Knight of Talassar
Steve Lyons

 	It seemed, at first, as if one of the stars had exploded.
 	A blue light flared above the all-too-close horizon, and a rumble like thunder shuddered through the moon’s thin atmosphere.
 	Kenjari was on his way to the mine when it happened. It was early in the morning, although day and night were just divisions on a chrono face here. He stood with a pickaxe slung uselessly over his shoulder, a rebreather clamped to his face, his feet rooted to the barren ground as something – something huge and dark and oddly symmetrical – came hurtling out of the sky towards him.
 	It was only when his workmates panicked and ran that he thought to do the same. He wasn’t ready to die; at least, not this way.
 	Kenjari was meant to die in the service of the Emperor, his body but not his spirit broken by the effort of hewing materials from the ground: vital metals to be forged into weapons and armour and vehicles for the Emperor’s glorious armies.
 	His days of life had been numbered since his transfer to this remote facility.
 	The truth was that few men ever saw out their two-year postings here. The moon’s atmosphere was toxic, even inside the billet huts since half the oxygen scrubbers had broken down. Almost as many miners were killed by minor rebreather failures as they were by tunnel collapses or simple exhaustion.
 	Every time he woke up on his lumpy mattress, Kenjari checked that his facemask was in place and wondered if this new morning would be his last.
 	After twenty months of wondering, he had just begun to feel, to hope, that he might be one of the lucky few. He had begun to think he might even see his home and his children on Agides Primus again.
 	Kenjari was a worker, not a soldier. He had always imagined that death would steal up on him slowly, through the shadows of a blocked mine tunnel or across the filthy floor of a medicae hut. Not this way. Not this way!
 	He hadn’t run like this in twenty years. His lungs, clogged with rock dust as they were, reacted violently to the sudden demand placed upon them, and Kenjari coughed up a mouthful of phlegm and stumbled badly. Another bright blue flash cast his shadow, long and thin, across the small, raised landing pad ahead of him and, instinctively, foolishly, he turned his head to look.
 	The plummeting object blotted out the stars now; it wasn’t a ship as he had briefly imagined – it was bigger, far bigger than any ship – nor was it a meteorite, it was clearly a man-made structure. It was something the likes of which he had never seen before, something that made no sense to his fear-addled brain.
 	It was wreathed in half-formed energy tendrils, clawing at its sides as if they were straining to hold it back. They didn’t succeed. It crashed through the towering pit head and splintered its plasteel struts like matchsticks. The winding wheel was completely demolished, stranding hundreds of miners underground.
 	The leading edge of the object – or perhaps just one of its tendrils – hit the ground and filled Kenjari’s head with a sound like every piece of metal in the world being tortured; and a cloud of dust and debris, the size of a hab-block and equally as impenetrable, crashed over him like a tidal wave.
 	He couldn’t see his workmates, his friends, around him any longer or the ground beneath his feet. He knew that running was futile; still, he ran for as long as he could manage, until he stumbled again and finally fell. Then he lay on his stomach with his hands clasped over his head and a desperate appeal for the Emperor’s mercy straining to escape his choked throat.
 	It was some time before he dared open his eyes again, before he realised that the all-pervading noise around him had given way to a silence that rang almost as loudly in his ears. His silent prayers must have been heard and he was alive. He was coated in rock dust; it sloughed from him as, gingerly, he tested each of his limbs in turn, relieved to find no broken bones. He discovered a body, half-buried, alongside him. Its head had been pulverised by a substantial hunk of debris, leaving him no means of identifying it. He had been lucky, that was all. Had his blind flight carried him an inch to the left or the right, he would likely have died too. He should have died.
 	Kenjari scrambled to his feet. A black cloud of terror hung over him, but for now shock was keeping it at arm’s length and he only felt numb. The workers’ billet huts had been shredded, their remnants strewn across the jagged landscape. The same fate had befallen the dark, tubular towers of the smelting plant. He couldn’t tell where he was standing, which way he was facing, because every landmark to which he had become accustomed had been razed.
 	Only one thing, one structure, reached above the surface now. It nestled, lopsidedly, in a crater of its own making, impossibly intact although sections of its walls had fallen and black wisps of smoke curled lazily upwards from its bowels. Kenjari thought about the miners in the tunnels beneath it. He knew they must have been crushed; the black cloud descended closer towards him.
 	In that moment, he felt death stealing up on him through the shadows and he thought, for the first time, that he would rather not have seen it coming. I should have died like the others, he thought. That would have been the true mercy.
 	Kenjari was a worker, not a soldier. He had always expected it would be his work that killed him. He had never imagined anything like this.
 	He hadn’t expected – of all things – a castle to fall out of the sky on top of him.
 
 
 	CHAPTER I


 	As usual, Captain Sicarius was the first to emerge from the Thunderhawk.
 	He stepped off the forward ramp onto earth that was cold and unyielding, even to his considerable armoured weight. He glanced up at strange patterns of stars, freckling the black sky. The captain wondered – as he had during every mission in the scant years since his rise to that rank – how many battle-brothers he would lose here.
 	They poured out of the transport ship behind him: thirty of the Emperor’s finest, resplendent in blue power armour with gold and white trappings, the U-symbol of their Chapter emblazoned upon their left shoulders. They had donned their helmets, forewarned that the air was poisonous, so the only way to tell them apart was by their battle honours.
 	More gunships – Thunderhawks and Stormravens –were in the process of landing beside them, easing themselves down onto cushions of noxious exhaust gases. They disgorged the remainder of the Ultramarines strikeforce onto this, their latest battlefield. At the same time, more Thunderhawks – modified to carry vehicles in place of passengers – swooped in to deposit their cargos of Predator Destructor and Vindicator tanks.
 	The operation was executed with the utmost efficiency. Where, a few minutes earlier, this low plateau had been devoid of any life – or of anything that life may have created – now it teemed with proud blue juggernauts, and not a moment too soon, as the captain quickly apprehended.
 	His auto-senses picked up the dull cracks of shell fire, even over the aircraft engines, before he could get his bearings. He stepped to the plateau’s edge and looked over a virtual labyrinth of trenches and foxholes. He could make out figures scurrying through those trenches: the soldiers of the Astra Militarum – a Death Korps of Krieg regiment, he recalled – whose reports had brought him to this tiny, unnamed moon.
 	His gaze, however, strayed beyond them – to the object of the Ultramarines’ mission here. The horizon was closer than Sicarius was accustomed to, no more than three kilometres ahead of him to the east. Squatting there upon it, like some ancient, mythical monster, was the Indestructible.
 	It was the size of a small city, but had the look of a cathedral with its gothic spires and towers and covered walkways. It was a multi-layered, stepped structure, symmetrical, with four arms extending from the diamond-shaped basilica at its centre. It had once, evidently, been a burnished gold in colour, but its walls were soot-blackened, flaking and beginning to crumble.
 	It was a Ramilies-class star fort: a giant mobile base of operations assembled in the Imperium’s own forges. It shouldn’t have been here. It should have been out in space somewhere, proudly standing sentry over one of the Emperor’s worlds; not crippled and stranded like this, held captive by the inexorable force of gravity.
 	The Ramilies was its own arsenal. Its towers bristled with gun emplacements, while torpedo tubes glowered warningly through its outer walls. Its cavernous launch bays could each easily contain a cruiser or multiple flights of smaller ships.
 	Four aircraft were rising from one of those launch bays now, from the Ramilies’s far quadrant. Like the fort itself, they had seen better days – though possibly not much better. They were crudely constructed, with heavy guns grafted haphazardly onto their patched-together hulls. They looked too ungainly to fly, yet fly they did, as if keeping themselves in the air by sheer obduracy alone.
 	Ork technology; there was no mistaking it.
 	The shells that Sicarius had heard had been fired by the Guardsmen in the trenches, shot from Earthshaker cannons. The Earthshakers were siege guns, slow to reload and cumbersome to aim; they were built for breaking through walls, not for bringing down aerial combatants. So far, they had failed to score a direct hit on any of their four targets, only buffeting them with explosive blast waves.
 	One of the ork craft was thrown into a clumsy barrel roll, careening away from the rest of its flight. As Sicarius watched, however – against all odds, against all sense – its pilot managed to wrestle it back under control. All four ships were sweeping over the trenches, he realised, without deigning to return their occupants’ fire. They were bearing down on the plateau on which he stood.
 	He bellowed an order to the Space Marines behind him: ‘Scatter!’
 	The first ork craft roared over Sicarius’s head, its bomb bay doors yawning open. Three rocket-shaped casings dropped out of its belly, one by one. Forewarned, the majority of Sicarius’s brothers leapt out of harm’s way; their vehicles, however, were virtual sitting ducks.
 	The first bomb smacked into the prow of a Predator Destructor, its gunner barely managing to duck back into his turret before it struck. The ensuing explosion lifted the vehicle off its tracks and set its engine ablaze, forcing its crew to evacuate.
 	The remaining two bombs took longer to choose their targets, and Sicarius realised that they had some form of guiding intelligence. One of them swooped low over the roof of the disabled Predator, and then began to climb again. It streaked towards a bright blue Thunderhawk which had been coming in to land; two Vindicator tanks were attached to the ship’s underside, dangling helplessly.
 	Fortunately for their crews – not to mention the Thunderhawk’s pilot – the bomb’s controller had overreached itself. Its limited propulsion unit sputtered out and it faltered a good way short of its objective. It spiralled back to earth, some half a kilometre away, where it burst harmlessly.
 	‘Let them come,’ a familiar voice bellowed, defiantly. ‘I will not cower from any stinking greenskins. Let them try to shift me from this spot.’ 
 	Brother Ultracius had not sought cover like the others. He had been an Ultramarines sergeant once – but now, he was a walking tank himself, what little remained of his physical form interred inside a Dreadnought casing.
 	Standing at almost twice the height of his brothers, he had made himself an irresistible target. As the third and final bomb came around and dived towards him, Ultracius let rip at it with his massive twin-linked heavy bolter: a prodigious weapon that jutted from his right elbow in place of a forearm.
 	The bomb flew unerringly through a hail of bolt-rounds towards him, close enough to Sicarius now for him to see that machine-spirits didn’t drive it as he had expected. It had a pilot: a gretchin, a member of a stunted orkoid subspecies. It was shorter – much shorter – and punier than a typical ork; still, it couldn’t have fit easily into the bomb’s casing, not unless its legs had been amputated.
 	Its squat body was hunched over a tiny control stick, its pointed ears trembling with malevolent laughter. 
 	One of Ultracius’s bolts had found its mark, and the guided bomb exploded barely a metre in front of the aquila symbol on the Dreadnought’s chassis. A fraction of a second later and it would have hit him squarely, cracking even his armour plating. As it was, he weathered the blast, though it forced him onto his back foot and almost made his knee joints buckle.
 	The gretchin pilot perished in flames.
 	Less than three seconds had passed since the bombs had dropped.
 	In that time, however, the vox-net had exploded with urgent chatter. The pilots of the grounded Thunderhawks were hauling them back into the air; while those still carrying tanks and other vital equipment were flying evasive manoeuvres, looking for a chance to set down their heavy burdens.
 	The second and third ork bombers, delayed by the Earthshakers’ covering fire, were intercepted before they could reach the plateau. One of them was crippled almost instantly, holed by an explosive punch from a Thunderhawk’s battle cannon; the other craft put up a better fight. Its hull may have seemed less than aerodynamic, but it was tough enough to shrug off a fusillade from four twin-linked heavy bolters.
 	The bomber fought back. Its pilot was a fully-grown ork, looking somewhat out of place behind a glacis, a pair of goggles perched ridiculously on its green snout. Its primary weapons were a pair of automatic ballistic guns slung underneath its wings. Like most ork ‘shootas’, they were noisier than they were accurate.
 	In a one-on-one dogfight, the clumsy ork craft was probably outmatched. That didn’t mean it wasn’t a threat, however.
 	The fourth bomber – the one the Earthshaker cannons had sent into a spin – was finally coming up on the plateau; while the first – the one that had made one bombing run already – was coming around to make another. They found that the Ultramarines had three more gunships in the air, waiting for them.
 	We should have set down further behind the lines, Sicarius thought. His eagerness for battle and inexperience of command had made him incautious. He blamed himself, but, stuck on the ground as he was now, there wasn’t much he could do to put things right. He could only watch as the opposing flights circled each other, spitting at each other venomously.
 	‘The Emperor is with you,’ he encouraged his pilots by vox, but resisted the urge to bellow instructions at them. They knew what they had to do and how to do it. They wouldn’t have been sitting in those cockpits if their instincts weren’t as finely honed as they could be.
 	He ordered his tanks to advance, separating as they did. They were moving targets now, grinding their way down the broad, winding trails that led to the plateau’s base; still, moving all the same. In addition, the Stormravens had closed ranks to keep their enemies at bay, and were beginning to drive them back.
 	Nevertheless, one of the bombers opened its bay to eject two guided casings, but their intended targets were beyond their limited range. They detonated on the ground, and claimed no casualties other than their own hapless occupants.
 	Another ork bomber was fatally holed and sent screaming, nose over tail, out of Sicarius’s sight. A moment later, a fiery cloud blossomed over the horizon to the north, reassuring him that the threat had been dealt with. In its turn a Stormraven gunship had also been damaged, smoke belching out of one of its engines; the pilot, however, sounded confident that he could make an emergency landing.
 	Sicarius stepped off the edge of the plateau. The drop was short enough for his armour to completely absorb the impact of his landing. He voxed his battle-brothers: ‘Form up on me.’ The first of the tanks was already pulling up behind him, while the situation in the sky seemed to be under control.
 	Then, a pilot’s voice rasped urgently through his earpiece: ‘The last ork, captain – it’s coming right at you… gambling everything on a suicide dive…’ He could hear the rattling of patched-together engines growing in volume above him.
 	Sicarius wasn’t worried. Three Stormravens had already dropped onto the bomber’s tail, with their lascannons flaring. It wouldn’t get close to him.
 	The inevitable explosion, when it came, made it seem as if a new sun was blazing in the sky, turning night into day for just a moment. The light glinted off blue ceramite and plasteel, and cast the shadows of a hundred armoured warriors and their powerful engines ahead of them. It was in that light that the Ultramarines strikeforce began their march across the small moon’s barren surface; a spectacle that would surely have caused their enemies to quail, had any of them only seen it.
 	The Ultramarines were marching to war.
 
