CHRIS WRAIGHT
GREY TALON

    It WAS A lucky ship, one upon which the fates smiled. Its hull had been laid down on the forge world Aphret in the one hundred and thirtieth year of the Crusade. Seventeen other destroyers had been completed in the same series, their superstructures filled out to the same template, each one also destined for Legion fleets.
    This one was number seven, a good number, free of the defects that were always found in early-run models. As war fronts had multiplied and the Mechanicum worked to ever-more punishing schedules, such defects were possible whatever the magi might have claimed.
    From Aphret's orbital shipyards it was delivered to the distribution hub at Tallameder for fitting out and ritual dedication. Legion brokers crawled over the void-docks in huddled packs, observing, noting, checking and scheming. They knew the consequences of returning to their masters bearing lower-quality materiel than their rivals, and so bidding was fierce.
    The Luna Wolves had a reputation. They were tough, dragged to maturity on Cthonia with none of the refinement of, say, Fulgrim's agents. Ship captains from other Legions whispered that Horus had insiders throughout the requisition bureaucracy, and as a result his own fleet had the edge. That might even have been true, although ship captains whispered all sorts of things.
    The unmarked ship was snapped up by a Legion agent named Flak Trakus, along with five more of the series. He said he liked the looked of number seven. All were quickly marked with provisional XVI Legion iconography, before being escorted under low burn to the Luna Wolves' forward base at Ipheriax Tertius for trials. Two failed to meet the Legion's exacting standards, leaving four to be given the full livery.
    The ships' induction was overseen by Ezekyle Abaddon, deputising for his primarch, who remained at the cutting edge of the Crusade. The First Captain did his duty perfunctorily, eager to be back at his master's side. He looked - so observers reported at the time - deeply bored.
    Number seven was named Grey Talon, and given to the command of what had been the 19th Chapter of the Luna Wolves. Its first legionary captain was Lucial Vormar, a Cthonian with ambitions to rise within the Legion and an enthusiastic lodge member right from the inception of the quiet orders. The Talon was small by the standards of the fleet, slotting between a pure torpedo boat and a line frigate. Such vessels were often referred to as destroyers, though the forward lance mounted under the main prow shield was uncommon for the class, making it weapon-heavy for its void displacement. The configuration performed well during seventy years of constant warfare, and it was only returned to its home berth twice for refit and overhaul. Four more captains and two more shipmasters took the helm during that period, each of them using it as a springboard for greater things.
    Soon the Talon had reinforced its reputation as a fortunate ship, one that promised advancement for its crew, and it found a regular place in actions across the ever-expanding battlefront of the Great Crusade.
    By the time of Isstvan III, it was under the command of Hierek Mon, a member of Vormar's lodge with an enviable kill-tally and a reputation for void flair. He defied orders to remain on a high-orbit blocking station and entered the bombardment zone in the wake of Angron's disastrous intervention, earning the ire of the Legion command. His reward was to be placed in a suicidal position during the fleet deployment for the subsequent inferno at Isstvan V, given little cover and expected to atone for his zeal in death.
    Once again, though, the Grey Talon defied expectations, riding its ever-present luck during the ruinous battle over the scrap-filled void space. Mon almost survived the entire encounter, poised to rejoin the main warfleet with honour restored, but for the intervention of a fleeing Salamanders boarding party on a captured lander. The loyalists used it to break into the destroyer as she came about, and after a brief but brutal action took it from within.
    Mon died on his bridge, screaming out curses as his limbs were hacked from him. During the confusion of the loyalist withdrawal, the Grey Talon managed to clear the system and enter the warp, its innards still riddled with close-quarters fighting as the Salamanders assumed full control.
    It was renamed after that, given the title of Nocturne's primary city, Hesiod. Other refugees were found and taken on board, including Bion Henricos of the X Legion and the renowned White Scars Librarian Targutai Yesugei. The ship was drawn into a new kind of war, running the shadows, hunting down isolated advance-packs of the enemy and cutting their throats. It was dangerous work, testing the good fortune that had by then been burned into the ship's spars.
    The end almost came under the broadsides of the Death Guard frigate Mind's Resolve. With the charred orb of Prospero below it, the Hesiod was surrounded in a corona of fire, knocked off-beam and rolled into macro-cannon range of three more cruisers. Its fortune held out, though, arriving in the shape of the main White Scars battlefleet. The fighting swept over it, dragging it spinwards, leaving it listing but still airtight. By then Henricos was its commander, cheated from the death he had confidently expected and left to brood as his powered-down ship drifted silently from the battlesphere.
    The Hesiod was retrieved six hours later and pulled into the V Legion's ambit. Tech-crews discovered then that the engine-chamber had been punctured and that it had been only minutes from destruction. The White Scars had laughed at that. Henricos hadn't - he knew the reputation of the ship, the one it had carried since its hull had been laid down, and did not see survival as something necessarily to aspire to.
    With the last of the Salamanders dispersed throughout the fleet, Henricos was joined by new White Scars on the bridge. The ship's name was switched again, restored to Grey Talon as it had been before, and its colours reverted to those of the Sons of Horus. Its ongoing role was decided even before the policy came down from the Khan himself - it would be an infiltrator, a chameleon, a snake in the shadows. Outright warfare, openly declared, was no longer an option.
    Henricos never left the bridge during the refit. He worked obsessively, driving the menials to extreme lengths to refashion the engines and realign the weapons. Those who saw him during that time sent shocked reports back up the V Legion hierarchy.
    He was like a devil, they said. A tortured spirit.
    Perhaps that was why they sent Hibou to him, to act as some kind of exemplary punishment. That was possible, though not likely. The primarch had doled out penance in sorrow rather than rancour.
    Moreover, Hibou knew to what manner of ship he had been assigned. It had cheated death before, and might do so again, whatever odds it sailed into. They had all told him that - Nozan, Torghun - trying to improve his mood before they were sent on their own death-missions. Even in the face of their great error, locked down by the shame of it, they could still see a path into the future. A way back, if fortune smiled on them.
    And the Grey Talon was a lucky ship, they said. One upon which the fates smiled.
    
    FOR A LONG time after boarding, Hibou Khan did not leave his cell. He felt the vibrations as the plasma drives keyed up, thrusting the ship clear of the already dispersing White Scars fleet. Some time later, this changed to the high-pitched whine of warp engines, followed by the lurch of entry into the aether. After that was the eerily quiet passage through the immaterium, punctuated only by the creak and snap of the Talon's flanks.
