The Beast Arises

Capturing…

It is a law inflexible, that whatever circumstances fail to destroy a species only serve to enhance it further. Early scientists, wading through their own ignorance, came to understand this in observing the long-lost species of Ancient Terra. Our first primitive steps into the Sol System and the systems beyond confirmed these observations on other worlds. During the Stellar Exodus and the Golden Ages of Expansion, the principle was proven again and again in the dominant xenos species we encountered and studied. We discovered it in the mythological cycles and emergence of the eldar. In the extinction and terrible rebirth of the ancient necrontyr. In the genetically engineered barbarism of the orks.

Every species thinks of its development — its destiny — as its own. This is forward-looking vanity, for those who look back know that we are nothing more than the product of dark and desperate times. A species should embrace its doom. Own it. Acknowledge the part it plays in crafting body, mind, and our presence on planes beyond. The skies have long shown us the way. As the light of distant stars, thousands of years in the travelling, shone down on Ancient Terra and the surface of the Red Planet, we might have seen our fate reflected. While we were still but gawping savages, the ancient races of the galaxy were already fighting by the light of alien suns. Failing. Succeeding. Growing stronger. For only the strong survive.

Strength has many forms, however. The crumbling empire of the eldar and the tombs of the necrontyr may ring with the silence of ages, but only a fool would think their threat consigned to the dusty pages of history. They have been tried and they have been tested but they exist on. They have learned the lessons of calamity. They live the determination of a survivor race. Unlocked potential resides within the horror of their alien flesh.

Some say it is heresy to suggest such things, but like the light of those distant stars, truth finds its way through the obfuscation and darkness of ignorance. Humanity is here and we are no different. Like the eldar, our empire has faltered and we have fallen. Like the necrontyr, we have had to adapt. In many ways, though it might seem abhorrent to admit it, we share the most with the orks. To humanity, they are a plague threatening to engulf the galaxy. To others, we are no different. A scourge of soft flesh and barbarous technologies, whose stated objective — announced with bombast to the void — is to cleanse the stars of xenos presence and assimilate all into an empire. Like the orks, our dominion ebbs and expands. Our strength and appetites grow. In our every defeat lie the seeds of future victories.

First comes the darkness and the thunder, and then the light of the dawn, terrible and true.

One

Worlds ablaze. A decimated empire. A galaxy of green.

If some extragalactic species — some xenos presence, blissfully unknown — had turned its attention to the realm of man, that was what they would have found. An Imperium hollow and without hope. A people scattered, screaming and fleeing for their lives. Planets trailing the smog of destruction through the void. A broken dominion.

The orks were everywhere. They were legion, and they terrorised their victims like monsters of myth. Their brutal technologies were the heralds of apocalyptic doom. Their sheer number was insurmountable. They were a green tide rising, swallowing hive worlds whole. Entire fleets plunged into the depths of their ramshackle barbarity, never to be seen again. The greatest armies of a millennium, uncounted regiments of the Astra Militarum, skitarii legions and Frateris Militia hordes, became nothing more than a bloody sludge through which ork billions stomped as they butchered their way across planets large and small.

High Admiral Thaddeon Trassq, flag officer of the Battlefleet Solar-Rimward, held a thousand battle cruisers and escorts on station in the Fantine Nebula, uncertain of his orders while the surrounding worlds of the Phadrian Cluster burned. Too late the High Admiral realised that his armada was hiding in the path of a different ork fleet entering the subsector. Led by vanguard space hulks that tumbled ahead of the fleet like the colossal chunks of a disintegrating comet, the orks smashed through the tight formation of the Imperial vessels. As battle cruisers and heavy frigates were pushed aside and overwhelmed, a trailing swarm of capsules, landers and assault boats descended upon their majestic wrecks.

In the Nazarex System, millions of agri-worlders perished with their crops as the sudden appearance of a monstrous ork attack moon threw the Praedial Worlds into gravitational chaos. Planets drifted out of their delicate orbits, some spinning towards their colossal sun while others were flung into the frozen darkness of the void.

Entire swathes of Imperial space were left derelict and lifeless in the wake of the destruction. Subsectors crowded with Imperial worlds became planetary mass graves. Smashed cities streamed with smoke, staining the heavens an acrid black. Corpses and body parts hung from vanes and cables, off baroque architecture and shattered statues — testament to the barbarity of the towering monsters storming through streets and structures.

The cardinal world of Koryban-Proctor and cemetery moons of Pulchra V, VI and VII were but shattered remnants, hollowed by the complete eradication of their priestly populations. The Hearth Worlds had been silenced, the boom of their industry and might no more. The colossal forges were now but mountains of scrap among the vapour forests, to be pillaged by the invader.

The creature they called the Beast was everywhere. His monstrous strength was in the brute swing of every primitive blade. His fury could be heard in the crash of rattletrap weaponry. His world-devouring madness could be seen in the fang-faced savagery of the hulking abominations that butchered in his name. The Imperium tottered before his alien wrath and the green inferno that swallowed planet after doomed planet.

Subsectors went dark like candles snuffed out in a cavern. Draznak. Phaal. Trega. Moebius. Solon. Quintarsus. Vulkhano. Battles blazed in the void about the sector Naval base of Gnostangrad and across the Chatasma Deeps. Mandeville points became the sites of horrific ship-to-ship collisions as desperate captains fought to make their jumps into the warp. Others attempted to do so without their Navigators, becoming forever lost in the empyreal storms beyond.

For other worlds the wait for Imperial assistance had simply been too long. Citizens and planetary governors had gone agonising months without word from their sector capital systems or even Terra itself. Urgent and repeated astropathic requests for assistance had been drowned out by announcements of alien invasion and catastrophic military failure in neighbouring systems and subsectors. Worlds without standing regiments of the Astra Militarum or stationed flotillas of Navy cruisers feared the worst in the face of obliteration. Many planets had lost their system ships and planetary militias to the authority and recalls of distant admirals and lord marshals.

Facing their doom in the swarms of space hulks and brute craft entering the system, miserable frater militias were disbanded and surface-to-orbit weaponry silenced. The baroque hives of Eidolon V rang with the screams of madness as the Beast’s unbearable psychic presence shattered minds. On final instructions from Ecclesiarch Mesring, sent shortly before his death, the shrine worlds of Fidessa Secundus and Pontefax XIII were urged to surrender themselves to the alien fury roaring its way across the void. Priests and pilgrims allowed the madness into their hearts, yielding their faith to the apocalyptic power of the Beast. By the time the orks arrived to decimate the towering statues and cathedra, all strata of Ecclesiarchal society on the shrine worlds had surrendered themselves to the Beast’s alien supremacy. On the industrial world of Trantis Di-Delta, the worker clans didn’t even need the intervention of a disgraced High Lord of Terra. They let the alien madness in unbidden and supplicated themselves before the arriving ork warlords, constructing from their communal visions a colossal representation of savage greenskin gods. The monstrous statues, plasma-welded together from assembly line materials, pleased the orks but they didn’t save the clansmen, who were swiftly butchered and sacrificed to the self-same gods.

So much death. Destruction untold. Worlds fell before the irresistible and unreasoning might of the Beast. Populations were slaughtered, Imperial citizens blasted apart, cleaved in two and torn limb from limb by hulking monstrosities. Planets that should have been notations in history books and the sites of grand last stands for colossal Imperial armies instead became only cemetery worlds of shallow graves. Armadas of ancient, cathedralesque battleships were turned into debris fields of scrap and frozen bodies drifting through the blackness. Great star forts and space stations were smashed aside before the might of the ork fleets, sent tumbling towards the surface of the planets about which they held station or into the blaze of system suns. In their wake the merciless creatures left dead worlds of ash, rotting bodies and smouldering scrap.

And those were the fortunate ones. As the green tide crashed on through the segmentum, pockets of systems and worlds were left unmolested. Already swarming with sheltering merchant vessels and freighters, the planets in these areas were overrun by arriving refugees. Order had long since broken down on such worlds but their populations were unified by hope — hope that the greenskin blight of brawn and technological calamity might pass them by. But the orks — creatures of absolute, insatiable appetite — had no such intention.

For the astropaths of the Imperium, around whom planetary governors, Imperial commanders and the captains of isolated vessels gathered, the scale of the horror was painfully apparent. Everyone was desperate for information, news of successes and plans for a coordinated counter-offensive. What the psykers dared not report was that the Segmentum Solar was growing increasingly silent, as astropaths died with the worlds to which they were assigned. For thousands of light years about the Sol System, fleets reported decimation, Imperial armies their annihilation and planets their end. The astropaths could not find it in themselves to tell the terrified and hopeless that no help was coming. That the status conferred by rank, title or planetary tithes could do them no good, or that the remaining armadas were being held back for the strategic defence of Terra and its surrounding systems. Battleships and grand cruisers maintained formation. Colossal troop carriers held at the ready, laden with regiments of Astra Militarum who had no orders to take back doomed worlds, alongside great Ark Mechanicus vessels and mass conveyors laden with Titan god-machines, whose fury lay dormant in vast hangars.

Of organised resistance mounted across the void, the astropaths knew little. Unremembered heroes were too busy fighting and dying where they were to offer assurance to distant victims cowering under green-tinged skies. While common humanity — the Guardsmen, the priests, the hivers, adepts, farmers and servitors — died in their droves, survivors looked to the stars for deliverance. They prayed to the God-Emperor for help and the sons of His mighty sons for salvation. What had the galaxy fought for, a thousand years before, if not for the unity of the Adeptus Astartes? Surely, the Space Marine Chapters would gather as they had done in times past, their strength a shield to protect the weak and defend their Emperor. They did not, however. They could not.

The orks were everywhere. Their attack moons appeared above Adeptus Astartes home worlds. Space hulks smashed into recruitment worlds. Fleets of barbaric craft drifted unannounced into systems in which Space Marine Chapters already fought Traitors and the xenos menace of other invader species. Librarians of all Chapters received calls for assistance all at once. Space Marine companies and strike cruisers were despatched across the void, responding to ancient accords or to reports of unimaginable destruction and warnings from their own sentry stations and outposts. Like dry parchment the void blotched green with enemy intrusions, the appearance of attack moons and armadas. There were so many reports and enemy fronts that Space Marine Chapters, already spread thinly, were forced to prioritise their engagements. As the darkness flashed with void battles and annihilations, the green tide rose, swallowing planets, systems and subsectors. Adeptus Astartes companies, battle-barges and strike cruisers became cut off from the command structures of their own Chapters, and Chapters became cut off from one another.

Driven by some feral instinct and reports of changing xenos migration patterns, the Space Wolves started returning to Fenris in droves. With their home world in the path of a vast enemy armada, the Wolves found themselves in a bitter void battle within their own system against thousands of attack ships carrying millions of orks. Meanwhile, the Ultramarines, used to fighting off ork Waaaghs! at the borders of Ultramar, were swift to respond. As the gargantuan scale of the invasion and the appearance of ork fleets within their domain became apparent, the Ultramarines were recalled from across Ultima Segmentum. With them came companies from the Genesis Chapter, Novamarines and Inceptors, intent on purging Guilliman’s empire of the xenos threat. The Dark Angels, spread across scores of subsectors on various undertakings, struggled to reform and offer a counter-offensive, instead fighting for their lives and those of any civilian populations near where squads and strike cruisers found themselves.

To the galactic north, south, east and west, the Adeptus Astartes fought for survival in the wreckage of a decimated Imperium. While citizens screamed and greenskins roared, the Angels of Death defended dying worlds and struck at the heart of invasion armadas. Drowning in a sea of green death, Space Marines struggled on. Squads were slaughtered without ceremony. Companies were lost attempting to reach the Sol System. Entire Chapters tried to come to Terra’s aid, attempting to break out of ork blockades and rampaging cordons that cut off whole sectors. All failed.

Only the Imperial Fists had been swift and strategic enough to summon their successor Chapters in force to the core systems before the enemy had swarmed the inner segmentum. Only the Imperial Fists had been wise enough to seek the aid of the only living primarch and courageous enough to strike with him at the heart of the ork empire. Only… the last Imperial Fist was dead, slain by the monstrous ork that had made the Imperium his plaything and the galaxy his own. In that one horrific moment, everything changed. The last Imperial Fist had died and hope died with him. A Chapter of the First Founding had been exterminated: the Defenders of Terra were no more.

If the citizens of the Imperium, for all their suffering and screaming, could comprehend such a thing, they would have lost their minds. Every exhausted Guardsman would have laid down his lasgun. Every captain of every vessel would have walked from their command decks. Every Space Marine would have been forced to confront a truth buried deep: that they might have been engineered to be superior exemplars of their species, but in the evolutionary arms race with the greenskin plague, they had lost. For if one Chapter could be destroyed then they all could — and without the Adeptus Astartes, the Imperium was doomed.

Two

The sun rose over the Imperial Palace.

Rays of light felt their way through the towers, citadels and hives beyond. The elegant architecture of the surrounding fortifications was cast in shadow, while the lamps punctuating the battlement walkway began to dim. Drakan Vangorich walked the ramparts of the Celantine Wall, the tails of his robes gliding along the polished stone. The Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum weaved through the clutter of rare and decorative plants, many of them of off-world origin, and beneath streaming red pennants. He passed statues of long-forgotten Thunder Warriors and monoliths listing in gold the tribes, clans and techno-barbaric warlords gathered under the Emperor’s banner at the end of the Wars of Unification.

Where the battlements widened into a platform overhanging a breathtaking drop from the Palace walls, Vangorich found smooth stone blocks serving as benches, but he did not sit. Instead he stood before the crenellations with his arms folded and his hands buried in his sleeves. A casual observer might have imagined the Grand Master of Assassins to have hidden weapons in there. He did, in fact — but the truth was that it was an unconscious habit, one that he had indulged in increasingly over the past months. He might have been a killer, the overlord of an army of similarly deadly agents of the Imperium, but he was still human and not immune to the anxiety of the times. Vangorich feared no man living or dead, and even held his nerve in the towering presence of humanity’s finest, but the Beast was a raging hurricane of green death swallowing the galaxy, and any man would be a fool to stand fearlessly before the apocalyptic savagery of such a creature.

Vangorich looked down between the crenellations and gave a shiver in the morning chill. It seemed like an unimaginably long way to fall. Stretching his neck in his hood he looked up, glad that the terrible shape of the ork attack moon no longer hung in the heavens. Beyond the dawn skies the Grand Master knew that there was the cold, black void — within which was an empire of broken and besieged worlds. Now, as a High Lord of Terra and with a seat on the Council of Twelve, Vangorich received daily and comprehensive reports: astropathic intelligence gathered from thousands of worlds, star forts, fleets and systems. Robed aides brought him piled stacks of data-slates on a daily, indeed hourly, basis. The reports were no different to those that Vangorich had acquired for himself, previous to his appointment as a High Lord. Now they simply carried an official seal.

His station had changed Drakan Vangorich, despite his best intentions. Palace intrigue and the political games he played seemed more important than ever, given that the tiniest ripples created by the High Lords — for good or for ill — had the power of tsunamis out across the Imperium. Now with a seat at their table himself, Vangorich felt not just the power of his new position but the crushing weight of responsibility. In this terrible game, the Beast held all the cards and had bet every wretched greenskin life on the likelihood that the Imperium would fold. That it would be consumed, as ever, by petty conflicts of its own making and therefore be ripe for destruction. The Beast knew its opponent well.

It was the combination of such feeble bureaucracy and an enemy the like of which the Imperium had never seen that had convinced the Grand Master of the need for action. Intervention. Drastic change — in himself and everyone else. He was convinced that now was the time for such determination. Every delay cost not lives but entire sectors. Every poor decision was not just a political setback but could break the collective will of humanity. Every failure carried with it not only horrific collateral damage but the very real possibility of existential doom. The Beast was coming and Terra was far from ready. His fellow High Lords and the common citizens of Terra were unified in only one thing: they both would only truly realise the need for such readiness with orks in the corridors of the hives and the palaces of the mighty.

It was time for decisive action from people with the backbone to act — High Lords who truly understood that their own private empires and armies were nothing without the Imperium, and that the Imperium was on its knees. High Lords like him.

A pair of Excoriators Space Marines approached along the battlements. Their plate, like the ramparts upon which they strode, was battle-scarred and annotated, a commemoration of the time when their brothers had held the wall against the besieging forces of the Warmaster, centuries before.

Between them they escorted a member of the Ecclesiarchy, a cardinal who cut quite an imposing figure even next to the two Space Marines. Cardinal Creutzfeldt was tall and heavy-set, but carried the extra weight well. He wore his robes and mitre with grizzled authority, while his large belt jangled with smouldering censers and tomes bearing chunky locks. In a tattooed hand he held a crosier that was crowned with a furiously burning brazier.

‘Eminence,’ Vangorich acknowledged.

Up close, Creutzfeldt’s face was a fearful mess. Horrific scars, long-healed, ran down the right side of his face like the tributaries of a delta. They twisted half of his mouth into a permanent snarl. A patch, decorated with the symbol of the Ecclesiarchy, covered his right eye. Creutzfeldt had served as a Ministorum priest in the ranks of the 401st Vymbari Pontificals, earning his scars against the orks of Fendrik’s World in an extended engagement that had all but claimed the regiment.

‘My lord,’ Creutzfeldt returned. Having taken a spear to the chest against the selfsame orks, his voice was a rasp. Still strong with a warrior’s pride and used to carrying a cardinal’s authority, he felt slightly awkward in expressing deference to a High Lord of Terra. Being used to sycophants and flatterers, many on the Council would have taken umbrage at such reservation. Men like Creutzfeldt made them nervous — men who had seen some of the Imperium and had suffered with it.

Vangorich liked him. He was exactly what the Grand Master needed.

‘My condolences,’ Vangorich said, ‘on your great loss, cardinal.’

‘My thanks,’ Creutzfeldt said. ‘With so many weighty matters on the mind of a High Lord, it is kind of you to spare a thought for the people of Aquillius.’

‘And for Fleur-de-Fides before,’ Vangorich added. After losing the cardinal world of Fleur-de-Fides to the Beast, Creutzfeldt had been reassigned to the seat of Aquillius but before he could even reach his new world, it too had been taken by the orks. ‘Tragedies both.’

‘Thank you, my lord.’

‘I have asked you here, Abriel — may I use your first name?’ Vangorich said. He didn’t wait for the cardinal to answer. ‘I have asked you here to consult with you about a very important appointment. As you no doubt have heard, Ecclesiarch Mesring was… removed from office.’

‘High Lord Mesring’s faith was tested,’ Creutzfeldt said, his voice rasping with unforced hatred. ‘He failed that test. He failed his God-Emperor, all Terra and the Imperium of Man. His release was a mercy the xenos-worshipping sack of wine did not deserve. Forgive me, my lord.’

‘No, please,’ Vangorich said. ‘These are emotive matters. His betrayal must have been a shock. With billions of the Emperor’s faithful subjects looking to the Ecclesiarchy for leadership, it would be unwise to leave High Lord Mesring’s seat empty for too long.’ He didn’t make mention of Koorland’s decree that the head of the Adeptus Ministorum no longer counted among the High Lords; he didn’t need to.

‘The orks are a grave threat, indeed,’ Creutzfeldt agreed, after a long uncomfortable pause. ‘If the people are to prevail against them, if their faith is to carry them through these terrible times, then they need to be shepherded to higher spiritual ground. Structures need to be maintained. Figureheads visible. Leadership unquestioned.’

‘This is why I am talking to you, Abriel,’ Vangorich said, looking off into the sunrise, ‘among other strong candidates in the ranks of the priesthood. I have been charged with finding an appropriate replacement. An Ecclesiarch for these dark times.’

‘You have spoken to Malachai?’ Creutzfeldt asked. ‘Shraile? Gorlandriaz?’

‘Among others,’ Vangorich said. He hadn’t, but he would not be drawn on the matter. Vangorich took his responsibility seriously but if the Imperium survived the greenskin apocalypse, then he would need a High Lord of the Adeptus Ministorum that he could control. He needed continued influence in at least one seat that was not his own. Creutzfeldt might indeed be that man but the Grand Master of Assassins had little intention of giving up the seat just yet.

‘Of course.’

‘I would be interested to hear your opinion on our present circumstances,’ Vangorich said.

‘I have fought the orks,’ Cardinal Creutzfeldt told him. ‘There is not a species in the galaxy, among all the rancid xenos-filth that pollutes the void, as mindlessly destructive. They live to fight. To kill. To be the end of all about them. And these invaders — the ones that are extinguishing our worlds one by one across the segmentum, led by this monstrous Beast — they are a breed apart. They are like no adversary we have ever faced. I am a humble servant of the God-Emperor and even I do not feel it heretical to claim that even He would have struggled to contain this threat.’

‘As a humble servant of the God-Emperor,’ Vangorich echoed him, ‘do you feel that we could be witnessing the end of the Imperium?’

Creutzfeldt looked at Vangorich, who in turn stared grimly into the rising sun.

‘Forgive me, my lord,’ the cardinal said, ‘but I feel that question to be a double-edged sword.’

‘It is a simple enough question,’ the Grand Master said absently.

‘If I tell you, without doubt, that we can exterminate the green plague,’ Creutzfeldt said, ‘as any in my position might be tempted to do, you would discount me as a fool living the fantasy of an Imperium long past.’

‘And if you tell me that we are doomed?’ Vangorich asked.

‘Then I would be a fatalistic fool,’ said Creutzfeldt, ‘of no use nor ornament to you or the Imperium.’

Beneath the glorious dawn, Drakan Vangorich came to a decision. He turned to the cardinal.

‘Then forget who I am,’ the Grand Master said. ‘Let me be but one amongst billions. A terrified soul, looking to my confessor for guidance, for comfort, for a truth Imperial. Cardinal, let me unburden my soul to you.’

Vangorich knelt before Creutzfeldt on the ramparts, his hooded head lowered.

‘As you wish, my lord,’ the cardinal said, making the sign of the aquila above the Grand Master of Assassins. ‘For even the strongest are allowed their doubts and fears. A man would not be a man without them. Speak, then, my lord. As if speaking before the God-Emperor Himself, who sees all, who knows all. Unburden your soul.’

‘I have lived a life of deaths,’ Vangorich told him. ‘All necessary. All in service of a stronger Imperium.’

‘The Emperor’s realm was built upon such necessities,’ Creutzfeldt said.

‘I am a blade,’ the Grand Master said, ‘in a box of blunt tools. Tools that seek to dull my edge.’

‘We all live to be of use, my lord.’

‘For so long, I have embodied the fears of others. But now I live my own.’

‘As do we all.’

‘And now all your fears are mine also,’ Vangorich said. ‘I bear the burden of the man who would act, who could act — but does not, in the forlorn hope that others will come to their senses and do what must be done.’

‘It will happen.’

‘I am not so sure,’ the Grand Master said. ‘And I become less sure, every day.’

‘The Imperium has stood for thousands of years, my lord,’ the cardinal assured him.

‘And I fear it will not last the passage of a single year more,’ Vangorich admitted. ‘We have seen our armies decimated and our fleets smashed. Impregnable fortress worlds have fallen and the industry of forge worlds is silenced. By the hour, we lose not ships and soldiers to the Beast but hive worlds and subsectors. Up until now Terra has been a healthy world in a gangrenous empire. But the orks are coming. The green tide rises about us. Terra is doomed, and with it, the Imperium of Man.’

‘I fear you underestimate the fortitude of the Emperor’s subjects, my lord,’ Creutzfeldt said.

‘As those subjects have underestimated the orks?’ the Grand Master returned. ‘I know it might not be a common sentiment to hear uttered within these hallowed halls, but the Imperium has a long history of overestimating itself.’

‘Well, my lord,’ the cardinal said, uncomfortable with such truths, ‘you would know better than I. I might not know much, but I know that the Imperium still stands.’

‘True,’ Vangorich said. ‘But for how long, Eminence? Fleur-de-Fides stood in honour of the Emperor but months ago. As did Aquillius. Now they are but mountains of smouldering masonry, turning silently in the void.’

‘But Terra,’ Creutzfeldt said, ‘is called Ancient for a reason.’

‘We stand on walls,’ Vangorich reminded him, ‘that barely a thousand years ago were crumbling before the might of the renegade Warmaster. You talk of the endurance of the past. I, like the rest of the Imperium, cannot afford that luxury. I live the threats of the present. The fears of the future.’

‘My lord…’

‘Forgive me,’ Vangorich said. ‘I go too far. You see kneeling before you a man at odds with himself and all else. I blame the High Lords for their intransigence and politics. The people for their blindness. Myself for sitting idly on my talents.’

‘I see that,’ Creutzfeldt said. ‘All the Emperor asks of us is that we act in accordance with our unique gifts. You are a man of action. My advice would be to act.’

‘Thank you for your honesty,’ Vangorich said. He lowered his hooded head and half nodded to himself. He had reached a dark decision. ‘I know that could not have been easy, especially in the viper’s nest of faith and politics that is the Imperial Palace. Eminence, would you do me one last service?’

‘Of course, Grand Master,’ Creutzfeldt told him.

‘Would you bless me?’ Vangorich said. ‘I feel the need for the Emperor’s benediction in these dark times.’

‘It would be my honour,’ the cardinal said.

Creutzfeldt put his tattooed hand on the crown of the Grand Master’s hooded head, speaking the benedictions and blessings of the God-Emperor as Vangorich knelt before him. As the cardinal drew back his hand, the Grand Master rose.

‘A thousand thanks,’ Vangorich said, ‘for your confidence and your service to a beleaguered Imperium.’

‘If there is anything more I can do to serve the Imperium,’ Creutzfeldt said, lowering his head, ‘then do not hesitate to call upon me.’ He brought a fat thumb up to his lips. A tiny cut bled on the digit and the cardinal sucked it clean.

‘As you say, cardinal,’ Vangorich said, ‘woe betide the foe that underestimates the Imperium of Man. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there are other matters that demand my attention.’

‘My lord,’ Creutzfeldt said, bowing and backing away from the Grand Master. He turned and tapped his way along the battlements with his smouldering crosier.

Vangorich watched him go. The cardinal would be making his way through the monstrous halls and chambers of the Palace, back to the Ecclesiarchal quarters set aside for his visit. There he would take ill and crash to the polished floor of his chambers. For where bullet and blade had failed to fell Abriel Creutzfeldt on Fendrik’s World, a microscopic pinprick of lethal poison would end the cardinal. He would be found dead, his heart having finally given out after the many trials of his hard and illustrious life.

Vangorich regretted the decision. He liked Creutzfeldt. As he knelt before him, the poison-tip slivers of crystal he wore in his hair waiting to pierce his hood and the cardinal’s unsuspecting flesh, he had wavered. The cardinal would have made an excellent High Lord of the Adeptus Ministorum, an Ecclesiarch the floundering Imperium deserved and needed. Unfortunately, Vangorich’s need for secrecy and security trumped all other concerns. He had let his guard down. Expressed genuine fears and given voice to thoughts a High Lord of Terra could not afford to have. He could not allow word of such weakness to leave the cardinal’s lips, and so he asked for a blessing, and the cardinal’s hand on his head.

As ever, Vangorich was a walking arsenal of silent death. If he were to be searched — a scandal for a High Lord of Terra — the Adeptus Custodes would find no blades or pistols. He carried disguised and concealed weaponry that the blunt security measures of the Palace were ill-equipped to detect. He had made a choice to deploy that weaponry and to end an ally he could not now afford to have.

These were the dark choices of a man of his station, and it was time to make more. While humanity died by the world and the Adeptus Astartes fought for their superhuman lives, Drakan Vangorich would not allow Terra to fall. Like a colossal edifice tottering on faltering supports, the Imperium needed to be strengthened. Reinforced. Structural weaknesses would be torn out and new foundations established. It needed men and women who would lift a smashed Imperium upon their shoulders, rather than cowards content to wander through the wreckage full of fears and excuses, cowards who hid within the walls of their Emperor’s fortress — dead men walking everyone else to their doom through the halls and corridors of the Palace.

Vangorich thought on the bodies he would have to step over to secure such a future. With worlds dying, primarchs dying, First Founding Chapters being exterminated to a man, Drakan Vangorich wasn’t sure that anyone would notice.

Three

Cold. Dark.

The nightside of Inwit was a swirling black storm of pain and numbness. Out on the ice wastes, away from the baroque glory of the hives and the welcome warmth of a distant sun, there was a solemn gathering. When the Adeptus Astartes entered a system or descended upon a world, such arrivals were usually accompanied by destruction and bombast. With orbital bombardment and the descent of drop pods. With death.

Not so with Inwit. The ice world hung glistening in the void, its peace left reverently undisturbed. It was an important world of the Imperium. A capital of a system cluster. A sector Naval base. The assembly ground for local Astra Militarum regiments.

The status of these establishments meant little to the Space Marines. What did matter was the history of the frozen world, for it had witnessed the arrival of a primarch. Inwit had been the hallowed home world of Rogal Dorn.

It had been appropriate, therefore, following the horrifying events on Ullanor, that the bearers of Dorn’s genetic legacy should congregate on Inwit. In silence. In mourning. In unity. The Imperial Fists had been destroyed. The last of their noble number had lost his life, and with him a Chapter of the First Founding had been lost to the Imperium. Only their Successors remained, each Excoriator, Crimson Fist, Black Templar, Soul Drinker, Executioner, Iron Knight and Fist Exemplar carrying with him all that was left of the Imperial Fists. All that was left of Dorn. So there, on the dark side of Inwit, in the flesh-searing cold, the Successors of the Imperial Fists gathered to honour their fallen brethren.

Without informing the planetary governor, the Admiral of the Fleet or the ruling huscarls, Adeptus Astartes frigates made their silent and sombre approach before deploying their gunships. Using their training and knowledge of Inwit’s defences, representatives of the seven Successor Chapters made atmospheric entry on the dark side of the planet without being detected. It was not difficult for the Space Marines, especially with every eye and augur directed at the void in expectation of the Beast’s coming. The rolling in of the green tide. The arrival of the apocalypse.

Coming in low across the predator-stalked wilderness that was the Splintering Land, Thunderhawks homed in on a ritual beacon — a beacon announcing in code the impromptu inception of the Feast of Blades. As reigning champions, the Fists Exemplar had the right to announce the Feast. With the Imperial Fists destroyed and the Chapter Masters of the Successors due to meet, Thane could think of no better way to commemorate the loss of their noble brothers.

Sending for the Sword of Sebastus — the blade awarded to the Chapter whose champion emerged victorious — Thane had summoned the Chapter Masters of the Imperial Fists Successors to Inwit. Dorn had become a man there; more than a man. He had led his Legion into the Heresy and into the trials of the Iron Cage that had been waiting for them thereafter. He emerged carrying the Sword of Sebastus, a weapon that came to be known as the Dornsblade. It was the honour of Chapters victorious in the Feast of Blades to receive the relic-weapon’s custodianship. With their reigning champion, Kalman Volk, lost on Eidolica, Thane decided to honour all three of Volk, Chapter Master Koorland and the Dornsblade by taking the champion’s place himself.

Thane stepped out onto the frozen floor of the arena. Without his plate, the Chapter Master was a rime-encrusted sculpture of scars and muscle. On this occasion, it had been decided that the combatants should fight not in power armour, but in carapace armour, as had been the tradition in ages past. In their frozen fists each gripped a simple gladius, weapons taken from the frigates’ fighting cages. While still holding an edge, the battered blades were notched and simple in design. With every member of every Successor Chapter needed to defend the Imperium, no one wanted to risk an accidental death.

