Black Leviathan 
Ben Counter


 
 
 Chapter One


 	‘Where the enemy thinks himself strong, show him weakness. Where he thinks you weak, show strength. But beware all such perfidy, for every general may fall prey to believing his own lie.’


 	– Codex Astartes

 	‘We keep our secrets. Some of them, even from ourselves.’

 	The man who spoke had not removed the helmet of his power armour. His livery was jade and black with the stylised image of a dragon on one shoulder pad. Dense patterns of swirls and dots covered one greave and one forearm, giving the impression that they meant something that could only be deciphered with an understanding of their intricate code. In the dim light of the Polar Defiance’s map room, ebon eyepieces glittered in the faceplate.

 	‘So I understand,’ said Captain Devynius. ‘What little I have been told of your Chapter emphasises that above everything else. But the Ultramarines share their counsel with their allies and I expect you to do the same. Sergeant Seanoa, is that correct?’

 	‘It is,’ replied Seanoa. 

 	‘Have you been briefed on our mission?’

 	‘The destruction of opposition to Imperial occupation in the city of Port Memnor,’ replied Seanoa bluntly.

 	‘That is one way of putting it,’ said Devynius. He tried to read some expression from the other Space Marine’s body language, but he found none. It was the custom among the Ultramarines to remove the helmet of one’s power armour when addressing another Space Marine away from the battlefield – perhaps this Seanoa’s Chapter did not share the same custom, or perhaps he was reminding Devynius that a Space Marine of one Chapter could not assume the subservience of another. He decided to give Seanoa the benefit of the doubt, for now. ‘I would rather avoid destruction as much as possible. Port Memnor is an Imperial city and one which has been loyal to the Emperor’s rule for thousands of years.’

 	‘One that requires subjugation now the alien has its claws into it,’ replied Seanoa. ‘This ship has orbital bombardment capability. Not equal to the Exterminatus but more than enough for our purposes. You realise, do you not, that this mission could be completed in a matter of minutes, with the push of a button?’

 	‘This mission, perhaps,’ replied Devynius. ‘But the occupation that follows will be ten times harder. The casualties among innocent civilians will set the population against us. The Imperial Guard would have to garrison the city in force if we were to use the spaceport, and that is manpower the war for Agrellan cannot afford to spare. We will do this my way, Sergeant Seanoa. The Ultramarines way, with honour and respect for the people whose Imperium we serve.’

 	‘You are in command, Captain Devynius,’ said Seanoa, and Devynius was sure both men understood how little that meant. 

 	‘We are three days out from Briseis,’ said Devynius. ‘I need full mission parameters drawn up by then. It is time you saw the prisoner.’

 	Both Agrellan and its near neighbour Briseis, as far as any could tell, were settled during the Scattering at the same time. That ancient migration of mankind across the stars, to every edge of the galaxy, had placed on Agrellan and Briseis colonies of humans that could not support themselves on an alien world. Both colonies had collapsed and reverted to the savagery that now prevailed on countless such worlds across the Imperium.

 	Agrellan had rebuilt its society and come to prosper. In the age of the Imperium it was a hive-world, a vast population supported by many-layered cities devoted to industry, the tracts between the cities drained of resources so the planet had to be fed by nearby agri worlds. Briseis had stayed barbaric until thousands of years after Agrellan’s urbanisation and only comparatively recently, over the last two or three thousand years, had the Imperially-founded city of Port Memnor become the capital of the planet’s population and society. 

 	Then the Damocles Gulf war had come, the second conflict over that reach of space between the Imperium and the xenos. And Agrellan had found itself the front line.

 	‘Open the shutters,’ came a voice piped in over the vox-casters. Two crewmen cranked the handle that raised the shutters covering the viewing windows, revealing the inside of the cell. The brig on the Polar Defiance resembled a dungeon of sweating steel, cold and functional, its locks and doorways hand-operated and mechanical to keep the place secure in case the power failed. Even the light came from torches burning in sconces on the walls. 

 	Inside the cell was a single figure crouched on the floor, its long limbs folded up around it. The bed and ablutions vessel were the only furniture in there with it. Even before its face became fully visible, its proportions were clearly inhuman.

 	‘I faced the greenskins a dozen times,’ said Devynius’s fellow Ultramarine, Brother-Sergeant Thaxos. ‘Tyranids, too. Huge bloody monsters that would tear your face off without knowing you were there. This thing doesn’t look like much of an enemy.’

 	Thaxos wore the white trim of a veteran on his blue power armour, his dark and battered skin broken by the studs of silver implanted on his forehead to denote the length of service he had given as a sergeant of the Ultramarines. Devynius was well aware that Thaxos was older than he, and yet Devynius was of the higher rank. Thaxos served as much as an advisor to Devynius as the sergeant of his command squad. When Devynius had been told that he would have only one squad of Ultramarines with which to prosecute this mission, he had chosen Squad Thaxos.

 	‘An enemy need not hold a gun to threaten us,’ said Devynius. ‘More than most, this one’s weapon is cunning and lies.’

 	‘Our only weapon,’ replied the alien, ‘is the truth.’

 	Its voice was dry and sibilant, like the shifting of sand. It unfolded its long arms and legs and stood. It had been given a crewman’s blue jumpsuit to wear, the arms and legs of the jumpsuit barely reaching its knees and elbows but hanging baggily around its narrow shoulders and chest. Its face was far too long compared to that of a human, with an elongated hairless cranium, two huge pure black eyes, and a thin, wide mouth. It had no nose, instead breathing through a slit that ran from the middle of its forehead to level with the lower edge of its eyes. Its skin was blue-grey, though in the cell it had become paler and duller.

 	‘First one I’ve seen in the flesh,’ said Thaxos. ‘Not sure what the fuss is all about.’

 	The alien put a hand against the toughened glass wall of the cell. It leaned forward, peering at Thaxos as if he was the prisoner and the alien was the interrogator. ‘The first step is to think upon what you are,’ it said. ‘And what you are permitted to be. When you comprehend the gulf between them, then you will turn to the Greater Good.’

 	‘It can’t stop,’ said Devynius, looking back at the alien. ‘Even when it is in chains.’

 	‘I speak only what you know is true,’ the alien replied.

 	Thaxos drew his combat blade. Its monomolecular edge flickered in the torchlight. ‘Would you like to hear my reply?’ he said.

 	A shutter on the wall behind Devynius rattled open, revealing Sergeant Seanoa. Two of his squad were with him and their armour showed the same tangles of symbolic designs, though less intricate than the sergeant’s. 

 	‘A living tau,’ said Devynius, indicating the alien. ‘Not so rare in itself, but this one is of their diplomatic caste. The water caste, they call them. These are not so commonly taken alive.’

 	‘Where did you get it?’ asked Seanoa. Even with his face hidden beneath his helmet, his disdain was clear – no, thought Devynius, not disdain, not the contempt a Space Marine should feel for the xenos. It was a detachedness, like that of a scientist examining something on a slide or performing experiments on something he had long since stopped thinking of as a living creature.

 	‘Inquisitorial agents brought it out of the Chrono-Wright’s District of Port Memnor,’ replied Devynius. ‘It’s a tau emissary, primed to create sedition and defection among Imperial citizens. Its Low Gothic is perfect. It has knowledge of Imperial history and institutions, too. They have been watching us, these xenos.’

 	‘What has it told us?’

 	‘All about the Greater Good,’ said Devynius. ‘And about how a Space Marine can become all that his Emperor intended him as a part of the Tau Empire.’

 	‘It does know what we are?’ said Seanoa.

 	‘If they don’t know now, they soon will,’ said Brother Thaxos. ‘The Raven Guard and the White Scars are fighting them across Agrellan. They’ll have to learn a whole lot more about the Space Marines if they want to take one of the Emperor’s worlds from us.’

 	‘We will not take anything,’ said the alien, which had not flinched even to be confronted by five Space Marines. ‘Agrellan will join us as surely as the day comes to join the dawn. Its people will decide your battle, not your soldiers or ours, and they will choose the Greater Good.’

 	‘What is this Greater Good?’ asked Seanoa.

 	‘Whatever benefits the tau,’ said Devynius. 

 	‘Thus do small minds speak of it,’ interjected the alien. ‘When they do not have the strength to understand.’

 	‘The corruption you have brought to Agrellan means millions of people will die,’ retorted Devynius. ‘That does no good for anyone.’

 	‘Would that the Greater Good could exist without conflict, and that all would walk into its embrace without resistance,’ said the tau, its voice almost hypnotically level. ‘But it is a good greater than the lives of those who must be lost to see it become reality. It is worth the bloodshed. It is worth anything, for it is to the betterment of all.’

 	‘Their fire caste warriors are on Agrellan fighting for its hive cities,’ said Devynius, ‘but on Briseis, this is the enemy. Words and lies. Already Port Memnor has been compromised and there is no way we can guarantee its safety for Imperial use if we do not weed out the xenophile faction first. That is the mission for which we have been chosen. We are stretched too thin to take Port Memnor and the spaceport by main force so we must do it with guile and swiftness instead, with our two squads and a devotion to honour and victory. That is why I have shown you this alien, Sergeant Seanoa. This is our enemy, not the people of Briseis.’

 	Seanoa regarded the xenos for a moment longer. The alien finally fell silent and backed down when confronted with Seanoa’s eyepieces, as if it could see through to the pitiless face underneath. 

 	‘What will you do with it?’ Seanoa said at length.

 	‘Keep it,’ said Devynius. ‘As long as it is useful.’

 	‘When it learns what befell its brothers on Briseis,’ said Seanoa, ‘it will envy them that the end came so quickly.’

 	At an invisible signal, Seanoa’s two squadmates marched out of the brig, the shutter clattering down behind them. Devynius pressed a control stud on the wall and the shutters fell down over the cell walls, too, and the alien was hidden from view again.

 	‘Jade Dragons,’ said Thaxos, an impressed note in his voice. ‘I never thought I’d see them in the flesh, either.’

 	The defence laser batteries surrounding the spaceport of Port Memnor could not be trusted. They were ostensibly still in the hands of the Imperial government of Briseis, but every strata of the city’s society had been compromised by the tau water caste emissaries and it was too great a risk to bring a spacecraft within reach of them. If the Polar Defiance attempted to make low orbit to drop transports that could land at the spaceport, xenophiles hidden among the gun crews could shoot the transports down and have a good chance of bringing the cruiser itself down after them. Devynius therefore took his small force of Space Marines down to the surface of Briseis by shuttle, landing beyond the city’s outskirts – a cumbersome way of making landfall without the swiftness and shock the Space Marines normally made use of, but better than having the mission end before it began in a rain of burning wreckage.

 	The four shuttles made landfall in a forest of cairns, tumbledown dry-stone structures where ancient chieftains and kings were buried. It was a sacred place, a shallow bowl in the landscape formed by the low shale-covered hills surrounding it and the course of a long-dried river that had left its chemical stains on the rocky ground. Iridescent blue and green riddled the ground like alien blood trails, weaving around cairns and low tombs of shale slabs. The few plants that found purchase there shuddered in the downwash of the shuttles’ retro engines, flinty shards scattered by the impact as they touched down.

 	Each shuttle disgorged five Space Marines, spread out among the craft to minimise the crash risk. The jade and black armour of Seanoa’s squad stood out against the stony slopes. The Ultramarines gathered around Devynius as he jumped from the gunmetal shuttle and set foot on the planet Briseis for the first time.

 	‘Cheerful place,’ said Brother Thaxos as he jumped down behind Devynius. ‘Lovely view.’

 	‘A place the people of Briseis made their home for tens of thousands of years,’ replied Devynius. ‘They were nomads before the Imperium founded Port Memnor. They followed the seasons and came by here once a year, to bury their dead.’

 	‘You are quite the historian, captain.’

 	‘I read my intelligence, Thaxos,’ replied Devynius.

 	‘I’m amazed the sky didn’t drive them mad first,’ said Thaxos, looking upwards.

 	Briseis had a breathable atmosphere, but it clung to the world in a thin and precarious layer. Light from the system’s star did not have to pass through the many layers of gas and dust of a deeper atmosphere and as a result the sky was permanently the black of the void, scattered with stars and including the hot bright diamond of the Dovar System’s sun. Agrellan itself hung among the stars, the blue-green of polluted oceans blooming out from continents as grey as ash or brown as dirt, blistered with the radiating black tendrils of the planet’s hive cities. 

 	On the horizon, past the slate hills sharp as knives, rose the spires of Port Memnor. The generatorium exhaust towers spewed grey smoke, between them the wider squat coolant towers rippling heat haze up past the stars. Hab-towers and communication masts were dark grey against the black. Somewhere below that skyline was a nest of xenophiles, heretics who had forsaken the Imperium of Man in favour of easy answers promised by an alien. Devynius’s duty was to root them out, and the demand of his honour as an Ultramarine was to do so with a minimum of violence to the innocent and loyal who made up the majority of the city’s population.

 	Devynius took out the auspex scanner and activated its screen, displaying the many maps of the city that Imperial intelligence had provided. He selected one of the outskirts, a tangle of sewers and processing plants that siphoned off the by-products of Port Memnor’s industries. 

 	‘Seanoa!’ voxed Devynius, and the Jade Dragons sergeant approached. ‘I will take my men to the entry point immediately. I suggest you enter the city by the south-west gate and make your way to the southern transportation hub. From there you can get to most areas of the city quickly.’

 	‘I would take the fight to the xenophiles,’ said Seanoa. ‘It is not the way of my Chapter to wait in reserve for the enemy to make his move.’

 	‘This operation will be conducted my way,’ replied Devynius, the tone of his voice aimed at cutting off any argument. ‘You have your orders, sergeant.’

 	Seanoa did not reply but turned back to his men and, with a gesture, set them off on the quick march towards scree-sloped hills and the port city beyond.

 	‘I don’t like him,’ said Thaxos over the Ultramarines squad vox, watching the Jade Dragons blend in and almost vanish among the rocks of Briseis’s wilderness.

 	‘Do you like anyone?’ asked Devynius.

 	‘There are some I tolerate,’ said Thaxos. 

 	The Ultramarines were already moving, heading for a cleft in the hills. The trickle of a foul effluent river glittered there, a mix of industrial chemicals. The river’s source was the processing district of the city, where the Ultramarines would enter Port Memnor.

 	‘In through the bloody sewers,’ said Brother Merovos, who carried the squad’s plasma gun in its sling at his side. 

 	‘That’s what you get for being the saviours of mankind,’ said Thaxos cheerfully. ‘You have to cover yourself in ordure before you can cover yourself in glory.’

 	‘Conduct yourselves like Space Marines,’ voxed Devynius sharply, and the squad moved off towards the city.

 
 
 Chapter Two


 	‘There is no enemy so mighty in body that he cannot be defeated by the addling of his mind.’


 	– Codex Astartes

 	Down among the lowest levels of the Chrono-Wrights’ District, among the foundation piles of the workshops and hab-blocks, were the tombs. The Imperial founders had built Port Memnor on the site of one of Briseis’s only permanent settlements, a necropolis whose inhabitants were a cursed and unclean tribe who made their homes among burial places of past kings. The tombs here had not been used for millennia, and in the unclean pits of bone and crumbling slate the meeting occurred by guttering torchlight.

 	The humans wore industrial rebreathers, the same kind that kept the worst of the metallic pollutants out of their lungs as they laboured in the workshops. Half a dozen of them guarded the elder, a bent and greying woman who seemed weighed down by the mask around her mouth. She walked with a staff that might have been a badge of office or might have been a simple necessity given the unsteadiness of her step as the guards led her across the uneven ground. The robes of her station, the deep green of the Thundercliff tribe, were mostly hidden beneath protective coveralls. Only the braids in her hair and the black ash markings on her face were obvious indicators of her exalted status among the old tribes of Briseis.

 	The aliens were waiting. Like the elder, the emissary had come here guarded, a trio of fire caste warriors standing alongside him. Their faces were hidden in their featureless helms, painted a dark orange-brown to go with the desert fatigues they wore. Each was armed with a rifle of alien design, shaped like nothing that had ever come from an Imperial weaponsmith. The emissary was taller and more spindly than his guards, for his caste did not do the ugly, base work of fighting. His own vestments were orange and black, shimmering and lustrous, and he jangled with the lengths of segmented metals forming a code to describe his rank and deeds.

 	‘To look upon you,’ said the elder of the Thundercliff, ‘I wonder not why the Imperium fears you so.’

 	‘It is natural for humans to recoil from the sight of the alien,’ replied the emissary. His Low Gothic was perfect, even weaving in the dialect and accent of Briseis’s old tribes. ‘The small-minded allow such things to rule their thoughts, but the wise examine them and rise above them.’

 	‘I do not recoil,’ said the elder. ‘The Thundercliff have seen worse.’

 	‘I am glad to hear it,’ said the emissary. ‘I have requested your presence here because we have detected Imperial forces landing near the city. The resistance against the Imperium must be stepped up. Fortunately we have foreseen this and with your assistance, the Imperial yoke shall be cast off and the independence of Briseis assured.’

 	‘That reminds me,’ said the elder. She clapped her hands and one of the tribesmen stepped forwards, handing the tau emissary a bundle wrapped in stained cloth. The emissary nodded a bow in appreciation and unwrapped the bundle.

 	If he was surprised to see a battered human head in his hand, he did not show it. The skin was pale grey, the hair matted black with blood, and from the smell of it putrefaction had been going on for a few days. 

 	‘The information about the Imperial spies in the city came from this man,’ the elder said. ‘Such knowledge being drained from him, he was executed. I trust you are not so different from us that you do not exalt in the severed heads of your enemies?’

 	‘Quite so,’ said the emissary, handing the head to one of his guards. ‘The Imperium’s agents may believe they have infiltrated us, but they know nothing of the true scale of our resistance. They know no more of our plans than it suits us to tell them.’

 	‘There was a time,’ said the elder, ‘when a spy among us would have been cast off the cliffs into the beast pits. He would have been devoured from the feet up, and begged us to kill him. We would have stared down at him as he died, and drunk deep of the anguish on his face as we gave him only silence. Now, we just cut off his head. We have become soft. I would go back to those days, emissary.’

 	‘You will,’ said the alien. ‘I promise you that. For the Greater Good.’

 	‘For our good,’ replied the elder.

 	‘The enemy will be at our gates in a matter of hours,’ said the emissary, his tone unchanged despite the challenge. ‘We will contact you with what must be done. You will need this.’ One of the fire caste warriors stepped forward holding a roll of hide. The emissary took it from him and let a length of it unravel to the tomb floor. It was gnarled and scaly, scarred all over as if by massive claws and pocked with clusters of barnacles. It smelled of the deep sea and rot. 

 	‘What is this?’ asked the elder, not hiding the distaste on her face.

 	‘A standard,’ said the emissary. ‘Of great power and import. I ask that you trust us, as you have so graciously thus far, when we instruct you as to its use.’

 	The tribesmen took the banner between them – it was too heavy for one man to carry. Trickles of stinking water spattered onto the floor of the tombs.

 	‘You instruct us often,’ said the elder. ‘You do not call them orders, but we are no fools. The Imperium is a common enemy to us, but you are still an alien and this is still our world. Take care not to forget that, or our greater good may prove not to coincide with your own.’

