a different truth now. One whose reality was not assured, but he would willingly die to make it a certainty. He saw a chain leading from Ardamantua: the disaster becoming the means of uniting the Successors, the lesson he learned there fuelling his determination to call the other Chapters to Terra. Link after link of steel purpose, leading to this moment on Caldera. If he fell now but Vulkan succeeded, the defence of the Imperium would be taken up by the legend it needed. If his sacrifice led to the purge of the orks from Ullanor, that would be a reason to rejoice.

‘Fight for Vulkan!’ Koorland exhorted. ‘His victory will be the Imperium’s salvation!’

He stormed into the ork fire, slamming into the body of the horde again. He smashed a foot soldier to the ground, crushed its skull with his boots and decapitated the next ork beyond. And then, coming up the slope, he saw a trio of hulking shapes. They were boxy, clanking monstrosities bristling with weapons and mechanical arms. They were grotesque xenos mockeries of Dreadnoughts, and they had come to accept Koorland’s sacrifice.

The Adeptus Mechanicus forces split off to the east and west at the volcanic gateway to the Ascia Rift. They escorted heavy, treaded transports. Arouar had mobilised them from the space port as soon as Koorland had reported on the installation. The Fists Exemplar and the combined regiments of the Astra Militarum pursued the orks through the gap between the mountains. Thane called a halt at the top of the descent into the rift. Below, the vastness of the ork horde poured into the valley. Kilometres in the distance, flashes of tortured energy marked the nexus.

The orks were rushing for the vulnerable centre of their machine, the centre they must attack but not destroy. In their rush to bring down the intruders, they demolished their own defensive wall. Past that barrier, though, they were forced into more cautious manoeuvres. The super-heavy vehicles had slowed to a stop as they reached the first of the conduits. The battlefortresses moved slowly through the narrow avenues of the facility. The giant walkers, too wide to pass without uprooting the clusters of pipes or crushing the walls of power plants, halted at the edge. They turned around to guard the approach into the rift, becoming the new line of defence. Beyond them, the smaller vehicles and infantry swarmed forward.

The entirety of the ork army had entered the Ascia Rift. The war hinged on a moment of enormous risk and opportunity.

‘They must be held,’ said Thane. ‘No reinforcements to the north wall. They must not retake the command centre, and they must not leave the canyon until Dominus Arouar has control of the gravity weapon.’

‘We are well positioned for an artillery strike,’ General Imren voxed.

Thane shared her eagerness for retaliation on a massive scale. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘We need the weapon operational. Damage must be contained. We will neutralise their Titans.’

‘Then we will deal with the rest.’

‘The battle will not be won on the floor of the rift,’ Thane told her. The mortals should labour under no illusions. The orks outnumbered and outgunned the regiments.

‘The undertaking is clear to me, Chapter Master.’

‘Then the Emperor guide your hand, general.’

‘And yours.’

Lucifer Blacks, Orion Watch, Jupiter Storm, Granite Myrmidons, Auroran Rifles, the battered and the bloody regiments of Terra stormed into the rift as if answering the first call to war. Battle horns sounded, challenging the orks to turn and face their pursuers, announcing the arrival of Imperial vengeance.

The Fists Exemplar tanks and assault squads took the lead, drawing the fire of the walkers to open the way for the regiments. The Rhinos carried the company. Thane rode in the upper hatch of his transport, watching for the moment to disembark. His target was the walker on the western side of the shattered wall. Its turrets and cannon arm fired, but their movement hesitated between a plethora of targets, the operators within the beast distracted by the strafing of Xiphon interceptors and the arcing flight of Thamarius’ assault squads. The shells hit. The ground exploded in flame one beat behind the roaring troop carriers.

The full strength of the Fists Exemplar drew that much closer to the colossal war machines.

‘Now!’ Thane voxed to the company. ‘Now now now!’

He leapt from the turret. The rear doors slammed open. The Fists Exemplar burst from the carriers.

The walkers found their targets at close range. They fired.

Thane ran through a holocaust of flame.

Imren heard the world ending behind her. It had been ending all this long night. She had had enough. If the end had come for her and for the troops under her command, then it would come for the enemy too. To the rear was the cataclysm of super-heavy cannon fire. Before her was the inferno of the horde. She expected to drown in the green tide. But by the Throne, she would go under with honour intact.

Wind buffeted the canyon. The banners of the regiments and of the Imperium flapped. Their ragged state only made their pride the fiercer. They flew high, and they were saluted by the full-throated roar of armoured fury. Leman Russ battle cannons, Taurox autocannons, Chimera multi-lasers and heavy bolters blasted the enemy infantry to shreds. Trucks and battlewagons exploded before they could turn. Rather than a walking barrage, Imren had ordered targets over a wide range, as far as the tanks could fire with enough accuracy that they would not cause critical damage to the facility. Geysers of fire and shattered bodies erupted across the canyon-filling mob. Confusion and rage rippled out of the impacts.

Columns of infantry charged into the orks, stabbing with bayonets even as they burned with las. Thousands of men and women howled. Driven by repeated retreats, defeats and the festering humiliation of the Proletarian Crusade, they were starved for revenge. In their anger, they were as savage as the orks. No urging was needed from the commissars. Every trooper was on a personal vendetta.

In the foe’s chaotic response, Imren saw contradictory orders. The facility was under attack from the north, the south and in the centre. The threats were everywhere, the priority targets unclear.

‘Choose us, xenos filth!’ Imren shouted at the burning night. ‘We are your doom! We are the great danger to your machine!’

As if they heard her over her cannons and their snarls, the orks reversed course. The tidal wave came for the Astra Militarum. It boiled through the passages between conduits rising from the ground and the generators. It flowed around the columns of Imperial infantry. It rushed to all sides of the armour. Carried in the current, rocking as they ran over the slower brutes, the battlewagons rumbled forward, their guns firing with greater abandon the closer they came.

Imren was yelling with her troops. Her throat was scraped raw. She could not hear herself over the ecstatic clamour of war. She could find no words for her rage. She gave herself over to the possession of fury. But her thoughts were clear. They were a prayer to the Emperor. As the vortex enveloped her, she thought, again and again, let this have meaning. Let this have meaning.

Let us have meaning.

‘No,’ said Alquist Arouar. Along the east edge of the Ascia Rift, skitarii and electro-priests paused in their tasks. ‘Physical connections must remain pending. Complete operations until that stage. Proceed no further until confirmation of the primarch’s success.’

He moved back from the cliff edge, tracing the web of cables running from the ork energy coil to the Mechanicus assembly. The control mechanism was large. It had taken four heavy transport vehicles to haul its components to this position, and three others had carried the means of conjunction. Kilometres of metre-thick cable spread out from the assembly, reaching out to four of the coils. Each of the ork structures was the height of a Warhound-class Titan. Each released enough excess energy to incinerate a division of infantry. The four Arouar was going to tap into were only a fraction of the total number. He extrapolated that their interconnection through the larger system would make them act in concert once he had control. Whether seizing four would be enough was the question to be tested.

He looked back at the coil, and at the network of coruscating light in the depths of the canyon. The moment was extraordinary. His multiplicity of sensors struggled to keep up with the wave of data. To be this close to the ork technology, to have the opportunity to put the theoretical work done on Mars during the war to work – to have access to the coveted machinery itself – was beyond price.

The flood of data had an undertow. In the terms of the flesh, it was temptation. It invited Arouar to submerge his consciousness in the study of the machine. If that was the final act of his being, and the data he processed made its way back to Mars, that would be a worthy form of worship of the Omnissiah.

Princeps Tynora 7-Galliax moved into his field of view, and recalled him to the necessities of the present. Her heavily armoured form was more massive than Arouar’s and more compact, its mechadendrites smaller and withdrawn within the armour’s shell. Her form had been forged for war at the expense of almost all exploratory function.

She was the reminder. The Mechanicus was at war. The Fabricator General had been explicit: the orks must be defeated. Terra must be saved. Data collection was a secondary priority. Koorland was Lord Commander of the Imperium, and his orders were to be followed.

7-Galliax gazed over Arouar’s shoulder at the assembled control machinery. ‘What is our probability of error?’ she asked.

‘Considerable,’ said Arouar. The precise calculation changed moment to moment as he observed and evaluated the behaviour of the installation. ‘Our mimicry of the ork technology is approximate in its effects. In terms of power, greatly lacking. Interface between xenos work and our own is a fraught procedure. Contamination and failure are inherent risks.’ He paused, looking over his shoulder to consider the progress of the work behind him. The assembly was complete. Its core was a based on a teleporter control, surrounded by giant capacitors and convertors. It had no power source of its own. It would use that of the weapon itself when connected, as long as there was no countervailing force still functioning.

‘What is the most favourable evaluation?’

‘A crude form of control. And a brief one.’ Even that, though, would be an immense victory. The data collected from that action alone could be the greatest achievement of the war this far.

7-Galliax nodded. She returned to the edge of the cliff. Below, battle raged. Energy flares mixed with the flashes of cannon fire and detonations, and the burning streaks of las. Arouar’s auditory receptors processed vast movement, analogous to clashing waves. The pulsations from the control nexus intensified. They became angry, their rhythm irregular. Deep, geologic vibrations travelled up from the centre of the rift. Puffs of dust rose from the ground. The edge of the cliff crumbled. The great coil trembled, its crackling bursts lashing out like the strike of a serpent.

‘Stand by,’ Arouar commanded his forces. ‘The moment of action or of defeat approaches.’ He advanced towards the core of his control assembly. It was inert but filled with gigantic potential. He settled into the throne, mechadendrites locking into place along its back and arms, fusing him with the machine. He observed the violent aurora of the canyon. He waited for its convulsions to reveal triumph or disaster.

Up. Down. Up. Down. The gravity fist turning Vulkan into the clapper of a bell, the impacts more and more ferocious. The ork engineer showing no care for the integrity of the structure. The gigantic force turned to the single task of destroying one warrior.

This is still not enough, he thought.

The enemy fears you.

The thought emerged from his deepest core. Beneath the battering pain, the constriction, and the confusion of the senses, was the immovable, the implacable, and the calm. Vulkan pulled his consciousness down into his absolute centre. There he had the patience and the resolution of mountains. He shut out damage and suffering. In the stony dark of that calm, he regained the coherence of his thoughts.

The enemy fears you.

You are a threat.

The assault grows more desperate.

Desperation is weakness.

Strike it.

Not the clapper of a bell, then. He was the hammer against the anvil. His core turned molten. The calm of the mountain became the anger of the volcano.

Erupt.

His consciousness exploded back into the full awareness of his body, and then transcended it. He observed his arc against the wall, and saw not the wound inflicted but the action he must take. And when the engineer hurled him to the floor again, he moved. He did not struggle against gravity. He acted in concert with it. He turned it into his own weapon. He punched forward with his left hand, hitting the floor, and drove his arm deep into the stone. He took root. He held Caldera. It held him back.

When gravity reversed, he remained in place.

The agony was a revelation. Forces sought to rip his body apart. He defied them. The ork had ceased to laugh, and now it froze. It stared at him, hands hovering uncertainly over its controls.

Tempered by the pain, guided by magmatic anger, Vulkan raised Doomtremor. The hammer’s wrath lit up the interior of the nexus with the blaze of a sun. Thunderhead, Dawnbringer, weapons long lost, were present to his spirit in that which he now held aloft. Their terrible strength demanded Vulkan rise. And with the reversed gravity, but against its current, he threw the hammer.

Its flight was true. A comet roared across the space between Vulkan and the pillar. It struck the platform, the impact released the energy of the throw, of the hammer, and of gravity itself. The explosion swallowed the top half of the pillar. The gravitic fist released him. He stood, and marched through a vortex of howling, chaotic lightning to retrieve Doomtremor.

The pillar ended in a jagged stump. The control mechanism was gone, vaporised along with its master. Around Vulkan, surviving orks ran in panic as their great mechanism lost all direction. The ground heaved and cracked.

Vulkan moved through a gathering storm. He picked up his hammer, braced his stance, and waited, fighting the instinct to destroy the abomination around him. If it did not find a new master within the next few moments, the storm would rip the planet open.

The shaking built.

Cracks became chasms.

The world groaned.

In the centre of the rift, the energy discharges were maddened. Arouar’s throne vibrated, presaging worse tremors to come.

‘Proceed,’ the dominus commanded.

The connections were made.

He screamed. His larynx was no longer capable of such a sound. His vocalisations had long been purged of any trace of emotion. Yet he screamed, emitting a wailing stream of binaric. His senses lit up with electric fire.

He became a god maddened by the pain of his own power.

Duty to the Omnissiah was his lodestone. His one focus was the coordinates of the ork attack moon.

In an act of prayer, he flexed his power.

And he lifted a mountain.

‘Admiral.’

The voice was distant. Rodolph could barely hear it. His body was growing cold and numb. He was dying along with his ship. He had to keep his attention on the oculus, on the sight of the moon. If his mind drifted, if his will failed, all would be lost.

‘Admiral.’

The voice was insistent. Then a hand shook his shoulder. The movement shot pain through his abdomen. He winced and looked away from the oculus.

Groth was beside him. The bridge was filled with smoke, but his crew was still on station. The Finality was still fighting. It was still approaching the moon.

‘What is it, captain?’ he managed.

‘Look, sir.’ She pointed to the auspex screen on his right.

Rodolph looked. The sensor array had picked up another mass rising from the planet towards the moon. Rodolph blinked. The mass was coming far too fast.

He grinned.

The mass became visible through the oculus a few moments later. It had risen with such velocity it was heated to red by its passage through the atmosphere. It spun end-over-end, thousands of metres long, trillions of tonnes of rock, a missile hurled at the exposed heart of the ork base. Rodolph watched it disappear into the uncompleted face of the assault moon.

It was small by comparison to the target, but so was a bullet fired into the body of a man. In the next instant, a fireball bloomed from the interior of the moon. It expanded far beyond the crescent edge, spreading until it was almost as wide as the moon. It was a sudden tumour, its uncontrollable growth killing the host. Fissures appeared across the partial globe. Fire leaked out of them. The moon was in agony.

‘Finish it,’ Rodolph said. ‘In the Emperor’s name, finish it.’

Much of the ork fleet had broken away from the Finality and formed a blockade around the open face. It was vaporised in the explosion. The path was clear for the battleship to complete its run and launch its full armament into the glowing interior.

Rodolph’s head cleared still further. He felt strength return to his body with the flush of victory.

But not all the orks had left. Those who remained kept on the attack. When the torpedoes slammed into the stern, Rodolph knew the worst before Groth told him. He felt the blow like a knife between the ribs.

‘The warp drive,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Groth answered. ‘Breached.’

‘How long?’

She spoke into the ship’s vox. Rodolph was surprised there were any survivors left in the enginarium to answer her.

Groth looked at the oculus, then back at Rodolph. ‘Not long,’ she said. ‘But long enough.’

Rodolph nodded. They understood each other. ‘Better than any ordnance,’ he said.

‘A definitive blow. A fine victory, admiral. Well fought.’

‘And you, captain. And you.’

‘Signal the Mechanicus vessels,’ Groth called. ‘They should rejoin the Alcazar Remembered. Helmsman,’ Groth called. ‘Take us in. For the Emperor!’

The crew echoed her. ‘For the Emperor!’

All batteries firing their last, marking the void with the purging light of the Imperial Navy’s power, the Finality plunged through the remaining ork vessels, completing its run, fulfilling its destiny. Rodolph watched the open face of the moon reveal itself. He saw a honeycomb of madness, construction on a gargantuan scale burning, shattered, pulsing with mortal fire. The Finality entered the maw of the wounded giant, warp reactors about to go critical. It travelled through an immensity of caves natural and artificial, of hangar bays for entire armadas, bearing with it a sun about to be born.

Rodolph gazed at what was about to be destroyed. The price he had paid for this vision seemed very little.

When the end came, in furious light, he was ecstatic.

He had taken one action. He had struck one blow. The power was building, raging, a beast about to slip its tether. Arouar’s grip on his omnipotence slipped. One more move, and then he must disengage. One more move, the one to bring an end to the power. The one Koorland had ordered him to make regardless of the situation in the canyon.

Arouar had no knowledge of the war below now. He had no knowledge of anything except the blinding absolute. So he took the action.

The Machine is all. Death to the blasphemy of the xenos machine.

Vulkan felt the change in the tremors. He felt how deep they went. He knew what was coming.

No more waiting, then. Culmination was at hand.

Koorland ducked beneath the ork dreadnought’s swing. The thing’s forearm was as long as he was tall, and it ended in a vice of revving killsaws. Another arm came in lower on the same side. Koorland stepped in closer, avoiding the saws but not the blow itself. It knocked him to the right, into the grasp of the two right arms. The claws seized him. The saws dug into his armour. He maglocked his bolter and with his free hand took a krak grenade from his belt, throwing it at the dreadnought’s viewing slit. The explosive attached itself to the metal and went off, damaging the ork’s shell.

It did not eat all the way through the armour, but the flash of its detonation stunned the greenskin wired into the mechanism. It flinched, and so did its mechanical limbs. Their grip loosened. Koorland pulled himself free. The gouges in his left flank went through his armour, all the way down to the bone.

He jumped forward before the dreadnought could react, grabbing the top of the huge head, then hauled himself up, and plunged his chainsword through the viewing slit. The blade vibrated as it cut through the body inside. Animal screams of pain turned into gurgles. Blood sprayed out of the slit, drenching Koorland’s chestplate. The war machine’s arms dropped. It stumbled forward, then stopped, inert.

Koorland dropped to the ground, grabbed his bolter and sprayed shells in a long burst, felling the greenskins that closed with him. To his right, another ork dreadnought had pinned Eternity to the ground. Its shoulder-mounted guns pummelled the veteran. The killsaws dug into him. Daylight was fighting to reach him, but the third dreadnought launched two rockets at him. The blasts took out the orks surrounding him and sent him flying. Absolution led three other battle-brothers against the dreadnought. Their relentless bolter fire and washes of flamer held it at bay.

But Eternity was dying.

Koorland ran, chainsword forward, bolt-shells scything his path toward Eternity. As he did, the earth tremors become violent. He managed to keep his feet, but many of the orks were knocked down as the ground bucked, an animal convulsing in pain. Koorland moved in awkward leaps, trusting the air instead of the surface, landing with hard stamps to keep his balance, putting more faith in luck than in the earth to be where he expected.

He closed with the dreadnought. Its mass was so great, its centre of gravity so low, that it was remaining stable through the tremors. It held Eternity fast with two of its arms and was cutting deep with the other two. Eternity’s rune was flickering between amber and red in Koorland’s retinal lens. ‘Brother!’ Koorland called to him.

‘Finish it fast!’ Eternity shouted, his voice tight with struggle and agony.

A crevasse burst open to Koorland’s left. The earth rose and fell in waves. Echoes of Ardamantua pursued him. The land in chaotic movement, the enemy overwhelming, the death of brothers looming.

But this was not Ardamantua. This was Caldera. And the orks were roaring in dismay as the planet turned against them. The quakes were not a mystery and the prologue to defeat by a power beyond his ability to grasp. The tremors were the work of the Imperium. They were the sign of victory.

And Koorland flew over the land, propelled by the furious energy of vengeance.

His shells struck the armour of the dreadnought. Not hard enough to punch through, but hard enough to draw the pilot’s attention. It held Eternity with its left limbs and turned to meet Koorland’s charge, guns blazing. Koorland ran into the fire. He exchanged his chainsword for a melta bomb, and ran through the snarling embrace of the arms, colliding with the dreadnought. It was like running into a tank, though his mass and momentum were enough to rock the monster back a step. He slapped the melta bomb against the dreadnought’s flank, then he threw himself back and over Eternity’s prone figure, shielding him.

The shaped charge ate through the ork monster. It melted iron and conduits and the flesh inside. At this proximity, the heat flash seared off the top layers of Koorland’s armour. His power pack fought to compensate, read-outs redlining in his lenses. The temperature inside his armour was enough to roast flesh. The dreadnought’s ammunition cooked off, and the war beast blew apart. Shrapnel embedded itself in Koorland’s back and arms. He rose, servo-motors catching and whining. His armour was heavy and sluggish. He fought to keep moving.

The tremors were still growing in intensity. There was not much time.

Eternity had lost his left leg below the knee. Koorland helped him stand. The wounded Space Marine took his chainaxe from his back and used the shaft as a cane, while Koorland held his shoulder. The dreadnought’s explosion had cleared some space for them.

‘Time to go, I think,’ Eternity rasped.

‘Yes.’ Across the command network, Koorland sent the order. ‘To all Imperial forces, the enemy’s defeat is at hand. Withdraw from the rift. But keep the orks contained.’ Switching to the squad channels, he said, ‘To the tunnels, brothers. To the tunnels.’

The brothers of the Last Wall fought their way back through the cauldron of orks, staggering up the slope. The land was a sea in storm. Chunks of the cliffs were falling onto the battlefield.

Koorland found he had to put his faith in the orks. He had to hope they had built their wall strong enough to withstand the storm.

‘Take the ground from under them!’ Thane ordered.

The armour of the ork walkers had withstood the fire of the Predators and the missiles of the gunships. The huge skirts of the behemoths were smoking and cratered, but so dense they still had not collapsed to expose the interior. The orks had destroyed two of the Fists Exemplar tanks. The Imperial armour was faster and more manoeuvrable than the greenskin machines, and they stayed close to the enemy, forcing the orks to risk their own destruction in the firing of the huge guns. But when the orks moved back, all it took was a single step, a lucky swing of the arm, and the tanks were exposed.

The earthquakes had begun. They were building. Remaining upright was difficult. Thane would make it even more so for the walkers.

Most of the greenskin infantry was held further into the valley, in the battle with Imren’s regiments. The Fists Exemplar destroyed the foot soldiers who had made it this far. Thane sent half the company downslope to hold back the rest. But the walkers were the problem. They needed to be stopped.

And as the tremors presaged great events to come, a barrier was needed.

The tanks lowered their guns. They blasted the land at the walkers’ feet. The shells dug deep depressions in the already wounded land. New fissures opened, joined, and spread in webs.

The ground heaved. The ground plunged.

And Koorland’s order came.

‘Acknowledged,’ Thane said.

He waited to hear the same from Imren. There was only silence from the general.

The walkers’ steps slowed, then stopped. They stood their ground, immensity holding them in place, while their gigantic arm turrets moved with jerking urgency, their shots coming faster but more erratic.

‘Chapter Master,’ Aloysian called on the feed. He and the rest of Thane’s squad were between the two walkers. The Techmarine pointed to the western monster. A third of the way up the hull, a shell impact had destroyed a gun emplacement and peeled back the piston-raised shutters that protected it.

‘I see it.’ The actual opening was small, the angle unpromising, but it was an opportunity. He eyed the overlapping shields. Their edges would serve. ‘With me, Brother Aloysian.’

They climbed. The rest of the squad provided covering fire as the other shutters opened and the orks rained shots down on the intruders.

Aloysian took the lead, climbing faster with his servo-arms. He and Thane took shots, but there was no evasion to take. It was all Thane could do to hold on to the ledges as the iron wall he climbed rocked and swayed, the operators of the walker struggling to compensate for the upheavals of the tremors.

Higher. Gravity and violent motion tried to throw them to the ground. Slugs slammed into their armour, striking at their gauntlets. Higher. The shattered gun came with reach. Smoke poured from the rent.

With less than two metres to go, a pair of orks appeared in the gap. They turned their shotguns on Thane and Aloysian. The Techmarine responded with his plasma cutter, firing the jet into the brutish faces, burning them off their skulls. The greenskins fell back, and Aloysian climbed in after them. Thane followed.

There was no time for strategy. Koorland’s warning was almost a minute in the past. Thane charged through the narrow passageway leading from the wrecked gun. It led to a network of catwalks and compartments surrounding a shaft where immense pistons and gears formed the mobile skeleton of the walker’s leg. While Aloysian cut cables and breached conduits, Thane hurled krak grenades into the shaft above and below their position. He exhausted his supply and sprayed bursts of shells in all directions. Smaller greenskins panicked. Larger ones died trying to attack. Mass-reactive shells blew apart the supports on the catwalks and they fell into the shaft, tangling gears.

The grenades went off. The damage spread. The machine shook within and without.

The floor tilted.

‘Out,’ said Thane.

The raid had taken thirty seconds.

They ran back to the gun emplacement. They climbed out of the gap, the slope of the walker’s skirt now near vertical. The walker was listing, one leg paralysed, its motion becoming erratic. The behemoth was unstable, and it was still firing. Thane and Aloysian dropped down its side, slowing their fall with quick grabs at ledges for as long as they could, then leaping the last several metres.

They landed on ground whose movement was as violent as the walker’s.

‘Pull back,’ Thane ordered. ‘Out of the rift. Suppressive fire on any enemy who follow.’ He tried to raise Imren, and this time she answered. ‘General,’ he said. ‘There is no more time.’

‘I agree, Chapter Master.’ She sounded injured. ‘There is no time. We will hold the enemy. Preserve our memory on Terra.’

Thane grimaced at the scale of the sacrifice. ‘It will be celebrated,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’ She signed off.

The Predators had ceased firing. They had shattered the land, and the walkers could not move forward without stepping into depressions that would overbalance them. The tanks now moved upslope. The pass between the volcanoes seemed desperately narrow from Thane’s position. The peaks thundered, and the clouds around them turned crimson. The eruptions had begun.

The Fists Exemplar charged between the walkers. The ork machines fired their cannons, and fired again, but the tremors were too powerful. The shells went wild, striking cliffs and mountainsides. The western walker lurched. Internal blasts beat against its interior. Thane and Aloysian stood between the two beasts until the rest of the company had passed through, then they followed. The wounded walker tried to walk. The tremors, broken land and the damage made the error a fatal one.

The walker began to fall towards its mate.

Titanic metal walls closed together over Thane’s head. A war mountain fell upon another. The monsters collided. Their limbs entangled. With grinding blasts aloft, Titan fused with Titan.

Thane and Aloysian passed from beneath their shadow, racing over the bucking, groaning earth for the waiting Rhino. The transport ground forward as the hatch slammed shut. Thane climbed through the roof turret to look back. He saw the final act of desperation, anger and madness. He saw the great cannons fire again.

The guns had no valid targets. They were aimed downward and too close to each other. The walker to the west blew up the lower reaches of the other’s armour. The eastern one created a new crater before both colossi. It turned into a widening chasm. The walkers fell forward, lodging in the gap, riven by blasts. The guns, their barrels now aiming beneath the surface, boomed again, but this time Thane knew he was hearing the start of a chain reaction, the weaponry of the monsters consuming itself in uncontrolled detonations. The walkers turned into metal volcanoes, a blazing wall of ruin across the southern access to the Ascia Rift, containing orks and humans alike inside the doomed installation.

The Thunderhawks kept pace with the convoy of Predators and Rhinos overhead. Their guns were silent. Their role now was to rescue battle-brothers from any vehicles that fell into the multiplying fissures.

The tremors shook the Rhino. Thane held tight to the turret to avoid being thrown free. On either side, the mountains raged. Rockslides roared down the faces. Lava followed, blood drawn from the night. Behind, in the pass, he watched the ork structures waver and fall, collapsing in a growing sea of flame.

And then came the immense crack of terminal rending. It was a sharp retort, but so deep and vast it drowned all other sound of war and destruction. It was the sound of the Ascia Rift opening wide its maw.

A terrible dawn broke, incandescent red, the sun rising from the centre of the canyon.

The rift parted. The great wound began in the centre. Metres wide, then tens of metres, then hundreds. It swallowed the ruins of the command nexus. It stretched its reach, longer and longer, expanding to half the length of the canyon. From it came the lava in a tide, a flood, a wall. A sea of molten rock rose to fill the rift.

It rose to swallow armies.

Imren saw it, and she smiled. She stood on her Chimera, bleeding out from a gut shot. Nissen was dead, burned when an ork rocket took out the treads and front of the hull. She was dying, but she was standing, and she was firing her plasma pistol at the enemy, and she had lived to see the victory. And so she smiled.

The victory was staggering to behold. She and her troops would become part of a legend, and that was glorious. Her soul was staggered by the sight. A lava wall thirty metres high swept toward her, and the sight was greater in her perception than the devouring heat that came before it. The orks in their tens of thousands, their tanks and their transports, their weapons and all their works disappeared in the wall. They were silhouettes of defeat, of fleeing despair, and then they were gone.

The wave was almost upon her. It took her troops. The heat set her hair alight. The light of the world’s anger blinded her. And there was pain. Inconceivable pain.

But greater than everything was the victory. Her troops celebrated as they died, and her final thoughts were of exultation.

A worthy end.

Honour is restored.

Koorland brought up the rear in the tunnel. He supported Eternity. He fired, killing the fleeing orks, denying them the last of a faint hope. The sides of the tunnel glowed with the heat. The joints of Koorland’s armour kept locking. He was dragging it almost as much as he was Eternity. But behind came the searing light of Caldera’s vengeance, spurring him on.

The wall was endless. The heat was swift and merciless. The lava flowed up the slope, devouring the horde, and then Koorland turned away. There was nothing but the killing brilliance behind him.

He staggered into the night, seconds ahead of the deluge. The Honour’s Spear was on the ground, rear hatch down, engines rumbling and eager for flight.

‘A good night’s work,’ Eternity slurred, barely conscious.

‘A great dawn,’ Koorland answered. He lurched up the ramp with his burden and collapsed onto a bench with his brother. The hatch closed and the Thunderhawk leapt for the skies.

Koorland looked through the viewing block. Lava shot out of the tunnel, a glowing finger emerging from the wall. Moments later the barrier failed. It had been strong enough to keep its builders trapped inside. Now it melted in the embrace of the lava flow. The mountainous landscape filled with incinerating light.

‘And the primarch?’ Eternity asked. ‘What of Vulkan?’

‘I have faith,’ Koorland answered.

They had returned to Torrens, as the Protector of Caldera had commanded. There was little of the mining settlement that remained. It was a location with a name, and some ruins, in which could be traced the fractured memories of a wall, of habitations, an echo of streets. But Lord Vulkan had commanded that they return, and so they had. The mere handful who had survived.

And now, standing where their rampart had been, they looked north, and saw the wrathful birth of day.

The glare of the lava flow spilled out from between the silhouettes of the twin volcanoes.

‘Will it reach this far?’ Karla asked.

The question had been on Becker’s lips too. He didn’t know.

‘If it does,’ said a voice deep as stone, ‘you will depart ahead of it, and begin anew. You know this danger. To be tempered on its anvil is your blessing as Calderans.’

Mesmerised by the flood, they had not seen Vulkan approach. He was before them now, a giant in the growing light.

‘I once brought a deluge of flame to this planet,’ he said. ‘It was a necessary destruction, and from the ashes of what had been before, Caldera was born. I then made a covenant with this world. I made no promise that I would not bring a burning flood again, but I swore to fight for Caldera.’ He raised his arm, and pointed with his hammer towards the lava. ‘Thus have I kept my oath. So will I ever.’ He gazed down on the people of Torrens. His eyes were as fierce as the lava flow, Becker thought. But they were also kind. ‘You have made me proud,’ Vulkan said. ‘You have fought well. Keep faith with Caldera as I do.’

‘We shall,’ Becker said.

‘We swear it,’ said Karla.

‘We swear it!’ One voice. All the voices.

Vulkan nodded. ‘Then I am satisfied.’

Epilogue

Terra – The Imperial Palace

The Monitus was a large, semi-circular hall at the top of the Stilicho Tower. Its huge, arcing balcony looked out towards the dome of the Great Chamber. Standing sentry on massive plinths every five metres along the balcony were monolithic, granite statues representing each of the original Loyalist Legions of the Space Marines. Each plinth held two statues, one facing towards the Great Chamber, the other casting a cold gaze down to the floor of the hall. The Monitus was the promise and reminder of vigilance. It was an unforgiving space.

The High Lords rarely set foot in it.

Valefor of the Blood Angels, Macrinus of the Ultramarines, Asger of the Space Wolves and Adnachiel of the Dark Angels were already there when Koorland arrived. The statues were three times larger than life, but the presence of the living Adeptus Astartes filled the hall. If the four commanders had been speaking before, they were silent now, and standing with some distance between them. Their faces were cold when they saw Koorland, and he knew the struggle he would have faced had he attempted to lead the expedition to Ullanor.

Koorland walked to the centre of the Monitus. ‘Brothers,’ he said. ‘I thank you for answering Terra’s call.’ Then he waited.

Behind came heavy footsteps. Vulkan entered the chamber.

The change came over the faces of the other Space Marines. Koorland saw in them the disbelieving awe he had experienced on Caldera. As one, they dropped to a knee and bowed their heads before the primarch.

‘Rise, brothers,’ Vulkan said. He strode between them to the edge of the balcony. He looked at the Great Chamber. He was silent for a full minute. Then, his voice redolent with judgement, he said, ‘I will meet the High Lords here.’

‘This is a coup,’ Tobris Ekharth complained.

Vangorich listened to the Master of the Administratum’s whine as the Council made its way up the long spiral staircase leading to the Monitus. No one else spoke. They let Ekharth bluster.

‘Koorland ousts Lord Udo,’ Ekharth continued. ‘He reforms a coherent Legion. He summons reinforcements to Terra. Then a figurehead. Then we are summoned to attend on the Astartes as though we were serfs. The primarch will not even deign to set foot in the Grand Chamber. And he makes us wait a full day before seeing us. A day! Don’t you see the pattern? Don’t you see what is happening? Koorland has returned a conqueror, and we are the conquered.’

Vangorich thought the man was on the verge of sobbing. He was desperate for an ally, for even one other High Lord to confirm his thinking. At the top of the stairs, in the antechamber to the Monitus, Ekharth jerked his head back and forth like a bird, pleading with his eyes. He found silence. He paled.

You’re more and less alone than you think, Vangorich was tempted to tell him. No one is contradicting you. They agree with you. But they won’t take the risk of saying so.

They entered the Monitus. When he saw the towering figure who awaited them, Vangorich had to stifle a gasp of awe and hope.

The silence of the rest of the Council took on a different cast. They were struck dumb. And they were terrified.

Vulkan was flanked by Koorland and the representatives of the four Chapters. The primarch had his arms folded. His eyes were stony.

Far below, in the streets and the squares and the chapels of the Imperial Palace, the people were celebrating the triumph of Caldera. The first true victory of the war. The first real sign of hope. But the sounds of rejoicing did not reach this high. There was only more and more and more silence. And something worse: judgement.

Ecclesiarch Mesring cleared his throat. He tried to speak. ‘Lord Vulkan,’ he croaked, ‘we honour your–’

‘I have spoken with Chapter Master Koorland,’ the primarch said.

Mesring froze, jaw hanging open.

‘I have spent a day and a night in contemplation of the words and deeds of the High Lords,’ Vulkan continued. ‘You should give thanks for the orks and for the threat they represent.’ He spoke calmly, and with infinite disgust. ‘If not for the need for unity, I would kill you all myself.’

Strike, Vangorich wanted to say. Strike now. Purge the rot and make something new. That is something a legend can do.

He said nothing.

Vulkan spoke again. ‘We make ready for Ullanor. You will do your duty in the preparations.’

And Vangorich sighed. The moment had passed. The High Lords were terrified, but they were calculating again. Each faction had tried to use Koorland to its ends. Now an even greater power had arrived, and the game resumed.

Even with the stakes higher than ever, the game went on. Petty beasts snapped at each other.

While on Ullanor, the Great Beast awaited.

THE BEAST MUST DIE

GAV THORPE

‘In my long years I have found that if one stares too long into the eye of the Beast, the Beast not only stares back but takes the opportunity to bite off your face. Decisive action – any action – far outweighs excessive contemplation.’

Attr. Leman Russ (unverified)

One

Terra – the Imperial Palace

We fell and we burned. Not just one, but all. These are the ashes we are left. The splinters of broken glass left of the window through which we watched humanity die. This is not our world, but they are not strong enough. Why? What was His plan? A crumbling ruin, a cruel joke. The blood in the veins is weak. But it is blood and it will bleed. It needs to bleed. To cleanse the infection. Purgation. Pain. Nothing is achieved without sacrifice.

Was that His plan all along?

The Senatorum Imperialis had long been a circus in the eyes of Grand Master Vangorich, but of late its habit of convening meetings in different locations had turned it into a travelling show. Security, his fellow High Lords had insisted. With an ork attack moon still lurking within striking distance, albeit silenced and blockaded for the moment, it was unwise to meet in the same location on successive occasions.

He was unsure how it was more secure or morale-boosting to meet beneath the cracked dome of the Anesidoran Chapel – once such a proud statement of Imperial Faith and power – when the chapel’s mosaics and friezes bore the scars from the attack moon’s arrival.

Most of the elaborate decorum of the High Lords’ conclaves had been gradually stripped away by each episode in the growing tragedy enveloping Terra and the Segmentum Solar. Gone were the hordes of retainers, the pomp of the Lucifer Blacks in escort, the self-important clarions and gaily coloured banners.

The entourage of clerks, administrators, vox- and vid-datacordists, factotums and counsellors was much diminished, replaced in part by two companies of Lucifer Blacks in combat gear rather than ceremonial uniforms. It made the large, echoing space of the chapel’s nave seem even grander, even emptier without the attendant background noise of teeming functionaries that had used to fill it with their tapping, scribbling and murmuring.

The Imperial Palace, the whole sprawling edifice, seemed overly grandiose. At least, Vangorich felt it so. The parade grounds built for Legions stood empty. Halls dedicated to the assembly of thousands in audience lay dusty and unused. Vast wings had been erected to house the armies of administrators that had been spawned over the last millennia, while the immensity of the past was allowed to remain standing idle, each vacant shell a hollow claim to a power that had long departed.

The High Lords seemed small and frail surrounded by the vastness of the chapel, as if it represented the scale of the threat they faced. In a palace built for demigods, they seemed more insignificant than ever.

Vangorich moved in the shadows beyond the central meeting, only half-listening to the back and forth of bickering and politics. He measured each man and woman at the table, recalling plans long in motion, schemes that had been devised over many years lest the need arise.

He knew exactly how each would die, if necessary. That was his role, though none subjected to his scrutiny would care to admit as much.

Take Mesring, for example. The Ecclesiarch thought himself safe, having uncovered and possibly countered the toxin Vangorich had introduced into his system. It might be a bluff, might be that the seed of Mesring’s destruction still tainted the blood in his veins, but it mattered nothing to the Grand Master if it was not. His agents had poisoned the head of the Imperial Church once, and they could do it again. Next time it would not be for leverage, it would be quick-acting and lethal.

Then Lansung, the Lord High Admiral, saviour and failure in one body. Vangorich often tempted himself with the idea that his own hand would deliver the blow here. Of them all, Lansung’s megalomania and vainglory had caused the most damage. But it was not the Grand Master’s position to strike the fatal blow. Not always. He was the hand that held the dagger, not the blade itself.