Pain had been the path of the Imperial Fists, however. They indulged their agonies in the pain-glove, on their fortress battlements and in the bloody siege-breaking assaults for which they were famous. While deaths were undesirable during any Feast, the ceremony demanded that the combatants gave each other their best. That meant the brutality of bruises, sliced flesh, smashed teeth, broken bones and sense knocked clean from skulls. Through the infliction of such pain, one battling participant upon another, each Space Marine sought to achieve communion with their brothers and their primarch.

It was snowing. Flakes sizzled on the roaring braziers that burned about the arena, their guttering flames struggling in the stormy darkness. Beneath his boots, Thane felt the ice creak. The arena had been hastily hewn from the bleak landscape of the Splintered Land. Black mountains rose about them on all sides, and the hollow between had been decorated with blocks of ice to create an arena of frozen angularity. While blocks were used to create obstacles within, the ice forming the arena’s exterior was crowded with the silhouettes of Space Marines. The armoured shapes of Crimson Fists standing with Fists Exemplar. Soul Drinkers side by side with Executioners. Iron Knights holding their own before the storm while Excoriators exchanged solemn encouragements with Black Templars. Chapter serfs and servitors of all the Chapters moved about their masters, seeing to their sparse needs. Gunships idled on the terraced mountainsides, providing heat and shelter for those that needed it. Meanwhile, the icy maelstrom and perpetual darkness closed in, the Feast of Blades all but lost in the howl and bluster of Inwit’s fury.

Stabbing his blade into the ice, Thane knelt down and scooped up a handful of snow. Rubbing it between his palms, he washed the blood of previous opponents from his hands. Something felt broken in his left forearm, his right eye was swollen and bloodshot, while the ragged slice across his chest was knitted together with ice. All over, his flesh burned with the deep cold of the planet. Thane felt the eyes of the gathered Space Marines on him. Chapter Masters like Cuarrion and Verpall, looking on with grim approval. Fists Exemplar, a cold pride thumping in their chests. Champions broken and bested by the Chapter Master, like Stormon Valdred of the Black Templars and Morion Abermort from the ranks of the Iron Knights. Gasparian Riguez, representing the Crimson Fists, was still unconscious.

Thane pulled his gladius from the chill embrace of the arena floor. It had come to this. The Excoriator, Dathan Tychor, and himself, ready to smash each other into the frozen surface of Dorn-blessed Inwit, in honour of a fallen Chapter. He felt the surrounding Space Marines feeding off the torment and expectation. They had to do something with their bottomless grief. Their superhuman rage. Their brotherly love.

Opposite, Chapter Master Issachar was conferring with his champion. With his words stolen by the wind, Thane nonetheless saw him nod his respect through the darkness and snow. Thane nodded back, as Sergeant Tychor jumped down from the ice blocks delineating the arena. As the Excoriator trudged through the snow towards him, Thane could see that the Space Marine was taller than he, and broad. His face and chest were a branching and bifurcating pattern of stapled scars, funnelling in towards the ragged tissue of his right arm. The limb was missing. Instead, the flesh was fused to a heavy-duty shoulder socket and a bionic replacement for an arm. It was an old cybernetic, dented and scuffed, but the sergeant looked like he had been attached to it a long time and knew how to use it.

An Excoriator called out from the surrounding crowd before throwing a blood-stained gladius through the gelid air. It flew blade over pommel across the arena. Tychor had broken his gladius in his previous battle against the Crimson Fist, Riguez. For a moment it looked like Tychor was going to let the gladius fly by, until, with a sudden movement, the champion snatched it out of the air with his bionic hand. To make matters worse, as he stood before Thane, he passed the blade from his right hand to his left and then back again. Clearly ambidextrous, the sergeant finally settled on his left hand for the gladius, leaving the bludgeoning metal of his bionic fist free. He gave the Chapter Master a grim and disarming smile of confidence.

‘Dorn demands your best,’ Thane told the Excoriator. It was almost an order. ‘I demand it too, brother.’

‘You will get it,’ Tychor assured him. ‘Every swing of my blade shall honour Koorland and his Imperial Fists. I won’t disappoint you.’

The mangled Excoriator lifted his blade and with a grim nod Thane tapped the end of his gladius against it. Taking several steps back through the snow the two Space Marines began to circle one another. Tychor gave the Chapter Master the confidence of a good-natured smile, frozen to his face like a mask. In return Thane had for the Excoriator the grim rawness of a bloodshot eye. He blinked as the pair of them circled, the snow swirling into his face.

Within the space of that blink, Tychor had passed his blade back to the metal digits of his right hand. With the speed of his bionics, he swung for Thane. The Chapter Master was faster, however and slipped straight into a powered turn. He had expected his opponent to make the most of the blinding snow and had heard the whine of the bionic’s servos milliseconds before the Excoriator had unleashed its hydraulic fury.

As he turned, Thane brought his own blade around in a clean and savage riposte. He intended to slash the edge of his weapon across the flesh of Tychor’s exposed back, leaving him with another precious scar. The bionic arm came around again, however, batting Thane’s blade aside with enhanced power and speed. Thane felt the force ring through the metal of his gladius, and then the gut-wrenching thud of Tychor’s boot in his midriff.

The Chapter Master grunted and stumbled back. The Excoriator wasn’t done with him, however. He came at Thane again and his gladius flashed in the guttering brazier light, coming down with pneumatic certainty. Thane smashed the blade aside again and again, the broken bone in his arm throbbing with every impact.

Abruptly their swords locked, the frozen metal of the weapons sliding down each other. The blades stuck in the deep cold of Inwit’s night. Thane capitalised, grabbing Tychor’s hilt-clutching hands in his own. Turning, he hauled the hulking Excoriator over his shoulder. The brutal throw sent the sergeant crashing into the ice. Tychor recovered quickly, rolling off his augmented shoulder and back onto his feet.

Thane ran at him, jumping to one side and jabbing in with his weapon. With a shower of sparks, Tychor smashed it aside with the back of his bionic hand. The duel devolved into a sequence of merciless manoeuvres: muscular bodies arching, arms reaching, blades clashing. With the sword in his left hand, the sergeant weaved, stabbed and slashed at Thane. The Chapter Master moved his own blade through a sequence of desperate deflections, turning and bringing the gladius over his head and behind him to protect his back. As the battle intensified, Space Marines on the surrounding ice blocks leaned in. The tip of Thane’s blade nicked the Excoriator above the eye, while the sergeant’s own opened up the muscle on Thane’s shoulder.

With blood in Tychor’s eyes, Thane pressed his advantage. Holding the gladius with both hands he brought down the blade with a cleaving motion. Tychor stumbled back, holding his bionic arm up to absorb the blow. Denting the forearm’s metal with the force, the Chapter Master aimed to repeat the manoeuvre — to cut through the armour and workings of the augmented limb, if he had to. The sergeant absorbed the power of the blow and with clenched teeth pushed against the blade, knocking Thane back.

The Fist Exemplar’s back hit an ice block situated in the middle of the arena, hard enough to leave cracks in the surface. Suddenly, Tychor was everywhere. Pinning Thane to the block with his sweeps and stabbing motions, the Excoriator crowded his opponent. Thane ducked and leaned out of the path of the blade as it carved up the ice at his back. The tip of the gladius hissed into the surface of the block as a manoeuvre designed to skewer him through the midriff went wide. The bionic fist came in like a hammer, narrowly missing Thane’s head and smashing free fragments of ice.

With the pair of Space Marines enveloped in a cloud of ice crystals, Thane passed his gladius between his hands and turned it about. Clutching the hilt, he braced his forearm behind the blade. As the pneumatic swing of the Excoriator’s bionic arm came in again, Thane was ready for it. While the power behind the blow almost knocked him into the ice, the squealing, sparking edge of the blade took the impact. Coming back up off his bending knees, Thane hammered his right fist home in Tychor’s stomach. It was like hitting stone, but after a second and third gut-pounding slug to the midriff, Thane forced his opponent back.

With grimaces of pain and determination carved onto their frost-burnt features, Thane and Tychor fought on. Their bodies became a camouflaged pattern of red as their blood steamed and froze to their skin. As Chapter Masters, battle-brothers and serfs watched the titanic battle, they were forced from their positions on the block wall of the arena as the two opponents fought their way along.

Thane didn’t know what drove the Excoriators sergeant. He had bested Chapter champions and was now holding his own against a Chapter Master. Thane cursed himself for such a foolish dismissal. His bruised bones and sliced flesh testified to Tychor’s natural skill and battlefield experience. What were sergeants and captains — and Thane had faced both in the arena — but the Masters of Chapters in waiting? He could be exchanging blows with a future Chapter Master of the Excoriators. How could Koorland have possibly known that one day he would be Master of his own Chapter?

What had started as a noble battle of ceremony and bladework had turned into a savage brawl. Neither Exemplar nor Excoriator wanted to concede the fight — not with the spirits of their Imperial Fists brothers watching over them. The Excoriators had a reputation for indomitability, earned long ago when they still wore the legionary yellow of the Imperial Fists. They were attrition fighters in the noblest tradition, their craft learned on the walls of the Imperial Palace, defending their position against blood-crazed World Eaters and the thunder of the Iron Warriors. Thane doubted that a champion like Dathan Tychor knew how to surrender.

Thane and the Excoriator slashed and pounded each other about the arena, the cold scalding them back to their senses as their bodies crashed into ice blocks and the frozen floor. Thane became aware of voices and movement from around the arena. Fists Exemplar were calling out their protestations. Excoriators were arguing with them. Ishmael Korda, the Apothecary of Thane’s Second Company, had even dropped down into the arena, ready to administer treatment. Thane slowed the thud of his hearts and allowed a hand to come up. He held an outstretched palm to his Fists Exemplar, to Apothecary Korda, and to Chapter Master Issachar — who also seemed ready to call off his champion.

Taking an agonising breath, Thane looked up at Sergeant Tychor. He could see a cold determination in his eyes. Dorn’s determination.

‘Submit,’ the Excoriator said, his words an entreaty lost in the storm.

‘And dishonour us both?’ Thane returned before the pair once again clashed frozen blades.

Like the battered, blood-streaked Excoriator, Thane was at the epicentre of a galaxy of pain. In the mirror of Tychor’s blade he saw reflected the faces of the greenskin invader, hulking monsters of tusks, blood-red eyes and alien barbarism. Each staggering blow of the bionic fist became the quake of world-shaking ordnance or the planet-tearing upheaval of gravitational weaponry. Thane’s body was a field of battle, the burning agony of each wound in his freezing flesh like notations on a map. Engagements fought and primarchs lost. In Tychor’s furious features he thought he saw the ghost of Koorland’s own — the last Imperial Fist fighting his way into a future that belonged to someone else, leading a spectral Chapter, a fallen brotherhood, into eternity.

Koorland was not there and neither were his Imperial Fists. Only their noble Successors, fighting on. Honouring their name and upholding their traditions. Beneath the scorched surface of his own armour and the blue, ivory, grey and black of his brothers’ plate burned the yellow of a Legion unbroken. For a moment, amongst the fury of crashing blades, the crunch of snow and grunts of superhuman exertion, Thane felt the wisdom of the primarch. Rogal Dorn — loyal, unflinching and resolute. The shield of Terra and most trusted of the Emperor’s sons. Dorn, who had railed against the breaking of his mighty Legion and purged his grief with battle and pain. Amongst the savage bladework and the agony of his wounds, the Chapter Master felt a flash of inspiration. An idea hot from the heart. From the abyssal darkness of his breast, where hope had gone to die, sprang forth a concept fully-formed and burning with possibility.

‘Wait,’ Thane found himself saying, but the damage had already been done. He had become distracted and Tychordid not waste his opportunity. The Excoriator’s blade smashed Thane’s from his frozen hand. Before Thane had chance to register the manoeuvre, Tychor’s sword was hauled back and came thrusting for the Chapter Master’s stomach. Thane grabbed for the sergeant’s arm and the pair fought for control of the weapon. The tip of the blade pushed on through, into the flesh of Thane’s muscular side. Tychor heaved at the blade, while the Chapter Master held him back.

The sergeant was powerfully built and burned with an indomitable will. He had brought honour to himself and his Chapter in the arena. For Thane, however, there was more at stake than the honour of a single battle-brother, or a thousand such. With a snarl he powered Tychor’s arm back and pulled the tip of the blade from his bleeding side.

‘I have something of yours,’ Thane told his opponent. With agonising and incremental movements he pressed the gladius blade back at the Excoriator. With a final thrust Thane forced the tip of the sword into the champion’s scarified flesh, between his shoulder and the fused interface of the replacement limb. Tychor roared as the blade sank through his muscle. ‘Have it back.’

Thane didn’t stop there. He twisted the gladius blade within the sergeant’s flesh, drawing a howl from the Excoriator. The bionic limb locked in place as the turning gladius prised its interfaces from nerve and bone.

Thane threw himself around, wrenching the hilt of the impaling blade away from the sergeant. With the horrible popping of bone and interface lines, he tore the bionic limb free of its anchorage. As the metal limb crashed to the arena floor, sparking and twitching, gore spattered from the ruined shoulder.

He pointed the gladius at Tychor. ‘Submit, brother.’

Silence replied. Thane held the blade, its point dimpling the side of the champion’s throat. He would not ask again. He had been right about the Excoriators. The sergeant would have rather died than submitted in the arena, and Thane would need such qualities in the weeks and months to come. He had no intention of beating them out of a worthy opponent.

Thane looked to Chapter Master Issachar. The Excoriator was halfway into the arena, with his Space Marines and Bohemond of the Black Templars.

‘Enough?’ Thane said, his voice hoarse with pain and exertion.

Issachar nodded.

Thane tossed the gladius into the darkness of the storm and held out his hand. Blinking blood and snow from his eyes, the Excoriators champion took it. The Chapter Master drew the indefatigable sergeant to him with the handclasp of a brother, and as he did so, another arena was created about them. Not of block and ice, but of flesh and honour. Chapter Masters and their Space Marines closed in, followed by attendant serfs and servitors. They came up behind Thane and Tychor, laying cloaks of yellow loosely across their frost-burnt backs. Apothecaries moved in to tend to their champions’ wounds.

‘Then I see no reason why the honour of victory cannot be shared,’ Thane announced to them all. He saw immediate discomfort in the Excoriator’s eyes. The sergeant’s pride would never allow him to accept a victory unearned. ‘Shared between all the descendants of Dorn — all the worthy Successors of his Imperial Fists. For beneath our plate are we not all still Imperial Fists? Was not their blood the same as our own — the blood we have spilled at this Feast, in this arena, in their memory?’

‘What are you saying?’ Issachar of the Excoriators asked, looking to Cuarrion, Euclydeas, Bohemond, Vorkogun and Verpall each in turn before returning his gaze to Thane.

‘That we should undo what has been done,’ said Thane. ‘There is not a brother among us who, if he could, would not have sacrificed all to save Koorland, the Imperial Fists or the Emperor’s Imperium. What if we can?’

‘How?’ Issachar pushed.

‘By carrying out the primarch’s wishes,’ Thane told them. ‘We all know how it wounded Dorn to break his Legion. The grief of it never left him. Imagine how he would have felt to see this day come to pass. Imagine what he would do now, if he could have attended this Feast. What he would tell us. Of course, the loss of the Imperial Fists will be remembered — will be honoured by all the Chapters here present. But all of the Chapters here were Imperial Fists once… and could be again.’

He let the idea sink home. The pain and trials of the arena battle had lent Thane clarity and some scintilla of the primarch’s wisdom. He allowed the Space Marines and their Chapter Masters a moment to take in the enormity and significance of what he was proposing.

‘The Imperium is not ready to lose a First Founding Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes,’ Thane said, ‘let alone the Defenders of Terra. Not now. Not with the galaxy collapsing around it and an alien armageddon to still face. And why should the people of the Imperium ever know? Why should they ever experience such fear and uncertainty? We can be their shield and protect them from these truths, just as we shall protect them from this galactic predator.

‘Let every Successor give back a little of what it took to build their honoured Chapters — in vessels, weapons, battle-brothers and plate. And for Dorn’s sake, let that plate be painted yellow.’

Thane looked around the gathering. At Verpall and Bohemond, who nodded solemnly. At Vorkogun and Euclydeas, their faces set in stern approbation. At Cuarrion of the Crimson Fists, who even ventured a grim smile. At Chapter Master Issachar, who strode forward to take the Sword of Sebastus from the serf who had brought it forth.

The sword’s elegance was its simplicity. Crafted from a single piece of adamantium, its pommel was a prism and its crossguard was stamped with the numerals VII. Its blade was polished to a mirror finish. Issachar held the weapon up before the gathered Space Marines. For a moment, Thane saw his battered reflection in the blade. That moment ended as Chapter Master Issachar gave the Dornsblade to him.

‘For Dorn’s sake?’ Issachar said. ‘For Dorn’s sake, let the best of us — victorious in the Feast and brother to all of us — take his rightful place as Master of the Imperial Fists. Let his name be carved into the bones of Rogal Dorn, and let no son of Dorn speak beyond our brotherhood of this again.’

With grave reverence, Maximus Thane took the offered Sword of Sebastus. There were no words for such an honour and so the Space Marine marked the moment as his primarch would have done: with silent solemnity.

‘What now, Chapter Master?’ Issachar asked finally, the storm intensifying about them.

‘Now we return to Terra,’ Thane said, in syllables of steel. ‘To gather our strength. For the Imperial Fists and their Successors go to a war the like of which we have never seen.’

‘And what of the mistakes of the past,’ Issachar asked, ‘and of history repeated?’

‘As our brotherhood has come together,’ Thane said, ‘so must humanity. Send for your Epistolary. I need to send word to Terra. I must speak with the High Lords.’

‘And you think that they will listen?’ Issachar said.

‘No,’ Thane admitted. ‘But that is because we do not speak their language. We need political animals, men of leverage and influence who do. If we are to open closed minds and release our full potential then we are going to need a hammer and a pry bar.’

‘Who do you have in mind?’ Issachar asked.

The Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists considered.

‘We must contact Kubik, the Fabricator General,’ Thane said at last, ‘and Grand Master Vangorich.’

Four

First Captain Zerberyn stood on the command deck of the battle-barge Dantalion, taking in the destruction. The Ophidium System was no more. It had been a trading hub of ancient commercial significance. Dominated by the hive world of Bucolica Mundi and near a hundred orbiting agri-moons, it was rumoured that the system fed half the sector.

It did so no longer, however. Gone were the fleets of merchant vessels and bulk freighters. Gone were the audit stations, the void storage depots and the orbital docking facilities that Bucolica Mundi wore about its fat belly like a belt. Gone was the planet itself. Torn apart by the orks’ gravitational weaponry, the hive world now drifted through the system as an ever-expanding blizzard of shattered rock and billions of frozen bodies. The Shepherd Moons had fared little better, their delicate orbits thrown into disarray. While some were flung off into the void, their worker populations freezing to death along with their livestock, others burned in the closing embrace of the raging Ophidium sun.

In the hive world’s place, Zerberyn saw an ork attack moon. A monstrosity of rock, rusted metal plating and gigantic weaponry. Upon its surface, a red, clenched greenskin claw had been roughly painted — not unlike the clasped gauntlet that identified the First Captain’s own vessels as belonging to the Fists Exemplar. About the moon, like the swirling stellar material of some newly formed star, a maelstrom of fragmented planetary rock and monstrous ork attack craft circled. Like a hurricane passing through the void, through enemy armadas and systems, it scoured Imperial subsectors clean of life.

‘I will repeat myself,’ Mendel Reoch hissed through his half-helm. ‘This is ill-advised.’

As if to echo the Space Marine’s view, the Dantalion shuddered briefly with the impact of a piece of debris that had found its way through the turrets.

‘Your opinion is noted, Apothecary,’ the First Captain said from the command pulpit.

‘The Chapter Master must be warned,’ Valric Lasander said. ‘Terra must be warned. These monstrosities have a weakness. It must be exploited.’

Reoch pointed towards lancet screens full of destruction and the enemy fleet that had wrought such calamity. ‘I am not seeing weakness out there. You are seriously suggesting that you want to take our ship into that?’

‘Of course not,’ Lasander admitted, ‘but we must reach the telepathica matrix so we can get word to Chapter Master Thane, and that is worth any risk.’

‘It’s comforting to know that I am surrounded by wrong-headed fools who would rather throw away lives than think,’ Reoch said, irritably.

‘Apothecary…’ Zerberyn began.

‘Don’t underestimate Chapter Master Thane,’ Reoch told him, glancing at Lasander to include him too in the rebuke. ‘He probably already has the information you risk so much to impart, and even if he does not, it will not matter. The Fists Exemplar will not allow this threat — this Beast — to prevail. Like him, we should be marshalling our strength and taking the fight to the orks.’

Lasander stepped aside and wordlessly offered a gauntlet towards the devastation of the Ophidium System and the ork attack moon.

‘Obviously, I don’t mean to make our stand here,’ Reoch said. ‘That would be suicide.’

‘Your faith in Thane is well-placed,’ Zerberyn said, ‘but just as there are procedures to follow on the surgical slab, there are protocols to follow in times of war.’

‘Protocols.’ Reoch’s tone was skeptical.

‘Yes,’ Zerberyn told him. ‘I know you are eager to get back to fighting the orks, but you would use a chainsword where a las-scalpel is required. I have seen you strategise, pick your enemies and triage the wounded. That is all I am doing here, Apothecary. Favouring the strategy that yields the most effective outcome. With knowledge of the aliens’ susceptibility to psychic assault, Terra might be secured, the Imperium unified and the Beast brought down.’

‘That may be, but we are not seeing much unity out here,’ Reoch retorted.

‘Explain yourself, brother,’ Zerberyn demanded.

‘I am saying that the Imperium should get the heroes it deserves,’ the Apothecary told them.

‘My lord,’ Lasander protested.

‘Let him speak,’ the First Captain said.

‘You were there,’ Reoch said. ‘You saw the regimental mutinies at Archangelus. Commodore Beauchamp’s refusal to abandon his station and join our number. The silent Mechanicus, too busy fortifying their forge worlds to accompany us in a counter-offensive.’

‘There might be other reasons for that,’ Lasander said, looking between the Apothecary and Zerberyn. ‘We keep ill company.’

‘The Iron Warriors are the only ones fighting alongside us,’ Reoch said simply.

‘They are not to be trusted,’ Lasander insisted.

‘Maybe not,’ Reoch said, ‘but that is not for you or I to decide.’

‘It makes me uneasy to hear you speak of them with such favour,’ Lasander said.

‘Like you, I favour the strong,’ the Apothecary said. ‘The Adeptus Astartes have always known the flaws of humanity. Its weakness, in body, spirit and mind. We know them for greed, politics and the indulgence of their fears. When humanity isn’t falling before its foes, it is selling out its allies.’

‘Betrayal?’ Lasander said. ‘You want to talk about betrayal? Phall? Sebastus? Terra?’

‘And what of the Rancora Deeps, Krastengrad and One-Twenty-Five-Twenty?’ Reoch countered. ‘Loyalties are but matters of time and place — and the High Lords of Terra are only loyal to themselves. Their ships stand off. Their armies flee. Their faithful embrace the worship of this Beast. How can we fight this alien invasion with that? We fought side by side with the Iron Warriors during the Great Crusade, as we do right now. Kalkator’s vessel sits under our guns and we have done nothing. Why? Because the First Captain knows that right now, a living Iron Warrior is worth more to our cause than a dead one. We need his warriors, their weapons and their assets. Let’s not waste them here in the service of protocol.’

A hololithic display crackled to life nearby, its signal hissing and warping with every void-borne rock to strike the Dantalion. The spectral form of Warsmith Kalkator presented itself on the command deck, battleplate a rust-mottled pattern of tarnished silver and stripe.

‘The Palimodes, First Captain,’ Shipmaster Marcarian said, stepping to one side.

‘You have something to report, Iron Warrior?’ Zerberyn said with impatience.

Kalkator let the suggestion that the Fists Exemplar were in charge of their joint venture pass. ‘Only that this was ill-advised,’ the Iron Warrior said.

Lasander looked to Reoch, but the Apothecary shrugged as if to say that he had told them so.

‘My vessel has sustained damage in the debris field. Repairs are necessary and urgent,’ Kalkator continued.

‘How long will this take?’ Zerberyn asked.

‘It will take us no longer than three hours to repair the damage,’ Kalkator said. ‘I would curse the decimation in this system, but I suspect that it is the only thing keeping our ships from being discovered by the orks.’

‘Very well,’ the First Captain said. ‘We shall proceed to the telepathica matrix and relay our warning to Terra.’

‘You will find no redemption there, Son of Dorn,’ the Iron Warrior said. ‘Not for words and not for actions. The galaxy is short on second chances — and you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Take it from one who knows.’

‘I am doing this, Iron Warrior,’ Zerberyn told him. ‘It is no less in your interest than mine that Terra defeats the orks.’

‘Agreed,’ Kalkator said, ‘for I much prefer fighting Imperials than greenskins. Though in truth, you both seem to like fighting yourselves.’

‘Three hours,’ Zerberyn said, moving the uncomfortable exchange on.

‘Do what you must,’ Kalkator said, ‘but once my repairs are made, I and my ship are taking leave of this deathtrap system.’

‘Such fearful assessments are not your reputation,’ Lasander said.

‘I fight the orks on my own terms,’ Kalkator told him. ‘What would you have us do? Defend a pile of void-strewn rubble? Mount a suicidal siege on that attack moon with insufficient men and vessels?’

‘No,’ Zerberyn admitted.

‘Then do not waste my time with your own fearful assessments,’ Kalkator said. ‘Palimodes out.’

The hololithic transmission faded to static and then to nothingness. Lasander grunted his derision.

There was a good reason why the orks, in their devastation of the system, had not discovered the Arx Meridia installation. The telepathica matrix was stationed in orbit close to the Ophidium star. Within the relative chill and darkness of colossal protective shielding, it was safe from the radioactive inferno of the sun. Lost, from without, in the blinding glare and static of the star, it remained safe from the invading attentions of the orks.

As they ploughed on through the blaze, the temperature aboard the Dantalion rose. Void shields crackled and pulsed while the command deck was flooded with blinding light from the bridge lancet screens. As the battle-barge fell in behind the orbiting station and the glowing metal of its protective shield, everything returned to blotched darkness. Upon the Dantalion’s approach, Zerberyn could see that beyond the baroque system ships of Adeptus Astra Telepathica, one other vessel was docked to the station.

‘Master Marcarian?’ the First Captain said.

‘It looks as if she belongs to the League of Black Ships,’ the shipmaster said, leaning in over deck serfs, servitors and consoles. ‘The Athymian Astra, my lord.’

‘A tithe ship?’ Lasander said.

‘For unbound psykers, yes,’ Marcarian confirmed.

‘She must have been levying the system when the oks attacked,’ Reoch said, ‘then sought shelter at Arx Meridia.’

‘Communications?’ Zerberyn asked.

‘From the station?’ the shipmaster said. ‘No, my lord. Nothing.’

‘Our reputation precedes us,’ Reoch mused.

‘Shipmaster,’ the First Captain said, ‘dock with the station.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Lasander,’ Zerberyn went on. ‘Have a squad meet me down in the airlock vestibule.’

‘You shall have my best, First Captain — Sergeant Vasmir.’

‘And continue with your long-range augur sweeps,’ Zerberyn ordered.

‘You are still going over there?’ Reoch asked.

‘We are going over there, Apothecary,’ Zerberyn said, making for the command deck elevator. ‘We need to find an astropath, and the souls on that station and the crew of the Black Ship may need our aid.’

Locking harsh gazes with Lasander, Reoch turned to follow the First Captain.

In the airlock vestibule that rang with the reverberating boom of battle-barge and station coming together, they were met by Titus Vasmir and his squad. The five Space Marines checked each other’s scorch-patterned plate before moving on to their own boltguns. A serf arrived in the vestibule with Zerberyn’s helmet, gladius and pistol, before exiting as steam vented about the Fists Exemplar. The docking had been successful.

‘First Captain,’ Vasmir acknowledged.

‘Flanking positions,’ Zerberyn ordered as the lock opened, making it clear that Vasmir’s squad was to perform the duty of an escort.

With Squad Vasmir marching either side and the sergeant in front, Zerberyn and Apothecary Reoch entered the telepathica matrix station. Within, Arx Meridia seemed like a haunted cathedral. The astropaths and their servants kept a dour and functional installation, largely dominated by dormitory cells, choir halls and techno-arcane equipment designed to relay and augment the astropathic talents of the station’s psykers. Since astropaths were blind, decorative features were restricted to hexagrammatic wardings, relief symbols and textured tapestries.

‘No reception party?’ Reoch said, both suspicious and insulted. ‘Or word from the choir-master?’

The facility appeared to be deserted. No robed astropaths. No adepts or station bondsmen. Not even servitors. ‘Where is everyone? Could the station have been attacked?’

‘No bodies, either,’ Zerberyn said, before adjusting his vox-channel. ‘Lasander?’

‘Captain?’ the Veteran Sergeant crackled back.

‘Are there any signs that the orks have already been here?’

‘Stand by,’ Lasander said, then a moment later: ‘The Athymian Astra shows battle damage down her flanks and engine column, but I’m assuming that was the cost of reaching the station. It doesn’t look like ork fire, though. Too precise. Arx Meridia itself is untouched.’

‘Make our announcement,’ Zerberyn said.

‘You might think we had already done that,’ Reoch commented.

The Fists Exemplar were traversing a scriptorium. A long, tall room, its walls were lined with bookcases stuffed with dusty tomes and scrolls. Desks and stools lay upturned all around. Above their heads, raised galleries and walkways projected from the shadows.

‘Arx Meridia matrix,’ Lasander’s voice boomed down the length of the cavernous chamber. It seemed that communications were being run through the facility’s vox-caster system. ‘This is the Adeptus Astartes battle-barge Dantalion, First Captain Zerberyn in command. The Space Marines of the Fists Exemplar require an audience with the station choir-master. Present yourselves.’

Zerberyn slowed, the Space Marines of Squad Vasmir with him. The sergeant and Reoch took a few more steps before turning.

‘First Captain?’ Vasmir said.

‘What is it?’ the Apothecary asked.

‘I thought I heard something,’ Zerberyn told them. ‘Sergeant, auspex — give me a sweep of the surrounding chambers.’

With Reoch looking around and Sergeant Vasmir going to work on his multi-scanner, the First Captain heard the sound of the squad’s gauntlets creaking about the grips of their boltguns.

‘Multiple signatures,’ Vasmir called out. ‘Ambush pattern!’

The gloom of the scriptorium suddenly became a storm of las-blasts and fury. Cooking the air, criss-crossing beams of energy seared into the plate of the Fists Exemplar. With flash-scarring and smouldering craters decorating their armour, the Space Marines fell into an immediate defensive posture against one of the walls. Powerful las-beams burned their way across the hall from all directions. Surrounding their First Captain, Squad Vasmir took their positions, boltguns primed and ready.

‘What are your orders, my lord?’ Sergeant Vasmir called.

