• THE VAMPIRE GENEVIEVE •
by Kim Newman
BOOK 1: DRACHENFELS

THE WICKED AND THE DAMNED
A portmanteau novel by Josh Reynolds, Phil Kelly and David Annandale

MALEDICTIONS
An anthology by various authors

PERDITION’S FLAME
An audio drama by Alec Worley

To see the full Black Library range, visit the Kobo Store.

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer Horror

Silence – Part 1

The Beast in the Trenches

Silence – Part 2

The Woman in the Walls

Silence – Part 3

The Faith and the Flesh

Silence – Part 4

About the Authors

An Extract from ‘Drachenfels’

A Black Library Publication Imprint

eBook license

A dark bell tolls in the abyss.

It echoes across cold and unforgiving worlds, mourning the fate of humanity. Terror has been unleashed, and every foul creature of the night haunts the shadows. There is naught but evil here. Alien monstrosities drift in tomblike vessels. Watching. Waiting. Ravenous. Baleful magicks whisper in gloom-shrouded forests, spectres scuttle across disquiet minds. From the depths of the void to the blood-soaked earth, diabolic horrors stalk the endless night to feast upon unworthy souls.

Abandon hope. Do not trust to faith. Sacrifices burn on pyres of madness, rotting corpses stir in unquiet graves. Daemonic abominations leer with rictus grins and stare into the eyes of the accursed. And the Ruinous Gods, with indifference, look on.

This is a time of reckoning, where every mortal soul is at the mercy of the things that lurk in the dark. This is the night eternal, the province of monsters and daemons. This is Warhammer Horror. None shall escape damnation.

And so, the bell tolls on.

The planet’s name was Silence. It was a world of grey pillars and dour statues, and the shadows that stretched between them. Amid these shadows, strange shapes prowled about on stick legs. Their gilded funerary masks occasionally caught the soft light of the ceremonial lumens, and their grey shrouds rustled as they went about their eternal labours.

Silence was a world of the dead. A cemetery world. Great repositories of the fallen stretched high into the pallid skies and deep beneath the skin of the earth. Towering mausoleums containing hundreds – if not thousands – of the honoured dead lined the wide, silent boulevards. Stone pits with shallow nooks housed paupers and mendicants in their untold millions.

As it was in life, so it was in death.

The air of the cemetery world was cold and clammy, heavy with mist and the lingering smell of incense. It hung over the streets, hiding the stink of decay. The foetal shapes of cybernetic cherubs drifted on tattered wings, their faces like golden skulls. They dragged smoking censers through the dark and the quiet, murmuring repetitive hymns in shrill, tinny voices. Condensation ran in unceasing ripples across the glassaic windows that overlooked the winding thoroughfares and avenues below.

The world was all but entombed in stone and glass. It had died centuries ago, but there was no one to notice. The only inhabitants were the cyber-cherubs and the mortuary-servitors, with their spindly legs and shrouded, inhuman bodies.

Like all servitors, they did not live so much as persist. They crept through the tombs, ensuring that all was as it should be and everything was in its proper place. They went about their task in utter silence, save for the dull clangour of the funeral bells that draped their forms. They paused in these efforts only to watch as those few pilgrims who came to Silence traversed the grim fields of stone and statuary.

Sometimes, for reasons of their own, they would follow these visitors at a distance. As if curious of their intentions. Or perhaps in anticipation of the inevitable.

It was the latter that was foremost in Egin Valemar’s mind as he walked alone through the streets of Silence. He was tall and narrow, in the way of some men, and his shadow stretched far in his wake. The mortuary-servitors watched him, and he watched them in turn with a soldier’s vigilance. He pulled the collar of his greatcoat tight, fighting the persistent chill. The coat was black, as was the peaked commissar’s cap he wore.

Valemar was angry. He was often angry. At the moment, he was angry because he was on Silence, and not with his new regiment. He was angry because he had been ordered to come, though he wasn’t sure why or by whom. And he was angry because his head hurt.

It had been hurting for some time. A persistent migraine, flowering within his skull. Sometimes, he grew so used to the ache that he forgot all about it. And then a sudden sharp pain would remind him of its presence. It dug into the meat of him, making it hard to think of anything else.

He stopped and rubbed his brow, trying to ease the increased throbbing in his temples. Beneath the pressure of his fingers, it receded, though only slightly. It was the stress of his recent posting. He sighed and lowered his hands.

‘I am sorry, colonel,’ he murmured.

He wondered if that was why he had been ordered to come to Silence, though he could not imagine who might have wanted him to do so. He had tried to find out, before his departure, but the Departmento Munitorum was an impenetrable labyrinth of bureaucracy; one he had no patience to navigate. Better to simply go along, rather than risk being derelict in his duty. And in any event, if he was here, it was where he was supposed to be.

He looked up. Statues lined the avenue, forgotten heroes of the Imperium, standing atop wide plinths marked with their deeds and date of death. Or, in some cases, the estimated date of death. It was hard to tell, sometimes. Imperial bureaucracy was a slow current. All things eventually reached the sea, but in their own time. A saying of the colonel’s.

Valemar frowned, annoyed by the thought. The colonel was dead, and sentiment was a coward’s refuge.

Funerary bells clanged somewhere close by. He turned, suddenly tense. Mist hung thick between the statues and tombs, all but obscuring the way he’d come. He made to hurry on, but the bells came again. Closer now. To his left. He stopped and turned, itching to draw his weapon. A sudden sense of paranoia flashed through him.

Perhaps this was a trap. Perhaps his enemies had summoned him here. And where better to kill a man than a cemetery world? He laughed sourly. They’d have no more luck now than they’d had before. The God-Emperor watched over him. He knew it, as he knew nothing else. The one certainty in an otherwise ambiguous existence.

As if reading his thoughts, the sound of bells faded. Whatever it was was drawing away from him. He waited for a long moment before making to continue on. He was not sure where he was going, but he knew he had to be there on time.

The mortuary-servitor was waiting for him as he turned.

The optic sensors within its funerary mask glowed crimson as it looked down at him. It was taller than him, but spindly. Its legs were oddly-jointed lengths of metal, studded with sensor-filaments, like the hairs on a spider’s leg. Its body was concealed beneath a ragged shroud of grey, but Valemar could see something twitching within the folds. Unseen things whirred and clicked, and he could smell the stink of old incense clinging to the stiff, grimy cloth.

The servitor’s head perched at the end of an elongated neck composed of metallic vertebral segments. These rasped softly as the servitor observed him. Its golden death-mask was wrought to resemble the round features of a smiling cherub. The automaton took a soft, scraping step towards him. Valemar held his ground. He could detect a hint of rotting meat beneath the omnipresent odour of incense. He did not trust machines – especially those draped in flesh. His hand fell to the laspistol holstered on his hip. The red gaze flicked down, following his hand, and then back up.

‘Identify,’ the mortuary-servitor asked, in a singsong, childlike voice.

‘Valemar. Commissar Egin Valemar. I am expected.’ Valemar paused, wondering why he’d said that. As far as he could recall, no one was waiting for him. No one alive, at any rate. However, it seemed to have the desired effect. The servitor gave a binaric grunt and clattered out of his path. It retreated into the mists, and soon there was little sign that it had been there at all.

Valemar pressed on. The ache in his head receded as he came to a small plaza containing rows of biers. He’d seen other such plazas at a distance, dotting the cityscape, according to some pattern that escaped him. He’d always been good at spotting patterns, even if he didn’t understand their meaning.

Each of the biers was occupied by a shroud-covered shape. He felt a chill as he passed through the rows, as if they might rise at any moment and demand his reasons for being there. He made his way towards the heart of the plaza, following the path. The mists thinned the further he went. He heard voices. Muffled. Indistinct.

He stopped and reached for his weapon. The mist parted and he saw two figures standing at the centre of the plaza. They turned as he joined them, his hand resting on his holstered sidearm. The man was below average height, and dark. He was clad in the heavy robes of an Ecclesiarchy missionary, and his eyes darted nervously between Valemar and his companion. She was small in height and build, but sharp-faced and hard-eyed. She was dressed in the uniform of an Astra Militarum officer. She idly tugged at the edges of bandages, just visible beneath her sleeves.

Valemar paused, wondering if he ought to salute. He settled for a respectful nod. She frowned, but returned the gesture.

The little man thrust out a hand. ‘Oswick,’ he said. ‘Oswick Marrikus. This is–’

‘I can introduce myself, priest,’ the woman said, her voice a harsh rasp. ‘I’m Field Commander Leana Vendersen, First Class. And you are?’

Valemar hadn’t taken Marrikus’ hand. The little man pulled it back with a frown as Valemar concentrated on the officer. ‘Commissar Valemar. I am expected.’

‘We’re all expected, commissar,’ Vendersen said. ‘Though I don’t have the faintest clue as to why.’ A puzzled frown spread across her features. ‘Come to that, I don’t…’ She paused and looked around, as if uncertain.

Marrikus nodded. ‘You don’t know how you got here. Neither do I.’ He looked expectantly at Valemar.

‘Of course I know how I got here,’ Valemar said. He’d taken an instant dislike to the smaller man, though he couldn’t say why. And the woman seemed nervous. But then, perhaps she had something to hide. Something she’d rather a commissar not know about. ‘I was ordered to come. I…’ He hesitated. ‘A ship,’ he said, finally.

But he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember arriving. He looked around, seeing his surroundings as if for the first time. How had he got here?

‘What ship?’ Marrikus pressed.

‘I didn’t come here to be interrogated,’ Valemar snapped.

‘Then why did you come?’ Vendersen asked.

Again, Valemar paused. He’d thought he’d known, but now, he found that he could not bring the words to mind. He shook his head. ‘My orders are none of your concern,’ he said flatly.

She bristled, and looked as if she wanted to speak, but Marrikus beat her to it.

‘Why did any of us come?’ He looked back and forth between them. ‘Do you remember being invited?’ he asked, looking at Valemar. Then, to Vendersen, ‘What about you?’ He looked around. ‘Maybe it doesn’t matter,’ he continued softly. ‘We’re here now. And may the God-Emperor keep us from harm.’

Vendersen snorted.

Valemar glared at her. ‘Do not blaspheme.’ He looked down at the closest of the shrouded bodies. He peered at it, trying to discern the features beneath the thin shroud. They seemed inexplicably familiar.

He reached for the shroud, to pull it back, but stopped as he heard the clangour of bells. He looked up, and saw the dim shape of a mortuary-servitor standing watchfully at the edge of the plaza. Its red gaze honed in on him, and he pulled his hand back slowly. Vendersen shook her head.

‘They don’t like it when you disturb things,’ she said. ‘They make an awful sound. Like someone skinning a gyrinx.’

‘They won’t let us leave, either,’ Marrikus said. ‘I tried, earlier. They herded me back here.’ He rubbed his arms, as if cold. ‘God-Emperor alone knows why.’

Valemar saw more servitors, creeping through the outermost biers, murmuring binaric prayers. Something about them set his teeth on edge. His head began to pound, and he rubbed his temples. ‘I have a weapon,’ he said.

‘Only one?’ Vendersen said, patting an ornate lasgun with bayonet affixed.

‘Maybe we should simply wait,’ Marrikus said. ‘Someone will eventually come. They’ll tell us why we’re here.’

‘And if they don’t?’ Vendersen said.

‘Why us?’ said Valemar. The others looked at him. He met their gazes, looking for any sign of falsehood. Any flash of something that shouldn’t be there. But there was nothing in their eyes save a reflection of his own growing confusion.

‘What?’ Marrikus said.

‘Why us? Why here?’ Valemar gestured to the biers. ‘Do we share some commonality?’ He licked his lips, suddenly anxious. He felt the urge to run, though he could not say from what. ‘What’s the last thing you remember?’ he demanded.

‘What do you mean?’ Vendersen asked, warily.

‘None of us recall why we’re here, or how we arrived at this place. What’s the last thing you do remember?’

Vendersen glared suspiciously at him. ‘You first, commissar.’

‘Yes, no, this is good,’ Marrikus said, quickly, before Valemar could reply. ‘We will each tell our stories, and see if the answer is there.’ He looked at Valemar. ‘You first, commissar. Please.’

Valemar shook his head. ‘Fine.’ He studied the closest of the bodies. ‘I remember…’

He smiled.

‘I remember that the sky was on fire…’

The sky was on fire.

As beginnings go, I think it has poetry. We were at war – when are we not? – and the world was burning beneath us. Beneath me. The air tasted of smoke and the heat pressed down on me, like the hand of the God-Emperor. My ears were ringing, but I could hear men screaming, up and down the trench-line. They were always screaming. Crying and wailing. My regiment was mostly made up of cowards and children, much to my chagrin.

The ferrocrete duckboards buckled beneath me as I pushed myself to my feet and fumbled for the laspistol on my hip. The mud – we’d taken to calling it ‘the soup’, for obvious reasons – beneath the duckboards was boiling from the heat of the barrage. The trench was sloughing into a new shape around me as I stumbled towards the nearest screams. The walls bubbled, bulging outwards or collapsing inwards. The ferrocrete frames of the line were cracked and pushed out of joint. Sometimes whole sections of the line – and everything in them – vanished into the soup. Like they’d never existed at all.

War is a hungry beast, and it gobbles its prey. A regiment can die in a moment, triumph can turn to tragedy, victory to defeat. Only by maintaining discipline can the hunger of war be held at bay. But discipline, like ferrocrete, can crack and burst, and vanish under the mud, unless someone tends to it.

Men moved around me, but I barely saw them – grey shadows, uniforms coated with mud and ash, environment masks giving everyone the same inhuman features. I didn’t often wear my mask, despite the way the heat bit at my lungs and sinuses. I wanted them to see me. To see my face. To see that I wasn’t like them. They needed to be reminded of that. I needed to be reminded of that. Standards – discipline – had to be maintained.

Coughing, I stumbled down the line, shoving men aside. They didn’t protest, or I didn’t hear them if they did. They saw my face, the black peaked cap, the coat – stained with mud though it was – and they knew me. Knew who I was, what I was. And they straightened at their positions. They went quiet. Like good soldiers.

But where there are good soldiers there are bad soldiers. There are always bad soldiers, in every regiment. The lazy and the cowardly. The unscrupulous and the mad. The God-Emperor saw them, and I saw them too. I had been trained my whole life to see them. To see the signs of faltering courage in a man, sometimes before the soldier in question even realised it. And then, to act.

Cowardice could spread like an illness, if left unchecked. And not just cowardice. Licentiousness, disrespect… these found fertile soil in untended souls. If not dealt with, they could bring a regiment to its knees. Cripple it, or even destroy it.

But not that day. Not then, with the sky burning with chemical fire and the trenches turning to soup around me. The screaming was bad for morale. Bad for the regiment. And I knew my duty.

Laspistol in hand, I swept down the line, moving quicker. The longer the screams went on, the worse the effect would be. Another lesson learned in the schola progenium. They’d taught me so many valuable things, there. I give thanks to the God-Emperor every night for those times, gruelling though they were.

The trenches I passed through were irregular canyons of mud, bolstered by support slabs of ferrocrete. In places, pre-fab bunkers of stone and metal had been sunk into the mud, their regimental markings obscured by grime and damage. Heavy environment netting had been strung over the tops of some places, in order to keep out the worst of the inclement weather. It didn’t work here – it rarely worked anywhere. But we strung it regardless, as the manuals insisted. We dug our trenches to regulation depth, despite the mud, and set our guns and placed our emplacements.

There is a right way to do things, and a wrong way. I know this. Another lesson, and one I took readily to heart. The right way was the way the God-Emperor wished it to be. The wrong way was the way of heresy, of disrespect and ill-discipline.

Armaplas firing pavises lined the top of the trenches, and men lined up behind them, standing on overturned crates or ferrocrete slabs. The sound of las-fire split the air as the soldiers vented their frustrations on the unseen enemy. It was always the same – during or just after a barrage, they would expend valuable charges from their lasrifles. The officers had given up trying to stop them from shooting at ghosts.

An odd word, that. Ghosts. But appropriate, I think, given our foe. They pounded us from afar, rarely daring to draw close. Rarely deigning, I should say. I couldn’t remember a day without their guns. Without that hateful rhythm. Even when they were silent, the air echoed with them. I couldn’t escape, even in sleep. If not for my training, I might well have been driven mad by it.

Some, among my charges, had been. The incessant bombardment ate away at their simple psyches, breaking their minds and spirits. When that happened, I had to be quick. I couldn’t allow the weakness to spread.

I reached the source of the screams after a few moments of laboured stumbling, and shoved my way through the grey crowd of masked loiterers. ‘Back to your positions,’ I growled, shoving men against the sides of the trench. ‘Get back. Back!’

They muttered darkly, their voices muffled by their masks, but they knew better than to argue. Arguing with a commissar was the equivalent of sleeping beneath a battle tank – one could get away with it, but only rarely.

When the space had cleared, I saw the screamer. He was young, and had torn his mask off, exposing milk-pale features and eyes so blue that I thought at first he’d suffered some injury. His uniform was spattered with mud and ash, and his weapon was nowhere to be seen. A medical corpsman crouched beside him, the caduceus on his shoulder plate faded and all but scraped away. The screamer did not appear to be injured. I holstered my weapon.

‘Why is he screaming?’

The corpsman looked up at me, eyes wide. He mumbled something, his voice muffled by his mask. I had never met a corpsman of any use. I shoved him aside and caught the screamer by the collar. He thrashed in my grip, boneless, like a worm. He babbled nonsense in that slurring dialect of Low Gothic shared by most of the regiment. I had never bothered to learn it, as most of them eventually figured out the right way to talk.

‘On your feet,’ I said, dragging him upright. ‘Answer me.’

His hand flapped uselessly at the wall of the trench, where bones were being squeezed from the mud like excrement. Skulls and femurs and shattered ribcages. The refuse of the battlefield. The mud cooked the dead, if the corpsmen didn’t get to them first. It boiled away the meat and muscle, leaving only bone. I paused, taking in the sight.

Sometimes, when the trenches clenched just right, the bones surfaced. They poured down and pooled across the floor of the trench. Most were reabsorbed before the trench settled, but sometimes they remained. I shoved the man back and plucked a steaming skull free of the soup. I held it up before him.

‘This? This is what you’re screaming about?’ I caught him again, before he could turn away. He was a coward, then. Like all of them. What use is a soldier that can’t face death? Like a gun that won’t fire.

The air shuddered as the dull crump of enemy artillery sounded. The trench shook and twisted as men lost their footing or fought to brace the ferrocrete slabs that held the bulk of the mud at bay. Fearful eyes darted in wild circles behind masks. A babble of voices rose. Between the mud and the screamer’s wails, they were on edge.

Discipline had to be maintained. And I had to be the one to do it.

I caught him by his flak armour and dragged him close. ‘Be quiet,’ I said. ‘Quiet!’ But he didn’t stop. Perhaps he couldn’t. I am no expert in the ways of the mind. Perhaps his had broken in such a way that the world about him had been reduced to something so infinitely terrifying that he could think of no other option than to scream and scream and scream… the noise of it was like a knife, digging into my head. Worse than the guns, almost.

I had to silence him. For the good of the regiment. For the sake of discipline. I dragged him towards the collapsed wall of the trench, and the bones. He tried to twist away, hands flapping at my arm. Weak blows. Weak mind. Weak link. I tossed the skull I held aside, and drove him face-first into the tide of bones.

‘Idiot,’ I snapped. ‘Coward. The dead can’t hurt you. But I will, if you don’t stop this foolishness.’

He struggled in my grip, whining. The corpsman had fallen over and scrambled back, and the others were watching. Staring. I wanted them to. I wanted them to see that there was nothing to be frightened of here. Nothing except me.

His scream changed, became a wail of desolation – a child’s cry. Weak, as I said. Too young for the battlefield, perhaps. But the God-Emperor had chosen him – had brought him here. The least he could do was show some courage. That was all He asked of His servants. The courage to do what was necessary, whatever the cost. I said this to him, to them all, as I held him there, in the mud, ignoring his struggles. The opportunity to impart a lesson was not to be ignored, even amidst the confusion of an artillery barrage.

His struggles grew more frenzied. I forced him deeper, until the bones were tumbling over my arms and slapping against my chest. His boots caught me in the shin as his hands dug futilely into the mud either side of his head. He clawed at the wall of the trench, still screaming, though I could only hear the barest edge of it over the guns.

And then, all at once, he went still. It was so sudden, I almost released him. But I didn’t. I held him for a moment more. Maybe two. I had to make sure, you see. He needed to understand the crime he had committed. Cowardice was the weed in the garden of victory. Fear, the vice of the weak. And I would suffer no weakness in my regiment.

When I finally hauled him back, it was clear that I had overestimated him. He had been weaker than I had imagined. I knew, in that moment, that I had done him a favour, and it annoyed me. Weakness was to be punished, not rewarded.

He was a deadweight in my hands and I let him fall. His body crashed to the duckboards and lay unmoving. His blue eyes, wide and empty, stared at nothing. I felt the gazes of the rest settle on me like hands and I turned, meeting their bewildered stares unflinchingly.

‘What are you looking at?’ I said, softly.

They said nothing. Could say nothing. Their lives were mine. To weigh and judge as I saw fit. And they knew it. Even as they knew I would not judge them unfairly. Some commissars might – petty tyrants, hiding behind His authority. But I was not one of them. The God-Emperor’s hand was at my shoulder, and His light in me.

Sometimes, I wondered if they could see it. If they can see it. The light, I mean. Or were their souls too simple to perceive such glorious luminescence? A question I have often asked myself, if I’m being honest. Am I blessed among the faithful? Or is such grace the common burden of humanity, shared by all, whether they realise it or not?

I confess, it troubles me.

But at that moment, I was not thinking of grace or light. I was thinking of the dead man at my feet, and the way his eyes stared up past me, as if seeking the stars. Blue eyes. No one in the regiment had blue eyes. I know, because it is my job to know such things. When everyone wears masks for the majority of a thirty-six Terran standard-hour day, you learn to recognise them by their eyes. By their voices, and the way they walk.

I recognised him, I thought. Not by name. But his eyes… had they changed? Minor mutation wasn’t unheard of, in such conditions as these. Another sign of weakness. His crimes compounded themselves, even in death. Or perhaps there was some toxin in the air, or in the soup, that had changed him. The thought sent a chill through me, and I admit, I glanced then at the mask hanging from my belt, and cursed my bravado.

It was only because of this momentary failing that I saw the locket. A little thing of gold. It had escaped his armour during his struggles. It lay across his unmoving chest, the tarnished gilt all but obscured by filth. I reached down and tore it loose.

I let it dangle from my fingers and spin, and I saw that there was a catch to it. Something inside, perhaps. A secret thing. Secrets were another crack in the wall of discipline. Soldiers were not allowed secrets. Their lives were best kept simple and uncomplicated – scraped sharp and straight, like the edge of a bayonet.

More weakness. Another crime for the tally. His death was more justified with every passing moment, and I felt a flush of satisfaction. The God-Emperor had guided my hand, as He had done so many times before.

‘Get him up,’ I said. The corpsman knelt beside the screamer as I studied the locket. Despite myself, I was curious. I wondered what it held. A picture, a message – something else? I closed my hand around it. ‘What are you waiting for? I said get him up.’

‘He’s dead,’ the corpsman said, in a hollow voice.

‘I know. I know a dead man when I see one.’ I stuffed the locket into my coat. ‘It’s just as well. The penalty for contraband is the same as that for cowardice… summary execution. The sentence has been administered.’ I looked around. ‘The rest of you, get back to your posts.’

The corpsman looked up at me. His gaze was unreadable. Brown eyes. Placid. A soldier’s eyes. ‘What about him?’

I looked down at the body. ‘Feed him to the soup.’

Someone talked, of course. They always do. Word got back to the colonel, as it always did. And I was summoned.

I went, obviously. While commissars are ostensibly outside the chain of command, in practice we are a part of it. Some may flaunt this to their betterment, but I have more discipline than most. Without rules, codified or not, discipline cannot be maintained. Thus, I subordinate myself to those with greater authority, as vested in them by the God-Emperor.

The colonel was one such. He was old and hard, like the fossilised lumps of bone that occasionally surfaced from the soup, with a sturdy frame that bespoke a welcome solidity of spirit. He wore his uniform well, and his face was a mass of scars and antiquated cybernetics. Part of his jaw was metal, and one eye. The eye whirred and clicked, lenses shifting.

I often wondered what it was like to see the world through such a mechanism. Were things clearer, or did it only add to the confusion of the moment? I regret never asking him when I had the chance.

‘I’m told you throttled a boy, Valemar,’ he said, without preamble, as I stooped to enter the command bunker. Right to the point – that was the colonel. I knew his name, but names are for civilians. Ranks serve to remind soldiers of their place in the grand machinery of war.

‘Commissar,’ I corrected. A game between us, begun the day I had been seconded to the regiment. He had been old, even then, and I young. I was older now, but the game continued. I looked around. No one else was there. No one of importance, I should say. Just his aide – a nondescript little entity of no particular interest or importance. Another grey shape among a regiment of grey shapes.

Usually the colonel was accompanied by a herd of lesser men – junior officers and their aides. And, of course, the colonel’s own aide would be bustling in the background, a silent shadow. They were all pale shadows of the colonel, as the men of the regiment were but shades of me. Their discipline and faith were but reflections of my own.

Do you think it arrogant of me to make such a claim? I assure you, it is the truth. As a commissar, I am the regiment’s soul. If it falters, it is only because I faltered first. That is what it means to be a commissar. You are the regiment – the Body Militarum. As the regiment suffers, so do you. As it prospers, so will you.

People – soldiers, I should say – do not understand the role of a political officer. They do not see the necessity of me. This is because they lack the foresight of a man like the colonel. The colonel understood me. He knew me, and knew my faith was strong. It was why he trusted me. No, we weren’t friends. But we trusted one another.

The colonel cleared his throat as his aide brought him a mug of recaff. ‘Why did you throttle the boy, commissar?’

‘He was a mutant, a coward and a thief.’ The latter was an assumption. I had not yet had time to examine the locket, but I thought the odds were good that he had stolen it.

‘And so you throttled him?’

‘An object lesson.’

The colonel laughed. It was a harsh sound, like the croaking of a bird. ‘Would not a las-round to the head have served just as well?’ He tilted his head, and fixed me with that false eye, its lenses glowing a deep, bloody red. ‘Or were you particularly incensed by his crimes?’

I said nothing.

He smiled, as if I had responded. ‘You do take it so… personally, don’t you, Valemar? As if their failings are yours.’

‘Commissar,’ I said.

‘Commissar,’ he amended. ‘How many is this, now? Since we arrived, I mean.’

It was not a real question, and I saw no reason to answer it. The colonel had greater concerns than the method of a coward’s execution. The war had been dragging on for months. Years, even. It was hard to tell, sometimes, when day and night blended into one grey stretch of nothing. But that was the way of it. The God-Emperor commanded, and we had only to obey.

When he saw I wasn’t going to answer, he grunted and turned away. Outside, I could hear the thunder, rhythmic and piercing.

‘Their rate of fire is impressive,’ he said, as he studied the maps and pict-captures plastered along the wall. He tapped a map. ‘No way to silence the guns without crossing open ground. No way to cross open ground without losing at least a third of the regiment to defensive emplacements. No way to break the defensive emplacements without air support, and no air support thanks to the guns. A pretty trap, and here we sit, caught fast in it.’ He looked at me. ‘Some of my officers don’t agree with my assessment. What about you?’

I glanced at the maps without interest. Unlike some who wore the black cap and coat, I knew my place. I was no line officer, and did not pretend otherwise. My duty was to follow orders, not give them or suggest them. The colonel had his own advisers. I was a different sort of sounding board.

‘You are the colonel of this regiment, not me. If you think it’s a trap, then it’s a trap.’

He chuckled. ‘A good answer. I wish I had a hundred like you, Valemar.’

‘Commissar.’

‘Of course. Commissar. Regrettably, you are only one, as am I.’ The regret in his voice was palpable. I didn’t like it. The regulations were clear. Regret led to doubt, and doubt to fear, and fear to treachery.

‘Strip dissenters of their rank,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘You see simple solutions where there are none.’

I didn’t know what that meant, so I let it pass. ‘Would you like me to investigate?’

‘No. That’s the last thing I want.’ He changed the subject. ‘How are the men? What’s their mood?’

‘Loyal,’ I said, without hesitation.

He laughed. I heard an echoing chuckle behind me and glanced around. I saw the colonel’s aide tidying stacks of reports. The aide ducked away from my eyes. I knew that he was frightened of me, though I thought little about it. He was right to be. Not even his relationship with the colonel would save him from my judgement, if I’d decided against him. Even so, I waited for him to scuttle to the other side of the bunker before elaborating.

‘Morale has suffered, but is within acceptable parameters. Talk of desertion is inevitable, but I have identified the potential vectors already.’

‘Vectors… men, you mean.’

‘Four men, two women.’

The colonel nodded. A nerve bundle in the prosthetic part of his jaw twitched. ‘And your diagnosis?’

I shrugged. ‘Observation, for the moment.’

‘I’m surprised that you haven’t disposed of them already.’

‘There is no point. And they haven’t committed a crime. Yet.’ My hand dropped to my pistol, and I patted the holster fondly. ‘They will. And when they do, I will make an example of them.’

‘Not all at once, I hope.’ He looked at me. ‘Not again.’ There was the faintest edge of reprimand in his tone. It irked me, for I had not exceeded my authority. I never did. I had merely done my duty. The men knew it, and so did he. I had only ever done my duty, as the God-Emperor commanded. It was what I lived for.

‘That will depend on them,’ I said, not letting my anger colour my words. The colonel studied me, his false eye clicking as the lenses oscillated through the light spectrum. Then he turned away once more.

‘Dismissed, commissar.’

I saluted and left, nearly stumbling over his aide. I kicked the fool aside, ignoring his muffled protests. He shouldn’t have been underfoot. Eavesdropping on his betters. The aides were inveterate gossips. Killing every one of them would have significantly improved the regiment’s morale, I have no doubt, even now.

Men were loitering near the bunker, and I smelled the stink of narc-sticks on the air. I stared at them, keeping my face carefully blank.

‘Shouldn’t you be at your posts?’ Narc-sticks were forbidden while on duty. They dulled the senses and lulled men into a relaxed state. Also, the glow made them easy prey for enemy snipers.

The soldiers scattered like frightened birds. I had hunted birds as a boy. Before the schola progenium had made me a man. I still remembered the flutter of their tiny hearts as I held them. And the wet crack of their fragile bones as I closed my fingers and twisted. The men had much in common with the birds. Little lives with no use save that which they were given. The regiment gave them – gave us – purpose. And yet, so few of them were grateful.

They lacked the wit to see the light, as I did. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. They were brutes and fools and I was the angel of their better nature, guiding them as the God-Emperor guided me. That is my duty, and I am glad of it.

I made my way back to my quarters. It had begun to rain. Fat, ashy drops pelted the environment netting and echoed rhythmically against the tops of the bunkers. It ran down my cap and beneath the collar of my coat, stinging my neck. The rain was hot, like the mud, and when it fell, it did so in sheets. I was forced to duck beneath one of the temporary shelters hacked into the trench wall. Like all of them, it was a simple divot, covered by netting or scrap metal. Sometimes the men added to them, carving out new roads in the dark, shadowing the twists and turns of the trenches. It was against regulations, but I had never caught anyone at it. Part of me was almost grateful.

I stood in the damp, listening to the rain thud against the metal sheet overhead. Out in the trench, indistinct grey shapes shuffled slowly. The enemy had ceased firing. They always did when it rained. I wondered if the weather interfered with their targeting systems. Perhaps it was more toxic to them than it was to us. There were numerous xenos species which faltered in conditions a human could easily endure. This war had proved that, if nothing else. Our guns, somewhere far to the rear, continued to fire.

Dull orange flashes crested the lip of the trench. It had been days – weeks, perhaps – since I had dared look out over the waste ground that lay between us. The enemy snipers were adept at concealment, and liked to creep close. We’d lost nearly a hundred men before we’d learned that lesson. That was what the pavises were for. But even they didn’t work all the time. There were bodies melting in the soup that could attest to that.

Something thumped against my boot. A shard of bone jutted from the soft wall of the shelter, corroded identity tags dangling from it. I was reminded of the contraband in my pocket, and I fished it out. The locket was small, and crafted in a way I was not familiar with. It clearly opened, but I could not find the catch. As I ran my fingers over the curved shape, I thought again of its former owner. Of his eyes, staring at nothing.

Bright blue eyes. Unusual, that.

I still couldn’t remember his name. That wasn’t surprising. My mind kept going back to his eyes. They bothered me. Reminded me of something else, perhaps.

Someone coughed. I smelled the pungent whiff of a narc-stick, and turned.

There was someone else in the shelter. I hadn’t noticed them at first. They crouched in the far corner, a heavy canvas slicker over their uniform. Man or woman, I couldn’t tell. The regiment made use of both. I had brought many soldiers of both sexes up on charges of unlawful fraternisation since our arrival.

Their mask was rolled up, past their mouth, allowing them to suckle on the narc-stick unhindered. The goggle eyes stared at me, and for an instant, I almost allowed myself a laugh at the incongruity of the situation.

‘Shouldn’t you be at your post?’ I asked, stuffing the locket back into my coat. I didn’t know whether they’d seen me trying to open it or not. I didn’t know why it bothered me to think that they might have.

‘I am, commissar,’ they said. A man’s voice. He pointed to the opposite side of the trench. A lasgun lay propped against the firing step there. ‘Just wanted to get out of the rain.’ He spoke Low Gothic with a barbarous accent that grated on my ears. The regiment had been formed in some backwater system – agri worlds, mostly. One of the reasons discipline was so bad, I suspected.

‘You left your weapon in the rain.’ I looked down at him. ‘Punishment detail – twelve hours.’ The rain was beginning to slacken, the rhythm fading. He rose slowly. Surly. I knew his type. A loafer and a slacker. Only a soldier if a sergeant or superior officer was present. ‘And narc-sticks are forbidden when on duty. Punishment detail – six hours.’

‘I’ve been on duty for eighteen already,’ he said quietly.

He was arguing with me. Not unusual, but it had been weeks since the last time. Defiance was punishable by death. My heart quickened, and my mouth was dry.

‘Then you’ll be used to it,’ I said. I kept my voice even. I didn’t want to be accused of provocation if there were witnesses. The thought made me glance around. My inattention almost proved fatal.

Even now, I don’t know whether his lunge was intentional, or provoked by surprise. As the rain stopped, the enemy started. The roar of their guns split the air. Somewhere on the other side of our lines, a trench collapsed and something exploded. The whole trench-line shook, and the soup shifted beneath our feet.

The shelter contracted. It was a sudden thing – faster than I’d ever seen. One moment, I was facing him, the next we were driven together as the mud boiled around us. It crashed down, striking me in the back, and on my head and shoulders. I stumbled, and then he was there – and something gleamed in his hand.

Later, I wondered if he had actually been attempting to aid me. But in that instant, instinct prevailed. As I felt his weight, my hand went to my pistol. We were driven back and sent sliding one way and then the next by the convulsions of the mud. I tried to shout, but all I got for my trouble was a mouthful of bitter foulness.

We struggled there, in the dark. Some might assume he was simply trying to get away. But I know he wasn’t. It was rare that a soldier tried to kill a commissar. Such a crime meant execution, or worse. But it happened. It had happened to me, more than once. Sometimes out of desperation, other times because they were mad.

But this time… this time was different. In the crushing dark, pressed close, his mask was askew. I saw his eyes. Blue. Bright blue. Like the skies of a world I barely remembered. Like the eyes of the man I’d executed that morning.

And, for a moment, it was him. Just for an instant. It was only when I felt the tip of his blade catch in the tangled folds of my coat that my shock gave way to anger.

I could hear his muffled curses, and they sounded more like the grunts of a beast. I drove my elbow into the side of his head, trying to open a gap big enough to draw my weapon. His bayonet tore strips from my coat as he flailed. I caught at his hand, earning myself a gash on the forearm. His knee sank into my midsection, and I gasped. He gripped my throat, and his panting took on an eager pulse.

The tip of the bayonet kissed my cheek, and my fingers fastened around his wrist. I squeezed and his hand spasmed. The knife fell away and I lunged after it. Bubbling mud splattered me, burning my face and neck. My attacker crashed down atop me, his hands scrabbling at my scalp.

I caught the hilt of the bayonet and rolled, driving it into something soft. He made a quiet sound, and his eyes widened behind his goggles. He slumped into the running mud and was pushed to the ground. I jerked the bayonet free and wrenched myself loose from the collapsing shelter. I snatched up my cap as I stumbled back. My heart thundered, and for a moment, I feared it would burst. I slid down the opposite wall of the trench, watching as his body was slowly drawn into the soup. His eyes stared blankly at me as his head was covered by a shroud of mud.

They weren’t blue at all.

Had I imagined it, then? Had the stress of the moment fooled me? I had no answers, as I sat heavily on a firing step, cap and bayonet in hand. I watched until he was all gone, and all trace of our fight with him. I looked at the bayonet, caked in mud and stained red. I heard voices. Shouts from up and down the line, as corpsmen saw to the injured. I stuffed the blade into my coat.

Smoke boiled down the line, and shapes moved through it. They were coming to check on the integrity of the line. They saw me and stopped. Four of them, one a corpsman.

‘Commissar?’ he said, hesitantly. I wondered if it was the same corpsman as before.

I donned my cap before answering. ‘A shelter collapsed. No one else made it out.’

Later, in my quarters, I considered the bayonet and the locket. Two more incongruent items I couldn’t imagine. What did one have to do with the other? Nothing, on the face of it. And yet, there was a connection.

I simply didn’t know what it was. Not yet. But it had to mean something. Everything meant something. I had learned that as a boy, and nothing I had seen since had disproved it. Even the most innocuous of phrases meant something. That is the last thing I want. That was what the colonel had said. But it wasn’t what he’d meant. I knew him well enough to know that. He was worried about something – not just the enemy. Something else.

That meant I should be worried as well.

My quarters were utilitarian. A simple pre-fab shelter, set into a reinforced divot towards the rear of the lines. There were cracks in the walls, and stains from where the soup had boiled through in the night. My bed was a simple cot, and my desk was an empty crate, balanced on two blocks of ferrocrete.

I rarely stayed in my quarters. I rarely slept. I came back only when necessary. I do not care for the feeling of being confined in such places. Too much like a cell – or a tomb. And there was always so much to be done. Punishments to be handed down, discipline to be enforced. Decisions to be made.

What was worrying the colonel? I sat at my desk, staring at the blade and locket, thinking. Trying to, at least. I knew I should have reported the attack. Instead, I’d obfuscated the matter. Some instinct had prompted me to do so, and I was not one to ignore such glimmerings. The God-Emperor spoke to us all. One but had to listen to be gifted with His wisdom.

I knew He was speaking to me. He always had. And right then, He was warning me. Telling me that something was happening, just out of sight. I felt curiously alone. I always have – I am not, by nature, inclined to the company of others. It is why I am effective in my duty. But now, I felt… isolated. Alone in a crowd. As if I were lost behind enemy lines.

I resolved to investigate the matter. If something was going on, it would be best if I found out quickly and handled it. The colonel would approve of my taking the initiative. If there was a problem with the regiment, it was my duty to deal with it. I felt better for having set my course. Uncertainty is a crack in the wall of faith. One cannot question the path ahead without risking a fall.

I rose and went to my cot. Beneath it was a crate. I dragged it out and opened it, as I had done every day of my time with the regiment. Routine is the sentry on the walls of the mind. It is important to establish and follow a pattern. Divergence leads to mistakes, mistakes to failure and failure to defeat. A slippery slope must be walked with care.

Inside the crate was everything I had confiscated in the course of my duties. Ordinarily, such contraband was turned over to the quartermaster for destruction. But I had never got around to it. There were always more important matters to attend to, and what did it matter where it was kept? The crate had once held ammunition for something – I forget what. Now it held what I had come to think of as my collection. A foolish thought, I admit. And in any case, I hadn’t started it, only added to it.

The seed of the collection had belonged to my predecessor. I’d discovered it upon taking up my duties. I suspect that he’d been using it to reward his favourites in the regiment. He’d been an old man, when the regiment was young. His edge had been dulled by too many soft postings, or so the colonel had said. That was why he’d requested a new commissar. A more vigorous one, capable of helping him whip the regiment into shape.

And that was exactly what I did. I found the weak links and removed them, making the rest stronger. The colonel had approved. Had left me to it, knowing that it was necessary. He was a wise man. But wisdom is often not enough. You must have a will to equal it. I had the will. And to ensure its strength, I tested it every day.

The collection helped. Over the years, I had added to it. Thoughtlessly at first, and then with more consideration. There were bits of jewellery and forbidden reading material. Articles of clothing, flasks of rotgut and narcotics. In the years since I’d joined the regiment, the collection had grown in leaps and bounds as I doled out the necessary punishments.

My collection served to remind me of the many temptations that threatened the integrity of the regiment. Temptations of the body, mind and soul. It reminded me that I had to be alert. Watchful. I often examined the items one by one, in my rare moments of solitude, remembering the moment of their owner’s execution, and the satisfaction of duty fulfilled. The look in their eyes as my laspistol snuffed out the last embers of their life.

I like to think that some, at least, understood, in their final moments. That they knew I had no choice in the matter, and took no pleasure from it. Satisfaction, certainly. But not pleasure. Never that. I took something from each of them, so that I would never forget the price of a life. Duty weighs heavily on an honest man, but he carries the burden regardless.

I added the locket and the bayonet to the collection. It seemed fitting.

Then I closed it up. I allowed myself only a few moments with it a day. Just enough to remind myself what was in it. To remember. And then I put it away.

I spent the rest of the evening on paperwork, as a reward. Unlike some of my peers in the Commissariat, I enjoyed paperwork. Thus were the walls of the Imperium maintained. It was not all ferrocrete and lasguns. Numbers and figures, reports and analyses – all were equally vital to the proper running of war. A strong bureaucracy was the unbending spine of empire.

But as I stamped, signed and filed, I found myself wondering if the enemy had their own bureaucracy, to match ours. I paused, realising that the guns had fallen silent. The enemy had ceased their efforts for the cycle. They would resume in a few hours. Once, we might’ve gone over the top. Seized the moment the God-Emperor had provided, and taken our steel to the enemy’s throat. But the order to advance never came, and so we waited. Waited for the guns to begin again, and ours to answer in kind, and us stuck in the middle.

If I had been a different sort of commissar, I might have urged the colonel to seize the initiative. To advance into glory – or glorious death. But it wasn’t my place. Even so, I sometimes wondered about the stillness of it all. Why had command sent no orders? Had they simply forgotten us? Or worse...

A ridiculous thought, but… it had happened before. If a report had been filed listing our regiment as destroyed, then for all intents and purposes, we were destroyed. And no amount of argument, or not being dead, would change that. To admit error was unthinkable. The Departmento Munitorum didn’t make mistakes. The Imperium’s war machine was infallible. This was a fact, inviolate and inarguable. And yet...

I pushed the thought aside, as I always did. If such was the case, there was nothing for it but to hold and wait for reality to catch up with the paperwork. We would be ground to nothing eventually, if the soup didn’t swallow us first. In the meantime, I would do my duty, as the colonel was no doubt doing his.

I had finished by the time the guns began their song anew. I could not sleep, though I was weary. I had not slept in two days. It wasn’t the noise – I was used to that – but rather the excitement. It wasn’t often I executed two men on the same day. My pulse was racing, and it was hard to sit still. I wanted to be out. To be about my responsibilities.

I left my quarters, taking care to lock them behind me. Not because I thought it would keep anyone out, but because if I came back and found it otherwise, I would know that someone had broken in.

It had happened once, early on. Apparently, breaking into the commissar’s quarters had been regarded as a rite of passage before my arrival. My predecessor had been known to keep a stash of amasec hidden beneath his cot. I had poured it all out in my first hour with the regiment. By my second hour, I had made my first execution, when some fool had slunk in, looking for the bottles. I shot him on the spot. No one had tried to break into my quarters since. But still, I locked them.

The regiment was awake, even as the sky turned dark. Crackling lumens hung from the shelters and netting, casting weird shadows on the walls of the trenches. Men and women sat around eating cold gruel from tins, or leaned against their posts, alert to enemy treachery.

The soup was noisiest at this time. It seemed to grow agitated as darkness fell, and I could feel it twitching beneath the ferrocrete slabs. In places, it was already swallowing them, and I saw soldiers desperately attempting to scrape it back. Once, I’d seen a trooper swallowed up by a wall. He’d been sleeping on duty, so I’d left him to his fate, though it was more peaceful than he deserved.

This memory was uppermost in my mind when my reverie was pierced by the high, thin whistle of an enemy shell. I did not look up. Only a fool looks up. I knew what was coming and I had no need to see it. I pressed myself tight against the wall of the trench as the barrage rained down. Mud seethed as fire filled the trench-line. Men and women were flung into the air, some whole, most in pieces. The ground convulsed beneath me and the soup surged up, lapping at my shins.

I cursed and climbed onto a firing step, trying to escape its pull. More explosions hammered the line. I heard ferrocrete bracers crack and buckle. A nearby shelter collapsed, burying those who’d sought safety within. Others rushed to their aid, only to find themselves sinking into the boiling mud, as I almost had. The wall behind me burst, and hot lashings of mud splattered my coat. It thrust out, pummelling me like fists. The ferrocrete slab cracked and mud oozed over and through it, even as the firing step began to sink.

I fell, and the soup welcomed me, greedily swallowing my hands as I tried to brace myself. The stink of it filled my nostrils. It was like tar and rotting meat and spilled promethium. I gagged, wishing I’d worn my mask. I flailed, trying to right myself as it sucked at my hands and feet. I could feel the heat of it through my boots and gloves, and knew I’d be lucky to get away with blisters.

To my left, the trench wall gave way, all but burying several unlucky men. This part of the line was going to be gone in moments. I staggered free of the mud’s embrace and dragged the nearest soldier to his feet.

‘Up – get up!’ I had to shout to be heard over the roar of the guns. ‘Grab your kit and move down the line, quickly.’ I shoved him in the direction I needed him to go, and started hauling others to their feet. ‘Go, go, go!’

They moved slowly at first. Some wasted time trying to help others. I left them to it. The soup would have them, or not. If they made it to safety, I would discipline them.

It is a peculiar thing to move through a trench that is rapidly filling. The walls close in, even as the ground rises. As you are buoyed, you are buried. Bones spill from the walls, and chunks of stone and bits of forgotten equipment bob to the surface.

Slabs of ferrocrete toppled forward, and more than one man was caught unawares and crushed. I narrowly avoided it myself as I chivvied the rest forward with kicks, punches and curses. They were like animals, without the wit to escape the butcher’s knife.

By the time we reached stable ground, the mud was surging almost to our thighs. The next part of the line was at a higher elevation and had avoided the collapse. Hands reached down to haul us up, and I heard the shouts of officers and enginseers over the babble of soldiers. I allowed myself to be dragged up and lay panting, watching as the mud rose and rolled like a river of browns and reds. There were bodies caught in the flow, drifting or tangled in bits of netting. Toxic steam rose from bursting bubbles, and I was forced back, hand over my mouth and nose. That part of the line would be unstable for days, if not longer.

Exhausted now, I dragged myself to an empty shelter and sat, waiting for the ache in my limbs and lungs to subside. I wondered if my quarters had survived. They were far enough back to have avoided the worst of the upheaval, but there was no guarantee. I was too tired to worry about it overmuch, in any case.

I must have slept then, though I don’t know for how long. It wasn’t enough.

I didn’t dream. I rarely dream. Dreaming is for the weak of mind and spirit. Instead, I remembered. The events of the day, or days previous, played themselves back on the screen of my mind. I studied myself, noting flaws and strengths. Sometimes the God-Emperor spoke to me in these memories.

This time, there was no comforting voice. Only the squealing of hogs.

I hate hogs. That had been my first duty, at the schola progenium. Slop the hogs. Clean their pen. Again and again. They never stopped eating and rooting and rutting. Fat, slovenly, undisciplined creatures, always tearing down fences. No discipline, hogs. Couldn’t be trained, couldn’t be taught.

They were tough. They had accompanied man to the stars, like dogs and rats. And like them, they’d found the galaxy to their liking. Where there were men, there were hogs. Eating and being eaten.

I still had a scar on my hip where a boar hog had tusked me, lifted me screaming and hurled me, bloody, into the muck. I remember them circling me, hungry and snorting. Grey mounds of hairy filth, gliding over the mud.

And every one of them with bright, blue eyes.

Only that wasn’t right. I woke up knowing it wasn’t right. Hogs didn’t have blue eyes. The ones at the schola progenium hadn’t had eyes at all, having been bred for generations in underground pens. The thought startled me awake, and I sat for a moment, uncertain of where I was, heart thumping. I couldn’t hear the guns.

I realise now that the guns had become a sort of lodestone for me. A constant in an ever-shifting world. However the trench-line warped itself, the guns were always there. I could count on them to form the borders of my world. The limits of my duty.

When the guns fired, the world made sense. When they stopped, when all was silence, that was when the world seemed to grow vague and uncertain, as it did then. I hauled myself to my feet, blinking sleep from my eyes and pushing down the memories of grunting beasts. I could hear alarm klaxons ringing, somewhere far behind the lines. There was smoke on the air. Something was burning.

Men stood opposite, their faces turned away, watching the enemy. For an instant, I thought that the stalemate had been broken. That the enemy were on the march. But the men would have been shooting. Or would they? Uneasy, I had an image of them turning, of blue eyes staring at me from under every hood. Just like the pigs at meal-time. Only the pigs had been blind. Why had I recalled otherwise?

Shaking my head, I made my way over to the firing steps. I climbed up behind a pavise, noting the pict-captures wedged in the overlapping plates. Unfamiliar places and faces, men and women and children. Contraband. I tore the pictures loose and crumpled them, letting them tumble into the soup. Men who thought of home inevitably had difficulty keeping their mind on the battle before them.

If any of the nearby soldiers noticed, they said nothing. They ignored me, as they often did. Unless someone had committed an infraction. Then, all eyes were on me. I still wonder whether that was due more to fear or resentment. Either way, it suited me. The less I had to do with them, the better.

We stood in silence, a row of watchful gazes. It was hard to breathe, but I left my mask where it was. To be seen donning it would be taken as a sign of weakness, worse even than wearing it. I blinked tears from my eyes as stinging vapour slithered between the pavises, and the mud beneath the firing steps shifted and squirmed.

I knew we all shared the same thought – what if they were drawing closer? Using the quiet moments to edge their lines forwards? As I said, I am no strategist, but it seemed to me that a smart enemy would press every advantage. Our lines were static, save where the soup caused them to buckle. Maybe they had the same difficulties we did. Maybe it was all they could do to keep their own emplacements from swallowing them, as ours did.

‘Think they’re out there?’ a soldier muttered, breaking the silence. I glanced at her. She was like all the rest – hooded and muddy, stinking of sweat and las-residue. Only her voice gave away her gender. She was shaking slightly. They did that sometimes, a by-product of the constant noise and movement, or so the corpsmen insisted. I, on the other hand, suspected it was a combination of fear and adrenaline. Mostly because they often stopped shaking when I looked at them, and those that didn’t soon didn’t move at all.

I didn’t reply. I doubted the question was aimed at anyone in particular. They talked to hear themselves, rather than to make conversation. Another sign of their lack of discipline. Silence is the shield of the soul. Loose words invite damnation. I had often tried to impart this most basic of wisdoms, but the men and women of the regiment proved unduly resistant to such lessons. That was why harsher measures were often called for.

I peered across the wastes between us. It was all but impossible to see past the miasma that rose from the soup and blocked all sight of the foe from us, and us from them. Steam and smoke and condensation merged into an opaque curtain the colour of bile. In its undulations, I saw the barest hint of distant earthworks and the implication of an artillery piece. Familiar and yet utterly alien.

‘I’ve never seen them. I realised that today.’ She was still talking. I’ve never understood why they felt the urge to talk in moments like this, especially to me. Then, in the gloom, I suppose we all looked alike. She probably didn’t know who she was addressing. ‘Are they xenos? Human? Are they rebels or invaders or something else?’ She looked at me. ‘Why are we here? Why are they shooting at us?’ Her voice held a pleading note, and I fought down a surge of anger.

Such questions are inevitable in any conflict of a certain scale. They are also unimportant. The Imperium is at war with the entirety of a fallen galaxy, and our enemies are legion. Why did it matter, then, who they were? What mattered was that they were on the other side.

‘Because they are our enemies,’ I said.

‘Why?’

The question itself would have been enough to see her punished, normally. But as I made to reprimand her, I stopped. A thought had occurred to me, one I did not like. I wondered what had made her ask the question, especially of me.

For the first time, I turned to look at her fully. I did not know then what I was looking for. It was instinct, I think. Something was amiss, and my mind screamed a warning. I looked and was met by a pair of blue eyes, staring at me from behind a rumpled mask.

As had happened earlier, I froze. I admit my failing freely. I do not know what, precisely, I was thinking. I think perhaps I was remembering the others, and the revulsion I’d felt at seeing those eyes. Like the eyes of the hogs – only they hadn’t had eyes, so what was I thinking of? I’m still not sure.

Regardless, I had my pistol out before I realised it. My finger tightened on the trigger, and the blue turned red. She pitched back into the soup, silent. The others scattered, flailing back from me, their voices like the murmur of startled vermin. They hadn’t seen what I’d seen. Or if they had, they hadn’t understood. How could they? Simpletons. Cowards and fools. That was why they needed me. Just as they’d needed me to save them in the trench earlier. Without me, the regiment would surely have collapsed. It is not hubris to say this. It is merely a statement of fact.

I tore her mask off, but the face was gone – cooked from inside out to unidentifiable bone by my shot. I turned, the mask still in my hand. The others refused to meet my gaze, and I was glad. I didn’t want to see those blue eyes, looking at me from behind another mask – or maybe all of them. The thought sent a shiver of repulsion running through me.

I looked down at the body, and saw that the soup was already taking it. The battlefield was hungry. When the guns began to thunder again, I knew it would feed well today, as it had every day so far. I looked up, watching the sky burn, and felt my uncertainties burn with it.

There was something going on. I could smell it. Taste it on the air, mingled with the smoke and the stink of death. The colonel was worried. And it seemed he was right to be, though not for the obvious reasons. I exulted in the realisation, I admit. It was as if the God-Emperor were whispering to me. I could not hear Him clearly, then. Not yet. But I would.

And I intended to do as He commanded.

The colonel called me in, after that. As if I were just another cog in the war machine. I understood, of course. Two public executions, one on the heels of the other – well, that required some statement from the senior officers. Once, it might not have. But those days were past us, and things had changed, though not for the better.

It wasn’t just for the benefit of the regiment, but for mine as well. A reminder that if I was acting up, they’d send for a new commissar. That was the way of it. If I was acting up. If I was a faulty cog. But I wasn’t. I was doing my duty. Just like always. It wasn’t my fault that they couldn’t see that.

