The Flight of the Eisenstein

Garro caught sight of Decius, listening intently to his helmet vox. 'Lord,' he called, any signs of their ear­lier disagreement gone. 'Message from Hakur below decks. He says there are… there are intruders on board.'

Nathaniel's hand went for the hilt of his sword. 'How can that be? We detected no craft launched from Typhon's ship!'

'I don't know, sir, I'm only relaying what the sergeant says'

Garro toggled the vox link on his armour's collar and caught fragmentary barks of noise over the

general channel. He heard the harsh snarls of bolter fire and screaming that clawed to inhuman heights. For an instant he thought of the Warsinger and her alien chorus.

'Alarm triggers sounding on the lower tiers,' reported Vought. 'It's Severnaya's adjutants again, at the navis sanctorum.'

'Hakur is there,' added Decius.

'Decius, with me. Sendek, you will remain here,' said Garro. 'Tell Hakur we're coming to him, and send to all the men to be on alert.'

'Aye, sir/ Sendek nodded his assent.

Garro turned to the older Luna Wolf. 'Captain Qruze, I would have you take my post here, if you will.'

Iacton saluted briskly. 'This is your ship, lad. I'll do as you order me. My experience may be of some use to these youths.'

Garro made to leave and found Keeler still there, standing before him. 'You will be tested/ she said, without preamble.

He pushed past her. 'Of that, I have never been in doubt.'

Andus Hakur had killed many times in his life. The countless adversaries that had fallen before his guns, his blades, his fists, they were a blur of swift and pur­poseful death. In service to the XIV Legion, the veteran had fought ork and eldar, jorgall and hykosi, he had fought beasts and he had fought men, but the enemies that he fought today were a kind that he had never seen the like of.

The first warning came when Severnaya's navis adjutant threw herself screaming from the door of the sanctum, weeping and shouting incoherently. The

woman collapsed in a heap of thin limbs and knotted cloak. Her hands jerked and pointed to the corners of thecorridor, as if she could see things up there that Hakur and the other Astartes were blind to. He stepped to her and felt his skin go cold, as if he had entered a refrigerated chamber. Then he saw it, just at the edges of his vision, the merest flicker of oddly coloured light, like fireflies shimmering in the dark. It came and went so fast for a moment he thought it might have been a trick of his brain, an after-effect of stress and battle fatigue.

He was still processing this when the first of the things emerged out of the smoky air and killed the Death Guard standing with his back to him. Hakur had the impression of a spinning disc, a wide purple blade trailing stinging cilia from its edges, and then the Astartes was being ripped open, blood and gore issuing out in runnels. Hakur fired reflexively, aware that his battle-brother was already beyond rescue, snapping off a three-round burst at the diaphanous shape. It died with a shriek, but the sound became a clarion call and suddenly new and different forms were emerging from the walls and floor. They brought a stench of such potency with them that Hakur's gorge rose and he tasted acid bile. The adjutant was already on her knees and puking violently.

'Blood's oath!' cursed one of the men in his squad. 'Rot and death!'

It was that, and a hundred times worse. The slices through which the creatures emerged allowed draughts of foetid plague-house stink to coil into the corridor. Patches of fungus and rusty discolouration fingered along crevices in the iron decking where the stench crawled forth, but this was only precursor to the diseased horrors of the invaders themselves.

They sickened Hakur to such a degree that he attacked instantly, so abhorrent were these things that the thought of their continued existence revolted him. The shape of the creatures was vaguely that of a man, but only in the grossest, most basic sense. Ropey limbs that shook with palsy flicked and clawed with black, decayed talons. Distended, malformed hooves scraped across the decking, leaving lines of acid slime and excrement. Each one was naked, and bloated around the torso and belly with gaseous buboes and grotesque sores that wept thick pus. Heads were shrunken balls of flaking skin over rictus-grinning skulls. All of them had trains of buzzing insects following behind them, tiny bottle-green flies that dived in and out of the invaders' open wounds.

Where bolter rounds struck them, gobbets of flesh were torn off and rolled away in bloody hanks of stinking meat. They took a lot of killing, the skitter­ing, burbling things coming at the Death Guard in hooting profusion. Hakur watched them take a sec­ond brother, and two more, even as he poured shot after shot into them.

Then Garro hove into view at the opposite end of the corridor, Decius and a handful of reinforcements with him. Caught between two packs of Astartes, the advance of the creatures was staggered, and the battle-captain waded into the mass of them. Libertas shone as it rose and fell. Decius had liberated a flaraer and torched the things with jets of promethium. Hakur used the distraction to recover the adjutant and pull her out of the line of battle.

She screamed and flailed at him, beating her hands on his chest plate. He could see now where her hands were bloody with self-inflicted scratch marks. 'Eyes and blood!' she wailed. 'But inside the pestilence!'

Garro stamped the last of the creatures to death and scraped the remains from his boot with a grimace. 'Silence her,' he snapped.

Decius's palm went to the breath grille of his hel­met. 'In Terra's name, that rancid smell!'

Hakur handed off the woman to one of his men and made his report to the battle-captain. Garro lis­tened intently. 'Word is coming in from all over the ship, the same thing: mutant freaks materialising and leaving decay in their wake.'

'It's the warp/ said Decius grimly. We all know the tales, of predators that prey on ships lost or weak.' He gestured at the walls. 'If the Geller Field fails, those things will overrun us.'

'I'll trust Master Carya's crew to keep that from happening,' Garro replied. 'In the meantime, we will destroy these unclean filth wherever we find them.'

'Unclean, unclean!' chorused the adjutant, ripping herself from the grip of Hakur's trooper. 'I have seen it! Inside the eyes!' She tore wildly at her face, ripping the skin and drawing blood. 'You see it too!

The woman threw herself at Garro with furious speed, and before he could deflect her, the adjutant impaled herself upon the hissing blade of his power sword.

Garro jerked back, but it was too late. The adjutant, a Navigator tertius in service to the senioris Sever-naya, pressed into him and raked bloody fingers over his torso. 'You see!' she gasped. 'Soon the end comes! All will wither.'

The end comes. Once more, the words of the jorgalli child fluttered through his thoughts like a dying rap­tor, falling and screaming. Garro's skin went hot with the flush of blood through his veins, his throat tight­ening in just the manner it had when he had taken

the draught from the cups with Mortarion. He trem­bled, suddenly unable to speak. The woman's upturned face became paper, aged and crumbling. She slid away from him, off the tip of Libertas, turn­ing into rags of meat and dead flesh, ash and then nothing.

'My lord?' Hakur's words were slow and thick, as if they were echoing through liquid. Garro turned to face his trusted sergeant and recoiled. Creeping decomposition was washing over Hakur and the other men, and none of them seemed to be aware of it. The resplendent marble-white of their armour bled away to become discoloured by a feeble, sickly green the shade of new death. The ceramite warped and became rippled, merging with their flesh until it strained and throbbed. Parasites and bloated organs pulsed within, and in some places wounds opened like new mouths, red-lipped with tongues of dis­tended bowel and duct.

Pus, thick and pasty, leaked from every joint and orifice with streaks of brown rust and black ooze. Flies floated in halos around the misshapen heads of the plagued Astartes. Garro's disgust rooted him to the spot. The malformed shapes of his warriors crowded in, words falling from their crackled, lisping maws. Upon their shoulders, Garro saw the skull and star of the Death Guard gone, replaced with three dark discs. His attention was drawn up and away. Beyond the men he saw a ghostly form towering above them, too tall to fit in the cramped corridor yet there before him, beckoning with skeletal claws.

'Mortarion?' he asked.

The twisted image of his primarch nodded, the figure's blackened hood dipping in sluggish acknowledgement. What Garro could see of his

primarch's armour was no longer shining with steel and brass, but discoloured and corroded like old copper, wound with soiled bandages and scored with rust. The Death Lord was no more and in his place stood a creature of pure corruption.

'Come, Nathaniel.' The voice was a whisper of wind through dead trees, a breath from a sepulchre. 'Soon we will all know the embrace of the Lord of Decay'

The end comes. The words tolled in his mind like a bell and Garro looked down at his hands. His gauntlets were powder, flesh was sloughing off his fin­gers, bones emerging and turning into blackened twigs. 'No!' he forced the denial from his throat. 'This will not be!'

'My lord?' Hakur tapped him on the shoulder, con­cern on his face. 'Are you all right?'

Garro blinked and saw the dead woman lying on the deck, her body still intact. He cast around. The horrific vision was gone, burst like a bubble. Decius and the others eyed him with obvious concern.

'You… seemed to leave us for a moment, captain,' said Hakur.

He forced the turmoil of emotion from his mind. 'This is not over,' Garro insisted. 'Worse is to come.'

Decius tapped his helmet. 'Sir, a signal from Voyen, on the lower tiers. Something is happening on the gunnery decks'

In the warp, it was said, all things in the material realm were echoed: the emotions of men, their wishes and their bloodlusts, the yearning for change and the cycle of life from death. Logicians and thinkers throughout the Imperium meditated on the mercurial and unknowable nature of the imma-terium, desperately trying to create cages of words for

something that could only be experienced, not understood. Some dared to suggest that there might be life, of a sort, within the warp, perhaps even intel­ligence after a fashion. There were even those, the ones who gathered in secret places and spoke in hushed awe, who were bold enough to venture the idea that these dark powers might possibly be supe­rior to humanity.

If these men could have known the truth, it would have broken them. In the gathering hell-light that thundered around the tiny sliver of starship that was the Eisenstein, a vast and hateful intellect gave the ship the smallest portion of its attention. A gossamer touch was all that was needed, spilling the raw power of decay over the frigate's protective sphere. It reached inside through gaps in causality and found corpse-flesh in abundance, pleasing in the ripe putrefaction of the diseased and dead. A diversion was presented here, the opportunity to play a little and experiment with things that might be done on larger scales at later times. Gently, as matters elsewhere drew it away the power stroked at what it had found and granted a thin conduit to itself.

The blast doors sealing in the toxic section of the gunnery deck had yet to be reopened. Issues of greater import had taken the attention of the frigate's crew as they fled from Isstvan, and the clearing of the dead had become of secondary consideration.

The Life-Eater virus was long gone. Powerful and deadly, the microbes were nevertheless short-lived, and Captain Garro's quick actions in purging the bay's atmosphere to the void had stopped the bane from running its full course. The virus could not live without air to carry it, and so it had perished, but the

destruction it had wreaked in the meantime remained. Corpses in varying states of decomposition lay scattered about the decking, men and Astartes lying where they had fallen as the germs tore through the defences of their bodies. The vacuum of space had preserved them in their grotesque tableau of death, some frozen with mouths open in endless screams, others little more than a slurry of jellied bones and human effluent.

It was in this state that the touch found them. Riven with rotten flesh, life flensed from them, for some­thing born within the ever-changing rebirth of the warp, it was easy to distort and remould them. With a careful placing of marks, the injection of new, more virulent clades than the human-borne virus. Death became fresh life, although not in a form pleasing to the eye of man.

In the airless silence, fingers frozen to the decking by rimes of ice twitched and moved, shaking off cowls of frost. The essence of decay flowed, rust and age caking the mechanisms of the blast doors, mak­ing them brittle. Those who were favoured walked once more, eschewing mortality for a transformed existence.

The Eisenstein had two long promenade corridors that ran the length of the frigate's port and starboard flanks, punctuated every few metres by thin observation slits that cast blades of light down across the polished steel decking. It was in this place, on the port side some ten or so strides from the ninety-seventh hull frame, that Death Guard met Death Guard in open conflict.

Garro saw the misshapen things from a distance and thought that the strange, plague-bearing

creatures they encountered at the navis sanctorum were before them once more, but he realised quickly that the size was wrong, that these diseased freaks were the match in height for the Astartes. When they hove into the light, what he saw sent him skidding to a halt, his free hand coming to his mouth in shock.

'In the Emperor's name,' choked Hakur, 'what hor­ror is this?'

Garro's blood turned to ice in his veins. The awful vision that seemed to transmit itself from the dying adjutant was suddenly here before him, written in reality over the mutated, swollen parodies of Death Guard warriors: the same corpse-pallor green of their battle armour, the same slack faces rippled with growths of broken tooth and horn, flesh stretched tight over bodies teeming with colonies of maggots. Voyen had joined Garro and the others at the entrance to the corridor and even the Apothecary, hardened to sights of disease and malady, retched at the sight of the twisted man-things.

The vision had been a warning, Garro realised, a glimpse of what he encountered here, and perhaps of what a failure might engender.

Around the legs of the abnormal Astartes were things that were once members of Eisenstein's crew, men caught halfway through the venomous ravages of the Life-Eater and suspended there, flesh in tatters and organs awash with ichor. They bayed and scram­bled forward to attack Garro's warriors. Decius led the firing as the Death Guard let fly with bolters and flamers.

A ragged scarecrow of skin and bone flung itself to the deck and mewed, fly-blown pustules pocking a face eaten away by leprous cancers. It spoke, the stink of its breath reaching them in a reeking wash. 'Master.

He saw the robes, the skull sigil around its neck. 'Kaleb?' Garro recoiled in recognition, sickened by whatever appalling power had returned his housecarl into this loathsome semblance of life. Without hesi­tation, Garro turned Libertas in his hand and beheaded the creature. He fervently hoped that death a second time would be enough. Garro hoped fleet-ingly that his friend could forgive him.

'Watch yourselves/ he shouted, 'this is a feint!'

The tattered crewmen-things were only to draw their fire from the mutant Astartes behind them. The grotesques hammered across the promenade deck towards them, snorting bilious discharges of gas and firing back with mucus-clogged guns. A shambling form advanced on metal-shod hooves among the undead brethren. It was as big as a brother in Termi­nator armour, and as Garro laid eyes upon it, the thing seemed to be growing larger by the moment. Metal bent and broke as abnormal curves of dis­coloured bone issued out of popping boils. A distended belly of scarred, pustulent flesh protruded in an atrocious pregnant mockery, studded with triad clusters of tumescent buboes, and atop all this, girn-ing from ravaged ceramite pieces that still resembled Astartes armour, a striated neck ending in a bulbous skull. The bloodshot, rheumy eyes in the grotesque head turned and found Garro. It winked.

'Do you not find my new aspect pleasing, Nathaniel?' bubbled a disgusting voice. 'Do I offend your delicate senses?'

'Grulgor.' Garro hissed the name like a curse. 'What have you become?'

The Grulgor-creature lowed and twitched as a horn, glistening wet with fluids, emerged from the middle of his brow, echoing the shape of Typhon's horned

helmet. 'Better, you hidebound fool, better! The first captain was right. The powers are soon to bloom.' He shuddered again, and flesh peeled away across his back to release tarnished tubes of budding bone.

Garro spat on the decking to clear the stink clog­ging his throat. The air around Grulgor and his diseased horde was thick with contagion, worse than the acrid atmosphere of the xenos bottle-ship, worse than the toxins of a hundred death worlds. 'Whatever force saw fit to reanimate you, it will be in vain! I'll kill you as many times as I must!'

The bloated monster beckoned with a crooked hand. 'You are welcome to make the attempt, Terran.'

The battle-captain waded into the fight, bolter and sword as one in arcs of death, slicing through dis­eased meat and matter teeming with parasites, cutting towards the monster. In the play of battle, Garro's mind retreated to the familiar paths of war drills, of melee patterns ingrained in muscle and sinew from thousands of hours of combat. In this state, it should have been easy for him to shutter away the chilling horror these warp-spawned terrors represented, to simply fight and concentrate on that alone. The reverse was the reality, however.

Garro had seen the virus savage these men. He had heard their dying screams from the other side of the blast doors only hours earlier, and they stood before him, transformed into some living embodiment of disease, their freakish parody of life sustained by no manner that he could fathom. Was it sorcery? Could such a thing exist in the Emperor's secular cosmos? Garro's carefully constructed world of deeply held truths and hard-edged realities was crumbling with each passing hour, as if the universe had elected to pick apart what he thought to be true and show him

the lie of it. With a near-physical effort, the Death Guard forced the inner turmoil into silence, dragging his mind to the single struggle of the fighting.

Close by, Voyen took a glancing blow from a bolt shell that spattered thick fluid across his shoulder pauldron. The Apothecary reeled to dodge a peculiar morning star of knobbed bone. The weapon found purchase instead in the throat of a junior warrior who died clawing at the cancerous wound it left behind. Garro snarled and his bolter echoed him, a burst of fire slamming the killer back and off his feet. The battle-captain cursed as the mutant Astartes shivered, and then pulled itself slowly upward, leaking tainted blood and viscera. The bolter should have ended its life outright. He stormed in and took the traitor's head with his sword, finishing the job.

Still the shambling, filth-encrusted monstrosities came on, the press of their bodies dividing the lines of Garro's warriors, bunching around them as Grul­gor moved to and fro, staying beyond close combat range. Perhaps he should not have been surprised to find these mutants hard to kill. Their advance mimic­ked the battle doctrine of the XIV Legion, the dogged and relentless progress that formed the core of the Death Guard's infantry dogma. They were matched closely, of that there was no doubt, but Garro's men were only Astartes, and as the Emperor was his wit­ness, he had no true understanding of what his enemies were. Garro knew only that an abhorrence had taken root in him, and that these loathsome per­versions of his brethren must be destroyed.

Separated from the other Death Guard, Decius found himself besieged by a gaggle of walking dead from the ship's company, the animated corpse-flesh

of the frigate's crewmen pawing at him and beating on his armour with clubs made from femurs and skulls. The flamer was spent and he was fighting hand-to-hand with the good weight of his chainsword as it rattled in his grip and the crackling force of his power fist.

The armoured gauntlet pummelled two conjoined deckhands into a seeping paste of rancid meat and bone fragments, and he took a torso apart with a downward sweep of his blade. The spinning ceramite teeth of the chainsword left a black rent in the mutant's body, and from the malodorous wound poured a waterfall of writhing maggots that pooled around Decius's boots. He turned around and cut necks with snapping reports like breaking wood.

The maggot-blown deckhand staggered backward, and as Decius looked on in fascinated horror the man-thing coiled the lips of the bloodless cut back together. Flies and shiny scarab-like insects swarmed over the wound and chewed at it, knitting the flesh with livid sutures beneath the repellent, hellish warp light from the window slits.

What powers propelled these foes, he wondered? Decius knew of no science that could make dead flesh animate once again, and yet here was evidence of just such an occurrence, hissing and clawing at him. The resurrected men seemed to bask in the glow from the immaterium beyond the thick armourglass windows of the promenade. It played over their bloated, pallid flesh in chaotic patterns. On some deep level, the Death Guard marvelled at the resilience and the hor­rific potency of these swarming plague carriers. They were living vessels for virulent disease, hosts for the simplest but most deadly of weapons.

Decius paid for his moment of inattention with a typhoon of pain that ripped down the length of his power fist. Too late, he sensed the blow coming from behind him and tried to turn from it. Grulgor's towering bulk moved fast, too fast for something so corpulent and foul. The freakish warrior's battle knife carved a dull arc through the air; like its owner, what had previously been a fine Astartes weapon was now a decayed version of its former self, the fractal-edged knife of bright lunar steel transformed into a blunted dagger of rusty metal.

