The Beast Arises

One

Kjarvik Stormcrow stood in the gunship’s open hatch. One armoured boot was on the lowering assault ramp, the extended hydraulics gripped in one wolf-clawed gauntlet. The braid of heavy ork knucklebones strung through his long forelock drummed wildly on his shoulder. His pelt whipped about behind him. The unfamiliar salts of an alien sea filled his nose and mouth. Before him was grey ocean, as far as his prodigiously enhanced senses and stupefying altitude could show it. Massive waves were capped with oily pollution and stuck through with scrap metal. It made them frothy and barbed, like watching the hreindýr herds on their winter exodus across the fjords.

The phosphorus burn of auto-fire tracers stitched across the streaking blue, the loose-chain rattle of machine cannons barely audible above the roar of turbofans. The Penitent Wrath descended hard and hammered left. A propeller-driven biplane with a lightning bolt jagging down the side droned by on the right, and spat high-velocity slugs into the water. Kjarvik held on, scowling. More of the atmosphere fighters were buzzing low over the ocean on an intercept course. They were not going to make it, of course.

The ork aircraft were remarkably capable given their ramshackle design, but they had not a scrap on the Thunderhawk’s speed. And Atherias, the Hawk Lord, was good. Almost preternaturally good. His co-pilot was not too bad either.

The gunship levelled out, auto-fire crisscrossing the sky around them. Kjarvik beheld the mountainous structure that Atherias’ evasive manoeuvres had brought into view.

Bohr would have called it an island hive, or the remains of one, but Bohr had no soul.

It was a titan of the ocean underworld, the burned, bombed-out skeleton of a thing that could not die. Its skin partially regenerated with drift metal, plastek sheeting, and planks of wood, it reared up for the feast of metallics that glinted in the orbital band. Fat blimps and transorbitals buzzed around its thorny head like carrion birds.

Massive guy ropes held the teetering mountain upright, anchored within the sprawling pontoon shanties that crested and fell with the waves. The relentless wave action was converted into power by salt-corroded copper converters, fed into hab-size capacitors for storage or through fat cables towards immense desalination complexes. The dark blue water was slurped out of the ocean by the kilolitre, potable water and salts spitting out into drums for export. Fleets of ramshackle paddleboats trawled the ocean for usable scrap.

Mere months after Plaeos had fallen, the orks had made their new conquest not just viable, but valuable.

‘Twenty seconds,’ came Atherias’ voice, tinny in his ear bead.

An ork fighter came apart in a blizzard of outsized engine parts as Penitent Wrath’s lascannons neatly cut it out of the sky and set off its fuel tank. Debris spanked off the gunship’s heavy hull armour, and Kjarvik ducked back to avoid a piece of propeller that came scything across like a circular saw and took a bite out of the foot of the ramp before bouncing clear.

He looked back out, and saw the fighter’s wingman pull a turn that would have torn a Lightning interceptor in half, then spear out left. Machine-guided underwing hardpoints tracked it, mass-reactives spitting between its wobbling interwing struts as it flashed underneath the gunship then pulled into a gravity-defying vertical corkscrew that swung the fighter-bomber in behind. Kjarvik caught a glimpse of the pilot — immense musculature, bulked out in furs and squeezed into a cockpit. A huge grin split the ork’s ugly mouth beneath a set of red-lensed goggles as it mashed its firing toggles to send a stream of auto-fire gnawing through the Thunderhawk’s blocky rear armour.

A ruptured oxygen main sprayed compressed gases across the assault ramp as Kjarvik drew his bolt pistol and loosed a flurry of rounds. The gas spray cut out as Penitent Wrath’s spirit redirected her outlets. The wind cleared the ramp, and Kjarvik was able to watch as the fighter veered off with a mass-reactive wound in her upper wing before breaking up in the water.

‘Hah!’ he roared. ‘Did you see that?’

‘A lucky shot,’ Bohr chided, crackling in his ear.

‘Better to be lucky than not, I say.’

‘Ten seconds.’

The Thunderhawk responded to the heightened strain of four armoured Space Marines moving towards its rear hatch with a barely audible whine of its already howling turbofans. Kjarvik looked over his shoulder.

Baldarich pressed Phareous’ shield into his gauntlets. It was white against the fresh black of his armour and bore the emblem of a writhing snake. Phareous in turn tossed the Black Templar his broadsword. Behind them, Zarrael rammed the most vicious-looking weapon Kjarvik had ever seen across his back. He called it an eviscerator. The Flesh Tearer was massive, despite the fact he had just knelt to strap a bandolier of grenades over his thigh plate. Kjarvik had seen orks smaller.

Kill-Team Umbra.

‘Your helmet.’ Iron Father Jurkim Bohr appeared from the cockpit hatch. Whipping mechadendrites performed final checks on his battleplate and moved, apparently guided by their own spirits, to pluck spare magazines and grenades from the equipment lockers. Other tendrils snaked through the cargo webbing, moving in a weird mirror-fashion to the stride of his armoured limbs. Two women in bulky pressure suits, back-mounted grav-harnesses and underwater rebreathers flanked him.

Despite their protective coverings, their relative stature, the women possessed a presence that engulfed them all, that the Thunderhawk itself could not contain. They glided where the Iron Hand clumped, floated within a null singularity of their pariah physiology.

Kjarvik gave a pantherish snarl, and slid the black helmet over his mane as advised. It found the gorget softseals with a hiss of magnetic constrictors. It killed the wind, but it would take more than an environment seal to take the chill factor of the Sisters away. After a moment, his helm display came alive, pre-set with counters clocking local probable and relativistic time. They were all blinking rapidly down towards zero.

‘Five seconds.’

There was a time and a place for waiting. Kjarvik did not think that this was it. What was five seconds anyway?

He stepped backwards off the ramp.

The wind hit him hard and he began to fall. The thunder of turbofans and heavy bolters disappeared in the roar. He spread his arms and legs wide and let go a howl of joy. The black paint of the gunship disappeared. The wide grey of the ocean rushed up to meet him, waves rearing up as though desperate to hit him before he hit them.

Then they did, like being rammed in the chest by a Razorback, and everything became black.

Eidolica — orbital

Check 7, -00:09:01

No one had ever called the Fists Exemplar home world beautiful.

Its sun was a ball of thermonuclear rage. The daylight terminator was a line of fire ten kilometres high and twenty thousand long, a creeping barrage of photons and ultraviolet rays. Barren mountains rose high into the atmosphere, what wind the world’s torturous spin could generate insufficient to blunt them. Vast black expanses of promethium sands covered about a third of the surface in lieu of liquid oceans.

From the Storm Eagle’s open rear hatch Tyris could pick out the sprawling extraction and refinery complexes, a web of rust and piping and sporadic flare-offs that ate into the littoral boundary. A countdown timer hovered over his left eye, stretched slightly by the curve of his visor. He turned from the hatch and stepped aside. The deliberate heel-up, disengage, toe-down maglock gait came as second nature.

His own genetic proclivities, maybe, but the Raven Guard would always be more comfortable in the black.

‘Nubis. Antares.’

The Salamander and Fist Exemplar of Kill-Team Stalker clumped up to the hatch. The sun burned a white stripe along the smooth relief of their helmets, pauldrons, and the lift jets of their jump packs. They stood either side of a third figure, similarly geared with a light-variant jump pack and grav-lines. She was tall for a human, but not so tall in the company she kept. Her ornate, high-collared armour appeared gold, but the thermal membrane that had been painted over the top dulled its shine. It stretched over her bald head and braided topknot like a taut skin. The infinite depths of her eyes were shielded by a set of flare goggles.

‘Go,’ Tyris voxed.

The two Space Marines pushed themselves through the hatch and into the thin, void-boundary layer of the upper atmosphere. The Sister followed a second behind.

‘Next.’

Vega and Iaros stepped up to the breach, a second woman similarly positioned between them. If Tyris had once thought the mortal women in need of protection, then that misconception had been cleansed from him over the weeks of joint exercises and training. They were simply too valuable to go in first.

Maglocked though they were, Tyris could picture the Doom Eagle shifting from foot to foot as he would in practice, eager to be away. He had come to know them all, better than many of his own gene-brothers, and he knew therefore that the Ultramarine would hesitate on the threshold and glance back.

‘I have an ill-feeling about this, brother-sergeant,’ said Iaros.

Tyris glanced to the silent Sister, felt his gut coil at the nothing that filled her space.

‘Don’t we all.’

‘We do not,’ voxed Vega.

‘Go,’ said Tyris, lest the Doom Eagle jump alone, and once again the three warriors pushed themselves through the open hatch.

Alone inside the coasting gunship’s assault bay, Tyris moved to the edge.

He held a moment, heart swelling, eyes drinking in the view.

There was no wind. No pull of air or ding of particulates hitting the fuselage. No howl of decompression. Just inside, outside, and nothing but the liminal between them. Half an eye on his visor’s countdown timer, he spread his arms, disengaged maglock, and pitched forward.

Sunlight hit him like a bolt-round in the face. It overloaded his auto-senses and bleached his view to whites and greys. Bleeps and chimes alerted him to temperature and radiation warnings, failures in his suit’s auspex, vox, and power distribution subsystems. There was a reason that Antares cursed with a reference to ‘bright skies’. Work ceased. Cities were locked down. Even microbes could not exist on the planet’s surface during its day.

Which was why only a daylight raid would succeed.

There was no sensation of falling at all. The air was too thin to be felt. The planet was so far below him that the passing seconds brought its features no closer. He could almost reach out, and clasp a hemisphere in each gauntlet. If not for the madcap race of altimeter runes in his helmet display, he might have believed he flew. He could just about pick out the rest of his kill-team through the radiation glare. They were far below him, freefalling, but still in formation and descending fast.

He turned his head slightly and caught the Storm Eagle as it cushioned off the atmosphere and away. Twenty metres of inertially propelled metal, unpowered, it might as well have been invisible. The precision calculation required to graze a body moving at one hundred and eighty thousand kilometres per second with another impelled towards it from a trillion kilometres away staggered him.

It could only have been achieved with the cooperation of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

He looked back to the planet. He scoured it for the coordinates of the Fists Exemplar fortress. Genhanced synapses lapped at the brink of the neural cascade that would trigger his jump pack as numerals raced across his helm display towards a string of zeroes.

It had to be all together or it might as well be not at all.

Soon.

But not yet.

Valhalla — Kalinin trench

Check 3, -00:03:35

Tulwei stood up on the bike’s foot pegs and looked back over the skull and triple-forked lightning emblem on his pauldron. The command Salamander rumbled up through thick snow, pitted dozer blade ploughing up a great heap of it as if to bank up its own earthwork. Rattling caterpillar tracks threw fresh fall over the idling attack bikes of Kill-Team Tigrus as it pulled in. Its chassis trembled and growled, one big beast asserting dominance over the lesser vehicles that spat and whined around its armour skirts.

‘The one you were sent for is here, all right.’ General Sebko of the Kalinin CCCIII, ‘White Guard’, was swaddled in an ice-camouflage greatcoat with a thick fur collar, gloves, a snow-speckled cap, and snow goggles. Only the pins on his cuff and the iron in his beard distinguished him from the junior staffers bustling about the command tank’s exposed rear section. ‘The orks are dug in deep, and in numbers. It will be a slaughter, my lord.’

‘Let the slaughter be your concern. The Lord Commander’s quarry is ours.’

‘Yes, lord.’

The general had to shout to be heard, or if he was addressing one of his own unaugmented soldiers he probably would have. Earthshaker batteries thumped and thundered. The shaking ground spilled snow into trenches where tens of thousands of heavy-coated soldiers tramped over squelching duckboards. Lasguns in equivalent numbers crackled. Men shouted. Tanks roared. Guns of every calibre voiced their frustration and spite. Hatred was as thick on the air as the slush in the bottom of the tenches, and every degree as bitter.

‘The army goes over on my signal,’ Tulwei roared. He could hear over the din perfectly well. Shouting was out of consideration for the human’s ears.

The likely annihilation of the CCCIII would leave Kalinin’s northern approach wide open, but to to the general’s great credit, he simply saluted. ‘It will, lord.’

‘A full-scale assault on the ork lines will draw them out, and when they come…’ He indicated the trio of black-painted attack bikes grizzling in the snow beside his. Spitting out promethium fumes and snowmelt alongside them were the lavishly baroque gold-and-black bikes of the Sisters of Silence. One of the sidecars was empty. It would not be so for the return ride. Tulwei clapped his gauntlets together. ‘We will wait for word of the witch-breed’s position and be on him like a winter gale.’

Sebko smiled thinly. ‘Show it Valhalla’s warmth.’

Cleaning out the sidecar’s heavy bolter beside Tulwei, Sentar gave an approving chuckle.

The Valhallans’ loathing of the greenskins could have matched their own. Small wonder that their world held out while forge worlds and garrison worlds with standing forces in the billions were ground under the ork war machine like stones under the linked treads of a super-heavy tank.

Tulwei looked to his left. The Dark Angel, Vehuel, throttled his engine, a challenge in his hooded eyes. He looked to his right. The Soul Drinker, Grigorus, looked back, gauntlet over his gear stick, the other on the throttle. Tulwei grinned in anticaption of the great race to come. A countdown timer scrolled down the left-hand side of his helm display.

‘Nearly, brothers.’

And the countdown ended.

Terra — Imperial Palace

Check 0, -00:00:57

The Meridian Chamber, a little known sub-annexe of the Clanium Library, was where the fractal vagaries of Imperial time were charted and thus standardised. Here, seconds, minutes and hours were ticked off, blinked away, their passage marked by the tens of thousands of asynchronous timepieces. The four walls were divided by the four outer segmenta, each one further subdivided by sector, by subsector, and, for particularly prominent, heavily settled regions, by system. Muttering chrono-savants in dusky robes compared neighbouring pieces, meditated over astropath logs and shipping data and, where necessary, made corrections, circled by joyful cherub seraphim. Here, Imperial Standard Time was set.

Koorland, Lord Commander of the Imperium, last of the Imperial Fists, stepped smartly out of the way as one of the hunchbacked magi shuffled blindly across him. Its robes scuffed the floor. Hourglasses adorned with cyberskull motifs and filled with grains of glass swayed from a belt of woven metal. The magos approached the group of chanting acolytes that surrounded the Praeceptor, the master chrono: a scuffed leaden tank the size of a drop pod, delineating Terran time by atomic resonance exactly as it had done for the last thirty thousand years. The magos’ tools clicked and chittered over the venerable machine.

‘What is the verdict, magos?’

The adept took his time in answering. Imperial time was an arcane measure. It was fractal, ever changeable. The unimaginable distances between worlds and the time-bending effects of warp travel rendered linearity subjective at best.

But not so for the Beast. His greatest strength, the orks’ subspace propulsion technology, was also mankind’s most glaring, stone-age strategic weakness. He could move from system to system at speeds greater than the warp’s. His lines of communication were instantaneous. Koorland had but one chance to catch the orks unprepared. The Deathwatch assault on the Terran attack moon had required to-the-second timing. Accomplishing the same over interstellar distances was an exponential order of magnitude more difficult.

Fail, and he would never find them unprepared again.

After a few seconds in which hundreds of timepieces ticked out their own relativistic versions of time, the chrono-magos turned. His face was hooded, but clicked with moving parts. ‘There is a reasonable degree of probability that our times are now in synchrony.’

Koorland clenched one gauntleted fist and glanced over his shoulder.

Maximus Thane stood in front of the clock-lined wall with arms crossed, garbed in a long surplice that was as severe as a statue’s and grey as the genetic character of his eyes. He nodded once, and Koorland made a smile, some of the tension he felt disappearing in it. Some, but not all.

Everything rested on this.

‘The Lords will be waiting. Call them into the Library, brother.’

Valhalla — Kalinin trench

Check 3, 00:00:00

Officers of the CCCIII sounded out long blasts on their whistles and Valhallan soldiers fixed bayonets, pushed wobbling trench ladders to the walls and yelled, screams as formless as the steam that burst from their mouths. They began to climb. Squadrons of patched-up Leman Russ tanks rattled forward in support on cleated tracks. Marauder fighter-bombers, invisible in the blizzard, rumbled overhead.

Tulwei gunned his engine and allowed the attack bike to crunch slowly forward. He fingered his chainsword’s activation stud impatiently, waiting for the signal, and watched as it began.

Eidolica — atmospheric entry

Check 7, 00:00:00

It began.

A splutter of thrust arrested Tyris’ descent. The thrill of afterburners shivered through his armour. Then nothing. He opened his arms and glided, no sound in his helmet but his own breath, the hiss of stabilisers. Solar radiation had killed unit vox, but every warrior knew his role. The atmosphere flared with short promethium burns as the others made use of their jump packs to correct their angles.

The sun was ferocious, his visor seared to grey opacity. He could barely see the landing zone at all, the listing fortress of the Fists Exemplar, but the greenskins would have had to shut down auspex grids and seal their shutters in preparation for the dawn. What was he — a charcoal speck in the daylight furnace, a mote, invisible in the light, a streak on the white-glare armaplas sky. He was the net, the knife.

He was the Raven.

And the orks would rue the day the Lord Commander had called his brothers to the war.

Plaeos — Mundus Trench

Check 2, 00:00:00

Kjarvik’s pack lights pierced the gloom of the oceanic trench to a distance of about ten metres. Rust flakes and bits of debris, from fingernail-size down, danced from the darkness of the water column in a reflective swirl for the passing of the beams. Depth indicator runes pulsed in his helm display, bleeding redly into the hyper-pressurised backdrop on the opposite side of the armourglass.

Running across his path at roughly man-height was a ridge of dirt: pipes, buried in sediment and planktonic xenoforms. Polyps and tendrils and silvery, segmented creatures retreated from Kjarvik’s light as though the sea floor were a living thing that recoiled from his touch. He clumped around.

One of the Sisters of Silence lumbered towards him. Dozens of tiny indicator lights lit up her form and the shoal of escaping bubbles that rippled around her. Unlike the superb homeostatic systems of Kjarvik’s power armour, her suit lost most of her exhaled gases with every breath. He could function at this depth for days, without food or rest if need be, but it had already taken them half an hour just to reach the bottom of the ocean trench. She probably had the same again at best.

Her hands moved in front of her. Slowly. As though chained to great weights buried deep beneath the sea floor.

‘There is time,’ she gestured, using Adeptus Astartes battle-sign. She raised a sluggish gauntlet to point right along the run of pipes. Kjarvik blinked up a tri-dimensional gridmap of the ocean bottom, overlaid with the runes of Umbra and flowing datascreed. His eyes roved over it, absorbing it metaconsciously. Hive Mundus’ foundation levels were about five hundred metres that way. It would be a hard half-kilometre in power armour.

‘Very well,’ he voxed, and then on Umbra’s shared frequency, ‘Kjarvik. Moving to target.’ He started right, following the line of piping.

The rest of the squad called in: Bohr, Zarrael, Phareous, Baldarich, a vox-click from the second Sister of Silence. The tracker runes in his helm display confirmed their convergence on the target. The Sister followed cumbersomely behind him, breathing heavily into the vox as she struggled to keep to his pace.

Pillows of dust rose languidly from the sea bed with the stomp of his boots, his visibility dropping to eight metres, then six, then three, a shoal of glittering particulates surrounding him like carnivores around a piece of meat. He continued on augur readings, the pipes always on his left. He glanced down for a moment to check the helmet-sized dish of ceramite casing that was maglocked to his hip. It was a melta mine. Its systems responded to his armour’s auto-interrogator with a squirt of reassuringly passive signals.

A double click on his vox-channel pulled his attention back up.

His pack beams slashed the dark with silver as he looked around. He snarled in frustration. The signal came again, click click, as urgent as a non-vocal responder could be. A Vow of Tranquility was all to the good in your cloister. He disengaged his bolt pistol’s holster seals, and the weapon came away in his gauntlet in a rush of air bubbles.

He half turned, head moving a fraction ahead of his weighted body, and saw it. A black shape, smooth, shiny like oil, cut his light beam in half. He stomped back and it flashed by him, barely two metres from his face, more of it sweeping past as he pulled up his bolt pistol. His light flashed over the leviathan’s blubbery underbelly. Fins. Webbed claws. Weird, oily camouflage.

His pistol fired with a thunderous boom. A compression wave rippled out ahead of the bolt, propellant burn frothing up the water in its wake. The second explosion came a split-second later with a sudden blossom of red. The pressure held it together rather than allow it to disperse and the ragged, heavier-than-water spill slowly sank.

There was no cry of pain, no ultrasonic squeal of panic or alarm. Kjarvik watched it swim past, separating the billowing blood sac into smaller droplets with a parting swipe of its gargantuan tailfin. He had barely scratched it.

A vox-crackle spoke into his ear. ‘Did you kill a fish, brother-sergeant?’

‘First blood to me, Phareous.’

‘It only counts if you kill it,’ said Zarrael.

‘Are you using a secure squad link to keep tally?’ grumbled Baldarich. Kjarvik did not think that the Black Templar liked him very much.

The huge metal wall of Hive Mundus’ exterior shell soaked up his light beam. It was a sheer cliff face of adamantium composite, encrusted with organisms that had spent the last five thousand years evolving to break it down. Kjarvik surveyed it quickly, beam nipping left, right, up, down. Its visual appearance aligned with the schematics that the tech-priests had released to Bohr. The deep ocean had shielded the hive’s foundations from the orbital strikes that had devastated the surface, and given a base for the orks to subsequently rebuild.

But it had been weakened. Kjarvik could see the hairline fractures in the plating.

‘Kjarvik. In position.’ He uncoupled the melta mine from its hip suspensor and clamped it to the wall, voxing it in as he backed up to put some distance between himself and it. Four more confirmations came swiftly back.

‘Detonation in three,’ voxed Bohr.

Kjarvik turned to the Sister. Her blank face was illuminated by the cold square of lumen strips that outlined the edges of her pressure mask.

‘Two.’

He clasped the woman’s wrist in his gauntlet. She turned to him questioningly, and he grinned. He was the Stormcrow. The unlucky.

‘One.’

Two

Tomorrow, he would be dead.

That view was Mesring’s own. His deterioration continued to baffle the mindless flow of hospitallers, physicae, and witch doctors that his personal staff summoned to his bedside. The cramps that woke him in the night to screaming agony at the passage of anything more fortifying than filtered water across his lips mystified them. As for the bouts of dizziness, the sweats, the lucid nightmares where he raved of plots and blasphemy — well, they were cause for great consternation. Every test was returned negative. Every palliative or medicament applied did nothing. It led even the most long-serving and decent amongst his staff to question whether it was simply his time. That he, Erekart Veneris Sanguinan Mesring, had served the divine Emperor for as long as He willed it.

Mesring would have sneered had he that much strength. The Emperor could not will Himself out of His own throne.

His opinion on his prospects, however, seemed to be one that his closest aides shared. He could think of no other reason, besides another ghastly hallucination, for the presence of Arch-Confessor Vitori Mendelyev beside him for his final hours.

‘This is a beautiful shrine,’ said Mendelyev. The old man took a deep breath of shriven air and candle smoke. ‘Peaceful.’ He had a soft, calming voice, an open face, both of which Mesring supposed were aids to his duties as confessor to the powerful.

‘I will not keel over on cue,’ Mesring snarled, fingernails digging into the wood back of the pew in front with his efforts at not crying out for the pain twisting in his gut. This was why he had sat in the second row when, as Ecclesiarch, the Emperor’s mortal representative on Terra, he could sit wherever he damn well pleased.

‘Of course,’ said Mendelyev, and fell silent. His eyes were closed, his lips moving soundlessly, his bald head dappled with the light of over a million candles. One for every world in the Emperor’s demesne. Mesring gave a rustling cackle, bringing the taste of old vomit back up into his mouth. Someone was failing to keep tally. There should be a few less of the things and their insufferable flickering by now.

The Cardinals’ Wake was a private sanctuary for the most senior clergy of the Adeptus Ministorum. The area was too sacred, and too sensitive, for their junior colleagues, and so even the most menial of functions from changing the oils in the scenting bowls to cleansing the colossal clerestory of stained glass were peformed by deacons and lectors, old men who could have been anointed primates of entire sectors and lived in commensurate luxury, but had instead opted to sweep the floors here. Mesring’s contempt for them was as limitless as the stars. The occasional Mechanicus adept, garbed respectfully in the palest off-white pink, worked out of sight beneath the basalt and gold statues of saints and Ecclesiarchs past, all the way back to Veneris I.

No effort was made to mask the great fibre-bundles and conduits that ran through the cathedra from the blessed machinery of the Golden Throne. It was sacred to both worlds, Terra and Mars, and the gentle susurrus of its continual operation was equally soothing to auditory systems of nerves and of wire. That was why the cardinals had held vigil here since the Emperor’s internment, and was what brought Mesring here now. Though he did not seek peace.

‘Doomed, all of you,’ he muttered, shivering, glaring at the handful of grey-haired clergy sat in silent prayer throughout the shrine. ‘Better to placate the Great Beast than trust in Him.’

‘The Emperor forgives and protects,’ said Mendelyev placidly, as though he had heard every deathbed blasphemy imagined by man.

‘It was the Emperor’s trespasses that brought the slow death to mankind. Ten millennia of decay and then final damnation. That is the loving bequest I foresee. One that only the Beast offers salvation from.’

The confessor, though bound for the same hell that awaited them all, of which Mesring now suffered but a fleeting foretaste, merely smiled. ‘In His deathless state, the Emperor reveals His divinity.’

‘Spare me. I can recite all the hypocrisy from memory.’

‘You want some new truth?’ said Mendelyev, soft still but with a firmer edge. ‘You have lived long and well, eminence. To all outward appearances you have been a paragon of the virtues of the Creed.’ Mesring caught the subtle reprimand. ‘The Emperor thinks little of self-pity. Believe me in this, eminence, that nothing eases a man’s passing like a little grace at the end.’

‘Grace,’ Mesring spat. ‘Vulkan is dead!’

The confessor shrugged. ‘As are many of his brothers.’

‘You seem remarkably sanguine.’

‘Worries are for the young.’

‘Old men dying with grace is what keeps the sheep in their pens and the wolves at the door.’

For all that they were used as metaphors in scripture wherever one looked, Mesring had never seen a wolf. They were the forest, the mountains, the night; the ancestral dread of upright apes that after a thousand generations of hive cities and nuclear winters still hadn’t lost a fear of the dark. They were what would emerge from the sump after the last lumen bulb sputtered out: not Chaos, but what Chaos made be.

Mesring blinked dizzily, realising that his voice was raised and echoing from the distant machinery, but also that a dying man couldn’t care less who he disturbed.

‘The Imperial Fists were destroyed, Vitori. It was Udo’s lie that put imposters bearing the black fist on their walls. My lie also. And Koorland upholds it. The people believe in a lie. They are all lies.’

To his surprise, tears were running down his cheeks.

Mendelyev clasped his shoulder kindly. ‘The Ecclesiarch weeps. This is good. Unburden yourself of your sins.’

‘I weep because I want to take off Vangorich’s head and stick it on a pole!’

‘Speak to me, eminence. I am here to listen, to whatever it is you need to say.’

Mesring looked up at the scrape of approaching footsteps, but it was merely a passing sexton come to relight the candles. With a cough that brought up some more blood, he reached into the sweat-soiled inner pocket of his surplice and withdrew a glass vial. It was empty. He placed it on the prayer table in front of Mendelyev.

‘What is this?’ the confessor asked.

‘The Emperor’s turned back. Poison delivered by a penitent’s kiss. An Ecclesiarch bought for a few meagre days of life.’

‘Bought?’

‘My alchemist was able to extend the final dose that Wienand supplied, but no more.’ He gestured to the empty vial. ‘Tomorrow I will be dead.’ He hissed the final word as a sudden, clenching pain overtook his self-control. His vision ran like the paint of an underhive mission in the acid rain. Something warm trickled down the inside of his leg. The Beast’s emissary to Holy Terra’s orbit had been vanquished and Mesring no longer knew where to turn. ‘Without… a… miracle.’

As if on cue — a sign, he prayed, a sign that the Emperor truly does watch and forgive — the monolithic Gates of Undying that led, ultimately, to the Golden Throne Room itself were opened and a procession of frocked men and their entourage entered.

The cortege was led by a frater swinging a jewelled censer and followed out by vestal choristers in trailing robes. The clergy were escorted by Frateris Templar in gleaming carapace, marching with ceremonial gold-plated lasguns locked to their shoulder, the cold fire of force-bayonets flickering by their ears. Mesring couldn’t tell how many there were. His eyes were too bleary to count, his mind too fuzzy to hold a number, but after a few minutes the procession tailed off and the gates were barred, physically, by the towering figure of a lone Adeptus Custodes.

The guardian was four metres tall, encased in golden artificer armour and wielding a halberd that was anything but ornamental. The Adeptus Custodes were crafted by the same artifice that had sired the primarchs, and though they were less than those demigods, they were still greater than the Adeptus Astartes. Seeing that being, Mesring felt the first stirrings of doubt at the enfeeblement of the God-Emperor.

‘You are not going to…’ hissed Mendelyev.

‘The Ecclesiarch has the authority.’

‘To make a request on behalf of another, not for himself. The Emperor’s tears are shed for His fallen warriors. They are for His warriors.’

‘He leaves me no choice. It cannot be His will for me to die like this. It cannot.’

An arch-cardinal in ostentatious white robes and jewelled mitre passed through the fug of incense and verse, dropped to one knee and kissed Mesring’s fingers. The memory of the last time Mesring had allowed that particular show of respect made his fists clench. The man’s name was Wilbran. His position of Emperor’s Chaplain was, naturally, a largely ceremonial one, but it carried tremendous prestige.

It occurred to Mesring that Wilbran’s would be high on any list of names to succeed him.

With a platitudinous greeting, the arch-cardinal stepped aside. Past him shuffled a lachrymal page with the wrung-out, worn-down look of a man who had grown old in spite of the chemical treatments belaying the onset of puberty and the death of innocence. He bore a silk cushion and on it a small golden reliquary. He prostrated himself and Wilbran opened the box. Inside was a vial, cut from a single piece of diamond, on a bed of scented tissue. It contained one droplet of glistening liquid.

Mesring’s breath caught as Wilbran lifted it reverentially and passed it to him.

The Emperor shed a tear for every one of His own that fell in battle. There was a priesthood dedicated to their collection, and just one had the power to heal a man of all wounds.

He took it, cotton-wool fingers fumbling with the stopper, and upended it over his desperate tongue.

He felt nothing.

The volume of liquid was so miniscule he did not even feel it hit his mouth. He was aware of the coiling in his gut, the fog in his brain, the thumping inside his ears. He scrunched his eyes and prayed to the Emperor to accept this one last chance to demonstrate His power. But he felt nothing. Nothing at all.

His grip tightened around the vial, and he pressed it to his forehead until it cut in.

He would not go quietly. He knew all the lies now.

And if a man as powerful as Mesring was going to fall, then the earth was damn well going to shake.

Three

Lady Kavalanera Brassanas, knight abyssal of the Sisters of Silence, sat perfectly upright at the head of the table, hands on her armoured thighs. She was clad in antique crimson armour etched with ancient Terran designs, extinct languages, ideograms representative of concepts relevant to a mythic age. Parchment strips attached to the armour with wax seals decorated her body with an impenetrable, spiderish script. The collar of her battleplate was high, obscuring her mouth and nose and leaving only the dark-matter emptiness of her stare between her and the world. She was an untouchable, a blank, one in a trillion: a homozygous carrier of the mutant pariah gene that rendered her impervious to all forms of psyker assault. A useful trait, if an unnerving one to be around.

The High Lords, those that Koorland had demanded attend, adopted various manifestations of mental brace against the negative pressure of the woman’s mind, and the inexorable pull on their souls.

Juskina Tull and Fabricator General Kubik sat together along one side of the long table, with Admiral Lansung, Wienand and Gibran facing them on the other. Drakan Vangorich sat somewhere between attention and repose at the far end. Though not officially represented on the High Twelve, the Assassin had become as much a part of proceedings as the Lord Commander himself, and Koorland suspected that a few of his less informed peers had forgotten that they technically outranked him.

In spite of recent damage, the Clanium Library remained very much the overstuffed vanity project that Lansung had made of it. For all the Lord Admiral’s faults in matters of grand strategy and statecraft, however, given a small enough stage in which to operate he was a perfectly able military commander. The chronometric displays, hololiths, and loop projectors that had been installed at great expense in place of the books and other portable storage media that had previously filled the shelves actually, by accident or design, made for an excellent consultation chamber.

The snarling visage of an ork filled the big screens that surrounded the conference table, not frozen exactly but jerking from one millisecond to the next and then back again as though eager to be done but barred from moving on. A pair of fuzzy verticals ran though the image at the exact same spot on every display. The brute’s crusted nose and gaping mouth were up close to the capturing lens, its expression very much what one would expect from an ork having its skull crushed in a Black Templars Dreadnought’s power fist. With every twitch around the timepoint, the ork’s eyes were noticeably squashed closer together and then released back. Energetic emanations sparked from the cracks in the ork’s skull, generating strange, unsettling imagery on the data medium that became overt only when, as now, the playback was held.

Koorland was not at all surprised that everyone — barring Juskina Tull, he judged by her rapt expression — had already seen the Dzelenic IV footage. He was resigned to the fact that any information known to more than two people within the Palace’s walls quickly became common knowledge.

‘This,’ said Koorland, ‘as you are probably all by now aware, is live footage retrieved from a battle between a force of Black Templars under Venerable Magneric and an ork warband. It was returned to Terra at great cost by the Interdictor in the belief of her crew that what it shows is the weakness that we have all been looking for in the orks. Their psykers. We simply did not have the means to exploit this information until now.’

Ignoring the intrigued murmur from the Lords, Koorland reached across Lady Brassanas to depress the intercom switch set into a panel at the head of the table. ‘Brother Thane, have you located Magos Laurentis?’

‘I have. It seems he took a wrong turn at the playback control room.’

‘Please escort him in, brother.’

One of the grand paired doors creaked inwards, disturbing the roost of herald-seraphim clustered over the lintel block with squawks of Thane, Thane. The Chapter Master of the Fists Exemplar held the door open and, with an oddly asynchronous click of metal ‘feet’ on the parquet tiles, Phaeton Laurentis scuttled towards the table.

There was almost nothing left of the magos who had been assigned to the Imperial Fists Second Company to study the extermination of the Ardamantuan chromes. The eye, perhaps, nestled in the centre of an insectile reconstruction of vox-thief pickups, mechanosensors and emotive carapace. That and the occasional quirk of personality. The rest was a reconstruction and, to Koorland’s mind, not one that the magos biologis, or anyone, could have deserved.