 	‘Our people are philosophers,’ said the emissary. ‘We have dedicated the life of our species to understanding what truly is good in life, and how best to spread that truth to those deserving of it. You deserve the Greater Good, people of Briseis. Trust us.’

 	The elder did not reply. She gestured to her guards and left with the banner, leaving the emissary and his fire caste warriors in the darkness beneath Port Memnor.

 	The operation did not have an auspicious start, for it began down among the filth of Port Memnor, the industrial run-off from a thousand workshops and the city’s enormous generatorium. Through the brown-black slurry the Ultramarines forged, the deep blue of their armour stained with abrasive chemicals, the rebreathers built into their helmets keeping their lungs intact against the corrosive fumes. Captain Devynius’s helmet was topped with a transverse crest to mark him out in the chaos of battle – it dragged along the top of the sewer and was now a clotted black nest of rat’s tails. At least he had not worn the cloak which bore the markings of his rank and achievements.

 	‘It’s right above us,’ voxed Brother Silen, taking point and reading the squad’s location from his auspex scanner. Devynius checked the maps loaded onto his own auspex and saw Silen was correct.

 	‘Merovos!’ ordered Devynius. ‘Knock on the door!’

 	Brother Merovos hauled his plasma gun up out of the sludge. Its power coils warmed up and acidic vapour rose off the weapon as he aimed it at the ceiling of the tunnel, a seam between two long sections. The rest of the squad backed off as the power coils whined, warming up to full power.

 	The gun filled the sewer with the glare of its plasma bolt, and the upper section of the sewer vanished. A cloud of vaporised steel rushed down the sewer in both directions, and Devynius was forced back a step by the sudden burst of pressure.

 	‘Go!’ voxed Devynius. ‘Onward!’

 	Brother Silen was the first out, hauling himself up through the hole. At that point in the sewer the pipe came within a few centimetres of the floor above, forming a hidden breaching point. It wasn’t hidden any more, as Silen burst up with bolter in hand.

 	‘Citizens!’ yelled Silen, ‘Do not resist! We are the Emperor’s hand! We are the Angels of Death!’

 	It took a few seconds for the screaming to begin. In that time half the squad had made it through the breach, Devynius vaulting up onto the floor.

 	Through the roil of scalding vapour, the columns of the parliament building soared up to a vault painted with vengeful angels and celestial choirs. The throne of the Emperor, depicted as a great gilded chair with the occupant obscured by a glare of light, formed a centrepiece of a grand central panel.

 	Below, the marble-tiled floor was scattered with knots of dignitaries in the lavish garb of Briseis’s ruling class. The city’s industry was precision mechanics and the wealthy and powerful wore constructions of clockwork – tall periwigs adorned with automata of battling knights or ships at sea, mantles which placed cherubs with flapping wings on the wearer’s shoulder, spinning cogs and pistoning gears everywhere. The men and women looked with shock at the Ultramarines emerging from the evil-smelling cloud of industrial chemicals. Some of them were screaming at the sight of them.

 	The Angels of Death. The vengeful fist of the Emperor, the defenders of humanity and the scourge of the unrighteous. Every Imperial citizen knew of the Space Marines, the icon of Imperial might, of the divine right of humanity to rule the stars and the vengeance that would fall upon every heretic and alien. And now they were here, in Briseis’s parliament building, and terror struck everyone who saw them.

 	The shock of the first few seconds died down, and they ran. Devynius saw aged matriarchs, young rakes and grey-templed noblemen sprinting at the sight of the Ultramarines, scattering wigs and swagger-sticks in their wake.

 	‘No resistance,’ voxed Devynius. ‘Make all speed, brothers. To the council chamber!’

 	Briseis fell under the auspices of Agrellan’s Lord Governor but Port Memnor had its own government, an aristocratic oligarchy based on the world’s most powerful families and representatives from its old tribes. That aristocracy, all the intelligence suggested, had been infiltrated first. They had to be taken down. 

 	Grand stairs swept towards the upper floor, where a dozen entrances led to the upper galleries of the council chamber. Devynius ran his squad up them, bolters held ready.

 	Dignitaries were running everywhere, tumbling down the steps and falling over one another to get out of the way. Devynius ignored them. An Ultramarine held his focus, even when hell was breaking out around him.

 	The doors at the top of the stairway were closed. The assault’s timing had worked out – the Ultramarines had caught the council in session. The doorway opposite was formed by the wings of a great carved wooden eagle, its harsh jet eyes glaring down at anyone who dared approach the city’s seat of government.

 	Devynius ran to the doors and kicked one off its hinges, the wood splintering and the carved eagle’s head collapsing to the floor behind him.

 	More than five hundred nobles and plutocrats made up Port Memnor’s government council. Most of them were there for that session in the grand circular chamber, with its speaker’s throne on one side and the councilmen’s benches radiating out from the heap of sacred books and scrolls in the centre. Almost half that number again were made up by functionaries, manservants, observers and recorders in the galleries. All turned to look as the doors ripped inwards and Devynius stomped into the chamber.

 	‘Councilmen of Briseis,’ shouted Devynius. ‘The infiltration of the xenos and his lackey into your ranks has rendered you unfit to rule. You are relieved of government and are henceforth the Emperor’s to do with as He wills. The innocent have nothing to fear and the guilty will be rooted out. Until then, you are under arrest. Place yourselves…’

 	One of the councillors jumped to his feet. He was younger than most, handsome and dashing, the image of an Imperial nobleman. He wore the uniform of his family’s household guard, heavy with gilt, and the Port Memnor fashion for decorative clockwork saw the campaign medals and honorifics on his chest dazzle as they spun. 

 	‘As the emissaries said,’ he cried out, ‘they have come to kill us! Fight back, sons of Briseis! To arms! Here it begins!’

 	He ripped up the seat of the bench on which he had been sitting and took from it a rifle – not a las-weapon, standard armament of the Imperial Guard, nor a nobleman’s hunting rifle. Its long barrel was rectangular in cross-section, painted in the dark ochres of desert camouflage, and in the nobleman’s hands it looked awkward and uncomfortable as if it hadn’t been made for human dimensions.

 	The rest of the squad were charging in behind Devynius as the nobleman levelled the rifle at the Ultramarines captain.

 	Devynius dropped to one knee and rolled as the weapon fired. A bolt of blue energy speared through the wall behind him, shearing off some of the wooden feathers that remained of the carved eagle.

 	More of the councillors were breaking out weapons, many of them the long alien rifles, others shorter-barrelled guns that fired rapid bursts of blue-white energy. The dense wood of the benches and partitions were shredded even as the Ultramarines ducked down for cover.

 	People were dying already. Nobles and functionaries caught in the crossfire had huge holes punched through them, flesh cauterised and bone turned to ash as the energy bolts discharged and ripped them apart. The council chamber rang with screaming and the high shriek of the alien gunfire. Men and women were clambering over one another and being trampled underfoot as most made for the exits. Those who stood and fought were rallying to the first noble’s command, leaping into firing position and crying slogans of freedom and defiance.

 	‘Thaxos, take the throne!’ ordered Devynius as another burst of gunfire streaked over his head. ‘Fire-team, to me!’

 	Devynius’s squad operated as one in most circumstances but when required it split into two fire-teams, one led by Devynius and the other by the veteran Thaxos. Brother Merovos, part of Devynius’s team, slid into cover beside the captain as Thaxos broke cover and sprinted from one bank of wooden seating to the next.

 	Devynius heard Brother Silen yell and the Ultramarine fell to the floor beside him a moment later, clutching one arm to his chest. ‘Got my shoulder,’ gasped Silen. ‘Damn thing went through my armour. Alien tech. Xenophile filth.’ 

 	Devynius, Silen and Merovos were joined by Timesus and Vesuvio. The faceplate of Vesuvio’s helmet was scored through and glowing from a glancing hit – he tore the helmet from his head and cast it aside, revealing a crimson strip of burned skin across his face. ‘Too close, by Calth,’ he spat. ‘Too close for these gun-whelps to get.’

 	‘Return fire!’ ordered Devynius. He levelled his own bolt pistol over the cover and snapped off a handful of shots at the enemy – well over fifty enemies faced him across the chamber, rapidly forming up behind cover to lay down withering fire at the Space Marines. A knot of them, led by the uniformed noble, had set up by the heaps of books and scrolls at the centre of the room. The burning pages of Briseis’s ancient law-tomes fluttered down around them, ignited by the bursts of energy fire. 

 	Devynius caught the uniformed noble in the upper chest, the bolt pistol’s shell blasting one arm and shoulder away, leaving the head tottering on a shattered spine. The body flopped out of view. Vesuvio stood proud of cover and rattled off a thundering volley of bolter fire, blasting the cover of the books away and throwing another corpse against the front row of benches, blown almost clean in half through the abdomen.

 	The back of the bench in front of Devynius was coming apart, the wood splintering and charred from the energy fire. ‘Those are pulse rifles,’ he voxed. ‘They’ll go right through our cover. Close, brothers, close and kill!’ 

 	Merovos stood and sprayed a fusillade of bolts from his plasma gun, the power coils flaring as the fist-sized bolts of liquid power spattered across the hall. The heretics dived for cover as the fire rained down around them and Devynius led the charge into the break in return fire. He vaulted the bench and crunched through the burning wreckage around him, kicking through the furnishings until he reached the table of burning books. His fire-team were right behind him, firing as they ran.

 	Devynius drew his power sword from its scabbard at his waist. The enemy had the firepower – the pulse rifles were xenos weapons, tau weapons, and they used technology of a level the Imperium could not replicate. But the enemy were still just men, and as far as Devynius knew the tau had not yet developed any weapon the equal of an angry Space Marine fought face-to-face.

 	Devynius heard a high whine over the gunfire, the sound of something very powerful warming up. He glanced over the burning books and saw one of the nobles, a woman, throwing off the bulky hoop-skirted dress she wore to reveal off-white armour plates banded around her body. The elaborate clockwork automata perched on her shoulders had concealed twin pulse weapons mounted on the back of her armoured bodysuit, and they tracked to follow her eyes as she tried to pick out a target among the flames and bedlam of the chamber.

 	Devynius had gone through the intelligence the Inquisition’s spies had submitted about Port Memnor’s parliament. Several of the councillors were considered particularly influential among the populace, and one of them was the woman that Devynius now saw clad in tau-made combat armour firing volleys of pulse fire at his battle-brothers. He recognised the sharp, hard features and ice blue eyes of Lady Solheindal-Thess, representative of one of the city’s oldest and most respected families. The intel had made it very clear that she was a devout Imperial loyalist, and that she was one of the councillors whose survival was important to provide the city with loyal leaders during Imperial occupation.

 	The supposed loyalist blasted another volley at Brother Timesus, who rolled to the ground before the chain of fire took his head off.

 	Devynius leapt up onto the table, scattering burning books. Lady Solheindal-Thess was a couple of strides away and she turned her icy eyes towards Devynius as he broke cover. Twin scouring blasts of flame shot down from thruster units mounted over her shoulder blades and cast her into the air, firing a burning arc down at Devynius as she soared over him.

 	Devynius did not run. He trusted in his armour, artificer-crafted plate from the forges of Ultramar, to deflect the first couple of shots that thudded against his shoulder guard. He leapt at Lady Solheindal-Thess as she came down to land, letting his bolt pistol fall from his hand and clamp by its mag-lock to his forearm. He grabbed the xenophile’s ankle and dragged her down, slamming her into the floor.

 	The xenophile’s armour covered everything except her head in flexible plating, with the joints enhanced with pistons and servos to lend her greater strength and freedom of movement. The forearm armour reformed into a thin glowing blade that extended from the back of her hand.

 	‘Heretic!’ growled Devynius, grasping at the noblewoman’s bladed wrist.

 	‘This is no heresy,’ replied Lady Solheindal-Thess. ‘This is the future. We will bring you down.’

 	The blade lanced at Devynius’s face. Devynius grabbed her wrist and bent it back – it should have snapped in Devynius’s fist but the alien armour’s joints were reinforced and powered, and the noblewoman span underneath him and suddenly a second blade, extended from her other forearm, was cutting at his throat.

 	Devynius ducked back before his throat was slit. The blade sliced off a chunk of his shoulder guard. He brought his power sword down overhead, arcing down at the noblewoman. The jets on the back of her armour fired and threw herself over Devynius’s head again, her wrist still in his grip, as the sword came down and carved a deep furrow in the wooden floor. 

 	The noblewoman’s twin guns fired. Devynius let the armour of his shoulder guard and breastplate absorb two shots, and he pulled her in. The jets fought against him but Devynius put a foot against the frame of the burning book table and hauled her towards him.

 	Panic flared on her face. The defiance melted even as Devynius brought the power sword around at her. The twin pulse carbines swivelled to aim at Devynius’s face, just a thought needed to fire another point-blank burst into Devynius.

 	The sword sliced through Lady Solheindal-Thess at waist height. It passed straight through her, the power field carving through the armour plates around her abdomen and lower back. Devynius slammed the upper half of her into the table, crunching through the wood. She disappeared in a flood of burning pages.

 	Devynius dropped to one knee and took stock of the battle. Dozens were dead, draped over the councilmen’s benches or in heaps of burning finery on the floor. Some of them clutched the tau pulse rifles; others had simply been caught in the crossfire, blasted apart by bolter shells or pulse rounds.

 	Twenty or thirty of the xenophiles had formed an organised firebase, sniping at Devynius’s fire-team from behind the casings of a choir of notary servitors. The servitors’ casings were packed with enough clockwork to absorb the worst of the fire and the few whose pasty torsos had yet to be damaged continued to clack away with quill-tipped fingers, blank dead faces staring impassively across the corpse-choked chamber.

 	Brother Thaxos’s fire-team appeared among the sculptures of the throne, where the council’s speaker oversaw debates. It was of massive carved hardwood, the core of a gigantic single tree, solid enough to turn away the pulse rifle shots that spattered against it. Thaxos led his battle-brothers in hammering a wave of bolter fire into the servitors, throwing the xenophiles into cover and blasting ragged wet holes in those caught in the open.

 	The pulse fire coming towards Devynius died down. He strode through the remains of the burning table, dropping the severed lower half of Lady Solheindal-Thess. His own fire-team followed him as he flicked his bolt pistol back into his hand and lent his own fire to Thaxos’s, blasting the arm off a xenophile at the elbow as the man leaned out to snipe at the advancing Ultramarines. Brother Merovos vaporised a servitor with a blast of plasma and the xenophile behind it stumbled, burning, the rifle dropping from his hands.

 	In moments, Devynius’s fire-team were among them. Devynius had spent thousands of hours in the duelling circles and drilling-halls of the Ultramarines fortress-monastery on Macragge, and the muscle memory kicked in as he lashed out with his power sword. Thaxos’s fire-team ceased fire as Devynius struck off a head here, an arm there, impaled another heretic in the blade’s point and shot another through the chest with his bolt pistol. Brother Silen cracked a skull with the butt of his bolter and Devynius spotted Brother Timesus putting a shot through the head of a heretic struggling on the floor – Timesus’s arm hung loose at his side, blood turning the blue of his armour black.

 	It was over. The xenophiles were dead. Those who had tried to flee as Devynius charged had been shot down by Thaxos, who wore a generous handful of marksman’s honours hanging from the lower edge of his right pauldron and was known throughout the Chapter as an outstanding shot. Devynius waved his squad into a perimeter formation and walked through the debris towards the heap of burning books.

 	He pushed Lady Solheindal-Thess’s body out of the fire. Her face was largely untouched but the alien armour plates were blackened by the flames. Her eyes were open, a trickle of blood running from her mouth.

 	‘Thought she was one of ours,’ said Thaxos. ‘She was on the list, wasn’t she?’

 	‘She was,’ said Devynius. 

 	‘What is this she was wearing?’

 	‘Tau battlesuit technology,’ said Devynius. ‘They turn up among xenophile nobles from time to time. Symbols of rebellion and prestige. I doubt she bought it for hard cash, though. The tau bought her loyalty with their trinkets.’

 	‘Captain,’ said a trembling voice from nearby. ‘It is captain, isn’t it?’

 	Devynius saw a young nobleman picking himself up from one of the bullet-riddled benches. His face was bloody and he had torn away the jacket of his dark blue uniform. Tatters of silver brocade hung from his shoulder. He had the look of one who had trained for hunting and war but did not make it his vocation, too slight and pale to be a soldier. 

 	‘Devynius of the Ultramarines. You are?’

 	The nobleman was forcing himself not to look at the body of Lady Solheindal-Thess at Devynius’s feet. ‘Baron Maelenar,’ said the young man. ‘Of House Maelenar.’

 	Devynius consulted the screen of his auspex scanner, cycling through the intelligence reports on Briseis. House Maelenar-Kolgor was considered loyal, with a reasonable level of confidence. The baron had ascended to his rank after the recent death of his great-uncle, the house patriarch. There were no other notes on the young man. ‘Then House Maelenar is the first to stake its claim,’ said Devynius.

 	‘There will be great uncertainty,’ said Baron Maelenar, carefully picking his words. ‘The city will need leadership.’

 	‘That didn’t take long,’ said Thaxos. ‘And I take it his lordship is the one to provide it?’

 	‘My family is old,’ said the baron. ‘We have connections, and our loyalty is certain.’

 	‘That is what they said,’ replied Devynius, indicating the body of Lady Solheindal-Thess, ‘about her.’

 	‘And I am more aware than anyone of the consequences of disloyalty,’ said the baron. 

 	Devynius looked at this man, who had just seen family and friends shot down before his eyes, who had narrowly avoided joining them in the crossfire, and yet who even now was politicking his way towards supremacy for his house. It was not an attitude that endeared a man to a son of Ultramar like Devynius, but it also suggested someone who put political pragmatism above everything else and would do whatever he was told if it meant House Maelenar took power in Port Memnor and kept it. As unpleasant as the idea was, Baron Maelenar might be just the sort of man the Imperium needed.

 	‘You are the speaker of the council,’ said Devynius. ‘The Imperial war effort will make demands of you. Can you fulfil them?’

 	‘There are precedents,’ replied the baron. His colour was coming back and his voice was steadier – politicking was a world he was comfortable in, and engaging in it let him banish the events from a few minutes ago. ‘Emergency decrees. There is one that gives the speaker the power to select council members. It does not specify a number, so long as decisions are quorate. It was created in case the city was infected and carriers of an infectious disease had to be kept out of the chamber but I can enact it now and put loyal men into the council. There will be no legal hindrance to the demands of the Imperium.’

 	‘Do it,’ said Devynius.

 	‘When the bodies are gone,’ said the baron.

 	‘Now,’ said Devynius. ‘Brothers,’ he voxed to his squad. ‘Report. Casualties?’

 	‘I’ll need patching up,’ came the reply from Brother Timesus. ‘It’s more a humiliation than a hindrance.’

 	‘Took a hit to the thigh,’ added Brother Oiolas of Thaxos’s fire-team. ‘I’m still mobile.’

 	With the penetrative power of the tau pulse rifles, that was a fortunately low tally of casualties. Two hit, and neither badly. That was the only fortunate thing about the events of the last few minutes.