The attack was aimed at Decius's shoulder, poised to penetrate his armour and cut his primary heart in two, but the Astartes moved. Decius succeeded in avoiding a killing impact, but still his reflexes were not enough to save him from a slash that cut his ceramite armour wide open. He fell down, turning and yelling as he did so. Pain erupted along his nerves as his power fist malfunctioned where the knife had torn into it.

His eyes widened as he saw rust and corrosion worming out across the damaged metals, a time-lapse pict of decay made real. Decius felt agony chewing at his veins and marrow, and sweat burst out all over him as his implanted organs went into overdrive to stem the tide of secondary infections.

Corruption! He could already see his skin distending and blistering where the plague knife had cut him. Decius's gut churned as the invisible phages that swarmed across Grulgor's blade massed inside him. He fought back bile as the twisted Death Guard loomed over him.

'No man can outlive entropy!' spat Gralgor. The mark of the Great Destroyer claims everything!'

His joints swelled and became inflamed and painful. With monumental effort, Decius swung up

his chainsword and hefted it. The corpulent mutant rocked back, out of range if the young Astartes tried to slash at him with it, but instead Decius brought it down hard across his arm, just below the elbow joint. With a scream of hate, the young Astartes severed his own limb, letting the plague-ravaged flesh and crum­bling metal of his gauntlet fall away.

His vision fogged, the youth's body was at its limits fighting infection and injury, and it could not support his consciousness. Decius's eyes fluttered as his body went slack and dormant.

Grulgor snorted and spat out a gobbet of acid phlegm before raising his plague knife again over Decius's unmoving body. Heavy bolt shells tore into his back and ripped away curls of dead flesh, knock­ing him off-balance before he could deliver the killing blow.

Garro's aim was exact, and it sent the Grulgor-thing stumbling, back towards the hull wall and away from Decius. Nathaniel wanted to look to the boy, to be sure that he was still alive, but his old rival was only wounded and from what Garro could see these rean­imated men healed as fast as he could hurt them. All around him, Voyen, Hakur and the others were caught in their own small battles. He pushed ques­tions of the why from his mind and concentrated on the how – how can I kill him?

Grulgor spun around and let loose a gargling roar, emerald-tinted blood trailing from him in a wet arc. Garro's old foe snatched at him, the plague knife and his cancerous fingers slicing through the air and miss­ing. Garro fired again and heard the hollow clack as his bolter ran dry. Without missing a beat, he let the gun drop and took Libertas in a two-handed grip.

'I knew this moment would come,' gurgled the mutant. 'I would not be denied it. My enmity for you is beyond death!'

Garro grimaced in return. 'You have always been a braggart and a fool, Ignatius. On the field of battle you served a purpose, but now, you are an abomina­tion! You are everything the Astartes stand against, the antithesis of the Death Guard.'

Grulgor spat again and made a clumsy, furious pass that Garro parried with quick replies. 'Nathaniel! So blind! I am the harbinger of the future, you pathetic wretch!' He pounded a crooked-fingered fist on the rusted armour over his breast. The warp's touch is the way forward. If you were not so blinkered and mawk­ish, you would see it! The powers that exist out there dwarf the might of your Emperor!' Grulgor pointed his knife at the throbbing crimson light beyond the starship. 'We will be deathless and eternal!'

'No/ said Garro, and took the sword to him. Liber­tas swung low and cut into Gralgor's fleshy, fish-belly white gut, and tore. Nathaniel's blade met diseased meat and to his alarm, it sank inwards.

Instead of cutting through pliant skin, the sword became enveloped in a doughy morass that drew on it like quicksand. Flickers of power from the blade sparked and died. Grulgor rumbled with amusement and puffed out his barrel chest, sucking the weapon into his body. 'There is no victory here for you,' he hissed, 'only contagion and lingering agony. I'll make this ship an offering of screaming meat-'

'Enough!' Garro could not draw the sword out. Instead, he ran it through. With all his might, the battle-captain rode the blade down and carved it out across the mutant's abdomen, forcing a full charge through the crystalline matrix steel. He opened

Grulgor with an angry snarl and Libertas at last came free.

Fatty ropes of serpentine intestine writhed and fell from the cut in loops across the wet decking. The for­mer Astartes wailed and struggled to catch them in his hands, stuffing them back into the maw of his belly. Garro rocked back, the putrid gas from inside the bloated body making his eyes stream and throat clog.

The Eisensteiris deck shivered beneath his feet and for a split-second the captain's attention was taken by a rolling flash of chain lightning that surged around the flanks of the frigate.

He heard Hakur shouting. 'The Geller Field! It's failing!'

Garro ignored Grulgor's hooting laughter as glim­mering motes of firelight began to form in the heavy air over their heads. He thought of the homunculus plague bearers and the slashing razor-disc predators from the navis sanctorum. If they came to bolster Grulgor and his changed army, the tide would turn against Garro's men. He could sense the engagement slipping away from him, the certain prediction of the battle's play hard in his thoughts just as it had been on the jorgall bottle-world and a hundred times before. He had only moments before the fight was lost to him.

Grulgor saw the expression on his face and laughed. The mutant Astartes spread his hands to the roiling, churning hell-light outside as a willing supplicant, bask­ing in the alien energies. Outside, the membrane of artificial force that separated the frigate from the mad­ness was disintegrating. Already weakened by the incursion of the pestilent touch that made Grulgor live and the breaches of the warp-beasts, the Geller Field unravelled in flares of exotic radiation, layer upon layer peeling back as if it were flesh flensed from bone.

Garro shouted into his vox, a desperate gambit coming to the fore of his thoughts. 'Qruze!' he cried, 'Heed me! Get us out of the warp, crash reversion! MowV

Over the clash of the skirmish and the buzzing interference, he heard raised voices in the back­ground, the bridge crew reacting with shock at his demands. The Luna Wolf was wary. 'Garro, say again?'

'Drop out of the immaterium! These intruders, the warp must be sustaining them somehow! If we stay here we'll lose the ship!'

'We can't revert!' It was Vought, her words laced with panic. We have no idea where we are, we could emerge inside a star or-'

'Do it!' The order was a thunderous roar.

'Captain, aye/ Qruze did not hesitate. 'Brace your­self!'

'No, no, no!' Grulgor pounded across the deck towards him, raising his blade. You will not deny me my satisfaction! I will see you dead, Garro! I will out­live you!'

The battle-captain brought up his sword and batted Grulgor away. 'Be gone, you stinking freak! Back to your hell and choke on it!'

Through the armoured window slits, a flurry of bril­liant blue-white discharges signalled the creation of a warp gate, and the frigate dropped through the screaming maw and back into the realm of real space. Grulgor and his freakish kindred bawled a chorus of agony and frenzy, and dissipated.

Garro saw it with his own eyes and still he could not explain it. He witnessed a roaring, shimmering phantom tear itself from the meat sack of a body, drawn up and away as if it were a leaf caught in a hur­ricane, and for an instant he saw the shapes of both

the mutant and the man that Ignatius Grulgor had once been before the screaming shade was torn away. It vanished through the hull of the ship with dozens of others, the captured energy of all the twisted Death Guard. Souls, he told himself, his mind unable to fur­nish any other explanation but this most numinous, unreal of notions. Their souls have been taken by the warp.

Trailing fire and pieces of itself, shedding waves of radiation from the brutal emergency reversion and the collapse of the Geller bubble, the tiny frigate returned to common existence in a dark and unpop­ulated quadrant of interstellar space. There were no stars to sight, no worlds within range, only dust and airless void. Directionless and adrift, the Eisenstein fell.

TWELVE

The Void

A Church of Men

Lost

'The fragrance of the sick and the wounded/ said Voyen with grim annoyance, 'this ship reeks of it.'

Garro did not meet his gaze, instead ranging about the interior of Eisenstein' 's infirmary. The frigate's vale-tudinarium was filled to bursting, temporary partitions made from sheets of metal segregating the areas of the long chamber to stem any chance of cross-infection. At the far end, hidden behind walls of thick, frosted glass and iron seal doors, was the isola­tion ward. Garro walked steadily towards it, picking his way around medicae servitors and practitioners. The Apothecary kept pace with him.

The remains were doused in liquid promethium and set to burn for the better part of a day,' Voyen continued. Then servitors were used to eject them into space. The helots were then terminated by Hakur, just to be sure.'

Remains. This was the word they were using to describe the diseased flesh-matter that was all that

was left of Grulgor and his men. It was easier to depersonalise it that way, to think of the puddles of ichor and bone as just effluent to be disposed of.

To face the reality of what those corpses had once been, what they became, nothing in the lives of Garro's men had prepared them for such sights.

Voyen, in particular, had taken it poorly. As much as he was a warrior like Garro, he was an oath-sworn healer as well, and for him to witness the dead rise to life as crucibles of seething pestilence troubled the Astartes more deeply than he might ever care to admit. Garro saw it in his hooded eyes, and saw the mirror of his own feelings there as well.

Now they were adrift and their flight stalled for the moment with the Navigator's death, the adrenaline of the battle and chase faded. In its place was the reck­oning of what had transpired, the realisation of its bleak import. If death was not the end, if what hap­pened to Grulgor was real and not some kind of warp-spawned illusion… then could such a fate be waiting for all of them? That this might be some ele­ment of Horus's pact with betrayal chilled Garro's marrow.

Voyen spoke again. 'Has Sendek had any success with the star maps?'

Garro shook his head, seeing no reason to keep the truth from him. 'The woman, Vought, she has been toiling with him, but the results are not favourable. As closely as they can determine the ship reverted to normal space somewhere beyond the edge of the Perseus Null, but even that is nothing more than an educated guess. No traders or scouts have ever ven­tured into the zone.' He took a deep breath. How long had they been becalmed out here? Days, or was it weeks? Inside the vessel all was a permanent, smoky

twilight that made it difficult to gauge the passage of time.

Voyen hesitated as they passed a section of the wall where refrigerated pods hung in clusters around heavy steel stanchions. The autopsy on the Navigator Severnaya was completed and I have viewed it.' He indicated one of the frosted pods. Garro could make out the impression of a drawn grey face inside the capsule. 'It is as Master Carya suspected. The Naviga­tor was injured in the engagement, but he died from the psychic shock of the emergency transition from the warp. The apparent bleed-over took the lives of his adjutants and helots. In his already weakened state, it was inevitable.'

'I might as well have placed my bolter to his skull and pulled the trigger/ Garro frowned. 'I should have known. With all the madness running riot through the ship, I should have known he wouldn't survive the journey' When Voyen didn't respond straight away, Garro shot him a look. 'What choice did I have?' he said flatly. The Geller Field was seconds away from collapse. We would have been torn apart in the warp or obliterated in a drive explosion.'

'You did as you thought right/ Voyen replied, unable to keep an element of reproach from his words.

'First it was Decius questioning me, and now you? You would have made a different choice?'

'I am not a battle-captain/ said the Astartes healer. 'I can only observe the aftermath of the choice my com­mander made. Our ship lies aimless and astray in uncharted space without means for rescue. The astropaths and Navigators are dead, so we cannot cry for help or chance another venture into the warp.' His eyes flared with restrained anger. 'We have escaped

the sedition at Isstvan only to die here, our message unheard and the Warmaster free to reach Terra before word of his perfidy. Despair stalks the corridors of this ship, sir, as real as any mutant killer!'

'As always, I appreciate your candour, Meric,' Garro allowed, resisting the urge to chastise him for daring to voice words that bordered on insubordi­nation. They moved on. 'Tell me about the other casualties.'

'Many of the officers and enlisted crew suffered injuries, and there were several deaths from the… the incursions.'

'And our battle-brothers?'

Voyen sighed. 'Every man who fell in combat with those things is dead, lord. Every one except Decius, and even he barely clings to the edge of life.' The Apothecary nodded to the sealed section. 'The infec­tions in his body strive to overwhelm him and I have done all I can with the medicines and equipment at my disposal. I confess I am at the limits of my knowl­edge with his malady'

'What are his chances of survival? I want no obfus-cation or hedging. Will he live?'

'I cannot answer that, lord. He fights hard, but his strength will eventually wane and this disease that has him is like none I have seen or heard of. It changes from moment to moment to mimic different phages, little by little wearing down his resistance.' Voyen gave him a hard look. 'You should consider granting him release.'

Garro's eyes narrowed. 'Events have forced me to end the lives of too many of my kindred already! Now you would ask me to slit the throat of one who lies too weak to defend himself?'

'It would be a mercy.'

'For whom?' Garro demanded. 'For Decius, or for you? I see the disgust you can barely hide, Voyen. You would rather all evidence of the foulness that attacked us be jettisoned, eh? Easier for you to ignore its consequence and whatever connection it might have to your blasted lodges!'

The Apothecary froze, shocked into silence by his commander's outburst.

Garro saw his reaction and immediately regretted his words. He looked away to see the Luna Wolf approaching. 'I am sorry, Meric, I spoke out of turn. My frustration overtook my reason-'

Voyen hid his wounded expression. 'I have duties I must address, lord. By your leave.' He moved away as Qruze came closer.

The old Astartes threw a glance after him. 'We think we have seen it all and yet there always comes a day when the universe shows us the folly of that hubris.'

'Aye,' managed Garro.

Qruze nodded to himself. 'Captain, I took the liberty of compiling an order of battle for your review, follow­ing the retreat from Isstvan.' He handed over a data-slate and Garro scanned the names. 'Just over forty line Astartes and half mat number of men of veteran rank­ing, including myself. Five warriors severely injured in the escape but capable of meeting batde, should it come to it. The count does not include you or the Apothecary.'

'Solun Decius is not listed.'

'He's in a coma, is he not? He is an invalid and can­not fight.'

The captain tapped a balled fist on his augmetic leg with a defiant grimace. 'Some dared to say that to me and I made a lie of it! While Decius lives, he's still one of my men,' Garro retorted. 'You'll add him to the roll until I tell you otherwise.'

'As you wish/ said Qruze.

Garro weighed the slate in his hand. 'Seventy men, Iacton. Out of thousands of Astartes at Isstvan, we are all that still live beyond the reach of the Warmaster's treachery.' The words were still difficult for him to say aloud, and he saw that Qruze found it just as hard to hear them.

'There will be others/ insisted the Luna Wolf. 'Tarvitz, Loken, Varren… all of them are good, staunch warriors who won't see such rebellion with­out opposing it.'

'I do not question that/ replied the Death Guard, 'but when I think of them left behind while we fled for the warp-' He broke off, his voice tightening. The memory of the virus bombing was still painful. 'I wonder how many made it to shelter before the plague and the firestorm. If only we could have saved some of them, rescued a few more of our brethren.' Garro thought of Saul Tarvitz and Ullis Temeter, and hoped that death had come quickly for his friends.

'It is the duty of this vessel to be a messenger, not a lifeboat. For all we can know, other ships may have slipped away, or gone to ground. The fleet is huge and the Warmaster cannot have eyes everywhere/

'Perhaps/ said Garro, 'but I cannot look upon my brothers hereabouts and not see those we left to face Horns/ He stood, his glove pressed to the thick armourglass of the containment chamber, and stud­ied the papery face of Decius where the youth lay amid a nest of life-support devices and auto-narthe-cia. 'I feel like I have aged centuries in a day/ he admitted.

Qruze snorted in a dry chuckle. 'Is that all? Live as long as I have and you'll come to understand that it's not the years that count, it's the distance you travel/

Garro broke away from the sight of his comrade. Then by that reckoning, I am older still/

'With all due respect, you're a stripling, Battle-Captain Garro/

'You think so, Luna Wolf?' Garro replied. 'You for­get the nature of the realm through which we pass. I would warrant that were we to match our days of birth to the Imperial calendar, I would be as old as you, brother, perhaps even your senior.'

'Impossible/ scoffed the other Astartes.

'Is it? Time moves at different rates on Terra and Cthonia. In the warp it becomes malleable and unpredictable. When I think of the years I have spent in passage through that infernal domain or in the lit­tle-death of coldsleep on voyages below the speed of light… I may not match you in days, but in chronol­ogy the story would be quite different/ He looked back at Decius. 'I see this poor, untempered boy and I wonder if he will ever live to see the glory and the scope of what I have known. Today, I feel more weary than I ever have before. All those days escaped and deaths postponed drag at me. Their weight threatens to pull me under/

The veil of long-suffering temper that was Qruze's usual mien dropped away for a moment, and the old soldier placed a hand on Garro's shoulder. 'Brother, this is the weight we bear all our living days, the bur­den of the Astartes as the Emperor gave it to us. We must carry the future of mankind and the Imperium upon our backs, keep it safe and held high for Him. Today that burden weighs more than it ever has, and we have seen that there are those among our number who cannot support it any longer. They chose…' He took a deep breath. 'Horus chose to throw it aside and become an oath-breaker, so we must bear it without

him. You must bear it, Nathaniel. The alarm we hold cannot sound unheard out here in the darkness. You must do whatever must be done in order to warn Terra. All other concerns, our lives and those of our brothers, come a distant second to that mission.'

'Aye/ said Garro, after a few moments. You only voice the words I heed inside myself, but it braces me to hear another say them.'

'The Half-heard is heard at last, eh? A pity it has taken such a turn of events to bring that to pass.'

'I accept my lot in this,' the Death Guard noted, fin­gering the oath paper sealed to the breastplate of his power armour, 'and yet I do not understand it.'

'Understanding is not required,' Qruze quoted the old axiom, 'only obedience.'

'Not true,' reasoned Garro. 'Obedience, blind obedi­ence, would have made us follow Horas to his banner and go against the Emperor. What I wish to under­stand is why, Iacton. Why would he do this, to his father of all men?'

'The question that comes again and again.' A shadow passed over the Luna Wolfs face. 'Damn me, Nathaniel. Damn me if I didn't see this coming but had too much pride to accept it.'

'The lodges,'

'And more/ said Qruze. 'In hindsight I see trivial things that meant so little at the time, turns of phrase and looks in the eyes of my kinsmen. Now, under the light of what has transpired, suddenly they show a different aspect.' He mused for a moment. 'The death of Xavyer Jubal on Sixty-Three Nineteen, the burning of the Interex… Davin, it was on Davin that things began to turn, where the momentum came to a head. Horus fell and then he rose, healed by the arcane. I knew then, even if I dared not take the scope of it.

Men took the good and open nature of our brother­hood and turned it slowly to meet their own ends. Dark shadows grew over the hearts of warriors who had once been devoted and loyal, Astartes I had seen grow from whelps to fine, upstanding brothers. When I finally spoke of these things, they thought me an old fool with nothing to provide but war stories and a tar­get for their mockery.' The Luna Wolf looked away. 'My crime, brother, my crime was that I let them. I took the easy road.'

Garro shook his head. 'If that were true, then you would not be here. If events of recent days have taught me anything, it is that there comes a moment for each of us when we are tested! As he said it, once again Euphrati Keeler came to the surface of his thoughts. 'What happens in that moment is the true measure of us, Iacton. We cannot break, old man. If we do, then we will be damned.'

Qruze chuckled softly. 'Strange, is it not, that we choose that word? A term so loaded with overtones of religion and holy creed, at polar opposites to the sec­ular truth we are oath-bound to serve.'

