Contents

Cover

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

WATCHERS IN DEATH

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Epilogue

THE LAST SON OF DORN

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Epilogue

SHADOW OF ULLANOR

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

THE BEHEADING

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

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…

WATCHERS IN DEATH

David Annandale

Prologue

The void

The Imperium’s eyes did not sleep. They did not blink. Even as the body convulsed with agony, wounded to the core by the Beast, the eyes watched. Organic or augmetic, sentient or servitor, the eyes watched the human galaxy without rest. They were everywhere.

Almost everywhere.

They were not here.

Here was night in its purest form. The black of the void was profound, an abyss of infinite depth, the sparks of the stars merely cold, jagged stabs. There was no true light here. There was only its dust, its ashes, the glint of the past that was years and centuries and thousands of millennia old.

No light. No warmth.

No watchers.

But if there had been, they would have seen the ork fleet surround the dark world. The orks did not make planetfall. They bombarded the surface with missiles and shells. They scorched it with energy beams. The ground ran with molten tears. Glows of orange and crimson, false sunrise and false sunset, spread their rage across the land. The planet shook. It cried out in its pain.

The orks’ target weathered the bombardment. It did not cry out. It was implacable in its silence.

And the orks did not land.

They battered the world with even greater ferocity. They brought light to the planet, and it did nothing but burn and shatter.

But they did not land.

The hurled their hatred at their target. They sought to make it scream and die. It remained silent.

Yet it answered the orks. It answered with fury.

One

Terra – the Imperial Palace

The silence crept through the halls and into Koorland’s mind. There was no lack of noise in the chamber, but the silence found the cracks between the hiss of steam, the crackle of energy, the clanking of mechadendrites. The silence was strong. It was filled with the dead, and with futility. Koorland wondered if this same silence had blanketed Terra in the wake of the Proletarian Crusade. It was a quiet deeper than mourning, more powerful than despair. It had followed him from Ullanor. It had been waiting for him on Terra.

Its weight was crushing.

The chamber was part of a bulbous chapel on the west side of the Cathedral of the Saviour Emperor’s exterior wall. The space was an ecumenical one, an architectural statement of the essential identity of the Imperial Creed and the Cult of the Omnissiah. The Black Templars of the Last Wall had insisted the decryption of the visual feed occur on sacred ground. Its transmission had been among the last acts of a Venerable Brother, and it had emerged from a battle where many Black Templars had died.

The chapel did double duty as site of worship and laboratorium. It would serve. The Mechanicus adepts fed the data through cogitators, assisted by Black Templars serfs. The air was thick with incense.

The operation was performed under the supervision of Eternity. He was of the Last Wall now, and wore the colours of the Imperial Fists, but he had come from the Black Templars. His arms were folded, his head bowed in reverence.

Koorland watched from the rear of the chapel with Thane. They were alone. Eternity had refused to allow any of the High Lords to bear witness, and Koorland did not blame him. Their presence would have disturbed the solemnity of the ceremony. Though Koorland did not care for the religiosity of the ritual, he accepted it. Even if he hadn’t, he would have barred the High Lords. There was no place for them and dignity to coexist.

‘Any speculations?’ Koorland asked Thane.

‘None.’ The Chapter Master of the Fists Exemplar spoke with a grim, flat tone. He sounded like a man bracing himself for the worst.

‘We know it is important. And to our advantage, if it emerged from a victory against the orks.’

‘I know,’ said Thane, as if Koorland had pointed out what he most dreaded.

Koorland said nothing else. Thane was surrounded by his own version of the crushing silence. Koorland could not dispel his own. There was nothing he could do for the Exemplar.

The silence settled over them. The chanting of the tech-priests and the crackle of energy discharges did little to pierce it. Koorland watched the ritual, but barely saw it. His vision narrowed to a dark tunnel. His consciousness sank into the tunnel and he stayed there, numb. The suffocation of the silence held off the piercing blade of loss, guilt and defeat for the moment. It was not a respite. It was only a different quality of pain.

He was so far in the tunnel he didn’t realise at first that he was being addressed.

‘Lord Commander Koorland,’ the voice repeated, its augmetic larynx buzzing.

Koorland blinked. The chapel snapped back into place about him. He looked down at the adept. Her name was Segorine. A cluster of servo-arms, segmented so that they flexed like tentacles, emerged from her torso. Her face was a steel mask dominated by compound eyes.

‘The decryption is complete,’ Segorine said.

‘Thank you,’ said Koorland. He and Thane followed her down the chapel aisle to where the other tech-priests waited. Behind the altar, a large pict screen pulsed with snow.

‘Faith,’ said Eternity.

Koorland waited.

‘Faith,’ Eternity said again. ‘That is what we are about to witness. That is what will grant us victory against the Beast.’

‘I see,’ Koorland said, noncommittal.

Segorine snaked out a limb to a control panel built into the altar. She depressed a dial, and the screen came to life. The images flickered and jumped, and the muzzles of beam weapons flared everything to white. Explosions broke up the picture.

But the worst distortion came from unleashed psychic energy. Koorland saw the Black Templars at bay, fighting hard against the ork horde. He saw the greenskin psyker, its power ferocious, seeming to destroy reality along with the images. He saw the Black Templars pray as they fought. The sound was a riot of distortion, a grating rhythm barely recognisable as gunfire. Breaking through in fragments were deep, sonorous chants, magnified by vox-casters. The voices of faith travelled across destruction and time to frame their moment of victory.

For a moment, the sound cleared altogether. The yowls of the orks and the concussions of the guns vanished. There was only the stern, martial prayer of the Black Templars. The energy flares of the witch stuttered, then spread out as if they had hit a wall. They curled away from the Space Marines. Koorland leaned forward, astonished. Arcing waves of power slammed back into the greenskin psyker. The beast’s mouth opened wide, its face contorted, and still there was only the sound of the chanting. The ork’s eyes burst. It exploded into flame. The energy flashed across the frame of the feed, utterly uncontrolled, blasting every ork to ash. The energy storm swallowed up the chanting. The chapel filled with a shattering feedback shriek, and the visual feed disintegrated.

The screen returned to snow, then went black.

‘The visible energy,’ Thane said slowly. ‘I didn’t see it come from the Black Templars.’

‘No,’ Koorland agreed. ‘It was all from the ork psyker.’ To the tech-priests he said, ‘Will you play that back again? Slowly.’

They watched. At the end, Thane said, ‘Are the orks and their witches linked?’

‘In some way, they must be,’ said Koorland. He could see no other interpretation. The psyker’s death had triggered the immolation of the horde.

‘So if we can target their psykers…’

‘A possible weakness, yes.’ Koorland turned to Eternity. ‘That was not the work of a single warrior, was it?’ Certainly not a Librarian. The Black Templars allowed no psykers within the ranks of their battle-brethren.

‘That was the faith of all my brothers present in that battle,’ said Eternity. ‘A collective strength.’

‘Against a single ork witch,’ said Thane.

‘Its fall destroyed its entire force,’ Eternity pointed out.

‘Yes,’ said Koorland. ‘Yes, it did.’

If only we’d known. The words came to him unbidden, a canker on his soul. He tried to push them away. He tried to tell himself the Imperial tactics on Ullanor would not have been altered, but his grief would permit no such comfort.

If only they had known. They would have fought differently. They would have made a greater priority of finding and taking out the ork psykers. They would have targeted the source of greenskin strength and turned it into a weakness.

He thought of Vulkan. The primarch had wished for the aid of the Sisters of Silence. He had recognised the need for a strong counter to the psykers.

He must have known, Koorland thought. He tried again to tell himself that they would not have fought any differently.

He knew that wasn’t true.

Neither were many things, he thought, that he had been telling himself of late. He had worked hard to maintain an illusion of self that made it possible for him to carry the responsibility he had shouldered. It made it possible for him to lead. But he had led nowhere except to disaster. He had nothing but contempt for the High Lords. At this moment, though, he was not sure how he was any different from them.

He forced himself to focus on the moment. ‘We may not see the key to the weakness in this data,’ he said. ‘But it is a weakness, and we will exploit it.’

But an hour later, he was still thinking about difference, his mind chasing itself in a toxic spiral. He walked alone on the ramparts of Daylight Wall, looking up into the night of Terra. There was a strong wind, and the sulphurous clouds over the Imperial Palace roiled, broke and reformed. In the gaps of their anger, the light of two moons reached down. Luna was a narrow, waning crescent. The reflected glow of the ork attack moon was paler, colder and more baleful. That threat was over, or at least contained. The orks were gone, the moon blockaded. But it was still a presence in the Terran sky, an insult and a wound to the heart of the Imperium. No enemy, even defeated, should ever have come so close.

He pictured another moon. He pictured several. Next time, the orks might not hold back from deploying their gravity weapons against Terra. They might have lost interest in conquest. They had been bloodied on Ullanor. Their vengeance might well take the form of total destruction.

And even if the moon was dead, it was not silent. It roared. I AM SLAUGHTER. I AM SLAUGHTER. I AM SLAUGHTER. The broadcast was ceaseless. It was gigantic. It would take nothing for Koorland to open a vox-channel and hear it.

He chose not to, but the reality of the shout was another poison in the toxic silence. The words of the Beast hammered at Terra, breaking down the spirit of its citizens. The roar mocked the sacrifices on Ullanor. It declared the futility of every Imperial endeavour to stop the orks. Every great quest, every journey, every challenge, every hard-won battle and shard of hope – they all meant nothing. What did they have to show for Caldera, for Ullanor? Even their victory against the moon was turned into mockery.

Koorland grieved, and so did all the world. He did not know fear, but he knew its cancer possessed every mortal soul on Terra.

The battlements of Daylight Wall were built upon many terraces. Turrets and cannon emplacements on multiple levels faced the east, so many it seemed they should be able to kill the rising sun if it dared to challenge the Emperor. Koorland walked along the top. He took up a position between the crenellations and looked down at the bristling strength below him. Not long ago, this perspective would have renewed his sense of duty and of purpose. Now he observed the defences and thought: Not enough.

The guns were insufficient.

So was he.

The approaching footsteps were quiet, more from a desire not to disturb than not to be heard. Koorland turned to the right. Drakan Vangorich, Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum, walked down the wide avenue of the wall towards him. There was enough room between the battlements for a Baneblade to pass, and the Assassin was a tiny figure in the night. On either side, the relief sculptures of the crenellations celebrated Imperial might. Heroic figures cut down their foes with sword and gun. Koorland’s eyes went back and forth from the brutal strength of the stone to the wiry Grand Master. In the contrast, he felt a glimmer of inspiration. It passed before he could discern its shape.

Vangorich nodded to Koorland as he drew near. ‘A homecoming?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Koorland. ‘Daylight Wall Company is gone. And my duty is no longer named by a single battlement.’

‘It was never limited to that, though.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’ Koorland sighed. ‘But there was great order in that naming. Symbols have powerful meaning.’

‘As does their loss,’ Vangorich said quietly.

‘Yes.’ The annihilation of Daylight Wall Company was of little importance next to the loss of a Chapter. And what was even that compared to the death of a primarch?

‘I’ve seen the recording,’ Vangorich said.

‘For all the good it does us now.’

Vangorich gave him a sharp look. ‘Defeatism doesn’t suit you, Lord Commander Koorland.’

‘Neither does naïveté,’ Koorland said.

Vangorich was quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘It isn’t that long since we last spoke on this wall.’

‘It isn’t, and I don’t come here seeking to have my morale boosted by you.’

‘It would be an odd thing to do, given my particular duty.’

Koorland grunted.

‘I hope, though,’ Vangorich went on, ‘that you will listen to counsel.’

‘I know what you would have to say about being a symbol.’

‘And you would deny its truth.’

‘I would deny my fitness to serve as that symbol.’

‘Would you deny your duty to do so?’

‘You know I would not,’ Koorland growled. Duty and fitness were very different things, and he resented Vangorich’s blurring of the two.

‘No,’ the Grand Master said. ‘You have never turned from your duty. You have always done it. You did it on Ullanor too.’

‘To no end.’

‘And who would have been better suited? Who should have led instead?’

Koorland didn’t answer.

‘Vulkan left much of the campaign in your hands, didn’t he?’ Vangorich said.

‘He did.’

‘Was he wrong? Did he err?’

Koorland looked down at the Grand Master and glared. Again he said nothing. He could not bring himself to say aloud that Vulkan had been mistaken. He would not question the final decisions of the last primarch.

‘I’ll take your silence as a no,’ Vangorich said.

‘You’re playing a game with words,’ said Koorland. ‘It isn’t amusing and it isn’t useful.’

‘You’re right,’ Vangorich said, his tone suddenly sharp. ‘There would be nothing useful in a game. The High Lords have proven this many times over, and as far as I can tell, they’re very much intent on proving it yet again. I am not playing at anything. What we need right now is clarity, don’t you agree?’

‘I do.’ He grimaced. ‘We could have used the clarity of Magneric’s information on Ullanor.’

‘Exactly. Obfuscation, illusion, denial, ignorance, they have brought us disaster.’

So has everything else, Koorland thought. He said, ‘Your point, when you reach it, will have to be an impressive one, Drakan.’

‘Did Vulkan speak to you before the end?’

‘He did.’

‘And?’

Koorland took a deep breath. He let it out with a shudder, as if it could expel the burdens and memories that had built up like a toxic cloud inside his chest. ‘He ordered me to carry on.’

‘That was all?’

‘He called me Lord Commander. He said I was the Imperial Fists.’

‘And you would dismiss those words?’

Koorland shook his head. ‘It isn’t that simple.’

‘I see nothing simple in what I am suggesting. I see that you have a great burden to carry, one that is enormously complex. It is yours, however. You shouldered it after Ardamantua. You have carried it since. Vulkan reaffirmed your duty to carry on. It is your burden, because you have the strength for it. The primarch saw you are the leader we need now. So do all your brothers. Across the Chapters.’

Koorland narrowed his gaze in disbelief.

‘Your doubt has no place here, Lord Commander,’ Vangorich said. ‘Unless your information is more complete than mine. Has there been a challenge to your leadership? Has one of the surviving Space Wolves stepped forward to declare himself the alpha of the campaign?’

‘No,’ said Koorland. ‘And I would thank you to refer to those Space Marines with greater respect. They have sacrificed much.’

‘All have,’ Vangorich said softly. ‘And the mission was a disaster. Yet there has been no challenge. There is a reason for that. They see what Vulkan saw. They await your orders.’

‘My orders.’

‘I assume you aren’t going to wait for the orks to attack first.’

Koorland felt the corners of his lips pull back. After a moment he realised something like a smile, cold and hard and hungry, had appeared on his face.

‘You’re very good at what you do,’ he told Vangorich.

‘I have to be.’

Koorland studied the Grand Master. ‘Perhaps we should learn from you,’ he said. As he spoke, the feeling of inspiration returned. It was stronger now. Closer to being something he could articulate.

‘What do you think I could teach you?’

‘Precision,’ Koorland said. The idea had almost formed. ‘You rely on few to do work that affects many.’

‘Precision is the correct word,’ said Vangorich. ‘What is necessary is not overwhelming force. What is needed is the right weapon and the right target.’

‘Which we have lacked,’ Koorland muttered.

‘The weapon or the target?’

‘Both. We thought we had found the Beast on Ullanor. Vulkan gave his life to slay it. And now…’ He pointed at the attack moon.

I AM SLAUGHTER, said the silence.

Koorland felt the words without hearing them. He saw Vangorich wince, and knew the Grand Master felt them too.

‘The Beast survived?’ Vangorich asked.

‘No. It can’t have. Yet something with its voice lives on. And that palace on Ullanor…’

‘Yes,’ said Vangorich. He understood. The horror was not lost on him.

‘They are creating an empire,’ Koorland said. ‘They plan to build it on the ashes of our own.’

Vangorich nodded. ‘The ambassadors,’ he said.

‘What about them?’

‘More evidence of the construction of an empire. The greenskins are evolving the classes that will be needed for an empire to function.’ He nodded to himself again. ‘So,’ he said, ‘no matter what died on Ullanor, the force of the Beast lives on. We have to consider what this means for our strategy.’

‘Our attack was too blunt. We were not a surprise. The orks knew what was coming, and prepared for us.’

‘What do you conclude, then?’

‘We need to keep looking for the Beast. In whatever form the guiding power of the orks exists, let us call it that. If we destroy it…’

‘The ork empire will fall,’ Vangorich finished. ‘A decapitation. You need to commit yourself to that, Lord Commander.’

‘We are. We were. We have to change our methods, though. If we come at the orks again as we did, even if we could assemble such a force again, they will win again. They outnumber us, and they outgun us.’ The last admission was the hardest. The entire history of the Imperium’s fight against the orks had involved the superiority of humanity’s technology against the orks’ vast tide of savagery. Recognising that the orks’ technology had outstripped the Imperium’s was a perpetually reopened wound. It had been the most basic fact of the war since Ardamantua, but speaking the words aloud sounded perilously close to capitulation. Not to face that reality would lead to true defeat. ‘We have to hit them another way.’

The inspiration that had teased the edge of his consciousness burst upon him. It had the clarity of revelation. He had known the same certainty when he had called for a unified command of the Imperial Fists Successor Chapters. Then, as now, the epiphany had come in the wake of devastating loss. Then, as now, he saw his course of action allowed for no doubt. He might question his own worthiness. He knew he would. But the path to follow shone before him.

He did not look at what he must do as cause for hope. It might yet fail. It was, instead, the thing that must be done. It was the one move left that the orks might not be able to counter.

‘Sometimes,’ Vangorich said, unknowingly giving voice to Koorland’s revelation, ‘a single knife can be more effective than a broadsword.’

‘Yes,’ Koorland said. ‘Yes. As your Officio has shown throughout its history. I’m interested in your tactics, Drakan. We need to learn from them. That is the counsel I would welcome from you.’

‘The Adeptus Astartes are not assassins,’ Vangorich said. He sounded cautious. ‘There are paths we must be careful not to take, if we do not want to repeat mistakes a thousand years old.’

‘We aren’t assassins,’ Koorland agreed. He respected Vangorich, but more, the Grand Master was the one member of the High Council for whom he felt anything even remotely approaching trust. He respected Veritus and Wienand, but he did not trust either. They were too immersed in the political machinations of the ordos. Veritus, in particular, he did not trust to act as the needs of the immediate crisis dictated. But now, as Vangorich spoke, Koorland saw the politician emerge in him. His caution was genuine. Even so, Koorland sensed an instinctive territorial defence.

Vangorich did not have to worry. Koorland had no interest in assassination. Decapitation was still the goal. And now he could imagine a new means to that end.

‘I don’t want to know about your organisation, your weapons or your specific tactics,’ Koorland said. ‘I want to hear about the broader strategy. Your philosophy of war.’

Vangorich gave him a half-smile. ‘You think the Officio Assassinorum goes to war?’

‘Of course it does, even if it might use a different name.’

Vangorich parted his hands, conceding the point. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Tell me about the knife, and how it strikes.’

Two

Terra – the Imperial Palace

Wienand sat in the lowest gallery of the Great Chamber. She had what amounted to a private stall. It had not been built as such; rather, a large fall of rubble had sectioned this small area of the benches from the other tiers. None of the minor lords who still attended council sessions had attempted to lay claim to it. Many likely did not even know about it. The heaps of tumbled marble and rockcrete shielded it from view of the other tiers. It was easily visible only from below, on the floor of the Chamber. If any of the nobility or Administratum officials were aware of this corner, they ignored it, preferring not to sit alone, and so Wienand had it for herself. She was unseen by the other spectators, and she had a good view of the dais.

Around the Chamber, the banners of the Imperium hung at half mast. So did every banner on every spire of the Imperial Palace. Green bands adorned the arms of the High Lords and of the spectators. The Council, the Palace and all of Terra mourned the loss of the last primarch.

Wienand knew that for many, it was not a pure form of grief. It was coloured by too much fear.

Veritus sat with the Council. Wienand was the joint Inquisitorial Representative, but she was content to be away from the dais today. The truce with Veritus was holding. They had not signed a peace accord, but they had found a way of working together. She could make her voice heard again, and, more importantly, she could watch the Council work through its contortions. Being at one remove from some of the debates was useful. It granted her perspective. She could observe the currents of the struggles, the developing fault lines, the weaknesses and pressure points.

All information was useful, she thought. All knowledge was power. In the present crisis, there were limits to what anyone, in the Council or outside it, could accomplish. She was determined to push against those limits. She would do what was needed to safeguard the Imperium.

Koorland, she could see, held fast to the same philosophy. The last Imperial Fist’s armour was polished, but bore the marks of the battle on Ullanor. The ceramite was cracked from bullet impacts, scarred by blades, scorched by flame. Koorland’s face bore the traces of almost as many wounds. His genhanced physiology had healed them, the new flesh roughened and thick. Koorland towered over the High Lords, but it was more than his height that made him the dominant force on the dais. It was more, too, than the fact he had fought and bled for the Imperium. He was not the only veteran on the dais. Abel Verreault, the Lord Commander Militant of the Imperial Guard, Lord High Admiral Lansung, Vernor Zeck, the Grand Provost Marshal of the Adeptus Arbites – all had their own scars of war. Zeck had lost much of his original flesh.

Perhaps it was the degree of Koorland’s sacrifice. Perhaps it was the scale of his loss, immeasurably beyond the trivialities of corporeal injury. He had lost his Chapter. And now, after the almost inconceivable casualties on Ullanor, after the death of the last primarch, what he had not lost was his inflexibility of purpose and his aura of command. What he announced to the High Lords had the weight of law.

They’re going to fight you on this one, she thought. They’re going to fight very hard indeed.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Tobris Ekharth, Master of the Administratum. ‘You’re talking about a united mission of the Adeptus Astartes? How is that different from what was already attempted on Ullanor?’

Wienand stifled a cynical chuckle. Koorland had barely begun to lay out his vision, and Ekharth was interrupting. Perhaps he was already confused. She didn’t think so. He was already anticipating where Koorland was going, and was impotently trying to stop him from speaking those words.

The Space Marine looked at Ekharth, his face stony with contempt.

‘I have proposed no such thing,’ Koorland said. ‘I am calling for the creation of a new force entirely. We cannot use a blunt weapon against the orks. We must strike with precision, swiftly, giving them no chance to mount a defence. Our force will be composed of independent kill-teams. The members of each kill-team will be determined by the needs of the mission and will be drawn from across the Chapters.’

‘Independent to what degree?’ Zeck asked, sceptical.

‘Completely autonomous with regards to the completion of the mission. Answerable to a centralised command.’

‘And whose command would that be?’

‘Mine.’

‘Not the Council’s?’

Wienand was impressed Koorland did not snort in disbelief. ‘No,’ he said.

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Zeck.

‘This is monstrous,’ said Mesring. The Ecclesiarch of the Adeptus Ministorum spoke with a trembling voice. The tremor was so pronounced, he barely managed a croak. His skin had a bad sheen to it. When he leaned close to the other Lords, their faces twitched as if they were holding their breath.

Before Mesring could speak again, Juskina Tull jumped in. ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘It is monstrous.’

The authority of the Speaker for the Chartist Captains had been in ruins since the disaster of the Proletarian Crusade. Wienand wondered if she saw an equivalence in Ullanor, and a chance to regain ground at Koorland’s expense.

‘Monstrous,’ Koorland repeated.

‘You are using this crisis for the political gain of the Adeptus Astartes,’ Tull said. ‘We have not forgotten why the Legions were broken up into the smaller Chapters. And now you would bring together all the Adeptus Astartes under a single authority, answerable only to you?’

Koorland’s eyes narrowed. ‘You are wilfully misunderstanding me,’ he said. He spoke calmly, but Wienand could hear the rumble of anger in his deep voice. ‘The force will consist exclusively of mission-specific kill-teams. These are not armies. They will not be engaging the orks in great fields of battle. That is the strategy that has failed us. We must think otherwise, and wage a new kind of war, or face annihilation.’

‘Of course you are not proposing unification,’ Lansung said. ‘You know the Council would never accept it. Furthermore, the casualties on Ullanor were too great to permit a mass assembly. You are being disingenuous. We can see where this path leads. Once these teams are formed, there will be nothing provisional about them. Consolidation will follow.’

Vangorich snorted. ‘You’re taking a lot for granted,’ he said. ‘So the Blood Angels and the Ultramarines will happily consent to submit to the authority of the lone Imperial Fist?’

Lansung waved the objection away. ‘If the plan is moving ahead, then the internal politics have been resolved.’

‘This is a coup!’ Ekharth shouted. ‘It will not succeed! We will not allow it!’

‘Monstrous.’ Mesring had not moved on from his initial judgement. The Ecclesiarch stood up from his seat, quivering, shaking his head back and forth like a wounded animal. ‘Monstrous, monstrous.’

‘Why?’ Vangorich asked.

Mesring snapped his mouth shut. Still quivering, he looked at Vangorich with wide, nearly maddened eyes. He stared at the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum for several long seconds. Then he said, ‘It cannot work. It will never work. It is against the divine will. It must never be attempted. It is unholy. Unholy.’ He paused. He looked up at the dome of the Chamber. ‘Unholy,’ he said again, more quietly, more to himself than to Vangorich.

Wienand leaned forward, watching Mesring carefully. There was something wrong with him. She couldn’t tell if the shaking was due to mental paroxysm or physical debilitation. Perhaps both. There had been fear in the look he had given Vangorich, yet his need to speak his truth had won out. Only his truth sounded odd. The other High Lords articulated their fears, and Wienand thought they were wrong. How they imagined the Dark Angels and the Space Wolves surrendering their independence was beyond her, but she could understand the logic of their anxieties. From her vantage point, just far enough away to see the entire Council at a glance, she could picture the High Lords as game pieces on a regicide board, the moves of one blocking and shaping the moves of the others, the ones with the least current power feeling they were the most vulnerable, and so making the most aggressive attacks.

Mesring, though, was puzzling. She should have been able to place him easily. He should, in this context, have been one of the more quiet members of the Council. The Ecclesiarchy had little to say when it came to strategy. As long as the orks were defeated, its power was unlikely to be diminished. Its only true fear should be the triumph of the greenskins.

So why was he frightened? she wondered. What possible threat would the kill-teams be to him?

Why? she wondered.

No, she corrected herself. She was asking the wrong question. It was assuming Mesring was acting out of the same self-preserving, territorial motives as the other High Lords. The assumption was wrong. Mesring’s dismay at Koorland’s plan was genuine. Wienand saw true religious horror in his reaction. He believed in what he was saying.

How could this possibly be against the Emperor’s will? That was the question to ask.

It had no answer.

The other High Lords were wrong-footed by Mesring’s reaction too. They did not appear to know how to respond. Even Tull was thrown off. She had tried to build on his horror from a political perspective. She clearly did not know how to do so from the perspective of faith. Wienand wasn’t sure of the depth of Tull’s piety, but it didn’t matter. Whatever theological turn Mesring had taken, no one else present could follow him.

Abdulias Anwar ignored the Ecclesiarch completely. The Master of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica spoke as calmly as Koorland. His voice was a barely audible sibilance, insinuating rather than commanding. It wrapped itself around Wienand’s will and tried to make itself one with her consciousness. She was used to being on her guard in the presence of Anwar, and she raised mental barriers, consciously pushing away the words of the telepath. She saw the slight shifting of positions on the dais as the other High Lords assumed their own forms of wary readiness.

‘I cannot speak to matters of faith,’ Anwar said. ‘I will speak to matters of principle. What the Lord Commander of the Imperium proposes is the destabilisation of the governance of the Imperium.’

Relief washed over the Council. Anwar had returned sanity to the debate. The ground was familiar once again. The opposition was clear. One after another, the High Lords railed against Koorland. They were unified in their accusations. Wienand found the unity significant. They were frightened. They saw his plan as a power play, not a strategy. They attributed their own motives to him.

The war, she saw, had taught them nothing.

Not all the High Lords spoke. Kubik and Veritus were quiet. The Fabricator General’s servo-motors clicked. His optics whirred as they turned from one member of the Council to another. Most of the time, his attention was on Koorland. Veritus was just as intent on the Space Marine. They were listening and evaluating. They did not support his position, but they did not take a stand against it. They were seeing possibilities, Wienand thought. So was she. The potential for Koorland’s force beyond the immediate need was amorphous.

‘Cross-Chapter kill-teams will have no reason to exist beyond the present crisis,’ Koorland was saying now. ‘There will be no need for them, and the circumstance that makes their formation possible will cease to hold sway.’

‘You cannot believe that,’ Zeck said. ‘If you go ahead with this madness, you will create a precedent. A pretext will always be found to keep the teams in place. That’s why this can’t happen even once.’

Correct, Wienand thought. On this point, the High Lords were right to be worried. If the kill-teams were successful, there was no way such a weapon would be put away.

If they were successful, she thought. Then what?

The great potential refused to come into focus. The force had to be a reality first. She had to witness what it could do. Then she would know what else it might accomplish, and perhaps how it might be controlled.

‘Vote, then,’ Koorland snapped. ‘Vote and be damned.’

The High Lords voted. Vangorich supported the plan. Kubik and Veritus abstained. The others voted against it.

Koorland did not hide his disgust. ‘You’re fools,’ he said.

‘We would be to fall into your trap,’ Ekharth said, smug in victory.

Wienand waited for Koorland to punch the little man’s head from his shoulders. The act would have confirmed the High Lords’ worst suspicions, but it would have been warranted. Instead, Koorland strode from the dais.

‘What do you plan to do?’ Zeck called.

Koorland stopped. He faced the Council. His stillness became dangerous. Wienand was acutely conscious of what he could do to the High Lords if he were not holding himself back.

‘I will do what must be done,’ Koorland said. And as he turned once more to go, he added, ‘So will you.’

‘I understand your frustration,’ Alexis Mandrell said, speaking into the vox-unit on his desk. ‘I share it. But unless and until Admiral Lansung issues new orders, here we are.’ The captain of the cruiser Sybota, commanding the blockade of the attack moon, was in his private quarters. He leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. Another twenty-four-hour cycle had been completed, and it had been another cycle of routine exercises. The endless broadcast of I AM SLAUGHTER from the moon was unchanging. Mandrell had ordered the transmission blocked from all ships for the sake of morale, instituting an hourly verification that there had been no change in the message.

There was none.

‘The task is dull,’ he said. ‘It’s still necessary.’

‘I’m not questioning that,’ replied Captain Makayla Ochoa, of the frigate Cyzicus. ‘It’s the decisions that have made this necessary I don’t understand. Such a large concentration of forces in this vicinity when reinforcements are desperately needed elsewhere…’

‘You aren’t the first to notice this, captain.’

‘You don’t say.’ Ochoa had two decades more experience in the field than Mandrell, but her family was a far more minor noble house than his. They had served together in the Navy long enough that they acknowledged the political realities of the differences in their advancement with amused cynicism. Ochoa took the liberty of being as insubordinate as she pleased with Mandrell in private. He accepted this liberty as her due.

‘I do say,’ he answered.

‘You have family connections to Lansung…’ Ochoa began.

‘Stop!’ Mandrell held up a hand as if Ochoa could see him. ‘No. No. There’s no point, and I’m not using what capital I might hypothetically have to push for something that will go nowhere at best and result in embarrassment at worst.’

‘Yours?’

‘That I could survive. I mean the Lord High Admiral’s. Do you think it’s by his choice that we don’t destroy that xenos hulk? The Mechanicus wants it. If the Lord High Admiral has not ordered us to destroy it, it’s because he can’t. I’m not going to put him in the position of having to admit that. I like my command. If it were possible to send us elsewhere, he would have done so.’

‘Really.’ Ochoa did not sound convinced.

‘Really.’ Mandrell did his best to be emphatic. In truth, he wasn’t sure. The Imperial Navy’s dispositions had been erring on the side of caution since the start of the war.

‘So keeping a massive fleet presence in the vicinity of Terra, where it is unlikely to suffer any losses, has nothing to do with shoring up his position on the Council?’

‘No. Captain, you will cease this line of questioning.’ Their vox-communication was encrypted, but Mandrell did not trust it that much.

Ochoa snorted. ‘My apologies,’ she said. Dryly.

‘We’ll see all the combat we could hope for,’ Mandrell said. He was telling the truth, though he suspected Ochoa would interpret his words differently than how he thought of them. He was not displeased to be assigned to a pointless blockade. The Sybota had been on no more than the edges of the engagements with the orks, and that had been enough. He did not think he was a coward. He simply did not see the value in plunging into battles where the only likely outcome was annihilation. Let the Adeptus Astartes take the lead in suicidal missions. That was their strength. Let the Imperial Navy consolidate gains and hold reclaimed systems. There was no dishonour in that service.

He couldn’t dispute Ochoa’s contention that resources were misallocated, but he had seen enough campaigns to know there was nothing new there. If poor deployment decisions were to continue, he would prefer them to work in his favour.

‘So we’re here indefinitely,’ Ochoa said. ‘How are we–’ She stopped. ‘What was that?’

‘What did you…’ Mandrell began. Then he heard and felt something that began as a deep, rattling vibration. It ran through the deck and wall of the Sybota. The data-slates on his desk drummed against the surface. The vibration ran up through the frame of his chair and through his spine. It grew stronger. A sweeping vertigo shook him, and he almost slid to the ground. He switched the vox to the bridge channel. ‘What is happening?’ he bellowed.

He couldn’t hear his own voice. The rattle had built to a piercing metallic scream. The entire ship howled in agony. Blood burst from Mandrell’s nose and ears. The vertigo grew worse. He clutched the desk, disoriented as his sense of up and down spiralled. He forced himself upright and staggered towards the door of his quarters, weaving with every step. As he reached the door, a colossal boom cut through the Sybota’s shriek. The sound was so vast it sucked the air from his lungs. He fell to his knees. The deck heaved. He dragged himself forward, clutched at the doorway and hauled himself up.

He stumbled into the corridor. The echoes of the boom faded, swallowed by the grinding scream of metal and the thunder of cracking stone. The walls, deck and ceiling of the corridor buckled. Pulverised marble filled the air. Mandrell coughed, inhaling dust and smoke. The lumen orbs flickered off and on. Ruptured conduits spewed steam and flame. He made his way forward, unable to see more than a few metres ahead. He saw the shapes of crew moving through the haze, trying to run. They flailed as the deck rose and fell like an ocean in a storm. The agony of the vessel was deafening. Mandrell could hear no voices or warning klaxons. The silhouettes of his crew were pantomimes of crisis.

The weight was sudden, terrible, crushing. It came upon Mandrell like the fall of a huge wave. It smashed him to the deck. His ribs cracked. His nose and teeth shattered. He was immovable, held fast to the deck by his own impossible mass. Struggling against the prison of gravity, he raised his head just enough to look ahead. He could do no more, but even this victory was enough. It meant he saw what happened next.

The scream of the Sybota was transcendent. The cracking was the sound of a world coming apart. Power failed. The lumen orbs flickered out. The corridor went dark, lit only by the flicker of spreading flame. Then, summoned by the cracking and the grinding, a new light burst into brief, monstrous life. Mandrell stared into a blinding flare of fire and energy discharges. And then there was the wind, blowing past him with a hurricane’s roar. And then there was the cold.

Wind and cold, because the Sybota tore in half.

Mandrell stared in wonder and horror. He had that much time. His final breath was long enough for him to see the fore section of the cruiser fall away from the aft. He saw all the exposed decks of his vessel. He saw plasma explode along the edges of the wound. He saw thousands of crew and troops float off into the void, tiny figures, insignificant, a tumbling swarm. He saw the dark of the void snuff out the flames, but the light did not die at once. The void shields went first, their end a chain reaction of brilliant ferocity, the ship’s defences exploding outward, failing after the hull itself.

The Sybota was a broken bone, its two halves slowly turning away from each other. The vision was immense. Mandrell witnessed a death so great, his own end was meaningless. The seconds that remained to him were consumed with bleak wonder.

Then the wind ceased, and there was only the dark, and the merciless, terminal cold.

Ochoa reached the command gallery above the bridge in time to see the Sybota break in two. The ork gravity weapon had lashed out from the attack moon, a single whip of unfurled, impossible force. It had seized the cruiser, and its grip was doom. The beam had sideswiped the Cyzicus. The blow had been nothing, the mere wake of the passing force. It had still been enough to disrupt the frigate’s artificial gravity, hurling Ochoa back and forth against corridor walls as she ran for the bridge. Klaxons still wailed, and the screens next to the oculus were filled with the red script of damage reports.

‘All batteries,’ Ochoa said. She got no further before there was another bright flash in the upper left quadrant of the oculus. The entire superstructure of the destroyer Iron Castellan vanished in the killing light. The ship began a slow roll out of formation. What looked like a small mountain had materialised in the vessel’s core, its rocky peaks projecting out of the stern and the upper portions of the hull. Ochoa stared for several seconds at the impossible vision. Just before the greater flash came, consuming the vessel entirely, she understood.

Teleportation, she thought. They teleported a chunk of the attack moon into the Castellan.

‘Signal all ships,’ Ochoa shouted to Gliese, the officer of the vox. ‘Open fire on the moon with all batteries, all torpedoes. Destroy it.’

Gliese turned to look up at her. ‘We have orders to–’

Damn Lansung and damn the Mechanicus. If those fleshless cultists wanted the greenskin toys, they could put them back together again. ‘You have new orders from me. The responsibility is mine. Now do as I say or I’ll shoot you where you stand.’

Gliese saluted and opened a channel.

‘All vessels, open fire,’ Ochoa said. ‘Full batteries, full torpedo launches. Destroy that moon.’

‘By whose authority…’

That was Huf, squawking from the frigate Steadfast Contrition.

‘By mine,’ Ochoa told him. ‘As most senior surviving captain. Open fire, Huf, or do you want the greenskins to crush your ship?’

Huf clicked off.

Moments later, Ochoa saw the streams of shells and torpedoes streak from the blockade towards the attack moon. Imperial ordnance cut through the dark of the void. No one else questioned the order. The other captains had probably already been issuing their commands. They knew what was at stake.

The barrage was immense. It was also too late. Before the first torpedo struck the surface of the moon, its terrible maw began to open once more. The shouting, raging corpse had come back to life. From its interior came a swarm of ork ships. Interceptors, fighters, bombers and torpedo ships raced for the blockade. Dozens were caught by the oncoming artillery. The near space of the attack moon became a fiery nimbus of superheated plasma and disintegrating metal. Hundreds more greenskin vessels shot through the curtain of destruction.

Ochoa stared at the oculus, at the oncoming storm of predators. Almost unconsciously, her hand moved to the tacticarium table at her side. She tapped the command vox-unit, tuning to the huge band of frequencies broadcasting the roar of the Beast.

She had no wish to hear it. Yet the need to face the full truth of the moment was too strong. She had never turned from battle. She had always sought the full measure of duty.

But there was more that directed her actions at that moment. The gaping maw of the ork base transformed the inanimate into a living skull. The face had a monstrous pull. Its power was absolute. Ochoa felt her insignificance before the presence of the active, murderous sublime.

Behold me, that gaping visage commanded. You bow before a god of stillness. I am a god of speed and violence. I am present. I am ascendant.

She turned the vox on to hear the actual voice, to blot out the words the sight of the moon tried to insinuate into her soul.

Ochoa vowed to herself she would fight the reality of the threat, and her spirit was the equal to its false divinity.

‘I AM SLAUGHTER!’ boomed through the command gallery. ‘I AM SLAUGHTER!’ It seemed the moon itself was shouting in the bridge. ‘I AM SLAUGHTER!’ And slaughter came from the moon, scything into the blockade fleet. Hundreds of ships descended on the frigates and destroyers. The Imperial cannons shifted from attack to defence. Every ship visible in the oculus flashed bright with straining void shields and the dissipating fireballs of destroyed ork craft. The attackers perished in droves. But more and more and more emerged from the maw, an endless curse from the god of violence.

‘I AM SLAUGHTER! I AM SLAUGHTER! I AM SLAUGHTER!’

The word became truth, and the truth burned the fleet.

Koorland walked the edge of the dais in the Great Chamber. He would not take his seat. He would not even stand by it. He would not associate himself with the High Lords. He understood that the realities of his position made the division he wished to enact a false one; he was part of the political machine of Terra now, whether he chose to admit it or not.

It would be close to a lie to say he accepted these facts. It was enough to say he knew them to be true. Today, he had to distance himself as much as he could from the rest of the High Lords. He was too disgusted to count himself of their number. If he sat in that chair, he might even derive the wrong sort of satisfaction from the inevitable turn the debate would take. He detested that temptation. It soiled and corrupted. If Koorland gave into it, he would truly be able to count himself a High Lord.

The thought was revolting.

He saw the sharp features and steel-grey hair of Wienand in her tier seat. Once again, she had decided to put some physical distance between herself and the other Lords. Vangorich and Veritus were in their seats. Koorland half-wondered how they tolerated their positions. Whatever else he might say of Veritus, the inquisitor was a faithful servant of the ordos and of the Imperium. Koorland had no doubt he always acted from a foundation of firm belief. Perhaps Veritus’ convictions were his form of armour. His need to pull the levers of power as he saw fit kept him in the political game. And Vangorich was the hunter on the political fields. He was where he needed to be.

Koorland was not. At least, not yet. If the High Lords would cease their posturing and accept what they all knew they had to accept, he could get on with his real duty – directing the blade that would decapitate the orks.

But the posturing must happen. Its inevitability was as certain as Daylight Wall.

‘How can they be back?’ Ekharth was saying. ‘How can the orks be back? The moon was dead!’ He pointed a trembling finger at Koorland. ‘You said it was dead!’

Of course I did, Koorland might have said. That’s why I demanded a blockade be maintained. He said nothing. Arguing with the little man would be a form of defeat. It would be descending to the level where nonsense was seriously debated.

‘Teleportation,’ Kubik said, more to himself than to Ekharth. He nodded his head, in satisfied agreement with his own deduction. ‘Confirmed by reports of the destruction of the Iron Castellan. The Veridi giganticus must have employed their teleportation technology to repopulate their attack base. The infiltration capabilities are impressive. So much more to learn.’ He abandoned all pretence of speaking to the Council and began to dictate into a recording unit built into one of his arms. ‘Effective range remains the question. Based on present knowledge, it appears to be effectively unlimited. Without any indication of the origins of teleported bodies, we are forced to the most extreme hypotheses in the interests of strategic extrapolations.’ His flat, machinic tones managed somehow to sound regretful. He switched into the whistles and screeches of binary.

‘Can your teams stop this?’ Lansung asked Koorland. His fleet was bleeding and dying. Already, a third of the vessels surrounding the moon had been destroyed. Lansung sounded desperate.

‘They will,’ said Koorland.

‘How do you know?’ Ekharth shouted. ‘This has never been done before! You have nothing to go on.’

Koorland stopped pacing. This time he would speak. He turned slowly to face Ekharth. ‘They are Adeptus Astartes,’ he said. ‘I have that to go on. I need no more.’

‘But…’ Ekharth began. He trailed off and looked away from Koorland’s glare.

Koorland faced Lansung. ‘How long can the blockade hold?’ he asked.

‘Not long.’

‘I noticed you have pulled the Autocephalax Eternal back to orbit around Terra. And that you are not sending reinforcements.’

‘We can’t. If the orks break through–’

‘When, you mean,’ Vangorich corrected.

‘The defence of Terra is paramount,’ Lansung said.

‘Of course,’ Koorland said. What the Lord High Admiral said was true. It was also convenient. Lansung’s reluctance to commit the flagship Autocephalax Eternal to combat had moved far beyond the craven into a realm so contemptible it did not have a name.

‘The kill-teams must act quickly,’ Lansung said.

‘They will,’ Koorland said.

Mesring had been staring into the middle distance, distracted by inner visions Koorland couldn’t guess at. Now the Ecclesiarch started in his seat. ‘We have not voted!’ he said. ‘Nothing has changed! What was monstrous before is just as monstrous now.’

Silence from the other High Lords greeted Mesring’s outburst. He looked from one to another, pleading for support that had evaporated.

Zeck sighed. ‘What assurances do we have this will not be your coup?’

Vangorich laughed. ‘And would you believe those assurances if you had them? Would they mean anything coming from any of you?’

Zeck said, ‘You find our circumstances amusing?’

‘Hardly,’ said Vangorich, suddenly cold. ‘Your responses to them, though, are quite another matter.’

‘Only one response interests me,’ Koorland. Even there he was stretching a point. He had little interest in anything the Council might say or do. He was here out of brute necessity and for no other reason. ‘You know what you have to do. Vote or be damned.’

‘You knew,’ Ekharth said, sullen with revelation. ‘You knew the orks would come back. You arranged this crisis. Now we have no choice but to embrace your rule as our salvation.’

‘Shut up, Tobias,’ said Tull. She sounded just as sullen, but where Ekharth was slipping into outright paranoia and speaking from genuine fear, in Tull’s voice Koorland heard suspicion shaped by frustrated ambition. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

‘No!’ Mesring shouted. ‘We must not let this pass! It is blasphemous!’

For the first time in the proceedings, Veritus spoke. ‘How?’ he asked.

Mesring hesitated. ‘It is blasphemous,’ he said again. He looked away from the inquisitor. He shrank against the back of his seat, staring at the floor.

Koorland frowned. Mesring’s objections bothered him more than Ekharth’s. The form they took made no sense. Koorland did not understand what was behind them, and that worried him.

The High Lords voted.

Mesring was the only one opposed. Even Ekharth, seeing himself isolated, joined with the others in voting with Vangorich. Veritus and Kubik abstained again. They seemed, Koorland thought, to have deliberately moved themselves to the sidelines. They were observers of an event whose end result could not be affected by their participation, and so they chose to guard their neutrality. They would bear watching. The power games of the High Lords never ceased, and it was the silent ones who were most formidable. They were the ones who, if they had not already seized an advantage, saw the potential of one within their grasp.

The Council feared Koorland’s long-term plans. He wondered how the consequences of what he was about to set in motion would serve Kubik and Veritus. Like the Council, he had no choice.

Koorland left the dais without a word.

Three

Terra – the Imperial Palace

Robed, Abathar gazed at the armour he was about to don once more, and thought of the task ahead. He was standing on the precipice of meaning. He needed to understand the nature of his leap, and his armour was the key to that understanding. He knew this at a deep level, one without words – one at the same depths as that which resonated with the needs of the machine-spirits when he listened to their rages and pains.

Outside the Techmarine’s armorium, footsteps rang up and down the corridors of the Imperial Palace barracks reserved for the Dark Angels. He heard the careful tread of Chapter-serfs. He heard the mechanical trudge of servitors. He heard the metallic cacophony of repairs, the murmur of prayers, and the whisper of oaths. Shadows, flickering in torchlight, moved over the armour and its folded servo-arms. The restless dark was deep, rich with imminent knowledge.

The revelation was approaching.

The sounds of the mobilisation seemed hollow and sparse. So many empty armoria and meditation cells. So many brothers lost. It would be easy to hear, in the diminishment, the echo of defeat. After a loss, a smaller muster, a weakened force.

That would be a lie, he thought.

It was true the combined Chapters on Terra could not attack the orks as they had before. It was true the new strategy Koorland had proposed was the product of necessity.

‘Not the full truths,’ the Techmarine muttered.

‘Lord?’ one of his armament serfs asked. They were standing by, waiting for him to permit them to return to their work of repair. His armour had escaped critical damage on Ullanor, but it had been badly scorched by vehicle-mounted flamers. It was blackened across most of its surface. The livery of the Dark Angels awaited restoration.

‘Wait,’ Abathar said.

The full truth was that Koorland’s plan would be a small deployment even if the disaster of Ullanor had never occurred. The plan had come into being through necessity, but its shape surpassed necessity. It was a new thing. In the demands it placed on the members of the kill-teams, it was an extraordinary thing. Abathar thought about the Space Marines at whose side he would be fighting. An Ultramarine. A Blood Angel. A Space Wolf. The composition of the teams was astounding. It would never have been possible before Ullanor.

Here again, was a product of necessity, and again the form of the act surpassed what was forced and entered into the realm of true daring and unprecedented innovation. Small squads of uniform composition would have been understandable. There were enough survivors of each Chapter to have mounted operations on that scale. But Koorland was urging them all to go further. The orders were to forge squad-level bonds with Space Marines who were strangers to him and to the ways of his brothers. At least one, he would have regarded with so much suspicion he would have refused to be in the same room as that warrior in other circumstances.

The circumstances were beyond extraordinary. So was Koorland’s plan.

‘He is asking us to become something new,’ Abathar said.

The squads were born of death, and their mission was death. They would be a lethal blade beaten to a point in the forge of tragedy.

Abathar watched the shadows on his armour, darkness shifting over black. The shadows appeared to him to be the shadows of his lost brothers. The fallen of Ullanor called to Abathar and to all the Adeptus Astartes making ready to wage war in a new way. Look upon us, they said. Witness us, and strike in our name. See our death, and stand guard in our stead. See our death, and visit it upon our enemies.

Born of shadow, Abathar thought, we become shadow. We are the eye of death.

He knew what he must do.

‘Continue,’ he said to the serfs. ‘But the armour needs new colours.’

The man and woman looked at each other, then at Abathar, confusion spreading over their features.

‘Restore the right pauldron,’ Abathar said. It must remain as it was, the icon of the Dark Angels pristine, the pride of brotherhood and Chapter still announced to the universe. ‘Paint the rest black.’

‘Lord?’ the woman said again.

‘You heard me.’

It had been over a thousand years since the Chapter had worn black livery. This darkness would be different, Abathar thought. It was the black of mourning. The black of anger.

The black of the death witnessed and delivered.

Koorland found the Fabricator General in the laboratorium of the Cathedral of the Saviour Emperor. Kubik was examining Magneric’s data-feed again. When he saw Koorland approaching, he gestured to the three tech-priests attending him. They bowed and withdrew through doors at the far end of the chamber, angular limbs pistoning under their robes as they left.

Kubik turned off the feed as Koorland approached. ‘What do you wish, Lord Commander?’ he asked.

‘I want to talk to you about the ork teleportation technology. I want us to use it against the attack moon.’

‘That will not be possible,’ said Kubik.

‘Because it won’t work?’

‘The Adeptus Mechanicus is not the Departmento Munitorum, Lord Commander.’ The voice was flat, mechanical, inhuman. And still it was contemptuous.

‘Are we to rehearse our grievances once more?’ Koorland asked. ‘I had hoped we had put them in the past for the sake of the Imperium. You did not deny us the use of the gravity weapons on Caldera.’

‘That technology was deployed by the adepts of the Mechanicus in that conflict. I heard no mention of their presence in your proposal.’

‘Nor did I make one.’

‘Then we have no more to say.’

‘I’m surprised, Fabricator General. The teleportation of a body as large as the attack moon holds no interest for you, then?’

Kubik’s stillness was the closest thing to uncertainty Koorland had ever detected in the High Lord.

‘You are not planning to use the technology as an augmentation of our current teleportation capabilities?’

‘No. Not primarily. We are going to teleport the moon out of this system.’

Kubik hesitated. It frustrated Koorland that he could not tell if the Fabricator General was evaluating the feasibility of the plan or formulating a lie.

‘The possibility of success is minimal,’ Kubik said at last. But he seemed less resistant now. He was being captured by the challenge of the problem.

‘Why?’

‘Our understanding of the technology is imperfect. Our adaptation is partial. The teleportation of Phobos was limited to repositioning it within its established orbit. The energy expenditure was of a magnitude very rare in a single action, requiring considerable resources on Mars. You wish to move a much larger body a much greater distance. We cannot transport the energy sources of Mars to the attack moon.’ There was a squeal of binary. ‘I amend my estimation. The operation is impossible.’

‘We used the orks’ energy sources against them on Caldera. We tapped into their grid to power the gravity weapon. We will do that again now.’

Kubik straightened in interest and surprise. ‘Employ the attack moon’s power to generate its own teleportation?’

‘Precisely.’ Koorland was aware of Kubik’s optics examining him closely.

‘The proposal is intriguing,’ said Kubik. ‘It has the merit of providing a testing ground for our advances.’

‘It isn’t a proposal,’ Koorland said. ‘It’s an order.’

Kubik regarded him in silence, except for the low hum of servo-motors and calibrating sensors.

‘This is what must be done,’ said Koorland. ‘We will neutralise the ork base once and for all. The Council has been too generous with regards to the desires of the Mechanicus. You had your chance to study it. Now here we are, with the orks on our doorstep once more, and the Navy falling before them. You have no more choice in obeying this order than I have in issuing it.’

Kubik’s digits flexed and curled, flexed and curled. He said nothing.

He was still silent when Koorland left. But he had not refused again.

The initial muster for the kill-teams was held in the Monitus. Abathar had no difficulty in understanding the choice. The hall, with its statues of all the loyalist Legions, represented the ultimate unity of the Adeptus Astartes. He saw meaning in its position, so high above the Great Chamber. It was here, too, that Vulkan had shamed the High Lords. It was a fitting place for the beginning of the new venture, and of a very particular kind of unity. One, he had heard tell, that the High Lords feared.

He arrived alone, following the orders of Grand Master Sachael.

‘You are Dark Angels,’ Sachael had told the survivors assigned to the kill-teams, ‘but for the length of this mission, you will also be something else. You will fight with warriors you might have regarded as strangers, in any other situation. You cannot do so now. You will join them as brothers. So you must arrive at the Monitus alone. In this manner, you are not departing a squad or a company. You are joining something else.’

Abathar reached the top of the Stilicho Tower and entered the Monitus. He slowed as he approached his assigned position toward the centre of the balcony. He was not the first to arrive. A figure was standing at the rail, next to the Ultramarines statue, looking down at the roofs of the Imperial Palace. The right pauldron showed the icon of the Space Wolves.

But the armour was black. Abathar stopped three paces away. The Space Wolf heard him and turned around. Abathar faced the weathered, bearded features of Asger Warfist. The Wolf Lord blinked in surprise.

Neither Space Marine spoke. They acknowledged the importance of the moment with a solemn silence. Then Abathar said, ‘This is not chance.’

Warfist nodded slowly. ‘It is fate.’

When Abathar had entered the Monitus, there had been the low, echoing murmur of conversation. Now the sound was fading. Abathar saw Warfist’s eyes shift, looking past him to the rest of the hall. They widened. Abathar turned.

There were more warriors in black armour. Abathar counted four others. Not many, but enough to be significant. Enough to prove the truth of Warfist’s words. Fate was at work here. Its hand was visible to every warrior in the Monitus.

All conversation ceased. The only sound was the rap of boots against marble as the Space Marines in black moved to their positions. They were the focus of attention in the hall. Abathar felt the force of a dozen gazes fall on him. He was not troubled by the scrutiny, for he was as astonished as everyone else. He stared as hard as any of the others.

A seventh warrior in black arrived, this one a Blood Angel. Then an eighth, an Ultramarine.

Time in the Monitus paused. The hall filled with the power of significance.

Warfist stepped forward. He moved to the centre of the hall. He spoke, the wind-cured rasp of his voice stretching across the Monitus.

‘Bear witness, brothers!’ he called. ‘Mark what is happening! This is a day the Imperium will remember.’ He was one Space Marine among many, yet in declaring the importance of what was happening, he became its nexus. All eyes turned to Warfist. All voices spoke to him.

‘An omen,’ said another Space Wolf on the other side of the hall.

‘It is more than that,’ Warfist said.

‘We have done this,’ said Abathar. ‘It is not visited upon us. We have taken this action. We have made this choice.’

‘And the choice has weight beyond the acts of a single brother,’ Warfist continued. ‘One choice, multiplied. This is a truth.’

‘So it is,’ said a Blood Angel nearby. Abathar recognised him as Forcas. He had seen the name on the list of members of his designated kill-team. Forcas’ armour was still red. ‘Can any of us doubt this truth? When it appears to us so clearly, and with such force?’

‘Was this truly a choice, then?’ Abathar wondered. ‘We were guided by the same circumstances, impulses and realities.’

‘Perhaps we have made our own omen, then,’ said Warfist. ‘If we have, its weight is all the greater.’

Forcas was nodding. ‘I will do as you have done,’ he said.

‘As will I,’ the other Space Wolf shouted.

The call was taken up. The Monitus rang with the oaths of a grim unity. The individual squads came together. The assembled Space Marines formed an arc before Warfist and the great statues.

Abathar observed his fellow warriors with growing awe as the moments succeeded each other with ever greater import. There was never doubt as to the ultimate unity of purpose of all the Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes. Every battle-brother, no matter how estranged he might be from those in another Chapter, stood for the defence of the Emperor. On Ullanor, there had been the forging of many forces into one devoted to a single immediate goal. Here, though, was something else again. Here, the unity was not institutional. It was being forged at the level of the individual. There would be friction between members of the kill-teams. Abathar had no illusions about himself, or how he would feel fighting in the same squad as a Space Wolf.

And yet…

What is this thing we are becoming?

Born of death. Forged in death. Living memoria of lost brothers, returning in anger.

‘What are we?’ Warfist roared. The question demanded an answer, but it was shouted with the certainty of the inevitability of that answer.

‘We are witness!’ said Forcas, and Abathar heard his thoughts present and past being spoken by others.

Here, now, we are one, he thought. We are this new weapon.

‘We watch from death,’ said the Ultramarine in black.

We are vigilance.

We are vengeance.

We are the judgement come for the xenos challenger.

There was such clamour in his mind, in his soul and in the hall that Abathar could not tell if the words came from within or without. Perhaps they were both. Internal need had led to an external manifestation on his armour, and on that of other battle-brothers. They were the example. They were the clarity of black.

Space Wolf, Dark Angel, Blood Angel and Ultramarine had spoken with a single voice.

‘We are the Deathwatch!’

The words rang out above the others, given strength by their iron truth. It was a moment before Abathar realised the voice was his.

‘Deathwatch!’ Warfist repeated.

‘Deathwatch!’ said Forcas.

Deathwatch. The word, the name, the truth was shouted by every warrior in the Monitus. It was the moment of creation. That which had been shattered on Ullanor had taken on a new shape, renewed of purpose.

Deathwatch. It was a blade aimed at the throat of the Beast.

The clouds parted. The attack moon appeared, as if in anger at the challenge. The roars grew louder yet.

Deathwatch.

Abathar shouted the name, and it was a mission. It was a calling. It was an identity. Sachael had been correct. Abathar was a Dark Angel. Nothing would change that. Nothing could. But he was also this new thing. As his armour bore the colours of two allegiances, so did his being. There was no contradiction. The Deathwatch was formed of disparate pieces, and it would depend on their separate identities to create its own.

What have we become? The full answer would come in time. But the name was here, defined by the crucible of sacrifice and vengeance. The one and the many had become synonymous.

Deathwatch.

The refrain was a thunder strong far beyond sound. It shook the Stilicho Tower. It cracked the air over the Imperial Palace. It rose to the sky. Towards the attack moon. It was an answer to the endless shout.

I AM SLAUGHTER, the Beast exulted.

And the warriors of many Chapters said, Fear us.

‘You want me to go back,’ Galatea Haas said.

‘Yes,’ Koorland said.

They were in the barracks of the Adeptus Arbites. Despite her rise in rank, Haas spent most of her time in this quadrant. Her authority now extended to most of the Arbitrators still in the continent-sized palace. She was Proctor of the Primus Imperialis Division, and she looked exhausted. The numbers of the Adeptus Arbites had been so badly cut by the Proletarian Crusade that their efficiency was a shadow of what it had been. Haas’ office reflected the constraints under which she laboured. It was bare except for a battered desk, a wooden chair, an equipment footlocker, and a massive vox-array.

Koorland found himself comparing the officer before him to the Grand Provost Marshal in the Great Chamber. He did not doubt Zeck’s skill. His ability to process vast amounts of data was more than impressive, and he had a keen strategic mind. It was the uses to which Zeck’s skill was put that inspired Koorland’s contempt. Had Zeck ever been something more than the political animal he was now? Koorland had his doubts. To become a High Lord, Zeck would have had to concentrate first and foremost on the goals of his ambition. His effectiveness as an administrator would have been a by-product of his personal desires. In Haas, Koorland saw a career take the form of a calling. He recognised her driven gaze. It was a product of duty and of loss.

She greeted the news that she was being asked to return to the attack moon with a grim, tight-lipped calm, as if she had been expecting this conversation. She did not ask if she had a choice. She said, ‘You’re going inside again.’

‘Yes, deeper. Small teams. This will be an infiltration.’

‘I see. What is my role?’

‘We will be looking for control centres and power sources. You are more familiar with the interior than anyone else still living.’

‘I understand.’ She tapped her shock maul where it hung from her belt. She took a breath. ‘I shall be ready to embark when you command.’

‘Thank you, proctor. It would have been understandable if you had been reluctant.’ Understandable, though reluctance would not have kept her on Terra. She was needed, and Koorland had been prepared to order her participation in the mission. Presenting her with a request first had been a courtesy, and a mark of his respect for what she had survived and what she had accomplished. He was pleased the request had been enough.

‘Reluctant?’ Haas said. ‘May I speak freely, Lord Commander?’

‘Please do.’

‘The prospect of returning there fills me with horror.’ She spoke calmly, her voice and her gaze steady. There was a faint twitch in her right eye. It was the only expression of what she was really feeling. ‘But I joined the Proletarian Crusade for a reason. I had a task, and that task is incomplete.’

‘Your commitment to duty is admirable.’

Her mouth twisted. ‘I’m not a saint,’ she said. ‘I lost my friends. I saw…’ She faltered. The twitch became more pronounced. ‘When the mountains moved…’ She looked past Koorland, at something colossal. He knew what she was remembering – billions of civilians and troops crushed, turned into a towering wave of blood. He knew what had happened on the surface of the moon. He had not witnessed it, though he had seen other horrors on Ardamantua. He could empathise without being able to experience the precise nightmare. They had each gathered their individual scars.

‘You want revenge,’ Koorland said.

Her gaze sharpened again. She gave him a curt nod. ‘I want to see the greenskins die in the same numbers. And I want to be responsible for that.’

‘You will be,’ Koorland promised.

The embarkation of the kill-teams took place in the Inner Palace’s pocket space port. There were three squads heading for the attack moon. Each was to board a Thunderhawk bound for the Dark Angels strike cruiser Herald of Night, which waited at low anchor to take them through the warzone. The ship was the fastest of the Adeptus Astartes vessels present over Terra.

Vangorich watched the departure from the far western edge of the landing pad. The hot wind from the first of the Thunderhawks’ turbofan engines blew his hair back. His eyes were painfully dry. Beside him, Wienand raised a hand to shield her eyes from the glare as a gunship turned on descent, its engines bright as suns in the pre-dawn gloom.

‘They’re all in black,’ Wienand said, looking at the thirteen Space Marines.

‘I’ve heard the change started with a few, and the others followed suit.’

‘You have thoughts?’

‘Koorland’s force already has a distinct identity. Before the first battle.’

‘A good sign, wouldn’t you say?’

‘For the task ahead, definitely.’

Wienand cocked her head. ‘Interesting hedge. Wasn’t this your idea in the first place?’

‘It was,’ he conceded.

The Thunderhawk’s embarkation ramp lowered. Koorland crossed the landing, coming from an eastern entrance to the space port. He stopped in front of the gunship and faced the kill-teams. Thane was with him. Their armour was not black.

‘Here’s a difference,’ Wienand said.

‘Understandable,’ said Vangorich. ‘The continued existence of the Imperial Fists hangs by a thread. I can’t imagine Koorland would do anything to downplay the memory of the Chapter.’ The Imperial Fists livery was already the colour of mourning, he thought.

‘Brothers,’ Koorland said, his voice amplified by vox-casters around the periphery of the landing pad, ‘you have earned my thanks many times over during the course of this war. You have fought, you have sacrificed, and you have followed me. What I see before me is something for which I cannot, in good conscience, express gratitude. To do so would be the height of arrogance. You have found the true meaning of our actions on this day. The Last Wall rose from ashes. So has the Deathwatch.’

‘It has a name,’ Vangorich said to Wienand. ‘I’ve heard it more than once now. I didn’t anticipate that when I spoke to Koorland. I didn’t expect the identity to form so quickly or so definitively.’

‘That’s a problem?’

‘The differences between a conception and its execution can be a source of unease.’

‘I can’t believe you’re backing down from your position in the Council. You fought hard for this operation.’

‘I know,’ said Vangorich. ‘And I still believe in it. This is our best hope now.’

‘I’m still hearing but in your voice.’

‘We are many, and we are one,’ Koorland was saying. ‘Today we will strike the greenskins in a manner they cannot anticipate, and in a manner that already surpasses anything I might have hoped for.’

The roar of the assembled Deathwatch forced Vangorich to wait before responding. When the noise subsided, Wienand spoke first. ‘Surpassing hope isn’t necessarily a good thing, is it?’ she said.

He managed a tight, grim smile. ‘Do you think it’s entirely healthy for you to know me that well?’

‘For you or for me?’

Either, he thought. He shrugged. ‘The name. The colours,’ he said. ‘The black. I wasn’t expecting any of that. So coherent an identity so soon…’

‘The other High Lords anticipated this. Or something very similar.’

‘True. That doesn’t mean they were right about this force’s long-term significance.’ He became aware that Wienand was looking at him sharply.

‘Altering livery isn’t something the Adeptus Astartes do lightly,’ she said.

‘No. It may be a necessary gesture for this attempt to succeed.’

Wienand snorted. ‘You don’t believe that’s all it is.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘We’re witnessing the start of something that is going to be with us for a long time,’ Wienand said. ‘That’s what is bothering you, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ said Vangorich.

‘You don’t really believe Koorland is planning a coup, though, do you?’

‘I don’t.’ Vangorich sighed. ‘It’s not what he intends that’s the problem. It’s the thing he has created. The more successful the Deathwatch is, the more difficult it will be to disband. And Throne, we need it to be successful. But afterwards, what then?’

‘You just implied you trusted Koorland.’

‘If he doesn’t survive,’ said Vangorich. ‘If his successor sees more potential for the Deathwatch than the immediate crisis…’

‘Pessimist,’ Wienand said.

‘Pessimism is my duty,’ said Vangorich. He looked at her. ‘You don’t seem worried.’

‘I think you’ve been in the presence of the High Lords for too long, Drakan. They’re a bad influence. Their thinking is constricting yours.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m more intrigued by the possibilities than the dangers.’

‘You think the Council’s anxieties are groundless?’

‘I didn’t say that. If we consider them in the right light, they may in fact be the key to the possibilities.’

‘Which are?’

‘I’m not sure yet.’

Koorland had finished speaking and the first of the kill-teams had followed him into the Thunderhawk. It lifted off, and a second gunship descended to take on Thane and the next squad.

‘I think we need to see how this day plays out first,’ Wienand said. ‘Don’t you agree?’

‘I do,’ said Vangorich. She was right. And he did still believe in the effort under way. There were no other options left. Koorland had listened to his advice, and had adapted the philosophy of the Officio Assassinorum to the crisis, and to the Adeptus Astartes.

He had forged his blade.

‘We are directing the primary data-feeds to your vox-frequency,’ Adnachiel told Koorland.

‘I am receiving them. Thank you, Company Master. I wish I could be on the bridge with you.’

‘You are where you need to be,’ Adnachiel said. Inside a Thunderhawk, inside a landing bay, he thought. He respected Koorland. He accepted his authority as Lord Commander. For the combined efforts of the Chapters to maintain cohesion, centralised command was needed. Between the traditional calling of the Imperial Fists as the defenders of the Terran wall, and Koorland’s status as both a unifier of Successors and a warrior without a Chapter, he was the logical, least objectionable choice for that position.

Adnachiel also accepted the reasons for the Deathwatch. He supported the action. He expected the battle-brothers he had seconded to the kill-teams to commit fully to the effort, and to the cooperation with warriors from other Chapters, no matter what Chapters they might be.

He accepted all the necessities of the struggle against the Beast. Even so, he preferred Koorland to be in a position where Adnachiel had some control over the information he received. The Herald of Night was the necessary ship to make the run to the attack moon. It was not necessary that there be any presence on its bridge that was not a Dark Angel.

There were no visual feeds to the Thunderhawk, but Adnachiel ensured Koorland had a channel to the command vox and received a constant update of ship positions relative to the Herald. He would know the state of the battle. He would know when the moment came for the launches.

The strike cruiser cut through the void, closing in on the burning region of the attack moon.

‘The Imperial Navy still has the orks contained,’ Shipmaster Aelia said.

Adnachiel grunted. ‘They’re holding them only because this is the greatest concentration of ships to destroy,’ he said.

The tacticarium screens flickered as they adjusted to the constant changes. The positions of Navy vessels changed slowly compared to the darting swarm of ork ships. Their status changed far more quickly. Green icons flashed amber, then red, then vanished. The frigates and destroyers that made up the blockade fleet were far from being the largest at the Navy’s command, but each was still over a kilometre long, with crews numbering in the tens of thousands. The pace at which they were disappearing from the sight of the Herald’s auspex array was disturbing. The orks were feasting on the Terran fleet. There were fifteen destroyers, almost as many frigates, and scores of escorts still in the fighting. Nowhere near enough.

Adnachiel had to hope they would feast a little longer. He resented the necessity for that hope. His anger spurred his determination to see the moon destroyed.

He looked back and forth between the screen readouts and the cloud of battle visible in the oculus. A battle cluster was forming, growing tighter. The Imperial ships were converging as they sought to provide supporting fire for each other. The orks battened on the higher concentration of prey. The blockade still surrounded the moon, but as the Navy fell, gaps opened. The orks were not coming through them yet, but instead they appeared to be intent on the total annihilation of the blockade.

‘Commander, we have a possible course plotted,’ Aelia said.

‘Show me,’ Adnachiel said.

The mortal pressed a key on her command throne stationed just below Adnachiel’s pulpit. An arcing path appeared on the oculus, cutting through one of the gaps to bring the Herald of Night close to the surface of the ork base.

‘No,’ Adnachiel said. ‘The target is the interior.’ The nearest approach of Aelia’s route would force the kill-teams to breach a surface thick enough to be a planetary crust, or travel to the open maw. That would take too long, giving the orks too much time to detect and counter the attack. ‘The jaws are our goal.’

Ork interceptors still streamed from the vast launch bay. The grotesque mouth opened and closed in an imitation of speech. It was the Beast’s shout given visual form. It gaped wide, narrowed, then gaped again. It never shut completely.

‘Use the gap between the vessels,’ Adnachiel said. ‘Enter the battle by that path, then cut through to the maw. Maximum speed, continuous fire.’

‘So ordered,’ said Aelia.

The Herald of Night plunged towards the war. It was larger and more powerful than any ship still in the battle, and its approach altered the gravitational tides of conflict. Adnachiel tracked the readings and the oculus display. In his mind’s eye, he saw the full shape of the struggle. He saw the shifting currents, the networks of fire, the ripple effects of actions large and small. The cloud began to bulge towards the Herald. The movement was slow. The orks were becoming aware of what was closing in, but they were already engaged. The reinforcements coming from the moon turned in the direction of the strike cruiser. Some were destroyed by crossfire within moments of their emergence. Others became caught in the maelstrom of the war. Still others kept their heading.

‘The enemy has seen us,’ Aelia said.

‘And I see them,’ Adnachiel answered. ‘Maintain course. We will meet them and crush them.’

The strike cruiser entered the gap. To port and starboard, above and below the course of the ship, the void burned and screamed. The edges of the oculus flashed with lance and torpedo fire. Ignited plasma billowed towards the centre of Adnachiel’s vision. In the upper right of his view, a dozen ork interceptors dived towards the core of the destroyer Unstinting. Its void shields fell. Its hull, already compromised, erupted. A new star burst from the centre. Destroyer and interceptors vanished in its roiling embrace. Edging in from the left was an intersecting web of fire between two frigates as they struggled to cut down the horde of greenskin ships that circled them like feasting insects.

The gap between the battles had looked like empty void from a distance. Now it revealed itself to be a graveyard of broken hulks and dying gas flares. It was dense with ruin. The Herald of Night struck the corpses of ships with its prow. A huge tomb of ragged metal half a kilometre long tumbled end-over-end along the Herald’s length towards the superstructure. The void shields strained under the impacts, but held. Adnachiel saw the ruin fill the oculus, then vanish as the feed redirected to sensors on the other side of the obstacle.

The hulk slammed against the superstructure. The impact reverberated through the hull. Adnachiel felt it in the walls of the bridge and in the deck. The Herald of Night was moving fast, and the mass of the hulk was huge. The first red icons of damage reports appeared on the tacticarium screens.

‘Anomalous gravity readings,’ Aelia announced. At the same moment, strange waves swept through the ship and Adnachiel felt himself weighed down, then pulled upward as if he might fly to the dome of the bridge. Conflicting forces pressed against him. His Lyman’s ear resisted the disorientation, but still his sense of the vertical fragmented. It spun. He held steady. Below, officers and serfs lost their balance. Some fell from their seats. Servitors jerked upward and then down against banks of consoles. The hull groaned.

Adnachiel saw new meaning in the shape of the path. The orks’ gravity weapon had swept through these coordinates, a scythe for ships. The reports reaching Terra from the battle had indicated it was active, but in a limited fashion. Its area of effect was narrow. Its strikes were sporadic.

The orks were back, but the injury inflicted on them before was real, Adnachiel thought. The base was weaker.

The Herald of Night’s run was a wager. There was no pretending otherwise. But if the aftershocks of the weapon were still being felt, it had been used very recently. Adnachiel disliked wagers. War had too much chance in it already. To willingly engage with it was a form of moral carelessness. His hand was forced, though. And everything about the Deathwatch mission was a wager.

But the fading gravity effects were promising. If he must wager, perhaps he was making a good one. The Herald of Night ploughed onward through the debris field, speed undiminished. Ahead, Adnachiel saw a path to the curve of the attack moon’s surface. ‘Hard to port,’ he ordered. ‘Fire at will.’

‘Hard to port,’ Aelia confirmed.

The Herald’s bow turned from the darkened path towards the cloud of lethal light, and its batteries acquired targets and fired. The first ork interceptors came into range and died. The hull shook as the ship entered a zone of overlapping shockwaves. Hostile targets closed in.

‘Master of the Vox,’ Adnachiel called, ‘begin a broadcast to all Imperial vessels.’

‘Transmitting,’ Master of the Vox Enger confirmed.

‘Ships of the Imperial Navy,’ Adnachiel said. ‘We come to drive a blade through the heart of the greenskins. Hold the xenos. Do not allow them to deflect the blow.’ He paused. ‘End vox-cast,’ he told Enger.

Now the surviving officers of the blockade knew their situation. The Herald of Night had not come to reinforce them. Instead, their role was to support its mission.

If any still lived at the end of this day, they would receive the gratitude of the Imperium for their service.

The view in the oculus shifted, reflecting the changes to the Herald of Night’s course. The orb of the attack moon moved to the centre. It was partially obscured by the explosions of ships and the pinprick flashes of guns. Its maw snarled, hate made of stone and iron. The base grew larger.

‘How close…’ Aelia began.

‘As close as we are able,’ Adnachiel said. He shifted his stance in the pulpit, bracing for the inevitable lash of the gravity weapon, balancing risks, riding the lethal edge of the wager. If the Herald of Night took the full force of what the orks were capable of, the mission would end before it had begun. But he had to get the Deathwatch into proximity with the target.

‘Get us in a direct line with the jaws,’ Adnachiel said. If the gravity weapon fired, the orks would destroy all the ships they were launching. He did not think they would use it unless desperate. The war was still running their way. The blockade was coming apart like the rotten wall it was.

More and more interceptors closed in. The Herald’s batteries could not take them all down – they were fast. Their construction seemed crude, brutal shapes hurtling through the void, and they were not agile, but they absorbed more damage than Imperial ships of comparable size. They came at the strike cruiser with the murderous intent of guided meteors.

The Herald had left the false calm of the gap for the heart of the storm. Vast engines of destruction warred with machines of shrieking speed. Death lashed out over distances of tens of thousands of kilometres. The strike cruiser became the centre of gravity of the conflict. Ork and Imperial ships converged in response to its movements, and leviathans and lightning found a single focus. The space of the battle constricted.

Beam weapons and torpedoes slammed into the Herald. Crippled ork fighters hurled themselves against its shields as they died. In the oculus, the void became a strobing storm of explosions and energy discharges. The void shields rippled and flashed, red and searing violet.

The attack moon was huge. Its circumference surpassed the edges of the oculus.

‘Lord Commander Koorland,’ Adnachiel voxed. ‘Are you ready to launch?’

‘We are.’

‘Opening bay doors.’

Adnachiel stared straight ahead, at the void and the gaping rage of the target. In the corner of his eye, he saw the multiplying red of damage icons. He ignored them. He felt each shake and tremor of the ship as a personal blow. He stood fast, willing his ship forward. He knew its injuries. Let it know his determination.

The jaws were opening again. The interior of the ork moon filled the centre of the oculus. Adnachiel glared at the hunger of fire and darkness.

‘Launch!’ he shouted. ‘Launch!’

One more klaxon added its voice to the cacophony of warnings on the bridge. It was the only sign of the departure of the Thunderhawks until Koorland spoke again.

‘You have taken us to the threshold, brother,’ he said. ‘Now we have crossed it.’

‘Strike hard.’

‘The orks will feel our blow even on Ullanor.’

‘Bow up!’ Adnachiel roared. ‘Take us over the pole.’ He would make the orks pursue the prize of the Herald of Night. He would be their target. He would draw their eyes away from the insignificant ships flying into the moon.

Strike hard, he thought again. Strike hard.

Four

The ork attack moon

The three Thunderhawks flew into the maw. They came in low, beneath the flights of the ork fighters, and close to the port side of the jaws. They entered the throat of the monster, a colossal shaft reaching straight down to the centre of the moon. Energy flashed outside the viewing blocks as they crossed the threshold.

Inside the Reclaimed Honour, the Ultramarine Simmias said, ‘Some form of containment field. They’re maintaining their atmosphere.’

‘You’re impressed,’ said Koorland.

‘I am respectful of an opponent’s capabilities,’ the Techmarine said. ‘Doing less would lead to faulty theoreticals and disastrous practicals in battle.’

‘And what do you deduce that we don’t already know?’ Hakon Icegrip asked. The Space Wolf had not donned his helmet yet, and the low snarl of his breathing was audible in the hold. He was taut with impatience.

‘I deduce that all aspects of this base are receiving large amounts of power,’ Simmias said, unmoved by the challenge in Icegrip’s question. ‘Theoretical – much of the damage we inflicted before has been repaired, at least in terms of tactical effects. That is a lot of energy to devote to the preservation of atmosphere in a launch shaft.’

The Honour shook. Proximity warnings sounded. Koorland looked through the viewing block. The Thunderhawk was flying so close to the inner wall that it had clipped protruding scaffolding. The walls were crude, uneven, and they whipped by at such speed there could be no evading minor obstacles. The three gunships were travelling through thickets of ragged ends of iron and rock. They were not taking fire yet. Koorland dared to hope they had entered undetected.

‘What do you think, Simmias?’ the Blood Angel Vepar asked, pointing to the teleport homer on the Techmarine’s back. ‘Will it work?’

‘I can’t say. Too much of this technology is unfamiliar.’

He sounded suspicious. Koorland couldn’t blame him. The Imperial device had been modified so heavily it was barely recognisable. It was less bulky than the standard model, but had sprouted a tangle of cables and brass spheres.

‘The device is xenos-tainted,’ said Hanniel.

Koorland turned to the Dark Angels Librarian. ‘Of course it is. And we will use its taint to purge the larger one.’

‘While teleporting ourselves back to the Herald?’ said Icegrip. ‘There isn’t even a platform.’

‘Once powered, the machine will respond to the signal from the ship’s teleportation pad,’ Simmias said. ‘It is the Herald’s device that will call us back, while the ones we place on the moon will send it away. Theoretically.’

‘Theoretically,’ Vepar repeated.

Koorland glanced at Haas. She had said nothing since the launch from the Herald of Night. She stared out the viewing block, her face grim with pain and stony determination as she returned to her prison. As he watched, he saw her jerk, as if in bleak recognition. He didn’t think it could be. She had never seen the launch shaft.

Even so, at the same moment, the pilot Nithael voxed, ‘Approaching primary target.’

‘How close can you get us?’ Koorland asked.

‘I see a major avenue. It looks clear.’

‘Take it.’

The Reclaimed Honour slowed. The wall became less of a blur. Its details became clear as the gunship turned into a passageway wide enough for a battalion of tanks. The edges of the opening were broken, as if the tunnel had been cut here by violent action. The kill-team shed grav-harnesses and stood. The Thunderhawk came to a rapid halt, landing with a blast of exhaust nozzles. The forward ramp dropped, and the first of the Deathwatch squads stormed down onto the tunnel floor. Koorland led his squad and Haas off while the gunship lifted off again.

‘Good hunting,’ said Nithael. ‘I will await your return.’

‘Fly well, brother,’ Koorland told him. He watched the Honour turn back towards the shaft. There was a glow coming from it, dark and red illumination from the engines of the passing interceptors still heading out to fight the blockade. The other two Thunderhawks should be finding their landing targets very soon. The Reclaimed Honour’s departure was a good omen. Perhaps all three would exit the moon and return to the Herald of Night.

Perhaps this mission was not completely mad.

The tunnel they were in was almost wholly dark. A few guttering lumen globes dangled from cables. They were widely spaced. Between them hung the broken husks of many others.

‘This region is no longer used,’ Simmias said. He gestured at the cables. ‘There is illumination here by chance, not design. The power is going everywhere, even where it is no longer needed.’

‘But what was this used for?’ said Vepar. ‘Wherever it begins, it leads only to the shaft. What use is that for vehicles?’

‘The tunnel is for construction,’ Haas answered. ‘They build fast. The big passages allow them to mobilise quickly.’

‘Indeed,’ said Koorland. ‘Look how quickly they rebuilt after our attack.’ To Haas, he said, ‘There have likely been considerable changes. We have an approximate location on the auspex. Do you think you can take us there?’

‘I haven’t been there, but I can show you the best way to get around.’ She moved further along the tunnel, sticking to the right-hand wall. ‘Here,’ she said, pointing up.

There was an opening just below her head height on the wall. Haas reached up and pulled herself inside. Koorland and the others followed. It was just large enough for a Space Marine to walk in a crouch. There was no light here at all, though Koorland’s helm lamp picked out more tangles of cables and conduits on the low ceiling of the passageway.

‘I’ve seen the little creatures use these,’ she said. ‘There’s room for many of them, and these shafts keep them out of the way of the large orks.’

‘Vermin,’ said Icegrip.

‘Cunning vermin,’ Hanniel answered. ‘They will need to be silenced quickly. The point is not to bring the full horde down on us. We are coming as a shadow among the greenskins.’

The Space Wolf grunted, acquiescing. ‘A shadow with teeth,’ he said.

Koorland showed Haas the auspex. The readings were marked by numerous power surges. Three were singled out – two were close together, one much larger than the other. The energy source furthest away was the known quantity. It fluctuated moment to moment, winking out of existence then becoming explosively bright, more intense than any other signal on the screen. It was the gate. The orks had reopened it. The third kill-team would close it again, this time forever.

The other two targets were the ones whose locations were approximate guesses, reached through a combination of analysis of power signatures and Haas’ memories of her imprisonment. Koorland pointed to the larger of the two clustered targets. This, he hoped, was the attack moon’s power source. ‘Can you find the way?’ he asked.

‘I think so. I only saw it once. But there is a kind of order to the pathways here. Things flow to and from that location.’

‘Show us, then,’ said Koorland.

The shadows with teeth moved off.

The Penitent Wrath dropped Thane’s squad on a rough platform just outside a tunnel so ragged it would have seemed natural if the walls had not been made of patched-together stone and iron. The five Space Marines entered the crevice. It made a sharp turn almost immediately, then another, its path nothing more than a fault line between walls. Within seconds, the squad vanished from sight of the launch shaft.

The passageway angled left, then dropped down, and kept sloping downward.

‘This is taking us in the wrong direction,’ Asger Warfist said.

‘I know,’ said Thane. The extrapolated target was a control complex, located above the presumed power source. The mission was already riddled with uncertainty and guesswork. Moving down and away from the goal only added to the frustration. Thane played his helm lamp over the walls ahead, looking for any kind of exit.

‘There,’ said Abathar.

Thane stopped and looked up at the spot the Dark Angels Techmarine had isolated. Twenty metres up, where the sloping walls of the tunnel almost met, two openings faced each other.

‘No bridge,’ said Straton, the Ultramarine. ‘Do the greenskins leap over the gap in the dark?’

‘I suggest this passage is a result of a shift in the walls,’ Abathar said. ‘That tunnel is not likely to be still in use.’

‘I think you’re right,’ said Forcas. The Blood Angels Librarian pointed to a spot on the floor of the fissure, directly below the broken tunnel. Three ork bodies lay broken, smashed open against the raised, jagged edges of metal plating.

‘How do we get up there?’ Straton asked.

Thane watched Abathar examine the right-hand wall. Its surface was rough, a contusion of folds and cracks. He fired up the plasma cutter on his right servo-arm and played it against the wall. The light stabbed at the eyes in the gloom. It took only a few seconds for the cutter to melt through the stone and metal and form a rough handhold. Abathar looked at his handiwork, then back upward. ‘The lean of the wall is unfortunate, but acceptable. We can climb.’ He raised the servo-arm and burned another ledge into the wall.

It took ten minutes for Abathar to cut a ladder all the way to the top. Once inside the tunnel, Thane found the path hewing much more closely to the desired heading. Warfist strode at his side. Though he wore his helm, Thane could sense the Space Wolf’s impatience for battle in the quick jerks of his movements. He was holding himself back, though, and Thane noticed him checking on the movements of the rest of the squad, especially Abathar, weighed down by the cumbersome teleport homer. Given the history of tension between the Dark Angels and the Space Wolves, Thane was pleased to see this automatic gesture on the part of Warfist. It made the black of the Space Marines’ armour more than a gesture. They were functioning as a team.

The creation of the Deathwatch livery had struck a resonant chord in Thane’s soul. He had seen an echo of the formation of the Last Wall. But that had been the coming together of Chapters who were all sons of Dorn. The Deathwatch was something else again. He did not know if it was more profound, or more meaningful. He did not try to guess at its consequences, though he knew they would be real, and far-reaching. He had pondered whether he too would change the colour of his armour. He had decided against it. He was part of the Last Wall, and its continued existence was necessary. It was about more than victory. It was about rebuilding.

The Deathwatch, he thought, was both simpler and more complex. It was the forging together of forces so disparate, in some cases so alien to each other, that loyalty to the Emperor was the only common bond. It did not exist to build, Thane thought. Not in the same sense as the Last Wall. But as he travelled the darkness of the attack moon, the colours of his own armour almost as shadowy here as the black of his squad, he was part of the Deathwatch blade. We do not stand guard, he thought. We are not the sentinels on the rampart.

We watch only to find the moment to strike. We are destruction.

They reached an intersection. The tunnel split into five paths. Thane stopped and consulted the auspex. The energy reading was to the left of their position, and two of the paths looked promising. All had cables running down them.

Since disembarking from the Penitent Wrath, Thane had heard the heartbeat of the attack moon. It was as deep and hard as a continent, irregular in its rhythm yet colossal in its strength. It had grown much louder since they left the crevice, booming now down all the tunnels. Dust shook from the roof of the passageway. There were other sounds too – a clamour of bestial snarling, the clangs of heavy blows, the high-pitched squeals of the vermin-like creatures that swarmed in menial servility around the feet of the orks.

‘We should wait,’ Straton said.

‘For what?’ Warfist asked, his patience stretching taut.

‘A frequency of traffic might point us to the correct route.’

‘That’s leaving things to chance at best,’ Warfist scoffed. ‘And wait how long? The success of the other two operations depends on us.’

‘Five minutes,’ Thane said.

Two minutes passed. Koorland’s voice came over Thane’s helm vox. ‘Squad Gladius, this is Sword. What is your status?’

‘Still searching.’

‘We have found the power source. Awaiting your action.’

‘Understood. What about the gate?’

‘Squad Crozius is also in position.’

‘We will take the target shortly.’ He vowed they would, if he had to punch his way through the interior walls of the moon.

‘Good. The Emperor protects.’

‘The Emperor protects.’

In the fourth minute, brutish voices sounded closer in the far left passageway. Thane held up an arm, waiting a few seconds more. The noises came closer. The other paths were silent. Warfist was right – Straton’s surmise was barely more than a guess. But the direction of the tunnel was correct, and there was little else to go on.

The bobbing glow of portable lamps appeared in the tunnel.

Thane lowered his arm.

Warfist shot forward, fists tight, arms extended, lightning claws at the ready. Thane and Straton followed, each with gladius drawn. The kills had to be silent. Forcas and Abathar brought up the rear.

Warfist rounded a curve in the tunnel. The voices became snarls of alarm. As Thane reached the curve, a shout was cut off, turning into a wet gurgle. He heard a sound like heavy bags of meat slapping against rock.

He made the turn. Warfist was in the centre of a group of about a dozen orks. Two lay dead. He had plunged into the centre of the greenskins and was fighting the largest. It was taller than Warfist, its head brushing against the roof of the tunnel. A huge wound gaped in its throat and its jaws were wide in near-silent, choking fury. It swung a massive hammer at the Space Wolf. Warfist jabbed with his left claws, sinking them deep into the greenskin’s arm at the elbow. He twisted. The greenskin’s hand opened, nerveless, and the hammer fell to the tunnel floor. A second later, so did the ork’s lower arm.

The other orks charged the kill-team. Thane pulled back his blade, then struck forward with servo-aided force. The gladius stabbed all the way through his target’s throat and out of the back of its neck. Thane slashed sideways. The ork’s head, half-severed, lolled back. Blood geysered; the body fell. Thane leapt over it and grasped another ork by the face. The beast jerked back in surprise and Thane yanked it forward. The greenskin chopped futilely at his armour with a heavy cleaver before Thane rammed the gladius into its chest. He angled the blow upward, drove the blade higher, cutting through gut and heart.

Beside him, Straton took down two more orks in swift, cold, precise strikes. A handful of others were still rushing forward. They were snarling in rage, and in their fury they were not shouting in alarm. Anger was the norm among orks. Even if those snarls reached others, they would not pay attention as they would to a summons.

Abathar’s plasma cutter burned through a pair of skulls. Warfist gutted the giant and turned back to impale the last of the attacking greenskins through the spine. That left the smaller, scuttling creatures. Their squeals were drowned out by the snarls of their masters. They fled, scrambling over the corpse of the monster, fast in their panic. Just a few metres ahead, Thane saw what looked like burrows in the stone. If the tiny xenos reached those holes, they would be impossible to follow. He reached for his boltgun, willing to risk the noise of concussion blasts.

Forcas stepped forward, right hand outstretched, energy crackling from his psychic hood and down his arm. Lightning flashed from his fingertips and struck the vermin, searing them to ash. There was a sharp crack of thunder. The smell of burned ozone filled the tunnel. The air rippled with the after-effects of dissipating warp power. Warfist’s wolf-headed helm turned from the smoking remains of the creatures towards Forcas. If he was disgusted by the Blood Angel’s sorcery, he refrained from saying so.

‘We have gained some time,’ Straton said. ‘But we have little to spare.’

‘Agreed,’ said Thane.

They moved quickly down the corridor. The pounding of machines and the violent discharge of energy grew louder, covering the sound of their boots as they ran. The tunnel twisted, then came to a stop.

It opened into a huge cavern. From this position, Thane could see only a small portion of its upper reaches. Ahead was a rough metal ramp leading up to what appeared to be a massive promontory that jutted out into the space of the cavern. At the top of the promontory was a roofless structure. The tops of its walls were angular, as if it were a jagged iron crown and energy coils rose from the corners, leaning out over the void. Innumerable cables ran from the base of the structure and into the air below the promontory, or down its slope into other tunnels opening up on the wall along its base. Some were as thick as Land Raiders. Searing light flashed from inside the structure. Energy arced and snapped from the coils, and the booms of the discharges were deafening.

In the gaps in the walls, figures moved back and forth, silhouetted by the pulsing light within. They were large. Their forms were strange, built up with something artificial that had the wrong shape for armour.

There was activity up and down the ramp as hordes of the tiny greenskins hauled wagons of equipment up, and burned-out debris back down. The creatures were urged to greater efforts by orks wielding shock prods.

‘A clear run to the top,’ Warfist said over the vox.

Thane eyed the traffic on the ramp and agreed. These orks were not a serious obstacle. ‘The alarm will be raised,’ he warned. ‘Our time will be limited.’

‘What time we have will depend on Squad Crozius,’ said Straton.

‘The timing of all three squads is critical,’ Forcas said. ‘We must have faith in them, and they in us.’

‘For Terra and the Emperor, then,’ said Thane. ‘For the Deathwatch!’

‘For the Deathwatch!’ the squad shouted, voices amplified by vox-casters.

Warriors in black stormed out of the tunnel and up the ramp, into the rising shriek of orks.

‘Ingenious,’ said the Blood Angels Techmarine Gadreel. ‘Despite the damage the Last Wall inflicted, the orks have managed to amplify the power of what remained.’

‘I have had more than enough of their ingenuity,’ said Iairos.

The Ultramarines sergeant had led Squad Crozius to a small tunnel that ended three metres up from the floor of the gate chamber. Based on the reports of the first engagement, a large portion of the cavern must have fallen in. It was still well over a kilometre wide, but to the right of the kill-team’s position was a massive collapse. It looked as if a mountain had fallen on the machinery that powered the gate.

Where there had been three Titan-sized horns, now there was only one, a monstrous patchwork that appeared to have been assembled from the wreckage of the previous three. Its balance was precarious, its upper half thicker than the lower, and its peak was a colossal, trifurcated claw. Countless support chains now ran from the horn to the walls and slope of rubble. The horn trembled and vibrated from the energies fed to it and summoned by it. Eldritch light exploded and imploded in the centre of the claw. Every time the burning force collapsed in on itself, there was a cave-filling flash on the platform at its base, and another war party of orks appeared.

‘There is our primary target,’ said Gadreel. He pointed.

To the left of the tunnel, an enormous power cable six metres thick entered the cavern. A short way to the right, it split into myriad smaller cables, running power to the hulking machines that, in turn, provided energy and direction to the functioning of the gate.

‘They are vulnerable,’ said Valtar Skyclaw. The Space Wolf Rune Priest looked up at the horn. ‘The unclean energies here are on the cusp of overwhelming their material constraints. We will destroy this gate forever.’

‘Not until we claim its power source,’ Gadreel said.

‘Aye,’ Skyclaw admitted.

‘Where is Gladius?’ the Dark Angel Vehuel asked.

‘Nearly in position,’ Iairos said. Until the power was shut off temporarily, they could not attempt to splice into the main cable and link it to Gadreel’s teleport homer.

‘How long will it take to cut into that?’ asked Eligos, the second Blood Angel.

‘Not long,’ said Gadreel.

‘Attacking control centre,’ Thane called over the vox. ‘Stand by. Stand by.’

Time accelerated and slowed at once. With Thane’s call, the mission entered the narrow window of success. The timing of the actions required from all three squads came down to a matter of seconds. Sword and Crozius could not take their targets until the power flow was under the control of Gladius. Thane’s squad would not be able to hold their position if Crozius did not stop the reinforcements from arriving. Crozius could not risk destroying the gate without also destroying its teleport homer.

The allotment of seconds crawled as Iairos took in the variables of the battlefield. He saw the vectors of action and their possible consequences. He waited, forced to guess at the moment and duration of Thane’s success.

So many unknowns.

Theoretical: action must be predicated on the known skill of allies.

Practical: attack at the opportune moment based on the presumption of skill.

He gave Thane a few more precious seconds.

Then he leapt from the tunnel, leading Squad Crozius towards the main cable’s junction.

The moon’s power plant was the size of a city. The cavern was so huge that Koorland could not make out the far walls. Haas brought Sword to an entrance on the floor of the cave. Her sense of how the shafts worked had been accurate, and the squad had moved quickly. They had encountered a few groups, quickly despatched, of the dwarfish greenskins.

Now the Deathwatch was surrounded by generators larger than hab-blocks. They were hulking machines, squat despite their height. It was impossible to see more than a few hundred metres in any direction. The generators sat at all angles on the cavern floor. The paths running between them were wide, but never straight for more than a few dozen metres.

A tangled forest of cables ran between the generators. They trembled and convulsed with surges. Sparks flew from flawed junctions and haloes of lightning crackled down their lengths. The din was immense, a deep, continuous tremor that vibrated deep in Koorland’s chest. The sound was so thick, it tried to stop his hearing. The sharp snap of energy cut through the tremor with a searing arrhythmia. The cavern rumbled and shrieked with the roars of beasts and the hiss of serpents. It rang with the endless, grating choir of xenos industry.

‘There is the power of a small sun here,’ Simmias said as they paused at the entrance. ‘We cannot cut in blindly.’

‘And we come to steal this energy, not to destroy it,’ said Koorland.

In the flashing gloom, orks clambered up and down the generators. The energy production was so violent, every few moments Koorland saw an electrocuted greenskin tumble from the heights of the machines.

‘There are so many generators,’ Vepar said. ‘How can we let Gladius know which node to shut down for us?’

‘We take the nearest,’ Simmias said. ‘Damage it, but do not destroy it.’

Vepar turned to the Ultramarine. ‘That smacks of messy improvisation.’

‘There is no perfection in this situation,’ Simmias told him. ‘The practical is constructed from the necessary.’

‘Improvisation, in other words,’ Vepar said. Koorland thought there was a glint of amusement in his tone.

Thane’s declaration of war came through the vox. ‘We go now!’ Koorland shouted.

Squad Sword raced towards the nearest generator. The labouring orks saw the Space Marines and Haas and roared in surprise and rage. From the ground and from the scaffolding of the generators, they opened fire. The rain of bullets was disorganised. The aim was wild.

Hakon Icegrip took the lead of the charge, ripping through orks with frost blade and bolt pistol. He howled as he ran, the fury of his voice a terrifying, distorted rasp from his vox-casters, a monstrous cry at once animal and machine. The squealing orklings fled before him. Icegrip gave their masters no time to respond. He ploughed through an explosion of blood and flesh.

Haas was not far behind him. She sprinted from enemy to enemy, her shock maul at full power, its blows immobilising and burning the orks before she finished them with autopistol rounds to their skulls. She was shouting, but Koorland could make out no words. Her cries were a pure expression of vengeance and rage. She had returned to the moon to avenge a defeat, and to purge her nightmares of the billions dead.

Vepar moved in tandem with Koorland. The Blood Angel used his bolter, cutting down orks that tried to close in on the flanks of Icegrip and Haas. Vepar fired in precise short bursts. Every pull of the trigger counted. Where he looked, greenskin heads burst apart. There was a careful art to his kills, a restrained wrath channelled into a perfection of aim, as if something worse were held in check by the force of discipline. Hanniel and Simmias followed at a more measured pace. They were no less destructive, their bolter fire systematic.

The run from the tunnel to the generator covered hundreds of metres in a single, relentless burst of speed. As the squad approached the huge device, Simmias’ fire turned from the orks to the generator. He shot at the junction points on the near facade, blowing away cables. They fell, lashing back and forth. Hanniel reached out for the orks on the scaffolding. An eldritch storm bellowed over the generator, wher two lightnings entwined and fought, the warp against the materium. Orks screamed, incinerated by the warring forces, their corpses dropping, falling to ash before they reached the ground. The generator was enveloped in coruscating power.

The kill-team reached the base of the generator, tore through its defenders, then rounded a corner. Ahead was a cable twice Koorland’s height.

‘There,’ said Simmias. ‘That one.’

‘Thane,’ Koorland voxed. ‘We have our target. Do you see it? Shut it down!’

The ork engineers were ready for Gladius. Thane and Warfist burst across the threshold first. Three engineers faced them. They were large beasts, made even larger by the harnesses they wore. Power coils and portable generators rose from the greenskins’ shoulders and backs like the arcing spines of saurians. The air around them shimmered. Static broke out across Thane’s auto-senses as they reacted to an overload of energy. He had trouble focusing on the targets. Their image juddered, a cracking mosaic, and his lenses fought to stabilise. He paused and fired. His shells exploded on contact with the orks’ force fields.

Warfist snarled with frustration and rage. He hurled himself at the nearest engineer and the force field flared from the impact of the lightning claws, then collapsed with a deafening concussion. Warfist grappled with the ork. It struck him with a heavy tool that resembled a fusion of a shock maul and a plasma cutter. Electricity and flame washed over the Space Wolf’s armour.

The other two orks came at Thane with similar weapons. He maglocked his boltgun and raised his chainsword, throwing himself at the closest ork, using his mass and velocity against the barrier of the shield. He felt the resistance as an invisible force that pushed against him and stabbed through his armour and his body with powerful jolts. A vibrating numbness suffused his limbs. He pushed on, the chainsword sparking and shrieking. There was a blast, and his blade moved quickly again. He brought it down on the ork’s skull and cut it in half before it could hit him with its weapon.

Warfist punched through the shocks and flame and jammed his lightning claws through his opponent’s throat. Before the third ork could attack either Space Marine, Abathar entered the control centre and hit the beast with his power axe. Two energy fields collided. The interior of the centre blazed with their fury, then the axe blade broke through. It severed the largest of the ork’s energy coils. The harness exploded, consuming the ork and hurling Abathar back out of the entrance. He was back in the next breath.

Outside, Forcas and Straton held off the orks seeking to retake the centre. The speed of the counter-attack did not concern Thane. He had expected such a response as soon as Gladius had attacked. What worried him was its strength. The orks already numbered more than a hundred. The choke point of the ramp and the lack of shelter gave the Deathwatch an advantage, but two defenders would not be able to hold off the horde for long. Warfist lunged out of the doorway to join them.

Koorland’s report came over the vox.

‘Sword is ready,’ Thane told Abathar. The Techmarine nodded and approached the control surfaces of the centre. They were crude and massive, like everything else fashioned by orkish hands, but Thane regarded them with more wariness than contempt. The power the orks wielded belied the rough construction.

There is technology here that is beyond our own, he reminded himself. The controls were a conglomeration of huge, clumsy levers, switches and buttons. They flashed with bursts of energy. Thane could not tell if the flares were overloads, short circuits, or if they were deliberate. Since the giant coils at each corner of the centre gave off so much excess, it was as if the centre were caught in a perpetual storm. Thane had no way to guess if the small blasts from the controls were by design or not.

Beyond the control surfaces, there was no wall. The centre was perched on the very edge of the promontory. Thane had a perspective of the entire power plant, of kilometres of colossal, linked generators. From this height, he felt as if he were looking into a cauldron of lightning. He could see no order to the construction. It seemed to be haphazard, machines piled atop machines, connections as superfluous as they were dangerous.

How were these beings a threat? he wondered. How had they not destroyed themselves? How could any of this work? How had it not blown up the instant it was activated?

The questions multiplied, though he knew there would be no answers. The Mechanicus might know them. Perhaps not. The answers did not matter. The action did.

Seconds had passed since the death of the ork engineers. Thane contained his impatience as Abathar examined the controls. The seconds were precious. Yet a mistake would be catastrophic.

Abathar was cautious. His helmet moved back and forth as he scanned the controls. He touched nothing, though Thane sensed the speed of his evaluation. After a few moments, his attention focused on a section of the controls to the far left. He looked back and forth between the cavern and the technological jumble before him. ‘There,’ he said. He pointed to flames at the extreme left of the cavern. ‘That is a true fire.’

Thane looked. Abathar was right. The flickering light also suggested flames close to the ground. All the other flashes Thane could see came from no lower than the cables, midway up the flanks of the generators.

‘A generator in distress,’ Abathar said. He moved his hand to a switch. Just above it, sparks flew with a surprisingly steady rhythm. ‘That,’ the Dark Angel said, ‘is what passes for a remote alarm with these brutes.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘As sure as I must be.’ He flipped the switch.

The sparks ceased. Exposed wiring glowed red, then went dark.

‘Sword, this is Gladius,’ Thane voxed. ‘We believe we have cut the power to your generator. Please confirm.’

‘Confirmed,’ Koorland said after a moment. ‘Splicing in.’

Thane turned to Abathar. ‘And the gate?’ he asked.

The Techmarine had already moved to the other end of the control banks. ‘The machines grow brighter towards the right,’ he said. ‘There is a higher intensity of power gathering there. We must seek the greatest current.’

Thane looked off to the right, following the pattern of light. The flares converged at a blinding point that pulsed in and out of existence. ‘I see it,’ he said.

‘As do I.’

‘But it is not damaged.’

‘There appears to be a rough concordance between the position of the generators and their controls here. A crude organisation, perfect for these brutes.’

These brutes who perform wonders we cannot hope to emulate, Thane thought. Even so, Abathar’s logic was sound. The orks combined brutishness and ingenuity in a manner that defied comprehension. It was necessary simply to accept the fusion and attempt to counter its effects.

Abathar wrapped his gauntlet around a lever the size of a bolter. He nodded at Thane.

‘Crozius,’ Thane voxed, ‘we are attempting to cut the power to the gate.’

‘We are ready,’ said Iairos.

Abathar pulled the lever. It moved with a foul metallic grinding, as if the end of the shaft went all the way to the core of the attack moon. An ear-shattering klaxon sounded. Scores of crackling warning flares shot up from the consoles around the lever.

‘You have angered the ork machines,’ said Thane.

‘Good.’

In the distance, the searing point dimmed to an ember, then went out.

‘The gate is closed!’ Iairos shouted, triumphant. ‘The gate is closed!’

Thane grinned. He imagined he could hear a howl coming from the throat of every ork on the moon as their device ceased to respond to their commands. He checked the clip on his bolter. ‘Now we wait on the others,’ he said.

‘I’m sure you can convince the orks to have patience,’ said Abathar. He unshouldered the teleport homer and extended its mechadendrites. His servo-arm’s plasma cutter sliced open a portion of the control surface, exposing a madness that Thane could barely qualify as technological. Abathar began linking the homer to the madness.

‘On what basis can we expect that to work?’ Thane asked.

‘On faith,’ Abathar answered. ‘The Mechanicus has made this a human device, but the taint of the xenos remains. On this day, that taint is necessary. It will permit the union of the homer to the greenskin network.’

‘Then you have my faith and my hope,’ Thane said. ‘The Emperor protects.’

‘The Emperor protects.’

Thane clapped Abathar on the pauldron and made for the door.

Outside the control centre, a green wave surged towards the ramp.

Iairos fired his bolter in a wide, repeating arc. Greenskin chests and skulls burst apart. Bodies fell on bodies. A mound of corpses grew. He timed his kills carefully. Theoretical: each foe killed at the right moment becomes a new obstacle to the others. Already he had created a protective wall of flesh taller than a man, blocking the left-hand and forward approaches to Squad Crozius’ position.

Behind him, Gadreel had cut into the housing of the giant cable. Where it began its branching into the smaller lines, he was connecting the mechadendrites of the modified teleport homer. The device would draw upon multiple branches of power.

‘How long?’ Iairos called out.

‘Nearly there.’

On the right, Vehuel and Eligos added to the wall of bodies. Skyclaw stood atop the mound, the centre of a shrieking storm. Winds flattened the orks as they struggled to close with the kill-team. Lightning struck them down when they dared to attack the Rune Priest. His axe blade shone a brilliant, frigid blue. Ice flew on the wind, sharp as steel, lacerating flesh, slashing faces. Orks staggered on the top of the mound, blinded by ice shards. They screamed, holding their eyes. Blood poured from between their fingers. Iairos did not waste shells putting those brutes down. When they came within Skyclaw’s reach, he decapitated them with a single, wrathful stroke of his runic axe.

‘A grand battle!’ Skyclaw shouted. ‘Son of Guilliman, you have led us to a rare feast!’

‘We will avenge the dead of Ullanor yet,’ said Eligos.

‘By the will of the Emperor,’ Iairos said. Yet he felt the pressure of passing time. The gate was dark, and the orks’ attention was divided by the simultaneous attacks on three fronts. The squads were benefiting, Iairos thought, from the uncertainty over which target was the most important, the most vulnerable. The orks were fighting blindly, for the moment without the direction that had made them so lethal on Ullanor. But the confusion would pass, and they were still mustering ever greater numbers of reinforcements. Greenskins poured out of every tunnel entrance. They converged on Crozius at a run. They died on the near approach.

For now.

Iairos calculated his team was at the edge of what it could hold off. And once Gadreel’s task was complete, they would be facing a much greater flood of the enemy.

‘Done,’ said Gadreel. ‘Let us bear witness now to the will of the Omnissiah.’

‘Thane,’ Iairos voxed. ‘Let the current flow.’

The orks were concentrating their fire now. With Sword no longer moving, the attacks were becoming more and more focused and savage. Desperate too, Koorland wanted to believe. He wanted the orks to know doom was rushing for them. He wanted them to know fear. He wanted them to know fate had turned its back on them at last.

Simmias had cut through a slab of the generator’s shielding. While he spliced the teleport homer into the inner workings of the machine, Koorland, Vepar and Haas held the ground attacks off. Icegrip had climbed up to the cable network. The lines were thick enough to walk on, and he raced over the network, taking down the ork gunners. Xenos blood rained on the cavern floor. Bodies hailed down upon their kin. Hanniel’s warp lighting lashed out again and again, burning more of the greenskins above.

And still the enemy fire became more and more focused. Solid rounds pounded against Koorland’s armour. Some of the rounds were large enough, the hits direct enough, to punch through the ceramite. He blinked off the damage warnings. There was no shelter, and nowhere to go until the task was done.

Haas’ armour was shattered over her chest and shoulders, though she still had her helmet. She kept moving, dodging from one end of the squad’s position to the other. Her shouts had become a raspy snarl. Her breath was pained. Her shots counted, though. She fought with the purpose of a warrior certain of her death, and as certain that she would take the enemy down with her.

‘Now!’ Simmias shouted.

‘Now!’ Koorland repeated into the vox. ‘Thane! It must be now!’

‘Turn the power back on!’ Thane voxed to Abathar. The roar of the attacking orks was too great for him to make himself heard otherwise. He did not look back. Standing above Forcas, Straton and Warfist, he sprayed bolter shells down the ramp into the rising tide. The four Space Marines killed the greenskins by the score, but the tide still grew. The orks charged over heaps of bodies. There were thousands of them massing at the base of the ramp, the press of the mob pushing them on. Their horde was so dense, it pushed even the dead forward.

There would be no retreat through the tunnels.

Squad Gladius slowed the orks. Each second was a victory, Thane thought. Each second might be the victory.

The orks did not engage in massed fire, wary of destroying the centre they had come to save. If they had, Gladius would have already lost.

There was a huge flash behind Thane. For a moment, the ramp and its combatants were lit in negative colours.

‘Power restored,’ Abathar reported. ‘The devices are charging.’

The gate burst into life. A foul, captive star blazed in the grip of the horn. It vanished, and an emerald explosion on the platform released a mob of heavily armoured orks and a tank into the cavern. The tank had a massive, spiked siege blade. It thundered off the platform in a cloud of black promethium smoke. Its hulking silhouette bristled with guns. Iairos saw it barrel across the cavern floor and knew the mission’s strategy had become desperate.

‘If they start using heavy armour…’ said Vehuel.

‘They may be willing to sacrifice what we have seized,’ Iairos finished.

The tank’s blade struck the wall of bodies. The rampart was taller than a Space Marine now. It toppled forward, a carrion wave. Skyclaw turned towards the vehicle. The storm gathered around him. It surrounded him with a gleaming, whistling shroud of razor ice. He shot his arms forward and the storm screamed with all its concentrated strength into the tank. Ice slashed through every gap in the armour, tore the plating, and shredded the crew. The tank swerved, out of control, but its turrets still barked. A shell slammed into Skyclaw. It hurled him from the remains of the corpse wall. He hit the cavern floor with such force he cracked stone. The storm died.

The Space Wolf’s icon blinked an ominous amber in Iairos’ helm display.

The tank was still moving. Iairos ran forward, his bolter on full auto-bursts. He held the gun in one hand, and with the other he unclipped a frag grenade. He jumped up the fallen wall, hurling the grenade through a rent in the armour. The cab of the vehicle exploded. Torn bodies flew out of it. The tank rode over the wall and then stopped, a new obstacle.

The gate flashed again. More orks appeared. And more tanks.

A snarl erupted from a vox-caster. It was a sound that began as something vaguely human, rising until it became a monstrous shriek of hunger. It was nothing but need, a drive that was beyond human, beyond animal. At first Iairos thought he was hearing the wolf howl of Skyclaw. But the Space Wolf had not moved.

The sound came from Eligos.

The Blood Angel had left his position to the right of Gadreel. He tore over the ground towards the nearest group of orks. They were racing to finish off Skyclaw, who had risen to his knees. Eligos pounded past the Space Wolf, chainsword drawn, and plunged into the orks, blade roaring. He did not fight as he had before. Gone was the elegant exactitude of his violence. He was worse than a butcher. His blows were savage, careless, lethal. The roaring from the vox-caster cut off as he shed his helmet. His face was contorted. It was a rictus, his teeth bared as if they would devour hunger itself.

Eligos was not rescuing Skyclaw. But his whirlwind of violence blunted the orks’ attack long enough for Skyclaw to regain his feet, lift his bolt pistol and shoot back. Iairos and Gadreel rushed to his position. Vehuel moved in more slowly, maintaining a wide field of fire, cutting back at the advance of the horde for another second, and another second.

Iairos stood at Skyclaw’s side, blasting at the enemy. Gadreel ran to Eligos. The Techmarine called to his brother, shouting his name over and over. Eligos did not respond. He tore the orks apart. The tide closed in on all of them, a constriction of foul smell, brutal muscle, drooling fangs and misshapen blades. A vibrating chainaxe cut into Iairos’ flank. He spun into the hit, firing as he turned. The stream of mass-reactive shells pulped the features of his attacker and the orks on either side.

Gadreel blinded one ork after another with his plasma cutter. He called and called his brother’s name in vain. Iairos did not understand the nature of the frenzy that had taken Eligos, but at this stage he almost welcomed it. The Blood Angel fought with such reckless fury he was forcing another small pause on the ork advance.

Iairos stood back to back with Skyclaw, a wall of huge, green brutishness before him. The Rune Priest’s breathing on the vox was ragged. The readout of his life signs was still flashing amber.

The teleportation device was still charging. A hum filled the cavern. It was gargantuan. It was in the walls, the floor, the air. The entire moon vibrated. A terrible song was coming into being. Soon it would have a voice.

‘A few moments more,’ Gadreel voxed. ‘A few–’

Light.

Light of breaking. Of dissolution. Of shattering, of edges, of fragmentation.

The end of here and the end of there. Death of space. Death of time.

Death.

Light of breaking.

Light of breaking.

All bro

ken.

Koorland gasped. Blood filled his mouth and his lungs. He was standing in the centre of the teleportation platform of the Herald of Night. Haas was on her hands and knees, shaking with enough force to fracture bone. All the squads were present. The other Space Marines seemed as unsteady on their feet.

He had never experienced a teleportation like this. He had been ripped into nothing, then reassembled, and every particle of his being remembered the pain of destruction and rebirth. Between the two lay an infinitesimal portion of a second that was as wide as aeons.

The hum was still growing. He could feel it even this far from the moon, through the hull of the strike cruiser.

He commanded his body to move. It obeyed with reluctance. With limbs of crumbling rockcrete, he walked from the teleportation platform. By the time he and his brothers reached the bridge, he could run again.

In the oculus, the moon was still there. The homers had functioned as Kubik had promised. They had locked on to the sensors in the armour and transported the tiny mass of the Deathwatch kill-teams before they had gathered the full power needed to send the ork base out of the sector.

‘Why has it not gone?’ Haas whispered. Her teeth chattered. She did not yet have control over her body.

‘It will. We are victorious.’ Koorland said this even as he watched the explosions of the void war. Nothing was finished.

But the teleporters worked. They were working. They had triumphed.

Staring at the moon, Simmias said, ‘That is… unexpected…’

The mountains, canyons and plains of the ork base were suffused with a shifting, retina-slashing glow. And they were moving. The mountains rocked back and forth. Peaks collapsed in on themselves. The canyons of iron pulled wide, the crust of the moon tearing like flesh. The plains heaved as if inconceivable leviathans were struggling to the surface.

‘What is happening?’ said Koorland.

Simmias shook his head. ‘The theoreticals of the technology do not account for this. The disassembly of the material body is instantaneous.’

‘It didn’t feel like it,’ said Haas.

‘This geomorphic distortion is abnormal.’

‘Shipmaster,’ Adnachiel said, ‘pull us back.’

Simmias said, ‘There is no distance we can reach. Our fates have already been decided.’

‘The Emperor protects,’ said Vepar.

‘The Emperor protects,’ Koorland repeated. He barely heard his own voice. He watched the vast agony take the moon. He saw dissolution approach.

We have done this to you, he thought. We have ended you. We are victorious.

There had been few triumphs in this war. If this was his last one, he would enjoy it.

The end came first as a brilliance that consumed the spectrum. Koorland’s lens shutters slammed down, but not fast enough. He saw the absolute light still.

The shutters opened again, and let him see the moon’s end. Half the sphere had vanished. What remained looked like a skull cut cleanly along a diagonal line. That form held just long enough for Koorland to understand what he was seeing. Then it erupted.

A swarm of asteroids hurtled through the void. The shattered surface tore through the warring ships.

He had begun coming to the Cerebrium again. Mesring did not let any of the other High Lords know. They did not come because of what they feared to see. They hid from the light of the ork moon under the cracked dome of the Great Chamber.

Mesring came to see the very thing that kept them away. The top of the Widdershins Tower pierced the clouds more often than any other point of the Inner Palace. Mesring was confident of being alone here, and of being able to contemplate the moon.

He saw the flash. Suddenly, there was an impossible shape in the heavens. Then it flew apart.

Mesring gaped. He stared. His mind was blank except for an inchoate horror.

The great light faded. Where the moon had been was a sudden blackness, the return of the void.

Smaller flashes and glints surrounded the absence where the moon had been. Some of the glints grew stronger. They became more consistent. Their number grew.

He understood nothing. He was bearing witness to a transcendent death, and his thought could not encompass it. He stood at the casement, his body numb, all his awareness focused on a point hundreds of thousands of kilometres away.

The points came closer. The glints became shards of white light. Still he did not understand.

He stayed where he was, fear and horror and helpless anger combining in an alchemy of madness.

He was standing there, blank, lost, when the fragments of the moon entered Terra’s atmosphere and the night caught fire.

The bones of the attack base fell on Terra. Flaring molten red from their descent through the atmosphere, they hammered the continental expanse of the Imperial Palace. Where there was night, titanic explosions created day. Where there was day, millions of tonnes of ash and dust blanketed the sky and brought down a reign of night. Sectors the size of hive cities vaporised. Millions looked up in the final seconds of their lives, and saw the mountains of iron and stone come for them. Millions upon millions more knew nothing. They moved through their entombed lives, far from any view of the sky, ignorant until the blow, the fire, the cathedrals turned to ash, the towers’ crushing fall.

Shockwaves annihilated ramparts. Winds of hundreds of kilometres an hour raged outward from the craters. Firestorms were a hundred kilometres wide. The dead at impact were fortunate in their ignorance or their momentary horror before oblivion. The victims of flame and wind and burial knew terror. Death came to them with great fear and pain.

Victory was choking, burning, suffocating, dying.

Victory was the most terrible destruction for a thousand years.

The greater meteor swarm spared the precincts of the Inner Palace. Small fragments fell closer, pulverising roofs. They slashed the night with streaks of fire. One struck the Widdershins Tower a glancing blow, shattering the plex-glass windows of the Cerebrium.

The big strikes fell beyond Mesring’s view of the horizon. The huge fragments vanished, and then he saw the awful sunrises of fireballs. The glow of devastation was the hammer blows of a wrathful god. Then the wind and the dust came for him, reaching into the Cerebrium with a furnace blast. He screamed, then. The hand of the Beast itself had come to claim him. He fell to the chamber floor, abandoned to a monstrous transcendence.

He was not found for two days. Even then, he was still screaming.

Five

The Immitis System

They reached the Immitis System, and it was burning.

The Fists Exemplar translated out of the warp shortly after the Iron Warriors. The Palimodes was already in combat. A single ork ship was attacking the base in the system. It was a leviathan, much larger than the Iron Warriors strike cruiser, larger even than the Fists Exemplar battle-barges. It was a hulking shape, wider than the Dantalion and Guilliman combined. A black, snarling, metal beast of war, a thing of shields like tectonic plates and volcanic weaponry, it orbited the industrial moon of the system’s gas giant. The ork ship battered the surface with a barrage of torpedoes. Ranks of immense cannons jutted out beneath its hull, running the entire length of the ship. They fired shells the size of Thunderhawks.

At this distance, the moon appeared in the Dantalion’s oculus as a metallic tangle. It was only a few hundred kilometres in diameter. Industrial works covered the entire surface. The gravity was too weak to sustain an atmosphere, and the belching of thousands of chimneys floated off into the void. The grey mass of twisting pipelines and manufactoria was lit now by blossoming fire.

‘Shipmaster Marcarian,’ Zerberyn said from the bridge pulpit, ‘set course for the starboard flank of the enemy.’ The Palimodes had engaged the port. ‘Weapons masters, target shields and weapons.’

Marcarian looked up from the throne. ‘Not the engines?’

‘No. The vessel’s orbit is too close to the moon. Anything like a plasma detonation might destroy… our goal.’ His hesitation was brief, and he hoped it was not noticed. He had been uncertain how to refer to the moon. It was a world of slave manufactoria controlled by the Iron Warriors. He had just ordered the preservation of a Traitor possession.

Of course you have, he thought. We need the resources to make repairs. I am honour-bound to aid Kalkator for the moment. And I do not intend to destroy a second world on this mission.

The reasons were good. The reasons were true.

They also sat uneasily in his heart.

Marcarian communicated Zerberyn’s orders to the rest of the flotilla, and the Fists Exemplar vessels adjusted their course. The ork battleship had not reacted to their presence yet. They had the luxury of planning an attack.

‘Master of the Vox,’ Zerberyn said. ‘Hail the Palimodes. Command channel.’

‘So ordered.’

‘Your arrival is welcome, if tardy,’ Kalkator said a moment later.

The Iron Warrior’s grim humour made Zerberyn’s neck muscles tense. It seemed to carry a presumption of brotherhood, one that Zerberyn was unable to reject as fully as he knew he should. He responded as if Kalkator had said nothing. ‘You cannot risk the destruction of the enemy.’

‘We cannot,’ Kalkator agreed. ‘Not in its current position.’ The effect of the warsmith’s voice was diminished by the distortions of the vox. Even so, it was harsh, the sound of spikes against a millstone.

‘You plan to board it?’

‘We do. We will be in position to attack the bridge shortly.’

‘If your ship survives long enough.’

‘Quite.’

The orks were hitting the void shields of the Palimodes with punishing broadsides. The strike cruiser was surrounded by a desperate flaring of red. Like the Dantalion, the damage it had already sustained was considerable. It would not be able to take much more.

‘We will launch boarding torpedoes to aft starboard to coordinate with your attack,’ Zerberyn said. ‘We will work our way forward and silence their guns.’

‘Then we shall meet on the bridge,’ said Kalkator, and signed off.

Zerberyn became aware of a presence to his right. ‘What is it, Brother Mandek?’ he said.

‘We are fighting alongside the Traitors again?’

‘Yes,’ Zerberyn said. He was unable to keep all the irritation from his voice. ‘Why are you asking? We travelled with them to Immitis. Or did you think we were following them in order to lay an ambush?’

Mandek gazed at him levelly. Zerberyn had been given command of the mission by Thane, but Zerberyn and Mandek had held the same rank until a few days before that. Mandek appeared to want Zerberyn to remember this. ‘I needed to hear it said,’ he said.

‘Why?’

Mandek frowned. Instead of answering directly, he said, ‘I’ve just come from the astropathic choir.’

‘Why?’ Zerberyn said again.

‘I wanted to know if there had been any message sent to the Chapter Master.’

And again, Zerberyn said, ‘Why?’

‘You have not communicated with him since we began travelling this path with the Traitors, have you?’

Was Mandek refusing to name the Iron Warriors, Zerberyn wondered, or was he simply choosing to state what they were until Zerberyn acknowledged that truth?

This was not the time, he thought. There was a slippery tightness in his chest.

‘What is your point?’ Zerberyn said. He gestured at the oculus. ‘We are entering battle.’

‘There has been another message from Chapter Master Thane,’ said Mandek.

‘Oh?’

‘We are ordered to return to Terra with all haste.’

‘So we shall.’

Mandek blinked.

‘Do think the flotilla can travel that distance through the warp and arrive intact?’

‘No,’ Mandek admitted.

‘Then we will make repairs first. Or are you suggesting we ignore the ork battleship before us?’

The dark look Mandek gave the oculus suggested he wished the Iron Warriors and the orks the pleasure of each other’s company.

‘We cannot go far in our present condition,’ Zerberyn insisted.

These are all true things, he thought. All of them.

‘Is there a message for the Chapter Master?’ Mandek asked.

‘Yes. That we have heard, and proceed as ordered.’

‘You will inform the astropathic choir of this message?’

Zerberyn forced himself not to bristle. ‘No,’ he said. He met and held Mandek’s gaze. ‘You will.’

Mandek nodded, satisfied. ‘So ordered.’

They were both pretending now that the decision had been entirely Zerberyn’s.

‘Good. Let’s kill some orks first.’

The boarding torpedoes from the Fists Exemplar flotilla drilled through dozens of metres of shield. They burrowed through the skin of the ork vessel like worms through earth.

Outside the hull, the vessels of the Fists Exemplar and the Iron Warriors had the battleship surrounded. The strike cruisers Paragon, Implicit and Courageous were so heavily damaged they had to keep further back and within the shelter of Dantalion and Guilliman, but they too pounded the enemy with cannon fire. The orks had no need for void shields. The vessel’s plating was so thick, so dense, that shells burst against it with little effect. It retaliated, redirecting some of its firepower from the bombardment of the moon to target the ships.

Zerberyn felt the blasts of the gargantuan cannons as his boarding torpedo ground its way forward. He was in the flesh of the enemy, and it shook with each concussion of its immense turrets. ‘Shipmaster,’ he voxed, ‘all torpedoes are breaching the target. What is your status?’

‘Our shields are at the limit,’ said Marcarian. ‘The hits are counting.’

‘Get some distance. I want something to return to when we are done here.’

‘So ordered.’

The torpedoes burst through the outer hull. They came out in emptiness. Zerberyn and his squad were suddenly weightless as the torpedo dropped. It struck hard, and its front hatch blew open. Zerberyn lunged forward, bolter held out before him.

The torpedoes had arrived in the lower third of a gallery that stretched for over a kilometre towards the bow of the vessel. Multiple levels of catwalks ran along the bulkheads. They led to the entrances to the turrets. The centre of the hull was a criss-crossing of metal platforms, bridges and ladders. In the vastness of the space, the web looked gossamer-thin. Orks swarmed over the structure like insects, running transport trains of shells to the guns, carrying materiel and tools as the web crumbled and shook with every blast of the guns.

They had taken the orks by surprise. Enemy fire was sporadic. The greenskins raged, hurling blades. They overturned their transports, derailing them and sending them and their contents hurtling down on the invaders.

‘Destroy it!’ Zerberyn ordered. He dodged a rain of gears heavy enough to crush a mortal. ‘Tear this structure down!’ He threw krak grenades at the base of the nearest scaffolding. Up close, the strength of the construction was clear. The girders were all at least a quarter of a metre thick. It was the obscene power of the cannons and their recoil that subjected them to such inconceivable stress. Ahead and behind Zerberyn, his brothers used more krak grenades and melta bombs.

The explosives went off within seconds of each other. A score of detonations turned the anchor points along a long section of the starboard base to liquid. The blasts melted through the bases of four supports rising from the bottom deck, and their collapse triggered a chain reaction. The tangle of metal web fell. Cables snapped and catwalks whipped away from bulkheads. Orks were crushed beneath thousands of tonnes of falling iron. The interior of the battleship echoed and rang with the avalanche of metal and the howls of the dying. The flow of ammunition for the entire section ended. The guns would soon fall silent.

Zerberyn led the charge towards the bow. The Fists Exemplar alternated between firing into the gunnery compartments in the starboard bulkhead and triggering further collapses of the scaffold. They had left the boarding torpedoes hundreds of metres behind before the orks mounted a true counter-attack.

They came from the upper cannon emplacements to starboard, and from all levels to port, pouring out of hatches and tunnels. The furious green tide flooded the gallery.

‘Keep advancing!’ Zerberyn ordered. ‘We’ll kill the guns, then finish off the crew.’

Squad formation tightened. The Fists Exemplar became their name. They were a fist of ceramite, a fist over a hundred battle-brothers strong, a fist that punched through the enemy, leaving blood and flame in its wake. The density of bolter fire was ferocious. On the flanks, flamers washed jets of ignited promethium over the greenskins. Zerberyn inhaled the smell of burning xenos flesh even through his rebreather. The pungent stench crumbled beneath the purging burn of fuel.

The orks shot and slashed at the formation. Their own crowd worked against them. They cut each other down with their own guns. They could not bring their mass to bear unless they isolated battle-brothers. The fist kept advancing, killing orks with every step. It was a long, slow, inexorable blow. The greenskins threw themselves against the formation and died.

‘They are doing our work for us!’ Mandek voxed.

He sounded energised by the combat. Zerberyn glanced back. Mandek was close to his position, flamer reducing the enemy to ash. He fought with exuberance, and that was the battle-brother Zerberyn knew – the firebrand on the battlefield, not the worried soul he had seen on the bridge of the Dantalion.

‘Then we should make them work harder yet,’ Zerberyn said.

The leading edge of the fist formation threw more krak grenades ahead. They melted flesh as well as iron, and the collapse of the scaffold web spread.

Ten metres from the end of the gallery, after the last of the cannon enclaves, there was a large door in the starboard bulkhead. Zerberyn had just passed it when it blew open. Three monstrous orks stormed out. As big as Dreadnoughts, they were clad in armour that mirrored that of their vessel. They were huge, massively shielded. Two of them wielded what appeared to be power chainfists and claws large enough to peel open the hull of a Land Raider. They flanked the third, who had a flamer nozzle on either arm. It bellowed in eager rage and bathed the Fists Exemplar in fire.

The assault was a flaming deluge that swept over the formation. The temperature inside Zerberyn’s armour rocketed and fire covered his helmet. He could see nothing except the burning red. He fired towards the position of the orks, shooting blind, as did all his brothers for many rows of the formation.

‘Rush them!’ Zerberyn ordered. The flamer would be useless to the ork at point-blank range.

He ran to his right, still firing, still blinded by the unending stream of liquid flame. He could hear the roars of the giant orks over the din of battle, and that was enough of a guide. He pulled out his chainsword, revved its engine and thrust the whirring blade forward.

He collided with a moving wall. The impact stopped both him and the wall. The wall growled. It hit him from the side with something massive. He flew back and to his right, landing in a heap of fallen iron, outside the wash of the flamer, and he could see again.

The ork’s flamers launched the promethium with a pressure as high as the volume was enormous. It enveloped most of the Fists Exemplar’s formation. The fist had changed direction, had lost some of its coherence, and the flanking orks were smashing into it with their massive power limbs. The flamer ork turned off its weapon as the flaming mass it had created closed in to grapple with it. The greenskin attacked with piston-driven arms. It hands were strong enough on their own to rip a man in half.

Zerberyn was at the edge of the formation. Smaller orks surrounded him. He kept his back to the wreckage and climbed a few steps, gaining elevation. He severed arms and heads with his chainsword, holding back the tide while he looked for the opportunity to take down the giants.