 
 	CHAPTER II


 	A knot of figures emerged from the trenches to meet them.
 	They were wrapped from neck to boots in thick black greatcoats; their shoulder flashes revealed them to be members of the 319th Krieg Regiment of the Imperial Guard. Sergeant Lucien had never met a Krieg Korpsman before, but others had spoken highly of their courage and commitment.
 	Like the Ultramarines, they didn’t show their faces. Thick rubber tubes snaked from the gasmasks they wore to rebreather units in battered leather casings slung from their webbing. The only features of the masks were pairs of opaque, round lenses, which gave the wearers a blank-eyed, expressionless look.
 	The masks were crowned by steel helmets, stamped with the image of the Imperial aquila; all but for one of them, who wore a commissar’s peaked cap. It was he who headed the welcoming committee: a barrel-chested man with a long, assured stride. Marching a step behind him was a shorter, wirier figure, who wore a captain’s rank insignia but, unusually, displayed no medals or other decorations.
 	The Krieg captain halted and saluted smartly, and Sicarius returned the gesture. The commissar began to extend a hand towards him, noticed the size of the Space Marine’s gauntlets and thought again. He introduced himself as Dast, but named none of the rest of his party. Even the captain he identified only by his rank.
 	Dast, with his captain, led the way down a flight of shallow steps, chiselled out of the hard ground. Only Sicarius and his command squad, which included Lucien as the captain’s second-­in-command, followed them. They left the bulk of the strikeforce behind with their vehicles to await further orders.
 	Ultracius was left behind too. The trenches were a tight enough squeeze for an ordinary Space Marine, so the Dreadnought would have struggled to negotiate them.
 	The remaining members of the squad included the captain’s standard bearer, his Apothecary and the Company Champion. They were joined by a Techmarine called Renius. While a loyal battle-brother, in some ways he seemed to stand apart from the other Ultramarines, in power armour the rust-red of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
 	Some recent rain had left the trenches spotted with puddles of water: stagnant, foul-smelling and, according to Lucien’s auto-senses, mildly acidic. Improvised walkways of corrugated metal sheets spanned the largest of the trenches; more than one snapped, however, as the Ultramarines trampled over it.
 	Passing a Termite burrowing vehicle, parked in a small, muddy enclosure of its own, they could hear the Death Korps’ guns still firing ahead of them, but the sound of aircraft engines had faded away.
 	Commissar Dast had noticed it too, his eyes searching the sky to confirm the evidence of his ears. ‘I thought you might have kept the Thunderhawks on station,’ he said over his shoulder as they walked. ‘We could certainly use them.’
 	Sicarius’s only response was a grunt of acknowledgement.
 	‘I, ah, feel I must apologise for the reception you encountered,’ Dast persevered. He was slightly in awe of the armoured giants behind him – in Lucien’s experience men always were – though the commissar hid it better than most. ‘Before today, we had only seen two ork fighter-bombers, and we thought we had crippled one of them.’
 	‘It isn’t like the orks to hold back resources,’ said Renius.
 	‘No,’ agreed Sicarius, thoughtfully. ‘Not like most greenskins.’
 	‘We know they’re in there,’ said Dast, ‘inside the star fort. They’ve made a few bombing runs, sent out the occasional raiding party, but they haven’t attacked us en masse. We know they have a leader, a warboss, by the name of Khargask.’
 	Lucien clenched his teeth. The name was familiar to him.
 	‘Obviously, he over-reacted when you arrived,’ said Dast, ‘and hoped to destroy the equipment you were bringing with you. Other­wise, for the most part, he has been sitting tight behind his shields and ramparts. The orks we have encountered, we believe, have slipped out against his orders.’
 	‘You’ve been briefed on the Indestructible itself?’ asked Sicarius.
 	‘We know about the, ah, incident,’ said Dast.
 	‘The Imperial Navy would like its property back – intact, if that is at all possible.’
 	Dast looked at Sicarius as if surprised, though it was difficult to tell with his face covered. ‘You do know the Indestructible is ancient? Thousands of years old. It had been damaged and was under repair apart when Khargask took it – and as we have seen, he couldn’t keep it aloft for long.’
 	‘I have my orders,’ said Sicarius. 
 	The commissar nodded his acceptance.
 	‘Well, fortunately, perhaps,’ he reported, ‘the Indestructible still lives up to its name. We’ve been bombarding it for weeks, but–’
 	The Krieg captain interrupted him, speaking for the first time. His voice was low and husky, muffled by his facemask. ‘But no structure is impregnable,’ he growled.
 	‘There is another matter that concerns us,’ ventured Dast.
 	At that moment, however, they reached the sunken entranceway to a dugout. The Krieg captain disappeared through it, followed by his aides. Dast paused, eyeing up his armoured guests. ‘Unfortunately, space is, ah, severely limited down here.’
 	Sicarius nodded. He asked Renius to join him inside the dugout, the others to wait outside. Lucien couldn’t help but feel a little slighted. He hadn’t yet been given the opportunity to earn the Knight of Talassar’s trust and, at this rate, he never would.
 	Even Dast had to duck to fit through the square opening, so the two Space Marines were forced to bend almost double, but the claw arm on the Techmarine’s servo-harness still caught on a support beam and almost tore it down.
 	Lucien decided to take a tour of the earthworks. It behoved him to learn about the resources available here, and the men alongside whom he would be fighting. The latter he began to encounter almost immediately.
 	Following the sounds of shelling, he found his path teeming with Krieg Guardsmen in their hundreds, like industrious ants scuttling around a giant nest. Many of them carried digging equipment and were busy extending the already-expansive trench network. They moved aside for Lucien to pass, but always returned to their work as soon as he had. They never spoke to him.
 	The Earthshakers, he discerned, had been placed as far apart as possible, the better to protect them from enemy bombs. He made for the nearest emplacement. The trench he was following eventually opened up into a large, square pit. There were four Korpsmen here: two of them stood on the cannon’s firing platform, behind its plasteel shield, while two more handed them shells from a pyramid-shaped stack.
 	The gun itself was anchored to an X-form base, with four broad feet stretching to the pit’s four corners. It was broader than the passageways that led here, and so must have been lowered into its current position.
 	The long barrel was set at a thirty-degree angle, peering over the emplacement’s edge. When Lucien lifted his head, he could see the towers of the Ramilies-class star fort, far closer and looming even larger now than before. He could also see tangles of razor wire, with several bloodied ork corpses caught up in it.
 	‘When was the last attack?’ he asked.
 	One of the Krieg men answered him, even as he hefted another shell up to his comrades on the platform. ‘It happened sixteen hours ago, my lord. An ork mob came at us across no-man’s-land. Most of them were slowed by the wire, enough for our lasguns to put them down before they could reach us.’
 	‘And the rest?’
 	‘The captain ordered a bayonet charge.’
 	Lucien was surprised. ‘You went over the top? Why didn’t you use the cannons? If the greenskins were struggling with the wire, they’d have made easy targets. You could have simply blasted them to shreds.’
 	No trace of emotion inflected the Krieg man’s voice as he answered, ‘Artillery shells are valuable.’
 	Lucien had heard that Krieg men never showed emotion. He had heard that they never removed their masks in front of outsiders, even where the atmosphere was breathable. He was starting to believe it.
 	This Krieg man was an officer, he realised. His coat was spattered with dry mud, which had obscured his stripes. This one – just like his captain, earlier – seemed especially deferential.
 	‘How many casualties, lieutenant?’ asked Lucien. He had encountered some orks in his time that were almost – not quite – a match for a Space Marine. They could probably have snapped a Death Korpsman’s fragile neck with one flex of their clumsy fingers, especially when worked into a frenzy.
 	‘Eighty-three Korpsmen were expended in the battle,’ the lieutenant answered, ‘but the threat of the orks was neutralised, so those lives were worthwhile.’
 	Lucien found the man’s attitude unusually pragmatic for a human.
 	One of the Krieg men on the platform had loaded the Earthshaker. The other sighted along its long barrel – though it would have been hard for him to miss his massive target – and fired. The recoil made the Earthshaker judder fiercely, but its heavy feet kept it in position.
 	Lucien followed the shell with his eyes as it hurtled across the black sky like a comet. Almost six seconds passed before it struck one of the star fort’s towers; their size had made them seem closer than they were. There was a fierce, though distant, eruption of light and sound. However, when the smoke of the explosion cleared, the tower showed no signs of damage.
 	The star fort had prodigious shields, of course, reinforcing its robust construction. A concentrated bombardment might have broken through both, in time – shield generators could eventually be overloaded – but it wouldn’t happen quickly.
 	No structure is impregnable.
 	Three more shells streaked over no-man’s-land, from different parts of the trench network. The Krieg officer had already gone back to work, helping the rest of his crew to reload their weapon, regardless of his rank. How long had they been going through these motions, Lucien wondered? Weeks, the commissar had said, and yet still they performed their duties patiently, efficiently, like automata.
 	A more pressing question was why their enemies were taking it? Orks, quite literally, thrived on constant battle. If they were hunkering down in their shielded bunker, ignoring the cannons that threatened to blast its walls asunder, then that had to be for a reason. A Ramilies-class star fort had powerful weapons too, and vast ammunition stores, so why weren’t they returning fire?
 	Or was it simply that their leader was smarter than the typical ork? He had taken the Indestructible, after all, and dealt the Imperium a major embarrassment in the process. Did he have some cunning, longer-term scheme in mind?
 	For that matter, why had Khargask come to the Agides System? It contained no worlds of any particular value. And why was the Adeptus Mechanicus so keen to recover his plunder, anyway?
 	Lucien wished he could have attended the meeting in the dugout. He knew it was not his place to question; he would do as he was ordered, he didn’t have to know the reason. He couldn’t help but wonder, all the same, what he and his battle-brothers – perhaps even Sicarius himself – had not been told about their latest mission.
 	What exactly was happening inside the Indestructible – and what made it so important to the orks and to the Imperium alike?
 
 
 	CHAPTER III


 	The dugout contained no more than a few sticks of furniture.
 	The Krieg men folded up canvas chairs to give their visitors room to stand. Sicarius squeezed himself into one corner of the underground chamber. His helmet scraped the ceiling, causing dirt to rain on his neck and shoulders.
 	A collapsible table was strewn with data-slates containing tactical maps of their surroundings – onto which the Krieg trenches had been stencilled like contour lines. There were also old-fashioned paper maps, chipped and yellowing despite their plastek coatings, bearing detailed but faded schematics of the Ramilies-class star forts. These included internal layouts; though, given the age of the Indestructible, they were unlikely to be especially accurate.
 	A smaller, rickety trestle table supported a holo-projector, which one of the Krieg captain’s aides had just activated. A translucent shape flared brightly an inch or so above the big table: the Indestructible – the upper part of it, at least, the part that could be seen from inside the trenches – picked out in beads of light.
 	There was something wrong with the hololith, however; it was shot through with purple and green flares, distorting the picture. Sicarius’s eyes narrowed as he realised what he was looking at: a vid rather than a still image; the flares were a part of the recording, not a glitch as he had assumed.
 	‘We recorded this six days ago,’ explained Dast, ‘but we witnessed the phenomenon three times before that and once more since. As near as we can tell, the flares are being generated by the star fort itself. At first, we thought they were the product of some weapon, but they’re simply too random, unfocused.’
 	A weapon under construction, perhaps, Sicarius thought, one that the orks have not yet perfected, but when they do… He turned to the Techmarine to see if he had anything to say, but Renius was keeping his own counsel.
 	‘The flare-ups, when they come, are accompanied by an unholy racket,’ the commissar continued. ‘It rises from the bowels of the earth, like the groaning of tortured machine-spirits. We lack the equipment to capture that sound, unfortunately, and our tech-priests, frankly, can’t explain it.’
 	‘How long do these episodes last?’ Sicarius asked.
 	‘No more than twenty seconds, or sometimes less, before the flares – and the sounds – die down again,’ the commissar told him.
 	‘We have an ork prisoner,’ the Krieg captain spoke up.
 	‘It was part of a mob that attacked us a couple of weeks ago,’ said Dast. ‘It made it all the way into the trenches before we finally put it down. It has certain, ah, augmentations that might bear closer scrutiny. I thought, perhaps, with the resources available to you, you might wish to–’
 	‘Let me see this creature,’ said Sicarius.
 	Dast led the way back out of the dugout, round several tight corners in quick succession and then some way along a northward-running trench.
 	Sicarius’s standard bearer fell into step behind him. The rest of his command squad had found ways to make themselves useful: mostly routine maintenance work to their armour and weapons or praying. Sicarius kept Renius close to him.
 	They negotiated one more turn then, four strides to the east, they reached a small, open-topped enclosure, guarded by two Korpsmen. The prisoner knelt inside it, almost filling it. It was wrapped in chains, tight enough to prevent it from standing or sitting comfortably, and shackled to four wooden stakes driven into the ground.
 	It looked like any ork to Sicarius, with its jutting brow, lower-jaw tusks and flat nose, its shoulders broader but its legs stumpier than those of a man. On a second look, however, he saw that its right arm was metallic and that its eyepieces, which he had mistaken for pilot’s goggles, were fused into the flesh of its face.
 	He had heard the ork howling and struggling violently as his party had neared the enclosure. Its chest was scarred with lasgun burns and bayonet wounds, and the lenses of its mechanical eyes had been shattered. It had been tortured.
 	The ork spat at its two armoured visitors – evidently, it could see them well enough – and bellowed angrily at them in its ugly native tongue. Among the unfamiliar words, Sicarius made out the name ‘Khargask’.
 	‘The prisoner was also in possession of a weapon, captain,’ Dast volunteered. ‘Quite unlike any we have seen before. It–’
 	Renius interrupted him. ‘Ork bionics are nothing new. This merely confirms what we suspected.’
 	‘That Khargask is no ordinary warboss,’ Sicarius agreed, ‘but rather what the greenskins call a “big mek” or a “mek boss”.’ He explained for the benefit of the Krieg men, who may have lacked his Chapter’s extensive knowledge of the subject: ‘Orks seem to have an instinct for making things, but that’s all it is: an instinct. Few of them have the intellect to actually know what they’re doing.’
 	‘It’s unusual for a more intelligent ork to gain power,’ said Renius, ‘in a culture that values strength and savagery above all else, but it can happen.’
 	‘If the ork is smart and strong and savage,’ Sicarius muttered.
 	‘This brute here is not smart. If it were, it would have reined in its primitive bloodlust and remained inside the Indestructible as it was told. I doubt we will learn anything useful by studying it – or its equipment.’
 	‘I assume we have no one who can speak its language?’ said Sicarius.
 	‘Even if we had,’ said Renius, ‘it’s unlikely that Khargask would have taken it into his confidence – or that it would have understood him if he had.’
 	‘We tried to find out how many orks are inside the star fort,’ explained Dast, ‘but as you say, there is a language barrier. It also seems that the prisoner can count no higher than five, maybe, so, ah…’
 	‘The ork is no use to us, captain,’ insisted Renius. ‘We should execute it and be done with it.’
 	He was probably right. It struck Sicarius, however, that he had been too keen to speak up, to see the captive ork dead, to preclude any possible further investigations. The thought – and its likely implications – rankled with him. He was sorely tempted to gainsay the Techmarine, if only to gauge his reaction.
 	He decided to bide his time. He gave a grunt of assent, then turned smartly and marched away. Renius followed him gladly.
 	Behind them, the Krieg captain issued an order to one of his sentries. They heard the distinctive crack of a lasgun being fired, followed by another bellow of injured rage, a fierce rattling of chains and the sound of at least one heavy wooden stake being shattered.
 	It took another two las-beams to penetrate the prisoner’s dense hide and silence it at last. The Krieg captain had taken the Ultramarine’s suggestion as an order. He hadn’t questioned it, hadn’t tried to advance an opinion of his own despite his greater experience here. 
 	Renius was silent again as they made their way back to the command dugout. Sicarius opened a private vox-channel to the Dreadnought. 
 	‘You were right,’ he told Ultracius. ‘I only suspected it before, but now I’m certain. The Techmarine is keeping something from us.’
 	In the dugout, Sicarius studied the data-slates and ancient papers more closely, but they told him little that he hadn’t already known.
 	‘This moon was a mining colony, yes?’ he barked. ‘I need a plan of the mine tunnels.’ The Krieg captain immediately despatched an aide to fetch one.
 	‘Ah, most of the tunnels in this sector collapsed,’ Commissar Dast pointed out, apologetically, ‘when the Indestructible landed on top of them.’
 	Sicarius nodded curtly. ‘Of course they did. It’s a miracle the star fort itself wasn’t disintegrated upon impact, shields or no shields.’
 	He threw a pointed glance at Renius, who didn’t take the bait. ‘Are the Ramilies’ guns operational?’ asked the Techmarine.
 	‘Most of them,’ said Dast, ‘but Khargask employs them sparingly: a few warning shots when we venture too close to him, that’s all.’
 	‘He’s conserving ammunition,’ Sicarius deduced, ‘the same as with the fighter-bombers. He didn’t plan on getting into trouble out here. He didn’t plan on his star fort falling out of the sky. His stores are probably depleted and he has no supply lines. He isn’t trying to win this battle, just prolong it long enough for… what?’
 	‘For reinforcements to arrive,’ Dast suggested.
 	‘Perhaps, yes. It would have required a fleet of tug ships to drag the Ramilies through the warp to this system, more than can be hiding in its bays. What happened to the rest of them? You’ve found no other crash sites?’
 	The commissar confirmed that they had not.
 	‘Do we keep up the shelling, captain?’ the Krieg captain asked.
 	‘And step it up,’ Sicarius confirmed. ‘I will add my personnel and armour – my Predator and Vindicator tanks – to your own. We will concentrate our attack upon the most damaged quadrant, here.’ He tapped a piece of paper. ‘Once the shields are down, however, and the ramparts have been breached, we hold our fire.’
 	The basilica was the Ramilies’ heart, he thought. So long as that remained relatively undamaged, then the Adeptus Mechanicus ought to be satisfied.
 	Renius spoke up: ‘Captain. It is possible that, when Khargask sees he is beaten, he might destroy the Ramilies himself rather than allow it to be recaptured.’
 	‘I had thought of that,’ said Sicarius.
 	The Krieg captain’s aide had returned with another data-slate, which the Ultramarine took from him. The slate seemed fragile in his massive gauntleted hand, and he held it carefully. ‘The bombardment will serve primarily as a distraction. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of pairs of eyes inside the Indestructible – I want them looking this way. If we can tempt a few more orks out here, all the better. Otherwise, I want them defending the ramparts, manning their weapon emplacements, anything to keep them busy.’
 	He plugged the data-slate into the interface jacks on his right gauntlet and loaded its contents into his armour. ‘In the meantime, I will lead a combat squad through the mine tunnels – yes, commissar, what remains of them – and attack the Indestructible from below.’
 	‘Permission to join that squad, captain,’ Renius requested immediately.
 	Sicarius said nothing, only nodded. ‘The star fort’s base will have taken the brunt of the crash,’ he continued aloud. ‘If we’re lucky, it might already have been holed. Either way, that’s where it will be most vulnerable. With the Emperor’s grace, we can climb up right inside the basilica itself.’
 	‘We have tried that, captain,’ Dast cautioned. ‘We used a Termite to bypass the blocked tunnels, but the greenskins heard us coming and were ready for us. They laid ambushes for us underground. They set traps for us. We couldn’t get through their defences, couldn’t even get close to our objective.’
 	‘We lost close to two hundred soldiers in the attempt,’ the Krieg captain mumbled. His tone was rueful.
 	Sicarius smiled grimly beneath his helmet. So, there was a route through the mine tunnels to the star fort, he thought; the orks’ presence down there proved it. ‘With all due respect, captain, commissar,’ he said, ‘you sent two hundred men into those tunnels – Imperial Guardsmen, perhaps, but just ordinary men all the same.
 	‘Five veteran Ultramarines are a different matter.’
 