    It felt like they had been in the warp for a long time. The campaign on Chondax had been a near-constant series of jumps, bridging the vicious combat-phases on the system's far-flung worlds. He'd had plenty of time back then to consider the Legion's place of dishonour, to listen to the words of Hasik Noyan-Khan, to talk to fellow members of the lodges and take in their grievances. The fighting had become almost secondary to the question that had come to dominate discourse in the brotherhoods.
    What next?
    And the answer to that had been: the Warmaster. Distrust of Imperial command structures had become so absolute, so ingrained, that aligning with Horus had come to seem not so much as prudent as inevitable. The entire Legion admired Horus. They knew of the regard between him and the Khan. Out of all the Eighteen, only the Thousand Sons had been closer, and relations with Magnus's sons had been conducted largely through the Stormseers.
    So it had been natural. When he was in the mood to find excuses, Hibou would remember that. On other days, when the shame made him want to ram his face into the metal walls of his cell until the blood ran, he would remember the warnings of his heart, the tremors of unease when the transmissions came in from beyond the veil around Chondax and the strange light in the eyes of some of his fellow loyalists.
    Loyalists. None of them had been loyalists. That term was now reserved for those who had cleaved to the Throne, while those who had been drawn to Horus's magnetic presence had been cast into the darkness, reviled as traitors and consorts with yaksha.
    That had never been part of the draw. No one had shown them the destination at the end of that path, and if they had done so the revolt would have been snuffed out long before it could have threatened the Legion's cohesion.
    It made him nauseous to think how close they had come. The vid-captures from the Vorkaudar, the Word Bearers ship captured by Yesugei, had made the implications plain.
    It would have started with a vow. The vow would have been made in good faith.
    At times, musing on that, Hibou regretted not taking the death-oath, the tsusan garag, which would at least have sealed his pact and left no room for reconsideration. If he had done so, he would now be dead, his hearts pierced by the primarch's own blade. As it was, he had been left the path of penance - to cleanse his soul by taking the fight ahead of the main fleet, striking with no hope of survival, carrying the anger of betrayal back to its heart.
    He was of the sagyar mazan now. They would find absolution only by returning the pain to its origin - to blood the arch-traitor as he had blooded them. Deeper, more sharply.
    But there would be weeks before he could unleash his blade again, and until that moment he had to negotiate the inner warrens of the starship with a soul who hated him almost as much as he hated the ones who had cast their lot with damnation.
    Sighing, Hibou Khan adjusted his robe over his armour, and made to leave his cell. It could not be put off forever. If they were to fight together, they would first have to learn to speak.
    
    HENRICOS WORKED ON the machine. He had been working on it since the day he had been taken on board by Xa'ven. In contrast to the Vorkaudar, it was a good, clean machine, one that he could engage with and improve. The Sons of Horus had not fallen quite so deeply into debauchery as the Word Bearers, at least not by the time of the Dropsite Massacre when the ship had been taken over, and the metal remained unsullied. It smelled of them still - the fusty pelts they wore, the Cthonian hides - but it functioned more or less as a machine should.
    For as long as he worked, he could forget the anger. If his hands, bionic and organic, were occupied then they did not itch to carry a weapon. In any case, there were no weapons on board that were worthy of his adoption. He still had his Medusan bolter, though no blade to go alongside it. The White Scars had offered him dozens of their own, and it had been hard not to laugh at them for that. Their metalwork was capable enough but they had fouled the metal with sweeping Chogorian runes, and the shafts were too basic, too unaugmented. Nothing they had offered him had had the same heft and killing potential as a true Medusan zweihander, and so he had rejected everything.
    He leant over his navigation station, staring at the images on the vid-feeds. He had been looking at the scan for hours, and his eyes were beginning to have trouble focusing. He could have let the cogitators take the strain, but they were poor on detail, and detail was everything.
    The task consumed him. By the time he sensed the other presence on the bridge, it was hard to guess how long he had been there.
    Damned Chogorian stealth.
    'What do you want?' Henricos rasped, never taking his eyes from the screen.
    Hibou Khan drew closer. Henricos could smell him too - old ceremonial oils on his ceramite, the last gift from his brothers in the Legion that had banished him. That had been sentimental and a waste. Henricos would have killed them all and recycled the gene-seed and weapons. Why trust a part that had already failed?
    'I do not know our trajectory,' said Hibou, in accented but reasonably fluent Gothic. It seemed that not all of them had the same impediment as their storm-witch.
    'And?'
    Hibou stiffened. 'We are destined to fight together. Perhaps I should know something of your plan.'
    Henricos let a long breath slide out of his clenched lips, then stood up. 'Nine of you. All traitors. You will know the plan when I tell you. Until then, you would do well to keep your mouth closed and your eyes away from my scanners.'
    To his credit, Hibou absorbed the spite. His tanned face, marked with the pucker of self-inflicted scars, flickered by just an infinitesimal amount.
    'If we had been traitors, we would be dead,' he said.
    Henricos could feel his humours darken. Even looking at the White Scar made him angry, just as almost everything else made him angry. 'I do not wish to do this now,' he muttered.
    Hibou stood his ground. 'We have been in the warp for a week. I would train, if I knew what I was training for.'
    Henricos turned on him. 'What do you need that you do not possess? You have your blades. All fighting is much the same.'
    'You truly believe that?'
    Henricos drew closer. 'So what fighting have you seen, White Scar? Greenskins?'
    It was so easy to bring it back - the skies above the dropsite, flared red, streaked with the contrails of falling assault claws. There had been seven primarchs in that slaughter. Seven. The killing had been industrial.
    'I know you underestimate us,' said Hibou evenly. 'Do not think that this will anger me. We are used to it.'
    'Damn you!' spat Henricos, clenching his metal fist. 'Underestimate you? I know the damage you can do.' He edged even closer, his sour breath washing over the scarred face before him. 'Tell me why I should even suffer you to look at me. I fought as the Gorgon was being cut apart. I fought as my Legion was being cut apart. I have fought every second since, and will fight until fate stops my hearts, and you. You. You were not even sure who the enemy was.'
    Hibou did not respond, but Henricos could see that he wanted to strike him. A nerve had been touched.
    'We were wrong,' the White Scar said, softly. 'We erred. We will pay the price.'
