Fire Warrior

VI 16.12 HRS (SYS. LOCAL — DOLUMAR IV, Ultima Seg. #4356/E)

The man in the dark place faced his captives and wet his lips. One of them moaned quietly, chains clinking in the gloom. The man took a deep breath, allowing a predatory smile to spread across his face, and began.

“Now be quiet and pay attention, please. I won’t repeat myself and, let’s be clear about this, one way or another you will listen to me. We can do this the easy way or... the other way. The choice is yours, gentlemen.

“Admiral? Do stop struggling. You’ll miss the good parts.

“Now Where to begin? This is a story, I suppose, so one rather feels the need for a ‘Grand Opening’...”

The man stroked at his immaculately sculpted beard thoughtfully. “People,” he said, with something akin to disgust in his voice, “have skewed views on what makes a story. They forget that everything we do, every day, every second of our small little lives, is part of a story’s middle; its guts, if you like. You’re born, you do things, you die. Where’s the beginning? Or the end? It’s never as simple as it seems.

“Oh, for warp’s sake — Aun! If you don’t stop fiddling with those chains I’ll have your hands removed. You’re putting me off.”

He shook his head, exasperated, and began again.

There was a beginning two days ago, when I captured a high-ranking tau ethereal on behalf of the Imperium. There was a beginning when I contacted Fleet Admiral Constantine to request a squad of specialist troops for that very job. There was a beginning, oh yes, twenty-three years ago when I arrived on Dolumar IV. It hasn’t changed much, this world. Did you know that? Oh, we built the odd factory, the occasional town, that sort of thing. But it’s what’s... underneath that counts.

There was a beginning twenty-one years ago, when Magos-explorator Carneg visited me after a routine survey of the eastern mountains. But that’s a boring beginning and besides... the tedious little man is, I’m sorry to say, no longer with us. So, we can go further back than that.

“There was a beginning, of sorts, in the thirty-first millennium when the Imperium rolled on its belly and realised it had been rotting from inside for years. The Horus Heresy blossomed and caught everyone off guard. Poor little creatures...” He grinned, envisioning the horror and shock that had spread across the galaxy like wildfire.

“Of course your species, Aun, back then, was lurking in a puddle of primordial ooze. Perhaps... Perhaps things would have gone better for you if you’d stayed there.

“But, listen. There’s another beginning. Just over three thousand years ago. The tyranids have not yet reached the galaxy, the orks are busy infesting the Straits of Halk and the tau... well. Maybe — just maybe — they’d mastered the art of simple tools by then. In any case, the eastern fringes were ripe for the taking.

There was an army. A Chaos army—”

The admiral began to thrash and groan, voice muffled behind the gag in his mouth. His face was twisted with revulsion and terror. Severus fixed him with a stare and shook his head.

“Come now, Constantine. You shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Closing your mind is the first step to mundanity, and we can’t have that, can we?

“Now this warhost... This tide of black death, this... this Chaos Undivided... It dragged a net of nightmares across the sector. It toppled a dozen systems, murdered a hundred planets. It spread the Dark Word throughout the Segmentum and doused a hundred cities in blood and plague and stink. It knocked down temples, laughed at the sanctity of Imperial shrines, built statues out of bone and pieces of meat... How does the ancient hymn go? “Mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Yes, that’s it. Then it reached Dolumar IV.

“Imagine the sight! Black clouds on every horizon! A million shrieking daemon things filling the skies. Drums! Oh, the drums! There were humans, even here. Some forgotten colony, lost since the Age of Apostasy or before, it doesn’t matter. They lasted all of five minutes.

“The warhost ordered their slaves to begin the excavation of a great pit; a Temple Abyss to collect and focus the energies of their Dark Lords. This pit, in fact. Oh yes: it’s still here, all these millennia later. Explorator Carneg stumbled upon the capstone shortly before his... ah... accident. Isn’t it beautiful?”

He spread wide his arms and gloried in the cool darkness of the vast pit, sunlight little more than a distant memory at the top of the shaft.

“To cut a long story short,” he smiled, locking eyes with the deadpan ethereal, “they summoned a daemon. Its name — oh, admiral, shut up!—its name was Tarkh’ax. Beneath the daemonlord’s dominion the warhost went on to greater obscenities, greater carnage, greater Chaos. Nothing could stand against them, and anyone idiotic enough to try was crushed underfoot.

“What’s all this got to do with us? That’s what you’re wondering. Oh, don’t worry, Aun: all will become clear.

“Here’s the thing. Just when Tarkh’ax was at the height of his power, when all the filth of the galaxy was drawn to his banner, when a Black Crusade into the Segmentum Solar seemed unavoidable, the eldar got involved.

“Oh, don’t ask me how or why. Maybe some broad-minded Imperium fop decided that consorting with aliens has benefits over total annihilation. Ironic, wouldn’t you say, how history repeats itself? One way or another the eldar came to Dolumar and began to cause difficulties. They are a shrewd breed; cunning in the extreme and impossible to predict. They harried the warhost and vanished, popping up in strange places. Like ghosts.

“It turns out — and it took me three years of borrowing xenolinguitor servitors to unravel this — that the eldar established quickly that their hopes of annihilating Tarkh’ax and his forces were scant. They opted instead for a sly solution.

“The cartouche they left behind them explains it all, though deciphering its mysteries has cost me much of my life and my fortune. They opened up a sealed pocket of warp-space... part of a ‘webway’, the text says. We can’t even begin to fathom its workings but... I like to think of it as a cage, outside of space and time, cut off even from the warp. They closed off all the exits, detached it from their network of warp tunnels and sealed the gateways behind them.

“The mightiest of their warlocks, commanded by the Farseer Jur Telissa, constructed a ‘songweave’—like a psychic melody, holding it together, stitching the prison closed piece by piece. Out on the plains Tarkh’ax was moments from crushing their forces when the spell was finished and... Hh...A-and every last unit, every daemon and Marine, every warp thing and every warrior in that glorious army — disappeared. The pennants and icons fell. The black heraldry was left to rot, vehicles burning in the deserts. A grim day for the powers in the warp.

“The effort killed almost all the eldar warlocks. Small comfort.”

His lip curled, the unquenchable agonies of his master wracking through his body, filling him with despair.

“Imagine,” he hissed, the sensation too much to bear, “being sealed away for three thousand years, unable to move or think or feel. Cut off from the rage and the power of your gods. Separated by impossible energies from the howling, insane fury of your daemonlord. His cage was — is—the strongest of all.

“It took me three years to discern what those meddling, arrogant xenogen warlocks had done. It has taken me sixteen to work out how to undo it — but I’m close. Oh, terror’s-face, so close! All but one of the prisons are sundered. The army is released. Praise be the Ruinous Ones! Oh, stories can get away with not having a real beginning, gentlemen, but... there’s always an ending.

“Don’t look at me with those disgusted eyes, admiral. You don’t know. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Your... Your ‘order’, your structure... it’s transient. It crumbles. I understand. Given enough time, even the mightiest of endeavours comes to dust. Disorder out of order. You can’t fight nature. And everyone, in their secret souls, knows it. My masters merely seek to speed the process.

“It took me a decade. Hard years of rites and incantations, secretly studied and recited, chipping away at the songweave, crumbling the walls of the prison little by little. And then this... this ‘diplomatic disagreement’. My crowning glory — an orchestrated war. A thousand casualties, and more, all in the name of the daemon-lord!” The governor breathed hard, heart hammering excitedly in his chest. He forced himself to regain his composure and lit a bac-stick from his pocket, inhaling the scented fumes thoughtfully.

“There are rules, you see.” He blew a greasy smoke ring, enjoying the ethereal’s undivided attention on his every movement. “Oh, you stand and chant, you render the dispel icons and arrange the non-weave perfectly. You strike at the monoliths with deconsecrated swords and smear plagueshit across the altars... but you still need a gesture. Sorcery has a high cost, gentlemen. It’s paid in blood and souls and hate.

Thanks to your little conflict, thanks to all those tau killed by human hands — and vice versa — more than enough blood was spilled to fuel the final little act. The walls came tumbling down. I set the army free.

“Let me spell it out to you. I ordered your abduction because I expected reprisals, Aun, not because I value whatever worthless shreds of knowledge you have. I have to admit, mind you, the severity of the counterattack was impressive. Perhaps the tau aren’t entirely useless to the Dark Powers after all. And admiral... Admiral, admiral, admiral. Oh you poor, deluded thing. You really think you had any autonomy throughout this? You think you exercised free choice? I summoned you here, I involved you, stoked up the fire — I even crawled into a librarian’s mind, just to persuade that pompous fool Ardias to intervene. A delightful little peace conference was the only way I could get you both in the same room. All terribly sneaky, don’t you think?

“So the warhost was freed. The webway spat them out like rotten meat — wherever I commanded, of course — and now they’re up there on the surface, flexing their muscles. They’ve been waiting for three thousand years. It would be rude not to allow them some... ha... “venting” time.

“I couldn’t have done it without you. You both have my deepest gratitude. Still. No rest for the wicked, as they say. I have one little job left and then this whole sordid business is done with. One last seal to break. It has to be at sundown, gentlemen. Nineteen minutes past seven pm, by Dolumar’s clock. I checked. That’s three hours from now. Three hours until the last prison crumbles. Three hours until almighty Tarkh’ax — Tarkh’ax the Barbarous; Tarkh’ax the Iniquitor; Tarkh’ax the Defiler!—rises again to finish his holy work... Three hours until all of us — we who’ve done more than any others to bring about the daemonlord’s release — are rewarded for our faith.

“Don’t look so scared, admiral. You might even enjoy it.”

The servitor twitched briefly and turned its baleful gaze upon Captain Brunt. The bearded man, legs long since atrophied away to nothingness by years of seated command, mentally swivelled his chair cocoon towards the skeletal creature.

“Message, captain,” it clicked, cable bundles swaying as it moved.

“From?”

“Ardias. Space Marine. Very patchy.”

“Play it.”

Ghoulishly, the servitor’s dry lips moved in time with the relayed message, sharp voice suddenly dampened and bullied into Ardias’s gruff tones.