 
 	CHAPTER IV


 	Kenjari bent his knees.
 	He lifted another shell off the pile and onto his shoulder. It was heavy, but no heavier than the loads he was used to lifting. The repetitive nature of the work was also something he was used to, and it gave him some comfort.
 	He straightened up. He turned and took three steps across the earthen enclosure. He waited for the loader up on the platform to turn towards him. He hefted the shell into his arms and turned away. Three steps took him back to the pile of shells. He bent his knees again. He didn’t have to think too hard about what he was doing.
 	Kenjari heard the blast of the Earthshaker cannon behind him. Once, he had thought he would never get used to that noise, but now he barely noticed it. He thought he might be losing his hearing, for want of ear protectors.
 	This wasn’t too different to working the mines, he told himself, to swinging his pickaxe at an unyielding wall of rock. Except that, if he dropped one of these shells, it could kill him. And an accident in the mines couldn’t?
 	Working the mines had been different.
 	Kenjari had known how he would likely die, then, and had resigned himself to face it. His future, now, was uncertain and terrifying to him. He had seen the xenos that lived inside the castle – the one that had fallen from the sky – tearing soldiers apart. Others, he had seen cut down by the xenos’ guns or shredded by their bombs.
 	The soldiers were supposed to have rescued him. He remembered the flutter of hope he had felt upon seeing their ships, new stars shooting across the firmament.
 	He didn’t know how long he had survived, waiting for them, waiting for the Emperor to send someone. Days had passed, but he had had no way to count them.
 	He had taken rebreathers from the broken corpses of his workmates, when the filters in his own had become rotten. He had taken their food and water too, though it hadn’t been enough. He had buried himself in the debris of the mine workings, to shelter from the moon’s acidic rainstorms.
 	He had seen them, occasionally: the xenos, green-skinned and heavy-browed, on the ramparts of their fortress. He had kept his head down and hoped not to be seen in return. Sometimes, the xenos had spilled out across the moon, apparently in search of salvage, and he had been forced to hide from them.
 	They had found a survivor, once. They had dragged him from underneath the wreckage and slaughtered him for sport, making noises that sounded like barks of laughter. Kenjari had told himself it was a mercy; the man was crippled and dehydrated. He felt guilty, all the same, because he might have been able to help him.
 	He had thought about searching for other survivors like him, but he had lacked the courage. He had stayed in hiding, except for when he needed new filters or when hunger and thirst overwhelmed him. He had kept on waiting.
 	The ships had vanished over the horizon. They must have landed, but some distance away from the castle. Kenjari had waited another day, perhaps two, for the occupants of the ships to come and find him. Then, he had plucked up the nerve and marshalled the last of his strength to go and look for them.
 	He couldn’t remember what had happened next. He could only surmise that fatigue had finally claimed him and he had collapsed.
 	He had woken in a hospital tent, with something heavy on his chest and a faceless figure hovering over him like an angel of death.
 	The figure had been wearing a mask, he had realised; he was wearing one too, in place of his smaller rebreather. The weight on his chest was a mechanical unit, connected to the mask by rubber hoses. Kenjari’s cuts had been dressed and his broken shoulder set. God-Emperor be praised, he had been saved!
 	Less than an hour later, he had had a pickaxe in his hand again.
 	He had been given a tube of nutrient paste, a mug of water and thirty seconds to ingest both. He had been issued with combat fatigues and a heavy black coat and told to dress in them. A pair of aides had attached flak armour to his shoulders, legs and chest; it was torn and bloodied, leaving no doubt as to the fates of its previous wearers. Heavy belts and holsters and a bulging rucksack had been added to his burden. A helmet, too small for him, had been jammed onto his head.
 	Kenjari had been taken out onto the moon’s surface and ordered to dig.
 	He had been surrounded by hundreds of other men with axes and shovels, doing the same. He hadn’t been introduced to any of them and none had spoken to him; few would even meet his gaze. They were intent upon their work. With their eyes, their faces, shrouded, they hardly seemed human. He was dressed the same as they were, he had realised; he must have seemed as inhuman to them.
 	His new co-workers were nothing if not efficient. They had soon dug a trench, a metre and a half deep and several kilometres wide, out of the obdurate black ground. Dropping down into it they had begun to extend tunnels from it, leading eastward towards the xenos’ castle. He was inching his way back towards the one place he had been desperate to avoid.
 	Kenjari hadn’t known that his helmet contained a comm-bead until a voice sounded in his ear, informing him that his work shift was over. He followed the others’ lead, waiting for someone to take his axe from him before he joined the throng clambering out of the trenches and returning to their campsite.
 	The voice had spoken again, requiring a Trooper 3117-Delta to report to a Commissar Dast. Kenjari had recalled being given a number and, fumbling for his dog tags, had found it. He had had to ask where Dast could be found, and was pointed towards an eagle-shaped drop ship, one of several on the ground.
 	Dast had turned the ship’s passenger compartment into his temporary quarters and office. He had been the first – and was still the only – soldier here who seemed to have a name; inside his air-conditioned sanctum, he had taken off his mask too.
 	The commissar had heavy jowls, pasty skin and an unnerving, narrow-eyed stare. He was also possessed of a brusque, impatient manner. He had asked Kenjari his name, age, occupation, height, weight, birthplace and medical history, while an aide tapped his answers into a data-slate.
 	There were no ships available to take him home, Dast told him. Nor could the Astra Militarum afford to feed a useless mouth. Kenjari had hurried to assure him that he would earn his keep. Dast had nodded, grimly, brought a stamp down hard on top of a sheaf of forms, thrust the forms across his desk towards Kenjari and informed him that now he belonged to the 319th Krieg Siege Regiment.
 	He was told to report to the quartermaster to be issued with arms and ammunition. Kenjari had felt his throat drying up. He had tried to explain that he hadn’t been trained to fight, but Dast had dismissed him sharply. He had stepped out of the drop ship’s hatchway in a daze. Suddenly, he was a soldier.
 	He had grown to hate Dast almost as much as he feared him.
 	His was a constant, interfering presence in the newly-dug trenches; with the drop ships returned to their orbiting cruiser, he wore his mask at all times, but was recognisable by his broad frame and commissar’s cap.
 	It was the commissar’s job to enforce discipline, though it seemed to Kenjari that few of the Krieg men needed it. In contrast, Dast could always find fault with Kenjari’s conduct: he wasn’t working quickly enough, hadn’t cleaned his lasgun thoroughly enough or saluted the commissar smartly enough.
 	He had threatened to have Kenjari flogged or shot.
 	Once, Dast had pressed his bolt pistol up against a Guardsman’s temple and squeezed the trigger. The safety catch had been on; the commissar had called it a warning. Kenjari had learned later that his victim was another non-Krieg citizen, another Agides miner, one whose name he vaguely recalled. He too had escaped the crash of the xenos castle relatively unscathed, to find himself enlisted.
 	At last, he had thought, someone he could talk to, someone who might understand.
 	By the time his shift had ended, however, the other man had faded into a crowd of black greatcoats and blank-eyed masks, and Kenjari couldn’t find him again.
 	He had longed for the sound of conversation, to begin with, if only to break up the monotonous rhythm of the cannons. He had come to appreciate that rhythm, however, and to fear the sounds that disturbed it: the occasional answering crumps from the turrets of the castle; the drones of xenos bombers overhead; or an officer’s voice, coldly feeding life-and-death instructions through his earpiece.
 	Thus far, Kenjari had been lucky. He hadn’t been sent over the top of the trenches yet. He hadn’t had to draw the gun that sat so uncomfortably at his hip. When the xenos – ‘orks’, the voices in his earpiece called them – had attacked, he had been left to man his Earthshaker cannon against them from a comfortable distance.
 	The closest he had come to the sudden, explosive death he so feared had been when a shadow had passed over his head and his failing ears had thrummed with the roar of aircraft engines. He had dived, instinctively, for cover. His sergeant had hauled him to his feet, screaming in his face – Dast hadn’t been present, fortunately for him – but Kenjari hadn’t been able to hear the reprimand.
 	The bomb that had been meant for their emplacement exploded on its lip instead, lighting up the sky and showering them with dirt and shrapnel.
 	Kenjari, still shaken, had been thrust back into work. The Earthshaker had been loaded and its barrel cranked skyward, waiting for the enemy to make another pass.
 	Instead, the xenos bomber had wheeled around and flown back towards the castle, venting black smoke from an engine pod. It must have been hit by one of the other cannons. Kenjari’s heart had been beating like a hammer, and his face had been drenched in cold sweat behind his mask.
 	An hour later, he had been digging again: not a trench this time, but a pit, a mass grave for those who had been less fortunate than he had; rather, for their bloody, dismembered limbs and mangled heads and torsos.
 	These past few weeks, he had done a great deal of digging.
 	This morning, there had been new stars in the sky again: more xenos, he had feared, until he had learned the truth. The newcomers were more servants of the Imperium: Adeptus Astartes, humanity’s much-vaunted defenders. He had wondered, briefly, if they would defend him too; if they might be the ones to rescue him, after all.
 	He had chased the thought away: a foolish dream.
 	He knew there was no saving him now. Kenjari knew how he would likely die; at least, where his mortal remains would come to rest: in a burial pit like this one, unidentified, un-mourned and indistinguishable from all the others.
 	His future was becoming more certain to him each day.
 	And yet, still it scared him witless.
 
 
 	CHAPTER V


 	The tanks advanced on Sergeant Lucien’s mark.
 	His Predator Annihilators and Vindicators separated into two columns, grinding their ways around the north and south ends of the Krieg trenches. Their guns had shorter ranges than the static Earthshakers, but would do more damage to their target when they hit it.
 	Lucien stood outside the command dugout, reluctant to be confined within it. Inside, the Krieg captain and his commissar pored over a tactical hololith, which was constantly updated by tireless aides as voxed field reports were received.
 	Lucien only had to raise his head to overlook the trenches, to see two lines of bright blue ceramite and plasteel converging upon their objective; as always, the sight spurred a patriotic fervour in his hearts.
 	‘Sergeant, what is our mission?’ a slightly slurred voice rumbled inside his ear. It was Ultracius, voxing him from the surface.
 	‘We are to take the star fort,’ he answered.
 	‘An Imperial star fort?’ the Dreadnought queried.
 	‘In ork hands,’ Lucien reminded him, patiently. When his body was blasted to pieces, Ultracius had lost some of his brain functions too. His long-term memory had survived intact, and he liked to reminisce about campaigns from many centuries past. More recent events, however, often proved elusive to him.
 	‘Have you been briefed on the ork theft of the star fort?’ asked Lucien.
 	There had been a fleet review in the Ultima Segmentum, so the story went. In the midst of a thousand Imperial Navy ships, the Indestructible had had its shields down, conserving power, and the orks had swooped on it.
 	It was whispered that the star fort shouldn’t even have been there. It had been brought out of hiding at the insistence of a vainglorious Lord High Admiral, overriding the objections of the tech-priests to whom it had been assigned. The orks had been searching for the Indestructible – for the Emperor knew what reason – and now they had known exactly where to find it.
 	‘They towed it away,’ recalled Ultracius with an effort.
 	The orks had been flying hijacked vessels themselves, and had not been detected until it was far too late. They had boarded the star fort and quickly seized control of it. A protective energy bubble had flared around its ramparts and its crew had ceased to respond to urgent hails. The rest of the fleet had reacted too slowly to what was happening in front of them. They had destroyed a handful of the orks’ tugs, but not enough to stop them. The Indestructible had plunged into the warp and was lost.
 	It had not been seen since that fateful day – until now.
 	‘Orks!’ cried Ultracius, as if Lucien hadn’t just said so. ‘Greenskins hijacked the Indestructible.’
 	‘Now we’re taking it back,’ said Lucien. Now I’m taking it back, he thought. Sicarius had placed him in command of the operation, at least the above-ground part of it. He had reserved the most dangerous assignment for himself, still eager to make his mark. When the story of this incident was told in future, Lucien would be named in it, although his captain would probably be the story’s hero.
 	That alone, he thought, was reason enough to fight this battle. He didn’t have to know anything more. It didn’t matter why Khargask wanted the Indestructible, nor why the Adeptus Mechanicus wanted it back. It only mattered to him that they did.
 	More voices were breaking over the vox-net now.
 	He picked out a report from the battle-brother at the head of the northern armour column; he was closing into weapons range of his looming target.
 	Lucien told him to start firing as soon as he could, and reminded him to aim for the gun emplacements in the star fort’s north-west-facing quadrant.
 	He watched as the tanks, having bypassed the trenches, began to fan out into two lines in front of them. The Indestructible’s guns – according to Techmarine Renius – had a long range; once they were close enough to start shelling the star fort, so would it be able to shell them in return.
 	The Krieg captain voxed Lucien: ‘Let me send my men over the top.’
 	Lucien scowled. ‘Not yet.’ What was the man thinking of, he wondered?
 	A rumble of gunfire swelled from the east, like approaching thunder, almost drowning out the rhythmic crumps of the Earthshaker cannons. Staccato flashes lit the sky like lightning. The orks had fired first, the vox-chatter informed Lucien, the gunners behind their walls succumbing to their own impatience. He ordered his tanks to hold their positions, let their enemies waste as much ammunition as they wished.
 	For twenty seconds or more, the orks obliged. Then, as the thunder died down, Lucien gave the order, ‘Armour, advance and fire at will!’
 	The tanks advanced, their main guns blazing; within seconds, a smoke cloud had descended over no-man’s-land and Lucien could see nothing but hazy, slowly-shifting silhouettes through it. He had to rely on the vox-chatter to tell him what was happening. His tank commanders were reporting strike after strike against the Indestructible’s ramparts, but little visible damage being done to them.
 	In contrast, it didn’t seem at all long before the first Vindicator took a direct hit which ripped its roof off. Its crew of three survived, thank the Emperor, but were forced to bail out of their burning vehicle. They found themselves in the heart of a veritable firestorm, caught in the crossfire between two inexorable forces. The Ultramarines power armour would do little to protect them from the shells that were whistling around their ears; nor were there any enemies in range of their handheld weapons. The only thing they could do was run for cover.
 	‘My men should be out there.’ It was the Krieg captain’s voice again.
 	‘No. I’m holding back our infantry,’ said Lucien, ‘until the biggest guns have been disabled. Then they might stand a chance of actually making it across that killing field to the enemy. That applies to Imperial Guardsmen and Space Marines alike. Right now, there’s nothing they can do out there but die.’
 	There was the briefest of pauses before the captain said, tonelessly: ‘That is what the Death Korps of Krieg does best.’
 	Lucien wasn’t sure he had heard correctly; but then, the captain continued, ‘Each shell that a Korpsman intercepts is a shell that doesn’t hit one of your tanks – which in turn means the tank can keep on firing. I have many hundreds of men and they are easily replaceable. You have only a handful of tanks and we cannot afford to lose them.’
 	He couldn’t argue with that logic.
 	Lucien remembered what Captain Sicarius had told him. He only had to keep the orks occupied, he had said, while his combat squad dug their way into the star fort from below. The plan seemed risky to him, though, and he could win the battle on the surface, he was sure of it.
 	Sicarius couldn’t be contacted any longer; but anyway, he had left Lucien in command. Lucien knew that, if he agreed to the Krieg captain’s suggestion, let the Korpsmen form a human shield for his artillery, then the casualty rate would be horrendous – but then, wasn’t that the Krieg captain’s call to make?
 	And wasn’t he also right? Human lives – the lives of Krieg men, especially, from what Lucien had heard tell of them – were the Imperium’s most expendable commodity. The Indestructible’s value, it seemed, was inestimable.
 	There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of Imperial Guardsmen on this moon, in addition to the Ultramarines themselves, the Emperor’s finest – but they couldn’t defeat their enemies, nor even keep them occupied, if they were cowering in holes in the ground.
 	A Predator commander reported a glancing blow that had cracked his vehicle’s armour and crippled its engine. Its weaponry, however, was still functional, which, against a static target, was all that mattered.
 	A moment later, there was rather better news. Two of the enemy’s guns had fallen silent. There was too much smoke for anyone to tell for sure, but the assumption had to be that they were damaged or destroyed.
 	‘Target the guns around them,’ Lucien ordered.
 	The star fort’s cannons were well-protected, built into its walls as they were, but that meant they had a limited field of fire. If his tanks could take out enough of them in a row, he thought, then they might create a blind spot on the battlefield through which his infantry could advance with relative impunity.
 	It was a realistic hope, but regrettably one short-lived.
 	A new sound, an angry scream, sliced through the other sounds; a new light, blinding, white, turned the fog transparent for an instant. The vox-channels were clogged by a dozen voices, each trying to describe what they had just seen: ‘–beam of energy–’ ‘–from one of the star fort’s towers–’ ‘–cut through the Imperial Thunder in a–’ ‘–armour plating just melted like–’
 	The Indestructible had a lance, an ultra-powerful energy weapon.
 	Of course it did. It had a battery of lances; they were right there on the schematics, it was just that Khargask hadn’t seen fit to use them until now. Sicarius had hoped that they had been damaged in the crash, or that they simply devoured more energy than the star fort could currently generate.
 	Lucien tried to contact the Imperial Thunder, but received no reply, only a telltale hiss of static. He counted forty-one seconds – of recharging time? – before a second energy beam lashed out; but, thank the Emperor, this one was off-target and only ploughed a new trench into the ground.
 	In the meantime, two more of the star fort’s main guns had been put out of action.
 	‘We could pull the tanks back,’ suggested Dast from inside the command dugout. ‘We certainly have the orks’ attention. If we regroup at the edge of the lance’s range and keep up the Earthshaker bombardment, then I’m sure we can hold it.’
 	Perhaps, thought Lucien.
 	‘No. Send them forward,’ said the Krieg captain. ‘The lance is mounted inside the star fort’s basilica. The closer they get to it, the harder it will be for the orks to target them – until eventually, the angle becomes impossible.’
 	He was right. The problem with his plan was that the Imperial tanks would find themselves pinned down, at the mercy of the star fort’s cannons, though possibly not for very long. If they could just do a little more damage themselves, thought Lucien, knock out a few more of those emplacements…
 	It could mean the difference between a frustrating stalemate and a glorious victory – or perhaps, he had to admit to himself, a terrible defeat.
 	It was the captain’s next words that convinced him: ‘My men are still at your disposal, Sergeant Lucien.’
 	He set his jaw grimly and gave the order. ‘All Imperial forces, full advance. Krieg infantry to take the vanguard and protect our tanks to the best of their ability. Artillery commanders, don’t stop until you reach the star fort’s walls and break them down. Ultramarines, bring up the rear, and be ready to board the Indestructible as soon as you see an opening. The Emperor is with us and, with his strength in our arms and his fury in our weapons, we can vanquish his enemies today and reclaim what is rightfully His. Courage and honour!’
 	He could do this, he thought. He could visit vengeance upon the upstart xenos, expunge the Imperium’s very public shame – and be the hero of the story, after all.
 
