The Noose
David Annandale

 	‘You are marred,’ Lord Commander Ariston said.
 	Theotormon was silent. There was nothing he could say, Ariston thought. Not before that self-evident truth. The captain of the Emperor’s Children strike cruiser Tharmas stood in Ariston’s quarters aboard the battle-barge Urthona. His flaws were an affront. No doubt conscious of this, Theotormon kept his peace so as not to give further insult.
 	Ariston was conscious of the irony in his words. They were surrounded by flaws. His irony was deliberate. He revelled in it. Yet it was a false one, for he was justified in upbraiding Theotormon. The tapestry series that covered his walls had once been exquisite in its flawlessness. It was The Tribute of Europa. Millennia-old, it depicted the birth of the Emperor’s Children – brought to heel by the Emperor’s Thunder Regiments during the Unification Wars on Terra, the nobles of Europa offered up their youth in service to the Emperor. The sequence was a movement from justified defeat to glorious fealty, culminating with the first warriors of the III Legion marching under the banners of the Palatine aquila.
 	Or so the tapestries had been. Now they were slashed by an elaborate cross-hatch of knife strokes. Nailed to the marble wall behind the hangings were the bodies of remembrancers who had spoken out when the great enlightenment had come upon the Legion. Their flesh had been torn with the tapestries, and their vitae had run down and stained the woven fabric. Thus the art of the enemy bled and died. The destruction of the perfect possessed an even greater perfection.
 	But it still wasn’t enough, was it? The ordinary, completed flawlessness of the atrocity fell short of the transporting sublimity he sought. The blood had dried and blackened. The suffering was over.
 	But the bleeding should not end. The cries should not fall silent. Blind to the truth that had come to Fulgrim, the enemy should know only pain and more pain.
 	That would be better; that would be closer to true perfection.
 	Theotormon’s flaws, on the other hand, were the mundane, unforgivable ones of failure. His flesh and his armour were disfigured by his own hand, but his ship had been scarred by another’s.
 	‘This is the tally of the encounter in the Hamartia System,’ Ariston said. ‘The battle-barge Callidora destroyed, its escorts, the Infinite Sublime and the Golden Mean, lost as well. And when a full fleet answers the call for help, not only are two more ships lost to mines and the Tharmas damaged, but the enemy escapes. Tell me again, captain, what enemy is this?’
 	‘The Iron Hands.’
 	‘The Iron Hands.’ Ariston paused, pretending to sort through his memories. ‘I was under the impression that we had shattered them at Isstvan. Perhaps I was wrong. They must have been able to field a number of formidable squadrons to hurt us that much.’
 	Silence again. Into it fell the distant screams of the tortured. The exploratory desolation of the flesh never ceased aboard the Urthona. There was so much to learn, so much to experience. Mortification’s supreme ecstasy beckoned just beyond the horizon of knowledge. The cries were now part of the air of the battle-barge. They rose and fell with the rhythms of lungs, of hearts. They were the sound of the new soul of the Emperor’s Children.
 	‘How large was the squadron?’ Ariston pressed.
 	‘They used a single strike cruiser,’ Theotormon said. ‘The Veritas Ferrum.’ 
 	His voice was flat. Ariston didn’t know if the care with which he kept emotion from his voice was due to shame or anger at being made to answer for the disaster.
 	Ariston hoped it was both.
 	‘One strike cruiser,’ he said. ‘Which then escaped.’
 	Theotormon nodded. 
 	At the end of another long silence, Ariston repeated, ‘You are marred.’
 	‘I am, lord commander.’ Theotormon barely hid his resentment. 
 	‘But from excess comes wisdom,’ said Ariston. ‘The flaw is the foundation of future perfection.’
 	‘I do not understand.’
 	‘Clearly not.’ This was why a commander’s role was also one of instruction. ‘We will extinguish the last sparks of the Iron Hands resistance.’ A simple statement of fact. Based on the estimates of the portion of the X Legion to have escaped Isstvan, the squadrons that were accompanying the Urthona were enough on their own to exterminate the Iron Hands. ‘But we will not waste resources in searching the galaxy for the hiding places. They will come and offer themselves up to us for the slaughter. Thanks to you. Thanks to your flaws.’
 	‘I see.’
 	‘Do you?’
 	‘You will put the Tharmas out for bait.’
 	Ariston smiled. The razorwire he had threaded through the contours of his lips scratched at his flesh, re-opening wounds. The taste of his own blood trickled down his tongue. 
 	‘Are you helpless?’ he asked. ‘Are you that badly flawed?’
 	Theotormon’s left fist tightened. ‘We can still fight,’ he said. ‘We have lost half the starboard guns. Our Geller field is unstable. Any jumps we make must be small, and we can’t do many.’
 	‘Hardly bait, then,’ Ariston said.
 	He was lying. They both knew it. When the fleet coming to the aid of the Callidora had encountered the mine field left by the Veritas Ferrum, not all the ships had been damaged. And some had been hit more severely than the Tharmas. The rest of the fleet had pursued the Iron Hands through the immaterium. And lost them. Ariston’s squadrons had joined up with the wounded vessels later, and he had singled out the Tharmas for a reason. He would construct the perfect trap for the Iron Hands, and the Tharmas was the perfect bait. It was strong enough that it could put up a convincing fight. But its injuries were such that Ariston thought it very unlikely it could prevail against a strike cruiser or larger ship. That was the prey Ariston sought. Let Theotormon pick off any minor targets that swallowed the lure.
 	The lord commander strode to the ornate desk dominating the port side of the chamber. Human limbs were fastened to its legs. He picked up a vellum star chart and showed it to Theotormon. ‘Here,’ he said, pointing to the Cyzicus System, a short jump from Hamartia. ‘You can make it this far, I believe.’
 	Theotormon nodded. ‘I believe so.’
 	‘You are fatally marred if you do not. Make for Cyzicus. Then call for our help.’
 	‘And I call until the enemy appears,’ Theotormon said.
 	‘Yes.’
 	‘My redemption has a high cost.’
 	Ariston frowned at the resentment. ‘You are fortunate to have this opportunity,’ he said.