Zerberyn lifted his head to peer around the chamber. He could see dark shapes in carapace moving along the raised galleries and out of the gloomy corridors adjoining the scriptorium. They wore power packs on their backs, enhancing the effectiveness of their weaponry. The lenses of their helmets burned the red of judgement as they took cover and rested their lasguns against corners and on toppled tables. Zerberyn realised that if they had reached the end of the hall they would have been caught in a bloody ambush.

‘Captain!’ the sergeant urged.

‘Hold your fire,’ Zerberyn growled.

‘What?’ Reoch said, turning on his captain. ‘We’re being fired upon.’

‘This must be a misunderstanding,’ Zerberyn said. ‘I will not take the lives of loyal Imperial troops over an error of judgement. If your system was swarming with orks then you might be over-ready with your weapons yourself.’

Reoch drew his bolt pistol.

‘It is,’ the Apothecary said, ‘and I am.’

‘Sergeant?’ Zerberyn said.

‘They appear to be Inquisitorial storm troopers,’ Vasmir said before a stream of light tore over his head. ‘Probably from the Black Ship,’ he added.

‘What are the Holy Ordos doing firing upon us?’ Reoch asked.

‘Captain,’ Lasander said over Zerberyn’s helmet vox. ‘I am getting reports of firing aboard Arx Meridia. Do you require reinforcements?’

‘Negative,’ Zerberyn said. He didn’t want to add to the havoc and confusion within the station. ‘Stand ready, but do not intervene unless I send word.’

With the air warming around them and the floor cratered with glowing impacts, Zerberyn fired three shots into the chamber ceiling. As he expected, the highly trained storm troopers retreated behind cover as chunks of metal and plascrete cascaded down in front of them.

‘Troop commander,’ Zerberyn called, taking advantage of the break in the blazing ambush. ‘Stand your men down. I am Zerberyn, First Captain of the Fists Exemplar. I have information vital to my brothers securing Terra from the alien threat. It is imperative that I make contact with them. I need to commandeer the abilities of this station’s astropathic choir to do so.’

After a few moments of tense silence, the storm erupted again, with beams searing into stone and over their heads. One las-blast found its way to glance off Reoch’s pauldron, spraying the Apothecary’s half-helm with glowing cinders of ceramite.

‘Cease firing or die!’ Reoch called out.

‘Troop commander,’ Zerberyn repeated. ‘The credentials of your order will not be able to protect you from the Adeptus Astartes.’

‘My lord,’ Sergeant Vasmir said. ‘They’ve been isolated. They could have taken leave of their senses…’

‘Or have already surrendered themselves to the xenos faith,’ the Apothecary said, ‘for which there is only one cure.’

Suddenly the scriptorium was silent again. The gloom of the hall returned, with the lasrifles of the storm troopers snapping to a stop in unison.

‘Troop commander,’ Zerberyn called again.

‘He is not in command here, captain,’ a voice crackled across the vox-casters around them. ‘I am.’

‘Identify yourself,’ Zerberyn commanded.

‘Darghastri,’ the voice came again, ‘of the Emperor’s Holy Inquisition.’

‘Then you will know, Lord Darghastri,’ Zerberyn said, ‘that we fight on the same side, for the same cause. That the Beast is our common enemy. Put aside your weapons and your men will not be harmed, I give you my word.’

‘Your word, eh?’ Darghastri said. ‘What would the word of a traitor be worth these days? Probably little more than a greenskin’s, I would think.’

‘Vasmir is right,’ Reoch said. ‘He’s gone insane.’

‘It is unwise to insult the Adeptus Astartes,’ Zerberyn told the inquisitor.

‘I dare say you are right, but you have fallen from the Emperor’s grace,’ Darghastri said.

‘Lord Darghastri,’ Zerberyn called. ‘The Adeptus Astartes are not in the habit of issuing warnings — but as a courtesy, I am doing so. To you, Lord Inquisitor. A final one. Lay down your weapons and surrender this facility to the Fists Exemplar, or suffer the Emperor’s wrath in bolt and blade.’

‘I can’t do that, captain,’ the inquisitor told him. ‘And neither can you. For the Emperor’s wrath is reserved for the enemies of His holy Imperium. For you, captain, and your traitor-hearted Space Marines.’

‘You shall pay the price for such accusations and false reports,’ Zerberyn growled.

‘At least the price shall not be my immortal soul,’ Darghastri said, before telling his storm troopers: ‘Destroy them.’

Zerberyn gritted his teeth behind the grille of his helm.

‘These servants of the Imperium have given themselves over to madness,’ he said to his men. ‘The order is given. Kill them. All of them.’

The Fists Exemplar advanced upon their new-found enemies. Like the closing of a ceramite trap, Zerberyn and his Space Marines turned the storm troopers’ ambush into a bolt-storm that rolled back towards the soldiers. The armour of the Fists Exemplar soaked up the blasts of lasrifles. With patches of their plate glowing with the insistence of gunfire, they hammered the troopers back with merciless bursts from their weapons. Beyond, they could hear urgent orders being called between the soldiers as they moved to take different positions about the end of the scriptorium.

It couldn’t save them. Within the blink of an eye the Fists Exemplar were upon them, the mortals looking down the sights of pistols and boltguns. With cold certainty of purpose, the Angels of Death lived up to their name. Bolt-rounds came blasting at the Inquisitorial storm troopers with a speed and accuracy they could never match. With suprahuman reflexes and a lifetime of training, the Space Marines blew ragged holes through chests and skulls, turning carapace armour and helmets into bloody mulch. Rounds exploded out of the backs of the soldiers, spattering the floor and furniture with gore. The force of the impacts lifted them off their feet and slammed them into the bookcase-lined walls. Before they even had time to hit the ground the Fists Exemplar had turned, aimed and delivered another death-dealing blast at their next victim. All the while beams of energy seared the air about them and left scorched craters in their plate.

To their credit, the storm troopers did not break. They died as they had lived. Precisely. Economically. Sergeant Vasmir unleashed the devastation of his boltgun on full automatic, turning hiding soldiers into a mess that was barely recognisable as human. With the troopers in the hall dead, Vasmir ejected his empty magazine and slammed in a new one.

Beyond, orders had turned into panicked shouting. An Inquisitorial storm trooper ran out from an adjoining corridor, clutching a plasma gun, and Zerberyn and Reoch both turned their pistols on him. As bolt-rounds tore the trooper’s body apart, the globe of superheated energy blazing forth from the plasma gun streaked away from the weapon. Like a tiny, blinding sun it struck Vasmir in the throat, bubbling ceramite and vaporising flesh into nothingness. The sergeant dropped with an armoured clatter, his auspex sliding across the floor.

The First Captain and Reoch reached the end of the scriptorium, taking positions on either side of the end of the corridor. Zerberyn took a moment to replace the magazine in his bolt pistol. The Apothecary holstered his own weapon and drew his chainsword from where it sat across his back. Gunning it to life, he thrashed the monomolecular teeth. Looking down at the dropped auspex on the floor nearby, Zerberyn could see the Inquisitorial forces withdrawing up the passage at the sound.

The First Captain looked back down the hall. The thunder of Squad Vasmir’s bolters had fallen silent, the hall emptied of foes. Zerberyn held up three armoured digits at Reoch. Then two. Then one.

Surging around the corner with powered steps, the Space Marines were met with a storm of las-beams that cut up the length of the corridor. Their battleplate smoked with the seething caress of suppression fire. The beams kept coming, the gloom of the corridor flashing like a warning strobe. Zerberyn heard the repetitive snap of a volley gun and felt a succession of powerful las-streams take him in the cabling of his midriff.

Squeezing the trigger, Zerberyn sent bolt-rounds rocketing into the storm troopers holding the passage. His shots tore through carapace, flesh and bone, blasting Darghastri’s highly trained troops into flailing corpses. Advancing past his captain, Reoch brought his chainsword up with skill and determination and swept the razored teeth of the blade through the soldiers, who were desperate to get off a last few las-blasts before the Apothecary reached them. Even Inquisitorial storm troopers lost their nerve as this death came at them.

Reoch moved through Darghastri’s troops with the precision of the surgeon he was. He opened soldiers up from jaw to hip, the chainsword chewing through flesh. He struck heads from shoulders and cut down through the lines connecting weapons to power packs.

The mortals were no longer retreating, they were fleeing. Zerberyn continued his fire. As bolt-rounds punched through the Inquisitorial storm troopers, they dropped to the floor until a single soldier remained — the trooper carrying the volley gun. With the smouldering muzzle aimed at the First Captain, he pulled back on the trigger. The weapon was silent, however. Reoch had sliced through the gun’s power cabling during his devastating onslaught.

Zerberyn looked back down the corridor. He saw Squad Vasmir stepping over the body of their sergeant, and turned on the remaining trooper with sudden fury, a cold vengeance that was equal parts indignation and indulgence. He slammed his pistol into its holster and grabbed the soldier savagely by the throat. As his powered gauntlet closed on the storm trooper’s neck, Zerberyn leaned in. So close to the struggling soldier’s helm, the Space Marine could hear Darghastri still giving orders. The First Captain realised that the inquisitor had been watching the whole firefight through the glowing red lenses of his men. Zerberyn positioned himself in front of the trooper’s optics.

‘There is but one Space Marine for every world in the Imperium,’ Zerberyn announced, for the inquisitor’s benefit. ‘This madness has cost me another of my brothers. While we fight among ourselves, worlds are being lost to the invader. For my battle-brother and the worlds he might have protected, you must die, inquisitor.’

With that, Zerberyn crushed the bones in the trooper’s neck and tossed his body away like a rag doll.

Mendel Reoch came up beside his captain.

‘Where are the astropaths?’ the Apothecary asked.

‘If I must guess, Darghastri has them in the Black Ship,’ Zerberyn said, his voice a hollow rasp. ‘But we need them.’

‘The Athymian?’ Reoch said.

‘Yes,’ Zerberyn said. He changed the channel on his helmet vox. ‘Lasander.’

‘Here, captain,’ Lasander responded from the bridge of the Dantalion.

‘Send me two more squads, and your second-best sergeant,’ Zerberyn ordered. ‘We are going to storm the Black Ship.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Zerberyn was silent as he made his way through the Arx Meridia station. While Apothecary Reoch kept his chainsword idling and Squad Vasmir moved from corner to corner, aiming their boltguns in advance of their progress, the First Captain didn’t seem to care. As they approached the reception antechambers of the Black Ship’s docking station, Zerberyn’s men were joined by Squads Torr and Escoban. Sergeant Solomon Torr was a veteran of Gamma-Hydrata and the Silent Wars. He had come ready with men and equipment to breach the airlock of the Athymian Astra. They didn’t need such measures, however, because as Zerberyn entered the antechamber for the starboard lock he found the barbican airlock to the Black Ship open.

Zerberyn held up a fist, bringing his Space Marines to a halt. The squads assumed positions on the airlock, their boltguns ready, while the First Captain slowed to a stop. The opening was not crowded with Inquisitorial storm troopers. Instead, three figures waited for the Space Marines.

The first was a robed, emaciated specimen of a man, raw-eyed and twitchy. His skeletal hands glowed with otherworldly energies. The second sat in a tracked throne, a shaved and muscular wretch. Despite his brawn, his face betrayed the simple wonder of a small child. Both bore the savage brand of the Inquisition on their foreheads — the mark of forced recruitment. Zerberyn knew that inquisitors often travelled on the Adeptus Astra Telepathica’s Black Ships, searching for psychic recruits to join the Holy Ordos. The third was restrained in an upright containment casket, criss-crossed with heavy chains, their face and form unseen within.

‘I advise caution, my lord,’ Reoch said. ‘They’re witchbreeds.’

Zerberyn nodded. He now had even more reason to regret having lost all of his Librarians.

‘Correct,’ a voice rang out across the antechamber, and the inquisitor stepped out from behind the upright containment casket. Darghastri was an aged wreck of a man, half machine and half rejuvenat-mangled flesh. The inquisitor’s dark robes and hood hid ugly armour. Buried in a stained, unkempt beard and held in a gap-toothed mouth was a tapering pipe that wreathed the old man in ghostly smoke. He walked around before the psykers with the sighing hydraulics of a bionic leg, steadying himself with a metal walking stick. He wore a holstered bolt pistol on his belt.

‘Inquisitor…’

‘First Captain,’ Darghastri acknowledged.

‘You are so ordered,’ Zerberyn said, ‘to hand over the astropath choir assigned to this station. For if you do not, with the Emperor’s own thunder, I will take them by force.’

‘The matrix personnel are under my protection,’ the inquisitor said, ‘and that is the way they will remain.’

Zerberyn snarled. ‘Brothers, advance.’

Squads Vasmir, Escoban and Torr stepped forward with their boltguns to blast the inquisitor and his three psykers into oblivion. Weapons barked their fury. Bolt-rounds tore through the cool air of the chamber. A metre in front of Darghastri and his gathering, the rounds stopped as though they had hit an invisible wall and showered to the deck. The Fists Exemplar intensified their fire, targeting the inquisitor, but to no avail. Bolt-rounds simply dropped before Darghastri to form piles on the metal floor before him.

The inquisitor lifted his walking stick. The pommel was crafted into a metal skull. As Darghastri flicked down the jaw with his thumb, a long flame rose up from the crown of the skull and from it, he re-lit his pipe. He jabbed the stick at the emaciated psyker, who held his glowing fists out at his sides.

‘I only travel with the Athymian Astra,’ the inquisitor said, ‘but as with any ship, you get to know your fellow travellers. Zygmunt Fesse here was part of a hive-world tithe from the Farrow Worlds. Before devoting his talents to the Holy Ordos he held off two battalions of his home world’s local militia and Imperial Navy airstrikes for three days. He has a talent for survival.’

‘His talents won’t be enough to save you, inquisitor,’ Zerberyn told him.

Darghastri pointed his walking stick at the musclebound psyker trapped in the tracked chair.

‘As there will be no escape for the Emperor’s enemies,’ the inquisitor told him. ‘Four-One-Seventy-Five here was transferred from the Dreadhaven penal colony on Panoptica XIII. Kept getting through the security measures. Doors. Bars. Chains. Sentry guns. They don’t work on him. Panoptica’s a dead rock, so there was nothing outside but sun-bleached stone. Still, he earned his place aboard the Athymian as now he earns his place in my retinue.’

Darghastri ejected his bolt pistol’s magazine and tossed the weapon into the seated psyker’s lap. The witchbreed set upon the weapon like a toy to be examined and explored. Within moments, the gun fell apart in his hands.

The inquisitor clicked at 4-1-75. Getting the psyker’s attention off the disassembled pistol, he pointed at the Fists Exemplar. A childish smile of delight passed across the psyker’s features. The deck began to clatter with components. While the Space Marines aimed their weapons at the inquisitor and his psykers, the boltguns fell apart in their gauntlets. Rounds rained to the floor, alongside the internal working parts of the weaponry. Eventually the barrels, breeches and grips of the boltguns and pistols clanged to the deck.

As Reoch’s pistol fell apart on his belt, pieces tumbling from his holster, he stepped forward. With a snarl he gunned his chainsword and advanced.

‘Apothecary,’ the inquisitor said, moving along the line to the final psyker. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

‘Wouldn’t do what?’ Reoch asked. ‘Wouldn’t step through your defences and hack you and your witches limb from limb?’

‘This is Thessda,’ Darghastri said, sliding open a narrow panel at the top of the containment casket, revealing the face of a woman. Her eyes were misted, but ravenous for sights unseen. Not knowing what powers she possessed, or what the inquisitor might do, the Apothecary slowed to a stop.

‘The guards named her,’ the inquisitor said. ‘She won’t be tamed for my service, but might still do the Emperor’s work. Under the right circumstances. Circumstances like these, captain. The Athymian found her on the feral world of Karnach. Upon arrival, the Black Ship found most of the population of the capital city dead, drowned. Her powers had blossomed with womanhood, and now, whatever she sees, she is driven to manifest. It must have rained — a rare occurrence on Karnach. Thessda flooded her entire city, and drowned thousands of her tribespeople. They tried to blind her to curtail her powers. But she can still see… a little. If something were to be held up close. A flame, say.’

Holding his walking stick up to the containment casket, Darghastri depressed the skull’s bottom jaw and produced a flame from the pommel. The rogue psyker’s eyes started to focus on the flame, and the casket began to rock.

Reoch looked back at his captain.

Zerberyn simply stared at the inquisitor and his collection of witchbreeds. ‘What is it that you want?’ he asked.

‘I want to serve my Emperor,’ Darghastri told him. ‘To my last dying breath.’

‘There is no one clad in this plate that feels differently.’

‘I very much doubt that,’ the inquisitor hissed.

‘Inquisitor,’ Zerberyn said. ‘Can’t you see what is happening? To this system. The sector. The Imperium? The orks are everywhere. They hang over Terra like an ill omen. You must allow me access to the astropathic choir. I have intelligence vital to our success against the alien invader.’

‘So that you might spread your poison to the stars,’ Darghastri said. ‘I think not. You will not be allowed to commandeer this station — for the astropaths here are the servants of the God-Emperor. You will not be allowed to enter the Athymian Astra to use the astropaths or to plunder its mutant cargo — for they are the God-Emperor’s bounty.’

Zerberyn’s lips wrinkled into a snarl. The First Captain knew that the inquisitor meant every word. That he would unleash the full destructive potential of his psykers upon them if pushed.

‘Squads Escoban, Vasmir, Torr,’ he said. ‘Do your duty.’ He heard the sound of combat blades being drawn as the Fists Exemplar made ready to storm the Black Ship.

‘Oh no, captain,’ the aged inquisitor said. ‘I can’t allow you to do that. You are traitors to the Imperium and must be purged. It is the reason for the Inquisition’s very being. I am nothing in the grand scheme of gods and emperors. But you, captain, and your men? If I let you go, you will go on to wreak havoc across a thousand worlds.’

‘Emperor willing, yes,’ Zerberyn said, ‘upon the barbarian greenskins.’

‘No, captain,’ Darghastri said. ‘I’ve seen the company you keep. You travel in consort with traitors. And I got a good look at them, captain — for it was your Iron Warriors compatriots who fired upon the Athymian Astra, some months since. This vessel still bears the scars of that engagement. We were fortunate to get away with our lives. If it hadn’t been for the havoc of the orks, I doubt we would have done so.’

‘You have seen what we face,’ Zerberyn said, stepping forward and gritting his teeth. ‘The Imperium is a candle, about to be snuffed out.’

‘There is no common ground to be held between those loyal to the Emperor, and traitors. Only degrees of denial and darkness,’ Darghastri told him.

‘I am First Captain of the Fists Exemplar. Gene-sired of Rogal Dorn,’ Zerberyn said. ‘Scourge of the Imperium’s enemies. True servant to the Emperor of Mankind.’

‘There can be no accord between you and me, captain,’ Darghastri said, ‘as there should not have been between the Fists Exemplar and the Iron Warriors. That is why I must destroy you, captain — even as I destroy myself.’

Darghastri passed the flame before the view-slit of the metal casket. The misty eyes of the psyker within lit up, and the girl let out an abysmal shriek of excitement and terror. The thrill of light in the darkness. The dread of what she was about to do.

Suddenly everything became light and noise. Thunder crashed through the empty telepathica matrix station. Girders tore. Decks shattered. Flames roared through the antechamber and the access corridor. Zerberyn watched as his Fists Exemplar were taken from him, swallowed by the rolling inferno that felt its way through the starboard section of Arx Meridia.

And then, without warning, they returned. Delivered from destruction, the Space Marines found themselves washed clean of the plate-scorching flame. Sucked back through their number, the firestorm disappeared. In confusion, Zerberyn turned around to see the flames recede. About him the station superstructure was shaking violently, prompting him to grab for a pipe-lined wall with his gauntlet.

With the fire went the airlock and the antechamber’s exterior wall. Flame and shearing sections of station hull were sucked out into the void. With the wall gone, Zerberyn could see the hull of the Athymian Astra. Explosions rippled down the length of the Black Ship, sweeping through the command deck, quarters, engineering and containment. As flame briefly blossomed through the vessel’s decks, the ship collapsed in on itself.

The station’s atmosphere howled past Zerberyn. He felt Reoch lifted off his feet by the fury of the evacuating air and the failing artificial gravity of the damaged section. He grabbed for the Apothecary, Zerberyn’s ceramite-clad fingers reaching out for Reoch’s own. Hooking the fingertips of their gauntlets together, the First Captain anchored himself to the wall. Hauling the Apothecary close and allowing him to gain purchase on the pipes also, Zerberyn watched the wreck of the Athymian Astra peel away from the station.

‘Lock boots to the deck!’ Zerberyn called across the vox to the Fists Exemplar. Engaging the magnetic soles of their armoured boots, the Space Marines resisted the venting atmosphere and the cold embrace of the void. As the decimated Black Ship fell away, Zerberyn watched Inquisitor Darghastri and his psykers disappear into the blackness of space, the deck tearing asunder beneath them.

‘Captain,’ Lasander called back across the vox. ‘The station is destabilised. I am struggling to maintain pressure and docking integrity. You must withdraw. I have brothers waiting for you at the airlock.’

Using the magnetic soles of their boots, the Fists Exemplar made the difficult journey back through Arx Meridia. All about them, Zerberyn and his Space Marines could hear the agony of the station. The superstructure groaned and the orbital facilities began to turn out of their alignment. Rolling out of the protection of its stellar shielding, the station increasingly became exposed to the monstrous heat of the sun. Its hull glowed white and sections disintegrated before the fury of the star, flame flooding halls and complexes. With the unfolding inferno at their backs, Zerberyn led the Fists Exemplar off the shattered station and through the main lock of the Dantalion. Space Marines and serfs in environment suits waited to assist them there.

‘We’re on board,’ Zerberyn told Lasander across the vox, catching his breath. ‘Detach.’

‘Detaching,’ Lasander reported back. ‘Captain.’

‘What is it?’ Zerberyn shot back with annoyance. So much had happened aboard the station that he just wanted to be alone with his thoughts — even just for a moment.

‘Long-range augur scans reveal ork attack craft closing on our position,’ Lasander told him.

‘What are the Iron Warriors doing?’

‘They’re leaving the system,’ Lasander said. ‘They’re making for the Mandeville point.’

Zerberyn looked at Apothecary Reoch and the Fists Exemplars with him in the airlock.

‘Follow them,’ he ordered.

Five

The Thunderhawk Pharosian dropped down towards the bleak, grey dust-deserts of Luna. Flying over mountains and the towers of installations, the scorch-plated gunship roared across void-black skies. Luna had a history stretching back almost as far as Terra, and the grand gothic architecture of its sun-baked facilities and installations seemed in a constant state of renewal and improvement. Derelict fortresses and the ruins of palaces dating back to the Heresy provided the foundations for newer, baroque structures that had sprung from the decimation to reach for the stars. Everything was covered in a harsh dust, the colour and consistency of gunpower, while the searing orb of Sol reflected off the moon-rock architecture.

The Pharosian banked down between towers and palace spires, then streaked across a desert sea towards the Somnus Citadel, the Inquisition’s base of operations. Leaving behind a disturbed trail of dust, the Thunderhawk sizzled through the citadel’s atmosphere shielding before weaving between its towers and fortifications. Great defence lasers tracked the Pharosian’s progress, while Inquisitorial gunships were scrambled to escort the Thunderhawk around restricted facilities. Accelerating across the sprawling expanse of the citadel installation, the Space Marine craft left the gunships in the wake of its afterburners.

Beyond the towering indomitability of the Inquisitorial citadel, the Thunderhawk dropped towards a much older structure. Shimmering in solar radiation, the gothic ruins of a minor palace rose up to meet the Pharosian. A circuit around the structure revealed that it was not merely another derelict and long abandoned facility. Light shone from within the crumbling structure of its austere halls and the glassaic of its window-ports. Shuttles sat in its domed crater-silos. Now that the Silent Sisterhood had returned to Luna, these ruins were serving them as a basic facility.

Dropping down through the atmosphere shielding of the pressurised dome, the Thunderhawk came in to land. Like the sealed-off sections of the derelict palace, the silo-crater benefitted from an atmosphere and artificial gravity. As the Thunderhawk touched down it created a small storm of grit and dust about it. Its nose ramp began to open, revealing Chapter Master Maximus Thane. Like the Thunderhawk and the two Space Marines escorting him, the Chapter Master wore the colours of the Fists Exemplar. As the gunship touched down, Thane stepped off the ramp and crossed the silo landing plaza. Crunching through the dust, he strode with power and purpose. It was not just that time was of the essence. Thane now knew what he was going to do with the time he had left. The days, weeks or months before the Beast made his monstrous push for Terra. With the green tide rising up through Segmentum Solar, flooding core systems with apocalyptic alien ferocity, the arrival of further attack moons or the convergence of ork armadas into some kind of super-fleet seemed inevitable.

As he marched across the plaza, Thane could see the towers of the palace framed in the light of Holy Terra. The glorious, besmirched jewel at the heart of the Imperium, Terra hung defiantly in Luna’s austere skies. Its smog-streaked cloud cover was pierced by capital hives and smothered by orbital plates, geo-synchronous stations and star forts. The blizzard of monstrous vessels about the planet gave the impression that it was being viewed upon a static-laced screen. Even so, the sight stirred his heart. Everything Thane had done, and more importantly was going to do, was in service of the Throneworld and the God-Emperor who ruled an empire from its modest magnificence.

As Thane passed another Thunderhawk, this one clad in ivory, battle-scarred plate, he was joined by Sergeant Dathan Tychor. Like the Chapter Master, the Excoriator had recovered from his wounds. While his battered armour was the same, his bionic arm — repaired and reattached — gleamed in the lunar sunlight.

‘As you requested, Master Thane,’ Tychor said. ‘The High Lords await your pleasure in the palace reception hall.’

‘I am indebted to you, brother,’ Thane said. ‘You may return to the Phalanx. There is still much to be done. Captain Oberon will have need of you.’

‘Thank you, Chapter Master,’ Tychor said.

As two Excoriators gunships lifted off from the plaza, turning the silo into a swirling haze of dust, Thane walked between a pair of palatial barges — system craft usually reserved for High Lords and visiting dignitaries. It had been these craft that Tychor’s gunships had escorted to Luna. Baroque wonders of beauty and excess, the barges came with their own security details. While the first was surrounded by ceremonial cybernetic soldiers, garbed in glorious, gold war-plate and crimson cloaks, the second was all but unattended. A single muscular figure waited on the colossal ramp, dressed in black bodyglove and hooded cloak. He sheltered from the lung-shredding dust just within the palatial compartment-quarters.

At the silo barbican, Thane and his Fists Exemplar passed a pair of sentries. Sisters of Silence in half-helms, bronzed plate and furs nodded their acknowledgement to the Chapter Master. Within, Thane saw two High Lords of Terra, standing with Lady Kavalanera Brassanas, commander of the Silent Sisterhood. Kavalanera, standing in her plate of ancient crimson, signed a greeting. Since retaking their vows, the Sisters communicated only through their own language of subtle signs and hand signals. Not unlike the battle-sign used by the Adeptus Astartes, it hadn’t taken Thane and his officers long to master the basics.

As he got closer to Brassanas, Thane felt a part of himself wither inside. A shiver ran through him — an unusual sensation for a Space Marine, let alone a Chapter Master. As a member of the Silent Sisterhood, Brassanas was a blank, what psykers called an untouchable. While they were highly trained warriors in their own right, the mere presence of a Sister of Silence was an anathema to all witchbreeds and daemons whose powers flowed from the warp. Brassanas’ own ability to nullify psychic energy was considerable — Thane wasn’t even a psyker and still, proximity to the Sister-Commander made him feel strange. Uncomfortable even. He personally liked Kavalanera Brassanas, but being around her filled him with a bottomless sensation of spiritual revulsion. As he arrived, the Sister-Commander nodded a silent acknowledgement.

The first High Lord was Kubik, the Fabricator General of Mars: an ornate fusion of man and machine, whose augmentations were lost in his rust-coloured robes and the darkness of his hood. The Fabricator General sensed Thane’s approach and turned, his revolving optics changing colour and orientation. Drakan Vangorich, meanwhile, was dressed in the sombre finery of a High Lord, the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum favouring blacks, greys and robes with room to conceal the tools of his trade. Gone was the quirk of the Grand Master’s lip or the knowing glint of his eye — features that had been in evidence the last time Thane had seen him. Something had changed in Vangorich. He looked every bit as serious as a man should be having attained his station.

‘My lords,’ Thane greeted them as his Fists Exemplar peeled off to stand to one side. ‘Lady Brassanas. Thank you for meeting me here. Mars or the Phalanx would have been inappropriate, given what has happened previously and what I intend us to discuss. The Imperial Palace, even more so.’

Brassanas signed an acknowledgement. With his haptic translators, Kubik had no problem understanding the Sister. Similarly, Vangorich with his trained talents had wasted little time in familiarising himself with the Sisters’ sign language.

Thane looked to the Fabricator General, but Kubik seemed as cold and consistent as the machine he mostly was. Given the recent conflict between the Adeptus Astartes and the priesthood of Mars, Thane had expected some haughty indignation at a summons, perhaps even outrage. At very least a rehearsed objection.

‘Proceed, Chapter Master Thane,’ Kubik said simply, the metallic echo of his voice accompanied by the brief flicker of revolving optics. As Thane looked to Vangorich, the Grand Master extended his arm as an invitation to speak.

‘Would you walk with me?’ Thane asked. ‘I have something to show you.’

Lady Brassanas led the way through the palace installation. Within an elevator of mirrored metal that dropped down below Luna’s surface, Thane turned to the others.

‘You have heard, of course,’ he said, ‘of the death of Chapter Master Koorland.’

‘With the loss of the primarch and our failure to destroy the alien Beast, a triptych of woes,’ Vangorich said.

Tragedy upon tragedy, Lady Brassanas signed.

‘Despite their best efforts, the Imperial Fists failed the Imperium and themselves,’ Kubik said. The words were difficult for Thane to hear, but hear them he knew he must if he were to bring the High Lords together.

‘As I believe the Imperium failed them,’ Thane said. ‘Our efforts against the Beast have been the thrust of a spear, with the Imperial Fists as the tip of that spear. Except everyone else behind that thrust let go, believing some other group or institution would be there to follow the strike through. This is why the Beast lives on, our killing thrust wasted. It is why the spear tip shattered and the Imperial Fists were lost.’

‘The Adeptus Astartes,’ Kubik said, ‘have a history of rash action and reaction — as had the primarchs that gene-sired them. The priests of Mars are slow to act but effective in their execution.’

We have much to learn from each other, Lady Brassanas signed, if we are to defeat this threat.

‘For me,’ Drakan Vangorich said, his lips unsmiling and face unusually taut, ‘direct action is the remedy for the myriad afflictions ailing the Imperium. For a long time I waited for such action. I do not blame Chapter Master Koorland or Primarch Vulkan for their failures. At least they tried. I, like billions of other Terrans and countless Imperial citizens, wait again. We wait for a man who will act. Who will step forth and do what needs to be done. History records many such men. The bold and the resolute, who push to the fore just as the Imperium needs them. Are you such a man, Chapter Master Thane?’

‘I am,’ Thane told Vangorich, with steel in his eyes. ‘Lady Brassanas is, of course, right. If history can teach the sons of Dorn anything, it is humility. We cannot act alone. The Adeptus Astartes are one piece in the great puzzle that is the Imperium. Without others at our side, we are nothing — as the Imperial Fists are now. Every brother of the Last Wall aches to avenge his brothers but I take the Fabricator General’s view. It is better to take a little time, gather our strength and act as one.’

