A game of opposites
Guy Haley

Confounding the foe is one sure way to victory. When this strategy is pursued, war becomes a game of opposites and expectations.
 	At all times, present your enemy with the reverse of the truth. When you are vulnerable, appear strong, when you are strong, appear vulnerable. When close by your enemy, appear far from him, and when far away, appear close by. Weakness may thus be turned into strength.
 	A cunning strategist will show the enemy a mirror image of the truth, but the master strategist will accord his lies with his enemy's expectations. Learn what your enemy believes of you. Present that image to him at all times. In using his intelligence as a cloak, you might hide your intentions, and strike as a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky.
 	- Jaghatai Khan, Tenets of War

 	The Storm Eagle hovered uncertainly over the mountainside. The site landing pad had been taken out in the attack, forcing the ship to put down directly onto the slope. Its engines whined, struggling to keep it over the flattest part of the terrain in the strong crosswind. After five minutes shifting from side to side, the Storm Eagle touched down awkwardly. Landing claws gouged white scratches into rock as they slipped. Engines howled again, pushing the ship back into position. Tentatively, the machine sank into its hydraulics. The engines cycled down and finally cut out. The craft sat unmoving a moment, wind screeching around its body.
 	The front ramp opened slowly, as if the Storm Eagle feared knocking itself from its precarious perch. Red light spilled out into the dim afternoon. An angry voice, distorted by the vox-mitter of early pattern power armour, came with it.
 	'Curse it all, can this landing sequence go any more slowly?'
 	'The landing area is unsafe, Warsmith Xyrokles.' The second had the long-suffering air of a man often criticised.
 	'Always got an answer, Phideark,' growled Xyrokles. 'It is one of your least attractive habits'
 	'Yes, Warsmith.'
 	'And stop agreeing with me when I insult you. A dignified silence is more becoming.'
 	'Yes, Warsmith.'
 	Within the ship a group of Iron Warriors waited for the ramp's cautious descent. The Warsmith stepped out as soon as the edge bit the mountainside. The slope was such that the ramp was angled awkwardly, and not all of the toothed lip made contact with the ground. The ship creaked ominously. Xyrokles looked up sharply at the tilted prow.
 	'Steady, my brothers,' he said. 'It would be embarrassing if we lost our ship to heavy footsteps.'
 	As lightly as a transhuman can move in power armour, the Iron Warriors disembarked, fanning out along the slope, guns ready. Xyrokles stomped ahead of them, his heavy boots slipping on the loose rock.
 	'What are you doing?' he said, waving at his warriors impatiently. 'Quickly! If they are still up there we are all dead.' He looked up at the construction site. 'We are sitting targets here. Who trained you fools? Get up to the ridge, cover Phideark and me! Go!' He waved them forwards. The servo-arm mounted on his power plant half extended with his irritation. The warriors lumbered up the mountainside. Xyrokles and Phideark followed.
 	'What a mess,' Xyrokles said when they crested the brow.
 	'They have done a thorough job, my lord,' said Phideark.
 	'Shut up, Phideark,' snapped Xyrokles. He stamped on. The level ground the construction teams had so painfully cut from the mountainside was cratered and fouled with construction machinery carefully positioned before being destroyed to prevent landing there.
 	Xyrokles waited for his bodyguards to fan out further before venturing on. He stopped again, shaking his head at a collection of new buildings, now all in flames. Black smoke twisted sideways in the wind.
 	'Everything, command centre, landing pad, comms arrays. All of it gone.'
 	A massive turret, which had been close to completion, had been levelled with melta-charges. Bubbled flows of melted plascrete clung to the slopes, frozen quickly in the mountain chill.
 	Fires from the construction site blew flat along the ground, only their ferocity keeping them from being blown out.
 	'This happened recently,' said Xyrokles. 'What was the exact time contact was lost?'
 	'Fifty-second segment, four hundredth millichron,' Phideark said faithfully.
 	'A few hours ago at most. These fires are still burning.' Xyrokles looked up at the mountainside where fresh craters made white starbursts fringed in black on the reddish stone. 'Those bastards are probably still up there, watching us.'
 	'I detect no power sources from active vehicles or war-plate.'