'Belief is not always a matter of religion/ said Garro. 'Faith can be a thing of men as well as gods.'

You think so? Perhaps then you ought to venture below decks and visit the empty water store on the forty-ninth tier, and share your viewpoint with those gathered there.'

Garro's brow furrowed. 'I do not follow you.'

'I have learned there is a church aboard your ship, captain/ said Iacton, 'and the congregation swells with each passing day'

Sindermann looked up as Mersadie tapped him on the shoulder. He put down the electroquill and slate.

He saw she had a couple of men with her, two junior officers in the uniforms of the engineering division.

The remembrancer hesitated, and one of the men spoke. We've come to see the Saint.'

Kyril threw a sideways glance along the length of the makeshift chapel. He saw Euphrati down there, talking and smiling. 'Of course,' he began. 'You may have to wait.'

That's all right,' said the other. We're off-shift. Couldn't make the… the sermon before.'

The iterator smiled slightly. 'It was hardly that, just a few people of like mind, talking.' He nodded to the dark-skinned woman. 'Mersadie, why don't you take these young gentlemen up?' He patted his pockets. 'I think I have a tract I could give you both.'

'Got one already,' said the man who'd spoken first. He showed Sindermann a frayed booklet with the kind of rough printing that came from old and rusted machinery. It wasn't a pamphlet he had seen before, not one of those that had circulated on the Vengeful Spirit. It appeared that the Lectitio Divinitatus had already made inroads aboard the Eisenstein long before his arrival.

Oliton led the men away, and Kyril watched her go. Like all of them, only now was Mersadie coming to understand the path that was laid out before her. Sin­dermann knew she was holding true to her calling as a remembrancer, but the recollections that she stored in the memory spools of her augmented skull were not tales of the Great Crusade and of Horus's glory. Mersadie had gently moved into the role of docu-mentarist for their nascent credo. It was Euphrati Keeler's stories that she wrote now, storing them and weaving them into a coherent whole. Kyril looked down at the data-slate where he had been attempting

to marshal his own thoughts, and reflected. How could he ever have expected to become part of some­thing like this? All around him, a church, a system of belief was accreting, gaining mass and potency beneath the shadow of the Warmaster's rebellion. How could any fate have judged that he, Kyril Sinder­mann, primary iterator of the Imperial truth, was suited for this new role? And yet here he found him­self, shepherding the words of Keeler, moulding them for the ears of the people even as Mersadie stood at his side, blink-clicking still images and recording Euphrati's every deed.

Not for the first time, Sindermann traced the line of events that had brought him here and pondered how things might have played had he spoken differently, thought differently. He had no doubt that he would be dead by now, gunned down in the mass termina­tion of the remembrancers aboard Horus's battle-barge. It was only the intervention of Loken's comrade Qruze that had saved their lives. The echo of the fear he felt at the sight of the bombing of Isstvan III whispered through him again. Death had been only a moment away, and yet Euphrati had shown no apprehension. She had known that they would live, just as she had been able to guide them to this ship and their escape. Once he would have rejected ideas of divine powers and of the so-called saints who com­muned with them. Euphrati Keeler took that scepticism away from him with her quiet authority, and made him question the secular light of unswerv­ing reason he had lived his life in service to.

They had all been changed after that day at the Whisperhead Mountains, when Jubal had trans­formed into something that still defied categorisation in Sindermann's thoughts. A daemon? In the end,

Kyril was unable to find any other means to explain it away. His light of logic fled from him, his precious Imperial truth was found lacking. Then the horror had come again, this time to destroy them all.

But he lived. They lived, thanks to Euphrati. With his own eyes, Sindermann saw her turn the might of a warp-spawned monstrosity with nothing more than a silver aquila and her faith in the Emperor of Mankind. His need for denial perished with the hate­ful creature that day, and the iterator saw truth, real truth. Keeler was an instrument of the Emperor's will. There was no other explanation for it. In His great­ness – no, in His divinity – the Emperor had granted the imagist some splinter of His might. They had all been changed, yes, but Euphrati Keeler the most of all.

Gone was the defiant but directionless young woman whose picts had caught the history around them. In her stead there was a new creation, a woman both finding and forging the path for all of them. Kyril should have been afraid. He should have been terrified that they would perish fleeing from Horus's perfidy. A single look at Keeler made that all disap­pear. He watched her talk to the two engineers, smiling and nodding, and a warmth spread through him. This is faith, he realised, and it is such a heady sen­sation! It was no wonder that the believers he had encountered during the Crusade resisted so hard, if this was what they felt.

Now, in the Lectitio Divinitatus, Kyril Sindermann found the same strength. His loyalty and love for the Imperium had never swayed. Now, if it were possible, he felt an even deeper devotion to the Lord of Man. He was ready to give himself to the Emperor, not just in heart and mind, but in body and soul.

He was not alone in this. The Cult of Terra, as it was sometimes known, was strengthening. The pamphlet in the engineer's hands, the ease with which Mersadie was able to find this disused water reservoir in which to assemble their makeshift chapel, all these things showed that the Lectitio Divinitatus existed on this ves­sel. And if it was here on this small, unremarkable frigate, then perhaps it was elsewhere too, not just concealed in the midst of Horus's fleet but maybe fur­ther afield, on worlds and ships spread across the Imperium. This faith was on the cusp of becoming a self-actualised creation, and all it needed was an icon to rally behind, a living saint.

Euphrati made the sign of the aquila and the two engineers followed suit. The hollow, nervous mood he had seen in their eyes upon their arrival was gone, and they walked away with purposeful strides, a new assurance in their spirits.

The Emperor protects,' said the younger of the two as he passed the iterator, nodding in thanks. Kyril returned the gesture. The girl gave them faith and calmed their fears as she had with dozens of others. The train of men and women finding their way to this rough-hewn chapel had been slow at first, but now they were coming more often, to listen to him speak or merely to be in the presence of the young woman. Sin­dermann marvelled how word of Keeler had spread.

'Kyril!' He turned to see Mersadie coming towards him in a rush, her perfect face turned in abject fear. 'Someone is coming!' The hushed dread in her words brought back memories of the secret ministry on the Vengeful Spirit, and of the men who had come at the Warmaster's behest with bolters and clubs to destroy it. A lookout reported in, just one of them: a single Astartes.'

Sindermann stood up. He could hear heavy boot steps ringing off the gantry deck outside the service hatch to the reservoir chamber, coming closer. 'Did the lookout see a weapon? Was he armed?'

'When are they not?' Oliton piped. 'Even without sword or gun, when are they not?'

His answer was lost as the hatch slammed open and the reverberation put every other sound to silence. A towering form in marble-white armour bent to enter the compartment and the iterator saw the glitter of pol­ished brass on an eagle's-head cuirass. Sindermann stepped forward and gave a shallow bow to the Death Guard, fighting down his trepidation. 'Captain Garro, welcome. You are the first Astartes to come here.'

Garro looked down at the slight man. He was thin and nervous, a cluster of sticks in an iterator's robes, but his gaze was steady and his voice did not waver. 'Sindermann,' noted Garro. He looked around at the inside of the reservoir. It was a large, cylindrical space some two decks tall, with grid-decked gantries on dif­ferent levels and a network of pipes and vent shafts protruding into the chamber. Tall sheets of metal extended out from the walls to act as baffles when the drum was full of water, but when the chamber stood empty as it did now, they gave the place the look of a chapel knave rendered in old, bare steel. Cargo pallets from the service decks had been arranged as makeshift seating and there was an altar of sorts made from a fuel cell container. Are you the architect of all this?'

'I'm only an iterator/ replied the man.

'What are you doing in here?' Garro demanded, a conflict of anger and frustration rising inside him. 'What do you hope to achieve?'

'That would be my question for you, Nathaniel.' The imagist, the woman they were calling the Saint, walked forward into the light of a string of biolumes. 'Keeler/ he said carefully, 'you and I will speak.' She nodded and beckoned him. 'Of course.' You won't hurt her!' The other remembrancer, the one Qraze identified as Mersadie Oliton, snapped at him. Her words were half in threat, half in despera­tion, and Garro raised an eyebrow at her temerity.

Keeler spoke again, her voice carrying to all the silent congregation in attendance. 'Nathaniel is here because he is no different from any one of us. We all seek a path, and perhaps I can help him to find his.'

And so, saint and soldier found a place in a shaded corner, and sat across from one another at the fringes of the lamplight.

'There are questions,' she began, pouring cups of water for Garro and for herself. 'I'll answer them if I can.'

The captain grimaced and took the tiny tin goblet in his hands. 'This cult goes against the will of the Imperium. You should not have brought your beliefs here.'

'I could no more leave this than you could leave behind your loyalty to your brothers, Nathaniel.'

Garro grunted and drained the cup with a grim sneer. And yet I have done exactly that, some would say. I have fled the field of battle, and for what? Horas and my own primarch will name me deserter for doing so. Men I have sworn to honour I have left to an uncertain fate, and even in my fleeing I have exe­cuted that poorly.'

'I asked you to save us, and you have.' Keeler watched him kindly. And you will. You are the

embodiment of your Legion's name. You guard us against death. There is no failure in that.'

He wanted to dismiss her words as insincere and accuse her of speaking empty platitudes, but despite himself, Garro found he was grateful for her praise. He forced the thoughts away and pulled Kaleb's papers from his belt pouch, the brass icon and its chain wrapped around them. "What meaning do these things have, woman? The Emperor is a force against false deities, and yet your doctrine talks of him as a god. How can this be right?'

You answer your own question, Nathaniel,' she replied. You said "false deities", did you not? The truth, the real Imperial truth, is that the Master of Mankind is no sham divinity. He's the real thing. If we acknowledge that, He will protect us.' Garro snorted, but Keeler kept speaking. 'In the past, a priest would ask you for faith based on nothing but words in a book, a tract.' She gestured to the bundle of papers. 'Does the Emperor do that? Answer my ques­tion, Astartes. Have you not felt His spirit upon you?'

It took an effort of will for Garro to speak. 'I have, or so I think… I am not certain.'

Keeler leaned back in her chair, and her beatific, metered manner dropped away. She became chal­lenging and focused, eschewing the saintly serenity he expected from her. 'I don't believe you. I think you are certain, but that you are so set in your ways that to voice it frightens you.'

'I am Astartes,' Garro growled. 'I fear nothing.'

'Until today' She eyed him. 'You are afraid of this truth, because it is of such magnitude that you will forever be remade by it.' Keeler placed her hand on his gauntlet. What you do not realise is that you have already been changed. It's only your mind that lags

behind your spirit.' She studied him carefully. 'What do you believe in?'

He answered without hesitation, 'My brothers, my Legion, my Emperor, my Imperium, but some of those are being taken from me.'

Euphrati tapped him on the chest. 'Not from here.' She hesitated. 'I know you Astartes have two hearts, but you understand my meaning.'

'What I have seen…' His voice grew soft. 'It pulls at the roots of my reason. I am questioning all that I thought absolute. The xenos psyker child that saw into me, that mocked me with jibes about what was to come… Gralgor, dead and yet returned to life by some gruesome infection… and you, glimpsed in my death-sleep.' He shook his head. 'I am as adrift as this ship. You say I have certainty but I do not sense it. All I see are paths to ruin, a maze of doubt.'

The woman sighed. 'I know how you feel, Nathaniel. Do you think that I wanted this?' She pulled at the robes she wore. 'I was an imagist, and a damned good one. I depicted histoiy as it was made. My art was known on thousands of worlds. Do you think that I wanted to feel the hand of a god upon me, that I dreamed one day of becoming a prophet? What we are is as much where destiny takes us as it is what we do with the journey' Keeler gave a slight smile. 'I envy you, Captain Garro. You have some­thing I do not.'

"What is that?'

A duty. You know what it is that you must do. You can find that clarity of vision, a mission that you can grasp and strive to fulfil. But me? Each day of my call­ing is new, a different challenge, constantly striving to find the right path. All I can be sure of is that I have an aspiration, but I can't yet see its shape.'

'You are of purpose/ murmured the Astartes.

We both are/ agreed Keeler. We all are.' Then she reached out and touched his cheek, and the sensation of her fingers against his rough, scarred face sent a tin­gle through Garro's nerves. 'Since you delivered this ship from the predations of the warp, some of the crew have been praying here for a miracle to save us. They asked me why I did not join them in their calls to the Emperor and I told them there was no need. I told them: "He has already saved us. We only have to wait for His warrior to find the means".'

'Is that what I am? The Emperor's divine will, made flesh?'

She smiled again, and with it she brought forth again the flutter of powerful emotion that Garro had felt alone in the barracks. 'Dear Nathaniel, when have you ever been anything else?'

'Status,' ordered Qruze, catching Sendek's eye at the control console.

The Death Guard nodded at the Luna Wolf with more than a little weariness in his manner. 'Unchanged/ he replied, casting about the bridge to see if any of the officers had anything else to add. Carya met his gaze and silently shook his head. Many of the shipmaster's crew, including the woman Vought, had been granted temporary suspension of their duties in light of the empty void where they found themselves, leaving the ever-wakeful Astartes to man the bridge while the men and women took some small respite. 'Machine-call signals continue to cycle on the short-range vox, although at a generous estimate they will not reach any human ears for at least a millennium.'

The old warrior's brows knitted. 'Do you have any­thing constructive to add?'

Sendek nodded. 'In the interests of posterity, I have commenced mapping this sector of space. Perhaps if this vessel is recovered at some future date, the data may be of use to those who find it.'

Qruze made a spitting noise. 'Are all you Death Guard this pessimistic? We're not corpses yet.'

'I prefer to think of myself as a realist/ Sendek bris­tled.

Both men turned as the bridge hatch irised open to admit the Apothecary Voyen. Sendek was still finding it hard to forgive Voyen's association with the lodges and he looked away. The Astartes was aware that Qruze saw the moment between the two battle-brothers, remarking silently upon it with a quizzical look.

Where is the battle-captain?' asked Voyen.

'Below decks/ replied Qruze. 'I have the conn. You may address yourself to me, son.'

As you wish, third captain. I have completed a sur­vey of the ship's stores and consumable supplies. If we instigate rationing at subsistence levels, it is my projection that Eisenstein's crew have just over five and one-third months of available resources.'

Carya came forward and ventured a suggestion. 'Could we not put some of the non-essential crew into suspension?'

Voyen nodded. 'That is a possibility, but with the facilities aboard this ship that would only lengthen the duration by another month, perhaps two. I have also examined the option of other emergency mea­sures, such as a cull, but the outcomes are little different/

The shipmaster grimaced. We're not picking any of my men for voluntary execution, if that's what you're thinking!'

'Seven months at sublight in the middle of the void/ said Sendek as the bridge hatch opened once more, 'and Horns out there all the while with Terra unaware of it.'

Garro entered, his stride firm and purposeful. 'Not on my watch. We have come too far to sit back and wait for death to claim us. We have to act.' He nodded to Carya. 'Shipmaster, signal the enginarium crews to charge the warp motors to full power.'

'Captain, unless that saint singing her hymns down below has grown a third eye and plans to guide us home, we cannot hope to travel any interstellar dis­tance!' Voyen's manner became acid and terse. "We have no Navigator, sir! If we enter the warp, we will be lost forever and those things that attacked us last time will have eternity to pick us apart!'

'I never said we were returning to the warp/ Garro replied coolly. 'Carya, how long until the drive blocks are at maximum potency?

The officer studied his console. 'A few moments, lord.' He hesitated. 'Sir, your Apothecary is correct. I fail to see the reason for bringing the drives back on line.'

Garro didn't answer the implied question. 'I want sublight thrusters ready for a burn at full military power on my command. Call the ship to general quarters and prepare void shields for activation.'

Voyen gestured around the bridge as the alert siren sounded. 'Thrusters and shields now? Is this some sort of drill, Nathaniel? Some kind of make-work to distract the crew, or did the prophet girl tell you that an attack is coming?'

'Watch your tone/ said Garro. 'My lenience only extends so far.'

'Thrusters at your command/ reported Carya. 'Shields ready to be deployed.'

'Hold/ ordered the battle-captain.

From across the bridge, Qruze rubbed his chin. 'Are we going to learn the point of all this activity, lad? I confess I'm as blind to it as the sawbones there.'

Carya looked up. 'Warp drives registering full energy capacity. Battery arrays are brimming, lord. What do you want me to do with them?'

'Clear the drive block compartments, and arm the release mechanisms on the warp motors. When I give the order, you will deactivate the engine governance controls and jettison the drive block, then raise shields and fire the sublight thrusters/

Qruze chuckled coldly. 'You're as bold as you are mad!'

'Eject the warp engines?' Sendek gaped. 'With all that energy in them, they'll detonate like a super­nova!'

Garro nodded solemnly. 'A warp flare. The blast will echo in the immaterium as well as real space. It will act as a beacon for any ships within a hundred par-sees/

'No!' Voyen's shout cut across the bridge. 'For Terra's sake, no! This is a step too far, captain! It's a death sentence!'

Garro shot him a hard stare. 'Open your eyes, Meric! Everything we have done since we defied the Warmaster has been a death sentence, and yet we still survive! I will not give up now, not after all this flight has cost us!' He reached out and put a hand on the Apothecary's shoulder. Trust me, brother. We will be delivered from this/

'No/ Voyen repeated, and in a swift blur of move­ment the Death Guard veteran drew his bolt pistol, bringing it to bear between Garro's eyes. 'I will not let you do this. You'll kill us all, and everything that we

have sacrificed will have been for nothing!' Dread filled his voice. 'Tell Carya to rescind those orders or I will shoot you where you stand!'

Sendek and Qruze went for their weapons, but Garro barked out a command. 'Stay your hands! This is between Meric and I, and we alone will decide it.' He met the Apothecary's gaze. 'Shipmaster Carya/ said the battle-captain, 'you will execute my com­mands in sixty seconds. Mark!

'Y-yes, sir,' the officer stuttered. Like everyone on the bridge, he was fully aware of the danger of what Garro had set in motion. The veteran was right. It could mean the destruction of the ship if the Eisenstein's thrusters couldn't push the frigate far enough from the blast radius of the warp flare.

Voyen thumbed back the hammer on the pistol. 'Captain, please don't test me! I will follow any orders you give, but not this one! You've let that woman cloud your thoughts.'

The dark maw of the gun never wavered before Garro's face. At so close a range, a single shell from the weapon would turn the Death Guard's unprotected head into a red mist. 'Meric, it does not matter if you kill me. It will still happen and the ship will still be rescued, and our warning will still be carried to the Emperor. I won't see it, but I'll die content knowing that it will come to pass. I have faith, brother. What do you have?'

'Thirty seconds,' reported Qruze. 'Release bolts are armed. The governance circuits are off-line. The over­load is building.'

'You've driven me to this/ cried Voyen. 'Death and death, and more death, brothers ranged against brothers… how can you be certain we will not be cor­rupted as Grulgor and his men were? We'll become like them! Abominations!'

Garro held out his hand. 'We will not. There is no doubt in my mind.'

'How can you know?' shouted the Astartes, the pistol faltering.