 	The Delium System had a name only because it existed, and for no other reason. It was uninhabited. Its four planets were all gas giants. None of their moons were colonised. And yet, it was a hostile system; Khalybus suspected that he and the ragged fleet he led had found the most hostile corner of it.
 	Fleet. He felt a jab of anger when he remembered what that word had meant to the Iron Hands before Isstvan V. It had meant more than a single strike cruiser and a handful of frigates and destroyers, all of them damaged to a greater or lesser degree. He knew he was lucky to have even that much at his disposal. Of his fellow captains with whom he had managed to make contact after the disaster, he was one of the few to have escaped Isstvan with more than a single ship.
 	Luck.
 	Escape.
 	Hateful concepts. They should have no place in the experience of the 85th Clan-Company of the X Legion, or aboard the Bane of Asirnoth. They should have remained abstractions. Things that enemies relied upon, only to be fatally disappointed when the Iron Hands shut down every destiny except total defeat. But he knew luck and escape now, along with other, equally foul terms.
 	Defeat. Treachery. Flight.
 	Then there was that other concept, the worst of them all: Ferrus Manus is dead.
 	Like so many of his brothers, he refused the experience of that one. Though its shadow fell over every moment of his existence, and every decision he made, he shunned it. He would not think about it. None of them could.
 	Khalybus had enough to think about on Galeras. The moon was a study in geological anguish. It was in close orbit around its planet. The gravitational forces of the giant tore and pulled at it. The crust distorted, rising and falling with an ocean’s tides. Volcanic eruptions racked the globe, throwing ash plumes hundreds of kilometres into the air. The surface was layers of congealed lava flows. Galeras had no indigenous life forms, but in its constant violence and change, it had its own form of life. Landing on Galeras had been a challenge in itself. The construction of a base was madness. 
 	Khalybus walked along the outer wall of the madness, inspecting the work. The modular fortification had to be modified if they were going to last more than a day on Galeras’s heaving crust. The flesh was weak, yes, always, but sometimes iron could become stronger if it took on some of the characteristics of the flesh. Flexible plasteel seals joined each segment of the walls, given them a degree of flexibility. Khalybus stood motionless, feeling the microquakes send vibrations up from stone, through the walls, and through his boots. Both his legs and his right arm were bionic, and the faint thrum ran along their length.
 	The base was on the crest of an isolated hill. Beyond the walls the land dropped away in a steep slope. The ground was uneven yet smooth – the succession of flows gave it the contours of melted wax. Ash fell from the sky, an endless blizzard of grey. Visibility was a few hundred metres at best. Though the base’s location had been dictated by priorities other than defence, its position was a good one. It would take a very determined and powerful siege to triumph over what was being constructed.
 	Also a mad one. For who would want to contest possession of a worthless satellite in a strategically irrelevant system?
 	This was not a world for the sane to inhabit, not even the sons of Medusa. The Legion’s home world put all of its life forms through brutal tests, but it did still support life. He had faith that the Iron Hands could sustain a foothold on Galeras indefinitely, but there were few reasons to do so.
 	Few reasons. There was, however, one in particular.
 	Khalybus turned to face the interior of the base. The hab units were along the periphery, and there weren’t many. Even with rebreathers, the mortal serfs of the 85th could not survive long on the surface. The construction of the base and its operation was the work of the legionaries. The central block had been completed, and the project within was proceeding well. Smoke, steam and sulphur vented from its chimneys. From the interior came the heavy, syncopated beat of machinery. Deep booms and the harsh cracks of splintering rock blended with the endless thunder of the distant eruptions.
 	Two legionaries emerged from the block. One was another Iron Hand from the Bane of Asirnoth, Raud. The other was Levannas, a battle-brother of the Raven Guard contingent that had been part of the desperate flight from Isstvan V. Altogether, there were now two squads’ worth of XIX Legion warriors aboard the Asirnoth and its escorts. Khalybus knew that some Salamanders had also been picked up by his brothers, but there had been none within reach during his own retreat.
 	Raud and Levannas spotted him and strode towards the wall. Khalybus waited. When they reached the iron staircase up to the parapet, Levannas hung back, walking more slowly so that Raud would reach Khalybus first. 
 	‘I take it you have news, sergeant,’ Khalybus said.
 	Raud saluted. ‘A message from the Asirnoth. The auspex has picked up a distress beacon. It appears to be from the Emperor’s Children strike cruiser Tharmas.’
 	‘Appears to be?’
 	‘Full confirmation is impossible,’ he admitted. 
 	Khalybus hadn’t expected otherwise. This was the new reality of war in the Imperium. He couldn’t trust anything to be what it appeared. 
 	Still, this might what they had been seeking. ‘Where is it?’ he asked.
 	‘The Cyzicus System.’
 	That was a piece of data hard to ignore. Close enough to the Harmartia System to be convincing. Khalybus had not spoken with Atticus since they had conferred along with Plienus and Sabenus by remote lithocast, but a short time ago there had been a signal burst from him. It had been linked to a mine, set to be released upon detonation. It was a proud curse directed at the Emperor’s Children, but it had been received by the Bane of Asirnoth as well. It was Atticus’s way of telling his brothers that he was still in the war without jeopardising his location.
 	There had been no word from Atticus since, and no detection of the enemy.
 	The immense storms that had surged through the immaterium made communication almost impossible and travel perilous. The risks needed a high prize. The Tharmas might be it. The vessel’s location made sense. Khalybus could picture it limping just that far from Harmartia.
 	Levannas joined them. ‘What do you think, captain?’ he asked. Levannas had become the liaison between the Raven Guard and the Iron Hands. His qualifications for the role appeared to be an instinctive diplomacy, since he was not an officer by rank. There were none who had escaped with Khalybus.
 	‘It is clearly a trap,’ Khalybus said. It was difficult to speak of strategy with the Levannas. The Raven Guard and the Salamanders had not betrayed his primarch, Ferrus Manus, but they had not marched with him as they should have either. He knew Levannas believed in the decisions of Corvus Corax. He knew that there was nothing to be gained in shunning the warriors of the XIX Legion.
 	Trust, though, that was different. He could not trust. 
 	Yet he had to, or at the very least not refuse to hear what Levannas had to say. What was left of the Iron Hands must now engage in a new form of warfare. As much as he resented having to admit it, even to himself, this was a form with which the Raven Guard was more familiar.