Laurentis circled the table on a tripod of articulated metal limbs that flicked up the skirts of ill-fitting robes, and distributed data packets with flicks of mechadendrites. His voice too was harshly synthesised.

‘You have begun to discuss the ork mysticus breed, correct?’ He pivoted his eyeball to Koorland, who nodded. ‘Good. Good. I apologise for my tardiness, Lord Commander, but I have studied this footage frame-by-frame one thousand and eleven times, and I have many demands on my time.’

‘As do we all,’ muttered Lansung.

Once, perhaps, Laurentis would have been human enough to note the not-so-subtle jab, but no longer. ‘As the Venerable Dreadnought-Marshal was cogent enough to recognise, the orks’ psykers are their weakness. The mind of each individual ork operates as a psychic dynamo of sorts, responsive to the ork’s mood and growing exponentially in power in the presence of other orks.’

‘The green roar,’ said Gibran, the hooded Paternoval Envoy of the Navis Nobilite, clearly more discomforted than the others by the psychic blank space generated by the knight abyssal. ‘We are familiar with the effect.’

‘The ork pyskers are able to absorb that power and release it in concentrated, directed form. As we observed on Ullanor, the harder we attack, the stronger the ork psychic field becomes. But as you have all seen…’ he gestured to the image frozen in greyscale on the pict-feed, ‘…the flow of power can be reversed.’

‘Potentially useful,’ said Vangorich, flicking through his packet, seemingly idly. ‘But we would have to draw these psykers out in order to exploit it, and the orks seem wiser than to let that happen. It didn’t happen on Ullanor.’

‘Which is why we must capture one for ourselves,’ said Koorland. ‘Ideally more than one.’

‘At least three, in fact,’ said Laurentis. ‘The Basilikon Astra and the work of the Grand Experiment have identified three ork colonies where the genotype of the mysticus subspecies has been confirmed. It is the opinion of my fellow magi biologi that the observed effect can be artificially induced. And targeted to destructive effect.’

‘An operation on this scale will require considerable manpower,’ said Lansung, with some of his usual bluster now he was on familiar ground. ‘And firepower. We are a council of twelve. We can’t in good conscience authorise that kind of operation without a full vote. Lord Verreault at least should be here to speak for the Astra Militarum.’

Tull and Gibran nodded gravely. Vangorich sat back in his chair and looked to the ceiling with a long sigh.

‘Let me be clear, so there can be no further misunderstandings.’ Koorland leaned forward. Everyone bar Vangorich and Kubik shifted noticeably back. ‘This is not a discussion. I do not ask for opinions and this is not a vote. There is no time to muster a fleet, and even if there were the unfortunate truth is that after Ullanor there is no longer the capacity to resource an expedition on that scale. We must learn to act quickly and decisively, which is why Deathwatch Kill-Teams Umbra, Stalker and Tigrus under the command of Sergeants Kjarvik, Tyris and Tulwei and supported by the Sisters of Silence have already been deployed to those worlds.’

‘Already. Deployed.’ Wienand enunciated each word as though they were too important to share a sentence.

‘You make it sound so ominous,’ said Vangorich.

‘Isn’t it?’ Wienand turned back to Koorland. ‘The Senatorum acknowledges the necessity of the Last Wall and the Deathwatch. And their effectiveness. But many of us, myself included, do not exactly like either. And now you appear to enjoy sole command of both? As I understand it you have even begun extending recruitment beyond those Chapters directly affected by the losses on Ullanor.’ She referred down to the extensive pile of handwritten notes in front of her. ‘Tyris and Tulwei are of the Raven Guard and the Storm Lords. Just how big is the Deathwatch now, Lord Commander? You can’t circumvent the Codex Astartes with loopholes.’

‘Must we have this same argument?’ said Vangorich.

‘Query,’ said Kubik, speaking in his harshly mechanised monotone for the first time since Thane had brought them all to their seats. ‘Objection has been raised to those of us not present, but what of those of us who are? Why are we here?’

‘Because I need ships. I need the best Navigators to pilot them and good men to crew them.’

As soon as Koorland said this, the atmosphere in the room changed. It became circumspect, the Lords each retreating to some private mental fief to survey its limits, what it held of value and, most importantly, what it was worth in trade. Koorland banished it back to the corners with a rap of his knuckles on the table. ‘I say again — this is not a request.’

‘It’s not that,’ said Lansung. He waved a pudgy hand vaguely. ‘There simply aren’t the ships to give you.’

‘The Autocephalax Eternal emerged from the most recent battle relatively unscathed. I will take everything. I can take no more from the Space Marine Chapters without blunting their own effectiveness.’

‘The damage to the flagship remains extensive, lord. Resources are scarce, and Mars has had… other priorities.’

‘The Synod of Mars is united in its support of Terra,’ Kubik interrupted, with a blurt of code. ‘But the Basilikon Astra suffered losses in the invasion of Ullanor and we too have few ships to offer.’

Koorland turned to the Chartist Speaker, Tull, who looked apologetically at something else and shrugged.

‘The Inquisition has ships,’ said Wienand, softly, filling Tull’s silence like a master rhetorician. ‘Experienced crews. The best Navigators in the Imperium.’

Gibran nodded, unasked-for confirmation that this was no exaggeration.

‘I will not give away control of the Deathwatch,’ said Koorland. ‘The Adeptus Astartes are not to be handed out like favours.’

‘You said yourself that the Deathwatch is too great a responsibility for one man. Even if we were to have faith in you to use them honourably, what of your successor as Lord Commander? What of theirs? No. Only the Inquisition can provide the proper authority for such a force, for it does not answer to one leader alone. I am but a representative of many, as is Veritus.’

Koorland rubbed the urge to snarl away on the back of his hand, and glanced sideways to Lady Brassanas who held his gaze with a frosty remove.

‘How many ships do you have?’

‘Several dozen operating from bases close enough to be contactable. Escorts all the way up to Black Ship class. They were built for transportion. I can’t promise it will be comfortable, but I have the capacity to transport several thousand men and their equipment wherever they need to go.’

Koorland let out a rasp of frustration. ‘Very well, inquisitor. As soon as this conference is over I will transfer full authority over the Deathwatch to the Inquisition. But these are my conditions. First, the Deathwatch is to be limited to Chapter-strength. Second, I retain the power to disband them when the current crisis is past. And third, with all respect, you are no military woman and the Inquisition is no military organisation. I will appoint a Space Marine to oversee all strategic aspects. Agreed?’

‘Do you have someone in mind for the role?’

Koorland met Wienand’s calculating eyes, too old for her young-looking face, tried to tease out what the woman was thinking. Thane had been in effective charge of Deathwatch operations since Sacratus, and was clearly the best fit for the role, but Koorland knew as soon as the thought arose that Thane, his right hand, was too close to him to be acceptable. The same might also be said of Bohemond and the other commanders of the Last Wall. He realised that even by assessing potential candidates in such a way he was making a political appointment rather than an operational one. His genhanced mind was superbly crafted to multi-task, but being forced to play the High Lords’ game, when his intent on becoming one of them had been to force them to play his, got under the skin.

‘There will be someone proven in place to oversee the next phase of the operation.’

Wienand held his gaze for a moment, then smiled lightly. ‘Agreed, then.’

Everyone suddenly looked relaxed, as though disaster had been averted with a near miss and normal service resumed.

‘Kubik,’ Koorland said, drumming his fingers irritably on the tabletop. ‘How proceeds the Grand Experiment?’

‘Entirely at the discretion of the Senatorum.’

‘He means, does it work?’ said Vangorich.

‘There have been several successful trials on both Martian moons. The investigation of the Techmarines, Abathar and Gadreel, into the failed experiment to teleport the Veridi starbase from Terran orbit was most illuminating. As was Alquist Arouar’s experience handling gravitic technology in the field on Caldera. The tech-priest dominus has been removed from military duties and transferred to the Grand Experiment. It is the conclusion of the project trajectoriae and the diagnostiad that a planetary body could be moved if so required.’

‘Mars, I presume?’ said Vangorich.

‘A logical conclusion, given that it is the only planet with the power capacity and the subspace impellers currently in place.’

‘What of Terra?’ asked Lansung.

‘Impossible. The effect on the Astronomican beacon would be enormous, and inherently unqualifiable.’

That brought a condemned silence upon them all. For several seconds, the weightiness of their responsibilities became untenable. Better several seconds than not at all, Koorland thought, though too little too late all the same. After a moment, Wienand spoke again.

‘What happens when the Deathwatch return to Terra?’

Koorland shook his head. ‘Time is critical. Each kill-team will translate to separate coordinates. Three fleets from Terra will rendezvous with them there.’

‘To what end?’

Koorland was considering how fully to answer when he heard what sounded like a body of men approaching the Library with some haste from the direction of the Cardinals’ Wake. Thane heard it at the same time, then Vangorich, the Assassin turning towards the door.

‘It is early,’ said Koorland. ‘But it could be news from one of the kill-teams.’

He rose from his chair, just as the grand doors were flung inwards and a trilling flock of herald-seraphim burst through.

Mesring, they sang, scattering over the table and circling the data-stacks. Ecclesiarch of the Adeptus Ministorum.

Here to attend.

Here to attend.

Here to attend—

‘Vangorich!’ the Ecclesiarch bellowed, flapping drunkenly through the flock and clattering into the back of a trolleycart, spilling data-slates and scrolls all over the floor tiles. ‘I know you’re in here, you and your cronies. Heretics all!’ Loose wheels and weaker legs rattled along together for a few metres, while the Lords were still scraping back their chairs to obediently join with Koorland in rising.

Laurentis halted the trolleycart’s sideways trundle with one of his three limbs.

Mesring extricated himself from the trolleycart, brandishing an empty vial as though announcing a toast to a vanquished foe’s honour. If Koorland could profess amazement at how some Lords retained all evidence of good living while the billions beneath them starved, it was almost as remarkable how quickly decades of indulgence could be expunged from a man’s body. Gone were the pouches under the Ecclesiarch’s eyes, the blubber that had padded his expansive white robes, the self-reverential glow of overstated piety. In its place were glazed eyes, black teeth made prominent by receding gums, sunken cheeks whose pallor he had for some reason decided to mask with dark green kohl. His beard came out in clumps, stained with blood, wine, and vomit. He tottered on the spot and would have fallen in a second if not for the efforts of an elderly but well-built man in the robes of a senior confessor and a gaggle of sextons and fraters. They looked nervous, embarrassed. Some of them looked afraid.

Why would they be afraid?

‘You look unwell, Mesring,’ said Vangorich, his tone one that Koorland had heard used by medical orderlies in battlefield hospices. ‘Why, you look fit to drop.’

‘Suffer in hell, Vangorich. So slick. So clever.’ The Ecclesiarch paused only to hawk up a gob of blood. ‘I want the cure. I want it. I want it now.’

Koorland looked from one to the other. ‘Vangorich?’

The Assassin shrugged. ‘The pressures of his office are great, lord, the pastoral care of so many billions. The tragedy of the ork moon’s destruction still affects him, I fear.’

‘Lies!’ Mesring staggered through the clutching hands to face Wienand. ‘Tell him! Tell him how you bought me with the cure to his poison, for as long as my life had worth to you.’

Vangorich and Wienand shared a look that gave away nothing and everything.

With a frown that the genetic bequest of Rogal Dorn made furrowing and deep, Koorland turned from them and extended a hand towards the Ecclesiarch. He was a metre taller than Mesring and, in armour, four or five times as broad. He could have enclosed the man’s head in one hand.

‘If you have accusations to make, then I will hear them.’

Mesring shook his head so vigorously against his frail neck that Koorland feared he might snap it, arms aflap, striking Koorland’s gauntlet like an inebriate attacking a wall and waving the diamond vial above his head as though it meant something.

‘Mutants. Poisoners. Heretics.’ Mesring shot them all a glare, his painted face puce with consumption as he pointed finally at Kavalanera. ‘Consorts of witches.’

The knight abyssal appeared to smile but gave no other reaction.

‘Your order is barely a millennium old,’ interrupted Wienand, firmly. ‘Hers is ancient, older by far even than Lord Koorland’s, and has fought alongside the very person of the Emperor. Are the orks not enough? Must we scour the human diaspora for more enemies?’

‘Apostates. Traitors. By the Throne of Ullanor, I am surrounded!’ With a flap of his arms, Mesring parted his attendants and stumbled through them. No sooner had he done so than he spun around again and waggled a shrivelled finger. ‘There will be no corner of Terra that does not feel my fall, you mark me. I know things. The hypocrisy. The lies. The masquerade of the Fists. The death of Vulkan. The empty deviants that call themselves their leaders.’ He signed the aquila and spat blood on the floor. ‘The Emperor abandons us and with just cause.’

He turned away, looked up, and spread his arms wide as though sermonising to a planetary congregation.

‘The people will hear it all! Only by throwing down the heretic and the disbeliever and welcoming the armies of the Beast can they be saved. Praise the Beast!’ he screamed, spittle spraying from his lips, eyes rolling up into his head. ‘All praise the Beast!’

The thunderous boom of bolter discharge startled the servo-seraphs to flight. The contents of Mesring’s head and shoulders sprayed over the suddenly screaming arch-confessor holding on to the arm of a now headless torso.

Wienand opened her mouth to say something. Her gaze slid from the dead Ecclesiarch on the floor to the pistol in Koorland’s hand and she shut it again. Wise. Vangorich leaned across the table to look at the body, a strange smile on his face. Everyone else looked too stunned to react. Except for Kubik, of course. Kavalanera turned to Koorland with an arch expression, as though to question whether summary execution was now commonplace on Terra.

Koorland’s bolt pistol slid back into its mag-holster with the faintest of sighs.

He shook his head.

‘Brother,’ said Thane, still positioned by the doorway, blood on the grey hem of his habit. ‘What have you done?’

Four

Black water boiled across Kjarvik’s faceplate, the thunder it made no longer separable from that of the explosion. His body banged against light alloy walls and any fixed machinery bulky enough to have stood up to the flood. His pack lights slashed the walls. White metal. Dark corridors. The beams speckled dirty water. Reflective strips shone back. Section markings. Hazard stripes. Kjarvik saw it fleetingly, the way a pebble might see the villages it was carried through when spring thaw burst the great rivers’ banks. The water turned him, spun him like thread on the wyrd-spinners’ wheel, so far beyond his superhuman ability to resist that his vaunted genetic lineage seemed like a joke of wyrd.

Punch a hole in the skin of a voidship, and every man knew that what was inside was going to come out. Inflict the same on the outer shell of an island hive under a thousand atmospheres of pressure, and the luckless enemies of man might see the first bitemark of the Wolves.

A length of metal cracked him on the back of the head. A ladder. He felt the aluminium alloy bend, and on preternatural reflex snapped out an arm. He missed. The torrent had already swept him past. His wolf-clawed gauntlet dug instead into the wall and screeched through until it struck a horizontal rebar and he stopped.

He began to draw himself up.

Water hammered against his huge, barrage-like pauldrons. The current dragged on his feet with a grip of void-cold iron, the wight-fingers of so many wolf-brothers lying on Ullanor’s red snow.

Not him. He was the unlucky one.

With a howl of defiance, he broke the surface. The wall he had latched on to was part of the bulk housing of an effluxer, one enormous pump slaved to a greater assembly installed millennia ago to keep the submerged levels of the underhive dry. They had been designed to mop up pressure leaks. This was a flood fit to drown a city.

The section was a vertical maze of catwalks and gangways, vast power coils towering up through the levels. Horizontally, there was little to see before hitting a wall or an effluxer station. At its best, it would have been dank and claustrophobic, but now, floodwaters rising, it was a thousand ways in which to suffocate and die in the dark.

His arm shook, armour servos whining, and with fangs biting into his bottom lip he managed to haul his trailing arm out of the water, the Sister of Silence still held firmly in his deactivated power fist. That was the hard part.

A flick of his shoulder sent the Sister arcing over the effluxer. The warrioress flipped mid-flight to guide herself feet-first onto the catwalk. It rattled on loose fixings. The woman immediately began shedding the layers of her pressure suit to reveal ornate crimson and gold armour with a high gorget that concealed her face up to the eyes. She activated her power blade and moved off. Torquing his body against the wall, Kjarvik vaulted after her, coming down in a feral hunch where the Sister had just been.

An ork came pounding down the gantry. It looked like a worker, but was still as big as an armoured Space Marine with biceps the size of demolisher shells straining at its short leather sleeves. A toolbelt clanked at its thighs like an armour skirt as it ran, a thick-toothed metal wrench held high above its head. It blinked, dazzled by Kjarvik’s pack lights as he turned towards it. The Space Wolf shot it once through the head. The mass-reactive detonation blew out the back of its skull and flung the wretched body forward as though some part of its corpse remained desperate to bury its wrench in an Adeptus Astartes helmet.

The walkway was clear.

Reaching up to his gorget ring, Kjarvik disengaged the seals and removed his helmet with a depressurising hiss. He tossed out his hair and took a deep breath of rust, gunpowder, alien sweat, and salt corrosion. Better. His Imbiber organ could usefully extract oxygen from seawater, but the pressure of the ocean trench would have crushed his head like an eggshell. That was not to say that he would rather have his helm on.

A burst of bolter fire drew his attention away and up. All he could see of it was muzzle flare, greasily reflected by a section of wall about ten metres above. The howls of dying orks rang out from a few metres further along from that.

‘Follow,’ the Sister signed. She broke into a run, angling against the wall and then, remarkably, shifting her feet across so that for the next few strides she ran along it. Using her momentum she leapt across, grabbed hold of a hanging rung on the opposite side, twisted her body around, kicked out, and swung into a kind of backwards roll that took her up onto the next level. Her power blade whickered out, silver-blue; there was a guttural roar, and an ork’s arm bounced down between the walls.

With a snarl, Kjarvik hauled himself up the wall. At about his own height, he pivoted at the waist and leapt, free arm out wide, legs tucked in, and slammed two-footed onto the previously hidden companionway.

A solid slug winged his elbow joint and deflected into a slag chute. He turned. A flex of his hand activated his power fist. A thrumming blue disruptor field surrounded the gauntlet, and with a roar he punched it through the shooter’s belly and wrist-deep into the backing wall. The ork looked at the arm buried in its gut with brute surprise, and died.

A short way ahead, Phareous backhanded his shield across an ork’s mouth and forced it back into another. The rapid-fire flash of his shield’s storm bolter mount lit the dingy walkspace and pulped the ork with the bloody mouth. The second bellowed, covered by its kin-thing, and shoved the corpse off. The second Sister of Silence tucked in lightly behind.

Kjarvik did not know their names. Names were powerful and the Vow of Tranquility made before the Golden Throne of the Emperor protected them. But names were also useful, and Kjarvik called this one Sommer, for her warmth, and to distinguish her from Rós and her open heart. That he could make light of their presence made it no less unnerving.

A dozen deftly guided slashes from Sommer’s power blade left a half-dozen orks in ruins.

More ran around the opposite corner, war-axes flashing, barking their guttural cries. A blizzard of bolter and plasma fire cut them down. Iron Father Bohr stomped through the red mist, boltgun steaming hot. A gout of flame from his servo-harness drove the following wave back out of sight.

It was hard-fought, vicious, but that was why Thane had summoned Kjarvik Stormcrow to get it done, and why he in turn had assembled Kill-Team Umbra.

An ork with a bare chest strapped with ammo belts and an autocannon-style weapon mounted on a line of toolbins held the end of the next corridor. Spent casings clattered across the metal floor as it pumped rounds into Phareous’ shield. The mob of orks in garish red wargear that had been lying in wait just around the corner took advantage of the big gun’s suppression fire to pile in, and then the fighting really became ugly.

Phareous’ knife flashed from behind his shield. A dead ork draped over it and blocked his storm bolter. Sommer skipped back. An ork lunged for her with an axe and fell on its face. Kjarvik stamped on its head. Tusks snapped against metal. His power fist ripped the arm off another and blood sprayed the walkspace. Rós danced across him, spun, blade a blur, and opened an ork from throat to middle with a sizzling back-slash. Bohr stamped into view like walker support. A scream of his servo-arm and an ork was rammed head-first into the bulkhead. Blood erupted from its back and splattered across the opposite wall.

And always, high-calibre auto-fire banged the walls.

Kjarvik marked the set of overflow pipes stood behind heavy metal jackets along the wall leading up to the machine-gunner’s nest. He raked his claws down the face of an ork, and pounced for it. Auto-fire chased him as he leapt, one to the next, slugs spanking off the thick metal. A lucky shot — or an unlucky one, Kjarvik was unsure of the difference — penetrated, and a jet of hyper-pressurised water punched an ork into the far wall, hard enough to sever threads. Phareous, Sommer and Bohr drove the orks left on their side of the torrent mercilessly into the water, like routed enemies into the sea.

From the last jacket in line, Kjarvik tossed a grenade into the nest and leapt.

The fragmentation blast ripped the crude barricade open. Bits of smoking metal rattled back up the walkspace like the cast of a rune-priest’s mystic bones. Kjarvik flung his gauntlet clawtips over the lip of the companionway above. With a snarled breath, he pulled himself up and rolled onto one knee.

Baldarich and Zarrael were already there, having risen by another route. The state of their armour and of the floor around them was testament to their bloody progress. The two Space Marines battled back-to-back within a maelstrom of massively muscular ork fighters. The Black Templar’s greatsword moved with the lightness of a knife. Severed hands and bits of tusk flew from its edge, as if to kiss his power armour in a final show of respect. Zarrael meanwhile had his boot on the chest of a brutally sized ork whose crooked moon tattoos and rumbling megaplate marked it as a boss. It was on its knees, hollering, the Flesh Tearer’s eviscerator ripping out its neck and painting it unevenly across the companionway. Another ork barrelled towards the Space Marine’s right, looking to blindside him on the side opposite his buried weapon. Zarrael turned, face unhelmed, the sneering red gaze of an angel, and launched a hissing gob of Betchers’ acid that dropped the brute at a full twenty strides.

If the fight had been related to Kjarvik with the skilled words of another, then the tale would have been one to inspire. Two warriors, champions of distant Chapters, side-by-side and slaying the Emperor’s foes by the legion. But he was witnessing it for himself, and had not the skjald’s skill to overlook the clear disdain in which each warrior held the other.

They did not have their backs turned out of necessity. It was preference.

‘I think you have their attention!’ The bark of Kjarvik’s bolt pistol announced his arrival to the fray. The orks did not last long after that.

They ran towards another big mob that was already retreating, hemmed into a deep column by the narrow walkspace, blockish stubbers up, moving towards a set of heavy-duty plasteel floodgates. Baldarich and Zarrael shrugged off the fire, hacking into the rearguard with a psychotic zeal, each more alike the other than not.

And men called the Vlka Fenryka wild.

‘More are coming.’ Kjarvik broke off the pursuit and took cover behind a dented piston block that seemed to be part of the floodgate mechanism. Baldarich and Zarrael just kept on killing. ‘We wait for the others. We attack as one!’

Orks in clanking war-plate piled through the floodgates to shore up the retreating mob, which in turn spread out into the cover of rusty toolbins and the thick buttress struts that leaned diagonally up into the section wall. Kjarvik shifted his aim upwards as a score of greenskins, their thickly muscled torsos wrapped in ammo belts, clattered across the upper walkways.

For some reason they did not fire.

They chanted — ‘Gork! Mork! Gork! Mork!’ — and mashed the barrels of their guns on the handrail in time to the foot-pound of ork warriors below. They got louder. The stamping grew faster. ‘Gorkamorkagorkamorka!’ Kjarvik could no longer tell individual orks apart. A weight dragged on his skull, as if the ork knucklebones braided through his hair felt the same primal call. His gums ached as though some reality-bending force drew on his teeth.

With a thump of metal, the roadway bridge trembled.

An oil-skinned, web-clawed monster of horrific size slither-crawled through the floodgates. Its passage bent them outward so completely that Kjarvik doubted they would ever shut again. It was the size of a Baneblade, mocking its rattling escort of garishly painted armoured walkers with their ill-made irrelevance. Serried rows of teeth gleamed a smudgy, reflected green from within a huge, half-moon slash of mouth. Rubbery gills fluttered behind armoured flaps. Two rows of uneven spines ran down its dark, blubbery back. With a bone-capped boot planted against a spike from either row, an ork clad in a studded leather harness of monstrous size and wielding a trident-stave coiled with spitting copper wires waved about in a trance.

Its harness was painted with weird, swirled lines, and its face and hands were tattooed with branching continuations of the uncanny design. At a growled utterance, a wind blew, causing its dangling piercings to twist like wraiths on a pyre. The gantry between Kjarvik and his two brothers buckled, bent, boiling seawater spraying through the fissure. The amphibious beast dug its claws into the tortured metal and gave a wet, cavernous roar. Green energies lanced through the spiked collar bolted over its neck and spat back out like living spikes.

Kjarvik bared his fangs.

Maleficar.

He was the Stormcrow, all right. The unlucky one. He could always rely on it.

Five

Tyris emerged from the loading breach of the voidstorm cannon and dropped into a soundless crouch. His landing trembled out through the metal gangway. The Sister of Silence — she had not yielded her name, and Tyris had not asked for it — squatted with her back to an equipment drum. Her blade was unpowered. She raised a finger to the concealing gorget above her mouth.

The voidstorm cannon was a relic of the Fists Exemplar’s past, a legacy of Alcazar Astra’s ownership of the Rubicante Flux stars. It was a ship-killer, its wide bore one of the few access points large enough for a jump pack-equipped Space Marine. It was a squeeze even so and Tyris felt no shame in leaving the nimbler mortal to scout ahead.

With excruciating stealth, he moved.

He could feel the Sister’s eyes on him, assessing his abilities against hers, as he unwound a strip of guncloth from a kit pouch, wrapped it round the barrel of his stalker bolter and rested the weapon on the gangway’s iron handrail. He almost let out a relieved breath at the woman’s faint nod of approval.

The Raven would have been proud.

In the vast hangar below, greenskin mechanics and slave-workers crawled over bomber jets with massively oversized engines and bulbous weapons pods. There was room enough there to muster a Chapter of old, cradle-space for two-score of gunships. That space was mostly filled with tin-walled tool sheds, tent hovels in which squabbling gretchin seemed to live cheek by jowl. Rubbish was piled high. Food rotted where it lay. Promethium fuel dribbled from half-empty drums.

A big ork moved amongst the aircraft, inspecting a fuselage here, booting a laggardly gretchin there. It was garbed in a cloak of tinkling chimes and wore torcs of polished bone clapped over its muscular forearms. A spectactularly horned skull enclosed its head. It danced a little as it walked, sprinkling Eidolican promethium sand over the parked engines from a rod-like aspergillum as if in blessing. The psyker. A mob of ten burly orks strapped up with shotguns and bludgeons and slabs of armour followed close behind. Every so often, one wandered off to administer a private kicking wherever their brutal code deemed it justified.

Tyris slotted a rare-pattern tranquilliser round into his bolter, muffling the click of acceptance in his hand.

‘Stalker, positions?’

The vox whispered back.

‘Vega, to your right.’

‘Iaros, second tier.’

‘Nubis and Antares,’ came the voice of the Fist Exemplar, ‘on secondary target.’

Tyris took aim down his weapon scope, the back of the ork psyker’s ugly head blowing up to fill his crosshairs. His finger rested on the trigger. He emptied his lungs. ‘Quick and quiet. On my mark.’

He fired.

Plaeos — Hive Mundus

Check 2, 00:59:13

Seawater geysered from the breach in the flooring. The abhorrent gale that emanated from the maleficar’s throbbing head sprayed it far and wild, but to Kjarvik’s heightened perceptions the individual droplets fell slowly, like snow out of season. The Emperor’s gift to His Wolves was a hunter’s senses. He felt the sting of water on his face. He heard the floodwaters frothing up through the baffles in the floor plates. His boots were already under. He could taste salt in his mouth, on his skin even, the threat heightening his senses to that extraordinary degree. The cracks and flashes of ork weapons lit the rainstorm like subsurface explosions and carved it up with bullet trails.

Baldarich was on the other side of the geyser, black armour drenched. He spread his arms to the enemy fire as though preparing himself for the penitent’s cross. Except that his gauntlets were not empty. One held his greatsword, dropping, the other a bolt pistol, freed from maglock and sweeping up.

Kjarvik was more than human in many ways, and less, arguably, in others, but there were some things that even he could not do.

He could not move faster than a bolt-round.

‘Kneel, witch.’

Time accelerated, and the Black Templar’s pistol kicked out rounds as though it knew it was catching up. The propellant burn was intense, each rapid-fired successor brightening the last. The roar was tremendous.

The ork merely cackled like a drunk entertained by a fool. Its eyes were tranced, black with maleficarum, dark veins sprouting from its head and pulsing. In no world could it have seen what was coming and yet it saw. It saw, and Kjarvik shuddered.

He did not himself see exactly what happened, only that the maleficar appeared to pump its twanging stave once around its head, and the psychic winds were whipped into a shrieking whirlwind. The floodwaters were lifted up from the ground, drawn out of the spray, shaped by the witchstorm into a funnel that enveloped the witch and his monster like a liquid caul. Where bolt-rounds penetrated they were sprayed back, spanking off walls and walker armour and striking orks down with the random hand of a god.

‘Withdraw to my position!’ Kjarvik shouted. A weird alien thought-scream filled the vox. Their harsh insertion into the underhive had spread them too thinly. ‘Draw out the maleficar and capture. The Sisters are one level below with Phareous and Bohr.’

Baldarich paused to reload.

The growing whirlpool shook to the howl of the warp, and broke before a massive fist. It burst through the watery barrier, green, a shade that was darker still seeping between clenched fingers, knuckles dusted with boiled-off salt and trailing greenish ectoplasm and steam. It shot towards the Black Templar.

‘I walk with the spirit of Saint Magneric!’

The ceramite-splitting impact pushed Baldarich through the geyser, diagonally across Kjarvik’s cover with the psychic manifestation crackling against his plastron, and shunted him through the stack of promethium drums that had been built up across the way. The stack came down on top of him, empty drums clangouring out over the walkspace floor.

Kjarvik looked for Zarrael.

The Flesh Tearer pushed into the wind, head down, the scowl on his face rippling in spite of the arm he held protectively out in front. Powered plates rattled and whined. The kill honours affixed to his left pauldron peeled off and tore away. He ground out another step, struggled to raise his eviscerator, dropped to one knee. Waterborne debris roiled outwards from the epicentre and swallowed him. He should have been flung back like scrap metal, and it was testament to the strength of his red fervour that he was not. An ork boss in cumbersome war-plate done out in jagged black and white stripes clumped through, unaffected, leaving the mighty Zarrael kneeling like a frostbitten hopeful before the statue of Russ.

‘To my position.’ Kjarvik dialled up the power of his battleplate vox for an orbital transmission. ‘Aelia,’ he said, addressing the shipmaster of the Dark Angels strike cruiser Herald of Night that was currently in low orbit above Hive Mundus. ‘Send in backup.’ He turned to Zarrael and growled, swinging up his bolt-pistol. ‘Wait for the Sisters.’

He sprayed the witchstorm with fire, ensuring that none struck the weirdboy or his beast. He was unlucky, but he was not careless. Two bolts to the armoured boss’ left shoulder caused enough damage to disable the arm’s crude motors. It did not seem to feel it, and gave a gurgling roar as it formed a fist of its power claw.

‘Waaagh!’

Eidolica — Alcazar Astra

Check 7, 01:02:22

The shot was perfection. A single tranquilliser round to the back of the head, and the ork psyker went down as though its muscles had been turned to jelly. The stalker bolter silenced the report and muffled the flash, and the psyker’s bodyguard were pointing their shotguns at shadows as Tyris ejected the one-shot magazine and slotted in a fresh sickle-mag of more conventional rounds.

Vega and Iaros opened fire from their own positions in hiding. It took Tyris the second or third round to see where they were, hidden behind a ventilation grating and amongst an extractor assembly on the second tier respectively. Tyris had trained them well. They would return to their Chapters better warriors when their work together was done.

By the time Tyris was ready to fire again there were only two orks left, running in opposite directions, which he coolly gunned down with barely a fraction of a second between aim and shot. The Sister beside him signed her approval with a hand gesture, powered her long blade, and rocketed from the gangway on her jump pack. She landed like a cat by the downed psyker, power blade purring as it made bloody mockeries of the gretchin that came running to the psyker’s aid. Two more rocket burns from opposite wings of the hangar, and Vega and Iaros broke cover to launch themselves into the open. The Doom Eagle emptied his bolter’s clip and slammed in another as he flew.

Tyris decided to save the fuel and simply jumped the handrail.

He landed with a mighty clang on the hardened metal deck, his silenced bolter gunning down ork mechanics and their gretchin slaves with calmness and grace. He, Vega and Iaros converged on the Sister at about the same time. They formed a ring and swung their weapons outwards.

‘On three,’ said Tyris.

Orks were charging in, using the aircraft as cover. Ricochets sang from their armour.

‘Two.’

In spite of the tranquilliser round and a dose of soporific that should have placated a bull grox, the psyker was still struggling. It flapped numbly against the Sister as she fixed it to her armour with clips. It must have been four times her weight. Those blows had to hurt, but the woman ignored them. She shot Tyris a look. Ready.

‘One!’

Orks piled in from every crawlway intersection and corridor. Tyris shot one between the eyes with a stalker round. Two. Three. Chewed out a chest cavity. Blew off an arm. The muffler was still on, the selector on single shot. One got in close enough to spray Vega with blood as the Doom Eagle gunned through its chest.

‘Now!’

The shout followed the same neural pathway that triggered his jump pack. Vega gave an answering roar. A big ork with a squealing chainaxe that had cut in behind Iaros and swung back its arm disappeared like tallow before a hydrogen torch as the four of them lifted off. Tyris felt a shuddering as he rose on a column of chemical burn. He threw out a hand to grab onto the Sister’s and Vega did the same. Between the three sets of jump packs they carried the drugged ork psyker up into the air and left the howls and gunfire behind. Tyris’ armour registered an impact as a startled gretchin got lucky with a snap shot, but he did not otherwise notice the damage.

The safety rail of one of several overlooking sub-decks passed beneath them.

His downward arc carried him over the fat body of an ork fighter sporting an immense set of underwing rocket pods. He hit the ground running to bleed off his momentum. Bullets fired from below rattled dully off the aircraft’s fuselage and the underside of the deck. Iaros was already down, and pushing for the searing wall of daylight that would once have been shielded by a coherence field but that was now just a burning hole in the fortress’ adamantium outer wall.