 	‘Why did they bring guns?’ asked Baron Maelenar. ‘And why in here, in the chamber?’

 	‘Because the tau wanted a bloodbath,’ replied Devynius. ‘If we had arrested the xenophiles quickly and quietly, the people of Port Memnor might never hear of it. The xenos gave their followers guns and told them to fight back if the Imperium played its hand, so there would be deaths that cannot be ignored. People like Lady Solheindal-Thess here were supposed to help stabilise the city so we could root out the xenophiles and take control of the spaceport without violence. Now, there will be violence. This scene will be repeated a hundred times in the streets. Look on the wages of conspiring with the alien, baron. The tau would see everyone in Port Memnor shot down like this if it meant they could deny the city to the Imperium.’

 	‘We must calm the population,’ said Baron Maelenar. ‘A gesture. A link between the Imperium and the people of Briseis, something significant. Magos Skepteris is the most senior official of the Imperium in the city. We will use her.’

 	‘Do it soon,’ said Devynius. ‘Word will be on the streets already.’

 	Functionaries and servitors were already picking through the carnage, finding survivors and summoning help. A few shocked-looking nobles and officials, evidently those who had experience with administering medical aid, were being herded into the chamber to staunch the bleeding of those who could be saved. Soon industrial servitors would be brought in to cart away the bodies and begin clearing the debris. Devynius didn’t know where Baron Maelenar would convene his new council, but it wouldn’t be here.

 	‘Your orders, captain?’ said Brother Thaxos. 

 	‘Withdraw to the Lawkeepers’ Precinct,’ said Devynius. ‘We can do no more good here. Space Marines bring fear wherever they go, even when we don’t want to. Our presence will make it impossible for the baron to calm things down.’

 	‘And then?’

 	‘The mission continues,’ said Devynius. ‘Our objectives are unchanged. This went poorly, but the xenophiles are gone from the city’s government. That at least has been accomplished. The spaceport remains our primary goal.’

 	‘Of course, captain. Brothers! Move out, we are done here!’

 	As the Ultramarines moved out of the chamber, a servitor dragged the two halves of Lady Solheindal-Thess out of the smouldering debris, beginning the long and perhaps impossible task of scouring the stain of death from Port Memnor’s parliament.

 	The Chrono-Wrights’ District was the heart of Port Memnor. It was the oldest quarter of the city and the centre of its precision engineering industry. Its buildings were the oldest in the city, the first constructed by the tribes brought together by the Imperial colonists, all age-rounded stone forming alleyways and switchbacks around hidden fountains and courtyards. Channels in the narrow streets siphoned away the heavy metals and toxins used in the countless small workshops, draining them away into the city’s sewers. The resulting chemical haze hanging around the district forced the younger labourers and artisans to wear rebreathers – the older ones had become immune to the effects, their lungs blistered and leathery like weather-beaten skin.

 	It was those older workers, the veterans of Chrono-Wrights’ District, who emerged first. It was a pre-appointed hour, passed by word of mouth at etching tables and clockworkers’ benches. As one tens of thousands put down their tools and came out into the open, still wearing the battered acid-stained overalls over work-tightened muscles. They rolled up their sleeves and exposed their chests to reveal the tattoos and scars marking them as members of the ancient Briseian tribes. It was not done in the city to display adherence to the old ways so openly – it was far more the fashion to deny that ancient and savage past when the people of Briseis had roamed the blasted landscape and carved out lives from the unyielding slate. Now they wore those symbols proudly: the clouded planet, the knot of snakes, the crossed swords, the shattered mountain.

 	The streets filled. The narrow alleys were choked and the fountain squares were crowded. Banners were raised, carrying the same symbols the people wore on their skin. Few spoke – this was a grim business, a necessary one, and one they did not take on lightly. It was a gathering on a scale that had not been seen for centuries, not since the Port Memnor Water Tax Riots, and while those times had been sparked by spontaneous anger, this was an organised gesture that even the Imperium could not ignore.

 	Sergeant Seanoa watched the crowd grow. It would soon be impossible to move through the streets of the Chrono-Wrights’ District at all, even for Space Marines. From the window of the clock tower he could see the organisers moving between the people, passing on instructions, messengers and heralds appointed by whoever orchestrated this protest. 

 	‘We could cut them down from here,’ said Tagamala, Seanoa’s squadmate. ‘Load up with Stalker shells and snipe them one by one.’

 	‘There would be bedlam,’ said Seanoa. ‘Crushes and stampedes.’

 	‘And a great many xenophiles would die,’ said Tagamala. ‘Is that not why we are here?’

 	‘The portents of the knife gather around you,’ said Seanoa, regarding his fellow Jade Dragon. Tagamala’s armour and his faceplate were scored with deep marks cut by a heated mono-edged combat knife, to match the scars he wore on his face beneath. The designs on his armour wove the images of his portents into it – knives, serrated edges and hooked fangs. ‘Those are the only thoughts you have. If you could slit every throat in this galaxy you would do it, but sometimes a knife through the neck is not what we need.’

 	‘If the Ultramarine has you so scolded, then why carry a gun at all?’ said Tagamala.

 	‘Speak thus again, brother, and we will see just to whom the knife comes easiest,’ replied Seanoa. ‘There is a place on our fleet where a blade is placed between us to see who will get to it first.’

 	There was no anger in Seanoa’s voice, no more threat than the bearing of a Space Marine naturally gave him. Other Chapters might rely on a chain of command and deference to rank, artificial constraints on the souls of men. The Jade Dragons organised themselves according to the rules of nature, to the apparent capacity and willingness for one to kill another. Other Chapters would not understand such bonds, at once brotherhood and predation. It was one of the many secrets the Jade Dragons kept.

 	The clock tower was at the heart of the Chrono-Wrights’ District, itself a clockwork marvel with a face bedecked with thousands of automated soldiers that fought a battle on the stroke of every hour. Its lower workings connected to Port Memnor’s mass transit system, which made it a useful base for observing events in the Chrono-Wrights’ District. As the people had spilled into the alleys, the Jade Dragons had been drawn there by the scent of conflict, to watch and wait.

 	A preacher’s voice was raised over the low murmur of the throng. ‘Your Emperor watches!’ he cried. His voice was hoarse, as if he had been pontificating non-stop for hours. ‘Your Emperor hears! He will snatch you up and cast you into the sky!’ He grabbed a woman by the shoulders, shaking her. ‘Your loved ones! Your friends! The penance will fall upon all!’ He was an old man with a drawn and pale face, in dark robes that dragged down in the effluent channel running down the street. He wore a heavy pack with bundles, pans and trinkets hanging off it – an itinerant preacher, a missionary who went from place to place spreading the word. The backbone of the Imperial faith when the Ecclesiarchy was far away.

 	One of the workers wrapped an arm around the old man’s throat and hauled him away from the woman. Others crowded around him and he disappeared from view, now just a ripple in the crowd as the protestors laid into him with boots and fists.

 	‘Who will throw off the yoke?’ cried out one of the assailants, holding a bloody fist high.

 	‘All of us!’ came the reply from all around. Banners unfurled from top floor windows. ‘Briseis will rise! The tribes will rise!’

 	Bright gunfire streaked into the sky, fired by hidden gunmen.

 	‘Pulse fire,’ voxed Seanoa. ‘Stand by.’

 	Chanting and singing broke out, rippling back and forth across the district – heretic hymns of freedom and independence. The Imperial eagle was dragged down from above the doorway of a factorium. A column toppled and a statue fell. More banners were held high, stained with age, hung with fetishes and scalps.

 	One of them was the hide of a sea creature, gnarled with barnacles. The tribesmen gathered around it wore the garb of the Thundercliff tribe, their bare torsos covered with serpentine coils, what little they wore in the dark green of their tribe. Two of them clambered onto the upper level of a fountain, unravelling the banner down to the ground. The sea monster’s spine ran down the middle of it and the skin of its many webbed limbs hung on either side. Men and women of the Thundercliff rallied around it, chanting and singing as the fronds of scaly skin flapped around them.

 	‘Do you see it, brothers?’ voxed Seanoa.

 	‘I do,’ said Brother Tagamala.

 	‘And I,’ said Brother Vai’ia.

 	One by one the squad sounded off, looking on from the windows and rooftops of the watchtower.

 	‘Because I must be sure,’ said Seanoa, ‘that you see what I do. I cannot stand up and speak of it without knowing my brothers have in their hearts what I have.’

 	‘Then pronounce on it, brother-sergeant,’ said Tagamala, taking his part in the ritual forms that had to be gone through if the portent was to be properly recognised.

 	‘It is the sign of the Black Leviathan,’ said Seanoa. ‘The Leviathan is among us on Briseis. Some have asked why the fates brought us into the battle for Agrellan, onto this planet. Now we have our answer.’

 	The Jade Dragons kept their secrets. Some, from themselves.

 	They spoke to no one of their home world. Perhaps the planet, with the recruiting population and fortress-monastery, was abandoned, the Chapter’s banners still hanging from its deserted battlements. Perhaps it was a wasteland, its surface melted to glass or reduced to radioactive rubble, or even obliterated entirely by war or stellar disaster. Perhaps they had never had a home world at all, and had always travelled the galaxy on a fleet of rapid attack ships that appeared and vanished as they willed it. That was one secret they kept. 

 	It was possible that someone could stumble on their home world, or that the truth of their world was hidden in the depths of some Administratum records-house. A deeper secret, one that no accident could bring to light, was the omens that drove them.

 	Every Jade Dragon was surrounded by omens that gathered towards him, drifting through fate to cling to him. He saw them in the stars, in the corpses and ruination of every battlefield, the visions they saw in their meditations and the thousand random events that could be interpreted every day. One might see knives everywhere. Another saw the flight, the wheeling of a host of predators in perfect coordination. Thunderclouds heavy with the promise of lightning. Birds of prey. Guns. A grinning face. They moulded a Jade Dragon to their image, and every time he saw them in an enemy’s wound or the sliding past of the stars he adhered a little closer to their omen’s way of killing. Whenever he saw it he gave thanks to the fates that had shown it to him, and sought out the next enemy on the battlefield to inflict the prophesied way of death. 

 	But there were greater omens, omens of the void, that touched the whole Chapter when they emerged from the blackness between the stars. Emerging from a warp jump on the way to the Gravenhal Crusade, the Jade Dragons fleet had witnessed a formation of stars shaped like a great archer, drawing back his bow and firing off a supernova that filled that quadrant of the sky with silver fire. When the Jade Dragons saw the archer next, be it a tribal enemy with a bow or the logo on a burned-out manufactorum, they saw it as a sign to strike now, strike hard and leaving nothing back to caution, for that was how the Gravenhal Crusade was won. Before the massacre at Ramnes Point the Chapter had witnessed a binary system, one star flaring bright, the other black and dead, and so the omen of a face with one eye gouged out and the other wide open told them their allies would turn on them. These were strong omens, the mightiest, read from the stars by the Chapter who alone could read His will written by fate.

 	As we hunt, so we are hunted. Thus went a secret that novices were told as they were implanted with the black carapace and took on the armour of a Jade Dragon. Just as they were seeking their own omens, they learned that the Chapter was not the greatest predator in the ocean of space. There was another that stalked them everywhere they went, looming out of sight to be glimpsed once every few centuries in the shadow of a dead world or hiding among the flares of a bloated star.

 	This was the Black Leviathan. It had been there from the start, since the murky time when the Jade Dragons Chapter was founded. It was the darkness within them and the treacherous enemy without, it was deceit and perfidy incarnate. It was, above everything, betrayal. The Black Leviathan was the shadow of the Great Adversary, of the gods of the warp, of the corruptive and infinite enemy that men called Chaos.

 	When the Jade Dragons saw the Black Leviathan, they knew that Chaos was close. The daemon and the witch worked their magics when the Leviathan was near. When the Jade Dragons glimpsed its shadow, caught its scent, then Chaos and all its madness and betrayal were sure to follow. In form it was a great dark mass trailing tentacles, a drinker of starlight that left suns dark and cold in its wake, sometimes with a planet-sized eye rolling in the seething blackness, sometimes with a vast maw that dragged in everything in its path. It had picked off Jade Dragons spaceships before, leaving them scarred with the coils of its tentacles and crushed of all life, the battle-brothers inside crumbling skeletons within their armour. Even as the Jade Dragons hunted, the Black Leviathan hunted them in turn, a constant reminder that they were not the sole predators in the galaxy.

 	They told a tale, perhaps one that had originated among the voidborn of the Imperial space lanes, perhaps gleaned by the Jade Dragons from a captive taken among the worshippers of the dark gods. They said a champion among the betrayers sought to impress his gods by cutting a sliver of flesh from the Black Leviathan and wearing it as a cloak or hanging it as his standard, a mark the gods of the warp could not ignore. When next he was seen he lay dead and drained of life on a world chewed and mutilated by the Leviathan’s coils. In the champion’s hand was the hide of the Black Leviathan. 

 	The Leviathan’s hide was the same as its shadow. It brought the same weight of portent with it. No Jade Dragon would mistake the gnarled pelt of the sea creature held in mockery of them. None would see anything but Chaos in the future.

 	The Ultramarines were automatons, blindly obeying a codex and the words of a long-dead primarch. They were blinkered to the truth, if that truth did not tally with what they had been taught and witnessed before. The Jade Dragons were not so constrained. Devynius and his Ultramarines might ignore it, but Seanoa and his battle-brothers knew who the true enemy on Briseis was.

 
 
 Chapter Three


 	‘Why do we fight? There are many answers, but one will always ring true. Look upon the worlds of your Imperium, upon the cities, and above all upon the people. That is why you fight.’


 	– Codex Astartes

 	The sun was high, a searing point of light in the black sky. The disc of Agrellan was half-full, the rest of it dipping below one horizon, the sooty wilderness between its hive cities streaked with the spires of Port Memnor’s skyline. Twelve figures were marched out onto the rockcrete promontory jutting from one of the upper class hab-blocks that clustered a short distance from the parliament building. This district of Port Memnor was in the grander Imperial style, with walls shored up by eagle-headed buttresses and every street junction watched over by a statue in marble or bronze of sector governors and Imperial nobles. It was normally stern and magnificent, but that noon it was more sombre than usual and none could deny the tension in the air.

 	The twelve hooded figures shuffled, heads bowed, at the order of the sergeant of the Memnoran Peacemakers. A squad of Peacemakers, the armed police force of the city, watched over proceedings as the prisoners lined up.

 	Captain Devynius watched from the adjoining apartment in the hab-block. Outside the window, which opened onto the promontory as if onto a balcony, the sergeant took a ledger from one of his troopers and began to read from it.

 	A crowd had gathered. It had been filtered by the Peacemaker soldiers stationed in the streets nearby – most were well-to-do citizens of Port Memnor, wearing more subtle echoes of the ruling class’s fashions. The wizened figures of tribal elders stood apart, shadowed by Peacemakers and their own attendants, for it was important that they be made a part of proceedings. A substantial number of those watching were from Briseis’s media, using picters and boom vox-catchers to record the events. 

 	‘We should be seen,’ said Procurator Kolnis. ‘You especially.’ He looked very much at home in the apartment, his black greatcoat matching the severe decor of devotional paintings and furnishings in mourning colours.

 	‘I am still uncomfortable with conducting our business publicly,’ said Devynius. ‘The Ultramarines are soldiers, not diplomats.’

 	‘Believe me, lord captain, the sight of you is one of the most useful assets we have,’ replied the procurator. He was a man of the Administratum, one of the few Imperial officials in Port Memnor. His job was technically limited to ensuring the planetoid supplied its portion of Agrellan’s tithe to the Imperium, but in effect he had been in charge of monitoring and fighting the growing xenophile threat before the Space Marines had arrived. ‘The massacre at the parliament has riled them up. They took to the streets in the Chrono-Wrights’ District. My people say they’re one step from rioting, and Throne knows we don’t need that. The xenophiles could commit who knows what atrocities under the cover of such unrest. They must be scolded, these people, shocked into inaction and obedience, and the sight of a Space Marine in the city will do that. Perhaps you do not know, lord captain, the effect such a sight has on an Emperor-fearing soul. No doubt the people of Macragge are used to an Ultramarine on every street corner. Not so here.’

 	‘I concur,’ said a third member of the party. The voice was flat and measured, and came from below the hood of a floor-length dark red cloak. Magos Skepteris was the most senior of the civilian Imperial personnel on Briseis, but she was not minded to take such a visible place in civil affairs as the procurator. Her responsibility was oversight of the laser defence batteries and associated plasma generators that defended the city’s spaceport, and she had very much the air of someone who would rather be there than here. Only the lower half of her face was visible – her skin was pale, her chin sharp, and rather distractingly her teeth were steel. One of her arms had been amputated at the shoulder and replaced with a trio of mechadendrites that hung, braided and coiled, around her neck like a massive gorget of steel snakes. ‘It behoves us to make all use of the resources at our disposal. Our task here is at least in part a psychological campaign for the suppression of rebellious intentions and the discouraging of xenophile sympathies. To be presented with such a symbol of Imperial capacity for violence will crush many intentions of sedition.’

 	‘We must make use of more than fear,’ said Devynius. ‘It is devotion to the Emperor and loyalty to their fellow men that will move these people to root out the xenophiles. Not fear.’

 	‘Not fear alone, granted,’ said Procurator Kolnis. ‘But believe me, fear should come first.’

 	‘The crimes are as follows,’ the sergeant outside was saying. This task fell to the local law enforcement of Port Memnor but no one would be ignorant of the hand of the Imperium behind it. ‘The placing of the Emperor’s goods and persons in the hands of the xenos enemy. The denouncing of the Emperor and His divine right. The sheltering and protection of xenos inimical to mankind. The setting of explosives. The dissemination of heretical literature and ideas. Murder of an Imperial official. Also several charges of common murder, theft and wounding. These charges to comprise a manifest and undoubted instance of heresy, foulest of crimes, striking as it does against mankind itself. The sentence pronounced is death.’

 	‘Captain?’ said the procurator. ‘Shall we?’

 	Devynius followed the procurator out of the grand windows onto the promontory. The rockcrete expanse had been used as an execution ground by the nobles of Briseis since the first towers of Port Memnor had been raised. The chambers adjoining it had been much prized for the excellent view of the executions, which could be observed by the inhabitants over a glass of strong wine and music. Now many of the noble families had quietly left Port Memnor, leaving only those involved in its government or who thought they had a way of profiting from the growing unrest, leaving places like this empty. 

 	Devynius emerged into the noon sun. The reaction was loud and immediate. The onlookers gasped and cried out. Some were dismayed, others shouted prayers of thanks that the Emperor’s Angels of Death had come to Briseis. All of them were afraid. Picters clicked and whirred, trying to get the best shot of the armoured giant who had suddenly appeared. Beside him, the procurator and even the outlandish and rarely-seen magos were diminished to mere details. Devynius’s armour had the gilded trim that marked him as a captain of the Ultramarines, and he went without his helmet to reveal a blunt, dark-skinned face with a wide and intelligent brow the picters zoomed in to capture. A pict-servitor took flight, buzzing on tiny rotors as it hovered as close as it dared to steal the image of the Ultramarine and transmit it to the city’s media.

