WEAPONSMITH Ben Counter Brother-Sergeant Chrysius grabbed a handful of filthy hair and rammed the peon’s face into the side of the fuel tank. Bone crunched under the impact. He threw the dead man aside and backed up against the huge cylindrical tank. His squad hurried into place alongside him. They were his battle-brothers, men he had fought alongside for decades: Vryksus, who had been bested at the Tournament of Blades seven years ago and still wore a black stripe down the centre of his faceplate as a mark of shame; Myrdos, whose study of the Imperial Fists’ past heroes made him the tactical brain of the squad; Helian, the monster and Gruz, who treated combat as an art. Assault Squad Chrysius, ready to kill. The sound of their ceramite soles on the deck was drowned out by the noise of machinery. This level of the station was a fuel depot, where enormous stirring mechanisms churned the vats of starship fuel to keep it from separating and congealing. Between the vats laboured the peons, marked by brands on their faces. They all had the same raised scar blistered up across their lips and crushed noses. Only someone who knew of their allegiance beforehand would recognise the shape of it – a stylised skull with a grille for a mouth, like the face of a steel skeleton. Chrysius had estimated thirty peons held this floor, all of them armed, none of them ready for the wrath of the Imperial Fists. Twenty-nine, he corrected himself. The body of the man he had just taken down slid to the floor beside him, leaving a glistening slick of blood on the side of the fuel tank. ‘Chrysius to command,’ he whispered into the vox, for he habitually fought with his helmet removed and did not want his voice to carry. He went into battle bare-headed because the facial tattoos of his youth, acquired in a half-remembered previous life among the hive gangers of the Devlan Infernus, were his personal heraldry and it was cowardice not to display it. ‘In position.’ ‘The assault has begun,’ came the reply from Captain Haestorr. ‘Execute, Squad Chrysius.’ Chrysius gave the signal, a clenched fist punched forwards, and his squad charged from their hiding place. The peons had no idea they were about to be attacked. Even when the Imperial Fists stormed into the open, bolt pistols hammering, the enemy took several seconds to realise it. In those seconds half a dozen men were dead, pinpoint shots blasting heads from shoulders or ripping holes through torsos. ‘Helian, Gruz, go high!’ ordered Chrysius, pausing amid the carnage to take stock of the situation. A foot ramp led to a series of walkways circling the upper levels of the fuel cylinders. Enemies might be up there, and they would have excellent positions to fire on the Imperial Fists. Brother Helian was first up – half a metre taller than some of the other Imperial Fists, his armour had been altered to fit his frame and even Gruz looked small compared to him. Chrysius spun around to see three peons taking up firing positions behind a bank of machinery. They had solid projectile guns of simple but effective design, perhaps even capable of putting a hole in power armour at close enough range. Chrysius did not intend to find out. He ran right at them. It was not the natural reaction for a human being faced with a gun, and the peons reacted with shock when they should have blazed every bullet they had at the charging Imperial Fist. But Chrysius was post-human and not afraid of being shot. That was the first thing the hypno-doctrination had weeded out of him. He vaulted the machinery and crashed down onto the first peon. This one’s face was so disfigured by the brand he seemed to have no nose or lips at all, just a torn snarl of blistered flesh that failed to cover his broken teeth. His eyes were yellow, and they rolled back into his head as Chrysius’s weight crunched into his ribcage. Chrysius thrust his chainsword into the belly of the next peon, squeezing the charging stud as he stabbed. The chain teeth chewed through the stomach and spine with a spray of blood and smoke. Chrysius barely even had to look to fire in the opposite direction, into the last peon, leaving three holes in his chest so huge that his upper body flopped away, the centre of the torso completely gone. ‘Report. Sound off!’ ordered Chrysius. More than ten seconds had passed since battle had been joined. It would be a good way towards its conclusion by now. ‘Helian. Nothing up here.’ Helian sounded disappointed. ‘Myrdos. Four down, am holding.’ ‘Vryskus. Under fire. Five have fallen to me!’ ‘Gruz,’ voxed Chrysius. ‘Gruz, report!’ The reply was the yellow-armoured body of Brother Gruz slamming into the floor ten metres from Chrysius’s position. Chrysius ran up to him, grabbed his wrist and hauled him into the cover of the machinery. Gruz’s pistol and chainsword lay where he had fallen, the teeth of the chainsword stripped away. Chrysius glanced at the panel on the forearm of Gruz’s armour, where the power armour’s sensors read off the user’s life signs. His battle-brother was alive. ‘Helian!’ yelled Chrysius into the vox. ‘Helian, what’s up there?’ Chrysius saw Helian running along the walkways above. He was firing at something out of sight and return fire, heavier, was hammering back at him. Chrysius saw a ramp leading up to the tank behind him. It might take him up behind the unseen enemy. He ran for it, bolt pistol held up ready to snap off shots at anything that wasn’t Brother Helian. Gunfire stuttered from below him – he would have to leave Myrdos and Vryskus to deal with the peons below. The great dark shape that barrelled towards him, around the curve of the fuel tank, was too big to be one of the peons. It moved too fast. Chrysius jammed the trigger down by instinct but the shot didn’t fell it, and a great weight slammed into him. It was a Space Marine, in battered power armour the colour of smoke-stained steel. The faceplate of the helmet was like the visor of a feudal knight, with dark red eyepieces and a grille over the nose and mouth like a jaw full of steel fangs. That same shape, the stylised, skull-like image, was emblazoned in silver on one black-painted shoulder pad. An Iron Warrior. The traitor’s weight was on Chrysius and he could barely move. His chainblade was pinned down by his side and his bolt pistol was jammed under the Iron Warrior’s torso, the barrel pointing down. The Imperial Fists had suspected the Iron Warriors had a hand in the taking over of the orbital habitats around Euklid IV, but here was proof. Proof that would kill Chrysius in a matter of seconds if he could not fight like a Space Marine when it counted. Chrysius let go of his chainsword and forced his arm out, feeling muscles wrenching. He grabbed the back of the Iron Warrior’s helmet and yanked it back, forcing the enemy’s head back and taking some of the weight off. He drove a foot into the walkway below him and rolled over, throwing the Iron Warrior off. ‘Did you think you could hide here like vermin?’ gasped Chrysius. ‘Hide from the sons of Rogal Dorn?’ ‘Brave words, whelp of Terra,’ replied the Iron Warrior. His voice was a metallic grind, distorted through the helmet filters. He tried to draw a bolter from a scabbard on his waist but Chrysius grabbed his wrist and the two grappled there, face to face, a test of strength with each trying to throw the other down. The Iron Warrior won. Chrysius toppled off the walkway, the railing parting underneath him. He slammed hard into the top of the fuel tank amid a tangle of cables and pipes. The Iron Warrior’s bolter was out and he snapped off a rattling volley of shots. Chrysius rolled to make himself a moving target as explosive shells hammered home around him. Blooms of flame erupted as fuel lines were ruptured. A ball of fire rushed up, masking Chrysius for the second it took him to get onto his feet. Chrysius fired blindly through the flames. He counted off the shells in his bolt pistol’s magazine, knowing he was outgunned and outmuscled by the enemy. But this was not just an enemy. This was an Iron Warrior, a Traitor Marine who had engaged the Imperial Fists in battle after bloody battle to test their strength against the scions of Rogal Dorn. Between the two, there was nothing but hate. Enough hate to propel the Iron Warrior through the fire, closing with Chrysius in a couple of seconds, a combat knife in one hand and the bolter in the other. Chrysius just had time to turn to face his assailant before the knife stabbed home. Chrysius had earned his laurels through an expertise in hand to hand combat that few Imperial Fists could better. He recognised the strike, a low one to the relatively vulnerable joints between the abdomen of his power armour and the chest plate. Chrysius drove the heel of his hand down, knocked the combat blade off target, and blasted off the remaining shells in his pistol into the Iron Warrior. One shot rang off the Iron Warrior’s shoulder guard, doing nothing more than adding another scar to the pitted paintwork. One hit the chest, blowing a crater in the ceramite but nothing more. A third, the last, punched into the Iron Warrior’s thigh, ripping through his thigh joint and blasting muscle and bone apart. The Iron Warrior bellowed in pain and dropped to one knee. Chrysius was on him. His chainblade was left up on the walkway, but he still had the hands of an Imperial Fist. He smashed his pistol into the Iron Warrior’s face. The weapon shattered but the faceplate buckled, one eye lens popping out. ‘There are ten thousand of us,’ growled the Iron Warrior as he tried to fend off Chrysius. ‘The future is ours. Every–’ Chrysius didn’t let the Iron Warrior finish. He drove his fist into his face, feeling nothing but hatred. It was as if there was nothing in the galaxy but Chrysius’s fist and the Iron Warrior’s steel face which every blow crumpled and split. Chrysius’s fist pistoned over and over again until the faceplate came apart and he was able to rip the helmet away. He looked into the Iron Warrior’s face. Brother Hestion reached the walkway overlooking the fuel tank. By the time he had vaulted down and reached Chrysius, the Iron Warrior’s face had been reduced to a crimson pulp. Chrysius let the body fall, and it clattered limply to his feet. Hestion handed Chrysius the chainsword he had left on the walkway. ‘Good kill, sergeant,’ he said. The edge of night passed across the surface of Euklid IV. The gas giant’s upper atmosphere was, in daytime, a mass of firestorms. As night passed the flames became dark, replaced with a grey-black caul of ash speckled with islands of glowing embers. People had lived here once – humans, citizens of the Imperium, living on the dozens of space stations orbiting the planet. Now whoever lived here could not be described as people at all. Against the scale of Euklid IV, those orbital stations seemed so tiny and delicate they could barely be thought of as existing at all. And compared to the void that lay beyond it, the planet was an insignificant, infinitesimally tiny fragment of nothing. Even Euklid, the system’s star, meant nothing compared to the galaxy. And the galaxy meant nothing compared to the universe. It was good, thought Chrysius, that a Space Marine rarely had the luxury of time to think about such things. ‘Chrysius!’ came a familiar voice behind him. Chrysius turned to see another Space Marine entering the observation deck. This one wore the White Scars’ livery on one shoulder pad but the rest of his armour was black with silver lettering inscribed. His face was familiar too, half the scalp a metallic shell, one eye a bionic, contrasting with a mouth that smiled easily. His skin, battered and tan like beaten bronze, was typical of the horse nomads from which his Chapter drew their recruits. ‘Kholedei!’ said Chrysius. ‘My brother. It has been too long!’ The two clasped hands. ‘It has,’ said Kholedei. ‘For all the honour of the Deathwatch, it is good to fight alongside old friends again.’ The last time Chrysius had seen Kholedei, it had been as a joint White Scars and Imperial Fists strike force lifted off from the shattered remains of Hive Mandibus. The city had fallen to a xenos plague which turned the inhabitants into walking incubators from wormlike aliens. The mission had been nothing short of a cull, exterminating every living thing they found. It was a foul, grim business, a merciless grind, when even a Space Marine had been in need of friends. The two had fought alongside each other, their squads merged into one and taking strength from their new comrades. ‘I had heard the Deathwatch had sent a kill-team to Euklid IV,’ said Chrysius. ‘I did not know you would be among them.’ ‘When I knew we would be in support of the Imperial Fists, I ensured that I would be in the kill-team,’ said Kholedei. ‘I would not miss the chance to fight alongside the Sons of Dorn again. What news of your squad?’ ‘Venelus fell at Thorgin,’ said Chrysius. ‘A shot from an eldar sniper. And Koron at the Fallmarch Expanse, when the Eternal Sacrifice was lost.’ ‘They were fine brothers, Chrysius. We are all diminished by their loss.’ ‘It is the way of war to take our best,’ said Chrysius. ‘Vryskus has yet to atone for his defeat at the tournament, though to every-one else but him he has redeemed himself a dozen times over. Myrdos is on his way to taking his own squad. Helian’s just the same, of course.’ ‘Good to know. I hear that you killed an Iron Warrior yourself.’ ‘That is so,’ said Chrysius. ‘I was fortunate.’ ‘A kill that I have not equalled, sergeant,’ said Kholedei. ‘Aliens aplenty have fallen to me and my team, but an Iron Warrior is something else. I would dearly love to shed the blood of such a traitor. I know of the dishonours they have done to the Imperial Fists.’ ‘Gruz was wounded,’ said Chrysius. ‘I am proud to have taken the kill, but not that my battle-brother suffered for it.’ ‘Then you will avenge him. Just as we avenge our fallen every time we fight. And the next fight will be soon. I have spoken with Captain Haestorr. Given the intelligence the Inquisition gathered on this mission, the enemy will be concentrated in the science facility. We strike there, and strike hard, and the Iron Warriors will be thrown off Euklid IV before they have the chance to mount a defence.’ ‘What interest does the Ordo Xenos have in Euklid IV?’ asked Chrysius. Kholedei smiled. ‘Believe me, the ordo wants the Iron Warriors extinct just as much as we do. They might specialise in hunting the alien, but an enemy is an enemy.’ ‘Well, that’s why we are here. Why are the Iron Warriors here?’ Kholedei looked out through the viewing port. Once this station had been a beautiful place, where the citizens could gather and reflect on the majesty of Euklid IV. Now the place was decaying, the walls spotted with rust and damp, the port smeared with condensation. ‘This was an intellectual colony,’ said Kholedei. ‘Artists, philosophers. Perhaps their meditations uncovered or woke something. A moral threat. Perhaps the Iron Warriors want it. Perhaps they built a science station of enough sophistication to make it valuable to the enemy. It matters little as long as it gives us a time and a place to kill them.’ ‘I am glad the Inquisition and the Chapter made common cause here,’ said Chrysius. ‘It is good to have you back, brother.’ ‘It is good to be back,’ said Kholedei. Chrysius recognised that smile, which his old friend only broke out when the chance for competition showed itself. ‘I get another chance to show you how a Space Marine really fights.’ Captain Haestorr ascribed to the tactical philosophy that a Space Marine was not a soldier. A soldier could lose his nerve. A soldier would not just walk into the fury of the enemy – he had to be corralled like an animal or cajoled like a child. A Space Marine was more like a bullet fired from a gun. He went wherever he was pointed, and needed no convincing to inflict fatal damage on anything he hit. The Imperial Fists’ boarding torpedoes slammed into the side of the station. By the lettering stencilled on its side, this station was called the Enlightenment. The hull plates came apart under the reinforced prows of the Caestus-pattern boarding rams, as the assault vehicles drove through the multiple levels of protective plating. Space Marine power armour was proof against the vacuum that ripped everything out of the station’s outer hull spaces. After a few seconds to let the gases vent, the prows of the boarding rams opened up and the Imperial Fists emerged, the assault squad first into the breach. They forged into the tangled labyrinth of ventilation ducts and fuel coolant pipes that encased the station’s interior. The enemy knew they were there. Even without any sensors left on the station, the impacts of the rams would have rung throughout the Enlightenment. Every Imperial Fist, and the Deathwatch kill-team members who accompanied them, knew this would be a contested boarding. That meant a close quarters fight, a butcher’s battle. It would be against the most hated enemy the Imperial Fists had ever made. They couldn’t wait. The first sight Chrysius had of the enemy was a blurred, half-glimpsed shape leaping between the laboratory benches. The lab floor was choked with machinery, wires and ducts hanging from the ceiling. An enormous cylindrical structure, an electron microscope, loomed like a monumental sculpture. The enemy had lots of places to hide and the one Chrysius saw, jumping from one piece of cover to the next, was humanoid in a way that was fundamentally wrong. It trailed fronds of skin and its limbs were too long, jointed in the wrong places. Mutants. Chrysius’s immediate objective was to close with the enemy. It was the first principle of The Doctrines of Assault, sleep-taught to Chrysius during his training. He crashed through the lab equipment, kicking through the bench in front of him, scattering chemical beakers and glassware everywhere. Gunfire was already starting – the staccato thunder of the Imperial Fists’ boltguns, and the red flashes of laser fire in return. Chrysius could see more of them now behind barricades of overturned benches and toppled lab gear, dressed in ragtag uniforms of black and yellow, and sporting different mutations. He saw in that glimpse vividly coloured and patterned skin, claws and stinger tails, tattered wings, scorched and blistered skin. Hestion was ahead of Chrysius, dropping a shoulder and crashing through a bank of cogitator screens. He slammed into the mutant sheltering behind it and yanked the thing off its feet as the mutant tried to wrench the Imperial Fist’s head off with its tentacles. Hestion dashed the mutant against the ground, splitting its head open against the white-tiled floor, and impaled a second mutant through the chest with his chainsword. The whirr of the teeth screeched even above the dying scream and the gunfire, and it was the sound of imminent victory. Chrysius jumped a barricade of furniture, shooting one of the mutants behind it through the chest before he even landed. It had huge compound eyes and mouthparts like an insect. He swept his chainblade and cut another in two at the waist, his backswing ruining the leg of a third. He barely had time to register what manner of uncleanness had been marked on their flesh before they died, fresh blood spraying across the golden yellow of his armour, the vibrations of cracking bone running up through his feet as he stamped down on them. The mutants were running into the fray, brought by the screams of their brothers. They were armed with las-weapons and autoguns. Bullets and las-blasts pinged off Hestion’s armour as he stood proud, battering down a mutant who charged at him with gun blazing. Hestion was wounded often, and Chrysius had often lectured him on a Space Marine’s duty to preserve himself and his wargear as well as destroy the enemy, but Hestion did not have a self-preserving cell in his huge body. There were hundreds of mutants pouring onto the laboratory deck. Radios were blasting orders and exaltations to kill. Chrysius’s squad paused for a moment, the first line of the enemy dead and the next line rushing towards them. ‘Hestion! Hold the line and charge on my mark,’ ordered Chrysius. ‘And get down!’ ‘Behold the enslavers!’ came a braying voice over a vox-caster with speakers mounted on the lab ceiling. ‘The heralds of order! The enslavers of your kind! Watch them fall, and revel in their death-cries!’ Chrysius glanced over the cover. The mutants were close. He could see their faces, and the ones with expressions he could read were glassy-eyed, as if they had been hypnotised or mind-wiped. Dogs, thought Chrysius. Animals, conditioned to attack. The Imperium’s malcontents lied to and indoctrinated, and loosed like a pack of dogs. ‘Now!’ yelled Chrysius, and leapt into the front rank of mutants, into the storm of claws and blades. Even against this fanatical horde there was glory to be won. The brutal rhythm of violence came easily to Assault-Sergeant Chrysius. They thrust, he parried, reversed and cut, blasted another few bolt shells into them and let them close again near enough for the pattern to repeat. He saw Brother Myrdos clamber onto the cylinder of the microscope and hack down those who tried to reach him, as if he was a flag planted at the summit of a mountain and the mutants were competing to see who could pull it down first. Somewhere in the thick of it was Hestion, hurling the enemy in every direction, some even clattering against the coolant ducts running across the ceiling. The enemy relented. They had to – there were only so many of them. As they broke off in twos and threes they were shot down by the bolters of the Imperial Fists behind, directed by Captain Haestorr. The kill-team were there too, firing with lethal precision, each bolter shell shredding a mutant’s central mass in a spray of gore. ‘Squads, respond!’ came the vox on Haestorr’s command channel. ‘Report all sightings of the Iron Warriors!’ ‘None here,’ replied Chrysius. ‘They sent in the fodder. They thought we’d be softened up before we reached them.’ ‘None yet,’ came a voice Chrysius recognised as Kholedei’s. ‘Squad, free target at will, don’t waste your kraken shells. Watch for the Weaponsmith.’ Chrysius dropped to one knee behind a bullet-riddled lab bench. ‘Kholedei? Brother Kholedei, can you repeat that?’ There was no answer. The second part of the vox had sounded like it was directed to the rest of the Deathwatch kill-team and not the rest of the force. Perhaps it had been a mistake, Kholedei momentarily forgetting to switch channels. But Chrysius was quite sure of what he had heard. And so had the rest of his squad. ‘Sergeant,’ said Brother Hestion, who emerged from a bank of machines to join Chrysius. Hestion was covered from head to toe in blood. His bolt pistol was still in its holster, and he had probably killed as many with his bare left hand as with his chainsword. ‘Did he say that? About the Weaponsmith?’ ‘Focus on the enemy, Brother Hestion,’ said Chrysius. ‘But he did,’ said Brother Vryskus, who approached wiping the blood from the blade of the duellist’s sabre he used in place of a chainsword. ‘We all heard him. I think, sergeant, we all know now why we are here.’ According to the collators of the Imperial Fists’ lore – those battle-brothers responsible for recording battle legends and old grudges –Weaponsmith Gurlagorg had been one of the first Iron Warriors ever to break the greatest taboo of the Space Marines. This Iron Warrior, a commander of his Legion, had taken an Imperial Fist prisoner at a long-ago battle, cut open his body and removed the gene-seed organs. The gene-seed, the organ that regulated all the many augmentations of a Space Marine’s body, without which he could simply not exist. The gene-seed, created after the genetic pattern of the Primarch Rogal Dorn himself who had in turn been made in the image of the Emperor. A shred of the divine that every Space Marine carried inside him. Gurlagorg had sought a way to create more Iron Warriors, and had struck upon the idea of harvesting the gene-seed from Imperial Space Marines, corrupting and debasing it, and creating new battle-brothers of his own. It was as blasphemous a concept as existed among the Chapter of the Space Marines. Some had even thought that the Traitor Legions, heretics and sworn enemies of mankind though they were, would at least respect the principles of their own creation. But no – Gurlagorg had created a new Iron Warrior from the first gene-seed he took, and set about seeking more to defile with his corrupted sciences. It was a dangerous story to tell, and the Chapter Masters condemned its spreading. But it was told, hushed and always changing. Gurlagorg was the worst of the worst, as deadly an enemy as the Imperial Fists had. If ever a roll of the Imperial Fists’ deadliest enemies were drawn up, Weaponsmith Gurlagorg would be near the top. Few and powerful would be names ahead of his. And now he was orbiting Euklid IV. The Deathwatch knew, and presumably Captain Haestorr and the Chapter’s leaders did, too. That was why the Inquisition had sent the kill-team to assist the Imperial Fists in wiping out the Iron Warriors there – because the Inquisition knew that Gurlagorg was a hated enemy of mankind, and that his death would make the galaxy that one degree more sacred. They had found him. After thousands of years they had found him. And now, after thousands of years, they would kill him. The deck beyond the laboratory bled from its walls. Where there had once been panels of steel, there was now a blackened biomechanical covering of skin, the rotting metal blistered up with pulsing steel veins. Drops of acid pattered from the sagging ceiling and a silver-black ooze bubbled up underfoot. Every warning rune was lit up on the retinas of the Imperial Fists as they warily moved into the science station’s core, the filters of their armoured faceplates capturing the worst of the pollutants that turned the air thick and hazy. Even Assault-Sergeant Chrysius wore his helmet here. The Imperial Fists force spread out through the deck, which stretched most of the rest of the way to the station’s centre. The deck was badly warped, forming slopes and hills as it rose and fell, and in places it shuddered underfoot as if ready to give way into the fuel cells and thruster arrays on the station’s underside. ‘It’s a miracle the gravity still works,’ voxed Brother Vryskus. ‘Speak not too soon, brother,’ replied Myrdos. ‘Think to the Battle of the Dark Ascension. The Night Lords there deactivated their flagship’s gravity just as battle was joined, hoping to spread confusion through the Imperial Fists’ ranks.’ ‘Did it work?’ asked Vryskus. ‘If you were minded to read anything our forefathers wrote, Vryskus, you would know the Imperial Fists were stern and resolute, and were victorious,’ said Myrdos testily. ‘Our brethren there were ready. So must we be.’ Before Chrysius was a blistered section of the deck where the biomechanical substance was stretched thin. Beneath the surface, suspended in greyish translucent fluid, was an object that looked like a boltgun of an ancient mark. Its lines were undeveloped and its details indistinct, as if it had been moulded from clay. ‘They’re growing their wargear here,’ he said. ‘Truly,’ said Vryskus, ‘no tech-heresy is beyond the Iron Warriors.’ Other blisters held segments of power armour and more weapons, all in various stages of growth. ‘We can destroy this on the way out,’ voxed Captain Haestorr. ‘The Iron Warriors are the objective here.’ ‘And Weaponsmith Gurlagorg,’ replied Chrysius over the command vox. ‘If he is here. You cannot deny us that knowledge, captain.’ ‘Discipline,’ replied Haestorr. ‘Focus, sergeant. The mission above all else.’ ‘If the Weaponsmith is on this station then our mission is to kill him,’ replied Chrysius. ‘As it has been the mission of the Imperial Fists to kill all enemies of mankind.’ ‘You are ahead of yourself,’ voxed Haestorr. ‘There is no sign the Weaponsmith is here.’ ‘The Deathwatch think otherwise,’ said Chrysius. He could see Kholedei and the rest of his kill-team moving carefully through the unstable chamber, on one flank of the Imperial Fists’ formation. Chrysius could see, along with Kholedei’s own White Scars livery, the heraldry of other Space Marine Chapters on the shoulder pads of the kill-team members – a Praetor of Orpheus, a Black Dragon, a Scimitar Guard. Chrysius wondered what it would mean to fight alongside Space Marines whose way of thinking came from the doctrines of a different Chapter, men who might be his brothers as the Emperor’s finest but not brothers raised together in war. ‘We’re closing on the Hazardous Materials Lab,’ voxed Sergeant Moxus, whose squad held the opposite flank. ‘It’s shielded and fortified, if the original blueprints still hold true. If the Iron Warriors make a stand on this station, they will make it there.’ ‘Captain Kholedei!’ ordered Haestorr. ‘Bring your demolitions charges forth. We’ll blast our way in.’ The kill-team headed to the front where a great bulkhead, the spine of the station, met the corrupted deck. Chrysius saw now the Praetor of Orpheus had the servo-harness and artificer armour of a Techmarine. He attached three large steel canisters to the bulkhead wall and keyed in a command sequence as the kill-team retired to beyond the blast zone. ‘If the Weaponsmith didn’t know we were coming,’ said Vryskus bleakly, ‘he will soon.’ ‘Lesser men would call us the forlorn hope,’ said Chrysius. ‘The first into the breach. A Space Marine calls it the place of the greatest honour, for to us will fall the first blood of the enemy.’ Chrysius drew his chainsword. ‘To us will fall the Weaponsmith.’ A trio of rapid explosions shuddered the chamber. The cysts burst, spilling half-formed wargear across the floor in a flood of greasy filth. The bulkhead shattered in a blast of red light and flame, and black smoke filled the air. Through the gloom, Chrysius’s auto-senses cut a path through the interior of the Hazardous Materials Lab. Whatever it had once been, it now resembled nothing so much as a temple ripped from whatever dimension had birthed it and transplanted into this space station. Chains hung across the void in the heart of the station, hung with festoons of mangled corpses impaled on the spiked links. Shafts of black steel fell down through the darkness, impaling great altars of carved stone. The laboratory floor had been turned into a maze of altars, the spaces between them choked with bodies and forming a charnel house labyrinth. Statues of monstrous gods and daemons – a dog-headed representation of the Blood God Khorne, a sagging monstrosity of grey stone that was surely Nurgle, the Plague Lord – glowered over the scene, the gemstones in their eyes watching for bloodshed about to begin. The only remnants of the original lab were the cells. They were of polished steel and now stood on the top of black stone pillars, each one holding a specimen of a different xenos species. Chrysius recognised a genestealer of the Ymargl strain, the harbinger species who moved ahead of the tyranid hive fleets. Another cell held the filth-encrusted mass of a hrud, spacebound scavengers who clothed themselves in exoskeletons of other species’ detritus. There was a snake-bodied, four-armed creature among them whose ornate armour suggested ownership by a more sophisticated species who used it as a bodyguard or foot soldier. On many of the altars were the corpses of other xenos, some cut open with their innards spread as fodder for soothsayers, other dissected as if for study, their body parts laid out as neatly as a watchmaker’s cogs on the sacrificial slabs. Chrysius took all this in as he led the charge. Half his mind was that of a student of war, sizing up every aspect for cover and fields of fire. The other half saw only the tell-tale shapes of ancient power armour among the heaps of bones and let the recognition of them fill him with hate, The Iron Warriors. They were here, making their stand in this grand temple to the warp’s own gods. If anyone had asked Chrysius, in that moment, to recite the principles of warfare that had been implanted in his mind in hypno-doctrination, he could not have done so. The glories of Rogal Dorn. The legends of his Chapter. His own name. They were all gone from his mind, replaced by a raw and burning hatred. Because he had seen the Iron Warrior’s face. The one he had killed in the fuel depot. And the image of that face filled his mind, an icon of hatred without equal. Bolter fire hammered against the shattered bulkhead as Chrysius vaulted the twisted wreckage. Shots burst against his chestplate and greave, but his momentum carried him on. He passed into the dense shadow between two altars, his feet crunching through xenos skeletons. Black power armour loomed in front of him. The shape was that of a Space Marine but deformed with bulky bionics. One arm was an industrial claw, more suited to carving up slabs of metal in a manufactorum than for using as a hand. Half the head was a metallic skull, crowned with a circle of bronze horns. The single eye in the centre of the faceplate glowed green as it played targeting lasers across Chrysius’s body. Chrysius never gave the Iron Warrior the opportunity to shoot. He closed the gap in two strides and hit the traitor square in the chest. But it held firm. It was heavier and stronger than Chrysius. It slammed its claw against Chrysius’s midriff in a colossal backhand, throwing the Imperial Fist into