Garro carefully reached out and took the gun from him. 'The Emperor protects/ he said simply.

'Zero/ announced the Luna Wolf.

THIRTEEN

Silent Watch

Fearless

Found

Hundreds of explosive charges around the rear ven­tral hull of the frigate went off in the silence of space, throwing sheets of hull plating away into the void. On rails, the thick cylinders of the starship's interstel­lar drive motors rolled out and fell into the darkness, conduits snapping and trailing jets of coolant liquid, cables arcing with glints of electricity. Crackling orbs of gathered energy spun and cried inside the dis­carded warp engines. Power that normally would have been channelled into ripping a doorway to the immaterium had no point of release, and now it churned about itself, faster and faster, spiralling towards critical mass.

The Eisemtein leapt away on rods of glittering fusion fire, leaving behind the parts of itself that she had cut loose. As the flexing gravitational output of the warp drives drew the drifting modules together, they sent out whips of brilliant blue-white lightning

that lashed blindly, snapping at the frigate's heels. Her void shields glowed but held firm. The true test of them would come in a few seconds.

The engine cores began to melt and deform, the power inside them grown to such capacity that it was a self-fulfilling reaction, drawing potency from the differential states between the dimensions of the warp and the common vacuum of real space. Circular sheets of exotic radiation, visible though the entire spectrum, radiated out of the lumpen cluster of mat­ter and energy. Too soon the warp motors had ripped into the madness of the immaterium, and the rush of force that flooded out was too much, too fast.

The reaction collapsed inward, the jettisoned hull panels, the slagged metals, dust and specks of free-floating hydrogen molecules, the very space around it folding in a final desperate trawl to fuel itself.

If there was an eye that could have seen something so abnormal or glimpsed into a range so far from that of normal sight, an observer might have glimpsed a screaming, clawing beast peering out of the core of the implosion, but then came the detonation.

Across barriers of dimension, the catastrophic destruction of the warp motors produced a sphere of radiation that lit space like a dying sun. In the empyrean, it became a towering shriek, a flash of dead blue, a surge of raw panic and a million other things. In real space it was a wave of crackling dis­charge that slammed into the fleeing Eisenstein and threw her bow over stern with murderous, lethal force.

In the deep shades of the empyrean, the ragged edge of a shockwave broke upon the preternatural senses of an enhanced mind. The wash of raw input blotted

out all other thought-sights in an instant of punish­ing, agonising overload. It struck the storms of insanity that clung to the mind and tore them away, blasting them apart. The mind was tossed and thrown in the impact, flailing for unending seconds in the turbulent undertow of its passing. Then the flare was gone, fading, leaving only the echo of its creation. Where there had been storms and fog, now there was clarity and lucidity.

The mind turned and peered across the wilderness of the immaterium and found the point of origin. As a flash of night-borne lightning might illuminate a darkened landscape, the shockwave made the molten terrain of the warp visible, gave it solidity when all other means of understanding had failed. Suddenly, paths that had been concealed were clear and dis­cernible. The way was abruptly opened, and across the incredible distance, the epicentre of the effect's creation still burned.

With care, the mind began to compute a route to take it there, curiosity brimming from every contem­plation.

Garro put down the electroquill and ran his gaze down the text rendered on the flat, glassy face of the data-slate. He released a deep breath and a cloud of white vapour emerged, fading into the cold, thin air of the observatorium. Everything in the chamber was covered in a thin patina of hoarfrost, the steel stan­chions and the wide sweeps of the windows painted with patches of white. In the shockwave of the warp flare, several power mechanisms already stressed by the headlong escape from the Isstvan system failed entirely, and whole decks of the frigate were without life-support. Carya had closed the flying bridge and

moved the command crew to a secondary control pulpit, leaving the upper deck to go dead and dark. Moment by moment, the Eisenstein was becoming a frozen tomb.

'Captain,' Qruze said coming into view, lit by the dull glow of the starlight through the frosted armour-glass, 'you summoned me?'

Garro showed him the data-slate. 'I want you to wit­ness this.' Nathaniel removed his gauntlet and pressed the commander's signet on his left forefinger to a sen­sor plate on the slate's case. The device chimed, recognising the unique pattern of the ring and the gene-code of the wearer. He passed it to the Luna Wolf and the old warrior paused for a moment, read­ing what was written there.

'A chronicle?'

'Perhaps it would be more accurate to think of it as a last will and testament. I have recorded here all the events of note that preceded our escape from the fleet, and all matters since. There should be a testimony for our kinsmen to find, even if we do not live to deliver it ourselves.'

Qruze snorted and mirrored Garro's actions, seal­ing the contents of the slate with a touch from his signet. 'Planning for the worst. First that boy Sendek and now you? Death Guard by name, dour by nature, is it?'

Garro took the slate back and secured it in an armoured case. 'I only wish to cover every eventuality. This container will survive explosion and vacuum, even the destruction of the ship.'

'So those words on the bridge, then? Your declara­tion to the Apothecary, all that was just an act, captain? You tell us you know we will survive, but secretly you prepare in case we do not?'

'I did not lie, if that is what you are implying,' snarled Garro. Yes, I believe we will see Terra, but there is no harm in being thorough. That is the Death Guard way.'

'Yet you do this thing out of sight of the men, with only a Luna Wolf in attendance? Is that perhaps because you would rather not undermine the faith you have kindled in the others?'

Garro looked away. 'Age has not dulled your insight, Iacton. You are correct.'

'I understand. In times like this, conviction is all a man can cling to. Before… before Isstvan, we might have looked to our faith in our Legions, our pri-marchs. Now, we must find it where we can.'

'The Emperor is still our constant,' Garro said, look­ing out at the stars. 'Of that, I have no doubt.'

Qruze nodded. Aye, I suppose so. You have made believers of us, Nathaniel. Besides, that chronicle of yours is a wasted effort.'

'How so?'

'The story there is only half-told.'

Garro's scarred face turned in a faint smile. 'Indeed. I wonder how it will end?' He walked away a few steps, thin rimes of ice crunching under his boots.

'Has your saint not told you?' Qruze asked, a note of wry reproof in his words.

'She is not my saint,' Garro retorted. 'Keeler is… she has vision.'

'That may be so. Certainly, enough of the crew seem to agree. There are many more attending her sermons on the lower decks. I have it on good authority that the iterator Sindermann has moved their makeshift church to a larger compartment among the armoury decks, to better accommodate them.'

Garro considered this. 'Closer to the inner hull spaces. It will be warmer there, more protected.'

There have been Astartes seen in attendance, cap­tain. It appears your conference with the woman has given legitimacy to her claims.'

Garro eyed him. 'You don't approve.'

'Idolatry is not the Imperial way'

'I see no idols, Iacton, only someone who has a purpose in the Emperor's service, just as you and I do.'

'Purpose/ echoed the Luna Wolf. That is what this all comes down to, is it not? In the past, we have never had to struggle to find it. Purpose has always been given to us, passed on from Emperor to pri-march to Astartes. Now events force us to seek it alone, and we splinter. Horus finds his in sorcery, and we… we seek ours in a divinity.' He chuckled dryly. 'I never thought I would live to see the like.'

'If your wisdom of years allows you to find another path, tell me of it/ Garro said firmly. This way is the only one that opens to me.'

Qruze bowed his head. 'I would not dare, battle-captain. I granted you my fealty, and I will follow your commands to the letter.'

'Even if you disagree with them? I saw the reproach in your eyes on the bridge.'

"You allowed the Apothecary to go without him being chastised for his actions.' Qruze shook his head. 'It was a punishable offence towards a senior officer. He drew a weapon on you, Garro, in anger!'

'In fear! Garro corrected. 'He allowed his emotions to overtake him for a moment. He is chastened by his actions. I won't put a man to the whip for that.'

'Your warriors question it/ pressed the other Astartes. 'For now they see it as lenience, but some might think it to be a sign of weakness.'

He looked away. Then let them. Brother Voyen is the best Apothecary we have. I need him. Decius needs him.'

Ah/ the Luna Wolf nodded. 'It becomes clearer to me. You want the youth to survive.'

'What I want is to lose no more of my brothers to this madness!' snapped Garro tersely. The rest of my Legion may fall to disloyalty or death, but not these men! Not mine!' His breath came out in clouds around him. 'Mark me, Iacton Qruze. I will not have the Death Guard become a watchword for corruption and betrayal!'

There was a note of genuine pain in the old war­rior's words as he looked down at the power armour he wore, still bearing the altered colour scheme of the Sons of Horus. 'Good luck in that, kinsman/ he said quietly. 'For me, I fear that moment has already passed.'

Power routed to the valetudinarium from other sec­tions of the Eisenstein ensured that the infirmary was kept at a functional level. Garro was aware that Voyen had initiated a move of all but the most badly injured patients to the deeper levels of the ship, in towards the core of the vessel. The battle-captain did not see the Astartes healer as he crossed the chamber, and felt better for it. Despite his words to Qruze, Garro still smarted at Voyen's actions on the bridge and he did not want to encounter him again so soon afterwards. It was better that the Apothecary kept his distance for the moment.

Garro stepped around an injured officer whose only inhalations came from a mechanical breather machine, and stopped at the glass pod of the isolation chamber. With care, Garro took his helmet – the repairs upon it were still visible, unfinished spots where paint had yet to be applied – and sealed it to the neck ring of his armour. Then, after checking the seals

on every joint and vent, he locked down the battle suit, preventing any possibility of outside contagions enter­ing his wargear. Garro passed through the chamber's airlock array and entered the sealed room. A medicae servitor tended to Decius with slow, deliberate care. The captain noted that the fleshy components of the machine-helot were already grey with infection. Voyen's reports noted that two servitors had died already from slow exposure to whatever poison Grul-gor had poured into the youth's wound. It was a testament to the potency of the Astartes biology that Decius was not dead a dozen times over.

Inside the armour Garro would be safe, and the strin­gent purification systems of the isolation chamber would stop any contamination following him out. He had no doubts that the chance of infection still existed, but he would risk it. He had to look the lad in the eye.

There on the recovery cradle, Solun Decius lay stripped of his power armour and swaddled in a mesh-like covering of metallic probes and narthecia injectors. The wound where Grulgor's plague knife had cut him was a mess of pustules and livid flesh on the verge between bilious life and necrotic death. It refused to knit closed, bleeding into a catch-bowl beneath the cradle. Portions of Decius's skin were missing where the medicae had plugged feed ducts and mechadendrites directly into the raw nerves. A forest of thin steel needles colonised the thick hide of the black carapace across his torso. Thin, white drool looped from Decius's lips and a pipe forced air into his nostrils with rhythmic mechanical clicks.

The Astartes was an ashen rendition of himself, the colour of a week-old corpse. Had Garro seen such a body on the battlefield, he would have cast it on to the pyre and let it burn. For a moment, Nathaniel

found his hand near the hilt of Libertas and Voyen's words echoed in his thoughts. You should consider granting him release.

'That would make a lie of what I said to Qruze/ he said aloud. 'The fight is all that we have now. The struggle is what defines us, brother.'

'Brother…'

The voice was so faint that at first Garro thought he had imagined it, but then he looked down and saw a flicker of motion as Decius's eyes opened into slits. 'Solun? Can you hear me, boy?'

'I can… hear you.' His voice was thick with mucus. 'I hear it, captain… inside me… the thunder in my blood.'

Suddenly, Garro's sword seemed to be ten times its weight. 'Solun, what do you want?'

Decius blinked, even this smallest of motions appearing to pain him terribly. 'Answers, lord.' He gasped in a breath of air. 'Why have you saved us?'

Garro pulled back in surprise. 'I had to,' he blurted. 'You are my battle-brothers! I could not let you per­ish.'

'Is that… the better path?' the wounded warrior whispered. 'Unending war between brothers… We saw it, captain. If that… if that is the future, then per­haps…'

'You would have us embrace death?' Garro shook his head. 'I know your pain is great, brother, but you cannot submit to it! We cannot admit defeat!' He placed his hand on Decius's chest. 'Only in death does duty end, Solun, and only the Emperor can grant us that.'

'Emperor…' The word was a dim echo. 'Forsaken… We have been forsaken, my lord, lost and forgotten. The beast Grulgor did not lie… We are alone.'

'I refuse to accept that!' Garro's words became a shout. *We will find salvation, brother, we will! You must have faith!'

Decius coughed and the pipes in his mouth gur­gled, red-green fluid siphoning away into a disposal tank. 'All I have is pain, pain and loss…' His blood­shot eyes found Garro and bored into him. 'We are lost, my captain. We know not where or when we are… The warp has made sport with us, cast us into the void.'

'We will be found.' Garro's words seemed hollow.

'By what, lord? What if… if the time we were lost in the empyrean was not hours… but millennia? The warning… worthless!' He coughed again, his body tensing. We may be ten thousand years too late… and our galaxy burns with chaos…' The effort of speaking drained the Astattes and he sank back into the cradle, the shambling servitor creaking to his side with a fan of outstretched fingers made of syringes and blades.

Garro watched Decius's eyelids flutter closed and the youth's consciousness slipped away once more. After a long moment, the battle-captain turned back to the airlocks and began the arduous process of cleansing his wargear of any lingering taint.

When he stepped out of the isolation chamber's outer hatch, he saw Sendek charging towards him across the infirmary, his face tight with tension.

'Captain! When I could not reach you, I feared something had happened!'

Garro jerked a thumb at the chamber's thick walls. 'The protective field baffles in there are electromag-netically charged. Vox signals won't penetrate inside.' He frowned at the alarm in Sendek's voice. What is it that requires my attention so urgently?'

'Sir, the Eisenstein's sensor grids were badly dam­aged in the shock from the warp flare and the engagement with Typhon, and we have only partial function-'

'Spit it out/ snapped Garro.

Sendek took a breath. There are ships, captain. We have detected multiple warp gate reactions less than four light-minutes distant. They appear to be moving to an interception heading.'

He should have felt elation. He should have been thinking of rescue, but instead, Garro's black mood brought him only imagined terrors and predictions of the worst. 'How many craft? Mass and tonnage?'

The sensors gave me only the vaguest of estimates, but it is a fleet, sir, a large one.'

'Horus?' Garro breathed. 'Could he have followed us?'

'Unknown. The ship's external vox transceiver is inoperable, so we cannot search for any identifier beacons' Sendek paused. They could be anything, anyone, perhaps an ally, perhaps ships on their way to join the Warmaster's insurrection, or even xenos.'

And here we sit, blind and toothless before them.' Garro fell silent, weighing his options. 'If we cannot know the face of these new arrivals, then we must encourage them to show it to us. They must have been drawn by the flare. Any commander worth the rank will send a boarding party to investigate. We will allow it, and from there take the measure of them.'

At their rate of closure, there is little time to pre­pare,' Sendek noted.

Agreed/ Garro said with a nod. 'These are my orders. Issue weapons to all the crew who know how to use them and get everyone else into the core tiers. Find somewhere they can be protected. I want

Astartes at every entry point, ready to repel boarders, but no one is to engage in hostilities unless it is by my word of command.'

The armoury chambers would be best,' mused Sendek, 'they are heavily shielded. Many of the crew are there already, with the… the woman.'

Garro's lip curled. 'Sanctuary in the new church. It seems fitting.' He gathered up his bolter. 'Quickly, then. We must be ready to meet our saviours or our assassins with equal vigour.'

They crowded about the frigate in the manner of wolves circling a wounded prey animal, observing and considering the condition of the Eisenstein. Sen­sor dishes and listening gear turned to face the drifting warship, and learned minds attempted to dis­cern the chain of events that had led to its circumstances.

Vessels that dwarfed the Imperial frigate placed hordes of armed lance cannons upon the ship's target silhouette, computing firing solutions and warming their guns in preparation for her destruction. Only one volley, and even then not one at full capacity, would be enough to obliterate the Eisenstein forever. It would only be a matter of a single word of com­mand, a button pushed, a trigger pulled.

The fleet moved slowly. Some of its number had counselled for the immediate destruction of the derelict, concerned that the flare it had generated to bring them here might only have been a lure. Even a ship the size of a mere frigate, when correctly armed and altered, could become a flying bomb big enough to destroy a battle cruiser. Others were more curious. How had a human vessel come to find itself out here, so far from the rim of known space? What lengths

had driven those aboard it to give up their engines in the vain hope of rescue? And what enemies had wrought the damage that scarred the armoured hull?

Finally, the predator ships of the war fleet parted to allow the largest of their number to face the Eisen­stein. If the frigate was a fox to the wolves of the battleships, then against this craft it became no more than an insect before a colossus. There were moons that massed less than the giant. It was the clenched hand of a god carved from dark asteroid stone, a nickel-iron behemoth pocked with craters and spiked with broad towers that jutted from its surface.

At a great distance, the vessel would have resembled the head of a mace, filigreed with gold and black iron. At close range, a city's worth of spires and gantries reached out, many of them glowing with the light of thousands of windows, others concealing nests of weapons capable of killing a continent. Ships like the Eisenstein were carried in fanged docks around the cir­cumference of the colossus, and as it drifted closer the sheer mass of its gravity gently tugged at the frigate, altering her course. Autonomous weapons drones deployed in hornet swarms, staging around the drift­ing craft. As one, they turned powerful searchlights on the ruined hull and pinned the frigate to the black of the void, drenching her in blinding white beams.

Eisenstein's name, still clearly visible atop the emer­ald sweep of her bow planes, shone brightly with the reflected glow. Inside, a handful of souls waited for their fate to be decided.

Hakur stepped in from the corridor, a loaded and cocked combi-bolter looped over his shoulder on a thick strap. 'Outermost decks are all but empty now, captain,' he told Garro, Vought has re-routed the

atmosphere to storage tanks or down here. Less than a third of the ship has life-support, but we won't lack for breathing.'

'Good.' He accepted the sergeant's report. 'The men on the promenade decks, they have been withdrawn?'

The veteran nodded. 'Aye, lord. I left them there as long as I thought I could, but I've pulled them all back now. I had them spying out through the ports. What with the scrying being out of action and all, I thought that eyeballs were better than no watch at all.'

'Quick thinking. What did they see?'

Hakur shifted uncomfortably, as he always did when he had no concrete answer for his commander. Garro knew this behaviour of old. Andus Hakur prided himself on providing accurate intelligence to his battle-brothers and he disliked having only half the facts about anything. 'Sir, there were a lot of ships and they seemed to be of Imperial lines.'

Nathaniel's lip curled. After Isstvan, that informa­tion only makes me more wary, not less. What else?'

'The fleet orbits a large construct, easily the size of a star fort, or larger. The brother who laid eyes upon it told me he had never seen such a thing before. He compared it to an ork monstrosity, but not so crude.'

Something pushed at the back of Garro's mind, a half-remembered comment that chimed with the description. Anything on the vox?'

Hakur shook his head. We are maintaining com­munications silence, as you ordered. If whatever is out there is close enough to broadcast on our battle frequencies, they are choosing not to.'