He climbed another step. An ork leapt for him, arms outstretched to pull him back down into the greenskin cauldron. Zerberyn slammed the hilt of his chainsword onto the ork’s skull. He shoved its head down with such force that the beast impaled its throat on a spur of shattered girder. The ork twitched and writhed, helplessly pinned. Its blood poured down the jutting metal angles.

The flames were dying down, and the Fists Exemplar could see again. Bolter shells blasted away chunks of ork armour, but the giants had not slowed at all. Dead battle-brothers, bodies crushed and dismembered, lay at their feet. The flamer ork lunged down and seized a Space Marine. It lifted him clear of the formation.

It held Mandek. His left arm was pinned by the ork’s grip but his right was free, and he thrust his chainsword through the ork’s jaws. The beast uttered a choking shriek, tightening its grip convulsively. The sword cut through its throat. Mandek strained and hauled the blade to his right. The upper half of the ork’s head slid to the ground.

The body twisted to Mandek’s left as it began to fall.

Zerberyn had a clear shot at the fuel tanks on its back. He sent a full burst of shells into their centre. His brothers nearest the ork stepped back as the tanks exploded. The blast stunned the other two orks. The flash was dazzling, but Zerberyn’s auto-lenses flickered over his eyes, blocking the glare. Now he and his brothers had a few seconds of advantage where they could see and the greenskins could not.

A huge gout of flame erupted over one of the giants. The inferno flowed through every chink in its armour. The ork became a screaming, towering torch, flailing its arms, as blind as its foe had been moments before. The Fists Exemplar surged forward again, pressing their advantage.

The monster began to go down under the concerted assault.

The body of the flamer ork was still standing, like a monstrous idol that refused to topple. And it still held Mandek in its death grip.

Zerberyn leapt off the rubble. He smashed and cut his way through the stunned enemy, rejoining the formation. He skirted the edge of the fist, wielding his chainsword like a scythe, parting muscle and tendons. Orks fell before him, but he was wading in a muck of grasping limbs and blades. Too slow, too slow, he thought.

The seconds fell away, sluggish and fatal.

Mandek was cutting through the dead ork’s armoured limb. His chainblade sent out showers of sparks.

Too slow, too slow.

Behind Mandek, the third monster reached out with a claw. It hammered its power fist on the deck. Battle-brothers threw themselves out of its path. The blow was so powerful the deck rippled like water. Zerberyn stumbled as the surface beneath his boots dropped and jerked.

He reached the flames of the burning ork, and he could move faster. He slipped under the arms of the dead ork. He looked up into the leering face of the remaining giant.

A straight shot. Up through the jaw guard of its helm and into its eyes.

He brought up his bolter.

Too slow. Too slow.

The ork’s power claw closed around Mandek’s head.

Zerberyn fired.

The claw snapped shut.

The ork’s face disappeared. Its skull disintegrated. The hail of shells knocked the remains back in its helm with explosive force. This greenskin did not remain standing after it was dead. It fell backward. The closed power claw dropped away from Mandek’s headless corpse.

The giants were dead. The number of the other orks was dwindling.

Then Kalkator’s voice was on the vox, that double voice of ancient warrior and of something else even older, that voice of an enemy, yet that voice strangely welcome. ‘We have taken the bridge, Zerberyn,’ he said. ‘What is your status?’

‘The starboard guns are silenced, or soon will be,’ Zerberyn said. He took up his position at the head of the formation once more. The Fists Exemplar moved forward, grinding the orks into the deck. ‘The ammunition flow is disrupted. We will be moving to the port side now.’

‘We will join you there. The ship will soon be ours.’

‘Good.’ Zerberyn blinked the channel closed.

He looked forward to his left and to his right as he advanced, shoulder to shoulder with his brothers through the smouldering wreckage of the gallery. They were leaving brothers behind. At the rear of the formation, Apothecary Reoch would be retrieving the progenoid glands of the fallen, preserving their genetic legacy and the continuity of the Fists Exemplar. The brothers had not fallen into oblivion, and they had not fallen in vain. Their deaths gave him sorrow. He found acceptance in the thought of their gift to the future.

It was Mandek’s death that bothered him. Zerberyn had been unable to save him. There was nothing more he could have done. He knew this to be true.

And yet…

I did everything possible. No one could have saved him.

He repeated these truths to himself as if they were weak, and must be reinforced or else they would fracture and turn into lies. He repeated them in the hope they would bury his awareness of the other thing he was feeling.

Relief.

Mandek’s oblique accusations were silenced now. So were the questions he had asked.

And the astropathic message to Thane would not be sent.

He could not be saved, Zerberyn thought. Snarling, he blasted a charging ork’s torso to shreds.

He could not be saved.

He could not be saved.

Every step of the march through the gallery, Zerberyn repeated the words. They began as a refrain. Gradually, they became something more. Something very like a prayer.

He could not be saved.

He could not be saved.

There could be no salvation.

Six

Terra – the Imperial Palace

On Daylight Wall, Koorland watched and listened to the night. He had hoped to return to find the silence banished. Instead it was waiting for him, between the sounds of celebration, coiling around the lights in the dark.

This is the victory I have brought you, Koorland thought. Perhaps the citizens of Terra did not feel the silence. Or perhaps they were trying to banish it. Koorland could make no such pretence.

The silence of the dead regarded him from the depths of the night.

There were fires burning out there, but they were the bonfires of celebration and thanksgiving. The flames of destruction caused by the moonfall had been extinguished. Most of them. Towards the equator, one of the firestorms still burned. And the devastation would take centuries to repair.

In orbit above Terra, there was more damage. The void war had ended with the destruction of the moon. Many Imperial Navy vessels had been destroyed. Others barely limped back to port. At least the ork interceptors had been obliterated by the shockwave of the moon’s explosion.

Earlier in the day, in the Great Chamber, Koorland had listened to Tobris Ekharth read the tally of victory. Hundreds of millions dead. Entire regions of the Imperial Palace had vanished. Some of the craters were ten kilometres wide. So much dust had been thrown into an atmosphere already dark with pollutants, day had been banished for years to come. Terra cycled through the heavy gloom of evening to the most profound night. Ash fell across the globe, white and grey and black, an accumulation of dry, gritty snow.

When Ekharth had finished, Koorland looked at Kubik. ‘Why did this happen?’

‘The analysis of this event is ongoing,’ the Fabricator General said. ‘We may be years from a definitive answer.’

‘Then give us a theory.’

Servos hummed. Kubik inclined his head. ‘Our adaptation of ork technology is still imperfect. We postulate that we failed to account sufficiently for the variance between our modifications and the originals. It is possible the teleportation of the moon would have been successful had the devices been powered entirely by our own energy sources. The attempted integration, however, failed.’

‘The xenos and the human cannot coexist,’ Veritus said quietly.

‘Well observed, inquisitor,’ said Kubik. ‘We might hypothesise a technological conflict. One that was resolved with the teleportation of only one half of the moon.’

‘To where?’ Koorland asked.

‘We do not know.’ Kubik waved his mechanical fingers. ‘The destination is unimportant. Given the energy released, we may presume that what vanished met the same fate upon arrival as that which remained.’ The fingers coiled into tight spirals. The gesture looked very like frustration. ‘These reasons for failure remain conjectural. We will need considerably more experimental data to obtain a more complete understanding of where we succeeded and where we failed. It is unfortunate that none of our sensors survived.’ His optics turned to Koorland. The gaze felt accusatory.

‘The equipment on the Herald of Night was destroyed?’ Lansung asked.

‘Scanning and recording devices were,’ said Koorland. ‘All circuits were melted when the kill-teams were teleported back to the ship.’

‘Very unfortunate,’ Kubik said. ‘Very unfortunate.’

Koorland had felt little sympathy for Kubik’s disappointment at that moment. He felt even less now. The crowd noises that reached his ears were the voices of people who had experienced true loss, not the private disappointment of the Mechanicus.

Yet the citizens of Terra were celebrating. Ceremonies were being held in every chapel and cathedral. The dead were mourned, and the Emperor was thanked. The ceremonies began in the false day and continued into the hard night. With the coming of night, the festivals began too. In the courtyards of hab complexes, on roofs of manufactoria, in the streets and in the marketplaces, the crowds gathered. They sang their praise of the Emperor. They celebrated the valour of the warriors who had destroyed the face in the sky, the face that had mocked them, threatened them, and shouted ‘I AM SLAUGHTER!’ at the world for so many days. They celebrated the fall of the face of the Beast. They celebrated as if the war had been won.

Koorland did not begrudge the people their celebration. That they could rejoice at all was cause for hope. But there was a sound he did not like. He had heard it since he had landed, after the Thunderhawks had escaped the meteor storm. He heard it now: two syllables that rose between the prayers to the Emperor. He heard his name.

He was the hero of Terra. He had returned bloodied from Ullanor, only to wreak vengeance on the Beast and banish it from the skies. He was the author of this victory.

Koorland accepted he was the author of this night. He wondered whether it was proper to call it a victory. A battle had been won, at the cost of a new catastrophe. And the war was not won. He had only destroyed one of the Beast’s masks. The true monster was still on Ullanor, enthroned in the capital of his newborn empire.

‘Congratulations, Lord Guilliman.’

Koorland winced at the use of the title. He glanced to his right. Veritus had joined him at the rampart. Koorland grunted. He didn’t ask how Veritus had known he would be here. He did wish it was Vangorich who was standing there. ‘For what, inquisitor?’ he asked.

‘For the Deathwatch. For its official recognition by the High Lords.’

‘That was nothing more than what the Council had agreed to, prior to the mission.’ Mesring, he was sure, would still have objected. But Mesring had not been present in the Great Chamber. He was, it was said, resting. If so, that was an improvement over raving and screaming. Koorland saw no downside to the Ecclesiarch’s collapse.

‘In any event,’ said Veritus, ‘you have what you wanted.’

Koorland refused to rise to the bait. ‘If you truly believe that was my intent, you are a fool, and I don’t believe you are.’

Veritus nodded once. ‘Politics are never your intent, Lord Guilliman.’ He emphasised the title, reminding Koorland of what he had become, whether he liked it or not. ‘But politics are your effect. You imposed your will on the Council. They accepted the temporary formation of the Deathwatch, and now that it has proven itself, they are forced to accept its permanence.’

‘Permanence? You think the other Chapters will consent to its existence beyond the end of the war?’

‘And do you think no further crises will arise which would create the need for it?’

This was not a debate Koorland was interested in having. Especially not with the Inquisitorial Representative.

‘What I think,’ he said, ‘is that you did not seek me out to offer congratulations.’

‘No.’ The old man’s gaze was lidded and dark. ‘The Deathwatch did well on the attack moon. Your strategy against the Beast is sound. I am curious, then. How will you use it on Ullanor? How will you decapitate the orks?’

Again Koorland wished Veritus away and Vangorich present. He did not trust the inquisitor. Even though he would reveal his plan of attack to the Council, he recoiled from the idea of Veritus having advance knowledge of it.

Koorland shrugged. He had no plan for Veritus to learn. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

He was surprised to hear Veritus express sympathy. ‘I do not envy you the responsibility of this decision. We live in a dark age. The orks are stronger and more advanced than they have ever been, and the Imperium cannot do what once it could. We have fallen far.’

The admission took Koorland aback. It seemed that it was Veritus who wished to speak. Behold a wonder, he thought. The Inquisition seeks to unburden itself.

‘I have read the chronicles,’ Koorland said, hoping to prompt more from Veritus.

‘They are far from complete. So much has been forgotten in a thousand years.’ Veritus paused. ‘There are archives…’ he began, hesitated again, then continued. ‘During the Great Crusade, we would have had the means to counter the Beast’s weapons.’

‘I can well believe it.’

Veritus changed the subject abruptly. ‘Have you thought about how the Deathwatch will neutralise the ork witches?’

‘What do you mean?’ Koorland asked, wondering how much Veritus knew.

‘I have seen the Black Templars’ data,’ the inquisitor said. ‘The witches, I would think, are key. Kill them, and you have your decapitation.’

Koorland sighed. Why did he think there was anything he knew that Veritus did not? ‘True,’ he said.

‘How will the Deathwatch destroy them?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said again. Dark laughter welled up from his chest. ‘Like you said, if this were the Great Crusade, we would have the means. Vulkan mentioned a special force – anti-psykers called Sisters of Silence – who would have been sent against the witches.’

‘The Sisters of Silence,’ said Veritus. ‘So named for the vow of silence. They were warriors of a particularly rare sort. They were psychic blanks. Their mere presence disrupted a psyker’s ability.’

‘You seem to know quite a bit about them.’

He wondered how. The archives of the Inquisition were deep, their memories long. But Veritus had the knowledge so easily at hand. Veritus nodded, but offered no explanation.

‘Such a force would be a gift from the Emperor,’ Koorland said. ‘If we could neutralise the greenskin psykers, then decapitation would be possible. But as you say, we have fallen since the days of the Great Crusade.’

Veritus was quiet for a long time. Then he said, ‘Not all have fallen.’

‘Who hasn’t?’

‘The Sisters of Silence.’

‘They still exist?’

Veritus nodded. ‘I believe so. Some.’

Where? Koorland tried to say. His tongue refused to obey him. The silence he had confronted since Ullanor rushed towards him, and it was not the thing he had believed. It was not the judgement of the past. It was the presence of fate.

‘Where?’ he managed, speaking not to Veritus, but to the silence.

‘Do you believe him?’ Thane asked.

‘Do we have a choice?’ Koorland replied.

They were in Thane’s quarters, in the small office outside his meditation cell. There were the bare necessities for command – a desk, two chairs, a vox-unit. A stained-glass portrait of Dorn covered the lone window.

The warriors of the Last Wall were stationed in the Imperial Fists barracks at the base of Daylight Wall. There were too many empty cells, Koorland thought. Too many reminders of compounded loss. At least some were occupied.

‘He hasn’t given us much to go on,’ said Thane.

‘I don’t think he has much more.’

Thane shook his head. ‘The Inquisitorial Representative is urging you to seek a myth, using a few uncertain clues as a guide. This really was Veritus?’

‘And he wishes to accompany you.’

‘How reassuring. He…’ Thane stopped. ‘Me?’ he said.

‘This won’t be the only Deathwatch mission,’ said Koorland. ‘We can’t attack Ullanor yet, but there are other targets that will make a difference. Mine is the ultimate responsibility and command for the whole. I must remain here. So yes, you and Squad Gladius.’

Thane frowned. He drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘I will do as you command, of course,’ he said.

‘But you have another concern.’

‘As Chapter Master of the Fists Exemplar, yes.’

‘What is it?’

‘I have repeatedly ordered the return of the rest of the fleet. Especially after our losses, we need the reinforcement to fulfil our duty of defence of Terra.’

‘Spoken like a true son of Dorn,’ said Koorland.

‘I ask to be nothing else.’

‘Repeated orders, you said?’

Thane nodded. ‘Most recently just before we departed for the ork base.’ He picked up a parchment and presented it to Koorland.

‘Is that the response?’ Koorland asked as he took it.

‘No. It’s a message from the Adeptus Astra Telepathica confirming that there has been no response.’

‘You have had no news from them?’

‘Nothing more recent than what the Black Templars relayed.’

‘The worst may have befallen them.’

Thane nodded again.

‘That doesn’t satisfy you,’ said Koorland.

‘I have considered that possibility. It could well be the truth. I was cut off from that portion of the fleet, and there were Traitors in the field as well as orks. Even so. All the ships destroyed without being able to send a single message?’

‘That does seem unlikely,’ Koorland admitted.

‘That unlikelihood in those particular circumstances concerns me.’

‘With justification,’ said Koorland. ‘However, what action can you take?’

Thane grimaced in frustration. ‘None,’ he said.

‘You are needed on this mission more than you are on Terra,’ Koorland went on. ‘And as I told you, Veritus is going too.’

Thane let out a bark of mirthless laughter. ‘We aren’t just going where an inquisitor points us. We will be led by the Inquisitorial Representative himself. We will trust a High Lord not to take us to destruction?’

‘No,’ said Koorland. ‘We aren’t going to trust him at all. He knows the way to where he thinks you may find the Sisters of Silence. Use his information. Listen to what he has to say. But the mission is yours. You are a Chapter Master leading Adeptus Astartes. The Deathwatch is not the Inquisition’s to command.’

‘Agreed. He’ll try to assume that authority, though. That’s a certainty.’

‘His tactics do not appear to be subtle. So far, at least. His power grabs have been accompanied by a clear belief in his entitlement. All the same, be wary, especially when you find the Sisters.’

‘You mean if, don’t you?’

‘No.’ Koorland spat the word out. If he denied the possibility of failure with enough force, perhaps he could will what the Imperium needed into existence. ‘They must be found. Without them…’ He stopped himself. Had he been about to say that unless the myths were discovered to exist, the war was hopeless? No. He would not permit himself so unworthy a thought. But oh, the weight of the defeats. It grew and grew, his shoulders straining to hold it up. Even the victories were partial, and came at so great a cost they were difficult to regard as triumphs. And so many victories led only to greater defeats. He and Thane had already found one myth, only to lose Vulkan forever on the blood-soaked ground of another legend.

And now another search. Once again on the sword point of desperation.

‘No,’ Koorland said again. ‘When you find them. You will.’

‘Because I must,’ Thane said. His face was lined with sorrow. He looked over at the stained-glass portrait of Dorn. ‘Do you think, when this war has run its course, we will have destroyed all the myths that were left to us?’

‘If we do,’ Koorland said, ‘we will create new ones. If we have to embody them ourselves.’

On the landing pad of the pocket space port, Wienand approached the warriors of Squad Gladius. ‘Politics,’ she said, ‘is a disease.’

The Space Marines were preparing the Penitent Wrath to leave from the only launching facility within kilometres of the barracks that had not been devastated by the meteor storm. They would be departing within hours. Veritus had not joined them yet. Wienand had guessed he would not arrive until shortly before the launch.

Thane and the warriors in black looked at her, motionless.

‘You have no love for politicians,’ Wienand continued. ‘Look where the Council has brought us. But politics are inevitable. There is no cure for the plague, and no immunity. Look at yourselves. The Deathwatch is political in its elements, and deeply so in its effect.’

‘Why are you here, inquisitor?’ Thane asked.

‘I’m here to contain the damage of your current infection.’

Warfist growled. ‘You think we would accept a second inquisitor on this mission?’

‘When that inquisitor is myself, yes.’ She walked across the launch pad, stopping near the gunship’s ramp. ‘I notice you take for granted that I know the nature of your mission.’

‘If you’re here,’ Abathar said, ‘then you know.’

‘No games,’ said Warfist. ‘State your intent or leave us.’

‘I’ve already stated my intent. And you are all playing the political game whether you admit it to yourself or not. But you’re right, I should be clear. You know Inquisitor Veritus and I do not work hand in glove.’

‘You are both inquisitors,’ said Forcas.

‘Which did not stop him from attempting to have me assassinated. He did succeed in having me deposed as Inquisitorial Representative.’

‘And?’ said Thane.

‘You should think of me as a check against his game.’

There was silence as the Space Marines exchanged glances. She waited in their midst. She did not withdraw to give them privacy. They would have to grow used to her presence. She watched them think through what she proposed. She had no authority here. She could only be invited. But if Thane, as mission commander, requested her presence, Veritus would not be able to overrule him.

‘Why do you wish to come?’ Straton asked.

Because there is great potential in what the Deathwatch is and does, she thought. Because I won’t let Veritus seize that potential for himself. What she said was, ‘Because I need to see what you will find.’ That, too, was the truth.

Vangorich had told her what Koorland planned. ‘The Sisters of Silence,’ she had said. She had never expected to speak those words. Years before, in the vaults of the Inquisition’s fortress, she had read about them, and many other organisations that might or might not have existed in the far reaches of time. She had never believed the order still endured. There was no reason to do so. The Sisters had vanished into a myth-shrouded past. What they represented…

She had not yet allowed herself to articulate what they meant, because the hope of their reality still felt like a forbidden one. Yet when she had spoken to Rendenstein about what Vangorich had told her, and what she planned, she had seen in her bodyguard’s face the same need, the same desire to hope, and the same caution. Rendenstein understood.

Thane was wearing his helmet. Wienand could not see his expression. But in the slight cocking of his head, she thought there was understanding.

‘You found one legend,’ she told him. ‘I need to be there when you find another.’

A low, weary chuckle emerged from the helm’s vox-grille. ‘Is that all?’

She grinned. ‘What do you think?’

Seven

Sacratus

The Sacratus System was a dark one. It was in an isolated sector in the eastern region of the Segmentum Pacificus, far from trade routes. It lacked any strategic value. The sun that shone on Sacratus was so distant, the light that reached the shrine world was frozen. It was the glint of ice, and the memory of solitude. The sluggish winds of the planet’s thin atmosphere stirred nitrogen snows over the roofs of mausoleums as large as manufactoria. The architecture reminded Thane more of an encrustation than of solemn remembrance. Sepulchres and vaults and chapels were built into and atop one another, tumours of granite and marble connected by tendrils of staircases.

Squad Gladius and Wienand followed Veritus down the staircases. The route was labyrinthine and patchwork, flights descending for hundreds of metres or less than five. Sometimes Veritus chose a direction that climbed back upwards for a few minutes, then he would take a sudden turn downwards again. Sometimes he would pause and consult his data-slate. For the most part he walked without hesitation.

‘He is sure of his way,’ Straton said.

‘Very,’ Thane agreed. ‘What do you know of this world?’ he asked Wienand.

She walked just ahead of the squad, a few steps behind Veritus.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I had never heard of it before now.’

‘You have not been looking at the correct records,’ Veritus said without looking back. The old man took the stairs with a surprisingly limber gait, even in his environmental suit.

‘Oh? And which ones were those?’

Veritus didn’t answer.

Eventually the staircases were no longer in the open air. The Deathwatch moved past and through shrines that had been buried by the others.

‘This is an underhive of remembrance,’ said Forcas.

Thane shone his light over the statuary. ‘What era is this from?’ he asked Veritus.

‘The Great Crusade,’ Veritus said, ‘and a few centuries after. Then it was forgotten.’

Thane supposed he should not be surprised. Sacratus was off the trade routes. There were no habitable planets in the system and it had no strategic value. He could imagine the memory of the world fading until it was a name on mouldering lists. That did not explain how Veritus knew of its existence.

At last they reached a door guarded by two caryatids in ancient armour. Their mouths were covered by grilles in the form of Imperial eagles.

‘You’ve been here before,’ said Wienand.

‘No,’ Veritus replied.

They passed through the high arch between the caryatids. A domed space lay beyond. Sarcophagi ringed the periphery, and statues lay in repose on each tomb. They wore the same armour as the tomb’s guardians. Veritus pointed upward.

‘There,’ he said. ‘That is what we’ve come to see.’

The Space Marines directed their lamps at the dome. Its fresco, dim with age and frost, depicted a group of female warriors. Cloaks billowed behind their armour, blending together, becoming thunderclouds edged with fire. The women held their swords upraised, converging towards the centre of the dome, where a red sun blazed.

‘The stars,’ Abathar said.

‘Yes,’ said Veritus. ‘That is what we came here to learn.’

The red sun was at the centre of a pattern of stars, Thane now saw. ‘A chart,’ he said.

‘Of where?’ said Wienand.

‘Of the location of Vultus,’ Veritus said. ‘One of the principal fortresses of the Sisters of Silence. This one is close to the edge of Imperial space. If unsanctioned psykers hoped to find refuge at the frontier, they were mistaken.’

‘What makes you think we’ll find them there?’ Thane asked.

‘I have accounted for the other, less remote fortresses. They are all abandoned.’

‘That doesn’t explain why this one won’t be,’ said Wienand.

Veritus shrugged. ‘That is where we must go,’ he said.

The Herald of Night’s Navigator identified Vultus’ system as Extorris. When the strike cruiser translated from the warp, the red giant filled the oculus with sullen crimson light.

‘Hostile contacts!’ the Master of the Auspex called out.

‘The orks are here?’ said Adnachiel.

‘Yes, lord.’

Thane stood with the rest of the squad and the two inquisitors around the tacticarium table. He watched the pict-screens light up with the configurations of the enemy deployment. The orks had a small fleet stationed above a moon of the gas giant fourth from the star.

‘Two battleships,’ Adnachiel said from the pulpit. ‘Five cruisers.’

‘What are they doing out here?’ Wienand wondered.

‘Saving us time in our search,’ said Adnachiel. ‘We know where we are heading now.’

‘Lord,’ said the auspex officer, ‘the vessels are not attacking.’

‘What?’

‘We are picking up heat emissions suggesting launches, but no bombardment. We are also detecting some launches from the moon’s surface.’

‘Missiles?’

‘No, too slow. I would suggest orks returning to the motherships.’

Adnachiel turned around to face Thane. ‘This is your search,’ he said. ‘Your determination.’

‘This doesn’t sound like combat,’ said Thane.

‘It does not,’ Adnachiel agreed. ‘It sounds like the end of an engagement.’

We can’t be too late, Thane told himself. If the orks had won so easily, their search had been pointless from the start.

‘We need to see for ourselves,’ he said.

‘Why are the orks here?’ said Abathar. ‘The question is significant.’

Thane nodded. ‘We need to go in.’

Adnachiel kept the huge orb of the gas giant between the Herald of Night and the ork fleet. Shipmaster Aelia brought the strike cruiser as close to the atmosphere as possible, deep within the planet’s ferocious magnetosphere. The Penitent Wrath launched just over the horizon from the greenskin ships. Qaphsiel, the Thunderhawk’s pilot, skimmed the cauldron of the emerald atmosphere until he had a straight shot up to the planetside face of the tidally locked moon.

The satellite was a small one, a craggy barren rock not much more than a hundred kilometres in diameter. Qaphsiel flew low above the surface, twisting through jagged canyons.

‘If you have any knowledge of the fortress,’ Thane said to Veritus, ‘it would be useful to hear it.’

‘You know as much as I do,’ the inquisitor said. ‘My knowledge ended on Sacratus.’

‘Then you will remain with the Penitent Wrath until we have a secured position.’

‘No,’ Wienand said. ‘We will follow with all due caution, but we’re coming with you.’

‘Why?’ Thane asked. He indulged in some heavy irony. ‘Don’t you trust us?’

‘We need to see,’ Wienand said, and Veritus nodded.

Thane disliked the unanimity the inquisitors were showing. Wienand’s tone, though, was more urgent. When she said we, it sounded like I. He thought about trying to force them to stay. He decided against it. If they got themselves killed, he would not mourn the loss.

The surface of the moon became more deeply scarred as the Thunderhawk drew nearer the fortress. The canyons were narrow, deep and interconnected. Soon the Penitent Wrath was flying through a landscape as cracked and shattered as glass, as if the gunship were approaching the site of a great blow.

Qaphsiel took the Thunderhawk up out of one gorge, then immediately dropped into a crevice no more than fifteen metres wide and hundreds deep. It cut almost directly towards the coordinates where the Herald of Night’s long-range auspex scans indicated Vultus stood. Thane felt the webbing of his grav-harness strain as Qaphsiel took hard turns between the rock walls.

A few minutes later, the crevice opened up into a deep, narrow bowl.

Looking through a viewing block, Wienand said, ‘This was a world shaped to their purpose.’

‘Indeed,’ Thane agreed.

Rising from the bowl was an immense column. It towered a hundred metres above the lip of the bowl, and it was over a kilometre wide. Vultus sat like a bird of prey on its peak. The fortress had been carved out of the rock of the column, the dark stone shaped into harsh towers. Their facades were perfectly vertical. Their angles, little eroded after a thousand years, were sharp as blades.

Qaphsiel flew just above the floor of the bowl as he closed in on the column. The orks appeared to have landed in the area beyond the bowl and on the launch pads Thane could see projecting from the column and the base of the fortress. As he watched, a ship lifted off one of the platforms. It trailed a long stream of fire in the thin atmosphere.

‘They’re leaving,’ Wienand said.

‘Some of them.’ Qaphsiel had gone into a steep climb. The features of Vultus were becoming clearer. So were the shapes of other ork vessels, their wings overhanging the edges of the platforms.

‘They can’t help but see us soon,’ said Veritus.

‘If they look,’ said Abathar.

‘I have a target for insertion,’ Qaphsiel said over the gunship’s vox. ‘The defence batteries directly above us.’

‘A good choice,’ Straton said. ‘There are no landing platforms on this face of the fortress.’

Unless the orks were using the guns. Thane brushed away the pessimistic thought. Whatever the orks wanted with Vultus, he did not believe they had come to seize it and hold it against non-existent enemies.

‘Make ready,’ Thane said. He detached the grav-harness. He stood. Leaning against the sharp angle of the ascent, he moved to the side door and slid it back. A hot wind raged through the troop compartment. The Deathwatch squad gathered behind him.

The Penitent Wrath levelled off as it reached the height of the fortress. A domed building hulking in the centre of the complex gave Thane the impression of a structure closed in on itself. Its nature seemed to float ambiguously between refuge and prison.

There were windows in the towers. They had all been smashed. Wedges of armourglass glinted like teeth in the red light of the sun.

Qaphsiel lowered the Thunderhawk over a gun emplacement halfway up. The platform was wide, and ran most of the length of the facade. Silent cannons waited to destroy any enemy who would dare approach Vultus. The enemy had come, though. The enemy was doing what it willed, and the guns remained silent.

Squad Gladius jumped from the gunship. The Penitent Wrath dropped back down the column, and Thane led the way at a swift march to the nearest entrance. The plasteel door had been smashed down from the inside.

The passageway beyond was dark. The fortress had no power. It was inert as dead as the rock of its walls. Aggressive life moved through the tomb, though. Brutes growled in the distance. Things smashed. But there was no gunfire. There was no battle.

‘The Sisters of Silence are not here,’ Forcas said.

‘There would be fighting,’ Wienand agreed.

‘And I would feel them,’ said Forcas. ‘I would feel the pressure of the psychical null.’

‘This is futile,’ said Warfist.

‘The cannons we passed have not been serviced for a long time,’ Abathar put in. ‘It is highly unlikely the orks have defeated the Sisters. Vultus has been abandoned. Perhaps for centuries.’

‘Our search ends here, then?’ Straton asked.

‘Perhaps not,’ said Wienand. ‘The dome on Sacratus showed us the way here. Maybe this dome has a similar message.’

The chances seemed remote to Thane. But we have to find them, he thought. Any possibility was worth exploring. ‘We make for the dome, then,’ he said. ‘Silent kills. We have not come to fight an entire ork fleet.’

Warfist growled low in his chest, the sound predatory in anticipation. He took point, lightning claws extended. The rest of Squad Gladius drew blades. Wienand took out her laspistol. ‘I’ll use it only if we are discovered,’ she said.

Veritus carried no weapon.

‘You are not very formidable, inquisitor,’ Warfist said.

‘In combat, no,’ said Veritus. ‘Nor am I a fool.’

Yet here we are, Thane thought.

They moved into the corridor. The walls were bare, the shredded remains of tapestries lying at their base. The first intersection was littered with overturned pedestals and smashed statuary. A severed head, its mouth covered by the same eagle grille as the caryatids of Sacratus, stared at the ceiling, judgement hard as the void in its blank eyes.

The route to the dome was obvious. The passageway from the gun emplacements ended at a corridor wide as an avenue. Traffic would once have moved rapidly from one end of the citadel to the other, down great halls radiating like spokes from the dome. Vehicles had come down this route very recently. The air stank of spent fuel. The walls were marred by wide scorch marks, and for as far as Thane could see in the light cast by their helms, broken statues lay on the floor.

‘The vandalism is systematic,’ Forcas said. ‘There is hatred here.’

‘The orks recognise the threat of the Sisters of Silence,’ said Veritus.

‘How?’ Wienand asked. ‘Have they encountered them before?’

‘These ork witches are powerful,’ said Forcas. ‘Perhaps, as a collective, they can sense the presence of a threat somewhere. They’re searching too. Seeking to destroy the threat, and any trace that it ever existed.’

From far down the corridor came growls and the sounds of smashing stone.

‘We will not surprise them on this route,’ Warfist said. He turned off the wide hall at the first opportunity, finding a narrow passage running parallel, and loped ahead of the rest of the squad. He had removed his helm, and he paused at intersections to sniff the air.

The further the Deathwatch went, the louder the ork din became. The sounds bounced off the stones of Vultus, redirected by the whims of the architecture.

‘Auspex?’ said Thane.

‘Unhelpful,’ Abathar replied. ‘The biomass is too large and mobile, and we do not know the floor plans of this fortress. I cannot narrow the enemy’s location and movements to specific halls.’

Warfist held up a hand. Helm lights switched off. Thane blinked through to thermal sight. Warfist was motionless.

‘Approaching,’ the Space Wolf voxed. He prowled forward, a silent giant, then turned left into another branching corridor and vanished.

Thane waited. Sounds grew sharper. Booted feet were coming closer. The snarls were close, not echoes. Metal scraped against stone. Thane’s lenses picked up heat silhouettes. Then light reappeared. A large group of orks came down the corridor at a fast march. They shouted at each other as they dragged their blades along the engravings on the walls. The lead ork wielded a jagged cleaver in each hand. The beast was large enough to gouge both walls as it ran.

‘Take them,’ said Thane.

Forcas struck first. The blow was silent. Its effect was not. The lead ork stumbled. It screamed. It dropped its weapons and clutched its head. It fell to its knees. The mob behind it milled in confusion. The agony of their leader held the greenskins’ attention. They did not shine their lights further down the corridor. They did not think to suspect an attack.

The leader’s howls became a hissing rasp, pain exceeding the body’s ability to express it. Scalding blood erupted from its eyes and ears and mouth. Crimson steam filled the hall. The chieftain’s body fell forward at the same moment that Warfist hit the orks from behind. He jabbed out with his lightning claws, stabbing through the necks of two greenskins at once. Thane heard his satisfied grunt on the vox.

Thane and Straton rushed on, Abathar and Forcas following more slowly. The orks heard the pounding of ceramite boots and finally looked up, much too late. Thane and Straton cut into the greenskins with chainswords. The snarl of the blades rattled the stones of the hall, yet it was of a kind with the howls of the orks and the roar of their weapons. The orks’ guns were still strapped to their belts. They had thought they were alone in the fortress. Thane wanted the delusion preserved for the rest of the force.

‘No firearms,’ he voxed to the squad.

‘Good,’ said Warfist.

Thane ran his blade through the chest of one ork. He yanked it from the falling corpse with such violence that the edge of the blade plunged into the shoulder of the ork to his right, severing the arm, then grinding through the beast’s spine. Straton clashed with a greenskin almost as big as the dead leader. He angled his chainsword and cut through the head of the ork’s hammer, so the xenos weapon fell into two halves, and the Ultramarine’s blade continued downward, cleaving the monster’s skull.

Abathar’s plasma cutter burned through eyes and throats, the hiss of its beam unheard in the tumult. Forcas boiled the blood of another ork. Warfist killed two more before the rest of the mob at last realised death had come for them in both directions. They lashed out, and they were strong in their rage.

The Deathwatch was precise.

Thane and Straton pressed in hard. There was no room in the narrow passage for the orks to find their footing and use their mass. They had no momentum behind their blows. An axe crashed against Thane’s helmet. His ears rang. He brought his chainsword up through the ork’s gut. The huge body shuddered. There was a second, weaker blow of the axe before it fell from dead fingers.

Squad Gladius waded deeper into the greenskins. Thane’s senses were submerged in the thick, liquid stench of gouting blood and greenskin musk. Claws and blades and tusks and straining muscle tried to fell him. He cut the tide back. He and his brothers in black forced it down. Ultramarine doggedness meshed with Space Wolf savagery, with Blood Angel precision and Dark Angel relentlessness. The machine rendered the orks to bloody meat. Thane had seen the fusion of battle philosophies on the attack moon, in the desperation of that struggle. He saw it again now, the interlacing occurring automatically, triggered by the moment of conflict. As the last of the orks fell, he began to understand why the Council felt so threatened by the Deathwatch.

This was a new force for war.

Wienand watched the five Space Marines take apart a score of orks in a matter of seconds. She realised Veritus was looking at her. ‘What is it?’ she said as the squad moved on. Her boots splashed through a pool of blood.

‘That skirmish didn’t mean anything,’ said Veritus.

‘Your point?’

‘Any squad of Adeptus Astartes would have made short work of those orks.’

‘I see,’ she said, as if she accepted what Veritus was saying. Her interest in the Deathwatch threatened him, she thought. Good.

Veritus was right. He was also obfuscating. The importance of what Wienand had watched lay not in the challenge this group of orks had presented, but in the manner the squad had eliminated them. The disparate operated in unison, forming a lethally efficient whole. That was what was important.

The Deathwatch encountered two more ork patrols on the way to the dome. Warfist varied the route, switching corridors every few junctions, sometimes backtracking or travelling laterally for a brief period before returning to the original heading. The orks went down quickly each time, with no shots fired. The rest of the orks in the fortress never had the chance to learn what had come among them.

This deep in the fortress, they were surrounded by the clamour of the orks rampaging through chambers and halls, smashing all they found. The infernal choir of xenos roars was a mixture of triumph, rage and frustration. The orks had come to destroy an enemy that had vanished from these halls centuries before.

The Deathwatch entered the main hall again for the last hundred metres before the entrance to the dome.

‘We should wait,’ Forcas said. ‘There is a battle ahead that it will serve no purpose to engage.’

‘Ork witches?’ Thane asked.

‘Yes,’ said Forcas. ‘Several.’

‘The auspex indicates a large horde,’ Abathar said.

Warfist snorted. ‘I can hear it, Techmarine.’

The squad withdrew into an alcove. The entrance to the dome glimmered with light from the space beyond. Wienand could make out the movement of hundreds of large bodies. The dome rang with bestial shouts. There were flashes of energy too, which made her skin crawl. The flares were powerful, the colours somehow inherently inhuman. At intervals, the clamour of the mob faded and individual ork voices rose to prominence. The horde was listening. Wienand listened too, to the sound of the greenskin witches. There was no sense to the language, but she could hear the power. She glanced at Forcas. Deep in the shadows of his psychic hood, his eyes glittered. His concentration was ferocious.

These were the voices they must silence, Wienand thought. She felt the tension in the squad as the warriors held back from battle. They understood the necessity of restraint. And they resented that necessity.

‘How long must we wait here?’ Warfist growled.

‘Until they go,’ said Thane.

The Space Wolf growled. ‘This is shameful.’

‘Shame,’ said Forcas, ‘would come in failing the mission by rushing into a pointless fight we could not win.’

Warfist muttered something Wienand could not make out. Then he was silent again.

It was several hours before the orks tired of the dome. They streamed out of multiple doors. Three armoured transport vehicles thundered past the squad’s alcove. Behind them came well over a hundred orks. After they passed, Wienand could hear the fading sounds of other parties heading out in other directions from inside the dome.

Quiet fell at last beyond the doorway. Thane waited another few minutes, then nodded and led the way into the dome. In the distance, Wienand could still hear the orks ransacking Vultus. There was also the deep roar of ships taking off from the landing platforms. The greenskins were not yet done with the fortress, but the departure was accelerating.

She wondered if the orks had found a destination.

The Space Marines played their helm lights over the hall beneath the dome. They fanned out across the vastness.

‘What are we looking for?’ Straton asked.

‘Anything,’ said Thane.

‘The orks didn’t leave anything,’ Warfist observed.

The floor was a mass of wreckage. Wienand assumed there had been statuary here, but there was nothing left of it now. She had to clamber over mounds of rubble to reach the centre of the hall.

There had been something large there before, but now there was only a massive heap of ruined stone. There were angled chunks of marble and vague shapes suggestive of massiveness. A colossus of the Emperor, perhaps. A figure to tower beneath the dome, to inspire with majesty. Gone now, reduced to nothing, significance turned to dust.

Veritus wandered between the mounds a little distance away. Wienand called to him. ‘If we find nothing, then what?’

No answer.

You thought the Sisters of Silence would be here, didn’t you? she thought. You don’t have an option beyond this.

‘There’s nothing up there,’ Straton said.

Wienand craned her head back. The squad’s beams moved over the interior of the dome soaring far above. There was no fresco as there had been on Sacratus. There was nothing at all. Only darkness.

‘Did the orks destroy what was there?’ Thane asked.

‘It would appear not,’ Abathar said. ‘The stone itself is black. I perceive some smoke damage, but not much else.’ A few moments later he said, ‘There is evidence of scoring. The dome may have been scraped.’

‘By the orks?’ said Thane.

‘No. The scoring is beneath the smoke. It was done centuries ago.’

‘There’s no gallery,’ said Wienand. The walls of the hall rose uninterrupted to the base of the dome. ‘No way for the orks to get up there.’

‘And no reason for them to do so,’ Warfist said. He sounded disgusted. ‘This is futile.’

Wienand was still looking up at the hemisphere of darkness when the beams went away, and so she saw the light that stayed behind.

‘Wait,’ she said. She stared, wondering if she was hallucinating. There was a silvery glow around the base of the dome. It was so faint, it vanished when Wienand looked directly at it. She focused her gaze instead on the crown. The silver grew stronger in her peripheral vision. She perceived brighter points and the hint of tracery. ‘There is something. A faint phosphorescence.’

The Space Marines and Veritus moved towards her position. They turned off their lights. The hall fell into pitch darkness. Wienand could see the glow more clearly now. She could look at it directly, though she saw nothing more than the most fragile gossamer of grey. ‘Those are stars,’ she said. ‘It’s another chart.’

‘One that someone sought to obliterate,’ said Abathar.

‘Can you make a record of it?’ Thane asked.

‘Yes. It is too faint for pict inscription, but I am making a copy of the stars’ positions relative to each other.’

‘Will that be enough for the Navigator?’

‘We will hope it is.’

‘I see nothing in the centre,’ said Straton. ‘Is something missing? Is it possible all that remains is the edge of the chart?’

‘Unlikely,’ said Abathar. ‘The scoring cuts across the full height of the dome. The phosphorescence is limited to the lower third. There is…’ He trailed off.

‘What is it?’ said Thane.

‘I am uncertain. The pattern I have recorded is suggestive, but we will have to wait for confirmation aboard the Herald of Night.’

‘Suggestive of what?’ said Thane. ‘I trust your conclusions, Brother Abathar.’

‘If this is a chart, it points to nothing at all.’

‘You mean there is no direction?’ said Veritus. ‘Or that it is unreadable?’

‘Neither, inquisitor. I mean as I say – nothing. The crown of the dome is between systems. There truly is nothing there.’

Eight

The Western Reaches
of the Segmentum Pacificus – the void

The Herald of Night came to the nothingness and found hordes. Instead of dark, there was the flare of engines, the flash of launches and guns, the streak of missiles. The orks besieged a point where there should have been emptiness.

There was a single planet in the starless night. It was a rocky mass, so cold its atmosphere was frozen, sullen snow. But the orks had brought heat to the world. Their bombardment melted nitrogen and methane. It pounded the surface to a molten orange, as if the greenskins sought to turn the world into a flowing, liquid hell.

But the world resisted. It remained solid. And the target of the orks’ hatred struck back.

‘Lance fire from the surface,’ said Adnachiel. He pointed to a spike of icons on a pict screen, and looked around the tacticarium table at the Deathwatch and the inquisitors. ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘By the Throne, I don’t think I can credit it even now. But I congratulate you. We have found our myths.’

‘At war,’ said Thane. ‘The orks have found them too. Before us.’

‘They wasted no time,’ said Straton.

‘No,’ said Adnachiel, ‘these are not the orks we saw over Vultus. The ships are different. The fleet is larger.’ He paused, his eye caught by a change on the pict screen to the left of the table. He grunted. ‘Cannon fire from the surface now too. And the orks have just lost an escort vessel. Impressive.’

‘But insufficient,’ Thane said.

Adnachiel nodded. ‘There are heat signatures of landing craft. The greenskins are attacking on the surface as well.’ He frowned. ‘What I do not understand is, if they already knew the location of the Sisters of Silence, what interest did they have in Vultus?’

‘Fear,’ said Veritus. ‘Or something very like it. The orks sense the threat the Sisters of Silence represent. They seek to destroy all trace of them.’ He pointed to the centre of the tacticarium table. The hololithic display of the planet had an illuminated target. Its coordinates marked the focus of the orbital bombardment and the ork landings, and the origin of the surface fire. The Herald of Night was as yet too distant for the auspex array to form an image of the fortress itself. But the citadel was there, its existence confirmed by the conflict. ‘The orks cannot know that this is the one place in the galaxy where the Sisters of Silence may be found. They must attack every trace of them they find.’

Warfist bared his teeth. ‘If this is true, so much the better. The thought of orks feeling threatened cheers me enormously.’

‘It proves the importance of our mission,’ Thane said. He examined the relative positions of the strike cruiser and the ork fleet. ‘What is your evaluation?’ he asked Adnachiel.

‘Worse than Vultus. This ork fleet is not much larger, but that one was already large enough. There are no planets to use as cover for our approach. The orks will see us coming, if they have not already detected our presence. If we fight…’ He stopped for a moment.

‘No one doubts your skill or the strength of your ship,’ said Thane.

‘I hope no one doubts my intelligence, either,’ Adnachiel replied. ‘The numbers and the forces are what they are. We can fight. We cannot win.’

‘We have not come all this way for a pointless sacrifice,’ said Warfist.

Adnachiel gave the Space Wolf a curt nod. ‘Quite,’ he said.

‘Then our attack must be in two stages,’ said Thane. ‘We must neutralise the fleet before we engage with the orks planetside.’

‘Obviously,’ said Wienand. ‘But what is the plan to do that?’

Thane had no illusions about the situation. He could see many ways for it to end in disaster, and knew there were many more he had not imagined. Even so, his lips pressed into a taut smile. ‘I thought it was clear,’ he told Wienand. ‘We are going to destroy an ork fleet.’

‘The Herald of Night?’

‘No. The Deathwatch.’

Five Space Marines in a single boarding torpedo came for the fleet. The launch of the torpedo, from the limit of its range, signalled the opening of a new front for the orks, though they did not know it. Abathar steered at an angle away from the Herald of Night, putting distance between the torpedo and its source. The Deathwatch streaked through the void, a lone missile directed at a fleet, beneath notice as the greenskins poured their wrath on the world below them.

The target was the largest of the battleships at the centre of the ork formation. Thane watched the readout of the vessel grow on the torpedo’s navigation pict screen. The representation began as a single point. It became an outline, then an ever-more detailed schematic in red lines. Icons for possible attack points multiplied.

‘Have you chosen?’ Thane asked.

‘Yes,’ said Abathar. His servo-arm pointed at the screen, to the junction of the immense engine block and the rest of the hull. The vessel narrowed slightly there. The battleship’s construction was a brutal monumentalism, a welding together of the massive. But still there was a junction. The shielding and the hull would be thinner. And the location was close to the goal.

‘Good,’ Thane approved. ‘And the ship’s position?’

‘Within an acceptable risk,’ Abathar said. ‘The defensive fire from the planet is pushing the greenskins back. They are substantially further from the surface than the enemy over Vultus.’

‘Far enough, then.’

‘Within an acceptable risk,’ Abathar said again.

They had no choice, Thane thought. There was no other way of dealing with the ork fleet. What would be an unacceptable risk? he wondered.

Nothing.

The action was necessary. It was the only alternative to assured defeat.

‘Time?’ he asked.

‘One hundred seconds,’ Abathar told him.

Thane voxed Adnachiel. ‘We are about to make our attack,’ he said.

‘Very well. We will delay engagement until your signal if possible. The Emperor protects.’

‘The Emperor protects.’

Behind Thane, Forcas said, ‘We are establishing a precedent.’

Thane turned around. Forcas was looking at the teleport homer on Abathar’s back.

‘The means we are using,’ Forcas went on. ‘The tools. The weapons.’

‘You think we should not employ them to defeat the orks?’

‘The devices are… impure,’ Forcas said. He used the word with the conviction of someone who was given to meditating on its meaning and implications. ‘Using them has a cost. We have seen that already.’

‘They aren’t made by xenos hands,’ Thane reminded him, though images of the cratered Imperial Palace flashed before his mind’s eye. ‘They are still productions of the Mechanicus.’

‘Their derivation is suspect.’

‘Nevertheless,’ Straton put in, ‘they are authorised.’

‘Even under the eyes of the Inquisition,’ said Warfist. He appeared to take sour enjoyment from the irony.

Forcas gave a solemn nod, acknowledging the points. ‘Yet the fact remains the technology originates with the greenskins. The taint cannot be expunged through adaptation. We are conscious of its danger. We are using it in extremity. Would any of you wish this technology to have widespread adoption by Imperial forces? By all the Chapters? By the Astra Militarum?’

The others were silent, their faces grim.

‘No,’ said Thane. Forcas was right. Already they’d had ample reason to distrust the ork-derived technology. Thane imagined the propagation of its use, and realised he was picturing a plague.

‘There must be a balance,’ Forcas said. ‘I acknowledge the necessity that forces our hands today. Yet we must limit the moral harm.’

‘Restrict the use of such weapons to the Deathwatch,’ said Straton.

We. The Deathwatch. They were speaking as a unified force, Thane realised. And they were discussing situations that extended far beyond the current mission. He had agreed with Koorland that the Deathwatch was a temporary measure. In many ways, it had to be. He knew his involvement was limited. His responsibilities as Chapter Master made it so. Nor could he imagine any of the Space Marines before him adopting the black livery permanently. They, too, would return to their Chapters.

And yet.

We. The Deathwatch.

There was something permanent here.

‘Fifty seconds,’ Abathar said, recalling Thane to the moment.

The boarding torpedo had no viewing blocks. The pict-screens above the steering controls were Thane’s only window onto the battlefield. He watched the columns of icons and coordinates change as Abathar aimed the torpedo at its target. The bombardment was intensifying. There were more and more landing ships descending to the surface. Damage runes were also appearing with greater frequency. The defenders of the starless world were exacting a price from the invaders.

All of the ork fire was directed at the planet. The Herald of Night had not been detected.

‘The Emperor does protect,’ Thane said. ‘He does indeed.’

‘Brace for impact,’ Abathar warned.

Thane stood firm against the coming blow.

The boarding torpedo hit the port side of the engine block’s junction. Violent rattling shook the torpedo hull as the drill head ground its way through the immense barrier. There were no void shields, only a monstrous excess of metal between the Deathwatch and their prey. The grinding went on for several minutes. Squad Gladius stood in a line before the hatch door, ready for the moment to storm out of the torpedo. Abathar’s head was cocked as if he were listening for nuances in the cries of iron agony.

‘We are nearly through,’ the Techmarine said.

Thane lifted his bolter.

The torpedo jerked forward, grinding air, then stopped. The hatch blew open. Squad Gladius charged out from below the drill head. The torpedo had broken through into a corridor running fore and aft. The battleship rang with the incessant beat of its bombardment. There was a group of orks to the right, frozen in surprise. Gladius cut them down with a sustained burst of bolter fire and the orks died before they could react.

The corridor was wide and high, yet it felt crowded by the tangle of enormous conduits that made up its ceiling. The walls on either side were an assembly of mismatched and misshapen iron slabs, held together by an exuberance of rivets the size of Thane’s fist. Past the bodies of the orks, the passage continued a hundred metres into the engine block before it ended at a blast door.

There were no other orks in sight. ‘These seconds are ours,’ Thane said. ‘Let us make good use of them.’

The Deathwatch moved swiftly down the hall, Abathar in the lead. The Techmarine paused just short of the blast door.

‘A Dreadnought could pass through that,’ Straton said.

‘I choose not to,’ Abathar said. He was looking at the conduits above his head. ‘A struggle for the enginarium will not serve.’

‘Assuming it lies beyond that barrier,’ said Thane.

‘The presence of a blast door in this location of the hull suggests it does.’ Abathar took a step to his right. He pointed at the conduits. ‘So do these.’ He was under the largest. It was nearly three metres wide. Water dripped from cracks and clumsy welds. ‘This one,’ he said. His servo-arm reached upward. He used his plasma cutter to slice through the metal in a circle while the rest of the squad trained guns down the corridor. A few seconds later, a large iron disc clattered to the deck. A stream of brown water poured down. A hot wind, foul with a mix of xenos musk and burned fuel, blew from the gap.

‘Ventilation,’ he said, sounding both satisfied and offended. ‘Ventilation and cooling. The greenskins’ conception of the machine is obscene.’

‘Though powerful,’ Forcas said.

‘This is so.’ To Thane he said, ‘This will be my route.’

‘Very well. We will keep their attention focused elsewhere.’

Abathar took hold of the edge of the hole with the servo-arm’s claw. He pulled himself up until he could grasp the edge with his gauntlets and disappeared into the conduit, heading in the direction of the engine block.

‘Now the guns,’ Thane said.

There was the long, booming thunder of another volley. The corridor shook. Warfist laughed. ‘They will not be difficult to find.’

Abathar moved through the long darkness of the conduit, facing into a burning gale. He tasted the air through his rebreather grille, laden with particles of soot and unrefined promethium. He was conscious of how offensive this machine grotesquerie was to the Omnissiah. He would make the destruction of this ship a worthy offering.

The pipe stretched on and on. The wind grew stronger. He would find his goal at the source of the wind, he was sure of this. It was consistent with the paradox that was ork machines. They were a confounding mix of inconceivably advanced technology and constructs so crude that they should not have functioned at all. This conduit felt like it had been built by creatures who had heard of cooling and ventilation systems, but had no idea of how they actually worked. Yet on his back was a device that was an even more imperfect attempt to mimic technology far beyond the capabilities of the Imperium. The miraculous and the barbaric mixed with no reason, no order.

It would be his privilege to erase it from existence.

As the wind became stronger, so too did a sound that resembled the breathing of a gigantic beast. Close, Abathar thought. He was nearing the core of the ship’s enginarium.

After another thirty metres, dim red light worked its way into the conduit. A bit further on, and the conduit became a nexus for dozens of pipes. There were now also many holes in the main conduit. Perhaps they were prepared for other shafts yet to be constructed. Perhaps they were intended to admit air from the chamber beyond. Whatever their purpose, they let in the pulsing, flickering red. Beyond the junction, fans spun. Abathar could see only a portion of one. Its blades must have been thirty metres long.

Abathar crouched beside a circular grille in the floor of the conduit. Below him, in the red glow, incomprehensible machines clustered. They sparked, they smoked, they chittered at each other as if they were alive. Abathar waited. If there were orks about, they had little reason to approach this particular configuration of machinery. He cut the grille free, and dropped through.

He landed in a nest of cables and shadows, a mire of technical perversity. It stretched for dozens of metres in every direction. The only illumination was the crimson, and Abathar turned around until he could see its origin. He was in a chamber large enough to contain the dome of Vultus several times over. In the far distance a massive shape loomed, as huge as myth. In its centre, a grille opened and closed, revealing and concealing the crimson heart of power, a miniature red sun, enslaved and turned into the motive power for the ship.

Many levels of catwalks ran along the walls of the chamber. Precarious spans stretched through the air to connect to the heart of the enginarium and to other, lesser monoliths. Orks swarmed along the catwalks, welding gaps, replacing cables, tending to control consoles bristling with levers that would have needed two mortals to pull. Power flashed at faulty junctions, incinerating orks. Other greenskins were electrocuted by flailing cables. Their shrieks mixed with the braying laughter of their kin, who then moved to complete the lethal maintenance work or die in their turn. Hordes of the dwarfish greenskins hauled the bodies away or dragged bundles of equipment at the command of their hulking masters.

Abathar had landed on the top of one of the secondary power sources. He was fifteen metres up from the floor of the enginarium, and six from the nearest catwalk. Heaps of tangled, metre-thick power cables sheltered him from sight. A few steps to his right, in the direction of the catwalk, was the base of an energy coil, ten metres high, which leaned out over the edge of the generator. The angry red power spiralled along its length.

Yes, he could do what needed to be done here.

Abathar removed the teleport homer from his back. He looked at the device differently than he had in the attack moon. Then he had been carrying untested technology, whose workings and morality were unclear. Now he saw the machine for what it truly was. It was a weapon, one whose use put more than its target at risk.

He had said nothing during the debate on the boarding torpedo. He agreed with Forcas, though. There were weapons that should never be deployed except by the Deathwatch. They must be kept within the confines of that structure, belonging to none of the Chapters, usable only in very specific circumstances. He distrusted the device, yet he would use it now for the Imperium, and in its destruction remove its unclean being from the sight of the Omnissiah.

Abathar moved towards the power coil. He was more exposed here, but the coil would have the energy concentration he required. The plan was not to teleport a moon this time. He did not have to tap into the full strength of the ship’s engines. Even so, an enormous level of energy would be unleashed. He stayed low and in the shadows, a machine among machines. There was a serpent’s nest of cables attached to the base of the coil. He scanned the radiation with the auspex until he found those that were drawing power from the coil rather than feeding it. His servo-arm claw yanked one after the other from the base.

A warning klaxon sounded a harsh, animalistic braying across the enginarium. Up and down the walls and the deck below, lightning flashed from wounded machines. Overloads and short circuits took more orks by surprise. Greenskins shrieked and burned. Others roared with alarm and raced to regain control of the unravelling systems.

Abathar’s actions were having an impact. He was on borrowed time now. The orks were seeking the source of the malfunctions. They would find him soon. He disconnected one more cable, then began the process of linking the teleport homer to the power coil.

He was finishing the first connection when a trio of orks ran down the catwalk towards his platform. They scrambled over the wall of cables and spotted Abathar where he crouched over the homer. They were just out of range of his plasma cutter. He trained his boltgun on them, and shot two into pieces before they could move. The sound of gunfire disappeared in the chaos of the klaxon and the booming beat of the engine. For a moment, Abathar thought he had gained another few seconds for his task.

The third ork jumped from behind the falling bodies, onto a cable heap, then launched itself at Abathar. He fired, catching the greenskin in the shoulder, knocking its flight to the left. The ork went over the side of the generator. Spraying blood, it tumbled end over end. It dropped twenty metres and landed head-first, snapping its neck. But it howled a warning all the way down.

Other orks heard. They saw the fall. They shouted, pointing, and the alarm spread. From across the enginarium, the orks abandoned their stations. The horde closed in on Abathar.

The rest of Squad Gladius followed the seismic pounding of the cannons. There was no time for stealth, and no need for it. Thane wanted the orks to know they were under attack, and he wanted them looking at the wrong threat.

The Deathwatch warriors tore through the halls and up the levels of the battleship at a run. Orks fell before them, leaves in a storm. Gladius struck with such speed that no warning could be issued. The orks were not prepared for battle on their own ship. Their weapons were sheathed. Their guard was down. They died by the score. The Deathwatch left a wake of shattered bodies and decks awash in xenos blood.

The cannons were two levels up from the boarding torpedo. The chamber was cavernous. Colossal guns, their barrels six metres in diameter, moved back and forth in the upper space above the Space Marines’ heads, pistoning with each recoil. The blasts rang through Thane’s bones. The chamber vibrated, blurring before Thane’s eyes with the steady drumbeat of the bombardment. Beneath the monstrous cylinders, gunnery crews worked the controls. The stations were bulky, grotesque complexes, spitting steam and sparks. The air roiled, thick with the stench of struggling bodies, ozone and spent explosive.

Thane, Straton and Warfist charged the nearest crew. Through a gap between Thane and Straton, Forcas unleashed a storm of crimson lightning. The warp energy hit the greenskins and their controls with explosive fury and both burned. Their station blew up, hurling shrapnel and fire across the chamber. Flames licked along cables and ignited pools of fuel. Black, choking smoke spread through the space, cutting visibility. The surviving crew turned on the rushing squad. Warfist reached them first. A greenskin managed a quick burst of its gun, the shells bouncing off the Space Wolf’s armour, before Warfist impaled it through the eyes with his lighting claws. Then he was speeding towards the next position.

Thane strafed the remaining orks with bolter fire while Straton climbed the ruin of the controls, up articulated scaffolding. He affixed a melta bomb to the cannon, then dropped down. Thane and Forcas had already moved on, catching up with Warfist.

The Deathwatch used speed against the orks. The surprise of the attack, the explosion of the station and the spreading fire had them off balance. Their retaliation was clumsy. They rushed, and missed.

Speed. Precision. Purpose.

Four Space Marines charged hundreds of orks, and the orks were on the defensive.

Thane and Forcas provided covering fire for Warfist as he closed with the second position. He gutted the orks that blocked his path, and jumped onto the scaffolding. Straton added his bolter fire to the hail, holding down the crew until Warfist had placed his melta bomb.

Then Warfist leapt away from the cannon and joined Straton and Forcas in giving Thane the cover he needed to sabotage the third cannon. Forcas lit up the chamber with more bolts of warp energy, spreading fires and ripping orks apart with eldritch lightning, but now he avoided destroying the controls. Bolter fire, too, no longer hit the stations.

His bomb in place, Thane jumped down from the scaffolding. The rush had stopped. There were more cannons ahead, but the orks had rallied. The crews clustered around the next station, a barrier of rage, and their gunfire had the volume now to be effective.

‘Well enough?’ Warfist asked.

‘Well enough,’ said Thane.

The Deathwatch retreated. The Space Marines laid down bursts of bolter fire behind them, but that was the lure. The true weapon was speed. The orks pursued, perceiving triumph as their enemy fled. The greenskins were fast, but the shells slamming into their bodies slowed their charge. The gun crews wore no armour, and the mass-reactive ammunition shredded their bodies. For the first several seconds of the chase, the orks died faster than they could charge. Then their numbers told, and they advanced on the wings of hate.

As Thane had planned.

The orks reclaimed the gunnery stations on the run. Crews resumed firing while the larger body continued the pursuit.

This too, was as it should be.

Thane brought up the rear, looking back, waiting for the moment. It came when the third cannon, having recoiled after its shot, moved outward once again. The second cannon was crewed once more, and about to roar back to life. ‘Now!’ Thane yelled. He pulled the trigger on his detonator. A moment later, so did Warfist.

Incandescence lit the chamber. First one, then the other melta bomb detonated, burning through the barrels of the cannons. First one, then the other gun fired just as the integrity of the barrel was destroyed.

First one, then another monstrous shell exploded inside the weapons.

The cannons flew apart. Thunder so huge it had physical force slammed the orks down. Shrapnel like jagged storm shields flew through the chamber. Flame engulfed the space. And now Straton triggered his bomb too. The cataclysm smashed into the weakened first cannon, and the barrel fell. It smashed down behind the Deathwatch, a wall six metres high.

Thane lost sight of the other Space Marines. He ran through fire, the world was fire, and the world disintegrated. The deck whiplashed. He flew through the fire, the world of fire. He landed on collapsing metal. He kept his feet and ran on.

To the rear, the explosions continued. Destruction spread, feeding greedily. Another cannon erupted, and deeper in the hull, a shell was triggered by the impacts of the blasts. It set more off. The battleship groaned as a chain reaction tore apart the interior of its port side.

Thane passed through the entrance of the gun chamber. The flames reached ahead of him, but he could see the rest of the Deathwatch now, and he could see the stairs leading back down the levels, back towards Abathar.

A great thunder resounded. An earthquake shook the battleship, hurling orks from catwalks. One of the connections to the teleport homer broke free. The cable slashed back and forth, spraying lightning. Abathar seized it with the servo-arm claw. He struggled to reattach it and finish the rest of the assembly. The tremors became even more violent, knocking many of the greenskins off their feet, slowing their attack. Some managed to cling to the side of the generator and climb up to his position. Bestial faces came over the edge just as he was closing the last of the circuits. Without releasing his work, he turned the plasma cutter on them.

The power coil wavered back and forth. Metal groaned. The crimson energy flickered, then steadied.

The explosions continued. Abathar had the sense of the battleship suffering wounds at a profound level. Had it been an Imperial ship, its machine-spirit would have been screaming. Abathar grunted with satisfaction. Well done, brothers, he thought. He finished his work, and the homer began to charge. The red glow spread over its cylinders.

Abathar turned from his work in time to put bolt-shells into the skulls of three more orks climbing the generator. On the deck, the greenskins had found their feet. Not all of them were trying to reach him now. The blast doors on all levels of the enginarium were grinding down. Streams of orks flowed through them, rushing to fight the true threat, or so they thought.

‘Gladius,’ Abathar voxed, ‘it is time we departed.’

‘On our way,’ Thane replied. ‘What is our best approach?’

Abathar looked up at the conduit that had brought him here. Though new fissures had appeared in its surface, it still appeared sound. ‘The way I came.’

‘We won’t be alone.’

‘Understood.’

He gunned down a group of orks running across the catwalk towards him. Bullets smacked against his armour and dug into the cabling around him. Some greenskins had chosen to shoot from positions atop other generators. He moved closer to the catwalk, drawing their fire away from the power coil and the teleport homer. He had to save ork technology from being damaged by its creators. He stood tall, weathering the hits, placing his return fire carefully, pulping skulls at a distance.

The mercy was that the orks labouring in the enginarium were not the largest or most heavily armed warriors. They were here because they were forced to be by their stronger brothers. Outnumbered scores to one, Abathar held his ground.

The homer charged. The ship’s tremors began to diminish. Abathar sensed time running out.

‘Gladius,’ he began, about to urge haste. He didn’t finish. On the deck below, time ran out.

A monster strode through the blast door. It was twice the height of a Dreadnought. Its armour was so thick, it seemed to be wearing the hull of a Land Raider. It carried a gun larger than an autocannon.

‘Gladius,’ Abathar said again, ‘there is no more time.’

‘Hold fast,’ Thane replied.

Abathar moved to his right, behind the wall of cables once more, further away from the power coil. He braced himself to fight the unstoppable.

The behemoth pulled the trigger. Its gun spat a thudding barrage of solid slugs. They smashed through generator walls and cut through cables. They set off a string of explosions and fires, a line of destruction marking the arc of the monster’s aim. The beast brought the gun up towards Abathar’s position. It was indiscriminate in its fire. It did not care what it destroyed. It revelled in the mad joy of devastation.

The conduit above Abathar shook with the tread of heavy boots and the concussion of bolter fire.

Abathar aimed his bolt pistol at the ork’s skull. He targeted the gap in the armour where the tusked jaw snarled. He fired. The shells smashed the ork’s fangs. They punched into the back of its throat.

It barely noticed.

The monster’s cannon shells pounded the cable barrier apart. Massive blows struck Abathar in the chest and threw him backwards. He fell in a tangle of wreckage, his armour cracked, servo-motors slipping and stuttering.

The other four members of Squad Gladius dropped out of the conduit. They fired back into it. The pipe trembled from the weight of the pursuing horde. It began to sag.

Abathar pushed himself to his feet. The giant ork had paused to examine its handiwork. Abathar forced movement into his legs and made for the teleport homer.

‘It must be now,’ he said.

The Deathwatch gathered around the homer. Orks poured from the conduit. The giant aimed its gun at the power coil. It fired again as Abathar triggered the homer.

And then, there truly was no more time.

Nine

The void – Nadiries

As before, the human and the ork made war in a realm of energy. For an immeasurable moment, the last stop before disaster, the clash of technologies was a stalemate, and the tiniest sliver of the power was channelled in its proper path. The homer responded as it was designed to do, and transferred the Deathwatch from the ork battleship to the Herald of Night. Then the stalemate collapsed. The forces of the human and the ork technologies destroyed each other in their rage. Half the vessel’s engine block vanished, disassembled past the subatomic. What remained erupted. An event far more traumatic than rupture struck the engine core. A star was cut in half. It died howling.

A shockwave produced by the severing of reality flashed across the ork fleet. The battleship vanished in a supernova cry of light. The wave blasted the nearby ships to fiery dust. Further out, it snapped escorts and cruisers in half. The wave lost force quickly as it travelled and the outer elements of the ork fleet survived. Barely. Ships floated in the void without power. Atmospheres vented through huge rents in the hulls. Fires swept through entire levels, never to be extinguished.

The Herald of Night emerged from the deep dark to bring judgement on what remained.

The dislocation seized Thane again. The ripping apart, the disintegration of identity one with the annihilation of reality. The transfer was so much more brutal than with unmodified Imperial teleporters. In the wrench of the process came the sense of a monstrous excess of energy. Of something unleashed. And of a danger to the soul.

The device was bestial. It was unclean.

It was also gone.

Thane blinked, acknowledging his and his squad’s return to being on the Herald of Night. They shook off the sickness of the translation and made for the bridge. There they joined Adnachiel, Wienand and Veritus in the strategium. They watched the end of the ork fleet through the oculus. Veritus looked grim, disturbed by what he’d seen. Wienand seemed both awed and thoughtful.

‘And so it is accomplished,’ she said. ‘Five Space Marines have destroyed a fleet. Impressive.’

‘There is a cost to these actions,’ Forcas said. He was breathing heavily. He spoke with a great effort of calm, as if he were still struggling to hold his identity together. His fangs were bared. He kept his gaze on the deck. ‘The means we employed… Such things cannot be undertaken lightly.’

‘Agreed,’ said Wienand. ‘Proper safeguards must be put in place.’

Thane glanced at her sharply. She looked back, face carefully neutral.

He chose not to ask her what she meant. The mission was paramount. ‘What have we learned about the situation planetside?’ he asked Adnachiel.

‘Auspex scans have confirmed the coordinates of the fortress. We have bought the defenders a little time.’

‘No more than that?’

‘The orks landed a large invasion force. The fortress’ defences no longer need to be aimed at the fleet, so there is no division of fire. But that will not be enough.’

‘I sense you’re about to tell me something most unwelcome.’

‘We have been picking up a concentrated energy signature. The orks have something very large approaching the fortress.’

‘How large?’

‘To judge from these readings, a giant walking machine, an ork Titan.’

I was right, Thane thought. That was not welcome at all. ‘Can we attempt an orbital bombardment?’

‘Not with any assurance of preserving the fortress,’ Adnachiel said. ‘The orks’ intent with their bombardment was purely destructive.’

‘While ours is not. Understood. Thank you, Master Adnachiel.’

Thane turned to the others. ‘We have a siege to break and a Titan to kill,’ he said.

The Penitent Wrath descended to the surface of the dark planet. The battlefield was still heated by the ork bombardment, and the temporary atmosphere was an orange-brown haze lit by the explosions of shells and the streaks of energy weapons. Qaphsiel flew as low as he dared over the orks, bringing out the details of the enemy from the great night. The region surrounding the fortress was an obscurity filled with a brutal, shifting mass. The flash of cannons illuminated the greenskins for a fraction of a second. If they knew about the destruction of their fleet, they did not appear to be troubled by it. This was an army on the march to victory.

That victory had not yet come, though, and Thane now saw how the fortress had held out for as long as it had. The keep was built at the top of a solitary peak. The mountain rose from the centre of a crater kilometres wide, as if the molten fountain from an asteroid impact had congealed back to rock in mid-flight. The slopes were steep, almost vertical, and jagged. Towering above the bowl of the crater, the fortress covered the entire peak. It was even more jagged than the mountain. It was a cluster of towers, walls fused together, rising one above the other. At the centre, the tallest spire stabbed at the infinite night. From a distance, it looked thin and sharp as a sword blade. The lower ramparts were studded with automated turrets. They rotated back and forth, cannons raining destruction on the orks below.

The greenskins raged at the base of the mountain. There was no path up. The infantry tried to climb, but was defeated by the cliffs and the punishing fire from above. They retaliated with their artillery. Hundreds of cannons and mortars battered the mountain and the fortress. They resisted. They stood fast. But the constant attack eroded the walls. It hammered at the mountainside, triggering rockslides. Given enough time, Thane thought, the mountain would be hit until there were handholds up its entire height, or the peak would be shot through and come crashing down into the crater, the fortress falling from the darkness of the sky to the darkness of the ground. Or, the last ork would finally be blasted to dust by the wall guns.

Given enough time.

There would not be enough time. The orks had no patience. They were bringing forth a monster to end time.

The ork Titan was sixty metres tall. It too was a mountain, one of iron. It lumbered across the crater, rocking side to side with each step. Its shape was squat in spite of its height. Thane pictured the walkers the Last Wall had fought on Caldera. This was many times larger. Its head alone was larger than the dome of Vultus. The Titan was fashioned in the shape of a monstrous ork, and Thane could well imagine the machine would inspire the worship of the infantry scurrying like insects at its feet.

An energy cannon emerged from the monster’s right eye, turning its mere gaze into a holocaust. There were other turrets all along its shoulders and flanks. But they were not the worst danger. One of its limbs ended in another energy weapon, claw-shaped, an electrode three metres long between the tips. The other arm was a double-barrelled cannon the size of the ones the Deathwatch had destroyed on the battleship. From the centre of its bodily mass another gun protruded, even larger.

The central gun fired. The flash illuminated the entire battlefield. Thane caught a frozen glimpse of thousands of orks exulting in the roar of their monstrous machine. The shell slammed into the mountainside. The explosion was gigantic. Boulders flew like hail. A dust cloud rose, then fell in the weak atmosphere.

The mountain trembled for long seconds after the impact. The ork Titan took another few steps, then fired again at the same spot. It raised its huge gun arm and let loose two more shots in quick succession.

Thane was sure he saw the mountain weaken. He knew he had not. He could see little of the battlefield beyond flashes, except for those vehicles with lamps. The Titan was well illuminated. It was a thing of brutish glory, and the orks wanted it celebrated.

And yet…

The power of the blasts unleashed by the ork Titan convinced him the fortress was not long for this world.

‘Take us above the Titan,’ he told Qaphsiel. ‘As close as you can.’

‘So ordered.’

Qaphsiel flew in from behind. The colossus continued its slow, steady, relentlessly destructive walk. There would be nothing left by the time it reached the mountain. As the Penitent Wrath closed in, Abathar said, ‘There. By the left-hand shoulder. A platform.’

‘Agreed,’ said Thane. He turned to the inquisitors. They wore armoured environment suits. ‘You are ready?’ They were to enter the citadel and speak with the Sisters of Silence. He did not relish the thought of an inquisitor making first contact with the order, but there was no choice. ‘Once the Titan is destroyed, we can coordinate the Sisters’ exit from the fortress.’

‘You are assuming they will agree to do so,’ Wienand said.

‘I am assuming nothing. But you know as well as I do that the Imperium needs them to agree.’

Wienand nodded.

‘They will agree,’ Veritus said.

‘I envy your certainty,’ said Thane. He thought about what it meant to have obliterated the traces of their existence, and to have retreated to a location so absolute in its isolation. He did not think an agreement would be easy to obtain. Qaphsiel had been hailing the fortress since the Penitent Wrath had begun its descent. The only hint of an answer had been the appearance of a single point of illumination at the highest point of the citadel.

The Thunderhawk dropped lower. Qaphsiel took it in at a steep dive. Veritus and Wienand were held firmly by their grav-harnesses. Abathar opened the side door and the Deathwatch stood before the opening, ready to jump. There was only a slight wind. The atmosphere was beginning to freeze again. Nitrogen snow blew inside the gunship. A cold beyond words came in with it.

The temperature could not reach Thane through his armour. The readouts of his auto-senses told him what it was. Yet he sensed it, too. The dark and the cold of the nameless world cried out with such force it was as if there were a huge wind, howling loss at the cosmos. This was a place beyond mourning, beyond the grave. Abandonment, rejection, betrayal, judgement, punishment – they were all part of the great night. They were, he thought, the very mortar of the fortress.

The shoulders of the ork Titan were broad and flat, landing pads, Thane guessed, for aircraft. They were clear except for a single anti-air cannon at the rear of each pad. The barrels were long, stretching across half the length of the shoulders. The Penitent Wrath roared towards the left-hand pad. In the last moments of the approach, the orks finally realised there was an airborne enemy in the field. The turrets began to turn. The cannons opened fire immediately, when they were still facing away from the gunship. Their massive shells burst in the air, brief suns in the endless night. Qaphsiel pushed the Penitent Wrath harder, racing against the left turret’s rotation.

Still behind the Titan, the Thunderhawk dropped below the shoulder, then came back up, flying level. The platform came closer. The turret was a third of the way through its rotation. In another moment, the length of its barrel would be in the gunship’s flight path.

Thane braced. He heard the whine of the turbofans as they began to alter the ship’s trajectory. Qaphsiel fired the retro-nozzles, slowing the flight. The deck angled up. Thane began his leap with the landing pad still ahead. He was in the air just as the Thunderhawk passed over the edge of the Titan’s shoulder. He and the squad landed, rolling off the momentum. The engine whine became a scream. The Penitent Wrath climbed sharply, pushing up with all the force of its turbofans. Its nose passed over the cannon. The anti-air guns fired interlocking streams of shells, but the gunship rose faster than the orks could adjust their aim. It flew on, higher, gathering yet more speed as it made for the high spire of the fortress.

Thane rose to his feet. His Deathwatch brothers at his side, he ran towards the Titan’s head. The platform tilted up and down with each rocking step of the weapon. The head was a massive, grimacing icon of a monstrous deity. It was surrounded by a rampart of teeth, the gaps between them like huge, clumsy crenellations. Their construction was as rough, patchwork and monolithic as the rest of the monster. Thane found plenty of handholds. Gladius climbed the teeth and dropped into the space beyond. It was wide as a town square.

In the head’s left eye, heavy-calibre guns opened up. Their fire swept across the empty space towards the Deathwatch.

Close in, the fortress was just as angular and bladed as it had appeared from a distance. The towers were clusters of close-standing spikes. They made Wienand think of a forest of lightning claws jutting from mailed fists. Turrets tracked the Penitent Wrath as it climbed the heights of the fortress. They tracked, but they did not fire.

‘A good sign?’ Wienand said to Veritus.

‘Not the worst, at least.’

The high tower had a small landing pad just below its tapered peak. It was the site of that single, harsh light. Qaphsiel approached it slowly. A gun mounted into the wall of the spire followed silently. The Thunderhawk came down on the pad. Wienand approached the open side door. The gun, five metres up, was pointed directly at her. She jumped down to the flagstones. Veritus followed her. The gun did not move.

Far below, the monstrous ordnance of the Titan struck the mountainside. The tremors reached all the way up.

At the other end of the platform was an iron door. In the landing lights of the Thunderhawk, it was a stark black, glinting with methane frost. Wienand walked to the door. There were no handles. She stifled the impulse to knock. They know we’re here, she thought. Veritus stood beside her. ‘Now what?’ she asked. ‘Did you have a speech prepared?’

Veritus shook his head. The harsh light mounted on his helmet bleached his features. The shadows of his face were deep as canyons. As he gazed at the door, so utterly closed and cold, he did not resemble the dangerous inquisitor Wienand had struggled against on Terra. He did not look like the zealot who had sent assassins after her. He looked like a very old man, one who had seen too much, who stood at the brink of despair, and who had to fight hard not to fall into its abyss.

No, he did not have a speech.

Wienand wondered again why Veritus had insisted on coming. To observe the Deathwatch? Certainly. There was much to know there. There would be matters to prepare as a consequence. But here, why come to this locked door? He could have just as well waited aboard the Herald of Night.

Perhaps he had come to bear witness. So had she. Though she felt another need as she stood here like a supplicant. She did not know what she should call it. She recognised the imperative, though. Even if Thane had not turned this part of the mission over to her, she would still be here.

A minute passed. Then another. Silence deeper than the absence of sound, a silence of the soul, hard and cold, surrounded the tower. At last, Wienand said to Veritus, ‘You must go.’ When he started to object, she interrupted him. ‘You know I’m right. You can’t be here.’ She looked back at the Penitent Wrath. ‘That can’t remain idle. It needs to be elsewhere. You need to not be here.’

Veritus looked at her. His face was still, unreadable. His eyes were nothing but glinting black. In the end, he nodded and walked back to the gunship.

‘Leave me,’ Wienand voxed Qaphsiel.

‘Understood.’

She faced the door. She didn’t look as the gunship took off. Light faded. There was only her helmet lamp now, and the night pressed close. The silence gathered weight. Wienand’s awareness of the war faded. There was only the door, and the myth behind it. She could not summon the myth. She could not make the door open. But she could wait. To stand here and meet the tower’s silence with her own was the most direct action she had yet taken in this war.

Then the silence changed. There was no noise in the thinning, falling, snowing atmosphere. But the silence changed, because there was movement. Frost cracked. The shadows changed.

The door opened.

From the dark of the Titan’s eye, massive stubber fire battered the Space Marines. They fought back with light. Forcas stretched out his arms. Energy flashed from his fingers, golden and pure, a blaze of righteousness in the night. The light became a wall. It was a shimmering nobility. The orks trained their fire onto the barrier. The shells exploded against the golden aura. Forcas strained. The shield trembled, flickered for a moment, then held.

‘Get beneath the guns!’ Thane yelled. ‘They’re our way in.’

The Space Marines broke left and right. Forcas stayed where he was, preserving the shield, holding the orks’ focus. Thane and Warfist went left around the wall, ran back into the dark. It was lesser, the glow of Forcas’ barrier spreading over the entire open area before the Titan’s skull. The Space Marines were visible to the gunners, but the barrier was the lure, dazzling them, frustrating them as it resisted their shells. On the other side of the wall, Straton and Abathar had almost reached a point directly underneath the eye turret.

The barrier flickered again, buckling under the sustained fire. In another moment, Forcas would be exposed.

The eye was three metres up the wall of the skull. Abathar fired upward with his plasma cutter. He sliced through the barrel of one of the guns. The weapon exploded. Straton threw a grenade through the socket. There was a second blast. The eye glared red at the night, blazed as ammunition cooked off, then went dark.

At the base of the head, a door in the shape of a maw rose with a deafening metallic screech. Orks boiled out of the opening. Thane and Warfist strafed them with bolter fire and hurled frag grenades into their midst. The charge stumbled into chaos, giving Forcas time to run across the space to join Straton and Abathar.

Thane and Warfist kept moving, and kept shooting. More and more orks were rushing from the maw. They become a flood, and there was no more holding them back.

‘We’re clear,’ Straton voxed.

‘Go!’ said Thane. He nodded at Warfist, who ran the rest of the distance to the eye. Thane paused long enough to throw two more grenades into the orks and hit them with a wide spray of shells. The orks were lightly armoured. They were the servants of their god-machine, not infantry, and Thane killed many. They were also legion, and their undisciplined shots were counting. Bullets hit him, a cascade of blows, driving him back.

‘We’re in,’ Warfist said.

Thane ran. He’d bought the squad the time it needed. Now the rest of Gladius poured fire on the orks from inside the eye, covering Thane. He maglocked his bolter to his thigh and leapt. Warfist caught his arm and pulled him inside.

The turret was a space of twisted, burned metal and carbonised flesh. The doorway out was blocked. Abathar hauled the wreckage out of the way while the others fired down on the orks as they tried to climb. Forcas created another golden shield over the opening of the eye. The orks screamed, enraged by the desecration of their icon as well as the barrier to their weapons.

Abathar had the way clear. Beyond was a narrow corridor leading deeper into the head. Thane said, ‘We have to kill the greenskins that direct this abomination. Can you take us to them?’

‘I can speculate about where they might be,’ Abathar replied.

‘That’s all I can ask. Lead us.’

Abathar plunged into the dark, cacophonous shadow. Thane followed. Straton stayed to plant a melta bomb. When the light of Forcas’ shield winked out, a more searing brilliance followed. The ceiling of the turret fell in, and the eye was blinded forever. The Deathwatch moved into the Titan, seeking its brain.

The hall at the top of the spire was circular. Vaulted, stained crystalflex windows faced every direction. With no illumination outside the fortress, the windows were lit by their own art. The mosaics depicted warriors destroying the enemies of the Emperor. Many of the foes wore psychic hoods. Their faces were contorted grotesques. Their eyes blazed with the fires of the warp, and the fires died before touching the warriors in armour of gold, of red, of black. Some of the windows depicted vessels, black against the black of the void, distinguishable only because they were outlined by the same phosphorescence that limned the figures of the other mosaics. The interior of the spire was lit the same way. The narrow, pointed dome was yet another star chart.

This one was of the entire Imperium. But the chart was old. It was the Imperium as it once had been, not as it was now. The faint trace Wienand had seen in Vultus was sharp here as a razor to the eye. In the night of the world, the cold silver was stark, nearly blinding, and without forgiveness.

The voice of the woman before Wienand was just as cold, just as lacking in mercy. It was the sound of silver.

‘Why have you come to Nadiries?’ she said.

Answering was difficult. It was painful to be in the presence of these women. An aura of nothing, of suffocating blankness squeezed Wienand’s soul. She felt as if something had murdered her unconscious mind. She was diminished. If this was her experience, she could not imagine the agony a psyker would suffer in this hall.

What had Wienand expected? Was it this? Was it to see the Sisters of Silence arrayed before her in this solemn amphitheatre?

No.

They wore dark, hooded robes, filigreed in the cold silver. They were wrapped in the void, upon its black the wordless voice of the stars and their memories of endless sacrifice. While Wienand struggled to speak, they pulled back their robes and hoods. The army of silence appeared before her in armour of gold, of red, of black.

Had Wienand expected to face the Sisterhood for the first time like this, standing in the centre of the amphitheatre, facing judgement colder, more pure, than that of the Inquisition?

No.

What had she expected? She did not know. But most of all, she had not expected to be alone, to know that it would be her words on which the success or failure of the mission would depend.

She had also not expected the Sisters of Silence to speak.

At last she managed, ‘We have come to seek your aid.’

‘We?’

‘The Inquisition, which I represent. The Adeptus Astartes, who are fighting at this moment to save Nadiries.’ She paused for a moment. ‘We is every citizen of every human world. The Imperium seeks your aid.’

The woman stared at her. Her armour was crimson. So were the optics that had replaced her eyes. Her face was expressionless, as devoid of light as the world.

Wienand estimated there were fifty Sisters of Silence present. Some wore helmets. Many did not. Their heads were clean-shaven except for a single long rope of hair. Some bore electoos of the Imperial aquila on their brows. Ritual scars marked their cheeks. Almost all the Sisters wore grilles over the lower halves of their faces. Some had helms with ornate rebreathers that concealed their features entirely. They had new faces of metal. All of the designs connoted a form of silence, though one that found expression in actions so final, they exceeded the power of mere words.

‘The Imperium seeks our help,’ said the warrior with the crimson stare. She spoke with a flat, deathly tone. ‘I am Kavalanera Brassanas, Knight Abyssal of Purgatory Squad, and it has been many centuries since the Imperium made it clear the aid of my order was not desired. I find this request hard to credit.’

‘And even more difficult to trust,’ said a Sister behind Brassanas. Her armour was black. Her face was one of those entirely concealed. Her voice resonated metallically behind the mask.

‘I agree with Knight Obsidian Drevina,’ said Brassanas.

‘The entire Imperium is besieged by orks,’ Wienand said. ‘They have technology beyond anything we possess. They have destroyed whole worlds. They smashed the Imperial Fists. The Imperium will fall without your aid.’

No emotion. No answer. Time fell into the dark. There was a faint movement of the Sisters’ fingers. They were speaking to each other, Wienand realised. She felt as if she were witnessing the discourse of tombs. They use their cant, she thought, but they speak too. Why?

Brassanas said, ‘Perhaps it is time for it to fall.’

Wienand gaped. But the shock made pieces fall into place. The Sisters had turned their backs on the Imperium, as they had turned from silence. ‘You renounced your vows,’ she said. ‘Was it that easy to abandon the Imperium?’

‘Our vows were to the Emperor,’ Brassanas replied. ‘And to the Imperium He created. The corruption you serve is not that Imperium. We still serve the Emperor. We still stand guard against the witch.’

‘We do not recognise the simulacrum that has replaced the Emperor’s dream,’ said Drevina.

‘That is the true betrayal,’ Brassanas said. ‘Let it fall.’

‘Let it fall,’ Drevina repeated.

‘Let it fall,’ the other Sisters echoed. ‘Let it fall. Let it fall.’

The whispered chorus chilled Wienand because it had the ring of justice. In this hall, there was moral authority of a kind never dreamed of in the Great Chamber. Wienand thought of the High Lords, and saw only the rightness of Brassanas’ verdict.

And yet…

In that verdict, Wienand saw the way forward.

‘Vulkan would have agreed with you,’ she said.

‘Vulkan,’ said Brassanas.

Wienand sensed a stir in the hall, though no one moved. ‘The primarch had no love for the High Lords. He saw the corruption. He knew the High Lords and all their works to be worthy only of contempt. Yet he fought for this Imperium.’

‘Vulkan was with you?’ said Drevina.

‘Fought?’ said Brassanas, emphasising the past tense.

Wienand nodded. ‘He died fighting the orks on Ullanor.’

A gasp rippled through the theatre.

‘Vulkan is dead,’ Drevina said, and her whisper was a mourning cry.

‘Vulkan is dead,’ the other Sisters repeated. ‘Vulkan is dead.’ The words tolled. The echoes grieved.

‘Ullanor,’ Brassanas said, sounding the word slowly. ‘The orks have returned to Ullanor. Then perhaps the end has truly come.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Wienand. ‘But Vulkan fought it.’

Brassanas said nothing.

‘If the Imperium falls, if Terra falls,’ Wienand pursued, ‘what of the Golden Throne?’

Still nothing.

‘What of your vow to the Emperor? And is this to be your legacy? The destruction of everything the Sisters of Silence have fought so hard to protect? Because you refused to help when you possess the key to defeating the orks?’

‘We possess the key?’ said Brassanas. ‘Explain yourself.’

‘The ork witches,’ Wienand said. ‘Destroy them, and we destroy the Beast.’

Brassanas stared at her for several long moments. Then she said, ‘We will deliberate. You will be taken to the lower gates to await our decision.’

‘No!’ Wienand shouted. There could be no deliberation. There was no choice. There was only duty. ‘How long will you deliberate? Until the orks tear down your gates?’

Brassanas watched her.

‘I too have been betrayed,’ Wienand said. ‘I have seen the corruption first-hand. I know exactly what it is I am defending. And I will defend it to my last breath. I will not let the Imperium fall into silence.’

‘Sacred or profane,’ Drevina said to Brassanas. ‘We must choose our silence.’

Brassanas nodded. She threw her cloak back over her shoulders, revealing the power claw on her left arm.

Now there were other echoes in the hall. They were the ratcheting clanks of magazines slammed home, and the impact of boot heels on stone. One by one, the unforgiving saints of the Imperium began their preparations for war.

The ork engineer’s gun unleashed a torrent of energy. The coruscating beam struck Thane, surrounded him, and lifted him from the deck. It threw him back between two immense spinning columns. Each was ten metres in diameter, and grooved. They moved back and forth along a horizontal slot in the deck, grinding together, then pulling back. Thane bounced off the pillar to his left, then fell into the ragged tear in the deck. He clung to the edge. Below him, the darkness shrieked with massive, incomprehensible machinery. If he fell, he would be reduced to pulp and splinters of ceramite in moments.

On either side, the spinning pillars closed in. The residual energy from the gun’s strike pulsed and jittered through his armour, and it would not obey his muscles’ commands. He held on to the ledge, but he couldn’t move.

The columns spun nearer.

There were three ork engineers in the control centre of the Titan. Abathar’s speculation had proven correct. He had led Squad Gladius upwards through the ork Titan’s head, winding through corridors tangled with power conduits and clanging with exposed gears to this point, just above the energy-cannon eye.

A hatch opened in the forehead of the Titan to reveal the land below and the mountain ahead. The space was vast yet crowded, a maze of pistons and chains, of machinery that spread like a cancer, yet somehow moved the Titan forward and directed the aim of its weapons. The engineers laboured in a multi-levelled nest of levers and arcing power sources. Each ork worked at its level, but when Gladius attacked, two of the engineers retaliated with energy weapons. The third clambered up and down the control levels, frantically throwing switches and working the dark machinic sorcery that kept the Titan advancing.

The force field protecting the engineers held back Straton’s shells. Warfist raced through the chamber, gutting the greenskins commanded by the engineers and slicing cabling in half. The second engineer hit Abathar with his beam weapon. The Techmarine was seized by a gravity whip, and the ork propelled him out of the hatch. The claw of his servo-arm clamped around a thick cable as he flew, and he hung on. The ork held the trigger down, its weapon glowing with heat. It shook Abathar back and forth, trying to dislodge his grip and send him falling far to the ground below.

A score of orks had rushed Forcas, overwhelming him with sheer mass, pushing him into machinery where he had no leverage. As Thane struggled to pull himself up, he heard a feral roar. Greenskins staggered back. The Blood Angel tore through them with his chainsword and a howling fury Thane had sensed just beneath the surface of his rigid, pious calm. His face was covered in the enemy’s blood. He raised a fist surrounded by a halo of scarlet warp energy. Both ork engineers trained their weapons in his direction. They fired at the same moment he unleashed his incinerating blast. The two forces collided halfway across the chamber. The explosion was blinding.

The Titan tilted violently to one side. The deck slanted. It was enough for Thane to push himself out of the trap. The columns clashed together behind him and the space marine rounded on them, facing a wall of grinding, whirling metal. He threw a melta bomb at the intersection of the pillars and thumbed the detonator at the same moment. The explosive went off before it could be sucked into the vortex. There was another dazzling flash.

Thane stumbled away, regaining control of his limbs. The columns spun into the melting heat of the explosive. They fused with each other, and their huge mass pulled them in the opposite directions of their spin. A huge, shuddering jolt ran through the Titan. From the decks below came the sounds of screams and the vibration of blasts.

The warring lightning faded between Forcas and the orks. The Blood Angel was still standing, but his armour was badly scorched. His face was a mass of burned meat. He staggered forward, still snarling. One of the engineers had fallen, smoke rising from its blackened corpse.

Abathar pulled himself back inside the Titan’s head. He charged the engineers’ nest and swung his power axe at the straining shield. Warfist looped around and rammed his shoulder into the field at the same moment. Straton’s shells never let up. The two remaining greenskin engineers had just enough time to know what was coming and roar a brutish denial.

They were dead moments later.

The molten bedlam of the columns screamed. Its fire spread along the cables. They melted. They convulsed like maddened serpents. Electrical fury lanced through the space and the fused columns spun still faster as they shattered restraints. The whirl reached beyond them. It took the chamber. It seized the Titan. Thane felt a world roar into a vortex.

The ork Titan was going mad.

The entrance behind Thane, the one through which Squad Gladius had entered the control hall, had been destroyed by the maelstrom of the columns. There was another one in the far wall. ‘Seal the door!’ Thane shouted into the vox. There would be no chance for any ork to attempt to regain control of the Titan.

Straton and Abathar ran through the monstrous clamour of the growing destruction. Abathar melted the door along its seams while Straton placed charges across the ceiling. Thane and Warfist turned to Forcas. The Blood Angel’s snarls were inaudible in the thunder of disintegrating metal. His movements were sluggish. They guided him towards the hatch.

The door burst open, the crush of orks overwhelming the seals before Abathar could complete them. He turned plasma cutter and power axe against the horde. He was surrounded by a flood of blood and greenskin muscle.

‘Do it now!’ Thane heard him vox Straton.

The Ultramarine set off the charges. The blasts brought down shrieking machinery and slabs of metal. They crushed flesh. Abathar disappeared under tonnes of burning wreckage with the horde.

The deck tilted thirty degrees. It threw Forcas, Thane and Warfist against the outside wall. Straton grabbed a spur of rubble, kept his feet and hauled. Metal shifted. The centre of the rubble glowed white. It trembled, then began to collapse from the heat of the plasma cutter. Abathar reared out of the mass. His left arm hung limp, but he punched at his prison with servo-arm and axe.

The deck rocked back, then to the sides. The rotation grew more violent. The spin gathered momentum. The columns had become a blinding mass of self-destruction, and still they spun and spun and spun. The flames were everywhere. There would be no salvation for the Titan. Soon there would none for the Deathwatch either.

‘Qaphsiel,’ Thane voxed. ‘We need extraction. Make for the crown of the Titan.’

‘Understood.’

Warfist went through the hatch first. He hacked at the shielding with his power claws, carving a path up. Forcas sagged against Thane, but he had ceased snarling, and he reached out and grabbed the sides of the hatch. A cloud of fire swept over them. Blinded, Thane felt Forcas begin to pull, and he added his strength to the Blood Angel’s, guiding him into the air.

‘Straton,’ he voxed. ‘Abathar.’ He looked back, but he could no longer see them. The control chamber was darkness and flame and heaving movement.

‘We are here,’ Straton answered. ‘We are following.’

Thane climbed outside. Fire erupted from the eyes of the Titan. Above him, Warfist was helping Forcas towards the crown. Thane waited until he saw Straton emerge from flame and smoke, then Abathar behind him. Then he climbed.

The mind of the Titan was dying, and its body responded with ever greater violence. The massive cannons were still firing, but the Titan’s arms were caught in a pendulum motion, the swings growing longer and more wild. The monster’s gait was a drunken, turning sway. It was a mountain falling into a dance of death.

Squad Gladius clung to the skull in storm. The Penitent Wrath skimmed the top of the Titan. Qaphsiel flew the gunship in tight circles as the Space Marines reached the peak. Warfist jumped through the side door as the Thunderhawk went by. He reached down for Forcas on the next pass. Thane held the psyker up. He was barely responsive.

‘Raise your arms, brother,’ Thane said. ‘Raise them in triumph.’

Something in Forcas heard. He obeyed. Warfist grasped his forearms and hauled him aboard. Thane and Straton followed when Qaphsiel brought the gunship around again.

One more pass now. One more brother. Thane and Straton crouched at the door to aid Abathar. The Techmarine flexed his knees and began his leap.

Metal buckled. The crown of the Titan collapsed into the vortex. Shields turned to jagged teeth. Abathar fell into the gnashing metal.

He stretched his servo-arm up as he plummeted. Thane seized the claw. The imploding skull dragged Abathar down and sought to pull Thane from the gunship. Straton clasped the arm and they both pulled.

Thane felt the jaws crush something human. The disintegration of bone shook through Abathar’s frame and into Thane’s arms. ‘We have you, brother!’ he yelled in defiance of the dying beast.

Then they did have him. They pulled him free. They dragged him aboard.

His right leg was gone below the thigh.

The Thunderhawk pulled away from the Titan. The monster was out of control now. It staggered through the mass of the ork army, crushing infantry beneath it. Its arms were a monstrous flailing, and the devastation of its guns spread across the battlefield, punching new craters in the ground as well as the mountainside. The ork invasion force turned on its own weapon. The caldera became a battlefield, a cauldron of explosives as the orks struggled against the awful power of their technology gone mad.

The Penitent Wrath flew towards the fortress.

Forcas was unconscious. Warfist and Straton wrestled him into a grav-harness. Abathar was awake. His blood slicked the deck, but his Larraman cells had already slowed the flow, coagulation building a scab over the stump. The femoral artery had pinched itself closed. Thane helped the Techmarine to a bench, then turned to Veritus. The inquisitor had been sitting silently in the troop hold. ‘Well?’ he asked.

Veritus shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘The enemy is distracted,’ said Warfist. ‘If they’re going to break out…’ He stopped. ‘What is that?’ he said.

Thane joined him at the viewing block. The mountain just below the base of the fortress was moving. ‘A gate,’ he said. A seam of light appeared in the darkness. Walls of rock rumbled apart, revealing a vehicle bay beyond. Silver illumination bathed the cliff face. Three armoured vehicles advanced from the depths of the bay. ‘Rhinos,’ Thane said.

‘How do they expect to reach the ground?’ Warfist demanded. ‘That’s a sheer–’ He stopped.

Thane’s eyes widened.

‘If those are Rhinos,’ Warfist said, ‘why are they flying?’

Engine exhausts burned red on the flanks and undersides of the Rhinos. The vehicles streaked down the mountainside, then levelled off as they approached the ground. The squadron flew over the orks, storm bolters cutting a swath of fire through them. Thane witnessed impossible, awe-inspiring technology, and it was Imperial.

Exulting, he said, ‘They are flying because they are transporting myths.’

Epilogue

Terra – the Imperial Palace

Koorland listened to the silence. It was stronger than ever. It strode above the celebrations. Its weight gathered second by second, and he knew its cause.

From the base of a staircase wide enough for thousands but forbidden to all but a few, he gazed at the towering door of the Sanctum Imperialis. He would never see what lay beyond. That was perhaps as it should be. The sublime was not for his eyes. He had not earned the right. The women who had entered a short while ago had that right. The staircase was not forbidden to them, nor was this door. There were other entrances to the Sanctum, but they were for those who would never come out again. The warriors who had climbed this staircase would also descend it.

‘Did you speak to them?’ he asked Thane.

‘Very little. They were disinclined to speak to anyone except Inquisitor Wienand.’

‘I see.’ He pushed aside thoughts for now of the power play Wienand might be preparing.

Inside the Sanctum, fifty women were passing before the Golden Throne, renewing their vows to the Emperor, and swearing themselves to eternal silence. Theirs was the quiet he was hearing. It was not a silence for which he could take credit or blame. It was not his burden, or his sacrifice, or his honour.

He gave thanks for it, though. He did not expect this silence to banish the others. Their weights would remain with him. But it might bring about yet another. Through it, the Beast would at last cease to roar.

THE LAST SON OF DORN

David Guymer

‘All war presupposes human weakness and seeks to exploit it.’

– General Carl von Clausewitz,
the Prussian Militarum of Ancient Terra, M2

One

Plaeos – atmospheric entry
Check 2, -00:15:21

Kjarvik Stormcrow stood in the gunship’s open hatch. One armoured boot was on the lowering assault ramp, the extended hydraulics gripped in one wolf-clawed gauntlet. The braid of heavy ork knucklebones strung through his long forelock drummed wildly on his shoulder. His pelt whipped about behind him. The unfamiliar salts of an alien sea filled his nose and mouth. Before him was grey ocean, as far as his prodigiously enhanced senses and stupefying altitude could show it. Massive waves were capped with oily pollution and stuck through with scrap metal. It made them frothy and barbed, like watching the hreindýr herds on their winter exodus across the fjords.

The phosphorus burn of auto-fire tracers stitched across the streaking blue, the loose-chain rattle of machine cannons barely audible above the roar of turbofans. The Penitent Wrath descended hard and hammered left. A propeller-driven biplane with a lightning bolt jagging down the side droned by on the right, and spat high-velocity slugs into the water. Kjarvik held on, scowling. More of the atmosphere fighters were buzzing low over the ocean on an intercept course. They were not going to make it, of course.

The ork aircraft were remarkably capable given their ramshackle design, but they had not a scrap on the Thunderhawk’s speed. And Atherias, the Hawk Lord, was good. Almost preternaturally good. His co-pilot was not too bad either.

The gunship levelled out, auto-fire crisscrossing the sky around them. Kjarvik beheld the mountainous structure that Atherias’ evasive manoeuvres had brought into view.

Bohr would have called it an island hive, or the remains of one, but Bohr had no soul.

It was a titan of the ocean underworld, the burned, bombed-out skeleton of a thing that could not die. Its skin partially regenerated with drift metal, plastek sheeting, and planks of wood, it reared up for the feast of metallics that glinted in the orbital band. Fat blimps and transorbitals buzzed around its thorny head like carrion birds.

Massive guy ropes held the teetering mountain upright, anchored within the sprawling pontoon shanties that crested and fell with the waves. The relentless wave action was converted into power by salt-corroded copper converters, fed into hab-size capacitors for storage or through fat cables towards immense desalination complexes. The dark blue water was slurped out of the ocean by the kilolitre, potable water and salts spitting out into drums for export. Fleets of ramshackle paddleboats trawled the ocean for usable scrap.

Mere months after Plaeos had fallen, the orks had made their new conquest not just viable, but valuable.

‘Twenty seconds,’ came Atherias’ voice, tinny in his ear bead.

An ork fighter came apart in a blizzard of outsized engine parts as Penitent Wrath’s lascannons neatly cut it out of the sky and set off its fuel tank. Debris spanked off the gunship’s heavy hull armour, and Kjarvik ducked back to avoid a piece of propeller that came scything across like a circular saw and took a bite out of the foot of the ramp before bouncing clear.

He looked back out, and saw the fighter’s wingman pull a turn that would have torn a Lightning interceptor in half, then spear out left. Machine-guided underwing hardpoints tracked it, mass-reactives spitting between its wobbling interwing struts as it flashed underneath the gunship then pulled into a gravity-defying vertical corkscrew that swung the fighter-bomber in behind. Kjarvik caught a glimpse of the pilot – immense musculature, bulked out in furs and squeezed into a cockpit. A huge grin split the ork’s ugly mouth beneath a set of red-lensed goggles as it mashed its firing toggles to send a stream of auto-fire gnawing through the Thunderhawk’s blocky rear armour.

A ruptured oxygen main sprayed compressed gases across the assault ramp as Kjarvik drew his bolt pistol and loosed a flurry of rounds. The gas spray cut out as Penitent Wrath’s spirit redirected her outlets. The wind cleared the ramp, and Kjarvik was able to watch as the fighter veered off with a mass-reactive wound in her upper wing before breaking up in the water.

‘Hah!’ he roared. ‘Did you see that?’

‘A lucky shot,’ Bohr chided, crackling in his ear.

‘Better to be lucky than not, I say.’

‘Ten seconds.’

The Thunderhawk responded to the heightened strain of four armoured Space Marines moving towards its rear hatch with a barely audible whine of its already howling turbofans. Kjarvik looked over his shoulder.

Baldarich pressed Phareous’ shield into his gauntlets. It was white against the fresh black of his armour and bore the emblem of a writhing snake. Phareous in turn tossed the Black Templar his broadsword. Behind them, Zarrael rammed the most vicious-looking weapon Kjarvik had ever seen across his back. He called it an eviscerator. The Flesh Tearer was massive, despite the fact he had just knelt to strap a bandolier of grenades over his thigh plate. Kjarvik had seen orks smaller.

Kill-Team Umbra.

‘Your helmet.’ Iron Father Jurkim Bohr appeared from the cockpit hatch. Whipping mechadendrites performed final checks on his battleplate and moved, apparently guided by their own spirits, to pluck spare magazines and grenades from the equipment lockers. Other tendrils snaked through the cargo webbing, moving in a weird mirror-fashion to the stride of his armoured limbs. Two women in bulky pressure suits, back-mounted grav-harnesses and underwater rebreathers flanked him.

Despite their protective coverings, their relative stature, the women possessed a presence that engulfed them all, that the Thunderhawk itself could not contain. They glided where the Iron Hand clumped, floated within a null singularity of their pariah physiology.

Kjarvik gave a pantherish snarl, and slid the black helmet over his mane as advised. It found the gorget softseals with a hiss of magnetic constrictors. It killed the wind, but it would take more than an environment seal to take the chill factor of the Sisters away. After a moment, his helm display came alive, pre-set with counters clocking local probable and relativistic time. They were all blinking rapidly down towards zero.

‘Five seconds.’

There was a time and a place for waiting. Kjarvik did not think that this was it. What was five seconds anyway?

He stepped backwards off the ramp.

The wind hit him hard and he began to fall. The thunder of turbofans and heavy bolters disappeared in the roar. He spread his arms and legs wide and let go a howl of joy. The black paint of the gunship disappeared. The wide grey of the ocean rushed up to meet him, waves rearing up as though desperate to hit him before he hit them.

Then they did, like being rammed in the chest by a Razorback, and everything became black.

Eidolica – orbital
Check 7, -00:09:01

No one had ever called the Fists Exemplar home world beautiful.

Its sun was a ball of thermonuclear rage. The daylight terminator was a line of fire ten kilometres high and twenty thousand long, a creeping barrage of photons and ultraviolet rays. Barren mountains rose high into the atmosphere, what wind the world’s torturous spin could generate insufficient to blunt them. Vast black expanses of promethium sands covered about a third of the surface in lieu of liquid oceans.

From the Storm Eagle’s open rear hatch Tyris could pick out the sprawling extraction and refinery complexes, a web of rust and piping and sporadic flare-offs that ate into the littoral boundary. A countdown timer hovered over his left eye, stretched slightly by the curve of his visor. He turned from the hatch and stepped aside. The deliberate heel-up, disengage, toe-down maglock gait came as second nature.

His own genetic proclivities, maybe, but the Raven Guard would always be more comfortable in the black.

‘Nubis. Antares.’

The Salamander and Fist Exemplar of Kill-Team Stalker clumped up to the hatch. The sun burned a white stripe along the smooth relief of their helmets, pauldrons, and the lift jets of their jump packs. They stood either side of a third figure, similarly geared with a light-variant jump pack and grav-lines. She was tall for a human, but not so tall in the company she kept. Her ornate, high-collared armour appeared gold, but the thermal membrane that had been painted over the top dulled its shine. It stretched over her bald head and braided topknot like a taut skin. The infinite depths of her eyes were shielded by a set of flare goggles.

‘Go,’ Tyris voxed.

The two Space Marines pushed themselves through the hatch and into the thin, void-boundary layer of the upper atmosphere. The Sister followed a second behind.

‘Next.’

Vega and Iaros stepped up to the breach, a second woman similarly positioned between them. If Tyris had once thought the mortal women in need of protection, then that misconception had been cleansed from him over the weeks of joint exercises and training. They were simply too valuable to go in first.

Maglocked though they were, Tyris could picture the Doom Eagle shifting from foot to foot as he would in practice, eager to be away. He had come to know them all, better than many of his own gene-brothers, and he knew therefore that the Ultramarine would hesitate on the threshold and glance back.

‘I have an ill-feeling about this, brother-sergeant,’ said Iaros.

Tyris glanced to the silent Sister, felt his gut coil at the nothing that filled her space.

‘Don’t we all.’

‘We do not,’ voxed Vega.

‘Go,’ said Tyris, lest the Doom Eagle jump alone, and once again the three warriors pushed themselves through the open hatch.

Alone inside the coasting gunship’s assault bay, Tyris moved to the edge.

He held a moment, heart swelling, eyes drinking in the view.

There was no wind. No pull of air or ding of particulates hitting the fuselage. No howl of decompression. Just inside, outside, and nothing but the liminal between them. Half an eye on his visor’s countdown timer, he spread his arms, disengaged maglock, and pitched forward.

Sunlight hit him like a bolt-round in the face. It overloaded his auto-senses and bleached his view to whites and greys. Bleeps and chimes alerted him to temperature and radiation warnings, failures in his suit’s auspex, vox, and power distribution subsystems. There was a reason that Antares cursed with a reference to ‘bright skies’. Work ceased. Cities were locked down. Even microbes could not exist on the planet’s surface during its day.

Which was why only a daylight raid would succeed.

There was no sensation of falling at all. The air was too thin to be felt. The planet was so far below him that the passing seconds brought its features no closer. He could almost reach out, and clasp a hemisphere in each gauntlet. If not for the madcap race of altimeter runes in his helmet display, he might have believed he flew. He could just about pick out the rest of his kill-team through the radiation glare. They were far below him, freefalling, but still in formation and descending fast.

He turned his head slightly and caught the Storm Eagle as it cushioned off the atmosphere and away. Twenty metres of inertially propelled metal, unpowered, it might as well have been invisible. The precision calculation required to graze a body moving at one hundred and eighty thousand kilometres per second with another impelled towards it from a trillion kilometres away staggered him.

It could only have been achieved with the cooperation of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

He looked back to the planet. He scoured it for the coordinates of the Fists Exemplar fortress. Genhanced synapses lapped at the brink of the neural cascade that would trigger his jump pack as numerals raced across his helm display towards a string of zeroes.

It had to be all together or it might as well be not at all.

Soon.

But not yet.

Valhalla – Kalinin trench
Check 3, -00:03:35

Tulwei stood up on the bike’s foot pegs and looked back over the skull and triple-forked lightning emblem on his pauldron. The command Salamander rumbled up through thick snow, pitted dozer blade ploughing up a great heap of it as if to bank up its own earthwork. Rattling caterpillar tracks threw fresh fall over the idling attack bikes of Kill-Team Tigrus as it pulled in. Its chassis trembled and growled, one big beast asserting dominance over the lesser vehicles that spat and whined around its armour skirts.

‘The one you were sent for is here, all right.’ General Sebko of the Kalinin CCCIII, ‘White Guard’, was swaddled in an ice-camouflage greatcoat with a thick fur collar, gloves, a snow-speckled cap, and snow goggles. Only the pins on his cuff and the iron in his beard distinguished him from the junior staffers bustling about the command tank’s exposed rear section. ‘The orks are dug in deep, and in numbers. It will be a slaughter, my lord.’

‘Let the slaughter be your concern. The Lord Commander’s quarry is ours.’

‘Yes, lord.’

The general had to shout to be heard, or if he was addressing one of his own unaugmented soldiers he probably would have. Earthshaker batteries thumped and thundered. The shaking ground spilled snow into trenches where tens of thousands of heavy-coated soldiers tramped over squelching duckboards. Lasguns in equivalent numbers crackled. Men shouted. Tanks roared. Guns of every calibre voiced their frustration and spite. Hatred was as thick on the air as the slush in the bottom of the tenches, and every degree as bitter.

‘The army goes over on my signal,’ Tulwei roared. He could hear over the din perfectly well. Shouting was out of consideration for the human’s ears.

The likely annihilation of the CCCIII would leave Kalinin’s northern approach wide open, but to to the general’s great credit, he simply saluted. ‘It will, lord.’

‘A full-scale assault on the ork lines will draw them out, and when they come…’ He indicated the trio of black-painted attack bikes grizzling in the snow beside his. Spitting out promethium fumes and snowmelt alongside them were the lavishly baroque gold-and-black bikes of the Sisters of Silence. One of the sidecars was empty. It would not be so for the return ride. Tulwei clapped his gauntlets together. ‘We will wait for word of the witch-breed’s position and be on him like a winter gale.’

Sebko smiled thinly. ‘Show it Valhalla’s warmth.’

Cleaning out the sidecar’s heavy bolter beside Tulwei, Sentar gave an approving chuckle.

The Valhallans’ loathing of the greenskins could have matched their own. Small wonder that their world held out while forge worlds and garrison worlds with standing forces in the billions were ground under the ork war machine like stones under the linked treads of a super-heavy tank.

Tulwei looked to his left. The Dark Angel, Vehuel, throttled his engine, a challenge in his hooded eyes. He looked to his right. The Soul Drinker, Grigorus, looked back, gauntlet over his gear stick, the other on the throttle. Tulwei grinned in anticaption of the great race to come. A countdown timer scrolled down the left-hand side of his helm display.

‘Nearly, brothers.’

And the countdown ended.

Terra – Imperial Palace
Check 0, -00:00:57

The Meridian Chamber, a little known sub-annexe of the Clanium Library, was where the fractal vagaries of Imperial time were charted and thus standardised. Here, seconds, minutes and hours were ticked off, blinked away, their passage marked by the tens of thousands of asynchronous timepieces. The four walls were divided by the four outer segmenta, each one further subdivided by sector, by subsector, and, for particularly prominent, heavily settled regions, by system. Muttering chrono-savants in dusky robes compared neighbouring pieces, meditated over astropath logs and shipping data and, where necessary, made corrections, circled by joyful cherub seraphim. Here, Imperial Standard Time was set.

Koorland, Lord Commander of the Imperium, last of the Imperial Fists, stepped smartly out of the way as one of the hunchbacked magi shuffled blindly across him. Its robes scuffed the floor. Hourglasses adorned with cyberskull motifs and filled with grains of glass swayed from a belt of woven metal. The magos approached the group of chanting acolytes that surrounded the Praeceptor, the master chrono: a scuffed leaden tank the size of a drop pod, delineating Terran time by atomic resonance exactly as it had done for the last thirty thousand years. The magos’ tools clicked and chittered over the venerable machine.

‘What is the verdict, magos?’

The adept took his time in answering. Imperial time was an arcane measure. It was fractal, ever changeable. The unimaginable distances between worlds and the time-bending effects of warp travel rendered linearity subjective at best.

But not so for the Beast. His greatest strength, the orks’ subspace propulsion technology, was also mankind’s most glaring, stone-age strategic weakness. He could move from system to system at speeds greater than the warp’s. His lines of communication were instantaneous. Koorland had but one chance to catch the orks unprepared. The Deathwatch assault on the Terran attack moon had required to-the-second timing. Accomplishing the same over interstellar distances was an exponential order of magnitude more difficult.

Fail, and he would never find them unprepared again.

After a few seconds in which hundreds of timepieces ticked out their own relativistic versions of time, the chrono-magos turned. His face was hooded, but clicked with moving parts. ‘There is a reasonable degree of probability that our times are now in synchrony.’

Koorland clenched one gauntleted fist and glanced over his shoulder.

Maximus Thane stood in front of the clock-lined wall with arms crossed, garbed in a long surplice that was as severe as a statue’s and grey as the genetic character of his eyes. He nodded once, and Koorland made a smile, some of the tension he felt disappearing in it. Some, but not all.

Everything rested on this.

‘The Lords will be waiting. Call them into the Library, brother.’

Valhalla – Kalinin trench
Check 3, 00:00:00

Officers of the CCCIII sounded out long blasts on their whistles and Valhallan soldiers fixed bayonets, pushed wobbling trench ladders to the walls and yelled, screams as formless as the steam that burst from their mouths. They began to climb. Squadrons of patched-up Leman Russ tanks rattled forward in support on cleated tracks. Marauder fighter-bombers, invisible in the blizzard, rumbled overhead.

Tulwei gunned his engine and allowed the attack bike to crunch slowly forward. He fingered his chainsword’s activation stud impatiently, waiting for the signal, and watched as it began.

Eidolica – atmospheric entry
Check 7, 00:00:00

It began.

A splutter of thrust arrested Tyris’ descent. The thrill of afterburners shivered through his armour. Then nothing. He opened his arms and glided, no sound in his helmet but his own breath, the hiss of stabilisers. Solar radiation had killed unit vox, but every warrior knew his role. The atmosphere flared with short promethium burns as the others made use of their jump packs to correct their angles.

The sun was ferocious, his visor seared to grey opacity. He could barely see the landing zone at all, the listing fortress of the Fists Exemplar, but the greenskins would have had to shut down auspex grids and seal their shutters in preparation for the dawn. What was he – a charcoal speck in the daylight furnace, a mote, invisible in the light, a streak on the white-glare armaplas sky. He was the net, the knife.

He was the Raven.

And the orks would rue the day the Lord Commander had called his brothers to the war.

Plaeos – Mundus Trench
Check 2, 00:00:00

Kjarvik’s pack lights pierced the gloom of the oceanic trench to a distance of about ten metres. Rust flakes and bits of debris, from fingernail-size down, danced from the darkness of the water column in a reflective swirl for the passing of the beams. Depth indicator runes pulsed in his helm display, bleeding redly into the hyper-pressurised backdrop on the opposite side of the armourglass.

Running across his path at roughly man-height was a ridge of dirt: pipes, buried in sediment and planktonic xenoforms. Polyps and tendrils and silvery, segmented creatures retreated from Kjarvik’s light as though the sea floor were a living thing that recoiled from his touch. He clumped around.

One of the Sisters of Silence lumbered towards him. Dozens of tiny indicator lights lit up her form and the shoal of escaping bubbles that rippled around her. Unlike the superb homeostatic systems of Kjarvik’s power armour, her suit lost most of her exhaled gases with every breath. He could function at this depth for days, without food or rest if need be, but it had already taken them half an hour just to reach the bottom of the ocean trench. She probably had the same again at best.

Her hands moved in front of her. Slowly. As though chained to great weights buried deep beneath the sea floor.

‘There is time,’ she gestured, using Adeptus Astartes battle-sign. She raised a sluggish gauntlet to point right along the run of pipes. Kjarvik blinked up a tri-dimensional gridmap of the ocean bottom, overlaid with the runes of Umbra and flowing datascreed. His eyes roved over it, absorbing it metaconsciously. Hive Mundus’ foundation levels were about five hundred metres that way. It would be a hard half-kilometre in power armour.

‘Very well,’ he voxed, and then on Umbra’s shared frequency, ‘Kjarvik. Moving to target.’ He started right, following the line of piping.

The rest of the squad called in: Bohr, Zarrael, Phareous, Baldarich, a vox-click from the second Sister of Silence. The tracker runes in his helm display confirmed their convergence on the target. The Sister followed cumbersomely behind him, breathing heavily into the vox as she struggled to keep to his pace.

Pillows of dust rose languidly from the sea bed with the stomp of his boots, his visibility dropping to eight metres, then six, then three, a shoal of glittering particulates surrounding him like carnivores around a piece of meat. He continued on augur readings, the pipes always on his left. He glanced down for a moment to check the helmet-sized dish of ceramite casing that was maglocked to his hip. It was a melta mine. Its systems responded to his armour’s auto-interrogator with a squirt of reassuringly passive signals.

A double click on his vox-channel pulled his attention back up.

His pack beams slashed the dark with silver as he looked around. He snarled in frustration. The signal came again, click click, as urgent as a non-vocal responder could be. A Vow of Tranquility was all to the good in your cloister. He disengaged his bolt pistol’s holster seals, and the weapon came away in his gauntlet in a rush of air bubbles.

He half turned, head moving a fraction ahead of his weighted body, and saw it. A black shape, smooth, shiny like oil, cut his light beam in half. He stomped back and it flashed by him, barely two metres from his face, more of it sweeping past as he pulled up his bolt pistol. His light flashed over the leviathan’s blubbery underbelly. Fins. Webbed claws. Weird, oily camouflage.

His pistol fired with a thunderous boom. A compression wave rippled out ahead of the bolt, propellant burn frothing up the water in its wake. The second explosion came a split-second later with a sudden blossom of red. The pressure held it together rather than allow it to disperse and the ragged, heavier-than-water spill slowly sank.

There was no cry of pain, no ultrasonic squeal of panic or alarm. Kjarvik watched it swim past, separating the billowing blood sac into smaller droplets with a parting swipe of its gargantuan tailfin. He had barely scratched it.

A vox-crackle spoke into his ear. ‘Did you kill a fish, brother-sergeant?’

‘First blood to me, Phareous.’

‘It only counts if you kill it,’ said Zarrael.

‘Are you using a secure squad link to keep tally?’ grumbled Baldarich. Kjarvik did not think that the Black Templar liked him very much.

The huge metal wall of Hive Mundus’ exterior shell soaked up his light beam. It was a sheer cliff face of adamantium composite, encrusted with organisms that had spent the last five thousand years evolving to break it down. Kjarvik surveyed it quickly, beam nipping left, right, up, down. Its visual appearance aligned with the schematics that the tech-priests had released to Bohr. The deep ocean had shielded the hive’s foundations from the orbital strikes that had devastated the surface, and given a base for the orks to subsequently rebuild.

But it had been weakened. Kjarvik could see the hairline fractures in the plating.

‘Kjarvik. In position.’ He uncoupled the melta mine from its hip suspensor and clamped it to the wall, voxing it in as he backed up to put some distance between himself and it. Four more confirmations came swiftly back.

‘Detonation in three,’ voxed Bohr.

Kjarvik turned to the Sister. Her blank face was illuminated by the cold square of lumen strips that outlined the edges of her pressure mask.

‘Two.’

He clasped the woman’s wrist in his gauntlet. She turned to him questioningly, and he grinned. He was the Stormcrow. The unlucky.

‘One.’

Two

Terra – the Imperial Palace
Check 0, 00:21:01

Tomorrow, he would be dead.

That view was Mesring’s own. His deterioration continued to baffle the mindless flow of hospitallers, physicae, and witch doctors that his personal staff summoned to his bedside. The cramps that woke him in the night to screaming agony at the passage of anything more fortifying than filtered water across his lips mystified them. As for the bouts of dizziness, the sweats, the lucid nightmares where he raved of plots and blasphemy – well, they were cause for great consternation. Every test was returned negative. Every palliative or medicament applied did nothing. It led even the most long-serving and decent amongst his staff to question whether it was simply his time. That he, Erekart Veneris Sanguinan Mesring, had served the divine Emperor for as long as He willed it.

Mesring would have sneered had he that much strength. The Emperor could not will Himself out of His own throne.

His opinion on his prospects, however, seemed to be one that his closest aides shared. He could think of no other reason, besides another ghastly hallucination, for the presence of Arch-Confessor Vitori Mendelyev beside him for his final hours.

‘This is a beautiful shrine,’ said Mendelyev. The old man took a deep breath of shriven air and candle smoke. ‘Peaceful.’ He had a soft, calming voice, an open face, both of which Mesring supposed were aids to his duties as confessor to the powerful.

‘I will not keel over on cue,’ Mesring snarled, fingernails digging into the wood back of the pew in front with his efforts at not crying out for the pain twisting in his gut. This was why he had sat in the second row when, as Ecclesiarch, the Emperor’s mortal representative on Terra, he could sit wherever he damn well pleased.

‘Of course,’ said Mendelyev, and fell silent. His eyes were closed, his lips moving soundlessly, his bald head dappled with the light of over a million candles. One for every world in the Emperor’s demesne. Mesring gave a rustling cackle, bringing the taste of old vomit back up into his mouth. Someone was failing to keep tally. There should be a few less of the things and their insufferable flickering by now.

The Cardinals’ Wake was a private sanctuary for the most senior clergy of the Adeptus Ministorum. The area was too sacred, and too sensitive, for their junior colleagues, and so even the most menial of functions from changing the oils in the scenting bowls to cleansing the colossal clerestory of stained glass were peformed by deacons and lectors, old men who could have been anointed primates of entire sectors and lived in commensurate luxury, but had instead opted to sweep the floors here. Mesring’s contempt for them was as limitless as the stars. The occasional Mechanicus adept, garbed respectfully in the palest off-white pink, worked out of sight beneath the basalt and gold statues of saints and Ecclesiarchs past, all the way back to Veneris I.

No effort was made to mask the great fibre-bundles and conduits that ran through the cathedra from the blessed machinery of the Golden Throne. It was sacred to both worlds, Terra and Mars, and the gentle susurrus of its continual operation was equally soothing to auditory systems of nerves and of wire. That was why the cardinals had held vigil here since the Emperor’s internment, and was what brought Mesring here now. Though he did not seek peace.

‘Doomed, all of you,’ he muttered, shivering, glaring at the handful of grey-haired clergy sat in silent prayer throughout the shrine. ‘Better to placate the Great Beast than trust in Him.’

‘The Emperor forgives and protects,’ said Mendelyev placidly, as though he had heard every deathbed blasphemy imagined by man.

‘It was the Emperor’s trespasses that brought the slow death to mankind. Ten millennia of decay and then final damnation. That is the loving bequest I foresee. One that only the Beast offers salvation from.’

The confessor, though bound for the same hell that awaited them all, of which Mesring now suffered but a fleeting foretaste, merely smiled. ‘In His deathless state, the Emperor reveals His divinity.’

‘Spare me. I can recite all the hypocrisy from memory.’

‘You want some new truth?’ said Mendelyev, soft still but with a firmer edge. ‘You have lived long and well, eminence. To all outward appearances you have been a paragon of the virtues of the Creed.’ Mesring caught the subtle reprimand. ‘The Emperor thinks little of self-pity. Believe me in this, eminence, that nothing eases a man’s passing like a little grace at the end.’

‘Grace,’ Mesring spat. ‘Vulkan is dead!’

The confessor shrugged. ‘As are many of his brothers.’

‘You seem remarkably sanguine.’

‘Worries are for the young.’

‘Old men dying with grace is what keeps the sheep in their pens and the wolves at the door.’

For all that they were used as metaphors in scripture wherever one looked, Mesring had never seen a wolf. They were the forest, the mountains, the night; the ancestral dread of upright apes that after a thousand generations of hive cities and nuclear winters still hadn’t lost a fear of the dark. They were what would emerge from the sump after the last lumen bulb sputtered out: not Chaos, but what Chaos made be.

Mesring blinked dizzily, realising that his voice was raised and echoing from the distant machinery, but also that a dying man couldn’t care less who he disturbed.

‘The Imperial Fists were destroyed, Vitori. It was Udo’s lie that put imposters bearing the black fist on their walls. My lie also. And Koorland upholds it. The people believe in a lie. They are all lies.’

To his surprise, tears were running down his cheeks.

Mendelyev clasped his shoulder kindly. ‘The Ecclesiarch weeps. This is good. Unburden yourself of your sins.’

‘I weep because I want to take off Vangorich’s head and stick it on a pole!’

‘Speak to me, eminence. I am here to listen, to whatever it is you need to say.’

Mesring looked up at the scrape of approaching footsteps, but it was merely a passing sexton come to relight the candles. With a cough that brought up some more blood, he reached into the sweat-soiled inner pocket of his surplice and withdrew a glass vial. It was empty. He placed it on the prayer table in front of Mendelyev.

‘What is this?’ the confessor asked.

‘The Emperor’s turned back. Poison delivered by a penitent’s kiss. An Ecclesiarch bought for a few meagre days of life.’

‘Bought?’

‘My alchemist was able to extend the final dose that Wienand supplied, but no more.’ He gestured to the empty vial. ‘Tomorrow I will be dead.’ He hissed the final word as a sudden, clenching pain overtook his self-control. His vision ran like the paint of an underhive mission in the acid rain. Something warm trickled down the inside of his leg. The Beast’s emissary to Holy Terra’s orbit had been vanquished and Mesring no longer knew where to turn. ‘Without… a… miracle.’

As if on cue – a sign, he prayed, a sign that the Emperor truly does watch and forgive – the monolithic Gates of Undying that led, ultimately, to the Golden Throne Room itself were opened and a procession of frocked men and their entourage entered.

The cortege was led by a frater swinging a jewelled censer and followed out by vestal choristers in trailing robes. The clergy were escorted by Frateris Templar in gleaming carapace, marching with ceremonial gold-plated lasguns locked to their shoulder, the cold fire of force-bayonets flickering by their ears. Mesring couldn’t tell how many there were. His eyes were too bleary to count, his mind too fuzzy to hold a number, but after a few minutes the procession tailed off and the gates were barred, physically, by the towering figure of a lone Adeptus Custodes.

The guardian was four metres tall, encased in golden artificer armour and wielding a halberd that was anything but ornamental. The Adeptus Custodes were crafted by the same artifice that had sired the primarchs, and though they were less than those demigods, they were still greater than the Adeptus Astartes. Seeing that being, Mesring felt the first stirrings of doubt at the enfeeblement of the God-Emperor.

‘You are not going to…’ hissed Mendelyev.

‘The Ecclesiarch has the authority.’

‘To make a request on behalf of another, not for himself. The Emperor’s tears are shed for His fallen warriors. They are for His warriors.’

‘He leaves me no choice. It cannot be His will for me to die like this. It cannot.’

An arch-cardinal in ostentatious white robes and jewelled mitre passed through the fug of incense and verse, dropped to one knee and kissed Mesring’s fingers. The memory of the last time Mesring had allowed that particular show of respect made his fists clench. The man’s name was Wilbran. His position of Emperor’s Chaplain was, naturally, a largely ceremonial one, but it carried tremendous prestige.

It occurred to Mesring that Wilbran’s would be high on any list of names to succeed him.

With a platitudinous greeting, the arch-cardinal stepped aside. Past him shuffled a lachrymal page with the wrung-out, worn-down look of a man who had grown old in spite of the chemical treatments belaying the onset of puberty and the death of innocence. He bore a silk cushion and on it a small golden reliquary. He prostrated himself and Wilbran opened the box. Inside was a vial, cut from a single piece of diamond, on a bed of scented tissue. It contained one droplet of glistening liquid.

Mesring’s breath caught as Wilbran lifted it reverentially and passed it to him.

The Emperor shed a tear for every one of His own that fell in battle. There was a priesthood dedicated to their collection, and just one had the power to heal a man of all wounds.

He took it, cotton-wool fingers fumbling with the stopper, and upended it over his desperate tongue.

He felt nothing.

The volume of liquid was so miniscule he did not even feel it hit his mouth. He was aware of the coiling in his gut, the fog in his brain, the thumping inside his ears. He scrunched his eyes and prayed to the Emperor to accept this one last chance to demonstrate His power. But he felt nothing. Nothing at all.