 	'It means nothing.' Xyrokles moved on, skirting a burned out earth mover slumped into the remains of its tracks. 'All this work, all wrecked, a week away from the installation of the primary armament.'
 	They spotted the first bodies near the outer defence lines. A firing line of Iron Warriors lay scattered by a missile hit. More were dead behind the short parapet guarding the principal blast doors, their wounds unmistakably inflicted by power weapons. 'There's one of theirs,' Phideark pointed.
 	'Shut up, Phideark. Shut up, shut up now. I am trying to think,' said Xyrokles. He went over to the dead warrior anyway. 'Typical hit and run tactics.' He kicked the dead warrior's chest-plate. His gunmetal boot made a dull sound on the white ceramite 'White Scars! I knew it was too good to be true when Harkaton said he'd driven off their warfleet. That attack on the outer solar line was a distraction to allow the slippery cheminerikoi to sneak in here.' He used an Olympian profanity with no true parallel in Gothic. There were several near translations of varying levels of offensiveness. 'But if they snuck in, it means their strength will be low. A raiding party, come to make our lives difficult - well, they'll regret it.' He stared up at the fire gutting the command post and shook his head again. 'Have you alerted the other sites?'
 	'Yes, Warsmith, as requested.' He paused. 'Site five has been hit. Similar timing to this.'
 	Xyrokles swore. Phideark stood stoically by as his commander worked his way through five city-states'-worth of gutterspeak.
 	'The same result?'
 	'The same. Total destruction.'
 	'Damn it all, Phideark!' He looked down to the Storm Eagle. 'What's that still doing there? Order the ship up. Do I have to do everything? It's vulnerable. Tell the men to start site recovery.'
 	'Shall we begin reconstruction?'
 	Xyrokles snorted. 'No. The enemy will keep knocking down every castella we put up. It's a wearying game. We need to deal with them before we can deal with that.' He pointed at the burning complex.
 	'Then what are your orders, my lord? Shall I order patrols out around the site?'
 	'Are you joking with me, Phideark?'
 	'No, my lord.'
 	'Then attempt more workable suggestions!'
 	'Then, we defend.'
 	'Also idiotic. They will hit us and hit us and hit us, that's what these savages do. We can build as many forts as we care to, it won't help. We don't have the manpower in-system to protect all our assets here, not while they are half-finished.'
 	'Then your suggestions, Warsmith, so that I might act upon them.'
 	'That's more like it, captain. We do not pursue, and we do not defend. We have to tempt them out get them to attack us, and box them in.' He nodded at his own suggestion. Lens glow glanced off the dull metallic armour plates. 'Yes. The only way to stop something that loves to move is to give it no opportunity to move at all. Order up our orbital fighters and gunships, standard search pattern.'
 	'My lord, we have less than half a grand company at our disposal. The weather is closing in. We are unlikely to find them.'
 	'Finding them is not the point,' said Xyrokles. 'They'll be expecting us to search. Let's not disappoint them.'
 	Some six hundred metres above, five White Scars stood in guard around a rocky eminence. Four wore the insignia of clan lords, the bond-kin of a khan of the Ordu. The fifth was the Khan Ishigu of the Third Tempest. He was a warrior of high rank and renown, but at that moment he stood with his warriors as a common sentry, for he waited on the Khan of Khans, Jaghatai, primarch of the White Scars.
 	The primarch knelt on a boulder above them, magnoculars to his eyes. He was leaning far out over the drop, thin air and a painful, fatal tumble down sharp rocks awaiting should he fall. Ishigu Khan and his men did not fear for their gene-father. He was the lord of all Khans, a son of the Emperor. Such a slip for him was unthinkable. A man might as well expect the sky to stumble.
 	Runic notifiers blinked in Ishigu's helm. He evaluated them and, finding danger in the warning, addressed his lord.
 	'My Khan,' he said. 'Two groups of enemy aircraft are moving in from the west and south on intersecting courses. Five lightning crows, a dozen gunships, mixed classes. They will be over our position within ten minutes.'
 	The Khan of Khans lowered his magnoculars.
 	'They begin their search for us, Ishigu.' He grinned back at his men. 'They will find nothing. We leave now.'
