Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

1

It gets light early. Another beautiful day on the estuary. The light’s so good, Oll reckons they can get an extra hour or so’s work done. An hour is an additional two loads of swartgrass. A day of hard labour for good returns.

His hands are sore from the harvest work, but he has slept well and his spirits are good. Strong sunlight always lifts him.

He rises, says a prayer. In the whitewashed lean-to at the back of the hab, there’s a gravity shower. He pulls the cord and stands under its downpour. As he washes, he can hear her singing in the kitchen.

When he goes into the kitchen, dried and dressed, she’s not there. He can smell warm bread. The kitchen door is open, and sunlight streams in across the flagstones. She must have just stepped out for a moment. Stepped out to get eggs. He can smell the swartgrass straw on the warm air.

He sits down at the worn kitchen table.

‘It’s time to get to work, Oll.’

He looks up. There’s a man standing in the doorway, backlit by the sun so that Oll can’t see his face for shadow.

But Oll Persson knows him anyway. Oll touches the little symbol around his neck, an instinctive gesture of protection.

‘I said–’

‘I heard you. I’ll get there when I’m good and ready. My wife’s making breakfast.’

‘You’ll lose the light, Oll.’

‘My wife’s making breakfast.’

‘She isn’t, Oll.’

The man comes into the kitchen. He hasn’t changed. He wouldn’t though, would he? He never will. That confidence. That good-looking… charm.

‘I don’t recall inviting you in,’ says Oll.

‘No one ever does,’ replies the man. He helps himself to a cup of milk.

‘I’m not interested in this,’ Oll says firmly. ‘Whatever you’ve come to say, I’m not interested. You’ve wasted a trip. This is my life now.’

The man sits down facing him.

‘It isn’t, Oll.’

Oll sighs.

‘It’s great to see you again, John. Now get out of my hab.’

‘Don’t be like that, Oll. How’ve you been? Still pious and devoted?’

‘This is my life now, John.’

‘It isn’t,’ the man says.

‘Get out. I don’t want anything to do with anything.’

‘You don’t have a choice, I’m afraid. Sorry. Things have escalated a little.’

‘John–’ Oll almost growls the warning.

‘I’m serious. There aren’t many of us, Oll. You know that. You and me, we could set our hands on the table here, and count them off, and we’d still have fingers spare. There never were many of us. Now there are even fewer.’

Oll gets up.

‘John, listen. Let me be as plain as I can. I never had time for this. I never wanted to be part of anything. I don’t want to know what trouble you’ve brought to my door. I like you, John. Honestly, I do. But I hoped never to see you again. I just want to live my life.’

‘Don’t be greedy. You’ve lived several.’

‘John–’

‘Come on, Oll! You and me? Anatol Hive? Come on. The Panpacific? Tell me that doesn’t count for anything.’

‘It was a lifetime ago.’

‘Several. Several lifetimes.’

‘This is my life now.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

Oll glares at him.

‘I’d like you to go, John. Go. Now. Before my wife gets back from the coops.’

‘She’s not coming back from the coops, Oll. She never went out to the coops.’

‘Get out, John.’

‘This is your life, is it? This? An ex-soldier turned farmer? Retired to a life of bucolic harmony? Good honest toil in exchange for plain food and a good night’s rest? Really, Oll? This is your life?’

‘This is my life now.’

The man shakes his head.

‘And what will you do when you’ve had enough of that? Will you quit it and move on to something else? When you’re tired of farming, what next? Teaching? Button-making? Will you join the Navy? You might as well, you’ve been Army already. What will you do? An ex-soldier-farmer-widower?’

‘Widower?’ Oll snaps, flinching from the word as though it was buzzing in his face to sting him. ‘What are you talking about, widower?’

‘Oh, come on, Oll. Don’t make me do all the hard work. You know this. She’s not out at the coop. She’s not making you breakfast. She wasn’t in here just now singing. She never came to settle on Calth. She was gone, the poor love, before you ever joined the Army. Last time you joined the Army. Come on, Oll, your mind’s a bit mixed up. It’s the shock.’

‘Leave me alone, John.’

‘You know I’m right. You know it. I can see it in your face.’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘Come on. Think.’

Oll stares at him.

‘Are you in my head, John Grammaticus? Are you in my bloody head?’

‘I swear I’m not, Oll. I wouldn’t do that uninvited. This is all you. Trauma. It’ll pass.’

Oll sits down again.

‘What’s happening?’ he whispers.

‘I haven’t got much time. I’m not here long. Just talking to you is taking a huge effort. We need you, Oll.’

‘They sent you? I bet they did.’

‘Yes, they did. They did. But I didn’t mean them. I meant humans. The human race needs you, Oll. Everything’s gone to shit. So, so badly. You wouldn’t believe it. He’s going to lose, and if he loses, we all lose.’

‘Who’s going to lose?’ asks Oll.

‘Who do you think?’

‘What’s he going to lose?’

‘The war,’ says John. ‘This is it, Oll. This is the big one, the one we always talked about. The one that we always saw coming. It’s happening already. Bloody primarchs killing each other. And the latest round of executions happens here, today. Right here on Calth.

‘I don’t want any part of it. I never did.’

‘Tough shit, Oll. You’re one of the Perpetuals, whether you like it or not.’

‘I’m not like you, John.’

John Grammaticus sits back and smiles, pointing a finger at Oll.

‘No, you’re bloody not. I’m only what I am now thanks to xenos intervention. You, you’re still a true Perpetual. You’re still like him.’

‘I’m not. And I don’t have what you have. The talents. The psyk.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Maybe that’s why you’re important. Maybe you’re just important because you’re here. There are only three like us in the whole Five Hundred Worlds right now, and only one of them on Calth. Ground zero. That’s you. This is down to you. You don’t have a choice. This is down to you.’

‘Get someone else, John. Explain it to someone else.’

‘You know that doesn’t work. No one else is old enough. No one else understands as much. No one else has the… perspective. I tell anyone about this, they’ll just dismiss me as insane. And I don’t have time to spend another eighteen years in an asylum like last time I tried it. You’ve got to do this.’

‘Do what?’

‘Get out of here. They’re going to slide this world. An interstitial vortex. The old Immaterium sidestep. You’ve got to be ready to step through that door when it opens.’

‘And go where?’

It’s fallen dark outside. The sun’s gone in. Grammaticus looks up, and shivers.

‘You’ve got to get something, and you’ve got to bring it to me. Step through the door when it opens, and bring it to me. I’ll wait for you.’

He hesitates.

‘I’ll try my damnedest to wait for you, anyway.’

‘Where am I going, John?’

It’s getting dark so fast. Grammaticus shrugs.

‘We’re running out of time, Oll. With your permission, I’ll show you.’

‘Don’t you bloody d–’

Somewhere. It stinks of the warp, of burning void shields. The walls are polished ebony and etched ceramite, inlaid with crystal and ivory and rubies. Gold leaf edges the hatch frames. The place is so big. So very big. Vaults and chambers, dark and monumental, like the naves of cathedrals. Of a tomb. Of a necropolis catacomb. The ground is black marble.

It’s not the ground. It’s a deck.

He can feel the throb of engines coming through it. Drive engines. The air is dry, artificially maintained. He can smell smoke.

‘Why can I smell smoke, John?’ he asks.

He can’t read whatever it is that’s etched into the polished walls. He realises he’s glad he can’t.

‘John? Where did you go?’

There are starfields outside the windows. There’s blood on the floor. Bloody footprints on the marble, bloody handprints on the walls. Tapestries have been torn down. There are bullet holes in the bulkhead panels: craters blown by bolt-rounds, gouges cut by lasers, by claws. There are bodies on the floor.

It’s not a floor, it’s a deck.

He can hear fighting. A huge battle. Millions of voices yelling and screaming, weapons clashing, weapons firing. The din is coming up through the deck. It’s echoing, muffled, through distant archways and half-seen hatches. It’s as if monumental, cataclysmic history is happening just around the corner.

‘John?’

There’s no sign of John. But he can feel the back-of-the-neck prickle of other minds. Minds as bright as main sequence stars.

‘John, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here at all.’

He moves forward, through an archway twenty times as tall as he is, into a chamber fifty times as tall. The walls and pillars are cyclopean. The air is filled with smoke and dying echoes.

There is an angel dead on the floor. On the deck. The angel is a giant. He was beautiful. His sword is broken. His golden plate is cracked. His wings are crushed. Blood streaks his armour and soaks the carnodon-skin mantle he wears. His hair is as golden as his armour. He has teardrops on his cheek.

His killer is waiting nearby, black as night, made of rage, masked by shadow. The edges of his wargear are chased with gold, giving his darkness a regal outline and shape. The gold encircles the eyes he wears on his chest and harness: baleful, red, staring eyes. He fumes with power. He prickles hot, like a lethal radiation leak. He’s polluting the galaxy just by standing in it. There’s a crackle. A fizzle. Malice so terrible a rad-counter could pick it up.

The killer is huge. His shoulder plates are draped with a cloak of furs and human pelts. A spiked framework surrounds his head: a psychic cage, an armoured box. There is a light glowing inside the box, a ruddy glow. The killer’s head is shaved. He is looking down, his face in shadow. He is looking down at the angel he has just killed. Cortical plugs and bio-feeds thread his scalp like dreadlocks. He is a beast made flesh, and shod in iron. He is made of pure hatred.

Oll Persson realises he should not be here. Anywhere, anywhere in the cosmos but here. He starts to back away.

The killer hears him move or senses him. The killer slowly raises his massive head. Light seeps up from the gorget, underlighting his face. Arrogant. Proud. Evil. He opens his eyes. He stares at Oll.

‘I… I renounce you, evil one,’ Oll stammers. He touches the little symbol around his neck, an instinctive gesture of protection.

‘You… what?’

‘I renounce you as evil.’

‘There is no evil,’ says the killer, his voice a landslip rumble of mountains falling. ‘There is only indifference.’

The killer takes a step towards Oll. The floor – the deck – trembles under the weight.

He halts. He’s looking at something. He’s looking at something in Oll’s hand.

Oll glances down, confused. He realises he’s been holding something in his other hand all along.

He sees what it is.

The killer makes a sound. A sigh. His lips part, connected by tiny strands of spittle. He looks Oll straight in the face. Straight into his soul.

Oll turns away. He cannot bear to look into those eyes any more. He turns to run.

He sees the light behind him.

He was so captivated by the killer, by the prickling, enveloping darkness, he almost didn’t see the light to begin with.

Now he sees it. It’s not the light it used to be. It’s not the light he used to know.

The light is fading. It was once the most beautiful light, but it’s dwindling. It’s ebbing away and growing dim. Golden, broken, like the angel. And, like the angel, brought low by the killer made out of darkness.

Beyond the light is a vast window port.

Through it, Oll sees the hazy glory of Terra.

The human homeworld is burning.

‘I’ve seen enough,’ says Oll Persson.

It’s the shock. It’s just the shock. You’ve been hurt, and I’ve shown you plenty. Plenty. I’m sorry, I really am. No one should have to see that. No one should have to deal with all of that in one go. But there really isn’t time to be gentle about this.

You saw what you had to see. I showed you where you have to go.

Now, this will hurt. This will be hard. You can do it. You’ve done hard before. Come on, Oll. Come on, my old, dear friend Ollanius.

It’s time to wake up. It’s time to w–

Oll wakes.

No sunlight. No bed. No singing from the kitchen.

Grey light. Fog. Cold.

Pain.

He’s fallen on his back, twisted. His hands are sore, and so is his back, and one of his hips too. His head feels as though iron screws have been driven into it.

He sits up. The pain gets worse.

Oll realises the worst of the pain isn’t his aches and sprains and bruises.

It’s the aftershock. The aftershock of the vision. He rolls onto all fours and dry-heaves, as if he’s trying to vomit out the memory and be rid of it.

It would be tempting to think it was just a nightmare. Tempting and easy. Just a bad dream that happened because he’d had a bump on the head.

But Oll knows the human mind doesn’t imagine things like that. Not like that. Grammaticus was here. The bastard was here. Not in the flesh, but as good as. He was here, and that’s what he had to show.

It says a lot that John made the superhuman effort, and took such an immense risk, to come. It says a lot, and what it says doesn’t sit comfortably with Oll Persson.

He gets to his feet, unsteady. He’s battered and bruised. His clothes are caked in mud that’s just beginning to dry and stiffen. He tries to get his bearings.

There’s not much to see. A dense grey mist is shrouding the entire world. There are rumbling sounds, and dull flashes up behind the clouds. Far away – Oll’s guess would be to the north – there’s a glow, as if something big on the other side of the fog is burning.

Something big like a city.

He looks around. The ground’s a slick of stinking black mud and ooze, of mangled agricultural machinery and broken fence posts. This is the spew the tidal wave left in its wake. This is what’s left of his land, of his fields.

He stumbles along, his boots squelching in the muck. The thick fog is part smoke, part vapour from the flood. The ground stinks of mineral cores and riverbed mire. All of his crops have gone.

He sees a line of fence posts, still standing. From the height of them above the muck, the flood wave left about a metre of silt and soil behind it. Everything’s buried. Worse than damned Krasentine Ridge. He sees a hand, a man’s hand, sticking up out of the black ooze, pale and wrinkled. It looks as if he’s reaching up, grasping for air.

Nothing to be done about it.

Oll reaches the fence posts and leans on one of them. He realises that it’s the gate at the end of the west field level. He’s not where he thought he was at all. He’s about half a kilometre west. The force of the flood water must have carried him, carried him like flood litter, like flotsam. Bloody wonder he didn’t break his limbs or get his brains dashed out against an upright post; it was a wonder he didn’t drown.

Re-aligned, he turns around and heads back the way he came. Now he’s got his bearings, he knows where the farmhab is.

He passes a cultivator unit, on its side and half-sunk in black mud. Then he finds the lane, or what used to be the lane. It’s a groove of ooze, a muddy furrow, knee deep in violet water along its belly. He sloshes along.

‘Master Persson?’

He stops, shocked at the sound of a voice.

A man sits at the edge of the track, his back against what’s left of the fence. He’s plastered in mud.

‘Who’s that?’ asks Oll.

‘It’s me. It’s Zybes.’

Zybes. Hebet Zybes. One of the labourers. One of the pay-by-the-days.

‘Get yourself up,’ Oll says.

‘I can’t,’ says Zybes. He’s sitting oddly against the fence. Oll realises that the man’s left arm and shoulder are wrapped to the fence post with barbed wire. They’ve become tangled together in the flood surge.

‘Hold on,’ says Oll. He reaches into his belt, but his work tools are long since lost. He goes back to the overturned cultivator unit and digs around in the thick mud until he finds the tool box in the cab. Then he comes back with a pair of cutters, and sets Zybes free. The man’s flesh is pretty torn up by the wire.

‘Come on,’ says Oll.

‘Where to?’

‘We’ve got places to be,’ says Oll.

It takes twenty minutes to trek across the mire, through the fog, to the farmhab. What’s left of it.

On the way, Zybes keeps asking questions, questions like, ‘What happened?’ and ‘Why did it happen to us?’

Oll doesn’t have any answers. None that he has the time or desire to explain, anyway.

Five minutes from the hab, they come across Katt, short for Kattereena. Ekatterina. Something like that, Oll forgets. She’s a paid-by-day too, like Zybes, works in the kiln store, drying the sheaves. She’s about seventeen; his neighbour’s girl.

She’s just standing there, in the fog, smirched in mud, looking vacant, staring at something there’s no possibility of seeing because there’s no distance visible, thanks to the fog. Maybe she’s staring at something comforting, like the day before, or her fifth birthday.

‘You all right there, girl?’ Oll asks her.

She doesn’t reply. Shock. Plain shock.

‘You all right? Katt, come with us.’

She doesn’t make eye contact. She doesn’t even nod. But when they start walking again, she follows them at a distance.

The hab is a mess. The floodwash swept right through it, taking away the doors, the windows, and most of the furniture, leaving a half-metre carpet of silt and wreckage in exchange. Oll thinks about looking for that pict of his wife, the one that used to stand on the dresser in the kitchen, but the dresser’s gone, so he doesn’t see much hope of finding a picture that he last saw standing on it.

He tells Zybes and Katt to wait, and goes in. His room’s upstairs, in the roof, so it’s weathered the smash better than the rest. He finds his old service kitbag, made of faded green canvas, and packs it with a few useful bits and pieces. Then he strips off to his work boots, and puts on dry clothes. The best he can find are his old Army-issue breeches and jacket, also green and faded.

He picks up a last few items, choosing things to take and things to leave. There’s a spare coat for Zybes, plus a medicae pack, and a blanket from the bed to keep Katt warm. He goes back down the stairs to find them.

His old lasrifle is still hanging over the fireplace. He takes it down. From the niche in the chimney breast he retrieves a small wooden box. Three magazines, fully charged. He puts two in his pocket and gets ready to slot one into the weapon.

He hears Zybes cry out, and rushes into the muddy yard, slipping and slithering. The bloody mag won’t slot. It’s been a long time since he drilled with a rifle, and he’s forgotten the knack.

He’s scared too. More scared than he’s ever been in his life, and that’s saying something, because his life has included Krasentine Ridge.

‘What’s going on?’ he asks, reaching Zybes, who has ducked behind a toppled stack of grass crates.

‘There’s something over there,’ he says, pointing at the side barn. ‘Something big. Moving around.’

Oll can’t see anything. He looks around to check where Katt is. She’s standing by the kitchen door, gazing at the past again, oblivious to Zybes’s panic.

‘Stay here,’ Oll tells the injured man. He gets up and moves towards the barn, rifle trained. He hears something move. Zybes wasn’t lying. It is big, whatever it is.

Oll knows he’ll need a clear shot. A kill shot. If it’s big, he’ll need to stop it fast.

He wrenches open the barn door.

He sees Graft. The big loader servitor is rolling around in the barn, bashing into things. Mud and riverweed have totally baffled its sensors and visual systems.

‘Graft?’

‘Trooper Persson?’ the servitor replies, recognising his voice.

‘Stay still. Just stay still.’

The big cyborganism halts. Oll reaches up and yanks the ropes of weed away. He gets a cloth and cleans the optics, and gets the mud out of the fine sensor grids.

‘Trooper Persson,’ says Graft. ‘Thank you for the assistance, Trooper Persson.’

‘Follow me,’ says Oll.

‘Follow you where, Trooper Persson?’

‘We’ve got work to do,’ says Oll.

2

‘Explain this,’ says the Word Bearer. His name is Ulmor Nul.

‘There was an ambush,’ says Vil Teth. ‘Two of the Ultramarines.’

Nul looks down at the corpse of the cataphractii.

‘They did this?’

‘They did this,’ agrees Teth. ‘They killed my watcher, killed members of my team, and then took the speeder. One was a captain.’

‘Why didn’t you stop them?’ asks Nul.

‘The cataphractii couldn’t stop them,’ says Teth, in surprise. ‘What makes you think I could?’

He pauses.

‘Forgiveness, majir. They were legionaries. We had no means.’

‘You have stayed in position since the attack, waiting for support?’

‘Yes, majir.’

Ulmor Nul raises his warp-flask. He speaks into it, alerting the formation officers that at least two more of the enemy elite are loose in that section of the starport.

‘They might have transport,’ he adds.

Nul looks at his squad members.

‘They need to be hunted down,’ he says, simply.

One of his men, Kelter, nods and brings the tracker forward. He has to use the electric goad. The tracker is angry and uncooperative.

It’s about the size of an adult mastiff, but it’s bulkier and it’s not canine. It growls and snuffles, drooling mucus from its flared black-flesh nostrils.

‘We need something they touched,’ says Nul.

‘The captain touched me,’ says Teth. ‘He knocked me down–’

He’s still saying it when he realises he’s an idiot.

Nul looks at him and nods.

‘Majir, no–’ Teth begins to say.