‘But we have no time,’ the Grand Master of Assassins told him. ‘Another attack moon could appear over Terra at any moment. The Beast’s fleets invade the core systems. The orks will swamp us.’

‘But we have a little time,’ Thane pressed as the elevator rumbled along the deep shaft, ‘and I intend to use it wisely.’

‘How?’ Vangorich asked, his words like a presented blade. ‘For if the Adeptus Astartes will not act — decisively — then other steps will need to be taken, to ensure all institutions play their part in the dark times to come.’

‘And they will, Grand Master,’ Thane told him, ‘for I go to the High Lords not to appeal for their assistance — for the full weight of their power, influence and forces they command — I go to demand it.’

‘Koorland and Vulkan could not achieve that,’ the Fabricator General said. ‘What makes you think you can? Now, with a First Founding Chapter lost and the faith of the people broken?’

‘Firstly,’ Thane said, ‘I do not intend to make the loss of the Imperial Fists public. As you observe, the morale of the people and their leaders is fragile. We don’t want panic.’

‘There would be no panic on Mars,’ Kubik assured him.

‘Or in the Temples of the Officio,’ Vangorich added.

‘Or here,’ Thane said, bowing his head to Lady Brassanas. ‘But secondly, we are not Koorland and Vulkan. They observed the sanctity of the Council. They played the political games of the Palace and lost. I do not intend to do that.’

The Adeptus Astartes have not imposed their will in such a way since the days of the Heresy, the Sister-Commander signed. To compel the High Lords to action? I fear history will not remember you kindly for this strategy.

‘If to act is damnation and inaction equally so,’ Thane told her, ‘what will it matter?’

‘If we fail,’ Vangorich added, ‘there will be no one to remember.’

‘You take responsibility?’ Kubik clarified.

‘For my actions,’ Thane said, ‘and those of my Chapter.’

Thane looked to the Sister-Commander and the two High Lords. As Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists, Thane would already have the nominal support of the Council to coordinate the defence of Terra and destroy the Beast. Kubik, Vangorich and Brassanas would, of course, work out what he intended to do. Thane had honoured his promise to his brothers in not informing them in so many words, but at the same time he knew he could rely upon their discretion. Kubik sat on bigger secrets than the resurrection of a Space Marine Chapter in his Martian vaults, while anyone told by the Grand Master of Assassins would almost certainly end up dead. As for the Sister-Commander, Thane was sure that Lady Brassanas would keep her silence.

‘How is this to be done?’ Kubik asked, his voice the metallic hush of a conspiratorial utterance.

‘The head must be cut from the serpent,’ Vangorich said.

‘Or rather, heads from the hydra,’ Thane said, ‘since it was discovered that there is more than one Beast. They all must die.’

‘The logic holds,’ Kubik agreed, ‘now as it did then. These Veridi, while monstrous in size and territorial appetite, are still creatures of simple hierarchy. While warlords of sufficient ferocity and psychic presence endure, the invaders will retain their cohesion and technological supremacy.’

‘Divide and conquer,’ Thane said. ‘We can prevail against fragmented fleets and orks intent on fighting themselves as much as the Imperium. We cannot prevail while the Beasts of Ullanor endure. That is why we have to return to Ullanor.’

The elevator eventually reached its destination, far below the surface of Luna. Lady Brassanas led the way into the rocky chamber beyond.

Immediately outside the elevator, Brassanas met with another senior Sister in distinctive silver armour. The pair exchanged a brief conversation through deft signs made with their gauntlets. The Sister looked to Thane and the High Lords, her steely gaze lingering suspiciously on the Chapter Master. Thane bowed his head briefly in acknowledgement. Exchanging nods with Brassanas, the silver-clad Sister left her commander and took her place in the elevator, bound for the lunar surface.

The chamber was dark and Thane’s armoured footfalls clanged on the metal walkway leading from the elevator. The bronzed mesh and rail of the companionway appeared to be made of a copper-threaded alloy. As they walked after Brassanas, they came upon more Sisters of Silence. These warriors were clad in similarly bronzed plate, furs and cloaks, with blades at their side and boltguns in their gauntlets. They were stationed along the walkway like sentinels, standing in silence and darkness.

After exchanging a brief interplay of signs with one of the Sisters, Brassanas took lantern-like lamps from a rack and handed them to Thane, Vangorich and the Fabricator General. Switching them on, the party bathed the walkway in a red light. They could see that the route extended through the open space of the chamber, high above the cavern floor. Ahead, the mesh walkway divided into junctions and crossways, as well as flights of steps leading to upper and lower levels. Sisters of Silence stood straight and with their eyes closed in the darkness, not flinching at the red light of the lamps or acknowledging the passing of their Sister-Commander. Their concentration remained unbroken. At the centre of the structure of walkways was a small cluster of cages — all different shapes and sizes, all made of the same bronzed metal.

As the red light of the lamps ghosted through the bars of the cages, hulking creatures were revealed within, greenskin monstrosities that dwarfed the Sisters guarding them. Three of them. Stripped of armour and decoration, the orks were draped in thick chains. Though starved and restrained, they were still anything but docile: all claws, muscle and trapjaw teeth. The brawn of their chests rose and fell as they clutched the bars of their cages.

As the red light felt its way through their gargoylesque forms, the creatures became increasingly aware of the new arrivals. Nostrils twitched, beady red eyes flickered and saliva dripped from tusk-crowded mouths, and the orks roared their hostility.

In amongst the snapping and the savage ferocity of the creatures, Thane thought he heard something else. A monstrous force of alien obscenity and fury. The sound of distant destruction, pulling him in like a black hole. It was the Beast — reaching out, as it had done before, across the galaxy. It filled Thane’s mind with momentary madness, and a dread feeling of the horrors to come. Then, it was gone.

Vangorich leant in with his lamp. Suddenly, one of the orks launched itself at the cage wall, dragging its chains along with it. It heaved back and forth on the bars with its jagged claws, making the metal bars groan in protest. The rabid thing’s eyes lit up with a blazing green light. Sparks of ethereal energy showered from its dagger-filled maw and arcs of strange power coursed across its flesh and sinews.

Expecting such a reaction, Lady Brassanas and the Chapter Master stood their ground. Kubik’s optics whirred around with surprise, changing colour and intensity, while the Grand Master of Assassins stepped back, his hands within his robes on what Thane imagined to be concealed blades and pistols. The actions of the first ork prompted the other two into a similar frenzy of rage, and they threw themselves savagely at the cage walls and floors. Ethereal energies dribbled from the orks’ noses and ears, and green lightning arced between their bodies. Their roars rustled the robes of the High Lords, while the hulking monsters’ efforts to get to Thane, Vangorich and the Fabricator General shook the walkway structure.

‘These are the psychic specimens?’ Vangorich said. ‘The creatures whose abilities you used against the orks in the last attack on Ullanor?’

Yes, the Sister-Commander signed. Like psychic mutants amongst humanity, they are outcasts. Unpredictable. Difficult to control.

‘So much so,’ Kubik added, ‘that the psychic energy they harness from gatherings of their kind can overload the conduit creature. This results in an explosion of stored energy and the death of the specimen.’

Following the last attack on Ullanor, Lady Brassanas explained, we had one left, which the Soul Drinkers handed over into our custody. Since then, two more have been secured by the Deathwatch.

‘There are three creatures in total, then?’ Vangorich said.

‘And only three,’ Thane said, ‘so we shall have to make them count.’

As they spoke, the orks raged beside them, crackling with otherworldly energies.

The cages are shielded with holy wards, Brassanas reassured Kubik and the Grand Master. And my Sisters’ presence keeps the creatures’ psychic powers in check. You are safe here.

‘On Ullanor it will be a different matter,’ Thane told the two High Lords. ‘I know that you have seen specimens dissected but we wanted you to see this for yourself, so that you can see what the sons of Dorn will be up against on that distant planet. The size and ferocity of these xenos, and their relentless instinct to butcher and kill.’

These specimens have been stripped of their strength and their weaponry, the Sister-Commander signed. But they are still dangerous.

‘These, now, are but feral creatures,’ Thane said. ‘The ones we will face on Ullanor have blades and blasters, armadas of attack ships and gravitic technologies of mass destruction. They will have armoured moons at their disposal and hordes without number at their command.’

A howl of metal made Kubik turn suddenly. In its fury, one of the orks had managed to bend one of the bars of its cage just enough to squeeze its hand through, and was grasping with a malformed claw at the Fabricator General’s robes. Lady Brassanas snatched her silver-bladed sword from her belt and lopped the broken claw off at the wrist, prompting the ork to retract the gushing stump of the limb.

‘Well, I’m convinced, Chapter Master,’ Drakan Vangorich told him. ‘What do you need to ensure the destruction of the Beast and its forces on Ullanor?’

‘Everything we have left,’ Thane told the Grand Master honestly. ‘I will not repeat past mistakes and overestimate my own forces while underestimating yours. My plan is to leave the Last Wall protocol in place, so that Terra remains protected by the sons of Dorn. I will personally lead the entire Chapter of Imperial Fists to Ullanor in the Phalanx, with the aim of storming the Beast’s palace and cutting the ork hordes across the galaxy off from their command structure. Without their leaders, the invader fleets will fragment. Armies will turn on themselves. Their warlords should revert to observed behaviours, fighting for supremacy amongst their ranks. This should give us time to reform, regroup and raise an expanded Deathwatch to enact a plan of eradication.’

‘But…’ the Fabricator General said.

‘But,’ Thane echoed, ‘we cannot do that without the full commitment of Imperial forces in support. We need everything that’s left. Beyond the Last Wall protocol and a skeleton force providing a sentinel defence of the core systems, I’m going to need whatever remains of the Imperial Navy, the Mechanicus fleet, the Astra Militarum, the god-machines of the Adeptus Titanicus and the skitarii legions. Naturally, Lady Brassanas has already pledged her Sisters of Silence to the assault.’

‘And leave the core systems and Terra exposed?’ Kubik said.

‘They are already exposed,’ Vangorich said.

‘The Grand Master is right,’ Thane agreed.

‘An Assassin knows when to commit his full resources to the attack,’ Vangorich said.

‘An attack that must, of course, succeed,’ Thane said. ‘Or the Fabricator General’s fears will become reality.’

The Silent Sisterhood will do what we have always done, the Sister-Commander signed. We will stand between the Emperor and His enemies. Dying, if we have to, in order to see the Master of Mankind safe.

‘They, along with the deployment of these alien psykers,’ Thane said, ‘will be essential in disorientating the Beast’s vast army of defenders and bodyguards. If the last attack taught us anything it is that the ork psykers draw their destructive power not just from the numbers of their kind in the vicinity but the length of time they are exposed to them. Like batteries, we need to give them time to charge their energies before unleashing them to create a backwash of psychic power. This will give my Space Marines the opening they need to fight their way through the palace and obliterate the Beast.

‘We will need vessels to punch our way in through the fleets of attack ships swarming the Ullanor System. We will need Titans to occupy gargants and ground forces to keep a planetary horde of orks off our backs. Even your Assassins will be needed, Grand Master.’

‘The talents of my Temples will be at your disposal, Chapter Master,’ Vangorich said.

Thane, Lady Brassanas and the Grand Master looked to Kubik.

The Fabricator General’s optics whirred and turned slowly in his hood, as though his cogitators were handling changing numbers of great size and importance. Finally the Fabricator General spoke.

‘The Adeptus Mechanicus have not forgotten the lessons the Veridi have taught us in fire and thunder,’ Kubik said. ‘The Ordinatus Ullanor might have been decimated by the monstrous machines of the alien but the priesthood of Mars can do better than vessels, Titans and Legions. You will, of course, have whatever the forge world principal and its empire can provide. But let me confide in you the questionable, as you have confided in me. Since encountering the Ullanor orks and their unique weaponry, my priesthood have been hard at work studying and attempting to replicate their technologies. We have met with some limited success and have managed to adapt and manipulate the orks’ gravitic weaponry to displace large asteroids and small moons.’

‘Displace?’ Drakan Vangorich echoed, his voice trailing off in amazement.

‘Yes,’ Kubik said. ‘In tests conducted within uninhabited systems, our technologies managed to knock small planetoids out of their orbits and propel them towards other planetary bodies. Inertia and the natural pull of gravity do the rest.’

‘You have this much mastery of the aliens’ technology?’ Thane asked.

‘A limited application,’ Kubik cautioned. ‘In a specific time and place. We could, for example, launch asteroids and small moons from the system’s edge, to smash through the greenskin fleets and impact upon the surface of Ullanor with varying degrees of accuracy. By the time your Adeptus Astartes arrive, Chapter Master, the defences of Ullanor will have been dealt a significant blow.’

Thane extended his gauntlet. The Fabricator General took it with the bionics of his own master-crafted appendage. The Chapter Master looked to Lady Brassanas, who nodded her agreement. Vangorich had a weak smile for the Space Marine, a little of his dark confidence returning. Thane returned the gesture.

‘In a few minutes,’ the Grand Master said, ‘we have managed to get more agreed than a century of Council meetings and Palace intrigue.’

Thane’s smile thinned. He didn’t like the sound of that, or the precedent it set. It was too late to go back, however. There was too much at stake in the present to worry about the future.

‘One thing,’ Kubik said. ‘How shall the Lord High Admiral and the Lord Commander Militant be similarly compelled to lend, without question, their remaining ships and soldiers to this venture?’

Drakan Vangorich’s wolfish smile widened further. He looked like a watch dog who had, at long last, been let off the leash.

‘Leave that to me,’ the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum said.

Six

It was evening. The sun was setting and thin cloud hung like a veil across the skies. Above, the lights of orbital plates, stations and upper atmospheric skyforts twinkled through the haze. Below them a sundered world turned. Hive cities had crumbled and crashed to the ground, blanketing the lower districts in dust. The ork attack moon might have been destroyed but millions had died in the defence of Terra. Death hung in the air. Shadows seemed longer and the darkness deeper.

Spirits too had been broken. News of failure and successive tragedies had plunged the hearts of billions into abyssal dread. It was a terror all but the most ancient had never known. The Astra Militarum and the Imperial Fleet — the Imperium’s bastion amongst the stars — had been smashed. The military might of Mars and the Red Planet’s Titan Legios had met their match. The Emperor’s Angels had failed to bring the Beast to his knees and even a primarch had been lost to the green tide as it came sweeping in to swamp the core sectors and drown Holy Terra in a deluge of alien savagery and destruction.

Still, the Imperial Palace stood defiant. It was like a galaxy of stars, every security lamp, glassaic window and loophole blazing with the light of occupation and industry. An army of serfs and servitors criss-crossed mighty halls, corridors and precincts. Adepts and scribes went about their bureaucratic business. Warriors of the Adeptus Custodes stood sentinel about the fortifications while important personages of every rank and station took meetings in conference halls, auditoria and star chambers, talking about everything and nothing. Even the High Lords of Terra haunted the dusty corridors and grand quarters of the Imperial Palace, for the Palace was to be found at the heart of the Throneworld and Terra at the heart of the Imperium of Man. No place in the galaxy bustled with such status and significance. It was a gothic crown of architectural magnificence, within which the mind-numbing business of a fading Imperium was conducted. Hive cities towered about the Palace walls. Titan god-machines shook the ground of their assigned avenues with ceremonial patrol circuits. A glittering blizzard of landers, shuttles and atmospheric craft passed overhead, funnelling into restricted flight paths.

On the Plaza Decamerata, Drakan Vangorich moved through the crowds. There was an atmosphere, something sombre and rehearsed. Still, gatherings of such number and in such majestic surroundings had the ability to send a flutter through the stomachs of even the jaded aides and clerics. It wasn’t just the number, it was the identity of those in attendance that stirred the soul. The entire Council was present, High Lords of Terra in luxurious robes, furs and best bionics. Like newly formed planets in a field of debris, they seemed to accrete growing mobs of followers. Some were serfs carrying furniture, attendants and advisors. Most were sycophants and opportunists. Adepts and officials who had High Lords they had waited months to meet with out in the open. The gathering on the Plaza Decamerata might have been a ceremonial engagement, but it still provided the chance to do business and press agendas.

Like these bureaucratic parasites, Vangorich was also working, but while other High Lords indulged and ignored, the Grand Master strode with purpose through the crowds. No flatterers mobbed him. No minions followed him in train. Talk became direct and economical. The Grand Master could get things done instead of spending his days wading through Palace bureaucracy. Unlike the other members of the Council, his robes were dark and simple, extravagant only in their depth.

The Plaza Decamerata was by no means the largest of the Palace plazas. It didn’t even come close. It still took the Grand Master thirty minutes or so to reach his seat. Situated in the western upper precincts, the plaza had always been a favourite of Vangorich’s. An elevated court, it boasted the monstrous fortification of the Boenician Wall on one side and views of Hive Valatyne on the other — one of the more handsome hives of the capital. The venerable Warhound Titans Canis Romula and Canis Rema towered over its bustling expanse, brought in specially to lend the ceremony an aura of significance. The Plaza Decamerata was ordinarily reserved for theatrical celebrations rather than Astra Militarum parades or Aeronautican flyovers. It was primarily used for entertainment and light-hearted distractions for dignitaries and the occasional High Lord and their staff: off-world acrobats, xenos menageries and colossal troupes of dancers. This, despite the fact that the grand atrium at the head of the plaza fielded twelve stone thrones.

Drakan Vangorich went to take a throne on one end of the line but found Fabricator General Kubik there already, resplendent in robes of crimson fabric and silvered mail. A skitarii honour guard stood nearby, flanked by a pair of combat-servitors, the grotesque fusion of their bodies disguised with ceremonial trappings. Taking the throne next to Kubik, Vangorich offered a slight bow from the depths of his hood.

‘Fabricator General.’

‘Grand Master.’

Vangorich looked out across the plaza. It was one thing to invite the High Lords of Terra and then watch as one by one they consented to attend, unwilling to be outdone by other members of the Council. The horde of adepts, aides and bureaucrats occupying the vast plaza in their dun robes was something else. Usually lord scriveners, sub-secretaries and adjutants were not invited to such gatherings, and the repulsion could be seen on the High Lords’ faces as they negotiated the crowd. Vangorich enjoyed watching them squirm.

The vox-bead in Vangorich’s ear chirped. Beast Krule was calling in. By the clarity of the vox-signal, Vangorich assumed he was near. Casting a practised eye across the multitudes he spotted Krule moving through the crowd in the simple robes of a scribe. With his bulk thus disguised the Assassin felt his way through the masses, attaching himself to the train of one High Lord and then the next. He moved within the protective canopies of storm troopers, between genetically-enhanced bodyguards and through dark throngs of Inquisitorial henchmen. Vangorich knew Krule to be an operative who never wasted an opportunity. He assumed that the Assassin wanted to show him how close he could get and how exposed the other High Lords were. He wanted to show his master what could be achieved.

Vangorich, meanwhile, had managed to lose two tails in the crowd — unobtrusive ghosts dressed as ceremonial serfs. They probably belonged to Wienand, but Vangorich couldn’t be sure. Another — a servitor-that-wasn’t — had offered the Grand Master a drink but in addition had placed a tiny listening device on his robes. That had been clumsy, and likely to have been someone else. Dropping the device into the drink — some kind of warmed, spiced wine — the Grand Master had deposited the chalice on the next meandering servitor’s tray.

His enemies on the Council would do anything to catch an unguarded whisper, or the exchange of intelligence between the Grand Master and his Assassins. Such efforts were undertaken as much in self-defence as from the desire to know Vangorich’s secrets. Each High Lord present wished to know what he was planning for them.

While an annoyance, Vangorich appreciated the theatrics. It fitted their location, the Plaza Decamerata having played host to celebrated savants, authorised remembrancers and great-companies of actors. Vangorich had seen both Klastragar Part II and The Witch of Galatae here, as well as The Massacre at Montalaban Fields, in which the Company of the Chartist Captains dramatised the atrocity death for death on the plaza expanse.

Now the plaza was going to play host to an entirely different kind of theatrics. Vangorich saw Gibran, Paternoval Envoy of the Navigators, exchange pleasantries with Juskina Tull, Speaker for the Chartist Captains, before the both of them settled. Wienand and Veritas of the Inquisition leant in conspiratorially. Their eyes darted across each other’s shoulders while harsh whispers were exchanged. Master Anwar of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica felt his way to his throne, while Tobris Ekharth, Master of the Administratum, scowled at approaching attendants, forcing them into a retreat. Vernor Zeck, Lord High Admiral Lansung and the Lord Commander Militant simply sat in grizzled displeasure. As the High Lords took their time and eventually their seats, the gathered thousands grew quiet.

Adeptus Custodes warriors watched from the ramparts of the Boenician Wall and the Warhound Titans boomed to stillness. Beneath the feet of the multitudes, the stone rumbled. Millimetre by grating millimetre, the plaza floor began to part. Adepts and scriveners cried out and jumped to safety as a gap began to open between them. For many, it was the most exciting thing to ever happen to them and they stared down into the trembling depths with awe. It was as if they had become part of the entertainment.

Crowds moved aside, individuals reaching out in their robes to steady themselves as they rode out the quake of the parting stone. Dust cascaded down into the dark chasm opening in between, and High Lords stood up from their thrones to get a better view. Bodyguards swept in to put themselves between their masters and harm’s way. Vangorich looked to Kubik, who said nothing. The Grand Master nodded for the both of them. He had seen different shows and spectacles performed on the Plaza Decamerata but he had never seen the elevated precinct open. It was quite a sight.

Some of his compatriot Lords were similarly impressed. Most tried to peer down into the rumbling darkness, while several even clapped. The stresses of war and xenos doom were momentarily forgotten in the distraction of the plaza. It was what the venue had been built for. As Vangorich caught sight of the vision below, the Grand Master of Assassins smiled. The High Lords paled, but the crowds began to cheer.

Rising up through the gap created by the parting plaza, riding a colossal platform of stone, were armoured figures. Many armoured figures, stretching across the platform as far as the eye could see. As the thunder of the rising floor echoed to a stop, the reverent cheering grew louder. Before the horde of lowly scribes and augmented adepts, there had appeared rank upon rank of Adeptus Astartes. More than any Palace menial had ever seen in one place. Aides and advisors took the appearance of the Space Marines as an indication that some kind of parade was to take place.

The High Lords knew better, however. They knew that such a gathering meant something else entirely. Something impossible. As they took their seats again, with grim faces and steely eyes, the celebratory cheering began to fade. Taking their masters’ solemn reception as an example, the crowds stood back in a collective silence that swept the plaza.

The Adeptus Astartes warriors didn’t move. They were like statues, or columns of standing suits of power armour. Each boltgun and piece of plate gleamed with the fresh attentions of Techmarines and artificers. Re-set banners billowed in the breeze above noble captains and command squads. Indomitable sergeants stood to attention at the fore of their own squads. At the head of the column was a company decked in Tactical Dreadnought armour and monstrous weaponry.

To the High Lords, it appeared to be an army of Space Marines. To Kubik, who rapidly counted their number, and Vangorich who guessed the true nature of what he was looking at, the assembly was a full Chapter of Adeptus Astartes. Not the mixed number of Space Marines that made up the Last Wall but a single glorious Chapter, standing tall and together in the presence of the High Lords of Terra. It was a truly terrifying sight. A vision that captured the imagination and took away the breath.

The singular, most striking feature of the Chapter, however, was not their number or presentation. It was the colour of their honoured plate. The adepts and scribes had cheered because they did not know what they were looking at, but each High Lord of Terra had received the briefs from Ullanor. Intelligence of the catastrophic losses suffered there. Reports of the death of Vulkan, the Emperor’s son. Word of Koorland and how he had met his end. The last thing the High Lords of Terra expected to see, towering above the plaza in perfect formation, were the Imperial Fists — the sons of Dorn resurrected and presented at fighting strength before them. The Council, like the surrounding crowds, were bathed in the glorious, golden plate of the Chapter. Its indomitable strength and grim resolve.

What they could not know, and what both Vangorich and Kubik suspected, was that each venerable suit of armour had been repainted to honour the spirit of a lost Imperial Fist. A warrior lost to the Imperium. Betrayed by the High Lords’ failure. Doomed by the orks’ success. A thousand Space Marines and their captains, selected from the battle-hardened ranks of the Excoriators, the Crimson Fists, the Black Templars, the Iron Knights, the Soul Drinkers, the Executioners and the Fists Exemplar. Punctuating their number was the black plate of Chaplains, the bone white of Apothecaries, the blue of Librarians and the red of Techmarines. The plaza, however, was a vision of gold. The noble yellow of Dorn’s honest plate — each suit’s pauldron adorned with the black fist of the primarch himself, clenched in cold fury. In unity. In victory.

Vangorich watched the Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists step forth from the gallery of armoured statues, his Terminator armour a monstrous sight to behold. Ornate and golden, it looked as impregnable as the Phalanx itself. The ground shook at the Chapter Master’s mighty step. As he approached the line of thrones, several High Lords vacated their seats and took cover behind them.

He stopped before the only throne to have remained empty. That which would have belonged to Lord Commander Koorland. The Space Marine gave the remaining members of the Council the pugnacious glower of his helm and allowed spidery arcs of power to cascade from the pair of gleaming black power fists that he held at his sides. The cyclone missile launcher mounted over his hood and pauldrons clunked ominously to priming, its sensor array blinking with readiness. At odds with the bombast of the suit, the crackling fists and missile launcher, a simple adamantium short sword sat mag-locked to the Chapter Master’s belt. A ceremonial weapon, Vangorich assumed, noting the numeral VII crafted into the blade — a symbol denoting Rogal Dorn’s glorious VII Legion and the Defenders of Terra.

A pair of Chapter serfs, garbed in yellow half-robes and carapace, came forth. The Terminator Space Marine’s helm hissed and vented streams of equalising pressure as the serfs unlocked the seals on the honoured item and took it away. Revealed was the grim visage of Maximus Thane, formerly Chapter Master of the Fists Exemplar — now presented to the High Lords of Terra as the Master of the Imperial Fists.

Within moments, High Admiral Lansung was on his feet, the folds of his braided uniform and cloak ruffled. As he snatched his extravagant tricorn hat from the dusty rolls of his wig, the High Admiral’s existing sneer deepened. Beside him Abel Verreault, the Lord Commander Militant, was also on his feet, jangling with medals and bionics. Snarling through his scars, the High Lord glared at Thane with an ornate replacement optic.

‘This is an outrage,’ Lansung said. ‘Has the Chapter Master no shame? Is this how he honours the memory of brothers fallen?’

‘How dare he?’ Verreault chimed in. ‘How dare he field the Adeptus Astartes here? Before the Palace wall at Chapter strength, in flagrant disregard of protocol and historical precedent?’

‘It is simply not done,’ Lansung said. ‘Such demonstrations have no place here.’

‘This had better not be some crude attempt to intimidate the Council,’ Verreault said.

‘If Lord Commander Koorland were…’ Lansung said.

‘Which he is not,’ the Lord Militant added.

Vangorich watched the interchange with interest. Lansung and Verreault’s words withered before the sight of the Chapter Master. Towering over them, like a living fortification in his battleplate, Maximus Thane seemed to be beyond them. Beyond the concerns of Palace politics and expectation.

And most of all, beyond his remit. The Grand Master understood why the pair of High Lords were on their feet. While Vangorich had tarried in filling the Ecclesiarch’s seat, that belonging to the fallen Koorland — and the office of Lord Commander that went with it — was now open. Like Verreault and the High Admiral, Vangorich lived in the shadow of such opportunity. It drew them in like a collapsing star. Status. Power. Doom. Both Lansung and Verreault saw themselves as candidates to be honoured with such a title — especially at a time of war and catastrophe.

As Wienand and the Grand Provost Marshal went to join them, Thane stamped down on the plaza with his boot. The thrones shook, and the High Lords with them. The quake sent Wienand and Vernor Zeck back into their seats. The High Admiral and Lord Verreault followed, falling back and thudding into their thrones.

Chapter Master Thane turned around, presenting his armoured back to the High Lords. The powered movement drew a gasp from several members of the Council, who couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Vangorich tensed. If one of the High Lords did something stupid — like call for the Adeptus Custodes and decry Thane and his Space Marines as traitors — then things could escalate quickly. The Grand Master wouldn’t allow such a thing. Thane must be given time to speak.

Vangorich watched as the Chapter Master addressed the plaza. His voice boomed about the Space Marines, High Lords and underlings alike, relayed from his suit to vox-casters situated about the precinct.

‘Brothers,’ Thane said, ‘lords and citizens of mighty Terra. Listen to me now — as you would to the Master of Mankind and his ministers of fate. For through our veins runs the blood of Rogal Dorn, as through his, the blood of the Emperor flowed. Before we were favoured with the Emperor’s blessing — before we were shielded with angel’s wings — we were as you are now. Of common flesh. Of uncertainty and questions eternal. I tell you this to remind us all that we are all interconnected. That we rely one upon the other. That we achieve nothing alone.’

The Grand Master watched Thane begin to pace up and down the plaza, his armoured boots sending quakes through the thrones of the High Lords of Terra.

‘Earlier,’ Thane said, his words carrying far and wide across the plaza, ‘I spoke at length to select High Lords. We talked of matters of Imperium and state. Of the vanquished ork attack moon and our challenges on the Beast’s monstrous home world, where heroes fight to bring an end to this vast and terrible conflict.’

Vangorich watched High Lords scowl and whisper amongst themselves, ignorant of such a meeting. As the Chapter Master went on, he drowned the Council members’ protests in thunderous proclamations of his own.

‘It was a long meeting,’ Thane told his audience, ‘as meetings concerning matters of consequence tend to be. While listening to the High Lords’ counsel, I noticed a spider crafting a web across the casing of an arch. Every time a scribe or servitor passed beneath, the web was damaged and torn. As I listened to the wisdom of our High Lords, I watched this tiny creature repair the structure it had created. Time and again, forces beyond its control, or even understanding, tore the web to shreds. Time and again, the spider crafted its home anew. Our lives are like the threads in that spider’s web. Each one connected to hundreds more, relying upon each other for strength and stability. Our Imperium is like the spider’s web. Myriad worlds connected by an intricate network of shipping lanes, interstellar trade routes and Navy patrols.

‘But when something crashes through that web, like the xenos invaders — this Beast we have come to know as our deadly foe — strands snap, structures collapse and the web hangs in disarray. The spider, however, knows nothing of fatigue. He has no indulgence for the loss of hope. The futility of his efforts is an alien concept — as it is with us. The Imperium of Man has stood for more than a thousand years because of such resolution and industry. Billions live within our web of protection. Worlds might be lost to the mutant. Subsectors fall silent at the arrival of alien invaders. Routes fall prey to warp storms and pirates. The Imperium endures. It will always endure while there are loyal subjects of the Emperor to sustain its majesty. From ages of darkness and strife we have returned. We lived the dread days of Heresy and loss. We shall survive this green plague.

‘Our victory over the alien shall be marked in statues on the Palace arcades, in monuments of commemoration crafted from the ruin of a thousand worlds and in memories passed from Terran father to Terran son. We shall never forget the rising of this Beast, the destruction he has wrought and the unbreakable will it took to defeat him — but first, we must defeat him. We must strike at the heart of his empire, as he has done to us. We must return to Ullanor, a planet infested with the alien, at the heart of a system swarming with the foe. The surrounding sectors are decimation and barbarity, awash with attack moons and monstrous fleets of greenskin craft.