 	Xyrokles' men engaged in constant searches to no effect. In the meantime, three more sites were attacked and badly damaged. All was as the Warsmith expected, and so he was not unduly concerned.
 	'I know how this Legion thinks,' Xyrokles told his five line captains. 'We must behave as they expect, in order to hide our intentions.'
 	'Why, lord?' asked Captain Melias, head of Xyrokles' armoured century.
 	'Because it is what Jaghatai Khan would do,' said Xyrokles. 'Helpfully, their primarch has put down a number of his thoughts on the nature of strategy. Misdirection is a keystone of his tenets of war.'
 	'They fight dirty,' said Captain Herakt.
 	'Dishonestly,' corrected Xyrokles.
 	Herakt picked up one of a number of slender pamphlets from the table. It was made of pounded grass paper, and written in hand-painted Chogorian ideograms. He held it open in his dull metal fists. His helm clicked as his suit cogitator attempted a translation.
 	'Know one's self, know one's enemy. If you do not know your nature it cannot be honed, but remains blunt. If you do not know your enemy's nature your attack will likewise be blunted…' Herakt laughed. 'What gnomic nonsense is this?'
 	'It is irritatingly composed, but taken together there is a certain poetry to it,' said Xyrokles.
 	'He's not exactly a plain speaker, is he?' Herakt tossed the book back onto the table.
 	'He is not. But the concepts expressed in these books are valid.' Xyrokles tapped a small stack of the pamphlets. 'They are a useful insight into his mind and the tactics of his Legion.'
 	'You've been studying these texts, my lord?' said Herakt.
 	'I have. There are more forms of war than ours alone. A mastery of sieges is of little use when your opponent scorns walls. I told you, I know this primarch.' He poked his finger into the tri-d map on the chart desk they stood around. The projection fizzed around his finger. 'Enough to know that station nine will be next.'
 	'That's my site,' said Captain Carazhk, looking up from a book of logistical tables suddenly.
 	'I am glad you are paying attention,' said Xyrokles.
 	'Then I shall evacuate,' said Carazhk.
 	'You will do no such thing,' said Xyrokles.
 	'Stand easy, brother captain, there's only a few of them,' said Herakt mockingly.
 	'Easy to say when it is not your men at risk,' said Garazhk, irritated easily by Herakt's baiting, as he always was. 'Why should we stand and die? Nobody else has had any luck against them. Warsmith, it makes no sense.'
 	'It makes perfect sense,' said Xyrokles.
 	'I protest, my lord,' said Garazhk. 'If you order me to fight, I shall, but I request reinforcements. Divided across the construction sites as we are, we have insufficient manpower at any one to stop them. We must meet them in force, and let them break themselves on the walls of our bodies. We have lost, how many?'
 	'Fifty-nine of seven hundred men,' said Melias.
 	'None of them yours,' said Captain Kyrix sourly.
 	'There will be no reinforcements,' said Xyrokles.
 	'Then… what?' said Garazhk. 'You want me to stand there and die?'
 	'I want you and your line company to make a show of defying them. You know they are coming, make them pay. Those are your orders.'
 	'We'll still be dead,' grumbled Garazhk.
 	'That is up to you,' said Xyrokles. His captains looked at each other. Xyrokles was exhibiting a great deal of patience, and he was not a patient man. The only time he did not snap and berate his warriors was when he had some kind of clever strategy in mind. These were usually successful, but costly in blood. 'Some of us are going to die,' that's what the captains' shared glances said.
 	'We cannot dig in. They will neutralise the defence laser network before it is finished. Need I remind you of Lord Perturabo's orders? We must deal with them quickly. If we allow the attack on station nine to proceed, we will have the White Scars exactly where we need them,' said Xyrokles. 'Captain Tar-Julsk.' He addressed the only captain who had not spoken. Tar-Julsk was thoughtful, and had spent the whole edification examining the data Xyrokles presented.
 	'My lord Warsmith?'
 	'You will prepare a convoy of materials to repair the four damaged sites.'
 	'I thought we weren't repairing the sites?' said Phideark.
 	'We are not. Not yet. I only want it to look like we are, because that's what they will be expecting us to do.'
 	'My lord, doing what he expects us to do will lead to defeat!' protested Garazhk.