Garro dismissed him with a nod. 'Carry on. We'll wait, then.' The battle-captain crossed back into the wide space of the armoury chamber. Partition walls had been hastily opened along the length to allow the

ship's complement of survivors to find purchase here, and from where he stood Garro saw a sea of figures huddled in the dim glow of emergency biolume lanterns. Many on the edges of the group were armed, and they had the air of desperation upon them. With deliberate care, Garro went in and walked among them, making eye contact with each of the crewmen just as he would do with his fellow Astartes. Some of the men trembled as he passed them by, others stood a little taller after the nods he gave them.

In all his years of service, Garro had always thought of the ordinary men of the army as warriors in the same cause as the Astartes, but it wasn't until this moment that he felt anything like kinship with them. Today we are all united in our mission, he mused. There were no barriers of rank or Legion here.

He came across Carya, the dark-skinned officer cradling a heavy plasma pistol. 'Lord captain,' he said thickly. The shipmaster's face was swollen with his injuries from the escape.

'Esteemed master/ Garro returned. 'I feel I owe you an apology.'

'Oh?'

Garro gestured at the hull walls around them. 'You presented me with a fine ship, and I have made such a mess of it.'

'You need not comment, my lord,' Carya laughed. 'I have served under your kind in the Great Crusade for decades and still I think I will never understand you. In some ways you are so superior to men like me, and in others…' His voice trailed off.

'Go on/ Garro said. 'Speak your mind, Baryk. I think our experiences together allow us to be candid.'

The shipmaster tapped him on the arm. 'In some ways you are like wanton siblings who yearn for a

place, for fraternity, but also spark against one another with your rivalries. Like all men, you strive to escape from the shadow of your father, but also to seek his pride. Sometimes I wonder what would hap­pen to you brave, noble lads if you had no wars to fight.' When Garro didn't reply, Carya's face fell. 'I am sorry, captain. I didn't mean to offend you.'

'You did not/ Garro replied. 'Your insight is… challenging, that is all.' He thought for a moment. 'As to your question, I do not know the answer. If there were no wars, what use would weapons be?' He pointed to Carya's pistol, and then himself. 'Perhaps we would make a new war, or turn upon each other.'

'As Horus did?'

A chill washed through Garro's soul. 'Perhaps.' The thought lay heavy upon him, and he turned, forcing it away.

Garro found Sendek and Hakur scrutinising an aus-pex unit. With the aid of Vought, Sendek had been able to connect the device to some of the Eisenstein's external sensory mechanisms. 'Captain! A reading…'

Garro dismissed Carya's words from his mind and snapped back to battle focus. 'Report.'

'Energy build-up/ said Hakur. 'For a second I thought it might have been a deep scan of the hull, but then it changed.'

A complex wave-form writhed across the auspex screen.

'A scan?' He glanced at Sendek. 'Could we be detected in here, through this much iron and steel?'

'It is possible/ replied the Astartes. A vessel with enough power behind her sensors could burn through any amount of shielding.'

A ship, or something like a star fort/ added Hakur.

Cold realisation seized Garro's chest and he snatched the auspex from Sendek's grip. The pattern; he knew what it was. 'To arms!' he bellowed, his voice echoing around the chamber. 'To arms! They're com­ing in!'

The auspex forgotten, Hakur and Sendek brought up their weapons and panned them around the com­partment. At Garro's words, the crew surged with panic. He saw Carya snap out commands and the men brought their guns to the ready.

'Sir, what is it?' Sendek asked.

'There!' Garro pointed into the centre of the cham­ber, to an open area just inside the doors where Hakur had arranged a staggered barricade. A low humming, like electric motors deep beneath the earth, was issuing from the air, and static prickled at the battle-captain's skin.

Embers of emerald radiance danced and flickered across the deck, for one moment recalling the strange warp-things that had come to the ship in the depths of the empyrean; but this was something different. This time, Garro knew exactly what to expect. 'No man opens fire until I give the word!' he shouted.

And then they came. With a thundering roar of splitting air molecules, a searing flash of jade light­ning exploded across the middle of the armoury chamber floor, the backwash of colour throwing stark, hard-edged shadows over the walls and ceiling. Garro raised his hand to shield his eyes from the bril­liance before it could dazzle him into temporary blindness. Then the light and noise were gone with a flat crack of displaced atmosphere, and the teleporta-tion cycle was complete.

Where there had been bare deck and scatterings of discarded equipment, now there was a cohort of

stocky, armoured figures in a perfect combat wheel deployment. A ring of eight Astartes, resplendent in battle gear that shimmered in the light of the biol-umes, stood with their bolters ranged at their shoulders, with none of the chamber unguarded.

One of them spoke with a voice clear and hard, in the manner of a man used to being obeyed instantly. 'Who is in command here?'

Garro stepped forward, his weapon at his hip and his finger upon the trigger. 'I am.'

He saw the speaker now, his head bare. He picked out a hard face, a humourless aspect, and behind him… What was that behind him?

'You will stand down and identify yourself!'

In spite of the tension inside him, something in Garro rebelled at the superior tone and he sneered in reply. 'No,' he spat, 'this is my vessel, and you have boarded it without my authority!' Abruptly, all the strain and anger that he had kept locked away inside him over the past few days roared back to the fore, and he poured every last drop of it into his retort. 'You will stand down, you will identify yourself, and you will answer to me}'

In the silence that followed, he caught a murmur and as one, the muzzle of every bolter the boarding party held dropped downward to point at the deck­ing. The warrior who had addressed Garro bowed and stepped aside to allow another figure – the shape he had glimpsed at the centre of the group – to step for­ward.

Garro's throat tightened as a towering shape in yellow-gold armour came into the light. Even in the feeble glow of the lanterns, the raw presence of the new arrival lit the room. A severe and uncompromising gaze surveyed the chamber from a

grim face framed by a snow-white shock of hair, a face that seemed as hard and unyielding as the mammoth plates of golden-hued brass that made the man a walking statue; but no, not a man.

'Primarch.' He heard the whisper fall from Hakur's mouth.

Any other words died forming in Garro's throat. He found he could not draw his sight away from the war­lord's armour. Like Garro's, the warrior wore a cuirass detailed with eagles spread over his shoulders and across his chest. Upon his shoulder pauldron was a disc of white gold and layered to that, cut together from sections of blue-black sapphire, was the symbol of a mailed gauntlet clenched in defiant threat. Finally the diamond-hard eyes found Garro and held him.

'Pardon our intrusion, kinsman,' said the demi-god, his words strong and firm but not raised in censure. 'I am Rogal Dorn, Master of the VII Legiones Astartes, Emperor's son and Primarch of the Imperial Fists.'

He found his voice again. 'Garro, lord. I am Battle-Captain Nathaniel Garro of the Death Guard, commanding the starship Eisenstein!

Dorn nodded gently. 'I request permission to come aboard, captain. Perhaps I maybe of some assistance.'

PART THREE

UNBROKEN

FOURTEEN

Dorn's Fury Divinity To Terra

The men at the gunnery stations stood in salute as they carried out the orders of the primarch. Heads bowed, they made the sign of the aquila across their chests before the commander of the cannonade island on the prow of the fortress placed his hand on die firing lever. The officer paused for a moment and then pulled the massive trigger.

Four high-yield ship-to-ship torpedoes flashed from their firing tubes, thruster rockets igniting to carry them the short distance from the fortress to the frigate. Each one was tipped with a compact but very powerful atomic warhead. One would have been enough to do the job, but after the catalogue of hor­rors that had walked the decks of the Eisenstein, the overkill was deemed necessary. The ship's duty was concluded, and only in death did duty end.

The Phalanx watched the last few seconds of the starship's life unfold. The massive construct, the

nomadic home of the Imperial Fists Legion, was more planetoid than it was space vessel. It stood at silent sentinel over the ending of its smaller Sister.

The torpedoes impacted at the bow, the stern and at equidistant points along the frigate's beaten and rav­aged hull. The detonations had been programmed flawlessly, all four rippling into one seamless, silent flare of radiation and light. The glow illuminated the surrounding vessels of the Astartes fleet, and cast bright columns of white through the windows of Rogal Dorn's sanctorum atop the highest of the Pha­lanx's towers.

Garro turned his face away from the flash and in doing so felt an odd pang of regret, almost as if he had done the steadfast vessel a disservice in not watching her last moments of obligation to the Imperium. Dorn, some distance away at the largest of the windows, did not move. The nuclear light washed over the primarch and not for one moment did he flinch from it. As the flare died away, the master of the Imperial Fists gave a shallow nod.

'It's done, then.' Behind him, Garro heard Iacton Qruze's remark. 'If any taint of that warp witchery remained, it is ashes now.' The old warrior seemed to stand a little taller now that his power armour had been repainted in the old colours of the Luna Wolf lively. Dorn had raised an eyebrow at the change, but said nothing.

Garro was aware of Baryk Carya at his side. The shipmaster's face was sallow and drawn, and the Astartes felt pity for the man. Commanders like Carya were as much a part of their ship as the steel in the bulkheads, and to give up his vessel like this clearly struck him hard. In his fingers, the man held the brass

dedication plate that Garro had seen bolted to the base of Eisenstein's navigation podium. 'The ship died well,' said the Death Guard. 'We owe it our lives, and more.'

Carya looked up at him. 'Lord captain, at this moment I think I understand what you must have felt at Isstvan III. To lose your home, your purpose…'

Garro shook his head. 'Baryk… iron and steel, flesh and bone, these things are transient. Our purpose exists beyond them all, and it will never be destroyed.'

The shipmaster nodded. Thank you for your words, captain… Nathaniel.' He looked to the primarch and bowed low. 'If I may take my leave?'

Dorn's adjutant, the Astartes captain from the boarding party,, answered the question. 'You are dis­missed.'

Carya bowed again to the Astartes and made his way out of the wide, oval chamber. Garro watched him go.

'What is to become of him?' Qruze wondered aloud.

'New roles will be found for the survivors,' replied the captain. His name was Sigismund, and he was a sturdy, thickset man, hair a dark blond with a patri­cian face that echoed the same austere lines as his liege lord's. 'The Imperial Fists have a large fleet and able crew are always prized. Perhaps the man can be put to use as an instructor.'

Garro frowned. An officer like that needs a ship under him. Anything else would be a waste. If only we could have taken the frigate in tow, perhaps-'

'Your recommendation will be noted, battle-captain.' Dorn's voice was a low thunder. 'I am not usually given to explaining myself to subordinate ranks, but as you are of a brother Legion and your

disciplines differ from that of my sons, I will make this exception.' He turned and looked at Garro, and the Death Guard did his best not to shrink beneath the steady attention. 4Ve are not given to waste time with ships that are wounded and unable to keep up with the Phalanx. Already during this journey I have lost three of my own vessels to the storms in the warp, and still I am no closer to my destination.'

'Terra,' breathed Garro.

'Indeed. My father bid me to follow him back to Terra in order to lend my arm to the fortification of his palace and the formation of a Praetorian aegis, but with the aftermath of Ullanor and all that came from it… we were waylaid.'

Garro felt rooted to the spot, the same tense awe he had felt before Mortarion and in the Lupercal's Court holding him in a tight embrace. It seemed so sUange to hear this mighty figure speaking of the Master of Mankind as any common son would talk of his parent.

Dorn continued. We left my brother, Horns, intent on making that voyage at long last, only to once more find the universe conspiring against us.'

Garro failed to keep a glimmer of unease from his face at the mention of the Warmaster's name, and he was aware that Sigismund noticed it. Garro knew from talk aboard the Endurance that the Imperial Fists had departed the 63rd Fleet some time before the Death Guard had arrived from the jorgall assault mis­sion. In his years in the Legion, he had never shared the battlefield with the sons of Dorn and knew of them only by their standing with the other Legions.

Fierce warriors and masters of siegecraft, it was said that the Imperial Fists could hold any citadel and make it impregnable beyond the reach of any enemy. Garro had seen their work first-hand, in the design of

fortresses built on Helica and Zofor's World. What he had heard of them appeared to be accurate. Dorn and his men seemed as rigid as castle walls.

'The storms,' ventured Nathaniel. 'They almost claimed our lives.'

Sigismund nodded. 'If you will permit me to com­ment, lord, I have never seen the like. The tempest came upon us the moment we took to the empyrean, and it rendered the careful routes of our Navigators useless. Whatever waypoints we had turned to sand and disintegrated. The finest of the Navis Nobilite, and they were reduced to the level of blind children flailing in a featureless desert.'

Dorn stepped away from the window. 'This is how we came to find you, Garro. The storms ringed us in a disordered region of the warp, put us in the mad­dening stillness of their eye. The Phalanx and her fleet were becalmed. Every ship we attempted to send beyond the storms was torn apart.' A tiny flicker of grim irony crossed the primarch's face. 'The imma-terium besieged us.'

'You saw his flare,' said Qruze. 'Across all that dis­tance, and you saw it?'

'A bold risk/ allowed the primarch. 'You could not have known that there would be anyone within range to glimpse it.'

'I had faith/ Garro replied.

Dorn studied him for a long moment, as if he were going to question the captain's words, but instead continued on. 'The Shockwave from the detonations of the drives disrupted the patterns of the storm bar­rier. The energy of the flare allowed our Navigators to get their bearings once more.' He inclined his head. We owe you a debt, Death Guard. You may consider it repaid by our rescue of your ship's crew.'

'My thanks, my lord.' Garro felt his gut tighten. 'My only wish is that the events that brought us to this place had not come to pass.'

'You pre-empt my questions, Garro. Now you understand how I came to your aid, it is your turn to illuminate me. I would have you explain why a lone Death Guard warship found itself in the uncharted territories, why signs of battle against Imperial guns lay upon her, and why one of your battle-brothers lies in my infirmary wracked by an illness that confounds the very best of my Legion's Apothecaries.'

Garro threw a look at Qruze for support and the veteran nodded back to him. 'Lord Dorn, what I have to say will not sit well with you, and at the end of the telling you may wish that you had not asked for it.'

'Oh?' The primarch moved to the middle of the sanctorum chamber, bidding them to follow. 'You think you know better than I what will distress me? Perhaps my brother, Mortarion, allows such pre­sumption among the Death Guard, but that is not the manner of the Imperial Fists. You will give me the complete truth and you will excise nothing. Then, before my fleet makes space for Terra, I will decide how to deal with you, and the rest of your seventy errant Astartes.'

Not once did Dorn raise his voice or show even the slightest fraction of aggression behind his orders, yet the commands came with such quiet force that Garro found them impossible to resist. He was aware that Sigismund and a cohort of his men were at the edges of the chamber, watching him and Cruze for any signs of behaviour that might mark them as untrust­worthy. Very well, my lord/ he replied.

Garro took a deep breath, and began the story at Isstvan and the Lupercal's Court.

On any other occasion, Qruze might have been willing to let his talkative manner come to the fore and lend his own viewpoint to a story told by one of his fellow Astartes, but as the lad Garro began to unfold the events to Dorn and his men, Qruze found himself quieted. He searched inside himself and realised there was nothing he could add to the Death Guard's dry, careful explana­tions, just a nod now and then when Garro looked to him for confirmation of some minor point.

The Luna Wolf became aware of the silence that had fallen across the rest of the sanctorum chamber. Sigis­mund and the other Imperial Fists in the black-trimmed armour of the First Company were as still as statues, their faces stoic against the unfolding tale. Rogal Dorn was the only point of motion in the room, the primarch walking back and forth in a slow pattern, lost in thought, occasionally pausing to stop and give Garro his full, unwavering attention. It was not until Garro reached the moment of Eidolon's orders to kill Saul Tarvitz and his refusal to obey that Dorn spoke again.

You disobeyed a ranking officer's direct command.' It was not a question.

'I did.'

'What evidence did you have at that time that Tarvitz was not, as Eidolon said, a renegade and a turncoat?'

Garro hesitated, shifting uncomfortably on his aug-metic leg. 'None, lord, only my faith in my honour brother.'

'That word again,' said the primarch. 'Continue, captain.'

Qruze had heard second-hand from conversations with Sergeant Hakur of the firefight on the Eisenstein's gun deck, but it was only as Garro relayed it that he found a true sense of it. The Death Guard baulked at repeating the seditious declarations of Commander Grulgor, and when Dorn ordered him to, a new ten­sion emerged across the room as he finally gave voice to them. Qruze saw anger pushing at Sigismund's lips and finally the captain spoke.

'I cannot hear this without answer! If this is true, then tell me how the Warmaster allowed Death Guard and Emperor's Children alike to make these plays for power under his very nose? The unsanc­tioned virus bombardment of an entire world? The execution of civilians? How did he become so blind overnight, Garro?'

'He was not blind/ Garro said grimly. 'Horus sees only too well.' He looked the primarch in the eye. 'Lord, your brother is not ignorant of this duplicity. He is the author of it, and his hands are stained with the blood of men from his own Legion, from mine and from those of the World Eaters and the Emperor's Children as well-'

Dorn moved so quickly that Qruze flinched, but the Master of the Imperial Fists was not coming for him. There was a crack of sound and Garro fell away, skid­ding back across the bright blue marble of the sanctorum's flooring. Qruze saw Garro hover on the edge of unconsciousness, a livid bruise forming on his face. With care, the Death Guard blinked back to wakefulness and worked at resetting his jawbone.

'For even daring to think of such a thing in my pres­ence, I should have you flogged and then vented to the void/ growled the primarch, every word a razor. 'I will not hear any more of this fantasy'

'You must/ Qruze blurted, taking a half-step for­ward. He ignored the ratcheting of slides on the bolters of Sigismund's men. 'You must hear him out!'

'You dare to give me an order?' Dorn faced the old warrior. 'A relic who should have been retired cen­turies ago, you dare to do so?'

Iacton saw his opening and took it. 'I do, and fur­thermore I know that you will. If you truly thought that Garro's words had no value then you would have killed him where he stood.' He moved to help Garro to his feet. 'Even in your moment of anger, you pulled a blow that could have broken his neck… because you want to hear everything. That is what you asked for, isn't it? The complete truth.'

For an instant, Qruze saw a flash of titanic rage in the primarch's gaze, and felt his blood run cold. That's it, you old fool, he told himself, that was a word too far. He's going to kill us both for our bold­ness.

Then Dorn gestured to Sigismund and his Astartes lowered their guns. 'Speak/ he told Garro. 'Tell me it all.'

Garro fought down the giddiness and pain. Dorn was so fast, even in that tonnage of armour, he was lightning. Had he intended real harm against him, Garro knew that he would never have seen it coming. With care, he swallowed and took a painful breath. 'After the bombing, I knew that I had no other choice but to do as Saul Tarvitz and I had discussed, and take a warning to Terra. With Grulgor dead, I ordered my men to secure the Eisenstein. In the interim, Captain Qruze had come aboard with the civilians.'

The remembrancers and the iterator/ said the pri­march. They had been aboard Horus's flagship.'

'Aye, lord/ added the Luna Wolf. 'My battle-brother, Garviel Loken, entrusted their safety to me. The girl Keeler, she…' He paused, marshalling his thoughts. 'She suggested that Captain Garro could help us.'

'Loken,' said Sigismund. 'My lord, I know him. We met aboard the Vengeful Spirit!

Dorn glanced aside. 'What was your measure of him, first captain?'

'A Cthonian, and all that entails, with a strong spirit if a little naive. He seemed trustworthy, a man of prin­ciples.'