“...hear this, Fleet... an’t wait any longe... tramarines will evacuate in thirty secon... o more delays. No merc... eel no remorse at this, the vesse...onger part of the God-Emperor’s flee... tterly corrupted. It must be destroyed...”

The servitor’s mouth snapped shut with a dry crack and it turned back to its console. Brunt arched an eyebrow. On the viewscreen at the apex of the hot, dry bridge, the Enduring Blade hung enormously in the void. Its ruined generarium vented white hot promethium fuel in a ghostly trail as it lurched slowly, carcass prow splintered and battered, broadside weapons batteries reduced to gaping, toothless maws. More disturbing still, over the past hour an unnatural patina had begun to form across those obsidian faces of the hulk left undamaged; a green/red corrosion that matted every gloss, sullying every bright icon and gargoyle, wrapping threadlike pseudopodia of rust and mould and decay around it: strangling tendrils dragging its prey out of the light.

Brunt was put in mind of a tumour, breaking free of its initial lodging and spreading its cancerous cells throughout every network of fluids and flesh, grasping blindly, twisting and perverting and corrupting. Spatter clouds of sparks and minor detonations marred the crevices striating the broad hull, the corridor viscera within — black and fluid with whatever ruinous sorcery was morphing and infecting the ship — exposed like withered intestines.

He almost spat. The revulsion at seeing a vessel of the Enduring Blade’s ancient calibre — a beacon of purity and strength that had served the Emperor unstintingly for millennia — so corrupted and mired in evil, so defeated and violated, so utterly ruined... it was more than he was prepared to tolerate.

There were innocents still aboard. Hiding in their cabins, lurking in gloom-filled dormitories, shrieking and screaming as the last drop pods fell away without them and the Marines, their last vestige of hope, boarded their strikehawk and deserted them.

Brunt thought: Better off dead.

“Officer Jarreth. Prime the starboard arrays. Bring us into position. Contact the fleet. Tell them...

Tell them the Purgatus claims this lamentable duty as its own. Tell them to get clear.”

Kais slept. Dreamless and black. A sleep of exhaustion and confusion.

Unable to resolve himself, unable to discern his thoughts into some precise mental colloid of reality and absurdity, his brain took the only option open to it.

It shut down. It closed itself off from everything. It threw up walls of weariness, pulled the plug on consciousness and aborted for the time that it took to reset. To start again.

Total. Mental. Expurgation.

His father had spoken of machines. The machine. A machine that, refusing to operate and unable to diagnose its errors, will nonetheless maintain every outward appearance of efficiency after simply closing down and being switched back on again. But the error would remain. Secret and impossible to reach. No matter how many times the machine required restarting, reformatting refreshing it would continue to falter until the problem was tackled at its root.

Outside of his mind a recorded servitor voice announced calmly that the drop pod had just punctured the mesosphere. Crude target seeking arrays, in the absence of any user input coordinates, identified a major population/energy reading within the troposphere, probably surface-based, and adjusted its descent to accommodate. A klaxon trilled once, almost perfunctory in its lacklustre volume, and the servitor voice reminded its occupants to batten down any cargo and ensure that all vehicular freight was adequately secured. Human passengers, it droned, were advised to check the straps of their deployment booths.

Kais rolled over in his sleep, flaccid muscles sprawled liquidly across the deck, and dreamed of cool, dark nothingness.

Kor’vesa 66.G#77 (Orbsat Surveillance) gusted horizontally — in relation to the planet’s terminator — to optimise its view of the gue’la vessel. The two fleets skulked on either side of the crippled hulk, weapons visibly lowered but not unlimbered. The drone drank it all in, recording and surveying, hungry for data.

Drop pods left the gue’la fleet like rain. Sunlight transformed them into pied fish shoals, iridescent flanks sweeping in broad waves of shimmering motion. The planetary exosphere took on a dappled ruby glow as pod after pod sluiced through its boundaries in a riot of superheated matter and coiling gases, the onset of evening marked brutally by the crescent swathe of darkness gobbling up continents below.

Orbsat 66.G could sense the abundance of weapons descending towards the surface. Munitions, artillery, vehicles: all deployed in a succession of different sized pods and shuttles, dipping their armoured bases and plummeting daggerlike, swallowed by perspective within moments.

The tau flotilla, positioned carefully opposite its black-hulled counterparts, efficiently disgorged a growing swarm of dropships. Soaring gulls to the humans’ graceless divehawks, they descended in progressive V-shaped waves, flanked by Barracuda fighters and drone-operated Harpedoes. Orbsat 66.G tracked a Dorsal-class heavy bomber as it rolled into the ionosphere in a gust of blue energy and was gone.

On either side of the tiny drone, waterfalls of death tumbled planetwards, and spinning with morbid ungainliness in the space in between, the mouldering cadaver of the Enduring Blade turned prow over stern and vented oxygen into the void. One of the gue’la vessels moved forwards, a ponderous monstrosity letting the last of its brood eggs tumble away to the spawning ground below. It was sleeker than the Enduring Blade, spire-encrusted plate surfaces more streamlined, arrowhead beak longer and more vicious. The drone’s vast memory banks hurried to identify the vessel, rapidly narrowing its list of candidates as each unique feature of the ebony black facade-hull was checked off against intelligence reports and sightings.

“The Purgatus,” the assessment reported, noting an elaborate array of cannon lances protruding from the vessel’s flanks and an ancient battle scar on the uppermost toroq spires — clearly repaired with more recent metallurgical techniques: telltale identifying marks, like pectoral wounds on an alpha t’pel shark. “Retribution class,” the report said. Impossibly ancient. Impossibly powerful.

Growing energy emissions from the swollen gun ports sent 66.G into a flurry of confirmations and warnings tightbeamed to the Or’es Tash’var. The response was dismissive: “Continue surveillance. No further action. Negligible threat detected.”

The Purgatus adopted a flanking position alongside the tumbling Enduring Blade, engines and stabilisers carefully fired in a succession of small bursts until the ships moved in the same slow pirouette together, a single unit bonded by invisible cords. The lance clusters developed a ruddy glow, faint deck lights surrounding their positions dimming even further as power was brutally redistributed. A corona began to form, a shifting zone of arcing electricity and vacuum-guzzled gases.

Orbsat 66.G sensed the energyspike in a sub-real spectrum moments before the weapons fired. In a flurry of glow-tipped torpedoes deployed from peripheral launch bays, the central cannon belched a solid stream of plasma-energy, secondary and tertiary weapons-fire clustered around its core like tributaries.

The first shot sliced open the Enduring Blade like a warm slab of poi’sell, melting its structure with colossal precision. Explosions and abortive mushroom-cloud gouts of superheated air marred the edges of the incision — dwarfed by the scale of the scene and rendered insignificant; little more than sparks at the tip of a hammer-struck anvil.

A wedge of decking yawned open from the dying vessel, exposing a labyrinth of cross-section corridors and machinery within. The dark aura that clung to the ship — totally escaping the drone’s abilities of analysis but somehow tangible nonetheless — was dragged out into the void to dissipate harmlessly.

The second strike, as the Enduring Blade rolled serenely end over tip, punctured the cavernous wreckage of the engine stacks and punched a mighty bolt hole the length of the carcass — a blazing lance that glowed through the portholes and gaps in the infrastructure and knocked a solid chunk of the wedge prow into razor-shrapnel; an exit wound full of fire and zero-gravity liquid metal, tumbling and accreting.

The ship rolled again, displaying the devastation of the first shot like a proud veteran dragging tight the skin around his flesh wounds to exaggerate his scars of honour. The third shot, accompanied by a precision-targeted swarm of torpedoes, stabbed deep into the wound and, the watching drone surmised, dissected a promethium fuel line.

For a single raik’an there was light: a nova flash bright enough to leave an ugly overexposed mishmash of pixels across 66.G’s conventional-spectrum recording and casting a freeze frame shadow, grotesque and crenellated, across the Purgatus’s hull.

Then, chain reactions dispersing along the length of the vessel in both directions, the Enduring Blade shrugged off its skin, scattered its rotten musculature like chaff, gurgled coils of white-hot fuel nervously, and finally — ghoulishly — vanished behind a domino effect detonation that pulverised every connection, shattered every joist and bulkhead, atomised every datalink and evaporated the aborted screams of anyone unfortunate enough to still be alive.

Orbsat 66.G watched — detached — as the lifesign counter dropped like a stone. The carcass broke up. Cable guts shimmied in the sun and fragmented. Melt-blasted debris formed gunmetal confetti, expanding spherically. And bodies. Bodies and bodies and bodies.

A motion detector set high on the drone’s casing diverted its attention briefly. It oscillated precisely and trained its primary optic on the gue’la fleet, brooding darkly against the planetary eventide, suffering the hail of fragments from their violated brother in some self-flagellating display of sorrow.

On every beaked monster, on every sombre battleship and snarl-prowed frigate, every colossal battlecruiser, a mast was jerkily raised above the bridgecastle. The fleet flew a black flag and the Imperial comm-channels were thick with the tinny report of funereal marches and martial fugues.

Things came back to him in a jumble.

Vision, somewhere. The wince-inducing flare of first light followed quickly by a moment’s confusion: perspective was all wrong — focusing on distant objects didn’t work.

Helmet-HUD, he reminded himself. Focus close.

The drop pod door lay open at an angle, the rich evening sky of Dolumar revealed beyond. Kais wondered abstractly how long he’d been asleep, how long since landing, how long since—

The memories came back to him in a glut of impressions and sounds, making him gag. He’d lost control, he knew. He’d been pushed to the very back of his own consciousness and forced to watch, forced to obey.

That’s an excuse.

Nobody forced you.

You. Did. It. Yourself.

He stamped on that thought quickly and bullied his attention onto less esoteric matters, peering down at his gloves. He was unsurprised to find the familiar black-brown crust of dried blood speckling each digit, and again looked away before the reality could seep into his thoughts. He shifted his concentration to the blinking icons bordering his HUD. Half his helmet’s analysis functions were inoperative, and an experimental grope with his hand revealed a network of dents and scrapes and scratches. Again, he blinked and moved on, exercising the methodical analysis his training had instilled.