 	'Wrong,' said Xyrokles. 'I have not finished. If I hear more objections, I will be looking for a new seventh captain.'
 	Garazhk shut up.
 	'I see your strategy,' said Tar-Julsk. He leaned forwards. The light of the cartolith danced in his eyes.
 	'Explain to the others,' said Xyrokles.
 	'I gather the convoy here, in the safety of the canyons leading up to the peaks.' He pointed to a maze of canyons the Iron Warriors had been using as a way up the mountains. 'I will take a full complement of guards, double the amount doctrine demands, in fact. We will reveal ourselves while the enemy are attacking station nine. They will identify me as a target of opportunity and strike, even though they will be weakened, low on ammunition and fuel, because I will be too tempting to ignore. You will counter-attack. They will be pinned into place and destroyed.'
 	'That is almost correct,' said Xyrokles. 'We will ambush them, but allow them the opportunity to withdraw. We will then hit them repeatedly with attacks here, here and here.' Xyrokles traced a line through the unforgiving mountainous terrain. 'They will be caught here.' He stabbed his armoured fingers down on a wide plateau. 'Our fighters will cut off their retreat. Melias will be lying in wait with his armoured century. They will be surrounded on all sides, and we shall obliterate them.'
 	'Risky,' said Tar-Julsk. 'Melias must get into position without being seen.'
 	'I can do it,' said Melias with a shrug. 'If they're engaged at station nine, they won't be looking.'
 	'They will withdraw,' Xyrokles gloated. 'That is their habit in the face of unfavourable odds. They will take the bait, unwittingly run into larger forces and withdraw again. We will direct their every move, until they are trapped.'
 	Tar-Julsk nodded. 'A good plan.'
 	Garazhk was relieved. 'So I will not face a full attack for long.'
 	'Can we be sure they will take this route into the mountains?' asked Herakt.
 	'It is a steep valley, limited opportunity for our fighter craft to take them, plenty of terrain for them to lose our ground forces in. What would you do in their position?' said Tar-Julsk.
 	'Our armour is the key to this fight. If we get them to face Melias, our problem will cease to be,' said Xyrokles. 'You have your orders. Let us rid ourselves of this irritant.'
 	* * *

 	Ishigu swept around the defence laser construction site. There were three dozen similar stations set around the planet's equatorial mountain chain, where they could target ships arriving at Epsilon-Garmon's Mandeville point. Epsilon-Garmon was a small orange star, its system tiny and of little strategic value, but the Khan, and evidently the Iron Warriors, thought Lord Guilliman's Legion might come that way.
 	Weapons fire chased his brotherhood across the planet's dusty sky. Sharp bursts of Chogorian battle talk kept the swarming flights of jetbikes in formation as they swept and dived over the site. Boltgun fire from the bikes drove back the enemy, while Storm Eagles and Thunderhawks ran bombing runs. Floury clouds of rock dust burst from the ground with each missile hit. Fire flashed in the clouds. The Iron Warriors were tenacious foes. Ishigu's brotherhood would have to land to finish them off.
 	'Khan,' his bond-brother Hesegai voxed him. 'Their response times are getting quicker. We have enemy interceptors en route to our position.'
 	Ishigu roared around in a banking curve over the battlefield. The mission was not finished, but it would have to do. 'Enemy work site is heavily damaged. Withdraw.'
 	The clouds of attack craft and skimmers flew apart, hurtling away from the battle in every direction. Each of the defence laser construction sites were located high up the faces of the mountains, and Ishigu sped down near-vertical slopes away from the enemy. One by one his brotherhood fell back into flight with him.
 	'Casualties,' Ishigu demanded.
 	His sergeants reported their losses. Three dead for certain, one more jetbike downed, though the rider's suit signum was still active and moving away from the battlefield.
 	'Log Kin-Ha's position. We will retrieve him at nightfall,' he said.
 	They dipped into steep valleys. Enemy strike fighters blazed overhead, their auspexes unable to get a lock on the speeding assault brotherhood hidden in the canyons beneath them.
 	'They do not see us. Split up into your extraction groupings and make for camp,' Ishigu said. Quick blurts of vox chatter acknowledged his order, and he was about to respond to them when a flashing mark on his helm cartolith caught his attention. 'Hold that last,' he said. Data screed ran quickly down his faceplate. 'I have new orders. A convoy attempting the ascent from the lowlands. They were waiting for us to be invested in attack before making a run for it.'