His grip tightened around the vial, and he pressed it to his forehead until it cut in.

He would not go quietly. He knew all the lies now.

And if a man as powerful as Mesring was going to fall, then the earth was damn well going to shake.

Three

Terra – the Imperial Palace
Check 0, 00:41:26

Lady Kavalanera Brassanas, knight abyssal of the Sisters of Silence, sat perfectly upright at the head of the table, hands on her armoured thighs. She was clad in antique crimson armour etched with ancient Terran designs, extinct languages, ideograms representative of concepts relevant to a mythic age. Parchment strips attached to the armour with wax seals decorated her body with an impenetrable, spiderish script. The collar of her battleplate was high, obscuring her mouth and nose and leaving only the dark-matter emptiness of her stare between her and the world. She was an untouchable, a blank, one in a trillion: a homozygous carrier of the mutant pariah gene that rendered her impervious to all forms of psyker assault. A useful trait, if an unnerving one to be around.

The High Lords, those that Koorland had demanded attend, adopted various manifestations of mental brace against the negative pressure of the woman’s mind, and the inexorable pull on their souls.

Juskina Tull and Fabricator General Kubik sat together along one side of the long table, with Admiral Lansung, Wienand and Gibran facing them on the other. Drakan Vangorich sat somewhere between attention and repose at the far end. Though not officially represented on the High Twelve, the Assassin had become as much a part of proceedings as the Lord Commander himself, and Koorland suspected that a few of his less informed peers had forgotten that they technically outranked him.

In spite of recent damage, the Clanium Library remained very much the overstuffed vanity project that Lansung had made of it. For all the Lord Admiral’s faults in matters of grand strategy and statecraft, however, given a small enough stage in which to operate he was a perfectly able military commander. The chronometric displays, hololiths, and loop projectors that had been installed at great expense in place of the books and other portable storage media that had previously filled the shelves actually, by accident or design, made for an excellent consultation chamber.

The snarling visage of an ork filled the big screens that surrounded the conference table, not frozen exactly but jerking from one millisecond to the next and then back again as though eager to be done but barred from moving on. A pair of fuzzy verticals ran though the image at the exact same spot on every display. The brute’s crusted nose and gaping mouth were up close to the capturing lens, its expression very much what one would expect from an ork having its skull crushed in a Black Templars Dreadnought’s power fist. With every twitch around the timepoint, the ork’s eyes were noticeably squashed closer together and then released back. Energetic emanations sparked from the cracks in the ork’s skull, generating strange, unsettling imagery on the data medium that became overt only when, as now, the playback was held.

Koorland was not at all surprised that everyone – barring Juskina Tull, he judged by her rapt expression – had already seen the Dzelenic IV footage. He was resigned to the fact that any information known to more than two people within the Palace’s walls quickly became common knowledge.

‘This,’ said Koorland, ‘as you are probably all by now aware, is live footage retrieved from a battle between a force of Black Templars under Venerable Magneric and an ork warband. It was returned to Terra at great cost by the Interdictor in the belief of her crew that what it shows is the weakness that we have all been looking for in the orks. Their psykers. We simply did not have the means to exploit this information until now.’

Ignoring the intrigued murmur from the Lords, Koorland reached across Lady Brassanas to depress the intercom switch set into a panel at the head of the table. ‘Brother Thane, have you located Magos Laurentis?’

‘I have. It seems he took a wrong turn at the playback control room.’

‘Please escort him in, brother.’

One of the grand paired doors creaked inwards, disturbing the roost of herald-seraphim clustered over the lintel block with squawks of Thane, Thane. The Chapter Master of the Fists Exemplar held the door open and, with an oddly asynchronous click of metal ‘feet’ on the parquet tiles, Phaeton Laurentis scuttled towards the table.

There was almost nothing left of the magos who had been assigned to the Imperial Fists Second Company to study the extermination of the Ardamantuan chromes. The eye, perhaps, nestled in the centre of an insectile reconstruction of vox-thief pickups, mechanosensors and emotive carapace. That and the occasional quirk of personality. The rest was a reconstruction and, to Koorland’s mind, not one that the magos biologis, or anyone, could have deserved.

Laurentis circled the table on a tripod of articulated metal limbs that flicked up the skirts of ill-fitting robes, and distributed data packets with flicks of mechadendrites. His voice too was harshly synthesised.

‘You have begun to discuss the ork mysticus breed, correct?’ He pivoted his eyeball to Koorland, who nodded. ‘Good. Good. I apologise for my tardiness, Lord Commander, but I have studied this footage frame-by-frame one thousand and eleven times, and I have many demands on my time.’

‘As do we all,’ muttered Lansung.

Once, perhaps, Laurentis would have been human enough to note the not-so-subtle jab, but no longer. ‘As the Venerable Dreadnought-Marshal was cogent enough to recognise, the orks’ psykers are their weakness. The mind of each individual ork operates as a psychic dynamo of sorts, responsive to the ork’s mood and growing exponentially in power in the presence of other orks.’

‘The green roar,’ said Gibran, the hooded Paternoval Envoy of the Navis Nobilite, clearly more discomforted than the others by the psychic blank space generated by the knight abyssal. ‘We are familiar with the effect.’

‘The ork pyskers are able to absorb that power and release it in concentrated, directed form. As we observed on Ullanor, the harder we attack, the stronger the ork psychic field becomes. But as you have all seen…’ he gestured to the image frozen in greyscale on the pict-feed, ‘…the flow of power can be reversed.’

‘Potentially useful,’ said Vangorich, flicking through his packet, seemingly idly. ‘But we would have to draw these psykers out in order to exploit it, and the orks seem wiser than to let that happen. It didn’t happen on Ullanor.’

‘Which is why we must capture one for ourselves,’ said Koorland. ‘Ideally more than one.’

‘At least three, in fact,’ said Laurentis. ‘The Basilikon Astra and the work of the Grand Experiment have identified three ork colonies where the genotype of the mysticus subspecies has been confirmed. It is the opinion of my fellow magi biologi that the observed effect can be artificially induced. And targeted to destructive effect.’

‘An operation on this scale will require considerable manpower,’ said Lansung, with some of his usual bluster now he was on familiar ground. ‘And firepower. We are a council of twelve. We can’t in good conscience authorise that kind of operation without a full vote. Lord Verreault at least should be here to speak for the Astra Militarum.’

Tull and Gibran nodded gravely. Vangorich sat back in his chair and looked to the ceiling with a long sigh.

‘Let me be clear, so there can be no further misunderstandings.’ Koorland leaned forward. Everyone bar Vangorich and Kubik shifted noticeably back. ‘This is not a discussion. I do not ask for opinions and this is not a vote. There is no time to muster a fleet, and even if there were the unfortunate truth is that after Ullanor there is no longer the capacity to resource an expedition on that scale. We must learn to act quickly and decisively, which is why Deathwatch Kill-Teams Umbra, Stalker and Tigrus under the command of Sergeants Kjarvik, Tyris and Tulwei and supported by the Sisters of Silence have already been deployed to those worlds.’

‘Already. Deployed.’ Wienand enunciated each word as though they were too important to share a sentence.

‘You make it sound so ominous,’ said Vangorich.

‘Isn’t it?’ Wienand turned back to Koorland. ‘The Senatorum acknowledges the necessity of the Last Wall and the Deathwatch. And their effectiveness. But many of us, myself included, do not exactly like either. And now you appear to enjoy sole command of both? As I understand it you have even begun extending recruitment beyond those Chapters directly affected by the losses on Ullanor.’ She referred down to the extensive pile of handwritten notes in front of her. ‘Tyris and Tulwei are of the Raven Guard and the Storm Lords. Just how big is the Deathwatch now, Lord Commander? You can’t circumvent the Codex Astartes with loopholes.’

‘Must we have this same argument?’ said Vangorich.

‘Query,’ said Kubik, speaking in his harshly mechanised monotone for the first time since Thane had brought them all to their seats. ‘Objection has been raised to those of us not present, but what of those of us who are? Why are we here?’

‘Because I need ships. I need the best Navigators to pilot them and good men to crew them.’

As soon as Koorland said this, the atmosphere in the room changed. It became circumspect, the Lords each retreating to some private mental fief to survey its limits, what it held of value and, most importantly, what it was worth in trade. Koorland banished it back to the corners with a rap of his knuckles on the table. ‘I say again – this is not a request.’

‘It’s not that,’ said Lansung. He waved a pudgy hand vaguely. ‘There simply aren’t the ships to give you.’

‘The Autocephalax Eternal emerged from the most recent battle relatively unscathed. I will take everything. I can take no more from the Space Marine Chapters without blunting their own effectiveness.’

‘The damage to the flagship remains extensive, lord. Resources are scarce, and Mars has had… other priorities.’

‘The Synod of Mars is united in its support of Terra,’ Kubik interrupted, with a blurt of code. ‘But the Basilikon Astra suffered losses in the invasion of Ullanor and we too have few ships to offer.’

Koorland turned to the Chartist Speaker, Tull, who looked apologetically at something else and shrugged.

‘The Inquisition has ships,’ said Wienand, softly, filling Tull’s silence like a master rhetorician. ‘Experienced crews. The best Navigators in the Imperium.’

Gibran nodded, unasked-for confirmation that this was no exaggeration.

‘I will not give away control of the Deathwatch,’ said Koorland. ‘The Adeptus Astartes are not to be handed out like favours.’

‘You said yourself that the Deathwatch is too great a responsibility for one man. Even if we were to have faith in you to use them honourably, what of your successor as Lord Commander? What of theirs? No. Only the Inquisition can provide the proper authority for such a force, for it does not answer to one leader alone. I am but a representative of many, as is Veritus.’

Koorland rubbed the urge to snarl away on the back of his hand, and glanced sideways to Lady Brassanas who held his gaze with a frosty remove.

‘How many ships do you have?’

‘Several dozen operating from bases close enough to be contactable. Escorts all the way up to Black Ship class. They were built for transportion. I can’t promise it will be comfortable, but I have the capacity to transport several thousand men and their equipment wherever they need to go.’

Koorland let out a rasp of frustration. ‘Very well, inquisitor. As soon as this conference is over I will transfer full authority over the Deathwatch to the Inquisition. But these are my conditions. First, the Deathwatch is to be limited to Chapter-strength. Second, I retain the power to disband them when the current crisis is past. And third, with all respect, you are no military woman and the Inquisition is no military organisation. I will appoint a Space Marine to oversee all strategic aspects. Agreed?’

‘Do you have someone in mind for the role?’

Koorland met Wienand’s calculating eyes, too old for her young-looking face, tried to tease out what the woman was thinking. Thane had been in effective charge of Deathwatch operations since Sacratus, and was clearly the best fit for the role, but Koorland knew as soon as the thought arose that Thane, his right hand, was too close to him to be acceptable. The same might also be said of Bohemond and the other commanders of the Last Wall. He realised that even by assessing potential candidates in such a way he was making a political appointment rather than an operational one. His genhanced mind was superbly crafted to multi-task, but being forced to play the High Lords’ game, when his intent on becoming one of them had been to force them to play his, got under the skin.

‘There will be someone proven in place to oversee the next phase of the operation.’

Wienand held his gaze for a moment, then smiled lightly. ‘Agreed, then.’

Everyone suddenly looked relaxed, as though disaster had been averted with a near miss and normal service resumed.

‘Kubik,’ Koorland said, drumming his fingers irritably on the tabletop. ‘How proceeds the Grand Experiment?’

‘Entirely at the discretion of the Senatorum.’

‘He means, does it work?’ said Vangorich.

‘There have been several successful trials on both Martian moons. The investigation of the Techmarines, Abathar and Gadreel, into the failed experiment to teleport the Veridi starbase from Terran orbit was most illuminating. As was Alquist Arouar’s experience handling gravitic technology in the field on Caldera. The tech-priest dominus has been removed from military duties and transferred to the Grand Experiment. It is the conclusion of the project trajectoriae and the diagnostiad that a planetary body could be moved if so required.’

‘Mars, I presume?’ said Vangorich.

‘A logical conclusion, given that it is the only planet with the power capacity and the subspace impellers currently in place.’

‘What of Terra?’ asked Lansung.

‘Impossible. The effect on the Astronomican beacon would be enormous, and inherently unqualifiable.’

That brought a condemned silence upon them all. For several seconds, the weightiness of their responsibilities became untenable. Better several seconds than not at all, Koorland thought, though too little too late all the same. After a moment, Wienand spoke again.

‘What happens when the Deathwatch return to Terra?’

Koorland shook his head. ‘Time is critical. Each kill-team will translate to separate coordinates. Three fleets from Terra will rendezvous with them there.’

‘To what end?’

Koorland was considering how fully to answer when he heard what sounded like a body of men approaching the Library with some haste from the direction of the Cardinals’ Wake. Thane heard it at the same time, then Vangorich, the Assassin turning towards the door.

‘It is early,’ said Koorland. ‘But it could be news from one of the kill-teams.’

He rose from his chair, just as the grand doors were flung inwards and a trilling flock of herald-seraphim burst through.

Mesring, they sang, scattering over the table and circling the data-stacks. Ecclesiarch of the Adeptus Ministorum.

Here to attend.

Here to attend.

Here to attend–

‘Vangorich!’ the Ecclesiarch bellowed, flapping drunkenly through the flock and clattering into the back of a trolleycart, spilling data-slates and scrolls all over the floor tiles. ‘I know you’re in here, you and your cronies. Heretics all!’ Loose wheels and weaker legs rattled along together for a few metres, while the Lords were still scraping back their chairs to obediently join with Koorland in rising.

Laurentis halted the trolleycart’s sideways trundle with one of his three limbs.

Mesring extricated himself from the trolleycart, brandishing an empty vial as though announcing a toast to a vanquished foe’s honour. If Koorland could profess amazement at how some Lords retained all evidence of good living while the billions beneath them starved, it was almost as remarkable how quickly decades of indulgence could be expunged from a man’s body. Gone were the pouches under the Ecclesiarch’s eyes, the blubber that had padded his expansive white robes, the self-reverential glow of overstated piety. In its place were glazed eyes, black teeth made prominent by receding gums, sunken cheeks whose pallor he had for some reason decided to mask with dark green kohl. His beard came out in clumps, stained with blood, wine, and vomit. He tottered on the spot and would have fallen in a second if not for the efforts of an elderly but well-built man in the robes of a senior confessor and a gaggle of sextons and fraters. They looked nervous, embarrassed. Some of them looked afraid.

Why would they be afraid?

‘You look unwell, Mesring,’ said Vangorich, his tone one that Koorland had heard used by medical orderlies in battlefield hospices. ‘Why, you look fit to drop.’

‘Suffer in hell, Vangorich. So slick. So clever.’ The Ecclesiarch paused only to hawk up a gob of blood. ‘I want the cure. I want it. I want it now.’

Koorland looked from one to the other. ‘Vangorich?’

The Assassin shrugged. ‘The pressures of his office are great, lord, the pastoral care of so many billions. The tragedy of the ork moon’s destruction still affects him, I fear.’

‘Lies!’ Mesring staggered through the clutching hands to face Wienand. ‘Tell him! Tell him how you bought me with the cure to his poison, for as long as my life had worth to you.’

Vangorich and Wienand shared a look that gave away nothing and everything.

With a frown that the genetic bequest of Rogal Dorn made furrowing and deep, Koorland turned from them and extended a hand towards the Ecclesiarch. He was a metre taller than Mesring and, in armour, four or five times as broad. He could have enclosed the man’s head in one hand.

‘If you have accusations to make, then I will hear them.’

Mesring shook his head so vigorously against his frail neck that Koorland feared he might snap it, arms aflap, striking Koorland’s gauntlet like an inebriate attacking a wall and waving the diamond vial above his head as though it meant something.

‘Mutants. Poisoners. Heretics.’ Mesring shot them all a glare, his painted face puce with consumption as he pointed finally at Kavalanera. ‘Consorts of witches.’

The knight abyssal appeared to smile but gave no other reaction.

‘Your order is barely a millennium old,’ interrupted Wienand, firmly. ‘Hers is ancient, older by far even than Lord Koorland’s, and has fought alongside the very person of the Emperor. Are the orks not enough? Must we scour the human diaspora for more enemies?’

‘Apostates. Traitors. By the Throne of Ullanor, I am surrounded!’ With a flap of his arms, Mesring parted his attendants and stumbled through them. No sooner had he done so than he spun around again and waggled a shrivelled finger. ‘There will be no corner of Terra that does not feel my fall, you mark me. I know things. The hypocrisy. The lies. The masquerade of the Fists. The death of Vulkan. The empty deviants that call themselves their leaders.’ He signed the aquila and spat blood on the floor. ‘The Emperor abandons us and with just cause.’

He turned away, looked up, and spread his arms wide as though sermonising to a planetary congregation.

‘The people will hear it all! Only by throwing down the heretic and the disbeliever and welcoming the armies of the Beast can they be saved. Praise the Beast!’ he screamed, spittle spraying from his lips, eyes rolling up into his head. ‘All praise the Beast!’

The thunderous boom of bolter discharge startled the servo-seraphs to flight. The contents of Mesring’s head and shoulders sprayed over the suddenly screaming arch-confessor holding on to the arm of a now headless torso.

Wienand opened her mouth to say something. Her gaze slid from the dead Ecclesiarch on the floor to the pistol in Koorland’s hand and she shut it again. Wise. Vangorich leaned across the table to look at the body, a strange smile on his face. Everyone else looked too stunned to react. Except for Kubik, of course. Kavalanera turned to Koorland with an arch expression, as though to question whether summary execution was now commonplace on Terra.

Koorland’s bolt pistol slid back into its mag-holster with the faintest of sighs.

He shook his head.

‘Brother,’ said Thane, still positioned by the doorway, blood on the grey hem of his habit. ‘What have you done?’

Four

Plaeos – Hive Mundus
Check 2, 00:41:11

Black water boiled across Kjarvik’s faceplate, the thunder it made no longer separable from that of the explosion. His body banged against light alloy walls and any fixed machinery bulky enough to have stood up to the flood. His pack lights slashed the walls. White metal. Dark corridors. The beams speckled dirty water. Reflective strips shone back. Section markings. Hazard stripes. Kjarvik saw it fleetingly, the way a pebble might see the villages it was carried through when spring thaw burst the great rivers’ banks. The water turned him, spun him like thread on the wyrd-spinners’ wheel, so far beyond his superhuman ability to resist that his vaunted genetic lineage seemed like a joke of wyrd.

Punch a hole in the skin of a voidship, and every man knew that what was inside was going to come out. Inflict the same on the outer shell of an island hive under a thousand atmospheres of pressure, and the luckless enemies of man might see the first bitemark of the Wolves.

A length of metal cracked him on the back of the head. A ladder. He felt the aluminium alloy bend, and on preternatural reflex snapped out an arm. He missed. The torrent had already swept him past. His wolf-clawed gauntlet dug instead into the wall and screeched through until it struck a horizontal rebar and he stopped.

He began to draw himself up.

Water hammered against his huge, barrage-like pauldrons. The current dragged on his feet with a grip of void-cold iron, the wight-fingers of so many wolf-brothers lying on Ullanor’s red snow.

Not him. He was the unlucky one.

With a howl of defiance, he broke the surface. The wall he had latched on to was part of the bulk housing of an effluxer, one enormous pump slaved to a greater assembly installed millennia ago to keep the submerged levels of the underhive dry. They had been designed to mop up pressure leaks. This was a flood fit to drown a city.

The section was a vertical maze of catwalks and gangways, vast power coils towering up through the levels. Horizontally, there was little to see before hitting a wall or an effluxer station. At its best, it would have been dank and claustrophobic, but now, floodwaters rising, it was a thousand ways in which to suffocate and die in the dark.

His arm shook, armour servos whining, and with fangs biting into his bottom lip he managed to haul his trailing arm out of the water, the Sister of Silence still held firmly in his deactivated power fist. That was the hard part.

A flick of his shoulder sent the Sister arcing over the effluxer. The warrioress flipped mid-flight to guide herself feet-first onto the catwalk. It rattled on loose fixings. The woman immediately began shedding the layers of her pressure suit to reveal ornate crimson and gold armour with a high gorget that concealed her face up to the eyes. She activated her power blade and moved off. Torquing his body against the wall, Kjarvik vaulted after her, coming down in a feral hunch where the Sister had just been.

An ork came pounding down the gantry. It looked like a worker, but was still as big as an armoured Space Marine with biceps the size of demolisher shells straining at its short leather sleeves. A toolbelt clanked at its thighs like an armour skirt as it ran, a thick-toothed metal wrench held high above its head. It blinked, dazzled by Kjarvik’s pack lights as he turned towards it. The Space Wolf shot it once through the head. The mass-reactive detonation blew out the back of its skull and flung the wretched body forward as though some part of its corpse remained desperate to bury its wrench in an Adeptus Astartes helmet.

The walkway was clear.

Reaching up to his gorget ring, Kjarvik disengaged the seals and removed his helmet with a depressurising hiss. He tossed out his hair and took a deep breath of rust, gunpowder, alien sweat, and salt corrosion. Better. His Imbiber organ could usefully extract oxygen from seawater, but the pressure of the ocean trench would have crushed his head like an eggshell. That was not to say that he would rather have his helm on.

A burst of bolter fire drew his attention away and up. All he could see of it was muzzle flare, greasily reflected by a section of wall about ten metres above. The howls of dying orks rang out from a few metres further along from that.

‘Follow,’ the Sister signed. She broke into a run, angling against the wall and then, remarkably, shifting her feet across so that for the next few strides she ran along it. Using her momentum she leapt across, grabbed hold of a hanging rung on the opposite side, twisted her body around, kicked out, and swung into a kind of backwards roll that took her up onto the next level. Her power blade whickered out, silver-blue; there was a guttural roar, and an ork’s arm bounced down between the walls.

With a snarl, Kjarvik hauled himself up the wall. At about his own height, he pivoted at the waist and leapt, free arm out wide, legs tucked in, and slammed two-footed onto the previously hidden companionway.

A solid slug winged his elbow joint and deflected into a slag chute. He turned. A flex of his hand activated his power fist. A thrumming blue disruptor field surrounded the gauntlet, and with a roar he punched it through the shooter’s belly and wrist-deep into the backing wall. The ork looked at the arm buried in its gut with brute surprise, and died.

A short way ahead, Phareous backhanded his shield across an ork’s mouth and forced it back into another. The rapid-fire flash of his shield’s storm bolter mount lit the dingy walkspace and pulped the ork with the bloody mouth. The second bellowed, covered by its kin-thing, and shoved the corpse off. The second Sister of Silence tucked in lightly behind.

Kjarvik did not know their names. Names were powerful and the Vow of Tranquility made before the Golden Throne of the Emperor protected them. But names were also useful, and Kjarvik called this one Sommer, for her warmth, and to distinguish her from Rós and her open heart. That he could make light of their presence made it no less unnerving.

A dozen deftly guided slashes from Sommer’s power blade left a half-dozen orks in ruins.

More ran around the opposite corner, war-axes flashing, barking their guttural cries. A blizzard of bolter and plasma fire cut them down. Iron Father Bohr stomped through the red mist, boltgun steaming hot. A gout of flame from his servo-harness drove the following wave back out of sight.

It was hard-fought, vicious, but that was why Thane had summoned Kjarvik Stormcrow to get it done, and why he in turn had assembled Kill-Team Umbra.

An ork with a bare chest strapped with ammo belts and an autocannon-style weapon mounted on a line of toolbins held the end of the next corridor. Spent casings clattered across the metal floor as it pumped rounds into Phareous’ shield. The mob of orks in garish red wargear that had been lying in wait just around the corner took advantage of the big gun’s suppression fire to pile in, and then the fighting really became ugly.

Phareous’ knife flashed from behind his shield. A dead ork draped over it and blocked his storm bolter. Sommer skipped back. An ork lunged for her with an axe and fell on its face. Kjarvik stamped on its head. Tusks snapped against metal. His power fist ripped the arm off another and blood sprayed the walkspace. Rós danced across him, spun, blade a blur, and opened an ork from throat to middle with a sizzling back-slash. Bohr stamped into view like walker support. A scream of his servo-arm and an ork was rammed head-first into the bulkhead. Blood erupted from its back and splattered across the opposite wall.

And always, high-calibre auto-fire banged the walls.

Kjarvik marked the set of overflow pipes stood behind heavy metal jackets along the wall leading up to the machine-gunner’s nest. He raked his claws down the face of an ork, and pounced for it. Auto-fire chased him as he leapt, one to the next, slugs spanking off the thick metal. A lucky shot – or an unlucky one, Kjarvik was unsure of the difference – penetrated, and a jet of hyper-pressurised water punched an ork into the far wall, hard enough to sever threads. Phareous, Sommer and Bohr drove the orks left on their side of the torrent mercilessly into the water, like routed enemies into the sea.

From the last jacket in line, Kjarvik tossed a grenade into the nest and leapt.

The fragmentation blast ripped the crude barricade open. Bits of smoking metal rattled back up the walkspace like the cast of a rune-priest’s mystic bones. Kjarvik flung his gauntlet clawtips over the lip of the companionway above. With a snarled breath, he pulled himself up and rolled onto one knee.

Baldarich and Zarrael were already there, having risen by another route. The state of their armour and of the floor around them was testament to their bloody progress. The two Space Marines battled back-to-back within a maelstrom of massively muscular ork fighters. The Black Templar’s greatsword moved with the lightness of a knife. Severed hands and bits of tusk flew from its edge, as if to kiss his power armour in a final show of respect. Zarrael meanwhile had his boot on the chest of a brutally sized ork whose crooked moon tattoos and rumbling megaplate marked it as a boss. It was on its knees, hollering, the Flesh Tearer’s eviscerator ripping out its neck and painting it unevenly across the companionway. Another ork barrelled towards the Space Marine’s right, looking to blindside him on the side opposite his buried weapon. Zarrael turned, face unhelmed, the sneering red gaze of an angel, and launched a hissing gob of Betchers’ acid that dropped the brute at a full twenty strides.

If the fight had been related to Kjarvik with the skilled words of another, then the tale would have been one to inspire. Two warriors, champions of distant Chapters, side-by-side and slaying the Emperor’s foes by the legion. But he was witnessing it for himself, and had not the skjald’s skill to overlook the clear disdain in which each warrior held the other.

They did not have their backs turned out of necessity. It was preference.

‘I think you have their attention!’ The bark of Kjarvik’s bolt pistol announced his arrival to the fray. The orks did not last long after that.

They ran towards another big mob that was already retreating, hemmed into a deep column by the narrow walkspace, blockish stubbers up, moving towards a set of heavy-duty plasteel floodgates. Baldarich and Zarrael shrugged off the fire, hacking into the rearguard with a psychotic zeal, each more alike the other than not.

And men called the Vlka Fenryka wild.

‘More are coming.’ Kjarvik broke off the pursuit and took cover behind a dented piston block that seemed to be part of the floodgate mechanism. Baldarich and Zarrael just kept on killing. ‘We wait for the others. We attack as one!’

Orks in clanking war-plate piled through the floodgates to shore up the retreating mob, which in turn spread out into the cover of rusty toolbins and the thick buttress struts that leaned diagonally up into the section wall. Kjarvik shifted his aim upwards as a score of greenskins, their thickly muscled torsos wrapped in ammo belts, clattered across the upper walkways.

For some reason they did not fire.

They chanted – ‘Gork! Mork! Gork! Mork!’ – and mashed the barrels of their guns on the handrail in time to the foot-pound of ork warriors below. They got louder. The stamping grew faster. ‘Gorkamorkagorkamorka!’ Kjarvik could no longer tell individual orks apart. A weight dragged on his skull, as if the ork knucklebones braided through his hair felt the same primal call. His gums ached as though some reality-bending force drew on his teeth.

With a thump of metal, the roadway bridge trembled.

An oil-skinned, web-clawed monster of horrific size slither-crawled through the floodgates. Its passage bent them outward so completely that Kjarvik doubted they would ever shut again. It was the size of a Baneblade, mocking its rattling escort of garishly painted armoured walkers with their ill-made irrelevance. Serried rows of teeth gleamed a smudgy, reflected green from within a huge, half-moon slash of mouth. Rubbery gills fluttered behind armoured flaps. Two rows of uneven spines ran down its dark, blubbery back. With a bone-capped boot planted against a spike from either row, an ork clad in a studded leather harness of monstrous size and wielding a trident-stave coiled with spitting copper wires waved about in a trance.

Its harness was painted with weird, swirled lines, and its face and hands were tattooed with branching continuations of the uncanny design. At a growled utterance, a wind blew, causing its dangling piercings to twist like wraiths on a pyre. The gantry between Kjarvik and his two brothers buckled, bent, boiling seawater spraying through the fissure. The amphibious beast dug its claws into the tortured metal and gave a wet, cavernous roar. Green energies lanced through the spiked collar bolted over its neck and spat back out like living spikes.

Kjarvik bared his fangs.

Maleficar.

He was the Stormcrow, all right. The unlucky one. He could always rely on it.

Five

Eidolica – Alcazar Astra
Check 7, 00:55:37

Tyris emerged from the loading breach of the voidstorm cannon and dropped into a soundless crouch. His landing trembled out through the metal gangway. The Sister of Silence – she had not yielded her name, and Tyris had not asked for it – squatted with her back to an equipment drum. Her blade was unpowered. She raised a finger to the concealing gorget above her mouth.

The voidstorm cannon was a relic of the Fists Exemplar’s past, a legacy of Alcazar Astra’s ownership of the Rubicante Flux stars. It was a ship-killer, its wide bore one of the few access points large enough for a jump pack-equipped Space Marine. It was a squeeze even so and Tyris felt no shame in leaving the nimbler mortal to scout ahead.

With excruciating stealth, he moved.

He could feel the Sister’s eyes on him, assessing his abilities against hers, as he unwound a strip of guncloth from a kit pouch, wrapped it round the barrel of his stalker bolter and rested the weapon on the gangway’s iron handrail. He almost let out a relieved breath at the woman’s faint nod of approval.

The Raven would have been proud.

In the vast hangar below, greenskin mechanics and slave-workers crawled over bomber jets with massively oversized engines and bulbous weapons pods. There was room enough there to muster a Chapter of old, cradle-space for two-score of gunships. That space was mostly filled with tin-walled tool sheds, tent hovels in which squabbling gretchin seemed to live cheek by jowl. Rubbish was piled high. Food rotted where it lay. Promethium fuel dribbled from half-empty drums.

A big ork moved amongst the aircraft, inspecting a fuselage here, booting a laggardly gretchin there. It was garbed in a cloak of tinkling chimes and wore torcs of polished bone clapped over its muscular forearms. A spectactularly horned skull enclosed its head. It danced a little as it walked, sprinkling Eidolican promethium sand over the parked engines from a rod-like aspergillum as if in blessing. The psyker. A mob of ten burly orks strapped up with shotguns and bludgeons and slabs of armour followed close behind. Every so often, one wandered off to administer a private kicking wherever their brutal code deemed it justified.

Tyris slotted a rare-pattern tranquilliser round into his bolter, muffling the click of acceptance in his hand.

‘Stalker, positions?’

The vox whispered back.

‘Vega, to your right.’

‘Iaros, second tier.’

‘Nubis and Antares,’ came the voice of the Fist Exemplar, ‘on secondary target.’

Tyris took aim down his weapon scope, the back of the ork psyker’s ugly head blowing up to fill his crosshairs. His finger rested on the trigger. He emptied his lungs. ‘Quick and quiet. On my mark.’

He fired.

Plaeos – Hive Mundus
Check 2, 00:59:13

Seawater geysered from the breach in the flooring. The abhorrent gale that emanated from the maleficar’s throbbing head sprayed it far and wild, but to Kjarvik’s heightened perceptions the individual droplets fell slowly, like snow out of season. The Emperor’s gift to His Wolves was a hunter’s senses. He felt the sting of water on his face. He heard the floodwaters frothing up through the baffles in the floor plates. His boots were already under. He could taste salt in his mouth, on his skin even, the threat heightening his senses to that extraordinary degree. The cracks and flashes of ork weapons lit the rainstorm like subsurface explosions and carved it up with bullet trails.

Baldarich was on the other side of the geyser, black armour drenched. He spread his arms to the enemy fire as though preparing himself for the penitent’s cross. Except that his gauntlets were not empty. One held his greatsword, dropping, the other a bolt pistol, freed from maglock and sweeping up.

Kjarvik was more than human in many ways, and less, arguably, in others, but there were some things that even he could not do.

He could not move faster than a bolt-round.

‘Kneel, witch.’

Time accelerated, and the Black Templar’s pistol kicked out rounds as though it knew it was catching up. The propellant burn was intense, each rapid-fired successor brightening the last. The roar was tremendous.

The ork merely cackled like a drunk entertained by a fool. Its eyes were tranced, black with maleficarum, dark veins sprouting from its head and pulsing. In no world could it have seen what was coming and yet it saw. It saw, and Kjarvik shuddered.

He did not himself see exactly what happened, only that the maleficar appeared to pump its twanging stave once around its head, and the psychic winds were whipped into a shrieking whirlwind. The floodwaters were lifted up from the ground, drawn out of the spray, shaped by the witchstorm into a funnel that enveloped the witch and his monster like a liquid caul. Where bolt-rounds penetrated they were sprayed back, spanking off walls and walker armour and striking orks down with the random hand of a god.

‘Withdraw to my position!’ Kjarvik shouted. A weird alien thought-scream filled the vox. Their harsh insertion into the underhive had spread them too thinly. ‘Draw out the maleficar and capture. The Sisters are one level below with Phareous and Bohr.’

Baldarich paused to reload.

The growing whirlpool shook to the howl of the warp, and broke before a massive fist. It burst through the watery barrier, green, a shade that was darker still seeping between clenched fingers, knuckles dusted with boiled-off salt and trailing greenish ectoplasm and steam. It shot towards the Black Templar.

‘I walk with the spirit of Saint Magneric!’

The ceramite-splitting impact pushed Baldarich through the geyser, diagonally across Kjarvik’s cover with the psychic manifestation crackling against his plastron, and shunted him through the stack of promethium drums that had been built up across the way. The stack came down on top of him, empty drums clangouring out over the walkspace floor.

Kjarvik looked for Zarrael.

The Flesh Tearer pushed into the wind, head down, the scowl on his face rippling in spite of the arm he held protectively out in front. Powered plates rattled and whined. The kill honours affixed to his left pauldron peeled off and tore away. He ground out another step, struggled to raise his eviscerator, dropped to one knee. Waterborne debris roiled outwards from the epicentre and swallowed him. He should have been flung back like scrap metal, and it was testament to the strength of his red fervour that he was not. An ork boss in cumbersome war-plate done out in jagged black and white stripes clumped through, unaffected, leaving the mighty Zarrael kneeling like a frostbitten hopeful before the statue of Russ.

‘To my position.’ Kjarvik dialled up the power of his battleplate vox for an orbital transmission. ‘Aelia,’ he said, addressing the shipmaster of the Dark Angels strike cruiser Herald of Night that was currently in low orbit above Hive Mundus. ‘Send in backup.’ He turned to Zarrael and growled, swinging up his bolt-pistol. ‘Wait for the Sisters.’

He sprayed the witchstorm with fire, ensuring that none struck the weirdboy or his beast. He was unlucky, but he was not careless. Two bolts to the armoured boss’ left shoulder caused enough damage to disable the arm’s crude motors. It did not seem to feel it, and gave a gurgling roar as it formed a fist of its power claw.

‘Waaagh!’

Eidolica – Alcazar Astra
Check 7, 01:02:22

The shot was perfection. A single tranquilliser round to the back of the head, and the ork psyker went down as though its muscles had been turned to jelly. The stalker bolter silenced the report and muffled the flash, and the psyker’s bodyguard were pointing their shotguns at shadows as Tyris ejected the one-shot magazine and slotted in a fresh sickle-mag of more conventional rounds.

Vega and Iaros opened fire from their own positions in hiding. It took Tyris the second or third round to see where they were, hidden behind a ventilation grating and amongst an extractor assembly on the second tier respectively. Tyris had trained them well. They would return to their Chapters better warriors when their work together was done.

By the time Tyris was ready to fire again there were only two orks left, running in opposite directions, which he coolly gunned down with barely a fraction of a second between aim and shot. The Sister beside him signed her approval with a hand gesture, powered her long blade, and rocketed from the gangway on her jump pack. She landed like a cat by the downed psyker, power blade purring as it made bloody mockeries of the gretchin that came running to the psyker’s aid. Two more rocket burns from opposite wings of the hangar, and Vega and Iaros broke cover to launch themselves into the open. The Doom Eagle emptied his bolter’s clip and slammed in another as he flew.

Tyris decided to save the fuel and simply jumped the handrail.

He landed with a mighty clang on the hardened metal deck, his silenced bolter gunning down ork mechanics and their gretchin slaves with calmness and grace. He, Vega and Iaros converged on the Sister at about the same time. They formed a ring and swung their weapons outwards.

‘On three,’ said Tyris.

Orks were charging in, using the aircraft as cover. Ricochets sang from their armour.

‘Two.’

In spite of the tranquilliser round and a dose of soporific that should have placated a bull grox, the psyker was still struggling. It flapped numbly against the Sister as she fixed it to her armour with clips. It must have been four times her weight. Those blows had to hurt, but the woman ignored them. She shot Tyris a look. Ready.

‘One!’

Orks piled in from every crawlway intersection and corridor. Tyris shot one between the eyes with a stalker round. Two. Three. Chewed out a chest cavity. Blew off an arm. The muffler was still on, the selector on single shot. One got in close enough to spray Vega with blood as the Doom Eagle gunned through its chest.

‘Now!’

The shout followed the same neural pathway that triggered his jump pack. Vega gave an answering roar. A big ork with a squealing chainaxe that had cut in behind Iaros and swung back its arm disappeared like tallow before a hydrogen torch as the four of them lifted off. Tyris felt a shuddering as he rose on a column of chemical burn. He threw out a hand to grab onto the Sister’s and Vega did the same. Between the three sets of jump packs they carried the drugged ork psyker up into the air and left the howls and gunfire behind. Tyris’ armour registered an impact as a startled gretchin got lucky with a snap shot, but he did not otherwise notice the damage.

The safety rail of one of several overlooking sub-decks passed beneath them.

His downward arc carried him over the fat body of an ork fighter sporting an immense set of underwing rocket pods. He hit the ground running to bleed off his momentum. Bullets fired from below rattled dully off the aircraft’s fuselage and the underside of the deck. Iaros was already down, and pushing for the searing wall of daylight that would once have been shielded by a coherence field but that was now just a burning hole in the fortress’ adamantium outer wall.

‘Antares,’ Tyris voxed, leaving Vega and the Sister to haul up the psyker and run for the exit. He checked his visor chrono. ‘We have five minutes before the Storm Eagle returns to my beacon. It will leave with us or without in six.’

‘Understood, brother-sergeant.’

A burst of gunfire exploded in volume as a set of access doors at the other end of the sub-hangar opened up. Antares backed through them, stalker bolter held one-handed to rake the opening with fire. The second Sister retreated with him, sword flickering out where a killing blow presented itself, but otherwise exploiting the Fist Exemplar’s armoured bulk as mobile cover. The secondary target was draped across his shoulders. It was the smaller of the two psykers, not much larger than the Sister of Silence. A juvenile perhaps. Whatever the complexities involved in the extraction of two psykers from Eidolica when Lord Thane had prepared them only for one, the double reward struck Tyris as worth the risk.

He had been left with no question as to the psykers’ value to the Imperium.

Antares clubbed the restive psyker into submission with a crack to the base of the skull with his bolter’s magazine, and the doors slid shut behind him. The Fist Exemplar lumped the ork off his shoulders. Bullets rang dully on the doors’ opposite side. He sealed them with a sharp burst from his bolter’s combi-melta.

‘Nubis?’ said Tyris.

‘He is not coming,’ Antares replied, voice inflected with emotion.

‘What do you mean, not coming?’

Tyris switched frequency, and was immediately overwhelmed by the squeal of bolter feedback. There was a crackling whoosh, the Salamander’s combi-flamer, followed by draconic howls.

‘Brother?’ Tyris voxed. The mass-reactive scream was his only answer. The periodic click-pause of auto-loaders provided an opening for the occasional legible word. Most of it was curses and vengeance.

But Tyris heard the name ‘Vulkan’ at least twice.

‘Move,’ said Antares. His voice was flat. Whatever he had felt before was dead now. Like his world. ‘There is nothing left for us here.’

Plaeos – Hive Mundus
Check 2, 01:02:59

Bullets sprayed from the power claw’s digital stubbers and made wobbling metallic crumps in the aluminium housing that Kjarvik sheltered behind. He rose to return fire, but found that he was barely capable of lifting his pistol against the witchstorm. By the stabbing throb in his skull and the ache in his jaw, he felt the maleficar’s attention shift from Zarrael to him. The wind ground him back first one step, then two, ankle-deep, the water still rising. The boss ork bore down, kicking out rounds, clanking plates as wide across as the back of a Rhino and glowing like an evil sun.

Kjarvik let the psyker-wind push.

The stubber, he could take. The power claw was something else entirely.

Two steps became three, and around that third step the entire universe seemed to realign.

His preternatural senses detected nothing untoward, but for all that the thunder of crashing water and the stink of fyceline surrounded him, it felt as though the bottom had fallen away from him and left those sensations hollow. It was without flavour or colour. Silenced. The orks continued to stamp and chant, but it was no longer the cacophonous force that it had been, and smaller for being the making of a horde rather than of a single overbearing power. The wind fell away. The water funnel slapped down as though something mighty had just died.

Those were the most unsubtle effects, but the least profound. The howl, not the wolf.

The expression on the maleficar’s alien face was the opposite of whatever spiritual perturbation Kjarvik felt.

Horror, even to that obscene degree, had been engineered out of the Space Marines’ fundamental makeup with the primarchs, but even had he been still human he doubted whether he could have experienced the psychic unravelling that the witch suffered now. It must have been like opening one’s eyes and finding that the illusion of a visible reality had been a dream, or awakening with no sense whatsoever of one’s physical body.

‘Get down, brother.’

Kjarvik dropped to one knee, and a ball of superheated plasma punched the mega-armoured boss ork through the chest. It dropped in a metallic clatter as Bohr moved up. Orks on the overlooking gangways belatedly opened fire, but a full-auto blizzard of bolter fire from the Iron Father’s servo-harness mowed them down. Kjarvik hardly needed to turn around to see Sommer and Rós moving up along the edges of the walkspace, in the partial shelter offered by the catwalks above them. Phareous advanced with less caution, drawing fire from both angles to where he walked up the middle.

‘Baldarich? Zarrael?’ The Iron Snake’s words were punctuated by the bang of solid rounds on his shield.

Kjarvik turned at the familiar liquidised scream of powered adamantium teeth at work on soft tissue. Freed of the psychic winds, the Flesh Tearer had closed on the maleficar’s orca-like mount and had his howling weapon buried in the monster’s flippered forelimb. Zarrael had his mouth wide open and basked in the spray.

With a wail of something more freeing than mere pain, the amphibeast reared up on its vestigial hindlimbs. It pawed with webbed claws at its collar, throwing the psyker from its back, and almost incidentally swatted the Flesh Tearer contemptuously from the walkspace and into the water.

Though no longer wreathed in lightning, the monster was still massive, more so now that everything around it had become inexplicably smaller, and it flattened an ork walker the way a cat would flatten a mouse. It carelessly shoved a heavier fighting machine off the walkway as it limped around, then snapped at another, snatched it up in its jaws and sent it smashing through the orks that had been mobbing in behind. They had been ready to break before the psyker had arrived to bolster their belligerent spirit, and they broke now, pounding through the ruined floodgates.

The amphibeast’s rampage back through its master’s escort had left the witch untended in the middle of the walkspace, spread amidst a floating mess of bent cogwheels and split plates like a scrap heap that someone had taken the trouble to build, but then abandoned to the floods.

‘He is yours, Iron Father.’ Kjarvik turned into the sporadic fire still raining down from above. ‘Phareous, remain with the Sisters and cover us.’

‘As ordered.’

Kjarvik took position over the downed ork psyker. Despite its injuries it was very definitely conscious, but too occupied smashing its own forehead into the puddled flooring to notice him. Loose rounds from above spanked off his plate, but the fire was aimless and half-hearted.

Bohr lowered himself with a hydraulic wheeze and examined the raging maleficar’s armoured frame. The ork’s head was bigger than the Iron Father’s torso. Its leather strapping could have encased him and Kjarvik both and left room to move. He rammed a piston-enhanced fist into the side of the ork’s head for good measure, then began spooling a length of heavy-duty chain from a hopper clamped to his hip. He bent to the task. A slug hit off a flicking mechadendrite and blew out an articulation segment. ‘We need to move it now or it will drown.’

Kjarvik stood up and growled into his gorget vox. ‘Now.’

From the crowded levels above there came the squeal of metal being torn, a reverberating clang as of a square of bulkhead that had been ripped out of a wall crashing onto a companionway. The torrential whine of an assault cannon carved through the orks on the left-hand walkways like a cutting beam. From the right, a wave of fiery promethium hurled a pair of incinerated greenskins through the handrail, back from the huge, flame-lit bulk of a Dreadnought in Dark Angels green. It stamped through a ventilation grate and shredded an ork in its power fist.

The Dreadnoughts Maloch and Azazael had been inserted into the hive by drop pod once the orks’ attentions – including that of the witch – had been focused on Umbra. The Vlka Fenryka were savage when savagery was demanded, but nothing pleased them like the chance to secure a victory through cleverness.

Kjarvik looked left to where Azazael tore through the remaining orks, too hemmed in to escape. There would be no reasoning with the ancient one now. Not until every greenskin in reach was jelly under his feet. He turned to Maloch. ‘Get down here and lift. Azazael will clear our path to Penitent Wrath.’

‘You are a sly wolf, I will not deny,’ Phareous laughed.

‘We have won nothing yet,’ said Bohr. His augmetised voice was the material doppelganger to the Sister’s null-psychic chill. ‘Let us move. And pray that our brothers do as well.’

Valhalla – Kalinin, north
Check 3, 01:19:45

+++CHECK+++

+++VERIFIED+++

+++ TRANSLATIONAL DISCREPANCY CONFIRMED+++

+++18:59:02+++

Tulwei’s attack bike sped over over the pot-holed terrain. Combatants flashed through the snow and disappeared. Vehicle wrecks lay skewed on the ice, Chimera and Leman Russ hulks belching smoke. Valhallans in ice-world camouflage streamed in the opposite direction. Amplified, inhuman bellows set the snowfall to trembling. Tulwei gunned the accelerator and pulled ahead.

The approach to Kalinin had been contested for almost a year and the deep holes of Demolisher and Earthshaker shells were themselves riddled with mass-reactive craters and stubber casings. The vivid red bodywork of pursuing ork vehicles swept in and out of view. Buggies bounced over the devasted tundra, breaking, swerving, screeching through channels between the larger craters. Kill-Team Tigrus’ durable suspension and shock-responsive tyres tackled the terrain better than the orks’ overpowered machines ever could.

‘How could they have predicted our approach?’ yelled Sentar, pivoting the sidecar’s heavy bolter to maul an ork bike as though it were a ration can attacked with a fork.

‘I do not know.’ And then, voxed on the squad channel, ‘Keep to the coordinates that the general fed back.’

‘Where is the general?’

‘I lost his signal in the retreat. Keep to target,’ said Tulwei.

Vehuel’s gunner pivoted his heavy bolter until it was as close to directly backward as it could turn, and fired. A stream of accelerated rounds puffed up the ice and ripped through a mob of manoeuvring bikers. Snowmelt and bits of engine housing rattled down over the surrounding craters, not nearly enough to fill them. A truck packed with bawling ork warriors ploughed into the hole and flipped over. More vehicles veered around the obstacle and gunned the throttle. Scores of bikes, half a dozen troop trucks and half-tracks were just behind. The orks bellowed, mad with speed, firing wild with sidearms and mounted weaponry, pennons flapping madly from whipping flagpoles.

For all the machines’ technical failings, their raw acceleration was incredible.

‘Where is the psyker?’ Tulwei shouted, and swung a left between two particularly deep, thermically glassed impact craters. Grigorus zipped after him, then the Sisters of Silence in their sleek-bodied vehicles, and finally Abathar and Vehuel on bikes at the rear.

A dark smudge appeared under the snow ahead. It was at the point where the two craters were at their closest, practically touching, barely metres apart. It grew out of the ice as he raced towards it: a battlewagon, parked side-on to Tulwei’s approach and effectively blockading the pass. The orks piled into the back hooted and shot into the air as Tulwei yelled a curse and swerved.

His bike skidded on the ice. White snow, black truck, round and round. As he wrestled with his steering bars, he saw an armour-fronted ork gun ’copter rise up over the lip of one of the craters like the breaching topfin of a shark. Its gun mounts blazed. Shells chomped through the ice towards the snarled-up bike squadron, loud, slow, as though its underslung machine cannons were driven by a hand-crank that spat out rounds. The stream of fire carved through Grigorus and Abathar and slugged the ice on the other side before either of them had a chance to reverse. The lead Sister slammed into Grigorus’ back and died in a cartwheel of black and gold. The second had time to swerve, and sped away from the pile-up, bouncing and skidding as she brought her bike under control.

Tulwei turned into the spin and screeched out of it, gunning for the hovering ’copter just as a krak missile corkscrewed from a shoulder launcher carried by one of the orks in the battlewagon and disintegrated Vehuel’s machine. The Dark Angel tumbled into the ice.

Of the Sister of Silence there was no sign but a brake mark at the lip of the crater.

Firing up at the ork ’copter with his bolt pistol as it veered and began to climb away, he slowly reduced speed. He stopped, surveying the wreckage, aware of the ork fighters storming over the ice from their battlewagon. Ork bikes rumbled in from the other side in low gear.

A trap. They had known he was coming.

Without a word between them, Sentar opened fire on the bikes. Tulwei loosed rounds into the charging infantry.

Kalinin was going to fall. The Imperium could follow.

He could only hope that someone had succeeded where he had failed.

Six

Terra – the Imperial Palace
Check 0, 01:02:09

Koorland’s armour was polished, perfect, garlanded with every honour and citation ever worn by a Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists, so high a yellow that it sparkled under the wall-bracketed lumen bulbs like gold. If his predecessor, Cassus Mirhen, had ever encased himself in such ostentation then Koorland would have thought him ridiculous. No one laughed now. He was just himself beginning to realise that perhaps they were right not to. It had been Ullanor that had changed him, standing in Vulkan’s presence, hearing his words. The primarch had taught him the power of symbols.

Ironic, if that were not too light a word, that the Imperium’s darkest day since Isstvan should be the day on which Koorland, last of the Imperial Fists, finally understood his role.

Senatorum ushers and Palace staff with pinched faces and grubby uniforms waited fractiously by the staircases to the Great Chamber’s few standing galleries that remained open. Hektor Rosarind, the Chancellor of the Imperial Estates, had outlawed the use of water for washing. Koorland had even heard of Chartist vessels returning to the asteroid belt and the Jovian moons in search of water ice and – the odd floating rock aside – they had been exhausted millennia before the Great Crusade. The tired officials drifted out of the way as Koorland walked towards the Great Chamber.

No one made a path for himself like a Space Marine with a purpose.

‘Word is in from Kill-Team Stalker,’ said Thane, marching in step behind his left shoulder. ‘The Adeptus Astra Telepathica interpreted the message this morning, and it was handed to me personally by Anwar’s staff.’

‘Thank him for his alacrity and tell him to begin forwarding messages to the Inquisition from now on. Meme-banks containing the kill-teams’ rendezvous coordinates, and our subsequent destinations, will be couriered to your ship at once.’

‘This clandestine skulking sits ill with me,’ muttered Bohemond.

The two Chapter Masters walked a step behind, garbed in plain robes. Those of the Fist Exemplar were grey, the Black Templar’s bone white, a black surplice over the top with the Sigismund cross emblazoned across the breast. In accordance with convention, the pair had surrendered their arms to the Lucifer Blacks before entering the Inner Palace, but Bohemond, as always, retained the Sword of Sigismund, belted at his side. The High Marshal regarded the genuflecting mortal dignitaries with a curl of his melted lip, his lidless augmetic eye picking them off one by one.

‘I despise every second,’ he finished.

‘The Beast must not be allowed to become aware of our plans,’ Koorland said. ‘Not until it is too late.’

‘I am scarcely aware of them. How then can I fairly call them plans?’

‘You will have coordinates of your own, brother. I trust you will be with me at the finish.’

Bohemond’s good eye spasmed. ‘You will find Abhorrence there ahead of you.’

‘I will hold you to your word, brother.’ He glanced over the other shoulder. ‘I will be making Alcazar Remembered my flagship. You will cede the remainder of your fleet strength to Issachar’s command.’

Thane bowed in acquiescence. There was no pride in the Chapter Master. Disaster had stalked the Fists Exemplar since the outbreak of the great Waaagh. They had lost their home world, Eidolica, half their fleet at Vandis, been further diminished by the battles for Mars, Caldera, and then Ullanor. They were the wider Imperium in microcosm. They no longer had the capacity to conduct this scale of operation alone.

‘For Dorn, brother.’

Bohemond watched his brother Chapter Master depart with a scowl, arms crossed over his surplice, and glanced towards the heavy adamantium-reinforced oak doors at the corridor’s end. They trembled slightly under the low bass bombardment of a powerful augmitter system. A few dulled words drifted down the corridor like smoke from an impact crater.

‘We need to talk about the Ecclesiarch.’

The reminder brought Koorland a flare of renewed anger and guilt. The anger was partly at himself, the resentment of which only goaded his temper further. ‘He left me little choice.’

‘Regardless, your actions leave a hole that needs to be filled, and now. It is in times of darkness and privation that the words of the witch or the heretic will be heeded. The people need certainty. They need the guidance of their Ecclesiarch.’ He dug into his habit and brought forth a data-slate. ‘At my invitation, the Adeptus Ministorum have provided a list of potential successors.’

With a sigh, Koorland stopped walking. He turned, enclosed his brother’s shoulder in one etched and damascened gauntlet.

The Black Templars’ conversion to their own variant of the Imperial Creed had, for some time, been the most open of open secrets amongst the sons of Dorn. Perhaps it would be better to stamp down hard, now, before such practices could embed and pervert. Vulkan had shown him a better way, and he would not have the Black Templars recalled as the sons of Dorn who had stumbled down the Word Bearers’ path.

‘The Emperor neither recognised His own divinity, nor encouraged His worship. Indeed, He enforced the opposite point with more than mere words. Such practices will no longer be sanctioned in His Imperium.’

The ruined, semi-augmetic face that glared back at him was expressionless, but the flesh eye bulged with an emotion that Koorland did not believe he had ever felt and did not recognise. Bohemond’s voice was quiet, like a melta beam, as he withdrew the slate and returned it to the fold in his habit. ‘Tell that to Magneric.’

Koorland let his breath out slowly.

It had been too late to save Lorgar too.

Furious suddenly, he turned and flung an arm towards the Great Chamber’s heavy doors. A handful of Chapter serfs in dulled yellow habits stood there with hands clasped, surrounded by a full squad of Lucifer Blacks in mirror-black ballistic carapace and softly humming shock-glaives.

‘Open the doors,’ Koorland boomed, stunning the hallway to silence. ‘I did not summon the people to hide from them.’

Great tiers of seating rose above Koorland on all sides as he strode down the processional to the dais. There were several other aisles through the auditorium seating, bringing in lesser lords, military officers, and senior officials from other wings of the Inner Palace, but most of them were roped off. Rubble was heaped up, sometimes covered with banners, but the attempt at concealment only made the wounds more obvious and drew the eye, from a deep-seated human instinct for self-preservation, to the ceiling. A piece of alien moon-rock extruded through the angelic frescoes. Most of the larger fragments from the attack moon’s destruction had missed the Palace or been broken up by the air-defence grids. This was one of the smaller ones. It was about the size of a Land Raider.

A large circular dais lit from multiple rigs and occupied by twelve high-backed chairs dominated the centre of the auditorium. It rotated slowly, almost imperceptibly, like the slow tick of a bomb mechanism, but Koorland’s genetics had been painstakingly coded to render him acutely conscious of such subtle changes.

The noise of several thousand, a fraction of what the intact arena could have held, rose exponentially as Koorland’s arrival was noted. Word spread. The clamour grew. Even with his great genetic gifts he could not separate the individual voices that cried out to him, but he recognised the fear and the doubt that Bohemond had diagnosed, the desperation for some sliver of hope. Whole districts had been lost to hive quakes and the calamities wrought by the unintended destruction of the ork moon. Millions had died in the Proletarian Crusade. Millions more had perished since. Rare skills had been lost forever. People starved. Families froze in the rubble of their homes for want of the fuel or blankets or warm food that Terra had long since exhausted the raw materials to manufacture for itself.

But here stood an Imperial Fist, the golden embodiment of endurance.

A symbol.

Koorland felt the weight of their attention. A tingle on the back of his neck, under the grizzled skin between his temples and eyes. Was this what Rogal Dorn had felt when he had manned the defences of Terra against the Arch-Heretic? Was it a feeling that the Emperor Himself would have recognised, as He stood upon this very site to declare His Crusade to retake the galaxy for mankind? The feeling that the world about them was about to be changed.

Tobris Ekharth of the Administratum currently had the podium, but stalled mid-sentence as Koorland took the steps onto the dais. The small man coughed nervously into the forest of pickups, scratchily echoing himself to every corner of the ruined colosseum. He dabbed a few droplets of sweat from his forehead on an embroidered cloth and leaned unnecessarily into the pickup field, blinking under the lights.

‘This extraordinary session of the Senatorum can now commence, convened at the special behest of Koorland, Lord Commander, in the wake of the death of High Lord Mesring, Ecclesiarch of the Adeptus Ministorum.’ Eckharth cleared his throat once more and hurriedly ceded the podium.

Koorland nodded his acceptance of it.

To his left, six chairs stretched out in a staggered line. Lansung, Verreault, Wienand sitting with Veritus standing behind her like an empty suit of armour, Gibran, Sark and Anwar. And to the right, six more. Tull, Kubik, Zeck, Ekharth as he nervously took his, and two more that stood empty. One belonged to him.

And so, ultimately did the other.

He held that empty seat in his gaze. The banner of the Adeptus Ministorum flapped limply from a rig above it.

‘The Ecclesiarch is dead,’ he began, drawing his eyes from the chair to stare out into the lights, their enhanced musculature adapting quickly and painlessly to the glare. ‘He was killed. Here. By my hand.’ His gaze rose, tier by tier of sudden gasps and mortified silence. ‘He thought to frighten you with truth, but what his church has forgotten is that the Emperor… is… truth!’

He straightened in a whir of servos and looked to those currently sat behind the dais, his own augmitted voice booming ‘truth!’ back to him.

‘Believe that you are better than the Ecclesiarchy has allowed you to be. As the Emperor believed. Many of you will have been here the day that the great Vulkan returned to us. Who remembers the joy they felt at the reunion, the hope?’

Murmured cries of assent began to circulate, the rustling of leaves compared to his augmeticised thunder. His voice became a growl.

‘Know then that it was a joy he did not share. Vulkan did not recognise the Imperium he saw on his return. He saw the values that the Emperor had given us, that he and his brothers had fought for, corrupted or cast aside. He made plain to me his opinion of those that have led you so low.’

The rest of the High Twelve looked distinctly uncomfortable. Only the heavily augmented and thus nigh-unreadable faces of Zeck and Kubik showed anything approximating support. No matter. The tide of history had receded for a time, but now it came again and the Lords could turn or they could be swept away.

He turned back to the fan array of pickups, thumped the lectern with a powered fist to emphasise his next words.

‘Mankind. Is. Better.’

He looked down over the cushioned pews of the minor lords. They would have taken their seats today as the men with most to gain from a reordering of the High Twelve. For all their power, the cocoons of influence that kept them clothed and well fed, they were far more terrified of him than their starving households were of the orks. All but one or two.

Koorland nodded grimly to the familiar faces in the crowd.

‘I know that you are afraid. I know that you suffer. I know that you do not expect me, being as I am, to understand, but know this – I would give my life for any one of yours, as would Vulkan in my place. Mesring feared the Beast, and he was not wrong to do so. I have seen the Beast’s power.’ He licked at lips that were suddenly dry, blinked in the light. ‘I was there when Vulkan fell.’

The Great Chamber erupted with anger and panic, outraged denials transforming the auditorium into a cauldron of noise. One voice was indistinguishable from another, but he could see people screaming, red-faced, others leaningagainst the chair back in front in fervent prayer. Lansung looked white enough to pass out. To his right, Verreault was on his feet, remonstrating with a junior clerk in the third row, though over what, Koorland could not make out. The primarch’s death was no secret. Nothing so profound that had been witnessed by so many could be kept so, but Koorland suspected that most would not have believed the tales until now. He raised his hands and shouted them down.

‘This is truth! No lie can diminish it. Only through facing a truth can we hope to make it good. Vulkan fell, but not in vain. In his name we build a new Imperium. In his name we fight for a new future for mankind, the future that the Emperor dreamed that you would one day have.’ He did not say we. For the Adeptus Astartes, there would always be war. ‘Free of threats from without. Free of lies spread from within.’ He turned towards the empty chair, and pointed at it. ‘It begins here.’ And back. ‘The Adeptus Ministorum will no longer be counted amongst the High Twelve. Their privileges are revoked, their holdings to be levied for men and materiel the same as any other ministry of mankind. We will rebuild!’

Stunned silence made a vacuum in the shape of an ovation, a black hole of stilled incomprehension. He had expected…

He had no idea what he had expected. But he had spoken the truth.

He pushed himself from the lectern, as unaccountably furious as he had been when he had barged through those doors. As when he had executed Mesring. As when he had received the recording that, had he seen it a little earlier, might have saved a primarch’s life. The Lords looked up at him like chastened children, terrified of a suddenly violent, superhuman father.

‘You will join me in the Cerebrium in fifteen minutes. The High Twelve is overdue a change.’ He nodded to the empty chair, and then made his way towards the doors. ‘See that that banner is taken down. And someone summon Vangorich!’

Seven

Terra – the Imperial Palace
Check 0, 03:55:16

Drakan Vangorich eased his hands along the carved wooden armrests of his new chair with some considerable pleasure. It was a beautiful thing, all braids and shine, and little bits of gold where the wood met that outrageously forgiving cushioned back. Europan, if he wasn’t mistaken, somewhere around the middle third of M3. He sighed and sat back into it. The leather squeaked in a pleasing fashion.

The window across from the sceptrewood table and antique marble handwash basin opened onto an acrid swirl of fortress spires, lighting twinkling in the smog layer like stars. The many faces of the Emperor looked on from marble walls, friezes carved in rare woods. Artworks hung in golden frames: portraits of women mostly, and not, to put it delicately, in a fit state of dress for their current altitude. Weird, black-skinned statuettes stood on pedestals.

Vangorich studied one for a moment, its proportions artistically imprecise, only looking up when a serving girl, recruited, it seemed, on the grounds of aesthetic perfection, approached through the thick carpet bearing a refreshment tray. Vangorich held up a glass, she filled it with something pink and fragrant from a platinum ewer, and he idly swirled it as she left.

He had visited Mesring’s apartments before, of course, but it felt different this time.

He knocked back the oddly tasteless wine and let the enzyme grafts lining his mouth and throat do their work, cleansing the liquid of alcohol and other toxins before it hit his stomach. Then he set the glass neatly on the table.

‘How does it feel to be one of the Twelve, then, sir?’ asked Beast Krule.

‘Very much the same as before, actually. Power is less about what’s given to you than what you take. And besides, it’s only provisional.’

Krule stood to one side of the table, between a statuette and a pedestal bearing a pottery fragment. A ripple of torso broke the cameleoline illusion of stillness and a data-slate slid across the table. The high varnish barely even whispered ‘friction’ until Vangorich trapped it under his fingers.

He turned it over, face up, and took a long look at the seal.

‘Where did you get this?’

Krule shrugged.

Vangorich picked up the slate. The Black Templars seal had already been bypassed.

‘A list of possible Ecclesiarchs,’ Krule said. ‘Drawn up by the Adeptus Ministorum at Bohemond’s request. Give me the night and I can whittle that list down for you. The High Marshal too, naturally.’

‘Eager for a little light exercise?’

‘The High Marshal’s going to be a problem, sir, in the long run. We both know it.’

‘And there I was thinking you wanted a contest with arguably the greatest warrior in the Adeptus Astartes. No.’ Vangorich tossed the slate back across the table. ‘No. I’m prepared to give the new Ecclesiarch the benefit of the doubt.’

‘Very… magnanimous, sir.’

‘Thank you, but I have enough here on Terra to deal with the entire Ecclesiarchy leadership a hundred times over without needing to call on my best. No.’ He leaned in, and Krule inched forwards. ‘The Twelve’s meeting with Koorland was about more than my investiture, overdue as it was. He’s gathering his assets for some kind of covert strike. To draw the Beast out, I presume. Inquisition, Militarum, Deathwatch, even the Mechanicus – he’s assembling an execution force for which he wants the deadliest men he can get, and so naturally I recommended you.’

‘Too kind, sir.’

Vangorich flashed a modest grin and sat back. ‘I’d go myself, but I can’t oversee everything in person. I hope to get a message to the Culexus Temple, but it’s a long way away from here and who knows if they’ll receive it in time. I’d like to have something to offer Koorland on his return, something to keep Wienand and the Lady Brassanas on their toes. That temper of Koorland’s is the only thing keeping them all off each other’s backs right now, but seeing me across the table from now on might remind them of the knife at their throats.’

‘Metaphorically, of course.’

Vangorich felt his smile subtly alter. He had a cultivated public image of urbanity, but the smile he wore now was of a man who spent every day in a mask, the sort of smile that no one wanted to see on the face of a Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum. ‘Metaphorical knives, you’ll find, cut every bit as sharp. Mesring’s fate won’t be soon forgotten.’

Krule nodded reluctantly.

‘Second thoughts?’

‘Koorland wasn’t the only one on Ullanor when the primarch died. A primarch, sir.’

‘Alcazar Remembered breaks orbit in an hour. Be on it.’ Vangorich slid a briefing packet back across the table. Krule scooped it up in his big hand and turned away. ‘Keep him alive, Krule, whatever his plan is. Right now, he is the Imperium. Oh, and one other thing–’ A shimmer against the portrait on the wall near the door betrayed the movement of Krule’s head. ‘Be sure Wienand keeps herself out of trouble.’

Terra – the Imperial Palace
Check 0, 04:13:39

‘You disapprove.’

Wienand stood with hands clasped behind her back, watching the Inquisitorial gunboats that slowly crisscrossed the Palace skyline through the silvered tint of the armourglass. Their black, slab-hulled bodies patrolled the surrounding spires, weapon hardpoints twitching, the deceptively ponderous sweep of their rotors mirrored across plasteel and glass. She watched a moment longer, then looked over her shoulder when she got no reply.

‘You have a way of being silent when you disapprove.’

Veritus nodded stiffly, the pallid skin of his neck creaking like old leather. ‘I can think of wiser places to be than on the Abhorrence in the middle of a new Crusade.’

‘It’s not exactly my first choice.’

‘Sigismund was a maniac. Even the Sigillite was overheard saying so. His successors are almost worse, striving to preserve a philosophy they lack the wit to inherit or the skill to prosecute. They will be at the forefront of any battle, and your protection will be far from their priority.’

Wienand’s ghostly reflection in the glass smiled in amusement. It was not so very long ago that she and Veritus had been trying to kill one another. ‘Koorland has ceded control of the Deathwatch, but through gritted teeth, and the Deathwatch will know it. I will have to earn their respect before they will follow an order without first taking it to Koorland or Thane.’

‘Or the new Watch Commander.’

‘Or him.’

The armourglass rattled as a gunboat passed close, flak turrets smoothly tracking it until it was gone. ‘Koorland is charismatic but naïve. I don’t doubt that his first act after the current crisis ends will be to dissolve the Deathwatch as he has always claimed he will.’ She turned fully from the window, hands still clasped behind her. ‘I can’t let that happen.’

‘Why?’

Wienand was pacing before she realised it. She could never sit while others stood, and Veritus almost never sat. Others assumed it good manners on her part, but that was only a front. A seated individual had further to move to react to a threat than a standing one. And she didn’t trust Veritus quite that much.

‘For the Imperium. The Inquisition is too important to fight amongst itself, or to depend on the resources of others, and our current arrangement seems to work well. You and those that think as you do attend to the Chaos threat, and I to that of the alien. Perhaps it’s time it was formalised into something permanent, so that an argument over who or what represents the greater threat to mankind will never again cripple us as it nearly did.’

Veritus nodded, accepting the unspoken charge.

‘Consider the possibilities,’ Wienand went on. ‘An alien-hunting strike-force that pools the greatest talents of the Space Marine Chapters, one that can be deployed anywhere in the galaxy, to arenas too hostile even for an Inquisitorial rosette to provide safety.’

‘That is a tremendous amount of power for you to wield. Power that you promised the Lord Commander would be shared.’

She took a deep breath and stopped pacing, turning to face Veritus fully. ‘Perhaps that power could be balanced by a force of Chaos hunters drawn along similar lines.’

Veritus’ suit sucked and wheezed around his corpse neck like a ventilator. It blew out an odour of cinnamon-scented oils and formaldehyde, and made the cuneiformed papyrus strips hung from his armour flutter like spirits with secrets. His eyelids fluttered drily. It was a tic, the tired rattle of an ancient cogitator, one that Wienand had come to associate with the deep dredging of ancient memory. ‘There is a Space Marine Chapter, based on Titan, that might serve.’

For a moment, Wienand found herself at a loss for words. She turned back to the window and looked out over the scarred, quake-blistered skyline.

‘An entire Chapter? Here? What in the name of the Throne were they doing while orks invaded Terra and Mars threatened outright rebellion?’

‘They have… special interests. Their existence is known only to a few.’

Wienand was long resigned to the fact that Veritus specialised in things known only to a few.

‘I will make the necessary overtures,’ he said after a moment, his lips animating to peel open in something too cadaverous and black-centred to be called a smile. ‘And I will ensure that power does not rush too strongly to Vangorich’s head. Though he flatters himself to think so, Malcador he is not.’

‘Don’t worry about Drakan. It’s out there, with Koorland, that things hinge now. He’s been fixated on the High Lords’ problems for so long that I think the changing centre of gravity has passed him by.’

The old inquisitor’s lips settled back into their corpselike repose. His eyes, now unblinking, found the reflection of hers. ‘Do not forget Krule. I doubt that Vangorich intends to be a complete bystander.’

‘I will have Raznick with me.’

‘Take more.’

‘There will be more waiting.’

‘You suspect. Koorland reveals nothing of your destination.’

‘Though it’s with a fleet of Inquisitorial barges that he intends to get there. I will be as safe as I can be.’

For a long spell, Veritus was silent, and Wienand feared that she was the focus of another unspoken reprimand. ‘Look out for him. For better or worse, Koorland is the only thing that holds the Imperium together.’

‘You don’t sound convinced that it is better.’

Veritus snorted, a crackling wheeze like the start of an old recording. ‘His diagnosis that the Imperium is not what it once was or was intended to be is correct, but, though it is not my place to question a primarch, Vulkan was missing for a thousand years. He lacked certain facts. The Emperor’s ambition for mankind was the product of an innocent time.’

‘Making this, what, a guilty one?’

It was a joke, but Veritus just looked at her, eyes dead, a slight curl to his upper lip.

‘Emperor watch over you both,’ he said, when he was ready. ‘I will be here when you return.’

Terra – orbital
Check 0, 05:22:46

Cold white vapour lay over the floor of the flight deck like a sub-zero froth, clinging to the thighs of the void-suited tech-serfs that hurried through it. The grinding closure of the anterior blast doors behind Thane’s back drew a ripple through the stew that lapped at the drab grey ceramite of his greaves.

He crossed the length of the deck. The hard grey mullions between launch bay doors passed slowly on his right, the rust-swathe crescent of Terra’s southern hemisphere dominating the spaces. There were no clouds. Terra no longer had a water cycle to speak of, but he could see gun-blimps, sub-orbital platforms, rad-harvesters, drifting across the slow-turning world like something robotically similar.

As he walked, a matt-grey Thunderhawk broke the coherence field in a squeal of spasming countervalencies and roared a few dozen metres over his head, turning tortuously on its axis before coming down in a marked bay in a blast of coolant vapours.

Incoming transports disgorged armoured Space Marines, or serfs laden with gear and pushing pallets stacked with equipment crates. Others were in the process of take-off, ferrying visiting officials and liaison staff back to their own ships.

Thane ignored the bustle, heading for the group of three gunships that were in the process of being unloaded at the far end of the deck. They were as devoid of Chapter icons and embellishment as any Fists Exemplar craft, but they were black. Quartermaster Heroth stood in the fountaining vapours with a clipboard tucked under one arm, glittering void suit made stiff with cold, and personally shook the hand of the more human of the disembarking passengers.

Thane recognised the Assassin, Krule, his big hand currently crushing the wincing Quartermaster’s, a light kit bag slung over the same shoulder. The magi, Eldon Urquidex and Phaeton Laurentis, he knew also. The latter scuttled down the boarding ramp on his tripod assembly, accompanied by a servitor pushing a tracked cart containing a set of lead containers marked with the Cog Mechanicus and cautionary runes in Low Gothic and binharic. Urquidex moved serenely a short distance behind. His left arm had been replaced with a bulky augmetic. His head was bald, bar-stamped and still scarred from the aborted surgical process of lobotomisation. His telescopic optics and facial grafts made the magos’ emotions alien to Thane, but the periodic twitch of his digital bionics seemed to betray his nerves. The ranger alpha seconded from the Taghmata to safeguard Mars’ investment met Thane’s regard with hard lenses of machined glass. Steam hissed from the blue-glowing cells of the plasma caliver in his articulated hands.

Kavalanera Brassanas and half a dozen of her Sisters gathered together, detached, parchment strips fluttering under the idling turbofans, in silent communion. About twice that number, Thane knew, would be distributed across Abhorrence, Punished, and the Anokrono. Six more hopefully waited at their separate rendezvous coordinates.

Leaning against their depowering gunship were two more that Thane did not know.

A pair of hugely muscular ogryn, their sloping brows almost level with the gunship roof, grunted at each other in their slow, sub-Gothic dialect. Their khaki vest tops hung open over slab-muscled chests and glittered with newly minted Ullanor campaign pins, Aquila Company patches, and numerous greatly loved honorifica for valour.

This was Koorland’s kill-team: the thirty or so that would succeed where the Emperor’s millions had failed.

‘The Lord Commander ordered me to find quarters for this group,’ said Heroth, still massaging his hand as Thane approached.

‘So I’ve been informed. Any further orders?’

‘No, lord.’

Thane grunted, somewhat disappointed, then looked up towards the tremendous metallic impact that rang against one of the gunship’s troop ramps.

‘Thane!’

The welcome came as a feline snarl from the closest gunship’s open hatch. A Space Marine in Deathwatch black bedecked in skull tokens and animal pelts walked down the ramp with his helm in his hands and the easy, nonchalant stride of an alpha wolf. He looked from side to side, seemingly idly, as he descended, an apex carnivore sizing up these other beasts that grazed on its plain.

Thane noted that even the skitarius looked away.

The first ever Watch Commander of the Deathwatch swept off the ramp, and thumped Thane with an embrace that had his gyros whirring to compensate. Thane awkwardly returned the bear hug, overwhelmed by raw animal charisma and the damp scent of musk. Thumping his rerebrace violently, the Wolf Lord pulled back. He smiled. His look might have been described as thoughtful, considered even, were it not for the set of sharp, overly long fangs.

‘Well met, Asger. Warfist’

‘And you, cousin.’ He slid one long arm across Thane’s shoulders and crushed his pauldron to his chest, a purring growl rolling from the back of his throat. ‘I never thought I would need to shake the hand of so many I have never met in one day.’

‘You grow accustomed to it.’

‘See my gladness at being here for just this one day. My ship translated into system barely six hours ago and I am already wearied by it.’ He turned to show the new crest on his armour. Thane could still smell the paint. ‘Though some idea of what the role of Watch Commander entails would have been welcome.’

‘If it makes you feel better, I am not sure either.’

Asger snorted, amused, as Thane’s gorget bead chimed. He held up a finger to forestall any further conversation. ‘Thane here.’

‘Lord Commander Koorland reports aboard, lord.’ The vox-whisper barely made it through the interference bands, but Shipmaster Weylon Kale was an old hand. A little inevitable physical deterioration was a fair price for almost three centuries of experience. ‘The shipmasters of Bulwark and Faceless Warrior also report ready. Lord Bohemond’s flotilla has cleared the exit lanes and is under way for the Mandeville point, and Lord Issachar signals that he now waits only on us.’

‘Inform Punished that we are ready.’

‘Signalled, lord. Lords Cuarrion and Verpall forward their regrets.’

Asger smirked, his hearing sharper even than Thane’s, and good enough to pick out the scratch of another man’s gorget bead over the flight deck’s clamour. ‘I do not envy the Iron Knight his chance to play guard dog over Terra, though I envy the Crimson Fist the opportunity to warm Koorland’s seat in the Great Chamber even less.’

Thane chose not to comment.

The loss of Quesadra remained too raw to properly acknowledge whatever difficulties his successor faced in filling his boots. So complete had been the Crimson Fists’ destruction on Ullanor that Cuarrion had barely made sergeant before his elevation to Chapter Master. They would stand guard over the Palace under Chapter Master Vorkogun and his similarly depleted Executioners, alongside the sentinels of the new-formed Imperial Fists.

‘There is also a personal communication for you, lord, from the Anokrono.’

Leaving Heroth to his duties with a nod, Thane withdrew to a stack of munitions crates beneath a little-used catwalk where it was marginally quieter than the rest of the deck.

‘Put it through.’

There was a click as the shipmaster switched channels and then a garbled hiss, the signal no longer a wired ship line but a ship-to-ship transmission through an intensely busy orbital space. There were vox-protocols, but they were poorly enforced and civilian transports rarely adhered to them.

‘Forgive the indulgence, Brother Thane,’ spoke the uncommonly cultured tones of Euclydeas, Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers. ‘But after our last meeting I felt a “good luck” was in order.’

‘It is welcome.’ Thane and Euclydeas had fought side-by-side on Ullanor, two of seven Chapter Masters that had formed Vulkan’s vanguard into the Great Beast’s temple-gargant. A day that would live on in future histories, if the Imperium endured to retell it.

He sighed. Quesadra was not the only one to fall. Odaenathus of the Ultramarines had also been slain, a mantle that was still to be taken up.

‘We will both need plenty of it,’ Thane said, ‘I have no doubt.’

‘Agreed, and I intend to buy my share with ork blood.’

‘I hope to fight beside you again come the end, brother.’

‘Likewise. I have already spoken with Issachar. My fleet will follow you out. For Dorn. For the Emperor. For freedom.’

There was a click, and then silence as the Chapter Master severed the line.

‘To the war then,’ said Asger.

‘To test Koorland’s new weapon.’

‘I have heard of it. And if it does not work as he hopes?’

Thane gestured to the row of towering launch bay doors and their view of Terra, as though this alone explained everything. ‘Then nothing changes.’

‘The Emperor protects. Kill every last one.’

– attributed to Ezekyle Abaddon,
Ullanor Crusade, M31

Eight

Incus Maximal – orbital
Check 5, 2017:09:28

It always took a ship’s real space systems a few minutes to recover but, despite his own post-Geller-collapse nausea, Urquidex had been sufficiently drilled in the procedure to get himself aboard the Thunderhawk and strapped in when it had occured. The skitarii ranger, Alpha 13-Jzzal, had checked his harness, then slotted in alongside.

The post-event syndromes made Urquidex’s mind squirm as though his skull had been opened for an augmentation procedure that he had not submitted to, memories of his time on the lobotomisation slab, implanted electrodes making his skin tingle and his limbs jerk. He could taste vomit in his mouth and thought he could smell it on his robes. There had barely been time to realign his senses to the restored reality before the Blood Angel, Gadreel, had guided the gunship from its hangar.

But then, Space Marine physiology tolerated translation better.

‘Are you all right, magos?’ asked the Inquisitorial storm trooper, a colonel named Rothi, in the opposite harness, holding on to the vertical bars.

Urquidex nodded, trying hard not to be sick again as the Thunderhawk passed through her parent ship’s void shields with a bump. Thrust rippled through his flesh organics as the gravitational forces pushed him hard against the restrictor bar.

Seeking something fixed to settle his churning stomach, his telescoping eyestalks sought out the nearest viewing block. Behind them, more troop ships streaming from its launch bays, the castellated bulk of the Inquisitorial flagship, Verisimilis, was a bulwark of darkness against the steady light of the stars. More heavily armed than the standard Black Ship template, and several times more massive than the spartan menace of Alcazar Remembered, the Inquisitorial flagship had been born black. Enveloped by an aegis of literal and metaphysical wards, and with a standard crew complement now supplemented with Deathwatch Space Marines, it was as formidable a foe as any, at arm’s length or in close.

The gunship altered course and the view swung. Inquisition and Excoriator ships crowded the orbital anchorages of a pearly hyper-industrial ice world. Drop pods smoked a small slice of the upper atmosphere in blacks, greens, and reds. A few other vessels were mixed up with them. Though no expert in Adeptus Astartes vexillology, Urquidex recognised warships of the Blood Angels, Aurora Chapter, and the Brazen Claws. They had been hastily, in some instances partially, reworked in black. The realisation of just how much manpower and materiel it would require to convert a million square metres of just one void-scarred warship to Deathwatch black had clearly come too late for some.

A vast manufactorum tender of the Basilikon Astra hove to alongside an Aurora Chapter cruiser with a spitting contusion from a gravitic lash in her port quarter. Manipulator claws and laser sculptors were setting to work, cutting and cauterising, even as the Space Marine vessel disgorged drop pods. The visible Navy and Mechanicus ships he could count on his one hand. They hung back from the planet.

The planet was one he had visited before, though he had never yet personally set foot on it. He had been part of the sample-retrieval mission dispatched after its fall. The memory did not settle his stomach at all.

An alien growl and a clank of chain drew his attention from the viewing block.

The Veridi mysticus was bolted to the wall, chains running through thick iron hoops that had been welded to the deck. Even tranquillised, it was terrifyingly strong. The storm troopers shifted in their seats. In slots designed for the transport of superhuman warriors they looked like nervous children at an adult’s table.

‘Be calm,’ said Tyris and the outward display of nerves diminished. Huge and fully sealed in his black armour, the Raven Guard surveyed the mortal soldiers. Under the infernal red of his lenses they found another object for their fear.

‘Yes, lord,’ said Rothi.

Urquidex glanced to the warriors either side of Tyris that made up the reformed Kill-Team Stalker. He was not yet adept at telling armoured Space Marines apart, and recognised them from their training exercises by Chapter marking – or lack thereof – more than any other feature. Hakon Icegrip of the Space Wolves. Vega of the Doom Eagles. Gadreel of the Blood Angels. Numines of the Fists Exemplar.

Unlike the others, the Fist Exemplar’s wargear carried no markings.

Urquidex could speak at length on the nature and variation of biological hierarchies. He could explain how the Leo of ancient Terra asserted their dominance over a breeding pool, or the socio-genetics of Veridi giganticus’ rigidly absolutist dominance structure. The ancient eldar too, from the few fragmentary treatises he had seen, held to a model of subservience and command that, for all its inherent alien-ness, was more remarkable for its similarities to human norms than its differences. Even amongst the adherents to the Cog Mechanicus, the exact same structure could be seen in the makeup of the Synod, the diagnostiad, and the alpha station of the Fabricator General himself. The instinct to dominate was as fundamental to biological life as the nucleotidal structure that underlay it. This man was quite plainly a leader.

A discussion of the flaws inherent to Oriax Dantalion’s philosophy would have made a fascinating diversion just then.

With a sullen growl, the ork psyker lunged for him.

Chains rattled and pulled taut and the huge beast clattered to the deck. The storm troopers swore. Alpha 13-Jzzal struck it across the jaw with the butt of his plasma caliver. Drugged as it was, ork as it was, the psyker almost certainly didn’t feel the blow, but there was force enough in his cyborgised guardian’s arm to put it back on the deck. It drooled where it lay. One poorly-focused eye rolled drunkenly around Urquidex.

He suspected that the ork was less interested in him than the trio of gold-armoured women beside him.

Urquidex was accustomed to the company of emotionless beings, but something about the warrior women chilled him. It was deeper even than the unease he felt in the presence of a mind-wiped servitor. It was visceral, basic; an aversion to something alien that was recognised directly by the soul rather than filtered by imperfect organic senses.

‘Can you tranquillise it again?’ said Rothi.

Urquidex nodded.

‘Remain harnessed, magos,’ said Tyris.

‘Crossing thermosphere,’ said Gadreel, the Techmarine’s voice coming through the internal vox.

‘Armour up,’ said Rothi. ‘Helms on. And check seals. It’s a cold world down there.’

Incus Maximal – orbital
Check 5, 2017:55:31

‘All drop-ships away, all gunships landed and redeploying to engage targets. Lord Issachar signals limited resistance thus far.’

Shipmaster Weylon Kale walked the gangway from strategium to command throne under the choral backing of cherubiam serfs of the Fists Exemplar Librarius. Koorland grunted acknowledgement. The tac-screens and data-displays showed the same information.

‘Ork vessels?’

‘Engaged or destroyed, lord.’

‘No sign of anything breaking away?’

‘Navy and Basilikon Astra have the Mandeville point under blockade.’

Koorland reformatted the data-display at his armrest to call up a bi-dimensional gridchart of the planet’s orbital band. Thirty to forty green icons represented ork ships. They were construction vessels and bulk haulers rather than true warships, though all were armed to some capacity and making a fight of it. At slightly under a quarter of the numbers, Space Marine and Inquisition ships were represented in Chapter colours and black respectively. They were true warships, and green icons disappeared fast.

Also in green, but larger, were the planet’s orbital facilities. The handful of weapons platforms that had been in orbit no longer had the power output or the mass to return an auspex signal. The installations currently showing up on Alcazar Remembered’s screens were dry docks, assembly yards and fuel depots, low-priority targets that the flotilla had ignored while green icons still crowded the board.

At Koorland’s swiped command, the image on the main oculus altered to one from a starboard viewer. It showed a tangle of aerials and macro-turrets, blanched with void frost, and, through it, one of the orbital shipyards. It was crescent-shaped, one face tidally locked to the planet and the other bristling with empty slipways. The ‘skull’ section of an Opus Machina had been crudely redone in green. Bulky weapon retrofits spewed macro-ordnance. The fire appeared to be manually targeted, much of it sprayed hopefully into space. Impacts flared violet and indigo from the forward shields of the Blood Angels cruiser that manoeuvred alongside. A full broadside from the Space Marine vessel blasted several hundred metres from the shipyard’s void-facing side and sent explosions rocking through the rest. The cruiser fired reverse thrusters, gunners reloading for a second volley. A much-reduced volume of fire blistered her shields.

‘Launch a shuttle with a message for the Sanguine to break off her attack.’ The blanket denial broadcast that all fleet elements were transmitting made direct ship-to-ship or ship-to-ground communication impossible. ‘Remind all captains and shipmasters, static facilities are to be disabled only. Dispatch Terminator squads to take recordings, but their orders are not to engage.’

‘And how do you propose they do that?’ said Thane.

The Chapter Master was lit up by the pale glow of the command deck’s vox-turret. He had no specific purpose here. Kale controlled the ship, Issachar the fleet and ground forces, Koorland himself had strategic command. For want of anything better to do, Thane monitored the hardline comm-booths for updates from their planetside forces, and coordinated with the shipmasters of Bulwark and Faceless Warrior.

Koorland put his brother’s uncharacteristic attitude down to frustration, and perhaps a little wounded Chapter honour. Most of the Fists Exemplar First Company and all of their Tactical Dreadnought suits had been lost with Dantalion. Out of respect for his and his Chapter’s losses, Koorland chose to let it lie.

‘Have Asger mobilise the necessary squads. And remind him that he is not to deploy in person.’ The reminder was necessary. Koorland knew where he would rather be had his position not prohibited it. ‘I want him monitoring the feeds from those facilities.’

‘I will remind him, lord.’

Koorland thought he detected some satisfaction in his brother’s voice. Nothing ameliorated a sense of frustration like spreading it around. Teleportation signals lit up the tactical displays, energy usage spiking on several Inquisitorial ships. He tapped impatiently at the snowy data-display.

‘And have one of our low-flying craft relay a message to Issachar. Tell him the weapon is inbound. He needs to draw the orks into the target area and quickly if we are to have a worthwhile test.’

Incus Maximal – Hyboriax Cryoforge
Check 5, 2018:09:01

Issachar could not see the orks yet. The landing zone was surrounded by bronzed manufactorum walls and by the ice-capped pylons through which ran a sky-blackening net of power lines. Cog Mechanicus icons re-cut with tusks, box chins, glowering eyes, and beret-style caps glared down from towering basilicae. A ranting xenos voice blasted out from augmitters set up amongst the buildings. The roadway hissed under an acid snow that tumbled through mechanised guttering, spraying out of corroded effluent pipes in kilometre-high glitterfalls that disappeared through successively narrower-spectrum rainbows to the unseen sump-layer below.

The local topography was of immense containers that had been broken open and scattered, ordnance potholes from the initial invasion that the orks had not bothered to fill. Yawing cranes swung in the jetwash of overflying gunships. The headlamps of three-score rumbling vehicles lit the ground in harsh white streaks, the periodic wash of electricity through the lines temporarily inverting light and shade.

Issachar could not see the orks. Not yet. But he could hear them.

Gunfire rattled far away. The crump of rockets. Bikes and buggies growled through the surrounding districts. He could even hear the orks themselves, and not the cracked voice being pumped through the augmitters. The forward squads were already engaged, just on the far side of those manufactorum walls.

‘Orders from Alcazar Remembered, brother-captain.’

Brother Orgos of the First approached over the debris-strewn roadway. His armour was rad-pitted. The vox-antennae of his high-powered pack array twanged with countervailing winds, the occasional snap of voltage leaping towards the overhead cables. ‘Koorland demands we engage with all haste.’

Issachar laughed. ‘Tell him that it would be my pleasure.’

Armoured fist squadrons of the Astra Militarum, the merged veterans of the Ullanor invasion, and Inquisitorial storm troopers shivered in column to the front, tracks and armour frosted with a yellow-brown ice of sulphates, fluorates and hydrochlorates. Demolisher siege tanks and Hellhounds grumbled at the head of each column. Fully-enclosed Sentinels with armoured canopies strode the flanks, overwatch provided by heavy weapon teams ensconced behind shockboard barricades set up on top of the crumpled superheavy crates. With a sequential whoosh of castellan guided missiles, Whirlwinds loosed. The missiles twirled and parted and spun together, the incendiary barrage crumbling an effluviam stack several kilometres due north.

The main armoured elements of the Excoriators were already engaged in support of the rapid forward advance. Vox-chatter from the various squad and company-level channels spoke over one another into his helmet feed. His Lyman’s ear could pluck one from the chaos without difficulty.

‘Hab-block clear. moving on–’

‘Ork vehicles flanking via tau processional–’

‘Entering Hyboriax Primus. Heavy fire–’

Issachar could see the mons temple through the bruised swirl of snow. It had suffered damage concomitant with massive orbital bombardment, but the fortified edifice still stood, some of the damaged wings reconstructed in less than sympathetic fashion. Cannon platforms and bright red runway strips for the take-off and landing of the orks’ big, multipurpose fighter-bombers spidered out from the cracked minaret, like tentacles emerging from a black-veined egg sac.

It was there that the ork forces would be concentrated.

Issachar raised his fist and a pair of serfs in ivory and red habits hoisted the Escharan standard from a crossbar above his personal Land Raider, Tyrant.

‘Inquisition forces to hold. All other units advance on my command.’

Nine

Incus Maximal – Mons Primus
Check 5, 2020:59:24

Acid snow was already beginning to pile up around the Thunderhawk. Urquidex hoped to take that as a positive sign, meaning that they planned to return for it. The gunship continued to disappear as he was hustled away from it, and that was when he realised. It had been expended to bring them down and was now being abandoned so as not to double the risk of discovery with a second flight. The ubiquitous Thunderhawk was the cheap, standard template design workhorse of the Adeptus Astartes, as easily thrown to the ice in the name of necessity as any organic servant of Him on Terra.

The air temperature was beyond freezing, and yet the snow burned where it touched bare skin. He pulled up his hood. Storm troopers in glassy black carapace and cold-weather survival gear crunched through the snow; two dozen of them together hauled the truculent ork by its chains. Steam billowed from its mouth and icicles of saliva bearded its jaw. The Sisters surrounded them like a warding hex, power blades spitting in the falling snow, causing the brute to snap and lunge and claw at its temples only for the chains around its wrist to yank taut and bring half a dozenstorm troopers skidding towards it.

The Space Marines of Kill-Team Stalker, Urquidex could no longer see. They had pushed well ahead and the sub-zero conditions had frozen his optics on near-view.

The landing pad projected from the upper bulge of the Mons Primus. It led onto a long ambulatory with great arched windows, detailed in brass, alternating from one side to the other. They ran down it, the drugged ork determining their pace. Snow swept in through the left-hand windows. They had previously been glazed by a conversion field that would have converted the impact of each flake of snow into glorious, eclectic light. Urquidex could see the emitters. They were unpowered now, several of the arches cracked. The siege-savants of Incus Maximal had authorised the destruction of the planetary capital in a bid to stem the ork advance onto the planet’s last Mechanicus enclaves. There had been no time to complete the sacrilege. The wreckage of the Ark ship Contrivenant still drifted in orbit.

The view from the left now was frozen, and dark because of it. Flickering exchanges of fire lit the silhouettes of forge basilicae, as if in crude mea culpa for the destruction of the conversion field. The traces of explosions went largely unremarked: a wink of light there, the dim rumble of a collapsing superstructure there.

By the time Urquidex saw the doors at the end of the ambulatory, the Thunderhawk was just another lump, indistinguishable from any of the forgotten lumps around it. Urquidex’s digitools twitched through a signum-code rendition of the Last Rites.

Hakon and Numines held the doors as Tyris, Vega and Gadreel surged through.

The ambulatory led to a covered chamber, and the first greenskins that Urquidex had seen alive.

There were six of them, gathered around a metal barrel of cleansing spirit with the lid torn off, sitting on sturdy tables as if they were benches. Their necks were as thick as iron hawsers. Their biceps were the size of promethium drums. Urquidex was wholly unprepared for their brute immensity. The intense fungal stench overpowered even the astringent chemicals.

A volley of silenced bolt-rounds dropped them before any of them could so much as grunt and Tyris and Vega powered through, smashing the tables aside to make way. Urquidex followed in behind the storm troopers and Sisters and looked around while his optics warmed through.

It was a narthex. Here was where pilgrims would congregate to wait, pray and suffer the requisite physical deprivation to earn the Omnissiah’s admission to the temple proper. The columns were bronze. The floor and ceiling were ribbed and the walls were decked with cabling. Pistons glided in and out of their sleeves, but they were without function, symbolic of the perpetuity of the Machine-God’s power. The distant pops of gunfire echoed through the chamber.

Tyris voxed a whispered ‘all clear’. The other Space Marines started after him with a startling lack of sound.

Urquidex pointed the way, bypassing the ascensor, to the penitent stairs at the far end of the hallway, doubting for a moment that he had seen the orks alive at all.

Just six corpses. No different to the tens of thousands shipped to Mars for dissection.

The penitent stairs led to a corridor, its walls adorned with tablet slabs stating the Universal Laws, and then on to another set of stairs. The metal newel rattled loosely as the Deathwatch powered ahead. Urquidex was only halfway up and feeling the lactate burn in his limbs when the roar of bolter fire carried down.

A dozen orks were dead and sprayed roughly over the atrium’s cuneiformed bronze walls when Urquidex stumbled onto the scene, but twice that number were still fighting.

They were machine-ork perversions, xenotech abominations of an engineer class. Slug bullets sprayed from crane-limbed servo-harnesses. Plasma blasts ripped craters out of the walls. Vega dropped to one knee behind a devotional font and disgorged a jet of flaming promethium from his bolter’s combi-attachment. An ork engineer wheezed through the flames, shuddering armour harness alight. It didn’t seem to notice. A multi-barrelled volleycannon attached to its fighting suit with swaying ammo belts began to whine, then to howl, and the font disintegrated. Vega and Numines went down. Icegrip took a glancing hit to the pauldron just as he was swinging up his frost blade. Tyris’ return fire spanked off the ork’s armour like rain hitting a drum.

Urquidex had just starting screaming, metal splinters from the destroyed font lodged in the organic attachers of his eye, when he felt Alpha 13-Jzzal’s cyborgised frame slam him against the wall. The skitarius grunted as bullets riddled his titanium exoskeleton. A squad of storm troopers formed up behind him and opened fire. Las-fire stitched the atrium, brutally impressive as a laser display and as wasted as one on the thick skulls of the orks.

The boss ork shrugged off the troopers’ attentions, beat one in half with a twist of its power claw, then lost the arm to the downward stroke of a Sister’s blade. She withdrew a step, pivoted on her toes, and with terrifying grace, backhanded the ork’s head from its shoulders. Her sister stood protectively over Urquidex and the growling ork psyker as the third took the fight to the orks. Tyris, Gadreel and Icegrip fought hard to match her battle-grace.

The last engineer had backed itself into a corner. It took a short burst of bolt-rounds to the gut, which then erupted from its back and painted a streak on the wall as it slid down it. Vega rose, clutching his hip, liquid sealant bubbling up from the rents in his armour.

‘I can continue,’ he rasped.

Numines didn’t rise. Gadreel crouched over him for a second, fingers to his throat, and spoke a prayer to honour the Fist Exemplar’s lost gene-seed. Tyris was already thumping towards the great set of double doors that the orks had been guarding. There was no stealth now.

The stylised plasteel was no match for the Space Marine’s powered strength and he shouldered the doors apart without breaking stride. In fact he was still speeding up, bolter up and firing again before the doors had slammed back into the walls. Vega, Icegrip and, a moment later, Gadreel walked into the return fire without the slightest hesitation.

Urquidex was awed. Here was the Omnissiah’s glory, expressed through biological perfection and the genetic mastery of the God-Emperor of Man.

‘Squads alpha and beta, left and right,’ roared Colonel Rothi as men surged forward, and held a hand to Urquidex to indicate that he should remain exactly where he was. ‘Delta on me, cover the payload, go.’

The Apse Mechanicus was a technological marvel in copper, polished mica, and gold, crosshatched by gunfire and smoke. At a prosaic level it resembled a temple of the Creed, but the pillars that upheld the vaulted ceiling were not monofunction stone, but great pipes that trembled musically with the Omnissiah’s breath. The Machine-God Himself was represented in sanctified metal at the end of the nave. It was more than just a statue. Its miraculous mechanics had breathed Motive Force into the lights, the energy fields, and provided Hyboriax its heat. It ran still, its isolation splendid, but its outward connectors had been hacked out of the walls. A necklace of human ribs hung from its cog-toothed neck. A crown of bent metal sat crooked on its head.

Squads alpha and beta lacerated the defiled space with las-beams. Orks built like armoured walkers turned around as though unexpectedly spat upon. A missile screwed across the nave from a crude shoulder-mounted launcher and wasted two men to armaplas scraps and flesh lather. Alpha 13-Jzzal’s caliver deoxygenated the air with rippling volleys of superheated plasma that left two orks as molten husks. Overheat runes glowed a dangerous amber as the weapon steamed off into the cold. Rothi roared. The troopers focused their fire, and twenty-plus convergent beams managed finally to punch one of the xenos brutes down.

Luckily for the mortals, the Space Marines had the orks’ attention.

Tyris advanced at speed towards the right transept, going column to column. Controlled bursts punched the orks cleanly down as they moved towards him. Wild returns ripped open the ornate pipes, mangled them as though grenades had blown them apart from the inside. Vega meanwhile advanced slowly down the centre, his limp growing more pronounced with every step. Heavy gunfire slugging his battleplate, he dropped to one knee and rolled a grenade down the aisle between two blocks of plug-in banks.

It burst into a thick pall of smoke. Tyris disappeared but for the muffled sound of him. Vega became a ghost. Urquidex could barely make out the silent Sisters beside him. Without his optics he doubted they could see him as well, but they appeared as unflustered by their sudden blindness as they were by everything else.

‘The weapon must be deployed as close to the centre as is possible,’ said Urquidex. ‘If the test is to yield meaningful data then it must be done properly.’ He looked back. Rothi was there. He had one hand pressed to his ear, the other cupped over his mouth.

‘Lord Issachar, come in. Lord Issachar–’

One of the storm troopers left dragging the payload cursed as it began to pull back against them.

‘It needs another dose!’

‘No,’ Urquidex replied. Xenos species reacted unpredictably to human pharmacopoeia. Even sub-breeds could show eccentricities of response. He began to see why Kubik had recommended him for this mission. Few if any knew as much about Veridi genetics as he did. ‘It must be as conscious as possible. I don’t know how the somnambulum might interfere with its psychic powers.’

‘Then release it now!’ yelled the storm trooper. The ork was small relative to others of its species, but more than equal to the five men left holding it. The soldier’s arms were wound through the chain and his feet braced, but he and his comrade beside him were being drawn back regardless.

‘Here, then,’ said Urquidex, and signalled as much to the one Sister of Silence still beside him. She took a step back.

He took a deep breath.

Fortunate that he was in a house of the Omnissiah.

He wanted his prayers heard.

Ten

Incus Maximal – Hyboriax Primus
Check 5, 2021:45:02

The Land Raider’s glacis ramp crashed down into the rubble. Issachar was first out, shredding an ork in thick red body plate with a burst of bolter fire. Another ork pushed through the girdering that had fallen across a window. He bracketed it with bolter fire until it dropped. Something pulled the blocking metal aside and lobbed in a grenade. The frag burst shook floor and ceiling, but Issachar barely felt it. Space Marines encased in wounded artificer armour and draped in scripture stomped towards windows and doors, weapons blazing.

The Land Raider had ridden through the tin wall and disgorged Issachar’s honour guard directly into a manufactorum complex attached to Hyboriax Primus. It was a shell, but it was cover and provided firing lines over the primus road and from the back onto the ork bikers flanking on secundus.

The big doors onto primus came down on their acid-corroded hinges, an ork walker bulldozing through and walking into the atmosphere-sear of Tyrant’s sponson lascannons. The smoking can spouted fire and crashed to the floor. Ork warriors poured in behind the wreck, bellowing and hooting and firing wildly into the air. Tyrant raked them with its glacis heavy bolters, body parts slapping into puddles of their own liquefied tissue. High-yield mass-reactives perforated the walker’s gouting shell with hollow thunks and exploded, showering the orks still behind it with boiling shrapnel. Even the tank’s commander popped the cupola hatch and added to the outpouring of firepower with its pintle-mounted storm bolter.

The honour guard were still laying down thinning fire from the windows, leaving it to Issachar to deal with the xenos inroad in person.

He crushed an ork’s spine with a blow from his power axe. Filled another with a close-range volley that tore it apart. An ork almost twice his size waded through the Land Raider’s bullet storm. It had a crossed axe branded on a box-magazine of a jaw, a lumpen bionic wedged into the crease of one eye. It barged him sideways and they grappled, servos whining, gears clunking.

He was Chapter Master of the Excoriators. He had served Katafalque as First Captain for a century. He had fought the enemies of mankind for nearly seven hundred years, and the Astronomican would cease to shine before he would fall at the hands of an ork.

He spat Betchers’ acid on its chest-plate, then slammed his forehead through the dissolving metal. The ork roared, in surprise, not pain, and released its grip on his power axe enough for him to molecularly disrupt the brute’s skull with force fit to topple a wall.

Chapter vox chattered in his ear the whole time, telling him exactly where and how badly they were being beaten.

‘Order all forces back to the secondary extraction zone,’ he voxed, calmly, bolt pistol eviscerating the next monster to test its luck against his fury and lose. ‘I will not sacrifice what little we have left for a test.’

‘Chapter Master.’ Orgos made a line for him from Tyrant, where he had been coordinating with air support. ‘Payload is signalling. They are ready to–’

There was a crack, and the Space Marine fell with a slugger round still embedded in the side of his helm. Issachar snarled and stepped over him.

He had lost too many brothers to be moved by one more.

Incus Maximal – Mons Primus
Check 5, 2021:58:15

Urquidex nipped in smartly behind the ork’s back and stabbed it in the side of the neck with a hypodermic. It roared, and instinctively tried to bite off his hand, but it was still groggy and snapped a few centimetres shy of his hastily withdrawn digitools. The storm troopers braced. There had been no way to drill for the actual detonation. All they had to go on was the Dzelenic IV recording and they looked duly terrified.

The ork psyker was growing increasingly lucid. With a furious bellow, it dragged on the chain around its muscular right arm and pulled the storm trooper holding on to it off his feet. He slid along the floor on his chest carapace and the ork stamped on his head.

‘Throne!’

The storm trooper escort detail cried out in alarm. One drew a laspistol and had singed the ork’s chest before Urquidex shouted for him to stop. The ork pounded on its chest with its free arm and grabbed hold of the chains around its left arm and its neck.

With a crack of energy discharge, the Sister of Silence severed its arm just below the shoulder. She regarded Urquidex frostily as the psyker howled. Gore turned the edge of her power blade a fizzing purple. Taking advantage of the ork’s momentary distraction, the storm troopers unclasped the chains from their carapace and started to wind them through the data-pews either side of the aisle.

Meanwhile, squads alpha through delta were firing blindly into the roiling smoke.

The Doom Eagle, Vega, fell out of the smog and hit the floor with an ork on top of him. The troopers tattooed it with las as it smashed the back of the Space Marine’s helmet into the floor. From somewhere, Urquidex could hear the cry of a wolf, the powered whine of a Techmarine’s servo-harness.

Good. The harder they attacked, the stronger the psychic field would become.

The more devastating the explosion.

The ork psyker hollered and struggled around towards the Sister of Silence, the source of all its pain.

‘Now!’ shouted Urquidex, but the Sister was already vanishing into the smoke. Her high gorget hid her mouth, but from the movement of her skin and the shape of her eyes, Urquidex was certain that she smiled.

The effect of her departure on the psyker was profound.

The ork’s eyes took on a glassy inner light. Its shoulders tensed and bulged with swollen musculature. Urquidex had no equipment for the measurement of the uncanny, but he could feel the force that built inside of its skull. It was the pressure in the air that grew in the wake of a storm. The creak of a dam.

The diagnostiad had theorised, on forensic analysis of the Dzelenic IV recording, that the surge of energy that followed a psychically neutered ork psyker being suddenly exposed to a large group of its kin would have catastrophic results.

The storm troopers felt it coming in the rattling of their chains. They abandoned them and started to run. The ork was free, but it made no move to join the fight. It clapped its remaining hand to its face as if to contain the swelling of its head. Bolts of energy spat from its nose, mouth, ears. The flesh of its forehead stretched as its cranium pushed through. Its skull creaked, split, and then burst open, spraying Urquidex and the fleeing storm troopers with brain matter and whizzing bone.

The shockwave hit Urquidex like a force stave and flung him back, up the aisle, and into the wall with a wetly organic crack. A numbing flash of excruciation centred somewhere around his upper spine, and he flopped to the floor minus the use of his limbs. His digitools gave a peripheral nervous twitch.

Courtesy of a massive opiate dump from his cortical implants he remained conscious, and quite by chance in a position that faced down the aisle.

The detonated psyker somehow still stood, wobbling on the spot, blood firing upwards in spurts from its splayed-open neck. The corpses of the escort squad lay in a psychic blast crater of tangled data-pews.

Vega was dead too, insofar as it was possible to make that determination. Urquidex had just noticed him when the ork that straddled him gave a jerk and violently evacuated the contents of its brainpan over a wide area of floor.

The ork slumped over the Space Marine and Urquidex smiled weakly. A string of wet detonations and splashes of red ran through the smoke. The psychic shock chained through the orks. Heads exploded. Inhuman souls blasted from hulking bodies. An ork mechanic staggered across the aisle, headless, guided on by his mega-armoured suit, and crashed through a stained glass window. Acid snow billowed through, pinching out the blooms of promethium fire that rose from the plummeting ork’s flamers. Through the open window, Urquidex heard something explode. A suddenly untended incendiary, perhaps? Or did the battle for Hyboriax Primus continue?

Inside the Apse Mechanicus, however, the silence was devastating. Urquidex heard a last bolt-casing tinkle to the ground. Colonel Rothi’s vox-set crackled with distant chatter. Icegrip clumped through the ruddy smoke and sniffed the air in search of more foes, and then gave a lopsided grin.

There were none.

Incus Maximal – orbital
Check 5, 2022:01:11

The rare strain of unfettered emotion swept the turreted command stations of Alcazar Remembered. Communications, auspectoriae, drive; men and women in glittering void suits rose from their fortress chairs, beating hands together and cheering. Even the cherubiam serfs in their null-shielded podia had fallen, if not quiet, then helplessly in with the general wave of elation. For once in their servile existences, the focus of their songs was not the warp-soothing verses of the Librarius, but the images and accompanying screed that scrolled across the main viewer.

‘Massive ork casualties,’ reported Kale, doing his best to keep his tone level and failing. A smile tugged at the corners of his lips and his hands were clasped a little more tightly than usual behind his back. ‘Early estimates from ground forces put their losses in the tens of thousands.’

Another wild cheer broke out. Even the old shipmaster allowed himself a smile. Koorland suppressed the desire to join the celebrations, or relax, and sat forward.

They had won nothing yet.

‘Details, magos.’

‘Noospheric interlink to Magos Urquidex’s data tether established,’ reported Laurentis, tinnily, unmoved by the exuberance of the tacticae staff around him, or by the serf who dropped onto her knees to throw a hug around his boxy chassis. ‘Stand by.’

The magos scuttled around the strategium desk, which had been modified to his own specifications. Twitching implementer rods projected a functional noosphere. A control board packed with dials hung lopsided from one end by a bundle of fibre-optics, and pinged with periodic sampling of said noosphere. Other parts did things that Koorland could not imagine, all under continuous manipulation by Laurentis’ mechadendrites.

‘My colleague reports partial success. Satisfactory. Reports of fighting in Hyboriax. Uplink from the Excoriators and other ground forces remains patchy, but it would appear that the blast effect was restricted to the Mons Primus and its immediate surrounds.’

Koorland glanced over to Thane. ‘Orbital facilties?’

‘Terminator squads heavily engaged, brother. No effect that I can tell.’

‘Bring them back aboard Alcazar Remembered, and then destroy those platforms. Send retrieval boats for Issachar’s force. I want helmet feeds compiled and supplied to Asger and Laurentis at once. Discontinue the blanket denial broadcast and begin ordering the fleet for immediate translation out.’

‘Aye, lord.’ The communications liaison serf slid her headphones back over her ears and sat back down, even as her station colleagues continued to celebrate.

‘I was hoping for more,’ Koorland muttered.

‘I will have to confer with Magos Urquidex and analyse the data gathered from the ground forces,’ said Laurentis. ‘Lord Tyris and any surviving members of the insertion will also need to be thoroughly interrogated. The psyker was the smallest and weakest of the three, however. That was why it was selected for a trial detonation. It is possible that further calibration of an admittedly improvised detonation procedure could result in improved blast yields.’

‘That is what I want, magos. It is what I need. More and better. I want to scour worlds. I want to ravage fleets. Do you understand me?’

‘I will commence data inload at once.’

‘I look forward to your preliminary report.’ Koorland turned to the communications turret. ‘Has the denial broadcast dissipated?’

‘Almost, lord.’

‘Then send word to the astropaths to make contact with Bohemond and Euclydeas. It is time for the final test.’

Eleven

Immitis VII – Moon
Check 9 [UNVERIFIED LOCATION], --:--:--

The psyker seized, bringing a haze of ferric red from the industrial clamps that held her pallet upright against the stone wall. Her scalp was stapled with adaptor plugs, dark cabling flexing and bowing as she struggled. Foam flecked her lips. Her eyes were wide and staring, though what it was that held her mind’s attention, Zerberyn could not hazard. In the matt of hoops and cabling above her, a lumen filament blinked on and off inside a cracked blue bulb. The witch’s fits were already becoming less frenzied, every abortive jerk against her restraints increasingly synchronised to that grubby flash of blue.

‘The soul is empty. It is dry. The green roar is heard across the stars. Drink deep of it. Drink deep.’

‘It is gibberish,’ said Zerberyn, a ghost-white giant encased in ceramite of unpainted grey.

‘The message doesn’t yet make sense to her,’ whispered the tonsured Librarius serf beside him. ‘Her mind is interpreting the psychic impulse as best as it is able.’

‘So far!’ she screamed, blood trickling from one nostril. ‘Why are you so far from home?’

More serfs in the plain grey habits of the Fists Exemplar Librarius hurried around her, making adjustments to flow regulators in her cranial plugs, tightening straps, or receiving instruction from the clicking instruments to which she was connected by peripheral and lumbar plugs. An overseer in baroque gunmetal-grey robes and bronze trim, a bondsman of sorts, offered sharp words of direction, but was largely content to let the serfs perform the labour. Various parts of his exposed flesh had been dug out and replaced with smooth iron grafts, presumably to excise the early stigmata of mutation. A brand of ownership, like a coal-black tattoo, was cut cleanly in half by one such metal plate on the side of his face.

The woman and her handler were the property of Warsmith Kalkator.

‘Are you even one of us, brother?’ The cage rattled with the violence of her efforts.

The words made Zerberyn’s neck itch, and the Iron Warriors bondsman growled instructions to his Fists Exemplar counterparts. Zerberyn looked up to where the cable bundle fed into a hole in the ceiling. White daylight fell through.

‘Join me,’ the psyker whispered, sinking into her restraints and turning her head sharply from side to side. ‘A red star. A world of fours.’

The overseer took her glistening wet hand, leant through the cage and listened as she whispered something in his ear.

‘We are the Last Wall. The Last Wall. The Last Wall…’

It went on. Zerberyn swore.

‘Find me when she begins to talk sense.’ Zerberyn enclosed the Librarius serf’s shoulder in a gauntleted hand. He towered over the mortal. The barest effort on his part would have broken ribs, torn muscle, crushed a lung, and not a shred of guilt would have haunted him at having done so. The serf swallowed. ‘Tell only me.’

‘Only you, lord. Of course.’

The corridor from what they laughingly now called the astropathicum was a worn-out stretch of ferrocrete blocks with freeze-thaw cracks in the mortar. Stacked building materials littered the floor, runes painted next to gashes in the wall or partial collapses of the ceiling with colours that indicated priority. Doorways without doors led to side chambers where serfs of the two Chapters – Legions? Zerberyn had ceased to worry over how he and his allies described one another – conducted basic repairs. In others, surplus equipment from Guilliman, Excelsior, Paragon, Courageous, Implicit, and from Palimodes had been stockpiled. Paired quartermaster serfs, one from each affiliation, took inventory, assessing how their meagre resources might be most efficiently shared.

From one, the scent of counterseptic hit Zerberyn well before his dully echoing footsteps carried him to the threshold. A dozen muscular youths from the local slave stock were laid on gurneys, stripped down, unconscious. One had been opened up, blood splattering his surgical robes in a perfect line from his throat to his sternum. Apothecary Reoch said nothing as Zerberyn walked past his door, giving him only the sullen flash of binoptics above an expressionless metal grille.

A short set of steps curved downwards forty-five degrees to the left. Zerberyn could not help but admire the design’s innate defensibility, based on the premise that ninety per cent of mortal human assailants would prefer to wield a close-combat weapon in their right hand.

It led to an archway large enough to accommodate a Terminator. The ferrocrete was sanded smooth.

Zerberyn walked through it and a sweeping turret opened out before him, large enough to land a Stormbird or to site heavy artillery. Its two-metre-high ramparts followed three-quarters of the circumference of a circle, until each end cut into the sides of the mountain into which the Iron Warriors had built their old fortress.

Sentinel servitors with low-oxygen enhancements looked out over the feeble atmosphere. Thousands of effluviam stacks broke the thin layer to belch toxic waste gases directly into the void. Behind the swaddling layer, the storm-wracked bulk of the gas giant Immitis VII seethed like a judgemental eye.

From the echoes of hammering, drilling and welding, Zerberyn knew that Forge-Brother Clathrin and his Iron Warriors counterpart would be conducting the serious work of shoring up the outer perimeter, retrofitting the back-up void bank hacked out of Implicit’s systems into the old fort’s age-withered grids. The older men of the manufactory slaves, the women, the younger boys, trimmed wires, sawed timber, shaped stone. The occasional whimper or cracked lash echoed up through the layered fortifications.

Zerberyn found the forced labour distasteful, but it was hardly the worst thing he had done in the name of necessity since becoming de facto lord of the Fists Exemplar. They had been slaves of the Iron Warriors long before his arrival, so what harm had he brought them? None.

He squinted in the dim, but unaccustomed daylight as Epistolary Honorius and Kalkator’s Apothecary, Barban, approached him.

Honorius was wearing Terminator plate without a helmet, his pale face like a pearl in a hard, dark shell of constrictor rings and armoured cabling. The Epistolary was paler even than Zerberyn, which was in itself disconcerting. Zerberyn’s skin was without pigment as he was the child of a world whose sun could kill, but Honorius was more ancient than he, and his recruitment predated the settlement of Eidolica by five centuries. His eyes, by contrast, were as black as the void beyond the Astronomican. He was a pressure on the psyche, a force against Zerberyn’s mind. Flickers of what could otherwise only be sensed steamed from the immensity of his armour plate like the corona of an eclipse.

Zerberyn aside, no one had worked more closely alongside their new allies than the Epistolary.

‘What news?’ said Honorius. The subtle power woven through the old warrior’s deep voice never failed to give Zerberyn pause.

‘Nothing yet. But it is the Last Wall.’

‘Then the fight continues. Good.’

‘Of course it continues. Do you think that brothers of ours would surrender?’

‘Do you intend to rejoin them?’ said Barban.

The Apothecary’s gunmetal and bronze battleplate was extensively modified and appended with bionics. A pair of bulky, muscular youths, perhaps eleven or twelve standard years of age, hovered behind him. They looked sickly from blood loss and enforced genhancement. There had been no time to assess the men for worth or for biological compatibility. As much as they needed strong walls, they needed strong warriors to hold them. Zerberyn examined the two neophytes. Their throats and chests were scarred from the implantation procedure. Both were already showing bruise-like discolourations to their skin, the first dermal deposits that would, over time, develop into the black carapace that would enable them to wear power armour. Zerberyn could not tell just from looking whether they were Iron Warriors or Fists Exemplar.

Presumably Reoch knew.

Zerberyn drilled the Iron Warrior with his gaze. Neither spoke.

‘My lord!’ came the relieved gasp of the Librarius adjutant, stumbling down the steps and onto the sunlit rampart. He offered the Epistolary a low bow and turned breathlessly to Zerberyn with his report. ‘The communication is from Euclydeas, lord.’

‘The Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers,’ said Honorius, one eyebrow lifted, peeling the infinite black lens a little wider. ‘Our absent brothers join the war. Perhaps all is not yet lost.’

‘What does it say?’ said Zerberyn.

‘A call for aid. They are beset, lord, by orks in great number.’

‘How far?’

‘The next system. Coreward.’

‘Reachable,’ said Honorius.

‘Just,’ Zerberyn corrected. Barban was watching them both without expression, as though assessing their decision. ‘Tell no one of this,’ he said, turning to the mortal serf. ‘You are to ignore all further attempts at communication from this source.’

‘But lord–’ Honorius began before falling silent.

On some deep, human level, it troubled Zerberyn that one so ancient and powerful could be silenced by a glance from him.

‘We are not ready yet, brother,’ he said, listening to the sounds of forced labour that continued far below his feet. ‘When we are strong again, then we will make our presence known.’

‘Peace is an armistice in a war that is continuously going on.’

– the remembrancer Thucydides, pre-M0

Twelve

The void

The conference room aboard Alcazar Remembered was as puritanical as Koorland had come to expect. It was oval in shape, its walls bare metal, its space dominated by a sturdy metal table and chairs enough for fifty warriors of the Adeptus Astartes. Hololith crystals studded the unpolished surface at intervals, returning the dim illumination of the ceiling lumen points like chipped glass. It was in this room that an argument over whether orbital barrage or drop strike was the surer method of pacifying the capital world of the abhuman Kivor Enclavium had famously brought Oriax Dantalion and Sigismund to blows, Koorland had learned (Shipmaster Weylon Kale being a remarkably informed historian). ‘I knew there was some life to these stone men,’ the Death Lord, Mortarion, commander of the compliance mission, was reported to have said as he pulled brother from brother.

If true, it was a damning indictment of them all, and another story altogether.

Two dozen Deathwatch sergeants were gathered in and around the available chairs. Koorland recognised the Raven Guard, Tyris, who had performed so superbly on Incus Maximal, in muted conversation with a Brazen Claw who must have travelled with Abhorrence, for Koorland did not know his name. The red-haired Wolf, Kjarvik, laughed harshly over the subdued chatter at some tale of Asger’s. The Watch Commander, for reasons known best to himself, had his boot on Oriax Dantalion’s austere table, hands afloat in demonstration of some grapple manoeuvre.

Issachar and Thane walked amongst them, speaking little, thus far avoiding a reprise of Sigismund and Dantalion’s infamous bout.

Field-Legatus Otho Dorr of the Ullanor Veterans, Astra Militarum, stood against a wall and sipped at a glass of clear wine. It was a plant fermentation product formulated to complement the nutrient gruel favoured by the Fists Exemplar. Despite all that he had survived on Ullanor and before, a social encounter with so many looming Adeptus Astartes clearly had him mortified. If he was hoping for the wine to loosen some of those nerves then he was due another disappointment. Intoxication was but one of the many things that the Fists Exemplar disapproved of.

Confessor-Militant Rawketh was arguably a natural companion under such circumstances, but the commander of the freshly raised Ecclesiarchy drafts stood alone by the viewports, captivated by the massed bow lights and engine flares of the combined fleets.

Phaeton Laurentis’ attempts at making small talk with Weylon Kale and Dominus Gerg Zhokuv appeared to be a waste of the magos’ synthised breath. The brain of the ancient dominus bubbled thoughtfully in its armoured jar. Kale, meanwhile, listened politely, but was finding it difficult to keep himself every few seconds from checking the vox-pin in his collar or glancing at the ship lights in the viewports. The coordinates Koorland had provided them were deep inside the orks’ burgeoning empire. The old shipmaster felt the phantom itch of sensor ghosts on the back of his neck whenever he turned his back on the viewports.

Two seats around from the table’s head, Kavalanera Brassanas sat, straight-backed, straight-armed, hands flat on the table, staring into the nothing between her and the bulkhead and through it to the fleet anchorage beyond. Wienand laid a hand on the knight abyssal’s shoulder and whispered something in her ear as she sat down beside her. The inquisitor’s aides spoke around them, exchanging slates, comparing notes, while the Assassin, Krule, lowered himself into the chair directly opposite. His muscles were tensed, his jaw firm, seemingly set on matching the Sister’s light-year stare and rising high in Koorland’s estimation simply for possessing the self-belief to imagine that he could.

All of it stopped as Koorland entered. The only sound was of the doors hissing shut and the seclusion field re-engaging with a hum. With one exception, those yet to be seated abandoned their conversations and found chairs.

Koorland’s muscles instinctively tensed for combat as Bohemond strode towards him and grabbed his forearm. He clasped it tight, and closed the fingers of his left gauntlet over his right hand, pulling Koorland in close. The High Marshal’s witch-burned face was a grimace of uncompromising wrath, but the embrace was fit for a brother.

‘I tire of waiting,’ he said.

‘Part of me doubted that you would wait,’ said Koorland, returning the pressure to the other warrior’s vambrace. ‘We did not part on best terms.’

‘Time spent alone with the void is time spent alone with one’s thoughts. That is why it is to be avoided.’ His augmetic eye clicked as it focused on Koorland’s. ‘But I came to question the direction you might lead us all without me beside you. I will be your Chaplain, brother, your evangelist, particularly if you tell me that you do not want me.’

Koorland smiled stiffly and gestured Bohemond to his seat. ‘I welcome it, brother.’

It was only then, as he pulled out his own chair at the head of the table, that Koorland noticed the expectancy that hung over them, camouflaged beneath the quiet. All eyes, all ears, were on him: the Emperor’s finest, all hanging on his word. Leading the Senatorum had been little preparation. These were people he respected.

‘Where is Euclydeas?’ Tyris asked before Koorland had sat down. ‘Antares and Iaros of my squad took the third ork psyker to the Soul Drinkers’ rendezvous coordinates. Iaros was to become sergeant of the new Kill-Team Ultima.’

‘The best we can assume is that for some reason the Soul Drinkers never received our message, or that their voyage against the Green Roar has proven longer and more turbulent than ours.’

The absence of a third of the combined fleet’s strength sunk in with a moment’s solemnity. The worst that they could assume needed no reminder from Koorland. He had been exacting in assigning the Black Templars and Soul Drinkers to rendezvous coordinates in the most strategically unimportant and underpopulated sectors in the vicinity. But the Segmentum Solar was close to being overrun. The possibility that Euclydeas had been killed or had destroyed the meme-bank containing the coordinate fragments to prevent its capture could not be discounted.

That was why he had separated the fleets in the first place.

‘What we have will suffice. It will have to, because there is nothing else. We are already out of time.’ His gaze moved down the table, two opposing rows of hardened faces. ‘Most of you will have observed the test on Incus Maximal. Some,’ a nod to Tyris and Issachar, ‘witnessed it first-hand. Others,’ a glance to where Wienand and Bohemond sat, ‘will have received the logs.’

A pantherish panting, something like a laugh, came from Kjarvik’s throat. He leaned forward, bone-braid dreadlocks knuckling across the table. ‘And impressive watching they were. It surprises me to say, but it actually made the effort of capturing them in the first place worthwhile.’

‘Agreed,’ said Tyris, to much solemn nodding from his brothers-in-black.

‘Incus Maximal was a test,’ Koorland said and the approving mutters dropped away. ‘Densely populated, lightly defended, but numbers enough to make any undertaking by conventional forces too costly to contemplate. Until now, of course. Laurentis, please.’

The magos rose slightly, not sitting so much as squatting into his tripod. ‘Magos Urquidex and I have thoroughly analysed the results of the first test detonation. Impressive though the results were, and in accord with our expectations from the Dzelenic IV data, my colleague and I are in agreement that the output could have been greater. The trial subject suffered a grievous injury in the moments prior to detonation, which we conclude may have dampened its connection to the ork psychic field. Furthermore, the greenskins native to Incus Maximal were not the largest specimens thus far encountered, nor was Lord Issachar’s force given the resources or the remit to stoke the orks’ psychic strength more fully. It is our conclusion that complete planetary wipe-out could be a possibility.’

‘You mean to cleanse a planet – good.’ Asger Warfist nodded approvingly. ‘Which is to be the lucky world?’

‘Magos,’ said Koorland and gestured with an empty hand across the table.

Laurentis pivoted on the spot and and telescoped a digital manipulator to activate the panel of switches mounted on the wall behind him. The lumen points dimmed. The hololith crystals in the table flickered and began to brighten, emitting a fuzzy white light from which emerged the ghost shape of a rotating spheroid. It was a planet, and the stuttering projection slowly began to stabilise as it spun about its slightly tilted axis.

Shocked murmurs from around the table. Even the Adeptus Astartes had not been engineered beyond a mortal’s capacity for surprise.

The planet was crenellated, buttressed, ironclad, mountains of rockcrete and plasteel rising from the pole-to-pole spread of inhuman habitation where mountains had no natural right to stand. Vast orbital rings of manufactories, dry docks and weapons platforms girdled the planet’s equator like crude analogues of the great space ports of Mars. Power fields and atmospheric distortions induced by the planet’s artificial seismology were displayed as periodic washes of colour. As the cogitators built into the table warmed through, the hololith filled in the projection with surface definition. Brackets locked on to features of interest, turning with the world as it spun: field projectors, megabatteries, a tangle of wire-trace lines showing tectonic boundaries where powerful xenos technologies could manoeuvre those surface plates to effect the rearrangement of whole continents or the rapid redeployment of billions.

Ullanor.

‘Vulkan threw everything the Imperium could give to him at that world and he failed,’ said Asger, voice soft. ‘What do you hope to achieve by trying again with a fraction of what the primarch had?’

‘There is no denying that the Imperium no longer has the men or the ships to launch an invasion on that scale again, or that there can be no replacement for Vulkan. I am not he. Those of us that are left to try and succeed where those heroes failed must become more than the numbers we bring with us.’ Koorland spread his hands to gesture not just to those present, but to the ships beyond and the many thousands they carried. The misshapen leer of the Beast, built in colossal facsimile into the very face of his throneworld, glared from the hololith with each rotation. ‘Here is where mankind stands. Or here is where it falls.’

‘I’m almost afraid to ask,’ said Wienand. ‘But how?’

‘I have to agree,’ said Kale. ‘We have less than a tenth of the fleet strength that the primarch commanded. Ullanor’s ground-to-orbit batteries will cripple us before half our troops can be moved planetside.’

‘Those weapons were devastating only because we were unprepared, an element of surprise that they will not enjoy a second time.’ Koorland turned to Asger. ‘We know the location of the orks’ defences, and it will be the responsibility of the Deathwatch to neutralise them.’

‘I’d like to help coordinate that, if I may,’ said Wienand, to a few chuckles from the Deathwatch sergeants sat nearest to her. Her expression in reply was frosty.

‘Ullanor will be no place for civilians,’ said Koorland. ‘Certainly not for High Lords.’

‘I am not the highest Lord in attendance, Lord Commander, and I know how to look after myself.’

Asger grinned through his fangs, looking sideways at the inquisitor. His chuckle was rather more approving than that of his subordinates, but then the Space Wolves had always been impressed by nerve. ‘She has you there, Koorland. What is that now, twice?’

‘Very well,’ said Koorland. ‘If you must, then on your head be it. You will take your lead from Asger. What commands he gives, you follow.’

‘Of course.’

Asger nodded to the hololith. ‘If the fleet is to remain out of weapons range then we will not be able to deploy from drop pods.’

‘We have gunships.’

‘What of the brute-shield?’ spoke Dominus Gerg Zhokuv, the voice arising from the waxen-faced servitor that stood by his pteknopic vessel. ‘It was impenetrable, and undoubtedly restored to full operation by now.’

‘As we discovered, the orks must lower the shield for a few seconds each time they fire their guns. While the bulk of the fleet remains out of range, some… sacrifices will need to be made to ensure the orks lower their shields. Long enough for a gunship to get through.’

‘Do not neglect their fleet-based defences, brother.’ Issachar pointed to the weapon silos and fighter launch bays that studded the hololithic world’s orbital ring.

‘They will be your responsibility,’ said Koorland. ‘You will have full command of the combined fleet while ground forces deploy into the beachhead that the Deathwatch will secure. Fists Exemplar, Black Templars, Excoriators – they will be the second wave.’ He nodded to Dorr, Rawketh, and Zhokuv. ‘Adeptus Militarum and the Mechanicus war machines to follow. Meanwhile, the Deathwatch with support from the Sisters of Silence will seek out and secure corridors through which the main force can proceed to assault the palace complex.’

‘I find no fault in your courage, Koorland,’ said Asger. ‘But a bold heart notwithstanding, this plan is little different to Vulkan’s. The Deathwatch alone will not tip the scales and nor will your new weapon. Whatever the magos believes, it is a stretch to imagine one witch eliminating every ork on Ullanor.’