I’d lost count of the number of times the colonel had called me in to chastise me in front of his subordinates. I was vigorous in the pursuit of my duty, and that required that he be vigorous in his – or at least be seen to be so. I like to think that he was grateful for the opportunity. Sloth is no less an enemy than vice or heresy.

The command bunker was more crowded than usual when I was shown in. Full of sweaty bodies, covered in mud, indistinguishable. The air was more stale than usual, and I wondered if the recyclers were malfunctioning again.

No one wore their hoods, but their pallid faces were all the same to me in the dim light. I suppose I would have looked the same, too, but for my peaked cap and coat. It was a reminder that I wasn’t like them, and I saw a look I didn’t like in the eyes of some.

I’d been seeing that look for a long time, and it rarely bothered me. They aren’t supposed to like us. If they do, we’re not doing our duty. But at that moment, I was all too conscious of it. There was a weight in it, a fierce pressure. They thought to judge me. Me.

I was momentarily struck by the absurdity of their hubris. Who were they to judge me? That was my duty, not theirs. I knew my place, and I would ensure that they knew theirs. So I met their glares with my own, eye to eye, and to a man they looked away, one by one. Only the colonel did not wilt before me. He never had.

He turned. ‘Well, Valemar. It’s been too long.’ He chuckled, and the sycophants among the crowd chuckled with him. ‘How many hours since I last had you in here?’

I did not reply.

He nodded and looked around. ‘I’m told you acted with commendable heroism in the recent line collapse. Several men reported that you saved them from the mud.’

‘I did my duty,’ I said, modestly.

The colonel nodded again. His smile was hard and flat. ‘And then you shot someone.’

‘I executed her.’

‘Why did you execute her?’

I wracked my brain for an answer. ‘Incitement to heresy,’ I said. She had blue eyes, I thought. But I couldn’t say that. The colonel might understand, but the others wouldn’t. Officers required simple answers, easy to process within the confines of their duties. They were like the men they commanded, in that way. Automata of meat and muscle, with precious little grace. Another lesson I had learned as a boy – don’t preoccupy their minds with such things. That was my job. My duty. I looked after the soul of the regiment. They looked after its body.

‘That wasn’t what I heard,’ someone said.

I looked at him. A captain, given his insignia. I knew his face, but not his name. He had soft features – the look of a child – beneath his scruff of stubble. Beards were not against regimental regulations, but this one should have been. It was patchy and the colour of bile.

‘I heard you had another of your episodes, Valemar.’ He spat my name like a curse, and I thought about shooting him dead there and then. But a look from the colonel made me reconsider.

A murmur passed through the crowd at this assertion. They reminded me of the grunting pigs, eager to be at their meal. In this case, the meal was me. While the colonel understood my function, and admitted the necessity of my presence, his subordinates lacked such clarity. They ever sought ways of discrediting me in his eyes, and those of the men.

I think that they feared me. Or rather, what I represented. Such men cannot fathom the limits of their own authority, of which I was a personification. When presented with such a limit, they react strongly.

‘What did you hear, exactly, Ducco?’ the colonel said. His voice was mild. Almost bored. But he was listening. That made me uneasy. The colonel was patient with my methods, but I knew that patience was a finite resource.

‘I heard Valemar–’

‘Commissar,’ I interjected. The captain looked at me, and I was startled to see the depths of his loathing displayed so openly on his face.

‘I heard Commissar Valemar screamed like a maniac at that poor soul before he murdered her. That he murdered her for asking a question. Not for heresy. For curiosity.’

‘Curiosity is heresy,’ I said, automatically. ‘Ignorance is the shield of faith.’

‘You see?’ the captain said, gesticulating. ‘Listen to him. He spouts these homilies as if they explain anything. I’ve never seen them in any manual or book. I think he makes them up to justify his actions after the fact.’

I saw heads nodding. Not firmly or fiercely, but nodding nonetheless. I made note of their faces. They would bear watching.

‘Ducco,’ the colonel said, his tone one of warning. But the captain was beyond such niceties.

‘Colonel, I know I might be overstepping my bounds, but even you have to admit that we can’t have this black-coated ghoul stalking the trenches, making things worse than they already are.’

More nodding. More sounds of agreement. More faces to remember. I remembered the trench and the feeling of the mud contracting around me. I was getting the same feeling now, as the captain continued with his impassioned assault on my character.

He continued in this vein, growing more fervent with every insult. My palm itched for the feel of my laspistol and I fought to control my expression. Any anger, any denial, would only further inflame the feelings against me. I wondered whether this was a spur of the moment declaration of war, or whether it was more calculated. Was this the first step in an attempt to remove me from my post?

I’d heard about such things, of course. Soldiers tended to try and settle such matters with a bayonet or a grenade rolled into someone’s quarters as they slept. But officers were a more civilised breed. They waged wars with words. They cast aspersions, rather than grenades. On the whole, I couldn’t say which method I preferred.

As I said, I’d known for some time that they feared me. But this wasn’t fear. Or at least not fear alone. And that made me wary. The regiment needed me. Without me, it would perish. For their own sake, I could not allow them to usurp my authority. I glanced at the colonel, hoping he would step in. His word was law. If he declared me inviolate, then there would be nothing they could do, short of mutiny. And if they mutinied… well.

I admit, I almost hoped they would give in to such treacherous urges, if they had them. It would have made things simpler. I have long held the belief that too many officers render a regiment slow and unwieldy, rather than increasing its overall efficiency. And our regiment had more than its share.

None had been promoted from within the ranks, of course. Soldiers do not make good officers any more than commissars do. No, they were the scions of a backwater aristocracy, born to command. As they saw it. Like me, the colonel was an outsider, but they forgave him. He was the sort of man they admired, in their own rustic fashion.

But I didn’t fit. I wasn’t a peasant to be ordered around. Nor was I their superior. So, I was an enemy. And it seemed as if they had decided to remove me from the field at last. I wasn’t planning to go without a fight, however.

The colonel gestured as the captain finally began to wind down. ‘Enough, Ducco. Your complaints are noted, and I will take them under consideration.’

I looked at him, startled, feeling somewhat betrayed. No one was looking at me now. All eyes were on him. As was proper. He sighed and clasped his hands behind his back.

‘And when I say I will take them under consideration, I mean it. We are in a precarious position. We cannot afford dissension in the ranks. Nor can we afford to bicker among ourselves. More importantly, we cannot be seen to do so. The men are uneasy enough.’ He looked around. ‘We are in this together, gentlemen.’ His eyes found mine. ‘All of us. That means we must pull together or hang separately. That includes you, commissar.’ He was silent for a moment. Then, ‘No more executions.’

I blinked. ‘What?’

‘You heard me, Valemar.’

‘Commissar,’ I corrected, unthinkingly. After a moment’s hesitation, I asked, ‘Are you telling me I cannot do my duty?’ The words tasted foul even as I said them. I was certain that I had misheard. The colonel could not mean it. I felt that there was some deeper game that I was simply too blindsided to see.

‘No. I am saying that you may not execute anyone without my express permission.’

Again, I hesitated. ‘That is – I am outside the chain of command, colonel.’ I spoke slowly, trying to explain. Perhaps he had forgotten. ‘You cannot order me to ignore what I see...’

‘And I am not, Valemar.’ He emphasised my name, and I bit back my correction. His false eye whirred, the crimson lens focusing on me. ‘What I’m saying is that you must come to me before drawing that sidearm of yours. Dole out punishments as you see fit. But no executions – unless I give the word.’ He looked around again, and I realised, if somewhat belatedly, that the words were not just for my benefit. He was speaking to the others as well. Showing them that he… had me under control.

He looked back at me. ‘Do you understand?’

I wasn’t certain that I did. But I nodded, if reluctantly, and he grunted and turned away, seemingly satisfied. I relaxed slightly, as did the captain and the others. Some of them murmured among themselves, and I had the impression that they were laughing at me.

The colonel’s aide brought me a cup of instant recaff. It tasted stale and cold. Nothing was hot here, except for the mud. I drank anyway, chewing granules.

‘New maps?’ I asked, trying to change the subject.

The colonel nodded. He looked tired. I sympathised. It was a gruelling task, made all the harder by the environment and the demands of his subordinates. I felt a flash of – not guilt, but regret for having added to it.

‘We’ve lost three sections from the trench-line in the past day, including the one that almost took you. We’re still trying to dig men out.’

‘At this rate, we’ll lose everything we’ve gained,’ a junior officer spoke up – one of the captain’s fellows. I studied him, wondering if his complaint was just that – or something else. He didn’t have blue eyes, though. Just brown, like the mud, and red-rimmed from lack of sleep. A moment later, I wondered why I had thought that. Had I seen something and not realised it?

The thought made me uneasy. I drank my recaff and watched them, suddenly suspicious. I thought of the soldier I had killed in the shelter – the one no one knew about yet. His eyes had turned blue just before he’d attacked me. I found my gaze drawn to the captain, but his eyes were as muddy as those of the others.

And yet… there was something there. I felt as if I were being watched. Not just watched. Observed. Studied. I glanced around, trying to find the source, but saw nothing. The colonel was speaking, tapping the new maps. I wasn’t listening. The air stank of the usual odours, but I thought I detected another beneath them. Something sweet and clean and entirely out of place.

At that moment, someone coughed behind me. The colonel’s aide. ‘More recaff, sir?’ he murmured. I hated his voice. It lacked all authority. It was like a gust of air. I realised that my hand had dropped to my sidearm, and I twitched it aside. No one had noticed, I thought, save perhaps the aide, and he didn’t matter. I grunted and handed him my cup.

Briefings had always bored me. I suspect that is why my mind wandered. As I’ve said, I’m not a strategist or a tactician. I go where I am ordered, and do as my duty compels me. It does not take a military genius to shoot the enemy as well as anyone who runs from the enemy. But the colonel insisted that I pay attention on the rare occasions I was present.

As he talked, I studied the pict-captures and the new maps, and saw that little had changed since the last time. I may not have a head for strategy, but I have a very good memory. The lines squirmed like worms after a hard rain, but never went anywhere.

I took a swallow of recaff and said, ‘What does command say?’

Conversation stopped. It was as if I had made a rude noise. The colonel looked at me, as if surprised to find me still there.

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’ It came out sounding like an accusation, though I hadn’t meant it to.

The colonel looked at me. The bunker was silent. They were all looking at me. Deliberately, I set my cup down. It vanished a moment later. The little aide was bustling about, utterly, blissfully unaware of the tension in the air. A blessed fool is worth two faithless men.

‘Are you implying something, Valemar?’

‘Commissar Valemar,’ I corrected.

The moment stretched. His eyes against mine. I ignored the others. They were little better than the rank and file – worthless, save for their ability to follow orders. As I had known he would, the colonel looked back at his maps, his augmetic eye whirring and clicking. ‘Commissar Valemar,’ he corrected absently.

‘I meant no disrespect, colonel. I merely found it odd that command would ignore the forward position for so long, without some order to advance or – Emperor forfend – retreat. Instead, we sit.’

‘We hold position until we are given further orders.’

‘Hard to do when the ground squirms so,’ one of the others muttered. ‘Worse than a woman on her naming day.’ Coarse laughter followed this rudimentary witticism. I did not join in. Not least because I had little idea what a naming day was, or how it pertained to a woman’s movements. And in any event, I prefer my women still.

The colonel silenced them with a terse gesture. He had the art of it – the sharp slice of a hand, the hint of a frown. I studied him often, trying to learn the trick of it. Now, I think it is simply an instinct some men have and others don’t.

‘Wherever the mud takes us, we will hold, until we are otherwise ordered. You are dismissed.’ He looked at me. ‘Valemar. Stay a moment.’

The captain and the others filed out. Some, like the captain, cast dark looks my way as they left. I ignored them.

The colonel and I stood in silence for a long moment after the last of them had left. Then, he sighed.

‘What am I going to do with you, Valemar – Commissar Valemar. My apologies.’ He waved aside my interjection. ‘Two in two days. In both cases with little to no provocation. This can’t stand.’

‘There was provocation in both cases.’ I decided not to mention the man in the shelter. Something told me that it would only make things worse.

‘The men say different.’

‘The men…’ I began. I heard the heat in my voice and forced myself to calm down. ‘If you listen to the men, they are never at fault for their vices. They never bear responsibility for their crimes. It is always someone else’s fault.’

‘Maybe so. But sometimes it is better to look the other way.’

I stared at him. We’d always had a connection, he and I. We’d always understood one another. Or so I’d thought. But now here he was speaking heresy. I felt sick.

‘That’s not what you said to me when I joined the regiment.’

‘When you joined the regiment, it needed a strong hand. It was nothing but farmers and miners. Dregs. I needed soldiers. You helped me make them soldiers. But a blade can only be sharpened so much before it breaks.’

‘And you think – what? That they’re on the verge of breaking?’ I set my mug down. ‘Something is going on, colonel. There’s something happening. I can feel it.’

‘Yes. I know. And I’m trying to head it off. I’m trying to protect you, Valemar.’ He reached out, as if to put his hand on my shoulder, but I twitched aside. I don’t care for being touched, even by a man I respect.

‘I do not require protection.’

The colonel sighed again and looked away. ‘I need you, commissar. More than that, I need you in one piece. Remember what I said.’ He gestured. ‘Dismissed.’

And so I left.

It was quiet outside. The guns were silent, the only sound the soft murmur of the mud. I turned one way, and then the other, uncertain. I was still being watched. I could feel it. None of the men on duty outside the command bunker looked at me. But that didn’t mean that they weren’t watching me.

I hesitated. The mud at my feet burbled and bones swam briefly to the surface, between the slabs of ferrocrete, before sinking out of sight once more. A superstitious mind would have seen it as an omen. But I am not superstitious.

I looked back at the command bunker, and saw the colonel’s aide watching me from near the entrance, a narc-stick dangling from his lips. I hadn’t even noticed him there. He nodded to me, as if we were acquaintances. I resisted the urge to berate him and made my way down the line.

The guns started up not long after.

When I got back to my quarters, I found that someone had broken in.

The lock had been violently pried apart. I do not know, even now, what they were after. Nothing had been taken from my collection of contraband. None of my manuals had been disturbed, nor my paperwork – all was as it had been. But the entrance was unlocked, and there was a smell on the air. A smell that made me think of blue eyes.

I sat for a time, letting my gaze roam. Trying to find anything out of place. Even the smallest difference might point me in the direction of the perpetrator. But there was nothing. It was as if they’d broken in just to look.

I’d have felt less violated, I think, if they’d stolen something. Then the motive would have been obvious, and my response justified. Instead, I felt as if I had entered a dark forest and wandered from the path. Nothing made sense. Old certainties were fraying. Even the colonel couldn’t be counted on.

Outside, soldiers tried not to meet my eyes as I left my quarters. They huddled against the sides of the trench, talking in low voices, all but inaudible beneath the crash of enemy artillery. They knew something. They might not know that they knew, but they did. Had they been watching as the culprit invaded my sanctum? Had they helped?

I stared at them, my hand on my weapon. The burning sky cast long shadows that obscured either side of the trench, and for an instant it seemed as if every man had blue eyes and all of them were fixed on me.

‘Having trouble, commissar?’

I spun, laspistol half drawn.

It was the captain. Watching me from a higher part of the trench. He was wearing his mask, but I could tell he was smiling.

‘No,’ I said, as I straightened.

‘Are you sure? You seem upset. Maybe it’s the air. It’s quite foul. You should wear your mask. Can’t have you keeling over from accumulated toxins, can we?’

I looked up at him. He was mocking me. I wasn’t bothered by it, only by the fact that he felt brave enough to do so. Mindful of the colonel’s orders, I fought to keep my voice even. ‘I shall take it under advisement.’

He climbed down to my part of the trench. Men drew away from him. It was difficult to tell who they were more frightened of – him or me. I left my hand on my pistol. I wondered if he had come alone. If so, he was a bigger fool than I thought.

He looked at my quarters. ‘Is this your kennel, then? Far from the rest of us. That’s not quite regulation, is it?’

‘I value my privacy.’

‘My privacy… sir.’

I allowed myself to smile. ‘I value my privacy.’

He made a sound that might have been a growl, or a laugh. It was hard to tell with his mask. ‘He’s been covering for you a long time, Valemar. But he won’t be around forever.’

I didn’t bother to correct him. ‘Is that a threat, captain?’

‘Does it matter? You can’t do anything about it. He’s muzzled you.’

‘I think you’ll find that I still have my teeth.’ My fingers tapped tunelessly against my weapon. The captain glanced at it, and then back to me. His hand fell to his own sidearm.

‘You wouldn’t dare.’ He spoke quietly. No arrogance to him.

‘It’s not a matter of daring, but of duty.’

‘If you kill me, you won’t last the day.’

I looked up at the burning sky. The toxic clouds seemed to twist into a familiar shape as I watched and I felt a sense of peace. I took a deep breath and dropped my gaze. ‘We’re all living on borrowed time, captain.’

‘Some more than others,’ he said, after a moment. He stepped back, deliberate and slow. I didn’t relax. ‘Look at you. The colonel’s mad dog. How many bodies has he buried for you? How many have you buried for him?’

‘I follow orders. Just like you.’

The captain snorted. ‘I’m nothing like you.’ He turned away, as if daring me to shoot him. I was tempted. The colonel’s orders were clear. But as the captain climbed back up to the higher trench, he glanced back at me, and in the flare of artillery, I thought I saw a flash of blue before he turned away.

I knew then that the God-Emperor was speaking to me. Showing me the enemy. The true enemy – not the ones across the field, but the ones at my back. The most dangerous enemy is the foe within, as the regimental primer often reminded me.

There was a conspiracy afoot. The captain had as good as admitted it. But I didn’t know what to do about it. My training had not prepared me for investigative work. If a commissar found a problem, he removed it. No man, no problem. That was the way it had always been. But now I couldn’t, thanks to the colonel.

I was forced to improvise. I took fewer chances. I followed the colonel’s advice. I was a good soldier, and I knew that he was right, as much as it pains me to admit it, even now. I needed to be more careful. Cautious. It was more important to find out what was going on than to punish every single infraction, no matter how much my soul rebelled at the thought. Especially if I was being watched. Perhaps they were seeking to discredit me. To provoke me. Perhaps that was what the colonel had been trying to warn me about.

So I waited. And I watched. I studied the men the way I’d once studied birds and rats. I went to where they congregated and watched them talk in low tones. Watched them eat and drink. Watched for patterns, as I had with the birds when I was a boy.

Day after day. Week after week.

And so it went.

There are patterns in everything. Nothing is random. Not really. There was a pattern to the enemy gun, and a pattern to ours. The same firing sequence, over and over again, whether those manning the weapons recognised it or not. And there was a pattern to the eyes. As I was watching them, I realised that they were watching me. Studying me, as I studied them. We both hid in plain sight, I in the trenches, and they in the bodies of men.

More and more of them, every day. Their numbers swelling, and ours shrinking. They whispered in corners, questioning our purpose and the colonel’s decisions. They spoke of defeat and death. Of surrender. Teeming hordes of blue-eyed devils, infiltrating and weakening our position. And only I could see them.

Everywhere it was the same. They were flaws in the wall. Cracks, growing wider with every passing cycle.

But despite recognising them, I couldn’t identify them. Nonsensical, I know. But true nonetheless. A man might have blue eyes one moment, and brown the next. I saw them out of the corner of my eye, or fleetingly, as they turned a corner or ducked into a shelter. Only among the common soldiers – never among the officers. Not then.

Save for the captain. He was one of them. I was sure of it. But he kept his distance from me. Perhaps he suspected that I knew his secret. Perhaps he was simply wary of me, after our encounter in the trench. Often, I caught a glimpse of him, watching me from a distance. Sometimes it wasn’t him, but those I recognised as his cronies.

Sometimes, it was just the soldiers. Watching me with their unnatural eyes.

What were they? Even now, I don’t know. Were they even men anymore? Or was it simply a cosmetic alteration? I’d heard stories of corruption, of plagues of unbelief, but this seemed subtler. More precise. Not witchcraft, but a weapon, perhaps. A toxin, spreading dissent through the trenches. Maybe it was in the air, or in the water.

I gnawed over those questions for days. Weeks. I circled them so often I lost all sense of why I was worrying, until I’d catch another flash of blue, peering at me through the goggles of an environmental hood.

And then I’d remember, and it would start all over again.

The only thing I was sure of was that it faded in death. I had learned that much from my second kill. Blue eyes gone brown. As if whatever had gripped him had fled the moment I’d driven the knife in.

I killed another to make sure, however. Quietly, so as not to arouse suspicion. Of course, I waited until I saw an obvious infraction. I’m not a murderer.

It was easy. I chose my moment well. The guns sounded and the sky burned. The trenches twisted about us, and men scattered to their posts as alert klaxons sounded. All but one, who headed for the latrines. That could be considered cowardice in the face of the enemy, from a certain point of view. If a man can’t hold his water in battle, what use is he?

I followed him. He never saw me. I made sure of that. I wasn’t wearing my coat or my cap. I’d left the signs of my authority in my quarters, and wore only my uniform, stained with mud, like everyone’s, and my environmental hood. It was uncomfortable, but one must make sacrifices for the good of the regiment. It is all that the God-Emperor asks of us.

There were designated latrines on every section of trench. Mostly, they were holes dug in the mud, and kept stable by netting and scrap. Benches lined the holes, and the whole affair was hidden from sight by a tarpaulin. The soup ate whatever it was given, so there was little need to clean them, though I often bestowed it as punishment detail.

I followed him in, dropped the netting that hid the interior from view, and waited for him to begin. Less messy that way. If he noticed me, he said nothing. Maybe he thought I was looking to hide, or perhaps he simply didn’t care. The soldiers learned quickly not to ask questions of each other. Especially in the latrine.

I sat by the door, and watched the trench through the drapes. Shadows danced along the trench wall, mocking and thin. I watched as they twitched in time to the pounding of the guns. The way they danced and twisted reminded me of something, but I could not say what. I knew only that it made me feel vaguely ill, and I quickly turned away.

My prey sang softly, between grunts, and I was almost lulled by it. It was a song they all sang – some pastoral ditty from their home world. They were all farmers, or the sons and daughters of farmers. Why anyone had thought that they would make good soldiers, I couldn’t say.

A good soldier must be quick and hard, with a taste for violence. The best soldiers come from hive cities, I think. They breed them nasty in the dark tunnels and cramped streets. But farmers have a certain rural pragmatism to them, even if it is so rarely evident. Both die equally well, I suppose. And that is their purpose, after all. To die for the God-Emperor. To make a wall of meat and piety, to ring His holdings and hold back the long night. That was – is – my purpose as well, and a glorious one it is.

To die in His name – what greater joy could a man have, I ask you?

Perhaps only to kill for Him.

Outside, the guns hammered at the air. Theirs and ours. Like the heartbeats of duelling giants. I wondered when they would finally grow tired of this game. When they would advance at last, into the teeth of our guns. Or would they? Perhaps they were waiting for something else.

It was something I had begun to consider, deep in the recesses of my paranoia. That what I had stumbled onto was not random at all, or unconnected, but part of some grand enemy plot. There was no evidence for it, save what I felt, but a commissar must trust his instincts. And mine were screaming a warning that this conspiracy was deeper than I thought.

In the end, that is why I decided to start my experiments.

I needed to understand them. To learn everything about them. The man in the latrine was but the first.

I waited for him to finish, as I said. When he sighed and made to stand, trousers half-raised, I lunged. I had brought the bayonet – the one I’d taken as contraband. It was a good blade. Light. Sharp. It did the job with commendable efficiency. I opened him there, gizzard to gullet, just as I had the birds, as a boy. Though you wouldn’t know it from appearances, the human body is essentially a bag of water, acids, bile and blood. All of this spills out when you cut someone deep enough. You have to be quick to avoid getting it on yourself, particularly in a confined space. Luckily, I knew the trick of it.

He fell back with a startled sound, almost a sigh. As if he could not believe what was happening. Then again, how many people truly expect to die in a latrine?

I held his chin as he bled out like a pig at slaughter. I watched his eyes go from blue to brown as he subsided. I made note of the time. A few moments. I wiped the bayonet clean on his sleeve and searched him. I found the usual bric-a-brac, most of which I confiscated. I intended to study it later, to see what secrets it might hold.

I never did, though.

Things became busy after that. It was child’s play to slip out of the latrine. No one was paying attention. All eyes were on the enemy, when the guns sounded.

It was the same the second time and the third. In both cases, I watched my prey for hours, caught them alone, and timed their death to coincide with the guns. In both cases, their eyes changed. With the third, when I thought I had the time down, I tried to gouge out the eyes before they changed, only to find the bloody orbs going brown in my fingers. After that, I decided a new experiment was called for. I needed to question one of them.

But for that I knew that I would require a bit of privacy.

‘A scouting mission?’ the colonel said, looking at me with that single, unblinking red eye. The command bunker was as crowded as ever, full of parasites in uniform. I’d come to loathe them, over the weeks of watching. In my disguise, I’d seen thousands of infractions, some small, some large. I knew them now for scum, one and all. I’d begun to wish that the hot rain would pour down and drown almost every living thing in the trenches. I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that the regiment could not be salvaged.

As I said, it was my third kill that decided me. She’d been a sergeant. I’d thought – I’d hoped – that the affliction, the curse, whatever you’d like to call it, had not reached the officers, save perhaps the captain. But it had been a vain hope. The infection was rampant. Everywhere I looked, blue eyes. In the mess, in the shelters. In the rain.

A few days after my third kill, I realised that the thunder of the guns drew them out. They hid well, during the quiet moments. But as soon as the guns sounded, I had little trouble spotting them. Part of me suspected that it was a signal of some sort, perhaps in the pattern of strikes, or maybe the sound of it exposed them, somehow. Regardless, I formulated a plan. But it required nerve and daring – two qualities I possessed in abundance. It is not hubris to say this, for one cannot be a commissar without them.

‘We are locked in a stalemate,’ I said, looking around the bunker. ‘If we cannot advance without orders, at the very least we can try and get a more accurate idea of the enemy’s positioning. We can determine a potential weak point… just in case.’

‘Are you that bored, commissar?’ he asked, but even as he said it, I knew he would agree. He saw the wisdom in it, even if he didn’t understand my true motives. Intelligence is an oft-overlooked element of any campaign. Too many commanders rely on brute force to win the day. Striking a blow against the enemy is all well and good. But it is best to strike them in the place that will do the most damage, when the time comes.

‘In point of fact, I am,’ I said. A low titter ran through the assembled officers. ‘Since I cannot perform my duty in one way, let me do it in another. I will go out into the wastes between our lines and theirs, and see what I can see.’

‘Alone?’ the captain asked. He’d been silent for a time. I knew he’d been watching me, but I also knew that his spies in the regiment had reported nothing back to him. They thought me a fool – blunt and unimaginative. They could not conceive of me shedding my trappings of office in order to hunt my prey. Or so I hoped at the time.

‘Ideally, no. Though I’d understand if no one wanted to come.’ Another ripple of amusement. The captain frowned and glanced at his fellows. So did the colonel, though for different reasons, I expect. The next moment was the most dangerous, and I took a breath before continuing. ‘As I am outside the chain of command, I make this request only as a formality. I intend to go regardless, as it is a facet of my duty. I will safeguard the regiment one way or another.’

‘And if you are killed?’ the colonel asked.

‘Then you will request a new commissar. The appropriate forms are in my quarters.’ I looked at the captain as I said this, and his eyes narrowed.

The colonel shook his head. ‘You’re right, of course. I can’t stop you. Take one of the men – captain, volunteer someone.’

‘I’ll go,’ the captain said, and my heart leapt in my chest. I’d known that he’d see it as a challenge. His sort always do. But the colonel gestured dismissively.

‘No. I need you here. Volunteer a ranker.’

I glanced at the colonel, wondering if he’d seen a shadow of my plan. Perhaps he simply worried that if both of us went out, only one of us would come back. Or maybe he feared for me.

‘Any help is welcomed,’ I said.

‘I’ll find someone… willing,’ the captain said. And for a moment, just an instant, I thought his eyes flashed the barest blue. I kept my expression neutral, despite the satisfaction that filled me. As I’d hoped, they’d taken the bait.

‘Tell them to bring supplies. We might be out there for several days.’

‘Then it’s settled,’ the colonel said. ‘Dismissed. Except you, Valemar.’

I didn’t bother to correct him, my mind already on the task ahead of me. He gestured for me to sit, but I remained standing. Regulations state that a commissar must remain standing in the presence of his regimental commander, so as to emphasise his independence of the chain of command.

His aide brought him a drink. I hadn’t even heard the little man enter. I wondered how they communicated so effectively. Perhaps it was simply habit. The colonel gulped it down, and the aide poured him another. ‘A good vintage,’ the colonel said, sipping this one more slowly. ‘Would you care for a drink?’

‘I’m on duty.’

He paused. ‘If I ordered you?’

I said nothing. The conversation had strayed into unfamiliar territory.

The colonel sighed. ‘Probably just as well. This is the last of the good stuff. We’re running low on everything. Even wine.’ He looked at me. ‘Sometimes you disappoint me, Valemar.’

The words stung, and I may have flinched. ‘My apologies, colonel, if I have given offence…’ I began, but he waved me to silence.

‘Apologies are a sign of weakness. You are putting yourself in danger. I have better use for you than seeing to a task any ranker could accomplish.’

‘Then why not send them out?’

‘Because we have all the information we need, commissar. Command has ordered us to hold position. Until we receive orders contrary to that, that is what we will do.’ His red eye whirred, focusing on me. ‘But this isn’t about that, is it?’

I wanted to tell him. But I knew that he wouldn’t believe me. Not really.

‘I don’t know what you mean, sir.’

The colonel hesitated. When he at last spoke, he sounded regretful. I did not like it. ‘No. Maybe you don’t. Sometimes, I think I’ve used you very badly, Valemar. Commissar. Other times, I think maybe that I got exactly what I wanted. This regiment would have collapsed under our predecessors. Men like Ducco would have run it into the ground. But we made it strong, didn’t we?’

‘I did my duty, colonel. As did you.’

The colonel made a sound that might have been a laugh. I forgot sometimes that we were both strangers to this regiment. The colonel had brought me on soon after he’d been given command. I never found out what happened to his predecessor. It wasn’t important, anyway. The regiment belonged to whoever was in command. It belonged to him. To us.

‘So we did. As we will continue to do.’ He looked at me over the rim of his cup. ‘Watch your back, commissar. Ducco won’t hesitate to shove a knife in, if he thinks he can get away with it.’

With those unsettling words, he dismissed me. It was the first time we had ever spoken openly of such things. There had been other Duccos. Other officers who could not adapt to the new status quo of the regiment. I had done my duty, as the colonel commanded, and we had made room for new officers. Ones who might be more amenable to the colonel’s way of thinking. But this was the first time he had ever warned me about them. I realised then that he was far more worried than I’d first assumed. I could only guess that was why he’d chastised me so publicly earlier.

I also wondered, then, if the colonel perhaps saw the same things I did. Was that his way of telling me that he knew what was going on, but that his rank prevented him from acting? That he approved of my actions? I hoped so. It would be easier to save the regiment with his help.

I brought the bayonet, of course. It had served me well enough in my earlier investigations, and I was becoming attached to it. Like me, it was a thing of simple, precise function. Dutiful and lethal. It was also easy to conceal.

The captain sent me a ranker by the name of Gomes. A tall, strong-looking lump of gristle, he towered over me. He barely spoke, save to greet me as he saluted.

I only knew Gomes’ name because I was fairly certain that he’d murdered another ranker over a game of cards, though I’d found no proof. Wasting regiment resources was punishable by death and Gomes knew it, so he’d made every attempt to hide his tracks.

I often wonder what inducement the captain had used to convince him to go. Credits, perhaps. That was often enough for a savage like Gomes. Regardless, the moment I saw him, I knew he was going to try and kill me.

We set off through the trenches, winding our way to the outermost lines. That was where they began to break down into rough gulches of ever-shifting mud and broken bunkers. The ground was uneven and soft, and more than once we were forced to wait for it to settle before we pressed on. The air was miasmatic, stinking of heat and less identifiable things. I had to don my environmental mask, as well as a pair of thick gloves. Despite the insulation, I could feel the heat seeping from the half-formed walls of the forgotten trenches.

They changed as we moved. Walls slid into new shapes, and the trench bottoms rose or sank even deeper, carrying us down one moment and then up the next. We trudged through knee-high sludge, and stumbled over dried flats of mud. Geysers of steam spewed into the air as the soup shifted, and more than once I looked back, only to lose sight of Gomes. But he would inevitably reappear, dogging my steps with plodding determination.

We crept through fields of the dead. The heat and toxins had warped the remains into strange and unsettling shapes – flowers of bone poked through the churned mud, spreading marrow-frosted petals to the fiery sky above. Brambles made of slag and bone hung like heavy curtains across our path, and more than once we were forced to cut and twist our way through. The heat grew oppressive, and I was sweating freely beneath my coat. I knew Gomes must be suffering as well, but he said nothing.

Gomes was going to try and kill me. I knew this like I knew my own name. That would give me all the excuse I needed to do what must be done. At the very least, it would give me an excuse to investigate further, whatever the colonel said.

The enemy lines were not close to us. I have implied that they were within sight, but the truth is, we couldn’t see them. Not really. Between the mists and mud, they were nothing more than an indistinct smudge on the horizon. It took nearly three days for us to come within sight of their outermost lines, and even then there was little to see. Just trenches and improvised bulwarks, much like our own.

Upon sighting them for the first time, I could not help but wonder if they were us. You understand what I mean, of course. The bureaucracy of the Imperium is vast and sluggish, and mistakes can occur easily. Regiments can find themselves ordered to take a world that has already been taken, and no amount of protest will convince those in charge otherwise. They see only numbers, not men. That is the difference between them and men like the colonel.

In that instant, as these heretical thoughts flitted at the edges of my certainty, I wondered if that was why the colonel seemed so evasive and tired lately. If he knew – as he almost certainly would have to – that we were facing not xenos, but fellow servants of the God-Emperor. If that was why he seemed disinclined to advance. Because he was hoping, praying, that the mistake would be noticed by his superiors before it was too late.

But of course, such thoughts are ridiculous. Though men are fallible, the God-Emperor is not. And He would not have sent us to this hellish world were we not needed. Indeed, I suspected that we had been sent for good reason. That I had been sent for good reason. And I was right.

Over the course of the three days, I had got to know Gomes well. Not personally, but men of his sort are open books to me. He was a brute – likely a criminal before joining the regiment. That explained his murderous nature. But he was cunning as well. He hid his eyes from me. He never looked at me full on. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t catch him out. Every time I looked at him, he was facing away.

Finally, I realised that – eyes or no eyes – I was going to have to take a chance. Without speaking, I retrieved my range-finders. They were blocky and old. Another item from my collection. I had been forced to discipline one of the regimental gunners not long after I joined for needless expenditure of the God-Emperor’s ammunition. He’d been repelling an enemy advance, but that was no excuse for such wasteful displays.

I wriggled through the mud, climbing a low slope to the edge of the trench, past broken bulwarks and shrouds of razor-wire. I focused the range-finders on the enemy emplacements. I saw nothing, even with their enhanced view. Sometimes, I think about that moment. Part of me was hoping to see something – anything. To see who was manning those guns. But all I saw was steam and mist and mud.

And then Gomes made his move, as I had expected.

He’d crept up so quietly that if I hadn’t been prepared, I might not have noticed until it was too late. The captain had chosen his assassin well. The cord slipped around my neck as easy as you please, and tightened instantly. But before Gomes could drive a knee into my back, I pitched to the side and rolled down the slope, back to the bottom of the trench. Startled, he was dragged off balance. He gave a muffled yelp as I sent him tumbling over me. I had the bayonet out before he could crawl to his feet, and I lunged.

His big hands slammed shut over mine, pinning the blade between us. My momentum was enough to carry him backwards and he slammed into the remnants of an old shelter. I could hear him cursing, but I was only looking at his eyes. They weren’t blue. I didn’t know what it meant. Not then. Regardless, he was trying to kill me.

I’m stronger than I look. Gomes had clearly thought I’d be an easy kill. We strained against one another, there in the collapsing trench, mud lapping at our shins. I didn’t want to use my laspistol. Any shot, any sound, might bring the enemy down on us. Even so, I needed answers. And Gomes could provide them.

I drove my knee up, catching him in the abdomen. He grunted and twisted, trying to throw me off balance. The mud gave way behind him, and he sank back. I leaned all my weight against the bayonet, driving him deeper into the shifting mud. His eyes widened as loose bones and bits of debris spilled over us.

The moment’s distraction was all I needed. His grip slackened, just for an instant, and I wrenched my hands to the side, breaking his hold. I slashed the bayonet across his belly, just beneath the edge of his flak armour, and stepped back. He bent forwards, clutching at himself. The mud had hold of him, and he thrashed, trying to get free, blood bubbling between his fingers. His eyes were still brown, though.

I held up the bayonet and pointed it at him. ‘Trying to murder a superior officer – the sentence is death. Do you want it here, or after a tribunal?’

He groaned. ‘Bastard…’

‘Yes. Why did you try and kill me?’

He continued to thrash, trying to get free. He almost made it, but I lashed out with a boot and drove him back into the sloughing wall of the trench. He bit back a scream. I leaned close, holding him in place with a hand on his shoulder, and put the bayonet to his throat. I was fairly certain that he wouldn’t risk his guts falling out to try and throttle me.

‘It’ll take you a long time to die from that sort of wound. Hours, even. Or it can be quick. It’s your choice.’

‘P-paid,’ he grunted.

‘By whom?’

He glared at me. Moving quickly, I reached into his belly and pulled something wet and soft out from between his weak hands. He shrieked like a pig as I twisted the soft thing until it burst in my hand, spilling fluids into the mud.

‘Tell me,’ I said.

He didn’t, overcome as he was by pain. It was just as well that I already knew. I cleaned the bayonet on his sleeve and put it back in my coat pocket, before wiping my hand off on his chest.

‘A bad bargain. More than your life is forfeit.’ I picked up my pack, and his. Wasted supplies are a sin in the God-Emperor’s eyes.

‘W-wait,’ he croaked, reaching for the edge of my coat. ‘K-kill…’

‘I already have. It is for the God-Emperor to take you, in His own time.’

I left him there, sitting slumped in the slowly rising mud. I did not look back. I feel no regret for his death. Gomes had tried to kill a commissar and failed. The sentence was just.

The next time the guns fell silent, I began my slow journey back. When I reached our lines, days later, the sentries on duty didn’t challenge me as quickly as regulations stated. I considered executing them as well, but refrained. Time enough to punish them later.

I was not surprised to find the captain waiting for me, though I know that he was surprised to see me. ‘Gomes?’ he asked, not looking at me.

‘A regrettable accident. The soup has him now.’

‘What sort of accident? Commissar?’

I brushed past him without answering. He continued to call after me for some time. His voice reminded me of a vox recording. Artificial and lifeless.

Inhuman.

It took two more scouting missions before I got my answers. I made sure not to kill either of them. It wouldn’t do to arouse suspicion. Not after what had happened to Gomes. Also, neither had blue eyes. Or if they did, I never noticed.

But the fourth, ah. That was the one I had been waiting on.

The colonel was reluctant to agree to more, after Gomes. I don’t blame him, even now. He must have known what had happened, or at least suspected. He’d known me too long to accept my answer for what it was. Like the God-Emperor, he saw through my necessary falsehoods, but accepted them for what they were.

He was a good man, then. A great man.

You may wonder why I continued to hide my suspicions from him. It was not out of malice, I assure you. No, I knew the burdens he carried better than most. He was a great man, as I’ve said. He had achieved a high rank and survived much in service to the God-Emperor. My suspicions were based on circumstantial evidence, at best. I needed more proof, you see. Incontestable proof as to the nature of the conspiracy before I could bother him with it.

Unfortunately, after my third mission brought back little of note, he declined to permit me a fourth.

‘I understand that you feel constrained, commissar,’ he said. ‘But the risk is too high, for too little gain. What intel you’ve gathered is nothing more than what we see here.’ He gestured to the pict-captures that adorned the walls of the command bunker.

‘I need to get closer,’ I said.

‘Any closer and you’ll be right up against their emplacements.’

‘Then that’s where I’ll go.’

‘No.’ The colonel shook his head.

‘Permission to speak,’ the captain said. He was one of a handful of other officers in the bunker. Not all of them had been invited to this meeting. The circle of trust had grown smaller over the days and weeks.

There were currents I was unable to navigate, but I noticed them all the same. The colonel was looking more haggard every day, and the number of officers who jumped at his command was shrinking. Some had been stripped of their rank and cashiered, sent to the rear. Others had been isolated, left to their tiny command in the farthest trenches.

He was losing control. The regiment was suffering a malaise – a faltering of discipline and mettle. Sitting in one place, under the shadow of enemy guns… it wasn’t surprising. But I knew it was made worse by a deeper rot than any of them realised.

The colonel nodded. ‘By all means, Ducco. Speak your mind.’

‘I think the commissar is right.’

I fought the urge to smile. If I’m being honest, I hadn’t been expecting it. Not so soon, at any rate. I thought I’d have to kill a few more like Gomes.

The colonel was surprised as well. His good eye widened slightly. ‘Do you?’ he said, and I could hear the consternation in his voice. He was afraid for me, I think. I regret that. The colonel was a good man. A good officer. I was proud to serve him. But the regiment was greater than one man.

‘I do.’ The captain looked at me. His face was set, his eyes brown. He was a clever one, whatever he was. I still wasn’t sure about him – about whether what I had seen was real, or just my imagination. I wanted him to be one of them, you see. But I am possessed of enough discipline to question such desires. I wasn’t a savage like Gomes, killing on a whim. I was no murderer, after all.

The captain looked tired. I realised that they all did, not just the colonel. They all looked worn down and haggard. As if the weight of the war were pressing their souls flat. Their uniforms were stained. Some were unshaven. They flinched at the boom of the enemy guns. Cowards and weaklings. Only a weak man fears the foe he can see.

Only a weak man considers betraying his own regiment.

I intended to make them strong again. It was all I had ever wanted. It was why the colonel had brought me to the regiment. To make it strong. To purge it of weakness. That was a commissar’s duty. My duty.

‘In fact, I’ll go with him this time,’ the captain continued. ‘Maybe I’ll spot something the others missed.’ He looked at me. ‘If you find that acceptable, commissar.’

I did, but I glanced at the colonel before I answered. I expected him to argue, as he had when the captain had volunteered before. Instead, he simply shook his head.

I looked at the captain. ‘I do. We’ll leave this evening. Bring only what you need.’

The captain nodded brusquely. The colonel dismissed us with a wave of his hand, and the others filed out quietly. I made to follow, but the colonel stopped me.

‘Valemar,’ the colonel said. He caught my arm. I flinched back, but he held tight. ‘Look at me, boy.’ His voice was low, and I could smell something on his breath. The men sometimes brewed an illicit form of alcohol in the latrines – potent stuff, if you didn’t mind the taste or the smell or the texture. I tried to step back, but he didn’t release me.

‘Commissar,’ I said.

‘Yes. My commissar.’ He frowned. His face was sagging, as if all the strength were going from him in dribs and drabs. It is a painful thing to see a strong man collapse in on himself, and I knew then that he feared for the regiment as much as I, though he had not said it out loud. ‘I thought I told you before, he wants you dead.’

‘I am aware.’

‘I don’t think you are. Not really.’ He pulled me close, and his sour breath washed across my face. ‘I need you alive, Valemar. Come back in one piece.’ He released me and turned away. Back to his maps and his fears and his booze. I saw his aide slink forth, drink in hand, and I wondered how often the scene repeated itself on a given day.

He was a good man. The best of men. It hurt to see him weak. To see him frightened. ‘I will do my best, colonel,’ I said. But he wasn’t listening. His mind was already on other problems, unrelated to me.

The captain was waiting for me outside the bunker. He didn’t look at me. ‘What did he say?’ he asked.

‘He told me to come back in one piece.’

‘Sound advice,’ he said. ‘We’ll see what we can do about that, shall we?’

I didn’t care for his tone. There was no arrogance in it now, only grim determination. I wanted to shoot him then and there, but I noticed the colonel’s aide watching me from the bunker entrance and pulled my hand away from my laspistol. As he retreated into the bunker, I said, ‘Yes. Make ready, captain. I will not wait for you.’

‘I think you will,’ he said. ‘But I won’t be late.’ As he pulled his mask on and turned away, I thought I saw his eyes flash blue.

We left the lines when the guns were at their loudest. Their roaring pummelled the air, and shook the trenches to their roots. In places, it was hard to keep our feet, such were the shudders running through the ground. It was as if the world knew that things were coming to a head, and sought to delay the inevitable.

Perhaps I flatter myself. The world took no notice of us, and neither did the guns. Artillery fell like rain, and I wondered at the expense of it all. I had once tallied the cost of a day’s expenditure of munitions and come away with a newfound appreciation for the Departmento Munitorum. While I was justly proud of my duty, I knew there were those who had heavier ones, still.

As with Gomes, we moved in silence. The captain seemed to have no interest in speaking to me, and I had none in speaking to him. I realise now, looking back, that I’d hated him from the first moment I’d laid eyes on him. He reminded me of a particularly odious snot at the schola progenium. One of the older boys, with pretensions to authority. The sort who becomes one of those commissars who winds up shot in the back by his own men.

I couldn’t remember his name. It wasn’t important. But I remember his face, even now. The way his eyes had bulged as I’d shoved his head down into the hog-slop, and held him until his thrashing had ceased. I did not kill him, if you’re wondering. As I’ve said, I’m no murderer. I simply left his unconscious body for the hogs to find. I told myself that if the God-Emperor spared him, I would know that I had been in the wrong. And I watched as they ate him, sure in the knowledge that the God-Emperor was at my shoulder.

I was sure then too, with the captain at my back. I knew that he wouldn’t simply shoot me. He wasn’t that sort of fool. I also suspected that he would want to know what I knew about the conspiracy. He would want to know if I had told anyone. No, I knew he would seek to confront me. But I kept the bayonet close, just in case.

It was not an easy expedition. The closer we got to the enemy, the less stable things became. Even worse than before. The abandoned trenches had been all but consumed by the mud, and thick curtains of toxic fog rolled across the writhing landscape. Again, I was forced to don my mask, and the eyepieces quickly became obscured with condensation as we struggled through the knee-deep mud. It bubbled and burst about us, scorching our coats and uniforms with burning excrescence.

The paths I had taken before were gone, and we were compelled to blaze new trails. It began to rain not long after we left our lines, and that added to our tribulations. It was tarry and stank of burnt rubber. It left black streaks down the captain’s coat and mask, and floated atop the mud in serpentine slicks.

We were forced to stop often, to avoid being buried by mudslides or caught up in turgid riptides – or simply to clean the black smears from the eyepieces of our masks. We climbed hills of ferrocrete rubble and passed through glens of razor-wire.

You might not believe me, but there was a certain beauty to it. It was a harsh place, but one that encouraged discipline. The captain didn’t agree.

‘The sooner we leave this place, the better,’ he said, his voice a harsh rasp. We had just come within sight of the outermost emplacements of the enemy. I was struck again by their familiarity. ‘We should never have come here.’

‘Cowardice is punishable by death,’ I said. I did not look at him, but I could feel his eyes on me.

‘Not cowardice. Fact. Do you even know what we’re doing here?’

I didn’t bother to reply. A soldier’s duty is to obey orders. Our orders had sent us here. The captain knew that – or he should have.

‘I bet you’ve never even asked,’ he continued. He puffed slightly as he spoke. It was hard to talk and navigate the mud, but that didn’t stop him. I was puzzled by this sudden volubility. I suspected that he was trying to put me off my guard, and I resolved to pay him little heed. If my reticence bothered him, however, he gave no sign.

‘No. Not you. Not Valemar, the colonel’s loyal dog. I knew you were going to be trouble the moment you showed up. We all heard the stories. And we all know why he requested you. He was scared.’

I stopped. Mud lapped nearly to my waist and I ponderously turned, my hand in my coat, my fingers tight about the haft of the bayonet. ‘The colonel isn’t scared of anything.’

The captain snorted. ‘Of course he is. He’s scared of losing face, losing his command, getting blamed for this cock-up. And he’s scared of us.’ He paused. ‘And he’s scared of you too. Don’t think he isn’t.’

Despite myself, I asked the obvious question. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What do you think I mean?’ He pushed past me, and I almost gutted him there. But his words – something about them set their hooks into me. I watched him tread mud, stumbling and cursing. And then I followed him.

We made our way to the enemy. Closer and closer. Past fallen bulwarks and spills of tangled razor-wire. Their lines, like ours, had suffered. I saw no bodies. No bones. No sign of them at all, save the sound of their guns, and the way the sky burned overhead.

The captain stopped. He leaned against a broken slab of ferrocrete, panting. The mud rose and fell around us, like wind-stirred water. He laughed softly. ‘I knew it.’

I thought, for a moment, that he’d gone mad. ‘What?’

‘Look around, Valemar. What do you see?’

‘The enemy’s lines.’

‘Yes, but… what do you see?’

‘The enemy,’ I said.

He stared at me for a moment, as if I were the mad one, and then shook his head. He spread his arms. ‘This building material… this is Departmento Munitorum issue. Those guns we hear? They’re ours.’

He was making no sense. Rambling. ‘Stolen, obviously,’ I said. ‘Rebels.’

‘What rebels? On a world like this?’ He took a step towards me, and I stepped back. I looked around, and realised we were in the remains of what had once been a bunker. The roof was gone, but I could still see the walls, half-shrouded in mud. ‘I knew it. I knew he was hiding something, the fat bastard.’

‘Who?’

‘Bramwell. The colonel.’ He looked at me. ‘Do you even know his name?’

‘It is against regulations to address an officer by name.’

The captain snorted. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying, Valemar?’

‘Commissar,’ I said.

‘Even you can’t be this blind,’ he snarled. His eyes flashed behind the lenses of his mask. I saw the trick, then. He was trying to sow doubt in my mind. To break my will. To confuse me. ‘Look around you – look, damn you!’

And despite myself, I did. I saw the bones then, all but hidden. Wrapped in tatters of uniform. Not one I recognised, but familiar all the same.

The captain laughed again. ‘All this time, we’ve been fighting another regiment. Someone sent us to the wrong part of the warzone. Someone made a mistake, and the colonel knows it. But if he reports it – he’ll get the blame. That’s how it works. That’s why he won’t talk to command. Why he won’t order an assault. So instead, we sit. We sit and…’ His shoulders slumped. ‘And we sit.’ He leaned back, and for a moment, I almost felt sorry for him.

But only for a moment.

‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘The colonel is a good man. He wants what’s best for the regiment. That’s why he sent me here.’

The captain looked at me. Despite his mask, I could tell he was frowning. ‘He sent us here to put the fear of the God-Emperor into us, because he was worried that the men would listen to us, rather than him.’

‘As they should.’

The captain snorted. ‘You would think that.’

‘Disobeying a direct order from a superior officer is grounds for summary execution.’

‘I bet you use that excuse a lot.’ Then, softly, ‘You killed Gomes, didn’t you?’

‘Gomes was a fool.’

‘He was one of the bravest men in the regiment.’

‘Really?’ I asked, in honest disbelief. ‘If that’s true, the regiment is in more trouble than I thought.’

The captain’s hand was on his weapon, but he didn’t dare draw it. I watched him. Watched his eyes, and the flicker of blue to brown and back again. I wondered what it meant. Was he even aware of it? Were any of them?

‘You’re an animal.’

‘We’re all animals,’ I said. My hand was in my coat, on the hilt of the bayonet. I could have it out in a moment. But he could clear his holster faster, I suspected. ‘The only thing that separates us from beasts is our duty. I know mine – what about you?’

‘You’re a murderer.’

‘I am the God-Emperor’s wrath manifest. And you are not human.’

He stared at me, as if confused. ‘What?’

‘I don’t know what you are… witch, mutant, xenos or something else… but I can see the mark of heresy on you.’ I gestured to my eye. ‘Just as I saw it on all the others.’

‘The others…’ His eyes widened. ‘How many have you killed?’

‘Not enough, clearly. How many of you are there? How much of the regiment has been compromised?’ I fired the words like bullets, trying to keep him off balance. My only advantage lay in our isolation. He couldn’t fire without drawing attention. We hadn’t seen them, but we both knew that the enemy was nearby.

‘Compromised… are you mad? Haven’t you been listening?’

‘I do not listen to heretics or xenos.’

‘You are mad. I thought you were just stupid. Or stubborn. But you’re… you’re actually mad.’ He drew his laspistol then. A fine thing. Pearl-handled, chased in gold. A rich man’s weapon. They were all rich, the officers. Backwater nobility, seeking glory on far-flung battlefields. Or were they? Had whatever it was always been within them? Or was it something new that had found fertile soil in their corrupt souls? These questions ran through my head as I stared down the barrel of his weapon.

‘I am not mad. I simply see more clearly than you wish. When did you realise that I’d noticed?’ I frowned. ‘What is your purpose? Do you serve the enemy?’

‘Listen to yourself, Valemar…’ he began, but his eyes were blue, bright blue. ‘What are you talking about? I just told you – there is no enemy…’

‘Commissar,’ I said, and lunged. The edge of my hand knifed against the barrel of the laspistol, swatting it from his grip even as he fired. The whining shot echoed loudly in the trench as I drove the bayonet into him. His eyes bulged and he grabbed at me. His fist caught me on the side of the head and I sagged, dazed. He was lurching away from me, one hand pressed to the wound in his belly.

I rose and followed. Slow now, taking my time. He was searching for his weapon, but the mud had claimed it. I heard no klaxons, no alarms from the enemy lines. I wasted no time wondering about this. Such mysteries are no better than distractions. My true foe was before me, and I wanted answers.

We made a pretty pair, I think, stumbling through that forest of ruin. Beneath boughs of rusted steel, and through drapes of razor-wire. The air thrummed about us, hot and tense. More than once, I thought I heard someone moving with us, but saw nothing. Later, I would wonder if perhaps I had not been alone in my hunt. If perhaps the God-Emperor guided me then, as He had before and would again.

The captain had courage. I will say that much for him. Human or xenos, he did not surrender to the fear he must have been feeling. But courage is no substitute for strength. No substitute for faith. I was in service to a power greater than any in the galaxy. And that power would not be denied.

The bayonet caught him in the back. I went for the kidneys, the way I’d been taught. He gave a cough and staggered against the side of the trench. I stabbed again and again – clean thrusts. Quick. Not enough to kill. He was big, and there was a lot of blood. Like the hogs. And like the hogs, he squealed as I butchered him.

That is the proper word for what I did. I am not proud of it, but I am not a dissembler by nature. I will not obfuscate my loss of control. I hated him – by the God-Emperor, I hated him. And I let that hate control me. My discipline slipped, and duty suffered.