 
 	CHAPTER VI


 	The orks had blocked the mine tunnel with broken props, razor wire, scraps of rusted machinery – and the badly decaying corpses of Death Korpsmen.
 	Techmarine Renius had been working on the barricade for almost twenty minutes. A krak grenade would have been quicker, but too noisy for Sicarius’s liking. The Termite-made tunnel was too narrow for him to join his Techmarine up front and lend his assistance. He had no option but to sit back and let Renius do his job.
 	Patience was not one of the captain’s virtues, and he chafed at every second of enforced inactivity. He wished he could contact Sergeant Lucien – better still, Brother Ultracius – to ask how their part of the operation was proceeding; but he was probably too deep underground, and, anyway, vox silence was advisable.
 	Renius wrenched the last stinking body from a wire tangle and passed it up the sloping tunnel to get it out of his way. Sicarius noticed that the Korpsman had been stripped of his body armour and weapons – by the orks or by his own comrades?
 	There was a sizeable gap in the barricade now, which Renius squeezed through feet first. Sicarius followed him eagerly, and lowered himself into a dusty mine tunnel taller than he was and, thankfully, three times as broad. A chain of lumoglobes was strung from the ceiling, but they were inactive.
 	The darkness was total, and Sicarius could only see in infrared. The mine tunnel ran north-south. To the north, it ended in a blank rock face, while to the south it had collapsed around a broken support. It was approximately four hundred metres long, with two openings in its eastern wall.
 	The first opening had caved in too and was completely blocked; the second, according to the Krieg captain’s information, might lead them to the Indestructible. Sicarius detected a faint current of air between the opening and the one through which he had just emerged, which was a promising sign.
 	‘They ought to have posted a sentry here,’ he grumbled. ‘If I were Khargask, I would have posted sentries.’
 	‘Perhaps he had none to spare,’ Brother Lumic suggested, clambering out of the tunnel wall behind his captain. Like the rest of the Ultramarines, he moved with a stealth and precision that belied his considerable bulk. Still, every scrape of his armour against rock, every contact between his boots and the ground, sounded like a crack of thunder in Sicarius’s ears; as had his own.
 	‘There are hundreds of kilometres of mine tunnels,’ added Renius, ‘and no way for the orks to know where we might enter them. If their leader is as smart as we think he is, he’ll have set up tremor sensors to detect any digging or drilling.’
 	‘I would still have had these tunnels patrolled,’ said Sicarius, obdurately.
 	The rest of his team had joined him in the tunnel by now. They numbered five in all: the captain, the Techmarine and three veteran battle-brothers from his command squad. He wished that Ultracius could have joined them. He missed the Dreadnought’s pragmatic counsel, not to mention his heavy bolters and power fist.
 	He cranked his auto-senses up to maximum sensitivity. He could hear tiny insects crawling in the nicks of the walls, but detected no other signs of life, no body heat or exhaled gases, within his range.
 	Cautiously, he advanced towards the unblocked tunnel entrance, motioning to his brothers to follow at a discreet distance. The tunnel ran eastward, its mine props intact, for as far as he could see. It was an open invitation.
 	He looked again. There had to be something else, and now he saw it: a metal thread, a fraction colder than the surrounding air. It was stretched across the width of the tunnel, forty metres in. He pointed it out to Renius: ‘A tripwire.’
 	The Techmarine ventured forwards and crouched in front of it. He followed the wire with his eyes, to a hidden recess in the northern wall. He reached into the hole and teased out a bundle of crudely-constructed stick bombs, holding them by their handles. He lowered the explosives carefully to the ground; only then did his servo-arm crane over his head to snip the wire.
 	Renius stood up, turned back to Sicarius and nodded.
 	Another barrier awaited them, further along the tunnel.
 	This one wasn’t constructed as the last one had been; the tunnel roof had simply collapsed, though whether by accident or design was impossible to tell.
 	Sicarius’s auspex revealed a path through, wide enough for an undersized human being to negotiate – or something wirier. It wasn’t nearly wide enough to accommodate an armoured Space Marine – and any attempt to broaden it, Renius warned, would likely only bring more earth down on top of them.
 	Sicarius consulted his uploaded maps to find a way around. He sent two brothers to scout a pair of likely looking tunnels, while he explored a third. Barely had he taken ten strides along his tunnel when he detected another cave-in ahead of him and was forced to turn back, frustrated.
 	He heard a flurry of movement behind him, from the tunnel he had just left, then a squeal and a sharp snap of bone. He hurried back, to find the Techmarine and Brother Filion standing over a dead gretchin.
 	‘It came crawling through the blockage, captain,’ explained Filion. ‘We heard it before it could see us and were waiting when it poked its head out of the dirt.’
 	They listened, all three of them, but heard no more creatures coming after the first. Still, the presence of just this one confirmed that they were drawing close to their objective – and that this area, at least, was patrolled.
 	‘If we’re lucky,’ said Renius, ‘there will only be gretchin down here. The orks will be manning the guns up top as we planned. Still, we cannot allow one gretchin to see us and live. It will scuttle straight back to its masters with word of our approach.’
 	Brother Gallo’s explorations bore more fruit than the others, thank the Emperor. They marched along an ascending, narrowing tunnel, and soon heard noises ahead of them: the capering and screeching of many more gretchin.
 	The others held back as Sicarius crept to the tunnel’s end. It opened onto a precarious stone ledge: it was a gallery, in fact, with a handrail, which circled and overlooked a large natural cavern.
 	It looked as if the cavern had been used as a storeroom for mining equipment. However, its roof had partially collapsed too, and its occupants were busy digging scraps of metal out from under the wreckage. Presumably, Khargask had set them to that task – which made Sicarius wonder, once again, what his objectives were. What was he trying to build?
 	A single lumoglobe had survived the collapse, hanging from a frayed wire. In its flickering white light, Sicarius counted twenty gretchin, scampering sure-footedly across treacherous heaps of debris.
 	He returned to his battle-brothers and appraised them of his findings. ‘We have no choice,’ he told them. ‘We have to go through them.’
 	He sent Lumic and Filion out onto the gallery first and had them circle left and right respectively. The gretchin heard them almost immediately, of course, their pointed ears twitching as their oversized nostrils sniffed the air.
 	By then, however, Sicarius had vaulted the balcony rail.
 	He landed with an unavoidable clang, though the pair of gretchin he had chosen to use as crash mats softened the sound somewhat. One of them died instantly, crushed by his plummeting weight. The other tried to wriggle out from under him, but Sicarius thrust his gladius through it.
 	He used the short-bladed weapon rather than the Tempest Blade. The hereditary weapon of his family and symbol of his role as Knight of Talassar was his preferred weapon, but the gladius was better for such close quarter fights. It didn’t have the reach of the larger blade, but then it hardly needed it. Five, six, seven gretchin piled eagerly on top of Sicarius, clawing and snapping at him viciously. Some of them hacked and bashed at his armour with primitive knives and clubs. At least the orks hadn’t armed them with guns, he thought.
 	It wasn’t these gretchin that worried him.
 	Others of their kind had been wiser, or just more cowardly. They had seen the other intruders up on the gallery and had known they were outmatched. They had scattered, and several of them had made straight for the exits.
 	Eight tunnels led away from the cavern in all, at various levels. Sicarius’s map had indicated that at least two of them could lead to the star fort. Sure enough, the majority of the gretchin were headed towards those tunnels.
 	Brother Lumic leapt into their midst, his boltgun drawn. He was too late to stop three of them from reaching a tunnel mouth. He clicked his weapon to full auto and sprayed the gretchin from behind, cutting them down.
 	The others did as Sicarius had expected they would. They scattered. They leapt behind – and, in some cases, under – mounds of debris, or made for the openings on the opposite side of the cavern. It was this latter group that concerned him the most. If they were left wandering the mine tunnels…
 	It wasn’t an issue. The fleeing gretchin found Brother Filion in their path, and fully half of them shied away from a confrontation with him. The remaining three tried to bull rush him out of their way and swiftly paid for their mistake.
 	Sicarius had deliberately been fighting a defensive battle, outnumbered by his attackers but wanting to keep them occupied, letting them imagine that they stood a chance against him. The time for that pretence had ended, as Renius and Brother Gallo dropped into the cavern to each side of him.
 	The gretchin were quick to see that they were beaten, their rabid jabbering giving way to terrified squeals. They dropped away from Sicarius, but found they had nowhere left to run. He caught one as it tried to scrabble away from him; it squirmed and scratched and spat as he crushed its windpipe with one powerful arm.
 	His brothers employed their gladii where they could. They slashed and stabbed at their enemies’ throats and stomachs, until the air was heavy with the stink of xenos blood. Only once did Renius have to loose off an explosive bolt-round, at a gretchin that had almost managed to slip past him and away.
 	Barely two minutes after it had begun, the skirmish was over.
 	It took a little longer for the surviving gretchin to be rooted out of their hiding places in the rubble and efficiently executed, usual­ly by a quick slash of a blade across the throat. Sicarius and Filion did the honours, while their brothers stood guard over the exit tunnels. Sicarius was glad to see that no orks or other creatures had appeared in response to the noise they had made.
 	At last, his auspex detected no more living beings in the cavern, other than the five Ultramarines themselves. They collected their enemies’ bodies, intending to cover them in case something did eventually pass this way. Renius counted the dead and reported that there were nineteen of them.
 	‘There were twenty,’ Sicarius growled.
 	He double-checked the Techmarine’s count, but found no fault with it. Behind his concealing helmet, his face folded into a scowl. ‘I saw twenty gretchin here,’ he reiterated, knowing that all present would understand the import of his words.
 	‘One of them got away.’
 
 
 	CHAPTER VII


 	In the end, after long weeks of waiting, the inevitable happened suddenly.
 	Kenjari heard the order through his earpiece, without fully understanding it; perhaps, rather, without wanting to believe it.
 	The voice of the Krieg captain had been entirely dispassionate, too much so for a man who was sending other men to their deaths.
 	He bent his knees. He lifted another shell off the pile and onto his shoulder. He straightened up and turned, and his blood turned to ice-cold water.
 	His crewmates were climbing down from the Earthshaker platform. His sergeant yelled at him and jabbed him in the side with a bayonet. He almost dropped the shell, trying to place it down. His hands were trembling.
 	He did what he had to do. He followed his sergeant, although it was the last thing his leaden feet wanted. As they hurried through the trenches, they were joined by tens, scores, hundreds of other Krieg soldiers. They could have been as scared as he was, thought Kenjari, but he doubted it; anyway, if they were, it wouldn’t show.
 	He kept an eye on his sergeant’s stripes, knowing that if he lost him he would struggle to locate him again. Conversely, he was sure that if he tried to hide himself, the sergeant – worse still, Commissar Dast – would find him.
 	His four-man Earthshaker crew were joined by six more to form a squad. The other Korpsmen were forming into groups of ten too, and spreading out along a wide, straight trench. They were at the eastern edge of the trench network, Kenjari realised, as close as they could get to the enemy. Emperor, this was really happening!
 	A blue-armoured giant was wading through the throng, his shoulders squared, his gauntlets clasped behind his back. His face was masked, like the faces of the Korpsmen, with metal rather than cloth but equally impenetrable. Kenjari had never been this close to a Space Marine before, and was daunted by his palpable presence.
 	He recalled his brief hope of salvation when the blue ships had arrived; it seemed even more absurd to him now than it had then. When first he had set eyes upon a Krieg Korpsman, he had feared him to be an angel of death. The Adeptus Astartes, however, were often given that nickname too.
 	Kenjari stood in the trench among the others, their bodies pressing in on him, his nostrils filled with the stench of his own terror. He had drawn his lasgun, following his sergeant’s lead, but his hands were so sweaty that he thought it might slip out of them. He had tried his best to keep the weapon maintained and to understand its functions; he prayed it would work for him when he needed it. For what it might be worth.
 	He strained to hear his sergeant’s voice over the crashing of manmade thunder. His eyes were distracted by flashes of man-made lightning. His orders were the same as those of the rest of his squad, the rest of his regiment. The Death Korpsmen of Krieg were to rise up out of their trenches into that raging storm. They were to march on the star fort, the fallen castle, and wrest it back from its usurpers.
 	It didn’t sound like much of a plan to Kenjari.
 	Not that he had a say in it. It seemed like an eternity before a whistle blew, somewhere, and the sound was taken up and amplified by Krieg officers closer to hand; an eternity, and yet the time passed in a heartbeat.
 	The men of Krieg surged forwards, almost trampling him in their rush to mount the trench wall. If Kenjari thought he could hang back, though, he was mistaken. His sergeant grabbed the scruff of his neck and dragged him bodily up after him. His gloved hands scrabbled to find purchase on the uneven surface and he almost dropped his gun again. He managed to dig a boot into the side of the wall and lever himself upwards, flopping onto his stomach with his legs dangling behind him. The sounds of shelling seemed suddenly much louder and he didn’t want to raise his head, but his sergeant was there again, hauling him to his feet, propelling him onwards.
 	Kenjari found himself running. He couldn’t see where he was going. He was following the soldiers ahead of him through the smoke, spurred on by the soldiers – the identical soldiers – at his heels. He spotted a rank insignia on an epaulet and realised that the captain had sent his officers out here to be slaughtered too. He had seen no sign of Dast in the trench, however.
 	He trampled over coils of razor wire, already demolished, flattened into the hard earth by the tracks of the Space Marines tanks. A monstrous shape emerged from the haze in front of him, then resolved itself into two smaller, angular shapes: a pair of tanks. One of them was dead, a gutted metal corpse, which the other was using for cover. Its main gun belched out fire and more smoke, and blazed a trail towards the Korpsmen’s objective like a route marker.
 	A moment later, fire blossomed among the soldiers to Kenjari’s left and only a little way behind him, close enough that his neck was seared by the blast heat; he could smell their burning flesh. They didn’t scream; or if they did, he couldn’t hear them over the guns. Were the men of Krieg really so stoic, he wondered dimly, or was it just that they hadn’t had time to suffer?
 	Would he suffer, he wondered, when the fire consumed him too?
 	He didn’t know how far he had to go. He couldn’t see the star fort through the smoke, and he had lost all sense of time and distance. He felt as if he might have been running forever and might yet be. The thundering of the shells to every side of him – the Imperial tanks were still firing, despite the risk of striking their allies – had merged into a continuous roar; except that sometimes, his ears picked out a louder, closer explosion than the others and he knew that another ten or twenty or thirty masked soldiers had just been wiped out.
 	This wasn’t at all how he had pictured it in his nightmares. He had thought he would see his death coming.
 	He had lost sight of his sergeant, after all. The soldiers around him may have been his squad-mates or not, Kenjari couldn’t tell. It crossed his mind that he could pretend to stumble or to have been hit by shrapnel, just fall to his stomach and let the others pass over him; but he was afraid they might trample him to death or he might be shot by an officer who saw through his deception, so he kept on running.
 	Then, to his surprise, he saw it: the star fort, or at least its towers looming over him in menacing silhouette. The sight of it lent strength to his weakening legs and bolstered his straining lungs as, for the first time, he thought he might be one of the fortunate few, the ones that actually made it there.
 	He focused his thoughts on that goal and followed the Korpsmen’s stout example. He willed his feet to fall one after another, his chest to rise and fall as he sucked in iron-tasting filtered air in an almost mechanistic rhythm. He lost heart as the towers seemed to grow no larger in his sights. He had misjudged their distance, he realised, deceived by the sheer scale of the construct and the intervening smoke.
 	He was all too close to the star fort’s guns, however.
 	The next explosion dazzled him and may have burst an eardrum. Its heat wave knocked Kenjari off his feet, and for an instant he thought it could well have been the one. He was caught, unexpectedly, by the Krieg Korpsmen behind him. They saved him from falling; had they not, he wasn’t sure he could have picked himself back up.
 	He was still dazed, disoriented, when they thrust him forwards again.
 	No soldiers remained ahead of him to follow, none that Kenjari could see, just the space where they had been – until he felt the soft wetness of their dismembered bodies underfoot and, looking down, saw their blood spattering his fatigues.
 	A voice, his sergeant’s voice, burst over his comm-bead at that moment, with a bluster of hollow encouragement. ‘Almost there,’ he insisted, ‘less than half a kilometre to go.’ A moment later, it was four hundred metres, then three hundred…
 	He could no longer see the star fort’s towers, he was too close to it. Instead, he was beginning to make out more intricate details: arched walkways and battlements and decorative mouldings – and a cannon barrel pointed squarely at him. The blank glare of the barrel transfixed him; he knew he was at its mercy. He could only pray for the greater mercy of the Emperor, if only he had had the breath.
 	He must have been heard, anyway, because the cannon didn’t fire. The Imperial tanks must have knocked it out already. Kenjari had survived. He had made it across the killing field. He was footsore, exhausted and only wanted to collapse into a quivering heap, and yet somehow he had made it.
 	He had made it – all the way to the place of his nightmares.
 	At least he would be safe from the castle’s remaining guns here, too close to their hidey-holes in the walls for them to get an angle on him. He was still in danger from friendly fire, however, as he realised when a shell burst too close over his head, peppering him with hot shrapnel. For the first time, he began to worry about the other perils ahead of him, the ones he hadn’t expected to have to face.
 	New shapes were forming ahead of him through the smoke, hulking figures with stooped postures and arms hanging down to their knees. Kenjari caught a glimpse of wild eyes beneath a heavy brow and tusks jutting out of a drooling mouth. The orks, he thought. The orks were coming out of their castle, pouring over its ramparts to greet the would-be invaders, impatient to engage them in physical combat.
 	He remembered how he had seen them tearing soldiers apart.
 	He stumbled to a halt and almost fled, momentarily forgetting how afraid he was of the Korpsmen and their leaders behind him; remembering, before he took his first step, how afraid he had been of the star fort’s guns, finding himself paralysed between a choice of violent deaths.
 	‘Trooper 3117-Delta,’ his sergeant’s voice bellowed. ‘You have a weapon. Use it!’ 
 	At least, against the orks, he could try to defend himself. His fingers had slipped from his lasgun’s trigger guard and he fumbled to find it again.
 	Many of the Korpsmen around him and behind him had dropped to one knee, bracing the butts of their weapons against their shoulders; so, clumsily, he followed their lead. He located his sights and squinted through them with his right eye, but couldn’t keep them steady. He saw a mass of green brutes thundering towards him, bearing down on him, swinging axes and crude chainswords.
 	One of them wielded a cobbled-together automatic weapon, and was spraying out bullets ahead of itself, indiscriminately. The Death Korpsmen had begun to return fire, and Kenjari’s sergeant’s voice was screaming in his good ear, urging him to do the same.
 	He screwed his eyes shut and squeezed his trigger.
 