Koorland’s stern expression twitched as murmurs of agreement arose from the other Deathwatch sergeants and the Astra Militarum. Koorland suppressed whatever empathy he might have felt for their situation, but he did not enjoy dispatching brave men, brothers, to almost certain death. He leaned forward, silencing the hubbub with no other gesture than that.

‘None of you are wrong. Overwhelming force has not given us victory before today and it will not now. We must deliver our weapon to the place at which it will be most devastating, to the one thing that the orks cannot afford to lose.’

Extending his palm outwards he summoned the rotating hololith, the planet shrinking as it moved towards his hand. It continued to rotate, the perspective hovering above it, parts of it beginning to fall away: zooming and focusing onto the fortified palace complex that the great Vulkan had died trying to crack. It looked like a crouching idol, four hundred metres tall, slabbed into ork features with metal and stone. Those outer fortifications faded back as the image passed inside. The interior mapping was good. Ongoing in-situ scans by embedded carto-savants of the Adeptus Mechanicus during the prior invasion had seen to that. The fact that Krule had personally verified much of it was invaluable.

The hololith continued to strip away layers until what remained, still turning in time with the spin of the world, was a single, huge room. The poorly defined outline of a giant throne stood in the centre of it.

‘Now, let me tell you what I will be doing.’

Thirteen

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

The second invasion of Ullanor began with a sacrifice. A shower of meteors marked the offering: fireballs, some hundreds of metres across, burned through the upper atmosphere and blasted against Gorkogrod’s brute-shields in a blaze of elemental colour. Some of them were recognisable as voidship remnants. The Dark Angels cruiser, Herald of Night. The Navy frigate, Cyzicus. The Inquisitorial escort, Perseus Banshee.

Skeleton crews, crippled ships, but losses keenly felt. Sacrifices painfully offered.

But they were willing, and they had fulfilled their role.

Penitent Wrath descended hard through a web of metal plankways and scaffold-like flak-towers. Glowing crossfire stitched across her hull and over her dorsal cannon. Combat thrusters burned white from driving evasive manoeuvres through a terminal descent. A black-painted gunship of the Aurora Chapter, Lance of Ultima, lost a tail-wing to a torrent of flak and crashed through the flat, oxide-red roof of an ork block where it exploded. Another was eviscerated mid-air, spilling Space Marines and crew over the abyssal drop like chaff dropped from the belly of a fighter craft.

Like planetary reformations in miniature, segmented metal shutters were clunking up to reveal secondary firepoints, huge-barrelled guns emerging from riveted walls and scaffolds and cranking into position. The opening phase of the first invasion of Ullanor had been quiet, characterised by Imperial circumspection and orkish cunning. Not this time. The Imperium knew now what surprises the orks had in store and where they were hidden.

And the orks knew that they had no reason to hold back.

A Blood Angels gunship met a cloudburst of fragmentation rockets and auto-fire and disintegrated as though it had been driven through a wall.

With no ordinary skill on the part of Atherias, the pilot, Penitent Wrath dropped between the crisscrossing lines of fire and responded in kind. Heavy bolters strafed the gun ports, hammering on the hardened metal, lascannons punching through as the Thunderhawk pivoted around her centre and dropped landing struts. Retro-thrusters fired, scorching the metallic surface beneath and bringing the gunship shuddering to a hover.

Two metres off the ground, turbofans howling with vertical strain, her assault hatch whined open and Kjarvik Stormcrow finally felt his boots on the ground of Ullanor. He took a deep breath of the burned, carcinogenic air. He had missed the last invasion, fighting back the greenskins in the Segmentum Obscura under the Fell-Handed.

He would not be so unlucky again.

The polluted sky was ashen and thick, riven by fire. It was raining metal, crumpled casings and bits of aircraft pattering down over the circular iron platform onto which Stormcrow and his kill-team swiftly deployed. It was some kind of landing pad, large enough to accept one of the big twin-rotor ork ’copters or a supply boat. Three ramps ran off from it, only a line of barbed-wire spikes that flexed in the turbofan outwash between them and a stupefying fall. One each to left and right led down towards partially fortress-fronted shacks. The third ramp was twice as long, slightly wider, and wobbled upwards to the primary objective.

Tactica-savants had designated it a collapser beam, for reasons that Kjarvik did not need explaining. It was a lumpen bristling of defensive ironwork surmounted by a towering edifice of suspensor rods and power transfer coils. An enormous cannon, longer again than its entire housing, pointed belligerently up at the sky. Entrance was via a set of heavy red doors plastered with glyphs. A great bar had been set up across them, spiked, wired in, and sparking with alternating current.

With a burst of propellant, twin missiles shrieked from the Thunderhawk’s underwing hardpoints and blasted the door to smithereens.

Kjarvik was already sprinting for it as the gunship lifted off, a parting burst of heavy bolter fire chewing up the walls around the fort’s firing slit windows.

‘Bring them the Emperor’s wrath,’ voxed Atherias, as the Thunderhawk swung back into the web of tracers.

Kjarvik did not reply. His attention was focused on gunning down the two leather-strapped greenskins that stumbled out of the smoking ruin of their doorway.

More were pouring out of the blockhouse structures to either side and piling onto the walkways, and straight into the storm bolter and eviscerator of Phareous and Zarrael. The sounds from that direction reminded Kjarvik of lumps of gristle thrown at a wall to see what would stick.

He ignored them, dropped his shoulder, and charged through what was left of the gate.

His vision became smoke, tangled spurs and spitting flame. The roars and gunfire merged and then morphed into the pop of cooling metal. And then he was inside. Baldarich, none improved for his humbling on Plaeos, was already there, power sword flashing in the dark. Flames licked the Black Templar’s armour. Smoke coiled through Kjarvik’s beard and hair like fishbone clips. His lungs shut themselves down. His next breath drew an oxygen-poor stew of ash and explosive compounds into his multi-lung.

It was the firing chamber, directly beneath the collapser beam. Ork mechanics crowded ladders and gantries. Gretchin wielding wrenches ran at the Space Marines with hissing faces and fell to contemptuous sweeps of Baldarich’s blade.

Automatic fire from Kjarvik’s bolt pistol drilled through thick ork skulls and hunched shoulders, painting the smoke with explosive splashes of red. His aim shifted from ladder to ladder as the orks dropped down, as fast as he could think. Half-second burst and move. Howls and thunder. Half-second burst and move. The air reeked of fyceline. His ammo counter blinked a warning. He squeezed off another burst, a charging mechanic so close that its forehead almost touched the muzzle.

Bad luck. He activated his power fist.

There was a clang of metal on metal, and Kjarvik glanced sideways to see Bohr beside him. The Iron Hand had planted his staff into the ground as if to make of himself a tripod and deploy the full arsenal of his servo-harness. Kjarvik made a laughing sound in the back of his throat as bolt-rounds, hell-beams, plasma ejectiles and raging gouts of flame finished off what he had not been able to. The burn painted the Iron Father a harsh white, steeping the cavities of his complicated bionics in shadow as though the ancient veteran could smile again.

‘Firepower,’ he grunted, his harness winding down, gun barrels spinning off heat. ‘It is always the solution.’

Kjarvik afforded his brother-in-black an elaborate bow. The sounds of chain weaponry and bloodcurdling shrieks delivered in an angel’s voice filtered in from the outside, and vox-chatter from his open channel scratched out of his gorget bead. Landers reported the safe arrival and deployment of ground troops. Deathwatch sergeants requested Sister or armour support, called in air strikes, and reported neutralised objectives with coupled requests for redeployment.

‘We are being made to look slow,’ Kjarvik hissed as Bohr hefted his staff and clumped heavily towards the base of the weapon’s generatorum housing. The Iron Father placed the charges: melta bombs, just like before.

Kjarvik was backing up, voxing in a demand for extraction.

Bohr nodded as he strode towards him. ‘On to the next.’

The brute-shield over Gorkogrod had failed.

Maximus Thane thudded down the landing ramp of his heavy transport, leading out seventy-three Fists Exemplar of the Sixth, Seventh, and his own Second. Company structures had largely disintegrated, and yet the last seventy-three clung to that final emblem of their identity as though it were more precious than the gene-seed of Dorn that each warrior carried inside. From the ramp’s clanging metal to solid tarmac, the Fists Exemplar poured out into the orks’ guns, merging with similar debarkments of Excoriators and Black Templars.

Valkyrie and Vendetta sorties had cleared a landing zone from a previously identified sector of relatively high topological stability. The orks had used it as an airbase, comprising several score parallel runways from which they had quickly been able to establish aerial supremacy over the battle for the nearby palace supercomplex. Not this time. This time, the orks’ fighter and bomber wings were charred wrecks on the runway or smouldering still in their hangars. Thick coils of ugly black smoke choked the sky. It was a churn of black over black, pulsed with thumping volleys from the landers’ flare cannons.

In anticipation of the Deathwatch’s success, the Adeptus Astartes drop-ships had wasted no time in setting down. The bulk Astra Militarum landers were still up there however, crisscrossing trails of flak and duelling aircraft lighting up the next wave of transports.

In howls of descent thrusters the heavy landers crunched down on top of stricken aircraft. Locking clamps blew, ramps slammed into the ground, and from container after container, mortal troops emerged with a collective roar that stirred mankind’s spirit to war.

In such moments, Thane could see why some of his brothers saw the guiding hand of divinity behind His great crusade.

Scores of regiments from worlds Thane would never know, united only by the common misfortune of having served in the last Ullanor campaign, moved up behind the Space Marine vanguard. They were slower, but numerous. Thane’s suit auspex could only provide an estimate, but it was a big one – close to a hundred thousand men, give or take. Sentinel walkers strode ahead, combing the bordering structures with multi-laser fire, accompanied by Imperial Knights. The Astra Militarum regiments were joined by skitarii cohorts, servitor mobile weapons platforms and Legio Cybernetica support, emerging from their gothic transorbitals without the cry of their base human counterparts but with a group precision that was, in its ordered refutation of the chaos of the battlefield, just as affirming. A fleet of supertransports brought down heavier Martian engines.

Baneblades pushed through the aircraft wreckage. Shadowswords powered their infamously slow-charging main guns. The last survivors of Legio Ultima, the mighty Warlord Decimus Ordinatus and her escort – a battered Warhound called Helfyre, bathed in purple static emitted by its intermittent void bank – made the ground shake as they advanced into Gorkogrod.

Before the Great Waaagh of the Beast had begun, Thane would have called this army the greatest he had ever seen, a force fit for the command of a warmaster, or perhaps, in extremis, the lord of a great Chapter such as Odaenathus or Sachael. A lot could change in one year. It was astonishing to think that it was only that long ago that he had been pushing traitor remnants deeper into the Rubicante Flux, no more to his flag than a handful of ships and a hundred warriors.

A lot had changed, and this world had changed it. Thane had been in Vulkan’s vanguard ahead of a force not in the ten of thousands but closer to the millions. A transhuman could not hear his own voice for the thunder of tanks, and the march of whole Legios of Titans had made the horizon itself seem to move.

Ahead of him now was a heavy articulated truck, with giant exhaust stacks and spiked wheels in the orkish preference. It was bent inwards at the coupler to form a ‘v’ shape, and incoming fire was spanking off the metal sides. Thane waved his command squad into cover. Brothers Kahagnis and Abbas moved to bull bar and rear fender respectively and laid down fire for the Black Templars and Excoriators that continued to pound past. Thesius pulled himself up onto the driver’s cabin, turned as Thamarius threw up his battle-brother’s autocannon, then got down to one knee and blazed over the charging Space Marines.

‘To the palace. Fast and hard!’

Thane thumped into the side of the truck’s trailer section without slowing down, so hard it lifted half an inch off its nearside wheels. He turned his back against it, auto-senses taking in the mass of Astra Militarum and mechanised support pushing up to secure the Space Marines’ gains. He switched to long-range vox.

‘Issachar, this is Thane. Estimate ninety per cent of forces landed. Advancing towards the palace on primary schedule.’ Static hissed across the channel. A Valkyrie gunship jetted overhead. ‘Issachar!’

The Valkyrie’s tail-wing seemed to pop. Promethium smoke spewed out of it as it dropped, corkscrewing over and over before disintegrating on impact with the ground without even so much as an explosion. A rust-coloured ork jet blasted through the smoke cloud, wings wobbling as it banked and strafed across the Black Templars advance with twin hails of high-powered shot.

‘Issachar!’

He gave up. He looked at the sky. The fleet must still be too far out, hence the lack of drop pod reinforcement. Fitting one boot between the solid rubber tyre and the hellishly scratched mud guard, he climbed up onto the vehicle’s slug-holed rear container. Keeping low, he looked across the field of wreckage and blast craters, auto-senses crowding his helm display with threat markers and tactical screed.

Gun emplacements in the control towers. Orks in heavy battlegear mustering behind pre-prepared chokepoints. Fast attack vehicles closing in. The ground between the outermost runway and the access roads was a killing field, and the Space Marines were breaking down into combat squads to maximise their use of cover. The palace was fifteen kilometres due north, a gauntlet of bunkers, tank traps and enfilading fire zones.

Dorn himself could not have done better.

‘A frontal assault is still foolhardy and predictable,’ Thane had argued. Watch Commander Warfist, he recalled, had nodded sagely, prompting several others around the conference table to do likewise. ‘It was tried once and it failed.’

‘Foolhardy and predictable is what the orks have come to expect from the Imperium,’ Koorland had answered, with that strained but confident smile that he wore now most days. He had grown into his crown. Sometimes, he seemed to forget that he wore it at all. ‘Let them see again what they expect to see.’

‘To the palace!’

Thane stood and waved the massed army forward, just as a massive explosion blew out the back wall of a structure that butted onto the airbase.

A spiked grinder wheel appeared through the dust, followed in a rattling of tracks and loose bolts by a super-heavy ork battlefortress. Battlecannons mounted on rotable turrets belched smoke while orks manning pintle-mounted machine guns on its rampart-like upper sections exchanged fire with what must have been the Deathwatch kill-teams deployed ahead to secure the flanks. Their fire discipline took out a few machine-gunners and was successfully holding up the vehicle’s infantry support, but it would take more than a smattering of lascannons and multi-meltas to put a terminal stop to a monstrosity on that scale.

‘For the Emperor!’ Thane bellowed as the first Chimeras rumbled into range. Koorland called the men Ullanor Veterans. They proudly called themselves the Ullanor First. Thane called them Ullanor survivors. They looked afraid.

They did not look afraid enough.

‘I need you to lead the assault, brother,’ Koorland had said to him, after Asger and the others had left and they were just brothers, alone, at his table. ‘Our success rests on my survival, and my survival rests on yours.’ He had put his hand on Thane’s shoulder and squeezed. Not hard. Enough to bid a brother farewell. ‘I would rely on none but a true son of Dorn to survive long enough.’

Ullanor – orbital

Koorland backed ponderously into the teleportation slot. It probably did not matter which way he faced once the teleport cycle was under way, but he wanted to be in a position to monitor his squad and in Terminator armour he was too bulky to turn around once inside.

Fidus Bellator was a relic of antiquity, the first of the Indomitus suits fashioned in the closing years of the Heresy War, a gift from the Black Templars to the last of the Imperial Fists. His field of view was narrower than he was accustomed to from wearing power armour, mobility around the neck sacrified in favour of massive protection over that area and the shoulders. What he could see, however, was virtually enhanced by the armour’s adaptive auspex, augmented with outlines and false contrast, every movement of his eyes tracked by icons, brackets and informative screed.

Power was at maximum. Armour integrity was at maximum. The ammunition count to his integrated storm bolter was at maximum.

In their own two alcoves, back-lit by the slow-powering blue hum of the slot’s dematerialisers, Bohemond and Asger were similarly, though less magnificently, clad in Tactical Dreadnought plate.

Asger’s was draped in a snowy white pelt, ritually scratched with kill tallies and symbols of luck and warding. His armour was fitted with a back banner pole from which the Wolf Lord would have flown his personal heraldry, but from which the Watch Commander had hung a swatch of plain black cloth. He wore a pair of lightning claws. Bohemond’s black plate was immaculately picked out in silver, hung with prayer strips and lengths of pure white fabric bearing the Sigismund cross. Hailing from a martial tradition with a common root to Koorland’s own, he was similarly armed with storm bolter and power sword, the peerless Sword of Sigismund already free of its scabbard.

Those two needed little reassurance from him.

The two ogryns, Olug and Brokk, however, had filled the confines of the teleportation chamber with their panicked odour. For all their fearsome, greater-than-human appearance, the pair had been close to a full-blown panic attack until Commissar Heliad Goss, formerly of the Minglor XVII ogryn auxilia, had been found from amongst the Ullanor Veterans billeted aboard Alcazar Remembered and at the last minute reassigned to Koorland’s force. He was in the slot between them, reciting children’s prayers from memory, interspersed with simple words of encouragement. They were still sweating, but were not about to rip through the conduits for a way out which was a marked improvement.

In the remaining six slots, Krule and the Space Marines of Kill-Team Stalker prepared themselves for teleport in whatever manner brought them comfort.

Alcazar Remembered had two teleportation decks. The chamber itself might have been cramped, wall space bulked with slots for twelve Terminators, the floor a trip hazard of power cabling and hoses, but the technology was astonishly power-hungry and demanded the sacrifice of an entire deck to its generators. Kavalanera’s squad was in the other chamber. They were the ones that could not be risked. And due to the inevitable shipwide systems drain that followed a teleportation cycle, Koorland and his squad would be on their own for several minutes at least.

Krule looked up from his prayers. ‘Answer me honestly, Space Marine. Are you afraid?’

‘You do not refer to the orks, do you?’ said Asger.

The Assassin was quiet a moment. ‘No.’

‘Fear was purged from our hearts with the making of the blessed primarch,’ said Bohemond.

‘Indeed,’ said Koorland as the energy brackets running through the alcoves built to lumen-strip brightness, the hum becoming equivalent in volume to what one might experience by passing the bulkhead onto main drive. There was a tremor in the walls. ‘And yet, I am terrified every time.’

For some reason, the Assassin seemed comforted by his admission.

‘Coordinates locked. Systems charged.’ Shipmaster Kale’s voice echoed through the chamber’s augmitters, like a stone dropping deep, deep down a bottomless well. ‘We will be powerless for up to half an hour, but Issachar has the orbital defences well engaged, and surface scans indicate that the Deathwatch have been successful in eliminating the ground-based weaponry targeting our orbit. Bulwark and Faceless Warrior will escort us in. We are ready up here, lord.’

Koorland closed his eyes and muttered an invocation to the Emperor’s protection.

But he did not hesitate.

He could already picture in his mind the throne room of the Great Beast that Krule had described to him.

‘Commence.’

Fourteen

Ullanor – Gorkogrod, inner palace

Teleportation was an experience that Koorland counted, his own near death on Ardamantua and subsequent bloody resurrection very much included, as one of rare horror.

Every atom in his body felt as if it had been electrified, charge repulsion baring his basic substance to the warp, then the quarks and gluons that constituted those creaking atoms, separating, separating, until he was a physical thing only in the abstract. He was atomic spaces, constrained only by the memory of nuclear cohesion. He was a nebula cloud, spread across the infinite, haunted by the unbearable thought of one day collapsing to form a star.

Then movement. But without body. It felt like his soul was forced through an electrostatic mesh. Like gruel being strained through muslin, but the substance was what was caught in the membrane, and he was the discoloured diluent that trickled through. From that weak suffusion of molecular memory and psychic tangling, there came a reformation.

And it was a, not the. Everything was contingent.

What emerged, and how, was in the lap of the gods.

The blinding light of teleportation faded, the disembodied sense of half-remembered dread following slowly, like blood trickling through a drain. Koorland’s primary heart was pounding, as though he had been engaged in some extraordinary struggle that he could not now recall. The teleportation chamber was gone. In its place, displayed by his suit’s auto-senses in augmented definition, was a dank, flame-lit room.

The ruddy heat of open stoves was reflected in the beaten metal fronts of cabinets, from the brutally large blunted implements that hung on pegs from the walls. Half-heartedly mopped-up bloodstains smeared the floor and the surfaces. Pots bubbled, ill-fitting lids chattering. A hunk of meat, what looked like a sawed-through stretch of vertebral column dipping from the end, dripped fat onto a sizzling element and rotated on a jerky mechanical spit. Koorland’s armour recorded the intense heat while insulating him from it, and the effects of the uncertain light were evenly filtered and restored.

The smell, however, was all too readily imagined.

Asger Warfist lowered his lightning claws. A wary sniff crackled through the unit vox, instinctual in spite of the total environment seal of Tactical Dreadnought armour.

‘This is no throne room.’

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

Inquisitor Wienand tapped her foot impatiently as a gang of servitors broke open a crate and spilled wirefoam cladding across the floor. It contained a portable vox-caster. Another was being installed directly opposite, part of two banks of units being wired up in series. Inquisitorial technical staff opened diagnostic channels and made expert reconfigurations inside open panels stuffed with what looked, to Wienand, like tangles of cabling. A magos supervised, hunched under his – or her, difficult to tell – acid-stained red robes. The occasional flicker of a servo-appendage switched across to furiously undo and redo someone’s work.

‘Castellan Clermont’s strike force coming under heavy fire in sector Twelve-B,’ said one of the vox-operators.

‘Twelve-B?’ said Wienand. ‘Do they plan to take the palace on their own? Redeploy Kill-Teams Godwyn and Phobos to clear the adjoining blocks, and raise the castellan if you can.’

‘Yes, Representative.’

The vox-breaking interference between surface forces and fleet was something that Imperial forces had been forced to contend with during the previous invasion. At Wienand’s insistence, and Asger’s approval, something had been done about it.

The chamber that her small command detail had occupied as a surface monitoring post was a level between levels in one of the hundreds of gretchin hab-towers that prickled the cityscape in the palace’s immediate vicinity. To supply their ork overlords with workers, Wienand assumed. Terra was organised with similar considerations in mind.

This particular floor was unoccupied, empty but for thick shock-absorbent clamps and structura-mimetic columns that enabled this structure and others like it to remain upright through the awesome stresses of tectonic rearrangement or subspace translation. The tower was the tallest in the battlezone that wasn’t part of the palace itself, and had been selected for that reason. Servitors and techno-magi trailed clumps of cabling and complex adaptor tablets behind them to exposed wall panels. From there, they cross-connected Wienand’s equipment through the tower’s own messy electrical system to the dishes, antennae and non-geometric pylons that flourished over the spiretop like fungoid weeds.

Veritus would have found the cross-wiring of technologies a borderline act of heresy. But that was why the ancient inquisitor had remained on Terra, and let her operatives do the work that he could not.

From the lower-level access ramps there came the sputtering hiss of superheated metal. A servitor with a melta-tool fitted to its wrist in place of a hand and a fuel canister integrated into its spinal column welded the zig-zagging door seal together, calm under fire as only a thorough lobotomisation could make something that had once been human. The muffled roar of two twin-linked heavy bolters from the other side of the door did not trouble it in the least.

The fate of the two Praetorian-class servitors was of far less concern to the servitor than it was to Wienand.

‘I seem to recall Lord Warfist telling you to observe from behind our assault.’ The Deathwatch sergeant, Kjarvik Stormcrow, stood with crossed arms, deliberately in the middle of a team of workers trying to assemble a tactical hololith where he was standing. His long bone-braided hair spread over the dark curves of pauldron and gardbrace. Several weeks aboard Abhorrence had acclimated Wienand to the stature and bearing of the Adeptus Astartes. But they were all far from alike. The Black Templars held themselves tall, unbending, like pillars of rockcrete with proud, human faces. The Space Wolf was not like that. He was ever so slightly hunched over, an animal at its ease, his annoyance at Umbra being drawn from active assignment to safeguard the Inquisitorial Representative on as-yet-untried authority an unguarded glimmer in his inhuman eyes.

‘Do you always do as Lord Asger tells you?’

‘Often,’ said Kjarvik, then grinned.

Wienand made herself smile in turn. She might just win these warriors’ respect yet.

‘Initial soundings from the auspex,’ said Raznick, veering loosely between the hurrying workers to approach.

He was wearing a long coat over a dull-green flak jacket surplus to some regiment or other from the Ullanor Veterans. There was a brace of pistols holstered at his hip, needle and las, and a sleeve for a power maul. The battery pack for a two-person refractor field was clamped over his right buttock, the emitters set into a pair of braces worn over his ballistic vest. Bodyguarding for the Inquisitorial Representative was testing work at the best of times.

Kjarvik regarded him like a bear at once amused and annoyed by the barked challenge of a dog. The Inquisitorial aide swallowed and turned to Wienand.

‘Issachar has the ork fleet engaged, but is keeping them at arm’s length. Losses appear light on both sides. Alcazar Remembered and her escorts are in geostationary orbit above the corridor opened up by the Deathwatch.’ A nod to Kjarvik that the Wolf acknowledged with a snarl. ‘From the power signatures, it looks as though one teleportation cycle has been completed.’

‘Koorland’s first squad is inside,’ Wienand summarised.

‘On schedule.’

Wienand frowned. She wasn’t ready to start taking Koorland’s undemonstrated ability to outwit the Beast on faith. ‘We should have them on vox by now.’

‘We’re almost finished here, Representative,’ said one of the workers at the hololith array.

A dozen men were busily boxing up the device’s exposed innards while a second magos canted the final start-up rituals. Eldon Urquidex helped where he could. The magos biologis limped slightly. A string of bionic vertebrae now ran down his neck, a gunmetal accoutrement to match the left arm, the right hand, and the surgical plates in his skull.

The hololith powered up. Ullanor’s wrinkled topography flickered into being as a spectral green overlay, rapidly filling up with blips as it liaised with the auspexes to present troop dispositions. Wienand watched the shift in the tide of Veridi red with her heart in her mouth. Her first thought was to instruct the adept to shut the device down and begin his rituals again. Its spirit had been improperly awakened. It had to be. Only her trust in the two magi’s superior knowledge kept her from doing so.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Kjarvik grunted.

‘The orks are disengaging, falling back towards the palace fortification.’ The voice was Raznick’s, his summation unnecessary. Wienand had eyes, and the great withdrawal of red across the hololith like a receding tide spoke for itself.

‘This is no rout,’ said Kjarvik, indicating with jabs of his power fist’s wolf-claws to where overwhelming numbers still hemmed in the frayed wedge of gold that represented Maximus Thane’s contingent. ‘They have left enough force behind to hold up the Guard.’

‘But why not crush them? Why pull back at all? Why…’ Wienand waved her hand as if to summon the absent thought. The boom of heavy bolters from the other side of the doors was an urgent distraction that she could do without.

A symphony of audially-coded alarm signifiers began to chime from the auspex units. ‘Force fields have just gone up inside the palace, Representative,’ came the report.

‘Inside?’

‘Yes, nothing projected outward that I can detect.’

‘What on the Throne… Can we raise Koorland?’

A shake of the head. ‘Some kind of signal deflection. The force fields, I think. I don’t know.’

‘Then raise Issachar. See what the fleet’s guns can do about it.’

‘No response from Punished!’

‘Try another ship.’

A tense moment later and several rows of shaken heads told Wienand that the answer was the same. The magos held up his digital manipulators in what was either a residually organic gesture of ignorance or an affectation painstakingly developed for maximal functionality as a human liaison. ‘The fleet is in range of this structure’s communications array. Supposition: we are too close to the palace, the electromagnetic output from its force fields is interfering with our equipment.’

‘Contact Thane,’ Wienand scowled, feeling her command of the situation unravelling fast. ‘Do it now. He’ll have no idea what’s going on, and he might at least have the chance to fall back and regroup. No point walking into a slaughter for no good reason.’

The operator looked up from his vox-caster. He looked broken.

‘We can’t reach our ground forces either?’

A solid thump from the other side of the lower access doors interrupted them, and the roar of four heavy bolters abruptly became that of two. Wienand would not have thought that the difference would have been so obvious. Stray slugs tapped on the welded door, almost politely.

The last weapon-servitor would not hold for long, and then Wienand would see close up just how impolite an ork could be.

‘Madame inquisitor,’ called the ranking officer monitoring the auspex staff. ‘More ships entering auspex range.’

‘There shouldn’t be any more ships.’

‘Ork ships. A hundred signatures, at least. They must have been waiting on the planet’s auspex dark side.’

Wienand felt a chill rise up through her and whisper round the base of her skull. The monitoring station had fallen deathly quiet, but for the much diminished thunder of heavy bolters. She swallowed, unable to articulate the cornered-animal sensation that had come over her with the appearance of those ork ships.

‘What should we do?’ asked Raznick.

Dumbly, she looked around the silent chamber, her eyes drawn inevitably, water running downhill, to Kjarvik’s yellow, vertically transected pair. She took a deep breath, felt it steady her nerves, and did not blink. She still had a task to perform, even if the total lack of long- and medium-range vox made that task impossible.

‘Leave everything,’ she said, directed at the two magi, and then to Kjarvik and Raznick: ‘Contact any gunships in range and have them pick up the remaining kill-teams. I’m going to have to direct things in person.’

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

As Koorland had suspected, the pre-teleportation position and facing of his squad members had had little bearing on how they were now deployed. The twelve of them had rematerialised into two half circles, facing outwards, a row of blue-white burners and butchery tools between them. He, Asger, Krule and the ogryn, Olug, had the two semi-circles’ four ends. Commissar Goss was being violently sick. Koorland did not know if it was the teleportation or the stench, but he doubted that either would have been easy on a mortal’s stomach.

‘Where are we?’ said Asger. ‘Why are we not where we are supposed to be?’

With a blink-click over the activation rune jittering yellow in his helm display, Koorland bade his armour’s spirit to summon a tri-d cartolith of the palace complex. It wavered into being a moment later, filling the left side of his display with a slowly rotating image. It took a few minutes to interface his armour’s locator beacon with the cartolith and pin his current location to the display, towards the top of the labyrinthine tangle of corridors.

‘About four hundred metres from the throne room, though the corridors in this section are a mess.’

‘What happened?’

‘Force fields on my auspex,’ said Bohemond. ‘A scatterfield too, perhaps? Our teleport must have been redirected to avoid it.’

Koorland blew out a relieved breath. The teleport systems incorporated safety protocols to prevent incorporation into solid matter or other violent means of rematerialisation, but even First Company veterans did not hold much trust in those. He was glad to see they had functioned now, even if they had moved his squad some way from his target. ‘What of Kavalanera’s team?’

Asger shrugged. Only his exposed head moved. ‘If this is the nearest area to the throne room large enough for twelve men then the Sisters will likely be redirected here.’

‘How long to teleport?’

‘Chronos do not operate during the teleportion cycle,’ said Bohemond. ‘I cannot contact Alcazar Remembered to correct. Outward channels appear to be jammed.’

‘Then we must clear the area,’ said Koorland, sharply. ‘Or else there will be no telling where the others will appear. Krule, can you find your way to the throne room from here?’

The Assassin was subconsciously scouring his surrounds for threats and targets, but responded to the question with a curt nod and pointed to one of two doors. He was a large man, by mortal standards, but moved with a balletic grace. The firelight scattered against his synskin.

‘Sergeant Tyris, escort him and secure the passage. We will follow.’

The Deathwatch Space Marines, ogryns, commissar, Terminator-encased Chapter Masters, and one Assassin exited the chamber. Koorland stopped under the lintel bar and turned ponderously to look back.

He had felt a prickling on the back of his neck.

The air in the orks’ butchery chamber shimmered and folded, a kneading of the warp space liminal that broke the warm, surface-hardened crust of normalcy to which mankind thought it clove and mixed it with darkness. The tear existed for a fraction of a second, and in a splurge of ionisation that left Koorland’s eyes and throat stinging in spite of his protection, it was sealed, and twelve additional figures now stood where there had been none.

Kavalanera and five of her sisters stood in a ring with power blades drawn and charged. Torn pages of ancient scripture fluttered from their armour in the air-cycled breeze of a voidship they no longer occupied. Two were in the same antique carmine as the knight abyssal, designating them, presumably, as belonging to the same sub-order of the Sisters of Silence. The other three wore black plate with golden trim, led by a knight obsidian by the name of Drevina.

The chilling effect on Koorland’s brain of the pariahs’ mere existence in the same room was every bit as profound as the teleportation cycle that had preceded it.

The women surrounded the ork psyker. It was far larger than the Incus Maximal test subject and its muscles swelled against the chains that bound its wrist and throat. Three enormously reconstructed draught-servitors supplied from Verisimilis’ loading decks had the ends of the chains clamped in vice-hands. Another lesson from Incus Maximal. The servitors were more than strong enough to keep the struggling ork restrained, and they would not react to personal danger the way the Inquistorial storm troopers had.

Laurentis scuttled around them on his three metal legs, ducking under flexing chains, monitoring pulse and breathing and stabbing the ork’s thick hide with digital probes for reasons of his own. The grizzled ranger, Alpha 13-Jzzal, watched the ork psyker’s occasional lunges with a dispassionate eye, motionless but for the optic pulse of the complete-wavelength scan with which he concurrently swept the room.

‘Scan complete,’ grated Alpha 13-Jzzal. The words were synthesised by a throat implant, and emerged with an artificial cadence that involved neither the movement of the ranger’s jaw nor the making of eye contact. ‘Infrared and X-ray sweeps reveal nothing in the vicinity.’ His head turned sharply towards Koorland then, faceted metal reflecting the firelight on a dozen different planes. ‘Past behaviour suggests the high likelihood of a trap.’

The same thing had occurred to Koorland, and he had decided equally quickly that it did not matter. They were committed now. There was no alternative.

Ullanor would be annihilated. Or Terra would be.

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

Shards of sharpened debris from ork fragmentation bombs scythed across Thane’s armour. Bent nails. Metal scraps. Direct hits drove shrapnel at him, hard, licked by fire. Cloudbursts clotted the sky with whizzing screws and blades, raining indiscriminately over all. The high-tempo thump of heavy guns boomed through the frag storm. Thane’s battleplate recorded hits as he advanced through the rubble: prangs, stings, chips to unpainted ceramite that brought sealant gel hissing over lodged bullets.

His umbra-pattern bolter answered back with more decisive effect. His helmet auto-senses compensated for the confusion of debris, filtering, ghostly reticules floating amongst the blizzarding buckshot. Bolter fire bracketed the faceplate ghosts one by one and blood sprayed from within them. Orks tumbled out as though pushed out in surrender, rolling with the unspent momentum of their charge, tracked by bolt and las until what lumped to a halt was an urecognisable ruin.

Thane drilled a bolt-round through a mouth that was somehow still sucking on air. The ork made a grunting sound, the subsequent detonation pasting Thane’s right greave with gore as he stepped over it.

‘Thesius, Agrippus, heavy weapons left and right.’ He pointed a gauntlet that was hatched with sealant scars towards a high, spiked tower. Burning rounds spat back and forth. He ducked instinctively from the whistle of an artillery shell. ‘Venerable Brother Otho, take a squad and help the Excoriators clear that tower. I want a corridor cleared for the Imperial Guard to follow. We are too thinly spread.’ The Earthshaker round thumped through the side wall of a building and spewed fire high back across the street. The famous aftershock rattled the entire connected superstructure.

The Excoriators had broken into the barracks blocks to the east, but had become mired in heavy urban fighting. Gun nests covering the bridgewalks and exits had them pinned in the complex’s near-side corner while hit-and-run attacks by aerially deployed ork shock troops, coordinated with armoured units on the ground, slowly ate into that slim territorial gain. But the Excoriators would hold. Venerable Brother Otho would see to it.

To north and west, the Black Templars continued to drive deep. Before passing out of vox-contact, Castellan Clermont had voxed in from a position almost three kilometres from Koorland’s teleport coordinates. Practically on the walls. But the Black Templars had been so intent on pressing forwards that entire mobs of orks had been able to slip through and assault the Fists Exemplar flank.

Thesius’ autocannon mowed them down before they could come within twenty metres. Brothers Tolemy, Preco, and Zaul moved into the kill-zone, cutting into the building fronts with precise bursts of bolter fire. None of them saw the shell before it landed. Thane did. It was unworthy of them, a lumpen metal casing for something incendiary, lobbed carelessly from a shanty block as if from a trebuchet, but it blasted a mighty hole out of the ground as well as any handcrafted munition blessed by the priests of Mars.

And just like that, the galaxy had sixty-nine Fists Exemplar.

‘There are few of us left,’ Thane had said, looking through the viewport at the dense stellar clouds of the galactic core in which the Ullanor star shone with a bright, beguiling innocence. ‘Barely enough to continue.’

Koorland had joined him. The lumen bars in the mullions accentuated the grey in his hair. ‘We are sons of Dorn, brother. We do not surrender.’ He had tapped his throat, Thane remembered, the progenoids held there, the last precious gene-seed of his Chapter. ‘That is the burden the primarch has placed on us. He knew we could shoulder it. We stand while all around us falls, and because we stand, others will stand with us.’

‘Call for Apothecary Antonius,’ yelled Thamarius, because every Fist Exemplar carried in his make-up the conceit of command.

Antonius was of the Excoriators, attached to the remnant Fists Exemplar to perform that most vital function in the absence of a surviving Apothecary of their own.

‘Press the attack,’ Thane ordered, emotionless, gunning down an ork that appeared in an unglazed window even as his brothers turned their helms to him in surprise.

They would stand while all around them fell. They wore no colours, they showed no pride, but to a transhuman man they were the truest sons of Dorn.

‘Whirlwinds!’ he shouted. ‘I want that block brought down!’

Thane could see the greater picture despite the slaughter. He knew the mathematics. The Chapter had been hit too hard, its gene-stocks depleted beyond their ability to propagate a viable genetic population. The Last Wall stood, but the Fists Exemplar were already finished.

A column of Deathwatch vehicles, scuffed paintwork revealing the bright green of the Aurora Chapter, trundled up towards the front. The rubble was causing them difficulty, the cavalcade advancing at less than walking pace behind a pair of Vindicators specially modified with urban clearance dozer blades. Both of the glacis modules were pocked by bullet holes. One of them was on fire. The desultory whistle of castellan missiles and lascannon stabs were all they could give back.

With a sonic clap and a promethium roar, an atmosphere fighter, with rippling flames chased in paint down its stub nose, dropped through the frag clouds and strafed the armour column with a linked pair of underwing quad-autocannons. High volume anti-personnel rounds spanked and rattled along armour plates, blood splashing across the turret of a Razorback as its commander vainly tried to track the jet with his pintle mount, and then in a rumble of afterburn it raced northwards into ork-held territory.

Two or three kilometres in that direction, where it had been driven to keep pace with the Black Templars advance, Thane could see the great fifteen-metre-high pyre that had been Helfyre. In the glare of that inferno, the invincible Decimus Ordinatus shimmered in a liquid caul of purples and greens, tormented from every angle by sustained fire.

As Thane watched, the Warlord raised an arm stained with pyrotechnic bruising, the diverted power causing its gatling blaster to glow like a birthing sun. The massive weapon began to spin, superfast, oddly silent against the cacophonies more immediate in Thane’s ears, and disgorged a blast of energy that carved the nearest of the offending gun towers in two. That beam of light was, in fact, a torrent of several million high-power las-beams per second, and the combined effect was devastating. The Titan dragged its arm diagonally across its body, chewing downwards through the blasted structure and overloading the shields of the pot-bellied ork gargant that had been sheltering behind it.

The gatling blaster gave out with a sputter of light and a spent whir of barrels as the remains of the gun tower crumbled down over the bright yellow body of the unshielded gargant. The ork machine drove through it, a lunatic grin in brilliant yellow over its crude orkish face. Behind it came several more. Decimus Ordinatus shook the earth with a backward step.

‘After today there might be no children of Dorn,’ Thane had said. Not in argument, but the words needed to be said. They were greater than him.

‘No wall stands forever, brother, but I think that our father’s legacy was always about more than us. If Vulkan taught me anything it was to have faith. Humanity will prevail as it always has. It is for those like us to ensure that it is so.’

Thane cursed on the Eidolican day as something unseen but earth-shakingly massive impacted somewhere in the conurbation, near enough to rattle his boots against the ground. He dropped to one knee in a crater and unloaded his magazine, speaking evenly and calmly into his helmet vox.

‘This is Force Commander Thane to all units still receiving – consolidate at the second marker and await–’

A rocket screamed across from a tower block and struck the lead Vindicator side-on between the dozer blade and the track. The explosion flipped it over, with fingers of flame and nails of smoke, onto its back, smashing through the glacis armour of the vehicle behind.

‘–Brother Agrippus!’ Thane finished, debris raining down.

His battle-brother tracked the aim of his heavy bolter round to the right and speared the crude rocket’s winding smoke tail with bunker-busting incendiary rounds. Thane saw a burly ork with a flared missile tube under one arm running window to window. Behind Thane’s back, the rest of the Aurora Chapter’s armour column snarled up into a congested huddle of vehicles behind the stricken Vindicator. Angry shouts and engine growls. The ork shooter crashed through a side wall and into an alley just as Agrippus’ heavy bolter tore up the last window in the row. It dropped, hanging onto its missile tube as though it doubled as a jump pack, and thumped two-footed onto the rear-axle suspension of a waiting truck. Wood and metal shards sprayed over the vehicle as it roared into a wheelspin and rattled off between the blocks, bolt-rounds spanking from its rear fender.

Thane’s Lyman’s ear tuned to the sounds of ork vehicles: fighters being picked up and redeployed, unhappy about it by the tone of their xenos grunts, but obedient to their leaders. He mentally reconfigured his mindmap of the battlefield. The orks were refocusing their forces along a narrower front, digging in somewhere just ahead of the Black Templars advance.

‘They are withdrawing.’

‘An unlikely but predicted variable,’ said Brother Kahagnis. ‘Substitute strategem is staged advance, pull Black Templars back and extend flanks with Astra Militarum units. Draw the orks onto us again.’

Thane took a moment to consider, to elevate his mind above the anarchy of the battlefield, to perceive in it the connections of cause and effect as every Fists Exemplar initiate was taught. Every possibility was considered. Every variable already had a strategy in place to counter it.

There had been no regicide sets on Eidolica, and no one would ever challenge a Fist Exemplar to a game of strategy.

These orks had shown a fondness for feints and counters.

Perhaps it was time to show them something they did not expect.

‘Vulkan had faith in you, brother,’ Thane had answered.

‘He had faith in us all.’ Koorland had turned from the window then, and lain a gauntleted hand on Thane’s shoulder. Half his face was dark, shielded from the viewport’s lumen bars like a planet’s night side. ‘As do I. We fight to the last. We are the ultimate realisation of the hopes of mankind, and by our virtues do we hold humanity’s leaders to account. In heart and mind, we never waver.’ He released his grip and appeared to sigh though made no sound. ‘The real work begins tomorrow and the day after. We will rebuild the Imperium, brother. If one day the Khan or the Raven should be found as Vulkan was, if the Emperor should awake, then I would have the Imperium that they find be one of glory and not despair. I would make our father proud.’

‘Pull back the Black Templars. But then throw everything onto the Excoriators’ flank. Even the reserves.’

‘That is not the correct strategem for this set of conditions,’ Kahagnis argued.

Thane’s expression was immobile as rock as he regarded the spires and gun turrets of the idolatrous palace complex, still several kilometres away. The orks knew that Koorland was inside and somehow, though he had not yet worked the problem through that far, his and Koorland’s roles of lure and trap had become reversed. Were it in his nature to do so, he might have smiled.

‘The objective is the same, brother,’ said Thane.

Kill the Beast.

It did not matter who did it, and Thane had no intention of becoming the last son of Dorn.

Ullanor – Gorkogrod, inner palace

The ogryn, Brokk, punched the locked door. Ripples of blue-green force spilled outward from the giant abhuman’s grinding knuckles and the force field cloaking the door gave an ozone sputter. The ogryn’s muscles bulged as he tried to force it. Sweat soaked his khaki vest. After a few seconds of straining, the ogryn withdrew his hand and shook out his seared knuckles, dog tags and chains clinking against the spit-polished campaign medals sewn into his jacket breast. Laurentis’ plasma cutters had failed to make a mark either. So had Asger’s lightning claws.

To look at the door was to look at something clearly ork. The metal was thick, and clamped in the middle by a meaty lock in the shape of a bull-horned greenskin. The black and white diagonal stripes were garishly done, the brush strokes occasionally veering off the line to create a weird, kaleidoscopic pattern. The doors, however, were well balanced on their runners. The join was perfectly centred. And then there was the force field.

Laurentis lifted an extensor that emerged from his robes on an articulated limb and tapped on the door at various points, like a medic manoeuvring his stethoscope as he palpated a patient’s chest. Small flowerings of counter-force rippled from around his bladed metal probe.

‘Supposition: a nanolayer force field, similar in concept to the adamantine surface layer of Thunderhawk or Land Raider armour.’ He tapped it again and watched the spread of colours. ‘Fascinating.’

‘Can it be broken?’ asked Koorland.

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘Can you break it?’

‘Oh. I think not. Not without further investigation.’

Koorland nodded in acceptance – though his helm, bonded to his plastron and pauldrons, did not translate it well – and turned ponderously around.

The corridor was of the same unidentifiable metal as the door, super-resistant, unmarked by the scrape of a lightning claw or the frustrated discharge of a commissar’s plasma pistol, but minus the paintwork or the energy field. It was remarkably clean. There was no light source that any of them could detect and there was no sign of external power generation. Every surface just seemed to glow with a soft, bluish light. Embossed plates and glyphs marked junctions and doorways.

Kavalanera and her sisters filled the corridor with raised swords, a shield of exquisite war-plate and power-edged blades between Laurentis and Alpha 13-Jzzal and the servitor-restrained ork psyker. Asger held the rear. The second ogryn and Commissar Goss stood at one of the junctions. This door was unshielded and Bohemond was already on the other side with Kill-Team Stalker.

Koorland glanced again at the cartolith. His current location was identified by a small pulsing icon, buried deep in a labyrinthine subterranean structure that more nearly resembled the root system of a tooth, than anything obviously palatial. Passageways spread out from his position like capillaries. It looked like they were in the midsection of a raised structure, one of several fortified edifices that ringed the Beast’s throne room. His best guess put them a hundred metres or so above it and about twice that horizontally.

‘The strange thing,’ Krule appeared by Koorland’s pauldron and gestured to the open door, ‘is that that’s the more direct route.’

‘The palace itself is movable. Are you certain?’

‘I wouldn’t open my mouth otherwise.’

‘A trap,’ Alpha 13-Jzzal said again, a vox-loop growl.

Koorland wondered if Rogal Dorn had smiled when he had first set foot on Sebastus IV. ‘Of course it is a trap.’

‘If I might propose a theory?’ Laurentis scuttled around from the locked and shielded door to face Koorland, audio receivers extending from his cranial structure as if, in some remotely human way, to present himself fully at the Space Marine’s disposal.

‘I remember a time when you would not have cared to ask first,’ said Koorland.

‘I have, on occasion, been made aware that my hypotheses are not at all times relevant or welcome.’

‘They are today, my friend. Speak.’

Laurentis blinked and lowered his eyeball, a gesture of humble gratitude. ‘The sole purpose of our mission is the assassination of the Beast, correct?’

Koorland nodded.

‘To eliminate the one target that the enemy cannot afford to lose,’ Laurentis quoted, in paraphrase, then prodded Fidus Bellator’s huge pectoral aquila with a manipulator claw. ‘It occurs to me that the Beast could have had a similar thought.’

‘The mission is compromised,’ said Alpha 13-Jzzal. ‘You have been lured here.’

Koorland regarded the cyborgised warrior sternly. The skitarius knew, because Koorland had shared the data himself, of the calculus-logi’s latest prognoses. Terra had been calculated to collapse in a matter of weeks. The most optimistic upper limit of statistical deviation had the greater Imperium continuing as a unified entity for only another few months at best. These facts were no secret. Let the ugly face of failure inspire the mortals to sacrifice all, as Thane and the Last Wall did mere kilometres away.

‘It changes nothing.’

‘We should at least contact Thane or Issachar,’ said Krule. ‘Or both. If you’re right then vox-silence is clearly unnecessary.’

‘Impossible,’ came Bohemond’s voice-amplified reply from the adjoining corridor. The Black Templar clumped back into view, bulging armour plates blued by the odd, rinsing light. ‘External vox is being blocked. Did Koorland not tell you?’

Krule puffed out his cheeks. ‘Then I suppose I’m with that.’ He jabbed his head sideways towards Alpha 13-Jzzal. ‘I’ve been this way before without losing outside contact. It has to be deliberate.’

‘I assume then that your opinion is the same,’ said Bohemond.

Krule’s expression was stony. His eyes widened slightly and the whites began to turn red. Without appearing to move, his musculature noticeably swelled under his synskin bodyglove. Chronaxic implants, Koorland reasoned, threat responsive, doping the Assassin’s already enhanced physiognomy with a sharp increase in metabolism. Krule grinned like a snake.

‘We came all this way. I brought all my favourite knives.’

‘Kill ork fur Empror,’ rumbled Olug, slowly.

Koorland felt his heart warm with gratitude.

‘Signal on my auspex,’ growled Asger, suddenly. ‘Fifty metres. That way.’ He pointed one set of lightning claws down the corridor. Kavalanera and her sisters made ready with a swift rustle of oiled plates. ‘Closing with some haste.’

‘How many?’ said Koorland.

‘Enough for me.’

‘It seems that the auspex is working after all,’ said Laurentis, happily.

‘Ave bloody Omnissiah,’ muttered Krule.

‘Praise Him,’ Laurentis agreed.

‘Break through them,’ suggested Alpha 13-Jzzal. ‘While we are still capable of salvaging the weapon. There is no way of ascertaining from here whether this route to the throne room will not be similarly warded.’

But somehow, Koorland knew that it would not be. The Emperor lit the galaxy through the Astronomican: was it not then possible that He watched over His children in spirit?

‘Krule, Tyris, you have point. Bohemond, with them. Asger, you know what to do if the orks catch up.’ The Wolf Lord flexed his lightning claws eloquently. ‘Goss, covering fire. Lady Brassanas, Laurentis – you’re with me.’

Fifteen

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

The Fists Exemplar, and those of the VII Legion that were their genetic forebears, had fought in some of the Imperium’s defining battles. They had defended Terra from the Arch-Enemy, fought in the Consus Drift campaigns. Oriax Dantalion himself had been at the primarch’s side through the slaughter of the Iron Cage. But Maximus Thane doubted that so much honour had ever been earned by so few as during the second battle for Ullanor.

He wondered if enough of them would be alive at the finish for their exploits to be remembered half as long as those names of legend.

It had been Assault Marines of the Seventh Company, in concert with their brothers of the Black Templars, that had taken the fight to the primary fortress blocking the palace’s eastern aspect and broken it open. It had been bike squads led by Forgemaster Aloysian that had led the Aurora Chapter tanks through the orks’ minefield and allowed them to crack the greenskins’ defensive lines of trenches and bunkers. When an armoured witch-tower, wreathed in green lightning and trundling forward on massive tracks, had delivered the deathblow on Decimus Ordinatus and turned its psychic fire upon the Deathwatch vehicles, it had been Brother-Sergeant Aquino of the Second who had led the kill-squad of Sisters of Silence to nullify it from within.

The galaxy would never again know his like.

As for Thane himself, he was too humble to keep a personal tally, but his helm display recorded it for him: three hundred and eighteen kills for three hundred and nineteen rounds expended. It had been him to lead the sortie that crippled the orks’ flak guns, and him that then called down the finishing blow.

The Icarus supercarrier, several kilometres of runstrip mounted over many windswept tiers upon two sets of awesome tracks, had been held in reserve with the Field-Legatus’ Leviathan and escort. Scant minutes after Thane’s voxed authorisation, dozens of low-flying Marauder bombers and Vulture gunships had turned what remained of the palace approach to ash and glass, dust under a Space Marine’s boot.

There had been nothing left but a handful of survivors, crawling cockroach-like in the rubble of apocalypse, to prevent the hundred and twelve Demolisher siege tanks of the Ullanor Veterans forming up into one long, slowly advancing firing line and opening up against the palace’s outer wall with the full fury of mankind.

The orks’ fortification was staggeringly vast. Superhard metals plated its sloped face. Energy fields flickered in ugly opposition to the shells and explosions that broke along its length. Fixed gun turrets raked the ground, even as shield overloads drove cracks through ablative plating and exposed bare rockcrete to the massed gunnery of the Astra Militarum. The wall crumbled.

Maximus Thane was the first to cheer.

Everything started to move forwards. On first impression it was as though the planet’s artificial tectonics were undergoing one of their gross scale rearrangements, but the sky was still, the ground was still, it was everything else that was moving. Every man, every vehicle was suddenly rushing towards the breach in the wall as though the planet was a voidship and they had just punched a hole in their own hull. Those that had been closest to the breach were the first to enter; no deeper thought went into it than that. They were the orks now.

A tactical squad of Excoriators advanced through the rubble, into a pall of dust that sparked with torn electrics and bolter fire. The grey ceramite block of Venerable Otho moved with them, crunching forward, figure-of-eighting spirals of fire spraying from the Dreadnought’s heavy flamer.

Thane joined the headlong rush over the shattered cityscape, unloading his bolter onto the breached section of wall, wildly skewing his accuracy ratios though he did not care. The urban terrain was post-apocalyptic: masonry in jagged lumps as though cut from passing asteroids and dropped from the sky, dismembered statues of armoured orks fifty metres high and brandishing chainaxes and heavy weapons. Vehicle wrecks, blackened, on their sides or in pieces; bunkers with smoke pouring from gun slits.

A Chimera ground over the loose earth on rattling metal treads, noisily passing Thane as he ran through a jumble of rockcrete blocks and wire. It had become separated from the rest of its armoured fist squadron by the terrain, slowed, but was steadily growling through the gears as it rumbled over the last of the major blast craters and saw open ground.

Thane turned and chased it, up a wobbling ramp of metal sheeting and onto the roof of a bunker. The Chimera was just accelerating away as Thane leapt, arms pulling on air as if to drag him forward, and thumped onto its armoured back. His boots made a hollow clang. The vehicle’s acceleration almost pitched him backwards, but he activated maglock to secure himself, swayed, then clumped forwards to grab hold of the handrail that circled the turret cupola. One-handed, he ejected the hot sickle magazine from his bolter and punched the weapon against his ammo-belt to insert a fresh one.

The Chimera gave a crunching, low-gear roar as it hit the rubbled section of wall, crashed through a metre-thick spit of standing masonry at the summit and then slewed freely, almost sideways, into the palace’s outer bailey. It trembled on its suspensors and then growled forwards in search of a site to unload. Its spotlight blinked on, a high-wattage lumen bulb spearing white light into the murk. Hull-mounted lasguns pivoted and fired. Its turret multi-laser traversed, cables swaying, and split the air with a crackling volley of beams.

Thane deactivated maglock and jumped down, crunching into gravelly ground as the Chimera reversed its tracks to pivot on the spot, spraying las-beams, and then rumble off in a new direction. He swung up his bolter and started firing.

Dust hung over everything. Spilled blocks cluttered the ground, a randomised topography of foxholes and trenches through which ork and man waged recreations of greater wars. Shield emitters, torn from the wall, struggling for function, flooded the air with sparks and fire. Landmines geysered tanks and rockcrete high into the air. Unexploded munitions went off. Distant walls, thicker, higher, more heavily defended even than those that had just been broken, echoed to the reports of gunfire.

Thane drilled an ork through the neck, splattered its blood over a rockcrete block, got another in the knee, stepped on its chest and shot a bolt between its eyes. A roar. An ork ripped through the smog, swinging an axe. Thane sided the blade on his bolter. The weapons came apart with a ring of metal, leaving shocked fingers. The ork blundered through into Thane and knocked them both to the ground. Icons flashed up minor damage; servos whirred and Thane struggled to his feet. The ork smashed into him again, but this time Thane was ready. He brought up his dented bolter and put four rounds point blank into the ork’s chest.

It exploded, wetly separating legs from head, and Thane thumped the bolter’s heavy stock, a crushed bolt-round spitting from the sickle magazine. Umbra-pattern. Practically indestructible. As close to a Chapter symbol as the Fists Exemplar came.

Armoured warriors of the Excoriators and Black Templars surged past him, war cries reverberating from helmet vox-casters. Those in ivory and red advanced into ork fire in disciplined lines like one-man tanks, laying down withering volleys as they moved. Their brothers moved in fits and bursts, pausing to hack through ork counters with gladius and power sword before dashing on.

‘All units forward!’ Thane yelled, amping his helmet’s vox-caster to maximum and striding up onto the silver-blue carcass of an Imperial Knight for a better view.

His auto-senses did their best to filter out the interference, figures emerging from the fog like black ghosts in a purgatory of grey, filled in with auspex-generated outlines that struggled to keep up. Assault Marines and Astra Militarum sappers assaulted the walls. He could see the controlled flare of jump packs, the sputter of portable shield racks, the cry and boom of ordnance pouring off the walls. Massed tanks growled together in the lee, recoil rocking them back as they slammed high-explosive shells into the base.

There was no time to regroup and adopt a more considered approach. They had pushed through the orks, yes, but they had certainly not beaten them. There were millions of fresh fighters out there, caught out of position by Thane’s flank attack, that were probably being piled into trucks and raced into new positions at the army’s rear even now. The only option was to push forward, to break the orks’ second wall before they could be smashed against it.

It was not war as the doctrines of Dorn or even Guilliman would have it, but it was exhilarating.

Everyone, Thane decided, should push forcibly against their nature at least once before the finish.

He turned to look up at the wall itself, just as a lobbed shell, trailing spurts of fire from an overpowered rocket, smashed through the top of a struggling Shadowsword tank and blew it to pieces before its main gun had a chance to fire. Black Templars wearing bulky jump packs held a beachhead on the parapet, backs forced to the rampart by several mobs of huge orks in steam-powered armour suits. As he watched, a boss ork with a shrilling buzz-saw and a pair of dribbling flamers bolted to its gauntlet chewed through a Space Marine’s right-hand jet flue and butted him off the parapet. The warrior broke on the rockcrete lumps below.

One breach was all they needed. Just one.

Sub-vocalising to his armour’s simplistic spirit he called up the army’s general channel, to coordinate some of the firepower that was labouring up towards the walls, and winced at the unexpected onslaught of orkish voices that emerged from his earpiece. Blink-scrolling through the frequencies found them all similarly blocked. Thane’s best supposition was the greenskins were using the full wavelength to coordinate their own unruly defense rather than actively blocking the Imperials’ communications. He set his vox to active scan, the exquisite properties of his Lyman’s ear allowing him to filter the overlapping noises into distinct sounds. He could not make out any specific headquarters location from background sounds, not could he understand the language, but there was one voice amongst the profusion that he knew immediately, as though a recognition marker had just flagged it up on his helm display.

It was guttural, unclean, the loudest and most strident, and also the deepest, as though delivered from a chest wider than the armoured body of a Dreadnought.

The Beast was near.

There was a loud roar of freshly gunned engines, and an exuberant hammering of gunfire that chewed into the crumpled shoulder of the Knight that Thane was standing on. Before he could think, battle-bred instincts loosed a four-round trigger-squeeze in the right direction, the bolts spanking off the snarling front radiator of a half-track laden with burly close-assault fighters. A dozen more of the ramshackle vehicles roared up behind it, packed with troops and guns, mouldings plastered with dust, powering up through a sally port under the wall that had been partially blocked with spoil and debris.

‘Ork vehicles inbound from a tunnel in grid section epsilon-nine,’ Thane voxed, jumping down from the shoulder of the Knight and pushing his bolter round its chewed-up rear plating, then returning fire. If any of his units were holding open comms under that xenos diatribe, he had no idea, or if they would be able to hear him if they were. But he had little option but to try. ‘Surrounding sections hold and counter. Repeat, hold and counter. Take that tunnel.’

Concentrated fire drove Thane back into cover. They were not aiming at him, of course. He was one Space Marine sheltering behind a wreck, and a Fist Exemplar, indistinguishable in undecorated ceramite from any battle-brother under his command.

Sparks rattled across the glacis plate of the drab grey Predator tank that rolled over the tangled rubble at walking speed, keeping step with the combat squad of Fists Exemplar advancing under the cover of its guns. A blast of its twin-linked lascannons slagged a high-sided armoured truck. Return fire cost it its left sponson and a turret antennae cluster. It growled to a stop, the Space Marines taking up positions around its bulk and laying down fire. Thane recognised Kahagnis, Abbas, Agrippus and his autocannon, Thamarius and Xeres. Brother-Apothecary Antonius of the Excoriators knelt by the Predator’s ruined gun, narthecium buried in the neck of fallen Sardonis, a plasma burn where an arm and a large part of a chest should have been.

Thane pulled himself in behind the body of the Knight, taking advantage of the cover to pull his mistreated bolter to his chest, eject the sickle magazine and slam in a fresh one with a red strip along the base to indicate that it contained armour-piercing vengeance rounds. He could feel the ding of bullets striking the far side of his cover. He could hear the rumble of engines, getting louder.

He stepped out of cover, side-on, bolter swinging upwards in one smooth motion in time with the flashed appearance of that overloaded half-track. He prepared to fire, but before he could rake the speeding vehicle’s flank with bolts he felt a hot downwash of air, like a fiery hand pressing down from above, and the half-track drove into a wall of heavy weapons fire. Quad-linked heavy bolters tracked back and forth, shredding the vehicle like paper. Thane dropped to one knee and turned his head away as a quartet of hellstrike missiles dropped from the black-painted Thunderhawk’s underwing hardpoints, flared, and then whistled through the vehicle formation, sending metal plates and smouldering remains billowing skyward.

Ground dust blew out from the lowering Thunderhawk in ripples, tied to the cycling of its engine fans. It hovered above the height of its landing struts and dropped its doors, squads of Inquisitorial storm troopers in glossy black carapace and visors tramping down the assault ramp and into a covering posture around the gunship. Thane saw another blunt wedge of black armour thunder overhead, strafing the ground with heavy bolters and turbolasers, with flak from wall-mounted air defences lighting up its aerofoil.

His vox-bead gave a long, power-boosted whine and the orkish voices receded. ‘Lord Thane,’ said a female voice. ‘This is Wienand. Are you hearing me now?’

‘I hear you!’ Thane ducked back into cover as a third gunship powered in low, spraying dust and gravel. He did not ask what the inquisitor was doing here when she had been directly instructed to remain behind the lines. She had followed her own counsel as any Fist Exemplar would have. ‘I did not realise we had any kill-teams still airborne.’

‘We have some remarkable pilots.’

‘The Beast is near, inquisitor. He is directing the defences himself, probably on short-range comms. Do you think your pilots are good enough to get us over the walls?’

The line went quiet a moment, presumably while the inquisitor conferred with her squad. It crackled back to full, static force.

‘Lord Atherias tells me that he’s excited to try.’

Sixteen

Ullanor – Gorkogrod, inner palace

The cartolith still floated on Koorland’s helm display. The icon representing his present coordinates was a heartbleed of gold, nine-tenths of the way down a zig-zagging stair that had multiplied the descent by a factor of twenty or more. Ork design. Two hours and they were still to breach the throne room. But they were close. A doubled stream of mass-reactive shells burned from his storm bolter, ripped open the drab blue and black chest-plate of an ork twice his weight in muscle, and strobed monstrous horned shadows along the walls. Dark gore splattered Koorland’s lenses. In tri-d, it was as though the palace schematic ran with blood.

‘One more turn and we are there,’ he called out to the kill-team and the others, his breathing remaining slow and deep even after two hours of intense hand-to-hand combat.

Blocks of screed and infographics reporting on his armour’s combat systems made fluid passes across his faceplate, kept in constant motion by the targeting reticules that pushed them aside to keep his vision uncluttered.

Battery reserves low. Ammunition nearly depleted. Armour compromised. No matter.

They were almost there.

Bohemond was already at the turn of the stair, surrounded by hulking orks that hacked at him with chainaxes and powered maces: fend, fend, strike, and push forward, nigh-invincibility allied to earth-shattering moments of power, the timeless fighting style of the Cataphractii.

Tyris was just behind, firing muffled rounds of stalker-variant ammunition into the densely packed mob. Gadreel and Icegrip fought hand-to-hand, servo-arm and frost blade, smiting and hacking. The Ultramarines Simmias and Straton, replacements for Numines and Vega, fallen on Incus Maximal, were a step behind, firing from the chest.

Brokk had an ork by the throat, ten centimetres off the ground and turning blue. His bicep was a swollen mass of veins and anger, faced creased by gun shadow, caught in a rictus of hatred for the alien. Olug’s ripper gun brought thunder into the confined space, spraying out bullets until the robust weapon clicked empty. The maddened ogryn took the gun two-handed and clubbed the closest ork to the ground with it. In his fury, Koorland saw the common thread that ran through every member of his squad: man, woman, abhuman, Space Marine.

One Emperor. One Imperium. One mankind.

‘Could you please avoid killing so many,’ said Laurentis, modulating his voice to a whining pitch that ogryns and bolter fire could not reach. ‘The weapon requires live Veridi to serve as detonators.’

Krule rolled his eyes, artfully massaging the selector of a palm-sized executor pistol: bolt-rounds shattered the weak joints between armour plates, needle killshots punctured dense green hide.

‘There are plenty more, magos,’ said Koorland.

Asger’s panting chuckle returned through the shared feed, along with the crack of lightning.

‘Take the stairs!’ Koorland bellowed, punching his sword’s blued edge through an ork’s chest-plate and forcing another step towards Bohemond and the others before more orks stepped up to stop him. He snarled.

Spotting the shift in his tactical display, Koorland glanced left as Kavalanera broke from the rest of her sisters. The women fought in uncanny unison to defend the bound ork psyker. The servitors dragging it along between them were mammoth but ill-suited to combat, though more than a few stray shots bound for the ork psyker smacked into vat-grown, plasteel-reinforced flesh. Drevina and the other Sisters adapted their blade routines to Kavalanera’s absence smoothly. The knight abyssal veered towards the handrail on the left-hand side of the stair and vaulted over it.

Koorland saw the parchment strips affixed to her armour flutter up as she dropped onto the orks charging up the stairs. Her power blade lashed out in perfect figures of eight, hacking orks limb from limb as they ran at her or past. Every part of her body moved with the minimum of effort and the maximum of effect: grace, poise, a ballet of slaughter performed in absolute quiet but for the howls of dismembered orks. Unnerved by their own brutish sense of the pariah in their midst, the orks began to waver.

The break in the influx of fresh combatants allowed Koorland to push onto the turn of the stair. Bohemond blink-sent a greeting rune to his helm display. Two walking tanks side-by-side, with relic blade and storm bolter they drove the orks back, round the turn and onto the final flight. Beyond Lady Brassanas, Koorland saw the doors.

They were large, but by the standards of neither human nor ork were they worthy of a centre of power. They were plain metal, unadorned except for a few furtively scratched glyphs in the frame. A service entrance, for gretchin and slaves.

For humans.

Koorland wondered if it was some kind of symbolism as much as its own desire for this confrontation that had led the Beast to direct them along this route. Conquest had never been enough, or the hives of Terra would have been aflame long ago. It was holy war. It wanted mankind’s capitulation, its humiliation. Vulkan had explained to him that when dealing with orks all things came down to dominance. The primarch had also repeatedly impressed on him the need to have faith, in himself, in his brothers, in the spirit of man.

‘For Dorn. For Vulkan. For the Golden Throne of Terra!’

Freed from the immediate fighting, the two ogryns opened up on the uncertain orks. Commissar Goss seared them with bolts of plasma, and Alpha 13-Jzzal joined him with raking volleys of his heavier plasma caliver.

‘Protect yourself, sister,’ yelled Tyris, as he pulled a clutch of frag grenades from his hip holster. Gadreel and the rest of Kill-Team Stalker did likewise, and Kavalanera plunged her sword into an ork’s chest and then ducked beneath it as it fell.

The air became metal. The frag blasts were too minor a flurry to inflict anything more than irritation on such armoured behemoths but iron shards were as pernicious as sand and, propelled with force, would work their way into anywhere. They got into eyes, into ammo slits, points of weakness that the orks could have protected, had function been as important to them as effect.

Humanity was not the only race with weaknesses.

Koorland raised his sword as an icon of man, as Asger and Bohemond pushed past and battered open the doors.

Into the chamber of the Beast.

Ullanor – Gorkogrod, inner palace

Penitent Wrath looped over the palace rooftops like a seabird with wings full of winter gale. She swung slowly on her axis, round and round, torn electrics spitting from the hole that gaped in her wing, coming in by some miracle on one turbofan and descent thrusters.

The section of roof high above the throne room of the Beast was flat as a frozen lake, spiralling in panorama across Kjarvik’s view. One black gunship was already down and unloaded, warriors in grey and in ivory and red spreading from it like cracks in the ice. Another burned up in the sky as it flew over, wreckage dropping over the spiked parapet in a death spiral. His vision swung from metal roof to cloudy sky and back again, both the same ruddy umber, fire and ash, one a beaten reflection of the other.

Kjarvik held onto the assault ramp’s hydraulic supports as centrifugal force tried to throw him out. He looked down. He felt no nausea or disorientation. His physiology was immune to that.

‘It is not going to get any closer,’ said Baldarich.

Kjarvik released his boot maglocks with a snarl. There was no need to jump. The gunship’s spin flung him out from the ramp, arms beating at the air like his namesake crow.

The gunship groaned as its back end swung away and its nose came back around. Kjarvik could see Atherias and Bohr through the armourglass, locked into restraint harnesses, fighting with the guide sticks. Penitent Wrath whipped around on its sole functioning turbofan and swept further out. Metres from the rooftop. Centimetres from the edge. Kjarvik twisted bodily, and smacked face-first into the roof. He rolled sideways a way, bled off his momentum, and came up on all fours with the exception of the one hand that hovered over his mag-holster. The sheet metal gave a crumping wobble where his weight had depressed it. His long hair and pelt whipped about in the high-altitude wind.

He sniffed. Dead orks. Engine oil. Burning.

A massive thump rumpled through the metal as Zarrael impacted like a drop pod without retros. The Flesh Tearer crunched two-footed into the roof, right boot breaking through to the greave. Actuators and suspensors responded after a second’s delay, dispersed the impact throughout his armour, plate to plate, servos whirring like dynamos as he violently kicked his leg free. Phareous hit a moment later, a few metres off, then Baldarich, coming in on the tips of his toes with a swordsman’s poise.

Penitent Wrath convulsed as her rear end swept over the parapet, attitude control jets burning blue to white, hot enough to hold her shuddering in place while two dozen Inquisitorial storm troopers poured out. They held a perimeter with lasguns aimed up and out as Inquisitor Wienand and her bodyguard, Raznick, hurriedly dropped out after them. Raznick supported Urquidex under one arm even as he marked threat angles with his laspistol.

The last few storm troopers were following up at the end of the ramp when the Thunderhawk’s last turbofan blew out. The engine housing vomited oily yellow flames and rotor shards, and the unresisted control thrusters suddenly hammered the gunship sideways.

Men fell, screaming, rolled across the roof like bones tossed from a cup or flailed over the edge. Others were thrown back into the troop bay or hung onto the now upside-down ramp by the fingers. Shorn of any uplift, Penitent Wrath crashed into the roof, bowing it permanently, and shrieked back on thrusters until it crashed into the soaring stretch of curtain wall that rose from that side.

Kjarvik had memorised the cartoliths, as they all had. If they were accurate and he remembered truthfully, then this was the south face of the palace’s innermost defences, an iron ring of brute firepower and hypertechnology that defended the Beast’s throne room against attack from the ground and from the air.

Penitent Wrath’s machine-spirit finally expired and she fell quiet. Steam rose from the tracked tears she had left in the roof. Smoke gouted from her blasted engine.

Phareous lowered his shield and ran for the downed gunship, voxing Atherias and Bohr. A few greenskins littered his path but their threads had been well cut and hard, mown down by the Thunderhawks’ anti-personnel guns or dispatched by the sons of Dorn.

‘We have located an access ramp down into the palace, and from there, with luck, to the throne room of the Beast.’ Maximus Thane’s war-plate boosted his voice over the thunder of flak guns and the shrapnel rain. Kjarvik knew of him from the Deathwatch’s very first missions. He was good. He spoke plainly. Kjarvik respected him enormously, and he was not alone in doing so.

Half a dozen Fists Exemplar and an Apothecary of the Excoriators followed Thane from his Thunderhawk, Zarrael and even Baldarich falling in behind the Chapter Master as he neared.

‘How far?’ asked Kjarvik.

Thane shrugged, a whine of servos. ‘Less than two hundred metres.’ He pointed over the fortress wall, the guns still spitting fire and energy bolts at the Deathwatch gunships trying to land closer. ‘Koorland’s teleport coordinates are just on the other side of that.’

‘Does his teleport homer still signal?’

‘I cannot raise the fleet to find out.’

‘On the bright side, the Beast will be distracted by Koorland and–’ Kjarvik waved a gauntlet vaguely in the direction that most of the muted booms were coming from ‘–and whoever it is now in charge down there. He will not be expecting us.’

As he spoke, another black gunship set down on landing struts, and another, just as a hellstrike missile from a third whistled through the air and obliterated a gun-nest, crowning the main source of flak with fire and scattering the neighbouring roofs with debris. More Deathwatch deployed from their open assault ramps: black-armoured, elite, packing combi-weapons and wargear for any occasion. He recognised several of the sergeants from the mission briefing.

Zarrael gave a twitching nod in the direction of Penitent Wrath, and Kjarvik looked that way. Wienand walked towards them, Raznick in close beside her, crowded by black-armoured mortal troopers – hreindýr displaying their antlers to a Fenrisian wolf. The inquisitor had changed out of her grey dress-suit during the flight, and into the same glossy black fatigues and hardened carapace worn by her storm troopers. She had a laspistol, but left it in its holster, content to cede her protection to the twenty-plus guns of her guards.

‘A neat fit,’ said Kjarvik, indicating her slighter frame relative to the muscular Inquisitorial storm troopers.

‘I came prepared.’

Raznick pushed Urquidex ahead of him, and now the magos was close, Kjarvik saw that he was pulling a small equipment cart behind him. Its wheels rattled on the bent metal roof. Lights blinked in no particular sequence, and wires flounced between what looked like a specialist vox-set and the plug-in sockets in the back of Urquidex’s neck. His eyes twitched randomly. He muttered a guttural alien gibberish under his breath, as though something primordial whispered in his ear. Drool trickled down his chin as he mumbled, too intent on sharing the profundity of what he heard to remember to swallow.

‘What is wrong with him?’ said Baldarich, voice thick with distaste.

‘He is parsing the orks’ communications for an indication of the Beast’s location,’ said Wienand. ‘When Thane told me that he could pick out the Beast’s voice from the palace transmissions, I was reminded of the linguistic matrix developed by Magos Laurentis to translate the Beast’s attempts at communication on Ardamantua. Urquidex possessed the necessary cranial implants to access his language centres, and he kindly volunteered.’

‘I am sure he did,’ said Kjarvik.

‘It. Is. Curious,’ said Urquidex, the human words forced between the brutish alien sounds that spilled from his cortex. ‘Multiple. References. To. Beast.’ His eyes were screwed shut, eyelids flickering as if in a troubled dream. ‘Unsure. Where. It. Is.’

‘Deliberate misdirection?’ Thane suggested.

‘Perhaps.’

‘Then we split our forces,’ said Wienand quickly. ‘Hit them all. The Fists Exemplar and Excoriators take half, while I and the Deathwatch will take the other. If nothing else, splitting up will keep the orks off-balance, possibly give Koorland and Kavalanera a chance to deploy the psyker.’

‘You?’ said Thane. ‘Representative, I do not believe–’

‘Don’t “Representative” me, Maximus. You lead your men and I intend to lead mine.’

Thane shot a glance at the Deathwatch. There were just under thirty of them, the finest warriors from nine different Chapters. The best that Kjarvik had ever fought beside.

‘I suppose I have little choice,’ said Thane.

‘Less than that. Now let’s go.’

‘Is one location more likely than another?’ said Thane, and turned to Urquidex.

‘Not. Significantly. But. One. Is. Source. Of. Most.’ He shuddered, jaw clenched over a truculent ‘Tra’ sound that apparently did not exist in the greenskin vocabulary. ‘Transmissions.’

‘Then I shall take that one. Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ said Wienand. ‘Assign teams and Urquidex will instruct them on where to go.’

Thane nodded and turned to order his men into combat squads. As soon as he was facing the other way, Wienand clasped Urquidex’s shoulder and, under the pretence of helping him walk, whispered something in his ear. But none of the Space Marines on the rooftop had keener ears than the Space Wolf.

‘My team takes the most probable location.’

Kjarvik shook his head and readied his wargear.

Bad luck. It was a curse.

Ullanor – Gorkogrod, throne room

The ork psyker gave a roar of supplication as the heavy draught-servitors hauled the creature into the great throne room of the orks. Laurentis scuttled under the chain to stab another dose of sedative into its leg. It barked and tried to kick back at the magos, but the dumb servitors dragged it inexorably forward. Signing to her sisters to close in around their charge, Kavalanera drew in behind it, raised her arm up and placed her hand to the back of the psyker’s neck, where it joined its head. It shuddered in bleak horror, some combined effect of the paralytic in its bloodstream and the pariah gene that cored its subconscious like a frost blade to the soul. Even so, it continued to ramble and growl. It dropped to its knees as though begging forgiveness and had to be dragged the rest of the way by its wrists.

That display alone would have been enough to convince Koorland that he was in the right place. But he knew this room. Krule had described it perfectly.

In the centre of the stupefyingly vast space was a circular dais, much like the centrepiece of the Great Chamber of Terra, though this example of the form was larger again, grander again. Six enormous thrones faced outwards in a ring, so that the one immediately opposite Koorland was out of view. And the one that faced him…

‘Stop!’ he roared, and, cued to his voice, command the servitors halted.

The ork psyker writhed on the floor.

‘This is the chamber,’ said Krule.

Behind the Assassin, Alpha 13-Jzzal and the ogryns held the doors with thumps of meat and fiery blasts of plasma. Kill-Team Stalker spread out, taking positions in the crop-circle patterns of pits surrounding the podium that might have been analogous to rows of seating.

Koorland clumped forward to join Bohemond and Asger.

Like him, they were staring up at the dais.

Enthroned in its titanic chair was a gigantic, armoured ork, nearer in size to a gargant than any common greenskin. No plate was of the same material or colour as the next, but all were threaded together with an intricate web of alien designs. Its head was bare: flesh, dark green, ridged like tree bark, and swirled nightshade blue with tattoos. Gauntlets the size of Koorland’s plastron clasped the throne’s arms. Calloused lips and painted tusks parted in a grin.

It had been waiting for them.

Koorland felt a chill in his soul.

With a clanking of armour, the Beast rose from its throne.

‘Emperor preserve us,’ cried Commissar Goss, turning from the mob at the door and lowering his plasma pistol in horror. The commissar was a last-minute addition. He would not have been briefed on events on the temple-gargant of the Beast.

Koorland became aware of jeering from above. He turned his faceplate to look up over his right pauldron.

The walls of the throne room were stone, black and white, made of large blocks carved with ork glyphs. Scores of iron-railed galleries jutted out. They were identified with glyph plates and a quick glance was enough to tell Koorland that there were only six unique pictograms in total. An iron-tusked ork on a disc of red; a red sun with an ork’s face; a crooked yellow half-moon; an angular serpent; a skull crossed by bloody axes; a horned blue ork’s head backed by bones. The galleries marked by that last symbol were lined with bellowing orks. The aliens were all as big or bigger than any Koorland had yet encountered beside the Beast itself. They were heavily armed and armoured, their gear a dull blue bearing the blazon of the death’s skull.

War machines flanked the galleries, great gargants, symbols of status as much as sentinels. Their enormous rivet-iron frames boasted only the largest and most complicated weapon mounts. The paint daubed across their bodywork and the jewels that studded their armour matched the glyph art of the chamber. None was smaller than a Reaver Titan, and most were considerably larger. In some cases the ork engineers had resorted to extending their machine outwards to outdo a rival engine. They were fortress walls on spiked tracks.

Koorland’s mind flashed back to Ardamantua and the powerful warrior forms that had torn from the ground in swarms when their principal nests had been threatened.

These orks were their warrior forms. Their Daylight Wall.

Their Adeptus Custodes.

The mosaic floor shuddered as the Beast took a step off the dais. It was titanic, three times Koorland’s size, and Asger and Bohemond seemed to shrink in accordance with its bulk. Koorland’s biology had passed far beyond the grasp of fear, but he comprehended the enormity of his task.

Here was the Great Beast. The ork that had contested Vulkan in single combat and survived the primarch’s end.

What chance did Koorland have?

The Beast grunted something orkish to the bound psyker, then passed its gaze over the three Terminators. It settled on Koorland, the instinctual recognition of one apex beast for another. Its eyes were like red suns caged. Its voice was the shattering of worlds.

‘Slaughter.’

Seventeen

Ullanor – Gorkogrod, throne room

Koorland stepped forward. An uncommon thrill of anticipation passed through him, an electric shiver, as if his body had been conditioning itself these past weeks and months to the cocktail of emotions that the moment of triumph would bring. Koorland’s gene-heritage would not let his face show it. He could not in fact remember the last time he had truly laughed or even smiled from his heart, though he assumed that he had, once. Even on frozen death worlds, mortal children still laughed. And as the Emperor’s distant light was his judge and witness, they always would.

Bohemond moved across his path, a pace ahead, sword raised as if to bar Koorland from the Beast and vice versa with his body and with his blade.

‘You would be my champion now as well?’ said Koorland on a private channel. ‘I am Lord Commander. It is my right to face the Beast alone.’

With a gruff murmur of assent, Bohemond ponderously backed up and lowered his blade until the tip scraped the mosaic tiles in front of him. Koorland watched him go, nodded his gratitude though no one could see it behind his fixed helm and gorget, and caught Kavalanera’s gesture.

‘Now?’

Koorland could guess that the Beast had some understanding of Low Gothic, but he doubted the greenskins were familiar with Adeptus Astartes battle-sign. He moved his hugely armoured fingers in reply.

‘Not yet.’

It was as complex a message as sign language could convey while wearing Terminator armour, but the knight abyssal signalled her understanding. She gestured to Laurentis. The ork psyker thrashed against the armoury servitors as Laurentis scuttled warily through with a stimm dose slurping into a hypodermic appendage.

At the door, Alpha 13-Jzzal and the ogryns were still battling to hold the orks back.

The harder we hit them, Koorland thought, the stronger the psychic field becomes.

The harder we hit them…

‘I am Slaughter,’ said Koorland, turning to the Beast. ‘I am the Lord Commander of the Imperium of Man, and I have come to kill you.’

The Beast did not laugh. It should have done, but it did not.

It swung up its arm.

An impossible array of firepower had been assembled into a triple-tiered gantry around its wrist. Two bolted-together battlecannons formed the mainstay. That twin-link was surrounded by autocannons, heavy flamers, rocket launchers, and multi-barrelled weapons of ork make that Koorland had never seen on any battlefield and could not identify. Ammo-belts and power hoses swung side to side as it took aim. It barely had to. In its open gauntlet was a pulsing trigger switch, onmi-linked to that awesome battery.

It clenched its fist.

Thunder struck. A star was born. Worlds collided.

Asger’s emergency vox blinked up an unnecessary warning on Koorland’s helm display, the same moment he felt Bohemond’s shoulder guard barge him out of the way.

The firestorm that engulfed the Black Templar would have rivalled a super-heavy tank squadron. Koorland did not see it fall. He was already stumbling away under Bohemond’s shove, the blast that struck still mighty enough to throw him down and shatter the lens of his right eye. Power failed to numerous systems and was rerouted. Servos whirred as Fidus Bellator aided its wearer in driving their mammoth weight back up. He looked back.

Bohemond was broken, leaking sealant. The mosaic he covered was pulverised. His rune in Koorland’s fractured visor was a warning amber.

The orks looking on bellowed thunderous approval, stamped their feet, beat their fists on the iron handrails. The galleries trembled, but the engineering expertise on display was sound and there was no danger of their stanchions buckling.

Asger flourished his lightning claws and howled back at them. Krule was more forthright. The Assassin lifted his executioner pistol and drilled a mass-reactive round through an ork’s head. The explosive bolt burst through the back of its skull, and the ork pitched over the rail and thumped into the floor.

For half a second the jeering stopped.

Then the Beast gave a roar that could have cracked armourglass and, as though it were the blow that shattered the dam, the ork elites began pounding down the stairs.

Koorland gave a tight little smile.

Yes. Hit them harder.

The Beast clanked through the pall of its own almighty weapons discharge. Auto-loaders clicked and whirred. Barrels spun off heat. Drum hoppers chewed through belts. Little hatches opened up in the brute’s armour, rubber conveyors porting heavier ordnance towards the battlecannons and rocket launchers. Koorland emptied his storm bolter’s clip into the gantry, seeing a weak spot in the array of loader mechanisms, but the mass-reactive explosions rippled purple-green across an energy field about a metre ahead of the great ork’s armour. The effect rose diagonally along the Beast’s chest as Koorland traversed his aim and moved ponderously aside.

Keep moving.

Fidus Bellator had kept him alive this long, but it was a millstone now, denying him the one advantage that might have bought him as much time as he needed – manoeuvrability.

The Beast opened up as it closed the distance. Auto-rounds and stabbing bolts of green energy mauled the tiles around Koorland’s boots and burst against his armour. The Beast broke into a thumping run, hollering even as its wrist-battery kicked out a storm of abuse, muzzle flare lighting up its face like a tusked horror from a nightmare. Koorland aimed the last round in his magazine and fired, aiming for the eye. The mass-reactive burned up in a vibrant death against the energy shield. Koorland backed ponderously, to mitigate what he could of the Great Beast’s forward momentum. He brought his power sword to a position of guard.

As it had been for Vulkan, so too then for him.

The fate of mankind would be decided hand-to-hand.

The ork swung up its combat weapon. It was a spiked vibro-mace, its head the size of a Space Marine. The haft was twice as long as Koorland. The arm added half that length again. All of it swung at Koorland with primarch-killing force. He was too slow to avoid it, and he knew without needing to try that a parry would not even be worth the attempt.

He was not a primarch.

The mace struck him in the shoulder and launched him across the chamber like a kicked stone. The vibro-blast was a parting gift, an extra metre or so of lift and a drilling numbness down the arm before he smashed into the wall. He fell to the floor on hands and knees, dust crumbling over his shoulders. Targeting reticules spilled over the spidery cracks in his faceplate as they sought locks. His armour emitted a complaining whine as he struggled to get himself back up.

The harder we hit them…

If only Koorland knew how to hit them.

Tyris flicked his bolter’s shot selector to automatic. It felt like time. Orks were flooding down the stairs from the galleries, through arches flanked by sentinel gargants, and into the throne room in their hundreds. He raked one stair, picking his shots still even as his trigger finger kicked them out faster than a mortal man could follow. One ork dropped with a bolt through the mouth, mass-reactive explosion blasting its skull back out through its visor, but the rest of the clip clanged off thick armour and rippling force fields. The Beast aside, they were the biggest greenskins he had ever seen. He reloaded.

‘Simmias, Straton – cover left. Gadreel – forward. Icegrip, with me.’

The warriors of Stalker were a firebase, a wall of bolter fire, but the orks were too big and too well armoured to be held at bay.

Kavalanera and her sisters sallied and drew back, fighting like warrior angels to defend the ork psyker. Tyris had known they could fight, but finally unleashed they were magnificent. They killed like bolts from the heavens, righteous judgement withdrawn the instant it was delivered to leave the orks railing at smoke or left for another ephemeral hand to strike down. Watching Kavalanera herself was like watching the armoured avatar of silent death, summoned forth for one final battle in the Emperor’s name. The enormous servitors did not fight, and for that reason the orks had not thought to attack them yet. They were like stakes in the ground. Laurentis hid behind one, lashing out with a converted power emitter, arcs of current that the rampaging greenskins did not even feel.

At the door, the fight had never stopped.

Commissar Goss’ chainsword banged furiously against an ork’s armour, adamantium teeth fighting for purchase like a man running on ice. He foamed at the mouth, cap on the floor somewhere, grey hair streaming wild as he discharged his plasma pistol into the ork’s chest. It ignored the shot, hacked off the commissar’s arm with its own whining axe-blade, then delivered a boot to the chest that broke the man and heaped him on the ground three metres back. Olug bellowed fury and mashed the butt of his ripper gun through the ork’s face. Brokk held the door single-handedly, wrestling with a mega-armoured ork almost his size. The strain on both faces was incredible. Even over the chaos of melee, Tyris could hear matched sinews creak.

Alpha 13-Jzzal cooly raked the ork mobs with plasma until an axe smashed through the back of his exo-skull. The skitarii ranger dropped with an electrical shiver and then self-destructed, an ultra-near-range implosion from a subdermal melta device taking out his killer’s arm. Asger finished the ork with a decapitating sweep. His lightning claws crackled and spat.

The Wolf Lord’s howl echoed from the rapidly emptying galleries.

It was drowned out by the rumble of engines.

The great gargants standing sentinel around the throne dais revved to full power. Exhaust stacks belched black smoke. Not, Tyris suspected, because the orks lacked the technological capability to engineer something cleaner, but because they enjoyed the sense of power that only a rumbling engine gave. With a discordant blast of war-horns, the war machines started haphazardly forward.

‘Now?’ Tyris voxed, though he doubted Koorland was in a position to respond.

Koorland pushed himself fully upright, back to the wall, as the Beast thudded towards him and swung. Koorland dropped heavily to one knee. The mace blew the wall apart. Vibrations drove deep cracks as high up as the gallery above his head. It swayed alarmingly as several brackets popped their bolts.

He stabbed at the Beast’s belly. It did not even bother to block. The power field nullified the sword’s disruption field, and the blade skittered harmlessly over riveted plates. The Beast used its wrist-battery like knuckle dusters – two-tonne knuckle dusters, worn by a giant. The blow hammered so hard into Koorland’s faceplate that it fried the shock circuits and smacked his head back into the padding. He crunched into the wall. The rim of the helmet bit through the gorget softseals. Atmosphere hissed in and Koorland’s visually augmented array went black.

On the second effort, he managed to tear the helm from the mangled gorget, then gave a deep roar of defiance as the Beast’s knee crushed into his plastron.

Fidus Bellator cracked like a block of stone struck along a plane of weakness. The breath was forced from his chest, his multi-lung supplying his physiology with oxygen in its absence. Systems alerts, mechanical and biological, blurted from mangled audio sounders in his gorget rim. The Beast ground him under its knee.

Koorland gritted his teeth, partially buried in rubble, and calmly ejected his storm bolter’s empty magazine. The Beast levelled its whirring wrist-battery. Not ten centimetres from Koorland’s face. He did not blink.

‘I defy you to my dying breath. Mankind defies you.’

A shriek of punctured metal startled him, expecting instant death as he was, and the dark blade of a power sword sheared through the giant ork’s thigh plate from behind. Koorland laughed then.

The Sword of Sigismund.

The Black Templar’s armour was cracked up the middle, marked by a jagged line of raw ceramite where it had been sealed. Sparks trailed from an exposed power cable near his elbow. He turned a twist on his relic blade and pulled it back. Blood sprayed. The Beast arched its back and howled in pain. It lashed back with its vibro-mace, but the surprise of being injured threw it off and it failed to account for the fact that the High Marshal stood barely in line with its hips. The weapon sailed over Bohemond’s helmet, but the Beast’s knuckles nevertheless caught him a glancing blow that stunned his systems and crashed him to the floor. Blood from what must have been a severed artery in the Beast’s thigh continued to spurt across Koorland’s body.

Koorland felt the pressure on his chest ease as the Beast drew in its wounded leg.

He stepped out of the wall. Half fell. Damaged sections of armour powered down as he stood, the tremendous drag of his Terminator plate like pushing against a moon. He slotted a fresh sickle magazine into his empty storm bolter. Dragonfire rounds. The nearest to hand.

He looked up at the Beast with eyes that swam in and out of focus.

The harder we hit them, the stronger the psychic field grows.

‘For Vulkan,’ he rasped, then opened a channel to Kavalanera. ‘Now.’

The Sister acknowledged with a click.

‘I will relish this moment forever, Beast.’

With Kavalanera leading, the Sisters broke from combat. It was there that Koorland saw the problem they had failed to foresee. The Sisters of Silence were mobbed in close combat by scores of the Beast’s bulkiest elites. Exquisitely as the women fought, as hard as Tyris and Stalker fought to pull them out, they simply could not bring the armoured hulks down fast enough to escape. Even so, Koorland felt a buzz of escalating force that tightened the skin of his forehead.

To Koorland’s astonishment, the staggered withdrawal actually appeared to be a boon in disguise. The psyker was absorbing power slowly, soaking in far more than it could have had it all come down on it in a rush. Its eyes rolled back. Its lids juddered as though electric current was being run though its chains. Froth boiled from its locked jaw. Veins bulged up from its body and turned a mouldy black as it seized uselessly in its restraints.

Clutching its head, the Beast turned round on its good leg.

With a grunt it raised its wrist-battery and fired.

The torrent of bullets and las and weird gravitic blasts mowed through two of the servitors and half a dozen ork elites. Suddenly released, the ork psyker flopped about on the floor like a suffocating fish. The bullet storm howled towards the seizing psyker and would have shredded it had Drevina not thrown herself into its path at the final second. She danced for a moment, then her ravaged body fell on top of the ork’s and the barrage swept on. It took another crimson-armoured Sister in the knee and dropped her. She did not break her vows even to cry out.

The Beast cursed as its myriad barrels whined empty and the auto-loaders set to work.

The remaining Sisters of Silence continued their fighting withdrawal and then, as their injured sister was still dragging herself away from the ork psyker, it detonated.

The ork’s mouth opened wide, a choking, gurgling sound trapped deep in its throat. Its head began to shake, like a loose bolt under pressure. Its eyes opened wide and bulged as though staring into the vivid core of the Primordial Annihilator. Koorland saw an ephemeral green shape swirl above the ork’s head. Sparks flew from its nose. It arched itself on the floor and then its head burst, slamming the back of it hard into the ground and spraying the mosaic tiles with blood and bits of skull.

The psychic blast wave tore the flesh from the last servitor and whipped around the wounded Sister like boiling water around a rock.

Emerald lightning sprayed from the glistening nub of the ork psyker’s exposed brain stem, like watching a weed flourish and die in accelerated playback, like current leaping from a broken wire in search of earth.

It found it.

Asger howled in triumph. Koorland had strength left only to remain upright. That felt like triumph enough.

Psychic feedback raced through the fighting ork mobs with the speed of lightning, a darting witchstorm manifested by the xenos’ collective mind that reached through the eyes into their skulls and tore out their souls. It ripped through the mob, a chain of cranial detonations following messily where it passed. A blood splatter suddenly painted the greasy driver’s window of a gargant from the inside. The war engines ground to a halt. One toppled over. Wet bursts and a pelleting sound evocative of skull fragments on metal sounded from the staircases leading up the galleries and the doors behind Olug and Brokk.

A snaking bolt snapped across the Beast’s tusked jaw, and it dropped to one knee, clutched the sides of its head in both hands and gave vent to a howl of pure, mental agony.

Then it looked up at him and snorted. Its eyes flared like wild things.

Something had gone wrong.

The wounded Sister.

Koorland aimed his storm bolter, range point blank, inside the Beast’s shield bubble, and unloaded the entire magazine into the ork’s face. Pyroclastic jelly burst over the ork’s armour and burned. With a dribbling howl, it knocked the storm bolter from Koorland’s gauntlet with a swipe of its left hand.

Largely unarmoured and unpowered, Koorland felt the reinforced bones of wrist, arm and shoulder shatter under the force. The storm bolter thumped into the wall and skidded off along the floor. His mind blacked itself out to block the pain.

Everything vanished but the feel of the power sword in his other hand.

The Beast slumped back, dazed. Its face was molten wreckage, eyeless, nostrils merged into one flapping gill, wobbling polyps of congealed fat hanging from its lips. It was blind as Koorland drew his blade back one-handed, imbued it with every last straining sinew of Dorn’s stubbornness, and then rammed it through the Beast’s open mouth. The Great Beast spasmed once, mighty enough even in its death throes to rip the sword’s grip from Koorland’s hands as it crashed face-first into the tiles.

And was still.

The whole throne room was still.

Koorland sank to the ground, a sudden weakness of the knees flushing out the battle-anaesthesia that had kept him on his feet for far longer than this one encounter. It was done. He had done it. His brain was, if anything, as numb as his body, and it refused to process the magnitude of what that meant.

He had succeeded where a primarch had failed.

They had succeeded.

Through the jangling tinnitus in his ears, he heard Tyris’ shout of congratulation. He saw Krule saunter across, a smile on his face as he spat on the Beast’s corpse. Surprising that the Assassin had been so close during the fight without Koorland noticing. If he had to guess, he would say that Krule had been protecting him. Laurentis emitted a joyful data-squeal, so overcome that he had slipped into binharic. Asger howled, though not like before. This was for the dead and for a victory to end all victories. It sent a shiver down Koorland’s spine, and he smiled for what felt like the first time in his post-human life, shaking with the withdrawl of adrenaline and the delayed creep-back of pain.

‘We won,’ he said.

What more was there to say than that?

Bohemond reared up over the fallen Beast then, on his knees, and impaled the ork’s heart with his blade. He sagged into it, took a moment, then withdrew a hand to disengage his helm’s gorget seals. It came away with a hiss of magnetic suction. Hands around the cross-hilt of his relic-blade, already on his knees, he bowed his head.

‘The primarch was right to entrust this role to you, brother. Forgive me my doubts, they were unworthy of a servant of the Emperor. What you have made be this day is the greatest victory since the destruction of Horus. If I achieve nothing more in my own service it will be to see your name spoken for eternity in the same esteem as Sigismund himself.’

Koorland took his brother’s hand and the two Space Marines allowed their weight to help the other stand.

The new Imperium began here.

As Koorland clasped the Black Templar’s fizzling elbow seal to congratulate him in kind, he saw the great doors at the far, far end of the throne room thrown open. He heard clamouring alien voices, the clank of a giant, armoured stride, and knew that he had been wrong.

About everything.

Eighteen

Ullanor – Gorkogrod, throne room

They had been wrong. So wrong. Koorland saw that now. He looked to the circular dais in the centre of the throne room and its six thrones. Six. He looked to the galleries and, again, six, unique identifiers that marked them apart. Illogical extrapolations ran through his mind as though the gates between what ‘could’ and what ‘could not’ be had been lifted. This was not like the ork empires of the past, not even the last true Waaagh of Urlakk Urg, carried by the iron rule of its single omnipotent ‘emperor’ figure.

There was not one Beast, and there had never been.

There were six. Prime-orks. Each a father to one legion within the whole.

From his position where the defeated ork had thrown him, some way around the circumference of the throne room from the slave’s entrance by which they had entered, Koorland could see the throne that had previously been hidden. It was larger than the others. It was covered with skins and furs, and adorned with black and white checks. As Koorland beheld it, struck by the familiarity of that particular pattern of black and white, the grinding clank of moving armour reached a crescendo and a second Beast passed through the massive main doors.

A second prime-ork.

Or was it the first?

It was greater in stature than the ork Koorland had just fought and encased in armour that was both heavier and more splendid, intricately wrought plates adorned with those black and white jags. A helm with a tusked face made a gory red with encrusted stones enclosed its head. It looked over the ruined gargants to either side of the gate, the hundreds of messily slain orks around the throne room, and emitted a rumbling growl like the war-horn of a Titan. Its gaze set upon the fallen prime-ork and it started forwards. Koorland felt the ground shake. The air around the brute whined as its gauntlets burst into writhing green flame.

This was the ork that had fought Vulkan.

Koorland cursed himself for not seeing it, but then why should he? How could he have reasoned that there could have been more than one Beast?

The how of it did not matter.

He was an Imperial Fist – he should have considered everything.

‘Defend your Lord Commander!’ Bohemond roared, and Kill-Team Stalker opened fire at the same instant, shooting from the chest as they moved at a steady walk to intercept. Bolt-rounds scattered off the prime-ork’s shields. Melta beams and plasma bolts from combi-attachments sizzled across them.

Kavalanera and her three sisters that remained able swiftly overtook Bohemond’s thumping progress. Olug and Brokk bellowed, not far behind. The women flowed across the ogryns and each other, crimson and black, like streams of coloured plasma under the fluctuating control of a multivariate magnetic field, but the prime-ork ignored their power blades as though they were insect stings. Olug barrelled into the great ork’s chest and bounced off. The prime-ork simply walked through him, breaking the ogryn’s hip under its boot, then swatted Brokk contemptuously aside on the edge of its gauntlet. Kavalanera continued to harry. With a growl, the prime-ork drew its gauntlets apart, the fires burning white-green and high, and then thumped them together. There was an implosive clap and a wave of force washed out and knocked the lightly armoured Sisters down.

Koorland heard the change in the thunder of bolter fire. It was missing, cracking along the wall above Koorland’s head. He saw one strike a bracket. The metal plate blew out and the stanchion buckled. The last holding up the gallery.

The whole structure fell away from the wall with a crunch of broken stone.

Bohemond drew sharply up. Asger, too, converging from another angle.

The prime-ork looked up, and the dropped gallery cracked in half over its helmet. Its force field flashed out with a burned stink of ozone and it sank under several tonnes of rock and iron and greenskin dead. Koorland saw the veiled threat of a humanoid shape sprint up one half of the gallery floor and vault up to the prime-ork’s shoulder. Krule. Koorland’s auto-senses were dead, and if they had been unable to track the Assassin before then his eyes had no chance now.

Krule appeared to have a sword in his hand, a long blade that phased in and out of material reality. With silent efficiency, the Assassin buried the weapon in the prime-ork’s neck. The phase blade passed through the prime-ork’s armour as though it just wasn’t there, but either lacked the length to do the same to the greenskin’s throat or found its flesh a tougher prospect.

The prime-ork began to rise, rubble tipping from its shoulders in almighty crashes. It was coated with powder. Bolt-rounds from the kill-team spanked off its unshielded armour.

A vicious twist of the neck sent Krule flying.

The Assassin twisted like an aerial gyro, landed in a roll, drew his executioner pistol and squeezed off bolt-rounds even as he spun. Their effect was no different to those of the Deathwatch.

It was impervious, imperious, and it continued towards Koorland and its beaten brother like an armoured locomotive.

‘Wither before the Emperor’s light, abhorrent,’ cried Bohemond. His ponderous stride bore him into the prime-ork’s path. Tactical Dreadnought armour weighed several tonnes. The vectoral force of a charging Space Marine Terminator was equivalent to being struck by a moving tank, but the prime-ork shunted him aside as though the battleplate was a hollow practice cast.

Asger Warfist slashed across the back of the prime-ork’s legs with similar luck. An up-clip of the giant’s spiked heel left the Wolf Lord on his back.

The last of the Imperial Fists squared himself defiantly. One leg was fully armoured, the other just a knee joint and a boot with some fluid-hydraulic wiring connecting the two to his hip. His torso was a patchwork of missing plates, his gorget ring mangled into a grimace of tortured adamantium. His gun was gone, the arm that would have wielded it useless anyway.

‘Daylight Wall stands forever.’

He lunged for the prime-ork’s groin with his sword. The disruption field was stuttering, caused by power outages from near continuous use, but come the final reckoning that did not matter. The prime-ork took the blow blade-on to its gauntlet palm and trapped it. The monster yanked the relic blade from Koorland’s grip with a strength that was simply irresistible and then, holding it by the blade, struck the grip across its thigh plate. The metal shattered into a dozen pieces.

With a grunt of satisfaction, it cast the last piece aside, planted its boot heel into Koorland’s chest, and shoved him to the floor.

It ground its boot in. Koorland’s solid rib-plate cracked under the weight. His vision turned spotty and black, but his hearing remained sharp.

Its voice was like death from orbit.

‘I am Slaughter.’

After murdering a path through several flights of stairs to reach the broad stone block corridor, Kjarvik’s vox-link with Kill-Team Stalker came back. They were close. He knew that because contact with Clermont, the fleet, or with Thane was still out. At first, his snarled demands for an update were looped back in a growl of static-chopped voices. Then buzzarding cries, barely human in their grief or their anger or both. The second thing Kjarvik knew was that they had failed.

The reasons for that were obvious.

Orks of an especially large breed blocked Umbra’s run on the vast arched gateway at the end of the corridor. They were bulked out in black and white megaplate, appropriately armed for urban combat with powered battle-saws, flamers, and high-volume stubbers.

Under other circumstances, Kjarvik might have doubted his ability to break through such heavy brutes in such numbers, but for once, the luck-spinners spared the Stormcrow a rare smile. The orks had been marching on the gate themselves, too hemmed in now to properly turn and fight the force that struck at their backs.

A blow from Kjarvik’s power fist obliterated a mega-armoured boss from waist to neck. A full magazine of vengeance rounds slowed down another. Blood matted his beard. His braids stuck to his head. Zarrael’s eviscerator was a near-constant meat shriek, white noise above the grunts and the howls and the thunder of heavy firepower. Baldarich’s sword made ribboning flurries of gore. Bohr murdered orks by the dozen with plasma and flame. Phareous’ shield was slick, his bolter still firing. The Iron Snake advanced in a crouch, Atherias walking behind and blazing over his head with bolter and servo-harness. The weapons flashes caused the brilliant purple and gold of his pauldron plate to shine. The Inquisitorial storm troopers made their contribution, pinpoint flurries of las hosing the inevitable gaps that Baldarich and Zarrael’s savagery left behind. Raznick came just behind them, shielding Inquisitor Wienand with his body, whatever neuro-enhancements he had been given allowing him to fire his brace of pistols entirely independently and with astonishing accuracy.

What all of that splendid slaughter told Kjarvik was that they had failed.

The psyker bomb had not worked.

The howl he gave was that of a wolf for its master, and burned his throat like a jawful of winter. He was unsurprised to hear the cries of lamentation from those around him.

‘Push through to the throne room,’ urged Wienand, covering her vox-bead with one hand whilst shooting with her laspistol. ‘Something has gone wrong. I have to see.’

Kjarvik did not need to see. He could already smell the red snow.

With a frenzied gargle, Zarrael tore out an ork’s throat with his bare teeth, dissolved the face of another with a gob of Betcher’s acid, and kicked himself a path to the gate. It was thirty metres high, as dense with imagery as any cave wall on Fenris, but the Flesh Tearer’s wrath cowed its grandeur. It was what lay beyond that put fire under them all.

Kjarvik rushed in behind with a howl, the rest of Kill-Team Umbra at his back, ready to administer the duty for which Koorland had brought them together.

They brought death to the alien.

Once before, Laurentis had witnessed the end of the Imperial Fists. It seemed horribly fitting that he should bear witness again.

He was aware of the Deathwatch and Inquisitorial storm troopers that came in firing through the main doors.

He was aware of the Beast – and it was the Beast, he had no doubt. The titanic ork withdrew its foot from Koorland’s chest, and then, with a rumble of mockery booming from the hollow spaces of its visor, it reached up to unhook its helmet from its gorget. Its flesh was a blackish green, crusted like scar tissue or lignified plant matter. The look it gave Koorland was at once contemptuous and triumphant. Helmet held underarm, it gave the remaining Space Marines and their efforts a derisive look.

It turned and walked away with a sneer.

Once more mankind handed up its best, and again the caprice of the gods had accepted that sacrifice and repaid it in blood.

Asger Warfist howled after it in futility as the Beast waded back into its bodyguard.

The Space Wolf led Kill-Team Stalker and the Sisters of Silence into the attack, Kill-Team Umbra falling on the assaulting mob from the rear. Laurentis was aware of the battle. Retribution so savage and total that even in the narrow-band focus of grief, Laurentis could not have missed it entirely. His eye was blinkered with sorrowful code. His ears carried the nothing whistle of a fluid-pump that did not beat. His small mechanical body was numb in a way that went beyond what its makers had intended.

Glory to the Ominissiah.

He was aware of Bohemond, on his knees and weeping unashamedly over Koorland’s broken body.

In a way that only one whose sensory apparatus was removed from their largely organic brain could experience, Laurentis was aware of it all. It took place in another reality, a noosphere of data-irrelevancy in which he had no interest and had lost the rites to access. All that felt real at that moment lay within the ruin of human flesh and golden-yellow ceramite draped through Bohemond’s arms.

Koorland had not just been humanity’s great symbol of hope. He had been Laurentis’ friend.

‘He needs an Apothecary,’ said Bohemond. The Black Templar wasn’t really looking at Laurentis at all. Much like himself, the Space Marine existed in his pocket space of grief. Behind them a battle raged.

They were both aware of it.

‘There is none,’ said Laurentis.

He knew more about Space Marine biology than most non-Space Marines could profess. He could pinpoint the secondary heart, the oolitic kidney, the pre-stomach. He knew enough to ask the right questions. Not enough to help his friend in any way. Trying not to think too much about what he did, he prodded Koorland’s purpled throat with a digital manipulator. Sensory feedback flowed back through its synthetic axon fibres. Fluid oedema. Larraman coagulation. Crushed cartilage. Like scrunching one’s finger through packing plastek. The incongruous likeness made him squirm and he withdrew the appendage.

The prime-ork had known exactly what had to be destroyed. To eliminate the one thing its rival could not afford to lose.

‘I think… I think that…’

‘No!’ said Bohemond. ‘No, I will not accept it. The line of Dorn must live on.’

Laurentis deployed his extensors for a second examination, this time preparing a full suite of electro-probes and echo-feelers. More out of due diligence than hope. As he extended his tools, a terrific explosion shook the ceiling, ferocious enough to force him to notice it. He rolled his eyeball up and saw light.

The ceiling was cracked. A second detonation blew a hole in it and brought a cataract of frescoed rubble pieces the size of battle tanks crashing down. Immediately under the downfall, the great dais of the six prime-orks was crushed. Spotlights swiped the throne room’s scarred mosaic, followed by the thunderous reports of heavy bolters and the empty prang of return fire from the ground. The signature, circular roar of turbofan engines angled for vertical lift.

An intense beam shone in Laurentis’ eye as it tracked. He blinked, but in the split-second before, he saw a pair of Deathwatch-black Thunderhawk gunships descending through the breached ceiling. They spat fire. Heavy bolters. Lascannons. Too tight for missiles. Lord Thane stood on the assault ramp, waving the embattled storm troopers and Deathwatch aboard.

With no one else of a mind to step into Koorland’s still-warm boots, Inquisitor Wienand gave the order to retreat.

Laurentis was aware of it.

Barely.

But only when Asger Warfist lifted him up under one arm and Bohemond reverently raised Koorland’s body did he pay it any mind.

They had lost.

The last son of Dorn was dead.

‘The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.’

– the remembrancer Thucydides, pre-M0

Epilogue

Ullanor – orbital

Candles flickered, wavering to the hull-dispersed groan of shield hits. The scent and the ethereal haze of incense swirled around the chamber, in and out, with the soft breath of the air cyclers. The small chapel of Alcazar Remembered was buried deep within the heart of the battle-barge. Reliefs portraying the works of the Emperor and the VII Legion were sparse on the walls. A single, unpainted statue of Rogal Dorn stood behind an altar, flanked by a pair of candelabra and an oil-burner made of plain, simple brass.

The last of the Imperial Fists lay in state. The Chaplaincy serfs had done their best with the damage. His shattered torso had been oiled and bound and hidden under full honours. His relic plate had been reassembled and polished until it shone like gold in heaven. His eyes had been closed. The Fists Exemplar no longer had a Chaplain, but the mortals had risen to fill the void and excelled. Perhaps humanity could prosper without the Space Marines after all, as Koorland had suggested they one day must. The space-time cocoon of a stasis field shimmered like a thermal blanket. It made it appear as though Koorland was resting, but somehow it was easier to believe that he was dead.

In the brief time that Thane had known him, he had never seen his Lord Commander rest.

The chapel had space for two dozen Adeptus Astartes, half that if they were in armour, as Thane was. Bohemond and Issachar stood beside him. The High Marshal was in almost as bad a shape as Koorland. He seemed almost angered by that, each slow, deliberate breath coming hotter than the last. The Excoriator’s armour bore no new scars, tasked with fleet command aboard Punished while Thane and Bohemond were engaged on the planet. Whether or not he was plagued by the same sense of dereliction as Thane, the ancient Chapter Master’s face showed nothing.

If he had been but a little quicker…

If he had been able to re-establish contact with that gunship wing just two minutes earlier…

It should have been Thane that had died. Or Bohemond even.

Anyone, but Koorland.

Thane returned to Koorland’s face. He leaned forward, ignoring the tightening stiffness that pulled on his side and made him want to wince. He looked deep into the set of the Imperial Fist’s jaw.

It was not reproach.

‘He looks peaceful.’

‘He looks angry,’ said Bohemond. ‘The Imperium is but half remade. The Emperor’s vision, Vulkan’s admonition – his work is unfinished.’ Thane thought the words disingenuous, since none had protested Koorland’s mission of revivification more sternly. ‘When we return I will stand before the Golden Throne and call a new Crusade in his name.’

‘From whom?’ said Issachar. ‘From where? And with what ships will you transport them? The Navy, the Mechanicus, the Inquisition – we run low on resources, brother.’ Issachar looked down at Koorland. The Excoriator was reserved where Bohemond was reckless, proud where Thane was modest. He was, it was at times easy to forget, more experienced and decorated in war than either of his junior brothers. ‘We must fortify,’ he said. ‘And prepare for the inevitable. We will break the ork’s back over the walls of Terra, just as our ancestors broke the Arch-Traitor.’

Issachar looked at Bohemond. Bohemond looked at Thane. Thane looked at them both. His thoughts placed Verpall, Cuarrion and Vorkogun, and Euclydeas too if the Soul Drinker still lived, interchangeably in their place.

He would not have the Last Wall repeat the mistakes of the High Lords before them. That would be an affront to Koorland’s memory. Whatever power struggles were to follow, he wanted no part of them. He was a Fist Exemplar above all else. There was not a system in his body that had not in some way been modified to serve him better in war, and through him, the Imperium. Always the Imperium.

That sense of duty alone was the ambit of his ambition. It was something that perhaps only one of Oriax Dantalion’s descendents could understand.

Mankind was better.

It deserved better.

SHADOW OF ULLANOR

Rob Sanders

Capturing…

It is a law inflexible, that whatever circumstances fail to destroy a species only serve to enhance it further. Early scientists, wading through their own ignorance, came to understand this in observing the long-lost species of Ancient Terra. Our first primitive steps into the Sol System and the systems beyond confirmed these observations on other worlds. During the Stellar Exodus and the Golden Ages of Expansion, the principle was proven again and again in the dominant xenos species we encountered and studied. We discovered it in the mythological cycles and emergence of the eldar. In the extinction and terrible rebirth of the ancient necrontyr. In the genetically engineered barbarism of the orks.

Every species thinks of its development – its destiny – as its own. This is forward-looking vanity, for those who look back know that we are nothing more than the product of dark and desperate times. A species should embrace its doom. Own it. Acknowledge the part it plays in crafting body, mind, and our presence on planes beyond. The skies have long shown us the way. As the light of distant stars, thousands of years in the travelling, shone down on Ancient Terra and the surface of the Red Planet, we might have seen our fate reflected. While we were still but gawping savages, the ancient races of the galaxy were already fighting by the light of alien suns. Failing. Succeeding. Growing stronger. For only the strong survive.

Strength has many forms, however. The crumbling empire of the eldar and the tombs of the necrontyr may ring with the silence of ages, but only a fool would think their threat consigned to the dusty pages of history. They have been tried and they have been tested but they exist on. They have learned the lessons of calamity. They live the determination of a survivor race. Unlocked potential resides within the horror of their alien flesh.

Some say it is heresy to suggest such things, but like the light of those distant stars, truth finds its way through the obfuscation and darkness of ignorance. Humanity is here and we are no different. Like the eldar, our empire has faltered and we have fallen. Like the necrontyr, we have had to adapt. In many ways, though it might seem abhorrent to admit it, we share the most with the orks. To humanity, they are a plague threatening to engulf the galaxy. To others, we are no different. A scourge of soft flesh and barbarous technologies, whose stated objective – announced with bombast to the void – is to cleanse the stars of xenos presence and assimilate all into an empire. Like the orks, our dominion ebbs and expands. Our strength and appetites grow. In our every defeat lie the seeds of future victories.

First comes the darkness and the thunder, and then the light of the dawn, terrible and true.

One

Segmentum Solar – Coreward Sectors

Worlds ablaze. A decimated empire. A galaxy of green.

If some extragalactic species – some xenos presence, blissfully unknown – had turned its attention to the realm of man, that was what they would have found. An Imperium hollow and without hope. A people scattered, screaming and fleeing for their lives. Planets trailing the smog of destruction through the void. A broken dominion.

The orks were everywhere. They were legion, and they terrorised their victims like monsters of myth. Their brutal technologies were the heralds of apocalyptic doom. Their sheer number was insurmountable. They were a green tide rising, swallowing hive worlds whole. Entire fleets plunged into the depths of their ramshackle barbarity, never to be seen again. The greatest armies of a millennium, uncounted regiments of the Astra Militarum, skitarii legions and Frateris Militia hordes, became nothing more than a bloody sludge through which ork billions stomped as they butchered their way across planets large and small.

High Admiral Thaddeon Trassq, flag officer of the Battlefleet Solar-Rimward, held a thousand battle cruisers and escorts on station in the Fantine Nebula, uncertain of his orders while the surrounding worlds of the Phadrian Cluster burned. Too late the High Admiral realised that his armada was hiding in the path of a different ork fleet entering the subsector. Led by vanguard space hulks that tumbled ahead of the fleet like the colossal chunks of a disintegrating comet, the orks smashed through the tight formation of the Imperial vessels. As battle cruisers and heavy frigates were pushed aside and overwhelmed, a trailing swarm of capsules, landers and assault boats descended upon their majestic wrecks.

In the Nazarex System, millions of agri-worlders perished with their crops as the sudden appearance of a monstrous ork attack moon threw the Praedial Worlds into gravitational chaos. Planets drifted out of their delicate orbits, some spinning towards their colossal sun while others were flung into the frozen darkness of the void.

Entire swathes of Imperial space were left derelict and lifeless in the wake of the destruction. Subsectors crowded with Imperial worlds became planetary mass graves. Smashed cities streamed with smoke, staining the heavens an acrid black. Corpses and body parts hung from vanes and cables, off baroque architecture and shattered statues – testament to the barbarity of the towering monsters storming through streets and structures.

The cardinal world of Koryban-Proctor and cemetery moons of Pulchra V, VI and VII were but shattered remnants, hollowed by the complete eradication of their priestly populations. The Hearth Worlds had been silenced, the boom of their industry and might no more. The colossal forges were now but mountains of scrap among the vapour forests, to be pillaged by the invader.

The creature they called the Beast was everywhere. His monstrous strength was in the brute swing of every primitive blade. His fury could be heard in the crash of rattletrap weaponry. His world-devouring madness could be seen in the fang-faced savagery of the hulking abominations that butchered in his name. The Imperium tottered before his alien wrath and the green inferno that swallowed planet after doomed planet.

Subsectors went dark like candles snuffed out in a cavern. Draznak. Phaal. Trega. Moebius. Solon. Quintarsus. Vulkhano. Battles blazed in the void about the sector Naval base of Gnostangrad and across the Chatasma Deeps. Mandeville points became the sites of horrific ship-to-ship collisions as desperate captains fought to make their jumps into the warp. Others attempted to do so without their Navigators, becoming forever lost in the empyreal storms beyond.

For other worlds the wait for Imperial assistance had simply been too long. Citizens and planetary governors had gone agonising months without word from their sector capital systems or even Terra itself. Urgent and repeated astropathic requests for assistance had been drowned out by announcements of alien invasion and catastrophic military failure in neighbouring systems and subsectors. Worlds without standing regiments of the Astra Militarum or stationed flotillas of Navy cruisers feared the worst in the face of obliteration. Many planets had lost their system ships and planetary militias to the authority and recalls of distant admirals and lord marshals.

Facing their doom in the swarms of space hulks and brute craft entering the system, miserable frater militias were disbanded and surface-to-orbit weaponry silenced. The baroque hives of Eidolon V rang with the screams of madness as the Beast’s unbearable psychic presence shattered minds. On final instructions from Ecclesiarch Mesring, sent shortly before his death, the shrine worlds of Fidessa Secundus and Pontefax XIII were urged to surrender themselves to the alien fury roaring its way across the void. Priests and pilgrims allowed the madness into their hearts, yielding their faith to the apocalyptic power of the Beast. By the time the orks arrived to decimate the towering statues and cathedra, all strata of Ecclesiarchal society on the shrine worlds had surrendered themselves to the Beast’s alien supremacy. On the industrial world of Trantis Di-Delta, the worker clans didn’t even need the intervention of a disgraced High Lord of Terra. They let the alien madness in unbidden and supplicated themselves before the arriving ork warlords, constructing from their communal visions a colossal representation of savage greenskin gods. The monstrous statues, plasma-welded together from assembly line materials, pleased the orks but they didn’t save the clansmen, who were swiftly butchered and sacrificed to the self-same gods.

So much death. Destruction untold. Worlds fell before the irresistible and unreasoning might of the Beast. Populations were slaughtered, Imperial citizens blasted apart, cleaved in two and torn limb from limb by hulking monstrosities. Planets that should have been notations in history books and the sites of grand last stands for colossal Imperial armies instead became only cemetery worlds of shallow graves. Armadas of ancient, cathedralesque battleships were turned into debris fields of scrap and frozen bodies drifting through the blackness. Great star forts and space stations were smashed aside before the might of the ork fleets, sent tumbling towards the surface of the planets about which they held station or into the blaze of system suns. In their wake the merciless creatures left dead worlds of ash, rotting bodies and smouldering scrap.

And those were the fortunate ones. As the green tide crashed on through the segmentum, pockets of systems and worlds were left unmolested. Already swarming with sheltering merchant vessels and freighters, the planets in these areas were overrun by arriving refugees. Order had long since broken down on such worlds but their populations were unified by hope – hope that the greenskin blight of brawn and technological calamity might pass them by. But the orks – creatures of absolute, insatiable appetite – had no such intention.

For the astropaths of the Imperium, around whom planetary governors, Imperial commanders and the captains of isolated vessels gathered, the scale of the horror was painfully apparent. Everyone was desperate for information, news of successes and plans for a coordinated counter-offensive. What the psykers dared not report was that the Segmentum Solar was growing increasingly silent, as astropaths died with the worlds to which they were assigned. For thousands of light years about the Sol System, fleets reported decimation, Imperial armies their annihilation and planets their end. The astropaths could not find it in themselves to tell the terrified and hopeless that no help was coming. That the status conferred by rank, title or planetary tithes could do them no good, or that the remaining armadas were being held back for the strategic defence of Terra and its surrounding systems. Battleships and grand cruisers maintained formation. Colossal troop carriers held at the ready, laden with regiments of Astra Militarum who had no orders to take back doomed worlds, alongside great Ark Mechanicus vessels and mass conveyors laden with Titan god-machines, whose fury lay dormant in vast hangars.

Of organised resistance mounted across the void, the astropaths knew little. Unremembered heroes were too busy fighting and dying where they were to offer assurance to distant victims cowering under green-tinged skies. While common humanity – the Guardsmen, the priests, the hivers, adepts, farmers and servitors – died in their droves, survivors looked to the stars for deliverance. They prayed to the God-Emperor for help and the sons of His mighty sons for salvation. What had the galaxy fought for, a thousand years before, if not for the unity of the Adeptus Astartes? Surely, the Space Marine Chapters would gather as they had done in times past, their strength a shield to protect the weak and defend their Emperor. They did not, however. They could not.

The orks were everywhere. Their attack moons appeared above Adeptus Astartes home worlds. Space hulks smashed into recruitment worlds. Fleets of barbaric craft drifted unannounced into systems in which Space Marine Chapters already fought Traitors and the xenos menace of other invader species. Librarians of all Chapters received calls for assistance all at once. Space Marine companies and strike cruisers were despatched across the void, responding to ancient accords or to reports of unimaginable destruction and warnings from their own sentry stations and outposts. Like dry parchment the void blotched green with enemy intrusions, the appearance of attack moons and armadas. There were so many reports and enemy fronts that Space Marine Chapters, already spread thinly, were forced to prioritise their engagements. As the darkness flashed with void battles and annihilations, the green tide rose, swallowing planets, systems and subsectors. Adeptus Astartes companies, battle-barges and strike cruisers became cut off from the command structures of their own Chapters, and Chapters became cut off from one another.

Driven by some feral instinct and reports of changing xenos migration patterns, the Space Wolves started returning to Fenris in droves. With their home world in the path of a vast enemy armada, the Wolves found themselves in a bitter void battle within their own system against thousands of attack ships carrying millions of orks. Meanwhile, the Ultramarines, used to fighting off ork Waaaghs! at the borders of Ultramar, were swift to respond. As the gargantuan scale of the invasion and the appearance of ork fleets within their domain became apparent, the Ultramarines were recalled from across Ultima Segmentum. With them came companies from the Genesis Chapter, Novamarines and Inceptors, intent on purging Guilliman’s empire of the xenos threat. The Dark Angels, spread across scores of subsectors on various undertakings, struggled to reform and offer a counter-offensive, instead fighting for their lives and those of any civilian populations near where squads and strike cruisers found themselves.

To the galactic north, south, east and west, the Adeptus Astartes fought for survival in the wreckage of a decimated Imperium. While citizens screamed and greenskins roared, the Angels of Death defended dying worlds and struck at the heart of invasion armadas. Drowning in a sea of green death, Space Marines struggled on. Squads were slaughtered without ceremony. Companies were lost attempting to reach the Sol System. Entire Chapters tried to come to Terra’s aid, attempting to break out of ork blockades and rampaging cordons that cut off whole sectors. All failed.

Only the Imperial Fists had been swift and strategic enough to summon their successor Chapters in force to the core systems before the enemy had swarmed the inner segmentum. Only the Imperial Fists had been wise enough to seek the aid of the only living primarch and courageous enough to strike with him at the heart of the ork empire. Only… the last Imperial Fist was dead, slain by the monstrous ork that had made the Imperium his plaything and the galaxy his own. In that one horrific moment, everything changed. The last Imperial Fist had died and hope died with him. A Chapter of the First Founding had been exterminated: the Defenders of Terra were no more.

If the citizens of the Imperium, for all their suffering and screaming, could comprehend such a thing, they would have lost their minds. Every exhausted Guardsman would have laid down his lasgun. Every captain of every vessel would have walked from their command decks. Every Space Marine would have been forced to confront a truth buried deep: that they might have been engineered to be superior exemplars of their species, but in the evolutionary arms race with the greenskin plague, they had lost. For if one Chapter could be destroyed then they all could – and without the Adeptus Astartes, the Imperium was doomed.

Two

Terra – the Imperial Palace

The sun rose over the Imperial Palace.

Rays of light felt their way through the towers, citadels and hives beyond. The elegant architecture of the surrounding fortifications was cast in shadow, while the lamps punctuating the battlement walkway began to dim. Drakan Vangorich walked the ramparts of the Celantine Wall, the tails of his robes gliding along the polished stone. The Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum weaved through the clutter of rare and decorative plants, many of them of off-world origin, and beneath streaming red pennants. He passed statues of long-forgotten Thunder Warriors and monoliths listing in gold the tribes, clans and techno-barbaric warlords gathered under the Emperor’s banner at the end of the Wars of Unification.

Where the battlements widened into a platform overhanging a breathtaking drop from the Palace walls, Vangorich found smooth stone blocks serving as benches, but he did not sit. Instead he stood before the crenellations with his arms folded and his hands buried in his sleeves. A casual observer might have imagined the Grand Master of Assassins to have hidden weapons in there. He did, in fact – but the truth was that it was an unconscious habit, one that he had indulged in increasingly over the past months. He might have been a killer, the overlord of an army of similarly deadly agents of the Imperium, but he was still human and not immune to the anxiety of the times. Vangorich feared no man living or dead, and even held his nerve in the towering presence of humanity’s finest, but the Beast was a raging hurricane of green death swallowing the galaxy, and any man would be a fool to stand fearlessly before the apocalyptic savagery of such a creature.

Vangorich looked down between the crenellations and gave a shiver in the morning chill. It seemed like an unimaginably long way to fall. Stretching his neck in his hood he looked up, glad that the terrible shape of the ork attack moon no longer hung in the heavens. Beyond the dawn skies the Grand Master knew that there was the cold, black void – within which was an empire of broken and besieged worlds. Now, as a High Lord of Terra and with a seat on the Council of Twelve, Vangorich received daily and comprehensive reports: astropathic intelligence gathered from thousands of worlds, star forts, fleets and systems. Robed aides brought him piled stacks of data-slates on a daily, indeed hourly, basis. The reports were no different to those that Vangorich had acquired for himself, previous to his appointment as a High Lord. Now they simply carried an official seal.

His station had changed Drakan Vangorich, despite his best intentions. Palace intrigue and the political games he played seemed more important than ever, given that the tiniest ripples created by the High Lords – for good or for ill – had the power of tsunamis out across the Imperium. Now with a seat at their table himself, Vangorich felt not just the power of his new position but the crushing weight of responsibility. In this terrible game, the Beast held all the cards and had bet every wretched greenskin life on the likelihood that the Imperium would fold. That it would be consumed, as ever, by petty conflicts of its own making and therefore be ripe for destruction. The Beast knew its opponent well.

It was the combination of such feeble bureaucracy and an enemy the like of which the Imperium had never seen that had convinced the Grand Master of the need for action. Intervention. Drastic change – in himself and everyone else. He was convinced that now was the time for such determination. Every delay cost not lives but entire sectors. Every poor decision was not just a political setback but could break the collective will of humanity. Every failure carried with it not only horrific collateral damage but the very real possibility of existential doom. The Beast was coming and Terra was far from ready. His fellow High Lords and the common citizens of Terra were unified in only one thing: they both would only truly realise the need for such readiness with orks in the corridors of the hives and the palaces of the mighty.

It was time for decisive action from people with the backbone to act – High Lords who truly understood that their own private empires and armies were nothing without the Imperium, and that the Imperium was on its knees. High Lords like him.

A pair of Excoriators Space Marines approached along the battlements. Their plate, like the ramparts upon which they strode, was battle-scarred and annotated, a commemoration of the time when their brothers had held the wall against the besieging forces of the Warmaster, centuries before.

Between them they escorted a member of the Ecclesiarchy, a cardinal who cut quite an imposing figure even next to the two Space Marines. Cardinal Creutzfeldt was tall and heavy-set, but carried the extra weight well. He wore his robes and mitre with grizzled authority, while his large belt jangled with smouldering censers and tomes bearing chunky locks. In a tattooed hand he held a crosier that was crowned with a furiously burning brazier.

‘Eminence,’ Vangorich acknowledged.

Up close, Creutzfeldt’s face was a fearful mess. Horrific scars, long-healed, ran down the right side of his face like the tributaries of a delta. They twisted half of his mouth into a permanent snarl. A patch, decorated with the symbol of the Ecclesiarchy, covered his right eye. Creutzfeldt had served as a Ministorum priest in the ranks of the 401st Vymbari Pontificals, earning his scars against the orks of Fendrik’s World in an extended engagement that had all but claimed the regiment.

‘My lord,’ Creutzfeldt returned. Having taken a spear to the chest against the selfsame orks, his voice was a rasp. Still strong with a warrior’s pride and used to carrying a cardinal’s authority, he felt slightly awkward in expressing deference to a High Lord of Terra. Being used to sycophants and flatterers, many on the Council would have taken umbrage at such reservation. Men like Creutzfeldt made them nervous – men who had seen some of the Imperium and had suffered with it.