Again and again, I drove the bayonet into his yielding flesh. I think I might have laughed. He’d come, thinking to befuddle me – to sway me from the light. Or failing that, kill me. And instead, I would kill him. As I would kill all of them.

Finally, he fell into the mud, choking and shaking. Curlicues of red stretched across the ochre surface of the soup. He was trying to crawl away, but the mud held him. I crouched over him, and took a handful of his scalp.

‘They’ve heard us by now, with the way you’re carrying on,’ I muttered. As if on cue, an alarm sounded – a jangling, familiar whine, much like our own. I heard the murmur of distant voices and saw the sweep of lights. ‘Are they coming to help you, do you think? Or will they kill us both?’

I had no intention of finding out. I wrenched him onto his back. His face was pale, his gaze unfocused. He clutched at me, trying to talk. His blue gaze flickered across my features and then past me, as if seeing something else. I realised I’d been too enthusiastic in pursuit of my duty. I leaned close, my hand on his fat chin. ‘Tell me – what are you? What are your intentions?’ But even as I demanded answers, the blue faded to a soft brown, and his features slackened. I thought, in those last few moments, that he seemed different – as if some burden had slipped from his shoulders. As if my bayonet had freed his soul, even as it claimed his life.

I like to think that he recognised my act for the mercy that it was, at the end. That he saw the God-Emperor, standing at my shoulder, welcoming him back to the bowers of humanity. I know now that death freed them, in some manner I cannot explain or understand. I think that is why the God-Emperor showed me the afflicted. He chose me as His instrument, and I could but follow the course He’d set me.

The voices grew louder. The sentries of the enemy were close, and there was no more time to waste. I left him there, to whoever – or whatever – might find him.

As I crept back towards safety, the guns began to roar once more.

I had much to consider when I got back to my own lines. But I had little time to do so. The regiment was on alert – tense, even – in a way I had never seen before. It was as if some unspoken signal had passed through the trenches.

Eyes followed me as I returned. Masks twitched as I passed, and no words of greeting were offered. They rarely were, but this seemed different. There was a hostility in their eyes that had not been there before – or at least not to such an extent. As if they knew something of what had happened and blamed me for it, with wrong-headed idiocy.

As I went to make my report, the skies burned, and a murmur passed by and ahead of me. I felt the need to keep one hand on my holstered laspistol. I wondered then if my expedition had inadvertently roused the enemy, if there was some sign that they were mustering for an assault. But I decided to make my report before I inquired about such matters. After all, what did it matter to me if they were? I knew my duty, and that was enough. The enemy were to be killed. No thought need be wasted on such matters.

I think, if there is a flaw in men like the colonel, it is that. They allow themselves the vice of unfettered thought. Ignorance is strength. To think is to imagine possibilities and with possibilities comes the potential for defeat. In considering defeat, one might as well surrender to its inevitability. Truly, as it is written, what need does a man have for thought, when he has faith in the God-Emperor?

Maybe that is the answer, in the end. Maybe that is why what happened… happened. But I get ahead of myself.

The officers were waiting for me in the bunker. Three of them now. The circle had shrunk much in the captain’s absence. Not a blue eye among them. I wondered if they were opportunistic traitors, or simply dupes, like the unlamented Gomes. It didn’t matter, of course. A crime was a crime, and they had committed the worst one of all. They had endangered the regiment, and would continue to do so, unless someone stopped them. Unless I stopped them.

‘Well, Valemar?’ the colonel asked. He looked as if he had not slept in some time. His organic eye darted towards his subordinates as he spoke. ‘What do you have to report?’ He asked the question as if he already knew the answer.

‘The enemy lines are in worse shape than ours. Whole sections are submerged under the soup. They’re farther back than we thought, as well. The maps will need to be updated.’

‘Where’s Ducco?’ one of the others asked. Like the colonel, he looked tired. But not fearful or nervous. Resigned. It put me instantly on my guard.

‘Dead.’

Silence fell. The colonel closed his good eye, and his face twitched. I could not tell whether he was frowning – or smiling. ‘How?’ he asked, after a few moments.

‘The enemy,’ I said. It was not a lie. The enemy had killed him. Not the enemy across the field, but a more insidious one.

‘He’s lying,’ one of the officers said. ‘Just like he was lying about Gomes.’

‘Quiet, Felts.’

‘No. Ducco was right. You are protecting him, and he’s a filthy murderer. We have proof – we’ve seen what he keeps in his quarters…’ He faltered, as he caught sight of my expression. I had been right. They had snuck in. Gone through my private things.

I looked at him. ‘Was that a confession?’

He took a step back, and his hand dropped to his sidearm. I had mine out first. But before I could fire the colonel hit me. The punch caught me in the side of the jaw, and I staggered against a table and went down, my pistol skidding from my grip. But it wasn’t the force of the blow that stunned me. Rather, it was the betrayal.

The colonel had hit me. He’d hit me when I was only defending myself. And all I could do was sit on the floor and stare at him, as he turned on the others.

‘Holster that weapon, Felts. Or I’ll do it for you.’

‘He killed Ducco, we all know it,’ one of them snapped.

‘We don’t. And until there’s proof, you’ll keep it to yourself.’ The colonel glared at them, red eye blazing. ‘Morale is bad, and I won’t have you making it worse with baseless accusations. Is that understood?’

Mutterings ran through them. For a moment, I thought they would turn on him. They wanted to. I could see it in their eyes. Brown eyes and black eyes and green eyes, not blue. But the captain had done his work well. Turned them from the path of righteousness with honeyed words and falsehoods. Just as he’d tried to do to me.

I knew I would have to kill them. Not then, not there, but eventually. But for the moment, they backed off. They seemed almost afraid – not of me, but the colonel. As if something had changed. Some balance had been upended. Whatever advantage they’d imagined that they had was gone. Maybe it had died with the captain. I’m still not sure.

The colonel dismissed them brusquely. And he was smiling openly as they went. His aide brought him a drink, and he gulped it down. Wiping his mouth, he spoke.

‘We are balanced on a precipice, Valemar. In a way, it is a lucky thing, if lamentable, that Ducco perished. He would have tipped us over the edge eventually. The others lack the spine. They’ll fall into line, now that he’s gone.’ He looked at me. I was still sitting on the floor. ‘Well? On your feet, man. They’re gone.’

I rose slowly. I still couldn’t believe that he’d struck me, as if I were no more than a dog. Again, I was reminded of the captain’s words. While I knew that they must be lies, a part of me felt that there might be a kernel of truth, however much I might wish otherwise. He’d changed so much over those past few weeks.

‘You’ll forgive the play-acting,’ he said. I dabbed at my face, and my fingers came away red. His blow had split my cheek. ‘I needed to show them that I have your leash in hand. You understand?’

‘I do.’ I kept my face expressionless. Inside, I was seething. And the colonel knew it. I could tell by the amused glint in his organic eye. I bent and retrieved my laspistol.

In the dim light, in his filthy uniform, the colonel resembled nothing so much as an animal. I hated him, in that moment. I hated them all, to some extent. But him most of all. The captain had been right about that at least. The colonel was slipping – it was all taking its toll. Even the strongest mind eventually broke. But if he fell, he’d take the regiment with him.

In that instant, I saw him for what he was. He was a hog, rooting at the base of the garden wall, threatening to bring it all down on our heads. He’d grown lazy in our stagnation, and the enemy – not just those across the battlefield – had taken advantage of his weakness of spirit.

‘Are you certain you understand?’ the colonel asked. Startled, I looked at him. He wasn’t looking at me, but at my sidearm. I hadn’t holstered it. I swallowed, suddenly uncertain, and put it away.

‘I can’t protect you forever, you know,’ he continued. His voice was mild. Steady. ‘You’ve been keeping contraband in your quarters. If the men find out…’

‘Contraband?’ The word tasted wrong in my mouth. What did he mean? I still don’t know. I’d confiscated contraband, but it wasn’t mine. I wasn’t keeping it. It was just there.

He looked away.

‘I don’t require protection,’ I said, after a moment. ‘Not from them.’

‘I know that this has been hard on you, Valemar – it’s been hard on all of us…’

‘Commissar Valemar,’ I said.

He continued as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘But it’ll be over soon.’ His false eye fixed on me, the crimson lens blazing. I was coming to hate that eye. I was beginning to wonder what it truly saw. Could it really be trusted? Machines were inherently corruptible – scrap code could taint even the most blessed of engines. I thought about all the augmetic parts in the colonel’s head, and his slovenly demeanour, and I wondered if he were the same man at all. Or someone else.

‘For the moment, this has to stop,’ he said. ‘Ducco was the last. No more killing. Not now. Not until this blasted campaign is done.’

Outside, the thunder had started again. The dull pound of distant artillery shook the bunker to its roots, rattling the cups on the table and making the pict-captures and maps on the walls twitch and flap. Shadows danced, and in them I saw all manner of things a man ought not to see. I could almost hear the groaning of the hogs in the roar of the guns. The sounds merged in my head, crashing over me. I stared at the colonel, watching his lips move, but not hearing him. Hearing only the crash and boom.

What colour was his organic eye? In that moment, I couldn’t recall. And there was no way to tell in the dim light of the bunker, with the red glare of his augmetic eye washing out all colour. Just that pulsing, raw ruby glow, staining everything the colour of blood.

He was still talking, but I was no longer listening. I had made up my mind, though I didn’t know it yet. I had allowed it to go on for too long. I had faltered in my duty, out of fear for myself, and failed the regiment. Something had to be done, and I was the one who had to do it. It was my responsibility. My duty.

I knew then that it was the colonel’s weakness that had allowed the infection in. His failure had allowed the regiment to be tainted. Not mine, but his. The captain had been right, in his own way.

In my mind’s eye, I saw my shot take him in that hateful crimson lens. Quick. Clean. I felt the God-Emperor’s hand on my shoulder, guiding me.

I wondered later if the colonel saw it coming. If he had his own guiding spirit. Or perhaps his augmetic senses had detected, gauged and measured my movement as my hand twitched. Regardless of how, he knew. He saw.

And then he hit me. Hard. Harder than before. Hard enough to drive the air out of my lungs and knock me back. Wheezing, I stumbled against the wall. I clawed for my gun as he swept a table aside and lunged. A half-full mug of cold recaff caught me on the side of the head, and then I was down on one knee, my head full of pain.

His big hands caught me by the throat and jerked me to my feet. I remember being surprised at his strength. He’d hidden it well. He slammed me back against the wall, once, twice, and then held me there, squeezing the life from me as I tore at his wrists. His false eye burned into me, red and fierce.

‘Are you mad? Is that it?’ he grunted. ‘Have you finally lost all reason? I am trying to help you, fool.’

I saw his eye, then. His true eye, like a bright blue marble. Like the hogs. Like the screaming man. Like the captain. One blue, one red, and both glaring at me hatefully.

My pistol was still in my holster, the flap undone. I tried to find the breath to answer, but no words came. I wanted to curse him. To tell him that he was the mad one, not me. They were all mad. They say epiphanies often come in moments of great stress. Being throttled by a commanding officer is suitably stressful, I suppose.

It was all so clear. So terribly, monstrously clear.

As I’d feared, something had got loose among them, some virulent bio-plague or memetic witchery. That was what it was. Some ploy of the enemy, or something in the air. Regardless of its origin, it was eating the regiment hollow – a cancer of the soul and spirit. And here was the wellspring, though I’d convinced myself otherwise. The colonel had let it in, and it had spread.

That was why the God-Emperor had sent me to him. To help him. To help them all. There was only one way to stop it. Only one way to save the regiment.

I managed to get my laspistol free as the colonel strangled the life from me. I thrust it beneath his fat chins, and sent a shot slamming up into his brain. His hands tightened convulsively, and I nearly blacked out. But then his grip went slack and he staggered back, a sound I had never heard before slithering from his open mouth. Smoke slipped between his lips, and through the joins of his augmetic parts. The red eye had gone dull, its glare fading to a single mote before winking out.

He fell back, and a table shattered beneath his weight. He lay still and limp, colonel no more. The sentence had been passed. Rubbing my throat, I pushed away from the wall. My heart was hammering, fit to crack my ribs, and I felt loose inside, as if I were coming apart at the seams. I stared down at him, trying to right myself with the world.

It had been necessary. I’d had to do it. For the good of the regiment. But that didn’t make it easier. It wasn’t satisfying, the way the others had been. It made me sick. Now I knew, you see. I knew that I had not been combatting a loss of discipline, but instead something more insidious. Perhaps the men I’d killed had not been shirkers and cowards and madmen, but simply… sick. Even the captain, much as I’d hated him.

I pushed the feeling aside. The sentences had been delivered fairly. I knew that. No one could fault me for my actions. My only crime would be in not seeing things through to the end. I had a duty.

And I intended to see it done.

There was only one cure for plague. It had to be burnt out. The sick had to be purified, to prevent the spread. I thought that what I was dealing with surely qualified. Killing them one by one was a fool’s errand. There was no telling how far it had spread. The regiment was infected, and to preserve it, drastic measures were called for.

There was only one way that I knew of. But it meant traversing the trenches, back to the rear. I did not bother to hide the colonel’s body. Only murderers hide the evidence of their deeds. There were precious few places to hide it that it wouldn’t be found, and there was no way to get it out of the bunker without risking discovery.

I still feel a pang of regret for leaving him there. He’d been a good man, once. He’d given me purpose – a regiment to call my own. It was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me, and I had repaid him with death. I do not regret that, for it was necessary, and he hadn’t been the man I’d known. But even I am not so callous as to forget all that had come before.

Outside the command bunker, the trenches were in chaos. Noise and heat and panic, mingling in a confined space. I could hear the slow slurp of moving mud, and I realised that things had become particularly unstable. But that was only of benefit to me. The longer it took for anyone to realise what had happened, the better. I knew that I couldn’t trust anyone. The currents of corruption were too deep. Even those not infected might have been suborned – and even if they hadn’t, would they understand? Would they be able to comprehend the holy necessity that drove me?

I knew better than to hope for that.

I navigated the confusion with all due speed, heading for the reinforced bunker that stretched the length of the forward line. It contained our regiment’s supply of munitions and lasrifle powercells. Where the other bunkers were little more than square huts of ferrocrete, this one was a fortress.

There were guards on duty in front of the entrance. There were always guards on duty, people coming and going, despite the burning skies and the thundering guns. Runners carried messages, servitors trundled carts of ammunition – a nigh-constant stream of witnesses. But I was beyond caring at that point.

As I’d suspected, the guards weren’t human. Blue eyes met mine as they tossed off sloppy salutes. They couldn’t even be bothered to pretend anymore.

‘I’ve come to inspect the bunker,’ I said.

‘On whose authority?’ one asked, harshly.

I blinked. ‘My own.’

‘I’m sorry, commissar, but the colonel said–’

I shot him. As he fell and his companion turned, I drew the bayonet from my coat and slammed it into his throat, where his environment mask and uniform overlapped. I twisted the blade and wrenched it free in a gush of red. I knew the code, and opened the bunker, heedless of the staring faces I left in my wake.

I heard shouts and klaxons echoing through the trenches, and wondered if the colonel had been discovered. I knew I didn’t have much time. If the regiment was to be saved, the infection had to be purged.

The interior of the bunker was divided into numerous chambers, all splitting off from a central hall. This hall held the bulk of the munitions. It also held the cogitator nodes that controlled the bunker’s failsafe.

In the event of the trenches being overrun, the regiment was to fall back to this last redoubt to await reinforcement. Failing that, the bunker would be destroyed by the failsafe built into its substructure. If defeat was a sin, a still greater one was the surrendering of precious materials to the enemy.

Only three people had the codes to control the failsafe. The colonel had been one. I was another. And the munitions-master was the third.

So I killed her next.

You might question my reasoning, but it was simple enough – what one of us could initiate, the other could abort. I could not risk her being compromised, and so I shot her. I did so with regret, and all due mercy. She never saw it coming. It was necessary, but unfortunate. My duty was clear. I like to think that, should she have been aware of the situation, she would have agreed with my chosen course of action.

She was a stern woman, hatchet-faced and grey-headed. She ran her fiefdom with admirable efficiency and our paths had crossed only once, during an investigation into an incident of theft. By all accounts, she had been pleased with my solution to the problem – summary execution of the offender. That is why I say that I am sure she would have understood. Like the colonel, I think she knew that I was the only thing standing between the regiment and anarchy.

I saw her before she saw me. She was hurrying towards the entrance, one hand on her sidearm, two servitors plodding in her wake. They were ugly things – too little meat, too much machine. Death is a mercy compared to servitor conversion. I often wondered if there was anything left of who they had been in those withered skulls, or whether all the cabling and metal had squeezed out all traces of personality.

‘Commissar?’ she called out. ‘Is something amiss? It’s rare that you leave the front…’ She paused. ‘What are those klaxons? What’s going on?’

‘The colonel is dead,’ I said, quickly. ‘We are under attack.’

‘The colonel–’ she began, her face pale. ‘How?’

‘There’s no time. Come. Take me to the failsafe.’

‘What? But…’ She paused and stepped back, eyes narrowed. Her hand fell to her sidearm, and she half-turned as if to give orders to the servitors, but my shot silenced her. I still don’t know what gave me away. It could have been anything. Perhaps she simply read it in my eyes. The servitors watched her crumple to the floor with dead, flat gazes. When it became clear that she was no longer capable of giving orders, those gazes switched to me.

I gestured with my laspistol. ‘Go. Guard the entrance. Keep everyone out.’ I paused. ‘Lethal force authorised.’

They plodded past, servos whining. They would follow my orders until they were destroyed or another officer commanded them to stand down. Either way, they would buy me the time I needed.

Quickly, I made my way through the racks of weapons and munitions. The failsafe was located at the rear of the hall, where the bank of cogitator alcoves sat. The alcoves were set deep into the reinforced walls, and the lights of the cogitators were visible in the gloom. Servitors had been wired into the crannies that were interspersed between the alcoves, and they murmured pre-recorded hymns to the cogitators’ machine-spirits, keeping them docile. The regiment suffered a paucity of enginseers and tech-adepts – something I was grateful for at that moment.

But as I drew near to my goal, I heard the tell-tale scrape of a boot on ferrocrete, and a voice said, ‘Valemar.’

Startled, I spun, going for my laspistol. I saw a familiar face – the colonel’s aide. I wondered what he was doing here. I got my answer when he drew his weapon – a heavy autopistol. Not regulation, but an officer’s aide is often considered exempt from such strictures. Nonetheless, I took note of it.

‘You killed him,’ he said, softly. ‘You vicious, stupid little bastard – why did you have to kill him?’

His first shot came quickly on the heels of his condemnation. I managed to duck aside, to put a ferrocrete rack between us. Heart hammering, I drew my own weapon. I wondered how he’d got past the servitors, before I recalled that as the colonel’s aide, he likely knew the proper rituals.

‘You don’t understand,’ I called out. ‘It had to be done. He was compromised. If you’ll just let me explain…’

The autopistol boomed again, loud in the confines of the ammunition bunker. The shots would soon draw attention. I knew I had to end things quickly. But I loathed to kill an innocent man. And yet, even as the thought occurred to me, I wondered if he was.

If the colonel had been taken, why would the aide have been spared? I knew then that the enemy had realised the nature of my plan, and had come to prevent it. More shots followed this revelation, driving me further to the edges of the hall.

Of course he was one of them. I look back now and realise how laughable it was to assume otherwise. Of course he was one. Of course. And likely he had been from the beginning. Always sneaking about, spying on his betters. Eavesdropping on private conversations. If I’d been more diligent, I’d have realised it sooner, and found an excuse to execute him. But my loyalty to the colonel had blinded me. Made me negligent.

Angered by the thought, I moved quickly, hoping to circle around him before he spotted me again. I knew that if I could get the drop on him, the fight would end quickly.

‘Where are you, Valemar?’ he called out, his voice echoing oddly in the space of the hall. ‘Come out.’

‘You first,’ I replied. I thought that if I could keep him talking, I could distract him. ‘How did you find me?’

‘I followed you. You didn’t notice. You’re not very observant, Valemar.’

I am honest enough to acknowledge that his comments stung, at the time. He was right. I had been unobservant. I had failed in my duty to the colonel, and to the regiment. But I intended to redeem myself.

‘Maybe not, but I know you now,’ I said. ‘I thought, at first, that the captain was the ringleader. Then, perhaps the colonel… but I see the truth now. It’s you. It’s always been you. Creeping about. Listening at doorways, unnoticed. This is your doing. All of it. But it won’t work. I know now, and soon others will as well. I’ll tell command. I’ll–’ I froze then, the words forgotten on my lips as I heard the click of an autopistol being readied.

‘Turn around, murderer.’

I did so, slowly. The aide glared at me over the barrel of his weapon, his eyes like chips of ice. The autopistol was aimed at my head.

‘Drop your weapon.’

I tossed my laspistol aside. He frowned.

‘Both of them.’

Reluctantly, I drew my bayonet from my coat and dropped it to the floor. He nodded, a grim expression on his nondescript face.

‘I told him,’ he said, as if I’d asked a question. ‘I told him that you couldn’t be trusted. All those incidents, stretching back to the schola progenium. Even his friends in command warned him. Told him you were a mad dog. That your only place was with a penal legion – or a firing squad. But he didn’t listen. He thought he needed you. Thought he could control you. And then you turned on him.’

‘He tried to kill me.’

‘Shut up, Valemar. You’re done.’

‘Commissar,’ I said.

He jerked the trigger. I admit – in that moment, I was certain that I had come to the end of my duty. I saw my life unravel before me. Moments of satisfaction and frustration tumbled over one another in my mind’s eye. I saw every enemy I’d killed, baying in triumph. But the God-Emperor was with me then, as He is with me now.

There was only a doleful click. The autopistol was empty – or perhaps it had jammed. I smiled then.

‘The God-Emperor is at my shoulder, and I shall know no fear,’ I said. ‘And you should have practised proper fire discipline. That’s an infraction.’

I tackled him, before he could run. He fought like a cornered animal, cursing and panting. But he was no soldier – not really. Just an old man now, whatever he had been. An old man with monstrously blue eyes. I will not pretend that I didn’t take pleasure in hitting him. I tore the autopistol from his hands and used it to batter him bloody.

He groaned and clutched at me. Asking for mercy, perhaps. I had none to give him. There could be no mercy for such creatures. To threaten a regiment of the Astra Militarum was to threaten the Imperium and the God-Emperor Himself. For the God-Emperor is the Imperium, and all who serve it. But turn from His light, and you will surely be cast into the outer darkness, there to weep for eternity.

So I hit him, until the stock of the autopistol broke. I cast the pieces aside and crouched over him. He still lived. And while he lived, the regiment was in danger. I had no choice. My duty was clear.

‘Your mistake was in leaving me alive,’ I said, as I gripped his throat in my hands. The bayonet and my laspistol were both out of reach. But sometimes it is best to do things the old fashioned way. ‘If you’d killed me first, I never would have seen you. But I did, and now I’m going to kill all of you filthy creatures. Whatever you are, you will not claim the soul of this regiment.’

He gagged and gabbled, clawing at my wrists, his bloody face going purple. It made his blue eyes stand out all the more, and as they blazed into mine, I tightened my grip.

‘You will not,’ I said again, leaning forwards. ‘I will not let you.’

His neck broke, even as his throat crumbled in my grip. I sat back, adrenaline surging. I waited for his eyes to darken back to whatever shade they had been before the infection had taken him. But they didn’t, and I wondered if his eyes had always been blue. Or maybe he had been their master all the time – a spider, spinning a web in plain view.

Scenarios flashed across my mind, each more sinister than the last. It all made sense, then, whichever one proved true. As the colonel’s aide, he had been free to go everywhere and anywhere and no one would have noticed. What better camouflage for such a creature – whatever sort of creature he was. I still didn’t know. It didn’t matter. I knew my enemy. I knew how to stop them. I did not need to know their name.

Alarms wailed as I stumbled to my feet. My hands ached. If you have never throttled another person you cannot imagine the ache in your fingers and palms afterwards. It is as if you have strained every muscle, one after the other. But there was something satisfying in it regardless. A savage joy. I felt it, I admit. There was something pure about it. Would that all the foes of humanity knew their end at the hands of honest men and women.

I passed through racks of weapons on my way to the control alcove. I took a lasrifle and extra powercells. I would not have time to reload the weapon in the conventional manner. Not if my plan succeeded.

When I reached the failsafe, I found it simple enough to prime and activate. Then, with the stock of the lasrifle, I smashed the cogitator panels, preventing any reprieve and silencing the alert klaxon. The sentence had been passed, and would be carried out without warning. After that, I made my way back to the upper levels of the bunker, traversing creaking gantries and ferrocrete walkways.

Once outside, I paused. The uppermost level of the bunker overlooked the nearest trenches. Shapes raced to and fro like insects, beneath a burning sky. I heard shots from below, and knew that someone had discovered the guards I’d despatched, and the servitors. They would have been on me in moments if I’d remained there. Instead, I whispered a prayer to the God-Emperor and trusted in His protection. I leapt from the bunker and fell to the mud below. Something jolted in me when I landed, and I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. But I scrambled to my feet nonetheless. I knew that time was against me. I had only moments to put as much distance as possible between myself and the bunker.

The explosion lifted me off my feet and sent me flying. Ribs snapped as I hit the ground, and it was all I could do to hold onto my weapon. Agony gripped me, but duty forced me to my feet. The sky was on fire – not from the guns this time, but from the explosion. And the ground shook like a wounded animal.

All it had taken was one good hit, in the right place. The trenches convulsed and crumbled. Not just in part, but the whole of the network. Every trench, every cut, all dissolving into a savage torrent of boiling mud. I heard screams rising up, and the crash as our guns were caught and crushed beneath the mud. Further explosions ripped through distant trenches, and the fire in the sky grew brighter. Like the glow of the God-Emperor’s light, shining down on His enemies.

I ran through the mist and smoke, my breath ragged in my lungs. I ran across the top of collapsing trenches, despite the danger. I ran to a point I’d chosen earlier – high up and solid enough that I could overlook the trenches as they filled.

The only safe point was above the line, in the open. Most of the regiment wouldn’t have time to reach the heights before they were swept away by the soup. And I would be waiting on those that did. It was the only way to be sure. The only way to keep the regiment safe from the horrors that nested within it.

Sometimes, salvation is found only in death.

I had to be sure, you see. I could not afford to let any escape. The God-Emperor had set me a task, and I was determined to see it done. I stood, backlit by the flames, wrapped in smoke, and waited until the first survivors groped their way from the wreckage, coughing and weeping. A trooper, just like the others. Bloody, beaten.

Blue-eyed.

I felt the wind, then. Heard it, and thought that it sounded like a voice. The voice of the divine will that drives us all. And I knew that my course was set.

I shot the first of them. I shot them all. One by one. I am sure I executed the innocent as well as the guilty in that cacophony of moments – I do not remember if they all had blue eyes or not. Regardless, I shot them until no more came, and there was only the murmur of mud and the thunder of the enemy’s guns, pounding at non-existent positions.

I had to be sure. I had to be certain.

I am certain.

Afterwards, I was taken into custody. I will spare you the details of those final days. The enemy – fled. I am sure. Or maybe there never had been an enemy. Maybe it was all a plot by the infected to pit loyal soldiers of the Imperium against one another. All I know is that the soldiers of another regiment – one as battered and as hollow-eyed as my own had been – found me, crouched in the mud with an empty lasrifle in my hands.

There was talk of a court martial, and even an execution. But it was just talk. They let me go, in the end. I was judged by a council of my peers. Only commissars may pass judgement on fellow commissars. I had done nothing wrong. Committed no infraction that anyone would admit to. I had merely done my duty. I was told I would be assigned to a new regiment, once matters had been settled, and I am content with that.

But even so, sometimes I wonder. I wonder if I acted correctly, or if my actions allowed some of them to escape. Mostly, these thoughts come whenever I see a flash of blue out of the corner of my eye.

I think often of the aide’s words, just before I killed him. About command, and the colonel’s friends. That they’d warned him against me. Could there be more of these blue-eyed devils in the upper echelons of the Munitorum? Do they still hide among the teeming billions? Are they watching me, even now?

I hope not. If they are, I do not think they will make the same mistake twice.

But I am watching for them. If I catch sight of one, I know my duty.

And that is enough.

‘And that is what I remember,’ Valemar said. He stiffened as the hollow clang of funerary bells sounded somewhere out of sight. He caught a glimpse of a mortuary-servitor stalking down the avenue, a shrouded body clasped to its inhuman torso. There was no telling where they took them – or why.

‘They’re preparing them for burial,’ Marrikus said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘It’s a tradition. They leave the dead to themselves for a time, and then take them below, where they’re… harvested, and prepared for burial.’

‘Harvested?’ asked Valemar. His head still ached. His skull felt as if there were a crack running all the way through it, letting in light and heat. His brains felt as if they had been cooked, and it was hard to think about one thing for too long.

‘Removal of organs, flensing, sacramental scrimshawing.’

‘More traditions,’ Valemar said.

‘Yes.’

‘I hate this place,’ Vendersen said. ‘Why are they watching us?’ She jerked her chin towards a pair of distant servitors, standing unmoving among the biers. The automata studied them with red, unblinking gazes, before moving off in opposite directions. Soon, they were lost to the rising mist, the only sign of their presence the ringing of their bells.

‘Maybe they were listening to the commissar’s story,’ Marrikus said. He scratched at his chest, and for an instant Valemar thought he saw something move beneath the man’s robes. But it was just a trick of the light.

‘Sounded more like a confession to me,’ Vendersen said. ‘I think they were right. You are crazy. Only a crazy man would come up with that type of story.’

‘Maybe not,’ Marrikus said. ‘I’ve heard stranger things on my journeys.’

‘I bet you have.’ She ran a hand through her hair and as Valemar watched, she suddenly wasn’t herself at all anymore, but something torn and red and dead. A strip of teeth grinning in a mask of ripped meat. Her arms were soaked crimson to the elbows, and there was blood everywhere. He shook his head, banishing the image.

‘What is it?’ she asked, and he thought he heard something in her voice. He flinched, and realised that he’d been staring. She balled her fists. ‘What are you looking at?’

‘Nothing,’ he said, rubbing his temples. ‘Let’s hear yours then, eh? I’ve told you what I remember. What about you?’

She looked away. ‘I…’

‘It is only fair. He told us his tale,’ Marrikus said.

‘Then why don’t you do it, priest?’ she snapped.

‘What are you so frightened of?’ Valemar asked.

For a while, she didn’t answer. But then, at last, in a halting voice, she began.

Incapacitate her, I said. Those were my exact words.

Incapacitate her.

Never trust the Savlar, they say. Even the word itself is a curse amongst us Noctai. Spend ten minutes in a room with the stimm-addicted scumbags and you’ll find yourself walking out with a lot less in the way of worldly possessions than you went in with. If you have the misfortune to meet my old trenchmates in the Two-Seventies, you might not walk out at all.

I should have known those idiots would push it too far. Once a penal legion, always a penal legion, whatever their precious Great Pardon might say. Perhaps I knew they would revert to type if I left them unsupervised. Perhaps that’s why I paid them – because then I could pretend I wasn’t culpable. ‘Typical Leana behaviour,’ as Marisel used to say. As if the smug blueblood and I were friends.

We weren’t friends.

It’s easy to see it all so clearly after the event, I suppose. Marisel Thorne was a field commander in the Noctai 337th, for Terra’s sake, of course she wouldn’t go down without breaking some heads first. Just lucky no one else got wise to what actually happened. I still technically have a clean sheet, even if I can’t sleep worth a damn these days.

I should have known they’d act out on the one mission I needed really quiet. The things the Chem-Dogs thrive on most of all, aside from resp-drugs and black marketeering, are being underestimated, and more than that, being unpredictable. They love it. They are intoxicated by it. Their guile and competence is hidden by the fact everyone who fights alongside them paints them as thieves, crooks and madmen – even cannibals. And not without good reason, I suppose. A few of them have resorted to it, in the bad times; I know that for a fact. Sometimes, on the front, you have no choice. I certainly didn’t, when we were starving and desperate in the mountains of Herodd.

I earned the Two-Seventies’ obedience that time, fair and square. And what do my hounds of war do? Soon as I really need them, they piss all over the rug. Addicts are easy to manipulate, right up until the point that they aren’t.

But I chose them for a reason. The Savlars are hardcore Militarum, through and through, and I’ve used them dozens of times in the past. Those who have seen them engage know they are some of the most ruthless killers you’ll ever fight alongside.

Not that Marisel would have understood that. Such superior, gold-nosing types never lower themselves to fighting with the troops in the corpse-furrows. If she had, maybe she’d still be alive, even if only to slum it with the rest of us.

First Captain Marisel Thorne had served alongside the firstborn sons of Vostroya, the Ventrillian Nobles, even alongside Bhulvadt in the Mordian Elite. She had not a single scar to show for her stellar fifteen-year career, but that didn’t stop her harping on about her accompaniments as if she were a war hero at a post-victory feast.

Emperor’s teeth, it still makes my skin crawl to think how she peppered her speeches with terms like ‘meta-strategy’ and ‘regiments of distinction’. To me, that means regiments where you are more concerned about which silver utensil to use in the mess hall than you are about where the enemy gun nests are. Who cares how many men you’re about to send against impossible odds when the jadeberry souffle’s getting cold? I bet she fit right in with those over-privileged pricks.

I heard Jecken Otto, one of the Noctai lads, refer to Marisel Thorne as ‘the Angel’ once; I nearly threw up in my mouth. Instead I wrote him up on some inventively worded charges of grand blasphemy, and made sure he got latrine duty for a week.

Had she ever even seen combat in her whole life? Had she ever cleaned a bayonet matted with blood and hair, gouged out an eyeball, or smelled the tang of a burned-out lasgun cell? I seriously doubt it. No, she just wandered through the echelons, high on the smell of her own cess. I worked my way into this position. Took me thirty years of blood, death and nightmares. And guess what? I get second place, again.

Makes you sick, really. Sick enough to do something about it.

When Field Commander Boll Gurtine got his chest shot out by a rebel’s bullet, I gave my bid to replace him everything I had. The scuttle said it was between Her Imperial Highness and me. Threnard had intimated that no one else was really close.

As a Noctai dockrat born and bred, I had one major advantage over Marisel Thorne – endurance. I must have walked a hundred miles that week, and more, sowing the seeds of my own success. But it’s a well-known fact that we Noctai Groundpounders never give up, and that’s especially true of our women. My old trenchmate Vix Denstadt once told me I helped cement that reputation over the highs and lows of my career. It’s a memory I’ve treasured for some time.

I’m never happy sitting still, in any case, especially when I’m against the clock. So I called in every favour, doubled down on every front, and orchestrated three big pushes. Meantime, I got my old feast-mates the Two-Seventies to spread every dirty secret I could dream up about Marisel, whether it was half true or complete fabrication.

That same week, she took the planetary governor’s palace with words alone. No shots fired, resources saved, lives spared – great. Her holier-than-thou image reinforced once again. But who’s to say that the agents of the Archenemy won’t sway those same biddable fools back the other way?

Not that old Bhulvadt saw it like that. Expediency is a weapon, as he tells us at every possible opportunity. It’s a mantra that was beaten into him by his own commanding officer – a domineering bastard we called the Butcher of Noctai for sending three million of us on a one-way trip into the meat grinder. Very expedient, I’m sure. Bhulvadt’s sent maybe half that to their deaths thus far. The old Mordian cretin thinks he’s a modern day Macharius.

Marisel’s the one Bhulvadt’s chosen to carry the torch when he finally has that fatal heart attack. He won’t get any objections from the regimental priests, either. She’s at the front in every service. Bhulvadt and his Emperor-loving cronies were all puffed up with pride when Her Highness charmed the place’s gates open in less than a day, their poorly-hidden infatuations vindicated once more. My gut churns just thinking about it.

In the debrief, she cited as her spur to action the fact that ‘we’ had spent a whole week trying to shatter the gates with brute force, ‘to no avail’. Throne, she actually said that. I’ve carried those mannered, damning words with me ever since. And by ‘we’ she meant ‘Leana’, of course – I caught her sideways glance just fine, and I wasn’t the only one.

Within a month of her miraculous victory, she was standing under Oong Tem City’s statue of the Emperor Ascendant, back ramrod straight and eyes forward, to receive the rank of field commander first class. As a captain – albeit second-class – I had a front-row seat for the whole thing. I had to stand bolt upright for three hours in full uniform, sweat trickling down my back and my dress shoes squeezing my feet like torture clamps. At the end, I even had to salute her. I almost choked when it was time to recite the oaths.

That’s when I made the decision, right then and there, that Marisel Thorne was going to take a fall.

Throne above, but how I’ve paid for it since then. Even now I keep seeing that silhouette, all broken up and wrong, in the dead of night. I still hear the tapping noises, then that damned scratching, like nails dragged across a splintered plank of driftwood. Post-warp auditory hallucination, they call it, but I don’t know. It feels more real than that.

She won’t leave me alone. I have to tell someone, or I’ll likely never sleep again.

Within ten hours of Marisel’s unfortunate accident with the Two-Seventies, I was summoned to attend Bhulvadt in the Marinister’s Palace. It’s a tall, spire-tipped building with a commanding view of the seaward quadrant. We’d used it as our HQ since the first week of the campaign, and despite the rebels’ best efforts it still stood proud.

Colonel First Class Leonid Vostok Bhulvadt, the high patriarch of the Tem Wargroup, was a shiny-headed brute squeezed into a double-breasted tunic. He had a temper like a phosphor round, but there was not one of us officers that didn’t see the balding tyrant as some kind of father figure. The kind that beats the discipline into you, but underneath all the hate and fear you somehow want to impress him nonetheless.

I was looking forward to seeing him on the long walk down the corridors. About as much as I look forward to a de-lousing treatment in the scour cubes.

A sharp knock, a deep breath, and into his office I went.

‘Know anything, Vendersen?’ he said, blurting out the words before I’d even closed the heavy iron-bound door. It felt like being barked at by a guardhound, and I had to fight back a flinch of distaste.

I closed the door carefully, and breathed out slowly to settle myself. The scent of oiled mahogany and shinebrass mix was rich in there. A note of rotten fibres cut through it, likely from the threadbare Tallarn rug that old Bhulvadt was too stubborn or sentimental to throw away.

‘Nothing to speak of, high patriarch,’ I said, staring straight ahead at attention stance.

‘Nothing to speak of.’ His tone was full of contempt. ‘Vague as ever. Elusive as ever. Don’t you Noctai ever give a straight answer?’

‘I wasn’t there, sir. I can give you second-hand information at best. I don’t openly fraternise with the rank and file. You always said it was bad practice.’

‘Where were you, then?’

‘On the rec level, sir. Playing Hexagrammon with Vix Denstadt. Trying out a new strategy for when you and I next get time enough for a game.’

He actually snorted at that. ‘Emperor knows you could use the practice.’

‘Captain Denstadt and I played right through the vespertine hours until just after midnight, sir. I was nowhere near Field Commander Thorne’s quarters at the time of the incident.’

‘You didn’t have to be. This incident had third party written all over it. And it was a full-blown murder, as well you know.’

‘A tragic waste of life, without doubt,’ I said, still staring straight ahead. Meeting his gaze when he was in this kind of mood was a bad idea.

‘The first men on the scene said there was the smell of resp-drugs in the air. Chem-Dog stimms, according to Threnard’s assessment. And he’s not a man given to making mistakes.’

That was certainly true. Bhulvadt’s adjutant, Macaval Threnard, was fiercely competent, acutely observant, and one of the few people in the wargroup I was still a little bit afraid of. I felt a weird mingling of hatred and respect whenever I was around him.

‘Didn’t you serve with the Savlar, back on Taupentire, second captain?’

‘Briefly,’ I replied. ‘But then I’ve served with nine regiments and counting. My hands are clean, high patriarch. Send Threnard to check my movements if you don’t believe me.’

‘I will, when he gets back. And when I find out who did this, I’ll beat their bones to kindling.’

I had no doubt he meant it. Corporal punishments were Bhulvadt’s vice – many and often. A traditional Mordian by birth, he didn’t wait for the Commissariat to dish out the discipline. No sirrah, good old Colonel Bhulvadt was always ready with his iron-cored swagger stick, breaking knuckles and splitting scalps every other day just to keep his hand in.

‘So what happened exactly, sir?’

‘I wondered why you weren’t asking that,’ he said, eyeing me up and down. ‘Field Commander Thorne was ambushed in her quarters.’

‘What? Who by?’

‘The Chem-Dogs, woman! Wash out your ears, for the sake of the God-Emperor!’

‘Chem-Dogs, plural?’

‘Yes, plural! Medicae corps reported four different bloodsigns in the spatter. There was plenty of it, all over the desk, the bunk and the floor. “Saturated” was the exact term Threnard used.’

‘So they what, beat her? Shot her?’

‘They found their way into the room with a stolen access code whilst she was asleep. From Threnard’s preliminary inspection of the scene, they broke her limbs before killing her. All four of them.’

‘Throne. Why do that just to kill her afterwards?’

‘You tell me, Vendersen.’

‘Someone else intervened?’

‘Not to my knowledge. No one has come forward.’

I felt the tension in my throat subside, just a little. ‘Four bloodsigns suggests she did a fair bit of damage back.’

‘I would say so,’ he scoffed, more pain than humour in his laughter. ‘She may have been slight, our Marisel, but she was fearsome in a corner.’

‘Are we sure it was the Chem-Dogs?’

‘Combat stimms,’ he said, holding his hands wide as if that removed all doubt and looking at me as if I was a dunce. ‘Who else uses them in the wargroup?’

‘Well, a few Athonians, I know that much. Some of the Indigan Praefects, too. Sallet helms hide that sort of thing easy enough.’

‘Do they.’

‘And the Miasman Redcowls, sir. They have plenty of users, I hear, and the stimm-scent’s easy to hide under their fumes. Thorne had enough detractors that the culprit could be from any one of half a dozen regiments.’

‘You seem very well versed in the subject of chems, second captain.’

‘I am well versed in every subject concerning the Astra Militarum, sir, high and low. It’s why you keep me around.’

‘Emperor knows it’s not for your respectful demeanour.’ The old man shifted in his chair, a tall-backed throne of Ventrillian brass and priceless Catachan fireoak upholstered in deep-red leather that squeaked as he shifted his weight. One day I would sit in that chair, whatever it took, and I would not find the position uncomfortable in the slightest. I had promised myself that long ago.

‘So if one of the bloodsigns was Thorne’s, that means at least three assailants,’ I said.

‘Threnard thinks six,’ sighed Bhulvadt. ‘Poor girl. She didn’t deserve all that.’ He seemed shrunken for a moment, his broad shoulders sagging and his ruddy, booze-warmed features wrinkled in consternation. It made him seem old and beaten. He reached out a hand to a decanter of Mordian crystal and poured himself a measure of the syrupy liquid before slugging it back. ‘I hate to think about it. She must have fought like a wildcat to keep them away. Wasn’t enough.’

‘A horrible thought,’ I said. Playing Hexagrammon gives you a good dead man’s mask, they say. I made the mistake of beating the high patriarch, once, early in my career. I still remember his face turning red; I swear that night set me back three years of hard graft up the ladder. Since then I’d let Bhulvadt win so often I have him convinced that one time was a fluke, and that he’s a good deal better at navigating the Liar’s Maze than I.

He doesn’t seem to realise I’m playing a different game altogether, and I have been for years.

‘Do you need me to join the investigation? I can make a few quiet inquiries.’

‘No,’ said Bhulvadt, elongating the word to make sure I got the message loud and clear. ‘You’re going nowhere near it. In fact, given the circumstances, you’re principal suspect. If I find any shred of evidence that you were involved, you won’t make it to the Commissariat. I’ll execute you myself.’

‘Sir,’ I said, opening my hands. ‘I’m not stupid. Yes, I was hoping to outclass Field Commander Thorne in the next warzone, maybe even discredit her if I could. I’ve been gunning for the same rank. But I could never have a fellow Guardsman killed. And certainly not one of my own.’

They say the best lies have their basis in truth, after all. I never said to kill her.

‘I know you wouldn’t, Leana,’ said the colonel. ‘Even you wouldn’t stoop to murder.’

I felt something squirm inside, but my face was like carven marble. I let the seconds tick by, watching Bhulvadt stare into nothingness out of the corner of my eye.

‘Sir, is Oong Tem still an operative theatre after the governor’s surrender?’

‘What?’ he said, his eyes refocusing. ‘Yes. Yes, it is, but we’re on the cusp of victory here. Another push or two, and we’ll have the outskirts. Marisel took the capital with words alone, you know. Saved a few thousand guns, I’ll wager.’

‘So everyone keeps saying,’ I said. I did my best to smile ruefully. ‘The regiment won’t be the same without her.’

‘Are you up to the task of taking this city back to Imperial standard, Vendersen?’

‘I am already doing so,’ I said. I took a data-slate from the back of my fatigues, rubbing some life into its activation stud with my thumb. ‘I have their secondary base isolated, and my platoon is in place to capitalise.’ A schematic of Oong Tem sprung up, marked carefully with my findings from over the last few weeks.

Bhulvadt’s brow furrowed, his white eyebrows meeting. The slate’s dim light cast his features in a yellowish pallor. Within seconds he was lost in interlocking manoeuvres, and I was halfway towards the freedom of the corridors.

I had a lot to do, and at the first chance I got, I intended to catch up with some old friends.

Sergeant Vernid and her fellow Two-Seventies showed up to the hangar late. Late enough to let me know she was not afraid of me, but not so late I would make an example of one of her men, or force them to leave empty-handed. It’s a fine tightrope we tread, the Savlar and I, but we’ve walked it for a long time, and we know its tolerances just fine.

They say the Chem-Dogs are known for getting the job done without any comeback. I learned the truth of that in my first command on Taupentire. They have a reputation for being bad news, and with a nasty anti-authoritarian streak to go with it. But a broken skull, administered to the right person? That can be enough to bring them into line.

I can vividly remember the first day I met Vernid and her squad, down in the maintenance bay. One of my finest. Halfway through the inevitable war of words I picked up a claw hammer, just as Yakobsen was making some crass comment about Noctai sea-peasants being allowed to use guns. I got the fat waste of skin just right. A solid hit in the temple with the flat of the thing, hitting hard enough to split skin but not hard enough for a court martial. There was a lot of blood, and a lot of laughter from the rest of the squad as he smeared it everywhere, trying to regain his balance.

Tragedy and comedy all at once. Vernid laughed loudest of all, a proper hyena’s screech. She never let the big ox live down getting knocked out by someone half his weight.

The Two-Seventies stopped giving me snide after that. Keeping them in stimms has been easy enough. I still have plenty of connections, and my history in the medicae corps is a gift that just keeps on giving. The combination of rank and black market clout has kept the Savlars eating out of my hand for years, but I always knew one day they would savage me, just for the spite of it.

And lo and behold, they had dropped me right in the cesspit at the worst possible time. Even the way they walked irritated me, with that combination of slinking insouciance and resentful submission. Avoiding eye contact, not through fear, but in the pretence that everything else was more interesting.

‘And here she is,’ said Vernid. Emerging from the shadow of a decommissioned Lightning fighter, she slunk into the disused command hub I was using for my rendezvous. Like most of the original Savlars she was chemically hairless. She had the thick black arrow mark of her former life as a convict in pride of place upon her forehead, a broken nose and a lopsided smile on her face. She seemed leaner than the last time I saw her – more like a piece of dried trail-meat than ever.

‘Here I am,’ I said, opening my arms as if to invite attack.

She ignored me. Her grey-blue eyes darted, checking every corner of the cogitator-walled room. Seeing nothing more dangerous than dust, she motioned to the rest of her squad, and Yakobsen, Doile and Groethe came forwards at a slouch.

Vernid’s eyes fell on the med crate I had behind me. That lopsided smile evened out, then, face split by teeth that ran from yellow to rotten brown as she finally met my gaze.

‘We thought you’d died, maybe.’ She took a wheezing pull on her customised resp-mask, then sketched a courteous bow. Thin plumes of chem-residuals came from her nostrils, making me think of a drake holding back its fire. ‘We’ve missed your moral guidance, sirrah.’

‘Don’t call me that, Vernid.’

She shrugged. ‘Where’ve you been, Vendersen? We were supposed to meet two days ago.’

‘Lying low,’ I replied. ‘Hard times.’

‘Not for us,’ said Groethe, picking his teeth as he and his squadmates stepped inside. A freaky-tall flamer specialist with acne-pocked skin, the promethium reek from his stained clothing was even more obnoxious than his body odour. ‘We got posted to a new billet. Lots of fresh meat there that ain’t seen combat yet, and we’ve eaten well. Figure-of-speaking, of course.’ He smirked, casting a glance at Vernid as if to share in a private joke.

I shook my head in disbelief. If there was ever a chance to remind me of the horrors we had shared in the mountains of Herodd, Groethe would seize it with both hands.

‘Shame about the lovely Thorne, eh,’ said Yakobsen, his gut wobbling in silent mirth. ‘Guess you heard we un-capacitated her pretty good for you.’

Next to the big man, his hanger-on Doile raised a finger and mimed slitting his throat with it, his underbite and greasy comb-over catching the light.

‘She’s dead,’ said Yakobsen, as if to clarify.

‘Emperor’s Grace,’ I said. ‘You don’t get any subtler, do you, Yakobsen? Want another slap?’

The big man’s grin evaporated, eyes narrowing as resentment soured his mood. I felt a mirthless smile of my own creep onto my face, and left it there.

Yakobsen raised a fat hand to the side of his head and scratched the scar on his temple absently, as if weighing up what to say next.

‘You din’t call us here for subtlety, sirrah,’ said Vernid.

I sighed. ‘You going to tell me what in the great void happened?’

‘It got messy,’ said Groethe with a shrug. ‘She was awake, and she was a fair bit stronger than she looked. She fought good and hard.’

‘To no avail,’ I said, the words escaping my lips before I caught myself.

‘You what?’ said Groethe.

‘Nothing. There were six of you, trained killers, and I had given you the access sigil to use on her door. How could you mess it up?’

‘She was at her desk, working on some papers,’ said Vernid. ‘All hunched over. She acted like she didn’t hear us as we came in, but when we got close she moved like a snake. Had a parchment knife hidden under her arm, too.’

‘A parchment knife,’ I said, my tone as neutral as I could manage.

‘Yeah,’ said Yakobsen. ‘Pock was first up. She dodged his grab, and put her stabber right in the side of his neck, nice as you please. I got his blood in my eyes, just as Little Fernas got her elbow in his throat.’

‘You both must have trained under the same drillmaster,’ said Vernid, staring at me with her cold, appraising eyes.

‘Mine was better. So Pock’s dead?’

‘Pock’s dead,’ said Yakobsen, blowing out through his fat cheeks. ‘Little Fernas is even deader.’

‘Astonishing. What happened to the useless runt?’

‘Fernas copped Thorne’s knee to the balls,’ said Vernid. ‘She clawed out his eye with one hand, grabbed his laspistol from its holster with the other, and shot him under the jaw. Brains everywhere. You had to see it.’ She shook her bald head in admiration.

‘Holy Throne,’ I said, closing my eyes in disgust. ‘And you just stood there, did you?’

Vernid shrugged again. ‘Rank hath its privileges. That’s what all this is about, right?’

I didn’t rise to the bait. ‘What about you, Doile? Did you lift a finger to help?’

He shook his head. ‘Pretty slick killer, she were, and I never liked Fernas anyway. I just left her to it.’

He likes to talk tough, does that greasy bastard, but I have it on good authority he draws charcoal pictures of Adeptus Astartes in his spare time.

‘Runt’s blood went everywhere,’ said Groethe, his voice a sinister whisper. ‘Fountains of the stuff. Didn’t know he had it in him.’ He laughed, short and nasty, before lapsing into a wracking cough.

‘We got her under control after that,’ said Vernid. ‘Though I earned a fresh crop of new war wounds in the process.’ She pulled back her collar, showing multiple dark bruises and a set of deep scratches that looked infected. ‘She was thrashing and shrieking, fit to wake the dead, but we broke her bones in the end, one by one. Bits of white sticking out left and right, like little porcelain knives.’

‘Snap-snap,’ said Yakobsen. ‘Sounded a bit like wet firewood.’

‘How lyrical,’ I said, my stomach turning as if I’d drunk a quart of vinegar. I’d seen many a broken body in the trenches, but this was somehow different.

Groethe nodded. ‘She went mad as a warp-child. Feels like my ears are still ringing, in the night.’

I winced. ‘I told you to muffle her first.’

‘Couldn’t get the gag on, with all the blood,’ said Vernid. ‘She was screaming like a griefer in full flow, biting and clawing as best she could. Made so much noise I had to put her out of her misery with my bayonet before anyone else showed up.’ She tapped the lasrifle slung over her shoulder. ‘Left some bloodstains still intact as proof of the deed, sirrah.’

‘I told you to stop calling me that,’ I said, putting an edge in my voice.

Vernid laughed. ‘You look as much man as mamzel, no point denying it.’

I stepped away from her, turning towards Yakobsen as if to attack him instead. As the big Guardsman flinched back, I donkey kicked Vernid in the leg. She half-caught my boot with both hands, only just stopping me from taking her kneecap clean off. Whilst her guard was down I wheeled around and backhanded her hard across the face.

Yakobsen slow-clapped. Vernid spat a tooth, blood pattering on the deck.

‘Easy, officer,’ she said, smiling through a mouthful of scarlet. ‘You got my chagrin, for what it’s worth.’ She took a hit from her resp-mask, rolled her neck and bounced on her feet like a pugilist. ‘Or would you rather go again?’

‘Chagrin’s good enough,’ I said, ‘for now. My appearance is no concern of yours. But if you can cut out the disrespect for five minutes, I have a job for you. One that even you lot can’t botch.’

‘Usual reward?’

‘And the rest. Point eight above usual, half in advance.’ I patted the med crate that I’d dragged into the hangar. I would be glad to see the back of the bastard thing after lugging it all the way here.

‘One point eight,’ wheezed Groethe, his watery eyes alight through his goggles. He turned his head and took a pull of his own resp as if in anticipation of a bonanza stimm session to come. ‘I’m in, whatever it is.’

‘Me too,’ said Doile, coming forward to stand at Groethe’s shoulder.

‘What’s the job?’ said Vernid.

‘Disappear,’ I said. ‘Lay low. Don’t do anything for anyone til I come to you.’

‘That’s it?’ said Groethe.

‘That’s it.’

‘For one point eight, I reckon we can manage that,’ said Vernid. ‘Together with the stimms from the last job, we’ll have enough to keep even Groethe out of trouble.’

‘You better. I’m already taking a crazy risk just meeting you.’

‘You weren’t followed. Trust us. We got the ratlings on side.’

‘I bet you have.’

‘Common folk, with common interests,’ said Groethe, trying for that salt-of-the-earth schtick that serves the Savlar so well. ‘That’s what gets the work done, see.’