His leg ached. He’d lost the medipack that covered it, somewhere. A cursory glance at his pack reminded him of the blade-encrusted vehicle-monster and he shuddered, secretly grateful that he’d been under the effects of the madness. In a more rational state of mind, beyond the ravaging effects of exhaustion and the rage, he couldn’t have hoped to deal with such an enemy.

Was the Mont’au to thank, then, for his deliverance?

More rogue thoughts, there. Displacement was the key, he decided. Stay busy. Don’t think. He stood up, testing his body, and was astonished to find himself refreshed. He stretched languidly, arching his back and rubbing at his arms, enjoying the feline sensation for its mundane normalcy.

Something loud punctured his comfort from outside the pod. He blinked and ignored the ugly sound, concentrating on himself.

Tapping at a small control on his wrist (mercifully undamaged), a small tube flicked into position alongside his mouth and he sipped gratefully on a high-energy soup of j’hal nectar, imagining it spreading through his body like a warm lattice of glowing tendrils. It felt that way.

“‘A well-maintained warrior’,” he said aloud, not feeling foolish, “‘is an effective warrior.’ Sio’t meditation twelve, lesson four.”

A series of explosions, somewhere nearby, rocked the drop pod lightly — like a faint wind. He scowled and put it out of his mind, not prepared to deal with that reality yet.

He picked up the burst cannon, examining its smooth lines. It was pitted and scratched in places, and as he drew a gloved finger along the barrel he was careful to avoid such imperfections, as if by refraining from any contact with the brutality of his memories he might successfully eclipse them. The dull report of distant explosions grew more frequent — stuttering gunfire and moaning aircraft engines entering the general background hum.

“‘A single blade of grass’,” he recited loudly, blocking the sounds of war, “‘will bend and falter in the lightest wind. But where grass grows in pasture, in field or savannah; each blade feels but a fraction of the wind’s full force. It prospers due to the common purpose of its fe—’”

“Xeno? Are you undamaged?”

Kais stopped, startled.

The voice had sounded like it came from behind him. He fought the irrational desire to spin on his spot, looking for the speaker. He already knew the pod was empty. He coughed and started again, even louder.

“‘A single blade of gr—’”

“Xeno? Xenogen, are you receiving this?”

This time the voice was impossible to ignore — more clear than previously and full of urgency. It spoke directly into his ear in the gue’la language. He resolved to ignore it.

“Guilliman’s oath, alien! If you’re there, answer me!”

“Who is this...?” he whispered, cold sweat gathering inside his helmet.

“Ah! You’re alive.”

“Who is this?”

“What do you mean? It’s Ardias, of course.”

The memories came tumbling in, and this time he couldn’t turn away from them.

At the height of the madness there’d been a voice in his head. This Ardias, he realised. The blue-suited Space Marine, with his grey on grey scarred features, his grizzled frown and his no-nonsense voice, helmetless and scowling. Instructing him how to destroy the weapon stacks, talking him through the worst of the murder rage. Part of his madness, he’d surmised. A gue’la in his ear.

“Ardias,” he said, trying out the sound of it. For some reason it was hard to visualise anyone other than Lusha at the end of the comm.

“That’s right. What’s your status?”

“Landed. I’m on the surface.”

“Obviously. I meant, whereabouts on the surface?” The voice was thick with impatience.

Struggling against the inertia, Kais dragged himself towards the gaping exit of the pod and peered out. The desire to withdraw and wrench closed the door was almost overwhelming.

A Barracuda shrieked overhead, heavy weapons throbbing at the air. Sooty arcs of dust and debris fountained skywards all across the horizon, bulbous mushrooms of flame and red-black smoke rising upwards at their hearts. A gue’la city spread out before him, crude earthen buildings of angry right angles and flat topped mundanity stretching away into the distance. He recognised certain landmarks — here and there the tall steeples of prefabricated chapels, erected by the book to mirror one another exactly. A serried rank of blocky factories and vast hangars cast a long shadow across the district. Somewhere behind him, long since deserted, were the trenchways where the madness had begun.

The drop pods came down like meteors hurled out of space, glowing red hot from the descent. Shrieking out their plummet like a tide of banshees, they ripped from the clouds and pummelled the city. Buildings dissolved to mud and dust, belching their pulverised walls air-wards. Streets were gouged and dented, succumbing to an artillery bombardment that spawned dizzy, shell-shocked passengers, gue’la and tau alike. They crawled from craters and wreckage groggily, clutching at heads and weapons and each other.

“There...” Ardias voxed. “We have a fix on your position. Stay out of the pod — it interferes with your communicator.”

Kais wasn’t listening. He’d seen something.

They came along the street like walking tumours. Armour articulating fluidly, dragging chains and horsehair capes behind them, ugly weapons chattering and crooning into the devastation. One of them had daubed seven-pointed stars across his armour using tau blood, opaque and bright against the matt-black shell.

Its private constellation of gore dripped and ran together as it killed. One wore no helmet, and its face was a bloodless white maggot-mask with eyes like embers. A nearby gue’la shot it, screaming out a prayer at the top of his voice, and ripped off the monster’s ear. Blood the colour and consistency of oil snaked along its neck and it smiled, enjoying the sensation.

One ripped open a building with a greasy krak grenade, laughing and cackling as the dust blossomed around it. It stalked into the wreckage and dragged the building’s mewling occupants into the street.

Then it...

It...

Kais watched until the civilians were all dead. It took a long time.

Mont’au Marines. Twisted versions of the blue-armoured colossus on the comm. He’d seen their kind on the Enduring Blade, of course, his memories were thick with their cruel laughter, but in that decaying ship tomb, overcome by the rage and the bitterness, he’d been beyond speculation. In the grips of the Mont’au he’d seen only beings to be destroyed, never differentiating between enemy or ally, never asking the question that now settled on him heavily.

“What are they...?”

“The enemy?” Ardias voxed, sounding matter of fact. “Chaos. Evil.”

Kais sought for words, hunting for resolve that he didn’t feel.

“The sio’t teaches us that evil is a falsehood,” he said, clutching at the display wafer in his pouch. “A-all truth is subjective. Evil is just valour, regarded from a different perspective.” He tried to put conviction into his voice, attempting to believe the dogma.

“Spare me your heresy!” the Marine voxed, angry. “How can you doubt the evidence of your own eyes?”

“How... how can we fight this?”

“A question that only a coward need ask, alien.”

Kais’s temper snapped, horror becoming anger in a flash. “Answer me! How do you fight this?”

“Ceaselessy, xeno. Ceaselessly.” The voice sounded tired suddenly, sighing heavily over the bolterfire chattering in the background of the channel. “This thing... this ‘Chaos’. You need to forget everything you know when you fight it. Do you believe that superior numbers matter? Do you think the calibre of your weapon, or... or the strength of your armour will avail you now? They won’t. There are no longer any rules. There are no approved tactics. All you can do, xenogen, is the best that you can.

“Anyone with a trigger finger and a pair of eyes can fire a gun — even those beyond the Emperor’s grace. But it takes more than that to fight Chaos.”

“I don’t underst—”

“Why would you? Listen to me, and remember: the greatest weapon you can possess in this struggle is not a plasma gun, or a bolter, or an entire armoury of tanks and cannons. It’s in your head, do you hear me? You need faith.”

Kais couldn’t conceal his scorn. “Faith in a shrivelled corpse? That’s your advice, is it? That’s your mighty power?”

The pause stretched out uncomfortably. When the gue’la spoke again, his voice was brittle and cold. Alien. “There will be a reckoning between us at the end of this. Is that clear?”

Kais just grunted, choosing not to enforce his point.

“You touched down in Lettica’s eastern district,” the Space Marine said, voice returning to its businesslike growl. “I have need of your assistance.”

Kais cocked an eyebrow and lifted his gun. He needed time to think, to sort through his mind. This gue’la prattle was a distraction. “Whatever it is, do it yourself.”

“My company was deployed to the south. It will take us too long to circle round.”

“I won’t be at your command, gue’la. I don’t take orders from the ignorant or the unenlightened.”

“And the Codex is unusually clear on the subject of refusing the assistance of abominations. Nonetheless — it has been a day of firsts; I suggest you learn to adapt.”

“Not likely.”

“You have something better to be doing?”

Kais frowned. He wanted to say: I’ve had enough. He wanted to collapse in the pod and let it all wash over him. He wanted to bury his head in the sand and forget about blood and killing and violence and chaos and... and his father’s eyes.

But it was too late, now. The Mont’au thing was awake in his mind and he couldn’t rest until it — or he — was dead. Besides, there was something...

Think. Why are you here? Killing was never your goal. It was a by-product. A symptom. You kill for a reason, remember!

“The ethereal!” The answer hit him like a warhead, splitting his world and filling him with sudden adrenaline, a shaft of light cutting through the confusion and madness. “I have to find El’Ko’vash!”

“You need to focus upon your priorities,” the voice said, thick with scorn.

“The Aun is always the priority!”

“I haven’t the time to contest the point, alien. Your ethereal is lost. If you don’t help me now then there won’t be another chance to find him.

“If you do not comply, xenogen, then by the Emperor’s grace we shall all be dead within the hour.”

“What is this job?” Kais asked, indecision wracking him.

“I shall brief you en route. Get moving.”

Something nagged distantly at Kais’s mind, spilling into his throat unbidden. “Why me, gue’la? Why would you trust me to do this thing?”

“The counsel of an old friend. You would not understand.”

“A friend?”

“He is with the Emperor now. I’m sending coordinates. Don’t fail me, xeno.”

El’Lusha settled into the carapace gratefully, reacquainting himself with the padded interior like a meeting of old friends. A web of cool air drifted past his face and along his spine, chasing away the nascent feelings of stifling warmth.

“Geneprint acknowledged,” a pleasant AI voice — feminine in its cadence (at his request)—trilled. “Welcome, Shas’el T’au Lusha.”

He grinned at the greeting, relaxing. The familiar flurry of claustrophobia and suffocation tension, natural responses to incarceration within such limited space, drained quickly away. A HUD faceplate — slightly larger and more complex than that of a line trooper’s helmet — descended into position above his face and swung forwards. He let his eyes accustom to the bright multi-spectral world and waited until his optimal focal distance was reached. An incautious setup could result in squinting, eye strain and migraine, none of them particularly desirable in the middle of a pitched battle.