the black stone of the altar behind him. Chrysius kicked out, forcing open the gap between himself and the Iron Warrior. It was just enough to bring the point of his chainsword up and drive it forward. The tip sheared through the pistons of the traitor’s bionic shoulder, slicing through cables and hoses. The Iron Warrior laughed. It was a hateful, metallic sound. Chrysius tried to wrench his chainblade back out and the Iron Warrior held up his claw, slamming its blades together as if in mockery, to show Chrysius the weapon that would cut him in half in a handful of seconds. Another shadow fell against the darkness, black against black. It was Brother Vryskus, his duelling blade arrowing down at the Iron Warrior. The blade punched into the Iron Warrior’s chest. The pressure came off Chrysius for a second and he was free, rolling out from under the Iron Warrior. The Iron Warrior ignored the injury, pivoting and catching Vryskus between the blades of his claw. Steam spurted from its damaged shoulder as the twin blades slammed closed, slicing Brother Vryskus in half at the waist. Chrysius felt as if he had been immersed in ice. His blood seemed gone, replaced with freezing gas. He cried out and stabbed his chainblade forward again, this time aiming at the back of the Iron Warrior’s head. The chainsword caught the Iron Warrior in the neck, where the spine joined the skull. The traitor tensed rigid as the chain teeth sawed through the top of his spine and brain stem, pulping the inside of the cranium. The single eyepiece popped and spurted viscous gore down the front of its black armour. It had taken less than a second. One moment Vryskus had been alive, the next he was dead. Chrysius had seen thousands of deaths, but the death of a brother, of a squad mate, was never the same. Brother Myrdos, who had bickered with Vryskus minutes before, crunched through the corpses underfoot and stopped dead when he saw Vryskus’s helmet, with the black stripe painted down its faceplate, down among the broken bodies. He saw instantly that Vryskus was dead. ‘We will mourn him when the Weaponsmith has fallen,’ gasped Chrysius. Myrdos could only nod his agreement before Chrysius stepped over the two dead Space Marines, one traitor and one loyal, and struck further into the altar labyrinth. The hate had been hot a moment ago. Now Chrysius was filled with ice, and it seemed twice as fierce. He had to be rid of it, this awful freezing pressure building up in his chest, and the only way was to fight on through, kill and maim and avenge with every stroke. Revenge. He would have revenge. He would carve every unspoken syllable of his hate onto the Weaponsmith’s body. Gunfire streaked from an altar above. Chrysius vaulted up onto the top and saw another Iron Warrior, this one with both hands altered with mutation and bionics into multi-barrelled bolters. It was spraying out the firepower of four or five Imperial Fists, filling the air with burning chains of shrapnel. Chrysius slashed down at one of the Iron Warrior’s legs, knocking it onto its back. Myrdos was beside him and leapt on the downed Iron Warrior, stabbing down at its heart. Myrdos’s chainsword threw a shower of sparks as it bit into ceramite. The Iron Warrior threw Myrdos off and, before Chrysius could even swing a return stroke at it, fired a volley at him. One shot caught Chrysius full in the leg and he felt the bones and gristle of his knee blown apart into a bloody-petalled flower of torn skin. Chrysius fell back. He ordered his body to move in for the kill-stroke, but his body refused to obey him, shocked into dis-obedience. The Iron Warrior turned to Myrdos and the snarl of its deformed faceplate seemed to sneer as it levelled its bolter barrels at the Imperial Fist. A massive volley of fire ripped into Myrdos, laying his ribcage open in a bloody mass. One of his arms was blown clean off and another shot punched through his eyepiece, splitting the back of his head open and spilling his brains across the black stone of the altar. I will mourn later, Chrysius told himself. Time seemed to slow down, leaving him the moments he needed to follow his thoughts. I will weep for him among the shrines and statues of the Phalanx. But not yet. Hanging above the altar was one of the specimen cages – this one containing another genestealer. Chrysius had fought them before, and knew them to be creatures of such viciousness that to take one down, one on one, in close combat was worth a badge of honour that Chrysius had yet to earn. They could be taken down at a distance with no loss, provided they were spotted and targeted in time. Up close, they were a horror. Chrysius drew his bolt pistol, not moving from his position on his back. He aimed up at the chain holding the cell above the altar. The Iron Warrior must have assumed Chrysius was trying and failing to aim at it. It blasted off a few bolter shots into the advancing Imperial Fists, then turned back to Chrysius. In the moment that gave him, Chrysius loosed off half his pistol’s magazine, and the top of the cage was shredded in a burst of silver shrapnel. The chain parted and the cell plummeted down. It landed just behind the Iron Warrior, who turned to see what had missed it. The four clawed limbs of the genestealer inside reached out between the bent bars and grabbed the Iron Warrior by the neck. The alien’s head was a mass of tentacles that splayed apart, revealing a beak-like mouthpart. The genestealer dragged the Iron Warrior against its cell, and lashed its tentacles around its helmet. The beak punched out through the back of the Iron Warrior’s face. The Traitor Marine convulsed, bolters firing randomly. Chrysius forced himself to stand, his ruined leg threatening to buckle under him. There was no pain, even though there should have been too much for his armour’s painkiller reserves to mask. He had no room for pain in him now. The rest of his bolter’s magazine was blasted point-blank into the feasting genestealer’s head, shattering its alien skull and leaving it slumped in its cell with the dead Iron Warrior still held close. Part of Chrysius wanted to pick up the remains of Brother Myrdos, carry him far from that battlefield and give him the funeral rites of a brother. He wanted to take Brother Vryskus, too, and bear the two sundered halves of him to the Phalanx where they might lie in state as heroes. But that part of Chrysius was a whisper compared to the hate rushing through him – now he was hollow, a desert valley worn smooth by a screaming wind. Everything was scoured away but the will to do violence to the Weaponsmith who had created all this. Chrysius ran on, leaping down from the blood-slicked altar into the labyrinth. His