‘Really,’ I said. I could feel my lips pursing in contempt. ‘Just get out of here, and lay low until we move out. Have one of the cook-rats send a missive if needed. I’ll find you when things calm down.’

‘Understood,’ said Vernid. ‘And what will you be doing in the meantime, mamzel?’

‘Conquering the city,’ I said. ‘Now piss off.’

Next news I heard of the Two-Seventies was via Enoch Whitemane, our wargroup’s ratling cook. That prune-faced little thief and I have had our differences, but he’s a useful contact, and for the right price he serves up more than just bad protein-swill.

Things had been quiet enough behind the lines. The official line on Marisel’s death was that she had been killed by hard-liner rebels who wanted to punish her for spoiling their fun. A decent enough story – via Enoch’s network of information brokers, I had spread it around myself. I had made sure to appear visibly upset at the burial ceremony. Not difficult, given the fact I felt like someone was staring at me the whole time. I put it down to lack of sleep.

Near enough everyone had bought the cover story about her death. Make yourself a known target in a war with rebels, you’re asking to be assassinated. Another good soldier dies horribly – welcome to the Guard.

The Imperium breeds martyrs like a sump breeds gnats, and ones that look good on a poster are the best kind of all. Recruitment went up after Marisel’s death, and other than Bhulvadt and his bloodhound Threnard, no one looked too closely at the whys and wherefores. I knew the old tyrant had come up with nothing, simply because he hadn’t beaten me to a pulp just yet.

Oong Tem was slowly, painfully brought back into compliance with Imperial rule. Cost us a lot of good men and women, but I made it happen, hab by hab. I developed plans within plans, and by and large, they came off.

I redirected parts of Marisel’s command as best I could, sending in pincer movements and even staging mock battles to bring hidden rebel elements out of hiding. When the victories started to rack up, I was given the rank of acting field commander, and inherited the entirety of the Noctai force in Oong Tem. Courtesy of Bhulvadt’s famed expediency, no doubt. When Threnard asked for the reason behind my sudden rush of victories at my inauguration ceremony, I told him I was doing it as much for First Captain Thorne as anything else. He gave me an odd look.

I wanted people to think me the grieving hero holding her head high, if only to put some distance between me and any accusations of foul play, but there was another good reason behind it. Distraction. I joined the grunts at the front line as often as I could, and I took a few lives when the rebels got feisty.

But even a heretic’s lifeblood didn’t wash clean whatever it was I felt about Marisel. I had a mark on my soul, and when I dwelt on it in the middle of the night, it felt like it would never fade. During my quiet moments of solitude in the strategium I looked at the threshold, half-expecting a pounding knock on the door, with faces like thunder behind it and a forced march to the execution centre soon to follow. In the dark of the night, whenever I lay awake, I kept feeling like someone was looking at me.

Saying I did not rest easy was an understatement.

One evening, I got back to my quarters to find a servo-skull hovering with a summons from Bhulvadt in its lacquered teeth. I pretty much felt my heart burst inside my chest. I readied myself for the worst, and made my way to the Marinister’s Palace to face the storm.

Bhulvadt’s office had a queue of officers waiting outside. I dutifully waited my turn, relieved by the fact there were so many of us there. The hangman’s noose, or death by beating, as was the likelier outcome, was not coming for me just yet.

When I was summoned inside, the balding tyrant gave me my marching orders, then dismissed me with a wave of his hand as if I was no more important to him than a dockyard gnat. I started making preparations to get my command out of there, a process so laborious that to be honest I found it harder than the actual war. Throne, but it was tortuous. When I was given my final exfiltration details and boarded the Divine Guidance two days later, I finally breathed for the first time in months. Cautiously, little by little, I let myself think the whole thing had blown over. And in a way, it had.

They say time is the great healer, but void travel’s pretty good for it too. Four months and seven days after I’d met with the Two-Seventies, the Guidance’s stately progress through the Taupen system brought it to the local Mandeville point. That’s the area where a ship’s captain can engage his warp drive without risking his vessel being pulled off course by the gravity of the system’s star, and hence sending everyone aboard to a screaming, burning, molten demise. It’s one of the cleaner ways to die from a warp accident. I’d heard of plenty worse.

Warp travel is a necessary evil. Without it, we’d have no hope of spanning the galaxy. The Imperium is so vast that a metaphysical solution is the only way we can hope to keep it even vaguely connected. So we shift our ships into the empyrean, that dimension of pure energy that sits behind ours, where strange tides and currents can carry you far faster and further than any real space propulsion.

That’s how I understand it, at any rate. I’m sure the truth is much stranger and more annoyingly mind-boggling. It’s a well-known fact amongst us soldier types that instances of combat psychosis escalate sharply over the course of a warp journey. Those are the risks, but in the glorious Astra Militarum there are always more recruits.

Maybe three days after we made translation into the warp, I was scoffing down my eventide meal in the canteen when I nearly choked on a tiny rolled-up piece of parchment. It was the kind the ratlings use as smoking paper, tucked deep in my protein mash. I pulled it out, palmed it and stashed it in my waist pocket.

I made my way back to my quarters after that, fast but not too fast. A few troopers saluted me as I went, standing bolt upright with their backs to the wall and chests held out as if they were proud to see me in the flesh. I still wasn’t used to my new rank, because their deference annoyed the crap out of me.

Nothing to be proud of here. Nothing to see, nothing to know.

‘Get back to work,’ I said. They cast their eyes down and hurried off, but for some reason, I got no pleasure from it.

When I got back to my bunk I carefully brushed the crusted protein mash off the tiny scroll, cleaning it enough that the writing on it was legible. There wasn’t much there, but it was enough. My room was uncomfortably hot, just like all of those above the enginarium deck, but the message left me feeling cold inside.

V unresp 7006

I screwed up the paper, then my eyes, then my fists.

Vernid unresponsive. And she’d been that way for at least a day, or Enoch wouldn’t have bothered sending the scroll in the first place.

If she was dead, that was bad. It was worse than bad. That leering old merc was about all that kept the Two-Seventies together. Without her to keep them in check, they’d come apart within weeks.

The truth about Marisel would come out eventually. Blackmail, extortion, incompetence, it didn’t really matter how. I’d be dead by swagger stick or noose if it did, of that I was convinced – she was too high profile a death to just disappear. But if I could just ride out the investigation until we got to the next warzone, the whole thing would likely fade into stale gossip. I just had to stay one step ahead of Bhulvadt and Threnard.

The number 7006 referred to a location – almost certainly Vernid’s quarters for the next jaunt, and likely not the ones on official record. I made up my mind to go there early the next morning. The Savlar Chem-Dogs are never easy to find, unless they want to be found. But Enoch has a way of always knowing where things are, and people are no exception.

I tried to settle in for the night, writing out a plan of action on a piece of parchment, but it was hard to concentrate. I kept hearing weird noises. Tapping and scratching sounds, as if something long and thin was being scraped down the opposite sides of the walls outside. Several times I went out into the corridor to see if anyone was there, but no luck. It was empty for a hundred feet in either direction.

A few hours slid past, and I began to feel drowsy, so I let my eyes close even though I was still sitting up in bed. I must have drifted off, because a little while later I had the most unsettling dream.

I felt a sharp pain right in the middle of my chest, just above the solar plexus, and pulled the sheet down from my shoulders to examine the site. There was a weird bulge there, small but prominent. I sat bolt upright, the fear of a late-stage carcinoma grabbing at my mind.

I felt my eyes widen in shock when the bulge moved under my skin, sharpening into a point like a knife pressing against a rubber sheet. The pain became intense, almost crippling. Then the taut white skin over the bulge split and broke. I tried to cry out, but I couldn’t breathe.

A slender, hooking fingernail pushed out. Up it came, impossibly long, its tip arcing towards my mouth in a shallow curve. Following it, a crooked finger emerged from the hole in my chest. It looked like the index digit of a corpse.

Adrenaline flooded my system. I felt the paralysis of pain that had grabbed my limbs slacken, and grabbed at the finger, intending to snap it in two. My hand went right through it.

I woke up tearing at the sheets, balled them up and threw them away from myself as if there was a plague rat caught in there. Shaking, I pulled my knees up to my chin on instinct. Then I made myself uncurl, and looked at the site above my solar plexus. Nothing there, thank Terra.

Believe me when I say I couldn’t sleep a wink after that. I decided to do something physical, if only to keep my mind busy.

I got dressed once more, readying myself to pay a visit to Vernid. No doubt I would be in for a good deal of scorn, having essentially paid her to hide, the better to distance us from one another. But at that moment, it seemed a far better idea than being alone.

As a sergeant, Vernid would have a private room to herself, albeit a tiny one. I had to find out what in Terra’s name was going on. It was another risk, but I was sick of sitting around staring into nothingness and nibbling at strands of my hair. I made preparations to visit 7000-7050 block as soon as I could.

They say the Noctai like to solve their problems on the move. I tend to think better when I walk, and I’m not afraid to get off my behind and hustle when I think it can help. Hoping to avoid the deference and attention paid to me by the troops, I opened the sealed chest in my locker and took out the old Savlar uniform the Two-Seventies had peeled off a corpse for me back on Taupentire.

The hideous set of fatigues has served me well, over the years. It doesn’t fit in the slightest, its ribbing pinches the skin, its resp unit stinks of mildew, and there’s a hole from a lasgun round right under the armpit. But it’s not conspicuous, and the mask covers the lower half of the face. The addition of a forage cap with my hair twisted up inside it makes me all but unrecognisable. The sight of a Militarum trooper looking like a beat-up scarecraven is nothing new. No one looks twice. We dockers know that to appear poor and dishevelled is to escape notice, more often than not. People always look away, just in case you ask them for something.

The meagre hab cells of 7000-7050 block lined the western flank of the Guidance. The cells were pretty much uniform apart from the odd bit of graffiti here and there. ‘Sump-Sucker’ was scrawled across one, ‘Dead Man Walking’ on another. One simply said ‘No,’ written in something red-brown that I didn’t dare examine. I could guess its provenance from the smell.

They keep us like prisoners in these crafts, like livestock. Likely a few souls would go stir-crazy even without the warp leaking its nightmares into the corners of our minds.

I slowed my pace as I neared 7006, waiting for the three dodgy characters at the end of the corridor to move on. When they had disappeared, I sauntered in close to the door, taking out the long, plasteel seal-slitter the Two-Seventies had sewn into the arm of my bogus uniform in exchange for a pillman’s box of prime stimms.

7006 was no sergeant’s quarters, but a platoon commander’s, which had an optica and a reinforced door. Trust Vernid to have wangled herself preferential treatment even when I specifically asked her to lay low.

Keeping an eye on either end of the corridor, I aligned the seal-slitter and ran it down the side of the door. The damned thing still wouldn’t budge. Vernid was long enough in the tooth to know how to guard from the usual tricks.

I rested my forehead against the door for a moment, thinking. Then I felt my heart lurch up into my throat. I could hear footsteps coming from down the next stretch of corridor.

No more options. I took out my officer’s ident badge and pressed the jewel-eyed, winged metal aquila against the hazed optica at the side of the door. According to my enginseer contact Yuki Beta-Dara, somewhere behind that broken plex-glass was a caryatid servitor, little more than a pickled human eyeball that would scan any badge applied to it. The muscles of its iris would send an imperative to the door’s machine-spirit if it recognised the data patterns, its reaction determining whether to let me through or keep me out.

Clearly the apparatus approved of my ident, because the door clunked and hissed open. I slid inside and hammered the close-rune so fast it wasn’t even halfway open before it slid back into place.

The stink inside was so strong that the resp couldn’t keep it out, even on full filter. The thick tang of blood mingled with the nose-wrinkling stenches of human faeces and rotting food. I felt my eyes water, though whether because of the smell or the fear that accompanied it, I don’t know. Certainly my bladder felt like it was watering pretty well too, because there on the bunk was Vernid’s corpse, and it was a twisted wreck.

That death-mask face will stay with me to the grave. Her usual leer was gone, replaced by a screaming and lip-stretched maw that put every one of her rotten yellow teeth on display. Her eyes were wide and white as eggs, the pupils and irises rolled right back. Blood had run from both nostrils, but her head had been canted so sharply backwards it had trickled past her cheeks and over her ears like the arms of a pair of spectacles. It had pooled, sticky and black, on the bunk beneath.

I could see corpsefly larvae wriggling in the little lakes of gore. She had been dead maybe sixteen hours, twenty at most.

That horrible visage was unsettling enough, but it was the rest of her that really gave me the terrors. I wanted to look away, I really did, but some part of me was transfixed. I told myself there were answers to be found here, but I found only questions, and terrifying ones at that.

Vernid’s arms and legs were broken all to sin. Snapped would be a better term. Sharp white spurs of bone protruded from her forearms, and bright blood darkened to black around the base of each jutting shard.

The skin was distended and bulging where the bones pushed up and out, especially on her left leg. There, both fibula and tibia had ripped their way through, like a sabre and a main-gauche both pointing towards some unseen enemy. Their knife-sharp tips glinted in the wan light of the lumen she had left on above her bunk, perhaps to ward off her own suite of night terrors.

Not that it had done her much good.

I felt my brow crease. No one had forced the door. No one of less than field captain rank could have overruled her lock protocol. There were no footprints, no real spatter amongst the discarded foil containers and ration tins that littered the floor. No sign that Vernid had done anything but lie there whilst her body was cracked and folded and splintered into jagged, malformed ruin. Whoever had done this had been very competent, very subtle, and very determined indeed.

The old Noctai tales of skull-faced assassins that could walk through walls rose to the forefront of my mind. We had a long and proud oral tradition in my regiment, trying to outdo one another with the horrors of war we had witnessed. It made for a steady supply of nightmare fuel, but Vernid’s corpse took the prize. I felt a sudden need to get out of there.

I pressed my ear to the door, listening for footsteps in the corridor outside. Three sets of them, and close. I prayed for them to recede, feeling keenly the presence of the corpse a few feet behind me.

I had to get out of there, and erase all trace of my investigation. Trying hard to focus, I took a Triplex las cell and a piece of fine copper wire from my thigh pocket, wiring it up fast so it would deliver a quick jolt of power when the two contacts were linked.

Every second that passed with that hideous mess of a cadaver near me felt like a long, agonising minute. I’d seen worse on the battlefield – corpses all torn to ruin. But Vernid was holed up in locked quarters, where she should have been safe. That got to me on some primal level. I half expected the blood-soaked thing to get up slowly behind me, to stare at me with those egg-white eyes, to growl unintelligible words through clotted blood as it flailed and clawed at my exposed back.

Finally the footsteps faded. I still felt like a shadow had fallen across me, robbing me of my calm. I put my hackles down as best I could, pressed the door’s egress rune and slid through, casting one last glance behind me.

For a moment, I thought I saw something on the wall; a faint shadow that had not been there before. My eyes had to have been playing tricks on me, I thought. Then the door hissed closed behind me, and I put it out of my mind.

Looking up and down the corridor, I pushed my wired las cell against the plex-glass of the optica. The little servitor-machine hissed, buzzed like a wasp in a plexi-tube, and gave vent to a thin plume of smoke.

Good enough. I headed back the way I had come, forcing some Savlar swagger into my walk. Not that hard for a Noctai born and raised on the docks. To a casual observer, I was just another half-sane knifegirl out to cause trouble.

Inside, I was a shaking mess.

In the canteen that afternoon I slipped Enoch Whitemane a note of my own, returning my starch tin upturned on its tray so he knew to look underneath. I’d kept the missive as brief as I could.

270/0427/v2335

I headed back to my quarters, ignoring the fools that insisted on saluting me as I went. The wizened little piglet Enoch would figure out the code in time, I was sure. He owed me a favour for turning a blind eye to his blood transfusion sideline, and with his long reach he could get word to the Two-Seventies without arousing suspicion.

A quick phys routine energised my body and settled my mind a little. Not long now til the Two-Seventies and I thrashed out exactly what had happened to Vernid. I took a few swigs from my canteen, then got dressed in my Savlar fatigues ready for a visit to Whitemane.

‘No one will look twice,’ I muttered to myself.

There was a bang on the door, and I nearly swallowed my tongue.

‘One second!’

I shucked off the Chem-Dog kit double-quick, kicking the fatigues under the bunk before opening the door just wide enough to show my visitor I was out of uniform.

Threnard’s penetrating eyes met mine, a mixture of accusation and hauteur staring out from his long features. He looked to me like a Noctai canid, one of those breeds with a face like a bunched-up sheet of deer leather.

‘The high patriarch wishes an audience,’ he said.

‘Have I got time to don my formals?’

‘Of course,’ said Threnard, looking away. ‘But make it quick, acting field commander. Your destiny is close at hand.’

‘How impressively dramatic,’ I said, closing the door with a fake smile. I got into my dress uniform at an unhurried pace, checked my appearance in the mirror. Innocents don’t run, as the Noctai saying goes, and Threnard would be waiting for something, anything, to confirm his suspicions about me. I had less than an hour of leeway if I wanted to make it to my rendezvous with the Two-Seventies, but rushing this would be almost as incriminating as rising to Threnard’s bait.

‘It will be good to see the old man again,’ I said brightly as I stepped out into the corridor. ‘Been too long. Is he adjusting to the warp travel well?’

‘He is unperturbed, as am I,’ said Threnard, walking away as he talked over his shoulder. I gritted my teeth and followed him. ‘Though he has been rather… distracted of late.’

I made a noncommittal noise. ‘You can hardly blame him, given the circumstances. I have been off my game myself.’

‘Really,’ said Threnard, not a single trace of questioning in his tone. ‘Is that so.’

Bhulvadt was in a good mood. I could tell by his stern scowl that he only partially wanted to kill me.

‘Well well well,’ he said. ‘Here she is.’

‘Why do so many people say that?’ I muttered.

‘You’re the woman of the hour, that’s why,’ said Bhulvadt, somewhat amused that I didn’t seem to understand what people said about me behind my back. He tilted his Acastian lamplight to cast a yellow glow across his vast desk of Catachan oak. All his prized antiques were present and correct, admittedly crammed into in a much smaller space than the Marinister’s Palace. Perhaps the delay in leaving Oong Tem City had been to ensure they all made it aboard the Guidance without a scratch.

‘You left quite a mark on the Tem Rebellion, Leana.’

‘Commander Thorne did most of the work, high patriarch,’ I said, looking down at my boots with all the modesty I could muster. Men like Bhulvadt liked to see that.

‘She did indeed. She broke the back of the thing. But you, Leana Vendersen, carried it through.’

‘That’s a well-known fact,’ said Threnard, taking his place by his master’s side like a good dog. He smiled thinly. ‘You took the city entire.’

‘Indeed,’ said Bhulvadt. ‘Not with genius, mind. Not with verve. But with sheer bloody Noctai determination. Ask anyone, they all say the same thing. Oong Tem was as much your victory as hers.’

‘My thanks, high patriarch.’ I genuinely felt something glow inside me.

‘That’s why I’m formally installing you as field commander first class.’

I swallowed. All this time I’d wanted to hear those words, and here they were. Perhaps it would take a while to sink in.

‘I… I am honoured, sir.’

‘You are indeed. Don’t make me regret it, Leana. You’ve got a few months at the least before we translate back into real space and commit to the next theatre. Make good use of them learning the role.’

‘I will.’

‘Yes, you will. I want you an expert in every facet and fixture. And it wouldn’t hurt to brush up on your etiquette, field commander.’

‘Of course, high patriarch.’

‘Respect, woman. I shouldn’t have to tell you how valuable that is. It greases the wheels of our great engine of war.’

Here we go, I thought, the balding tyrant indulging in his own pomposity once more. I could almost feel Threnard rolling his eyes at the back of the room. For once, we had something in common.

‘Don’t think this means you’re not under scrutiny,’ said Bhulvadt, his smile souring. Even after all these years, he still loved to watch me squirm. ‘You are still very much under the eye of the Commissariat, amongst others. We’ve no definite culprit ascertained for Commander Thorne’s death.’ He looked sidelong at Threnard, and to my great pleasure I saw the adjutant flinch, just a little. ‘But we will find who murdered her, mark that well.’

‘Someone else suffered much the same fate, I hear,’ I ventured. ‘One of the Savlar.’ It was a risky play, especially with Threnard in the room, but a high reward if it came off. And pretending I knew nothing about it was never going to fly, given my connections.

‘Ear to the ground as ever,’ nodded Bhulvadt. ‘Yes. It appears we have madmen in our ranks.’

Threnard raised an eyebrow, just a fraction. I caught the meaning just fine.

‘Gruesome business,’ I said.

‘To their credit, they covered their tracks well this time,’ said Threnard.

‘Stay out of this, Leana,’ said Bhulvadt. ‘We’ll deal with it. You should concentrate on the future, rather than the past. These coming years could well be a bright time for you.’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘Come by this office first shift next week – we’ll squeeze in that game of Hexagrammon.’

‘I would love to, sir,’ I replied, genuinely meaning it. It would be worth a long game session just to see Threnard’s floppy face sag as he was relegated to the ranks of all Bhulvadt’s other antiques. I might even play for keeps this time.

Seemed that I was pretty good at it after all.

The next scroll I had found tucked in my protein mash had had a simple Y on it. Enoch had deciphered the meaning of my code just fine, given the context. 270/0427/v2335 – get the Two-Seventies to meet me at berth 0427, vespertine chronosegment 23.35. The only mystery part was how much of a favour he would consider it, and whether I still had clout with him after I had called it in.

All the low 0400s were equestrium berths of one kind or another. 0427 was not your average stable; it belonged to the infamous 76th Chem-Riders. Those mean-eyed lowlifes were serious war assets. All the Savlar cavalry rode a strain of equuid creatures known as chem-beasts, and when the explosive impact of their hunting lances was twinned with the rugged, clawed might of their mounts, the charges were truly devastating. They had a kind of dirty glory to them, on the field at least.

In transit, they were as crooked as any other sons of Savlar. I had no doubt I could buy the silence of any who saw my little rendezvous, but even then, I wasn’t prepared to risk going in my Noctai uniform. My Savlar fatigues, as ragged and awful as ever, were chafing uncomfortably as I made my way into the equestrium area. I pulled at them, shifted them around, but they were too damn big, just like the accompanying resp-mask. Fiddling with the straps with my free hand, I checked the seal. Good enough.

Every equestrium comes with its stablehands, and I was not in the mood to have another pair of eyes or ears – more than one, most likely – complicating matters. The Two-Seventies would have got there first, and would have evacuated it one way or another, of that I felt sure.

It took close on twenty minutes before I got my chance to step inside without alerting the optica, waiting in the corridor with a lho-stick held oh-so-casually in one hand. No one looks twice at a loitering Chem-Dog. Besides, when dismounted, an infantryman looks much the same as the cavalry equivalent.

I waited for the stablehand to leave, a squat-bodied youngster with a scarred face, then strode past him with a curt nod as if I owned the place. Just another dutiful rider checking on her chem-beast.

Those creatures never failed to make me feel vaguely ill. I could see dozens of them, ranged along the sides of the berth, as bored and unhappy as the rest of us. Tack jangled behind the beasts when they moved; the equuids were kept more like battery farm fodder than the warhorses they replaced.

Taller than any classical cavalry steed, the creatures were gangling, rangy beasts with thorned limbs and sickly yellow skin like badly cured leather. In place of hooves the beasts had heavy knots of knucklebones, and their tails were long and muscular. Long, vaguely conical heads boasted tiny flat ears and a ridged, lamprey’s mouth boasting four principal teeth. The one nearest me stuck out its tongue like a snake, a blue-white spike amongst a quartet of jutting fangs. It fixed me with one evil pink eye, and snorted a mist of mucus.

Right at the back, the Two-Seventies were lingering, as shifty as ever. I saw Groethe reach back behind a bale of rope-hay, twisting something fast. I realised it was a canister of gas when a sickly sweet smell seeped through my resp.

It’d be some kind of intoxicant, knowing the Two-Seventies. Enough to send the stable boys packing, at least. They knew better than to interrupt a clandestine session of recreational crim-fodder. Sure enough, three more cadets came out of the woodwork and left the chamber without a word.

Never let it be said that the Savlar don’t know how to get the most out of their recreationals.

‘Nicely done,’ I said through my resp. The thing distorted my voice into a rough, genderless rasp, and I was okay with it. Even an eavesdropper would find it hard to place me.

‘Thanks, your ladyship,’ said Groethe, staring hard at me through his yellowed goggles.

‘Not funny,’ I said. ‘Keep it low, no signifiers.’

‘Right, right,’ he said. ‘Not really a time for jokes.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

‘None of us know,’ said Yakobsen. ‘The sarge got killed bad, though. I seen her corpse.’

‘Hard to forget,’ I said. ‘I paid her a visit myself.’

Yakobsen nodded, his body language that of a beaten man.

‘She was hit bad,’ said Doile. ‘We got the big lad here to slide the door. Revenge attack, by the wounds. Must have been some of Thorne’s crew. Not rested easy since seeing what they left behind.’

The manner of Vernid’s death hung between us, unspoken.

‘Vernid was acting weird before we went to ground,’ said Doile. ‘Kept saying she saw something moving in the corner of her eye.’

‘Aye,’ said Groethe. ‘Doily’s right. Said it was a shadow, like. We just took the vinegar out of her. Said she should sleep with the light on if she was scared of warp-gheists, maybe suck her thumb a little.’

Doile grinned nastily, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it.

‘Weird things can happen during a warp jump,’ I said, folding my arms. ‘I have my own theory about it. Any of you ever heard of that skull-faced assassin that the lads in Three-Ten talk about when they’re in their cups? The one they say was set to kill the Velvet Magus, back on Taupentire?’

I heard that weird tap-scratching noise then, and turned to look at the bulkhead where I thought it was coming from. I thought it was my imagination until I saw Yakobsen looking at the very same place.

Behind me, the two nearest chem-beasts started to whinny and snort in their stable-berths. I looked back; their breath was coming fast, their beady pink eyes staring wide in alarm.

‘What in Throne’s name…’ said Yakobsen. His eyes were wide, too, staring at the bulkhead. ‘Wait. That’s not possible…’

‘It’s just a wall, Yakobsen,’ said Doile. ‘Seems plausible enough.’

Yakobsen raised a finger, then scrabbled for his laspistol. ‘No,’ he said, his voice oddly strangled and high-pitched as he drew the gun with a shaking hand.

I stepped in quickly and backhanded the pistol hard across the room. Even a single las discharge could bring people running, and potentially damn us all to court martial charges of conspiracy. We would die at the noose, just because the fat man couldn’t do up his resp well enough to avoid a dose of paranoia from Groethe’s cylinders.

‘Pull it together, Yakobsen,’ I hissed. ‘At least pretend to be a professional.’

‘No… get away from me, please!’

Yakobsen turned, and bolted for one of the beast berths the handlers had left open. He disappeared inside.

‘Fat lunk can’t handle his gas,’ sniggered Groethe.

‘Yakobsen?’ said Doile, incredulous. ‘That ain’t true and you know it. He usually laps it up.’

There was a screech a few seconds later, loud and inhuman. I felt a sick, queasy feeling in my stomach as the screech turned into a bellow, then a scream. It was punctuated by a series of awful snapping noises.

‘The chem-beast’s kicking him to death,’ said Doile. ‘We gotta help him.’

No one moved.

‘Oh, for Throne’s sake,’ I said. I pulled out my knife and ran towards the berth. The chem-beasts stabled along the edges of the room were screaming too, now, their animal panic spreading like a virus.

Inside, Yakobsen was making a sound like a dying pig. I felt the rawness of his agony like sandpaper on a wound. Then I heard another snapping sound, gristly and wet, and the screaming stopped.

I darted my head around the side of the stable, then pulled it back again quickly, anxious not to catch a hoof in the face. Yakobsen was in there, all twisted on the ground in a pool of his own blood. He was broken up pretty bad.

At the back of the stable, the chem-beast had flattened itself against the wall. It was panting hard, likely with exertion, its flanks slick with sweat. My knife was ready to stab at the beast’s face if it came for me, but it didn’t move – just fixed me with its weird, red orbs, and shivered as if it was outside in midwinter.

Doile came up beside me with his contraband bolt pistol held in both hands. The boxy weapon was far too large for a man his size.

‘Emperor’s teeth, look at him, he’s still breathing,’ said Doile, his own breath coming in quick and nervous gasps. ‘We can’t leave him like that.’

He had a point. Yakobsen had been snapped like a badly made wooden doll, his arms and legs broken and facing in strange directions.

‘Doile, don’t do anything–’

The Savlar took the shot, and the bolt thudded into Yakobsen’s armpit.

It detonated. Everything went white. My ears were filled with sonic fuzz and a thin insect scream that shook the highest spires of my mind. Then things began to come into focus.

How I wish they hadn’t.

Red flesh, strewn everywhere. Not just red, but meaty crimson and marbled pink, like a steak. Yakobsen was laid open, burst and strewn wide like a grenade victim. In the space of a few seconds the stable had become an abattoir.

I heard the whinnying of chem-beasts and yells of the panicking Savlars mingling into cacophony, but I felt separate from it all, as if I were hearing them underwater. Then they resolved into cogent sounds, and I shook my head to get some measure of control.

‘What on Holy Terra is going on?’ said Groethe in a nasal whine. He joined us at the edge of the stable, his face white as bleached parchment.

‘He got warp-scared, and startled one of these beasts,’ I said. ‘We need to get out of here. Now help me with what’s left.’

‘What are we going to do about… this?’ said Groethe, gesturing in bewilderment at the ruin that had once been Yakobsen.

In the stalls behind me, the nearest chem-beasts were bucking and snorting hard, their blue-white tongues poking in and out of their ribbed mouths like pistons. I scowled as an idea came into focus.

‘These things eat human flesh, right?’

The lanky arsonist just shook his head, batting at one of his ears. ‘I haven’t done that for years…’

‘Not you, Groethe! Throne’s sake, get it together! Do these things eat human flesh?’

‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘Help me with his body.’ I span around and kicked the release on two of the nearest chem-beast berths. Dodging past the scaled flank of one of the creatures, I scooped a handful of meatfeed from a nearby hopper and ran back to Yakobsen’s corpse.

‘This should get them started,’ I said, scattering the feed across the floor and into his open chest cavity. ‘Less evidence the better. We have to leave, now.’

The largest of the chem-beasts ventured forwards on cue, licking up the feed nearby and then sticking its long snout in Yakobsen’s guts. Its bluish tongue darted back and forth.

Doile was nodding frantically as if agreeing with me, but he was stood stock still, his contraband bolt pistol still held out in both hands. I stepped to one side, putting the chem-beast between us before making my way to the door.

No one was coming, thank the Throne. Most likely the sound of gunshots had sent a clear enough message to stay away. Gang violence, and all that. I motioned the all-clear.

Groethe ran out past me, Doile close behind. Despite my better instincts, I took one look back before leaving.

This time I saw something weird on the equestrium wall. A shadow – no, more than that, a stain. It was vaguely humanoid, as if someone was buried behind the façade of the wall, the decomposing corpse leaking and bleeding into the plascrete around it.

It’s just mould, I told myself, or some other discolouration. It could have been chem-beast piss, for all I knew.

I shook my head, and the vision was gone. That made even less sense. I stared, numb with confusion for a moment. Focus, Leana.

‘Vendersen!’ hissed Groethe as he followed Doile out of the exit. ‘Let’s go!’

I turned and left, trying to numb the maddening feeling of dread that was slowly bleeding into the back of my mind.

That night I couldn’t sleep at all. Images kept intruding on my thoughts, branded on the undersides of my eyelids. Vernid’s staring, empty eyes. Yakobsen’s limbs all broken up, with spars of bone jutting through. Doile’s bolt detonating in the fat man’s armpit, and the yawning cavity it left behind. Ribs spread-eagled around a core of dark crimson. The rolling eyes of the alpha chem-beast, its blue-white tongue thrusting into Yakobsen’s guts as it feasted on the juicy offal inside.

But most of all, I thought of that damned stain I saw on the wall. I couldn’t shake it. Sometimes I thought I saw a similar shadow on the plascrete in the corner of the room, like in those picts of dead souls atomised during the world-ending fires of Exterminatus.

Then would come the tapping, and that awful scraping sound. I told myself it had to be the interior systems of the Guidance. It was an old ship, even for the Imperial Navy, and the enginseers could only do so much.

It was possible Yakobsen had been attacked by some esoteric kind of assassin in the employ of Thorne’s family. A psyker, even, projecting some horror into his mind to drive him mad. To think I never really believed the Noctai old timers with their tales of killers that could phase through walls. It made a lot more sense now, that much was becoming obvious.

Perhaps the killer had been sent by Bhulvadt, and he was using a façade of ignorance. Perhaps the whole thing was being facilitated by that slimeball Threnard as some cruel trick. And who did I have to turn to, to talk it over and share the load? A couple of Savlar stimm-addicts, a ratling crook and an emotionless cyborg. What’s the old expression? ‘With friends like these…’

It was almost enough to make me renege on my oath never to seek solace in the Imperial Cult. Almost enough to make me seek out the wargroup’s Ministorum priest, Gethsame. But not quite.

The sleepless hours ticked by. I started seeing the shadow-stain in clusters of hanging clothes, in discolourations on the mirror, even in creases in the fabric of my stormcoat. That horrible tapping and scraping played on my raw nerves every time I thought it had stopped, and something in my gut told me its frequency was increasing. I didn’t dare time it, in case I was right.

Sleep-deprived and growing desperate, I buried my head under the pillow, curled up tight in a foetal ball, and forced myself to think of walking along a beach, warm, golden sand underfoot. I conjured up the crashing waves and cawing gulls of the coastal village where I grew up, and the promontory where I walked when I needed a break from the constant grind of alley running and fencing goods. I found a measure of solace in the memory, imagining the feeling of sand squishing between my toes, and going over the memories of the strange shells I picked up in my youth. Thank the Emperor, I slowly began to drift off.

Then the dreams came.

I say dreams, but to be honest I’m not sure whether they were half-awake imaginings, or tricks my rotten psyche had decided to play on me. They felt so real, so malevolent. Whenever my forearm or foot came out from under the covers, I felt like something was staring at it, really close. Almost breathing on it.

I would pull the limb under the covers each time, feeling a little foolish at being such a scared little girl. I was a field commander in the Astra Militarum, for Throne’s sake. I would go back to my beach, drift off a little bit, and then move in my sleep. When I awoke, sure enough, a forearm or leg had made its way out of the covers again.

Feeling alone and confused, I even tucked myself in really tight at one point. Woke up a few minutes later, same deal. But that time, it was all four limbs out, me lying on my back with arms and legs spread wide.

Freaked me out, that did. I pulled my arms and legs back under the covers like a sunturtle protecting itself from a desert predator. Emperor’s Mercy, but I was hot under there; my heart was hammering, and I was sweating like I’d done three laps of the Noctai assault. I bit into the back of my thumb, lifting the covers the barest crack so that I could breathe. One of my legs had a fierce case of pins and needles, but I couldn’t stretch it out. I just couldn’t.

After a few minutes of heavy breathing and dark thoughts, I thrust out an arm and snatched up my stormcoat – I had thrown it from its peg onto the floor when its shadow had creeped me out – then spread it out over my sheet to form an extra, heavier layer. Huddled up in there, I felt a bit safer. On some level I was not sure a third of an inch of hardwool would protect me against whatever hideous ether-tech Vernid’s assassin was using, but you know what, I definitely felt more secure under there. Some primal thing, maybe. I got a few hours, after that, and woke up with the light-cycle lumen.

The bed was soaked. Soaked with my own blood, clinging to my limbs and viscerally crimson. Saturated with it.

I screamed, sitting bolt upright and clawing at the blanket and stormcoat wrapping my arms and legs like a shroud. Then I realised what had soaked the bed was my own sweat, and that I was unhurt. A stinking, tangled mess, but unhurt.

I saw a set of four shallow scratches on my calf muscle, long and angry red, and realised that was not entirely true. They burned in the cool air.

I got up, shivering with fear and sudden chill as the covers fell away, and stumbled over to the waterscourer with my heart in my mouth.

Desperate for human company, I dropped in on Yuki’s forge shop, ostensibly on official business. There was nothing untoward about a senior officer paying her wargroup’s enginseer a visit, after all.

It was good to be out of that horrible Savlar uniform, and to see Yuki, to bask in that utter lack of judgement and moralising that made her such good company in a crisis. She had nothing to do with the politicking and power grabbing of the Noctai’s upper echelons, and that was fine by me. Plus she was about the only person I could talk to about warp hallucinations and assassination attempts without it turning into a descending spiral of gossip.

When I made it into the enginseer’s forge room she was repairing a ruined optica that looked very familiar. Given the cleanliness of her work desks, my sabotage of Vernid’s door unit may well have been the most interesting thing to happen to her for weeks. There’s not much work for a humble enginseer during a warp transit. I had a feeling she was bored, and glad of any source of new knowledge she could find.

I casually looked over her shoulder as she was working, as if to pass the time. ‘What is that thing, Yuki?’

‘This is a caryatid-class door optica from berth seven-zero-zero-six. Requisitioned yesterday from the quarters of one Locia Vernid.’

‘Someone forced entry, you think?’

‘Inconclusive.’ Some part of her made a ticking sound. ‘I am examining it on the orders of Acting Platoon Commander Rojo Krodden of the Two Seventies Savlar Chem-Dogs. He was most insistent, and used unpleasant terms concerning the extent of my cybernetics.’ Yuki glanced up at me, her telescopic bionic eye whirring softly as it refocused. ‘It was reported faulty, and it is relatively complex, so I took it back here for deconstructive analysis.’

‘Monotask servitor?’

‘Essentially so.’ She scratched the back of her neck with a hand of pistons and silver claws, the motion swift and strangely canine. Always itching, was dear Yuki. Her cogtooth-embroidered robe of office was made of redroot-dyed hessian, and once, over a bottle of piston moonshine, she had confided in me that it irritated her remaining areas of flesh something fierce.

‘It keeps records of who comes in and out, right?’

‘In theory, yes,’ said the enginseer, clicking the device open. The pungent smell of alkaline chemicals filled the workshop. ‘Though this one has been tampered with. Its eyeball was badly compromised by an electric current. The organic component has popped at the back here.’ One of her steel-grey fingers split in two, becoming a pair of pincers that held a flap of milky white matter away from the top of the eyeball.

The image of Vernid’s blank and freakish eyes jumped into my forebrain.

I breathed deep, regained a little of my composure. ‘Does the device still have a record of how many people have used the door within the last few days? Or who used it?’

‘The former, affirmative,’ said Yuki, scratching the back of her forearm. ‘The ingress data will still be in there. The latter is likely in the negative. Let us have a look.’

I waited, doing my best to appear only slightly interested and fussing with my uniform when I felt like I was staring too long.

‘It appears the door was opened twice over the course of this diurnal cycle, but the data as to who did so is unavailable.’

That was me. And presumably whoever had officially found Vernid’s remains. ‘And before that?’

‘Nothing. By its interior abacus, it was last opened four days ago.’

I felt my throat tighten, and blew out my cheeks. The timing just did not add up. Vernid had died two nights back, I would stake my old medicae badge on it.

‘Are you sure about that, Yuki?’

‘That part of the optica device is analogue,’ she said, her tone as certain as steel.

‘Right. I’m only asking because Sergeant Vernid was a friend of mine. I don’t want people to think I’m overstepping my jurisdiction here.’

‘That is not relevant to my investigation. I only wish to repair and reinstall this device. I never speak of our conversations to others. They would likely find them distracting and hence counter-productive.’

‘Yuki?’

‘Yes, Leana Vendersen?’

‘You haven’t heard anything of an Assassinorum presence in this wargroup, have you?’

‘I have not.’ She narrowed her eyes for a moment, and the data tether on her back give a high-pitched hum. After a moment, she shrugged. ‘As I thought. All enginseer-accessible records within range are silent on the matter.’

I nodded in thanks, and she inclined her head, just a little, in a very human gesture of complicity.

Emperor bless you, Yuki Beta-Dara. May your tiny metal fingers never be idle.

Later that day, I made up my mind to crawl back into my Savlar kit and talk to the Two-Seventies. They were the only ones who had a chance of understanding what I was going through, and giving me some perspective over whether I was really under some kind of curse that made my dark-cycle hours a living nightmare.

I would have to approach the subject carefully, if I wanted to keep any sense of being the alpha predator amongst that pack of bastards. But there would be signs there to read if I wasn’t the only one going through this. If my own reflection was anything to go by, those signs would be pretty obvious, and big dark rings under the eyes would be amongst them. Right now I looked as though a very accurate prizefighter had punched me in the face a couple of times. My calf still hurt; I must have scratched myself badly in the night, perhaps in an effort to drive off my imagined assailant. My hair was matted and beginning to dread, but I had no time to properly comb it out. Still, I could tackle all that when things blew over. Right now I had more pressing matters to attend to.

Like trying to find out what in the warp was trying to kill the Two-Seventies.

My meeting with Bhulvadt was that evening, and I had no intention of being late, but I had time to visit at least one of the Savlar first. Of the two mercs left from the squad I sent after Thorne, I picked Doile. Groethe was likely out setting fire to something, whereas Doile was the most biddable of the lot, and being something of an introvert, was likely in his bunk. Though he could fight like a cornered wolf if it came to it, he always seemed awkward around me, and with the right cajoling he would tell me what I needed to know. I made my way down to Doile’s quarters at an unhurried Savlar slouch just before the eventide service.

As a field commander, I wasn’t expected to attend Pater Gethsame’s preachy little gatherings, provided gratis to ensure the Ecclesiarchy’s brainwashing of the Imperial sheep was still in full effect. The Savlar rank and file aren’t big on following orders, and they’re not much for the glorification of the Imperial Cult either. It was a fair bet Doile would be on his own, entertaining himself somehow whilst more devout soldiers sang praise to the Emperor in the lower levels.

No need to tangle with any caryatid door-opticas this time. Colpius Doile held the lowly rank of private, and as any Militarum veteran will tell you, privates have no privacy whatsoever. The doors to their quarters were heavy enough – this was a spacecraft, after all – but they had no locks. Provided you knocked first, you could just open the door whenever you liked.

So I knocked on Doile’s door, nice and loud. No answer. There was a weird smell in the air, as if something had been burning.

I knocked again, then went in.

That strange smell intensified, cloying and sharp. I felt bile rise in my throat, steeled myself and yanked the handle up before sliding the door hard to the right.

The sight before me made me puke a little in my mouth. Swallowing down the gobful of hot vomit, I staggered inside and slid the door closed behind me. I unslung my lasrifle and detached the bayonet from its slot by the barrel, wedging it in tight in order to prevent the door being opened after me. I had another nightmare to confront, and I didn’t want anyone looking over my shoulder.

Doile was there, kneeling in the middle of the room in a pool of gore and bits of pinkish-red matter. The top of his cranium was missing, like an egg cracked and scooped out. Blood and brain matter had spattered across the porous tiles of the false ceiling. Even as I looked up, a droplet elongated and fell to the floor with a soft plip. The private’s chin was resting on the end of his own lasrifle, propping up the shattered remains of his head and keeping his slumping form upright as if too long at prayer. His finger was still on the trigger, twisted awkwardly.

The smell of las-burned flesh filled the room. It was so thick it made another mouthful of puke rise in the back of my throat before I swallowed it back down with a sting of heartburn. He’d done this to himself, and recently. A quick finger placed on the back of his hand confirmed my suspicion; the corpse was still warm, and rigor mortis had yet to set in.

I looked around the room for any clue as to whether anyone else had been here, perhaps to kill him and then make it look like suicide. The place was unkempt, with dirty clothes strewn around the floor, but there was nothing to indicate a struggle.

What I did find, and in great number, were charcoal pictures pinned to the walls. Some of them were not bad at all; depictions of Space Marines posing heroically or gunning down mutant unfortunates with horns coming from their heads. Others were homemade cheesecake pin-ups that put Doile’s sexual maturity at about the age of twelve. There was even a picture of me, rendered well enough for me to catch the likeness from the swipe of black hair and strong jawline. I was sitting in the sun on a cairn of stones, with scratch marks all over my bare arms and legs. I didn’t know what to make of that, and I still don’t.

But some of the pictures, glued to the back wall and pinned over swathes of the others with gobbets of lho-gum, depicted something horrible. As I took it all in, every hair on my arms and neck stood on end as if something had just blown on the back of my neck.

They depicted an emaciated figure, arms and legs badly broken, with shards of bone jutting out of its limbs. The creature was naked and hovering, held suspended in the air. A cascade of straight hair covered its face, and disproportionately long nails grew from its slender fingers and delicate toes, each curving like a sickle.

There must have been fifty of these pictures all told. Some were sketched hurriedly in charcoal on scraps of cleaner’s weave, their forms stick-like and impressionistic. Others were drawn on the back of official parchments in almost lifelike detail. In some of them the figure was emerging from the darkness, in others, it had a halo of light.

I took one of the better ones, I don’t know why, and stuffed it into my fatigues. I guess I thought it could come in useful, if I ever wanted to show someone what in Throne’s name I was talking about should I ever have to describe the thing that had obsessed Private Colpius Doile before his death. I told myself it was a depiction of a contract killer sent after the Two-Seventies, that it confirmed my suspicions about some exotic sub-type of assassin, but something in my head told me I knew perfectly well what it was, and that it had nothing to do with the Officio Assassinorum, nor the rebels we had left behind.

Turning away from the nightmarish pictures, I stepped on something squishy and wet. I recoiled, face contorting, and flicked it off the sole of my shoe. Grey and quivering as it flew away under the bunk, I was pretty sure it was a piece of Doile’s brain.

That was enough for me. Leaving good quality boot prints at the scene of a suicide was asking for a visit from Threnard and a couple of Bhulvadt’s voidsman heavies. I smeared away the greasy footprint on the floor with a stolen parchment, tucking it in my fatigues after wiping my boot, then listened at the door for a moment to check the path was clear. It was, thank the stars.

This time, I left in a hurry. I don’t think I had much swagger left in me.

I stood outside Bhulvadt’s office, bolt upright, just as he liked me to. The bald bastard had this habit, if I turned up even a few minutes early, of making me wait outside his quarters until the specified time, even though I knew he was doing nothing in particular. Conversely, if I turned up even a single minute late, he would shout himself hoarse in berating me for wasting his time.

I felt a surge of hatred in my chest, my Noctai formals suddenly feeling tight across my torso. For a moment I found myself imagining Bhulvadt all broken up and snapped, blood smeared across his stupid shiny skull, then banished the image with a grimace. Not a good thing to dwell on. Not at all. This evening was all about escaping the horrors of the last few days, and making a delicate political position strong enough to last.

The door to Bhulvadt’s office clunked open, and Threnard’s weather-beaten face – old before its time, and entirely devoid of warmth – poked out.

‘Vendersen,’ he said. ‘He’s ready for you now.’

I saluted, then clicked my heels, as much to get into the right headspace as to show any kind of obedience. ‘My thanks, Adjutant Prime Threnard,’ I said. ‘And it’s Field Commander Vendersen, if you recall.’

I walked into the room to see Bhulvadt sitting at the strategium table, his Hexagrammon board in pride of place. I had always coveted that thing. Tessellating hexes of Iaxian granite, Calthian jade and Talassarian mother-of-pearl were chased with lines of red gold. The pieces themselves were just as sumptuous.

The set was worth an absolute fortune, but more than any monetary value, I wanted it for what it represented. Legitimacy. Privilege. Freedom from the desperate worlds of the cobbled alleyway, the overpopulated hivesprawl and the sweat-stained training ground. To own such artefacts was to belong to another level of existence altogether.

‘Do sit, field commander,’ said Bhulvadt, motioning to a chair made of Truskan mahogany. I’d always wondered whether it was a calculated insult that amongst all the antiques that Bhulvadt had collected over the course of his long career, not one of them came from my dark, briny home world of Noctas. It sent a message clear enough. The planet was of no real value, and we Noctai had nothing to be proud of.

‘Are you prepared for a crushing defeat?’ I asked, forcing just the right amount of levity into my tone.

‘I am prepared to give no quarter,’ he said, narrowing his eyes. ‘You don’t object to Threnard accompanying us, I take it?’ He waved the rhetorical question away before I had a chance to answer. ‘He has aspirations of giving you a sound thrashing of his own someday.’

I felt my soul squirm inside, but said nothing. At least Threnard had the decency to look away; I could feel his intense gaze finding something else to study.

‘Shall we begin?’ I said, moving my first disc in a standard gambit.

‘You must permit me a few pleasantries as we let the blood flow,’ said Bhulvadt, replying in kind. ‘It has been so long. You don’t look as if you are sleeping well, Leana.’

‘Well, I have had some difficult nights.’ I took one of the balding tyrant’s outriders, opening myself to a pincer that gave him a chance to take one of mine and earn himself a warm sense of vengeance.

‘Only to be expected, given the fact we are in empyrean transit,’ said Bhulvadt. ‘When you get to my age, you’ll sleep sounder. Even when things get rough.’

Oh, but how I hoped he was right.

‘Nothing troubling you, is there, field commander?’ said Threnard innocently.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, wobbling my head from side to side as if weighing something up. I moved a piece in central, forming half a guard hex. ‘Transit bleed, perhaps. Pressures of the new rank. Marisel Thorne is a hard act to follow.’

‘She left quite an impression on us all,’ said the adjutant. ‘I am sure you think of her often.’

I nodded absently, but let it slide, pretending to concentrate on the game. For some reason I was acutely aware of the scratches on my calf, throbbing with a dull pain. Maybe they were infected after all.

Bhulvadt had developed his game well, but I could see three decent plays at the back. Always so pedestrian, his gambits. Defensive, even predictable.

I felt myself wonder how Threnard would play. Like a weasel-faced scumbag, no doubt.

‘Are you content with my inception thus far?’ I asked.

Bhulvadt snorted. ‘Frankly, no.’ He took my leading piece.

I felt a hand of tension at my throat. ‘No, high patriarch?’

‘Another Savlar found this morning, top of his head blown across the ceiling. Three dead, not counting Thorne herself. All within a matter of days.’

‘How did he die?’ I said, my brow lined with concern. It wasn’t hard to make it look genuine, especially when I called up the memory of that ruined skull, and the blood on the ceiling.

‘Shot himself an hour before falsedawn,’ said Threnard. ‘Warp madness, they think.’

‘It’s a terrible thing,’ I replied.

‘It is when it’s on your watch!’ shouted Bhulvadt, suddenly standing up and leaning over so that he was practically spitting in my face. Hexagrammon pieces toppled, rolling across the board; one fell, but Threnard’s arm shot out to catch it. ‘Three deaths in sixty hours!’ bawled Bhulvadt, too incensed to care. ‘That’s well above acceptable percentages for a craft of our magnitude! And all from the same unit? What in the Emperor’s name is going on, woman?’

‘I can only imagine it’s a gang killing,’ I said, trying to keep calm by resetting the board as best I could. Threnard replaced the fallen piece in the correct hex and orientation, but his eyes never left me. ‘It’s the Savlars,’ I said, as if that explained everything. ‘They often carry over vendettas from their former lives.’

‘Do they,’ said Bhulvadt, his words cold as a grave slab. He sat back down, but his body language was still that of a hyperfelid about to pounce.

‘They are all criminals, incepted into the Astra Militarum to bulk out the numbers,’ I said. ‘Even with the Great Pardon they’re bound to cause trouble. Especially when there’s no enemy for them to loot and pillage.’

‘In her defence, high patriarch, it is not the first time something like this has happened,’ said Threnard.

‘In her defence?’ said Bhulvadt, his tone dripping with acidic incredulity. ‘In her prosecution, these are the same Savlar with which Field Commander Vendersen associated upon Taupentire. You told me that yourself, Threnard.’

‘Yes, high patriarch. She is still very much my prime suspect.’

‘I am still very much here, adjutant prime,’ I said.

Threnard shot me a sidelong look, all knives.

‘And were you “playing Hexagrammon with Vix Denstadt” at the time of these Savlar murders, Field Commander Vendersen?’

‘No, high patriarch,’ I said. ‘At the time of the suicide I was in my bunk, sir, sleeping off an amasec session that I resorted to in order to get some sleep. And if you are linking the equestrium incident to all this, at that hour I was in conference with one of my associates, Enoch Whitemane.’

‘A ratling,’ said Bhulvadt. ‘Such company she keeps.’ He shook his bald head, but I could feel his wrath was subsiding like a thundercloud passing overhead. The lie about Whitemane was another high stakes gamble, but if I could get to the food-stained little midget before Threnard did, there was a chance I could make it work as an alibi bought and paid for.

‘We will see,’ said Bhulvadt.

‘Does this mean anything to you?’ said Threnard, thrusting a piece of parchment two feet from my nose. It was one of Doile’s crude charcoal pictures. The emaciated woman, broken and awful, with those long, hideous nails.

It was a supreme effort not to scream.

‘Charming,’ I managed. I waved it away. ‘Your line work is improving, Threnard, but your study model looks a little sick.’

Threnard raised an eyebrow, tucking the picture away once more. ‘I took it from the quarters of the suicide, one Colpius Doile. One of dozens of such images he had amongst his sketches. He was a very disturbed individual.’

That much was true. I had one of his little works of art tucked inside my vest, and right now it felt more prickly and uncomfortable than ever.

‘Warp transit, as you say,’ I shrugged. ‘It’s never dull for long.’

‘Ha,’ said Bhulvadt, but there was no trace of warmth or humour in the exhalation.

‘And this one?’ Threnard took out another parchment, unfurling it. I felt my tongue dry up like a lizard in the desert sun as I realised it was the sketch he’d done of me, sitting in the sun on a cairn of stones.

‘I’m flattered,’ I managed. ‘From the same artist?’

Threnard stared hard. ‘Yes.’

‘He must have been one of the young men I served with in the Herodd Mountains. We left plenty of cairns there.’

‘He must have been,’ said Bhulvadt again, nodding with his eyes narrowed. ‘Very well. You say you know nothing about all this, and though I do not believe you for a minute, I have little in the way of proof. But any more oversights, any more incidents like this, and I will strip you of your rank before your first active command even begins. Do you understand me, Field Commander Vendersen?’

‘Absolutely,’ I replied, feeling as if I had been punched in the chest. ‘Would you excuse me? I had no knowledge of this suicide, and I have enquiries of my own to make to ensure no more incidents occur this side of translation.’

‘“Would you excuse me”, she says,’ said Bhulvadt, sighing as if I were a truculent child. ‘Go about your business, Vendersen. But tread carefully. Marisel Thorne was a fond part of my staff, and her death is linked to the demise of these guttersnipe Savlars. I’m sure of it.’

At this, I thought I saw something in the wall behind him, just for a moment. A strange outline on the wall, a stain spreading slowly from nowhere, with what looked like a spindly arm stretched out to one side. I looked away, a feeling of cold dread spreading down my limbs.

Bhulvadt leaned forwards, sensing that my attention had slipped away. ‘You might well look uncomfortable. If I find even a shred of evidence you are connected with any of these killings, I will have no option but to have you beaten until the whole truth comes out.’