    'Aye, we all will,' Henricos said, his voice edged with disgust.
    He had never doubted, not for a microsecond. Ferrus Manus had never doubted. There had never been room for it - they had the assignment, and they executed it. That was why Horus had gone for them first. Of all the Legions, the Iron Tenth had been the most steadfast, the only ones not plagued by ambitions beyond the most efficient prosecution of war.
    There were moments when he took pride in that. Mostly, though, the thoughts just summoned the blind rage back, so he shoved it down, burying the memory in the work schedule that made his servos stutter and his eyes scratch.
    'Get away from me,' Henricos said. 'I will summon you when I need you. Until then, just stay away. You make me…'
    In another age, he might have said ''sick'', but the Iron Hands did not sicken, for what was broken was quickly replaced.
    '…angry.'
    And that was true enough, though hardly remarkable anymore.
    
    HIBOU DID AS he was bid. There was no point in antagonising the Iron Hand further, for who knew where his rage would take him? Hibou adopted the same tactic his Legion always did - withdraw, pull away, conserve strength for another pass. He tried not to let his ever-lurking shame cloud his emotions, for that would make him duller, less able to react when the time came. But that was not easy, for the shame was infinite and did not diminish.
    He walked down the corridors of the ship, feeling its otherness with every step. He had only ever gone to war on vessels of the ordu, with their clean lines and bright livery. This ship was stained by the temper of its original masters - crude edges, dark shades. It was a blunt-edged weapon. The ongoing sense of dislocation surprised him, and he made a mental note to attend to it in his meditation.
    The Grey Talon was sparsely inhabited - a mix of servitors, a skeleton crew of menials from the White Scars, and no doubt some old XVI Legion serfs who had managed to avoid Xa'ven's purge and now kept their heads down in the dingy corners of the bilge levels. In the absence of proper numbers, it was Henricos who kept the whole thing together, stringing automated mechanisms into line, restoring burned-out systems, reviving dormant machine-spirits. The furious pace of work was all that kept him from lashing out at living targets, and that was welcome enough.
    Were all Iron Hands the same, Hibou wondered, with that mix of sullen fury and morbid obsession? Impossible to tell. He had never fought alongside them before, and did not expect the current experiment to last long enough for him to form a settled opinion.
    He reached the practice cages, where Teji was already limbering up. Hibou drew one of the blades from the racks, watching his opponent idly.
    He had not known Teji before. The young warrior had been just one of many lodge members across many brotherhoods: each of them seduced by the same words and tiptoeing the precipice of damnation without knowing it. The Khan had ruled that kill-squads of the sagyar mazan be composed of strangers, lest the bonds of old brotherhood return and kindle fresh insurrection. A sensible precaution, but in truth hardly necessary. They all knew how close they had come, and what they had to do to redeem themselves.
    Teji had been from the Brotherhood of the Red Sun, one of the many under Jemulan's command. He had reached Ascension just before Chondax, joining the fleet in the last reinforcement wave from Chogoris before the veil fell. Not long in which to make a choice that would cripple his future forever.
    Hibou entered the cage, bowing. Teji returned the gesture, and brought his blade into guard. The weapon was as blunt as Hibou's, and wouldn't have hurt even a mortal badly. Damage was not the point of the exercise, though - it was balance, speed and reaction.
    'Did he speak to you?' asked Teji.
    Hibou shook his head. 'I made the first move. He will make the next.'
    Teji smiled. 'Maybe.'
    The sagyar mazan had become closer during the voyage, all nine of them, but wariness still remained. They were an artificial unit, pushed together only by a shared culpability, which in itself was a poor foundation for vengeance. Combat would test their weak links, either welding them firm or shattering the whole.
    'Begin, then,' said Hibou, and the two of them swept into movement, parrying, jabbing, using the blades with all the fluidity of their training. In seconds, the cage became an arena of Chogorian art, a crucible of swordsmanship.
    Immersed within that, the divisions seemed trivial. The doubt, the guilt, all of it became invisible, sublimed by the dominant physicality of combat.
    So they fought one another, enjoying the release. They knew, though, that when the blades were lowered again it would all come back, vivid like the shuddered recollection of dreams.
    
    He was back on Medusa, trudging beneath lightning-scored skies, feeling the primordial cold pressing in upon his skin. Somewhere up in the gloom, invisible beyond the night-dense clouds, the iron band of the Telstarax hung in orbit, ruined and echoing - a grave-marker of another age.
    He had never seen it, but it had always been a figure of Medusan myth - the ancient torc that marked the world from the void, shackling it in metal. He had never seen the primarch Ferrus Manus either, but knew that he was there too, somewhere. A mortal Telstarax of sorts, both guardian and destroyer, forging the planet's sons into new weapons and purging the last morsels of weakness from their privation-hardened bodies.
    He had walked for ten days as the dull Medusan sun had it, drinking little, eating little, his boots kicking up black dust and caking his layered synth-fabrics. His breather-mask had picked up a fault and clicked when he inhaled, letting in the gritty taste of spoil-dust. His land-engine was just a memory now, grinding its way south with the rest of his clan. The dirty smoke-plume had hung on the horizon for a long time before being lost in the smog, but he had never turned to look for it.
    On the eleventh day, the tower rose up before him - colossal, clad in plates of ink-black iron. He heard the boom of engines under the earth, and felt the shiver of the solid rock underfoot. Walls loomed away from him in geometric layers, star-shaped for siege, crowned with guns as vast as his old tracked home.
    He thought he had reached the Sorrgol citadel then, but he was wrong, because the tower before him was only the smallest of many spires, a mere sentinel over the southern gates. Beyond it stretched forges, burners, smelters and extractors, kilometre after kilometre, linked by webs of iron pipework and covered in a cloak of carbon vapour.
    Before the gate stood Ferrus Manus, a titan in charcoal armour, invincible and eternal in his watch over the citadel. Except that he was wrong about that too - the guard was just a legionary of the Tenth, the first he had ever seen, though to a youth's awed eyes it might just as well have been the primarch himself.
    He felt his head go light at last, and struggled to keep his feet. The gate-watcher gazed down at him with eyes that glowed dull red amidst a slope-grilled helm.
    'I come to serve,' he said, proudly, belligerently, daring the warrior above him to refuse.
    He thought he heard a faint whirring, like optical instruments. The legionary might have been considering the words, or was amused or irritated by them, but with the helm in place his emotions were unreadable.