The tracker surges forward. It’s on him. Teth shrieks as it begins to eat him alive.

‘It’s got the taste,’ Kelter says. He pulls the tracker off the Kaul Mandori warrior. Teth’s not dead. He should be. He ought to be. Too much of him is missing and gnawed away for him to ever mend or lead any kind of life. He can’t speak. He can’t even express his overwhelming agony, except to paddle his fingerless hands and churn what’s left of his jaw.

The tracker starts to move, following the psyk-sense it has devoured. The Word Bearers fall in behind it.

‘What about him?’ one of them says to Ulmor Nul, indicating the twitching remains. ‘You could end his pain.’

‘Pain is something we learn from,’ says Nul, ‘and mercy is a waste of ammunition.’

The Ultramarines captain puts up a decent fight. Cornered and outnumbered, he tries to do as much damage as possible before the inevitable.

Sorot Tchure makes the kill. He puts two mass-reactives into the bulkhead behind the Ultramarine, and the force of the blasts, in the enclosed space, rams the cobalt-blue figure out of cover.

He tries to get up, but it’s too late. A third shell takes his head off.

Tchure walks back to the yard’s master control room. He masses his squads marshalling human prisoners, or dragging out the bodies of the enemy dead. A sheen of blue smoke hangs in the air. The Zetsun Verid Yard is now secure.

It’s taken longer than expected. This irks Tchure. He had hoped that sheer bewilderment would knock the fight out of the XIII, but they stuck to it.

His only solace is that the shadow magi have exceeded their estimates too. They’re still at work, recalibrating the yard’s main systems. Kor Phaeron’s displeasure will mostly be reserved for them.

In the master control room, some magi are working with power tools, removing still more deckplates and wall panels to access sheafs of cables. Others are performing more delicate processes, probing intricate circuitry with watchmaker instruments, many of which are fused into their digits. A few have linked directly via the MIU ports, freeing their minds into an improvised noospheric environment in which they can rebuild the yard’s shattered manifold architecture. They are bathing in the warm essence of the Octed code loose in the systems.

Kor Phaeron, Master of the Faith, is not exasperated. Tchure finds him in a control office overlooking the main chamber, a glazed brass box like an ecclesiastical confessional. He is reading from a roughly-bound book. The Book of Lorgar. It is not the whole book, of course, merely one volume. The Book of Lorgar fills an entire datastack, and has been transcribed by hand into nine thousand seven hundred and fifty-two volumes. The number increases regularly. Kor Phaeron has personally gathered a ten-thousand-strong staff of rubricators and scribes to copy the book, and to multiply those copies. Each senior officer of the XVII, and each planetary overlord appointed by the Word Bearers, is expected to own and study a set. Tchure understands that sets are also being prepared as gifts for each of the primarchs who have thrown their loyalty behind Horus. Copies of copies of copies. Perturabo’s edition will be bound in etched steel. Fulgrim’s will be bound in living flesh. Alpharius will be presented with two editions, each subtly different from the other.

Horus’s set will be wrapped in the tanned hide of betrayed legionaries.

Copies of copies of copies. Lorgar reviews each edition, line by line. Transcription errors are punished by death, or worse. Just the day before they translated into the Veridian System, a rubricator was disembowelled for missing a comma.

Tchure enters the control office. He can see, now he is closer, that the book Kor Phaeron is reading is one of the master copies, one of the original manuscripts. It is in the primarch’s own hand, directly as he composed it. This is the latest volume, ready for dissemination. Kor Phaeron always makes a close, personal study of the new instalments before passing them to his staff for copying, archiving and publication.

Kor Phaeron is reading secrets that no one else has yet seen.

‘I apologise for the delay,’ says Tchure.

Kor Phaeron shakes his head, raising a claw hand, still reading.

‘The magi have explained it,’ he says. ‘Our devastation of the Calth noospherics was more fundamental than we hoped. There is a lot to rebuild. Another ten minutes, as I understand it.’

‘I will be happy when you are securely back aboard your ship, master,’ says Tchure.

Now Kor Phaeron looks up. He smiles.

‘Your care is noted. But I am safe here, Sorot.’

He looks frailer than ever. A halo of filthy empyrean light flickers around him. Tchure can see flashes of his bones through his skin, like sporadic X-rays. Kor Phaeron is maintaining a vast degree of warpcraft.

‘Come, Sorot,’ he says. ‘Read with me, for a moment.’

Sorot Tchure steps to the console and looks at the open book. He notes the intricate beauty of the handwriting. There is barely a hint of blank paper on the pages.

‘He uses a stylus. And ink,’ says Kor Phaeron, as if marvelling. ‘In this day and age. A stylus. Of course, I have the rubricators do the same thing.’

‘I understand that–’

Kor Phaeron looks at him.

‘What, Sorot?’

‘I was going to say, master, that I understand Guilliman also uses a stylus.’

‘Indeed. Who told you that?’

‘Luciel.’

‘The one you killed?’

‘The first sacrifice, yes.’

‘He was your friend.’

‘That is why the death had value,’ says Tchure.

‘Yes, I believe that Roboute Guilliman uses a stylus,’ says Kor Phaeron. ‘He writes. A lot of words, as I have been told. Not a great deal of content, however. He writes… a treatise. On warfare. On combat mechanics. On the theory of fighting. Childish concerns. The man clearly has no soul or character. And no interest in the metaphysical subjects that challenge those of more considerable intellect. Our beloved primarch already knows all there is to know about killing. He has no need or reason to write it down. The principles are simple. That is why he is able to go beyond records of gross practicality, and invest his time and energy in consideration of the great mysteries. The workings of this universe, and others. The nature of existence.’

Kor Phaeron looks at him.

‘You know, Lorgar simply records what is dictated to him? What is whispered to him and him alone?’

‘By the gods?’ asks Tchure.

‘By the powers of eight,’ replies Kor Phaeron. ‘By the speakers of the void and the voices of the abyss. By the Primordial Annihilator, out of the throat of the warp.’

There is a call from outside. The magi have finished their work.

Kor Phaeron closes the book and rises to his feet.

‘Let us put their good work to use, shall we?’ he asks.

The Zetsun Verid Yard systems come on-line, restarted by the shadow Mechanicum. A data-engine resumes operation. Sensing that the planetary weapons grid is inactive, and that the inactivity has been caused by the inexplicable loss of the data-engine hub located aboard Calth Veridian Anchor, the engine automatically obeys protocol and assumes control, taking up the slack reins of the grid system. Zetsun Verid contains one of the advanced engine hubs capable of substituting, in an emergency, for the primary orbital hub.

The Calth weapons grid goes back on-line. Its manifold reignites.

Kor Phaeron observes the work, observes how the scrapcode of the Octed is firmly established in the noospheric architecture. He determines his target, and the magi hurry to set and lock the coordinates.

All the orbiting weapons platforms, as well as several ground-based stations including the polar weapon pits, activate and begin to track as their power reservoirs come up to yield.

It takes approximately ten minutes before authority lights flicker green along the master control room’s main console.

‘Target resolution achieved,’ reports the senior magos, scrapcode binaric chattering behind his meatvoice.

‘You may fire when ready,’ says Kor Phaeron.

There is a glimmer. A flash. Beams of coherent energy, beams of staggering magnitude, rip from Calth and from its orbital stations.

Calth has a weapons grid capable of keeping at bay an entire expedition fleet or primary battlegroup. Only the most devious and ingenious treachery has circumvented it today.

The weapons grid begins to discharge. Calth begins to kill the neighbouring planets in the Veridian system.

It starts with a massive asteroid world that orbits the system beyond the circuit of Calth’s moons. The asteroid, called Alamasta, is the main remnant of a planet that once occupied that orbital slot. It is now a rock the size of a major satellite.

It is no longer called Alamasta. It is known as Veridia Forge. It is the system’s principal Mechanicum station, and the most significant manufacturing venue in six systems.

Veridia Forge is helpless, its systems crashed by the same scrapcode that brought the Calth grid down.

It has no shields, no responsive weaponry, and no means of evasion.

It takes four prolonged strikes from the weapons grid. The first two burn away surface rock and immolate rockcrete bastions or adamantine bulwarks. The third voids the main fabricatory to space, and combusts the forge world’s reactor power systems.

The fourth causes Veridia Forge to explode like a newborn star.

For the next eighteen minutes, Calth has no nightside.

3

Ventanus throws the speeder into reverse thrust. The auspex is smashed and useless. He only saw the gun-carriage when he cleared the corner.

The speeder reverses down the slipway with a violence that lurches Ventanus and Selaton forward in their seats. Cannonfire is already chasing them. Rapid fire from the grav-compensated carriage, a quad-weapon monster, shreds the barns and storeblocks around them. Cargofabs and payload warehouses explode or disintegrate. Rockcrete walls shiver and exhale dust as shots pummel through them. Window ports burst out.

‘Not that way either,’ says Ventanus.

‘Agreed,’ says Selaton. He’s got the autocannon across his knees, and he’s checking the munitions feed. There’s not much left in the hopper.

Ventanus swings left, and they race down a dank rockcrete underpass, zip between two huge aerospace manufactories, and skirt the perimeter of a burning excise facility. There are bodies everywhere. Civilians, Army, and far too many Ultramarines for Ventanus to be even slightly sanguine about. Men are dead with their weapons still sheathed or covered. Men cut down without the opportunity to face their deaths.

Heaps of cobalt-blue armour – limp corpses inside scuffed plate – line the roadways and arterials. Some have been stacked against fences and walls like firewood. Some have been cut open and emptied. A few have been nailed to posts, or against the sheet-metal sides of buildings.

Some appear to have been butchered or… eaten.

Ventanus doesn’t understand this. He presumes they are victims of some explosive weapon type new to the arsenal of the XVII. Theoretical. That’s the best case theoretical. Ventanus hopes it turns out to be the practical too. The theoretical alternatives are too indecent to consider. The Word Bearers are allied with some species of carnivorous xenoform. The Word Bearers are indulging in some ritual cannibalism…

Ventanus doesn’t need much more of a reason to make war to the death against the Word Bearers. The injury they have done to Calth and to the XIII, that is cause enough. Their treachery, that is cause enough. Their relentless, merciless prosecution of attack, beyond any measure of honour, that is enough.

But this desecration, this takes his casus belli to a whole new level. This is not a just war, this is a war crime. It defies and shames the codes and precepts of the Legiones Astartes, codes and precepts set down by the primogenitor Emperor. The Word Bearers have perverted any semblance of the true and legal path of the Imperium, or the moral code of mankind.

Here and there, Ventanus spots signs that have been daubed on walls, presumably in blood. Eight-pointed stars and other devices he is not familiar with, and the sight of which make him uncomfortable.

Over the chug of the speeder’s engine – a chug that is developing a worrying, clattering under-note – Ventanus can hear the rattle of other gun-carriages moving through the nearby streets. They are in the industrial hinterland between the starport proper and the city. Ventanus is desperate to find a route that they can use to break out and head north-west to Erud. His primary concern is re-establishing contact with his company and the other units in the Erud muster. If they’ve come through this intact, or approximately intact, he intends to make them the spearhead of a counter-strike.

A haze washes across the city and the port. It’s smoke, in vast quantities, but it’s also vapour. Steam. A fog swathes the skyline, blanketing the river basin and turning millions of individual fires into soft orange smudges. Ventanus has seen that phenomenon before, when large bodies of water have been flash-evaporated by sustained energy discharge. A dead ocean condenses over the city lowlands.

They turn another corner, and see six Word Bearers advancing down the freight lane ahead of them. The Word Bearers challenge them, and then open fire.

The speeder rocks under the hits as it starts to reverse. Its armour is pretty solid, but Ventanus knows it’s taken quite enough punishment. He glides backwards, hoping to swing-turn on the hardpan in front of a fabricator shed and find another path. More Word Bearers open up on them, firing from an overwalk, and from a girder bridge between two manufactories. A mass-reactive round explodes against the side of the cab, where the roof is already peeled back and torn. The shock lurches Selaton hard.

They’re running out of ways to turn.

Ventanus reverses faster. He runs down two Word Bearers who emerge behind them. Their crimson-armoured forms are slung out from the repulsors at the speeder’s plated back end and fall, bouncing and clattering across the rockcrete.

But he can’t simply run down the gun-carriage that’s rolling out, facing their back end. It’s twice their size, twice their mass, and it starts traversing its quad-guns to target them.

‘Go!’ Selaton shouts. ‘Go! Through them!’

Ventanus kicks the speeder forward again, cranking thrust. He knocks down one of the Word Bearers they have already smashed aside once. The brute was regaining his footing. The right front wing catches him hard, folds him around the reinforced fender, and tosses him sidelong. He tumbles, and lands in a way that speaks of a severed spinal cord.

Selaton rises in his seat, bracing the autocannon against the sill of the screen. They’re heading directly for the Word Bearers squad that cut them off in the freight lane. They’re also running right through the hail of fire chopping down from the overwalk and girder bridge. Shells slam into the ground around them, pluming fire and grit. Others thump the bodywork like piledrivers.

Selaton kicks off with the cannon. He gets a good angle, given the improvised circumstances, and stitches a line of shots along the girder bridge, ripping handrail spars and shredding the metal balustrade. He knocks two of the enemy shooters off their feet, and then licks across a third. Ventanus sees a helmet explode like a red paint flare. The casualty rocks backwards off the bridge and hits the ground a second after they’ve passed underneath.

Selaton drops his angle and guns down one of the ground troops. The rotating cannon chews the figure up, shredding him like a sack of meat and metal chaff. The others stand their ground, firing straight at them. Ventanus, his grip unflinching, sees a mass-reactive round pass through the cabin between his head and Selaton’s and exit through the back port-slot.

He knocks one Word Bearer down, throwing him over the racing speeder. Then he hits another and catches him on the speeder’s plated fender, upper body spread across the nose, legs caught under the machine. A huge wake of sparks kicks out from the underside of the speeder as it carries the road kill along, abrading the heels and calves of the pinned Word Bearer’s heavy Mark III battle plate. There is a terrible noise of squealing and scraping. Ventanus can’t dislodge the man.

A wall collapses into the freight lane ahead of them, and a crimson Land Raider lumbers into the open, its hull tipping up and over the rubble of the demolished structure. It swings around, weapon mounts lining up.

Ventanus peels left. There’s no other practical. He rams the sheet metal wall of a warehouse unit and blows clean through it to escape the Land Raider’s hail of fire. The Word Bearer pinned to their front end takes the force of the impact. If he wasn’t dead already, he is now.

But so is the speeder. The impact has killed the drive reactor. It starts coughing and rasping, leaking smoke from its vents. The speeder coasts to a halt in the darkness of the warehouse.

Ventanus and Selaton dismount. Selaton has the autocannon and the last of the ammo hoppers. Ventanus gets the standard, and then pauses and goes back to prise the boltgun out of the dead grip of the Word Bearer now all but fused into the mangled nose. There’s very little of him intact from the waist down. There’s a smell of superheated metal, of friction, of cooked bone marrow.

The first of the Word Bearers force their way in through the gap the speeder created. Selaton rakes them, cutting two down and sewing more holes in the wall for the light to shine in.

His hopper is spent. He ditches the cannon and pulls his boltgun.

They start retreating across the jumbled floor space of the warehouse, trading shots with the Word Bearers who are breaching their way in through the gap. Bolter shells spit to and fro. Ventanus scores a hit, but he can’t be sure if it’s a clean kill. Sheer weight of numbers is stacked against them.

He keeps expecting a wall to cave in and the Land Raider to storm the barn, hunting for them. He can hear it outside, rumbling and revving.

Suddenly, there’s a staggering explosion outside. A brilliant light-flash pushes into the warehouse for a second, through every slit and bullet hole and window. The buildings shake, and whizzing pieces of superhot machine parts and plating debris punch through the wallskin.

Ventanus and Selaton pick themselves up. The Word Bearers who have forced entry after them are getting up too. They attempt to re-lock target finders on the fleeing Ultramarines, but they are bewildered. What was the blast? Did something just kill the Land Raider?

Searing plasma beams chop the gloom and slice them apart as they turn. The beams – scintillating green – fuse through and through blast holes in their armour and pop their helmets like balloons.

Ventanus and Selaton back into cover, weapons ready.

Lugging their powerful, close-quarter plasma blasters, skitarii of the Mechanicum flood into the building. Without compromise, they finish off any of the Word Bearers not cleanly killed.

There are dozens of the fearsome Mechanicum fighters.

‘Warriors of the XIII,’ one of them broadcasts in loudhailer mode. ‘Make yourself known to us. Hurry, time is against us.’

Ventanus gets up, raising the battered standard.

‘Remus Ventanus, 4th Company,’ he announces.

The skitarii commander comes to face him. He’s a big veteran, scarred and ugly, gaudy in his aposematistic wargear. One of the red eyeslits in his copper visor is flickering.

‘Arook Serotid, Skitarii Kalkas Cohort,’ he replies. His voice is slightly halting, as if he is not practised at talking. ‘We realised from the Word Bearers activity there had to be XIII strengths in the vicinity. Just the two of you?’

‘Yes. We thank you for your intervention.’

‘It will count as nothing if we remain here much longer, captain,’ replies Arook. ‘We have the firepower to assault a small squad, a vehicle or two. But power reserves are limited, and we cannot take on the mass of the enemy forces.’

‘Can you get us out of here?’ asks Ventanus.

‘We can get you to our senior magos,’ says Arook. ‘It is hoped we can begin to coordinate our resistance.’

Ventanus nods. The skitarii lead the way to the closest exit point.

Arook notes the standard that Ventanus is carrying.

‘That is bulky,’ he says. ‘There is no need to bring it.’

‘There really is,’ says Selaton.

She uses her fleshvoice.

‘I am Meer Edv Tawren,’ she says. ‘I hold the rank of magos. I am the acting Server of Instrumentation for Calth/Numinus.’

‘There doesn’t appear to be much left to instrument,’ says Ventanus.

‘True enough,’ replies Tawren. ‘This is a hateful day. Both of our institutions have lost grievously–’

‘The Imperium has lost grievously,’ says Ventanus. ‘Indeed, something more awful than that has occurred. For reasons I cannot even make a theoretical about, the Word Bearers have turned on us. They have unleashed open war on Calth, on the XIII, on the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, and on the Imperium of Mankind.’

She nods. She is tall and solemn. Her ceremonial robes of office are dirty and torn, and they are stiff with bloodstains. In the last few hours, someone has died while being cradled in her arms.

They are standing in a sub-ground cistern several hundred metres north of the main Numinus arterial. It is a dank cavern, a storm drain for the river system. Arook has suggested that the density of rockcrete above their heads can deter the detection systems the Word Bearers are using.

‘My direct superior is dead,’ says Tawren. ‘We escaped from the Watchtower at the time of the ship impact, but it was too late for him. Responsibility for command and coordination falls to me.’

‘What resources do you have?’ asks Ventanus.

‘I have a force of about three hundred skitarii, with portable weapons and some light support,’ she replies, ‘and that number is growing as we contact other survivor groups. We have no manifold capacity, no noosphere, and absolutely no operational control of the data-engines or the Veridian system weapons grid.’

‘None at all?’

She shakes her head.

‘This is due to scrapcode infection that immediately preceded the start of hostilities. We believe that the XVII Legion deliberately introduced a scrapcode plague into the Calth noospherics prior to attack in order to destabilise then cripple the Mechanicum’s capability.’

‘Since when does a Legion technologically outflank the Mechanicum, magos?’ Ventanus asks.

‘Since today, captain.’

‘So… this scrapcode, it was new to you?’

‘It was like nothing we had ever encountered before. Not just the coding language. The very basis of it. We are still not entirely sure what it is or how it operates.’

‘Further evidence that this was planned and orchestrated well in advance,’ says Selaton.

No one speaks. For a moment, the only sound is dirty water plinking down from the overflow chutes.