 	‘Yes,’ Levannas said. ‘It is a trap. That does not mean it will be a successful one.’
 	‘The Emperor’s Children do not do things by halves,’ Raud said. ‘It will be a good trap.’
 	‘I would be insulted otherwise,’ said Khalybus. ‘Even more insulted than I am by the methods we must use.’
 	Raud muttered, ‘Strike from the shadows, then scuttle back.’
 	Levannas smiled to show that he was not offended. 
 	‘The only dishonour,’ he said, ‘belongs to the traitors. The shadows are true, brothers. If you understand them, they have an honesty that is missing in the light.’
 	As the Raven Guard spoke, it seemed to Khalybus that the crepuscular light of Galeras dimmed around him. He was standing in the open, as they all were, but he became harder to see. His hard features became difficult to make out behind the ashfall. His stillness took on the characteristics of an absence. He was in and of the shadows, and that, Khalybus saw, was indeed a truth. In withdrawing from sight, Levannas revealed his core reality to them. 
 	Khalybus looked at his own right arm. He moved the fingers that had not been flesh and blood for over two hundred years. He considered his own truth – the truth of the Iron Hands that he must safeguard more jealously than ever before. 
 	‘We are not you,’ he said to Levannas. ‘And we will not become you.’
 	‘I would never suggest that you should,’ Levannas answered.
 	‘We still can’t attack directly,’ said Raud.
 	‘I know. We all do.’ He eyed the central block of the base. ‘So we must find a new way to fight that is still true to our primarch.’
 	‘Then we will head into the trap.’ The upper half of Raud’s skull was metal. There was still flesh on his lower jaw, though, and he could just about form the approximation of a smile.
 	‘Well, they’re hardly going to come to us, are they?’ asked Khalybus.
 	The logical moment to spring the trap would have been at the Mandeville point of the Cyzicus System. Khalybus had the Bane of Asirnoth at full battle stations, ready to open fire the second after transition to real space. He would not let the Emperor’s Children have an easy kill. He had no illusions about such a battle’s outcome, though. If the Asirnoth were unable to flee back into the warp, it would not survive a prolonged encounter. The strike cruiser had been damaged over Isstvan. Some repairs had been made, but there were limits to what had been possible. The void shields were some way from full strength. There hull had been compromised, and the sites of those wounds were painful weaknesses.
 	The first hard reality of Khalybus’s gamble: it was easily within the power of the Emperor’s Children to annihilate any single ship that took the offered bait.
 	The second hard reality: he had no choice but to take that bait.
 	He stood in the lectern above the bridge of the Bane of Asirnoth. Nothing appeared in the oculus. The system was quiet except for the distress beacon of the Tharmas.
 	‘Auspex?’ Khalybus asked.
 	‘We have picked up the radiation from the Tharmas’s engines,’ Seterikus said. ‘No other vessels within range.’
 	‘Which doesn’t mean they aren’t here,’ said Raud. He was at the weapons station, at the forward end of the bridge.
 	‘Of course they’re here,’ Khalybus said.
 	But they hadn’t attacked. They were remaining hidden. Why? Because killing the Bane of Asirnoth would be insufficient. The traitors had bigger prey in mind. 
 	So do I, he thought.
 	‘It would be disappointing if they were not. Set course for the Tharmas.’
 	The III Legion strike cruiser was about a third of the way from the Mandeville point toward the system’s sun. Czysicus was an old red star. It had swallowed up its inner planets hundreds of millions of years ago, leaving only the outer gas giants and the frozen planetoids of its Kuiper belt. Czysicus was as dead as Delium, though it was now alive with the anticipation of war. 
 	Khalybus kept the first stage of the approach to the Tharmas slow and cautious. There was no point in trying to disguise the Bane of Asirnoth’s presence. The Tharmas and whatever other Emperor’s Children vessels that waited concealed in the system already knew that they were here, but he wanted time to detect the rest of the enemy force, if he could. He wanted a feel for the full nature of the trap.
 	Still nothing. Only the endless broadcast of the enemy cruiser’s beacon. 
 	Khalybus saw Levannas looking at him. The Raven Guard had taken up a discreet position on the bridge, near the back wall, just below and to the right of the lectern. He was out of the way, but visible if the captain wished to speak to him.
 	‘Well?’ Khalybus asked. ‘What do you see in the shadows here?’
 	‘I’m sure I see the same things you do, captain. They are waiting for us to engage.’
 	‘At which point they will wound us, force us to retreat, and follow.’
 	‘Yes.’
 	Which is what we’ve been expecting all along, he thought. The absence of an initial attack was confirmation of that theory.
 	Khalybus nodded to himself. ‘We have no choice but to play their game,’ he announced. ‘But we will beat them at it. Full speed ahead, full barrage. I want that verminous ship destroyed.’
 	The background hum that was the sum of the Asirnoth’s machinery of life increased. Its vibrations became more intense. Khalybus felt the ship’s anger as though it were his own. Its life and his were on a continuum.
 	This was part of what it meant to be one of the Iron Hands – not just to understand the strength of the machine, but to be the machine. When he was aboard the Bane of Asirnoth, when he commanded its course and its actions, there was no absolute demarcation line between his being and the ship’s. The helmsmen of other Legions experienced that blurring when the mechadendrites fused them to their vessels. But every warrior of the X Legion walked the path towards the unbending power of the mechanical. The machine had a discipline, a focus and a clarity that was foreign to the flesh. The Bane of Asirnoth was an extension of his will, a force multiplier of his own strength. It was his right arm reaching out to crush his foe. And he, and all the legionaries aboard, repaid the machine’s gifts by moving closer and closer towards complete identification.
 	Ferrus Manus had shown them the way. He had not been given the time to complete his journey – though he was not dead, he could not be dead – and it was their duty to redouble efforts to complete the pilgrimage. Now, more than ever, they needed the rigour of the machine. 
 	Standing a few steps behind Khalybus in the strategium, Cruax said, ‘And so, as we expected, we will strike and we will run.’ His machine voice sounded more cold and hollow than ever.
 	‘Yes, Iron Father.’ Khalybus did not look back. ‘But more than that, as well.’