 	‘I’m sure they would appreciate a few words,’ said the procurator.

 	‘I’m sure they would,’ replied Devynius tightly.

 	The sergeant ordered five men to stand forward. They were the execution detail, selected by lot from the Peacemaker squad. They were armed with rapid-firing lascarbines, their power packs supercharged to deliver greater killing power. It reduced the charge capacity, but only one burst of fire was needed here. The troops stood to face the prisoners, who were lined up against a wall that bore the scars of having been riddled with las-fire and resurfaced many times. The sergeant walked along the line of prisoners asking if they wanted their hoods removed. Some did, most did not. The revealed faces were of clockmakers, dirty and scarred, eyes bleary from years staring at tiny cogs on black velvet. Those eyes widened at the sight of Devynius, and were fixed on him rather than the soldiers about to shoot them. They murmured prayers under their breath, as if asking if they were dead and were being confronted by a vision of the Emperor’s justice come to usher them into the afterlife.

 	Devynius watched as the sergeant gave the order to ready arms, and to take aim. The unhooded prisoners did not take their eyes off Devynius as a volley of las-fire sheared through them, the sharp cracks of superheated air mingling with the gasps from the crowd. The bodies fell, and those not called upon to perform the execution stepped up to take on clean-up duty.

 	‘Good,’ said the procurator. ‘Always a nasty mess when things don’t go to plan.’

 	Devynius glowered up at the picter-servitor, which backed off and panned across the bodies. They lay in spreading pools of blood in undignified heaps. The clean-up detail were unfurling black corpse bags ready to cart them away in a waiting Peacemaker ground vehicle.

 	‘The xenos wanted the massacre,’ said Devynius. ‘They have their hooks deep into this city. We cannot keep killing until the xenophiles are all gone, or we will not have a city left for the Imperium to make use of.’

 	‘Then your battle-brothers had better root out the aliens before it comes to that.’

 	‘Most citizens,’ said Devynius, ‘do not speak to a Space Marine thus.’

 	‘I hope, captain, to rule this city one day soon,’ said the procurator. ‘What remains of the parliament cannot do it. That Baron Maelenar boy cannot do it, he’s no more than a child. This world needs a governor. It will be my duty to govern in the God-Emperor’s name. I can hardly take on such a responsibility if I flinch in fear when confronted by even one so intimidating as yourself. Not that I don’t feel some of that fear and awe with which the prayer books instil us.’

 	The crowd were departing, the media crews getting the last shots of the bodies as they were zipped up in their bags. One of the onlookers was escorted onto the execution ground by a Peacemaker trooper – it was an elderly woman, her head bent and face lined, thick grey hair tied in long plaits. She wore long dark green robes and walked with a stick as gnarled as she was.

 	‘One of the elders,’ said the trooper. ‘Of the Thundercliff.’

 	‘Tribals, lord procurator,’ said the Peacemaker sergeant, who was making a determined effort not to stare at Devynius.

 	‘Tribals,’ repeated the procurator wearily. ‘What does she want?’

 	‘It is not with you, lord procurator,’ replied the elder. ‘Nor with the Angel of Death. It is with the magos.’

 	Magos Skepteris tilted her head in as profound an expression of surprise as she seemed able to summon. ‘With me, elder?’

 	‘The deaths at the parliament have stirred up the people,’ said the elder. ‘This you know. These executions and their timing are surely intended to remind the people of their subservience to the Imperium. But this alone will not keep them in check. I can read the pulse of the people as you cannot, my lords. Trust me when I say this.’

 	‘And what solution do you suggest, elder?’ asked Magos Skepteris.

 	‘Only this. The magos is the most senior of the Imperium’s servants on Briseis and, due to her limited interaction with the people, is seen as impartial. A gesture by her would do much to quell the anger of our people.’ 

 	‘I am not accustomed to presenting a public face,’ said Skepteris. 

 	‘There need be minimum effort on your part,’ said the elder, ‘and the good name of the Priesthood of Mars shall be preserved. A mere ceremony, performed for public consumption, according to the traditions of our world. We request, magos, that you become a member of the Thundercliff tribe.’

 	‘Now, now,’ interrupted Procurator Kolnis, ‘such a thing would be gravely irregular. The officials of the Adepta have stayed well clear of tribal politics.’

 	‘And thus the gesture will have all the more import,’ said the elder. ‘Trust me, lords, this is not a step we undertake lightly either. Extending membership of the tribe to one not born to Briseis has never been even suggested before. But we of the Thundercliff love our world, and we despise the unrest in its streets. If we can help quell it without bloodshed or the oppression of fear, we shall do so. It is the best way to preserve our way of life and fulfil our duties to the Imperium.’

 	‘My own duty,’ interjected Devynius, ‘is to see Briseis secured for the use of the Imperial war effort on Agrellan, with the minimum of violence against its people. Any proposal that will turn the people away from the xenophiles is one I would support.’

 	The elder bowed her head in Devynius’s direction, showing deference but none of the fear Devynius was so used to. ‘My thanks, lord captain. Some among the tribes fear you, and say you can only be here to do great bloodshed among us. But the Thundercliff are loyal, and rejoiced when the Angels of Death were revealed among us.’

 	‘I shall think on this, elder,’ said Magos Skepteris. 

 	‘That is all we ask,’ said the elder. ‘The tribe desires greatly the elimination of the alien influence on our people. We, the autochthonous of Briseis, born from the earth, hate the alien with the passion of our Lord Angel here. However you choose to destroy the xenos and the xenophile, the Thundercliff shall stand with you.’

 	The Peacemakers were hosing the blood off the promontory and moving among the lingerers in the crowd, scattering the onlookers. The elder was escorted back off the execution ground, her piece said. Devynius noticed how the remaining media crews took pains not to point their picters at the elder as she shuffled past a statue of a past governor and out of sight.

 	Down among the tombs, the trail had warmed up. Thaxos had lost it in a great necropolis of black stone where ancient kings had been buried thousands of years before. Their saint-king cults remained as the thousands of niche-tombs for the servants and sacrifices buried alongside them, and the monumental heads that lay, split and shattered, which once had glowered across the broken stone lands of Briseis. Thaxos got his last glimpse of the quarry among the fallen features of one pre-Imperial king, and by the time he had scrambled up the broken brow ridge it was gone.

 	Brother Keltus found the trail again. The quarry had been winged by a bolter round and he spotted the smear of blood on the broken finger of a monumental statue’s hand, long severed from its arm. The enemy had leaned here to catch its breath or patch up its wounds, and had moved on. It was slowed by the action and the Ultramarines had quickened their own pace, for they were closing in.

 	‘Keltus, report in,’ voxed Thaxos as he clambered over a heap of necropolis rubble and found himself looking across a long black chasm, the depths reaching further into the ancient past beneath Port Memnor. ‘We’re out of visual.’

 	‘I’m fifty metres down, pursuing,’ replied Keltus. ‘I can see him.’

 	‘Do not get too far ahead,’ said Thaxos. ‘He’s leading us. There could be more.’

 	There was a ledge, caused by a shifting of the strata of the chasm wall, barely wide enough for a fully armoured Space Marine to navigate. Thaxos’s boots crumbled chunks of rock from the edge as he began the journey down, spotting Brothers Inigens and Oderac on the other side of the chasm half-sliding down a drift of stone fragments. Thaxos’s fire-team were advancing from all sides to corner and trap the quarry. The Ultramarines fought side by side, like primitive phalanx soldiers, when it was appropriate, but Thaxos’s fire-team could be cunning hunters as well when the situation warranted it. 

 	A river glinted at the bottom of the cavern. The darkness down among the tombs was so profound even Thaxos’s augmented sight could barely make it out as it rushed and foamed. 

 	‘He’s out of sight,’ came the vox from Keltus. ‘But he’s cornered. He’s trapped. There’s no way up.’

 	‘If there is,’ voxed Brother Venarin, ‘I’ll see him.’ Venarin was a marksman, as fine a shot as Thaxos himself, and his custom bolter was loaded with long-range Stalker shells and a preysense scope. Thaxos could just make out Venarin crouched at the lip of the chasm, sighting down his bolter.

 	Bolter fire crackled from below. ‘Contact!’ voxed Keltus.

 	Thaxos scrabbled as fast as he could down the chasm face. The river grew closer and the rushing of its waters louder. He picked out another sound – the high hiss of pulse fire, familiar from the firefight in the council chamber. 

 	‘Multiple contacts,’ voxed Thaxos. ‘Venarin! Do you see them?’

 	‘Not from here,’ replied Venarin. ‘I am displacing.’

 	Thaxos stumbled the last dozen metres. Foaming dark water rushed up to meet him and he strode into it, the pull of it trying to drag him down and wash him away. Flashes of crimson light up ahead marked the continuing pulse fire, underscored with the low thudding of bolter volleys. Thaxos’s own bolter was up in front of his face, every eye movement tracked by the barrel as he had been sleep-taught since novicehood.

 	Thaxos rounded a corner and saw the enemy. They were barely visible in the dark and clamour – their faces were completely hidden in the featureless helms of their armoured suits, the desert camouflage incongruous among the tombs. He spotted two or three of them at the side of the river, the red filaments of their rifles’ laser sights playing across the rock where Brother Keltus crouched. Thaxos fired almost without having to will it, the order coming from the warrior’s part of his brain cultured and trained by sleep-teaching and veneration of Guilliman’s Codex Astartes. A volley of three bolter shells thudded into the torso of one tau, the explosive bolts blasting off an arm and ripping open the torso. Thaxos counted three more visible, scrambling for cover among the rocks.

 	Keltus leapt to his feet and followed up, two well-placed shots taking down another tau.

 	These were fire caste warriors, Thaxos remembered. The tau society was based around castes, not just social but physiological – the fire caste had quick aggression and athleticism, the water caste cunning, the earth caste physical strength, the air caste reflexes. The fire caste were trained by the tau cadres as excellent shots and participants in the combined arms manner of tau warfare. They were not trained to face a Space Marine in any context, save down the sights of a pulse rifle.

 	Thaxos didn’t have to give the order. Keltus was charging even as Thaxos sprinted through the filthy, foaming water, rattling off half a bolter magazine to keep the tau ducking behind the fallen rocks at the base of the chasm. He vaulted over a rock and crashed into the tau sheltering there, crushing the alien’s body beneath all the weight of Space Marine and armour. He brought his combat knife out and lashed it at the nearest fire caste standing – his reach was more than the tau had expected and the blade cut through the front of its helm, the monomolecular edge propelled by augmented muscles. The tip cut through the helm into flesh and the tau reeled backwards. Thaxos was on the fallen tau, plunging the blade into the tau’s throat, hauling the alien into the air and blasting three shots into its chest at point-blank range.

 	Brother Keltus cracked his quarry around the side of the face with the stock of his bolter. As the alien reeled Keltus shot it in the abdomen and put another round through its head as it fell.

 	A fire caste leapt out from cover, rifle levelled at Thaxos. The side of its throat exploded and its head snapped to the side before it could pull the trigger. Thaxos didn’t have to look up to know that Brother Venarin had taken it down with a Stalker shot.

 	‘Where is the target?’ voxed Thaxos, before the last fire caste warrior had plunged into the water. 

 	‘They were covering his retreat,’ said Venarin. ‘There’s a structure up ahead.’

 	‘Down here? A tomb?’

 	‘Don’t think so.’

 	‘Forward,’ voxed Thaxos. ‘Tighten up. Take it prisoner if possible, shoot if you must.’

 	Past the bodies of the fire caste warriors the chasm took a sharp bend, the water rushing over chunks of fallen stone. The tumult almost hid the entrance to a tunnel in the chasm wall, a solid steel frame surrounding a blast door. It looked as out of place down here as anything could. 

 	‘Blow this open,’ voxed Thaxos. ‘Oderac, melta bombs!’

 	Oderac had a practical and level head, making him the team’s field engineer when no Techmarine was present. He carried the squad’s melta bombs and a demolition charge, and scrabbled down the remaining slope into the water. Venarin remaining overlooking the chasm as the rest of the fire-team took cover and Oderac attached the melta bombs to the side of the door with magnetic clamps.

 	The bombs radiated tremendous heat, melting deep glowing red holes in the door. Molten steel spat and hissed in the water. Oderac stepped forward again and forced the demolition charge into one of the holes, twisting the primer.

 	‘Ten seconds!’ he voxed.

 	‘The alien is perfidious and cunning,’ said Thaxos. ‘But we shall force him to show his hand. No longer will he hide. And when the light of justice is upon them, there is no escape from the sons of Macragge.’

 	The demolition charge went off. The autosenses built into the Ultramarines’ armour deadened the sound so they were not deafened by it. The door was blown open, torn petals of steel splayed wide enough to allow a Space Marine entry. 

 	Thaxos took the lead. The other Ultramarines of his fire-team followed him in. Harsh white lights flickered inside, picking out steel floor and white wall panels, and signs in the tau language pointing deeper into the facility.

 	Ahead was a larger chamber, the walls lined with transparent-walled cages. A large brushed steel table stood in the centre of the room, a smaller table beside it covered in fine silver medical implements designed for three-fingered tau hands. Thaxos glanced at the cells – they had a single drain in the floor and a single slot in the front wall, and nothing else. Against the back wall were two automated guns, cylindrical units containing pairs of pulse rifles. They were deactivated, any fugitive here moving too quickly to turn them on to defend the place.

 	‘He is desperate,’ voxed Thaxos. ‘He will err. We will not. Be sharp.’

 	Thaxos waved for Oderac and Keltus to move one way, he, Venarin and Inigens the other. Machinery covered the walls up ahead of uncertain purpose, in the featureless casings typical of tau technology. The antiseptic smoothness of every surface indicated alien minds free of faith, without the guidance of belief in the God-Emperor to guide them. The very cleanliness was unclean. 

 	Thaxos caught up with their quarry in the facility’s interrogation chamber. The purpose of this room was clear given the man strapped, naked save for the harness affixing him to the wall, among a tangle of pipes and cables hooked up to his body. Thaxos took in the detail as he scanned the room for targets and saw one – crouching behind a white cabinet that might have been a cogitator housing or a storage unit for interrogation implements. The hint of movement was enough to draw Thaxos’s eye. 

 	The alien’s limbs were too long to be folded up completely behind the scant cover. It had chosen, in its desperation, a bad place to hide. It had made many mistakes in its life, chief among which was standing against the interests of the Imperium, but its choice of this place to shelter from the Space Marines would be its last.

 	‘I know you speak Low Gothic,’ said Thaxos. ‘One chance. Surrender.’

 	‘Please,’ came the reply in the dry whisper of the tau voice. ‘We can coexist. Just listen.’

 	‘One chance,’ said Thaxos.

 	‘There is something greater than the war between us. Greater than the pride of our species. You are wise among your people. You have not the narrow minds of its citizens. There is a Greater Good…’

 	Thaxos took two long strides to the alien’s position and dragged it out from cover. It was one of the water caste, the diplomatic strain of the tau species. It was not built for physical conflict, with its spindly limbs and pigeon chest over which its orange and black robes hung loosely. It had a pistol in its hand, a compact pulse weapon, and Thaxos snapped its wrist with a jerk of its arm so the pistol clattered to the floor. The alien whimpered.

 	‘Report,’ voxed Thaxos.

 	‘Clear,’ replied Keltus. ‘Your orders?’

 	‘Prepare to deny the facility to the enemy,’ said Thaxos. 

 	‘Listen,’ said the alien, its voice hoarse and broken. ‘It is not too late for our species. We two, we can start it. A dialogue. For peace. For truth. For…’

 	Thaxos threw the alien to the ground and levelled his bolter at it. ‘I think this thing counts as a moral threat,’ said Thaxos. ‘Brothers? Do you concur?’

 	‘I do, Brother Thaxos,’ replied Venarin.

 	‘Thank the Throne for that,’ said Thaxos, and shot the alien through the chest. The bolter shell detonated inside it, spreading its shattered ribs out through his back. It was dead before its broken form sprawled onto the ground. Huge black eyes turned dull and glassy in the harsh light of the glowstrips on the ceiling.

 	‘He’s alive,’ said Brother Inigens. Thaxos turned to see Inigens examining the body restrained against the wall. Now he had time to look closer at the captive he could see the chest was rising and falling, and readouts in the alien alphabet winked steadily on displays set into the wall panels.

 	The captive’s mouth was obstructed by a gag from which several tubes and pipes ran. Inigens undid a catch on the gag and slid it out, pulling a long slimy tube from the captive’s throat. The captive was a man in middle age, evidently in fit and good health. The fittings around his face came away and Thaxos saw the well-worn features of soldier.

 	The man coughed phlegmily and his eyes opened, squinting in the light. He gasped back a choking breath in shock at the sight of three Space Marines standing in front of him.

 	‘You are safe, citizen,’ said Thaxos. ‘The xenos are dead.’

 	‘Dead?’ spluttered the captive.

 	‘Very dead indeed,’ said Thaxos, indicating the water caste corpse.

 	The captive chuckled weakly at the sight of the body. ‘Savages,’ he said. ‘Heathens. We will kill them all.’

 	Inigens removed the restraints one by one, supporting the man’s body until he could be lifted down from the wall. He knelt on the floor coughing, chest heaving.

 	‘Your name?’ asked Thaxos, removing his helmet. When dealing with civilians, the more human face was the better one to show. He took out a data-slate and cycled through various intelligence files on its screen.

 	‘Dwynen Vular Kesseoth,’ replied the captive. ‘Explicator Errant. In service to Inquisitor Vengel Prianze, Damocles task force conclave.’

 	Thaxos flicked through pages of names. Dwynen Vular Kesseoth was among the Inquisitorial agents known to be operating in the system, deployed in their dozens by the Inquisition to embed themselves in Imperial settlements and watch for signs of xenophile treachery. ‘Your call-sign?’ he asked.

 	‘Dawnlight,’ replied Kesseoth.

 	‘Then I hope you are enjoying the sights of Briseis, Explicator Kesseoth,’ said Thaxos. ‘How did they capture you?’

 	‘The xenophiles had men in the Peacemakers,’ said Kesseoth. ‘I bedded down in the precinct-house, woke up down here. Must have drugged me.’

 	‘Did you talk?’

 	Kesseoth looked up at Thaxos. His eyes were rimmed with red. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

 	‘Melta bombs set around the entrance,’ voxed Oderac. ‘They’ll bring the ceiling down.’

 	‘We’ll get you to the surface,’ said Thaxos, helping Kesseoth to his feet.

 	‘I must ask for a weapon,’ said Kesseoth. ‘They have a lot of xenos down here, that much I know.’

 	‘Your sidearm, brother,’ said Thaxos, and Inigens handed his bolt pistol to Kesseoth. The weapon was made for a Space Marine and Kesseoth had to hold it with both hands. 

 	‘Stay alert,’ said Thaxos. ‘We have killed all that stood before us but there may be more. The alien could have got a distress call out. Normally I would relish the chance to kill a few more of them but we have a guest to think of now. Move out.’

 	The Ultramarines left the facility, emerging into the darkness of the chasm. Venarin scouted ahead, Keltus watching their rear.