In passing, he caught the eye of his operative amongst the minions hovering close to the High Lords. It was remarkable how so lethal an individual, one so possessed of physical strength and dexterity, could masquerade his puissance beneath the plain green cowl and cape of an Administratum adept, his size and power hidden as easily as the mono-stiletto he carried. The weapon was fashioned from gene-modified bone as hard as steel. Organic matter, invisible to any auspex currently known to the minds of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Esad Wire, the Beast, Vangorich’s right hand during the unfolding catastrophe. The Beast did not react to the brief glance of his master, his attention fixed on the proceedings of the High Lords, features hidden in the darkness beneath his cowl.

And there was Kubik, Fabricator General, head of the Cult Mechanicus. Today he was present only in hololithic representation. Perhaps he feared to attend in person after the revelations of previous gatherings. The Adeptus Mechanicus’ long-standing relationship with the Imperium of Terra had been fractious of late. Agendas had clashed, information had been hoarded, loyalties had been called into question.

Vangorich looked at the static-flecked image of the Martian overlord and wondered whether recent protestations of renewed dedication to the Imperial cause were simply more lies. In a show of cooperation, Kubik had shared – under duress – the findings regarding the ork teleporter technology and the location of Ullanor, the world from which this threat seemed to have sprung.

The Grand Master had plans and agents in place within the Adeptus Mechanicus on both Terra and Mars to extract what further information was being hidden and, if ultimate sanction was required, to strike at Kubik himself.

The only other individuals of importance were missing. Veritus and Wienand, the joint Inquisitorial Representatives, had not made any communication since Koorland’s return from his mission, and whether by choice or from the ongoing machinations of the Inquisition was not clear. It irritated Vangorich that he was unsure of their current whereabouts, but as he had found, sometimes it was best not to worry too much. Much as with his own organisation, when the Inquisition could be seen at work was when it was too late.

An approaching thunder silenced the discussion and all eyes turned to the great doors of the chapel. The Lucifer Blacks parted swiftly as a handful of commanders from the Adeptus Astartes entered, their armoured boots striking deafening drumbeats across the broken tiles. They were a few individuals, but each was the avatar of a martial power deemed so strong it had been divided, their might judged too much for a single hand to wield. And now that edict was being reversed, and might yet prove a greater threat than the orks.

Space Marines. Each dwarfed the chapel’s occupants: just the seven present were capable of killing everyone within, including the Lucifer Blacks. Except Vangorich, of course. At any given heartbeat he knew precisely which of the four escape routes he might use should the Adeptus Astartes decide that pandering to the pride and ambition of these mortals was too much effort.

Captain Valefor of the Blood Angels. Wolf Lord Asger of the Space Wolves. Chapter Master Odaenathus of the Ultramarines and Grand Master Sachael of the Dark Angels, both newly arrived on Terra, fresh come from battles in the darkest reaches of the galaxy. Their Chapters bore the names of the greatest Legions from the Heresy War, and carried that distinction well.

With them came High Marshal Bohemond of the Black Templars and Chapter Master Quesadra of the Crimson Fists. Both had earned glory in the battles against the orks thus far, each creating a legacy worthy of Rogal Dorn from whom their gene-seed had been created. Others were continuing the fight, in the Sol System and beyond.

And with these lords of the Space Marines arrived the last of Dorn’s sons, the remaining survivor of the Imperial Fists. Captain, Chapter Master and, lately, Lord Commander Koorland, who had resumed the use of his wall-name, Slaughter. His ochre plate had recently been repaired and repainted, but the injury of war and loss was borne in his eyes. Dark, distant, they looked upon the High Lords as though surveying pieces of furniture. A necessary but uninteresting feature of the environment.

And then came Vulkan, and suddenly the mighty halls, kilometres-long processionals and cavernous chapel did not seem so large after all.

The primarch filled the huge space, and not just with his gigantic physique; the raw presence of the Emperor’s warlord was like a force that swept all before it. A few of the High Lords stood up on reflex, some bowed, and all but Vangorich averted their gaze, however briefly.

His armour, plate worthy of a demigod and forged by his own hand, was burnished dark green and gold. In one fist he bore a hammer the size of a Lucifer Black and many times more deadly. His skin was ebon, as dark as a starless night, save for two eyes that glittered like rubies.

They found Vangorich immediately despite his attempts at being inconspicuous, effortlessly identifying and locating the greatest potential threat in the chapel. He flinched at their silent interrogation, his unfettered reaction providing the answer they sought. A hint of a smile creased the primarch’s lips for half a heartbeat. A challenge, almost.

He knew.

Vulkan knew Vangorich had a plan to kill even a primarch. The Grand Master had to, it was the inevitable logic of his position. Duty compelled him to consider such a terrible scenario.

Vulkan’s eyes moved on, releasing Vangorich from their burning intensity, the primarch’s expression sour as he took in the surroundings and the holy nature of their decoration. The giant turned his gaze back to the others. However, his next words were directed towards the Master of Assassins.

‘Grand Master Vangorich, what is our purpose in going to Ullanor?’

‘You ask me because I am the Assassin, lord primarch, which gives us our answer,’ the Grand Master replied smoothly, moving into the light, drawn forth like venom from a bite. ‘To slay the Great Beast. We know that orks follow the strongest leader. Take that away and they will fall on each other in the resulting power vacuum. The invasion will splinter and die. For all their barbaric strength, they are vulnerable to a classic decapitation strike.’

‘Had we known that Ullanor was the source, I would have directed efforts thus,’ protested Lansung. He wilted a little as Vulkan’s unforgiving gaze moved to him, but retained enough composure to redirect the primarch’s ire. ‘Had the Fabricator General not withheld such intelligence, we might have ended this sooner.’

Even across the medium of the hololithic transmitter, Kubik looked unsettled.

Vulkan said nothing, but moved to one end of the debating table as his commanders spread to either side. Vangorich tried not to think of it as an encircling manoeuvre, but he quickly reassessed his options and concluded that only two escape routes remained.

‘The full weight of Mars is being directed to support the assault of the lord primarch,’ Kubik’s voice buzzed from a vox-caster placed in front of his hazy image, ‘as swiftly as it can be mustered. Dominus Gerg Zhokuv is one of our best and most experienced commanders from the Taghmata.’

‘One of your best?’ said Vulkan.

‘The best!’ Kubik quickly answered. ‘His logistaria and strategic engrams date back to the Heresy War and earlier.’

‘The ships are ready?’ Vulkan demanded of Lansung.

The Lord High Admiral nodded without comment.

‘I have put out the call for the Frateris to assemble. Thousands of followers are ready to embark as soon…’ Mesring trailed off in the face of Vulkan’s unflinching stare.

‘That will not be necessary, Ecclesiarch.’ The primarch’s distaste for Mesring’s position made the title sound like a curse. ‘Your brand of zealotry will not serve our cause.’

Vangorich was so busy enjoying Mesring’s utter despondency that he almost missed a small reaction from Bohemond. The High Marshal glanced sideways at the primarch, and then fixed his gaze on a point on the ground for several heartbeats. Nobody else seemed to notice and Vangorich wondered what could prompt such a guilt reflex.

Tobris Ekharth, Master of the Administratum, cleared his throat. His eyes momentarily flicked from one High Lord to the next, seeking reassurance and receiving little, until they rested again on the sheaf of translucent datasheets in his quivering hands. He swallowed hard.

‘I… That is, my organisation…’ He sniffed, gripped his reports tighter and started again. The words burst forth in a breathless stream. ‘This whole process is without mandate or proper protocols, and is not in compliance with at least seventy-two per cent of the Senatorum Imperialis code, not least being the exclusion of required officials to make proper record and deliver due notification on the deliberations and ramifications of gatherings at which Imperial policy and the application of military resource of greater than regiment-strength or equivalent thereof has been debated.’

‘I am quite sure that half of those words were not in the correct order,’ said Odaenathus. ‘Are you objecting to something?’

‘This war,’ Ekharth blurted, ‘is illegal! Without proper authority. Of uncertain integrity.’ The next word was uttered with such contempt that it made Vangorich wince. ‘Unauthorised…’

‘You mentioned compliance,’ said Vulkan, folding his arms. ‘That word can mean many things. In one respect, it is something with which I am more familiar than any other in this chamber.’

‘I don’t understand,’ confessed Ekharth, looking to his companion High Lords for support or guidance.

Vangorich laughed gently and he felt their scrutiny and their antipathy. The Master of the Administratum glared at him.

‘What is so funny?’ Ekharth demanded.

‘You seek compliance, my dear Tobris.’ Vangorich looked across to Vulkan. ‘Worlds brought into the Imperial Truth during the Great Crusade were “compliant”. The lord primarch has several thousand Space Marines poised at his command, in orbit and on the surface of Terra. It is we that need to consider the nature of compliance.’

Silence followed for several seconds. Vulkan did not gainsay Vangorich’s assertion.

‘Good.’ The primarch nodded. ‘We are of one mind. Let us turn our efforts to Ullanor and the matter at hand. Now the war truly begins.’

Two

Ullanor – outer system

Peace is deception. It does not last. It cannot last. The enemy is always waiting. The fight is endless, relentless. A tide that rises. Even when it recedes it takes away. It erodes. Nagging, gnawing, grinding. Slowly, war after war, battle after battle, fight after fight, every grain dropping away, washed into nothingness. Peace is the breath between shouts. The inhalation before the gasp of pain or ecstasy. Why can we not forge peace? Forges make weapons. Only war, merciless and constant, is truth.

The Adeptus Astartes were in the vanguard.

As always.

Rapid strike vessels, cruisers and battle-barges pierced the Ullanor system, a slashing sabre to open up the orks’ defences and leave the xenos unable to counter the more ponderous but powerful blows of the Imperial Navy, Adeptus Mechanicus and Astra Militarum.

Guided by the most able Navigators of the Navis Nobilite, the ships of the Space Marines convened within days of each other, despite the usual vagaries of the warp and the ever-present ork psychic disturbance that had come to be known as the green roar. Auspex arrays scoured the system for all signs of the enemy. Weapon decks and gun turrets were poised to unleash incredible firepower. The vessels of the Space Marines pushed hard from their translation points around the perimeter of the Ullanor system.

The outer system was an anarchic tempest of asteroids, lost moons, nebulous vapour clouds and wayward comets, thrown into terrible storms by the orbits of three super gas giants. Within this navigational horror lurked relative normality. There were eight more planets, three of them lethal gas worlds, though three inner micro-planets and a frozen Terra-sized globe showed signs of low level habitation. The fourth out from the red star was the only major populated sphere – Ullanor Prime.

There were also orks. Many, many orks.

The Ullanor system was awash with starships, an armada of vessels coursing to or from the ork world in the inner system. Ships of all descriptions plied the routes from the safe translation zone far from Ullanor’s star. Alien-built freighters with ramshackle hulls encased in shimmering fields moved alongside stolen cargo haulers with sputtering void shields, bearing the insignia of Imperial merchant houses defaced by orkish glyphs. A score of warships lost against the green menace had been taken, their crippled hulls pressed into service as bulk carriers: flight decks and gun bays stripped, the weapons stolen to bolster the armaments of the escorts.

The Reprisal was the first to lie alongside one of these. A force of Dark Angels Terminators teleported across, led by Grand Master Sachael.

The heavily armoured elite of the Deathwing company faced nothing more threatening than a few dozen orks – brutish overseers that had enslaved the crew of the ship, no match for the First Company of the Dark Angels. Searching through the ship for any surviving foes, Sachael was disgusted by what they found.

The orks had shown little regard for their captives, content to give them the bare minimum of food, water and heat. The air was freezing, the rag-clad slaves close to exhaustion and death from exposure. Many hundreds had not survived, their bodies left where they had fallen, some cleared away into the disused ammunition magazines and food storage halls. Vermin and insects were everywhere, fungal growths from ork spores lying in a patina across metal bulkheads and plasteel decking.

Interviewing the captives revealed that the vessel had been overrun when the orks had invaded the Trolgeth System. Nobody knew the fate of the freshly raised regiment of several thousand soldiers IG-8112 had been carrying, except that they had been taken from the ship on ork transports in orbit over Ullanor. Since then the vessel had been making supply runs, though to and from which systems and with what cargo the battered crew remained ignorant of.

‘They drove us, saviour, drove us something wicked,’ one emaciated soul told the Grand Master, emerging from the darkness of a sub-hold, blinking in the lamplight from Sachael’s Tactical Dreadnought armour. His pallid skin was broken by sores and whip marks, bruised and grazed along the spine and shoulders where he had carried heavy loads. ‘Killed the officers first. Ate them, right in front of us. Raw and bloody, it was.’

‘They came for us, they came for us!’ squealed another unfortunate. He fell to the floor at the Grand Master’s feet, pawing at the armoured boots, drooling and wild-eyed. ‘They came for us!’

Two more moved forward and dragged him back, flinching as if expecting blows to rain down on them.

‘No Geller fields, saviour, you see?’ explained the first man. ‘They got a shield, of a sort. It softens the voices, dulls the dreams. But it don’t take them away. Not proper. Three trips we made, away and back and away again. Six journeys through the warp. More killed ’emselves than died from lack of nourishment, I reckon. Or killed others… We had to… They needed stopping.’

His gaze was haunted and he glanced down at his dirty hands. Sachael understood the meaning.

‘You gave them the Emperor’s mercy and saved the lives of your companions. There is no shame in that.’

‘Emperor defend us, that’s the truth,’ said another of the internees.

‘Is we safe?’ A woman draped in the remains of an old grain sack tottered out from the crowd. ‘Is we safe yet?’

‘More ships are coming,’ Sachael assured them. ‘The Imperial Navy. They’ll send over new officers to take you away from here.’

‘Emperor bless the Navy,’ she cried, tears welling up in her eyes. She blinked forcefully and fell to her knees, hands clasped in prayer. ‘And gratitude to the Emperor for sending His Space Marines to deliver us from evil. Great is His benevolence.’

‘Praise Him,’ others chorused, entwining their thumbs and splaying their palms across their chests in a crude approximation of the eagle of the Imperial aquila.

‘Angels of mercy!’

‘Divine guardians!’

‘Praise the Dark Angels!’

Sachael backed away, uncomfortable with their adoration. His second, Sergeant Gadariel, approached, the bulk of his Terminator armour barely fitting through the door in the bulkhead.

‘No more xenos, Grand Master,’ he reported over the vox. ‘Main hold is filled with perishable food. Thousands of tonnes. Shall we let these poor wretches have some?’

‘Not yet,’ Sachael replied, turning away from the freed slaves. ‘They need proper rehabilitation and we do not have time nor means for such measures. Lock the holds.’

‘They are starving, Grand Master.’

‘And they will have to starve for a few days longer until the Navy arrives and can post armsmen at the holds to stop them killing each other over the food.’ Sachael stepped out of the chamber, sparing no glance for the unfortunates. ‘We can brook no delays. Our greatest efforts must be spent confronting the orks.’

Such experience was repeated on many other ships boarded by the first wave of Space Marines. Like a flock scattering before wolves, the ork supply convoys split into the void as the Adeptus Astartes continued their encroachment and more Imperial ships broke warp at the system boundary. Ship commanders were caught between the need to press in-system and secure passage towards their target, and their desire to board or destroy as many of the captured vessels as they could.

The faster vessels, rapid strike craft crewed by a few Space Marines, darted across the vacuum hunting down such ships as could be easily overhauled. On many of these ships the appearance of the Space Marines, even just a handful, was enough to rouse the crews from their timidity, and they used chains, tools and bare hands to fight back against their greenskin enslavers. Thousands died in these shipborne uprisings, but many more were freed from nightmarish servitude – and those that gave their lives were considered more fortunate than those that remained on the ships that eluded the pursuit of the Space Marines.

Such actions were admirable, but with each passing hour the penetrating blow of the Space Marine attack dissipated. Flotillas became separated and escorts drawn away from their battle-barges. Ever used to independent action, the captains and masters of the Adeptus Astartes were always ready to act on their own initiative.

From aboard the Alcazar Remembered, Koorland observed this dissolution of force with some unease. Leaving Thane with orders to continue on as fast as possible, Koorland left the command bridge and descended to the armoury bay that had been rapidly reconfigured into quarters for Vulkan.

The twin sliding doors were open as Koorland approached, allowing the flaring sparks and crackle of a laswelder to pass into the corridor. He stopped at the threshold and looked within.

Vulkan was stooped over a worktable – the heavy bench had been set onto a plinth, but it still barely came up to the primarch’s waist. He was stripped down to the inner harness of his war-plate, revealing jet-black skin marked across every square centimetre with scars, tattoos and brand marks. An assortment of armoured plates, stacked crystal cells, cabling and bolts were carefully arranged on the table. Laswelder in one hand, Vulkan lifted a sheet of ceramite and inspected it closely.

‘You may enter, Koorland,’ said the primarch, not looking up from his work.

‘I am Slaughter,’ the Imperial Fist replied. ‘My wall-name.’

‘You are not on the wall now, Son of Dorn.’

‘We are the Last Wall, my lord. It is a state of mind, not a geographic location.’

‘I know,’ said Vulkan, smiling as he placed the ceramite and laswelder on the bench and straightened. ‘I was there when Dorn took the first wall-name at the last defence of the Emperor’s Palace. Do you remember what it was?’

Koorland stepped into the primarch’s chamber, which had not altered much with its change of purpose. Materials and tools lined the walls on hooks and shelves, boxes were stacked neatly beneath them. A table to one side held a few books, data crystals, a scattering of personal effects. Doomtremor lay on the bare metal, glinting beneath the lumen strips. There were no luxuries – if the primarch slept, it was on metal decking.

‘Of course, my lord.’ Koorland stopped a few metres from the bench. ‘Defiance. Lord Dorn took the name Defiance.’

‘He did.’ The primarch’s smile slipped away and his focus shifted, lost in a moment of recollection.

‘The fleet is dispersing, my lord. The orks are not fighting. They flee as soon as we approach. Even vessels obviously built as warships are avoiding confrontation if they can. The rapidity of our advance is drawing us away from the Mandeville boundary and only a few of our allies’ ships have arrived.’

‘And what do you wish to do, Koorland?’

‘I am Slaughter, my lord.’ He did not know why the primarch insisted on using his other name, but he had to assume it was not for insult. Perhaps he was trying to make some point that the Imperial Fist did not understand. ‘We need to issue orders to consolidate our positions before we push again for Ullanor orbit.’

‘A reasonable plan. Why have you not yet implemented it?’

‘I…’ Koorland frowned. ‘You are the primarch, my lord. The fleet, the warriors, they fight under your command.’

‘And I give you my full authority,’ said Vulkan. He lifted up a jar of lubricant and dipped a finger into it, the digit barely fitting. He started to apply the unguent to a metal coil. ‘You have commanded planetary landings before, Koorland. You do not need me looking over your shoulder.’

‘I would prefer… My lord, the High Lords have entrusted this expedition to us on the belief that you will command it. I have led Space Marines, but we also have Adeptus Mechanicus, Imperial Navy and Astra Militarum forces here too. Only a primarch, only you have experience leading such an armada.’

Vulkan stopped his work and drew in a breath, laying his hands flat on the table as though steadying himself, though more likely steadying his thoughts. By the accounts from Thane, Vulkan’s battle-wrath was every bit as mighty as the legends portrayed but here he was patience personified.

‘The last time warriors of the Emperor attacked this world, the force consisted of a hundred thousand Space Marines, eight million soldiers of the Imperial Army, a legion of a hundred Titans and over six hundred warships to protect the thousands of transports to carry them.’ Vulkan wiped his hands on a rag of cloth large enough to be a serviceable battle standard. ‘You have to worry about roughly a tenth of that.’

Koorland nodded, accepting the subtle chastisement, although he was still not comfortable with the task Vulkan handed him. The primarch read the reluctance in his expression.

‘That armada was led by a primarch. His name was Horus. The victory earned him the title of Warmaster.’ Vulkan’s shoulders tensed as he turned back to the work bench. He toyed with a few items, his hands deft despite their size. ‘We both know how that ended, Koorland.’

‘I am Slaughter.’ The reply was an unthinking instinct, but Vulkan snapped his gaze onto the Space Marine, brow furrowed with displeasure.

‘You are Lord Commander Koorland,’ growled the primarch. ‘You took that title freely. Now it is time to live up to it.’

Koorland stepped back, physically reeling from the rebuke as if struck. Recovering, he bowed to Vulkan, ashamed that he had disappointed the primarch. Vulkan’s disapproval was more injurious than any physical wound the Imperial Fist had suffered, the thought of it nearly as painful as the memory of Ardamantua. Swallowing hard, he resolved never to feel such disgrace again.

‘As you will it, Lord Vulkan. In your name, for the memory of Defiance and of the Lord Guilliman who first held the title, I shall continue as Lord Commander.’

Vulkan gave him a nod, a quick gesture but one that sent a surge of strength through Koorland. As easily as the primarch’s disapproval had dashed him down, his simple endorsement gave the Lord Commander renewed confidence and hope.

It was not until he was halfway back to the command bridge that he reflected on Vulkan’s words. To take Ullanor, Horus himself had commanded ten times the force at Koorland’s disposal. Koorland’s new optimism fled like sunlight at dusk.

Three

Ullanor – low orbit

The overture has begun. A while remains until the main movement begins.

Time is the enemy of peace, peace the enemy of sanity. I do not need to ponder, I have many lifetimes of sorrows to occupy me. Let us be at the matter and bring it to swift resolution.

But it is not your place any more. That was the disaster. Even before the corruption, we were poor lords. No leader save He alone should be greater than his followers. He must value them more than they value him.

Why did we not understand that before?

Melta charges turned the airlock door into slag in milliseconds, filling the corridor beyond with vapour and fiery particles. Valefor of the Blood Angels was the first through the breach, molten armaplas flecking his red armour as he pushed through the haze.

Bullets whined down the corridor and ricocheted from his war-plate while las-beams seared narrow welts across the ceramite. He lifted his pistol to reply with equal force, only for his finger to remain still – his attackers were not orks.

The volley of fire spewed towards him came from the pistols and rifles of human crew. A shotgun blazed as an armsman opened fire, spattering the Blood Angels captain with pellets.

‘Hold your fire!’ he bellowed, levelling his sword at the five Sanguinary Guard of his retinue that followed from the assault pod. Another flurry of bullets rattled around him and he returned his attention to the men in front. ‘Stop shooting, in the Emperor’s name!’

His words fell on deaf ears. Valefor’s auto-senses adjusted as the glare of entry faded, revealing more details of his attackers. They wore patched uniforms, some of them little more than rags held together by crude stitching and maintenance tape. Ork glyphs had been painted onto the fabric and the crew members wore necklaces of human teeth. Their cheeks and brows bore scars and other tribal markings.

‘Cleanse the traitors,’ spat the captain, opening fire. His shots cut through the nearest trio, spattering the bulkheads with their blood. More bolts flared past as the Sanguinary Guard unleashed their Angelus bolters, turning another dozen foes to broken flesh.

Valefor launched himself into the remaining crew, his power sword a golden shaft of light in his fist. He parted limbs and bodies with every slash and thrust, the continuing storm of fire from his companions tearing around him.

In a few more seconds they had reached an arterial corridor, emerging into a fresh conflagration of fire from all directions. On galleries above and through open doors, the crew of the boarded ship spilled forth like ants from their nest. Their calls were more like the grunting of animals, low and hoarse. The walls were clumsily painted with more ork glyphmarks, and piles of filth littered the deck. Chains and cables strung with bones and hunks of scrap metal hung from gallery to gallery in rough ornamentation.

The crew were savage, hollering and hooting as they poured along balconies and through the corridors, brandishing their weapons, firing wildly at the interlopers.

‘Orks in human bodies,’ muttered Sergeant Marbas. The veteran levelled his wrist-mounted bolter and sent a salvo of shots slashing through the closest crew.

‘This ship was not overrun in these past months of invasion,’ replied Valefor, adding his own bolts to the furious storm cutting along the corridor from his Sanguinary Guard. ‘These wretches have long been under the dominance of the greenskins.’

Marbas growled. ‘Did none stand guard for these lost worlds? Did none count their fall?’

‘I am sure reports of their loss lie somewhere on the desk of an Administratum clerk, unseen beneath tithe receipts and Astra Militarum levy charters,’ said Valefor. ‘We cannot be absolved of blame. We are the defenders of humanity – it is our watch that also fell lax.’

‘We cannot be everywhere, captain. How are we to safeguard a million worlds if they do not call for our aid?’

The crew withdrew a distance, cowed by the firepower of the Space Marines, their laspistols and shotguns of little use against Adeptus Astartes battleplate, their aim as woeful as the xenos that dominated them. The savages jeered and screeched, baring their teeth as if they had tusks and fangs like their ork masters.

Amongst the raucous cries and shouts, Valefor heard an undercurrent of another sound, a repetitive noise that grew in volume, taking over the disparate bellows and snarls. Through the roar of bolters, snap of lasguns and the shouts of the wounded and dying, he recognised a single word over and over, a guttural chant in crude Low Gothic.

‘Beast! Beast! Beast! Beast!’ The war chant echoed through the ship, accompanied by pounding fists and stamping feet, causing the entire corridor to reverberate.

‘They are lost to the Emperor,’ said Marbas. ‘They serve another, more immediate power.’

‘There is nothing to be salvaged here,’ snarled Valefor, withdrawing back into the accessway, moving out of the welter of las-blasts and projectiles.

The Sanguinary Guard followed, stepping backwards as they continued their volleys of bolts. A woman emerged from a hatch to their right, barking madly as she threw herself at Valefor, daggers improvised out of plasteel sheets in her fists. She wore daubs of black face paint, and a headscarf checked in black and white – a pattern Valefor had seen on many an ork banner. The tip of his sword found her throat even as she scrambled to her feet, snarling becoming a death rattle as she folded to the deck. Others were pushing through the maintenance shaft after her. Valefor kicked the first back into the tunnel and tossed a frag grenade into the open hatch. He stepped back as the detonation filled the small space with deadly shrapnel, then signalled to his vessel.

‘Sanguinem Ignis. We are ceasing the boarding action. When we are clear, turn this ship to plasma.’

Thane turned at the sound of the command bridge doors opening. He caught his breath as Vulkan ducked beneath the lintel. Fully armoured, he was as big as a Dreadnought and the battle-barge’s bridge, though large by human standards, seemed barely able to contain his presence. The Chapter Master of the Fists Exemplar stepped to one side as Vulkan took the centre of the chamber.

Others turned at their stations – those capable of independent thought did. Thane saw veterans of dozens of battles trembling in the presence of the Emperor’s son. Several unaugmented crew muttered invocations and bowed their heads.

Thane let out a breath he hadn’t realised he had been holding.

It was the primarch’s first appearance on the command deck since he had come aboard. His presence lightened Thane’s mood, reassuring and strong in equal measure. Koorland followed a few steps behind, his expression guarded.

‘Welcome to the Alcazar Remembered, lord primarch. I am sorry I did not get to extend a greeting on your arrival.’

Vulkan said nothing and eyed the main display.

‘A Salamanders strike cruiser arrived in-system yesterday, my lord,’ Thane continued. ‘They requested an audience.’

‘No,’ Vulkan replied, still examining the scanner feeds. ‘They will operate as part of the force without favour. Seeing me will only… distract them.’

‘They will be disappointed.’

‘That is all?’ the primarch said, turning to Thane. ‘A few battle stations and a handful of warships?’

‘We can detect no other orbital defences, lord primarch.’

Koorland stepped forward. ‘I have sent Chapter Master Odaenathus and High Marshal Bohemond to lead the attacks against the orbital platforms. Admiral Villiers and the survivors of the Third Coreward Flotilla are clearing out the remaining starships while Admiral Acharya creates a high orbital blockade.’ He took a breath and his gaze moved between the primarch and the screen and back again. ‘Within ten hours we will have full orbital supremacy.’

‘I see.’ Vulkan placed his hands together, palm to palm, resting against his plastron as if in prayer. He did not look pleased. ‘Are we to truly believe that we have seized Ullanor, homeworld of the Beast that has unleashed untold destruction across the Segmentum Solar, within ten days of arrival, and with the loss of only two frigates, one destroyer and less than twenty Space Marines?’

‘That is the situation at present, lord primarch,’ said Thane.

Vulkan accepted this in silence, looking at Koorland expectantly. The Lord Commander ground his teeth in thought for a short time.

‘We cannot dispute the facts as they are,’ he said slowly, considering his words. ‘Orbital dominance is assured and the ork fleet is scattered. The Imperial Navy is capable of creating an outer blockade against any counter-attack. The next phase must be surface assault. We need a war council to decide the strategy and plan of attack.’

‘Very well,’ Vulkan said with a nod. ‘By my authority, make it so.’

The primarch left, and with his departure the bridge regained something of its old dimensions, the background mood losing some of its intensity. Thane approached Koorland.

‘Why does he not issue the command himself?’ the Exemplar asked. ‘He seems… disinterested in the entire endeavour.’

Koorland laid a hand on Thane’s pauldron.

‘He is a primarch, a son of the Emperor. I do not try to guess his thoughts, but I have no doubt of his motivations. He has brought us here to kill the Great Beast, and that is what we shall do.’

‘Then I will share your confidence, brother,’ said Thane. ‘Who shall we bring to the war council?’

‘All of them,’ replied the Lord Commander. ‘Chapter Masters and command-level captains, admirals and commodores, and don’t forget Dominus Gerg Zhokuv and whichever subordinates he wishes to bring.’

‘And what is to be the strategy, brother?’

‘We find the Great Beast, attack with everything we have, and destroy it.’

The words were simple enough, but the look Koorland exchanged with Thane confirmed the Exemplar’s belief that the execution, literal and figurative, would be far from straightforward.

The lexmechanic’s voicebox had an irritating static interference that made her sibilants sound like a hissing snake. Koorland tried to ignore the aural tic so that he could concentrate on the tech-priest’s analysis. She was currently pointing with a reticulated mechanical limb at a greyish globe dominating the hololith display that hung in the middle of the briefing chamber.

The room was dark, illuminated only by the sparse light coming from the projector. The gloom did nothing to alleviate the claustrophobic conditions of a chamber built for half a dozen officers filled with twice that number and their attendants, not to mention the dominating presence of Vulkan looming over them all from beside a blinking bank of strategic cogitators. The primarch had his fingers entwined, his gaze directed off to one side, barely observing the proceedings. Removing the large brushed-steel table had not made much difference, but Koorland was glad of the little extra space that this had afforded.

He shifted his weight, agitated, aware that many of his companions were barely restraining their desire for more determined conversation, only for the sake of appearances observing the niceties of the technical reports and standard liaison protocols. Everyone had something to say but nobody was saying anything yet.

‘Electromagnetic disssturbance in the upper ionosssphere hasss led to much reflective patterning on our initial orbital ssscan data.’ At an unseen command, areas of the slowly spinning globe highlighted in orange, with trails of yellow criss-crossing sections of the remaining whited-out sphere. ‘Much of thisss interference can be traced to masssive orbital intrusssions. The ressst we expect isss generated by unssshielded indussstrial ssstructuresss on the sssurface of the planet.’

‘Orbital intrusions?’ The question was asked by Field-Legatus Otho Dorr, strategic commander of the gathered Astra Militarum forces. In terms of raw manpower, when the remainder of the transports completed the journey into orbit he would lead the largest force – nearly ninety thousand soldiers and ten thousand battle tanks and other vehicles.

‘Ship descents and ascents,’ explained another of the Cult Mechanicus adherents. He looked much like a crab perched on a hunched human body, a splay of hydraulic appendages like a ruff around his neck. ‘Poorly-shielded plasma drives in low orbit, wakes from dirty atomic propellants on shuttlecraft. That sort of thing.’

‘A lot of them,’ added the dominus.

Koorland knew that it was crude to think of martial prowess in purely physical terms. In fact, to equate pure size with military ability was ork-thought. Yet despite being logically aware of this deficiency in his judgement, he could not help but think of the leader of the Adeptus Mechanicus battle congregation as being somewhat underwhelming.

The dominus was, for the moment, a brain in a glass vessel. An armoured vessel, Koorland conceded, as Gerg Zhokuv continued his detailed explanation of the vacillations and weaknesses of starship augur arrays. Clusters of sensory nodes and rods were mechanical replacements for eyes, nose, ears and skin, linked through spiralling cables attached to sockets in the exterior of the metre-high vessel that two lumbering natal-tank Praetorians had brought to the council room. The biotic fluid inside obscured all but the dark shadow of the organ within, but occasionally Koorland could see there were rods penetrating the naked brain matter. The brain itself was distended, patched in places with inorganic plates, far larger than any normal human skull could contain.

Most disconcerting was that the dominus’ ‘voice’ actually came from the young, waxen-faced man beside the stand on which the pteknopic vessel was set. By some invisible pathway Gerg Zhokuv controlled the slack-faced servitor’s body – at least the jaw and vocal cords, for all other facial functions seemed inoperative.

‘Can you find it?’ Bohemond’s growl cut across the dominus’ lecture. ‘Where is the Great Beast of Ullanor?’

‘We have identified several potential locations, hotspots of multi-frequency activity.’ There was a pause while Zhokuv’s attendants manipulated the display, which flickered with runic lingua-technis inscriptions over several broad zones of red.

‘Each of those must be several thousand square kilometres,’ said Wolf Lord Asger. ‘And there are four of them. That’s a quarter of the planet’s surface.’

‘We need to do better.’ Koorland spoke, sensing growing unease between the Space Marines and Adeptus Mechanicus representatives. ‘We cannot attack the entire world. We are here to kill the Great Beast, not conquer Ullanor. That is a war for another time. Terra itself is threatened. Time is a luxury.’

His announcement was met with silence for several seconds. Adnachiel, a Company Master from the Dark Angels, spoke next. He pulled back the cowl of his robe and revealed a deeply lined face, grey hair cropped short. Red light glittered in one eye, the lifelike orb hiding a bionic within.

‘As nobody else seems willing to raise the point, let me ask the question that is doubtless on all of our minds.’ As he spoke he looked at Vulkan, but his gaze moved to Koorland when he received no response from the primarch. ‘Why is Ullanor so poorly defended?’

The obvious answer went unspoken for a few seconds before Bohemond offered an alternative.

‘We have seen little strategy in the orks’ movements.’ He shifted his weight, his black armour reflecting the yellow and green lights from the hololith projector. ‘Orks do not consider grander plans, they simply attack until victorious or defeated. I am not surprised that there has been no thought given to the defence of their world.’

‘That might be true,’ said Asger, ‘but for the recent example of the attack moon. I have seen the reports. The orks on the station above Terra lured in the assault, feigning weakness before striking.’

‘Had that attack been led by experienced commanders they would have foreseen the danger,’ said Bohemond.

‘And here we are,’ replied Asger.

‘So, it’s a trap,’ said Thane. He looked at the assembled officers and commanders, hoping one might offer an alternative. None of them argued, not even Bohemond.

‘A trap we cannot avoid,’ said Koorland, his expression sour. ‘Perhaps that is the intent. We cannot destroy the Great Beast without landing forces. If we are not here to kill it, we should simply return to Terra and reconsider our options.’

‘There will be no withdrawal,’ growled Vulkan. He moved into the light of the hololith, filling the room, drawing all eyes. ‘The Great Beast dies, or we do. This is how it will be. This is how it should be.’

‘What do you mean, Lord Vulkan?’ asked Zhokuv. ‘Pointless expenditure of resources must be avoided. What is to be attained by placing ourselves between the jaws of the enemy if we have no guarantee of success?’

‘You wage war with formulae and calculations, magos dominus,’ said Vulkan. He narrowed his eyes and then looked away. ‘The balance of expense versus gain, parsed through algorithms and logic engines. All is rendered into probability. I must ask you to go further. To have… faith.’

‘My lord?’ Bohemond was conflicted, his expression vacillating between confusion and eagerness. ‘Faith in what, Lord Vulkan?’

‘Ourselves, perhaps,’ the primarch replied. ‘In justice. In vengeance, if needs be. If that does not suffice, then you must have faith in me. We can do nothing more than strive for victory, even if we cannot see how we might triumph. Magos, do not take this as insult, but there are matters that exist beyond the predictable and physical. The hearts of warriors and the chances of war are not easily codified.’

‘I have never claimed as such, lord primarch,’ Zhokuv protested. ‘My successes have been built upon adaptation and reaction, the ability to respond to the unknowable when it becomes known.’

‘Then we shall have faith in the Adeptus Mechanicus, also,’ Vulkan replied with a placating smile.

‘Faith will not bring forth the Great Beast,’ Zhokuv argued through his vox-servitor. ‘Application and endeavour will locate the target.’

‘As you say, magos dominus, as you say,’ Vulkan conceded. He looked at Koorland, expecting the Lord Commander to continue.

‘Application and endeavour,’ echoed Koorland. ‘We cannot avoid a planetstrike, so we must expend no concern on that front. There is one goal alone that must drive us. To locate the Great Beast. When that is achieved we will bring such force to bear that whatever the orks think they might do, it shall pale in comparison to our fury.’

There were words and gestures of assent from the gathered council. When the others had dispersed, Thane and Koorland were left with Vulkan. The primarch had withdrawn into himself again and stared silently at the slowly revolving hololith of Ullanor.

‘You look troubled, my lord,’ said Thane.

Vulkan did not move his gaze, but replied softly.

‘Rivers follow their course. Animals follow their runs. Events follow required patterns.’ He sighed. ‘Certain confrontations are inevitable. Unavoidable consequences were set in motion the moment we chose to come to Ullanor.’

‘What consequences, my lord?’ asked Koorland.

‘None that we can evade, Koorland,’ said the primarch. ‘But we must prevail or all is lost. As I said, we must all show a little faith.’

Following the disappointing council, Koorland sought to find a little time for reflection before returning to the command bridge and the demands of his rank. Ever since he had taken up the mantle of Lord Commander it had seemed that vexation had become his constant companion.

He walked the corridors and decks of the Alcazar Remembered, but despite recent familiarity with the battle-barge it felt alien and unwelcoming. It was a ship of the Fists Exemplar, the demesne of Thane. As welcome as Koorland had been made, as much as he shared gene-seed with Thane and his battle-brothers, it was still foreign to an Imperial Fist.

His unthinking route took him away from the main decks and up towards the Navigation suite where the members of the Navis Nobilite were quartered. He did not disturb the Navigators, but turned towards the observation deck aft of their chambers. From the long starboard gallery of armourglass windows he could see Ullanor past jutting gun batteries below, the edge of a purple-grey hemisphere.