 	‘I know. My concern remains. What will this strategy cost us? How much is it shaped by strangers to our philosophy?’
 	Khalybus glanced down at Levannas. Circumstances were forcing the Iron Hands to learn from the methods of the Raven Guard. But those lessons would not alter the core of the Legion. ‘Do you doubt me?’ he asked Cruax, quietly, keeping the exchange between the two of them.
 	‘I have doubts about where this path is leading us. The Legions who abandoned our primarch on Isstvan have nothing to teach us.’ There was no tone in the voice of the guardian of the Iron Hands’ soul. The anger was in the words.
 	Khalybus shared it. He wanted Cruax to understand that he had not made his decisions lightly.
 	‘What choice do we have? If we wish to fight on, then we must adapt.’ He looked back at the other warrior. Cruax’s servo-arms were folded behind his back. Of all the legionaries aboard the Asirnoth, he was the one most fully transformed. Khalybus wasn’t sure if he had any flesh left at all. ‘What we are about to do,’ he said, ‘is true to the Iron Hands. It will be precise. It will be rigorous. It will succeed on those merits.’
 	Cruax said nothing. Khalybus faced the oculus once more.
 	‘It’s the Bane of Asirnoth,’ Enion reported. ‘Captain Khalybus.’ 
 	‘Thank you, equerry,’ Ariston said. Not the Veritas Ferrum. A shame. Revenge on Atticus would have been a pleasing, violent symmetry. But perhaps Khalybus would be the key to the other captain as well. Ariston watched the trajectories of the strike cruisers plotted on the tactical screens. 
 	‘We could take them apart now.’
 	‘We could,’ Ariston agreed.
 	Enion hesitated, expecting an order. Ariston amused himself by not giving it.
 	‘There is no need to put the Tharmas at risk,’ said Enion.
 	‘The imperfection of Theotormon’s command needs to be chastised,’ Ariston told him. ‘Emphatically. And more to the point, are we going to satisfy ourselves with a single strike cruiser? Not even the one that destroyed the Callidora?’
 	‘No, lord commander.’
 	‘No,’ Ariston repeated. ‘We will use these Iron Hands to take us to their brothers.’
 	‘They aren’t fools.’
 	‘True. So our mistake must be perfect. They must believe they have thwarted us.’
 	The two ships went to war. They opened fire at virtually the same moment. They were as big as mountains, as long as cities. Their movements were too massive to reflect the urgency in the wills that drove them. They struck at each other with torpedoes and cannons. Their weapons had speed, but the wills were faster yet, the hatreds more furious. The ships turned on each other with majesty, with the grace of monuments. There would be no evading the wounds of the duel. Instead, they engaged in the lethal, gradual dance of manoeuvring to be the first to strike the greatest injury.
 	The oculus flashed with the energy discharges of the void shields. Khalybus heard the damage reports. He saw, below him, the tell-tale red of the runes appearing on the screens monitoring the cruiser’s health. He had little need to hear or see either. He could feel how his ship fared. Its body was his.
 	But it had his will, and it would not stop before it had torn the life from its enemy.
 	The Bane of Asirnoth was cutting across the prow of the Tharmas. The Emperor’s Children ship presented a smaller profile, but Khalybus was able to strafe it with the full thunder of the starboard armament. The Tharmas fired forwards, and Khalybus saw the weakness – most of its torpedoes and shells were coming from the port side.
 	‘Get us around to their starboard flank,’ he told the helmsman, Kiriktas. ‘They don’t want us there.’
 	Kiriktas complied. The Asirnoth began its turn, still at full speed. The Tharmas tried to counter. It did not have to move as far or as fast to keep the Asirnoth away from its vulnerabilities. But its movements were hampered, and it revealed its second weakness.
 	‘Their engines…’ Raud began.
 	‘I can see,’ Khalybus said. He saw more than that. He saw the inevitable result of the dance. The Emperor’s Children had already lost. They had lost the moment the nature of their wounds had become visible. There was nothing the traitors could do to stop what was coming. He hoped they realised this as completely as he did. He wanted them to experience the closing down of possibility, the unstoppable approach of execution.
 	They fought to the end, though. They fought hard to take the Asirnoth to oblivion with them. The Tharmas’s guns concentrated their fire on a single point amidships.
 	‘Shields going down,’ Demir called. ‘Hull integrity compromised.’
 	‘Vent and seal,’ Khalybus ordered. ‘Full energy to the starboard shields.’
 	‘Contacts!’ said Seterikus. ‘Multiple signals moving in.’
 	‘From what direction?’ Khalybus asked.
 	‘All of them.’
 	‘Brother-captain,’ said Demir, ‘our port flank will be vulnerable.’
 	‘We have time.’
 	Demir paused, then said, ‘So ordered.’
 	They had time, Khalybus told himself. He would create it himself if necessary.
 	The Bane of Asirnoth completed the manoeuvre. The two ships were flank to flank. The distance between them became an irrelevance. The Tharmas was still fighting, but it was dead.
 	‘Fire,’ Khalybus said.
 	The Asirnoth struck with a full broadside, and then again. It hit the Tharmas with better than twice the force that the III Legion ship could summon. Khalybus grimaced as he felt the Asirnoth shudder. The shields flared again, and even with the boost in power, some of them collapsed. Demir was calling out damage reports, but Khalybus tuned them out. He focused on the Tharmas. His concentration followed ship-killing ordnance across the void. He had committed the Asirnoth to this action, and by the Throne, this act of justice would be complete.
 	Under the bombardment of massive shells, the void shields of the Tharmas flared like suns, then fell into darkness. The torpedoes slammed through the hull, and then there was a new light. It began as a pulsing crimson. That was the firestorms scouring the ship’s corridors. It grew brighter, building in pain and intensity. It became the plasma cry of a dying ship. The Tharmas cracked wide open. Its fore and aft halves began to move independently even as they were swallowed by the growing fireball. The immense ship was dwarfed by its explosions. Cascading shockwaves reached out across the void.
 	‘Get us clear,’ said Khalybus, but Kiriktas was already altering course, putting the Asirnoth into a straight run, taking off on a tangent from the arc it had been making around the Tharmas. ‘Redistribute shield energy, Brother Demir.’