‘Of course, high patriarch,’ I replied. ‘I promise you, my conduct from here will be exemplary.’ I saluted, clicking my heels once more, and made to leave. Threnard held the door for me, ever the gentleman.

‘Good luck, Field Commander Vendersen,’ he said to me as I passed him. ‘I have a feeling you will need it.’

I made my way to the galley at a double-quick pace, fury driving me forwards even though my body felt ready to collapse from mental and physical exhaustion. Bhulvadt and Threnard were already on to me. If I didn’t make it to Enoch first and get my story straight, I was as good as dead. I was mad at myself more than anything else, having let their primitive interrogation tactics rattle me so much I gave a false alibi.

Even if the meet with Enoch went without a hitch, there were another three days before we made warp translation. I felt all but certain that they would execute me before we were back in real space, if I didn’t get killed in the night by some hideous assassin-thing first. So far my career as field commander was going swimmingly.

I smelled the ship’s galley before I saw it. The stink of bad cabbage mingled with the sharp carbon tang of burned animal. It was not a good sign. Enoch wouldn’t countenance the loss of even a single rasher of groxmeat. For all else the ratlings were, they made great cooks. So either he was absent, or very busy.

Emperor, please let him be there.

I reached the oval hatch that led into the galley and knocked three times on the doorjamb. There was a fair bit of noise coming from inside – raised voices, the round clang of tureens, and the occasional hiss of steam from an auto-processing machine.

It occurred to me that a Noctai officer in formal uniform this late in the shift might not be welcomed with open arms, especially given how cagey Enoch was with his secondary line of work. To be honest I was past caring at this point.

‘Random inspection,’ I called out, more for the benefit of anyone who was tailing me than anyone inside. I screwed my eyes shut for a moment. Another risky play; no veteran officer was stupid enough to carry out a random inspection on the kitchen. Not if they wanted to eat anything better than piss-laced gruel for the rest of the journey.

I ventured inside. There were perhaps six galleymen in there, preparing the officer corps’ breakfasts and freezeblasting them to last the night. Berating them with a fiery passion was Enoch Whitemane, a four-foot scrapper of a ratling with a shock of unruly hair. It had been some time since he could legitimately have called that ‘mane’ white. Over his forty-three years of operating the wargroup’s greasy and humid kitchens, it had become the colour of a lho-stick addict’s lungs.

I walked in, making myself obvious by knocking on the edge of a brushed steel cooking desk. The ratling did not look over; he was too busy swearing a blue streak at one of his underlings. Despite the fact the man towered over his boss, the galleyman was actually pale with fear.

Whitemane felt me looking at him and glanced over in my direction. He gave a hissing whisper, and the young man and his fellow ‘cooks’ vanished out of the back door without looking back.

‘Field Commander Vendersen,’ he said. His rasping voice was strangely deep for one so short. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure? It’s nearly midnight.’

‘I need answers, and a favour.’

‘Another one.’

‘Yes. If anyone asks, we were in close consultation with one another for the entirety of yesterday evening.’

‘Ah, no we weren’t,’ he said, wrinkling his ruddy nose. ‘I was in here, just as I am in here every evening, with plenty of people to swear to the fact. You know that.’

‘Then so was I. Reading data-slates in the stockroom, perhaps, finding a moment’s peace from the constant knocking on my door.’ I shook my head. Why was he being so difficult? ‘Make it work, Whitemane, and we’re square for the brig haul.’

‘You already called in that favour,’ he said. He grabbed a piece of rolling paper from a toback-strewn shelf nearby and wiggled it in the air. ‘All the little notes? Besides, there were five other people working with me last night. You have enough favours to call in to cover all of them, too?’

He had a point. The more I thought about it, the less it seemed like the alibi could work. But his was the name I had blurted out in front of Bhulvadt and Threnard, and there was nothing I could do about it now.

‘Look, Enoch, I’m in trouble. It’s bad. I need your help.’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘You really do.’ He went over to an auto-processor, fiddled with a couple of the buttons on it. Steam hissed from the side vents. ‘I heard the latest. A lot of your old Savlar friends in trouble recently, it seems. The terminal kind. Any idea why?’

‘It’s no accident, I know that much. Something weird is going on, even for warp transit. Have you heard anything about any Officio Assassinorum presence in the wargroup?’

He winced. ‘Why not just come right out and ask me?’

‘I’m not in the mood for dancing around the subject,’ I said. ‘I haven’t the time to mess around, and you have more inside information than anyone I have ever met. So have you heard of anything weird? Anything that can move through solid objects?’

‘No, Leana,’ he said, rubbing his eyes with gnarled, heavily-scarred fists. ‘I have heard nothing of the sort. A member of the Assassinorum? For our little wargroup?’ He raised a hairy eyebrow. ‘They say you Noctai know more than most, but realise less. I’m not sure the High Lords of Terra think of our light-fingered Savlar friends as a big threat.’

‘A private contract, then?’ I could hear the note of pleading in my voice, and I did not like it one bit. There was a faint tapping, clicking noise at the back of the galley, and though I knew it had to be some cooking machine or other, it was playing on my nerves.

‘No such thing, with the Assassinorum,’ said Whitemane. ‘But we are in transit, in the warp, and crazy things happen. I’m sorry they are happening to you and yours, for what it’s worth. And you’re right.’

‘About what?’

‘You’re out of time.’

I saw long shadows, then, as the door that led from the galley into the stockroom opened wide.

Three Savlar Chem-Dogs burst through in full combat gear. I backed towards the corridor, but another three were coming through that way as well. The one in the middle of the latter group was enormous. He had the physique of a Goliath ganger, bulked out with vat-grown muscle, and it looked like he was as much cybernetic as he was human. His Savlar fatigues were not so much worn as wrapped around him, a motley of several sets with the sleeves tied in strips around his biceps and thighs.

‘Evening,’ he said calmly.

‘You treacherous little shit, Enoch.’ I spat phlegm at the ratling, hitting him on the lapel. I suddenly realised that coming straight from a formal meet in Bhulvadt’s war room without heading back to pick up my pistol was a very bad idea indeed.

‘Sorry, Vendersen,’ said the ratling cook. ‘You’re bringing a lot of heat, and it’s bad for the market.’

‘Worse than bad,’ said the giant Chem-Dog. ‘You got how many of my men killed now?’

‘They were grown men, and hardened criminals,’ I said back. ‘They made their own decisions.’

‘The worst they ever made was working with you.’

‘You must be Krodden,’ I said, noticing the sergeant chevrons tattooed on his forehead. ‘Heard you made quite the impact on Armageddon.’

‘Sergeant Rojo Krodden, Acting Platoon Commander of the Two-Seventies,’ he said. He snorted like a bull, the ugly resp-snout covering his mouth wet with saliva and snot. ‘Time for you to learn some respect.’

I felt two pairs of hands grab me from behind, and slammed my head back fast. I felt it connect, the sensation of bone and teeth breaking making me smile as a loud yelp of pain sounded in my ear. A moment later I stamped hard on the instep of the boot I saw out of the corner of my eye, ducked a meaty arm, then came up diagonally so my shoulder caught my next attacker in the stomach. I was rewarded with a pained wheeze, this time, and saw a man with a straggly beard spitting blood.

Seeing a pair of goggles glinting to my left, I swung an elbow back to connect with the next one’s throat, smashing his resp free in a spray of atomised stimms. Then the giant strode over, cocky and over-confident, as most of these really big muscleheads are. I lashed out a boot and took him just under the kneecap, hard enough to dislodge his patella and force it up into his thigh. He stumbled and went down with a bellow of pain, grabbing a cleaver from a chopping block at his side.

‘Right!’ he shouted. ‘Change of plan. Death sentence!’

I danced away, but that Sergeant Krodden, he had some real reach. The cleaver came round crazy fast, and its blunt end clipped me on the temple. Everything went black.

I came to a moment later, surrounded by six of Savlar’s finest. They had me in a double arm-lock, and they were forcing me forwards, pushing me and kicking at my bootheels so I stumbled towards the machine at the back of the kitchen.

The autocarnis processor, it was called. The galley staff just called it the meat engine. Put a carcass in one end, it gets torn up nice and fine, and you can work the machine for ground meat for days. I’d heard tales of Enoch using it to intimidate more than one fool who couldn’t pay his bills.

‘She’s coming to, Rojo,’ said one of the Chem-Dogs. ‘Gonna struggle hard. Better watch yer knees.’

There were a few stifled laughs. Then I heard a fist connect with a thump, a loud crack, and someone slump to the floor behind me. The strip lights in the ceiling flickered, throwing weird shadows that made me feel strangely dizzy.

‘Sleep it off til you learn some respect, boy,’ said Krodden. ‘Or you’ll go in the grinder as well.’

I struggled then, all right. I thrashed, bit and screamed, until a hand was clamped over my jaw. I bit that too. I felt myself being lifted up, kicked and punched myself free, jabbed two fingers into a bloodshot eye, got smacked in the side of the head and was lifted up again, this time by a grip so strong I couldn’t break it.

‘Time to give a little back to the troops, field commander,’ said Rojo. ‘Like back on Herodd.’

I could see the boxy maw of the meat engine, its interior blade-teeth like the business end of a Goliath rockgrinder. With a guttural roar, it powered up, and the circular blades began to spin, spitting sparks and flecks of meat. The strip lights flickered again, dark, light, dark. Then they went out altogether.

I fell, and the screaming started.

Flickering, strobing, flashing; the lights rendered everything like a stuttering proto-vid from one of Bhulvadt’s antique zoetropes. I saw that meathead Krodden lifted from his feet by an invisible force. It crushed him against the ceiling until his neck broke with a horrible snap. Faces slashed open as if four knives had been driven into them and ripped sideways with sickening force, blood and teeth spraying everywhere. Throats opened so deep the spine was visible in the gaping hole. Over and over again, deep slashing marks appeared in pale Savlar flesh, as if people were being clawed by some monstrous, invisible beast.

More sudden images, cut into a series of tableaux by the strobing light. I felt as if I was fixed by some hideous paralysis. It was all I could do to just gape, lying propped on my elbows.

Flash.

Fatigues ripped through, ribs flying from torn-open torsos.

Flash.

Tongueless mouths full of blood.

Flash.

Eyeballs bursting in a spray of fluids, ripped from a mask of red.

Flash.

A headless corpse flailing in futile desperation to collide with racks of pots, sending saucepans clattering everywhere.

Flash.

Arteries gushing black.

A tattooed hand reached towards me from above. On instinct, I batted it away into darkness. A moment later, I saw the forearm lit brightly, but this time the hand had been ripped away to leave a spraying, bright red stump. Blood spattered my face, hot and stinking.

I felt something scratch my shoulder, four lines of fire appearing under my fatigues, and yelped like a scared dog. Then I heard a rasping noise above me. It sounded halfway between a death rattle and a woman’s voice, its tone so filled with hatred that I felt my bones turn to water.

‘Mine.’

I scrabbled backwards until I saw the faint line of light coming from the galley entrance. Driven only by animal instinct, I crawled through the melee on my belly, bashing my head on the hard plastic skirt of a cook desk in my haste to escape. The lights in the galley had gone out entirely, now, but the screaming still filled my ears.

I left smears of other people’s blood along the corridor as I scrambled away, stunned and ungainly as a newborn herd-beast. Then I finally got into my stride, and ran until I collapsed.

For the next few hours, I stumbled away from any sign of movement, no matter how small. I wasn’t in my right mind, and my head throbbed fit to burst. I rebounded from walls and doorways like a drunken sailor caught in the teeth of a storm. Somewhere in my mind I knew I was leaving spots and smudges of blood behind me, and that someone of Threnard’s calibre would track them easily enough. But I was obeying one simple animal instinct above all others.

Get away.

I finally came to my senses in the bilges of the ship, down near the brig, where everything was quiet and still. The punitive deck was the least likely place for other people to hang out, and as a wanted woman it made a kind of sense that I bolted there. On some superstitious level I think the Savlar feared the place.

The galley massacre had put paid to my theories of an Imperial Assassin hunting me and mine. I was the only one in that kitchen connected with Thorne’s death, and but for a new set of scratches I had been left intact. There was something else going on here. It says a lot about the Chem-Dogs that I’d rather take my chances with some weird warp phenomenon than being found by a bunch of vengeful Savlar.

It’s not like having other people around had helped, when it came to the visitations. If anything, I was the one being spared. Back in the galley, the horrific force had essentially saved me from being ground into mincemeat.

I shivered, cold and hungry. A sudden hollowness in my gut reminded me I hadn’t eaten for almost two days. There was no food down here, save perhaps for the odd scuttleroach or stowaway rat. I wasn’t sure I was that desperate just yet.

I caught sight of myself in the reflection of a burnished copper heat sink, part of the ship’s infrastructure. Still wearing formal Noctai uniform, albeit spattered with dirt and blood. The sight brought me back to my senses a little; made me think like an intelligent person instead of a scared animal.

I had to act, to strike back somehow. And what did the Noctai do when things got tough? They got off their backsides and made change happen.

I stood up, shakily, and blew out a long, shuddering breath. All was not lost. The events in the galley could have been due to an unsanctioned psyker amongst Krodden’s bully-boys, his psyche going haywire with the prospect of a kill in such close confines to the warp. Wild psykers were bad news, everyone knew that. If even one of them went rogue, they said, the only thing that could save you was the God-Emperor himself.

Maybe that’s the answer, I thought. If it was a supernatural threat – and the events in the galley had made abundantly clear that it was – I should be looking for some manner of spiritual defence. Faith wasn’t something I had much of, but in the teeth of the tempest, any port will do. Despite myself, I found myself praying under my breath. Maybe that would be enough.

I checked my timepiece, the second of two vintage cog-chronos given to Thorne and I by Bhulvadt in a rare moment of largesse. Sixteen minutes until the vespertine service was over. I could still make it up to the Ministorum deck in time. Given my rants on the nature of Imperial religion over the years, Threnard would not think to look for me there, and the Savlar avoided the Imperial Cult as if it would burn them.

I straightened my uniform as best I could, used a spit-covered thumb to rub off the worst of the blood, and ran at a jog towards the Ministorum deck.

Michail Gethsame was a flabby, watery-eyed fifty-something with a bad hunchback and a severe case of the shakes. He’d gone sober three months back, according to the Noctai scuttle, and his temper had been awful ever since. He tried knocking the drink on the head every year or so, but it never stuck. He’d be back on the moonshine soon enough. Catch him on the wrong day, and he was a hungover nightmare.

The story was that Pater Gethsame had his back broken in a tussle with a rebel in his twenties, back in the Damocles Gulf. Some said there was more to it. He certainly wasn’t telling, no matter how many glasses of liquor he’d put away. The war wound had done two things – driven him to the bottle, and made him officially unfit for active duty. He channelled decades of repressed anger and a daily regime of pain into his faith: a burning, aggressive surety that the heretic, the mutant and the alien must be punished as often as possible.

I approached him after the vespertine service, making sure to keep my face hidden as the faithful filed out.

‘Greetings in the name of the God-Emperor, Pater Gethsame,’ I said softly, genuflecting before the throne-topped Terrestine altar. The smell of incense was thick in my nostrils, resinous and somehow calming, like the smell of a favourite grandsire’s pipe in front of a crackling fire.

‘Leana Vendersen,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘What a pleasure to see you.’ I think I reminded him of someone he once knew. Not sure he would have been so kind to me otherwise.

‘And you,’ I replied, smiling a little with the corner of my mouth.

‘Would you give me a moment?’ he said. ‘I have a few of the faithful left to see on their way.’

‘Of course.’

He made his way to the other end of the temple hall, and exchanged a few words with the last of the congregation to linger on the threshold. Once they were all gone, he closed the doors behind them and made his way back up towards me.

‘You must be in some hot water to come down here and pay respect to the Altar of the Emperor Almighty. I thought you two didn’t get on.’

‘We have had our differences in the past, it’s true.’

‘Well, you’re here now. How’s the transit been?’

I shook my head, and shivered despite myself. ‘Ugly.’

‘That bad?’ he said, frowning in genuine concern. ‘That isn’t your blood on your jacket, is it?’

‘This?’ I said. ‘No, that’s a stain from back on Oong Tem. Not had a chance to get it cleaned yet.’

‘I heard you excelled yourself there. Am I to call you field commander now?’

I laughed without humour. ‘Certainly for a day or two. If I last that long.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I… well…’

‘You can tell me, warchild.’ His face was set in a gentle and understanding smile as he reached out a fat hand. It shook perceptibly, the liver spots on his thick-veined skin a nasty reddish brown.

‘I think I am being haunted, Pater Gethsame.’

His expression was suddenly sombre and grave. ‘Haunted,’ he said. ‘By what?’

‘I don’t know. But… it doesn’t feel like the work of the warp.’

He relaxed, just a little. ‘How do you mean?’

‘It’s more personal than that. I think it might be someone I killed in the line of duty, back on Oong Tem. Is that plausible?’

‘It’s certainly possible,’ he said. ‘Especially if that person was a psyker. Their soul may have feelings that have lingered after death.’

‘That, pater, is not particularly reassuring.’

He made an apologetic face. ‘You want honest answers, I assume. Don’t worry overly, Vendersen. Whatever this phenomenon is might cost you a few night’s sleep, especially during warp transit, but I doubt it can do you any lasting harm.’

I had memories of bones breaking through skin, invisible fingernail slashes opening throats in four places at once, and Krodden’s thick neck snapping as his head was rammed into the underside of the galley ceiling.

‘Right,’ I managed. ‘But what if it could? Would a rite of the faith work against it? Or aqua sanctus, even?’

‘It may,’ said Gethsame. He appraised me with a long glance, looking more unsettled by the moment. I had a reputation for being unshakeable, even for a Noctai. To see me so visibly rattled was a sign I was telling the truth, and that something very bad was going on.

‘What do you think is haunting you, Leana?’

‘I can’t say,’ I said, my voice quavering oddly. ‘I just can’t say.’

Gethsame pursed his lips. If there was something unnatural loose on the ship, it had implications for us all. Even if we could deal with it through faith and fire, should an official enquiry be launched the authorities might quarantine us for years. They may even have us mind-scrubbed en masse, and return us to duty as basic conscripts.

I had a sudden vision of Bhulvadt, myself, Groethe, Pater Gethsame and Threnard all standing shoulder to shoulder in some Emperor-forsaken corpse-furrow, reduced to simpletons with barely enough knowledge to hold our lasguns the right way round as the artillery shells fell around us and the enemy charged howling to kill us where we stood.

And that was one of the better outcomes.

‘Look, pater, I need something. I am in real danger here. Whatever’s after me, and it is after me in particular, I need something I can use against it.’

‘Does it look… inhuman?’ he ventured. Everything about his body language screamed ‘please say no’.

‘It’s human, just about. Long nails. Really long. I think it… sort of… hovers.’ I reached into my tunic’s inner lining and pulled out Doile’s sketch, smoothing it out on the altar. I could hardly bear to look at it.

‘Right,’ he said, nodding. ‘Right. Well, that is nothing I have ever seen or heard of before.’

‘You sound relieved,’ I said.

‘There are worse things in the empyrean than warp-gheists,’ he said. I could tell by the tone of his voice that he really, truly meant it.

‘Not sure I follow you.’

‘The warp,’ he said. He looked around, making sure there was no one here but us, despite the fact he had closed the doors himself only a few minutes ago. ‘It is not like real space. Some of my order think of its tides and currents, its very substance, as a reflection of our emotions. It is a metaphor, they say, but I am not so sure. Where strong enough emotions gather, they can… well, they can coalesce.’

‘You think this thing, this warp-gheist, is a coalescence of emotions?’

‘I very much hope not,’ he said. ‘It might be the residue of a troubled soul, especially if that soul was touched by the warp. But I think it is likely human in origin. There are other entities… but they have stranger forms than this. Forms that hurt the mind.’ His hand strayed sideways, as if to grab something that wasn’t there, before he caught himself and folded it in his sleeves once more. ‘Trust me, it could be so much worse.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘That’s really great.’

‘I can give you a blessing, my dear, if that would help.’

‘Fine. Why not. But what are the chances of me leaving with something I can actually use?’

‘Slim,’ he said. ‘I absolutely cannot give you any aqua sanctus. Ecclesiarchal writ makes it very clear it is not for dispersion amongst the flock, even to the officer corps.’ He reached under the altar once more, palmed something, and held both his hands out in a gesture of benediction. ‘Now, about that blessing.’

Raising an eyebrow, I held my own hands out as if to receive a boon. And what do you know, I did.

As Gethsame put his shaky, loose-skinned paws over mine, he slipped into my grip a glass container no bigger than a perfume bottle, along with a golden device shaped like a tiny mace. A sanctus phial and an aspergillum, if I remembered my High Gothic terms correctly. I took my hands to my chest, tucked the items into my inner breast pocket and bowed my head.

‘I do indeed feel blessed, pater,’ I said. ‘Blessed to have such a kind soul looking out for me.’

‘You needed but to ask,’ he said. He stood up and rearranged the altar cloth. ‘We will make translation back into real space in two or three days, by the latest estimates. I sincerely hope that you can bear your burden until then. And once we retranslate, I feel sure this will all fade away.’

‘Let’s hope you are right.’ I linked my thumbs across my chest and fanned my fingers in the Noctai version of the Imperial aquila, the palm of my right hand brushing against the vial of aqua sanctus next to my heart. For the first time in weeks, I felt something akin to hope.

‘Oh, and Pater Gethsame,’ I said as I was turning to leave. ‘Can I please borrow a couple of blankets from the vestry?’

He looked at me, frowning.

‘It’s cold at night, in my quarters,’ I said lamely. ‘Cold as the damn void.’

That night, I made my bunk in the brig. I reasoned that I would be thrown in one of them as soon as Threnard caught up with me anyway, so I might as well cut right to it. Sleeping in my own quarters was out of the question. They were no doubt watched by a servo-skull or some skulking informant with orders to report to Threnard. So were those of my known associates; Yuki, for example, would be under strict instructions to tell Bhulvadt if I stopped by, and she was a sucker for a direct order. Vix Denstadt would do right by me for a while, but under enough pressure even she would fold.

My jewelled aquila got me access to the inner corridors. Fancying a bit of room to think, I took one of the cells built to contain an ogryn. The abhuman dimwits always proved frequent visitors to the brig, and the Guidance’s shipwrights had made provisions for an entire squad of the meatheads being locked up at once. It seemed like a good place to use my little presents from Pater Gethsame without being disturbed.

Word would have got round about the massacre in the galley by now, and there would almost certainly be search parties looking for me. But the Divine Guidance was a big ship, at least a thousand years old, and it had plenty of places to hide. No ogryns on board, either, so no real chance of my impromptu bunk being found by accident, even if some infraction saw the voidsmen-at-arms come down here to fling some Savlar ape into the cells.

So here I was, hiding like a stowaway rat. If I could ride this out til we made translation once more, I thought, things would likely get a lot better.

Over time, though, as the chill seeped under my skin and the lights began to dim for the nocturnal cycle, I began to think maybe I should run back up to the mess and face the music. I was already imagining the shadows on the walls elongating, forming that horrible, broken-limbed shape, and with every sigh of air or scuttle of an insect my ears were straining for that weird tapping, scratching noise. I screwed my eyes shut hard, shook my head, and prepared to betray a lifelong conviction that the Imperial Cult did people a lot more harm than good.

Teeth gritted, I took my belt buckle, turning it edge-first, and carefully unscrewed the big, iron bunk from the wall. It was so beaten up by taking the weight of some long-departed ogryn transgressor that it came away pretty easily with a bit of leverage. I hauled the heavy, iron-sprung thing into the middle of the room, right under the dim lumen-ring that kept the cell in a semblance of illumination. Then I took out my phial of aqua sanctus and decanted about a third of it into the little mace-like aspergillum.

Here goes, I thought.

I thumbed to the litany section of the dog-eared Ecclesiarchal Primer that Gethsame had lent me, found the rite of warding that I remembered from when I was a child, and recanted it as best I could. As I spoke I shook drops from the tiny mace onto the cold stone floor. The stuff was going everywhere, so instead I got down on my knees and used it to trace a circle of dribbled liquid around the bed until I had completed the circle. It took the best part of forty minutes to get an unbroken ring around the outsized bunk, but I considered it time well spent.

Once the circle was complete I sat cross-legged on the bunk, blankets wrapped around me and the Ecclesiarchal Primer held in a pool of light to pass the time. An hour went past, then another. Sometimes I read the same paragraph three times over, but when I got to a particularly good fire-and-brimstone passage, it took my mind off things for a little while. But for the occasional howl of boredom or despair coming from the regular cells far down the corridor, and the odd scratching of a rat on patrol, I was undisturbed, and with every minute that went past I was a little closer to warp translation back into real space.

After two more hours of trying to focus on ‘Laud his name, blah-blah-blah,’ and ‘Give unto us the strength to pay for another thousand years of oppression, blah-blah,’ I felt my eyelids begin to droop. I pulled my two blankets over me, still holding onto the book and trying to read even as I lay down to keep my mind from wandering. If I lay there awake, I would replay the strobing carnage of the galley in my mind, or the sight of Yakobsen’s limbs breaking in front of me. After trying to read six more long and archaically worded paragraphs, I drifted off into sleep.

At least, I hope I did.

In a fug of half-consciousness, I slowly became aware of one of the shadows in the corner shivering, bulging, then unfolding to form the image of a walking corpse. It had long, thin fingernails, and broken, bone-snapped limbs. Hideous white protrusions jutted at angles that made me want to scream.

The thing peeled away from that wall, solidifying out of thin air as it reached for me. My panicked mind threw up regimental tales about aeldari changelings, creatures of pure shadow that would steal you away into a cold and infinite purgatory.

Out that spectre came, stretched and hideous, walking impossibly forwards on long, curling toenails that should never have supported its weight. Its face was hidden, covered over by lank black hair, earth-gritted and soiled as if it had just hauled itself out of the grave.

The apparition smelled awful, a rank mixture of decay and thick, resinous smoke that filled the cell and made me retch. One of its legs ground and cracked as it stumbled towards me, the broken bone jutting from its thigh pushing out in a squirt of rotten corpse-blood that spattered the floor.

I was shaking in fear, but other than that my limbs felt almost physically pinned in place. Speaking fast, I made a word-mangled mess of the aegis prayer and looked down at the circle of aqua sanctus on the ground.

Part of me hoped it would keep the creature back. Another part just wanted it to kill me quickly, to let the sweet black oblivion of death take me so I never had to see that horrific thing again.

The apparition jerked forwards. One of its surreally long toenails touched the circle of aqua sanctus as it reached for me with its curving, fragile-looking talons. A halo of white fire blazed into being above its dark black head. It did not scream, did not recoil, did not discorporate in a mist of ectoplasm. Instead it stood up to its full height, straightening and placing its hands together as if in prayer. Its flickering halo crowned its black pate, making it look like some twisted lunatic’s depiction of a martyr. Then it faded away, an illusion dispelled by the light of reason.

I came to full wakefulness in a hot flush, desperate to pee. I looked around the room, panting hard, but there was no sign of the visitation. The cell around me was empty, thank the Throne. All the shadows were straight, predictable, and in their right place. But the memory was still strong, and in the back of my throat, there was a strange aftertaste of smoke and soil, as if I’d swallowed a bunch of half-burned leaves.

I think I made a weird keening noise, then, a primal noise of pure fear. I bit the back of my thumb, rocking backwards and forwards with the covers pulled up around my neck. My bladder felt like it was going to burst, but there was no way I was getting off that bunk to use the basin in the corner of the cell. Not before dawn.

At least the thing was gone. The ordeal was over. I had experienced a warp-nightmare, I told myself, and a powerful one. But nothing more.

Then I saw little splashes of black on the floor, where the rotten corpse-blood had spattered from the thing’s leg.

I cried a little, then, my shaken self-control taken by sheer terror. You would have done the same, if you’d gone through the same ordeals. Throne, if only you could know half of the things that were going through my mind. If that thing was real enough to leave those spots of black blood, it was real enough to hurt me. To kill me. Break my limbs, snap them one by one, as soon as I let my guard down. Leave me to bleed out as I drowned in a sea of madness and pain.

I must have stared at the dark spots of blood for a full hour, sitting in a patch of my own stress-induced sweat with my bladder screaming blue murder, sobbing and rocking myself like a lunatic. My eyes were as wide as those of old Vernid; I dared not close them for a moment.

No sleep for me. Not now. Not ever again.

The false dawn came, eventually, with the lumens in the corridor glowing a little brighter to show the diurnal cycle had begun. Time to get to work, they said. Time to eat, time to train. Unless you were hiding in the brig, of course. Unless you were a fugitive.

I peeled myself off the bunk and used the corner basin as a latrine, my body sending a wave of blessed relief from the bladder upwards. Then I got dressed and walked unsteadily over to the door.

I had a thought, just as I left. I pulled out the parchment and quill nib I had boosted from Gethsame’s sanctum, and slumping down against the opposite wall, began to write.

I had perhaps one chance left, and I wasn’t going to let another night slip past without taking it.

Mid-morning, and the corridors were quiet. Those who weren’t at phys were likely at one of the hymnal services recommended during warp transit, or maybe just lying in their bunks, sleeping off the muzziness of the transit pills they’d acquired from Enoch’s black market.

I had a decent chance of getting the objectives I set myself sorted and making it back to the brig before I was discovered. There was a part of me, an inner voice, that kept telling me what I was doing was mad. Maybe it was right, given the nightmares of the nocturnal cycle. Maybe I secretly wanted to be caught, and to be put out of my misery.

Noctai make for pretty good stealthers, especially those of us that grew up on the docks. I’d left my boots back in the brig, tucked under the bunk, to give me the best chance of moving silently as I crept around the ship. Knowing how to sneak around can be the difference between making it in gang life and of having a rival ganger’s fisherspike slammed into the back of your neck when you think you’re the one being quiet as a snake.

You get sharp ears, too. Sharp enough to hear a set of booted footsteps thudding down the next corridor in time to get away, and take a different route. I’d had to do that three times in the last ten minutes, and with so many detours I had made it only about half a mile through the ship. But in my position, I had little choice.

Eventually I made it to the little vestibule that led to the officer-level corridors, and the familiar territory beyond. Thank the stars, its portal was open already. I darted my head around the doorjamb, took a quick peek, and darted back again.

Just as I feared, my quarters had two voidsmen-at-arms stationed outside. No doubt Threnard had already gone in there and had a rummage through my stuff. Probably found my Savlar uniform and all the little creature comforts I’d nabbed or had Enoch supply to me over the years.

How I longed for a hot scrub now, and a change of clothes. I smelled bad, not least of all from the night before. I was pretty confident I could take the two sentries if it came to it, but there was no way I was getting in there without raising the alarm. The scrub could wait.

Back I went towards the bowels of the ship, cursing myself for my stupidity in going back to my own quarters. I had to do better than that. I had to think, to let the old Leana come to the surface and get me out of the hellish trap that was closing around me.

It didn’t take me long to find a servo-skull, one of the highly polished, cybernetically-wired crania that were built as servitors from the remains of loyal Imperial servants. It was a weird-looking thing, buzzing its way down the corridor on some peculiar errand as if a floating skull was the most normal thing in the world. We never had them back on Noctai, or if we did, I had been too low in status to see one of the horrible things.

Held around shoulder height by primitive anti-gravitic motors, the servo-skull had one long, jointed, limb-like metal prosthesis, and an underslung syringe gun with several interchangeable cartridges. One of its hollow sockets was fitted with a telescopic optica that whirred and clicked as it focused on me. Registering the chevrons of my rank on my filthy uniform, it dipped its head in an automated gesture of respect.

That’s when I punched the horrible little thing out of the air. It rebounded from the wall, and I swivel-kicked it hard, sending it smacking into the bulkhead opposite with a loud crack. The skull gave a high-pitched whine of protest as I grabbed it in both hands, the red lumen of its telescopic eye flaring bright. Its syringe jabbed in and out with frantic swiftness, reminding me of the dunny scorpions back on Noctas that we made spasmodically sting themselves to death by trapping them in rings of flame.

The skull gave out a loud mechanical burr, and fell silent. Weirdly, its anti-grav still worked just fine; when I released it, it just hung there in the air, a morbid buoy adrift in an invisible sea.

Perfect. I took out my tiny rolled parchment, bent underneath the skull, and pushed it up through its jaw cavity into the interior part of its brain pan. I wedged the little cylinder in tight, slotted into that part of the skull that wasn’t filled with circuitry and engine gravitics.

I heard two sets of footsteps, then, coming from the other end of the corridor. I padded barefoot down the way I had come, so quiet and smooth that even the scuttleroaches I passed did little more than twitch their antennae at my passing, and ducked around the corner.

‘Hey,’ came a voice from back in the other corridor. ‘Dorghen. Look at this little floater. Pretty busted, it looks like. You think we should let one of the cog-heads know?’

‘I suppose,’ came the reply. ‘If you can distract ’em with it, I’ll see if I can move some loot.’

Hope yet, then. Hope yet.

Eight hours, it took, before I got something back. Eight hours stuck in that bastard brig with only the Ecclesiarchal Primer for company, and a belly rumbling in displeasure at how little food I’d eaten recently. I started reading the primer aloud, just to hear a human voice. I tried it in Gethsame’s bass rumble, then Threnard’s cultured tones, then Groethe’s sibilant, uncouth whine. I’d got pretty good at mimicry as a youth, and never really lost the knack for it. It kept me amused for a while. Provided I didn’t think too much about the events of the last night, I stopped myself from crawling out of my own skin with anxiety and fear.

Around lunchtime I went through the rigmarole of re-inscribing the ritual circle around my bunk, trying not to think about that hideous, haloed thing that had come for me as I did so. The aqua sanctus had worked, I think. I mean, it must have. I was still alive, and the nightmare thing had faded away when it came into contact with the circle. So it had been effective, on some level. And if Yuki came through for me, what I had in mind for tonight would probably work even better.

After the best part of the day slid past, I heard a thin whine on the cusp of hearing, slowly getting louder. A burnished skull floated into view, the sight startling me a little at first despite the fact I was half-expecting it. It had two pincered manipulator arms that awkwardly held a package wrapped in brown paper.

I got up from my bunk. The skull’s lens-eye whirred as it got a fix on my appearance, checked it against some programmed imperative, and came forwards, proferring the package. I stood up and took it, hoping the parcel had a pistol in there at the very least.

Once I had carefully disentangled the package from the servo-skull’s grip – the little monster didn’t seem that keen to part with it at first – I opened it to find it held a spare set of Savlar fatigues, two quarts of clean water in sealed flasks, and a parcel of protein slab.

‘Thanks, Yuki,’ I said.

I ditched my dirty, sweat-sodden uniform before donning the fresh clothes and downing the water in one go. The protein slab didn’t last long, either. I ate every morsel, even those bits that fell on the cold, hard floor. They tasted more of ash than they did of meat, but right then, they were delicious. I felt a bit more human, after all that. The ache in my belly had subsided a little.

I stretched out my limbs and did some phys. One of the breast pockets of my uniform crinkled a little. I felt inside, and found a parchment note in tiny, impossibly neat script.

MESSAGE BEGINS

Weapons specialist Egrond Groethe seen in sub-quart Omeg-11-4 Enginatrium – Resistant to proposed rendezvous/Signs of cerebral malfunction evident/Secondary request under consideration

MESSAGE ENDS.

‘Secondary request under consideration,’ I said, closing my eyes for a moment. Four simple words, and likely the difference between life and death. Still, I’d take it. What other choice did I have?

I tucked my copy of the primer into my belt, and headed out.

It was getting late when I finally found Groethe, the only person in the entire wargroup who could possibly understand what I was going through. More than that, he was likely the only soul who would greet me with something other than ridicule or fatal censure.

I found him in the enginarium, sitting in a dark corner wearing nothing but a loinstrap. He was gnawing on something long, red and stringy, some kind of scavenged meat by the look of it. Tattoos of snakes and spiders, each alight with stylised flame, covered his body, wrapped around his limbs and formed stylised patterns across his torso.

Along the corridor on the other side of the room, blank-eyed servitors carried metal pails of incense blocks and fuel rods to the main propulsion chambers. The witless lumps didn’t even glance in my direction, but just went about their business. Perhaps that was why Groethe had taken up residence here. Hiding in plain sight.

‘Leana Vendersen,’ said the Savlar through a mouthful of blood and bone. He wiped blood from his lips, gave a shrill giggle, then hit the side of his head with the ball of his hand. ‘It’s Leana Vendersen!’

‘Yes, it’s me,’ I said. ‘I’ve come to get us out of this.’

‘I have a plan too,’ he said. He tapped his knuckles on the promethium tank to his right, his stripped-down flamer propped up against it. ‘Burn the witch!’ He laughed again, a sound soaked in madness and despair.

‘Not sure that’s a good idea, down here,’ I said.

‘The more fire, the more chance I’ll get her. This place will go up nice as you like.’

‘And you’ll burn in the process.’

‘I’m not afraid of fire. It’ll clean me.’ His eyes glinted weirdly in the gloom. ‘It’ll burn me clean.’

‘It’ll burn you to death, Groethe,’ I said. ‘And if it catches the engines, it might kill the rest of us too.’

He shrugged and pulled a weird, frog-eyed face: what do I care?

‘There’s got to be another way,’ I said. ‘Look, I know a place where we can hide out. It’s even safer than this. There’s… I made a circle of aqua sanctus around my bunk, like a ritual circle. I think it keeps that thing at bay.’

‘Nothing keeps her at bay.’

‘Trust me. It came for me last night. And I’m here, aren’t I?’

‘Then it wasn’t the same thing.’

I reached into my fatigues, pulled out Doile’s picture, and showed it to him. He scrabbled back, his face drained of all colour.

‘Put it away,’ he said, half pleading. ‘I don’t want it.’

I folded the charcoal sketch once more, and tucked it away. Groethe seemed to rally a little.

‘She’s keeping you for last of all,’ he said. He smiled nastily, sharp little teeth still smeared with blood. ‘That’s why you’re still alive.’

I felt something tickle my spine, then. Fingers of cold terror, playing up my vertebrae and across the nape of my neck. He was right, and some part of me knew it.

‘Bullets won’t work,’ he said. ‘Blades won’t work. Even your aqua sanctus won’t work, no, mamzel, it won’t. No good against her. But fire...’ He tapped the tank again. ‘Fire is always good. Burn her back to the warp.’

I grimaced. Part of me wanted to believe him about the fire. The Adepta Sororitas used flamers as one of their holy trinity of weapons, and they dealt with the most diabolic threats in the Imperium. Maybe there was something to his claim.

‘Right, fine.’ I stretched out a hand. ‘Fight the cold grave with the fires of war. I’ll requisition a flamer, or just steal one, I don’t know. Back to back, covering each other, we can hold anything at bay.’

‘Yeah, now you’re seeing it,’ he said. ‘Fire fixes everything.’ His smile was like a split wound, and he took my hand, allowing me to help him up.

Then his eyes went wide, and his forearm broke right in front of me with a gristly crack. A shard of red-slicked bone jutted up, barely three inches from my chin. I recoiled hard, and he screamed in my face.

‘No,’ I managed. I grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled hard, flinging him behind me. ‘Get back! Run!’

He scrabbled away, then launched himself sideways, tucking his broken arm close to his chest. He scooped up his flamer, pulled its safety lever, and let fly a blast of searing promethium fire at something I couldn’t see.

Too close. I felt incendiary heat kiss my skin. The unmistakable scent of smouldering hair was horribly thick in my nostrils as I staggered backwards.

‘Burn!’ screamed Groethe, staring at thin air as he squeezed out another blast of roaring flame. ‘Burn, you bloody abomination!’

Flames licked across the walls, rippling upwards from blue to orange. The heat was unbearable. Klaxons roared from every corner of the room, servitors lumbering around with canteens of dirty water as they enacted emergency fire protocols.

I looked back at Groethe. He screamed and swept the flamer round in a searing, billowing arc. I hit the deck, the flames cascading overhead. Groethe stumbled backwards, desperate to catch the invisible apparition in his flames. Sliding backwards as best I could, I looked up to see him knocked sideways as if by a charging bullgryn. He slammed into one of the walls that was already on fire, and liquid flame spattered across his shoulder and neck. His flesh burned, bubbled and roasted, filling the hold with the scent of cooking human flesh. It wasn’t the first time I’d smelled it, and it made my gut churn with a potent mixture of hunger and revulsion.

Groethe screamed and held out his wounded arm as if to ward something off. His fingers twisted this way and that, snapping like kindling. One, two, three digits bulged and bent double on themselves, breaking with a horrible series of pops to form odd little half-spirals. The man’s screams doubled in intensity. Blood drizzled from the jutting spikes of his radius and ulna.

I shook myself, stumbling back, but I couldn’t look away. Groethe was raised from the ground by an invisible force. His left leg bent sidelong, jerking about in spasmodic motion as if in the jaws of a crocodile. Then it snapped at the thigh with a crack like a rifle retort. Two more jagged spars of bone burst through his fatigues, each ringed with bright red blood. The scent of it filtered through my resp, mingling with the smell of promethium and burning flesh to make me gag in horror and disgust.

Groethe’s other leg was forced up against his chest, as if he was kicking high. It was suddenly levered sideways to snap in the middle, the kneecap and cartilage torn apart to leave his lower leg dangling by a thin sleeve of tattooed skin. A moment later his undamaged arm, finger still tight on the flamer’s trigger, snapped like a dry branch, bone jutting out the back of his elbow to gouge a deep gash across his cheek.

Fire roared around me, the shimmering flame obscuring Groethe from view as he screamed over and over again. My feet, still bare in the name of stealth, were touched by a licking tongue of flame. I jumped back with a yelp, but I still couldn’t take my eyes off the Savlar getting broken to pieces in front of me.

I felt hot air catching in my lungs. Suddenly, the spell was broken. The enginarium was alight, flickering and orange-red like some primitive’s idea of purgatory. The stink of burning human meat was thick. If I didn’t get out of here, I would die of suffocation – or, if Groethe’s promethium cylinder caught first, be torn apart by the subsequent explosion.

I scrambled to my feet and ran back the way I had come, leaping over a pool of liquid fire before ducking under a servitor’s yoke and slamming into the wall on the other side of it. A primal fear drove me on, my bare feet pounding across the rough metal grilles of the engine deck. My soles were slowly being cut to ribbons, but I didn’t feel anything. Every fibre of my being was screaming at me to get away.

Groethe’s screams still rang loud behind me as he burned alive, too broken and splintered to escape the flames of his own making.

I made it all the way back to my outsize brig without being seen. I suppose the rank and file were busy obeying their fire-in-transit protocols. Given the fact the klaxons had ceased, the servitors had likely been reinforced by their tech-priest masters, and together they had got the blaze under control.

With my feet in such a state, it’s almost certain I left bloody footprints leading back to the brig. By this point, I was numb to the idea of the voidsmen coming for me. I could use the company. After the last few encounters, death by beating seemed preferable to what was waiting for me.

But I was too stubborn to truly give up. I always have been. It’s how I rose through the ranks, even if I’d had to climb over the bodies of people I’d betrayed to get there.

When the thump of marching feet came from the end of the corridor, rhythmic and methodical, my heart leapt with fierce elation. Too slow and heavy to be voidsmen.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. You’re going to see what you get, now. See what you get.’

‘Are you addressing me, Field Commander First Class Leana Vendersen?’

‘Yuki! It is you, thank the God-Emperor.’ I ventured out of my cell, emboldened. There she was, my petite enginseer friend in her deep red tech-priest regalia. She was flanked by four heavy servitors. Their left arms had been surgically removed, replaced with giant, boxy heavy bolters. Together they had enough firepower to slaughter a herd of stampeding grox.

‘You brought them!’

‘Only on the understanding I will be able to record clear vid-capture of a Class Alpha warp-gheist within the next sixteen hours.’

‘Oh, you’ll get your footage,’ I said. ‘Station one servitor at each of the cardinal points of this circle, please.’

She didn’t ask why. She just got right to it. Throne above, how I love that woman.

The gun-servitors lumbered into place, guided by Yuki’s electronic imperatives. Their slack-jawed expressions reminded me of comatose shell-shock victims, but their bionic eyes were in constant motion, whirring and recalibrating as they covered a quadrant of the cell each. Yuki fussed and tinkered with their exact orientation, chanting hymns of electrocompliance as she made final adjustments.

‘All quadrants covered with a three point five per cent overlap,’ she said. ‘A precaution, in case of turbulence.’

‘And the ammunition?’ I asked, climbing onto the cot and folding my legs under me. ‘Do you have it?’

‘I do,’ she said. She opened a cavernous pocket of her hessian robes, took out an ammo case, and carefully placed two dozen bolt-shells on the end of the cot. Each was the thickness of my forearm, a small artillery projectile inscribed with tiny letters. I picked one up. The text had been fastidiously inscribed by Yuki’s dextrous fingers – SANCTUS IMPERIALIS DOMINATUS. The enginseer made a clicking burr of disapproval, and I put it back down. She moved it ever so slightly to the left, and went back to her work.

As she placed the bolt-shells, I took out my aspergillum and transferred some aqua sanctus to the tip of each. The fluid ran down in little streams to fill the words of faith that Yuki had inscribed in them.

‘I saw this done on Herodd once,’ I said. ‘At the time, I thought it was ridiculous. Now, I’m not so sure.’

‘Rituals must be observed,’ said Yuki, as if to a simpleton. ‘Or else how will the machine-spirits be appeased?’

‘How indeed,’ I said.

I had never really understood the Priesthood of Mars. Their cold, dead-eyed servitors had always creeped me out, with their unthinking obedience and slack, pale flesh. But so long as the tech-priests kept the wider war machine in good working order, so long as their adherence to their odd cult gave us reliable firepower, none of us Noctai really cared how they did it.

‘These things can see in several different spectrums, right? Their eyes look a lot like yours.’

‘They have been retrofitted to perceive infrared and electromagnetic spectrums, as well as autopsychic disturbances, provided their neural link is not severed. It is an extrapolation of my own augmentary bioware.’

I nodded sagely as if I understood every word.

‘I would remind you of the importance that this fact remains off record,’ said Yuki. ‘Such advanced bionics are not standard issue for one of enginseer rank, let alone their servitors.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I only mention it because she… because the warp entity might not be perceivable on the standard wavelengths. You’ll have to scan through the filters until you get a bead.’

‘Oh, I will not be present during the investigation.’

‘You won’t?’

‘No, field commander. I do not wish to be the subject of a mind wipe in the event of a full-scale empyrric phenomenon. It would adversely affect my chances of progress in the Machine Cult.’

‘Mind wipe. Great.’

‘In the extremely unlikely event you survive a warp manifestation, and are thence modified into a servitor, I will do my best to ensure you are regularly oiled.’

I nodded, feeling a little like my heart had just fallen into my lap.

‘Right. Thanks, Yuki.’

‘Units Gamma-Ferenth, Beta-Nonagon, Mu-Zenda-Threnn, and Octoss-VII-Endi will keep you company.’ She loaded the aqua-blessed shells into the servitors’ heavy bolter breaches one by one. ‘I have keyed them to your vocal patterns over the course of our exchanges over the last twelve point two minutes, and given you authority to target, but not to redeploy. I have no doubt they will make for lively conversationalists. They may even sing to you as an accomplished quartet. End falsehood.’

There she was, my old friend behind that hypersteel façade. No one can deadpan a joke like a tech-priest.

‘Thank you for all this, Yuki. I can’t tell you how much this means to me.’

‘All knowledge is power,’ she said. ‘If I can add significant data on the warp crisis to my order’s records, the contribution will not go unnoticed.’

She fixed me with her green eye, the one that was still recognisably human, and walked over to me.

‘Besides, I like you.’

She took out a folded environment suit from beneath her heavy robes, put it on the bunk, and motioned for me to hold out my hands. I followed suit, and she carefully placed a pair of synthwax muffler plugs into my cupped palms. They were the type used by the enginseers in weapons testing facilities. She put the folded staff pict I had requested on top, and placed a sealed flask of liquid on the bunk.

Then she made the sign of the holy cog, turned, and left without another word.

Another two hours crawled past. I’d unscrewed the top of the flask Yuki had given me, hoping for more water, and found something better – sweet-smelling Noctai liquor. If I made it through the night and somehow rode all this out, I would pay her back three times over.

The sheer unnatural bulk of the combat servitors was daunting after so long alone in the cell. They made me feel on edge, especially whenever I looked closely at the inflamed and puckered flesh around their bionic enhancements. I was very glad they were facing outwards, to be honest, because meeting their gaze would have made me feel distinctly uneasy. What a fate, to become one of those things, permanently in thrall to the Adeptus Mechanicus that made you that way. It helped me to think of them as weapons, as my weapons at that.

After a while, I got used to them. The weighty muscularity of the servitors and the smell of freshly-oiled guns at least gave some sense of security. Anything that came for me would be met by a thunderous bombardment of explosive, mass-reactive rounds, each still wet with aqua sanctus. I knew there was a chance the combination of holy blessing and battle-grade firepower might not work against that Emperor-damned apparition, in the final reckoning. But at this point, it was the best I could hope for.

I donned the hostile environment suit that Yuki had left me, wondering what reason she had for leaving it to me until I realised it was sewn with flak weave over the torso. It was likely provided to protect against the shrapnel of my own firepower rather than to shield me against anything else.

I gathered the blankets around me, more as a ritual than anything else, and waited. The scratches on my calf and shoulder felt fever-hot. I spread a little aqua sanctus on them, and the feeling subsided.

It wasn’t that long before I heard sounds in the corridor. Tap, tap, tap, scratch. Tap, tap, tap, scratch.

I put them out of my mind, focusing on the verses of the Ecclesiarchal Primer that seemed best for an impromptu exorcism. They didn’t recede for long, though. Just enough to make me feel they had stopped altogether – and then they would start again. It was driving me slowly towards the edge, towards the brink of doing something stupid.

‘Come out, then!’ I shouted. ‘Come out and we’ll see how clever you are!’

I listened again. This time I heard the sound of footsteps. Lots of them, and moving fast. With a sense of sudden fear I recognised the heavy boots of voidsmen, punctuated by the click of dress uniform heels.

‘Stand down,’ I said quietly. My cyborg guardians slumped, pointing their heavy bolters diagonally downwards with a whirr of servomotors. I sat bolt upright on my cot, held my copy of the Ecclesiarchal Primer high, and began to read as if I had not a care in the stars.

One of the voidsmen came round the side of the cell. I cast him a glance. He was a starch-uniformed busybody with a white moustache and a brass-chased lasgun that he was pointing right at me.

‘Found her, adjutant prime,’ he said, his impeccable accent the clipped syllables of a Navy soul born and bred. Another two voidsmen came up behind him, one a tall male with infra-goggles, the other a female with a shaved head and a hairlip.

‘And what in Throne’s name are these?’ he asked.

‘Gun-servitors, Voidsman Xandt,’ I said. He looked taken aback that I knew his name, but it was right there on his fancy gold-braided epaulette. ‘They are on loan from the tech-priests, and until this judiciary disaster is concluded to my satisfaction, they will remain that way.’

My tone, combined with the sight of four heavy combat servitors, took the bluster out of Xandt’s sails. He looked sidelong at someone down the corridor, then moved along the front of the cell, his fellow voidsmen going with him.

Threnard took his place a moment later, his uniform impeccable but for two thin crescents of darkness under his arms. He too was carrying an ornate lasgun. He lowered it just a little when he saw that my servitors were currently inactive, and that I had nothing more dangerous in my hands than a water flask and a book.

‘Resourceful as ever, Field Commander Vendersen,’ he said.

‘Don’t call her that!’ came a bombastic roar from down the corridor. It was a voice full of that predatory joy that certain men take in giving vent to their anger. I knew it only too well.

Bhulvadt came around the corner, his puffy, balding head flushed from chin to scalp. ‘She’s no part of the Astra Militarum, Threnard. Not any longer.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ I replied. ‘I think I have til falsedawn at least.’

‘You will be court-martialled before the night is over,’ said Bhulvadt, eyes wide in that huffing, breathless slab of a face. ‘I will devise a fitting punishment for your murder of Thorne and those Savlar men, you can be sure of that.’

I yawned. ‘Perhaps a bit less time contemplating punishments and a bit more time in phys might do you good,’ I said. ‘I haven’t murdered anyone, save for perhaps a few hundred enemies of the Imperium. Still, I’m sure you found more than enough evidence to satisfy your bloodlust.’

‘The footprints that led here from the enginarium would have been damning enough on their own,’ said Threnard. ‘But I have a dossier ready in case more is needed.’

‘Private Groethe’s dead, and we know you did it,’ said Bhulvadt. ‘Same modus as Thorne, Vernid and Yakobsen, eh? Stronger than you look, you heretic scum.’

‘What on Terra are you talking about?’

‘You were seen near the equestrium on the night of Yakobsen’s death,’ said Threnard, ‘and near Doile’s berth on the morning of his suicide.’

‘He knew what you were going to do to him,’ said Bhulvadt. ‘Took the coward’s path rather than let you torture him.’

‘Utter nonsense. He was spooked. Warp-touched, perhaps. I had nothing to do with it.’

‘Several cook-hands placed you in the kitchens immediately before the galley massacre,’ said Threnard, ploughing on regardless. ‘Enoch Whitemane said your alibi was a complete fabrication.’

‘The little bastard’s still alive?’

‘Yes, despite your best efforts,’ said Bhulvadt. ‘Not quite as adept at navigating the Liar’s Maze as you thought, are you?’

Oh, for the love of Holy Terra. I really hoped this wasn’t about me beating him at Hexagrammon that time. Surely even Bhulvadt wasn’t that monstrous an egomaniac.

‘And what are these for?’ asked Threnard, waving a long finger at the servitors. He looked wary, but impressed, like a man eyeing a pack of prize attack canids. ‘They look to me like unsanctioned use of Mechanicus resources. I am sure Enginseer Beta-Dara’s superiors will be very interested to hear of this.’

‘These are my new friends. I am expecting a visitor later tonight.’

Threnard made an exaggerated expression of confusion. ‘Later tonight? I don’t think you understand. You are coming with us.’

‘No, I really don’t think I am. Target close.’

The servitors lurched to life, dead-eyed stares and slack jaws turning to face Bhulvadt and his posse. Their heavy bolters made a deep clungg-chakk noise in perfect unison.

I grinned, then, despite myself. I could feel the mania behind my eyes, but I didn’t care.

‘You must come with us, Leana,’ sighed Threnard. ‘Cease all this posturing, or it will go worse for you.’ He motioned to the voidsman with the scalp-cut, and she stepped forwards, plasteel manacles held in either hand.

‘May I finish my chapter first?’ I held up the Ecclesiarchal Primer. ‘“Blessed is he that meditates upon the word of the Holy Texts.” Funny how it’s always “he,” don’t you think?’