“Stop,” he commanded. The creeping faceplate settled to a halt and locked off with a pleasant chime. He noted with some irritation that it was fractionally closer to his eyes than for his last mission and mused sadly to himself upon the nature of growing old. He’d have to visit the fio’uis to see about some bionics, soon.

“Status checks,” he grunted into the microphone array, tensing the muscles of his arms and legs rhythmically to prevent cramps. A group of spongy restraints like knuckled digits closed around the back of his skull, gently but firmly restraining his head. The comm toned serenely.

“Vre’Tong’ata. Optimal performance. The new upper-left limb is perfect.”

“Vre’Wyr. All good.”

“Vre’Kol’tae. Coolants are a little unbalanced, but the AI can regulate it.”

Lusha clucked appreciatively as glowing icons representing his team mates imposed themselves over a radar plan. “Good. I’m reading a flawless status too. Next — kor’vesas. Report.”

The clipped tones of his attendant battledrones piped up.

“Kor’vesa 12.A #34 (Combat). Optimal diagnostic. Full ammunition load.”

“Kor’vesa 921.H(s2) #01 (Artillery). Optimal diagnostic. Full ammunition load.”

Their icons — glowing green discs — faded into being over the HUD. They orbited the stationary team slowly, like binary moons.

“Very well...” Lusha took a deep breath and grinned, appreciating the rush of anticipation. He’d been too long away from combat. “Lock down and interleave. Interface insertion in five raik’ans.”

The battlesuit’s servos came to life with a quiet nimble, quickly fading to near silence. A low whine came from behind him, complex machinery sliding on well oiled rails into position. He winced, preparing himself. He hated this part.

A needle, little more than a monofilament sliver of metal, punctured his skull three tor’ils above the terminus of his cir’etz scales and entered his brain.

The nausea ran its familiar jig through his guts, forcing another wince. His fingers and hoof joints curled in reflex as their connections to his motor neurones were temporarily interrupted. The feeling, he reminded himself, was not unlike falling asleep.

And then he was the machine. He flexed a limb experimentally, enjoying the sensation of reasserted control as the nausea faded. His arm — his real arm — remained limp by his side, nestled snugly in its padded bindings. Instead, sensed rather than seen, a heavy fio’tak ablative armature, complete with wrist-slung fusion blaster, flexed from the massive shoulder of the suit. He resisted the urge to chuckle.

He moved the muscles of his neck, mentally commanding his skull to rotate and allow him the opportunity to look around. His vertebrae remained straight and immobile but the optic cluster perched atop the suit oscillated and flexed — a replacement cranium just as responsive to his neural commands as the real thing. Flicking through spectral filters was as simple as blinking.

He examined his surroundings. The dropship hold was a cavern of pale, liquid smooth surfaces, unadorned by the paraphernalia of deployment seats and shas’la weapon racks. The four suits hulked in its centre.

Built like upright tanks, supported by tall, ankle-jointed lower limbs and flanked by their broad-shouldered arms (complete with retracted manipulatory digits and overslung weapons mounts), they moved their extremities with athletic grace, twisting and flexing in refined subtlety with none of the inelegant jerkiness of gue’la machinery. The primary sensor dusters, wedge boxes supported at the crest of the suits, peered around in interest. Vre’Kol’tae caught him staring and dipped her suit’s “head” in a nod — a bizarrely organic mannerism from such artificial surroundings.

To his left, Vre’Wyr’s suit raised its right limb, heavy flamer fuel lines automatically slackening to compensate for the movement, and ignited its pilot light with a quiet hiss. The cool glow cast a gallery of soft edged shadows across the walls, bulky jetpacks reduced to smooth crescents of shade.

The battledrones were a pair of satellite discs, held aloft on thrumming anti-grav fields, diagnostically manipulating the heavy weapons slung to their bellies, checking targeting facilities and functionality.

“Interface successful,” Lusha grunted, instinctively running through his missile pod tracking checks and practice locking on thin air. “Confirm preparations.” A series of affirmations tumbled across the comm.

He took another deep breath, thinking back to the ill-fated infantry deployments at first light, all those long decs ago. How had Kais felt, he wondered, standing on the brink, staring down into an abyss of unknown horrors and glories? He remembered the advice he’d given. The advice the boy’s own father had given him, tau’cyrs earlier during the be’gel incursions.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re ready for this.

But Kais had been ready. More than ready. Too ready The youth had sounded... broken, when last he spoke from the Enduring Blade. There was no other word for it. The comm-line had gone dead and his bio trace had blinked from the scans with a solitary blip. He’d stared into the abyss and it had opened up and swallowed him whole.

He was dead, then.

The tau’va preached pragmatism over indulgence. In the face of loss, the sio’t espoused, an efficient tau was expected to nod in acceptance, recognise that there was nothing to be done and no sense in sorrow, and simply get on with things. It was easier said than done.

“Kor’vre?” He pushed the unsettling thoughts from his mind and opened a channel to the dropship pilot. “Ready when you are.”

“We’re at a safe altitude, Shas’el. Splitting the deck now.”

The world fell away beneath his feet. Dividing along a central connection, the floor of the drop bay swung open — two halves of a giant trap door hinging apart in unison. As always a wave of dizziness surged over him, filling his mind with the clouds racing below: wave-borne froth vaguely concealing a dark seabed. It was an enthralling sensation.

The certainty of plummeting through the yawning hole to tumble and spin, shrieking, into the gulf of air, was a falsehood: thick connector joists held the battle-suits securely to the drop hold’s ceiling. They began to extend with a piston hiss, the four hulks lowering from the belly of the dropship like string-suspended wind-chimes. Lusha marvelled at the strangeness of it all: his mind was convinced it could feel the cold air rushing past despite the chassis’ encapsulating presence.

“Status checks,” he commanded.

“Ready.”

“Ready.”

“Ready.”

He grinned. “Kor’vre?”

“Standby, Shas’el... Umbilicals will disengage in five, four, three, two, one...”

The connector parted from the upper chassis of the battlesuits with a half-heard click. There was a jolt, spinning the world sideways. A half-formed impression of the dropship sailed overhead and was gone. And then gravity reached out and pulled, tumbling madness overwhelming his senses. The ground was on all sides at once.

Stability returned quickly, arms outstretched, gyroscopes locked off and balance reasserted. The silence was endless.

“Steady descent,” Vre’Tong’ata reported, breaking the airy quiet with a hint of nervousness in his voice. This was only his second high-altitude drop.

“Drones?”

“Maintaining position.”

“Good. Unit three?”

“All signs are good.”

“Four?”

“Fine, Shas’el.”

“Coolant regulators are holding out, Kol’tae?”

“Clean and efficient, Shas’el.”

He nodded happily. “Stay alert. Engage packs at five hundred tor’leks. Not a second after. And easy on the deceleration — I don’t want any mid-air liquidations.”

The cloud layer dissolved around him, its ethereal paleness replaced by the sudden visual shock of the ground beneath, approaching at impossible speed.

The onset of evening rendered the sand rose red — a sea of embers stretching across every horizon. Lettica, directly below them now, was a jagged ulcer marring the desert, uneven surface casting its clawlike shadow in an ever-extending clutch as the sun lowered.

The four suits hurtled earthwards, like misfired bullets cruising along their curvaceous trajectory. Slaves at the whim of gravity. A blue light flickered twice at the corner of Lusha’s HUD, informing him that terminal velocity had been reached.

Pinpricks of light dappled and criss-crossed the black city, weaponsfire and explosions seeming somehow unreal under the influence of distance: bright festival lights against a dark background.

“Shas’el?” the comm chimed. This is the Or’es Tash’var!

Lusha rolled his eyes. “Make it quick,” he replied, “or I’m a ge’ta-flatbread.” The other team members chuckled quietly, reassured by their leader’s joviality.

The voice on the comm sounded perplexed. “S-shas’el?”

“Never mind. You’ve caught me at a bad time, Kor’ui, that’s all.”

“It’s just something O’Udas thought you’d want to know, Shas’el...”

“Understood. Squad — eight hundred tor’leks, brace for firing.”

“Shas’el, should I contact you later?”

“No, no...”

“It’s Shas’la Kais.”

What?

“You said you wanted to know if there was any news.”

Lusha’s stomach turned over.

Pragmatism. Detachment. Efficiency.

He frowned. Pragmatism be damned — he’d known Kais’s father. He’d watched the youth’s progress all rotaa. He owed the shas’la his concern. “And?”

“We think we’ve found a trace. On the surface.”

“You think?”

“It’s patchy, but we’re confident.”

“Be sure, Kor’ui. Is it him or not?”

“Uh...”

Is it him? Lusha struggled to control his eagerness, aware that his squad were listening.

“Probably” The Kor’ui replied hesitantly. “It’s as if his signal’s being blocked by so—”

“Shas’el!” Vre’Wyr’s voice cut in urgently. “You’re too low!”

Lusha glanced at his altimeter, heart racing. The kor’ui’s news had short-circuited his attention for too long: he’d dropped below the five hundred tor’lek limit.

Hissing in alarm, he brought the jetpack online quickly, overfeeding the anti-grav bursts to compensate for his tardiness and ignoring the chorus of protest chimes from the AI. The rest of the team grew more and more distant above him, decelerating at a far more sensible speed.

He overrode the jet dampeners with a rank command, ignoring the squeal of metallic protest as the burners kicked in and aided the anti-grav. The ground came up to meet him inexorably, altimeter blinking red in alarm.

“Shas’el?” the comm chimed. He was too busy sweating and fighting for control to discern whether it was one of the team or the kor’ui.

At an altitude of two hundred tor’leks, with the city’s buildings fully formed and ugly beneath him, he was fairly certain he was going to make it. The jetpack was moaning like an infant at the exertions placed upon it, anti-grav distorting the very air in a long column of shimmering diffracted light. He strengthened the field higher still and felt a glut of blood rush to his head. His organs sat heavily inside him, crushed indelicately by the force of the deceleration. He choked back on the nausea and brought himself under control.