‘We have stood in the blood and dust of Ullanor and failed. But during the Emperor’s Great Crusade, we raised the battle standards and banners of victory over Ullanor. The difference then was that we were united under the Emperor’s gaze. We were humanity resplendent, fighting together for a common cause. The vessels of the Imperial Armada, the god-machines of the Mechanicum — the Space Marine Legions, and the millions of the Imperial Army. We were as one, with the indomitable will of the Imperium behind us. We have proved that nothing can stand before such a collective will — and nothing ever shall. That is why we return to Ullanor — glorious in our unity, assured of our victory and ready to reassert our dominance in the galaxy once more.

‘Let me hear you, now. Let my Imperial Fists — who go to war in your name — hear your brotherly love. Let the Master of Mankind in His Palace hear your pride in His dominion. Let the Beast across the void hear your fury and defiance.’

Drakan Vangorich felt the plaza tremble with the wild roars of desiccated adepts and soulless scribes. Dust fell from servile robes as blood thumped once again through withered hearts. An army of petty bureaucrats found themselves and what it meant to be human with Thane’s words echoing about them. His rallying call had awoken them, as if from some smothering nightmare of crumpled vellum, data-streams and meetings eternal. They were men and women once more, not just augmented collators, servants senseless to impending doom. The orks seared into reality for the Palace clerks, administrators and scriveners. They were not merely digits on a data-slate or the subjects of dictated scrolls. They became creatures of alien flesh and blood. A living, breathing menace. A reality in which they found their deepest fears. A monstrous vision upon which to project their hatred.

In those moments of bellowing affirmation, the Grand Master watched the Palace servants forget the petty jealousies of their masters, the politics and game-playing. It all became so simple. The Imperial Fists — with the Astra Militarum, the Imperial Navy and the Adeptus Mechanicus at their side — would destroy the green plague at its source. They would emerge victorious upon Ullanor and deliver Holy Terra from alien destruction because they had to — because every war ever fought by the forces of humanity had allowed for a moment like this. A moment in which those that were left pledged their all to a future unknown. A moment in which survivors found their voice in the silence of empires all but conquered, and declared with one voice that they were forever.

Vangorich looked to Thane. The Chapter Master stood tall amongst the triumphant cacophony. Adepts shook their staffs of office while scribes flapped scrolls in the air. Beyond, the Grand Master saw that the ramparts of the Boenician Wall were crowded with silhouettes, similarly waving. Whole sections of the Palace had ground to a halt as serfs and servants of the Administratum stopped to listen to the Master of the Imperial Fists — a Chapter whose glorious plate, like the rising of a new dawn, had once again appeared on their hallowed plazas and precincts. Members of the Adeptus Custodes looked on as the bells of the Ascension Tower and the Campanilius Cursus rang out, all but drowned in the earth-shaking horns of the Warhound Titans. For a moment, the setting sun broke through the rust-stained clouds of the capital, bathing the Imperial Fists in a golden light.

With the announcements of Canis Romula and Rema booming across the plaza, Vangorich left his throne, and Kubik followed him. The High Lords were out of their seats and in uproar but their carping remonstrations and threats made little impression upon the crowd — most of whom could not hear their masters. None spoke to the Grand Master of Assassins. None tugged at his robes or unleashed their bluster upon him. None asked him to join them in their outrage. While Kubik was courted, the Fabricator General gave them the impassive blankness of the machine.

As Thane turned around to address them directly once more, Vangorich and the Fabricator General reached the bottom of the atrium steps. Both turned crisply in their red and black robes to regard the Council, flanking the looming magnificence of the Chapter Master. The High Lords grew still, the violent indignation screwing up their faces remaining fixed. Wienand and the Provost Marshal looked grave. Standing with Thane, Vangorich saw that the High Lords were looking at him. Usually they averted their gaze but now they stared at the Grand Master of Assassins with horror and dread. While the Legions of the Adeptus Astartes and the might of the Mechanicus caused hearts to hammer in chests, it was the declaration of Vangorich’s intentions that chilled the blood pumping through them.

Several members of the Council went to speak, but Wienand silenced them with a gesture. Nothing would stop High Admiral Lansung and Abel Verreault. With a swish of their heavy cloaks and the creak of boots, the pair left the atrium by a side-arch, to be joined by storm troopers and a Naval honour guard. From there, Lansung and the Lord Militant made their way off the Plaza Decamerata and back into the labyrinthine safety of the Palace.

Vangorich looked to Thane. Like Kubik, the Chapter Master didn’t take his eyes off the remaining High Lords. He nodded. Vangorich obeyed. Turning, the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum strode after Verreault and the High Admiral, his black robes swishing after him like a ill wind. As he left the plaza and the dumbfounded Council, Vangorich activated the vox-bead in his hood.

‘Krule?’

‘I have them,’ the Assassin told him. ‘They are going by way of the Tortestrian Gate.’

‘We shall engage them in the Vangora Quarter,’ Vangorich told Beast Krule. ‘Meet me there.’

It did not take the Grand Master long to reach Krule and the High Lords. He found them walking through a cluster of little-used halls in the upper east wing of the Bastile-Autronomica. The boots of the High Lords echoed with urgency through the vaulted chambers, while the pair blustered their indignation and self-importance.

Like one of the many spectres rumoured to haunt the Bastile-Autronomica, Vangorich appeared in a grand archway. Verreault’s storm troopers saw him first and ran forward to encompass the Lord Militant in a canopy formation. Verreault and the High Admiral slowed to a stop in the middle of the hall. The Naval armsmen took position around Lansung, levelling their las-carbines at Vangorich. The High Lords looked the way they had come, back along the footprints they had left in the dust. There they found Beast Krule, leaning against the pillars of the grand entranceway from which the prints led.

‘You dare to bar our way?’ Verreault shouted across the hall at Vangorich.

‘I dare to walk the corridors and halls of the Emperor’s mighty Palace,’ Vangorich said, ‘and speak to whom I find there.’

‘We have nothing to say to you,’ Lansung told him, ‘or your Adeptus Astartes compatriots.’

‘You can both make all the high-minded speeches you like,’ Abel Verreault warned him, ‘but the great armies of the Imperium — their lord marshals and regimental commanders — answer to me and me alone.’

‘And even if they didn’t,’ Lansung said, ‘you couldn’t possibly muster their strength. Not without the might of the Imperial Fleet. Thane may conjure the ghosts of the Imperial Fists but he seeks death among the ruins of Ullanor alone. For without the Astra Militarum and the vessels to transport them, he condemns his Imperial Fists to an early doom.’

‘I whole-heartedly agree,’ Vangorich told them, approaching. ‘That is why the Chapter Master has engaged me. To impress upon you the importance of your role in the great victory to come. You are going to save the Imperium, my lords: for your God-Emperor and for us all.’

Verreault kept turning. As he swept his cloak around he looked between Krule and the Grand Master of Assassins.

‘Call off your dog,’ the Lord Militant said, ‘or I will order my men to put him down.’

‘I shouldn’t worry about my man,’ Vangorich said as he walked towards the High Lords. ‘I would worry about your own.’

Panic spread across the faces of Lansung and Verreault. Armsmen and storm troopers became twitchy, moving their high-powered weaponry off Beast Krule and tracking it across both their own ranks and the ones opposite.

‘Vangorich!’ the Lord Militant roared, drawing a master-crafted pistol from beneath his cloak. It was all baroque barrels and antique finery. As it hummed at the Grand Master, Lansung pulled an extravagant dress blade from his scabbard.

It was all over in moments, the flash of lasguns lighting up the hall. It was unclear who fired first. Either a storm trooper or an armsman opened fire upon members of the opposite party. Beams proceeded to criss-cross the open space, searing into troopers and the High Admiral’s honour guard. Peerless marksmanship on both sides and the close range ensured that the firefight was brief. Bodies dropped to the dusty floor all about the two High Lords, the craters in their chest carapace glowing.

Unfazed by the fury of the blinding exchange, Beast Krule had unslipped a pistol of his own and blazed away. Aiming through the gunfire and confusion, the Assassin blasted Verreault’s pistol into a shower of scorched components. His second shot took a storm trooper through both helm and head. As the Guardsman fell away, Krule sent his final blast at Lansung’s ridiculous blade. With a blinding flash, the ornate sword was knocked from the High Admiral’s hand and sent skidding across the hall floor. As the whoosh of las-fire died away, Lansung and Verreault looked down at their dead men and then at each other. Both were of advancing years, but they were still at their hearts military men. Seeing abandoned las-carbines on the floor, the pair went for the weapons.

‘Rise,’ Vangorich commanded.

The High Lords staggered back as a storm trooper and a Navy armsman got back to their feet. Scooping up their weapons and kicking away others, the two bore no evidence of damage or injury. Whereas the other bodies on the floor displayed searing blasts to the chest and helm, the two standing before them remained untouched.

‘What in the damnable Eye is going on?’ Lansung rumbled.

‘Vangorich,’ Abel Verreault spat, ‘what is the meaning of this?’

‘It is a demonstration, my lords,’ the Grand Master of Assassins told them. ‘Sleeper cadre Black Glass: identify.’

The armsman’s patrician features began to ripple and twist. To Lansung and the Lord Militant’s revulsion, his face began to change. Muscles spasmed and rearranged under face-flesh, while the stature of the honour guard became slight and shapely. With the las-carbine still held upon Lansung, the armsman became an armswoman before the High Admiral’s eyes. From beneath the severity of a regulation haircut, dark eyes burned with lethal intelligence.

‘Augustra Phex, my lord,’ the Assassin said. ‘Temple Callidus.’

By the time the storm trooper had removed his helm, the features beneath had also transformed into those of a young woman. She leant into her las-carbine and pointed the weapon at Abel Verreault.

‘Kitrid Vaunce, Grand Master,’ she said, without taking her eyes off the Lord Militant. ‘Temple Callidus.’

‘You dare to place your monstrous infiltrators in my ranks?’ the Lord Militant growled.

‘Damn you, sir,’ Lansung said.

‘As the pair of you dare to monitor the comings and goings of my Temples from orbit,’ Vangorich said, ‘and try to stalk my clade snipers with inferior marksmen of your own.’

‘We will not be intimidated,’ Verreault told the Grand Master. ‘You cannot threaten us, Vangorich. We are beyond your reach, especially with the segmentum in peril.’

‘I don’t need to threaten you,’ Vangorich told them, his words like shattered glass. ‘I only need to kill you. Cadre, enact your protocols.’

Augustra Phex and Kitrid Vaunce slipped easily into a grotesque transformation. Bones crunched. Sinew tore. Fat and muscle ballooned. They grew in height and heft. Their chins and faces grew fat. Vaunce became the mirror image of the battle-scarred Lord Militant, while Phex’s skin grew lined and weather-beaten like the High Admiral’s. Even their eyes changed colour, making the pair indistinguishable from the High Lords.

‘Lord Militant,’ Vaunce addressed Verreault in his own gravelly voice.

‘High Admiral,’ Phex said, touching her temple in a playful salute as the shock of hearing his own voice played out across Lansung’s face.

‘I could execute you right here,’ Vangorich told the pair, ‘in the Imperial Palace, and no one would be any the wiser. I could replace you with my Assassins and have the Astra Militarum and the Imperial Navy under my control.’

‘Who could conceive of such a monstrous thing?’ Lansung said.

‘Who indeed?’ Vangorich said. ‘With one command I could rid the Imperium of two sacks of rancid wine and use your influence to bring the Council on board with Chapter Master Thane’s plan. With your stationed fleets, High Admiral, and your mustered billions, Lord Militant, the Imperial Fists just might stand a chance against the foe and snatch Terra from the jaws of the Beast.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Verreault asked, his voice betraying the tremor of a man who had thought through his enemy’s battle plan and found it to be sound. Lansung stared at the Grand Master, his great chest rising and falling.

‘That is really down to you, my lords,’ Vangorich said. ‘It is your fingers on my triggers. I take solace in the fact that your deaths won’t be my responsibility — though you should know that they would weigh very little on my conscience.’

‘What do you want?’ Lansung asked.

‘I want your cooperation, gentlemen,’ Vangorich said with a wolfish smile which died on his face as he carried on speaking. ‘I want you to live up to the Emperor’s expectations. I can replace your aged flesh but the experience that has put lines upon that flesh would still be lost to the Imperium, should I have to take drastic measures. Your knowledge and military skill are the only things of worth to me. They are the reason you are alive. What do I want? I want sentinel regiments allocated to the subsector, as well as core fleets to remain on station about the capital system. They will coordinate with the Adeptus Astartes of the Last Wall to shield Terra and the Emperor from the enemy should our attack on the Beast fail.

‘It will not fail, however. For you will mobilise every available warship and transport, every battle company and battalion, to accompany the Imperial Fists to Ullanor. If you hold back so much as a stretcher-bearer or fleet tender, I will issue the order for your assassination. Augustra and Kitrid here will be waiting upon it. They will be every Guardsman, every armsman and officer that you see about you — in place and waiting. Waste no time in flushing them out, for they are not the only members of the Black Glass cadre. My operatives are everyone and everywhere. Each is ready to take your worthless lives and replace you at a moment’s notice. So tell me, my lords — do we have an accord?’

Lansung and Verreault looked wretchedly at one another and then at the Callidus Assassins, who were like reflections in a crystal clear mirror.

‘We do,’ the High Lords answered, their voices laden with dying anger and doom.

‘Good,’ Vangorich said, nodding to himself at a job well done. He enjoyed the moment: the High Admiral and the Lord Militant, finally doing as their duty required of them. ‘Very good.’

Seven

Thane pushed himself through the rocky corridors and across the cavernous chambers of 44 Thoosa. The asteroid was a labyrinth of darkness and zero-gravity, allowing even the Chapter Master in his Terminator plate to move effortlessly through its rocky heart.

44 Thoosa had been selected from the Golgashir asteroid field and hollowed out by heavy servitors above the fabricator moon of Abythica Prime. Shielded by an intense debris field, the tiny forge world had been missed by roving ork fleets, and selected as one of the six staging points for the Imperial attack upon Ullanor. Thane had had his Imperial Fists travel there to be met by Artisan Trajectorae Augus Van Auken, whom Fabricator Kubik had entrusted with the experimental gravitational technologies the Adeptus Mechanicus had developed from recovered ork equipment.

Within a wide ring of colossal node-installations hanging above the fabricator moon, 44 Thoosa tumbled through the path created by the gravitational node fields, orbiting the planet. The asteroid was busy with scaffolding and orbited in turn by work stations and servitor ships. With alterations made and its precious cargo installed, the asteroid gathered speed as it moved between the alternating nodes. Pulled onwards by the gravitational forces of the adapted ork technology, the colossal piece of rock spun with increasing velocity around the fabricator moon.

Utilising Artisan Van Auken’s calculations, power to the gravitational ringway was cut and 44 Thoosa was thrown out into the void like a tossed bolas, heading at carefully calibrated speed on a trajectory for the planet Ullanor. The last of six successful test launches using asteroids from the Golgashir field, 44 Thoosa followed in the path of its rocky predecessors. Like a comet breaking up into a meteor storm, the asteroids plunged towards the homeworld of the Beast; 44 Thoosa, however, was the only one to carry the forces of the Imperium.

Also repairing at Abythica Prime had been what remained of Battlefleet Solar-Spinward. Comprised of ancient battleships, grand cruisers and fleet carriers, the armada had been bolstered with escorts and heavy frigates from Zanaheim, as well as Abythican ark cruisers of the Zeta-Iota battle group. Newly reassigned as Attack Group Thoosa and placed under the command of Lord Admiral Evelyn Napier, the fleet’s instructions were to follow the asteroids in through the outer systems of the alien stronghold sector at sub-light attack speed, while protecting the heavy transports, troop carriers, ark freighters and mass conveyors from the swarms of ork assault craft Thane expected to find there.

Fighting fire with fire, Thane had chosen to transport most of the Chapter, along with Kavalanera Brassanas’ Sisters of Silence and the ork psykers, to Ullanor aboard the asteroid. Crashing into the planet, in emulation of the orks’ own devastating tactics, Thane aimed to take advantage of the widespread destruction and chaos by holding and expanding the decimated landing zone with landed armour, Guardsmen of the Astra Militarum, skitarii legions and battle-automata. Utilising orbital strikes and Navy air support, he also hoped to get the god-machines of the Legio Intrafex down on the ground. All the while, Thane and his Imperial Fists would besiege the orks’ palace and the Sisters of Silence could unleash the power of a greenskin psyker upon the apocalyptic monstrosity the galaxy had come to know as the Beast.

Launched from other fortress worlds and forge worlds situated about the Ullanor systems, five more attack groups were surging through the void towards the stronghold system. Magos Dominus Gerg Zhokuv led one attack group from Dynax-Abultra, the dominus’ experience in commanding Adeptus Mechanicus forces during the previous attack on Ullanor seen as invaluable. Another benefitted from having High Marshal Bohemond of the Black Templars leading the charge. One even carried a High Lord of Terra. Wienand of the Inquisition had decided to accompany her Adeptus Mechanicus adviser Eldon Urquidex and a force of Deathwatch Space Marines under their watch commander, the Space Wolf Asger Warfist. The last attack group followed in the wake of the mighty Phalanx itself, with Tenth Captain Decarion fortifying the colossal craft with the Scouts of the Tenth and two demi-companies of Imperial Fists.

Arriving at the distant Mandeville points of outlying systems, thousands of vessels converged upon Ullanor, their engines blazing at attack speed. The Imperial Navy had deployed the last of its battleships and grand cruisers, leading patchwork armadas of scrambled vessels made up of system squadrons, patrol groups, flotillas and sector fleets. Legendary capital ships had even been hastily refitted and brought out of retirement: the Emperor Ascendant, and the Astra Glorianus that had been serving as a prison hulk amongst the rings of Tetra-Bithia. Flanked by cruisers, heavy frigates and destroyers they escorted the great ark ships of the Adeptus Mechanicus and bulk freighters transporting the apocalyptic war machines of the Adeptus Titanicus. Fat troop ships carrying Astra Militarum regiments travelled alongside ark freighters transporting skitarii legions to war and Navy carriers primed with interceptors, strike fighters, bombers and gunships. Other institutions had contributed what they could. The Ecclesiarchy had sent along Ministorum transports, overladen with hastily recruited frateris militias. The Adeptus Arbites had despatched a small number of precinct ships and counter-insurgency craft while Drakan Vangorich had contributed several cladeships, carrying some of the deadliest killers in the Imperium.

Thane and his attack force were prepared to give the orks no quarter and no respite from catastrophic destruction. As the monsters staggered through the ruins of their own world, the Chapter Master would visit on them doom upon doom before baptising the newly formed Imperial Fists in dust, blood and battle.

Scraping the golden yellow of his Terminator plate against the rocky wall, Thane pushed out across the cavernous gloom of the asteroid’s central chamber. Hollowed out at the heart of 44 Thoosa, it had been nicknamed the Nexus. Adamantium frameworking and field generators had reinforced the chamber for the rough landing to come. Artisan Van Auken had crafted the rocky body to be an asteroid within an asteroid, the inner core benefiting from anti-gravitational technologies shielding it from the worst of the planetary impact, and the outer core designed to absorb the worst of the contact destruction.

It was here in the Nexus — pressurised and supplied with a basic atmosphere — that the Space Marines, Sisters of Silence and alien prisoners would ride out a planetary impact. It was here, amongst the hurried adaptations of the Adeptus Mechanicus and by the good grace of their technological invention, that they would attempt to survive the unsurvivable.

Above him, the cavern ceiling housed a small cluster of cages. The three monstrous orks from Luna, hardy beyond understanding, clawed their way around their cages in the zero-gravity. Their eyes and mouths blazed with ethereal power, while arcs of psychic energy sizzled across green flesh and the bars of their prison. Their fang-filled maws were open and their ugly faces contorted about ferocious roars.

Lady Kavalanera Brassanas drifted down from the cavern ceiling in her crimson plate, accompanied by the Sister in silver that Thane had encountered in the lunar caverns. They stopped gracefully before the Chapter Master.

‘Status, Sister?’ Thane said, looking up at the monstrosities above. Ethereal light blazed within the cages and crackled across the bars.

The prisoners grow in power and agitation, Brassanas signed back, the closer we get to Ullanor.

Thane nodded gravely. ‘Can they be contained?’

The outer systems are swarming with the enemy, Brassanas told him, each creature a psychic reservoir from which these monsters draw their power.

‘This is a good thing, yes?’ Thane put to her. ‘The longer the charge and greater the number of orks, the greater the power. The greater the power, the greater the destruction to be wrought upon the greenskins.’

To a point, Brassanas signed.

Thane sensed her caution. ‘Can they be contained, Sister?’ he repeated.

The Sisters of Silence will not fail, Chapter Master, Brassanas assured him.

‘My lord,’ Honoured Brother Tychor said as he approached Thane, moving around the equipment with the Chapter’s new battle standard clutched in his gauntlet. The banner was tall and proud. While the fabric glinted with gold thread, the shaft and crossbar of the standard were crafted from silvered adamantium, each of the four ends terminating in a sculpted fist.

In recognition of his bravery in the Feast of Blades, Thane had appointed Dathan Tychor both Chapter standard bearer and his personal champion. Leading an honour guard of former Excoriators, hand-picked by Tychor himself, he had responsibility for the Chapter Master’s person on the field of battle. While Tychor’s plate gleamed newly golden yellow, his bionic arm still held the battle-scarred sheen of age and bloody employment.

‘Epistolary Zoldt and the Chief Librarian have word for you from Attack Group Sisyphax,’ Tychor reported now.

‘My lady,’ Thane said to Brassanas, nodding in farewell, before following the standard bearer.

In the zero-gravity of the cavernous chamber, Tychor and the Chapter Master made swift progress. They glided across ranks of Imperial Fists, each standing to attention in transportation cradles. They waited in silence. Hungry for battle. Ready for the havoc to come.

They found Epistolary Zoldt at a communications station. Zoldt was prevented from using his psychic powers in the presence of the Sisters of Silence, and Thane could only imagine what agony it was for the Librarians to be in the presence of a null like Kavalanera Brassanas. Even without the use of his powers, however, Thane had found a duty for the Epistolary, nominating Zoldt his chief communications officer.

Along with installing the transportation cradles, chamber reinforcements and tethers, Artisan Van Auken and the Adeptus Mechanicus priests at Abythica Prime had ensured that Thane could coordinate the colossal forces at his command. A hololithic vox-station relayed directly to the monstrous Phalanx, similarly closing on Ullanor. With most of the Chapter deployed for battle on board 44 Thoosa, the Imperial Fists Space Marines left aboard the mobile fortress-monastery were Captain Decarion and his Tenth Company, two further demi-companies, a skeleton complement of Techmarines, and Chief Librarian Azmachai and his Epistolaries. Decarion was charged with the defence of the fortress-monastery and leading Attack Group Sisyphax. He commanded one hundred Space Marine Scouts made up of a mixture of neophytes taken from all six Successor Chapters of the Imperial Fists and one hundred battle-brothers, with two thousand battle-ready serfs and servitors.

Azmachai and his Epistolaries, meanwhile, had the responsibility of astropathically communicating the Chapter Master’s orders to all under his command. Away from the nullifying influence of the Silent Sisterhood, the Chief Librarian could relay orders to astropaths aboard Lord Admiral Napier’s flagship, the Apocalypse-class battleship Master of Mankind, and the Ark Mechanicus Buenaventura, commanded by Dominus Gerg Zhokuv. At much greater distances, Azmachai also sent and received astropathic messages from choirs aboard the flagships of the other attack groups converging upon Ullanor, each leading fleets that trailed their own tumbling asteroids.

‘Brother Zoldt?’

‘The Chief Librarian for you, Chapter Master,’ Zoldt said, his voice strained with the burden of being surrounded by the Silent Sisterhood.

The warping hololithic representation of Azmachai suddenly crackled into focus. The Chief Librarian stood encased in a hooded suit of blue Terminator armour, swathed in golden robes. He jabbed his force staff at deck serfs that Thane could not see, giving them a haughty scowl. As he moved, the lines on his haggard face ran to deep shadow, while a milky eye blinked with constant agitation.

‘Chapter Master,’ the Chief Librarian said. ‘I have much to report.’

‘Proceed, old friend.’

‘Attack Group Perditor has had their force bolstered by a reserve flotilla under Commodore Beauchamp,’ Azmachai said.

‘I get the feeling that is the only good news you have for me, Librarian.’

‘Indeed, Chapter Master,’ Azmachai said. ‘Perditor has run afoul of an attack moon on their approach through the outer systems. They have experienced heavy loses, including the capital ships Rex Resurgam and Voidhammer.’

‘Admiral Lumaresq is lost?’

‘Flag Captain Emes now commands, Chapter Master,’ Azmachai told him.

‘What of Attack Groups Idas and Verita?’

‘Idas is coming up through the Acheronias,’ the Chief Librarian told him. ‘Dominus Zhokuv has sent word that the systems there are decimated. Charted worlds are gone with only a debris field remaining. He suspects that the Acheronias region might have been used as a testing ground for the ork gravitational weaponry.’

‘Can they make it through?’ Thane asked.

‘They endeavour to do so, my lord.’

‘And Verita?’

‘Sporadic contacts with enemy flotillas in the Scorpicon Nebula,’ Azmachai said. ‘Several escorts have become separated from the main fleet in the dust clouds.’

‘Have Watch Commander Warfist and the Deathwatch leave them,’ Thane ordered. ‘We cannot afford to slow our approach. Out here, hesitation is death. The commanders of those vessels will have to act under their own initiative. Now tell me: have we had any further contact with Attack Group Phaethon?’

‘Nothing, my lord,’ Azmachai told him. ‘Group Phaethon’s approach lay through some of Ullanor’s satellite and stronghold systems. Last reports were of the destruction of a number of troop carriers. I regret to inform you that the 3001st Arphistran Rifles, the Varsine Dragoons 3rd Battalion and the Ypresian Free Companies are all lost to us. Commodore Tregorran identified an ork vessel on the Sartovian Drift,’ Azmachai said, ‘last seen at the Battle of the Hartzhaven. A space hulk mounting experimental weaponry, codenamed Green Herald. Since Tregorran’s identification of the vessel, I have heard nothing from the commodore or his captains.’

‘Bohemond?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Keep trying,’ Thane urged the Chief Librarian.

‘Of course,’ Azmachai said. ‘I do, though, have reports for you from your own group.’

‘Proceed.’

‘The troop carrier Pronteus has been boarded,’ the Chief Librarian reported. ‘The orks are employing long-range teleporter technology. The 3rd Royal Vortiga carry a contingent of abhuman auxilia that have proved successful in keeping the enemy from the bridge. The carrier is managing to keep pace.’

‘Any losses?’

‘We lost the bulk freighter Bellico and the three Titans it was carrying to a ramming action, while the battle-damaged frigate Duke Castagir detonated her engines, clearing our rearguard of attack ships. The sacrifice was a noble one but the enemy still pursues, however, and in growing number.’

‘And Attack Group Sisyphax?’

‘I am happy to report that the Phalanx and Fleet Sisyphax have fallen in behind you, Chapter Master,’ the Chief Librarian said. ‘Captain Decarion has asked me to pass on his assurances. She has not a scratch and he intends to keep our fortress-monastery that way. He has had occasion to exercise the gun crews, however, and sent three ork battle cruisers into the asteroid surface.’

‘We felt the impact detonations,’ Thane confirmed.

‘Several cruisers have broken off from the attack, following the mauling,’ Azmachai told him. ‘The Lord Admiral’s captains are requesting permission to pursue.’

‘Absolutely denied,’ Thane said. He knew it went against an officer’s every instinct to watch an enemy all but destroyed limp away to safety, but he could not allow a few hothead captains and commanders to break formation and threaten the integrity of a coordinated attack.

‘No vessel is to break off from the fleet — and that goes for all other attack groups also. We are to be the hammer’s swing: unswerving and true.’ Thane looked out across the hundreds of Imperial Fists in the chamber, each waiting for an opportunity to prove himself to his Chapter Master, to honour the noble yellow of his plate and his Chapter’s history.

‘When we strike, we strike together — and when we do, we shall shatter this barbarian empire. Only then will the galaxy ring with our victory.’

Eight

Impacts upon the surface of 44 Thoosa had become increasingly regular as the colossal rock rolled through the void, ever closer to the stronghold world of the monstrous Beast. Ork attack ships, brute cruisers and great carriers of the greenskin horde were smashed into oblivion as the asteroid ploughed through the swarming system.

When Chief Librarian Azmachai announced that they were entering the Ullanor System, Thane decided that he needed to see it for himself. Having visual feed signals transmitted from the Phalanx and vanguard vessels of the fleet, he watched their approach on the hololithic projector.

The darkness of space was tinged green with the grotesque presence of the invader. The Chapter Master felt his jaw clench behind his faceplate. The scale of the xenos contamination was appalling. Here, within the borders of the God-Emperor’s Imperium, Ullanor had festered like an old wound. What had once been lauded as one of the greatest engagements of the Great Crusade advertised itself to the galaxy as a failure. The orks had not been wiped out on Ullanor. They had not been defeated. Like a fever untreated, they had returned with a vengeance. Each planet and moon of the system was a blot, a swarming miasma of monstrous craft. Rust-buckets of ungainly accretion, boasting bulbous engines and bristling with weaponry. Bastardised warships, cobbled together from the wrecks of Imperial vessels. Weaponised chunks of rock and debris.

The crowning glory of the madness was Ullanor itself. A beast of a planet, it sat like a barbarian warlord among satellite supporters. A place that burned the eye with its xenos taint and ached with the mindless violence of alien brutality. Thane forced himself to stare at its horror. Beneath the impenetrable haze of craft and orbital detritus that buzzed about the planet like angry insects swarming, the Chapter Master knew what was waiting for them. A writhing carpet of green. A planetary horde of savage abominations. Pole to pole orks, their brute workshops and the heretical technologies they spawned.

Their target, however, or certainly the general target that Artisan Van Auken had aimed 44 Thoosa for with his mind-bending calculations, was the city named Gorkogrod: the stronghold of the Beast. An equatorial fortress-palace the size of a small continent, it was the alien warlord’s seat of power and savage authority in a contested galaxy. It was from this monstrous stronghold that the Beast advertised his presence and supremacy. Technological abominations had been perfected in his barbaric honour. Trillions of orks had converged upon the system in their hulks and attack ships, augmenting the billions teleported there and those spawned under the Beast’s own banners. The doom of his psychic invitation even reached out to humans on Imperial worlds. Citizens, local flotillas and Astra Militarum garrisons went mad and defected to the orks before their hulks and derelicts even broke system, before ending up as slaves in a growing alien empire.

Thane couldn’t tear his eyes from the spectacle. The planet even seemed to call to him. Across the frozen silence of space, he fancied he heard the raving ferocity of the orks. A rising cacophony of snaggle-tusked fury and bloodlust unbound, coming together in a mind-splitting roar, Thane once again heard the Beast. Like a beacon of infectious, alien insanity, the Beast’s furious presence seemed to reach out from Ullanor.