 	‘Wait,’ said Kesseoth as they began to forge through the rushing water. ‘There’s a defence system. Drones. They’re stationed across this region. If they were alerted, they’ll come in from overhead.’

 	‘Eyes up, brothers,’ said Thaxos, glancing towards the distant stone ceiling of the tombs. He could see nothing in the grey-black expanse.

 	Kesseoth held out the bolt pistol in front of him, barely able to lift it. ‘For the Greater Good,’ he said, and shot Brother Thaxos through the back of the head. 

 
 
 Chapter Four


 	‘No doubt the vaunted general is confident he knows all that is required to outfight and confound his enemy. No doubt the enemy opposing him knows exactly the same thing.’


 	– Codex Astartes

 	The generatorium dominated the west of Port Memnor, its exhaust stacks and cooling towers defining the cityscape. The enormous cylinders of the generators were clad in age-stained rockcrete, criss-crossed with gantries and cranes. The blocky shapes of the turbine were halls covered with industrial gothic flourishes insisted on by the city’s Imperial founders. Shanties crusted around the base of the buildings, nestling precariously on the banks of open industrial sewers.

 	A short distance away was Port Memnor’s spaceport, enormous hexagonal landing pads served by hundreds of fuel tanks and control towers. Hidden beneath the pads, beneath enormous hydraulic hatches, were the defence lasers that made the spaceport such a valuable asset for the Imperium to take control of. It would allow large space-bound ships to disgorge their complements of Imperial Guard men and tanks, then taken to Agrellan itself on faster armour transports that could weather ground fire from the tau advancing across the planet. But there were xenophiles everywhere, including among the thousands of men and women among the crews of the generatorium and spaceport, and the Imperium could not land its ships until the traitors were rooted out of Port Memnor.

 	In the heart of the generatorium complex was the personal domain of Magos Skepteris. It was into this web of dark chambers and corridors that the small party from the Thundercliff tribe were admitted, among them the old woman who served as their elder, and a number of men and women inducted into the tribe’s mysteries. They carried tribal fetishes, the shed snake skins and staffs cut from the trees watered by the bloodshed in the beast pit beneath the cliff, and were escorted through the labyrinth of Skepteris’s lab complex by a detail of Peacemaker troops.

 	Picters followed them, their operators carefully shadowed the Peacemakers. They were not permitted to film details of the complex unnecessary to the broadcast. They passed by the strange exotic machines for generating and transferring strange forms of energy that crackled fingers of electricity between their polished brass spheres. 

 	Magos Skepteris waited in her receiving chamber, a room barely ever used for she was not a diplomat at heart. Banners hung displaying the heraldry of the Priesthood of Mars and an altar of pure carbon blocks was stacked up by one wall, with an icon of the half-skull and cog that was the symbol of the Mechanicum.

 	‘Is this necessary?’ said Skepteris as the delegation filed in. She glowered at the technicians aiming their picters at her.

 	‘The gesture must be seen if it is to serve,’ said the Thundercliff elder. ‘Or it will be as if it had never happened.’

 	‘Very well,’ said Skepteris.

 	‘You will need to let blood,’ said the elder. ‘Just a little. Blood is essential. Without it there can be no bond to the earth of Briseis.

 	‘That will not be a problem,’ said Skepteris. ‘My pain centres have been replaced with data storage.’

 	‘Then we may begin,’ said the elder.

 	The picters began to whir as the delegation surrounded Skepteris in a robed circle. She was draped with garlands of braided snake skins and the elder pronounced a ritual in the native tongue of Briseis, the language with which its tribes had greeted the Imperial founders of Port Memnor. One of the ritual attendants rolled up the sleeve of the magos’s robes and, finding one of the few areas of skin that had not been replaced with data ports or radiation shielding, drew blood with a long golden needle. Drops of it were poured into a bowl made from an animal skull and the elder sang, the attendants taking up her song in the same sibilant language.

 	‘Briseis is cruel,’ said the elder now in Low Gothic as the singing continued. ‘Briseis thrusts us into her stony world and takes us out just as suddenly. But in the time between, she gives us the greatest gifts. Minds, that we may understand. Hands, that we may create. Souls, that we may join them in brotherhood. And she is not jealous. One may enter her embrace that was not born to her cruelty, to partake of her gifts yet not suffer a birth into the plains of slate and the forests of beasts. Blessed indeed is such a newcomer, and exalted indeed. This honour Briseis extends to Magos Skepteris of Mars, Priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and through our hands she welcomes her.’

 	The picters focused in on Skepteris’s face, which was still half hidden by the cowl of her red robes. The ceremony paused and the ritual attendants turned to Skepteris expectantly.

 	Skepteris glanced between them and the lenses of the picters, and seemed to realise that a speech was expected of her. Not being used to such things, she had not prepared anything.

 	‘I thank you,’ she said flatly. ‘The Adeptus Mechanicus thanks you. For this honour.’

 	The silence that followed indicated that Skepteris was finished. 

 	‘Then from this moment,’ said the elder, ‘you are a member of the Thundercliff tribe and a child of Briseis.’ 

 	The attendants unravelled a bundle they had brought with them, revealing it to be a large expanse of animal hide, scaled and craggy with barnacles, exuding a strong smell of brine and faint decay. This mantle was draped over Skepteris’s shoulders, swamping her with its size and heaviness.

 	‘Sister,’ said the elder, placing a hand on Skepteris’s mantled shoulder.

 	‘Sister,’ said Skepteris. 

 	The picters zoomed in on the pair, and the ceremony was complete.

 	The xenophile corpses had barely begun to turn cold when the broadcast began. Sergeant Seanoa had led his squad in at the first vox suggesting the safehouse location, and had shown no pause or mercy.

 	The safehouse was three floors, two below ground, none free of corpses. They lay shredded by bolter fire or carved clean open by chainblades, killed in the bedlam of a predator’s feeding frenzy, the battle-trance that came over the Jade Dragons when the fight turned to wanton butchery and their way of war permitted abandonment of tactic and restraint.

 	The Ultramarines could not fight like that. Their Codex Astartes did not acknowledge that Space Marines were predators, as surely as the ravenous hunters that drifted between the stars. It was a fine book, certainly, full of generations of battle-wisdom. But it was not the whole truth of war. The truth the Jade Dragons knew.

 	Seanoa was on the upper floor, the one that resembled a workers’ dwelling with several rooms of bunks and communal kitchens. The Jade Dragons had fallen on the people here as they had everywhere else – those living there as camouflage for xenophile activities were as guilty as the xenophiles themselves, and had been exterminated. Torn bodies and severed limbs littered the floor and the instep-deep blood rippled with the footsteps of the Jade Dragons moving around on the lower floors looking for survivors. Outside, the street was overlooked by one of the district’s many enormous screens which broadcast civil information, prayer services and the recent exhortations to report xenophiles and suspicious activity. The screen was covered in a mesh of thin bars to protect it from missiles thrown by disgruntled citizens, and as Seanoa passed by the window the screen lit up.

 	It showed the image of Magos Skepteris, surrounded by citizens in the dress of one of Briseis’s tribes. The ceremony proceeded and Skepteris was enrobed and pronounced a member of the Thundercliff tribe.

 	Finally, the magos was draped in the skin of the Black Leviathan. 

 	And Seanoa of the Jade Dragons understood at last what he was on Briseis to do.

 	Captain Devynius stood over the body of Brother Thaxos, lit by the harsh lights of the glow-globes in the transport hub. The back of Thaxos’s head was gone, the cranium missing behind the line of the ears. His face was mostly intact. His eyes, ruptured red by the bolter’s detonation, had been closed.

 	‘All the xenos on Agrellan are not worth a single Ultramarine,’ said Devynius. ‘Especially not Thaxos. His blood is on the hands of the water caste, and on those of every tau. If we did not have anything to avenge upon them before, we do now.’

 	The rest of Devynius’s squad stood around the bench on which Thaxos’s body had been lain. The body’s armour had been removed, revealing the old scars of his augmentations and the new ones of battle. The squad had no Apothecary to remove Thaxos’s gene-seed – the body would have to be transported back to the Chapter for the organ to be taken out ready to be implanted into a novice, and for the flesh of Guilliman to pass on again. 

 	‘If you wish to speak freely, brothers,’ said Devynius, ‘then now is the time. I give you leave.’

 	‘It was not a way for an Ultramarine to die,’ said Brother Venarin. Venarin had snapped the prisoner Kesseoth’s neck a second after the fatal shot had been fired. 

 	‘And our mission has gone awry since the moment we landed here,’ said Brother Silen. ‘The massacre, then this. And the Jade Dragons are not allies I trust. We do not even know where they are right now, save that they are somewhere in the Chrono-Wrights’ District doing Throne knows what.’

 	‘Then we take the initiative,’ said Devynius. ‘Thus does the Codex Astartes state. We do not react, we act. The mission continues as planned. The early stages have not gone as they would, but the next will bring the Emperor’s will to Port Memnor. We cannot bring Thaxos back but we can avenge him with victory. The war effort on Agrellan relies on us. We shall not let them down.’

 	‘Pray, brothers,’ said Silen, who by unspoken assent was now Devynius’s second in command. ‘Take your own words from the Codex and the rites of Macragge, search your own soul for the armour of faith and the sword of hatred. But pray, for soon there will be no time for words.’

 	The members of Devynius’s squad knelt one by one around Thaxos’s body as Devynius shrouded the body in a corpse-sheet. They all murmured their own prayer, some to the machine-spirits of their wargear, some to the long-dead heroes of the Ultramarines, some to the Primarch Roboute Guilliman himself. All of them asked for victory. 

 	All of them asked for revenge.

 	The loss of the outpost in the tombs had been a blow, but it had been prepared for. Such assets were not essential, and in cases of aggressive persecution by an enemy could be considered disposable, obstacles for the enemy to overcome before he could make real headway. It was part of the water caste’s way of silent invasion, always evading instead of coming to battle, giving the enemy just enough to draw him on and commit his resources without making headway into the core of the subversion strikeforce.

 	A far more important installation was hidden among the shanties and rat-trap habs that adjoined the Chrono-Wrights’ District, far from the affluent districts around the palace. It was concealed among the labyrinth of hab-blocks, its entrances accessible only through camouflaged firing positions. It was not armoured, for its defence was secrecy, and it was not heavily staffed because numerous personnel would be a liability and not an asset. It was crewed by a handful of water caste interrogators and emissaries, an honour guard of two fire caste warriors, and a complement of Briseis’s most dedicated and trusted gue’la – the hateful Imperial term for these loyal humans was ‘xenophile’, but the tau took pains to educate them that they were valued and respected converts to the Greater Good. 

 	The shanty facility was the more important of the two major bases in Port Memnor. The conversion of the city could be achieved without the fire caste facility, but not without the intelligence base the water caste had built down amid the poverty that had turned so many Briseians to the Greater Good.

 	Behind a disguised blast door at the back of a particularly filthy and ill-omened shanty, the salvaged boards and plastic sheeting gave way to the gleaming purity of tau architecture. Two of the xenos moved down a narrow corridor, past the choke point covered by a pair of gun drones mounted in the ceiling. One was a water caste ambassador, the same who had met with the Thundercliff elder in the tombs beneath Port Memnor. The second was a fire caste warrior, a shas’vre in command of this mission’s fire caste complement, squatter and more powerful in build wearing combat armour and armed with a rapid-firing pulse carbine slung at his side. The knife of the bonded ta’liserra was inscribed on his shoulder guard, marking him out as the leader of a squad whose members had sworn to fight and die together by the Greater Good.

 	‘I fear,’ said Ambassador O’Myen, ‘his mind has been picked clean. I have envoys working on him day and night. He will not last much longer.’

 	‘If you have indeed mined him dry,’ said Vre’Cyr, ‘then should the effort prove too much for him, we will not have lost anything much.’

 	‘True,’ said O’Myen. ‘What is it you hope to find?’

 	‘Anything will be useful to us,’ said Vre’Cyr. ‘Space Marines require a particular form of warfare. They are rarely encountered, and survivors to debrief are rarer still.’

 	‘Then have at it,’ said O’Myen.

 	A door slid open to reveal the interrogation chamber. O’Myen’s envoys were monitoring the equipment keeping the captives alive. Most of them were Imperial spies or Port Memnor dignitaries, kept for what they knew about the defences and society of the city. An earth caste technician worked the controls of the medical gear and one of the dozen captives shuddered in his restraints as stimulants and metabolic balancing agents were pumped into him. The captive’s eyes snapped open and he stared down from his cage on the wall, convulsing with the effort of being woken once again.

 	‘Our data indicates that this is an older specimen,’ said O’Myen. ‘Lifespan extended with their rejuvenation technology. They are so obsessed with their lifespan, these creatures. It is one of the many factors that makes them exploitable. They fear death so. Without the Greater Good, there is nothing to fight for save for another day alive.’

 	‘They all look the same to me,’ said Vre’Cyr. 

 	The captive’s eyes focused again, and the confusion on his face was replaced with despair.

 	‘Is it the day?’ whispered the captive, his voice ruined by the tube in his throat. ‘The day when I am to die?’

 	‘What is your name?’ asked O’Myen. 

 	‘Throne be damned, you know my name!’ gasped the prisoner.

 	‘What is your name?’ asked O’Myen again. ‘If you do not answer aversion stimuli will be applied.’

 	The prisoner’s head hung. ‘Thelso DeNyre,’ he replied.

 	‘Your rank?’

 	‘Lord Archivist of the Librarium Penitentiam on Morkrut.’

 	‘The Lord Archivist here,’ explained O’Myen, ‘was quite the coup for the Second Phase Expansion intelligence corps. It seems we are more effective at sifting through the bureaucracy of the Imperium than the Imperium itself. The knowledge he has absorbed over a lifetime of labour is often lost to the Imperium at large. Thus in some respects we know more about them than they do. Lord Archivist, tell us of the Codex Noctis Verminion,’

 	The archivist’s head lolled to one side and twitched.

 	‘It is accessing the data implant in the back of its cranium,’ said O’Myen. ‘Its purpose was a mystery when this one was first processed. Thankfully it was not removed immediately.’

 	‘The Codex Noctis Verminion presents a history of the hunt for the Infinity Wyrm,’ began the archivist. ‘Led by Lord Inquisitor Trentis Venn and…’

 	‘The Jade Dragons,’ said Vre’Cyr.

 	‘Two battle companies of the Jade Dragons Space Marine Chapter were present,’ said the archivist. A drop of blood ran from his eye down one cheek as the strain of repeated accessing of his datavault continued to damage his nervous system. ‘Led by Captain Nuufalao the Huntsmaster…’

 	‘Their way of war,’ said Vre’Cyr. ‘Their weaknesses. Will they fall prey to the Patient Hunter or the Killing Blow? The Seven Spears? The Final Shadow? Speak!’

 	‘Fast assault and shock tactics,’ droned the archivist. ‘Evidenced by the landings at Fedoran IV. Suitable for morally deniable operations… Ecclesiarchical oversight denied, suspected… suspected deviant ritual faith…’ The archivist coughed and spat gobbets of blood down his front, splattering the clean floor.

 	‘I can be certain you know everything the archivist has divulged about the Jade Dragons,’ said O’Myen. ‘They were a subject of the first interrogation cycle, especially when it became apparent knowledge of them was not available in the Imperium at large.’

 	‘Then the Ultramarines,’ said Vre’Cyr.

 	‘Among these creatures,’ said O’Myen, ‘the Ultramarines are preceded by great fame. You will be here some time, shas’vre.’

 	The archivist spooled out tale after tale of the Ultramarines. They concerned endless battles, tactics first written in the Codex Astartes and preserved in fragments the archivist had crammed by their thousand into his datavault. O’Myen had no interest in them. He had plumbed the archivist’s mind for everything he cared about – the way the Ultramarines thought, the weaknesses among their beliefs and worldview. Humanity had been conditioned to think the Space Marines invincible and without flaw, but they had more than enough failings to be exploited by a veteran of the water caste. Pride was among them, as was their adherence to the Codex Astartes and the teachings of their long-dead Primarch Roboute Guilliman. 

 	‘Where will they strike next?’ demanded Vre’Cyr. ‘Where on Briseis will they make their move?’ 

 	Archivist DeNyre stared blankly up at the fire caste leader. There was only confusion and fear in the human’s face. 

 	‘It matters not,’ said O’Myen. ‘There is no action the Space Marines can take for which I have not laid the groundwork.’

 	‘I can only hope you are correct,’ said Vre’Cyr, ‘for the sake of my fire caste brethren. The Space Marines are few in number but when they strike, they strike hard, and focused for the maximum impact. The hunter cadres have few counter-tactics to the Space Marines – it has been one of our greatest setbacks in the Third Sphere Expansion. If we do not respect them, we are done for.’

 	‘I respect them well enough, shas’vre,’ said O’Myen. ‘It is for that reason I was sent to Briseis. We knew the Space Marines would be here. My task was to observe the city and all the possible paths a Space Marine operation in this city could take. Thus far the Ultramarines and Jade Dragons have followed those paths as surely as if I myself was leading them. And I will lead them to the end of whatever path they will take, a path that leads only towards the Greater Good.’

 	‘You make a tool of everything around you, ambassador,’ said Vre’Cyr. ‘Enemy and ally. It would not surprise me to learn that your fellow tau were just instruments to you, to be used and disposed of as you will.’

 	‘Not as I will,’ said O’Myen smoothly. ‘As the Greater Good demands of me.’

 	The tau re-attached the archivist to his life support systems, ignoring his weak cries for mercy and death. Soon the pipe was slid back down his throat and he was silent. As O’Myen and Vre’Cyr left the place, the silence was broken only by the ticking and bleeping of the machinery.

 	The Codex Astartes was obscure on some points, ambiguous on others, but on the subject of surprise it was clear. Tactical surprise is the greatest advantage any fighting force can have in war. An enemy fights two battles when he is taken by surprise – he must fight his own inertia, the chaos of sudden assault, the ancient instincts to flee or hide, even before he can take up arms and face any enemy. 

 	A Space Marine was not ideally suited to stealth, which any other soldier might use to claw back an edge of surprise. A Space Marine’s sheer bulk made it almost impossible for him to hide or creep in silence, and the pride he took in his Chapter meant that, with few exceptions, he would not cover his colours with camouflage. The Codex therefore endorsed surprise by means of a rapid and furious assault from an unexpected angle, achieving with speed and suddenness what could not be achieved with silence. The Space Marines made use of the drop pod and gunship assault, the boarding torpedo, the armoured spearhead to snatch up the initiative and plunge an enemy into battle before that enemy knew it was being fought.

 	Captain Devynius knew the Codex well. No Ultramarine was ignorant of Guilliman’s masterwork. And so it was that he crouched alongside the battle-brothers of his squad on the lev-train as it thundered along the track, passenger stations and loading docks hurtling past through the strobing darkness.

 	‘Three minutes out!’ called Brother Silen, reading the transit system’s schematics from his auspex scanner. ‘Unorthodox, captain! I wonder if Guilliman envisioned this when he wrote?’

 	‘He imagined victory,’ said Devynius over the thundering of the passing structures and the howl of the lev-train’s overcharged coils. ‘And this is how we will win it!’