“Shas’el — are you all right?” The rest of the team were now just fifty tor’leks above.

“Fine,” he grunted, trying to sound unruffled. A bright stream of ordnance rattled past him, tracers peppering the sky.

Great, he thought sourly. Just what I need.

He tried to fix on the firing position but it was lost in a riot of explosions and gunfire. Until he was down amongst the violence and madness it was difficult to appreciate its reality — being detached from it by distance made it seem almost laughable, a lightshow for his own amusement.

“Setting down in ten,” he hissed, hoping the battlesuit could take the strain. It was going to be a bumpy landing.

“Good fortune, Shas’el,” Vre’Kol’tae mumbled from somewhere above, voice thick with concern.

The ground came up like a battering ram, a clear street overshadowed by wrecked buildings. He pushed every remaining drop of power to the jetpack and flexed the absorption pads on the base of the suit’s lower limbs, angling his body shallowly to avoid a ruinous cartwheel splashdown. He’d seen it happen before.

The neural interface was supposedly unconnected to his pain centres. It should, in theory at least, be possible to lop off his mechanical limbs, fire bullets into his chassis, electrocute or burn or maim or behead the unit, without him feeling so much as a twinge of discomfort. In theory.

In practice, a veteran user of Crisis XV8 technology often developed ho’or-ata-t’chel: sympathetic ghost-pains. Phantom reactions to external damage.

He’d seen shas’uis so traumatised by losing their sensor-cluster “heads’ they’d spent kai’rotaas in a coma. He’d seen a shas’vre who, shot in his biological leg by a lucky armour-piercing round, couldn’t understand why he was unable to walk normally when he exited the suit, since its lowest limbs were perfectly intact. He’d seen shas’vres at the end of their careers, minds addled by a lifetime of war, by tau’cyrs of bounding effortlessly across cities on thrumming jetpacks, trying to fly...

The altimeter read 15t’l, 10t’l, 5t’l...

“T’au’va protect,” he said.

And then there was only sand and dust and a bone-jarring jolt that overrode the interface and left him gagging for breath, pushing red-hot splinters up his shins and knees. The suit wobbled forwards, base pads digging ugly gouges from the city street, recoil absorbers moaning in untaulike protest at their unkind treatment. He fought for calm, grimacing through the pain, and killed the jetpack. He’d seen novice suit-users drop neatly and forget to cut the power, launching vertically again like a bouncing ball straight into the rest of their squad. He’d seen just about everything there was to see, at one time or another. None of it was pretty.

“I’m down,” he commed with a mental shrug, fighting the instinctive desire to brush himself off. The sand was settling around him. He’d left quite a crater.

The other battlesuits executed textbook drops on either side, Vre’Wyr perching on a ruined building incline to survey the territory.

“Most impressive, Shas’el...” Tong’ata enthused with characteristic understatement. “I’ve never seen a drop so low.”

The battledrones arced out of the sky at bullet speed and came to a perfect halt without appearing to decelerate at all. Lusha felt, for a paranoid moment, like they were making fun of him.

“Heavy ordnance half a tor’kan north,” Vre’Wyr communicated from his vantage point. “Can’t identify the source from here, but it’s an enemy position.”

“Given that they were shooting at us on the way down,” Lusha grumbled, “I’d say that was a fair assumption.”

“Shas’el?” Kol’tae sounded uncertain. “Who exactly are we fighting?”

He remembered Kais’s words on the comm. Was the youth still alive?

Mont’au. Mont’au!

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s move out.”

Ardias scowled into the shifting warsmog and consulted the rune icons on his auspex scanner. The third and fifth squads were creeping implacably into position, outflanking the artillery dugout they’d identified as a priority target.

“Head east,” he grunted. The Space Marine beside him nodded, twisting the control stick and sending the land speeder gliding, cautious of ambushes, along the smoke-shrouded streets. Ardias ignored the creeping view and kept his eyes on the scanner. The whispering urge to rage and kill was stronger than ever. He breathed deep and remembered the Codex.

Somewhere beyond the blasted remains of these few streets, perhaps three blocks from his current position, a wedge of Chaos Marines manning an anti-aircraft cannon and at least three mortar units were raining fire and death upon Lettica.

“Brother-captain,” Sergeant Larynz voxed. “I have an audio bearing upon the warp filth.”

“And?”

“They’re laughing.”

“Not for long,” Ardias replied, lip curling.

The basso report of cannonfire was a constant annoyance, reverberating from buildings and shaking the air, punctuated every now and again by the distinctive foom of mortar shells curving upwards. Whole districts away, sooty detonations fed a fire that raged obscenely, threatening to consume the entire southern district. Citizens fighting the blaze in simple workers’ clothing, desperate to protect their homes and families, were cut down by the gore-drenched Chaos things that prowled the streets, or else caught in a vicious crossfire and sent jerking to the sand, overalls punctured and bloody. Ardias had seen the footage, relayed by the scout squad he’d deployed southwards.

Most of the human troopers — guardsmen from the Dolumar barracks and storm-troopers deployed from orbit — had dug themselves into defensive positions and were engaged in a spirited attempt to contain the blossoming daemon army. It wasn’t working.

Portals yawned open seemingly at random, disgorging more and more Chaos Marines, more cackling daemon vermin, more rumbling perversions of Imperial vehicles and machines. Did they have objectives, he wondered? Did they have a single goal?

Just to kill.

The whole city was going straight to hell.

As if to prop up his wandering mind, he remembered long sermon tutorials in the schola lecturae of the barracks upon Macragge, tactical training and deployment conventions passed directly from Codex to student via a veteran-sergeant, soaked up by the young minds eager to prove their readiness for the mantle of superhumanity.

The flanking manoeuvre his squads were undertaking, miniaturised and given an unreal cheeriness by the bright lights of the scanner, was an exact replica of the standard deployment he’d been taught all those years ago. By the book. No mistakes. The Ultramarine way.

In exactly thirty-three seconds the Third tactical squad, lightly armed with bolters and grenades, would open fire from concealed positions upon the enemy dugout. They had little chance of hitting anything significant, of course, but as the gun crew scrabbled to return fire, the Fifth squad — devastators armed with a withering array of heavy weaponry — would crest the ridge directly behind them and blow the Chaos filth into several million tiny fragments of gore and bone. By the Codex. No mistakes.

Except...

Except he hadn’t been lying when he’d told the xeno there were no rules where Chaos was involved. You couldn’t anticipate disorder.

Ardias had served the Emperor for many, many years. He’d fought the eldar. Theirs was a discipline of intractable grace, stunningly swift, stunningly effective. Every unit had its role, its niche to fulfil, and would cling to it grimly. Their inflexibility — their inability to adapt — was their weakness.

He’d fought the tyranids. Theirs was a simple goal. There were no complexities buried beneath the lust to devour, no unpredictable tangents in behaviour behind the simple biological imperative to consume and propagate. They were adaptable, oh yes, but predictably so. There was no randomness in their behaviour and it could therefore be anticipated.

Even the orks, in their way, followed a set of rules. Theirs was a madness borne from utter dislocation with reason and rationality; they made up for their obvious intellectual shortcomings with a bloody-minded determination to surprise, to take the road less travelled. Their wanton disregard for convention, bizarrely, gave them a convention all of their own. Again, in their own unique way, they were predictable.

But Chaos...

Chaos wasn’t even madness. Chaos went beyond the wilful randomness of the orks into a realm of almost “rational irrationality”. It espoused a considered form of anarchy, an almost educated approach to uneducating. It was a thing of contradictions and adaptations, of ceaseless change and unrelenting unknowability. The greatest thing Ardias had learnt throughout his years of captaincy, that wasn’t inscribed in the scriptures of the Codex, was this: The only thing you can predict about Chaos is that you can’t predict it at all.

“Captain?” Larynz’s voice, distorted by the vox, sounded confused.

“Go ahead.”

“We’re at the dugout... They’ve gone, sir. There’s nobody here.”

Ardias realised with a start that the cannon had fallen silent. He’d been too intent on the auspex — and too immersed in his thoughts — to notice. He felt a cold shiver in his spine.

“Where are they?”

“There’s a trenchline buried nearby. The filth must have crawled out as we approached. Techmarine Achellus is preparing to scan the surroundings now.”

“Larynz...”

“What action, Brother-cap—”

“Larynz — you get out of there.”

“Wh—?”

Get out!

The explosion shook the world.

It was felt by Marria Sleva, cowering beneath the crude table in her two-room hab, hugging herself and crying. Jonas had gone out to help fight the fire, bless him, but... oh, God-Emperor — it seemed like hours ago and she was scared but, oh, but the baby was due any day and he’d told her — he’d told her — stay put, don’t move at all! I’ll be back, he said. And now there were explosions outside and the house was rocking and something was knocking on the door and laughing, and she was sure she could hear chainsaws-

It was felt by Solomon Gathandre, clutching at his las-gun and thanking his lucky stars. Posted with the second Dolumar regiment, he’d been in the perfect position to scramble for the deserted reservoir system on Lettica’s eastern fringe when the portals started opening. Armed with his gun, a hipflask of Old-Foiz and a stash of gantha-root rollups, he could wait out the lunacy in perfect contentment.

Away across the shadow relief buildings an almighty fireball clawed its way into the sky, shaking the ground. It looked like the whole of the south side had decided to go skyward.

“Hoooo-aaaaa...” he breathed, impressed.

Then the wreckage started to fall: vast slabs of blast-melted plascrete and metal tumbling along the slopes of the mine basin, and Solomon began to wonder whether he’d chosen the best hiding place after all.

Crunch.

It was felt by Shas’el T’au Lusha, swooping low across a shattered plaza in the city’s administrative quarter. He turned his — no, the battlesuit’s — fusion blaster on a gaggle of red armoured hulks, carving their way through a knot of screaming gue’la with vast axes that howled and smoked as they cleaved. Watching the glowing-eyed devils smoulder and shrivel beneath the stream of superheated air was, he admitted quietly, immensely gratifying.

One of the battledrones chattered an energy spike warning to his suit’s AI and he was treated to a peripheral view of the boiling smoke cloud twisting and eating itself above the city to the south. He filed the incident away in his memory without comment — unimpressed — and instructed the team to continue with the search. The ethereal must be found.