Vangorich liked him. He was exactly what the Grand Master needed.

‘My condolences,’ Vangorich said, ‘on your great loss, cardinal.’

‘My thanks,’ Creutzfeldt said. ‘With so many weighty matters on the mind of a High Lord, it is kind of you to spare a thought for the people of Aquillius.’

‘And for Fleur-de-Fides before,’ Vangorich added. After losing the cardinal world of Fleur-de-Fides to the Beast, Creutzfeldt had been reassigned to the seat of Aquillius but before he could even reach his new world, it too had been taken by the orks. ‘Tragedies both.’

‘Thank you, my lord.’

‘I have asked you here, Abriel – may I use your first name?’ Vangorich said. He didn’t wait for the cardinal to answer. ‘I have asked you here to consult with you about a very important appointment. As you no doubt have heard, Ecclesiarch Mesring was… removed from office.’

‘High Lord Mesring’s faith was tested,’ Creutzfeldt said, his voice rasping with unforced hatred. ‘He failed that test. He failed his God-Emperor, all Terra and the Imperium of Man. His release was a mercy the xenos-worshipping sack of wine did not deserve. Forgive me, my lord.’

‘No, please,’ Vangorich said. ‘These are emotive matters. His betrayal must have been a shock. With billions of the Emperor’s faithful subjects looking to the Ecclesiarchy for leadership, it would be unwise to leave High Lord Mesring’s seat empty for too long.’ He didn’t make mention of Koorland’s decree that the head of the Adeptus Ministorum no longer counted among the High Lords; he didn’t need to.

‘The orks are a grave threat, indeed,’ Creutzfeldt agreed, after a long uncomfortable pause. ‘If the people are to prevail against them, if their faith is to carry them through these terrible times, then they need to be shepherded to higher spiritual ground. Structures need to be maintained. Figureheads visible. Leadership unquestioned.’

‘This is why I am talking to you, Abriel,’ Vangorich said, looking off into the sunrise, ‘among other strong candidates in the ranks of the priesthood. I have been charged with finding an appropriate replacement. An Ecclesiarch for these dark times.’

‘You have spoken to Malachai?’ Creutzfeldt asked. ‘Shraile? Gorlandriaz?’

‘Among others,’ Vangorich said. He hadn’t, but he would not be drawn on the matter. Vangorich took his responsibility seriously but if the Imperium survived the greenskin apocalypse, then he would need a High Lord of the Adeptus Ministorum that he could control. He needed continued influence in at least one seat that was not his own. Creutzfeldt might indeed be that man but the Grand Master of Assassins had little intention of giving up the seat just yet.

‘Of course.’

‘I would be interested to hear your opinion on our present circumstances,’ Vangorich said.

‘I have fought the orks,’ Cardinal Creutzfeldt told him. ‘There is not a species in the galaxy, among all the rancid xenos-filth that pollutes the void, as mindlessly destructive. They live to fight. To kill. To be the end of all about them. And these invaders – the ones that are extinguishing our worlds one by one across the segmentum, led by this monstrous Beast – they are a breed apart. They are like no adversary we have ever faced. I am a humble servant of the God-Emperor and even I do not feel it heretical to claim that even He would have struggled to contain this threat.’

‘As a humble servant of the God-Emperor,’ Vangorich echoed him, ‘do you feel that we could be witnessing the end of the Imperium?’

Creutzfeldt looked at Vangorich, who in turn stared grimly into the rising sun.

‘Forgive me, my lord,’ the cardinal said, ‘but I feel that question to be a double-edged sword.’

‘It is a simple enough question,’ the Grand Master said absently.

‘If I tell you, without doubt, that we can exterminate the green plague,’ Creutzfeldt said, ‘as any in my position might be tempted to do, you would discount me as a fool living the fantasy of an Imperium long past.’

‘And if you tell me that we are doomed?’ Vangorich asked.

‘Then I would be a fatalistic fool,’ said Creutzfeldt , ‘of no use nor ornament to you or the Imperium.’

Beneath the glorious dawn, Drakan Vangorich came to a decision. He turned to the cardinal.

‘Then forget who I am,’ the Grand Master said. ‘Let me be but one amongst billions. A terrified soul, looking to my confessor for guidance, for comfort, for a truth Imperial. Cardinal, let me unburden my soul to you.’

Vangorich knelt before Creutzfeldt on the ramparts, his hooded head lowered.

‘As you wish, my lord,’ the cardinal said, making the sign of the aquila above the Grand Master of Assassins. ‘For even the strongest are allowed their doubts and fears. A man would not be a man without them. Speak, then, my lord. As if speaking before the God-Emperor Himself, who sees all, who knows all. Unburden your soul.’

‘I have lived a life of deaths,’ Vangorich told him. ‘All necessary. All in service of a stronger Imperium.’

‘The Emperor’s realm was built upon such necessities,’ Creutzfeldt said.

‘I am a blade,’ the Grand Master said, ‘in a box of blunt tools. Tools that seek to dull my edge.’

‘We all live to be of use, my lord.’

‘For so long, I have embodied the fears of others. But now I live my own.’

‘As do we all.’

‘And now all your fears are mine also,’ Vangorich said. ‘I bear the burden of the man who would act, who could act – but does not, in the forlorn hope that others will come to their senses and do what must be done.’

‘It will happen.’

‘I am not so sure,’ the Grand Master said. ‘And I become less sure, every day.’

‘The Imperium has stood for thousands of years, my lord,’ the cardinal assured him.

‘And I fear it will not last the passage of a single year more,’ Vangorich admitted. ‘We have seen our armies decimated and our fleets smashed. Impregnable fortress worlds have fallen and the industry of forge worlds is silenced. By the hour, we lose not ships and soldiers to the Beast but hive worlds and subsectors. Up until now Terra has been a healthy world in a gangrenous empire. But the orks are coming. The green tide rises about us. Terra is doomed, and with it, the Imperium of Man.’

‘I fear you underestimate the fortitude of the Emperor’s subjects, my lord,’ Creutzfeldt said.

‘As those subjects have underestimated the orks?’ the Grand Master returned. ‘I know it might not be a common sentiment to hear uttered within these hallowed halls, but the Imperium has a long history of overestimating itself.’

‘Well, my lord,’ the cardinal said, uncomfortable with such truths, ‘you would know better than I. I might not know much, but I know that the Imperium still stands.’

‘True,’ Vangorich said. ‘But for how long, Eminence? Fleur-de-Fides stood in honour of the Emperor but months ago. As did Aquillius. Now they are but mountains of smouldering masonry, turning silently in the void.’

‘But Terra,’ Creutzfeldt said, ‘is called Ancient for a reason.’

‘We stand on walls,’ Vangorich reminded him, ‘that barely a thousand years ago were crumbling before the might of the renegade Warmaster. You talk of the endurance of the past. I, like the rest of the Imperium, cannot afford that luxury. I live the threats of the present. The fears of the future.’

‘My lord…’

‘Forgive me,’ Vangorich said. ‘I go too far. You see kneeling before you a man at odds with himself and all else. I blame the High Lords for their intransigence and politics. The people for their blindness. Myself for sitting idly on my talents.’

‘I see that,’ Creutzfeldt said. ‘All the Emperor asks of us is that we act in accordance with our unique gifts. You are a man of action. My advice would be to act.’

‘Thank you for your honesty,’ Vangorich said. He lowered his hooded head and half nodded to himself. He had reached a dark decision. ‘I know that could not have been easy, especially in the viper’s nest of faith and politics that is the Imperial Palace. Eminence, would you do me one last service?’

‘Of course, Grand Master,’ Creutzfeldt told him.

‘Would you bless me?’ Vangorich said. ‘I feel the need for the Emperor’s benediction in these dark times.’

‘It would be my honour,’ the cardinal said.

Creutzfeldt put his tattooed hand on the crown of the Grand Master’s hooded head, speaking the benedictions and blessings of the God-Emperor as Vangorich knelt before him. As the cardinal drew back his hand, the Grand Master rose.

‘A thousand thanks,’ Vangorich said, ‘for your confidence and your service to a beleaguered Imperium.’

‘If there is anything more I can do to serve the Imperium,’ Creutzfeldt said, lowering his head, ‘then do not hesitate to call upon me.’ He brought a fat thumb up to his lips. A tiny cut bled on the digit and the cardinal sucked it clean.

‘As you say, cardinal,’ Vangorich said, ‘woe betide the foe that underestimates the Imperium of Man. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there are other matters that demand my attention.’

‘My lord,’ Creutzfeldt said, bowing and backing away from the Grand Master. He turned and tapped his way along the battlements with his smouldering crosier.

Vangorich watched him go. The cardinal would be making his way through the monstrous halls and chambers of the Palace, back to the Ecclesiarchal quarters set aside for his visit. There he would take ill and crash to the polished floor of his chambers. For where bullet and blade had failed to fell Abriel Creutzfeldt on Fendrik’s World, a microscopic pinprick of lethal poison would end the cardinal. He would be found dead, his heart having finally given out after the many trials of his hard and illustrious life.

Vangorich regretted the decision. He liked Creutzfeldt. As he knelt before him, the poison-tip slivers of crystal he wore in his hair waiting to pierce his hood and the cardinal’s unsuspecting flesh, he had wavered. The cardinal would have made an excellent High Lord of the Adeptus Ministorum, an Ecclesiarch the floundering Imperium deserved and needed. Unfortunately, Vangorich’s need for secrecy and security trumped all other concerns. He had let his guard down. Expressed genuine fears and given voice to thoughts a High Lord of Terra could not afford to have. He could not allow word of such weakness to leave the cardinal’s lips, and so he asked for a blessing, and the cardinal’s hand on his head.

As ever, Vangorich was a walking arsenal of silent death. If he were to be searched – a scandal for a High Lord of Terra – the Adeptus Custodes would find no blades or pistols. He carried disguised and concealed weaponry that the blunt security measures of the Palace were ill-equipped to detect. He had made a choice to deploy that weaponry and to end an ally he could not now afford to have.

These were the dark choices of a man of his station, and it was time to make more. While humanity died by the world and the Adeptus Astartes fought for their superhuman lives, Drakan Vangorich would not allow Terra to fall. Like a colossal edifice tottering on faltering supports, the Imperium needed to be strengthened. Reinforced. Structural weaknesses would be torn out and new foundations established. It needed men and women who would lift a smashed Imperium upon their shoulders, rather than cowards content to wander through the wreckage full of fears and excuses, cowards who hid within the walls of their Emperor’s fortress – dead men walking everyone else to their doom through the halls and corridors of the Palace.

Vangorich thought on the bodies he would have to step over to secure such a future. With worlds dying, primarchs dying, First Founding Chapters being exterminated to a man, Drakan Vangorich wasn’t sure that anyone would notice.

Three

Inwit – the Splintering Land

Cold. Dark.

The nightside of Inwit was a swirling black storm of pain and numbness. Out on the ice wastes, away from the baroque glory of the hives and the welcome warmth of a distant sun, there was a solemn gathering. When the Adeptus Astartes entered a system or descended upon a world, such arrivals were usually accompanied by destruction and bombast. With orbital bombardment and the descent of drop pods. With death.

Not so with Inwit. The ice world hung glistening in the void, its peace left reverently undisturbed. It was an important world of the Imperium. A capital of a system cluster. A sector Naval base. The assembly ground for local Astra Militarum regiments.

The status of these establishments meant little to the Space Marines. What did matter was the history of the frozen world, for it had witnessed the arrival of a primarch. Inwit had been the hallowed home world of Rogal Dorn.

It had been appropriate, therefore, following the horrifying events on Ullanor, that the bearers of Dorn’s genetic legacy should congregate on Inwit. In silence. In mourning. In unity. The Imperial Fists had been destroyed. The last of their noble number had lost his life, and with him a Chapter of the First Founding had been lost to the Imperium. Only their Successors remained, each Excoriator, Crimson Fist, Black Templar, Soul Drinker, Executioner, Iron Knight and Fist Exemplar carrying with him all that was left of the Imperial Fists. All that was left of Dorn. So there, on the dark side of Inwit, in the flesh-searing cold, the Successors of the Imperial Fists gathered to honour their fallen brethren.

Without informing the planetary governor, the Admiral of the Fleet or the ruling huscarls, Adeptus Astartes frigates made their silent and sombre approach before deploying their gunships. Using their training and knowledge of Inwit’s defences, representatives of the seven Successor Chapters made atmospheric entry on the dark side of the planet without being detected. It was not difficult for the Space Marines, especially with every eye and augur directed at the void in expectation of the Beast’s coming. The rolling in of the green tide. The arrival of the apocalypse.

Coming in low across the predator-stalked wilderness that was the Splintering Land, Thunderhawks homed in on a ritual beacon – a beacon announcing in code the impromptu inception of the Feast of Blades. As reigning champions, the Fists Exemplar had the right to announce the Feast. With the Imperial Fists destroyed and the Chapter Masters of the Successors due to meet, Thane could think of no better way to commemorate the loss of their noble brothers.

Sending for the Sword of Sebastus – the blade awarded to the Chapter whose champion emerged victorious – Thane had summoned the Chapter Masters of the Imperial Fists Successors to Inwit. Dorn had become a man there; more than a man. He had led his Legion into the Heresy and into the trials of the Iron Cage that had been waiting for them thereafter. He emerged carrying the Sword of Sebastus, a weapon that came to be known as the Dornsblade. It was the honour of Chapters victorious in the Feast of Blades to receive the relic-weapon’s custodianship. With their reigning champion, Kalman Volk, lost on Eidolica, Thane decided to honour all three of Volk, Chapter Master Koorland and the Dornsblade by taking the champion’s place himself.

Thane stepped out onto the frozen floor of the arena. Without his plate, the Chapter Master was a rime-encrusted sculpture of scars and muscle. On this occasion, it had been decided that the combatants should fight not in power armour, but in carapace armour, as had been the tradition in ages past. In their frozen fists each gripped a simple gladius, weapons taken from the frigates’ fighting cages. While still holding an edge, the battered blades were notched and simple in design. With every member of every Successor Chapter needed to defend the Imperium, no one wanted to risk an accidental death.

Pain had been the path of the Imperial Fists, however. They indulged their agonies in the pain-glove, on their fortress battlements and in the bloody siege-breaking assaults for which they were famous. While deaths were undesirable during any Feast, the ceremony demanded that the combatants gave each other their best. That meant the brutality of bruises, sliced flesh, smashed teeth, broken bones and sense knocked clean from skulls. Through the infliction of such pain, one battling participant upon another, each Space Marine sought to achieve communion with their brothers and their primarch.

It was snowing. Flakes sizzled on the roaring braziers that burned about the arena, their guttering flames struggling in the stormy darkness. Beneath his boots, Thane felt the ice creak. The arena had been hastily hewn from the bleak landscape of the Splintered Land. Black mountains rose about them on all sides, and the hollow between had been decorated with blocks of ice to create an arena of frozen angularity. While blocks were used to create obstacles within, the ice forming the arena’s exterior was crowded with the silhouettes of Space Marines. The armoured shapes of Crimson Fists standing with Fists Exemplar. Soul Drinkers side by side with Executioners. Iron Knights holding their own before the storm while Excoriators exchanged solemn encouragements with Black Templars. Chapter serfs and servitors of all the Chapters moved about their masters, seeing to their sparse needs. Gunships idled on the terraced mountainsides, providing heat and shelter for those that needed it. Meanwhile, the icy maelstrom and perpetual darkness closed in, the Feast of Blades all but lost in the howl and bluster of Inwit’s fury.

Stabbing his blade into the ice, Thane knelt down and scooped up a handful of snow. Rubbing it between his palms, he washed the blood of previous opponents from his hands. Something felt broken in his left forearm, his right eye was swollen and bloodshot, while the ragged slice across his chest was knitted together with ice. All over, his flesh burned with the deep cold of the planet. Thane felt the eyes of the gathered Space Marines on him. Chapter Masters like Cuarrion and Verpall, looking on with grim approval. Fists Exemplar, a cold pride thumping in their chests. Champions broken and bested by the Chapter Master, like Stormon Valdred of the Black Templars and Morion Abermort from the ranks of the Iron Knights. Gasparian Riguez, representing the Crimson Fists, was still unconscious.

Thane pulled his gladius from the chill embrace of the arena floor. It had come to this. The Excoriator, Dathan Tychor, and himself, ready to smash each other into the frozen surface of Dorn-blessed Inwit, in honour of a fallen Chapter. He felt the surrounding Space Marines feeding off the torment and expectation. They had to do something with their bottomless grief. Their superhuman rage. Their brotherly love.

Opposite, Chapter Master Issachar was conferring with his champion. With his words stolen by the wind, Thane nonetheless saw him nod his respect through the darkness and snow. Thane nodded back, as Sergeant Tychor jumped down from the ice blocks delineating the arena. As the Excoriator trudged through the snow towards him, Thane could see that the Space Marine was taller than he, and broad. His face and chest were a branching and bifurcating pattern of stapled scars, funnelling in towards the ragged tissue of his right arm. The limb was missing. Instead, the flesh was fused to a heavy-duty shoulder socket and a bionic replacement for an arm. It was an old cybernetic, dented and scuffed, but the sergeant looked like he had been attached to it a long time and knew how to use it.

An Excoriator called out from the surrounding crowd before throwing a blood-stained gladius through the gelid air. It flew blade over pommel across the arena. Tychor had broken his gladius in his previous battle against the Crimson Fist, Riguez. For a moment it looked like Tychor was going to let the gladius fly by, until, with a sudden movement, the champion snatched it out of the air with his bionic hand. To make matters worse, as he stood before Thane, he passed the blade from his right hand to his left and then back again. Clearly ambidextrous, the sergeant finally settled on his left hand for the gladius, leaving the bludgeoning metal of his bionic fist free. He gave the Chapter Master a grim and disarming smile of confidence.

‘Dorn demands your best,’ Thane told the Excoriator. It was almost an order. ‘I demand it too, brother.’

‘You will get it,’ Tychor assured him. ‘Every swing of my blade shall honour Koorland and his Imperial Fists. I won’t disappoint you.’

The mangled Excoriator lifted his blade and with a grim nod Thane tapped the end of his gladius against it. Taking several steps back through the snow the two Space Marines began to circle one another. Tychor gave the Chapter Master the confidence of a good-natured smile, frozen to his face like a mask. In return Thane had for the Excoriator the grim rawness of a bloodshot eye. He blinked as the pair of them circled, the snow swirling into his face.

Within the space of that blink, Tychor had passed his blade back to the metal digits of his right hand. With the speed of his bionics, he swung for Thane. The Chapter Master was faster, however and slipped straight into a powered turn. He had expected his opponent to make the most of the blinding snow and had heard the whine of the bionic’s servos milliseconds before the Excoriator had unleashed its hydraulic fury.

As he turned, Thane brought his own blade around in a clean and savage riposte. He intended to slash the edge of his weapon across the flesh of Tychor’s exposed back, leaving him with another precious scar. The bionic arm came around again, however, batting Thane’s blade aside with enhanced power and speed. Thane felt the force ring through the metal of his gladius, and then the gut-wrenching thud of Tychor’s boot in his midriff.

The Chapter Master grunted and stumbled back. The Excoriator wasn’t done with him, however. He came at Thane again and his gladius flashed in the guttering brazier light, coming down with pneumatic certainty. Thane smashed the blade aside again and again, the broken bone in his arm throbbing with every impact.

Abruptly their swords locked, the frozen metal of the weapons sliding down each other. The blades stuck in the deep cold of Inwit’s night. Thane capitalised, grabbing Tychor’s hilt-clutching hands in his own. Turning, he hauled the hulking Excoriator over his shoulder. The brutal throw sent the sergeant crashing into the ice. Tychor recovered quickly, rolling off his augmented shoulder and back onto his feet.

Thane ran at him, jumping to one side and jabbing in with his weapon. With a shower of sparks, Tychor smashed it aside with the back of his bionic hand. The duel devolved into a sequence of merciless manoeuvres: muscular bodies arching, arms reaching, blades clashing. With the sword in his left hand, the sergeant weaved, stabbed and slashed at Thane. The Chapter Master moved his own blade through a sequence of desperate deflections, turning and bringing the gladius over his head and behind him to protect his back. As the battle intensified, Space Marines on the surrounding ice blocks leaned in. The tip of Thane’s blade nicked the Excoriator above the eye, while the sergeant’s own opened up the muscle on Thane’s shoulder.

With blood in Tychor’s eyes, Thane pressed his advantage. Holding the gladius with both hands he brought down the blade with a cleaving motion. Tychor stumbled back, holding his bionic arm up to absorb the blow. Denting the forearm’s metal with the force, the Chapter Master aimed to repeat the manoeuvre – to cut through the armour and workings of the augmented limb, if he had to. The sergeant absorbed the power of the blow and with clenched teeth pushed against the blade, knocking Thane back.

The Fist Exemplar’s back hit an ice block situated in the middle of the arena, hard enough to leave cracks in the surface. Suddenly, Tychor was everywhere. Pinning Thane to the block with his sweeps and stabbing motions, the Excoriator crowded his opponent. Thane ducked and leaned out of the path of the blade as it carved up the ice at his back. The tip of the gladius hissed into the surface of the block as a manoeuvre designed to skewer him through the midriff went wide. The bionic fist came in like a hammer, narrowly missing Thane’s head and smashing free fragments of ice.

With the pair of Space Marines enveloped in a cloud of ice crystals, Thane passed his gladius between his hands and turned it about. Clutching the hilt, he braced his forearm behind the blade. As the pneumatic swing of the Excoriator’s bionic arm came in again, Thane was ready for it. While the power behind the blow almost knocked him into the ice, the squealing, sparking edge of the blade took the impact. Coming back up off his bending knees, Thane hammered his right fist home in Tychor’s stomach. It was like hitting stone, but after a second and third gut-pounding slug to the midriff, Thane forced his opponent back.

With grimaces of pain and determination carved onto their frost-burnt features, Thane and Tychor fought on. Their bodies became a camouflaged pattern of red as their blood steamed and froze to their skin. As Chapter Masters, battle-brothers and serfs watched the titanic battle, they were forced from their positions on the block wall of the arena as the two opponents fought their way along.

Thane didn’t know what drove the Excoriators sergeant. He had bested Chapter champions and was now holding his own against a Chapter Master. Thane cursed himself for such a foolish dismissal. His bruised bones and sliced flesh testified to Tychor’s natural skill and battlefield experience. What were sergeants and captains – and Thane had faced both in the arena – but the Masters of Chapters in waiting? He could be exchanging blows with a future Chapter Master of the Excoriators. How could Koorland have possibly known that one day he would be Master of his own Chapter?

What had started as a noble battle of ceremony and bladework had turned into a savage brawl. Neither Exemplar nor Excoriator wanted to concede the fight – not with the spirits of their Imperial Fists brothers watching over them. The Excoriators had a reputation for indomitability, earned long ago when they still wore the legionary yellow of the Imperial Fists. They were attrition fighters in the noblest tradition, their craft learned on the walls of the Imperial Palace, defending their position against blood-crazed World Eaters and the thunder of the Iron Warriors. Thane doubted that a champion like Dathan Tychor knew how to surrender.

Thane and the Excoriator slashed and pounded each other about the arena, the cold scalding them back to their senses as their bodies crashed into ice blocks and the frozen floor. Thane became aware of voices and movement from around the arena. Fists Exemplar were calling out their protestations. Excoriators were arguing with them. Ishmael Korda, the Apothecary of Thane’s Second Company, had even dropped down into the arena, ready to administer treatment. Thane slowed the thud of his hearts and allowed a hand to come up. He held an outstretched palm to his Fists Exemplar, to Apothecary Korda, and to Chapter Master Issachar – who also seemed ready to call off his champion.

Taking an agonising breath, Thane looked up at Sergeant Tychor. He could see a cold determination in his eyes. Dorn’s determination.

‘Submit,’ the Excoriator said, his words an entreaty lost in the storm.

‘And dishonour us both?’ Thane returned before the pair once again clashed frozen blades.

Like the battered, blood-streaked Excoriator, Thane was at the epicentre of a galaxy of pain. In the mirror of Tychor’s blade he saw reflected the faces of the greenskin invader, hulking monsters of tusks, blood-red eyes and alien barbarism. Each staggering blow of the bionic fist became the quake of world-shaking ordnance or the planet-tearing upheaval of gravitational weaponry. Thane’s body was a field of battle, the burning agony of each wound in his freezing flesh like notations on a map. Engagements fought and primarchs lost. In Tychor’s furious features he thought he saw the ghost of Koorland’s own – the last Imperial Fist fighting his way into a future that belonged to someone else, leading a spectral Chapter, a fallen brotherhood, into eternity.

Koorland was not there and neither were his Imperial Fists. Only their noble Successors, fighting on. Honouring their name and upholding their traditions. Beneath the scorched surface of his own armour and the blue, ivory, grey and black of his brothers’ plate burned the yellow of a Legion unbroken. For a moment, amongst the fury of crashing blades, the crunch of snow and grunts of superhuman exertion, Thane felt the wisdom of the primarch. Rogal Dorn – loyal, unflinching and resolute. The shield of Terra and most trusted of the Emperor’s sons. Dorn, who had railed against the breaking of his mighty Legion and purged his grief with battle and pain. Amongst the savage bladework and the agony of his wounds, the Chapter Master felt a flash of inspiration. An idea hot from the heart. From the abyssal darkness of his breast, where hope had gone to die, sprang forth a concept fully-formed and burning with possibility.

‘Wait,’ Thane found himself saying, but the damage had already been done. He had become distracted and Tychordid not waste his opportunity. The Excoriator’s blade smashed Thane’s from his frozen hand. Before Thane had chance to register the manoeuvre, Tychor’s sword was hauled back and came thrusting for the Chapter Master’s stomach. Thane grabbed for the sergeant’s arm and the pair fought for control of the weapon. The tip of the blade pushed on through, into the flesh of Thane’s muscular side. Tychor heaved at the blade, while the Chapter Master held him back.

The sergeant was powerfully built and burned with an indomitable will. He had brought honour to himself and his Chapter in the arena. For Thane, however, there was more at stake than the honour of a single battle-brother, or a thousand such. With a snarl he powered Tychor’s arm back and pulled the tip of the blade from his bleeding side.

‘I have something of yours,’ Thane told his opponent. With agonising and incremental movements he pressed the gladius blade back at the Excoriator. With a final thrust Thane forced the tip of the sword into the champion’s scarified flesh, between his shoulder and the fused interface of the replacement limb. Tychor roared as the blade sank through his muscle. ‘Have it back.’

Thane didn’t stop there. He twisted the gladius blade within the sergeant’s flesh, drawing a howl from the Excoriator. The bionic limb locked in place as the turning gladius prised its interfaces from nerve and bone.

Thane threw himself around, wrenching the hilt of the impaling blade away from the sergeant. With the horrible popping of bone and interface lines, he tore the bionic limb free of its anchorage. As the metal limb crashed to the arena floor, sparking and twitching, gore spattered from the ruined shoulder.

He pointed the gladius at Tychor. ‘Submit, brother.’

Silence replied. Thane held the blade, its point dimpling the side of the champion’s throat. He would not ask again. He had been right about the Excoriators. The sergeant would have rather died than submitted in the arena, and Thane would need such qualities in the weeks and months to come. He had no intention of beating them out of a worthy opponent.

Thane looked to Chapter Master Issachar. The Excoriator was halfway into the arena, with his Space Marines and Bohemond of the Black Templars.

‘Enough?’ Thane said, his voice hoarse with pain and exertion.

Issachar nodded.

Thane tossed the gladius into the darkness of the storm and held out his hand. Blinking blood and snow from his eyes, the Excoriators champion took it. The Chapter Master drew the indefatigable sergeant to him with the handclasp of a brother, and as he did so, another arena was created about them. Not of block and ice, but of flesh and honour. Chapter Masters and their Space Marines closed in, followed by attendant serfs and servitors. They came up behind Thane and Tychor, laying cloaks of yellow loosely across their frost-burnt backs. Apothecaries moved in to tend to their champions’ wounds.

‘Then I see no reason why the honour of victory cannot be shared,’ Thane announced to them all. He saw immediate discomfort in the Excoriator’s eyes. The sergeant’s pride would never allow him to accept a victory unearned. ‘Shared between all the descendants of Dorn – all the worthy Successors of his Imperial Fists. For beneath our plate are we not all still Imperial Fists? Was not their blood the same as our own – the blood we have spilled at this Feast, in this arena, in their memory?’

‘What are you saying?’ Issachar of the Excoriators asked, looking to Cuarrion, Euclydeas, Bohemond, Vorkogun and Verpall each in turn before returning his gaze to Thane.

‘That we should undo what has been done,’ said Thane. ‘There is not a brother among us who, if he could, would not have sacrificed all to save Koorland, the Imperial Fists or the Emperor’s Imperium. What if we can?’

‘How?’ Issachar pushed.

‘By carrying out the primarch’s wishes,’ Thane told them. ‘We all know how it wounded Dorn to break his Legion. The grief of it never left him. Imagine how he would have felt to see this day come to pass. Imagine what he would do now, if he could have attended this Feast. What he would tell us. Of course, the loss of the Imperial Fists will be remembered – will be honoured by all the Chapters here present. But all of the Chapters here were Imperial Fists once… and could be again.’

He let the idea sink home. The pain and trials of the arena battle had lent Thane clarity and some scintilla of the primarch’s wisdom. He allowed the Space Marines and their Chapter Masters a moment to take in the enormity and significance of what he was proposing.

‘The Imperium is not ready to lose a First Founding Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes,’ Thane said, ‘let alone the Defenders of Terra. Not now. Not with the galaxy collapsing around it and an alien armageddon to still face. And why should the people of the Imperium ever know? Why should they ever experience such fear and uncertainty? We can be their shield and protect them from these truths, just as we shall protect them from this galactic predator.

‘Let every Successor give back a little of what it took to build their honoured Chapters – in vessels, weapons, battle-brothers and plate. And for Dorn’s sake, let that plate be painted yellow.’

Thane looked around the gathering. At Verpall and Bohemond, who nodded solemnly. At Vorkogun and Euclydeas, their faces set in stern approbation. At Cuarrion of the Crimson Fists, who even ventured a grim smile. At Chapter Master Issachar, who strode forward to take the Sword of Sebastus from the serf who had brought it forth.

The sword’s elegance was its simplicity. Crafted from a single piece of adamantium, its pommel was a prism and its crossguard was stamped with the numerals VII. Its blade was polished to a mirror finish. Issachar held the weapon up before the gathered Space Marines. For a moment, Thane saw his battered reflection in the blade. That moment ended as Chapter Master Issachar gave the Dornsblade to him.

‘For Dorn’s sake?’ Issachar said. ‘For Dorn’s sake, let the best of us – victorious in the Feast and brother to all of us – take his rightful place as Master of the Imperial Fists. Let his name be carved into the bones of Rogal Dorn, and let no son of Dorn speak beyond our brotherhood of this again.’

With grave reverence, Maximus Thane took the offered Sword of Sebastus. There were no words for such an honour and so the Space Marine marked the moment as his primarch would have done: with silent solemnity.

‘What now, Chapter Master?’ Issachar asked finally, the storm intensifying about them.

‘Now we return to Terra,’ Thane said, in syllables of steel. ‘To gather our strength. For the Imperial Fists and their Successors go to a war the like of which we have never seen.’

‘And what of the mistakes of the past,’ Issachar asked, ‘and of history repeated?’

‘As our brotherhood has come together,’ Thane said, ‘so must humanity. Send for your Epistolary. I need to send word to Terra. I must speak with the High Lords.’

‘And you think that they will listen?’ Issachar said.

‘No,’ Thane admitted. ‘But that is because we do not speak their language. We need political animals, men of leverage and influence who do. If we are to open closed minds and release our full potential then we are going to need a hammer and a pry bar.’

‘Who do you have in mind?’ Issachar asked.

The Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists considered.

‘We must contact Kubik, the Fabricator General,’ Thane said at last, ‘and Grand Master Vangorich.’

Four

Ophidium System – Arx Meridia telepathica matrix

First Captain Zerberyn stood on the command deck of the battle-barge Dantalion, taking in the destruction. The Ophidium System was no more. It had been a trading hub of ancient commercial significance. Dominated by the hive world of Bucolica Mundi and near a hundred orbiting agri-moons, it was rumoured that the system fed half the sector.

It did so no longer, however. Gone were the fleets of merchant vessels and bulk freighters. Gone were the audit stations, the void storage depots and the orbital docking facilities that Bucolica Mundi wore about its fat belly like a belt. Gone was the planet itself. Torn apart by the orks’ gravitational weaponry, the hive world now drifted through the system as an ever-expanding blizzard of shattered rock and billions of frozen bodies. The Shepherd Moons had fared little better, their delicate orbits thrown into disarray. While some were flung off into the void, their worker populations freezing to death along with their livestock, others burned in the closing embrace of the raging Ophidium sun.

In the hive world’s place, Zerberyn saw an ork attack moon. A monstrosity of rock, rusted metal plating and gigantic weaponry. Upon its surface, a red, clenched greenskin claw had been roughly painted – not unlike the clasped gauntlet that identified the First Captain’s own vessels as belonging to the Fists Exemplar. About the moon, like the swirling stellar material of some newly formed star, a maelstrom of fragmented planetary rock and monstrous ork attack craft circled. Like a hurricane passing through the void, through enemy armadas and systems, it scoured Imperial subsectors clean of life.

‘I will repeat myself,’ Mendel Reoch hissed through his half-helm. ‘This is ill-advised.’

As if to echo the Space Marine’s view, the Dantalion shuddered briefly with the impact of a piece of debris that had found its way through the turrets.

‘Your opinion is noted, Apothecary,’ the First Captain said from the command pulpit.

‘The Chapter Master must be warned,’ Valric Lasander said. ‘Terra must be warned. These monstrosities have a weakness. It must be exploited.’

Reoch pointed towards lancet screens full of destruction and the enemy fleet that had wrought such calamity. ‘I am not seeing weakness out there. You are seriously suggesting that you want to take our ship into that?’

‘Of course not,’ Lasander admitted, ‘but we must reach the telepathica matrix so we can get word to Chapter Master Thane, and that is worth any risk.’

‘It’s comforting to know that I am surrounded by wrong-headed fools who would rather throw away lives than think,’ Reoch said, irritably.

‘Apothecary…’ Zerberyn began.

‘Don’t underestimate Chapter Master Thane,’ Reoch told him, glancing at Lasander to include him too in the rebuke. ‘He probably already has the information you risk so much to impart, and even if he does not, it will not matter. The Fists Exemplar will not allow this threat – this Beast – to prevail. Like him, we should be marshalling our strength and taking the fight to the orks.’

Lasander stepped aside and wordlessly offered a gauntlet towards the devastation of the Ophidium System and the ork attack moon.

‘Obviously, I don’t mean to make our stand here,’ Reoch said. ‘That would be suicide.’

‘Your faith in Thane is well-placed,’ Zerberyn said, ‘but just as there are procedures to follow on the surgical slab, there are protocols to follow in times of war.’

‘Protocols.’ Reoch’s tone was skeptical.

‘Yes,’ Zerberyn told him. ‘I know you are eager to get back to fighting the orks, but you would use a chainsword where a las-scalpel is required. I have seen you strategise, pick your enemies and triage the wounded. That is all I am doing here, Apothecary. Favouring the strategy that yields the most effective outcome. With knowledge of the aliens’ susceptibility to psychic assault, Terra might be secured, the Imperium unified and the Beast brought down.’

‘That may be, but we are not seeing much unity out here,’ Reoch retorted.

‘Explain yourself, brother,’ Zerberyn demanded.

‘I am saying that the Imperium should get the heroes it deserves,’ the Apothecary told them.

‘My lord,’ Lasander protested.

‘Let him speak,’ the First Captain said.

‘You were there,’ Reoch said. ‘You saw the regimental mutinies at Archangelus. Commodore Beauchamp’s refusal to abandon his station and join our number. The silent Mechanicus, too busy fortifying their forge worlds to accompany us in a counter-offensive.’

‘There might be other reasons for that,’ Lasander said, looking between the Apothecary and Zerberyn. ‘We keep ill company.’

‘The Iron Warriors are the only ones fighting alongside us,’ Reoch said simply.

‘They are not to be trusted,’ Lasander insisted.

‘Maybe not,’ Reoch said, ‘but that is not for you or I to decide.’

‘It makes me uneasy to hear you speak of them with such favour,’ Lasander said.

‘Like you, I favour the strong,’ the Apothecary said. ‘The Adeptus Astartes have always known the flaws of humanity. Its weakness, in body, spirit and mind. We know them for greed, politics and the indulgence of their fears. When humanity isn’t falling before its foes, it is selling out its allies.’

‘Betrayal?’ Lasander said. ‘You want to talk about betrayal? Phall? Sebastus? Terra?’

‘And what of the Rancora Deeps, Krastengrad and One-Twenty-Five-Twenty?’ Reoch countered. ‘Loyalties are but matters of time and place – and the High Lords of Terra are only loyal to themselves. Their ships stand off. Their armies flee. Their faithful embrace the worship of this Beast. How can we fight this alien invasion with that? We fought side by side with the Iron Warriors during the Great Crusade, as we do right now. Kalkator’s vessel sits under our guns and we have done nothing. Why? Because the First Captain knows that right now, a living Iron Warrior is worth more to our cause than a dead one. We need his warriors, their weapons and their assets. Let’s not waste them here in the service of protocol.’

A hololithic display crackled to life nearby, its signal hissing and warping with every void-borne rock to strike the Dantalion. The spectral form of Warsmith Kalkator presented itself on the command deck, battleplate a rust-mottled pattern of tarnished silver and stripe.

‘The Palimodes, First Captain,’ Shipmaster Marcarian said, stepping to one side.

‘You have something to report, Iron Warrior?’ Zerberyn said with impatience.

Kalkator let the suggestion that the Fists Exemplar were in charge of their joint venture pass. ‘Only that this was ill-advised,’ the Iron Warrior said.

Lasander looked to Reoch, but the Apothecary shrugged as if to say that he had told them so.

‘My vessel has sustained damage in the debris field. Repairs are necessary and urgent,’ Kalkator continued.

‘How long will this take?’ Zerberyn asked.

‘It will take us no longer than three hours to repair the damage,’ Kalkator said. ‘I would curse the decimation in this system, but I suspect that it is the only thing keeping our ships from being discovered by the orks.’

‘Very well,’ the First Captain said. ‘We shall proceed to the telepathica matrix and relay our warning to Terra.’

‘You will find no redemption there, Son of Dorn,’ the Iron Warrior said. ‘Not for words and not for actions. The galaxy is short on second chances – and you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Take it from one who knows.’

‘I am doing this, Iron Warrior,’ Zerberyn told him. ‘It is no less in your interest than mine that Terra defeats the orks.’

‘Agreed,’ Kalkator said, ‘for I much prefer fighting Imperials than greenskins. Though in truth, you both seem to like fighting yourselves.’

‘Three hours,’ Zerberyn said, moving the uncomfortable exchange on.

‘Do what you must,’ Kalkator said, ‘but once my repairs are made, I and my ship are taking leave of this deathtrap system.’

‘Such fearful assessments are not your reputation,’ Lasander said.

‘I fight the orks on my own terms,’ Kalkator told him. ‘What would you have us do? Defend a pile of void-strewn rubble? Mount a suicidal siege on that attack moon with insufficient men and vessels?’

‘No,’ Zerberyn admitted.

‘Then do not waste my time with your own fearful assessments,’ Kalkator said. ‘Palimodes out.’

The hololithic transmission faded to static and then to nothingness. Lasander grunted his derision.

There was a good reason why the orks, in their devastation of the system, had not discovered the Arx Meridia installation. The telepathica matrix was stationed in orbit close to the Ophidium star. Within the relative chill and darkness of colossal protective shielding, it was safe from the radioactive inferno of the sun. Lost, from without, in the blinding glare and static of the star, it remained safe from the invading attentions of the orks.

As they ploughed on through the blaze, the temperature aboard the Dantalion rose. Void shields crackled and pulsed while the command deck was flooded with blinding light from the bridge lancet screens. As the battle-barge fell in behind the orbiting station and the glowing metal of its protective shield, everything returned to blotched darkness. Upon the Dantalion’s approach, Zerberyn could see that beyond the baroque system ships of Adeptus Astra Telepathica, one other vessel was docked to the station.

‘Master Marcarian?’ the First Captain said.

‘It looks as if she belongs to the League of Black Ships,’ the shipmaster said, leaning in over deck serfs, servitors and consoles. ‘The Athymian Astra, my lord.’

‘A tithe ship?’ Lasander said.

‘For unbound psykers, yes,’ Marcarian confirmed.

‘She must have been levying the system when the oks attacked,’ Reoch said, ‘then sought shelter at Arx Meridia.’

‘Communications?’ Zerberyn asked.

‘From the station?’ the shipmaster said. ‘No, my lord. Nothing.’

‘Our reputation precedes us,’ Reoch mused.

‘Shipmaster,’ the First Captain said, ‘dock with the station.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Lasander,’ Zerberyn went on. ‘Have a squad meet me down in the airlock vestibule.’

‘You shall have my best, First Captain – Sergeant Vasmir.’

‘And continue with your long-range augur sweeps,’ Zerberyn ordered.

‘You are still going over there?’ Reoch asked.

‘We are going over there, Apothecary,’ Zerberyn said, making for the command deck elevator. ‘We need to find an astropath, and the souls on that station and the crew of the Black Ship may need our aid.’

Locking harsh gazes with Lasander, Reoch turned to follow the First Captain.

In the airlock vestibule that rang with the reverberating boom of battle-barge and station coming together, they were met by Titus Vasmir and his squad. The five Space Marines checked each other’s scorch-patterned plate before moving on to their own boltguns. A serf arrived in the vestibule with Zerberyn’s helmet, gladius and pistol, before exiting as steam vented about the Fists Exemplar. The docking had been successful.

‘First Captain,’ Vasmir acknowledged.

‘Flanking positions,’ Zerberyn ordered as the lock opened, making it clear that Vasmir’s squad was to perform the duty of an escort.

With Squad Vasmir marching either side and the sergeant in front, Zerberyn and Apothecary Reoch entered the telepathica matrix station. Within, Arx Meridia seemed like a haunted cathedral. The astropaths and their servants kept a dour and functional installation, largely dominated by dormitory cells, choir halls and techno-arcane equipment designed to relay and augment the astropathic talents of the station’s psykers. Since astropaths were blind, decorative features were restricted to hexagrammatic wardings, relief symbols and textured tapestries.

‘No reception party?’ Reoch said, both suspicious and insulted. ‘Or word from the choir-master?’

The facility appeared to be deserted. No robed astropaths. No adepts or station bondsmen. Not even servitors. ‘Where is everyone? Could the station have been attacked?’

‘No bodies, either,’ Zerberyn said, before adjusting his vox-channel. ‘Lasander?’

‘Captain?’ the Veteran Sergeant crackled back.

‘Are there any signs that the orks have already been here?’

‘Stand by,’ Lasander said, then a moment later: ‘The Athymian Astra shows battle damage down her flanks and engine column, but I’m assuming that was the cost of reaching the station. It doesn’t look like ork fire, though. Too precise. Arx Meridia itself is untouched.’

‘Make our announcement,’ Zerberyn said.

‘You might think we had already done that,’ Reoch commented.

The Fists Exemplar were traversing a scriptorium. A long, tall room, its walls were lined with bookcases stuffed with dusty tomes and scrolls. Desks and stools lay upturned all around. Above their heads, raised galleries and walkways projected from the shadows.

‘Arx Meridia matrix,’ Lasander’s voice boomed down the length of the cavernous chamber. It seemed that communications were being run through the facility’s vox-caster system. ‘This is the Adeptus Astartes battle-barge Dantalion, First Captain Zerberyn in command. The Space Marines of the Fists Exemplar require an audience with the station choir-master. Present yourselves.’

Zerberyn slowed, the Space Marines of Squad Vasmir with him. The sergeant and Reoch took a few more steps before turning.

‘First Captain?’ Vasmir said.

‘What is it?’ the Apothecary asked.

‘I thought I heard something,’ Zerberyn told them. ‘Sergeant, auspex – give me a sweep of the surrounding chambers.’

With Reoch looking around and Sergeant Vasmir going to work on his multi-scanner, the First Captain heard the sound of the squad’s gauntlets creaking about the grips of their boltguns.

‘Multiple signatures,’ Vasmir called out. ‘Ambush pattern!’

The gloom of the scriptorium suddenly became a storm of las-blasts and fury. Cooking the air, criss-crossing beams of energy seared into the plate of the Fists Exemplar. With flash-scarring and smouldering craters decorating their armour, the Space Marines fell into an immediate defensive posture against one of the walls. Powerful las-beams burned their way across the hall from all directions. Surrounding their First Captain, Squad Vasmir took their positions, boltguns primed and ready.

‘What are your orders, my lord?’ Sergeant Vasmir called.

Zerberyn lifted his head to peer around the chamber. He could see dark shapes in carapace moving along the raised galleries and out of the gloomy corridors adjoining the scriptorium. They wore power packs on their backs, enhancing the effectiveness of their weaponry. The lenses of their helmets burned the red of judgement as they took cover and rested their lasguns against corners and on toppled tables. Zerberyn realised that if they had reached the end of the hall they would have been caught in a bloody ambush.

‘Captain!’ the sergeant urged.

‘Hold your fire,’ Zerberyn growled.

‘What?’ Reoch said, turning on his captain. ‘We’re being fired upon.’

‘This must be a misunderstanding,’ Zerberyn said. ‘I will not take the lives of loyal Imperial troops over an error of judgement. If your system was swarming with orks then you might be over-ready with your weapons yourself.’

Reoch drew his bolt pistol.

‘It is,’ the Apothecary said, ‘and I am.’

‘Sergeant?’ Zerberyn said.

‘They appear to be Inquisitorial storm troopers,’ Vasmir said before a stream of light tore over his head. ‘Probably from the Black Ship,’ he added.

‘What are the Holy Ordos doing firing upon us?’ Reoch asked.

‘Captain,’ Lasander said over Zerberyn’s helmet vox. ‘I am getting reports of firing aboard Arx Meridia. Do you require reinforcements?’

‘Negative,’ Zerberyn said. He didn’t want to add to the havoc and confusion within the station. ‘Stand ready, but do not intervene unless I send word.’

With the air warming around them and the floor cratered with glowing impacts, Zerberyn fired three shots into the chamber ceiling. As he expected, the highly trained storm troopers retreated behind cover as chunks of metal and plascrete cascaded down in front of them.

‘Troop commander,’ Zerberyn called, taking advantage of the break in the blazing ambush. ‘Stand your men down. I am Zerberyn, First Captain of the Fists Exemplar. I have information vital to my brothers securing Terra from the alien threat. It is imperative that I make contact with them. I need to commandeer the abilities of this station’s astropathic choir to do so.’

After a few moments of tense silence, the storm erupted again, with beams searing into stone and over their heads. One las-blast found its way to glance off Reoch’s pauldron, spraying the Apothecary’s half-helm with glowing cinders of ceramite.

‘Cease firing or die!’ Reoch called out.

‘Troop commander,’ Zerberyn repeated. ‘The credentials of your order will not be able to protect you from the Adeptus Astartes.’

‘My lord,’ Sergeant Vasmir said. ‘They’ve been isolated. They could have taken leave of their senses…’

‘Or have already surrendered themselves to the xenos faith,’ the Apothecary said, ‘for which there is only one cure.’

Suddenly the scriptorium was silent again. The gloom of the hall returned, with the lasrifles of the storm troopers snapping to a stop in unison.

‘Troop commander,’ Zerberyn called again.

‘He is not in command here, captain,’ a voice crackled across the vox-casters around them. ‘I am.’

‘Identify yourself,’ Zerberyn commanded.

‘Darghastri,’ the voice came again, ‘of the Emperor’s Holy Inquisition.’

‘Then you will know, Lord Darghastri,’ Zerberyn said, ‘that we fight on the same side, for the same cause. That the Beast is our common enemy. Put aside your weapons and your men will not be harmed, I give you my word.’

‘Your word, eh?’ Darghastri said. ‘What would the word of a traitor be worth these days? Probably little more than a greenskin’s, I would think.’

‘Vasmir is right,’ Reoch said. ‘He’s gone insane.’

‘It is unwise to insult the Adeptus Astartes,’ Zerberyn told the inquisitor.

‘I dare say you are right, but you have fallen from the Emperor’s grace,’ Darghastri said.

‘Lord Darghastri,’ Zerberyn called. ‘The Adeptus Astartes are not in the habit of issuing warnings – but as a courtesy, I am doing so. To you, Lord Inquisitor. A final one. Lay down your weapons and surrender this facility to the Fists Exemplar, or suffer the Emperor’s wrath in bolt and blade.’

‘I can’t do that, captain,’ the inquisitor told him. ‘And neither can you. For the Emperor’s wrath is reserved for the enemies of His holy Imperium. For you, captain, and your traitor-hearted Space Marines.’

‘You shall pay the price for such accusations and false reports,’ Zerberyn growled.

‘At least the price shall not be my immortal soul,’ Darghastri said, before telling his storm troopers: ‘Destroy them.’

Zerberyn gritted his teeth behind the grille of his helm.

‘These servants of the Imperium have given themselves over to madness,’ he said to his men. ‘The order is given. Kill them. All of them.’

The Fists Exemplar advanced upon their new-found enemies. Like the closing of a ceramite trap, Zerberyn and his Space Marines turned the storm troopers’ ambush into a bolt-storm that rolled back towards the soldiers. The armour of the Fists Exemplar soaked up the blasts of lasrifles. With patches of their plate glowing with the insistence of gunfire, they hammered the troopers back with merciless bursts from their weapons. Beyond, they could hear urgent orders being called between the soldiers as they moved to take different positions about the end of the scriptorium.

It couldn’t save them. Within the blink of an eye the Fists Exemplar were upon them, the mortals looking down the sights of pistols and boltguns. With cold certainty of purpose, the Angels of Death lived up to their name. Bolt-rounds came blasting at the Inquisitorial storm troopers with a speed and accuracy they could never match. With suprahuman reflexes and a lifetime of training, the Space Marines blew ragged holes through chests and skulls, turning carapace armour and helmets into bloody mulch. Rounds exploded out of the backs of the soldiers, spattering the floor and furniture with gore. The force of the impacts lifted them off their feet and slammed them into the bookcase-lined walls. Before they even had time to hit the ground the Fists Exemplar had turned, aimed and delivered another death-dealing blast at their next victim. All the while beams of energy seared the air about them and left scorched craters in their plate.

To their credit, the storm troopers did not break. They died as they had lived. Precisely. Economically. Sergeant Vasmir unleashed the devastation of his boltgun on full automatic, turning hiding soldiers into a mess that was barely recognisable as human. With the troopers in the hall dead, Vasmir ejected his empty magazine and slammed in a new one.

Beyond, orders had turned into panicked shouting. An Inquisitorial storm trooper ran out from an adjoining corridor, clutching a plasma gun, and Zerberyn and Reoch both turned their pistols on him. As bolt-rounds tore the trooper’s body apart, the globe of superheated energy blazing forth from the plasma gun streaked away from the weapon. Like a tiny, blinding sun it struck Vasmir in the throat, bubbling ceramite and vaporising flesh into nothingness. The sergeant dropped with an armoured clatter, his auspex sliding across the floor.

The First Captain and Reoch reached the end of the scriptorium, taking positions on either side of the end of the corridor. Zerberyn took a moment to replace the magazine in his bolt pistol. The Apothecary holstered his own weapon and drew his chainsword from where it sat across his back. Gunning it to life, he thrashed the monomolecular teeth. Looking down at the dropped auspex on the floor nearby, Zerberyn could see the Inquisitorial forces withdrawing up the passage at the sound.

The First Captain looked back down the hall. The thunder of Squad Vasmir’s bolters had fallen silent, the hall emptied of foes. Zerberyn held up three armoured digits at Reoch. Then two. Then one.

Surging around the corner with powered steps, the Space Marines were met with a storm of las-beams that cut up the length of the corridor. Their battleplate smoked with the seething caress of suppression fire. The beams kept coming, the gloom of the corridor flashing like a warning strobe. Zerberyn heard the repetitive snap of a volley gun and felt a succession of powerful las-streams take him in the cabling of his midriff.

Squeezing the trigger, Zerberyn sent bolt-rounds rocketing into the storm troopers holding the passage. His shots tore through carapace, flesh and bone, blasting Darghastri’s highly trained troops into flailing corpses. Advancing past his captain, Reoch brought his chainsword up with skill and determination and swept the razored teeth of the blade through the soldiers, who were desperate to get off a last few las-blasts before the Apothecary reached them. Even Inquisitorial storm troopers lost their nerve as this death came at them.

Reoch moved through Darghastri’s troops with the precision of the surgeon he was. He opened soldiers up from jaw to hip, the chainsword chewing through flesh. He struck heads from shoulders and cut down through the lines connecting weapons to power packs.

The mortals were no longer retreating, they were fleeing. Zerberyn continued his fire. As bolt-rounds punched through the Inquisitorial storm troopers, they dropped to the floor until a single soldier remained – the trooper carrying the volley gun. With the smouldering muzzle aimed at the First Captain, he pulled back on the trigger. The weapon was silent, however. Reoch had sliced through the gun’s power cabling during his devastating onslaught.

Zerberyn looked back down the corridor. He saw Squad Vasmir stepping over the body of their sergeant, and turned on the remaining trooper with sudden fury, a cold vengeance that was equal parts indignation and indulgence. He slammed his pistol into its holster and grabbed the soldier savagely by the throat. As his powered gauntlet closed on the storm trooper’s neck, Zerberyn leaned in. So close to the struggling soldier’s helm, the Space Marine could hear Darghastri still giving orders. The First Captain realised that the inquisitor had been watching the whole firefight through the glowing red lenses of his men. Zerberyn positioned himself in front of the trooper’s optics.

‘There is but one Space Marine for every world in the Imperium,’ Zerberyn announced, for the inquisitor’s benefit. ‘This madness has cost me another of my brothers. While we fight among ourselves, worlds are being lost to the invader. For my battle-brother and the worlds he might have protected, you must die, inquisitor.’

With that, Zerberyn crushed the bones in the trooper’s neck and tossed his body away like a rag doll.

Mendel Reoch came up beside his captain.

‘Where are the astropaths?’ the Apothecary asked.

‘If I must guess, Darghastri has them in the Black Ship,’ Zerberyn said, his voice a hollow rasp. ‘But we need them.’

‘The Athymian?’ Reoch said.

‘Yes,’ Zerberyn said. He changed the channel on his helmet vox. ‘Lasander.’

‘Here, captain,’ Lasander responded from the bridge of the Dantalion.

‘Send me two more squads, and your second-best sergeant,’ Zerberyn ordered. ‘We are going to storm the Black Ship.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Zerberyn was silent as he made his way through the Arx Meridia station. While Apothecary Reoch kept his chainsword idling and Squad Vasmir moved from corner to corner, aiming their boltguns in advance of their progress, the First Captain didn’t seem to care. As they approached the reception antechambers of the Black Ship’s docking station, Zerberyn’s men were joined by Squads Torr and Escoban. Sergeant Solomon Torr was a veteran of Gamma-Hydrata and the Silent Wars. He had come ready with men and equipment to breach the airlock of the Athymian Astra. They didn’t need such measures, however, because as Zerberyn entered the antechamber for the starboard lock he found the barbican airlock to the Black Ship open.

Zerberyn held up a fist, bringing his Space Marines to a halt. The squads assumed positions on the airlock, their boltguns ready, while the First Captain slowed to a stop. The opening was not crowded with Inquisitorial storm troopers. Instead, three figures waited for the Space Marines.

The first was a robed, emaciated specimen of a man, raw-eyed and twitchy. His skeletal hands glowed with otherworldly energies. The second sat in a tracked throne, a shaved and muscular wretch. Despite his brawn, his face betrayed the simple wonder of a small child. Both bore the savage brand of the Inquisition on their foreheads – the mark of forced recruitment. Zerberyn knew that inquisitors often travelled on the Adeptus Astra Telepathica’s Black Ships, searching for psychic recruits to join the Holy Ordos. The third was restrained in an upright containment casket, criss-crossed with heavy chains, their face and form unseen within.

‘I advise caution, my lord,’ Reoch said. ‘They’re witchbreeds.’

Zerberyn nodded. He now had even more reason to regret having lost all of his Librarians.

‘Correct,’ a voice rang out across the antechamber, and the inquisitor stepped out from behind the upright containment casket. Darghastri was an aged wreck of a man, half machine and half rejuvenat-mangled flesh. The inquisitor’s dark robes and hood hid ugly armour. Buried in a stained, unkempt beard and held in a gap-toothed mouth was a tapering pipe that wreathed the old man in ghostly smoke. He walked around before the psykers with the sighing hydraulics of a bionic leg, steadying himself with a metal walking stick. He wore a holstered bolt pistol on his belt.

‘Inquisitor…’

‘First Captain,’ Darghastri acknowledged.

‘You are so ordered,’ Zerberyn said, ‘to hand over the astropath choir assigned to this station. For if you do not, with the Emperor’s own thunder, I will take them by force.’

‘The matrix personnel are under my protection,’ the inquisitor said, ‘and that is the way they will remain.’

Zerberyn snarled. ‘Brothers, advance.’

Squads Vasmir, Escoban and Torr stepped forward with their boltguns to blast the inquisitor and his three psykers into oblivion. Weapons barked their fury. Bolt-rounds tore through the cool air of the chamber. A metre in front of Darghastri and his gathering, the rounds stopped as though they had hit an invisible wall and showered to the deck. The Fists Exemplar intensified their fire, targeting the inquisitor, but to no avail. Bolt-rounds simply dropped before Darghastri to form piles on the metal floor before him.

The inquisitor lifted his walking stick. The pommel was crafted into a metal skull. As Darghastri flicked down the jaw with his thumb, a long flame rose up from the crown of the skull and from it, he re-lit his pipe. He jabbed the stick at the emaciated psyker, who held his glowing fists out at his sides.

‘I only travel with the Athymian Astra,’ the inquisitor said, ‘but as with any ship, you get to know your fellow travellers. Zygmunt Fesse here was part of a hive-world tithe from the Farrow Worlds. Before devoting his talents to the Holy Ordos he held off two battalions of his home world’s local militia and Imperial Navy airstrikes for three days. He has a talent for survival.’

‘His talents won’t be enough to save you, inquisitor,’ Zerberyn told him.

Darghastri pointed his walking stick at the musclebound psyker trapped in the tracked chair.

‘As there will be no escape for the Emperor’s enemies,’ the inquisitor told him. ‘Four-One-Seventy-Five here was transferred from the Dreadhaven penal colony on Panoptica XIII. Kept getting through the security measures. Doors. Bars. Chains. Sentry guns. They don’t work on him. Panoptica’s a dead rock, so there was nothing outside but sun-bleached stone. Still, he earned his place aboard the Athymian as now he earns his place in my retinue.’

Darghastri ejected his bolt pistol’s magazine and tossed the weapon into the seated psyker’s lap. The witchbreed set upon the weapon like a toy to be examined and explored. Within moments, the gun fell apart in his hands.

The inquisitor clicked at 4-1-75. Getting the psyker’s attention off the disassembled pistol, he pointed at the Fists Exemplar. A childish smile of delight passed across the psyker’s features. The deck began to clatter with components. While the Space Marines aimed their weapons at the inquisitor and his psykers, the boltguns fell apart in their gauntlets. Rounds rained to the floor, alongside the internal working parts of the weaponry. Eventually the barrels, breeches and grips of the boltguns and pistols clanged to the deck.

As Reoch’s pistol fell apart on his belt, pieces tumbling from his holster, he stepped forward. With a snarl he gunned his chainsword and advanced.

‘Apothecary,’ the inquisitor said, moving along the line to the final psyker. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

‘Wouldn’t do what?’ Reoch asked. ‘Wouldn’t step through your defences and hack you and your witches limb from limb?’

‘This is Thessda,’ Darghastri said, sliding open a narrow panel at the top of the containment casket, revealing the face of a woman. Her eyes were misted, but ravenous for sights unseen. Not knowing what powers she possessed, or what the inquisitor might do, the Apothecary slowed to a stop.

‘The guards named her,’ the inquisitor said. ‘She won’t be tamed for my service, but might still do the Emperor’s work. Under the right circumstances. Circumstances like these, captain. The Athymian found her on the feral world of Karnach. Upon arrival, the Black Ship found most of the population of the capital city dead, drowned. Her powers had blossomed with womanhood, and now, whatever she sees, she is driven to manifest. It must have rained – a rare occurrence on Karnach. Thessda flooded her entire city, and drowned thousands of her tribespeople. They tried to blind her to curtail her powers. But she can still see… a little. If something were to be held up close. A flame, say.’

Holding his walking stick up to the containment casket, Darghastri depressed the skull’s bottom jaw and produced a flame from the pommel. The rogue psyker’s eyes started to focus on the flame, and the casket began to rock.

Reoch looked back at his captain.

Zerberyn simply stared at the inquisitor and his collection of witchbreeds. ‘What is it that you want?’ he asked.

‘I want to serve my Emperor,’ Darghastri told him. ‘To my last dying breath.’

‘There is no one clad in this plate that feels differently.’

‘I very much doubt that,’ the inquisitor hissed.

‘Inquisitor,’ Zerberyn said. ‘Can’t you see what is happening? To this system. The sector. The Imperium? The orks are everywhere. They hang over Terra like an ill omen. You must allow me access to the astropathic choir. I have intelligence vital to our success against the alien invader.’

‘So that you might spread your poison to the stars,’ Darghastri said. ‘I think not. You will not be allowed to commandeer this station – for the astropaths here are the servants of the God-Emperor. You will not be allowed to enter the Athymian Astra to use the astropaths or to plunder its mutant cargo – for they are the God-Emperor’s bounty.’

Zerberyn’s lips wrinkled into a snarl. The First Captain knew that the inquisitor meant every word. That he would unleash the full destructive potential of his psykers upon them if pushed.

‘Squads Escoban, Vasmir, Torr,’ he said. ‘Do your duty.’ He heard the sound of combat blades being drawn as the Fists Exemplar made ready to storm the Black Ship.

‘Oh no, captain,’ the aged inquisitor said. ‘I can’t allow you to do that. You are traitors to the Imperium and must be purged. It is the reason for the Inquisition’s very being. I am nothing in the grand scheme of gods and emperors. But you, captain, and your men? If I let you go, you will go on to wreak havoc across a thousand worlds.’

‘Emperor willing, yes,’ Zerberyn said, ‘upon the barbarian greenskins.’

‘No, captain,’ Darghastri said. ‘I’ve seen the company you keep. You travel in consort with traitors. And I got a good look at them, captain – for it was your Iron Warriors compatriots who fired upon the Athymian Astra, some months since. This vessel still bears the scars of that engagement. We were fortunate to get away with our lives. If it hadn’t been for the havoc of the orks, I doubt we would have done so.’

‘You have seen what we face,’ Zerberyn said, stepping forward and gritting his teeth. ‘The Imperium is a candle, about to be snuffed out.’

‘There is no common ground to be held between those loyal to the Emperor, and traitors. Only degrees of denial and darkness,’ Darghastri told him.

‘I am First Captain of the Fists Exemplar. Gene-sired of Rogal Dorn,’ Zerberyn said. ‘Scourge of the Imperium’s enemies. True servant to the Emperor of Mankind.’

‘There can be no accord between you and me, captain,’ Darghastri said, ‘as there should not have been between the Fists Exemplar and the Iron Warriors. That is why I must destroy you, captain – even as I destroy myself.’

Darghastri passed the flame before the view-slit of the metal casket. The misty eyes of the psyker within lit up, and the girl let out an abysmal shriek of excitement and terror. The thrill of light in the darkness. The dread of what she was about to do.

Suddenly everything became light and noise. Thunder crashed through the empty telepathica matrix station. Girders tore. Decks shattered. Flames roared through the antechamber and the access corridor. Zerberyn watched as his Fists Exemplar were taken from him, swallowed by the rolling inferno that felt its way through the starboard section of Arx Meridia.

And then, without warning, they returned. Delivered from destruction, the Space Marines found themselves washed clean of the plate-scorching flame. Sucked back through their number, the firestorm disappeared. In confusion, Zerberyn turned around to see the flames recede. About him the station superstructure was shaking violently, prompting him to grab for a pipe-lined wall with his gauntlet.

With the fire went the airlock and the antechamber’s exterior wall. Flame and shearing sections of station hull were sucked out into the void. With the wall gone, Zerberyn could see the hull of the Athymian Astra. Explosions rippled down the length of the Black Ship, sweeping through the command deck, quarters, engineering and containment. As flame briefly blossomed through the vessel’s decks, the ship collapsed in on itself.

The station’s atmosphere howled past Zerberyn. He felt Reoch lifted off his feet by the fury of the evacuating air and the failing artificial gravity of the damaged section. He grabbed for the Apothecary, Zerberyn’s ceramite-clad fingers reaching out for Reoch’s own. Hooking the fingertips of their gauntlets together, the First Captain anchored himself to the wall. Hauling the Apothecary close and allowing him to gain purchase on the pipes also, Zerberyn watched the wreck of the Athymian Astra peel away from the station.

‘Lock boots to the deck!’ Zerberyn called across the vox to the Fists Exemplar. Engaging the magnetic soles of their armoured boots, the Space Marines resisted the venting atmosphere and the cold embrace of the void. As the decimated Black Ship fell away, Zerberyn watched Inquisitor Darghastri and his psykers disappear into the blackness of space, the deck tearing asunder beneath them.

‘Captain,’ Lasander called back across the vox. ‘The station is destabilised. I am struggling to maintain pressure and docking integrity. You must withdraw. I have brothers waiting for you at the airlock.’

Using the magnetic soles of their boots, the Fists Exemplar made the difficult journey back through Arx Meridia. All about them, Zerberyn and his Space Marines could hear the agony of the station. The superstructure groaned and the orbital facilities began to turn out of their alignment. Rolling out of the protection of its stellar shielding, the station increasingly became exposed to the monstrous heat of the sun. Its hull glowed white and sections disintegrated before the fury of the star, flame flooding halls and complexes. With the unfolding inferno at their backs, Zerberyn led the Fists Exemplar off the shattered station and through the main lock of the Dantalion. Space Marines and serfs in environment suits waited to assist them there.

‘We’re on board,’ Zerberyn told Lasander across the vox, catching his breath. ‘Detach.’

‘Detaching,’ Lasander reported back. ‘Captain.’

‘What is it?’ Zerberyn shot back with annoyance. So much had happened aboard the station that he just wanted to be alone with his thoughts – even just for a moment.

‘Long-range augur scans reveal ork attack craft closing on our position,’ Lasander told him.

‘What are the Iron Warriors doing?’

‘They’re leaving the system,’ Lasander said. ‘They’re making for the Mandeville point.’

Zerberyn looked at Apothecary Reoch and the Fists Exemplars with him in the airlock.

‘Follow them,’ he ordered.

Five

Luna – Somnus Citadel

The Thunderhawk Pharosian dropped down towards the bleak, grey dust-deserts of Luna. Flying over mountains and the towers of installations, the scorch-plated gunship roared across void-black skies. Luna had a history stretching back almost as far as Terra, and the grand gothic architecture of its sun-baked facilities and installations seemed in a constant state of renewal and improvement. Derelict fortresses and the ruins of palaces dating back to the Heresy provided the foundations for newer, baroque structures that had sprung from the decimation to reach for the stars. Everything was covered in a harsh dust, the colour and consistency of gunpower, while the searing orb of Sol reflected off the moon-rock architecture.

The Pharosian banked down between towers and palace spires, then streaked across a desert sea towards the Somnus Citadel, the Inquisition’s base of operations. Leaving behind a disturbed trail of dust, the Thunderhawk sizzled through the citadel’s atmosphere shielding before weaving between its towers and fortifications. Great defence lasers tracked the Pharosian’s progress, while Inquisitorial gunships were scrambled to escort the Thunderhawk around restricted facilities. Accelerating across the sprawling expanse of the citadel installation, the Space Marine craft left the gunships in the wake of its afterburners.

Beyond the towering indomitability of the Inquisitorial citadel, the Thunderhawk dropped towards a much older structure. Shimmering in solar radiation, the gothic ruins of a minor palace rose up to meet the Pharosian. A circuit around the structure revealed that it was not merely another derelict and long abandoned facility. Light shone from within the crumbling structure of its austere halls and the glassaic of its window-ports. Shuttles sat in its domed crater-silos. Now that the Silent Sisterhood had returned to Luna, these ruins were serving them as a basic facility.

Dropping down through the atmosphere shielding of the pressurised dome, the Thunderhawk came in to land. Like the sealed-off sections of the derelict palace, the silo-crater benefitted from an atmosphere and artificial gravity. As the Thunderhawk touched down it created a small storm of grit and dust about it. Its nose ramp began to open, revealing Chapter Master Maximus Thane. Like the Thunderhawk and the two Space Marines escorting him, the Chapter Master wore the colours of the Fists Exemplar. As the gunship touched down, Thane stepped off the ramp and crossed the silo landing plaza. Crunching through the dust, he strode with power and purpose. It was not just that time was of the essence. Thane now knew what he was going to do with the time he had left. The days, weeks or months before the Beast made his monstrous push for Terra. With the green tide rising up through Segmentum Solar, flooding core systems with apocalyptic alien ferocity, the arrival of further attack moons or the convergence of ork armadas into some kind of super-fleet seemed inevitable.

As he marched across the plaza, Thane could see the towers of the palace framed in the light of Holy Terra. The glorious, besmirched jewel at the heart of the Imperium, Terra hung defiantly in Luna’s austere skies. Its smog-streaked cloud cover was pierced by capital hives and smothered by orbital plates, geo-synchronous stations and star forts. The blizzard of monstrous vessels about the planet gave the impression that it was being viewed upon a static-laced screen. Even so, the sight stirred his heart. Everything Thane had done, and more importantly was going to do, was in service of the Throneworld and the God-Emperor who ruled an empire from its modest magnificence.

As Thane passed another Thunderhawk, this one clad in ivory, battle-scarred plate, he was joined by Sergeant Dathan Tychor. Like the Chapter Master, the Excoriator had recovered from his wounds. While his battered armour was the same, his bionic arm – repaired and reattached – gleamed in the lunar sunlight.

‘As you requested, Master Thane,’ Tychor said. ‘The High Lords await your pleasure in the palace reception hall.’

‘I am indebted to you, brother,’ Thane said. ‘You may return to the Phalanx. There is still much to be done. Captain Oberon will have need of you.’

‘Thank you, Chapter Master,’ Tychor said.

As two Excoriators gunships lifted off from the plaza, turning the silo into a swirling haze of dust, Thane walked between a pair of palatial barges – system craft usually reserved for High Lords and visiting dignitaries. It had been these craft that Tychor’s gunships had escorted to Luna. Baroque wonders of beauty and excess, the barges came with their own security details. While the first was surrounded by ceremonial cybernetic soldiers, garbed in glorious, gold war-plate and crimson cloaks, the second was all but unattended. A single muscular figure waited on the colossal ramp, dressed in black bodyglove and hooded cloak. He sheltered from the lung-shredding dust just within the palatial compartment-quarters.

At the silo barbican, Thane and his Fists Exemplar passed a pair of sentries. Sisters of Silence in half-helms, bronzed plate and furs nodded their acknowledgement to the Chapter Master. Within, Thane saw two High Lords of Terra, standing with Lady Kavalanera Brassanas, commander of the Silent Sisterhood. Kavalanera, standing in her plate of ancient crimson, signed a greeting. Since retaking their vows, the Sisters communicated only through their own language of subtle signs and hand signals. Not unlike the battle-sign used by the Adeptus Astartes, it hadn’t taken Thane and his officers long to master the basics.

As he got closer to Brassanas, Thane felt a part of himself wither inside. A shiver ran through him – an unusual sensation for a Space Marine, let alone a Chapter Master. As a member of the Silent Sisterhood, Brassanas was a blank, what psykers called an untouchable. While they were highly trained warriors in their own right, the mere presence of a Sister of Silence was an anathema to all witchbreeds and daemons whose powers flowed from the warp. Brassanas’ own ability to nullify psychic energy was considerable – Thane wasn’t even a psyker and still, proximity to the Sister-Commander made him feel strange. Uncomfortable even. He personally liked Kavalanera Brassanas, but being around her filled him with a bottomless sensation of spiritual revulsion. As he arrived, the Sister-Commander nodded a silent acknowledgement.

The first High Lord was Kubik, the Fabricator General of Mars: an ornate fusion of man and machine, whose augmentations were lost in his rust-coloured robes and the darkness of his hood. The Fabricator General sensed Thane’s approach and turned, his revolving optics changing colour and orientation. Drakan Vangorich, meanwhile, was dressed in the sombre finery of a High Lord, the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum favouring blacks, greys and robes with room to conceal the tools of his trade. Gone was the quirk of the Grand Master’s lip or the knowing glint of his eye – features that had been in evidence the last time Thane had seen him. Something had changed in Vangorich. He looked every bit as serious as a man should be having attained his station.

‘My lords,’ Thane greeted them as his Fists Exemplar peeled off to stand to one side. ‘Lady Brassanas. Thank you for meeting me here. Mars or the Phalanx would have been inappropriate, given what has happened previously and what I intend us to discuss. The Imperial Palace, even more so.’

Brassanas signed an acknowledgement. With his haptic translators, Kubik had no problem understanding the Sister. Similarly, Vangorich with his trained talents had wasted little time in familiarising himself with the Sisters’ sign language.

Thane looked to the Fabricator General, but Kubik seemed as cold and consistent as the machine he mostly was. Given the recent conflict between the Adeptus Astartes and the priesthood of Mars, Thane had expected some haughty indignation at a summons, perhaps even outrage. At very least a rehearsed objection.

‘Proceed, Chapter Master Thane,’ Kubik said simply, the metallic echo of his voice accompanied by the brief flicker of revolving optics. As Thane looked to Vangorich, the Grand Master extended his arm as an invitation to speak.

‘Would you walk with me?’ Thane asked. ‘I have something to show you.’

Lady Brassanas led the way through the palace installation. Within an elevator of mirrored metal that dropped down below Luna’s surface, Thane turned to the others.

‘You have heard, of course,’ he said, ‘of the death of Chapter Master Koorland.’

‘With the loss of the primarch and our failure to destroy the alien Beast, a triptych of woes,’ Vangorich said.

Tragedy upon tragedy, Lady Brassanas signed.

‘Despite their best efforts, the Imperial Fists failed the Imperium and themselves,’ Kubik said. The words were difficult for Thane to hear, but hear them he knew he must if he were to bring the High Lords together.

‘As I believe the Imperium failed them,’ Thane said. ‘Our efforts against the Beast have been the thrust of a spear, with the Imperial Fists as the tip of that spear. Except everyone else behind that thrust let go, believing some other group or institution would be there to follow the strike through. This is why the Beast lives on, our killing thrust wasted. It is why the spear tip shattered and the Imperial Fists were lost.’

‘The Adeptus Astartes,’ Kubik said, ‘have a history of rash action and reaction – as had the primarchs that gene-sired them. The priests of Mars are slow to act but effective in their execution.’

We have much to learn from each other, Lady Brassanas signed, if we are to defeat this threat.

‘For me,’ Drakan Vangorich said, his lips unsmiling and face unusually taut, ‘direct action is the remedy for the myriad afflictions ailing the Imperium. For a long time I waited for such action. I do not blame Chapter Master Koorland or Primarch Vulkan for their failures. At least they tried. I, like billions of other Terrans and countless Imperial citizens, wait again. We wait for a man who will act. Who will step forth and do what needs to be done. History records many such men. The bold and the resolute, who push to the fore just as the Imperium needs them. Are you such a man, Chapter Master Thane?’

‘I am,’ Thane told Vangorich, with steel in his eyes. ‘Lady Brassanas is, of course, right. If history can teach the sons of Dorn anything, it is humility. We cannot act alone. The Adeptus Astartes are one piece in the great puzzle that is the Imperium. Without others at our side, we are nothing – as the Imperial Fists are now. Every brother of the Last Wall aches to avenge his brothers but I take the Fabricator General’s view. It is better to take a little time, gather our strength and act as one.’

‘But we have no time,’ the Grand Master of Assassins told him. ‘Another attack moon could appear over Terra at any moment. The Beast’s fleets invade the core systems. The orks will swamp us.’

‘But we have a little time,’ Thane pressed as the elevator rumbled along the deep shaft, ‘and I intend to use it wisely.’

‘How?’ Vangorich asked, his words like a presented blade. ‘For if the Adeptus Astartes will not act – decisively – then other steps will need to be taken, to ensure all institutions play their part in the dark times to come.’

‘And they will, Grand Master,’ Thane told him, ‘for I go to the High Lords not to appeal for their assistance – for the full weight of their power, influence and forces they command – I go to demand it.’

‘Koorland and Vulkan could not achieve that,’ the Fabricator General said. ‘What makes you think you can? Now, with a First Founding Chapter lost and the faith of the people broken?’

‘Firstly,’ Thane said, ‘I do not intend to make the loss of the Imperial Fists public. As you observe, the morale of the people and their leaders is fragile. We don’t want panic.’

‘There would be no panic on Mars,’ Kubik assured him.

‘Or in the Temples of the Officio,’ Vangorich added.

‘Or here,’ Thane said, bowing his head to Lady Brassanas. ‘But secondly, we are not Koorland and Vulkan. They observed the sanctity of the Council. They played the political games of the Palace and lost. I do not intend to do that.’

The Adeptus Astartes have not imposed their will in such a way since the days of the Heresy, the Sister-Commander signed. To compel the High Lords to action? I fear history will not remember you kindly for this strategy.

‘If to act is damnation and inaction equally so,’ Thane told her, ‘what will it matter?’

‘If we fail,’ Vangorich added, ‘there will be no one to remember.’

‘You take responsibility?’ Kubik clarified.

‘For my actions,’ Thane said, ‘and those of my Chapter.’

Thane looked to the Sister-Commander and the two High Lords. As Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists, Thane would already have the nominal support of the Council to coordinate the defence of Terra and destroy the Beast. Kubik, Vangorich and Brassanas would, of course, work out what he intended to do. Thane had honoured his promise to his brothers in not informing them in so many words, but at the same time he knew he could rely upon their discretion. Kubik sat on bigger secrets than the resurrection of a Space Marine Chapter in his Martian vaults, while anyone told by the Grand Master of Assassins would almost certainly end up dead. As for the Sister-Commander, Thane was sure that Lady Brassanas would keep her silence.

‘How is this to be done?’ Kubik asked, his voice the metallic hush of a conspiratorial utterance.

‘The head must be cut from the serpent,’ Vangorich said.

‘Or rather, heads from the hydra,’ Thane said, ‘since it was discovered that there is more than one Beast. They all must die.’

‘The logic holds,’ Kubik agreed, ‘now as it did then. These Veridi, while monstrous in size and territorial appetite, are still creatures of simple hierarchy. While warlords of sufficient ferocity and psychic presence endure, the invaders will retain their cohesion and technological supremacy.’

‘Divide and conquer,’ Thane said. ‘We can prevail against fragmented fleets and orks intent on fighting themselves as much as the Imperium. We cannot prevail while the Beasts of Ullanor endure. That is why we have to return to Ullanor.’

The elevator eventually reached its destination, far below the surface of Luna. Lady Brassanas led the way into the rocky chamber beyond.

Immediately outside the elevator, Brassanas met with another senior Sister in distinctive silver armour. The pair exchanged a brief conversation through deft signs made with their gauntlets. The Sister looked to Thane and the High Lords, her steely gaze lingering suspiciously on the Chapter Master. Thane bowed his head briefly in acknowledgement. Exchanging nods with Brassanas, the silver-clad Sister left her commander and took her place in the elevator, bound for the lunar surface.

The chamber was dark and Thane’s armoured footfalls clanged on the metal walkway leading from the elevator. The bronzed mesh and rail of the companionway appeared to be made of a copper-threaded alloy. As they walked after Brassanas, they came upon more Sisters of Silence. These warriors were clad in similarly bronzed plate, furs and cloaks, with blades at their side and boltguns in their gauntlets. They were stationed along the walkway like sentinels, standing in silence and darkness.

After exchanging a brief interplay of signs with one of the Sisters, Brassanas took lantern-like lamps from a rack and handed them to Thane, Vangorich and the Fabricator General. Switching them on, the party bathed the walkway in a red light. They could see that the route extended through the open space of the chamber, high above the cavern floor. Ahead, the mesh walkway divided into junctions and crossways, as well as flights of steps leading to upper and lower levels. Sisters of Silence stood straight and with their eyes closed in the darkness, not flinching at the red light of the lamps or acknowledging the passing of their Sister-Commander. Their concentration remained unbroken. At the centre of the structure of walkways was a small cluster of cages – all different shapes and sizes, all made of the same bronzed metal.

As the red light of the lamps ghosted through the bars of the cages, hulking creatures were revealed within, greenskin monstrosities that dwarfed the Sisters guarding them. Three of them. Stripped of armour and decoration, the orks were draped in thick chains. Though starved and restrained, they were still anything but docile: all claws, muscle and trapjaw teeth. The brawn of their chests rose and fell as they clutched the bars of their cages.

As the red light felt its way through their gargoylesque forms, the creatures became increasingly aware of the new arrivals. Nostrils twitched, beady red eyes flickered and saliva dripped from tusk-crowded mouths, and the orks roared their hostility.

In amongst the snapping and the savage ferocity of the creatures, Thane thought he heard something else. A monstrous force of alien obscenity and fury. The sound of distant destruction, pulling him in like a black hole. It was the Beast – reaching out, as it had done before, across the galaxy. It filled Thane’s mind with momentary madness, and a dread feeling of the horrors to come. Then, it was gone.

Vangorich leant in with his lamp. Suddenly, one of the orks launched itself at the cage wall, dragging its chains along with it. It heaved back and forth on the bars with its jagged claws, making the metal bars groan in protest. The rabid thing’s eyes lit up with a blazing green light. Sparks of ethereal energy showered from its dagger-filled maw and arcs of strange power coursed across its flesh and sinews.

Expecting such a reaction, Lady Brassanas and the Chapter Master stood their ground. Kubik’s optics whirred around with surprise, changing colour and intensity, while the Grand Master of Assassins stepped back, his hands within his robes on what Thane imagined to be concealed blades and pistols. The actions of the first ork prompted the other two into a similar frenzy of rage, and they threw themselves savagely at the cage walls and floors. Ethereal energies dribbled from the orks’ noses and ears, and green lightning arced between their bodies. Their roars rustled the robes of the High Lords, while the hulking monsters’ efforts to get to Thane, Vangorich and the Fabricator General shook the walkway structure.

‘These are the psychic specimens?’ Vangorich said. ‘The creatures whose abilities you used against the orks in the last attack on Ullanor?’

Yes, the Sister-Commander signed. Like psychic mutants amongst humanity, they are outcasts. Unpredictable. Difficult to control.

‘So much so,’ Kubik added, ‘that the psychic energy they harness from gatherings of their kind can overload the conduit creature. This results in an explosion of stored energy and the death of the specimen.’

Following the last attack on Ullanor, Lady Brassanas explained, we had one left, which the Soul Drinkers handed over into our custody. Since then, two more have been secured by the Deathwatch.

‘There are three creatures in total, then?’ Vangorich said.

‘And only three,’ Thane said, ‘so we shall have to make them count.’

As they spoke, the orks raged beside them, crackling with otherworldly energies.

The cages are shielded with holy wards, Brassanas reassured Kubik and the Grand Master. And my Sisters’ presence keeps the creatures’ psychic powers in check. You are safe here.

‘On Ullanor it will be a different matter,’ Thane told the two High Lords. ‘I know that you have seen specimens dissected but we wanted you to see this for yourself, so that you can see what the sons of Dorn will be up against on that distant planet. The size and ferocity of these xenos, and their relentless instinct to butcher and kill.’

These specimens have been stripped of their strength and their weaponry, the Sister-Commander signed. But they are still dangerous.

‘These, now, are but feral creatures,’ Thane said. ‘The ones we will face on Ullanor have blades and blasters, armadas of attack ships and gravitic technologies of mass destruction. They will have armoured moons at their disposal and hordes without number at their command.’

A howl of metal made Kubik turn suddenly. In its fury, one of the orks had managed to bend one of the bars of its cage just enough to squeeze its hand through, and was grasping with a malformed claw at the Fabricator General’s robes. Lady Brassanas snatched her silver-bladed sword from her belt and lopped the broken claw off at the wrist, prompting the ork to retract the gushing stump of the limb.

‘Well, I’m convinced, Chapter Master,’ Drakan Vangorich told him. ‘What do you need to ensure the destruction of the Beast and its forces on Ullanor?’

‘Everything we have left,’ Thane told the Grand Master honestly. ‘I will not repeat past mistakes and overestimate my own forces while underestimating yours. My plan is to leave the Last Wall protocol in place, so that Terra remains protected by the sons of Dorn. I will personally lead the entire Chapter of Imperial Fists to Ullanor in the Phalanx, with the aim of storming the Beast’s palace and cutting the ork hordes across the galaxy off from their command structure. Without their leaders, the invader fleets will fragment. Armies will turn on themselves. Their warlords should revert to observed behaviours, fighting for supremacy amongst their ranks. This should give us time to reform, regroup and raise an expanded Deathwatch to enact a plan of eradication.’

‘But…’ the Fabricator General said.

‘But,’ Thane echoed, ‘we cannot do that without the full commitment of Imperial forces in support. We need everything that’s left. Beyond the Last Wall protocol and a skeleton force providing a sentinel defence of the core systems, I’m going to need whatever remains of the Imperial Navy, the Mechanicus fleet, the Astra Militarum, the god-machines of the Adeptus Titanicus and the skitarii legions. Naturally, Lady Brassanas has already pledged her Sisters of Silence to the assault.’

‘And leave the core systems and Terra exposed?’ Kubik said.

‘They are already exposed,’ Vangorich said.

‘The Grand Master is right,’ Thane agreed.

‘An Assassin knows when to commit his full resources to the attack,’ Vangorich said.

‘An attack that must, of course, succeed,’ Thane said. ‘Or the Fabricator General’s fears will become reality.’

The Silent Sisterhood will do what we have always done, the Sister-Commander signed. We will stand between the Emperor and His enemies. Dying, if we have to, in order to see the Master of Mankind safe.

‘They, along with the deployment of these alien psykers,’ Thane said, ‘will be essential in disorientating the Beast’s vast army of defenders and bodyguards. If the last attack taught us anything it is that the ork psykers draw their destructive power not just from the numbers of their kind in the vicinity but the length of time they are exposed to them. Like batteries, we need to give them time to charge their energies before unleashing them to create a backwash of psychic power. This will give my Space Marines the opening they need to fight their way through the palace and obliterate the Beast.

‘We will need vessels to punch our way in through the fleets of attack ships swarming the Ullanor System. We will need Titans to occupy gargants and ground forces to keep a planetary horde of orks off our backs. Even your Assassins will be needed, Grand Master.’

‘The talents of my Temples will be at your disposal, Chapter Master,’ Vangorich said.

Thane, Lady Brassanas and the Grand Master looked to Kubik.

The Fabricator General’s optics whirred and turned slowly in his hood, as though his cogitators were handling changing numbers of great size and importance. Finally the Fabricator General spoke.

‘The Adeptus Mechanicus have not forgotten the lessons the Veridi have taught us in fire and thunder,’ Kubik said. ‘The Ordinatus Ullanor might have been decimated by the monstrous machines of the alien but the priesthood of Mars can do better than vessels, Titans and Legions. You will, of course, have whatever the forge world principal and its empire can provide. But let me confide in you the questionable, as you have confided in me. Since encountering the Ullanor orks and their unique weaponry, my priesthood have been hard at work studying and attempting to replicate their technologies. We have met with some limited success and have managed to adapt and manipulate the orks’ gravitic weaponry to displace large asteroids and small moons.’

‘Displace?’ Drakan Vangorich echoed, his voice trailing off in amazement.

‘Yes,’ Kubik said. ‘In tests conducted within uninhabited systems, our technologies managed to knock small planetoids out of their orbits and propel them towards other planetary bodies. Inertia and the natural pull of gravity do the rest.’

‘You have this much mastery of the aliens’ technology?’ Thane asked.

‘A limited application,’ Kubik cautioned. ‘In a specific time and place. We could, for example, launch asteroids and small moons from the system’s edge, to smash through the greenskin fleets and impact upon the surface of Ullanor with varying degrees of accuracy. By the time your Adeptus Astartes arrive, Chapter Master, the defences of Ullanor will have been dealt a significant blow.’

Thane extended his gauntlet. The Fabricator General took it with the bionics of his own master-crafted appendage. The Chapter Master looked to Lady Brassanas, who nodded her agreement. Vangorich had a weak smile for the Space Marine, a little of his dark confidence returning. Thane returned the gesture.

‘In a few minutes,’ the Grand Master said, ‘we have managed to get more agreed than a century of Council meetings and Palace intrigue.’

Thane’s smile thinned. He didn’t like the sound of that, or the precedent it set. It was too late to go back, however. There was too much at stake in the present to worry about the future.

‘One thing,’ Kubik said. ‘How shall the Lord High Admiral and the Lord Commander Militant be similarly compelled to lend, without question, their remaining ships and soldiers to this venture?’

Drakan Vangorich’s wolfish smile widened further. He looked like a watch dog who had, at long last, been let off the leash.

‘Leave that to me,’ the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum said.

Six

Terra – the Imperial Palace

It was evening. The sun was setting and thin cloud hung like a veil across the skies. Above, the lights of orbital plates, stations and upper atmospheric skyforts twinkled through the haze. Below them a sundered world turned. Hive cities had crumbled and crashed to the ground, blanketing the lower districts in dust. The ork attack moon might have been destroyed but millions had died in the defence of Terra. Death hung in the air. Shadows seemed longer and the darkness deeper.

Spirits too had been broken. News of failure and successive tragedies had plunged the hearts of billions into abyssal dread. It was a terror all but the most ancient had never known. The Astra Militarum and the Imperial Fleet – the Imperium’s bastion amongst the stars – had been smashed. The military might of Mars and the Red Planet’s Titan Legios had met their match. The Emperor’s Angels had failed to bring the Beast to his knees and even a primarch had been lost to the green tide as it came sweeping in to swamp the core sectors and drown Holy Terra in a deluge of alien savagery and destruction.

Still, the Imperial Palace stood defiant. It was like a galaxy of stars, every security lamp, glassaic window and loophole blazing with the light of occupation and industry. An army of serfs and servitors criss-crossed mighty halls, corridors and precincts. Adepts and scribes went about their bureaucratic business. Warriors of the Adeptus Custodes stood sentinel about the fortifications while important personages of every rank and station took meetings in conference halls, auditoria and star chambers, talking about everything and nothing. Even the High Lords of Terra haunted the dusty corridors and grand quarters of the Imperial Palace, for the Palace was to be found at the heart of the Throneworld and Terra at the heart of the Imperium of Man. No place in the galaxy bustled with such status and significance. It was a gothic crown of architectural magnificence, within which the mind-numbing business of a fading Imperium was conducted. Hive cities towered about the Palace walls. Titan god-machines shook the ground of their assigned avenues with ceremonial patrol circuits. A glittering blizzard of landers, shuttles and atmospheric craft passed overhead, funnelling into restricted flight paths.

On the Plaza Decamerata, Drakan Vangorich moved through the crowds. There was an atmosphere, something sombre and rehearsed. Still, gatherings of such number and in such majestic surroundings had the ability to send a flutter through the stomachs of even the jaded aides and clerics. It wasn’t just the number, it was the identity of those in attendance that stirred the soul. The entire Council was present, High Lords of Terra in luxurious robes, furs and best bionics. Like newly formed planets in a field of debris, they seemed to accrete growing mobs of followers. Some were serfs carrying furniture, attendants and advisors. Most were sycophants and opportunists. Adepts and officials who had High Lords they had waited months to meet with out in the open. The gathering on the Plaza Decamerata might have been a ceremonial engagement, but it still provided the chance to do business and press agendas.

Like these bureaucratic parasites, Vangorich was also working, but while other High Lords indulged and ignored, the Grand Master strode with purpose through the crowds. No flatterers mobbed him. No minions followed him in train. Talk became direct and economical. The Grand Master could get things done instead of spending his days wading through Palace bureaucracy. Unlike the other members of the Council, his robes were dark and simple, extravagant only in their depth.

The Plaza Decamerata was by no means the largest of the Palace plazas. It didn’t even come close. It still took the Grand Master thirty minutes or so to reach his seat. Situated in the western upper precincts, the plaza had always been a favourite of Vangorich’s. An elevated court, it boasted the monstrous fortification of the Boenician Wall on one side and views of Hive Valatyne on the other – one of the more handsome hives of the capital. The venerable Warhound Titans Canis Romula and Canis Rema towered over its bustling expanse, brought in specially to lend the ceremony an aura of significance. The Plaza Decamerata was ordinarily reserved for theatrical celebrations rather than Astra Militarum parades or Aeronautican flyovers. It was primarily used for entertainment and light-hearted distractions for dignitaries and the occasional High Lord and their staff: off-world acrobats, xenos menageries and colossal troupes of dancers. This, despite the fact that the grand atrium at the head of the plaza fielded twelve stone thrones.

Drakan Vangorich went to take a throne on one end of the line but found Fabricator General Kubik there already, resplendent in robes of crimson fabric and silvered mail. A skitarii honour guard stood nearby, flanked by a pair of combat-servitors, the grotesque fusion of their bodies disguised with ceremonial trappings. Taking the throne next to Kubik, Vangorich offered a slight bow from the depths of his hood.

‘Fabricator General.’

‘Grand Master.’

Vangorich looked out across the plaza. It was one thing to invite the High Lords of Terra and then watch as one by one they consented to attend, unwilling to be outdone by other members of the Council. The horde of adepts, aides and bureaucrats occupying the vast plaza in their dun robes was something else. Usually lord scriveners, sub-secretaries and adjutants were not invited to such gatherings, and the repulsion could be seen on the High Lords’ faces as they negotiated the crowd. Vangorich enjoyed watching them squirm.

The vox-bead in Vangorich’s ear chirped. Beast Krule was calling in. By the clarity of the vox-signal, Vangorich assumed he was near. Casting a practised eye across the multitudes he spotted Krule moving through the crowd in the simple robes of a scribe. With his bulk thus disguised the Assassin felt his way through the masses, attaching himself to the train of one High Lord and then the next. He moved within the protective canopies of storm troopers, between genetically-enhanced bodyguards and through dark throngs of Inquisitorial henchmen. Vangorich knew Krule to be an operative who never wasted an opportunity. He assumed that the Assassin wanted to show him how close he could get and how exposed the other High Lords were. He wanted to show his master what could be achieved.

Vangorich, meanwhile, had managed to lose two tails in the crowd – unobtrusive ghosts dressed as ceremonial serfs. They probably belonged to Wienand, but Vangorich couldn’t be sure. Another – a servitor-that-wasn’t – had offered the Grand Master a drink but in addition had placed a tiny listening device on his robes. That had been clumsy, and likely to have been someone else. Dropping the device into the drink – some kind of warmed, spiced wine – the Grand Master had deposited the chalice on the next meandering servitor’s tray.

His enemies on the Council would do anything to catch an unguarded whisper, or the exchange of intelligence between the Grand Master and his Assassins. Such efforts were undertaken as much in self-defence as from the desire to know Vangorich’s secrets. Each High Lord present wished to know what he was planning for them.

While an annoyance, Vangorich appreciated the theatrics. It fitted their location, the Plaza Decamerata having played host to celebrated savants, authorised remembrancers and great-companies of actors. Vangorich had seen both Klastragar Part II and The Witch of Galatae here, as well as The Massacre at Montalaban Fields, in which the Company of the Chartist Captains dramatised the atrocity death for death on the plaza expanse.

Now the plaza was going to play host to an entirely different kind of theatrics. Vangorich saw Gibran, Paternoval Envoy of the Navigators, exchange pleasantries with Juskina Tull, Speaker for the Chartist Captains, before the both of them settled. Wienand and Veritas of the Inquisition leant in conspiratorially. Their eyes darted across each other’s shoulders while harsh whispers were exchanged. Master Anwar of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica felt his way to his throne, while Tobris Ekharth, Master of the Administratum, scowled at approaching attendants, forcing them into a retreat. Vernor Zeck, Lord High Admiral Lansung and the Lord Commander Militant simply sat in grizzled displeasure. As the High Lords took their time and eventually their seats, the gathered thousands grew quiet.

Adeptus Custodes warriors watched from the ramparts of the Boenician Wall and the Warhound Titans boomed to stillness. Beneath the feet of the multitudes, the stone rumbled. Millimetre by grating millimetre, the plaza floor began to part. Adepts and scriveners cried out and jumped to safety as a gap began to open between them. For many, it was the most exciting thing to ever happen to them and they stared down into the trembling depths with awe. It was as if they had become part of the entertainment.

Crowds moved aside, individuals reaching out in their robes to steady themselves as they rode out the quake of the parting stone. Dust cascaded down into the dark chasm opening in between, and High Lords stood up from their thrones to get a better view. Bodyguards swept in to put themselves between their masters and harm’s way. Vangorich looked to Kubik, who said nothing. The Grand Master nodded for the both of them. He had seen different shows and spectacles performed on the Plaza Decamerata but he had never seen the elevated precinct open. It was quite a sight.

Some of his compatriot Lords were similarly impressed. Most tried to peer down into the rumbling darkness, while several even clapped. The stresses of war and xenos doom were momentarily forgotten in the distraction of the plaza. It was what the venue had been built for. As Vangorich caught sight of the vision below, the Grand Master of Assassins smiled. The High Lords paled, but the crowds began to cheer.

Rising up through the gap created by the parting plaza, riding a colossal platform of stone, were armoured figures. Many armoured figures, stretching across the platform as far as the eye could see. As the thunder of the rising floor echoed to a stop, the reverent cheering grew louder. Before the horde of lowly scribes and augmented adepts, there had appeared rank upon rank of Adeptus Astartes. More than any Palace menial had ever seen in one place. Aides and advisors took the appearance of the Space Marines as an indication that some kind of parade was to take place.

The High Lords knew better, however. They knew that such a gathering meant something else entirely. Something impossible. As they took their seats again, with grim faces and steely eyes, the celebratory cheering began to fade. Taking their masters’ solemn reception as an example, the crowds stood back in a collective silence that swept the plaza.

The Adeptus Astartes warriors didn’t move. They were like statues, or columns of standing suits of power armour. Each boltgun and piece of plate gleamed with the fresh attentions of Techmarines and artificers. Re-set banners billowed in the breeze above noble captains and command squads. Indomitable sergeants stood to attention at the fore of their own squads. At the head of the column was a company decked in Tactical Dreadnought armour and monstrous weaponry.

To the High Lords, it appeared to be an army of Space Marines. To Kubik, who rapidly counted their number, and Vangorich who guessed the true nature of what he was looking at, the assembly was a full Chapter of Adeptus Astartes. Not the mixed number of Space Marines that made up the Last Wall but a single glorious Chapter, standing tall and together in the presence of the High Lords of Terra. It was a truly terrifying sight. A vision that captured the imagination and took away the breath.

The singular, most striking feature of the Chapter, however, was not their number or presentation. It was the colour of their honoured plate. The adepts and scribes had cheered because they did not know what they were looking at, but each High Lord of Terra had received the briefs from Ullanor. Intelligence of the catastrophic losses suffered there. Reports of the death of Vulkan, the Emperor’s son. Word of Koorland and how he had met his end. The last thing the High Lords of Terra expected to see, towering above the plaza in perfect formation, were the Imperial Fists – the sons of Dorn resurrected and presented at fighting strength before them. The Council, like the surrounding crowds, were bathed in the glorious, golden plate of the Chapter. Its indomitable strength and grim resolve.

What they could not know, and what both Vangorich and Kubik suspected, was that each venerable suit of armour had been repainted to honour the spirit of a lost Imperial Fist. A warrior lost to the Imperium. Betrayed by the High Lords’ failure. Doomed by the orks’ success. A thousand Space Marines and their captains, selected from the battle-hardened ranks of the Excoriators, the Crimson Fists, the Black Templars, the Iron Knights, the Soul Drinkers, the Executioners and the Fists Exemplar. Punctuating their number was the black plate of Chaplains, the bone white of Apothecaries, the blue of Librarians and the red of Techmarines. The plaza, however, was a vision of gold. The noble yellow of Dorn’s honest plate – each suit’s pauldron adorned with the black fist of the primarch himself, clenched in cold fury. In unity. In victory.

Vangorich watched the Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists step forth from the gallery of armoured statues, his Terminator armour a monstrous sight to behold. Ornate and golden, it looked as impregnable as the Phalanx itself. The ground shook at the Chapter Master’s mighty step. As he approached the line of thrones, several High Lords vacated their seats and took cover behind them.

He stopped before the only throne to have remained empty. That which would have belonged to Lord Commander Koorland. The Space Marine gave the remaining members of the Council the pugnacious glower of his helm and allowed spidery arcs of power to cascade from the pair of gleaming black power fists that he held at his sides. The cyclone missile launcher mounted over his hood and pauldrons clunked ominously to priming, its sensor array blinking with readiness. At odds with the bombast of the suit, the crackling fists and missile launcher, a simple adamantium short sword sat mag-locked to the Chapter Master’s belt. A ceremonial weapon, Vangorich assumed, noting the numeral VII crafted into the blade – a symbol denoting Rogal Dorn’s glorious VII Legion and the Defenders of Terra.

A pair of Chapter serfs, garbed in yellow half-robes and carapace, came forth. The Terminator Space Marine’s helm hissed and vented streams of equalising pressure as the serfs unlocked the seals on the honoured item and took it away. Revealed was the grim visage of Maximus Thane, formerly Chapter Master of the Fists Exemplar – now presented to the High Lords of Terra as the Master of the Imperial Fists.

Within moments, High Admiral Lansung was on his feet, the folds of his braided uniform and cloak ruffled. As he snatched his extravagant tricorn hat from the dusty rolls of his wig, the High Admiral’s existing sneer deepened. Beside him Abel Verreault, the Lord Commander Militant, was also on his feet, jangling with medals and bionics. Snarling through his scars, the High Lord glared at Thane with an ornate replacement optic.

‘This is an outrage,’ Lansung said. ‘Has the Chapter Master no shame? Is this how he honours the memory of brothers fallen?’

‘How dare he?’ Verreault chimed in. ‘How dare he field the Adeptus Astartes here? Before the Palace wall at Chapter strength, in flagrant disregard of protocol and historical precedent?’

‘It is simply not done,’ Lansung said. ‘Such demonstrations have no place here.’

‘This had better not be some crude attempt to intimidate the Council,’ Verreault said.

‘If Lord Commander Koorland were…’ Lansung said.

‘Which he is not,’ the Lord Militant added.

Vangorich watched the interchange with interest. Lansung and Verreault’s words withered before the sight of the Chapter Master. Towering over them, like a living fortification in his battleplate, Maximus Thane seemed to be beyond them. Beyond the concerns of Palace politics and expectation.

And most of all, beyond his remit. The Grand Master understood why the pair of High Lords were on their feet. While Vangorich had tarried in filling the Ecclesiarch’s seat, that belonging to the fallen Koorland – and the office of Lord Commander that went with it – was now open. Like Verreault and the High Admiral, Vangorich lived in the shadow of such opportunity. It drew them in like a collapsing star. Status. Power. Doom. Both Lansung and Verreault saw themselves as candidates to be honoured with such a title – especially at a time of war and catastrophe.

As Wienand and the Grand Provost Marshal went to join them, Thane stamped down on the plaza with his boot. The thrones shook, and the High Lords with them. The quake sent Wienand and Vernor Zeck back into their seats. The High Admiral and Lord Verreault followed, falling back and thudding into their thrones.

Chapter Master Thane turned around, presenting his armoured back to the High Lords. The powered movement drew a gasp from several members of the Council, who couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Vangorich tensed. If one of the High Lords did something stupid – like call for the Adeptus Custodes and decry Thane and his Space Marines as traitors – then things could escalate quickly. The Grand Master wouldn’t allow such a thing. Thane must be given time to speak.

Vangorich watched as the Chapter Master addressed the plaza. His voice boomed about the Space Marines, High Lords and underlings alike, relayed from his suit to vox-casters situated about the precinct.

‘Brothers,’ Thane said, ‘lords and citizens of mighty Terra. Listen to me now – as you would to the Master of Mankind and his ministers of fate. For through our veins runs the blood of Rogal Dorn, as through his, the blood of the Emperor flowed. Before we were favoured with the Emperor’s blessing – before we were shielded with angel’s wings – we were as you are now. Of common flesh. Of uncertainty and questions eternal. I tell you this to remind us all that we are all interconnected. That we rely one upon the other. That we achieve nothing alone.’

The Grand Master watched Thane begin to pace up and down the plaza, his armoured boots sending quakes through the thrones of the High Lords of Terra.

‘Earlier,’ Thane said, his words carrying far and wide across the plaza, ‘I spoke at length to select High Lords. We talked of matters of Imperium and state. Of the vanquished ork attack moon and our challenges on the Beast’s monstrous home world, where heroes fight to bring an end to this vast and terrible conflict.’

Vangorich watched High Lords scowl and whisper amongst themselves, ignorant of such a meeting. As the Chapter Master went on, he drowned the Council members’ protests in thunderous proclamations of his own.

‘It was a long meeting,’ Thane told his audience, ‘as meetings concerning matters of consequence tend to be. While listening to the High Lords’ counsel, I noticed a spider crafting a web across the casing of an arch. Every time a scribe or servitor passed beneath, the web was damaged and torn. As I listened to the wisdom of our High Lords, I watched this tiny creature repair the structure it had created. Time and again, forces beyond its control, or even understanding, tore the web to shreds. Time and again, the spider crafted its home anew. Our lives are like the threads in that spider’s web. Each one connected to hundreds more, relying upon each other for strength and stability. Our Imperium is like the spider’s web. Myriad worlds connected by an intricate network of shipping lanes, interstellar trade routes and Navy patrols.

‘But when something crashes through that web, like the xenos invaders – this Beast we have come to know as our deadly foe – strands snap, structures collapse and the web hangs in disarray. The spider, however, knows nothing of fatigue. He has no indulgence for the loss of hope. The futility of his efforts is an alien concept – as it is with us. The Imperium of Man has stood for more than a thousand years because of such resolution and industry. Billions live within our web of protection. Worlds might be lost to the mutant. Subsectors fall silent at the arrival of alien invaders. Routes fall prey to warp storms and pirates. The Imperium endures. It will always endure while there are loyal subjects of the Emperor to sustain its majesty. From ages of darkness and strife we have returned. We lived the dread days of Heresy and loss. We shall survive this green plague.

‘Our victory over the alien shall be marked in statues on the Palace arcades, in monuments of commemoration crafted from the ruin of a thousand worlds and in memories passed from Terran father to Terran son. We shall never forget the rising of this Beast, the destruction he has wrought and the unbreakable will it took to defeat him – but first, we must defeat him. We must strike at the heart of his empire, as he has done to us. We must return to Ullanor, a planet infested with the alien, at the heart of a system swarming with the foe. The surrounding sectors are decimation and barbarity, awash with attack moons and monstrous fleets of greenskin craft.

‘We have stood in the blood and dust of Ullanor and failed. But during the Emperor’s Great Crusade, we raised the battle standards and banners of victory over Ullanor. The difference then was that we were united under the Emperor’s gaze. We were humanity resplendent, fighting together for a common cause. The vessels of the Imperial Armada, the god-machines of the Mechanicum – the Space Marine Legions, and the millions of the Imperial Army. We were as one, with the indomitable will of the Imperium behind us. We have proved that nothing can stand before such a collective will – and nothing ever shall. That is why we return to Ullanor – glorious in our unity, assured of our victory and ready to reassert our dominance in the galaxy once more.

‘Let me hear you, now. Let my Imperial Fists – who go to war in your name – hear your brotherly love. Let the Master of Mankind in His Palace hear your pride in His dominion. Let the Beast across the void hear your fury and defiance.’

Drakan Vangorich felt the plaza tremble with the wild roars of desiccated adepts and soulless scribes. Dust fell from servile robes as blood thumped once again through withered hearts. An army of petty bureaucrats found themselves and what it meant to be human with Thane’s words echoing about them. His rallying call had awoken them, as if from some smothering nightmare of crumpled vellum, data-streams and meetings eternal. They were men and women once more, not just augmented collators, servants senseless to impending doom. The orks seared into reality for the Palace clerks, administrators and scriveners. They were not merely digits on a data-slate or the subjects of dictated scrolls. They became creatures of alien flesh and blood. A living, breathing menace. A reality in which they found their deepest fears. A monstrous vision upon which to project their hatred.

In those moments of bellowing affirmation, the Grand Master watched the Palace servants forget the petty jealousies of their masters, the politics and game-playing. It all became so simple. The Imperial Fists – with the Astra Militarum, the Imperial Navy and the Adeptus Mechanicus at their side – would destroy the green plague at its source. They would emerge victorious upon Ullanor and deliver Holy Terra from alien destruction because they had to – because every war ever fought by the forces of humanity had allowed for a moment like this. A moment in which those that were left pledged their all to a future unknown. A moment in which survivors found their voice in the silence of empires all but conquered, and declared with one voice that they were forever.

Vangorich looked to Thane. The Chapter Master stood tall amongst the triumphant cacophony. Adepts shook their staffs of office while scribes flapped scrolls in the air. Beyond, the Grand Master saw that the ramparts of the Boenician Wall were crowded with silhouettes, similarly waving. Whole sections of the Palace had ground to a halt as serfs and servants of the Administratum stopped to listen to the Master of the Imperial Fists – a Chapter whose glorious plate, like the rising of a new dawn, had once again appeared on their hallowed plazas and precincts. Members of the Adeptus Custodes looked on as the bells of the Ascension Tower and the Campanilius Cursus rang out, all but drowned in the earth-shaking horns of the Warhound Titans. For a moment, the setting sun broke through the rust-stained clouds of the capital, bathing the Imperial Fists in a golden light.

With the announcements of Canis Romula and Rema booming across the plaza, Vangorich left his throne, and Kubik followed him. The High Lords were out of their seats and in uproar but their carping remonstrations and threats made little impression upon the crowd – most of whom could not hear their masters. None spoke to the Grand Master of Assassins. None tugged at his robes or unleashed their bluster upon him. None asked him to join them in their outrage. While Kubik was courted, the Fabricator General gave them the impassive blankness of the machine.

As Thane turned around to address them directly once more, Vangorich and the Fabricator General reached the bottom of the atrium steps. Both turned crisply in their red and black robes to regard the Council, flanking the looming magnificence of the Chapter Master. The High Lords grew still, the violent indignation screwing up their faces remaining fixed. Wienand and the Provost Marshal looked grave. Standing with Thane, Vangorich saw that the High Lords were looking at him. Usually they averted their gaze but now they stared at the Grand Master of Assassins with horror and dread. While the Legions of the Adeptus Astartes and the might of the Mechanicus caused hearts to hammer in chests, it was the declaration of Vangorich’s intentions that chilled the blood pumping through them.

Several members of the Council went to speak, but Wienand silenced them with a gesture. Nothing would stop High Admiral Lansung and Abel Verreault. With a swish of their heavy cloaks and the creak of boots, the pair left the atrium by a side-arch, to be joined by storm troopers and a Naval honour guard. From there, Lansung and the Lord Militant made their way off the Plaza Decamerata and back into the labyrinthine safety of the Palace.

Vangorich looked to Thane. Like Kubik, the Chapter Master didn’t take his eyes off the remaining High Lords. He nodded. Vangorich obeyed. Turning, the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum strode after Verreault and the High Admiral, his black robes swishing after him like a ill wind. As he left the plaza and the dumbfounded Council, Vangorich activated the vox-bead in his hood.

‘Krule?’

‘I have them,’ the Assassin told him. ‘They are going by way of the Tortestrian Gate.’

‘We shall engage them in the Vangora Quarter,’ Vangorich told Beast Krule. ‘Meet me there.’

It did not take the Grand Master long to reach Krule and the High Lords. He found them walking through a cluster of little-used halls in the upper east wing of the Bastile-Autronomica. The boots of the High Lords echoed with urgency through the vaulted chambers, while the pair blustered their indignation and self-importance.

Like one of the many spectres rumoured to haunt the Bastile-Autronomica, Vangorich appeared in a grand archway. Verreault’s storm troopers saw him first and ran forward to encompass the Lord Militant in a canopy formation. Verreault and the High Admiral slowed to a stop in the middle of the hall. The Naval armsmen took position around Lansung, levelling their las-carbines at Vangorich. The High Lords looked the way they had come, back along the footprints they had left in the dust. There they found Beast Krule, leaning against the pillars of the grand entranceway from which the prints led.

‘You dare to bar our way?’ Verreault shouted across the hall at Vangorich.

‘I dare to walk the corridors and halls of the Emperor’s mighty Palace,’ Vangorich said, ‘and speak to whom I find there.’

‘We have nothing to say to you,’ Lansung told him, ‘or your Adeptus Astartes compatriots.’

‘You can both make all the high-minded speeches you like,’ Abel Verreault warned him, ‘but the great armies of the Imperium – their lord marshals and regimental commanders – answer to me and me alone.’

‘And even if they didn’t,’ Lansung said, ‘you couldn’t possibly muster their strength. Not without the might of the Imperial Fleet. Thane may conjure the ghosts of the Imperial Fists but he seeks death among the ruins of Ullanor alone. For without the Astra Militarum and the vessels to transport them, he condemns his Imperial Fists to an early doom.’

‘I whole-heartedly agree,’ Vangorich told them, approaching. ‘That is why the Chapter Master has engaged me. To impress upon you the importance of your role in the great victory to come. You are going to save the Imperium, my lords: for your God-Emperor and for us all.’

Verreault kept turning. As he swept his cloak around he looked between Krule and the Grand Master of Assassins.

‘Call off your dog,’ the Lord Militant said, ‘or I will order my men to put him down.’

‘I shouldn’t worry about my man,’ Vangorich said as he walked towards the High Lords. ‘I would worry about your own.’

Panic spread across the faces of Lansung and Verreault. Armsmen and storm troopers became twitchy, moving their high-powered weaponry off Beast Krule and tracking it across both their own ranks and the ones opposite.

‘Vangorich!’ the Lord Militant roared, drawing a master-crafted pistol from beneath his cloak. It was all baroque barrels and antique finery. As it hummed at the Grand Master, Lansung pulled an extravagant dress blade from his scabbard.

It was all over in moments, the flash of lasguns lighting up the hall. It was unclear who fired first. Either a storm trooper or an armsman opened fire upon members of the opposite party. Beams proceeded to criss-cross the open space, searing into troopers and the High Admiral’s honour guard. Peerless marksmanship on both sides and the close range ensured that the firefight was brief. Bodies dropped to the dusty floor all about the two High Lords, the craters in their chest carapace glowing.

Unfazed by the fury of the blinding exchange, Beast Krule had unslipped a pistol of his own and blazed away. Aiming through the gunfire and confusion, the Assassin blasted Verreault’s pistol into a shower of scorched components. His second shot took a storm trooper through both helm and head. As the Guardsman fell away, Krule sent his final blast at Lansung’s ridiculous blade. With a blinding flash, the ornate sword was knocked from the High Admiral’s hand and sent skidding across the hall floor. As the whoosh of las-fire died away, Lansung and Verreault looked down at their dead men and then at each other. Both were of advancing years, but they were still at their hearts military men. Seeing abandoned las-carbines on the floor, the pair went for the weapons.

‘Rise,’ Vangorich commanded.

The High Lords staggered back as a storm trooper and a Navy armsman got back to their feet. Scooping up their weapons and kicking away others, the two bore no evidence of damage or injury. Whereas the other bodies on the floor displayed searing blasts to the chest and helm, the two standing before them remained untouched.

‘What in the damnable Eye is going on?’ Lansung rumbled.

‘Vangorich,’ Abel Verreault spat, ‘what is the meaning of this?’

‘It is a demonstration, my lords,’ the Grand Master of Assassins told them. ‘Sleeper cadre Black Glass: identify.’

The armsman’s patrician features began to ripple and twist. To Lansung and the Lord Militant’s revulsion, his face began to change. Muscles spasmed and rearranged under face-flesh, while the stature of the honour guard became slight and shapely. With the las-carbine still held upon Lansung, the armsman became an armswoman before the High Admiral’s eyes. From beneath the severity of a regulation haircut, dark eyes burned with lethal intelligence.

‘Augustra Phex, my lord,’ the Assassin said. ‘Temple Callidus.’

By the time the storm trooper had removed his helm, the features beneath had also transformed into those of a young woman. She leant into her las-carbine and pointed the weapon at Abel Verreault.

‘Kitrid Vaunce, Grand Master,’ she said, without taking her eyes off the Lord Militant. ‘Temple Callidus.’

‘You dare to place your monstrous infiltrators in my ranks?’ the Lord Militant growled.

‘Damn you, sir,’ Lansung said.

‘As the pair of you dare to monitor the comings and goings of my Temples from orbit,’ Vangorich said, ‘and try to stalk my clade snipers with inferior marksmen of your own.’

‘We will not be intimidated,’ Verreault told the Grand Master. ‘You cannot threaten us, Vangorich. We are beyond your reach, especially with the segmentum in peril.’

‘I don’t need to threaten you,’ Vangorich told them, his words like shattered glass. ‘I only need to kill you. Cadre, enact your protocols.’

Augustra Phex and Kitrid Vaunce slipped easily into a grotesque transformation. Bones crunched. Sinew tore. Fat and muscle ballooned. They grew in height and heft. Their chins and faces grew fat. Vaunce became the mirror image of the battle-scarred Lord Militant, while Phex’s skin grew lined and weather-beaten like the High Admiral’s. Even their eyes changed colour, making the pair indistinguishable from the High Lords.

‘Lord Militant,’ Vaunce addressed Verreault in his own gravelly voice.

‘High Admiral,’ Phex said, touching her temple in a playful salute as the shock of hearing his own voice played out across Lansung’s face.

‘I could execute you right here,’ Vangorich told the pair, ‘in the Imperial Palace, and no one would be any the wiser. I could replace you with my Assassins and have the Astra Militarum and the Imperial Navy under my control.’

‘Who could conceive of such a monstrous thing?’ Lansung said.

‘Who indeed?’ Vangorich said. ‘With one command I could rid the Imperium of two sacks of rancid wine and use your influence to bring the Council on board with Chapter Master Thane’s plan. With your stationed fleets, High Admiral, and your mustered billions, Lord Militant, the Imperial Fists just might stand a chance against the foe and snatch Terra from the jaws of the Beast.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Verreault asked, his voice betraying the tremor of a man who had thought through his enemy’s battle plan and found it to be sound. Lansung stared at the Grand Master, his great chest rising and falling.

‘That is really down to you, my lords,’ Vangorich said. ‘It is your fingers on my triggers. I take solace in the fact that your deaths won’t be my responsibility – though you should know that they would weigh very little on my conscience.’

‘What do you want?’ Lansung asked.

‘I want your cooperation, gentlemen,’ Vangorich said with a wolfish smile which died on his face as he carried on speaking. ‘I want you to live up to the Emperor’s expectations. I can replace your aged flesh but the experience that has put lines upon that flesh would still be lost to the Imperium, should I have to take drastic measures. Your knowledge and military skill are the only things of worth to me. They are the reason you are alive. What do I want? I want sentinel regiments allocated to the subsector, as well as core fleets to remain on station about the capital system. They will coordinate with the Adeptus Astartes of the Last Wall to shield Terra and the Emperor from the enemy should our attack on the Beast fail.

‘It will not fail, however. For you will mobilise every available warship and transport, every battle company and battalion, to accompany the Imperial Fists to Ullanor. If you hold back so much as a stretcher-bearer or fleet tender, I will issue the order for your assassination. Augustra and Kitrid here will be waiting upon it. They will be every Guardsman, every armsman and officer that you see about you – in place and waiting. Waste no time in flushing them out, for they are not the only members of the Black Glass cadre. My operatives are everyone and everywhere. Each is ready to take your worthless lives and replace you at a moment’s notice. So tell me, my lords – do we have an accord?’

Lansung and Verreault looked wretchedly at one another and then at the Callidus Assassins, who were like reflections in a crystal clear mirror.

‘We do,’ the High Lords answered, their voices laden with dying anger and doom.

‘Good,’ Vangorich said, nodding to himself at a job well done. He enjoyed the moment: the High Admiral and the Lord Militant, finally doing as their duty required of them. ‘Very good.’

Seven

Ullanor Sector – 44 Thoosa

Thane pushed himself through the rocky corridors and across the cavernous chambers of 44 Thoosa. The asteroid was a labyrinth of darkness and zero-gravity, allowing even the Chapter Master in his Terminator plate to move effortlessly through its rocky heart.

44 Thoosa had been selected from the Golgashir asteroid field and hollowed out by heavy servitors above the fabricator moon of Abythica Prime. Shielded by an intense debris field, the tiny forge world had been missed by roving ork fleets, and selected as one of the six staging points for the Imperial attack upon Ullanor. Thane had had his Imperial Fists travel there to be met by Artisan Trajectorae Augus Van Auken, whom Fabricator Kubik had entrusted with the experimental gravitational technologies the Adeptus Mechanicus had developed from recovered ork equipment.

Within a wide ring of colossal node-installations hanging above the fabricator moon, 44 Thoosa tumbled through the path created by the gravitational node fields, orbiting the planet. The asteroid was busy with scaffolding and orbited in turn by work stations and servitor ships. With alterations made and its precious cargo installed, the asteroid gathered speed as it moved between the alternating nodes. Pulled onwards by the gravitational forces of the adapted ork technology, the colossal piece of rock spun with increasing velocity around the fabricator moon.

Utilising Artisan Van Auken’s calculations, power to the gravitational ringway was cut and 44 Thoosa was thrown out into the void like a tossed bolas, heading at carefully calibrated speed on a trajectory for the planet Ullanor. The last of six successful test launches using asteroids from the Golgashir field, 44 Thoosa followed in the path of its rocky predecessors. Like a comet breaking up into a meteor storm, the asteroids plunged towards the homeworld of the Beast; 44 Thoosa, however, was the only one to carry the forces of the Imperium.

Also repairing at Abythica Prime had been what remained of Battlefleet Solar-Spinward. Comprised of ancient battleships, grand cruisers and fleet carriers, the armada had been bolstered with escorts and heavy frigates from Zanaheim, as well as Abythican ark cruisers of the Zeta-Iota battle group. Newly reassigned as Attack Group Thoosa and placed under the command of Lord Admiral Evelyn Napier, the fleet’s instructions were to follow the asteroids in through the outer systems of the alien stronghold sector at sub-light attack speed, while protecting the heavy transports, troop carriers, ark freighters and mass conveyors from the swarms of ork assault craft Thane expected to find there.

Fighting fire with fire, Thane had chosen to transport most of the Chapter, along with Kavalanera Brassanas’ Sisters of Silence and the ork psykers, to Ullanor aboard the asteroid. Crashing into the planet, in emulation of the orks’ own devastating tactics, Thane aimed to take advantage of the widespread destruction and chaos by holding and expanding the decimated landing zone with landed armour, Guardsmen of the Astra Militarum, skitarii legions and battle-automata. Utilising orbital strikes and Navy air support, he also hoped to get the god-machines of the Legio Intrafex down on the ground. All the while, Thane and his Imperial Fists would besiege the orks’ palace and the Sisters of Silence could unleash the power of a greenskin psyker upon the apocalyptic monstrosity the galaxy had come to know as the Beast.

Launched from other fortress worlds and forge worlds situated about the Ullanor systems, five more attack groups were surging through the void towards the stronghold system. Magos Dominus Gerg Zhokuv led one attack group from Dynax-Abultra, the dominus’ experience in commanding Adeptus Mechanicus forces during the previous attack on Ullanor seen as invaluable. Another benefitted from having High Marshal Bohemond of the Black Templars leading the charge. One even carried a High Lord of Terra. Wienand of the Inquisition had decided to accompany her Adeptus Mechanicus adviser Eldon Urquidex and a force of Deathwatch Space Marines under their watch commander, the Space Wolf Asger Warfist. The last attack group followed in the wake of the mighty Phalanx itself, with Tenth Captain Decarion fortifying the colossal craft with the Scouts of the Tenth and two demi-companies of Imperial Fists.

Arriving at the distant Mandeville points of outlying systems, thousands of vessels converged upon Ullanor, their engines blazing at attack speed. The Imperial Navy had deployed the last of its battleships and grand cruisers, leading patchwork armadas of scrambled vessels made up of system squadrons, patrol groups, flotillas and sector fleets. Legendary capital ships had even been hastily refitted and brought out of retirement: the Emperor Ascendant, and the Astra Glorianus that had been serving as a prison hulk amongst the rings of Tetra-Bithia. Flanked by cruisers, heavy frigates and destroyers they escorted the great ark ships of the Adeptus Mechanicus and bulk freighters transporting the apocalyptic war machines of the Adeptus Titanicus. Fat troop ships carrying Astra Militarum regiments travelled alongside ark freighters transporting skitarii legions to war and Navy carriers primed with interceptors, strike fighters, bombers and gunships. Other institutions had contributed what they could. The Ecclesiarchy had sent along Ministorum transports, overladen with hastily recruited frateris militias. The Adeptus Arbites had despatched a small number of precinct ships and counter-insurgency craft while Drakan Vangorich had contributed several cladeships, carrying some of the deadliest killers in the Imperium.

Thane and his attack force were prepared to give the orks no quarter and no respite from catastrophic destruction. As the monsters staggered through the ruins of their own world, the Chapter Master would visit on them doom upon doom before baptising the newly formed Imperial Fists in dust, blood and battle.

Scraping the golden yellow of his Terminator plate against the rocky wall, Thane pushed out across the cavernous gloom of the asteroid’s central chamber. Hollowed out at the heart of 44 Thoosa, it had been nicknamed the Nexus. Adamantium frameworking and field generators had reinforced the chamber for the rough landing to come. Artisan Van Auken had crafted the rocky body to be an asteroid within an asteroid, the inner core benefiting from anti-gravitational technologies shielding it from the worst of the planetary impact, and the outer core designed to absorb the worst of the contact destruction.

It was here in the Nexus – pressurised and supplied with a basic atmosphere – that the Space Marines, Sisters of Silence and alien prisoners would ride out a planetary impact. It was here, amongst the hurried adaptations of the Adeptus Mechanicus and by the good grace of their technological invention, that they would attempt to survive the unsurvivable.

Above him, the cavern ceiling housed a small cluster of cages. The three monstrous orks from Luna, hardy beyond understanding, clawed their way around their cages in the zero-gravity. Their eyes and mouths blazed with ethereal power, while arcs of psychic energy sizzled across green flesh and the bars of their prison. Their fang-filled maws were open and their ugly faces contorted about ferocious roars.

Lady Kavalanera Brassanas drifted down from the cavern ceiling in her crimson plate, accompanied by the Sister in silver that Thane had encountered in the lunar caverns. They stopped gracefully before the Chapter Master.

‘Status, Sister?’ Thane said, looking up at the monstrosities above. Ethereal light blazed within the cages and crackled across the bars.

The prisoners grow in power and agitation, Brassanas signed back, the closer we get to Ullanor.

Thane nodded gravely. ‘Can they be contained?’

The outer systems are swarming with the enemy, Brassanas told him, each creature a psychic reservoir from which these monsters draw their power.

‘This is a good thing, yes?’ Thane put to her. ‘The longer the charge and greater the number of orks, the greater the power. The greater the power, the greater the destruction to be wrought upon the greenskins.’

To a point, Brassanas signed.

Thane sensed her caution. ‘Can they be contained, Sister?’ he repeated.

The Sisters of Silence will not fail, Chapter Master, Brassanas assured him.

‘My lord,’ Honoured Brother Tychor said as he approached Thane, moving around the equipment with the Chapter’s new battle standard clutched in his gauntlet. The banner was tall and proud. While the fabric glinted with gold thread, the shaft and crossbar of the standard were crafted from silvered adamantium, each of the four ends terminating in a sculpted fist.

In recognition of his bravery in the Feast of Blades, Thane had appointed Dathan Tychor both Chapter standard bearer and his personal champion. Leading an honour guard of former Excoriators, hand-picked by Tychor himself, he had responsibility for the Chapter Master’s person on the field of battle. While Tychor’s plate gleamed newly golden yellow, his bionic arm still held the battle-scarred sheen of age and bloody employment.

‘Epistolary Zoldt and the Chief Librarian have word for you from Attack Group Sisyphax,’ Tychor reported now.

‘My lady,’ Thane said to Brassanas, nodding in farewell, before following the standard bearer.

In the zero-gravity of the cavernous chamber, Tychor and the Chapter Master made swift progress. They glided across ranks of Imperial Fists, each standing to attention in transportation cradles. They waited in silence. Hungry for battle. Ready for the havoc to come.

They found Epistolary Zoldt at a communications station. Zoldt was prevented from using his psychic powers in the presence of the Sisters of Silence, and Thane could only imagine what agony it was for the Librarians to be in the presence of a null like Kavalanera Brassanas. Even without the use of his powers, however, Thane had found a duty for the Epistolary, nominating Zoldt his chief communications officer.

Along with installing the transportation cradles, chamber reinforcements and tethers, Artisan Van Auken and the Adeptus Mechanicus priests at Abythica Prime had ensured that Thane could coordinate the colossal forces at his command. A hololithic vox-station relayed directly to the monstrous Phalanx, similarly closing on Ullanor. With most of the Chapter deployed for battle on board 44 Thoosa, the Imperial Fists Space Marines left aboard the mobile fortress-monastery were Captain Decarion and his Tenth Company, two further demi-companies, a skeleton complement of Techmarines, and Chief Librarian Azmachai and his Epistolaries. Decarion was charged with the defence of the fortress-monastery and leading Attack Group Sisyphax. He commanded one hundred Space Marine Scouts made up of a mixture of neophytes taken from all six Successor Chapters of the Imperial Fists and one hundred battle-brothers, with two thousand battle-ready serfs and servitors.

Azmachai and his Epistolaries, meanwhile, had the responsibility of astropathically communicating the Chapter Master’s orders to all under his command. Away from the nullifying influence of the Silent Sisterhood, the Chief Librarian could relay orders to astropaths aboard Lord Admiral Napier’s flagship, the Apocalypse-class battleship Master of Mankind, and the Ark Mechanicus Buenaventura, commanded by Dominus Gerg Zhokuv. At much greater distances, Azmachai also sent and received astropathic messages from choirs aboard the flagships of the other attack groups converging upon Ullanor, each leading fleets that trailed their own tumbling asteroids.

‘Brother Zoldt?’

‘The Chief Librarian for you, Chapter Master,’ Zoldt said, his voice strained with the burden of being surrounded by the Silent Sisterhood.

The warping hololithic representation of Azmachai suddenly crackled into focus. The Chief Librarian stood encased in a hooded suit of blue Terminator armour, swathed in golden robes. He jabbed his force staff at deck serfs that Thane could not see, giving them a haughty scowl. As he moved, the lines on his haggard face ran to deep shadow, while a milky eye blinked with constant agitation.

‘Chapter Master,’ the Chief Librarian said. ‘I have much to report.’