 
 	CHAPTER VIII


 	The orks were massing ahead of them.
 	Sicarius could hear their guttural voices, grunting half-formed words in their own crude language. He understood enough to know that they were gathering for battle. They spoke of intruders in the mine tunnels.
 	The missing gretchin had found its masters, after all; with that, his hopes of reaching the star fort undetected were finally dashed.
 	‘We have a fight on our hands,’ he told his combat squad over their shared vox-channel. He saw no point in keeping radio silence now.
 	The tunnel they were following was narrow, and they had to proceed in single file. Sicarius took the lead, making no attempt to quiet his ringing footsteps. He could hear orks ahead, waiting out of sight, and could smell their xenos stink.
 	He detected Khargask’s hand in their actions again. It wasn’t the way of these brutes to wait patiently in ambush, and he guessed that some of them would be chafing at their orders, as he would have been himself. He decided to test his theory.
 	He stopped short of the tunnel’s end, activated the Talassarian Tempest Blade’s energy field and bellowed one of his Chapter’s war cries: ‘Courage and honour!’
 	Two greenskins took the bait.
 	They tumbled out of hiding, jostling with each other to be the first through the tunnel entrance. The winner stampeded towards Sicarius, with bloodlust in its eyes and a blood-caked axe raised over its head. He had time to snap off a single plasma pistol shot before it reached him. The bolt of superheated energy struck the ork in its shoulder, burning through flesh, and it howled in pain but didn’t flinch from him.
 	As it brought its axe head down, Sicarius ducked under it and parried it with his energy-wreathed blade. The blow was strong, but not as strong as he had expected, perhaps weakened by its wielder’s injury. He thrust the axe away from him and plunged his blade sideways into the ork’s chest. It coughed up blood and the axe fell from its numbed fingers; still, it managed to shift its falling weight onto him. It yanked at his helmet as if trying to dislodge it or snap his neck, and he couldn’t break its grip.
 	Instead, he lowered his head and thrust himself forwards. Surprised, the ork was lifted off its feet and carried along with him. He slammed it into its comrade, coming up the tunnel behind it, and felt its bones being crushed between them.
 	The ork let out a half-grunt, half-groan and let go of the Ultramarine’s head. It was still on its feet, albeit with support from the second brute behind it, so he tore its torso open with a double-handed, downward stroke.
 	He stepped back and loosed off a series of plasma bolts at the second ork. It tried to use its dead comrade as a shield, with limited success. It let the body drop to the ground instead, trampling and tripping over it to get to its tormentor. By the time it stumbled within striking range of Sicarius, the second ork was half-dead itself, and his Tempest Blade finished the job.
 	Two down, and neither of them had landed a blow on him. These narrow confines gave him a distinct advantage, forcing the orks to engage him one by one despite their greater numbers. Sicarius amplified his voice and yelled along the tunnel again: ‘Is that the best you can do? Send me your real fighters. I need a challenge!’
 	He heard a choked splutter from ahead of him. This time, however, no orks responded to his taunt; they had learned the folly of that. Had he had more time, Sicarius might have tried again. As it was, he had no choice. His enemy wouldn’t come to him, so he had to go to them – even if it meant marching into a trap.
 	He fingered a frag grenade on his belt as he stepped forwards. He thought about rolling it ahead of him: it would scatter the waiting orks, at least, and likely injure a few of them. An explosion, however, could have brought down the roof and cost him more time than he could afford to lose. He couldn’t risk it.
 	Nor, however, would he approach his enemy timorously. Sicarius picked up speed along the tunnel, his pistol levelled, his Tempest Blade ready, knowing that the rest of his combat squad would follow him, intending to burst upon the cowering orks like the Emperor’s wrath personified.
 	He was six steps from the tunnel’s end when a gretchin popped up in front of him. With a wide-mouthed cackle, it lobbed a small object his way. His Space Marine reflexes kicked in and he shot the creature before it could duck back out of sight. The thrown object, in the meantime, skipped across the tunnel floor between Sicarius’s feet, and he shouted a warning to his battle-brothers behind him: ‘Grenade!’
 	It was a stick bomb, like the ones they had seen before.
 	There wasn’t enough space for the Ultramarines to scatter away from it; chances were, their armour would be proof against it, anyway. The danger, once again, was that it might collapse the tunnel and slow them down, even divide their forces.
 	There was no time for Sicarius to issue an order. Brother Filion acted on his own initiative. He dropped to his hands and knees on top of the bomb, which bounced into his plastron and burst. He hadn’t quite smothered the blast, but he did absorb the brunt of it. The tunnel trembled – as did Filion, though his arms remained locked into position – and sweated dirt, but maintained its integrity.
 	Sicarius never broke his stride.
 	He erupted from the tunnel mouth like an oncoming tank, swinging his blade and firing his plasma pistol blindly, a war cry in his throat. As he had expected, he was immediately attacked from both sides. At least six orks piled onto him, battering him with clubs and meaty fists. They weren’t prepared for the momentum he had built up, however, and he carried them several steps before they wrestled him to a halt.
 	The short stretch of ground thus gained by him proved crucial, allowing his brothers space to emerge from the tunnel behind him.
 	Lumic and Gallo fired up their chainswords and laid into the captain’s attackers. He felt them beginning to fall away from him and dislodged another himself, with a hefty punch to its stomach, but was borne to the ground all the same. An axe head slammed into his helmet, making it ring, and his blade was knocked out of his hand.
 	He jabbed his elbow into an ork’s throat, and suddenly only one remained.
 	He managed to turn the tables on the brute, pinning it beneath one knee. He jammed his pistol into its slavering mouth. Its comrade, the one with the fractured larynx, leapt onto his shoulders, gasping and spluttering incoherently, but couldn’t stop him from pulling the trigger.
 	The ork on his back was trying to throttle him. Sicarius reached over his head and seized it by its brawny forearms. It was strong, but its strength was waning quickly. He managed to lever himself to his feet and propel his opponent backwards, slamming it against a rock wall. He felt its fingers losing their hold on him, and threw the ork over his shoulder. It landed on its back and, thanks to its throat injury, couldn’t regain its breath. Sicarius saw his Tempest Blade on the ground and snatched it up. He sliced through the ork’s neck, so it wouldn’t have to worry about breathing again.
 	For the first time unencumbered, he took a good look at his surroundings.
 	He was in another cavern, man-made and smaller than the last one, little more in fact than a confluence of several tunnels. It was heaving with green-skinned orks, many more than had initially leapt on him – but his strategy of punching a hole through their ambush had proven effective. His blue-armoured battle-brothers – and one in red – had ploughed right into their midst and were cutting a bloody swathe through them.
 	Sicarius could see the Indestructible: a part of it, at least. The star fort, he recalled, had extra landing pads and gun towers on its underside, the better to defend itself in its natural environment of space where up and down had no meaning. One of those towers had crashed through the roof of one of the tunnels. In the process, it had been reduced to scrap. Beneath its burnished armour plating, the tower was fashioned from something that looked like stone – a super-dense stone, he had learned from the schematics, mined on one particular world – but this too had been shattered.
 	There had to be a way up through the wreckage, Sicarius thought, and into the Ramilies itself. His gaze strayed upwards, but alighted upon something else instead: the rounded edge of another large structure, relatively intact, welded to the star fort’s hull; something that had not been in the plans.
 	It’s an engine pod, he realised. They were fighting almost directly underneath an engine pod! Was it operational, he wondered? If so, then Khargask only had to fire it, only had to operate a series of control runes somewhere, and Sicarius, the other members of his combat squad and their enemies would all be incinerated.
 	He wondered why a Ramilies-class star fort – never meant to fly under its own power – had been fitted with an engine in the first place, and by whom? Khargask could have been the culprit, of course; Sicarius, however, suspected otherwise. There would have to be more of them, he thought. There would have to be hundreds of engine pods on the hull to stand a chance of lifting such a colossal mass.
 	He needed to talk to Techmarine Renius.
 	These thoughts – and more – raced through his mind in a second. A second too long, the captain chided himself inwardly. His brothers appeared to be getting the better of their enemies, but he knew how suddenly the tides of battle could turn.
 	He saw an ork wielding a huge but primitive-looking blunderbuss, apparently fashioned from a pair of cannon barrels roped together. It brought the weapon to bear on Brother Lumic, and Sicarius shoulder-charged it, throwing off its aim as it fired.
 	The ork peppered its own allies with explosive pellets. In its blind fury, it turned its gun around and clubbed Sicarius with the butt. The impact did more damage to the blunderbuss than it did to his power armour. An answering blow from his sword to the greenskin’s shoulder drew blood.
 	There was no turning back now, even had he wanted to.
 	If that engine should fire, then its superheated exhaust fumes would billow out through the surrounding tunnels. There would be no escaping them; not even an Ultramarine would be able to outrun them. The only safe place from the inferno would be inside the star fort itself – and the only way to reach the star fort was through the orks.
 	Now, then, more than ever, it was imperative that they won this battle quickly.
 	And with the Emperor’s blessing, thought Sicarius as he plunged into the heart of the melee, Khargask’s attention may just be held elsewhere. He may not have understood that he is facing not flesh-and-blood soldiers this time, but something more deadly, more powerful by far – and we may surprise him yet.
 
 
 	CHAPTER IX


 	Dast had left the shelter of the command dugout.
 	He strode through the trenches purposefully. He had never seen them so devoid of life before. He had already passed three abandoned cannon emplacements.
 	The captain had dismissed him without argument or question, with barely a glance at him. He had been too busy counting the casualty reports.
 	As a commissar, he had been trained to be dispassionate. Sometimes, however, a feeling took him by surprise. Right now, he was feeling angry. He was keeping it in check, clenching his fists tightly.
 	He was looking for Sergeant Lucien. He was surprisingly hard to find, considering his size; he moved more quietly than Dast would have imagined.
 	At last, he caught a glimpse of shiny blue inside one of the enclosures. He stood in the entranceway and cleared his throat, calling attention to himself.
 	Lucien was lost in thought, or perhaps he was voxing orders inside his helmet. Dast didn’t doubt that his presence had been noted, however. He waited impatiently until the Ultramarine deigned to acknowledge him.
 	‘Sergeant,’ he said, crisply. ‘I hoped we could talk.’ What he had to say, he couldn’t broadcast, especially not where the captain could overhear him.
 	Lucien looked at him. His helmet rendered him expressionless, but Dast was more than used to that. ‘The battle is going well,’ he rumbled finally, as if that meant there could be nothing more to talk about.
 	‘For your Space Marines, perhaps. My regiment has lost a third of its strength, hundreds of men.’ Reports were still coming in from Krieg sergeants and quartermasters at the front, an endless litany of bloodshed in his ear.
 	‘Your soldiers fight with exceptional courage,’ said Sergeant Lucien.
 	‘They always do,’ said Dast, ‘even when they are sent to the slaughter.’
 	Lucien stepped towards him, but the commissar stood his ground. He had never seen a Space Marine up close before today, and it was hard not to feel small and vulnerable in their presence. However, he refused to be intimidated.
 	‘The Ramilies’s generators are failing,’ said Lucien. ‘Its shields have already collapsed in several key areas. We have silenced most of its guns – and all this was made possible by the sacrifice of the Krieg Korpsmen. Had they not drawn the orks’ fire as they did, then our tanks would have been–’
 	‘Your tanks could have bided their time,’ insisted Dast. ‘Your captain, Sicarius, only asked for a distraction.’
 	‘I saw a chance to do more,’ Lucien snapped. ‘Your captain offered me that chance. It was he who offered to send his men out there – I did not ask him. If you have a problem with his decision, you should take it up with him.’
 	He was right. Dast made himself breathe before he answered.
 	Before he could, there came a renewed peal of thunder from the east, and the vox-net was flooded with fresh incident reports. The orks had got their big guns working again – a whole battery of them – and shells were raining down around the Imperial forces. Perhaps, thought Dast, the guns were never out of action in the first place, and Khargask lured us into a trap.
 	His soldiers, those caught in the open, were being eradicated again, by the phalanx. The spiralling numbers of the dead were reported in a flat tone by the voice of a servitor. It was easy to feel detached about those numbers from a distance. Nor was Dast especially concerned about individual Krieg lives. As the captain had said, dying was his people’s sole purpose.
 	‘What would you have me do?’ asked Lucien, unexpectedly. ‘Summon your Guardsmen back here? Have them run the gauntlet of the Ramilies’s guns again?’
 	‘No,’ said Dast. ‘No, I–’
 	Lucien clenched a fist. ‘This is only a temporary setback. Khargask believes he can outthink us, but an ork is still an ork.’
 	‘The Death Korps of Krieg are courageous,’ insisted Dast. ‘To a man, they are fearless, loyal and highly disciplined.’ They were the most disciplined soldiers he had encountered; they hardly needed a commissar. ‘Any one of them would surrender his life in a heartbeat, for the smallest advantage.’
 	‘And they can be replaced, in as little as nine months – or even less, if the rumours I hear about Krieg can be believed.’
 	Vox-chatter told Dast that more Korpsmen had made it to their goal. They were battling orks in the Indestructible’s shadow; once again, it appeared, just a handful had spilled out of their fortress against their leader’s orders. The Korpsmen outnumbered them and were faring well against them. It was something.
 	The Ultramarines Predators and Vindicators were advancing too. They were mercilessly firing at the star fort’s active battery. Dast grimaced upon hearing that an artillery shell had fallen short, exploding in the midst of the fighting orks and Guardsmen, decimating both forces.
 	‘At least,’ he implored, ‘send your Space Marines forwards now. Have them and the Korpsmen scale the ramparts together.’ Lucien didn’t answer him; Dast didn’t know if he was considering his suggestion or not.
 	He waited a moment, then ventured: ‘You undervalue them. I did the same when I first joined a Krieg regiment, but the Death Korps is one of the Imperium’s finest assets. Individually, yes, each one of them is expendable, yet that is also their greatest strength. En masse, they can be an unstoppable force.’
 	‘You are not of Krieg yourself?’ asked Lucien.
 	‘I’ve never been there.’
 	Others had made the same assumption – despite the fact that commissars never served with soldiers from their own planets. Dast only wore his facemask and rebreather when he had to – which, in itself, distinguished him from the rest of his regiment – but then, the Death Korps was often sent to worlds with poisonous atmospheres, worlds like their own. He had begun to notice that, when he was wearing the mask, he found it harder to make his voice heard.
 	Sometimes, his job was to save the Death Korps of Krieg from themselves.
 	‘If the men of Krieg have a failing,’ he said calmly, ‘it is that they undervalue themselves too. They will die for you gladly, if you tell them they are dying for a reason, any reason. I am asking you, please, do not abuse that trust – and don’t squander the resources you have here. That is all I have to say.’
 	He was talking to Lucien’s broad back. The Ultramarine had turned away from him in mid-sentence. Perhaps his helmet vox had distracted him again, Dast thought; perhaps he had more orders that he needed to issue. A moment later, without turning, Lucien said, ‘I must join my battle-brothers up on the surface. It is almost time for us to march on the Ramilies ourselves.’
 	‘Thank you,’ said Dast, although he wasn’t sure he had anything to thank him for. He hesitated for a second, then turned and walked back towards the command dugout. He had said his piece, as his field report would make perfectly plain. By the end of the day, the 319th Krieg Siege Regiment may well no longer exist, but at least he would have done his duty.
 	The Krieg captain hardly acknowledged Dast’s return, any more than he had acknowledged his departure from the dugout.
 	Hovering between them, the tactical hololith showed a closer view of the combat zone than it had before. The Indestructible was a dark shape on its eastern border; arrayed before this were the survivors of the 319th regiment, each squad represented by a black skull with wings and a helmet. There were far fewer skulls to be seen than when the commissar had left.
 	The orks were represented by skull symbols too, but theirs were green and malformed with tusks and horns, and there were fewer of them still. A vox-caster crackled and buzzed in one corner, a servitor’s hands flickered over the holo-projector’s runes and a number of the green skulls blinked out.
 	The captain spoke over his comm-bead: ‘Sergeant Lucien. My men have the orks outside the star fort under control. I can have ten squads disengage and begin to scale the walls.’ A rare emotion had crept into his voice: a hint of pride.
 	A long time passed, it seemed to Dast, before the response came: ‘Tell your Korpsmen to deal with the orks and then hold their positions.’
 	The vox-caster buzzed again, as did his comm-bead, each reporting a new presence on the battlefield. This new information was programmed into the holo-projector, and suddenly there they were: the blue stylised-U symbols that denoted the Ultramarines infantry, heading east, past the almost-static markers of their own armour units. One of them had to be Lucien himself.
 	The star fort’s lance stabbed out of its tower again.
 	Its interruptions had been decreasing in frequency, as if it was becoming ever more reluctant to recharge. Unfortunately, its blasts were still as potent as ever; already, the first of the blue new­comers had to be removed from the board.
 	The rest of the Ultramarines kept on going.
 	When the Death Korps of Krieg had advanced, it had been in a ragged line of black skull icons, through which the enemy guns had punched hole after hole. The line, each time, had reformed, a little thinner than before but relentless. The Ultramarines blue line, in contrast, was thinner to begin with, but it swept across no-man’s-land more rapidly and maintained its integrity throughout.
 	Within minutes, blue icons were mingling with the black and the green in the star fort’s shadow, and the green orks were dying more swiftly than ever. Dast picked out one of the many reports in his ear: a Krieg quartermaster, describing how the Ultramarines Dreadnought had ignited his fist and driven it through an ork’s chest, shattering its ribcage and its spine and emerging from its back.
 	‘Sergeant Lucien,’ the captain voxed. ‘My men are ready to scale the walls.’
 	‘Captain,’ Dast protested. ‘Might it not be, ah, a wiser strategy to allow the Ultramarines to take point here? Their armour will protect them from anything the orks have to throw at us, and, with their superior firepower, we can take the ramparts in a fraction of the time and likely with a fraction of the casualties.’
 	The captain fixed him with a blank-eyed look.
 	Dast decided to appeal to his sense of pride. He knew it existed, well-hidden but surfacing from time to time. ‘Why don’t we show them what the Death Korps of Krieg can do? Show these self-styled angels that we are capable of more than just lying down and dying for the Emperor, if only we are given the chance.’
 	He couldn’t tell if his words were reaching the captain’s ears or not.
 	At that moment, however, the vox-caster spluttered again, and Lucien’s voice rang out of it. He couldn’t have heard the commissar’s plea, and was responding to the captain’s latest broadcast. ‘Agreed,’ he said curtly. ‘Send your men over the walls, and advise them the Space Marines have operational command.’
 	The captain nodded and turned away from his commissar, abruptly. After a short pause, Sergeant Lucien spoke again, and Dast had no doubt that this postscript was meant for his ears specifically.
 	‘After all,’ he said, ‘they are your men, captain. You know how best to utilise them.’
 