‘Antares,’ Tyris voxed, leaving Vega and the Sister to haul up the psyker and run for the exit. He checked his visor chrono. ‘We have five minutes before the Storm Eagle returns to my beacon. It will leave with us or without in six.’

‘Understood, brother-sergeant.’

A burst of gunfire exploded in volume as a set of access doors at the other end of the sub-hangar opened up. Antares backed through them, stalker bolter held one-handed to rake the opening with fire. The second Sister retreated with him, sword flickering out where a killing blow presented itself, but otherwise exploiting the Fist Exemplar’s armoured bulk as mobile cover. The secondary target was draped across his shoulders. It was the smaller of the two psykers, not much larger than the Sister of Silence. A juvenile perhaps. Whatever the complexities involved in the extraction of two psykers from Eidolica when Lord Thane had prepared them only for one, the double reward struck Tyris as worth the risk.

He had been left with no question as to the psykers’ value to the Imperium.

Antares clubbed the restive psyker into submission with a crack to the base of the skull with his bolter’s magazine, and the doors slid shut behind him. The Fist Exemplar lumped the ork off his shoulders. Bullets rang dully on the doors’ opposite side. He sealed them with a sharp burst from his bolter’s combi-melta.

‘Nubis?’ said Tyris.

‘He is not coming,’ Antares replied, voice inflected with emotion.

‘What do you mean, not coming?’

Tyris switched frequency, and was immediately overwhelmed by the squeal of bolter feedback. There was a crackling whoosh, the Salamander’s combi-flamer, followed by draconic howls.

‘Brother?’ Tyris voxed. The mass-reactive scream was his only answer. The periodic click-pause of auto-loaders provided an opening for the occasional legible word. Most of it was curses and vengeance.

But Tyris heard the name ‘Vulkan’ at least twice.

‘Move,’ said Antares. His voice was flat. Whatever he had felt before was dead now. Like his world. ‘There is nothing left for us here.’

Plaeos — Hive Mundus

Check 2, 01:02:59

Bullets sprayed from the power claw’s digital stubbers and made wobbling metallic crumps in the aluminium housing that Kjarvik sheltered behind. He rose to return fire, but found that he was barely capable of lifting his pistol against the witchstorm. By the stabbing throb in his skull and the ache in his jaw, he felt the maleficar’s attention shift from Zarrael to him. The wind ground him back first one step, then two, ankle-deep, the water still rising. The boss ork bore down, kicking out rounds, clanking plates as wide across as the back of a Rhino and glowing like an evil sun.

Kjarvik let the psyker-wind push.

The stubber, he could take. The power claw was something else entirely.

Two steps became three, and around that third step the entire universe seemed to realign.

His preternatural senses detected nothing untoward, but for all that the thunder of crashing water and the stink of fyceline surrounded him, it felt as though the bottom had fallen away from him and left those sensations hollow. It was without flavour or colour. Silenced. The orks continued to stamp and chant, but it was no longer the cacophonous force that it had been, and smaller for being the making of a horde rather than of a single overbearing power. The wind fell away. The water funnel slapped down as though something mighty had just died.

Those were the most unsubtle effects, but the least profound. The howl, not the wolf.

The expression on the maleficar’s alien face was the opposite of whatever spiritual perturbation Kjarvik felt.

Horror, even to that obscene degree, had been engineered out of the Space Marines’ fundamental makeup with the primarchs, but even had he been still human he doubted whether he could have experienced the psychic unravelling that the witch suffered now. It must have been like opening one’s eyes and finding that the illusion of a visible reality had been a dream, or awakening with no sense whatsoever of one’s physical body.

‘Get down, brother.’

Kjarvik dropped to one knee, and a ball of superheated plasma punched the mega-armoured boss ork through the chest. It dropped in a metallic clatter as Bohr moved up. Orks on the overlooking gangways belatedly opened fire, but a full-auto blizzard of bolter fire from the Iron Father’s servo-harness mowed them down. Kjarvik hardly needed to turn around to see Sommer and Rós moving up along the edges of the walkspace, in the partial shelter offered by the catwalks above them. Phareous advanced with less caution, drawing fire from both angles to where he walked up the middle.

‘Baldarich? Zarrael?’ The Iron Snake’s words were punctuated by the bang of solid rounds on his shield.

Kjarvik turned at the familiar liquidised scream of powered adamantium teeth at work on soft tissue. Freed of the psychic winds, the Flesh Tearer had closed on the maleficar’s orca-like mount and had his howling weapon buried in the monster’s flippered forelimb. Zarrael had his mouth wide open and basked in the spray.

With a wail of something more freeing than mere pain, the amphibeast reared up on its vestigial hindlimbs. It pawed with webbed claws at its collar, throwing the psyker from its back, and almost incidentally swatted the Flesh Tearer contemptuously from the walkspace and into the water.

Though no longer wreathed in lightning, the monster was still massive, more so now that everything around it had become inexplicably smaller, and it flattened an ork walker the way a cat would flatten a mouse. It carelessly shoved a heavier fighting machine off the walkway as it limped around, then snapped at another, snatched it up in its jaws and sent it smashing through the orks that had been mobbing in behind. They had been ready to break before the psyker had arrived to bolster their belligerent spirit, and they broke now, pounding through the ruined floodgates.

The amphibeast’s rampage back through its master’s escort had left the witch untended in the middle of the walkspace, spread amidst a floating mess of bent cogwheels and split plates like a scrap heap that someone had taken the trouble to build, but then abandoned to the floods.

‘He is yours, Iron Father.’ Kjarvik turned into the sporadic fire still raining down from above. ‘Phareous, remain with the Sisters and cover us.’

‘As ordered.’

Kjarvik took position over the downed ork psyker. Despite its injuries it was very definitely conscious, but too occupied smashing its own forehead into the puddled flooring to notice him. Loose rounds from above spanked off his plate, but the fire was aimless and half-hearted.

Bohr lowered himself with a hydraulic wheeze and examined the raging maleficar’s armoured frame. The ork’s head was bigger than the Iron Father’s torso. Its leather strapping could have encased him and Kjarvik both and left room to move. He rammed a piston-enhanced fist into the side of the ork’s head for good measure, then began spooling a length of heavy-duty chain from a hopper clamped to his hip. He bent to the task. A slug hit off a flicking mechadendrite and blew out an articulation segment. ‘We need to move it now or it will drown.’

Kjarvik stood up and growled into his gorget vox. ‘Now.’

From the crowded levels above there came the squeal of metal being torn, a reverberating clang as of a square of bulkhead that had been ripped out of a wall crashing onto a companionway. The torrential whine of an assault cannon carved through the orks on the left-hand walkways like a cutting beam. From the right, a wave of fiery promethium hurled a pair of incinerated greenskins through the handrail, back from the huge, flame-lit bulk of a Dreadnought in Dark Angels green. It stamped through a ventilation grate and shredded an ork in its power fist.

The Dreadnoughts Maloch and Azazael had been inserted into the hive by drop pod once the orks’ attentions — including that of the witch — had been focused on Umbra. The Vlka Fenryka were savage when savagery was demanded, but nothing pleased them like the chance to secure a victory through cleverness.

Kjarvik looked left to where Azazael tore through the remaining orks, too hemmed in to escape. There would be no reasoning with the ancient one now. Not until every greenskin in reach was jelly under his feet. He turned to Maloch. ‘Get down here and lift. Azazael will clear our path to Penitent Wrath.’

‘You are a sly wolf, I will not deny,’ Phareous laughed.

‘We have won nothing yet,’ said Bohr. His augmetised voice was the material doppelganger to the Sister’s null-psychic chill. ‘Let us move. And pray that our brothers do as well.’

Valhalla — Kalinin, north

Check 3, 01:19:45

+++CHECK+++

+++VERIFIED+++

+++ TRANSLATIONAL DISCREPANCY CONFIRMED+++

+++18:59:02+++

Tulwei’s attack bike sped over over the pot-holed terrain. Combatants flashed through the snow and disappeared. Vehicle wrecks lay skewed on the ice, Chimera and Leman Russ hulks belching smoke. Valhallans in ice-world camouflage streamed in the opposite direction. Amplified, inhuman bellows set the snowfall to trembling. Tulwei gunned the accelerator and pulled ahead.

The approach to Kalinin had been contested for almost a year and the deep holes of Demolisher and Earthshaker shells were themselves riddled with mass-reactive craters and stubber casings. The vivid red bodywork of pursuing ork vehicles swept in and out of view. Buggies bounced over the devasted tundra, breaking, swerving, screeching through channels between the larger craters. Kill-Team Tigrus’ durable suspension and shock-responsive tyres tackled the terrain better than the orks’ overpowered machines ever could.

‘How could they have predicted our approach?’ yelled Sentar, pivoting the sidecar’s heavy bolter to maul an ork bike as though it were a ration can attacked with a fork.

‘I do not know.’ And then, voxed on the squad channel, ‘Keep to the coordinates that the general fed back.’

‘Where is the general?’

‘I lost his signal in the retreat. Keep to target,’ said Tulwei.

Vehuel’s gunner pivoted his heavy bolter until it was as close to directly backward as it could turn, and fired. A stream of accelerated rounds puffed up the ice and ripped through a mob of manoeuvring bikers. Snowmelt and bits of engine housing rattled down over the surrounding craters, not nearly enough to fill them. A truck packed with bawling ork warriors ploughed into the hole and flipped over. More vehicles veered around the obstacle and gunned the throttle. Scores of bikes, half a dozen troop trucks and half-tracks were just behind. The orks bellowed, mad with speed, firing wild with sidearms and mounted weaponry, pennons flapping madly from whipping flagpoles.

For all the machines’ technical failings, their raw acceleration was incredible.

‘Where is the psyker?’ Tulwei shouted, and swung a left between two particularly deep, thermically glassed impact craters. Grigorus zipped after him, then the Sisters of Silence in their sleek-bodied vehicles, and finally Abathar and Vehuel on bikes at the rear.

A dark smudge appeared under the snow ahead. It was at the point where the two craters were at their closest, practically touching, barely metres apart. It grew out of the ice as he raced towards it: a battlewagon, parked side-on to Tulwei’s approach and effectively blockading the pass. The orks piled into the back hooted and shot into the air as Tulwei yelled a curse and swerved.

His bike skidded on the ice. White snow, black truck, round and round. As he wrestled with his steering bars, he saw an armour-fronted ork gun ’copter rise up over the lip of one of the craters like the breaching topfin of a shark. Its gun mounts blazed. Shells chomped through the ice towards the snarled-up bike squadron, loud, slow, as though its underslung machine cannons were driven by a hand-crank that spat out rounds. The stream of fire carved through Grigorus and Abathar and slugged the ice on the other side before either of them had a chance to reverse. The lead Sister slammed into Grigorus’ back and died in a cartwheel of black and gold. The second had time to swerve, and sped away from the pile-up, bouncing and skidding as she brought her bike under control.

Tulwei turned into the spin and screeched out of it, gunning for the hovering ’copter just as a krak missile corkscrewed from a shoulder launcher carried by one of the orks in the battlewagon and disintegrated Vehuel’s machine. The Dark Angel tumbled into the ice.

Of the Sister of Silence there was no sign but a brake mark at the lip of the crater.

Firing up at the ork ’copter with his bolt pistol as it veered and began to climb away, he slowly reduced speed. He stopped, surveying the wreckage, aware of the ork fighters storming over the ice from their battlewagon. Ork bikes rumbled in from the other side in low gear.

A trap. They had known he was coming.

Without a word between them, Sentar opened fire on the bikes. Tulwei loosed rounds into the charging infantry.

Kalinin was going to fall. The Imperium could follow.

He could only hope that someone had succeeded where he had failed.

Six

Koorland’s armour was polished, perfect, garlanded with every honour and citation ever worn by a Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists, so high a yellow that it sparkled under the wall-bracketed lumen bulbs like gold. If his predecessor, Cassus Mirhen, had ever encased himself in such ostentation then Koorland would have thought him ridiculous. No one laughed now. He was just himself beginning to realise that perhaps they were right not to. It had been Ullanor that had changed him, standing in Vulkan’s presence, hearing his words. The primarch had taught him the power of symbols.

Ironic, if that were not too light a word, that the Imperium’s darkest day since Isstvan should be the day on which Koorland, last of the Imperial Fists, finally understood his role.

Senatorum ushers and Palace staff with pinched faces and grubby uniforms waited fractiously by the staircases to the Great Chamber’s few standing galleries that remained open. Hektor Rosarind, the Chancellor of the Imperial Estates, had outlawed the use of water for washing. Koorland had even heard of Chartist vessels returning to the asteroid belt and the Jovian moons in search of water ice and — the odd floating rock aside — they had been exhausted millennia before the Great Crusade. The tired officials drifted out of the way as Koorland walked towards the Great Chamber.

No one made a path for himself like a Space Marine with a purpose.

‘Word is in from Kill-Team Stalker,’ said Thane, marching in step behind his left shoulder. ‘The Adeptus Astra Telepathica interpreted the message this morning, and it was handed to me personally by Anwar’s staff.’

‘Thank him for his alacrity and tell him to begin forwarding messages to the Inquisition from now on. Meme-banks containing the kill-teams’ rendezvous coordinates, and our subsequent destinations, will be couriered to your ship at once.’

‘This clandestine skulking sits ill with me,’ muttered Bohemond.

The two Chapter Masters walked a step behind, garbed in plain robes. Those of the Fist Exemplar were grey, the Black Templar’s bone white, a black surplice over the top with the Sigismund cross emblazoned across the breast. In accordance with convention, the pair had surrendered their arms to the Lucifer Blacks before entering the Inner Palace, but Bohemond, as always, retained the Sword of Sigismund, belted at his side. The High Marshal regarded the genuflecting mortal dignitaries with a curl of his melted lip, his lidless augmetic eye picking them off one by one.

‘I despise every second,’ he finished.

‘The Beast must not be allowed to become aware of our plans,’ Koorland said. ‘Not until it is too late.’

‘I am scarcely aware of them. How then can I fairly call them plans?’

‘You will have coordinates of your own, brother. I trust you will be with me at the finish.’

Bohemond’s good eye spasmed. ‘You will find Abhorrence there ahead of you.’

‘I will hold you to your word, brother.’ He glanced over the other shoulder. ‘I will be making Alcazar Remembered my flagship. You will cede the remainder of your fleet strength to Issachar’s command.’

Thane bowed in acquiescence. There was no pride in the Chapter Master. Disaster had stalked the Fists Exemplar since the outbreak of the great Waaagh. They had lost their home world, Eidolica, half their fleet at Vandis, been further diminished by the battles for Mars, Caldera, and then Ullanor. They were the wider Imperium in microcosm. They no longer had the capacity to conduct this scale of operation alone.

‘For Dorn, brother.’

Bohemond watched his brother Chapter Master depart with a scowl, arms crossed over his surplice, and glanced towards the heavy adamantium-reinforced oak doors at the corridor’s end. They trembled slightly under the low bass bombardment of a powerful augmitter system. A few dulled words drifted down the corridor like smoke from an impact crater.

‘We need to talk about the Ecclesiarch.’

The reminder brought Koorland a flare of renewed anger and guilt. The anger was partly at himself, the resentment of which only goaded his temper further. ‘He left me little choice.’

‘Regardless, your actions leave a hole that needs to be filled, and now. It is in times of darkness and privation that the words of the witch or the heretic will be heeded. The people need certainty. They need the guidance of their Ecclesiarch.’ He dug into his habit and brought forth a data-slate. ‘At my invitation, the Adeptus Ministorum have provided a list of potential successors.’

With a sigh, Koorland stopped walking. He turned, enclosed his brother’s shoulder in one etched and damascened gauntlet.

The Black Templars’ conversion to their own variant of the Imperial Creed had, for some time, been the most open of open secrets amongst the sons of Dorn. Perhaps it would be better to stamp down hard, now, before such practices could embed and pervert. Vulkan had shown him a better way, and he would not have the Black Templars recalled as the sons of Dorn who had stumbled down the Word Bearers’ path.

‘The Emperor neither recognised His own divinity, nor encouraged His worship. Indeed, He enforced the opposite point with more than mere words. Such practices will no longer be sanctioned in His Imperium.’

The ruined, semi-augmetic face that glared back at him was expressionless, but the flesh eye bulged with an emotion that Koorland did not believe he had ever felt and did not recognise. Bohemond’s voice was quiet, like a melta beam, as he withdrew the slate and returned it to the fold in his habit. ‘Tell that to Magneric.’

Koorland let his breath out slowly.

It had been too late to save Lorgar too.

Furious suddenly, he turned and flung an arm towards the Great Chamber’s heavy doors. A handful of Chapter serfs in dulled yellow habits stood there with hands clasped, surrounded by a full squad of Lucifer Blacks in mirror-black ballistic carapace and softly humming shock-glaives.

‘Open the doors,’ Koorland boomed, stunning the hallway to silence. ‘I did not summon the people to hide from them.’

Great tiers of seating rose above Koorland on all sides as he strode down the processional to the dais. There were several other aisles through the auditorium seating, bringing in lesser lords, military officers, and senior officials from other wings of the Inner Palace, but most of them were roped off. Rubble was heaped up, sometimes covered with banners, but the attempt at concealment only made the wounds more obvious and drew the eye, from a deep-seated human instinct for self-preservation, to the ceiling. A piece of alien moon-rock extruded through the angelic frescoes. Most of the larger fragments from the attack moon’s destruction had missed the Palace or been broken up by the air-defence grids. This was one of the smaller ones. It was about the size of a Land Raider.

A large circular dais lit from multiple rigs and occupied by twelve high-backed chairs dominated the centre of the auditorium. It rotated slowly, almost imperceptibly, like the slow tick of a bomb mechanism, but Koorland’s genetics had been painstakingly coded to render him acutely conscious of such subtle changes.

The noise of several thousand, a fraction of what the intact arena could have held, rose exponentially as Koorland’s arrival was noted. Word spread. The clamour grew. Even with his great genetic gifts he could not separate the individual voices that cried out to him, but he recognised the fear and the doubt that Bohemond had diagnosed, the desperation for some sliver of hope. Whole districts had been lost to hive quakes and the calamities wrought by the unintended destruction of the ork moon. Millions had died in the Proletarian Crusade. Millions more had perished since. Rare skills had been lost forever. People starved. Families froze in the rubble of their homes for want of the fuel or blankets or warm food that Terra had long since exhausted the raw materials to manufacture for itself.

But here stood an Imperial Fist, the golden embodiment of endurance.

A symbol.

Koorland felt the weight of their attention. A tingle on the back of his neck, under the grizzled skin between his temples and eyes. Was this what Rogal Dorn had felt when he had manned the defences of Terra against the Arch-Heretic? Was it a feeling that the Emperor Himself would have recognised, as He stood upon this very site to declare His Crusade to retake the galaxy for mankind? The feeling that the world about them was about to be changed.

Tobris Ekharth of the Administratum currently had the podium, but stalled mid-sentence as Koorland took the steps onto the dais. The small man coughed nervously into the forest of pickups, scratchily echoing himself to every corner of the ruined colosseum. He dabbed a few droplets of sweat from his forehead on an embroidered cloth and leaned unnecessarily into the pickup field, blinking under the lights.

‘This extraordinary session of the Senatorum can now commence, convened at the special behest of Koorland, Lord Commander, in the wake of the death of High Lord Mesring, Ecclesiarch of the Adeptus Ministorum.’ Eckharth cleared his throat once more and hurriedly ceded the podium.

Koorland nodded his acceptance of it.

To his left, six chairs stretched out in a staggered line. Lansung, Verreault, Wienand sitting with Veritus standing behind her like an empty suit of armour, Gibran, Sark and Anwar. And to the right, six more. Tull, Kubik, Zeck, Ekharth as he nervously took his, and two more that stood empty. One belonged to him.

And so, ultimately did the other.

He held that empty seat in his gaze. The banner of the Adeptus Ministorum flapped limply from a rig above it.

‘The Ecclesiarch is dead,’ he began, drawing his eyes from the chair to stare out into the lights, their enhanced musculature adapting quickly and painlessly to the glare. ‘He was killed. Here. By my hand.’ His gaze rose, tier by tier of sudden gasps and mortified silence. ‘He thought to frighten you with truth, but what his church has forgotten is that the Emperor… is… truth!’

He straightened in a whir of servos and looked to those currently sat behind the dais, his own augmitted voice booming ‘truth!’ back to him.

‘Believe that you are better than the Ecclesiarchy has allowed you to be. As the Emperor believed. Many of you will have been here the day that the great Vulkan returned to us. Who remembers the joy they felt at the reunion, the hope?’

Murmured cries of assent began to circulate, the rustling of leaves compared to his augmeticised thunder. His voice became a growl.

‘Know then that it was a joy he did not share. Vulkan did not recognise the Imperium he saw on his return. He saw the values that the Emperor had given us, that he and his brothers had fought for, corrupted or cast aside. He made plain to me his opinion of those that have led you so low.’

The rest of the High Twelve looked distinctly uncomfortable. Only the heavily augmented and thus nigh-unreadable faces of Zeck and Kubik showed anything approximating support. No matter. The tide of history had receded for a time, but now it came again and the Lords could turn or they could be swept away.

He turned back to the fan array of pickups, thumped the lectern with a powered fist to emphasise his next words.

‘Mankind. Is. Better.’

He looked down over the cushioned pews of the minor lords. They would have taken their seats today as the men with most to gain from a reordering of the High Twelve. For all their power, the cocoons of influence that kept them clothed and well fed, they were far more terrified of him than their starving households were of the orks. All but one or two.

Koorland nodded grimly to the familiar faces in the crowd.

‘I know that you are afraid. I know that you suffer. I know that you do not expect me, being as I am, to understand, but know this — I would give my life for any one of yours, as would Vulkan in my place. Mesring feared the Beast, and he was not wrong to do so. I have seen the Beast’s power.’ He licked at lips that were suddenly dry, blinked in the light. ‘I was there when Vulkan fell.’

The Great Chamber erupted with anger and panic, outraged denials transforming the auditorium into a cauldron of noise. One voice was indistinguishable from another, but he could see people screaming, red-faced, others leaningagainst the chair back in front in fervent prayer. Lansung looked white enough to pass out. To his right, Verreault was on his feet, remonstrating with a junior clerk in the third row, though over what, Koorland could not make out. The primarch’s death was no secret. Nothing so profound that had been witnessed by so many could be kept so, but Koorland suspected that most would not have believed the tales until now. He raised his hands and shouted them down.

‘This is truth! No lie can diminish it. Only through facing a truth can we hope to make it good. Vulkan fell, but not in vain. In his name we build a new Imperium. In his name we fight for a new future for mankind, the future that the Emperor dreamed that you would one day have.’ He did not say we. For the Adeptus Astartes, there would always be war. ‘Free of threats from without. Free of lies spread from within.’ He turned towards the empty chair, and pointed at it. ‘It begins here.’ And back. ‘The Adeptus Ministorum will no longer be counted amongst the High Twelve. Their privileges are revoked, their holdings to be levied for men and materiel the same as any other ministry of mankind. We will rebuild!’

Stunned silence made a vacuum in the shape of an ovation, a black hole of stilled incomprehension. He had expected…

He had no idea what he had expected. But he had spoken the truth.

He pushed himself from the lectern, as unaccountably furious as he had been when he had barged through those doors. As when he had executed Mesring. As when he had received the recording that, had he seen it a little earlier, might have saved a primarch’s life. The Lords looked up at him like chastened children, terrified of a suddenly violent, superhuman father.

‘You will join me in the Cerebrium in fifteen minutes. The High Twelve is overdue a change.’ He nodded to the empty chair, and then made his way towards the doors. ‘See that that banner is taken down. And someone summon Vangorich!’

Seven

Drakan Vangorich eased his hands along the carved wooden armrests of his new chair with some considerable pleasure. It was a beautiful thing, all braids and shine, and little bits of gold where the wood met that outrageously forgiving cushioned back. Europan, if he wasn’t mistaken, somewhere around the middle third of M3. He sighed and sat back into it. The leather squeaked in a pleasing fashion.

The window across from the sceptrewood table and antique marble handwash basin opened onto an acrid swirl of fortress spires, lighting twinkling in the smog layer like stars. The many faces of the Emperor looked on from marble walls, friezes carved in rare woods. Artworks hung in golden frames: portraits of women mostly, and not, to put it delicately, in a fit state of dress for their current altitude. Weird, black-skinned statuettes stood on pedestals.

Vangorich studied one for a moment, its proportions artistically imprecise, only looking up when a serving girl, recruited, it seemed, on the grounds of aesthetic perfection, approached through the thick carpet bearing a refreshment tray. Vangorich held up a glass, she filled it with something pink and fragrant from a platinum ewer, and he idly swirled it as she left.

He had visited Mesring’s apartments before, of course, but it felt different this time.

He knocked back the oddly tasteless wine and let the enzyme grafts lining his mouth and throat do their work, cleansing the liquid of alcohol and other toxins before it hit his stomach. Then he set the glass neatly on the table.

‘How does it feel to be one of the Twelve, then, sir?’ asked Beast Krule.

‘Very much the same as before, actually. Power is less about what’s given to you than what you take. And besides, it’s only provisional.’

Krule stood to one side of the table, between a statuette and a pedestal bearing a pottery fragment. A ripple of torso broke the cameleoline illusion of stillness and a data-slate slid across the table. The high varnish barely even whispered ‘friction’ until Vangorich trapped it under his fingers.

He turned it over, face up, and took a long look at the seal.

‘Where did you get this?’

Krule shrugged.

Vangorich picked up the slate. The Black Templars seal had already been bypassed.

‘A list of possible Ecclesiarchs,’ Krule said. ‘Drawn up by the Adeptus Ministorum at Bohemond’s request. Give me the night and I can whittle that list down for you. The High Marshal too, naturally.’

‘Eager for a little light exercise?’

‘The High Marshal’s going to be a problem, sir, in the long run. We both know it.’

‘And there I was thinking you wanted a contest with arguably the greatest warrior in the Adeptus Astartes. No.’ Vangorich tossed the slate back across the table. ‘No. I’m prepared to give the new Ecclesiarch the benefit of the doubt.’

‘Very… magnanimous, sir.’

‘Thank you, but I have enough here on Terra to deal with the entire Ecclesiarchy leadership a hundred times over without needing to call on my best. No.’ He leaned in, and Krule inched forwards. ‘The Twelve’s meeting with Koorland was about more than my investiture, overdue as it was. He’s gathering his assets for some kind of covert strike. To draw the Beast out, I presume. Inquisition, Militarum, Deathwatch, even the Mechanicus — he’s assembling an execution force for which he wants the deadliest men he can get, and so naturally I recommended you.’

‘Too kind, sir.’

Vangorich flashed a modest grin and sat back. ‘I’d go myself, but I can’t oversee everything in person. I hope to get a message to the Culexus Temple, but it’s a long way away from here and who knows if they’ll receive it in time. I’d like to have something to offer Koorland on his return, something to keep Wienand and the Lady Brassanas on their toes. That temper of Koorland’s is the only thing keeping them all off each other’s backs right now, but seeing me across the table from now on might remind them of the knife at their throats.’

‘Metaphorically, of course.’

Vangorich felt his smile subtly alter. He had a cultivated public image of urbanity, but the smile he wore now was of a man who spent every day in a mask, the sort of smile that no one wanted to see on the face of a Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum. ‘Metaphorical knives, you’ll find, cut every bit as sharp. Mesring’s fate won’t be soon forgotten.’

Krule nodded reluctantly.

‘Second thoughts?’

‘Koorland wasn’t the only one on Ullanor when the primarch died. A primarch, sir.’

‘Alcazar Remembered breaks orbit in an hour. Be on it.’ Vangorich slid a briefing packet back across the table. Krule scooped it up in his big hand and turned away. ‘Keep him alive, Krule, whatever his plan is. Right now, he is the Imperium. Oh, and one other thing—’ A shimmer against the portrait on the wall near the door betrayed the movement of Krule’s head. ‘Be sure Wienand keeps herself out of trouble.’

Terra — the Imperial Palace

Check 0, 04:13:39

‘You disapprove.’

Wienand stood with hands clasped behind her back, watching the Inquisitorial gunboats that slowly crisscrossed the Palace skyline through the silvered tint of the armourglass. Their black, slab-hulled bodies patrolled the surrounding spires, weapon hardpoints twitching, the deceptively ponderous sweep of their rotors mirrored across plasteel and glass. She watched a moment longer, then looked over her shoulder when she got no reply.

‘You have a way of being silent when you disapprove.’

Veritus nodded stiffly, the pallid skin of his neck creaking like old leather. ‘I can think of wiser places to be than on the Abhorrence in the middle of a new Crusade.’

‘It’s not exactly my first choice.’

‘Sigismund was a maniac. Even the Sigillite was overheard saying so. His successors are almost worse, striving to preserve a philosophy they lack the wit to inherit or the skill to prosecute. They will be at the forefront of any battle, and your protection will be far from their priority.’

Wienand’s ghostly reflection in the glass smiled in amusement. It was not so very long ago that she and Veritus had been trying to kill one another. ‘Koorland has ceded control of the Deathwatch, but through gritted teeth, and the Deathwatch will know it. I will have to earn their respect before they will follow an order without first taking it to Koorland or Thane.’

‘Or the new Watch Commander.’

‘Or him.’

The armourglass rattled as a gunboat passed close, flak turrets smoothly tracking it until it was gone. ‘Koorland is charismatic but naïve. I don’t doubt that his first act after the current crisis ends will be to dissolve the Deathwatch as he has always claimed he will.’ She turned fully from the window, hands still clasped behind her. ‘I can’t let that happen.’

‘Why?’

Wienand was pacing before she realised it. She could never sit while others stood, and Veritus almost never sat. Others assumed it good manners on her part, but that was only a front. A seated individual had further to move to react to a threat than a standing one. And she didn’t trust Veritus quite that much.

‘For the Imperium. The Inquisition is too important to fight amongst itself, or to depend on the resources of others, and our current arrangement seems to work well. You and those that think as you do attend to the Chaos threat, and I to that of the alien. Perhaps it’s time it was formalised into something permanent, so that an argument over who or what represents the greater threat to mankind will never again cripple us as it nearly did.’

Veritus nodded, accepting the unspoken charge.

‘Consider the possibilities,’ Wienand went on. ‘An alien-hunting strike-force that pools the greatest talents of the Space Marine Chapters, one that can be deployed anywhere in the galaxy, to arenas too hostile even for an Inquisitorial rosette to provide safety.’

‘That is a tremendous amount of power for you to wield. Power that you promised the Lord Commander would be shared.’

She took a deep breath and stopped pacing, turning to face Veritus fully. ‘Perhaps that power could be balanced by a force of Chaos hunters drawn along similar lines.’

Veritus’ suit sucked and wheezed around his corpse neck like a ventilator. It blew out an odour of cinnamon-scented oils and formaldehyde, and made the cuneiformed papyrus strips hung from his armour flutter like spirits with secrets. His eyelids fluttered drily. It was a tic, the tired rattle of an ancient cogitator, one that Wienand had come to associate with the deep dredging of ancient memory. ‘There is a Space Marine Chapter, based on Titan, that might serve.’

For a moment, Wienand found herself at a loss for words. She turned back to the window and looked out over the scarred, quake-blistered skyline.

‘An entire Chapter? Here? What in the name of the Throne were they doing while orks invaded Terra and Mars threatened outright rebellion?’

‘They have… special interests. Their existence is known only to a few.’

Wienand was long resigned to the fact that Veritus specialised in things known only to a few.

‘I will make the necessary overtures,’ he said after a moment, his lips animating to peel open in something too cadaverous and black-centred to be called a smile. ‘And I will ensure that power does not rush too strongly to Vangorich’s head. Though he flatters himself to think so, Malcador he is not.’

‘Don’t worry about Drakan. It’s out there, with Koorland, that things hinge now. He’s been fixated on the High Lords’ problems for so long that I think the changing centre of gravity has passed him by.’

The old inquisitor’s lips settled back into their corpselike repose. His eyes, now unblinking, found the reflection of hers. ‘Do not forget Krule. I doubt that Vangorich intends to be a complete bystander.’

‘I will have Raznick with me.’

‘Take more.’

‘There will be more waiting.’

‘You suspect. Koorland reveals nothing of your destination.’

‘Though it’s with a fleet of Inquisitorial barges that he intends to get there. I will be as safe as I can be.’

For a long spell, Veritus was silent, and Wienand feared that she was the focus of another unspoken reprimand. ‘Look out for him. For better or worse, Koorland is the only thing that holds the Imperium together.’

‘You don’t sound convinced that it is better.’

Veritus snorted, a crackling wheeze like the start of an old recording. ‘His diagnosis that the Imperium is not what it once was or was intended to be is correct, but, though it is not my place to question a primarch, Vulkan was missing for a thousand years. He lacked certain facts. The Emperor’s ambition for mankind was the product of an innocent time.’

‘Making this, what, a guilty one?’

It was a joke, but Veritus just looked at her, eyes dead, a slight curl to his upper lip.

‘Emperor watch over you both,’ he said, when he was ready. ‘I will be here when you return.’

Terra — orbital

Check 0, 05:22:46

Cold white vapour lay over the floor of the flight deck like a sub-zero froth, clinging to the thighs of the void-suited tech-serfs that hurried through it. The grinding closure of the anterior blast doors behind Thane’s back drew a ripple through the stew that lapped at the drab grey ceramite of his greaves.

He crossed the length of the deck. The hard grey mullions between launch bay doors passed slowly on his right, the rust-swathe crescent of Terra’s southern hemisphere dominating the spaces. There were no clouds. Terra no longer had a water cycle to speak of, but he could see gun-blimps, sub-orbital platforms, rad-harvesters, drifting across the slow-turning world like something robotically similar.

As he walked, a matt-grey Thunderhawk broke the coherence field in a squeal of spasming countervalencies and roared a few dozen metres over his head, turning tortuously on its axis before coming down in a marked bay in a blast of coolant vapours.

Incoming transports disgorged armoured Space Marines, or serfs laden with gear and pushing pallets stacked with equipment crates. Others were in the process of take-off, ferrying visiting officials and liaison staff back to their own ships.

Thane ignored the bustle, heading for the group of three gunships that were in the process of being unloaded at the far end of the deck. They were as devoid of Chapter icons and embellishment as any Fists Exemplar craft, but they were black. Quartermaster Heroth stood in the fountaining vapours with a clipboard tucked under one arm, glittering void suit made stiff with cold, and personally shook the hand of the more human of the disembarking passengers.