‘What is your intention at this point?’ Ventanus asks.

Tawren looks at him.

‘I will use every means at my disposal to regain control of the data-engines. To oust the enemy from our systems and retake the noosphere.’

‘The weapons grid would certainly be a considerable asset,’ says Ventanus. ‘Not to say a crucial one. I fear the XIII has been worse than decimated. I fear for the fleet too.’

‘We have very little in terms of accurate projections,’ says Arook, ‘but at least fifty per cent of the fleet assembly and the ground forces appear to be lost.’

Ventanus tries to focus. He tries to get into theoretical so that he can assist the strategy planning. He tries not to dwell on the practical that over one hundred thousand Ultramarines may already be dead. Dead in just a few hours. It is the greatest Legion loss in history, by an appreciable margin.

‘How do you contact them?’ Selaton asks, suddenly.

‘I beg your pardon?’ replies Tawren.

‘You said the skitarii numbers are increasing as you contact other survivor groups. How do you contact them? There is no vox.’

‘True, but the skitarii have a dedicated emergency manifold, a crisis back-up,’ says Tawren. ‘Arook has switched to the reinforced, military code system of his brigade. The range is limited, but secure.’

‘You have limited secure comms?’ asks Ventanus.

She nods.

‘I need to contact Legion Command,’ he says.

‘Not possible,’ replies Arook. ‘We have no orbital links.’

‘Then I need to contact my company,’ Ventanus counters. ‘There are skitarii units stationed with the Mechanicum support at the Erud muster. I need to contact them.’

‘Erud Station?’ Arook echoes. He glares his red eyes at the server. One of them flickers on and off, sporadically.

‘Of course,’ she says.

Ventanus slots open the cuff of his armour, and lights up a small hololithic chart. He scans the terrain, zipping back and forth. Selaton looks over his shoulder.

‘Theoretical,’ says Ventanus. ‘If we can get the muster moving, we could coordinate a rendezvous. Somewhere here. On the Plains of Dera. Zetaya, perhaps.’

‘It’s defensible, but open to the west,’ Selaton points out. ‘Lernaea might be a better choice.’

‘They’d be too exposed crossing the valley floor,’ says Ventanus. He alters the projection.

‘What about Melatis? It’s got a good position, and it’s agricultural. With fortune on our side, it won’t have been hit in the first strike. Not an important enough asset.’

‘Fortune does not seem to have been on our side much so far today, captain,’ says Selaton.

‘What are you talking about, Kiuz?’ Ventanus snaps. ‘We’re here, aren’t we?’

He turns to Arook and Tawren.

‘When you establish contact, I can give you an authority code to identify me. Try to find out who you’re talking to. Ideally, Captain Sydance or Captain Yaulus. I need them to advance any units they have to Melatis on the plains. I’ll meet them there.’

‘You intend to go overland to Melatis?’ asks Tawren.

‘Yes,’ says Ventanus simply.

‘It is probably an over-ambitious goal,’ she says gently.

‘Severe bombing north of the river,’ says Arook. ‘They’ve taken out the highway. The enemy is also massing engines along the Neride Wall.’

‘Titans?’ asks Ventanus.

Arook hesitates.

‘It shocks me too, sir,’ he says stiffly. ‘I have no idea how any Mechanicum engine could have been so miserably corrupted. Loyalty and devotion seem to be in short supply at this hour.’

‘Leptius Numinus,’ says Tawren.

They all look at her.

‘The old gubernatorial palace, on the plains,’ she explains. ‘It was high on my list of potential destinations. The palace has a non-active but functional data-engine, as well as a high-cast vox array. Neither are operational when the governor is not in residence, but they are maintained. I was hoping that, because both systems were off-line, they might have been spared scrapcode infection and electromagnetic damage.’

‘We could contact the fleet?’ asks Ventanus.

‘If we could make them work,’ she agrees, ‘we could contact the fleet.’

‘We’ve already identified Leptius Numinus as one of the most viable options,’ says Arook. ‘As an added advantage, the sub-ground network will make passage there easier than to any open target on the plains.’

‘Are they part of the Calth arcology?’ asks Ventanus. He recalls that significant systems of natural caverns lace the planet, and many are being developed as habitats. They are commonly used as population shelters when the local star undergoes its infrequent periods of maximum solar activity.

‘Not fully, a branch,’ replies Tawren. ‘The early governors created a secure underground link between the city and the palace.’

‘Military support from the XIII Legion at Leptius would be of great assistance while we begin our recovery program,’ says Arook.

He looks at Ventanus. That defective red eye glimmers. It fades out and in again. Ventanus can hear a burble of binaric cant issuing from Arook’s cybernetics.

‘I have made contact,’ he says. ‘I have a manifold link with Skitarii Commander Gargoz. Gargoz has your Captain Sydance with him.’

‘What is the situation?’ asks Ventanus. ‘Ask him what the situation is.’

There is a binaric crackle.

‘Grim,’ relays Arook. ‘The muster site has been bombarded. Many are dead. Very little survives in the way of vehicles or transports. Sydance reports that strengths from the Ultramarines 4th, and eight other companies, have managed to shelter at the Braxas Wall. Approximately seven hundred men. They are ready to move at your instruction.’

Arook looks directly at Ventanus.

‘Captain Sydance apparently wishes to emphasise that he is pleased to hear from you. He is pleased to know that you are alive.’

‘Tell him where we need them to be. Ask him to see what other forces he can mobilise. As muster commander, I am giving authority to the movement of troops. Ask him to send an arrival estimate.’

Arook nods and relays.

‘We will need a shibboleth,’ says Selaton.

Ventanus hesitates.

‘They have cracked everything. They’ve broken Mechanicum code,’ says Selaton. ‘Even our authority codes can’t be trusted.’

Ventanus nods.

‘Tell Sydance that he can only trust a message from someone who knows the number of the painted eldar. Tell him I will only trust the same.’

‘It is done,’ says Arook. ‘What does it mean?’

Ventanus doesn’t answer.

‘Tell him I’ll see him at Leptius Numinus in a few hours,’ he says.

4

Chapter Master Marius Gage hits the bulkhead and slides down it with a wet squeak, leaving a smear of blood.

The wound’s bad. Envenomed somehow. It’s actually beating his transhuman clotting factor. He can feel his body fighting the fever.

He can feel his mind fighting the fear.

It’s not fear of death or fear of pain. It’s not even fear of failure.

It’s the undermining disquiet of the unknown.

It’s what mankind had to overcome in order to come out of his cave, in order to set forth from his birthworld. It’s the thing mankind had to conquer in order to face down the xenos and the horrors that lurked in Old Night.

It’s the fear his kind was bred to lack.

It amazes him.

He thought he had seen everything. His career has been a long and successful one. His status as the first Chapter Master attests to that. He has been with the Ultramarines since the very beginning.

They are genetically adjusted to register diminished levels of fear response. They are psychologically programmed to eschew its weakness, to resist the critical and dismaying shocks that fear can induce. Part of that programming is to study every threat and hazard, every new xenos form and mutant, that the Imperium might encounter during its outward expansion. Nothing must come as a surprise. Every possible horror must be explored. They must be exposed to every new possibility. An immunity must be built up. A disregard. Some say this makes the Ultramarines seem callous, but it is only the same kind of callous that a labourer might build up on his hands through graft work.

They must be unflinching. They must be impervious to fright.

And Gage thought he was. He really thought he was. Fear was a stranger to him.

Sweat begins to bead on his forehead. He struggles to get up, but he can’t. There is a lesson here, he considers, the practical application of a theoretical paradigm. Pride is our weakness. Over-confidence. We are so sure of ourselves and our vaunted fearlessness, of such conviction that the galaxy no longer contains anything that can scare us, we make ourselves vulnerable.

Gage is sure that Guilliman has already thought of this. He is sure that Guilliman has already written the notion down somewhere in his codification notes. The sin of over-confidence. Yes, Guilliman has definitely schooled against this in his writings. He has admonished the XIII not to assume mastery of anything, including fear, because that instantly creates a vulnerability.

Now Gage thinks of it, the primarch certainly has said this several times.

Certainly. Certainly, he has.

He has said it.

He has warned. Warned of it.

In case he hasn’t. In case. In case he hasn’t, in that case, Gage hopes he can get to... He can mention it to Guilliman. Mention it later.

Except. Except there may not be a later.

Guilliman.

On the bridge when... The bridge just...

That thing. That thing.

So much blood. Then open to the void. That thing. There may never be a chance now. Guilliman. Guilliman may be... He was ripped into space when the ports blew.

He may be...

Guilliman may already be dead.

That thing.

That damned thing.

He–

–comes back out of the blackness. Acid bile in his throat. Tears in his eyes. Agony in his back and ribs where that thing bit him.

He blacked out there. Blacked out. Slid away into a red fog of unconsciousness as the toxins momentarily overwhelmed him.

Gage is breathing hard. Every push of his lungs is a neural fire. He looks down the hallway.

There’s smoke in the air. It’s moving like a river along the ceiling, gusted by the steady breeze. The flagship’s air pumps are fighting to restore onboard atmospheric pressure after the bridgespace voided. Hazard lamps flash. He can see an Ultramarine dead about five metres away. The fellow’s head is twisted the wrong way. Beyond him, three bridge officers sit with their backs against the bulkhead wall, resting against each other like comrades back from a drunken night’s shore leave. They are entirely covered in blood, every shred of them apart from the whites of their glazed, staring eyes.

Beyond them, there’s a bloody ribcage with one arm attached to it. Beyond that, a second Ultramarine has been split open like a fibrous seed.

Then he sees the thing.

Gage isn’t sure if the thing on the bridge, the thing that… killed Guilliman… Gage isn’t sure if it was one thing, or many in one amorphous shape. The thing picking its way towards him might be one of the many, or a piece of the whole.

It’s humanoid, roughly, and about twice the size of a legionary. Its proportions are simian, though its true outline is hard to discern. Reality seems to contort around it. The air festers. It moves like a fog of the unreal, like the fluid black flow of the deepest, most subterranean nightmare.

Like a great ape, it shambles on all fours, its massive arms like tree trunks. It is bristled black, like a blowfly, but its flesh between the coarse bristles is iridescent.

It has no eyes. Its skull is all jaw and no cranium. Its face is a shrivelled grey scrap of skin drawn tight over a deformed human skull, the empty eyes like lunar craters. Its mouth is an eruption of curved tusks and huge yellow teeth like chisel blades. Venom, like sticky brown syrup, droops from its lipless gums.

It is making a snuffling sound. It smells of battery acid and spun sugar.

Is it the same thing that bit him? He doesn’t want it to bite him again. He wonders if it can see him.

Of course it can see him. He’s sprawled out in the open, right in its path.

But it hasn’t got any eyes, so–

Gage takes a deep breath. He appreciates that the venom is making his mind swim. He knows it’s making him think stupid, illogical, foolish things. He knows his transhuman metabolism is fighting it, but he’s not sure if it will win the battle.

If it does win, Gage isn’t sure it will win it in time.

The thing is right on him.

He reaches for his boltgun.

The weapon is long gone. He realises that several of the fingers of his gun-hand are missing too.

His power sword is on the deck near his outstretched left leg. He leans and reaches for it. He stretches. He strains. By the old gods of Terra, he has barely the strength to move!

Gage utters an involuntary bark of frustration.

The thing hears him. It turns its tusked maw towards him. It bobs its head slightly, a feline habit, and then pounces.

Gage screams in rage and horror. He lashes out with his right hand to try to catch its throat and keep it at arm’s length before it lands its full weight on him. If that happens, he’s done.

His hand misses the throat. He manages to ram it up to the forearm in the thing’s mouth.

The thing bites.

There is a crack of armour shattering, a crunch of forearm bones shearing. It bites his hand off beyond the wrist. There is a generous spill of blood. Pain cores up his arm like a hot wire. Gage howls. His heart rates spike.

The savage pain jacks up his metabolic reaction so hard it clears the fog of the toxin from his befuddled mind. He smashes around with his left fist, and cracks the thing in the side of the skull, knocking out two molars in a squirt of pink saliva.

The blow drives the thing back and to the side. Its mouth is still full of his hand. Gage rolls to grab his sword, but the thing is standing on his knee, and he can’t twist far enough.

It opens its mouth impossibly wide and comes in for his face. He can see his severed hand flopping down its gullet.

Blue impact slams it aside. Black ichor is suddenly painted across all the nearby surfaces, including Gage’s face. The thing is down, cut badly. An Ultramarine stands over Gage. He’s a sergeant. His armour is battered. His helmet is painted red, indicating he has been marked for censure. He has an electromagnetic longsword in one hand and a Kehletai friction axe in the other.

‘Go back to hell!’ he tells the thing. It is screaming and caterwauling, its black shape swirling and re-forming, as though reality is trying to heal itself.

The sergeant puts the axe into it. The Kehletai, before they were extinguished during the bitter Kraal Compliance, made paper-thin blades that cut on a molecular level. The nanoedge blade of the axe is huge, bigger than a Fenrisian battle axe. It goes right through the thing, exploding rotten gore in all directions.

For good measure, the sergeant spears it with the longsword. Dead, it is nothing more than a stain.

The sergeant turns.

‘Move up!’ he yells. A fighting party appears, moving urgently down the corridor. There are several Ultramarines in it, but it is also composed of Army troopers and Navy personnel, including at least one abhuman stoker. They are armed with the most mismatched and exotic weapons Gage has ever seen outside Guilliman’s private arsenal of–

They are all from the primarch’s private arsenal.

‘Move up. Secure the section!’ the sergeant yells. ‘Brother Kerso, scope the next corridor. Flamers to the front! Apothecary Jaer, get to the Chapter Master! Right now!’

He bends down beside Gage, setting his weapons on the deck where they will be in easy reach. Close up, Gage can see the scratch marks adorning the sergeant’s armour.

‘You’ve got an Apothecary?’ Gage asks, his voice a husk of its normal baritone.

‘Just coming, sir.’

‘Your name?’

‘Thiel, sir. Aeonid Thiel. 135th Company.’

‘Marked for censure?’

‘Today started in a different place, sir.’

‘That it did, Thiel. Well said. Who put you in charge?’

‘I put myself in charge. I was awaiting interview on deck forty when everything went to pieces. There was no chain of command. I decided I needed to build one.’

‘Good work.’

‘What happened, sir?’ Thiel asks. He steps back slightly to allow the Apothecary to start work on Gage’s wounds.

‘Something attacked us. Blew the whole main bridge. Some of us got out. More than that, I can’t say.’

‘Who did we lose?’ Thiel asks.

He’s impertinent, Gage thinks. He’s–

No, he’s not. He’s level-headed. He’s practical. He’s fearless. He’s asking questions because he needs to know the answers.

‘The shipmaster, certainly,’ says Gage. ‘Most of the bridge seniors. Chapter Master Vared. Chapter Master Banzor. Your Chapter Master, Antoli.’

‘Terrible losses. What about the primarch?’

‘I did not see him die, but I fear the worst,’ replies Gage.

Thiel is silent for a moment.

‘What are your orders, sir?’ he asks.

‘What was your operational plan, sergeant?’

‘Practical: I was attempting to consolidate and coordinate a shipboard fighting force, sir, and begin to retake the ship. These daemons are everywhere.’

‘Daemons, Thiel? I don’t think we believe in daemons these days.’

‘Then I don’t know what you want to call them, sir, because they are not xenos. They are byblows. Monsters. Warp-things. It takes everything we’ve got to kill them.’

‘Is that why you raided the primarch’s collection?’ asks Gage.

‘No. I raided the primarch’s collection because of the Word Bearers, sir.’

‘Theoretical: explain that logic,’ Gage asks. Then he says, ‘Wait, wait. Apothecary, help me to my feet.’

‘My lord, you are in no condition to–’ the Apothecary begins.

‘Help me to damn well stand up, Apothecary,’ Gage snaps.

They help him up. He is unsteady. The Apothecary resumes dressing his wrist stump.

‘Now, continue,’ says Gage. ‘Theoretical?’

‘We are attacked by the Word Bearers,’ says Thiel.

‘Agreed.’

‘These byblow daemons may be allied to them, some form of creature they have enslaved to their service. Or they may be controlling the XVII. It would certainly explain why our brothers have turned against us in such a fundamental fashion.’

‘Agreed. Continue.’

‘The daemons present a significant threat, but they appear to be… receding.’

‘Receding? Explain.’

‘It’s like a tide going out, sir. They are fewer and weaker than they were an hour ago. As though they are draining back into hell or the warp. However, the Word Bearers have three cruisers alongside us, and they are in the process of boarding. Within the next hour they will be through the airgates and the hull, and we will be compelled to fight our own kind. This form of combat is unprecedented. Their advantage is shock and surprise. Our counter-advantage must be a lack of convention.’

‘Expand.’

‘They know what we are, for they are us. They know the attributes of our armour and our weapons. They also know our tactics and formulae of war, for our beloved primarch has made his codifications available to all his brothers. We never thought we would need to conceal our combat methods from our own kind. Today, we have been disabused of that notion. So we must fight them in ways that they do not expect from us. We must use the unconventional, the improvised and the makeshift. In order to properly honour the combat teachings of Roboute Guilliman, we must cast his rules aside for the day. I have always considered his greatest wisdom to be Remark 101.x–’

Gage nods.

‘I know it. “What wins the fight is what wins the fight. Ultimately, nothing should be excluded if that exclusion leads to defeat”.’

‘Precisely so, sir.’

‘The “by any means” edict,’ Gage says. ‘The ultimate rule that no rule is unbreakable. You know, that idea always troubled him. He told me he often thought to excise the remark. He thought it too dangerous. He feared it would stand, in posterity, as a justification for any action.’

‘I think the XVII have already dispensed with any such rationale, sir,’ replies Thiel. ‘I also would urge you not to refer to the primarch in the past tense in front of the men.’

Gage catches himself.

‘Quite correct, sergeant.’

‘Are my theory and my practice approved, sir?’ Thiel asks.

‘They are. Let us coordinate. What other officers can we contact?’

‘There is a possibility that Chapter Master Empion is operational on deck thirty-five with a resistance force, and Captain Heutonicus on deck twenty.’

‘A decent beginning,’ says Gage. He picks up his fallen power sword and slides it into its scabbard. ‘Let’s move before this day goes altogether. That friction axe?’

‘Sir?’

‘Can it be wielded one-handed?’

Thiel hands it over.

‘It’s light enough, sir.’

‘Lead the way. Let’s cut a line towards the bridge tower.’

Thiel salutes. He turns, raising his longsword and shouting instructions to the clearance team.

Gage glances at the Apothecary.

‘Are we done?’ he asks.

‘I’d prefer to get you to–’

‘Are we done, Jaer?’

‘We are, sir. For now.’

Gage hefts the axe in his good hand.

‘Sergeant Thiel. Do you happen to know why he was under censure?’

‘I do, sir,’ says Jaer. ‘His commanding officer discovered that he was running theoreticals on how to fight and defeat Space Marines, sir. Thiel claimed, in his defence, that he had run theoreticals on all other major adversaries, and it was a tactical blind spot not to know how to fight the Legions. He said, as I understand it, that the Space Marines of the Imperium were the greatest warriors in the galaxy, and thus had an obligation to understand how to fight and defeat the greatest warriors in the galaxy. Thiel declared that Space Marines were the only opponents left worth any theoretical study. His theoreticals were regarded as treasonous thought, and he was referred to the flagship for censure.’

‘That was his infraction?’ asks Gage.

‘Looks bloody pitiful from where we’re standing, doesn’t it?’ asks Jaer.

Trooper Bale Rane and Trooper Dogent Krank are running for their lives through the burning streets. Trooper Maxilid was with them for a while, but some fugging thing from hell, something they didn’t even see properly, swept out of the fog and bit Maxilid’s bloody head off, thank you, so now they’re on their own.