Thane closed his eyes and blinked both the spectacle and the Beast’s monstrous roar from his thoughts. He did so because he was a Space Marine and he could. He was engineered to be stronger in both body and mind. The Beast had infected entire worlds with his alien madness, however, and commissars on board fleet carriers had reported hundreds of Guardsmen from scores of different regiments lost to such insanity. Chief Librarian Azmachai had reasoned that it was a psychic expression of the Beast’s barbaric desire to conquer the galaxy, a territorial advertisement, wielded — like all things by the orks — as a weapon. The Chief Librarian knew not, however, how to combat such a potent phenomenon.

Faith, Thane had told him, ordering his company Chaplains to conduct battle blessings on the sons of Dorn as the asteroid approached.

‘Look at what we have done,’ Thane said, half to himself.

‘We did not do this,’ Tychor replied, before the crackling hololithic image of Azmachai could speak. ‘The orks need no assistance in polluting the dark reaches of the galaxy. They are the plague, we are but the cure.’

‘Brave words, brother,’ Thane said, ‘and worthy of a Chapter standard bearer. I fear they have been here spoken before, however. By our father… and our father’s father.’

‘You blame them?’

‘If they were here, to see this,’ Thane said, ‘knowing that the claws of these beasts are slick with the blood of the Imperial Fists? I think that they would blame themselves.’

‘You are here,’ Tychor said, ‘seeing this. Living this. What do you think?’

‘I think that we are being punished for our lack of vigilance,’ Thane said. ‘I think it has happened before and will happen again. The galaxy is vast and deep but it belongs to humanity. It is our responsibility. Our burden. We cannot afford to be complacent.’

Cycling through the hololithic visual feeds, Thane saw the vessels of the two attack groups rocketing up behind. With engine columns blazing, the Imperial ships kept pace with the asteroid and held a defensive formation. Admiral Napier and Captain Decarion had formed two lines of battle with the majestic battleships, grand cruisers and Adeptus Mechanicus ark ships under their command. While the Admiral led one column with the Master of Mankind, Decarion led the other with the monstrous Phalanx. Between them, the vessels offered protection to the convoy of bloated troop carriers, skitarii ark freighters and mass conveyors that the warships were escorting.

The fleet was like a colossal fortification moving through the void, vessels ancient and indomitable presenting towering walls of titanic gunnery. Boasting Guardsmen, cybernetic soldiers and combat servitors numbering in the millions, as well as the apocalyptic engines of war, it should have been more than a match for the enemies of humanity. Faced with Ullanor itself, however, with its nebulous blizzard of ships and continent-swallowing hordes, it didn’t seem enough. Not nearly enough.

While 44 Thoosa in itself raised neither suspicion or alarm amongst the orks — the system being used to its fair share of comets and meteorite storms — the trailing formations of Imperial warships were another matter entirely. Drawn to them like predators to a game trail, ork attack craft swarmed the capital ships, attempting to match their reinforced hull plating against Imperial firepower. Crash-capsules and rocks rolled through turret fire, while hammerheaded battle cruisers attempted to plough on through lance beams and cannon blasts. The disciplined broadsides of the Navy warships washed the orks back in a tsunami of light and heat, but the junkers just kept coming.

As the 44 Thoosa tumbled on through the ork system, Thane watched the other asteroids ahead of them closing in on the ork planet. The smallest of them struck an attack moon on its way in-system, resulting in a blinding light of impact that faded to the molten glow of scarred rock. The destruction was horrifying. While the asteroid survived, it had been deflected and Thane estimated that it would barely graze the atmosphere of the target planet. His blood chilled at the prospect of 44 Thoosa doing the same in the crowded system. He didn’t need Chief Librarian Azmachai to tell him of the hell-storm of rock and debris that the asteroid must have been shedding, straight into the path of the fleet.

The Chapter Master marvelled at the sight of the other asteroids and the technological ingenuity it must have taken Artisan Van Auken to put them on such a course. As the leading pair spun through the void, they were followed by a third, as ugly a piece of rock as ever graced the galaxy. Monstrously bulbous and irregular, it was also the largest of the asteroids that the priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus had gravitationally propelled towards Ullanor. The massive rock piled on through flotillas of ork attack vessels, decimating stationed terror ships and crashing through star forts.

Thane and Tychor watched the pair of vanguard asteroids strike the planet. The Chapter Master’s hearts thumped in his chest and his spirit soared as the two bodies, so graceful in their approach, smacked into Ullanor like a pugilist delivering an almighty left-and-right. The planet trembled and the points of impact glowed hot with tectonic fires. Blast waves rippled out, turning the swarms of attack ships into tangled wrecks. As the skies rained debris and shattered gun platforms, waves of corpses, broken and aflame, were blasted back across the land. Within horrific moments it was over, the impact sites ablaze with melted rock and devastation. The ugly rock that followed struck the planet only just behind, and bathed the ork world in a corona of destruction.

‘Burn,’ Thane hissed through his helmet grille. Fleets annihilated. Imperial worlds torn apart. Populations enslaved. He felt all such atrocities in his chest and yearned for vengeance. ‘Burn, you monsters.’

He watched, chafing for action, as Ullanor grew before him. 44 Thoosa would be the next to smash into the greenskin world, right on top of the palace stronghold of Gorkogrod. Intelligence gathered upon the two doomed previous attacks told the Chapter Master that the Beast’s lair spanned a small continent. It was all colossal fortifications and monstrous architecture, as alien as it was formidable. Within the walls were precincts kilometres across, choked with weapons factories, titanic workshops, fungus plantations, holdings of greenskin livestock and encampments for vast hordes of ork warriors. Of the destruction wrought by the previous two attacks, however, there was no sign. The orks had rebuilt their monstrous fortifications. Colossal alien giga-weaponry and vast factory complexes were everywhere.

‘Time?’ Tychor asked.

‘It’s time,’ Thane answered.

The Chapter Master was beginning to feel the slight drag of planetary gravity on his suit. He reached down with the toe of his armoured boot. It crunched into the grit of the chamber floor as his own weight began to reassert itself.

Above, the ceiling of the chamber was ablaze with coruscating bolts of psychic power. The three cages could barely be seen through the otherworldly energies. Lady Brassanas and her Sisters slowly descended with the effect of gravity.

‘Lady Brassanas, get your Sisters to their landing cradles,’ Thane told her as he strode towards the communications station. ‘Brother Zoldt, general order — all attack groups to take station above impact site. Orbital strikes and Aeronautica to secure landing zones towards the site perimeters. Have Captain Decarion launch his Thunderhawk Transporters with armour payloads. I want our Land Raiders and gunships on the ground following our landing, followed by drop-ships to deploy Astra Militarum and skitarii troops. A foothold must be established before we can bring down the heavy armour and Titans.’

‘What about upper-orbital enemy attack ships and gun platforms?’ the Epistolary asked.

‘All vessels will have to engage while offering orbital support fire and deploying ground troops,’ Thane growled with some annoyance. ‘Tell the captains they will not have the luxury of ordered engagement here. The orks won’t wait on protocols and I won’t wait on the orks. Their first priority is to get troops and war machines down on the ground. Make sure that all attack group commanders understand.’

‘Yes, Chapter Master.’

‘Open vox-channel,’ Thane commanded. ‘All Imperial Fists.’

‘You’re patched through,’ Zoldt confirmed.

‘Brothers,’ Thane began, ‘we have arrived in deep, in the embrace of the enemy’s stronghold world. We are not the first to make this attack but for good or ill, we shall be the last. The enemy is expecting us. Their warriors will be hungry for our blood. Their weapons will be loaded to bursting and their great blades serrated and sharpened. Their world-spanning fortifications will be ready for our coming.

‘Have no doubts. We will lose ships, we will lose armour; we will lose valiant men and women, loyal servants of the Emperor. And yes, we will even lose our own brothers. There is no other path open to us. But the Imperial Fists will endure, as we always have. The paint on our plate is honourable and fresh. Below us on Ullanor is a green inferno. A baptism of fire. And we shall endure the horror. We shall survive this xenos apocalypse. We shall carve a victory as yet unwritten into the flesh of our foe with bolt and blade. We shall find and destroy the Beast, this thing whose every breath mocks us, and burn his home world, as he has done to so many of humanity’s own. For the second time, Ullanor shall be cleansed of alien taint. Like the Imperial Fists, this planet will be delivered and reborn. As your Chapter Master, in word this is my decree. Now in action I command you to prosecute it.’

‘For the glory of Dorn!’ Tychor roared across the channel, clenching his gauntlet into a fist and hammering it against his breastplate. Company upon company of Space Marines did the same, the vox-channel crackling with the thunder of a thousand Imperial Fists returning the standard bearer’s call.

Tychor and Thane took to their cradles with the rest of the Chapter Master’s honour guard, their powered armourlocked in a standing position. Behind them was Emmerich Berengard, Captain of the First, and Eckhart, the veteran sergeant who led his command squad. The First Company was mostly made up of former Black Templars, like Berengard himself. They stood in grim silence behind their captain and Chapter Master.

‘Ready for the fight of your life, First Captain?’ Thane asked across the vox.

‘It has been my life’s work to purge this galaxy of the alien, Chapter Master,’ Berengard said. ‘Live or die, I could wish for no better reward for my service.’

It was a suitably grim response from a grim man. Berengard’s plate gleamed golden yellow just like the rest of his brothers, but beneath it the captain was nothing but scar tissue. Having been burned from head to toe in the Promethium Wars, Berengard had lost his skin and any last vestiges of good humour.

‘Master Vorstecht,’ Thane called across the vox, ‘report. Are we ready for impact?’

‘Yes, Chapter Master,’ the Master of the Forge told him. ‘All battle-brothers, with weapons and plate, caged in their cradles.’

‘Very good,’ the Chapter Master returned. ‘Prime the detonators.’

A sound rumbled through 44 Thoosa — the excruciating fracturing of rock. Going from the deep cold of space to the friction of atmospheric entry, the surface of the asteroid was heating. Thane’s plate detected the first indications of moving air and a rising temperature. Wind howled through the hollows and tunnel-riddled interior of the asteroid.

‘Stand by,’ Thane snapped into the vox as rock trembled beneath the anchorage of his cradle. Dust rained down from the Nexus ceiling and the walls of the cavern shook. The gravitational forces of Ullanor tore at 44 Thoosa as the asteroid plummeted towards the surface.

The Chapter Master prepared himself for impact. The Adeptus Mechanicus at Abythica Prime had done what they could to counter the dreadful forces at work. The cavern reinforcements. The cradles. Field generators. Anti-gravity technologies designed to cushion the inner core and Nexus from the planetary collision wracking the asteroid’s rocky shell. Even the launching of 44 Thoosa had been calibrated to make the landing survivable. Artisan Van Auken aimed to have the asteroid retain its structural integrity upon impact, unlike the other asteroids which had been launched at Ullanor at maximum velocity.

Such considerations should have offered reassurances to Thane, but plunging towards the planet surface, all he could think of was the fate of his new Chapter. It would be a cruel fate indeed if the Imperial Fists were to burn in the baptism of their first engagement. He shouted further assurances to his battle-brothers, but his words were lost to the roar of atmospheric friction.

Impact.

For a minute — several minutes — Thane could not speak.

His body had been engineered to take all that the galaxy could throw at him, but this was something else entirely. As 44 Thoosa hit the surface of Ullanor, the cavern shook and cracks ripped through the rock. Support struts were torn out of their foundations. Grit rained from the ceiling, pitter-patting across the surface of the Chapter Master’s plate. Dust choked the air and lamps died, plunging the Nexus into darkness. Even the ork prisoners had been knocked semi-senseless within their cages, abruptly ending the psychic lightstorm above the heads of the Imperial Fists.

Every bone in Thane’s body reverberated with the asteroid’s sudden impact, as he was flung back against his supporting cradle by the unimaginable forces of the graceless landing. Blinking sense back into his jarred mind, the Chapter Master found his honoured plate to be urgently reporting a deluge of data. Environmental warnings, integrity assessments and damage reports, mostly. His Tactical Dreadnought armour sparked, while the landing cradle was a ruin about him.

Getting the thumbs of his gleaming black power fists beneath the frame, Thane heaved. The cradle had nothing left and broke away in his grip, allowing him to stumble forward. The floor felt different beneath his boots, tilted at a strange angle. Based upon the weight distribution of 44 Thoosa, Artisan Van Auken had made an estimate regarding the orientation it would assume as soon as it was in the embrace of Ullanor’s powerful gravity. It had only been an estimate, however, and the asteroid seemed to have settled upon an incline.

‘Tychor,’ Thane called through the darkness. ‘Report. Can you hear me?’

‘Barely, my lord,’ the standard bearer replied, his voice cracked across the vox.

‘First Captain?’ Thane said. ‘Come in.’

‘To the end,’ Berengard growled, shaking off his own injuries and rising from his cradle.

‘Suit lamps,’ Thane ordered. At once, the Nexus was criss-crossed with beams that cut through the murk of the cavern. With light, Thane could make out a collapse, where both the cavern wall and adamantium supports had given way. ‘Zoldt?’ When the Epistolary didn’t answer, the Chapter Master repeated his call.

‘My lord,’ Zoldt managed.

‘Communications?’

‘The station is shattered, my lord,’ Zoldt reported.

‘We will have to rely upon suit arrays,’ Thane said. ‘When the Phalanx achieves high orbit, I want a vox-channel through to Captain Decarion as soon as possible. This is imperative, do you hear me, brother?’

‘Acknowledged, my lord,’ the Epistolary voxed back.

The Chapter Master shook his head within his helm and blinked the last of the disorientation away. They were there, on Ullanor. In the midst of a raging nest of greenskin barbarity, at the heart of an alien empire. They would need to act fast. They would need to be resolute. Everything relied upon their indomitable spirit and the tradition of victory on which the reputation of the Imperial Fists was built.

Turning, Thane saw his companies had fared little better than himself. Plate that had gleamed golden yellow moments before now sparked and was covered in dust. Imperial Fists extricated themselves from landing cradles with powered force, before checking their weapons for damage or obstructions. From the way they moved, he could tell some of the Sisters had suffered in the rough landing, but they attended to each other and their alien charges with the efficiency and determination he had come to expect. Taking their positions about the buckled cages, they stood sentinel over the ork psykers.

‘Captains, report in,’ the Chapter Master commanded, ‘and check for casualties.’

‘Berengard, First, reporting in.’

‘Karlito, Second, present and ready.’

‘Company Apothecaries, see to your injured,’ Thane said.

‘Oberon, Seventh, ready, Chapter Master.’

‘Captain Brondal, reporting in.’

‘Master Vorstecht,’ Thane voxed, ‘I want status on warsuits and armour, right away.’

‘Aye, my lord.’

‘Storn of the Ninth, standing by.’

The Chapter Master listened for his remaining captains. After Gortez, Uzziah and Valdanor, he expected to hear Saul Abramach, formerly of the Excoriators, but the call never came.

‘Captain Abramach, report in,’ Thane said.

‘Chapter Master, I regret to inform you that the captain is dead,’ a steely voice returned.

‘Chaplain Ishcarion?’

‘Yes, Chapter Master,’ the Chaplain said. ‘He was killed during the collapse. Two battle-brothers go with him.’

Thane nodded to himself. The insertion had been a high-risk strategy and he had known there were going to be battle-brothers amongst the ranks of the Imperial Fists that would pay for his decision. The Chapter Master could only hope that vastly more orks had lost their lives as a consequence of their apocalyptic landing.

‘Understood, Chaplain,’ Thane returned. ‘Take charge there amongst the ranks of the Eighth.’

‘Affirmative,’ Ishcarion returned.

‘Apothecaries, report numbers of casualties and identify your dead. The Chief Apothecary will ensure that their gene-seed is recovered and their spirit lives on in our ranks.’

They didn’t really have time for such luxuries, but Thane couldn’t treat the Chapter’s first battle dead with disrespect. They would all have to hurry, however: their entrance might have been cataclysmic but there was no way of telling how long it would take the orks to rally.

The criss-crossing beams of suit lamps suddenly picked out a hulking figure, dropping from the ceiling. Carrying itself with primordial, brutal grace, the monster landed with assurance. Its cage and chain anchor had broken free in the crash. The lamps of Thane’s honour guard flashed at the creature to reveal its green face and yellowing tusks. The ork bellowed its alien fury at the Imperial Fists, before smashing one of the honour guard aside with a back-breaking crunch. Its heavy chains whipped about around it.

‘Alive!’ Thane called as the boltguns of the honour guard came up. ‘I want it alive.’

Dathan Tychor was suddenly there, the golden fabric of the Chapter standard flapping between the honour guard and their enemy. Knocking the barrels of the boltguns aside with a thrust of the battle standard, Tychor brought it immediately around like a hammer, smashing the ork senseless with the impact of the crossbar’s sculpted fist. As the monster tried to reassert itself, Tychor drew back the standard and then jabbed it forward, shattering the snaggle-fanged maw of the roaring thing. Turning with power-armoured grace, the standard bearer sent the banner fluttering across the heads of the honour guard and their Chapter Master before landing another skull-hammering blow with the adamantium fist on the other end of the crossbar. This time the creature went down, knocked unconscious by Tychor’s relentless assault. As the Sisters of Silence swept in, dragging heavy chains and manacles to clasp on the alien brute, the standard bearer turned to Thane.

‘It’s still alive.’

Turning around, the Chapter Master marched back towards the Imperial Fists, who were out of their landing cradles and forming up. Above, he could hear the remaining ork psykers raging and howling in their cages. In the gloom of the cavern, three battle brothers approached him, each clad in plate of different colours.

‘Three casualties only, Chapter Master,’ Chief Apothecary Delgado informed him, ‘including Captain Abramach.’

‘He will be sorely missed in this venture,’ Thane said solemnly.

‘Their gene-seed has been recovered.’

‘Injured?’ Thane asked.

‘Twenty-two,’ Delgado told him, ‘spread across five companies. None incapacitated. All able to take part in the battle ahead.’

‘Good,’ Thane said. ‘Thank you, Chief Apothecary. Master Vorstecht, what of our combat capabilities?’

‘All Centurion warsuits ready for deployment, Chapter Master,’ the Master of the Forge said.

‘Good, for they shall be needed. I thank you for your efforts, Master Vorstecht. I fear that further damage waits for your venerable machines on the field of battle.’

‘It is our honour to serve, Chapter Master.’

‘Chapter Master,’ Epistolary Zoldt said, ‘Orbital contact established. Captain Decarion for you. Channel psi-sigma.’

Thane nodded and adjusted his vox-channel.

‘Captain, we’re blind down here,’ he told Decarion. ‘I need a status report.’

‘Praise the primarch,’ Decarion said, his words warping across the poor transmission, ‘for your safe delivery and that of the Chapter. It is havoc up here. Phalanx’s batteries and turrets are all firing at full capacity, and still there are attack ships everywhere. Crash-capsules, ramming ships and landers constantly try to board us. My company stands ready to repel the orks when that happens — and it will happen, Chapter Master. It will not take the enemy long to focus their teleporters on us.’

‘Understood, captain,’ Thane said gravely. He could hear the drum of the distant guns. ‘And what of our own forces?’

‘Stormtalon gunships, drop pods and Thunderhawk Transporters are on their way down to you carrying Land Raiders,’ Decarion said. ‘The Deathwatch is inbound. Drop-ships and conveyors are descending now. The Lord Admiral had to send the Titans down with the skitarii and regimentals. The ark freighters are too exposed. Our carriers are attempting to achieve low orbit to deliver their fighter and bomber wings, but ground based macrocannons — the biggest I’ve ever seen — are making that difficult. Napier’s battle cruisers are offering bombardments of their own but he has already lost the Agamemnos and Saint Solomon. Buenaventura, also, has been crippled. Dominus Zhokuv is being evacuated.’

Thane grunted. For the magnificent Ark Mechanicus to be crippled, monstrous vessel that it was, the void battle must be unimaginably intense. He knew that every moment counted. Every second on the planet’s surface cost the attack groups above lives and vessels.

‘Attack Groups Idas, Verita and Sisyphax all have troops and armour on the surface,’ Decarion reported. ‘Princeps Senioris Grimaldi is desperately trying to get his Titans unloaded, dispensing even with ritual observances and weapons testing. Our augurs, however, show the heat signatures of several Titan-class war machines firing up to move on their position. Lord Marshal Rothenberg and Magos Reductor Ohmnix both report colossal numbers of enemy troops. The ork artillery is relentless, powerful but inaccurate. Their vehicles are rolling scrap. Ground forces display little organisation beyond being hordes that rally about larger chieftains and champions. These hordes, however, stretch to the horizon and are devastating in number and at close quarters.’

‘They converged back upon the impact sites?’ Thane asked.

‘Yes, Chapter Master,’ Decarion confirmed. ‘Just as they flood back towards your position. You have little time, my lord.’

Thane nodded. ‘Heavy reinforcements?’

‘Yes, my lord. The heaviest — and in great concentration.’

‘Where are the reinforcements coming from?’ Thane demanded.

‘The fortress precincts about your position,’ the captain told him. ‘Your arrival demolished a large number of factories and fortifications but the largest is seven kilometres to the south.’

‘The target?’

‘Yes, Chapter Master.’

Thane turned to Tychor. ‘We have missed our aim by seven kilometres.’ If the asteroid had struck the hub of Gorkogrod with the Beast within, their mission would already be over.

‘Captain Decarion,’ Thane continued, ‘the Imperial Fists are to attack the palace, at Chapter strength. The assault will be swift and bloody, and the Phalanx will have the honour of lighting our way. Take station above our position and power up your lances.’

‘Yes, Chapter Master,’ Decarion said. ‘We shall carve the Chapter an avenue of destruction.’

Thane realised that the chamber was becoming bathed in an infernal glow. Molten rock was beginning to bubble up through the rocky floor. Upon colliding with Ullanor, both the surface of 44 Thoosa and the landing site had melted with the heat of impact.

‘Captain Storn,’ Thane called. ‘Attend to that, if you please.’

Storn was Captain of the Ninth and a former Iron Knight. Within moments he had directed his Devastators to move into position. The cavern briefly lit up with the launch of missiles. Hitting the rock just above the openings with krak missiles, Storn’s Imperial Fists demolished part of the cavern and buried the magma-bubbling breach in collapsing stone.

‘Captains,’ Thane voxed across the open channel, ‘it is time. The Imperial Fists go to war. Final checks and observances. Ready your companies. Master Vorstecht?’

‘Chapter Master?’

‘Fire the detonators.’

‘Yes, Chapter Master.’

Nine

Maximus Thane stood amongst the rubble of 44 Thoosa.

Charges placed about the asteroid superstructure by the Adeptus Mechanicus at Abythica Prime had allowed the Imperial Fists to choose their exit points. Firing the detonators above the small lake of molten rock in which the wreckage of the asteroid sat, the Chapter prepared to step out onto the doomed surface of Ullanor.

Thane waited as Thunderhawks deposited Land Raiders, Land Speeders and bikes down onto strips of steaming black rock.The devastated land about the mountainous remains of the asteroid was clouded with black dust and glowing with molten rock that bubbled in strips and shallows. From what he could see, it was a landscape of twisted, smouldering devastation. Scorched sand and wildfires. Wreckage. Rubble. Broken bodies.

The Second Company, under the famed former Crimson Fist Konrade Karlito, marched their Centurion Assault squads out onto the wasteland, each step of the mighty warsuits crushing grit and shattering the heat-baked stone. Formations of Stormtalon gunships roared into position above their allocated companies.

As Imperial Fists, in their soot-besmirched plate, moved into formation, Emmerich Berengard came up behind the Chapter Master. The Terminators of the First Company were deploying, their storm shields and thunder hammers held in close. The grizzled Berengard carried a monstrous power sword, which stood almost as tall as the Terminator Space Marine himself.

Lady Brassanas skidded down smouldering scree with a squad of her Sisters of Silence. Between them they dragged one of the ork psykers in chains. The thing roared and clawed at them but the Sisters hauled at it, wrangling the creature back into position.

‘It is the lowest form of life,’ said Berengard, with disgust.

‘It will be even lower when we have done with it,’ Tychor assured him, holding the company standard above the warriors of Thane’s honour guard.

Thane let them have their words. Their genetically bred bravado. It was almost a ritual. Before battle, while Guardsmen cursed and prayed and the servants of the Omnissiah climbed inside their great war machines, the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes talked about what was and what would be. The destruction they would bring to their xenos enemies and the honour of being the Emperor’s Angels.

The shattered rock trembled under the Chapter Master’s boots. From out of the charge-blasted exit stomped a Dreadnought, painted in midnight black. It trailed frayed honours and was draped with chains that jangled with its every thumping step. Strips of vellum hung like a tabard between its heavily armoured legs, while a roaring brazier burned on each shoulder. A cracked and browning skull sat in a hooded socket, each eye aglow, and the gilded wings of the Imperial aquila spread across its battle-plate.

‘The High Chaplain has awoken,’ Captain Berengard announced.

The monstrous machine thundered past the Chapter Master before coming to a stop, its automotive engines rumbling. A living shrine, Chaplain Bachorath had been entombed in his sarcophagal battle-suit for longer than Thane had been alive. While the Chapter had its full complement of company Chaplains, all drawn from the different Successor Chapters, the venerable Bachorath had been given the title of High Chaplain in honour of both his many years of service and the number of foes that had fallen before his hulking form.

When he spoke — a voice that issued from vox-casters and boomed with age, experience and madness — the sound carried across the smoke-wreathed desolation.

‘Where?’

The Chaplain-Dreadnought’s brutal chainfist growled to life, while his twin-linked assault cannons cycled. High Chaplain Bachorath did not know where he was or the year into which he had been awoken. He did not know the nature of the enemy beyond. He did not even seem to care that he was standing among the ranks of the Imperial Fists rather than his own Chapter. All he knew was that he had been called to serve. To kill in his Emperor’s name.

‘Everywhere, High Chaplain,’ Thane told him.

The Chapter Master scanned the swirling black obscurity of the crash site. He peered through the choking dust that glowed an infernal red with the light from the molten surface below. The auto-senses of his Terminator helmet cycled through different spectra before settling on a false-colour filter representing target signatures.

Thane took a moment to absorb what he saw. The horizon was not just blotched with enemies. It positively blazed with approaching targets. Hordes upon hordes of hulking monsters, charging for 44 Thoosa — the mountain that had appeared upon their savage world and levelled forts, workshops and hundreds of thousands of warrior greenskins. Clan kin, whom the barbarian orks of the neighbouring fortress precincts had seen disappear in a thunderous tsunami of dust, flame and unstoppable force.

His vision picked out the serrated outlines of rabid green mobs that stretched as far as his armour’s spirit could see: horned helms, spiked armour, monstrous augmentations, ragged banners and barbed chainswords held high. Thane could see rolling gunfortresses, belching heat and smoke, with warbikes chewing up the rocky ground and surging ahead. Hunchbacked walkers, dragging hydraulic claws and shoulder-mounted artillery, were lost in the shadow of an ork gargant — a towering horror of layered metal and enormous weaponry. Even at such a distance, the thing shook the ground with its hydraulic step. Coming up behind the weaponised effigy, scrambled from some nearby base, Thane could see enemy aircraft thundering in: pot-bellied bombers and junk fighters that were little more than jet engines with wings.

The Chapter Master’s hearts beat hard at the sight. The Imperial Fists had levelled a small corner of the Beast’s empire, a vast, walled precinct of his continental palace. The monster would not stand for that. He would do what the Imperials had done when the ork fleets and attack moons had left worlds burning in their wake — he would send his best.

And like the Imperial Fists, like the Space Marines of the Deathwatch and mighty Vulkan himself, its best would die. Spilling from surrounding strongholds and the fortress-palace of Gorkogrod itself, the green hordes aimed to close the gap — to flood the devastated landing zone with firepower, muscle and savagery. Gunfortresses and scrap-tanks would ride roughshod over the interlopers. Bombers would obliterate the crash site. The gargant, both an effigy to savage gods and a palace sentinel, had been despatched to crush them.

Thane didn’t have the time or manpower to stop such apocalyptic weapons of destruction. He could not allow drop-ships, conveyors and their precious cargo of fighting souls to be swallowed up by the green maelstrom. The Chapter Master had established a toe-hold right in the middle of the Beast’s barbarian empire. He would not lose it to a counter-insurgency, not even an attack of such overwhelming strength that it swept in towards them like a natural force.

All about him, Thane knew that the Imperial Fists were seeing what he was seeing.

‘And here you wait,’ High Chaplain Bachorath’s voice crackled from his vox-casters, the scorn in his tone like a cutting edge.

‘Did you used to favour the sparring cages, High Chaplain?’ Thane asked.

‘I did,’ the Chaplain-Dreadnought told him, unsure as to whether the new Chapter Master was levelling some kind of insult at him. ‘And if I were to favour them now, I would be able to tear the cage — bars, opponent and all — out of the auditorium.’

‘I don’t doubt it, Venerable Chaplain,’ the Chapter Master said. ‘Brothers of my ilk favoured fist over blade.’

‘The pugilist’s path,’ Bachorath said. ‘I, too, have broken my honoured brothers’ heads in my day.’

‘Then you know,’ Thane said, ‘that the knock-out blow is often struck out of opportunity. Opportunity created by an intentional opening. An invitation that cannot be resisted. You put your opponent where you want him — in the devastating path of your fist.’

‘That is as may be,’ the High Chaplain said, his vox-hailed words echoing about the shattered remains of 44 Thoosa, ‘but my auto-senses tell me that we are standing upon a multitude of paths and on all of them we are the ones about to be devastated.’

‘Just be ready to do the Emperor’s work,’ Thane told the Chaplain. ‘Brother Zoldt, how far out are the drop-ships?’

‘Two minutes, Chapter Master,’ the Epistolary told him across the vox-channel.

‘And, at present speed, how long until the enemy vanguard reach our position?’

‘The same.’

Thane stood and waited. The dust and smoke began to thin. The strips of molten rock bubbled and spat, and the roar of the enemy grew louder about them. The titanic steps of the gargant. The coughing and rumbling of monstrous engines. Savage battle cries. Soon the silhouettes of the ork hordes could be made out in the haze. Hulking chieftains towered over their followers, bellowing their alien rage and shooting into the sky with belt-fed weaponry. Bikes screamed ahead. Gunfortresses fired their mighty cannons blind. The sky was filled with the drone of closing aircraft. The cave entrance that the Imperial Fists had blasted in their asteroid transport was cast into the shadow of the great gargant. Shells, from both the titanic walker and the ork armour, smashed into the side of 44 Thoosa. Grit and shattered rock rained from the impacts down onto the Imperial Fists, drumming off their plate.

‘Chapter Master, I must insist…’ High Chaplain Bachorath said, his words bouncing around the mountainous exterior of the asteroid.

‘Hold position,’ Thane ordered across the vox. Gunship-deposited Land Raiders idled. The powerful engines of Space Marine bikes chugged. Stormtalon gunships swooped in, the launchers of their missiles aimed over the ranks of Imperial Fists. Company by company, they held position about the broad cave entrance, their boltguns, pistols and heavy weapons aimed at the oncoming storm of green flesh and carnage.

‘My lord, that gargant…’ Tychor said, but Thane ignored the standard bearer. He could hear the flap of the Chapter battle standard in the backwash of the gunship engines.