 	The squad was in the rearmost carriage of four, the front housing the powerful generator which was being drained dry to force the train well past its maximum speed. According to the schematics, the train could not stay on its tracks if it maintained this speed when it hit the next major junction.

 	‘Then again,’ reflected Devynius, ‘this was Thaxos’s idea.’

 	‘Would that he were here to see it,’ said Brother Merovos, whose plasma gun was slung so he could hold on to the railing beside him with both hands. ‘He would have something clever to say about our chances.’

 	‘We fight this like any other battle and our chances will be nil,’ shouted Devynius in reply. ‘The Emperor demands victory. The Codex commands it. We will deliver.’

 	The train shrieked through a passenger station. The controls had been doctored and bypassed by Oderac who, while not a Techmarine, had a more than good enough head for technology. The citizens waiting on the platforms had expected the train to stop to pick them up – instead it shot past at tremendous speed and they screamed as several were thrown off their feet by the gale that passed in the train’s wake.

 	Perhaps word would get out about the Ultramarines in the rearmost carriage. It didn’t matter. They had less than thirty seconds before they reached their target, and any warning would arrive far too late.

 	Ahead the junction approached, lit by warning lights flashing red. A terrible metallic scream filled the air as the train tried to take the next bend too quickly and the magnetic clamps were torn off the rail, the train slewing onto one side as it arrowed onwards.

 	Devynius kept his footing. A couple of the Ultramarines lost their balance, grabbing onto a handhold before they were tumbled through one of the windows that shattered under the strain.

 	The front carriage slammed into the wall of the tunnel. The wall collapsed and the carriage was propelled into the rooms beyond it, masonry falling in the dark hail. With an awful sound of tearing metal the front carriage was forced to a halt, embedded deep in the foundations of the building ahead. The second carriage buckled and crumpled to half its length, and the third fared little better. The fourth carriage was warped and twisted but not enough to imperil the Ultramarines still clinging on.

 	No normal soldier would have countenanced it as a method of insertion. That was why the Ultramarines had used it to score tactical surprise against the enemy inside.

 	Thus was the spirit of the Codex adhered to, if not its letter, as Captain Devynius led his squad through the wreckage and the rubble into the lower floors of the generatorium.

 	Sergeant Seanoa’s totem was the flight, the swirling pack of predators that moved as one with the same purpose. That was how his squad moved, following him less by orders and more by instinct. Seanoa was a natural leader in the purest sense, born to be at the head of the flight, born to be the first teeth into the prey.

 	They broke into the open among the shanties at the foot of the generatorium’s great cooling towers, cloaked in the pollutant mists and the darkness where the complex’s floodlights could not reach. The people who lived there shut themselves in, bolted their windows and doors, and hoped to survive until the sun came up. The Jade Dragons were angry ghosts breaching the surface of the night, and the ancient fears of Briseis’s tribes spoke of such monsters rising from the slate wastes to mutilate and destroy. They were not far wrong.

 	Seanoa led the squad up the lower levels of gantries, up towards the command catwalks allowing maintenance access to the cooling towers. The walkways connected to the main building housing the turbine hall and command rooms. The workers who saw them fled, and not a shot had to be fired before the Jade Dragons reached the turbine hall itself.

 	The generatorium was at full capacity. The turbines roared, shuddering the web of catwalks high above the main hall. The first kill was one of the sentries who watched over the hall for xenophile saboteurs, sniped through the upper back with a Stalker shell. His body fell several storeys to the floor of the turbine hall and vanished between the huge cylindrical housings of the turbines.

 	Two more died, one to Seanoa’s own lightning claw. He didn’t even activate the weapon’s power field as he punched the weapon’s curved blades through the sentry’s back. The sentry wore the dark red uniform of men under the orders of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and carried a lasgun he never had time to unsling. Seanoa kicked the body over the railing.

 	‘There,’ he said, pointing towards one of the control rooms overlooking the turbine hall, a short sprint across the walkways. ‘Expect resistance. Be swift, and do not wait to see a weapon. Move, my brothers.’

 	The ten-strong squad were hindered more by the size of their armoured bodies in the narrow doorway than by the generatorium workers manning the late shift in the control room. The shock on their faces was illuminated by the lights on the readouts and control panels lining the walls. Seanoa shot one with his bolt pistol, the customised weapon blowing a torso wide open with a fragmenting metal storm shell. It was overkill, but that was better than underkill.

 	The Jade Dragons making their way into the room added their own fire, single bolter shots taking down the half-dozen workers in a few seconds. A vox-link handset on the wall was untouched – none of the workers had time to grab it and raise the alarm. That was a minute or two more of time the Jade Dragons had bought with their speed and lack of mercy. That was how true predators won the day.

 	Tagamala affixed a charge to the command room’s back wall, magnetic clamps holding it to the control panel. The Jade Dragons backed up against the wall. Seanoa didn’t have to say anything. His squadmates knew the plan well enough and filled their part in it like true flightmates.

 	The charge went off and the wall was blown inwards. Seanoa was through the breach before the debris hit the floor. Beyond the architecture changed. The practical industrial face of the turbine hall was replaced with the religious overtones of the Priesthood of Mars: columns topped with half-skulls and cogs, shrines built into the walls with offerings of raw metal blocks and clockwork trinkets, machine-code prayers pinned to the walls. The air was thick with incense burning in the braziers that provided a guttering light.

 	Seanoa didn’t wait for his squad. They would be behind him. They always were. He forged through the Mechanicus chambers, passing by equipment rooms and laboratories where ornate crucibles burned exotic elements and generator towers spat arcs of electricity.

 	The alarm had been raised. A klaxon blared somewhere. The Adeptus Mechanicus had brought in more men and armed them to defend this place, in response to the xenophile presence in the city. Seanoa had seen the troop manifests, and he knew they would not be enough.

 	Three troopers burst into the laboratory as Seanoa led the squad through it. Las-fire met him and he dropped down behind one of the lab benches, the slab of solid bronze absorbing the fire. Bolter fire streaked back across the room and as the troops took cover, Seanoa vaulted the bench and fell among them. He shot one through the stomach and lashed through the other with his lightning claw – the power field activated this time and burst in a shower of light as it discharged through the second trooper, shredding his upper body and leaving nothing left above the mid-chest.

 	 The third trooper was shot down by a bolter round from the other Jade Dragons moving through the room. The firefight had lasted about five seconds.

 	Ahead was the chapel, overlooked by a great altarpiece of the half-skull, a fat industrial diamond set into its eye and the cog half plated in brass. Columns of polished steel rose towards a vaulted ceiling covered in machine-code script, zeroes and ones mingling with equations picked out in electrum. 

 	There, Magos Skepteris was performing her prayers to the machine-spirit of the generatorium and the defence laser complex she watched over, and to the Omnissiah of whose intellect they were all a part. She knelt before the altar and turned at the sound of the Jade Dragons’ footsteps booming on the steel grille of the chapel floor. She still wore the hide of the Black Leviathan over her shoulders. 

 	The magos stood as Seanoa crossed the chapel floor. The rest of the squad stood back – their guns were ready in case they were needed, but for now this was their sergeant’s fight.

 	‘Why are you here?’ demanded Skepteris. ‘This is a place of worship.’

 	‘I know what you worship,’ said Seanoa coldly, ‘and it is not the Omnissiah. You may have fooled the Ultramarines but we are not so stupid. The mark of the Black Leviathan is on you, heretic. As we hunt, so we are hunted, but sometimes fate brings those that hunt us into our gunsights. And so you will die.’

 	‘I am loyal,’ said Skepteris. ‘I am dedicated to destroying the xenophiles and doing the Emperor’s work.’

 	‘I care nothing for the xenophiles,’ said Seanoa. ‘Briseis and Agrellan can burn for all we care. Fate put us here to destroy you.’ Seanoa pointed at Skepteris with the blades of his lightning claw and the blue-white light of the power field flickered across the columns and the shadowy vault of the ceiling.

 	Skepteris fought back. Her augmentations had enough combat capability to give her a good chance against xenophile assassins. Her mechadendrites whipped around Seanoa, who grabbed them in the crook of one elbow and twisted, throwing Skepteris to the ground like a wrestler. He slashed down at her with his claw but she was faster than she looked and rolled out of the way, the mechadendrites slithering out of Seanoa’s grasp. 

 	Skepteris’s jaw opened wide, too wide to be natural. Between her metal teeth emerged the barrel of a gun, the slotted heat dissipater of a melta weapon. She fired a bolt of superheated particles that burned a deep furrow through one of Seanoa’s shoulder pads, scorching through the ceramite down to the bone. Seanoa roared and ducked behind a column, molten ceramite running down his side.

 	‘What witchery has taken root on Briseis?’ shouted Seanoa. ‘What dark god sent you here? You will answer the Emperor in hell!’

 	Skepteris stood, the gun barrel withdrawing back down her throat. She turned to see the Jade Dragons squad standing across the chapel, cutting off any escape. Every bolter barrel was aimed at her.

 	‘I can kill one of you,’ said Skepteris. ‘But the chances are low. And then I will die. So there is no logic in resisting. Use no more of the Emperor’s bullets on me than you have to.’

 	She did not turn as Seanoa walked up behind her, the power field crackling around his claw. He rammed the blades through her midriff, carving upwards through her chest and out through her upper back. Her head flopped forwards on its ruined neck and Seanoa caught her as she fell forwards. He slashed across her waist and cut her in two, shreds of burning robe and hide falling among the showering blood.

 	‘I will waste no bullets on this creature,’ said Seanoa, dropping the upper half of Magos Skepteris to the floor. 

 	The bodies formed a trail from the turbine hall to the chapel, marking out the progress of the Jade Dragons. Some of the bodies were still alive, by some fluke their vital organs spared the bolter shrapnel, leaving blood loss and shock to finish the job.

 	One of them, a Peacemaker soldier, dragged himself on bloody hands into the command room. The place was choked with smoke from the charge that had blown the wall out, and draped with the bodies of the workers who had died there with no idea why. The floor was slick with blood and the trooper’s hand slipped in it as he dragged himself forwards.

 	He reached one of the control consoles. Lights still winked on its readouts. He grabbed the ankle of the body lying over the controls and pulled it away, letting it flop to the floor. A handset came away with the body, dangling by a wire, and the trooper held it to his face.

 	‘Whoever hears,’ gasped the trooper. ‘What brothers there are out there. I know one of you must hear me. The generatorium. They are hitting the generatorium. Tell the ambassadors, tell everyone. For the Greater Good.’

 
 
 Chapter Five


 	‘The enemy will use every wile of battle against you, every truth you have learned herein, every hard lesson that war has taught you. The general who thinks himself unique in his learning is merely the next head hanging on the wall.’


 	– Codex Astartes

 	The Ultramarines plan was simple, but that did not mean it was easy. The generatorium and the adjoining defence laser complex were always the primary objective for the Space Marines in Port Memnor, but it was the endgame, the capstone of the campaign to bring the planetoid to heel. Any tactician of the Imperial Guard would identify a cascade of objectives to be toppled one at a time, culminating in the conquest of the defence lasers to make the spaceport safe for Imperial use.

 	Space Marines did not think like that. They did what had to be done, fight the battle that had to be fought, and ignore everything else. They would not reduce the xenophile strongholds, fortify the parliament and the places of worship, assist in the evacuation of Imperial personnel or establish garrisons throughout the city. They would go for the throat, for the heart of the victory, trusting in their superiority in battle to make everything else irrelevant.

 	So Captain Devynius led his squad into the lowest levels of the generatorium, where the lights were few and the shadows were deep. It was a relic of the first days of Briseis’s Imperial settlement, where the burgeoning city had been fuelled by fat iron boilers surrounded by a tangle of corroded pipework. The structure had been dropped from orbit shortly after the Imperial settlers had first broken ground on Port Memnor, then forgotten and crushed beneath the mass of the generatorium for centuries.

 	Devynius emerged into the coolant complex, enormous refrigerated storage tanks reaching seven storeys above the labyrinth of pipework. Freezing mist clung to the lower levels, swirling around the Ultramarines as they burst through from the below.

 	‘The objective is the defence laser command,’ voxed Devynius. ‘Through the coolant towers, into the defence complex. Do not get held up. Once we have the complex, the xenophiles will never get us out.’

 	The generatorium workers fled at the first sight of the Ultramarines. They had all heard what had happened at the parliament house. There was no impediment to the squad making their way up to the mid-levels, moving towards the laser complex adjoining the generatorium.

 	Soon the towering vault of the laser cathedral loomed ahead. Six enormous laser cannon stood around the huge circular hall, forming a great place of worship dedicated to the Omnissiah. An icon of the Machine Cult stood in the centre of the arena-like central expanse, a hooded titan surrounded by a cog halo and carrying the power axe that symbolised the Priesthood of Mars. The first magi to oversee the defence lasers’ construction had consecrated this place, the rituals repeated by every magos since up to Skepteris.

 	‘Hold this place,’ said Devynius. ‘Oderac! Barricade the entrances, take whoever you need. I need to get onto the vox and bring as many workers in as we can to help. The xenophiles will strike as soon as they realise we have moved, but we will throw them back to their tau masters in pieces!’

 	‘They cannot weed us out of here,’ said Oderac, looking around the cathedral. ‘This monument to Imperial might, this icon of majesty! We can hold this for years, my brothers.’

 	‘I wish the xenophiles had been rooted out first,’ voxed Devynius as the squad spread out to cover all the ways in. ‘And this city could have been taken without bloodshed. But they are dug in deep, my brothers. They will come to us, they will beg to die on our blades. If they will refuse the Emperor’s mercy I fought so hard to show them, they will get the Emperor’s wrath in its place!’

 	The laser complex was highly defensible, built to be garrisoned by Imperial forces. Destroying the xenophiles had been at the forefront of the Space Marines mission objectives, but the ultimate goal had always been holding the defence lasers and hence securing the spaceport for Imperial transports. The xenophiles would die, and many innocent citizens, as they were forced to mobilise against the complex, but the Ultramarines would hold it. Briseis would suffer, as Devynius had sought to prevent, but the Emperor’s will would be done and the forces fighting on Agrellan would be bolstered.

 	This battle would be won. Agrellan would be won, and this war after it. It was the Emperor’s will.

 	Devynius’s thoughts were broken by the metallic howl from above. A section of the ceiling bowed in and fell, a shower of wreckage and flame pouring through. His squadmates scattered across the cathedral floor.

 	Through the flames it descended. The hard lines of its shape were framed in the fire that shimmered against the chrome-bright surrounds of the reactors built into its chest, echoed in the blue-yellow jets of flame from the exhausts on its back. It was huge, not far shy of a an Imperial Knight demi-Titan in scale, one arm holding a massive multi-barrelled pulse weapon and the other the glowing vanes of a shield generator. Twin reactors glowed on either side of its massive torso, its reverse-jointed knees bending to absorb the shock as it hit the cathedral floor. Burning wreckage crashed into the floor around it as the missiles racked around its shoulder angled towards Devynius. 

 	The design was unmistakeably tau. The lenses in its head dilated as they focused on Devynius. Smaller machines were descending around it, their jets firing to land.

 	Devynius had never seen anything like it, save the early battle assessments from the war on Agrellan. A new form of battlesuit, a bipedal machine with the firepower of a super-heavy tank and manoeuvrability equal to anything the tau had fielded before. Until now only a few grainy pict-captures and garbled field reports attested to their existence. The tau treatment of technology was their most blatant heresy – they created, they innovated, constantly forging new machines to fight their expansionist wars. This machine was their latest, a huge and massively armed iteration of the smaller Crisis battlesuits now dropping into the cathedral behind it.

 	‘Riptide!’ shouted Devynius over the vox as he ran. Two missiles streaked towards him, screaming on trails of white exhaust. A few strides away was the statue of the Omnissiah and Devynius dived past the folds of its sculpted robe.

 	One missile hurtled past the statue and exploded against the far wall. The second hit the statue, blowing it in half at the waist, sending chunks of torn bronze falling in scorching rain around Devynius. The upper half toppled, the head of the statue’s axe burying itself in the floor. 

 	Devynius broke from cover, snapping shots up at the Riptide. Its burst cannon followed him, tracking unerringly. It could punch through power armour as if it wasn’t there. 

 	Devynius dropped onto his back. He had one shot before the Riptide’s cannon speared right through him. He had trained for such a shot a thousand times in the firing ranges of Macragge, against drone-servitors in the proving grounds. Thaxos had been a better shot than he was, and Venarin was better than either. But Devynius was an Ultramarine, and there was no facet of the Codex Astartes he had neglected. Marksmanship included.

 	The bolter kicked in Devynius’s hand. The Riptide’s eye lens shattered, spilling sparks like burning blood. 

 	It would not last. The tau battlesuits had redundant sensor systems that kept them lethal even when their primary sensors were destroyed, but it would buy seconds, and seconds were what Devynius needed. 

 	The other Ultramarines were fighting the Crisis suits. Each suit was the personal war machine of a tau fire caste veteran, armed with the exotic xenos weapons with which that warrior was most proficient – fusion rifles, missile pods, burst cannons. Brother Silen was down, clutching the wreckage of a ruined thigh, firing with one hand from his back. Merovos and Oderac brought one Crisis suit down with combined fire, Merovos’s plasma gun scorching a deep molten furrow across the battlesuit’s chest, the flesh of the alien inside bubbling and popping in the heat.

 	Devynius could see the next few moments unravelling in his mind. The pages of the Codex Astartes seemed to turn before his eyes and every movement, every shot, was picked out in the hot glow of fate. 

 	And Devynius knew that Merovos would die. Merovos paused, gunfire streaking all around him, and took stock of the Riptide battlesuit stomping around the ruined statue to finish off Devynius. Merovos saw his commander stricken and the huge battlesuit turning its burst cannon towards him. Merovos raised his plasma gun, sighting down it, picking out the weak spots in the hulking machine as years of sleep-taught battle-lore had trained him.

 	The plasma gun emitted a bolt of superheated plasma, the sound like tearing metal. The bolt sheared into the shoulder joint of the Riptide’s gun arm. Molten handfuls of armour fell away and the arm hung limp. The tip of the barrel scraped along the floor.

 	The Riptide turned, its remaining sensors scanning the direction of the fire that had crippled its arm. The shoulder-mounted missile racks were full again and they tracked towards Merovos, who paused a half-second longer to spray another stream of plasma up into the Riptide’s chest.

 	He was aiming for the reactors mounted on either side of the torso. What little intelligence existed on the Riptide suggested the blocky armoured areas housed the battlesuit’s power plant and that if breached, the machine might be destroyed. It was the only chance he had at bringing it down.

 	The armour of the Riptide’s torso held. The sensors of the half-ruined head focused in on the Ultramarine and the missile racks let loose a trio of missiles that crossed the expanse of the cathedral in a heartbeat.

 	Merovos was caught out in the open. He had no cover and had stood still to get the shot. The missiles hammered into him and Merovos vanished in a great plume of flame and wreckage.

 	Devynius had seen it happen a second before the missiles had hit home. It was the way of the Ultramarines – to fight and die for one another, to hold honour above survival. Die if you must, Guilliman had written ten thousand years before, but die well.