They’re only alive because the thing was too busy chomping Maxilid down. Blood fugging everywhere.

Rane is pretty numb. He’s seen it all today. All of it. Everything it’s possible to see. Every horror show. Every shock, every terror. He’s seen men die. He’s seen friends die. He’s seen cities burn and starships fall out of the bloody sky. He’s seen more dead bodies than he thought it was possible to see. He’s seen men torn apart. He’s seen daemons in the fog.

Worst of all, somehow, worse even than the daemons, is that he’s seen men who should be friends, men who were supposed to be friends, turn towards him with unalloyed murder in their eyes. The basis of the Imperium has been up-ended. The fundamental tenets of loyalty to the fugging Throne of Terra have been torn down and pissed on.

Bale Rane knew that death would probably hurt. War would probably hurt. Breaking up with your brand-new bride and leaving her to go off to war, that would hurt too. Like a bastard.

He never, ever, in a million light years, expected treachery to hurt so much.

They’ve been betrayed. Calth, Primarch Guilliman, Ultramar, the Emperor, the fugging Imperium and Bale Rane of the Numinus 61st; they’ve all been betrayed.

Rane wants to kill someone for turning his world upside down. He wants to kill one of those bloody Word bloody Bearers, although he knows he wouldn’t stand a single, solitary chance, not for a second.

What the fug are they thinking? What are they after? What bloody toxic poison shit is in their heads that they thought this was something they should do?

Krank is falling behind. He’s getting tired. The fog’s all around them, and it’s getting hard to know which way to go. They’ve both got rifles, Illuminators, though neither of them are the weapons they were issued with at muster. They took them from corpses during their escape. When they were running from the bloody heathen Army forces that butchered their regiment.

‘Come on, Krank,’ Rane mutters. ‘Come on now, Kranky mate. We can keep going. We can get out of here.’

Krank nods, but he’s weary. There’s shock in his blood, in his spirit. Rane dare not let him stop or sleep. He might not wake up.

It ought to be the other way around. It ought to be Krank, the veteran, bucking up Rane, the rookie. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. That’s the way it’s been until today.

Rane thinks about Neve a little bit. He thinks he needs to go and find her, and take her out of the city with them. He had convinced himself she was pretty safe, tucked up in the cellar at her aunt’s. But that was before the Word Bearers turned, before the Word Bearers and their heathen fugging cult troops turned and started killing everything, before it turned out not to be an accident at all.

That was before the daemons in the fog.

Bale Rane knows that it’s his moral duty to go and find his young bride. He has to go and find her, and her bloody aunt too, if needs be, and get them out of the city before the city becomes an entirely dead place. That’s all. That’s the up and down of it.

He tells Krank that’s what he’s going to do.

‘You can come along, if you like. Won’t blame you if you don’t want to.’

Krank tells him how stupid he is, but he doesn’t stop walking along beside him.

The funny thing is, and Rane doesn’t mention this to Krank because he knows it sounds strange, but the funny thing is, Rane doesn’t believe it will take long to find Neve. He can feel her. He can feel, somehow, that she’s close. She’s almost calling to him. She’s right there, close by, waiting for him.

They say that about people who are in love. They can find each other, find each other through thick and thin, against all the odds. He’s going to find Neve, and she’s going to find him.

The fog is like a silk curtain. Everywhere is grey. Fuzzy amber lights pulse where fires burn in the distance. The ruins are black and smell of smoke, of fycelene, of mud and broken drains.

Bale.

‘What?’ Rane asks Krank.

‘What what?’ Krank replies.

Bale. Bale. Where are you?

‘You hear that?’ Rane asks. ‘Kranky, can you hear that?’

He can hear her. It’s Neve. She’s close. She’s very close and she’s calling to him. It’s like a miracle play where the lovers are finally united at last curtain.

‘Neve?’

He stops. He sees her. Just across the street, through the mist, standing in a doorway. She’s pale. It looks like she’s made out of mist. How the hell did she manage to track him down?

He’s never been so happy to see anyone in his entire life. He feels love. He feels uplifted by love.

He takes a step forward to cross the cratered street.

Krank grabs his arm. Krank can’t speak because his mouth is stoppered up with terror.

What Krank can see doesn’t look like Bale Rane’s young bride at all.

The tunnel system opens out on the perimeter of Leptius Numinus. For the last few kilometres, the subsurface structure is fractured, and the tunnels are flooded to knee-height. Liquid from the dislocated water table and sewage from city treatment plants has seeped up and washed out the tunnel system. They are obliged to wade.

Ventanus leads them out into the palace grounds, flanked by Arook’s primary squad. They’ve added to their force during the journey. Several squads of skitarii have joined them, swelling the Mechanicum numbers to close to one thousand. They’ve also connected with about thirty Ultramarines from various decimated units, and four hundred men from the Neride Regulators 10th, nominally under a Colonel Sparzi.

The palace is elegant, a rectilinear villa complex. It reveals its stately lines slowly through the thick mist. The gardens of the estate are tumbledown. Shockwave winds and blast scorching have denuded the ploin, haps and pistachio orchards, and turned the vines into charred ropes. Ornamental walls have spilled over. Carp ponds are dry basins, the water evaporated. They find the cowering, burned skeletons of gardeners and groundsmen behind splintered trees.

The palace is closed for the winter. The city governor was in residence at Dera Tower in the city. Ventanus reflects that the governor is probably dead by now. All the casements, apart from armourglas and crystalflex reinforced sections, have been blown in by the savage transcontinental winds. The rooms, most of them filled with furniture covered by dustcloths, are littered with broken glass and snapped muntins.

Outside, the valley and the plains beyond are dark under a blanket of fog. There is no wind. Everywhere is eerily tranquil. A calm that recalls the obligatory stillness of death.

To the north-west, the Mountains of Twilight form a grey limit to the fogbound plains. To the south and south-east, the dark shape of the Shield Wall hems the city. A rugged natural formation, the back of the ridge rises above the languid, unctuous fog. Its famous forests are spines of tattered wood, stripped of limbs and leaves.

Numinus burns, a giant haze of golden light. It is not the only massive blaze they can see. Others show up in the distant fog in almost every direction, and the brutalised sky is speckled with them. Every now and then, something falls down the back of the heavens, trailing a tail of flame, and crumps into the hidden landscape with a distant tremor.

They move into the palace, breaking down doors where necessary. Some of the halls and chambers are littered with broken masonry where walls or ceilings have fallen. Ventanus sees fragments of moulded plasterwork, some of it painted. He sees shattered heroes from the early days of the Five Hundred Worlds. He sees the Ultima symbol, the one they all wear on their armour, broken in pieces.

Tawren assembles a working party of magi to locate and prepare the palace’s data-engine and the high-cast vox array. Ventanus, in consultation with Selaton, Arook, Sparzi and Captain Sullus, a survivor from 39th Company, prepares the defences. Though its perimeter wall and ditch are quite considerable, the palace proper is not designed for military resistance of any appreciable magnitude. Sparzi’s men find some tractor guns and light field pieces in a stable block to the west, and set them up facing the plains.

‘If they find us here,’ says Sullus, ‘they will punish us.’

‘If they find us here,’ replies Ventanus, ‘I will kill them.’

Sullus nods. A half-smile crosses his mouth. He has lost most of his company brethren since dawn. He has seen other sections of the XIII cut down by troop fire or obliterated by heavy weapons. Ventanus knows that, to keep Sullus effective, he has to spur him out of his despondency. Ventanus has already considered putting Greavus, Sullus’s sergeant, in his place in the chain of command. Sullus is old, a veteran. It is as though the wind has been struck out of him.

Greavus walks over to them. He is carrying his helm under his arm. There is chalky dust on his face and in his hair. Greavus’s close-cropped fair hair is red, like dirty gold. The dust makes him look as though he is prematurely aging.

‘Report from the server, sir,’ he says, addressing Ventanus not Sullus. ‘They’ve found the vox-caster system. There are some power issues, but they hope to make a test broadcast within the hour.’

‘Good. The data-engine?’

‘Nothing on that yet, sir,’ replies Greavus.

Arook suddenly moves, raising his main weapon limb.

‘Contact,’ he reports. ‘Two kilometres from the north gate, coming this way out of the fog.’

‘Identity?’ asks Ventanus.

‘Concealed.’

Ventanus picks up the standard.

‘Selaton, cover the south line. Colonel Sparzi, the north-east. The rest of you with me.’

They head for the gate, crossing once-ornamental lawns. Fireteams of Army troopers are setting up in hastily dug foxholes. Ventanus notes good practical distribution of the few crew-served weapons and mortars. Sparzi has read a manual or two. Probably some of Guilliman’s.

They pass the field guns and reach the gate. Outside, the approach bridge spans the earthwork ditch. Beyond two obelisk mile marks, the road stretches off across scrub, the beginnings of the famous and majestic Plains of Dera. Fog and murk spoil the view.

‘We’ve got heat-sources,’ reports Arook. ‘Warm bodies.’

‘Confirming that,’ says Greavus, using a hand-held auspex.

‘They’re using the fog as cover,’ says Sullus dourly. ‘That can’t be good.’

‘If I was leading reinforcements here from Erud Station,’ says Ventanus, ‘I’d be using the fog as cover too.’

He looks at the skitarii master.

‘Vox signals?’

Arook shakes his head. The light in his damaged red eye is fading slowly in and out.

‘You mentioned a code term,’ says Arook.

‘Yes,’ says Ventanus. ‘Wait.’

A slight breeze stirs. Leaf litter rattles amongst the rubble at their feet.

‘A signal,’ says Arook. They can all hear the muted background binarics. ‘Attention palace,’ he translates. ‘Identify occupation.’

‘Is that Mechanicum?’ asks Ventanus.

‘I can confirm the signal code source is Mechanicum,’ says Arook. ‘Not that it proves anything. If it’s Gargoz, he’s being circumspect.’

‘Again,’ says Ventanus, ‘I would be if I were approaching this location hoping to find friends and fearing I was about to find enemies.’

‘The signal has repeated twice,’ says Arook.

‘Answer it,’ says Ventanus. ‘Request identity.’

Arook makes a quick blurt.

‘Reply reads,’ he relays. ‘Support elements from Erud muster, seeking shelter.’

Ventanus sticks his standard point in the earth so he can clamp on his helm.

‘Too easy,’ he says. ‘No one from my company would expose himself that readily. Not on a day like today. No one from my company, or any other company. Ask them the question.’

‘The number of the painted eldar?’ asks Arook.

‘That’s the one.’

They wait for a second.

‘No response. They repeat the claim that they are support elements from Erud muster.’

‘Ask again,’ says Ventanus. He glances at Sparzi. ‘Get your boys up,’ he says.

The colonel nods and hurries off.

‘Response,’ says Arook. ‘A request for confirmation of xenos activity in this zone. Confirm, eldar forces?’

‘They don’t understand the question,’ says Ventanus.

‘I don’t understand the question,’ remarks Arook.

‘The point is, Sydance would,’ replies Ventanus. ‘And so would any other officer of the 4th Company. Ask them to verify their response. Tell them we will stand by.’

Arook does so.

After a long pause, he says, ‘They ask us to confirm xenos activity in this zone.’

Ventanus lifts the standard. ‘Arook, have your skitarii paint heat-source targets in that fog bank for the benefit of the artillery crews. Tell Colonel Sparzi we will open fire in sixty seconds.’

‘You’re going to open fire?’ Sullus barks. ‘Are you mad? If it’s our own kind–’

‘It isn’t. And I’m not going to allow it to get any closer.’

‘But if they are XIII!’ Sullus insists. ‘If they are of Ultramar!’

‘They are not, captain,’ says Ventanus firmly.

Beyond the ditch, at the very edge of the miserable fog, the first figures begin to loom. The feeble sunlight catches the dull sheen of crimson armour.

‘Fire!’ says Ventanus.

‘Let me go back.’ cries Bale Rane. ‘Let me go the fug back!’

Krank punches him in the gut and winds him badly, just to get him to stop fussing.

‘Sorry,’ Krank says. ‘Sorry, Rane. Sorry, kid. I can’t let you.’

Rane gasps out words, doubled up.

‘I did not shoot at your bloody wife, Bale,’ says Krank. ‘I did not do that. I opened up full auto on something and it definitely weren’t your wife. It most surely weren’t.’

‘It was Neve. She was calling to me!’

‘Rane, shut up. Just shut up. Thank me, why don’t you? You showed me picts of your wife. She was pretty. That thing calling to you, it wasn’t pretty.’

Krank sighs. He sinks down beside Rane.

‘It weren’t your wife, kid. Even if you hadn’t shown me picts, I’d have known. Your wife, she’s got eyes, right? And she ain’t got horns. I don’t know what it was, Rane, but it wasn’t good. It was some xenos thing. Some bloody daemon.’

The foul wind stirs the fog on the blown-out street. Out in the distance, a city hab explodes in a gout of flames, and the rumble of it falling lasts three or four minutes. Artillery thumps. Things boom above, in orbit.

Bale Rane murmurs his wife’s name, tears in his eyes, snot on his lip.

Krank hears running.

‘Get up, get up!’ he says, pulling Rane up by the sleeves. He bundles him into cover.

Two men, Army, run past them, down the street, and then a third. They are tattered and dirty, and they’re running from something. One of them is sobbing like a child.

They’re fleeing. That’s what they’re doing.

Krank pushes Rane up against the wall as the pursuers run into view. They’re Army too, but not the same Army. They’re ragged, wrapped in black, brotherhood cultists like the ones who slaughtered Krank’s unit. There are two of them. One laughs, raises his autorifle, and brings down the lagging trooper with a spine shot.

The other two fugitives skid up, halting. Two more cultists have appeared in their path.

The hounded men back up. The cultists stroll towards them out of the fog. The ones who were chasing drop to an amble, closing in behind.

‘Please!’ Krank hears one of the men beg. ‘Please!’

He gets a headshot for asking nicely. He goes down like a commercia mannequin.

The other tries to run, but the cultists grab him. They pin him between the four of them, drag his head back by the hair, and cross his exposed throat with a ritual knife. His blood makes a dark red mirror in the gutter under his body.

Rane makes a noise. An involuntary sob.

The four knife brothers turn from their kill. Their eyes are sunken shadows. In the half-light, their faces look like death’s-heads.

Krank fumbles with his rifle. He’s not going to get it aimed in time. One of the killers sees him, and fires. The rounds whine into the brickwork beside them, and spatter them with grit and slime. Krank fires back, but Rane is tangled with him, and his aim is rubbish. His shots go wide.

The knife brothers rush them.

Krank hits one in the chest with a clean shot, point blank, and drops him on his back. Then he gets a rifle-butt in the face and collapses, his nose and mouth a bloody mash. The other two cultists grab Rane and twist his arms. One drags Rane’s head back by the hair.

‘This one first,’ says the one who stock-smashed Krank. He stoops over his chosen victim, dagger drawn. Krank is moaning, clutching his nose. The man turns Krank’s head by the chin, and aims the point of his dagger at Krank’s wide left eye.

Rane goes berserk. He kicks one of his captors in the balls, then tears free and punches the other in the throat. As both of them stumble backwards, Rane hurls himself headlong at the bastard with the knife and tackles him clear of Krank.

They roll together. They writhe. Rane is nothing like strong enough. He’s just a kid. The cultist is big and rangy, thin and hard. His limbs are long, and he is as tough as a wild animal.

The other two rush back in to help him, cursing. Krank reaches for his rifle, but he gets kicked down. One of them puts a pistol to his head.

The gun goes off. Krank feels surprisingly little pain considering he’s been shot through the forehead. Blood runs down his face. It’s hot. But there’s no pain. There’s not even any recoil or blowback.

The man with the pistol falls over. It’s his blood decorating Krank’s face. The side of the cultist’s skull has been shot off. It’s all matted hair and white bone shards and leaking pink.

Another man stands on the roadway. He’s got a lasrifle. He fires it again, and snaps the second cultist over on his back. Headshot. A really clean headshot. Marksman standard.

Krank blinks. Where did this guy come from? He’s Army. Krank can’t tell which unit. The shooter clambers off the street to join them.

Rane and the other cultist have stopped fighting. Rane rolls the dead cultist off him. The big, rangy freak has got a dagger wedged in his heart. Somehow, in the frenzy, Rane managed to stick the bastard with his own knife.

‘Probably an accident,’ Rane says, sitting up, saying what Krank was thinking. Krank laughs, despite the fact that absolutely fugging nothing in the world is funny.

They look up at the shooter.

‘Thanks,’ says Krank.

‘You needed help,’ says the man. He’s a veteran. His face is lined and his kit is faded. He’s got silver in his hair.

‘We all need help today, friend,’ says Krank.

‘True words,’ says the man, offering his hand. He pulls Krank to his feet.

‘I’m Krank. The kid is Rane. Bale Rane. We’re Numinus 61st. Well, we were. For whatever that counts.’

‘Ollanius Persson, retired,’ says the man. ‘I’m trying to fight my way out of this shit hole. You boys want to come along?’

Krank nods.

‘Safety in numbers,’ he says.

‘Or company in death,’ replies the old guy. ‘But I’ll take either. Grab your guns.’

Persson looks at Bale Rane.

‘You all right, boy?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ replies Rane.

‘He had a shake-up,’ says Krank. ‘He thought he saw his bride. His little wife. But it wasn’t her. It wasn’t human.’

‘I saw her,’ Rane insists.

‘Nothing looks like what it’s supposed to today,’ says Persson. ‘You can’t trust your eyes. The warp’s at work, and it’s cursing us all.’

‘But–’ Rane begins.

‘Your friend is right,’ says Persson. ‘It wasn’t your wife.’

‘How do you know so much about it?’ asks Rane.

‘I got old,’ says Persson. ‘I saw plenty.’

‘You’re not that old,’ says Rane.

‘Not compared to some, I suppose,’ says Persson.

He crouches down, and plucks the ritual knife out of the cultist’s blood-soaked chest. It’s a black stone blade with a hand-wound wire handle, home-made. An athame. It reminds Oll Persson of something, but it’s not quite right. He tosses the wretched thing away.

‘Come and meet the others,’ he says to the two troopers.

‘Others?’ asks Krank.

5

The enemy comes at Leptius Numinus. It’s hard to assess numbers because of the terrible visibility, but Ventanus estimates at least six thousand. The core of the force is made up of Army units auxiliary to the XVII, the so-called brotherhoods. They look more like ritual fanatics than soldiers to Ventanus, typical of that zealot XVII mindset. Ventanus is certain that the root of many of the day’s ills lies there: the fanaticism of the Word Bearers. They were always borderline and unstable, always of a religious inclination. They worshipped the Imperium as a creed and the Emperor as a god. That’s why they were rebuked in the first place. That’s why the Emperor used the XIII, surely his most rational warriors, to do the job.

It should have been enough. It should have ended the Word Bearers’ wayward thinking, and brought them and their spurned primarch back into the common fold.

Evidently, it did not.

The Word Bearers have been fomenting dissent since that day. Reaching some crisis of faith, some epistemological crossroads, they have turned. They have turned against the Emperor they once adored.

But for what, Ventanus wonders? What do you replace your notion of god with?

Ventanus fears that the Calth Conjunction was an opportunity seized by the XVII to demonstrate their new alignment. The choice of Calth cannot have been chance. This was an opportunity to hurt and shame the Legion that chastised them all those years ago. By being the instrument of the savage reprimand on Monarchia forty-four years earlier, the Ultramarines made themselves a target. They made all of Ultramar’s Five Hundred Worlds targets.

There are still too many questions for Ventanus’s comfort. What force or concept has usurped the Emperor as the Word Bearers’ all-consuming cause? What, apart from malicious vengeance, are they hoping to achieve in the Veridian system? If they crush the Ultramarines at Calth, what is their next step?