Bhulvadt bared his teeth in something that he probably imagined was a snarl of triumph. ‘If you think you can wriggle out of what’s coming to you with a paper-thin conversion to the Imperial faith, you are sorely mistaken. When we get to the next warzone, you will be formally executed. In the meantime, you will be bound in chains, and publicly flogged every dusk and falsedawn. I will ensure it is I who wields the whip.’

‘Over the last few days,’ I said, sipping the sweet Noctai liquor Yuki had left for me, ‘I have seen things that make you seem not intimidating, but ridiculous. You are an angry little boy playing at being a military man, all dressed up in his famous father’s uniform. It doesn’t fit you nearly as well as you think.’

‘That’s enough!’ roared Bhulvadt. ‘Arrest her immediately!’

The three voidsmen started forwards, then hesitated as the servitors’ heavy bolters took direct beads on their chests. I pushed Yuki’s earplugs home, one after another.

‘For Throne’s sake!’ Bhulvadt grabbed Threnard’s ornate lasgun, ripped it from his grip and pointed it at me, tucking it against his shoulder as he walked forwards.

‘Fire,’ I said.

Then the world erupted into thunder and death.

A few seconds later, I was the only person left alive in the Guidance’s brig.

Well, not strictly true, but I don’t really count the servitors in that. Those poor bastards aren’t alive in any sense that matters, no more than a servo-skull or an antique bolter is alive. But I tell you what, they work just fine.

Everyone in Bhulvadt’s arrest group had been blown to pieces in a matter of four short seconds. I’m not the squeamish type, but I could only glance at the chamber outside the brig for short periods at a time. It looked like a demolition charge had gone off in an abattoir. Ribcages and opened guts had spilled dark tangles of meat. Disembodied heads and severed hands were strewn like litter amongst lakes of blood and slews of shiny red organs. Flaps of skin mingled with gore-slicked cloth, in places all but indistinguishable. Here and there were the hard edges of lasguns or pieces of field equipment, but the rest was organic ruin. It stank to high heaven.

Throne, but they’re right when they say that heavy bolters can make a real mess. My ears were still ringing, even with my Mechanicus-grade plugs. The voidsmen hadn’t really had a chance. They’d got off a few good shots; two of the servitors had stinking red holes in their torsos, and one of the others had taken a hit in the thigh. But not one of them had moved, or so much as groaned, come to that. They’d just got on with the job, thudding out explosive shells in a pitiless, murderous firestorm until nothing in their arc of fire was moving. Then they had wordlessly resumed their original positions, and gone back to their silent vigil.

Other than raising my Ecclesiarchal Primer to shield my face from shrapnel, I hadn’t moved throughout. Bits of bone and meat had spattered across me when one of the voidsmen got close, but the hazard suit kept the organic shrapnel from doing anything other than stinging a little. I was unscathed, in body at least. The smell of the carnage was getting to me, so I took the plugs out from my ears and delicately inserted them into my nostrils instead. Much better.

Not quite what Yuki had in mind, I don’t think, when she lent me her cyborg friends, but by this point I was numb to the horrors of the last few days. In fact, if anything, I felt a sense of fierce elation. I could feel it bubbling up inside me, threatening to burst out as a giddy laugh that would never end.

Then I noticed the corpse of one of the voidsmen, the scalp-cut girl, had its eyes looking roughly in my direction. They were wide open, as if in profound surprise. I saw myself in her, and it sobered me.

Oh, a pox on it all. It was them or me.

I turned my back on that grisly tableau, forced myself to focus on my prayer book, and waited for the real threat to come home.

It was some time later when Marisel Thorne’s ghost came for me.

After another painstaking iteration of my aqua sanctus ritual, I’d climbed back on the cot, and muttered the Litany of the Lost a few times just for good measure. I was so exhausted by the events of the last few days I worried I was going to fall asleep, but my nerves were so shredded I felt more awake than I’d ever been before. No way was I going to nod off, only to wake up with that thing looming over me like a deathwitch over a newborn’s cot.

I unfolded the staff pict Yuki had given me along with the earplugs. The official pict of Marisel Thorne, the one that they had used at her burial. In that grainy image she was standing as tall as she could, given her slight frame. Her uniform was impeccable, and there was a trace of idealism in the set of her jaw. She seemed so young in that depiction. It made me feel bad to look at it, a queasy feeling right in my stomach. My scratches were itching again, so I dabbed a little more aqua sanctus on them, and fought to control my breathing. Only a few drops left.

The minutes stretched into hours. I could feel the stress sweat all over my back, and soaking my armpits. The environment suit was unbearably stifling, and I had to lose the collar as well as the gloves to stop myself from being cooked in it.

After a while, I got out the charcoal picture I’d moved from Doile’s berth and compared it against the photocell. I forced myself to look at the drawing, to get used to the sight of it. Emperor knew the image was burned into my mind already.

Putting aside the horribly broken limbs, the sketch was a good fit for the official pict. Doily had real talent. He’d even got the curve of those horribly long, dirt-yellowed fingernails right in his drawing – I recalled the image of one of those talons slithering out of my chest and coming towards my lips with startling vividness. I was reminded of cadaver class in medicae training, and being a little freaked out by the fact that even when a person is dead, their nails and hair keep growing, getting longer and longer inside their coffin until they curl back on themselves.

It was her, alright, in the drawing. Marisel Thorne. And with Groethe burned alive, she was coming for me.

I must have run through every possible scenario in my head a hundred times over. A lot of them involved more voidsmen making their way down into the brig, finding the crimson ruin spread across the corridor opposite, then yanking me away to something they thought of as a safe place, thereby dooming me in the process. Some of the waking dreams had Yuki arriving at gunpoint, her vox imperative powering down the combat servitors so that I was matched against half a dozen well-armed killers with nothing but a heavy book.

They were the best case scenarios, really. Some ended with the corpses of the voidsmen coming to life, blank-eyed and hateful. In one vivid imagining, Threnard and Bhulvadt somehow stitched themselves together, stumbling forwards like a terrifying patchwork golem to tear me limb from limb.

The worst of them started with her, coming out from the shadows on the wall of the cell, then walking right through my defences. Sometimes she rose right up from the shadow of the bed itself, her matted and earth-soiled scalp cresting the edge of the cot, then rising to reveal the mouldering features beneath. Some of them ended with her breaking me into a dozen pieces before sending my soul screaming into the warp. In one scenario, she opened a maw of jagged teeth and began to eat.

The one scenario I’d neglected to factor in – well, that was the one that happened.

Halfway through the night, I was lying on my side, trying to conjure images of golden sands and found objects purely to give my fevered mind a break from the horrors running through it. I heard her coming, then, or I thought I did.

Tap, tap, tap, scriiitch.

I sat bolt upright, peering hard at each of the walls in turn. There were shadows there, but none of them were moving. The servitors were still in sentry mode, but not one of them had so much as twitched.

The noise came again, this time from behind me. Tap, tap, tap, scriiitch.

Expecting to feel corpse-nails scraping the back of my neck, I turned suddenly, but there was nothing there.

Tap, tap, tap, scriiitch.

Not the sound of fingernails down splintered driftwood. More like one set of toenails clicking on the stone floor, then others dragging behind. A ghost on broken limbs.

‘Leaaana…’

I clutched my Ecclesiarchal Primer so hard it buckled in my hands and I stared every which way, but I couldn’t see a damn thing to direct my firepower at. The shadows were all straight and unmoving, and my circle of aqua sanctus was intact.

Then, on some nameless instinct, I looked up.

She was coming through the ceiling. Lank black hair stretched down around the face of a half-rotten corpse. The creature emerged with horrible slowness from an oil-black slick of shadow, transfixing me with a paralysis of pure dread. I saw a wrinkled white forehead, then sunken, milky eyes, bloodshot at the edges and dotted with tiny hollow pupils that stared their black hatred into my soul. She had a ghoul’s mouth, teeth so broken and wrong that some of them pierced her parchment-dry lips.

Long, white arms dangled towards me. Each jerky motion was more sickening than the last as the broken limbs bent awkwardly back and forth, cracking and grinding in ways that should never have been possible. Rotten black blood spattered on my face and hands, a trickle of droplets leaking from each of her shattered bone spurs.

I gabbled meaninglessly, stricken with terror as ten preposterously long fingernails came down as if to cup my face. One shattered leg jerked from the shadow on the ceiling as she crawled out of nothingness, the skin of her bare thigh liver-spotted and sallow.

‘Fire!’ I choked out. ‘Fire close!’

The gun-servitors, oblivious, continued to stare at their prospective walls. Bereft of targets, they did nothing.

Then she peeled herself out from the folding shadows of the ceiling like some hideous insect emerging from a chrysalis, and dropped down to fall across me.

I saw her rotting face inches from mine, heard a soil-choked gurgle as her corpse-weight pressed down. Those dirt-encrusted fingernails slashed through my hazard suit – though they looked fragile, they were as strong as titanium knives – and dug hard into my flesh. I tried to scream, but nothing came out.

I convulsed, frothing at the mouth with raw panic. She raked my ribs and slashed the muscles of my arms and shoulders to ribbons. Skin like milk-white parchment buckled over a framework of broken bone as she reached right back, splintered arms rotating unnaturally, and ran her claws down the length of my legs.

Lines of fire burned everywhere across my body. The pain was becoming indescribable, as if fissures filled with fire and acid were opening all over me. I still couldn’t move. She was cutting faster and faster now, thrashing almost, making the horrible rasping noise of a corpse exhaling the last of the air in its lungs. She turned again, and her lank wet hair slapped at the sides of my face. Her fingernails gouged and raked at the sides of my neck, her dead eyes locked onto mine all the while. I saw nothing there but hate and madness.

The pain reached a wracking crescendo. Those glinting black pupils expanded to fill my entire world, and I was gone.

I woke at falsedawn with a lurch, staggering from my cot and rebounding from the broad back of one of the combat servitors. It pivoted, trying to turn its heavy bolter on me.

‘No!’ I said, holding out my hands. ‘Stand down. Stand down!’

The servitor made a stricken, whirring noise, and turned back to the wall.

‘Oh Terra,’ I panted. ‘Oh Holy Throne above. God-Emperor. Thank you for sparing me.’ I clutched at my heart, feeling like I was on the brink of just dying of shock then and there as the events of the last twenty-four hours raced through my mind.

I checked my body for the long, deep nail marks I was convinced had torn me to ribbons from head to toe. Thank all that is holy, I found no more than the ones on my calf and shoulder. Even they had faded.

Still intact. Still alive, despite the terrors of the night. It was more than I could say for the people that really had visited me.

I looked over at the horrible, stinking morass of corpse-remnants across the way, and felt my gorge rise. Already bilge-flies were beginning to gather. I needed a plan, and fast.

I paced up and down, desperate for a piss, but not wanting to use the basin to relieve myself in front of the servitors. The idea of those dead eyes watching gormlessly gave me the shivers, even after all that had happened. Not sure anyone smaller than Rojo Krodden could have used the plus-sized refuse bowl in the corner of the outsize cell without falling in, either.

And there it was. A plan, or the beginnings of one, unfolded in my mind.

‘Found you, you little shit.’

Enoch Whitemane was outside the phys hall, writing something on a tiny parchment he had pinned up against a wall. As he turned, I pointed my lasgun – well, Threnard’s lasgun – right at his smug, mutton-chop-wearing face. I’d taken the liberty of attaching the bayonet.

‘Field Commander Vendersen, good evening. I wondered when I would see you again.’ The little swine didn’t miss a beat, nor flinch from the two-foot length of steel with its tip hovering between his eyes. ‘I see you’ve adopted my habit of going barefoot.’

‘I have for now,’ I said. ‘Been moving about this ship, slow and quiet. Like a gheist, you might say.’

He shuddered, just a little. It was enough.

‘You didn’t stick around for long when your Savlar pals got theirs, back in the galley.’

‘I’m a ratling,’ he said, his stubby arms spread wide. ‘We know when to run.’

‘How went the clean up?’

‘Profitable enough. I had many a compliment on my meatbread.’ He smiled nastily, seeing if I would take the bait.

‘Surprised you got that fat oaf Krodden into the machine without breaking it.’

He shrugged. It was a small tell, but nonetheless the one I wanted to see.

‘Unless his body is still in your meat locker, of course. Shame to waste all those expensive bionics, right?’

‘Something like that,’ he said.

We stared at each other for a long moment.

‘They say you’ve acquired quite a taste for mutilating Savlar bodies yourself,’ said Enoch.

‘You’ll be surprised to hear it was Krodden all along,’ I said.

He frowned. ‘Care to elaborate?’

‘Can all this really be laid at my door? Do I look like the sort of person that could snap a man’s limbs like they were twigs? Not even I could down six of Savlar’s dirtiest fighters in the dark.’

Enoch inclined his head, pushing the tip of the bayonet to one side. ‘You’d be surprised what people will believe. And even the biggest lies, often enough repeated…’

‘It still smells like a smokescreen,’ I interrupted, bringing the bayonet back to hover between his eyes. ‘And I have a far more believable lie ready to go.’

‘This Krodden angle,’ he said. ‘Won’t it all be a little irrelevant when Bhulvadt catches up with you?’

‘Bhulvadt and Threnard are dead,’ I said.

‘What? No.’

‘Oh yes. As are the three voidsmen they had with them as military arbitrators. If you want to make use of them, you’ll need a shovel and a bucket.’

The ship shuddered slightly, and at the end of the corridor, klaxons sounded. The Guidance was only three hours from warp translation.

I had to try hard not to leap into the air with joy.

‘Damnation,’ said Enoch. ‘That changes things.’

‘Afraid so.’

He whistled, long and low. ‘And makes you the ranking officer.’

‘Yes indeed.’ I smiled thinly. ‘You work for me now, Enoch. And you can start by spreading the unvarnished truth that we’re about to make up.’

‘Roger that, field commander,’ he said, wiping his hands on his hips. ‘No problems with that at all.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now listen carefully. You and I have work to do.’

It took a lot of effort and the impromptu hijack of a mag-hauler trolley, but Whitemane and I got Krodden’s body from the galley meat locker and down into the outsize brig without being seen. With most of the crew holed up in their berths ready for the warp translation, there weren’t that many prying eyes to avoid.

We swung by the armourium and picked up a couple of heavy bolters, too, the better to give Krodden a weapon that could have killed Bhulvadt and his party once Yuki had withdrawn her servitors from the scene. By the time the translation was over and we were all officially allowed back out of our berths, the big Savlar would have thawed out well enough, and his cadaver was still in pretty good shape.

The ratling cook’s deep freeze had stopped Krodden’s body from rotting since the night of the massacre. When we reached the brig I put a hole in his chest with one of the voidsmen’s lasguns, and arranged the heavy bolters strung on their bulky straps around his neck. The whole charade wouldn’t fool a determined investigator, but with Threnard gone, I doubt anyone cared enough to challenge the narrative we were putting in place. He looked a lot more like a mass murderer than I did, after all.

Navy steersmen always leave an hour or so leeway during a major warp translation, so Whitemane and I got back to our bunks in time. We rode out the transition over the next five hours. I’m just glad it happened during the day cycle. Aside from a few splitting migraines, it all went smoothly.

After that, we were pretty much set. Whitemane and I concocted a lurid tale around Krodden being a serial murderer. Emperor knows he was monstrous enough to play the part. When pict-captures of the carnage in the brig were circulated on the black market, everyone was so distracted by the visceral thrill of it that no one challenged our story.

I ensured the official line was that Krodden was the one who maimed and killed the Two-Seventies as revenge for them having failed him in Oong Tem City. It was him that blew away High Patriarch Bhulvadt and his brave detail of enforcers after Macaval Threnard tracked him down. The giant Savlar died in the fight down in the brig, but he took a horrible toll on the detail sent to apprehend him. Yuki doctored a screed-list from a servo-skull as corroboration, maintaining that it had witnessed the whole thing.

With Yuki to shore up the logistical details of our story, myself to amend and authorise the official write-up, and Whitemane to spread the scuttle across every stratum of the wargroup, we had our unvarnished truth in place before another day had slid past. I took a bit of liberty with the details in the official report. In the titanic battle of the brig, the heroic voidsmen took Krodden down, dying to a soul in the process. Adjutant Prime Threnard fought well, but Leonid Bhulvadt hid at the back the whole time, screaming in fear. He died with his pistol still holstered. I was pretty proud of that last detail; amongst the Tem Wargroup, to play the coward has been known ever since as ‘playing Bhulvadt’. I thought it a fitting legacy for a man more interested in fighting his own staff than opposing the true enemies of mankind.

The story spread like a pox-cough in a playhouse. It was whispered at first, but before long it was told freely, then turned into crude songs by bored rank-and-filers in every regiment. I find myself whistling the catchiest versions now and again. The Bonebreaker is dead, long live the Queen.

I still struggled with getting any proper rest. Enoch had given me some premium sleepers, back when it was time to ride out the translation, but I’d turned to hypercaff stimms instead. He’s kept me in a regular supply of them ever since. I still haven’t slept properly for months, despite the fact we’re well out of the warp. Despite the fact that since translation, she has been relegated to a set of awful, mind-scarring memories.

Sometimes I think the sleep deprivation is costing me dearly in the long term, and that I’m going slowly mad. Still, I’m holding down the command just fine. There’s not one of these bastards that holds a candle to me in the Liar’s Maze. With me covering dead centre, and Whitemane and Yuki supporting me on the fringes, we pretty much have this wargroup sown up.

I made planetfall at Silence less than a week ago. I still have Gethsame’s Ecclesiarchal Primer, more dog-eared and well thumbed than ever before, and I know some of its lessons by rote. So I’ll put on a good show, playing the devout heroine leading the flock in their faithful duty just in time for the next big push. Put some flowers on a few graves, say a few words. And when I finally get my formal inception as high matriarch, I’ll swear as many oaths to the Emperor as they want me to.

Who knows, this time I might even mean them.

‘And that’s it,’ Vendersen said. She rubbed her arms. ‘That’s my story.’

Marrikus coughed. ‘I see why you hesitated.’

‘And you called me mad,’ Valemar said nastily.

Vendersen whirled. ‘I’ll do more than that, Valemar.’

‘Commissar,’ he corrected. He took a step towards her, but Marrikus interposed himself.

‘Quiet, please, both of you,’ the missionary said softly.

Valemar looked at him, startled. Were the little man’s eyes blue? For a moment they’d seemed to flash. He shook his head. Marrikus was still talking.

‘We have an audience. It would be wise to show some decorum.’

Valemar turned and spotted the swaying shape of a mortuary-servitor stalking among the biers. Was it his imagination, or was it circling them? Its death-mask turned towards him, red eyes gleaming, and his head felt as if it were about to burst. The ache was growing worse. He rubbed his brow, and felt something wet. Condensation, perhaps. He looked at his fingers and thought, for a moment, that they were red.

He blinked, and saw that he had been mistaken. The others were watching him, and he wondered if they had seen anything. ‘What?’ he growled.

‘Nothing,’ Marrikus said hastily. He tugged at his robes and scratched, as if he were uncomfortable in them. Again, Valemar had the feeling that something was moving beneath the missionary’s garments. And he could almost hear… voices? He shook his head, trying to clear it. It was just a trick of the pain, making him hear and see things.

‘Well,’ Vendersen said. ‘We’ve both told our stories. It’s your turn, priest.’

‘Is it?’ Marrikus shuddered slightly, as if in pain. ‘Very well. Though I’m not seeing much commonality so far.’ He looked at Valemar, almost pleadingly. ‘What about you, commissar? Do you see any connections?’

Valemar shifted his weight, suddenly uncomfortable. ‘No. Not yet.’

‘Maybe this was – not a good idea, then. Maybe… maybe we should try and leave.’ Marrikus looked around. Unable to help himself, Valemar did so as well. The mortuary-servitors were watching them again. And they were closer this time. Only a few biers away. How had they got so close, without being noticed? His head ached so badly. Maybe that was why he’d missed them.

‘I tried to leave earlier,’ Marrikus said. ‘Did I say that?’

‘You did,’ Vendersen said.

‘They wouldn’t let me. Why won’t they let us leave?’ His voice had as much curiosity in it as fear. ‘They shouldn’t – they shouldn’t care about us at all.’

‘But they do,’ Valemar said.

Marrikus looked at him. ‘For a moment, I thought you were bleeding.’ He tapped a point between his eyes. He looked at Vendersen. ‘And you…’

‘What about me?’ she demanded.

Marrikus shook his head. ‘It’s my turn, isn’t it? That’s what you said. Yes.’ He swallowed. ‘Time to tell my story…’

I wonder what you would have done. If you had seen what I saw, if you had learned what I did, would you have taken a different path? Would you have done any better? I don’t think so. I don’t say that out of pride. I am not seeking heroic stature for myself, and I am not trying to diminish you. I simply think this is the truth. I did what I had to do.

What is the hardest choice you have ever faced? If you have to think about that, then you haven’t faced it yet. The hardest choice will mark you forever. Its shadow will fall over all the days that follow. You will barely recognise who you were before the choice. That is how important the decision is. Every fork in the path that you came to before will seem childishly simple in retrospect. You will wonder why you even hesitated before those other choices. There was only this one that truly mattered.

Until you are faced with such a dilemma, though, you may think you have already encountered the hardest decision. I know I did. When I arrived at the Ligurian, I thought I was in the middle of wrestling with the choice that would define my life. Or, to be more honest, the choice that would blight my life. I could see no good way forwards. And that lack of a good option is one of the defining characteristics of the hardest choice. It is not the sole characteristic, though. The stakes must be high too. I thought they were. I thought they were the highest they could be.

I was wrong. I was naïve. But I will not condemn myself. We are, all of us, naïve until that moment comes. You are, if you haven’t faced your choice, and I don’t mean that as an insult. That’s why I don’t condemn my earlier self for being wrong. There was no way I could have known what was coming.

My name is Oswick Marrikus. You won’t have heard of me. You might have heard of my family, though, if you are from the Meror subsector. Our lineage has had more than its fair share of cardinals. I am not one of them, and there was no chance I ever would be. But I was my parents’ first-born son, and that meant I was destined for the Ecclesiarchy. Questions of temperament, ability and depth of faith were irrelevant. The first-born Marrikus sons entered the Adeptus Ministorum because all of their predecessors had, and all of their successors would. In fairness, it does seem that there is a predisposition for the religious life in our blood. Some of the most devout ecclesiarchs of the subsector are Marrikus men. So are some of the richest and most powerful.

I wasn’t going to be any of those. I knew that from an early age. As soon as I was old enough to understand what I must become, I also knew I was not suited to the life. My hope, which I clutched tightly until the moment it evaporated before reality, was to be appointed deacon. I was not ambitious. A quiet position, deep in the administrative thickets of the Ecclesiarchy, providing a quiet, predictable, stable existence on a hive world, would have suited me well. Instead, my superiors, in their wisdom, declared that I should be a missionary and sent me to the Tromos system.

There was war on Tromos Prime. It was my duty to inspire the men and women of the Tromos Watch as they put down the insurrection on the planet’s southernmost continent. It took a year to bring the fighting to a close. I don’t know how the war started. I don’t know why the rebels rose up against the Emperor’s rule. I do know that they had to be destroyed. I do know that any break from the Imperial Creed must be met with merciless force. I know all this.

Even so, the things I saw during that year… I was lucky, in that I avoided the worst of the combat, but I did see its aftermath. When I saw the muddy fields and ruined cities, and the thousands of bodies from both sides of the conflict strewn across the landscape like spoiled meat, it was hard to imagine that any of this was leading to something worthwhile.

Still, I did not face a difficult choice yet. That would have been unlikely. I was not invested in war itself beyond staying alive.

Don’t misunderstand me. My duty was to inspire the troops to kill and die for the Emperor, and I did my duty. I even did it well, and that isn’t boasting, either. I have a gift for writing inspiring sermons. This is not something I am proud of. Did I just call it a gift? I think I should have said burden. Please imagine what it is like to see others inspired by the words that feel rote to you. I set them on fire with faith. I wished I could do the same for myself.

But the war did end, and my mission in the Tromos system did not. I travelled Tromos Prime and the other inhabited regions of the system, reinforcing the Imperial Creed. One of the consequences of my travels made the year the happiest of my adult life. That same consequence made the prospect of leaving Tromos unbearable.

It was inevitable that I would someday have to leave. I was a missionary. It was my lot to move from system to system, from conflict to conflict. That year in Tromos after the war created an illusion of stability. I knew it would not last forever, but I allowed myself to feel as if it would. So when I received my orders to leave, the pain I felt was, I thought, beyond bearing.

And so I came to the ship-breaking station Ligurian one more time, convinced that I was facing the hardest choice of my life, and desperate to find a way forward that did not mean the forsaking of all happiness.

I arrived on the Steadfast, a medium-sized mass conveyer that was doing its regular tour of the outer system. And by regular, I mean yearly. It did its run of the asteroid belt, bringing supplies to the mining, prison and ship-breaking stations that dotted that region of the planetoids, before heading for the Tromos Mandeville point and wider trade with the galaxy.

I imagine you have never been to a ship-breaker. Few have. They are hard, lonely outposts, isolated from any other point of civilisation in a system. This is by design and necessity. The work of these facilities is extremely dangerous, and not just to their personnel. The vessels they work with are, naturally, beyond repair, and are therefore unstable death traps. There is always the chance of a catastrophic accident. The greatest fear is a plasma engine rupture. There is no chance whatsoever of the crew of a ship-breaker surviving such an explosion, but if the facility were in orbit around an inhabited world, the blast could burn away the atmosphere and scour the surface of life. Therefore, they make provisional anchor on asteroids, far enough from other remote facilities that even the worst disaster would destroy nothing except the station itself.

The Ligurian’s structure was rather like that of a flower transformed by the filthy hand of industry. Its stem was the long, flexible iron-and-plasteel anchor that extended from the centre of the facility, down to the surface of the asteroid, where its piston-powered claws punched through the rock and gripped hard. The receptacle housed the control centre and the crew’s quarters. At its base were the Ligurian’s four wide, stubby engines. The facility was a massive, clumsy, slow-moving beast, unsuited for a journey of any length. But it travelled in-system, abandoning one asteroid and moving on to the next.

The four petals that surrounded the receptacle were more like immense, swollen tumours. These were the work bays. They were separate from each other, though they could be connected through temporary, filament-like walkways. Their primary points of access were all from the command hub. They were large enough that they could take in small craft or a hewed-off chunk of a larger one, a dead ship’s final dry dock. For the larger vessels, which accounted for most of the station’s work, the procedure was different. Claws even larger than the ones that held the Ligurian to its asteroid grabbed a ship’s hull and held it flush against the work bay. Nozzles in the claws sprayed sealant foam, closing out the void. The outer doors of the bay then irised open to the diameter best suited for the size of the ship.

One bay held only a few skeletal remains, while the bay on the opposite side of the hub was latched on to an old colony ship that looked intact. I presumed it was a recent arrival. The ships docked to the other two bays had been there longer, and were losing their shape. One I could just recognise as a lifter. The other was a mass conveyer larger than the one bringing me here. It was huge, and though its superstructure was gone, the great mass of its hull bulked defiantly, its darkness blotting out the stars. Its name, the Cardinal Vezayne, was still visible in the bronze runes, fifty feet high, around its prow. Its hull was breached in so many places it looked like a gnawed bone. Each of the great holes marked where the claws had held the Vezayne at one point. A section of the vessel was hollowed out by the servitors, and then sealed off to preserve the atmosphere in the next sector to be worked on.

As the ships were dismantled, the debris was launched downwards until, caught by the gravity of the planetoid, it fell to the surface, keeping the approaches to the station clear.

The Steadfast came in over the top of the Ligurian, as if avoiding the death grip of the work bays. There was a docking bay on the opposite end of the hub from the grav platform arm. The mass conveyer synchronised its spin with the Ligurian’s and locked itself to the station. The large airlocks opened, and I moved down a ramp that twisted sharply, reorienting me for the gravity of the station. Motorised servitors moved ahead of me, hauling maglev carts of supplies that were then taken by the station’s own servitor crew.

Vel Heusen was waiting for me at the end of the ramp. The Ligurian’s chief was squat, his head barely as high as my chest. He had a face that looked well lived in. His cheeks sagged, accentuating the pouches under his eyes, and his nose was thick and drooping. He had been running the station for more than fifty years. He was a stolid, competent officer. He was also unimaginative, which made him perfect for a position of isolation and, despite the risks, great boredom and repetition. He grinned as I drew near.

‘Good to see you, missionary,’ he said. He used my title as if it were a nickname, one that he did not entirely take seriously. I could hardly blame him.

‘You too, Vel,’ I said, and tried not wince when he clapped my back. By the standards of the Ligurian, I was a frequent guest.

‘Came all this way to see me, did you?’ Heusen asked, just as he had the last five times I had been here. Some of those trips had been expensive. I’d had to pay traders a good price to deviate so far off their usual routes.

‘You know I did,’ I said, giving him the bald-faced lie he was waiting for.

Heusen laughed as if this were the first time we’d had this exchange. I think he laughed even harder because it was the fifth time.

We walked down the corridor towards the centre of the hub. The walls were grimy black iron. The ceilings were sharply peaking vaults that made the corridors seem even narrower than they were. We were going down one of the main hallways of the station, and there was room for Heusen and myself to walk abreast, and for the trudging servitors to pass us on either side. Yet when I looked along the entire perspective, with the lumen strips creating only enough illumination for a twilight gloom, the effect was like peering into a sarcophagus whose depths fell away into shadow.

‘You’ll be wanting to see her, I suppose,’ said Heusen, teasing.

‘I thought I might,’ I said, with false casualness. I was going through the motions of joining in the banter, but my heart wasn’t it in. All I could think about was that this might be the last time I was on the Ligurian.

‘Of course you did, of course you did,’ Heusen said. ‘You’ll find her in Delta Bay.’

‘Thank you. I’ll head over there.’

‘Is she going to convince you to stay with us this time?’

‘I really hope she will.’

He was joking. I was not.

We reached the hub, and he paused before heading off to his domain in the command centre. ‘Something I did want to ask you,’ he said, sounding more serious than I was used to.

‘Anything.’

‘Would you perform a service for us?’ The jocularity slipped away, revealing the devout man beneath. ‘It’s been a long time since the chapel had a proper ecclesiarch leading the prayers.’

I blinked, hesitating. Heusen’s devotion made me ashamed of my discomfort with my calling. ‘Of course,’ I said, trying to sound more enthusiastic than I felt.

‘Thank you, missionary.’ He looked very happy. ‘That will do us all some good. We need to be reminded that we aren’t truly alone out here.’ He gave my arm a squeeze of gratitude and left me.

I followed the ring corridor until I reached the doors to Delta Bay. They were massive, ten feet high and twenty wide. There were two sets, and they were raised at the moment, but were also airlocks and could slam down at a moment’s notice in the event of a breach. That would potentially save the rest of the station, but almost certainly doom whoever was inside the bay. That was the way of things. The work the Ligurian did was necessary, but it and its crew were expendable. The station’s design and the way it worked factored in that expendability. Only four officers ran the Ligurian, controlling the labour of an army of servitors. In the event of a disaster, the losses would be acceptably small. If something went wrong, the four were on their own. It would be too risky to send a rescue ship, and it would be less expensive to replace the destroyed facility than to try to salvage it.

I entered the colossal space of Delta Bay and was surrounded by the echoing din of demolition. The nose of a lifter protruded through the outer doors of the bay. Scaffolding surrounded it, and a swarm of monotasked servitors climbed over the ship, plasma cutter limbs slicing through the hull, carving it into smaller chunks and opening access to modules that might still be of use. Other servitors, built into mechanised carts, hauled the salvage away. Another group took the detritus and dragged it to the right-hand wall, where they shoved it into the maw of the disposal. This mechanism took up almost a third of the wall in length, and was almost twenty feet high. It was on a slow slope, almost prone. The jaws opened to accept debris, and then the grinding machinery inside hauled the refuse down to jettison it onto the surface of the asteroid.

I walked into the roar, ducking back and forth between smaller clusters of servitors breaking down fragments of hull and slabs of decking until I spotted her. Ligeia Rowne was on a low platform midway between the disposal and the end of the vessel’s nose. A nest of mechadendrites reached out from the platform. At her direction, the arms plugged themselves into the spines of waiting servitors, altering their programming for the next task.

Rowne was the works officer of the Ligurian. The entire process of demolition fell under her supervision. And she was the reason I could not bear the thought of leaving the Tromos system.

She saw me as I approached. She waved and held up two fingers. I nodded and waited while she finished redirecting another set of servitors. Then she turned around, surveying the work in the bay, and nodded to herself. She stepped down from the platform and walked over to join me.

‘That should keep this lot operational for a bit,’ she said. She smiled. ‘It’s good to see you, Oswick.’

‘It’s good to see you too.’ Hardly the most romantic of reunions. But the slack faces of the servitors and the deafening clang and hiss of the work didn’t invite intimacy. And I knew better than to do anything that came from the realm of emotions when Rowne was at work. She would not appreciate it.

She was five years older than me, but looked as if she had had far more than a decade’s worth of experience over me. In many ways, she had. Working in a facility like the Ligurian tempered a person quickly. She and her shipmates had also served in the Tromos Watch, recalled to the home planet to fight in the war. That was where we had first met, when I preached to her unit of mechanised infantry. Between the war and her work, she had gained a strength that I lacked, and I envied her for it.

I have been told that I have a face suited to my calling. My dark hair, pronounced eyebrows, cleft chin and sharp nose apparently convey sternness. I suppose they do. When I preach, I see the desired effect in my listeners. But when I look in the mirror, I see only a perpetual frown, guarding against internal accusations of weakness.

Rowne was taller than me and wiry, her flesh tight on her bones as if barely covering an armature of pistons. Her hair, like that of everyone else on the Ligurian, was shaved closed to the skull. Compared to the crew, my hair and beard, though modest in length, seemed a luxurious affectation. Rowne’s face, which had picked up a few more burn scars since I had last seen her two months ago, was angular, sharp and questioning. Her dark eyes evaluated everything that came before them, weighing for use and value, and from the time of our first conversation, it had become my great goal to never be found wanting by those eyes.

She smiled. I would have conquered the galaxy for that smile. Fortunately, she did not ask that of me. But it was worthy of that enterprise. Just seeing it now gave me the strength to hope there was a way out of the choice I faced. I also felt the sudden vice-squeeze in my heart, because I knew the hope was in vain.

‘Your timing is good,’ Rowne said. ‘I just finished my tour. The work in Alpha and Beta Bays is in good order, and the demolition in Gamma is almost finished.’

‘You have a bit of time, then?’

She nodded. ‘Let’s go to my office.’

We walked back to the hub. Crew quarters were located in a circle off the control centre, with the offices linked to both the bridge and the private living spaces. Rowne’s chambers were on the opposite side of the station from Delta Bay, so we cut through the bridge to reach them. The heart of the Ligurian was a circular space, with Heusen’s control throne in the very centre. All the principal communications and command surfaces were within easy reach of his rotating chair. In between the doors leading to the offices, long viewports gave a panoramic perspective of the four bays.

Heusen nodded to Rowne as we passed through. ‘Word from Kren,’ he said. Ariadne Kren was the salvage officer. ‘Sounds like she’s bringing in something interesting.’

‘Tell her Gamma will be ready to receive it when she arrives.’

Rowne’s office was not spacious. There was barely room for her simple iron desk. It was not much more than a metal slab fastened to the wall, on the left as we entered. With the two of us standing on the same side of the desk, it was crowded, which was what we liked. Rowne put her arms around my neck, pulled me in, and we kissed. I held her tight against me, clutching her strength as if it would support me in all the times ahead. The warmth and softness of her lips shut out the rest of the world. The play of our tongues was gentle at first, then insistent with the exploration of teeth, of our mouths, rediscovering the familiar and the long-missed.

We kissed with the tender ferocity of the hunger to be ever more completely with the other. When we parted, it was all I could do not to sag against her. It would have been so easy. That was all I wanted to do, to hold her and to be held, to feel the demands of the future melt before the present joy’s suspension of time. To give in to this temptation would not have been fair. I would have been thinking only of my own needs. That would have made my love for her a shallow thing, don’t you think? And it wasn’t.

Even so, Rowne took one look into my eyes and saw that I was troubled. She moved to the other side of the desk, not to put distance between us, but to give me the space I needed to breathe and to speak my mind. She didn’t sit down. She leaned against the other wall, folded her arms and smiled. She smiled gently, encouragingly. There was a touch of sadness there too, as if she already knew what I was going to say, and had braced herself for it.

‘You bring news,’ she said, ‘and I don’t think it’s good.’

‘I’m being reassigned,’ I said. ‘There’s a crusade leaving Aighe Mortis to fight the t’au. I’m to be part of it.’

‘When do you leave?’

I noticed that she did not ask if. I winced. ‘I’m supposed to go in less than a month.’ There had been barely enough time for me to get out to the Ligurian and get back to Tromos Prime. As it was, I had been forced to spend most of the credits I owned to arrange for the trader Discipline’s Fire to make a diversion to collect me on its return journey to the system. It would be here in ten days.

‘I am to be, I’m supposed to go,’ Rowne repeated. ‘Why are you phrasing things this way?’

‘You know why.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I don’t want to go.’

Her smile faded, leaving only her sadness. ‘I don’t want you to go, either.’

‘Tell me not to.’

Her laugh was pained. ‘How could I? What do you think would happen to you if you refused?’

‘I know, I know.’ I shook my head. ‘But I’m wrong for this, Ligeia. I’m not a missionary. I’ve always known that, and it’s more clear than ever to me now. I can’t leave you.’

‘You have to,’ she said softly. ‘It’s your duty.’

‘My duty,’ I repeated. I grimaced at the bitter taste of the word. ‘I’m a lie. I’ve been placed in a position where, in the long run, I’ll do more harm than good.’

‘What are you talking about? You preach magnificently.’

I snorted. ‘So I’m told,’ I said bitterly. ‘Vel has even asked me to preach to you here.’

‘That would be wonderful.’

‘It will be a farce. I’m good with words. That doesn’t make me genuine. That doesn’t make me a good missionary. Not if my spirit is not in my actions.’

Rowne didn’t answer at first. She frowned, thinking through what I had said. ‘You have doubts?’ she asked quietly.

‘Yes,’ I said, just as quiet.

‘How deep do they run?’ She was whispering now, a look of horror waiting to break the surface of her eyes.

I shook my head. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ I said, a bit too quickly.

‘What did you mean?’

‘I think…’ I began, then trailed off. I wasn’t sure. Did I mean that I doubted myself? But I had already said that. I couldn’t bring myself to admit the worse doubt that she now suspected. Not even to her. ‘I’m unfit,’ I said. That wasn’t good enough. I cast about for the right words. That was an unusual problem, for me. Before I found them, a klaxon sounded.

‘Kren is back,’ said Rowne. ‘We should see what this marvel is she’s brought with her.’

We left the bay. I walked close to her, our shoulders almost brushing.

Do I think about what could have happened, and what would not have happened, if I had not gone to the Ligurian? If I had quietly accepted my fate and done what I was told? Yes, I do think about that.

I do not have any good answers.

We returned to the bridge. Barnabas Macer was there now, too. He was the station’s maintenance officer, the only person aboard the Ligurian whose duty it was to hold things together rather than take them apart. He was a big man, brown-skinned and bearded, and with startlingly long, graceful fingers. I had seen him touch ruptured conduits with the tenderness of a parent calming a child. He gave me a clap on the shoulder as we joined him near Heusen’s throne.

Kren was on the vox. ‘It’s a combat vessel,’ she was saying. ‘I can tell that much.’

‘What type?’ Macer asked.

‘I would have said if I knew. I’m not being coy.’

‘Not intact, then,’ said Heusen, disappointed.

‘Sorry,’ said Kren. ‘It’s just a section of the hull. But I think there’s enough to be interesting all the same.’

‘Now you’re being coy,’ said Macer.

‘Maybe.’

‘Where did you find it?’ Rowne asked.

‘It found me. I was about to make for the Anteris system to get the governor’s yacht they’re decommissioning, and this came through the Mandeville point before I could make the jump.’

‘Sounds like fate,’ said Heusen.

‘Must be,’ Kren said cheerfully.

She was close now, and her tug and the load she was hauling became visible through the viewports. The wreckage was maybe three hundred feet long, and about half that at its thickest point. Its shape was irregular, looking as if it had been ripped from the larger whole by an explosion. I could see why Kren could not identify the vessel. I am no expert on void ships, but I was standing with three salvage specialists, and they were clearly as baffled as I was. The wreckage was not even part of the exterior of a hull, which would have helped make some kind of identification possible. It appeared to be a portion of the interior of the ship. I could see the strata of decking, though these had been twisted as if a monstrous vice had crushed the ship. The entire ruin was scarred black from fire. At first glance, I couldn’t see why she had bothered to capture it instead of completing her run for the yacht. She and her crew-mates would have been guaranteed of gathering credit-worthy material from that ship. What she was hauling looked like nothing but scrap metal, more usefully sent on a trajectory to the system’s sun.

‘It doesn’t look like much, but I’m getting some readings from inside,’ said Kren.

‘It’s still operational?’ said Macer, eyes widening.

‘Something is still generating power, and something is receiving it. That’s all I know.’

‘That’s good enough for me,’ said Heusen.

The vast majority of the ships the Ligurian broke down were civilian. Military vessels were extremely rare, but when they came through, they yielded salvage of the highest value.

‘I thought it might be,’ said Kren. ‘Bringing it in to Gamma Bay.’

We watched as she manoeuvred her catch towards the end of the bay. Her tug’s tow line morphed between rigid and flexible during the slow dance of huge masses, and Kren brought the wreck close to the bay with efficient grace. Heusen engaged the grappling controls, and the huge claws reached majestically out for the wreckage. Once they had hold of it, Kren detached the tug and headed for its dock, a blocky protrusion from the hub between Gamma and Delta bays.

As soon as Heusen had fixed the wreckage to the bay and engaged the sealant process, we left the bridge to meet Kren.

She was waiting for us at the doors to Gamma. She was a small, compact person, no taller than Heusen but densely built, well-suited to the confines of her tug. She had a wide smile, and she beamed it at us now.

‘You look pleased with yourself,’ said Rowne.

‘That’s because I am.’

There was a pict screen next to the doors. It showed a feed of the interior of the bay, along with readouts of the atmospheric and rad conditions. The five of us watched carefully for unnatural spikes. The bay’s voidward entrance was irised wide open, giving the broadest possible range of access points to the interior of the wreck. The servitors had gathered at the outer threshold and were standing motionless, slack, awaiting commands.

The conditions in the bay remained stable. ‘Well?’ Kren asked.

‘I think we need more than a few minutes to be sure,’ Heusen cautioned.

‘When are we ever sure?’ said Macer.

Heusen shrugged, conceding the point. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We can begin initial probing.’

‘Remotely,’ Rowne added.

‘Yes,’ said Heusen. ‘Remotely. Get your servitors ready, Ligeia. The rest of you, let’s try a little patience.’

There was no good reason for us to wait by the doors, but we did. Rowne left to return to the bridge, where there was a terminal that linked her to some of her servitors. From there, she could control the more basic procedures in the bay. A short while after she departed, a group of servitors jerked into movement and advanced to the wreck. The pict screen updated quickly, showing the glare of their plasma cutters and the start of their work to cut an entrance into the twisted, burned, fused mass.

The process was slow. The servitors peeled away thin layers of metal, and there was a short pause every time they made progress while Heusen monitored the conditions in the bay. They remained stable, and there were no explosions of escaping gas or ruptured plasma reservoirs. After a couple of hours, Rowne joined us again and Heusen opened the doors to Gamma Bay.

We went in. Rowne headed for the control platform and activated a larger contingent of servitors. Kren and Macer set up a ring of sensors in front of the tunnel the servitors were carving into the wreck. Macer carried an auspex. Heusen closed the doors again and returned to the bridge, while I stood beside Rowne’s platform, watching the work, grateful to have my mind occupied by something other than my future.

‘A lot of adamantium alloys,’ Rowne said. ‘This is not going to come apart easily.’

‘And if there really is power still on inside?’

‘Then this isn’t going to be quick, either.’

It wasn’t. Rowne wound up directing the servitors’ efforts onto a single access point. Macer followed the servitors in through the tunnel, calling out shifts of direction as his auspex picked up more definite readings. Over the course of the next ten hours, the tunnel became a burrow, sloping upwards and diagonally through a tangle of crushed decking. Macer and Kren took it in shifts to follow the servitors with the auspex. After the first few hours, they had to carry a vox unit as well to send the reports. The further the tunnel went, the more the interior became recognisable as that of a ship. In the tenth hour, the servitors broke through another massive collapse and onto a deck that was intact. With the interference of crushed walls suddenly removed, the auspex readings became much clearer.

‘The way forwards is clear,’ Kren voxed. ‘It looks like there’s a stasis field not far ahead.’

The safest approach would have been for Heusen to pull everyone back again, and for one officer to go to confirm the energy reading. But if any of the crew of the Ligurian had really been concerned with safety, they wouldn’t have been on the station at all. So we all went in. By right of discovery, Kren led the way.

‘We’re not closer to identifying this than we were from the outside,’ said Macer. Fire had swept the decks with such fury that it had melted surfaces and scorched away all markings.

‘I wonder what happened here,’ I said.

‘War,’ said Rowne. She had witnessed much more of it, much more directly than I had. ‘War happened.’ She pointed to a fragment of marble cladding on a wall. ‘Whatever ship this was, it was not unimportant.’

‘We’re getting close to the stasis field,’ said Kren, her eyes on the auspex.

We slowed, and walked silently down a narrow corridor. Then we turned right, into an arched doorway, and there we found the angel.

The chamber seemed spacious compared to the tunnel and the broken corridors. It too had been destroyed by fire. More truthfully, it was being destroyed. It was square, about fifteen feet on each side and twenty feet high. On the other side of the threshold, the air crackled, and Rowne put a hand on my shoulder to hold me back. The entire chamber was held in stasis. Shrapnel was suspended in mid-flight, debris frozen in the moment of bursting. And in the centre of the room was a Space Marine.

Have you ever seen one of the Emperor’s angels? I had not, until that moment. They had always been figures of living myth for me. I knew they existed. I had heard of their deeds. But they had been tales to be told, things to be wondered at. They were heroes so far beyond and above the common mortal that though I could believe in them, I could not conceive of them. Not really. Until now.

The Space Marine’s armour was destroyed. That must have happened before the stasis field engaged, because the smashed and burned bits of ceramite and plasteel lay in a heap at the Space Marine’s feet. He was frozen as he rose on the ends of his toes, his arms high and wide, his mouth open and his eyes closed in what I knew at once was an ecstasy of religious fervour. His hair was golden, and though his features and his body were covered in burns and scar tissue, he was perfection embodied. His wounds were badges of honour, every one of them a step towards earning the rapture I now beheld.

There was a pile of stone rubble a few feet in front of the Space Marine. Like his armour, it was too smashed to be reconstructed, but there were just enough larger pieces to suggest what had been there. They were curved, too ornamented to have served any practical function. And their position in the room with respect to the angel, close to the wall and facing him, told me what the rubble had been.

‘That was an altar,’ I said. My voice cracked.

I stared at the Space Marine, my emotions crashing like breakers on the rocks of awe and shame. He was an ideal, and he was a rebuke. He was the dream of militant faith made flesh, and he was my nightmare, because he was more than I could ever be. In that immobilised rapture, I saw what I had never wanted, yet should have.

I staggered away from the doorway. I wanted to cover my eyes, but I could not. The sight of the angel burned its way deep into my soul. It robbed me even of the strength to cry out as I beheld the wasteland of my pathetic, selfish existence.

Do you know what it is to want to scream, to need to scream, and be unable to do so? Maybe you do. I think we might have that in common. Then you know something of what I felt then.

Yes, you’re right. It would happen again in the days ahead. More than once.

Yes, I was still naïve – that’s true, too. I thought this was the worst that could happen to me. I thought this was the worst pain.

Throne, I was so very, very wrong.

‘What do you mean, you aren’t going to release him from stasis?’ I demanded.

Heusen held up a placating hand. ‘The situation is complex,’ he said.

We were in the mess hall of the Ligurian, a chamber off the bridge that held a table just large enough to seat the four officers. Rowne and Macer were in Gamma Bay. Heusen and Kren were eating refab rations consisting of a grey soup and a grey slab of protein. I had come looking for Heusen after what Macer had told me. He had managed to tap into the power conduits feeding the stasis field, and though the actual source of the power was still buried somewhere in the ship, Macer had some measure of control over it.

‘So you’re going to turn it off?’ I had asked.

‘No, I’m stabilising it,’ Macer had told me, and when I started yelling, he redirected my anger Heusen’s way. Macer was acting on his orders.

‘What do you mean, complex?’ I said to Heusen. ‘The situation couldn’t be simpler. This is one of the Emperor’s angels! It is our duty to free him!’

‘Is it?’ said Kren.

‘How could it not be?’

‘What do you know of Space Marine physiology?’ Heusen asked.

‘Nothing. Why?’

‘Because I don’t know anything, either. And why, do you think, is he in stasis?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

‘No, you don’t,’ said Heusen. ‘None of us do.’

‘That isn’t a stasis chamber,’ Kren said.

Heusen nodded. ‘Which makes things even more complicated. Was he placed there deliberately, by himself or someone else? Is his situation unintentional, a result of the damage his ship suffered? What happens to him if we turn the field off? What if he is on the point of death now? Oswick, I don’t have answers to any of these questions. Are you willing to take responsibility for his death if we make the wrong choice?’

I hesitated, then took a breath. ‘If I must, then…’

Heusen raised a hand, cutting me off. ‘That was a rhetorical question. You don’t have that responsibility because you don’t have that authority. I do. And I say that this situation is too complex.’

I turned to Kren in mute supplication for aid. She took another forkful of gelid protein and shook her head.

‘What, then?’ I asked Heusen. ‘Are you just going to leave him like that indefinitely?’

‘I have sent word about what we’ve found. We will await orders, and do nothing until they arrive.’

I snorted. There were no astropaths on the Ligurian. Heusen’s message would take days to reach Tromos Prime, and there were no Space Marine Chapters anywhere in the system. An astropathic message would have to be sent out from Tromos Prime, and there was the question of whether anyone knew where and to whom it should be sent. And then there would be the wait for the answer, if any. Communications with ship-breaking facilities were slow and uncertain. They were designed to be self-sufficient, having little need for communications except with vessels in the near vicinity. It could be weeks before we heard something.

‘And until then we do nothing?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Heusen. ‘Until then we work.’ He gave me a pointed look. ‘The rest of us have plenty to keep ourselves busy.’

I was in Rowne’s quarters, sitting beside her on her cot. It was the end of shift, a full station’s cycle after the discovery of the angel. It was the first chance we had had for a few hours together since my arrival. She had turned off most of the strips, and the light that leaked in from her office bathed the chamber in a dim twilight.

Rowne put her hand against my cheek, and I leaned into her touch. I did so with too much painful need, and she noticed. She pulled back, and placed her hand on mine. ‘You’re grieving,’ she said.

It wasn’t the most attractive form of passion. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I keep thinking this might be the last time I feel your touch.’

‘It might be,’ she said. ‘So should that last memory be a mournful one?’

‘I don’t mean it to be. But I look into a future without you, and I can’t help but mourn.’

‘You look to the future too much. You’re forgetting what you actually have is the present.’

I sighed. ‘That isn’t enough for me.’

‘It has to be. You have to be resigned to leaving the system.’

‘You sound like you’re resigned to me going.’

‘It’s not like we have a choice, Oswick.’

I knew she was right. I refused to accept that she was. ‘I want to fight for what we have,’ I said. ‘I wish you would, too.’

‘I am.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘I’m fighting for it very hard. You’re the one who is turning away from it.’

‘I’m wallowing in self-pity, is that it? When I should be revelling in the moment.’

‘Yes,’ she said, very quietly. Her eyes glittered in the dark, and from the twitch of her hand, I knew that I had hurt her.

I grimaced and stared at the floor.

‘Let’s pretend,’ Rowne said, still speaking quietly, the warm, flowing tone of her voice a sound that I was already missing. ‘Let’s pretend that you use family connections to somehow leave your missionary work without being imprisoned. Let’s pretend that’s possible.’

She paused, letting me contemplate the massive implausibility of what she had just said.

‘So we’re pretending that you can stay in Tromos. And why not, let’s even pretend that you are able to come to the Ligurian as frequently as once a month.’

That, too, was highly unlikely. The effort and expense of consistently breaking the isolation of a station designed to be as isolated as possible would be enormous. The fantasy she was building sounded more and more ridiculous, even though all she was doing was putting into words the hope that I had been inarticulately holding in a death grip.

‘I take your point,’ I said, wearily.

‘I haven’t made it yet, and this is important. Are you pretending all these things?’

I nodded, going along. ‘Yes, I am.’

‘Good. So listen. The present is still all we’d have. There would be no future. How long do you imagine I will live, doing what I do?’

My breath caught in my throat. That was not a question I could bear to answer. Never that question.

She held my hand with both of hers. ‘I have to live for the now,’ she said. ‘I don’t have the luxury of tomorrow.’

There was a choice here, and she was asking me to face it, and to choose the right path. She was showing me the way forwards. All I had to do was follow.

I know that now. And though I keep revisiting that moment, because of what flowed from it, I cannot decide if I also knew this then. I can’t remember. I want to go back to my earlier self and ask, Did you know? Did you?

I am also glad that I can’t.

Whether I knew what I was doing or not, I refused to follow where she led. ‘Living in the moment isn’t good enough for me,’ I said. ‘I wish you would fight for a tomorrow. I wish you believed we were worth the struggle.’

She let go of my hand and clenched her fists in frustration. ‘What do you want, Oswick? Will making heretics of us both be the only thing that satisfies you? You have to throw away the present and the future?’

‘We wouldn’t be heretics.’

‘How, by the Throne, can you say that? We would be disobeying the Emperor’s will. You most of all!’

‘We don’t know what His will is.’

She was silent for a bit. ‘Have you completely forgotten who you are?’ she finally asked, and I could barely hear her.

‘No. I wish I knew what His will was. But I don’t. I think it would be worse to pretend that I did. Why shouldn’t it be His will that you and I should be together? Our meeting was improbable.’

Rowne stood. ‘You’re not even thinking through what you’re saying anymore. I asked you earlier how deep your doubts went, and you didn’t really answer me.’

I still didn’t. ‘I said that I wish I knew the Emperor’s will. I do! I want to be one who knows.’ I stopped, my thoughts racing down to Gamma Bay. ‘Like he knows.’

‘Who?’

‘The Space Marine.’

She smiled. ‘You’d like to speak with him, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

Her smile faded. ‘Oh. You’re serious.’

‘I am. And Heusen won’t free him from stasis.’

‘With good reason. We have to wait for guidance.’

‘Your answer won’t arrive until long after I’m gone,’ I pointed out.

‘Then what, if anything, the Space Marine has to say is not for you. Your fate lies somewhere else.’