Thane recognised the Assassin, Krule, his big hand currently crushing the wincing Quartermaster’s, a light kit bag slung over the same shoulder. The magi, Eldon Urquidex and Phaeton Laurentis, he knew also. The latter scuttled down the boarding ramp on his tripod assembly, accompanied by a servitor pushing a tracked cart containing a set of lead containers marked with the Cog Mechanicus and cautionary runes in Low Gothic and binharic. Urquidex moved serenely a short distance behind. His left arm had been replaced with a bulky augmetic. His head was bald, bar-stamped and still scarred from the aborted surgical process of lobotomisation. His telescopic optics and facial grafts made the magos’ emotions alien to Thane, but the periodic twitch of his digital bionics seemed to betray his nerves. The ranger alpha seconded from the Taghmata to safeguard Mars’ investment met Thane’s regard with hard lenses of machined glass. Steam hissed from the blue-glowing cells of the plasma caliver in his articulated hands.

Kavalanera Brassanas and half a dozen of her Sisters gathered together, detached, parchment strips fluttering under the idling turbofans, in silent communion. About twice that number, Thane knew, would be distributed across Abhorrence, Punished, and the Anokrono. Six more hopefully waited at their separate rendezvous coordinates.

Leaning against their depowering gunship were two more that Thane did not know.

A pair of hugely muscular ogryn, their sloping brows almost level with the gunship roof, grunted at each other in their slow, sub-Gothic dialect. Their khaki vest tops hung open over slab-muscled chests and glittered with newly minted Ullanor campaign pins, Aquila Company patches, and numerous greatly loved honorifica for valour.

This was Koorland’s kill-team: the thirty or so that would succeed where the Emperor’s millions had failed.

‘The Lord Commander ordered me to find quarters for this group,’ said Heroth, still massaging his hand as Thane approached.

‘So I’ve been informed. Any further orders?’

‘No, lord.’

Thane grunted, somewhat disappointed, then looked up towards the tremendous metallic impact that rang against one of the gunship’s troop ramps.

‘Thane!’

The welcome came as a feline snarl from the closest gunship’s open hatch. A Space Marine in Deathwatch black bedecked in skull tokens and animal pelts walked down the ramp with his helm in his hands and the easy, nonchalant stride of an alpha wolf. He looked from side to side, seemingly idly, as he descended, an apex carnivore sizing up these other beasts that grazed on its plain.

Thane noted that even the skitarius looked away.

The first ever Watch Commander of the Deathwatch swept off the ramp, and thumped Thane with an embrace that had his gyros whirring to compensate. Thane awkwardly returned the bear hug, overwhelmed by raw animal charisma and the damp scent of musk. Thumping his rerebrace violently, the Wolf Lord pulled back. He smiled. His look might have been described as thoughtful, considered even, were it not for the set of sharp, overly long fangs.

‘Well met, Asger. Warfist’

‘And you, cousin.’ He slid one long arm across Thane’s shoulders and crushed his pauldron to his chest, a purring growl rolling from the back of his throat. ‘I never thought I would need to shake the hand of so many I have never met in one day.’

‘You grow accustomed to it.’

‘See my gladness at being here for just this one day. My ship translated into system barely six hours ago and I am already wearied by it.’ He turned to show the new crest on his armour. Thane could still smell the paint. ‘Though some idea of what the role of Watch Commander entails would have been welcome.’

‘If it makes you feel better, I am not sure either.’

Asger snorted, amused, as Thane’s gorget bead chimed. He held up a finger to forestall any further conversation. ‘Thane here.’

‘Lord Commander Koorland reports aboard, lord.’ The vox-whisper barely made it through the interference bands, but Shipmaster Weylon Kale was an old hand. A little inevitable physical deterioration was a fair price for almost three centuries of experience. ‘The shipmasters of Bulwark and Faceless Warrior also report ready. Lord Bohemond’s flotilla has cleared the exit lanes and is under way for the Mandeville point, and Lord Issachar signals that he now waits only on us.’

‘Inform Punished that we are ready.’

‘Signalled, lord. Lords Cuarrion and Verpall forward their regrets.’

Asger smirked, his hearing sharper even than Thane’s, and good enough to pick out the scratch of another man’s gorget bead over the flight deck’s clamour. ‘I do not envy the Iron Knight his chance to play guard dog over Terra, though I envy the Crimson Fist the opportunity to warm Koorland’s seat in the Great Chamber even less.’

Thane chose not to comment.

The loss of Quesadra remained too raw to properly acknowledge whatever difficulties his successor faced in filling his boots. So complete had been the Crimson Fists’ destruction on Ullanor that Cuarrion had barely made sergeant before his elevation to Chapter Master. They would stand guard over the Palace under Chapter Master Vorkogun and his similarly depleted Executioners, alongside the sentinels of the new-formed Imperial Fists.

‘There is also a personal communication for you, lord, from the Anokrono.’

Leaving Heroth to his duties with a nod, Thane withdrew to a stack of munitions crates beneath a little-used catwalk where it was marginally quieter than the rest of the deck.

‘Put it through.’

There was a click as the shipmaster switched channels and then a garbled hiss, the signal no longer a wired ship line but a ship-to-ship transmission through an intensely busy orbital space. There were vox-protocols, but they were poorly enforced and civilian transports rarely adhered to them.

‘Forgive the indulgence, Brother Thane,’ spoke the uncommonly cultured tones of Euclydeas, Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers. ‘But after our last meeting I felt a “good luck” was in order.’

‘It is welcome.’ Thane and Euclydeas had fought side-by-side on Ullanor, two of seven Chapter Masters that had formed Vulkan’s vanguard into the Great Beast’s temple-gargant. A day that would live on in future histories, if the Imperium endured to retell it.

He sighed. Quesadra was not the only one to fall. Odaenathus of the Ultramarines had also been slain, a mantle that was still to be taken up.

‘We will both need plenty of it,’ Thane said, ‘I have no doubt.’

‘Agreed, and I intend to buy my share with ork blood.’

‘I hope to fight beside you again come the end, brother.’

‘Likewise. I have already spoken with Issachar. My fleet will follow you out. For Dorn. For the Emperor. For freedom.’

There was a click, and then silence as the Chapter Master severed the line.

‘To the war then,’ said Asger.

‘To test Koorland’s new weapon.’

‘I have heard of it. And if it does not work as he hopes?’

Thane gestured to the row of towering launch bay doors and their view of Terra, as though this alone explained everything. ‘Then nothing changes.’

Eight

It always took a ship’s real space systems a few minutes to recover but, despite his own post-Geller-collapse nausea, Urquidex had been sufficiently drilled in the procedure to get himself aboard the Thunderhawk and strapped in when it had occured. The skitarii ranger, Alpha 13-Jzzal, had checked his harness, then slotted in alongside.

The post-event syndromes made Urquidex’s mind squirm as though his skull had been opened for an augmentation procedure that he had not submitted to, memories of his time on the lobotomisation slab, implanted electrodes making his skin tingle and his limbs jerk. He could taste vomit in his mouth and thought he could smell it on his robes. There had barely been time to realign his senses to the restored reality before the Blood Angel, Gadreel, had guided the gunship from its hangar.

But then, Space Marine physiology tolerated translation better.

‘Are you all right, magos?’ asked the Inquisitorial storm trooper, a colonel named Rothi, in the opposite harness, holding on to the vertical bars.

Urquidex nodded, trying hard not to be sick again as the Thunderhawk passed through her parent ship’s void shields with a bump. Thrust rippled through his flesh organics as the gravitational forces pushed him hard against the restrictor bar.

Seeking something fixed to settle his churning stomach, his telescoping eyestalks sought out the nearest viewing block. Behind them, more troop ships streaming from its launch bays, the castellated bulk of the Inquisitorial flagship, Verisimilis, was a bulwark of darkness against the steady light of the stars. More heavily armed than the standard Black Ship template, and several times more massive than the spartan menace of Alcazar Remembered, the Inquisitorial flagship had been born black. Enveloped by an aegis of literal and metaphysical wards, and with a standard crew complement now supplemented with Deathwatch Space Marines, it was as formidable a foe as any, at arm’s length or in close.

The gunship altered course and the view swung. Inquisition and Excoriator ships crowded the orbital anchorages of a pearly hyper-industrial ice world. Drop pods smoked a small slice of the upper atmosphere in blacks, greens, and reds. A few other vessels were mixed up with them. Though no expert in Adeptus Astartes vexillology, Urquidex recognised warships of the Blood Angels, Aurora Chapter, and the Brazen Claws. They had been hastily, in some instances partially, reworked in black. The realisation of just how much manpower and materiel it would require to convert a million square metres of just one void-scarred warship to Deathwatch black had clearly come too late for some.

A vast manufactorum tender of the Basilikon Astra hove to alongside an Aurora Chapter cruiser with a spitting contusion from a gravitic lash in her port quarter. Manipulator claws and laser sculptors were setting to work, cutting and cauterising, even as the Space Marine vessel disgorged drop pods. The visible Navy and Mechanicus ships he could count on his one hand. They hung back from the planet.

The planet was one he had visited before, though he had never yet personally set foot on it. He had been part of the sample-retrieval mission dispatched after its fall. The memory did not settle his stomach at all.

An alien growl and a clank of chain drew his attention from the viewing block.

The Veridi mysticus was bolted to the wall, chains running through thick iron hoops that had been welded to the deck. Even tranquillised, it was terrifyingly strong. The storm troopers shifted in their seats. In slots designed for the transport of superhuman warriors they looked like nervous children at an adult’s table.

‘Be calm,’ said Tyris and the outward display of nerves diminished. Huge and fully sealed in his black armour, the Raven Guard surveyed the mortal soldiers. Under the infernal red of his lenses they found another object for their fear.

‘Yes, lord,’ said Rothi.

Urquidex glanced to the warriors either side of Tyris that made up the reformed Kill-Team Stalker. He was not yet adept at telling armoured Space Marines apart, and recognised them from their training exercises by Chapter marking — or lack thereof — more than any other feature. Hakon Icegrip of the Space Wolves. Vega of the Doom Eagles. Gadreel of the Blood Angels. Numines of the Fists Exemplar.

Unlike the others, the Fist Exemplar’s wargear carried no markings.

Urquidex could speak at length on the nature and variation of biological hierarchies. He could explain how the Leo of ancient Terra asserted their dominance over a breeding pool, or the socio-genetics of Veridi giganticus’ rigidly absolutist dominance structure. The ancient eldar too, from the few fragmentary treatises he had seen, held to a model of subservience and command that, for all its inherent alien-ness, was more remarkable for its similarities to human norms than its differences. Even amongst the adherents to the Cog Mechanicus, the exact same structure could be seen in the makeup of the Synod, the diagnostiad, and the alpha station of the Fabricator General himself. The instinct to dominate was as fundamental to biological life as the nucleotidal structure that underlay it. This man was quite plainly a leader.

A discussion of the flaws inherent to Oriax Dantalion’s philosophy would have made a fascinating diversion just then.

With a sullen growl, the ork psyker lunged for him.

Chains rattled and pulled taut and the huge beast clattered to the deck. The storm troopers swore. Alpha 13-Jzzal struck it across the jaw with the butt of his plasma caliver. Drugged as it was, ork as it was, the psyker almost certainly didn’t feel the blow, but there was force enough in his cyborgised guardian’s arm to put it back on the deck. It drooled where it lay. One poorly-focused eye rolled drunkenly around Urquidex.

He suspected that the ork was less interested in him than the trio of gold-armoured women beside him.

Urquidex was accustomed to the company of emotionless beings, but something about the warrior women chilled him. It was deeper even than the unease he felt in the presence of a mind-wiped servitor. It was visceral, basic; an aversion to something alien that was recognised directly by the soul rather than filtered by imperfect organic senses.

‘Can you tranquillise it again?’ said Rothi.

Urquidex nodded.

‘Remain harnessed, magos,’ said Tyris.

‘Crossing thermosphere,’ said Gadreel, the Techmarine’s voice coming through the internal vox.

‘Armour up,’ said Rothi. ‘Helms on. And check seals. It’s a cold world down there.’

Incus Maximal — orbital

Check 5, 2017:55:31

‘All drop-ships away, all gunships landed and redeploying to engage targets. Lord Issachar signals limited resistance thus far.’

Shipmaster Weylon Kale walked the gangway from strategium to command throne under the choral backing of cherubiam serfs of the Fists Exemplar Librarius. Koorland grunted acknowledgement. The tac-screens and data-displays showed the same information.

‘Ork vessels?’

‘Engaged or destroyed, lord.’

‘No sign of anything breaking away?’

‘Navy and Basilikon Astra have the Mandeville point under blockade.’

Koorland reformatted the data-display at his armrest to call up a bi-dimensional gridchart of the planet’s orbital band. Thirty to forty green icons represented ork ships. They were construction vessels and bulk haulers rather than true warships, though all were armed to some capacity and making a fight of it. At slightly under a quarter of the numbers, Space Marine and Inquisition ships were represented in Chapter colours and black respectively. They were true warships, and green icons disappeared fast.

Also in green, but larger, were the planet’s orbital facilities. The handful of weapons platforms that had been in orbit no longer had the power output or the mass to return an auspex signal. The installations currently showing up on Alcazar Remembered’s screens were dry docks, assembly yards and fuel depots, low-priority targets that the flotilla had ignored while green icons still crowded the board.

At Koorland’s swiped command, the image on the main oculus altered to one from a starboard viewer. It showed a tangle of aerials and macro-turrets, blanched with void frost, and, through it, one of the orbital shipyards. It was crescent-shaped, one face tidally locked to the planet and the other bristling with empty slipways. The ‘skull’ section of an Opus Machina had been crudely redone in green. Bulky weapon retrofits spewed macro-ordnance. The fire appeared to be manually targeted, much of it sprayed hopefully into space. Impacts flared violet and indigo from the forward shields of the Blood Angels cruiser that manoeuvred alongside. A full broadside from the Space Marine vessel blasted several hundred metres from the shipyard’s void-facing side and sent explosions rocking through the rest. The cruiser fired reverse thrusters, gunners reloading for a second volley. A much-reduced volume of fire blistered her shields.

‘Launch a shuttle with a message for the Sanguine to break off her attack.’ The blanket denial broadcast that all fleet elements were transmitting made direct ship-to-ship or ship-to-ground communication impossible. ‘Remind all captains and shipmasters, static facilities are to be disabled only. Dispatch Terminator squads to take recordings, but their orders are not to engage.’

‘And how do you propose they do that?’ said Thane.

The Chapter Master was lit up by the pale glow of the command deck’s vox-turret. He had no specific purpose here. Kale controlled the ship, Issachar the fleet and ground forces, Koorland himself had strategic command. For want of anything better to do, Thane monitored the hardline comm-booths for updates from their planetside forces, and coordinated with the shipmasters of Bulwark and Faceless Warrior.

Koorland put his brother’s uncharacteristic attitude down to frustration, and perhaps a little wounded Chapter honour. Most of the Fists Exemplar First Company and all of their Tactical Dreadnought suits had been lost with Dantalion. Out of respect for his and his Chapter’s losses, Koorland chose to let it lie.

‘Have Asger mobilise the necessary squads. And remind him that he is not to deploy in person.’ The reminder was necessary. Koorland knew where he would rather be had his position not prohibited it. ‘I want him monitoring the feeds from those facilities.’

‘I will remind him, lord.’

Koorland thought he detected some satisfaction in his brother’s voice. Nothing ameliorated a sense of frustration like spreading it around. Teleportation signals lit up the tactical displays, energy usage spiking on several Inquisitorial ships. He tapped impatiently at the snowy data-display.

‘And have one of our low-flying craft relay a message to Issachar. Tell him the weapon is inbound. He needs to draw the orks into the target area and quickly if we are to have a worthwhile test.’

Incus Maximal — Hyboriax Cryoforge

Check 5, 2018:09:01

Issachar could not see the orks yet. The landing zone was surrounded by bronzed manufactorum walls and by the ice-capped pylons through which ran a sky-blackening net of power lines. Cog Mechanicus icons re-cut with tusks, box chins, glowering eyes, and beret-style caps glared down from towering basilicae. A ranting xenos voice blasted out from augmitters set up amongst the buildings. The roadway hissed under an acid snow that tumbled through mechanised guttering, spraying out of corroded effluent pipes in kilometre-high glitterfalls that disappeared through successively narrower-spectrum rainbows to the unseen sump-layer below.

The local topography was of immense containers that had been broken open and scattered, ordnance potholes from the initial invasion that the orks had not bothered to fill. Yawing cranes swung in the jetwash of overflying gunships. The headlamps of three-score rumbling vehicles lit the ground in harsh white streaks, the periodic wash of electricity through the lines temporarily inverting light and shade.

Issachar could not see the orks. Not yet. But he could hear them.

Gunfire rattled far away. The crump of rockets. Bikes and buggies growled through the surrounding districts. He could even hear the orks themselves, and not the cracked voice being pumped through the augmitters. The forward squads were already engaged, just on the far side of those manufactorum walls.

‘Orders from Alcazar Remembered, brother-captain.’

Brother Orgos of the First approached over the debris-strewn roadway. His armour was rad-pitted. The vox-antennae of his high-powered pack array twanged with countervailing winds, the occasional snap of voltage leaping towards the overhead cables. ‘Koorland demands we engage with all haste.’

Issachar laughed. ‘Tell him that it would be my pleasure.’

Armoured fist squadrons of the Astra Militarum, the merged veterans of the Ullanor invasion, and Inquisitorial storm troopers shivered in column to the front, tracks and armour frosted with a yellow-brown ice of sulphates, fluorates and hydrochlorates. Demolisher siege tanks and Hellhounds grumbled at the head of each column. Fully-enclosed Sentinels with armoured canopies strode the flanks, overwatch provided by heavy weapon teams ensconced behind shockboard barricades set up on top of the crumpled superheavy crates. With a sequential whoosh of castellan guided missiles, Whirlwinds loosed. The missiles twirled and parted and spun together, the incendiary barrage crumbling an effluviam stack several kilometres due north.

The main armoured elements of the Excoriators were already engaged in support of the rapid forward advance. Vox-chatter from the various squad and company-level channels spoke over one another into his helmet feed. His Lyman’s ear could pluck one from the chaos without difficulty.

‘Hab-block clear. moving on—’

‘Ork vehicles flanking via tau processional—’

‘Entering Hyboriax Primus. Heavy fire—’

Issachar could see the mons temple through the bruised swirl of snow. It had suffered damage concomitant with massive orbital bombardment, but the fortified edifice still stood, some of the damaged wings reconstructed in less than sympathetic fashion. Cannon platforms and bright red runway strips for the take-off and landing of the orks’ big, multipurpose fighter-bombers spidered out from the cracked minaret, like tentacles emerging from a black-veined egg sac.

It was there that the ork forces would be concentrated.

Issachar raised his fist and a pair of serfs in ivory and red habits hoisted the Escharan standard from a crossbar above his personal Land Raider, Tyrant.

‘Inquisition forces to hold. All other units advance on my command.’

Nine

Acid snow was already beginning to pile up around the Thunderhawk. Urquidex hoped to take that as a positive sign, meaning that they planned to return for it. The gunship continued to disappear as he was hustled away from it, and that was when he realised. It had been expended to bring them down and was now being abandoned so as not to double the risk of discovery with a second flight. The ubiquitous Thunderhawk was the cheap, standard template design workhorse of the Adeptus Astartes, as easily thrown to the ice in the name of necessity as any organic servant of Him on Terra.

The air temperature was beyond freezing, and yet the snow burned where it touched bare skin. He pulled up his hood. Storm troopers in glassy black carapace and cold-weather survival gear crunched through the snow; two dozen of them together hauled the truculent ork by its chains. Steam billowed from its mouth and icicles of saliva bearded its jaw. The Sisters surrounded them like a warding hex, power blades spitting in the falling snow, causing the brute to snap and lunge and claw at its temples only for the chains around its wrist to yank taut and bring half a dozenstorm troopers skidding towards it.

The Space Marines of Kill-Team Stalker, Urquidex could no longer see. They had pushed well ahead and the sub-zero conditions had frozen his optics on near-view.

The landing pad projected from the upper bulge of the Mons Primus. It led onto a long ambulatory with great arched windows, detailed in brass, alternating from one side to the other. They ran down it, the drugged ork determining their pace. Snow swept in through the left-hand windows. They had previously been glazed by a conversion field that would have converted the impact of each flake of snow into glorious, eclectic light. Urquidex could see the emitters. They were unpowered now, several of the arches cracked. The siege-savants of Incus Maximal had authorised the destruction of the planetary capital in a bid to stem the ork advance onto the planet’s last Mechanicus enclaves. There had been no time to complete the sacrilege. The wreckage of the Ark ship Contrivenant still drifted in orbit.

The view from the left now was frozen, and dark because of it. Flickering exchanges of fire lit the silhouettes of forge basilicae, as if in crude mea culpa for the destruction of the conversion field. The traces of explosions went largely unremarked: a wink of light there, the dim rumble of a collapsing superstructure there.

By the time Urquidex saw the doors at the end of the ambulatory, the Thunderhawk was just another lump, indistinguishable from any of the forgotten lumps around it. Urquidex’s digitools twitched through a signum-code rendition of the Last Rites.

Hakon and Numines held the doors as Tyris, Vega and Gadreel surged through.

The ambulatory led to a covered chamber, and the first greenskins that Urquidex had seen alive.

There were six of them, gathered around a metal barrel of cleansing spirit with the lid torn off, sitting on sturdy tables as if they were benches. Their necks were as thick as iron hawsers. Their biceps were the size of promethium drums. Urquidex was wholly unprepared for their brute immensity. The intense fungal stench overpowered even the astringent chemicals.

A volley of silenced bolt-rounds dropped them before any of them could so much as grunt and Tyris and Vega powered through, smashing the tables aside to make way. Urquidex followed in behind the storm troopers and Sisters and looked around while his optics warmed through.

It was a narthex. Here was where pilgrims would congregate to wait, pray and suffer the requisite physical deprivation to earn the Omnissiah’s admission to the temple proper. The columns were bronze. The floor and ceiling were ribbed and the walls were decked with cabling. Pistons glided in and out of their sleeves, but they were without function, symbolic of the perpetuity of the Machine-God’s power. The distant pops of gunfire echoed through the chamber.

Tyris voxed a whispered ‘all clear’. The other Space Marines started after him with a startling lack of sound.

Urquidex pointed the way, bypassing the ascensor, to the penitent stairs at the far end of the hallway, doubting for a moment that he had seen the orks alive at all.

Just six corpses. No different to the tens of thousands shipped to Mars for dissection.

The penitent stairs led to a corridor, its walls adorned with tablet slabs stating the Universal Laws, and then on to another set of stairs. The metal newel rattled loosely as the Deathwatch powered ahead. Urquidex was only halfway up and feeling the lactate burn in his limbs when the roar of bolter fire carried down.

A dozen orks were dead and sprayed roughly over the atrium’s cuneiformed bronze walls when Urquidex stumbled onto the scene, but twice that number were still fighting.

They were machine-ork perversions, xenotech abominations of an engineer class. Slug bullets sprayed from crane-limbed servo-harnesses. Plasma blasts ripped craters out of the walls. Vega dropped to one knee behind a devotional font and disgorged a jet of flaming promethium from his bolter’s combi-attachment. An ork engineer wheezed through the flames, shuddering armour harness alight. It didn’t seem to notice. A multi-barrelled volleycannon attached to its fighting suit with swaying ammo belts began to whine, then to howl, and the font disintegrated. Vega and Numines went down. Icegrip took a glancing hit to the pauldron just as he was swinging up his frost blade. Tyris’ return fire spanked off the ork’s armour like rain hitting a drum.

Urquidex had just starting screaming, metal splinters from the destroyed font lodged in the organic attachers of his eye, when he felt Alpha 13-Jzzal’s cyborgised frame slam him against the wall. The skitarius grunted as bullets riddled his titanium exoskeleton. A squad of storm troopers formed up behind him and opened fire. Las-fire stitched the atrium, brutally impressive as a laser display and as wasted as one on the thick skulls of the orks.

The boss ork shrugged off the troopers’ attentions, beat one in half with a twist of its power claw, then lost the arm to the downward stroke of a Sister’s blade. She withdrew a step, pivoted on her toes, and with terrifying grace, backhanded the ork’s head from its shoulders. Her sister stood protectively over Urquidex and the growling ork psyker as the third took the fight to the orks. Tyris, Gadreel and Icegrip fought hard to match her battle-grace.

The last engineer had backed itself into a corner. It took a short burst of bolt-rounds to the gut, which then erupted from its back and painted a streak on the wall as it slid down it. Vega rose, clutching his hip, liquid sealant bubbling up from the rents in his armour.

‘I can continue,’ he rasped.

Numines didn’t rise. Gadreel crouched over him for a second, fingers to his throat, and spoke a prayer to honour the Fist Exemplar’s lost gene-seed. Tyris was already thumping towards the great set of double doors that the orks had been guarding. There was no stealth now.

The stylised plasteel was no match for the Space Marine’s powered strength and he shouldered the doors apart without breaking stride. In fact he was still speeding up, bolter up and firing again before the doors had slammed back into the walls. Vega, Icegrip and, a moment later, Gadreel walked into the return fire without the slightest hesitation.

Urquidex was awed. Here was the Omnissiah’s glory, expressed through biological perfection and the genetic mastery of the God-Emperor of Man.

‘Squads alpha and beta, left and right,’ roared Colonel Rothi as men surged forward, and held a hand to Urquidex to indicate that he should remain exactly where he was. ‘Delta on me, cover the payload, go.’

The Apse Mechanicus was a technological marvel in copper, polished mica, and gold, crosshatched by gunfire and smoke. At a prosaic level it resembled a temple of the Creed, but the pillars that upheld the vaulted ceiling were not monofunction stone, but great pipes that trembled musically with the Omnissiah’s breath. The Machine-God Himself was represented in sanctified metal at the end of the nave. It was more than just a statue. Its miraculous mechanics had breathed Motive Force into the lights, the energy fields, and provided Hyboriax its heat. It ran still, its isolation splendid, but its outward connectors had been hacked out of the walls. A necklace of human ribs hung from its cog-toothed neck. A crown of bent metal sat crooked on its head.

Squads alpha and beta lacerated the defiled space with las-beams. Orks built like armoured walkers turned around as though unexpectedly spat upon. A missile screwed across the nave from a crude shoulder-mounted launcher and wasted two men to armaplas scraps and flesh lather. Alpha 13-Jzzal’s caliver deoxygenated the air with rippling volleys of superheated plasma that left two orks as molten husks. Overheat runes glowed a dangerous amber as the weapon steamed off into the cold. Rothi roared. The troopers focused their fire, and twenty-plus convergent beams managed finally to punch one of the xenos brutes down.

Luckily for the mortals, the Space Marines had the orks’ attention.

Tyris advanced at speed towards the right transept, going column to column. Controlled bursts punched the orks cleanly down as they moved towards him. Wild returns ripped open the ornate pipes, mangled them as though grenades had blown them apart from the inside. Vega meanwhile advanced slowly down the centre, his limp growing more pronounced with every step. Heavy gunfire slugging his battleplate, he dropped to one knee and rolled a grenade down the aisle between two blocks of plug-in banks.

It burst into a thick pall of smoke. Tyris disappeared but for the muffled sound of him. Vega became a ghost. Urquidex could barely make out the silent Sisters beside him. Without his optics he doubted they could see him as well, but they appeared as unflustered by their sudden blindness as they were by everything else.

‘The weapon must be deployed as close to the centre as is possible,’ said Urquidex. ‘If the test is to yield meaningful data then it must be done properly.’ He looked back. Rothi was there. He had one hand pressed to his ear, the other cupped over his mouth.

‘Lord Issachar, come in. Lord Issachar—’

One of the storm troopers left dragging the payload cursed as it began to pull back against them.

‘It needs another dose!’

‘No,’ Urquidex replied. Xenos species reacted unpredictably to human pharmacopoeia. Even sub-breeds could show eccentricities of response. He began to see why Kubik had recommended him for this mission. Few if any knew as much about Veridi genetics as he did. ‘It must be as conscious as possible. I don’t know how the somnambulum might interfere with its psychic powers.’

‘Then release it now!’ yelled the storm trooper. The ork was small relative to others of its species, but more than equal to the five men left holding it. The soldier’s arms were wound through the chain and his feet braced, but he and his comrade beside him were being drawn back regardless.

‘Here, then,’ said Urquidex, and signalled as much to the one Sister of Silence still beside him. She took a step back.

He took a deep breath.

Fortunate that he was in a house of the Omnissiah.

He wanted his prayers heard.

Ten

The Land Raider’s glacis ramp crashed down into the rubble. Issachar was first out, shredding an ork in thick red body plate with a burst of bolter fire. Another ork pushed through the girdering that had fallen across a window. He bracketed it with bolter fire until it dropped. Something pulled the blocking metal aside and lobbed in a grenade. The frag burst shook floor and ceiling, but Issachar barely felt it. Space Marines encased in wounded artificer armour and draped in scripture stomped towards windows and doors, weapons blazing.

The Land Raider had ridden through the tin wall and disgorged Issachar’s honour guard directly into a manufactorum complex attached to Hyboriax Primus. It was a shell, but it was cover and provided firing lines over the primus road and from the back onto the ork bikers flanking on secundus.

The big doors onto primus came down on their acid-corroded hinges, an ork walker bulldozing through and walking into the atmosphere-sear of Tyrant’s sponson lascannons. The smoking can spouted fire and crashed to the floor. Ork warriors poured in behind the wreck, bellowing and hooting and firing wildly into the air. Tyrant raked them with its glacis heavy bolters, body parts slapping into puddles of their own liquefied tissue. High-yield mass-reactives perforated the walker’s gouting shell with hollow thunks and exploded, showering the orks still behind it with boiling shrapnel. Even the tank’s commander popped the cupola hatch and added to the outpouring of firepower with its pintle-mounted storm bolter.

The honour guard were still laying down thinning fire from the windows, leaving it to Issachar to deal with the xenos inroad in person.

He crushed an ork’s spine with a blow from his power axe. Filled another with a close-range volley that tore it apart. An ork almost twice his size waded through the Land Raider’s bullet storm. It had a crossed axe branded on a box-magazine of a jaw, a lumpen bionic wedged into the crease of one eye. It barged him sideways and they grappled, servos whining, gears clunking.

He was Chapter Master of the Excoriators. He had served Katafalque as First Captain for a century. He had fought the enemies of mankind for nearly seven hundred years, and the Astronomican would cease to shine before he would fall at the hands of an ork.

He spat Betchers’ acid on its chest-plate, then slammed his forehead through the dissolving metal. The ork roared, in surprise, not pain, and released its grip on his power axe enough for him to molecularly disrupt the brute’s skull with force fit to topple a wall.

Chapter vox chattered in his ear the whole time, telling him exactly where and how badly they were being beaten.

‘Order all forces back to the secondary extraction zone,’ he voxed, calmly, bolt pistol eviscerating the next monster to test its luck against his fury and lose. ‘I will not sacrifice what little we have left for a test.’

‘Chapter Master.’ Orgos made a line for him from Tyrant, where he had been coordinating with air support. ‘Payload is signalling. They are ready to—’

There was a crack, and the Space Marine fell with a slugger round still embedded in the side of his helm. Issachar snarled and stepped over him.

He had lost too many brothers to be moved by one more.

Incus Maximal — Mons Primus

Check 5, 2021:58:15

Urquidex nipped in smartly behind the ork’s back and stabbed it in the side of the neck with a hypodermic. It roared, and instinctively tried to bite off his hand, but it was still groggy and snapped a few centimetres shy of his hastily withdrawn digitools. The storm troopers braced. There had been no way to drill for the actual detonation. All they had to go on was the Dzelenic IV recording and they looked duly terrified.

The ork psyker was growing increasingly lucid. With a furious bellow, it dragged on the chain around its muscular right arm and pulled the storm trooper holding on to it off his feet. He slid along the floor on his chest carapace and the ork stamped on his head.

‘Throne!’

The storm trooper escort detail cried out in alarm. One drew a laspistol and had singed the ork’s chest before Urquidex shouted for him to stop. The ork pounded on its chest with its free arm and grabbed hold of the chains around its left arm and its neck.

With a crack of energy discharge, the Sister of Silence severed its arm just below the shoulder. She regarded Urquidex frostily as the psyker howled. Gore turned the edge of her power blade a fizzing purple. Taking advantage of the ork’s momentary distraction, the storm troopers unclasped the chains from their carapace and started to wind them through the data-pews either side of the aisle.

Meanwhile, squads alpha through delta were firing blindly into the roiling smoke.

The Doom Eagle, Vega, fell out of the smog and hit the floor with an ork on top of him. The troopers tattooed it with las as it smashed the back of the Space Marine’s helmet into the floor. From somewhere, Urquidex could hear the cry of a wolf, the powered whine of a Techmarine’s servo-harness.

Good. The harder they attacked, the stronger the psychic field would become.

The more devastating the explosion.

The ork psyker hollered and struggled around towards the Sister of Silence, the source of all its pain.

‘Now!’ shouted Urquidex, but the Sister was already vanishing into the smoke. Her high gorget hid her mouth, but from the movement of her skin and the shape of her eyes, Urquidex was certain that she smiled.

The effect of her departure on the psyker was profound.

The ork’s eyes took on a glassy inner light. Its shoulders tensed and bulged with swollen musculature. Urquidex had no equipment for the measurement of the uncanny, but he could feel the force that built inside of its skull. It was the pressure in the air that grew in the wake of a storm. The creak of a dam.

The diagnostiad had theorised, on forensic analysis of the Dzelenic IV recording, that the surge of energy that followed a psychically neutered ork psyker being suddenly exposed to a large group of its kin would have catastrophic results.

The storm troopers felt it coming in the rattling of their chains. They abandoned them and started to run. The ork was free, but it made no move to join the fight. It clapped its remaining hand to its face as if to contain the swelling of its head. Bolts of energy spat from its nose, mouth, ears. The flesh of its forehead stretched as its cranium pushed through. Its skull creaked, split, and then burst open, spraying Urquidex and the fleeing storm troopers with brain matter and whizzing bone.

The shockwave hit Urquidex like a force stave and flung him back, up the aisle, and into the wall with a wetly organic crack. A numbing flash of excruciation centred somewhere around his upper spine, and he flopped to the floor minus the use of his limbs. His digitools gave a peripheral nervous twitch.

Courtesy of a massive opiate dump from his cortical implants he remained conscious, and quite by chance in a position that faced down the aisle.

The detonated psyker somehow still stood, wobbling on the spot, blood firing upwards in spurts from its splayed-open neck. The corpses of the escort squad lay in a psychic blast crater of tangled data-pews.