Just how many of them are there out there in the fog?

The enemy leaders press the cultists forward in serious numbers. The brotherhood warriors, swathed in black, are chanting, and Ventanus can hear drumming too. The Word Bearers are holding back, driving the cultists forward as shock troops into the earthwork ditch and against the gate.

Sparzi’s gun crews have been shelling into the enemy line for about twenty minutes. They’ve done some serious damage considering the comparatively light nature of the field pieces. The ground beyond the earthwork is peppered with craters and littered with dead. Shot callers on the palace walls are directing the gunners in on the moving mass. Shells fall into the ranged lines, lifting tattered bodies into the air with blasts of flaming debris.

Still they come, wave after wave.

‘Small-arms!’ Ventanus instructs the defenders at the gate and wall. His practical is to let the Army bear the brunt of this, because the legionaries need to spare their boltguns and heavier munitions for the Word Bearers.

The Army force seems content with this. Greavus and some of the other legionaries have co-opted spare lasrifles and other weapons, and are joining the line. Others stand, blades ready, to meet any strength that reaches the gate.

Only Sullus seems distracted. His boltgun is drawn and ready. He wants to act, to fight. He’s angry and frustrated, and it’s fuelling his impatience.

‘Steady yourself,’ Ventanus warns him. ‘I’ll need you when the XVII come at us.’

Sullus spits out a snarl of a reply.

‘Then they’d better come soon!’ he snaps.

Ventanus leaves him to stew. The cultists renew their attacks. The outer walls of the palace are scarred with thousands of shot marks. Parts of some parapets have collapsed. There’s an endless supply of the black-robed figures. They keep rushing the gate bridge. The bridge is littered with enemy dead, and black figures have tumbled into the ditch in significant numbers.

Rockets squeal and lash up at the walls. Sparzi’s artillery tries to bracket the rocket launchers.

Ventanus has a growing concern about munitions supplies.

Ventanus locates Arook on a wall section beside the gate that is defended by the skitarii.

‘Any signal from outside?’ he asks.

‘No,’ says Arook.

‘And the server? Anything from her?’

‘No,’ says Arook. He seems slightly embarrassed.

Mortars tunk and cough behind them. Ventanus hears more rockets wailing in at the wall.

‘Can your men pinpoint the rocket sources? Sparzi’s guns need to end that pain fast before they bring the walls down.’

Arook nods.

‘I wonder how they found us so quickly?’ Arook murmurs as soon as he’s issued command blurts to his warriors.

‘Listening in to our comms?’ Ventanus suggests.

‘No chance,’ says Arook. ‘The skitarii emergency link is secure.’

‘Then just bad luck,’ says Ventanus. ‘There’s more than enough of that to go around today.’

The warp opens broad, black wings. Kor Phaeron manifests.

‘Explain your delay,’ he hisses. Creatures of unlight and the outside fidget and gibber around him.

Morpal Cxir, force commander, bows his head to his manifested superior. Dirty light from the warp-flask swaddles them both.

‘Resistance here, lord,’ Cxir says. ‘Leptius Numinus.’

‘I know it,’ replies Kor Phaeron. ‘A summer palace. No strategic importance. No tactical viability. Burn it. Move on.’

‘There is resistance, lord.’

The Black Cardinal exhales.

‘Your host is expected at the Shield Wall in two hours, Cxir. Do not waste effort and lives on a non-essential target that can be razed by orbital weapons later.’

‘With respect, lord,’ says Cxir. ‘I believe there is more to it.’

He gestures to the warriors grouped around him. One of them is Ulmor Nul, his tracker beast growling and straining at its leash.

‘Nul was pursuing an Ultramarines captain who was discovered fleeing the starport. He obtained an indelible scent. The track led here, to the palace.’

‘Just a survivor, running to the nearest place of shelter,’ remarks Kor Phaeron.

‘It is a very direct and deliberate route to take, lord,’ says Nul. ‘I believe the target has Mechanicum forces with him, and other survivors assembled into a reasonable fighting force.’

‘The defence of the palace complex is resolute,’ adds Cxir. ‘It is organised and purposeful. I believe it has tactical credibility. The XIII is trying to achieve something here.’

Kor Phaeron pauses. The Primordial Truth whispers around him, a hiss like waves breaking on an endless shoreline.

‘You are redirected, Cxir,’ he says. ‘Pursue this prosecution. Exterminate them.’

The chanting and drumming get louder. The next wave of cultists throws itself at the palace.

‘They’re wired,’ warns Greavus sharply.

Ventanus amps up his visor view. There are brotherhood warriors in the front ranks wearing bomb vests or carrying flasks and tubs of explosives.

‘Take them down before they reach the bridge!’ Ventanus orders. Marksmen on the wall line, some of them skitarii using needle laser weapons, start to pick off the bombers. Some detonate as they are brought down. One is caught at the far end of the bridge, his vest exploding with a huge, sickle-shaped rip of fire. Ventanus feels the ground shake.

‘They are renewing their efforts,’ says Sullus.

‘They are,’ Ventanus agrees.

‘Prelude to an attack by their Legiones Astartes, I’ll wager,’ says Sullus.

‘They’ll want to weaken the walls first,’ says Ventanus.

‘Let me take the fight to them!’ Sullus barks. ‘Practical: into the heart of them. Kill their leader. Break their focus.’

‘Theoretical: you die, and so do the men I’m fool enough to let you take with you. Munitions and strength are squandered. No.’

Sullus glares at Ventanus.

‘Do you doubt my courage?’ he asks.

‘In a way, I do,’ says Ventanus. ‘We know no fear, but I think, just now, you do.’

Sullus takes a furious step towards Ventanus.

‘I’ll break your back for that insult! I’m not afraid to die!’

‘I know you’re not, Sullus. But I think you’re afraid that our way of life is dying. That the universe as we understand it is dying. That’s what I’m afraid of.’

Sullus blinks.

‘Practical: loss of faith in our philosophy will lead to over-emphatic and reckless actions. Our combat efficiency will be lost. Our performance as warriors will suffer.’

Sullus swallows.

‘What if… Guilliman’s dead, Remus?’ he asks.

‘Then we avenge him, Teus.’

Sullus looks away.

‘Go find the server,’ Ventanus tells him. ‘Get an update on her progress. If they come at the walls, I want you to protect her.’

Sullus nods and strides away.

In the cavernous sub-basements of the palace, several levels underground, Tawren hears the dull crump of explosions from above ground. Trickles of dust skitter from the disturbed ceiling. She hears detonations, small-arms rattle, the steady tolling of artillery, the crazy ebb of chants and drums.

In chambers nearby, her magi are scrambling to reactivate the palace’s old high-cast system. The vox seems to be intact, but there is a singular lack of viable power.

With a skitarii aide, a female called Cyramica, Tawren has just gained entry to the ceramite-lined well under the palace centre where the data-engine and stacks are held. The data-engine is cold, off-line. She examines it, running her agile hand along its dusty, brown plastek casing. She peers into its inspection windows, observing the etched circuitry, the brass key systems. It is old, an old pattern, probably one of the first data-engines active on Calth at the time of first settlement. It employs Konor-Gantz sub-aetheric systems, and linear binaric cogitation. Old. Quite beautiful.

But not very potent. Tawren understands that the engine was only brought on-line when the governor was in residence at the palace, and then only as a back-up for state records.

‘It will have to be enough,’ she declares out loud. Cyramica glances at her.

Tawren calls in some of the magi, and they begin work on ignition and data-agitation. The engine has its own power supply, a Gysson fusion module set into the floor. The chamber grows warm as the module starts working.

‘If we had one of these for the vox-caster…’ remarks one of the magi.

‘Let us bring it to yield and then measure what it appreciates,’ suggests Tawren. ‘Its power output should be rated in excess of the engine’s needs, to cover all circumstances. Perhaps we can divert some energy to the vox once the engine is operational.’

The magos nods. Tawren has moved laterally around a problem that was confounding him.

Tawren oversees the work. Her gaze lingers on the MIU socket. She will, of course, have to plug herself in. When the time comes. If the engine is tainted with scrapcode, all her efforts may be for nothing, and she will die in the process. Die like Hesst, die the brain-death, the data-death. She remembers Hesst passing in her arms.

A voice interrupts her thoughts. ‘Will it work?’

She turns. An Ultramarines captain has entered the stack room. It is Sullus. She is not sure what to make of Sullus. From observation of micro-expressions during the journey to the palace, she believes that Ventanus does not trust his judgement or reliability.

‘It will work,’ she says with a conviction she does not entirely feel.

‘And the vox system?’ he asks, looking at the ancient engine with a dubious expression.

‘That too. Another half an hour, perhaps.’

‘We don’t have anything like that, server,’ says Sullus. ‘They are at the wall. Can’t you hear them? They’re at the gate, and they will burn this if they get to it.’

‘Then make sure, captain,’ she replies, ‘that they do not get to it.’

One of the magi nods to her. She clears her throat, and walks up to the MIU socket.

The plug connectors lock into place.

The data-engine purrs.

Thiel blows open the next hatch. The daemon-thing on the other side lunges at him, howling. It has teeth – rotten, broken pegs of teeth – all the way around its yawning mouth, which is big enough to swallow him whole. Its legs are back-jointed, with bird’s feet.

Thiel rips the electromagnetic longsword through its maw, severing the upper and lower jaws. Then he puts two bolt-rounds down its sputtering gullet.

Kerso moves in to back him up, hosing the daemon-thing with fire. The thing is already shrieking and spasming, spraying the flagship hallway liberally with ichor. It starts thrashing as the fire wraps around it.

From behind them, Chapter Master Empion yells a warning. A second daemon, a thing made of hair and arachnoid limbs and antlers, has scuttled out of the shadows. It grabs Kerso before he can turn, splitting his armour down the length of his spine, peeling his carapace away like foil. Kerso is screaming. His flamer unit tumbles away, weeping fire.

Thiel hacks off two of the spider-thing’s legs. They are like black willow trunks, ropey and matted with brown fuzz. More ichor spatters. Another leg lashes at Thiel. Too many limbs.

Kerso is done screaming. A lack of skull has silenced him. The thing pinning and peeling him has vomited acid juices onto his head and shoulders to render him more palatable. Kerso’s head is a fused, smoking lump of tissue.

The thing has one eye, a huge white orb that throbs with a sickening, celestial light. It is crowned with a spreading tree of sixty-point antlers.

Brother Bormarus has a heavy bolter. He slugs repeated shots into the creature’s wizened form. Rounds detonate under the skin, pulsing the slack flesh out or tearing it and spraying gobs of meat and pus.

Empion leaps forward alongside Thiel. He has a thunder hammer, and he breaks legs with it. He smashes at the daemon-thing’s body. The energised strikes fracture chitin and pulp tissue. The daemon-thing rears back, dropping Kerso’s corpse, waving its spider legs in a defensive posture. Some legs trail, broken and useless. It has hundreds of them.

Bormarus fires again, aiming at the exposed belly. Something bursts, and the hallway is filled with a noxious stench. Flies swarm everywhere. The daemon-thing flops forward. Thiel ducks a slicing limb, and stabs his longsword into the baleful eye, twists it, and keeps twisting and digging until the unholy light goes out.

Zabo recovers Kerso’s flame-unit and burns the twitching hulk.

‘Every door, a new horror,’ says Empion to Thiel.

‘And every moment a moment lost,’ Thiel replies.

They’re fighting their way down-ship towards the auxiliary bridge. The banging and scraping on the outside hull is getting louder and more persistent: the Word Bearers are on the verge of boarding from their ships alongside. But there is no point fighting for a ship that they can’t control. The auxiliary bridge is a vital practical asset. The Macragge’s Honour has lost its primary bridge tower and its shipmaster, but a replacement for Zedoff has been located among survivors picked up from the Sanctity of Saramanth. Master Hommed, along with a contingent of ready and prepped command officers, is following on behind Thiel’s desperate advance.

The fight is chamber by chamber, companionway by companionway. Daemons lurk in every shadow and around every turn. They spilled into the flagship from loose folds of the warp when the main bridge was compromised, and flow through the vast vessel like a flash flood of ink, of pitch, of liquid tar.

Thiel, Empion and the rest of the ship’s defenders are learning how to daemon-fight under practical conditions. Fire and blades have greater efficacy than projectiles or energy weapons. It seems that the primordial entities suffer greater harm from simple, basic injuries: the primitive qualities of edge, and blunt force, and flame.

Thiel has a theoretical developing, a proposition that suggests a link between damage and ritual function. Fire and cutting or stabbing tools were essential elements of ancient magic-working. It seems more than coincidental that their symbolic provenance should be retained. It is as if the daemons, products of the primeval void before man’s birth, remember the sacred instruments that were used to summon them.

He doubts he will ever have the opportunity to write down or propose this theoretical. He believes that, if he ever should, he would be scorned as a superstitious fool.

Urgency is renewed. Bormarus leads the way. Flies buzz in the clefts of the hall, and gather in frenzies around the bulkhead lights. Mould has formed on ceilings and wall ribs, and slime is dribbling up through deck seams.

Beyond the next blast hatch, a broad prep chamber is littered with dead men. They are almost all flagship crew, most of them ratings, but Thiel spies at least four Ultramarines among the dead. All of the corpses look as though they have been crushed under the treads of a Baneblade convoy. The bodies form a broken, mangled carpet of flesh, bone and armour. The floor of the chamber is slick with blood. Flies buzz.

Thiel can hear dripping.

He looks up. The ceiling is covered, just like the deck. Bodies have been crushed into it, crushed and squashed into the ceiling like papier maché. Small pieces drop or splat down as gravity works its gradual influence.

‘What did this?’ Empion murmurs, marvelling at the sheer ingenuity of the horror.

There is a scraping sound. They turn, and find out the answer to his question.

6

‘Here they come!’ cries Arook Serotid.

The Word Bearers charge out of the fog, their huge red figures dwarfing their cultist troops. They drive the ragged brotherhood warriors ahead of them like packs of dogs into the onslaught of the palace guns. They use the cultists as shields.

‘Meet them! Deny them!’ Ventanus orders. At last, he fires his boltgun. Along the line of the walls and the gate, bolters open up, jagging, jumping and crackling with muzzle-flash. Heavier Legion weapons join in. Autocannons. Lascannons. The precious instruments they reserved for this moment.

The firepower slaps into the enemy charge, properly hurting it, slowing it, breaking it. Thousands of separate explosions and blasts tear men apart or throw them into the air. Tracer-bright streaks of las and plasma stitch across the enemy line. Black-robed humans are mown down. Ventanus smiles under his helm as he sees crimson-armoured figures shudder and fall amongst them.

But there is an inevitable balance. Because it is finally time to utilise the Legion-issue weapons, it is also time to suffer equivalent wrath. The assaulting Word Bearers open fire with bolters and heavy cannons, supplementing the light infantry weapons of the chanting brotherhoods. Mass-reactive shells punch into the walls, scattering large chunks of stone, and rip into the gate. The loyalist forces start taking much heavier casualties.

Loyalist, Ventanus thinks. How bitterly natural was it to arrive at that name?

Crimson shapes, fast as darts, loft out of the fogbank. Assault squads. Shock troops launching on jump packs. They come thundering in like missiles, clearing the broad ditch, plunging down onto the defences. Their attack leap-frogs the main assaulting host. They arrive killing, armed with bolters and chainblades, reaping the Army troops like ripe crops. Angry, whining chainswords rip screaming men apart, making red ribbons of flesh, hurling matted body parts into the air.

‘Drive them off the walls!’ Ventanus yells.

Arook opens fire, spearing one Word Bearers assaulter out of the air with a surgical intercept shot. The Word Bearer veers away on a twisting plume of black smoke.

Four of them land on their feet at the head of the bridge, in front of the gate. They hack and shoot their way into the dug-in Army fireteams. The chainblades score through sandbags, through cannon barrels, through shielding, through flesh, through bone. The strangled, oddly modulated shrieks of the Army troopers unable to defend themselves mark the savage progress of the Word Bearers.

Ventanus bounds forward, Greavus at his side. They reach the defensive line under the gate, where the ground flows with a preposterous, spreading quantity of blood. There’s a pulsing pressure to it, a flow driven by the scampering hearts of men who bleed out through unimaginable wounds. Streams spray and gurgle along the gutters of the bridge, gutters designed to handle rainfall. The torrents void into the ditch below like rusty water from iron pipework.

Ventanus reaches one of the Word Bearers while he is busy disarticulating an Army corporal. Ventanus catches the traitor under the chin of the helm with the thrusting wings of the standard. He drives him backwards, and then blasts him in the torso, point blank, with his boltgun. The shot augurs clean through the Word Bearer and his jump pack in a violent belch of flames and sparks.

The Assault Marine falls, but grabs the thrusting standard as he collapses, dragging it out of Ventanus’s grip. Ventanus doesn’t have time to recover it. Still firing with his right hand, he draws his power sword underhand with his left, and then rotates the freed blade in a semi-circle, catching it full grip.

Greavus has engaged the second of the jump infantry warriors, swinging his power fist to meet the Word Bearer’s moaning chainsword. The chainsword is kicking out exhaust fumes of blood and tissue fibre from its fresh kills. The augmented gauntlet, sizzling with force, shatters the grip and blade drivers of the chainsword, seizing its function.

The Traitor Marine discards his broken sword, and fires his bolt pistol. The round explodes against the side of Greavus’s helm, throwing him sideways into the gateway wall. The Marine steps forward to put a second shot into him.

Ventanus’s bolter roars, and the Word Bearer takes one hit in the throat and another in the chest. The twin impacts stagger him backwards, spalling slivers of armour off him in a cloud like ice chips. Blood pours through the ruptures. The Word Bearer sags against the gate wall, bubbles of blood aspirating through his mouthguard. He tries to raise his pistol again.

Ventanus’s clip is spent. He clamps the bolter, bringing the power sword home with both hands. He finishes the wounded, swaying Word Bearer with a brutal scything zigzag slash. The upper part of the cut goes sideways through the faceplate, the lower return through the abdomen, clean to the backbone. Clutching his almost bisected waist, the Word Bearer buckles.

Ventanus turns in time to meet a third. The Assault Marine rushes him. Ventanus notices there are grim figures etched and marked on the Word Bearer’s shoulder guards, and gibberish litanies inscribed down the length of his body plates. It is the heraldry of the insane.

Ventanus blocks the chainsword swing with his blade. More sparks dance. The chainblade, a two-handed monster, chatters as it bites against the energised edge of the power sword. They break. Ventanus parries the next stroke, blocks another, and then runs his blade, tip first, clean through his adversary’s gut. The stab misses the spine, but the end of the blade merges through the plating above the Word Bearer’s left hip.

Ventanus attempts to slide the blade out, but it’s stuck. Nor is his opponent dead. He swings for Ventanus again, and Ventanus is forced to evade as the chainsword mutters towards his face. He has to let go of his sword, and leave it impaling the warrior’s abdomen.

The Word Bearer lunges at him, set on finishing the contest. He’s wielding the massive chainsword two-handed, stroking left and right in an attempt to catch the now unarmed Ultramarine. A skitarii warrior leaps to Ventanus’s defence, but the Word Bearer cleaves him in half in a swirling red haze.

Open-handed, Ventanus leaps at him, tackling him bodily to the ground while his chainsword is still tearing through the Mechanicum soldier. Pinning the Word Bearer’s right arm so the brute can’t make a swing across his body, Ventanus punches his confined enemy in the head repeatedly. After three blows, the helmet buckles slightly. A fourth fractures part of the gorget. A fifth crazes a visor lens.

The Word Bearer roars, throwing Ventanus off him. Ventanus allows himself to be knocked clear.

He has regained his grip on the hilt of his power sword.

He wrenches it out of the Word Bearer. Sideways.