The primarch absorbed this. 'Continue, Garro.'

Nathaniel ignored the tension in his jaw and relayed the details of the signal sent to Typhon and the Eisenstein's pursuit by the Terminus Est, then the catastrophic voyage through the warp. There was a moment when one of Sigismund's men made a deri­sive noise under his breath as Garro described the freakish revivification of Grulgor's dead men, but Dorn silenced that with a hard look.

'There are stranger powers that lurk within the immaterium than we may know/ the warlord said darkly, 'but what you say tests reason even with that qualification. These things you speak of come dan­gerously close to primitive ideals of sorcery and magic'

The Death Guard nodded. 'I do not deny it, Lord Dorn, but you asked me to give you the truth as I saw it, and this is what I saw. Something in the warp brought Grulgor back to life, it animated his contam­inated flesh through the very disease that had claimed him. Do not ask me for an explanation, sir, as I have none.'

'This is what you come to me with?' The primarch's slow anger filled the room like smoke, heavy and

dark. 'A convoluted story of treachery and conspiracy among the Emperor's sons, a collection of ill-informed opinions and rash actions made with base emotion and not cold clarity?' He advanced slowly on Garro, and it took all of Nathaniel's courage not to back away. 'If I were to have my brothers in this room right now, Mortarion, Fulgrim, Angron, Horns… what would they say of your tale? Do you think that you would even be able to draw a breath before you were struck down for such an outright fiction?'

'I know it is difficult to accept-'

'Difficult?' Dorn raised his voice for the first time and the room shook with it. 'Difficult is a winding labyrinth, or a complex skein of navigational formu­lae! This is against our very creed and character as the Emperor's chosen warriors!' He glared at Garro, eyes aflame. 'I do not know what to make of you, Garro! You carry yourself like an honest man, but if you are not a traitor and a deceiver then you can only be pos­sessed by insanity!' He stabbed a finger at Qruze. 'Should I make a concession for some contagious senility perhaps? Did the warp addle your minds and create this hallucination between you?'

Garro heard the sound of his blood rushing in his ears. Everything was going wrong, falling apart around him. In his rush to find a rescuer for the Eisen-stein and a way to get the message out, it had never occurred to him that he would not be believed. He looked away.

'Look at me when I speak to you, Death Guard!' snapped the primarch. 'These lies you bring into my personal chambers, they sicken and disgust me. That you would dare to say such things about a hero of such matchless character as my brother, Horus, it vexes me beyond my capacity for description!' He

placed a massive finger on the sternum of Garro's armour. 'How cheap you must hold your integrity to give it up so easily! I weep for Mortarion if a man of such low honour as you could rise to command a company of the XIV Legion.' Dorn's hand closed into a massive brass fist. 'Know this – the only reason I do not tear you limb from limb for your defamation is that I know my brothers will reserve that pleasure for themselves!'

Garro felt the decking turn to mud beneath his boots and his chest caught in an invisible vice, return­ing to him the same sickening sensations that he had felt in the corridor outside the navis sanctorum and in the grip of the xenos war beast. As he had there, he reached for and found the strength of will that had carried him this far.

My faith.

'Are you blind?' he whispered.

Dorn was thunder incarnate. What did you say to me?'

'I asked if you were blind, lord, because I fear you must be.' The words came from nowhere, even as some part of Garro marvelled at the mad daring of what he was saying. 'Only one struck by such a terri­ble ailment could be as you are. Yours is the blindness that only a brother might have: that of a keen judge­ment clouded by admiration and respect, clouded by your love for your kinsman, the Warmaster.'

It was not often that Rogal Dorn's stern mask cracked, but it did so now. The fury of a god made flesh erupted upon his aspect and the primarch drew his powerful chainsword in a flashing golden arc of roaring death. 'I rescind my former statement/ he bel­lowed, 'get to your knees and accept your death, while you still have the chance to die like an Astartes!'

'Lord Dorn, no!' It was a woman's voice and it came from across the room, but it carried with it a wave of such emotion that every man in the sanctorum, even the primarch himself, hesitated.

Qruze turned and saw the girl Keeler running across the blue marble tiles, her boots clacking against them. Behind her were Sindermann, Mersadie Oliton and a pair of Imperial Fists with their guns at the ready. Iacton felt the echo of Euphrati's voice resonate through him and he remembered the strange warmth he had felt from her hands upon his chest, aboard the Vengeful Spirit as things had turned to hell.

'What is this intrusion?' snarled Dorn, his hum­ming blade still hanging at the end of his swing towards Garro's throat.

'They demanded entry/ said the one of the guards. 'She… The woman, she…'

'She can be very persuasive at times/ noted Qruze.

Fearlessly, Euphrati stepped forward to face the pri­march. 'Rogal Dorn, Hero of the Gold, Stone Man. You stand upon a turning point in the history of the Imperium, of the galaxy itself. If you strike Nathaniel Garro down for daring to give you his candour, then you truly are as blind as he says.'

'Who are you?' demanded the figure in gold.

'I am Euphrati Keeler, formerly an imagist and remembrancer of the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet. Now I am only a vessel… a vessel for the Emperor's will.'

'Your name means nothing to me/ Dorn retorted. 'Now stand aside or die with him.'

He heard Oliton whimper and bury her face in Sin-dermann's shoulder. Qruze expected to see fear bloom on Keeler's face, but instead there was sadness and compassion. 'Rogal Dorn/ she said, holding out

a hand to him, 'do not be afraid. You are more than the stone and steel face that you show the stars. You can be open. You must not fear the truth.'

'I am the Imperial Fist/ he shouted, and the words hit like hammers, 'I am fear incarnate!'

Then see the fidelity of Nathaniel's words. Look upon the proof of his veracity.' She beckoned Oliton forward, and with the iterator giving her support, the documentarist came closer. Qruze smiled a little as the dark-skinned woman composed herself enough to show a facade of her more usual elegant manner.

'I am Mersadie Oliton, remembrancer/ she announced with a curtsey. 'If the lord primarch will allow, I will provide a recollection of these events to him.' Oliton pointed to a hololithic projector dais mounted in the floor.

Dorn brought his sword to his chest, fuming. 'This will be my last indulgence of you.'

Sigismund stepped up and directed Mersadie to the hololith. With care, the documentarist drew a fine cable from among the brocade of her dress and traced it along the seamless crown of her hairless, elongated skull. Iacton heard a soft click as a concealed socket beneath the skin mated to the wire. The other end she guided to an interface plate on the dais. This done, Oliton sank into a cross-legged position and bowed her head. 'I am gifted with many methods in which I may remember. I will write and I will compose image streams, and this is aided by a series of mnemonic implant coils.' She brushed a finger over her head once more. 'I open these now. What I will show you, my lord, is as I witnessed it. These images cannot be fabricated or tampered with. This is…' She faltered, trembling, her words thick and close to tears. This is what happened.'

'It's all right, my dear/ said Sindermann, taking her hand. 'Be brave.'

'It will be difficult for her/ explained Keeler. 'She will experience an echo of emotions from the events.'

The hololith came to life with an opaque jumble of images and half-formed shapes. In the dreamlike mass, Qruze saw glimpses of faces he knew and some he did not: Loken, that degenerate poet Karkasy, the astropath Ing Mae Sing, Petronella Vivar and her bloody mute Maggard. Then the mist shifted and for a moment Oliton looked around the room, the hololith screening what she saw. Her gaze froze on Dorn and he nodded.

The haze of the hololith changed and Garro found his attention was caught by the dance of motion and replay within it. He had only heard Qruze's second­hand explanation of what had transpired in the Vengeful Spirit's main audience chamber, but here he was seeing it first-hand, through the sight of an eye­witness.

Scenes of battlefield butchery transmitted from the surface of the Choral City on Isstvan III hovered before them and Oliton sobbed a little. Garro, Qruze and the men of the Imperial Fists were no strangers to war, but the obvious, wanton horror of the combat was enough even to give them pause. He saw Sigis­mund grimace in disgust. Then the recording turned as Mersadie looked to the Warmaster upon a tall podium, his face lit with a cold, hard purpose. 'You remembrancers say you want to see war. Well, here it is.' The relish in his voice was undeniable. This was not a warrior prosecuting a necessary battle, but a man running his hands through tides of blood with open satisfaction.

'Horus?' The name was the ghost of a whisper from Dorn's lips, but Garro heard the question in it, the puzzlement. The primarch saw the wrongness in his brother's manner.

Then, through Mersadie Oliton's eyes, they watched the bombing of Isstvan III and the Choral City. Darts of silver surged from the ships in orbit like diving rap­tors falling on prey, and as the voices of remembrancers long since gunned down by Astartes bolters gasped and screamed, those darts struck home and coiled into black rings of unstoppable death.

'Emperor's blood,' whispered Sigismund, 'Garro told the truth. He bombed his own men.'

'What… what is it?' asked Oliton, speaking in uni­son with her own voice on the recording.

Keeler's recorded words answered her. 'You have already seen it. The Emperor showed you, through me. It is death.'

The recording jumped and unspooled. In fast blinks of recall, they saw Qruze fight the turncoat bodyguard Maggard in the launch bay, the escape from Horus's warship, the attack of the Terminus Est, and more.

Finally, Dorn turned away. 'Enough. End this, woman.'

Sindermann gently detached the cable from the hololith and Mersadie jerked like a discarded mari­onette as the images died.

The cold, clear air inside the sanctorum was rich with tension as the primarch slowly sheathed his chainsword. He ran his fingers over his face, his eyes. 'Perhaps… Did I not see?' Dorn looked to Garro and some measure of his great potency was dimmed. 'Such folly. Is it any wonder I would rebel at the real­ity of so mad a truth, even to the point of killing the messenger who brought it to me?'

'No, lord/ Garro admitted. 'I had no wish to believe it either, but the truth cares little for what we wish.'

Sigismund looked to his commander. 'Master, what shall we do?' Garro felt a stab of compassion for the first captain. He knew the pain, the shame that the Imperial Fist had to be feeling at that moment.

'Convene the captains and brief them, but see this goes no further/ Dorn said after a moment. 'Garro, Qraze, that order includes you. Keep the Eisenstein survivors silent. I will not have this news spread through my fleet uncontrolled. I will choose when to reveal it to the Legion.'

The Astartes nodded. 'Aye, lord.'

Dorn walked away. 'You will leave me now. I must think on this matter.' He threw a last look at Sigis­mund. 'No one is to enter my chambers until I emerge/

The first captain saluted. 'If you wish my counsel, lord-'

'I do not/ The primarch left them, and after they left, Garro could not help but see the expression of deep concern on Sigismund's face as he sealed the sanctorum shut behind them.

Garro saw Keeler standing by the door and glimpsed a single tear tracing a line down her cheek. "Why do you weep?' he asked. 'Is it for us?'

Euphrati shook her head and gestured to the heavy locked hatch. 'For him, Nathaniel, because he can't. Today you and I have broken a brother's heart, and nothing will ever mend it/

Dorn's fleet readied itself for a return to the warp, and the men and women of the Eisenstein found themselves left outside the work and progress, iso­lated in temporary quarters deep inside the stone

corridors of the Phalanx. Meditation did not come so easily for Garro, and so he prowled the archways and passages of the great star fortress. Once, the Phalanx might have been a planetoid or a minor moon of some distant world, but now it was a cathedral dedi­cated to the business of war and the glories of the VII Legiones Astartes. He saw galleries of battle honours that went on for kilometres and corridors to whole sections of the fortress that duplicated the conditions of different combat environments for training pur­poses. Garro dallied in a vast chamber that replicated the Inwitian frost dunes where legend said Dorn had grown to manhood. All around him, warriors in golden armour moved with sober intent, without pause or doubt as he stepped carefully, still smooth­ing out the limp from his battle injury. He felt out of place, the marble and green of his wargear ringing a wrong note among the hornet-yellow and black trim of the Imperial Fists.

Finally, in such a way that he could almost fool himself into thinking it was happenstance, Garro found himself outside the quarters that had been granted to Euphrati Keeler.

She opened the door before he could knock. 'Hello, Nathaniel. I was preparing a little tisane. Would you like some?' Keeler left the door open and vanished back into the chamber. He sighed and followed her in. There has been no word from Lord Dorn yet?'

'None/ confirmed Garro, examining the spare space of the quarters. 'He has not left his sanctorum for a day and a night. Captain Sigismund maintains com­mand authority in the meantime.'

'The primarch has a lot to consider. We can only begin to imagine how troubled our news has made him.'

'Aye/ he admitted, taking a cup of the pungent brew from Keeler's delicate hands. He shifted, taking the weight on his augmetic. The machine limb was the least of his concerns these days.

'What of you?' she asked. 'Where has this turn of events brought you?'

'I had hoped that I might find some time to rest, to take sleep. It has been elusive, however.'

'I thought you Astartes never slept.'

A misconception. Our implants allow us to main­tain a semi-dormant state while still being aware of our surroundings' Garro sipped the infusion and found it to his taste. 'I have tried this past day, but what awaits me there is disquieting.'

'What do you see in your dreams?'

The Death Guard frowned. A battle, on a world I do not know. The landscape seems familiar but difficult to place. My brothers are there, Decius and Voyen, and Dom's warriors as well. We are fighting a creature of some loathsome aspect, a beast of disease and pestilence like the things that boarded the Eisenstein. Clouds of car­rion flies darken the air, and I feel sickened to my very core.' He looked away, dismissing it. 'It is just a mirage.'

There was a sheaf of Divinitatus tracts on her desk, and a thick candle burning on the mantle. 'I read Kaleb's papers. I think I have a better understanding of what you people believe.'

Euphrati saw where he was looking. 'The flock have been keeping to themselves since the rescue/ she explained. There haven't been any more gatherings.' She smiled. 'You said "you people", Nathaniel. Is that because you don't think you're one of us?'

'I am Astartes, servant of the Imperial truth-'

Keeler waved him into silence. 'We've had that con­versation before. The two do not have to be mutually

occlusive.' She looked into his eyes. 'You are carrying so much weight upon your shoulders, but you're still reluctant to let others bear it with you. This mes­sage. .. the warning, it is not yours alone. All of us who fled the murder at Isstvan, we carry it as well.'

'Perhaps so/ he allowed, 'but that does nothing to lighten my burden. I am in command…' He faltered for a moment. 'I was in command of the Eisenstein, and the message remains my duty. Even you told me that it was my mission.'

Keeler shook her head. 'No, Nathaniel, the warning is just an aspect of it. Your duty, as you said just now, is the truth. You have risked your life for it, you have gone against every will in your heart to join your kins­men to serve it, you even stood in the face of a primarch's fury and did not flinch.'

'Yes, but when I think of all the darkness and destruction that will come of it, I feel as if I am about to be crushed! The import of this, Keeler, the sheer magnitude of Horus's betrayal… It will unleash a civil war that will set the galaxy alight.'

'And because you carry the warning, you feel responsible?'

Garro looked away. Tm only a soldier. I thought I was, but now…'

The woman drew closer. "What is it, Nathaniel? Tell me, what do you believe.'

He put down the cup and produced Kaleb's papers and the brass icon. 'Before he died, my housecarl told me I was of purpose. At the time I did not understand what he meant, but now… now I cannot question it. What if Kaleb was right, if you are right? Am I the instrument of the Emperor's will? Your prayers say that the Emperor protects. Did He protect me so I could fulfil this duty?' Garro spoke faster and faster,

his words racing to match the pace of his thoughts. 'All the things I have seen and heard, the visions that touched my thoughts… Were these to strengthen my resolve? Part of me cries out that this is the highest hubris, but then I look around and see diat I have been chosen by Him. If that is so, then what manner of being can the Emperor be but a… divine one?'

Keeler reached out a hand and touched his arm. Giving voice to the words tore the breath from his chest. 'At last you see with clear eyes, Nathaniel.' The woman looked up at him and she was crying, but they were tears of joyous faith.

A summons was waiting for him in the sleeping cell where Garro had been billeted. He followed Sigis-mund's terse message to a pneu-tram that canied him up through networks of rail tunnels more complex than those of a planet-bound hive meUopolis. He arrived at the fortress command centre and a hard-faced Imperial Fists sergeant escorted him to an audience chamber that rivalled the Lupercal's Court for size and grandeur. Garro felt an uncomfortable flash of memory. The last time he had been called to an assembly like this, it set in motion the events of the Warmaster's heresy.

Iacton Qruze was already there, along with the cap­tains from each of many companies of the Imperial Fists. The warriors in yellow barely acknowledged the arrival of the Death Guard, with only Sigismund granting him a terse nod in greeting.

'Ho, lad/ said the Luna Wolf. 'It seems we're to know our fate soon enough.'

Despite it all, Garro felt a new wellspring of vitality deep inside, the words of his conversation with Keeler still fresh in his thoughts. Tm ready to meet it/ he told the veteran, 'whatever it is.'

Qruze smiled a little, sensing the change in him. 'That's the spirit. We'll see this through to the end.'

'Aye.' Garro studied the other men in the room. This is Dorn's senior cadre? They seem a sombre lot.'

'True enough. Even on the best of days, the Imper­ial Fists are a stiff breed. I remember battles my lads of the Third fought with Efried, my opposite number.' He indicated a bearded Astartes in the other group. 'Never saw him crack a smile, not once in a year-long campaign. That's Alexis Polux over there, Yonnad, and Tyr from the Sixth… It's not for nothing they call them the Stone Men.' He shook his head. 'And now, they'll be grimmer still.'

'Sigismund told them about Horns?'

Qruze gave him a nod. 'But that's not the sum of it. I've heard rumours that sounds of violence were heard inside Dorn's quarters. One can only imagine the destruction a primarch's temper might wreak when awakened.'

'And Rogal Dorn would never be one to vent his frustration openly.' He studied the other captains again. The humour of a primarch sets the manner of his Legion.'

'It's their way,' Qruze noted. 'They bury their rages under rock and steel.'

The tall doors at the end of the chamber yawned open and from the dimness beyond came the master of the Imperial Fists. The battle armour he had worn when Garro had first seen him was gone, and instead Dorn was clad in robes of a simple cut, but the change in dress did nothing to diminish his presence. If anything, the primarch seemed larger still without the trappings of ceramite and flexsteel to confine him. Sigismund and the other captains bowed, with Garro and Qruze following suit.

Given what he knew of the Imperial Fists, Garro expected some sort of ceremony or formal procedure, but instead Dorn strode firmly to the middle of the chamber and cast around, looking at each man in turn.

Garro saw anger set hard in granite behind those eyes, the echo of the rage that he had briefly seen directed at him. His mouth went dry. He had no desire ever to come that close to it again.

'Brothers,' rumbled the primarch, 'something has begun in the Isstvan system that goes against every tenet of our oath to the Lord of Terra. While the full dimensions of it are not yet clear to me, the matter of what must be done about it is.' He took a step towards the Death Guard and the Luna Wolf. 'For good or ill, the statement brought to us by Battle-Captain Garro must be taken onward to its ultimate destination. It must reach the Emperor's ears, as only he can decide how to act upon it. That choice, as much as I regret it, is beyond even me.'