    'So I see,' the legionary eventually replied.
    The gate cracked open, pulled back by immense cylinders. He swayed on his weary legs, catching sight of the furnaces beyond - the fields of metal and the boiling, underlit clouds.
    The legionary gestured for him to enter.
    'Have you the spine, child?' he asked, his voice a tinny, machine-filtered snarl. 'Make it to the tower, and they will test you further.'
    He was afraid then. Desperately afraid. His throat was dry, his hands cold with sweat, and it was hard to make his legs move. The legionary waited, silent again, as unmoving as the walls around him.
    He wanted to move. He could see the great tower within, a jagged blade at the heart of the foundries, glistening like the slate edges of mountains.
    He wanted to move.
    
    HENRICOS WOKE WITH a jerk. He had fallen asleep over his station on the bridge, slumped on a scanner console. None of the crew had dared to wake him.
    He lifted his head, wiping a line of drool from the smeared screen. How long had he been out? Seven minutes, by his armour's chronos. That was his sleep-pattern now - a few moments here and there, islands of unconsciousness between the long work shifts.
    The lapse was shameful. He was on the bridge, surrounded by those who had marked his weakness and would now be wondering how much longer he could last.
    Work harder.
    He tightened his shoulders, feeling the shift of armour-plate over tight muscle, the pain of limbs that had been cramped and compressed for too long.
    He looked down at the screen. It was covered with phosphor-trails of warp-wake projections, overlaid on a cartographic grid of dizzying complexity. He had traced the last two trail patterns over that, marking the passage of the Grey Talon through the maze of the aether.
    He studied the incoming signals, making allowances for the known ghost reflection from the augur array. Blinking to clear the last of his fuzziness, he remembered where he had got to before unconsciousness had crept up on him. He activated a new scan-sweep and watched the screen fill with data. It had taken five hours to prepare the algorithms, just as it had done for all the other searches. At times he wondered whether he had forgotten how to do it properly.
    It had been Jebez Aug who had hammered the technique into him, drilling the procedures by rote under the shadow of constant discipline. 'Others may be faster,' the Iron Father had been fond of saying to him. 'Others may even be stronger, but none are more methodical.'
    Aug, no doubt, was dead. It was likely now that the entire clan had been wiped out, either at Isstvan or in the aftermath. All of them, lost in the inferno. The old lessons had not helped them then, but they had all gone into that situation blind, forgetting their own maxims in their haste to reach the enemy.
    Ferrus, too. The blindest of us all.
    The lens before him throbbed with fresh runes, and Henricos snapped back to full attention. He reviewed the multi-layered tangle of trajectory markers, twisting away within stylised warp-conduits.
    For a moment, he saw nothing.
    Then a glimmer. A faint trace, just visible over the range of possible warp-paths.
    He could almost imagine Aug with him again, leaning over him, uttering a rare grunt of satisfaction.
    Henricos checked, to be sure, then opened a channel to Hibou. There was no avoiding the meeting now.
    'Khan,' he said, keeping it to the point. 'Ready your squad and meet me on the bridge. We have our target.'
    
    HIBOU STARED AT the screen, wondering exactly what he was supposed to be looking at. He was adept at reading tactical displays of a dozen kinds, but Henricos had created a mosaic of overlapping nonsense on the pict-feeds, one that even a Mechanicum magos would have struggled to process.
    'You see it?'
    'I do not,' said Hibou, bracing himself for fresh scorn. 'Please, show me.'
    Henricos snorted in exasperation, then zoomed in on the image. 'Forget three dimensions - the warp operates differently. We alter standard scan algorithms and course settings to cover the greatest area in the shortest time. The result is an organic pattern, developed by my clan's Iron Father on Medusa, and takes into account the underlying movement of aether conduits. We are not in physical space, so we do not move as if we are. The equations are… complex.'
    Hibou could believe that. The screen was crammed with trajectories, half of which meant nothing to him. 'You mean this,' he said, pointing to a ship-marker set several hours in Grey Talons wake.
    'No. Look at its movements, the same as ours - it is a mirror. A ghost. Consider it an artefact of the scanners and ignore. The target is here.'
    Henricos gestured towards a faint blip on the extreme edge of the display. Hibou frowned.
    'That is not a ship-marker,' he said.
    Henricos rewarded that with a sarcastic smile. 'Astute. A ship-marker is not what we seek.' He zoomed in further, increasing the granularity of the sweep. 'This is a warp-wake - the sign of deep passage. Count yourself lucky, White Scar. None of your Legion could have detected this.'
    Hibou let the insult slide. He was used to them. 'How far?'
    'I can bring us within strike range. But remember this is not physical space. We must track it, using the search-pattern, waiting for them to drop out, then we fall upon them. I can materialise on top of it, in its shadow. They will have only seconds to respond.'
    'They will not see us coming?'
    'Not unless they were schooled to recognise an algorithmic pursuit. That is unlikely.'
    Hibou detected the sullen pride there and let Henricos enjoy the moment. The Iron Hands had had precious little to celebrate, and if their warp-tracking prowess was grounds for arrogance then they were welcome to it.
    'Which Legion, then?' Hibou asked. 'Can you tell me that?'
    'Look here.' Henricos zoomed in further, exposing the wound in the warp gouged by the prey-ship's engines. 'Three salients, aggressively pitched, characteristic of Draco-series drives - an old configuration. These were favoured by one Legion only, so either that is a Sons of Horus ship, or you may have my eyes.'
    Hibou felt eagerness stir just at the name. 'Can we take it?'
    'No idea, not until we break the veil. But it cannot be much larger than us, and we will be on it before it knows we are a threat.' He looked up at Hibou, and for the first time there was a crooked grin twitching at his lips. 'You wished to know the plan. Here it is. We are in their colours - that will give them a moment's uncertainty. We board before they can raise shields, take the command bridge, disable it. The guns on the Talon can do the rest.'
    Hibou nodded. The schematics were already beginning to untangle in his mind, and he could half see the route that the Iron Hands legionary was proposing.
    'And you will take the Talon's helm,' he said, planning how he would deploy the boarding party.
    'I will not,' growled Henricos, slamming the screen away on its angled mount and resuming the hostility that bubbled just under the surface of his humour. 'I will be with you. We will need all the blades we can muster.'
    That anger was directed now - no longer at those he was forced to serve with, but at the real enemy, the ones who had unambiguously chosen treachery.