‘Proceed, old friend.’

‘Attack Group Perditor has had their force bolstered by a reserve flotilla under Commodore Beauchamp,’ Azmachai said.

‘I get the feeling that is the only good news you have for me, Librarian.’

‘Indeed, Chapter Master,’ Azmachai said. ‘Perditor has run afoul of an attack moon on their approach through the outer systems. They have experienced heavy loses, including the capital ships Rex Resurgam and Voidhammer.’

‘Admiral Lumaresq is lost?’

‘Flag Captain Emes now commands, Chapter Master,’ Azmachai told him.

‘What of Attack Groups Idas and Verita?’

‘Idas is coming up through the Acheronias,’ the Chief Librarian told him. ‘Dominus Zhokuv has sent word that the systems there are decimated. Charted worlds are gone with only a debris field remaining. He suspects that the Acheronias region might have been used as a testing ground for the ork gravitational weaponry.’

‘Can they make it through?’ Thane asked.

‘They endeavour to do so, my lord.’

‘And Verita?’

‘Sporadic contacts with enemy flotillas in the Scorpicon Nebula,’ Azmachai said. ‘Several escorts have become separated from the main fleet in the dust clouds.’

‘Have Watch Commander Warfist and the Deathwatch leave them,’ Thane ordered. ‘We cannot afford to slow our approach. Out here, hesitation is death. The commanders of those vessels will have to act under their own initiative. Now tell me: have we had any further contact with Attack Group Phaethon?’

‘Nothing, my lord,’ Azmachai told him. ‘Group Phaethon’s approach lay through some of Ullanor’s satellite and stronghold systems. Last reports were of the destruction of a number of troop carriers. I regret to inform you that the 3001st Arphistran Rifles, the Varsine Dragoons 3rd Battalion and the Ypresian Free Companies are all lost to us. Commodore Tregorran identified an ork vessel on the Sartovian Drift,’ Azmachai said, ‘last seen at the Battle of the Hartzhaven. A space hulk mounting experimental weaponry, codenamed Green Herald. Since Tregorran’s identification of the vessel, I have heard nothing from the commodore or his captains.’

‘Bohemond?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Keep trying,’ Thane urged the Chief Librarian.

‘Of course,’ Azmachai said. ‘I do, though, have reports for you from your own group.’

‘Proceed.’

‘The troop carrier Pronteus has been boarded,’ the Chief Librarian reported. ‘The orks are employing long-range teleporter technology. The 3rd Royal Vortiga carry a contingent of abhuman auxilia that have proved successful in keeping the enemy from the bridge. The carrier is managing to keep pace.’

‘Any losses?’

‘We lost the bulk freighter Bellico and the three Titans it was carrying to a ramming action, while the battle-damaged frigate Duke Castagir detonated her engines, clearing our rearguard of attack ships. The sacrifice was a noble one but the enemy still pursues, however, and in growing number.’

‘And Attack Group Sisyphax?’

‘I am happy to report that the Phalanx and Fleet Sisyphax have fallen in behind you, Chapter Master,’ the Chief Librarian said. ‘Captain Decarion has asked me to pass on his assurances. She has not a scratch and he intends to keep our fortress-monastery that way. He has had occasion to exercise the gun crews, however, and sent three ork battle cruisers into the asteroid surface.’

‘We felt the impact detonations,’ Thane confirmed.

‘Several cruisers have broken off from the attack, following the mauling,’ Azmachai told him. ‘The Lord Admiral’s captains are requesting permission to pursue.’

‘Absolutely denied,’ Thane said. He knew it went against an officer’s every instinct to watch an enemy all but destroyed limp away to safety, but he could not allow a few hothead captains and commanders to break formation and threaten the integrity of a coordinated attack.

‘No vessel is to break off from the fleet – and that goes for all other attack groups also. We are to be the hammer’s swing: unswerving and true.’ Thane looked out across the hundreds of Imperial Fists in the chamber, each waiting for an opportunity to prove himself to his Chapter Master, to honour the noble yellow of his plate and his Chapter’s history.

‘When we strike, we strike together – and when we do, we shall shatter this barbarian empire. Only then will the galaxy ring with our victory.’

Eight

Ullanor System – 44 Thoosa

Impacts upon the surface of 44 Thoosa had become increasingly regular as the colossal rock rolled through the void, ever closer to the stronghold world of the monstrous Beast. Ork attack ships, brute cruisers and great carriers of the greenskin horde were smashed into oblivion as the asteroid ploughed through the swarming system.

When Chief Librarian Azmachai announced that they were entering the Ullanor System, Thane decided that he needed to see it for himself. Having visual feed signals transmitted from the Phalanx and vanguard vessels of the fleet, he watched their approach on the hololithic projector.

The darkness of space was tinged green with the grotesque presence of the invader. The Chapter Master felt his jaw clench behind his faceplate. The scale of the xenos contamination was appalling. Here, within the borders of the God-Emperor’s Imperium, Ullanor had festered like an old wound. What had once been lauded as one of the greatest engagements of the Great Crusade advertised itself to the galaxy as a failure. The orks had not been wiped out on Ullanor. They had not been defeated. Like a fever untreated, they had returned with a vengeance. Each planet and moon of the system was a blot, a swarming miasma of monstrous craft. Rust-buckets of ungainly accretion, boasting bulbous engines and bristling with weaponry. Bastardised warships, cobbled together from the wrecks of Imperial vessels. Weaponised chunks of rock and debris.

The crowning glory of the madness was Ullanor itself. A beast of a planet, it sat like a barbarian warlord among satellite supporters. A place that burned the eye with its xenos taint and ached with the mindless violence of alien brutality. Thane forced himself to stare at its horror. Beneath the impenetrable haze of craft and orbital detritus that buzzed about the planet like angry insects swarming, the Chapter Master knew what was waiting for them. A writhing carpet of green. A planetary horde of savage abominations. Pole to pole orks, their brute workshops and the heretical technologies they spawned.

Their target, however, or certainly the general target that Artisan Van Auken had aimed 44 Thoosa for with his mind-bending calculations, was the city named Gorkogrod: the stronghold of the Beast. An equatorial fortress-palace the size of a small continent, it was the alien warlord’s seat of power and savage authority in a contested galaxy. It was from this monstrous stronghold that the Beast advertised his presence and supremacy. Technological abominations had been perfected in his barbaric honour. Trillions of orks had converged upon the system in their hulks and attack ships, augmenting the billions teleported there and those spawned under the Beast’s own banners. The doom of his psychic invitation even reached out to humans on Imperial worlds. Citizens, local flotillas and Astra Militarum garrisons went mad and defected to the orks before their hulks and derelicts even broke system, before ending up as slaves in a growing alien empire.

Thane couldn’t tear his eyes from the spectacle. The planet even seemed to call to him. Across the frozen silence of space, he fancied he heard the raving ferocity of the orks. A rising cacophony of snaggle-tusked fury and bloodlust unbound, coming together in a mind-splitting roar, Thane once again heard the Beast. Like a beacon of infectious, alien insanity, the Beast’s furious presence seemed to reach out from Ullanor.

Thane closed his eyes and blinked both the spectacle and the Beast’s monstrous roar from his thoughts. He did so because he was a Space Marine and he could. He was engineered to be stronger in both body and mind. The Beast had infected entire worlds with his alien madness, however, and commissars on board fleet carriers had reported hundreds of Guardsmen from scores of different regiments lost to such insanity. Chief Librarian Azmachai had reasoned that it was a psychic expression of the Beast’s barbaric desire to conquer the galaxy, a territorial advertisement, wielded – like all things by the orks – as a weapon. The Chief Librarian knew not, however, how to combat such a potent phenomenon.

Faith, Thane had told him, ordering his company Chaplains to conduct battle blessings on the sons of Dorn as the asteroid approached.

‘Look at what we have done,’ Thane said, half to himself.

‘We did not do this,’ Tychor replied, before the crackling hololithic image of Azmachai could speak. ‘The orks need no assistance in polluting the dark reaches of the galaxy. They are the plague, we are but the cure.’

‘Brave words, brother,’ Thane said, ‘and worthy of a Chapter standard bearer. I fear they have been here spoken before, however. By our father… and our father’s father.’

‘You blame them?’

‘If they were here, to see this,’ Thane said, ‘knowing that the claws of these beasts are slick with the blood of the Imperial Fists? I think that they would blame themselves.’

‘You are here,’ Tychor said, ‘seeing this. Living this. What do you think?’

‘I think that we are being punished for our lack of vigilance,’ Thane said. ‘I think it has happened before and will happen again. The galaxy is vast and deep but it belongs to humanity. It is our responsibility. Our burden. We cannot afford to be complacent.’

Cycling through the hololithic visual feeds, Thane saw the vessels of the two attack groups rocketing up behind. With engine columns blazing, the Imperial ships kept pace with the asteroid and held a defensive formation. Admiral Napier and Captain Decarion had formed two lines of battle with the majestic battleships, grand cruisers and Adeptus Mechanicus ark ships under their command. While the Admiral led one column with the Master of Mankind, Decarion led the other with the monstrous Phalanx. Between them, the vessels offered protection to the convoy of bloated troop carriers, skitarii ark freighters and mass conveyors that the warships were escorting.

The fleet was like a colossal fortification moving through the void, vessels ancient and indomitable presenting towering walls of titanic gunnery. Boasting Guardsmen, cybernetic soldiers and combat servitors numbering in the millions, as well as the apocalyptic engines of war, it should have been more than a match for the enemies of humanity. Faced with Ullanor itself, however, with its nebulous blizzard of ships and continent-swallowing hordes, it didn’t seem enough. Not nearly enough.

While 44 Thoosa in itself raised neither suspicion or alarm amongst the orks – the system being used to its fair share of comets and meteorite storms – the trailing formations of Imperial warships were another matter entirely. Drawn to them like predators to a game trail, ork attack craft swarmed the capital ships, attempting to match their reinforced hull plating against Imperial firepower. Crash-capsules and rocks rolled through turret fire, while hammerheaded battle cruisers attempted to plough on through lance beams and cannon blasts. The disciplined broadsides of the Navy warships washed the orks back in a tsunami of light and heat, but the junkers just kept coming.

As the 44 Thoosa tumbled on through the ork system, Thane watched the other asteroids ahead of them closing in on the ork planet. The smallest of them struck an attack moon on its way in-system, resulting in a blinding light of impact that faded to the molten glow of scarred rock. The destruction was horrifying. While the asteroid survived, it had been deflected and Thane estimated that it would barely graze the atmosphere of the target planet. His blood chilled at the prospect of 44 Thoosa doing the same in the crowded system. He didn’t need Chief Librarian Azmachai to tell him of the hell-storm of rock and debris that the asteroid must have been shedding, straight into the path of the fleet.

The Chapter Master marvelled at the sight of the other asteroids and the technological ingenuity it must have taken Artisan Van Auken to put them on such a course. As the leading pair spun through the void, they were followed by a third, as ugly a piece of rock as ever graced the galaxy. Monstrously bulbous and irregular, it was also the largest of the asteroids that the priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus had gravitationally propelled towards Ullanor. The massive rock piled on through flotillas of ork attack vessels, decimating stationed terror ships and crashing through star forts.

Thane and Tychor watched the pair of vanguard asteroids strike the planet. The Chapter Master’s hearts thumped in his chest and his spirit soared as the two bodies, so graceful in their approach, smacked into Ullanor like a pugilist delivering an almighty left-and-right. The planet trembled and the points of impact glowed hot with tectonic fires. Blast waves rippled out, turning the swarms of attack ships into tangled wrecks. As the skies rained debris and shattered gun platforms, waves of corpses, broken and aflame, were blasted back across the land. Within horrific moments it was over, the impact sites ablaze with melted rock and devastation. The ugly rock that followed struck the planet only just behind, and bathed the ork world in a corona of destruction.

‘Burn,’ Thane hissed through his helmet grille. Fleets annihilated. Imperial worlds torn apart. Populations enslaved. He felt all such atrocities in his chest and yearned for vengeance. ‘Burn, you monsters.’

He watched, chafing for action, as Ullanor grew before him. 44 Thoosa would be the next to smash into the greenskin world, right on top of the palace stronghold of Gorkogrod. Intelligence gathered upon the two doomed previous attacks told the Chapter Master that the Beast’s lair spanned a small continent. It was all colossal fortifications and monstrous architecture, as alien as it was formidable. Within the walls were precincts kilometres across, choked with weapons factories, titanic workshops, fungus plantations, holdings of greenskin livestock and encampments for vast hordes of ork warriors. Of the destruction wrought by the previous two attacks, however, there was no sign. The orks had rebuilt their monstrous fortifications. Colossal alien giga-weaponry and vast factory complexes were everywhere.

‘Time?’ Tychor asked.

‘It’s time,’ Thane answered.

The Chapter Master was beginning to feel the slight drag of planetary gravity on his suit. He reached down with the toe of his armoured boot. It crunched into the grit of the chamber floor as his own weight began to reassert itself.

Above, the ceiling of the chamber was ablaze with coruscating bolts of psychic power. The three cages could barely be seen through the otherworldly energies. Lady Brassanas and her Sisters slowly descended with the effect of gravity.

‘Lady Brassanas, get your Sisters to their landing cradles,’ Thane told her as he strode towards the communications station. ‘Brother Zoldt, general order – all attack groups to take station above impact site. Orbital strikes and Aeronautica to secure landing zones towards the site perimeters. Have Captain Decarion launch his Thunderhawk Transporters with armour payloads. I want our Land Raiders and gunships on the ground following our landing, followed by drop-ships to deploy Astra Militarum and skitarii troops. A foothold must be established before we can bring down the heavy armour and Titans.’

‘What about upper-orbital enemy attack ships and gun platforms?’ the Epistolary asked.

‘All vessels will have to engage while offering orbital support fire and deploying ground troops,’ Thane growled with some annoyance. ‘Tell the captains they will not have the luxury of ordered engagement here. The orks won’t wait on protocols and I won’t wait on the orks. Their first priority is to get troops and war machines down on the ground. Make sure that all attack group commanders understand.’

‘Yes, Chapter Master.’

‘Open vox-channel,’ Thane commanded. ‘All Imperial Fists.’

‘You’re patched through,’ Zoldt confirmed.

‘Brothers,’ Thane began, ‘we have arrived in deep, in the embrace of the enemy’s stronghold world. We are not the first to make this attack but for good or ill, we shall be the last. The enemy is expecting us. Their warriors will be hungry for our blood. Their weapons will be loaded to bursting and their great blades serrated and sharpened. Their world-spanning fortifications will be ready for our coming.

‘Have no doubts. We will lose ships, we will lose armour; we will lose valiant men and women, loyal servants of the Emperor. And yes, we will even lose our own brothers. There is no other path open to us. But the Imperial Fists will endure, as we always have. The paint on our plate is honourable and fresh. Below us on Ullanor is a green inferno. A baptism of fire. And we shall endure the horror. We shall survive this xenos apocalypse. We shall carve a victory as yet unwritten into the flesh of our foe with bolt and blade. We shall find and destroy the Beast, this thing whose every breath mocks us, and burn his home world, as he has done to so many of humanity’s own. For the second time, Ullanor shall be cleansed of alien taint. Like the Imperial Fists, this planet will be delivered and reborn. As your Chapter Master, in word this is my decree. Now in action I command you to prosecute it.’

‘For the glory of Dorn!’ Tychor roared across the channel, clenching his gauntlet into a fist and hammering it against his breastplate. Company upon company of Space Marines did the same, the vox-channel crackling with the thunder of a thousand Imperial Fists returning the standard bearer’s call.

Tychor and Thane took to their cradles with the rest of the Chapter Master’s honour guard, their powered armourlocked in a standing position. Behind them was Emmerich Berengard, Captain of the First, and Eckhart, the veteran sergeant who led his command squad. The First Company was mostly made up of former Black Templars, like Berengard himself. They stood in grim silence behind their captain and Chapter Master.

‘Ready for the fight of your life, First Captain?’ Thane asked across the vox.

‘It has been my life’s work to purge this galaxy of the alien, Chapter Master,’ Berengard said. ‘Live or die, I could wish for no better reward for my service.’

It was a suitably grim response from a grim man. Berengard’s plate gleamed golden yellow just like the rest of his brothers, but beneath it the captain was nothing but scar tissue. Having been burned from head to toe in the Promethium Wars, Berengard had lost his skin and any last vestiges of good humour.

‘Master Vorstecht,’ Thane called across the vox, ‘report. Are we ready for impact?’

‘Yes, Chapter Master,’ the Master of the Forge told him. ‘All battle-brothers, with weapons and plate, caged in their cradles.’

‘Very good,’ the Chapter Master returned. ‘Prime the detonators.’

A sound rumbled through 44 Thoosa – the excruciating fracturing of rock. Going from the deep cold of space to the friction of atmospheric entry, the surface of the asteroid was heating. Thane’s plate detected the first indications of moving air and a rising temperature. Wind howled through the hollows and tunnel-riddled interior of the asteroid.

‘Stand by,’ Thane snapped into the vox as rock trembled beneath the anchorage of his cradle. Dust rained down from the Nexus ceiling and the walls of the cavern shook. The gravitational forces of Ullanor tore at 44 Thoosa as the asteroid plummeted towards the surface.

The Chapter Master prepared himself for impact. The Adeptus Mechanicus at Abythica Prime had done what they could to counter the dreadful forces at work. The cavern reinforcements. The cradles. Field generators. Anti-gravity technologies designed to cushion the inner core and Nexus from the planetary collision wracking the asteroid’s rocky shell. Even the launching of 44 Thoosa had been calibrated to make the landing survivable. Artisan Van Auken aimed to have the asteroid retain its structural integrity upon impact, unlike the other asteroids which had been launched at Ullanor at maximum velocity.

Such considerations should have offered reassurances to Thane, but plunging towards the planet surface, all he could think of was the fate of his new Chapter. It would be a cruel fate indeed if the Imperial Fists were to burn in the baptism of their first engagement. He shouted further assurances to his battle-brothers, but his words were lost to the roar of atmospheric friction.

Impact.

For a minute – several minutes – Thane could not speak.

His body had been engineered to take all that the galaxy could throw at him, but this was something else entirely. As 44 Thoosa hit the surface of Ullanor, the cavern shook and cracks ripped through the rock. Support struts were torn out of their foundations. Grit rained from the ceiling, pitter-patting across the surface of the Chapter Master’s plate. Dust choked the air and lamps died, plunging the Nexus into darkness. Even the ork prisoners had been knocked semi-senseless within their cages, abruptly ending the psychic lightstorm above the heads of the Imperial Fists.

Every bone in Thane’s body reverberated with the asteroid’s sudden impact, as he was flung back against his supporting cradle by the unimaginable forces of the graceless landing. Blinking sense back into his jarred mind, the Chapter Master found his honoured plate to be urgently reporting a deluge of data. Environmental warnings, integrity assessments and damage reports, mostly. His Tactical Dreadnought armour sparked, while the landing cradle was a ruin about him.

Getting the thumbs of his gleaming black power fists beneath the frame, Thane heaved. The cradle had nothing left and broke away in his grip, allowing him to stumble forward. The floor felt different beneath his boots, tilted at a strange angle. Based upon the weight distribution of 44 Thoosa, Artisan Van Auken had made an estimate regarding the orientation it would assume as soon as it was in the embrace of Ullanor’s powerful gravity. It had only been an estimate, however, and the asteroid seemed to have settled upon an incline.

‘Tychor,’ Thane called through the darkness. ‘Report. Can you hear me?’

‘Barely, my lord,’ the standard bearer replied, his voice cracked across the vox.

‘First Captain?’ Thane said. ‘Come in.’

‘To the end,’ Berengard growled, shaking off his own injuries and rising from his cradle.

‘Suit lamps,’ Thane ordered. At once, the Nexus was criss-crossed with beams that cut through the murk of the cavern. With light, Thane could make out a collapse, where both the cavern wall and adamantium supports had given way. ‘Zoldt?’ When the Epistolary didn’t answer, the Chapter Master repeated his call.

‘My lord,’ Zoldt managed.

‘Communications?’

‘The station is shattered, my lord,’ Zoldt reported.

‘We will have to rely upon suit arrays,’ Thane said. ‘When the Phalanx achieves high orbit, I want a vox-channel through to Captain Decarion as soon as possible. This is imperative, do you hear me, brother?’

‘Acknowledged, my lord,’ the Epistolary voxed back.

The Chapter Master shook his head within his helm and blinked the last of the disorientation away. They were there, on Ullanor. In the midst of a raging nest of greenskin barbarity, at the heart of an alien empire. They would need to act fast. They would need to be resolute. Everything relied upon their indomitable spirit and the tradition of victory on which the reputation of the Imperial Fists was built.

Turning, Thane saw his companies had fared little better than himself. Plate that had gleamed golden yellow moments before now sparked and was covered in dust. Imperial Fists extricated themselves from landing cradles with powered force, before checking their weapons for damage or obstructions. From the way they moved, he could tell some of the Sisters had suffered in the rough landing, but they attended to each other and their alien charges with the efficiency and determination he had come to expect. Taking their positions about the buckled cages, they stood sentinel over the ork psykers.

‘Captains, report in,’ the Chapter Master commanded, ‘and check for casualties.’

‘Berengard, First, reporting in.’

‘Karlito, Second, present and ready.’

‘Company Apothecaries, see to your injured,’ Thane said.

‘Oberon, Seventh, ready, Chapter Master.’

‘Captain Brondal, reporting in.’

‘Master Vorstecht,’ Thane voxed, ‘I want status on warsuits and armour, right away.’

‘Aye, my lord.’

‘Storn of the Ninth, standing by.’

The Chapter Master listened for his remaining captains. After Gortez, Uzziah and Valdanor, he expected to hear Saul Abramach, formerly of the Excoriators, but the call never came.

‘Captain Abramach, report in,’ Thane said.

‘Chapter Master, I regret to inform you that the captain is dead,’ a steely voice returned.

‘Chaplain Ishcarion?’

‘Yes, Chapter Master,’ the Chaplain said. ‘He was killed during the collapse. Two battle-brothers go with him.’

Thane nodded to himself. The insertion had been a high-risk strategy and he had known there were going to be battle-brothers amongst the ranks of the Imperial Fists that would pay for his decision. The Chapter Master could only hope that vastly more orks had lost their lives as a consequence of their apocalyptic landing.

‘Understood, Chaplain,’ Thane returned. ‘Take charge there amongst the ranks of the Eighth.’

‘Affirmative,’ Ishcarion returned.

‘Apothecaries, report numbers of casualties and identify your dead. The Chief Apothecary will ensure that their gene-seed is recovered and their spirit lives on in our ranks.’

They didn’t really have time for such luxuries, but Thane couldn’t treat the Chapter’s first battle dead with disrespect. They would all have to hurry, however: their entrance might have been cataclysmic but there was no way of telling how long it would take the orks to rally.

The criss-crossing beams of suit lamps suddenly picked out a hulking figure, dropping from the ceiling. Carrying itself with primordial, brutal grace, the monster landed with assurance. Its cage and chain anchor had broken free in the crash. The lamps of Thane’s honour guard flashed at the creature to reveal its green face and yellowing tusks. The ork bellowed its alien fury at the Imperial Fists, before smashing one of the honour guard aside with a back-breaking crunch. Its heavy chains whipped about around it.

‘Alive!’ Thane called as the boltguns of the honour guard came up. ‘I want it alive.’

Dathan Tychor was suddenly there, the golden fabric of the Chapter standard flapping between the honour guard and their enemy. Knocking the barrels of the boltguns aside with a thrust of the battle standard, Tychor brought it immediately around like a hammer, smashing the ork senseless with the impact of the crossbar’s sculpted fist. As the monster tried to reassert itself, Tychor drew back the standard and then jabbed it forward, shattering the snaggle-fanged maw of the roaring thing. Turning with power-armoured grace, the standard bearer sent the banner fluttering across the heads of the honour guard and their Chapter Master before landing another skull-hammering blow with the adamantium fist on the other end of the crossbar. This time the creature went down, knocked unconscious by Tychor’s relentless assault. As the Sisters of Silence swept in, dragging heavy chains and manacles to clasp on the alien brute, the standard bearer turned to Thane.

‘It’s still alive.’

Turning around, the Chapter Master marched back towards the Imperial Fists, who were out of their landing cradles and forming up. Above, he could hear the remaining ork psykers raging and howling in their cages. In the gloom of the cavern, three battle brothers approached him, each clad in plate of different colours.

‘Three casualties only, Chapter Master,’ Chief Apothecary Delgado informed him, ‘including Captain Abramach.’

‘He will be sorely missed in this venture,’ Thane said solemnly.

‘Their gene-seed has been recovered.’

‘Injured?’ Thane asked.

‘Twenty-two,’ Delgado told him, ‘spread across five companies. None incapacitated. All able to take part in the battle ahead.’

‘Good,’ Thane said. ‘Thank you, Chief Apothecary. Master Vorstecht, what of our combat capabilities?’

‘All Centurion warsuits ready for deployment, Chapter Master,’ the Master of the Forge said.

‘Good, for they shall be needed. I thank you for your efforts, Master Vorstecht. I fear that further damage waits for your venerable machines on the field of battle.’

‘It is our honour to serve, Chapter Master.’

‘Chapter Master,’ Epistolary Zoldt said, ‘Orbital contact established. Captain Decarion for you. Channel psi-sigma.’

Thane nodded and adjusted his vox-channel.

‘Captain, we’re blind down here,’ he told Decarion. ‘I need a status report.’

‘Praise the primarch,’ Decarion said, his words warping across the poor transmission, ‘for your safe delivery and that of the Chapter. It is havoc up here. Phalanx’s batteries and turrets are all firing at full capacity, and still there are attack ships everywhere. Crash-capsules, ramming ships and landers constantly try to board us. My company stands ready to repel the orks when that happens – and it will happen, Chapter Master. It will not take the enemy long to focus their teleporters on us.’

‘Understood, captain,’ Thane said gravely. He could hear the drum of the distant guns. ‘And what of our own forces?’

‘Stormtalon gunships, drop pods and Thunderhawk Transporters are on their way down to you carrying Land Raiders,’ Decarion said. ‘The Deathwatch is inbound. Drop-ships and conveyors are descending now. The Lord Admiral had to send the Titans down with the skitarii and regimentals. The ark freighters are too exposed. Our carriers are attempting to achieve low orbit to deliver their fighter and bomber wings, but ground based macrocannons – the biggest I’ve ever seen – are making that difficult. Napier’s battle cruisers are offering bombardments of their own but he has already lost the Agamemnos and Saint Solomon. Buenaventura, also, has been crippled. Dominus Zhokuv is being evacuated.’

Thane grunted. For the magnificent Ark Mechanicus to be crippled, monstrous vessel that it was, the void battle must be unimaginably intense. He knew that every moment counted. Every second on the planet’s surface cost the attack groups above lives and vessels.

‘Attack Groups Idas, Verita and Sisyphax all have troops and armour on the surface,’ Decarion reported. ‘Princeps Senioris Grimaldi is desperately trying to get his Titans unloaded, dispensing even with ritual observances and weapons testing. Our augurs, however, show the heat signatures of several Titan-class war machines firing up to move on their position. Lord Marshal Rothenberg and Magos Reductor Ohmnix both report colossal numbers of enemy troops. The ork artillery is relentless, powerful but inaccurate. Their vehicles are rolling scrap. Ground forces display little organisation beyond being hordes that rally about larger chieftains and champions. These hordes, however, stretch to the horizon and are devastating in number and at close quarters.’

‘They converged back upon the impact sites?’ Thane asked.

‘Yes, Chapter Master,’ Decarion confirmed. ‘Just as they flood back towards your position. You have little time, my lord.’

Thane nodded. ‘Heavy reinforcements?’

‘Yes, my lord. The heaviest – and in great concentration.’

‘Where are the reinforcements coming from?’ Thane demanded.

‘The fortress precincts about your position,’ the captain told him. ‘Your arrival demolished a large number of factories and fortifications but the largest is seven kilometres to the south.’

‘The target?’

‘Yes, Chapter Master.’

Thane turned to Tychor. ‘We have missed our aim by seven kilometres.’ If the asteroid had struck the hub of Gorkogrod with the Beast within, their mission would already be over.

‘Captain Decarion,’ Thane continued, ‘the Imperial Fists are to attack the palace, at Chapter strength. The assault will be swift and bloody, and the Phalanx will have the honour of lighting our way. Take station above our position and power up your lances.’

‘Yes, Chapter Master,’ Decarion said. ‘We shall carve the Chapter an avenue of destruction.’

Thane realised that the chamber was becoming bathed in an infernal glow. Molten rock was beginning to bubble up through the rocky floor. Upon colliding with Ullanor, both the surface of 44 Thoosa and the landing site had melted with the heat of impact.

‘Captain Storn,’ Thane called. ‘Attend to that, if you please.’

Storn was Captain of the Ninth and a former Iron Knight. Within moments he had directed his Devastators to move into position. The cavern briefly lit up with the launch of missiles. Hitting the rock just above the openings with krak missiles, Storn’s Imperial Fists demolished part of the cavern and buried the magma-bubbling breach in collapsing stone.

‘Captains,’ Thane voxed across the open channel, ‘it is time. The Imperial Fists go to war. Final checks and observances. Ready your companies. Master Vorstecht?’

‘Chapter Master?’

‘Fire the detonators.’

‘Yes, Chapter Master.’

Nine

Ullanor – Ground Zero

Maximus Thane stood amongst the rubble of 44 Thoosa.

Charges placed about the asteroid superstructure by the Adeptus Mechanicus at Abythica Prime had allowed the Imperial Fists to choose their exit points. Firing the detonators above the small lake of molten rock in which the wreckage of the asteroid sat, the Chapter prepared to step out onto the doomed surface of Ullanor.

Thane waited as Thunderhawks deposited Land Raiders, Land Speeders and bikes down onto strips of steaming black rock.The devastated land about the mountainous remains of the asteroid was clouded with black dust and glowing with molten rock that bubbled in strips and shallows. From what he could see, it was a landscape of twisted, smouldering devastation. Scorched sand and wildfires. Wreckage. Rubble. Broken bodies.

The Second Company, under the famed former Crimson Fist Konrade Karlito, marched their Centurion Assault squads out onto the wasteland, each step of the mighty warsuits crushing grit and shattering the heat-baked stone. Formations of Stormtalon gunships roared into position above their allocated companies.

As Imperial Fists, in their soot-besmirched plate, moved into formation, Emmerich Berengard came up behind the Chapter Master. The Terminators of the First Company were deploying, their storm shields and thunder hammers held in close. The grizzled Berengard carried a monstrous power sword, which stood almost as tall as the Terminator Space Marine himself.

Lady Brassanas skidded down smouldering scree with a squad of her Sisters of Silence. Between them they dragged one of the ork psykers in chains. The thing roared and clawed at them but the Sisters hauled at it, wrangling the creature back into position.

‘It is the lowest form of life,’ said Berengard, with disgust.

‘It will be even lower when we have done with it,’ Tychor assured him, holding the company standard above the warriors of Thane’s honour guard.

Thane let them have their words. Their genetically bred bravado. It was almost a ritual. Before battle, while Guardsmen cursed and prayed and the servants of the Omnissiah climbed inside their great war machines, the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes talked about what was and what would be. The destruction they would bring to their xenos enemies and the honour of being the Emperor’s Angels.

The shattered rock trembled under the Chapter Master’s boots. From out of the charge-blasted exit stomped a Dreadnought, painted in midnight black. It trailed frayed honours and was draped with chains that jangled with its every thumping step. Strips of vellum hung like a tabard between its heavily armoured legs, while a roaring brazier burned on each shoulder. A cracked and browning skull sat in a hooded socket, each eye aglow, and the gilded wings of the Imperial aquila spread across its battle-plate.

‘The High Chaplain has awoken,’ Captain Berengard announced.

The monstrous machine thundered past the Chapter Master before coming to a stop, its automotive engines rumbling. A living shrine, Chaplain Bachorath had been entombed in his sarcophagal battle-suit for longer than Thane had been alive. While the Chapter had its full complement of company Chaplains, all drawn from the different Successor Chapters, the venerable Bachorath had been given the title of High Chaplain in honour of both his many years of service and the number of foes that had fallen before his hulking form.

When he spoke – a voice that issued from vox-casters and boomed with age, experience and madness – the sound carried across the smoke-wreathed desolation.

‘Where?’

The Chaplain-Dreadnought’s brutal chainfist growled to life, while his twin-linked assault cannons cycled. High Chaplain Bachorath did not know where he was or the year into which he had been awoken. He did not know the nature of the enemy beyond. He did not even seem to care that he was standing among the ranks of the Imperial Fists rather than his own Chapter. All he knew was that he had been called to serve. To kill in his Emperor’s name.

‘Everywhere, High Chaplain,’ Thane told him.

The Chapter Master scanned the swirling black obscurity of the crash site. He peered through the choking dust that glowed an infernal red with the light from the molten surface below. The auto-senses of his Terminator helmet cycled through different spectra before settling on a false-colour filter representing target signatures.

Thane took a moment to absorb what he saw. The horizon was not just blotched with enemies. It positively blazed with approaching targets. Hordes upon hordes of hulking monsters, charging for 44 Thoosa – the mountain that had appeared upon their savage world and levelled forts, workshops and hundreds of thousands of warrior greenskins. Clan kin, whom the barbarian orks of the neighbouring fortress precincts had seen disappear in a thunderous tsunami of dust, flame and unstoppable force.

His vision picked out the serrated outlines of rabid green mobs that stretched as far as his armour’s spirit could see: horned helms, spiked armour, monstrous augmentations, ragged banners and barbed chainswords held high. Thane could see rolling gunfortresses, belching heat and smoke, with warbikes chewing up the rocky ground and surging ahead. Hunchbacked walkers, dragging hydraulic claws and shoulder-mounted artillery, were lost in the shadow of an ork gargant – a towering horror of layered metal and enormous weaponry. Even at such a distance, the thing shook the ground with its hydraulic step. Coming up behind the weaponised effigy, scrambled from some nearby base, Thane could see enemy aircraft thundering in: pot-bellied bombers and junk fighters that were little more than jet engines with wings.

The Chapter Master’s hearts beat hard at the sight. The Imperial Fists had levelled a small corner of the Beast’s empire, a vast, walled precinct of his continental palace. The monster would not stand for that. He would do what the Imperials had done when the ork fleets and attack moons had left worlds burning in their wake – he would send his best.

And like the Imperial Fists, like the Space Marines of the Deathwatch and mighty Vulkan himself, its best would die. Spilling from surrounding strongholds and the fortress-palace of Gorkogrod itself, the green hordes aimed to close the gap – to flood the devastated landing zone with firepower, muscle and savagery. Gunfortresses and scrap-tanks would ride roughshod over the interlopers. Bombers would obliterate the crash site. The gargant, both an effigy to savage gods and a palace sentinel, had been despatched to crush them.

Thane didn’t have the time or manpower to stop such apocalyptic weapons of destruction. He could not allow drop-ships, conveyors and their precious cargo of fighting souls to be swallowed up by the green maelstrom. The Chapter Master had established a toe-hold right in the middle of the Beast’s barbarian empire. He would not lose it to a counter-insurgency, not even an attack of such overwhelming strength that it swept in towards them like a natural force.

All about him, Thane knew that the Imperial Fists were seeing what he was seeing.

‘And here you wait,’ High Chaplain Bachorath’s voice crackled from his vox-casters, the scorn in his tone like a cutting edge.

‘Did you used to favour the sparring cages, High Chaplain?’ Thane asked.

‘I did,’ the Chaplain-Dreadnought told him, unsure as to whether the new Chapter Master was levelling some kind of insult at him. ‘And if I were to favour them now, I would be able to tear the cage – bars, opponent and all – out of the auditorium.’

‘I don’t doubt it, Venerable Chaplain,’ the Chapter Master said. ‘Brothers of my ilk favoured fist over blade.’

‘The pugilist’s path,’ Bachorath said. ‘I, too, have broken my honoured brothers’ heads in my day.’

‘Then you know,’ Thane said, ‘that the knock-out blow is often struck out of opportunity. Opportunity created by an intentional opening. An invitation that cannot be resisted. You put your opponent where you want him – in the devastating path of your fist.’

‘That is as may be,’ the High Chaplain said, his vox-hailed words echoing about the shattered remains of 44 Thoosa, ‘but my auto-senses tell me that we are standing upon a multitude of paths and on all of them we are the ones about to be devastated.’

‘Just be ready to do the Emperor’s work,’ Thane told the Chaplain. ‘Brother Zoldt, how far out are the drop-ships?’

‘Two minutes, Chapter Master,’ the Epistolary told him across the vox-channel.

‘And, at present speed, how long until the enemy vanguard reach our position?’

‘The same.’

Thane stood and waited. The dust and smoke began to thin. The strips of molten rock bubbled and spat, and the roar of the enemy grew louder about them. The titanic steps of the gargant. The coughing and rumbling of monstrous engines. Savage battle cries. Soon the silhouettes of the ork hordes could be made out in the haze. Hulking chieftains towered over their followers, bellowing their alien rage and shooting into the sky with belt-fed weaponry. Bikes screamed ahead. Gunfortresses fired their mighty cannons blind. The sky was filled with the drone of closing aircraft. The cave entrance that the Imperial Fists had blasted in their asteroid transport was cast into the shadow of the great gargant. Shells, from both the titanic walker and the ork armour, smashed into the side of 44 Thoosa. Grit and shattered rock rained from the impacts down onto the Imperial Fists, drumming off their plate.

‘Chapter Master, I must insist…’ High Chaplain Bachorath said, his words bouncing around the mountainous exterior of the asteroid.

‘Hold position,’ Thane ordered across the vox. Gunship-deposited Land Raiders idled. The powerful engines of Space Marine bikes chugged. Stormtalon gunships swooped in, the launchers of their missiles aimed over the ranks of Imperial Fists. Company by company, they held position about the broad cave entrance, their boltguns, pistols and heavy weapons aimed at the oncoming storm of green flesh and carnage.

‘My lord, that gargant…’ Tychor said, but Thane ignored the standard bearer. He could hear the flap of the Chapter battle standard in the backwash of the gunship engines.

‘Drop-ships and conveyors on final approach,’ Epistolary Zoldt reported. Above, beyond the drone of approaching bombers and the roar of his own gunships, the Chapter Master could hear the descent engines of the gigantic drop-ships, each carrying Astra Militarum regiments and macroclades of skitarii soldiers. Beyond them he could make out the even deeper rumble of mass conveyors bringing down the god-machines of the Adeptus Titanicus.

‘We must attack,’ High Chaplain Bachorath insisted with a growl of his automotive engines.

‘Hold,’ Thane said. He licked his lips. The enemy were everywhere. He could hear the roars of monsters astride warbikes and the crash of gunfire coming into range. The ground before the Imperial Fists ranks erupted in sparks, showering stone and the splatter of molten rock.

‘My lord?’ Emmerich Berengard said, even the grizzled Templar stirred to question his Chapter Master’s orders and sanity. Thane nodded. He had drawn the enemy in. It was time to deliver the killing strike.

‘Lady Brassanas,’ Thane said. ‘Our foe is in range and in great number. Now is the time, Sister. Do what our bolts and blades cannot.’

Thane looked back grimly at Tychor and Berengard, while the High Chaplain’s autoloaders primed with a sequence of clunks that seemed to underscore his doubts. Brassanas led her Sisters of Silence out from under the shadow of the asteroid. Picking their path carefully through the channels of molten rock, they heaved along the monstrous ork psyker until they were clear of the Imperial Fists. At Brassanas’ sign, the Sisters backed from the creature in a crescent. Letting the chains run to their full length, they secured the creature to a mangled girder. The monster became the nexus of a blaze of ethereal power. Bolts of psychic rage snapped between it and the rocky floor, searing with growing intensity.

As the Silent Sisters moved away, back to the safety of the waiting Imperial Fists, the psyker became a dazzling nova of otherworldly energy, spidery arcs sizzling about it. It tried to lunge free of its restraints to no avail.

Thane looked back and forth between the blinding light of the ork psyker and the rabid advance of the alien hordes. His plate’s systems registered the first slugs of the ork vanguard plucking at his Terminator armour. Dathan Tychor held the Chapter standard high and took his position with the honour guard around his Chapter Master. The barrels of High Chaplain Bachorath’s assault cannons whirred to life, in readiness for the storm to come. Chainswords growled in unison amongst the battle-brothers of the Eighth Company. Across the Chapter, missiles primed in their launchers. Multi-meltas and plasma guns hissed to readiness. Heavy bolters and boltguns cleared with a thunk. First rounds were loaded into breeches. Barrels were aimed. Ceramite fingertips rested on triggers.

‘Now, damn it…’ Thane growled. The words were almost a plea.

Suddenly the intensifying lightstorm about the psyker died. Thane felt his stomach flip with the backwash of otherworldly emptiness. With tens of thousands of orks converging on the impact site, their mere presence feeding the psykers with ethereal power, the ork prisoner had become a weapon of mass destruction. Without the intensity of the nullifying field about it, the colossal psychic energies building within the creature blasted the monster’s head from its shoulders in a fountain of gore.

And then followed the ugly heads of the closing attackers. The crazed warrior orks on the front line died in droves even as they charged at the Imperial Fists with reckless bloodlust, their boots hammering on several steps more as their bodies crumbled and their heads disappeared in blasts of blood and brain. As ork carcasses crashed down into the dirt, green ethereal energies crackled from the stumps of the necks and briefly across their bodies before dying away.

The effect of the Silent Sisters’ retreat became clearer as the forward ranks of orks stopped shooting. They dropped their weapons and clutched their heads and tusks. A bestial shriek arose from each before their heads started exploding, shooting gore into the skies of Ullanor. As a red mist descended upon the greenskin hordes, the forward ranks collapsed. The cacophony of gunfire began to die away. The headless corpses of ork riders fell from careering warbikes. The cannons of battlefortresses fell silent before the tanks drifted into their own allies. Ploughing through mobs of armoured greenskins, the vehicles mulched orks in their tracks and smashed into each other, resulting in spectacular explosions and a storm of shrapnel.

The surviving orks and their hulking chieftains were at first unperturbed by their falling comrades. It was normal for ork vanguard troops to fall before enemy gunfire. The following warriors barged past crashing corpses to get to the front line, where their savage gunfire or barbed bladework might find an enemy. Instead they found a furious bolt-storm of nearly a thousand Imperial Fists unleashing their blessed weaponry. Missile launchers streaked destruction into the oncoming hordes while the assault cannons of Stormtalon gunships chewed through the thinning enemy ranks.

Before long the ork army had stopped in its tracks. The air was heavy with gore and the ground carpeted with alien corpses. Battlewagons slid down into bubbling hollows of molten rock, melting in the magma, their headless crews still slumped inside. Above the Imperial Fists, the great gargant had frozen. Its colossal workings moaned, the mournful drone of metal upon metal and frozen hydraulics echoing about 44 Thoosa. The mighty vehicle tottered. Gravity and the weight of its monstrous weaponry was dragging it over. Without living crew to correct the war machine’s fall, the towering effigy of alien ingenuity went over on its side. The titanic walker shattered as it hit the ground, pulverising greenskin bodies and filling the sky with an excruciating boom whose echoes seemed to hang in the air.

With the gargant toppled and the field of battle a bloody haze of ork bodies, Thane heard the drop-ships and conveyors of the fleet descend. The landing zone was easy to find, painted red in the gore of warrior foes for kilometres about the crashed asteroid. Silent slaughter greeted the landing gears of the mighty drop-ships. Wreathed in steam and venting gases, the colossal Astra Militarum and skitarii transports sat upon the bloody ground as following craft, including the huge orbital conveyors of the Adeptus Titanicus, made their final approach. Moments later, Navy strike fighters screamed across the sky, banking and circling the carnage surrounding 44 Thoosa.

The Imperial Fists stood there amongst the death and destruction, their guns heavy with bolts unfired and their plate pristine. As the noble yellow of their armour and idling vehicles misted red with the drifting blood of the battlefield, the remaining Sisters of Silence left the asteroid with the two surviving ork psykers chained between them.

Stepping forward through the ranks of his honour guard and from beneath the standard, Chapter Master Thane stood next to High Chaplain Bachorath. Beyond, through the thinning dust and the blood-stained skies, he could see the distant fortress-palace of the Beast. The vast, jagged monstrosity of stone and metal plating appeared to have suffered some superficial structural damage as a result of the asteroid’s impact. Gorkogrod still stood, however: its colossal architecture, reinforced walls and fat citadels still towering above the clanlands and desolation of Ullanor.

Thane smacked a clenched black power fist against the Chaplain-Dreadnought’s thick plate.

‘Now we attack,’ Thane told him.

The Chapter Master began to issue orders to his captains and companies across the vox. ‘Bikes and Land Speeders to reconnoitre ahead of the main force. Land Raider columns to take position along our flanks. We move as a Chapter. We move as one. Companies, form up. Captain Karlito, your Second Company Centurions are to take vanguard and set the pace. Captain Brondal,’ Thane said, ‘the rearguard belongs to the Sixth. You are to have the Chapter’s back.’

‘As ever we shall, Chapter Master,’ Mace Brondal returned.

‘Lady Brassanas, look to your prisoners,’ Thane said. ‘They travel under the Chapter’s protection until their talents are ready to be deployed.’

‘The plan, Chapter Master?’ First Captain Berengard said, hefting his mighty blade.

‘Is simple,’ Thane said. ‘We are the bolt discharged from the gun – direct and unstoppable. We punch through the alien host, puncturing plate, rupturing flesh and breaking bone.’ He looked up at the shapes of black Thunderhawks dropping down out of the sky. ‘The Deathwatch will eradicate any orks that try to close the gap behind us. The Guardsmen and Adeptus Mechanicus will clear anything that remains. Like the bolt, the Adeptus Astartes will fly straight and true. Our target is the Great Beast of Ullanor, and let no wall, weapon or creature stand in our path. For we are the Imperial Fists – the living weapons of the Emperor.’

It was a glorious sight to behold. Near one thousand sons of Rogal Dorn, marching to war. With Karlito’s Centurions setting the steady pace, company upon company held stalwart formation behind. Land Raiders rumbled beside the Imperial Fists, mulching through the bodies of headless orks and barging derelict battlewagons aside. Captain Gortez rode ahead with the Land Speeders and heavy-set bikes of the Fifth Company, while Brondal’s Tactical squads covered the Chapter’s rear. All the while the gun-laden towers and jagged walls of Gorkogrod rose before the Imperial Fists.

As Thane trudged through the sea of bodies and the burning rubble left behind by the city-levelling power of the asteroid impact, Epistolary Zoldt kept him apprised of the status of the various forces attacking Ullanor. The Titans of the Legio Decimata were raining destruction down upon the precincts near 44 Thoosa’s impact site, levelling cannon-bristling fortresses, monstrous factories and the shanty workshops that belched smoke in between. Princeps Senioris Grimaldi had managed to field his Titans from mass conveyors and bulk landers that were swiftly overrun by greenskin hordes. At the price of an entire legion of skitarii soldiers and combat-servitor ship sentinels, the god-machines Deus Domitor, Divinitata Excelsii and Imperator Ultimatum were allowed their freedom. Although denied the ritual observances that usually heralded the awakening of their machine-spirits, the annihilation on offer in the palace precincts was enough to satisfy them. With the Deus Domitor damaged by enemy bombing runs and the wild strikes of ork artillery pieces, Grimaldi awaited drop-ships carrying what remained of the 201st Zenobian Regiment of Foot, in the hope that the Guardsmen and those that followed could establish a foothold in the apocalyptic wasteland left behind by his Titans and retake the landers.

Lord Marshal Rothenberg, meanwhile, had managed to unload his armour in the devastation following one of the cataclysmic asteroid strikes, but the terrain in which he had put down was difficult. Leman Russ variants, heavy battle tanks and Baneblades from patchwork contingents of the Delphriq Cataphracts, the 1st Gorgonian Ironclads, the Nymnal Adamaticlax and Brontaghast IVth Armoured had all deployed together to punch through the ork hordes and their inferior battlefortresses. Progress was slow, however, as the tanks became bogged down in the extensive delta system of a heavily polluted river that had run through the devastated precinct. The river was choked with fungus and ork bodies from the asteroid impact, and the going was made worse by the toxic sludge from a vast factory complex further upstream. The delta turned to blood, mud and mulch beneath the tracks of Rothenberg’s armour, forcing the lord marshal to deploy the remnants of the 39th Lundran Indentured – the only infantry regiment currently at his disposal – in helping to dig out sinking Leman Russ battle tanks.

Then came the second wave – orks whose gunfortresses and battlewagons turned out to be no better adapted to the environment than Rothenberg’s own division. With both ork and Imperial armour intermittently stuck in the heavy metal mire, mud-thrashing tanks became small islands from which Guardsmen and greenskins exchanged vicious fire. Like a honey trap, the thunder of Imperial cannons drew creatures on foot and within the patchwork plating of battlewagons for kilometres around, turning the engagement into an ever bigger mess.

Magos Reductor Ohmnix was having better fortune in a range of volcanic mountains just to the north. The nest of peaks reached up from the lands beyond the Beast’s palace. They had been fortified to form a surface-to-orbit macrocannon emplacement and a line of surrounding strongholds, whose artillery sat in installations carved in the mountainsides. As well as being military fortresses, the strongholds stained the sky with black smoke belched from workshops and weapons factories, the orks’ colossal forges utilising the magma chambers of the surrounding volcanoes.

Magos Ohmnix’s initial assessment had told him that the embedded fortresses would require days to take, even with the small contingent of self-propelled artillery, bombards and siege mortars under his command. Fortunately for the tech-priest, the impact of one of the asteroids had initiated a chain reaction of volcanic eruptions that flooded the interior chambers of the mountains with lava. With hundreds of thousands of orks already fleeing the stronghold, the magos reductor used his monstrous artillery on the mountainsides. Thousands of tonnes of dislodged rock and debris crashed down the slope breaking and burying the escaping orks. Deploying skitarii rangers aboard Mechanicus Valkyries, Ohmnix had his cybernetic soldiers pick off the hundreds of hardy greenskin survivors that had escaped the disaster.

As Grimaldi, Ohmnix and Rothenberg attempted to get footholds in the area about the asteroid impact sites, they were followed down by the meagre stream of reinforcement ships sent by Dominus Zhokuv and Admiral Napier. Colossal drop-ships carrying Astra Militarum regiments, skitarii macroclades, and remnant armour formations belonging to both negotiated the storm of atmospheric gun platforms, ork attack ships, grapplers and fat cruise missiles launched from ground silos on the planet’s surface. Legio Cybernetica ark freighters, transporting maniples of battle-automata, and mass conveyors ran the gauntlet of crash-capsules and ramming craft as they attempted to get their precious few ancient and honoured god-machines down to the landing site intact. Even faithships carrying the ravening militia armies of the Ecclesiarchy attempted to run the ork blockade, alongside the sleek Temple craft of the Officio Assassinum that were used to a more clandestine insertion.

As Zoldt’s blizzard of reports came in, it became clear to Thane just how far the odds were stacked against them on Ullanor. Drop-ships carrying surviving regiments of Guardsmen were being blasted out of the sky by rocket silos. Hastily refitted Imperial battle cruisers were tumbling from orbit aflame. The attack groups had managed to carve out landing sites in the swarming multitudes of the Beast’s continental hordes, but an entire planet was coming down on them. While the remaining carriers and ark freighters continued to send drop-ships and landers with small regiments and skitarii half-legions, they could not match the reinforcements summoned by the Beast on his own world. Tribes of nomadic ork warriors mounted on bikes and wartracks. Cavalcades of tanks and battlefortresses under the command of the Beast’s most monstrous chieftains. Millions upon millions of ork warriors, summoned from every foetid corner of Ullanor, drawn to the battle and their Beast by the apocalyptic arrival of humanity on their soil.

As the sun lowered on the horizon, a hazy orb that smeared the sky with blood and dust, the central stronghold of the Beast’s palace could be made out. It was a towering, ugly silhouette of jagged irregularity – serrated battlements, armoured towers, the barrels of vast superguns and alien architectural bombast. Its construction was both martial and monstrous, boasting exotic surface–to-orbit weaponry, massive gargant assembly workshops and tribal sub-citadels.

As the sunlight disappeared, the flashes of the space battle above became clear. The darkening firmament became a rune-bank blinking with alerts and warning lamps. However bad it was on the surface, it would be worse in the void. The system was choked with attack ships, crash-capsules and hulks. Ork boarders filled derelict craft to the rivets and orbited Ullanor, waiting for the call to war. While the Imperial Fists were the sword thrusting for the Beast’s alien heart, the Navy battle cruisers and Mechanicus arkships were the shield, with the mighty Phalanx weathering the worst of the punishment.

As Navy Lightnings shrieked overhead and battle-scarred Marauder aircraft tore through the sky in dog fights with enemy flyers, flaming ork attack ships tumbled out of the benighted heavens. Blasted to wrecks in the disciplined broadsides of grand cruisers and smashed aside by the fortress-monastery, vessels plummeted broken-backed and glowing with the heat of re-entry. They struck the blasted lands of Ullanor, creating fountains of rock and wreckage that rocketed skyward. A colossal derelict plunged spectacularly down through the heavens, breaking in half after some kind of brutal ramming action. Zoldt informed his Chapter Master with heavy heart that the wreck was the venerable Mars-class battle cruiser Tyrant’s Light. Hitting the surface of Ullanor, the flaming remains of the majestic vessel rolled across the path of the Chapter, forcing Captain Gortez to recall bikes and Land Speeders that had streaked ahead of the advancing column of Imperial Fists.

The battle-brothers of the Second Company trudged on in their Centurion suits, followed by veterans in Tactical Dreadnought armour. The companies of the Imperial Fists marched to war, flanked by rumbling Land Raiders. Before them the palace-fortress grew – a jagged monstrosity of a fortification, all towers, ugly stone and thick armour plating. The stronghold was an architectural abomination, smothered in overlapping energy shielding and protective fields. In some places the monstrous fortification was unshielded and open to the sky. In others it benefited from triple shielding, able to resist the most determined of attacks. While the broken corpses and shattered structures smouldering beneath their boots were testament to the destructive power of the asteroid’s impact, the Beast’s fortress seemed to have weathered the worst of the devastation.

‘Captain Gortez, Chapter Master,’ the vox chirped.

‘Proceed, captain.’

‘Third wave enemy forces,’ the former Crimson Fist reported, ‘leaving the palace.’

‘Form up,’ Thane ordered, waving the tank column on.

It did not take Thane long to see the reinforcements. A coordinated attack. It made sense. The Beast would rather his forces face the Imperial Fists outside of Gorkogrod’s walls than within them and indeed he had designed his palace this way, so that the progress of any invaders might be frustrated by enormous barriers cutting the continental palace into numerous kill-zones. Warbikes and gun-mounting buggies leapt the fortress’ jagged walls in a constant stream of outriders, no doubt intended to flank the approaching Imperial Fists. Ork aircraft borne on sets of serrated rotor blades took to the air from the palace compounds, the chug of their engines and beat of their blades echoing across the desolation. Each carried beneath it a huge piece of ordnance, almost too heavy for the craft to get off the ground. Meanwhile, on the smoking wasteland about them, hatches set within rocky bunkers began to open, pushing aside smouldering wreckage and baked earth. Hulking orks dressed in heavy armour and bearing brute cybernetics and monstrous weaponry began to pour from the hatches.

‘Artillery,’ Captain Berengard called out to his First Company veterans as big guns and mortars within the fortress walls began hurling explosive shells into the air.

Thane frowned. The orks knew where the Imperial Fists were heading. As he had drawn the xenos in to kill them earlier, now the orks were doing the same – inviting the Space Marines along the path of least resistance, straight into annihilation.

He had not brought the Imperial Fists this far to be caught in the jaws of an alien trap. He wasn’t going to be outflanked and blasted to oblivion within striking distance of the palace walls. The Beast was attempting to hit the Space Marines from both sides and from above. Thane thought on the jumping bikes, the rotor-bladed junkers, the orks flooding the wasteland from the subterranean tunnels running out from the palace. There was something else. The enemy had further doom to visit upon the Imperial Fists.

‘Fifth Company, hold!’ Thane roared across the vox. ‘Gortez, halt your advance!’

It was too late. The first of the captain’s bikers had been storming towards the palace walls, intent on reconnoitring the fortifications before the arrival of the Chapter. Several Imperial Fists bikes and their riders rocketed up into the air in an explosion of grit and flame.

‘Bright skies,’ Thane swore, the Eidolican oath rising unbidden to his lips. The mines had not even been particularly well hidden, as Gortez had confirmed moments later. Spiked like fat sea-urchins, they had been buried in shallow earth waiting for an enemy to wander into the field. Perhaps they had been put in place after the initial attacks on the palace. Perhaps entire precincts were booby-trapped. Thane had no way to know if the entire palace was surrounded by minefields, but he did not have time to test such a theory. He needed to get his Imperial Fists inside to do the job they had come to Ullanor to do. Slay the Beast.

As artillery landed indiscriminately across the plain, emerging orks were thrown into the air in blossoming balls of flame. They seemed not to care how many of their own they lost, as long as their fire found Space Marines. A shell dropped among Captain Uzziah’s Fourth Company, blasting four Space Marines to bloody pieces and knocking the rest of the company to the ground in a storm of shrapnel.

‘Zoldt,’ Thane called angrily. ‘Get me Captain Decarion – now.’

‘Yes, Chapter Master.’

Thane pointed up at the Stormtalon gunships hovering noisily above the companies with their missile launchers armed. Rotating his armoured finger around and then jabbing it at the ork aircraft, the Chapter Master watched the gunships leave their companies and peel off to meet the approaching junkers in the air. They were overtaken by Thunderhawks painted in midnight black. Hellstrike missiles streaked away from the wings of the Deathwatch gunships, blasting apart ork bike formations and gun buggies. Heavy bolter fire from the Thunderhawks’ flanks tore up the smouldering wasteland, ripping through heavily armoured warriors emerging from hatches in the ground. As the gunships circled the battlefield, rearguard squads of Deathwatch Space Marines ran up behind the Imperial Fists formations.

‘We have your back, brothers,’ a Fenrisian voice barked across the vox. A voice Thane recognised as belonging to Kjarvik Stormcrow, whose Deathwatch squad had been instrumental in securing two of the ork psykers for use in the attack.

‘Land Raiders,’ Thane voxed, ‘you are authorised to offer suppression fire. Companies Oberon and Valdanor to support. Captain Storn, your Devastators front and centre. All other companies, keep up the pace.’

‘The Phalanx for you, Chapter Master,’ Epistolary Zoldt told him.

‘Decarion, are you on station?’ Thane demanded.

‘My lord, we’ve had some complications,’ Captain Decarion confessed. Over the channel Thane could hear the sound of combat shotguns.

‘The Phalanx has been boarded?’ Thane asked, his voice edged with concern. He saw the helms of other Imperial Fists turn at the prospect. ‘Status, captain!’

‘The Phalanx has sustained damage, Chapter Master,’ Decarion told him, ‘but is still operational. The orks are throwing everything at us. Literally: they’re using their star forts and gun platforms to make suicide runs at the fortress-monastery as they orbit. While our turrets and cannons kept boarding capsules and ramming ships at bay, we were struck by an orbital shipyard and the alien craft being assembled within. As we became tangled in the scaffolding, orks from the vessel flooded the perimeter decks.’

‘Captain,’ Thane said. ‘The Imperial Fists need the Phalanx. We need her lances for an orbital strike. We need her bombardment cannons to break the palace open. Do whatever you must, but we need the Phalanx back on station and we need it now.’

‘Understood, my lord,’ Captain Decarion voxed back.

Above the advancing Imperial Fists the gunships strafed left and right, their assault cannons blazing. Enemy aircraft laden with fat ordnance banked this way and that, their own blasting weaponry raining empty shells down on the desolation below. Cutting through the light armour of the flyers with their forward guns, the Space Marine gunships finished the craft with precision marksmanship. Rockets tore away from the Stormtalons as they expertly flew through serrated rotor blades and heavy gunfire. Several aircraft detonated, a larger fireball following almost immediately afterwards as their ordnance exploded also. Others peeled off, streaming black smoke from their workings and compartments, before plummeting into the ground to create flaming craters.

As the Chapter advanced towards Gorkogrod, Thane knew they were running out of room to manoeuvre. With ork artillery dropping from the sky and the minefields before them, it would only be a matter of time before the ork forces moved up behind to cut them off from the rest of the advancing Deathwatch under Watch Commander Warfist, and the surviving portions of Attack Group Thoosa. Looking up, Thane saw the sky briefly lit up by a flare in the pin-pricked darkness of the void.

‘Zoldt?’ the Chapter Master called.

‘Reports confirm it to be the Lex Immaculata, fleet carrier,’ the Epistolary told him moments later. ‘A hit upon her engine column at point-blank range.’

Thane thought about the swarming havoc of the space battle raging above their heads. With vessels all but smashing into one another in the confines of orbit, he doubted whether much of the gunnery was anything other than point-blank.

A wild round ricocheted off his pauldron, from a mob of armoured orks throwing their monstrous forms at the Chapter flanks. Imperial Fists from the Third and Seventh Companies had climbed up onto the Land Raiders to offer a bolt-storm in support of the tanks’ flamestorm cannons. As the rolling Land Raiders presented a curtain of fiery doom to the attacking orks, turning towering monsters into thrashing infernos of skin-melting agony, the riding Space Marines fired through the flames and into the creatures beyond. A chance artillery impact turned two of the Land Raiders into infernos of their own, blasting the fiery wrecks from the ground to land on their roofs and sides. Imperial Fists ran in to assist their brothers but both the crews and the Space Marines firing from the roofs were beyond help.

‘Fifth Company, withdraw,’ Thane commanded as Captain Storn’s Devastator squads ran up through the ranks of the Imperial Fists. As Gortez and his men rode back to the Chapter, Storn’s Space Marines took position in their stead with their heavy weapons. As buggies and greenskins on warbikes rode at the Imperial Fists the Ninth Company opened fire. Missiles streaked off into buggies, blasting them apart. Heavy plasma guns sent orbs of superheated gas straight through the engine columns of vehicles, causing them to roll to a steaming stop, while heavy bolters carved furrows across the orks, tearing their ragged bodies from seats and saddles. Lascannons cut surging warbikes in half, while those that did make it through the storm of destruction were turned into a smeared fusion of flesh and metal by the blast of multi-meltas.

Tychor ran at his Chapter Master, the standard bearer hitting Thane’s Terminator plate with the powered force of his own suit. Thane was knocked back as a piece of ork artillery hit the Imperial Fists’ front ranks. High Chaplain Bachorath stumbled on his pistons and hydraulics. The bodies of Sisters of Silence were flung into the air in their slender bronze plate and flaming cloaks. The ork psykers went wild, tearing at their chains and the remaining Sisters. Chief Apothecary Delgado ran in, his bone-white plate smeared with soot. A second shell, following the first on its random trajectory, came down, blasting Delgado back off his feet. Several First Company veterans had parts of their Terminator plate sheared from their bodies, while Berengard’s second, Sergeant Eckhart, became an armoured silhouette writhing in flame. Brother Alverez, the Second Company’s Apothecary, ran over to check on Delgado but the Chief Apothecary was dead, his body a shattered mess.

For a moment, a terrible dread crept into Thane’s heart. That he had doomed them all with such a bold strategy, this strike straight to the heart of the greenskin empire. That the Imperial Fists would be lost… again.

‘Zoldt,’ Thane roared. ‘Call it in to Captain Decarion. Lance strikes. Full spread. I want a path cleared to the target and then I want every piece of ordnance – every warhead on board the Phalanx – dropped on the outer wall of the palace. Do you hear me?’

‘Affirmative, Chapter Master,’ the Epistolary said, staggering away from the remains of a Land Raider that an ork bombard had just turned into a flaming wreck.

‘We have reached the edge of the minefield, Chapter Master,’ Captain Storn reported as his heavy weapons Space Marines jogged to a halt.

‘All stop and close in,’ Thane ordered, prompting their perimeter of Land Raiders to crunch to a standstill. Track to track, the tanks put a wall of armour between their brothers on foot and the orks pouring from dusty hatches situated in the desolation around the minefield.

‘Brother Stormcrow,’ Thane called across the vox.

‘How can the Deathwatch aid you, Chapter Master?’ Kjarvik Stormcrow called back.

‘The mighty Phalanx will pound the palace, but the fortifications are triple-shielded in places.’

‘Our Thunderhawks report large generator structures further along the palace wall perimeter,’ the Fenrisian reported. ‘Leave it to us.’

Thane looked behind him as Deathwatch squads peeled off across the smouldering wasteland, protected by black Thunderhawks making strafing runs along their position. About the Imperial Fists formations, hulking orks in heavy armour advanced behind shields the size of bulkheads. Behind, more greenskins – drunk on battle and the prospect of tearing Space Marines apart – sprayed the Land Raiders with a stream of slugs from their outlandish guns. Crude rockets spiralled through the night air, sometimes wheeling off into the sky and sometimes juddering the tanks with their armour-cracking impact.

‘Captain Uzziah, split the Fourth by squads to support the Third and Seventh on the Land Raiders,’ Thane commanded. ‘Chaplain Ishcarion, have your Assault Marines cut down anything that gets through our perimeter.’

Behind him, Thane could hear Gortez and Brondal’s companies fiercely ensuring that the Chapter wasn’t cut from the rest of Attack Group Thoosa. Land Raiders nearby suddenly rocked as muscle-bound orks slammed into them with their shoulders. While the tanks’ flamestorm cannons turned huge swathes of the foe to ash and charred bone, the orks’ numbers were such that many inevitably got through. Captain Valdanor and his Imperial Fists blasted heads and horned helms from shoulders as the orks tried to break the perimeter. Space Marines from the Fourth Company, running up to join Valdanor on the Land Raiders, hammered those that got through on their approach, with Chaplain Ishcarion’s Assault squads carving up what was left with the sweep and thrash of chainblades. Another wild shell landed on the right flank, bouncing several tanks on their tracks.

Circled by angry bikes and buggies, the Imperial Fists were holding their own against the hulking orks pouring from the subterranean hatches. Blocked from advancing by the minefield, the sons of Dorn simply had to suffer the destruction raining down on them from the palace artillery. With battle-brothers blasted apart and Land Raiders turning into storms of shrapnel and flame, Thane peered down the flank of the palace wall. Deathwatch Thunderhawks were being blown out of the sky by ork macrocannons. Those gunships that did manage to fire off their lascannons and bombardment cannons sent blasts into the giga-generators powering the palace’s overlapping fields.

‘Phalanx!’ Thane yelled into his vox, as the perimeter fields began to collapse. ‘I need that–’

And everything turned to blinding light. Imperial Fists in their armoured suits became scorched silhouettes and orks melted away in the stunning blaze. As Thane’s eyes and auto-senses adapted, he saw lance beams searing down from the sky and striking the palace wall. Somehow Decarion had managed to hold off the boarding orks and get the fortress-monastery back on station above the palace of the Beast.

The world rocked beneath the Chapter Master’s boots. In blasting a breach into the fortified rock and armour plating of the unshielded palace wall, the Phalanx’s lances had super-heated the ground of the perimeter. The field of mines before the wall was detonating in a chain reaction, shattering the wall’s foundations and causing sections of it to topple. Vanguard Imperial Fists attempted to retreat but were blasted off their feet by the force of the rippling detonations. Space Marines in Centurion suits were knocked down while Land Raiders closest to the minefield were rolled onto their backs by the blasts.

Charging orks were turned to ash on the wind. One moment they were ferocious alien predators, behemoths of fang and muscle – the next they were gone, scoured from existence. Those monsters not caught in the apocalyptic blaze were blasted aside by the shockwave of the lance strikes. They crashed into the sides of the Land Raiders with bone-shattering force. Space Marine bikes were knocked over, Land Speeders spun and bobbed in the air and Imperial Fists slid from the roofs of tanks, knocked off by the backwash of heat.

Thane felt the quake of explosions beneath his armoured boots. The Chapter Master steadied Tychor, who was desperately trying to put out flames that were swirling about the battle standard. The air about them was thick with smoke. Space Marines emerged from cover like soot-caked revenants. Thane was about to issue an order when another apocalyptic boom erupted about the Imperial Fists. This time it emanated from below the ground. Something had detonated in the tunnels beneath them, those same tunnels the armoured orks had emerged from to flank their attackers. The palace and surrounding precincts were so bewildering in their architecture and monstrous in function that the rippling explosions could have originated from anything: subterranean promethium depots, ammunition dumps or even the trapped gases of an overloaded waste system.

But it made no difference either way. With nowhere for the power of the explosion to go, it ripped up through the ground, spouting streams of flame. Thane felt the ground give way beneath him and then he was falling amongst tonnes of rubble, everything ablaze with the blinding light of venting flame, deafened by the ear-splitting rumble of the world breaking up about him. Finally there was stillness, dust and darkness.

Thane lay there for a moment, blinking himself back to his senses. His leg hurt. One of his optic helm displays was alerting him to a hundred different problems, while the other was dead. Hooking the thumbs of his power fists under the great piece of rock laying across him, Thane heaved the boulder off him. With an effort, he got himself to his feet – not easy in Terminator plate. A pauldron of his suit had been stove in by falling rock, his helm was cracked – including a shattered lens – and the hydraulics of his leg sparked with damage. As he limped about he found himself surrounded by ghosts in the dust and haze. Suit lamps picked out groups of Imperial Fists heaving stone and vehicle parts off the trapped bodies of their brothers.

As his honour guard located and surrounded him, the Chapter Master saw Captain Berengard and members of the First Company digging High Chaplain Bachorath out of the rubble. Lady Brassanas and her Sisters of Silence were struggling with one rabid ork psyker attempting to make an escape. The second was dead, having been crushed beneath huge pieces of shattered masonry.

Soot-stained Apothecaries moved among the battle-brothers, rendering succour to the wounded and removing the gene-seed from the dead. Thane crunched through the collapse, helping to right Terminators and Centurions whose thick armour had allowed them to survive the fall.

Through the thick dust and darkness the Chapter Master saw Tychor helping a battle-brother up a rubble incline, heading towards him. In his gauntlet he clutched the standard, the banner hanging miserably from its broken crossbar. As the two Space Marines got closer, he recognised the second as Epistolary Zoldt.

Thane shook grit from his plate as the dust settled. He stood in a rock-strewn depression. It looked as if a section of the outer palace grounds and sub-level foundations had collapsed under the force of the underground explosion. Thane and his battle-brothers, picking themselves up out of the rubble, found themselves in what remained of a tunnel that ran beneath the palace. Shattered rock and smashed vehicles sat like small islands in a river of filth that had burst its banks. The surface of the foetid liquid had crusted over with dust and the heat of the firestorm that had swirled down the tunnel, but the waters were rising where the rubble had created a dam.

He heard his battle-brothers calling to each other and their captains across the vox. Whereas much of what remained of the First and Second Company were down in the pit with him along with Brassanas’ shattered Sisters, the one remaining ork psyker, and Chaplain Ishcarion’s Assault squads, Storn’s Devastators were above them, gathering about the lip of the crater with Uzziah and Valdanor’s men.

Thane stood on the shoreline of a tide of rising filth. They were in some kind of primitive sewer – a network of rough-hewn tunnels that made use of existing cave systems and caverns that ran under the core palace and central precincts. Looking up through the shattered foundations of the palace wall, he could see the thick armour plating, bolted to the exterior, still glowing with the heat. Both the wall and floor of the precinct had suffered from the chain reaction of the lance strike, detonating mines and subterranean explosion. Blackened and blistering stone cracked and crumbled as acrid smoke billowed from the fortifications.

Thane marvelled that the palace-fortress had sustained so little damage as a result of the lance strike. While it was huge, the stronghold looked like a nightmare of armour-plating, jagged accretions and rough masonry – not unlike the mighty space hulks the orks used to move from system to system, and like the hulks, Gorkogrod was a great deal more resilient than it looked. But with a hole blasted into the subterranean tunnel network, Thane and his men now had another way in.

‘Captain Berengard,’ Thane called. Through the dust, the former Black Templar appeared, splashing through the stinking shallows in his Terminator plate.

‘What is your assessment?’ asked Thane, indicating the dark, gaping entrance before them.

‘These tunnels are oriented towards the palace,’ the First Company captain said, ‘radiating outwards under the precincts. This could work in our favour. We should take advantage of this good fortune.’

‘Zoldt?’ Thane called. ‘Report.’

‘Captain Decarion and our fleets have been reinforced, my lord,’ the Epistolary said.

‘Bohemond…’ Thane said, looking at Berengard. He gave the First Captain a slow nod. ‘Our Black Templar brothers have arrived.’

‘In orbit and aboard the Phalanx,’ Zoldt said. ‘Caught between the sons of Dorn, the enemy boarders have been annihilated.’

It was the stroke of good fortune they had been hoping for. Reinforcement from above and an opening below.

‘Inform the commanders at the landing site,’ Thane said, ‘that we have created a breach. I am ordering all Attack Group Guard regiments, skitarii legions, automata – any fighting man, woman or construct – into the palace. Once unloaded, have the Titans of Legio Intrafex secure both the landing site and the route to the palace. They are to exterminate enemy reinforcements from surrounding precincts and supply convoys bound for the palace hub.’

‘Chapter Master, they report gargant formations closing in from the southern precincts,’ Zoldt said.

‘Then they’re going to have to deal with them as well,’ Thane answered. ‘Navy bomber wings to support.’

‘Yes, Chapter Master.’

Thane looked up through the clearing fug at the Imperial Fists righting themselves in the rubble and gathering above on the crater lip. He could see Captains Storn, Valdanor, Uzziah and Gortez looking down at him.

‘Whether we survive this dreadful day or not, the Beast must die,’ the Chapter Master told them. ‘By our fire from the sky or the cold steel of our blades, the Beast must die. Brothers, we must be as one. One mission. One Chapter. One empire – the Imperium of Mankind. Second Company to lead, advance with Centurions and armour. The Attack Group will need an entry point. Something we can hold and advance from. Brothers, let us be the adamantium fist that punches straight through these walls, these walls behind which our craven enemy hides. Let us drag him into the light and destroy him for all the galaxy to see.

‘We shall take the low road, brothers, and rise up like vengeance from beneath. This Beast thinks he is safe behind his walls and shielding. We shall show him how wrong he is. Our mighty guns shall pound this fortress from above while the sons of Dorn shall shake its very foundations with their fury. Beasts rise and they shall fall, but the Imperium of Mankind is forever.’

Ten

Ullanor – Gorkogrod

Maximus Thane had experienced a lifetime of war. He had lived the blood-splattered insanity of battle. The hum of powered armour. The crash of boltguns. The ugly sound of enemies coming apart. He had gone toe to chainsword-wielding toe with Ezrah Geddon, Arch-Heretic of Praetis-Prandia. He had blasted his way through the deviants and piratical raiders of the fallen eldar at the Ferrospire. He had slaughtered the greenskin invader on the hallowed sands of his own homeworld of Eidolica and on Ullanor’s cursed earth. Little could have prepared him for the carnage that took place during the fight to gain entrance to the orks’ palace.

As the Imperial Fists made their way along the subterranean tunnels, Thane had initially found the darkness and quietude unsettling. The battle above them was a distant, muffled afterthought. Deathwatch Space Marines and descending Black Templars fought side by side, their shared hatred of the alien like a torch leading them through the gargantuan architecture of Gorkogrod’s inner precincts.

Mixed contingents of Astra Militarum from scores of shattered regiments were pushing on through wall-to-wall orks. Shock troops took districts building by building, while storm troopers and airborne companies rappelled to roofs from hovering Valkyries. Battle-automata stomped alongside skitarii soldiers who crackled with radioactivity. Sentinels stalked through the carnage while Leman Russ tank companies rolled up through the dragways, demolishing ork junkers and fortifications. Frater militia mobs swarmed creature after creature, bludgeoning and burning the xenos while Vindicare Assassins moved across the roofs of grand alien architecture, blasting huge holes through warlords and mega-bosses with their Exitus rifles.

Feral world scouts scalped the aliens with their knives, while the blue-blooded officers of spireborn regiments directed tracked mortars, bombards, Marauder airstrikes and orbital fire from the sky in an effort to pound the way ahead into cataclysmic ruin before the arrival of vanguard troops. All the while, Thane’s bloody and battered companies advanced along the rough tunnels and cave systems of the sewer.

Liquid filth moved slowly down excavated channels, carried onward by a downhill incline and great water wheels. It seemed few orks were interested in frequenting the sewer system. Those that did were ragged ferals, who, while still hulking in size, fell easily before the chainswords and bolt pistols of Chaplain Ishcarion’s Assault squads. The river of filth was, however, choked with alien fungus and swarming with tiny greenskin runts whose eyes glinted in the darkness. Terrified of the approaching Space Marines, they fled before them, shrieking in alarm. Little ammunition was wasted on these wretches but Thane had no doubt that the miserable creatures would quickly carry news of their presence to their larger cousins.

Thane ordered his men on at double time, still hoping to retain the element of surprise. The Space Marines left the rumble of battle above them behind, drawn on instead by the regular pounding of the palace’s mighty cannons. Like a beacon, the boom of the gargantuan alien weaponry told the Imperial Fists where they needed to be.

When they were right underneath the thunder, Thane directed the last of Captain Karlito’s Assault Centurions to lead the way, boring their way into the bowels of the palace with their siege drills. Here, they ran into heavily armed orks, plated in slablike armour and wielding monstrous heavy weapons. Working around, Thane directed the Eighth Company Assault squads to flank the monsters and enter the bloody fighting while the Chapter Master led the rest of his force up through the rough-hewn levels of the palace-fortress.

With boltguns clunking empty and battle-brothers of all companies forced into close combat with the hulking monsters of the palace, Thane’s Space Marines fought their way up staircases, through gauntlets and chambers crowded with the most monstrous of orks. There was no time – for thought, for action or to catch one’s breath. Orders were monosyllabic and roared across the vox amid the thunder of battle. The palace halls were packed wall-to-wall with frothing orks, and these were not even the towering monsters the Adeptus Astartes had met offworld, despatched by the Beast to bring death and destruction to every corner of the Imperium. These were greater yet: warrior greenskins, minor warlords in their own right, who by virtue of their monstrous size and savagery had earned a place at the side of the Beast. They were creatures of hulking green brawn and the scars of myriad wars fought across scores of conquered systems, and there were thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. Their fangs were sharp and their tusks were long. Their flesh was tattooed and dyed with clan colours, their frames – that dwarfed even Space Marines – were draped in thick and ugly plate, bristling with spikes. Helms were extravagantly horned and weaponry was obscene in its size and brute design. The creatures bawled their barbarian rage from the black holes of their open mouths, and their beady red eyes burned with territorial fury.

Leading from the front, Thane was the battering ram that smashed through gargantuan doors and armoured sentries. Crushing skulls in the clasp of his mighty black fists, he knocked hulking orks back through walls with a single strike. He smashed snaggle-tusked chieftains into the ground and swung wide, knocking ugly heads clean off shoulders. The storm bolters of the First Company veterans thundered about him, forcing the attacking orks back away from their Chapter Master. Captain Berengard carved a path of destruction through the brutes with his power sword, while battle-brothers forsook their empty boltguns to team up on the towering monsters, slashing and stabbing desperately at green flesh with their combat blades. As ork Dreadnoughts and heavily armed walkers stomped into battle, guns wildly blazing, Storn’s Devastators answered the call, blasting them back with missiles and blinding fury from their lascannons and heavy plasma guns.

Thane’s mind was nothing but ork monsters and the deaths he foresaw for them. Swinging the crackling doom of his power fists, the Chapter Master made such imaginings reality, punching and smashing his way through the Beast’s palace guardians. He broke monsters and buried killsaw-wielding creatures in the fortress floor.

Thane killed without thinking. Like the orks, the Imperial Fists were now acting on primitive instinct. The instinct to survive and see their enemies sundered. Bolt-rounds hammered into the iron-hard hides of alien creatures at point-blank range. Pistols were emptied at tusk-filled faces. Heavy weapons lit up the claustrophobic havoc with the flash and thunder of Imperial Fists Devastators. Powered plate showered with sparks as the wild fire of greenskin guns sent torrents of slugs at the Space Marines. The proud yellow of Imperial Fists plate soon became a soot-streaked, blood smeared camouflage pattern of craters where ork lead had burrowed into ceramite.

All the Chapter Master could hear was death. The mindless fury of towering orks running straight into the blasts of heavy flamers. The screams of his battle-brothers across vox-channels that sizzled with suffering. The thud of butchers’ blades chopping down through plate and genhanced flesh. Thane’s captains led their companies through the labyrinth of tribal halls and antechambers. Each pushed his men on to find routes through the carnage, clearing gauntlets and blasting through walls. As each company found bloody success, the others would follow, funnelling through body-lined archways before spreading out again through the gunfire-crashing, axe-swinging pandemonium.

Orks burst from doorways about the vanguard companies, roaring their delight as they blasted at the Imperial Fists with their belt-fed weaponry. Some even attempted to barge through the Space Marines with their monstrous bulk and huge serrated blades. All they found was death. As the orks ran at their attackers, the chests of Centurions blazed with the hurricane bolters set about their chestplates. Within moments, bounding, blade-wielding warriors were turned to bloody mulch. It didn’t stop the orks, however. Driven on by primal instinct and the thrill of combat, the hulking monsters just kept on coming. Stamping through the remains of unfortunates who had fallen before them, they charged the Space Marines.

The chaos and confusion had been Thane’s world for hours. He fought for his life and the lives of his brothers and sisters about him, all of them lost in a deluge of greenskin barbarity.

Then suddenly, there were no more foes to fight. Breaking through the back of their ranks, Thane found himself where he had never thought to be: the throne room of Gorkogrod. The very centre of the ork empire. The cavernous chamber was still. Six thrones towered above Thane, facing outward in a circle from their places on a great dais. Like the galleries opposite each one, they were decorated with rough banners and standards, each stone throne augmented with metal plating and serrations. Each was carved with its own glyphs and sigils, presumably marking out different clans and tribes.

Damage from previous engagements within the throne room was evident from the scaffolding that dominated a shattered roof section. But it was still well defended. Battle-scarred gargants loomed over the arriving Space Marines, their engines and weaponry roaring to life.

Tychor battered his way through the remaining orks to join his Chapter Master, the battle standard of the Imperial Fists held high. Zoldt was not far behind, with Captain Berengard and his hammer-wielding Terminators stomping up beside them. Lady Brassanas and her remaining Sisters struggled to drag the captive psyker through on its chains, watched over by the brute threat of High Chaplain Bachorath and his whirring assault cannons. As they entered, the Imperial Fists aimed their all-but-empty weaponry up at the gargants. Even with full magazines and power packs, the Space Marines’ weapons could not have hoped to pierce the thick plate of those mighty war machines.

Thane looked about the colossal throne room. Its galleries were empty, as were its monstrous thrones. Only the gargants, towering above the Imperial Fists, seemed to display any evidence of life.

‘The sons of Dorn have come for you, Beast of Ullanor,’ the Chapter Master called about the cavernous chamber. ‘I have come for you. It is time, Beast. It is time to face your doom in the Emperor’s Angels of Death. In his Imperial Fists. In me.’

With the rumble of gargant engines about him and the clunk of loading magna-bore weaponry, Thane approached the Sisters of Silence and the last ork psyker. The alien’s eyes wept the brilliance of otherworldly energies and dripped with spidery threads of green power. The Chapter Master peered into the darkness of the throne room’s gargantuan exits. In their depths he saw the movement of monstrous beasts, colossal ork warlords of extravagant tusk and fang. In the galleries above, the shadows solidified into more massive orks – tribal chieftains and their warriors, wielding chunky weaponry and heavy, serrated blades. They pushed forward, but made no move to attack.

‘Fight me, monster!’ Thane called out. ‘Fight me for Ullanor. For Terra. For the galaxy.’

The Chapter Master turned, and what remained of his glorious Chapter turned with him. Thane felt the quake of the alien’s step. The monster that had felled Vulkan, and in killing Koorland had doomed the Imperial Fists to extinction, was coming to meet him. Dust and debris rained from the chamber ceiling with each heavy stomp of the gigantic ork’s boots.

Ducking into the chamber, the Beast of Ullanor entered the throneroom. The towering ork looked down at the Imperial Fists. It stared at the Space Marines with, Thane thought, a look of amused disdain.

It was huge, like a death world reptile that had grown so large that it had no natural predators. Green muscle. Mounds of furs. Plates of black and white armour as thick as a gargant’s hull. Like its palace, the Beast’s brutish form crackled with defence fields and protective shielding. With colossal claws wreathed with green fire, it lifted a great horned helm from its head to reveal the tusked and scar-mangled horror of its face. Eyes that burned with doom. Monstrous fangs too large and warped for its massive jaws. Green skin cracked with age and scarring.

On the balconies above, the watching orks shouted and howled in adulation of their ultimate champion.

Thane glanced over at the last ork psyker, which Lady Brassanas and the remaining few Sisters were struggling to control. It was a monstrous brute covered in the scars and markings of a tribal shaman. It was wreathed in a blinding nimbus of ethereal energies like a star about to go supernova. It thrashed against its chains, driven into a frenzy by its surroundings and the presence of so many other orks.

‘The galaxy totters,’ Thane told his battle-brothers. ‘but Dorn is with us and the Emperor guides our hand. The Beast must die!’

The throne room became a raging bolt-storm of vengeance. Imperial Fists squeezed the triggers of boltguns, heavy bolters, storm bolters and pistols. Their weapons spoke with the last of their fury. Lascannons and multi-meltas sent streams of death at the colossal monster. Nothing phased the creature, however. Bolts ricocheted harmlessly off its sizzling force fields, and those that did manage to penetrate overloading patches sparked off armour as thick as a frigate’s hull. Beams shimmered from the energy field and the detonations of missiles bloomed uselessly against the Beast’s shielding.

The Beast of Beasts thundered forward. It seemed monstrously amused, not only at Thane and his words but at the useless rage of the Imperial Fists’ weaponry. With an almighty swing of its hugely muscled arm, it brought a colossal, green-wreathed fist down on Thane.

‘No!’ Tychor yelled, running towards his Chapter Master. Barging Thane aside, the standard bearer disappeared – hammered into the floor by the towering monster. The impact of the ork’s fist ripped through the chamber like a thunderclap. Gore splattered across the chamber floor. Sickened to his stomach, Thane pointed the finger of his power fist at the Beast.

‘Again!’ the Chapter Master roared.

The half-demolished chamber lit up. Storn and his Ninth Company unleashed the devastation of their heavy weapons. Missiles struck the Beast, exploding against its shielding, while balls of superheated plasma raged off it. The heavy bolters of Second Company Centurions chewed into the crackling force field while beams of pure energy struck the monster from arm-mounted lascannons. Assault squads of Space Marines ran forth with the thrashing teeth of their chainswords held high, while Imperial Fists of other companies emptied their boltguns and threw grenades at the Beast in hatred and fury.

Thane watched the monster emerge from the vortex of destruction. Nothing could stop it. Stamping down furiously on the charging Space Marines of the Eighth, the Beast went wild. With fists of blazing green fire it smashed squads aside, breaking them within their plate. It back-smacked charging sergeants into the stone of the walls and snatched up battle-brothers in its ferocious claws. Some it threw with lethal force into the throne room floor. Others it pulverised, allowing gore to leak down between its green fingers.

Space Marines in Centurion war-plate were smashed to bloody pieces. Instant death greeted Terminator veterans who were struck from the ground and across the chamber. Within a handful of furious moments, the greenskin giant had painted the throne room with the blood of Dorn. Smashed plate. Body parts. Imperial Fists torn in half. It was a slaughter. One moment High Chaplain Bachorath was a raging Dreadnought, roaring from his vox-casters and emptying his assault cannons at the Beast; the next he was smouldering scrap, as the hulking abomination put its armoured boot straight through him.

In a moment of horror, the Beast brought his blazing fist around, smashing it through the squad of Sisters of Silence. Like broken dolls their bodies flew across the chamber, leaving only their leader holding on to the alien psyker’s chain. The creature tried to break away, forcing the Lady Brassanas to wrap her length of chain about a column for leverage.

The Chapter Master turned just in time to see the Beast’s lethal fist hurtling towards him. The bone-shattering impact took Thane off his feet and across the throne room, where he crashed to the ground and skidded through the bodies of dead Imperial Fists. He struggled to catch his breath, but even his multi-lung was struggling to sustain him. His armour’s diagnostic systems were dead but he was fairly certain that his arm was broken. The breastplate of his Terminator armour had been smashed open down to his black carapace.

Within moments the Beast was looming over him. It stared down at him with the contempt of a barbarian god and brought its flaming fist around to deliver one last crushing blow. Thane did the only thing he could. One half of his cyclone launcher was a crumpled mess, but the other was still functional. Arming its remaining missiles, the Chapter Master blasted them ceilingward. They struck the partially demolished roof of the throne room, and rock and scaffolding crashed down upon the Beast.

With debris raining down about him, Thane tried to roll over and crawl away. One of his power fists was smashed and the Chapter Master had to fire the locks and purge the weapon. Clawing at the chamber floor, he fought to haul himself out of the path of the collapsing ceiling.

Rising like a behemoth of the deep, the enraged Beast shrugged off the mound of masonry in which it was buried. Still aflame with green brilliance, the giant ork reached out with its colossal claws. Snatching up Thane, the monstrous Beast lifted him up to its furious face. Green flame raged about him as the monster’s claw tightened, crushing plate and bone. With a bellow of alien rage, the monster prepared to slay a second Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists.

Squeezing his hand down between the Beast’s titanic grip and his ruined plate, Thane got his fingers to the Sword of Sebastus where it sat mag-locked to his belt. Resting his palm against the Dornsblade – the weapon wielded by the primarch himself – Thane pushed the blade down into the flesh of the Beast’s palm. The ghost of a snarl passed across the monster’s mouth, and Thane felt the grip about his waist slacken slightly. Tearing the Sword of Sebastus up, he thrust the weapon at the creature’s face. The tip of the blade thudded into one of the Beast’s blood-red eyes, before Thane tore it free of the ruined socket.

The monster shrieked. Its grip tightened once more with pulverising force as the pain broke its concentration. It howled at the chamber ceiling, a terrible sound that shook the very foundations of the palace.

The Beast’s claws suddenly opened, allowing Thane to crash to the floor. It was an ugly fall but from the ground, Thane watched the Beast of Ullanor stumble back. It clawed at its face and blinked gore from its punctured eye.

Looking around, the Chapter Master saw Lady Brassanas. She was heaving at the heavy chain, the links biting into the column like a pulley. Her movements were restricted by the armoured bodies on the ground and the stumbling footfalls of the Beast. It was clear to Thane that she and the captive ork were locked together in a dance of death, neither able to escape the other. With one final haul of the chain, the Lady drew her own glinting blade.

As the last Sister of Silence slid down onto her knees she momentarily locked eyes with Thane. In that moment, the Chapter Master understood what she was going to do. The ork psyker needed to be activated. Right here and now. Right next to the alien abomination that held the Imperium in its bloody claw. Thane nodded grimly to her. With the determination of a true servant of the Emperor, Lady Brassanas nodded back, and made the sign of the aquila.

Grasping her knife, she turned the hilt about in her gauntlet and rested the tip of the blade against her stomach. She closed her eyes, and with a supreme effort of will thrust the knife into her abdomen. Even in her last moments of agony, the Silent Sister never uttered a sound.

Thane knew she was dead when the ork shaman fell to its knees and clutched its grotesque skull. With the nullifying effect of the Sister’s presence gone, and being in such close proximity to the Beast and so many other of its brother greenskins, the psyker’s head blasted apart with the force of a small bomb.

The Beast of Ullanor felt the effects of the psychic backwash immediately. Forgetting about the agony of its eye, the warlord grabbed at its head and fell back into the ruin of a throne. It bellowed. It raged. Blood gushed from its nostrils and ears. Then – incredibly – it died. With a fountain of gore and colossal shards of skull, the Beast’s head exploded. Its arms fell down at the sides of the throne with a thud, before the hulking body of the monstrous warlord fell still.

The effect beyond was instantaneous. Shrieks could be heard from within the gargants as the crews of the war machines succumbed to the psychic backwash of the psyker’s overload. The barrels of gargantuan weaponry drooped and the walkers’ engines died. In the galleries and chambers beyond, Thane heard greenskins die horribly as the feedback effect blasted their ugly skulls from their armoured shoulders. In the darkness beyond the remaining lesser Beasts were rocked by the resonance, clutching their heads before the great ugly skulls detonated in their grasp. A psychic shockwave ripped through the chamber. The palace. The planet. Feeding back through the monstrous connection the Beasts had with their savage hordes, a chain reaction of gore-fountaining destruction rolled through the ork warhost.

Thane lay for a moment in the silence, his only movement the rise and fall of his shattered chest. It was over. The Beast of Ullanor was dead. He felt… nothing.

Slowly, he became aware of sounds coming across his vox. Across the crackling channels he could hear shouts and cheering, faint at first, then becoming louder. The battle was over. The Imperial forces fighting inside the palace and beyond had witnessed the heads of their enemies explode in an endless chain reaction that stretched across the whole planet, leaving their headless bodies crashing to the ground.

Thane could not find it in himself to indulge in such jubilation. The orks’ leader was dead; the Imperium was saved. That was enough for a son of Dorn.

With excruciating agony he forced his body and shattered plate up. The throne room floor was covered with the armoured bodies of Imperial Fists. The dead, the dying and the broken. Holding himself awkwardly, Thane limped towards the body of Lady Brassanas and knelt beside her, resting the tip of his blade on the ground for stability. There he waited and became one with his pain.

Eleven

Terra – the Imperial Palace

Dawn broke over the Imperial Palace and once more, Drakan Vangorich found himself enjoying the feeble rays that felt their way through the hive-world smog of the capital. Another dawn meant that he was still breathing. He had lived another day and might live through another still. His enemies were either dead, or lived on in frustration and fear. In a life of death, there was a great deal that could be accomplished in a single day.

Vangorich sat for a while. Somewhere above his head, across the vastness of the void, men and supermen were dying. Alien monsters were being fought. The destiny of empires was being decided. And yet for Vangorich, the Beast – the horrific enemy who had brought the Imperium to its knees – had become a necessary evil. The greenskin apocalypse was a warning to humanity not to become complacent, that the Imperium of mankind was but one of many powers vying for control of the galaxy. There would only ever be war, and the Imperium had to be ready for such challenges, with capable leaders worthy of the God-Emperor’s trust. Men like Thane, like Koorland… like himself. Men who would not flinch from doing what had to be done.

The Imperium had always been an unwieldy entity. Even with His warlord sons to oversee peace across His realm, the Emperor had allowed His people and His domain to slip away from him. And now, barely a thousand years since the terrible civil war that had turned the Imperium into a galactic battleground, the rot had returned.

A self-righteous torpor dominated everything. Terra had long been buried in scrolls, reports and data-slates burdened with more information than could ever be read or responded to. Mars was a runaway monitor train with no one at the controls. The planets of the Imperium were like fruit spoiling on a tree. Heresy and mutation were a canker running wild. One by one worlds and sectors were forgotten and allowed to shrivel on the stalk. Meanwhile the aggressive alien species of the galaxy would routinely tear through the branches, gorging themselves on the precious fruit. Species like the orks, that had been forgotten as backwater barbarians until the Beast had arisen to lead them.

Whereas Horus had been the half-forgotten threat of the past and the Beast the peril of the stormy present, Vangorich wondered what other dangers lay ahead for humanity. What revenants and warped monstrosities might the dread Eye of Terror vomit forth? What of the xenos? The orks had smashed the Imperium into a flaming wreck. What alien civilisations – forgotten, long dead or dying – were awaiting a cataclysmic resurgence? What of the species yet to achieve sentience, and monsters of the void yet to be discovered? Vangorich suspected that even if humanity survived the Beast, a weakened Imperium would embolden other warlords and galactic predators to take their opportunity for glory. Every broken world was a smouldering mountain of rubble, in whose shadow the wretched citizens of the Imperium would toil to rebuild their cathedrals, their cities and their lives. A living advertisement in stone and flesh that humanity was vulnerable to attack.

Such disturbing thoughts had led a restless Vangorich to walk the walls of the Palace. Finding himself in the inner arcades, he watched the bleary sun break the horizon from the Investiary. Here, the mighty primarchs had been immortalised in stone.

Mighty no more, they were now but memories. Their statues stood on towering plinths, bearing stone weapons and sculpted in poses of action and agency. It was the way the Imperium chose to remember them. The communal lie. The feeble-minded had little time for uncomfortable truths. From the lowliest gutter wretch to the lords of surrounding smog-wreathed spires, all carried the memory of the primarchs with pride. They were the sons of the Emperor, the warlords responsible for a golden age. Their shoulders, like pillars, had held the Imperium up above the flood of alien filth that washed through the galaxy.

They did not remember them as the squabbling siblings they had truly been, their hearts beating with jealousies and resentments that ran even deeper than those of mortals. They saw them as the pinnacle of human development – magnificent specimens with minds of tactical superiority and the engineered bodies of demi-gods. But everything about them had been superhuman, including the bitterness and hatred they harboured for one another. It amused Vangorich somewhat that the ancient architects had positioned the primarchs’ plinths in a ring about the circular arcade, so that they might regard one another – stony-faced – in an eternal stand-off.

Their choices and their inability to act until it was too late had been the doom of men a thousand years before. The primarchs were gone now – all of them. And in their place sat pompous oafs on thrones, great not of mind or body, but of reach. The High Lords of Terra had unrivalled power and influence. Like the primarchs, the Lords could damn the Imperium with a single decision. The galaxy was theirs to neglect. As the rising of the Beast had proven, their hunger for power and petty politicking had made the Imperium vulnerable. They had made humanity weak. Their existence had been, was and would continue to be a threat to everything the Emperor had worked so hard to build.

Lansung and Verreault held the Imperium to ransom with their ships and their soldiers. Kubik’s true allegiance belonged not to the Imperium but to the Machine-God and Mars. Wienand was free to pursue any dark agenda she wished, ready to see corruption in all who stood in her way, while Vernor Zeck was content in his blindness to the actual corruption before his very eyes. As for Gibran, Sark, Anwar, Tull and Ekharth – their crimes were dangerous incompetence. Their entangled institutions were a house of tarot cards upon which the future of the Imperium was written. When they were at their most needed, their structures had nearly collapsed, and the dominion of mankind with them. This category would no doubt also include whoever was elected to fill the seat of Ecclesiarch, for there were only such men to choose from. Who could know which of these parasites would be chosen for the seat of Lord Commander? All would crave such a position, for leeches always sought out the richest veins from which to feed.

This would not stand, Vangorich decided. He would not be remembered by history so. He would not be some footnote at the bottom of a vellum scroll, buried in a dusty vault. He would not be cursed for his inaction. He was there. A frequenter of the Palace. A member of the Council. An entrusted servant of the Emperor. He could achieve more in a day than even the most powerful Imperial subjects could in a score of lifetimes. The Imperium had been brought to its knees, and might not survive at all. Even if Thane returned victorious, it could not be rebuilt upon the weak foundations the High Lords of Terra would provide. The Emperor’s dominion in the galaxy had to be inviolable and absolute. It had to be strong, and such strength came from an adamantium will – the will to act and see the Imperium’s future preserved.

Vangorich stopped to look up. Mighty Vulkan, cast in stone, stood above him, his hammer held high. The expression on his face was one of potent resolution – like a smouldering volcano, building to blow. On the next towering plinth along, Rogal Dorn cast his grim unsmiling visage down upon the Grand Master. Dour. Intractable. Indomitable. So many of his sons had been lost in the war against the Beast. Those of Dorn’s bloodline, more than anyone else, had paid for the High Lord’s abuses. Looking up at him now, Vangorich found it uncanny how closely Koorland had resembled his genic father.

Vangorich thought on Koorland’s execution of Mesring and nodded to himself. He considered Vulkan’s wise words and his condemnation of the High Lords. A primarch had denounced the Council as unfit for purpose. The son of a primarch had demonstrated how such a problem might achieve resolution. They were not traitors to the Imperium or madmen. They were heroes.

The Grand Master of Assassins shivered as the last of the dawn’s scattered rays penetrated his deep hood. A cold front had moved in over the Palace, carrying with it dirty clouds and acidic rain that sizzled upon the marble. The capital was in for a storm, it seemed. It might have been a new dawn above the Palace and for the Imperium, but thunder was rolling in.

THE BEHEADING

Guy Haley

One

Death to the Beast!

The citizens of Terra crowded the streets in their millions. They sang out their praises to the Emperor with tears in their eyes. They roared their approval until they were hoarse. After months of terror, there was victory.

Terra’s most beloved sons were coming home, and the Throneworld had found its voice.

Maximus Thane led the heroes of the Imperium, standing tall in the cupola of the Land Raider Dorn’s Fist. The Imperial Fists marched in tight lockstep, their yellow armour gleaming in the smog-choked morning of Terra. The Imperial Fists were newly gathered as brothers still, and nearly half of those who had taken up the yellow and black to fight on Ullanor had fallen, but they marched as one: Excoriator, Executioner, Iron Knight, Soul Drinker, Black Templar, Crimson Fist and Fist Exemplar had cast off their prior identities and subsumed them into the deeper brotherhood of Dorn. Old ties dissolved into the rebirth of a greater past. Continuation would be their legacy, though none outside the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes would ever know the Imperial Fists had fallen.

Behind the reformed Imperial Fists came representatives of a dozen other Chapters of the First, Second and Third Foundings. They were small contingents in the main, but in some of them were contained every remaining member of their orders. The victory against the Beast had cost the Imperium dear.

After the marching Space Marines snaked a trail of armoured vehicles ten kilometres long, all brightly painted in the honourable heraldries of the Emperor’s chosen. Behind them the ground quaked to the tread of thousands of Astra Militarum Guardsmen, macroclades of Martian skitarii, and plodding, mighty mechanisms of the Legio Cybernetica. Machines and men of every conceivable type walked proudly past the Tortestrian Gate, Ballad Gate, and Bastion Ledge. Overhead soared flights of Navy Aeronautica fighters and Chapter Thunderhawks. Above them, the dim shapes of starships at low anchor coasted across the brown sky, serene as icebergs.

Laud-hailers borne by floating platforms sang their praise to the Emperor. Servo-skulls and cybernetic constructs without number swarmed in the sky. Along every street, from every window, from balconies and suspended ways hundreds of metres above ground level, from buried halls and avenues hidden in the planet’s metal skin, the people of Terra gave thunderous voice to their gratitude.

The procession turned onto Victory Way and headed east. There, tens of millions of pallid clerks blinked in the unaccustomed daylight. The crowds were thousands deep, reducing the kilometre-wide road to a ribbon of rockcrete. Singing priests gathered in huge numbers. Shrieking herald-seraphim, set free from their roosts in the great cathedrals, soared on the thermals, chanting the names of the victorious. Light from Terra’s rising sun pierced the cloak of industrial filth that veiled her face and lit upon the sons of Dorn, birthing gold from the yellow. The roaring of the crowd intensified. It was overwhelming, deafening. The eyes of a world were upon Thane. Thane! Thane! Thane! They chanted his name like a heartbeat. Terra had returned to life.

It should have been Koorland, thought Thane, not I. It is he who deserves this honour.

If he was saddened his friend’s name was not chanted, he was grateful for the shortness of man’s memory. Soon he too would be forgotten, and another name would take the place of his. How had Koorland managed to cope with all this, he thought. How can any child of humanity?

His helmet auditory equipment and Lyman’s ear struggled to keep the noise of the crowd to tolerable levels. There would be mortals there that day deafened by the crowd’s tumult, he was sure. They would tell their grandchildren proudly that the sound of victory was the last thing they heard.

The procession ground on, already hours into its passage. More hours of noise awaited.

Victory Way opened up onto the Fields of Winged Victory, a vast space built to accommodate the armies of the Great Crusade so that the Emperor could address them. Giant vid-screens surrounded it, displaying Thane’s face to the adoring populace of the Imperial Palace. A sea of faces turned towards him as Dorn’s Fist rode into the Fields, eyes rippling to the procession’s entry point underneath a skyscraping triumphal arch. A row of twenty Titans formed an aisle to receive the heroes of the Imperium. They waited with their heads bowed. As each war machine was passed by the procession on its way towards the centre of the Fields, it rose up and gave voice through its war-horns, until the ground vibrated with their basso profundo song, the mightiest chorale in the galaxy.

Thane’s destination was an edifice three storeys tall erected specially for the occasion. Dorn’s Fist mounted the ramp winding around the outside. It was lined with the Adeptus Custodes, come out at last from the inner wards of the Palace. At each sharp corner, Dorn’s Fist swung around abruptly, until the last was taken, and the marble summit of the platform opened. A pinnacle awaited Thane, topped with a smaller platform and a lectern. As the crowd roared on, the tank’s assault ramp slammed down to crack the fresh, gleaming paving and Thane strode out. The ordinarily still, heavy air of Terra had space to move over the Fields, and a light wind teased his honour papers and oath scrips.

He emerged at the top of the pinnacle to a deafening cheer that seemed to last an age.

In front of the lectern, upon a stone bier decorated with a frieze of victorious Space Marines, lay the corpse of an immense ork. It was an impressive specimen, twice the height of Thane and clad in barbarous armour. Every time the vid-screens showed its magnified face to the masses, there came a hysterical booing, whole sectors of the Palace hissing so that it sounded as if a desert’s worth of sand spilled upon the rockcrete.

This ork was not the Beast. The example before Thane had been selected carefully by those adepts skilled in the manipulation of the human psyche. Fabricator General Kubik had offered his best magi-genetors for the task. Thane had elected to employ Grand Master Vangorich’s logistaries and Temple Vanus agents instead.

The Beast could not be too large, for it would instil fear in the people rather than dispelling it, Vangorich insisted. Nor could it be too small, for then contempt for the rulers of Terra would seep into the hearts of humanity that they were bested repeatedly by a weak foe. Thane wished the Beast itself had survived, for he was tired of subterfuge, but the Beast’s head and those of its monstrous comrades had detonated under the stress of psychic feedback, and their corpses were buried in the ruins of Gorkogrod.

The gleaming of his armour put a cast on everything he saw, tinting the red of his eye-lenses orange. The colour was a deception. He was not made to be an Imperial Fist. When he first put on the colours of the old Legion he had expected it to be temporary, but the lie had become the truth; he was no longer a Fist Exemplar. The Imperial Fists were dead, but the Imperial Fists must be seen as immortal. The Defenders of Terra could not fall.

Only months before, he had been outraged by Udin Macht Udo’s demand that the fall of the Fists on Ardamantua be kept secret. He had privately doubted Koorland’s judgement when he had warriors of the other Chapters masquerade as Imperial Fists during that other, premature victory parade. At last he understood. Some walls must be rebuilt in the night. Appearances were everything.

Thane had come to loathe politics. Far on the other side of the Fields, on another platform, were twelve stone thrones. He upped the magnification of his sensorium. The High Twelve were not yet present, but the steps were crowded with thousands of lesser lords and ladies. The sight of them made his jaw clench.

He waited. In the crowded confines of the Terran hives, the Fields were an anomaly, a perfectly square clearing over a thousand hectares in size. Thousands of men, women and armoured vehicles rumbled onto them, taking up position in perfect blocks that shimmered in a haze of exhaust heat. Thane marvelled at the display of arms, but not for the first time he was taken aback at how it was dwarfed by the accomplishments of the past. The Fields had room for hundreds of thousands more men; millions more.

Kilometres away, the great walls of the Imperial Palace stood sentinel over Terra’s screaming populace. Patches of bare adamantium gleamed where gravitic disruption had caused their decorations to tumble free, but the walls held firm. Similar signs of devastation were evident wherever he looked around the city, and these were not superficial. Broken hives, piles of rubble and twisted metal; gaps in Terra’s claustrophobic skyline opened by the gravity weapons of the attack moon. The smooth, artfully laid paving of the Fields was buckled in places, hastily and inexpertly patched in others. More signs of time’s erosion of the achievements of the past; one more step away from the dreams of the Emperor towards the nightmare of endless war.

For an hour Thane stood to attention as the sun climbed over the towering hives of Terra and the formations of troops and machinery laid themselves out line by line. The crowd unceasingly sang and shouted. Atmospheric craft and void fighters streaked overhead, releasing bursts of fireworks and scintillating displays of directed energy.

Finally, the last of the heroes took up position and stopped. An army bracketed Thane’s pulpit. Ten thousand trumpets sounded, overtaken at the last by the mass sounding of Titan war-horns. The remaining members of the High Twelve emerged. Their greeting from the crowd was muted.

‘People of Terra!’ Thane roared. His suit’s vox-systems were rerouted to giant public address systems and his voice filled the Fields louder than the death of worlds. The crowd shouted back even louder. ‘Silence!’ he commanded. His single word rippled away, an infinity of echoes carrying his voice across the planet’s surface. Before the last had died, a hush fell that carried the curious weight of a hundred billion breaths withheld. The wind that stirred his parchments and tabard blew harder, then dropped to nothing. He reached up, unclasped his helm from its softseals, lifted it off, and breathed the unfiltered air of Holy Terra.

It was stale with overuse.

‘I come before you today to announce a great triumph!’ he said. ‘The orks of Ullanor are defeated. Their leaders are no more. Already, their attack fleets fall upon each other in disarray. The Imperium is saved!’

A vast, howling cheer roared from the masses. The wind of their breath buffeted Thane again. He held up a hand, magnified and multiplied on innumerable vid-screens, and held it there until the noise once again dropped.

‘As a species, we have come close to the brink. Holy Terra itself was threatened. The Emperor was at risk!’ He pointed an accusatory hand in the direction of the Palace, making sure that his gesture encompassed the distant dome of the Great Chamber of the Senatorum Imperialis. Let the High Lords think he meant to accuse them, for he did. ‘The Lord of all Mankind, who raised humanity back up from the dark days of Old Night, who built this Imperium of which we are all citizens, who gave all to shield His species, and who sits in agony eternal to protect us still – He was in danger, He was in peril, He was failed by all of us. No more, I say. We shall never allow this to happen again!

‘This is the second time in a year that I have taken part in such a celebration,’ shouted Thane. ‘That first time, nine months ago, was premature. We were complacent even at the height of danger. This time, we celebrate true victory.’

Again that howling of a world, a nation of billions in ecstatic release from fear. Thane strode from his pulpit. The Sword of Sebastus, the Dornsblade, rang from its scabbard. Pollution-tainted Terran sunlight sparkled with renewed purity along its edge. The prismatic pommel called forth a rainbow from filth. With a crackle amplified to deific proportions, he swung the blade down. The sword shattered the creature’s crude gorget, severing the ork’s head from its bullish neck. With swift, exaggerated movements, Thane reversed, cleaned and sheathed the Sword of Sebastus and picked up the dead ork’s head in both hands. Steam rose from its cauterised neck. The deep chill of methalon preservation cooled his face as he lifted it over his head.

‘The Beast lies dead, the Imperium endures. Ave Imperator! All hail the dominion of Man!’

Maximus Thane, Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists, cast the head of the proxy Beast from the top of the spire. Propelled by his augmented strength, it sailed over the edge of the platform and shattered messily on the stone of the Fields of Winged Victory scores of metres below.

‘The reign of the Beast is over!’

Two

Legacy of the Sigillite

Getting to the Sigillite’s Retreat through the Imperial Palace was not easy. Ancient, it had been swallowed whole by centuries of building. Wienand enjoyed the tortuous route to the hidden garden; it helped stretch out her mind and her muscles. She had been feeling twitchy ever since the third attack on Ullanor, and relished the exercise.

She ducked under an archway spidered with cracks caused by the buildings bearing down on it from above, and came into the Retreat. It hadn’t changed since she was last there – although, she reflected, it probably hadn’t changed for hundreds of years. It was the same grey, dismal place she had tracked Vangorich to months before. Very remote, very quiet, it had many qualities that recommended it as a spot for meditation and clandestine meetings, but she’d be a fool to think they were the only ones that drew the Master of Assassins there. She had no idea if this rough little space had once been frequented by Malcador himself, but his name carried enough of the resonance of history with it to make it attractive to those seeking power.

She must be mindful of Vangorich’s ambition.

He was already there, sitting openly upon the cracked wood of the split-trunk bench at the garden’s heart.

‘Red incense rises over the Tower of Philo. Drakan Vangorich wishes to see me,’ she said lightly. Her feet crunched on the dusty gravel as she made her way to the bench. Terra was so biotically compromised that in one thousand years the tree trunk had not decayed at all, only shrunk in on itself and twisted out of shape. It was an apt visual metaphor for the state of the Imperium.

Vangorich closed his book, rose and bowed. He was wearing the monkish robes he’d taken to before the attack on Terra. She gave them an amused frown.

‘Wienand!’ he said with evident pleasure. ‘I am glad you came.’

‘I am not sure how I feel about your new look, Drakan. Why did you start to wear that ridiculous habit?’

Vangorich looked down at his robes.

‘These? They present a certain cenobitic air, don’t you think?’

‘More places to hide weapons, perhaps. You are not a holy man.’

‘I have no idea what you mean, my dear Wienand. I am aiming for devout. Too many people see me as frivolous. It is time I adopted a more serious air.’

She scowled. ‘Less of the “my dear”, Drakan. Despite your overtures of friendship, you would kill me without a moment’s hesitation if you thought it necessary. Assassins don’t have friends.’

‘You are my friend, Wienand.’

‘I wish I could believe that,’ she replied.

Vangorich’s smile slipped for a fraction of a second. ‘So you don’t like my robes?’

‘I preferred the suit. Don’t deflect me. What is it that you want, Vangorich?’

Vangorich gestured to the bench. They sat together.

‘The war is over, but the struggle is yet to be resolved,’ began Vangorich. ‘The orks have been driven back, and for that the worlds of humanity can give praise. However, we both know they are not the greatest threat to the Imperium.’

‘The High Lords,’ said Wienand wearily.

‘The High Lords. A knotty problem. I preferred dealing with the orks.’

‘You are a facetious man,’ said Wienand.

‘Thank you. This crisis could have been resolved so much earlier were it not for the fragmented nature of Imperial governance. There are billions of men under arms in the Imperium, hundreds of thousands of Space Marines. Titan Legios. War fleets. Where were they all? Scattered. Leaderless, misdirected to the ends of personal interest and agenda so that when a real crisis arose they were attacked and eliminated in isolation. Under less ineffectual direction, the Beast’s rise would never have occurred. How many times did we make the same mistakes? Three direct assaults on Ullanor. I’m no tactician, but tell me that was wise.’

Wienand looked up towards the plasteel sky half a kilometre above. Windowless towers crowded the garden. What little light reached the retreat was attenuated, the environs murky. ‘This place suits you very well,’ she said. ‘So shady.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Vangorich, looking around the retreat’s tired cloisters. ‘Or rather it did. Since you uncovered it, I have taken against coming here. I don’t know why. It was my special place, but the thought of encountering someone… unexpected,’ he said with a deliberately unctuous grin, ‘took the shine off it. A shame, there are so few places I can be myself.’

She laughed at that. ‘Your self is whatever you need it to be.’

‘You’re hurting my feelings.’

‘So we’re back where we started. Making veiled threats and accusations at each other while the real problems continue their idiotic reputational struggles.’

‘It doesn’t have to be that way,’ said Vangorich.

‘Then stop it,’ she said sharply. She looked into his eyes properly for the first time since she had arrived. His face softened. ‘Please. We’ve proved good allies to one another. Let’s not cast it all aside. We’re better than them.’

Vangorich nodded with relief. ‘I was hoping you were going to say that. I’m sorry, I had to check.’

‘There was no need to goad me.’

‘Goading people is part of my charm, and part of my plan.’

‘Killing people is the culmination of it,’ she retorted. ‘I take it the beheading of the ork was your idea?’

‘Naturally.’

‘I am surprised you got the Chapter Master to agree to it.’

Vangorich smoothed out his habit and made an apologetic noise. ‘Poor Thane has learned that bolter and blade are not the only weapons of war, and that not all wars are obvious.’

‘Careful there, Drakan. If you continue his education so effectively you might make him dangerous.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Vangorich. ‘They are a peculiar breed, the Adeptus Astartes, so deadly in some respects, almost childlike in others. Thane is cannier than Koorland was, less of a naïf, if you will. He has more experience, after all. I wonder how things would have gone had he been the last Imperial Fist rather than Koorland. Would this crisis have lasted so long?’

‘Koorland was more easily led. A man needs to be malleable if you would turn him into a hero. He was right for the role.’

‘The Emperor sent him at the right time,’ said Vangorich.

‘Now I know you don’t believe that,’ scolded Wienand. ‘Be careful with Thane. You cannot manipulate him. He needs to be contained.’

‘Ah, well, that might be a little tricky,’ said Vangorich. ‘I’ve asked you here because I think we should make him the Lord Guilliman.’

‘What?’ said Wienand.

‘He is dangerous, you are right. More so now the war is over. The enemy is defeated. Space Marines need enemies, it’s their whole reason for being. He’ll be looking for more soon.’

‘And you want to put him in a room where he has nobody to look at but us?’

‘Oh, I think we’re quite safe,’ said Vangorich amiably. ‘He doesn’t trust me, but he does listen. And you, you have his respect, my dear Wienand. You fought by his side. You proved yourself to him. You know, those new scars you have are very fetching.’ He looked at her meaningfully.

‘You’re suggesting that the Inquisition table the motion that he take the post? No,’ she said.

‘I was actually thinking you should do it. But the Inquisition, yes, the right hand of the Emperor Himself. Who could refuse that?’

‘Don’t mock me, Drakan.’

‘I’m teasing you. It’s affectionate.’

‘You can put teasing on my file along with “my dear” as things not to do to me.’ She gripped the edge of the desiccated wood. It was as hard as stone. She bowed her head in thought. ‘Veritus will not agree,’ she said, ‘but I cannot deny that your plan is appealing. Thane in charge of the Senatorum might put a stop to the squabbling, at least for a while. He is more than a Space Marine, more than a son of the Emperor, he is the slayer of the Beast. The saviour of the Imperium.’

‘He is a symbol,’ said Vangorich. ‘Seeing as we’re out of primarchs, he’ll have to do.’

She couldn’t stop a smile at the thought of the reactions of the others. ‘They could say nothing against him. Thane would have the backing of every man, woman and child in the whole of the Imperium.’

‘You’re coming round to the idea, I can tell,’ said Vangorich.

‘I am not sure. Putting so much power into the hands of one man, at the height of his popularity?’

‘Just like Horus?’

‘That is exactly what Veritus will say,’ she said.

‘Only I can’t imagine someone like Thane going bad. Can you? Tell me truthfully.’

‘Power corrupts,’ said Wienand. ‘There is a reason why the Emperor created the Senatorum Imperialis to rule. The Imperium was too much even for Him alone.’

‘And like so many things since the time of the Great Crusade, it’s worked just marvellously,’ said Vangorich. ‘The Emperor was not infallible. Thane is no primarch. His rule won’t last forever, and the Imperium needs a steady hand for a while. We need reform. He can push it through.’

‘Reforms you suggest?’

He shrugged. ‘Or you. Tell me it makes no sense, and I will drop the issue. You agree with me though, and I know you can handle Veritus.’

She paused, and became suspicious. ‘There is something you are not telling me,’ she said. ‘What play are you making, Drakan?’

He became serious. ‘The play I am making is for stability at a time when we so desperately need it. The Beast nearly finished us, Wienand. Neither you nor I believe things can go back to the way they were. You know this isn’t about personal power. It never has been. I am not made that way. If I were, I would never have been recruited as an Assassin, nor would I have been elevated to Grand Master.’

‘Psych screening doesn’t always work.’

‘But you know me.’

‘I’m afraid I do, all too well.’

They looked at each other, neither willing to drop eye contact. Wienand broke their silence.

‘Verreault and Lansung will not agree to this,’ she said.

Vangorich smiled.

She gritted her teeth. If she was at the point of making individual objections that could be dealt with one by one, she’d lost the argument.

‘I’ll handle them. They will back your proposal. So will I. Zeck will too. He understands the situation. All I have to do is convince one more and we will have a majority.’

‘How can you be sure of Verreault and Lansung? They will be the biggest opponents to the idea. They have the most to lose.’

‘I am sure they will back you,’ he said confidently.

‘Do I want to know?’

‘Mmm, I don’t think so,’ said Vangorich.

Wienand bit her bottom lip. It wasn’t clear there was any other way. ‘I’ll consider it, but it will not be without cost.’

‘And what would that cost be, Inquisitorial Representative?’

Her face hardened. ‘Don’t be disingenuous, Drakan.’

Vangorich passed three cowled menial priests on the stairs leading to the Monitus. When he walked through the high marble gate he was gratified to see that his orders had been obeyed. The Monitus, empty of all but dust until a few days ago, had been attracting increasing numbers of pilgrims since the fall of the Beast. They had all been removed.

There was but one other living being in the Monitus that evening. Surrounded by his noble antecessors rendered three times life-size in stone, Thane looked entirely in place. He stood at the centre of the semicircular balcony that led out from the hall, framed against the dirty warmth of Terran skies. He was one of the heroes of old come back to life and stepped down from his plinth to survey the modern age with sorrowful eyes. Vangorich pitied him. Such was the fate of all heroes, their lives short, their souls captured in stone, their reputations used to rebuke generations yet to come. All of them would be disappointed to see the dream they had fought for.

‘Vangorich. High Lord,’ Thane said. He bowed his head.

‘Lord Thane,’ Vangorich returned his courtesy. He pulled out a blocky box from under his robes.

‘What is that?’ said Thane.

Vangorich waved the device. ‘An audio damper. Nothing sinister.’

‘Put your silence field away. You’ll talk to me openly or not at all,’ said Thane. ‘I’ve no appetite for subterfuge.’

‘As you wish,’ said Vangorich. He had had the place swept for listening devices earlier that day. He was sure nobody would be listening. And if they were, what they might learn would not help them. Never act, Vangorich held, until it is too late for anybody to do anything about it.

Thane looked around the ranks of heroes. They were paired, back to back, one looking down at the floor, the other staring sternly at the dome of the Great Chamber. Thane’s own eyes followed the stone gaze of the statues and settled on the house of the Senatorum, and he half turned away from the Grand Master to share their view.

‘What is it that you want from me, Lord Vangorich?’ said Thane. ‘Summoning me here, where so much of import has occurred these last months, surrounded by the warriors of the great Legions, you can only be hoping to make some sort of point.’

Vangorich went to look out over the vista of the Palace. He leaned on a marble balustrade eroded by the corrosive air and drummed his fingers. The dome looked so fragile, like a bald head ready to be cracked. Only fate had preserved it from the shattering of the ork attack moon.

‘Providence played a part in preserving the Great Chamber, don’t you think?’ Vangorich said. ‘The Emperor watched over it, I am sure.’

‘I am unconvinced by your piety.’

‘I pray daily, my lord.’

‘Koorland told me. In the Chapel Ordinary. I am sure the common people are most affected by your display of humility. Not I. You do not believe in the Creed. I can tell.’

‘That’s an interesting observation.’

Thane made a dismissive noise deep in his throat. ‘My kind knew the Emperor when He walked among us. You are not so far divorced in time from the founders of the Officio Assassinorum yourself. There have been, how many, twenty Grand Masters since your order was founded?’

‘Eleven,’ said Vangorich. ‘We Assassins become adept at staying alive.’

‘You are too rational for faith. I’ll not play your games, Grand Master. I am not Koorland. The war is over. I tire of Terra.’

‘No, you are not Koorland,’ agreed Vangorich.

‘Then tell me why I am here. Speak plainly to me as Thane, not as your puppet. Koorland was a great hero, but he heeded you too closely. I am weary. The Imperial Fists, my Chapter,’ he added, with a touch too much stress, ‘are battered. We may be brothers in blood but we must learn to be comrades. I have much to do and little time to do it in.’ Thane stalked forwards, ceramite boots scratching the porphyry floor, to stand over Vangorich.

Vangorich rested on the stone rail. He was a fraction of Thane’s armoured weight, yet he was easy in the Chapter Master’s presence, a poisonous spider as deadly as the great cat in whose shadow it lurked.

‘Well then, I shall get to the nub of it. You might be done with Terra, but Terra is not done with you. Wienand is going to propose you as Lord Guilliman. You should accept.’

Thane blew out a prodigious sigh. ‘Politics. I will not do it.’

‘I suspected you might say that. That’s why I called you here.’

‘I am not a politician. Ask the Ultramarines. I belong on a wall facing outward against our enemies, not sequestered in the keep surrounded by vipers.’

‘The Ultramarines mourn the loss of their master. They have their own realm to look to.’

‘We mourn our master too. I will not do it, Vangorich.’

‘I see. A shame. Oh well.’

‘I am glad you do not press it.’

Vangorich looked at the fantastical, miniature landscape of the worn rock and traced it with his finger. ‘Ask yourself, what happens when the Traitors come forth from the Eye of Terror again, or if the eldar become resurgent?’ said Vangorich.

‘So you are going to press it,’ said Thane.

‘What happens,’ said Vangorich, raising his voice, ‘Emperor forbid, if the orks find a new Beast? Or if another xenos threat arises? We became lax. Ullanor should have been levelled, or better yet, destroyed. The site of the greatest victory of our supposed god, and what, we forget where it is? Our leaders neglect the defence of our frontier in favour of chasing more riches or shiny medals for themselves? It’s insanity, you know it. The Senatorum Imperialis is broken. We need something else while it is restored to something approaching the Emperor’s vision.’

‘I will not play medicae to Terra’s ills when there is much work to be done beyond this system. The Emperor never intended that the Adeptus Astartes rule over common humanity. Our role is in its defence, and in furthering the Emperor’s glory.’

‘You’re going to leave,’ stated Vangorich.

Thane’s blocky transhuman face registered something akin to disdain. ‘You quickly come to that conclusion? There are hundreds of worlds in the thrall of the orks. Thousands of fleets. Dozens of attack moons. They must all be dealt with. The Beast is dead, but if one warlord gains traction a fresh ork crusade could build. In its weakened state, the Imperium will crumble. There are many armies and fleets scattered across the galaxy. They must be reorganised and motivated to fight back. The campaign to cleanse the stars of orks will take decades, and it must be done now.’

‘See, our fears coincide!’ exclaimed Vangorich. ‘You will be in a better place to deal with it as a High Lord. You will make an excellent Lord Guilliman.’

‘I cannot afford the delay.’

‘What is a few more weeks? Then you can be on your way.’

‘You propose that I assume the office, then depart?’ Thane looked at him in puzzlement.

‘The threat of your return will be enough to keep them in line.’

‘A few weeks saw us delivered of Magneric’s intelligence. Had we had that sooner, the first assault on Ullanor would have been the last. Koorland would live. Many of my brothers would remain in service. A few weeks is everything, Grand Master. You, the deliverer of the perfectly timed blade, know this full well.’

‘Days then,’ Vangorich said reassuringly. ‘Put the house in order, then head out to employ your talents where they are needed. There are many here on Terra who could rule in your stead and–’

‘Many as in one?’ Thane clapped his armoured hands slowly together. The clash of metal rang off the statues. ‘Who do you propose, Vangorich, yourself?’

‘No! No,’ Vangorich shook his head. ‘Good grief, no. I belong in the shadows. I was thinking… Veritus? I’d suggest Wienand, but she wouldn’t do it. She is like you, chafing to get back to her business now the crisis is past.’

‘Veritus because he will object to my appointment.’

Vangorich grinned. ‘You’ve become good at this.’

‘A Space Marine who cannot judge a battlefield and adapt himself accordingly is not worthy of his battleplate,’ said Thane. ‘The Senatorum is as deadly a warzone as any.’

‘Of course, Wienand will need mollifying. I suspect she might want the role herself, and if you give to it Veritus she may be outraged. It wasn’t so long ago that the Inquisitorial Representatives were trying to kill each other. Might I suggest your first act as Lord Guilliman should be to transfer control of the Deathwatch permanently to the Inquisition?’

‘I was thinking of disbanding it,’ said Thane, ‘along with the Last Wall.’

‘Ah good, I was going to bring that up too. The latter has to be done. But the Deathwatch have proven their utility. They serve very well in building bonds between your Chapters. You have become a little, well, estranged since the Second Founding, and the Third didn’t help.’

‘I do not–’

‘If you would indulge me, Chapter Master,’ said Vangorich. ‘The addition of a Chapter-strength force of Space Marines to the Inquisition’s arsenal will greatly shore up their authority, and further keep the High Lords’ minds focused where they should be: on the business of government, and not on their own estates.’

Thane stared down at him dubiously. Their faces were so heavy, thought the Grand Master, that it was too easy to see the Adeptus Astartes as stupid.

‘Come now. You know the rules very well,’ Vangorich went on. ‘The reformation of the Imperial Fists and that presentation to the High Lords in the Plaza Decamerata? Masterful work. You already have them in retreat. Take on the mantle of Lord Guilliman and put them to flight. The Imperium needs you, Maximus Thane. Now is not the right time for another mortal man to lead.’

‘And what do you gain from all this, Master of Assassins?’

‘Nothing. I get nothing. I get not to assassinate anyone, that is what I get. Keeping the peace is always my first intention, Chapter Master. I assure you of that.’ He tapped Thane’s plastron. ‘A threat loses its power once it is acted upon. I am a threat. Like I said, I belong in the shadows.’

Terra breathed again. The Great Chamber swarmed with lesser lords. It was even busier than usual, packed out with planetary delegations from beleaguered worlds. How quickly the vermin boil out of their hiding places when the storm has passed, Vangorich thought. A short while ago, he had regretted the absence of the least lords and all the others. Now he saw in them yet more potential for delay. Once, wider democracy had worked, but these were different times.

Nevertheless, today they were needed.

The building was in the throes of repair. Piles of rubble had been cleared away. Collapsed tiers of seating were roped off, the process of dismantling them half completed. Walls unknown to daylight for a thousand years stood exposed. Scaffolding rose up the sides of the dome, catwalks crisscrossed its vaulted expanse. Lines of fresh, pale plaster crept up along cracks. All menials had been dismissed while the Senatorum was in session, except the fresco painters, who must work their paints into the damp plaster before it dried. They sent black looks at the gathering lords, as if it were they who had invaded the painters’ workspace and not the other way around.

Really, it would have made more sense to hold a closed meeting of the High Twelve in the Clanium Library, or the Cerebrium, but a full session was required. Vangorich had spent several exhausting days making sure that it occurred.

Otherwise, the Great Chamber remained as it had been before the crisis. Floating constructs traversed the wide open space under the dome. The dais still rotated at its glacial pace. Dorn still glared down upon the seats of the High Lords. Vangorich looked up at the primarch’s face while the others dealt with their armies of aides and subordinates. He suppressed a smile at the thought of his Temple masters arriving here and mobbing him. Naturally, he only appeared alone. There were over a dozen Officio agents in the chamber, several embedded in the retinues of his fellow High Lords. He remained forever grateful that they could not bother him directly. He was a loner by inclination.

Everything hinged on the next few hours. He trusted Dorn’s glower would prove sufficient motivation to his gene-son to do the right thing.

The wait for proceedings to begin was the most tedious part of the day. Thousands of lesser lords and adepts filed into the intact galleries. Prefecti by the cohort, consularies by the gross. Vangorich slipped into a meditative trance, his hearing flicking from conversation to conversation. Ekharth was flustered, as well a man tasked with putting right the material damage done to Terra and its domains might be. Lansung was defiant, but it was a shell. Verreault was cowed, spending his time brooding over his own failures. Zeck’s augmetic face was unreadable. Kubik had come back from Mars, but his body was still.