 	Even as he spoke, the first torpedoes from the rest of the fleet hit the Asirnoth’s port flank. The jolt was a big one. Even before Demir spoke, Khalybus knew the injury was serious. The vibrations of the ship had carried the shock to him. The pulse of the ship’s life stuttered. Khalybus wondered if he’d been wrong. This didn’t feel like an attack to wound. The Emperor’s Children were coming to kill.
 	‘We’ve lost two banks of port cannons,’ Demir said. ‘Secondary damage from exploding ordnance. There is a breach across the loading bay. Fires are spreading.’
 	‘Do what is necessary,’ Khalybus said. Demir did not need to be told what to do. The order was confirmation that, as captain, he understood the losses that were occurring, and the further toll that would be paid. How many battle-brothers had been near the bay and had been propelled into the void? Had they lost any gunships? How many serfs had been incinerated by the fires? Questions whose answers were, in this moment, irrelevant. What mattered was the survival of the ship itself, and its ability to continue the war. Second by second, that was the only consideration, if there was to be any hope of reaching the end game of this campaign.
 	‘Can we afford the greater loss ahead?’ Cruax asked, as if reading his mind.
 	‘If there is a way of avoiding it, I will take it,’ Khalybus said.
 	The Bane of Asirnoth shuddered again. Tocsins wailed.
 	‘There will not be,’ Cruax said.
 	‘The Emperor’s Children will suffer worse,’ Khalybus promised.
 	But only if the Asirnoth escaped this system.
 	‘Helmsman Kiriktas, make course for the Mandeville point. Brother Seterikus, what are the positions of the foe?’
 	‘Still on the outer edges of the system. The ships on the far side are closing. The ones closest to the Mandeville point are not advancing.’
 	‘They know we have to come to them. Then let us do so. Full speed. All forward batteries fire.’
 	This was the hardest gamble he would make in the Czysicus System. It was also the one move that was open to him. The Iron Hands could not evade the net being drawn around them, and they could not fight an entire fleet. There was a tremble in the Asirnoth’s vibrations now. Khalybus doubted his vessel could fight a single enemy with any expectation of survival. There only flight or death now. And so the strike cruiser ran in the teeth of the trap.
 	‘Brother-captain,’ Seterikus reported, ‘we are making for the battle-barge Urthona.’
 	‘Then let us give them cause to worry,’ Khalybus said.
 	‘This is desperate,’ Cruax muttered.
 	‘So is this mission. So is our war.’
 	‘I understand, captain. But is the desperation one that is true to us?’
 	‘It is,’ Khalybus said. ‘We knew this was a trap. The risk is a calculated one. That the odds are against us makes it no less calculated.’
 	‘Good,’ said the Iron Father.
 	The Bane of Asirnoth ran straight for the Urthona, cannon shells and torpedoes racing ahead, as if they might clear the void of incoming fire. The Asirnoth’s profile would be reduced from the perspective of the battle-barge. Khalybus saw the irony in using the same tactic against the enemy that had done so little for the Tharmas. But the Iron Hands had speed. That, and the faint hope of luck, was all they had to see them through to escape.
 	Calculated, Khalybus thought. The word was all the more bitter for being true. He and his brothers had been pushed to this extremity by treachery. All the Iron Hands had now was the calculated risk in its most dire form.
 	The guns of the battle-barge and its escorts flashed.
 	Ariston smiled as he turned from the tactical screens to observe the display in the oculus. The clockwork toys of the X Legion were behaving with perfect predictability. They did as he expected, when he expected. He could mark time with the beats of their manoeuvres. There was no art to their warfare. It was mechanistic. He had never understood their commitment to that approach. When they had fought side by side, he had appreciated the pulverizing victories they achieved, but found their methods uninspiring. Now he had a different perspective. Now he would use their plodding dullness as a medium for his art. He had the canvas prepared, and they would travel across it, marking it according to his will. A creation on this scale would be a source of delicious sensation, he was sure, especially at its moment of fruition, when the Iron Hands took a great leap towards final extinction.
 	‘Annihilation,’ he said to Enion, ‘has a piquancy that should be tasted more often, don’t you agree?’
 	‘Quite so, lord commander.’
 	Did Enion agree because he felt he should, or because he truly did understand what Ariston meant? The equerry was an intelligent officer. He had been demonstrating a growing aptitude for the intricacies of sensation, and the nuances of pain. Hooks and wires linked the corners of his eyes to his shoulder plates. Every time he turned his head, he opened his flesh again. He appeared to be eternally weeping tears of blood, though he had slit the corners of his mouth into a fixed grin. Perhaps he did have some conception of the exquisite nature of Ariston’s plan. 
 	‘Hurt them,’ Ariston ordered his officers. ‘Make them believe their moment has come. But do not kill them.’
 	‘At least we made one of them move,’ Raud said.
 	A frigate to port of the Urthona was engaging in evasive action, rising above the plane of the battle. The battle-barge did not deviate in its course. Its ranks upon ranks of guns blazed, shaking the void with silent thunder. The Urthona was twice the size of the Bane of Asirnoth, but there was still arrogance in its unwavering slow approach. It was not invulnerable to the strike cruiser’s attacks.
 	They know how badly we’ve been hurt, Khalybus thought. He saw mockery in the Urthona’s indomitability. The Emperor’s Children were holding up a mirror to the Iron Hands. Look, they were saying. This is how you once went to war, and we have taken this from you.
 	The Ariston shuddered again as the enemy shells struck its prow. The shields bled off the worst of the impacts, but the kinetic force of projectiles a dozen metres long was such that heavy blows ran along the spine of the vessel. The armour on the prow crumpled.
 	A torpedo flashed across the top of the hull and struck the base of the superstructure. The impact shook the bridge with the force of an earthquake. It knocked the mortal crewmembers off their feet. The legionaries remained standing, though Khalybus knew they were bracing for the inevitable. It would not take many more barrages of that scale to doom the Asirnoth. If the rest of the fleet started hitting them, the end would come in seconds.
 	‘Helmsman,’ Khalybus said, ‘our need to escape grows pressing.’ 