    'Side by side, then,' said Hibou, smiling dryly.
    'If you insist,' muttered Henricos, turning back to the data. 'As long as we kill and as long as we hurt them, I care not.'
    
    IT WAS TWELVE more hours before the target ship made signs of dropping from the warp. For most of that time the kill-team waited in the holds of the gunship Golden Dagger, primed for rapid hangar exit. Boarding torpedoes had been considered and rejected - they would be coming in too fast to guarantee a fire-angle - so they trusted the manoeuvrability and speed of the Thunderhawk to get them across the void gulf.
    After launch, the Talon's mortal crew, under the command of a stoic Chogorian bridge officer named Omoz, would keep the destroyer as close as possible, drawing any incoming fire while the boarding parties infiltrated the hangars.
    Henricos waited impatiently, locked in the gunship's forward hold, Hibou's White Scars in restraint cages on either side of him. Streams of data scrolled across his visor feed, giving him every detail of the final approach. Both vessels were still in the warp, but the target had now changed course dramatically and was slowing for exit. The Grey Talon pursued it along the twisting lines of the Sorrgol pattern, operating on the automatic guides he had set in place before taking position.
    'Start launch cycle,' he muttered, keeping an eye on the evolving timings.
    The Thunderhawk's thrusters roared into life. Ahead of them, glimpsed through grainy pict-feeds, the hangar door locks slammed open.
    'Warp-bubble punctured ahead,' reported Omuoz over the comm. 'It is coming out.'
    'Remain tight on it,' warned Henricos, frustrated that he could not be in two places at once and fly both ships. He had tried to relax - the V Legion pilots who steered both the Talon and the gunship were as good as any he'd ever seen - but it was still hard to trust outsiders. 'Five kilometres, real space. No more.'
    It was insanely close, a warp exit virtually on top of their enemy's, but it had to be that tight or they would lose the fractional chance.
    Golden Dagger rose from the apron on booming cushions of downdraft, hovering a metre clear. A second later, the Grey Talon ripped free of the aether's clutches. As soon as it had cleared the rift, the hangar's void-doors ground open amidst a smudge of straggling Geller remnants.
    'Now!' cried Henricos.
    The Thunderhawk hit full speed, hurling him back against his restraint harness, and shot out into the void. The target hung just ahead of them on the augur screens, emerging from the last of its warp rift just as the Talon was cleared, angled away and with its running lights low.
     'Shields?' demanded Henricos.
    'Not yet,' reported Omoz, his voice commendably calm.
    The enemy ship raced towards them. Henricos saw then how big it was - a line frigate with a full battle-lance - and cursed under his breath. It would already be scanning the Grey Talon, sending hails, running checks against fleet ledgers and picking up the incoming gunship. The subterfuge of their XVI Legion livery was painfully slight.
    'Get us in now,' he voxed to the Golden Dagger's crew.
    They sped under the shadow of the frigate's hull. Rows of hangar bays, all of them barred, swam up into the viewers. The Thunderhawk's battlecannon loosed, sending shells screaming into the nearest void-doors. Hull plates exploded under the impact, disintegrating in a welter of spinning adamantium.
    'Faster!' roared Henricos, knowing that the void shield arrays would now be powering up.
    The gunship swooped for the aperture, blasting through at a steep pitch, scraping the edges of the hangar entrance before shuddering to a full-stop and coming to rest on a violent bloom of downthrust. The sponson-mounted heavy bolters opened up, spraying in twin arcs from the ingress, raking enemy ships locked on the deck rails and shredding any crew caught out on the apron.
    Disengaging his restraint cage, Henricos slammed the ramp release. 'Out, out, out!'
    They spilled from the holds, accompanied by the howl of released atmosphere and the blare of alert klaxons. Behind them, the gauze of atmospheric containment fields finally slid across the shattered hangar entrance, now too late to do anything other than trap the infiltrators within the hull.
    Hibou raced ahead, making for the hangar's inner doors. The Khan had a power sword with a florid dragon carved into its crackling edge. Henricos followed him with his bolter at the ready, scanning for incoming targets.
    The first opposition came from the ship's mortal crew. They reacted quickly, forming up at the intersections of the corridors leading up from the hangars and laying down concentrated fire. All of them were from a hard world and had lived lifetimes of combat, so they performed admirably.
    Yet it didn't help them. The White Scars were astonishingly fast, crashing aside the opposition before it had time to get established, whooping and yelling as they laid about them with their blades. Henricos had never seen them in action as squads before, and he could admire the seamless interaction between them - a warrior would sway out of the way to allow another to fire, then dart back into contact, aware the whole time of the flight of bolter-rounds and the whirl of steel around him.
    'The flesh is weak!' Henricos roared, watching the enemy die, listening for the wet slap of flesh splitting and the echoing rip of the mass-reactive shells going off. That gave him pleasure, the first he had taken since the similar slaughter on the Vorkaudar.
    The Scars joined him in viciousness. They hit recklessly, aiming for pain, and their cries were edged with something more raw than he had heard before. It was a kind of frenzy, with each kill seeming to spur them deeper into it.
    They were the sagyar mazan, the penitents, and they fought like it.
    Henricos and Hibou led them onwards, carving twin passages towards the command bridge. The pace quickened, and they stormed through crew halls and armouries, leaving a long trail of slicked blood behind them. The decks shook as heavy impacts rocked the hull - the Talon firing, stressing the void shields and keeping the enemy crews busy.
    The boarding party tore up through the levels, hurling grenades into choke points, charging through them with the flesh-scraps still flying. The White Scars' armour became streaked with red splatter-patterns across the ivory. Henricos's own iron-black plate barely reflected the gore, though he was as steeped in it as the rest of them.
    By the time they had reached the wide assembly chamber below the bridge, the real enemy emerged, pushing past their own battling crew to get at the invaders, issuing Cthonian kill-challenges from brass-edged augmitters.
    The Scars scattered instantly, spreading out across the chamber's marble floor and racing for the cover of the supporting columns. Bolter-fire crisscrossed the open spaces, shattering rockcrete and throwing a powder haze across the hall. Henricos thudded up against a three-metre-wide pillar, feeling the stone of it tremble as the mass-reactives exploded.
    He waited two seconds, letting his cover absorb the fusillade, before charging out again - keeping low, trusting his armour to take the hits. By then the Scars were moving too, flitting like gore-speckled ghosts between the columns. They danced through an oncoming storm of bolter-rounds, spinning as they came within sword-reach to give their blades more speed.