vision swam with tears as he forced his way through the heaps of skeletons and wreckage. A red glow was ahead of him, and he recognised the heat and colour of molten ceramite. In the forges of the Phalanx it was melted down to create new armour plates. He caught the smell of it, breaking through the stench of bodies and boltgun propellant that made it through the filters of his faceplate. The forge at the centre of the temple was a structure of barricaded archways. Hundreds of skulls were mounted on spikes on the walls. Gunfire was blasting chunks from the barricades of wreckage the Iron Warriors had set up – the battle had already reached this far into the temple, the Imperial Fists following in the wake of Chrysius’s charge and engaging the Iron Warriors from every direction. The Weaponsmith must be here, in the forge. In front of one of the barricades was Brother Hestion, the last member of Chrysius’s squad. Hestion had charged through the hail of bolter fire to the foot of the barricade. Chrysius watched as he dragged an Iron Warrior over the barricade, flinging it to the floor and pounding a fist into its faceplate. Another Iron Warrior mounted the barricade and vaulted down. He wielded a power axe with both hands and struck down at Hestion. The blade bit into Hestion’s arm and almost cut right through it. Hestion grabbed the Iron Warrior by the throat with his good arm and, with a strength that even a Space Marine could rarely muster, hurled the Iron Warrior into the barricade. Chunks of wreckage and steel beams tumbled down. Chrysius ran to his battle-brother’s side. The Iron Warrior on the floor was trying to get up – Chrysius lanced it through the spine with his chainblade, putting all the momentum of his charge into the sword-thrust. The blade bit deep but did not penetrate far enough to kill the Iron Warrior, who turned and blasted at point-blank range with a bolt pistol. Chrysius felt the armour over his abdomen dent and shear, but not give way. The bolter round had not penetrated. The next shot would. Chrysius put a foot against the Iron Warrior’s neck, feeling the spikes of pain bursting from his shattered knee. He drove down as best he could, forcing the Iron Warrior’s head down, twisted the chainblade and put all of his weight behind it. This time the blade bored through the Iron Warrior’s back. Chrysius pulled it almost all the way out and stabbed down again and again, each thrust bubbling up a torrent of gore from the well of blood. Chrysius looked up to see Hestion and the second Iron Warrior duelling, axe against chainblade. The axe swung in a low arc, aimed at taking out Hestion’s legs. Hestion blocked the blow with his weapon but in a flash of light the axe’s power field discharged and the chainblade was ripped apart. Loose metal teeth spattered against Chrysius, embedding themselves in his armour like tiny daggers. Hestion, unarmed now, put both hands around the Iron Warrior’s neck. Chrysius fought to get his own chainsword out of the downed Iron Warrior’s back but it had jammed tight against the breastplate of fused ribs. Finally it came loose and Chrysius lunged forwards but his knee gave way, folding the wrong way underneath him. The Iron Warrior drove the head of the axe up under Hestion’s ribs. The Imperial Fist fell back, the breastplate of his power armour laid open. The Iron Warrior drew up its axe and buried the blade up to the handle in Hestion’s exposed chest. Chrysius cried out wordlessly. The Iron Warrior brought up the axe again and swung it down with such force it split Hestion’s torso from shoulder to waist. Chrysius grabbed the fallen Iron Warrior’s bolt pistol from the floor. He dragged himself forward a couple of paces so the shot would be point blank. He unloaded the pistol’s remaining ammo into the back of the Iron Warrior, blasting apart the power plant of its armour. Hestion was still alive. He was the strongest man, Space Marine or otherwise, that Chrysius had ever known and his last act was to grab the Iron Warrior’s helmet and wrench it off, before falling to the ground. The last round of bolter ammo went into the back of the Iron Warrior’s head. It blew the back of the traitor’s skull apart, throwing brain and skull against the fallen barricade. Chrysius knew what he would see even before the Iron Warrior tumbled back, its head tilted back so Chrysius was looking into dead eyes. He knew what the face would look like. He had seen it earlier, when he had killed the Iron Warrior in the fuel depot. The image had burned into his brain. And this Iron Warrior was the same. Chrysius was looking into a human face. Not a monster’s face, not the face of a daemon or an inhuman fusion of man and machine. Just a man’s face, like a Space Marine. No, not like any – Chrysius himself, with his gang tattoos, looked far more monstrous than either this Iron Warrior. They were men. Space Marines, just like him. Whatever made them the enemy of mankind, it was not the fact they were monsters, debased and savage creatures disfigured by the marks of their heresy. What made them traitors was something inside, something that waited inside every Space Marine. There was nothing that Chrysius had seen in his life so hateful as a normal, human face on this enemy. Chrysius struggled across the wreckage to Hestion’s body. His battle-brother was dead – his innards were open to the air and Chrysius could see his hearts and lungs motionless amid the gore. Chrysius pulled himself upright against the ruins of the barricade. Beyond it he could see molten ceramite pouring in sheets, like waterfalls, from above. Here, in the forge, was where the Weaponsmith waited. Chrysius clambered over the fallen barricade. He reloaded his bolt pistol with hands that shook with pain and physical shock. It did not matter that he was hurt. When he was so full of hate, when it drove him on with such force, he could ignore that. He would suffer later. Now, there was one last kill to be taken. In the centre of the forge, kneeling beside a black iron anvil, was the Weaponsmith. The pain all caught up to Chrysius at once. He slumped down, supporting himself with one hand. He wanted to pitch forward onto the floor and let unconsciousness take over, but refused to allow himself such respite. The Weaponsmith was three-quarters the height of a human, half the height of a Space Marine. It was roughly humanoid, though its limbs were too long for its body and its oversized feet had multi-jointed prehensile toes. Its hands had similarly long fingers, so dextrous they curved back on themselves like snakes. It was covered in red-brown fur. Its face was flat, almost simian, with an underdeveloped nose and wide mouth. It wore no clothing