 
 	CHAPTER X


 	Sicarius felt as if he had been fighting for hours, though he knew it hadn’t been nearly that long.
 	The orks in the cavern were tenacious, like any of their kind. They battled on after being dealt mortal blows, their bodies fuelled by rage and a primitive, mindless lust for battle. They had landed a few good blows of their own too.
 	At one point, Lumic had gone down. His brothers had fought their way to him in time, thank the Emperor, and a chainsword blade had severed his attacker’s weapon arm before it could complete a killing stroke.
 	Sicarius was backed up to the cavern wall, duelling with a massive brute with a head too big for its squat body, teeth like neglected gravestones and breath to match. It had a makeshift chainsword of its own, fashioned from real ork teeth, spitting out black gobbets of promethium as it whirred. The ork’s technique needed work, but it wielded the weapon with more than enough force to compensate.
 	His own blade parried each of its clumsy thrusts, but he quickly tired of being on the defensive. He allowed the ork’s next blow to land on his shoulder, the whirring teeth chewing into his pauldron. Some teeth were blunted or snapped clean off their chain; still, the cut was deeper than Sicarius had expected, nicking his flesh.
 	He thought about the engine pod, hanging over him like an executioner’s axe, and he pressed the advantage his feint had bought him. He slashed at his opponent, once, twice, three times, cutting a series of dark red trenches into its flesh.
 	The ork was on the back foot, but still struggling. ‘Emperor,’ Sicarius cursed, ‘how do you convince these things that they’re dead?’ No longer pinned, however, he could now bring his plasma pistol to bear, placing a shot right through the greenskin’s body in an eruption of blood.
 	The ork joined its comrades, many of them, in a growing heap of bloodied corpses. There were only three of them left now, outnumbered by their stronger and better-armed attackers, two of them wounded but fighting on beyond reason.
 	This was taking too long.
 	A new sound echoed between the tunnel walls: a deep, metallic clunk. Sicarius knew where it must have come from, and his auto-senses confirmed it. He looked up at the engine pod in the roof. It hadn’t ignited yet but a second clunk came from somewhere inside it, like the tolling of a death knell.
 	‘Brother Filion,’ the captain yelled, ‘we don’t need you here. Climb up inside the star fort. Renius, behind him!’ The Techmarine was his most vital squad member on this mission, and had to be saved. Filion would go ahead of him to take the brunt of any more ork ambushes or traps.
 	He took Filion’s place in the melee. Another ork, a walking mass of blasted flesh, had finally lost too much blood to remain standing, so only two remained. At that moment, however, the engine pod emitted a third clunk, which was followed this time by a cough and a puff of acrid, white smoke.
 	Brother Filion voxed Sicarius: ‘I’m inside the gun tower, sir. You were right, I think there’s a way up through here, through the debris of the internal bulkheads. It’s narrow – but wide enough for an ork to squeeze through, after all.’
 	Techmarine Renius reported that he was having more difficulty. His servo-harness was a definite problem for him, but it also provided a solution. He could cut or tear his way through any blockage, and thus was making slow but steady progress. Sicarius sent Brother Gallo after him, while he and Brother Lumic squared off against a single ork each. He took the biggest and healthiest-looking brute for himself.
 	The engine pod was spluttering and coughing up more smoke, denser clouds of it, while sparks were beginning to dance around its mouth. The engine was struggling to fire, there could be no doubt of it. Sicarius was alive thanks only to its decrepit state – and any second could bring an abrupt end to his reprieve.
 	Lumic despatched his wounded opponent with ease and, with the same blade stroke, cleaved into the last remaining greenskin’s back. Sicarius bundled his battle-brother ahead of him, towards the gun tower. A bright bolt of energy discharged itself from the engine pod, striking the ground between Sicarius’s feet. He followed Lumic through a gash in the star fort’s outer wall and began to haul himself upwards, away from the threat, through twisted hunks of stone and metal.
 	His ankle snagged on something.
 	Looking down, Sicarius realised that a massive green fist had closed around it. He saw a snarling green face glaring up at him, and recognised the brute with the ork-tooth chainsword, the one he thought he had slain. It was screaming something, but he couldn’t make it out because the engine’s spluttering had turned into an unrestrained roar. The ork was trying to drag him back down into the tunnels; it didn’t have the strength, but then nor could he seem to shake it loose. He wanted to stamp on its crooked gravestone teeth, but his free foot was wedged into a crevice, while his pistol was pinned to his side.
 	The ork was dead, it just hadn’t accepted it yet; not while it could still drag its killer down into the inferno behind it.
 	Superheated exhaust smoke billowed up the inside of the gun tower.
 	Sicarius saw the ork’s flesh stripped from its bones. Its face was little more than a leering skull when he lost sight of it; still, its eyes glared up at him, full of hatred, as intractable as its death grip on his foot. Alarms began to screech and wail and blink inside his helmet, detecting intolerable temperatures without.
 	He pulled for all he was worth, and finally tore himself free of the clinging fingers. He felt as if his every nerve was afire, but he couldn’t allow himself to succumb to the pain. He scrambled for handholds above him, straining every muscle and fibre bundle in his arms to lift himself out of the deadly cloud. He was grateful now for Renius, who had widened the way ahead of him.
 	He might have blacked out briefly, the conscious part of his mind at least. Like the orks, however, Sicarius didn’t know when to die; while, unlike them, he had selfless allies to make sure that he didn’t.
 	He felt Brother Lumic’s hands tightening around his wrists, felt himself being lifted when he didn’t have the strength to lift himself. He sprawled onto his stomach inside a large, octagonal chamber. Cracks ran through its walls, and its ceiling bulged in the centre and groaned ominously. He felt dizzy. He didn’t know if he could stand, but he stood anyway and refused to let his battle-brothers help him.
 	The alarms in his helmet were quieting one by one, while scrolling displays told him how many painkilling and invigorating drugs had been pumped into him: enough to keep him active and alert, which was all that mattered to him.
 	His power armour required repairs, when he had the chance to see to it. Its protective layer of ceramite had begun to bubble and crack with the intense heat – though it had maintained its integrity and thus preserved his life. The floor was trembling violently, no doubt because of the engine beneath it – and how many others, Sicarius wondered, attached to other parts of the star fort’s hull?
 	For the first time, he noticed a pattern on one of the chamber’s walls, picked out in coloured tiles. It was the icon of the Cult Mechanicus: a half-human, half-machine skull bounded by a cogwheel, representing the perfect fusion of Man with the Machine God. 
 	The Machine God was a minor aspect of the Emperor, in Sicarius’s view. Still, it angered him to see that the mosaic had been defaced. Many of the steel-grey and ivory-white tiles that formed the composite skull had been pried loose, while others had been cracked or shattered in the attempt. Someone had spray-painted an ork face, inexpertly, over the image. The insult focused the captain’s attention on his mission.
 	He rounded on his Techmarine. ‘No more secrets,’ he growled, the throbbing of the engine – the engines – underfoot lending his voice a threatening undercurrent. ‘Tell me what the Adeptus Mechanicus were doing aboard the Indestructible.’
 	‘I’m sorry, captain,’ said Renius, setting his jaw stubbornly.
 	‘I need that information, Techmarine!’ Sicarius flared. ‘I’m standing in the bowels of the Emperor-damned thing, aren’t I?’
 	The rest of the Ultramarines closed in around Renius, in silent support of their leader. He looked at each of them in turn, then conceded defeat with a nod. ‘There was a project,’ he confessed. ‘The tech-priests were attempting to make a star fort mobile – independently mobile, I mean.’
 	‘By fitting it with engines,’ said Sicarius. He wasn’t surprised.
 	‘Many engines,’ confirmed Renius. ‘Thruster engines and warp engines. Think about it. The Ramilies’ greatest asset is its ability to traverse the immaterium. It can generate a warp bubble around itself, which allows it to withstand–’
 	‘I already know this,’ Sicarius said impatiently.
 	‘But imagine if, instead, the Ramilies could provide its own propulsion. Imagine if it could shift from one star system to another, without having to wait for a fleet of ships to tow it and with negligible risk: a mobile command base with weapons fully charged and fully-stocked repair and resupply facilities.’
 	He sounded almost evangelical about the prospect.
 	‘Imagine,’ Sicarius growled, ‘if the orks had that capability.’
 	Renius inclined his head. ‘Khargask is attempting to bring the project to fruition, and has clearly come closer than we hoped. I suspect it was a test flight that brought him to the Agides System. Something went wrong. The Indestructible came down here, but its engines slowed its descent, at least. The damage to the propulsion systems and plasma generators may have been minimal.’
 	‘And what about the energy flares that the Krieg men saw?’
 	‘Attempts to re-establish the warp bubble,’ Renius surmised, ‘and to reconfigure it to maintain the Ramilies’s integrity, to hold it together against the incredible stresses of take-off.’
 	The floor and the bulkheads around them were still trembling, but less violently now. The engine below them had ceased its angry protests and settled into a comfortable rhythm, almost a hum. Sicarius asked himself why it was still running at all, now that the five Ultramarines were safely out of the reach of its backwash. He didn’t like the answer he came up with. He turned back to the Techmarine.
 	‘Is there a control room?’ he asked. ‘There must be a control room.’
 	‘The basilica,’ said Renius. Of course. ‘Beneath the Grand Chamber.’
 	Sicarius pinpointed the location on his schematics. He had already calculated his own position, towards the inner edge of the star fort’s south-west-facing quadrant, and he quickly mapped a route from one to the other.
 	There were narrow, winding, upward-leading staircases in each of the chamber’s eight corners. Most of them had partially collapsed, but the one he needed looked to be just about passable. Sicarius hurried towards it, his footsteps crunching on broken mosaic tiles, and his battle-brothers didn’t need to be told to follow him. If what he suspected, what he feared, was true, then his mission was more urgent now than ever. 
 	He had to get to that engine control room while there was still time.
 
 
 	CHAPTER XI


 	The Korpsmen were wheeling siege towers across no-man’s-land: tall, teetering wire-frame and canvas constructs, six of them in all. The Indestructible’s energy weapon stabbed out at one of them and reduced it to smouldering ashes.
 	The towers didn’t look as if they provided much protection. Most of the Death Korpsmen didn’t wait for them to arrive, anyway. The order had come for them to scale the star fort’s ramparts, so scale them they did.
 	Mouldings and gun emplacements provided plentiful handholds, and some Korpsmen were equipped with crampons and grappling hooks, so the climb itself was easy – but for the green-skinned creatures waiting at the end of it. Kenjari could see their brutish faces, peering through crenels above him; then the faces were replaced by guns and rocket launchers, firing downward.
 	He could almost have admired the men of Krieg, the way they never flinched nor wavered, just swarmed up those walls as many around them were riddled with bolts and bullets and sent hurtling back to the ground. He could almost have admired them – had he not been expected to follow them.
 	Kenjari shrugged his rucksack from his shoulders, sifting through it for climbing tools with shaking hands. He found a small hand axe, which would do. As he straightened up, he realised that his sergeant had seen him vacillating and was elbowing his way towards him – through a scrum of waiting Death Korpsmen – with his bayonet poised to deliver his customary encouragement.
 	Then, a series of warning cries rang out: ‘Look out below!’
 	Two orks had tipped a vat of something over the side. Some of the Korpsmen managed to leap for cover, but those higher on the walls were drenched in a viscous, silver tidal wave that sizzled through their flak armour. Several of them, these normally taciturn warriors, screamed. Kenjari gasped as a maimed body smacked into the ground at his feet, writhing in agony. His sergeant judged that the casualty couldn’t be saved and put him out of his misery with a gunshot.
 	He heard the voice of an officer over his comm-bead: ‘Keep climbing. Climb! Climb! The Emperor expects.’
 	He realised that the guns of both sides had fallen silent; it could only just have happened, because his ears were still ringing from their barks. Blue-armoured figures marched out of the battlefield smoke, and Kenjari was filled with awe at the very sight of them. The Angels of Death didn’t mount the ramparts themselves, but they aimed their bolt and flamer weapons up at the defenders and several brutish faces quickly disappeared from sight.
 	The remaining siege towers crashed into the side of the star fort, and the nearest Korpsmen poured into them at ground level, to emerge a minute later onto platforms at their tops. Kenjari tried to make it to a tower – it seemed like the safest option for him, relatively speaking – but too many others were in his way. He found himself pushed up against the Indestructible’s ramparts and, though he had thankfully been separated from his sergeant, he could feel a hundred other blank eyes upon him and he knew what he had to do. He had to climb.
 	It was like the trek across no-man’s-land again, just in a different plain. He was following pairs of booted feet above him, spurred on by the blank-faced men at his own heels when his every muscle only longed to surrender, fearing that he ought to pray for a speedy death because it might be the kindest fate on offer. Time after time, shots rang out above him – despite the efforts of the Space Marines below – and a nearby Korpsman lost his grip on his hand- and footholds and tumbled past him, no longer a human being but merely a sack of flesh and bones and blood.
 	A body glanced off him and almost took Kenjari down with it. His right hand lost its grip on the wall and that side of his body swung away from it. He hadn’t climbed as high as he had imagined; he could have survived a fall, but he would likely have been injured and his sergeant might have euthanised him too. To his relief, the Korpsman at his ankles caught his slipping right foot and boosted him back into position with a growl: ‘The Emperor expects.’
 	He felt light-headed, sweaty and sick, and just wanted to cling to something solid for a moment, but the masked man beneath him was still pushing and he had to climb again. He saw a gun emplacement within reach – no threat because the barrel of its cannon had been shattered – and gratefully utilised the broad, firm ledge it offered. As he pushed off from it, with a little more confidence, a green hand was thrust through the gap above the cannon and grabbed him by the knee.
 	Kenjari squealed in terror. It was the first time he had ever touched a xenos, and a tiny, irrational part of his brain insisted that he was contaminated now.
 	When the orks had attacked at the star fort’s base, the men of Krieg had saved him, though that hadn’t been their objective. They had saved him by getting between Kenjari and the xenos and by fighting them relentlessly, many of them to the death. Three squads of experienced Guardsmen – grenadiers – had charged the orks with bayonets and, though they hadn’t been able to match their strength, they had kept them busy while their comrades had sniped at them from the sidelines.
 	Kenjari had loosed off several shots himself, firing blindly in panic, and he knew that his efforts had amounted to precisely nothing.
 	No one else could save him this time. His lasgun was slung across his back again, but his hand axe was clamped between his teeth in case of need. He clung to the wall with his left hand, snatched the weapon with his right and struck down with it. He wasn’t thinking clearly enough to aim, and his blows made criss-cross patterns of cuts across the ork’s flesh instead of slicing through its muscles.
 	The Emperor was with him, however, and it proved to be enough. The ork’s fingers spasmed and let him go; his axe head must have struck a nerve. He dragged himself away from there as quickly as he could, his weariness forgotten.
 	To his right and above him, a siege tower had extruded a gangplank over the star fort’s battlements. Death Korpsmen were teeming across it, though it was only wide enough to accommodate two of them abreast.
 	He couldn’t see, but could imagine, the reception with which they were greeted. He could see the results of it too, as more bodies came hurtling over the parapet. Death Korpsmen were backed all the way along the gangplank, jostling to get forwards. Perhaps Kenjari was better off where he was, after all. Rather here, he thought, than queuing up the steps of one of those fragile towers, waiting for his turn to confront the monsters above…
 	He was nearing the top of the ramparts. Other Korpsmen had made it ahead of him; most had detached their bayonets and were wielding them like knives, knowing that the orks would quickly close upon them. Perhaps, Kenjari thought, by the time he was able to join them, the combatants on both sides would be occupied and he wouldn’t be noticed. Perhaps he could slip past them and find a nook somewhere inside the star fort to hide until the fighting was over.
 	The structure was shaking.
 	Kenjari hadn’t noticed it at first, with all the sound and motion around him. The vibrations, however, were growing fiercer, and suddenly the air was charged with electrical energy and he could see sparks of it, purple and green, flaring around him. The sparks seemed to be building inside the walls themselves, until they were too powerful to be contained. For a moment, the energy wreathed him, making his nerves tingle and his hair stand on end beneath his helmet, but fortunately doing no worse.
 	A new sound, far louder than the others, rose from the bowels of the earth: a groaning of tortured machine-spirits.
 	Kenjari had seen this happening before, but from a distance, standing up on his toes to sneak a glance out of a Krieg trench where no officers could see him. He had heard it suggested that the orks were building and testing a powerful weapon inside the Indestructible. Were they about to test their weapon on him?
 	The Space Marines were finally climbing the walls beneath him. They were climbing faster than any Korpsman could; in some cases climbing right over them. The Korpsmen’s handholds weren’t strong enough to support them, so they were punching new ones through the star fort’s adamantium skin into the metal beneath.
 	One of them – a blue tank with two legs and a single arm – had been lifted by a gunship right onto the top of the battlements, landing with a thud, squashing countless ork defenders. He managed to swing out of the juggernaut’s way, into a space left on the wall beside him by a Korpsman who had taken a stray bullet to the head.
 	‘Follow the Space Marines,’ the ever-present voice in Kenjari’s ear buzzed. ‘They are the Emperor’s angels, and it is they who will bring justice to His enemies.’
 	The star fort was shaking more violently than ever and, suddenly, glancing down as he clung to its mouldings for dear life, Kenjari saw the reason why. The star fort – the castle from the sky – was straining to lift itself off the ground, to return to the heavens from which it had so unceremoniously fallen.
 	It wasn’t going to make it. It wasn’t just the gravity of the Agides moon that was holding onto it. The star fort’s lower levels were entangled – inextricably so? – with the moon’s mine workings and its subterranean tunnels. It had failed to pull itself free of them before, he suddenly realised.
 	This time, however, was different. This time, the machine-spirits weren’t about to give up their struggle. Their groans had steadily increased in pitch and volume until they became full-blooded howls of defiance. The emissions from the star fort’s walls were combining to form a bubble around its massive structure, a flickering, flaring energy shield; there were still a few gaps in it, but they were closing up fast.
 	The Indestructible seemed to scream as it wrenched itself free from the grip of the hard, black earth and began to ascend.
 	It was, for Kenjari, just the latest in a succession of overwhelming terrors; one more than he could bear. He saw some Korpsmen shaken from the ramparts, plummeting towards the ground, and he felt a powerful stab of envy towards them. It occurred to him that he could plausibly fall too. He might break a few bones, or he might find a soft landing on the bodies that were piling up underneath him.
 	Either way, the xenos would fly their castle away from him, and take the Death Korps of Krieg and the bright blue Space Marines with them. They could carry on their bloody war without him, among the stars. Kenjari would live.
 	There was no time to think about it, to second-guess himself. The surface of the moon was already beginning to recede beneath his feet, and in a second it would be too late, he would be trapped. He had one chance to save himself, and that chance was now.
 	Kenjari jumped for his life.
 