‘That’s trite, Ligeia.’

‘No it isn’t. It’s true.’ She was angry now. ‘You can’t have everything right away,’ she said.

‘I don’t expect to.’

‘Really? Well you do want everything on your terms.’

I stood now too, answering her anger defensively with my own, striking back because I knew she was right. ‘Maybe I do,’ I said. ‘Maybe that’s wrong. But what about you? Do you have no terms at all? Do you accept everything that happens with no thought for yourself? Oh look, I’ve lost another arm. Nothing to be done, just what was meant to happen.’

Rowne glared at me. ‘Get out,’ she said.

I should have apologised. By the Throne, I should have tried. Instead, I stormed out of her quarters.

The rations on the Ligurian were not inspiring, but enough to live on. There were, though, other supplies that saw to morale rather than to simple physical sustenance. One of the most vital cargoes of any resupply ship was amasec. I had come with my own stock, too, knowing that Rowne and I would want to share it. We had already, though its effects had been to make me more morose and argumentative. When I left Rowne’s quarters, I swung by the mess hall and grabbed another bottle.

I took a few deep gulps from it while I walked. Suffused with hurt, convinced of the galaxy’s injustice, I wanted drunkenness as an excuse to go where I was already heading. Though I gave myself the chance to reconsider. First, I went to the chapel. It was a chamber just off the bridge, larger than was needed for a crew this small, and was the one place on the station with true artistry in the ornamentation, and even some gold inlaid in bronze. I looked at the altar, staring into the empty sockets of the winged skull. I was glad Heusen had not yet pressed me to lead the crew in prayer. I had nothing to say.

There was no comfort for me here.

I received no warmth from the amasec, either. I abandoned the bottle beside the altar and left the chapel.

I walked to Gamma Bay. There, servitors hauled the wreckage that had been removed from the tunnel, throwing it into the disposal. Others worked on portions of the ship that had been removed from the main body. The outer layers of the salvage were being taken apart. I moved past them, weaving around islands of work, where the servitors methodically cut down the huge metal bones of the ship. I stumbled once when I misjudged the speed of a tracked servitor and almost collided with it. For a moment, we were face to face, its flat, dead eyes staring right through me before I jumped out of the way. Then I entered the tunnel and marched as if I had a credible purpose.

I think I did have a real one. It was just too vague to be of any guidance.

There were servitors just outside the stasis room. One of them was motionless, a mechadendrite linking it to Macer’s stasis control, holding it ready to act if conditions changed unexpectedly. The other was dragging away more debris. I could hear other servitors nearby. They were not enlarging the tunnel while the crew slept, but they were reinforcing what had already been opened up in the wreckage.

I brushed past the motionless servitor and stopped in the doorway, just shy of the stasis field. I gazed at the Space Marine, at the transfixion of absolute belief. He could not speak to me, but I could speak to him.

‘What do you know of doubts?’ I said. ‘Do you even know they exist? I know the truth of the God-Emperor,’ I told the angel. ‘I believe in it. Ligeia asked me how deep my doubts go. They don’t go as far as heresy. I doubt myself, not the Imperial Creed. I believe in the Creed. I…’

The motionless, ecstatic face hurt me. But I didn’t look away.

‘I think I do,’ I said. I barely whispered. The four words horrified me as they passed between my lips. My face burned with shame. At the same time, my skin prickled with the thrill of giving voice to so terrible an honesty.

The moment passed as I stared at that face, and I began to laugh with relief. Speaking even the possibility of doubt had exorcised it. There was no possibility of unbelief when I was faced with the proof of the Emperor’s truth before me.

‘I believe,’ I said, and that felt like the truth to me in that moment. Banishing doubt is easy when confronted by a miracle. ‘But I do not feel the truth as I should. How can I preach it when I do not feel it? Am I not, at the very least, a hypocrite?’

The Space Marine answered with silent rapture.

‘These are meaningless words for you, aren’t they? You can’t doubt when you are an angel. Your being is proof of the God-Emperor’s divinity. There is no such thing as hypocrisy for you.’

The Space Marine stared at the source of his ecstasy. I followed his gaze, but there was only space.

‘You feel the truth. You are the truth. Won’t you teach me? If I could feel what you do, I would know my path. I would accept my fate…’

I broke off, choking on the lie.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We both know that isn’t true. This is not what I was made for. And I don’t understand. I don’t understand how the Imperial Creed can be the truth, but still feel to me like a lie.’

I half-expected the inert servitor to jerk to life and strike me down. The frozen ecstasy in the chamber condemned me, and my resentment stirred.

‘I do not want this fate. I did not ask for it. What good is the truth if all it gives me is pain? And if I leave, what good will I do if I hate every moment of my existence? If I despise my duty, surely I’ll be doing more harm than good. It would be better to release me.’ I paused. ‘We should both be free,’ I muttered.

I straightened up. I tried to feel as if I were standing my ground. ‘If you won’t teach me, don’t judge me,’ I shouted, jabbing a finger at the Space Marine. My voice wavered with my confidence as I tried to stare down the face that was looking upon the divine. My anger remained strong. ‘It’s easy for you. You are outside of time. Doubts can never arrive.’ I took a breath. ‘Your present is eternal.’ I spat the sentence out with all my bitterness. I felt as if I could dissolve stone by spitting on it. I wanted to point at the Space Marine and ask Rowne if this was how to she would like to hold on to the present. ‘There’s nothing to hold!’ I shouted at the absent woman and the deaf Space Marine. ‘The present ends as it arrives. If there is no future, then what good is the present?’

No answer, always and forever no answer, only that accusing, selfish, untroubled, unending rapture.

My head was swimming with anger and self-loathing. ‘I wonder if your joy would stand up to time,’ I murmured. ‘I wonder if you would be as holy then.’ I was projecting my hurt and my doubts onto the Space Marine. I knew what I was doing even then. The pain I felt was too strong, though, to be reasoned away.

I did what I did next because of the pain. The galaxy was intent on showing me how unfair it was. Who wouldn’t strike out? I’m only human.

It wasn’t the worst choice I’d made. It wasn’t difficult either. Perhaps it should have been. But it wasn’t. And really, I don’t think you would have done better. Not in my circumstances.

‘You should have to face time, too,’ I said to the Space Marine.

I turned to look at Macer’s control unit. It appeared complicated at first, because I am entirely ignorant when it comes to machinery. There were numerous meters, their illuminated runes meaning nothing to me. After studying the bulky device for a bit, I decided that the readouts were unimportant as far as I was concerned. They were monitoring the stability of the stasis field and the flow of power. Two large probes jutted from the back of the machine and into the conduit that the servitors had exposed by tearing open the wall near the entrance.

‘I don’t care about you, or you, or you,’ I said, looking at the mechadendrite ports, and the cluster of dials that I guessed would feed commands to the servitor as needed. In the end, what mattered was a heavy lever on the side. Macer had had to use something to start the machine’s operation. If this control was not what he had used, it was clearly important enough to do something that mattered.

What it would do, I thought, would matter very much to me.

I pulled it before I had a chance to reconsider.

The meters flashed red. Klaxons erupted with wails of panicked warning. The servitor jerked as a massive shock rolled through it. The mechadendrites pulled free, and the servitor walked forwards. It collided with the stasis field. It kept trying to walk in the same direction, but the invisible wall blocked it. The servitor was moving without purpose or task.

Blue lightning blasted out from the power conduit. The energy arced across the hall, and I threw myself out of the way, cowering in the doorway as the hall strobed. The chamber of the angel flickered, power levels rising and falling. Then the conduit exploded. A pipe wrenched itself out of the wall like an angry serpent. It smashed Macer’s control unit against the other side of the tunnel. It unleashed a roaring stream of energy down the ruined deck towards the bay, and then died, frozen in mid-strike in the middle of the corridor.

In the chamber, the stasis field flashed once, and then it was gone. The explosion it had arrested now continued. Shrapnel cut into the walls and screamed over my head. The Space Marine’s altar fell in pieces to the deck. And the Space Marine completed his act of worship.

His eyes grew even wider. His back arched. He pulled his arms back as if to embrace infinity itself.

‘Hail!’ he screamed. His voice was thunderous, majestic, and yet wrenched out of tune. The rapture I had seen, I now heard, and it pushed rapture beyond ecstasy and into perfect agony.

‘Hail!’ he screamed again, and though I covered my ears, I could not blot out that awful shriek. My mind raced in blind confusion. To fear the God-Emperor was right, but I had never imagined that to experience the divine would be so much like torture.

The Space Marine’s eyes bulged with madness. I was grateful that what he saw was beyond my sight and my conception. He cried out again, and his voice was wrong. To the very depths of my soul, I knew that voice was wrong.

‘Hail!’ he screamed. ‘Hail, hail, hail, Changer of Ways!’

And then the angel transformed.

The Space Marine grew. His limbs, already massive, thickened until they seemed wide as pillars. He hunched forwards, still screaming his praise, and a row of spikes burst through the skin of his back. Blood and black ichor soaked them as they thrust upwards from his spine. They curved and twisted in every direction, and more of them appeared as his torso grew. Some were the size of daggers. Others were twice the length of my arm. A shudder gripped the Space Marine, powerful enough to make the deck tremble. It started at the base of his neck and travelled down the length of his spine, forcing him to crouch even lower, almost knocking him off his feet. When the tremor reached the end of his spine, his lower back erupted in a spray of liquefied flesh, and a tail uncoiled. It was segmented like the body of an insect, and covered on all sides by rows of more spikes. It ended in a cluster like a tuft of spears. Green liquid dripped from their ends. Where it fell, the decking hissed, and gave birth to wriggling filaments that seemed to be forming unholy runes.

The Space Marine’s head grew with the rest of his body. His skull stretched higher and longer. His eyes become long as snakes, their pupils multiplying like a disease, their lids melting away into his flesh that tore and reformed, tore and reformed.

‘Hail, hail, hail, Changer of Ways!’

The chanted prayer grew louder, and the walls of the chamber trembled. I did not know how the monster sang, how it shaped words, because its mouth was no longer human. It howled, and there were two voices at once. The roar of a mad beast, and the praise of an insane worshipper. The jaws opened wide as they grew, and they split. Dark blood sprayed from the shredded muscles and flesh. The maw pulled back in four segments, each long and jutting, toothed and scaled like a reptile, yet jointed as if they were mandibles. From within the thing’s mouth came a tongue. It was leathery and coated in a thick, viscous slime. It was forked, the two ends moving independently of one another. And in the centre of the fork, there was another mouth. It gaped, revealing human teeth, and while the great maw roared, the tongue chanted.

Battered by the double sound of fury wrapped around worship, I stumbled backwards. My mouth opened and closed. I was grasping for something, for anything. Nothing came. As the angel turned into an abomination, a spawn of nightmares, I reached for succour and no one came to my aid.

The change was not complete. Limbs shot up from the monster’s shoulders. They were entirely insectile, with at least a dozen joints each. They had a reach of over fifteen feet, and they ended in pincers that looked like they could tear a Taurox open. The monster’s skin darkened, turning to shades of deep crimson and black. It stopped tearing, becoming so thick it was now an exoskeleton. Yet even though it looked hard as iron, it still rippled, as if the forces of its transformation still rocked its being.

‘Hail, hail, hail, Changer of Ways.’

With the stasis field gone, the servitor walked into the room, into the monster’s path. The thing turned its elongated eyes on the figure. It reached out and closed one of its pincers around the servitor’s waist. The monster lifted the servitor into the air.

The servitor barely reacted. Its legs moved as if it were still trying to walk. The monster waited for a moment, as if expecting distress. When none came, it snapped the pincer closed and sliced the servitor in half.

The servitor never showed pain or fear as its body parted in two. It could not. Yet, as bone snapped, and blood flowed, and intestines spilled heavily to the deck, I was confronted with the fact that this had been a human being, and that there would be nothing to distinguish me from those slabs of butchered meat if the monster seized me.

From the entrance to the chamber, I watched the transformation and the killing of the servitor from a point of physical and spiritual paralysis. I seemed to be floating just to the side of my body. I was numb with fear and horror. All trace of reason had fled the galaxy, and I could not respond. I did not understand what I was seeing. There was nothing in my training or in my studies that permitted such a reality. Everything I believed in, everything I thought to be true, fractured before the existence of this monster.

I had believed the Space Marine was proof of the divine. Instead, the monster was its refutation.

This was the crushing sensation that formed during the eternity of the transformation and the seizing of the servitor. But as the mutilated body fell, I realised something else, and I began to recover control over my thoughts and my limbs. This monster was proof of the supernatural. It was an abomination that opposed the truth of the Emperor, and in so doing, proved that truth. I had wanted an end to doubt. There it was, standing before me.

And I was a missionary of the Adeptus Ministorum. I was the voice that spread the Emperor’s word. Here, now, at this terrible juncture, I stood for the Emperor. It was through me that He would banish this horror from existence. It was my duty to act.

This was not the moment of choice, because there was no choice at all.

I reached for my belt with an instinct I had not believed I possessed. I seized my icon of the Emperor, a winged skull on an iron rod, and I raised it before me. Words sprang to my lips, words that would have rung hollow until now, because now I saw what these words were meant to combat.

‘In the name of the Emperor of Mankind, our Father, our Guardian and our God, begone, foul thing.’

The monster cocked its head. Its unholy eyes blinked at me in curiosity. It pincers opened and closed, snapping at the air. The mouth in the tongue stopped chanting for a moment, and hung open, glistening with drool, waiting for me to finish.

I took a step forward and stretched my arm towards the monster. I held the icon tightly. It was already slick with sweat. ‘Return to the foul pit from whence you came,’ I said. ‘I renounce you, I banish you. I cast you out! Let no human eye see you, no human ear hear you, no human heart feel your presence ever again! Begone, abomination! Begone!’

Even in my terror, I felt a rush of pride that I had found the strength to stand my ground. And I felt the first stirrings of true religious ecstasy. The rapture I thought I had seen in the Space Marine would now be mine, because I would feel the hand of the Emperor. I would feel His will act through mine. I would know the grace and wrath of the Emperor as He burned this monster from existence.

Nothing happened.

The monster stalked out of the chamber towards me, its spikes bristling, its pincers snapping at the air. It reached down with one of its huge, clawed hands and picked up the upper half of the servitor. It tore the head off and dropped the rest of the corpse. It wrapped its tongue around the head, coating it with viscous drool, and the flesh sloughed off the skull in a thick, pinkish stew. The monster held out the skull before it, mirroring and mocking me. Its tongue withdrew into its huge jaws, then snaked out again, and in the midst of a triumphant roar came the chant again.

‘Hail, hail, hail, Changer of Ways!’

The Emperor had failed me. And the monster charged. It hurled the servitor’s skull, smashing it against the wall by my shoulder. Abandoned, bereft, I ran.

I looked back as I reached the beginning of the tunnel’s passage through the denser part of the wreckage. The thing, unhurried, stalked down the corridor in great strides. It crouched forwards, its deformed head brushing the ceiling. It spikes scraped the walls on both sides.

I shoved past a servitor trudging back the way I had come. Unable to deviate from its set task, it headed directly for the monster. I heard a crunch and squelch as it collided with the abomination. I did not look back again.

The tunnel seemed endless, a jagged zig-zag through darkness. I banged into corners and bounced off walls as I ran. Protrusions tore at my vestments. My sacred robes, my mark of a useless office. I was trailing rags when at last I saw the lights of Gamma Bay ahead of me. I plunged towards them, as the bay meant safety.

I was not yet done with illusions.

Behind me, the heavy, clawed tread of the beast boomed and pounded, a drumbeat punctuating the rhythmic, ululating cries of ‘Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail!’ As I leapt from the wreckage and into the bay, the monster’s two mouths shrieked in unison.

‘TZEEEEEEEEEENTCH!’

Because the bay had promised light, I had seen it as safety. Now it was just an even vaster space for me to cross. The open doors were another world away. The klaxons here were deafening, their wails reverberating off the walls, and the army of servitors ignored them, locked into their appointed tasks, cutting wreckage apart and hauling detritus to the disposal. The space was filled with the waste of the dead ship, a maze of industrial bones I had to navigate to reach the doors.

I ran, jerking around the field of demolition, and the deck vibrated with new impacts as the monster entered the bay.

I wished for a plasma cutter as I sprinted past the servitors, my lungs rasping from the effort. I had no idea if a cutter would have an effect on the monster. I just wanted anything at all that might grant me a sliver of hope. I was surrounded by beings whose tools could be used as weapons against the monster, but they could never attack it of their own accord.

I was less than a quarter of the way across the bay, too terrified to look back and see how close I was to my end, when I came around a mound of debris on which servitors worked like ants on a hill, and saw that I was no longer alone. There was a straight path ahead of me through the disassembled wreckage, extending halfway to the doors, and Heusen was running towards me.

He looked past my shoulder and his eyes widened. At the same moment, there was an enormous crash of metal being sheared apart.

‘Changer of Waaaaaaays!’ The idiot prayer filled the bay, drowning out the work of the servitors.

‘Kill it!’ I screamed. It was a pointless cry, a howl of weakness and fear. I think there was guilt there, too.

But how could I have known what I would unleash?

I whirled as something huge crashed behind me. The monster struck a scaffolded wedge of hull with such force that the mass hurtled like a rolling boulder towards us. Servitors went down under it, their crushed bodies slicking the metal. I threw myself to the side with such panicked energy that I tripped and fell. Sobbing, I crawled, scrabbling at the floor, moving with the crabbed, clumsy sluggishness of nightmares.

The wreckage thudded past less than a yard from my legs and collided with another work emplacement. The support structures collapsed and the towering hull ribs toppled over. A forest of iron and adamantium alloy crashed to the deck, shaking the floor, pulverising servitors. Plasma cutters slashed wildly with the wielders’ death throes. A beam burned the air just over my head.

The monster strode through the ruin it had created, singing praise and lashing out. Its pincer limbs seized servitors as if by reflex. The abomination did not even look at them as it crushed heads and severed legs. Its clawed hands grabbed anything it could reach, and hurled metal and flesh across the bay. A servitor arced upwards and slammed into the wall above the disposal. The impact shattered its bones to dust and it dropped, a soft bag of flesh, into the open maw of the disposal.

Heusen dragged me to my feet. ‘Keep moving!’ he shouted, and shoved me in the direction of the doors.

I stumbled forwards, my feet trying to learn how to run again. A tracked servitor came between us, rolling towards the collapse. Its plasma cutter was ignited, beam low, in readiness for the work of cutting through the fallen wreckage. I paused, staring at the cutter as it passed so close to me. If only there was a way of using it.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Heusen shouted. ‘Run, you fool!’

The monster sank its four-pronged jaw into the chest of a servitor and yanked out its heart. The servitor died without a sound, and the creature roared, furious at the lack of response to its slaughter. It turned to look at us. ‘The Waaaaaaays!’ the tongue-mouth screamed, and the monster came towards us. Its long, serpentine eyes seized mine.

I couldn’t move. The gaze was utterly mad, yet burned with hideous knowledge. The monster looked through to the depths of my soul. It promised to give me the truths that would make me join it in insanity.

‘Run!’ Heusen shouted again.

I couldn’t move.

The monster came for us. Heusen cursed, and leapt onto the back of the tracked servitor. He seized its tool arm and forced the plasma cutter around to face the horror. The beam sliced through the creature’s shoulder. It severed the right pincer arm. Black ichor jetted from the wound, splashing over the servitor. The monster screamed at the cutter’s burn and stepped back. The servitor juddered, nerves misfiring as its skin melted under the touch of the ichor.

Spatters of the foul liquid fell on Heusen. Smoke rose from his arm, and he was screaming, but he still managed to reach forwards and fire the plasma cutter again, slashing diagonally down the monster’s torso. Writhing tentacles erupted from the wound. At its shoulder, a flood of eyes streamed out of the injury until a thick mount of flesh rose from the shoulder, a single great eye at its peak. It kept growing, as if it were a tumorous stalagmite. A vertical split appeared in the flesh. It tore wide, becoming a mouth filled with hundreds of needle teeth as long as my hand.

And now the monster had a new voice. ‘Hail! Hail! Hail! Changer of Ways!’

The other pincer arm snapped forwards, reached around the servitor and grabbed Heusen around the chest. It snatched him up. The monster held him aloft for a moment. It turned its head like a bird, favouring him with the full length of one of its eyes. Its tongue snaked around his upper chest. His shrieks became muffled as it surrounded his head.

‘Ahhhhhhh!’ the monster sighed, as if it had been looking for him.

The tongue slithered off Heusen, leaving him covered in a thick coating of the corrosive saliva. He screamed and writhed, and the monster brought him to its shoulder maw. The rows of teeth snapped open and shut, catching Heusen’s chest and face. His arms went rigid with explosive agony. I heard the cracking as the monster bit through the front half of his skull, and now Heusen’s arms went limp.

The beast devoured him. I should say it consumed him. After the first two bites, the mouth chewed and slurped. The monster seemed to be sucking Heusen into the maw. His body began to flap, and it was too loose. His arms bent smoothly. They were unnaturally flexible, as if the bones inside had turned to string. His body flattened. Ripples ran through it, the monster drinking his flesh. He was pressed against the mound on the shoulder. Heusen’s skin merged with the creature’s exoskeleton.

Heusen became vague. The more the monster chewed and swallowed, the more Heusen became part of its grotesque body.

I started to move again, stumbling backwards away from the horror, but I could not look away. I wanted to run. I did not want to throw away Heusen’s sacrifice. But the sight held me.

You think you would have run. I think you’re wrong. What I saw was the most heretical nightmare made real. I can tell you what I saw. I can describe it. But I cannot give you the experience of witnessing it. If your faith is strong, it will hold the implications of what I saw at bay. You will not accept them, because to accept them would shatter your faith. You may say that you believe what I am telling you. Perhaps you think you do. But at the deepest level, you do not. You cannot. If you had been there, you would understand, because you would have been frozen too.

Heusen reacted. Yes, he did. He was not an ecclesiarch. He did not fully comprehend what he was seeing.

The monster finished consuming Heusen. It absorbed his body completely, but a trace of him remained. In the rippling exoskeleton of the monster’s chest, below the right shoulder, I could see Heusen’s face. It was a shadow, like a brass rubbing of his features. His mouth was wide with pain, his eyes wide with horror. His face moved. It was the image of his soul, trapped in the being of the abomination.

‘Praaaaaaise the Chaaaaaange!’ the three voices of the monster cried.

Finally, the spell broke, and I could run.

‘Praaaaaaise! Chaaaaaaaange!’ the monster howled.

I screamed, trying to blot out the sound of that unholy prayer. The creature hooted and roared, and made a liquid, gargling sound that I think was laughter. I heard it lurch forwards again, but I was sprinting now, weaving around the islands of scaffolding. My desperation had made me clumsy. Now it gave me wings. Even as another crash happened behind me, my way to the doors was clear.

Macer was on one side of the doorway, his hand on the wall controls, ready to slam the doors shut and seal them. He gestured at me to run faster. Then he was looking past me in horror, and the pounding of heavy feet closed in. I stopped screaming. I took deep, ragged breaths, drawing on every ounce of strength I had to escape my pursuer. Macer was shouting at me, but I could not hear him for the pounding of my blood in my ears and the thumping of the monster’s tread.

As I approached, Macer slammed his hand against a stud. I leapt forwards. The first set of doors shuddered down, inches behind me. I fell and rolled under the second set. I had a momentary glimpse of a wall of metal rushing for me, and then I was through. I lay, gasping, on the floor, feeling the vibrations fade from the emergency closure.

The monster smashed against the barriers. I held my breath, waiting for it to claw through one door and then the other. It did not. The sound of the battering remained muffled, and I could barely hear the ranting prayer over the wailing of the klaxons.

Rowne and Kren were running down the hall towards us. It had only been a few minutes since I had triggered the alarms.

‘What is that creature?’ Macer asked, his voice broken.

‘Lies,’ I whispered. ‘It is a thing of lies.’

I had to tell myself that. It was the only way I could keep myself from screaming forever.

‘It took Heusen,’ Macer said, his voice grey.

‘Is there any chance…’ Rowne began.

‘No,’ I said. I swallowed. ‘He saved my life.’

Macer and Kren looked at me with open hatred.

The four of us faced the door, listening to the muffled blows and the three entwined voices. We could not make out the words. The sound was bad enough, disturbing at a spiritual level.

‘What is that thing?’ Rowne asked.

The answer I had given Macer was not enough. It was a cowardly evasion, and I abandoned it. ‘I don’t know, exactly,’ I said. ‘It was the Space Marine.’

‘He changed in stasis?’ Kren asked, disbelieving.

‘No,’ I said. I turned away from their stares. I looked at my hands. They were shaking. I could almost see Heusen’s blood coating them.

‘What did you do?’ said Rowne.

‘What I thought was right. I was wrong.’ I glanced up at her. I encountered coldness and judgement. I swallowed the pain in my throat. Emperor, I thought, grant me the chance of redemption.

I did not expect an answer.

A pict screen beside the door showed a frozen image of the monster. Kren stared at it. ‘Is it some kind of mutation?’ she wondered.

I could have just nodded. I could have said nothing. That response would have sufficed. Only I could not bear for the burden of truth to be mine alone. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Something worse than that.’

To my relief, Macer was nodding. He had seen and heard it, and so already knew more than he liked. ‘I heard its prayer,’ he said.

‘It prays?’ Kren’s eyes were wide.

‘Not to the Emperor. To something else.’

‘It spoke a name,’ I said. ‘It sounded like Tzeentch.’

‘What does that mean?’ Rowne asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘This was never in your religious training?’

‘No. But whatever it is, it seems to answer prayers.’

Boom, boom, boom from the other side of the door. Relentless, untiring.

‘Do you think the doors will hold?’ Rowne asked Macer.

He grimaced. ‘I want to say yes.’

‘Is that good enough to trust them with our lives?’ said Kren.

‘I wouldn’t,’ I said.

‘Then we reinforce them,’ said Rowne. ‘There’s enough debris in Delta Bay to plug this corridor completely.’

‘We need to destroy it,’ I said.

‘I’m sure we do,’ Rowne snapped. ‘Do we know how to do that?’

I shook my head.

‘Then let’s concentrate first on preventing it from getting us.’

The others agreed, and they threw themselves into the task. The work progressed quickly. Rowne re-tasked the servitors of Delta Bay, and her army dragged tons of disassembled lifter to the corridor outside Gamma. Once the process was underway, and a stream of tracked servitors were hauling the material, she redirected others to begin constructing the barricade. Macer and Kren oversaw the assembly, and I watched a dense wall of metal build up in front of the door.

There was nothing I could do to help. I hovered, useless, fighting shame and trying to damp down my terror. I watched the screen next to the door. The successive picts showed the monster still trying to batter its way through. I was grateful that that the noise of the construction blotted out the sounds of the creature’s blows and prayers. I did not like looking at the images. The obscenity of the monster’s form ate at me. There was no room for such things in any understanding I had of the Imperial Creed. Its presence was a tumour upon reality itself. When I looked away from the screen, I could pretend for brief moments that the monster was not there. The pretence was a weak, pointless exercise. Yet I needed to do it. If I didn’t, I forgot to breathe.

The crew and the servitors laboured until the barricade was floor to ceiling, and extended halfway across the hallway. Its composite nature was clear, and it bristled with jagged protrusions. At the same time, the wreckage was so densely packed I could not have inserted a finger between the seams of welded metal. I could not imagine Gamma Bay ever being accessible again.

When the work was done, Rowne changed the tasks of the servitors yet again. Two lines of them formed a semi-circle around the barricade, their plasma cutters inert but ready to ignite the instant something emerged from the bay.

‘Can that thing be harmed?’ Kren asked.

‘Heusen hurt it,’ I said. ‘It recovered quickly, but it screamed when the plasma cutters burned it.’

‘That’s something, at least,’ said Rowne.

I turned around, eyeing the ranks of motionless servitors. ‘Can they really fight?’ I asked Rowne.

‘They don’t fight. They will simply attempt to cut apart any mobile wreckage, which is how they will perceive that creature.’

With the work done, we could hear the pounding on the doors, even through the massive wall of the barricade.

‘This won’t be enough,’ I said.

‘It’s a start,’ said Rowne.

We left the corridor ring leading to the bays and moved to the bridge. There were more pict screens here, fed by more lenses, giving us a better sense of the situation in Gamma Bay. We were at last far enough away that we could not hear the creature. The station seemed secure, its walls and doors solid. Free of the soul-eroding cries, I felt stronger, as if we had retreated to a fortress and could now prepare a true counter-attack. I saw the resolve strengthen in the others, too. Where we differed was that I did not trust my bravado.

‘Oswick is right,’ Rowne said, eyeing the images of the monster. ‘Containment isn’t enough. We have to destroy this thing.’

‘Are we sure we can?’ I said. The question had to be asked. I didn’t worry about how the others would look at me. That damage had already been done.

‘If it can be hurt, it can be killed,’ said Macer.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘but by us? Wouldn’t it be better to leave the Ligurian, and wait for a military solution?’ I knew we could not wait aboard. There was no telling how many weeks or months it would be before someone finally came.

‘Leave,’ Rowne said. She rolled her eyes. The other two chuckled bleakly. ‘How do you propose we do that?’ she asked.

‘Couldn’t we take the tug?’

‘That’s a one-person craft,’ said Kren.

‘The escape pod, then.’ It nestled inside a blister on the outer hull next to the tug’s docking station.

There was more bitter laughter. ‘I thought you understood the nature of this facility,’ said Rowne.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The design of the station is older than its current use,’ she said. ‘The lifepod is a relic from when ship-breakers were still in orbit around inhabited worlds. It is for getting to the surface. There is no steering, no propulsion after initial launch. There are provisions for two days with the full crew aboard.’

‘Then we ration as much as necessary. The Discipline’s Fire will be here to get me in eight days.’

‘How are you planning to ration oxygen?’ Kren asked.

‘Oh,’ I said. I began to grasp, on a visceral level, what it really meant to be expendable. This was different than on the battlefield. Here, the crew of the Ligurian was thrown away from the start. ‘Have we called for help?’

‘I’ll do that now,’ said Kren. She turned to the vox controls. ‘But don’t expect rescue. A cry for help from a ship-breaker is a signal for everyone else to get as far away as possible.’

‘What about the colony ship?’ I was grasping at anything at all now. I wanted to get off the station.

‘The Wind of Faith was barely voidworthy when it arrived,’ said Rowne. ‘We have worked on it. I’d be surprised if we could even get it powered up again.’

‘But you might be able to?’

She and Macer exchanged a look.

‘If there was no other choice…’ she began.

‘Why are we talking about abandoning the station?’ Kren asked. ‘If we can destroy this thing, then we should do it.’

‘How?’ I asked. ‘Can we get the servitors inside the bay to attack it?’

‘Not without retasking them,’ Rowne said. ‘And I can’t do that without access to them.’

‘Meaning you would have to be in the bay.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So,’ said Macer, ‘we have to kill it without breaking its quarantine.’

‘Vent the bay,’ said Kren.

Macer nodded and started flipping toggles. Warning runes flashed on the console as he made his way across the rows.

Let it be this simple, I prayed. Emperor, let it be this simple. Let the consequences of my sin end here. I had Heusen’s blood on my hands. I would have given a lot to put aside the terror and have only the guilt to shoulder.

Before he released the wreckage, Macer held the outer door open. Klaxons sounded in anger at the danger he was courting. He shut down all the safety overrides, then pulled back on the claw release. It was a massive iron lever, and he had to use both hands to move it, a final confirmation of an irrevocable command.

The station shuddered as the void seal was broken and the claws pulled back from the wreckage. I turned away from the pict screens to look out the viewport. The Space Marine’s vessel drifted gradually away from Gamma Bay. A cloud of frozen water vapour rushed out of the bay, haloing the claws as they retracted. In the silence, and from this distance, there seemed to be no violence, only the gradual separation of dancers at the end of a ball. But the klaxons screamed, and the deck vibrated from the strain. And then I saw that violence had come to Gamma Bay. Wreckage followed the vapour, and with it the tiny figures of servitors. Hundreds of them, twitching their last as they sought to breathe in the void. A gale of escaping air tossed them against and around the departing wreckage. The distance between the ship and the Ligurian grew with the station’s slow rotation. I still held my breath, half expecting the ship to come to life, reverse course and collide with the station. But there was no fool aboard. There was nothing aboard. It was only a dead thing now, and it floated further and further away, disappearing into the eternal dark as it moved beyond the lights of the facility.

My fear was unfounded, but so was my hope. I had not seen the figure of the monster among the servitors.

‘It hasn’t moved,’ Kren said, sounding impressed and frightened in equal measure.

I looked back at the pict screens. The images succeeded each other, showing the bay stripped of servitors and the lighter wreckage. The monster was in the same position in every pict. It had been knocked back into a work island as decompression began, and had grabbed the scaffolding. It was hunched forwards against the wind.

‘Is it bigger than it was?’ Macer asked me.

‘It looks swollen,’ I said. The monster’s back had become a spiked dome.

The windstorm diminished, then stopped. A vacuum claimed the bay. Pict after pict appeared on the screens, and the monster never moved.

‘Any chance it’s dead?’ Kren wondered.

‘It’s still standing,’ said Rowne. ‘I think we should assume it lives.’

Macer’s hands hovered over the controls. ‘I don’t want to leave the outer door open,’ he said. ‘There’s always the chance of another breach.’

Rowne nodded. ‘Open or closed makes no difference now, does it?’

‘It doesn’t.’ Macer flipped back a number of the toggles, and the door irised shut. ‘I’m keeping the oxygen turned off.’

‘So what now?’ Kren asked. ‘How do we expel it?’

‘Amputation,’ Rowne said softly.

Macer’s eyes widened. ‘You want to break off part of the facility?’

‘Is it possible?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Macer moved to a pict table in the centre of the bridge. He called up hololithic maps of the station. We stood around the table and waited while he contemplated the lines. ‘I’m no tech-priest,’ he said at last. ‘We’re risking a lot by not knowing the proper rituals.’

‘But…’ Rowne encouraged.

‘But life support is concentrated in the hub. Ventilation and power feed into the bays from the centre, and there is little circulation between them.’ He drew a finger around Gamma Bay. A red line followed his gesture, isolating the bay. ‘What we’ll be doing is cutting the bay off. We don’t have to re-route anything. We’ve already killed the oxygen. I’ll do the same to the power once we no longer need to see what is going on in there.’

‘We’ll have to be careful with the cutting until then, but we can manage,’ said Rowne.

‘You make it sound so simple,’ I said.

‘It isn’t,’ said Kren.

‘It’s what we do,’ said Rowne. ‘We break ships. We’re just breaking our own this time.’

‘And if that piece collides with the rest?’ My earlier fear seemed much more plausible now.

‘Explosive charges.’ Rowne leaned closer to the diagram, calculating. ‘If we put them in the right positions, they’ll give the bay enough motive force to move it away safely.’

‘I’ll sort out the trajectories,’ said Kren.

Rowne looked back at the bay’s pict screens. ‘The beast still hasn’t moved,’ she said. ‘We haven’t killed it, but maybe the void has it immobilised. We have our chance. Let’s use it.’

Kren and Macer turned to the cogitators to begin calculating the lines on which they would break the Ligurian apart. Rowne headed for the bridge door. She had to prepare the hordes of servitors in the other bays.

‘What can I do?’ I asked her.

She paused. She gazed at me, her face expressionless. ‘Monitor our foe,’ she said. ‘Let us know if it moves.’

‘If there’s anything else…’ I began.

‘You’ve done enough,’ she said, and strode off the bridge.

The work began. I did as I was told, and nothing else. There was nothing else for me. I had less use than a servitor. I could not even preach to the crew. I could not stir their courage. I did not think they wanted to hear anything I had to say, and not because their faith was wanting. They would hear a fool and a hypocrite.

Rowne, Macer and Kren began the systematic process of disassembling a portion of the station. They worked with the same focus of purpose that they did on the wrecks they collected. There was, in the end, very little difference between the work they did to live, and the work they did now to survive. A mistake in either case could mean disaster. I wanted them to hurry, and I didn’t want to die, so I said nothing, trusting their skill, and kept my exhortations inside my head. One of the first things Macer did was remove several plasma cutters from the servitors. The tools were in the bridge now, our weapons of last resort. I did not believe they could kill the monster. They could hurt it, though. Or so I felt reasonably sure. Their presence gave me a measure of comfort.

I stayed out of the way of the work and watched the screens. Hour after hour went by, and the monster never moved. I speculated that it had stored oxygen in its swollen back, though I could not imagine how, or guess how long the supply might last. The speculation, like everything about me, was pointless.

I prayed, too. I prayed while I stared at the monster. I prayed during my brief periods of rest, when one of the others would relieve me. I prayed for guidance, for strength, for redemption. And I prayed for a sign, any sign, that the Emperor had not turned His back on me.

Or worse. My greatest fear, that I was directing my prayers to nothingness, threatened to become something more terrible – a conviction. I did not want that to happen. I told myself that it was my own weakness that was leading me down this path.

I was being left alone with my thoughts for too long. I envied the others. They had the work to keep them busy. Their thoughts were focused on the urgency of their task. They had no room for doubts, and they felt no guilt.

The few conversations I had were brief, and brought me no comfort. They were little more than requests for the status of the monster, and my answer was always the same. It had not moved. Once, when Macer came through and checked, I tried to engage him in a longer discussion.

‘We have the door to Gamma Bay properly barricaded,’ I said. ‘What about the walls? Do you think they’re strong enough?’

‘If they aren’t, we’re sure to find out.’

‘Is there something we should do?’

‘We’re doing it. It can’t break through the walls if it isn’t on the station.’

He wasn’t being sarcastic. I felt the rebuke all the same. When it came to the physical realities of our situation, there was nothing I could suggest that the others had not already considered. This was their domain, not mine. My domain should have been the spiritual threat, and I had abdicated my duty there.

Rowne, Kren and Macer worked relentlessly, but what they were attempting was a massive undertaking. It took time, and they needed to rest, too. When they had cut through almost half the thickness of the facility’s hull, a moment came when Kren relieved me on the bridge, and Rowne staggered past on the way to her quarters to sleep. I followed her. If I had been asked what I hoped to accomplish, I would not have been able to answer. We had not exchanged more than a few words since I had freed the monster, and I could not let things remain as they were between us. I had no clear idea of how I would make things better, though I was driven by the unformed but urgent need for redemption. She could give me that. A sign from her would feel like a blessing from the Emperor.

Rowne had collapsed on her cot when I reached her doorway. She groaned when she saw me. ‘Go away, Oswick. Let me sleep.’

‘I just wanted to ask, again, if there’s something more I can do. Anything at all.’

‘You’ve done enough. Heusen is dead because of you.’

Her judgement was definitive. I nodded, and turned to go. Before I could leave, though, she sat up.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I have to know. Why did you do it?’

‘I thought it was the right thing to do.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ I said, defensively.

‘Why did you think it was right?’

‘I… He was an angel of the Emperor. It was wrong to keep him frozen. We… I mean… I needed…’ I flailed about for any answer that would give me absolution in her eyes. There was none to be found. I was desperate for anything that I could believe was the truth, other than the truth that I could not face. My efforts were pathetic to my own ears, and her eyes grew even colder.

Rowne confronted me with the truth I was trying to avoid. ‘You did it because you were angry with me?’ she said. ‘Were you that shallow a fool?’ She waited for me to prove her wrong, to show that I was driven by more than hurt feelings.

I was silent at first. I couldn’t look at her. I stared at the floor next to her cot. ‘Yes,’ I said at last. ‘But not just because of that.’ This was also true. There were the doubts that had driven me to seek escape with her in the first place. ‘The Space Marine had religious certainty. I needed that.’

‘And did you get it?’ She turned the question into an accusation.

‘That monster prays,’ I said softly. ‘It is sure of its god. It has been blessed by its god.’

‘What are you saying?’ Rowne asked, horrified.

‘I don’t know. Only what I witnessed.’ I took a deep, shuddering breath of pain. ‘I confronted the creature with the icon of the Emperor. I tried to banish it in His name. I failed. The icon did nothing.’

‘Then perhaps it is a mutation,’ she said. ‘Nothing more.’

‘It isn’t. You know it isn’t.’

She didn’t contradict me. ‘Then it is your faith that is too weak.’

‘Yes,’ I said. That was still the most comforting of answers. The alternative ate at my heart like a cancer. ‘Which is proof of what I’ve been telling you all along. I am unfit. I was tested, and I failed. In every possible way.’

‘What do you want from me?’

‘What I said. To help. I need a way back, Ligeia. I need to atone.’

She sighed. ‘Your needs are not uppermost in my mind right now.’

A short blast of a klaxon saved me from the need to answer. It was a signal of alarm from Kren. Rowne shot up off the bed, and was past me, through the doorway and out of her quarters before I had taken two steps. I hurried to catch up, and managed to reach the bridge just ahead of Macer.

‘What is it?’ Rowne asked.

Kren pointed at the monitor. ‘It’s gone.’

We gathered around the screen. The region of the bay it showed was empty.

‘Did you see which way it was moving?’ Macer asked.

‘No. It disappeared between picts.’

‘How fast can it move?’ Rowne wondered. There were only a few seconds between each image capture.

‘So where is it?’ said Macer. He moved from one screen to the next. Between them, the row showed the entirety of Gamma Bay. There was no sign of the creature.

A helpless silence fell. We were statues, each waiting for someone else to take the initiative, to find the solution, to tell us what we must do. We had been braced for the creature to begin smashing at the doors again. We had no contingencies if it broke through, but we had gone ahead with the plan. We had had faith that there was time to put it into action. We had been waiting for the horror to start moving again. We were unprepared for its absence.

‘How close are we to being able to sever Gamma Bay?’ I asked.

‘What does it matter?’ said Kren. ‘If it’s gone, what’s the good in cutting the bay loose?’

‘What if it’s still there, hiding under wreckage?’

‘Why would it do that?’

‘To fool us. Maybe it knows what we have been trying to do.’

‘If it’s still there, we’ll find it,’ said Macer. He worked the controls, froze the march of successive picts, and called up earlier images. ‘It can’t have hidden without displacing the wreck. Look for differences between these picts and the current ones.’

We studied the screens. The task was rendered more difficult by the disorder left behind by the venting. The heavier wreckage had not been blown into the void, but almost all the scaffolding at the work islands had fallen, and the floor was strewn with the displaced masses. We had to look over every square foot of the bay. Macer was right, though. If there was a change, it should be obvious once we spotted it.

There was nothing.

‘It didn’t get out the door,’ Macer fumed. ‘It didn’t cut through the walls. So where is it?’

I went back to the first monitor and selected the last image of the monster, then the first of its absence. I wanted to see something in the way the monster crouched that we had missed before. There was nothing. It was there, and then it wasn’t, as if it had blinked out of existence. I flipped back and forth between the picts, unwilling to accept the impossible. Then I saw it.

‘What’s this?’ I asked. In the first pict showing the empty space where the monster had just been, there was a rectangular piece of metal on the floor. Its surface was taken up by thick mesh. It was not there in the earlier picts.

Macer looked over my shoulder. ‘That’s one of the ventilation grilles.’

‘Throne,’ said Rowne. ‘It’s in the shafts!’

‘How?’ Macer objected. ‘One of us could only barely squeeze in. It’s several times too large.’

‘I don’t know how,’ said Rowne. ‘But that’s where it is.’

We fell quiet again. We looked around at the black iron of the walls, and the ribbed, shallow dome of the ceiling, as if the creature would suddenly be revealed to us. Every click and chug and groan of the machinery of the facility took on new significance. Nothing was normal any longer. Every sound was the approach of the beast.

I turned around slowly, feeling utterly exposed. ‘What do we do?’ I asked. I wanted the certainty of either action or of refuge as desperately as I had needed the certainty of faith earlier.

No one answered. We grabbed plasma cutters, their comfort suddenly seeming very poor. I held the bulky tool with both hands. My throat was dry. If I have to fire, I thought, I’m already lost.

‘What do we do?’ I said again, growing frantic.

‘Be quiet,’ Kren hissed.

I obeyed. I turned and turned, ears straining for the metal creaks that would herald my doom. Every second that passed with nothing closing in built up an illusion that the next second would also be quiet. I plunged into a deep irrationality of hope. Perhaps, I thought, if I listened hard enough, I would never hear what I feared to hear.

‘There,’ Rowne whispered. ‘There.’

Voices slithered out of the ventilation grilles. They were faint. That made them no less terrible. The monster’s hideous prayer came for us. ‘Hail, hail, hail, Changer of Ways!’ The metal confines of the shafts reverberated with echoes, filling the bridge with the sound of a distant, idiot choir. The cries became louder and more distinct. There were far more than three voices now. There was still the deep, thunderous growl. It surrounded a myriad of high trills that sank into my ears like acid. I had a vision of an army of filaments coiling through the ventilation shaft, shrieking praise to their foul god.

‘Where is it coming from?’ said Macer.

The chanting was so loud, it seemed to emerge from all the grilles at once. Metal groaned under the weight of a great bulk, almost inaudible beneath the rhythmic screaming. The monster was almost upon us, and we still did not know where to turn.

‘We can’t stay here,’ Rowne said, and rolled the dice. She made for the exit that would lead to the ring corridors.

I started to follow, and then the ceiling ripped open. The grille in the centre of the dome crashed to the deck. Metal peeled back like blackened petals, and the monster plunged down to the centre of the bridge. It struck with such force that the bridge shook, throwing us off balance. The monster rose to its full height and screamed with a hundred voices.

‘CHANGER OF WAAAAAAAAYS!’

The creature had transformed. Though it had come for us through narrow shafts, it had grown. When it reared up, it was almost fifteen feet tall. Almost every trace of the human had vanished from its shape. The rippling exoskeleton was gone, replaced by rubbery, slime-coated flesh that flashed iridescent night-blue and muscle-pink. Instead of the two muscular legs, the beast’s torso ended in a long, thick, slug-like tail, fringed with hundreds of scaled, insectoid legs. Its arms were longer and more flexible than before, and looked both gelid and strong enough to rip the hull open. Even the pincer arm slashed the air like a whip. The jaws of the pincer glinted with rows of gleaming, ivory teeth. They were human, though filed into broken, jagged points. The mound on the shoulder had lengthened, as had the monster’s neck, and the two had wrapped around each other, a helix of tensing, flexing, oozing muscle. The head had become a cluster of maws, reptilian, serpentine, snapping and slavering on all sides. Their sprouting, multi-forked tongues spewed hissing ichor, and they vibrated so quickly they created a humming, ear-splitting song.

Tentacles covered the body. Some were the length of a human finger. Others were as long as the arms. They seemed to have spread over the creature like a disease, radiating outwards from the chest wound Heusen had given it. There were scores of them, and they ended in mouths. The tentacles were the choir. They were throats as well as arms. Their circular jaws opened and closed, pursing puckered, suppurating lips and opening them to release air and shriek their part of the refrain.

The eyes had spread too. The long eyes had moved downwards from what had been the head. They wrapped around the throat beneath the jaws, a sickly yellow band of a score of lidless pupils. More eyes blinked from the lengths of the tentacles and limbs. They were scattered across the torso and along the tail. They even gazed from the top and underside of the jaws. The monster looked everywhere at once, and it hurled its prayer at all it saw.

And moving through the body, like the vision of a man trapped under ice, was Heusen. His agony seemed to mock me, as if to say, Here! Here! Here is the religious certainty you need! I did not want to believe that I was seeing his soul, trapped forever in the monstrous body, screaming as he sought an escape from torment, an escape that would never be his.

I remember the appearance of the monster, and the details of its form, as if I had had the luxury of contemplating a statue. The truth is that the horror of the creature was so great, it impressed itself upon me in all its hideous detail in an instant. It crashed to the deck and rose. I gasped in horror. Then, I ran.

Macer and Kren were within the abomination’s reach. Macer leapt over the bank of screens and fell on the other side. Kren was only a few feet from the creature and its impact staggered her. She stumbled and fired her plasma cutter at the same time. The beam cut up along the monster’s neck and into one of its maws. The flesh parted, hissing, and then closed again, as if she had been firing at water.

‘Praaaaaaaaiiise!’ the monster roared with a hundred voices. It lunged forwards and grabbed Kren’s head with one of its clawed hands. The talons closed over her like a cage. As they did, Heusen’s face suddenly emerged from the palm, his shrieks clear again and suffused with a suffering beyond my comprehension. His mouth opened as if on a hinge, and snapped shut on Kren’s face. Her muffled scream sounded like drowning. Flesh hissed, and my last glimpse of Kren was of her head starting to stretch apart, skull and flesh flowing into the hand of the beast.

She was still screaming.

Macer was on his feet again and running, and the three of us fled the bridge. The liquid, cracking, choking sounds of Kren being absorbed followed us. We sprinted down the hall and into the ring corridor. Ahead of me, Rowne paused for a moment, and then turned left.

‘Where?’ Macer gasped.

‘Escape pod,’ Rowne said.

Good, I thought. I didn’t care that the reasons not to take the pod had not been resolved. All I cared about was that we leave the Ligurian at once.

Kren’s death had bought us a head start in our flight, but it was a short one. As we tore past the entrance to Beta Bay, I heard the songs of the beast rattle down the corridor. It was following us.

Midway between Alpha and Beta, Rowne turned into a narrow accessway. It sloped upwards steeply, the ceiling angling in parallel, and ended at a nondescript wall. Rowne opened a panel in it, yanked the recessed lever down, and the wall rose into the ceiling, revealing a small airlock and the hatch of the escape pod. Rowne turned the wheel on the hatch, the clamps released, and she pulled the door open. I followed Macer into the pod. Before Rowne followed us, she re-engaged the airlock and the wall slid down while she closed the hatch.

The slam and clunk of metal sealed us off from the rest of the facility. The sound of the monster’s pursuit became almost inaudible. A huge sigh of relief wracked my body. Only a hair’s breadth of dignity differentiated it from a sob.

The interior of the pod was cramped. The chamber was circular, with a ceiling so low that I could not stand without stooping. There were four seats with grav webbing facing each other from the perimeter of the space. The controls were in the centre, within easy reach of any of the seats, and so leaving almost no space to stand. We sat whether we wanted to or not. Rowne and Macer watched the hatch, their shoulders hunched with tension. Macer and I had dropped our plasma cutters, but Rowne still carried hers. She aimed it at the hatch. After a minute, perhaps remembering how little difference Kren’s weapon had made, she lowered it again. Her eyes never wavered from the hatch, though.

The noises the monster made as it lurched through the ring corridor were less faint than they had been. I started holding my breath again. Neither Rowne nor Macer even glanced at the pod’s controls.

‘What are we waiting for?’ I whispered. ‘Why aren’t we going?’

‘No point,’ said Rowne. ‘We already explained.’

‘But we have to leave!’ It was all I could do not to shout.

‘We can’t.’

‘So we’re just going to wait for it to find us? We’ve nowhere to run.’

‘The pod’s oxygen supply is self-contained,’ Macer explained with forced calm. ‘There are no points of connection between the pod and the station except the hatch.’

I began to understand. The monster could not reach us through the shafts. If it did not know we were here, we might be safe for a short while. I had the refuge I had prayed for. I did not like it. In spite of everything, I wanted someone to launch the pod. Better to take our chances in the void, I thought. Better to die that death than the ones the abomination had in store for us.

My thoughts must have been visible on my face. Rowne said, ‘I’m not ready to die at all. Not yet.’

I clenched my jaw and nodded.

No one said anything else. The slithering, shuffling, scraping movement of the monster drew closer. ‘Hail!’ the horror sang. ‘Hail! Hail hail hail! Change, change, change for Lord of Fate! Haaaaaaaail!’

I wanted to close my eyes and cover my ears. Every instinct urged me to flee from the unholy sounds and prayer. I backed up until I was pressed against the rear wall of the pod. My heart pounded a deafening beat. It was too loud. The monster would hear me breathing. It would hear my fear. It would find me.

Closer now. The hatch seemed thin as gossamer. The beast was huge. It must fill the halls beyond, I thought. It owned the Ligurian. We were the hunted at bay, trapped in a burrow with no exit.

I stared at the hatch and waited for the claws to tear through the metal.

‘Embrace the maelstrom of flux!’ the monster cried with one set of voices. A dozen other thin, whistling throats howled, ‘Hail, hail, hail, Changer of Ways!’

The first set broke up into overlapping dialogue.

‘Accept the Lord of Fate!’

‘Receive his touch!’

‘Receive his gift!’

The huge mass of the monster scuttled and squelched closer yet. It stopped for a moment, and I knew it was at the entrance to the accessway. Then it began moving again. Gradually, the songs faded away.

My knees gave out and I slumped into the nearest seat. I accepted the brief reprieve with gratitude. I saw the shoulders of the other two relax. Slightly.

‘That gives us a bit of time,’ said Macer.

‘And we’ve learned something to our advantage,’ Rowne added.

‘What?’ I asked, disbelieving.

‘It doesn’t reason well, if at all. It did not come up the ramp. It saw an empty corridor and a blank wall, and kept going.’

‘That is something,’ said Macer. ‘We know we can hide. I don’t know for how long, though. We have to destroy it.’

‘How?’ I said. ‘The plasma cutters don’t hurt it anymore. What do we have that can kill it?’

‘Nothing,’ said Rowne. ‘So our situation is unchanged. We have to get it off the station.’

‘If we’re lucky and we know where it is, I might be able to vent that sector,’ Macer said. ‘But that didn’t do us any good before, so unless you can think of a way of getting it back into Gamma Bay…’

‘It doesn’t have to be Gamma Bay,’ Rowne said. Her eyes narrowed as the idea took form. ‘All we have to do is lure it onto one of the wrecks, then release it’

‘That’s cleaner than breaking the station,’ Macer agreed. ‘Which wreck?’

‘The mass conveyer,’ I suggested. ‘In case we have to use the colony ship.’

‘We never said we could use it,’ said Rowne.

‘You did say it wouldn’t be impossible.’

She grimaced, but Macer nodded. ‘He’s right,’ he said. ‘We should keep all our options open.’

‘All right,’ Rowne said. ‘The Cardinal Vezayne, then. It’s on Beta. That’s close.’

‘How is this going to work?’ I asked.

‘I have to reach the bridge,’ said Macer.

‘Which you can’t until we’re sure the creature isn’t after you,’ said Rowne. ‘So stay here until it starts pursuing me. You should be able to hear it.’

I cleared my throat. ‘Pursuing us,’ I said. My voice cracked.

Rowne looked at me. ‘Are you sure?’

Of course I was. And of course I wasn’t. I knew every way that I was unfit for this. I was unfit for the path my life had taken. I should never have been on the battlefield. I should never have been outside an administrative warren, surrounded by scribes and thickets of bureaucratic parchment. But I survived the battlefield, and managed not to dishonour myself, even though I suffered through the hypocrisy of my sermons. I was where I should not be once again, and I had already done enough to bring shame to the rest of my life. Ever since I had unleashed the horror, I had been a cowering mess, unable to help, looking entirely to the others to save my foolish hide. It was time for that to stop.