 	Kiriktas summoned more power from the engines. The background hum of the Bane of Asirnoth became a snarl. And beneath it was the deeper, coiling tension of the warp drive building up for the jump. The juddering and the stuttering spikes in the vibrations became stronger too. Khalybus spared a thought for the stability of the warp drive, the integrity of the hull, and the strength of the Geller field. Then he put the concerns to one side. The Asirnoth would survive the jump, or it would not.
 	First it had to survive until the jump.
 	‘Ten seconds,’ Krikitas announded.
 	Another barrage from the Urthona hit. Somewhere, iron shrieked. A chain of explosions, building on each other, rattled down the spine of the ship.
 	It seemed to Khalybus that he was holding his vessel together through willpower alone.
 	Well enough, then. He had plenty to spare.
 	Reality shuddered and tore. The Bane of Asirnoth jumped into the warp.
 	The wounded ship vanished from the physical realm. It left behind dissipating energies – some from its own injuries, some the whispers of insanity that bled in from the warp. Ariston saw perfection in the damage done to the strike cruiser. The Iron Hands would, he judged, survive the journey through the empyrean, though they would be tested. It would be a much more difficult one for them than for the Emperor’s Children, even if they weren’t limping.
 	He opened a communications channel to the entire fleet. ‘All ships, follow behind the Urthona,’ he said. ‘We shall let our quarry guide us through the immaterium.’
 	The battle-barge made its jump minutes after the Asirnoth. Its drives had been powering up during the entire confrontation. The length of the Iron Hands’ lead meant little, though, in the warp. There, space collapsed and time contorted. Neither had any objective meaning. Dark simulacra took their place, alongside the illusion of matter, the insistent presence of dreams, and the being of dark intelligences.
 	The warp was a storm. It convulsed with a fusion of delight and fury. Waves of non-being rose to infinity and crashed upon the mad creatures who thought they could navigate the domain of the gods without their leave.
 	For the chosen few, however, the way was made clear. The Urthona passed between the vortices of destruction. The Emperor’s Children would travel the seas of unreality without hindrance. Enlightenment had taken them to the wisdom hidden in the furthest extremes of sensation, and that light shone on their paths through the immaterium. The powers that ruled in the warp were one with Horus’s war against the Emperor.
 	The Bane of Asirnoth was caught in a tempest. Their Navigator would be all but blind. Where was the Emperor’s light to guide them?
 	Nowhere. Occluded. Swamped by the great ruinstorm. 
 	‘The enemy will be lucky to make short jumps,’ Enion commented.
 	‘Luck has little to do with it,’ said Ariston.
 	‘I don’t understand.’
 	‘We are here to follow. We want them to reach their destination. Our masters wish it too.’ He smiled. ‘Their journey won’t be easy, but they will reach safe harbour.’ His smile became broader yet. ‘Which we will then burn.’
 	The shuddering of the Asirnoth grew worse after the translation to the warp. The stresses of the immaterium were less direct than a bombardment, but they were more insidious. The death of the real surrounded the vessel, and sought to erode its existence.
 	‘Are we being followed?’ Khalybus asked Seterikus.
 	The legionary shook his head in frustration. ‘I can’t tell, brother-captain.’ He turned from the auspex display. ‘They could be right on top of us and we wouldn’t know.’
 	‘They are here,’ Levannas said. ‘Depend upon it.’
 	‘I am.’ If they weren’t, the Iron Hands would have won a tiny victory, one hardly worth the sacrifice. He addressed the entire bridge. ‘We cannot see the enemy, but we must assume that they can see us. All efforts must now be put toward evasion.’
 	‘The longer we stay in the warp…’ Raud began.
 	‘I know, brother. I wish we had a choice.’
 	‘If we manage to lose them,’ Seterikus asked, ‘what have we accomplished?’
 	‘We won’t lose them. But we can’t underestimate them. If our evasions are a facade, they’ll know. We must try everything in our power to shake them.’ He paused, waiting. There was a question his brothers would be asking themselves. He wanted one of them to articulate it. Speaking it aloud, and having it answered, was important. Not for the success of his strategy, but for the morale of his clan-company.
 	Raud spoke first. ‘Brother-captain, it would appear that our strategy is predicated on the assumption of our own failure.’
 	‘It is,’ Khalybus told him, still speaking to them all. ‘This is our weakest moment. We know this. So do the traitors. Knowing exactly what our relative strengths are is crucial to the prosecution of war. We will be rigorous in all things. Even in this necessary failure. It is from this precision that our victory will come. Do any of you think we can deceive the Emperor’s Children? No? I swear to you, brothers, that we can. But we will deceive them with the truth.’
 	He looked back at Cruax. The Iron Father nodded.
 	‘Perfection,’ Khalybus said. He faced the bridge again. ‘Perfection. The Emperor’s Children believe the concept is theirs. But recall the weapons that Ferrus Manus and Fulgrim forged on their first encounter. They were both perfect. Our route is not theirs, and our perfection will smash theirs.’
 	He paused for a moment.
 	‘After all,’ he added, ‘they failed to stop us from entering the warp in the first place.’
 	Tracking the Bane of Asirnoth was a pleasure in and of itself. It was, Ariston thought, like watching the scurrying of an insect across a sheet of parchment. The insect could change direction all it wanted, but it remained as visible at the end of its efforts as it had been at the beginning.
 	The warp was not parchment. It was obscurity and madness. The strike cruiser made sudden course corrections, taking advantage of the very storms that threatened the ship with destruction. Ariston pictured how the manoeuvres must appear to the Iron Hands. They sailed down current after current of insanity, making ever more random choices, risking with every decision the dissolution of coherence. They must, he thought, find it impossible to believe that they could be detected in this raging insanity of non-space. 
 	The Urthona had no difficulty tracking its quarry. If the chase had been through the Czysicus System, and the Asirnoth had been leaking radiation, the pursuit could hardly have been simpler. The art lay in keeping back. ‘I will personally execute the captain of any vessel that is detected by the enemy,’ he announced to the fleet. They were all eager for the blood of the Iron Hands. So was he. But there must be enough blood. There must be all of it.