He looked at the planet for some time, no single thought coalescing, his mind moving from one concern to the next without even seeking solution – simply cataloguing the obstacles that seemed to have amassed in his path.

The thud of a heavy tread caused him to turn, expecting to see a maintenance servitor or other menial. Instead he met the concerned gaze of Maximus Thane.

‘I apologise for the disturbance, Lord Commander,’ said the Chapter Master. ‘The fleet commanders and our battle-brothers have been requesting instruction. Did you learn anything more of use from the lord primarch?’

Koorland shook his head.

‘We have not spoken further. It is clear he wishes me to fulfil the role of Lord Commander. The title is not for decoration alone even with his return.’

‘I have issued standard protocols, in your name,’ Thane said, stopping alongside the Lord Commander. ‘Straightforward requests for data, obvious fleet manoeuvres to allow the Adeptus Mechanicus to conduct survey flights. Bohemond and his Black Templars are assuming an aggressive orbital stance. It seems he is volunteering to be the spearhead of an assault.’

‘Of course he is,’ murmured Koorland. He waved a hand towards Ullanor and raised his voice. ‘Against what foe should we cast the spear, Maximus? Would Bohemond have us strike without sight? If only I had the eyes to pierce the gloom that shrouds this world.’ He turned away from the view and addressed Thane directly. ‘What matter do you need to raise?’

‘Something I think you need to know, though I cannot say if it is important or not. Events at Vandis that have been overlooked. The last transmission of Magneric – it has been gnawing at me. He was willing to risk everything to ensure it was safely conducted to Terra, but the ships had not arrived before our departure. Information so vital an honoured veteran of the Heresy War was prepared to make common cause with accursed traitors!’

‘There is nothing I can do about that, brother.’ Koorland sighed. ‘I cannot reach out my hand and pluck the missing ships from the warp, nor pull free from them the information in an encrypted data-packet.’

‘It is… an unfinished business,’ Thane said slowly, choosing his words carefully, finding it difficult to explain his thoughts. ‘And Zerberyn did not return, even though we know that the Dantalion survived the battle. It is most uncharacteristic that he did not come to Terra immediately. Our astropaths and Librarians sought for any sign of their approach before we departed but saw nothing.’

‘It is possible that both Zerberyn and others arrived after…’ The Lord Commander straightened, struck by a thought. He glanced at the planet below and then back to Thane. ‘Perhaps we do have eyes to pierce this veil, Maximus.’

For the first time in many, many days, Koorland smiled.

Maximus Thane had never previously ventured into this part of the Alcazar Remembered. There had been no reason to intrude upon the private chambers set aside for the Librarius of the Fists Exemplar. It was with a brief moment of trepidation that he paused at the threshold to the deck, one hand on the bulkhead, the other on the pistol grip at his hip as though expecting attack.

‘Is there something wrong, brother?’ Chapter Master Odaenathus asked from behind.

Thane did not look back, but knew the eyes of his companions were on him – Koorland, Adnachiel, Asger Warfist, Quesadra and Issachar. In other circumstances it would be unthinkable for such a group of officers to be absent from their commands while in orbit over an enemy world, but the orks had shown no more intent to attack than when the fleet had first broken warp. The Imperial Navy were more than capable of fending off the disjointed assaults by individual ork battleships and opportunistic flotillas.

Saying nothing, Thane stepped through into the Librarius deck, expecting to sense some change in the atmosphere or mood. Aside from his own tension, there was nothing. He looked at the wards cast into the fabric of the walls and bulkheads, psychic-shielding runes wrought as much to keep out unwanted attention as they were to contain the power of the Librarians gathered within. Should the Geller fields fail in warp transit – itself a numbing proposition – the inner wards provided a sanctum within the ship from which psychic resistance might be staged.

At the heart of the deck was an amphitheatre, the Hall of Solace. The dome above it was formed of petal-like segments lined with crystalline channels and veins, the seemingly haphazard array of blue and grey lines having a mesmerising quality when Thane looked up at them. The Hall of Solace was usually a place of solitude and calm, but today it served a different purpose.

Nearly a score of Space Marine psykers, in many colours and of varying rank, had gathered aboard the Alcazar Remembered in the ten hours since the war council. Some he had met before, such as Rune Priest Thorild from Asger Warfist’s Great Company and Lexicanium Gandorin of the Dark Angels, as well as several from the Imperial Fists successors that had gathered at Phall. Others, the gaunt-faced Blood Angel Redolphio and Carrigan Nos of the Crimson Fists among them, were known to him only by name.

Thane glanced at Koorland and received a nod of assurance from the Lord Commander. Neither had remarked on the absence of Vulkan – the primarch was keeping his own counsel for the time being and that suited Thane. As much as the presence of the lord of the Salamanders gave him heart, Thane was also slightly disturbed by Vulkan’s occasionally fatalistic utterances.

‘Shall we begin?’ asked Vaniel, the Chief Librarian of the Ultramarines, who had been tasked with orchestrating the psykers.

‘Why are we here?’ said Quesadra. With the others he sat on a curved bench close to one of the walls, looking down into the bowl of the Hall of Solace.

‘As witnesses,’ Vaniel replied. ‘My brother Librarians and I shall be in communion with each other and I shall be the conduit. To break through the fog of ork psychic power that envelops Ullanor we shall all need to enter a trance-like state. It is possible we will not remember that which we encounter.’

‘Though we will not touch on your minds directly,’ added Redolphio, ‘you are all warriors with strong will. Your mere presence in this place will act as a shield against disturbances and intrusions, allowing us to focus our efforts on silencing the ork psychic roar.’

‘Very well, what do you require of us?’ said Koorland.

‘Nothing more than your attention and your patience, Lord Commander,’ said Vaniel. He turned back to his companions, standing within the lines of a hexagrammic star laid into the deck with lines of lead, the cardinal points and intersections marked by jutting pillars of metal like candlesticks. Vaniel stood at the centre. Pauldrons scraped against each other as the rest of the Librarians came together in a circle around him, the space intended for half their number.

The Librarians bowed their heads. An aura of light filled the air around them, glowing from the nest of cables that splayed from the neck openings of their armour and pierced each of their heads – psychic hoods that amplified their powers. Thane realised he was holding his breath. He let it out slowly, not wishing to betray his sensitivity. His exhalation came as a faint mist. The hall had dropped several degrees in temperature. A thin rime of frost glittered at the hexagrammic nodes on the floor.

The other officers were intent on the unfolding scene below and did not spare him a glance.

Silence descended, the only sounds those of the ship around them, which quickly faded from thought. The gleam and glitter of psychic energy were made more sinister by the lack of accompanying noise. No word was spoken by the Librarians but Thane had a sense of conversation, of the connection between them growing, unseen and unheard. He listened to the whisper of their breaths, realising that they were coming together, every inhalation and exhalation moving into time with the others.

Thane leaned forward, intent. His eyes swept from one Librarian to the next, seeking any sign of strain. If anything, the psykers looked at peace, eyes closed, faces relaxed. He could see Vaniel only in profile, but the Chief Librarian’s face was slightly uplifted, as though a heavenly body above drew his unseen gaze. His eyes moved back and forth under the lids, as if reading.

‘Anger.’

The word was muttered, barely audible as it left Vaniel’s lips, but it made Thane twitch in surprise.

‘Immortal anger. Rage. A tempest.’ Vaniel’s mouth barely moved but the words grew in volume, amplified by the chamber, settling in Thane’s thoughts more loudly than the Librarian’s voice alone. A darkness passed over Vaniel’s face, like the shadow of a cloud.

Thane blinked. He looked up, and the channels of psychic crystal in the dome glowed with a consistent pale blue light. The lumen strips in the walls were equally constant.

‘A storm, a storm of wrath, a storm of fury.’

Thane felt it. Felt the anger that lapped at the minds of the Librarians like a tide breaking against a sea wall. The others sensed it too. They shifted in unease, their movement in the corner of his eye, but his attention fixated upon the psykers. He saw the shadow again, darker, lingering longer on the face of Vaniel. Thane wanted to speak out but knew that any disturbance not only threatened failure in the ritual but might compromise the psykers’ defences.

A scrape just beside him drew his glance for just a moment. Gauntleted fingers drew back along the bench, leaving ragged marks. Thane realised it was his own hand. His jaw was clamped tight, aching.

It was not just Thane and his distaste for psykers. A noticeable tension permeated the chamber, emanating from the circle of Librarians. The Space Marine officers observing the ritual all felt what Vaniel felt, sensing the savagery of the orks as well as hearing his thoughts in their minds. A brutal urgency was pushing into Thane, quickening his hearts.

‘Straining, raging, thrashing,’ Vaniel rasped. His voice was becoming more guttural, his demeanour darkened. He bared his teeth, heavy gasps punctuating his snarled words. ‘The great green powers us. The great green becomes us. We are the great green.’

The grunts and groans were not limited to the Ultramarines Chief Librarian. The other psykers channelled the primal spirit of the orks, their faces masks of bestial hate, hands forming claws or fists. Redolphio was banging the heels of his hands against his chest, each impact sending a jolt of energy through the others. Thane noticed that the Blood Angel’s incisors seemed long, fang-like. He tore his eyes away for just long enough to steal a glance towards Valefor. The Blood Angels captain was alert, leaning forward on the bench.

A growl, long and low, reverberated around the dome. Though he could not say how he knew, Thane felt it emitted from the Rune Priest, Thorild. The Fenrisian’s eyes were wide open, glowing red like embers. His beard and hair moved as though in their own breeze. The pulses of energy playing around the assembled Librarians’ psychic hoods was tainted by green sparks.

‘The city,’ croaked Vaniel. His gaze moved slowly around the room, his body turning with it. ‘The citadel. Gorkogrod. Temple of the Great… Green. A throne of rage. A blade awaits. Cannons… lie slumbering.’

As one, all of the Librarians jerked, straightening suddenly with throaty roars. Thane started in shock, and the clatter and whine of war-plate betrayed the reactions of the others.

‘The Beast arises!’ Vaniel hunched, arms hanging like an ape’s limbs, lips drawn back to reveal teeth and gums darkened by psychic power. He threw back his head and lifted his hands high, a wordless howl bursting forth. ‘Waaaaagh!’

Several of the others raised their voices in unison, creating a primordial shout that shook the hall physically and psychically.

Thorild stepped back, breaking the circle. His entire body was taut, thrumming with tension like the air around him. Ceramite shattered as talons of scarlet lanced from the Rune Priest’s fingertips.

Koorland drew his pistol and fired, the bolt hitting the Space Wolf in the back of the left arm, splintering war-plate.

‘No!’ bellowed Asger, smashing a shoulder into the Lord Commander, sending Koorland’s next shot into the far wall.

Thorild leapt, and in that moment Thane saw what the Rune Priest had sensed a moment earlier.

Vaniel drew his combat blade and pistol in a fluid movement. Roaring incoherently, he attacked, firing bolts into the face of Carrigan Nos of the Crimson Fists while he drove the point of the knife into the throat of Redolphio. Two other Librarians fell onto their companions, battering with fists wreathed in green lightning, shrieking like foul greenskins.

The other Ultramarine in the circle, Adarian, threw out a hand. A golden gladius appeared in his fist, piercing the chest of one of the ork-maddened psykers. Thorild’s claws sheared through the throat of Vaniel, almost severing his head. A detonation of jade energy erupted from the slain Chief Librarian. The shockwave hurled everyone to the ground with a howling wind and the clatter of armour. It slammed into the walls and dome where runes burned with a blinding green light for several seconds.

Thane felt himself at the centre of a storm, his body crushed by a tremendous weight, his thoughts tossed adrift by the psychic tempest. The primal roar flowed into him. Through him. He gritted his teeth, resisting the instinct to add his voice to the tumultuous bellow.

For an instant he was but one of countless billions, a single warrior in an immense army that bestrode the stars. His voice was countless voices. Countless voices were his. A single shout, a unifying war cry that drove them all, that fuelled and was fuelled from the great green sea that swept away all in its path.

The pounding of his hearts filled his ears. A growl shook Thane, welling up from his throat.

He needed his weapons. He needed to fight, to dominate, to destroy.

‘I am Maximus Thane,’ he snarled, the words coming as though dragged from his lips. ‘Chapter Master of the Fists Exemplar. Son of Dorn!’

This last declaration broke him free from the lure of the savage ork spirit unleashed by the Librarians. He recovered his wits to find himself lying face down on the hard floor. He remained there for several heartbeats, steadying his thoughts before he risked standing.

Slowly he pushed himself up.

Koorland was already on his feet. He advanced on the dazed psykers, a glance at Asger warning the Wolf Lord to stay back. Thorild pushed himself away from the bloody wreckage that remained of Vaniel, covered in gore. His claws had disappeared and he held up his hands as Koorland approached with purpose.

‘Wait!’ called Thane. ‘I saw what happened.’

Koorland stopped. His eyes remained on Thorild.

‘So did I, brother.’ He motioned for Thorild to put down his hands. ‘I think we owe you a blood debt, Brother Rune Priest. Our loss would have been greater today if not for your strength.’

‘The great green… The ork psychic field is phenomenal,’ Thorild whispered. ‘All-consuming. I wanted to embrace it, become it. To unleash the beast inside.’

‘It was not simply the gestalt ork presence,’ said Adarian. The Ultramarine gazed sorrowfully at what remained of his superior. ‘It was focused, as through a lens. Not consciously directed, but… amplified?’

‘It reminded me of something,’ said Gandorin. He glanced at the surviving psykers, haunted, and received nods of agreement. ‘But I am not sure what.’

‘I do not know,’ said Adarian, ‘but I concur. The Great Beast, we felt it, just for an instant. An incarnation. A conquering spirit given giant form. All that it is to be an ork, made flesh. Nearly overwhelming.’

‘But you resisted,’ said Thane, regaining his feet. He looked at the others that had countered the ork insurgence. ‘You fought back.’

‘It met something more savage,’ Thorild growled. He tapped his chest. ‘Something in here it wasn’t expecting, a little gift of my Fenrisian heritage.’

‘I followed your call,’ said Gandorin. A brief smile. ‘Your howl was louder.’

‘What of the city?’ The question came from Odaenathus. The others had descended to the floor of the hall and waited just behind Thane and Koorland.

‘Gorkogrod,’ said Adarian. ‘We all saw it. A towering edifice, dedicated to the essence of orkdom. The Great Beast is there, I am certain.’

‘Where?’ asked Koorland. ‘Where is this “Gorkogrod”?’

‘I cannot say,’ said Adarian. The other psykers shook their heads and frowned.

‘Which part of the sun blinds you when you look upon it?’ explained Gandorin. ‘The assault was both like a lens, and diffused. We have learnt nothing in return for the losses we have suffered.’

This sombre news was greeted with silence. Thane looked at the Librarians who had been slain. Good warriors, taken from the service of the Emperor in the worst circumstance – by the hands of their battle-brothers.

‘We must shut down all psychic activity across the fleet,’ said Koorland. ‘If this was a deliberate counter-attack, the orks may target our Navigators or the primaris psykers of the Astra Militarum.’

‘There are means and places for such precautions,’ said Thorild. ‘Librarius sanctums. Navigator safe-chambers. Of course, some might not be willing to go into isolation.’

‘We will not offer them the choice,’ Koorland said quietly.

‘And the astropaths,’ added Odaenathus. ‘This close to Ullanor, we cannot risk any psychic pollution, even if the orks do not intend it.’ He looked at the corpse of Vaniel and shook his head. ‘If the will of an Adeptus Astartes Chief Librarian is not strong enough to resist, perhaps even being soul-bound to the Emperor is no defence against the rage of the Great Beast.’

Thane had not thought it possible for the mood in the hall to get any grimmer, but he discovered he had been wrong.

The Cortix Verdana hung like an inverted pyramid in orbit over Ullanor. The Adeptus Mechanicus war-forge bristled with weapon turrets and gun decks, but it was the activity in its eight flight bays that was the focus of attention. The strategium was abuzz with clattering, chattering servitors, the air thick with sacred incense issuing forth from the environmental systems in preparation for the massed launch, touching the air with the mixed scent of oil and perfume.

Gerg Zhokuv had been installed into his primary motor array, a sprawl of jointed limbs and coiled wires that gave him the freedom to move about the vast strategium deck via overhead magnetic runners. The hum of his perambulations heralded his arrival at any particular station, prompting the tech-priest overseers to sharply deliver their reports without need for request.

Bursts of machine-intelligible vox-code mixed with lingua-technis, the high notes against a background symphony of droning and whirring cogitators, metriculators and logistographs. The bubble of phageolinear pipes keeping the servitors alive was nearly lost in the hiss of hydraulics from augmented magi and the crackle of static-filled vid-screens awaiting active livefeeds from the drop-craft about to descend into Ullanor’s murky atmosphere.

‘Where is the magos veridi-exactor? I demanded his presence seven hectosecs ago!’ Zhokuv’s voice snapped mechanically from two hundred speaker grilles across the strategium, momentarily blotting out all noise.

‘He is en route, revered Spear of the Omnissiah,’ Magos Delthrak replied from a few paces behind the dominus. Zhokuv’s chief strategos was a bear of a man. His red robes barely contained the mountain of flesh and bionics within. Muscular bulges and angular jutting edges distorted the heavy fabric. The tread of metal-shod feet set the deck plates trembling with every step. Two finger-thin tentacular mechadendrites whirred out from niches between his shoulders. They gesticulated in agitation. ‘He has reached the logical limit for useful competence, dominus. I am unsure what role you foresee him adequately fulfilling. Why even have him brought forth from the datacores of Pavonis Mons?’

‘This is why I am the dominus and you are the strategos,’ rasped Zhokuv, his voice emitting from the personal address system mounted into the cradle holding his pteknopic jar.

‘I am the Barbarian’s Advocate, mighty Sun of Vengeance. It is my duty to test your theories. You should not take my disagreements personally.’

‘I do not. Your role I accept. We should ever guard against self-replication and self-verification. Your unbridled enthusiasm for your duties, on the other hand…’

A piercing siren and flashing amber lights announced the opening of the grand doors of the strategium. Each door weighed several tonnes, constructed of layered plasteel and adamantium, able to withstand atomic attack and the heaviest melta blasts. Immense engines built within the doors themselves growled into action, sliding open the massive portal. It was rare for them to operate. On this level alone there were six other smaller entryways into the strategium for the regular coming-and-going of tech-priests and menials, not to mention elevators, conveyors and two staircases linking the master deck to the other parts of the immense command core.

Against the white lumen glow beyond the doors a small figure appeared. It stood lopsided on three spindly legs, a barrel-shaped body and upper limbs currently hidden in the voluminous folds of a tech-priest’s robe. A head, or what was left of one, topped the bizarre torso. As the outlandish figure moved into the strategium, light glinted from a single natural eye set into what had once been the man’s forehead, surrounded by metal reinforcements, data-gathering spines and sensor globes.

The tech-priest stopped. His head rotated left and right several times and then his focus latched on to the dominus. He surged closer in a series of unbalanced bursts, skidding to a halt every few strides before propelling himself forward. Stopping a few metres from the overlord of the Cult Mechanicus forces, the tech-priest unfolded two crane-like arms and dipped bodily in an approximation of a bow.

‘Magos dominus, profound apologies for the tardiness of my response.’ The tech-priest’s voice was artificially modulated, the bass intonation strained through mechanical processors. ‘My navigational banks were uploaded with inaccurate charts of the Cortix Verdana. I had to inquire as to the correct route to the strategium several times. I hope I have not missed anything.’

‘Launch will commence in two hectoseconds, Magos Laurentis,’ Zhokuv replied. Quivering metal appendages waved the unstable tech-priest aside and the dominus zipped to the main command station at the centre of the master deck. He settled his carry cradle into a socket where a more able-bodied leader might have placed a command throne. He had no physical need to see the screens and displays; he could monitor all of the feeds directly through digital translation. However, the symbolism of being at the literal centre of all of the martial activity was not lost on Zhokuv. If he had possessed a more traditional corporeal incarnation, this was where he would have sat.

A gaggle of servitors blurted out the latest status updates while more of their kind ambled forward and plugged the dominus’ thicket of external interface attachments into the sockets piercing the command station. Laurentis and Delthrak arrived just as he settled his systems into the embracing mecha-consciousness of the Cortix Verdana’s primary systems. Above him an atmospheric outlet puffed a mist of pungent sacred incense into the air, responding to his subconscious desire to exhale at length.

‘Phaeton Laurentis, one of only two witnesses to survive the denouement of the Ardamantua attack,’ the dominus said to Delthrak, turning a sapphire lens towards the tech-priest, in answer to his strategos’ earlier complaint. ‘Aside from the personal experience, Magos Laurentis is also a repository for all of the data related to encounters with the Veridi giganticus since the Ardamantua attack. I understand that your lack of induction through the Magi Militarum might impair your ability to understand some of my thinking, but in this case I would think my reasoning requires no justification.’

‘He is dysfunctional, of dubious sanity, dominus,’ said Delthrak. He glared at Phaeton. ‘Unreliable.’

‘Thank you,’ said Laurentis, taking no affront from his superiors’ discussion in his presence. ‘I have come to the conclusion that reliability is an overemphasised trait. The unreliable orks appear to be doing very well thus far, to the extent that the Omnissiah might learn much from them.’

‘He also blasphemes,’ Delthrak added. ‘He was almost disassembled, a blatant neovagris apostate. A corrupting influence.’

‘The magos’ unorthodoxy is one of his greatest strengths. He is irretrievably broken, but his insights into the waywardness of the Veridi giganticus behavioural model are essential integration material. Have you not assimilated his recent Treatise on the Notional Benefits of Wrongness?’

‘One of my most radical tracts.’ A grating sound which might have been a chuckle vibrated through Laurentis’ speaker. ‘Also my shortest. I shall perform a through-check study to see if there is a correlation between brevity and anti-hierarchal asceticism.’

‘The launch commences in one hectosecond,’ announced the dominus, cutting off any further response from his strategos. The alert passed through his system without effort, his meta-consciousness overridden by the automaton will of the Cortix Verdana. As Zhokuv uttered the words, binharic cant-code throbbed from interconsciousness and out through the massive starship, setting off alerts and status demands in a cascade effect. Two hundred and forty-eight servitors roused from dormancy at his call, secondary monitor systems on-lining as his crypto-engrams flowed into their machine bodies. It felt as though he multiplied, becoming a thousandfold incarnation of himself. ‘All stations on final alert for launch!’

Delthrak and Laurentis were arguing about something, but Zhokuv ignored them, letting their words fall into a temporary memory bank for later review while he focused his will on the final preparations for the scanning mission.

Blocky triangles of gunmetal and black, the data-gatherers sat on their launch catapults and awaited the last integration protocols for their human pilots. Mostly human. While cortical automata and servitors were useful for many tasks, it was near-impossible to replicate human ingenuity and intuition in an artificial spirit. Given the circumstances – a descent into the virtually unknown, looking for an as-yet-unidentified location – logic alone would not be able to highlight the location of the Great Beast.

While the pilots plugged in their data cables and connected their brains to the machine-spirits of their unarmed craft, Zhokuv ran a thorough diagnostic of the surveyor assimilation systems. Twelve independent data-streams coalesced within the analytic framework and the dominus did not want to leave any possibility of information corruption or mis-flow. The response from the orks was, given past experience, likely to be rapid and lethal. The pilots had been briefed as such, the dominus making an effort to explain to them the value of their potential sacrifice, ensuring they were cognisant both of the honour they received in being assigned to such an important mission and the glory of the Omnissiah that went with them.

‘Two decaseconds to mission commencement. Final alert, all stations. Propulsion, bring to full orbital stasis for launch.’

Energy grids rippled across the Cortix Verdana. To Zhokuv it felt like a sudden rush of blood – as well as he could remember having such a thing, it having been over a century since anything resembling flesh had encased his consciousness. Arrestor engines and stabiliser jets fired, ensuring the massive starship was in absolute synchronous orbit with the rotation of the world below. Even a few metres out of place could render the octangulated data-feed useless, putting off readings by several kilometres or more.

Zhokuv allowed himself a moment of introspection. Fifty milliseconds, to be precise. The behemoth weight of the starship was nothing, just a fraction of its mass at the outer edges of Ullanor’s gravity well, riding the line between spiralling into the depths and slinging out into deeper orbit.

He wondered if birds felt a similar sensation, poised gliding on a volcanic thermal, riding the invisible line between flying and crashing into the fires below. Plasma pulsed through the dominus’ artificial hearts and electricity flared along wires like blood vessels. Eyes that could scan every range of radiation glared down at Ullanor, vexed by the miasma of atmospheric and artificial fugue.

‘Clear for launch. Bay doors to vacuum lock. Final status transmissions readied.’

He noticed that his subordinates had fallen silent. All eyes in the strategium capable of moving from their workstations were turned upon the banks of the main displays, now crackling with dark shadows from the interior of the flight decks.

‘Mission commence. Vent bays.’ Zhokuv felt a slight thrill himself. He had wondered if, divorced of normal human hormones, he was still capable of excitement. Apparently he was, though the experience was purely intellectual anticipation rather than instinctive reaction.

Air rushed out into the waiting vacuum as the flight deck doors swiftly opened. On some of the screens a mixture of distant stars and the purple-grey cloud of Ullanor’s sphere appeared from the visual feeds. A spike of light and radiation from full-spectrum monitors flared across others.

He silently recalled his final, personal instructions from Fabricator General Kubik.

‘Ullanor is their heartworld, the key to unlocking the secrets of the ork gravitic teleporters. Secure that knowledge for the Cult Mechanicus and you shall be immortalised as a Techtrarch of Mars, saviour of our creed. Whatever happens, we must ensure the survival and future of Mars.’

‘Blessings of the Omnissiah upon your datacores!’ Zhokuv announced, letting forth the launch transmission codes. ‘Unto the void, unto the unknown, the hopes of sacred Mars upon your shoulders!’

The launch catapults flared, hurling the recon craft into the darkness. Zhokuv felt their expulsion as a ripple across nonexistent skin, perhaps like a scorpupine ejecting its poisonous spines at a predator.

The blunt-nosed ships curved out and down from the Cortix Verdana, the momentum of their ejection taking them away while the gravity of the world pulled them down into meticulously-calculated entry patterns.

All was silent across Zhokuv’s systems for nearly a whole second. The engines of the datacraft flared, and they surged towards the planet in a dispersing cluster of sparks against the grey of Ullanor.

Four

Ullanor – low orbit

The lighting in the chamber had been switched off, leaving it illuminated only by tall candles arranged in a circle. Banners hung in the shadows and before each was set a small altar on which company relics had been carefully laid – wargear from past heroes, trophies from slain foes, artefacts connected to the Emperor, Dorn and Sigismund.

‘Upon us has been thrust a duty no other is willing to take.’ Bohemond stood in the circle of light, in front of his kneeling marshals. His blade was bared, its edge resting on the skin of his exposed left palm. The light of the candles was swallowed by the black weave of his robe, his skin dark. ‘We few, we that hold to the higher ideals of the Emperor from the wisdom of Sigismund, know a Truth far more valuable than any weapon.’

His seven subordinates looked up at him with expressions fierce with pride, eyes alight with zealous fury.

‘Long has been the path to this understanding, long have we warred in the darkness driven by ancient oath but unknowing of the Truth to which we were being drawn. As the Light of the Emperor guides ships in the warp, we must allow the Truth to guide our actions. Only from the divine will of the Master of Mankind comes our purpose. No loyalty, no oath, no duty is above that fealty.’

He slowly drew the blade across his hand, allowing thick blood to spill onto the parchment that lay on the deck at his feet, weighted with gilded skulls of assorted alien species – an ork among them. The blood spattered across the yellowing sheet and soaked into the porous material. Moving his hand, Bohemond allowed the drop to form a rough cross, the shape of the Black Templars Chapter badge.

‘From this blood we shall know the Truth, for the Emperor’s Will courses through our veins. Our hearts beat by His design. Lord Dorn, our creator’s eternally blessed son, gave unto Sigismund his gene-seed and from Sigismund the Great and the Loyal Crusade we were given form and will.’

Bohemond flicked his blade clean, the last of the blood creating fresh marks on the parchment. He sheathed the sword and crouched, examining the patterns in some detail. The High Marshal allowed the Truth to take him, his stare losing focus, his vision fogging as the spirit of the Emperor seeped into his soul, touching him with its wisdom.

The markings swam in his vision, merging and splitting, forming shapes as yet beyond discerning. Bohemond closed his eyes, allowing the memory of the blood-omens to continue to form in his thoughts, seeking the intervention of his divine master.

It came to him in a flash. The patterns became an image, the image a vision. A sword descending, piercing a world.

Its meaning was clear.

‘Praise the Emperor, for He has made His will known to us!’ declared Bohemond, opening his eyes.

‘Mark these words for remembrance, brothers!’ he whispered, looking at each of his subordinates, pleased by their resolve. ‘Trust in the Emperor at the hour of battle. Trust to Him to intercede, and protect His warriors true as they deal death on alien soil. Turn their seas to red with the blood of the slain. Crush their hopes, their dreams, and turn their songs into cries of lamentation.’

At a gesture from their High Marshal the Black Templars rose. Bohemond stooped and picked up the parchment. He tore it into strips, passing the tatters to his subordinates. Clermont fell out of line to follow his commander, bringing with him one of the large red candles that illuminated the chamber. Using the molten wax, he helped his battle-brothers to affix the bloodied parchment to their armoured pauldrons, placing each piece amongst the remains of previous purity seals.

‘Praise the Emperor. In our blood flows His will,’ each marshal intoned as he received the anointment from Clermont. ‘As our blood flows, His will is done.’

‘Return to your ships and prepare for the combat drop,’ Bohemond announced. ‘We have enough data from the initial scans to target the enemy. Let others wring their hands like timid scholars pondering their mysteries. We are the light that leads the way. The crusade continues, brothers! We are the Black Templars, the Emperor’s Sword, and in our wake shall come the Imperial Truth.’

‘We attack, High Marshal?’ asked Clermont. The castellan was excited by the prospect, not daunted. His hands trembled with anticipation, spilling drops of wax from the candle.

Bohemond smiled.

‘Indeed! Let us pray, as our bolters shall praise the Emperor soon enough.’ He bowed his head, one hand on the pommel of his sword, for no true warrior could commune with the Emperor without a weapon in hand. ‘Lead us from death to victory, from falsehood to truth. Lead us from despair to hope, from faith to slaughter. Lead us to His strength and an eternity of war. Let His wrath fill our hearts. Death, war, and blood – in vengeance serve the Emperor and the name of Dorn!’

The initial readings had been fruitful but not conclusive. Skimming through the upper atmosphere, the datacraft pieced together a rudimentary topology and energy schematic of Ullanor. The world was made up of three large continents and two oceans, one broken by a vast archipelago. These bodies of water were shallow, scarcely seas at all, and what further water remained to the planet was mostly trapped at the icy poles. The land was covered with urban sprawl, almost four-fifths of Ullanor inhabited, the density rising to an estimated several hundred thousand per square kilometre in the areas defined by the orbital surveys. It was to these huge conurbations that the datacraft headed, dividing into squadrons as they descended several kilometres through the thick clouds of vapour and pollutants.

‘Why have the orks not attacked?’ asked Delthrak. ‘We know that they possess detection systems capable of reaching beyond orbit.’

‘Insufficient data,’ chimed three of the dominus’ servitors before he could reply.

‘Our craft are unarmed. Perhaps they do not perceive them as a threat,’ Zhokuv said.

‘Orks care nothing for such niceties,’ countered Laurentis. A cable snaked from the nape of his neck to a nearby console, allowing him to monitor the dataflow in real time. ‘They relish conflict but they are also genetically programmed to dominate and destroy. However, there may be another truth hidden in your words, dominus. The lack of armament may mean the orks simply do not recognise the datacraft. It would be inconceivable to their minds that an aerocraft would not possess weapons. They might simply mistake them for orbital debris.’

As he considered this, Zhokuv slid a partial-consciousness engram through a data-transmitter, allowing him to settle part of his awareness into the implants of one of the pilots’ brains. For this close inspection he chose the lead craft of the squadron nearing the largest energy returns. Only the complete rejection of the flesh allowed him such transference – bitter experience had taught some of his body-bound predecessors that biological distraction acted as an anchor to the consciousness and caused duality-matrix problems with full engrammic integration.

Zhokuv reminded himself that he had transitioned to total pteknopic encasement to allow him to better monitor the battle-data for his command, but the perk of being able to partially experience front-line conflict in this manner also brought a certain level of satisfaction and reward.

The pilot blinked as the dominus’ presence settled into his stem implants. Zhokuv adjusted his perception systems, dialling them back to the mortal visual spectrum, and looked out of the pilot’s eyes. Witnessing an event first-hand was as important as any data-feed analysis.

The squadron broke through the cloud layer just a short time later, revealing the sprawl of the ork cities and the wastelands between. Grey dunes spread across steep hills and dells, shifting in a strong crosswind. Large patches of oxide red and verdigris-like debris marked the expanse. Processing this, Zhokuv determined that the colouration was due to staining from the decay of ancient metals – possibly structures, potentially immense machines.

This ashen wilderness was littered with fortresses and other defensive structures. Walled compounds several kilometres across loomed over fading lines of age-old highways, while spurs of stone parapet and turrets splayed like the limbs of squatting arachnids, tipped with ungainly towers of corroded metal.

Sluggish rivers of polluted water meandered through the detritus-citadels. Spectromatic feedback revealed a toxic combination of chemicals oozing from the city, acidic and deadly – at least, to humans. Though he understood the hardiness of the orkoid species, the dominus was surprised to see small towns clinging to the banks of the rivers, breaching the lakes and pools as stilt-villages, as though some sustenance might be clawed back from the oil-slicked flows.

The outer settlements and maze of roads grew thicker closer to the city, like the moons of a gas supergiant unable to escape its pull, not yet consumed by its presence. There was no single point of change, no easy delineation between not-city and city. The citadels started to merge, becoming vaster and taller, yet still only outskirts and buttresses of the urban mountain that rose up beyond.

While he rode on the physical senses of the datacraft pilot, the dominus allowed his central consciousness capacitors to analyse the ongoing stream of other data fed into dozens of the Cortix Verdana’s supracogitators. He traced a near-invisible energy stream, networking through the scattered settlements to the central mass of the city itself. There was certainly no sign of a physical transmission system on the surface, and the surveyors were unable to determine if subterranean lines carried the energy waves. Nor did there seem to be any specific generation point. A few reactors and power plants had been detected in some of the fortresses, but their grids did not extend far beyond their walls.

More confusingly, the energy flow appeared to be towards the city, not out of it. The settlements were feeding the city somehow.

With a growing sense of distasteful revelation, Zhokuv was forced to conclude that the city was built from the remains of a far larger settlement, like a star going nova that was consuming its stellar system to fuel itself. Its near-impossible bulk heaved out of the plain, separated from a high mountain range to the west by a broad river that meandered north-west to a ragged coastline fifteen kilometres from the base of the mountain.

Tecto-sonographic impulses revealed that the heart of the city delved as deep into the crust as it rose, a catacomb of thousands of square kilometres of halls and corridors, the equal of the buildings and streets above.

Unlike the shanty-keeps of the ash wastes, these buildings seemed new. Although the materials were obviously reclaimed, showing signs of corrosion and improvisation, the slab-sided structures had a more considered, fabricated look than the ad-hoc fortifications of the wasteland. The closer to the centre of the city, the more organised the layout. Wide thoroughfares and broad plazas that would be the envy of any Imperial city emerged from the discordant urban clutter of the periphery.

Even as he marvelled at this, Zhokuv registered a vocal input and identified it as coming from Phaeton Laurentis.

‘Remarkable,’ droned the tech-priest. ‘Even a cursory analysis of the structural integrity ratings reveals a complex logarithmic progression.’

‘I see it,’ said Delthrak. ‘It is an exponential inversion. What does that mean?’

‘Order from anarchy.’ Laurentis let out one of his grating chuckles. ‘An urban incarnation of the emergence of will over wild.’

The dominus briefly focused on the other squadrons, to see if they encountered similar circumstances. The other two cities, of which it seemed there were actually many more across the planet, duplicated the structure-from-disorder scale to varying degrees.

‘Manifest order!’ crowed Laurentis. His enthusiasm quickly turned to solemnity. ‘I warned about this from the outset. But I was wrong, no simple will guides this. No volition. No single vision, to be precise. It is the inherency of the native orkoid hierarchy to eventually escalate to a point where upper echelons of order realise endemically out of the semi-random appropriation of their genetic and technological inheritance.’

‘If allowed to grow to sufficient levels, a true Veridi giganticus civilisation emerges?’ Zhokuv mused. ‘A sustainable, organised culture? Is that really possible?’

‘Possibly even sentience to the point of co-existence,’ Laurentis postulated, his vocal synthesisers tremulous with the thought.

‘Impossible,’ snapped Delthrak. The Barbarian’s Advocate snorted. ‘Highly organised, I grant you. Capable of peaceful interaction with other species? Nothing in any study has ever hinted at such a possibility. Structured or not, they would see the Cult Mechanicus and humankind destroyed or enslaved.’

‘No weapons,’ added the dominus. ‘We are well within any security zone, eighteen kilometres from the city centre. No response as yet…’

Long-range visuals started to reveal the innermost areas of the city, while laser-like injection scans sent back more detailed feedback of geological, physical and structural data.

Where the outer precincts seemed heaped upon each other, almost toppling upon themselves in their efforts to cram in as much living space as possible, the city’s inner region was like the eye of a storm.

An instant later Zhokuv’s surveyor-senses felt a surge of power from below, emanating from the outer fortifications. His immediate reaction set sirens squealing through the decks of the Cortix Verdana and triggered alarms across the panels of the other datacraft. The pilot he was monitoring responded within moments, as did the others, but human reactions were simply not swift enough to avoid what happened next.

Energy flared up from the ground, flowing like a shimmering wall from hundreds of generator stations located in the outlying citadels. Four milliseconds after first detecting the eruption, Zhokuv wrenched his engrammatic presence out of the pilot’s body, but even so he felt the contact-shock of the force field’s interaction with the datacraft.

Through his assayer conduits on the Cortix Verdana the dominus witnessed an interspersed energy signature unlike anything he had encountered – part gravitic, part electromagnetic, part radiation, and part something entirely unquantifiable. The same happened in the other targeted cities, with near-instantaneous coordination between the different conurbations.

Part of him experienced the raising of the defensive shield in this detached manner, watching the intersection of the roiling wave with the physical entities of the datacraft, slicing them in half. Simultaneously, his meta-being still encapsulated in the biological systems of the pilot caught the faintest echo of the man’s interpretation of events.