 	‘Fall back!’ yelled Devynius into the vox, scrambling to his feet. ‘We will regroup, we will return! Fall back!’

 	Runes projected onto Devynius’s retina called out the status of his squadmates. Three runes were dark – Silen, Merovos and Brother Timesus. Three Ultramarines dead to tau guns in the flaming chaos of the cathedral. This should have been their victory. 

 	Devynius sprayed fire almost at random at the Crisis battlesuits flitting between the defence lasers. He spotted some of the Ultramarines making their way towards him, holding together in a line as they fired, keeping the battlesuits on the move to thin the fire coming down at them. 

 	Behind him was a processional down which the servitors would approach the cathedral for the annual rituals to consecrate the defence lasers. It was one of the ways in that Devynius had earmarked to be fortified against attackers. Now it would have to serve as a way out. Past magi of Port Memnor glowered down at him through the hoods of their bronze robes, and incense-servitors droned around the rafters casting billows of sickly smoke. 

 	Brother Vesuvio got there first after Devynius, Timesus slung over his shoulder as Vesuvio fired one-handed at the tau closing in behind. Timesus’s armour was cratered and glowing down his left side, where one of the battlesuits’ fusion guns had hammered him with half a dozen shots. Timesus was almost certainly dead, and Vesuvio would not leave his squadmate behind.

 	‘Focus fire and keep moving!’ ordered Devynius. ‘Cage your fury, brothers! Discipline! By the Emperor’s will we shall return!’ The rest of Devynius’s squad reached the processional, Silen’s body dragged by a squadmate – there had not been enough left of Merovos to salvage.

 	‘How did they know?’ growled Vesuvio as the squad moved out of the cathedral and into the tangled mass of coolant ducts in the lower levels of the generatorium. ‘They never knew of our objective. Not even the procurator, not Maelenar, no one. How did the xenos know when and where we would strike?’

 	As the squad reached the outskirts of the generatorium, where the workers’ habs and shanties clustered around the cooling towers, they came within earshot of the huge screens that broadcast to the people of Port Memnor. And it was then they got the answer.

 	From time to time, the magi of Briseis would have cause to speak to the population, sometimes to warn of a coolant leak or industrial accident at the generatorium, sometimes to pronounce a new ordnance conscripting citizens into the workforce. It was used rarely, especially by the publicity-shy Magos Skepteris, but the picters and broadcast equipment needed were still stored in the magos’s quarters in the generatorium complex. It was this that Sergeant Seanoa used to speak to Port Memnor.

 	On dozens of screens the cold black eyes of Seanoa’s faceplate looked out across the city. He held up one hand so the picter could see what he was carrying. It was the severed head of Magos Skepteris, seen out of its dark red hood for the first time on Briseis. A mass of ribboned flesh hung from below the neck, all that Seanoa’s lightning claw had left of her torso. The magos’s jaw hung open, revealing her steel teeth and the machinery in her throat. Cables and pipes hung among the gore. 

 	‘Thus are the wages of heresy,’ said Seanoa. His voice echoed among the spires of spire-habs around the parliament building, between the chimneys of the generatorium and across the expanse of the spaceport’s landing pads. It reached into the workshops of the Chrono-Wrights’ District, the animal pens of the Slaughtermens’ Quarter, the millions of hab-cells and shanties. ‘The Enemy sought to convince us the tau were the threat on Briseis. But Fate told us otherwise. The Enemy sought to wage his war in the shadows, but Fate brought him to light. As we hunt, so we are hunted, but on this world we turned and fought back!’

 	Seanoa cast the head of Magos Skepteris onto the floor of the magos’s chambers. The picter panned down to watch it land on the sea creature’s hide spread out on the floor. Seanoa’s armoured foot stamped down on the head, crushing the magos’s skull flat against the barnacled scales. 

 	‘The Enemy cannot hide the signs of its passing, not from the Jade Dragons! The Black Leviathan passed by here and left its mark. It left it on the magos, the servant of the Enemy, and she was cut down. It left it on your city, and it shall be purged. You who worship the dark gods, you who lust for the power of the warp, know this! Now you are hunted!’

 	Ambassador O’Myen watched with satisfaction as the picter turned back to the Space Marine’s face, its features hidden behind the faceplate. The screen turned black as the broadcast finished and O’Myen turned his attention back to the generatorium complex.

 	O’Myen had wished to observe events at the generatorium directly and so had taken an escort of fire warriors and his detail of lower-ranked water caste to the top of a hab-block overlooking the complex. The signs of battle had been apparent from the buildings above the defence laser housing – fire and explosions from the entrance of Vre’Cyr’s fire caste cadre. Like punctuation marks in the history of Briseis, the explosions had marked the end of one age and the beginning of another.

 	‘Record, if you will,’ said O’Myen. The water caste emissary beside him, a loyal and hard-working tau who would never rise above his current rank, clacked away on a wrist-mounted data device. O’Myen’s words were worthy of preserving, for his was one of the finest minds in all the water caste.

 	‘Upon considering a problem,’ said O’Myen, ‘one should never seek out the solution as one might pick out a certain star in the sky. There is never a single answer and to hunt it is to chase one prey-beast while a thousand others like it are slumbering at your feet. Instead, we look upon the answers as the roots of a tree, dividing and rejoining, until the tip of every root is the result you desire and to get there you must merely follow the path of cause and effect.

 	‘Let us consider the solution to the problem presented on Briseis. The Imperial elites, the Space Marines as the gue’la know them, have the capacity to hold the defence laser complex indefinitely once they had taken and fortified the place. Thus, we place in motion events that will compromise their effort to do so. Observation, intelligence gathering and the resultant manipulation of the Jade Dragons created several potential outcomes, each of which would generate such a compromise. The first desirable outcome is the turning of the people of Briseis further against the possibility of Imperial occupation. That is the tip of one root, so to speak, and would be achieved by a public and graphic act of violence against one perceived as a friend of the tribes of Briseis. Another root leads to the outcome of the generatorium itself being unable to function properly without the input of an expert in its technology, of which the Imperium has mystifyingly few. Finally, the manipulation may lead to the fire caste response, intended to bring these Jade Dragons to battle, engaging a second Space Marine force in the process of fortifying the defence laser housing.’

 	A second series of explosions rippled along the roof of the main generatorium building, the red-orange glare flickering against the massive shapes of the cooling towers. From this distance the glow of Crisis battlesuit exhausts was just visible, playing across the gargoyles and arch-tops of the Imperium’s grotesque architecture. Quite why the Imperium of Man insisted on creating such visions of oppression escaped O’Myen, for whom the clean, gleaming lines of tau cities was a vision so emblematic of peace and wisdom. Perhaps it would be a suitable study subject in the future, to provide an insight into the frustratingly wayward Imperial mind.

 	‘Thus we see that true social engineering is the instigation of behaviours and events of which the only possible outcomes are beneficial to the Greater Good,’ continued O’Myen. ‘To structure such a pattern, a cascading series of inevitably useful events, is the goal of every water caste intervention. In this we see in action previous lessons on the use of an opposing force’s qualities against him. The aggression and independence of the Jade Dragons, and the concept of human honour given such import by the Ultramarines, are themselves factors in the success of this intervention. This ambassador can think of no more useful tools in the work of the Greater Good than the Space Marines.’

 	The emissary finished recording O’Myen’s words. They would form part of the great body of work he would leave behind, which later water caste ambassadors would use to further refine their ways of advancing the Greater Good and necessary expansion of the tau empire. Briseis would be a useful prize, Agrellan more so, but the true contribution to the Greater Good would come from the wisdom O’Myen had gathered in solving problems such as had been presented to him in Port Memnor.

 	‘Addendum,’ said O’Myen. ‘The fire caste win with blades and pulse rounds. The air caste win with fighter craft and bombs. The water caste win with words, and with them we shall deliver more than all our brother castes combined.’

 	Perhaps the fire caste warriors standing guard on the rooftop would object to that, but they all knew better than to state it out loud. They could whine about it to their captain when they were done on Briseis, if their leader survived.

 	That reminded O’Myen.

 	‘Vre’Cyr,’ said O’Myen into his communicator. ‘Report.’

 	Brother Oderac crawled the last few metres across the floor of the turbine hall. Above him, what remained of the squad were swapping fire with the other Crisis battlesuits across the roof of the generatorium building. Around him rose the din of the turbines, masking the thudding footsteps of the battlesuit that had descended on its back-mounted jets to make sure he was dead. Oderac had fallen Throne knew how far when the roof section had collapsed and one leg had folded under him, broken and useless. He had already taken pulse rounds to the chest and shoulder, punching through his ceramite and into flesh and bone. He was dying.

 	Looking down from the roof Devynius could see it all panning out in the same clinical slow motion as Merovos’s death. Oderac rolled onto one side, hot blood spraying over the blue of his armour as he unhooked a melta bomb from his waist. He sprawled across to the massive cylinder beside him – the turbine itself, powered by the steam superheated by the plasma reactors. 

 	The Crisis battlesuit stalked into view. A fusion blaster levelled at Oderac, and Oderac ripped the pin out of the meltabomb as he clamped it onto the turbine.

 	Devynius scanned through the situation, the sleep-taught instincts of a combat leader taking control. His squad was down to half strength. He had taken a shot to one shin that had shattered the bone and though he could still walk, he limped through the fuzz of automatically dispensed painkillers and could feel the boot of his armour filling with blood. Vesuvio had fallen, Timesus still slung over his shoulder, drilled through the back by a volley of pulse shots a few paces from Devynius. The only way forward had been across the roof, towards the walkways and stairwells leading to the tangle of shanty tunnels where the Ultramarines could lose the bulky battlesuits, but until then there was scant cover among the gargoyles of the rooftop.

 	In the same queasy slow motion, Oderac rolled onto his back. His helmet was gone, shredded by fusion fire, and Devynius could see Oderac mouthing some old curses of Macragge at the battlesuit looming over him. 

 	The melta bomb detonated. The turbine, Oderac, the battlesuit and the turbine hall vanished in a white eruption of steam, shards of shrapnel punching up through the roof. The shockwave hit Devynius and heat roared around him, everything swamped in the white wall of steam rushing up from the explosion.

 	Somewhere in the storm and bedlam, the rest of the turbine hall roof collapsed. Devynius felt the world yawning open beneath his feet and he fell, every sense overwhelmed. Impacts hammered at him from every direction as if a thousand stone fists were pummelling him. 

 	He couldn’t even tell when he landed. The din ended and he was down, one side crushed into the splintered flagstones of the floor. The ruins of the turbine hall came into view as the steam dissipated. Oderac and the Crisis battlesuit were gone, shredded into nothing by the eruption of shrapnel. 

 	Devynius clambered to his feet, as painfully and unsteadily as a crippled old man. His bolter was gone – he still had his bolt pistol and his power sword scabbarded. 

 	The icons on his retina were dark. His helmet was dented and one eyepiece was fractured, a black spider’s web cast over his field of vision. His leg was numb and wavering beneath him and the internal breastplate of bone was cracked. He could feel the splinters of bone floating free beneath the skin of his chest. An unaugmented human’s chest would have been crushed. Anyone but a Space Marine would have been dead a dozen times over.

 	The turbine hall was full of wreckage. The destroyed turbine had burst open in a great torn spray of ripped metal. The structures criss-crossing the hall fallen. Chunks of smouldering wreckage were everywhere. The endless drone of the turbine hall was stuttering and uneven, the other turbines on the verge of tearing themselves apart.

 	Movement caught Devynius’s eye, looming above the shattered turbine. Through the billows of steam emerged the head and shoulders of the Riptide battlesuit. Its gun arm was completely gone, torn off in the fall from the rooftop, its own jets not quick enough to engage. The desert colours were blistered and scraped away, revealing streams of bare metal underneath. Armour segments and loose components hung from the war machine, and the head in which its eyepieces were mounted was half-crushed and wrenched sideways.

 	Devynius could make out the whining of the Riptide’s damaged servos over the turbines. The Riptide stalked through the wreckage towards Devynius, the single remaining lens narrowing to focus. It had seen him.

 	Devynius drew his sword and pistol. The Riptide cycled two remaining missiles on its launcher.

 	Devynius could hide. He could hunker down behind cover and hope the missiles didn’t tear him apart where he sheltered. He could run and hope that the Riptide didn’t just draw a bead on him as he fled, launching a missile to hit him square in the back. Devynius chose neither option.

 	He ran at the Riptide, pistol up and hammering fire out at the Riptide’s mechanical face. Bolt shells burst around its shoulders. Devynius vaulted a bank of torn metal, ignoring the bolts of pain rippling down his leg and through his chest.

 	The Riptide was, like many war engines of the tau, designed to kill from afar. No xenos species possessed superior firepower technology to the tau. That was how the tau fought – holding off the enemy, pinning them down and herding the disposable auxiliaries of their client races forward to deal with the bloody melee of battle. 

 	It was in that melee that a Space Marine excelled. The ways of the Imperium did not change rapidly, but the Space Marines could learn to fight a new form of enemy rapidly enough if they had to. A Space Marine knew not to face the tau at their favourite range, where they could pick their shots and make the best use of their firepower. He faced them up close, where the tau tenets of war admonished them never to fight.

 	The first missile streaked at Devynius. Devynius dropped and turned, letting the missile streak over him, the scorching exhaust bubbling the paint of his armour. He rolled to his feet and the second missile, unleashed too quickly, veered from a target obscured in the smoke from the first. Twin explosions helped lift Devynius as he jumped at the Riptide.

 	Devynius slammed into the war machine at the height of its massive chest, grabbing the upper edge of one of the twin reactors. The armour plating was hot against his hand. The Riptide’s remaining arm reached up at him, a hand sliding out of its housing beneath the missile rack. Devynius drew his power sword and swung, a solid, glittering arc that cast a crescent of light through the Riptide’s wrist. The mechanical hand was sliced clean off and clattered into the wreckage below. Devynius found a foothold and powered himself up onto the Riptide’s shoulder, drawing back his blade and plunging it into the armour. The power field cracked armour plating and the tip slid through circuitry and machinery, hydraulic fluid spurting like thick oily blood.

 	The Riptide bucked to throw Devynius off, but he held tight. Sparks sprayed out of the wound. Explosive bolts fired as the Riptide activated its emergency escape mechanism and the torso split open down the middle. 

 	The sealed atmosphere inside was vented as cold vapour. Inside was revealed the cockpit of the Riptide, the fire warrior pilot inside hooked up to his machine with dozens of wires, cradled in a cocoon-like pod to absorb the shocks the Riptide would suffer in battle. 

 	The tau looked up at Devynius. Devynius thought he could detect some recognisable emotion in that alien face. Its lipless mouth was set in a grimace and the nose-slit flared wide. The three-fingered hands were forcing the controls round, trying to throw Devynius off. Devynius didn’t think it was afraid – it was desperate certainly, injured, angry. But not yet afraid.

 	Devynius reached down and grabbed the collar of the pilot’s jumpsuit. The pilot tried to draw a pistol from a holster next to the controls but Devynius yanked the alien out of the Riptide, holding it above the cockpit. The pilot’s feet kicked unsupported among the severed cables hanging from interfaces all over the jumpsuit.

 	‘What species is this, that butts heads with the Imperium of Man?’ growled Devynius. He didn’t know if the alien could understand him and he didn’t care. ‘Have you not witnessed our wrath? Have you not left your dead piled deep enough? Humanity does not kneel! Humanity is no slave-species for you to exploit, alien! If you have not learned that by now then we will teach it to you in death.’

 	The tau grimaced as it fought to breathe with Devynius’s gauntlet around its throat. ‘We do this for you,’ it slurred. ‘For your people. For their freedom. For the Greater Good.’

 	Devynius rammed the power sword up into the tau’s stomach. The power field blew out the back half of its chest, throwing shattered ribs and torn organs across the armoured carapace of the Riptide. The alien’s eyes rolled back and went dull, the light glinting in their black lenses extinguished. Devynius dropped the corpse at the feet of the Riptide and clambered down.

 	His squad were lost, shot down by the tau or killed in the collapse of the turbine hall. He did not know if the same could be said for the Crisis battlesuits, so he wasted no time in making his way across the turbine hall, through the sections of the fallen roof and out into the shanty town that clustered around the base of the building.

 	The firefight and the explosion in the turbine hall had scared the people away and the city surrounding the generatorium was empty. No doubt the people who lived here were well primed to evacuate the area at the first hint of an industrial accident. Devynius limped through the deserted streets, through the puddles of industrial run-off scum and through the greasy drizzle that had just begun to fall.

 	His vox was full of static. As he cleared the shadow of the cooling towers it resolved into the regular patterns of a starship’s beacon, and he switched to the orbital vox-channel. 

 	‘Devynius to the Polar Defiance,’ he said. He repeated himself, struggling to make anything out through the static.

 	‘Stand by,’ came a weak fuzzy voice in reply. ‘We’re cleaning up the signal.’ The vox became a little clearer. ‘Captain Devynius, this is the bridge of the Polar Defiance, communications helm.’

 	‘Report mission failure,’ said Devynius. ‘The tau have this city, all of it. Throne forgive me, we have failed. Launch the orbital bombardment.’

 
 
 Chapter Six


 	‘Suffer any ally, because every gun and sword is to be welcomed into your service. Trust no ally absolutely, for every gun and sword may be turned against you.’


 	– Codex Astartes

 	O’Myen had not expected Vre’Cyr to survive. The fire caste were useful, but sometimes their greatest utility lay in situations of danger. The water caste had to balance their immediate benefit against the possibility of using them again in the future, and Vre’Cyr was far more useful dying to deny the Ultramarines the generatorium than he was in fighting any future battles that might come along. It was testament to the stubbornness of the Space Marines that even protected by the armour and guns of a Riptide, Vre’Cyr had not been safe.

 	The fire caste themselves did not understand. Their own commanders tried to preserve their troops, basing decisions on the suboptimal desire to reduce casualties. The ethereals, infinitely wise though they were, were also compassionate to a fault. That was why the water caste had to be trusted sometimes, with the completion of goals whose means were less palatable to the other castes.

 	The ethereals would bemoan the deaths among all species. The fire caste would rage at the loss of their brethren. But the water caste would agree that O’Myen had done what was necessary for the Greater Good, and keep the lines of his reasoning to themselves.

 	O’Myen had left the city by that point, leading his entourage through the gue’la network of tunnels and safehouses to the cemeteries outside the city limits. There the gue’la had interred their dead, and icons of their strange Emperor-worshipping faith scattered the stony hills. The fire caste crouched among the tombstones, blending with the stony ground in their camouflage mantles. The water caste functionaries huddled around the ambassador as if they were freezing and his knowledge was warmth.

 	The first streak of fire in the sky did not bring O’Myen joy. The gue’la were odd creatures with their mercurial, tempestuous emotions, their capricious desires and constantly shifting focus. They would find a savage joy that someone they hated was suffering, that they had won a victory against a despised foe. They would whoop and dance, and intoxicate themselves as they so loved to do. O’Myen had seen this happen in his mind a thousand times before and had planned out a hundred lines of cause and effect that led to those first explosive starship rounds breaching the upper atmosphere. Any joy had burned out long ago.