 	So the fleet followed. The distance between it and the X Legion ship was a fiction where space was a lie. But the vessels were all real. They had presence, an intensity that affected the warp and was detectable by the other ships. Ariston held his force back. He reduced to zero the intensity of the fleet’s presence with respect to the Bane of Asirnoth. The strike cruiser faded to a dim perception. It could still be tracked, but it hovered on the edge of disappearance. To the Iron Hands, beset by the full force of the warp storm, the Emperor’s Children would be invisible.
 	Enion said, ‘We run the risk of losing them.’ The Asirnoth was travelling down yet another turbulent current.
 	‘We do not,’ Ariston replied.
 	‘But if they should…’
 	Ariston cut him off. ‘What they do is irrelevant. They have been lost from the moment they took the bait. Our actions are what matters. I will not sully the perfection of our art by rushing forwards in blind eagerness. That is the risk. When we mar the work by accident instead of purpose is when we fail. That was Theotormon’s crime.’
 	And he had been punished.
 	Hours of ship-time passed before the Bane of Asirnoth at last translated from the warp. Ariston was surprised its captain had risked a jump this long and turbulent. His ship was badly damaged. It must be on the verge of losing structural integrity.
 	The Urthona followed. The fleet re-emerged in real space.
 	The system was another dead one. 
 	‘Delium,’ Enion said. Ariston liked the symmetry with Czysicus. Chance had reinforced the aesthetics of the trap. They were running their prey to ground in a corner of the galaxy as empty and hopeless as the one where the chase had begun.
 	Good.
 	The Bane of Asirnoth was leaking plasma. It left a trail so easy to follow it was almost insulting. If Khalybus was trying to hide, Ariston really would take offence.
 	He wasn’t. They found the strike cruiser at low anchor over Galeras. Observing the auspex readings, Bromion called out, ‘Strong energy readings from the moon. The enemy has established a base.’
 	‘So they’ve chosen their gravesite,’ Ariston said.
 	In the oculus, the Bane of Asirnoth became more clear. Its injuries were extensive. Fires shone through the fissures in the hull. The cruiser’s silhouette was deformed, sunken. It was a chewed bone.
 	Ariston pointed at it. ‘We will march on the base. But first, rid my sight of that sad wreck.’
 	The Iron Hands fired back. Once. Ariston was surprised they managed even that.
 	The Urthona’s void shields shrugged off the single broadside. It responded with a devastating barrage of torpedoes and cannon fire. It was joined by every ship in the fleet. They surrounded the Asirnoth and seared the void with the power of the Emperor’s Children. The cruiser vanished, the explosion of its ruptured warp drive indistinguishable from the firestorm that caused it.
 	The fire of the Asirnoth’s death still burned, a miniature sun, when the drop pods began their descent on Galeras. The near orbit of the moon was crowded with ships. Their hulls disgorged a metal hail that pummelled the surface. The plains below the Iron Hands base filled with legionaries in armour the colour of luxury and violence.
 	Ariston stood at the base of the hill as the host gathered before him. He turned to Enion at his side. ‘The point is not just the victory,’ he said. ‘There is a lesson to be taught as well.’
 	The Emperor’s Children would roll over the Iron Hands with an unstoppable wave. They would smash the foe with an echo of their own machinic war, and in the irony of that gesture would be the excess of true art.
 	The rows of Space Marines disappeared into the murk of the atmosphere. The drop pods were vague silhouettes. Further out came the snarl of the tanks brought down by dropships. Ariston could not see them, but their strength was at his command. Their shells would hammer the walls of the base while the legionaries marched on it.
 	‘Brothers,’ he voxed to them all, ‘the Iron Hands have fled, and now they cower. Shall we complete their humiliation?’
 	He was answered, exulted in the clamour of his warriors. This was war converted to sensation, and sensation weaponised. 
 	The march began. 
 	The Iron Hands base was barely visible at the crest of the hill. At first, it was a smudge, a blurred mass of black. It wasn’t until Ariston was halfway up the slope that the details began to resolve themselves. The lines of the wall sharpened even as they were battered by the Demolisher shells of the Vindicator tanks. It was only then that the cannons on the walls answered back. That surprised Ariston. The Iron Hands had given the Emperor’s Children all the time they needed to land and assemble. Ariston’s army was beyond any numbers that Khalybus could possibly have behind the walls, but to wait this long to return fire was a compounding of errors.
 	At his side, Enion frowned. ‘Are they really this stupid?’
 	‘I find that hard to believe.’
 	‘A trap of their own?’
 	‘Likely.’
 	‘But how? What could they hope to do?’
 	Ariston didn’t know. For the first time since the arrival of the Bane of Asirnoth in Czysicus, he felt a flicker of unease. He tried to imagine what the broken, depleted Iron Hands could possibly use to counter his advance. He failed, and that failure disturbed him, because the abject collapse of the X Legion was even harder to imagine.
 	Ariston watched for a mine field or an ambush. Both would have been possible. The volcanic smog of the atmosphere was so thick, that even with his preysight he would not have seen an attack until it was too late.
 	But even a successful ambush would barely have slowed the advance. And there was nothing. Just the cannons on the wall.
 	Their shells punched craters into the hill. Legionaries disintegrated. The guns took their toll, though it was a small one. And one by one, they fell silent as the tanks drew nearer, concentrating their fire, and smashing the walls down.
 	There had been no further defensive barrages for several minutes by the time Ariston crossed the ruined fortification lines. Ahead was the centre block of the fortress. The smaller prefab structures close to the walls were burning.
 	‘Where are they?’ Enion asked.
 	Ariston was wondering that too. Whatever was buried in the rubble would remain hidden, though he saw what looked like the remains of servitors here and there. There was no trace of the Iron Hands, and there was only silence from the heart of the fortress ahead.
 	Was the ambush yet to come, he wondered? No. Even with the greater concentration of his forces in the base, his army was so vast that it still extended all the way down the slope. 
 	‘An orbital strike?’ Enion suggested.
 	‘With what?’ If the Bane of Asirnoth had still remained intact, perhaps. He headed toward the main bunker. ‘Our answers will be here,’ he said.
 	‘As will the trap.’
 	‘It will be a poor one.’ 
 	It had to be.