Greavus, his head streaming gore, isn’t finished. He has risen again, throwing aside his ruptured, ruined helm. He has recovered a bolt pistol and is firing it past Ventanus. The fourth of the assaulters is cleaving his way through Army regulars and skitarii.

Arook and the largest of the heavyweight skitarii have retrenched. They open up with their plasma inbuilds, and slice the traitor apart. Ventanus hears Greavus yelling tactical commands to rally the head of the bridge and drive back the storm force. They’re holding, but the line’s going to break. Hundreds of cultists and Word Bearers are on the bridge, and some are actually swarming up the slopes of the ditch. The defenders on the walls can’t get an angle of fire steep enough.

Selaton arrives with several more of the Ultramarines contingent. He moves in to support Greavus at the bridge. Ventanus reloads his boltgun, and takes a place in the line.

The force of fire now being directed at the palace gate and frontage is immense. Men are being felled by the hail. They are even being hit and killed by the stone shrapnel kicked up by shots striking the wall.

‘I have a signal!’ Arook yells to Ventanus over the din. ‘A new signal.’

‘Relay it!’

‘Inbound force of XIII Legion requesting position specifics.’

‘Challenge them,’ Ventanus orders. ‘Ask them the number of the painted eldar!’

Arook sends the message.

‘Reply,’ he says. ‘The number is twelve. Message continues, “As anyone will tell you”.’

He looks at Ventanus. Droplets of blood from dozens of bodies bead his golden armour. His defective red eye ebbs and flares.

‘Captain?’ he asks. ‘Response?’

‘The correct answer is thirteen,’ says Ventanus. He takes a deep breath. ‘Supply them with the coordinates and tell them that time is not on our side.’

The daemon has a beak. It has a beak and feathers, and hundreds of vestigial limbs that end in hooves. But its body, all thirty tonnes of it, is that of a serpent, a fat, bloated constrictor. A Space Marine could stand with his arms outstretched and not match the diameter of its scaled girth.

It emerges from the vault shadows to the side of the prep chamber, spooling its vast, swaying bulk up through a massive deck hatch that leads into a magazine store. Thiel realises how the crushed carpet of victims was manufactured.

The vast beak clacks. Thiel sees that secondary snake bodies, dozens of them, form a beard, a frill under the chin of the beak. They writhe like tentacles, like pseudopods. The daemon is a hundred giant snakes fused into one titanic abomination, sharing one beaked head.

Bormarus rakes with his heavy bolter, and Zabo spears scalding flame. The daemon-snake rears back, and then lashes out with its frilled head. The beak catches one of the squad, a battle-brother called Domnis, and shears him in a line from the groin to the left shoulder.

Empion wades in, unflinching, circling his thunder hammer to gather momentum. The daemon-snake strikes at him, and he meets the strike, turning its beak aside with a staggering blow. The impact shakes the chamber and causes a pop of overpressure.

The beak is cracked. Ichor trickles out. Thiel strides in to support the Chapter Master, and when the daemon-snake strikes again it is greeted by the hammer and the electromagnetic longsword.

The hammer connects above the bridge of the massive beak, and deconstructs a brittle, avian eye-socket. Simultaneously, Thiel runs his longsword’s razor edge up the rising belly and throat under the beard of secondary tails. The sword parts white scaled flesh, and opens bright pink meat and transparent bone. Internal pink sacs, swirled with white fat, burst and an alimentary canal ruptures.

The daemon-snake rears, its beak wide. Its secondary snake bodies and vestigial hooves thrash and spasm furiously. Partially digested, dismembered parts of human beings and Space Marines spatter out of the deep, gutting wound Thiel has delivered. The body parts spew wide in an outrush of gastric fluid.

The Ultramarines can all hear a colossal booming noise. It is the daemon’s immense tail end, still coiled in the magazine below, thrashing in pained frenzy against the metal walls of the compartment.

The daemon slides back through the hatch to escape its tormentors.

‘The hatch! Close the hatch!’ Zabo yells. He has a locked string of ten frag grenades in his hand. As Empion punches the hatch control, Zabo arms one and lobs the whole string into the deck hatch.

The hatch is almost shut when the grenades go off. The blast jams the hatch a few centimetres from full closure, and the narrow slit focuses the contained blast pressure into a tight, extreme geyser of flame and debris that jets up and burns out across the chamber ceiling.

The booming stops.

Empion glances at Thiel.

‘Every door, a new horror,’ he says.

‘And every moment a moment lost,’ Thiel replies.

It is not the last time they will echo this call and return.

It is not the last compartment of the flagship they will have to clear a path through.

7

The Word Bearers launch a third wave of Assault Marines at the palace.

Ventanus, Selaton and Greavus have held the defence force together, and kept the gate and the bridge, though the bridge is chewed down to shreds of its former majesty. The second wave almost pushed them out of the gate into the inner yard, but for serious counter-fire from Arook’s skitarii.

The third wave, Ventanus knows, will be the critical phase. He sees it coming: one formation of jump troops swooping for the bitterly contested gate, another veering south to hit the wall further around the perimeter. Their intention will be to break in on Sparzi’s artillery positions.

Remus Ventanus is resolved to endure whatever he must endure, but he knows that resistance must crumble eventually. It is a calculable inevitability. It is a matter of numbers. It is a solid practical.

He clings to one hope. He clings to the whispered, relayed message from his home company. Let it not be a lie or a trick, he thinks. I’ve had enough of tricks this day. If it isn’t a lie, let them be fast enough. Let them be fleet of foot and tread. Let them get here while being here still matters.

He knows the wave is coming. There are precursor signs. The brotherhood cultists swarm yet again at the gate and ditch. The chanting becomes so loud that Ventanus imagines the pulse of it, the massed breath of it, will blow away the fetid smog. The enemy strikes at the walls with more rockets, with mortars, and with medium artillery. Shells punch holes in the old walls, or drop long into the gardens and compounds, scattering gun-crews and reserve positions. Selaton reports hearing tracks clattering in the fog, suggesting that the shelling is coming from enemy tanks or self-propelled guns. Ventanus doesn’t hear anything: his hearing is dulled by the sheer pitch of the intense combat in which he has been locked.

The Assault Marines shriek down. Their jump packs generate rasping, heat-shimmered forks of blue flame. The brotherhood charges crush the bridge barricades. Part of the top arch of the gate explodes and collapses in a slip of dust and loose stones. The defenders brace.

Greavus curses, blood matting his already red hair.

A Baneblade, a crimson behemoth, looms out of the fog on the far side of the earthwork and lines up on the gate and west wall. Brotherhood warriors swarm around the bulk of the massive tank.

The superheavy tank takes aim with its primary siege weapon. The Demolisher cannon clanks into alignment. Its skirts and side-plating are painted with eight-pointed star designs and what appears to be considerable quantities of scrawled handwriting.

A Baneblade.

Ventanus knows the balance has finally and firmly tipped in favour of the Word Bearers.

The close combat has already begun. There’s no time to think about the tank.

He is too busy fighting off a pair of Assault Marines. One has wounded him in the side. The other is laying in with a power axe. The confines of the gate cramp the full measure of the axe-wielder’s swing, but the Word Bearer has already killed two Army troopers and a skitarii.

Selaton covers his captain’s back, turning aside the power axe with a battered combat shield whose surface decoration has been obliterated into a billion raw metals, nicks and scratches. Ventanus and Selaton fight back-to-back. Ventanus clashes his power sword with his opponent’s kinetic mace. Selaton drives a chainsword across the guard of the axe-wielder.

All the while, Ventanus has half an eye on the tank.

Selaton takes a hit. The power axe gets past his combat shield and hacks into his shoulder guard. It doesn’t bite through to the flesh underneath, but the damage is deep, and it jams the articulation of his arm.

Selaton tries to compensate, but his balance is twisted. He stumbles sideways, lurched by the momentum of the axe wrenching out.

His guard is therefore poor as he takes the second swing in the chest.

The wound is bloody. The force of it knocks Selaton down, and it looks as though he has the entire bite of the axe buried in his chest. In truth, his carapace has absorbed the lethal part of the hit, but the flesh is sliced and – until Selaton’s transhuman biology kicks in to staunch it – bleeds copiously.

Ventanus is too committed to protect his fallen sergeant. The Assault Marine with the power axe closes down for the finishing blow.

Greavus punches him in the side of the head with his power fist, compacting his helm like a foil ration tray.

Greavus hauls Selaton back to his feet. They struggle for a second to free the axe from Selaton’s armour.

Ventanus kills his opponent. Fury directs his hand. He plants his blade through the Word Bearer’s helmet, slicing off the right-hand third of it. Something that for all the galaxy resembles an anatomy scholam cross-section is visible as the Assault Marine sags aside.

Ventanus can feel the heat seething inside him like a fever. Since the fighting broke out, he’s taken about eighteen minor wounds, including a through and through las-hit to the meat of his right thigh, a fracture to a bone in his forearm, and a crushed fifth finger. The others are knocks, scars, and serious concussion-transmitted bruising.

His metabolism is cranking up, trying to compensate, trying to fight or delay pain, trying to maintain peak performance, trying to accelerate healing and repair. The energy debt has raised his body temperature by several degrees. He is flash-burning body fat fuel reserves. He knows he will soon need hydrolytes and additional pain-buffers if he is going to retain his battlefield edge.

He looks at the tank again. Why hasn’t it fired? Why–

The Baneblade abruptly revs its powerful engine plant, throbs jets of black exhaust into the air, and starts a rapid reverse. Ventanus can hear its track sections clattering. Its massive hull rocks tail-to-nose, and its main turret begins to traverse to the left, the battle cannon elevating.

The host of brotherhood warriors mobbing around it has to break frantically to avoid being crushed by its hasty redeployment.

What’s it doing? Is it turning? Is it turning?

There’s something in the oily fog. Something to the north-west.

The Word Bearers Baneblade fires its battle cannon. The muzzle-shock is huge, and the pressure smack puffs dust up from the ground all around it. The shell spits into the fog, creating a corkscrew ripple that slowly dissolves. Ventanus does not hear it hit.

But he hears the response.

There is an oscillating scream of energy and pressure, accompanied by a micro-pulse of electromagnetics. A thick beam of blinding energy shears out of the fog and strikes the Baneblade. The impact shakes the tank, all three hundred tonnes of it. It shakes it. It rattles it like a tin toy. It rocks it off the ground for a second and skids it sideways. Dozens of brotherhood warriors perish under its violently dislodged mass.

The energy beam bangs painfully as it connects. Huge chunks of armour plating eject, some spinning high into the air. Half the turret structure is burned away. Smoke begins to plume, and then gutters and pours up and out of the damaged section. The Baneblade shudders. Ventanus can hear it attempting to restart its main drive, stalled by the body-blow. He can hear the multi-fuel plant gagging and choking.

A second energy beam, bright as the first, scores out of the fog and misses the tank by a few metres. It hits the ground, spontaneously excavating a huge trench of superheated, fused rock, and incinerating two dozen of the brotherhood and four of the Word Bearers. Other cultists caught in the immediate target zones scream as the secondary heat-sear ignites their robes and their ammo.

The third beam, coming just a moment after the second, kills the Baneblade. It hits the hull square, under the throat of the turret, and the tank ruptures and explodes. For a millisecond, it resembles one of the wood-and-canvas vehicle dummies, little more than covered frame tents, are used in basic training exercises by the Army. It looks like a tank dummy where the wind has got up under the hem of the cover tarp and billowed it out off the underframe, lifting it, twisting the painted outline and edges.

Then the internal blast comes, sudden and bright, and hot and vast, and the twisted outline of the tank vanishes, atomised.

Two Shadowsword tanks plough out of the fog, roiling it around their cobalt-blue hulls.

Cobalt-blue. Cobalt-blue, wearing the white and gold heraldry of the Ultima.

Land Raiders and Rhinos churn through after them, then a trio of Whirlwinds, and a walking line of Ultramarines, forty bodies wide. They fire as they advance on the Word Bearers positions from the north, passing the smoking crater-grave of the Baneblade. Two or three bikes and speeders scoot after the massive battle tanks, romping over the churned-up ground.

The brotherhood formations at the head of the bridge baulk, under fire from a new angle. Hundreds are slaughtered where they stand. Some leap into the corpse-choked ditch to evade the hammering fire of Land Raiders. The Shadowswords are already firing into the fog, targeting high-value Word Bearers assets hidden from the palace by the haze. Their main guns screech out columns of energy that cook through the mist vapour. Objects in the blanket of fog explode. Flames gust high into the air over the mist cover. The smell in the air changes, like the turn from summer to autumn. New energies, new machines, new chemical interactions.

Full-scale battle is joined. For the first time since the attack on the palace began, the Word Bearers force is thrown into a defensive mode, prosecuted hard by an unexpected, mobile foe.

The cultist warriors break. Their chanting stops. Behind the first walking line of Ultramarines is a second, and a third. Their gold and blue armour is slightly dulled by the atmospheric conditions, but still it gleams. Salvation never looked so splendid. Death never looked so noble.

The cultists begin to flee. They run south down the earthwork, or flee into the mist. Those trying to follow the earthwork line, picking their way, scrambling, draw fire from the wall. Sparzi’s troopers and Arook’s skitarii lace them with opportunist weapons-fire, dropping them like sticks. Some turn back, and then turn back again, pinned and bracketed by gunfire that creeps in and slays them. Bodies slither and tumble into the death-pit of the ditch.

Ventanus sends an order to the colonel to suspend artillery. He wants to ensure the counter-strike has an unimpeded run into the enemy formation.

‘Captain Sydance,’ says Selaton, noting a standard and pointing.

‘The 4th,’ Ventanus agrees. He is surprised by the level of emotion he registers. It’s not just relief from the physical hazard. It’s honest pride of association. His company. His company.

It’s a heterogeneous mix, in all truth. Sydance has composed his battlelines out of men from several XIII Legion companies. All of them were assembled at the Erud muster. He’s patched holes and losses in the 4th Company structure with reinforcements from other broken units. One of the Shadowswords is an 8th Company asset, two of the Land Raiders are from 3rd. Ventanus notes the battle colours of Captain Lorchas, the second officer of the 9th.

The palace defenders watch whatever is visible. Most of the fighting boils back into the fog. Long-range armour duels rip through the cloudy murk. Nearer at hand, the Ultramarines finally dismember the last of the cult resistance, and engage in vicious close-quarter melee with the warriors of the XVII.

To their credit, the Word Bearers do not break like their chanting followers. They have significant numbers – a two-or three-company strength, by Ventanus’s estimate – and even caught out of position and by surprise, they dig in. From the savagery of Sydance’s assault, 4th Company and its reinforcing elements have seen too much already today to think about quarter. Ventanus wonders – dreads – what they might have witnessed and experienced out at Erud Station as the main part of the treachery broke. Did the Word Bearers encamped alongside the Ultramarines zones just turn? Did they simply rise and draw their weapons, and begin killing, without notice or warning?

He is sure they did. Ventanus is sure the Word Bearers have nothing but the absolute extermination of the XIII as an objective.

You do not just kill the Ultramarines Legion.

Lorgar’s barbarians would not have risked a fair fight. They would have gathered every advantage that surprise, deceit and entrapment could offer. They would have wanted to blitz and kill their enemy, kill him before he even realised he was an enemy.

It did not work. It did not work. The XIII has been hurt. The last ten hours on Calth might even have mortally wounded the Legion to such an extent that it will never fully recover, and, as a consequence, will always be a weaker, smaller fighting force.

But the Word Bearers did not make the clean kill they intended. They fumbled it, or they underestimated the effort required. They made a bloody mess, and left a wounded foe that could still move and fight; a wounded, mangled foe that was fuelled by pain and hatred and vengeance, and by the bright shock of moral outrage.

Always make sure your enemy is dead.

If you must fight an Ultramarine, pray you kill him. If he is still alive, then you are dead.

You are dead, Lorgar. You are dead. You are dead.

‘Did you say something?’ Arook says to Ventanus.

Ventanus wonders if he did.

‘No,’ he replies. He unbuckles his helm, removes it, and wipes a smear of blood off the pitted, chipped visor. Much of the cobalt-blue paint has been scratched or spalled off. Arook Serotid, similarly, is covered in metal scrapes and dents, his ornate golden armour battered and streaked with blood and oil.

Around them, wounded, weary, filthy men gather to watch the brutal fighting on the far side of the earthwork. Army, Ultramarine and skitarii alike stand together, weapons lowered. Residue smoke coils under the chewed-up arch of the gate. Broken pieces of stone slither down from the wall, some of it jarred loose by the earth-trembling assault of the armoured vehicles. The precious few medical personnel among Ventanus’s force take advantage of the suspended fire to move up and tend the injured and dying. Virtually every single one of the palace defenders has taken an injury of some kind. There are nothing like enough dressings or drugs to go around.

‘Why the code?’ asks Arook.

‘What?’

‘The number of the painted eldar?’

‘The war against Jielthwa Craftworld,’ Ventanus replies quietly. ‘Eight years ago. Sydance had the main assault. A privilege. During the charge, he was briefly cut off and made a personal stand, taking on a dozen eldar warriors. It was an outstanding achievement. He was decorated for it. I arrived to relieve him just as the fight was ending, and he was finishing his last opponent.’

Ventanus glances at the skitarii master.

‘The primarch decorated him for twelve kills in one accelerated bout of combat. Twelve of the painted eldar. But there were thirteen eldar dead on the hall floor when I reached him. I came in firing, anxious for his welfare. It is a high probability that my shots, loosed into the smoke, killed the thirteenth. So it is a standing joke between us. He famously slew twelve and was decorated for it. I slew one. But that one may have been crucial. It might have been the one who, at last, overcame him. Sydance might have died at the hands of the thirteenth, and never lived to celebrate his glory and prowess. So which was more important, his twelve or my one?’

Arook stares at him.

‘This is the sort of thing you joke about?’ he asks. ‘This passes for humour among your kind?’

‘I thought you might understand,’ says Ventanus, shaking his head. ‘Most humans would not.’

Arook shrugs his mighty shoulders.

‘I suppose I do. We skitarii enjoy similar boasts and rivalries. We just do it in binary and keep it to ourselves.’

The force of the armour battle has become so intense the field of fog west of the palace is rippling and churning like a troubled sea. Fierce beams of light flash and burn in the murk. A troop transport, hoisted by a considerable explosion, bursts out of the mist like a breaching cetacean. Debris and fragments shower off its burning carcass as it flops back into the vapour sea.

Closer at hand, at the edges of the mist, Ultramarines are locked in hand-to-hand fighting with Word Bearers. Loyal blue against traitor red. No quarter given or taken.

Ventanus reloads his boltgun, checks his sword, and gathers up the standard. Its haft is streaked with runs of blood, and badged with bloody palm prints.

‘I’m rejoining the fight,’ he tells Selaton. ‘Secure the palace.’

He hears a buzz from beneath his left ear, and responds instinctively before he realises what it is.

‘Ventanus? This is Sullus.’

‘Sullus?’

‘I’m in the palace sub-basement, Remus. She did it. The server did it. Vox-link is live. Repeat, vox-link is back and live.’

Ventanus acknowledges. He turns to Selaton and the other officers.

‘Change of plan,’ he says. ‘I’m returning to the palace building. Hold the line, and let me know the moment the nature of the fight out there changes.’

He turns and begins to walk away, through the gate, across the cratered gardens, towards the battered facade of the summer palace.

Blue smoke wreathes the air, and there’s a stink of fycelene from the artillery emplacements.

He has hope. For the first time since the day began, Ventanus has decent, proper hope in his heart.

Ventanus enters the sub-basement. He can feel the soft heat of the working machines. Mechanicum magi stand around, observing, monitoring. A few work at exposed circuit integrators, making final adjustments.

Tawren stands in the stack room, connected to the chattering data-engine by an MIU umbilical. She looks serene.

She glances at him as he approaches, but is too busy reconfiguring a data-transfer structure in her head to speak.