It was felt by Brother Pereduz, heretic-Marine and veteran of the Iron Warriors, as he eased himself into a cellar-excavation deep underground. Three of his battle brothers, studded armour glimmering with a matt-gun-metal sheen, followed him along the tunnel. They’d been excellent bait, Pereduz judged, laughing uproariously in a fine imitation of demented bloodlust, a convincing characteristic of other, less academic Traitor Legions.

An Iron Warrior rarely laughed.

A relay-trigger, wired to a scan-beam sensor on the surface, blipped.

“Iron within,” he said, voice a monotone. “Iron without.” He pressed down on the remote detonator in his hand and basked in the sheets of cascading dust from the roof as the whole planet seemed to tremble.

It was felt by Sergeant Larynz, Veteran of the Ultramarines Third Company, holder of the Olivius Valoricum for bravery in the course of his duties, as he and the Third Tactical Squad glanced about the crevicelike dugout with a growing sense of impending doom. Techmarine Achellus swept his scanner across a strange device half-buried in the mud.

“Get out!” the vox screamed.

Everything went white.

It was felt by Shas’la T’au Kais, tor’kans distant, and he looked up from prising some strange weapon from the hands of a dead tau fireteam he’d discovered scattered across the street. Scavenging had become a vital part of his role: procuring an undamaged backpack, armfuls of auto-deploy mines, grenades, medipacks, rations...

A hundred-and-one carrion supplies stained with the blood of dead comrades.

Even through the soot and gore tangled and matted across his helmet-optics, the blinding explosion from the south made him wince to protect his eyes. He didn’t have much time to muse upon the maelstrom — something giggled from the shadows nearby and he turned his attention back to the strange gun with professional haste.

It was felt by Captain Jehnnus Ardias.

The streets flew apart: masonry confetti enveloping him moments after the scanner went dead. A slab of girder-striated rubble tumbled horizontally on a plume of flame and splattered the Marine pilot of the land speeder like a bursting bubble. Blood scattered airily across Ardias’s cheek.

Impressions surged past his consciousness: white lights and fire and smoke and, worst of all, the knowledge that he’d been fooled. Sent his men directly into a trap like a first-year rookie on a simulated mission. Suckered. Outwitted.

He’d told the xeno: There are no longer any rules. There are no approved tactics. All you can do is the best that you can.

His best, he reflected, had not been good enough.

The world went sideways, the land speeder’s nose pointed at the ground and the sky both at once, the streets gashed past in a rush of smoke and ruddy red fire and Ardias thought: Aye, straight to hell.

The hunger was almost intolerable. Were it not for the celestial nature of his restraints and the perpetual vitality of his spirit, his own fury and frustration would have consumed him like wildfire long before. Unable to die, his torment was limitless.

The Daemonlord Tarkh’ax raged.

Had he been alive — in the true sense of the word — his vocal cords would have splintered and exploded beneath the force of his ceaseless howling millennia ago. His fingers would have crumbled to ruined, bloody powder at the impotent flexing and scrabbling he subjected himself to. His eyes would be shrivelled prunes, his teeth blunted and shattered, his face clawed apart in self-inflicted flagellation, his bones hammered out of shape by the force of his flexing, gyrating madness, and his mind a maelstrom of insanity.

But he had no vocal cords to shred (and yet still he howled).

He had no fingers or nails or eyes or teeth to abuse, but still he scratched and snarled and glared and spat and gnashed.

He had no face to claw at, but still he twisted his features randomly, inhuman fury segueing seamlessly into childlike mischief.

He had no bones to shatter, but still he clenched his spiny knuckles and shrugged his claw-pocked shoulders in turmoil.

And his mind—

His mind was insane long, long before his incarceration.

As insubstantial as mist, coiling and billowing inside his glowing warp wall cage, he twitched and screamed and howled and giggled, listening intently to the ebb and flow of reality through the tiny imperfections of the gaol. In such a fashion had he wrought his influence, piece by piece, upon Severus.

And others...

The governor was intelligent, at least. He suffered from an unquenchable desire to prove his worth — an insecurity into which Tarkh’ax had gloatingly inserted his insubstantial claws. Initially — after the man first visited the newly unearthed Temple abyss with a xenolinguitor servitor, all interested smiles and academic intentions — Tarkh’ax was barely a whisper: an unconscious demi-urge acting upon the governor’s dreams. The fool’s damnation had been a slow trickle of acquiescence and diminishing resistance, forever convinced that each new heresy was his own idea, forever certain that it was he who stood to gain from the whole convoluted plot.

Tarkh’ax had played him like a puppet, subtle influence growing every day, guiding him through the dark rituals required to break the eldar curse. It was painstaking work, like attempting to move boulders using only blades of grass, and the frustration mounted with every moment.

But finally the seals were breaking.

Sunset. It had to be sunset.

The eldar farseer had been no fool; he understood that even the sorcerous spellsongs of his people were impermanent, transient like every other aspect of creation. Chaos came to all things, eventually. Unable to kill Tarkh’ax, unable even to banish him for eternity, they imprisoned him behind power-bolstered walls, exiled him to immaterial limbo and weaved an elaborate web of obstacles and falsehoods to prevent any but the most determined liberator from countering their efforts.

Guided by the daemonlord, Severus’s attempts had gone beyond determination. But their final obstacle remained — one last exquisite delay to leave him stamping and raging uselessly for a few hours more, counting out every split second until the sun set over the eastern mountains of Dolumar IV’s principal continent. The cage had been erected beneath the waning light of the sun; only beneath parallel conditions could it be dismantled.

Two hours. Two hours until, with no more ceremony than a splatter of blood, he’d throw off his shackles and, in the name of the Changer, murder the galaxy.

And that would be just the start...

The scale of the building was impossible.

Kais stared up from the floor of the hangar, picking his way past construction equipment and cable bundles thicker than a clonebeast, and mused in lightheaded awe upon the sense of constructing a palace of such massiveness within the confines of the flimsy (albeit vast) warehouse.

Its architecture was positively bizarre: a chapel-fortress rising up sixty storeys or more, vaulted windows and defensive emplacements pocking every square tor’lek of stone and metal. Its external complexity outdid even that of the Imperial warships which, similarly striated by obsidian buttresses and tiered alcoves, it resembled. The conventions of a sturdy, durable edifice, so typical amongst the buildings of the city beyond, were somehow forgotten in favour of a fantastical, exotic aesthetic. No wide foundations based the structure, rather a pair of vast towers flared upwards, joining in a gaggle of enormous tensile brackets and load-bearing machinery. Thus twinned, like prehistoric monoliths supporting a keystone load, the tower struts bore the remainder of the building’s bulk.

But the strangeness went on. Way above — almost occluded in the clouds of moisture lurking in the shadows of the hangar’s upper reaches — the broad ramparts of the palace’s roof extended way beyond the sensible limits of the central stack. The flared top-heaviness created a sense of unwieldy clumsiness; an impression compounded by an apparently random outcropping of curved chambers and sensory outlooks from the forward facing facade. Stranger still, suspended from beneath the limits of the palace’s outermost reaches like enormous stalactites, a pair of vast heavy weapons hung immobile, house-sized joints like elbows inert and silent.

Kais frowned.

Like elbows...

He closed his eyes and mentally adjusted his frame of reference before looking upwards once again. His breath caught in his throat.

Not monolith-towers; legs.

Not building-stalactites; weapon-tipped arms.

Not an over-wide series of ramparts and spires; shoulders.

Shoulders supporting a curved head, no less, complete with mournful eye sockets and a sweeping jawline.

“By the path...” he hissed, his ability to restrain himself from exclamations long since forgotten...

A dataload burst in his memory, didactic information implanted during his training swimming unbidden to the fore of his consciousness. He’d examined it before, this one, reading through the artificial memories like data wafers inside his head during some sleepless night in the battledome. He hadn’t fully believed it, back then.

An Imperial titan, haloed by the harsh floodlights of the gigahanger, cast its hunchbacked shadow across him and reduced him to microscopic ineffectuality, deep shaded eye sockets filling his world with vast, godlike mournfulness. Such things were little more than a whisper to his race. City-sized war machines: the stuff of untaulike fancy and legend. Completely absurd, the Shas’ar’tol said, an irrational propaganda item dreamed up by some gue’la administrator to terrify those races less focused than the tau into submission.

Just make-believe.

Looming over.

If it were alive; if its machine parts were muscle and bone and sinew; if its overshadowed view ports were eyes; if its portcullis vents were nostrils and ears; if in fact it were a giant, crouching massively within its oubliette dwelling, it wouldn’t even have noticed him.

“Ardias?” he commed, still feeling light headed. The Ultramarine’s instructions had been characteristically vague: the gue’la fleet had detected some sort of war vehicle being powered up in Lettica’s eastern districts and — in the absence of any friendly units confirming their involvement — had decided it had been hijacked by Chaos forces. Kais’s task was, simply, to stop them. He might as well cast grains of sand at a mountain.

Far, far above, he thought he could hear laughing. An unhuman, untau cackle scatter-echoing on the uneven surfaces of the titan and flitting around the hangar. Mocking him. A sequence of lights rose up from nowhere in the monstrosity’s central core with a whine, making his heart race. Somewhere inside the colossal shell the twisted minions of the Dark Powers, those Mont’au devils made flesh, were powering up, settling in, preparing themselves.

Kais’s didactic memories lacked any footage of a titan in action but... One didn’t need the imagination of a fio’la to anticipate the horror. Street-sized strides. Warship-strength weapons. Crushing. Obliterating.

Without finesse, without grace, without subtlety: a walking engine of mass-destruction. Wholesale murder.

“Ardias?”

Still no answer. In contacting him aboard the Enduring Blade, the Space Marine had altered his helmet communicator somehow, pushing aside the detector tightbeam he shared with his tau comrades and imposing some sort of unshiftable gue’la code. Since then, Kais had been unable to raise Lusha or the Or’es Tash’var, despite repeated attempts. The ugly holes and dents covering his helmet — not to mention the unexploded bolter shell still lodged deep within the fio’tak — were not, he suspected, helping.