 	The first rounds hurtled through the middle and lower atmosphere, accelerated by Briseis’s own gravity, and speared into the Chrono-Wrights’ District. A bloom of orange fire rose over the skyline, throwing a cloud of debris into the air. A clock tower toppled, vanishing in a billow of dust. Secondary explosions peppered the rooftops as the volatile chemicals stored in the mechanics’ workshops caught fire. 

 	The main body of the salvo descended in a slow burning rain. The people below, the loyal gue’la and ignorant civilians alike, were recovering from the shock of the first impact and perhaps looking up at the sky to see what disaster would come next. They saw many more disasters, forty or fifty, each one a massive-calibre shell fired from a broadside cannon on the Polar Defiance.

 	More explosions blossomed across the Chrono-Wrights’ District. Some shells fell wide and erupted among the lavish housing around the parliament, or strayed into the Industrial or Clerks’ Quarters. How many people died in those moments? The fire caste had calculated the outcome of such a bombardment, but the numbers they came up with had slipped O’Myen’s mind. It was unnecessary information, irrelevant, shunted aside to make room for something more important. The lives of the gue’la did not matter. The effect the bombardment would have on the survivors was the crucial knowledge, and O’Myen knew exactly what it would be.

 	The skyline of the Chrono-Wrights’ District was eroding, its cramped hab-blocks and towers collapsing. A spire near the parliament collapsed, taking with it a meaningless number of the city’s aristocracy. The cemetery’s tombs were lined red and orange with the glare of the fires ripping up from the city. 

 	The sounds reached them, deep rumblings like an earthquake punctuated by the sudden gunshots of exploding chemical stashes.

 	‘Where is the beauty in this?’ asked O’Myen.

 	The functionary beside him turned to answer. ‘In the knowledge of the furtherance of the Greater Good,’ he replied.

 	O’Myen nodded in agreement, signifying the functionary was correct. These little moments of praise kept the smaller-minded on the right path.

 	‘And thus we reach the pinnacle of our craft,’ said O’Myen. ‘The blissful stage when all we need to do to see the Greater Good fulfilled, is wait.’

 	In the hours that passed the bombardment ceased, long after its purpose in wiping out the strongholds of the loyal gue’la was complete, and the fires spread to other parts of the city. Streams of evacuees left the city gates to form miserable makeshift camps in the flinty hills – none of them strayed near the cemetery, for it was a place of ill omen and such things held much weight in the imaginations of a society still not far removed from its tribal roots. The clever ones brought supplies with them to set up shelter and the others crowded around them to absorb better chances of survival. Survivors of the Peacemakers tried to police the evacuees, but they had no hope of keeping the peace here. Opportunists were already stealing and settling scores. Thus were the ways of the gue’la.

 	A group of humans approached the cemetery. They were tribal elders, among them the elder of the Thundercliff who had spoken to O’Myen many times in preparing this moment. Other leaders were among them, representatives of every ancient tribe of Briseis, guarded by the tribal enforcers who were the true lawkeepers of Port Memnor. They were the leaders of the Endless Sky, the Black Thorns, the Bone Renders and many more, those peoples who had wandered Briseis before they even learned of a long-dead Emperor and his crumbling Imperium.

 	‘Why have you chosen this place?’ demanded the Bone Render elder. He was a robust and bearded man, who seemed not to need the protection of the warriors at his side – they carried weapons carved from bone, and he wore the trinkets of tooth and ivory emblematic of his people.

 	‘We will not be watched here,’ said O’Myen. ‘And as you can see the city is not safe. I have called you together because in their infinite mercy and generosity, the tau wish to extend once more their offer to your people. You have heard the terms already, and they are once more laid before you. It is not much we ask, but in return, we offer you the greatest gift. A place within the Tau Empire, freedom for your people, a future of your own.’

 	‘It is more to ask than you realise,’ said the elder of the Black Thorns. He was a sickly-looking old man with skin that seemed paper thin. His attendants carried the implements of his tribe’s primitive alchemy – grinding bowls, bundles of rank herbs, jars of insects and leeches. ‘To turn back the centuries, to make whole what has so long been broken. Our people live in cities, they kneel before the eagle. Those who keep to the old ways are few. Many will die, alien.’

 	‘Your weak will die,’ said Ambassador O’Myen. ‘Is that not the way of Briseis? It was the principle on which your tribes were built. It is our principle, too. It is a part of the Greater Good to abandon to their fate those who do not deserve to thrive. And you forget, you will not be alone. The Tau Empire will protect you and watch over you, as it does all who pledge themselves to it.’

 	‘And we will become strong,’ said the Thundercliff elder. ‘We have been weak for too long. The Imperium has seen to that. One generation is all it will take. We will be hard as the stones and unyielding as the sky.’

 	‘And if you fear for the lives of your people,’ said O’Myen, ‘then simply observe.’ He cast a hand towards the city, the heart of which was spurting clouds of flame and black smoke as it burned. ‘The Imperium will have their city, and if it be a ghost town inhabited by none but corpses, they will care not. They would herd every Briseian into the fires. There is no turning back. Throw off their yoke or they will destroy you.’

 	‘I say yes to your offer,’ said the elder of the Storm of Shale tribe. ‘The Imperium have shown what manner of master they are. I would kneel to the alien a thousand times before I would once before an Imperial altar.’

 	Other elders gave their assent, a dozen voices raised at once.

 	‘But we once were free!’ shouted the elder of the Bone Renders. ‘We will but cast off one slavemaster for another! I will lead my tribe to destruction before I lead them to servitude again!’

 	The Thundercliff elder shuffled forwards to stand face to face with her Bone Render counterpart. The Bone Render was a big man, obviously powerful and physically dangerous, but the frail old woman before him seemed to make him shrink away as if she was the true threat. ‘War between the tribes,’ she said, ‘is a terrible thing. You are charged with keeping the memories of your tribe, so you know it as well as any of us. You speak of leading your people to destruction. Stand before the rest of us, and that is exactly what you will do. Pride keeps you from proclaiming your allegiance to the alien. That is to be expected, for the Bone Renders always were proud. Simply stand in silence, and your will shall be our will.’

 	The Bone Render tried to meet the old woman’s gaze, but his eyes turned to the ground instead. The moment passed, and he stayed silent.

 	‘Then it is agreed,’ said the Thundercliff elder. ‘None will stand against? None will make war in the name of pride?’ There was no answer from the other elders.

 	‘My gratitude, noble people of Briseis,’ said O’Myen. ‘From the sadness of this day shall come a great celebration, for you are now united with a hundred other species in the embrace of the Greater Good. But there are urgent matters that must be attended to. Have you brought the scouts we requested?’

 	The Thundercliff elder gestured to her entourage and a dozen men came forward. They wore the colours of several different tribes, hardy souls with pallid and pockmarked skin brought about by spending too much time underground. ‘They have mapped the tombs and tunnels as their fathers did,’ said the Thundercliff elder. ‘None know the underside of Port Memnor as they do. The scouts of the Thundercliff gave you access to the tombs as you requested, and now all tribes have given their expertise there is no corner of the under-city they do not know.’

 	‘Then I ask that we move immediately,’ said O’Myen. ‘An earth caste work detail waits at the tomb entrance. The rest of you, my fire warriors have prepared a safe place for you so you might be spared the wrath of the Imperials, for more may soon fall on Port Memnor. They want to wipe you out, but the Greater Good values your allegiance and will protect you with our own tau blood.’

 	The fire warriors gathered the elders up and began marching them off the cemetery grounds, towards a ridge a short distance away where another team of tau troops kept watch. The Bone Render looked back at his burning city, just once, and followed the rest without another word.

 	The Space Marines met at the landing site, where the shuttles from the Polar Defiance had dropped them at the start of the mission. The full Jade Dragons squad was there, barely scratched by their assault on the chambers of Magos Skepteris. 

 	Devynius, on the other hand, was alone.

 	The Jade Dragons squad was lined up along the ridge when Devynius arrived, standing watch. Sergeant Seanoa was among them, Skepteris’s blood still caking his armoured boot. Devynius limped down the slope as Seanoa’s eyepieces turned to follow him.

 	Devynius took off his helmet and dropped it at his feet. His power sword followed, and he stood unarmed.

 	Seanoa stepped out of line and walked to a few paces from Devynius. He unhooked the power couplings on his lightning claw and placed it on the ground. He removed the magazine from his bolter and laid the weapon beside the claw. He took his helmet off as Devynius had done – his face was bull-necked and flat-nosed, with the same swirling patterns on his armour inked across his cheeks and forehead.

 	Neither man spoke. 

 	Seanoa dropped into a loose guard, hands held up, mobile and feinting. Devynius watched him, unmoving, gauging every detail of the Jade Dragons mobility and fighting style. Seanoa was all power and momentum, built for takedowns and grappling, neutralising an enemy’s movement and grinding him into defeat. Devynius had fought a thousand unarmed bouts against his brother Ultramarines on Macragge and he knew just about every style of combat a Space Marine might employ.

 	Seanoa made a move for Devynius’s front leg, not a serious attempt to knock him down but a probing attack to see how Devynius moved. Devynius made the least movement necessary, not giving anything away. Seanoa circled, face focused, making quick half-movements with his hands, trying to draw a false start out of Devynius.

 	Seanoa knew he would have to move in first, make the first attack. That was why Devynius made the first move instead, darting inside Seanoa’s guard with the speed and focus he had learned in decades of sparring and warfare. He drove a fist into Seanoa’s breastplate, knocking the Jade Dragon off-balance. He hooked Seanoa’s leg with his own, driving an elbow up into Seanoa’s jaw and tipping him onto his back.

 	Seanoa sprawled onto his back in the loose shale. Devynius was on him, driving a fist down at his face. Seanoa caught Devynius’s arm in the crook of his elbow and forced Devynius down to the ground. Suddenly the positions were reversed, Seanoa on Devynius’s back, wrenching his arm behind him. Devynius felt his injuries, sealed up by the rapidly-clotting blood of a Space Marine, tearing open inside his armour. Hot blood pooled inside his breastplate. Pain rippled up through his chest, met by the cold flood of painkillers dispensed by his armour. They weren’t reducing the pain any more, just turning it from an isolated tearing to a dull pulse of agony that went right through him, as if he was immersed in it.

 	Seanoa wrenched on Devynius’s shoulder. The joint was separating. After the encounter with the tau battlesuit force, it wouldn’t take much to put Devynius out of action entirely. Seanoa had a dozen ways of beating Devynius now, in a position in which he had a massive advantage. Choke Devynius out. Lock the head and make it clear he could break Devynius’s neck at will. Simply pound on Devynius’s skull until he fell unconscious.

 	But there was one way for Devynius to regain the advantage.

 	Devynius forced his body around under Seanoa’s weight, not fighting against the wrenching on his shoulder but using all his leverage to pivot in the same direction. He felt tendons snapping and gristle tearing, just before the flood of pain blanked everything else out. His shoulder dislocated and the joint of his armour was mobile enough to let the bone swivel freely in its socket. 

 	No longer pinned in place, Devynius spun on his stomach out from beneath Seanoa. Seanoa was still holding his arm but it gave him no purchase on Devynius with the shoulder joint giving no resistance.

 	Devynius was on his feet, turning to face Seanoa. Devynius raised a foot and brought it down on the back of Seanoa’s head. His shoulder separated further, but the pain from the injury was just another note in the cacophony soaring through him. He had felt pain before. A Space Marine had to accept it, to welcome it even, to shunt it to a part of his mind where it could not interfere in the cold business of inflicting harm on the body of an enemy. 

 	Seanoa was face down on the ground. Devynius drove a second axe kick into the Jade Dragons head and Seanoa’s face slammed into the shale ground. When he lurched up, his face was cut by the flint shards. He tried to reel Devynius back in by the arm he still had hold of but Devynius dropped knee-first onto the back of Seanoa’s neck and pinned him in place.

 	Devynius drew back the fist of his good arm and hammered it down into the side of Seanoa’s face. Pain was bursting through him like fireworks, their glow mingling into a smouldering fire, and it was good – he let it bleed right through him and turn into strength that drove his fist. Bone cracked. Shards of stone clattered against armour. Again and again the fist drove down and each time it hit a more yielding surface, finding fragments of bone instead of a solid skull, torn mush instead of muscle.

 	Devynius held his fist still, hovering beside his face ready to hammer down again. The side of Seanoa’s face was a bloody mess.

 	A brother did not kill a brother. Seanoa had destroyed the chances of Imperial success on Briseis with his rogue mission to kill Skepteris, but he was still a Space Marine. Devynius could have killed Seanoa there, and both men knew it. Seanoa’s squadmates, still watching silently, knew it. That was enough.

 	Seanoa let go of Devynius’s arm. It hung limp and senseless by Devynius’s side. Devynius got to his feet and Seanoa lay under him, rolling onto his side and putting a hand to his half-ruined face. Already Seanoa’s eye had closed up and the remaining one looked up at Devynius with hatred he did nothing to disguise.

 	Overhead the shuttle from the Polar Defiance was descending, its silhouette edged in the glare from its engines against the black sky. The Jade Dragons stayed where they were as the shuttle came down to land and the ramp opened up. Devynius walked up the ramp alone and the door closed again, leaving the Jade Dragons on the surface and the shuttle lifted off to return to orbit.

 	Seanoa clambered slowly to his feet. None of his squadmates helped him – it would be a great shame for Seanoa to show further weakness by accepting the help of a battle-brother now.

 	Seanoa picked up his helmet and weapons as the squad stood around him, waiting for their next orders. He jammed his helmet back on, hiding his wounded face. 

 	‘As we are hunted,’ said Seanoa thickly, ‘so we hunt. The Black Leviathan is here. And there are still aliens to kill.’

 	The earth caste work party followed their tribal guides through the tombs, deep down among the ancient fissures and uncovered graves with mouldering bones and shattered statues. These were paths known only to the tribesmen and their elders, mapped by scouts who had paid for the knowledge with their lives. It took many hours to reach the lowermost point, where the warrens through the rocky earth merged with the tectonic margin hidden beneath Port Memnor.

 	The earth caste surveyors had surmised the existence of this fault from orbit when they first prepared for the war on Agrellan, but reaching it had needed the help of the tribes. The tribes had not been willing to give it. And so O’Myen had been despatched to do his work, and the web had first been spun.

 	The earth caste workers were squat and powerful, with heavy hands and muscles made for labour. They hauled with them an explosive charge, sometimes on wheels, sometimes lowered by ropes, finally carried on their shoulders like a steel coffin. The guides who led them did not know for sure what it was, but they could guess.

 	In the infernal heat and the dull glow of the magma-heated rocks, the earth caste detail unloaded the charge and set it with a timer of twelve hours. They wedged it into a fissure in the rocks, a place where the volcanic heat of Briseis’s core met the stony mantle. They made their final checks and the team leader announced their work was done.

 	The guides were killed with the efficiency on which the earth caste prided itself. Each tau had a pistol concealed in his coveralls and put a single pulse round through the back of each guide’s head. The guides had guessed this, too, for if they were captured alive they might be forced to divulge the location of the bomb and put the whole operation in danger. They did not struggle or complain. They were doing their duty to their tribes, to the family who had raised them and loved them even when the cold hand of the Imperium had tried to crush out all that made the people of Briseis who they were. Better to die here with their work complete than live on another day as chattels of the Imperium.

 	When the last corpse hit the ground, the tau began the return journey towards the surface. They made good pace, because in twelve hours there would be no surface to reach.

 	‘Would that I could see this a thousand times,’ said O’Myen. ‘A million times. So rarely we can observe the Greater Good advanced. It must be a thought, an emotion. But here we can see it, and there is nothing more beautiful.’

 	The tau observer ship had remained hidden among its camouflage fields and the gravitational disturbances around Briseis. The Polar Defiance had missed it entirely. It was not a large craft, just enough to transport O’Myen’s water caste command and the late Vre’Cyr’s fire caste cadre. It was highly advanced, however, far beyond the technology the Imperium could create, and its bridge was a cold, humming testament to the sleek and efficient science of the tau. A section of the viewscreen was zoomed in on the city of Port Memnor, focusing on the huge starport that dominated one side of the city with its enormous rockcrete expanses and scattering of control towers. 

 	‘The fire caste can destroy,’ said O’Myen, the water caste functionaries diligently recording his word. ‘The earth caste can build, and the air caste can take us among the stars. The ethereals can unite us in one glorious whole, a single mind and a single purpose. But only the water caste can bring about such beauty.’

 	The tectonic charges laid by the earth caste had detonated some time before. The sequence of events, of one land mass moving against another, was as carefully planned as the chain of cause and effect that had seen the Space Marines defeated and the tribes of Briseis broken. Now the sequence reached the surface.

 	Port Memnor lurched, and the first buildings fell. The burning scars left by the Imperial bombardment blossomed into flame again and the tallest structures toppled – the spires around the parliament, the parliament itself, the towers of the generatorium. A thousand disasters unfolded at once. Those who had not left the city already perished in their thousands. Half the city rose up like a sea monster from an ocean, like the Black Leviathan with which the Jade Dragons were so usefully obsessed. The other half sank as if under an enormous weight.

 	The fissure opened. A great black slash ripped across the city and hundreds of buildings vanished, crumbling to dust and pitching into the depths. The fissure reached the spaceport and one of the landing pads was torn in half, control buildings falling, explosions erupting where underground fuel tanks were breached.

 	It took almost an hour to unfold. The fault line under the city opened up and fully half of Port Memnor vanished, the rest devastated more thoroughly than a hundred Imperial bombardments could manage. The spaceport was completely destroyed, only burning islands of rockcrete remaining between a crazed pattern of crevasses. Ambassador O’Myen watched it all, not speaking or even blinking, as the Greater Good was done before his eyes.

 	When it was done and only the stubbornly burning fires still moved, O’Myen turned to the gathering assembled at the back of the bridge. The elders of Briseis’s tribes had watched in silence, stunned by the enormity of destruction.

 	‘It is done,’ said O’Myen. ‘You are free members of the Tau Empire. Your people will no longer serve as pawns of the Imperium, serving them to maintain a foothold for their war on Agrellan. You finally have the liberty to seek out the Greater Good. The crew have prepared berths for you on board for the time being, but soon you will rejoin your people and lead them in the old ways again, as nomads and tribes of Briseis, honouring the ancient traditions you preserved for so long. Air caste crew began leading the elders off the bridge, towards the heart of the ship. One did not move, the Bone Render elder, and he stepped forward as the air caste tried to direct him away.

 	‘Speak the truth, alien,’ said the Bone Render. ‘Will any of us leave this ship?’

 	Two fire caste warriors stepped in front of O’Myen, pulse carbines in hand. The Bone Render did not argue further, and joined his fellow elders as they were escorted off the bridge.

 	O’Myen waved a hand and the viewscreen shifted to show the wide view of Briseis, and Agrellan hanging behind it. He was done with this world. A compliance detail would land there soon with water caste social engineers and fire caste enforcers to make something useful out of the displaced peoples of Briseis. That was beneath O’Myen’s concern. There were other worlds, other species, on whom to do his work and leave his legacy. Other worlds on which to pursue the Greater Good.

 	Perhaps, he would even start to believe in it.