    Henricos lumbered by comparison, coming up against the bulk of a Sons of Horus warrior in dark, sea-green plate. Both bolters fired simultaneously - Henricos was hit on the shoulder, his enemy in the chest. The impact of the Iron Hand's round caused the greater damage, throwing the traitor back by a hand's width.
    Henricos pressed in fast. He fired again, cracking his enemy's faceplate, then piled in with his gauntlets, punching rapidly and hard until he heard the wet crack of a breaking spine. As the warrior fell, Henricos grabbed his power maul - finally something he could relish using - and pressed onwards.
    By then the noise in the hall was hammering, a mix of vox roars and explosions. More Sons of Horus charged in, adding to the lattice of shellfire.
    Henricos's mind suddenly shifted back to Isstvan - the last time he had faced the XVI Legion in numbers. He remembered the desperate stands on the ridges at the edge of the depression, watching as waves of the enemy advanced, the bloody dust kicked up into a boiling cloud of rage.
    He was hit again, a bolt-round smacking into his knee joint before exploding against the covering plate, and he staggered in the charge. A traitor got close to him with a chainaxe, and Henricos whipped his crackling maul around to block the challenge. They were coming in from all angles now, pushing the boarding party away from the hall's far end and driving them back towards the exposed centre.
    'For Ferrus!' he bellowed, lashing out and driving the maul deep into his enemy's neck before kicking the choking adversary aside and launching himself at the next. They had to keep the momentum up, break through to the bridge before they were dragged into a drawn-out melee, or the chance would be gone.
    By then the Scars were fighting with an almost berserk energy, their battle-challenges more like screams. Henricos saw a Sons of Horns legionary literally torn apart by two of them, his body sliced at the armour joints by whistling bladework. The Warmaster's own were just as vicious - a few metres away, an ivory battle-brother was dragged to the deck, his back broken and his helm-plate smashed.
    Henricos limped over to avenge the kill, but was slammed to the ground by a bolt impact, the third to hit him. He skidded over, his armour scraping against the marble. He made to rise, and only then realised what damage had been done - blood was cascading down from his stomach, foaming around the ragged edges of the hole in his armour.
    He spat, furious at the setback, and switched to his bolter, snapping the muzzle up to fire. But his vision blurred from pain, and he missed the target. An enemy legionary sprinted towards him, swinging a power axe around his head to generate the down-force for a killing strike.
    Henricos tried to rise, to get his maul up to block the blow, but he never got the chance. A White Scars legionary smashed into the charging traitor, blocking him bodily and sending them both careering across the deck. They rolled together, hacking madly, until the White Scar managed to pin him. With a deft twist, he plunged his curved sword deep into his enemy's gullet, ripping upwards to tear out his throat. Then he was up again, falling back to Henricos's position, drawing a bolt pistol and firing out into the throng.
    'Khan…' acknowledged Henricos, still struggling to rise.
    Hibou crouched beside him. 'Can you fight?'
    Henricos snarled, knowing the answer but unable to get the words out. He would be lucky not to bleed to death where he lay. 'The bridge… is within range…'
    That, technically, was a lie. The assault had stalled, and the bodies of four White Scars lay motionless across the chamber floor. The rest were falling back towards his position, pursued by twice that number of Sons of Horus.
    Hibou kept firing, trying to slow the oncoming traitors. 'I do not think so. We will end more of them yet, though.'
    Henricos reloaded his bolter and took aim. As he did so, the entire chamber rocked, as if buffeted by a hull breach. For a moment he dared to hope that the Grey Talon had broken through the void shields, though the thought did not last long - the ship did not have the weaponry, and even if it had there were no more troops aboard that could have turned this battle.
    'Die well, brother,' he snarled, taking aim at an advancing group of Sons of Horus and opening fire again.
    He didn't expect his shots to do more than hinder their inevitable onslaught, but his shells seemed to multiply in mid-flight, hitting the targets in a whole volley of mass-reactive destruction. The advance crumpled to a halt amidst a roiling wave of explosions, sending the Sons of Horus reeling backwards.
    Startled, Henricos looked around, and only then detected the acrid tang of teleport discharge. Seven leviathans in Terminator battle-plate stalked out of disintegrating warp-frost spheres, clad in a mix of Gorgon and Cataphractii suits, laying down a heavy curtain of fire from twin-linked bolters and combi-meltas.
    Their plate was black, pitted with bare metal scratches, the edges picked out in white. He saw Medusan emblems on the pauldrons - cogs, fists, skulls. They were all clans he recognised, ones he had fought alongside or been rival too, including his own - Sorrgol, bearing the wrench-and-cog sigil, just as he himself wore.
    The White Scars reacted quicker than he did, joining the new assault, adding their speed to the advance of the Terminators. Henricos remained locked down by the shock of recognition.
    We were all dead…
    Hibou sprinted back into the melee, joining his brothers in the counter-attack, crying out in the outlandish tongue of his home world. As Henricos struggled to regain his feet, cursing at the sluggish recovery of his flesh, a shadow fell over him.
    He looked up into the red-eyed glare of a Legion deathmask. He might as well have been back on Medusa - gazing up, stupefied, at the anonymous legionary he had thought was Ferrus Manus.
    'Bion Henricos,' came the familiar voice of Shadrak Meduson, once captain of Sorrgol's Tenth Company, but now so much more. 'Ensure you do not die here. I will have need of you.'
    
    MEDUSON HAD ARRIVED in the X Legion strike cruiser Iron Heart. The warship was many orders more powerful than either Grey Talon or the XVI Legion frigate - which was named, somewhat ironically, the Inexorable Conquest - so it had been able to render down the enemy ship's shields in two colossal broadsides. The Terminator bridgehead was just the start - more troops were sent over in boarding rams, spilling into the narrow inner passages and clogging them with slaughter.
    With such numbers, the assembly hall was quickly taken, followed by a swift and brutal assault on the bridge. The enemy, as could be expected, fought to the end, but it was Meduson who ended it, decapitating the ship's captain with a single savage swipe, mirroring the death of his gene-sire amidst the metallic choler of the assembled Iron Hands.
    Hours later, the ship was secured. Five of the White Scars' kill-team still lived, including Hibou Khan. Henricos came closer to death than he felt comfortable admitting, but the hated flesh-components responded to the challenge, aided by the knives of the Iron Heart's medicae teams.