 	Some shells had fallen upon the structure, but it had withstood them. It had lost a number of its vent stacks, but appeared to be sound enough. Bolter at the ready, Ariston shouldered the doors open; they weren’t barred. The corridor ahead was deserted. Lumen globes lit a silent path and the air was thick with absence.
 	‘There is no one here,’ Enion muttered.
 	‘If they were all aboard their strike cruiser, they are worse than fools,’ replied Ariston. The unease was still there, but also rage. His great triumph would be an embarrassment against an enemy this incompetent. 
 	But no, that was impossible. The Iron Hands were fools in their dogmatic loyalty to the Emperor. But they were still tacticians.
 	The corridor led to a massive open area at the centre of the block. Here a shaft descended deep into the tortured crust of Galeras.
 	‘A risky endeavour,’ Enion commented.
 	‘Agreed.’ Sulphuric fumes rose from the depths. Even inside the walls, Ariston could hear the distant, endless rumble of the moon’s volcanoes. Dust, shaken loose by the trembling rock, floated down the sides of the shaft. One solid quake would be enough to trigger a collapse.
 	‘It’s deep,’ said Enion. There were lumen strips at regular intervals as they disappeared deeper into the gloom.
 	‘Whatever is down there, they went to considerable effort and risk to reach it,’ said Ariston. He gestured to an elevator whose tracks appeared to descend the full length of the shaft. ‘An open invitation.’
 	‘Bait?’
 	‘Of course it is. They didn’t refuse ours. I won’t refuse theirs.’
 	‘We have a choice.’
 	‘Do we? If we want to finish them off, we have to know where they are. We have to know what they’re doing.’ Ariston thought for a moment. ‘One squad with me,’ he said. ‘And I want the fleet ready for emergency embarkation.’
 	‘What could they do against us?’
 	‘I don’t know. They think they can do something. I won’t give them the chance.’
 	Ariston, Enion and the eight brothers in the command squad entered the conveyor carriage – it was a rapid one, but the descent was long, the shaft going much deeper than Ariston would have guessed. The violent life of the moon followed them down. Profound vibrations thrummed down the walls. They plucked at the conveyor’s tracks. The deck of the platform buzzed.
 	Down. Down. No branching tunnels. No mining. Just down, down and down through the crust.
 	‘What were they looking for?’ Enion wondered.
 	And how did they know it was here? Ariston thought. There was only this base. This one shaft. This was the work of certainty, not exploration. 
 	The temperature was rising. There was a glow coming from below now.
 	It was red. Molten.
 	The answer came to Ariston just before he saw what waited in the depths. 
 	‘They weren’t looking for anything,’ he said to Enion. ‘They were placing something.’
 	‘What…’ Enion began, but then cylindrical shapes resolved in the gloom. They were fastened to the walls of the shaft, waiting for a distant signal to begin their brief but terrible flowering.
 	Cyclonic torpedoes.
 	Ariston opened his mouth, but he had no voice. It had been throttled by the noose that had tightened around his fleet.
 	Such weapons could crack a planet in half, given the right circumstances. The 85th Clan-Company had removed the element of chance. Rigour, Khalybus thought, as he witnessed the culmination of his work. Precision. That was where the Iron Hands found the sources of perfection.
 	The torpedoes detonated. Their immense power multiplied the stresses that sought to pull the moon apart. Galeras’s death came all at once. The moon exploded. The fire of its ending was dull and ugly, a volcanic fist lashing out at the near orbit. A storm of fiery crust fragments blew outwards through the Emperor’s Children’s fleet. The Urthona disintegrated, and its blast was bright, as proud as a star. It was surrounded by the smaller pyres of other ships.
 	Collisions and shockwaves built upon each other. Vessels many thousands of metres long were mere fragments in the holocaust, battered to nothing as the moon’s fragments were propelled outwards. Mountains tore through hulls. There was no time to react. There was no evasion. The only escape came from blind chance.
 	As the shockwave passed, a few survivors pulled away from the disaster. None were undamaged. Few would have made the jump to the immaterium.
 	Aboard the Iron Hands frigate Sthenelus, which had lost its captain during its own ordeal over Isstvan, Atticus directed their extermination. His squadron was small. There were no capital ships. But it was more than enough to smash what was left of the enemy. The Emperor’s Children had one cruiser remaining – the Hypsous – and it was already burning when the Sthenelus came for it. A gaping hole ran through the centre of its span. It was barely moving. Its drive was likely about to go critical. Khalybus made sure that it did. 
 	The light from the Hypsous’s end washed through the bridge of the Sthenelus. Khalybus watched until there was only void again, then left the bridge. He was heading for his new quarters – the chambers of a dead warrior, now occupied by the captain of a dead ship.
 	Levannas was waiting in the corridor just outside. Khalybus hadn’t seen him on the bridge, but that didn’t mean the Raven Guard hadn’t been there. 
 	‘I’m curious to hear your thoughts, captain,’ Levannas said.
 	‘I am glad of our victory,’ Khalybus said. ‘I regret that we suffered a significant loss, too.’ The Bane of Asirnoth had no longer been void-worthy when they had reached Delium again. The Iron Hands had abandoned it, leaving only enough servitors aboard the strike cruiser and at the base to make a show of presence by firing the guns.
 	‘The Emperor’s Children suffered a much greater blow.’
 	‘Perhaps.’ The III Legion had been hurt. Nothing much more than that.
 	‘Do you see what we might be able to accomplish?’ Levannas asked, and at that moment, Khalybus heard his carefully suppressed desperation. The Raven Guard needed to continue the war as badly as the Iron Hands did.
 	‘Yes,’ Khalybus said quietly. ‘Yes, I do see.’
 	Incorporating the Raven Guard’s methods into the Iron Hands’ strategy had borne fruit. Shattered, fragmented and wounded though they were, they could still strike at the enemy, and hit hard.
 	They were still in the war, and they would exact their payment of blood.
 	And yet…
 	He had assured the Iron Father that he would keep to the path of the Iron Hands. He believed he had done so.
 	And yet…
 	So many shadows. So much subterfuge.
 	Change had come. Caught by tragedy and necessity, the Iron Hands were becoming something other than what they had been when Ferrus Manus had led them. Khalybus could see the transformation happening before his eyes.
 	It disturbed him that what he could not see was where it would end.