 	'Who knew the Iron Warriors could be so cunning?' said Hesegai. 'Do we engage?'
 	Ishigu checked the fuel gauges of his forty-strong attack force. 'Engage,' he said.
 	Hesegai sang a snatch of hunting song. 'I am enjoying this little war!' he whooped.
 	The convoy ground slowly up the mountain pass. The core of it was fifteen heavy haulers, dragging trailers laden with newly made construction equipment to replace what the White Scars had destroyed. Sixteen Rhinos and light tanks escorted them. None of the vehicles enjoyed the terrain, and they dragged themselves metre by painful metre through the primary slot canyon. Tar-Julsk's force was an expensive lure; the machinery had taken a great deal of effort to construct and would be lost in the battle.
 	The Iron Warriors had been obliged to build their own road into the mountains, but the White Scars had bombed it several times, and the going was slow. The chances were Tar-Julsk's luring force would take heavy casualties, but he bore the risk stoically. That was the Legion way.
 	Tar-Julsk detected the White Scars as soon as they burst out of a side canyon three kilometres to his rear.
 	'They have risen to the bait,' he voxed. 'Convoy haulage elements, begin your escape. Squads seven to twelve, hang back and engage.'
 	Engines roared so loudly in the canyon that they penetrated the armour of Tar-Julsk's command Spartan. The smell of overheated drive plates filled the crew compartment from the haulers struggling ahead.
 	Seconds later, screaming jets echoed up the canyon. Gunfire sounded from the rearguard of Whirlwinds and Sicarans. A moment later the While Sears were among them, their jetbikes screaming, bolters banging. The whooshing roar of melta weaponry came neat as Land Speeders followed the faster bikes. An explosion rocked Tar-Julsk's Land Raider.
 	Comms chatter from his men was calm in his vox-bead.
 	'Hauler six destroyed.'
 	'They are fast, I cannot target them.'
 	'Enemy elements regrouping for second attack run.'
 	 Tar-Julsk's face set. 'Iron Within, Iron Without,' he muttered to himself.
 	Ishigu flew over the convoy. The Iron Warriors behaved true to form: their tanks covering the rear, chasing the jetbikes with gunfire as they raced by, looped around and flew back, while the haulers attempted to escape forwards.
 	'We have them,' Hesegai laughed. 'They are trapped!'
 	A second hauler exploded, the tractor unit lifted up so violently it upset its trailer, spilling the crane it carried onto the rough road.
 	'Squad Screaming Hawk, target the foremost hauler,' Ishigu commanded. 'Block the pass. Stop their escape.'
 	'As you command, khan,' Screaming Hawk's sergeant voxed back. Scimitar jetbikes accelerated past Ishigu, protecting a Proteus-class Land Speeder at the centre of their tight grouping. Ishigu watched them jink past the fire of the Whirlwind tanks. Missiles burned past them, evaded at the last possible moment. The targeting systems could not regain locks in time, and the missiles slammed into the cliffs, bringing down noisy rockfalls onto the pass.
 	'They do our job for us,' Hisegai said.
 	Screaming Hawk swooped on its target, strafing the lead convoy elements with mass-reactives. But before the meltaguns of the Land Speeder could do their work, a second barrage of missiles came down from above, fired from the canyon lip.
 	'Enemy troops on the ground, coordinates—'
 	A direct hit turned Screaming Hawk's sergeant into a ball of fire. A second jetbike exploded immediately after. Missiles rained down and cut up from the canyon floor, creating a crossfire that even the White Scars could not evade. Lascannon fire flickered up the canyon, and Ishigu's augurs rang urgent alarms.
 	'Enemy aircraft coming from behind,' he voxed. 'This is a trap. Break off attack. Accelerate forwards, punch through, and regroup.'
 	He depressed the accelerator on his bike, sending the Scimitar surging forwards. His men followed.
 	'Fly on and out,' he commanded. But as soon as he spoke, more aircraft burned overhead, creating a ceiling that boxed the White Scars into the canyon. He craned his neck to follow their flightpaths. They circled like eagles, content to wait for the moment to strike.