‘Drop-ships and conveyors on final approach,’ Epistolary Zoldt reported. Above, beyond the drone of approaching bombers and the roar of his own gunships, the Chapter Master could hear the descent engines of the gigantic drop-ships, each carrying Astra Militarum regiments and macroclades of skitarii soldiers. Beyond them he could make out the even deeper rumble of mass conveyors bringing down the god-machines of the Adeptus Titanicus.

‘We must attack,’ High Chaplain Bachorath insisted with a growl of his automotive engines.

‘Hold,’ Thane said. He licked his lips. The enemy were everywhere. He could hear the roars of monsters astride warbikes and the crash of gunfire coming into range. The ground before the Imperial Fists ranks erupted in sparks, showering stone and the splatter of molten rock.

‘My lord?’ Emmerich Berengard said, even the grizzled Templar stirred to question his Chapter Master’s orders and sanity. Thane nodded. He had drawn the enemy in. It was time to deliver the killing strike.

‘Lady Brassanas,’ Thane said. ‘Our foe is in range and in great number. Now is the time, Sister. Do what our bolts and blades cannot.’

Thane looked back grimly at Tychor and Berengard, while the High Chaplain’s autoloaders primed with a sequence of clunks that seemed to underscore his doubts. Brassanas led her Sisters of Silence out from under the shadow of the asteroid. Picking their path carefully through the channels of molten rock, they heaved along the monstrous ork psyker until they were clear of the Imperial Fists. At Brassanas’ sign, the Sisters backed from the creature in a crescent. Letting the chains run to their full length, they secured the creature to a mangled girder. The monster became the nexus of a blaze of ethereal power. Bolts of psychic rage snapped between it and the rocky floor, searing with growing intensity.

As the Silent Sisters moved away, back to the safety of the waiting Imperial Fists, the psyker became a dazzling nova of otherworldly energy, spidery arcs sizzling about it. It tried to lunge free of its restraints to no avail.

Thane looked back and forth between the blinding light of the ork psyker and the rabid advance of the alien hordes. His plate’s systems registered the first slugs of the ork vanguard plucking at his Terminator armour. Dathan Tychor held the Chapter standard high and took his position with the honour guard around his Chapter Master. The barrels of High Chaplain Bachorath’s assault cannons whirred to life, in readiness for the storm to come. Chainswords growled in unison amongst the battle-brothers of the Eighth Company. Across the Chapter, missiles primed in their launchers. Multi-meltas and plasma guns hissed to readiness. Heavy bolters and boltguns cleared with a thunk. First rounds were loaded into breeches. Barrels were aimed. Ceramite fingertips rested on triggers.

‘Now, damn it…’ Thane growled. The words were almost a plea.

Suddenly the intensifying lightstorm about the psyker died. Thane felt his stomach flip with the backwash of otherworldly emptiness. With tens of thousands of orks converging on the impact site, their mere presence feeding the psykers with ethereal power, the ork prisoner had become a weapon of mass destruction. Without the intensity of the nullifying field about it, the colossal psychic energies building within the creature blasted the monster’s head from its shoulders in a fountain of gore.

And then followed the ugly heads of the closing attackers. The crazed warrior orks on the front line died in droves even as they charged at the Imperial Fists with reckless bloodlust, their boots hammering on several steps more as their bodies crumbled and their heads disappeared in blasts of blood and brain. As ork carcasses crashed down into the dirt, green ethereal energies crackled from the stumps of the necks and briefly across their bodies before dying away.

The effect of the Silent Sisters’ retreat became clearer as the forward ranks of orks stopped shooting. They dropped their weapons and clutched their heads and tusks. A bestial shriek arose from each before their heads started exploding, shooting gore into the skies of Ullanor. As a red mist descended upon the greenskin hordes, the forward ranks collapsed. The cacophony of gunfire began to die away. The headless corpses of ork riders fell from careering warbikes. The cannons of battlefortresses fell silent before the tanks drifted into their own allies. Ploughing through mobs of armoured greenskins, the vehicles mulched orks in their tracks and smashed into each other, resulting in spectacular explosions and a storm of shrapnel.

The surviving orks and their hulking chieftains were at first unperturbed by their falling comrades. It was normal for ork vanguard troops to fall before enemy gunfire. The following warriors barged past crashing corpses to get to the front line, where their savage gunfire or barbed bladework might find an enemy. Instead they found a furious bolt-storm of nearly a thousand Imperial Fists unleashing their blessed weaponry. Missile launchers streaked destruction into the oncoming hordes while the assault cannons of Stormtalon gunships chewed through the thinning enemy ranks.

Before long the ork army had stopped in its tracks. The air was heavy with gore and the ground carpeted with alien corpses. Battlewagons slid down into bubbling hollows of molten rock, melting in the magma, their headless crews still slumped inside. Above the Imperial Fists, the great gargant had frozen. Its colossal workings moaned, the mournful drone of metal upon metal and frozen hydraulics echoing about 44 Thoosa. The mighty vehicle tottered. Gravity and the weight of its monstrous weaponry was dragging it over. Without living crew to correct the war machine’s fall, the towering effigy of alien ingenuity went over on its side. The titanic walker shattered as it hit the ground, pulverising greenskin bodies and filling the sky with an excruciating boom whose echoes seemed to hang in the air.

With the gargant toppled and the field of battle a bloody haze of ork bodies, Thane heard the drop-ships and conveyors of the fleet descend. The landing zone was easy to find, painted red in the gore of warrior foes for kilometres about the crashed asteroid. Silent slaughter greeted the landing gears of the mighty drop-ships. Wreathed in steam and venting gases, the colossal Astra Militarum and skitarii transports sat upon the bloody ground as following craft, including the huge orbital conveyors of the Adeptus Titanicus, made their final approach. Moments later, Navy strike fighters screamed across the sky, banking and circling the carnage surrounding 44 Thoosa.

The Imperial Fists stood there amongst the death and destruction, their guns heavy with bolts unfired and their plate pristine. As the noble yellow of their armour and idling vehicles misted red with the drifting blood of the battlefield, the remaining Sisters of Silence left the asteroid with the two surviving ork psykers chained between them.

Stepping forward through the ranks of his honour guard and from beneath the standard, Chapter Master Thane stood next to High Chaplain Bachorath. Beyond, through the thinning dust and the blood-stained skies, he could see the distant fortress-palace of the Beast. The vast, jagged monstrosity of stone and metal plating appeared to have suffered some superficial structural damage as a result of the asteroid’s impact. Gorkogrod still stood, however: its colossal architecture, reinforced walls and fat citadels still towering above the clanlands and desolation of Ullanor.

Thane smacked a clenched black power fist against the Chaplain-Dreadnought’s thick plate.

‘Now we attack,’ Thane told him.

The Chapter Master began to issue orders to his captains and companies across the vox. ‘Bikes and Land Speeders to reconnoitre ahead of the main force. Land Raider columns to take position along our flanks. We move as a Chapter. We move as one. Companies, form up. Captain Karlito, your Second Company Centurions are to take vanguard and set the pace. Captain Brondal,’ Thane said, ‘the rearguard belongs to the Sixth. You are to have the Chapter’s back.’

‘As ever we shall, Chapter Master,’ Mace Brondal returned.

‘Lady Brassanas, look to your prisoners,’ Thane said. ‘They travel under the Chapter’s protection until their talents are ready to be deployed.’

‘The plan, Chapter Master?’ First Captain Berengard said, hefting his mighty blade.

‘Is simple,’ Thane said. ‘We are the bolt discharged from the gun — direct and unstoppable. We punch through the alien host, puncturing plate, rupturing flesh and breaking bone.’ He looked up at the shapes of black Thunderhawks dropping down out of the sky. ‘The Deathwatch will eradicate any orks that try to close the gap behind us. The Guardsmen and Adeptus Mechanicus will clear anything that remains. Like the bolt, the Adeptus Astartes will fly straight and true. Our target is the Great Beast of Ullanor, and let no wall, weapon or creature stand in our path. For we are the Imperial Fists — the living weapons of the Emperor.’

It was a glorious sight to behold. Near one thousand sons of Rogal Dorn, marching to war. With Karlito’s Centurions setting the steady pace, company upon company held stalwart formation behind. Land Raiders rumbled beside the Imperial Fists, mulching through the bodies of headless orks and barging derelict battlewagons aside. Captain Gortez rode ahead with the Land Speeders and heavy-set bikes of the Fifth Company, while Brondal’s Tactical squads covered the Chapter’s rear. All the while the gun-laden towers and jagged walls of Gorkogrod rose before the Imperial Fists.

As Thane trudged through the sea of bodies and the burning rubble left behind by the city-levelling power of the asteroid impact, Epistolary Zoldt kept him apprised of the status of the various forces attacking Ullanor. The Titans of the Legio Decimata were raining destruction down upon the precincts near 44 Thoosa’s impact site, levelling cannon-bristling fortresses, monstrous factories and the shanty workshops that belched smoke in between. Princeps Senioris Grimaldi had managed to field his Titans from mass conveyors and bulk landers that were swiftly overrun by greenskin hordes. At the price of an entire legion of skitarii soldiers and combat-servitor ship sentinels, the god-machines Deus Domitor, Divinitata Excelsii and Imperator Ultimatum were allowed their freedom. Although denied the ritual observances that usually heralded the awakening of their machine-spirits, the annihilation on offer in the palace precincts was enough to satisfy them. With the Deus Domitor damaged by enemy bombing runs and the wild strikes of ork artillery pieces, Grimaldi awaited drop-ships carrying what remained of the 201st Zenobian Regiment of Foot, in the hope that the Guardsmen and those that followed could establish a foothold in the apocalyptic wasteland left behind by his Titans and retake the landers.

Lord Marshal Rothenberg, meanwhile, had managed to unload his armour in the devastation following one of the cataclysmic asteroid strikes, but the terrain in which he had put down was difficult. Leman Russ variants, heavy battle tanks and Baneblades from patchwork contingents of the Delphriq Cataphracts, the 1st Gorgonian Ironclads, the Nymnal Adamaticlax and Brontaghast IVth Armoured had all deployed together to punch through the ork hordes and their inferior battlefortresses. Progress was slow, however, as the tanks became bogged down in the extensive delta system of a heavily polluted river that had run through the devastated precinct. The river was choked with fungus and ork bodies from the asteroid impact, and the going was made worse by the toxic sludge from a vast factory complex further upstream. The delta turned to blood, mud and mulch beneath the tracks of Rothenberg’s armour, forcing the lord marshal to deploy the remnants of the 39th Lundran Indentured — the only infantry regiment currently at his disposal — in helping to dig out sinking Leman Russ battle tanks.

Then came the second wave — orks whose gunfortresses and battlewagons turned out to be no better adapted to the environment than Rothenberg’s own division. With both ork and Imperial armour intermittently stuck in the heavy metal mire, mud-thrashing tanks became small islands from which Guardsmen and greenskins exchanged vicious fire. Like a honey trap, the thunder of Imperial cannons drew creatures on foot and within the patchwork plating of battlewagons for kilometres around, turning the engagement into an ever bigger mess.

Magos Reductor Ohmnix was having better fortune in a range of volcanic mountains just to the north. The nest of peaks reached up from the lands beyond the Beast’s palace. They had been fortified to form a surface-to-orbit macrocannon emplacement and a line of surrounding strongholds, whose artillery sat in installations carved in the mountainsides. As well as being military fortresses, the strongholds stained the sky with black smoke belched from workshops and weapons factories, the orks’ colossal forges utilising the magma chambers of the surrounding volcanoes.

Magos Ohmnix’s initial assessment had told him that the embedded fortresses would require days to take, even with the small contingent of self-propelled artillery, bombards and siege mortars under his command. Fortunately for the tech-priest, the impact of one of the asteroids had initiated a chain reaction of volcanic eruptions that flooded the interior chambers of the mountains with lava. With hundreds of thousands of orks already fleeing the stronghold, the magos reductor used his monstrous artillery on the mountainsides. Thousands of tonnes of dislodged rock and debris crashed down the slope breaking and burying the escaping orks. Deploying skitarii rangers aboard Mechanicus Valkyries, Ohmnix had his cybernetic soldiers pick off the hundreds of hardy greenskin survivors that had escaped the disaster.

As Grimaldi, Ohmnix and Rothenberg attempted to get footholds in the area about the asteroid impact sites, they were followed down by the meagre stream of reinforcement ships sent by Dominus Zhokuv and Admiral Napier. Colossal drop-ships carrying Astra Militarum regiments, skitarii macroclades, and remnant armour formations belonging to both negotiated the storm of atmospheric gun platforms, ork attack ships, grapplers and fat cruise missiles launched from ground silos on the planet’s surface. Legio Cybernetica ark freighters, transporting maniples of battle-automata, and mass conveyors ran the gauntlet of crash-capsules and ramming craft as they attempted to get their precious few ancient and honoured god-machines down to the landing site intact. Even faithships carrying the ravening militia armies of the Ecclesiarchy attempted to run the ork blockade, alongside the sleek Temple craft of the Officio Assassinum that were used to a more clandestine insertion.

As Zoldt’s blizzard of reports came in, it became clear to Thane just how far the odds were stacked against them on Ullanor. Drop-ships carrying surviving regiments of Guardsmen were being blasted out of the sky by rocket silos. Hastily refitted Imperial battle cruisers were tumbling from orbit aflame. The attack groups had managed to carve out landing sites in the swarming multitudes of the Beast’s continental hordes, but an entire planet was coming down on them. While the remaining carriers and ark freighters continued to send drop-ships and landers with small regiments and skitarii half-legions, they could not match the reinforcements summoned by the Beast on his own world. Tribes of nomadic ork warriors mounted on bikes and wartracks. Cavalcades of tanks and battlefortresses under the command of the Beast’s most monstrous chieftains. Millions upon millions of ork warriors, summoned from every foetid corner of Ullanor, drawn to the battle and their Beast by the apocalyptic arrival of humanity on their soil.

As the sun lowered on the horizon, a hazy orb that smeared the sky with blood and dust, the central stronghold of the Beast’s palace could be made out. It was a towering, ugly silhouette of jagged irregularity — serrated battlements, armoured towers, the barrels of vast superguns and alien architectural bombast. Its construction was both martial and monstrous, boasting exotic surface — to-orbit weaponry, massive gargant assembly workshops and tribal sub-citadels.

As the sunlight disappeared, the flashes of the space battle above became clear. The darkening firmament became a rune-bank blinking with alerts and warning lamps. However bad it was on the surface, it would be worse in the void. The system was choked with attack ships, crash-capsules and hulks. Ork boarders filled derelict craft to the rivets and orbited Ullanor, waiting for the call to war. While the Imperial Fists were the sword thrusting for the Beast’s alien heart, the Navy battle cruisers and Mechanicus arkships were the shield, with the mighty Phalanx weathering the worst of the punishment.

As Navy Lightnings shrieked overhead and battle-scarred Marauder aircraft tore through the sky in dog fights with enemy flyers, flaming ork attack ships tumbled out of the benighted heavens. Blasted to wrecks in the disciplined broadsides of grand cruisers and smashed aside by the fortress-monastery, vessels plummeted broken-backed and glowing with the heat of re-entry. They struck the blasted lands of Ullanor, creating fountains of rock and wreckage that rocketed skyward. A colossal derelict plunged spectacularly down through the heavens, breaking in half after some kind of brutal ramming action. Zoldt informed his Chapter Master with heavy heart that the wreck was the venerable Mars-class battle cruiser Tyrant’s Light. Hitting the surface of Ullanor, the flaming remains of the majestic vessel rolled across the path of the Chapter, forcing Captain Gortez to recall bikes and Land Speeders that had streaked ahead of the advancing column of Imperial Fists.

The battle-brothers of the Second Company trudged on in their Centurion suits, followed by veterans in Tactical Dreadnought armour. The companies of the Imperial Fists marched to war, flanked by rumbling Land Raiders. Before them the palace-fortress grew — a jagged monstrosity of a fortification, all towers, ugly stone and thick armour plating. The stronghold was an architectural abomination, smothered in overlapping energy shielding and protective fields. In some places the monstrous fortification was unshielded and open to the sky. In others it benefited from triple shielding, able to resist the most determined of attacks. While the broken corpses and shattered structures smouldering beneath their boots were testament to the destructive power of the asteroid’s impact, the Beast’s fortress seemed to have weathered the worst of the devastation.

‘Captain Gortez, Chapter Master,’ the vox chirped.

‘Proceed, captain.’

‘Third wave enemy forces,’ the former Crimson Fist reported, ‘leaving the palace.’

‘Form up,’ Thane ordered, waving the tank column on.

It did not take Thane long to see the reinforcements. A coordinated attack. It made sense. The Beast would rather his forces face the Imperial Fists outside of Gorkogrod’s walls than within them and indeed he had designed his palace this way, so that the progress of any invaders might be frustrated by enormous barriers cutting the continental palace into numerous kill-zones. Warbikes and gun-mounting buggies leapt the fortress’ jagged walls in a constant stream of outriders, no doubt intended to flank the approaching Imperial Fists. Ork aircraft borne on sets of serrated rotor blades took to the air from the palace compounds, the chug of their engines and beat of their blades echoing across the desolation. Each carried beneath it a huge piece of ordnance, almost too heavy for the craft to get off the ground. Meanwhile, on the smoking wasteland about them, hatches set within rocky bunkers began to open, pushing aside smouldering wreckage and baked earth. Hulking orks dressed in heavy armour and bearing brute cybernetics and monstrous weaponry began to pour from the hatches.

‘Artillery,’ Captain Berengard called out to his First Company veterans as big guns and mortars within the fortress walls began hurling explosive shells into the air.

Thane frowned. The orks knew where the Imperial Fists were heading. As he had drawn the xenos in to kill them earlier, now the orks were doing the same — inviting the Space Marines along the path of least resistance, straight into annihilation.

He had not brought the Imperial Fists this far to be caught in the jaws of an alien trap. He wasn’t going to be outflanked and blasted to oblivion within striking distance of the palace walls. The Beast was attempting to hit the Space Marines from both sides and from above. Thane thought on the jumping bikes, the rotor-bladed junkers, the orks flooding the wasteland from the subterranean tunnels running out from the palace. There was something else. The enemy had further doom to visit upon the Imperial Fists.

‘Fifth Company, hold!’ Thane roared across the vox. ‘Gortez, halt your advance!’

It was too late. The first of the captain’s bikers had been storming towards the palace walls, intent on reconnoitring the fortifications before the arrival of the Chapter. Several Imperial Fists bikes and their riders rocketed up into the air in an explosion of grit and flame.

‘Bright skies,’ Thane swore, the Eidolican oath rising unbidden to his lips. The mines had not even been particularly well hidden, as Gortez had confirmed moments later. Spiked like fat sea-urchins, they had been buried in shallow earth waiting for an enemy to wander into the field. Perhaps they had been put in place after the initial attacks on the palace. Perhaps entire precincts were booby-trapped. Thane had no way to know if the entire palace was surrounded by minefields, but he did not have time to test such a theory. He needed to get his Imperial Fists inside to do the job they had come to Ullanor to do. Slay the Beast.

As artillery landed indiscriminately across the plain, emerging orks were thrown into the air in blossoming balls of flame. They seemed not to care how many of their own they lost, as long as their fire found Space Marines. A shell dropped among Captain Uzziah’s Fourth Company, blasting four Space Marines to bloody pieces and knocking the rest of the company to the ground in a storm of shrapnel.

‘Zoldt,’ Thane called angrily. ‘Get me Captain Decarion — now.’

‘Yes, Chapter Master.’

Thane pointed up at the Stormtalon gunships hovering noisily above the companies with their missile launchers armed. Rotating his armoured finger around and then jabbing it at the ork aircraft, the Chapter Master watched the gunships leave their companies and peel off to meet the approaching junkers in the air. They were overtaken by Thunderhawks painted in midnight black. Hellstrike missiles streaked away from the wings of the Deathwatch gunships, blasting apart ork bike formations and gun buggies. Heavy bolter fire from the Thunderhawks’ flanks tore up the smouldering wasteland, ripping through heavily armoured warriors emerging from hatches in the ground. As the gunships circled the battlefield, rearguard squads of Deathwatch Space Marines ran up behind the Imperial Fists formations.

‘We have your back, brothers,’ a Fenrisian voice barked across the vox. A voice Thane recognised as belonging to Kjarvik Stormcrow, whose Deathwatch squad had been instrumental in securing two of the ork psykers for use in the attack.

‘Land Raiders,’ Thane voxed, ‘you are authorised to offer suppression fire. Companies Oberon and Valdanor to support. Captain Storn, your Devastators front and centre. All other companies, keep up the pace.’

‘The Phalanx for you, Chapter Master,’ Epistolary Zoldt told him.

‘Decarion, are you on station?’ Thane demanded.

‘My lord, we’ve had some complications,’ Captain Decarion confessed. Over the channel Thane could hear the sound of combat shotguns.

‘The Phalanx has been boarded?’ Thane asked, his voice edged with concern. He saw the helms of other Imperial Fists turn at the prospect. ‘Status, captain!’

‘The Phalanx has sustained damage, Chapter Master,’ Decarion told him, ‘but is still operational. The orks are throwing everything at us. Literally: they’re using their star forts and gun platforms to make suicide runs at the fortress-monastery as they orbit. While our turrets and cannons kept boarding capsules and ramming ships at bay, we were struck by an orbital shipyard and the alien craft being assembled within. As we became tangled in the scaffolding, orks from the vessel flooded the perimeter decks.’

‘Captain,’ Thane said. ‘The Imperial Fists need the Phalanx. We need her lances for an orbital strike. We need her bombardment cannons to break the palace open. Do whatever you must, but we need the Phalanx back on station and we need it now.’

‘Understood, my lord,’ Captain Decarion voxed back.

Above the advancing Imperial Fists the gunships strafed left and right, their assault cannons blazing. Enemy aircraft laden with fat ordnance banked this way and that, their own blasting weaponry raining empty shells down on the desolation below. Cutting through the light armour of the flyers with their forward guns, the Space Marine gunships finished the craft with precision marksmanship. Rockets tore away from the Stormtalons as they expertly flew through serrated rotor blades and heavy gunfire. Several aircraft detonated, a larger fireball following almost immediately afterwards as their ordnance exploded also. Others peeled off, streaming black smoke from their workings and compartments, before plummeting into the ground to create flaming craters.

As the Chapter advanced towards Gorkogrod, Thane knew they were running out of room to manoeuvre. With ork artillery dropping from the sky and the minefields before them, it would only be a matter of time before the ork forces moved up behind to cut them off from the rest of the advancing Deathwatch under Watch Commander Warfist, and the surviving portions of Attack Group Thoosa. Looking up, Thane saw the sky briefly lit up by a flare in the pin-pricked darkness of the void.

‘Zoldt?’ the Chapter Master called.

‘Reports confirm it to be the Lex Immaculata, fleet carrier,’ the Epistolary told him moments later. ‘A hit upon her engine column at point-blank range.’

Thane thought about the swarming havoc of the space battle raging above their heads. With vessels all but smashing into one another in the confines of orbit, he doubted whether much of the gunnery was anything other than point-blank.

A wild round ricocheted off his pauldron, from a mob of armoured orks throwing their monstrous forms at the Chapter flanks. Imperial Fists from the Third and Seventh Companies had climbed up onto the Land Raiders to offer a bolt-storm in support of the tanks’ flamestorm cannons. As the rolling Land Raiders presented a curtain of fiery doom to the attacking orks, turning towering monsters into thrashing infernos of skin-melting agony, the riding Space Marines fired through the flames and into the creatures beyond. A chance artillery impact turned two of the Land Raiders into infernos of their own, blasting the fiery wrecks from the ground to land on their roofs and sides. Imperial Fists ran in to assist their brothers but both the crews and the Space Marines firing from the roofs were beyond help.

‘Fifth Company, withdraw,’ Thane commanded as Captain Storn’s Devastator squads ran up through the ranks of the Imperial Fists. As Gortez and his men rode back to the Chapter, Storn’s Space Marines took position in their stead with their heavy weapons. As buggies and greenskins on warbikes rode at the Imperial Fists the Ninth Company opened fire. Missiles streaked off into buggies, blasting them apart. Heavy plasma guns sent orbs of superheated gas straight through the engine columns of vehicles, causing them to roll to a steaming stop, while heavy bolters carved furrows across the orks, tearing their ragged bodies from seats and saddles. Lascannons cut surging warbikes in half, while those that did make it through the storm of destruction were turned into a smeared fusion of flesh and metal by the blast of multi-meltas.

Tychor ran at his Chapter Master, the standard bearer hitting Thane’s Terminator plate with the powered force of his own suit. Thane was knocked back as a piece of ork artillery hit the Imperial Fists’ front ranks. High Chaplain Bachorath stumbled on his pistons and hydraulics. The bodies of Sisters of Silence were flung into the air in their slender bronze plate and flaming cloaks. The ork psykers went wild, tearing at their chains and the remaining Sisters. Chief Apothecary Delgado ran in, his bone-white plate smeared with soot. A second shell, following the first on its random trajectory, came down, blasting Delgado back off his feet. Several First Company veterans had parts of their Terminator plate sheared from their bodies, while Berengard’s second, Sergeant Eckhart, became an armoured silhouette writhing in flame. Brother Alverez, the Second Company’s Apothecary, ran over to check on Delgado but the Chief Apothecary was dead, his body a shattered mess.

For a moment, a terrible dread crept into Thane’s heart. That he had doomed them all with such a bold strategy, this strike straight to the heart of the greenskin empire. That the Imperial Fists would be lost… again.

‘Zoldt,’ Thane roared. ‘Call it in to Captain Decarion. Lance strikes. Full spread. I want a path cleared to the target and then I want every piece of ordnance — every warhead on board the Phalanx — dropped on the outer wall of the palace. Do you hear me?’

‘Affirmative, Chapter Master,’ the Epistolary said, staggering away from the remains of a Land Raider that an ork bombard had just turned into a flaming wreck.

‘We have reached the edge of the minefield, Chapter Master,’ Captain Storn reported as his heavy weapons Space Marines jogged to a halt.

‘All stop and close in,’ Thane ordered, prompting their perimeter of Land Raiders to crunch to a standstill. Track to track, the tanks put a wall of armour between their brothers on foot and the orks pouring from dusty hatches situated in the desolation around the minefield.

‘Brother Stormcrow,’ Thane called across the vox.

‘How can the Deathwatch aid you, Chapter Master?’ Kjarvik Stormcrow called back.

‘The mighty Phalanx will pound the palace, but the fortifications are triple-shielded in places.’

‘Our Thunderhawks report large generator structures further along the palace wall perimeter,’ the Fenrisian reported. ‘Leave it to us.’

Thane looked behind him as Deathwatch squads peeled off across the smouldering wasteland, protected by black Thunderhawks making strafing runs along their position. About the Imperial Fists formations, hulking orks in heavy armour advanced behind shields the size of bulkheads. Behind, more greenskins — drunk on battle and the prospect of tearing Space Marines apart — sprayed the Land Raiders with a stream of slugs from their outlandish guns. Crude rockets spiralled through the night air, sometimes wheeling off into the sky and sometimes juddering the tanks with their armour-cracking impact.

‘Captain Uzziah, split the Fourth by squads to support the Third and Seventh on the Land Raiders,’ Thane commanded. ‘Chaplain Ishcarion, have your Assault Marines cut down anything that gets through our perimeter.’

Behind him, Thane could hear Gortez and Brondal’s companies fiercely ensuring that the Chapter wasn’t cut from the rest of Attack Group Thoosa. Land Raiders nearby suddenly rocked as muscle-bound orks slammed into them with their shoulders. While the tanks’ flamestorm cannons turned huge swathes of the foe to ash and charred bone, the orks’ numbers were such that many inevitably got through. Captain Valdanor and his Imperial Fists blasted heads and horned helms from shoulders as the orks tried to break the perimeter. Space Marines from the Fourth Company, running up to join Valdanor on the Land Raiders, hammered those that got through on their approach, with Chaplain Ishcarion’s Assault squads carving up what was left with the sweep and thrash of chainblades. Another wild shell landed on the right flank, bouncing several tanks on their tracks.

Circled by angry bikes and buggies, the Imperial Fists were holding their own against the hulking orks pouring from the subterranean hatches. Blocked from advancing by the minefield, the sons of Dorn simply had to suffer the destruction raining down on them from the palace artillery. With battle-brothers blasted apart and Land Raiders turning into storms of shrapnel and flame, Thane peered down the flank of the palace wall. Deathwatch Thunderhawks were being blown out of the sky by ork macrocannons. Those gunships that did manage to fire off their lascannons and bombardment cannons sent blasts into the giga-generators powering the palace’s overlapping fields.

‘Phalanx!’ Thane yelled into his vox, as the perimeter fields began to collapse. ‘I need that—’

And everything turned to blinding light. Imperial Fists in their armoured suits became scorched silhouettes and orks melted away in the stunning blaze. As Thane’s eyes and auto-senses adapted, he saw lance beams searing down from the sky and striking the palace wall. Somehow Decarion had managed to hold off the boarding orks and get the fortress-monastery back on station above the palace of the Beast.

The world rocked beneath the Chapter Master’s boots. In blasting a breach into the fortified rock and armour plating of the unshielded palace wall, the Phalanx’s lances had super-heated the ground of the perimeter. The field of mines before the wall was detonating in a chain reaction, shattering the wall’s foundations and causing sections of it to topple. Vanguard Imperial Fists attempted to retreat but were blasted off their feet by the force of the rippling detonations. Space Marines in Centurion suits were knocked down while Land Raiders closest to the minefield were rolled onto their backs by the blasts.

Charging orks were turned to ash on the wind. One moment they were ferocious alien predators, behemoths of fang and muscle — the next they were gone, scoured from existence. Those monsters not caught in the apocalyptic blaze were blasted aside by the shockwave of the lance strikes. They crashed into the sides of the Land Raiders with bone-shattering force. Space Marine bikes were knocked over, Land Speeders spun and bobbed in the air and Imperial Fists slid from the roofs of tanks, knocked off by the backwash of heat.

Thane felt the quake of explosions beneath his armoured boots. The Chapter Master steadied Tychor, who was desperately trying to put out flames that were swirling about the battle standard. The air about them was thick with smoke. Space Marines emerged from cover like soot-caked revenants. Thane was about to issue an order when another apocalyptic boom erupted about the Imperial Fists. This time it emanated from below the ground. Something had detonated in the tunnels beneath them, those same tunnels the armoured orks had emerged from to flank their attackers. The palace and surrounding precincts were so bewildering in their architecture and monstrous in function that the rippling explosions could have originated from anything: subterranean promethium depots, ammunition dumps or even the trapped gases of an overloaded waste system.

But it made no difference either way. With nowhere for the power of the explosion to go, it ripped up through the ground, spouting streams of flame. Thane felt the ground give way beneath him and then he was falling amongst tonnes of rubble, everything ablaze with the blinding light of venting flame, deafened by the ear-splitting rumble of the world breaking up about him. Finally there was stillness, dust and darkness.

Thane lay there for a moment, blinking himself back to his senses. His leg hurt. One of his optic helm displays was alerting him to a hundred different problems, while the other was dead. Hooking the thumbs of his power fists under the great piece of rock laying across him, Thane heaved the boulder off him. With an effort, he got himself to his feet — not easy in Terminator plate. A pauldron of his suit had been stove in by falling rock, his helm was cracked — including a shattered lens — and the hydraulics of his leg sparked with damage. As he limped about he found himself surrounded by ghosts in the dust and haze. Suit lamps picked out groups of Imperial Fists heaving stone and vehicle parts off the trapped bodies of their brothers.