Vega was dead too, insofar as it was possible to make that determination. Urquidex had just noticed him when the ork that straddled him gave a jerk and violently evacuated the contents of its brainpan over a wide area of floor.

The ork slumped over the Space Marine and Urquidex smiled weakly. A string of wet detonations and splashes of red ran through the smoke. The psychic shock chained through the orks. Heads exploded. Inhuman souls blasted from hulking bodies. An ork mechanic staggered across the aisle, headless, guided on by his mega-armoured suit, and crashed through a stained glass window. Acid snow billowed through, pinching out the blooms of promethium fire that rose from the plummeting ork’s flamers. Through the open window, Urquidex heard something explode. A suddenly untended incendiary, perhaps? Or did the battle for Hyboriax Primus continue?

Inside the Apse Mechanicus, however, the silence was devastating. Urquidex heard a last bolt-casing tinkle to the ground. Colonel Rothi’s vox-set crackled with distant chatter. Icegrip clumped through the ruddy smoke and sniffed the air in search of more foes, and then gave a lopsided grin.

There were none.

Incus Maximal — orbital

Check 5, 2022:01:11

The rare strain of unfettered emotion swept the turreted command stations of Alcazar Remembered. Communications, auspectoriae, drive; men and women in glittering void suits rose from their fortress chairs, beating hands together and cheering. Even the cherubiam serfs in their null-shielded podia had fallen, if not quiet, then helplessly in with the general wave of elation. For once in their servile existences, the focus of their songs was not the warp-soothing verses of the Librarius, but the images and accompanying screed that scrolled across the main viewer.

‘Massive ork casualties,’ reported Kale, doing his best to keep his tone level and failing. A smile tugged at the corners of his lips and his hands were clasped a little more tightly than usual behind his back. ‘Early estimates from ground forces put their losses in the tens of thousands.’

Another wild cheer broke out. Even the old shipmaster allowed himself a smile. Koorland suppressed the desire to join the celebrations, or relax, and sat forward.

They had won nothing yet.

‘Details, magos.’

‘Noospheric interlink to Magos Urquidex’s data tether established,’ reported Laurentis, tinnily, unmoved by the exuberance of the tacticae staff around him, or by the serf who dropped onto her knees to throw a hug around his boxy chassis. ‘Stand by.’

The magos scuttled around the strategium desk, which had been modified to his own specifications. Twitching implementer rods projected a functional noosphere. A control board packed with dials hung lopsided from one end by a bundle of fibre-optics, and pinged with periodic sampling of said noosphere. Other parts did things that Koorland could not imagine, all under continuous manipulation by Laurentis’ mechadendrites.

‘My colleague reports partial success. Satisfactory. Reports of fighting in Hyboriax. Uplink from the Excoriators and other ground forces remains patchy, but it would appear that the blast effect was restricted to the Mons Primus and its immediate surrounds.’

Koorland glanced over to Thane. ‘Orbital facilties?’

‘Terminator squads heavily engaged, brother. No effect that I can tell.’

‘Bring them back aboard Alcazar Remembered, and then destroy those platforms. Send retrieval boats for Issachar’s force. I want helmet feeds compiled and supplied to Asger and Laurentis at once. Discontinue the blanket denial broadcast and begin ordering the fleet for immediate translation out.’

‘Aye, lord.’ The communications liaison serf slid her headphones back over her ears and sat back down, even as her station colleagues continued to celebrate.

‘I was hoping for more,’ Koorland muttered.

‘I will have to confer with Magos Urquidex and analyse the data gathered from the ground forces,’ said Laurentis. ‘Lord Tyris and any surviving members of the insertion will also need to be thoroughly interrogated. The psyker was the smallest and weakest of the three, however. That was why it was selected for a trial detonation. It is possible that further calibration of an admittedly improvised detonation procedure could result in improved blast yields.’

‘That is what I want, magos. It is what I need. More and better. I want to scour worlds. I want to ravage fleets. Do you understand me?’

‘I will commence data inload at once.’

‘I look forward to your preliminary report.’ Koorland turned to the communications turret. ‘Has the denial broadcast dissipated?’

‘Almost, lord.’

‘Then send word to the astropaths to make contact with Bohemond and Euclydeas. It is time for the final test.’

Eleven

The psyker seized, bringing a haze of ferric red from the industrial clamps that held her pallet upright against the stone wall. Her scalp was stapled with adaptor plugs, dark cabling flexing and bowing as she struggled. Foam flecked her lips. Her eyes were wide and staring, though what it was that held her mind’s attention, Zerberyn could not hazard. In the matt of hoops and cabling above her, a lumen filament blinked on and off inside a cracked blue bulb. The witch’s fits were already becoming less frenzied, every abortive jerk against her restraints increasingly synchronised to that grubby flash of blue.

‘The soul is empty. It is dry. The green roar is heard across the stars. Drink deep of it. Drink deep.’

‘It is gibberish,’ said Zerberyn, a ghost-white giant encased in ceramite of unpainted grey.

‘The message doesn’t yet make sense to her,’ whispered the tonsured Librarius serf beside him. ‘Her mind is interpreting the psychic impulse as best as it is able.’

‘So far!’ she screamed, blood trickling from one nostril. ‘Why are you so far from home?’

More serfs in the plain grey habits of the Fists Exemplar Librarius hurried around her, making adjustments to flow regulators in her cranial plugs, tightening straps, or receiving instruction from the clicking instruments to which she was connected by peripheral and lumbar plugs. An overseer in baroque gunmetal-grey robes and bronze trim, a bondsman of sorts, offered sharp words of direction, but was largely content to let the serfs perform the labour. Various parts of his exposed flesh had been dug out and replaced with smooth iron grafts, presumably to excise the early stigmata of mutation. A brand of ownership, like a coal-black tattoo, was cut cleanly in half by one such metal plate on the side of his face.

The woman and her handler were the property of Warsmith Kalkator.

‘Are you even one of us, brother?’ The cage rattled with the violence of her efforts.

The words made Zerberyn’s neck itch, and the Iron Warriors bondsman growled instructions to his Fists Exemplar counterparts. Zerberyn looked up to where the cable bundle fed into a hole in the ceiling. White daylight fell through.

‘Join me,’ the psyker whispered, sinking into her restraints and turning her head sharply from side to side. ‘A red star. A world of fours.’

The overseer took her glistening wet hand, leant through the cage and listened as she whispered something in his ear.

‘We are the Last Wall. The Last Wall. The Last Wall…’

It went on. Zerberyn swore.

‘Find me when she begins to talk sense.’ Zerberyn enclosed the Librarius serf’s shoulder in a gauntleted hand. He towered over the mortal. The barest effort on his part would have broken ribs, torn muscle, crushed a lung, and not a shred of guilt would have haunted him at having done so. The serf swallowed. ‘Tell only me.’

‘Only you, lord. Of course.’

The corridor from what they laughingly now called the astropathicum was a worn-out stretch of ferrocrete blocks with freeze-thaw cracks in the mortar. Stacked building materials littered the floor, runes painted next to gashes in the wall or partial collapses of the ceiling with colours that indicated priority. Doorways without doors led to side chambers where serfs of the two Chapters — Legions? Zerberyn had ceased to worry over how he and his allies described one another — conducted basic repairs. In others, surplus equipment from Guilliman, Excelsior, Paragon, Courageous, Implicit, and from Palimodes had been stockpiled. Paired quartermaster serfs, one from each affiliation, took inventory, assessing how their meagre resources might be most efficiently shared.

From one, the scent of counterseptic hit Zerberyn well before his dully echoing footsteps carried him to the threshold. A dozen muscular youths from the local slave stock were laid on gurneys, stripped down, unconscious. One had been opened up, blood splattering his surgical robes in a perfect line from his throat to his sternum. Apothecary Reoch said nothing as Zerberyn walked past his door, giving him only the sullen flash of binoptics above an expressionless metal grille.

A short set of steps curved downwards forty-five degrees to the left. Zerberyn could not help but admire the design’s innate defensibility, based on the premise that ninety per cent of mortal human assailants would prefer to wield a close-combat weapon in their right hand.

It led to an archway large enough to accommodate a Terminator. The ferrocrete was sanded smooth.

Zerberyn walked through it and a sweeping turret opened out before him, large enough to land a Stormbird or to site heavy artillery. Its two-metre-high ramparts followed three-quarters of the circumference of a circle, until each end cut into the sides of the mountain into which the Iron Warriors had built their old fortress.

Sentinel servitors with low-oxygen enhancements looked out over the feeble atmosphere. Thousands of effluviam stacks broke the thin layer to belch toxic waste gases directly into the void. Behind the swaddling layer, the storm-wracked bulk of the gas giant Immitis VII seethed like a judgemental eye.

From the echoes of hammering, drilling and welding, Zerberyn knew that Forge-Brother Clathrin and his Iron Warriors counterpart would be conducting the serious work of shoring up the outer perimeter, retrofitting the back-up void bank hacked out of Implicit’s systems into the old fort’s age-withered grids. The older men of the manufactory slaves, the women, the younger boys, trimmed wires, sawed timber, shaped stone. The occasional whimper or cracked lash echoed up through the layered fortifications.

Zerberyn found the forced labour distasteful, but it was hardly the worst thing he had done in the name of necessity since becoming de facto lord of the Fists Exemplar. They had been slaves of the Iron Warriors long before his arrival, so what harm had he brought them? None.

He squinted in the dim, but unaccustomed daylight as Epistolary Honorius and Kalkator’s Apothecary, Barban, approached him.

Honorius was wearing Terminator plate without a helmet, his pale face like a pearl in a hard, dark shell of constrictor rings and armoured cabling. The Epistolary was paler even than Zerberyn, which was in itself disconcerting. Zerberyn’s skin was without pigment as he was the child of a world whose sun could kill, but Honorius was more ancient than he, and his recruitment predated the settlement of Eidolica by five centuries. His eyes, by contrast, were as black as the void beyond the Astronomican. He was a pressure on the psyche, a force against Zerberyn’s mind. Flickers of what could otherwise only be sensed steamed from the immensity of his armour plate like the corona of an eclipse.

Zerberyn aside, no one had worked more closely alongside their new allies than the Epistolary.

‘What news?’ said Honorius. The subtle power woven through the old warrior’s deep voice never failed to give Zerberyn pause.

‘Nothing yet. But it is the Last Wall.’

‘Then the fight continues. Good.’

‘Of course it continues. Do you think that brothers of ours would surrender?’

‘Do you intend to rejoin them?’ said Barban.

The Apothecary’s gunmetal and bronze battleplate was extensively modified and appended with bionics. A pair of bulky, muscular youths, perhaps eleven or twelve standard years of age, hovered behind him. They looked sickly from blood loss and enforced genhancement. There had been no time to assess the men for worth or for biological compatibility. As much as they needed strong walls, they needed strong warriors to hold them. Zerberyn examined the two neophytes. Their throats and chests were scarred from the implantation procedure. Both were already showing bruise-like discolourations to their skin, the first dermal deposits that would, over time, develop into the black carapace that would enable them to wear power armour. Zerberyn could not tell just from looking whether they were Iron Warriors or Fists Exemplar.

Presumably Reoch knew.

Zerberyn drilled the Iron Warrior with his gaze. Neither spoke.

‘My lord!’ came the relieved gasp of the Librarius adjutant, stumbling down the steps and onto the sunlit rampart. He offered the Epistolary a low bow and turned breathlessly to Zerberyn with his report. ‘The communication is from Euclydeas, lord.’

‘The Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers,’ said Honorius, one eyebrow lifted, peeling the infinite black lens a little wider. ‘Our absent brothers join the war. Perhaps all is not yet lost.’

‘What does it say?’ said Zerberyn.

‘A call for aid. They are beset, lord, by orks in great number.’

‘How far?’

‘The next system. Coreward.’

‘Reachable,’ said Honorius.

‘Just,’ Zerberyn corrected. Barban was watching them both without expression, as though assessing their decision. ‘Tell no one of this,’ he said, turning to the mortal serf. ‘You are to ignore all further attempts at communication from this source.’

‘But lord—’ Honorius began before falling silent.

On some deep, human level, it troubled Zerberyn that one so ancient and powerful could be silenced by a glance from him.

‘We are not ready yet, brother,’ he said, listening to the sounds of forced labour that continued far below his feet. ‘When we are strong again, then we will make our presence known.’

Twelve

The conference room aboard Alcazar Remembered was as puritanical as Koorland had come to expect. It was oval in shape, its walls bare metal, its space dominated by a sturdy metal table and chairs enough for fifty warriors of the Adeptus Astartes. Hololith crystals studded the unpolished surface at intervals, returning the dim illumination of the ceiling lumen points like chipped glass. It was in this room that an argument over whether orbital barrage or drop strike was the surer method of pacifying the capital world of the abhuman Kivor Enclavium had famously brought Oriax Dantalion and Sigismund to blows, Koorland had learned (Shipmaster Weylon Kale being a remarkably informed historian). ‘I knew there was some life to these stone men,’ the Death Lord, Mortarion, commander of the compliance mission, was reported to have said as he pulled brother from brother.

If true, it was a damning indictment of them all, and another story altogether.

Two dozen Deathwatch sergeants were gathered in and around the available chairs. Koorland recognised the Raven Guard, Tyris, who had performed so superbly on Incus Maximal, in muted conversation with a Brazen Claw who must have travelled with Abhorrence, for Koorland did not know his name. The red-haired Wolf, Kjarvik, laughed harshly over the subdued chatter at some tale of Asger’s. The Watch Commander, for reasons known best to himself, had his boot on Oriax Dantalion’s austere table, hands afloat in demonstration of some grapple manoeuvre.

Issachar and Thane walked amongst them, speaking little, thus far avoiding a reprise of Sigismund and Dantalion’s infamous bout.

Field-Legatus Otho Dorr of the Ullanor Veterans, Astra Militarum, stood against a wall and sipped at a glass of clear wine. It was a plant fermentation product formulated to complement the nutrient gruel favoured by the Fists Exemplar. Despite all that he had survived on Ullanor and before, a social encounter with so many looming Adeptus Astartes clearly had him mortified. If he was hoping for the wine to loosen some of those nerves then he was due another disappointment. Intoxication was but one of the many things that the Fists Exemplar disapproved of.

Confessor-Militant Rawketh was arguably a natural companion under such circumstances, but the commander of the freshly raised Ecclesiarchy drafts stood alone by the viewports, captivated by the massed bow lights and engine flares of the combined fleets.

Phaeton Laurentis’ attempts at making small talk with Weylon Kale and Dominus Gerg Zhokuv appeared to be a waste of the magos’ synthised breath. The brain of the ancient dominus bubbled thoughtfully in its armoured jar. Kale, meanwhile, listened politely, but was finding it difficult to keep himself every few seconds from checking the vox-pin in his collar or glancing at the ship lights in the viewports. The coordinates Koorland had provided them were deep inside the orks’ burgeoning empire. The old shipmaster felt the phantom itch of sensor ghosts on the back of his neck whenever he turned his back on the viewports.

Two seats around from the table’s head, Kavalanera Brassanas sat, straight-backed, straight-armed, hands flat on the table, staring into the nothing between her and the bulkhead and through it to the fleet anchorage beyond. Wienand laid a hand on the knight abyssal’s shoulder and whispered something in her ear as she sat down beside her. The inquisitor’s aides spoke around them, exchanging slates, comparing notes, while the Assassin, Krule, lowered himself into the chair directly opposite. His muscles were tensed, his jaw firm, seemingly set on matching the Sister’s light-year stare and rising high in Koorland’s estimation simply for possessing the self-belief to imagine that he could.

All of it stopped as Koorland entered. The only sound was of the doors hissing shut and the seclusion field re-engaging with a hum. With one exception, those yet to be seated abandoned their conversations and found chairs.

Koorland’s muscles instinctively tensed for combat as Bohemond strode towards him and grabbed his forearm. He clasped it tight, and closed the fingers of his left gauntlet over his right hand, pulling Koorland in close. The High Marshal’s witch-burned face was a grimace of uncompromising wrath, but the embrace was fit for a brother.

‘I tire of waiting,’ he said.

‘Part of me doubted that you would wait,’ said Koorland, returning the pressure to the other warrior’s vambrace. ‘We did not part on best terms.’

‘Time spent alone with the void is time spent alone with one’s thoughts. That is why it is to be avoided.’ His augmetic eye clicked as it focused on Koorland’s. ‘But I came to question the direction you might lead us all without me beside you. I will be your Chaplain, brother, your evangelist, particularly if you tell me that you do not want me.’

Koorland smiled stiffly and gestured Bohemond to his seat. ‘I welcome it, brother.’

It was only then, as he pulled out his own chair at the head of the table, that Koorland noticed the expectancy that hung over them, camouflaged beneath the quiet. All eyes, all ears, were on him: the Emperor’s finest, all hanging on his word. Leading the Senatorum had been little preparation. These were people he respected.

‘Where is Euclydeas?’ Tyris asked before Koorland had sat down. ‘Antares and Iaros of my squad took the third ork psyker to the Soul Drinkers’ rendezvous coordinates. Iaros was to become sergeant of the new Kill-Team Ultima.’

‘The best we can assume is that for some reason the Soul Drinkers never received our message, or that their voyage against the Green Roar has proven longer and more turbulent than ours.’

The absence of a third of the combined fleet’s strength sunk in with a moment’s solemnity. The worst that they could assume needed no reminder from Koorland. He had been exacting in assigning the Black Templars and Soul Drinkers to rendezvous coordinates in the most strategically unimportant and underpopulated sectors in the vicinity. But the Segmentum Solar was close to being overrun. The possibility that Euclydeas had been killed or had destroyed the meme-bank containing the coordinate fragments to prevent its capture could not be discounted.

That was why he had separated the fleets in the first place.

‘What we have will suffice. It will have to, because there is nothing else. We are already out of time.’ His gaze moved down the table, two opposing rows of hardened faces. ‘Most of you will have observed the test on Incus Maximal. Some,’ a nod to Tyris and Issachar, ‘witnessed it first-hand. Others,’ a glance to where Wienand and Bohemond sat, ‘will have received the logs.’

A pantherish panting, something like a laugh, came from Kjarvik’s throat. He leaned forward, bone-braid dreadlocks knuckling across the table. ‘And impressive watching they were. It surprises me to say, but it actually made the effort of capturing them in the first place worthwhile.’

‘Agreed,’ said Tyris, to much solemn nodding from his brothers-in-black.

‘Incus Maximal was a test,’ Koorland said and the approving mutters dropped away. ‘Densely populated, lightly defended, but numbers enough to make any undertaking by conventional forces too costly to contemplate. Until now, of course. Laurentis, please.’

The magos rose slightly, not sitting so much as squatting into his tripod. ‘Magos Urquidex and I have thoroughly analysed the results of the first test detonation. Impressive though the results were, and in accord with our expectations from the Dzelenic IV data, my colleague and I are in agreement that the output could have been greater. The trial subject suffered a grievous injury in the moments prior to detonation, which we conclude may have dampened its connection to the ork psychic field. Furthermore, the greenskins native to Incus Maximal were not the largest specimens thus far encountered, nor was Lord Issachar’s force given the resources or the remit to stoke the orks’ psychic strength more fully. It is our conclusion that complete planetary wipe-out could be a possibility.’

‘You mean to cleanse a planet — good.’ Asger Warfist nodded approvingly. ‘Which is to be the lucky world?’

‘Magos,’ said Koorland and gestured with an empty hand across the table.

Laurentis pivoted on the spot and and telescoped a digital manipulator to activate the panel of switches mounted on the wall behind him. The lumen points dimmed. The hololith crystals in the table flickered and began to brighten, emitting a fuzzy white light from which emerged the ghost shape of a rotating spheroid. It was a planet, and the stuttering projection slowly began to stabilise as it spun about its slightly tilted axis.

Shocked murmurs from around the table. Even the Adeptus Astartes had not been engineered beyond a mortal’s capacity for surprise.

The planet was crenellated, buttressed, ironclad, mountains of rockcrete and plasteel rising from the pole-to-pole spread of inhuman habitation where mountains had no natural right to stand. Vast orbital rings of manufactories, dry docks and weapons platforms girdled the planet’s equator like crude analogues of the great space ports of Mars. Power fields and atmospheric distortions induced by the planet’s artificial seismology were displayed as periodic washes of colour. As the cogitators built into the table warmed through, the hololith filled in the projection with surface definition. Brackets locked on to features of interest, turning with the world as it spun: field projectors, megabatteries, a tangle of wire-trace lines showing tectonic boundaries where powerful xenos technologies could manoeuvre those surface plates to effect the rearrangement of whole continents or the rapid redeployment of billions.

Ullanor.

‘Vulkan threw everything the Imperium could give to him at that world and he failed,’ said Asger, voice soft. ‘What do you hope to achieve by trying again with a fraction of what the primarch had?’

‘There is no denying that the Imperium no longer has the men or the ships to launch an invasion on that scale again, or that there can be no replacement for Vulkan. I am not he. Those of us that are left to try and succeed where those heroes failed must become more than the numbers we bring with us.’ Koorland spread his hands to gesture not just to those present, but to the ships beyond and the many thousands they carried. The misshapen leer of the Beast, built in colossal facsimile into the very face of his throneworld, glared from the hololith with each rotation. ‘Here is where mankind stands. Or here is where it falls.’

‘I’m almost afraid to ask,’ said Wienand. ‘But how?’

‘I have to agree,’ said Kale. ‘We have less than a tenth of the fleet strength that the primarch commanded. Ullanor’s ground-to-orbit batteries will cripple us before half our troops can be moved planetside.’

‘Those weapons were devastating only because we were unprepared, an element of surprise that they will not enjoy a second time.’ Koorland turned to Asger. ‘We know the location of the orks’ defences, and it will be the responsibility of the Deathwatch to neutralise them.’

‘I’d like to help coordinate that, if I may,’ said Wienand, to a few chuckles from the Deathwatch sergeants sat nearest to her. Her expression in reply was frosty.

‘Ullanor will be no place for civilians,’ said Koorland. ‘Certainly not for High Lords.’

‘I am not the highest Lord in attendance, Lord Commander, and I know how to look after myself.’

Asger grinned through his fangs, looking sideways at the inquisitor. His chuckle was rather more approving than that of his subordinates, but then the Space Wolves had always been impressed by nerve. ‘She has you there, Koorland. What is that now, twice?’

‘Very well,’ said Koorland. ‘If you must, then on your head be it. You will take your lead from Asger. What commands he gives, you follow.’

‘Of course.’

Asger nodded to the hololith. ‘If the fleet is to remain out of weapons range then we will not be able to deploy from drop pods.’

‘We have gunships.’

‘What of the brute-shield?’ spoke Dominus Gerg Zhokuv, the voice arising from the waxen-faced servitor that stood by his pteknopic vessel. ‘It was impenetrable, and undoubtedly restored to full operation by now.’

‘As we discovered, the orks must lower the shield for a few seconds each time they fire their guns. While the bulk of the fleet remains out of range, some… sacrifices will need to be made to ensure the orks lower their shields. Long enough for a gunship to get through.’

‘Do not neglect their fleet-based defences, brother.’ Issachar pointed to the weapon silos and fighter launch bays that studded the hololithic world’s orbital ring.

‘They will be your responsibility,’ said Koorland. ‘You will have full command of the combined fleet while ground forces deploy into the beachhead that the Deathwatch will secure. Fists Exemplar, Black Templars, Excoriators — they will be the second wave.’ He nodded to Dorr, Rawketh, and Zhokuv. ‘Adeptus Militarum and the Mechanicus war machines to follow. Meanwhile, the Deathwatch with support from the Sisters of Silence will seek out and secure corridors through which the main force can proceed to assault the palace complex.’

‘I find no fault in your courage, Koorland,’ said Asger. ‘But a bold heart notwithstanding, this plan is little different to Vulkan’s. The Deathwatch alone will not tip the scales and nor will your new weapon. Whatever the magos believes, it is a stretch to imagine one witch eliminating every ork on Ullanor.’

Koorland’s stern expression twitched as murmurs of agreement arose from the other Deathwatch sergeants and the Astra Militarum. Koorland suppressed whatever empathy he might have felt for their situation, but he did not enjoy dispatching brave men, brothers, to almost certain death. He leaned forward, silencing the hubbub with no other gesture than that.

‘None of you are wrong. Overwhelming force has not given us victory before today and it will not now. We must deliver our weapon to the place at which it will be most devastating, to the one thing that the orks cannot afford to lose.’

Extending his palm outwards he summoned the rotating hololith, the planet shrinking as it moved towards his hand. It continued to rotate, the perspective hovering above it, parts of it beginning to fall away: zooming and focusing onto the fortified palace complex that the great Vulkan had died trying to crack. It looked like a crouching idol, four hundred metres tall, slabbed into ork features with metal and stone. Those outer fortifications faded back as the image passed inside. The interior mapping was good. Ongoing in-situ scans by embedded carto-savants of the Adeptus Mechanicus during the prior invasion had seen to that. The fact that Krule had personally verified much of it was invaluable.

The hololith continued to strip away layers until what remained, still turning in time with the spin of the world, was a single, huge room. The poorly defined outline of a giant throne stood in the centre of it.

‘Now, let me tell you what I will be doing.’

Thirteen

The second invasion of Ullanor began with a sacrifice. A shower of meteors marked the offering: fireballs, some hundreds of metres across, burned through the upper atmosphere and blasted against Gorkogrod’s brute-shields in a blaze of elemental colour. Some of them were recognisable as voidship remnants. The Dark Angels cruiser, Herald of Night. The Navy frigate, Cyzicus. The Inquisitorial escort, Perseus Banshee.

Skeleton crews, crippled ships, but losses keenly felt. Sacrifices painfully offered.

But they were willing, and they had fulfilled their role.

Penitent Wrath descended hard through a web of metal plankways and scaffold-like flak-towers. Glowing crossfire stitched across her hull and over her dorsal cannon. Combat thrusters burned white from driving evasive manoeuvres through a terminal descent. A black-painted gunship of the Aurora Chapter, Lance of Ultima, lost a tail-wing to a torrent of flak and crashed through the flat, oxide-red roof of an ork block where it exploded. Another was eviscerated mid-air, spilling Space Marines and crew over the abyssal drop like chaff dropped from the belly of a fighter craft.

Like planetary reformations in miniature, segmented metal shutters were clunking up to reveal secondary firepoints, huge-barrelled guns emerging from riveted walls and scaffolds and cranking into position. The opening phase of the first invasion of Ullanor had been quiet, characterised by Imperial circumspection and orkish cunning. Not this time. The Imperium knew now what surprises the orks had in store and where they were hidden.

And the orks knew that they had no reason to hold back.

A Blood Angels gunship met a cloudburst of fragmentation rockets and auto-fire and disintegrated as though it had been driven through a wall.

With no ordinary skill on the part of Atherias, the pilot, Penitent Wrath dropped between the crisscrossing lines of fire and responded in kind. Heavy bolters strafed the gun ports, hammering on the hardened metal, lascannons punching through as the Thunderhawk pivoted around her centre and dropped landing struts. Retro-thrusters fired, scorching the metallic surface beneath and bringing the gunship shuddering to a hover.

Two metres off the ground, turbofans howling with vertical strain, her assault hatch whined open and Kjarvik Stormcrow finally felt his boots on the ground of Ullanor. He took a deep breath of the burned, carcinogenic air. He had missed the last invasion, fighting back the greenskins in the Segmentum Obscura under the Fell-Handed.

He would not be so unlucky again.

The polluted sky was ashen and thick, riven by fire. It was raining metal, crumpled casings and bits of aircraft pattering down over the circular iron platform onto which Stormcrow and his kill-team swiftly deployed. It was some kind of landing pad, large enough to accept one of the big twin-rotor ork ’copters or a supply boat. Three ramps ran off from it, only a line of barbed-wire spikes that flexed in the turbofan outwash between them and a stupefying fall. One each to left and right led down towards partially fortress-fronted shacks. The third ramp was twice as long, slightly wider, and wobbled upwards to the primary objective.

Tactica-savants had designated it a collapser beam, for reasons that Kjarvik did not need explaining. It was a lumpen bristling of defensive ironwork surmounted by a towering edifice of suspensor rods and power transfer coils. An enormous cannon, longer again than its entire housing, pointed belligerently up at the sky. Entrance was via a set of heavy red doors plastered with glyphs. A great bar had been set up across them, spiked, wired in, and sparking with alternating current.

With a burst of propellant, twin missiles shrieked from the Thunderhawk’s underwing hardpoints and blasted the door to smithereens.

Kjarvik was already sprinting for it as the gunship lifted off, a parting burst of heavy bolter fire chewing up the walls around the fort’s firing slit windows.

‘Bring them the Emperor’s wrath,’ voxed Atherias, as the Thunderhawk swung back into the web of tracers.

Kjarvik did not reply. His attention was focused on gunning down the two leather-strapped greenskins that stumbled out of the smoking ruin of their doorway.

More were pouring out of the blockhouse structures to either side and piling onto the walkways, and straight into the storm bolter and eviscerator of Phareous and Zarrael. The sounds from that direction reminded Kjarvik of lumps of gristle thrown at a wall to see what would stick.

He ignored them, dropped his shoulder, and charged through what was left of the gate.

His vision became smoke, tangled spurs and spitting flame. The roars and gunfire merged and then morphed into the pop of cooling metal. And then he was inside. Baldarich, none improved for his humbling on Plaeos, was already there, power sword flashing in the dark. Flames licked the Black Templar’s armour. Smoke coiled through Kjarvik’s beard and hair like fishbone clips. His lungs shut themselves down. His next breath drew an oxygen-poor stew of ash and explosive compounds into his multi-lung.

It was the firing chamber, directly beneath the collapser beam. Ork mechanics crowded ladders and gantries. Gretchin wielding wrenches ran at the Space Marines with hissing faces and fell to contemptuous sweeps of Baldarich’s blade.

Automatic fire from Kjarvik’s bolt pistol drilled through thick ork skulls and hunched shoulders, painting the smoke with explosive splashes of red. His aim shifted from ladder to ladder as the orks dropped down, as fast as he could think. Half-second burst and move. Howls and thunder. Half-second burst and move. The air reeked of fyceline. His ammo counter blinked a warning. He squeezed off another burst, a charging mechanic so close that its forehead almost touched the muzzle.

Bad luck. He activated his power fist.

There was a clang of metal on metal, and Kjarvik glanced sideways to see Bohr beside him. The Iron Hand had planted his staff into the ground as if to make of himself a tripod and deploy the full arsenal of his servo-harness. Kjarvik made a laughing sound in the back of his throat as bolt-rounds, hell-beams, plasma ejectiles and raging gouts of flame finished off what he had not been able to. The burn painted the Iron Father a harsh white, steeping the cavities of his complicated bionics in shadow as though the ancient veteran could smile again.

‘Firepower,’ he grunted, his harness winding down, gun barrels spinning off heat. ‘It is always the solution.’

Kjarvik afforded his brother-in-black an elaborate bow. The sounds of chain weaponry and bloodcurdling shrieks delivered in an angel’s voice filtered in from the outside, and vox-chatter from his open channel scratched out of his gorget bead. Landers reported the safe arrival and deployment of ground troops. Deathwatch sergeants requested Sister or armour support, called in air strikes, and reported neutralised objectives with coupled requests for redeployment.

‘We are being made to look slow,’ Kjarvik hissed as Bohr hefted his staff and clumped heavily towards the base of the weapon’s generatorum housing. The Iron Father placed the charges: melta bombs, just like before.

Kjarvik was backing up, voxing in a demand for extraction.

Bohr nodded as he strode towards him. ‘On to the next.’

The brute-shield over Gorkogrod had failed.

Maximus Thane thudded down the landing ramp of his heavy transport, leading out seventy-three Fists Exemplar of the Sixth, Seventh, and his own Second. Company structures had largely disintegrated, and yet the last seventy-three clung to that final emblem of their identity as though it were more precious than the gene-seed of Dorn that each warrior carried inside. From the ramp’s clanging metal to solid tarmac, the Fists Exemplar poured out into the orks’ guns, merging with similar debarkments of Excoriators and Black Templars.

Valkyrie and Vendetta sorties had cleared a landing zone from a previously identified sector of relatively high topological stability. The orks had used it as an airbase, comprising several score parallel runways from which they had quickly been able to establish aerial supremacy over the battle for the nearby palace supercomplex. Not this time. This time, the orks’ fighter and bomber wings were charred wrecks on the runway or smouldering still in their hangars. Thick coils of ugly black smoke choked the sky. It was a churn of black over black, pulsed with thumping volleys from the landers’ flare cannons.

In anticipation of the Deathwatch’s success, the Adeptus Astartes drop-ships had wasted no time in setting down. The bulk Astra Militarum landers were still up there however, crisscrossing trails of flak and duelling aircraft lighting up the next wave of transports.

In howls of descent thrusters the heavy landers crunched down on top of stricken aircraft. Locking clamps blew, ramps slammed into the ground, and from container after container, mortal troops emerged with a collective roar that stirred mankind’s spirit to war.

In such moments, Thane could see why some of his brothers saw the guiding hand of divinity behind His great crusade.

Scores of regiments from worlds Thane would never know, united only by the common misfortune of having served in the last Ullanor campaign, moved up behind the Space Marine vanguard. They were slower, but numerous. Thane’s suit auspex could only provide an estimate, but it was a big one — close to a hundred thousand men, give or take. Sentinel walkers strode ahead, combing the bordering structures with multi-laser fire, accompanied by Imperial Knights. The Astra Militarum regiments were joined by skitarii cohorts, servitor mobile weapons platforms and Legio Cybernetica support, emerging from their gothic transorbitals without the cry of their base human counterparts but with a group precision that was, in its ordered refutation of the chaos of the battlefield, just as affirming. A fleet of supertransports brought down heavier Martian engines.

Baneblades pushed through the aircraft wreckage. Shadowswords powered their infamously slow-charging main guns. The last survivors of Legio Ultima, the mighty Warlord Decimus Ordinatus and her escort — a battered Warhound called Helfyre, bathed in purple static emitted by its intermittent void bank — made the ground shake as they advanced into Gorkogrod.

Before the Great Waaagh of the Beast had begun, Thane would have called this army the greatest he had ever seen, a force fit for the command of a warmaster, or perhaps, in extremis, the lord of a great Chapter such as Odaenathus or Sachael. A lot could change in one year. It was astonishing to think that it was only that long ago that he had been pushing traitor remnants deeper into the Rubicante Flux, no more to his flag than a handful of ships and a hundred warriors.

A lot had changed, and this world had changed it. Thane had been in Vulkan’s vanguard ahead of a force not in the ten of thousands but closer to the millions. A transhuman could not hear his own voice for the thunder of tanks, and the march of whole Legios of Titans had made the horizon itself seem to move.