but had a pair of welding goggles clamped to its face and a bandolier of tools strung across its chest. The anvil beside it was covered in tools and components. As Chrysius watched, it assembled a few into another creation, a spinning armature like a clockwork toy for the amusement of a child. The Weaponsmith let the device fall whereupon it took flight, catching the updraft of hot air from the forge and flitting towards the ceiling like an insect. The Weaponsmith watched it with curiosity, paying no attention to Chrysius at all. There was no one else in the forge. The Iron Warriors were dead or fighting the main Imperial Fists force outside. Chrysius had been certain he would see the multi-armed servo-harness of Gurlagorg, the steam that belched from the engines and reactors mounted on his archaic armour, the pallid mask of synthetic flesh he wore as a face. But none of those were here, just the strange furred creature beside the anvil. Another of the barricades fell in, shoved down by the combined weight of two members of Kholedei’s Deathwatch kill-team. Kholedei himself followed them in. ‘Kholedei!’ shouted Chrysius. ‘What is this? Where is Gurlagorg?’ Kholedei walked forwards slowly. ‘Step back, brother, This battle is over.’ ‘Where is Gurlagorg?’ demanded Chrysius again. ‘My squad died to get to him. Where is he?’ ‘Gurlagorg was never here, Brother Chrysius,’ said Kholedei. ‘But you spoke of the Weaponsmith! We heard you! That was why you were here!’ ‘And we were,’ replied Kholedei, his voice level and calm. ‘But I never spoke of Gurlagorg. This creature is of a species possessing a rare technological skill. The Iron Warriors were using it to manufacture wargear for them. It might reasonably be called a weaponsmith. That is what we were here to find.’ ‘You… you knew we would hear you,’ said Chrysius. ‘Over the vox. You knew we would believe it was Gurlagorg we were hunting, and you let my squad sacrifice themselves to kill him!’ Chrysius aimed his bolt pistol at the alien, which again did nothing to acknowledge any of the Space Marines around it. ‘And perhaps I will!’ Kholedei held up a calming hand, but the Space Marine beside him, who wore the golden livery of the Scimitar Guard beside the black of the Deathwatch, had his bolter up and aiming at Chrysius. ‘The kraken rounds my kill-team use can punch through even the ceramite of a Space Marine’s armour,’ said Kholedei. ‘Including yours, Brother Chrysius. Though you may not be familiar with the brain stem grafts of the Scimitar Guard, be assured that Brother Shen here can shoot you dead before your finger has finished pulling the trigger. We are here for the alien and we will take him alive. That is our mission, and we will complete it even if we have to go through you. I do not say this lightly, Chrysius. That we bring this alien back to the Inquisition is a matter outweighing either of our lives.’ Chrysius slumped and let his pistol drop. ‘We were brothers, Kholedei. At Hive Mandibus you pulled Gruz from the rubble of that blast, and you debated with Vryskus for hours! They were your brothers! You were my brother! You knew we would die for the chance to kill Gurlagorg and you let us believe it anyway.’ ‘The Iron Warriors were trying to get this alien off the station,’ said Kholedei. ‘We had to take this position as quickly as we could. That meant spurring the Imperial Fists on to storm this place with all haste, more than combat doctrine would allow. We told you no lies and we fought as sternly as any of you, and for the same end.’ Kholedei knelt beside Chrysius and put a hand on his shoulder, and for a moment Chrysius saw in him the same White Scar who had once fought alongside him. But then that face was gone, replaced with another – the face of a Space Marine sworn to the Inquisition, and not to the battle-brothers at his side. ‘And this xenos is a powerful asset to the Inquisition. Even among its own kind, it is a genius. It is responsible for arming whole Black Crusades and now that skill will be used for the good of the Imperium. You may not understand all that we have achieved here, but if you have ever trusted me, trust that it is a greater victory than killing a hundred Gurlagorgs.’ Kholedei waved the Praetors of Orpheus Techmarine forward. He placed cuffs on the alien’s wrists and ankles. The xenos did not resist. One of the Techmarine’s servo-arms was equipped with a syringe – this injected the alien, which slumped unconscious. The Techmarine picked it up and slung it over his shoulder. ‘We must leave,’ said Kholedei. ‘I will pray for your fallen.’ ‘They are your fallen, too,’ said Chrysius. With that the kill-team left the forge, moving rapidly back towards the boarding rams. When the main Imperial Fists force breached the barricades, they found nothing but Assault-Sergeant Chrysius, slumped beside the anvil, exhausted and beaten. Chrysius watched the science station explode and be scattered in the void, shattered by a few demolition charges placed at strategic points. Behind him, on the observation deck, were the bodies of Brothers Hestion, Vryskus and Myrdos, covered in shrouds for they were in no condition to be viewed. Here they would lie until the Imperial Fists force had loaded their wargear and wounded onto their strike cruiser for the journey back to the Phalanx. The dead would be buried there, and their gene-seed would be extracted to be implanted into another generation of battle-brothers. It should have been a consolation. Chrysius’s helmet sat on the workbench in front of him. He had a little time before the force had to leave this place. He had found some paint and a brush among the workmen’s tools on the fuel depot. Before he started work he glanced through the viewport again and caught his own face, illuminated by the ruddy light of the dark Euklid IV, covered in the gang tattoos that were far more monstrous than anything he had seen on the faces of the Iron Warriors. There had been nothing monstrous on the face of his friend Kholedei, either, but perhaps it had been there, exploited by the Inquisition to fulfil their mission at any cost – even the cost of fellow Space Marines’ lives. Perhaps Kholedei had been justified. Perhaps the Inquisition’s mission had outweighed any Imperial Fist. Chrysius realised now, for the first time, he did not know. As dawn broke on the far edge of Euklid IV, igniting the planet’s atmosphere anew, Sergeant Chrysius began to draw the black stripe down the centre of his helmet. Brother Myrdos had never avenged his shame of losing at the Tournament of Blades. Chrysius doubted he would never avenge his shame, either. But until he did, or more likely until he died, this would be the face he would wear.