    By the time the last of Meduson's troops returned to the strike cruiser he was on his feet again, and was there when Meduson himself returned to the ship's council chamber. The room was hexagonal and of night-black iron, rising up into a shaft like a foundry vent and filled with the grinding hum of engines.
    'Henricos. You did as you were bid,' the warleader noted.
    That was as much congratulation as he was likely to get from Meduson for staying alive. It already felt unusual, having grown used to the courtesy and deference of the Chogorians, to be plunged back into the blunt manner of his own Legion.
    'It was an order,' said Henricos.
    Meduson stood alongside four others - two Iron Hands, a Salamander and a Raven Guard. It seemed that the hybrid army sent to Isstvan still endured, at least in scraps.
    'Many clans,' said Henricos. 'Many Legions.'
    'Forged into one. We are gathering in numbers again.'
    Henricos could admire the sentiment. A nagging part of him thought it mistaken, but there could be no arguing with rescuers. 'Others of Sorrgol?'
    'Jebez Aug lives, though I command the clan. Much has changed - you will be told all these things. What of you?'
    Henricos told them of the flight from Isstvan, the encounter on Prospero, and the penitents of the V. Shadrak Meduson listened intently, absorbing the data like a machine, scouring it for anything he could use.
    'Then that was a ship of my Legion?' asked the Salamander, sounding genuinely interested.
    'For a time,' said Henricos. Though it has been many things.'
    'And the Khan remains loyal?' pressed Meduson.
    'Completely. His Legion has mobilised for war. Even now he will be engaging the enemy.'
    'But those you fought with - they were traitors?'
    Henricos paused. 'No. They were not.' He struggled to find the words. 'There was… insufficient data.'
    Meduson did not look convinced. 'You vouch for them?'
    It felt strange, to be defending Hibou and the rest, but now that they had fought together it was harder to maintain outright hostility. 'They are atoning.'
    'So be it. If they can fight, I can use them.' Meduson looked at Henricos carefully. 'You can see what is happening here. The strands are being pulled together, winding into cords of greater strength.'
    'And that is wise?'
    'Why would it not be?'
    Henricos glanced across the faces in the room: three of them ashen, one bone-pale and another dark. 'While we hunt apart, we are hard to detect. And when we come together, we can be seen. We cannot defeat this enemy through strength - they have more of it.'
    'Yet there are things we can achieve,' said Meduson. If the challenge to his strategy irritated him, he made no sign of it. 'I have marked a soul for destruction and I have bound the warriors under me to this cause. If we do no more than this, it will have satisfied honour.'
    Henricos did not much like the sound of that, but knew better than to press the matter. If Meduson was motivated by vendetta than that would at least be purpose, and he himself had been working without that for too long.
    'Count yourself fortunate,' Meduson said. 'You were fated for death on that ship. Now you will fight on.'
    Fortunate. Of course.
    'But it was not fortune that brought you,' said Henricos.
    Meduson snorted a dry laugh. 'So you worked it out.'
    'The sensor-ghost, mirroring our every move. You were watching us.'
    'Aug detected you. He recognised the Sorrgol search-pattern and replicated it, mimicking a scanner-artefact, something we have done many times. Consider that your luck in this - if he had not counselled us to wait and to observe, we would have destroyed you as a Sons of Horus vessel.' Meduson sounded amused. 'Aug admired the way you ran the algorithm, though he was disappointed that you did not investigate the ghost.'
    Henricos felt the barb. The White Scar had seen it, and he had not. 'I was in error. I will learn from it.'
    'See that you do. This will be a war of deceptions, and they are as apt to it as we.'
    Henricos bowed. 'So what now?'
    'Our fleet has another ship. We are used to the process now - purge the crew, instate our own and add the guns to our arsenal.'
    'You are rebuilding the Legion, brother?'
    Meduson shook his head. 'No, but we are more than scattered clans now. That is the lesson here.'
    'And if there is no Tenth, I guess you are no longer captain.'
    'Warleader. That is all.'
    Henricos could have commented on that. He could have remarked that there had already been an idea in which many Legions were subsumed under a single commander, with a title that was not so far away from this new one. He might have noted that this had not apparently ended well and that the parallels were worth noting…
    Of course he did not do this. Meduson's quiet command was evident. The suicide mission that Henricos had willingly embraced was now part of something greater. He was no longer alone amidst the warriors of other Legions, and he had the chance to do more than petty damage to those he hated with such perfect clarity.
    He should have been happy. That should have doused the anger that still burned through his every vein.
    'Then you will join us,' said Meduson, in a way that was more observation than command.
    'On one condition,' Henricos replied.
    Meduson looked at him warily.
    'Name it,' he said.
    
    Medusa's skies were never open. There were never starlit nights - just the turmoil of toxin-heavy vapour banks, jostling, boiling and murmuring in the dark.
    He limped from the southern gate towards the citadel's heart. All around him the forges worked, tended by ranks of silent guardians with faceplates of beaten metal. Factory spires rose from the installation's twisted entrails, each one crusted with the panoply of the machine - valves, intakes and conveyors. Between them were the great shafts, plunging away into the planet's core, welling up rust-red from the violence unfolding in their deep wells.
    He dragged his bandaged feet through streets thick with dust, his jaw clenched tight against the pain and the hunger. The walls were far behind now and he had not seen another armoured guardian, just mortals like him in black climate suits, all consumed by the spine-breaking labour of the forges. He had been told to enter, but did not know the way. Amidst the smog, the spark-spills and the biting cold, it was hard to see more than ten metres ahead, let alone locate the path to the citadel's heart.
    He knew even then that this was the test. Others must have done what he was doing - left the precarious safety of the clan land-engines and stumbled over the plains towards the strongholds. Maybe most of them died on the way, their bones picked clean by the icy wind. That was the kind of selection Medusa specialised in, the one that made its children harder than adamantium.
    He lowered his head, clutching his collar to keep the chill out. There was no point in peering ahead through the gloom, so he just focused on putting one foot in front of the other keeping his muscles moving in rhythm.
    It must have been many hours before the ground started to rise and the path switched back between stairways of new-cut stone. Inner walls rose up around him, vaster even than those on the perimeter. He saw a great sigil made from polished slate - a circular cog device, centred on a stylised wrench-head. It was huge, more than thirty metres in diameter, and embedded in a cliff face of stone that seemed to tower up into the turbulent heavens themselves.