Ahead of him now was a heavy articulated truck, with giant exhaust stacks and spiked wheels in the orkish preference. It was bent inwards at the coupler to form a ‘v’ shape, and incoming fire was spanking off the metal sides. Thane waved his command squad into cover. Brothers Kahagnis and Abbas moved to bull bar and rear fender respectively and laid down fire for the Black Templars and Excoriators that continued to pound past. Thesius pulled himself up onto the driver’s cabin, turned as Thamarius threw up his battle-brother’s autocannon, then got down to one knee and blazed over the charging Space Marines.

‘To the palace. Fast and hard!’

Thane thumped into the side of the truck’s trailer section without slowing down, so hard it lifted half an inch off its nearside wheels. He turned his back against it, auto-senses taking in the mass of Astra Militarum and mechanised support pushing up to secure the Space Marines’ gains. He switched to long-range vox.

‘Issachar, this is Thane. Estimate ninety per cent of forces landed. Advancing towards the palace on primary schedule.’ Static hissed across the channel. A Valkyrie gunship jetted overhead. ‘Issachar!’

The Valkyrie’s tail-wing seemed to pop. Promethium smoke spewed out of it as it dropped, corkscrewing over and over before disintegrating on impact with the ground without even so much as an explosion. A rust-coloured ork jet blasted through the smoke cloud, wings wobbling as it banked and strafed across the Black Templars advance with twin hails of high-powered shot.

‘Issachar!’

He gave up. He looked at the sky. The fleet must still be too far out, hence the lack of drop pod reinforcement. Fitting one boot between the solid rubber tyre and the hellishly scratched mud guard, he climbed up onto the vehicle’s slug-holed rear container. Keeping low, he looked across the field of wreckage and blast craters, auto-senses crowding his helm display with threat markers and tactical screed.

Gun emplacements in the control towers. Orks in heavy battlegear mustering behind pre-prepared chokepoints. Fast attack vehicles closing in. The ground between the outermost runway and the access roads was a killing field, and the Space Marines were breaking down into combat squads to maximise their use of cover. The palace was fifteen kilometres due north, a gauntlet of bunkers, tank traps and enfilading fire zones.

Dorn himself could not have done better.

‘A frontal assault is still foolhardy and predictable,’ Thane had argued. Watch Commander Warfist, he recalled, had nodded sagely, prompting several others around the conference table to do likewise. ‘It was tried once and it failed.’

‘Foolhardy and predictable is what the orks have come to expect from the Imperium,’ Koorland had answered, with that strained but confident smile that he wore now most days. He had grown into his crown. Sometimes, he seemed to forget that he wore it at all. ‘Let them see again what they expect to see.’

‘To the palace!’

Thane stood and waved the massed army forward, just as a massive explosion blew out the back wall of a structure that butted onto the airbase.

A spiked grinder wheel appeared through the dust, followed in a rattling of tracks and loose bolts by a super-heavy ork battlefortress. Battlecannons mounted on rotable turrets belched smoke while orks manning pintle-mounted machine guns on its rampart-like upper sections exchanged fire with what must have been the Deathwatch kill-teams deployed ahead to secure the flanks. Their fire discipline took out a few machine-gunners and was successfully holding up the vehicle’s infantry support, but it would take more than a smattering of lascannons and multi-meltas to put a terminal stop to a monstrosity on that scale.

‘For the Emperor!’ Thane bellowed as the first Chimeras rumbled into range. Koorland called the men Ullanor Veterans. They proudly called themselves the Ullanor First. Thane called them Ullanor survivors. They looked afraid.

They did not look afraid enough.

‘I need you to lead the assault, brother,’ Koorland had said to him, after Asger and the others had left and they were just brothers, alone, at his table. ‘Our success rests on my survival, and my survival rests on yours.’ He had put his hand on Thane’s shoulder and squeezed. Not hard. Enough to bid a brother farewell. ‘I would rely on none but a true son of Dorn to survive long enough.’

Ullanor — orbital

Koorland backed ponderously into the teleportation slot. It probably did not matter which way he faced once the teleport cycle was under way, but he wanted to be in a position to monitor his squad and in Terminator armour he was too bulky to turn around once inside.

Fidus Bellator was a relic of antiquity, the first of the Indomitus suits fashioned in the closing years of the Heresy War, a gift from the Black Templars to the last of the Imperial Fists. His field of view was narrower than he was accustomed to from wearing power armour, mobility around the neck sacrified in favour of massive protection over that area and the shoulders. What he could see, however, was virtually enhanced by the armour’s adaptive auspex, augmented with outlines and false contrast, every movement of his eyes tracked by icons, brackets and informative screed.

Power was at maximum. Armour integrity was at maximum. The ammunition count to his integrated storm bolter was at maximum.

In their own two alcoves, back-lit by the slow-powering blue hum of the slot’s dematerialisers, Bohemond and Asger were similarly, though less magnificently, clad in Tactical Dreadnought plate.

Asger’s was draped in a snowy white pelt, ritually scratched with kill tallies and symbols of luck and warding. His armour was fitted with a back banner pole from which the Wolf Lord would have flown his personal heraldry, but from which the Watch Commander had hung a swatch of plain black cloth. He wore a pair of lightning claws. Bohemond’s black plate was immaculately picked out in silver, hung with prayer strips and lengths of pure white fabric bearing the Sigismund cross. Hailing from a martial tradition with a common root to Koorland’s own, he was similarly armed with storm bolter and power sword, the peerless Sword of Sigismund already free of its scabbard.

Those two needed little reassurance from him.

The two ogryns, Olug and Brokk, however, had filled the confines of the teleportation chamber with their panicked odour. For all their fearsome, greater-than-human appearance, the pair had been close to a full-blown panic attack until Commissar Heliad Goss, formerly of the Minglor XVII ogryn auxilia, had been found from amongst the Ullanor Veterans billeted aboard Alcazar Remembered and at the last minute reassigned to Koorland’s force. He was in the slot between them, reciting children’s prayers from memory, interspersed with simple words of encouragement. They were still sweating, but were not about to rip through the conduits for a way out which was a marked improvement.

In the remaining six slots, Krule and the Space Marines of Kill-Team Stalker prepared themselves for teleport in whatever manner brought them comfort.

Alcazar Remembered had two teleportation decks. The chamber itself might have been cramped, wall space bulked with slots for twelve Terminators, the floor a trip hazard of power cabling and hoses, but the technology was astonishly power-hungry and demanded the sacrifice of an entire deck to its generators. Kavalanera’s squad was in the other chamber. They were the ones that could not be risked. And due to the inevitable shipwide systems drain that followed a teleportation cycle, Koorland and his squad would be on their own for several minutes at least.

Krule looked up from his prayers. ‘Answer me honestly, Space Marine. Are you afraid?’

‘You do not refer to the orks, do you?’ said Asger.

The Assassin was quiet a moment. ‘No.’

‘Fear was purged from our hearts with the making of the blessed primarch,’ said Bohemond.

‘Indeed,’ said Koorland as the energy brackets running through the alcoves built to lumen-strip brightness, the hum becoming equivalent in volume to what one might experience by passing the bulkhead onto main drive. There was a tremor in the walls. ‘And yet, I am terrified every time.’

For some reason, the Assassin seemed comforted by his admission.

‘Coordinates locked. Systems charged.’ Shipmaster Kale’s voice echoed through the chamber’s augmitters, like a stone dropping deep, deep down a bottomless well. ‘We will be powerless for up to half an hour, but Issachar has the orbital defences well engaged, and surface scans indicate that the Deathwatch have been successful in eliminating the ground-based weaponry targeting our orbit. Bulwark and Faceless Warrior will escort us in. We are ready up here, lord.’

Koorland closed his eyes and muttered an invocation to the Emperor’s protection.

But he did not hesitate.

He could already picture in his mind the throne room of the Great Beast that Krule had described to him.

‘Commence.’

Fourteen

Teleportation was an experience that Koorland counted, his own near death on Ardamantua and subsequent bloody resurrection very much included, as one of rare horror.

Every atom in his body felt as if it had been electrified, charge repulsion baring his basic substance to the warp, then the quarks and gluons that constituted those creaking atoms, separating, separating, until he was a physical thing only in the abstract. He was atomic spaces, constrained only by the memory of nuclear cohesion. He was a nebula cloud, spread across the infinite, haunted by the unbearable thought of one day collapsing to form a star.

Then movement. But without body. It felt like his soul was forced through an electrostatic mesh. Like gruel being strained through muslin, but the substance was what was caught in the membrane, and he was the discoloured diluent that trickled through. From that weak suffusion of molecular memory and psychic tangling, there came a reformation.

And it was a, not the. Everything was contingent.

What emerged, and how, was in the lap of the gods.

The blinding light of teleportation faded, the disembodied sense of half-remembered dread following slowly, like blood trickling through a drain. Koorland’s primary heart was pounding, as though he had been engaged in some extraordinary struggle that he could not now recall. The teleportation chamber was gone. In its place, displayed by his suit’s auto-senses in augmented definition, was a dank, flame-lit room.

The ruddy heat of open stoves was reflected in the beaten metal fronts of cabinets, from the brutally large blunted implements that hung on pegs from the walls. Half-heartedly mopped-up bloodstains smeared the floor and the surfaces. Pots bubbled, ill-fitting lids chattering. A hunk of meat, what looked like a sawed-through stretch of vertebral column dipping from the end, dripped fat onto a sizzling element and rotated on a jerky mechanical spit. Koorland’s armour recorded the intense heat while insulating him from it, and the effects of the uncertain light were evenly filtered and restored.

The smell, however, was all too readily imagined.

Asger Warfist lowered his lightning claws. A wary sniff crackled through the unit vox, instinctual in spite of the total environment seal of Tactical Dreadnought armour.

‘This is no throne room.’

Ullanor — Gorkogrod

Inquisitor Wienand tapped her foot impatiently as a gang of servitors broke open a crate and spilled wirefoam cladding across the floor. It contained a portable vox-caster. Another was being installed directly opposite, part of two banks of units being wired up in series. Inquisitorial technical staff opened diagnostic channels and made expert reconfigurations inside open panels stuffed with what looked, to Wienand, like tangles of cabling. A magos supervised, hunched under his — or her, difficult to tell — acid-stained red robes. The occasional flicker of a servo-appendage switched across to furiously undo and redo someone’s work.

‘Castellan Clermont’s strike force coming under heavy fire in sector Twelve-B,’ said one of the vox-operators.

‘Twelve-B?’ said Wienand. ‘Do they plan to take the palace on their own? Redeploy Kill-Teams Godwyn and Phobos to clear the adjoining blocks, and raise the castellan if you can.’

‘Yes, Representative.’

The vox-breaking interference between surface forces and fleet was something that Imperial forces had been forced to contend with during the previous invasion. At Wienand’s insistence, and Asger’s approval, something had been done about it.

The chamber that her small command detail had occupied as a surface monitoring post was a level between levels in one of the hundreds of gretchin hab-towers that prickled the cityscape in the palace’s immediate vicinity. To supply their ork overlords with workers, Wienand assumed. Terra was organised with similar considerations in mind.

This particular floor was unoccupied, empty but for thick shock-absorbent clamps and structura-mimetic columns that enabled this structure and others like it to remain upright through the awesome stresses of tectonic rearrangement or subspace translation. The tower was the tallest in the battlezone that wasn’t part of the palace itself, and had been selected for that reason. Servitors and techno-magi trailed clumps of cabling and complex adaptor tablets behind them to exposed wall panels. From there, they cross-connected Wienand’s equipment through the tower’s own messy electrical system to the dishes, antennae and non-geometric pylons that flourished over the spiretop like fungoid weeds.

Veritus would have found the cross-wiring of technologies a borderline act of heresy. But that was why the ancient inquisitor had remained on Terra, and let her operatives do the work that he could not.

From the lower-level access ramps there came the sputtering hiss of superheated metal. A servitor with a melta-tool fitted to its wrist in place of a hand and a fuel canister integrated into its spinal column welded the zig-zagging door seal together, calm under fire as only a thorough lobotomisation could make something that had once been human. The muffled roar of two twin-linked heavy bolters from the other side of the door did not trouble it in the least.

The fate of the two Praetorian-class servitors was of far less concern to the servitor than it was to Wienand.

‘I seem to recall Lord Warfist telling you to observe from behind our assault.’ The Deathwatch sergeant, Kjarvik Stormcrow, stood with crossed arms, deliberately in the middle of a team of workers trying to assemble a tactical hololith where he was standing. His long bone-braided hair spread over the dark curves of pauldron and gardbrace. Several weeks aboard Abhorrence had acclimated Wienand to the stature and bearing of the Adeptus Astartes. But they were all far from alike. The Black Templars held themselves tall, unbending, like pillars of rockcrete with proud, human faces. The Space Wolf was not like that. He was ever so slightly hunched over, an animal at its ease, his annoyance at Umbra being drawn from active assignment to safeguard the Inquisitorial Representative on as-yet-untried authority an unguarded glimmer in his inhuman eyes.

‘Do you always do as Lord Asger tells you?’

‘Often,’ said Kjarvik, then grinned.

Wienand made herself smile in turn. She might just win these warriors’ respect yet.

‘Initial soundings from the auspex,’ said Raznick, veering loosely between the hurrying workers to approach.

He was wearing a long coat over a dull-green flak jacket surplus to some regiment or other from the Ullanor Veterans. There was a brace of pistols holstered at his hip, needle and las, and a sleeve for a power maul. The battery pack for a two-person refractor field was clamped over his right buttock, the emitters set into a pair of braces worn over his ballistic vest. Bodyguarding for the Inquisitorial Representative was testing work at the best of times.

Kjarvik regarded him like a bear at once amused and annoyed by the barked challenge of a dog. The Inquisitorial aide swallowed and turned to Wienand.

‘Issachar has the ork fleet engaged, but is keeping them at arm’s length. Losses appear light on both sides. Alcazar Remembered and her escorts are in geostationary orbit above the corridor opened up by the Deathwatch.’ A nod to Kjarvik that the Wolf acknowledged with a snarl. ‘From the power signatures, it looks as though one teleportation cycle has been completed.’

‘Koorland’s first squad is inside,’ Wienand summarised.

‘On schedule.’

Wienand frowned. She wasn’t ready to start taking Koorland’s undemonstrated ability to outwit the Beast on faith. ‘We should have them on vox by now.’

‘We’re almost finished here, Representative,’ said one of the workers at the hololith array.

A dozen men were busily boxing up the device’s exposed innards while a second magos canted the final start-up rituals. Eldon Urquidex helped where he could. The magos biologis limped slightly. A string of bionic vertebrae now ran down his neck, a gunmetal accoutrement to match the left arm, the right hand, and the surgical plates in his skull.

The hololith powered up. Ullanor’s wrinkled topography flickered into being as a spectral green overlay, rapidly filling up with blips as it liaised with the auspexes to present troop dispositions. Wienand watched the shift in the tide of Veridi red with her heart in her mouth. Her first thought was to instruct the adept to shut the device down and begin his rituals again. Its spirit had been improperly awakened. It had to be. Only her trust in the two magi’s superior knowledge kept her from doing so.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Kjarvik grunted.

‘The orks are disengaging, falling back towards the palace fortification.’ The voice was Raznick’s, his summation unnecessary. Wienand had eyes, and the great withdrawal of red across the hololith like a receding tide spoke for itself.

‘This is no rout,’ said Kjarvik, indicating with jabs of his power fist’s wolf-claws to where overwhelming numbers still hemmed in the frayed wedge of gold that represented Maximus Thane’s contingent. ‘They have left enough force behind to hold up the Guard.’

‘But why not crush them? Why pull back at all? Why…’ Wienand waved her hand as if to summon the absent thought. The boom of heavy bolters from the other side of the doors was an urgent distraction that she could do without.

A symphony of audially-coded alarm signifiers began to chime from the auspex units. ‘Force fields have just gone up inside the palace, Representative,’ came the report.

‘Inside?’

‘Yes, nothing projected outward that I can detect.’

‘What on the Throne… Can we raise Koorland?’

A shake of the head. ‘Some kind of signal deflection. The force fields, I think. I don’t know.’

‘Then raise Issachar. See what the fleet’s guns can do about it.’

‘No response from Punished!’

‘Try another ship.’

A tense moment later and several rows of shaken heads told Wienand that the answer was the same. The magos held up his digital manipulators in what was either a residually organic gesture of ignorance or an affectation painstakingly developed for maximal functionality as a human liaison. ‘The fleet is in range of this structure’s communications array. Supposition: we are too close to the palace, the electromagnetic output from its force fields is interfering with our equipment.’

‘Contact Thane,’ Wienand scowled, feeling her command of the situation unravelling fast. ‘Do it now. He’ll have no idea what’s going on, and he might at least have the chance to fall back and regroup. No point walking into a slaughter for no good reason.’

The operator looked up from his vox-caster. He looked broken.

‘We can’t reach our ground forces either?’

A solid thump from the other side of the lower access doors interrupted them, and the roar of four heavy bolters abruptly became that of two. Wienand would not have thought that the difference would have been so obvious. Stray slugs tapped on the welded door, almost politely.

The last weapon-servitor would not hold for long, and then Wienand would see close up just how impolite an ork could be.

‘Madame inquisitor,’ called the ranking officer monitoring the auspex staff. ‘More ships entering auspex range.’

‘There shouldn’t be any more ships.’

‘Ork ships. A hundred signatures, at least. They must have been waiting on the planet’s auspex dark side.’

Wienand felt a chill rise up through her and whisper round the base of her skull. The monitoring station had fallen deathly quiet, but for the much diminished thunder of heavy bolters. She swallowed, unable to articulate the cornered-animal sensation that had come over her with the appearance of those ork ships.

‘What should we do?’ asked Raznick.

Dumbly, she looked around the silent chamber, her eyes drawn inevitably, water running downhill, to Kjarvik’s yellow, vertically transected pair. She took a deep breath, felt it steady her nerves, and did not blink. She still had a task to perform, even if the total lack of long- and medium-range vox made that task impossible.

‘Leave everything,’ she said, directed at the two magi, and then to Kjarvik and Raznick: ‘Contact any gunships in range and have them pick up the remaining kill-teams. I’m going to have to direct things in person.’

Ullanor — Gorkogrod

As Koorland had suspected, the pre-teleportation position and facing of his squad members had had little bearing on how they were now deployed. The twelve of them had rematerialised into two half circles, facing outwards, a row of blue-white burners and butchery tools between them. He, Asger, Krule and the ogryn, Olug, had the two semi-circles’ four ends. Commissar Goss was being violently sick. Koorland did not know if it was the teleportation or the stench, but he doubted that either would have been easy on a mortal’s stomach.

‘Where are we?’ said Asger. ‘Why are we not where we are supposed to be?’

With a blink-click over the activation rune jittering yellow in his helm display, Koorland bade his armour’s spirit to summon a tri-d cartolith of the palace complex. It wavered into being a moment later, filling the left side of his display with a slowly rotating image. It took a few minutes to interface his armour’s locator beacon with the cartolith and pin his current location to the display, towards the top of the labyrinthine tangle of corridors.

‘About four hundred metres from the throne room, though the corridors in this section are a mess.’

‘What happened?’

‘Force fields on my auspex,’ said Bohemond. ‘A scatterfield too, perhaps? Our teleport must have been redirected to avoid it.’

Koorland blew out a relieved breath. The teleport systems incorporated safety protocols to prevent incorporation into solid matter or other violent means of rematerialisation, but even First Company veterans did not hold much trust in those. He was glad to see they had functioned now, even if they had moved his squad some way from his target. ‘What of Kavalanera’s team?’

Asger shrugged. Only his exposed head moved. ‘If this is the nearest area to the throne room large enough for twelve men then the Sisters will likely be redirected here.’

‘How long to teleport?’

‘Chronos do not operate during the teleportion cycle,’ said Bohemond. ‘I cannot contact Alcazar Remembered to correct. Outward channels appear to be jammed.’

‘Then we must clear the area,’ said Koorland, sharply. ‘Or else there will be no telling where the others will appear. Krule, can you find your way to the throne room from here?’

The Assassin was subconsciously scouring his surrounds for threats and targets, but responded to the question with a curt nod and pointed to one of two doors. He was a large man, by mortal standards, but moved with a balletic grace. The firelight scattered against his synskin.

‘Sergeant Tyris, escort him and secure the passage. We will follow.’

The Deathwatch Space Marines, ogryns, commissar, Terminator-encased Chapter Masters, and one Assassin exited the chamber. Koorland stopped under the lintel bar and turned ponderously to look back.

He had felt a prickling on the back of his neck.

The air in the orks’ butchery chamber shimmered and folded, a kneading of the warp space liminal that broke the warm, surface-hardened crust of normalcy to which mankind thought it clove and mixed it with darkness. The tear existed for a fraction of a second, and in a splurge of ionisation that left Koorland’s eyes and throat stinging in spite of his protection, it was sealed, and twelve additional figures now stood where there had been none.

Kavalanera and five of her sisters stood in a ring with power blades drawn and charged. Torn pages of ancient scripture fluttered from their armour in the air-cycled breeze of a voidship they no longer occupied. Two were in the same antique carmine as the knight abyssal, designating them, presumably, as belonging to the same sub-order of the Sisters of Silence. The other three wore black plate with golden trim, led by a knight obsidian by the name of Drevina.

The chilling effect on Koorland’s brain of the pariahs’ mere existence in the same room was every bit as profound as the teleportation cycle that had preceded it.

The women surrounded the ork psyker. It was far larger than the Incus Maximal test subject and its muscles swelled against the chains that bound its wrist and throat. Three enormously reconstructed draught-servitors supplied from Verisimilis’ loading decks had the ends of the chains clamped in vice-hands. Another lesson from Incus Maximal. The servitors were more than strong enough to keep the struggling ork restrained, and they would not react to personal danger the way the Inquistorial storm troopers had.

Laurentis scuttled around them on his three metal legs, ducking under flexing chains, monitoring pulse and breathing and stabbing the ork’s thick hide with digital probes for reasons of his own. The grizzled ranger, Alpha 13-Jzzal, watched the ork psyker’s occasional lunges with a dispassionate eye, motionless but for the optic pulse of the complete-wavelength scan with which he concurrently swept the room.

‘Scan complete,’ grated Alpha 13-Jzzal. The words were synthesised by a throat implant, and emerged with an artificial cadence that involved neither the movement of the ranger’s jaw nor the making of eye contact. ‘Infrared and X-ray sweeps reveal nothing in the vicinity.’ His head turned sharply towards Koorland then, faceted metal reflecting the firelight on a dozen different planes. ‘Past behaviour suggests the high likelihood of a trap.’

The same thing had occurred to Koorland, and he had decided equally quickly that it did not matter. They were committed now. There was no alternative.

Ullanor would be annihilated. Or Terra would be.

Ullanor — Gorkogrod

Shards of sharpened debris from ork fragmentation bombs scythed across Thane’s armour. Bent nails. Metal scraps. Direct hits drove shrapnel at him, hard, licked by fire. Cloudbursts clotted the sky with whizzing screws and blades, raining indiscriminately over all. The high-tempo thump of heavy guns boomed through the frag storm. Thane’s battleplate recorded hits as he advanced through the rubble: prangs, stings, chips to unpainted ceramite that brought sealant gel hissing over lodged bullets.

His umbra-pattern bolter answered back with more decisive effect. His helmet auto-senses compensated for the confusion of debris, filtering, ghostly reticules floating amongst the blizzarding buckshot. Bolter fire bracketed the faceplate ghosts one by one and blood sprayed from within them. Orks tumbled out as though pushed out in surrender, rolling with the unspent momentum of their charge, tracked by bolt and las until what lumped to a halt was an urecognisable ruin.

Thane drilled a bolt-round through a mouth that was somehow still sucking on air. The ork made a grunting sound, the subsequent detonation pasting Thane’s right greave with gore as he stepped over it.

‘Thesius, Agrippus, heavy weapons left and right.’ He pointed a gauntlet that was hatched with sealant scars towards a high, spiked tower. Burning rounds spat back and forth. He ducked instinctively from the whistle of an artillery shell. ‘Venerable Brother Otho, take a squad and help the Excoriators clear that tower. I want a corridor cleared for the Imperial Guard to follow. We are too thinly spread.’ The Earthshaker round thumped through the side wall of a building and spewed fire high back across the street. The famous aftershock rattled the entire connected superstructure.

The Excoriators had broken into the barracks blocks to the east, but had become mired in heavy urban fighting. Gun nests covering the bridgewalks and exits had them pinned in the complex’s near-side corner while hit-and-run attacks by aerially deployed ork shock troops, coordinated with armoured units on the ground, slowly ate into that slim territorial gain. But the Excoriators would hold. Venerable Brother Otho would see to it.

To north and west, the Black Templars continued to drive deep. Before passing out of vox-contact, Castellan Clermont had voxed in from a position almost three kilometres from Koorland’s teleport coordinates. Practically on the walls. But the Black Templars had been so intent on pressing forwards that entire mobs of orks had been able to slip through and assault the Fists Exemplar flank.

Thesius’ autocannon mowed them down before they could come within twenty metres. Brothers Tolemy, Preco, and Zaul moved into the kill-zone, cutting into the building fronts with precise bursts of bolter fire. None of them saw the shell before it landed. Thane did. It was unworthy of them, a lumpen metal casing for something incendiary, lobbed carelessly from a shanty block as if from a trebuchet, but it blasted a mighty hole out of the ground as well as any handcrafted munition blessed by the priests of Mars.

And just like that, the galaxy had sixty-nine Fists Exemplar.

‘There are few of us left,’ Thane had said, looking through the viewport at the dense stellar clouds of the galactic core in which the Ullanor star shone with a bright, beguiling innocence. ‘Barely enough to continue.’

Koorland had joined him. The lumen bars in the mullions accentuated the grey in his hair. ‘We are sons of Dorn, brother. We do not surrender.’ He had tapped his throat, Thane remembered, the progenoids held there, the last precious gene-seed of his Chapter. ‘That is the burden the primarch has placed on us. He knew we could shoulder it. We stand while all around us falls, and because we stand, others will stand with us.’

‘Call for Apothecary Antonius,’ yelled Thamarius, because every Fist Exemplar carried in his make-up the conceit of command.

Antonius was of the Excoriators, attached to the remnant Fists Exemplar to perform that most vital function in the absence of a surviving Apothecary of their own.

‘Press the attack,’ Thane ordered, emotionless, gunning down an ork that appeared in an unglazed window even as his brothers turned their helms to him in surprise.

They would stand while all around them fell. They wore no colours, they showed no pride, but to a transhuman man they were the truest sons of Dorn.

‘Whirlwinds!’ he shouted. ‘I want that block brought down!’

Thane could see the greater picture despite the slaughter. He knew the mathematics. The Chapter had been hit too hard, its gene-stocks depleted beyond their ability to propagate a viable genetic population. The Last Wall stood, but the Fists Exemplar were already finished.

A column of Deathwatch vehicles, scuffed paintwork revealing the bright green of the Aurora Chapter, trundled up towards the front. The rubble was causing them difficulty, the cavalcade advancing at less than walking pace behind a pair of Vindicators specially modified with urban clearance dozer blades. Both of the glacis modules were pocked by bullet holes. One of them was on fire. The desultory whistle of castellan missiles and lascannon stabs were all they could give back.

With a sonic clap and a promethium roar, an atmosphere fighter, with rippling flames chased in paint down its stub nose, dropped through the frag clouds and strafed the armour column with a linked pair of underwing quad-autocannons. High volume anti-personnel rounds spanked and rattled along armour plates, blood splashing across the turret of a Razorback as its commander vainly tried to track the jet with his pintle mount, and then in a rumble of afterburn it raced northwards into ork-held territory.

Two or three kilometres in that direction, where it had been driven to keep pace with the Black Templars advance, Thane could see the great fifteen-metre-high pyre that had been Helfyre. In the glare of that inferno, the invincible Decimus Ordinatus shimmered in a liquid caul of purples and greens, tormented from every angle by sustained fire.

As Thane watched, the Warlord raised an arm stained with pyrotechnic bruising, the diverted power causing its gatling blaster to glow like a birthing sun. The massive weapon began to spin, superfast, oddly silent against the cacophonies more immediate in Thane’s ears, and disgorged a blast of energy that carved the nearest of the offending gun towers in two. That beam of light was, in fact, a torrent of several million high-power las-beams per second, and the combined effect was devastating. The Titan dragged its arm diagonally across its body, chewing downwards through the blasted structure and overloading the shields of the pot-bellied ork gargant that had been sheltering behind it.

The gatling blaster gave out with a sputter of light and a spent whir of barrels as the remains of the gun tower crumbled down over the bright yellow body of the unshielded gargant. The ork machine drove through it, a lunatic grin in brilliant yellow over its crude orkish face. Behind it came several more. Decimus Ordinatus shook the earth with a backward step.

‘After today there might be no children of Dorn,’ Thane had said. Not in argument, but the words needed to be said. They were greater than him.

‘No wall stands forever, brother, but I think that our father’s legacy was always about more than us. If Vulkan taught me anything it was to have faith. Humanity will prevail as it always has. It is for those like us to ensure that it is so.’

Thane cursed on the Eidolican day as something unseen but earth-shakingly massive impacted somewhere in the conurbation, near enough to rattle his boots against the ground. He dropped to one knee in a crater and unloaded his magazine, speaking evenly and calmly into his helmet vox.

‘This is Force Commander Thane to all units still receiving — consolidate at the second marker and await—’

A rocket screamed across from a tower block and struck the lead Vindicator side-on between the dozer blade and the track. The explosion flipped it over, with fingers of flame and nails of smoke, onto its back, smashing through the glacis armour of the vehicle behind.

‘—Brother Agrippus!’ Thane finished, debris raining down.

His battle-brother tracked the aim of his heavy bolter round to the right and speared the crude rocket’s winding smoke tail with bunker-busting incendiary rounds. Thane saw a burly ork with a flared missile tube under one arm running window to window. Behind Thane’s back, the rest of the Aurora Chapter’s armour column snarled up into a congested huddle of vehicles behind the stricken Vindicator. Angry shouts and engine growls. The ork shooter crashed through a side wall and into an alley just as Agrippus’ heavy bolter tore up the last window in the row. It dropped, hanging onto its missile tube as though it doubled as a jump pack, and thumped two-footed onto the rear-axle suspension of a waiting truck. Wood and metal shards sprayed over the vehicle as it roared into a wheelspin and rattled off between the blocks, bolt-rounds spanking from its rear fender.

Thane’s Lyman’s ear tuned to the sounds of ork vehicles: fighters being picked up and redeployed, unhappy about it by the tone of their xenos grunts, but obedient to their leaders. He mentally reconfigured his mindmap of the battlefield. The orks were refocusing their forces along a narrower front, digging in somewhere just ahead of the Black Templars advance.

‘They are withdrawing.’

‘An unlikely but predicted variable,’ said Brother Kahagnis. ‘Substitute strategem is staged advance, pull Black Templars back and extend flanks with Astra Militarum units. Draw the orks onto us again.’

Thane took a moment to consider, to elevate his mind above the anarchy of the battlefield, to perceive in it the connections of cause and effect as every Fists Exemplar initiate was taught. Every possibility was considered. Every variable already had a strategy in place to counter it.

There had been no regicide sets on Eidolica, and no one would ever challenge a Fist Exemplar to a game of strategy.

These orks had shown a fondness for feints and counters.

Perhaps it was time to show them something they did not expect.

‘Vulkan had faith in you, brother,’ Thane had answered.

‘He had faith in us all.’ Koorland had turned from the window then, and lain a gauntleted hand on Thane’s shoulder. Half his face was dark, shielded from the viewport’s lumen bars like a planet’s night side. ‘As do I. We fight to the last. We are the ultimate realisation of the hopes of mankind, and by our virtues do we hold humanity’s leaders to account. In heart and mind, we never waver.’ He released his grip and appeared to sigh though made no sound. ‘The real work begins tomorrow and the day after. We will rebuild the Imperium, brother. If one day the Khan or the Raven should be found as Vulkan was, if the Emperor should awake, then I would have the Imperium that they find be one of glory and not despair. I would make our father proud.’

‘Pull back the Black Templars. But then throw everything onto the Excoriators’ flank. Even the reserves.’

‘That is not the correct strategem for this set of conditions,’ Kahagnis argued.

Thane’s expression was immobile as rock as he regarded the spires and gun turrets of the idolatrous palace complex, still several kilometres away. The orks knew that Koorland was inside and somehow, though he had not yet worked the problem through that far, his and Koorland’s roles of lure and trap had become reversed. Were it in his nature to do so, he might have smiled.

‘The objective is the same, brother,’ said Thane.

Kill the Beast.

It did not matter who did it, and Thane had no intention of becoming the last son of Dorn.

Ullanor — Gorkogrod, inner palace

The ogryn, Brokk, punched the locked door. Ripples of blue-green force spilled outward from the giant abhuman’s grinding knuckles and the force field cloaking the door gave an ozone sputter. The ogryn’s muscles bulged as he tried to force it. Sweat soaked his khaki vest. After a few seconds of straining, the ogryn withdrew his hand and shook out his seared knuckles, dog tags and chains clinking against the spit-polished campaign medals sewn into his jacket breast. Laurentis’ plasma cutters had failed to make a mark either. So had Asger’s lightning claws.

To look at the door was to look at something clearly ork. The metal was thick, and clamped in the middle by a meaty lock in the shape of a bull-horned greenskin. The black and white diagonal stripes were garishly done, the brush strokes occasionally veering off the line to create a weird, kaleidoscopic pattern. The doors, however, were well balanced on their runners. The join was perfectly centred. And then there was the force field.

Laurentis lifted an extensor that emerged from his robes on an articulated limb and tapped on the door at various points, like a medic manoeuvring his stethoscope as he palpated a patient’s chest. Small flowerings of counter-force rippled from around his bladed metal probe.

‘Supposition: a nanolayer force field, similar in concept to the adamantine surface layer of Thunderhawk or Land Raider armour.’ He tapped it again and watched the spread of colours. ‘Fascinating.’

‘Can it be broken?’ asked Koorland.

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘Can you break it?’

‘Oh. I think not. Not without further investigation.’

Koorland nodded in acceptance — though his helm, bonded to his plastron and pauldrons, did not translate it well — and turned ponderously around.

The corridor was of the same unidentifiable metal as the door, super-resistant, unmarked by the scrape of a lightning claw or the frustrated discharge of a commissar’s plasma pistol, but minus the paintwork or the energy field. It was remarkably clean. There was no light source that any of them could detect and there was no sign of external power generation. Every surface just seemed to glow with a soft, bluish light. Embossed plates and glyphs marked junctions and doorways.