Abstractly, he wondered if the Or’es Tash’var was still there at all. He wondered where Lusha was; whether he was still riding on the optic signals; how disappointed he felt at his pupil’s loss of control. He wondered about Ju and Vhol and where they were — fighting or injured or dead. He wondered about Ko’vash and the grey-haired admiral and the governor with his feral smile and his gaudy robes. He wondered where in the name of the One Path he fitted into any of this madness.

But more than anything else, above all things, he wondered about how Ardias could have been so colossally stupid to imagine that he, a lone tau, could possibly hope to stop a titan. And now he couldn’t even contact the grizzled snae’ta to tell him what he thought of him.

Focus.

We’re all cogs in the machine.

He realised with a twinge of guilt that he was chuckling beneath his breath at the thought of his father’s famous “machine” oratory. It had been intended as a cunning metaphor: a fitting symbol of unity, of all parts relying on all others. Cogs and chains and pistons and levers, all as important as one another. A stirring speech and a resounding, enduring allegory for the tau’va.

Kais wondered what his father might think of him now, standing before the most colossal machine of all and seriously contemplating its destruction.

The gun felt heavy in his hands, its unfamiliar balance more than made up for by its usefulness. The journey to the hangar had not been without incident.

The weapon was vaguely reminiscent of a pulse rifle: a long barrel and squat stock with little obvious room for firing mechanisms. It was almost completely smooth but for a long groove running the length of the muzzle on either side. Unlike its rifle counterpart, it was black, a glossless matt darkness that made it seem unreal — a lance of shadows obstructing the paleness of his gloves. He’d seen weapons like it before: vast things slung to the stalwart undersides of Moray-class gun-ships, or else mounted massively on the wide shoulders of Broadside battlesuits.

It was a railgun, in miniature, and he’d already used it to punch holes through Traitor Marines with as little effort as sliding a needle through fabric. Tiny gravitic accelerators running the length of the barrel hyperaccelerated a single shell to unimaginable speeds: a linear concentration of energies that negated recoil and left its target blindly clutching at itself, senses far too slow to even register the impact until it was too late.

New technology, he guessed. Experimental, maybe. A prototype infantry version of an artillery weapon, fielded by test-shas’uis as a final assessment of its abilities. They’d died.

Too bad for them.

Kais squared his shoulders, locked off the auto-load on the coal-black gun, and stalked forwards towards the titan’s feet, ignoring the piles of dead gue’la technicians the littered the ground.

“Captain Ardias? Come in, Captain Ardias.”

“Come-in?”

“...WW...”

“Ardias? Reply, please.”

“...what is...? What?...”

“Captain Ardias? Lord, is that you?”

“...uungh... Emperor’s grace... what happened?”

“Lord? Are you all right?”

“Nothing serious. A few new scars.”

“Lord, this is Ensign Corgan, with the Purgatus.”

“This had better be important. I’ve just lost two entire squads. I haven’t time for navy trivialities...”

“My lord... We think we’ve found the epicentre.”

“The epicentre?”

“The centre of the warp portals. Like an... uh...”

“An HQ?”

“Yes... Yes, I suppose so. Commissar Gratildus with the Third battalion managed to discuss things with an enemy prisoner and—”

“Skip it. Where?”

“East, my lord. The mountains, to the east. It looks subterranean, some sort of pit.”

“Send me the co-ordinates.”

“Bu—”

“Ensign. Fifteen of my brothers are dead. My communicator is damaged, I can’t patch through to the rest of my company and even if I could, I’m cut off from them by a fire like an Inferria-Prime summer. My land speeder is all but destroyed, I’ve lost two fingers from my left hand and at least five of my ribs are broken. Do not waste my time.”

“S-sending co-ordinates now...”

Plaguelord Siphistus, Disease Marine of the Death Guard Legion, twitched his carrion lips into a lopsided impression of a smile and hissed pleasurably A strand of spittle, uncollected by the gyrations of his prehensile tongue, collected in bubble-flecked viscosity at the corner of his mouth and began the slow journey across his ulcerous chin.

Of his entire face, the only features not actively degrading in malignant pestilence were his eyes, burning with crystal intelligence: icebergs adrift in a polluted ocean. He giggled like a schoolchild and drummed his fingers— encased in millennia-old armour — against the armrests of the throne.

Old Grandfather Nurgle, most ancient and intractable of the Chaos Gods, had been truly generous this day. Siphistus’s excitement overcame him briefly and he coughed a thick soup of infected fluids, bubbling and wheezing glutinously and not bothering to wipe away the sputum.

“Power at sixty per cent...” one of the scurrying plague-priests gurgled, leech-like hands sucking raw information from the consoles around the command nave. “Ready now, lordship, yes.”

“Good. Good. Mm.” He sneered in pleasure, pink tongue flitting briefly from his mouth to clean his irises, lizardlike. “Do it. Do it now.”

Two more plague-priests — once-black robes of the Adeptus Mechanicus now stained with green mould and pus-like contagion — shuffled forwards in a chorus of creaking joints and rasping breaths, carrying the mindcrown. They settled it over his bald skull reverently, tightening clasps and inserting connector cables with clumsy, sluglike fingers.

“Connecting now, lordship,” one hissed, twisting a valve wheel.

Unfamiliar sensations rocked through the plague lord; a barrage of information and uncertainty, challenging his self-perceptions and opening conduits of thought and movement unconnected to his physicality. He could see from any one of a hundred internal cameras, each revealing the tight confines of the titan’s interior. He wondered if this was how flies felt: compound pupils flitting across myriad views at will.

He could gaze through the city machine’s eyes, hundreds upon hundreds of alternative angles and filters endowing him with complete wraparound sensory overload. He could hear what it heard, taste the air itself with electronic sensitivity, detect odours and gases and pheromones, feel its power emissions like a warm glow in his own guts-He was the titan-god.

He was the first machine child of the factories of Dolumar IV, an incarnate engine of destruction, holy vessel for the nascent machine spirit Imperio Prince-Nebulae Draconis, which moved through its logic engines with youthful exuberance, perplexed and invigorated by the presence of its first pilot.

Siphistus giggled again.

“Hello, my pretty-pretty...” he whispered, thoughts coiling insidiously around and through the confused spirit. “Won’t you come share with me...?”

Princeps? the machine thought, logic engine consciousness filled with slow analysis.

“Yess...” he hissed. “Yess, your princeps. Lord Siph. Me. Yess. Won’t you come share?”

The god-mind surged with power and dissolved into his thoughts, tasting and melding sensually, trusting in the sincerity and morality of its pilot guide to provide its moral compass. A child, placing its trust in a doting parent.

They intertwined and ran together.

When the two thought streams detached, Siphistus’s consciousness withdrawing slowly to behold its work, the Imperio Prince-Nebulae Draconis was changed. Radically changed.

“Lordship?” a Traitor Marine flanking his throne leaned closed to him, concerned. “Is all well?”

“No, brother...” Siphistus chuckled, dragging a maggot finger across his boil-encrusted brow. “All is vile.”

Like tendrils of decay, twisting and reticulating, black thoughts spiralled through the machine-spirit; pestilent conceits and amoralities swelling throughout its logic engines with a groan of displaced circuitry. All things rot, it accepted with childlike wonder. All things perish and decay and fester. Why fight against nature?

The indefinable shadow of the ruinous powers — like a dark light — hardened every edge and bled the colours from every heraldic icon within the command deck. The power gauges shrieked as, deep in the machine’s generarium heart, colossal engines rumbled to life with a violet aura of crackling energies.

“My child...” Siphistus crooned, a proud father.

Tumorous energies blossomed hungrily on every deck, lights surging to full strength then dimming to a more acceptable half-lit gloom, waste energies venting deliberately into the corridors, filling the internal spaces of the warmachine with pungent fumes and the unmistakable miasma of decay.

The Imperio Prince-Nebulae Draconis flowed through the titan’s ancient shell like a black cloud, oozing filth and decay from every bulkhead, staining its innards with putrid energies and releasing torrents of toxins into its cloister arteries. The titan mouldered from the inside.

New name... the spirit hissed, naive gentleness replaced by a forceful strength, making Siphistus wince at the urgency of its thoughts. New naaaaaaame.

“Yes, youngling yess...” he grinned, nodding. “For you, anything.”

The spirit hissed its new name, ethereal words echoing massively inside his cancerous skull. “Captivating,” he grinned, “A fine choice, my child.”

Siphistus returned his attention to the command deck. A small gaggle of Traitor Marines, varied armour styles colourfully declaring their different originator Legions, milled about with guns drawn, anticipating a fine view of the coming destruction. The Plaguelord recognised blood-red World Eaters and gaudy Emperor’s Children lurking amongst his own Plaguemarines, even an occasional blue-and-gold representative of the Thousand Sons, thrumming with arcane sorceries. Daemon things cackled and hissed, traitor priests slithering from console to console, two sleek-limbed Chaos Raptors perched loftily in the portcullis viewing bays, avian spines hunched. To witness them all together, bitter differences and rivalries disregarded, favoured gods collaborating with rare unity in a pantheon of insanity, warmed the plague lord’s long-rotten heart with a frail surge of pleasure.

All of them were silent. Dumbfounded. Dwarfed by the monstrous power of this vessel, this living chaos-god, this titan-contaminator, this city-sized disciple of Nurgle.

“Gendemen...” he gurgled, phlegmatic voice catching and rasping unkindly in his throat. The Machina Dragon-Bile salutes you!”

The beast raised a limb and howled. The Marines clashed their weapons together and laughed and roared. Siphistus grinned and giggled and chuckled, and didn’t ever want to stop.

Somewhere a gun opened fire.

El’Lusha jumped a building distractedly and sent the combat drones ghosting along a side street, data feeds opening secondary windows on his HUD. A “target-acquired” tone rang out and he fired off a pair of missiles, turning away dismissively as the smoke trails corkscrewed away. Somewhere amongst the city wreckage the tiny drone-controlled stingers weaved and rushed amongst crumbled pillars and zeroed in on a group of twisted chaos-things efficiently. They were everywhere. A black tide, impossible to fully beat back.