It was as though a giant hand swatted him out of the sky. An impression, nothing physical to be recorded, nothing verifiable. Swatted. It was the exact feeling that vibrated through Zhokuv’s being as the tiniest portion of mortal pain started to flood the pilot’s nervous system and the dominus’ engrammatic ejection completed.

The datacraft and its companions exploded as power plants overloaded, turning each into a scattering of particles that slicked along the shimmering screens of energy that now enveloped the cities.

Wholly back aboard his starship, Zhokuv took nearly two seconds to recover from the shock of engrammatic death. He felt incomplete, disjointed. Flustered, he withdrew his other data-tendrils from the Cortix Verdana’s systems, allowing full control back to the servitors and tech-priests. He detached his auditory and visual inputs to cocoon himself in absolute sense deprivation for several milliseconds while he contemplated the experience.

Mortality. There had been no physical threat to the dominus but even the glancing experience of the orks’ power left him in no doubt that he faced a highly advanced technology. It was one matter to know as much from the reports of the attack moons and other weaponry thus far employed, but it was something far different to encounter it first-hand.

Shock gave way to remembrance of his duty to the Cult Mechanicus. Fear subsided, to be replaced with resolution and ambition.

The power arrayed against them was indeed formidable, but he would overcome the obstacles. Zhokuv would harness that power and tame the xenos technology, for the sake of Mars.

Five

Ullanor – upper atmosphere

They must find their own way, so thinks the father. Mistakes teach us, experience moulds us. Who am I to deny them this? I learnt at the feet of two fathers, and still my mistakes were grievous. I trusted. I hoped. I dreamed.

The dream became a nightmare.

Let them find their own path, wayward and wandering. They do not need my dreams to guide them astray.

Staring out of the canopy of the Thunderhawk’s cockpit, Bohemond could see the blazing entry trails of the other gunships streaking down to the surface. For a time he watched the falling stars of destruction, bright lights against the perfect deep blue of near space.

‘It is beautiful,’ he whispered.

‘The Emperor’s vengeance on swift wings, High Marshal,’ replied Eudes, in the piloting position next to Bohemond. The jet black of his armour was marked by a single red pauldron on the left, signifying his symbolic ties to Mars as a Techmarine.

‘We are the guiding light and the burning flame, brother. On our blades the xenos will learn the penalty for despoiling the Emperor’s realm. Bolt and plasma, sword and fist shall be the manner of their punishment.’

‘Glorious fate, High Marshal, to be chosen amongst the Emperor’s anointed warriors!’ crowed Eudes. ‘Those that come after shall envy us this opportunity to strike in righteousness and end the terror of the greenskins forever.’

‘Indeed they shall. The Great Beast is no such thing. A petty alien warlord preying on fools that allowed self-service to outweigh diligence. The orks are a judgement upon the laxity of the High Lords. Before the blood of the invaders has soaked into the soil of the lands they have despoiled we shall bring the Emperor’s scorn upon the vermin that infest Holy Terra.’

‘Is that not the task of the Inquisition, High Marshal?’ Eudes glanced at his commander.

Bohemond watched the flicker of plasma jets disappear into the thickening cloud bank. A few seconds later the cockpit dimmed, the view outside turned to a uniform purple-grey of diffused light. His gaze moved to the surveyor screens, the transponder positions of the other Thunderhawks marked out by red sigils on the black display. In arrowhead formation they continued to plunge surfaceward.

‘The Inquisition?’ Bohemond resisted the urge to spit his disgust. ‘Cloistered meddlers, products of the inbred politics of the Senatorum.’

‘Of course, High Marshal.’ Eudes paused, uncertain of continuing.

‘You think that I overstep the mark of an Adeptus Astartes commander, Eudes?’

‘There are covenants, oaths…’

‘Pledges are but one form of honour and duty, brother. Ours is a higher cause, our judge none other than the Emperor Himself. What mortal bondage can stay our hand when a higher calling demands action? If I had been chosen as Lord Commander our forces would not be loitering in orbit as uncertain as a novitiate at first bolter drill. Praise Vulkan, son of the Emperor, but he is not the Emperor Himself. His coddling of Koorland leads our crusade astray.’

Eudes said nothing, fixing his eyes upon the monitors and controls. He was clearly ill at ease with the words of his superior but he offered no argument that might be taken as insubordination.

‘A doubt unvoiced is a doubt doubled,’ said the High Marshal.

‘Why must we hide the Truth, Brother-Marshal?’ Eudes’ look was plaintive. ‘Why should we be ashamed of being the Emperor’s trusted heralds?’

‘Be wary, brother.’ Bohemond spoke softly. He laid a hand upon the arm of his companion, a gesture of solidarity and reassurance. ‘The Emperor has chosen us to bear this message, because we are strong enough. The others are weak. They hold His light but do not embrace it. We are the true fists of the Emperor, the inheritors of the crusade He launched across the stars. In time others will come to our cause and know the truth of it. The Master of Mankind hid His light for thousands of years until the time was right to lead humanity back to glory. What terrible labour is it to conceal our greatness for a few years so that revelation might come at the correct moment?’

‘You are right, High Marshal. It was selfish of me to doubt your wisdom.’

‘The wisdom of Sigismund, not mine. We are great because we are the sons of greatness, never forget that.’

For the next several minutes Bohemond studied the navigational data transmitted by the Adeptus Mechanicus, gathered by their scout flights just before the datacraft had been destroyed. There was barely a square kilometre of the surface that was not populated – and hence defended. Wherever the Black Templars landed they would face instant retaliation. The only plausible attack strategy was to make planetstrike in overwhelming force, obliterating the orks in the landing zone’s vicinity to allow Bohemond’s warriors to establish a working beachhead.

He reviewed possible strike locations, immediately dismissing any landing within one of the major cities. As tempting as it was to directly pierce the heart of the enemy, there was little reward in attacking the most heavily fortified areas. Instead, his thoughts were drawn to one of many strange expanses in the ash wilds – areas obviously artificially flattened but bereft of significant structures. It was likely they were sites for future settlements, cleared and prepared but the construction not yet commenced.

A signal alerted him to a communication incoming from the Abhorrence in orbit. He activated the Thunderhawk’s vox-systems. Through the hiss of distance and growing interference from Ullanor he recognised Clermont’s voice. The castellan had been left in command of the fleet assets, awaiting instruction on the primary landing site.

‘High Marshal, we are losing surveyor contact with your position,’ the castellan warned. ‘I have been told communications will deteriorate rapidly over the next five minutes, possibly be eliminated entirely.’

‘You need the target zone, yes?’

‘Affirmative, High Marshal. Our companies are waiting in their drop pods, the cascades are primed for launch. Do we have an assault site confirmed?’

Bohemond looked again at the rough cartographic intelligence. One site looked the same as any other from their current position. He closed his eyes and adjusted the viewscreen without looking, trusting in the Emperor to lead him to the best site, a silent prayer for guidance in his thoughts. He opened his eyes and picked the closest of the flat expanses, noting the grid reference.

‘Transmitting target data to you, brother-castellan.’ Bohemond entered the coordinates and despatched an encrypted signal to the Abhorrence. ‘Immediate drop. Your assault wave will make planetfall no more than three minutes after our touchdown.’

‘We have your target data, High Marshal. Confirmed that assault wave will make planetfall at the target location in twenty-eight minutes.’ The link crackled for several seconds and then Clermont spoke again. ‘I have, per your orders, informed the Lord Commander of our intent to secure a landing zone and asked for his support. I have also contacted the other commanders. Quesadra, Antilipedes and Valefor have pledged support for the attack, and I will pass on the target data as soon as we launch. Issachar has made a qualified promise of secondary attack, dependent upon his review of the landing zone data. Odaenathus will only act on orders from the Lord Commander. I assume the Salamanders will follow Vulkan’s will, whatever that turns out to be. I have yet to receive responses from the others.’

‘Have you heard from Thane or Koorland?’

‘The Lord Commander has contacted us. I passed him the same information as the others, but he demands to speak with you. I have a vox-feed ready to link if you are willing, High Marshal.’

‘Very well, brother, I will speak with him. Continue with the assault as planned.’

The vox snarled and hissed for a few more seconds and then went quiet, signifying contact had been established with the Alcazar Remembered.

‘Lord Commander, you are speaking to High Marshal Bohemond.’

‘I demand that you call off your planetstrike immediately, Bohemond!’ Koorland sounded strained, though the poor quality of the link might also have been responsible for the flutter in his voice. ‘You have no authority to launch this attack.’

‘I am High Marshal Bohemond of the Black Templars, recognised as Chapter Master by the Senatorum Imperialis. I know well how far my authority extends, and yours, Lord Commander.’

‘We cannot attack piecemeal, brother.’ Koorland’s attempts at conciliation sounded equally as forced as his assumed authority. ‘We must coordinate our strategy with the Astra Militarum and Adeptus Mechanicus. This impetuous assault will gain us nothing.’

‘You wish to talk of strategy, Lord Commander? You said yourself that we can do nothing from orbit. Why waste time? The longer we hold back our fury the more we allow the orks opportunity to prepare their defences. We are the Space Marines of the Emperor. We lead, others follow. Koorland, it is time to lead!’

Koorland did not reply immediately, the delay in transmission caused by more than simple distance. It was in such moments that Bohemond was pleased to possess the Light of the Emperor. Hesitation was doubt made manifest and he harboured no doubts. Listening to the static, Bohemond thought the Lord Commander might hear the thoughts of the Master of Mankind, hoped that perhaps the divine will made itself manifest in the mind of the Imperial Fist.

Evidently, it did.

‘We will launch a full assault in support of your attack.’ Koorland’s sigh was just about audible. The vox-link was worsening by the second.

‘It is a wise commander tha–’

‘By my word, Bohemond, this matter is not concluded. You are subject to my command and specific orders will be forthcoming.’

The vox-hiss was almost overwhelming.

‘Affirmative, Lord Commander. For the Emperor!’

Any reply Koorland might have made was lost in the surge of static. Bohemond turned to Eudes and smiled.

‘Justice prevails. The Emperor provides, brother.’ He switched the vox to general address, his words carrying to the hundred Black Templars of the strike force. ‘We are dark vengeance clad in light. We are the purging of the weak. We are the irresistible ending. Glory to the sons of Sigismund, for the Emperor has seen fit to deliver us in righteousness to the heart of the cause.

‘What happy tidings, that we be so blessed by the Emperor to stand upon the brink of His vengeful storm, the lightning that shall strike His foes asunder. He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand taller when this day is named, and rouse him at the name of Ullanor. He that shall live this day, and see old age, will yearly on the vigil toast his companions, and say “Tomorrow is the Remembrance of Ullanor.” Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, and say “These wounds I had on Ullanor.” And all will rejoice in his glory. The Emperor watches us, brothers. No fear. No pity. No remorse!’

Kilometres above, the drop bays of a dozen Black Templars battle-barges and strike cruisers opened. They coughed forth the second assault wave and the battle for Ullanor began.

Koorland pounded his fist on the plasteel of the door, the blows echoing down the corridor, resounding within the chamber.

‘Lord Vulkan!’ He slammed his hand against the door again, already irritated by the primarch’s lack of response to his vox-hails. ‘Lord Vulkan!’

Gears wheezed and the door cranked open, revealing the primarch standing at the threshold with one hand on the controls, towering over the Lord Commander. Koorland stepped back, his agitation suddenly cowed by the dominating presence.

‘There is a reason I have not answered your communications, Lord Commander Koorland,’ growled the primarch. He turned away and Koorland relaxed slightly, as though released from an invisible grip. Vulkan waved towards his work bench where his hammer lay on the top, the innards of its head splayed across the surface. ‘I have my own labours to attend to. What is so urgent that it demands my personal attention?’

‘The attack on Ullanor has begun.’

‘That seems… precipitous. I have monitored the data-channels, I saw no indication that the location of the Great Beast has been identified. Where are you attacking?’

‘Bohemond has launched an assault on the planet.’ Koorland uttered the words as calmly as possible, not wishing to show discomfort in front of the primarch. He swallowed hard, his annoyance at Bohemond’s challenge to his authority overtaking his vexation at Vulkan’s self-imposed solitude.

‘A reconnaissance-in-force, Lord Vulkan,’ he continued. ‘Adeptus Astartes companies will secure ground and then we will establish the location of the Great Beast from intelligence gathered on the surface. The Adeptus Mechanicus and Astra Militarum will commit their forces when the primary target is located.’

Vulkan raised his eyebrows as he looked back, leaning over the table. His fingers continued to work at the exposed cables of his weapon, pushing them back into the head of Doomtremor.

‘You are making a landing without exact knowledge of the Great Beast’s whereabouts?’

‘I…’ Koorland had nothing to offer. He shook his head and looked away, unable to meet the primarch’s inquiring look. ‘The initiative was Bohemond’s, not mine, lord primarch.’

‘I see.’ Vulkan finished his work quickly and set his hammer aside. He pulled forward a screen on an articulated arm and his fingers danced over the runepad below. Without looking at him, Vulkan gestured for Koorland to approach. ‘These are the findings from the Adeptus Mechanicus flights, yes?’

Koorland looked at the screen and nodded.

‘There are still three possible sites,’ he said. ‘Nothing pinpoints a specific location. All we have from the psychic scan is a name. Gorkogrod. The landing is blind, to all intents. Interference is still wreaking havoc with surveyors and communications. The only option is to seek out what we want on the ground. We can take prisoners, find out where Gorkogrod is located.’

‘A justification, after the event,’ Vulkan said quietly. ‘Bohemond has forced you into premature action. He has already chosen your “only option”.’

‘Perhaps,’ conceded Koorland. He clenched a fist. ‘We cannot afford the luxury of blame at this moment. What has happened cannot be changed. The consequences have to be dealt with. Bohemond has a point, lord primarch. Time is not our ally. We must commit to action sooner rather than later. We do not know how long until the orks attack Terra again. Perhaps even now the Throneworld is assaulted.’

Vulkan held his hand up to the flickering screen, as if communing with it, fingers not quite touching its surface. His brow knotted in thought and relaxed.

‘Here,’ he declared. ‘This is Gorkogrod. Here you will find the Great Beast.’

Koorland looked. Vulkan had chosen one of the cities approached by the Adeptus Mechanicus flights. By coincidence, it was the closest to Bohemond’s impending planetfall.

‘Are you sure, Lord Vulkan? Why this one?’

Vulkan looked sharply at him and he flinched, fearing he had angered the primarch.

‘Is my word not enough, Lord Commander Koorland?’

‘Should it be?’ Koorland asked cautiously. He had no desire to anger the primarch further, quite the opposite, but Vulkan’s manner and actions since his return had been erratic. ‘I do not mean to doubt your word, Lord Vulkan. There is so much at stake, I need to be certain. How can you know that this is the place?’

‘You must learn to show a little faith, Koorland.’ Vulkan pushed away the screen and folded his arms. ‘And you must also learn that certain things happen in a certain way. War has a pattern, a form. It follows specific paths to known ends. We seek confrontation with the Great Beast. That confrontation will occur. The narrative of war demands it.’

‘I still don’t understand. What narrative? War is not a story, Lord Vulkan.’

‘War is always a story, Koorland, told by the victors, shaped by the survivors.’ The primarch sighed, not in frustration but resignation. ‘The orks respect only power. To defeat the orks requires a greater power. Our presence here, our attack, is a challenge to the Great Beast. Never forget that it is an ork, nothing more. It must prove itself, it can do nothing but show its dominance over a foe. It can no more resist the lure of battle than a predator can resist the urge to pounce for the kill.’

‘That does not explain how you can know that this city is Gorkogrod, Lord Vulkan.’

‘More than fifteen hundred years ago, the Great Crusade of the Emperor came to this world. Horus himself bested the warlord that ruled here, and a great triumph was held in honour of the victory. On this world, the orks were broken. On this world, humans proved their dominance.’

‘And the orks have reclaimed it…’ Koorland moved past the primarch and looked at the conglomeration of lines and figures that denoted the ork city. ‘This world was lost again generations ago, but nobody noticed. The orks have taken it back. But there is something more. Zhokuv’s tech-priests posit that this latest expansion is a new phase of war. The cities have cannibalised smaller settlements to grow.’

‘A catalyst, a signal,’ said Vulkan. ‘Symbols matter, Koorland, especially to the primitive minds of the orks. The narrative, the story of Ullanor. One rises, others follow, greater than any for fifteen hundred years. Where would such a creature build its capital?’

Koorland considered the question, trying to imagine the thought processes of an ork. To prove it was the most powerful, it had to overcome the biggest foe, be the most important thing on the planet.

‘The Triumph…’ Koorland looked at the screen again. ‘This is where the Triumph ended?’

Vulkan nodded.

‘Here the Emperor stood, greatest warlord of all time. Here nine of His sons stood, lauding their father. Here He named Horus as Warmaster. We know what happened next.’ Vulkan tapped the screen, the sound like a normal man’s fist thudding against a window. ‘Places remember such events. Worlds are marked by the passing of such beings. Where the Emperor treads, legends follow. Where else would an ork civilisation start? Where else but at the very place where it ended?’

‘Yes, I see it,’ said Koorland. He activated a vox-link to the command bridge. ‘Thane, Gorkogrod has been located. Inform the fleet, we have a target point.’

The narrative of war. The story of the orks. He looked at Vulkan, marvelling at the primarch’s perception. It seemed obvious in reflection, as most great insights did.

Where would the tale of Ullanor move next? What other chapters would unfold before a new legend had been created?

Six

Ullanor – low orbit

The main flight deck of the cruiser Divine Right thrummed with idling engines and echoed to the clatter of ratchet cranks and the whine of loader servitors fitting hellstrike missiles to the wings of six Lightning air superiority fighters. Tech-priests performed their final chants and benedictions, activating the machine-spirits of the aircraft in turn. They formed into two lines flanking the path from the pilots’ quarters – a guard of honour, censers spilling fragrant smoke, oil-tipped rods raised in salute to those that would guide the machines down to Ullanor.

Six silver-masked figures emerged from the ruddy gloom of the suiting chamber. Their dark-blue flight suits bulged with pressure lines and reinforcement studs. Two acolytes of the Cult Mechanicus fell in step behind each of the anointed air-warriors, murmuring the blessings of the Machine-God upon their life support systems, daubing the holy oils of Mars onto the rubberised skin of their suits.

Thus consecrated to guide the vessels of the Omnissiah, the pilots climbed up the ladders of their machines while the engines of the Lightnings were fired by ignition rods. The idling of motors intensified to a growl. Final rites were grated by vocalisers and modulated tongues, praising the artifice of man and the beneficence of the Machine-God. Armoured canopies whined closed, sealed with elongated hisses.

The tech-priests and their semi-aware attendants rapidly left the flight deck, vacuum-proof heavy doors sealing the bay behind them. Red lights flashed in warning as the outer portal opened like a castle portcullis rising, the trapped air evacuating into the void in a gale.

Jets flaring, the Lightnings sped out one after the other, dipping towards the orb of Ullanor. From other ships across the fleet more scatters of plasma-jets were emerging, hundreds of craft speeding towards the planet.

A few dozen kilometres from atmospheric entry one of the Lightnings peeled away, guidance jets spitting fire as it veered towards the northern pole.

‘Hiedricks? What are you doing?’ demanded the squadron commander, Corbrus. ‘Return to formation immediately!’

There was no response.

‘I don’t know how you conducted business aboard the Impregnable, Hiedricks, but in my squadron you obey immediately! Return to formation or we will shoot you down!’

The rogue Lightning’s engines burned brighter as it accelerated. Corbrus’ long-range vox crackled into life.

‘Hawk squadron, report status,’ came the inquiry from the Divine Right. ‘We are monitoring an unauthorised manoeuvre.’

‘The new pilot that came over from the Impregnable, Hiedricks, just broke formation, command. Permission to pursue and engage.’

‘Negative, mission takes precedence. Continue to allocated patrol coordinates and provide additional interception cover for Adeptus Astartes forces on the surface.’

‘Understood,’ replied Corbrus, reluctantly. He watched the last spark of the Lightning dipping towards atmospheric entry and consulted his nav-pad. At that trajectory, Hiedricks seemed to be heading directly for the major ork city, the one called Gorkogrod. If Hiedricks was deserting, he was picking the worst place possible to do it.

Twenty-two minutes later, Hawk Four swooped into the outskirts of Gorkogrod. A kilometre above the surface, the pilot ejected, leaving his aircraft to spear into the ork shanty surrounding the main city. Ammunition and hellstrike missiles detonated with a blast that levelled buildings for eighty metres, sending a pall of smoke and dust boiling into the thick air.

Deftly manipulated grav-chute suspensors carried the pilot away from the burning wreckage of his Lightning. He landed amongst a tangle of scrap and broken masonry where a cluster of buildings had recently been torn down. Several small greenskins that had been scavenging the debris snarled and spat at him as he landed, brandishing lengths of pipe and improvised daggers.

The pilot pulled free a needle pistol and opened fire, every shot putting a toxin-laden shard into the eye of each of the five gretchin. They spasmed as they fell, shrieks stifled by the blood bubbling from their lungs.

The man took off his helm and stripped off the flight suit, revealing muscle-cladding synskin. It rippled as he activated its cameleoline coating, the surface becoming a blur of metallic shades and dark brown. He gathered up the corpses of the dead aliens and thrust them beneath a sheet of corrugated steel.

Retrieving several other weapons he had concealed within the pilot’s gear, Esad Wire hid the uniform with the bodies and set off towards central Gorkogrod.

Seven

Ullanor – primary landing zones

The crack of detonating missiles announced the arrival of the Black Templars. Lascannon beams and the bark of autocannons greeted the orks that scurried from their ugly barrack blocks, heading towards a ring of improvised anti-aircraft emplacements set about the edge of the huge crater.

Three Storm Eagles descended, weapons scouring the aliens and buildings scattered on the waste ground surrounding the flat expanse. Above them a pair of Thunderhawk transporters swooped groundwards, each bearing a Predator tank in its grip.

Thick dust and ash swirled as retro-thrusters fired, slowing the Thunderhawks over the last few metres of their landing. Before the extended hydraulic legs had touched down the assault ramps opened, spewing forth the warriors of Bohemond.

The High Marshal bounded forward, every leap covering two dozen metres with the aid of bursts from his jump pack. His honour guard followed a few metres behind, chainswords whirring.

Other squads fanned out across the crater, their bolters snapping as they gunned down greenskins skulking in the cover of revetments and trenches dug into the crater wall – fortifications that were poorly positioned, directed outwards to protect the crater.

Their warrior cargo disgorged, the Storm Eagles lifted off in a fresh gale of grit and flame, their renewed storm of fire levelling several more bunkers and hovels. The transporters took their place, dropping their battle tanks, tracks already spinning, the last couple of metres. As the Predators landed they lurched forward in spumes of dust, turret and sponson locks disengaging to allow their gunners to open fire. Heavy bolter rounds and concentrated autocannon salvoes added to the storm of destruction tearing along the crater walls.

Bohemond’s squad reached the incline just as a hellstrike missile streaked overhead to pierce an armoured gun turret turning in their direction. The detonation tore the emplacement apart from within, scattering burning metal and charred ork flesh over the bare rock of the crater edge.

The High Marshal’s jump pack easily took him over a chest-high retaining wall. Plunging into the trench beyond, he landed on a greenskin, the impact shattering its skull beneath his armoured boots even as his sword cleaved through the neck of another.

The rest of his honoured veterans crashed into the fortifications, hewing through the aliens within. Snarling greenskins and black-armoured warriors turned the entrenchment into a boiling melee while more blasts and bolts screamed overhead.

It took twenty seconds to clear the first stretch of trenchline.

‘Is that the best these scum can offer?’ roared Eddarin. The sergeant tore the head from an ork corpse and with a snarl threw it at the burning fortifications further up the slope. ‘We came seeking warriors and found juveniles and cripples!’

Bohemond saw that it was true. Most of the bodies were of smaller greenskins, poorly armoured and armed. The few that seemed to have attained mature size and weight sported prosthetics and bionics, some so crude as to be simple hooks and plain metal peg legs.

‘Gun garrison, poor duty for an ork,’ said Bohemond.

‘Such is the number plaguing the Segmentum Solar, perhaps all of their true warriors have deserted this waste-hole,’ said Eddarin, sounding disappointed by the prospect.

Bohemond pointed with his sword to the building-covered mountain reaching over the horizon, the city obscured by distance and the shimmer of its force field.

‘Foes enough await our righteous intentions, brothers,’ said the High Marshal. ‘The Great Beast lurks within that city and with the Emperor as my witness I declare the abomination will fall to the blade of a Black Templar. As Sigismund upon the bloodied fields of Terra, so we shall seek out the strongest foes and overcome them.’

He moved his blade towards the sky, where the black dots of descending drop pods were visible against the low clouds. With them emerged bulkier shapes, more Thunderhawk transporters laden with Rhino armoured carriers and other vehicles.

‘We push on to Gorkogrod, High Marshal?’ asked Eddarin, moving to the edge of the trench.

‘Not yet. Temper your zeal, brother-sergeant,’ replied Bohemond. ‘We hold the landing zone until our allies in the Navy have deposited the regiments of the Astra Militarum. We are the sharp spearpoint, but the weight of the haft must follow us today.’

Eddarin looked up at the crater’s edge and Bohemond could imagine his sergeant’s desire to continue the attack, his longing to take the fight to the enemy and punish them for their innumerable transgressions against the Emperor.

‘Justice will be done, brothers, vengeance will be served,’ he assured his warriors. He gestured towards the remaining buildings. ‘Ensure nothing lives that does not call the Emperor master.’

Bohemond activated his jump pack and bounded from the trench, angling towards the burning buildings ahead. Around the crater, black-armoured warriors pushed through the fire and ruin.

‘The highway is secure, Lord Commander.’ Odaenathus used the high-powered vox-unit of his Land Raider command tank to transmit his report. Even though only fifteen kilometres separated him from Koorland’s position, the vox-breaking interference reduced the range of his war-plate’s communicator to a few hundred metres. Contact with orbit was virtually non-existent.

‘Astra Militarum landings are progressing on schedule,’ he continued. ‘Armoured, artillery and infantry companies are awaiting our advance.’

‘Understood, Chapter Master,’ came Koorland’s crackle-broken reply. ‘You are authorised to conduct the second phase. Companies from Issachar’s command will rendezvous at the primaris target grid in three hours.’

‘Affirmative, Lord Commander.’

Odaenathus shut down the transmitter and replaced his helmet. Pushing open the upper hatch of the Land Raider, he climbed out onto the roof to survey the unfolding scene.

The Ultramarines were a cordon of blue describing an arc nearly two kilometres long, a wall of armoured warriors between the landing zone and Gorkogrod some twenty kilometres away. His auto-senses picked up the faint bark of bolters as squads continued to clear the surrounding wasteland of xenos. Thunderhawks, Whirlwind missile launchers and Land Speeders were extending the Ultramarines’ perimeter, pounding alien fortifications, weakening them in preparation for the armoured assault of Predators, Vindicators and Land Raiders that Odaenathus would lead. Overhead roared Imperial Navy bombers, destined for targets further along the main arterial route into the ork city.

There seemed little response from the orks. Considering a large enemy force had landed within striking distance of their capital, the counter-offensive by the greenskins had been minimal. Lacklustre. All that the Ultramarines commander knew of the greenskins told him that they were voracious fighters, lusting for battle. Even if some grander strategy was desired by the Great Beast, it seemed unlikely to overrule the base instincts of the orks in the immediate vicinity. The lack of response left Odaenathus feeling ill at ease, unable to test his theories but aware that all was not as it appeared.

Adeptus Mechanicus bulk servitors cleared the wreckage of the buildings turned to rubble by the Ultramarines’ attack, ploughs and pneumatic shovels turning masonry, metal and dirt into earthworks for the Astra Militarum engineers to fortify while simultaneously clearing more landing zone for the next wave of transports.

Of the stronghold that had squatted on the ridge two hours earlier, only broken debris remained. Ork cadavers were treated like the rest of the waste, unceremoniously dumped into pits dug into the polluted earth, a task that had been assigned to the punishment platoons of the Astra Militarum landing forces. They laboured with scarves tied over their bare faces, sweating despite the chill of the uplands. Black-coated commissars watched them closely, never slow to shout admonishment at any that seemed to slacken in their labours.

Naval drop-ships formed an inner boundary, seventeen of them so far, as many again still arriving from orbit. Some were tank carriers, flat and broad, with wide doors that allowed their cargoes to disembark three abreast. The troop barges were longer and narrower, hundred-strong columns of infantry emerging at the double.

‘A labour misspent, Brother Chapter Master.’

Odaenathus turned at the metallic growl of Ancient Selatonus. The Dreadnought approached from the right, the top of his armoured plates almost level with the roof of the Land Raider. Encased within the plasteel, ceramite and adamantium giant were the system-sustained bodily remnants of a Space Marine, a great hero from the battles of Calth-That-Was.

‘Misspent, Venerable Brother?’ Odaenathus reviewed his dispositions and could see nothing amiss. ‘What labour goes awry?’

‘Siege lines… Supply corridors… These are the works of an occupying force, Chapter Master,’ the Dreadnought said, every word from his vocalisers heavy with artificially intoned gravitas. He raised a claw-tipped power fist and pointed towards the distant objective. ‘We come to kill the Great Beast. Our sojourn here will not last long, in victory or defeat.’

Odaenathus thought about this for several seconds, reviewing the situation. It was a planetary landing on an unprecedented scale. There were protocols and doctrines to ensure all passed smoothly. He caught himself, realising the error of his logic. The landings were unprecedented by his experience, but for a veteran of the Heresy Wars they were a straightforward incursion.

‘What counsel would you share, Ancient One?’ he asked the Dreadnought.

‘Speed in all things, Chapter Master. The Astra Militarum are capable of fending for themselves. We should strike for the city as soon as possible.’

The Chapter Master nodded and moved back to the hatch. He needed to request fresh orders from the Lord Commander.

From the observation platform of the Praetor Fidelis, Field-Legatus Otho Dorr could more clearly see the odd topography of the landing zone. From orbit it had looked like a series of eight mesas, each rising a few hundred metres from the wastelands’ mean level. On the upper gallery of his Capitol Imperialis command vehicle, itself forty metres high, the regularity, the sheer flatness of the surrounding rocky plateaus, struck him as conspicuous.

The immense war engine rumbled on, its tracks leaving metre-deep trails of compacted ash and dust. Around the Praetor Fidelis smaller tanks and assault gun squadrons moved away from the landers, following the command vehicle like the tail of a comet. Sentinel walkers and Rough Rider companies moved ahead to scout the best route for the Praetor Fidelis and more super-heavy tanks descending in the next wave.

A sudden vibration silenced the chatter of vox-operators and junior officers. Dorr felt the movement again, a shift in the ground significant enough that it could be felt through the grinding of the Capitol Imperialis’ tracks and the constant rumble of its engines.

‘Galtan!’ His staff lieutenant snapped to attention at the sound of his name. ‘What was that? Contact the tech-priests immediately. I want…’

The next tremor caused the lumen fittings to sway from the ceiling. Several of the deck’s occupants had to grab their consoles to stop themselves tipping from their stools. Dorr swayed with the movement, stumbling as he took a step towards the reinforced windows.

Looking down he saw that several of the surrounding vehicles had bogged down, caught as shifting dunes slid into newly formed dells littering the canyons between the plateaus.

‘Sir, look at the rock faces!’

Galtan’s call drew the field-legatus’ gaze to the cliff a few hundred metres directly ahead of the Praetor Fidelis. Boulders tumbled in a shower of dust. Through the murk of the landslide he saw racks run up the length of the rock. Stone split along unseen fault lines, thousands of tonnes of rock shearing away as something beneath – within – moved.

Alarm sirens shrieked from half a dozen positions as the ground lurched again, tipping the Capitol Imperialis to the left. Men and women tumbled across the observation deck and mechanical howls of protests shuddered through the war machine as drive systems tried to continue pushing the tilting Praetor Fidelis into the growing drifts of rock, sand and ash.

‘All drives to idle!’ barked Dorr.

‘Sir…’ Galtan’s hand tugged at the field-legatus’ brocaded sleeve. ‘You have to come to the gyro. I’ve ordered full staff council evacuation.’

‘You’ve ordered…?’

‘My prerogative, field-legatus.’ The junior officer signalled to a stern-faced commissar standing by the stairwell that led up to the flight platform atop the command vehicle. ‘Strechan will look after you.’

‘Come with me, sir.’ Strechan’s tone suggested he would brook no argument. His hand on the butt of a shock maul indicated he was also willing to take physical measures to ensure the field-legatus’ safety.

Dorr allowed himself to be hurried up the stairs. Emerging onto the flight platform he saw that the Capitol Imperialis had heeled over almost twenty degrees. The recon gyro – a four-rotored flyer capable of carrying five men in addition to the pilot – was still tightly gripped by landing claws.

‘What is happening?’ Dorr demanded, stepping away from the gaggle of officers surging up the stairs behind him.

Strechan looked as though he might intervene but stopped as the field-legatus directed a glare at him.

‘You may have the authority to detain me, commissar, but I would think twice about exercising it.’

The towering rock plateaus were falling to pieces, revealing glinting metal beneath. Like petals unfolding, huge plates hinged down, unleashing crushing deluges of rock onto the men and tanks between. Looking behind, Dorr could see one of the massive structures fully opened. Where there had been a mesa of solid stone – so he had thought – he could see a pointed dome at least a hundred metres across. It was painted in huge checks of red and black.

‘Is that…?’

‘Yessir,’ Galtan said hurriedly, seizing hold of the stunned field-legatus’ belt to drag him towards the open doors of the gyro. The blades started to spin, the whine of motors almost lost under the tumult of falling rocks and the shrieks of pulverised tank armour. The cacophony swallowed the screams of the dying, their last cries passing unheard forty metres below.

Bundled into the gyro, Dorr had not even strapped on his safety harness when the engines pitched to a shriek and he felt the craft lift away. Already at an awkward angle, the gyro sheared sideways towards the grey-and-black avalanche, until the pilot heaved the flyer into a swift climb. A cloud of choking ash and dust mixed with exhaust smoke swept through the still-open door of the compartment, coating uniforms, lips and skin with powdery residue. The updraught shook the gyro, its rotors rattling through stone splinters.

The field-legatus shouldered past Galtan, noting that Commissar Strechan had remained behind on the stricken Capitol Imperialis. Through the murk, wiping grit from his eyes, Dorr looked out of the ascending gyro, able to see across the expanse of the landing zone.

He could not credit his own senses at first, but the impossible forced its way into recognition. Where there had been rock and wilderness, now Dorr watched eight missiles push up from their silos, each defying sanity with their size.

‘We have to warn the others,’ he croaked, swallowing dust.

A captain manning the vox-station looked at him, the blood drained from his face. He was holding the speaker-piece against his ear to listen over the continuing storm of noise.

‘They already know, sir. By the Throne, they already know…’

Like a cornered animal, Ullanor bared its fangs.

Years of psychodoctrination meant that Captain Valefor could not panic. Vigorous mental conditioning and genetic therapy had eliminated biological fear. Even so, as a cocktail of hormones and stimulants raced through his bloodstream, as twin hearts thundered into accelerated life and his tertiary lung inflated to flood his system with oxygen, the biological call to action that seared through his body and thoughts came very close.

The desert had swallowed six Astra Militarum drop-craft already, the yawning chasm that had split the basin still widening. Dust and ash flowed like water into the breach, dragging tanks and men with it. Ruddy light, the gleam of the abyss itself, burned from the new crevasse, and with it came an ear-piercing screech of tortured metal.

The plain was shifting under his feet, toppling columns of soldiers that had been advancing from the landing barges. He could feel himself moving slowly to the right without taking a step. He watched as a Leman Russ tank tilted, trapped against a boulder. Hatches slammed open as the crew tried to scramble to safety. Too late, too slow, they fell into the gaping rift with their vehicle.

The vox was a thrum of meaningless noise, every general channel and frequency overloaded. He shut down all but the Adeptus Astartes feeds. The garbled bursts were replaced by clipped, efficient reports and unruffled commands. The relative quiet allowed him to focus on the immediate situation.

Valefor’s auto-senses brought to him the insistent bellows of officers and the terrified shouts of dying Guardsmen. Many of the Astra Militarum infantry were breaking ranks, fleeing towards the distant lip of the basin. Commissars did their best to prevent the retreat becoming a rout – the Blood Angel could hear them exhorting their men to keep weapons and packs, ordering them to drag their heavy bolters and lascannons, autocannons and mortars through the undulating dunes of ash and dirt.

A slew of rocks and earth was building up against the walls of the hollow, forming a ramp for some of the vehicles to drive over while men clambered through the churning debris. Many disappeared beneath the surface, while others were bloodily crushed by rolling boulders or suffocated by erupting clouds of dust.

‘Our forces are clear, captain.’ Marbas was at Valefor’s shoulder, golden armour coated with dark grey ash. He waved a hand towards red-liveried Rhinos, Predators and Land Raiders just visible through the whirling dust-storm. ‘What are your orders?’

Valefor could see that the chasm was now nearly fifty metres wide. Several of his Land Speeder crews had already taken it upon themselves to act as lifeboats, skimming dangerously close to the rolling stones and earth, laden with Guardsmen clinging to every handhold. Valkyries and Vendettas in the colours of the Imperial Navy and the Coltain XV Air Dragoons skimmed to and fro, their hoverjets kicking up even more ash and soot. The men and women aboard hauled up as many fellow soldiers as they could, filling their troop compartments to bursting. Here and there brave pilots set their machines down so that wounded soldiers could be loaded aboard. Valefor saw a Vendetta crushed like a rations can as a boulder twice the size of a troop transport tumbled into it.

‘Get the Thunderhawks, rapid evacuation.’ Valefor watched as a ring of drop pods vanished into the depths. He had landed in one just a few hours earlier.

He turned and waded back down into the basin. His auto-senses flickered through various modes until they settled on thermal, picking out the fleeing men and women like flares at night. A gaggle of soldiers struggled towards him a few metres away. The swirling ash was like quicksand, dissolving underfoot. Valefor heaved the closest man out of the mire as easily as an adult lifts a child, almost throwing him towards the basin’s edge. Another cradled a broken arm, blood staining his light blue uniform.

Valefor saw the injury and knew that the soldier would not fight again. He stepped past, ignoring the man’s pleas for help. Other Blood Angels followed, advancing into the raging storm to help the beleaguered Imperial Guardsmen.

‘Concentrate on the uninjured,’ Valefor voxed to his companions. The mounting dirt was heaped up almost to his knees. The captain kicked himself free and looked around at the devastation. From the long-range broadcasts on the vox he knew that their predicament was far from unique. ‘We’re going to need every able-bodied soldier.’

Eight

Ullanor – low orbit

Once more, dear friend, once more. Now is the moment.