As his honour guard located and surrounded him, the Chapter Master saw Captain Berengard and members of the First Company digging High Chaplain Bachorath out of the rubble. Lady Brassanas and her Sisters of Silence were struggling with one rabid ork psyker attempting to make an escape. The second was dead, having been crushed beneath huge pieces of shattered masonry.

Soot-stained Apothecaries moved among the battle-brothers, rendering succour to the wounded and removing the gene-seed from the dead. Thane crunched through the collapse, helping to right Terminators and Centurions whose thick armour had allowed them to survive the fall.

Through the thick dust and darkness the Chapter Master saw Tychor helping a battle-brother up a rubble incline, heading towards him. In his gauntlet he clutched the standard, the banner hanging miserably from its broken crossbar. As the two Space Marines got closer, he recognised the second as Epistolary Zoldt.

Thane shook grit from his plate as the dust settled. He stood in a rock-strewn depression. It looked as if a section of the outer palace grounds and sub-level foundations had collapsed under the force of the underground explosion. Thane and his battle-brothers, picking themselves up out of the rubble, found themselves in what remained of a tunnel that ran beneath the palace. Shattered rock and smashed vehicles sat like small islands in a river of filth that had burst its banks. The surface of the foetid liquid had crusted over with dust and the heat of the firestorm that had swirled down the tunnel, but the waters were rising where the rubble had created a dam.

He heard his battle-brothers calling to each other and their captains across the vox. Whereas much of what remained of the First and Second Company were down in the pit with him along with Brassanas’ shattered Sisters, the one remaining ork psyker, and Chaplain Ishcarion’s Assault squads, Storn’s Devastators were above them, gathering about the lip of the crater with Uzziah and Valdanor’s men.

Thane stood on the shoreline of a tide of rising filth. They were in some kind of primitive sewer — a network of rough-hewn tunnels that made use of existing cave systems and caverns that ran under the core palace and central precincts. Looking up through the shattered foundations of the palace wall, he could see the thick armour plating, bolted to the exterior, still glowing with the heat. Both the wall and floor of the precinct had suffered from the chain reaction of the lance strike, detonating mines and subterranean explosion. Blackened and blistering stone cracked and crumbled as acrid smoke billowed from the fortifications.

Thane marvelled that the palace-fortress had sustained so little damage as a result of the lance strike. While it was huge, the stronghold looked like a nightmare of armour-plating, jagged accretions and rough masonry — not unlike the mighty space hulks the orks used to move from system to system, and like the hulks, Gorkogrod was a great deal more resilient than it looked. But with a hole blasted into the subterranean tunnel network, Thane and his men now had another way in.

‘Captain Berengard,’ Thane called. Through the dust, the former Black Templar appeared, splashing through the stinking shallows in his Terminator plate.

‘What is your assessment?’ asked Thane, indicating the dark, gaping entrance before them.

‘These tunnels are oriented towards the palace,’ the First Company captain said, ‘radiating outwards under the precincts. This could work in our favour. We should take advantage of this good fortune.’

‘Zoldt?’ Thane called. ‘Report.’

‘Captain Decarion and our fleets have been reinforced, my lord,’ the Epistolary said.

‘Bohemond…’ Thane said, looking at Berengard. He gave the First Captain a slow nod. ‘Our Black Templar brothers have arrived.’

‘In orbit and aboard the Phalanx,’ Zoldt said. ‘Caught between the sons of Dorn, the enemy boarders have been annihilated.’

It was the stroke of good fortune they had been hoping for. Reinforcement from above and an opening below.

‘Inform the commanders at the landing site,’ Thane said, ‘that we have created a breach. I am ordering all Attack Group Guard regiments, skitarii legions, automata — any fighting man, woman or construct — into the palace. Once unloaded, have the Titans of Legio Intrafex secure both the landing site and the route to the palace. They are to exterminate enemy reinforcements from surrounding precincts and supply convoys bound for the palace hub.’

‘Chapter Master, they report gargant formations closing in from the southern precincts,’ Zoldt said.

‘Then they’re going to have to deal with them as well,’ Thane answered. ‘Navy bomber wings to support.’

‘Yes, Chapter Master.’

Thane looked up through the clearing fug at the Imperial Fists righting themselves in the rubble and gathering above on the crater lip. He could see Captains Storn, Valdanor, Uzziah and Gortez looking down at him.

‘Whether we survive this dreadful day or not, the Beast must die,’ the Chapter Master told them. ‘By our fire from the sky or the cold steel of our blades, the Beast must die. Brothers, we must be as one. One mission. One Chapter. One empire — the Imperium of Mankind. Second Company to lead, advance with Centurions and armour. The Attack Group will need an entry point. Something we can hold and advance from. Brothers, let us be the adamantium fist that punches straight through these walls, these walls behind which our craven enemy hides. Let us drag him into the light and destroy him for all the galaxy to see.

‘We shall take the low road, brothers, and rise up like vengeance from beneath. This Beast thinks he is safe behind his walls and shielding. We shall show him how wrong he is. Our mighty guns shall pound this fortress from above while the sons of Dorn shall shake its very foundations with their fury. Beasts rise and they shall fall, but the Imperium of Mankind is forever.’

Ten

Maximus Thane had experienced a lifetime of war. He had lived the blood-splattered insanity of battle. The hum of powered armour. The crash of boltguns. The ugly sound of enemies coming apart. He had gone toe to chainsword-wielding toe with Ezrah Geddon, Arch-Heretic of Praetis-Prandia. He had blasted his way through the deviants and piratical raiders of the fallen eldar at the Ferrospire. He had slaughtered the greenskin invader on the hallowed sands of his own homeworld of Eidolica and on Ullanor’s cursed earth. Little could have prepared him for the carnage that took place during the fight to gain entrance to the orks’ palace.

As the Imperial Fists made their way along the subterranean tunnels, Thane had initially found the darkness and quietude unsettling. The battle above them was a distant, muffled afterthought. Deathwatch Space Marines and descending Black Templars fought side by side, their shared hatred of the alien like a torch leading them through the gargantuan architecture of Gorkogrod’s inner precincts.

Mixed contingents of Astra Militarum from scores of shattered regiments were pushing on through wall-to-wall orks. Shock troops took districts building by building, while storm troopers and airborne companies rappelled to roofs from hovering Valkyries. Battle-automata stomped alongside skitarii soldiers who crackled with radioactivity. Sentinels stalked through the carnage while Leman Russ tank companies rolled up through the dragways, demolishing ork junkers and fortifications. Frater militia mobs swarmed creature after creature, bludgeoning and burning the xenos while Vindicare Assassins moved across the roofs of grand alien architecture, blasting huge holes through warlords and mega-bosses with their Exitus rifles.

Feral world scouts scalped the aliens with their knives, while the blue-blooded officers of spireborn regiments directed tracked mortars, bombards, Marauder airstrikes and orbital fire from the sky in an effort to pound the way ahead into cataclysmic ruin before the arrival of vanguard troops. All the while, Thane’s bloody and battered companies advanced along the rough tunnels and cave systems of the sewer.

Liquid filth moved slowly down excavated channels, carried onward by a downhill incline and great water wheels. It seemed few orks were interested in frequenting the sewer system. Those that did were ragged ferals, who, while still hulking in size, fell easily before the chainswords and bolt pistols of Chaplain Ishcarion’s Assault squads. The river of filth was, however, choked with alien fungus and swarming with tiny greenskin runts whose eyes glinted in the darkness. Terrified of the approaching Space Marines, they fled before them, shrieking in alarm. Little ammunition was wasted on these wretches but Thane had no doubt that the miserable creatures would quickly carry news of their presence to their larger cousins.

Thane ordered his men on at double time, still hoping to retain the element of surprise. The Space Marines left the rumble of battle above them behind, drawn on instead by the regular pounding of the palace’s mighty cannons. Like a beacon, the boom of the gargantuan alien weaponry told the Imperial Fists where they needed to be.

When they were right underneath the thunder, Thane directed the last of Captain Karlito’s Assault Centurions to lead the way, boring their way into the bowels of the palace with their siege drills. Here, they ran into heavily armed orks, plated in slablike armour and wielding monstrous heavy weapons. Working around, Thane directed the Eighth Company Assault squads to flank the monsters and enter the bloody fighting while the Chapter Master led the rest of his force up through the rough-hewn levels of the palace-fortress.

With boltguns clunking empty and battle-brothers of all companies forced into close combat with the hulking monsters of the palace, Thane’s Space Marines fought their way up staircases, through gauntlets and chambers crowded with the most monstrous of orks. There was no time — for thought, for action or to catch one’s breath. Orders were monosyllabic and roared across the vox amid the thunder of battle. The palace halls were packed wall-to-wall with frothing orks, and these were not even the towering monsters the Adeptus Astartes had met offworld, despatched by the Beast to bring death and destruction to every corner of the Imperium. These were greater yet: warrior greenskins, minor warlords in their own right, who by virtue of their monstrous size and savagery had earned a place at the side of the Beast. They were creatures of hulking green brawn and the scars of myriad wars fought across scores of conquered systems, and there were thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. Their fangs were sharp and their tusks were long. Their flesh was tattooed and dyed with clan colours, their frames — that dwarfed even Space Marines — were draped in thick and ugly plate, bristling with spikes. Helms were extravagantly horned and weaponry was obscene in its size and brute design. The creatures bawled their barbarian rage from the black holes of their open mouths, and their beady red eyes burned with territorial fury.

Leading from the front, Thane was the battering ram that smashed through gargantuan doors and armoured sentries. Crushing skulls in the clasp of his mighty black fists, he knocked hulking orks back through walls with a single strike. He smashed snaggle-tusked chieftains into the ground and swung wide, knocking ugly heads clean off shoulders. The storm bolters of the First Company veterans thundered about him, forcing the attacking orks back away from their Chapter Master. Captain Berengard carved a path of destruction through the brutes with his power sword, while battle-brothers forsook their empty boltguns to team up on the towering monsters, slashing and stabbing desperately at green flesh with their combat blades. As ork Dreadnoughts and heavily armed walkers stomped into battle, guns wildly blazing, Storn’s Devastators answered the call, blasting them back with missiles and blinding fury from their lascannons and heavy plasma guns.

Thane’s mind was nothing but ork monsters and the deaths he foresaw for them. Swinging the crackling doom of his power fists, the Chapter Master made such imaginings reality, punching and smashing his way through the Beast’s palace guardians. He broke monsters and buried killsaw-wielding creatures in the fortress floor.

Thane killed without thinking. Like the orks, the Imperial Fists were now acting on primitive instinct. The instinct to survive and see their enemies sundered. Bolt-rounds hammered into the iron-hard hides of alien creatures at point-blank range. Pistols were emptied at tusk-filled faces. Heavy weapons lit up the claustrophobic havoc with the flash and thunder of Imperial Fists Devastators. Powered plate showered with sparks as the wild fire of greenskin guns sent torrents of slugs at the Space Marines. The proud yellow of Imperial Fists plate soon became a soot-streaked, blood smeared camouflage pattern of craters where ork lead had burrowed into ceramite.

All the Chapter Master could hear was death. The mindless fury of towering orks running straight into the blasts of heavy flamers. The screams of his battle-brothers across vox-channels that sizzled with suffering. The thud of butchers’ blades chopping down through plate and genhanced flesh. Thane’s captains led their companies through the labyrinth of tribal halls and antechambers. Each pushed his men on to find routes through the carnage, clearing gauntlets and blasting through walls. As each company found bloody success, the others would follow, funnelling through body-lined archways before spreading out again through the gunfire-crashing, axe-swinging pandemonium.

Orks burst from doorways about the vanguard companies, roaring their delight as they blasted at the Imperial Fists with their belt-fed weaponry. Some even attempted to barge through the Space Marines with their monstrous bulk and huge serrated blades. All they found was death. As the orks ran at their attackers, the chests of Centurions blazed with the hurricane bolters set about their chestplates. Within moments, bounding, blade-wielding warriors were turned to bloody mulch. It didn’t stop the orks, however. Driven on by primal instinct and the thrill of combat, the hulking monsters just kept on coming. Stamping through the remains of unfortunates who had fallen before them, they charged the Space Marines.

The chaos and confusion had been Thane’s world for hours. He fought for his life and the lives of his brothers and sisters about him, all of them lost in a deluge of greenskin barbarity.

Then suddenly, there were no more foes to fight. Breaking through the back of their ranks, Thane found himself where he had never thought to be: the throne room of Gorkogrod. The very centre of the ork empire. The cavernous chamber was still. Six thrones towered above Thane, facing outward in a circle from their places on a great dais. Like the galleries opposite each one, they were decorated with rough banners and standards, each stone throne augmented with metal plating and serrations. Each was carved with its own glyphs and sigils, presumably marking out different clans and tribes.

Damage from previous engagements within the throne room was evident from the scaffolding that dominated a shattered roof section. But it was still well defended. Battle-scarred gargants loomed over the arriving Space Marines, their engines and weaponry roaring to life.

Tychor battered his way through the remaining orks to join his Chapter Master, the battle standard of the Imperial Fists held high. Zoldt was not far behind, with Captain Berengard and his hammer-wielding Terminators stomping up beside them. Lady Brassanas and her remaining Sisters struggled to drag the captive psyker through on its chains, watched over by the brute threat of High Chaplain Bachorath and his whirring assault cannons. As they entered, the Imperial Fists aimed their all-but-empty weaponry up at the gargants. Even with full magazines and power packs, the Space Marines’ weapons could not have hoped to pierce the thick plate of those mighty war machines.

Thane looked about the colossal throne room. Its galleries were empty, as were its monstrous thrones. Only the gargants, towering above the Imperial Fists, seemed to display any evidence of life.

‘The sons of Dorn have come for you, Beast of Ullanor,’ the Chapter Master called about the cavernous chamber. ‘I have come for you. It is time, Beast. It is time to face your doom in the Emperor’s Angels of Death. In his Imperial Fists. In me.’

With the rumble of gargant engines about him and the clunk of loading magna-bore weaponry, Thane approached the Sisters of Silence and the last ork psyker. The alien’s eyes wept the brilliance of otherworldly energies and dripped with spidery threads of green power. The Chapter Master peered into the darkness of the throne room’s gargantuan exits. In their depths he saw the movement of monstrous beasts, colossal ork warlords of extravagant tusk and fang. In the galleries above, the shadows solidified into more massive orks — tribal chieftains and their warriors, wielding chunky weaponry and heavy, serrated blades. They pushed forward, but made no move to attack.

‘Fight me, monster!’ Thane called out. ‘Fight me for Ullanor. For Terra. For the galaxy.’

The Chapter Master turned, and what remained of his glorious Chapter turned with him. Thane felt the quake of the alien’s step. The monster that had felled Vulkan, and in killing Koorland had doomed the Imperial Fists to extinction, was coming to meet him. Dust and debris rained from the chamber ceiling with each heavy stomp of the gigantic ork’s boots.

Ducking into the chamber, the Beast of Ullanor entered the throneroom. The towering ork looked down at the Imperial Fists. It stared at the Space Marines with, Thane thought, a look of amused disdain.

It was huge, like a death world reptile that had grown so large that it had no natural predators. Green muscle. Mounds of furs. Plates of black and white armour as thick as a gargant’s hull. Like its palace, the Beast’s brutish form crackled with defence fields and protective shielding. With colossal claws wreathed with green fire, it lifted a great horned helm from its head to reveal the tusked and scar-mangled horror of its face. Eyes that burned with doom. Monstrous fangs too large and warped for its massive jaws. Green skin cracked with age and scarring.

On the balconies above, the watching orks shouted and howled in adulation of their ultimate champion.

Thane glanced over at the last ork psyker, which Lady Brassanas and the remaining few Sisters were struggling to control. It was a monstrous brute covered in the scars and markings of a tribal shaman. It was wreathed in a blinding nimbus of ethereal energies like a star about to go supernova. It thrashed against its chains, driven into a frenzy by its surroundings and the presence of so many other orks.

‘The galaxy totters,’ Thane told his battle-brothers. ‘but Dorn is with us and the Emperor guides our hand. The Beast must die!’

The throne room became a raging bolt-storm of vengeance. Imperial Fists squeezed the triggers of boltguns, heavy bolters, storm bolters and pistols. Their weapons spoke with the last of their fury. Lascannons and multi-meltas sent streams of death at the colossal monster. Nothing phased the creature, however. Bolts ricocheted harmlessly off its sizzling force fields, and those that did manage to penetrate overloading patches sparked off armour as thick as a frigate’s hull. Beams shimmered from the energy field and the detonations of missiles bloomed uselessly against the Beast’s shielding.

The Beast of Beasts thundered forward. It seemed monstrously amused, not only at Thane and his words but at the useless rage of the Imperial Fists’ weaponry. With an almighty swing of its hugely muscled arm, it brought a colossal, green-wreathed fist down on Thane.

‘No!’ Tychor yelled, running towards his Chapter Master. Barging Thane aside, the standard bearer disappeared — hammered into the floor by the towering monster. The impact of the ork’s fist ripped through the chamber like a thunderclap. Gore splattered across the chamber floor. Sickened to his stomach, Thane pointed the finger of his power fist at the Beast.

‘Again!’ the Chapter Master roared.

The half-demolished chamber lit up. Storn and his Ninth Company unleashed the devastation of their heavy weapons. Missiles struck the Beast, exploding against its shielding, while balls of superheated plasma raged off it. The heavy bolters of Second Company Centurions chewed into the crackling force field while beams of pure energy struck the monster from arm-mounted lascannons. Assault squads of Space Marines ran forth with the thrashing teeth of their chainswords held high, while Imperial Fists of other companies emptied their boltguns and threw grenades at the Beast in hatred and fury.

Thane watched the monster emerge from the vortex of destruction. Nothing could stop it. Stamping down furiously on the charging Space Marines of the Eighth, the Beast went wild. With fists of blazing green fire it smashed squads aside, breaking them within their plate. It back-smacked charging sergeants into the stone of the walls and snatched up battle-brothers in its ferocious claws. Some it threw with lethal force into the throne room floor. Others it pulverised, allowing gore to leak down between its green fingers.

Space Marines in Centurion war-plate were smashed to bloody pieces. Instant death greeted Terminator veterans who were struck from the ground and across the chamber. Within a handful of furious moments, the greenskin giant had painted the throne room with the blood of Dorn. Smashed plate. Body parts. Imperial Fists torn in half. It was a slaughter. One moment High Chaplain Bachorath was a raging Dreadnought, roaring from his vox-casters and emptying his assault cannons at the Beast; the next he was smouldering scrap, as the hulking abomination put its armoured boot straight through him.

In a moment of horror, the Beast brought his blazing fist around, smashing it through the squad of Sisters of Silence. Like broken dolls their bodies flew across the chamber, leaving only their leader holding on to the alien psyker’s chain. The creature tried to break away, forcing the Lady Brassanas to wrap her length of chain about a column for leverage.

The Chapter Master turned just in time to see the Beast’s lethal fist hurtling towards him. The bone-shattering impact took Thane off his feet and across the throne room, where he crashed to the ground and skidded through the bodies of dead Imperial Fists. He struggled to catch his breath, but even his multi-lung was struggling to sustain him. His armour’s diagnostic systems were dead but he was fairly certain that his arm was broken. The breastplate of his Terminator armour had been smashed open down to his black carapace.

Within moments the Beast was looming over him. It stared down at him with the contempt of a barbarian god and brought its flaming fist around to deliver one last crushing blow. Thane did the only thing he could. One half of his cyclone launcher was a crumpled mess, but the other was still functional. Arming its remaining missiles, the Chapter Master blasted them ceilingward. They struck the partially demolished roof of the throne room, and rock and scaffolding crashed down upon the Beast.

With debris raining down about him, Thane tried to roll over and crawl away. One of his power fists was smashed and the Chapter Master had to fire the locks and purge the weapon. Clawing at the chamber floor, he fought to haul himself out of the path of the collapsing ceiling.

Rising like a behemoth of the deep, the enraged Beast shrugged off the mound of masonry in which it was buried. Still aflame with green brilliance, the giant ork reached out with its colossal claws. Snatching up Thane, the monstrous Beast lifted him up to its furious face. Green flame raged about him as the monster’s claw tightened, crushing plate and bone. With a bellow of alien rage, the monster prepared to slay a second Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists.

Squeezing his hand down between the Beast’s titanic grip and his ruined plate, Thane got his fingers to the Sword of Sebastus where it sat mag-locked to his belt. Resting his palm against the Dornsblade — the weapon wielded by the primarch himself — Thane pushed the blade down into the flesh of the Beast’s palm. The ghost of a snarl passed across the monster’s mouth, and Thane felt the grip about his waist slacken slightly. Tearing the Sword of Sebastus up, he thrust the weapon at the creature’s face. The tip of the blade thudded into one of the Beast’s blood-red eyes, before Thane tore it free of the ruined socket.

The monster shrieked. Its grip tightened once more with pulverising force as the pain broke its concentration. It howled at the chamber ceiling, a terrible sound that shook the very foundations of the palace.

The Beast’s claws suddenly opened, allowing Thane to crash to the floor. It was an ugly fall but from the ground, Thane watched the Beast of Ullanor stumble back. It clawed at its face and blinked gore from its punctured eye.

Looking around, the Chapter Master saw Lady Brassanas. She was heaving at the heavy chain, the links biting into the column like a pulley. Her movements were restricted by the armoured bodies on the ground and the stumbling footfalls of the Beast. It was clear to Thane that she and the captive ork were locked together in a dance of death, neither able to escape the other. With one final haul of the chain, the Lady drew her own glinting blade.

As the last Sister of Silence slid down onto her knees she momentarily locked eyes with Thane. In that moment, the Chapter Master understood what she was going to do. The ork psyker needed to be activated. Right here and now. Right next to the alien abomination that held the Imperium in its bloody claw. Thane nodded grimly to her. With the determination of a true servant of the Emperor, Lady Brassanas nodded back, and made the sign of the aquila.

Grasping her knife, she turned the hilt about in her gauntlet and rested the tip of the blade against her stomach. She closed her eyes, and with a supreme effort of will thrust the knife into her abdomen. Even in her last moments of agony, the Silent Sister never uttered a sound.

Thane knew she was dead when the ork shaman fell to its knees and clutched its grotesque skull. With the nullifying effect of the Sister’s presence gone, and being in such close proximity to the Beast and so many other of its brother greenskins, the psyker’s head blasted apart with the force of a small bomb.

The Beast of Ullanor felt the effects of the psychic backwash immediately. Forgetting about the agony of its eye, the warlord grabbed at its head and fell back into the ruin of a throne. It bellowed. It raged. Blood gushed from its nostrils and ears. Then — incredibly — it died. With a fountain of gore and colossal shards of skull, the Beast’s head exploded. Its arms fell down at the sides of the throne with a thud, before the hulking body of the monstrous warlord fell still.

The effect beyond was instantaneous. Shrieks could be heard from within the gargants as the crews of the war machines succumbed to the psychic backwash of the psyker’s overload. The barrels of gargantuan weaponry drooped and the walkers’ engines died. In the galleries and chambers beyond, Thane heard greenskins die horribly as the feedback effect blasted their ugly skulls from their armoured shoulders. In the darkness beyond the remaining lesser Beasts were rocked by the resonance, clutching their heads before the great ugly skulls detonated in their grasp. A psychic shockwave ripped through the chamber. The palace. The planet. Feeding back through the monstrous connection the Beasts had with their savage hordes, a chain reaction of gore-fountaining destruction rolled through the ork warhost.

Thane lay for a moment in the silence, his only movement the rise and fall of his shattered chest. It was over. The Beast of Ullanor was dead. He felt… nothing.

Slowly, he became aware of sounds coming across his vox. Across the crackling channels he could hear shouts and cheering, faint at first, then becoming louder. The battle was over. The Imperial forces fighting inside the palace and beyond had witnessed the heads of their enemies explode in an endless chain reaction that stretched across the whole planet, leaving their headless bodies crashing to the ground.

Thane could not find it in himself to indulge in such jubilation. The orks’ leader was dead; the Imperium was saved. That was enough for a son of Dorn.

With excruciating agony he forced his body and shattered plate up. The throne room floor was covered with the armoured bodies of Imperial Fists. The dead, the dying and the broken. Holding himself awkwardly, Thane limped towards the body of Lady Brassanas and knelt beside her, resting the tip of his blade on the ground for stability. There he waited and became one with his pain.

Eleven

Dawn broke over the Imperial Palace and once more, Drakan Vangorich found himself enjoying the feeble rays that felt their way through the hive-world smog of the capital. Another dawn meant that he was still breathing. He had lived another day and might live through another still. His enemies were either dead, or lived on in frustration and fear. In a life of death, there was a great deal that could be accomplished in a single day.

Vangorich sat for a while. Somewhere above his head, across the vastness of the void, men and supermen were dying. Alien monsters were being fought. The destiny of empires was being decided. And yet for Vangorich, the Beast — the horrific enemy who had brought the Imperium to its knees — had become a necessary evil. The greenskin apocalypse was a warning to humanity not to become complacent, that the Imperium of mankind was but one of many powers vying for control of the galaxy. There would only ever be war, and the Imperium had to be ready for such challenges, with capable leaders worthy of the God-Emperor’s trust. Men like Thane, like Koorland… like himself. Men who would not flinch from doing what had to be done.

The Imperium had always been an unwieldy entity. Even with His warlord sons to oversee peace across His realm, the Emperor had allowed His people and His domain to slip away from him. And now, barely a thousand years since the terrible civil war that had turned the Imperium into a galactic battleground, the rot had returned.

A self-righteous torpor dominated everything. Terra had long been buried in scrolls, reports and data-slates burdened with more information than could ever be read or responded to. Mars was a runaway monitor train with no one at the controls. The planets of the Imperium were like fruit spoiling on a tree. Heresy and mutation were a canker running wild. One by one worlds and sectors were forgotten and allowed to shrivel on the stalk. Meanwhile the aggressive alien species of the galaxy would routinely tear through the branches, gorging themselves on the precious fruit. Species like the orks, that had been forgotten as backwater barbarians until the Beast had arisen to lead them.

Whereas Horus had been the half-forgotten threat of the past and the Beast the peril of the stormy present, Vangorich wondered what other dangers lay ahead for humanity. What revenants and warped monstrosities might the dread Eye of Terror vomit forth? What of the xenos? The orks had smashed the Imperium into a flaming wreck. What alien civilisations — forgotten, long dead or dying — were awaiting a cataclysmic resurgence? What of the species yet to achieve sentience, and monsters of the void yet to be discovered? Vangorich suspected that even if humanity survived the Beast, a weakened Imperium would embolden other warlords and galactic predators to take their opportunity for glory. Every broken world was a smouldering mountain of rubble, in whose shadow the wretched citizens of the Imperium would toil to rebuild their cathedrals, their cities and their lives. A living advertisement in stone and flesh that humanity was vulnerable to attack.

Such disturbing thoughts had led a restless Vangorich to walk the walls of the Palace. Finding himself in the inner arcades, he watched the bleary sun break the horizon from the Investiary. Here, the mighty primarchs had been immortalised in stone.

Mighty no more, they were now but memories. Their statues stood on towering plinths, bearing stone weapons and sculpted in poses of action and agency. It was the way the Imperium chose to remember them. The communal lie. The feeble-minded had little time for uncomfortable truths. From the lowliest gutter wretch to the lords of surrounding smog-wreathed spires, all carried the memory of the primarchs with pride. They were the sons of the Emperor, the warlords responsible for a golden age. Their shoulders, like pillars, had held the Imperium up above the flood of alien filth that washed through the galaxy.

They did not remember them as the squabbling siblings they had truly been, their hearts beating with jealousies and resentments that ran even deeper than those of mortals. They saw them as the pinnacle of human development — magnificent specimens with minds of tactical superiority and the engineered bodies of demi-gods. But everything about them had been superhuman, including the bitterness and hatred they harboured for one another. It amused Vangorich somewhat that the ancient architects had positioned the primarchs’ plinths in a ring about the circular arcade, so that they might regard one another — stony-faced — in an eternal stand-off.

Their choices and their inability to act until it was too late had been the doom of men a thousand years before. The primarchs were gone now — all of them. And in their place sat pompous oafs on thrones, great not of mind or body, but of reach. The High Lords of Terra had unrivalled power and influence. Like the primarchs, the Lords could damn the Imperium with a single decision. The galaxy was theirs to neglect. As the rising of the Beast had proven, their hunger for power and petty politicking had made the Imperium vulnerable. They had made humanity weak. Their existence had been, was and would continue to be a threat to everything the Emperor had worked so hard to build.

Lansung and Verreault held the Imperium to ransom with their ships and their soldiers. Kubik’s true allegiance belonged not to the Imperium but to the Machine-God and Mars. Wienand was free to pursue any dark agenda she wished, ready to see corruption in all who stood in her way, while Vernor Zeck was content in his blindness to the actual corruption before his very eyes. As for Gibran, Sark, Anwar, Tull and Ekharth — their crimes were dangerous incompetence. Their entangled institutions were a house of tarot cards upon which the future of the Imperium was written. When they were at their most needed, their structures had nearly collapsed, and the dominion of mankind with them. This category would no doubt also include whoever was elected to fill the seat of Ecclesiarch, for there were only such men to choose from. Who could know which of these parasites would be chosen for the seat of Lord Commander? All would crave such a position, for leeches always sought out the richest veins from which to feed.

This would not stand, Vangorich decided. He would not be remembered by history so. He would not be some footnote at the bottom of a vellum scroll, buried in a dusty vault. He would not be cursed for his inaction. He was there. A frequenter of the Palace. A member of the Council. An entrusted servant of the Emperor. He could achieve more in a day than even the most powerful Imperial subjects could in a score of lifetimes. The Imperium had been brought to its knees, and might not survive at all. Even if Thane returned victorious, it could not be rebuilt upon the weak foundations the High Lords of Terra would provide. The Emperor’s dominion in the galaxy had to be inviolable and absolute. It had to be strong, and such strength came from an adamantium will — the will to act and see the Imperium’s future preserved.

Vangorich stopped to look up. Mighty Vulkan, cast in stone, stood above him, his hammer held high. The expression on his face was one of potent resolution — like a smouldering volcano, building to blow. On the next towering plinth along, Rogal Dorn cast his grim unsmiling visage down upon the Grand Master. Dour. Intractable. Indomitable. So many of his sons had been lost in the war against the Beast. Those of Dorn’s bloodline, more than anyone else, had paid for the High Lord’s abuses. Looking up at him now, Vangorich found it uncanny how closely Koorland had resembled his genic father.

Vangorich thought on Koorland’s execution of Mesring and nodded to himself. He considered Vulkan’s wise words and his condemnation of the High Lords. A primarch had denounced the Council as unfit for purpose. The son of a primarch had demonstrated how such a problem might achieve resolution. They were not traitors to the Imperium or madmen. They were heroes.

The Grand Master of Assassins shivered as the last of the dawn’s scattered rays penetrated his deep hood. A cold front had moved in over the Palace, carrying with it dirty clouds and acidic rain that sizzled upon the marble. The capital was in for a storm, it seemed. It might have been a new dawn above the Palace and for the Imperium, but thunder was rolling in.