 
 	CHAPTER XII


 	The Indestructible was in motion.
 	Sicarius was hurrying along a curving passageway, fighting to stay upright as the floor bucked like a panicked mount. The walls were getting the worst of it, his pauldrons leaving indentations in the stone and shattering lumoglobes.
 	Back above ground, he had been able to vox Sergeant Lucien. His second-in-command had been proud to report his progress. He had led their Chapter over the star fort’s ramparts and they were fighting its occupiers hand-to-hand. It was more than Sicarius had expected.
 	So far, as his command squad had journeyed to the star fort’s heart, they had met little resistance. A few gretchin had crossed their paths – inadvertently, he suspected – but not for long. Now he knew what was keeping most of the orks busy. Lucien had not seen the big mek himself, however.
 	Sicarius knew where Khargask would be; and he knew that, no matter the situation outside, he would not be alone.
 	‘These xenos are not so tough,’ a welcome voice boomed over an open vox-channel, ‘when they have no cannons to hide behind.’ Evidently, Brother Ultracius had made it to the Ramilies too.
 	Sicarius opened a private channel to him. ‘What’s the situation out there?’ he asked. ‘How high up from the ground are we?’
 	‘I can’t tell from here, Knight of Talassar,’ replied Ultracius. ‘Much higher, though, and these Guardsmen without faces won’t be able to breathe.’
 	‘The Krieg Korpsmen are…?’ He stifled the question. He was already mentally putting the pieces together, beginning to see what must have transpired in his absence. He didn’t much care for the image that was forming. He had to find that control room; apart from any other reason now, for the sake of hundreds of Imperial soldiers – at least, he hoped there were still so many – about to die by asphyxiation.
 	‘Never thought I would say this,’ said Ultracius, ‘about anyone, but these Krieg men are too fearless for their own good.’ He had, in fact, said the same thing more than once about Captain Sicarius himself, if only he could have remembered it.
 	A blocked shaft had forced them to take a detour. Sicarius led his battle-brothers up a flight of steps, to what the star fort’s schematics called the command level. The engine room was now one floor below them. They followed a covered walkway with armaplas windows along one side, looking out upon the black sky. 
 	The orks came to meet them as they rounded the next corner.
 	They were in a spacious atrium. Ahead of them, a pair of grand iron doors, inlaid with intricate carvings, stood wide open. Through these, Sicarius could see the Indestructible’s Grand Chamber, once a haven for prayer and reflection.
 	Its rows of seats had been uprooted, its statues had been bludgeoned to pieces, while a row of five patterned windows, ten metres tall, had been defaced by crude ork glyphs. The whole place stank of ork faeces.
 	A hole had been gouged out of the floor, twenty metres long and about a quarter as wide. Smoke was billowing up through it, along with a sickly green light. ‘The engine control room!’ Sicarius announced. Now, all they had to do was reach it.
 	Eight brawny figures stood in their way already, and more were clambering up out of the ragged aperture. They were slobbering at the long-denied prospect of a brawl. The Ultramarines were almost as eager themselves and, for once, Sicarius sent his brothers into the fray ahead of him.
 	Two lines of ruthless warriors smashed into each other like opposing tidal waves, and the air was filled with the sounds of revving chainswords, bolts and bullets, the pounding of axes and clubs against plasteel and ceramite. Sicarius’s hand twitched on the pommel of his Tempest Blade, but he held himself back.
 	He had hoped the enemy line might give with that first impact, giving him a gap to slip through. It was no use. He should have known that, this close to their leader and his all-important project, the orks would be more disciplined than ever.
 	He raised his sword and plunged into the melee.
 	The next few minutes were a blur of slicing and shooting and punching, of hate-filled faces coming at him with drooling mouths wide open, of foetid ork breath and ultimately ork blood in his nostrils, the stench strong even through his helmet.
 	For every enemy that fell, it seemed that two more emerged from the hole in the Grand Chamber’s floor to replace it. With no time to strategise, Sicarius placed his trust in his own instincts, enhanced by his armour’s auto-senses.
 	‘They’re stronger than the orks we faced below,’ Lumic grunted, ‘as strong as any I’ve ever encountered.’ Clearly, Khargask had held back the best of his mob for his own protection. They parried Sicarius’s blows with almost enough force to send the weapon spinning from his hands. Outnumbered, he couldn’t block all of their blows in return. A massive iron-headed hammer smashed into his ribs, and his helmet readouts told him that his armour had sustained hairline fractures.
 	The star fort’s violent shaking only added to the Ultramarines woes, though it hampered the greenskins equally. The floor suddenly tipped away from Sicarius, throwing two orks in front of him off-balance; he helped the first of them on its way with a booted foot to its stomach. It reeled into the second and they toppled and rolled, hopelessly entangled, each howling indignantly at the other.
 	Another ork appeared in front of Sicarius to replace them, but he had expected that and was more than ready for it. For the first time, momentarily, he had only a single opponent, and he took full advantage of that opportunity too. A fusillade of plasma bolts left the greenskin blinded and stunned. A follow-up series of swipes from the captain’s Tempest Blade carved it up neatly.
 	Not all his battle-brothers were faring as well.
 	Brother Gallo had stumbled when the floor had tipped, landing in the midst of five enormous greenskins. They were battering him mercilessly, cracking open his armour and driving him into the ground. Brothers Filion and Lumic were doing their best to help him, but that meant turning their backs on other opponents, which left them vulnerable. Sicarius had to make a painful decision.
 	He voxed his squad: ‘Leave Gallo to fend for himself. We can’t afford to be kept on the defensive. We have to reach that control room.’ One life was unimportant, he told himself, when so many more were at stake.
 	Next, he voxed Ultracius, out on the ramparts, again. ‘We need you down here,’ he said grimly, knowing that the Dreadnought could lock onto the source of his transmission and find him.
 	‘On my way,’ came the immediate reply.
 	From under the floor, Sicarius heard a series of small explosions, and the sound of orks cursing as they spluttered to draw breath. He heard one voice, deeper and more strident than the others, booming angrily as the floor bucked again beneath his feet. What are they doing down there? The background rumble of engines burped and hiccupped, then resumed in a slightly more throaty tone than before.
 	‘Renius?’
 	‘It sounds like… they’re actually trying to make a warp jump,’ the Techmarine returned his vox. His voice was strained, as well it might be; he was on the back foot against a pair of axe-wielding brutes. He employed his servo-arm as a weapon, clawing at one ork’s face, gouging blood out of its eyes as he struggled to hold it at bay. ‘If they do, and the energy shield around the Ramilies holds–’
 	‘A warp jump?’ repeated Sicarius, horrified. ‘While we’re still in the atmosphere? It’ll tear this moon apart – and we could end up anywhere in the galaxy.’ Most likely, in the heart of ork space, he thought.
 	‘Those of us that survive the journey,’ said Renius, pointedly. ‘Our battle-brothers on the ramparts risk being hurled out of the warp bubble and torn apart on the currents of the immaterium. That is, if the warp jump is successful.’
 	‘If it isn’t?’
 	‘If the warp jump fails and if Khargask refuses to abort the attempt…’
 	Renius took a breath as he brought his favoured weapon to bear on his attackers: a power axe, with a ridged blade shaped like half of the Cult Mechanicus’s symbol. It crackled and blazed as it bit hungrily into an ork’s stomach. ‘In that case,’ he resumed, ‘the reactor will almost certainly explode, with enough force to consume the Indestructible and dislodge this moon’s flaming remains from orbit.’
 	The orks, at least, were running out of reinforcements to throw at them. The flow of fresh bodies from below had finally abated, and the battle now had an end in sight. Sicarius continued with his tactic of hammering at one spot on the enemy line until suddenly – as another opponent fell with a gash in its throat, choking on its own blood – most unexpectedly, he found himself stumbling through it.
 	There was nothing now to keep him from his goal, from diving through the hole in the floor and confronting his true enemy at last. Nothing but the knowledge, which Sicarius accepted grudgingly, that another was needed down in the engine control room more urgently than he was.
 	Techmarine Renius was fighting three orks at once, one with each of his real and mechanical hands. Sicarius spun on his heel and slashed one of them across the back. Renius’s axe felled the second a moment later, while Lumic obligingly stepped in to engage the third. Sicarius yelled, ‘Renius, with me. Lumic and Filion, keep us covered.’ Seven orks were still fighting and Lumic had been badly bloodied; they were leaving their brothers outnumbered, facing almost certain defeat, but what else could they do? Ultracius would arrive soon, hopefully.
 	Sicarius and Renius burst through the Grand Chamber’s open doors.
 	A greenskin howled as it saw what they were doing. It hurled a wrench at Sicarius, who deflected it with a backhand swipe. He couldn’t see anything through the rectangular hole in the floor – there was too much smoke down there; the hole, he suddenly apprehended, had been dug for ventilation – nor could his auspex give him any definite readings. Whatever was waiting for him down there, however, his duty was to face it. He didn’t break his step.
 	Sicarius pushed off from the edge of the hole and plunged into the unknown. He dropped four metres and crashed down in the centre of a smaller chamber.
 	Through the smoke haze, he could make out flickering flames, the dark, angular shapes of rune panels around the walls – and the silhouettes of several sturdy inhuman figures in frantic motion.
 	Renius touched down heavily beside him and took a moment to get his bearings. ‘You deal with the engines,’ said Sicarius, ‘I’ll deal with the greenskins.’
 	A shadow, much larger than the others, came hurtling towards him.
 	He had a fraction of a second to try to work out what it was. It looked like a machine: an ork machine, haphazardly bolted together, heavier on one side than on the other, with all manner of random protuberances. It looked like a smaller and shabbier version of a Dreadnought – though not much smaller.
 	It was only when the shadow let out a curdling war cry that Sicarius saw a slobbering mouth and a glaring, blood-crazed eye in among the mechanics and realised that it was a flesh-and-blood creature. That was when he recognised his ill-famed enemy, at last, and knew it for what – and exactly who – it was.
 	Khargask!
 
 
 	CHAPTER XIII


 	Commissar Dast stepped out of the Centaur transport vehicle.
 	He had planned to join the men of Krieg on the front lines of their desperate battle. He was too late. He had felt the ground – the whole moon, it had seemed – trembling as the Indestructible had slowly wrenched itself free from its moorings.
 	He had had his driver bring the Centaur to a stop. Dast stood on the barren surface of the Agides moon; for once he was glad of the facemask that concealed his expression of horror.
 	He knew what had happened, having picked up the details from the vox-chatter that filled his ear. He ought to have been prepared to face it, and yet to see the massive star fort just hanging in the sky, where it had no possible right, and no reason to be hanging… he wondered how anyone could have been prepared for that.
 	He lifted a pair of magnoculars to his eyes. Even through their lenses, the Korpsmen clinging to the star fort’s walls looked smaller than ever. From this distance, even the Space Marines beside them appeared almost insignificant. Korpsmen and Space Marines alike, however, clung stubbornly to their uncertain handholds. Why didn’t they jump when they had the chance? Dast thought.
 	Why didn’t their captain order them to jump?
 	The commissar had excused himself from the command centre in the dugout, because he had done as much as he could there. Sometimes – more often than not, he had always prided himself – his captain actually heeded his advice; just not today. Today, the Krieg man preferred to listen to Sergeant Lucien.
 	It wasn’t just that the captain was in awe of the Ultramarine. Dast knew that, at heart, he genuinely agreed with his point of view. He agreed that a Space Marine was worth a hundred ordinary men of Krieg. Perhaps he was right. Anyway, the captain had made the decisions he had made. He had given his orders, and that was all that mattered. Dast could better serve his regiment elsewhere now.
 	The Indestructible had stopped climbing. It was shaking and groaning as if the effort of merely staying aloft might tear it apart. A transparent bubble of energy had formed around it, but it flickered and sparked as if it might burst at any moment.
 	As Dast watched, another Korpsman fell off the side of the star fort, followed in short order by yet another. They tumbled through the energy bubble, and from here he couldn’t tell if their bodies had been burned or fried by it. Either way, their next stop was the ground, too far below them.
 	Some of their comrades were hardier, or had been luckier. They had made it onto the star fort itself, onto the lowest of its stepped surfaces – the tops of its virtual ramparts – where of course they had a mob of eager, baying orks to contend with. Dast could only catch glimpses of the fighting from where he was, and hear breathless snatches of reports from those trapped in the thick of it.
 	The orks, to begin with, had had the advantages of height and cover over their attackers, not to mention their bestial strength. The arrival of Sicarius’s Ultramarines, however, had tipped the balance. A tide of bright blue-armoured warriors were tearing into the green-skinned xenos, eviscerating them with their whirring blades. Dast wished he could have been with them.
 	In addition, he was hearing – over the Ultramarines vox-channel, to which he had been granted access – that Sicarius’s command squad had penetrated the star fort’s heart. They were about to take on Khargask himself. He relayed the news to his regiment, to boost their morale. He told them that victory was almost within their grasp. Whether that was true or not, it didn’t matter.
 	He heard the Krieg captain’s voice: ‘Remember the value of the Adeptus Astartes to the Imperium – they are the Emperor’s angels.’ He knew he was speaking Sergeant Lucien’s words. He gathered that Lucien himself had attained the ramparts too and was leading his men from the front, fighting valiantly.
 	At the same time, he had had the Krieg Korpsmen form up in front of the Dreadnought, Ultracius. He was their most powerful weapon, according to Lucien, and Dast had certainly heard nothing to gainsay this. He couldn’t keep track of every single vox-report – hence the tactical hololith and its attendant servitors in the dugout – but more than once he had heard tell of the Dreadnought’s twin-linked heavy bolter, tearing through ork flesh whenever it barked.
 	Lucien addressed the men of Krieg again: ‘The orks are desperate to take our best weapon out of action. So, let them slice and shred their way through you to get to him – because even as you die, you are frustrating them in their efforts.’ Dast chose not to dwell on the picture that those words painted.
 	The star fort gave another violent lurch, and he saw another score of figures – Korpsmen and orks alike, even a couple in blue – flung over the edge. The Space Marines had their armour to protect them, of course, and would survive the landing, perhaps even the passage through the energy bubble; the others had no such hope.
 	Dast lowered the magnoculars.
 	Only now did he realise that he had been walking across no-man’s-land, though he had no way of reaching his hovering objective. Even if he could, he knew he would be far too late. The Indestructible had shaken itself into a veritable frenzy. One way or another, it couldn’t endure the stresses being placed upon it much longer. One way or another, this battle – another war – would soon be over.
 	Had Dast fought alongside his regiment today, he would likely have died alongside them too, and for nothing.
 	The plain around him was almost eerily silent. The smoke that had smothered it had dispersed on a thin breeze. The Ultramarines artillery guns were biding their time, having done all they could for the present. There was no point in shelling the Indestructible any further, in dealing it any more damage than they already had.
 	Beyond the blue tanks, five siege towers stood in a forlorn row. The star fort’s sudden take-off had left them stranded, and though many Krieg Korpsmen had jumped from the tops of the towers to the star fort while they could, others had been left behind. They milled around the bases of the towers, helplessly.
 	Joining them were the men who had lost their grips on the walls, while the drop to the ground had been survivable. Dast counted roughly sixty figures in all, some of them badly injured. They were the lucky few.
 	There was little these few survivors could usefully do, little but try to stay alive despite the hunks of debris, pieces of unanchored equipment and bodies that were raining down from the teetering structure above them. Dast lowered his head and hurried to join them. He took charge of them, ordering them to heft their wounded onto improvised stretchers and begin to withdraw from the danger zone.
 	Above, the carnage showed no signs of abating. The voices of three quartermasters competed in the commissar’s ear with their roll calls of the recently deceased. The reports were coming in too fast for the servitors to collate. His guess was that, at most, four hundred Korpsmen remained in the fray, and that number was dwindling by the second.
 	‘Ultracius is withdrawing from the battle.’
 	‘–just ordered the Korpsmen that were protecting him to part and–’
 	‘He caught the orks, the ones in his path, unprepared. He just charged through their line and scattered them around him. He–’
 	Dast picked out Sergeant Lucien’s voice from the others: ‘Our Dreadnought has been summoned to assist Captain Sicarius inside the star fort. Men of Krieg, you follow in the shadow of the Emperor’s angels. Let them guide you to glory, let them guide you to salvation, let them be your shield against the alien and the unclean. Obey their orders without question for you serve the greater glory of mankind.’
 	‘Ultracius just shot out a stained-armaplas window,’ a quartermaster reported, ‘and crashed through its remains into the star fort’s inner compound.’
 	‘–left the greenskins reeling, disorganised in his wake. They can’t decide whether to follow him or–’
 	‘–paying dearly for their hesitation. The Ultramarines guns are cutting through them like–’
 	Dast heard the scrape of a boot against the earth, where there should have been no such sound. Instantly, his attention snapped back to his immediate vicinity. He spun around, in time to catch a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye. He whipped out his bolt pistol and bellowed a challenge: ‘Who goes there?’
 	There came no answer.
 	His finger flicked to his ear, silencing his comm-bead. Now, Dast could hear frightened breathing; it was coming from behind the burned-out corpse of a Predator Destructor. He took a step towards it and issued his challenge again, in a sterner tone this time. A wretched-looking figure emerged from behind the ruined tank. He was wearing a Death Korps uniform, facemask and rebreather unit; immediately, however, Dast knew that this was no man of Krieg.
 	‘Identify yourself, trooper,’ he demanded. When the figure’s response caught in his throat, Dast prompted him, ‘You were issued with a number. What is it?’
 	The trooper had to check his own dog tags before he could answer.
 	Dast nodded. The number was a recently issued one. He didn’t need to tap it into his data-slate to confirm his suspicion: that this was one of the Agides miners who had been found here and pressed into service. He couldn’t remember his name, but that was un­important. He kept his pistol levelled at the trooper’s head: he might just have been stupid and desperate enough to think about using his own weapon.
 	‘Why are you hiding, trooper?’ barked Dast, knowing the answer.
 	‘I…’ the trooper stammered.
 	‘Who ordered you to leave the front lines?’ He knew the answer to that too.
 	The trooper lurched towards him; for an instant, Dast thought he was going to attack. Instead, he fell to his knees in front of the commissar and his lasgun slipped from between his fingers, disregarded. ‘I… I’m a worker, not a soldier,’ he pleaded. ‘I was never trained to fight. I was never prepared for… for this.’
 	‘You jumped from the star fort,’ Dast guessed, presenting the question as a statement of fact. ‘You didn’t fall. You chose to jump.’ 
 	The trooper’s guilty silence was the only answer he needed. The commissar’s duty was clear.
 	This man had disobeyed orders. He didn’t need to be told the consequences of that. Dast told him to remove his helmet, which he did, with trembling hands. Dast put his gun to the trooper’s temple. He gave him a moment to make his final peace with the Emperor, then he squeezed the trigger.
 	He beckoned one of the other survivors to him. He had him strip the flak armour, the lasgun, the rucksack and the rebreather mask from the cowardly trooper’s body. He averted his eyes from the dead man’s face as it was revealed. He never looked at their faces, not the ones who had faltered in their duty. Their lives hadn’t mattered and were not worthy of remembrance.
 	The man’s equipment would be passed on to the Death Korps of Krieg’s next recruit. Dast hoped that, with the Emperor’s grace, this time it might be issued to someone more worthy of it.
 