Nearly all of the Cult Mechanicus personnel were already on Ullanor or in atmospheric transit. Aboard the Cortix Verdana the eruption of surface defence systems burst across the sensors as a stream of alerts and surveyor spikes. With two-thirds of his divisible consciousness plugged directly into the assessor arrays to monitor the ongoing landings, Gerg Zhokuv felt it like a burning sensation racing through his being.

‘It is… astounding,’ said Laurentis, gazing at the images arranged on the visual displays. Hundreds of installations appeared, massive thermal plumes and energy signatures like celebration lights flickering on the screens. Around the cities the force fields gleamed, encompassing entire settlements. ‘Not an attack moon. An attack planet?’

‘Thousands of soldiers are dying,’ Delthrak snapped in response to his fellow tech-priest’s enthusiasm. ‘Our assault is crumbling before our eyes.’

The surge of signals from orbital and ground-based data-feeds crackled lightning-like through Zhokuv’s synapses, the equivalent to a blinding, deafening pulse. They emerged in a wave from a battery of outposts almost directly below the Martian ship’s orbital arc.

‘We are being targeted!’ the dominus roared across the vocal and sub-aural channels of the war-forge.

‘By what?’ inquired Delthrak, tapping into the data-stream.

Zhokuv did not have to reply.

His subconscious reaction directed power to the main void shield generators and shut down reactor plasma inlets as he braced the starship for the inevitable attack. Anti-torpedo las weapons thrummed into life, though they were of virtually no use against surface-launched missiles. The targeting arrays would not have time to adjust in the moments between the projectiles breaking atmosphere and striking the ship in low orbit. Damage teams and repair servitors were despatched to their emergency positions while the more vulnerable parts of the ship were evacuated completely except for servitor personnel.

A vessel the size of the Cortix Verdana had no chance of evading the incoming attack. Instead, the ship assumed its maximum defensive posture, the equivalent of curling into a foetal ball and awaiting the worst.

They did not have to wait long.

Less than a minute after detecting the first defence activations, Zhokuv sensed a ripple of energetic particles erupting from one of the ground installations. In less than a second the beam struck the Cortix Verdana.

‘Gravitic attack!’ The warning raced through the ship’s systems. Klaxons blared. Those that could made fast to whatever they could hold.

The wave of anti-gravitic energy passed through the void shields without effect. It slammed into the planetwards decks, instantly crumpling metres-thick armour, tearing chunks of plasteel and adamantium from their housings.

The physical damage was significant, but worse still, the beam ruptured the basic fabric of the gravity well, dragging the ship towards Ullanor. The sudden acceleration created a form of weightlessness on board, overpowering even the artificial gravity. Personnel and equipment were sent flying from the decks, slamming into ceilings and bulkheads as though caught on an aircraft in horrendous turbulence. Zhokuv felt pressure doors bursting and vacuum seals shredding under the immense forces.

The dominus knew from all previous reports that even the massive engines of the Cortix Verdana could not resist the power of the gravity beam. Instead he diverted all remaining energy to the physical defences and energy shields.

‘Atmospheric entry in thirty seconds,’ groaned an alarm-servitor.

The strategium was a scene of chaos, tech-priests and servitors thrown like dolls as another wave of impossible gravitic energy flared along the Cortix Verdana. Zhokuv had no time to spare for the broken bodies littering the deck – every navigational shield and altitude jet burst into life at his command, easing the massive starship into a better angle of entry.

Even so, the flare of frictional heat from the thickening atmosphere overloaded the ship’s sensors. Blinded, the flagship of the Adeptus Mechanicus plunged into Ullanor’s skies.

‘Launch everything!’ bellowed Koorland. ‘Anything that can drop, get it off the ships. Any vessel that has already despatched must break orbit immediately.’

Thane was already barking commands at the vox-officer, demanding reports from the surface. Warning alerts wailed into life as the Alcazar Remembered took evasive action. The battle-barge fired its main engines, heading towards Ullanor in an attempt to break the target lock that had overloaded its surveyor systems a minute earlier.

‘Incoming missiles,’ growled Thane from a monitor station. ‘A dozen at least.’

The flat areas chosen as landing grounds by their forces had in fact been the covers to immense silos of anti-ship guns and missiles. Not just physical missiles targeted the orbiting fleets – powerful gravitic manipulators were turning ships inside out, pulling them down to fiery deaths in the atmosphere or tossing them into deep space. Strangely pulsating green rays sliced warships in two while cluster-missiles engulfed descending drop-ships with thousands of detonations, and rapid-firing flak guns smashed apart plummeting drop pods.

‘We can’t stay here,’ snarled Koorland. He started towards the door of the command bridge. ‘Alert all combat personnel to prepare for launch. Drop pods and Thunderhawks.’

‘We’re evacuating, Lord Commander?’

‘Attacking, while we can.’

‘And Lord Vulkan?’ asked Thane, following his Lord Commander. The remaining Space Marines left their positions, their roles handed to unaugmented officers and servitors. Fists Exemplar across the ship would be doing the same. Every warrior ready for combat would be at his drop-station in minutes.

‘I will speak with him myself,’ said Koorland. He took his helmet from his belt as the doors wheezed open. With a last look at Thane he fitted the helm.

‘Brace for impact.’ The mechanical tones of the alert servitor across the shipwide vox did nothing to convey the urgency of its message. ‘Impact imminent.’

Koorland grabbed a bulkhead, pressing close to the plasteel. The others found similar handholds and waited.

Three seconds later the ork missiles erupted around the battle-barge in a storm of fire and metal. Void shields flared black and blue, warp-shunting what they could before their generators overloaded, exploding with showers of sparks in the bowels of the ship.

The Alcazar Remembered shook from prow to stern as the remaining energy and debris slammed into its starboard side. The entire ship lurched. Lights flickered. Koorland felt as much as heard the rip of tortured metal shuddering along the length of the battle-barge.

Damage reports flowed through the vox but he cut them off and signalled the quarters of the primarch. Unlike before, Vulkan responded immediately.

‘The orks have woken up,’ said the primarch.

‘A quarter of the fleet is already in ruins, my lord,’ replied Koorland. He hit the call rune for the conveyor and chains rattled in the shaft beyond the heavy doors. ‘They hit us exactly when we could do the least about it, mid-drop.’

‘And your strategy, Lord Commander?’

‘We have to complete the drop, Lord Vulkan. Our ships cannot stay in orbit and survive.’

‘The army will be stranded on Ullanor.’ Koorland heard the grinding noise of the primarch’s chamber doors across the link. ‘While these weapons remain active there can be no return from the surface.’

‘That does not concern us, does it?’ Koorland said. The conveyor arrived and he wrenched open the door. He and the others crowded into the cage within. Thane operated the controls, taking them down to the launch decks.

Memories crammed into Koorland’s thoughts as tightly as the warriors in the conveyor. Of Ardamantua. His brothers penned in, dying by the score with no escape. The buzz of suppressed vox-traffic reminded him of the confused warnings and alerts of that dreadful day.

‘Lord Commander?’ Vulkan had been speaking. ‘Koorland, respond.’

‘It is of no concern,’ the Imperial Fist said, pushing back any thoughts of his Chapter’s demise. ‘The orks were ready, no matter what. The dilemma has not changed. Attack, or return to Terra. We came to Ullanor with a single purpose. That mission remains. The Beast must die!’

Bohemond watched with mounting incredulity as the barrels of three immense cannons emerged from the splitting crater. Secondary guns broke free of rock cladding in the surrounding hills. Within seconds they opened fire, spewing a torrent of exploding shells and pulsing blasts into the drop-ships bringing down the Astra Militarum forces.

He looked up into the sky and saw drop-craft burning, falling like meteors. Showers of debris rained down, some pieces as large as battle tanks. Charred skeletons and bloody body parts fell too, striking terror into the squads of Guardsmen fleeing the carnage.

The main cannons boomed into life. Bohemond’s auto-senses blotted out the ear-shattering noise but the shockwave threw hundreds of Astra Militarum fighters to the ground, screaming as their eardrums burst. The wave swept onwards, tipping armoured vehicles and sending Land Speeders and Navy aircraft into mad spins. Bohemond’s armour registered the wash of pressure over him with a row of amber warning sigils.

The High Marshal could just about track the supersonic course of the shells towards orbit but in moments they were lost in the high cloud. His eye was drawn to the upper reaches, his disbelief increased. A scarlet comet fell, larger than anything he had ever seen. Increasing the resolution of his auto-senses, he magnified the view.

The descending ship was wreathed in fire, trailing broken plates and corpses like smoke. In general shape it was an inverted pyramid, a stepped ziggurat of many levels. He could see the blazons of the Adeptus Mechanicus in many places and realised it was the flagship of the dominus.

Despite its calamitous fall, the ship was not without control. Bohemond could see that its trajectory was flattening sharply, some mechanism of the Cult Mechanicus lessening the speed and incline of its course. Distance and size made its rapid descent seem almost stately.

The Cortix Verdana hit the ground many kilometres away, just beyond the horizon. The ork cannons fired again even as a bright flash of detonating plasma lit the distant sky.

Bohemond turned away from the fallen ship and voxed his warriors.

‘The xenos have hidden their holes well, my brothers. Now they are revealed and our vengeance will be swift.’ He activated his jump pack and bounded back towards the crater. ‘In attacking, they have left themselves vulnerable. Into the breach they have opened! Destroy the guns! Praise those that slay in the Emperor’s name!’

Esad Wire, known to a few by the title of Beast Krule, let the body of the greenskin slip to the ground, its throat crushed. His synskin suit was hidden beneath a few scraps of clothes and armour he had looted from other targets. The silhouette they gave him was more of a disguise than the shifting cameleoline, though he could not hope to look like an ork. He had smeared a little of their filthy blood and spoor over himself to cover his own scent, having been briefed on orks from the Officio Assassinorum’s mission data repositories. Despite its limits, his rough silhouette had confused the greenskins he had encountered long enough to get in range with weighted fists or needle pistol.

Grand Master Vangorich had expressed the uniqueness of the mission – rarely was an operative of the Assassins despatched to slay a non-human target. Their purview was far more concentrated on the rogues and rebellions within the Imperium.

In fact there was almost nothing about the orks at all in the archives, and Vangorich had drawn in favours from the Inquisition to supplement their records.

Krule stepped over a corpse, past two other dead orks that had been lounging by their armoured wagon. The complacency of the aliens – the sheer casualness they showed in the face of a massed human attack – worried him as he pulled himself up into the driver’s position. Settling into the bucket seat, he looked over the crude pedals and controls, working out where throttle and gearing systems were located.

He heard a dull, distant thunder that he instantly recognised as the retort of a large cannon. It continued for some time, many guns firing not quite in unison. He waited to hear the corresponding explosions in the city but nothing came, yet the fusillade continued.

Perplexed, he stood up, the better to see over the corrugated iron and broken plastek rookeries of the ork shanty piled up on the foot of the mountain that was Gorkogrod. The haze of the force dome gave everything beyond the city’s borders a greenish cast. Streaks of shells disappeared into the cloud. Looking left and right the Assassin saw the flashes of other weapons – beams and blasts and oscillating green waves from emplacements somewhere beyond the city’s semi-derelict outskirts.

He had seen drop-ships descending all afternoon, accompanied by the occasional shower of artificial meteors when the Adeptus Astartes had made secondary drops. The Assassin had paid it no mind. He had been expecting floods of alien warriors to pour from Gorkogrod to fend off the attacks, and had hoped to use such activity and confusion to slip through the ork city. Now the lack of response from the orks was explained. He had seen no defences as he had brought his commandeered aircraft down, but could see that the firepower being unleashed into the sky and towards orbit was devastating.

Dropping down into the seat, Krule started the engine. Its throaty roar accompanied a cough of oily smoke from the pierced exhausts flanking the machine. He slammed his foot onto the throttle pedal and sped out of the courtyard and into the street beyond, crashing through a crowd of greenskins that had emerged from their hovels to stare at the anti-orbital attacks. One bounced from the large iron buffer on the front of the battlewagon; another went jolting under a wheel.

Ignoring their death-cries, Krule powered the vehicle uphill, heading as fast as he could towards the inner city.

Nine

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

I dared what others could not. I knew what awaited me in the inferno and I stepped willingly into the flames. No other could. As above, so below, the fight without and the battle within. Endless torment, unending perseverance. Not one of my brothers could have done it, in body or in mind. It was my agony alone to suffer.

For what? For maggots to erupt from the corpse of greatness, devouring blindly the very thing that sustains them, consuming all until is spent. The Imperium is a husk; even the rot has eaten itself.

The city was ringed with fire. Devastation caused by crashing ships and burning debris spread far into the wastelands that surrounded the ork capital – wastelands that had not been empty of life, but concealed a profusion of orks beneath rock and ash.

‘Be thankful for small boons,’ said Vulkan. Thane looked from the Thunderhawk at the fires and wreckage. The primarch spoke from the main compartment, making the already over-filled space even smaller with his bulk. Thirty-five more Space Marines had managed to fit into a space intended for thirty, even with the primarch. Similarly laden, every drop pod, gunship and shuttle on the Alcazar Remembered had been despatched within minutes of the first ork attack.

‘Small boons, lord primarch?’ asked the Fists Exemplar Chapter Master.

‘Our fall from grace has killed no small number of orks as well.’

‘Forgive me, my lord, for taking little comfort in that fact.’ Thane activated the powerful vox of the Thunderhawk to contact his battle-barge. The signal was surprisingly clear when Shipmaster Weylon Kale responded. Evidently much of the vox-clutter had been deliberately created by the orks to mask their anti-orbit weapons.

‘Substantial damage, Chapter Master,’ Kale reported in response to Thane’s inquiry. ‘But we have attained higher orbit. It seems that the initial attack was a massive drain on the power grid of Ullanor and their targeting systems are having trouble tracking us at this distance.’

‘How much of the fleet has survived?’ asked the Lord Commander, sat next to Thane.

‘Half of the warships, barely any transports. We are also detecting increased activity from the ork vessels in the system. It seems they will try to pick over the scraps. Admiral Acharya has taken command for the Imperial Navy. He assured me that they can cope with the void threat for the time being.’

‘Low orbit is out of the question,’ said Thane. ‘We cannot risk any more ships even for the benefit of orbital firepower.’

‘Agreed,’ said Koorland. ‘We have perhaps one more opportunity to strike with everything – we cannot waste it.’

‘You have a strategy, Lord Commander?’ Vulkan shifted his bulk and looked through the door into the command deck.

‘I do, Lord Vulkan. What I said before still holds true. We must attack as swiftly as possible. Our mission has become threefold. We must determine the exact location of the Beast for an overwhelming concentration of force. We cannot be tricked into thinking a whole world is arrayed against us. It will take time for the orks to mobilise any force of note from the other cities and move them to our battlezone. We must use what strength we can to break into Gorkogrod and destroy the Great Beast before we are overwhelmed.

‘In order to do that we must first disable the force fields and weapons protecting the city against orbital support. Also, we need to disrupt the gathering ork armies so that both of the previous objectives can be achieved before the massive weight of ork numbers can be brought to bear.’

Vulkan nodded his approval.

‘A sure course of action, Lord Commander. The warriors of the Adeptus Astartes must bear the brunt of the assault on the city. As much as it seems counter to your ethos, I would spare the Chapters the brunt of the fighting before then.’

‘I can think of several commanders that will not like the idea of holding back,’ said Koorland.

‘Bohemond, for one,’ said Thane. ‘And there will be others of similar thought. Those that supported his pre-emptive strike spring to mind.’

‘What happened was unavoidable,’ Koorland replied, staring out of the canopy. Night was falling, the darkness lit by plasma fires and the occasional jade glow of defence beams and scarlet of missile trails, the sunset obscured by columns of black smoke. ‘Whether today or tomorrow or the day after, we would have landed and the orks would have revealed their intent. Perhaps the High Marshal’s attack was not so rash. Had the orks had time to prepare even further for our landings we might not have the period of relative grace we have now. There has been little sign of enemy movement on the ground to exploit our predicament.’

‘Why?’ said Vulkan. ‘The city must house thousands of orks. Why has the Great Beast not unleashed its horde on our remnants before we can gather ourselves?’

‘I feel that you know the answer to that already, Lord Vulkan,’ said Thane.

Koorland shook his head.

‘The Great Beast does not need to strike. It knows that we come for it. We do not face a childish mind, but a calculating leader. It will let us bleed ourselves on the walls of its fortresses before it wipes the remains from the planet.’

‘That fails to comfort me, too,’ said Thane.

‘Which is why we cannot expend our best,’ Koorland said quietly, looking at Vulkan. ‘Dross and slaves may man the defences, but their guns will slay Space Marines as surely as they will combat servitors and Astra Militarum.’

‘It is not the place of the Adeptus Astartes to hide behind the shields of others,’ said Thane, not believing the strategy his superiors discussed.

‘Nor shall they,’ said Vulkan. ‘If Bohemond wishes to be the point of the spear, let him. Guardsmen and skitarii will not breach the city, but the Black Templars might. Lord Commander, I appreciate the sentiment but you mistake the intent of my words. We cannot fight a war of attrition. We must trust to others to guard our backs while we turn every thought to piercing Gorkogrod.’

‘Very well, lord primarch. The Astra Militarum and the Cult Mechanicus will provide the weight behind our shaft. The Adeptus Astartes shall dare the ire of the orks.’

Koorland spoke with certainty, but Thane could not tell if it was simply the habit of the commander or genuine confidence. As the Thunderhawk touched down among the broken and burning remains of the fleet, he felt no particular reason to be hopeful.

‘Let it not be said that we were found wanting when the Lord Commander called upon us!’

Vox-casters across the warzone relayed the field-legatus’ words to his devastated, demoralised regiments. It was all he could do to summon the spirit to address them, ensconced just below the main turret of his new command vehicle: the Dorn’s Ire, a Baneblade-class super-heavy tank. He considered the naming of the tank a good omen, but he knew there were those in his staff that thought otherwise. Of late, the legacy of the Imperial Fists primarch had suffered in reputation.

‘Our goal is clear, our resolve unbroken,’ he continued. He looked at one of the displays carrying a visual from the external pict-feeds. Ahead of the Baneblade, columns of tanks forced their way through the smashed remains of the city outskirts. Chimera infantry fighting vehicles carrying armoured squads followed, ready to deploy their platoons in support of the battle tanks. ‘We are to be the shield to the Space Marines, the rear guard that will allow them to be the blade that prises open the defences of the city, so that all of us can bring the battle directly to the Great Beast.’

Artillery batteries of hastily mustered multiple rocket launchers and self-propelled guns started to lay down a barrage of fire across the line of advance. Manticores launched their hail of missiles into the ruins while Basilisks pounded out shell after shell, flattening any building left standing by the rain of destruction that had fallen from orbit. Daring radioactive fire, companies from the Elran Fourth Pioneer Corps had salvaged a trio of Deathstrike launchers from their drop-carriers, but Dorr was conserving their deadly vortex warheads for the time being.

The bombardment was fierce, but nothing like the tempest of shell and rocket he might have hoped to unleash had his force landed intact. But big guns would not win this war. The initial reports from rocket and bombing attacks by Imperial Navy Marauders suggested that the power shields protecting Gorkogrod would be as impervious to ground-based weapons as they were to aerial and orbital attacks. Such information had been paid for by the lives of the air crews, shot down by an iron ring of anti-air defences around the outskirts of the ork city. Even this showed the depth of cunning of the Great Beast, having remained dormant long enough to allow the Adeptus Mechanicus flights to approach and to draw the attack of the Emperor’s servants.

As was almost universally true, it would require soldiers on the ground to force their way into the city. That was the purpose of the Astra Militarum. Given how many had already died it seemed likely that none of his brave Imperial Guard would leave Ullanor. A less experienced commander might have given his soldiers hope and allayed their fears. Dorr knew better. He knew that any soldier of the Imperium worth the name, any true servant of the Emperor that had passed through the firestorm unleashed against them, cared nothing for survival now. Whether for themselves or worlds lost or dead comrades, the Astra Militarum would fight to punish the orks and give their lives in the effort. The commissars reported barely any desertions despite the disaster that had beset the landings.

Dorr was not surprised. Even for those of low resolve, where was there to run? The only option was to fight as hard as possible to survive.

The majority of the foe came in savage mobs of infantry, emerging from massive fortifications of which the surface bastions and citadels had been but the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of kilometres of city extended beneath the ash dunes. Much of it had been collapsed by fallen starships, but a maze of tunnels and chambers remained, populated by hordes of greenskins ready to burst free almost anywhere.

The main battle cannon of the Dorn’s Ire thundered into life, hurling its massive shell into a building flanking the line of advance. Its lascannon sub-turrets spat white flares while heavy bolter sponsons sent out an almost constant stream of fire at the alien brutes skulking in the ruins.

The bulk of the army advanced on foot, keeping pace with the broad-sided Baneblades, Stormblades and other super-heavies. Lasguns strobed red beams through the clouds of dust and grit while ork slug-throwers and energy weapons flared in reply. Scout teams in camouflaged fatigues surged ahead, their bayonets at the ready. Behind, smartly-uniformed troopers advanced in rank beneath fluttering standards and Imperial aquilas, defiant in the face of the orks’ weapons.

Sentinel scout walkers stalked the ruins, their multi-lasers and autocannons picking out scattered groups of greenskins. In return, xenos tank-hunters sowed deadly anti-vehicle mines and lay in wait with short-ranged but powerful rocket launchers. Ork nobles twice the size of any unaugmented human led counter-charges with blazing-headed axes and growling chain weapons. They led hundreds of orks in bloody close assaults to cut down the servants of the Emperor by the score, before the fire of surviving Guardsmen slew them or drove them back into their holes.

Bulky-suited Deltronis fire teams with heavy flamers accompanied pairs of Hellhound flamethrower tanks, burning the greenskins from their lairs. In turn they were supported by specialist tunnel fighters brought from the hive cities of Hermetica. These ex-hive gangers were barely civilised, regarded as savages by many of their fellow regiments, but in the close confines of the ork weapon-site tunnels their barbarity was an advantage, matching the orks for sheer viciousness if not size and strength.

Demolisher tanks and siege bombards advanced behind the outer cordon of Leman Russ tanks. Where the enemy massed in some bastion or bunker unbreached by the carpet bombing of the Navy and the rolling barrage of the artillery, the wall-breakers moved forward and unleashed their fortress-busting salvoes.

A whine of alarms brought Galtan and two subalterns into the chamber, ready to throw themselves on top of the field-legatus. A few seconds passed and then impacts rang on the Baneblade’s hull – a pattering of detonations that spread from the engine blocks behind and passed directly along the entire tank. Galtan visibly flinched, eyeing the vaulting of the reinforced ceiling that held up the turret.

‘What was that?’ asked one of the junior officers.

‘Strafing run,’ said another.

‘What happened to our anti-air guns? Where are those damned Navy interceptors?’ Galtan moved towards the vox-panel, but Dorr stopped him with a raised hand.

‘They are protecting the squads on the tip of the attack, lieutenant.’ Dorr shooed the staff officer away with a wave of his hand. ‘A place far more suitable than guarding this armoured behemoth, regardless of the rank of its crew. This is the closest you’ve been to a battle, isn’t it, Galtan?’

‘I have had the privilege of serving on the command staff of three general-rank officers, field-legatus.’

‘From a Capitol Imperialis or in orbit, yes?’

Galtan swallowed hard and examined his fingernails.

‘Yes, field-legatus.’

‘It is not an accusation,’ Dorr assured him. ‘I am certain you served with distinction. I do not claim any particular experience at close quarters myself. I earned my rank in the artillery regiments of Aldarast. Even so, it is important that we keep calm, no matter how hot things get around us.’

‘I understand, sir.’

‘I do have one suggestion though, lieutenant.’

‘Sir?’

‘There will be a time when the fighting gets close and dirty, when perhaps you and I even are required to remember our basic training and fire a weapon in anger. When that time comes, assure me of one thing, Galtan.’

‘Anything, sir. My dedication will not fail, nor my courage.’

Dorr pointed to the empty holster at the lieutenant’s hip.

‘Remember to bring your laspistol.’

The strategium and inner chambers of the Cortix Verdana had been constructed as an armoured core, protected not only by a reinforced structure but also an onion-like, multi-layered field system. The central structure resembled the pyramid shape of the ship but on a much smaller scale, barely a hundred metres high, tilted at a sharp angle among a tattered cocoon of tangled cables, splintered walls and ruptured bulkheads. It was perhaps only due to these additional measures that Magos Laurentis was alive to loiter amongst the wreck of the war-forge with the other upper-hierarchy tech-priests, while the bulk of the ship and its crew lay scattered and burning over several square kilometres of devastated ork city.

A cadre of several hundred skitarii – the dominus’ personal guard – held a perimeter just half a kilometre from where Laurentis watched the unfolding battle. Beyond them heavier engines of war waged their own fight – two Warlord Titans of the Legio Ultima had landed close to the crash site, another likely reason for Laurentis’ continued mortal existence. The towering avatars of the Machine-God’s wrath put forth an ear-splitting, blinding storm of fire from their immense rocket launchers, volcano cannon, turbolasers and macro-cannons, reducing clanking ork transports to careening piles of slag, obliterating mobs of aliens in blossoms of immolating fire.

Smaller war machines held the other approaches. Moving between the fume-wreathed remains of the engine decks and the glassy crater that had been a plasma reactor, a Warhound scout-class and two Reaver Battle Titans in the dark green and gold of the War Griffons supported maniples of red-armoured automaton warriors from the Legio Cybernetica. Any orks cunning, persistent or lucky enough to survive the ire of the Titans were hunted down by hulking mechanical brutes, targeted by raging bursts from incendine combustors or crushed with crackling power fists. Volkite blasts and the muzzle flash of macrostubbers added to the hellish glow of the flame-shrouded battle. Tracer rounds left actinic trails against a backdrop of the fading dusk while incendiary missiles burst in blooms of incandescent wrath.

The silhouette of a rare tri-legged Punisher-class Titan blocked out the sky above, standing guard over the upper ranks of Martian nobility with tezlan accelerators gleaming. The containment fields of its underslung plasma annihilator vibrated through the ground, and Laurentis’ bionics, like a heartbeat.

Such protection did not render them immune to harm. Ork heavy guns had started shelling the Cult Mechanicus forces as they had assembled on the site of their fallen commanders. Stray rockets continued to sputter and spit past, detonating against the black metal of the war-forge’s inner sanctum.

His recent near-fatal experiences had inured the magos to any anxiety concerning self-preservation, but he sensed the unease of his companions. He had no doubt that they would have preferred to stay within the armoured shell of the strategium block, but that was impossible. The glitter of las-cutters and corona of phase fields illuminated the interior as a full recovery phalanx attempted to free the dominus from the half-collapsed decks. Monotask servitors with cranes and heavy mechanical lifters pried apart the wreckage, red-robed tech-priests overseeing the oddly brutal-yet-delicate operation.

Delthrak’s transmitter was a constant stream of coded orders, a rat-tat-tat barrage of signals that flitted through a sub-channel of Laurentis’ auditory backups.

‘Please stop that, it is impossible to think with the racket,’ Laurentis told the Barbarian’s Advocate. ‘I am trying to metriculate.’

‘Someone has to coordinate the defence while the dominus is discommoded,’ replied Delthrak.

Laurentis could not see well after his most recent reconstruction, but from what he observed there was nothing to be done that wasn’t already under way.

‘I would also suggest that you cease distracting our line-commanders with this constant inanity,’ the magos continued. ‘They are far more experienced than you or I in these matters.’

‘You have no rank here,’ Delthrak snapped back. ‘In fact, you have become utterly irrelevant.’

A particularly large and multicoloured explosion to their right drew everybody’s attention. Just a few hundred metres away the red-armoured carapaces of several Kataphron warrior-constructs stood out starkly against the white ash and grey dust. Their weapons chattered, muzzle flare visible even at this distance when they engaged another foe, as yet out of sight past the scraps of the forge-ship littering the blasted hillsides. Until large numbers of infantry arrived, there would be gaps in the defensive enclosure – Titans were more properly suited to levelling cities than picking off infantry assaults.

A rocket whined overhead and crashed a few hundred metres away, behind the tech-priests. Another followed, striking closer. The deafening blast of a war-horn from the looming Punisher – the Modus Destructor – warned those below that it was moving. Skitarii squads scattered and the tech-priests moved closer to the inner shell as the gigantic construct stepped forward. The shell of an ork building collapsed under its clawed foot as the Titan settled in its new position.

Turning about its waist axis, the Modus Destructor brought its twin accelerators to bear on some target out of sight of Laurentis. A high-pitched wail split the air moments before the weapons lit up with a burst of azure light. Laurentis’ inhuman sight picked up pulses of electromagnetic charge as a hail of hundreds of solid missiles flared into the darkness, shredding whatever engines or batteries had launched the rockets.

The magos caught a burst of vox-traffic emanating from the innards of the broken strategium. Tech-seers and servitors moved out of the structure, dragging twisted plates and carefully-sliced support struts with them.

‘The dominus has been freed,’ said Delthrak, decoding the data-stream microseconds before Laurentis. The Barbarian’s Advocate’s auto-synapses had not endured the turmoil that had battered Laurentis since he had been despatched to Ardamantua.

The cabal of ranking Cult Mechanicus huddled together as they approached the broad docking doors that had been freed by the work teams. Sputtering temporary lights lit the insides of the bay, casting an inconsistent crimson-and-amber gleam.

The deck floor shuddered, settling under a fresh weight, the crash of metal reverberating from the open hold. A large shadow eclipsed the internal light. A second later Dominus Zhokuv strode into view.

His pteknopic casing was hidden from view, located somewhere in the depths of the plates of armourplas, ceramite and plasteel. Twice as tall as a Space Marine Dreadnought, the dominus’ war body hunched on dog-legs. Two volkite cannons flanked the central coffin housing Zhokuv’s physical remains. Beneath this sarcophagus, field-sheathed power saws extended on articulated arms. A tangle of mechadendrites curled from under the carapace plates, tipped with a variety of appendages for fine motor work. The sparkle of an omnidirectional power shield caused the air to sputter with ionised particles, forcing the tech-priests back several paces as the giant walker emerged into the night. Two eye-like searchlamps sprang into life, bathing the assembled Cult Mechanicus with multi-spectral light.

‘Praise the Machine-God!’ Laurentis joined in with the hailed chorus, feeling an uncharacteristic surge of relief at the sight of the Cult Mechanicus commander. He reasoned it was simply the cessation of Delthrak’s chatter that had ended his discomfort.

A burst of high-velocity data speared into Laurentis’ cortical analysis cells, apprising him of the entire strategic situation in less than two seconds. Zhokuv had not been idle during his enforced absence, having assimilated the data-feeds of the remaining Adeptus Mechanicus assets and interfaced with the strategic and tactical systems of the Imperial Navy, Adeptus Astartes and Astra Militarum. It included every last detail until moments before his emergence, down to the level of individual squad auspex readings detected by the massive augur arrays of the war-forge. It was too much for Laurentis to comprehend as raw data, his afflicted brain instead summarising the mass of information in vaguely visual terms – a ring of green around the red runes of the Adeptus Mechanicus, while a black thunderbolt speared towards the ork city followed by a blue shield.

‘The plan is simple, my learned companions,’ the dominus boomed through his address systems. ‘The Space Marines will seize approaches into the city interior. The Astra Militarum will hold the ground they take and shield them against counter-attack from the rear and flanks. Our task, blessed be the Omnissiah, is to locate and disable the anti-bombardment shield and anti-orbital weapons protecting Gorkogrod.’

‘Would it not be better to spearhead the attack with our Titans?’ suggested Delthrak. Laurentis could not tell if he was simply fulfilling his role or expressing personal doubts.

In reply, the dominus remotely opened a specific data-packet in the cogitators of his minions. Laurentis reeled as the contents of the packet unfurled through his thoughts.

‘Analysis of the ork brute-shield,’ said Zhokuv. ‘It combines the same energetic and gravitational properties as many of the grand weapons we have encountered previously, and those that assailed us in orbit, but utilised in a different fashion. Any void shield or power field we possess that contacts the ork brute-shield will detonate. We cannot send our engines through it with their fields deployed, and to do so without would see them destroyed in minutes by the orks within.’

‘What if we cannot destroy the shield, dominus?’ asked Delthrak.

‘There is no retreat, no possible evacuation under present conditions. The Omnissiah will curse our existence and our infantry and vehicles will be forced to assault without Titan and orbital support.’

‘They will die,’ said Laurentis.

‘Yes, they will. Which is why we must not fail. Mars demands success, even at the cost of our lives.’

Laurentis turned his attention from the dominus and focused on the mountain of lights that denoted the distant ork city, shimmering as though behind a heat haze. Lit from within by innumerable lamps and fires, studded with cannon-encrusted pinnacles and towers, Gorkogrod looked like a massive, squatting beast.

Ten

Ullanor – Gorkogrod, outer defences

This again? It all resolves the same way, in blood and mayhem and the courageous or lucky surviving to another day.

Can a legend not just stay dead?

A night and a day of relentless fighting meant that Koorland no longer heard the thump of exploding shells and the crackle of bolters and lasguns. He was as deaf to it as the roars and groans of the orks and the growing prickle at the nape of his neck that increased with proximity to the brute-shield.

He vaulted over the broken remains of a courtyard wall, landing messily in the bolt-ruined corpses of the orks that had been defending the barrier a minute earlier. Thane and his Fists Exemplar moved through the rubble to either side. Lascannon and autocannon fire flared and shrieked overhead from the Land Raiders and Predators pushing up behind the Space Marines’ thrust. Further out, companies from the rest of the multi-Chapter taskforce speared into the desolation unleashed by the big guns of the Astra Militarum and the bombs of the Navy.

The setting sun carved stark shadows from the jutting remnants of walls and stairwells, the heaps of collapsed roofs, making dark pits of exposed cellars and sub-levels.

A distinct crack sounded through the din of other battle noise, sharper than thunder, longer than the report of a cannon. An instant later a bolt of red flew past the advancing Space Marines, striking a Crimson Fists Predator. The blast passed through the turret armour, leaving a neat hole. Its exit through the engine block was far more explosive, turning fuel and batteries into an incendiary blast that shot out ten metres, scattering flaming shrapnel.

In seconds the other vehicles returned fire, tracing the trajectory of the attack to an armoured bunker that squatted over the ruins on an outcrop of bomb-cratered rock. Lascannon beams and shells ricocheted harmlessly from a gleaming wall of energy that sprang into life around it.

The squads pushed on, concentrating their bolter fire on the orks still holding the ruins ahead. Corkscrewing rockets and rapid-fire bullets whined out of the dust clouds in reply.

The ork gun fired again, this time slashing through the frontal armour of a Vindicator tank that had been crawling forward, its demolisher cannon intending to breach the gates of the fortifications guarding the gun tower. The muzzle flare of smaller weapons sparkled along revetments and from firing slits, the fusillade lashing down at the brightly-armoured warriors pushing through the smoke and rubble.

‘We cannot afford to lose more armour!’ Quesadra’s vox-carried assessment was as accurate as it was brief.

‘Air support?’ suggested Thane. ‘Knights?’

‘Anti-air batteries still active,’ replied Koorland. ‘The Knight battalions are supporting the western flank. Analysis has revealed a weakness in the orks’ chronobiology. They seem to be more sluggish around twilight. We need to be at the shield-line by dusk. We’ll have to do this ourselves.’

A shadow swallowed Koorland as Vulkan caught up with him. The primarch paid no attention to the weapons fire exploding all around them, turning his helmeted head left and right as he surveyed the scene.

‘Armoured gate, Lord Commander,’ Vulkan told Koorland. Bullets skipped from his plastron and shoulder pauldrons as he raised to point a little to the right.

Koorland looked, magnifying his suit’s auto-senses. Through the swirl of grime and smoke he could see the portal, hidden between two craggy outcrops surrounded by mounds of broken masonry and tangled metal.

The ork emplacement fired again, turning a second Predator to slag and broken armour plates.

‘We must pull the armour back, brother-commander,’ said Thane, coming up from behind Koorland, two squads of Fists Exemplar with him.

‘Vehicle support, withdraw five hundred metres,’ Koorland announced over the vox. ‘Devastator squads attend for new orders.’

Bohemond arrived out of the battle fog moments later, leading nearly two hundred black-armoured Space Marines – his personal guard bolstered by warriors drawn from other companies. He did not pause but broke out of the ruined buildings across the square beyond, into the teeth of the ork defensive fire. Several of his Space Marines fell to a converging storm of heavy weapons fire, yet the High Marshal’s warriors gained ground quickly and took up firing positions from which they could target the orks ringing the hill-bunker.

‘Advance!’ called Koorland, taking advantage of the Black Templars assault. The Lord Commander surged across the shifting piles of rubble, Vulkan striding alongside. Koorland’s sprint finished in the cover of a broken archway just a hundred metres from the fortification’s gatehouse.

The force shield sparked and flared as Devastators levelled their heavy bolters and lascannons at the portal. Secondary turrets mounted on the pinnacles of rock flanking the gate opened fire, pulverising rubble and armour with rapid bursts of blue plasma. Dragging their dead and wounded companions with them, several Space Marine squads were forced back into the ruins.

‘We cannot just stay here,’ snarled Bohemond. ‘Koorland, give the order to attack!’

Koorland hesitated, trying to find another way of opening up the fortress.

‘What manner of Lord Commander are you?’ Bohemond continued. ‘Lord Vulkan, I have held my tongue, but now I must speak. Our brother of the Imperial Fists would barely make the rank of Chapter Master in better times. Why do you support him as Lord Commander?’

The primarch said nothing.

‘We’re still outside their field,’ remarked Thane. ‘How do we breach the gate?’

‘With this,’ said Vulkan, brandishing Doomtremor. He looked at Bohemond and tossed the weapon onto a pile of rubble a few metres ahead of their position. ‘High Marshal, prove to me you are worthy of my support instead of Koorland.’

Bohemond did not hesitate, but burst from the ruins. A single blast from his jump pack took him to the massive hammer. Seizing the haft in both hands, he tried to lift Doomtremor. It barely rose a few centimetres, servos whining in the Black Templar’s armour. A second later he dropped the hammer and staggered away.

‘Any others?’ Vulkan announced. He pointed at Quesadra. ‘Crimson Fist, would you be Lord Commander instead?’

‘If you will it, lord primarch,’ replied the Chapter Master.

Bullets pinged from the rubble as he advanced. Bohemond stepped back with a shake of the head.

‘It is a trick, brother, nothing more.’ The Black Templar stalked back to his warriors while Quesadra strained to lift the primarch’s hammer without success.

Koorland watched all of this in silence, wondering what Vulkan was trying to prove.

‘Lord Commander, your turn,’ said the towering warrior, waving a hand towards Doomtremor.