The battlesuit team pushed across the western districts, sensors carefully attuned to Aun’el Ko’vash’s precise biosignature. It was like seeking a t’repa in a gerosh’i.

“This is a waste of time...” Lusha declared, distractedly sweeping his fusion blaster across an open-fronted building to smoke out a gaggle of winged daemonettes. Vre’Wyr and Vre’Kol’tae picked off the chittering fiends with cool precision.

“You think we should try a different district, Shas’el?” Tong’ata commed, scouting ahead, his voice excited. The sky was a ploughed field of clouds and artillery detonations, long trails of smoke undulating vertically from countless fires throughout the city.

“No point. There are other teams operating all across the city...”

“You don’t think we’ll find him, Shas’el?”

He sighed, feeling old. Listening to hunches, he remembered O’Shi’ur (who was more guilty of it than most) saying with a wry smile, was the first sign of madness.

“I think... I think that all rotaa we’ve been bluffing and counter bluffing, and if this dirty little war has one recognisable feature, it’s expecting the unexpected.”

“Shas’el?”

“Consider. These warriors. These ‘Chaos’ creatures. They seem to me as near to Mont’au as it is possible to be... Do they strike you as rational beings?”

“Well, no, but—”

“So, answer me this... Where does an irrational force conceal its prisoners? Rationally, the ethereal would be well guarded — held wherever the enemy numbers are thickest. Here in the city, correct? But irrationally...”

“Outside the city?”

“Hmm.”

The drones returned from the side streets silently, one of them venting smoke from a lucky bolter shot. It wobbled erratically, as if embarrassed, before regaining balance. Lusha chewed his lip before opening a channel to the Or’es Tash’var.

“Ui’Gorty’l here. How goes the hunt, Shas’el?”

“Listen to me, Kor’ui. I want you to expand the survey drones’ target areas.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t care how you do it. Use every drone you’ve got, if you have to. I want sensor checks for energy readings, lifesigns, weaponsfire, comm-frequencies... everything.”

“Shas’el, a planetwide survey would take rotaas!”

“Then I suggest you get started. Start outside the city. Work outwards. They won’t be far away... supplies, reinforcements, that sort of thing... It’ll be close...”

“What will?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“But—”

“Skip it, Kor’ui. Get to it.”

The voice on the comm was quietly surly. “Of course, Shas’el.”

“Good. Is there any other news on La’Kais?”

“We lost the reading. It was probably just a sensor fault.”

Lusha shook his head, ignoring his team’s weapons-fire from further along the street. “Kor’ui — how long since you graduated from ’saal rank?”

“W-what?”

“You heard me. How long?”

“Seven tau’cyrs...”

“And in all that time, how many ‘sensor faults’ have you encountered?”

“Uh...”

“Quite. Keep scanning for him. If he’s alive, I want to know it. Lusha out.”

He cut the channel before the crewman could respond, and bounded into the air with unnatural lightness to assist his team.

He trod the path.

A sword-edge trail, bordered by the abyssal depths of madness.

The bloodlust threatened to overwhelm him again, red mists descending in a carefree melange of blood-snarled, wet-lipped violence. It whispered and trilled hungrily: a song of killing and unstoppability. You can’t die, it grinned. You’re a god!

It was lying. The rational part of him knew it, digging its fingertips in and clinging to the tenets of the sio’t grimly. No compromise. Equilibrium above excess. Unity above unrest. Altruism above egotism.

The choice seemed a cruel one:

Machine or beast.

Soulless efficiency or primitive savagery.

T’au’va or Mont’au.

Was there no middle ground?

Kais gritted his teeth and squeezed the trigger over and over again, punching gore holes through black and red armour, boring glow-edged craters into daemon flesh, lancing black blood wounds with perfect, silent, recoilless efficiency. A bolter shell blasted open what little remained of his torso guard in a spray of shattered fio’tak and he stumbled into the shadows with a strangled yelp. The roaring of the Marine throng eclipsed even the chattering of their weapons, and he realised with a momentary rush of astonishment that, in their haste to confront him, they were casually blasting each other aside.

The titan had been an almost impossible obstacle. He’d risen through its crawl spaces like a parasite, planting a trail of bombs as he clambered ever upwards, losing all sense of time and scale somewhere within its buttressed midriff. Already its interior was changing: the inelegant lines and angles of gue’la construction softening with moist organic corruption, green hazes filling the air and a bitter patina, like oil-black rust, creeping stealthily across the gloomy bulkheads.

His legs ached, head throbbing with the physical exertion of the climb. He remembered once — what seemed like an age ago now, but in fact only that morning — being physically sickened by the idea of gue’la blood staining his hooves. Now the matted gristle and filth of humans, tau and, worse, the stinking black fluids of Chaos, were drying and glistening across hooves, ankles, legs... He looked liked he’d waded through a sea of blood, and, terrifyingly, he couldn’t bring himself to care.

The wound on his leg was infected, he knew, seeping with ineffectual antibodies and crusted by an ugly series of lesions. He’d paused to apply fresh medipacks twice during the ascent, squatting in shadowed recesses and biting back on the screams of pain welling in his throat.

He returned to the present with a jolt, the chatter of chaotic gunfire suddenly conspicuous in its absence. He risked a glance over the obsidian console and withdrew into cover with a hiss.

The Chaos filth on the command deck had calmed, resolving themselves with some loosely organised sense of purpose. Stepping over the mangled shells of their comrades, several had taken up firing positions and were waiting with unnatural concentration bent upon the second that he revealed himself, guns with jagged toothed maws trained unwaveringly.

“Come out come out come out come out, little piggy...” something giggled, its voice a singsong shrill.

A grenade skittered into the recess beside him. He stared at it for long raik’ans with an incomprehensible feeling of indignation, reviewing his choices: remain where he was and die; dive out of cover and die.

Not really thinking, acting on adrenaline-wired instincts more than rational thought, he scooped up the grenade and bowled it back towards the Marines, fully expecting his hand to detonate in bone-flecked cyan madness. He just made it, withdrawing himself behind the console as it arced away to erupt in mid-air. A tumult of fire and shrapnel peppered the outward surfaces of his cover.

He leapt into the blastwave without waiting, ignoring the agony of his wounded leg as he pushed down on it and surged forwards. A greasy smoke patch occluded his advance, tumbling shapes half seen through the haze shouting and bickering. Some peripheral part of his mind registered the bloodslick across the floor with a surge of triumph, as shrapnel-diced bits of power armour crumpled like paper.

And then he was through the smoke and amongst them, a tawny blur barely reaching chest height on these daemonic hulks, which spun and fired and cleaved with growling blades, just missing their elusive prey. More often than not they impacted cruelly against their comrades, close confines turning every carefully executed lunge into a brawler’s hack, every well-aimed shot into a point-blank bloodsplatter disaster.

Kais kept low, fighting back on the sickly sweet Mon-t’au whispers, and sowed madness throughout the command nave.

Keraz the Violator vented his frustration joyously.

He’d been denied his rightful butchery upon the orbiting vessel, commanded to escort the prisoners down to the planet. Him, Champion of the Blood God, on escort duty like a novice pup! The indignity made him shriek.

He’d been ordered and commanded by the sneering governor, unable to hack the smug head from its over-pampered shoulders by the sorcerous bindings protecting it. He’d been dispatched to Lettica to oversee the battle, travelling instantaneously through the last crumbling fragments of the eldar’s warp-prison as it shook itself apart. Then, diverting to the eastern districts with news of the titan’s discovery, he’d anticipated a spectacle worthy of a Lord of Destruction.

He’d spent an hour and a half milling about in tedious expectation as the plaguelord in the pilot’s chair coaxed power from the war machine’s engine.

He was bored. He was blood-thirsty.

And finally, like an offering from the Throne of Bone itself, like a ray of darklight penetrating the interminable clouds of tedium, a morsel of prey flesh had come his way A beige blur to his right sent him spinning hungrily, daemon axe laughing and delighting in its red and gold arc. It bit flesh, wailing its song of cleaved bone and armour, and Keraz gloried in the destruction.

Abruptly the prey morsel was at his left, ducking beneath a hail of bolter fire from some other idiot Marine. Keraz, grateful for the prey’s hardiness (protracting his moment of grisly pleasure), backstepped and cleaved leftwards, and again to the right, then a downward chopping blow, a spinning orbit slice, always chasing the elusive beige and tawny shape—

Every time he turned the xenogen helmet ghosted past his view, lost in a boiling sea of battle lust and bloodsplatter. In no time at all the rage came upon him, the berserker fury turning his muscles to fire and his mind to steam, and he gave up on any logical means of bonehewing the shadow-quick enemy in a whirlwind of undirected insanity. Flesh gurgled, armour parted, bones shattered—

Blood for the Blood God!

When finally the fit abated and he glanced about himself, the slow realisation of something being wrong stole upon him. Jellylike lumps of meat, encased in spine-tipped, chain-festooned armour, cluttered the deck. A dozen Chaos Marine bodies, dejointed in thoughtless butchery, reduced to stinking black charnel and dusty necrosis. Axe wounds on every surface. Nothing moved in the command nave.

The Blood God, upon reflection, would not celebrate his name this day.

The xenogen stepped out of the shadows, head tilted in disbelieving gratitude. It shot him twice in the chest, and Khorne the Butcher God guzzled his soul with relish.

Kais approached the vile creature in the throne, watching him with a silent glare of hate. It was powerless, nauseous power armour bound to the chair with thick cords and safety straps, head encased within a weird profusion of cables and gadgetry. Apart from Kais, it was the only thing still alive in the command nave.

The red-armoured devil had brutalised everything that moved, carving a gruesome path through its protesting comrades. If ever Kais was confronted by the reality of the Mont’au, it was in that moment of orgiastic carnage; without target or rationality or reason. Killing the butcher had felt like cauterising a wound.

The diseased figure in the throne gurgled quietly. Thick sludge dribbled obscenely from its mouth, curled into a dour sneer of defiance. Its bright eyes, arctic blue irises glimmering in the half light, tracked him as he moved.

“Here,” he said, placing the final auto-deploy charge in its pus-flecked lap.

Then he turned and stalked out.