 	'Up the mountain, then,' Hesegai voxed.
 	'Reading more troops ahead!' Ishigu voxed urgently. 'Bank left. Take canyon spur.' He sent a datasquirt highlighting a narrow defile to his warriors' displays. Still accelerating, they pulled up, sweeping about. Though they turned just before they came into the firing line of the men hiding up the canyon, one of his men strayed too far, and took a multi-laser volley from the position. The engine lit up with explosions, and the Space Marine fell on a tail of black smoke to his death.
 	'Ride the storm, my brothers!' Ishigu commanded, opening his throttle to full.
 	The canyon spur was very narrow. Rocks flashed by, some close enough to touch. The spur ran out a few kilometres ahead, breaking up into several short tributary formations that led up onto a plateau.
 	'Reach the end, break by squad, gain the mountainside and escape. Designate point Cheng Shek as rendezvous.'
 	The defile was too narrow for the enemy fighters to follow, and too overhung for them to fire effectively from above. The Iron Warriors didn't appear to have any skimmers to chase them with, but Ishigu was concerned nonetheless.
 	'They're herding us,' Hesegai said.
 	'They are,' Ishigu responded. 'It has been tried before. No one can catch the wind.'
 	They raced up the defile, swerving around its sharp corners. It broadened out momentarily. A small lake, low in the dry season, blurred by. Five feeder valleys as crooked as arthritic fingers led off.
 	'Split, split, split!' Ishigu ordered.
 	The enemy were there too, guarding the entrances to the valleys, firing down on his men. The White Scars were exposed as they crossed the lake, and the aircraft joined their fire to that of the ground troops. Two more jetbikes went crashing down before the dwindling raiding party made it to the relative safety of the smaller canyons. These rose steeply, and Ishigu's grav-plates warbled in protest at the angle of the climb. Shadows crowded him. His shoulder pad rang, fountaining sparks as it brushed a volume in the rock. A millimetre more and he would have been torn from his saddle.
 	Thundering more loudly than the sky gods of Chogoris, the Scimitar burst from the canyon onto the plateau. From the other chasms, black cracks in the ground no wider than a few metres, the rest of his force shot upwards and spread out, racing for their rendezvous.
 	'Enemy tanks, dead ahead!' someone shouted, at the instant Ishigu's helm systems clamoured.
 	Cresting the rise of the ridge at the end of the plateau came a full century of Iron Warrior armoured vehicles.
 	Xyrokles watched from the safety of his personal Land Raider.
 	'Annihilate them,' he voxed.
 	Few things stirred his soul as much as an armoured century opening fire together. Twenty-five tanks raked the sky with laslight and bullets. The White Scars powered through it but such was the weight of the attack that they would all be killed before they reached safety again. Xyrokles estimated that the party represented the majority of the White Scar forces on Epsilon-Garmon II. Typical Chogorian raiding tactics, small forces sent out to cause maximum damage, hard to catch, but once caught, easily dealt with.
 	'I have the measure of you!' he said to himself. 'Iron Within, Iron Without!'
 	He was still congratulating himself on the success of his plan when the Land Raider next to his exploded violently. He instinctively searched the skies for more aerial contacts, but there were none. It was not until another tank died in a flaming ball of shrapnel that he scanned the ground.
 	A dozen White Scars tank hunters were racing onto the battlefield, cutting across the armoured century's advance and firing as they came. The fleeing raiding force ceased their ragged rout, and flowed together. A second skimmer force lifted off from concealed positions up the mountain and split, half attacking the line of tanks, the rest speeding off to hunt down the corralling forces Xyrokles had placed in the canyons. A final chorus of chimes alerted him to White Scar interdiction fighters powering up and dropping from orbit onto the Iron Warriors atmospheric force.
 	Within a few moments, it was over.
 	The White Scars dragged Xyrokles from his burning tank and stripped him of his damaged armour, leaving him grimy-faced and clad in his tattered body suit, kneeling in disgrace with his hands bound behind his back.