‘You wish me to use your hammer to break the gate of the fortress, Lord Vulkan?’ said Koorland, holstering his pistol. ‘Is that the challenge?’

‘It is.’

Koorland looked at Doomtremor and then the gate and back to the power hammer. It was clear none but Vulkan had the strength to lift it conventionally. The Lord Commander raised a hand to the Fists Exemplar beside him.

‘Thane, bring your squad with me.’

Koorland set off over the rubble, the Fists Exemplar in tow. At his direction, Thane and two others helped him take up Doomtremor, like a siege ram of ancient times.

‘Cover fire!’ ordered Koorland, breaking into a run, the others matching his pace. The remaining Fists Exemplar poured what fire they could towards the slits and ramparts of the gate-crags.

Bullets spitting past them, explosions tearing up dirt and brick in their wake, Koorland’s assault team dashed between the crag-towers, lifting Doomtremor to their shoulders. Bolt impacts and lascannon blasts spattered them with splinters and molten rock from the walls above.

‘Now!’ Koorland told his companions. They hurled Doomtremor as a javelin. Head wreathed in lightning, the hammer struck the gate like a thunderbolt. Metal shattered under the impact, the detonation of power shearing the entire gate from its mounting.

The Lord Commander and his warriors drew their weapons to open fire at the stunned orks within, stepping into a mist of molten steel. Koorland felt the tread of Vulkan approaching a second before the primarch passed, snatching up Doomtremor to wade into the greenskins with broad sweeps of the gleaming hammer.

‘There is more to the rank of Lord Commander than being the best fighter, Bohemond,’ the primarch called out, voice stern. ‘Great warriors follow the greatest leader.’

Eleven

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

The anarchic sprawl of the outer city butted up against larger, more purpose-built edifices in central Gorkogrod. The maze of overlapping roofs and walkways, the cable runs and subterranean tunnels, winding alleys and semi-derelict construction sites that had enabled the Assassin to move this close abruptly stopped.

Heading into Gorkogrod, Esad Wire found evidence of the workforce that had built the city: human corpses, left out where vermin and smaller greenskins picked at flesh and bones. Not only humans had given their lives in the labour – a few eldar and species he could not identify shared the mass graves with the Emperor’s servants. He came across filthy, half-collapsed cage-houses and cell blocks that must have held thousands of slaves in this quarter alone. The orks’ smaller cousins, the gretchin, had claimed these prisons in the shadow of the great fortresses of their overlords, and turned them into shanties that were home to hundreds of screeching, bickering aliens.

He ditched the buggy about four kilometres from where he had taken it. Contrary to their previous apathy, the orks had mustered from their barracks and shanty-houses when starships started falling from the skies. On foot his progress was slower but more assured, but now he faced a fresh challenge.

Beast Krule had hoped that the fall of night would assist him, but the roads of the inner city were lit with bright lamps while searchlights cut the sky to aid the anti-aircraft guns that jutted from the roofs like the thorns of a bush. The orks were out in numbers, hundreds trudging down into the ghetto, as many riding on battlewagons, trikes, buggies and other vehicles. He had seen nothing of the larger war engines, but he knew that they had to be somewhere, possibly using a more accessible route out of the city.

Crouched in the shadow of a chimney stack, Krule watched the near-endless procession of aliens going past. It seemed to him as much a carnival as a war mustering, reminding him of the ranting, self-flagellating zealots that sometimes gathered outside the great shrines that had been erected in worship of the Emperor. There were banners and icons depicting orkish faces, surrounded by glyph-runes he could not decipher, which he assumed might be devotions and prayers.

Quite a lot of the orks seemed to be drunk – at least as far as Krule could tell with his limited experience. They had barrels and bottles that they repeatedly drank from, slopping thick liquid into large cups and raising them in toast to each other. Gretchin scurried everywhere, fetching and carrying weapons, ammunition, roasted meat on skewers, shiny baubles and everything else beside. They clung to the footplates and roll bars of the wagons, and scampered underfoot through the crowds of marching orks, some of them clearly selling wares, others simply trying not to be trodden underfoot.

Krule jumped to the next roof. He had cast off his orkish disguise in favour of a return to cameleoline stealth and unhindered agility. From this new vantage point the Assassin could see further up the broad street, to a pair of reinforced towers flanking the highway. There didn’t seem to be actual gates, but the road was barred by a body of ork warriors in what appeared to be uniforms – nothing quite so elaborate as the dress style of the Astra Militarum, but the two dozen or so xenos wore black flak jackets reinforced with rivets, and square back banners emblazoned with sigils of a red fist.

These guards patrolled back and forth, clubbing lesser warriors seemingly at random, sometimes stopping a truck or buggy to extract information or possibly bribes from those aboard.

If there was one blessing to be found in the mobilisation, it was that Krule knew he would not be heard. The orks’ laughter and shouts competed with the snarl of engines. On the open beds of some of the transports orks drummed with more enthusiasm than rhythm, and thrashed at amplified string instruments, chanting and bellowing along to their battle-music. Others listened to portable vox-casters, a horrendous cacophony blaring from speakers attached to their vehicles or carried by diminutive assistants.

Krule’s eye was drawn to a peculiar couple of orks a little distance from the gate. The two of them stood on crates and shouted at the passing greenskins from their vantage point. A crowd of gretchin holding placards filled with ork glyphs surrounded them. Sometimes one of the orks would reach into a sack and scatter handfuls of shells and bullets into the crowd while the other bared its fangs, raised its hands in the air and shook its fists even more vigorously. Many of the greenskins stopped to pick up the thrown ammunition, clasping the bullets in their fists and bellowing approval to the two orks. More gretchin tumbled and fought through the legs of their betters trying to get as many of the gift-shells as possible, snapping and clawing. The Assassin watched this behaviour for several minutes until he realised what the cajoling, bullet-scattering orks were doing.

They were preaching.

While the great minds of the Imperium had been focused on anticipating what new machines and warriors might emerge from this accelerated development of the orks, none had considered the emergence of other social constructs such as music and entertainment. And just as the Ecclesiarchy had risen in power in recent centuries, so it seemed that religion was also emerging in the ranks of the orks.

Beast continued towards the divide between shanty and city proper. He moved away from the main thoroughfare to where it was darker. Beneath the shadow of the great fortress-buildings ringing the upper mountain, the narrower roads were choked with rocks, metal, rubble and trash – detritus thrown down from roofs and storeys above or simply left heaped where it had been discarded during construction of the inner city.

The compounds and shanty-terraces were abandoned but Krule was pleased to see that the buildings were still mostly intact and butted directly up to the outer walls of the higher citadels. The foundations were made from a type of ferrocrete, soft enough for his reinforced fingers to make handholds.

A spidery darker shadow in the night, Beast Krule climbed.

It took several minutes, moving past lit windows and iron-railed walkways, until he reached a rampart isolated from any view of the upper fortifications. He pulled himself over the ledge and onto the walkway.

A door swung open to his right, spilling blue light onto the rampart. Krule’s cameleoline shifted rapidly, trying to adjust from total darkness to the grey of artificial stone. Something grunted in the doorway, stepping out.

Krule sprang, lancing his mono-stiletto through the ork’s left eye, piercing the brain. He rode the body down as it crashed to the hard floor. He looked up, finding himself at the threshold of some kind of guard room or barracks dorm. Three orks sat around a table tossing glyph-marked tiles, moving small metal effigies across a triangular board. Steaming mugs sat beside their game, along with bowls that held chewed bones and remnants of other food.

The orks looked up at the commotion, red eyes widening in shock.

Combat stimms flooded his body. Krule threw himself into the room, his needler coughing projectiles into the face of the ork furthest from the door. The alien warrior slumped, twitching as anti-xenos toxins shut down its organs. The closest ork rose from a sagging couch, tugging madly at the pistol in its belt. The Assassin’s fist found its gaping mouth, shattering its jaw and crushing its throat with a spray of thick blood.

The third pushed itself towards another door, or rather the vox-set visible in the room beyond, shouting a warning. Krule felled it with more needler fire and burst into the adjacent chamber.

Two gretchin manned the communications system. They spun on their stools. Krule snapped the arm of the one reaching towards a vox-pickup and kicked the other into the wall. Half a second later his fists cut short their horrified squeaks and hisses.

Crouched in the doorway, he waited and listened.

A minute passed. Nothing came.

Krule stalked back to the exterior and glanced down to the outer city. The lamps and lanterns of the orks made rivers of fire pouring towards the distant plains. Looking further still he could see the small stars of aircraft jets and the red blossoms of artillery detonations. The view crackled and sparked where shells and missiles hit the force field protecting the city. Many would die in the assault, thousands or tens of thousands, but it was unavoidable. The greater the fury thrown at the city, the more opportunity for Krule to get to his target and strike.

The best way to help mankind in the grander scheme, and those battling for Gorkogrod, was to kill the Great Beast.

Invigorated by these thoughts, Krule started to climb again, seeking a vantage point from which he would be able to plan the next phase of the infiltration.

Twelve

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

As he ripped free his sword from the ork’s gut, blood sprayed across Bohemond. His tabard was already soaked in the gore of his foes, clinging to the black enamelled plates of his armour. He stepped to the right, letting the body slump atop the other corpses piled around him, bringing up the long blade to stop the swing of a power-wreathed claw.

‘We are but vessels for a divine wrath!’ the High Marshal bellowed to his warriors. ‘Into us is poured the ire of the Emperor and in our veins it boils. Your blade is His blade, your blood is His blood.’

Bohemond stepped inside the reach of the ork and slammed the brow of his helm into its jaw, snapping teeth and bone. The alien’s snarl turned to a howl of pain. Bohemond ducked its clumsy swipe and hacked his sword into the exposed midriff, his blue-gleaming blade slicing easily through layers of studded metal plating. Drawing the sword out, he spun and chopped, severing the creature’s arm.

Beside him, Clermont was firing his bolter into the ruins on the far side of a collapsed bridge, the rest of the castellan’s squad providing more cover fire. The river that gurgled below was so choked with filth, bodies and debris that it was impossible to tell if it had ever been fresh or was just an exposed sewer. It steamed in the heat of the midday sun.

Just ahead of Bohemond a shell detonated against the remains of the bridge’s arch, showering him with fist-sized chunks of rubble. Stonework swayed and then collapsed, tumbling down the short ravine to dam the river even more.

‘Incoming vehicles,’ warned Brother Derneicht. ‘Multiple sig–’

The auspex-bearer was cut off by a massive tracked battlewagon rearing up over the mounds of rubble beside him, a huge spiked roller turning on arms mounted at its front. The machine slammed down into the rubble, crushing Derneicht and another Black Templar beneath the roller. Pieces of flesh and shattered ceramite flew in all directions as the behemoth churned towards the other squads. It was easily as large as a Land Raider, two turrets flanking a high-sided driver’s cab, their heavy weapons spitting rounds into the Space Marines.

Their engines a higher-pitched scream, three warbikes hurtled over the crest behind the battlefortress, wide-slung chainguns spewing haphazard salvoes. A fourth sped into view, jumping over the ridge. A shot from Clermont took off half the rider’s head and the warbike crashed flaming into the mess of broken masonry.

‘With me! Let not the size of the foe weight your thoughts,’ Bohemond roared, sprinting towards the battlefortress. From a slatted troop compartment behind the turrets, more orks threw stick-bombs at the onrushing Black Templars. Explosions and metal fragments engulfed them, but Bohemond pressed on through the smoke and dust.

He slightly misjudged the position of the battlefortress. It loomed out of the smoke, accelerating hard, just a few metres away. Jump pack flaring, Bohemond leapt, clearing the deadly cylinder. Behind him Brother Cadrallus was not so fortunate, and disappeared beneath blood-slicked, rubble-choked spikes.

Bohemond hewed through the retaining cage of the driver’s armoured cab, peeling back the roof like the lid of a ration tin. The driver looked up, firing a pistol with its free hand, the other chained to a thick-rimmed steering wheel. Bullets cracked from the High Marshal’s faceplate.

The cab was too confined for Bohemond’s blade. He punched down with all of the weight and strength of his battleplate, crushing the ork’s head with a single blow. An axe skittered across Bohemond’s pauldron and he turned, sword licking out instinctively to slash the face of his assailant. The ork fell back with a whine of pain. Other greenskins clambered out of the transport cage, climbing over whirring tracks and spinning turret gears.

With jump packs shrieking more Black Templars arrived, bodily landing on some of the orks, blades and pistols hacking and roaring to cut down others. A particularly well-armoured foe pulled itself out of the turret behind Bohemond and threw itself at him, bearing them both over with its momentum. They rolled twice, metal buckling under their bulk. Bohemond’s hand struck a trembling exhaust stack, jarring his blade from his grip. It dangled over churning treads, linked to his wrist by a length of gilded chain, just centimetres from being drawn into the grinding road wheels powering the track.

Pinning the Black Templar’s other hand beneath its bulk, the ork smashed the haft of its axe into Bohemond’s face, cracking his left eye-lens. It drew its arm back for another blow.

Clermont was there as the axe head reached the apex of its backswing. His armoured boot crashed into the side of the ork, knocking it over. Three rapid rounds from the castellan’s bolter obliterated the alien’s chest, bolts punching through armour to detonate inside the creature’s ribcage.

The battlefortress still careened onwards, the slumped driver’s body taking it in a curve towards the rubble-choked waterway. Drawing up his sword, Bohemond stood. He looked down the ridge from the extra height of the engine deck, to where a pall of smoke and dozens of vague silhouettes betrayed the approach of even more vehicles.

He leapt from the mobile fortress, his battle-brothers following. They landed awkwardly in the hillocks of broken stone and shattered corpses. A few seconds later the ork tank disappeared over the lip of the waterway. The crash of its descent masked the increasing growl of engines drawing closer.

Two warbikes still raced around the Space Marines, their autocannons blazing, chased by a storm of bolter flares from the encircled Black Templars. Large humanoid shapes appeared from the murk – more orks, piloting Dreadnought-like walkers with heavy weapons and pincer-clawed arms. One strode past Brother Sigurd, brushing the Space Marine aside with a back-handed blow. While bolts sparked from its armour the walker swiped at Bohemond, trying to seize hold of his arm. He dodged the clumsy attack and, sword in both hands, set about hacking away the offending limb.

‘Signal Dorr,’ he barked at Clermont. ‘We need that flying column of tanks he promised us. Without air or war machine support inside the shield, we cannot hold.’

The High Marshal rolled aside as the ork walker tried to shred him with a point-blank burst of weapons fire. He cut the cables of its legs, pinning it in place with a spray of dark hydraulic fluids.

‘Retreat, High Marshal?’ Clermont sounded incredulous. ‘What about taking not one step back?’

‘Sometimes, castellan…’ Bohemond paused while he rammed the full length of his sword between two armoured plates, piercing the walker with a metre and a half of power-field-encased blade. Something shrieked inside the machine and its metal limbs rattled with sympathetic death throes. Bohemond dragged out the sword, blood hissing from its field.

‘Sometimes, castellan,’ he started again, ‘you need to take a step back to get a proper swing.’

Galtan continued to read from the list scrolling across the face of his data-slate, rocked left and right as the Dorn’s Ire swayed and lurched over hills made of levelled buildings.

‘Twenty-three aircraft remaining, including four strategic bombers. Tech-priests are working as fast as possible to bring the Scornful back to battle-readiness. We really could do with that Stormblade at the moment.’

‘That’s enough of what we have, or rather don’t have. What about the enemy?’ said Dorr. He swung his chair towards the plate of the cartolith, its surface flickering with tiny holograms of runes depicting the latest dispositional data.

The gunners in the secondary sponsons opened fire. On external pict-feed displays Dorr saw that they were raking the burning wreckage of several ork heavy transports, ensuring nothing had survived the battlecannon blasts that had destroyed them a few minutes earlier. Galtan waited patiently for the din of their fire to stop.

‘Super-heavy tanks and walkers… nothing Titan-class as yet, field-legatus,’ he replied between bursts of dual heavy bolters. ‘A surprising lack of air power, but more than compensated for by a plethora of anti-aircraft rocket batteries and self-propelled guns.’

‘And the brute-shield,’ one of the subalterns added with a grimace.

‘Yes, best not to forget that,’ said Dorr. He returned his attention to Galtan. ‘What about infantry?’

‘In all honesty, we’re outclassed, field-legatus. We lost half our companies in the orbital strike. Starting from such a poor base, we could never match the orks’ numbers. Without the Space Marines we would never have reached this far.’

Dorr absorbed this brutal assessment in silence, rubbing his whiskered chin. His valet and personal kit had been lost with the Praetor Fidelis, along with a company of his best storm troopers and the majority of his logistical and strategos teams.

‘On the other hand,’ Galtan added with forced cheerfulness, ‘if it wasn’t for us, the Space Marines would have been overrun within hours.’

‘We’re stretched too thin,’ the field-legatus remarked, waving a hand towards the strategic display. ‘This was supposed to be a concentrated thrust into the city. The ork attacks have dragged us out to the flanks, pulling us away from the Space Marines.’

‘A quirk of the city’s layout, field-legatus,’ said Galtan.

‘Yes, I know that!’ snapped the field-legatus, banging a fist on the console panel. He drew in a breath, shaking his head. ‘This city is not as ramshackle and anarchic as it looks, is it? Kill-channels, underground supply routes, layered defences. A well-planned structure hiding under hovels and scrapyards!’

‘We believe we have engaged a significant part of the ork forces, field-legatus,’ said another subaltern – one with curly hair and bright blue eyes, called Festria or Fenestris or something like that. ‘Far more than we should have been able to, considering our deplorable state at the outset. The Adeptus Mechanicus have been making far swifter progress.’

‘Yes, Zhokuv’s latest communiqué suggested as much,’ said Dorr. He leaned his chair back, crossing his arms. ‘Perhaps they could have spared us a Knight or two, maybe even a Titan.’ He sighed. ‘There’s nothing more to be done, except press on where we can and hold ground where we cannot.’

And hope the warlords of Mars can bring down the field before we are destroyed, he added to himself.

Thirteen

Ullanor – outer Gorkogrod

Sometimes the dream returns. A fantasy. A phantasm. Just one more year. One more year before Davin. What might have been? What might we have accomplished? Another year before Ullanor, perhaps. Another year in the presence of the Emperor, another step closer to the victory He had seen.

But it was false, even then. Do not tell me about falsehood. It lies in the hearts of all men and women, waiting to be nurtured by vanity and lies.

But if mankind were not weak and broken, that would be even more dreadful.

Though the reach of the magos dominus’ mightiest engines stopped at the brute-shield, they were not without impact. The nobles of the Knight Houses had long sworn fealty to Mars, and on the battlefields of Ullanor they adhered to those ancient oaths through the fiercest fighting.

A dozen metres tall, the ancient walkers of the Knight Scions stalked the ruins of Gorkogrod seeking the enemy wherever they could be found. Unhindered by the broken terrain, the massive Knight suits pushed forward where tanks could not, carving into the enemy and laying waste to the city itself.

Knights Paladin led the line, their battle cannons breaking ork mobs as easily as they crumpled the armour of tanks and transports. Chainswords several metres long were more than a match for the claws and buzzsaws of ork heavy dreadnoughts and mega-armoured nobles. With the Paladins came Knights Errant with thermal cannons to vaporise metal and flesh, the flanks of their squadrons secured by darting forays by paired Knights Lancer.

Directional ion fields crackling under incessant barrages from ork artillery and tank guns, the towering Knights Castellan and Crusader were bastions around which the infantry of the Adeptus Mechanicus could hinge their attacks. Battle servitors and carapace-suited skitarii flooded the ruins, a wall of red every bit as relentless as the ork waves that crashed against them.

The Great Beast showed its cunning here also, harbouring its forces well, committing them only when needed. Where the Knights strode, infantry and light vehicles attempted to speed past to strike into the rear of the advancing Cult Mechanicus. Where the Knights were not, the weight of battlefortresses and super-heavy stompers – war engines a match for any Imperial Knight in bulk and firepower – was pressed hardest. But no amount of raw strategy could guard against the meticulous encroachment of the Martian warriors, guided by machine intelligences and the most sophisticated battle-augurs.

Zhokuv wielded the men, servitors, tanks, automata and war engines like an overseer of a manufactory, driving them on hard but weighing every loss against potential gains, seeking efficiencies with ruthless precision. Like the gears of a machine the Martian army continued to grind on. Sometimes the Mechanicus overpowered the orks through sheer force of guns, machines and men. At other times they used superior logistics to draw the greenskins into ambushes or outpace them with rapid flank attacks that cut them off from their support coming from the inner city.

Block by block, street by street, the Adeptus Mechanicus took Gorkogrod, until the lead echelons of Kataphron cyborgs and Praetorian heavy servitors were a kilometre inside the brute-shield. Thousands of Martian veterans swarmed forward to occupy abandoned bunkers, while tech-priests and magi seized and analysed what they could of the ork technology in the hopes of discerning some secret of how the brute-shield worked or was powered.

Much to the dismay of his less bellicose advisors, Zhokuv left the command headquarters protected by the Warlord Titans and sought to view the new front line in person. Escorted by Knights Warden and Knights Castigator of House Taranis, the dominus sallied forth in his battle shell.

Riding behind in a tracked armoured car, Laurentis and others of the inner cadre looked in awe at the devastation that had been brought to Gorkogrod. Of the city they had seen on the initial scans and vid-streams, only the inner reaches remained. The mountainside was littered with ruins and the remnants of war engines both human and ork. Shell craters were criss-crossed by seared trenches from volcano cannons, marked by glassy bowls of plasma detonations.

They were no more than fifteen hundred metres from the brute-shield, which could be clearly seen as a shimmering curtain cutting across the rubble-strewn ridge ahead. Picking up urgent broad-channel transmissions from the vanguard companies, Zhokuv ordered his retinue to stop.

‘What is it, dominus?’ asked Sir Valek, piloting the Knight Warden Red Warrior. He brought his machine to a halt astride the broken highway, its gatling cannon and missile launcher poised to deliver a blistering fusillade at anything approaching from the city centre.

‘Ork counter-attack, rapid advance against our positions,’ Zhokuv informed his companions, broadcasting to the magi and pilots. To the Knight Scions, he added, ‘Move forward and engage.’

‘We are tasked with your protection, dominus,’ Sir Valek protested.

Zhokuv voxed back, sending a chastisement code into the system of Valek’s Knight that marked the machine and pilot for censure at a future date. ‘The surest way to guarantee our safety is a swift end to this mounting assault.’

The Knight pilots confirmed their orders and strode ahead, weapons at the ready. Zhokuv patched his visual feeds into the data-receptors of the Red Warrior, as he had done with the scout-craft at the start of the planetary assault. He felt the limbs of the ancient war machine bunching and flexing as if they were his own, glorying in the sensation of power emanating from his reactor. Valek’s presence was like a fly on his back, barely noticed in the midst of the war machine.

Ahead, flurries of explosions lit the landscape – detonations unlike anything they had seen since landing. Coruscations of green energy flowed upwards like flames in slow motion, carrying with them avalanches of debris. It took a moment for Zhokuv to adjust to the perspective of the Knight. As he did so, calculating the range to the closest detonation, he realised that some of the lumps of debris were Kataphrons and battle tanks, tossed into the air like the toys of a petulant child.

Shapes larger than Knights bulled their way through the buildings, brushing them aside with their bulk. Small arms and heavy weapons were equally ineffective against their power fields, sparks of red against the immensity of the new war engines. Anti-tank cannons strobed las and tracers into the ruins, shredding stone and soldier with equal ease. Massive belly guns belched fire and sent tank-sized shells crashing into the waves of red-armoured skitarii falling back from the assault.

The Great Beast had finally despatched its gargants.

Zhokuv immediately transmitted a withdrawal order to the beset infantry phalanx, channelling the command via the Red Warrior to boost its reach. Needing no further encouragement, robed tech-priests, clanking cybernetica constructs and Martian soldiers broke cover and flowed back down the city-mountain in droves, but the gargants paid them little heed. They continued on, emerging from the brute-shield to take on the assembled Knight squadrons.

The fire of the macro-cannons and gatling blasters of the Knights lit the lead gargant from base to head, power fields flickering with scarlet lightning. The ork war machines returned fire, bolts of energy and ripples of shells slamming into the gleaming ion shields of the Martian walkers. Wayward las-beams and cannon strikes ripped swathes through the few buildings still standing, turning multi-storey fortifications and half-broken towers into falling rubble and billowing dust clouds.

Yet for all he strained the sensory array of the Knight Warden and scanned back and forth across the data-streams, Zhokuv could find nothing that explained the extraordinary detonations and anarchy that had heralded the counter-attack. The Red Warrior advanced another hundred metres, its guns targeting the failing energy defences of the closest gargant. The dominus spied smaller war engines rumbling and striding through the clouds of exhaust and dust that swathed the gargants.

Some were tracked or wheeled battletowers, arcs of green lightning forking from their summits. With them came more gargants, amongst their rockets and guns crane-like appendages that fired crackling emerald stars. Fronds of wreathing jade flame wrapped around Kataphrons and skitarii, dragging them into whirling maelstroms of devastating energy.

Advancing past the gargants which duelled with newly-arrived Titans, the battletowers turned their otherworldly powers upon the Knights. Against physical attacks their ion shields provided some protection, but many were struck by phantamagorical bolts that passed straight through such defences, turning armour inside out, as though invisible hands ripped them asunder from within.

Flurries of psychic energy pummelled the plates of a Knight, crushing it into the ground with repeated blows that buckled armour and bent internal struts like grass. Waves of fire rippled out from a trio of battlewagons connected to each other by sparking cables. The inferno of psychic energy licked up the legs and body of a Knight Castigator, causing the ammunition of its bolt cannon to explode in the hopper. Zhokuv felt the loss of connection with the pilot as he was burned alive inside the cockpit.

Together the gargants and psychic engines advanced again. In their wake came a flood of maddened orks, frothing and spitting, each as large as a common ork chieftain. Huge detonations of psychic power wracked the Cult Mechanicus lines, leaving blasted craters in their wake looking oddly like trails of monstrous footsteps.

Faced with such a combination of brute power and insidious attack there was nothing Knights or skitarii, tech-priests or Kataphrons could do except pull back.

Rune Priest Thorild sensed waves of anger emanating from the primarch. Fully armoured, expression concealed within his dragonet helm, his body language spoke of repose, but the emotions leaking through the iron will of Vulkan said otherwise.

On hearing the news of the Adeptus Mechanicus setback, the gene-father of the Salamanders had demanded a Thunderhawk and as many Librarians as could be quickly mustered. The Lord Commander had argued that if the Space Marines could penetrate deeper into the inner city on another front, the Great Beast would be forced to pull back its greatest war engines and psykers to combat the threat. But such logic only triggered a rare outburst, a direct order from the primarch, evidence of Vulkan’s barely contained wrath.

Cowed, Koorland had assembled from the Chapters to hand the small company that rode with the primarch towards the heart of the ork offensive. Other Space Marine forces followed to provide a more physical back-up to the Librarians’ otherworldly powers. Bohemond had not outright refused to join the mission, but had made it clear he wanted no part of it, claiming the need for his presence elsewhere was greater.

The Space Wolf also felt the presence of the others – Gandorin and Adarian most strongly, but also lesser-ranked psykers of several Chapters. The remaining survivors of the first connection with the orks had been charged to watch the other psychic assets of the force, to ensure no further contamination from the raging psychic power of the orks.

‘Pardon my asking, Lord Vulkan, but I cannot help but sense you are taking this personally,’ said Epistolary Kalvis of the Crimson Fists. ‘Given experience in earlier interaction with the background ork psychic presence, is this wise?’

Vulkan did not turn his head.

‘We must fight fire with fire,’ he said quietly.

None of the other Librarians spoke, but Kalvis persisted, perhaps feeling it was his duty to speak out, or simply holding a personal unease at their immediate future.

‘What exactly do you intend, Lord Vulkan? It pains me to say, but we cannot match the psychic might of the orks.’

‘You just have to contain them long enough for me to kill them,’ growled the primarch. He straightened and looked at the assembled psykers. ‘During the Great Crusade we met many strange creatures and warp-born horrors. We knew little of psychic power and its true source, for the Emperor had chosen ignorance to be our shield against temptation. But we knew enough. That some foes cannot be beaten by bullets and blades, but with the power of the mind. In His wisdom He did not tell us of daemons and gods, of course.’

Thorild shifted nervously. He knew of what the primarch spoke. The others were similarly uncomfortable, sharing the belief that such matters, such entities were not for casual conversation. Vulkan seemed oblivious to their unease, or uncaring of it, and continued.

‘But the Emperor had a secret army to combat the threat of the psychic and the daemonic. His Sisters of Silence, we called them. Anti-psykers trained as warrior-maidens. One in trillions, each of them, but across the great vastness of humanity they were number enough. What I would give for a company of the Silent Sisterhood now…’

‘I do not think the Sisters of Silence have survived, lord primarch,’ said Gandorin.

‘We will do what we can,’ said Thorild, ‘but we risk further ruin if we dare too much, lord primarch. To treat too long with the powers of the Great Beast is to open ours–’

‘Do not speak to me of temptation and powers, rune-wielder,’ Vulkan said heavily. The eyes of his helm seemed to take on a different gleam, but it had to be a trick of the Thunderhawk’s lighting. ‘When you have looked upon the face of your brothers and seen strangers, when you have seen the entire galaxy burn for the whims of Dark Gods… Or stood for an eternity at the breach to keep the ravening powers from destroying all that you love…’

‘We have incoming counter-air fire, Lord Vulkan,’ announced the pilot. ‘Where do you want to set down?’

‘Get as close as you can,’ the primarch replied. He stood up and moved to the front assault ramp, head bent beneath the ceiling of the troop deck. ‘There will be no need to land.’

The muffled thump of flak shells and the rattle of shrapnel on the hull mixed with the growl of the engines. The pilot moved the gunship in tight turns to evade the worst of the incoming fire but Thorild felt the anxiety of his brothers even above the mounting anticipation of the primarch.

‘Do all that you can to suppress their powers, that is all I ask,’ Vulkan told them. ‘Keep close, shield me with your thoughts.’

He opened the main ramp, air screaming into the troop compartment. Thorild could see the ruined city whipping past a hundred metres below. Titans and Knights duelled with gargants and stompers, heavy weapons pounding out destruction, tank-sized fists and blades that could demolish buildings smashing and slamming against each other. Skitarii and greenskins ripped into each other in firefights and desperate melee across broken buildings. Flickering psychic fires spewed and monstrous apparitions thrashed above the ork horde on the edge of vision.

Almost directly below them waddled a great gargant, thirty metres tall, its huge rotund hull jutting with pylons and copper coils that crackled with green sparks. Upon its shoulders several ork psykers were chained, absorbing the latent savagery of the greenskins around them. Thorild could feel the power churning around the machine. Even as he detected the release of psychic energy a flare of green lightning spat from the psykers, lancing into a column of battle tanks that tried to hold back the ork offensive.

Thorild could feel the wider ork psychic presence like a living thing, seething at the attack on its city, bloating and growing with rage at the human invasion.

‘The harder we attack, the stronger the ork psychic effect becomes,’ said Adarian, sensing it also.

Thorild nodded. He moved up beside Vulkan.

‘You knew the Wolf well, my lord?’ he asked.

‘We were friends as well as brothers,’ Vulkan replied.

‘And you trusted him, Lord Vulkan?’

‘Several times with my life and the lives of my sons.’

‘Then trust me, son of the Wolf. We will not fail you.’

The primarch looked at him and nodded. A second later, he threw himself from the assault ramp.

Thorild watched Vulkan fall, Doomtremor trailing sparks like a comet. The primarch had timed his jump to perfection, hitting the upper deck of the gargant, the impact sending him crashing through the tower and through the armoured plates into the depths below.

A roar of instinctual protest swelled up from the orks’ psychic manifestation, but in the depths of the gargant the primal shout was quickly silenced.

‘Now, brothers,’ Thorild commanded, opening his thoughts to the other Librarians. ‘Let us show this savage, and the primarch, what the Adeptus Astartes are truly capable of.’

Thorild launched his spirit into the roiling green mass of the ork aura, the minds of his companions on his heels appearing in his thoughts as a snarling wolf pack. He sensed rather than saw Vulkan bursting out of the collapsing gargant, already sprinting towards a battletower just behind it.

Gleaming psychic fangs shredded the green claws coalescing around the primarch. The wolves of the Emperor howled their challenge to the Great Beast.

Fourteen

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

And at the end we must face the fact that immortality is a greater burden than mortality. The long death, a slow diminishing of meaning. Why curse us with the knowledge, with the fate that we would outlive all that we built? Did He think to outfox entropy itself?

Was it a pain that He had to share? Companions for eternity, empty totems raised up in memory of those lost in the mists of five hundred lifetimes.

And now I am the one that stands alone and I can take no more of it. There is no healing the wounds of the soul.

Stealth had to be sacrificed for speed on occasion. Gore-drenched, Beast Krule’s cameleoline had been of little effectiveness for the past hour anyway. With this thought, he dropped out of the duct he had been using, landing in a clean, whitewashed corridor. Oddly clean, for orks, he thought. Chanting echoed from both directions, slow but forceful.

The ork palace-complex – factory, cathedral and fortress combined – was vast but he could hear the muted rumble of detonations, which told him that the other Imperial forces were getting ever closer.

Even if he could not strike down the Great Beast before they arrived at the gates to the citadel, the Assassin’s presence would cause confusion and indecision, which would aid the Adeptus Astartes and their allies in their final onslaught.

A pair of orks turned a corner ahead and he opened fire with the alien weapon he had salvaged from his last victim, gunning them down in a flare of rapid energy blasts. Moving past their smouldering corpses, he turned towards the echoing roar of ork voices. Another greenskin emerged from a doorway right in front of him, gnawing at a bone with its chisel fangs. It barely had time to grunt its surprise before his stiletto pierced its chest.

The ork lashed out, Krule’s blade still wedged into its ribs. Its fists cracked against the side of the Assassin’s head, dazing him. Cursing the resilience of all greenskins, Beast Krule pulled himself free of the hands grasping for his throat and retaliated with a hammerblow punch of his own, caving in the top of its skull and brain.

Stepping over the corpse, Krule noticed in detached fashion that the food still gripped in its fist looked like a small green-skinned arm, a couple of fingers attached with bloody sinew at one end.

The corridor took him to a large balcony overlooking a hangar-like space. Half a dozen orks leaned on a metal rail as they looked into the depths. At one end of the vast hall was a large statue made of overlapping metal plates, heavily riveted, in the form of a giant squatting ork. It was covered head-to-foot in heavy armour, its fists clad in clawed gloves the size of battle tanks. The walls were stone, made of large blocks each carved with an ork glyph – the story of the rise of the Great Beast, perhaps.

There were more galleries above, below and opposite, lined with bellowing orks. The aliens were all as large as nobles or bigger, many of a size to match the archive descriptions of army warlords. They were heavily armed and armoured, bearing the blazon of the red fist he had seen on banners and walls across the palace.

And below were thousands more, perhaps tens of thousands, a sea of gigantic alien beasts. They chanted and grunted in unison, waving their weapons, whipped into a zealous frenzy by some unseen orator at one end of the massive space. The huge cathedral shook with stamping feet and the girder-vaulted ceiling rang with a deafening shout of praise.

Krule staggered back until his spine touched the cold stone of the wall. Through the fog of stimulants the raging orks were a sea of brutal monsters, their chants distant but deafening.

He had expected an elite guard, but the creatures that thronged the hall were terrifying, far beyond the plans of Vangorich. To the orks, might made right, and the creature that ruled over such a mass of alien nightmares had to be mightier than anything the Imperium had encountered for an age.

With cold dread washing away the vestiges of the stimm-fugue, Beast Krule realised that his mission was impossible.

Worse still, the entire endeavour could not possibly succeed, not against such a force defending a near-impregnable fortress. The Lord Commander, the lord primarch, tens of thousands of Space Marines and soldiers would die before ever setting foot near the Great Beast.

Thought after thought raced through the Assassin. Years of training and experience crumbled when confronted by the sheer horror of the Great Beast’s power. How could the Imperium possibly win against such alien fury incarnate? The war was folly. There was no triumph to be had, only the slim chance of survival.

His breathing became ragged, the tension and fatigue of days crowding into his weary body, all resolve dissipating at the sight of the task ahead.

One of the greenskins just a few metres from Beast Krule sniffed the air heavily and turned its flat head towards him. At the same moment, something large eclipsed the light behind Krule.

Instinct rolled him aside, the crackling fist centimetres from his face prickling his skin with energy discharge. His evasive manoeuvre took him out onto the balcony, closer to the other orks. They turned, glowering and snarling.

The creature that had attacked almost blocked the whole entrance with its bulk. It was dressed in a thick hide coat reinforced with straps of metal and rivets the size of a man’s fist. It wore a kilt of the same, and heavy steel-capped boots up to its knees. It swung the power claw again, forcing Beast Krule to duck.

The Assassin fired the stolen ork gun, blasting a fusillade directly into the chest of the alien blocking his escape. Metal and leather turned to smoke and steam, and flesh boiled as the ork stumbled back, staggering to one knee.

With just a split second to act, Beast Krule leapt. Using the knee of the downed ork as a step, he vaulted over the wounded alien. It snatched at his ankle as he passed, but momentum carried him over its shoulder. Landing heavily, he tumbled to his feet and started running.

Action cleared away his dread. A fresh purpose filled him. Anger at himself for his weakness spurred him to renewed effort. Krule’s mind still burned with what he had seen in the temple-chamber, and with images of what would happen when that army was unleashed against the unsuspecting Space Marines.

They were so close now, Koorland could almost reach out and touch the immense walls of the central citadel. Progress had been slow, tortuous even, every metre gained inside the brute-shield paid for with death and hardship. And the warriors of the Emperor had paid dearly. Of the Space Marines that had survived to reach the surface of Ullanor, a third had been lost. Amongst the ranks of the Astra Militarum the casualty rate was at nearly fifty per cent. Following the psyker-bolstered offensive of the orks, stopped only by Vulkan’s direct intervention, the Adeptus Mechanicus had suffered even more. The host of Mars had been reduced to a handful of Titans and seven fully functional Knights, and these war machines could not pass the brute-shield unmolested.

Countless orks had fallen, their bodies a green carpet under the boots of the Space Marines and the treads of Astra Militarum tanks. Where days before they had clashed over a broken field of rubble, now the Emperor’s servants and the Great Beast’s savages contested for piles of blood and bones, mounds of shattered vehicles and burning gargant wrecks.

If the next kilometre was anything like the last, there would barely be any Imperial force left to break into the citadel proper.