Sullus glances at Ventanus.

‘4th Company just relieved us,’ Ventanus tells him.

‘So she said,’ Sullus replies, nodding towards the server. ‘She’s constructing a tactical overview. I don’t understand the details, but I gather she’s collecting and collating strategic data from every system and information source she can link to.’

‘Across the planet? Orbital?’ asks Ventanus.

‘Not yet, captain,’ says Cyramica, the server’s aide. ‘For now, it is just on a local, continental level. Because it was dormant and isolated, the data-engine was not infected with pernicious scrapcode. The server is extending her reach one step at a time, maintaining code-protected cordons, so that she does not contaminate herself by infected data-transfer. There is also some doubt that this engine will be powerful enough to coordinate a full, global noosphere.’

Ventanus nods. He appreciates the way the Mechanicum have of never sugar-coating any news.

‘What about taking control of the planetary weapons grid?’ asks Sullus.

‘No,’ replies Cyramica bluntly. ‘The active grid is under enemy control, and it is infected with their invasive scrapcode. All the server can do is gather data in passive mode. The engine is not powerful enough to wrest grid control from the enemy-operated data-engines, and even if it were, such a process would require active MIU function, which would allow the scrapcode a viable cross-infection route. As was demonstrated today, we do not have a code-protection cordon or “killcode” powerful enough to eliminate and cleanse the scrapcode.’

‘So Tawren’s forced to remain passive?’ asks Ventanus.

‘To protect the integrity of what we have here,’ says Cyramica.

‘But she can assemble and compile tactical data for us?’

‘Extensively. Her magi are already assembling the first databriefs.’

Ventanus looks at Sullus. ‘She can prep us with material to formulate proper theoreticals. We can then use the vox to coordinate the practicals.’

‘Any coordinated reprisal is going to be bloody welcome,’ says Sydance, walking into the chamber. He wrenches off his bloodstained helm and grins at Ventanus. ‘Thought you were dead, Remus,’ he says.

‘Hoped you might be,’ Ventanus replies.

‘Hope all you like,’ says Sydance.

They embrace with a clatter of armour.

‘There’s always a thirteenth eldar, Lyros,’ says Ventanus.

‘Twelve, only ever twelve,’ Sydance replies.

He breaks the bearhug and grins at Sullus.

‘Good to see you standing, Teus,’ he says.

‘We march for Macragge,’ Sullus replies stiffly.

‘You march where the hell you like,’ says Sydance. ‘I’m marching straight for Lorgar’s throat today. I’ve seen...’

He hesitates, and wrinkles his mouth in distaste.

‘Men are dead and gone, brothers,’ he says quietly, his smile behind a cloud. ‘I’ll spare you the list for now, but so many. Friends, warriors, heroes. The catalogue of the fallen will make you weep. Weep. The bastards slaughtered us. Unguarded. In our sleep. Surprise attack is an honourable tradition of war, but not from a supposed friend. Ah, I’m sure you saw plenty on your way from the port, Remus.’

‘I did.’

‘I will make an ocean of blood,’ says Sydance. ‘An ocean. I will soak the soil in the blood of these bastards. I will bleed them beyond the limits of their clotting factor. I will leave their heads on spikes.’

‘Vengeance, yes,’ Sullus nods. ‘Quite. We should however formulate a solid theoretical.’

‘Screw theoreticals!’ Sydance growls. ‘This is one occasion when we are excused our usual approach to war as a science. This is war as art. This is war as emotion.’

‘Yes,’ says Sullus. ‘Let us paint our faces and charge the enemy guns. They only outnumber us four-fold, after all. The few of us that remain will die, but at least we’ll have died expressing our anger. So that makes it all right.’

Sydance makes a contemptuous sound.

‘I’m with Sydance,’ says Ventanus, but quickly raises a warning finger before Sullus can object. ‘With one caveat. Given our losses, given our enemy’s numerical and technical superiority, I think our spirit, our rage for vengeance, our furious need for restitution... those things may be the only qualities that give us an advantage. They have made the mistake of hurting us instead of killing us. We are more dangerous. We will use the hurt.’

He looks at Sydance.

‘But there is always a thirteenth eldar.’

Sydance laughs.

Sullus is unable to cover a tiny smile.

‘We must cover our backs,’ Ventanus says. ‘We must channel our rage, and temper it with strategy. We must use every weapon: fury, vengeance, intelligence. Fury is our practical. Intelligence is our theoretical. Neither works alone. We would disgrace Guilliman in this hour if we forgot that. Information is victory.’

He turns to Cyramica.

‘Please, inform the server I wish to begin vox transmissions. I need the best signal encryption she can give me, and any source modifiers. Anything she can do to disguise our position.’

Cyramica nods.

Flanked by Sydance and Sullus, Ventanus walks into the vox-caster room. He takes up the speaker horn.

9

It’s darker above ground than beneath it.

The open air is a poison fog, and the dense blackness moves hard on a wind that pushes through the Ourosene Hills.

Brother Braellen doesn’t believe it’s a natural wind. A natural weather pattern. During a break in the gunfire, he heard Sergeant Domitian speculate that it was atmospheric displacement: major pressure and air patterns thrown into upheaval by orbital bombardment.

There’s certainly a line of firestorm glow around the lip of the southern sky.

6th Company, supported by the Army and stragglers from two other Ultramarines companies at the Ourosene muster, has pulled back from the devastated ground camp areas, and taken up position defending the surface tower of one of the northern arcologies.

Braellen hasn’t seen inside the arcologies, but he knows they are huge sub-ground complexes. Some of them are habs. This one, apparently. There are hundreds of thousands of citizen workers down there, and the 6th is the only thing stopping the enemy from getting at them.

The surface tower is a small fortress, a significant fortified structure that covers and defends the mouth of the arcology system. Its sublevels contain entrances to the main underground arterial, to walkways and cargo-freight systems, and even maglev rail lines, all feeding the huge subterranean complex.

The tower is a good place to make a stand.

The enemy has been coming up the pass all day. Brotherhood cultists at the fore, then Word Bearers, then armour. The cultists seem mindless, frenzied. They are drumming and chanting nonsense. Heedless of their own lives, they rush the walls and gates, and are cut down. Some are wired to explode, and detonate themselves against the walls in the hope of bringing them over.

Braellen is intrigued by their behaviour. The cultists seem willing and eager. That is clear from their chanting and drumming and mindless sacrifice. But it is a group mentality, a hysteria. He has observed Word Bearers at the back of the vast host spurring them on, driving them forward with pain and threats. They are enslaved killers, their hysteria enforced by cruel authority.

Perhaps they have been promised some redemption, some metaphysical reward for their bloody efforts. Perhaps they hope that if they survive devoted service, they might be freed.

Perhaps they know that refusing the XVII is a more unpleasant option.

A fresh wave comes at the tower. Captain Damocles has ordered that the Army provide fusillades for the instrumentation of each repulse. The legionaries must withhold, saving their more precious munitions for Legiones Astartes targets.

The link to the arcology is vital. Significant reserves of standard Army munitions can be raised from arcology silos to supply the human defenders. But the reserves of Legion-specific munitions, including ordnance for their fighting vehicles, is limited to the supplies carried by the battle-brothers, or retrieved from the muster camp before it was abandoned.

Every bolter round must count. Las-bolts and small-arms hard-rounds can be hosed at the waves of screaming knife brothers.

Legion weapons are withheld for more significant targets.

Those targets are coming. Apart from the Word Bearers, who are yet to commit in serious numbers, there are signs of major armour massing down the throat of the pass, perhaps even war-engines.

Braellen both understands and supports his commander’s practical. Tempting though it is, the legionaries must wait until their abilities are the only ones that will do.

He doesn’t understand the enemy.

What has transformed them so? What has turned them? They have all heard Domitian’s stories about the old rivalry and the competition.

So what? Show him two Legions that don’t compete for glory and distinction? The rebuke was just that: a rebuke for impoverished service and performance. And it was more than four decades ago!

What is this now? Are the Word Bearers and their demented master so addled that they can brood for forty years, and finally act with such disproportionate ignominy that the galaxy draws a gasp of surprise?

Braellen can tell that Captain Damocles is wounded by it. He has never seen him so driven or grim. It is the treachery more than the loss of life. The treachery has taken his breath away, and shaken his belief in the sanctity of the Imperial truth.

That’s all before you even begin to consider the transformation of the Word Bearers: their altered schemes and heraldry, their expressed choice to decorate their armour with esoteric and frankly bizarre symbols and modifications. Their willingness to consort with superstitious, heathen zealots.

Have they been consumed by some mass delusion of sorcery?

Or has something darker and more insidious got its poison into their veins and twisted their minds against their kin?

The next wave is coming. Braellen sees them running up the slopes, a mass of swirling black robes and brandished weapons. The knife brothers, thousands of them, stampede over the dead left by the last charge and roll like a river breaking its banks towards the gate and storm walls.

The Army – 19th Numinus, 21st Numinus, 6th Neride ‘Westerners’ and 2nd Erud Ultima – opens fire. Lasrifles volley, light support guns and crew-serveds chatter, grenade launchers clunk and pop. Heavier autocannon emplacements crank up, chewing into the moving lines.

Another slaughter. Black figures are mown down. Some explode in shooting fireballs as they die, slaying the men round them.

Braellen clutches his bolter, fighting back the urge to shoot.

‘Captain! Captain!’

Sergeant Domitian moves through the back of the line. Men turn as he passes.

Domitian reaches Captain Damocles.

‘Sir,’ he says. ‘The damn vox just lit.’

Sergeant Anchise turns sharply.

‘What did you say?’ he asks.

They’re on the fringes of Sharud Province, moving at best speed ahead of the conflagration that’s consuming the forests. They are the pitiful remnants of the 111th and the 112th.

Anchise has taken command now that the company captains are gone. He’s trying to rally something out of the men, but there’s no time to stand still. Pursuit is right there, constantly pressing them: Titans, Titans of the traitor Mechanicum, plus heavy armour columns.

The Word Bearers are in the burning woods, and every kilometre further means greater losses inflicted.

Warhorns, deep, lingering, mournful, echo through the blackness of the forest, summoning the Ultramarines to their doom.

‘We’re detecting a sporadic pulse code on the vox, sir,’ says Cantis, who’s been carrying the only caster set they dragged out of Barrtor with them.

‘Is it on the helm pick-ups?’ Anchise asks.

‘Too weak,’ says Cantis. ‘I really need to set this down, erect the portable mast.’

Anchise doesn’t have to tell him why he can’t. Three or four mass-reactive rounds spit through the canopy above them like game birds bolting for freedom, and punch into a mature quaren. The bole splinters in a spray of fire, and the head limbs of the tree come tearing down through the canopy spread in a blizzard of sparks.

‘Move! Move it!’ Anchise yells. Damn they’re close! He can hear whirring, the chug of treads. That’s a damn Whirlwind, or maybe one of the Sabre tank hunters.

There is simply no let up. They are going to be hounded until the last of them are dead.

Two Word Bearers rush the clearing. The trees are stark black, backlit by fierce fires that have erupted close by. Anchise can smell woodsmoke, burning brush, sparks, the burnwash of explosives.

The first of the XVII brutes fires his storm bolter, and kills Brother Ferthun with a hit to the lower back that blows out his spine and hips. The other is hefting a lascannon. He braces it and lets rip, flattening trees and retreating Space Marines with bright spears of las-energy.

Anchise decides to face his death. He goes at them, boltgun blasting in one fist, kinetic mace in the other. The mace belonged to his captain, Phrastorex. The captain never even got the chance to unlock it from its case this morning.

Anchise’s bolts blow the face off the Word Bearer with the cannon. The visor of the man’s helmet explodes, and he falls back, hard. The other clips Anchise on the shoulder, and then makes a cleaner hit to his left leg. The detonation of the mass-reactive shell hurls Anchise onto the loamy ground. Rolling, he swings the mace, and breaks both of the Word Bearer’s legs. The warrior goes down. Anchise finishes the job with another mace swing.

His own leg is broken. He can feel the bone trying to reknit, but the damage may be too great.

He looks around in time to see that the other Word Bearer is not dead.

He’s getting up. Anchise’s shots shredded his helmet, his gorget and part of his upper chest plate. The Word Bearer’s head and face are exposed.

It may just be injury: burns, contusions, swelling. The warrior has, of course, just taken substantial damage from a boltgun.

But the horror doesn’t look like that to Anchise. The flesh is puffed taut, like the necrotised swelling of a venom bite. The mouth is misaligned, but it looks as though it has grown that way, not been brutally configured by kinetic shockwaves. Blood streams down the side of the Word Bearer’s face and neck.

There are yellow scutes on his brow that look disturbingly like budding horns.

He throws himself at Anchise, a combat blade in his right hand. The dagger looks as though it’s made of obsidian or polished black rock. Its grip is wound with fine chains. Is it some kind of trophy?

Anchise lapses to automatic practical, taking his foe on in basic, close-hand measures to stop the blade. He half-rises to meet the Word Bearer, turning his left palm out to run in past the lunging knife, and turn the right wrist and forearm away. Simultaneously, he brings his right forearm up as a crossed block against the enemy’s face and chest.

Transhuman versus transhuman. It’s about mass and speed and power, about the application of accelerated strength and enhanced reaction time. Anchise’s hard block breaks the Word Bearer’s cheek, his pass turning the knife aside. But the Word Bearer is strong, and driven by a murderous fury. He circles the blade, stabbing at Anchise’s side and left arm. Anchise turns his right arm block into a jabbing punch, ramming his steel fist into the enemy’s throat which has been exposed thanks to the damaged gorget. The impact crushes something in the Word Bearer’s throat. His eyes bulge for a second, and blood jets from his mouth and nostrils. He attempts another savage stab, and the knifeblade scores Anchise’s right forearm through armour, flesh and muscle to the very bone.

Anchise is not going to lose the advantage. He places a second punch into the throat, and then a third, higher, into the misshapen jaw.

The Word Bearer’s head snaps back. Anchise feels rather than hears a sharp crack. He punches again to be sure. Then, as his foe drops, he wrenches the dagger out of his hand to make certain of things.

The hand that he uses to grasp it tingles. The wound made by the knife in his forearm throbs.

He freezes.

Something opens in his mind. Despite the burning forest around him, everything is very cold. There is a sterile blue light. Something pulses. Anchise can hear a deep, cosmic heartbeat. He can smell neurotoxin and molecular acid. He cannot see it, but he has a sense of something uncoiling, something vast, something black, something scaled and greasy, something coated in a heavy caul of grey mucus. He can feel it unwrapping, expanding out of a pit that’s older than all the eons, moving up through the eternal darkness of Old Night and the interstellar gulf, moving towards the light of the burning forest. Moving towards him.

It can smell him. It can taste his pain. It can hear his thoughts.

Closer. Closer. Closer.

Anchise cries out and hurls the black glass dagger away. The door in his mind slams shut.

He is breathing hard, shaking. The wound in his arm will not stop bleeding.

He knows he needs the vox. It doesn’t matter if they haven’t got the time or opportunity to stop and set up. He needs the vox.

If someone’s out there, if anyone’s listening, they need to hear him. They need to know.

They need to know what they’re facing.

On. Off.

On. Off.

On.

Maintain activation. Maintain. Wake.

Trapped and blind. Helpless. Deprived of consciousness for so long, he has lost all sense of when now is or what now is.

He knows fear.

He is Telemechrus.

He has been taught things, and one of them is to control his anger until it is needed. It is probably needed now.

He lets his go. He lets it replace the abomination fear.

He analyses. He scans. He determines.

His determination is this: he is still in his casket, and his hibersystems have shut down. No, they have been interrupted. By a comm signal. An encrypted vox signal.

He was woken by an encrypted vox transmission that triggered an auto-response in his casket support system.

His casket is damaged. Telemechrus does not believe he can get out of it. He calls out, but there are no venerables around to counsel or help him.

There is no one around.

He will know no fear. He will know no fear.

His implant clock tells him that he has been dormant for a little over eleven hours. External sensors are down. He can’t see. He can’t open the casket. There is no noosphere. There is no data inload.

There is only the vox signal that woke him. He clings to that. He tries to decrypt it.

His inertial locators tell him that he is stationary. They record, eleven hours earlier, an extreme displacement followed by a kinetic trauma spike that was too intense to fully measure. He does not remember that. Hiberstasis must have shut him down before it happened.

Motion sensors light.

There is something close by. Something approaching his casket.

Friend or foe? He has no data. No means of determination. He cannot target. The casket is trapping him. He cannot even discharge his weapons while he is locked in the box.

Friend or foe?

Something strikes the outer shell of his casket and slices through the clamps. Something pulls the hatch open.

‘Are you alive in there?’ a voice asks.

Telemechrus suddenly gets optic feed input. Light. He can feel air flow against his skin, even though he has no skin.

The voice comes from the figure silhouetted against the light.

‘Respond,’ the voice says. ‘Are you capable of activity, friend?’

Telemechrus tries to reply, but his voice does not work. There is a whirr. A whine. A dry gasp of sonics. He engages his cyberorganics, drives power to his articulated limbs, shakes off the tingling numbness of stasis, and levers himself forward.

Clumsy and inelegant, he clambers out of the casket. The figure moves back to let him out.

He steps out of the casket, crushing rock fragments and glass to powder beneath his feet. He feels sunlight on his face, though he has no face. He stretches out his ghost spine, stretches his remembered arms.

His weapon pods engage. Power couplings light up. Feeds flow live. He looks down at the figure who freed him.

‘Thank. You. Lord,’ he manages to say.

‘You know me?’ the warrior asks.

‘Yes. Tetrarch. I. Identified. Your voice. Pattern.’

Eikos Lamiad nods.

‘That’s good. My face is not as recognisable as it once was.’

Telemechrus adjusts his optic feed and zooms in on the great tetrarch. Lamiad’s visual profile does not match the one stored in Telemechrus’s autostack memory.

Lamiad’s glorious golden armour is dented and scorched. The famous porcelain half of his face is cracked and disfigured. The intricate mechanism of the left eye is ruined.

His left arm is missing from just above the elbow, leaving nothing but a buckled stump of armour, and a cluster of torn fibernetic cables, broken ceramite bone-form, and frayed artificial muscles. With his right hand, Lamiad leans on his broadsword as though it were a walking staff.

‘You. Are. Hurt. Lord Champion.’

‘Nothing that can’t be repaired,’ replies Lamiad. ‘Except, perhaps, my heart.’

‘You. have. Sustained. Cardiac damage? Which. Vessel?’

‘No, friend. I meant it metaphorically. Do you understand what’s happened today?’

‘No. Where. Am I?’

Lamiad turns and gestures. Telemechrus adjusts his optic scope and pans out, wide, tracking. A desert area. The sky is dark and mottled with heat-strong blotches. A heat-blotch in the near distance represents a building structure of significant size, which is on fire. More distant but perhaps larger heat-blotch/fires can be identified and plotted. The desert is littered with debris, much of it Legion materiel, much of it apparently destroyed by impact. Telemechrus tracks around. He scans his own casket, crumpled, half-buried in an impact crater. Smashed storage pods and equipment containers are scattered all around. There are two other caskets.

Telemechrus checks for a noospheric, but there is none. He cannot patch and configure a global position with any accuracy.

‘You fell from a low orbit facility,’ says Lamiad. ‘Two of your kind fell at the same time, but their caskets were already damaged and they did not survive.’

Telemechrus zooms in on the half-open caskets beside his own.

‘Oh,’ he says.

‘What is your name, friend?’ asks Lamiad.

‘Gabril. No. It is. Not. It is. Telemechrus. Lord.’

‘Telemechrus, we have been attacked in the most underhand and cowardly fashion. The XVII Legion has turned on us. They have slaughtered us, crippled the fleet and the orbital facilities, and laid waste to vast tracts of Calth. We are close to defeat. We are close to death.’