'My liege, if I may speak,' began Captain Tyr. 'If the veracity of this horrifying act is undoubted, then how can we allow it to go unanswered? If treachery is stir­ring in the Isstvan system, it cannot be given time to gain a foothold.' A chorus of nods came from the other men around him.

'We will answer, of that you may be assured,' replied Dorn, with quiet force. 'Captain Efried, Captain Hal-brecht and their veteran companies will form a detachment with my personal guard and remain aboard the Phalanx with me. At the conclusion of this audience, I will order our Navigators to set a course for the Sol system. Captain Garro has fulfilled his responsibility in bringing this warning to us, and it is my aim to personally see that task completed. I will

go on to Terra, as we originally intended.' He glanced at his first captain. 'Sigismund, my strong right arm, you will take direct command of the rest of our Legion and its war fleet. You will execute a return voy­age to the Isstvan system under the auspice of a combat deployment and consider yourself to be entering hostile territory. The journey back will be difficult. Warp storms still rage in that sector and you will find the passage challenging. Go there, first cap­tain, support our kinsmen loyal to the Emperor and learn what is occurring on those worlds.'

'If the Warmaster has turned his back on Terra, what are my orders?' Sigismund asked, ashen-faced.

Dorn's countenance became rigid. 'Tell him his brother Rogal will have him answer for it.'

FIFTEEN

The Fate of the Seventy

Sea of Crises

Rebirth

The Death Guard captain entered the tiers of the fortress's massive infirmary, and inside he found his way to the ward where Decius was being held. He approached the isolation chamber. Along with the dedication plaque that Carya had taken with him, it remained the only other component of the starship Eisenstein that had survived the frigate's destruction. Huge cargo servitors had physically disconnected the module from the vessel's valetudinarium and trans­planted it to here, where Dorn's medicae could turn their skills to the warrior's injuries.

The Apothecaries of the Imperial Fists had met with no more success than those of the Death Guard. Through the walls of the glass pod, Decius seemed closer than ever to his end. The livid knife wound was a sink for his colour and complexion, fingers of pallid corpse-flesh reaching out from the injury. Seeping sores collected at the corners of Decius's lips and

nostrils, and his eyes were gummed shut with dried runnels of pus. The infection from whatever poison had soaked Grulgor's debased blade was overcoming the defences of the young Astartes, moment by agonising moment.

Garro became aware of someone standing close by. He saw Voyen's face reflected in the glass wall. 'He has spoken once or twice. His words are largely incoher­ent.' The other man was muted, as if he were afraid to speak to the captain. 'He calls out war cries and battle orders in his delirium.'

Garro nodded. 'He's fighting the disease just as he would any other adversary.'

'There is little we can do,' Voyen admitted. 'The virus has moved to an airborne stage of contagion in recent days, and we cannot enter the chamber to minister to him, even in fully sealed power armour. I have done what I can to ease his pain, but he's on his own.'

The Emperor will protect him,' murmured Garro.

4Ve can only hope so. Captain Sigismund has given orders that every aspect of Decius's malady is to be examined and documented by the Phalanx's medicae staff, in case the… the intruders we encountered on the Eisenstein return. I have told them everything I witnessed.'

'Good.' Garro turned to leave. 'Carry on.'

'Lord.' Voyen blocked his path, his head bowed. "We must speak.' He offered the battle-captain his combat blade. 'On the bridge, before you triggered the warp flare, I challenged you and I see now that I was wrong to do so. You promised us rescue and it came. Such defiance as mine cannot go without censure.' He looked up. 'I have betrayed your trust twice. I will accept whatever punishment you will mete out. My life is yours.'

Garro took the knife and held it for a long moment. 'What you have done, Meric, with the lodges and on the Eisenstein, did not fall from any malice in your character. These things you did through fear: fear of the unknown.' He handed back the weapon. '1 will not punish you for that. You are my battle-brother, and your challenges are why I have you at my side.' He touched Voyen on the shoulder. 'Never be afraid again, Meric. Look to the Emperor, as I have done. Know Him, and you will know no fear.' On an impulse, he drew out Kaleb's tracts and pressed them into Voyen's palm. 'You may find, as I have, some measure of significance in these.'

Coded astropathic signals had gone before the Pha­lanx, high-level protocols that called to alert the most secure levels of the Imperium's forces in the Sol sys­tem. Dorn's authority was enough to set ships in motion and for troops to be put to a higher state of readiness; and there were other forces at work as well, agencies that had sensed the arrival of the star fortress and the precious cargo it carried.

Several light-minutes inside the orbit of Eris, the Phalanx exploded from a warp gate with violent con­cussion, sending sheets of exotic lightning radiating out and away into the void. Delicate sensory devices dotting the surface of the tenth planet registered the new arrival and immediately communicated reports to relay stations on Pluto and Uranus, where in turn they would be sent onward by astropath to Terra and her dominions. The return of the Imperial Fists to humanity's cradle was long overdue. By rights there should have been celebrations and great ceremony on many of the outer colonies of the solar system to mark it. Instead, the Phalanx came in with speed and

ruthless purpose, not in a stately cruise about the solar system's outlying worlds.

The mammoth craft did not fly the pennants and banners associated with the triumphant arrival of a heroic vessel. Instead, the colours on her masts and the laser lamps about the Phalanx's circumference were lit for urgency. Patrol ships made way, no cap­tain daring to challenge the Master of the Imperial Fists for his haste. Drives flaring like captured stars, the fortress-vessel passed in through the ragged edges of the Oort Cloud at three-quarters the speed of light, down into the plane of the ecliptic, crossing the orbit of Neptune in a flicker of dazzling radiation.

Once again, Garro was summoned to Dorn's cham­bers. At the rear of the great hall, massive iron panels folded away into the ornate walls, revealing a glass bowl that looked down to the command nexus of the fortress below. It was like the bridge of any starship, but magnified a hundredfold in size and scope. Garro was reminded of a stadium, with concentric rings of operator consoles raised in staggered tiers over an arena in the middle. The central portion of the com­mand deck was a gallery of hololithic displays, some of them four storeys tall, forever glittering and shift­ing. Statues of armour-clad Astartes in the wargear of the Imperial Fists were ranged along the sides of the nexus, arms out as if they held Dorn's observation bowl at their fingertips.

On this level, repeater consoles were arranged so that the primarch and his officers could draw information from any post in the nexus with a single word of instruction. Garro realised that from this high vantage point, a single general would be able to direct an entire war of millions of men and

thousands of starships. He acknowledged Qraze where the Luna Wolf stood in conversation with Captain Efried and bowed before Dorn.

'You sent for me, lord?'

'I have something for you to see.' The primarch nod­ded to Halbrecht, a tall Imperial Fist with a sharp face and a shaved skull. 'Show the battle-captain our new escort.'

Halbrecht touched a control and a pict screen emerged from the broad console. Garro saw an image of void outside the Phalanx's hull and of a large, dark silhouette that moved in echelon with it. The struc­ture of the other vessel was only defined by the places where it blotted out the stars: a Black Ship.

The Aeria Gloris.' It was unmistakable, and the instant Garro seized on the configuration his mind filled in the empty spaces. He had no doubt it was the same craft that had appeared near Iota Horologii.

'Correct/ said Dorn. 'This phantom joined us as we cleared the shadow of Neptune and fell in to match us in course and speed. They brought with them orders from the Council of Terra itself and directions to harbour. Specific reference was made to you, cap­tain, and the woman Keeler. You will tell me why'

Garro hesitated, unsure of how to proceed. 'I have had dealings with Amendera Kendel, a senior Oblivion Knight among the Silent Sisterhood/ he began.

Dorn shook his head once, a curt gesture of com­mand. 'Your dealings with these Untouchables do not concern me, Garro. What troubles me is that they know Keeler is aboard my ship, and they have bid me to have her isolated.'

Garro felt a surge of concern. 'Euphrati Keeler is no threat to the Phalanx, sir. She is… a gifted individual.'

'Gifted.' Dorn made the word a growl. 'I know the kinds of "gifts" that the Sisterhood come seeking. Have you brought a mind-witch aboard my fortress, Death Guard? Does this remembrancer bear the mark of the psyker?' He grimaced. 'I was there at Nikaea when the Emperor himself censured the use of these warp-spawned powers for the good of the Imperium! I will not allow such forces to run unchecked among my warriors!'

'She is no witch, lord/ Garro retorted. 'If anything, her gift is that she has felt the Emperor's touch more keenly than any one of us!' The tremor in his voice drew Qruze's attention and the Luna Wolf came closer.

'We shall see. Sister Amendera has requested that Keeler be kept under lock and key, and Halbrecht's men have placed a guard upon her. The woman and her cohorts will be turned over to the Sisters of Silence once we make orbit at Luna.'

'Sir, I cannot permit that.' The words streamed from him before he could stop himself. 'They are under my protection.'

'And mine!' broke in Qruze. Token entrusted their safety to me personally!'

'What you wish and what you will permit are of no interest to the Imperial Fists!' snapped Halbrecht, stepping up to face Garro. 'You are guests of the VII Legion and you will conduct yourselves as such.'

'You labour under a misapprehension, both of you,' said Dorn, moving to the windows. 'Have you forgot­ten what you said to me? The Death Guard and the Sons of Horns have turned against the Emperor, and if so then their Legions are soon to be declared rene­gade, as will all their warriors, protectorates and crews in service.'

'We risked everything to bring the warning!' Garro's words were brittle ice. 'And now you all but name us traitor?'

'I say only what some already have, what others will. Why do you think we travel to make port at the Luna base instead of taking orbit about Terra? I will not risk the lives of the Council and the Emperor on a whim!'

Qruze spat angrily, the old warrior's normally reti­cent manner melting away. 'Forgive me, Lord Dorn, but did you not see the Lady Oliton's mnemonic recording? Are not the sworn words of seventy Astartes proof enough for you?'

'Seventy Astartes whose Legions have turned their backs on Terra/ said Efried grimly.

The primarch nodded. 'Understand my position. Despite all the evidence you bring me, I cannot be certain of this until I see it through the eyes of an Imperial Fist. I do not call you liars, brothers, but I must see all sides of this, consider every possibility.'

'What if you are the traitors here?' demanded Hal­brecht. 'Suppose Horus has been laid low by some conspiracy among his own men, and you have been sent to assassinate the Emperor?'

Garro's hand fell to the hilt of Libertas. 'I have killed men for lesser insults, Imperial Fist! Pray tell, how could we do such an impossible thing?'

'Perhaps by bringing a witch-psyker to Terra in secret/ said Efried, 'or a man wracked with a plague that no medicine can defeat?'

Ice formed in Garro's chest and the anger left him in a cold rush. 'No… no.' He turned to Dorn. 'Lord, if what I have told you and shown you is not enough to convince you, then I beg to know what it will take! Must I fall upon my own blade before you believe me?'

'I have this hour spoken to the Imperial Regent, Malcador the Sigillite, via machine-call vox/ said the primarch. 'It was my affirmation to him that, despite the dedication you have shown to the Emperor in braving the gauntlet to carry forth your warning, the Council of Terra cannot be fully certain where the loy­alties of such men ultimately lie.' There was a hard edge to Dorn's voice, but for the first time Garro sensed the tension in him. It was not easy for the pri­march to utter such words to fellow Astartes. 'My orders were to return to Terra to bulwark the planet's defences and it seems that I may have to do that in order to resist my own brothers' He glanced at Garro. 'I will attend the Imperial Palace and brief the Emperor on this grave news. You, the refugees from the Vengeful Spirit and all the Astartes from the Eisen-stein, will remain in secure holding at the Somnus Citadel on Luna until our master decides what your fate will be.'

Slowly and carefully, Garro drew his sword and turned it in his grip, offering the weapon to Dorn just as Voyen had offered his combat knife to Garro. 'Take my sword and end me with it if I am a deceiver, lord, I implore you, for I grow weary of each test that is heaped upon us! With all the lies and distrust that have bombarded me, I cannot face the same from those I call kinsmen!' With his free hand, Garro reached up to his chest and touched the eagle cuirass. He nodded to the primarch's armour and the similar aegis there, both echoes of the wargear worn by the Master of Mankind. *We both carry the mark of the Emperor's aquila. Does that count for so little?'

'In these dark times, nothing can be certain.' Dorn's face turned to stone once again. 'Put away your weapon and be silent, Battle-Captain Garro. Know

this: if you resist the edict of the Sigillite in any way, then the full and unfettered wrath of the Imperial Fists will be set upon you and your cohorts.'

4Ve will not resist/ Garro said, defeated. 'If this is what must be done, then so be it.' Libertas returned to its sheath in silence.

The primarch turned away. 'We will arrive in a few hours. Assemble your men and be ready to disem­bark.'

The distance across the marble floor to the cham­ber's doors seemed to expand as Garro's injured leg tensed with ghostly pain on every step he took.

The Phalanx approached Luna through the hanging ornaments of orbital defence stations and commerce platforms, her path an open corridor through the dark­ness towards Terra's natural satellite. As the fortress of the Imperial Fists found harbour at the gravity-null La Grange point beyond the moon, the Phalanx mimicked the orbit of Luna around its parent world.

Once, the satellite had been a mottled stone waste­land where humans had ventured in their first infantile steps away from their birth world. They had built colonies there, testing their mettle in the pitiless cold of the void in preparation for future voyages to other planets, but as Terra's people had advanced, Luna had become little more than a way station, a place to pass by on the journey to the interplanetary – and later, interstellar – deeps.

For a time, in the Age of Strife when Terra was engulfed in war and blood, the moon had become desolate and empty once again, but after the rise of the Emperor, Luna had known a rebirth. Waxing and waning, the satellite came full circle as the Age of Imperium brought it new life.

Bisecting the grey stone sphere across its equator lay a man-made valley many kilometres wide. This was the Circuit, an artificial canyon that laid open me rock and stone beneath the dusty lunar surface. All along the length of the chasm lay gateways into the moon's interior, vast doors to the honeycomb of spaces carved by mankind in the heart of Luna. The ancient, dead boulder of the moon became the largest military complex ever built by humans. A vast shipyard for the armada of the Imperium, thousands of starships from the smallest shuttle to the largest battle barge were built and maintained there, and across the face of the far side there were complex sta­tions for observation of the great void beyond. Port Luna was the cold, stone heart of humankind's great fleets.

The satellite was as much a weapon as it was a safe harbour. Much of the metals mined from the moon's heart and the rock from the Circuit's excavation had been employed by the Emperor's most skilled engi­neers, fashioned into a synthetic ring that girdled the planetoid. The vast grey hoop held batteries of lance cannons and docking bays for more warships. Wher­ever the light from Luna fell, those who saw it could sleep soundly knowing the ceaseless guardian stood to their defence.

And beyond it, Terra.

The cradle of humanity was in darkness. The light of the sun glimmered around the curvature of the planet, a brilliant arc of golden colour. Terra's night side showed its face towards Luna, the features of her continents and towering hive city constructs largely hidden beneath thick storm fronts and haze. In the places where the cloud formations were thin enough, the pulsing spark of lights from the great metropolis

arcologies made necklaces of stark white and bright blue, some clustered in haloes, others extending out along coastlines for hundreds of kilometres. Dark patches where the oceans lay shimmered like spilled ink.

On the yellow-hued Stormbird that carried the first group of the Eisenstein seventy, Nathaniel Garro detached himself from his acceleration cradle and made his way to a viewport, ignoring the neutral stares from Captain Halbrecht and his men. He pressed his head close to the hemisphere of armour-glass and looked with naked eyes upon the planet of his birth. How long had it been? Time seemed to weigh so much more upon him than it had before. Garro estimated that it had been several decades since he had last seen Imperial Terra's majesty.

There was a pang of sadness. In the dark of night, he could not hope to pick out the terrain formations and landmarks that he had learned so readily as a youth. Would there be men down there looking up as he stared out on them, Garro wondered? Perhaps a boy, no more than fifteen summers, out in the wild agri-parks of Albia for the first time in his life, would be staring up into the night sky and marvelling at the impossible magnitude of the stars.

Turning there below, somewhere beneath him was the place where he had been bom, and all the other land­scapes of his childhood. Down there was the heart of the Imperium, great complexes of infinite majesty and achievement like the Red Mountain, the Libraria Ultima, the Petitioner's City and the Imperial Palace itself, where even now the Emperor resided. It was so close, Garro felt like he could reach out and take it in his armoured fingers. He pressed his gauntlet to the win­dow and his palm covered the planet completely.

'If only it were that simple to keep it safe,' said Hakur. The sergeant joined him at the viewport.

In spite of everything, Garro felt strangely cheered by the sight of his home world, even as his emotions pulled him towards melancholy. 'As long as one Astartes still draws breath, old friend, Terra will never fall.'

'I would prefer not to be that one Astartes/ replied Hakur. 'With each passing day we are isolated further still.'

'Aye.' The Death Guard reflected. Time indeed was passing more swiftly than he had anticipated. While the Eisenstein's escape, becalming and rescue had seemed like little more than a matter of weeks for those on board, Garro soon discovered that their sub­jective period did not marry with the passing of days elsewhere. According to the central chronometer broadcast from the Imperial capital, more than twice as much time had passed since the attack on Isstvan III. Once more, Garro spared a thought for the loyal­ists left behind to face the guns of Horns.

The Stormbird turned and dipped its nose towards Luna, filling the viewport with spans of hard white stone the same shade as Garro's marble-hued armour. They were falling towards the Rhetia Valley and beyond it the Mare Crisium – the Sea of Crises where the Silent Sisterhood kept their secure lunar citadel.

Garro caught movement from the corner of his eye, the yellow of an Imperial Fist going forward from the aft compartment. Hakur saw him notice. 'I dislike being treated like a noviciate on my first mission off-world,' he said quietly. 'We don't need escorts, not from these humourless dullards.'

'It is by Dorn's orders,' Garro replied, although he said it with little conviction.

'Are we prisoners now, captain? Have we come so far only to be clapped in irons and stowed away in some lunar dungeon?'

Garro eyed him. 'We are not prisoners, Sergeant Hakur. Our wargear and weapons still remain in our possession.'

The veteran snorted. 'Only because Dorn's men think we are no threat to them. Look there, sir.' He nodded at the warriors at the far end of the compart­ment. They pretend to be at ease but they are too stiff to carry it off. I see the patterns of their movements through the ship. They walk as if they are on guard duty, and we are their charges'

'Perhaps so/ admitted Garro, 'but I believe it is more that Captain Halbrecht fears what we represent than who we are. I saw his face when Dorn revealed the truth of the Warmaster's deceit. He could not comprehend it.'

That may be, lord, but the tension grinds like blades upon me!' He looked around. 'It's an insult to us. They separated us, placed the Luna Wolf with Voyen and the boy Decius's capsule on another shutde, and I never saw what happened to the iterator and the women.'

Garro pointed at something through the viewport. 'We're all going to the same place, Andus. Look there.'

Outside, the sheer brass tower of the Somnus Citadel turned to meet the descending drop ship. As they came closer, Garro saw that the building was made from hundreds of gates, one atop the other, arrayed like the faceplates of the golden helmets of the Silent Sisters. The Stormbird fell into a spiralling turn, orbiting around the tower. A dome became vis­ible in the floor of the vast crater beyond, and slowly it opened, triangular segments drawing back to pre­sent a concealed landing field.