Kavalanera and her sisters filled the corridor with raised swords, a shield of exquisite war-plate and power-edged blades between Laurentis and Alpha 13-Jzzal and the servitor-restrained ork psyker. Asger held the rear. The second ogryn and Commissar Goss stood at one of the junctions. This door was unshielded and Bohemond was already on the other side with Kill-Team Stalker.

Koorland glanced again at the cartolith. His current location was identified by a small pulsing icon, buried deep in a labyrinthine subterranean structure that more nearly resembled the root system of a tooth, than anything obviously palatial. Passageways spread out from his position like capillaries. It looked like they were in the midsection of a raised structure, one of several fortified edifices that ringed the Beast’s throne room. His best guess put them a hundred metres or so above it and about twice that horizontally.

‘The strange thing,’ Krule appeared by Koorland’s pauldron and gestured to the open door, ‘is that that’s the more direct route.’

‘The palace itself is movable. Are you certain?’

‘I wouldn’t open my mouth otherwise.’

‘A trap,’ Alpha 13-Jzzal said again, a vox-loop growl.

Koorland wondered if Rogal Dorn had smiled when he had first set foot on Sebastus IV. ‘Of course it is a trap.’

‘If I might propose a theory?’ Laurentis scuttled around from the locked and shielded door to face Koorland, audio receivers extending from his cranial structure as if, in some remotely human way, to present himself fully at the Space Marine’s disposal.

‘I remember a time when you would not have cared to ask first,’ said Koorland.

‘I have, on occasion, been made aware that my hypotheses are not at all times relevant or welcome.’

‘They are today, my friend. Speak.’

Laurentis blinked and lowered his eyeball, a gesture of humble gratitude. ‘The sole purpose of our mission is the assassination of the Beast, correct?’

Koorland nodded.

‘To eliminate the one target that the enemy cannot afford to lose,’ Laurentis quoted, in paraphrase, then prodded Fidus Bellator’s huge pectoral aquila with a manipulator claw. ‘It occurs to me that the Beast could have had a similar thought.’

‘The mission is compromised,’ said Alpha 13-Jzzal. ‘You have been lured here.’

Koorland regarded the cyborgised warrior sternly. The skitarius knew, because Koorland had shared the data himself, of the calculus-logi’s latest prognoses. Terra had been calculated to collapse in a matter of weeks. The most optimistic upper limit of statistical deviation had the greater Imperium continuing as a unified entity for only another few months at best. These facts were no secret. Let the ugly face of failure inspire the mortals to sacrifice all, as Thane and the Last Wall did mere kilometres away.

‘It changes nothing.’

‘We should at least contact Thane or Issachar,’ said Krule. ‘Or both. If you’re right then vox-silence is clearly unnecessary.’

‘Impossible,’ came Bohemond’s voice-amplified reply from the adjoining corridor. The Black Templar clumped back into view, bulging armour plates blued by the odd, rinsing light. ‘External vox is being blocked. Did Koorland not tell you?’

Krule puffed out his cheeks. ‘Then I suppose I’m with that.’ He jabbed his head sideways towards Alpha 13-Jzzal. ‘I’ve been this way before without losing outside contact. It has to be deliberate.’

‘I assume then that your opinion is the same,’ said Bohemond.

Krule’s expression was stony. His eyes widened slightly and the whites began to turn red. Without appearing to move, his musculature noticeably swelled under his synskin bodyglove. Chronaxic implants, Koorland reasoned, threat responsive, doping the Assassin’s already enhanced physiognomy with a sharp increase in metabolism. Krule grinned like a snake.

‘We came all this way. I brought all my favourite knives.’

‘Kill ork fur Empror,’ rumbled Olug, slowly.

Koorland felt his heart warm with gratitude.

‘Signal on my auspex,’ growled Asger, suddenly. ‘Fifty metres. That way.’ He pointed one set of lightning claws down the corridor. Kavalanera and her sisters made ready with a swift rustle of oiled plates. ‘Closing with some haste.’

‘How many?’ said Koorland.

‘Enough for me.’

‘It seems that the auspex is working after all,’ said Laurentis, happily.

‘Ave bloody Omnissiah,’ muttered Krule.

‘Praise Him,’ Laurentis agreed.

‘Break through them,’ suggested Alpha 13-Jzzal. ‘While we are still capable of salvaging the weapon. There is no way of ascertaining from here whether this route to the throne room will not be similarly warded.’

But somehow, Koorland knew that it would not be. The Emperor lit the galaxy through the Astronomican: was it not then possible that He watched over His children in spirit?

‘Krule, Tyris, you have point. Bohemond, with them. Asger, you know what to do if the orks catch up.’ The Wolf Lord flexed his lightning claws eloquently. ‘Goss, covering fire. Lady Brassanas, Laurentis — you’re with me.’

Fifteen

The Fists Exemplar, and those of the VII Legion that were their genetic forebears, had fought in some of the Imperium’s defining battles. They had defended Terra from the Arch-Enemy, fought in the Consus Drift campaigns. Oriax Dantalion himself had been at the primarch’s side through the slaughter of the Iron Cage. But Maximus Thane doubted that so much honour had ever been earned by so few as during the second battle for Ullanor.

He wondered if enough of them would be alive at the finish for their exploits to be remembered half as long as those names of legend.

It had been Assault Marines of the Seventh Company, in concert with their brothers of the Black Templars, that had taken the fight to the primary fortress blocking the palace’s eastern aspect and broken it open. It had been bike squads led by Forgemaster Aloysian that had led the Aurora Chapter tanks through the orks’ minefield and allowed them to crack the greenskins’ defensive lines of trenches and bunkers. When an armoured witch-tower, wreathed in green lightning and trundling forward on massive tracks, had delivered the deathblow on Decimus Ordinatus and turned its psychic fire upon the Deathwatch vehicles, it had been Brother-Sergeant Aquino of the Second who had led the kill-squad of Sisters of Silence to nullify it from within.

The galaxy would never again know his like.

As for Thane himself, he was too humble to keep a personal tally, but his helm display recorded it for him: three hundred and eighteen kills for three hundred and nineteen rounds expended. It had been him to lead the sortie that crippled the orks’ flak guns, and him that then called down the finishing blow.

The Icarus supercarrier, several kilometres of runstrip mounted over many windswept tiers upon two sets of awesome tracks, had been held in reserve with the Field-Legatus’ Leviathan and escort. Scant minutes after Thane’s voxed authorisation, dozens of low-flying Marauder bombers and Vulture gunships had turned what remained of the palace approach to ash and glass, dust under a Space Marine’s boot.

There had been nothing left but a handful of survivors, crawling cockroach-like in the rubble of apocalypse, to prevent the hundred and twelve Demolisher siege tanks of the Ullanor Veterans forming up into one long, slowly advancing firing line and opening up against the palace’s outer wall with the full fury of mankind.

The orks’ fortification was staggeringly vast. Superhard metals plated its sloped face. Energy fields flickered in ugly opposition to the shells and explosions that broke along its length. Fixed gun turrets raked the ground, even as shield overloads drove cracks through ablative plating and exposed bare rockcrete to the massed gunnery of the Astra Militarum. The wall crumbled.

Maximus Thane was the first to cheer.

Everything started to move forwards. On first impression it was as though the planet’s artificial tectonics were undergoing one of their gross scale rearrangements, but the sky was still, the ground was still, it was everything else that was moving. Every man, every vehicle was suddenly rushing towards the breach in the wall as though the planet was a voidship and they had just punched a hole in their own hull. Those that had been closest to the breach were the first to enter; no deeper thought went into it than that. They were the orks now.

A tactical squad of Excoriators advanced through the rubble, into a pall of dust that sparked with torn electrics and bolter fire. The grey ceramite block of Venerable Otho moved with them, crunching forward, figure-of-eighting spirals of fire spraying from the Dreadnought’s heavy flamer.

Thane joined the headlong rush over the shattered cityscape, unloading his bolter onto the breached section of wall, wildly skewing his accuracy ratios though he did not care. The urban terrain was post-apocalyptic: masonry in jagged lumps as though cut from passing asteroids and dropped from the sky, dismembered statues of armoured orks fifty metres high and brandishing chainaxes and heavy weapons. Vehicle wrecks, blackened, on their sides or in pieces; bunkers with smoke pouring from gun slits.

A Chimera ground over the loose earth on rattling metal treads, noisily passing Thane as he ran through a jumble of rockcrete blocks and wire. It had become separated from the rest of its armoured fist squadron by the terrain, slowed, but was steadily growling through the gears as it rumbled over the last of the major blast craters and saw open ground.

Thane turned and chased it, up a wobbling ramp of metal sheeting and onto the roof of a bunker. The Chimera was just accelerating away as Thane leapt, arms pulling on air as if to drag him forward, and thumped onto its armoured back. His boots made a hollow clang. The vehicle’s acceleration almost pitched him backwards, but he activated maglock to secure himself, swayed, then clumped forwards to grab hold of the handrail that circled the turret cupola. One-handed, he ejected the hot sickle magazine from his bolter and punched the weapon against his ammo-belt to insert a fresh one.

The Chimera gave a crunching, low-gear roar as it hit the rubbled section of wall, crashed through a metre-thick spit of standing masonry at the summit and then slewed freely, almost sideways, into the palace’s outer bailey. It trembled on its suspensors and then growled forwards in search of a site to unload. Its spotlight blinked on, a high-wattage lumen bulb spearing white light into the murk. Hull-mounted lasguns pivoted and fired. Its turret multi-laser traversed, cables swaying, and split the air with a crackling volley of beams.

Thane deactivated maglock and jumped down, crunching into gravelly ground as the Chimera reversed its tracks to pivot on the spot, spraying las-beams, and then rumble off in a new direction. He swung up his bolter and started firing.

Dust hung over everything. Spilled blocks cluttered the ground, a randomised topography of foxholes and trenches through which ork and man waged recreations of greater wars. Shield emitters, torn from the wall, struggling for function, flooded the air with sparks and fire. Landmines geysered tanks and rockcrete high into the air. Unexploded munitions went off. Distant walls, thicker, higher, more heavily defended even than those that had just been broken, echoed to the reports of gunfire.

Thane drilled an ork through the neck, splattered its blood over a rockcrete block, got another in the knee, stepped on its chest and shot a bolt between its eyes. A roar. An ork ripped through the smog, swinging an axe. Thane sided the blade on his bolter. The weapons came apart with a ring of metal, leaving shocked fingers. The ork blundered through into Thane and knocked them both to the ground. Icons flashed up minor damage; servos whirred and Thane struggled to his feet. The ork smashed into him again, but this time Thane was ready. He brought up his dented bolter and put four rounds point blank into the ork’s chest.

It exploded, wetly separating legs from head, and Thane thumped the bolter’s heavy stock, a crushed bolt-round spitting from the sickle magazine. Umbra-pattern. Practically indestructible. As close to a Chapter symbol as the Fists Exemplar came.

Armoured warriors of the Excoriators and Black Templars surged past him, war cries reverberating from helmet vox-casters. Those in ivory and red advanced into ork fire in disciplined lines like one-man tanks, laying down withering volleys as they moved. Their brothers moved in fits and bursts, pausing to hack through ork counters with gladius and power sword before dashing on.

‘All units forward!’ Thane yelled, amping his helmet’s vox-caster to maximum and striding up onto the silver-blue carcass of an Imperial Knight for a better view.

His auto-senses did their best to filter out the interference, figures emerging from the fog like black ghosts in a purgatory of grey, filled in with auspex-generated outlines that struggled to keep up. Assault Marines and Astra Militarum sappers assaulted the walls. He could see the controlled flare of jump packs, the sputter of portable shield racks, the cry and boom of ordnance pouring off the walls. Massed tanks growled together in the lee, recoil rocking them back as they slammed high-explosive shells into the base.

There was no time to regroup and adopt a more considered approach. They had pushed through the orks, yes, but they had certainly not beaten them. There were millions of fresh fighters out there, caught out of position by Thane’s flank attack, that were probably being piled into trucks and raced into new positions at the army’s rear even now. The only option was to push forward, to break the orks’ second wall before they could be smashed against it.

It was not war as the doctrines of Dorn or even Guilliman would have it, but it was exhilarating.

Everyone, Thane decided, should push forcibly against their nature at least once before the finish.

He turned to look up at the wall itself, just as a lobbed shell, trailing spurts of fire from an overpowered rocket, smashed through the top of a struggling Shadowsword tank and blew it to pieces before its main gun had a chance to fire. Black Templars wearing bulky jump packs held a beachhead on the parapet, backs forced to the rampart by several mobs of huge orks in steam-powered armour suits. As he watched, a boss ork with a shrilling buzz-saw and a pair of dribbling flamers bolted to its gauntlet chewed through a Space Marine’s right-hand jet flue and butted him off the parapet. The warrior broke on the rockcrete lumps below.

One breach was all they needed. Just one.

Sub-vocalising to his armour’s simplistic spirit he called up the army’s general channel, to coordinate some of the firepower that was labouring up towards the walls, and winced at the unexpected onslaught of orkish voices that emerged from his earpiece. Blink-scrolling through the frequencies found them all similarly blocked. Thane’s best supposition was the greenskins were using the full wavelength to coordinate their own unruly defense rather than actively blocking the Imperials’ communications. He set his vox to active scan, the exquisite properties of his Lyman’s ear allowing him to filter the overlapping noises into distinct sounds. He could not make out any specific headquarters location from background sounds, not could he understand the language, but there was one voice amongst the profusion that he knew immediately, as though a recognition marker had just flagged it up on his helm display.

It was guttural, unclean, the loudest and most strident, and also the deepest, as though delivered from a chest wider than the armoured body of a Dreadnought.

The Beast was near.

There was a loud roar of freshly gunned engines, and an exuberant hammering of gunfire that chewed into the crumpled shoulder of the Knight that Thane was standing on. Before he could think, battle-bred instincts loosed a four-round trigger-squeeze in the right direction, the bolts spanking off the snarling front radiator of a half-track laden with burly close-assault fighters. A dozen more of the ramshackle vehicles roared up behind it, packed with troops and guns, mouldings plastered with dust, powering up through a sally port under the wall that had been partially blocked with spoil and debris.

‘Ork vehicles inbound from a tunnel in grid section epsilon-nine,’ Thane voxed, jumping down from the shoulder of the Knight and pushing his bolter round its chewed-up rear plating, then returning fire. If any of his units were holding open comms under that xenos diatribe, he had no idea, or if they would be able to hear him if they were. But he had little option but to try. ‘Surrounding sections hold and counter. Repeat, hold and counter. Take that tunnel.’

Concentrated fire drove Thane back into cover. They were not aiming at him, of course. He was one Space Marine sheltering behind a wreck, and a Fist Exemplar, indistinguishable in undecorated ceramite from any battle-brother under his command.

Sparks rattled across the glacis plate of the drab grey Predator tank that rolled over the tangled rubble at walking speed, keeping step with the combat squad of Fists Exemplar advancing under the cover of its guns. A blast of its twin-linked lascannons slagged a high-sided armoured truck. Return fire cost it its left sponson and a turret antennae cluster. It growled to a stop, the Space Marines taking up positions around its bulk and laying down fire. Thane recognised Kahagnis, Abbas, Agrippus and his autocannon, Thamarius and Xeres. Brother-Apothecary Antonius of the Excoriators knelt by the Predator’s ruined gun, narthecium buried in the neck of fallen Sardonis, a plasma burn where an arm and a large part of a chest should have been.

Thane pulled himself in behind the body of the Knight, taking advantage of the cover to pull his mistreated bolter to his chest, eject the sickle magazine and slam in a fresh one with a red strip along the base to indicate that it contained armour-piercing vengeance rounds. He could feel the ding of bullets striking the far side of his cover. He could hear the rumble of engines, getting louder.

He stepped out of cover, side-on, bolter swinging upwards in one smooth motion in time with the flashed appearance of that overloaded half-track. He prepared to fire, but before he could rake the speeding vehicle’s flank with bolts he felt a hot downwash of air, like a fiery hand pressing down from above, and the half-track drove into a wall of heavy weapons fire. Quad-linked heavy bolters tracked back and forth, shredding the vehicle like paper. Thane dropped to one knee and turned his head away as a quartet of hellstrike missiles dropped from the black-painted Thunderhawk’s underwing hardpoints, flared, and then whistled through the vehicle formation, sending metal plates and smouldering remains billowing skyward.

Ground dust blew out from the lowering Thunderhawk in ripples, tied to the cycling of its engine fans. It hovered above the height of its landing struts and dropped its doors, squads of Inquisitorial storm troopers in glossy black carapace and visors tramping down the assault ramp and into a covering posture around the gunship. Thane saw another blunt wedge of black armour thunder overhead, strafing the ground with heavy bolters and turbolasers, with flak from wall-mounted air defences lighting up its aerofoil.

His vox-bead gave a long, power-boosted whine and the orkish voices receded. ‘Lord Thane,’ said a female voice. ‘This is Wienand. Are you hearing me now?’

‘I hear you!’ Thane ducked back into cover as a third gunship powered in low, spraying dust and gravel. He did not ask what the inquisitor was doing here when she had been directly instructed to remain behind the lines. She had followed her own counsel as any Fist Exemplar would have. ‘I did not realise we had any kill-teams still airborne.’

‘We have some remarkable pilots.’

‘The Beast is near, inquisitor. He is directing the defences himself, probably on short-range comms. Do you think your pilots are good enough to get us over the walls?’

The line went quiet a moment, presumably while the inquisitor conferred with her squad. It crackled back to full, static force.

‘Lord Atherias tells me that he’s excited to try.’

Sixteen

The cartolith still floated on Koorland’s helm display. The icon representing his present coordinates was a heartbleed of gold, nine-tenths of the way down a zig-zagging stair that had multiplied the descent by a factor of twenty or more. Ork design. Two hours and they were still to breach the throne room. But they were close. A doubled stream of mass-reactive shells burned from his storm bolter, ripped open the drab blue and black chest-plate of an ork twice his weight in muscle, and strobed monstrous horned shadows along the walls. Dark gore splattered Koorland’s lenses. In tri-d, it was as though the palace schematic ran with blood.

‘One more turn and we are there,’ he called out to the kill-team and the others, his breathing remaining slow and deep even after two hours of intense hand-to-hand combat.

Blocks of screed and infographics reporting on his armour’s combat systems made fluid passes across his faceplate, kept in constant motion by the targeting reticules that pushed them aside to keep his vision uncluttered.

Battery reserves low. Ammunition nearly depleted. Armour compromised. No matter.

They were almost there.

Bohemond was already at the turn of the stair, surrounded by hulking orks that hacked at him with chainaxes and powered maces: fend, fend, strike, and push forward, nigh-invincibility allied to earth-shattering moments of power, the timeless fighting style of the Cataphractii.

Tyris was just behind, firing muffled rounds of stalker-variant ammunition into the densely packed mob. Gadreel and Icegrip fought hand-to-hand, servo-arm and frost blade, smiting and hacking. The Ultramarines Simmias and Straton, replacements for Numines and Vega, fallen on Incus Maximal, were a step behind, firing from the chest.

Brokk had an ork by the throat, ten centimetres off the ground and turning blue. His bicep was a swollen mass of veins and anger, faced creased by gun shadow, caught in a rictus of hatred for the alien. Olug’s ripper gun brought thunder into the confined space, spraying out bullets until the robust weapon clicked empty. The maddened ogryn took the gun two-handed and clubbed the closest ork to the ground with it. In his fury, Koorland saw the common thread that ran through every member of his squad: man, woman, abhuman, Space Marine.

One Emperor. One Imperium. One mankind.

‘Could you please avoid killing so many,’ said Laurentis, modulating his voice to a whining pitch that ogryns and bolter fire could not reach. ‘The weapon requires live Veridi to serve as detonators.’

Krule rolled his eyes, artfully massaging the selector of a palm-sized executor pistol: bolt-rounds shattered the weak joints between armour plates, needle killshots punctured dense green hide.

‘There are plenty more, magos,’ said Koorland.

Asger’s panting chuckle returned through the shared feed, along with the crack of lightning.

‘Take the stairs!’ Koorland bellowed, punching his sword’s blued edge through an ork’s chest-plate and forcing another step towards Bohemond and the others before more orks stepped up to stop him. He snarled.

Spotting the shift in his tactical display, Koorland glanced left as Kavalanera broke from the rest of her sisters. The women fought in uncanny unison to defend the bound ork psyker. The servitors dragging it along between them were mammoth but ill-suited to combat, though more than a few stray shots bound for the ork psyker smacked into vat-grown, plasteel-reinforced flesh. Drevina and the other Sisters adapted their blade routines to Kavalanera’s absence smoothly. The knight abyssal veered towards the handrail on the left-hand side of the stair and vaulted over it.

Koorland saw the parchment strips affixed to her armour flutter up as she dropped onto the orks charging up the stairs. Her power blade lashed out in perfect figures of eight, hacking orks limb from limb as they ran at her or past. Every part of her body moved with the minimum of effort and the maximum of effect: grace, poise, a ballet of slaughter performed in absolute quiet but for the howls of dismembered orks. Unnerved by their own brutish sense of the pariah in their midst, the orks began to waver.

The break in the influx of fresh combatants allowed Koorland to push onto the turn of the stair. Bohemond blink-sent a greeting rune to his helm display. Two walking tanks side-by-side, with relic blade and storm bolter they drove the orks back, round the turn and onto the final flight. Beyond Lady Brassanas, Koorland saw the doors.

They were large, but by the standards of neither human nor ork were they worthy of a centre of power. They were plain metal, unadorned except for a few furtively scratched glyphs in the frame. A service entrance, for gretchin and slaves.

For humans.

Koorland wondered if it was some kind of symbolism as much as its own desire for this confrontation that had led the Beast to direct them along this route. Conquest had never been enough, or the hives of Terra would have been aflame long ago. It was holy war. It wanted mankind’s capitulation, its humiliation. Vulkan had explained to him that when dealing with orks all things came down to dominance. The primarch had also repeatedly impressed on him the need to have faith, in himself, in his brothers, in the spirit of man.

‘For Dorn. For Vulkan. For the Golden Throne of Terra!’

Freed from the immediate fighting, the two ogryns opened up on the uncertain orks. Commissar Goss seared them with bolts of plasma, and Alpha 13-Jzzal joined him with raking volleys of his heavier plasma caliver.

‘Protect yourself, sister,’ yelled Tyris, as he pulled a clutch of frag grenades from his hip holster. Gadreel and the rest of Kill-Team Stalker did likewise, and Kavalanera plunged her sword into an ork’s chest and then ducked beneath it as it fell.

The air became metal. The frag blasts were too minor a flurry to inflict anything more than irritation on such armoured behemoths but iron shards were as pernicious as sand and, propelled with force, would work their way into anywhere. They got into eyes, into ammo slits, points of weakness that the orks could have protected, had function been as important to them as effect.

Humanity was not the only race with weaknesses.

Koorland raised his sword as an icon of man, as Asger and Bohemond pushed past and battered open the doors.

Into the chamber of the Beast.

Ullanor — Gorkogrod, inner palace

Penitent Wrath looped over the palace rooftops like a seabird with wings full of winter gale. She swung slowly on her axis, round and round, torn electrics spitting from the hole that gaped in her wing, coming in by some miracle on one turbofan and descent thrusters.

The section of roof high above the throne room of the Beast was flat as a frozen lake, spiralling in panorama across Kjarvik’s view. One black gunship was already down and unloaded, warriors in grey and in ivory and red spreading from it like cracks in the ice. Another burned up in the sky as it flew over, wreckage dropping over the spiked parapet in a death spiral. His vision swung from metal roof to cloudy sky and back again, both the same ruddy umber, fire and ash, one a beaten reflection of the other.

Kjarvik held onto the assault ramp’s hydraulic supports as centrifugal force tried to throw him out. He looked down. He felt no nausea or disorientation. His physiology was immune to that.

‘It is not going to get any closer,’ said Baldarich.

Kjarvik released his boot maglocks with a snarl. There was no need to jump. The gunship’s spin flung him out from the ramp, arms beating at the air like his namesake crow.

The gunship groaned as its back end swung away and its nose came back around. Kjarvik could see Atherias and Bohr through the armourglass, locked into restraint harnesses, fighting with the guide sticks. Penitent Wrath whipped around on its sole functioning turbofan and swept further out. Metres from the rooftop. Centimetres from the edge. Kjarvik twisted bodily, and smacked face-first into the roof. He rolled sideways a way, bled off his momentum, and came up on all fours with the exception of the one hand that hovered over his mag-holster. The sheet metal gave a crumping wobble where his weight had depressed it. His long hair and pelt whipped about in the high-altitude wind.

He sniffed. Dead orks. Engine oil. Burning.

A massive thump rumpled through the metal as Zarrael impacted like a drop pod without retros. The Flesh Tearer crunched two-footed into the roof, right boot breaking through to the greave. Actuators and suspensors responded after a second’s delay, dispersed the impact throughout his armour, plate to plate, servos whirring like dynamos as he violently kicked his leg free. Phareous hit a moment later, a few metres off, then Baldarich, coming in on the tips of his toes with a swordsman’s poise.

Penitent Wrath convulsed as her rear end swept over the parapet, attitude control jets burning blue to white, hot enough to hold her shuddering in place while two dozen Inquisitorial storm troopers poured out. They held a perimeter with lasguns aimed up and out as Inquisitor Wienand and her bodyguard, Raznick, hurriedly dropped out after them. Raznick supported Urquidex under one arm even as he marked threat angles with his laspistol.

The last few storm troopers were following up at the end of the ramp when the Thunderhawk’s last turbofan blew out. The engine housing vomited oily yellow flames and rotor shards, and the unresisted control thrusters suddenly hammered the gunship sideways.

Men fell, screaming, rolled across the roof like bones tossed from a cup or flailed over the edge. Others were thrown back into the troop bay or hung onto the now upside-down ramp by the fingers. Shorn of any uplift, Penitent Wrath crashed into the roof, bowing it permanently, and shrieked back on thrusters until it crashed into the soaring stretch of curtain wall that rose from that side.

Kjarvik had memorised the cartoliths, as they all had. If they were accurate and he remembered truthfully, then this was the south face of the palace’s innermost defences, an iron ring of brute firepower and hypertechnology that defended the Beast’s throne room against attack from the ground and from the air.

Penitent Wrath’s machine-spirit finally expired and she fell quiet. Steam rose from the tracked tears she had left in the roof. Smoke gouted from her blasted engine.

Phareous lowered his shield and ran for the downed gunship, voxing Atherias and Bohr. A few greenskins littered his path but their threads had been well cut and hard, mown down by the Thunderhawks’ anti-personnel guns or dispatched by the sons of Dorn.

‘We have located an access ramp down into the palace, and from there, with luck, to the throne room of the Beast.’ Maximus Thane’s war-plate boosted his voice over the thunder of flak guns and the shrapnel rain. Kjarvik knew of him from the Deathwatch’s very first missions. He was good. He spoke plainly. Kjarvik respected him enormously, and he was not alone in doing so.

Half a dozen Fists Exemplar and an Apothecary of the Excoriators followed Thane from his Thunderhawk, Zarrael and even Baldarich falling in behind the Chapter Master as he neared.

‘How far?’ asked Kjarvik.

Thane shrugged, a whine of servos. ‘Less than two hundred metres.’ He pointed over the fortress wall, the guns still spitting fire and energy bolts at the Deathwatch gunships trying to land closer. ‘Koorland’s teleport coordinates are just on the other side of that.’

‘Does his teleport homer still signal?’

‘I cannot raise the fleet to find out.’

‘On the bright side, the Beast will be distracted by Koorland and—’ Kjarvik waved a gauntlet vaguely in the direction that most of the muted booms were coming from ‘—and whoever it is now in charge down there. He will not be expecting us.’

As he spoke, another black gunship set down on landing struts, and another, just as a hellstrike missile from a third whistled through the air and obliterated a gun-nest, crowning the main source of flak with fire and scattering the neighbouring roofs with debris. More Deathwatch deployed from their open assault ramps: black-armoured, elite, packing combi-weapons and wargear for any occasion. He recognised several of the sergeants from the mission briefing.

Zarrael gave a twitching nod in the direction of Penitent Wrath, and Kjarvik looked that way. Wienand walked towards them, Raznick in close beside her, crowded by black-armoured mortal troopers — hreindýr displaying their antlers to a Fenrisian wolf. The inquisitor had changed out of her grey dress-suit during the flight, and into the same glossy black fatigues and hardened carapace worn by her storm troopers. She had a laspistol, but left it in its holster, content to cede her protection to the twenty-plus guns of her guards.

‘A neat fit,’ said Kjarvik, indicating her slighter frame relative to the muscular Inquisitorial storm troopers.

‘I came prepared.’

Raznick pushed Urquidex ahead of him, and now the magos was close, Kjarvik saw that he was pulling a small equipment cart behind him. Its wheels rattled on the bent metal roof. Lights blinked in no particular sequence, and wires flounced between what looked like a specialist vox-set and the plug-in sockets in the back of Urquidex’s neck. His eyes twitched randomly. He muttered a guttural alien gibberish under his breath, as though something primordial whispered in his ear. Drool trickled down his chin as he mumbled, too intent on sharing the profundity of what he heard to remember to swallow.

‘What is wrong with him?’ said Baldarich, voice thick with distaste.

‘He is parsing the orks’ communications for an indication of the Beast’s location,’ said Wienand. ‘When Thane told me that he could pick out the Beast’s voice from the palace transmissions, I was reminded of the linguistic matrix developed by Magos Laurentis to translate the Beast’s attempts at communication on Ardamantua. Urquidex possessed the necessary cranial implants to access his language centres, and he kindly volunteered.’

‘I am sure he did,’ said Kjarvik.

‘It. Is. Curious,’ said Urquidex, the human words forced between the brutish alien sounds that spilled from his cortex. ‘Multiple. References. To. Beast.’ His eyes were screwed shut, eyelids flickering as if in a troubled dream. ‘Unsure. Where. It. Is.’

‘Deliberate misdirection?’ Thane suggested.

‘Perhaps.’

‘Then we split our forces,’ said Wienand quickly. ‘Hit them all. The Fists Exemplar and Excoriators take half, while I and the Deathwatch will take the other. If nothing else, splitting up will keep the orks off-balance, possibly give Koorland and Kavalanera a chance to deploy the psyker.’

‘You?’ said Thane. ‘Representative, I do not believe—’

‘Don’t “Representative” me, Maximus. You lead your men and I intend to lead mine.’

Thane shot a glance at the Deathwatch. There were just under thirty of them, the finest warriors from nine different Chapters. The best that Kjarvik had ever fought beside.

‘I suppose I have little choice,’ said Thane.

‘Less than that. Now let’s go.’

‘Is one location more likely than another?’ said Thane, and turned to Urquidex.

‘Not. Significantly. But. One. Is. Source. Of. Most.’ He shuddered, jaw clenched over a truculent ‘Tra’ sound that apparently did not exist in the greenskin vocabulary. ‘Transmissions.’

‘Then I shall take that one. Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ said Wienand. ‘Assign teams and Urquidex will instruct them on where to go.’

Thane nodded and turned to order his men into combat squads. As soon as he was facing the other way, Wienand clasped Urquidex’s shoulder and, under the pretence of helping him walk, whispered something in his ear. But none of the Space Marines on the rooftop had keener ears than the Space Wolf.

‘My team takes the most probable location.’

Kjarvik shook his head and readied his wargear.

Bad luck. It was a curse.

Ullanor — Gorkogrod, throne room

The ork psyker gave a roar of supplication as the heavy draught-servitors hauled the creature into the great throne room of the orks. Laurentis scuttled under the chain to stab another dose of sedative into its leg. It barked and tried to kick back at the magos, but the dumb servitors dragged it inexorably forward. Signing to her sisters to close in around their charge, Kavalanera drew in behind it, raised her arm up and placed her hand to the back of the psyker’s neck, where it joined its head. It shuddered in bleak horror, some combined effect of the paralytic in its bloodstream and the pariah gene that cored its subconscious like a frost blade to the soul. Even so, it continued to ramble and growl. It dropped to its knees as though begging forgiveness and had to be dragged the rest of the way by its wrists.

That display alone would have been enough to convince Koorland that he was in the right place. But he knew this room. Krule had described it perfectly.

In the centre of the stupefyingly vast space was a circular dais, much like the centrepiece of the Great Chamber of Terra, though this example of the form was larger again, grander again. Six enormous thrones faced outwards in a ring, so that the one immediately opposite Koorland was out of view. And the one that faced him…

‘Stop!’ he roared, and, cued to his voice, command the servitors halted.

The ork psyker writhed on the floor.

‘This is the chamber,’ said Krule.

Behind the Assassin, Alpha 13-Jzzal and the ogryns held the doors with thumps of meat and fiery blasts of plasma. Kill-Team Stalker spread out, taking positions in the crop-circle patterns of pits surrounding the podium that might have been analogous to rows of seating.

Koorland clumped forward to join Bohemond and Asger.

Like him, they were staring up at the dais.

Enthroned in its titanic chair was a gigantic, armoured ork, nearer in size to a gargant than any common greenskin. No plate was of the same material or colour as the next, but all were threaded together with an intricate web of alien designs. Its head was bare: flesh, dark green, ridged like tree bark, and swirled nightshade blue with tattoos. Gauntlets the size of Koorland’s plastron clasped the throne’s arms. Calloused lips and painted tusks parted in a grin.

It had been waiting for them.

Koorland felt a chill in his soul.

With a clanking of armour, the Beast rose from its throne.

‘Emperor preserve us,’ cried Commissar Goss, turning from the mob at the door and lowering his plasma pistol in horror. The commissar was a last-minute addition. He would not have been briefed on events on the temple-gargant of the Beast.

Koorland became aware of jeering from above. He turned his faceplate to look up over his right pauldron.

The walls of the throne room were stone, black and white, made of large blocks carved with ork glyphs. Scores of iron-railed galleries jutted out. They were identified with glyph plates and a quick glance was enough to tell Koorland that there were only six unique pictograms in total. An iron-tusked ork on a disc of red; a red sun with an ork’s face; a crooked yellow half-moon; an angular serpent; a skull crossed by bloody axes; a horned blue ork’s head backed by bones. The galleries marked by that last symbol were lined with bellowing orks. The aliens were all as big or bigger than any Koorland had yet encountered beside the Beast itself. They were heavily armed and armoured, their gear a dull blue bearing the blazon of the death’s skull.