 
 	CHAPTER XIV 


 	Khargask cannoned into Captain Sicarius, with enough force to bowl him over had he not seen it coming in time to brace himself.
 	He had stooped to take the impact of the charge on his shoulder, which gave him leverage to thrust his attacker away from him. He swung his Tempest Blade at the massive ork, but a rusty servo-arm blocked it, showering both combatants with furious sparks. Another mechanical limb, with a snapping claw attachment, slithered over Khargask’s shoulder and struck for Sicarius’s throat. He was forced to surrender a step to wrench himself free from it, before it could tighten its hold on him.
 	In the meantime, Renius had downed a greenskin mechanic with his power axe, and a bank of rune panels was his now. His voice came over a vox-channel, calm and clear: ‘There’s a blockage in the hyper-plasmatic energy conduction system and a synchronous vibration in the tertiary warp engine manifold.’
 	Sicarius had found the orks’ guttural language easier to understand. There was no mistaking the Techmarine’s next words, however: ‘It won’t make it.’
 	In his flesh-and-blood arms, Khargask clutched an oversized shooter. Something flashed inside it and it bucked violently in his grip as it fired with a series of deafening pops. Its bullets sprayed the engine control room almost indiscriminately, but three of them tore through Sicarius’s armour. The damage to the unique Mantle of Suzerain would pain the artificers on Macragge.
 	One of the bullets lodged itself in the muscle of his left leg.
 	The pain only lasted for an instant before a cocktail of chemicals suppressed it. However, he could feel the bullet shifting, tearing through more tissue, as he twisted to avoid another metal-armed swipe from his opponent. It’s like fighting a giant octopus, he thought ruefully, I’m being attacked from every direction at once.
 	To Renius, he voxed: ‘I don’t want to hear that. I want those engines shut off. That’s why I included you in this mission, so do your duty!’
 	Khargask had only one eye, his left, red and rheumy. The other had been replaced by something that looked like a sniper scope, jammed into the socket; it wasn’t helping with Khargask’s aim. Sicarius suspected that it might serve as a primitive auspex. It looked painful; he hoped it was.
 	He ducked between the big mek’s whirling arms and hacked energetically at the armour that protected its chest. He felt he had dislodged something, but he failed to draw ork blood. He did raise Khargask’s ire: he was seething and spitting, hurling insults at the Ultramarines captain.
 	More than anything else, Khargask seemed affronted. He was more than aware, Sicarius guessed, of his own notoriety. Indeed, he had pulled off quite a coup, stealing the Indestructible from under the noses of the massed Imperial Navy. ‘Khargask!’ The ork kept bellowing out his own name as if it ought to mean something.
 	One of Khargask’s claw arms fastened onto Sicarius’s blade. The machine-spirits in both fought a savage duel of their own, rending and biting at each other’s metal flesh, oily black blood spraying from their arteries.
 	The Tempest Blade, ancient and mighty, emerged as the victor. Sicarius let it rest while he emptied his plasma pistol’s charge into Khargask’s face. Most of the sun-hot rounds melted intervening servo-arms, but one of them scorched the big mek’s eyepiece.
 	I’ll deal with the greenskins, he had assured Renius. He chided himself for his overconfidence. It was almost more than he could do to stand up to a single ork, this ork. Smart and strong and savage, he recalled. He had underestimated Khargask, despite warning others against that very mistake.
 	‘Another one coming your way,’ the Techmarine warned him.
 	A greenskin had left its station at the edge of the room and was lurching towards him through the smoke. It was another mek, bristling with bionics but not engulfed by them as Khargask was. Sicarius feinted, luring Khargask into his ally’s path as it fired a burst of flame from a welding torch. He howled at the mekboy, sent it scurrying back to its rune panels. The big mek wanted Sicarius for himself: his first mistake.
 	The other orks were wrestling with levers, fighting fires, too busy to pay much attention to the battle raging behind them. Khargask employed his full complement of mechanical limbs to keep his opponent at bay, and bellowed orders at them that urged them to work faster.
 	A second ork mek saw what Renius was doing and sprang at him from behind. He didn’t turn, but his auto-senses must have seen the ork coming, because his servo-arm met it with a punishing blow. The ork’s knees buckled, but it pushed itself back to its feet with a roar of defiance.
 	It lunged at Renius again, just as a rune panel blew out in front of him and sprayed the pair with white-hot plasma. Renius got the worst of it, but the ork had no armour to protect it. For a second time, it staggered, clutching its hands to its eyes. It was blind and helpless, just awaiting the mercy of a killing blow.
 	Sicarius returned his focus to his own fight. He blocked the big mek’s next swing at him with his Tempest Blade, but shifted too much weight onto his left foot in the process. The bullet in his leg squirmed again, and he all but fell into a mighty, power-assisted punch to his jaw. He rolled with the blow, because it gave him the space he badly needed to reemploy his plasma pistol.
 	Khargask was panting eagerly, sensing his enemy’s weakness. He held himself in check long enough to finger a rune panel on his arm. A pair of pylons strapped to his back burst into ozone-stinking life and projected a luminous, close-fitting aura around him. The way the aura popped and crackled, it surely couldn’t endure for long – it had to be a drain on whatever power source he was using – but while it did, the big mek was well-protected.
 	He bore down on Sicarius, straight through a hail of plasma, which his force field comfortably deflected. He mauled and clawed and even bit at his armoured foe again. He succeeded in breaking the seals on Sicarius’s helmet, so the smoke that wreathed the control room seeped into his nose and throat.
 	Renius’s voice broke through the fog: ‘–can’t power down the engines. The only thing I can do is try to starve them of air, make them stall before they–’
 	A claw arm jabbed through Khargask’s force field, and Sicarius caught it. With a laboured grunt of effort, he ripped the arm from its harness and set about the big mek with the sparking end. He hoped that some of the strength of his blows might make it through the field, or that he might be able to overload it.
 	Khargask shrugged off his efforts and responded with another shooter burst. Sicarius tried to twist out of the way of the bullets, but his injured leg betrayed him – as he had known it eventually would – and he found himself falling. He caught himself, just, on his hands and rolled onto his back, his pistol flaring wildly and in vain. Khargask took a moment to stand astride his downed opponent, with his ugly face twisted into an even uglier sneer, savouring the taste of victory.
 	Sicarius snarled up at him. ‘Enjoy it while you can, you brainless brute, because your schemes have come to nothing. Your engines don’t work and we’re all about to be blown to bloody–’
 	Khargask’s sneer froze. His eyepiece, even broken, must have warned him of imminent danger. He dived for cover as a fusillade of explosive bolt-rounds churned up the floor where he had been standing. A mass of solid blue armour came plummeting through the vent hole in the ceiling, landing with an impact that threatened to knock everyone else off their feet.
 	It was Ultracius, of course; and behind him appeared Brother Filion, his power armour scratched, dented and burned but his chainsword dripping dark ork blood from its teeth and howling for yet more. ‘Orders, captain?’ he requested.
 	The remaining ork meks were abandoning their rune panels, realising perhaps that there was nothing more they could do, seeing their enemies among them, and seeing a precious chance for a good fight. ‘Brother Filion, deal with them,’ Sicarius ordered as he pushed himself to his feet. ‘Ultracius, you too. Ensure that Renius’s work is not interrupted.’ The Dreadnought and the big mek had been squaring up to each other, as the former ignited his power fist. Sicarius was grateful for the respite that Ultracius had given him, but Khargask was his and his alone.
 	He readied the Tempest Blade.
 	He hurled himself at his enemy’s back and thrust his blade through a gap between the flickering bands of the ork’s failing force field. The sword’s energy field spluttered and screamed as Sicarius jammed the weapon into a vent in Khargask’s makeshift servo-harness. Machine-spirits danced and buzzed around his gauntlets in impotent fury, as the big mek’s mechanical arms went limp and the force field sputtered and died.
 	Khargask pitched forwards and took Sicarius’s blade with him. He was staggering under the dead weight of his useless servo-arms. He made one final attempt to bring his shooter to bear, but Sicarius was waiting for him and fired when he saw the angry red of the ork’s remaining eye.
 	This time, his plasma rounds thudded into green ork flesh and mined wells of viscous ork blood. Still weighed down by his broken accoutrements, Khargask stumbled backwards and flailed into an instrument bank. For the second time, he was wreathed in dancing energy; but this time it was hurting him, scorching his skin. His single eye rolled back into his head, a mixture of blood and snot dribbled from his snout and he crumpled and slid to the floor.
 	Ultracius was making short work of the remaining meks, with the able but almost unnecessary assistance of Filion. It felt as if the star fort was shaking itself apart, and the greenskins were struggling to stay upright, let alone fight.
 	Sicarius was fighting to stay on his feet too, and to cross the room to Renius. He was finding it difficult to breathe. His armour was pumping air to his nostrils, but too much of it was escaping through the cracks in his artificer plate. Throwing out his hands, he fell heavily into a rune panel beside his red-armoured brother.
 	‘I’m no Techmarine,’ he growled, ‘but it seems to me we’re out of time. Can you stop those engines or can’t you?’ If the answer was negative, then he and his brothers – his entire company – were about to die… and the Indestructible would be lost too. Sicarius would have failed in his mission.
 	Renius hesitated for a moment, then made a decision. He plunged his claw arm through one of the rune panels in front of him. He shattered dials and switches and yanked out bundle after bundle of tangled wires, wrenching them from their roots. Sicarius opened his mouth to yell something at him over the roars of the engines, then realised that, abruptly, the sounds of the engines had ceased. The star fort had stopped trembling too.
 	Everything seemed preternaturally still, for a moment.
 	Then the floor dropped out from underneath him.
 
 
 	CHAPTER XV


 	Sicarius woke to a barrage of vox-chatter in his ear.
 	His chrono told him he had been out for almost eight minutes. His auto-injectors were pumping him full of stimulants. He could feel weight pressing down on top of him. The roof of the control room and much of the Grand Chamber above it had collapsed onto his head. Either that or the floor had rushed up and smashed him into the roof; perhaps both had happened.
 	The weight that pinned him was shifting, lightening a little. Someone was digging their way towards him. He had fallen on his hands, so he could easily brace himself and start to lever himself upwards. He felt debris sloughing off his back. He heard a booming, mechanical voice, but not through his comm-bead. It was Ultracius, welcoming him back to the land of the living.
 	‘We didn’t jump?’ Sicarius checked. ‘We’re still on the Agides moon?’
 	‘Dropped like a stone and landed hard, Knight of Talassar,’ the Dreadnought confirmed. ‘A lot of Krieg men didn’t make it – the impact turned their bones to jelly. No shields to protect the star fort this time, either. The tech-priests won’t salvage much from it.’
 	At least they’d be able to salvage something, Sicarius thought. Their clandestine project had been a failure, anyway, he could certainly tell them that.
 	Ultracius was working slowly but methodically, with one giant hand. He wrenched a heavy plasteel beam from the wreckage and tossed it over his shoulder, almost casually. Sicarius found that he could stand now. The fires in the engine control room had been extinguished, but the smoke of them lingered. Nearby, an Apothecary in white armour was tending to a pair of casualties. Filion was already trying to sit up; Lumic must have fallen from the floor above and was ominously still.
 	Sicarius voxed Lucien and asked how many battle-brothers they had lost. He responded with Gallo’s name and ten others. Each one was a tragedy, but Sicarius knew the list could have been much longer. He hesitated to ask the next question: ‘And what of the Krieg regiment?’
 	‘Still counting their dead,’ Lucien told him, gruffly.
 	Sicarius picked his way across the room to where the body of the ork’s big mek lay, half-buried. Khargask’s hand twitched, but it must have been a post-mortem spasm or perhaps a shock from his still-sparking servo-harness. Sicarius’s auspex detected no breath on his lips, and confirmed that his body heat had all but dissipated.
 	He turned the body over with his foot and wrestled his sword out of its back. He ignited the energy field, which flared into life. Sicarius smiled. Like his tortured armour, the Tempest Blade had served its purpose well.
 	He raised the blade and sliced through Khargask’s thick neck. He picked up the ork boss’s head by one of its tusks.
 	Sicarius didn’t need a trophy. He had, however, heard Khargask’s name spoken too often for his liking. He was dangerously close to becoming a legend to some; and legends were difficult, almost impossible, to kill.
 	The Imperial Navy would want to announce the Indestructible’s recapture to the galaxy. They would want all faithful servants of the Emperor and His enemies alike to know that its hijacker, the upstart ork, had paid for his transgressions. The story of the star fort’s loss would still be told, but now it would have a new and more apposite ending. A whispered rumour of the Imperium’s folly would become a cautionary tale of its bloody and righteous vengeance.
 	It would behove the Lord High Admiral to have tangible, unequivocal proof of his claims; Sicarius would present him with exactly that. He tied the ork’s head to his belt, unceremoniously.
 	He scaled a mountain of debris, which slipped and shifted beneath him every finger- and toehold of the way. He was having to drag his injured left leg behind him, and more than once he almost suffered a fall that would have been embarrassing if not actually injurious to him. My body requires repairs, Sicarius thought ruefully, as badly as my armour does.
 	He clambered up through the wreckage of the Grand Chamber, out through its double doors. The atrium beyond was relatively intact, though cluttered with greenskin corpses. Brother Gallo’s body was here too, lying where it had fallen. No lumoglobes had survived the star fort’s crash – its second crash – but pale starlight leaked through narrow windows and cracks in the walls.
 	The slope of the floor was steeper than it had been before. Sicarius had to hold on to the walls to keep his footing. He headed downward and westward, towards the brightest light source. A fading heat trail, detected by his auspex, suggested that someone had recently come this way: the Apothecary, he hoped.
 	He ducked beneath a half-collapsed archway and emerged into the light.
 	The Indestructible’s basilica towered, battered but defiant, behind him.
 	Sicarius looked out over the stepped layers of two of its quadrants, towards the labyrinth of Krieg trenches in the near-distance. The star fort’s brief flight had taken it right back to where it had started. It was cradled by the same impact crater that its first and more violent crash landing had created.
 	The damage, this time, was more extensive, as Ultracius had intimated. Many of the star fort’s hangars and weapons bays had crumbled into each other. There were bodies, hundreds of bodies, sprawled across them. Many of them belonged to Khargask’s brutish followers; more of them, the majority, did not.
 	He removed his helmet, to feel fresh air on his face again. He remembered that the air of this tiny moon was poisonous, so he couldn’t risk breathing it for long, though his genhanced body would filter the worst of it. Sergeant Lucien had already contacted their orbiting battle-barge and had them send the Thunderhawks. Sicarius would welcome their timely arrival.
 	He heard a skittering of adamantium chips above him.
 	A squealing, scrabbling something landed heavily on his shoulders. A gretchin, he realised, had concealed itself behind one of the decorative gothic mouldings, waiting for a target to pass beneath it.
 	He wondered if it had waited especially for him, if it possessed the intellect to identify his captain’s insignia. Had it not been for its abominable xenos nature, he might have admired its gall. Its ork masters were dead and their plans, quite literally, in ruins. It could have slinked away and perhaps survived; instead, it was taking one final, desperate chance to do harm to its enemies.
 	The gretchin stabbed at Sicarius’s eyes with a knife.
 	Having heard it coming, however, he was already in motion. He dropped to his good right knee before it could secure a grip on him. Its blade thrust went awry and the gretchin’s feet shot out from underneath it. It bounced off Sicarius’s left shoulder and he caught it with his right hand. The wiry creature squirmed fiercely in his grip and slashed at his armoured fingers with its blade. He drove its head into the wall of the basilica behind him, dampening its defiance by cracking its skull.
 	He tossed the gretchin over an ornamental balustrade. It cleared two of the star fort’s outer storeys to end up smeared across the third. Sicarius thanked the Emperor for a fortuitous escape. Small and weak as the creature had been, it might still have blinded him or worse. He could have been the captain who had lost an eye to an imp, an object lesson that no foe should ever be underestimated.
 	He clambered over the balustrade himself, and lowered himself to the next level and then the next. Beneath him, he saw Death Korpsmen digging through the wreckage to their dead. Did they never rest, he wondered? He thought, at first, that they were trying to extricate their late brothers-in-arms for burial. They seemed more interested, however, in salvaging what they could of their equipment.
 	Some of his Ultramarines were assisting with that effort, in lieu of further orders, while others had weapons and armour of their own to patch up.
 	The Indestructible’s western-facing ramparts were lower than they had been, thanks to its new and more pronounced list. It was possible to hop from them to the ground; at least, it was for someone wearing power armour. In the star fort’s shadow, Sicarius saw a Korpsman – or rather, a Korpsman’s peaked cap – that he recognised, and knew that he ought to face its wearer.
 	Commissar Dast was busy coordinating the recovery effort. Sicarius waited for him to take a breath before he approached him. He congratulated the commissar on his regiment’s loyal service. ‘Had your men not fought so hard and so well, then Khargask would have had more orks to protect his engine room. This war might have ended very differently, and more tragically for all of us.’
 	That said, he asked how many Krieg men had been lost.
 	‘Our quartermasters are still counting the bodies,’ said Dast. ‘I expect the final tally to be close to eighteen hundred.’ If he felt any bitterness about that, his tone didn’t betray it. Close to eighteen hundred lives, thought Sicarius. Almost ninety per cent of their original strength. He knew how he would feel were he ever to lose ninety battle-brothers to a single mission.
 	‘The most remarkable thing is,’ a voice interjected from behind him, ‘that, while we are screening and conditioning and training and implanting new, raw recruits to replace our fallen battle-brothers, the 319th Krieg Siege Regiment will be back up to full strength and fighting for the Emperor in a matter of months.’
 	The voice belonged to Sergeant Lucien, who had walked up behind Sicarius as he and Dast conversed. ‘Isn’t that right, Commissar Dast?’ Lucien asked pointedly, though he didn’t meet the commissar’s blank-eyed gaze. He had noticed the big mek’s skull attached to Sicarius’s belt and was admiring that instead.
 	Sicarius detected a brief hesitation before Dast answered. ‘That’s right,’ he agreed. ‘The Death Korps of Krieg is, ah, indestructible.’
 	He turned smartly on his heel and strode away.
 	‘The Astra Militarum has a medal,’ Lucien told his captain, ‘the Triple Skull. It is awarded to survivors of campaigns where the casualty rate has been extremely high. We ought to recommend the survivors of the Krieg 319th for that honour. Their captain should be awarded the Winged Skull for his inspirational leadership.’
 	Sicarius nodded, silently.
 	‘Never did a man of them flinch from his duty,’ Lucien continued. ‘Never did they question what the Emperor would have them do, nor stand back and hope that someone else would offer his life in their stead. I wish you could have seen them as I did, captain, for you would have been as proud of them as I am.’
 	An approaching scream of engines drew Sicarius’s eyes to the sky.
 	Ultracius and the others had just emerged from inside the Indestructible, carrying Gallo and Lumic between them. Sicarius hadn’t seen Renius since he had woken. He wasn’t listed among the dead, however. He had likely descended to the star fort’s buried bowels, to sift through the remnants of the Adeptus Mechanicus’s precious engines. 
 	Sicarius set out across the cold, dark plain to meet the first of the arriving Thunderhawk transport ships. There were other battles to be fought, and more glory to be won.