The others behaved according to their character. Juskina Tull was a mental wreck, a blank face swamped by outrageous finery. She had developed a small tic around her left eye. The defeat of the Beast would force her to confront her failure with the Proletarian Crusade soon. Vangorich didn’t expect that to turn out well. Reports from his Temple Vanus infocytes indicated that her own people thought so too, and that a struggle among the Chartist Captains was already developing. Should she fall, he doubted the organisation would retain its place among the High Twelve.

Dissent among the Chartists, and a vacuum at the high table. More problems. Anwar, Sark and Gibran were becoming closer, the two psykers pulling the Paternoval Envoy into their circle. They had the warp in common, after all. This little triumvirate concerned him only slightly. Gibran held real power, but the other two were functionaries at heart, fiercely defensive of their adepta’s influences for no good reason – both the Adeptus Astra Telepathica and the Astronomican were essential to the Imperium. Neither of them posed any risk.

‘Vangorich.’ The phlegmy, ancient voice of Veritus broke into his semi-trance.

‘Ah, Veritus, how are you?’

Veritus loomed over him in his cream power armour, so Vangorich stood. Veritus’ wrinkled face stared at him defiantly from its protective apparatus. He looked so small in there.

‘This idea of yours, it cannot be,’ said Veritus. ‘You are playing a dangerous hand.’

‘Wienand told you, did she?’ said Vangorich.

‘She intends to go through with it, against my recommendation.’

‘A pity. I am sure if you were to re-examine the issue, it would make sense to you,’ said Vangorich.

‘A Space Marine should not sit on the Council. This reformation of the old Legion is ample evidence why.’

‘The first Lord Guilliman was, well, Lord Guilliman,’ offered Vangorich. ‘There is precedent.’

‘He was a primarch,’ said Veritus. ‘And perhaps the only one suitable to the role. Horus’ betrayal of the Emperor is the history you should be looking to here. Do not invest a Space Marine with such power over mortal men!’ Veritus was close to shouting in his face, his words carrying over the numbing hubbub of voices filling the chamber.

‘Sorry, but I don’t agree. Look, a couple of the others are beginning to pay attention to our business. Let’s say we debate this in the proper forum, when this session commences? Let’s put it to a vote.’

Veritus glared at him. ‘You cannot control him.’

‘Veritus! Why would I want to control him?’

‘You’re a liability,’ said Veritus. His armour whined as he stepped around the dais to take a seat by Wienand. Since Koorland’s death, there was one free.

‘Ekharth, when are we going to get started?’ called Zeck.

‘We’ll get started–’ began the master of the Administratum. The thump of ceramite boots on stone interrupted him.

‘Now?’ suggested Vangorich lightly.

Maximus Thane strode towards the dais, the crowds parting before him. He came escorted by a full squad of Imperial Fists First Company veterans, their armour heavy with battle honours. Cast icons of the Chapter hung from chains on their pauldrons. The yellow of their armour was almost obscured by gilding, badges and emblems.

‘Chapter Master! Good of you to join us,’ called Vangorich.

‘What can we do for you, Lord Thane?’ said Ekharth. Without a Lord Guilliman, he had asserted his adeptus’ seniority and appointed himself temporary chair. Such a snivelling, reactive little man ordinarily, he had become swelled with pomposity, like a toad.

‘I will speak with the High Lords,’ said Thane. He stopped by the rotating dais.

‘Impossible,’ said Ekharth. ‘The business of the Senatorum Imperialis is about to commence in full session. You have no seat here. We have petitions to hear from hundreds of worlds. You must wait your turn.’

‘I shall not,’ said Thane. ‘This will not wait.’

‘You must go, Thane,’ said Ekharth, his face flushing crimson.

So he has a backbone, thought Vangorich. That might prove problematic. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I motion that we bring forward other matters from the end of the session to now?’

‘We have not begun!’ said Lansung exasperatedly.

Vangorich shot him a warning look. The Lord Admiral seethed.

‘Seconded,’ said Wienand.

Anger bubbled up through the cracks in Ekharth’s mask of self-importance. ‘This is most irregular.’

The background chatter of the crowd hushed as the lesser lords and planetary delegations caught notice of the growing confrontation.

‘Call a vote. We are the High Lords. I rather thought we could conduct our business as we see fit. Let’s get it out of the way.’

‘Very well!’ said Ekharth. Along with his new backbone, he had acquired an orb of black granite that he slammed into a cup of the same. The clack of the gavel snapped through the chamber like a cannon shot. Bobbing servo-skulls swung their attention to the dais. The High Lords shooed away their remaining servants and subordinates. The conversation in the chamber dwindled to a breathy silence. ‘I bring this meeting of the Senatorum to order! We shall vote on undertaking other business first.’

Vangorich raised his hand, as did Wienand, Anwar, Zeck, Verreault and, after a cocked eyebrow from Vangorich, Lansung.

‘Carried!’ said Ekharth angrily. ‘What do you want to table, Vangorich?’

‘Not me,’ said Vangorich. He held out a hand to Wienand.

Wienand hesitated. Veritus was staring at her so hard the blue veins in his temple pulsed.

‘I move that we appoint Maximus Thane to the head of this Senatorum as Lord Guilliman,’ she said.

Her words were met with resounding cheers from the lesser lords that almost drowned out Vangorich’s seconding of the motion, despite the voxmitters amplifying his voice.

Ekharth went purple. He really has had no idea, thought Vangorich. ‘Vote then!’ he said, cracking his spherical gavel petulantly. ‘For.’

Vangorich, Wienand, Zeck, Verreault, Lansung and Anwar again voted. After a moment’s consultation, so did Gibran and Sark. Kubik raised a mechanical hand in silence, then went back to whatever it was that really interested him.

‘Against!’ said Ekharth. He raised his own hand quickly, then snatched it down. He stared at the table in defeat.

‘Welcome to the Senatorum Imperialis,’ said Vangorich to Thane. He bowed his head. ‘My Lord Guilliman.’

The chamber shook to the cheers of the massed lesser lords as Maximus Thane took his seat at the head of the table.

Three

Exemplars of the Imperium

Zerberyn ran at the ork blocking the companionway down to the enginarium, bowling it over the railing and into the churning machinery below. He fired into the face of the one behind, blasting the back of its skull apart. Vaulting over its tumbling corpse, he buried his chainsword in the head of a third. A burst of heavy bolter shots felled three bigger orks coming up the steps.

‘There it is!’ voxed Sergeant Solomon Torr. ‘I have the xenos mechanician in sight.’

Runes flickered over Zerberyn’s faceplate. A red signum dot pulsed on the miniature cartograph of the spaceship’s interior. The ork commander was in a large room suspended above the thundering ship’s engines.

‘Squad Torr, follow!’ he ordered.

Squealing ork slaves scattered before him. He did not waste his ammunition on them, and they died under his boots. He rounded a corner to see a heavy blast door grinding into place. His hand went to his belt and came away empty. His last melta bomb had been spent three bulkheads back. ‘Melta!’ he called.

Space Marines clattered down the stairs behind him, taking up fire positions along the rickety safety rail. Their weapons panned back and forth, laser targeters gleaming in the dark.

‘Melta!’ Zerberyn called again, his patience gone.

Brother Rosdane shoved his way down the stairs, banging into the backs of his brothers in his haste. ‘Here, First Captain.’ His plain, unmarked armour was covered in dark ork blood, bright grooves scratched into the surface where enemy fire had been deflected.

‘Burn us a way in,’ Zerberyn ordered. ‘Squad Torr, firing lines!’

He took a step back as Rosdane adjusted the focal length of the melta and levelled the slotted muzzle of the gun at the door. The rest of his squad formed up, bolters level. The foetid atmosphere of the ork hulk shimmered in front of the meltagun, then with a whooshing roar the door burst into flame. Thick gobbets of burning steel ran from the breach, draining in lethal drips through the mesh of the catwalk. The bright spot of heat spread, until the whole of the door glowed white. All of a sudden, it collapsed wetly, spraying sparks and droplets of molten metal.

‘Fire!’ shouted Zerberyn.

His warriors let loose together, sending a barrage of bolts through the door before the smoke of its destruction had cleared. Zerberyn leapt through.

‘Follow the First Captain!’ shouted Sergeant Torr.

They emerged into a storm of bullets. Rounds screamed off Zerberyn’s armour in a blaze of sparks. Orks came out of the smoke and dark, and he cut them down. Behind them was a huge, squat-bodied ork engineer, the mockery of a Space Marine’s servo-harness attached to its back.

Boltguns barked around him, felling the xenos, as Zerberyn charged to attack. This fleet’s strange vessels and bizarre weaponry were the creations of this monster. He was the lord of the armada. Kill him, and what little cohesion the force had would collapse.

There was no point, Zerberyn realised. They had chased him from his bridge, he was cornered. They could have set the charges and left. The orks lacked the organisation they had shown only weeks ago. But he wanted to kill it. He needed to.

It raised a blocky pistol and fired. A round as big as a human fist punched a fresh dent into Zerberyn’s plastron and knocked him off his feet. A tall ork reared over him, a growling chainaxe raised over its head. Before it could strike its chest blew out and it fell down dead. Zerberyn recovered and got back to his feet, bolt pistol spitting.

His rounds smacked into an energy field surrounding the ork engineer and exploded harmlessly. It bared its massive yellow fangs at him and raised its weapon. Zerberyn dodged, taking a hit on the greave as he dived aside. The strength of the weapon was so great the plate buckled. On his faceplate, a warning rune blinked. A tiny schematic of his armour flickered up, his lower left leg glowing amber.

The ork mechanic roared. The last of its bodyguard died, blown apart by seven simultaneous bolt hits. Squad Torr trained their weapons on the engineer, advancing on it as they fired. The creature’s energy shield flared under the strain and gave out with a bang. Zerberyn jumped at it, his sword swinging. The ork roared and hammered down with the whirring attachments of its harness. Zerberyn parried one with the flat of his blade and sheared the other away. Black oil pumped from the harness’ hydraulics.

The ork swung its pistol around. Like so many of its monstrous kind its strength was undone by sluggishness, and Zerberyn chopped hard, separating its hand from its body. Howling in outrage, the ork threw itself at Zerberyn, bearing them both to the floor. Zerberyn’s boltgun was knocked from his grasp. His chainsword was no use and he dropped it to grapple with the monster. His eye-lenses filled with the slavering jaws of the ork as it bit furiously at his face. His fingers slipped on waxy skin. The thing grabbed him around the throat and squeezed. The pressure was immense, crushing his neck through his softseal. Zerberyn scrabbled for his combat knife. He unsheathed it, fought it past the ork’s flailing stump. The ork batted at his hand. Ivory fangs snapped on his forearm.

With muscle-cracking effort, Zerberyn bucked under the creature, shifting it enough to drive the point of his blade into its eye. The ork mechanician continued to roar for a second. Zerberyn saw his death in its face, but then the light went out in its remaining eye, and it slumped.

His brothers heaved the dead beast off him. Sergeant Torr extended a hand.

‘Have you worked out your anger, brother-captain?’ he said.

‘Watch your tone, brother,’ said Zerberyn. He allowed himself to be hauled back up.

‘Perhaps you are still in need of battle,’ said Torr. ‘But we are done here and should leave.’

‘I thank you for letting me slay the beast alone,’ he said.

‘A worthy opponent,’ said Torr. ‘Your order, First Captain?’

‘Cripple the engine. Krak, meltagun, anything we have left.’

Zerberyn opened a line to the other Fists Exemplar upon the ship. He scrolled through the icons of the five squads. Most were green, a couple tending to amber. Casualties were light. ‘The ship’s captain is dead. All squads fall back to extraction point. Hail Shipmaster Marcarian. We are returning to the Dantalion.’

Zerberyn ran into the ork hangar, a wide metal hole haphazardly floored by welded plates, shielded from the void with a buzzing yellow integrity field. Two squads waited by the Thunderhawks Aegis of Alcazar and Pride of Oriax, snapping off disciplined volleys of fire into the corridors leading into the bay. The transports faced inward, away from the freedom of space, their front and rear ramps down. Their cheek-mounted heavy bolters twitched, lest any ork be foolish enough to come around their fronts. Orks fired sporadically from the gallery circling the bay, but they were few and quickly fell to grenades and missiles when they showed their faces. Mounds of greenskin dead choked the hangar doors.

His warriors’ guns zeroed in on Zerberyn as he thundered back into the bay followed by Squads Torr and Nubius, held a moment, then tracked away to find other targets.

‘Odrazar, we leave as soon as the others join us,’ Zerberyn ordered his pilot. ‘Begin preparations to depart now!’

As soon as the order was given the Thunderhawks came to life, their engines thrumming in anticipation of flight. The deck vibrated at their awakening.

Communications crackled in through his helmet vox. Squad Escoban reported that the shield generators had been destroyed, Squad Rodrian that the main reactor was rigged to explode. Zerberyn and his squads joined the firing line of the raiding party rearguard and awaited their comrades.

They came soon, Squad Escoban first: two brothers hauling their wounded sergeant between them, four more covering each other in pairs. Fire, retreat, cover, fire, retreat, cover, fire. Zerberyn selected their squad icon in his suit’s faceplate. It was tending from green to amber. It expanded, pushing out squad level detail for the rest of his taskforce and listing the brothers individually. Nine had set out, seven returned.

Rodrian came next. Their squad marker was red. Only four of eight remained. All were wounded.

‘Board the transports!’ shouted Zerberyn. The nineteen warriors already with him raised their weapons. Squads Rodrian and Escoban ran past, Sergeant Escoban dragged up the ramp leaving a trail of rapidly clotting blood.

The orks came after them. There were dozens as opposed to hundreds, their numbers thinned, but they were still dangerous. Many were lesser varieties of the ork technical class, while others wore massive harnesses covered in an unlikely array of guns. They flooded onto the deck, brandishing bizarre energy weapons that they wasted no time in using. A beam of searing ruby light pulsed out, neatly bisecting Brother Irken. Another dead. Twelve warriors lost in this battle alone.

‘Kill them all!’ roared Zerberyn. He needn’t have expended his breath – his brothers were already responding, riddling the ork crew with mass-reactive fire. The Thunderhawks’ anti-personnel weapons opened up, stitching so many lines of light across the hangar that Zerberyn found it hard to see Pride of Oriax from his position at the foot of Aegis of Alcazar’s front ramp. So many orks were hit that their atomised flesh misted the air. The walls were repainted dark red.

‘Squad Torr, board!’ ordered Zerberyn. Torr led his men aboard Pride of Oriax, two of them covering the rest as they thundered around to the front of their craft and up the assault ramp. Beams of barely focused light and small, hissing rockets scored the hull as the door swung shut. One impacted inside. A flash, and a jet of fire suppressant, then the hatch was shut and the Pride of Oriax was lifting off, engines in rocket mode, blasting out blades of blue-white fire. Its blunt rear penetrated the crude integrity field with an electric crackle and it was away into the void, swinging about, all engines engaging, and racing away from the flagship.

The orks fell back, sniping at the Fists Exemplar from the doorways and gallery. A lascannon blast slammed into the roof of the Aegis of Alcazar, bringing down a shower of molten ceramite and calling forth the voice of a tocsin from inside. Another of Zerberyn’s brothers fell, a smoking hole punched through his face. The others bore the hail of bullets and micro-missiles stoically, firing calmly back.

‘Evacuate!’ ordered Zerberyn. His men broke their line and pounded up the ramp. Zerberyn was last aboard, still firing outward as the Thunderhawk’s ramp closed. His warriors set themselves into their flight restraints. Zerberyn pushed past them, up into the rear compartment and on into the flight deck. Odrazar and his co-pilot were strobed by the light of gunfire flashing through the canopy. Bolt-rounds continued to chug from the forward mounts, dismembering orks foolish enough to chance the bay again.

‘Captain,’ Odrazar acknowledged Zerberyn.

‘Brother. Time to leave.’

Aegis of Alcazar reared up and back. The roar of the engines outdid the crackle and boom of the orks’ strange weaponry. Sailing backwards, it breached the integrity field and turned away, running along the side of the ork ship. Gunfire blasted from multiple mounts, forcing Odrazar to jink between their streams of shells and energy.

All was silent. The void brought peace. The ork ship vented its fury voicelessly. The rumble of the craft and the quiet conversations of active machines filled the cockpit.

Odrazar banked around and opened up the engines to maximum, and the flagship fell away behind them. Burrok’s World rolled into view, its marbled clouds and seas stained with the black smoke of worldwide fire. Burrok’s World was yet another nowhere planet beset by the greenskins. They attacked indiscriminately, invading whatever place they happened across. The world had little strategic significance for either orks or humans, but Zerberyn would gladly fight them wherever they were. The opportunity for resupply the battle presented was a secondary consideration to him. He wished only to slay orks.

‘There is an energy spike on the ork flagship, captain,’ the Thunderhawk’s co-pilot said. Zerberyn went to the ship’s operations desk. With his backpack on, he could not sit in its empty chair, but he keyed the display, selecting the Thunderhawk’s aft augurs.

The ork flagship was a brute of a thing, with a prow as blunt as an ork’s jaw welded to a long, rickety body that gave it the overall appearance of a predatory oceanic life form. When the Fists Exemplar had tackled it initially, it was powerful and proud, protected by an energy field that Space Marine ordnance was powerless to penetrate. Now the projection vanes were wilting, the field they generated was out and the ship suffered under the bombardment of the Space Marine fleet.

Slowly, the craft began to fall towards Burrok’s World. Zerberyn smiled as fire like solar flares burst from the haphazard array of vents and exhaust ports around the engine stack, and it turned, presented half its belly to his inspection. Explosions rippled from gun decks and fighter bays, catching the smaller craft fleeing it in their fires. In typical orkish fashion, the guns continued firing to the very last, but madly, targeting nothing. The mindless biting of a wounded animal.

The void sheeted white as the mechanician-admiral’s junk ship exploded into a maelstrom of spinning debris tortured by crackling green lightning. A weak shockwave of expanding gases tilted the Thunderhawk. The hull pinked and tinkled with a hundred micro-impacts. When the viewscreen’s image returned, in the flagship’s place was a crowd of fizzing sparks that went out one by one. Burning wreckage hurtled away into the void or scorched fiery trails into the upper atmosphere of the planet. In moments there was no sign the ork ship had ever existed.

Zerberyn remained in the Thunderhawk’s cockpit as it crossed the void towards the Dantalion. The ork fleet was well into the process of transformation into a debris field. With their admiral dead, the flotilla broke in all directions. Lightstorms flashed as the fleeing ork ships were picked off one by one. Engine stacks blew into greasy, roiling balls of fire.

A victory, but another costly one. The Guilliman moved sluggishly, half its engines lightless. The Excelsior was dead, her broken hull shining with short-lived fires and the departure thrusts of lifeboats. He called up the casualty lists in his faceplate from the taskforce noosphere. Twenty-nine dead brothers and thousands of serfs. He unfocused his eyes from the list, but left it scrolling across his view of the disintegrating ork ships.

A bleeping interrupted his thoughts.

‘First Captain, we have an incoming message from the surface,’ said Odrazar.

‘Survivors?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Zerberyn stood taller. ‘Excellent news! Turn us about. We are in no danger now. Let us descend to the surface and see these people our blood has saved.’

The Thunderhawks of the Iron Warriors and the Fists Exemplar landed together upon the shattered landing fields of Turos port. Zerberyn, Honorius, Reoch and five others stepped out into a landscape of utter devastation. The space port was in ruins, substantial terminal buildings and hangar spaces broken into untidy heaps of rubble. Beyond the rockcrete aprons the vegetation was burned back to ash. Columns of smoke held up a sky of black clouds. The light of the sun was obscured, the horizon stained red and orange with the fires of burning cities.

Against the odds, mankind had survived the orks there. A delegation of a dozen battered, dirty soldiers waited for the Space Marines when they walked down the assault ramp. They were streaked with soot and old blood, their uniforms tattered. Several were not soldiers, but civilian guerillas bearing weapons of the dead. Their leader wore a necklace of large orkish teeth. In him the light of defiance burned brightest.

‘My lord,’ he said, and knelt with fearful reverence. ‘It is you who destroyed the ork fleet?’

‘It was. My brothers run the last few out of the system as we speak.’

There were more figures two hundred metres away, a small crowd watching nervously in the lee of a half-burned warehouse. ‘Rise. Do not kneel.’ Zerberyn looked around at the ruined landscape. ‘You are this army’s general?’

‘Lieutenant, my lord. The generals are all dead.’

‘Look at me. What is your name?’

‘Cadraig, my lord.’ The man lifted his head. He looked Zerberyn unflinchingly in the eye-lenses, but remained kneeling. He was scared; Zerberyn could practically taste his fear. ‘I was an officer in the militia. You have saved us.’

‘You saved yourselves,’ said Zerberyn. ‘How did you prevail?’

‘We did not prevail. We were near defeat. It is three months since the orks came, and we have been fighting all the while. They… they took most of us. There are not so many of us left, but those that are alive still took an oath not to lay down our arms until we were all dead. We swore not to let a single other person be taken. We owe it all to Penderyn. He raised our spirits when our will was broken. He roused us to fight back when the regiments of our defence force were crushed. At his command we struck at them from hidden places. We bled their supply lines. We did what we could. It was not enough.’ The man bowed his head.

‘You have done more than most,’ said Zerberyn. ‘Where is this Penderyn? I would speak with him.’

‘He is dead, my lord.’

‘A shame. But you have done well. You are free now. Raise a monument to him and be thankful.’

Zerberyn looked to Kalkator’s craft. The warsmith had yet to emerge. An uneasy feeling passed through him.

‘My lord, might I beg to ask a question of you?’

‘Yes. By all means. You have earned my attention.’

‘Why were we left to fight alone? Not a single one of our requests for aid went answered. We had lost faith in the Emperor. We thought He had abandoned us, until now.’

‘The galaxy burns,’ said Zerberyn. ‘Your world is one of a thousand assailed.’

He would have said more. The man’s plight moved him. For the first time in months he saw a human being who had not lost his wits, or thrown his lot in with the orks, or allowed himself to be made livestock, but who had fought bravely, and nearly won.

The ramp to Kalkator’s Thunderhawk descended, hissing compressed gases. The lieutenant watched Kalkator as he approached over the pitted landing apron. The warsmith stamped down the ramp to stand next to Zerberyn.

‘Your prayers have been answered. We have come, but freedom does not come cheap.’

‘My lord?’ said Cadraig uneasily. His eyes shifted from Kalkator to Zerberyn and back again, the fear in them growing.

With a sudden chill, Zerberyn realised that Cadraig looked at he and Kalkator the same way. Fear and awe. There was no difference in his regard. And why should there be? Their metallic liveries were stained with soot and blood, with no markings clear to tell them apart. In Cadraig’s eyes they looked the same.

‘Aid such as ours requires payment. Our fleets are battered, our supplies low,’ said Kalkator.

‘Of course, my lord,’ said Cadraig. ‘You are welcome to rest here. We will give you what we can.’

‘You will give us everything,’ said Kalkator menacingly. ‘Food. Water. Munitions. All of it.’

Cadraig got falteringly to his feet. The men behind him looked up uncertainly.

‘We have so little. We shall starve.’

‘If you do not give us what we demand, we shall take it,’ said Kalkator. ‘Are there children among you?’

‘My lord!’ said Cadraig in alarm. ‘We swore not to let any more of our people be taken.’

One of Cadraig’s men caressed the firing mechanism of his gun. Kalkator caught the tiny movement and turned to address him.

‘I would not advise resistance. We will take one hundred of your strongest boys. Now. We do you a great honour. We are not orks. We shall not eat them, but raise them above the fragile state of base humanity. Your sons will be Legiones Astartes.’

‘Legiones?’ said Cadraig. A dawning realisation crossed his face. Weapons were raised. ‘Who are you?’ he said suspiciously.

‘We are members of the Fists Exemplar Chapter of Space Marines,’ said Zerberyn. He took a step forward. ‘We are loyal servants of Terra.’

‘You are. I am not.’ Kalkator plucked his pistol from his belt. Cadraig’s men raised their weapons fully. Kalkator trained his gun upon Cadraig. Servo-motors whined in the cheeks of the Iron Warriors Thunderhawk, bringing heavy bolter sponsons to bear.

‘One hundred youths,’ said Kalkator. ‘As much food as you can gather. Bring it here tomorrow morning, or we shall rain fire down upon this world that shall make your engagement with the orks appear trivial. Now go!’ The last words he amplified to godlike levels, and the men flinched and turned, and ran away. The crowd by the ruined terminal building looked on nervously.

Reoch laughed drily.

‘Brother,’ Kalkator said to Zerberyn. His use of the word had lost its ironic edge.

‘Why?’ said Zerberyn. ‘Why do we have to take everything? They would have supplied us well without complaint.’

‘You know why,’ said Kalkator, holstering his pistol. ‘My Great Company is a fifth the size it was before this began. I have lost all my holdings. Three worlds were mine to command, and now I have but one. A single further setback, and I shall be reduced to the status of a wandering beggar. I have lost most of my fleet, many of my machines. We are low on stores and munitions. I need recruits, I need food to feed them, or my brotherhood will die.’

‘There is no need. They would have given to you freely.’

‘Not everything. Now I get it all.’

‘You take their children! You are as good as killing them.’

‘I am not killing them. Shooting them would be killing them. What do you care, Zerberyn?’ said Kalkator, turning to look on the Exemplar fully. ‘The expression of disdain for common humanity has stamped itself into your face so deeply your own serfs have begun to fear you. How many have we seen reduced to livestock, or turned feral under the influence of the Green Roar? One pocket of defiance and your resolve crumbles.’

‘When man is at his best, it puts us in our proper place,’ said Zerberyn. ‘I was made to defend them. When I defend those who are worthy of my efforts, I see who I am. These people deserve our respect.’

‘They have my respect,’ said Kalkator. ‘Humankind isn’t often at its best. Not enough. You will come to understand that, if you have not already. Look at them, grovelling at the feet of the idols of a man who professed not to be a god, then allowed himself to be worshipped as one. We are saving them from the pernicious creed of the Emperor’s lies. If humanity is to survive it must help itself. The Emperor is deaf to the pleas of his faithful, but there are other gods who answer prayers. Mankind will not endure as these feeble examples, but as legionaries. The people of this world have proved themselves fine warriors. We do them a great honour in taking them into our Legions, brother.’

‘I am not a legionary!’ said Zerberyn.

‘Are you sure?’ said Kalkator slyly.

‘Your intention was to cleanse the systems around Immitis. Why have we come so far back into Imperial space?’

‘You would prefer it if we didn’t hunt orks?’ Kalkator said. His voice, rich and sardonic, made Zerberyn’s muscles tense. ‘Why are you so angry, brother? Do you think your loyalist brothers treat their charges any better? Be thankful. If it were not for your moderating influence, we would have taken their children and killed them all. You reminded me that a little mercy can be useful. Some of those wretches may live. They fought well against the orks, for mortals. Let them toil, let the struggle to survive harden them further, and then let them raise new offspring. It will be worth our while revisiting this place in fifty years or so. Yes, a good result. This will be a fine recruiting world. Thank you, Zerberyn, for your wise counsel.’

Kalkator strode back to his gunship, laughing. Zerberyn stared at the ragged crowd at the edge of the field. Some of the men from Cadraig’s group were shouting and pointing. He considered going to them, calling his ships and having them blast the Palimodes from the sky. The Iron Warriors ship was outnumbered four to one. The end would be quick. Numerous scenarios ran through his head. Victory would be assured, but survival would not be.

He could not turn on Kalkator. Not until the Beast was dead and the orks driven back. Until that came to pass, he needed the Iron Warriors. It was as simple as that; this was the lesser evil.

Teeth clenched, he turned on his heel and ascended the ramp of the Thunderhawk.

Much as it made him seethe, Kalkator was right. The Fists Exemplar required supplies and recruits. Zerberyn had agreed to set them on this course of action. He had evaluated it, tested it, and decided it was the correct solution. There were orks everywhere. Since that last desperate message from Euclydeas of the Soul Drinkers, he had heard nothing more from the Last Wall. He had to work with what he had. For the time being, that meant Kalkator.

A Fist Exemplar was never wrong.

Four

The crusade of iron

The Phalanx defied description. Ship was not a big enough word for the home of the Imperial Fists. Fortress made no allowance for its grace and ability to travel between the stars. It could be defined in several ways: as fortress-monastery, temple, relic, the single biggest warp-capable object in all the Imperium, a symbol of Imperial might, battle-fortress. But none adequately captured the reality in words. Human speech was too limited.

Phalanx’s mass blotted out the stars. On the sunward side its spires and towers were lit in brilliant sunlight. The muzzles of thousands of guns protruded from weapons ports. The broad rectangles of hangars and flight bays patterned its decks between enormous effigies of heroic Imperial Fists. On the dark side its shadows were absolute, its bulwarks rimed with void frost. None knew its origins. Legends had it that Dorn himself had built the fortress as the ultimate expression of his skill, or that he had found, adrift in space, a relic of the Dark Age of Technology. Whether built by the primarch or ancient engineers it had been Dorn’s, and the marks of his artifice were all over it. The station had taken damage during the final attack on Ullanor, but it was so huge that the signs of its wounding were not apparent to the naked eye. Phalanx remained one of the most impressive sights in all the dominions of man, a defiant statement against the cold horrors of void and warp.

The High Lords communicated little as they and their retinues flew towards Phalanx aboard the Potus Terrae. They kept to their quarters, each brooding on their own summons. The time for scheming was past. They must play the waiting game. Until the last half-day Phalanx grew slowly, then suddenly it expanded in size until it became a wall across the sky. Vangorich received overtures from several of the other Lords, but ignored them until, only a few hours out from the Imperial Fists fortress-monastery, he sent word to the Inquisitorial Representatives to join him for refreshments in the observation deck.

Veritus and Wienand were already present when Vangorich arrived. They looked outwards at the giant foredecks of Phalanx obliterating half the sky. Cyber-constructs buzzed around, augur attachments blinking, sniffing the air. Articulated instruments capable of detecting toxins at one part per hundred million in the ship’s gas mix flickered in and out of their housings like tongues. There were storm troopers in Inquisitorial black at every door and every thirty paces along the lengthy plasteel and stone gallery. Vangorich didn’t have a single agent among them. Veritus wore his power armour as usual. Wienand looked striking in a tight doublet and breeches, her iron grey, cropped hair coloured silver in the stark sunlight.

‘The idea was to enjoy a quiet moment together before the bickering begins again,’ said Vangorich. ‘I see you preferred a party.’

Veritus swung about, his armour whining. A puff of life-extending gas hissed from around his neck seal.

‘Caution is our watchword,’ he said.

‘What about mistrust?’ said Vangorich.

‘Don’t bait Veritus,’ said Wienand. ‘These are only precautions.’

Vangorich took a tray of three goblets from a menial whose eyes, mouth and ears were banded over by constricting iron. Beneath the implants, the organs of sight, speech and hearing were excised, replaced with crude augments that gave such unreliable perceptions of the world that the servant could never have described what he had seen and heard, even had he been capable. There were a number of such mutilated menials attending the party. No servitors, for their programming was too easy to compromise. If he thought about it, and he sometimes did, Vangorich found their deliberate disablement distasteful. But it was necessary.

He stopped before another servant who filled the goblets with dark wine. He carried them over to the inquisitors, set the tray on an ornate table and held up one goblet to Veritus.

The inquisitor curled his lip. ‘Do I look like a fool?’

‘You don’t, Lastan, and I would not take you for one, therefore this wine is safe. I am sure your constructs here would detect any attempt on my part to poison you.’

‘I will not drink with you, Drakan,’ said Veritus. ‘There are poisons no device can find.’

‘Fair enough. Wienand? You still trust me, don’t you?’

‘Did I ever trust you, Vangorich?’ she said distantly.

‘Apparently not, or we wouldn’t have so much company. You are hurting my feelings. This is very fine wine. Venusian. Very rare.’

‘I will drink, but I’ll take that one there,’ said Wienand, picking up one of the goblets still on the table and bidding the serf pour again.

‘Thank you. I feel a little less offended.’ He raised the goblet he had offered to Veritus and knocked it against Wienand’s. Veritus snorted.

‘Why have you called us?’ said Veritus. ‘Are you attempting to shore up your power before we go in to see the Lord Guilliman? I’d expect that sort of behaviour from Ekharth or Lansung, not you.’

‘Did they send you messages too? They sent me messages. I didn’t answer them,’ said Vangorich.

‘They did. We didn’t,’ said Wienand.

‘Now, I thought you might say that. So, you answered my message. That suggests to me that we have some common ground,’ said Vangorich.

‘Maybe,’ conceded Veritus. ‘But you are becoming ever more slippery, Grand Master. Your schemes to put Thane in Lord Guilliman’s throne were overt and sloppy. We only went along with it–’

‘Because you agreed?’ interrupted Vangorich. ‘More common ground then.’

Veritus groaned slightly and sank into his armour.

‘What is it you want?’ said Wienand.

‘It’s impressive, isn’t it?’ said Vangorich. ‘Phalanx, I mean.’

‘You are changing the subject,’ said Wienand.

‘I am, but as is my usual way I will get to the point.’

‘Which is?’ said Veritus.

‘Humour me,’ said Vangorich. ‘That’s not my point, obviously. Just look at Phalanx. Huge, magnificent, terrifying, but like so many other Imperial works, its initial impression hides a sorry truth. No such thing can be built now in the Imperium. Phalanx is vast, and yet it is not so large as the smallest of the ork attack moons. Like so many of the supposedly overpowering weapons our Imperium possesses, for much of the war it was absent, kept in deep space between Venus and Earth. Do you know, it was denied participation in the battle over Terra because its mass would have proved its own worst enemy when confronted with the gravity lashes of the orks? Thane risked it in the Third Battle for Ullanor where Koorland would not, and look at the damage it has sustained. One only has to look at what became of the Throneworld’s orbital defences to see how useless large ships or stations were against the orks. And there is a further thing.’

He stepped closer to Wienand and pointed with his wine. ‘Those docking piers, there are hundreds of them. They hold space for the battlefleets of scores of Chapters. But the dozen belonging to the Imperial Fists look lost amid those soaring towers. The halls within will be similarly empty. At their height, the Legiones Astartes each had tens of thousands of Space Marines. The half a thousand that comprise today’s Imperial Fists would be swallowed up by that fortress a hundred times over. There was a term used in ancient times: a paper tiger. Now, a tiger was–’

‘I know what a tiger was, Vangorich!’ said Veritus.

‘Well then. So you see, this giant weapon was no danger to the orks. How do you suppose our enemies see us now? We look at Phalanx, at our armies and our Space Marine Chapters, and we see the glorious past. But we do not live in the past. We live now. Our enemies – the xenos, the followers of the dark, old gods – they look at us and they see weakness.’ He stamped his foot upon the deck. ‘Down there is the cause of that weakness. We cannot let this happen again.’

‘You are drifting close to treason,’ said Veritus. ‘We will not be complicit in the extermination of the High Lords of Terra. Attempt such an act, and the Inquisition will be forced to move against you.’

‘You see? Straight away you threaten me. I am proposing no such thing as assassination. I am performing my role, Lord Inquisitor, as a balance. All I ask is that we three work together to make sure that whatever it is Thane asks of us, the Senatorum does it correctly. We cannot afford to squabble. Look at us! We cannot build another Phalanx. We no longer understand our own science. We no longer even understand what our own Emperor wanted from us. The Imperial Truth? The Imperial Creed? Which is right?’

Veritus’ lips thinned at that.

‘Were our ancestors to come from out of the past of the Dark Ages, if they penetrated the veils of Old Night and stepped into the present, they would laugh at us. Our enemies laugh at us. Soon they will stop, and the feasting will begin. Work with me. Keep the Imperium alive.’

Veritus and Wienand looked at one another. Wienand raised her eyebrows at Veritus.

‘Very well,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Our alliance continues. But we are but two votes between the three.’

‘It’s all we need,’ said Vangorich.

A tocsin started up a frantic bleeping.

‘Warning, atmospheric pressure dropping. Vacate the observation gallery. Vacate the observation gallery,’ said a droning voice.

‘There we are, as if in evidence. Even this ship is old and worn out,’ said Vangorich.

A service door clanked upwards, releasing a spider-legged servitor from its cradle with a gush of gas. Its organics jiggled horribly to the march of its mechanical legs as it clambered up the gallery wall towards the source of the leak.

‘Stabilising atmosphere,’ said the droning voice.

Veritus stared at Vangorich suspiciously. ‘Probe 93/4A, scan for introduced toxins.’

A servo-skull swept over them, speeding from one end of the long gallery to another.

‘None detected,’ it said with its synthesised voice.

‘See?’ said Vangorich.

‘Very well,’ said Veritus. ‘Our alliance holds, for now.’

The inquisitors departed, their warriors marching out behind them. It amused Vangorich that four of them retreated backwards, covering the Grand Master all the way until they were out of the door. He saluted them with his goblet.

Vangorich remained with the deaf, dumb and blind servants, drinking up the wine, until Phalanx swallowed the Potus Terrae in its cavernous foredeck. Potus Terrae was not a small ship, but the size of a light cruiser. The space it flew into had berths for a dozen more of similar size. They were all empty.

Vangorich stood deep in thought for a few minutes, then took an anti-intoxicant and hurried away to prepare himself.

Priests, savants, servants and household troops accompanied the High Lords in great number. They met together in the grand atrium of the ship by the main docking portal. The ornate panels were already flung wide and a gloriously decorated docking corridor was locked on to the side of the ship. A delay was incurred by squabbling over precedence, in which order the Lords should depart the ship and head the procession to meet with the Lord Guilliman. An hour of close argument concluded with a smug Ekharth being given the lead position. Flanked by lines of Lucifer Blacks, his entourage strode down the docking tunnel and out into the main concourse.

Vangorich, predictably, had been given the last position in the parade, which suited him fine, even if it did only intensify his opinion that the High Lords were beneath his contempt. He had no attendants so he emerged alone from the tunnel to find the rest of the High Lords blinking idiotically on the docking concourse.

Potus Terrae was lavishly appointed. During his career Vangorich had had occasion to visit some of the richest halls on Terra and many other worlds. In short, he was no stranger to luxury – but the interior of Phalanx gave him pause.

The domed ceiling was over a hundred metres high, split into panels painted in exacting detail with murals of the victories of the Imperial Fists Chapter and its father Legion. The dividers were decorated with gold and precious stones from across the galaxy, and the dome was crowned with a dazzling light carved from a single enormous diamond thirty metres across. Its hard, geometric facets split the sunlight into dozens of intersecting rainbows, creating a prismatic display that delighted and confused the eye in equal measure. Four docking tunnels exited into the hall besides the one the High Lords had used. Between them were broad reliefs carved in alien marbles, depicting heroes of Dorn’s line in action. The floor was an exercise in magnificence, a huge mosaic of interlocking swirls at whose centre was inlaid a giant VII.

An honour guard of Imperial Fists veterans awaited the High Lords around the VII in an open circle. Their armour was flawless and lapped to a high shine, their weapons gleaming; purity seals and honours crisp, red stripes on their helmets and red aquilas on their chests. In the Plaza Decamerata Vangorich had been impressed by Thane’s display. Now more than ever he realised that the Imperial Fists were more than the brothers in the armour. They were the armour, the colours, the weaponry and the relics. The men inside were irrelevant; that they were all of Dorn’s line was all that mattered. The Imperial Fists lived again. As long as Phalanx remained, or there was a single brother gifted with Rogal Dorn’s genetic legacy, they could never die. They were not a wall to break the enemies of humanity, but the idea of a wall: a wall that would never fall, could never be torn down, and that would forever be manned.

Ideas cannot die.

The veterans’ captain stepped forward and undid his helm, revealing a battered face criss-crossed with scars. A tattoo of a gothic cross covered his forehead. A Black Templar once, now an Imperial Fist.

‘My lords, I am First Captain Berengard. The Lord Guilliman, Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists, Maximus Thane bids you welcome to Phalanx!’

‘We are ready to see him,’ declared Lansung pompously. ‘Where is he?’

‘He awaits you, my lords. This way.’

In perfect synchronicity, the Imperial Fists turned about face. The two ends of the circle wound past each other and the Space Marines formed a square, their captain at its head, and began to march. The Lucifer Blacks, Naval armsmen of the Royal Barque, skitarii of Mars and other troops of the High Lords fell in behind the Adeptus Astartes with admirable smoothness. Less smooth was the rearrangement of the remainder of the High Lords’ retinues. Ekharth’s staff made an undignified scramble for lead position, tangling themselves with Juskina Tull’s staff who, being voidsmen and women, had wandered a little way to admire this most massive of vessels. The Ecclesiarchy entourage to the High Lords lacked direction now the Ecclesiarch was not on the Council, and got under everyone’s feet. By the time it was all arranged, the warriors of the Imperium were halfway out of the hall, exiting through a monumental arch crowded with stern-faced Space Marines and the fallen enemies of mankind.

They ascended a staircase wider than an expressway, lit only by baroque lumen globes held upon golden pillars. In the darkness above, finely finished stone echoed to the calls of airborne creatures roosting amid half-glimpsed statues. Despite the life forms, the steps and stairwell were unsoiled.

Vangorich laced his fingers behind his back and sauntered up to join the Inquisitorial delegation. There were only half a dozen men and women serving the two inquisitors, all Wienand’s. His Inquisitorial convocation aside, put together with the express purpose of eliminating Wienand and disbanded soon after, Veritus was never accompanied. Vangorich nodded at Raznick and Rendenstein, Wienand’s bodyguards. The acknowledgement made the younger inquisitor redden. Raznick had fared poorly against Vangorich’s team on Mars.

‘Is all this fortress so ornate?’ Vangorich asked conversationally. ‘It’s more of a palace than a castle.’

‘The primarch was a being of great artistry in many areas. What did you expect?’ said Veritus.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Vangorich. ‘Something draughtier.’

The stairs led into a hall kilometres long. Arrayed along its cloistered sides were the arms, armour and the mortal remains of extinct xenos species and subjugated human cultures. Worn plaques of brass over each cabinet detailed the time of their earning. Those nearest the stairs bore dates from before the Ascension of the Emperor and were marked with compliance designations from the Great Crusade.

The Imperial Fists marched them more than a kilometre along this hall, past a seemingly endless succession of mementos. Models, fragments of metal, captured vehicles, stuffed alien beasts went by until even Vangorich struggled to assimilate it. The Space Marines took an abrupt left-hand turn through another archway. The trophy corridor continued on past this exit so far that its end was lost to perspective.

A short corridor led them to a second staircase, smaller but just as grand in decoration, that switched back and forth upon itself. The High Lords went on doggedly. More than a few of them were old beyond the natural span of men, kept alive by anti-gerontic drugs and augmentations. Lansung was a fighting man, but out of shape. Vangorich found it no trouble, nor did Wienand. Kubik’s robes brushed the ground; he seemed to hover along above the floor, which, thought Vangorich, he could well be doing. Tull strode forwards yet still seemed hesitant, as if she might trip at any moment. Sark, Anwar and Ekharth struggled. Zeck projected tension that suggested he wanted to break into a run. Verreault kept marching, his face grim as he attempted to control his limp.

For the ancient Veritus it was a trial. Though his armoured legs rose and fell without slowing, his face paled and sweat collected on his lip.

For an hour and a half they walked up stairs and down corridors until they were hopelessly disoriented. At no time did they see any sign of human life aboard the Phalanx except those Space Marines that led them. Somewhere, there would be servitors, menials, Chapter serfs by the thousand. Thane had kept them out of sight. He presented the Phalanx as a ghost ship, a mausoleum where the past decayed, atom by atom, under its layers of polish.

They went into a corridor whose roof was glazed with armourglass. In this part they saw damage, sections where the glass had been broken and the battle shutters left closed. In one place the marble facing had gone, and the less noble stone revealed behind was cracked and half melted. The floor there was riven by a chasm bridged over with plasteel plating.

They stopped before a gate that, though immense in scale, was modest compared to some they had passed through.

‘Lord Guilliman Thane is within,’ said First Captain Berengard. Two veterans took the handles and pushed wide the doors. ‘Your retinues will wait. We have a hall prepared with refreshments for them.’

‘My men will accompany me!’ insisted Ekharth, his protestation ridiculous in the face of the scarred, much-decorated captain.

‘They will wait, and be refreshed,’ insisted Berengard.

‘Let them be, Ekharth,’ called Vangorich. ‘As if these soldiers with us could stop the Space Marines should they decide to kill us, which I am sure Lord Thane does not intend. Allow your men their leisure – they have marched admirably and deserve a rest from our tedious debates.’ The other High Lords split in reaction into those who laughed at Ekharth, and those who were outraged at Vangorich’s disregard for decorum.

‘If the business of government bores you, Grand Master, perhaps you should not have done so much to involve yourself in it!’ blustered Ekharth.

‘It is not boring to me, I find everything you say in particular to be most fascinating. I think only of those of us who are forced to listen and not take part.’

‘You are on Phalanx, my lords,’ said Berengard. ‘There is nowhere safer. The Lord Guilliman wishes to conduct this most sensitive of business in total privacy.’

‘You will be allowed to listen, I am sure. Private but for the ears of the Adeptus Astartes!’ said Gibran.

‘Not at all, my lord. Only the Lord Guilliman will remain, I assure you, High Lords. Now,’ said Berengard, holding up his hand to direct them. ‘Please proceed within. The Chapter Master is waiting.’

For the first time, Vangorich saw the mortal servants of the Imperial Fists upon Phalanx. Dozens of them issued from hidden servants’ doors, garbed in yellow, shaven-headed and bearing a tattooed fist on their left cheeks. Fifteen of them were armed and armoured in dark yellow carapace. Warrior serfs.

‘Please, this way,’ said the serfs’ spokesman. A large door was opened down the hall. Tantalising smells wafted out. The High Lords stood firm, however, looking at each other uneasily.

‘For the love of Terra, are we going to stand here all day?’ growled Zeck.

‘I shall dismiss my men. I have nothing to fear from the keepers of Terra’s walls,’ said Verreault eventually.

‘I too,’ said Lansung. The Lord Commander Militant and the Lord High Admiral purposefully did not look at Vangorich.

‘Very well then!’ said Ekharth shrilly. ‘I shall dismiss my servants.’

There was some tension from those others attending upon the High Lords, and they left their lords unwillingly. Wienand dismissed her entourage with a curt nod. Raznick left with several backward glances, Rendenstein with not a one. The soldiers and Naval armsmen saluted and crisply manoeuvred. If only the High Lords would behave so well, thought Vangorich. There was more muffled debate and pointed looks.

‘We are hardly covering ourselves with glory here,’ Wienand whispered to him.

‘All hail the mighty High Lords of Terra,’ Vangorich murmured back.

Finally, the High Lords arranged themselves into a group that suited everyone and walked through the door. Vangorich went at the back, a wolf shepherding sheep. He gave Berengard a broad smile as he passed. The First Captain frowned back. He knew a threat when he saw one.

The doors swung closed. The Senatorum Imperialis was in session.

Thane awaited them in a circular chamber walled for much of its circumference with sweeping, plain glass. There was a single mullion in the centre, a statue of a Space Marine, his hands clasped around his sword. The art required to make such broad expanses of glassteel sufficiently strong to withstand the void, let alone battle, was great indeed. In the elegant simplicity of it, Vangorich saw the hand of Rogal Dorn himself. The chamber was at the edge of a cliff and the carved expanses of stone and metals receded into the distance on either side. Spires and weapons batteries cluttered the view forward.

In contrast to many of the chambers they had seen in Phalanx, this was neither large nor ornate. A fine-grained black stone made up the floors, ceiling and those parts of the walls not fashioned from glass. A large, circular table made of the same stone filled half the internal space. Lumens set into the wall and the centre of the ceiling struck angular reflections from the stone’s finish. Twelve chairs sized for unaltered human beings were set at the table, these made of black wood. A single chair made for a Space Marine brought the number up to thirteen. Thane occupied it. He was fully armoured, his helmet and boltgun resting on the table in front of him. There was no rawer statement of power.

‘Lords. Welcome to Phalanx. Please, sit.’ He held out his hand to indicate the chairs.

The High Lords took their seats, approximating their positions back on Terra. Verreault and Lansung sat together, Verreault hesitating before taking a place by the Lord Guilliman. Zeck was an uneasy satellite to their alliance, drawn in by their adepta’s collective employment of force more than personal common cause. Ekharth sought reinforcement to his words through proximity to Zeck. Tull sat next to Gibran for their mutual interest in the void. Vangorich, who sat where he pleased outside the Great Chamber, upset Sark and Anwar by seating himself between them and Zeck. Wienand took a seat by Anwar. Veritus sat between her and Thane, even his power-armoured body made small by the presence of the transhuman.

‘I trust you will forgive me for the extra chair, but I thought it impolite to make Veritus stand again,’ said Thane.

No one answered.

‘We are meeting here so that you are under no illusion that what I dictate shall be made law.’

‘My lord…’ began Anwar.

‘You will wait, Lord Astropath. I thought Koorland rash to enter the high politics of Terra. I have been convinced otherwise. Let me make myself clear, it is your self-interest that made this disaster possible.’

‘How dare you, Chapter Master. What do you know of government? You are a warrior,’ said Verreault.

‘Now I am a High Lord. Explain to me, as a man new to politics, exactly where were the armies of the Imperium when the orks devastated worlds, Verreault?’

‘Heth’s responsibility!’ said Verreault.

‘And yours, once he was killed. His failures were compounded by yours. At least Heth died honourably. More than can be said for you, Lansung. You showed courage. You fought, but of all of the Lords here, you bear the most culpability. Your fleets should have brought word of the gathering of the orks. They should have acted in concert. Instead, you spent your years politicking to replace Udin Macht Udo. The debacle at Port Sanctus is but the least of your errors. You, my lord, were chasing glory at the expense of our species.’

‘How dare you impugn my honour?’ exclaimed Lansung.

‘And how dare you suggest you have any!’ shouted Thane. The High Lords fell quiet. ‘The only sense you showed was to hold back your flagship from the disastrous Proletarian Crusade. You are a fine naval tactician, Lansung, and a good strategist. Both abilities deserted you when you put yourself first. You are many things, but a good politician is not one of them.’

As much as Vangorich had enjoyed watching Lansung squirm in the past, he took little pleasure in it then. Lansung had lost weight. His complexion had once been ruddy, now he was grey, his bellicosity bled out of him along with his fat. He was a beaten man. Surely Thane could see that he had lost his confidence and that he should be replaced. Such a man was not suitable to lead the navies of the Imperium. Lansung would become hesitant when he should be bold, and rash when he should be cautious. Every successful large-scale engagement would only be another step towards catastrophe.

Thane turned his attention upon Tull next. ‘And that crusade… A fine sentiment, the desire to fight no matter the odds. But the odds would have been so much better, had any of you had the sense to consolidate the Imperium’s core worlds and withdraw a reasonable force to Terra to defend it. A billion armed men could have been within the Sol System in days. That was not the action taken. Instead, what? Scribes. Functionaries. Menials. An army of innocents sent to the slaughter. The level of ineptitude on display here defies all logic.’

‘The moon was over the Palace, it could have struck at any moment. We had no choice,’ said Tull. She spoke quietly; her heart wasn’t in her objection.

‘You would have, had Lansung here not squandered half the Imperium’s warfleets in pointless tit-for-tat actions. Koorland was right to blockade the moon. He acted well, you acted without thought. Our entire species could have been enslaved. “As you excel in war, so shall you excel in peace,” Roboute Guilliman, the first to hold this office, said of we Adeptus Astartes. For most of my life I have thought him wrong. There is no peace. There is only war. I thought there was no need for Space Marines to involve themselves in the ruling of the Imperium. I was wrong. With power left in the hands of men and women such as you, disaster will befall us all.’

The High Lords looked aghast.

Lansung swallowed hard. ‘What are you proposing?’ he said. ‘A coup?’

‘You are Horus returned!’ said Zeck.

‘He does not intend to eliminate us,’ said Sark. ‘I would sense it.’

Anwar smiled, a ghoulish expression on his emaciated, eyeless face.

‘Elimination? I propose nothing of the sort,’ Thane said in disgust. ‘This system of governance was devised by the Emperor Himself. I am not so arrogant as to propose it be undone. Where it has failed, it has failed because it has not been adhered to properly. The Senatorum Imperialis has met in secret for too long. This is my first decree, that the Great Chamber shall be brought back into use permanently. No more meetings in closure. There are not sufficient checks upon the ambitions of individuals among the High Twelve without involvement of the other High Lords and the lesser lords. Too much effort is expended by the masters of lower ordos, adepta and officios in seeking the patronage of the High Twelve. While the High Twelve themselves are without the scrutiny of the wider government, they are free to neglect their duty to the Imperium in favour of duty to their adepta, or worse, their own personal glory.’

‘Closed sessions were only introduced, my lord, to speed the decision-making process in the wake of the First Black Crusade,’ said Ekharth tremulously.

‘Six hundred years ago and more. Extraordinary measures have a habit of becoming ordinary,’ said Thane. ‘This decree will ensure a more proper adherence to the intentions of the Emperor.’

‘You said decrees, Lord Guilliman,’ said Kubik. ‘Enumerate them for our edification.’ He chose a placating, human voice for this, surprising Vangorich. Kubik had only ever used his harsh, machine voice in the Grand Master’s hearing. ‘If you could lay out the contents of this meeting for us, then we shall be better equipped to proceed and enact your wishes, highest of Lords.’

Thane gave the Fabricator General a considered look. Kubik’s own games had played their part in the Imperium’s near downfall. ‘I have but three in total. Once they are done, they are binding. After that, we shall move on to the business of rebuilding. New fleets need to be commissioned, new armies raised. Terra’s fortifications must be rebuilt. Thousands of worlds are ruined. All must be restored. This will be your life’s work from now on. Service to the Emperor and the Imperium shall be restitution for your crimes of vanity. Is that clear?’

The High Lords looked at him wordlessly.

‘These then, are my other decrees. My second is that there shall be a Fourth Founding of Space Marine Chapters. We are too few to effectively defend the Imperium. A thousand years after the Heresy, our numbers are a fraction of what they once were. To allay your concerns, I swear that I do not intend to reform the Legions. The Last Wall will be disbanded. So much power cannot be one man’s to command, I think we can all agree with that. Instead, we shall raise as many new Chapters as we have gene-seed in the great vaults of Terra to sustain. This must be done swiftly. I shall issue a proclamation as Lord Guilliman and as the Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists that all Chapters shall release a portion of their veterans to provide the initial basis for this founding, the greatest since the First. Gene-seed tithing will be doubled for the next century to replenish the vaults. When it is done, there will be hundreds of Chapters to ring the Imperium in adamantium and ceramite instead of dozens.’

‘Can such a thing be accomplished?’ asked Ekharth.

‘If the genetic material exists, then yes. As a pledge of our continued fealty to Terra, the Adeptus Mechanicus shall undertake to outfit all new Chapters with full armoriums and warfleets, I so submit,’ said Kubik silkily.

‘Your offer is appreciated,’ said Thane. ‘I am pleased I did not have to demand.’

‘The defence of Terra is the defence of Mars, Lord Guilliman,’ said Kubik.

‘Are we all agreed?’ asked Verreault.

‘We must not rush into this,’ said Veritus. ‘We must, we must…’ He drew in a huge breath, his entire body shuddering with the effort.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Wienand.

Veritus held up a hand and shook his head.

‘Leave me be!’

‘Do we have any choice, Lord Inquisitor?’ asked Gibran. ‘If we do not agree, what of it? The Lord Guilliman decrees!’

‘Why would we not agree?’ said Zeck. ‘This is the plainest sense. More Space Marines mean greater security.’

‘But who shall they answer to,’ gasped out Veritus.

‘Are there any more objections?’ asked Ekharth. There were not. ‘Then it is done. Lord Thane?’

‘My third, and final decree,’ said Thane. ‘I will be a crusading lord. The Imperial Fists shall no longer stand upon a wall and look out on our enemies and defy them to come to us. We shall be a mobile fortress, moving ever forward to crush those who would spurn the will of the Emperor, whether they be known or unknown. Dangers cannot be waited upon, but must be rooted out and destroyed ere they pose a risk. Never again shall an enemy of the Imperium enter the orbit of Holy Terra. This we swear! For what use is a wall if all the lands about it are laid waste and occupied by the hateful foe? No longer will we stand in one place. No longer will we take wall-names, but we shall become a wall for the whole Imperium. Phalanx will leave before the end of the week, and I will be taking the Imperial Fists with me.’

Immediate uproar greeted this statement.

‘You are the defenders of Terra! It is your Chapter world!’ exclaimed Anwar, his head swinging to and fro as if he would capture Thane in his empty eye sockets.

‘You defy convention, and the wishes of the Emperor,’ said Ekharth. ‘Imperial Fists have stood upon the walls of the Palace since the Heresy!’

‘And we shall no longer,’ said Thane. He placed his hand, palm flat, on the table. The gentlest click of ceramite upon stone silenced the High Lords more effectively than a bolt-shot. ‘Listen to me, my lords.’

‘The traditions and obligations of your Chapter aside, you are the Lord Guilliman,’ said Verreault harshly. ‘You cannot simply abandon your responsibilities.’

‘As you Lords abandoned yours?’ said Thane. ‘I am mindful of the need for direction within the Senatorum. A weak Lord Guilliman is a bigger danger than the most self-interested of High Lords, and an absent lord is the weakest lord of all. But I shall bring my strength and authority to the beleaguered worlds of the Imperium, to free them from alien tyranny, and speed their reconstruction. Therefore, I require a representative among you, whom I shall raise over the others and invest with my authority to act upon my behalf. Should Terra be threatened, we shall return. But I expect my labours to be long. I may never see the Throneworld again.’

Vangorich looked forward to sinking back into the shadows again.

‘Drakan Vangorich, Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum, shall be my voice and my hand. I hereby invest him with all my authority. He is to be heeded and treated with as if he were myself.’

Ah, thought Vangorich.

‘Any of you who have misgivings, do not fear.’ Thane gave Vangorich a steely look. It was nothing to the poisonous glare Wienand gave him. ‘The threat of my return will be enough to ensure his good behaviour.’

Five days of intense debate followed. The High Lords were given chambers near to the small conference room. Their entourages were thinned to the bare minimum and their lives were run to the harsh schedule of the Adeptus Astartes. Isolated, kept from their servants and wholly at the mercy of Maximus Thane, the negotiations were concluded quickly. When the High Lords emerged dazed and exhausted from their discussions, many matters had been decided. The details of Terra’s rebuilding, the raising of new regiments, an Imperium-wide survey of what remained after the attacks of the orks, a pledge from the Inquisition to reorder itself, and not least the beginning of the Fourth Founding, all were examined in depth. What would once have taken months, if it were finished at all, was concluded before the week was out.

A day’s feasting followed. The Imperial Fists were as exacting in their leisure as they were in their business. The bottomless stores of Phalanx were opened, fine victuals from the length and breadth of the Imperium were served, while the newly reconstituted Imperial Fists deepened their bonds of brotherhood and entertained the lords of Terra with dazzling displays of gladiatorial skill.

All was done. Phalanx readied to depart. The lords of the other Chapters that made up the Last Wall came and went. Whole fleets hung in the void by the giant star fort while their masters conferred with Thane. The flotillas of the Space Marines were greatly diminished. Some Chapters were down to a handful of ships, but they were proud, and they were ready.

Over the course of the next few days, the Lord Guilliman broke from his arranging of the Chapters’ deployment to speak with each of the High Lords alone. Kubik was first, and when his conference was done he left alone aboard a swift Mechanicus pentere.

Zeck insisted he be next because he was needed on Terra. Thane indulged him, and he departed after their meeting also, as did Wienand and Veritus. Lansung had the ships of the reforming Segmentum Solar fleet parade past Phalanx before joining them on his flagship, Autocephalax Eternal. Only a few of the High Lords remained behind after their conferences. Ekharth and Gibran sought constantly to win Vangorich over with honeyed words. The others avoided him.

Finally, Vangorich was summoned. Thane had left him to last, with a sufficient space between the previous meeting and his own to upset a lesser man’s ease. Vangorich was not bothered in the least.

It happened so. Vangorich was exploring an enormous library of rare texts when three Imperial Fists marched him up a hundred stairs without saying a word besides ‘Thane will see you now.’

‘Now I know how a condemned man feels,’ Vangorich said, glancing back longingly at the books.

The Space Marines ignored him.

The Chapter Master was in a private strategium atop one of the central towers of Phalanx. Its sweeping views put Vangorich in mind of the Cerebrium on Terra. Out beyond the countless gun barrels and docking piers, ships moved in number. It was almost enough to persuade Vangorich that the Imperium retained some strength.

Vangorich announced himself with a cough. Thane would have heard him already, but the Chapter Master was making a point of studying the pile of papers on his desk and the multiple hololithic star systems hanging at eye level in the room. ‘You wanted to see me, Lord Guilliman?’ Vangorich asked.

Thane looked up, and Vangorich reconsidered his opinion. The Lord Guilliman looked genuinely distracted. ‘You are here. Good. I will not keep you long, Lord Protector, and I apologise for your long wait. Ground must be prepared before tactics are discussed.’

‘I am your tactic?’ Vangorich said mildly.

‘You are aware of that. You’re not the only game player on Terra, Grand Master. It is time to show your mettle.’

‘I do love a challenge,’ said Vangorich. He looked about for a chair, but all of them were sized for Space Marines.

‘Kubik. You must watch him closely,’ Thane said bluntly.

‘I had intended to,’ said Vangorich. ‘His empire within an empire has shown alarming separatist tendencies. But he is the most powerful of all the High Lords, and his most annoying characteristic is that we need him more than he needs us.’

Thane grunted in affirmation.

‘That’s why you did not publicly dress him down as you did the others,’ said Vangorich. ‘You are getting good at this.’

‘Diplomacy is an art I am having to learn fast. The Adeptus Mechanicus are not completely a part of the Imperium, although we treat them as if they are. And though Kubik honoured the ancient alliance between Mars and Terra towards the end, that was not inevitable.’

‘He only did it when he had been found out. If he had not been found out, though?’

‘You see my concerns.’

‘Oh, Lord Thane, I share them!’ exclaimed Vangorich. ‘Still, the priests of Mars have gained a lot of knowledge from the xenos. It might be that they are satisfied with what they have learned.’

‘Or they changed their minds when they realised that they could not survive on their own,’ Thane said. ‘For the time being, our two realms remain interdependent, but I do not trust the Fabricator General. This new knowledge must not be kept from the Imperium, they hoard too much to themselves already. He has agreed to deploy the xenos tech in the destruction of Ullanor.’

‘You’ve asked him to destroy it?’

‘It lies too far from our current borders to be watched effectively,’ said Thane. ‘I will not have it forgotten again. If the orks returned once, they could do so in the future. Ullanor shall be wiped from the galaxy.’

‘I am amazed you convinced Kubik to do that,’ said Vangorich. ‘I am impressed, as a matter of fact. There is a lot of xenotech upon the planet he would dearly love to possess.’

‘The priests of Mars cannot be allowed to have more of the orks’ devices. It is not only because their power must be held in check. They risk corruption. There is a psychic mark on the machines of the ork. On Ullanor, the Beast reached out into the minds of our warriors and destroyed their reason. My Librarians fear a vestige of the Beast’s rage may taint their artefacts forever. Allowing such into the hands of the Adepts of Mars is unacceptable. Kubik might see the sense in ridding the galaxy of Ullanor, but whether he does or doesn’t, destroying it will be a test of his loyalty,’ Thane went on. ‘He will be forced to use his new devices in plain sight.’

‘I doubt Kubik does anything he does not wish to. Or that does not benefit him.’

Thane looked down at Vangorich. ‘Make sure he complies. If there is any deviation from the plan to destroy the world, contact me immediately and I shall return to deal with him.’

‘So war with Mars is still a possibility,’ said Vangorich. ‘I don’t suppose I need to tell you we cannot afford it.’

‘I shall trust in the Emperor that it does not come to that. Kubik will comply. I have made it clear to him that his loyalty to the Emperor is under question. If he were willing to risk a direct confrontation between Mars and Terra, it would have occurred by now. They have weighed the options, seen the consequences, and found the status quo to be the better choice. But still, stay aware of whatever schemes he might concoct.’

‘As you wish, my Lord Guilliman. I shall gladly do as you command,’ said Vangorich.

‘Tomorrow, you shall wield a power neither of us wanted in my name.’

‘You have had similar, my lord, in the Last Wall. The power you wield as Lord Guilliman is no different to that.’

‘I disagree. It is entirely different,’ said Thane. ‘I do my best to rid myself of both. I have dispatched the sons of Dorn to scour the galaxy. Many return to their home worlds to begin their efforts there. Besides the new Chapters, all existing Adeptus Astartes forces have suffered casualties and must replenish and re-arm. We are no different. Three thousand potential neophytes are en route to Phalanx from Terra. This mass method of selection is unusual, but it will serve. Phalanx is amply equipped with testing grounds, so they will undergo trials as soon as we commence our journey. There is much to be done. The Chapter Masters will rally what troops they can near their home systems and begin reconquest and rebuilding.’

‘I imagine Verreault choked on his moustache when you told him that.’

‘Damn him and his predecessor,’ said Thane darkly. ‘The disorganisation that led to this debacle is over. Verreault can watch and approve, or he can be replaced.’

‘I have been informed of the intentions of the Crimson Fists, Excoriators, the remaining Iron Knights and the rest, but where will you go, my lord?’

Thane smiled admonishingly at Vangorich. ‘You are not stupid, Vangorich. I suspect you have already guessed. Although I am no longer a Fist Exemplar, I owe an honour debt to see that the Chapter does not die. We go to Eidolica one final time. It is as good a place to start my crusade as any.’

‘Are you sure it is the best course of action, my lord? There are systems of higher strategic value nearer and in greater need.’

‘The sons of Dorn do not abandon each other and they do not neglect their legacy. I have an obligation. I do not expect you to understand.’

Vangorich laced his hands together in the deep sleeves of his robes. He was treading dangerous ground. ‘So might I ask, my lord, have you had any word from your brothers of the Fists Exemplar?’

That made Thane uncomfortable. His fists clenched. ‘None. They were last seen at the Vandis System. I guess your opinion, Lord Protector. You suggest they are dead, but I saw them make the Mandeville point myself, and so I cannot accept that First Captain Zerberyn’s force is destroyed until it is presented to me as a solid fact. They are unaware of it, but they are the Fists Exemplar now. It would be a tragic irony if my resurrection of the Imperial Fists doomed my original order to extinction. That is a possibility that I have to consider. If so, a new brotherhood shall take Eidolica as its home. If one Chapter can be resurrected, so might others.’

‘I understand. If more of us showed such solidarity then maybe this would not have happened.’ Vangorich stood a little taller, presenting an aspect of himself he usually hid by careful posture and body language. Maximus Thane knew Vangorich was dangerous, but for a moment he saw clearly who he was dealing with: an intelligent, careful man, the worst kind of killer. ‘I will oversee the rebuilding of Terra. I shall ensure your wishes are adhered to, my lord.’

Thane looked out through the armourglass over the spires and peaks of Phalanx. ‘I am trusting you to make this work, Vangorich. You have implied many times that one man might make a better ruler than twelve Lords. I honestly have no idea if you truly wished Veritus to be that man. It does not matter. Now is your chance to prove theory. Lead them wisely, and remember Kubik is not the only High Lord I would return to Terra to replace.’

Five

The fate of Ullanor

Mariazet Isolde wore the shape of a shuffling Adeptus Mechanicus menial priest convincingly. She hobbled her way through red-lit decks crammed with servitor crew, her false implant broadcasting forged Adeptus Mechanicus identification codes. She had Yendl to thank for those. Without the Temple Vanus infocyte, the cell would have been discovered a long time ago. Isolde missed her expertise; operating on Mars had become difficult since Yendl’s death.

She wasn’t confident she could maintain the pretence, but her death did not matter. Only the mission did. She was to bear witness to the destruction of Ullanor from within the Mechanicus ship.

The Ark Majesty was immense, a huge inverted pyramid staffed by hundreds of thousands of Adeptus Mechanicus tech-priests and their lobotomised slaves. No one paid her any attention. She went at a measured pace, not wishing to bring attention to herself as a shirker or someone in an unusual hurry. The command deck was her goal. Isolde was circumspect in her work, and she was on her highest level of alert.

Clanking men-machines lumbered past her, wheezing aseptic breath. Choirs of lowly adepts sang hymns to placate the spirit of the Ark Majesty’s many machines while higher-ranking priests conducted inscrutable rituals. Isolde walked by.

She took the least-used ways upward, transit tubes used mainly by servitors. Their blank-eyed stares passed over her with no more interest than if she’d been an empty fuel canister. Her codes, marking her as a member of Kubik’s personal household, gave her access to most areas of the ship, except the command deck. Getting in there was the difficulty.

The fabric of the Ark Majesty thrummed to the song of titanic energies as the Adeptus Mechanicus prepared for the conclusion of their Grand Experiment. Not, as secretly planned, the removal of Mars from the Sol System, but the destruction of the orks’ capital, a fitting test of the new and terrifying matter displacement technologies plundered from the greenskins. Odd whoops and growls sounded from vents and shafts as she passed them. The vibrations of the ship changed in frequency and violence as the vast banks of teleporters grafted to the Ark Majesty’s frame were cycled up and down in repetitive test runs.

She neared the centre of the vessel where the command deck was situated. The Adeptus Mechanicus favoured burying their command sections deep in their craft for maximum survivability. There was a paucity of windows on an ark vessel. All sight was provided remotely, by the grace of the Machine-God. A corridor with a pronounced declivity led down to the cradle housing the command decks. She slowed. Her identity would take her no further.

Streams of adepts went to and fro, passing from side rooms and engine halls to join the ceaseless flow of augmented humanity. The number of servitor crew declined as the number of adepts increased, until close to the great reinforced blast doors of the command deck the tech-priests outnumbered the mindless cybernetic constructs three to one. Those servitors that were present stamped past in large groups headed by genetors-primus. A few others were heavy combat drones stationed at strategic points. These comprised the torsos of dismembered men plugged directly into track units, their arms replaced by potent weaponry.

She scanned the crowds until she found what she was looking for. A middle-ranking magos metallicus transmechanic with a face of flesh. It was crucial her mark have no obvious facial augments; that would be too hard to mimic. On a starship the metallicus’ principal duties were confined to repairs. A busy man in a battle, but today he would have little to do. He headed with purpose down a narrow gangway. Isolde followed, striding after him as if she had always intended to go that way.

The gangway opened up into a large, tiered hall. On each level the walls were studded with heavy copper handgrips set in pairs. As she followed the magos, a troop of electro-priests came marching into the hall, singing devotional cant to the Body Electric and the Motive Force. They filed in, taking up station by the contacts and grasping them with both hands. Accidental electrical discharge buzzed and filled the space with the smell of sharp ozone.

The magos metallicus strode on through another, even bigger space, filled to within half a metre of the walls with a gigantic machine from whose depths multiple lights shone. Tech-priests moved painfully around the outside, sometimes on their knees, mechadendrites and ancillary limbs snaking out to make minute adjustments. Past this, the magos metallicus turned into a vestibule sandwiched between the corridor and a third chamber. Through the doorway into this further hall Isolde glimpsed tall plasma coils wreathed in crackling loops of green energy, and she had the notion that she looked upon technology engineered from the greenskins’.

The tech-priest went into a small door set into the wall of the vestibule. Isolde ducked through and found herself in a small storeroom hanging with neatly bunched cables labelled carefully in lingua-technis. She moved so quietly that the man did not notice her at first. When he selected a cable, turned round and saw her, the flesh of her face was already transforming itself into a passing resemblance of his own. She cast her hood back so he could see her features run. He let out a surprised electronic burble from a vox-box implanted in his neck at the sight of her.

Isolde cursed inwardly, she had not seen that augmentation. Most of the tech-priests had such things to allow them to speak the machine language, but they were not always so obvious. She killed him quickly, her exotic sword springing out from its housing on the back of her arm and taking him through the eye. Ignoring the crawling feeling as her face rearranged itself, she stripped the magos’ outer garments off and replaced them with her own, then, kneeling, pulled out a sharp knife and began to cut. His intelligence core was easy to find in his skull, which was a small blessing, for the cybernetics of the Mechanicus followed no standard pattern and it could as easily have been implanted in his leg as his head. She wiped the blood off her hand, sheathed her knife and paused. He still held the cable in his dead hand. He’d evidently got it for something, and so she spent a valuable moment debating whether to take the cable or not. In the end, she decided to leave it behind.

She checked her unit was broadcasting the dead magos’ codes, opened the door and stepped out. She allowed the door to slide shut and fried its locking mechanism, then set out for the command deck.

Fabricator General Kubik surveyed the command deck of the Ark Majesty. Here was his kingdom in microcosm, and he was well pleased with its efficiency. Men, machines and blends of the two performed their duties to the ninety-fifth percentile of perfection.

‘Provide mark. Synchronise time between target system and Ullanor System,’ he commanded.

‘Yes, prime of primes,’ intoned a crowd of tech-adepts. Tasks ordinarily performed by hard-wired servitors were being undertaken by adepts. This was an operation too important to be trusted to the monotasked. An enormous brass-handed chrono ticked down to zero.

‘Artisan Trajectorae Van Auken, prepare for planetary teleportation,’ said Kubik. ‘The time of projection is closing.’

Van Auken had been a large man before his numerous augmentations – with them, his appearance evoked a mechanical bear. ‘The corpuscarii are ready, Fabricator General. They stand prepared to unleash their life force in the service of the Omnissiah,’ he answered with exaggerated humility.

Kubik favoured him with a nod. It had been Van Auken who hit upon using the cults of electro-priests. Their intuitive manipulations of the Motive Force had stabilised the meshing of Imperial and orkish technology. This one idea had cast down all remaining barriers to success. Their recent trials had worked perfectly. The Grand Experiment was an experiment no more.

The Adeptus Mechanicus were ready to move a planet. The chrono’s hands shifted closer to the instant of success.

A grand flotilla of ships crowded the command deck’s hololith. An endless stream of data poured through Kubik’s multiple intelligence cores, filling him to the brim with delicious knowledge. Most of it was ephemeral, pointless, adding nothing to the grand store of knowledge the Adeptus Mechanicus had. The gravitic perturbations inflicted upon the ships by close proximity to each other could easily be calculated using existing formulae, as could the energy output of the combined engines of the fleet, the effects on the remaining astronomical bodies of the system once Ullanor was removed and a million other readings. As such, it was all useless, but it would never be forgotten. For the time being Kubik enjoyed the rush of it, the way a man of more usual form enjoys the pleasure of hot water pouring from a cascade.

‘Imperial Fleet shall be at safe distance in six hundred hectoseconds, prime of primes,’ said the craft’s Artisan of the Vox. Half of what was said aboard was twittered quickly in binharic, the rest in lingua-technis.

‘Planetary teleportation beam is powering,’ said Van Auken.

‘Cut vox-traffic with Imperial craft,’ ordered Kubik. ‘Artisan of the Vox, you are our line of communication with the greater fleet. Let no event or word distract us from the Omnissiah’s holy work!’

The adept did as he was ordered, but the change in noise within the command deck was negligible. ‘Chosin and Ullanor will be at optimum alignment in two hundred hectoseconds.’

‘Fleet at safe distance in one hundred hectoseconds.’

‘Prepare to engage veridian plasma engines. Electro-priest manual regulator arrays on standby,’ said Van Auken.

‘Fleet at safe distance. Lord Protector Vangorich is making a speech, prime of primes,’ said the Artisan of the Vox.

Kubik hunched at the mention of Vangorich’s name, his mechanical appendages thrashing. ‘I do not wish to hear it. His speech is without purpose. The symbolic activities of the non-believer have no interest for me. Record it. Archive it. Add it to the sum total of all knowledge. We have work of our own. Extend matter collapse beam emitter.’

The ship quaked. Rumbling clanks echoed throughout. Displays ran red and green with swift lines of datacode.

A final, echoing clunk reverberated dully around the ship.

‘Beam emitter extended,’ came the report.

Kubik tensed. In response, his gravity chair rose a few centimetres from the deck. Success depended on timing. Ullanor had to be moved at exactly the right moment to displace the existing fourth world in the target system. Every datum he possessed predicted that the original fourth planet, Chosin, would enter into a disruptive orbit that would stabilise over time, allowing Ullanor to take its original orbital track. It was an immensely complex undertaking and its calculation had required the efforts of thousands of magi logis. The possibility of destroying Chosin completely had been raised as a simpler alternative, but discarded. Its destruction would have resulted in an asteroid field of huge destructive potential right in Ullanor’s path around its new star.

Every variable had to be correct. Ullanor’s velocity would not change when it was teleported, therefore it had to move at precisely the right time so that it would fall into orbit around its new star, and pass close enough to Chosin to knock it aside without hitting it. If a single calculation were wrong and Ullanor’s survival was detected, civil war was the likely outcome.

The risk had been calculated as acceptable. Kubik wanted the world for himself. Ullanor was rich with unclaimed alien technology. The acquisition of knowledge superseded all other considerations.

‘Prepare to fire,’ said Kubik.

‘Imperial forces signalling their readiness,’ reported the Artisan of the Vox.

‘Engage all reactors. Relinquishing the holy flow to electro-priests,’ said Van Auken.

The large chrono counted down to zero, its three great hands coming together and stopping with a final, metallic clunk.

‘Let the Imperial fleet see us bring armageddon down on Ullanor!’ ordered Kubik.

The ship hummed with the songs of praise of its myriad crew. Green light pulsed from the hololith. A wavering beam of bright green energy slashed across space, stabbing into Ullanor’s smouldering equator. It spread across the orkish capital world, consuming it with bright fire.

‘Atomic decoupling matrix stabilising. Subspace transportation in forty hectoseconds,’ said Van Auken.

The chatter of machines became synchronised as tech-priests input the bewildering results of the magi logis’ calculations. A rising howl built from the teleportation engines. In their galleries, electro-priests chanted melodic cant to swell the presence of the holy Motive Force. The Ark Majesty trembled with the power building within it.

‘Quantum disassociation achieved. Matter potential neutral. Engaging subspace teleport conduits,’ said another.

Dozens of hands and mechanical appendages depressed levers simultaneously, the singing of algebraical hymns rose in volume, lingua-technis bass overlaid with a high register of binharic informational pulses. The ship’s trembling became a quaking. A deep metallic hum joined the noise of machinery and tech-priests as the fabric of the vessel resonated in harmony to the prayers of its crew and the exertions of its devices.

‘Transmit,’ commanded Van Auken in lingua-technis, Gothic and binharic simultaneously. His mechadendrites speared from his broad back into a dozen ports arrayed around and above him.

The ship vibrated with more than the unleashing of power; reality trembled, pushing open a tear not into the warp, but into subspace, that strange, ephemeral realm that existed between the universe of energy and the universe of matter. A burst of sparks shot out from an overloaded console. A number of hololiths blinked and went out. Lumens burst. Cables ruptured, sending fatal arcs of electricity into a dozen tech-priests as the Motive Force burst free. Bangs sounded from all over the deck as machines failed. Tocsins rang, but their alarms were lost in the roar of the impossible science of the Grand Experiment.

A mighty thrumming vibrated through the bones and bonded endoskeletal augments of everyone aboard. The tumult ceased abruptly, passed over and through the ship like an ocean breaker moving over a reef. The whine of machines quieted. The vibrating faded away into ever decreasing, unpredictable aftershocks.

On the last functioning hololith, space flashed with green lightning that faded slowly. When it did, Ullanor had gone.

‘Simple and elegant,’ said Van Auken. ‘Success is assured.’

Servitors thumped forward to remove the corpses of those tech-priests who had given their lives in the service of the Machine-God.

‘Contact Lord Vangorich. Inform him that the planet has been cast into the heart of the nearest blue supergiant hyper-star. Ullanor is no more,’ said Kubik. ‘Prepare my private pentere. He will wish to congratulate me personally. Van Auken, you shall accompany me as architect of this great endeavour. Have our astropaths signal the explorator teams. Ullanor is to be stripped to the core of useful technology, commencing immediately. No trace of the orkish presence upon the world can be left. The motive engines that moved the crust must be dismantled. If the world is explored or settled, there shall be no indication that the orks were ever there. I so command it.’

‘As you command, prime of primes,’ intoned his crew.

‘All hail the Omnissiah, He that giveth knowledge so that we might perform miracles in His name,’ said Kubik. He powered his grav chair and ascended through a portal in the ceiling. There was no celebration from the crew of the Ark Majesty. They worked on without comment. Success was its own reward.

At the back of the room, Isolde headed for the door.

Isolde shed her magos metallicus disguise as soon as she was able. Reassuming the role of one of Kubik’s household adepts, she headed off to decks unused by thinking beings. Servitors congregated there in their multitudes, but Isolde passed them unchallenged, her cowled form hidden by the soft red light of the lumens.

Life support was at the minimum required to keep the servitors’ organic components alive. She was shivering by the time she found a data conduit sized for humans to access and crawled inside. With numb fingers she searched through a tangle of copper cables and shining fibre-optics until she found an unshielded line. Her dataspike slid into it easily enough, and once she had checked the crawlspace both ways for Mechanicus repair vermin, she contacted the Grand Master.

A black screen appeared on her palm-sized data-slate, the coat of arms of the Assassinorum bold in white upon it.

‘Red Haven, Mariazet Isolde, Temple Callidus,’ she said. ‘Confirm.’

‘Identity confirmed. Line checked. Line secure,’ said the slate.

Vangorich’s face appeared a second later in grainy monochrome.

‘Isolde, good to see you. Tell me now, can I believe what I just saw?’

‘Regretfully no, Grand Master,’ she said. ‘They lied. They’ve moved it, not destroyed it. They’re going to plunder it.’

Vangorich looked away. ‘Stupid,’ he said. When he looked back his eyes were hard. ‘Where is Ullanor now?’

‘I don’t exactly know. I’ve got the name and the stellar signifier. The code puts it on the edge of the Segmentum Solar, and if it’s named it’ll be on a chart somewhere. It did have nine worlds, orbiting a main sequence yellow star not unlike Sol. The code is for an uninhabited system marked for colonisation. They got quite agitated about moving Ullanor at exactly the right moment to displace the existing fourth world safely, a place called Chosin, so I don’t know if that’s of any worth as a planet. I can’t tell you any more than what I gleaned through eavesdropping. This ship has its datacore encrypted so heavily it’d take a Vanus acolyte a week to get into it. I don’t have the skills. I can’t exload to you. Verbal report only.’

‘Give me the code and name.’

‘Yes, Grand Master,’ she said. ‘PL-SS042002-9001. The prime-assumptive world is Pelucidar. The system must be named for it.’

‘Pelucidar? Never heard of it,’ said Vangorich. ‘Good work, Isolde. Severing contact now.’

The screen blinked out. Isolde stowed her data-slate, checked outside, and slipped away.

Six

Holy ordos

There were gardens under the ice and rock of the Antarctic; the recreated habitats of a thousand worlds graced the deepest catacombs of the Inquisitorial Fortress. Most were small, places for the study of dangerous environments or the pharmacological benefits to be wrested from promising species, but there were those set aside for meditation. The Inquisition understood well the need for calm and clarity.

The Park of Oak was one of those places, forty hectares of vibrant green caged by skies of black Antarctic rock.

Veritus met Wienand under the gnarled branches of an ancient tree that had never seen the sun. Its leaves rustled in the unvarying breeze of ventilation ducts, otherwise the forest was silent; no bird or beast lived there. The deep quiet sharply defined the crackling of leaves under her feet and the hiss and whirr of Veritus’ life support system.

‘Wienand,’ said Veritus. He was haggard, his skin looser and paler than normal. She attributed it to the conclusion of the war against the Beast. The closure of a mission often had the same effect on her – months of high activity and adrenaline were followed by deferred exhaustion.

‘Is it time for us to resume our struggle for the seat of Inquisitorial Representative?’ she asked.

‘I hope not,’ said Veritus. He appeared disappointed that she had brought it up. He rested an armoured hand upon the trunk of the tree. ‘There are more pressing concerns.’

‘Let’s get this one out of the way, then. I’ve made my decision. I will relinquish the seat to you. My concern was the alien threat, and that is now done. It is your turn.’

Veritus was taken off guard, but composed himself before an expression of surprise could take shape. ‘You have my gratitude.’

‘You have mine,’ she said. ‘I’ve sat in the Senatorum too long. I have to think of the future. It is time I began to train a successor.’

Veritus became thoughtful. ‘Something I have neglected. I never had time to plan for that future, and yet the future is why we are here. You know that Terra was once an ocean world, inhabited by a trillion different species of life?’

‘I cannot really imagine it, Terra is so… dead,’ she said. ‘Although I have seen other oceans, it is impossible to picture them here.’

‘It was a long time ago. I am very old, Wienand, but even in my youth Terra looked much the same as it does now. But once, it was rich in life,’ said Veritus. ‘Our ancestors, for all their might, did not take care for the future.’

‘I have been lectured about that more than once by the eldar,’ said Wienand.

‘Hypocrisy is their most aggravating characteristic. The fall of their empire sterilised countless worlds,’ he said. ‘You put too much faith in them.’

‘And you too little,’ she said. ‘They are implacably opposed to Chaos, and have helped me many times.’

‘The eldar are prideful and conceited, practically blind to their own faults.’ He smiled tiredly. ‘Listen to us. You are the one who champions defence against the alien, but works with them against Chaos. I am the one who fears Chaos above all things, but lectures you about the xenos threat. Maybe we are both right. The eldar are right about one thing, we must think of the future. The Inquisition must change.’

‘So you promised Thane,’ said Wienand guardedly. ‘Did you have the right to decide that alone? Who is to say the others will agree?’

‘They will agree,’ said Veritus. ‘My question is, do you?’

‘If you are confident you can impose change, why do you need my opinion at all?’ she said.

‘Because you are still the Inquisitorial Representative alongside me. We were opposed, now we work in unity. A unified decision from us will carry much more weight.’

‘So you are not confident of change.’

‘Without you,’ said Veritus, ‘no.’ His breath wheezed. ‘I am uncommonly tired. Walk with me a way, there is a bench not far.’

He led the way down a narrow path of chipped bark. Through it and the litter of the forest floor patches of growth mesh were visible, twisted up by the actions of the trees’ roots. The more she looked, the less natural the forest became.

‘If I am to trust you, then there can be no more secrets between us,’ she said.

‘Agreed,’ said Veritus. Though they went at no great pace, he was breathing heavily.

‘Then tell me more of the Space Marine Chapter stationed on Titan that nobody, except you, appears to be aware of.’

Veritus grasped at branches as they went on, only lightly, as if he were seeking approval from them. They came to a clearing in the trees. A wooden bench made of a split tree trunk occupied the centre. Water pipes and a blinking environmental control station at the edge of the glade further undermined the nominally natural feel of the forest.

‘They are an important part of the reorganisation, and a means to convince the other inquisitors to agree to our plan.’

‘It is your plan, Veritus, and I still do not know what it is.’

Veritus had trouble lowering himself to sit. He leant on Wienand and she sagged under the pressure of his armoured grip as he sat. When he let go, it was as if the weight of the world had come off her shoulders. She sat beside him.

‘They are called the Grey Knights,’ said Veritus. ‘They are a force of warriors without peer, engineered from gene-seed taken from the Emperor Himself a thousand years ago. A last, parting gift from our god before He was taken from us to sit upon His Golden Throne.’

‘They are Adeptus Custodes then?’ Wienand rubbed her hand along the wood. Whereas the bench in the Sigillite’s Retreat was smooth and dry, the grain of this wood was rough under her touch, the strands of lignin still swollen with moisture. Although dead, it smelt fresh; a sense of life still clung to it.

‘They are greater than the Adeptus Custodes,’ said Veritus. ‘Each one is a potent psyker. Their strength is in their brotherhood. As the end approached, the Emperor foresaw a need for warriors who could stand against Chaos, incorruptible and mighty, and He made them so, the mightiest warriors beside the primarchs He ever created. For them, the daemon holds no fear. I believe that, in time, the Emperor hoped mankind would realise its psychic potential, avoid the catastrophe that struck the eldar, and end the threat of Chaos forever. In the Grey Knights, I see hope for the future. They are the pinnacle of what we could be.’

‘The eldar are psychic by nature. From what they have hinted, that sped their destruction. They tell me that we have already fallen. The Dark Age of Technology was our era of might, and even then we could not match their empire of old. They persisted for millions of years, we for mere thousands and now we slowly die.’ She thought of the Sigillite’s Retreat as she said that.

‘We rose again, and we can rise a third time. They are the spent force, not us,’ said Veritus. ‘We must believe this, or we are doomed. When you see the Grey Knights, you will understand that there is hope.’ He was trembling. His breath was shallow, and he perspired. Wienand looked at him with concern.

‘Are you ill, Veritus?’

‘I have felt better. I shall rest later. First, hear me out. There were once four of us who knew of this Chapter. The secret has been mine alone to keep for years. I do not share it lightly.’ Veritus became grim. ‘Assassination, execution, these have been the sentries to this knowledge. I have been forced to employ Exterminatus on three occasions to keep them hidden. That is how delicate the matter of their existence is. I could not call them in to fight the orks. Their psychic abilities would have proved useful, but though they are mighty, they would have fallen, and we would have lost a valuable weapon against Chaos.’

‘We needed all the warriors we could get,’ said Wienand.

‘They would not have tipped the balance. We would have won or lost with or without them. Weapons should be applied to the appropriate threat.’ He clenched his fists on his knees and turned to her. ‘And we agree there are two threats.’

‘Of the alien and Chaos,’ she said.

‘The aliens of this galaxy pose a danger. If I had not believed it before, then this war against the Beast would have convinced me. But we cannot ignore Chaos. Dealing with both is impossible under our current organisation. I believe that the remit of the Inquisition is too diffuse. We need to specialise so that our efforts can be better focused. This is my proposal, that the Inquisition adopt a bicameral nature. The Ordo Xenos shall concentrate its affairs upon alien threats. The Ordo Malleus shall devote itself to rooting out Chaos wherever it shows itself. With the Grey Knights as the Chamber Militant of the Ordo Malleus, and the Deathwatch providing a similar role to the Ordo Xenos, both ordos will be equal in power. The Inquisition will be better able to combat threats mundane and supernatural.’

‘What of those inquisitors who have no desire to specialise?’ asked Wienand.

‘There are some, but most you and I know have their own particular areas of interest. In any case, there are other dangers facing the Imperium, these two are just the largest. I am not suggesting an absolute division. The nature of these threats is that sometimes they are intertwined. Individual inquisitors will be free to move between them. Others might stay free of both.’

‘What if some of the others take to your idea and suggest the need for more ordos?’ said Wienand.

‘Then they can be constituted as and when they are needed. With the model of these two in place, I would imagine it would be easier to do so. For the time being, two will suffice. Wienand, I am speaking of creating a framework which can support inquisitors, give them access to specialist equipment and personnel, and an army to use if required. I am not speaking of imposing an absolute hierarchy on the Inquisition.’

‘But this will introduce hierarchy. It must, by its nature. With hierarchy comes oversight,’ she said. ‘Our comrades do not like to work with others looking over their shoulders.’

‘Nobody is immune to corruption. Oversight is needed. A rogue inquisitor can do so much harm.’

Wienand’s mouth twisted. ‘This change is greater than specialisation. You are suggesting a hierarchy where none exists. There is no ruling council for the Inquisition.’

‘I am not proposing a binding hierarchy. Our freedom to act as we see fit is our greatest strength. It is time the organisation we do have is formalised, that is all. We cannot rely on ad hoc quorums to guide our fate. There must be a council of the most high Inquisitorial lords.’

Wienand laughed softly. ‘The Senatorum Imperialis has exhausted my patience with councils.’

‘Ours shall be smaller, and uneven in number so that deadlock can be avoided. Until now, I have assigned the Grey Knights where I see fit. We must decide a new mechanism for their deployment. I cannot live forever. Would you put that power into the hands of another?’

She gave him a look. ‘You trust yourself, evidently.’

‘There were once four of us,’ he reminded her.

There were four founding members of the Inquisition, thought Wienand, but his being one was impossible. Even so, he must have been heir to that line, and the system of the four lords was long defunct.

‘You’re older than I thought.’

‘Much older,’ he said. ‘I…’ He blinked. ‘I… Wienand?’

‘Veritus? Are you all right?’

He gave her a puzzled look, then his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell from the bench to the thin, artificial soil.

Wienand knelt by him. Veritus’ face was pressed into the ground, sealing shut his nose and mouth. She tugged and tugged at his armour, but could not right him, so she rocked him back and forth until she could get to his head and turn it to one side. When he was breathing again, she spoke urgently.

‘Vox-bead, activate.’ Her wrist chimed. ‘This is Wienand. I’m in the Botanicum, the Park of Oak. I have a medical emergency. Veritus is down.’

Seven

The opening of the warp

Deep in the fortress of the Iron Warriors was the Astropathicum. The name bore no relation to the meaning of the word as Zerberyn understood it. Imperial astropathic stations were very different in character.

The Iron Warriors’ sole telepath hung in her upright coffin, imprisoned by cables trailing from her skull like a shock of thick hair. Serfs from both brotherhoods worked around her, adjusting the power feed from the cables and monitoring her vital signs. The woman was not a true astropath, but a witchborn taken from their slave stock, a natural psyker, unblessed and unprotected by the Emperor. She was naked, emaciated and filthy, but deadly. The banks of crackling machinery around her were there to contain her powers.

‘Green, green, no more seen,’ she whimpered. ‘The roar goes on, and on. Loudly, quietly. Two brothers cease their fight for a time, exhausted. Red stars for eyes, two apiece.’ She giggled.

Zerberyn’s astropaths were dead. She was all they had, not that she was much use; the Iron Warriors’ witch had not made any sense in all the time they had been on the moon of Immitis.

Zerberyn listened to the witch’s babble. She still made no sense, but the fortress was changing around her. Fresh ferrocrete covered scars inflicted on the complex by the cyclical tidal tugging of Immitis VII, the gas giant the moon orbited. Zerberyn felt that pull himself when the giant planet rose, four times a day. New machinery salvaged from ravaged worlds and ships had been integrated with the ancient systems. The halls hummed with the quiet work of technology. Air filtration meant the air was purer, and this was only one of a hundred small alterations that was changing the fort from a semi-derelict to something resembling a Chapter fortress. Zerberyn was beginning to feel at home there, surrounded by Traitors. He saw them now as more than just despicable foes. They were capable warriors and builders, and though there were methods the Iron Warriors employed that he would never have dreamt of using himself, he was beginning to see their utility. That concerned him.

Someone drew near, and his thoughts fled like clouds before the wind.

Epistolary Honorius’ psychic presence filled the room, pushing at the crazed, fluctuating gifts of the witch as a fortress wall opposes the air. His physical presence was barely less imposing. The Librarian was never out of his Terminator battleplate. A wise precaution, thought Zerberyn. The Iron Warriors could grow tired of their alliance at any time.

‘First Captain, you called for me?’

The Librarius serfs genuflected to their master and went back to their work. The woman sobbed, her metal-faced handler shocked her with the savage throw of a switch, and she screamed.

‘Brother-Epistolary. A word in private.’

Black eyes gazed impassively from Honorius’ ageless, snow-pale face as he swept them over the serfs. ‘Leave us!’ he called.

Immediately the serfs began to shut down the equipment. They bowed and departed. The psyker’s overseer, one of Kalkator’s creatures, remained.

‘You too,’ said Honorius. His voice was sepulchral, his lips permanently downturned. ‘Begone.’

‘My master told me no one was to be alone with the witch.’

‘Go,’ said Honorius, with a power that could not be denied. The overseer hesitated, then left, cowering under the Librarian’s disapproval.

‘Are we alone?’ asked Zerberyn.

The Epistolary’s eyes closed. Eidolica bred men with pale skin, Honorius was among the palest. There was the merest hint of pink to his lips; without that he could have been a marble figure on a tomb.

‘No one hears us,’ he said dolefully.

Zerberyn pointed at the witch, moaning in her restraints and rolling her head. ‘The Green Roar abates. The witch speaks nonsense still, but I believe that is what she is trying to say. Is this not so?’

Honorius inclined his head but once. ‘It is, First Captain.’

‘Something has happened in the wider war. Victory must be close to hand. Have we any word from the Last Wall?’

‘None intelligible, First Captain. My Librarians are not astropaths, but we sense something, a shift in the warp. They receive fragments of messages where before there was nothing. Communication becomes clearer by the hour.’

‘We will be able to send our own messages soon?’

‘Yes, brother-captain. If the brothers of the Librarius work together, it can be done within a day or two, no more.’

Zerberyn turned back to look at the witch. His eyes narrowed. ‘And can we do so without it being intercepted?’

‘You intend to betray the Iron Warriors?’ said Honorius.

‘I intend to be cautious, Brother-Librarian. Do you disapprove?’

‘You are the First Captain. I will do whatever you command,’ said Honorius. ‘The message will not be intercepted.’ Honorius bowed and made to depart. Zerberyn halted him.

‘Honorius, you knew Oriax Dantalion.’

‘I did,’ said Honorius.

‘What would he have made of our allies?’

‘Dantalion was an inflexible and furious man,’ said Honorius. ‘He would have hated the Iron Warriors, as the enemies of the Legion and traitors to the dreams of the Emperor.’

‘And what do you make of them, brother?’

Honorius looked sidelong at Zerberyn. ‘I think that the Iron Warriors are useful, my lord.’

Zerberyn nodded. ‘I concur. Perhaps they can be saved, turned back onto the righteous path. Prepare a message. As soon as you are able, send it. Inform the Last Wall of our location, tell them to come in peace and bearing the markers of truce. It is time we readied ourselves to return home.’

Eight

Vangorich decided

The final time Wienand went to meet Vangorich at the Sigillite’s Retreat, she abandoned the code of coloured smokes and contacted him openly. And she went armed.

Although she had refrained from voxing him until she was a few hundred metres from the forgotten garden, she had no chance to lay an ambush, for when she arrived Vangorich was sitting on the bench. He smiled sadly, shut his book – the same one he had been reading the last time they met – and set it down.

‘We won’t be able to use this place again,’ he said, ignoring the laspistol she was pointing at his head. ‘I suppose you knew that, contacting me on open vox like that. Everyone will know about it. Such a shame, it took me years to find it. It’s a piece of history I shared with nobody but you. Never mind. It is time I came out from the shadows a little. I always thought the Cerebrium would make a fine personal office. I will take it on; it is a beautiful room. If no one objects, of course.’ He seemed to focus on her properly for the first time. ‘Your actions, and that gun, suggest you are less than pleased with me.’

‘What did you do to Veritus?’

He feigned surprise, and that enraged her. Her finger twitched on the trigger, and it was all she could do not to shoot him in the face then and there.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Stop it, Drakan!’ she shouted. She circled, searching for traps and Assassins, wishing that she’d thought more calmly and ordered a kill-team to accompany her. Instead she’d rushed to the Inquistorial Fortress’ space port and taken the first craft she’d seen to get here. She regretted her haste. ‘He’s dying.’

‘I am so sorry to hear that,’ he said, and looked like he meant it. ‘He is a little stiff, but a good man in the most fundamental of ways. It is no wonder that you two have become quite close, which is amusing really, seeing as he tried to kill you. And now you’re here, threatening to kill me for allegedly killing him. Honestly, the contradictions of this life never fail to entertain me.’

‘Drop your act, Drakan!’

He shook his head. ‘This is no act,’ he said almost regretfully. ‘This is truly who I am.’

‘Give me the antidote,’ she said. She chanced a step towards him. Vangorich sat innocently in his lifeless garden in the ossified heart of the Imperium. She thought of the synthetic forest in the Inquisitorial Fortress. As pale a reflection of the past as it was, it was still alive. In the Sigillite’s Retreat there was only death.

‘I am afraid there is no antidote,’ he said. ‘Not if he has already collapsed. It will be a matter of time now. I am sorry.’

‘You admit it, then.’

‘I believe I just did, yes,’ he said with a little shrug.

‘Why did you do it? The crisis is over. The orks are done. We should be rebuilding.’

‘And we will,’ he said. ‘Which is precisely why I had to do it. Veritus would never agree with me, you see. I wanted the poison to be an insurance policy, the way I did with Mesring. You spoilt that for me, remember? You might agree with me though,’ he said speculatively.

A cold, sinking feeling clutched at Wienand. Her pistol wavered in her hand. The High Lords. Where were the other High Lords, right now? ‘What do you mean, Vangorich?’

‘The Officio Assassinorum is a check on the follies of empire,’ said Vangorich. ‘I know what it can do, what an abuse of power it could be to use it as the Emperor intended it to be used. That is why I have avoided acting. Until now. I was hoping Veritus could be controlled – not like Mesring, you understand, I never had any respect for him. I just needed enough leverage to convince Veritus what we are doing is right.’

‘You are Lord Protector. Why do you need him under your control?’

‘I did not want to be Lord Protector. I wanted Veritus in the role, I really did. I thought Veritus would do a much better job of it than me, though of course I needed some control. Thane flushed me out, and I’ve had to act.’

‘You were going to give him an antidote, but in small doses.’

‘Yes. But I haven’t, because there’s no need now. It’s gone too far.’ Vangorich made an apologetic face, like a scholam child caught stealing sweet treats. ‘Do you think that squabbling rabble in the Senatorum would actually make things better, when all they’ve done for a thousand years is stuff their greedy faces with the wealth of the Imperium? I didn’t want this, Wienand. I had no choice.’

‘Oh, Vangorich!’ she said in despair. ‘What have you done?’

‘Only what needs to be done. Thane saw that too, I think. If I look at it in a certain way, I might even say that I have his tacit permission. Don’t you see? The Imperium is as petrified as the wood of this bench.’ He patted the wood soundlessly. ‘If it is to come into leaf again, the old wood must be disposed of, and the new given chance to germinate. Try to see it as I do: we have the opportunity to instigate a new era for mankind!’

‘You are not the Emperor, you’re not the Sigillite.’

‘One of those people can do nothing, the other is dead so long I am sure his abilities and wisdom have been exaggerated greatly. You know what time and legend can do to a man’s reputation. We can never live up to the past because we invent it to punish ourselves. It was probably no better or worse than our own era.’

‘I can’t let you do it,’ she said.

‘You’d kill me? Then who would be the assassin?’ he said. His humour was tinged with sadness. ‘Best leave that sort of thing to me. It is what I am, after all. I am trying, Wienand, not like those fools in the High Twelve. I aspire to the greatness of the past – they’re simply overawed by it. Vulkan, a son of the Emperor Himself, denounced the Council. Koorland killed Mesring. Thane made me Lord Protector. It all makes sense. They have to die. I thought you of all people would understand that.’

Vangorich stating his murderous design out loud released something savage in Wienand. She fired, putting a las-bolt through Vangorich’s forehead.

Vangorich flickered. He blinked sympathetically at her. She opened up, putting beams of light through every part of the Grand Master, but they passed harmlessly through him. The wood of the bench smouldered. She looked around for the loops and projectors of a hololith unit, but could see none. The illusion was totally convincing, the best she had ever seen, lacking the ghost-like quality the majority of projections possessed.

‘A shame,’ sighed Vangorich’s projection. ‘I thought you would probably react like that, but I was holding out hope you would not. We really should work together. Now it seems I’ve some work to win you over. No matter, you’ll see the light.’

Wienand held up her vox-button to her mouth.

‘It’s too late, Wienand, you can’t save them,’ said Vangorich. ‘The order is given. The High Lords die today.’

Nine

The beheading

Long before dawn, Abdulias Anwar rose from his bed in an unlit cell. There were grander apartments in the Silent Mansions, but Anwar eschewed them. The terrible losses the Beast had inflicted had impelled him towards humility.

All astropaths were blind, but very few of them were sightless. Some pieced together a patchwork world gathered from foreseen events, apprehending their surroundings through anticipation. The more powerful might see through the eyes of other people. Some saw the world as a blinding vista of soul-light, a few sensed the echoes of the past that wove themselves psychically into the fabric of the universe. Theirs was a sad fate, constantly subjected to the ghostly replays of emotional events, many of great horror.

As the head of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, Abdulias Anwar was a telepath of extraordinary ability. The human mind was an open book to him, if it were not carefully warded. His world was one of phantom shapes, a vision of sorts that wove the souls of living beings into a map of energy. It had been so long since Anwar had seen a face the memory had faded into the depths of his extraordinarily long life. Physical beauty was meaningless to him. What he did see was spiritual beauty. The souls of the living shone. Each person was a network of fibres, alive with the pulse of thought. The souls of good men were white, those of less noble tendency red. Blue indicated great sorrow, those burdened with their duties showed a dull yellow, and so on in a million hues. No man or woman was a single shade, save a rare few. Most were subtle blendings that changed from moment to moment.

From the reflected spirit light of humanity, Anwar could discern the shapes of the material world, albeit dully, a psychic false-colour rendering in blues and blacks. Behind this lurked the ever present maelstrom of the warp. Not all telepaths had the dread cosmic truth in front of them all the time like Anwar did, but he had been luckier than others and had learned to mask its presence.

Above it all was the light of the Astronomican, a constant beacon that shone through the intervening rock of Terra as if it were smoke, the bonfire of souls that bound the Imperium into one coherent entity. When he was younger, the undying blaze had kept him from sleeping. What it represented had terrified him. As he aged it had become his greatest comfort.

Only his own soul lit the way for him, the light of it coaxing meaning from the surrounding matter of his domicile. There were no servants to tend to him in the mornings any more. As part of his penance he had dismissed them. He half saw, half felt his way to his wash basin where he plunged his face into freezing water. It filled his empty eye sockets, chilling his skull. The discomfort was good. He patted around for his towel and dried his face. Then he washed himself gaspingly, and went to pray.

The arcane patterns of hexagrammatic wards glimmered all around him, defining the corridors of the Silent Mansions. Through the murk of the solid walls behind the wards, he saw the distant glimmer of soulshine. Psychic humans were flaring beacons, the more mundane sort still bright and glorious in their own way. Closer to his location there were the dim, barely-there flickers of servitors slumbering in their alcoves. Anwar had heard it said that mind-wiping was no worse than execution. The people who said such things were wrong: the souls of the servitors were trapped in bodies of dead flesh and metal. It was a fate worse even than the ocean of souls that awaited the truly dead.

His long staff tocked as he made his way to the Master’s Chapel. This room was the biggest in the Mansions, full of artworks created with psychically active substances of immense cost that only the blind could see. Anwar went before the great statue of the Emperor Resplendent and knelt.

By nature, Anwar was a spiritual man. His early life had been one of wonder, as a world no one else could see had opened to him. The Black Ships had taken that world away from him and given him another more profound, when he had lost his sight in exchange for the touch of a god. That the Emperor was divine was beyond doubt. Anwar had seen Him, a blazing soul that drowned all others with its light. The statues he had seen as a youth captured not the tiniest truth of His essence. For that one glimpse, Anwar felt himself truly blessed. He was content in all that he had done, he had served to the best of his ability and risen as far as any man of his station might go. He had a good friend in Sark. Sark was more powerful than Anwar, strong enough to keep his eyes. Sark had lived a full-blooded life before he took high office, Anwar one of monkish self-denial. But Anwar did not resent him.

He was long past any sort of envy. He had been satisfied with the role the Emperor had chosen for him, and he worked diligently to fulfil that role when immersed in the madhouse of the Great Chamber. He had watched the ridiculous power struggles within the High Lords with a species of detached bewilderment, banding together with Sark and Gibran for no other reason than to preserve his sanity. He left politics to the others, taking pride in keeping his adeptus in order, and he had been content.

He gave praise for his blessing, whispering mantras of thanks over and over.

But he should have done more. He should have been more vigilant.

For years, Anwar had also been complacent. Lately anguish replaced his contentment. He wondered, in the dead of night, if he could have foreseen the rise of the Beast. The Green Roar had built slowly, giving all the appearance of being a simple disturbance in the warp like so many in the past. The sort of storm that might last a night or a millennium, bearable nonetheless. But it had been different. He should have put resources into divining its source. Its true nature had become apparent only when the Beast attacked, and then the bestial howling of the orks had overwhelmed so many of his adepts. Communications had fallen into chaos. Now the warp was stilling again. The roaring of the ork had not disappeared, but receded into the distance like the thunder of a passing storm. Anwar was fearful. Like a storm, the Beast could return again.

‘I should have seen it coming, my Lord. I swear I will next time,’ he whispered. ‘I will be more vigilant.’

He pulled down his hood and unlaced the top of his robes. Anwar had ceased to wear the ornate garments of a High Lord, reverting to the plain green astropath’s garb. He pulled his skinny arms from the sleeves and pushed the robe down to his waist. He took up a switch, made of rare birchwood grown in hallowed arboreta. It was priceless, his sole remaining indulgence. This was his first penance.

‘For failing in my duty, I beg Your forgiveness,’ he murmured. The crack of thin wood on flesh echoed off the chapel walls. Anwar suppressed a cry of pain.

‘For failing in my duty, I beg Your forgiveness.’ He switched sides, whipping himself over the left shoulder.

Every day, his back burning from his flagellation, he forced himself from the Silent Mansions to the astrotelepathicum of the Imperial Palace. There he spent hours in the receiving couches, parsing messages from all over the Imperium. The majority of them were degraded by the turmoil in the warp. Disrupted chronologies were common.

Anwar was gifted still. The passing of years had dulled his abilities little. He decoded more messages than the youngest and best, and he made himself do it. Story after story of ruination, horror and savagery. This work was his second penance for his inaction. He prayed it would be enough to earn the Emperor’s forgiveness. He knew in his heart it was not.

‘For failing in my duty, I beg Your forgiveness!’ he said louder, his papery voice filling with power. He hit himself harder.

‘For failing in my duty–’

The gentlest scuff of a foot on dusty stone broke his chant. A blind man hears no better than a seeing man, but he does pay attention more closely to what his ears tell him.

‘Who’s there?’ he said and turned. The nearest soul light was many rooms distant. There was nobody in the chapel with him. Still he was compelled to shout out. ‘This is the Chapel of the Master of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica! Who is there?’

Silence. There was nobody there. There could be no one there without his seeing. Why then did the iron hand of dread squeeze his heart?

He groped for his staff and stood, robes dangling around his waist. Sightless eyes panned around the room. Far greater senses than sight showed him nothing. The hexagrams and psychic paintings on the wall glowed, disapproving faces staring down.

He froze. There, there was a disturbance in his second sight, a warping of a ward-tapestry’s silver threads. He drew in a frightened breath. The distortion moved, coming closer. As it approached it became a sucking black void that drew all light towards it, banishing it utterly.

‘Traitor,’ said a voice in a low whisper that pulled at the weft of Anwar’s soul.

‘No, wait. I am no traitor. I am a loyal servant of the Emperor!’ said Anwar. He stumbled backwards, until his back connected painfully with the edge of the altar.

‘We are the Emperor’s justice. We are the Emperor’s judgement.’ A whirring rasp of machinery came, that of a metal iris opening. The whining rise of weaponry spooling up to full power vibrated Anwar’s teeth painfully.

There was only one being this could be. A Culexus Assassin: a creature like the Sisters of Silence, born without a soul, taken, trained, honed into a killer of psykers, an abomination which could extinguish the light of a soul as easily as snuffing a candle. ‘I know your kind! Why did Vangorich not release you to fight the orks? Why do you only show yourself now? You call me disloyal? What about the Grand Master!’

A darker point of light appeared in the air at head height, totally black, the absence of everything – space, time and soul. Anwar felt his very being tugged towards it. The sensation was excruciating. Absolute terror flooded his aged heart.

‘Please! Please,’ he sobbed. ‘I know. I… I know. I could have done more. I shall! I have learned my lesson. It is not enough to fulfil the Emperor’s wishes. One must always strive to exceed them. I know this now,’ said Anwar. He slipped down the altar to kneel on the cold floor. ‘Tell the Grand Master, I know I have been remiss. I am sorry. I am ashamed.’ But his eyes could not cry, and no tears came.

‘You are guilty,’ said the pariah.

A beam of blackness cut across Anwar’s spirit sight and connected with his forehead. For the first time in his life, he was truly blind. All good sensation was driven out of him, leaving nothing but the pain as his soul was pulled slowly from his body, singing like a raw, stretched nerve.

With his mouth, and with his mind, Anwar screamed. His last psychic shout blasted out from the chapel, stunning everyone it touched for five hundred metres in every direction.

His soul dissipated into nothing. The Culexus shut off her animus speculum. Anwar’s body fell to the ground alive, but Abdulias Anwar had found a fate far worse than death.

By the time his aides and guards reached the chapel, the Culexus Assassin had long gone. She had another psyker to visit that night.

The Navigators’ Quarter was a world distinct from the rest of Terra. Though it was surrounded by the hives of standard humans, it was walled off from them absolutely. To be apart was the condition of the Navigators, on a starship or on the ground. Within the Quarter’s walls were the greatest palaces in the human galaxy, but no normal man might visit these gilded prisons for the Navis Nobilite.

From his lighter, Helad Gibran looked glumly down over the soaring spires of the Navigatorial estates, each house attempting to outdo the other with the height and splendour of its demesne. Glittering pinnacles and gardens were cut through by broad waterways and lakes protected from the polluted air of Terra by ornate domes. Near the centre was the greatest edifice of all, the Paternoval Palace. Currently in possession of House Gibran. It was all so beautiful, so excessive and so claustrophobic.

The lighter pilot zeroed in on the main docking hall of the Paternoval Palace. Its outrageously decorated spires soared overhead, embracing Gibran in their shadows. He shuddered. Gibran was not pleased to be home.

After they landed he rushed through the ritual greeting offered him by House Gibran servants in the hangar, and hurried to a mechalandau. He instructed its simple machine-spirit to take him to his private quarters as quickly as possible.

‘As you wish, Navigator,’ its unpleasant voice burbled. It lurched to its six feet and cantered off down the labyrinthine corridors of the palace, carrying him past lesser members of House Gibran about errands of their own. It was late, and he passed only one other of the mechanical transports. He returned the greeting of Lord Navis Orto Gibran as he approached, declined his offer to talk and take wine, and sped on.

The landau deposited him in the entrance vestibule to his apartments, a high porch and steps set into a tall window of glass that looked out onto jungle gardens. Rain jetting in regimented bursts from sprinklers high in the artificial sky rattled on the window, an incongruously natural sound in those deeps of steel and stone.

The moment he was through the door, his majordomo Erdacian came to greet him.

‘You have been gone long, my lord,’ he said. Erdacian was a Navigator, like all in the Quarter. His third eye was covered over with a strap marked with the sigil of House Gibran.

‘I wish it were wandering through the stars, Erdacian,’ said Helad Gibran. ‘I’ve wandered only so far as the Venusian Lagrange.’

‘My lord,’ said Erdacian, and dipped his head. ‘Shall I order dinner prepared?’

Silent servants came to take Helad Gibran’s outer garments, wash his hands and feet, and spray him with perfumes. Gibran put up with their ministrations impatiently.

‘Yes, and call my companions. I wish to talk of other things than politics for a while.’

‘There is a deal of work for you in your opusarium.’

Gibran sighed with displeasure. ‘I will look it over quickly. Dinner. One hour. I command it.’

‘As you wish, my lord.’

Gibran shook off the last of his servants and made for the large stairway curling around the glassteel atrium of his apartments. Erdacian followed him to the foot of the stairs.

‘What of my Lady Mossa Belisarius-Gibran?’

‘Schedule breakfast for us tomorrow. I shall see her then, not before.’

‘She was most insistent she speak to you as soon as you arrive, my lord.’

‘Tomorrow, Erdacian!’ Gibran called down from the balcony. ‘I wish to look over the gardens for a while. Inform the Paternova’s Master of Admissions that I have returned. If he will meet with me in the afternoon, then I am humbly at his disposal.’

‘My lord.’

Gibran went into his opusarium and shut the door behind him. He rested against the smooth wood, closed his eyes and let out a long, weary breath. The High Lords he could handle, even the Paternova himself, but speaking to his wife tonight was one task too far.

He stood. The lights were off. Soothing green light reflected off the jungle through the room’s large rose window. On the far side of the room was a set of upholstered doors. Beyond them were his bed, his concubines and his collection of fine off-world wines. He was in the mood to enjoy all three. First, he wished to look on his garden, a collection of ancient Terran plants which existed nowhere else.

But to look over the garden, he must stand by his desk. His treacherous eyes were dragged to the piles of work atop it. It was a large desk, but not a scrap of its surface could be seen, buried under a pile of data-slates, documents and flimsies a metre high. His shoulders sagged.

He looked to the exit. He could walk away and pretend he had not seen. He took a step forward, his hand reaching up involuntarily for the door and the pleasures beyond.

He stopped. The stacks of work waited. His warp eye throbbed. He was a fool to come this way. Sentimental, wanting to look upon the gardens. There were no pure pleasures in this world that duty could not spoil.

‘Warp take it all,’ he said. He pressed the button on his vox-cuff. ‘Erdacian. I shall be late for dinner.’

‘Yes, your grace.’

Gibran sat down with a heavy sigh. With a wave of his hand he decreased the opacity of the window until it was totally clear. Artificial rain lashed against it, making the jungle foliage bob with its pounding. At least he might take some pleasure in that.

The work was consuming. It never stopped. If it was not the business of the Imperium, it was the business of his House. He was not the Novator, but he was responsible for ratifying the breeding programmes of his own closest relations. A good quarter of the documents concerned matches and marriage contracts. Many more were reports from Gibran Navigators scattered across space by the war against the Beast. The saddest was the shortest, a list of known and probable losses for his and allied Houses. He held the slate for far longer than it took to read it.

The rain drummed hard on the window. On the other side of the dome encompassing the garden, Sol was slipping out of the smoggy sky.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Damn it! Erdacian! Erdacian! Whoever that is, send him away!’ Gibran bellowed. ‘I’ve got a stack of work here that stretches to Cypra Mundi and back! Erdacian?’ Cursing, he put the slate back on the desk and swore as he chased his vox-link around his wrist. When he pressed it, there was no answer to its musical chime. ‘Erdacian, where are you?’

The door opened a crack, slashing the carpet with a spear of yellow lumen light from the landing.

‘Erdacian?’

Gibran’s hand strayed for the pistol under his desk. His fingers were brushing the holster, when a familiar voice stayed his hand.

‘He is not here, cousin,’ said his visitor.

‘Dovrian Ofar, is that you?’ he said with relief. He relaxed.

‘It is I.’

‘Why did you not announce yourself?’

‘I was passing. I heard you’d come back and, you know, stopped by to surprise you.’ Dovrian shrugged. ‘I rang and rang the bell, but Erdacian was nowhere to be seen. I bring you refreshment where your lax servant has failed.’

Gibran snapped on his desk lumen. Dovrian was Gibran’s fifth cousin, three times removed, the product of three generations of marriage planning that had brought about a fruitful alliance between House Gibran and House Ofar. Careful breed matches meant his genetic code was predominately that of House Ofar, and as such would have looked freakish to standard human eyes. Spindle-limbed and willowy-tall, his skin had a bluish cast and an uncomfortable translucency that hinted at the squirmings of the muscles beneath. His third eye was bound with red cloth, as was House Ofar’s custom. Discreet hydraulic calipers aided his movement, for the Ofars were void-adapted, force-bred for service on Rogue Trader ships, ultra-light packet ships and other far-ranging vessels. The Ofar palaces were in an orbital habitat around Jupiter, and they seldom ventured anywhere that had more than one-quarter Terran gravity, including the manned decks of the vessels they guided.

Dovrian was reckoned of uncommon strength among his clan for the fact he could walk on Terra at all. It was this physical attribute that the Gibran blood had contributed, and as planned, it was also why he had been chosen as the Ofarn Ambassador to the Court of the Paternova. The plan had been to create an Ofar who was of Gibran descent to support House Gibran in the byzantine politics of the Quarter, but good breeding only went so far in determining the traits of an individual Navigator. In a society fond of high living and displays of wealth, Dovrian Ofar had a reputation as a rake, and so teetered alarmingly on the knife blade between asset and liability.

He was, however, good company, and he knew his drink. In his hand he carried an octagonal bottle of Europan salt brandy, a particular favourite of Gibran’s.

‘A gift to welcome you home.’

‘I will not be staying long in the Quarter,’ said Gibran. ‘There is too much to do.’ He waved his over-large hand at the piles of documents on his desk.

‘I can see.’ Dovrian’s exoskeleton hissed as he came closer. ‘May I? Terra’s pull is a burden on my limbs I haven’t yet grown accustomed to.’

Gibran nodded. Dovrian dragged over a chair and sat. ‘That is better. I miss the void.’

‘Me also, and my yearnings grow deeper of late.’ Gibran fetched two glasses and set them down in front of his cousin. ‘Come on then, pour. When I do not complete this work, I can blame you.’

‘Ah, I knew I had a use.’ Dovrian uncorked the brandy and poured it. The sharp, briny smell of it prickled Gibran’s tastebuds.

‘To your health.’ Dovrian raised his glass in salutation.

Gibran drank. The brandy was fine, very fiery and salty.

Dovrian put his own glass down untouched and topped up Gibran’s glass.

‘Drink up, cousin, you never know which will be your last day. These have been testing times for us all.’

‘Praise the Emperor to that!’ said Gibran. He downed the brandy in one gulp and gasped appreciatively, a delightful tremor travelling up his spine from his stomach to his shoulders.

‘Any day these last months could have been your last, my last, the last day for everyone.’ Dovrian gave a mirthless chuckle. ‘We came this close.’ He held up his long, mutant’s fingers, thumb and forefinger a hair’s breadth apart. He smiled again, equally without humour.

‘You are not drinking?’ said Gibran.

‘No. I am not drinking.’ He pushed the glass away from him with his long fingers. ‘Helad,’ he said after moment, ‘the Paternova is displeased.’

The glass paused at Gibran’s lips. ‘How displeased?’

The delightful tremor did not stop, but increased and turned painful. Gibran’s shoulder shook. He set the glass down on the desk. His hands trembled so much he knocked it over. It fell with a muffled thud on the thick carpet, staining it with the sticky liquid.

‘You have poisoned me!’

‘I have,’ said Dovrian.

‘But, but you cannot take my place.’

‘I can, and I will. Lord Vangorich has made a pact with the Paternova. It is settled.’

‘How… how did he speak with him without going through me?’ Gibran said. Seven hundred years of life and decades of staring into the warp had rendered him immune to fear, so he thought. He had been wrong.

Dovrian spread his hands apologetically. ‘I provided the conduit. It was a risk to me to even attempt it, but your performance has been so woeful I was confident of success. The price for my ascension is your death. I am sorry. I am fond of you. It is nothing personal.’

‘You traitor, you…’ Gibran reached under his desk with weak hands for his pistol. The holster was empty. His throat constricted. He stood, his legs almost buckling.

‘Why?’ he croaked. ‘Your strain is not even gravity adapted. Living here will kill you.’

‘You are gravity adapted, but life here has still killed you.’

‘Your every day will be agony.’

‘Perhaps, but I am marooned here anyway. You made me to suffer. Power will dull my pain.’

Gibran spluttered and choked. He could barely breathe. ‘Erdacian. Erdacian!’ His voice was a painful whisper.

With the last of his strength he stumbled drunkenly towards the doors, forcing them open by falling against them. He staggered out onto the balcony. It was empty. His servants had deserted him.

Choking on frothing sputum that tasted of blood, Helad Gibran fell to the floor. Dovrian stood over him. Gibran tugged with nerveless fingers at his warp eye cover, hoping to reveal it and blast Dovrian with the fell energies it contained. But the scarf would not come loose, and his hand ceased to obey his brain. He slid to the floor, his limbs loose as string.

‘I am now the Paternoval Envoy to the Senatorum Imperialis,’ said Dovrian. ‘The youngest in all history. Can you imagine?’

Gibran was past hearing. Dovrian stepped over his twitching corpse. A new world order was dawning.

Juskina Tull sat limply in her bedchamber as her handmaid Anastay brushed her hair. She no longer took pleasure in the murals on her walls. Representing four-fifths of Imperial territory, they were huge spacescapes, the nebulae and planetary systems on them gleaming by cunning means, each celestial body shifting as the hours of the day passed to represent their position in the heavens relative to one another. Where perspective and positioning permitted a view of the stars as they were seen from Terra, fanciful beasts curled around the points of light, drawn from the dozens of zodiacs dreamed up across the ages. Humanity had always looked to the stars and dreamed, even in the worst of times. At night, when she lay in bed, the murals made it seem as if she floated through space. It had been a marvellous feeling.

If she wished, she could call up the positions of Chartist ships in the areas depicted, so the murals served a purpose partway between art and strategic tool. She had always preferred them as art, spending long hours staring into abyssal depths, picking out the stars of the worlds she had visited. It was her meditation, her way of purging the cares of the day and focusing on what she was, the mistress of the free merchant fleets of the Imperium.

Now they gave her only shame. The dark between the pinpricks of distant suns held an unquenchable terror, and yet still she could not stop looking.

Her nights were full of the screams of dying men and women, crushed upon the ork attack moon. She hadn’t been on the surface, but she could imagine. During the day her mind was troubled by flashes of bloodied faces and screaming orks. She had been one of the lesser players of the great Imperial game, but an enthusiastic one. No more. Her mind was numbed with horror. She stifled a sob.

Anastay ran the brush through her hair.

‘Hush, mistress, be still, be calm. We are nearly done. Am I hurting you?’

Tull wanted to speak, but she was deep in sorrow. She shook her head mutely.

‘Put aside your cares then.’

Hiss, hiss, shush shush, went the brush.

‘I have done such a terrible thing,’ Tull said softly.

‘Hush. Do not dwell on it.’

‘I do not sleep.’

‘Heavy are the burdens of power,’ said Anastay.

Tears welled from Tull’s eyes and spilled down her cheeks. ‘I failed in my responsibility. I overreached. I have embarrassed my adeptus, and caused the loss of millions of lives. All so that ork could laugh at us, and that horrible face in orbit…’ She buried her face in her hands and sobbed.

Anastay set the brush down on the table and came around Tull’s front. She grabbed Tull’s wrists gently and pulled them away from her face. Anastay was very old.

‘Do not be sad, you have much to live for. You shall recover. You are strong, and beautiful.’

Tull smiled through her tears. ‘Not now.’

‘You could be old like me. Better to stay beautiful forever.’

‘That is impossible.’

‘Then enjoy it now, before it fades. In time, you will be old and wrinkled as I.’ Anastay gently pushed Tull around so that she faced the mirror above her dressing table. ‘See, such fine hair, not grey. Such perfect skin and bone structure.’

Tull looked into the mirror. The contrast between the lady and her servant was striking, horribly so. She imagined becoming that repulsive. The truth was that Tull was almost certainly many years older than Anastay, but anti-gerontic drugs and rejuvenat therapies could not stave off age forever.

‘My father was a remembrancer, did you know that?’ said Anastay.

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Tull.

‘He was very fond of ancient history. Really ancient history, the cultures of Roma and Nihon from the first and second millennia. Do you know, in ancient times, when a warrior or official failed, they would kill themselves? They would take their gun, or their sword, poison, or a razor and they would end their lives, just like that. They must have been very brave to do that, I always thought, to banish dishonour with their own sacrifice.’

‘Yes, they must.’ Her eyes strayed to a drawer in her table. Inside was her pistol, unworn for many years since she had left active service. The drawer was open a crack. She didn’t remember taking out her gun. She had not for a long time.

‘My lady,’ said Anastay, putting her hands on Tull’s shoulders. ‘It is better to be strong, to face your failures and overcome them, to rise to the challenge that disgrace presents us, and prove ourselves better.’

‘But I am not strong,’ said Tull. ‘I was, but I am not any more.’ She put her hand over Anastay’s. It was hot and soft.

‘Then you must be brave,’ said Anastay. She squeezed Tull’s hand. ‘I shall draw your bath, my lady.’

‘Thank you,’ said Tull. ‘You have always been a great comfort to me.’

Anastay departed, leaving Tull alone below the shifting, hololithic skies.

Thane, the Lord Guilliman, had accused her directly of incompetence. She had had faith in the Emperor, she had trusted He would aid her in her crusade. He had not. Mesring had had no faith either, and that had dismayed her. But Thane was no follower of the Imperial Creed. The Adeptus Astartes were gross deformations of the human form, but they were made by the Emperor Himself. How stupid she had been. Thane was right, he was closer than she could ever be to the Emperor. Gods could not help them, mankind should help itself. Where she had thought she had faith, she had exhibited a child’s belief in the infallibility of her parents, nothing more.

She looked at the drawer. She was naive, foolish. She had nothing more to offer. Perhaps she had enough strength left in her to be brave.

The drawer slid out easily. Her pistol lay in a cavity fitted perfectly to its form. It was nothing exotic, a simple laspistol, but of great value to her. It had been a present from her father when she took command of her first ship. The gun was expensive, of course, chased with iridescent gold etched with looping patterns.

Her trembling fingers brushed it. Dishonour, that was the word Anastay had used. She pulled the gun from the drawer. The feel of its weight in her hand and the smoothness of the rosewood butt brought back memories. Most were good, proud moments. All they did was make the shame of the present seem sharper.

She thumbed on the power. The battery indicator ticked up from red through to green. Funny. Her father always bought the best, but she would have thought the battery would have run flat during its time in the drawer.

Many guilty lives had been claimed by the pistol. Mutinous crewmen, pirates, xenos raiders. What was one more? The muzzle was cool on her temple. Anastay would not hear the shot over the thundering of the bath water. Tull hoped someone else found her. The handmaid had been the closest thing she had to a friend.

The stars shifted above. Once more she took pleasure in their beauty. She smiled before she squeezed the trigger.

Her skull muffled the discharge.

In the ablutorial down the hall, the bath ran and ran until it overtopped, spilling water and flower petals upon the floor.

Anastay had returned to her temple, her mission complete.

The Tower of Autumn was inconspicuous as the spires of Terra went. A bastion swallowed by the rebuilding of the city a thousand years ago, it no longer served a defensive purpose. Being too hallowed to be given over to other uses, it remained as a dusty monument to the siege of the Imperial Palace.

Verreault grimly looked up from its loopholes. Not far away was the Widdershins Tower, and the Cerebrium at its summit.

‘Come away from the window,’ said Lansung.

‘No one will see me.’

‘I don’t like it. I don’t like you staring up there. Vangorich has been using it as his personal lair, I hear. Skulking in there when he thinks no one is watching. He has been for some time. I’ll bet it is crowded with listening devices and vid-capture units.’

‘Probably. Certainly,’ said Verreault. ‘Does it matter? Did you ever use it?’

‘No. Mesring did, I think. Do I look so foolish?’

‘We have all been foolish to let that snake slither into our company,’ said Verreault. ‘He sat among us as if he were a member of the High Twelve until he was actually made one. He’s always been there, poking and prodding.’

‘Imagine if we’d have given Rosarind, Mendem, Hardiman or any of the other lesser High Lords the same access.’

‘We wouldn’t,’ said Verreault. The Cerebrium was featureless through the ever-present smog of Terra. Faceless as an assassin, he thought.

‘Abel, come away from the window, please!’ said Lansung.

Verreault sighed but relented. He limped over to the table where Lansung sat. It was made of iron, circled by nine seats to represent the nine loyalist primarchs of the Heresy war. None were designed to be sat in. They were oversized and bolted to the ground too close to the table. He lowered himself into one anyway, wincing as he bent his bad knee.

‘Neither of us are getting any younger,’ said Verreault. ‘I should retire.’