    Before he was even fully aware of it he was climbing steeply, breathing heavily, feeling the air grow more coarse and cold. His eyes were slits now, screwed against the dust. Something was bleeding - he could feel the hot trickle down his chest - but he kept putting one foot on each new step before him, inching his way upward.
    Only once did he look back. He saw the plains stretch away from him far below, webbed with metal and punctured with gas-pluming wellheads. He saw concentric rings of walls, as solid as the sacred mountain, each one studded with defence towers. When the lightning whipped across the obsidian landscape he saw the detail there, picked out in neon, markers of a manufactory of infinite power and strength.
    He never remembered the final ascent, the one that ripped the skin from the soles of his feet and made his lungs burn. He must have passed through many portals, each one opened for him by the machine-guardians of that place who recognised a supplicant and allowed him passage.
    By the time his senses returned he was in a great hall, lined with iron columns and lit with orange sodium lamps. He had fallen and was on his knees, but he still shuffled onwards, knowing that he would either reach the place of testing or die like an animal.
    He looked up, blinking through the filth-smear across his eyes. There were bodies all around him then - skeletal figures with metal parts embedded in their ghostly flesh, spidery amalgams of mortal and machine, and dwarfish attendants that scuttled between the legs of the greater constructs around them.
    And then there were the Lords of Medusa, clad in blackened iron and attended by scores of robed menials. They were looking down at him. He could hear their mask-filtered breathing, scraping like the wind of the plains over stone.
    One of them came closer, stooped, and took his chin in one gauntlet.
    He lifted his head, painfully, trying not to wince. Just as at the gate, he heard the whirr of instruments. He was being scanned, judged and assessed.
    The iron knight before him said nothing until the scans were complete. The grip on his chin was ice-cold.
    'Pass the gate,' said the knight, 'and your trials will be eternal.'
    He could feel his heart beating weakly.
    'You will be Sorrgol. None will own you but us. When you learn secrets, you will never share them. You will fight alone, you will take no allies. We are the Iron Tenth, and we are alone. Outside this place is weakness. We alone are strong.'
    He believed those words as soon as he heard them. A fierce joy kindled in his breast, and for the first time he became sure that he would survive to take the trials.
    'You will never trust. You will never dilute your strength by fighting alongside another who is not of Medusa. We are the Iron Tenth. We alone are strong.'
    There was moisture on his cheeks. He would listen, he would learn. He would break free of the shackles set upon the world by fate, and see the iron collar in all its void-set majesty, and to accomplish this he would absorb every maxim given to him.
    He would learn. He would believe.
    'You understand this?'
    'I… do,' he rasped, his lips dry and bleeding.
    'Then repeat it. Say it, and never forget it.'
    'We are the Iron Tenth,' he said, burning with both pain and pride, yearning for nothing more than it to be true. 'And we alone are strong.'
    
    HE FOUND HIBOU down in the Talon's practice cages. The Khan had been working near-constantly since the assault on the Inexorable Conquest, believing that faults in his kill-team's tactics had led to the failure. Unlike Henricos, he could take little satisfaction from the arrival of Meduson, since his actions had done nothing to bring it about. The redemptive mission he had embarked upon had brought him neither deserved victory nor honourable death, leaving him dependent once again on the intervention of others.
    Henricos watched him for a while, remaining in the shadows. The White Scar fought just as he had done on the frigate - a blur of speed, far surpassing anything that the common warriors of the X Legion could summon. There was a virtue in that, just as there was a virtue in the more solid techniques that the Medusans had been schooled in.
    Eventually the Khan stopped, glistening with sweat, panting heavily. He must have been working for hours. Henricos came to meet him at the cage's entrance, offering him an oil-stained cloth.
    'I did not think to see you again,' said the Khan, wiping his brow.
    'You thought I'd take a place on the Iron Heart.'
    'It is a fine ship.'
    They walked together, heading for the chamber's exit. 'It is a long time since I was on a Medusan vessel. Perhaps I remember them differently.'
    Hibou raised an eyebrow, and the movement made the scar on his cheek twitch. 'Then you are staying on the Grey Talon?'
    Henricos shrugged. 'This is a lucky ship. And I do not trust you to fly it.'
    'That may be wise - you have fouled half the systems.'
    They reached the exit, and Hibou paused at the doorway. 'Teji is dead. Three others. Their blood was wasted - we would have lost the action.'
    'That is war.'
    'We must do better.'
    Henricos nodded. 'We will.'
    He reached over his shoulder and drew a sword, the first he had carried since Isstvan. It was no curved piece of Chogorian steel, but an augmented-function Medusan zweihander, the length of a mortal man, riddled with power feeds and linked disruptor field generators. It was the kind of weapon he had dreamed of owning again, far better than a bolter or a borrowed power-maul.
    'Next time we fight, I will be at your shoulder with this. A single strike can carve a legionary in two.'
    Hibou looked at the longsword cautiously. The heavy construction was the antithesis of everything that his own Legion practised in weaponry. 'Impressive, certainly,' he said, doing his best.
    Henricos laughed. 'It was the condition of my taking Meduson's command. That, and captaining the Talon. I see potential here. I see a melding of philosophies.' He sheathed the sword again. 'Your kind move a blade fast. You could teach me how to do that.'
    Hibou didn't manage to hide his surprise. 'Teach you?'
    'And the reverse.' Henricos hit the door release, and the blast-panel slid back. 'Meduson is serious. He's going after the Sixteenth now, right to the top. You are correct - we need to find a way of doing better. Perhaps this is it.'
    'That is madness.'
    'In all likelihood, but what strategic use is sanity now?' Henricos fixed Hibou with a steady glare. 'If the chance comes, I will take it. I will look on the Warmaster's face as I end him. Will you be beside me then?'
    Hibou stared back warily, seemingly unable to decide if he was being mocked. 'You will never get the chance.'
    'You're probably right.'
    'But if you did…'
    Henricos waited patiently. In the end, though, Hibou never finished the sentence. The Chogorian's eyes moved back to the hilt of the zweihander.
    'So how does it handle?' Hibou asked.
    Henricos stepped back from the door and unsheathed the blade again. He nodded over to the practice cage.
    'Draw your own blade,' he said, wondering how well his wounds would hold up if things got too strenuous. 'I will demonstrate.'