 	He seethed inside as the savage White Scars went over the battlefield, executing his men and reducing his vehicles to slag with fusion charges and phosphene bombs. Heat washed over him from the burning wrecks of his task force. His captors laughed with one another, jesting in their sawing, singsong barbarian's speech. A single warrior, his armour more heavily decorated with primitive markings than the rest, stood guard over him. Otherwise Xyrokles was ignored, and he ignored them in return.
 	A heavier tread made him look up. He found himself staring into the face of Jaghatai Khan himself.
 	Xyrokles fought back his unease at being in the presence of a primarch. Even now, after years fighting half of them as enemies, it was hard for him to overcome his awe of the Emperor's sons.
 	'Your presence explains my defeat,' said Xyrokles. He sagged in his bonds. 'White Scars staging a tank assault. Concealed troops. Not true to type at all. I never had much of a chance.'
 	'Did you not?' Jaghatai Khan squatted in front of the Iron Warrior. 'Look at me, Warsmith.'
 	Xyrokles had no choice but to obey.
 	'My men would have beaten you even if I were not here.'
 	'I disagree,' said Xyrokles.
 	The Khan was hiding something in his fist. He opened his hand, revealing Xyrokles' copies of his books.
 	'You have studied my philosophies,' said the Khan. 'You think you understand me because you know my Legion's preference for lightning war. This is false understanding, Iron Warrior. You read the words, but did not fully comprehend. If you had, you would have anticipated my actions. All this was a simple game of opposites. You allowed yourself to be confident in the reading of my Legion, when all along my purpose was to make you fall prey to hubris. Your attempt to concentrate and misdirect my force was well chosen, but flawed from the outset, because you did not consider I could be here personally, or that my men might employ different strategies. You did not see my tanks because you did not look for them.' He smiled, a white flash in his tanned face 'I admit, I am a little impressed. It is unusual for your kind to be flexible in battle. Unfortunate for you that, in the war of storms, I am the stronger wind. Know that failure is not a sin. You fought well.'
 	'Why are you telling me this?' Xyrokles asked. 'You have killed all my men. You will execute me in moments.'
 	The Khan shrugged. 'Maybe my words will live on in your spirit when you are dead. Think on them in your next life. May they increase your wisdom, and profit you. I give them freely.'
 	The Khan stood. His master-crafted power armour made barely a sound.
 	Xyrokles began to laugh, a chuckle that turned into full-bellied humour, and ended in a bloody cough. He spat. Something was broken inside him. 'The next life? You should have followed the Warmaster.'
 	'Why would I do that?' asked the Khan neutrally.
 	'Don't demean yourself by playing ignorant, my lord. You know exactly what I mean. What you say does not conform with the Imperial truth.'
 	'My father's truth is His truth. It is not my truth,' said the Khan. 'Every truth is a lie to someone. I am the son of the storm as much as I am the son of the Emperor. You are not the first to try to sway me, but if the thunder in my heart will not be tamed by my father, then it will not be tamed by my brother, either. I choose my own path.'
 	Xyrokles shook his head. 'You're on the wrong side. The Emperor lied. He used us all.'
 	'That is what you believe,' said the Khan. 'Rightness in a war is relative, as is truth. I choose to be loyal to the Emperor's ideal even if I do not believe in His truth. You are a traitor to all mankind.' He smiled again. 'In the end, I won, and you have lost, that is all that matters here. I thank you for the contest of wills.' The Khan dipped his head.
 	'Pompous, double-talking wretch!' Xyrokles snarled. 'Why don't you go and…'
 	Jaghatai Khan moved too quickly for the Warsmith to see. Xyrokles felt a firm grip on his head, a sharp twist, something part in his neck, and life was done with him.
 	The Khan set Xyrokles' body down gently.
 	'Rouse your astropaths. Summon the fleet here,' he said to Ishigu. 'You did well, but we have a little work left to do, and it must be done quickly. I wish to neutralise more such places and clear the way for Guilliman before we head back deeper into the cluster. Sanguinius needs us. The Warmaster has mustered many more Titan Legions at Beta-Garmon than we suspected.'
 	Ishigu bowed. 'What of this one, my Khan?'
 	Jaghatai stared down at Xyrokles' corpse for a moment. 'Bury him with respect. He fought well, and with finesse.' He turned his gaze skywards, already calculating where his attention should fall next. 'In this war, an enemy with finesse is no small thing.'