‘I am more concerned with neither of us getting any older,’ said Lansung irritably. ‘Retiring won’t save you from Vangorich’s killers. In making him Lord Protector, Thane might as well have handed him a license for our executions.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Don’t maybe me, Abel. You wouldn’t be here if you thought your head safe.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘This is not the Senatorum. We have no room for equivocation. Stop the maybes and the perhapses. You must commit. Are you with me or are you not?’

‘Yes, yes. Of course I am.’ Verreault gave his ally – friend was too much of a stretch for Lansung – a reassuring nod. ‘Keep your head, man.’

‘Damn it!’ Lansung slapped his hat upon the table; it was an artisan’s cap. Both of them were disguised as commoners, though they bore arms no common man could possibly possess. A cloud of dust rose to sparkle in the dirty sunlight. ‘All this, all these years of service to be accused of treachery. What do the Adeptus Astartes know of governance? They are killers. It is all they know.’

‘Where is Ekharth?’ said Verreault. ‘Shouldn’t he be here by now?’

Lansung pulled a pocket chronograph out. ‘He is late. I advised him to take a circuitous route. He will have become lost. I’ve never seen him without a dozen servants. The man’s hopeless.’

‘Vangorich may have got to him already.’

‘He’ll be here,’ said Lansung.

They had nothing more to say. The raucous noise of Terra’s traffic and industry rumbled in through the unglazed loopholes. The smell of their own fear settled in the room. The Autumn Tower had seen fierce fighting. Many heroes had been made there. Verreault offered a private apology to their ghosts for his own cowardice.

The door creaked. Lansung half leapt from his chair, his hand on the hilt of his sword. Verreault drew his bolt pistol.

‘Ekharth?’

The door squealed wide. A breathless Ekharth, smeared in rust and dust, came through it.

‘Why are you dressed like that?’ said Lansung, eyes widening at the Master of the Administratum’s dirty finery. ‘What if you were followed?’

Ekharth laughed through his panting at their disguises. ‘Do you think playing dress up would help us?’

‘Did you come alone?’ said Verreault. He kept his bolt pistol in his hand.

‘I did, I did. I got a little lost,’ said Ekharth. ‘One is not used to arranging one’s own affairs.’

‘Sit! We lack for time,’ said Lansung.

‘I have guessed why you wish to see me.’ Ekharth sat, equidistant from the other two so they formed the points of a triangle.

‘Vangorich,’ said Verreault. His voice strangled on the name.

‘His appointment is dangerous, I agree,’ said Ekharth.

‘He forces our hand,’ said Lansung. ‘Vangorich seeks to govern in all but name. He has threatened us to win our support. Our entourages were infiltrated. Assassins disguised as our closest bodyguards have been at our sides for the Emperor alone knows how long. Months.’

‘Years, even, Lansung. We should not underestimate him,’ said Verreault.

‘We should not!’ said Ekharth. He panicked. ‘Has he done the same to me? Are my family all right? I… I must go.’

‘Calm down, Tobris. Stay seated.’

‘He will have similar plants in all the High Lords’ households.’

‘Even Wienand’s, even the Navigator’s,’ said Ekharth. His eyes boggled. Sweat beaded his face.

‘Definitely. His men are everywhere,’ said Verreault.

‘You are sure?’

‘We have seen it. Their faces melted and changed in front of us,’ said Lansung. ‘Polymorphine.’

‘I saw it too,’ said Verreault. ‘He has used the threat of them to garner our support.’

‘I had wondered why you voted with him recently,’ said Ekharth. ‘What are you proposing?’

‘Like any enemy, he must destroyed,’ said Lansung.

‘Killed,’ said Verreault.

‘Assassinate the Assassin? Are you sure?’ said Ekharth.

‘We have no other choice,’ said Lansung. ‘Our adepta have their own killers. Vangorich has no monopoly on death.’

Ekharth’s face changed in an instant, from panic to laughter. He opened his mouth wide and laughed so loudly the chamber rang with the sound of it.

‘He’s gone insane,’ said Verreault. ‘I knew we shou–’

An overpowered laspistol went off, the displacement crack muffled by a megathule modulator. Verreault fell face forwards onto the table. As he died, his fingers tightened, sending a bolt shooting past Ekharth’s head. It buried itself in the wall and exploded, scattering a spray of hot iron. Ekharth did not flinch at the impact. Lansung shrank in on himself, hands upraised.

Ekharth stood, laspistol trained upon Lansung in a rock steady grip, though a fragment of shrapnel hissed in the skin over his eye.

‘You are not Ekharth,’ said Lansung.

‘My, my. The people mutter about your idiocy. I had thought them wrong, it is the way of the ruled to rail against rulers. It appears they were not. Obviously, I am not Ekharth. Stand up.’ The man who was not Ekharth jerked his gun. ‘Move. Take my place here.’

‘And if I do not?’

‘I’ll shoot you and then drag you here. If you want to survive this, I advise you to comply. Move, Lord High Admiral.’

‘This is treason! Vangorich cannot hope to get away with this.’ Lansung stood up, his hands over his head.

‘I believe he can, though what I think doesn’t matter. I am a tool. He is the artist. Now sit.’

The Assassin waved Lansung into the chair. Still covering the Lord High Admiral, he walked around the table, took up Verreault’s bolt pistol in his left hand and crouched down to the level of the table. When he pointed the bolt pistol at Lansung, it was situated exactly where it would have been had Verreault been alive and still holding it.

‘What are you doing?’ said Lansung, his face blanching.

‘From your own lips you condemn yourselves. There is no escape from this. You are to die a traitor, Lord High Admiral.’

Lansung rose from the chair. ‘You said I would survive!’

‘I implied you would. Goodbye.’ The Assassin fired. Lansung’s protests went unsaid. The bolt-round hit him in the heart, obliterating the organ and with it, the life of Lord High Admiral Lansung.

The Assassin sprayed the guns with a geneticide that wiped all trace of his use of them away. He waited for the chemical agent to become inert, then placed the guns into the hands of the two dead High Lords. Then he peeled off the thin layers of flesh-coloured synskin that covered his arms to the elbow, placed them in a loophole and set them alight with a melta beam, burning them twice so that only fine ash remained. He blew this away to join the rest of the particulate matter clogging Terra’s skies. They’d find no fyceline discharge on him now, if they dared to look.

He ruffled his hair, hyperventilated to redden his face, then keyed his vox-button. Ekharth’s servants waited for him at the foot of the tower.

‘Help! Help!’ he said in Ekharth’s voice. ‘High Lords Lansung and Verreault have murdered each other!’

Ten

Krule’s judgement

Beast Krule observed the street from a stanchion of a monorail, crushed into the space between bracket and trackbed that allowed the rail to flex on its pneumatic suspension, although a carefully placed block of adamantium prevented it from doing so for the time being. Apart from a slightly bumpy ride for the commuters riding between the Archive Menorum and their tribal hab-towers, there was no indication Krule was there, down in the underhive of the Antipodean Minoris region. He was shielded from the street by the architecture of the transit line and from augurs by the electricity sputtering from the monorail’s fraying cables.

It was extremely uncomfortable, but comfort had never been a consideration in an Assassin’s career. Lurking had been his lot in life. Even while monitoring traffic in Tashkent Hive, he had been watching unobserved. If there was a time in his life when he hadn’t hidden, he didn’t remember it. The Venenum Temple had been dark. When he hadn’t been training to fight or to poison, he had been training to hide. That was his role, to hide and strike in close and depart, and he was good at it.

The land here had been mountainous before it had been covered over. Rather than level the peaks, the architects of the hive had simply boxed them in, creating this small underworld. The metal sky of the higher levels pressed down hard on the mountain stumps. An angle of stone and filthy metal defined the boundary of the underhive. Ancient structures from the dawn of mankind’s history slumped against the giant supporting columns of the hive above. Rotting rockcrete slums closed in his perceptions to this one dirty street, washed by effluent rain and frequented by nobody he would like to meet. He had been waiting a very long time, and Krule was getting nervy.

Ordinarily, Krule asked no questions about a particular play, beyond those that would help him refine the mission. This time there was a question that niggled him as he waited in that noisome space.

Why did Vangorich want Vernor Zeck dead? Vangorich confided a lot in Krule, but not everything. Krule had seen how ineffectual the High Lords had become, he understood Vangorich’s frustration. But why Zeck? Zeck had been no worse than the others, and in Krule’s estimation, he had been a sight better than most of them. Most of the High Lords were either good at running their adepta but not very good at politics, or the reverse. Zeck was among maybe three of the High Twelve that were good at both. The Grand Provost Marshal did not take much for himself in the way of riches and prestige. He did his duty, in fact, he did more. He took as much interest in the local Arbitrators of Terra as he did in the more prestigious, star-spanning lawgivers of the Adeptus Arbites. The fact that Krule was watching over some run-down sub-precinct at the back end of the world, and not stalking the halls of a palace, was proof of that.

A facility for the common touch and an interest in all levels of his organisation might not be the only reasons Zeck was there. It could also signify something else; it could be proof that Zeck knew he was being watched. Better to be attacked surrounded by seasoned urban warfare specialists than soft servants in the high hives. If that was the case, then Krule’s gambit here was not going to work. He was going to have to go in and finish the job personally.

Zeck’s private vehicle waited outside the sub-precinct, protected by four Adeptus Arbites armoured suppression transports. It had been on the curb for hours. That was the first issue provoking Krule’s nerves. The second was the inexorable train of thought that thundered through his mind as often as the monorails shuttling dead-eyed scribes between the only two buildings they’d ever see.

It went like this. If Zeck was judged worthy of termination, a fate Krule thought he did not deserve, then why not all the High Lords? And if all the High Lords were in line for assassination, then the reason Krule was here might be that his own specialisation best equipped him to deal with the massively augmented Grand Provost Marshal. But it could also be that Vangorich wanted Krule out of the way while his grand plan played out. That was bad news, because it meant Vangorich had lost his trust in his favoured weapon.

Vangorich’s trust was not something Krule wished to lose. If Vangorich was shutting him out, it would be a short step to shutting him down.

He returned his attention to the mission. There was only the mission, he had been taught that since his earliest years. There was no higher authority than the Grand Master. He repeated this to himself until it made a nonsensical babble in his mind, and yet his doubts grew stronger.

What if Vangorich wanted him dead too?

The sound of a poorly maintained door sliding open drew his attention back to the sub-precinct. Krule held up his magnoculars to his eyes. A man who looked very much like the Grand Provost Marshal got into his private transport. A second later, this same man was comprehensively gassed by the toxin microdevice Krule had secreted in its chassis. Green fog billowed from the vehicle, corroding everything it touched.

As alarms blared the length of the street and Arbitrators flooded from the building, Krule reviewed the pict capture of his magnoculars. The man was too broad, too short; only by millimetres, but there it was. The heat pattern of his organics did not match the data files contained in the magnoculars.

That was not Zeck.

Screeching tyres sounded up the road. An armoured speedster sent up clouds of blue smoke as it burned synthrubber on the potholed hardtop. Someone was panicking.

‘That is Zeck,’ said Krule.

He unfolded himself from his hiding place and dropped six metres to the ground. He yanked a piece of scrap plasteel from the side of the monorail pylon, uncovering a high-powered motorbike.

Less than a second later, he was in pursuit, Arbitrators shouting and firing ineffectually as he roared off after the speedster.

The light car raced along the underhive streets at breakneck speed, hurtling down the road, driving straight at piles of garbage and blasting them apart. The speedster took a right-angle turn down a narrow lane into a slum. Filthy shacks squatting in the ruins of dead civilisations were shattered by the ground car’s prow. The dispossessed scattered in every direction. Krule jinked around them skilfully. The driver was good, but no one was as good as Krule.

The speedster accelerated towards a bridge over a riverbed dry of water for dozens of centuries. The rusting supports of the bridge whipped past. To the left was an ancient seabed, the braided marks of the dead river’s outflow still visible under cluttered piles of junk. A little further out, where the seabed flattened, the hive bottom rested directly on Terra’s rock. A wall of plasteel higher than a cliff hurried the horizon near. Dirty windows looked over the stone and filth of Terra’s true self.

In the bottom of the wall was a neglected transit tunnel edged with dirty hazard striping. Placards indicated it led to the upper levels of the Nozaylant hive. No one in the underhive was wealthy enough to own private transportation, and no one from above would want to go there. The road was as empty of traffic as the river was of water, its toll gates derelict.

Sensing escape, the driver accelerated the speedster. Krule opened the throttle on the bike, sending it hurtling after with an animal roar that reverberated around that small metal hell. The car approached the tube. Krule depressed a button on his bike’s handlebar, sending a compact rocket streaking from the front fairing. It hit the car’s rear-right wheel just as it was nearing the tunnel and blasted the wheel free, sending it burning and bouncing off the abandoned road into a cluster of ruins that must have been twenty thousand years old if they were a day. The car bucked, slewing off the road, and impacted with a fatal crunch into the edge of the tunnel. Krule decelerated. He drew his pistol and leapt off the bike, leaving its machine-spirit autodrive to take it away from him.

He rolled as he landed, coming up with both hands on the gun. His sleeveless, skintight mission suit was covered in filth from his wait. His hair itched. Krule was not in a good mood.

The flames of ruptured fuel cells burst from the car’s engine compartment. A pathetic machine whining came from its on-board systems, the sound of a terrified prey animal.

He went to the driver’s station first. The windows were opaque from the outside, and he couldn’t see in. Holding his pistol in one hand, he punched his adamantium-reinforced fists through the window, grabbed the door and ripped it free. A man who can rip a car door off, he thought, and I was helpless against the orks of Ullanor.

Krule realised he was allowing his frustrations of the last months to distract him, and that nearly cost him his life. He was too slow putting a frozen needle of toxin into the head of the driver.

The rear door of the car burst off in a shower of glass. Krule turned as it flew through the air and landed with a bang on the road, dragging a trail of sparks from the rough surface. That delay could not be regained. Half a second, but that brief span of time would have enabled him to fill Zeck with toxin needles if he hadn’t been thinking about orks.

Zeck’s bionic hand slapped Krule’s gun hard, breaking it and sending it wheeling through space to be lost in the detritus of man’s forgotten past.

‘Krule. The Grand Master’s pet,’ said Zeck. He hauled himself from the wreck of the car and the remnants of his uniform fell burning from his body. His torso, exposed, revealed how much of Vernor Zeck’s original body remained, and it was a low proportion of the whole. All of his left side had been replaced with banded plasteel, from below his sternum to the tips of his fingers. His right arm possessed a little more of his birth organics, being augmetic only below the shoulder. Both of his legs were mechanical. The few patches of skin uncovered by metal were livid with fresh burns. Zeck appeared not to feel them.

‘I will not fall to that serpent.’ Zeck wrenched a piece of metal from the car and threw it at Krule’s head.

Krule dodged, put himself into a guard position and backed away as Zeck advanced.

‘Traitor!’ roared Zeck. ‘You would slay a High Lord?’

He charged at Krule. The Assassin sidestepped. Zeck’s fist punched a blow into the rockcrete road that would have shattered a man’s ribcage to mince.

‘I have been ordered to terminate you. My wishes don’t come into it.’

‘A man who obeys orders without thought is as much a traitor as one who thinks treason for himself. Your master would usurp the rule of the Imperium. You are as culpable as he.’

‘I’ve been given orders only to kill you,’ said Krule. He shouldn’t talk to his marks, but his misgivings were resurfacing.

Zeck swung again. Krule ducked the blow. A grinding sound came from Zeck’s left knee. The crash had done its damage.

‘Then surely you must care for your own life as much as you do for your duty,’ said Zeck. ‘Vangorich will end you once this is over.’

Krule paused. Zeck spoke Krule’s own thoughts aloud.

Zeck’s fist pounded into Krule’s chest. The metal in his ribs flexed, cracking the bone it was bonded to, and he was sent staggering back. Zeck laughed and drew back his fist. Krule caught it in his own hands, twisted, straightened the Grand Provost Marshal’s arm into a lock. Servo-motors whined as he pushed, but Krule’s musculature was as enhanced as his skeleton, and slowly he forced Zeck to the ground.

‘The problem with this model of augmetic is that although it is very strong, the shoulder attachments are quite weak in this one direction,’ said Krule, and slammed the heel of his hand hard into Zeck’s shoulder. Zeck roared in pain. He swatted at the Assassin with his free hand, but Krule took the blows, and he pushed harder and harder.

With a wrenching crack, Zeck’s left arm buckled around the joint. The plasteel ruptured. Wires fizzed and the arm fell limp. Krule released it. The Provost Marshal staggered to his feet, but Krule spun and kicked hard at his weakened knee joint, shattering it, and Zeck fell to the ground again.

‘When I put someone down, they stay down, Zeck.’ He lifted his metal-bonded fists and prepared to deliver the final blow.

‘Wait! Wait!’ cried Zeck. ‘You paused. You know he will kill you.’

‘We’ve all got to die sometime,’ said Krule.

‘But why like this, in dishonour? What of your oaths of loyalty?’

‘I owe my loyalty to the Grand Master, no other man.’

‘That is untrue! You owe your loyalty to the Emperor of Mankind, not to Drakan Vangorich. Think, Krule! Your Officio is a check on the others. But where is the check on the Assassins? Vangorich has gone rogue. Is this how you want to spend your life? Murdering those who disagree with Vangorich? He doesn’t need to do this. Thane appointed him Lord Protector. His only reason can be that he wishes to rule alone.’

Krule lowered his hands.

‘You see it!’ Zeck said, encouraged. He pulled himself up, resting on his good knee. ‘You’ve got to stop him, Krule. You’re the only one who can get close to him. The rest of us are finished. If he has sent you after me, the most loyal of the Emperor’s servants, then not one of the High Lords will see the week out.’

‘I think that’s why I’m here,’ said Krule. ‘He sent me away. He guessed I wouldn’t agree.’

‘And you discover this now?’

‘I am not as intelligent a man as Drakan Vangorich, do you think he’d have me around if I were?’ Anger rose up in him. He shook his head and began to pace. ‘It won’t work. I’m next on his list. I better disappear.’

‘You’ve got to try. If he takes over the Imperium, it will be a disaster. No one man can rule. Finish his reign before it begins and call back the Lord Guilliman. You will be a hero.’

‘Do you think I care about fame, heroism? Do you think I want a statue?’ Krule laughed. ‘I’m an Assassin!’

‘Then think about the future of the human race. If you don’t care about that, then what have you been killing for? You’re nothing but a monster.’

Krule stepped back. The ruined face of Zeck remained awkwardly upturned. Zeck looked like the monster, not he. But true monstrousness was worn on the inside, the way Horus and his brothers had hidden their treachery. Krule might get away and live a life on some backwater world, always looking over his shoulder. That would make him no better than Vangorich, complicit in his treachery by his refusal to act.

‘All right. All right. I can’t face going back to Tashkent anyway. I’ll act the loyal attack dog and then I’ll bite him hard. But I need proof I killed you. It’s the only way he’ll swallow the lie and let me get near to him.’

‘Take what you need,’ Zeck said. The relief in his voice was palpable.

‘You’re not going to like it.’ Krule pulled out a monofilament garrote from his utility belt.

‘Wait! Stop! There must be another way.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Krule, ‘but I’m going to need your head.’

Eleven

Red Haven

Saskine Haast walked into the great stores of the palace of the Fabricator General. Servitors clomped about, mindlessly performing whatever it was they were programmed to do. Whenever she saw an adept, she ducked out of sight until they had passed. They were no one of any consequence, but such low-ranking people tended to be insufferable busybodies, taking such pride in their inconsequential work that they would report the slightest thing out of place. They bemused Haast. She could understand it if they behaved so for favour, but she had spent some time now among the servants and bondsmen of the palace, and most of them appeared to lack any iota of ambition. They had been extremely hard to hide among, and she had come close to discovery. She checked her impatience. So close to being freed from the tedious role that had been forced upon her, she was in danger of making a mistake.

The palace’s store was immense, and stocked with all manner of things. There were those tech-priests who still ate, and so there was room after room of hyper-chilled larders. The machine as well as the flesh of such creatures needed sustenance, and so there were also kilometres of shelving taken up with chemical drums and vats of elixirs, spare parts and raw materials. These items for the maintenance of Kubik’s extensive household did not interest her. She needed the deeper stores. Kubik’s personal laboratory was incorporated into the palace and it was served by its own complex of receptaculae. Beyond them were the cavernous cellae, where treasures from all over the Martian empire were kept: rare technologies, organisms and resources. But what she needed was closer to hand.

She followed stairs down into the chemical stores of the palace, passing huge tanks full of liquids and silos of powder. She checked the location of the object on her data-slate and slowed. She was getting close.

She halted at a long row of identical cylinders, taller than two men and held in frames of yellow metal embellished with castings of the Machina Opus. She searched out the datastamps at the top of each one, the laser reader on her slate bipping as it scanned the patterns of binaric lines and dots. They were full of pressurised methalon, all but one.

‘001100011110,’ she said, and double-checked the number sent to her by Mariazet Isolde. This was it. The cylinder was sealed and must be cut open. If the information was wrong, she’d be doused in supercooled liquid and suffer an agonising death. She did not hesitate, and produced a lascutter from inside her stolen robes. It was then, lascutter in hand, that she was interrupted.

‘01-Devore, what by the Omnissiah are you doing down here?’

Saskine Haast tensed at the high, piping voice of Vorid Chume, Kubik’s steward.

‘This is not your designated place of service. Please submit immediate summary report as to your last movements. Today and yesterday will suffice.’

‘I regret I cannot, master,’ Haast said humbly, secreting the lascutter in her sleeve.

‘Hmmm, your binharic projector is still non-functional?’

‘Yes, my master.’

Chume glided down the aisle, his long, serpentine fingers entwining with one another and disengaging repetitively. ‘Really, it is two months! This is most irregular. I will look into it myself. Tell me then verbally why you are here.’

‘I am awaiting a delivery of replacement parts for the master’s somnarium, steward,’ she said.

‘You will not find them here! You are very far from the correct store.’

‘I am lost, master,’ she said, feigning embarassment.

Chume was not deceived. His green glass augmetic eyes whirred as they focused on her face.

‘You are lying!’ he said. ‘This is modus unbecoming. You shall be reported and dealt with. You are in a high security area. This is an offence punishable by mind wipe. I am summoning the palace guard.’

‘If you must.’

Chume let out a shrill squeal as Haast cast off her cloak, revealing a supple, synskin-clad body underneath. She activated the lascutter and slashed it across Chume’s throat. His squeal became a gurgle, and he fell down, spraying artificial blood and lubricant.

An alarm sounded some way off.

‘Throne,’ said Haast. She turned to the cylinder and set to work.

Tybalt the Abolitiate dwelt in darkness. He dreamed no dreams. For him, there were periods of death with peaceful nothing inbetween.

The time for peace was over.

He came awake, activated by the last of his shouted trigger words. Warm liquid flushed around him, carrying methalon suspension fluid from his casket out of drains at the bottom. His body temperature rose quickly. He flexed his hand. The neurogauntlet’s five claws ticked on glass. He reached for his thigh where his executioner pistol was holstered and drew it.

His casket was at an angle. Light from its regulating machinery bathed his skull-masked face, supplementing the weak lumen-glow admitted by a gash in a metal surface where a triangle of plasteel had been peeled back. His casket was in a cylinder. He heard shouting, smelled blood, sensed the deadly prickle of radium ammunition.

Under his death’s head rictus, Tybalt grinned.

Insanity was the logical end result of a life like Tybalt’s, frenetic violence followed by enforced suspension. A normal man would not have survived long, but Tybalt was far from normal. It was not that his brain had been altered, or his body packed with implanted technology; what suited him to his role was not what had been done to him, but what he was. When Tybalt was born the sense of empathy human felt for fellow human was missing. Tybalt cared only for the suffering of others, not their tears or their stories. No smile could move him, only terror.

Tybalt had been born to kill. It was a trait the Assassinorum was only too glad to exploit.

Roaring like an animal, he drew back his gauntlet and thrust it forwards. The distance his fist travelled was minimal; the glass shattered anyway, destroyed by a combination of enhanced strength and carefully inculcated skill. Ripping and rending, he sliced the frame of his casket away, leaving its machines to die smoking. Shearing through the metal of the empty methalon cylinder, Tybalt climbed howling into the fray.

His emergence brought a moment of silence. A clade of elite skitarii gathered at each end of an aisle lined by cylinders. Haast was crammed in between two of the storage units. Bodies of cybernetic warriors that had strayed too close lay broken on either approach.

The targeting unit on Tybalt’s backpack rose up, its glassy eye taking in a 270-degree view of his surroundings and swivelling about to complete the picture. A miniature cogitator in the backpack calculated all attack vectors, ranking the opposing Martians in order of threat. Targeting reticules danced all over the faceplate screen of his skull helm. Combat stimulants pumped into his system in massive quantities, elevating his metabolism and mind to superhuman heights. The battle took a microsecond to observe, evaluate and process.

‘Eversor!’ said one of the skitarii. Their rifles opened fire again. Tybalt ran. He was fast, the low gravity of Mars made him faster. An inhumanly high leap sent him crashing among the cyborgs.

With his neurogauntlet flashing, Tybalt set about his deadly work.

Alarms blared all over Kubik’s palace. The sounds of battle grew nearer. Heavily armoured myrmidons enclosed the Fabricator General in a phalanx of steel-caged flesh as they hurried him from his apartments to the main gate, but he was not safe.

Lesser priests came running behind, shouting out status reports with emotionless efficiency. There were a dozen Assassins, one said; there are only two, said another. More broadcast frequent updates to the situation on Terra: the other High Lords were dead, and now Vangorich was coming for him.

An explosion rumbled beneath their feet. In its wake, masonry clattered. Dust blew on a chemical wind.

Kubik screeched angry orders in swift binharic, sending his servants scurrying away. He had been assured the remaining Assassins would be caught. They were not, and now they were in his palace. Those responsible for this failure would be rendered down to components, if he survived.

‘Prime of primes, we have an armoured transport waiting at the main gate,’ said the myrmidon lord, Primus-Ultra Gangovich. They marched down the great staircase of the palace, the weapons mounts of the myrmidons swivelling as they tracked potential ambush sites. By the open gates, Mechanicus troops of all kinds looked out, weapons ready.

‘The Fabricator General comes!’ a seneschal shouted. ‘Hail the Omnissiah!’

More cybernetic Martians joined Kubik’s group, shielding their high priest with their own flesh and metal. They swept towards the door. On the plaza outside, a clade of Onager Dunecrawlers squatted around a legged, armoured transport, waiting to bear Kubik away.

‘Get the prime to the walker!’ ordered Gangovich. Heavily armed skitarii poured out of the palace. Kataphron battle servitors rolled into position around the plaza. The walker’s door dropped and Kubik was hustled towards it.

When he was ten metres from the door, the walker exploded. Shrapnel scythed out, felling the lead elements of Kubik’s bodyguard. Others crowded around him as a shot rang out, striking down a myrmidon who had placed herself in front of Kubik barely in time. Another shot cracked across the plaza, and another myrmidon died. Its head removed, its body mindlessly stamped away.

Kubik’s enhanced mind went into overdrive. The scene was a total loss. Skitarii primes shouted orders. Weapons of the most potent sort blazed in every direction, but the shots kept coming, each a kill. The shooter moved constantly. Every time their position was located, they had gone, and another shot sounded. Kubik’s bodyguard were being whittled away fast.

‘My lord, this way!’ someone said. Arms and mechanical appendages pulled at him, dragging him back into the palace. A shot hit an Onager with an audible plink. A moment later the construct exploded, slaughtering dozens of the Omnissiah’s faithful.

‘We will take you to Port Fabricata,’ said Gangovich. ‘We must get you out of the palace.’

‘No!’ Kubik managed. They were in the hall again, away from the doors. Outside, the shrieking discharge of high-energy weapons carried on unabated. Kubik extricated himself from the manipulators of his would-be saviours. ‘I will go to the chamber of the diagnostiad. I will be safe there. It is inviolable.’

‘As you wish, my lord,’ Gangovich said, and Kubik was again hustled away.

Kubik arrived in an antechamber to the diagnostiad by one-man bullet lift, whisked there through a depressurised transit tube. The palace was a long way away, and Kubik began to relax. Outside the diagnostiad, troops of all Mars’ many varieties mustered to protect the approach. Not only Kubik needed defence, but also the tech-priest choir who made up the core of the Martian world-mind.

A metre-thick wheel door separated the bullet lift from the diagnostiad. Disgengaging its complex security protocols calmed him. By the time the door rolled open again, he had begun to formulate a plan. He went into the great sphere, the door rumbling closed after him, and walked around the giant needle that housed the primary interface throne. The whispering voices of the hundreds of mind-linked tech-priests hissed on the air. Quiet. Safety. With a sigh, Kubik stooped. The weight of Mars was on him and he must know what occurred in the palace.

He attempted to open a datalink from his mind to the Martian noosphere. Nothing happened. Internal diagnostic checks indicated no malfunction in his augments. He went to a console embedded in the main gateway. He bent over it, and inserted a probe into an access socket. Immediately, he uncovered the problem.

There was but one conduit for the Motive Force and dataflow in and out of the chamber. Impossibly, somebody had put a block on it.

He retracted his mechadendrite from the console into his robe and made for the door. There was always a member of the Synod on duty there, watching over the machines.

‘I wouldn’t bother,’ said a voice behind him. ‘I got in here, don’t you think I would have taken the precaution of isolating you? He’s dead. It is a fine, fine place to hide, the diagnostiad. Only a couple of ways in, only one way out. And only one data line. A good idea of yours to come here, if only I hadn’t have been waiting.’

‘Drakan Vangorich,’ said Kubik. He turned to find the Grand Master of the Assassinorum behind him. ‘I am honoured. You came yourself.’

‘Well, you’re an important man, Fabricator General.’

Vangorich was wearing the robes of one of the muttering components of the diagnostiad. Kubik searched for an empty alcove. Sure enough, he found one. In Vangorich’s hand was a light needle pistol with an underslung plasma caster. It looked like something specifically devised to kill the master of Mars.

‘You knew I would do this,’ said Kubik. ‘That I would come here.’

‘Knew?’ said Vangorich. ‘I planned it! I am the Grand Master of Assassins, after all. One would hope such a person might be good at their job. But then, who can tell in these trying times? So few people seem to be fit for their office.’

‘You cannot kill me,’ said Kubik.

‘Can’t I? Your servants are distracted, and they are looking in the wrong place. We have plenty of time.’

‘Gloating before execution is the primary cause of failure of seven per cent of despots,’ said Kubik.

‘I’m not going to gloat,’ said Vangorich. ‘We’re going to talk. Actually, I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen, but it’s not gloating.

‘You know, I was raised in Temple Venenum. We are a subtle Temple, not like the others with their guns and alien technology and psychotic super-warriors. Ours is more genteel, we follow the way of guile, of poison, though not exclusively so. Take Krule, I am sure you have heard of him. He is of my Temple. He prefers to use his fists, but I, I have always had an affection for poison. It is so discreet. Poison a man and he won’t even know he’s been murdered. You can change the course of a river with the careful removal of a stone. That is the Assassin’s task. With poison, nobody need ever know who moved it.’

‘How apt,’ said Kubik. He was using his emotionless machine voice. ‘You are poison, Vangorich, corrupting everything you touch.’

Vangorich smiled, pleased with the comparison. ‘I never had you for a dealer in metaphor, Fabricator General. I do like to think I am subtle, like poison, but I am no corrupter. I prefer to think of myself as a healer. Many poisons are medicine, only at too high a dose are they deadly.’

Kubik bleeped in indignation. ‘The removal of the Grand Master from the High Twelve was done for sound reasons. We were remiss to allow your reinstatement.’

‘You were right to bring me back. It should have been done sooner.’

‘So that you might install yourself as ruler?’

‘So that I might prevent the deaths of billions of Imperial citizens,’ said Vangorich. ‘I have not assassinated very many people myself for a long time, Kubik. I am going to make an exception for you. Of all the petty, self-serving, childish behaviour I have witnessed on the Senatorum Imperialis, yours has been the worst by far. I was willing to forget and forgive, move forward with the Senatorum and rule correctly according to the will of the Emperor, however hopelessly idealistic His plans were. But then you had to disobey Thane and move Ullanor. That is what set me on this course of action. In a way, you are responsible for the deaths of the High Lords. Before you made your last greedy error, I was planning on just bullying you all to work together, but you made me realise I’d be better off without the lot of you. I don’t know what I should have expected, I suppose. You did want to secede from the Imperium. I’m an optimist, that’s my problem.’

‘That which is not a part cannot secede.’

‘Semantics. Without the Imperium, the Empire of Mars is dead, and vice versa. We are one people, and that will not change no matter how many times you say otherwise. You are a High Lord of Terra, and you betrayed your office and your Emperor-Omnissiah many times over.’

‘You cannot kill me with impunity.’

‘I can,’ said Vangorich. ‘I’m going to give you a choice. Poison comes in many forms, and not all of it is deadly to living organisms. There are poisons for machines, too. When I sent Red Haven here, I had my infocyte Yendl secrete a dataphage in the Martian noosphere. Now, there are formidable defences in your data vaults, but we of Venenum are clever. The phage has had time to mature, to learn its enemy. It’s been there for months, gathering information to make itself as deadly as it possibly can be. The noosphere has become a home from home. Every lock and keyhole, window and door is known intimately to it.’

Kubik’s mechanical limbs twitched. ‘You will topple an empire to teach me a lesson. Vanity.’

‘Of course not,’ snorted Vangorich. ‘I’m outlining your options. The first is this. You do nothing, I shoot you in the head with this gun which carries a neurotoxin so potent it will burn out every last organic nerve remaining in your body, and then I release the phage into the world-core. It may result in the destruction of Mars as a functioning civilisation, or it may just destroy billions of terabytes of very valuable information. Either way, it is a circumstance you will want to avoid.’

‘And the other alternative?’

‘You voluntarily shut down. After giving me your intelligence core, of course. The thing is, I don’t want you around any more, Kubik, but I would rather that everyone else thinks you are still in charge. It’ll be easier for all concerned that way.’

‘You wish me to kill myself and acquiesce to a replacement who will take my identity?’

‘That’s it. You must ask yourself, what is more important to you – yourself, as an individual, or the continued existence of thousands of years of knowledge?’

Kubik made a strange sound, a flurry of bleeps and twittering. It took Vangorich a moment to realise that the Fabricator General was laughing.

‘You cannot succeed in this. Give yourself up, Vangorich. I assume you have succeeded in disposing of our colleagues on the Council. Stop here. You have rooted out the rot. My death will accomplish nothing.’

‘It will make me feel a lot better,’ said Vangorich. ‘I do so hate a traitor.’

He straightened his gun arm, levelling the pistol at Kubik, and held up a device in the other. ‘Give me your intelligence core, or I swear I will kill this world while you watch.’ Vangorich stared at Kubik, his thumb ready over a button that could wipe away the accumulated wisdom of millennia.

‘You are bluffing.’

‘I assure you I am not,’ said Vangorich. ‘And you cannot afford to assume I am.’

Kubik wilted. ‘You have me,’ he said finally. ‘You slight my loyalty to the Imperium and ask me to prove my loyalty to Mars. Here it is, then, the last act of a true servant of the Omnissiah.’

Kubik threw back his hood, revealing a head underneath made entirely of metal. He cast down his rod of office and depressed a panel on the side of his skull. A fingerwidth column rotated and withdrew from his head. He pressed out the centre of the column and held it out to Vangorich.

‘My intelligence core. The essence of who I am is encoded herein.’

Vangorich came forwards and took it. He passed it over a machine at his belt that beeped and shone green. Vangorich put the intelligence core in his pocket. ‘You are finally doing the right thing.’

‘You will pay for this, in time,’ said Kubik, his voice slurring.

‘Maybe I will, but you are paying for your sins first. Goodbye, Fabricator General,’ said Vangorich.

The indicator lights of Kubik’s augments dimmed and went out. His limbs folded in on each other and he slid gracefully to the floor.

When he was down, Vangorich filled him with toxin needles.

‘A man’s work is never done,’ said Vangorich. He strode from the muttering diagnostiad into a small chamber lined with cogitator banks. A single, immovable red glass eye stared out from their centre. Vangorich stood in front of it and leaned in.

‘Come on, Kubik, I knew about this last bolthole. I can’t have you exloading your consciousness once I’ve gone.’ He tutted. ‘Don’t you know non-organic intelligence is forbidden? This really is the end for you.’

Whistling a jaunty tune, Vangorich got down on his hands and knees and yanked wires out of the cogitators until they stopped working. Then he took out a compact melta bomb and set it to go off where the connections had been thickest.

Just to be sure.

Twelve

Voice from the past

The Medicae Heroum was eerily quiet and smelled of unguent and healing agents. Machine glow lit up the treatment bays punched into the wall. Of the twenty, three were occupied by injured Inquisitorial agents. Veritus was situated in the very last. Wienand trod carefully, wary of disrupting the calm of the ward. Tanks of brightly coloured fluids bubbled in decorative brackets. Her servo-skull escort floated behind her. A second detached itself from an alcove in the wall and floated to the first. Wienand paused as the two exchanged security codes. The medicae skull swung about. A compact augur embedded in the polished bone of its eye socket swept her up and down with a broad beam of red light. An arcane, psychically sensitive pict unit in the other eye took a snapshot of her soul. A mechadendrite whipped out and jabbed her with a needle. She winced as it drank her blood.

‘Wienand, Marguerethe A, genetic imprint confirmed,’ said the skull. ‘Aura imprint confirmed. Security clearance Ultima Black confirmed. Welcome, Lady Inquisitor.’ Its machine-spirit satisfied, the medicae servo-skull withdrew to its alcove. Nestled inside, it became just another part of the room’s decoration.

The Coroner General of the Inquisition himself treated Veritus. Dressed in severe black robes, he waited for Wienand at the foot of Veritus’ bed.

‘Lady Inquisitor,’ said the coroner.

‘How is he?’

‘He will be dead soon,’ the coroner said baldly. ‘There is nothing we can do. Vangorich was thorough with his poison. The Inquisitorial Representative’s body is undergoing cellular collapse. I have tried every sanctioned technique and treatment, and a few that are not. He does not have long. I have interred him in a stasis field at his request, because he wished to speak with you before the end. Alone. I am sorry, Representative.’

The Coroner General bowed his head and departed.

Through the blue shimmer of the stasis field, Veritus looked impossibly small and frail. His armour had been removed and he was swaddled in bright white sheets.

Hesitantly she shut off the field, knowing that in doing so she signed his death warrant. Wienand had seen many people die in the course of her duty. They had never troubled her. This one death of a man who had tried to kill her did.

The field vanished like ice from a heated window. Veritus drew in a long rasping breath. His mouth gaped and his eyes rolled before he settled himself.

‘Wienand?’

‘I am here, Veritus.’

Age had him firmly now. He appeared so ancient that he should not be alive, his skin sagging so much his skull was visible beneath it. But his mortal frame contained life yet, and he fixed rheumy eyes on her and smiled.

‘I half expected Vangorich.’

‘So you know it was him,’ she said.

‘The conclusion did not require a great leap of logic. How long have I been suspended?’

‘Five days,’ she said. ‘I came as quickly as I could. There have been complications.’

‘Vangorich has assassinated the rest of the High Lords.’

Wienand nodded. ‘Most of them. Lansung and Verreault were set up to look like they murdered each other. Their bodies were discovered by Ekharth, but it is probable he is an Officio Assassinorum plant. Sark and Anwar had their souls sucked out by a member of the Culexus Temple. Gibran was killed within the Navigators’ Quarter in what looks like an internal squabble between the Houses.’

‘Vangorich’s hand will have mixed that pot.’

‘I don’t doubt it. The same can be said of Tull’s death. She killed herself, but I believe she was encouraged. She had a longstanding servant who vanished the night of her death. Zeck was killed by Krule. Only Kubik seems to have escaped, and I cannot be sure if he has. He may have struck a deal with Vangorich, the Paternova certainly did, but Vangorich held Kubik and Lansung most responsible for the ork crisis. If I know him, he will have gone after the Fabricator General zealously. And there is, of course, you,’ said Wienand. She laced her hands behind her back and averted her eyes, uncomfortable at the emotion she was showing. Then she remembered that was a particular posture of Vangorich’s and put her hands at her side.

‘I make the full house. I expected him to move against me, I attempted to prevent it, but I underestimated his cunning,’ said Veritus.

‘The poison, how did he administer it to you?’

‘On the Potus Terrae, in the observation gallery. It was the only opportunity he had. My own quarters were hermetically sealed.’

‘But you drank no wine nor took anything else from his hand.’

‘You did,’ said Veritus, ‘and you live. The wine was not poisoned.’

‘The pressure leak,’ said Wienand. ‘But our servo-skulls detected nothing in the gas mix that should have caused you harm, and like the wine, I was exposed. I am still fine. I have been thoroughly examined.’

Veritus nodded weakly. His papery skin rasped on the crisp sheets. ‘The gas mix was non-toxic on its own, but it contained an agent that reacted with the compounds my suit produces for me to breathe. A single molecular binding altered my serums to a form indistinguishable from the benevolent variety, but enough to turn them deadly in my system. It reversed my anti-gerontic medicines, so they attacked my genetic code where they should have preserved. By the time I was ill enough to notice, the damage was irreparable. I am too old to recover from this.’ He laughed drily. ‘Vangorich is clever. He used what was keeping me alive to kill me.’

‘Then I am at risk too,’ said Wienand. She began to pace. ‘I should stay away from the Palace. If I take refuge here in the Inquisitorial Fortress I should be safe enough. From there, I can set the Inquisition to eliminating him.’

‘Not yet. You cannot kill him. You must let him live.’

‘What?’ said Wienand, ceasing her pacing in surprise.

‘Vangorich will have contingency plans, he will have a means to govern. We have none. Remove him now, and civil war will engulf the Imperium. His cover-ups may look sloppy to us, but the doubt they will sow means nobody will trust anybody else. Succession struggles will tear the adepta apart. At this time in history, it will result in the dissolution of the dominion of man, and an end to our species. You must come to an arrangement with him.’

‘He will kill me.’

‘He will not. Wienand, he does not want you dead. I had the wine tested. It contained an antidote.’

‘But the poison was tailored to you, I was not at any risk.’

‘He went out of his way to protect you. Wienand, he has affection for you. You must work with him, for the time being. You are his weakness. He respects you, but his personal feelings cloud his judgement.’

‘I know how he feels,’ she said softly. ‘He would kill me regardless.’

‘He would. So you must not give him any reason to. You must bide your time. Convince him you are sincere in your support, only then will you be able to strike.’

‘That might take years,’ said Wienand.

‘Then so be it. Stability and continuity are what we need now. Let Thane have his Founding and the worlds of the Imperium rebuilt. Only through strength can we resist tyranny, and now we are weak.’

‘You don’t agree with what he has done, do you?’

‘Do you?’ countered Veritus. ‘Both of us have spoken of removing the High Lords in the past, though they rule by fiat of the Emperor Himself.’

Wienand thought a moment. ‘I cannot agree with his actions. He behaved unilaterally. Thane effectively made him regent of the Imperium. He did not need to go so far.’

‘In my opinion it was Thane’s appointment that emboldened him to do so.’ Veritus drew in a sharp, painful breath. He did not have long. Wienand knelt by his side.

‘His plan was to have you be Lord Protector, not he, or so he told me.’

‘A lie or a truth, it doesn’t matter. If I had been appointed, Vangorich would have dangled an antidote to the poison in front of me. He would have taken measures to ensure I didn’t refuse it. The only material difference is that he rules openly rather than manipulating events as he planned, and you are in the position I would have been in, supporting him for fear of something worse. I apologise for that, it is a heavy burden.’ Veritus paused a moment, coming to a decision. A fresh resolution. ‘Wienand, I must tell you things now that no other person alive knows.’

‘You have more secrets?’ she said.

‘My secrets have secrets,’ he said, and smiled. ‘Vangorich may have the best interests of the Imperium at heart, but he will fail. No man can rule the Imperium alone. You must keep the Inquisition independent until this episode is over. Remain vigilant against corruption. No one is immune. I have seen how Chaos can take the best of us. I was there on the Vengeful Spirit when the Luna Wolves were corrupted from within.’

‘The Vengeful Spirit? The Luna Wolves?’ Wienand frowned. ‘The Warmaster Horus’ ship? That’s impossible! No standard human has lived so long.’

‘I have. I did. I am over fifteen hundred years old.’ He reached out with his hand. When Wienand took it, he surprised her with the power of his grip. ‘I knew him, Wienand, I knew the Warmaster. Horus did not begin as anything other than a loving son of the Emperor, but he was proud and he was arrogant, and so when he was tested, he did not have the strength to resist. Do you not see? If he fell, anyone can. There are holes in the armour of the mightiest man. The influence of Chaos is pernicious, it is a slow poison. A man might think he does great good, when he does terrible evil. You must, you must…’ he took in a heaving breath. His eyes locked on to Wienand’s and he held her hand so tightly the bones ground together. Death hovered close at hand and when he spoke again, he did so quickly.

‘You must make sure the Inquisition does not lose its focus. The threats of the material universe are nothing when set alongside the dangers of Chaos. It can strike any time, corrupt any heart. The road to damnation is travelled with small steps and the paving is engraved with noble intentions. By the time we look up from our feet we find ourselves staring into the furnaces of damnation.’

‘No one of any influence like Horus’ has fallen to Chaos since the Heresy,’ said Wienand.

‘Our vigilance has weakened. There have been others, planetary governors among them, who have heard Chaos’ siren call. It is only a matter of time until someone of higher station treads the infernal trail beaten by the Warmaster. Beware of the Adeptus Astartes. They are our greatest defenders, but they can become greater enemies. They are not equipped for failure. I am afraid the end of this crisis may beget more terrible problems than we have endured yet. If the Space Marines fell to Chaos once, they might do again. The Luna Wolves… they… they showed me how it can happen,’ he gasped. ‘They were brought low by pride and false grievance. Their turning damned the Warmaster. Always look to the masses as well as the figureheads. Chaos strikes at both.’

‘I shall. I will!’

‘Do not lose heart. The lures of Chaos are manifold,’ he said, panting shallowly. ‘The powers of the Dark Gods are terrifying, but they are not boundless in their might, and they are opposed. There is light in the universe. You must have faith. The Imperial Creed is the truth, Wienand. I have seen the power of the Emperor at first hand, the way He shields us. He watches us all, He protects us. Never forget that. Even now, as He sits entombed upon the Golden Throne, He is with us. I take comfort in that, although I have seen so much that would test the most pious. My successor, the one you will choose to lead the Ordo Malleus, they must be pure. Anyone who opposes Chaos directly is exposed to its temptations. The finest soul can be blackened. They must be kept honest, focused not on their duty, but why they do their duty. Do you understand me?’

Wienand nodded. ‘I do.’ She looked down at the wizened example of humanity in the bed, so emaciated and frail his body made but a wrinkle under the sheets. She looked into his face wonderingly. Could a man truly live 1,500 years?

‘Now, there is something I have to give you. Press your palm to mine. Quickly!’

She shifted her grip on his hand. Veritus spoke swift words under his breath. Wienand cried out as a sharp pain stabbed into her palm, growing hot to the point of agony.

‘Hold still! Bear the pain! I pass to you the key to Titan. Without it, you will not be able to enter the monastery there.’

The pain grew. Wienand gritted her teeth. It reached a crescendo and she gasped.

‘You must go to Titan,’ said Veritus. ‘Seek out the Supreme Grand Master of the Grey Knights. Seek out Janus! Pass on to him our plans and tell him they have my blessing.’

His breath rattled in his chest. His eyes slid closed.

‘Is it true?’ she whispered. ‘Did you really know Horus?’

‘It is the truth,’ said Veritus. With a last effort, he pulled on Wienand’s hands, his knuckles white, half lifting his frail body. His face lost some of the lines of pain, becoming open and lighter. He smiled, pleased to share his great secret at last. ‘My name was Kyril Sindermann. I was chief iterator to the Sixty-Third expedition of the Great Crusade. I was present when Horus abandoned the love of the Emperor for the lies of the enemy. I was there as the Luna Wolves were corrupted from within. I was there at Isstvan III when brother turned on brother. I endured the Siege of Terra, and I knew Saint Euphrati, the first of the saints, as a friend.’

He sank back into the mattress.

‘And…’ he gasped. ‘And…’

Wienand leaned in. His last words were as arid and hushed as wind blowing over sand.

‘And I was there the day the Emperor slew Horus.’

A last, wheezing breath passed from Veritus’ lungs, followed by a thread of bloody dribble. His heart fluttered under the sheets, then stilled.

Wienand bowed her head. On impulse, she planted a kiss on Veritus’ – on Sindermann’s – dry forehead. As she pulled free from the dead man, she saw an open, bloodless wound in his palm. Her own twinged in sympathy and she rubbed at it. There was a small scar transecting the lines of her hand. Beneath it, she felt the lump of an implanted device.

She must go to Titan. But first, there was someone she must set free.

Thirteen

A new order

Vangorich stood up from the high table and raised his hands. ‘My lords and ladies of the Adeptus Terra!’ he proclaimed. His amplified voice boomed through a Great Chamber packed to capacity. Every tier of seating was full. Where the chairs had been removed, men and women stood. He looked up to a sea of expectant faces. ‘I am pleased today to address you as the new Lord Protector of Terra.’

The chamber erupted in uproarious cheers. Vangorich basked in them before silencing the crowd with a downward wave of his hands. ‘Thank you for your approval. It is some time since this Council has been so fortunate as to reign with the full backing of the estates of the Imperium. We are here before you with a new High Twelve. Sadly, our Lords of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica and the Astronomican have retired from public life, the psychic strain of the Beast having proved too much for even their powerful minds to encompass safely. The losses of this war have been grave, and they continue still.

‘I ask you to join with us in memoriam for Juskina Tull, whose bravery and faith in calling the Proletarian Crusade bought Terra many valuable hours before the arrival of the Last Wall could deal with the ork moon orbiting the Throneworld. Lady Tull has taken her own life. She believed herself a failure, but we shall remember her as a valiant heroine.

‘The changes go further, my friends, as you can see from the people arrayed at this table with me here. You will notice the Grand Provost Marshal of the Adeptus Arbites Vernor Zeck has also gone. He has relinquished his post on the Council to better aid the reconstruction efforts of the Imperium. Lansung and Verreault are no more.’ He became theatrically solemn. ‘I was due to instigate an investigation into their affairs. Already the Adeptus Fidicius have uncovered grave irregularities in Lansung’s accounting for the running of the Imperial Fleet. At this stage, we can only assume he argued with his partner in these crimes Abel Verreault, who will forever be known for his sluggish response to the orkish threat, and, after an argument, they killed each other.’

Hush greeted this announcement. ‘And so, allow me to introduce the new High Twelve of the High Lords of the Senatorum Imperialis.’ He held out his hand to a man on his right, a balding, square-set fellow whose face was crossed with a livid purple scar. ‘Oskar Lowis, new Lord Commander Militant of the Astra Militarum.’ He indicated a woman next to Lowis. ‘Iryss Gelthor, recently segmentum commander of the Obscurus Fleet, now Lord High Admiral. We all know Hektor Rosarind, whose position as Lord of the Imperial Estates will be invaluable at this time of reconstruction. Lady Wienand remains as Inquisitorial Representative.’

He smiled at Wienand. She glared stonily back at him, making no attempt to hide her feelings about Vangorich’s performance. Doubtless she would challenge him as to whether anyone in the chamber believed what he was saying. Some would, the rest would not care. She didn’t understand people like he did. They didn’t care about intrigue or the truth. They cared about their own positions, knowing that they were ruled and that they could continue with their petty power games unmolested.

‘Fabricator General Kubik returns to us from his forges on Mars,’ he said. ‘Master of the Administratum Tobris Ekharth thankfully returns also,’ he went on, bowing slightly to the Assassin who wore Ekharth’s face. ‘The Paternova of the Navis Nobilite has blessed us with a new envoy, Dovrian Ofar. In recognition of her service in the defence of Terra, Arbitrator Haas joins us as Zeck’s deputy. Henceforth she will be addressed as Lady Speaker for the Grand Provost Marshal.’

Vangorich had his doubts about Haas, but she was popular with the masses; there were demands that she be sainted, and he could use that. He went through the remaining pair. First was Ecclesiarch Ostulus – called in from the other side of the galaxy, he was sufficiently humble at his elevation to actually take his role seriously, and divorced enough from the politics of Terra to be easily manipulated. Vangorich could not risk telepaths upon the High Twelve, and so neither the Adeptus Astra Telepathica nor the Astronomican had retained their seats. Instead, he gestured to the last figure at the table, a mountain of muscle and armour, capped with a tall helm. ‘Captain-General Beyreuth of the Adeptus Custodes, the first time his august brotherhood have had a say in the government of Terra. It is only fitting that it should be so!’ he said emphatically.

Thunderous applause greeted the announcement. Vangorich suppressed a smile. He could get used to this. ‘Alas, there is much that needs to be done. I will not bore you lords and ladies with the terrible labours we of the High Twelve must endure. You have your own adepta and officios to run, the correct functioning of which is of inestimable importance to the recovery of the Imperium. We shall therefore be submitting a broad plan of reconstruction, reconquest and reconsolidation of our devising,’ by that, Vangorich meant his devising, ‘to you for approval. Then let us shoulder the numbing detail. For the next eighteen months, the Senatorum will not meet in full session as we have become accustomed to again recently. But rest assured, this is purely an emergency measure. As soon as the damage is put right, then the Great Chamber will resonate to the voice of democracy again!’

This was less enthusiastically greeted. Most of the crowds cheered, but a proportion did not. Knots of people were debating, gesturing at the High Table. These were the seeds of rebellion. It was the time to drive the reality of his power home. Vangorich sent a sub-vocal signal to his assets.

‘My lords and ladies! A further change, and then we must begin the serious efforts of debate and voting. The Lucifer Blacks, who so faithfully served this house since the time of the Heresy, have been disbanded.’

Outright shock greeted this pronouncement. Vangorich ploughed on regardless. ‘Their time of glory is past. Their inability to stop the eldar before the warriors of Captain-General Beyreuth were forced to step in was inexcusable. It is the nature of institutions to outlive their usefulness,’ he said pointedly. ‘Let us remember them for the heroes they were, and not the faded sentries they had become. Security for this house and the Imperial Palace shall now rest with the Officio Assassinorum!’ he shouted. As he did, three hundred Assassins stepped out onto the balconies around the hall. Faceless in their combat masks, armed with exotic weapons, they had exactly the effect Vangorich anticipated.

Everyone looked. Few people spoke.

‘I declare this first session of the new Senatorum Imperialis open!’ He stared full into the stony, disapproving face of Rogal Dorn. ‘Let the Emperor and His primarchs look favourably on all we shall achieve.’

The Cerebrium was mercifully quiet. Outside its many windows the life of Terra went on as it had since the ascension of the Emperor. But something fundamental had changed, and Vangorich was its architect. He needed time to think, but he wasn’t about to get it.

Beast Krule was sitting behind Vangorich’s new desk, Vernor Zeck’s lifeless head in front of him. Krule had his fingers laced above the head, his hands obscuring much of his own face. Krule’s eyes were unfriendly, that much was apparent.

‘Krule! What are you doing sitting in the dark there?’

‘I brought Zeck’s head. My mission is accomplished, Grand Master,’ he said.

Vangorich shook his head and grimaced. ‘You are a fine fighter, Beast, but you don’t hide your opinions. You know, it’s that sort of truculence that had you recommended for Temple Venenum’s close-combat school. I can’t imagine you quietly poisoning feasts, can you?’ Vangorich approached slowly. Krule didn’t move from Vangorich’s seat, but watched him with glittering eyes.

‘I listened to your speech,’ said Krule.

‘Oh?’ said Vangorich. He went to a drinks cabinet and poured himself a glass of brandy. The miniature augurs embedded in his rings sampled the vapour coming off the liquid. They did this automatically, over everything he ate or drank, even though the Grand Master prepared all his food himself.

‘Do you think any of them actually believed that?’ said Krule.

‘No. It doesn’t matter, though.’

‘And those creatures of yours on the Council…’

‘I’d hardly call Beyreuth a creature! Come on, Krule! I’m rather proud he agreed to join. Convincing Beyreuth was a monumental effort, the Custodes swore some time ago to remain detached from any duty beyond the guarding of the Emperor’s mortal remains. I had to visit him five times and say the words “eldar before the Eternity Gate” over and over again before he agreed to take the seat.’ He replaced the decanter in the cabinet. ‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked.

‘Assassins all over the Palace. Every man will know himself watched,’ said Krule.

‘They’ve always been there, they’re just in the open. They’re a safeguard.’

‘But now the people know they’re there. That’s a different sort of safeguard. That’s a threat.’

‘So you don’t want a drink. Fine.’ Vangorich dropped into a large chair. ‘Do stop speaking so slowly. It’s a sign you’re thinking, and right now I wouldn’t advise too much of that.’

Krule looked around the room, never completely taking his eyes off the Grand Master. The table that had accommodated the High Twelve had been removed and much of the furniture replaced.

‘This is a fine place to run an empire from. Not showy, modest. You’d never think a tyrant worked here.’

‘I’m a man of simple tastes,’ said Vangorich testily. ‘Krule, I know why you’re here.’

‘You don’t trust me.’

‘Of which this little display is ample proof that I was right not to!’ said Vangorich, waving his glass towards Krule. He calmed. ‘I thought that if you weren’t too heavily involved, it’d be too late for you to think about it and you’d fall into line. Evidently that didn’t work.’

‘So this is a small falling out? Don’t patronise me, Grand Master. When people lose your trust, they die. Can I trust you not to kill me?’

‘That all depends on what you do next.’ He set his drink down. ‘It’s your move, Krule, as the old cliche goes.’

‘You’re the one playing regicide, you’ve killed a number of kings. But there’s one left – you.’ Krule stood. ‘This isn’t going to be easy for me. You are the closest thing I have ever had to a father. You should have trusted me. If you had explained yourself, I might have seen it from your side.’ Krule cracked his knuckles and his neck, and took up a fighting stance.

‘You wouldn’t,’ said Vangorich softly. He too stood up.

‘No, I wouldn’t. You know me better than most, but I know you too. The worst of this is that you know what you have done is wrong.’

‘What would you have done?’ said Vangorich.

‘Reform. Reorganisation. Not this.’

‘What do you know of politics?’

‘Enough.’

‘Krule…’

‘My name is Esad Wire!’ snarled Krule.

Vangorich shook his head. ‘It’s not. It never has been. The one thing you are and will ever be is Beast Krule. From the moment they brought you to Temple Venenum, you were Krule. Esad Wire is a dead man, an illusion. Strip away the pretence, and all that is left is a killer. I’m very proud of what you are, Krule. You are the best I have.’ Vangorich undid his robes. Underneath was the same design of close-fitting suit he’d been wearing for years. ‘These robes are ridiculous. Wienand tried to tell me. She was right.’ He folded them and put them upon the chair. ‘I mean, they are very silly to look at, and don’t capture what I wanted in the slightest. But the worst of it is that they’re no good for fighting in.’

Vangorich’s age was indeterminate. Sometimes he appeared of middle years, at other times old, but he did not move like an old man. He bounded over the seat at Krule, drawing a slender-nosed pistol from nowhere. Krule dodged the first shots. Frozen toxin slivers shattered on the wooden panelling.

‘You’re slow,’ Krule said, as Vangorich landed on the other side of the room.

‘I was once the best of the Venenum Assassins. I always wanted to test myself against you.’

‘You’ll fall short,’ said Krule. ‘I’m going to kill you.’ He charged at Vangorich; his sense of time slowed by deeply implanted devices, he dodged the hypertoxin spat out by the Grand Master’s needler.

Vangorich dropped his gun. Slapping Krule’s fists aside he bent his body around the blows and moved back. Krule followed.

‘You are one of the best, the very best,’ said Vangorich. ‘This is madness. Stop. Join me.’

‘I am the best. You can’t beat me,’ said Krule.

‘I won’t have to,’ said Vangorich. He sidestepped Krule’s blurring fists again. ‘Pelagic gambit,’ he said. Krule stumbled. He shook his head. Vangorich delivered a devastating blow to the nerve cluster at the base of his neck.

Krule spluttered and staggered to the side.

‘Ordinance keystroke,’ said Vangorich.

With a yelp of pain, Krule crashed to the floor, his muscles locked solid. He balanced on his head, knee and outstretched fist, stiff as a statue that had fallen from its plinth.

‘That’s enough,’ said Vangorich. ‘Among your implants is a failsafe system. Obviously, I activated it. The key to regicide is to plan several moves ahead.’ He crouched down by Krule’s head. The Assassin’s eyes were locked open, and watering furiously. He made a strangled noise through clamped teeth. ‘It would be a shame to waste you,’ continued Vangorich. ‘I preferred you as a free thinker, Krule, you served Venenum well that way, but there is another Temple that will make good use of your talents and which does not require that characteristic. You’re going to have a little sleep. When you wake up again, we’ll have nothing to disagree about ever again, I promise.’

Fourteen

Fist of iron

A Space Marine’s sleep was short, but necessary. Even the Emperor Himself could not engineer out the human need for rest.

An insistent chiming woke Zerberyn. His enhanced physiology brought him from deep slumber to full awareness in a fraction of a second. A red lumen bulb, caged in battered wire, blinked over his cell door. Accommodation for officers and line warriors alike was basic in Kalkator’s fortress. Zerberyn’s smelled of damp and fresh ferrocrete.

‘What is it?’ he said.

The vox-emitter by the door crackled. ‘Forgive me, my lord. There is a Librarium serf here to see you. He says it is urgent, your command. I swore to kill him if he was lying, but he insists it is the truth.’

Zerberyn was off his pallet and by the door in a single stride. The door slid back into the wall. Brother Rantan stood over a cowering man. Zerberyn sneered. The serfs had become more cowardly of late.

‘My lord,’ said the serf nervously. ‘You told me to come and inform you the moment the Iron Warriors’ witch started making sense. Well, she has.’

‘I will visit her immediately. Summon Honorius to the Astropathicum.’

The witch twitched in her cradle of wires and chains. She spoke rapidly and so quietly the serfs transcribing her ramblings had to lean in close. The transliterator of the Dantalion’s astropathicum stood at the other side of her, listening intently. Zerberyn’s Lyman’s ear enabled him to apprehend her words, but he could make no sense of the meaning.

‘It is still gibberish,’ said Zerberyn.

‘No, my lord!’ said the serf. ‘She speaks in a standard astrotelepathic metaphor. You, my lord, would never hear it. The method is idiosyncratic to each sender and receiver, but there is a commonality of pattern. This is one of the simplest, the first mnemonic image-words an astropath learns.’

‘Someone wants us to hear this message,’ said Honorius.

The minutes trickled by. Eventually the witch’s mumbling became fainter, and she sagged in her restraints. The transliterator had the serfs read back what they had written to him, then he nodded, took the scrolls they had produced and approached the Fists Exemplar.

‘My lords,’ he said. ‘The witch has spoken. I have a message.’ The transliterator’s face was twisted in disgust at being so close to an unsanctioned pysker, and he kept turning his head back towards her. ‘The Black Templars are coming. Our sending got through.’

‘Tell me the message. Exactly,’ said Zerberyn.

‘I cannot offer exactness,’ said the transliterator regretfully. ‘But I can convey the meaning. The Last Wall is disbanded, the Beast is dead.’

‘Inform the others, this is a day for celebration!’ said Zerberyn. The serfs lost their newly cowed nature for a moment, and stood taller. Their excitement stimulated the witch’s mind, and she moaned in her fugue.

The transliterator held up his hand. ‘If I may, my lord. High Marshal Bohemond himself comes here. One part of the message is very clear, repeated several times.’

Zerberyn’s good humour vanished. ‘That is?’

‘Death to the betrayers of the Imperium of Man. Praise be.’

‘A difficult situation,’ said Honorius drily.

‘We’ve got to get out of this fortress, meet them in the void,’ said Zerberyn. ‘Bohemond won’t pause. He will attack immediately and destroy the city. Call the First Company to me, full armour. Honorius, muster the rest of the Fists Exemplar and have them take up position to seize the fortress by force, tell the captains to be ready but not to act. Then you and I must pay a visit to the warsmith.’

The veterans of the Chapter gathered quickly. They were raw as Space Marine veterans were reckoned, with most of the First Company killed and replaced several times over in the war against the Beast, but they were formidable nevertheless, and Zerberyn could count on their absolute loyalty.

They marched openly to the centre of the fortress. The Iron Warriors responded, occupying strongpoints where they could. In other places, Fists Exemplar and Iron Warriors came face to face. Zerberyn ordered his squads to match them, man for man, and left them staring at each other, armaments ready.

The fortress’ command hub was deep in the mountainside, a spherical sub-building independently supplied with power and air. One corridor approached the armoured doors, dead straight, two hundred metres long, every square centimetre covered by automated turrets and servitor-directed heavy weapons.

The majority of the First Company halted at the end. Zerberyn marched right down it, flanked by his command squad. Guns tracked his movement, but did not open fire.

He halted beside the door. His standard bearer planted his flag firmly, the clink of the pole on the ferrocrete echoing ominously. Every weapon whirred around to cover the First Captain. The door remained shut.

A hidden vox-emitter activated.

‘At last our alliance breaks,’ said Kalkator, his voice sounding down the corridor.

‘Not so, or we would already be fighting,’ said Zerberyn. ‘I come with news. High Marshal Bohemond is on his way to this system. He intends to kill you.’

‘He is already here,’ said Kalkator. ‘He arrived an hour ago at the Mandeville point. They will be in orbit of Immitis VII in less than a day.’

‘Why was I not informed?’

Kalkator laughed, his voice taking on that strange doubling it did sometimes. The second voice sent chills down Zerberyn’s limbs. It was wholly unnatural.

‘Because of this?’ said Kalkator.

‘They are traitors by nature,’ said Brother Mardath, Zerberyn’s melta-gunner.

‘You are the ones here in full battle array!’ said Kalkator. ‘I knew of this, and I could have murdered you in your sleep, and I did not. Do you really intend to slaughter your allies, after all we have been through?’

‘No,’ said Zerberyn. ‘This is a precaution. I do not intend to kill you, but to save you.’

‘Really now,’ said Kalkator. ‘How touching.’

‘If you do not come out, Bohemond will arrive here with his crusade. Already we outnumber you. I have two hundred and fifty brothers remaining, you but ninety. We are in your fortress. We will prevail, if we are forced to cross swords.’

Silence greeted Zerberyn’s remark. He glanced at Honorius. The ancient Librarian gazed resolutely ahead.

‘What do you propose?’ said Kalkator.

‘Come with me on the Dantalion. We must meet Bohemond away from this nameless moon, in the void.’

‘An easy way to present my head to your brother.’

‘I will speak with him, make him see sense,’ said Zerberyn. ‘Leave the Palimodes here in case you need to evacuate. I will make my best efforts to ensure that does not happen.’

‘It will happen. Bohemond is a fanatic.’

‘He is a noble son of Dorn!’ said Zerberyn angrily. ‘He will listen. If we wait, he will attack. If we meet him in the void your men will have a chance to escape.’

‘You ask me to abandon a third world. I do not have an infinite supply of planetary holdings, you realise. If we lose Immitis, my Great Company will be lost.’

Zerberyn looked aside, searching for the right words. ‘Kalkator, I can see no alternative. You have fought honourably by my side. I will not allow you to be killed by Bohemond. I give you my word. Staying here is untenable. Come with me. Bohemond will not open fire on the Dantalion. You do not have a choice.’

A klaxon sounded once. The doors slid open, four intersecting triangles splitting wide to reveal Kalkator waiting on the other side, flanked by his own veterans.

‘I agree,’ he said. ‘I do not.’

‘The Abhorrence approaches,’ said Shipmaster Marcarian. His eyes moved more than those of a hale man, darting about in their cage of half-dead flesh. The serf-crew of the Dantalion had learned to read their motions well. A close view of the Black Templars flared into life in the main hololith. Zerberyn watched it with Honorius and Reoch. The Apothecary’s presence discomfited him. As their time with the Iron Warriors had dragged on, Reoch had abandoned his civilised shell, becoming more savage.

‘She has suffered in the war,’ said Marcarian, a ribbon of drool leaking from the corner of his semi-paralysed mouth. His hololith officers read his desire, and painted highlight signifiers upon the Abhorrence.

‘Gravitic lash damage, mass impact trauma,’ said the Master of the Augur. ‘Their reactor reads with a four per cent erratic pulse.’

‘She has no attendant vessels,’ said Honorius. ‘She comes to confront us alone.’

‘The Black Templars are rash for sons of Dorn,’ said Apothecary Reoch. ‘I wonder how it would be to test our bloodlines against one another.’

‘Their fanaticism outstrips their wisdom,’ said Kalkator. ‘You would win.’

‘Warsmith, I ask you to be quiet. If Bohemond knows you are on board this vessel, then this communication will be short and the results bloody. Fists Exemplar never make mistakes. Don’t prove that truth a lie.’

Kalkator bowed his armoured head in acquiescence. ‘Neither I nor my men shall say a word, First Captain.’

‘I have a request for communication, my lords,’ said the Master of the Vox.

Zerberyn stepped onto a narrow-field hololith plate. ‘Activate.’

Bohemond’s scarred face materialised in the hololith display.

‘Zerberyn! You live. I feared to find an Iron Warrior at the helm of the Dantalion.’

‘I remain in command of my own ships, High Marshal.’

‘I see the Paragon, the Implicit, the Courageous and the Guilliman remain operational. You have done well. How many of you still live?’

‘Two hundred and forty-eight of the four hundred brothers I set out with remain.’ Zerberyn felt a thrill of disquiet at disclosing his numbers.

‘I am sorry. We have all suffered gravely in this war. And yet your survival is cause for celebration! Thane has reconstituted the Imperial Fists from the Successors. You and your warriors are the Fists Exemplar.’

Zerberyn bowed his head.

‘First, the Traitors must be crushed,’ went on Bohemond, ‘then you may join with us on Thane’s crusade to slaughter the remaining ork hordes and restore the Imperium to peace. Praise be to the Lord of Mankind!’

Zerberyn felt Kalkator’s eyes on the back of his neck. He could not reply.

‘Brother?’ said the High Marshal.

‘I cannot,’ said Zerberyn tightly.

‘Explain yourself,’ said Bohemond dangerously.

‘Throughout this war, the Iron Warriors have fought alongside us. Without their support and access to their intelligence, supplies, and bases, the Fists Exemplar would have been annihilated weeks ago.’

‘Then stand aside. We shall do the job for you, if you lack the heart,’ said Bohemond scornfully.

‘That I cannot do either. I have sworn an oath to preserve the life of the warsmith and his men. Depart, and we shall join you at a rendezvous of your choosing. But the Iron Warriors will be permitted to leave.’

A savage smile turned Bohemond’s ruined face even uglier.

‘Is that a threat of action against the Black Templars, Fist Exemplar? Be careful with your words.’

‘It is what it is. I have no wish to fight you. Allow me to fulfil my oath, and all will be well.’

‘Allowing Traitors free?’ said Bohemond. ‘That is far from well! To associate with Traitors is to become a Traitor. Prepare to be boarded. I will detain you. You shall be returned to Terra to face the judgement of the Inquisition. They shall determine your fate. I shall pray that they are merciful and offer you a quick death. Contact your daemon-worshipping friends and tell them that, Bohemond comes for their heads!’

Bohemond stepped back from the projector. Its focusing loops retrained themselves on the background. Zerberyn caught a glimpse of armoured pods and flat projection platforms.

‘He’s on the teleport deck,’ he breathed.

‘My lord! The Abhorrence is powering its main weapons array,’ called out a serf.

‘They’ve raised their shields!’

‘Damn him!’ snarled Zerberyn. ‘He came in expecting to fight. Prepare for combat. All ships raise shields and prime weapons.’

Tocsins sounded. Marcarian gave out a calm string of orders. The deck crew went into swift action, bringing the Dantalion ready. ‘Activate psychic shielding,’ he concluded. The Librarium serfs began to sing in their alcoves, weaving a subtle field of protection around the command deck.

Zerberyn looked helplessly on as the Abhorrence powered forwards. Bohemond meant to pass into the middle of his fleet.

‘We have multiple launch tubes coming online aboard the Abhorrence,’ said a serf.

‘They’re locking on to our weapons batteries and engines,’ said another.

A clamour of information filled the deck, drowning out the warding songs of the choir.

‘Captain Arcos of the Fourth demands to speak with you,’ said the Master of the Vox.

‘Demands?’ said Kalkator. ‘You are losing control of your warriors, First Captain.’

Zerberyn ignored the jibe. ‘Give me hololith.’

‘What are you doing?’ said Arcos without preamble. ‘I will not attack a fellow Adeptus Astartes, have you lost your mind?’

‘You will follow orders!’ said Zerberyn.

‘I do not follow orders from Traitors. I will contact Bohemond. This has gone far enough. I stand with him.’ Arcos cut the hololithic feed.

‘My lord, I have a message from First Sergeant Rost aboard Paragon querying your orders. They’re breaking formation,’ said the Master of the Vox.

‘Hold fire!’ shouted Zerberyn. The situation was slipping from his grasp.

‘The Black Templars are firing on us,’ said the Master of the Augur.

Through the vast oculus, they saw the Abhorrence’s weapons flash in sequence along both flanks and down its spine. The main hololith display filled with blinking icons denoting incoming ordnance.

‘Shall I return fire?’ asked Marcarian.

‘No!’ shouted Zerberyn. ‘Brace for impact. Hail Bohemond again!’

‘Massive energy spike, amidships of the Abhorrence.’

Honorius held up an armoured hand to his bare face. ‘The warp is disturbed, they are coming.’

Shapes of flickering mist coalesced towards the command deck blast doors. Twelve huge shapes began to form. The choirs sang louder, and half of the Black Templars’ emerging forms rippled, the helmets of the warriors twisting and melting into the underlying flesh. Three disappeared altogether to the sound of ghostly screams. The others affected crashed to the deck in a mess of steaming metal and flesh. The remainder arrived firing.

‘So you bring your Traitor friends aboard your own ship?’ boomed Bohemond when he saw Kalkator behind Zerberyn. He marched forwards, his massive Terminator suit denting the deck plating, his weapon blasting serfs apart.

Whether it was the Iron Warriors or the Fists Exemplar who returned fire first, the result was the same. Bolts filled the air from all three sides, the banging of their release and explosion drowning out the cries of terrified serfs. Marcarian, unable to move, was reduced to bloody rags of flesh hanging from his exoskeleton. The numerous weapons built into the bridge’s walls and ceiling opened up at his death, catching the Black Templars in a murderous crossfire. Bolts spanged off their thick armour, but there were more potent weapons on the bridge. Honorius ravaged them with psychic fire, and one by one they began to fall.

‘Stop! Stop!’ shouted Zerberyn. He moved to intercept Bohemond as he marched towards Kalkator, but the High Marshal slapped him aside. His power fist ruptured the plastron of Zerberyn’s armour, lifting him high and slamming him into a serf’s station.

‘You shall die the traitor’s death, Kalkator!’

‘You will have to catch me first,’ said the warsmith.

‘I will gladly kill you here, if that is what the Emperor demands!’ Bohemond emptied his storm bolter into the warsmith’s chest, but Kalkator weathered the storm, his armour’s superior construction protecting him.

Bohemond let out a thunderous war cry.

‘No mercy! No remorse! No fear!’ He lumbered into a charge.

Kalkator was ready. With impossible strength he slammed the High Marshal in the head, breaking the adamantium and ceramite of his armour, and sent him toppling backwards. Bohemond came to rest on the floor, struggling to get back to his feet. Kalkator advanced on him, gun out. Bohemond got onto his knees, wrenched off his helmet and cast it aside.

‘See, Zerberyn,’ said Bohemond. ‘See what you ally yourself with. This Iron Warrior is possessed of unnatural vigour! He has given himself over to fell powers to make himself mightier. You have sorely disappointed me, Zerberyn. Have you also embraced his sorcery? You disrupted the transit of my men. I should have blasted you from the void the moment I saw you.’

Zerberyn heaved himself out of a tangle of broken components and metal. His armour leaked gas from its ruptures, frothing ceramite gels bubbling around the cracks. The sounds of fighting diminished and stopped as the last of Bohemond’s Black Templars died.

The Fists Exemplar trained their guns on the Iron Warriors. A tense silence fell, too thick to be broken by the groans of the wounded and the dying.

The ship rocked and rumbled under the bombardment of the Abhorrence, but the shields held.

‘It is no sorcery. This vessel was modified to withstand the worst the Rubicante Flux could marshal. The Librarium choirs confound cross-warp teleport as easily as they do the daemon. You accuse a man who has spent his entire life fighting Chaos.’

‘You will burn for all time in the fires of the Emperor’s judgement,’ said Bohemond.

‘Call off the attack,’ said Zerberyn. ‘This ends now.’

‘Never!’ spat Bohemond. ‘I would rather die fighting than offer succour to the Traitor Legions. They are an abomination in the holy sight of the Emperor. They must be purged. If you will not do it, then I will, though I die in the attempt.’

‘See him throw his life away! Is this what you want to serve, Zerberyn? This frothing zealot? The Emperor himself denounced his own worship,’ said Kalkator. ‘He scolded the Word Bearers for seeing him as a god. And yet you will listen to the words of this man, who with his idolatory spits in the face of the Emperor you purport to follow.’

‘The Emperor is not a god,’ said Zerberyn. ‘It is you who should be censured, not I.’

‘There is another possibility, Zerberyn,’ said Kalkator. ‘Horus, Perturabo and the others were correct. The Emperor lied to us all, he denied the truth of the warp not to protect us, but to keep its secrets to himself. When it appeared his sons were stumbling too close to the truth of it, he forbade the use of Librarians. He intended all along to be a god, and he used the human race to make it happen. He was stopped just in time.’

‘Lies,’ said Bohemond. ‘The Emperor is divine. The Emperor protects!’

‘Which is it then, Bohemond?’ said Kalkator. ‘The Emperor spoke the truth, and he is not a god, and you are wrong, or he is a god, and you are right, which makes him a liar? Do you not see? He does not care about humanity, the whole purpose of his crusade was to further his own goals of ascendance. He didn’t wish to oppose the Gods of Chaos, he wanted to become one!’

‘Lies, lies!’ said Bohemond. ‘End him, Zerberyn. Turn your bridge weaponry on him and wipe his stain from the galaxy.’

‘Would you do that, Zerberyn?’ said Kalkator. ‘We are the true champions of mankind. We serve ourselves, but in doing so we preserve humanity. Might is right. To save our species we must embrace the powers of this universe, the great Gods of Chaos. We do not do this because we are evil, we do it because we must. What are you, Zerberyn? What are the Fists Exemplar?’

Oily swirls of light played through the oculus as a void shield collapsed. ‘We are a wall that defends the Imperium,’ he said dully. His heart was breaking.

‘You are a bastion in a fortress of lies, and this warrior, this Black Templar, who wears his fanaticism so openly, is its castellan. Kill him!’ urged Kalkator.

‘They will kill you too, Zerberyn, once they are done with me,’ said Bohemond.

‘We have fought alongside you for months, brother,’ said Kalkator. ‘Where were they?’

Zerberyn looked from Bohemond to Kalkator.

‘Call off the attack,’ Zerberyn said one last, hopeless time to Bohemond.

‘Never,’ said Bohemond.

A single shot was all it took. Bohemond’s head disappeared in a mist of blood, his body locked in place by his armour. Zerberyn blinked stupidly at the bolt pistol in his hand. He had no recollection of drawing it. The little litany he had for the weapon went through his head. It was Umbra-pattern. It lacked the refinement of post-Heresy models, 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.

Without thinking, he had made his decision. He had damned himself.

‘All ships, open fire. Destroy the Abhorrence,’ he ordered.

Faces paler than lack of sunlight could explain looked back at him.

‘Now!’

The crew moved into action. Corpses were heaved aside by repair teams. Where needed, backup stations were brought into operation. Fresh serfs were admitted onto the bridge. Zerberyn walked to the command dais and stood by Marcarian’s corpse.

‘My lord. Courageous and Implicit are breaking from attack,’ said the Master of the Augur. ‘I have reports of fighting breaking out aboard the Guilliman.’

‘Tell Captain Venthryn to contain it or it will be his head. Courageous, Implicit, come about. Open fire on the Abhorrence or be declared enemies of the Chapter.’

Arcos’ horrified face flickered into view.

‘Then we are enemies,’ said Arcos. ‘You betray your oaths!’

‘Weapons batteries, open fire on the Courageous and the Implicit,’ said Zerberyn coldly. ‘That is the price of their disloyalty.’

The void erupted with chaotic firing as the Fists Exemplar Chapter fell apart. The Implicit took a punishing broadside as it attempted to turn and flee, wrecking its engines and leaving it drifting out of control. The Courageous took a different tack, coming directly at the Dantalion with all weapons blazing. The Abhorrence’s fire redoubled, encouraged by the split in the Fists Exemplar.

‘Courageous is building to ramming speed!’ shouted the Master of the Augur.

‘He means to take us with him,’ said Zerberyn. ‘Concentrate all fire forward!’

The Courageous came down towards them, void shields flaring as they shunted the power of Dantalion’s fury into the warp. At a distance of metres, it skimmed past the Dantalion, close enough for protruding spires on both vessels to be sheared off by the pass. The Dantalion shuddered violently as Courageous burned its engines at maximum, and powered past.

‘The Courageous is escaping!’

‘Ignore it! Destroy the Abhorrence,’ said Zerberyn.

The Black Templars battle-barge was beset on all sides, fire from the Paragon, Guilliman and the Dantalion bringing down one shield after another. With a low purple light, its final void shield gave out, and the combined barrage of the three Fists Exemplar ships slammed into it. The Abhorrence came apart in a shower of fire. Apothecary Reoch cackled like a child at a victory display. Honorius stood silently, his face lit by the explosion.

‘We are fortunate. If Bohemond had commanded the Eternal Crusader, we would all be dead,’ the Librarian said quietly.

Kalkator’s gun came up to Zerberyn’s face. He pressed it lightly against Zerberyn’s temple. Its muzzle was still warm from firing.

‘Who are you, First Captain Zerberyn? Are you a Fist Exemplar still? Will you slay me as you slew Bohemond? Was all this fratricide a terrible mistake?’

Zerberyn turned. Kalkator’s boltgun slid around his face until it was in the centre of his forehead. Zerberyn pressed his face against it and stared into Kalkator’s eye-lenses.

‘A Fist Exemplar is never mistaken,’ he said. He knelt. Behind him, the crew and Space Marines of the Dantalion followed his example.

‘Iron within, iron without,’ he said.

Once free of the Immitis System, communications became possible again. The last vestiges of the Green Roar clung hard to the Iron Warriors’ home, and Arcos, captain of the Fourth Company, last loyal officer of the Fists Exemplar, suspected that was not chance. Having hauled over at an isolated mining colony, Arcos spent some time communicating with other members of the Last Wall. By these means, he discovered that Maximus Thane was at Eidolica, once home world of the Fists Exemplar. As soon as this information was known, Courageous made all speed there to find Phalanx in high anchor over the Alcazar Astra. It could have hid in the nightside of the world, but in a show of machinic sympathy with the downed star fort, Dorn’s citadel stood in the full light of the blazing Eidolican sun. The choice lifted Arcos’ battered spirit.

The joy that greeted the Courageous’ arrival at Phalanx turned sombre as it became apparent that there were no more ships coming, and there were only twenty-two surviving Fists Exemplar. The battered cruiser was escorted in with full pomp. But when Arcos exited his vessel grim-faced and demanded to be conveyed to the Chapter Master immediately, the last smiles died on lips that moved with many questions.

Arcos would provide answers to no one but Thane.

At Arcos’ request, Thane dismissed his honour guard and advisers, leaving Arcos and he alone. Thane occupied the throne of Inwit, a high seat in a massive dome devoid of any other furniture. Bathed in a shaft of diamond white light so bright it seemed distilled from the system’s deadly sun, Thane listened in furious silence to Arcos’ report. Arcos knelt to deliver it, his eyes fixed firmly on the floor.

‘Bohemond is dead,’ Thane said, when Arcos had finished. ‘And Zerberyn turned.’ His voice caught in his throat. Zerberyn had always been impetuous, creative in interpreting his orders, but he had been a warrior of uncommon valour. ‘Honorius too.’

‘Yes, my lord. We spent too long with the Iron Warriors. Some of their evil must have wormed its way into his heart. Apothecary Reoch is with him, and some two hundred others.’ Arcos looked up. ‘Allow me to atone. Let me rebuild the Fists Exemplar and I swear we shall become a byword for opposition to the Traitors. We shall return to the Rubicante Flux and hunt for them through the reefs of the immaterium. We shall be dauntless, and never rest. This shall be my oath.’

Thane gripped the armrests of the his throne. The shaft of light shining hard from above cast his face into craggy shadow. ‘You have sworn many oaths, Captain Arcos. You have dishonoured them all.’

‘My lord, I do not know what I can say.’

‘You can say nothing.’ The anger of Thane’s voice was awful for its calmness. ‘You have consorted with Traitors, and failed to prevent the greatest shame to befall the Adeptus Astartes since the Heresy war.’

‘Please let me atone.’

‘No. The Fists Exemplar will not be reconstituted. You and your warriors will submit yourselves to the Master of Recruits, and you shall be inducted into the Imperial Fists. A new Chapter shall be raised, and take Alcazar Astra as their home.’

‘If we are to obscure the metal of our armour with the yellow of the Imperial Fists, there will be no more Fists Exemplar left. The Chapter will die. Please let me save the memory of our predecessors. Do not let one moment of madness undo a millennium of loyal service.’

‘There will be no memory. No monuments or songs. The name of the Fists Exemplar shall be struck from Imperial records. Every mention, every honour, every report shall be hunted down and expunged from history. It is our shame that ours is the first Chapter to fall to Chaos since the Heresy. We do not deserve to be remembered.’

Arcos stood in disbelief. ‘My lord, we must be allowed to salvage the honour of Oriax Dantalion. We cannot let his legacy die here.’

‘There is no honour left!’ shouted Thane, suddenly wrathful. His armoured fist slammed into the throne arm. ‘Stubborn, prideful, convinced of our own rectitude. So arrogant we remained that when our star fort fell we would not ask for aid from the Adeptus Mechanicus. Rather defy the wrath of a star, than admit to any wrongdoing! Those were the gifts of Dantalion to our Chapter. They have served us poorly. Our record shall be erased.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Arcos. He bowed his head.

‘You should have acted, you should spoken up. There is no situation so dire as to render an alliance with the Traitors expedient, and the Iron Warriors no less. As penance, you shall descend to Eidolica. You shall oversee the destruction of the records of the Fists Exemplar. Your tears will wet the relics of our order as you consign them to oblivion. As you watch our history burn to ashes I pray you remember: the Traitor can never be called friend.’

‘My lord,’ said Arcos. ‘We shall see it done.’

‘Our name shall be forgotten. Let none speak of it evermore. We are the Imperial Fists now and forever, let that be our legacy. It is a pure one,’ said Chapter Master Thane.

No mention of the Fists Exemplar passed Thane’s lips again in his long life, and he would not tolerate the name being said in his hearing until the day he died.

Fifteen

Warriors of Titan

There was a shift in the cutter’s centre of gravity, a lurch in its smooth acceleration as mass detached itself. In the cramped quarters of the cutter’s command deck, Lady Inquisitor Wienand watched the infiltration craft speed away upon a hololithic display. Its matt-black hull was lost to sight quickly. When it engaged its sophisticated baffles and augur-blinds it winked out of existence, a ripple on the stars, and then it was gone.

She made a silent prayer to the Emperor, asking if she had done the right thing.

Lhaerial Rey piloted the infiltrator. The Imperium needed allies. She hoped the harlequin might be one, some time in the future. Wienand had no doubt at all that she would get away from Sol.

There were three crew on the bridge: a shipmaster pilot, an augur and weapons operative, and a transmechanic magos. All of them wore the Inquisitorial barred I as much in their minds as they did on their clothes. They knew better than to ask questions.

Wienand retreated to her quarters. She fell into a deep and dreamless sleep of the kind she only experienced in the void, until Rendenstein came and woke her gently.

‘Lady, we approach Saturn. I thought you might like to see.’

‘Thank you.’ Wienand touched Rendenstein’s hand where it rested on her shoulder. The two of them had drifted apart physically over the long months of the war against the Beast. Having her there still brought comfort. She hoped Rendenstein understood.

Wienand had felt better. Her teeth were furred and her breath stank. She needed to stop, soon. She considered stimms to carry her through, but that road ended badly for many. She needed to become tougher. There was precious little rest in the life of an inquisitor. There would be none for her, not while Vangorich reigned in all but name.

She rinsed her mouth out with water warm from the vessel’s recycling systems and tainted with iron.

Rendenstein fell into step with her as she left her quarters. These were relatively large and well appointed. The ship, though small, was designed to carry only a single inquisitor and their retinue.

Raznick waited outside. He too fell in with her, walking at her left shoulder, Rendenstein at her right. The cutter was two hundred metres long in total, the habitable section considerably less. They were on the command deck in seconds.

Wienand stopped at the threshold of the door. Through the oculus of the ship Saturn turned serenely, its rings shining in the sunlight over a striated body the colour of recaff mixed with dairy fats. Its many moons paraded round it like pearls. Wienand had been all over the galaxy, but this world had always been special to her, if only because Saturn was forbidden. Unlike its brother Jupiter, Saturn was not ringed by orbital habitats. Remnants of those predating the Imperium added to its flock of moons, but there was nothing inhabited, no mining platforms, no gas extraction or research stations. Compared to the rest of the over-exploited solar system, Saturn was pristine.

The cutter flew around the gas giant, skimming the rings at distances as little as twenty thousand kilometres. A caramel orb rose from the shoulder of the giant, massive as a planet, dwarfing its brother and sister moons.

‘Titan, my lady,’ said the captain. He adjusted his course, pointing the sharp nose of the cutter directly at the hazy world.

Red lights and alarms flashed over every display.

‘Halt, and turn back. This world is perdita by order of the Holy Inquisition of the Emperor of Mankind. Turn back or be destroyed. Halt,’ began a message, and then repeated on a loop.

‘Inquisitor Wienand, Marguerethe, A. Ident code Sigma Five Full Black Delta. Requesting permission to land.’

‘Code not accepted. Halt, and turn back. This world is perdita by order of the Holy Inquisition of the Emperor of Mankind,’ said the message again. Warnings bleeped. The ship’s master of augur and arms spoke.

‘They’re locking on to us. Not much, but it’ll finish us if they fire.’

Wienand flexed her hand. The implant that had burrowed into her flesh from Veritus hampered her movement, grinding against her tarsal bones. She yanked off her glove.

‘Give me a data reader, key it in to the vox. Broadcast it to the source of that message.’

‘Yes, my lady. In what form is the data to be read?’

‘I don’t know, try them all,’ she said. More alarms went off.

‘Halt, and turn back. This world is perdita by order of the Holy Inquisition of the Emperor of Mankind. Turn back or be destroyed,’ said the message.

The master of augur and arms indicated a green panel. She flexed her hand again and spread it over the glass. The machine tried every wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum before switching to audible bands. Finally, the thing in her palm vibrated and the device chimed.

‘Halt, and–’ The message stopped.

The vox shifted. A human voice replaced the machine’s.

‘Veritus is dead,’ it said.

‘He is dead,’ said Wienand. ‘I am the Inquisitorial Representative to the Senatorum Imperialis, one of the High Twelve of the High Lords of Terra. Veritus nominated me as his successor as liaison between the Inquisition and the Grey Knights Chapter, Adeptus Astartes, number six, six, six. I wish to meet with Supreme Grand Master Janus.’

The reply was immediate. ‘Have your ship follow these coordinates to high anchor. Lady Inquisitor, you may break orbit and descend, but only you. Fail to obey these two instructions or any further forthcoming, and your vessel will be destroyed.’

The voice snapped off. The master of augur and arms attempted to raise them again, but the void remained silent.

‘Friendly, aren’t they?’ said Raznick.

‘We should come with you,’ said Rendenstein.

‘I’ll go alone,’ said Wienand. ‘I should be safe enough.’ But she didn’t believe it.

Wienand’s ship dropped through the upper layers of Titan’s hazy gas envelope. The void was lost to sight. Saturn’s domineering presence was visible for a few seconds longer as a brown disk in the haze, and then that too was gone and she was enclosed by yellow organonitrogen murk.

Hands awkward in the gauntlets of her void suit rested lightly on the shuttle’s sticks as the roar of atmospheric entry built around the craft. Augur pulses showed nothing dangerous around her, but she scanned the close horizon through the cockpit automatically, tensely searching for hazards she couldn’t possibly see. Reflections on the visor of her suit limited what she could see as much as the organic soup of the air. Flying blind, she was reliant on the craft’s suite of sensors. The altimeter rolled down. The hull’s temperature rose. A brief period of turbulence marked her transition from the upper atmosphere to the lower. The haze thinned, becoming clouds. Through the auspex of the ship she received visual representations of the ground below, and fleeting visible-light glimpses of the landscape.

She fired the ship’s rockets, increased gain to its grav systems. Inquisitorial craft were outfitted with the pinnacle of Adeptus Mechanicus technology, and the approach was smoother than a lesser ship’s. The craft levelled out. She banked round, flying in broad circles in search of a beacon. The hull’s outer temperature plummeted now re-entry friction had stopped. Down the thermal gauge went, impossibly low; Titan was beyond cold. Wienand dropped lower, skimming over a volcano spewing ammonia-water ice. Thick, greasy snowflakes of methane-ethane splatted on the cockpit. Lakes of oily hydrocarbons passed under the ship’s keel, fed by lazy rivers.

Around she went again. Various indicators blinked amber on the ship’s flight boards. The temperature and atmosphere taxed its systems.

‘Where are you,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’

A nav beacon lit up on her main display, pulsing bright yellow in a tangle of contour lines. Breathing a prayer of relief, she swung the ship around and locked on to the location, relinquishing control to the ship’s machine-spirits. The craft flew over more of the strange, mottled landscape. Titan appeared habitable when viewed from safety. It was a lie. If she stepped outside without her suit she’d die. She had seen airless worlds and death planets, and worlds consumed perpetually by fire, but never had she had cause to come somewhere as cold as this. Titan exceeded all parameters Terran life had set itself. It was hard to imagine Space Marines living there.

Jagged peaks of ice appeared ahead. At such temperatures, water took the place of rock. Low gravity allowed tectonic upthrust to make them oddly tall. They were fairy peaks, something from a child’s tale.

The ship flew right at them. Wienand looked long at the approach vector, described on a glass screen as a tunnel of boxes rushing over the representation of the ship. She looked back at the mountains, seeing no sign of any structure. Perhaps this was how the Grey Knights dealt with unwanted visitors. Staged accidents were easier to brush away than unexplained weapons discharge.

An ice cliff came at her, black as night and harder than granite. She held her breath. At five hundred metres, green light shone from no discernible source, illuminating a gate of plain plasteel for less than a second before blinking out. The gate vanished again, the cliff becoming totally black in the hydrocarbon snow. Wienand let the ship fly right at it, trusting the light to be an invitation to an open way, and not a quick route to death.

The gate was open. Her lighter’s beams shone into a small, rectangular space, big enough to accommodate a single Space Marine gunship, no more. She swore loudly and slammed on the front jets to full burn. A smooth ice wall rushed at her, then she stopped abruptly, slamming painfully into her seat restraints.

A flashing light drew her attention to a datascreen. Her ship had been caught in a gravity sling like a ball in a glove.

‘Land,’ said a voice through the vox.

She activated the ship’s landing cycle and the sling shut off. Her lighter touched down on a metal floor. A moment later it began to sink down a shaft. Hardened plasteel runners were embedded directly into the rock-ice. Every thirty metres dim yellow lumens punctuated the shaft, the only lights besides those of her ship.

The elevator came out into a huge cave. The platform touched down and rotated. Metallic clanks sounded underneath her, and the ship was conveyed sideways, then backwards, and brought to rest in a docking bay carved from the ice of the moon. There were many of these stalls, each one occupied by a Thunderhawk in a bluish-silver livery.

Wienand waited in her restraints for further instruction. ‘Hello?’ she said into the vox. ‘What do I do now?’

Receiving no reply, she decided to leave. The gauge showed the temperature in the hangar to be minus-fifty degrees, warmer than the surface, still ultimately deadly.

The ship’s ramp opened. She punched open her belt locks and exited into the hangar. It glowed with soft blue light under which the Thunderhawks slept, glittering with carbon frost. Water ice furred their heraldry of a book transfixed by a sword. There were other ways into the hangar, she saw, and other kinds of ship. A broad ramp led lower into the icy bedrock, marked with the imprints of tank treads.

She turned around, seeking a way out. Seeing none, she went to the cave wall where she found a door, hidden by a natural camouflage of frost.

‘This is Inquisitor Wienand, I have done as instructed. Are you going to leave me here?’ The imperiousness of her voice in the silent chamber abashed her.

Lights blinked over the door. With a sighing groan, it cracked open, shedding plates of ice and showers of hoarfrost upon the threshold.

Beyond the door stood a Space Marine unlike any other she had ever met. He was ageless in the way of the Adeptus Astartes, but carried an air of great venerability that outmatched even that of Veritus. His face was leathery, tanned by the light of myriad suns, and wrinkled with fine lines. The skin was folded with age over his eyes, one of which had a pronounced squint – the mark of an old injury, perhaps – and his forehead was a mass of long-service studs.

In the deadly cold he was barefoot and wore simple robes. Plumes of steam blew from his nostrils with each steady breath. Despite his great age he was tall and proud, his physiology distorted by his enhancement, neural plugs glinting in the grotesque musculature of his arms, but it was his psychic potency that took her aback. Wienand was no psyker, although many inquisitors were, but still she could feel his power emanating from his eyes. A nimbus of light from some internal source shone around his head. Wienand was overwhelmed by a sense of the holy; this was a warrior saint. She was one step from the Emperor Himself, and she fought the urge to prostrate herself before him.

‘I am Supreme Grand Master Janus of the Grey Knights,’ he said. He looked on her.

She felt the touch of his mind on hers and she shivered.

‘I am Inquisitor Wienand. I bring you news of a reorganisation within our ordos, and the formation of an order of specific relevance to your brotherhood.’

‘Sindermann told me this day would come. I grieve for his passing. He was an old friend and will be missed. But it is best not to dwell on the past. What has gone cannot be helped, only the future may be saved. I sense now is the time for new friendships.’ He stood aside, and held open his arms in welcome. ‘You may enter, Lady Inquisitor Wienand. Come, we have much to discuss.’

Sixteen

Fury of the Space Marines

Four hundred Space Marines came to Terra. A company each from two of the newly founded Chapters, the Halo Brethren and the Sable Swords. Flying with them were two hundred Imperial Fists of the First, Fourth and Fifth Companies. This time, the crowds were not out to meet them.

‘I thank you for the honour of leading this expedition, Lord Thane.’

Unhelmeted, Qublicus Amar, lord of the Sable Swords, was forced to shout over the noise of the Thunderhawk as it battled its way down through Terra’s atmosphere. ‘It has been said that you should lead it. The Imperial Fists have accrued many battle honours since the fall of the Beast.’

‘Not I,’ said Thane. He did wear his helmet, and his vox-grille boosted his voice. ‘Vangorich was my error. I have come to put it right, but I should not be the one to lead. My judgement regarding the Grand Master is compromised.’

Amar resettled himself in his drop cradle. The Thunderhawk banged and leapt as it encountered a pocket of rising warm air.

‘It is over a century since you last trod the Throneworld’s surface, you could not have predicted what happened. A new golden age approaches, Thane, and your efforts are to thank. Beyond Terra, the Imperium has recovered. Hundreds of worlds have been reclaimed and rebuilt. The armies of the Imperium are larger and better organised. New fleets ply the stars and the warp, while the eyes of the Inquisition are everywhere alert to new threats. It will soon be time to crusade again, and expand our borders in the name of the Emperor.’

‘All you say is true. But Terra itself, and many other worlds have suffered. That is on me. I cannot lead this expedition.’

Thane would speak no more of it, and Amar let him be to check his equipment one final time.

Thane had expected a fight, but the taskforce did not get one. Kubik greeted them cordially from Mars. No fire was loosed at them by star forts or solar defence ships. The new orbital fortresses greeted the Space Marines and offered their fleet berths.

Several tense hours ensued after the fleet put in to high orbit over Terra. A party of High Lords met with Thane and Amar aboard the High Wall, a new Goliath-class star fort in orbit over the Palace. After swift negotiation, twenty Thunderhawks flew to the surface. Thane suggested Amar have the gunships put down in a ring in the Fields of Winged Victory. It seemed apt somehow. The paving was dirty and cracked, the spires surrounding it tarnished and in ill repair. Thane had a feeling this neglect was only a taste of what there was to come.

Unopposed, Thane and Amar walked down the ramp of the gunship and onto Terra’s hallowed surface. Squads of Space Marines spread out in defensive order. Land Speeders dropped from passing transports made controlled descents to the surface then raced off into the Palace.

‘My lords Chapter Master,’ said Captain Ethratan, Second Captain of the Sable Swords. ‘There are no signs of an enemy anywhere.’

Thane looked around the Fields. They were a good place to land, so big ambush was impossible. ‘Everyone wants Vangorich gone. We’ll suffer no attention from the Adeptus Militarum, Arbitrators or Adeptus Custodes,’ he said to Ethratan and Amar. ‘But there will be opposition. Vangorich’s Assassins are loyal to him, and he has expanded his officio since I was last here. Be careful. Watch the shadows. This will not be an easy fight.’

‘Understood, my lord,’ said Amar.

Dissatisfied, Thane watched Amar head out; Amar should have more confidence. The members of the newer Chapters were too deferential to him, and it made him uncomfortable. Warriors that adulated their heroes could be led astray by the wrong leader. If the likes of Ethratan or Amar knew that the Imperial Fists had briefly fallen, they might not be so worshipful.

A Thunderhawk transporter came down slowly, engines roaring, Dorn’s Fist slung in its cradle. It released its cargo claws three metres above the ground, dropping the Land Raider onto the Fields. The assembled forces of the three Chapters spread out in groups, heading into the deathly quiet city.

Dorn’s Fist was the very Land Raider in which Thane had arrived in triumph at the Fields a century before. He boarded the great vehicle. Reversing the course he took on that day, he headed for Bastion Gate and rode for the Widdershins Tower.

They passed through without incident, the Bastion Gate’s bristling weapons arrays inactive. The lights were out in the wall tunnel, and beyond. There were no people on the streets. There was an expectant quiet everywhere. Terra wanted rid of Vangorich, but it irked Thane that the worthies of the Throneworld were too spineless to do it themselves.

The buildings of the Palace were in various states of disrepair. Some still bore the scars of the ork attack. Instead of proper reconstruction, vast sums of money had been spent on great monuments, from whose half-finished edifices hung the corpses of those who had displeased the Lord Protector. The dead were more evident than the living. Tall informational posters adorned every major intersection and transit station, laying out the duties of the Terran citizen. The penalties for failing to comply were invariably death.

The Great Chamber’s domed roof rose pregnantly from the surrounding blocks and spires. Still they saw no one.

It was as Thane neared the Widdershins Tower that the first shot was fired. A vox-chime, ultimate priority, rang in his helmet.

‘Lord Thane! Chapter Master Amar is dead!’

‘Report.’

‘An exitus round took him as we were deploying to search the Great Chamber. We’re under heavy fire. There are numerous hostile contacts.’

‘Fall back into cover,’ he ordered. ‘I shall assume command.’

Thane’s fury grew. The first casualty, and it was a Chapter Master. It appeared he was to be responsible for Vangorich’s overthrow after all. He ordered augur sweeps and airstrikes on the areas around the Great Chamber to clear the way for the Sable Swords.

And then hell broke loose.

Thane leaned around a corner and let off a quick burst of three bolts. He received a punishing exitus round in his pauldron that shattered its autoreactive mechanisms in exchange.

‘Get a missile launcher up here!’ he commanded. His faceplate was full of flashing runes. Imperial Fists warriors were embattled all around the Widdershins Tower. Vindicare Assassins shot down at them from the rooftops with virtual impunity. Callidus operatives attacked in free-flowing squads of three, slashing their phase swords through power armour and darting back into cover before they could be cut down. Thane had penetrated into the foyer of the tower. The lifts were all dead, no power was within. The entry had the run-down, neglected feel that had been reported from all over the city.

Thane retreated a few metres, rotated his arm and grimaced. The mechanisms in his armour ground horribly. Three other Space Marines took his place and fired up the stairs. One was downed after firing only twice, smoking holes drilled through each of his hearts.

‘Missile approaching.’

Space Marines moved out of the way, making as much use of the limited cover as was possible. Every exposed stabilisation nozzle, elbow or foot drew a shot.

‘Make way for him!’ commanded Thane. The missile launcher bearer, Brother Arkhis, crouched by Thane’s feet. ‘On three,’ said Thane. ‘We shall fill this stairway with bolts. You must aim true, brother.’

‘I have a lock on the Assassin’s position, my lord,’ said Arkhis.

‘Very good. Make it count. On three, two, one.’

Thane and four others leaned out, sending out a wall of bolts. Arkhis stepped into the middle of the stairs, activated his stabilisers and fired.

The missile roared off, lighting the dark stair with its exhaust flare. A ball of flame rolled back down towards them as it detonated over the target. Bits of debris rattled off their armour.

Arkhis remained where he was. ‘He is dead,’ he said.

Thane looked up, his sensorium overlay settling on a corpse torn in half some hundred steps up the staircase.

‘He is,’ said the Chapter Master. He slapped the warrior on the shoulder. ‘A good shot, bravely done.’

‘My lord!’ called Arkhis as Thane headed off up the stairs. ‘Perhaps you should not go first?’

‘If I fall, there are others who will kill the Grand Master for me. Vangorich skulks behind others. That is not my way.’ So saying, Thane bounded up the steps.

Three more Assassins fell before Thane made it to the top of the tower. The antechamber outside the Cerebrium was quiet, the sounds of the combat going on at every level of the buildings around the Widdershins Tower muted. In battle-stained armour, Thane trod a thick carpet past displays of flowering plants. He looked back to the warriors following him, three Imperial Fists and two Sable Swords, held a finger to his visor grille and tapped at the housings of his vox-pickup, then shook his head. There were precious few who could break the encryption of Space Marine squad communication. Vangorich was one of them.

By battle sign Thane had his warriors array themselves around the Cerebrium’s priceless wooden doors. It seemed a shame to kick them in.

The doors flew back under the blow from Thane’s boot. The Cerebrium was beyond, outfitted as a private office for someone who loved books. They lined every wall, hiding the wooden panelling. Behind the large desk, her back to the window, was Inquisitor Wienand.

‘Wienand,’ said Thane. ‘Where is Vangorich?’

Thane looked much the same as he had a century ago. Wienand was unrecognisable. The handsome woman Thane had last seen had become wrinkled, her features distorted by harsh anti-gerontics and the hardships of an inquisitor’s life. Her eyes were sunken and ringed with brown flesh. A scar ran across her face from her left temple to her chin, cutting through her nose and lips. Her hair, once iron grey, was a brilliant white.

She smiled. ‘I have become old,’ she said, apologetically. ‘I’ll bet under that helmet you have not changed at all.’

Thane made to come forwards, his bolter up.

‘Stop!’ she said. ‘Drakan assumed you would come here, to his office this last century. It is rigged to explode as soon as anyone attempts to leave it.’

Thane stopped at the threshold. ‘You are within.’

‘I needed a way to convince you of my sincerity. I will not live past the end of the hour – whether I am killed by your hand or by Vangorich’s, it makes no difference. Do you think me a traitor, Chapter Master?’

‘Yes,’ said Thane. ‘Vangorich executed the High Twelve, he left you alive and in office. When he installed puppets and doppelgangers to do his bidding, you and Kubik remained in power. When they too failed to be biddable and he dissolved the Council, you and Kubik were set free.’

‘Not free, not completely,’ she said. ‘And Kubik is dead. He has been for a hundred years.’

‘Then with whom was I speaking when we put in at Mars?’

‘Eldon Urquidex,’ she said. She picked up a book and turned it over in her hands. Four boltguns were trained upon her. Thane raised his hand and gestured his men back. ‘Vangorich took Kubik’s datacore, implanted it in Urquidex and convinced him to impersonate Kubik, although he’s been doing it so long now I think he’s forgotten who he was. From a certain point of view, Urquidex is Kubik.’

‘It doesn’t matter who he is. He supported Vangorich. You are both traitors,’ said Thane.

‘You are not blameless,’ said Wienand. ‘You made Vangorich Lord Protector. You have been absent for a century, crusading so zealously it blinded you to what was happening on Terra. You must have known Vangorich had executed the High Lords, though he tried to keep it from you. I tried to tell you often enough myself. You must have received some of my messages, but you did not return to put an end to his reign. Is that not an act of treachery?’

Thane shrugged. His damaged pauldron hitched. ‘He was doing a reasonable job of ruling Terra, so I believed. He has outlived his usefulness, and that is my fault, but it is my duty to kill you nevertheless.’

‘I am not a traitor, Thane. No one stands against you, the Assassinorum aside, because I have worked for weeks to bring together the adepta of Terra. Before that, while you were off washing your failures away with blood, I have been at Drakan’s side moderating his worst excesses. I was all for trying to bring him down, but Veritus convinced me not to. He said that Vangorich had outplayed us all, and that removing him would be worse than the alternative of letting him rule. A single voice sings clearer than an unharmonious chorus, and there was no chorus as unharmonious as the Beast-era High Lords. We haven’t done badly. We restored Terra, and refortified it. We have seen dozens of the worlds ravaged by the orks rebuilt and reincorporated. Mars works in unity with the Imperium again, and he did not interfere with your Fourth Founding. The armies of man are stronger than at any time since the Heresy.’

‘That is why I did not return.’

‘Then it is your fault. These last twenty years have been different. His edicts have become bizarre. There have been needless massacres. Population relocation for no reason. Appointment of unsuitable candidates to planetary governorship. Worlds starve as he redirects resources here for vain works. Terra was rebuilt, but he would turn it into a bauble while its real needs go untended.’ She smiled bitterly. ‘The biggest statues he erected are of you and Koorland.’

‘I do not care for statues. He must go. The High Lords must reign once more.’

‘They must,’ Wienand said. She turned the book over again, running slender fingers over its page edges. ‘Vangorich did not wish to be a tyrant. He set out with the best of intentions. The pressure of running the Imperium has driven him quite mad, I fear. It did not help him that I never could return the affection he had for me. So maybe I am as responsible for his excesses as you.’

Thane said nothing. Matters of the heart were a mystery to him.

‘This book,’ she said, holding it up. It had a grubby, blue canvas cover. ‘He used to read it in the Sigillite’s Retreat. It is the Sayings of the Sigillite, with notes on the apocrypha.’

‘What of it?’

She set it down. ‘I merely underline my point. He set out to do what he could,’ she said.

‘Where is he, Wienand?’

‘He has fled to Temple Eversor in the Aktick. He is waiting for you there.’

‘Is this a trap?’

‘Not one I am setting, if that is what you are suggesting. I stayed here to tell you this information so you’d be forewarned. He knows I would tell you this. From his point of view, it is a trap whether you go in blindly or with your eyes open. He knows you will go there, no matter what I say.’

‘We have seen no Eversor acolytes here. Where are they?’ said Thane.

‘They are with him. All of them. That is the trap.’ She smiled one last time. ‘Goodbye, Maximus Thane.’

Thane placed his fist on his chest, bowed, and left.

When he was halfway down the stairs, the Cerebrium exploded.

Thane reviewed the casualty reports from the battle in the Palace. Half of the Space Marines had fallen. It was hard to credit that mortals could inflict such losses.

Ten Thunderhawk gunships left the Fields of Winged Victory while the battle in the Palace raged on. The Assassins had wisely left the gunships alone, but in the confines of the city they were deadly, and they were everywhere. Thane had no idea how many of them there were, and the fighting spread out across the whole central district of the Palace and beyond. Theoretically, the Assassins could fight a covert war for years; realistically the only way to stop them would be to have a new Grand Master order them to lay down their arms. Though their numbers dropped by the hour, they fought on in pockets.

Thane was grateful for Wienand’s preparatory efforts to ensure that Vangorich could not rouse the population of Terra against him, and even more glad that the Adeptus Custodes had decided to remain neutral. The Assassins were trouble enough, and even though people were off the streets in the central districts, Thane’s strategos serfs and his own best guesses put the casualties among civilians well into the thousands. In the more distant parts of the Palace it was far worse, with many of them still attempting to go about their business, driven by duty and fear to reach their places of service. Battles burst into vast scriptoria where thousands laboured. Artisanal workshops became the sites of brutal firefights. It was inevitable people would die.

Thane added their deaths to the tally of Vangorich’s sins as the Imperial Palace dropped away under the Thunderhawk.

Layers of brown smog cloaked the Palace but could not hide the sheer immensity of it. The Palace was more than a city, it covered the site of the old continent of Europa from north to south, spilling out into the dry seabeds. At six thousand metres, the lower portions were lost to view, the higher towers and spires thrusting up through the polluted air like islands in a dirty sea. The Thunderhawks turned towards the pole and rose higher. Auspex sweeps pinged repeatedly in the cockpit but Terra’s substantial anti-orbital and anti-aircraft firepower remained inactive.

Vangorich was completely isolated.

As they flew over the Palace and towards the dirty ice fields of the north, Thane called the battle-barge Storm of Might and ordered Scout teams to land nearby and guide orbital strikes on the temple.

‘Precision only, remove its air defences, target the barracks. Do not destroy it,’ he concluded his orders. ‘I will take Vangorich alive. He must answer for his crimes.’

The Space Marines put down in a plaza still smoking from a stray lance hit. Defence laser towers burned at the four corners of the temple. Temple Eversor occupied the planed-off summit of a mountain near to the magnetic pole. A dreary vista of exposed seabed and eerily sculpted sails of ice caked in dirt and pollutants receded into the distance.

The temple staff were dead. Their bodies were scattered wherever Thane looked. A few had been killed by the Space Marine reconnaissance teams, but most had no visible injuries, but exhibited signs of poisoning of a dozen different kinds.

‘Who did this?’ asked Thane’s standard bearer.

‘He has. Vangorich slaughtered his followers,’ said Thane. ‘He is insane.’

Cold wind blew over the arid landscape. Thane marshalled his one hundred and fifty warriors. The main temple was ahead.

Setting the Scout teams to guard the Thunderhawks, the battle-brothers of three Chapters advanced.

The entrance to the temple was deceptively small and unassuming, but the first hall was as grand as a cathedral. Stone blocks with no visible names upon them acted as memorials to the unsung heroes of the Imperium. More temple staff lay dotted around, their skin green, mouths thick with frothed saliva. The Space Marines spread out. Ahead, a broad stairway led downwards into the main part of the temple; an extensive underground complex of training chambers, barracks, surgeries, cells, hypnosariums and huge machine rooms. Thane had his warriors check them all, though he knew in his gut they would be deserted by all but the dead.

Vangorich waited for them in the depths of the temple, a spider at the heart of its web. He was in the largest hall of all, dominated by monumental statuary and massive glassaic windows whose colours were dulled by the black rock behind them. A vaulted ceiling stretched a hundred metres above their heads, supported on a row of columns running down the walls where they divided the spaces between the windows into cylindrical alcoves, fifty either side of the hall.

Vangorich sat on the steps of a dais at the end of the hall, one knee upraised, his elbow resting on it and his hand cupping his chin. Once so neat and well presented, he had become filthy and unkempt. His nails were long and ragged, and his hair lank. He had become thin, but there was still a hint of his old strength visible in the sinewy cords of his neck and wrist. Though old by the standards of mortals, he was without mechanical aid. He was still dangerous.

‘Drakan Vangorich,’ pronounced Thane. ‘I am here to arrest you for high treason to the Imperium of Man, and gross abuse of privilege that goes against the fundamental principles of Imperial government.’

Vangorich yawned. ‘You always said you’d come back. Here you are, making good on your threat.’ His voice had a new, wild edge. ‘You took your time.’

‘I never intended that you rule alone,’ said Thane. He stepped closer, and drew his power sword. Its field glowed faintly in the gloom.

‘I discovered fairly quickly that it was either rule alone, or not rule at all,’ said Vangorich. ‘The Senatorum was ungovernable. I had to act. Kubik moved Ullanor, that’s why I had to kill them. It’s still out there, not too far from Terra.’

‘Why did you not recall me? Why did you kill them all?’

‘Because you would not have come back,’ said Vangorich. He stood up, his stale scent wafting out to Thane. ‘I did my best. You should have ruled, Thane, you would have done better. But you wanted your crusade. I didn’t want to be Lord Protector.’

‘You did,’ said Thane. ‘You lied for so long that you cannot stop. You lied even to yourself. Look into your innermost self, Grand Master. I believe you will find that you intended to rule all along, and I was blind not to see.’

Vangorich smiled, exposing dirty teeth. In the smile, the lines around the mouth, the set of the head, there was a flash of the man he had been.

‘Give me time, everything will be set to rights. Protecting the Imperium and protecting humanity are not always the same. I will make it better, you will see.’

Thane looked at the filthy Vangorich. His suaveness, intelligence and wit were gone. Time was cruel to mortal men. What bit at Thane the most was that Vangorich was right, he should have stayed. He had set personal honour over duty.

‘It is too late. You failed in your ambition as you failed your Emperor,’ said Thane. ‘It is time for you to step down, Vangorich. Come and face judgement. You shall be tried by the new High Lords of Terra. Justice served shall be a warning to all those who think themselves mightier than the Emperor’s will.’

Vangorich stood and laughed, clapping in delight.

One hundred and fifty boltgun slides were racked back.

‘What a marvellous speech,’ he said. ‘But no, I must decline. You see,’ he said impishly, ‘you are making a terrible mistake.’

‘I made my mistake a hundred years ago,’ said Thane. ‘I should have heeded your suggestion, and let Veritus lead the Senatorum.’

‘You’re making another one now,’ said Vangorich. His eyes gleamed with incipient madness. ‘And it shall be your last.’

A klaxon blared its rising-falling song. Blinking lights shone in the alcoves along the temple walls. A hundred capsules rose from the floor into them, rotating amber lights on their tops. They locked into place with loud thunks. Swirling gas filled each, lit with blue light. Inside them were the indistinct forms of human bodies, clad in tight-fitting synskin. In an asynchronous cacophony, the gas vented from the capsules.

‘This is Temple Eversor,’ said Vangorich. ‘Allow me to introduce its acolytes.’

The Space Marines opened fire, shooting at the capsules, but they were made of centimetres-thick armourglass, and though they cracked and fractured, they did not break. One by one the shapes inside came alive, twitching gauntlets raking against their prisons.

The doors opened, releasing more methalon fumes into the room. Water vapour condensed in the chilled air, cloaking everything with a dense, freezing fog. The warriors around Thane disappeared into coils of white. Thane activated false-colour heat vision. He saw his men. The Eversors were as cold as the gas, and he did not see them coming.

Boltguns went off all around him; somewhere he heard Vangorich’s insane laughter.

The fight that followed was one of the hardest of Thane’s life. Black-suited killers reared up in the mist, moving too fast for him to hit easily. The shouts of battle-brothers rang in his helmet. Space Marines came into sight, only to be cut down by the flashing finger blades of Temple Eversor’s crazed killers.

‘Fall back to the door!’ ordered Thane. ‘Defensive cordon!’

His dwindling men formed up around the entrance, back-to-back, boltguns blazing. A handful of Eversors got behind them, causing great loss before they were cut down. Casualty screed scrolled endlessly on Thane’s faceplate display. Black, skull-masked Assassins darted in and out of view, clawing men down. In their turn, the Assassins died messily, blasted apart by mass-reactives or detonated by uncontrollable bio-feedback when their hearts stopped. Such was the force of their explosions that Space Marines went down, battleplate holed by fragments of hyper-velocity bone shards and armour.

‘Keep them back!’ yelled Thane. ‘Keep them back!’

Executioner pistols fired, loud brazen boltguns one moment, silent toxin needlers the next.

The Eversors pressed nearer. Fighting became close and desperate, and the firing discipline of the Adeptus Astartes collapsed. The group disintegrated into individuals fighting for their lives in melee. At close quarters Vangorich’s killers excelled. The warriors fighting at his side became fewer, going from one hundred, to seventy-five, to fifty, to twenty, to ten.

Thane battled on, his power sword the flaring dividing line between his life and death. He parried and cut, but his blows cleaved only the mist. The Assassins were faster than the wind, near impossible to hit. They fought in a frenzy that appeared at first to lack control, but after a time Thane discerned a pattern to their combat, and was awed by their skill.

His actions became reflexive, time blurred. Only rarely had Thane fought so hard. As a Space Marine he regarded himself as the pinnacle of the transhuman type. The Eversors, though unstable mentally and physically, challenged that belief.

Thane fought with a dancing monster with a blue death’s head for a face. It leapt around, howling like an animal. After minutes of duelling, Thane spotted a weakness in its attacks and brought his sword up, hilt first, swinging the point up and through the Eversor’s stomach wall and gutting it. Before it died, it slashed down with its neurogauntlet. Monomolecular blades sliced through ceramite and plasteel, biting into Thane’s flesh. Toxins surged from micropores all up the blades, pumping into the Chapter Master’s body.

He roared in agony. He had never felt such pain. He stumbled and fell to his knees, paralysed by the poison.

When his body had purged the toxins sufficiently for him to move, he looked up, his eyes streaming with tears. The mist was clearing. He heard a final round of gunfire, a scream, and the clash of power armour falling to the floor.

A dark shadow fell across Thane’s face. An Eversor stood over him, ready to deliver the final blow.

‘Halt!’ called Vangorich. He walked through the last dispersing tendrils of mist. ‘You have lost, Chapter Master Thane, and it is your life that is forfeit.’

‘No,’ said the Eversor, and stood back. Trembling with the effort of disobeying its programming, the killer pulled its skull mask from its face. Yanking cables from its head, it cast the mask aside. Most of the flesh of the face beneath had been peeled away, replaced with close-fitting augmetic devices. Elsewhere there was naught but shining, polished bone inscribed with devotional text. But there was just enough of the features left for Thane to recognise him.

‘Krule!’ he said.

Through a mutilated mouth, Krule managed to speak.

‘My name is Esad Wire,’ he said.

He stood aside, leaving Thane a clear shot at Vangorich.

Thane raised his bolt pistol.

Vangorich’s eyes widened. He held up his hands. ‘Wait! Did you ever hear the story of the end of Konrad Curze?’

‘No more stories, Drakan,’ said Thane, and ended Vangorich’s life with a single bolter shell.

Swaying, feeling nauseous from the residue of the poison in his blood, Maximus Thane stood. He gripped his wounded arm. He was alone amid a carpet of broken bodies, Space Marine and Assassin alike. He called out for survivors, but no voice answered. Relief flooded him when he voxed the Thunderhawks and found all was well outside.

‘Send the Apothecaries. They have a harvest of sorrow ahead of them,’ he said. He turned away from Vangorich’s broken corpse. Too weary to raise his sword, he dragged it across the ground as he walked unsteadily back towards the stairs and the daylight beyond.

Of Esad Wire, there was no trace.

Seventeen

A matter of control

To the psychic sight of Eldrad Ulthran the skein was a living being, a complicated braiding of the life threads of every living thing in the galaxy. The main flow of fate resembled the corded trunk of a tree. From its mighty sides grew innumerable branches. Most were small, looping back to rejoin the main course of destiny; many more withered and died before long, the potential choices that predicated them so unlikely they would never come to be, or the creature intended to set those events in motion meeting its end before it could. Others branched many times into complex networks of possibility all their own. A few of these split the skein, forming mighty boughs upon the tree of fate. Sometimes a single choice could dictate a different future entirely.

It was upon these that Ulthran dwelt as his bodiless mind flew along the twisting ways of the future. Farseers were consumed utterly by the drive to preserve their craftworld, but Eldrad Ulthran’s calling was higher. He ignored the fates of maiden worlds, crone worlds, true stars, exodite clans, pirates, dark kin and craftworlds. Planets burned and kindreds were snuffed out in myriad futures. These extinctions pained him, but they were only a small part of the game and he could not afford to be distracted. He played at fate because he saw a greater prize than simple survival. Eldrad Ulthran would have the glories of old restored and Chaos’ influence banished from the material realm. There was no other goal worth aiming for; all others led ultimately to death and damnation.

A cracking roar announced the splitting of the skein. A new forest of possibilities grew rapidly out from the trunk. Familiar as he was with the skein, like no other being in the galaxy, Ulthran rarely saw such a dramatic reconfiguration of potentiality born before him and he followed it eagerly. Tendrils of individual fates, vanishingly small, sprouted from the main path, growing long with incredible velocity, wrapping around each other, twisting themselves into thicker and thicker ropes of complex interaction. These came together, and again, until the fates of worlds and sectors were bound up with one another, all generated from the actions of the galaxy’s uncountable creatures.

The wave front of possibility and its fronds of maybes raced away from Ulthran. Beneath him, more cords were being joined, wrapping around each other in tight embrace until in their coilings Ulthran descried the fates of entire species. A moaning rolled through the timeless spaces of fate. The other half of the fork, the original from his perspective, blackened and died, its unformed might-bes disintegrating into unrealised motes of chance and fragments of unfulfilled cause and effect.

He paused. Turning about, he looked back at the skein towards the present. He had outpaced the now by some days, but the origin of the split was only hours ahead of the present, and it approached swiftly, a boiling wall of yellow light that rushed unstoppably towards the future. When it encountered the What Might Be, it solidified it into the glimmering of What Is, a moment so short it could not be measured. When the present passed on by the skein was still and clear as glass, the dead times of What Was.

Ulthran looked down at where the split had occurred, now no more than a slight kink in the skein. He raced downward, into it, passing through the endless threads of individual lives, his powerful mind inadvertently tasting their short-lived joys and lasting pain. So many billion human existences, twined mostly with their own kind, but touching here and there against the fates of other creatures including the eldar, often disastrously.

He hunted to find the cause of the change, his practised astral eyes darting from deaths and births to the explosions of suns.

The rumble of the approaching present grew louder as he located the source of the change. One thread, one death.

Drakan Vangorich, master of the Imperium, was about to die.

Ulthran rapidly examined all possible futures for the Grand Master’s thread, but though they began as many, they all converged on that one point, when a Space Marine in yellow armour would put a bolt between Vangorich’s eyes.

Racing back to the surface of the skein entire, Ulthran looked ahead, to where the ghost of the dead futures yet lingered as a dying swarm of particulate maybes. That had been a bad future, the slow decline of the human Imperium, the resurgence of Chaos, the probable death of the eldar, but woven in amongst the doom were gleaming threads of salvation. These Ulthran had resolved to pursue, and he had been confident of success despite the grim nature of the predominate fates. But all of that had gone.

Behind him the present rushed on. Ulthran looked to the new future. Less certain, more fraught. The chances of survival were more numerous, the opportunity of restoration far more remote. Time stretched away unbrokenly. Ulthran saw his own fate weaving in and out of it until it was lost to sight among the uncountable tomorrows. The roar of the now thundered, waterfall-loud. A great shock hit his body and Ulthran was engulfed, carried along upon the wave of actuality towards futures he had not yet assimilated. It was time to leave, before he was consumed.

Eldrad Ulthran opened his eyes. His runes slowed their spinning in the air and sank to the crystalline floor around him. There, one by one, they came to a wobbling halt, fell and clinked to a standstill.

‘Drakan Vangorich is dead,’ he said aloud. His voice echoed weirdly through the forest of crystal trees of Ulthwé’s Dome of Seers.

His death was foreseen, replied a disembodied voice.

The skein is changed, said another.

Among the groves of trees were half a dozen silent, vitreous statues of eldar farseers, those psykers whose bond to the craftship’s heart had become too much to ignore, and whose spirit fled their flesh to join the infinity circuit while still alive. Their voices were hard to tease apart. Though they spoke individually, their words blended into one another’s speech. Male voices became female or something inbetween. They might speak all together, then split as they disagreed. Eldrad Ulthran knew all their names as he had known them all in life, but without joining in direct psychic communion with them it was impossible to identify which soul spoke.

‘We go on,’ said Ulthran. ‘The mon-keigh are aware of the threat of Chaos, they will continue the struggle.’

One thousand five hundred cycles ago you sought their destruction, and through it the extinguishment of Chaos, said another voice.

‘The Cabal did. I did not. I only ever sought our survival,’ said Ulthran.

The Cabal are gone. The Cabal did not have the best interests of the children of Eldanesh at heart. We were used. The trees pulsed with dancing witchlight, their boughs raced with the thoughts of the dead.

‘Yes. The only way our species is to survive is through the support of humanity. Our fates are inextricable. If they fall, so shall we.’

You chase ever-diminishing possibilities of salvation. We should depart this starwheel and begin anew elsewhere.

‘Even were that possible, and we are not assured that it is, then what? The Primordial Annihilator knows no limits. Time and space mean nothing in the Othersea. If we travel to another starwheel, we will take our daemons with us. She Who Thirsts will be waiting wherever we go. Our fate is here, with this place, for good or ill. Many fates are possible. If we guide them wisely, we shall prevail.’

You do not have the power of the Acuity. You do not have the foresight of the Cabal. We stand alone. Your actions could doom us all. The mon-keigh have proven again that they will not be manipulated. They will see us all dead before the end. Already it is two thousand cycles since the fall. Every pass brings us closer to extinction. The lights in the crystal danced with agitation. A period of instability awaits the humans’ empire, and they may not recover. If they do, they shall hunt us to destruction.

‘Not all threads say this is so.’ Ulthran picked up his helm and held it under his arm. ‘Humanity is our best chance, but it is not the only one. There are many more worlds of the krork,’ said Ulthran. ‘Beasts never die, they are only banished. The cry of “Mag Uruk Thraka” echoes still in the Othersea. Should one rise again, the greenskins may yet fulfil their original purpose. New races may evolve in time. There is hope while we live.’

You are arrogant. You are but one alone against eternity.

‘One mind is sometimes all it takes to change fate,’ Ulthran said defiantly.

The lights dwindled. The dead farseers retreated into the core of the worldship. The crystal dome took on its dark, marmoreal air again. Other craftworlds had lighter aspects, but Ulthwé never forgot, forever in mourning for an empire lost.

Eldrad Ulthran would not mourn. He would see the days of greatness return, no matter how long it took.

About the Authors

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.

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 and the Gotrek audio drama Realmslayer. 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.

Rob Sanders is the author of the Horus Heresy novellas Cybernetica and The Serpent Beneath, the latter of which appeared in the New York Times bestselling anthology The Primarchs. His other Black Library credits include the The Beast Arises novels Predator, Prey and Shadow of Ullanor, the Warhammer 40,000 titles Sons of the Hydra, Skitarius, Tech-Priest, Legion of the Damned, Atlas Infernal and Redemption Corps and the audio drama The Path Forsaken. He has also written the Warhammer Archaon duology, Everchosen and Lord of Chaos, along with many short stories for the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in the city of Lincoln, UK.

Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Wolfsbane and Pharos, the Primarchs novels Corax: Lord 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.

A Black Library Publication

Watchers in Death first published in 2016.
The Last Son of Dorn first published in 2016.
Shadow of Ullanor first published in 2016.
The Beheading first published 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 3 © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. The Beast Arises Volume 3, 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: 978-1-78030-876-0

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.