‘Nothing worth fighting for was taken easily,’ Vulkan told him, perhaps sensing his mood. ‘The orks have bled as much as us. More. Much more.’

‘We have been too slow, Lord Vulkan. Too slow.’ Koorland smashed a fist into the palm of his other hand. ‘They are massing behind us. Three landing sites have been overrun. Two more are surrounded.’

‘It was never our intention to leave,’ the primarch reminded him. He seemed more than resigned to this fact. Rejuvenated almost. Vulkan had shown more heart for the fight after the disastrous landing than before. The Lord Commander had suspicions about the primarch’s motives, but his doubts were vague and of no consequence to the immediate future.

Koorland looked up at the forbidding city-palace and the ring of walls, turrets, towers and gatehouses. Idol-statues topped some of the buildings, of polished gold and chrome. Huge standards the equal in size of any Titan kill-banner flapped along the ramparts. And cannons. Cannons by the hundred.

His gaze slid further upwards, to the oppressive, half-seen crackling dome of the brute-shield. The Lord Commander felt claustrophobic looking at it. He could not shake the idea that, like the rest of Ullanor, its intent was not so much to keep attackers out but to trap them within.

Inside with the Great Beast.

The brute-shield had shrunk a few kilometres, its generators overrun by the Imperial advance. But it still protected the inner city from the ships in orbit, as did the massive guns, missiles and energy cannons within.

‘We have to get into the citadel,’ Koorland declared. He selected the channel to address the Chapter Masters and other force commanders. ‘Prepare for the final assault.’

Fifteen

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

We delude ourselves with promises of a better tomorrow. ‘If only…’ begins the mantra of the weak. We must strive without hope of cessation of effort. We must hold ourselves above ambition, seeking to excel but not to conquer. To build is a fleeting experience, while destruction is eternal. Build not for tomorrow but for today. Fight not for your future, but for the present. The past becomes meaningless in such consideration, but we cannot break free from its shackles.

The universe knows what must happen but panders to whims that wish otherwise. Recognising inevitability is not fatalism. How I loathe this waiting.

As when two pugilists step back by tacit consent to draw a breath before recommencing their fight, a lull descended upon the ork city. While the Lord Commander arrayed his broken companies into new formations and Field-Legatus Dorr drew up his reserves to support the next thrust, the Adeptus Mechanicus scoured the outer city of the remaining pockets of orks to secure the line of attack.

Laurentis had argued, possibly a little too vehemently, that the destruction of the brute-shield was still the paramount objective of the Cult Mechanicus, which was how he found himself tasked with leading an expedition to discover how to do just that. Guarded by maniples of cyber-constructs and several platoons of skitarii, watched over by the Knight Paladin Greyblade, he picked through the remains of an ork tower close to the original line of the shield. Taking pict-captures and data readings, he examined the spread of debris and attempted to divine the purpose of several chambers and broken machines within.

‘It is an amplifier,’ he said aloud. He gestured at Jeddaz, a minor tech-priest who had been assigned to him as attendant for some unknown dereliction of duty. Laurentis pointed to the drops of metal on the walls – conduits for something. ‘Here, look. These were a network, melted by whatever blast broke the tower. High-intensity melta residue everywhere, a Knight’s thermal cannon I would say. And these rooms, they housed battery cells of some kind.’

‘But there are no conduits or projectors,’ Jeddaz replied with a sigh. He turned over flattened pots and broken furniture with his mechadendrites, what remained of his face curled in a distasteful sneer as though rifling through effluent.

‘Magos, I am detecting an aerial approach on an unexpected vector,’ Sir Phaldoron warned from the Greyblade.

‘An air raid?’

‘A single craft, coming out of the inner city.’

‘Is it heading towards us?’

‘Its course will bring it close. Anti-air batteries in the main force are preparing to engage.’

Laurentis shunted the data-stream from the Knight into his cogitator back-ups, thinking to add the information to the vast repository on the orks he already carried. As he did so, he noticed that the flight path of the aircraft was unlike anything he had recorded from the greenskins.

He tried to quantify what he found. Orks were headlong, instinctual fighters. Their pilots were mostly crazed speed-cultists who valued the thrill of high velocity as much as battle itself. The incoming craft was being… circumspect.

‘No!’ shouted Laurentis, jamming the Greyblade’s communications channel with an override signal. He scrambled out of the bunker and up a pile of gore-strewn ruin, his three mechanical legs making hard work of the incline. He searched the skies and saw the blot that was the incoming aircraft.

‘Is it broadcasting any signals? Any identifiers?’

‘Why would it…’ The Knight Scion trailed off. ‘There is a low-frequency radio transmission, magos.’

‘Send it to me.’

‘It could be–’

‘Send it to me! And tell the anti-air to hold fire!’

The Knight Scion obeyed, broadcasting the intercepted transmission into the dataflow of Laurentis. The magos opened up the compact data packet and translated it to audio.

‘…must not attack. Overwhelming counter-assault is ready. Is anyone listening to this? I am Esad Wire of the Officio Assassinorum, agent of Lord Vangorich. My mission is sanctioned by Inquisitorial representation. I must speak to the Lord Commander and lord primarch immediately! Do not attack the citadel! For the love of the Emperor and Mankind, do not attack!’

Surrounded by Chapter Masters, the Assassin was certainly not the most intimidating individual gathered in the bombed-out ruin of an ork storehouse. The presence of Vulkan made his lack of size even more apparent. But Assassins did not rely on physique alone. There was a tension in every movement of Esad Wire, an underlying energy about to be unleashed. Koorland recognised it from his own brothers when preparing for battle – the storm beneath a calm sea.

Esad Wire sat on a broken plinth, his black bodysuit slicked with blood. Most of it was the thick gore of the orks, but some of the Assassin’s own leaked through a number of tears in the synskin suit. His shoulders were hunched with fatigue, a finger tapping on one knee with nervous energy.

His eyes were hard as flint, pupils glittering with augment systems. Koorland could also smell a trace of biomechanical oil and artificial sanguinary fluids, indicating internal bionics as well. No surprise, of course, given that all Officio Assassinorum personnel were physically boosted in some fashion. The hidden nature of Wire’s augmentations meant that his role was clearly one of disguise and infiltration.

His breath stank of stimm residue and an aura of antiseptic coagulant surrounded the Assassin. As he shifted, a wound opened under his ribs, a fresh trickle of blood dribbling out onto his synskin sheath. The Assassin didn’t seem to notice. His attention moved from one Space Marine to the next and then on again, constantly scouring his surroundings and their occupants.

Esad Wire had crash-landed the ork fighter almost on top of the Imperial lines, demanding audience with the commanders. Secured by Crimson Fists, he had said nothing until the representatives of the allied factions had arrived. The scene for the audience was grim – the broken stone underfoot was smeared with the blood of orks, their corpses and body parts still wedged between chunks of rubble. The ceiling had collapsed, letting the mid-afternoon sun lay deep shadows across the proceedings.

‘By what right were you sent into our forces?’ demanded Odaenathus.

‘Is that really the issue, Chapter Master?’ the Assassin replied. He grimaced and took in a ragged breath. ‘My orders came directly from Lord Vangorich, in concert with members of the Inquisition. Does it matter how or why? I tell you again, I have seen inside the ork city. The force that remains is overwhelming. Stronger than anything you have yet encountered. You cannot attack.’

‘Why did you not continue your mission to kill the Great Beast?’ asked Vulkan. ‘Surely that was more important than warning us of any danger. If you killed the target, our losses become inconsequential.’

‘I could not reach the Great Beast,’ Esad Wire admitted with a shake of the head. His eyes lost their focus for a few seconds, seeing something that was only memory. ‘I barely breached the outskirts of its sanctum. It was even more luck that I got out again. Tens of thousands of giant orks, armed as well as your elite companies. But that is not the worst. There is more than simply a warlord guiding this force. It is something far grander. A demagogue, a high priest perhaps.’

‘An emissary of an ork god?’ Bohemond spat the words, his fingers tight on the hilt of his sword. ‘Folly! Do not attribute the trappings of civilisations to their primitive antics.’

‘I have seen their temples and preachers,’ the Assassin replied sharply, his gaze still moving from one Space Marine to the next, never stopping. Koorland noticed his defiant stare did not extend to Vulkan. ‘I have witnessed the ceremonies, the rituals and sermons of their creed. This is holy war to the orks, every bit as zealous as that ill-fated, ridiculous Proletarian Crusade.’

‘That changes nothing,’ said Vulkan. ‘If anything, it reinforces the importance of the Great Beast. If we slay the orks’ demigod, we break them.’

‘I agree,’ said Wire. ‘But I tell you without a word of a lie that we cannot reach the monster this way.’

‘It’s been baiting us the whole time,’ Thane suggested, ‘trying to draw us in at every turn. This last trap might be the final one.’

‘It’s an ork, it wants to fight,’ Bohemond interjected. ‘It is a smart ork. But do not give it more credit than that. It simply wants to fight on its own ground, its own terms.’

‘We cannot let it,’ said Koorland.

‘It offers us no option, Lord Commander.’ Vulkan stood up, as though about to leave. ‘Must I say it yet again, you must have some faith, Koorland. If there is a single lesson I need you to learn, it is that there is no final defeat while you hold true to the service of the Emperor. We cannot give in to despair, no matter what happens. Even when it seemed that Horus could not possibly lose, those of us loyal to the Emperor continued to fight. Even when there was not even a vision of what winning might look like, we refused…’

Vulkan bowed his head. His voice trailed away, shoulders hunched by some personal, painful memory.

‘We cannot out-brute the orks!’ snarled Esad Wire. He lifted his hands imploringly. ‘It is why we have lost every battle so far. It is why we will lose everything if we do not think harder rather than fight harder! Lord Vangorich sent me as his agent. Stop fighting a war and start thinking like Assassins!’

Bohemond growled something incoherent and Vulkan shook his head in disgust.

‘You have a suggestion, Assassin?’ asked Koorland.

‘If you cannot get to the target, bring the target to you. Draw it out and then strike.’

‘The Great Beast has resisted all military challenge so far,’ said Vulkan, looking back at them. ‘What could possibly draw it out of its fortress that we have not already done?’

‘I’ve seen inside the palace.’ The Assassin spoke quietly and quickly. ‘Ullanor cannot sustain itself. If you think we must fight time as much as the enemy, the orks have it worse. They may have driven us from orbit, but not a single supply ship has landed in days. You see no sign of it here, but the warehouses, the great stores of the palace are virtually empty. Not even fresh water. Their supplies are so low, the orks are cannibalising each other. They’ve eaten all of the human slaves and started on their own. I saw the remains. The weak link in the chain is the need for support from the tribute worlds in the surrounding systems. Ullanor’s air and water are polluted, its food resources scarce.’

‘Blockade is not an option, we need a swift victory too,’ said Koorland. ‘The ork relief armies will be upon us in three days at the most.’

‘Then bring them to their knees in one,’ said Esad Wire. ‘Find the remaining stores and break them, whatever the cost.’

Vulkan returned, nodding. His demeanour had changed again, once more the resolute, proud warrior.

‘Yes, that would work. Draw out the Great Beast and then we strike with everything.’

Koorland knew that it really would not be so simple, and was sure that the primarch was not naive either. But faith required a plan, no matter how hopeless.

A scrape of metal on stone and the hiss of pneumatics drew everyone’s attention to the Cult Mechanicus representative – Magos Laurentis. The bizarre-looking tech-priest had listened to the exchanges without comment, but now stepped forward, limping slightly.

‘If I might make a suggestion, commanders…’

Sixteen

Ullanor – high orbit

Thane strode off the ramp of the Thunderhawk, glad to feel the deck of the Alcazar Remembered beneath his boots again despite the grim circumstances and his immediate prospects of survival. Laurentis scuttled after him, chattering to himself in an irritating mix of Gothic and lingua-technis. The magos had expounded at length on the flight up to high orbit, regaling Thane with his outlandish theories on the brute-shield, the Great Beast and orkdom in general.

The Chapter Master was pleased to see Weylon Kale waiting for him beyond the opening flight deck doors.

‘Shipmaster, please assimilate the targeting data carried by my companion and disperse the firing solutions through the fleet as itemised in the attendant records.’ Thane waved Laurentis forward and the magos proffered a coil of cogitator tape which Kale took without comment. ‘The fleet has manoeuvred as ordered?’

‘It has, Chapter Master,’ Kale replied, falling in beside his commander, jogging to keep up with Thane’s long strides. Laurentis clanked and clicked behind them, his head rotating rapidly from left to right and back as he took in his surroundings. ‘But I do not understand. All scans show that the defensive field is still operational. If we move into attack range the orks will open fire, but the city is still protected.’

‘Fluctuations, shipmaster,’ said Laurentis. He accelerated to come alongside the officer. The tech-priest’s head turned ninety degrees to regard Kale with his remaining eye. ‘Study of the field when the first attack occurred has revealed that in order for weapons within the city limit to open fire, the field had to drop. It is not a one-way barrier! With the damage inflicted on the orks’ capabilities, and further targeted strikes during the first window of opportunity, we have hypothesised that we can return fire within the temporal lapse of the protective layer.’

‘Return fire?’ Kale sounded dubious. ‘We have to let them shoot at us first, Chapter Master? This is an untested hypothesis?’

‘Yes,’ said Thane. They reached a conveyor port and stopped. He looked at Kale, understanding the man’s reluctance but in no mood for explanations or speeches. ‘We cannot bring the field down in its entirety but we can do a lot of damage. As well as brute-shield projection sites and weapon positions, we will destroy much of the city’s storage facilities, pipelines and energy grid. We will drive the orks out, even if it costs the fleet to do so.’

Kale said nothing else as they rode to the command bridge. He headed directly to the weapons consoles and then the vox-officers, handing over the carefully constructed attack solution prepared by Dominus Zhokuv and his best strategos. It maximised the amount of fire the ships would be able to pour down onto the city in the shortest time possible.

‘We’re ready, Chapter Master,’ announced Kale. ‘Commands have been transmitted and acknowledged.’

‘Commence the attack, shipmaster,’ Thane replied quietly.

The Alcazar Remembered powered on with the other surviving ships, a makeshift flotilla of Space Marine battle-barges and strike cruisers, Navy battleships, frigates and destroyers, Martian hemiolia and penteres. Several minutes passed before the Fists Exemplar flagship passed the invisible boundary that took them into range of the surface weapons. Another thirty seconds later and the call came from the augur array technicians.

‘Targeting signals detected, Chapter Master. Multiple surface sources.’

‘Ork void assets are incoming, Chapter Master,’ another officer reported.

‘Signal Admiral Acharya, he needs to keep those orks off our backs, whatever it takes,’ replied Thane. ‘All crew to firing stations, prepare for surface bombardment.’

He heard Kale mutter to himself as the shipmaster flexed his fingers into the sign of the aquila.

‘Emperor protect us from the schemes of tech-priests…’

Seventeen

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

The growl and grumble of hundreds of engines shook dust from the ruins. Exhaust fumes from the assembled tanks of the Astra Militarum swathed the rubble of Gorkogrod with an oily mist. Close to the front of the three columns of fighting vehicles – not right at the front, Field-Legatus Dorr knew well his place within the grander scheme of the plan – Dorn’s Ire rumbled forward, accompanied by Leman Russ battle tanks, Chimera transports and Demolisher siegebreakers.

The deep red livery of Martian command vehicles broke the camouflage and grey of the Astra Militarum. Through the gloom strode the remaining Knights, ion fields gleaming, the rubble shifting and shuddering under their tread.

And last came the Titans, ponderous and magnificent, dwarfing even the war machines of the Knight Houses, their lamps shining like beacons in the pre-dusk gloom. The two Warlords led, followed by the Executor, flanked by the smaller Titans moving in echelon to the right.

War-horns sounded the challenge to the orks, a wave of sound that eclipsed all others for several seconds, shattering the last pieces of glass in broken windows, causing debris dunes to shift and tremble.

Dorr, sitting in the open hatch of the main turret to watch the awesome engines, covered his ears. He marvelled that he could feel the ground shake with each tread even through the bulk and vibration of the Baneblade.

Zhokuv advanced alongside the super-heavy tank, his piston-legged battle-rig carrying him easily over the broken ground. Further into the smog the remaining infantry forged through the broken city, some twenty-two thousand Imperial Guardsmen, skitarii, Space Marines and cybernetica. Dorr could see nothing of them, but knew they were there from the murmur of Galtan and the subalterns passing updates to each other on the command deck below.

Behind and above, the last few squadrons of Valkyries and Vultures, Lightnings, Thunderhawks, Marauders and other aircraft loitered just outside the range of the anti-air weapons that ringed the central citadel.

All was poised, the giant many-limbed and multi-headed creature that was the Emperor’s war machine waiting for the moment to pounce.

‘You know, for the first time since arriving on Ullanor, I actually think I know what we’re doing,’ Dorr confessed to Zhokuv. ‘That we’re all moving towards the same purpose now.’

No answer was forthcoming from Zhokuv. The dominus’ reply was forestalled by a sudden flicker in the smog ahead. Green lightning raced across the clouds, illuminating the ruins with a jade glow. Watching this, Dorr’s heart raced. Had the tech-priests’ assertions been right?

With a last crackle of emerald fire, the brute-shield dropped.

Seconds later, before even a cry of triumph had left Dorr’s lips, the sky erupted with missiles, las and coruscating blasts of energy racing up towards the void.

‘Sound the charge!’ Dorr dropped down into the turret, slamming the hatch closed. He wriggled past the gunners and through the accessway to the command deck.

‘I’m glad I was never a tanker,’ he muttered when he emerged into the space beyond, already nearly full with staff officers.

He almost fell into his chair as the Dorn’s Ire gathered speed, the acceleration unexpected rather than rapid. The vox was alive with confirmations of the advance commencing, the voices of tank commanders and platoon officers, Titan Princeps and Knight Scions overlapping and competing. The surge of noise from the Baneblade’s engines and the feeling of motion and power filled Dorr with urgent excitement.

‘One way or another, by nightfall we’ll know,’ he told the others.

‘Know what, field-legatus?’ asked a subaltern.

‘Whether we actually have a chance at killing the Great Beast.’

Valefor and his Blood Angels formed a red tip to the spear of the Imperial attack. Through circumstance and fortune, the warriors of Baal Secundus had suffered the least in the preceding battles, though they had still lost a quarter of the Space Marines that had arrived at Ullanor six days earlier.

Sergeant Marbas had fallen the day before, leaving only Rabael and Micheleus as the surviving members of the Sanguinary Guard. Their golden armour was much battered, patched by the Chapter Techmarines with raw grey ceramite and dull metal, the fibre bundles and servos exposed in places. Along with Valefor and his guard, Blood Angels Terminator veterans led the attack into the buildings under the shadow of the fortress-palace – a force of Space Marines that would punch through the ork defenders across a narrow front and turn behind them, trapping the aliens against the following column of Space Marine and Astra Militarum tanks. Elsewhere, other Chapters were doing likewise, piercing the defending army at several points to occupy them while the biggest war machines moved on the storage sheds and weapon silos.

Rockets flared up to the heavens and long cannons boomed out a storm of anti-orbital fire, their fury matched only by the descending ire of the fleet above. Lance strikes and plasma bolts fell upon Gorkogrod less than a kilometre from the Space Marine offensive, guided by signals from Scout squads and Land Speeders. Bombardment cannons on the Space Marine vessels unleashed thunderous salvoes against the ork city. The air-to-surface weapons of the Adeptus Astartes flattened entire blocks and warehouses, pulverised ramparts and towers, and immolated fuel depots and power stations with rare phosphex warheads.

Into the tempest charged the Blood Angels, the name of their primarch on their lips.

‘In memoriam Sanguinius! We are the wrath, we are the vengeance!’ cried Valefor, blade aloft. Sporadic small-arms fire flashed from the roof and upper windows of a cargo facility ahead. The burned-out remains of an orbital lifter sat on the flat landing pad beside the warehouse. A rocket sputtered past the Blood Angels captain and detonated against the Tactical Dreadnought armour of a following Terminator. The veteran shrugged off the blow without breaking stride, his storm bolter lifted to return fire with a blaze of bolts.

Smashing shoulder-first through the large metal freight door, Valefor led his Blood Angels inside.

The warehouse was all but empty – of supplies, at least. Hundreds of gretchin and orks crowded mezzanines and walkways, their fire suddenly engulfing the Blood Angels as they entered. Valefor fired back with precise, short bursts from his pistol while behind him the Terminators raked longer fusillades into the foe, the growl of storm bolters accompanied by the bass snarl of an assault cannon.

Valefor did not slow his run, heading directly into the knot of orks skulking around the last few crates and barrels at the back of the warehouse. His sword split the haft of an axe swung at his face while bolts from his pistol ripped out the wielder’s chest. Bellowing the war cries of the Chapter, the last two Sanguinary Guard fell on the other orks. Jump packs howling, they leapt up to the upper gantries, crashing through the metal like ascending comets. Vambrace-mounted Angelus bolters chewed bloodily through the greenskins pouring down fire from above while their glaives parted bodies and limbs.

The Blood Angels continued on, erupting from the back of the warehouse, pouring out across the street towards the next building. Even as the orks still alive inside the warehouse moved to follow, Predators and Land Raiders arrived, laying waste to the building with heavy weapons fire while Astra Militarum Valkyries and Ultramarines Land Speeders targeted the Blood Angels’ next objective.

‘Keep moving!’ bellowed Valefor. Out in the open again he could see that the fire from orbit was less intense than just ten seconds earlier. Much of the ground fire had been silenced too, but the barrage from the starships was waning fast. A glance back confirmed a wave of Leman Russ and other Astra Militarum tanks bursting into the newly-seized streets, and behind them the far larger shadows of Knights and Titans loomed through the murk.

The blaze of immense guns flashed in the gloom. Habitation blocks and a large viaduct about three kilometres beyond the Blood Angels’ right flank exploded with shell, plasma and volcano cannon impacts, collapsing and toppling in a plume of fire, smoke and dust. Valefor heard the cheers of the Imperial Guard half a kilometre behind as they swarmed into the breach made by his Space Marines.

He headed for the next building. After days of fighting over ruins, it seemed jarring to see intact walls, windows still glazed, doors and gates still barred. A row of tenements, factories and forts half a kilometre wide delineated the expanse between the extent of the Imperial force’s previous attack and the crashing orbital fire. This was the line the Space Marines had to pierce before the brute-shield was restored. It was impossible to tell how many orks held those buildings, but Valefor’s orders from the Lord Commander had been concise and clear – break through as swiftly as possible.

Debris from the smashed viaduct rained down as the Land Raider Crusaders forming the plunging fist of the Black Templars attack roared down the rubble-strewn streets of Gorkogrod. In the lead vehicle Bohemond listened to the bang and rattle of impacts on the assault carrier’s upper armour, mixed with the higher-pitched ping of bullets.

‘Do not think that the enemy target us without retort,’ he voxed to his warriors, referring to the gauntlet of fire through which the column raced. Missiles and energy bolts screamed and whined around the five armoured transports. ‘The stalwarts of the Astra Militarum shall see the Emperor’s justice delivered to those that resist His divine will.’

The Crusader briefly left the ground as it sped over the remains of a collapsed wall, causing Bohemond to pause. He braced himself, waiting for the jarring impact of the seventy-tonne behemoth crashing down. Suspension and road wheels screeched in protest and the ten Space Marines sharing the compartment with him swayed in their restraints. Steadying himself against the firing cradle, where Adolphus manned the twin assault cannons atop the hull, Bohemond heard the gunner laughing.

‘Joyous is the occasion on which we can deliver the Emperor’s punishment,’ the High Marshal continued, slapping Adolphus’ leg. He pulled himself up to the roof cupola and slammed open the hatch. Seizing hold of the storm bolter mounted there, he added its fire to the raging storm from hurricane bolters, lascannons, heavy bolters and autocannons scything along the buildings to either side. ‘Every bolt and blast is a rebuke by the Emperor! Every foe slain is vindication of our existence! Forget not that the Emperor Himself subjugated this world for mankind. Be mindful that noble Dorn himself, gene-father of Holy Sigismund, trod these lands.’

He rotated in the cupola, bringing the fusillade of bolts against a sandbagged gun position on the roof of a building ahead. The bags split and exploded, the orks behind them flung back by a tight cluster of detonations.

‘We fight for ground no less sacred than that of Terra itself. Here the Triumph of Ullanor was held, to mark the greatest victory of humanity. That memory is tarnished, that victory undone by the foul greenskins that occupy this city. When we are done, when the Great Beast is slain and Holy Terra restored to renewed glory, a fresh Triumph shall be held in honour of the Master of Mankind, for His ire grants us success today. We follow in the steps of giants and shall not be judged poorly by it!’

Eighteen

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

The anti-orbital barrage was sporadic – the few last rockets and the occasional pulse of crackling energy. Twelve minutes after the offensive had begun, the flash and boom from the last exchange of orbital fire dissipated. Three seconds later the brute-shield crackled back into life over Gorkogrod. Tank battles and firefights continued to rage below, but the Imperial line had been moved forward several kilometres to within direct-fire range of the outer palace fortifications.

Koorland headed to join the spearpoint of the attack in a Thunderhawk. Lascannon blasting, the heavy bolters unleashing their last rounds into the orks swarming away from the massive offensive, the gunship swept over central Gorkogrod. Koorland could see that the majority of the Imperial forces had moved inside the barrier. In particular the Titans and Knights were fighting at full effectiveness with void and ion shields intact.

Trails of broken tanks and flame-wreathed war engines marked the routes of attack, and in places he could see mounds of Astra Militarum dead and handfuls of bright Space Marine armour left in the wake of the quick advance. Smoking craters, ork corpses and partially collapsed buildings looked as if great claws had raked through the inner city towards the central palace-fortress.

The cost on the ground had been considerable, but lower than he had feared. He signalled the Alcazar Remembered and inquired after the success of the bombardment and status of the fleet.

‘Eighty per cent of targets damaged or destroyed, Lord Commander,’ replied Thane. ‘I ordered the remains of the fleet to pull back to high orbit, it seemed pointless losing more ships for those last few storehouses.’

‘I concur. Losses?’

‘Severe.’ Thane took a long, audible breath. ‘Do you want the details, Lord Commander?’

‘What sort of transport capacity is left, assuming that we can kill the Great Beast and get off this abominable planet?’

There was no reply for several seconds. Koorland hoped the delay was due to the need to gather the information rather than Thane’s hesitation to break bad news.

‘Dedicated Adeptus Astartes vessels could carry our remaining ground forces. Three thousand berths. Of the Imperial Navy, there’s room for perhaps twelve thousand troops. Unsure regarding the Adeptus Mechanicus capacity. They have several Titan transports left that could house thousands but very little food and other supplies for soldiers.’ Thane paused, leaving Koorland with nothing but static for a few seconds. ‘Of course, given our losses on the ground, that’s not really an issue any more, is it?’

‘No,’ the Lord Commander agreed. ‘Very well, have the fleet prepared to conduct retrieval operations when needed. If Esad Wire’s assessment is true, this will be a hard night for the orks. If it wants to maintain any control, the Great Beast will have to s–’

‘Lord Commander!’ The cross-force channel crackled with static from an emergency override. Koorland recognised Field-Legatus Dorr’s voice. ‘We have a new problem.’

He snapped his attention back to the city and needed no further explanation from the commander of the Astra Militarum. The centre of Gorkogrod was changing. Buildings and walls were folding, revealing massive portals opening into the ground.

From a thousand metres in the air Koorland had an almost perfect view, watching incredulously as large ramps opened in the ground to disgorge a tide of orks, fully armoured in plates of dull black, banners of the red fist flying above them.

They marched. Marched like the proudest Imperial Guardsmen. Dozens of massive battle tanks erupted from other enclosures, many-turreted monstrosities each the size of a Baneblade, their high-sided compartments carrying even more of the Great Beast’s elite companies.

And dreadnoughts. And stompers. And gargants, some larger than the mighty Warlord and Executor Titans that were at the forefront of the Adeptus Mechanicus attack.

Parts of the city were also moving. Upward.

Like barges drifting away from their moorings, whole building tops detached themselves. Pulses of green light enveloped their undersides – more evidence of the advanced gravitic capacities the orks had somehow discovered. Koorland counted at least fifty of the hovering platforms.

The palace remained, squatting at the top of the mountain, the full extent of its walls and bastions revealed. From the angle of Koorland’s view the entire complex looked like a single inter-linked construction, resembling nothing so much as a four-hundred-metre tall, crouching ork god carved in gigantic blocks of stone and skinned with metal plates.

Koorland could scarcely believe the sudden change in the city, and the sheer scale of the Great Beast’s last reserves was breathtaking. But it was neither of these things that gave the Lord Commander a momentary pause. He had known of the giant orks from Esad Wire’s testimony, though the reality was far greater than the threat. Koorland had witnessed first-hand the devastating new technologies of the orks, so it was not the weaponised city that struck him cold.

Two simple facts burned bright in his thoughts. The first was that the Great Beast had held back these forces despite the ruination of its city and the deaths of tens of thousands of its followers. The ruthlessness might be expected of any ork warlord, but the patience such a strategy betrayed was something no greenskin commander had ever previously demonstrated.

The second thought, the one that really made Koorland question the chances of victory, was that the Great Beast had recognised immediately the strategy the Imperial forces were enacting and had reacted with overwhelming force. The moment the first strikes had rained down on its supply depots the creature had known what Koorland and his army intended.

Just as at every stage since the commencement of the planetfall and assault, the Great Beast had simply been biding its time.

Gutting another foe, Bohemond noticed the ground trembling. At first he thought it was his Crusader’s engine, but the Sigismund’s Pride was stationary fifty metres behind the High Marshal, blasting its assault canons and hurricane bolters into the remnants of an ork gun pit.

‘The Assassin was a liar,’ spat Clermont as he hewed the head from another ork, its blood spattering against the life fluid of so many others drying on the castellan’s armour. ‘These warriors are no worthier foe than the scum we have slain for the past days!’

More orks spewed from the gutter-ramp ahead, their shrieks as wild as their firing. Bohemond and his guard met the fresh onslaught with bolters and blades, and for another few minutes the fury of close combat absorbed the thoughts of the High Marshal. It was a shout from Clermont that brought him out of his battle-trance to notice the wide shadow moving over the fallen buildings and corpse-choked street.

He looked up to see a massive platform floating impossibly over the ruined skyline, a hundred-metres-long oblong slab that gleamed with jade energy. On its back it carried five metal towers, and struts like gangplanks jutted from every level.

The hovering fortress slid to a halt a hundred metres above Bohemond’s force. Lascannon blasts from the Land Raiders flickered from its shimmering field. A circle opened in the centre of the bizarre engine, flaring with paler green light. A disc of energy descended from the opening, a crowd of heavily armoured orks clustered on the pulsing light as though it was a solid thing.

The Black Templars opened fire, bolters and heavy weapons strafing back and forth across the extending cylinder of light. From towers atop the construct emerged more armoured foes, the spark of power weapons and plasma chambers stark against the darkness of the flying keep. Brighter flares lit the sky as the orks jumped, falling down towards the Black Templars with green bursts of fire from their flight packs.

The drop-troops landed first, crashing into the Space Marines with bursts of plasma fire and sweeps of wickedly serrated power axes. Eddarin launched himself at them, several squads following his counter-attack.

The Black Templar hammered his chainsword against the raised power fist of a greenskin. His cry was of joy more than surprise. ‘It’s raining orks!’

If any servant of the Omnissiah or Emperor had doubted that the final battle for Gorkogrod had begun, those doubts were drowned by the growl of engines, the pounding of terrible cannons and the bellows of ten thousand gigantic mega-armoured orks.

The main cannon of the Dorn’s Ire had run out of shells in the push across the boundary of the brute-shield, and it was reduced to lascannons and bolters against the incoming tide. The same was true of many of the field-legatus’ super-heavy tanks, such had been the need for their guns in the prior days of battle. Normally they would have been resupplied by orbital drops, but any such action had been impossible given the lethality of the anti-orbital defences. Knights and Titans were not so limited, but the engines of the Adeptus Mechanicus were hard-pressed against the fresh surge of ork gargants and stompers.

‘I fear these foes may be the match of us,’ Dorr confided over his secure channel to Dominus Zhokuv. ‘The damage was done with the first blow, and we simply don’t have the guns to face these giants.’

‘Your fear is ill-founded, field-legatus,’ came Zhokuv’s clipped reply. ‘Trust ever in the artifices of the Machine-God to deliver us from harm.’

‘We have already lost one of the Warlords and the other is beset by foes,’ said Dorr.

‘I speak not of Titans, but of a far newer addition to the arsenal of the Machine-God,’ declared the dominus. ‘If you would direct your attention a kilometre to the west…’

Dorr adjusted the auspex and vid-capture feeds to look at where the dominus indicated. Something enormous was advancing slowly through the rubble and shattered walls. It was longer than any of the ork sky-barges, carried on huge track units larger than battle tanks. Much of the superstructure was taken up with an immense cylinder surrounded by building-sized cabins and kilometres of scaffold and walkways.

‘Are those…’ Dorr looked again. ‘Those tracks are from the Praetor Fidelis! What have you done to my Capitol Imperialis, Zhokuv?’

‘The Praetor Fidelis has been given new life in a more functional form, field-legatus,’ crowed Zhokuv. ‘The reactors and tracks were very useful in my grand design. The weapon you might not recognise. We salvaged it from the wreckage of my forge-ship. A plasma accelerator.’

‘You mounted a starship cannon on the bastardised remains of my command vehicle?’ Dorr was not sure whether to cry or laugh. He opted for the latter.

‘Behold the great device of the Omnissiah’s retribution,’ declared Zhokuv. ‘Witness the power of the Machine-God’s wrath. Pay homage to the mysteries of the Cult Mechanicus! Be in awe of the majesty of Ordinatus Ullanor!’

At the conclusion of the dominus’ speech, the newly constructed Ordinatus opened fire. A scintillating stream of plasma blasts erupted from its weapon, striking the closest of the mega-gargants menacing the Imperial lines. Energies capable of overloading the defensive screens of voidships burst through the power fields of the gargant in moments. Energy shields parted in a collapsing shower of red lightning and green flares, the layers of fields evaporating in moments. The final blasts of the salvo tore through the gargant’s plated shell – armour a tenth the thickness of a warship’s hull.

Engines and ammunition detonated inside the brutal machine, scattering tank-sized debris and shrapnel through the mobs of orks marching in its shadow.

One minute and forty-five seconds later the Ordinatus had recharged, its next target reduced to smoking slag by another fusillade of incendiary blasts.

‘I’ll light a hundred votives for the Omnissiah myself,’ Dorr promised the dominus.

Nineteen

Ullanor – central Gorkogrod

What is the point of an ork? What mishap of evolution or derangement of design would bring forth a creature entirely possessed of the need to conquer?

What purpose can it serve beyond destruction? And in such state it can serve no other purpose but its own eventual destruction.

Was that... Was there ever any future for us? Were we intended as nothing more than destroyers?

And at the end I become what I must. A beast to face a beast.

Blue lightning forked in all directions from the ork battle-tower. The psyker-carrying engine had been brought to a halt by the combined efforts of Rune Priest Thorild and two of his Librarius strike team, but the alien machine was proving difficult to finish off – not least because the background psychic presence of the orks still threatened to overload any human that tried to tap directly into the warp, limiting the psykers’ strength.

‘Khofus, draw out its spite,’ the Space Wolf called to his companion from the Excoriators. His next words were directed to Epistolary Conneus of the Ultramarines. ‘Use your power to shield Khofus from the worst. I will target the connection point.’

So instructed, the Librarians raced into action. Khofus stepped from the ruins and threw another blast of lightning at the weirdtower. Its psychic aura bulged outwards to form a green tentacle that lashed at the Excoriator. Khofus inverted his psychic draw, tapping into the stuff of the ork attack, fixing the lunging protrusion upon himself. As the green energies enveloped Khofus, Conneus threw his psychic might into the mind of his companion, bolstering the defences of his psychic hood to prevent the burning tendrils of orkish energy from burrowing into mind and flesh.

Thorild charged from cover, pushing his soul-fire into the head of his rune axe. The blade flared with blue light as he leapt up onto the structure of the immobilised tower and swung at the wavering tendrils of energy streaming from it. As the edge of the blade bit he let free his power, allowing it to surge into the ork psychic miasma.

A shock of feedback ran through him, body and soul, but he fought through the instant of pain and poured forth his rage. He let himself fall to the tossing sea that was the swelling of ork psychic potential into which the battletower tapped. Through that ocean of primal force pushed Thorild, just one of many swirls and counter-currents trying to break the immense tide.

As he moved against the churn of the current he noticed that all the energy was being drawn inward like an immense maelstrom, converging on a central point that was swelling with obscene power.

He let his psychic might explode in a devastating blast. His axe hewed through the intangible fabric of the tower’s psychic aura and crashed through physical armour, slicing deep into the black-painted metal. The attack thundered through the machine and he leapt clear as psychic energy erupted with the howling of a wolf, tearing the ork contraption apart from the inside.

‘Lord Commander,’ he voxed, the image of the psychic tidal swell throbbing in his thought. ‘Lord Commander!’

‘Thorild, what is it?’

‘Something is stirring in the palace. The Great Beast, I think. The ork psychic potential is accumulating massively. It will not be long before…’

Koorland did not catch the end of the message as the Space Wolf’s voice trailed away. Over the jutting ruins, the Lord Commander saw something immense moving up from the centre of the city.

‘I see it too, Rune Priest.’

At first it looked as though the entire palace had risen. After a moment, Koorland realised it was just the central portion, what he and the others had taken to be a temple. It was like the gargants in shape, a bulky, rotund idol, but so much larger in size as to defy belief. Gravitic projectors and thundering jets lifted the edifice above the surrounding buildings. It was so much larger than any war machine the orks had sent before that it defied the senses, blotting out the setting sun with its bulk.

Guns and rocket batteries studded its surface, alongside dish-shaped gravity weapons and outlandish energy cannons. Fluctuating fields encased the black-and-white behemoth. What appeared to be a dome pushed upwards, revealing itself as a grimacing ork face wrought in plates of riveted metal and smooth stone.

Buildings crumbled under the wash of energy. The city turned to dust like a bow wave before the advance of the titanic effigy-machine. Thunderhawks, Valkyries and Lightnings swooped and fired, their missiles, shells and bullets coursing across the temple-gargant’s fields, leaving after-sparks of dissipating power but nothing more. Hastily redirected artillery boomed out, rocket batteries and guns throwing their devastating weight against the onslaught of the Great Beast’s mobile fortress. Like the air strikes, they achieved nothing save to engulf the citadel in a curtain of emerald power.

A few kilometres away, Ordinatus Ullanor roared its anger again. A hail of plasma bolts smashed into the temple-gargant. Fields crackled and spat, but the construct continued to advance unblemished.