War machines flanked the galleries, great gargants, symbols of status as much as sentinels. Their enormous rivet-iron frames boasted only the largest and most complicated weapon mounts. The paint daubed across their bodywork and the jewels that studded their armour matched the glyph art of the chamber. None was smaller than a Reaver Titan, and most were considerably larger. In some cases the ork engineers had resorted to extending their machine outwards to outdo a rival engine. They were fortress walls on spiked tracks.

Koorland’s mind flashed back to Ardamantua and the powerful warrior forms that had torn from the ground in swarms when their principal nests had been threatened.

These orks were their warrior forms. Their Daylight Wall.

Their Adeptus Custodes.

The mosaic floor shuddered as the Beast took a step off the dais. It was titanic, three times Koorland’s size, and Asger and Bohemond seemed to shrink in accordance with its bulk. Koorland’s biology had passed far beyond the grasp of fear, but he comprehended the enormity of his task.

Here was the Great Beast. The ork that had contested Vulkan in single combat and survived the primarch’s end.

What chance did Koorland have?

The Beast grunted something orkish to the bound psyker, then passed its gaze over the three Terminators. It settled on Koorland, the instinctual recognition of one apex beast for another. Its eyes were like red suns caged. Its voice was the shattering of worlds.

‘Slaughter.’

Seventeen

Koorland stepped forward. An uncommon thrill of anticipation passed through him, an electric shiver, as if his body had been conditioning itself these past weeks and months to the cocktail of emotions that the moment of triumph would bring. Koorland’s gene-heritage would not let his face show it. He could not in fact remember the last time he had truly laughed or even smiled from his heart, though he assumed that he had, once. Even on frozen death worlds, mortal children still laughed. And as the Emperor’s distant light was his judge and witness, they always would.

Bohemond moved across his path, a pace ahead, sword raised as if to bar Koorland from the Beast and vice versa with his body and with his blade.

‘You would be my champion now as well?’ said Koorland on a private channel. ‘I am Lord Commander. It is my right to face the Beast alone.’

With a gruff murmur of assent, Bohemond ponderously backed up and lowered his blade until the tip scraped the mosaic tiles in front of him. Koorland watched him go, nodded his gratitude though no one could see it behind his fixed helm and gorget, and caught Kavalanera’s gesture.

‘Now?’

Koorland could guess that the Beast had some understanding of Low Gothic, but he doubted the greenskins were familiar with Adeptus Astartes battle-sign. He moved his hugely armoured fingers in reply.

‘Not yet.’

It was as complex a message as sign language could convey while wearing Terminator armour, but the knight abyssal signalled her understanding. She gestured to Laurentis. The ork psyker thrashed against the armoury servitors as Laurentis scuttled warily through with a stimm dose slurping into a hypodermic appendage.

At the door, Alpha 13-Jzzal and the ogryns were still battling to hold the orks back.

The harder we hit them, Koorland thought, the stronger the psychic field becomes.

The harder we hit them…

‘I am Slaughter,’ said Koorland, turning to the Beast. ‘I am the Lord Commander of the Imperium of Man, and I have come to kill you.’

The Beast did not laugh. It should have done, but it did not.

It swung up its arm.

An impossible array of firepower had been assembled into a triple-tiered gantry around its wrist. Two bolted-together battlecannons formed the mainstay. That twin-link was surrounded by autocannons, heavy flamers, rocket launchers, and multi-barrelled weapons of ork make that Koorland had never seen on any battlefield and could not identify. Ammo-belts and power hoses swung side to side as it took aim. It barely had to. In its open gauntlet was a pulsing trigger switch, onmi-linked to that awesome battery.

It clenched its fist.

Thunder struck. A star was born. Worlds collided.

Asger’s emergency vox blinked up an unnecessary warning on Koorland’s helm display, the same moment he felt Bohemond’s shoulder guard barge him out of the way.

The firestorm that engulfed the Black Templar would have rivalled a super-heavy tank squadron. Koorland did not see it fall. He was already stumbling away under Bohemond’s shove, the blast that struck still mighty enough to throw him down and shatter the lens of his right eye. Power failed to numerous systems and was rerouted. Servos whirred as Fidus Bellator aided its wearer in driving their mammoth weight back up. He looked back.

Bohemond was broken, leaking sealant. The mosaic he covered was pulverised. His rune in Koorland’s fractured visor was a warning amber.

The orks looking on bellowed thunderous approval, stamped their feet, beat their fists on the iron handrails. The galleries trembled, but the engineering expertise on display was sound and there was no danger of their stanchions buckling.

Asger flourished his lightning claws and howled back at them. Krule was more forthright. The Assassin lifted his executioner pistol and drilled a mass-reactive round through an ork’s head. The explosive bolt burst through the back of its skull, and the ork pitched over the rail and thumped into the floor.

For half a second the jeering stopped.

Then the Beast gave a roar that could have cracked armourglass and, as though it were the blow that shattered the dam, the ork elites began pounding down the stairs.

Koorland gave a tight little smile.

Yes. Hit them harder.

The Beast clanked through the pall of its own almighty weapons discharge. Auto-loaders clicked and whirred. Barrels spun off heat. Drum hoppers chewed through belts. Little hatches opened up in the brute’s armour, rubber conveyors porting heavier ordnance towards the battlecannons and rocket launchers. Koorland emptied his storm bolter’s clip into the gantry, seeing a weak spot in the array of loader mechanisms, but the mass-reactive explosions rippled purple-green across an energy field about a metre ahead of the great ork’s armour. The effect rose diagonally along the Beast’s chest as Koorland traversed his aim and moved ponderously aside.

Keep moving.

Fidus Bellator had kept him alive this long, but it was a millstone now, denying him the one advantage that might have bought him as much time as he needed — manoeuvrability.

The Beast opened up as it closed the distance. Auto-rounds and stabbing bolts of green energy mauled the tiles around Koorland’s boots and burst against his armour. The Beast broke into a thumping run, hollering even as its wrist-battery kicked out a storm of abuse, muzzle flare lighting up its face like a tusked horror from a nightmare. Koorland aimed the last round in his magazine and fired, aiming for the eye. The mass-reactive burned up in a vibrant death against the energy shield. Koorland backed ponderously, to mitigate what he could of the Great Beast’s forward momentum. He brought his power sword to a position of guard.

As it had been for Vulkan, so too then for him.

The fate of mankind would be decided hand-to-hand.

The ork swung up its combat weapon. It was a spiked vibro-mace, its head the size of a Space Marine. The haft was twice as long as Koorland. The arm added half that length again. All of it swung at Koorland with primarch-killing force. He was too slow to avoid it, and he knew without needing to try that a parry would not even be worth the attempt.

He was not a primarch.

The mace struck him in the shoulder and launched him across the chamber like a kicked stone. The vibro-blast was a parting gift, an extra metre or so of lift and a drilling numbness down the arm before he smashed into the wall. He fell to the floor on hands and knees, dust crumbling over his shoulders. Targeting reticules spilled over the spidery cracks in his faceplate as they sought locks. His armour emitted a complaining whine as he struggled to get himself back up.

The harder we hit them…

If only Koorland knew how to hit them.

Tyris flicked his bolter’s shot selector to automatic. It felt like time. Orks were flooding down the stairs from the galleries, through arches flanked by sentinel gargants, and into the throne room in their hundreds. He raked one stair, picking his shots still even as his trigger finger kicked them out faster than a mortal man could follow. One ork dropped with a bolt through the mouth, mass-reactive explosion blasting its skull back out through its visor, but the rest of the clip clanged off thick armour and rippling force fields. The Beast aside, they were the biggest greenskins he had ever seen. He reloaded.

‘Simmias, Straton — cover left. Gadreel — forward. Icegrip, with me.’

The warriors of Stalker were a firebase, a wall of bolter fire, but the orks were too big and too well armoured to be held at bay.

Kavalanera and her sisters sallied and drew back, fighting like warrior angels to defend the ork psyker. Tyris had known they could fight, but finally unleashed they were magnificent. They killed like bolts from the heavens, righteous judgement withdrawn the instant it was delivered to leave the orks railing at smoke or left for another ephemeral hand to strike down. Watching Kavalanera herself was like watching the armoured avatar of silent death, summoned forth for one final battle in the Emperor’s name. The enormous servitors did not fight, and for that reason the orks had not thought to attack them yet. They were like stakes in the ground. Laurentis hid behind one, lashing out with a converted power emitter, arcs of current that the rampaging greenskins did not even feel.

At the door, the fight had never stopped.

Commissar Goss’ chainsword banged furiously against an ork’s armour, adamantium teeth fighting for purchase like a man running on ice. He foamed at the mouth, cap on the floor somewhere, grey hair streaming wild as he discharged his plasma pistol into the ork’s chest. It ignored the shot, hacked off the commissar’s arm with its own whining axe-blade, then delivered a boot to the chest that broke the man and heaped him on the ground three metres back. Olug bellowed fury and mashed the butt of his ripper gun through the ork’s face. Brokk held the door single-handedly, wrestling with a mega-armoured ork almost his size. The strain on both faces was incredible. Even over the chaos of melee, Tyris could hear matched sinews creak.

Alpha 13-Jzzal cooly raked the ork mobs with plasma until an axe smashed through the back of his exo-skull. The skitarii ranger dropped with an electrical shiver and then self-destructed, an ultra-near-range implosion from a subdermal melta device taking out his killer’s arm. Asger finished the ork with a decapitating sweep. His lightning claws crackled and spat.

The Wolf Lord’s howl echoed from the rapidly emptying galleries.

It was drowned out by the rumble of engines.

The great gargants standing sentinel around the throne dais revved to full power. Exhaust stacks belched black smoke. Not, Tyris suspected, because the orks lacked the technological capability to engineer something cleaner, but because they enjoyed the sense of power that only a rumbling engine gave. With a discordant blast of war-horns, the war machines started haphazardly forward.

‘Now?’ Tyris voxed, though he doubted Koorland was in a position to respond.

Koorland pushed himself fully upright, back to the wall, as the Beast thudded towards him and swung. Koorland dropped heavily to one knee. The mace blew the wall apart. Vibrations drove deep cracks as high up as the gallery above his head. It swayed alarmingly as several brackets popped their bolts.

He stabbed at the Beast’s belly. It did not even bother to block. The power field nullified the sword’s disruption field, and the blade skittered harmlessly over riveted plates. The Beast used its wrist-battery like knuckle dusters — two-tonne knuckle dusters, worn by a giant. The blow hammered so hard into Koorland’s faceplate that it fried the shock circuits and smacked his head back into the padding. He crunched into the wall. The rim of the helmet bit through the gorget softseals. Atmosphere hissed in and Koorland’s visually augmented array went black.

On the second effort, he managed to tear the helm from the mangled gorget, then gave a deep roar of defiance as the Beast’s knee crushed into his plastron.

Fidus Bellator cracked like a block of stone struck along a plane of weakness. The breath was forced from his chest, his multi-lung supplying his physiology with oxygen in its absence. Systems alerts, mechanical and biological, blurted from mangled audio sounders in his gorget rim. The Beast ground him under its knee.

Koorland gritted his teeth, partially buried in rubble, and calmly ejected his storm bolter’s empty magazine. The Beast levelled its whirring wrist-battery. Not ten centimetres from Koorland’s face. He did not blink.

‘I defy you to my dying breath. Mankind defies you.’

A shriek of punctured metal startled him, expecting instant death as he was, and the dark blade of a power sword sheared through the giant ork’s thigh plate from behind. Koorland laughed then.

The Sword of Sigismund.

The Black Templar’s armour was cracked up the middle, marked by a jagged line of raw ceramite where it had been sealed. Sparks trailed from an exposed power cable near his elbow. He turned a twist on his relic blade and pulled it back. Blood sprayed. The Beast arched its back and howled in pain. It lashed back with its vibro-mace, but the surprise of being injured threw it off and it failed to account for the fact that the High Marshal stood barely in line with its hips. The weapon sailed over Bohemond’s helmet, but the Beast’s knuckles nevertheless caught him a glancing blow that stunned his systems and crashed him to the floor. Blood from what must have been a severed artery in the Beast’s thigh continued to spurt across Koorland’s body.

Koorland felt the pressure on his chest ease as the Beast drew in its wounded leg.

He stepped out of the wall. Half fell. Damaged sections of armour powered down as he stood, the tremendous drag of his Terminator plate like pushing against a moon. He slotted a fresh sickle magazine into his empty storm bolter. Dragonfire rounds. The nearest to hand.

He looked up at the Beast with eyes that swam in and out of focus.

The harder we hit them, the stronger the psychic field grows.

‘For Vulkan,’ he rasped, then opened a channel to Kavalanera. ‘Now.’

The Sister acknowledged with a click.

‘I will relish this moment forever, Beast.’

With Kavalanera leading, the Sisters broke from combat. It was there that Koorland saw the problem they had failed to foresee. The Sisters of Silence were mobbed in close combat by scores of the Beast’s bulkiest elites. Exquisitely as the women fought, as hard as Tyris and Stalker fought to pull them out, they simply could not bring the armoured hulks down fast enough to escape. Even so, Koorland felt a buzz of escalating force that tightened the skin of his forehead.

To Koorland’s astonishment, the staggered withdrawal actually appeared to be a boon in disguise. The psyker was absorbing power slowly, soaking in far more than it could have had it all come down on it in a rush. Its eyes rolled back. Its lids juddered as though electric current was being run though its chains. Froth boiled from its locked jaw. Veins bulged up from its body and turned a mouldy black as it seized uselessly in its restraints.

Clutching its head, the Beast turned round on its good leg.

With a grunt it raised its wrist-battery and fired.

The torrent of bullets and las and weird gravitic blasts mowed through two of the servitors and half a dozen ork elites. Suddenly released, the ork psyker flopped about on the floor like a suffocating fish. The bullet storm howled towards the seizing psyker and would have shredded it had Drevina not thrown herself into its path at the final second. She danced for a moment, then her ravaged body fell on top of the ork’s and the barrage swept on. It took another crimson-armoured Sister in the knee and dropped her. She did not break her vows even to cry out.

The Beast cursed as its myriad barrels whined empty and the auto-loaders set to work.

The remaining Sisters of Silence continued their fighting withdrawal and then, as their injured sister was still dragging herself away from the ork psyker, it detonated.

The ork’s mouth opened wide, a choking, gurgling sound trapped deep in its throat. Its head began to shake, like a loose bolt under pressure. Its eyes opened wide and bulged as though staring into the vivid core of the Primordial Annihilator. Koorland saw an ephemeral green shape swirl above the ork’s head. Sparks flew from its nose. It arched itself on the floor and then its head burst, slamming the back of it hard into the ground and spraying the mosaic tiles with blood and bits of skull.

The psychic blast wave tore the flesh from the last servitor and whipped around the wounded Sister like boiling water around a rock.

Emerald lightning sprayed from the glistening nub of the ork psyker’s exposed brain stem, like watching a weed flourish and die in accelerated playback, like current leaping from a broken wire in search of earth.

It found it.

Asger howled in triumph. Koorland had strength left only to remain upright. That felt like triumph enough.

Psychic feedback raced through the fighting ork mobs with the speed of lightning, a darting witchstorm manifested by the xenos’ collective mind that reached through the eyes into their skulls and tore out their souls. It ripped through the mob, a chain of cranial detonations following messily where it passed. A blood splatter suddenly painted the greasy driver’s window of a gargant from the inside. The war engines ground to a halt. One toppled over. Wet bursts and a pelleting sound evocative of skull fragments on metal sounded from the staircases leading up the galleries and the doors behind Olug and Brokk.

A snaking bolt snapped across the Beast’s tusked jaw, and it dropped to one knee, clutched the sides of its head in both hands and gave vent to a howl of pure, mental agony.

Then it looked up at him and snorted. Its eyes flared like wild things.

Something had gone wrong.

The wounded Sister.

Koorland aimed his storm bolter, range point blank, inside the Beast’s shield bubble, and unloaded the entire magazine into the ork’s face. Pyroclastic jelly burst over the ork’s armour and burned. With a dribbling howl, it knocked the storm bolter from Koorland’s gauntlet with a swipe of its left hand.

Largely unarmoured and unpowered, Koorland felt the reinforced bones of wrist, arm and shoulder shatter under the force. The storm bolter thumped into the wall and skidded off along the floor. His mind blacked itself out to block the pain.

Everything vanished but the feel of the power sword in his other hand.

The Beast slumped back, dazed. Its face was molten wreckage, eyeless, nostrils merged into one flapping gill, wobbling polyps of congealed fat hanging from its lips. It was blind as Koorland drew his blade back one-handed, imbued it with every last straining sinew of Dorn’s stubbornness, and then rammed it through the Beast’s open mouth. The Great Beast spasmed once, mighty enough even in its death throes to rip the sword’s grip from Koorland’s hands as it crashed face-first into the tiles.

And was still.

The whole throne room was still.

Koorland sank to the ground, a sudden weakness of the knees flushing out the battle-anaesthesia that had kept him on his feet for far longer than this one encounter. It was done. He had done it. His brain was, if anything, as numb as his body, and it refused to process the magnitude of what that meant.

He had succeeded where a primarch had failed.

They had succeeded.

Through the jangling tinnitus in his ears, he heard Tyris’ shout of congratulation. He saw Krule saunter across, a smile on his face as he spat on the Beast’s corpse. Surprising that the Assassin had been so close during the fight without Koorland noticing. If he had to guess, he would say that Krule had been protecting him. Laurentis emitted a joyful data-squeal, so overcome that he had slipped into binharic. Asger howled, though not like before. This was for the dead and for a victory to end all victories. It sent a shiver down Koorland’s spine, and he smiled for what felt like the first time in his post-human life, shaking with the withdrawl of adrenaline and the delayed creep-back of pain.

‘We won,’ he said.

What more was there to say than that?

Bohemond reared up over the fallen Beast then, on his knees, and impaled the ork’s heart with his blade. He sagged into it, took a moment, then withdrew a hand to disengage his helm’s gorget seals. It came away with a hiss of magnetic suction. Hands around the cross-hilt of his relic-blade, already on his knees, he bowed his head.

‘The primarch was right to entrust this role to you, brother. Forgive me my doubts, they were unworthy of a servant of the Emperor. What you have made be this day is the greatest victory since the destruction of Horus. If I achieve nothing more in my own service it will be to see your name spoken for eternity in the same esteem as Sigismund himself.’

Koorland took his brother’s hand and the two Space Marines allowed their weight to help the other stand.

The new Imperium began here.

As Koorland clasped the Black Templar’s fizzling elbow seal to congratulate him in kind, he saw the great doors at the far, far end of the throne room thrown open. He heard clamouring alien voices, the clank of a giant, armoured stride, and knew that he had been wrong.

About everything.

Eighteen

They had been wrong. So wrong. Koorland saw that now. He looked to the circular dais in the centre of the throne room and its six thrones. Six. He looked to the galleries and, again, six, unique identifiers that marked them apart. Illogical extrapolations ran through his mind as though the gates between what ‘could’ and what ‘could not’ be had been lifted. This was not like the ork empires of the past, not even the last true Waaagh of Urlakk Urg, carried by the iron rule of its single omnipotent ‘emperor’ figure.

There was not one Beast, and there had never been.

There were six. Prime-orks. Each a father to one legion within the whole.

From his position where the defeated ork had thrown him, some way around the circumference of the throne room from the slave’s entrance by which they had entered, Koorland could see the throne that had previously been hidden. It was larger than the others. It was covered with skins and furs, and adorned with black and white checks. As Koorland beheld it, struck by the familiarity of that particular pattern of black and white, the grinding clank of moving armour reached a crescendo and a second Beast passed through the massive main doors.

A second prime-ork.

Or was it the first?

It was greater in stature than the ork Koorland had just fought and encased in armour that was both heavier and more splendid, intricately wrought plates adorned with those black and white jags. A helm with a tusked face made a gory red with encrusted stones enclosed its head. It looked over the ruined gargants to either side of the gate, the hundreds of messily slain orks around the throne room, and emitted a rumbling growl like the war-horn of a Titan. Its gaze set upon the fallen prime-ork and it started forwards. Koorland felt the ground shake. The air around the brute whined as its gauntlets burst into writhing green flame.

This was the ork that had fought Vulkan.

Koorland cursed himself for not seeing it, but then why should he? How could he have reasoned that there could have been more than one Beast?

The how of it did not matter.

He was an Imperial Fist — he should have considered everything.

‘Defend your Lord Commander!’ Bohemond roared, and Kill-Team Stalker opened fire at the same instant, shooting from the chest as they moved at a steady walk to intercept. Bolt-rounds scattered off the prime-ork’s shields. Melta beams and plasma bolts from combi-attachments sizzled across them.

Kavalanera and her three sisters that remained able swiftly overtook Bohemond’s thumping progress. Olug and Brokk bellowed, not far behind. The women flowed across the ogryns and each other, crimson and black, like streams of coloured plasma under the fluctuating control of a multivariate magnetic field, but the prime-ork ignored their power blades as though they were insect stings. Olug barrelled into the great ork’s chest and bounced off. The prime-ork simply walked through him, breaking the ogryn’s hip under its boot, then swatted Brokk contemptuously aside on the edge of its gauntlet. Kavalanera continued to harry. With a growl, the prime-ork drew its gauntlets apart, the fires burning white-green and high, and then thumped them together. There was an implosive clap and a wave of force washed out and knocked the lightly armoured Sisters down.

Koorland heard the change in the thunder of bolter fire. It was missing, cracking along the wall above Koorland’s head. He saw one strike a bracket. The metal plate blew out and the stanchion buckled. The last holding up the gallery.

The whole structure fell away from the wall with a crunch of broken stone.

Bohemond drew sharply up. Asger, too, converging from another angle.

The prime-ork looked up, and the dropped gallery cracked in half over its helmet. Its force field flashed out with a burned stink of ozone and it sank under several tonnes of rock and iron and greenskin dead. Koorland saw the veiled threat of a humanoid shape sprint up one half of the gallery floor and vault up to the prime-ork’s shoulder. Krule. Koorland’s auto-senses were dead, and if they had been unable to track the Assassin before then his eyes had no chance now.

Krule appeared to have a sword in his hand, a long blade that phased in and out of material reality. With silent efficiency, the Assassin buried the weapon in the prime-ork’s neck. The phase blade passed through the prime-ork’s armour as though it just wasn’t there, but either lacked the length to do the same to the greenskin’s throat or found its flesh a tougher prospect.

The prime-ork began to rise, rubble tipping from its shoulders in almighty crashes. It was coated with powder. Bolt-rounds from the kill-team spanked off its unshielded armour.

A vicious twist of the neck sent Krule flying.

The Assassin twisted like an aerial gyro, landed in a roll, drew his executioner pistol and squeezed off bolt-rounds even as he spun. Their effect was no different to those of the Deathwatch.

It was impervious, imperious, and it continued towards Koorland and its beaten brother like an armoured locomotive.

‘Wither before the Emperor’s light, abhorrent,’ cried Bohemond. His ponderous stride bore him into the prime-ork’s path. Tactical Dreadnought armour weighed several tonnes. The vectoral force of a charging Space Marine Terminator was equivalent to being struck by a moving tank, but the prime-ork shunted him aside as though the battleplate was a hollow practice cast.

Asger Warfist slashed across the back of the prime-ork’s legs with similar luck. An up-clip of the giant’s spiked heel left the Wolf Lord on his back.

The last of the Imperial Fists squared himself defiantly. One leg was fully armoured, the other just a knee joint and a boot with some fluid-hydraulic wiring connecting the two to his hip. His torso was a patchwork of missing plates, his gorget ring mangled into a grimace of tortured adamantium. His gun was gone, the arm that would have wielded it useless anyway.

‘Daylight Wall stands forever.’

He lunged for the prime-ork’s groin with his sword. The disruption field was stuttering, caused by power outages from near continuous use, but come the final reckoning that did not matter. The prime-ork took the blow blade-on to its gauntlet palm and trapped it. The monster yanked the relic blade from Koorland’s grip with a strength that was simply irresistible and then, holding it by the blade, struck the grip across its thigh plate. The metal shattered into a dozen pieces.

With a grunt of satisfaction, it cast the last piece aside, planted its boot heel into Koorland’s chest, and shoved him to the floor.

It ground its boot in. Koorland’s solid rib-plate cracked under the weight. His vision turned spotty and black, but his hearing remained sharp.

Its voice was like death from orbit.

‘I am Slaughter.’

After murdering a path through several flights of stairs to reach the broad stone block corridor, Kjarvik’s vox-link with Kill-Team Stalker came back. They were close. He knew that because contact with Clermont, the fleet, or with Thane was still out. At first, his snarled demands for an update were looped back in a growl of static-chopped voices. Then buzzarding cries, barely human in their grief or their anger or both. The second thing Kjarvik knew was that they had failed.

The reasons for that were obvious.

Orks of an especially large breed blocked Umbra’s run on the vast arched gateway at the end of the corridor. They were bulked out in black and white megaplate, appropriately armed for urban combat with powered battle-saws, flamers, and high-volume stubbers.

Under other circumstances, Kjarvik might have doubted his ability to break through such heavy brutes in such numbers, but for once, the luck-spinners spared the Stormcrow a rare smile. The orks had been marching on the gate themselves, too hemmed in now to properly turn and fight the force that struck at their backs.

A blow from Kjarvik’s power fist obliterated a mega-armoured boss from waist to neck. A full magazine of vengeance rounds slowed down another. Blood matted his beard. His braids stuck to his head. Zarrael’s eviscerator was a near-constant meat shriek, white noise above the grunts and the howls and the thunder of heavy firepower. Baldarich’s sword made ribboning flurries of gore. Bohr murdered orks by the dozen with plasma and flame. Phareous’ shield was slick, his bolter still firing. The Iron Snake advanced in a crouch, Atherias walking behind and blazing over his head with bolter and servo-harness. The weapons flashes caused the brilliant purple and gold of his pauldron plate to shine. The Inquisitorial storm troopers made their contribution, pinpoint flurries of las hosing the inevitable gaps that Baldarich and Zarrael’s savagery left behind. Raznick came just behind them, shielding Inquisitor Wienand with his body, whatever neuro-enhancements he had been given allowing him to fire his brace of pistols entirely independently and with astonishing accuracy.

What all of that splendid slaughter told Kjarvik was that they had failed.

The psyker bomb had not worked.

The howl he gave was that of a wolf for its master, and burned his throat like a jawful of winter. He was unsurprised to hear the cries of lamentation from those around him.

‘Push through to the throne room,’ urged Wienand, covering her vox-bead with one hand whilst shooting with her laspistol. ‘Something has gone wrong. I have to see.’

Kjarvik did not need to see. He could already smell the red snow.

With a frenzied gargle, Zarrael tore out an ork’s throat with his bare teeth, dissolved the face of another with a gob of Betcher’s acid, and kicked himself a path to the gate. It was thirty metres high, as dense with imagery as any cave wall on Fenris, but the Flesh Tearer’s wrath cowed its grandeur. It was what lay beyond that put fire under them all.

Kjarvik rushed in behind with a howl, the rest of Kill-Team Umbra at his back, ready to administer the duty for which Koorland had brought them together.

They brought death to the alien.

Once before, Laurentis had witnessed the end of the Imperial Fists. It seemed horribly fitting that he should bear witness again.

He was aware of the Deathwatch and Inquisitorial storm troopers that came in firing through the main doors.

He was aware of the Beast — and it was the Beast, he had no doubt. The titanic ork withdrew its foot from Koorland’s chest, and then, with a rumble of mockery booming from the hollow spaces of its visor, it reached up to unhook its helmet from its gorget. Its flesh was a blackish green, crusted like scar tissue or lignified plant matter. The look it gave Koorland was at once contemptuous and triumphant. Helmet held underarm, it gave the remaining Space Marines and their efforts a derisive look.

It turned and walked away with a sneer.

Once more mankind handed up its best, and again the caprice of the gods had accepted that sacrifice and repaid it in blood.

Asger Warfist howled after it in futility as the Beast waded back into its bodyguard.

The Space Wolf led Kill-Team Stalker and the Sisters of Silence into the attack, Kill-Team Umbra falling on the assaulting mob from the rear. Laurentis was aware of the battle. Retribution so savage and total that even in the narrow-band focus of grief, Laurentis could not have missed it entirely. His eye was blinkered with sorrowful code. His ears carried the nothing whistle of a fluid-pump that did not beat. His small mechanical body was numb in a way that went beyond what its makers had intended.

Glory to the Ominissiah.

He was aware of Bohemond, on his knees and weeping unashamedly over Koorland’s broken body.

In a way that only one whose sensory apparatus was removed from their largely organic brain could experience, Laurentis was aware of it all. It took place in another reality, a noosphere of data-irrelevancy in which he had no interest and had lost the rites to access. All that felt real at that moment lay within the ruin of human flesh and golden-yellow ceramite draped through Bohemond’s arms.

Koorland had not just been humanity’s great symbol of hope. He had been Laurentis’ friend.

‘He needs an Apothecary,’ said Bohemond. The Black Templar wasn’t really looking at Laurentis at all. Much like himself, the Space Marine existed in his pocket space of grief. Behind them a battle raged.

They were both aware of it.

‘There is none,’ said Laurentis.

He knew more about Space Marine biology than most non-Space Marines could profess. He could pinpoint the secondary heart, the oolitic kidney, the pre-stomach. He knew enough to ask the right questions. Not enough to help his friend in any way. Trying not to think too much about what he did, he prodded Koorland’s purpled throat with a digital manipulator. Sensory feedback flowed back through its synthetic axon fibres. Fluid oedema. Larraman coagulation. Crushed cartilage. Like scrunching one’s finger through packing plastek. The incongruous likeness made him squirm and he withdrew the appendage.

The prime-ork had known exactly what had to be destroyed. To eliminate the one thing its rival could not afford to lose.

‘I think… I think that…’

‘No!’ said Bohemond. ‘No, I will not accept it. The line of Dorn must live on.’

Laurentis deployed his extensors for a second examination, this time preparing a full suite of electro-probes and echo-feelers. More out of due diligence than hope. As he extended his tools, a terrific explosion shook the ceiling, ferocious enough to force him to notice it. He rolled his eyeball up and saw light.

The ceiling was cracked. A second detonation blew a hole in it and brought a cataract of frescoed rubble pieces the size of battle tanks crashing down. Immediately under the downfall, the great dais of the six prime-orks was crushed. Spotlights swiped the throne room’s scarred mosaic, followed by the thunderous reports of heavy bolters and the empty prang of return fire from the ground. The signature, circular roar of turbofan engines angled for vertical lift.

An intense beam shone in Laurentis’ eye as it tracked. He blinked, but in the split-second before, he saw a pair of Deathwatch-black Thunderhawk gunships descending through the breached ceiling. They spat fire. Heavy bolters. Lascannons. Too tight for missiles. Lord Thane stood on the assault ramp, waving the embattled storm troopers and Deathwatch aboard.

With no one else of a mind to step into Koorland’s still-warm boots, Inquisitor Wienand gave the order to retreat.

Laurentis was aware of it.

Barely.

But only when Asger Warfist lifted him up under one arm and Bohemond reverently raised Koorland’s body did he pay it any mind.

They had lost.

The last son of Dorn was dead.

Epilogue

Candles flickered, wavering to the hull-dispersed groan of shield hits. The scent and the ethereal haze of incense swirled around the chamber, in and out, with the soft breath of the air cyclers. The small chapel of Alcazar Remembered was buried deep within the heart of the battle-barge. Reliefs portraying the works of the Emperor and the VII Legion were sparse on the walls. A single, unpainted statue of Rogal Dorn stood behind an altar, flanked by a pair of candelabra and an oil-burner made of plain, simple brass.

The last of the Imperial Fists lay in state. The Chaplaincy serfs had done their best with the damage. His shattered torso had been oiled and bound and hidden under full honours. His relic plate had been reassembled and polished until it shone like gold in heaven. His eyes had been closed. The Fists Exemplar no longer had a Chaplain, but the mortals had risen to fill the void and excelled. Perhaps humanity could prosper without the Space Marines after all, as Koorland had suggested they one day must. The space-time cocoon of a stasis field shimmered like a thermal blanket. It made it appear as though Koorland was resting, but somehow it was easier to believe that he was dead.

In the brief time that Thane had known him, he had never seen his Lord Commander rest.

The chapel had space for two dozen Adeptus Astartes, half that if they were in armour, as Thane was. Bohemond and Issachar stood beside him. The High Marshal was in almost as bad a shape as Koorland. He seemed almost angered by that, each slow, deliberate breath coming hotter than the last. The Excoriator’s armour bore no new scars, tasked with fleet command aboard Punished while Thane and Bohemond were engaged on the planet. Whether or not he was plagued by the same sense of dereliction as Thane, the ancient Chapter Master’s face showed nothing.

If he had been but a little quicker…

If he had been able to re-establish contact with that gunship wing just two minutes earlier…

It should have been Thane that had died. Or Bohemond even.

Anyone, but Koorland.

Thane returned to Koorland’s face. He leaned forward, ignoring the tightening stiffness that pulled on his side and made him want to wince. He looked deep into the set of the Imperial Fist’s jaw.

It was not reproach.

‘He looks peaceful.’

‘He looks angry,’ said Bohemond. ‘The Imperium is but half remade. The Emperor’s vision, Vulkan’s admonition — his work is unfinished.’ Thane thought the words disingenuous, since none had protested Koorland’s mission of revivification more sternly. ‘When we return I will stand before the Golden Throne and call a new Crusade in his name.’

‘From whom?’ said Issachar. ‘From where? And with what ships will you transport them? The Navy, the Mechanicus, the Inquisition — we run low on resources, brother.’ Issachar looked down at Koorland. The Excoriator was reserved where Bohemond was reckless, proud where Thane was modest. He was, it was at times easy to forget, more experienced and decorated in war than either of his junior brothers. ‘We must fortify,’ he said. ‘And prepare for the inevitable. We will break the ork’s back over the walls of Terra, just as our ancestors broke the Arch-Traitor.’

Issachar looked at Bohemond. Bohemond looked at Thane. Thane looked at them both. His thoughts placed Verpall, Cuarrion and Vorkogun, and Euclydeas too if the Soul Drinker still lived, interchangeably in their place.

He would not have the Last Wall repeat the mistakes of the High Lords before them. That would be an affront to Koorland’s memory. Whatever power struggles were to follow, he wanted no part of them. He was a Fist Exemplar above all else. There was not a system in his body that had not in some way been modified to serve him better in war, and through him, the Imperium. Always the Imperium.

That sense of duty alone was the ambit of his ambition. It was something that perhaps only one of Oriax Dantalion’s descendents could understand.

Mankind was better.

It deserved better.