‘I have seen. Death, lord. We have both. Seen it. Come close to. Us and yet in neither. Case. Did it claim. Us.’

Lamiad listens. He nods slowly.

‘I had not considered it that way. You are new-forged, Telemechrus, but you already display the wisdom of a venerable. The techpriests selected you well for this honour.’

‘I was. Told. It was. Because I. Was compatible. Lord.’

‘I think that is so. And not just biologically. I was almost made like you, after Bathor. The Mechanicum of Konor blessed me with a more subtle rebuild. It is not, however, as robust.’

Lamiad glances down at his shattered arm-stub.

‘Today, your Dreadnought build has allowed you to endure better than me.’

‘Without you. Lord. I could not. Even. Have got. Out of. My. Box.’

Lamiad laughs.

‘Please. Inload me. With full. Tactical,’ says Telemechrus.’

‘I was over there,’ Lamiad says, pointing towards the burning buildings in the middle distance. ‘The Holophusikon. That was supposed to be a commemoration of our future, Telemechrus. The orbital strike rained debris across this entire area. Large pieces. They struck the whole zone like a meteor storm.’

‘I was. One. Of them.’

Lamiad nods.

‘A whole ship came down over there,’ he says. ‘And that way, a section of orbital platform that struck like a rogue atomic. The Holophusikon took direct hits. There was no protection. I was hurt. Most others present were killed by the collision trauma, the shock concussion, and the subsequent fire.’

‘That’s Numinus City,’ he says, pointing in another direction.

Telemechrus scans another vast heat-source. He compares the stored grid positions of the city and the Holophusikon, and calculates his position relative to them, to within two hundred metres.

‘There is. No. Data,’ says Telemechrus. ‘There is. No. Central. Command.’

‘There is not.’

‘Have you. Determined. A theoretical. Lord?’

‘I am trying to assemble whatever strengths I can salvage,’ says Lamiad. ‘Then I intend to take the war back against the traitors who did this.’

‘What is. The strength. of your. Force. So far. Lord?’

‘It’s you, and it’s me, Telemechrus.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’ asks Lamiad.

‘Why did. Our brothers. Turn. On. Us?’

‘I have no idea, friend. I am almost afraid to know the answer. In that explanation, I fear, our future will burn again. Brother against brother. Legion versus Legion. A civil war, Telemechrus. It is the one blight the Imperium never even considered.’

‘We shall. Know. No fear. Lord.’

Lamiad nods again.

‘I. Await. Your. Orders. Lord.’

‘The city,’ says Lamiad. ‘Numinus. If we must make anywhere our killing ground, it’s there. That’s where the enemy will be.’

‘Yes.’

Lamiad turns.

‘What. About the. Vox-signal, lord?’

‘What vox-signal?’

‘The. Encrypted. Signal.’

‘My vox-link is smashed, Telemechrus. Tell me what signal you mean? Is someone out there? Is someone talking?’

The enormous security hatches, twice the height of a legionary, hiss open, retracting into the armoured frame. Internal blast shutters, like nictitating eyelids, open in sequence after them.

The auxiliary bridge of the Macragge’s Honour is revealed. One by one, starting from just inside the hatch to the right, and moving around the room, the consoles and bridge stations begin to light up, commencing automatic activation cycles. The auxiliary command has interlaced redundancy parameters. It will be, for now, clean of scrapcode. Cryptocept keys, reserved for only the most senior personnel, empower the auxiliary command to re-integrate with the flagship’s primary service and control system, to purge and rewrite the command codes, and, if necessary, to assume control of the ship.

Shipmaster Zedoff had a key, and he’s dead. Guilliman had one, and he is missing.

Marius Gage has the third.

He looks at Shipmaster Hommed and the two ranking functionary magi they have rescued during the fight downhull. Hommed is bruised, and his uniform is stiff with the blood of others. He only survived the death of his ship, the Sanctity of Saramanth, because his first officer bundled his unconscious form into an escape pod. He would have preferred to die with his ancient and honoured vessel.

Hommed also accepts that the duty thrust upon him now is as critical as it is unexpected. A qualified and experienced shipmaster must take Zedoff’s place at the helm of the Macragge’s Honour.

‘Ready?’ asks Gage. There’s no room for ‘if’ in his question. He does not even allow for a theoretical where Hommed will decline the command. The Ultramar fleet is dying. Scattered across Calth nearspace, it is being hunted, hounded and picked off by the predator warships of the XVII and the unstoppable fury of the weapons grid. Something must be done. It may already be too late, but something must at least be attempted.

‘I am ready, Chapter Master,’ replied Hommed.

Flanked by Hommed, the magi and a gaggle of deck officers and command servitors, Gage crosses to the master console, and inserts the last cryptocept key. His authority is requested, taken by gene-scan and retina print, then verified by voice and pheromone. Hommed then steps forward, and allows his biometrics to be recorded, verified, and imprinted.

‘Command is yours, shipmaster,’ says a magos.

‘Command accepted, with honour,’ replies Hommed. ‘Begin primary service and control system purge and rewrite. On three, two, one.’

‘Purge under way, shipmaster.’

‘Prepare override protocols,’ says Hommed. He walks towards the strategium with rapidly mounting confidence, or at least the determination not to look like a fool. As he goes, he starts pointing left and right to direct his officers to their stations. They hurry to respond, strapping in or, in the case of magi and servitors, plugging up.

‘Everybody to readiness,’ says Hommed. ‘All stations, all stations. I will be asserting override in three minutes, and I want every station to gather and present all and any data they can the moment we are live. Priority to drive, shields, weapons and sensors.’

‘Strategium tactical externals are to be built and viewable within two minutes of restart,’ Gage adds.

‘Let him call it,’ Empion hisses to Gage. ‘Hommed knows what he’s doing. He needs to know that chair is his.’

‘And I need to know what the battle looks like,’ says Gage. What he doesn’t say is, I need to know if, by any miraculous chance, Guilliman is still alive.

Thiel and the strikeforce watch proceedings from the hatchway, guarding against possible attack. It’s a high theoretical that the Word Bearers have already boarded the flagship. Even with Hommed installed in command, the ship may not actually belong to them at all. Thiel itches to lead squads to the main airgates and the hangar decks.

They are the sites he would use to storm-board a ship.

‘Override complete,’ announces a magos.

‘Auxiliary command is active,’ calls a deck officer.

‘I have control,’ agrees Hommed.

Almost immediately, the newly-assigned Master of Vox calls out.

‘Signal!’ he cries. ‘Encrypted signal from the surface!’

‘The surface?’ says Empion, amazed. ‘But–’

Gage steps forward. He nods at the Master of Vox to activate full encrypt, and takes the speaker horn.

‘This is Marius Gage,’ he says. ‘Who speaks for Calth?’

10

‘Ventanus of the 4th,’ says Ventanus. ‘Please stand by as we verify your code authority and identity.’

Ventanus lowers the speaker horn and waits until Cyramica relays a confirmation from the server.

‘Ventanus again,’ he says. ‘It is good to hear your voice, Chapter Master.’

‘And yours, Ventanus,’ the reply crackles back, tonally altered by the signal encrypt. ‘We were blind until a few moments ago. We thought the surface was dead.’

‘Not quite, sir,’ Ventanus replies, ‘but I can’t pretend the picture is good. Our losses have been severe. We have spent the hours since the attack trying to re-establish a vox-net and regain some data capacity. In the next few minutes, I will begin passing to you details of surviving surface strengths and their positions, as they come to me. We have the Mechanicum server here, and she is processing the inload for us.’

‘Ventanus, can you restore the weapons grid?’ the vox crackles. ‘Is the server able to do that? The enemy has control of it, and is using it to obliterate the fleet. We cannot hope to achieve anything in the face of their grid control.’

‘Stand by,’ replies Ventanus. ‘I believe the cogitation power of this data-engine is insufficient, but the server is examining the issue. I’m going to talk with her now. Data should be inloading to you. Captain Sydance will remain on the link for further voice contact.’

‘Gage, acknowledged.’

Ventanus hands the speaker horn to Sydance and walks back into the stack room with Cyramica. There is a tranquil but dead look on Tawren’s face, as if her body is empty, as if her mind has fled deep into remote sub-aetheric reaches and left the physical shell behind.

‘Vox contact has now been made with sixty-seven survivor groups,’ Cyramica tells him, ‘including two engine squadrons in North Erud, an armour company near the Bay of Lisko, and the 14th Garnide Heavy Infantry, who survived virtually intact at a bunker complex in Sylator Province.’

‘Keep compiling. The primarch will coordinate the active practical.’

‘The Chapter Master responded from the flagship,’ observes Cyramica. ‘Not your primarch. Have you discussed the orbital losses yet?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Orbital losses are extreme, and they are increasing every minute as the grid hunts new targets. Is your primarch still alive? Is an active practical even possible?’

Ventanus glares at her.

‘Can I speak to the server?’ he asks.

‘She is in deep interface.’

‘And I appreciate her efforts, but I need to talk to her.’

Cyramica nods. She issues a gentle binaric signal.

Tawren opens her eyes.

‘Captain,’ she nods, an underlying, tremulous carrier signal clicking along behind her voice.

‘Our priority is the weapons grid, server. What progress have you made?’

‘I can confirm,’ she says calmly, ‘that this engine is not capable of either overriding control of the grid, or of managing the grid’s operation after an override. It is simply not powerful enough.’

‘Is there an alternative?’

‘I am attempting to decide that,’ she replies. ‘So far there does not appear to be a single, functioning data-engine on Calth rated sufficient for the job that is not also infected with the enemy scrapcode. For a definitive answer, however, you must wait until my final determination.’

‘How long will that take?’ asks Ventanus.

‘I do not know, captain,’ she replies.

Ventanus hears footsteps behind him, and looks around.

Selaton stands in the doorway.

‘You’d better come, sir,’ he says.

Ventanus nods.

‘Inform me the moment you have an answer,’ he says to Tawren, and exits.

Tawren drifts back into the dataverse. Her serenity is practised and deliberate. A server can manage far greater degrees of data manipulation whilst in a calm state of mind. In truth, she is fighting a core of anxiety.

With the data-engine active, she can see it all. Or, at least, she can see more of the situation’s totality than anyone except the enemy. She can see the truly frightening scale of the losses: the death toll, the crippling injury to the XIII Legion, the burning cities, the slaughtered populations, the devastated geography and the systematic annihilation of the fleet. Under any other circumstances, Calth would be considered a loss, and the battle a defeat.

The Ultramarines‘ characteristic determination is the only thing keeping them going: their fearless resolve to devise a new practical, to circumvent and outplay even hopeless odds.

These are worse than hopeless odds. Tawren can see that. She has a simultaneous dataview of the globe, and she can see that even the surviving loyalist forces are hard-pressed and dying, cornered, fighting off attack from all sides, slowly facing elimination. They are too scattered and too isolated. The enemy has superiority in every way.

This is extinction. The grid might have made a difference, but there is no way of accessing or controlling it.

This is extinction. This is the death of Calth. This is the end of the XIII Legion.

‘I thought you needed to see this,’ says Selaton. He leads Ventanus outside, onto the cratered lawns of the palace.

‘A prisoner?’ Ventanus asks dubiously.

Most of the enemy fled after the 4th ripped into them. Many stood their ground and fought to the death. But this one has accepted capture.

He is standing on the lawn by the broken fountain, guarded by four Ultramarines.

Ventanus leaves Selaton to his duties and approaches the Word Bearer. The warrior’s armour is dented and bloody. His face is smeared with gore. He looks at Ventanus, and almost seems to smile.

‘Name,’ says Ventanus.

‘Morpal Cxir,’ replies the Word Bearer.

One of the guarding Ultramarines shows Ventanus the weapons that the Word Bearer was carrying when he was captured. A broken boltgun. A large dagger made of black metal with a wire-wound handle. The dagger is curious. It looks ritualistic and ceremonial: less of a weapon and more a totem of status.

‘Were you the ranking officer?’ Ventanus asks.

‘I was in command,’ Cxir admits.

‘Any reason I shouldn’t just kill you, you bastard?’ Ventanus asks.

‘Because you still live by a code. Your Imperial truth. Your honour. Your ethics.’

‘All of which you have forgotten.’

‘All of which we have specifically renounced,’ Cxir corrects.

‘This is the old enmity?’ asks Ventanus.

Cxir laughs.

‘How typically arrogant! How characteristic of the Ultramar mindset. Yes, we slaked our dislike of you today. But that is not why we attacked Calth.’

‘Why then?’ asks Ventanus.

‘The galaxy is at war,’ replies Cxir. ‘A war against the False Emperor. We follow Horus.’

Ventanus doesn’t answer. It makes no sense, but the apparent senselessness must at least be set in the context of the day’s unimaginable events. He takes another look at the ritual knife. It is ugly. Its shape and design make him uncomfortable. He believes that the brotherhood cultists were carrying similar weapons. He slides it into his belt. He will show it to the server. Perhaps the data-engine can provide some illuminating information.

‘So the galaxy is at war?’ he asks.

‘Yes.’

‘A civil war?’

‘The civil war,’ replies Cxir, as though proud of it.

‘Warmaster Horus has turned against the Emperor?’

Cxir nods.

‘News takes time to travel,’ he says convivially. ‘You will hear of it soon enough. Except you won’t. None of you. None of the XIII. Accept the fact that you have just hours to live.’

‘If you allowed yourself to become a captive just so you could try to threaten us,’ says Sullus, walking up to join them, ‘then you are a fool.’

‘I am not here to threaten you,’ says Cxir. ‘I would have preferred to have died, but I have a duty as commander. A duty to offer you terms.’

Sullus draws his sword.

‘Give me permission to silence this traitor,’ he says.

‘Wait,’ replies Ventanus. He looks at the Word Bearer. Cxir’s expression is scornful and confident.

‘He knows we won’t hurt him while he is a captive, Sullus,’ Ventanus says. ‘He has mocked us for it. He has mocked our civilised code and our principles. He taunts us for having humanitarian ethics. If that’s the worst thing he can say, let him.’

Sullus growls.

‘Seriously, Teus,’ says Ventanus, ‘he thinks that’s an insult? That we have moral standards and he does not?’

Cxir looks Ventanus in the eyes.

‘Your ethical stance is admirable, captain,’ he says. ‘Do not misunderstand me. We of the XVII admire you. We always have. There is much to be admired about the august Ultramarines. Your resolve. Your sense of duty. Your loyalty, especially. These comments are not intended to appear snide, captain. I am being genuine. What you stand for and represent is anathema to us, and we have taken arms against it. We will not rest until it is dead and overthrown. That does not prevent us, all the while, from admiring the strength with which you champion it.’

Cxir looks from Ventanus to Sullus and then back again.

‘You were everything we could not be,’ he says. ‘Then the truth was revealed to us. The Primordial Truth. And we realised that you were everything we should not be.’

‘His jabbering bores me,’ Sullus says to Ventanus.

‘You are creatures of honour and reason,’ says Cxir. ‘You understand terms. That is why I refrained from seizing a death I was happy to embrace, and undertook this humiliation. I have come to offer you terms.’

‘You have one minute to express them,’ says Ventanus.

‘In failing to take the palace and destroy you,’ Cxir begins, ‘I have disappointed my field commander. Leptius Numinus was identified as a primary target. Do you understand what I’m saying, captain? Just because you’ve defeated my force, it will not prevent others from coming. At the time of my capture, Commander Foedral Fell was advancing on Leptius with his battlehost. They can’t be long away. Fell will crush you. You barely broke my force. His is twenty times the size. And he is not a creature of honour, captain, not as you understand the principle. Surrender now. Surrender to me, and I will vouch on your behalf. You, your forces here, their lives will be spared.’

‘Spared for what?’ asks Sullus. ‘A life spared under those terms is not a life I’d care for.’

Cxir nods.

‘I understand. I anticipated as much. There can be no rapprochement between us. We have waded into blood too far.’

‘Then what did you expect?’ asked Ventanus. ‘That we would surrender to you? Side with you, with the XVII, with – if what you say is true – Horus? Against Terra?’

‘Of course not,’ replies Cxir. ‘But I did, perhaps, expect that you might at least listen to our truth. It is not what you think, captain. It is beautiful. Your understanding of the galaxy will change. A paradigm shift. You will wonder why you ever thought the things you think. You will wonder how and why they ever made any sense.’

‘Cxir,’ says Ventanus. ‘I have listened to your terms, and I have heard your offer. I formally reject both.’

‘But you will die,’ says Cxir.

‘Everyone dies,’ replies Ventanus, turning away.

‘It will not be a good death,’ Cxir calls after him. ‘There will be no glory in it. It will be a sad and miserable end.’

‘Even in glory, death is miserable,’ Ventanus replies.

‘Fell will punish you! He will punish you in unimaginable ways! He will trample your flesh into the earth!’

‘Ignore him,’ Ventanus says to Sullus.

‘Just like we did to your primarch!’ Cxir yells. ‘We will cut you and bleed you and kill you, like we cut and bled him! He begged for death in the end. Pleaded for it! Begged us like a coward! He wept! He pleaded for us to finish him. To end his pain! We just laughed and pissed on his heart because we knew he was afraid.’

Ventanus can’t stop him. Sullus moves like a blur. Cxir’s torso is slashed open from the left hip to the throat in one ripping cut. The end of Sullus’s sword embeds itself in the underside of Cxir’s jaw.

Blood pours out of the Word Bearer. He sways. Black blood floods from the wound, down his legs, back down the wedged blade and up Sullus’s arm. It streams from Cxir’s mouth. His mouth is half-open. Ventanus can see the fine steel edge of the sword blade running between two of the lower teeth.

Cxir is laughing.

He murmurs something, choking on blood, gagged by the sword.

Ventanus pushes Sullus away and grasps the sword to wrench it out and deliver the mercy of a quick kill.

‘Finally,’ Cxir gurgles. ‘I w-wondered w-what it w-would take... I knew o-one of you would have the balls...’

He begins to collapse, dropping to his knees before Ventanus can withdraw the sword. The blood pools around him on the dry earth, rolling out like a purple mirror in all directions. The four Ultramarines guards step back in quiet disapproval. Sullus is staring, cursing himself for letting his anger out.

Something else is being let out, too.

Cxir is laughing. The laughter throbs tidal surges of blood out of his mouth. It is thick. There are clots in it. Shreds of tissue. The laughter is a gurgle, like a blocked storm drain.

Cxir divides along the line of the sword wound. He splits from the hip to the throat. Then his skull parts too in a vertical line, like a pea-pod dividing. Flesh tears and shreds apart like fibrous matter. The sword, unseated, falls onto the bloody earth.

Cxir is on his knees, opened from the waist like a bloody flower. He is still, somehow, laughing.

Then he turns inside out.

Ventanus, Sullus and the guards recoil in dismay. Blood spatters them. Cxir’s backbone sprouts like a calcified tree trunk, growing weird branches that look as if they are composed of arm bones. His ribcage opens like skeletal wings. His organs pulse and grow, smearing tissue and sinew across the reshaping skeleton.

Cxir becomes a vessel. Whatever is hidden inside him, whatever is germinating and shooting through him from the warp, is much much bigger than his physical form could have contained.

Sprouting limbs turn black and scaly. They grow bristles and thorns. They stretch out like the legs of a giant arachnid. Scorpion tails twist and thrash like a nightmare wreath as they grow out of the open ribs. Stings glitter like knives.

Cxir’s new head buds and unfolds, slowly turning up from a bowed stance. Mouthparts chatter. Huge multi-faceted eyes twinkle and glitter, iridescent. Horns sprout from the cranium; the huge, upright horns of some ancient Aegean bull-daemon.

Cxir is still laughing, but it’s not Cxir any more.

The air is full of blowflies, like a storm of buzzing ash.

‘Samus,’ laughs Cxir. ‘Samus is here!’