The vox crackled with another transmission from Thorild.

‘Lord Commander, I can feel the hate building. I think the temple-gargant is about to unleash s–’

Again his warning came too late. The eyes of the temple-gargant lit with pale green force. Twin beams of dazzling power lashed across the city, running the length of Ordinatus Ullanor. Plasma chambers exploded, turning the Adeptus Mechanicus engine into an artificial sun that engulfed an area half a kilometre across, turning buildings, men and orks to vapour.

‘We can’t stop it,’ Koorland whispered. ‘We have no defence against that kind of power.’

From amidst a sea of greenskin bodies, Vulkan watched the emergence of the sanity-defying ork engine. The sky burned with the impacts of rockets, shells and las-blasts, surrounding the floating temple with a star-like corona. Its eyes gleamed as the main weapon recharged while torrents of fire streamed down from scores of emplacements and heavy cannons.

The Great Beast had sent its best and now it had been forced to reveal itself.

The primarch smiled.

Soldiers of the Imperium died by the thousand and fled the Great Beast’s wrath in even greater number. Agents and artifices of the Omnissiah were worthless against the might of the orks’ mechanically rendered god. Titans and Knights fell before the crushing power of the temple-gargant. Those Martians and their subject troops with the will to retreat did so. The tech-priests and cybernetica held fast, even against the overwhelming logic of withdrawal, constructed or engineered by choice or intervention to respond only to the commands of their overlords. Dominus Zhokuv would see the affront against the Machine-God destroyed or else be destroyed himself in the effort.

Dorr did his best to maintain a line against the encroachment of the massive war-edifice. His tanks pounded the last of their shells into its armoured belly as it swept overhead, while the infantry battalions left to him battled to resist fresh waves of armoured orks discharged from keeps on its flanks. Having fought so hard to reach the temple, now it came for them and there was nothing they could do but dig in and die fighting.

The Space Marines attacked.

Koorland rode with Vulkan in the lead Storm Eagle, along with Thane, Bohemond and their attendant retinues.

‘As then, so now,’ said the primarch. If not actually enjoying the blooms of anti-aircraft fire, the clatter of shrapnel on the hull and the whine of air across the cracked canopy, he was certainly invigorated by the circumstances, more focused than at any time since their arrival.

‘As when, lord primarch?’ asked Koorland.

‘The Great Crusade, of course,’ replied the gene-father of the Salamanders. ‘Or the Heresy Wars. And the Scouring. Not since those days have our brothers been tasked with such a momentous labour, nor responded with such ferocity.’

‘Like old times?’ suggested Thane.

‘Exactly that.’

Squadrons of other gunships packed with the surviving warriors of the Adeptus Astartes followed, along with dozens of transports and support craft commandeered from the Imperial Navy and Astra Militarum. Each was filled to capacity with Space Marines. Below them assault troops bounded forward with jump pack-assisted leaps, crashing through the remaining ork resistance. Land Speeders of many patterns with more Space Marines clinging to their sides wove through the desolation. All that had survived the fighting thus far converged on the Great Beast’s last bastion.

Fists Exemplar, Black Templars, Soul Drinkers, Ultramarines, Executioners, Dark Angels, Crimson Fists, Excoriators, Salamanders, Space Wolves, Blood Angels. And one Imperial Fist.

In all the panoply of a dozen Chapters, the last three thousand heroes of the Adeptus Astartes launched their final assault.

Twenty

Ullanor – temple-gargant sanctum

Momentum. Direction. Ruthless aggression. These are the true weapons of the victorious. Hesitation is defeat.

And we hesitated. When the guns of our brothers roared, shock laid the first blow. We were lax and they were not. The war lasted seven years, but the dream was destroyed in that first second. What was left worth fighting for after? Pride. Foolish pride.

Caestus assault rams that Koorland had kept in reserve now flew past the lead transports in the final seconds before contact with the objective. Their melta charges and reinforced prows smashed through the walls of the temple-gargant in blasts of super-heated air and vaporised metal. Squads deposited within the structure pushed into the waiting foe with blades, bolters and grenades, forcing beachheads fifty metres into the mechanical behemoth.

Volleys of fire from the gunships raked across the mobs of orks crowding the surface of the war machine, rockets and bullets flaring up towards them as they descended. A few Imperial Navy fighters and bombers flew final passes above and below the focus of the Space Marine attack, plasma-tipped missiles and heavy bolters incinerating and shredding even more defenders. Turrets spat torrents of shells and las-blasts, exacting a deadly toll for the bravery of the crews.

In rapid waves the Space Marine gunships despatched their cargoes into the breaches created by the assault rams, while ad hoc transports deposited more squads into the ramparts and walkways of the temple-gargant’s exterior to seize conventional ingress points.

Koorland kept close to Vulkan. The primarch did not pause for a moment, his hammer in constant motion as he waded into the orks crewing the temple-gargant. Mega-armour shattered under the blows, power claws and energy blasts bouncing from the ancient war-plate forged by his hand.

Koorland had a little time to take stock of his surroundings, and was surprised by what he saw. He had expected the usual ork technology – clanking pistons and gears, hissing steam pipes, the stench of oil and corroded metal.

Instead the interior of the temple-gargant was almost pristine. The walls were chrome-like, painted with friezes of simple black and white dags or check patterns. Embossed plates of glyphs marked many doorways and junctions – signs, he realised with some shock. Doors slid open with faint purrs. The lights were a pale blue with barely a flicker of power flow.

In fact there seemed to be very little in the way of outward energy sources. Everything hummed and gleamed with its own radiant light, the same strange power that fuelled all of the new ork technology.

He had little enough time to process the importance of this observation. The needs of the mission were far more pressing.

Hundreds of Space Marines forced their way into the hovering edifice, charging into brutal combat with the Great Beast’s monstrous elite. Terminators and Dreadnoughts led the assault in many places, their heavier armour weathering the fire of the orks to allow their power-armoured brothers to gain a foothold, weapons filling the corridors and chambers with continuous hails of fire.

There were few foes that survived the charge of Vulkan, but many adjoining corridors and halls spilled forth their own flood of raging greenskins as the primarch thrust fast towards the heart of the impossible war engine. Armed and armoured with the best from the slave-lines of Ullanor’s manufactories, these creatures were as deadly as Esad Wire had warned.

Yet they were confronted at the fore by seven Chapter Masters and twice as many more Space Marines of high rank and great prowess. Many of Vulkan’s companions carried artefacts dating back to the Heresy Wars and earlier – swords, hammers, maces and shields that first saw battle during the Great Crusade and even the Unification Wars. They cut down the orks with plasma pistols, volkite carbines and thermal blasters forged on Mars before any of their Chapters had been founded. And each warrior was already a renowned hero amongst his brothers, his life a succession of great victories and campaigns that would grace future rolls of honour. Their names and titles would be lauded by generations to come.

Koorland felt humbled by such company, but in that time of unrelenting madness, a seeming eternity in which he waded into a sea of screaming ork faces, he finally understood the meaning of Vulkan’s assertions.

He had faith.

In himself. In the choice of the primarch to take him as his heir-in-command, above all others present.

And he had faith in his battle-brothers. If ever a band of warriors could triumph against the odds ranged against them, they had been gathered here. If there were any weapon in the armoury of the Imperium that Koorland could choose to wield at that moment, it would be three thousand warriors of the Adeptus Astartes.

And, lastly but most keenly, he had faith in Vulkan. The primarch was a vital energy every bit as powerful as the one against which they were set. Perhaps it was destiny or some other impulse that drove Vulkan, but whatever the cause he seemed set on a course and knew exactly where to lead them.

Into the depths of the temple-gargant, racing towards a confrontation with the Great Beast.

They came upon a large hall at least two hundred metres long and thirty high. Here the lights were dimmed, a respectful ochre that bled orange shadows behind the advancing Space Marines. The greater part of the force had created a cordon and held back the ork counter-attack while Vulkan, Koorland and their companions, accompanied by a mixed-Chapter company two-hundred strong including the cadre of Librarians, pressed ahead for the final assault on the Great Beast.

The sides of the hall were piled with detritus several metres deep. Tattered cloth, bent metal spars and splintered wooden poles made strange shapes in the gloom. The footfalls of the Space Marines echoed from the metallic walls and ceiling, loud against the backdrop of weapons fire resounding through the corridors behind.

‘What is this?’ asked Thane, moving to one of the trash piles. He pulled free a piece of cloth several metres long. He turned it, a richly embroidered sheet slashed and burned, golden thread glimmering in the light. Words were stitched into the design, human words, above a double-headed eagle. ‘It’s the aquila. By the Emperor…’

All of the rubbish was made of broken standards, torn and hacked and desecrated by the orks. Metal eagles and lightning bolts adorned some of the poles, bent and hammered out of shape.

‘From the Triumph,’ growled Vulkan, ripping free a rag of banner. It bore the icon of the Blood Angels Legion.

‘I know this design,’ he whispered. ‘It was the personal banner of Captain Nemedeus. I knew him from the Artagean campaign. His whole company died during the Ullanor assault.’

Valefor rushed forward and laid a hand reverently upon the cloth. ‘One of our greatest sacrifices. I bear his sword still!’

They continued past the broken, heaped remains of mankind’s last victory over the orks of Ullanor. The far end of the hall was not a wall but two immense doors fashioned from grey and black marble into a grimacing ork face, layered with precious metals studded with gems.

‘The breaking of the banners, I understand,’ said Quesadra. ‘But this kind of ornamentation is not in the aesthetic of the orks.’

‘Look at the floor,’ added Koorland. ‘It is polished granite.’

‘From the parade ground along which the victorious armies of the Emperor marched,’ said Vulkan. He gestured towards the doors as they neared. ‘And doubtless this is from some other structure associated with the Triumph.’

Koorland thought the primarch sounded wistful.

‘The high point of the Great Crusade,’ Vulkan continued. ‘The culmination of decades of war. The beginning of the end, we used to think. But we did not realise what that meant, how true those words would be. Such hope, such greatness, was the height from which we fell. Here we built the tallest pinnacle before the deepest drop. If only the orks knew what ruin they wrought here.’

He fell silent, and in the absence of his voice the hall gently rang with the retort of weapons in the surrounding corridors and chambers.

‘An attempt at humiliation,’ said Bohemond. ‘An empty gesture.’

‘An assertion of power,’ Vulkan corrected him, ‘stated by the Great Beast to its own kind. When we slay it, our statement will be louder still.’

When the Space Marines were halfway down the hall a shudder rumbled through the chamber. Two broad portals slid open, one on each side of the gateway. Metallic clanks and thudding steps heralded the arrival of a pair of identical stompers. They were fashioned as grotesque caricatures of orks, rotund mechanical beasts with guns and saw-blades for arms, the head of each almost scraping the high ceiling. They were painted in red and black with splashes of bright yellow, festooned with Titan kill-banners looted from the display of the Ullanor Triumph. Koorland recognised the icon of the ancient and honoured Fire Wasps Legio.

Koorland barked orders even as the machines opened fire. The Space Marines split, Vulkan and one contingent heading for the engine on the right, Koorland and the rest to the stomper on the left.

An explosion engulfed three battle-brothers while large-calibre rounds screamed through half a dozen more. Bolts flared through the dim light, a storm of small detonations wreathing each war machine.

Koorland fixed his attention on the target ahead, trusting to Vulkan to deal with the other mechanical giant. Eye-like lamps blazed into life and its head turned towards him, as though specifically seeking him out. He could see ork crew loitering on the shoulder gantries, firing their sidearms while the massive gun of the right arm adjusted aim amongst much gear-grinding and chain-rattling.

‘Melta bombs!’ he cried, taking a fist-sized charge from his belt.

The stomper’s main cannon roared again, flame and fury engulfing more of the Space Marines just behind Koorland. His armour registered the wash of heat from the detonation but he ignored the amber warning flashes.

The stomper took a step, exhaust smoke billowing as engines rumbled. It swung its right arm, a wicked chainblade thrice as long as Koorland was tall. The whirring teeth snarled over the Lord Commander’s head. He heard the snap of shattering ceramite and a cry from Quesadra.

Glancing back Koorland saw the blade sweep on and up, bloodied teeth hurling chunks of the bisected Chapter Master across the black granite and vandalised banners. The Crimson Fists shouted their dismay and swore vengeance, the blood of their commander spattered on their armour as they charged the ork engine.

Nearing the stomper, Koorland sheathed his blade and jumped, his fingers finding purchase on the metal belly plates of the ork war machine. The metal clanged around him as others landed on the towering engine, smashing at the armour with power fists and thunder hammers, with the more staccato chime of maglocks as melta bombs were slammed into place.

Koorland pulled himself up a few more metres, to where a viewport was cut into the plates. A diminutive gretchin stared out in horror. He plunged his fist into the war machine’s chest and dragged the creature out of the hole. Activating the melta charge’s timer, he tossed the bomb into the stomper’s interior and pushed away, jumping down to the hall floor.

He had time to glance across the hall, to see Vulkan emerge from the smoking ruins of the other engine, fumes coiling around the glowing head of Doomtremor, his war-plate smeared with oil and alien gore.

The melta bombs detonated in a rippling cascade over a few seconds, turning the stomper’s metal hide into showers of molten drops, slashing through the mechanisms within with blasts of super-heated gas. Fuel stores and ammunition ignited, ripping the stomper apart with secondary detonations. The Space Marines withdrew as jagged debris and burning hunks of ork flesh rained down onto them.

Vulkan was already at the gate, standing before the portal with Doomtremor held aloft ready to strike.

Before he even started to swing his weapon, a line of light appeared between the doors and the portal swung away, opening inwards to the sanctum beyond, flooding the outer hall with bright, pale green light.

Koorland and the others followed the primarch over the threshold, weapons ready. Koorland checked on his small force. About a third had fallen to the stompers’ attack. He could hear fighting from beyond the hall, getting closer. The rearguard was collapsing.

The chamber past the gateway was most definitely a power generator of some kind. Koorland was reminded of the plasma chambers of Imperial fortresses and starships, the walls lined with pipes and crackling cables, in this instance thick bundles of coppery wire strewn like garlands that hissed and sparked with green energy. The air throbbed with latent power. Koorland could feel the vibrations through his armour.

But it also put him in mind of the Ecclesiarchy shrines. Past the mechanical aspects, the walls had the same decorations as much of the rest of the temple-gargant – glyph plates and stark mosaics, painted geometric designs and pictorial murals. The chamber was semicircular, about thirty metres across, the focus of the arrangement an ork idol sitting upon an ornate chair.

The statue was at least ten metres tall, in a square-arched alcove filled with the green light of ork power. Its body was encased in thick layers of plate, intricately wrought and carved with orkish designs. A bull-horned helm with a mock tusked face encased the head. Two claws each the size of a Space Marine rested on the arms of the chair.

‘Master of Terra…’ muttered Odaenathus.

‘Speak not of the Throneworld in this place,’ growled Bohemond. ‘What further mockery is this?’

A plethora of cables hung from the armoured form of the idol, fizzing with power. It was clear that the statue was the centre of the power generation system, though by what means Koorland did not know. He looked to the Rune Priest, Thorild.

‘Is this the centre of the psychic presence?’

‘The power of the waaagh suffuses this place,’ replied the Space Wolf, with some evident effort, his voice strained. ‘It is both the vortex and the sun, the consumer and the creator.’

Koorland looked sharply at the psyker, remembering the ork-possession that had beset some of the other Librarians. The Space Wolf seemed in control of himself, merely being poetic in his choice of words.

‘Let us destroy the reactor and find the Great Beast,’ declared Thane, stepping towards the energy-shrouded god-effigy.

‘Where are you?’ Bohemond called, stalking after the Exemplar. ‘False priest to an artificial god! No Great Beast here, just alien impostors!’

The air buzzed with a surge of power. An inhuman shriek echoed around the chamber and all eyes turned to Thorild, the source of the terrible cry. He shuddered, lightning arcs of green power spewing from his psychic hood, his runestaff burning with jade flames. Moments later the other Librarians collapsed, screaming in most un-Space Marine fashion, cries of utter terror and agony ripped from them.

Gandorin staggered wildly, flares of green sparks arcing from his helm. He stopped a few metres from Koorland, face twisted in a terrifying snarl. A second later his head exploded, showering brain matter and skull across the Lord Commander.

Disgusted, Koorland turned on the idol as the smoking corpses of the psykers clattered to the floor. Bohemond roared, the chains binding his sword to his wrist rattling as he raised his weapon in challenge.

‘Face us, coward! Your death has arrived, false prophet of a doomed race. Ullanor shall be razed again, and none shall remember the Great Beast.’

With a drawn-out creak, the statue stirred.

Bohemond took a step back.

Koorland felt the other Space Marines crowding closer as the idol’s eyes became stars of green fire. He looked away and his grip loosened on his weapons, and it was only when he felt the presence of Vulkan looming up beside him that he was able to look at the animating effigy again. The primarch stood with legs slightly apart, hammer held up like a shield.

Power flared and pipes hissed while cables and wires detached from the idol with fountains of emerald sparks. Clanking and whirring, the immense machine rose up from its throne and took a step out of the alcove, twice as tall even as Vulkan.

‘We destroyed your other engines,’ said Thane, brandishing his sword. ‘This will be no different.’

Koorland looked up at the living idol, filled with foreboding. Black and white checks adorned the effigy, the face painted a deep red. At its full height, the thing seemed even bigger, swamping the primarch with its bulk, a monster of moulded plates and jutting spikes covered with writhing, coiling fronds of power.

‘It isn’t a war machine,’ Koorland told the others, the words almost choking him. ‘It’s a suit of armour.’

Twenty-one

Ullanor – temple-gargant sanctum

Survival begets sacrifice. How long have You sat immobile, my Father? They speak in Your name and know nothing of Your mind. Is this what You wanted? I cannot countenance such a thing. It is a travesty of the Imperial Truth, the epitome of all that we wished to vanquish. Venal, selfish, corrupted. Did we not show the way brightly enough? Did our blood not wash the wounds clean?

Why do You not speak out? Father, why have You forsaken me?

‘The Great Beast must die, whatever the cost.’

The last words to leave Odaenathus’ lips were painfully prescient. The Great Beast threw out a flame-wreathed fist and a blast of power smashed into the Ultramarines Chapter Master, smearing his remains across several metres of granite. For a couple of seconds, Koorland couldn’t drag his eyes from the droplets of molten armour and the stain of blood-grease that had been his fellow commander. All that he was, all that he might be, had been ended with contemptuous ease.

Koorland looked again at the Great Beast, a manic laugh threatening to burst free as he considered the impossibility of taking on such a foe.

‘Destroy the generator,’ snapped Vulkan. He stepped past, hefting Doomtremor in one hand. ‘Orks love to fight. I’m going to give the Great Beast exactly what it wants.’

The tone of the primarch left Koorland no choice – a command that reached into his heart and head and could not be gainsaid. Even had he the inclination to defy Vulkan, he had no time. The gene-father of the Salamanders threw himself at the gargantuan ork, his hammer a blue star against wreathing clouds of green fire.

At Koorland’s command the remaining Space Marines poured fire into the arcane technology of the reactor. Bolts, volkite flares and melta bursts rippled across the screen of shimmering energy that covered the mass of machinery surrounding the Great Beast’s throne. The green curtain broke into constellations of small stars, rippling and surging with energy flux.

‘More!’ roared Koorland, loading a new magazine into his pistol. The juddering snarl of assault cannons and bark of bolters drowned out the boom of Doomtremor striking the Great Beast’s armour and the shriek of power claws raking across Vulkan’s war-plate. The converging fire of the taskforce was a near-solid stream of energy and metal. The reactor field writhed and buckled, building to blinding intensity, but did not break.

Vulkan and the Great Beast reeled to one side and then the other, smashing titanic blows against each other. Sparks and lightning fountained from the plate of both warriors. Their movement exposed the throne alcove of the reactor.

‘There is another way,’ declared Valefor. He dashed past the melee between the two behemoths and slashed his sword against the brute-shield. Green-black energy flared, throwing the Blood Angel twenty metres, his plate ripped apart. Koorland suppressed a cry of woe, his grief tempered by a slight movement from the crippled Blood Angel.

‘He still lives!’ one of Valefor’s warriors declared, kneeling beside the fallen hero.

How long do any of us have? Koorland wondered, looking at the ongoing struggle between the Great Beast and Vulkan. In the presence of such demigods, what worth were the efforts of simple mortals?

Taking up Doomtremor in both hands, the primarch ducked beneath a swinging strike from the Great Beast and threw all of his weight behind his next blow. The head of the hammer crashed against the thigh of the immense ork, the thunderous sound of the blow lost amidst a deafening bellow of pain. The Great Beast staggered, a lightning-tipped claw lashing out to rip across Vulkan’s chest, peeling apart the outer layer of his plastron.

The Great Beast recovered almost immediately, warding away the primarch’s next blow with an upraised arm. It kicked hard, a monstrous foot connecting with Vulkan. The impact sent the lord of the Salamanders spinning away, his chestplate buckled even more.

‘Target the ork!’ shouted Thane, turning his weapon on the Great Beast.

The fusillade of the Space Marines engulfed the warlord with the same intensity as the reactor. And with similar lack of effect. Vulkan staggered to his feet, ripping away his broken plastron to reveal a layer of banded armour beneath.

The Great Beast turned to face the primarch. It raised a hand and beckoned mockingly with a finger.

‘Lord Koorland!’ Vulkan circled, moving his hammer to the left then the right, adjusting his stance constantly to mask his next attack. The Great Beast stepped and turned, keeping the primarch and Space Marines in view.

‘My lord?’ Koorland advanced, weapons at the ready.

‘Leave! If I cannot end this here, none of us can. I know what to do, but it will be the end of us all if you stay. You must survive. You are the Imperial Fists, the Last Wall. And you are Lord Commander. Do not let the High Lords squander our victory, nor make vain my sacrifice.’

Over the crackle of the generator and the thud of the Great Beast’s steps Koorland could hear shouts – ork and human – echoing along the outer hall. The sound of gunfire and crashing blows was almost in the hall itself. He looked at the primarch, and then to the immensity of the Great Beast.

Could Vulkan possibly prevail?

And he remembered Vulkan’s assertions since the beginning. Faith, belief, the importance of symbols. He, Koorland, was the sole survivor of Ardamantua, the Lord Commander and heir to the likes of Dorn and Guilliman.

And he realised that Vulkan had known this moment would come from the time he had first heard of the Great Beast. An immovable object required an unstoppable force to match it. Neither primarch nor warlord could prevail.

But that was not Vulkan’s plan.

Koorland looked at the primarch, his massive frame rendered to mortal proportions by the immensity of his foe. It was more than size alone that gave Vulkan his power. Into him the Emperor had put every artifice and effort to create the most sublime warrior – a figure of imagination and myth as much as brute strength.

Intellect beyond Koorland’s understanding guided that power. A mind that had witnessed all of the glories and horrors of the galaxy through nearly two millennia of constant war.

A warrior who had seen his gene-sons slaughtered by their battle-brothers, who had taken up arms against his own brother demigods for the Emperor.

What could Koorland know of an immortal’s mind and reasoning?

Vulkan perhaps sensed the attention of the Lord Commander. He looked at Koorland with eyes that had seen more than any other human soul. What was it Koorland saw in them? Pain? Yes, but not of the physical kind, not from the marks upon armour and flesh. It was the agony of wisdom. An ache of many centuries.

And in that gaze Koorland came to know what Vulkan had always known, and saw the intent of the Emperor’s last loyal son.

The Great Beast roared, a deafening wall of sound matched by a flare of power rippling through the generator crackle. The glow of the warlord’s claws brightened and became flames. Vulkan swung his hammer again, fending off the next blow. A tempest of sparks erupted where weapons clashed.

‘All forces, evacuate the objective,’ Koorland announced over the command vox. ‘Immediate fighting withdrawal from the temple-gargant.’

Most of his companions started towards the doorway. The Blood Angels heaved up Valefor and carried him from the chamber. A score or so of the Space Marines stayed where they were. Black Templars.

Bohemond moved in the opposite direction, blocking Koorland’s path.

‘What fresh insanity is this?’ spat the High Marshal, barely audible over the tumult of Vulkan and the Great Beast. ‘The lord primarch needs us.’

‘He does not,’ Koorland answered calmly. He stepped to go past the Black Templar. Bohemond grabbed the Lord Commander’s arm.

‘We swore to die for the Emperor. We do not retreat! We are not cowards!’

Koorland’s fist hit Bohemond square in the faceplate. The blow knocked the High Marshal crashing to the floor. The other Black Templars took steps towards their commander, blades and bolters raised.

‘I am your Lord Commander!’ The rage boiled from Koorland, allowed free vent after so much loss and frustration. No more could he withstand the jibes and barbs of the Black Templar’s scorn. The endorsement of the lord primarch was enough. Koorland no longer cared for the affirmation of Bohemond and could certainly not spare the thought or effort required to continue seeking it. He pointed the tip of his blade at the downed warrior. ‘Refuse me again and your life is forfeit, by my hand or word.’

Bohemond lay where he had fallen, shamed. Koorland turned his back on the High Marshal and strode away.

‘If you want to die, stay here. If you want to serve the Emperor, come with me.’

Twenty-two

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

There was never an external threat to mankind that we could not overcome. The greatest foe always lies within. That is the only lesson to be learned. No matter how bleak times become, the power to prosper or fall is held in the breast of every man and woman. The chain is as strong as the weakest link, but mankind has the Emperor to bear the weight of all. And it was from within that the deadly blow was dealt. Deadly. A lingering death, fifteen hundred years of slow pain. How much longer until the corpse admits its demise? Longer than I can bear to witness any more.

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 there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

The Great Beast was an elemental force. Vulkan could feel the pressure of its power lapping against him like heat, an embodiment of the raw and raging instincts of the orks. Although he remembered little of his almost ceaseless labours against the daemons of the Dark Gods during the Heresy War, the primarch recalled enough to know that one did not win such a fight. It was victory merely to sustain it.

He caught a claw with the haft of Doomtremor, muscles and armour fibre-bundles straining against the warlord’s brutal strength. Vulkan shifted his weight, widening his stride as he heaved off the Great Beast’s next attack, moving quickly to his other foot to avoid the monstrous ork’s return swing. He smashed Doomtremor against the greenskin’s armour, its fire-shrouded head bouncing from energy-charged plates.

‘In your ignorance, do you see what you have wrought?’ Vulkan said, swinging his hammer again. ‘Your kind should have stayed dead where we buried you.’

They exchanged more blows. Vulkan struggled to keep his footing against the hammering impact of every strike, but slowly circled to his left, manoeuvring the ork into position.

‘You moved too soon,’ Vulkan continued. ‘Had you but the patience of true intelligence you would have seen that another decade, perhaps two, and the Imperium would have crumbled easily. And to strike at the Throneworld… You have roused a different beast, one that will see you crushed.’

The Great Beast surprised him. It did not draw back its fist, but reached out and snatched him by the throat. War-plate groaned under the pressure of the ork’s fierce grip, tightening around Vulkan’s windpipe. He rained blows against its arm as the warlord pulled back its other fist for a blow that would take off the primarch’s head. As the claw powered towards his face, Vulkan switched the focus of his attack, slamming Doomtremor into the oncoming fist.

The explosion of competing powers parted the two combatants, flinging Vulkan into the wall and sending the Great Beast staggering across the floor, spiked boots gouging furrows in the stone.

The ork shook its arm and hand, numbed by the impact. Vulkan blinked hard to clear his spinning vision.

‘But you are not the real threat,’ the primarch snarled, pushing to his feet. He spun Doomtremor in his palms, sizing up his opponent. ‘You are the distraction that will allow the true enemy to surge forth again.’

The two giants hurled themselves at each other. The Great Beast crushed the bodies of fallen Chapter Masters underfoot. Vulkan threw Doomtremor at the last moment, casting the burning hammer into the Great Beast’s face. Armour buckled and split and the hammer whirled away across the chamber.

Vulkan wheeled past the stunned ork, but not so swiftly that he avoided its next punch, which caught him square in the gut and launched him a dozen metres through the air. Turning his crash into a roll, Vulkan regained his feet.

Its helm was a mess, but the ork now stood between the primarch and his weapon.

The flames around one of the Great Beast’s gauntlets flickered away. It reached up and tore free the remnants of its helmet, tossing the mangled armour aside. Its head was enormous, with tusks and fangs like swords. The Great Beast regarded Vulkan with deep red eyes, a permanent scowl furrowing its brow.

‘You are right, son of the Emperor,’ it said. The voice was deep, guttural, but unmistakably speaking Imperial Gothic.

Vulkan was so taken aback by this utterance that he barely dodged the blast of power that erupted from the Great Beast’s out-thrust fist.

‘Your empire is on its knees. We shall be its death.’ The Great Beast glanced over its shoulder and turned back to the primarch with what Vulkan believed was a smile. ‘And just like your Emperor, you have thrown away your most powerful weapon.’

The Great Beast lowered its head and charged with a roar, green flames bursting from its fists. Vulkan leapt aside and threw a hand out towards Doomtremor, activating the miniature teleport link he had fitted into its head and his gauntlet. With a crack of splitting air, the hammer appeared in his fist. He swung hard, aiming for the side of the Great Beast’s head.

The blow bounced from thick skull, Doomtremor’s power field ripping skin and flesh down to the bone, searing a streak across the Great Beast’s scalp.

The ork lumbered away. A pulse of power flooded from it in a shockwave, staggering Vulkan as he readied for his next strike.

The Great Beast straightened, thick blood pouring down its face, a visible crack in the side of its skull.

‘Are you feeling tired yet, son of the Emperor?’ it asked. Green coils of energy snaked up to its face, flowing over the wound, healing the gash in a few seconds. The Great Beast laughed. ‘Is that the hardest you can hit me?’

‘I don’t have to hit harder,’ Vulkan replied. ‘I just have to think quicker.’

Their last exchange had brought the Great Beast back in front of the massive throne alcove in the heart of the reactor. The primarch hurled himself full force, tackling the warlord in the midriff to take them both into the pulsating green aura of the energy field.

At the moment of entry, Vulkan felt the overwhelming nature of Ullanor pouring into him. He witnessed and participated in the unimaginable orkishness of Ullanor, feeling himself drawn out into a web of waaagh power stretching across many star systems, the pulsing tendrils feeding back into his being even as his presence radiated energy into those around him.

That power echoed back through time, past the Horus Heresy to the primordial origins of the orks themselves. He was one with the nature of the orks, and saw for the briefest moment two green-skinned behemoths battering each other with bare fists at the dawn of time before even mankind was born.

The sensation of something around his throat dragged Vulkan back to the present, staring into the rage-filled eyes of the Great Beast. Both claws were on his throat, squeezing the life from the primarch.

Having seen the nature of the waaagh-force that bound the orks together, guessing at its nature from his own dark experience of Chaos, Vulkan was struck by a revelation. All things were interconnected. The orks seemed random but they were not. They were emergent. Trial and error always began with wildness and accidental circumstance, but it honed and refined. It evolved.

As the orks had evolved of late – hyper-evolved in the accelerating presence of the Great Beast – so their strategy had evolved. From gargants to hulks, to attack moons, to Ullanor itself – a progression that, once revealed, could be followed back to its base in the most simple of ork constructions.

And the same was true of all their acts.

Learn through action. Trial and error.

The attack moons were not battle stations, or at least not merely battle stations. They were test shots, dry runs sent out into the void as the orks tinkered and improved their gravitic engines.

And once the technology had been proven they needed to find a target. The Great Beast had not struck early, it had struck a bargain. It would avenge the abused spirit of the orks, it would crush the Emperor that had humbled orkdom. On the crescendo of such a victory its power would be unlimited and it would ascend to rule of the galaxy.

And now, Vulkan realised in that instant of feverish thought, they had found Earth. They had located the Throneworld and humanity had proven itself incapable of fighting back.

The attack moon over Earth was a beacon as much as a vanguard. Ullanor, the whole world, was the same thinking writ on a planetary scale – a base of billions of orks. It had been armed and protected like an attack moon. Could it also be moved across star systems like one? If Terra was the target…

There really was no way to stop the Great Beast by any conventional means.

Such power could not be destroyed, only diverted. Feeling the last gasps of breath escaping his body, Vulkan let his thoughts flow again. He reached out into the undulating waaagh, tapping into that warp-born part of himself that had been for every primarch a blessing and a curse. He allowed his primal essence to mix with that of the orks, his Emperor-created body absorbing the surge of energy like a sponge.

He allowed the pure orkishness that had killed so many Librarians to infuse his body. Vulkan felt the Great Beast tense, its thoughts moving to him with tectonic slowness as it realised something was amiss. It tried to pull back the waaagh, to wrest the raw orkish power from the mind of the primarch.

Vulkan only had a moment before he lost the battle, before the power of the orks and the last dregs of his life were both spent.

With failing muscles, he thrust Doomtremor into the face of the Great Beast and detonated the power field generator.

The last of the transports lifted away, a battered Thunderhawk in the livery of the Salamanders. Its original occupants had died in the fighting, determined to fight to the last close to their primarch. Now it carried the Lord Commander, two Chapter Masters and a wounded captain of the Blood Angels. High company in dire circumstances.

Koorland looked down at the dwindling city below from the open ramp, his thoughts at a standstill. His gaze roved over the mounds of dead and the broken ruins where tech-priests and skitarii, tanks and Guardsmen still battled for no reason other than survival. Drop-ships were coming for them, but few would get off Ullanor.

He could have done no more, he was certain of it. Had he done enough? Had he done the right thing? Koorland knew that only history would make that judgement, but he had to believe in the truth of Vulkan’s assertion.

‘Lord Commander! The temple-gargant!’

Thane’s call drew Koorland’s attention back to the inner city. A shuddering wave of green power flowed out from the temple-gargant. The floating citadel was listing heavily, its front bastions carving a ruinous path through what little remained of the city centre as it descended. The entire structure writhed with green flames, and at the heart of an inferno of raw energy Koorland thought he saw flickering images of two immense beings, locked together in an embrace of mutual destruction.

The bubbling shockwave crackled out for several kilometres, passing over and through everything. Koorland watched as it overtook the last remnants of Adeptus Mechanicus and Astra Militarum trying to flee the devastation. Tanks and cybernetica were tossed like grains of sand. Roaming ork mobs were taken up in the wave, borne up into the green cloud like flecks of flotsam on an incoming tide.

Stretching nearly a kilometre across, the detonation rapidly slowed and then stopped.

Koorland held his breath for several seconds as the immense green hemisphere wavered, balanced perfectly between expansion and retraction.

Then the field collapsed.

In seconds the implosion raced back to the temple-gargant, scouring clear everything that had been encompassed in its girth, ripping Gorkogrod down to the foundations and swallowing the pinnacle of the mountain with its ravening energy.

The temple-gargant split asunder, crashing into the scourged ground spouting pillars of green fire and storms of jade lightning, breaking apart into hundreds of hab-block sized chunks, scattering masonry and metal.

Just before the Thunderhawk passed into the cloud cover, Koorland could see the ork armies amassing around the capital, a ring of smoke and darkness several kilometres deep. Millions of orks from across Ullanor, poised just half a day from pouring into Gorkogrod. There was no chance of going back.

‘Is it dead?’ asked Thane, leaning around the Lord Commander to look at the devastation wrought by the temple-gargant’s destruction. ‘Did Vulkan kill it?’

‘Have faith,’ replied Koorland.

Epilogue

Terra – outer system

Koorland was in the strategium when the Alcazar Remembered broke warp back in the Sol System. Transit back to the Terran system had been swift, the warp-roar of the orks momentarily quelled. A few hundred Space Marines had made the journey with him. Perhaps ten times that number from the Astra Militarum, Imperial Navy and Cult Mechanicus had been lifted from the city before the orks had reclaimed it.

Nobody had felt like celebrating a victory.

The strategium was tense. There had been no confirmed contact with Terra. It was impossible to know whether the strike had been in time. Were they simply returning to the ashes of the Throneworld?

Koorland did not think so. When the time came, the Great Beast would have led the attack. He had learnt as much from the actions of Vulkan.

‘Any transmissions?’ he asked Kale.

The shipmaster shook his head.

Thane was with him. So many were not. The Exemplar remarked as much.

‘They will be honoured, each one,’ the last of the Imperial Fists replied. ‘They were all heroes of the Imperium, from the mighty such as Odaenathus who fell against the Great Beast itself to the first Guardsman who died in the planetstrike. And Vulkan, his passing shall be mourned for millennia. Without each and every one of them we could not have prevailed. It is our duty that their deaths are not squandered. We have shown what we can do, when united in ambition, and led with purpose. The orks have shown us how broken we had become. The wounds are still raw but it is not too late to tend them, brother.’

‘Lord Commander, I am detecting a powerful transmission,’ one of the deck officers announced. ‘Source origin is Terran orbit. Looped signal. All major channels. I’m going to–’

The officer stood up straight, face ashen, headset falling to his console. His terrified gaze moved to Koorland while his mouth continued to work silently, unable to form the words needed.

‘On audible,’ the Lord Commander snapped. The officer’s trembling finger activated a rune.

The speakers crackled into life, and from them issued a deep, grating voice, slowly repeating the same words.

‘I am Slaughter! I am Slaughter! I am Slaughter! I am Slaughter!’

About the Authors

Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Wolfsbane and Pharos, the Primarchs novels Corax: Lords of Shadows, Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia, and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dark Imperium, Dark Imperium: Plague War, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

David Guymer wrote the Primarchs novel Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa, and for Warhammer 40,000 The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two The Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he wrote the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, including Warden of the Blade and Castellan, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Neferata: Mortarch of Blood. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Deliverance Lost, Angels of Caliban and Corax, as well as the novella The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs, and several audio dramas including the bestselling Raven’s Flight. He has written many novels for Warhammer 40,000, including Ashes of Prospero, Imperator: Wrath of the Omnissiah, the two Rise of the Ynnari novels Ghost Warrior and Wild Rider, Jain Zar: The Storm of Silence and Asurmen: Hand of Asuryan. He also wrote the Path of the Eldar and Legacy of Caliban trilogies, and two volumes in The Beast Arises series. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Warhammer Chronicles omnibus The Sundering, and much more besides. In 2017, Gav won the David Gemmell Legend Award for his Age of Sigmar novel Warbeast. He lives and works in Nottingham.

A Black Library Publication

Throneworld first published in Great Britain in 2016.
Echoes of the Long War first published in Great Britain in 2016.
The Hunt for Vulkan first published in Great Britain in 2016.
The Beast Must Die first published in Great Britain in 2016.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Víctor Manuel Leza Moreno.

The Beast Arises Volume 2 © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. The Beast Arises Volume 2, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78030-886-9

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.