I can tell what you’re thinking. And you’re right. It wasn’t honour that pushed me at that moment. It was the pain I felt every time Rowne looked at me. I loved her. I could not bear to think that she no longer loved me. I had to banish the coldness in her gaze. I wanted her to look at me as she once had. Before, she had believed too much in me, and my commitment to duty. Now, she didn’t believe in me at all.

There wasn’t much I could do to fight the monster. But I did think I could change how Rowne saw me. I could win her love back. This would be my redemption. It was, I believe, the only redemption I cared about.

I know what this sounds like. I know you think I’m ridiculous. You think this was hardly the moment for a foolish romantic gesture. Perhaps. Perhaps my behaviour was based on my fantasies of who Rowne and I were, rather than our realities. But isn’t that love? Isn’t it about idealisation? Aren’t we supposed to see the perfection of the loved one, and then, in order to be worthy, strive to become the perfected dream of ourselves?

There is so little light in the galaxy, we must fight with all our souls to hold on to the glimmers that come our way. You think I am a fool. I think you are cynical. I think you have never loved, not truly, or you would understand my need to save myself by saving Rowne.

Yes, by saving Rowne. That was what I aspired to. That was what I believed I was taking the first step towards. I am not ashamed of that. I am proud.

‘Two of us are a more convincing target,’ I said. ‘The beast will have no reason not to follow us, and two have a better chance of survival.’

‘True enough,’ said Macer.

Rowne looked doubtful, but she nodded.

‘I can see how we’ll lure it into the ship,’ I said. ‘How do we get out again and keep it in there long enough for Macer to release the Vezayne?’

‘Explosive charges,’ Rowne said. ‘Go in, double back once it follows us and blow up the way behind us. We don’t have to hold it long.’

‘The moment I see you come out,’ said Macer, ‘I’ll close the outer door.’

‘We’ll use some of the charges that were going to separate Gamma Bay. We know where they are.’

‘Right,’ said Macer. ‘So we all know what we’re doing, do we?’

Rowne gave a short bark of laughter. ‘I don’t know about that, but we know what we’re going to try.’

‘Lots of running,’ I said. ‘I can do that.’

That was my attempt at gallows humour. It fell flat even for me.

Rowne opened the hatch. She pressed her ear against the closed wall of the airlock, then raised the lever on our side. When the wall went up, there was a grinding screech, as if we had sounded a klaxon for the beast to come and consume us.

‘That should make it come running,’ I said.

Rowne didn’t answer. We moved forwards, and Macer closed the airlock and hatch behind us. We headed down the ramp to the intersection with the ring corridor, where we stopped and listened again. There was nothing.

‘Other side of the station?’ I whispered.

‘Or right over our heads,’ Rowne said grimly.

She turned left. As silently as we could, we jogged spinward, listening for the approach of the maddening choir. We passed Beta Bay and kept going until we reached one of the sites where Rowne and the others had been working to cut Gamma Bay free of the Ligurian. Servitors, now inert, had cut a deep trench into the deck and up the void-side wall of the corridor. Conduits and cables had been severed and capped. The crew had gone as far as turning off all the life support systems to the bay before the monster had escaped. There was still power running in for illumination. Otherwise, Gamma Bay had become a frozen, lifeless sector. I wondered what would have happened if the monster had waited just a bit longer. If we had had a few more hours, maybe the plan would have worked. Then again, perhaps the beast had always meant to leave at the juncture it had. Maybe the scheme had never had a chance of success.

I hoped the new one did.

Rowne knelt beside the trench. She reached down and detached an explosive charge from inside, removing the remote detonation cable. She moved across the corridor and pulled out another. Then she handed me one of the devices. It was a blocky, metal prism about a yard long. There was a trip on one side, and three buttons below it, red, green and black.

‘Have you used one before?’

‘No.’

‘Green primes the explosive.’ She pointed at the buttons. ‘Black cancels. Red triggers with a ten-second delay.’

‘Understood.’ The demolition charge was heavy. I had to lean slightly against its weight. ‘Running with these is not going to be easy,’ I said.

‘I know. If we have to drop them, we will. Better not to.’

‘We could place one near the entrance to the Vezayne. Trigger it as we leave.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘We’ll put yours there.’ She was stronger than I was, and I didn’t argue. ‘We’ll keep the other, try to hold it deeper in the ship if we can.’

I nodded. ‘So now all we have to do is find it.’ My mouth was dry. The thought of deliberately seeking the monster terrified me. ‘It could be anywhere.’

‘If it’s still following this corridor, it will wind up coming back this way.’

‘If,’ I repeated. ‘We haven’t predicted its actions very well up to now.’

‘No,’ she admitted. She looked up and down the corridor.

‘If it turns around, it could cut us off from Beta,’ I said. Then we would have to circumnavigate the Ligurian. On a journey of that length, our chances would drop to zero.

‘We’ll bring it to us.’ Rowne started back the way we had come. ‘We’ll bring it to where we want it. We’ll draw it with noise.’

Unless we already have, I thought. I chose to believe we had not. Except for when it had been motionless in Gamma Bay, the monster had never stopped chanting. Its hymn announced its coming, the fluting of a hideous piper.

Weighed down by the demolition charges, we moved much more slowly, but more quietly. The gradual curve of the corridor seemed endless, bulkheads like vertebrae marking off our steps down a path of iron vanishing into the gloom. I strained to hear the monster’s song. The background groans and stirrings of the station oppressed me. They were working against us, concealing the approach of the creature. The incomplete demolition work around Gamma Bay had put the integrity of the station under strain, and every time the hull creaked, I thought it was the monster’s tread.

The corridor curved, on and on, the distance to our goal seeming to recede the longer we walked. It’s waiting for us there, I thought. It’s following us through the walls. It will attack just before we’re ready, because it is a curse. It is my punishment. It is the hand of a dark god, and it is here to show me, as I meet my doom, that this god, at least, is real.

Despair followed me, breathing down my neck. I kept my eyes focused on Rowne. She was why I was here. She was why I was still fighting.

Survive this, and anything is possible. Win her love again, and everything is possible.

Reaching the door to Beta Bay felt like victory. Without a pause, Rowne opened the bay. The grinding roar of the door was monstrously loud. We ran inside, making for the gaping hole in the hull of the Cardinal Vezayne. We passed by ranks of motionless servitors. Rowne had nullified all other tasks during the attempt to sever Gamma Bay. Her control dais was a short distance from the hull, and she stopped beside it. Mechadendrites linked the dais to a dozen servitors.

‘Keep watch,’ Rowne told me, then put down her explosive and climbed up to the controls. A few moments later, the servitors jerked into action. The mechadendrites withdrew, and the servitors converged on a nearby mound of refuse. Drills and plasma cutters attacked the metal. Fragments of the dead ship clattered to the deck. The din of pointless labour was tremendous.

Rowne descended from the dais, picked up her demolition charge, and we moved to Beta Bay’s outer door. Unlike with the Space Marine’s vessel, the opening was at the widest diameter of the iris. We watched the threshold to the bay, our backs to the huge, dark maw of the Vezayne. I felt that I was standing on the edge of an immense cavern. If I stumbled backwards, I would fall into a starless void.

The metal crashed. Drills whined. My heart beat so loudly, it was in competition with the uproar of the servitors. Rowne said something I could not hear.

‘I wish we had a vox!’ she repeated.

I nodded. Was Macer still in the pod? Had he heard the passage of the monster? Was he on the bridge? I hoped so. Rowne trusted his judgement. So did I. Given what we were fighting, that meant little.

So much depended on chance. If Macer was just a few seconds too slow in reaching the bridge, then we were doomed. And we had no way of telling him what to do.

We did not hear the monster’s song. The noise Rowne had created to lure it was too great. It arrived suddenly, rushing through the doorway with a slithering lurch. It saw us, and it reared back, its mouths shouting ‘HAAAAAAIL!’ in unison. Then it rushed forwards. Its gelid body crushed servitors, and its arms flailed at the air like a storm of whips. Rowne grasped my shoulder, holding me back until the beast was committed to its charge.

‘Now,’ she hissed, and we turned and ran.

A wide catwalk led us into the hull of the Cardinal Vezayne. It branched over and over again, an iron web extending through the caverns of the huge vessel. Sparse lumen strips lit the walkways but little else. Hints of immensity surrounded us. The vessel was more than three miles long. It seemed much larger than that. Catwalks, ladders and dimly glinting cables stretched into the ghosts of cargo bays and the traces of decks. This was a monstrous honeycomb of spaces. The walls of some caverns were intact. Others were half-disassembled outlines. The interior of the Cardinal Vezayne was interlocking emptiness, a sectioning of void.

Rowne led the way down the primary catwalk. The demolition charge banged against my leg as I ran awkwardly, an insect suspended in black space. From behind came the bellow of the monster.

‘HAIL, CHANGER OF WAYS!’

All the voices were in unison, a hundred jaws and tentacles screaming in rapture. The shout rolled into the caverns of the Vezayne. The echoes bounced off concavities. Pendulous halves of walls reverberated with the cry. The ship itself seemed to join in the praise, for it had been transformed, and now, with its dimly seen forms, it could well be a cathedral to a god of change. Divinity snarled in the Cardinal Vezayne, and it sank its fangs into my faith.

The huge mass of the beast shook the catwalk. Long throats hooted in the eagerness of pursuit.

Rowne paused at an intersection. ‘Leave your charge here,’ she said. I dropped it where she pointed, on the other, narrow walkway, just past the junction.

I glanced back. The monster was visible as a dark, hulking shape less than a hundred yards away, and closing. When it heaved itself past a lumen strip, the pink and blue of its flesh glistened.

We started running again. Freed of the encumbrance of the charge, I had new energy and speed. Rowne was still in front, still carrying her explosive, and I had to slow down or collide with her.

The slithering drew closer. The catwalk shook with greater violence. It bounced under our feet. The railing was a single cable running through poles ten yards apart. It would be easy to slip and fall through and plummet into the dark.

Rowne turned right at the next junction. I had to hold on to the cable as we scrambled up towards the mouth of a cylinder a quarter-mile in diameter. At the top, adamantium walls divided the space, rising to a ceiling that was no longer there. Rowne hurried along the far right divide, next to the curvature of the cylinder’s wall. I had no idea of what the space might once have been. It was an abstraction now, a collection of metal shapes with no meaning, only size, as they delineated space with no purpose. I was growing disorientated, having trouble remembering which way we were heading.

We ran straight for several hundred yards, growing tired, the horror eating up the space between us. Then Rowne turned right again, passing through a gap in the cylinder and down another swaying catwalk, heading back to the main path. When we rejoined the first catwalk, she stopped.

‘Keep going,’ she said. ‘This is where we stop it.’

I took a few steps and hesitated. She had crouched and primed the charge. The monster was halfway down the slope to the junction.

‘Go!’ Rowne shouted.

I obeyed. I headed for the exit, but kept looking back. She waited another few seconds, then hit the detonator. As she straightened to run, the horror sprang forwards, rushing to catch her. Still on the secondary catwalk, it snapped out a tentacle and caught her left ankle. It pulled her down. Rowne shouted and grabbed a pole with both hands, holding fast.

The seconds counted down.

I stopped, horrified.

I was too far away to help. I was. If I had run back, I would have arrived just in time for the explosion.

‘Chaaaange!’ the monster shouted. It reached the intersection. It was not yet close enough to reach Rowne with its talons. Another tentacle stretched out for her.

Three seconds had passed.

Rowne’s pant leg dissolved and her flesh sizzled. She shrieked in pain and fury, and yanked her foot with desperate violence.

Five seconds.

Rowne hauled herself forwards with her arms as she pulled. The tentacle slipped down her foot, peeling off flesh and liquefied work boot. Rowne shed her skin, and the tentacle fell away, clutching tissue.

Seven seconds.

Rowne staggered up, one foot a crimson mess. She ran. The tentacles grasped for her and missed.

Nine seconds.

The monster’s jaws gabbled in confusion that its prey should spurn its gift. With a choir of roars, it launched itself after Rowne.

The demolition charge exploded.

The flash lit the interior of the Vezayne in blinding orange. It enveloped the monster and disintegrated sections of both catwalks. The monster fell into the bowels of the ship. Darkness swallowed it, and it sang as it fell out of sight, screaming praise as it bounced and crunched against the vessel’s broken skeleton. There was a heavier impact, far down, and then no more. The clanging of falling metal faded, but the monster’s song continued. Faintly, the echoes distorted by distance and the fragmented interior of the ship, the voices crawled up the hall and twisted through the hollow dark.

The explosion turned the catwalk into a metal whip. Where I stood, it jerked up and down violently. I fell against the cable and clutched it in a death grip. Rowne was fast enough to escape the blast area, but not to reach safety. The catwalk bucked, throwing her into the air. She came down hard, bounced again, and slid back as the severed catwalk bent down. The cable snapped free of a handful of poles, and the path dipped even further. She scrabbled for purchase. As she pitched off into the void, she grabbed a trailing end of the cable and hung there, dangling, her grip slipping.

I struggled towards her. Every step made the catwalk bounce and weave, threatening to throw her off, and I could barely stand. ‘Hang on!’ I called, as if she would choose not to. ‘I’m coming! I’ll get you up!’

As the catwalk dipped, I had to slow down, and then crawl, making sure of each handhold before I made another move. My progress was slow. The endless song of the monster mocked me as I inched through the dark towards the hope of redemption.

Rowne tried to climb up the cable, but her grip kept slipping, and her movements made the bucking worse.

I reached the end of the catwalk. ‘I’m here!’ I said. I didn’t know how to get her back up. My own position was precarious. The slope was so steep, I had to hold on to one of the poles with both hands to keep from slipping off. I didn’t see how I could pull the cable and Rowne up without falling too. She was about ten feet below me, and hopelessly out of reach.

She looked at me. She said nothing.

‘I…’ I said. ‘I just… Let me try to…’ I cast about helplessly.

Rowne grimaced. She made one more desperate attempt to climb the cable.

I wrapped my arms around the pole as the catwalk whipped back and forth. It jerked up, and yanked the cable from her hands.

She fell in silence.

‘No no no no no nooo,’ I moaned. I peered into the darkness. There were no lumen strips below. There was only inky black. ‘Ligeia!’ I called.

Ligeia-geia-eia, my voice came back to me.

I listened for an answer. All I heard was the distant hymn of the monster. ‘Hail, hail, hail, Changer of Ways!’ Voices small and great tumbled over each other, now in unison, now in counterpoint, now in utter cacophony. They created a mosaic of prayer, rising from the depths. The monster was far away, and it was everywhere. I did not know if it was climbing or still.

‘Ligeia!’ I called again, and listened again, and still there was no word. The mad hymn surrounded me. I clung to the pole, motionless and helpless, and at last I screamed, ‘Where are you?’

I cried out to Rowne in desperation, to the monster in fear, and to the Emperor in agony. Where are you? The desperation, the fear and the agony had scraped me hollow. I was a husk, bereft of hope and purpose. Where are you? Without an answer, I might stay where I was until the darkness took me too.

Only the monster replied, and its answer was the same mockery, the everywhere and nowhere song.

Where are you? There would never be an answer, I thought. Then I realised that the silence was the answer. Where are you? Nowhere.

There was no one.

There never had been.

And then, from the dark and the deep, came a groan, perfectly human in its pain.

‘Ligeia!’ I cried once more in a sudden rush of hope.

‘I need light,’ she called.

Light. I looked back up the slope of the catwalk. Light. That, I could do. ‘I’m going to get some,’ I shouted into the black.

I climbed back up the catwalk as slowly as I had descended. Once I reached the level portion, I stood. The crude railing was not to be trusted, with the cable severed at one end. I walked carefully, trying to keep the swaying down. The monster’s song followed me. I told myself it was not growing louder, not getting closer. If I believed otherwise, then there was no hope.

I crossed back into Beta Bay and broke into a run. I scanned the construction zones and servitors for some kind of light that I could carry. The lumen strips were all affixed to the walls. I thought of a plasma cutter, but doubted the extremely focused beam would do Rowne much good. Finally, on the control dais, I found a torch on a rack of tools. I seized it and hurried back into the Cardinal Vezayne.

The monster’s chanting was louder. I froze for a moment, then forced myself to keep moving forwards. Crawling back down the bent catwalk was even more terrifying than the first time, but I managed it.

I think that counts for something.

I hooked my right arm around the last of the poles. I used the torch to look at it carefully before I trusted it with my weight. It was still firmly attached to the catwalk’s surface. Then I shone the torch into the dark below. It was the best part of a minute before the beam found Rowne. She had landed on a girder about fifteen feet down. The girder was about four feet wide, a monolithic slab of metal, but a very narrow refuge. If the catwalk had been weaving slightly to the left or right when she had fallen, she would have missed the girder and plummeted into a dark that extended beyond the reach of the torch beam.

She was sitting up. Blood from her foot pooled around her leg.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘Is anything broken?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. She moved her limbs experimentally. ‘Maybe a rib. It hurts everywhere.’

‘Can you move?’

‘I think so.’

‘Can you climb?’

‘I’ll have to.’

There was nothing I could do from here. I couldn’t get down to her. Even if I could, doing so would serve no purpose.

‘Move the light off me,’ Rowne said. ‘I need to see where I have to go.’

I brought the beam back to where the girder jutted out from a cluster of others emerging from a partly disassembled bulkhead. The top of the climbable mass was within five feet of the catwalk.

Rowne looked at what rose before her. ‘I think I can get that high,’ she said.

‘What about the rest?’ She would still be just below the catwalk, and the gap was too high to jump.

‘Use the cable,’ she said. ‘But wait until I get closer.’

I held the torch steady. She began to climb. She had to get through a thicket of shorn metal, and the light was hardly adequate for the task. Shadows enveloped the ruin, and she reached for glints and the suggestions of shapes. Her movements were slow and painful. Her left foot was slippery with blood. One careful handhold at a time, though, she made her way up.

All the while, I listened to the foul hymn, and waited for the sounds of a huge body in motion.

At last, Rowne was as high as she could go. She wasn’t far from safety, standing on the rounded shape that was the trace of the top of the bulkhead. Now it was up to me.

I left her in darkness again while I struggled with the cable. I pulled the dangling end out through the support poles until I had a good six feet of length. More than enough. I threw it to her, and trained the torch on her again. As she fastened her grip on the cable, I saw, further below, at the edge of the beam, a tentacle slither around a girder.

‘Hurry!’ I said. ‘It’s coming up!’

She climbed. The catwalk began to bounce again, as it had before when it made her fall. But she only had a few hand-widths to go to this time.

Below, the monster’s huge jaws rose into the light.

Rowne’s hands slipped once. She could not use her feet to help, but she clung to the cable with a ferocious grip, and she did not fall. She reached the catwalk.

The monster sang and climbed, tentacles and arms seizing metal, propelling it upwards faster.

Rowne staggered to her feet and took a limping step forwards. I gave her my shoulder, put an arm around her waist, and we struggled forwards on the bucking catwalk, the chanting of the monster closing in. One last stretch now; a straight line to the exit and the end of our trial.

We were less than a dozen yards from the bay’s outer door when there was a roar and the catwalk heaved downwards violently. The monster was up. The tentacle mouths trilled a song of welcome, and the huge jaws roared, ‘Praise change! Praise change! Praise change!’

‘Run!’ said Rowne. She let go and pushed me.

The exit was so close. I charged down the catwalk, heedless of risk. Just a few more steps, a few more steps. I glanced back. Rowne was running, her face a twisted mask of pain. Behind her came the monster, its limbs snatching at the handrail, its body surging our way like a hideous engine. All four mouths at the end of its long neck were gaping our way. In a few seconds, it would have us.

And we didn’t know if Macer was on the bridge.

I reached the doorway and jumped aside. Rowne was right behind me. The monster’s tentacles and arms stretched ahead of it, talons grasping, the circular mouths of the tentacles snapping in hunger.

The moment Rowne crossed the threshold, the iris of the door contracted. The monster howled. The gloom of the Vezayne boiled with the rush of the abomination. ‘TZEEEEEENTCH!’ it wailed. This time, its prayer was not answered. The door closed with the last second to spare. It severed the tip of a raging tentacle. The eyes on its length blinked once, as if in shock that the beast should fail. The mouth gaped open, and then the stump fell, writhing onto the ramp leading to the door.

We heard the deep, heavy grind of the bay’s claws releasing the Cardinal Vezayne. The bay trembled once, then was still. The mass conveyer was unmoored from the Ligurian.

We had banished the horror within.

There was one last thing to do. There was a mound of scrap metal beside the ramp. I grabbed two small sheets of metal from the top. I caught the tentacle between the sheets. With my arms extended, I carried it across the bay to the disposal. A weak flouting came from the tentacle, one last refrain of the monster’s hymn. I hurled the sheets and the tentacle into the disposal. They would be ejected from the station, onto the planetoid below.

And now it was done. I had purged the Ligurian of my sin.

The three of us gathered on the bridge to watch the end. Rowne left a trail of blood behind her, but she refused to go to the medicae centre until everything was finished. She and Macer embraced, trembling with relief.

‘You were there for us,’ Rowne said.

‘Always.’ Macer smiled.

‘Thank you.’ Rowne squeezed his shoulder.

I stood a few paces away, the outsider to a comradeship of years.

We moved to the consoles and Macer trained the exterior lenses on the drifting Cardinal Vezayne. The main screen flicked from lens to lens as the station rotated, and the mass conveyer moved gradually away. We watched it from the viewports too, a huge shape, lightless, a massive, hollow tomb.

Macer had kept the focus of the lenses trained on the hole that had been linked to the Ligurian. The monster was visible in the picts, a grainy figure of frozen rage. At first it was in the same position as the picts succeeded each other, motionless as it had been when Macer had vented Gamma Bay. Then, from pict to pict, it became diminished.

‘It’s falling apart,’ I said.

In one image, a tentacle was broken off. Then one of the talons. The lenses captured the progress of the disintegration. It was gradual at first, then rapid. The huge body remained on the threshold of the breach, less of it there to be seen in each pict. It was a husk.

‘You have been abandoned, too,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘Your god has forsaken you.’

Finally, there was nothing left. The Cardinal Vezayne was the marker of the monster’s end, but the corpse was gone.

Macer slumped back in his seat with a huge sigh of relief. Rowne at last agreed to go to the medicae centre. It was a small chamber, barely more than a first-aid station. The nature of the work on the Ligurian was so dangerous that injuries were either minor or fatal. There was not much I could do for Rowne. I wrapped her foot in bandages, and a clotting salve stopped the bleeding.

‘You need this seen to properly,’ I said.

‘How many days until the Discipline’s Fire comes for you?’

‘Six.’

‘We’ll see if I can hold off an infection until then. I’ll probably lose the foot regardless.’

‘Until then?’ I said. ‘You’re coming with me.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

When we returned to the bridge, Macer concurred with her decision. ‘I’ve been examining the damage we’ve done,’ he said. ‘The Ligurian is unsound. We have to abandon it. We can’t continue the work anyway, not with only two of us.’

‘Has there been any response to our messages?’ Rowne asked.

‘No. I’ve sent another, though, reporting what has happened.’ He did not look happy.

‘How detailed?’

‘As detailed as I felt I had to be.’

‘But no more,’ I said.

‘That’s right.’

Rowne sighed. ‘There will be repercussions.’

And investigations, I thought. They would come from quarters not known for their mercy.

Rowne was leaning against the back of Macer’s seat. Her knuckles suddenly went white with the effort to stay upright.

‘You need to rest,’ I told her.

Her face grey, she let me help her back to her quarters. She fell into bed with a groan.

‘Get some sleep,’ I said.

‘I don’t know if I’ll ever wake.’

‘How bad is the pain?’

‘I’m trying not to think about it.’ She took my hand. ‘Thank you for being there with me,’ she said.

I squeezed her fingers gently. My chest hurt with the swell of happiness. I had my redemption.

‘Stay for a minute,’ she said.

I sat down on the cot beside her. ‘Of course.’

‘So,’ she said, ‘what will you do next?’

‘What I’m told, as will we all.’ Even though what I said was a truth that satisfied her, I felt the guilt of evasion. I was relieved she had not asked whether I would go to Aighe Mortis, or whether I would accept my posting. Depending on the outcome of the investigations, I might find myself wishing I could. But those concerns seemed abstract. I was only interested in the short term. We would be leaving the Ligurian together. That outcome was better than anything I had dared to hope for when I had arrived.

‘And what of your doubts?’ she asked. ‘Have they been answered?’

I thought carefully. ‘I think they might have been,’ I said. ‘What has happened has felt…’ I reached for the right word, and settled on, ‘Definitive.’

‘You accept your calling, then.’

‘Yes.’ The answer came quickly this time. It was a lie.

Why did I lie to her? Because that answer was what she wanted to hear. In her state of exhaustion and pain, why would I inflict anything more on her? I loved her. Why would I not give her every comfort that I could?

You don’t like that answer. You think it is insufficient. Perhaps you’re right. We’re being honest with each other, aren’t we? At least I should be honest with myself.

All right, then. I lied to her, and I gave her comfort because I did not want her to look at me again the way she had after I had unleashed the monster. If I told her that I knew now, more than ever, how utterly unfit I was to be a missionary, then I would have undone all the good I had accomplished in the Cardinal Vezayne. I wasn’t sure if she had forgiven me for my mistakes, for the deaths I had caused. Right now, what appeared to be freshest in her mind was how we had fought together in the Vezayne. When she was less exhausted, maybe she would not think as kindly towards me. If there was anything within my power that would regain her affection, then I would do it.

I loved her. I told you. Nothing else mattered. The truth was valuable only to the degree that it brought her back to me.

‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘The Emperor has given you a gift. You must use it to the fullest.’

My sermons. I couldn’t imagine ever writing another. They had rung false to me before, slick exercises with weak or absent conviction behind them. That they were effective made things worse. I took no pride in my skill. All it did was make me a talented charlatan.

I didn’t think I would face that problem again. What I had seen on the Ligurian had burned away my capacity for pretence. I tried to imagine how I would begin a sermon for the dead of the facility. The only words that came to mind were the fragments of the monster’s prayer.

I kept my thoughts to myself. I reassured Rowne. ‘If I’m given the chance,’ I said, ‘I will use my gift to the fullest. I will carry the word of the Emperor’s glory before me.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Good.’ She smiled, and closed her eyes.

She was asleep before I left her quarters.

‘How is she?’ Macer asked when I returned to the bridge.

‘Resting. She’s strong.’

‘That she is. And rest is what we should all do.’

‘The station isn’t going to come apart while we sleep?’

‘If it does, I’d rather it did when I didn’t know about it. But no, I think it will hold. We aren’t going to put it under any more strain until the Discipline’s Fire gets here.’

‘Good. Can I do anything?’

He shook his head. He didn’t seem unfriendly, but I didn’t think he was going to go out of his way to help me feel useful. He stood. ‘I’m going to get some rest too. So should you.’

‘I will in a bit.’

Macer left the bridge. I stayed a little longer. I walked the circle of the viewports, stopping to watch the Cardinal Vezayne. It had already drifted far enough to be hard to make out. It was a darker shadow in the void.

I wandered off to walk the ring corridor, trying to ready myself for sleep. I was buzzing from the touch of Rowne’s hand. My mind was a jittering animal, leaping from joy to horror to anxiety to guilt, and then back around. I tried not to think of anything, and when that didn’t work, I tried to focus on Rowne’s face, looking at me with an expression I chose to believe was affection and forgiveness.

Nothing worked. And as I walked past the fissures cut into the floors and walls near Gamma Bay, and neared the barricade, the monster’s refrain gradually took over my thoughts. Hail, hail, hail, Changer of Ways! The words filled my head. I couldn’t make them leave. I caught myself walking in time with their rhythm. Hail (step), hail (step), hail (step), Changer of Ways (pause, then step).

‘That’s enough,’ I said aloud. I stopped walking. ‘No more.’ I would stay where I was until I could get the song out of my mind.

Hail, hail, hail, Changer of Ways!

‘You are dead and gone,’ I said to the monster. ‘Be silent.’ I shook my head to clear it.

Then I realised the words were not just in my head. I was hearing them. ‘No,’ I whispered. I had to be wrong. It was impossible. Frozen, breath held, I listened.

‘Hail, hail, hail, Changer of Ways!’

The praise whispered out from every ventilation grille. It was faint, sounding as if it came from a great distance. I felt as if a frozen breath blew against the back of my neck. My skin crawled. The tips of my fingers buzzed with shock. As I stood there, paralysed and listening, the voices grew louder. The choir seemed much larger than before. There were hundreds of voices, large and small, hailing their dark god.

The entire station jerked. The deck canted up one way, then the other. I was thrown off my feet as the Ligurian’s grav system struggled to keep up with the sudden changes of orientation with respect to the planetoid. Stability returned, and the decks seemed straight again.

I knew the normality was an illusion. I whimpered, dreading the coming blow. I sprinted back to the bridge, the voices growing louder. I could hear them quite clearly now.

Macer was already back at his post when I reached the bridge. Rowne stumbled in from her quarters a moment later. ‘What’s happened?’ she said.

‘Our anchor’s been severed,’ said Macer. ‘We’re drifting away from the planetoid.’

‘How?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know! I’m trying to find out.’

‘Can’t you hear it?’ I said.

‘Hear what?’ Macer snapped. Then he stopped.

‘Oh,’ Rowne said.

‘It isn’t possible!’ said Macer. ‘We saw it die!’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘It’s here.’ The hymn struck me with renewed power. The monster’s god was powerful indeed to call it back from oblivion. My faith in the Imperial Creed was already smouldering ash. I wondered how long I could resist the truth that this creature offered.

Macer reoriented the lenses on the underside of the station, turning them around to look at the Ligurian. The pict screens showed the length of the huge anchor cable descending to the planetoid.

‘How did you get back in?’ Macer swore under his breath. ‘How did you get back in?’

‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing to a chute next to the anchor’s retraction shaft.

‘The disposal outlet.’

‘What’s wrong with it? It looks ragged.’

Macer frowned. He magnified the image, and the ones that came after, focusing on the chute. It looked more than ragged in close-up. Its shape changed between picts. It was more or less cylindrical in one image, wide open like torn wings in another, then a cluster of waving tendrils.

‘That’s not metal,’ said Rowne. ‘That’s flesh.’

‘I don’t understand this,’ said Macer. He sounded more brittle than I had ever heard him.

‘I threw a piece of tentacle into the disposal,’ I said softly. ‘One small piece.’ And that had been enough. I tried to imagine how that bit of flesh had achieved what we were seeing. My mind’s eye flashed back to the crumbling desiccation of the monster’s body in the Cardinal Vezayne. I remembered how I had rejoiced to see the monster abandoned by its god as I had been by mine. I had been wrong. The essence of the beast had lived on. Perhaps its soul, or what it had instead of one, had left the stranded body and been transferred into that stub of tentacle. Perhaps that squirming flesh had been enough in itself to spawn a new body. I could not know what process had preserved the horror. I only knew that it had. Here, truly, was the work of a god. How could one stand against the divine?

It could not be done.

But I didn’t want to die.

‘Look,’ said Rowne. ‘It’s spreading.’

Tentacles were erupting in spreading circles with the disposal chute at the centre.

We stared in silence for the next several seconds as the picts documented the impossible, but undeniable.

‘That thing is transforming the station,’ Rowne said.

‘Or consuming it,’ I added. I thought about the way Heusen and Kren had been absorbed into the monster’s body.

This appeared to be something else again. As Macer fought to squeeze more details out of the picts, the nature of our peril became clearer. There was no difference between the fabric of the station and the body of the monster. They were one. The Ligurian was becoming part of the abomination.

This time, there would be nowhere to hide.

‘Can you burn it off?’ Rowne asked.

‘I want to,’ said Macer. ‘I don’t think I can.’

The exhaust nozzles for the engines were well below the infected portions of the facility.

‘The heat might still make a difference,’ Rowne said.

While we stayed at the pict screens, Macer moved to the command throne. We watched, waiting for the jerk and the fiery glow of ignition. It didn’t come.

‘What’s taking so long?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Macer. ‘The engines should be firing.’

‘Look at them,’ said Rowne, her voice heavy with despair. ‘Throne, look at them.’

They were infected too. It was harder to see at first. I think the spreading, monstrous flesh had only just reached the engines when Macer tried to start them up. Now we could see the tentacles emerging from the nozzles. And then the nozzles themselves began to change. They bent and turned inwards. By the time I looked away, the picts were showing enormous claws on their tips.

The chanting grew louder, seeming to vibrate from the very walls. Tremors rippled through the Ligurian. I looked out the viewports.

‘We have to leave,’ I said. ‘We have to leave now!’

The monster was reaching from the underside to the top of the station. Its flesh arrived from all sides. Out of our failure to kill the creature had come a thing even more powerful. It no longer had any shape. It was an amorphous, spreading concatenation of polyps and eyes, of tentacles and claws. There was every limb and every organ, and they flowed together, changing from one thing to another in a matter of seconds. Eyes and mouths were one and the same. Jaws gazed back at the viewports. Eyes devoured the metal of the station, turning it into more flesh. A massive hand grasped the docking bay of the tug. The structure collapsed, dissolving into muscle. The tug started to drift away, but a polyp extended from the top of the hand and pulled it into the greater mass.

The Ligurian would soon cease to be, and the creature replacing it would devour us.

‘Six days until rescue,’ Rowne said. ‘We can’t take the pod.’

‘The colony ship, then.’ It and Alpha Bay were still untouched.

Gamma was disappearing quickly. The entire extension of the bay was writhing. And everywhere the bruised colours of pink and blue spread like an oil slick.

Rowne and Macer shared a look.

‘I don’t even know if we can get it powered up,’ she said.

‘What choice do we have?’ he asked.

‘None,’ she agreed.

We fled the bridge, the tremors growing violent, the entire station being shaken in the jaws of a giant beast. We made for the forlorn hope of the Wind of Faith. Rowne leaned on me. She could not place any weight on her left foot without gasping and staggering in pain. Macer grabbed a plasma cutter on the way out. He carried it as a symbol, like my icon of the Emperor. It would, I thought, be as futile.

The cries of the prayer became thunderous as we struggled down the ring corridor towards Alpha Bay. It was a choir of thousands now, hailing change, praising change, welcoming us to the glories of change. ‘Embrace!’ the voices shouted in ecstasy. ‘Embrace! Embrace! EMBRAAAAACE!’

We had just passed the door to Beta Bay when the walls began to change. The dark grime of iron gave way to the blue and pink of muscle. The walls rippled like drapes, and shapes moved beneath their taut surface. I tried not to look at them, fearing what I would see. I tried to push Rowne to move faster and get ahead of the transformation of the wall. It spread too quickly, racing ahead of us, then arcing up to the ceiling. Though the deck was still metal, we were surrounded by pulsing skin. I looked in spite of myself. I saw, in the depths of the wall flesh, as if rising to the surface of a pond, the faces of the lost crew. They were mouthing inaudible words through their torment.

Alpha Bay seemed miles distant. The escape pod was closer, taunting me with its false hope.

Kren’s face broke the surface of the flesh. Screaming, it plunged from the ceiling ahead of us at the end of an elongated, scaled neck. ‘Embraaace!’ it screamed. ‘Embrace embrace EMBRAAAACE!’ Kren’s teeth sank into Macer’s shoulder. He shrieked and tried to yank away, but the neck stretched with his movements, and the teeth were in deep. Blood welled from his shoulder. His flesh began to run like candle wax. Macer stumbled, and Kren’s face pulled him against the wall. Hands emerged and grasped his legs.

Macer looked at us with pleading eyes. Rowne reached for him. I hauled her back and dragged her past him. She tried to fight me, but in her weakened state, I was stronger.

‘Help me!’ Macer begged. He struggled against the walls, but tendrils had latched on to him. His back was already being absorbed into the wider body.

‘We can’t,’ I said, and kept pulling at Rowne.

‘Let go!’ she yelled. ‘I’m not leaving him!’

‘You can’t help him!’ I yanked hard, and forced her on.

Macer’s rising scream of denial and pain followed us. For a moment, its piercing horror drowned out the chanting. It stabbed me to the marrow, and for Rowne, it was almost lethal. I felt her hesitate, her feet dragging.

‘There’s nothing we can do!’ I shouted, and urged us on.

Macer disappeared behind the curve of the hall, and the sound of his scream changed. It became hollow and then muffled, as if a huge maw were closing over him. Then it became a horrible gagging as something filled his throat. Then there was only the triumphant song of the monster once more.

The hall rocked back and forth, staggering us. The promise of Alpha Bay receded even further. We were less than ten yards from the passage to the escape pod, its mirage even more enticing as the station succumbed to the nightmare of change.

Four days, I thought. Four days. That was how long the two of us would last in the pod now. So close to the arrival of the Discipline’s Fire. If there were only a way to last two more days, to defy the tyranny of oxygen rations. But there wasn’t, and I didn’t even know if the pod was still a pod.

A rhythmic crashing began ahead and behind us. It sounded like metal being driven into meat, again and again, every time the choir shouted ‘HAIL!’ The noise drew nearer from both directions. I didn’t know whether to run faster or stop, and I hesitated.

The source of the noise came into view from behind first. It was a huge maw, filling the width and height of the corridor, turning the hall behind it into the interior of a throat. Its teeth were needles, densely packed in row upon row, and as long as my leg. The jaws snapped shut, teeth protruding above and below, slicing open the flesh of the faceless mouth. Ichor spewed onto the deck. The mouth opened wide and snapped again, a lurching, unstoppable embodiment of hunger.

‘CHANGE!’ The Ligurian now cried to the beat of gnashing teeth. ‘CHANGE! CHANGE! CHANGE!’ The word was exultation and command.

We staggered forwards a few seconds more, and then we saw another set of jaws closing in from the other direction.

The way to Alpha Bay was blocked.

We were level with the access corridor to the escape pod.

This. This juncture. This was the worst choice. This is the moment I cannot leave behind. I revisit it constantly. I relive it every night. I feel the agony of that decision as acutely now as I did then. It will be with me always. That is the nature of such ultimate turning points.

Truly, I wonder if you would have done better.

This was the choice. I could stay with Rowne and we would meet our fate together, or I could abandon her and run for the pod. If I reached it in time, alone, I would have oxygen and provisions for eight days, more than enough to keep me alive until the Discipline’s Fire arrived.

I loved Rowne.

I did not want to die.

Rowne and I looked at each other, and there was judgement in her eyes again. I’m not sure what had summoned it. Perhaps she thought I had been too quick to abandon Macer. Perhaps she saw me wrestling with the choice.

The reason doesn’t matter. The terrible judgement was there. That is what matters.

If you think it made my choice easier, you’re wrong. It was still the worst moment of my life. What that look in her eyes did, though, was make the correct decision clear.

I loved her. She didn’t love me. Why, then, would I die for her?

No, you would not have done better. I know you would not have.

I sobbed as I let go of her waist and slipped out from under her shoulder. She stumbled, steadying herself just before she collided with the straining wall. Macer’s face appeared beneath the skin, staring at her in eager pain.

Rowne looked at me in silence. She did not beg. She said nothing at all. She did not have to. Not with that terrible gaze.

I felt it burn into the back of my head as I turned and ran. I felt it follow me when I turned onto the ramp to the escape pod. The accessway was beginning to change, but there was still metal in the walls here. Most vitally, the airlock wall had not become part of the monster.

I felt a burst of hope, though it was muted by terror, grief and Rowne’s last look. Though I could no longer see her, I carried that gaze like a dagger in my heart.

I still do.

‘Please please please please please,’ I moaned. I opened the panel and slammed the lever up. I was not praying for the Emperor’s mercy. I might have been praying to the perversity of the galaxy. I might even have been praying to the monster, for it had become my world now, and in its immortality and omnipotence, it was as close to a god as I could imagine. I might not have been praying at all. Chance favoured me, and the wall rose, revealing the unchanged escape pod.

Rowne screamed as the door went up. She screamed with anger and betrayal as well as pain. I gasped at the sound, fumbling with the pod’s hatch. I was relieved when the shriek ended and the thunderous chant of ‘CHANGE, CHANGE, CHANGE, CHAAAAAANGE!’ spurred me on.

I opened the hatch, then turned and pulled the lever on the inside of the airlock, bringing the wall down. When it met the deck, the change reached it. Metal became flesh. Rowne’s awful face came for me. I cried out, hurled myself into the pod, slammed the hatch shut and punched the launch button. The jerk of violent acceleration hurled me against the control console. I struck my head and fell unconscious. I was helpless then, but it didn’t matter. I had escaped.

You would not have done better.

I’m glad I survived. If I had to make the choice again, I would do the same thing. But I regret having been forced to do so. I never wanted any of this to happen. I mourn for the dead, and especially for Rowne. Their memories live on with me. I carry their faces in me.

This, too, should count for something.

It must.

There was a promise I broke. I never preached on the Ligurian, as Heusen had asked. If I had the chance now, I would have something to say. My sermon would come from my soul. I would speak with the force of conviction, because I no longer have any doubts. I would speak of monsters, and destiny, and change. I would teach fear, because I have learned its true measure.

I have learned to fear the reality of a true god.

I have learned to fear the Changer of Ways.

Marrikus tugged open his robes, exposing his neck and chest. ‘Can you see them?’ he croaked. ‘I can’t see them, but I can feel them. I thought I escaped, but… I think I was wrong.’ He looked down at himself, and slumped against a bier. As he did so, there was a horrible clattering of bells, and a shrill whistle-shriek.

Valemar’s hand fell to his sidearm as the mortuary-servitor loomed suddenly out of the mist. It blared wordless chastisements, and Marrikus flinched away from the bier.

‘More of them,’ Vendersen said.

Valemar turned. She was right. They came out of the mist, swaying on stick legs, shrouds rustling, bells clanging. Golden faces glared down at them, and his head was suddenly full of pain. He staggered, clutching at his skull. It felt as if it were about to burst. The servitors were talking among themselves now, ignoring the people scrambling beneath their feet. They threaded among the nearby biers, checking the bodies.

Valemar reached again for his pistol. He wanted to shoot them. But couldn’t. Could only watch as they pulled back the closest shroud, revealing–

‘Oh,’ Vendersen said, softly. He turned, but she was no longer there. Instead, she was on the bier, her flesh lacerated, her eyes wide and staring. Valemar staggered back, and tried to grab Marrikus. But the missionary was gone as well. Valemar caught sight of something that might once have been a man, slumped on another bier, flesh twisted and pulsing with slack faces. Valemar spun away, not wanting to see. A shadow fell over him as a mortuary-servitor leaned close, red gaze boring into his own, just as the colonel’s had.

He backed away. ‘No. No. No, no.’

The edge of a bier dug into his back. A metal claw fastened on his head, and forced him around. Forced him to look into his own eyes. Into the raw, red hole between them, where the colonel’s aide had shot him dead. He wanted to speak, to beg forgiveness, to beg for help, but he no longer felt the God-Emperor at his shoulder. He felt only cold stone, pressed against his back, and the pain in his head growing, swelling, filling him and emptying him all at once, as the world spun away.

And then, finally, he felt nothing at all.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Josh Reynolds is the author of the Horus Heresy Primarchs novel Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix, and two audio dramas featuring the Blackshields: The False War and The Red Fief. His Warhammer 40,000 work includes Lukas the Trickster and the Fabius Bile novels Primogenitor and Clonelord. He has written many stories set in the Age of Sigmar, including the novels Shadespire: The Mirrored City, Soul Wars, Eight Lamentations: Spear of Shadows, the Hallowed Knights novels Plague Garden and Black Pyramid, and Nagash: The Undying King. His tales of the Warhammer old world include The Return of Nagash and The Lord of the End Times, and two Gotrek & Felix novels. He lives and works in Sheffield.

Phil Kelly is the author of the Space Marine Conquests novel War of Secrets, the Space Marine Battles novel Blades of Damocles and the Warhammer 40,000 novellas Farsight and Blood Oath, as well as the Warhammer titles Sigmar’s Blood and Dreadfleet. He has also written a number of short stories. He works as a background writer for Games Workshop, crafting the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in Nottingham.

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.

An extract from Drachenfels.

From the terrace of the convent, Genevieve could see the deep, slow, glass-clear waters of the River Talabec, hundreds of feet below. Bordered with thick, sweet-smelling pine forests, the river was like the central artery of the Empire. Not as long as the Reik, which ran a full seven hundred and fifty miles from its rise in the Black Mountains to its mouth at Marienburg, but still cutting across the map like a knife-slash, from the rapid streams of the World’s Edge Mountains through the heart of the Great Forest, swelled by its confluence with the Urskoy, to the inland port of Talabheim and then, heavy and thick with the black silt of the Middle Mountains, into the Reik at Altdorf. If she were to cast her kerchief from the terrace, it could conceivably travel the length of the Empire to the sea. Just now, a riverboat – unusual this far up – was pulling in to the jetty that served the convent. More supplies for the Order of Eternal Night and Solace.

Here, secluded from all, she liked the idea of the waters running like the bloodstream. She had come to the convent to be out of the world, but her centuries among men had given her a taste for their affairs. A taste that Elder Honorio discouraged, but which could still not be suppressed. As the comforting dark fell, she saw the tall trees dwindle into shadows and the risen moon waver in the waters. How were things in Altdorf? In Middenheim? Did Luitpold still rule? Was the Crescent Moon still doing business? Was Oswald von Konigswald yet the elector of Ostland? These were not her concerns, and Elder Honorio dismissed her interests as ‘a prurient liking for gossip,’ but she couldn’t be without them. The boat below would be bringing animals, clothes, tools, spices. But no books, no music, no news. In the convent, one was supposed to be content with the changelessness of life, not caught up in its chaotic tumble of events, of fads, of trends. A quarter-century ago, Genevieve had needed that. Now, perhaps she needed to return to the world.

The convent had been founded in the time of Sigmar by Elder Honorio’s father-in-darkness, Belada the Melancholy, and had remained unchanged in its isolation down through the centuries. Honorio still wore the buckles and pigtail of a long-gone era, and the others of the order favoured the fashions of their lifetimes. Genevieve felt herself the child again, and sensed censorious eyes criticizing her dresses, her hairstyle, her longings. Some of the others, the Truly Dead, disturbed her. They were the creatures in the stories who slept by day and would burst into flame at cock-crow if not safely packed in a coffin layered with their native soil. Many bore the marks of Chaos: eyes like red marbles, wolfish fangs, three-inch talons. Their feeding habits offended her polite sensibilities, and caused much hostility between the convent and the few nearby woodland villages.

‘What’s a child, more or less?’ Honorio asked. ‘All who live naturally will die before I next need to razor the bristles from my chin.’

Genevieve had been feeding less of late. Like many of the old ones, she was outliving the need. In some ways it was a relief, although she would miss the rush of sensations that came with the blood, the moments when she felt most truly alive. One thing she might regret was that she had never given the Dark Kiss; she had no get, no young vampires to look to her as a mother-in-darkness, no progeny to seed the world.

‘You should have had your get while you were still young enough to appreciate them, my dear,’ said the graceful, stately Lady Melissa d’Acques. ‘Why, I’ve birthed near a hundred young bloods in my centuries. Fine fellows all, devoted sons-in-darkness. And all handsome as Ranald.’

Chandagnac had been the Lady Melissa’s get, and so the vampire noblewoman treated Genevieve as a granddaughter-in-darkness. She reminded Genevieve of her real grandmother in her manner of speech and in her fussiness, although the Lady Melissa would always physically be the golden-haired twelve-year-old she had been eleven hundred years ago. One night then, her coach had been held up by a nameless brigand thirsty for more than money.

According to the grimoires of the order, Genevieve would lose her ability to procreate with the passing of the red thirst. But maybe not: in the libraries of the convent, and through a simple observation of her companions in the order, she had learned that there were as many species of vampire as there were of fish or cat. Some abhorred the relics and symbols of all the gods, others entered Holy Orders and lived the most devout of lives. Some were brutish predators who would drain at a draught a peasant girl, others epicures who would sip only, and treat their human meals as lovers rather than cattle. Some, skilled in sorcery and wizardry, could indeed transform themselves into bats, wolves or a sentient red mist; others could barely tie their own bootlaces. ‘What kind am I,’ Genevieve would occasionally wonder to herself, ‘what kind of vampire am I?’

The thing that marked her bloodline – the line of Chandagnac, reaching ultimately back to Lahmia – from the vampires of dark legend was that they had never died and lain in the earth. The transformation had been wrought lovingly while they still drew breath. She might have no reflection and feel the need for blood, but her heart still beat. The Truly Dead – sometimes known as the Strigoi – were more dead than alive, essentially walking corpses. Few of them were decent, they were the bad ones, the child-stealers, the throat-tearers, haunters of the grave…

Genevieve and the Lady Melissa played cards on the terrace as the sunset faded, the quality of the game improving as their night-senses awoke. Genevieve ran her tongue over her sharp teeth, and tried to think two or three hands ahead.

‘Now, now, my girl,’ said the Lady Melissa, her child’s face grave, ‘you shouldn’t try to read your granny’s mind like that. She’s much older and wiser than you, and could easily give you the vision of the wrong cards.’

Genevieve laughed, and lost again, trumped from nowhere.

‘You see.’

The Lady Melissa laughed, as she scooped the trick. For the moment, she was genuinely a giggling child; then she was the old lady again. Inside the convent, the Truly Dead were rising. Wolves howled in the forests. A large bat flapped lazily across the sky, blotting the moon for a moment.

Twenty-five years ago, Genevieve had been in at the death of the most evil man alive. The effects had been calamitous, and unforeseen. Throughout the Known World, the agents of evil – some of whom had masqueraded for years as ordinary or even exemplary citizens – were transformed into their true, monstrous selves, or struck down by invisible arrows to the heart, or blasted to pieces by explosions. A castle in Kislev fell silently to the ground, crushing a coven of witches to a paste. Thousands of spirits were freed from their ties to the earth and passed on, beyond the ken of mediums and necromancers. In Gisoreux, the statue of a martyred child came suddenly to life, speaking in an ancient dialect no one could understand, the spell upon him at last lifted. And Prince Oswald and his companions became the heroes of the age.

Emperor Luitpold, shamed by his initial refusal to aid Oswald’s expedition, had sent in a troop of the Imperial Guard to clear out the pathetic remnants of Drachenfels’s foul servants from his castle. Goblins, orcs, trolls, hideously altered humans, degenerates and hordes of unclassifiable creatures had been put to the sword, or burned at the stake, or hanged from the battlements. The Emperor had wanted to raze the place to the ground, but Oswald interceded, insisting that it should stay standing and desolate as a reminder of the evil that had been. Drachenfels’s books, papers and possessions were argued over by the grand theogonist of the cult of Sigmar and the high priest of the cult of Ulric, but eventually found their way into shrines and libraries throughout the Empire, accessible only to the most esteemed and unblemished of scholars.

Genevieve, meanwhile, had refused all offers of reward and returned to the Crescent Moon. Her part in the adventure was over, and she wanted to hear no more of it. There were too many dead and worse for her to make light of the story. But the tavern had changed, and was thronged now with the curious and the disturbed. Balladeers wanted her story, the devout wanted relics of her person, relatives of the monster’s victims inexplicably wanted reparations from her, politicians wanted her name to lend to their causes, a clandestine group of young sons-in-darkness wanted to form a vampires’ guild around her to lobby the Emperor for the lifting of certain laws against the practices of their kind.

Those loyal to the cause of Drachenfels tried several times to assassinate her. And those narrow-minded worthies who couldn’t bear the thing she was decried her part in the fall of the Great Enchanter and tried to make her out as his secret ally.

Most unnerving of all were the flocks of young men who became her admirers, who would bare their throats and wrists to her, begging her to drink deeply, who would sometimes take an edge to their veins in her presence. Some were of that sorry type who plague all the undead, those who crave the Dark Kiss and all it brings. But others claimed they would be content simply to bleed their last for her, to die twitching and ecstatic in her arms.

There was only so much she could stand, and eventually she embarked upon a riverboat for the convent. She had heard such a place existed, and various of her cousins-in-darkness had given her contradictory stories about a remote refuge for vampirekind, but only now did she make the effort to find the truth behind the stories, to petition for admittance into the Order of Eternal Night and Solace. When she had needed to find them, they had got in touch with her. Evidently, they had their agents in the world.

‘You’re troubled,’ the Lady Melissa said. ‘Tell me your troubles.’

It was not a helpful suggestion. It was a command.

‘I’ve been dreaming.’

‘Nonsense, girl. Our kind don’t dream. You know as well as I do that we sleep the sleep of the dead.’

Genevieve saw the masked face in her mind, heard the chilling laughter. ‘And yet I’ve been dreaming.’

They were joined on the terrace by Honorio, the vampire dwarf who was the current elder of the order, and a party of others. One of the party was alive, and nervous. He was a young man, well enough dressed, but obviously not of the first rank. Something about him struck her as being not quite right.

Wietzak, the Truly Dead giant who had once ruled Karak Varn with unparalleled savagery, eyed the young man with obvious bloodlust. Wietzak was Honorio’s favoured attendant and would do nothing unsanctioned by the elder, but the visitor wasn’t to know that.

‘My ladies, I hope you will pardon this interruption,’ began Elder Honorio. ‘But it seems that though we have left the world behind, the world is not quite ready to abandon all its interest in us. A message – a summons – has been brought here. This gentleman is Henrik Kraly, from Altdorf, and he would have words with you, Genevieve. You may see him or not, as you wish.’

The messenger bowed to her, and presented her with a scroll. She recognized the seal, a crown against trees, and broke it at once. Wietzak ground his teeth as she read. In the forest, there was a commotion as a bat took a wolf.

Within the hour, she was aboard the riverboat, prepared for a long journey. The Lady Melissa gave her a long lecture of farewell, cautioning her against the perils of the world outside and reminding her of the difficulties she would face. Genevieve loved the old lady-child too much to tell her that the hawthorn-wielding Inquisitors she spoke of were three centuries gone and that the cities she remembered as thriving sources of lifesblood were abandoned ruins. Lady Melissa had been with the order for an apparent eternity. They embraced, and the Lady Melissa returned to the jetty where Wietzak, one of those who couldn’t bear running water, awaited to accompany her back to the heights of the convent. As her grandmother-in-darkness waved goodbye to her, Genevieve had the disturbing feeling that they were both alive again, and that they were just dearest girlfriends, sixteen and twelve, being separated for a summer.

The next day, prone in her bunk as the oarsmen propelled the craft through the forests, she dreamed again.

The iron-masked man with the hellish laugh would not leave her sleep. Gone he might be, but forgotten was another matter entirely.

She was travelling now to Altdorf. But eventually, she knew, her journey would take her back to the Grey Mountains, back along the course she had followed twenty-five years ago.

Back to the fortress of Drachenfels.

WARHAMMER HORROR

A Black Library Publication Imprint

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Allan Ohr.

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ISBN: 978-1-78030-790-9

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