'We are on final approach to the citadel/ said Hal-brecht. 'Take your seats'

'What if I wish to stand?' replied Hakur, open defi­ance in his tone.

'Sergeant/ warned Garro, and waved him to his place.

'Are all your subordinates so obstreperous?' grum­bled the other captain.

'Of course/ said Garro, returning to his acceleration couch, 'we are Death Guard. It's our nature.'

The Stormbird's hatch yawned open and Garro strode out down the drop-ramp, catching Halbrecht unaware. Protocol meant that as it was an Imperial Fists ship, an Imperial Fist should have been first down the ramp, but Garro was finding less and less use for such pointless etiquette.

A cadre of Silent Sisters was waiting for them in a careful formation on the landing apron. Garro glanced around, up over the folding wings of the Stormbird to the open hatch far above. The soap-bubble shimmer of a porous aura field was visible, holding the atmosphere inside the chamber but allowing objects of high mass like the ships to pass through unencumbered. A second Stormbird was dropping in behind on jets of retro thrust, and out in the void a third ship was approaching, twinkling with indicator lights but too distant to see in any detail.

The Astartes came to a halt and bowed to the Sis­ters. 'Nathaniel Garro, Battle-Captain of the Death Guard. By order of the primarch Rogal Dorn, I am here.'

Halbrecht and his guards came down heavily after him, and Garro felt the annoyance radiating off them. He kept his eyes on the Sisters. Their squad markings

varied among the group and he searched for some that matched those of the Storm Dagger cadre.

Garro saw the same kinds of warriors as he had on the jorgalli world-ship, but with stylistic differences upon their armour in the same fashion as those of the various Legiones Astartes. One group wore armour detailed in wintry silver, the lower halves of their faces hidden behind spiked guards that resembled a barrier fence. Another woman, standing to the edge of the group, had no armour at all. Rather, she was clad in a thick, buckle-studded coat of blood-red leather, with matching gauntlets and a high collar ranged around her neck. The woman had no eyes. In their place were two augmetics, heavy lenses of ruby-coloured glass fixed to the skin of her brow and cheeks with hair-fine wires. She studied Garro with all the warmth of a chirurgeon observing a cancer beneath a microscope.

With an abrupt sensation, Garro felt a chill range deep through his bones. It was the same odd feeling he had encountered when he saw Sister Amendera in the Endurance's assembly chamber, the same peculiar absence of something indefinable, only now he felt surrounded by it, the disquiet pressing in on him from every side.

'Battle-Captain Garro, well met/ said a familiar voice. A slight figure in robes dropped back her hood and he recognised the novice girl he had spoken to before. And to you as well, Halbrecht of the Imperial Fists. The Silent Sisterhood welcomes you to the Som-nus Citadel. It saddens us that your arrival must come under such difficult circumstances/

Garro hesitated. He wasn't sure how much the Sis­ters knew of the Isstvan situation, or what Dorn and the Sigillite had communicated to them. He covered

with a salute. 'Sister, I thank you for granting us a haven while these matters are addressed.'

It was a lie, of course. Garro did not wish to be here and neither did his men, but the Sisterhood had proven themselves worthy of his respect and he saw no need to begin this meeting on an adversarial note. He had taken his fill of such behaviour with the Imperial Fists. 'Where is your mistress?'

The novice girl's neutral expression faltered for a moment and Garro saw her give the woman in the red coat a sideways glance. 'She will attend us momentarily'

The rest of Garro's men from the first Stormbird had fallen in behind him and under Hakur's com­mand, presented a parade ground formation. Halbrecht stood at Garro's shoulder and eyed him. 'Captain/ he said with formality, 'a word.'

'Yes?'

The Imperial Fist's eyes narrowed, but not in annoy­ance as Garro expected. Halbrecht showed what might have passed for compassion. 'I know what you must think of us. I can only begin to comprehend what you have experienced.' If it is true. Garro could almost hear the silent addendum. 'Do not think ill of my primarch. These orders he has given ar to preserve the security of the Imperium. If the price of that is a wound to your honour, then I hope you will see it is a small one to pay'

Garro met his gaze. 'My kinsmen have betrayed me. My master has turned traitor. My honour brothers are dead, and my Legion is on the path to corruption. My honour, Captain Halbrecht, is all I have left.' He turned away as the second Stormbird settled into place with jets of spent thruster gas.

The other transport opened along its flanks and servitors scurried out with the isolation capsule in

their grip. Voyen walked in lockstep with them. As Garro watched, a contingent of Silent Sisters, all of them armed with powerful inferno guns, formed a guard around the module as it was carried past them.

'Where are you taking him?' he asked.

'The Somnus Citadel has many functions, and our hospitallers are highly skilled,' said the novice. 'Per­haps they may have success where the medicae of the Astartes did not.'

'Decius is not a xenos corpse to be poked and dis­sected,' Garro replied tersely, his thoughts returning to the alien psyker-child. 'You will treat him with the respect a Death Guard is due!'

Sendek and Qruze approached, joining Hakur's for­mation with the last of the men. 'Be still, lad/ said the Luna Wolf. Your boy is not dead yet. Still he clings on to bloody life, even now. I've rarely seen a fighting spirit of the like.'

Garro grunted, his mood darkening. At last, the final vessel dropped down into the chamber and turned, landing struts extending from the spread wings and fuselage. He recognised the shuttle, the black and gold livery identical to the ship from the Aeria Gloris he had spied on the landing deck of the Endurance. The swan-like ship settled gently on the apron and fell silent. Garro knew instinctively who he would see aboard before the egress hatch opened. A ramp extruded from the ventral hull and a hand­ful of figures disembarked. Leading them was Amendera Kendel, her proud and noble bearing somewhat muted. She seemed distracted and wary. Two more of Kendel's Storm Dagger Witchseekers marshalled the other passengers from behind: Kyril Sindermann, Mersadie Oliton and at their head, Euphrati Keeler.

Keeler's gaze crossed the chamber and found Garro. She gave him a nod of greeting that seemed almost regal. He had expected her to appear afraid, as nervous as Oliton and the old iterator obviously were, but Keeler stepped down into the citadel as if she were fated to be there, as if she were the mistress of the place.

Sister Amendera did something in sign-language and the unblinking woman in the red coat and her cohorts moved with sudden, graceful swiftness.

'An Excrutiatus,' said Halbrecht of the woman. It is said that each one of them must personally burn a hundred witches before they can take the rank.'

Keeler stood, unruffled, as the prosecutor squad approached her. With exaggerated caution, the Sister Excrutiatus gave Euphrati a cold and clinical once­over, looking her up and down. Then she signed to Kendel and gestured sharply to her warriors, who sur­rounded the refugees.

Both Garro and Qruze came forward at the same moment, ready to step to battle if events fell that way. 'These people are under my aegis!' barked the Death Guard. Those who harm them will face me-'

Sister Amendera and her witchseekers stepped in to block the Astartes's path, but it was Keeler who gave them pause.

'Nathaniel, Iacton, please, don't interfere. I will go with them, it is necessary.'

The woman in the red coat signed and the novice translated. 'This one demonstrates traits that are of issue to the Sisterhood. By the Emperor's edicts and the Decree of Nikaea, we have the authority to do with her as we wish. You have no right of claim in this place, Astartes.'

'And the civilians, a documentarist and an iterator?' snapped Qruze. 'Are you free to take them as well?'

'Wherever Euphrati goes, we will accompany her!' Mersadie managed a defiant interjection and Garro saw Sindermann nod in agreement.

Keeler began to walk. 'Don't be afraid for us/ she called. 'Have faith. The Emperor will protect.'

Garro watched the procession of figures disappear down a ramp and through a thick iris of steel leaves that slammed closed behind them. He could not shake the sudden, icy certainty that he would never see them again.

Amendera Kendel was still in front of him, still studying him with iron eyes. She signed again. 'Cap­tain Garro, and the men under your stewardship, know this,' the novice translated in a clear, crisp voice, 'we grant you sanctuary here until such time as the Master of Mankind makes ruling on what shall be done with you. Quarters have been prepared.' The Silent Sister never once broke eye contact with him. 'You are our guests and you will be treated as such. In return we ask that you behave only as the warriors of the Legiones Astartes should, with honour and respect.' The novice paused. 'Captain, she asks you for your word.'

It seemed like an eternity before Nathaniel answered. 'She has it.'

It was a prison, in any real sense of the word.

There were no bars upon the windows, no locked doors on the spartan tier of the citadel where the Sis­ters gave them quarters in which to wait, but outside was barren rock and airless void, and for kilometres in all directions there were autonomous sensor units and gun-drones. If they left the spire, where could they go? Steal a ship from the launch bay? And then what?

Garro sat in his small chamber in silence and lis­tened to the men of the seventy as they talked among themselves. All of them gave voice to the things that churned inside their minds, thoughts of what futures lay before them, fears borne of desperation and plans that went nowhere and did nothing.

Sister Amendera was no fool. He saw the look in her eyes. He knew as well as she did that if the Astartes of the Eisenstein decided that their confine­ment was at an end, there would be little the Sisters of Silence could do to stop them from leaving. Garro was certain that Kendel's warriors would make it a costly path for them, but he estimated he would lose no more than ten of his men, and probably only the ones who had been slowed by injury during the escape from Isstvan.

He knew the Phalanx was still nearby, and Dorn with it. Perhaps if they did try to leave, the primarch would send Halbrecht and Efried to convince them otherwise. Garro frowned. Yes, that was a sensible tac­tic and Dorn was nothing if not the master of level-headed strategy. Stepping back for a moment to examine the situation, Garro had to give the lord of the Imperial Fists his due for handling the Eisenstein men in the manner he had. If Garro and the others had remained on the star fortress, eventually friction would have flared and blood would have been shed. By placing them here, under the roof of the Sister­hood – and the very same women who had fought alongside them only months ago – Dorn forced Garro to give pause to any thoughts of unfettered combat.

Even if they fought through the Sisters and the Imperial Fists, and got themselves a ship, what would it earn them? It was madness to think they might

approach Terra and demand an audience with the Emperor to vindicate themselves. Any atmosphere-capable ship would be ripped from the sky before it came within sight of the Imperial Palace, and if they fled for deep space there were hundreds of battleships between Luna and a navigable jump locus.

Of all the things he feared would happen to the sev­enty, Nathaniel Garro had not expected this. To come so far, in measures of both his soul and of distance, only to be held at bay here, within sight of his goal… It was torture, in its own way.

Time passed and no word came for them. Sendek wondered aloud if they might be left here to live out their lives while the matter of Horus was settled on the other side of the galaxy, the seventy an inconve­nient footnote forgotten amid the fighting. Andus Hakur made a joke to him about it, but Garro saw the real concern beneath the forced humour. Barring death in battle or fatal accident, an Astartes was func­tionally immortal and he had heard it said that one of his kind might live a thousand years or more. Garro tried to imagine that, being trapped in the citadel while the future unfolded around them, unable to intervene.

The Death Guard had attempted to rest for the first few days, but as it was aboard the frigate, sleep came infrequently to him and when it did, it was brimming with images of darkness and horror dredged from the madness of the flight. The corrupted, diseased things he had seen masquerading as Grulgor and his men lurked in the shadows of his mind, tearing at his will. Had those things truly been real? The warp was after all, a reflection of human emotion and psychic tur­bulence. Perhaps the Grulgor-daemon was that, a freakish mirror of the black, diseased heart that beat

beneath Ignatius's chest made real, a fate that other unwary men could also fall to. At the opposite end of the spectrum, he felt the golden glow of something –someone – impossibly ancient and knowing. It wasn't Keeler, although he sensed her as well. It was a light that dwarfed hers, that reached into every corner of his spirit.

Finally, he awoke and decided to give up his efforts at sleep. There was a war being fought, he realised, and not just the one out in the Isstvan system, the one between those who stood by Horus and those who stood by his father. There was another war, a silent and insidious conflict that only a few were aware of, people like the girl Keeler, like Kaleb and now Nathaniel him­self: a war not for territory or material gain, but a war for souls and spirits, for hearts and minds.

Two paths lay open before him and his kindred. The Astartes understood that they had always been there, but his vision had been clouded and he had not seen them clearly. Along one, the route that Horus had taken, that way lay the monstrous horrors. The other led here, to Terra, to the truth and to this new war. It was on that battlefield that Garro stood, the battle looming ever closer like thunder at the horizon.

'A storm is coming,' said the captain to the air, hold­ing Kaleb's brass icon of the Emperor before him.

There were always two paths. The first was wet with blood and he had already stumbled a good way down it. At the end point, always visible but forever out of reach, there was release, painlessness and the sweet nectar of rebirth.

The other route was made of knives and it was agony and torture and grief without respite, with only

greater suffering heaped upon those that already wracked his mind and body. There was no conclusion to this route, no oblivion, only an endless loop, a Mobius strip cut from hell.

Solun Decius was Astartes, and against an unrefined man among the billions of the Imperium, his kind were the sons of war-gods; but even a being of such strength has its limits.

The wound grew to become a fanged maw that chewed upon him, biting and drawing his essence from the Death Guard's body. Where Grulgor's plague knife had sunk through his armour and into his flesh, Decius was invaded by a virus that was all viruses, a malady that was every disease that man had encountered and more that it had yet to face. There was no cure, how could there be? The germs were made from the living distillate of corruption in its rawest form, a writhing pattern of tri-fold and eight-pointed microbes that disintegrated everything they came into contact with. These invisible weapons were the foot soldiers of the Great Destroyer, each of them stamped with the indelible mark of the Lord of Decay.

'Help me!' He would have screamed those words if only he could have opened his rictus-locked jaws, if he could have parted his dry, gummed lips, if his throat could have channelled anything but a thick paste of blood-darkened mucus. Decius writhed on the support cradle, livid bruises forming about his body where flesh went dull with infection. He clawed at the glass walls around him, arms like brittle sticks in bags of stringy muscle and pallid flesh. Things that looked like maggots with three black eyes bored through the meat of his torso, raking him with tiny whips of poisonous cilia. There was so much pain,

and every time Decius imagined he had reached the peaks of each new agony, a fresh one was brought to him.

He so wanted death. Nothing else mattered to him. Decius wanted death so much he prayed for it, Impe­rial truth be damned and burned! He had no other recourse. If peace would not be granted by any source in this world, what entreaty did he have left but to beg the realms beyond the real?

From the agony, came laughter, mocking at first, then gradually softening, becoming gentle. An intelli­gence measured him, considering, finally seeing something in the youth, a chance to refine an art only recently discovered: the art of remaking men.

Sorrow flowed over him. How terribly sad it was that the men Decius had called brother and lord ignored his pain, how cruel of them to let him suffer and suffer while the malaise burrowed deeper into his heart. He had given so much to them, had he not? Fought in battle at their sides. Saved their lives with no thought for his own. Become the very best Death Guard he could be… and for what? So they could seal him inside a glass jar and watch him slowly choke on the fumes of his own decay? Did he deserve this? What wrong had he com­mitted? None] Nothing! They had forsaken him\ He hated them for that! Hated theml

They had made him weak. Yes, that was the answer. In all this vacillation over Horus and his machina­tions, Decius had let himself become weak and indecisive! He never would have suffered Grulgor's blow if his mind had been clear and focused.

Yes, through the burning pain it became clear. His error traced its roots to one place, to a single point. He had bowed to Garro's orders. Despite the way in which it chafed upon him, Solun had let himself

believe he was still raw and untested, let himself think that Garro's way was best. But the truth? That was not the truth. Garro was irresolute. His mentor had lost his killer instinct. Horus… Horus! There was a warrior who knew the nature of strength. He was mighty. He had turned primarchs to his banner, Mor-tarion included! Decius thought he could stand against that? What madness must have possessed him?

Do you want death? The question echoed in him, the agony suddenly abating. Or will you grasp new life? A new strength that cannot be made vulnerable? The voice that was no voice whispered, dank and rancid in his thoughts.

Yes!' Decius spat bile and black ichor. 'Yes, damn them all! I will never be weak again! I choose life! Give me life!'

The dark laughter returned. And so I will.

What ripped itself from the medicae cradle was no longer Solun Decius, naked and close to the ragged edge of torment. It was alike to an Astartes, but only in the ways that it was a brutal parody of their noble form. Across rotten bones and raw, pustulant skin grew chitinous planes of greenish-black armour, gleaming like spilled oil beneath the light of the biol-umes. Eyes that had shrivelled to knots of dead jelly erupted into gelid sapphires, multi-faceted orbs that massed across a wrecked face and set into the bone. Mandibles joined brown, cracked teeth in the mouth. A stump reached up and batted away the glass rigs of potion bottles, growing and malforming as it did into a clawed limb with too many joints. The serrated fin­gers inflated and hardened into solid knives of bony carapace the colour of sword beetles. What was no

longer Solun Decius opened its mouth and roared, and from bleeding, suppurating lips spewed a cloud of insects that raced around the shivering body in a living shroud, a cape of beating, swarming wings.

On newly clawed feet, the Lord of the Flies raised himself up and shattered the armourglass walls of his confinement, and began a search for something to kill.

SIXTEEN

Lord of the Flies

Silence

In His Name

Tollen Sender stepped off the gravity disc as the floating platform reached the infirmary level. The oval plate hovered for a second after he departed, then drew silently away, up one of the many vertical shafts that cut through the interior spaces of the Somnus Citadel. His lip curled. The tower had a peculiar array of scents to it that the Death Guard found off-putting. Different levels had different odours, cast out from censers and odd mechanical devices that resembled steel flowers. It was some element of the Silent Sisterhood's discipline, a way of patterning the women used to mark out quadrants of the building. Similar methods were used for the blind astropaths on some starships and orbital platforms. Perhaps it was this unwelcome similarity that made Sendek uncomfortable. He disliked all things about the psyker arts, and all things that connected to them. Such realms were at odds with his rational,

reductionist view of the universe. Sendek believed in the cold, hard light of science and the Imperial truth. The freakish facilities that verged on the edges of sorcery were disquieting to him. Such things were for the Emperor to understand, not for those with minds of lesser breadth.

But the smell… today it was different. Before it had been like roses, collecting at the edge of his senses. Now it was strange, sweeter than before, but with a sour metal taste beneath it. He kept walking.

Without making an order of it, or with anything approaching official sanction, the men of the seventy started a watch. They had nothing to do inside the citadel but drill and spar in the cramped quarters a few levels up the length of the tower, and the waiting, the inaction, chafed at them. So they took it in turns to keep the watch on their fallen comrade. Iacton Qruze was not expected to participate – Decius was a Death Guard and Qruze was not – but all the other men under Garro's command automatically accepted and understood what was required of them. Quietly, they made sure that there was never a moment that passed when a warrior of the XIV Legion was not attending the sick bed of Solun Decius. That the young warrior was destined to die was not questioned by any one of them, but it became an unspoken imperative that he would not die alone.

Not for the first time, Sendek found himself won­dering what would happen when the end came for the youth. In a way, Decius had become something of a symbol for them all, an embodiment of the resilient endurance of their Legion. He thought of the two of them matched over a regicide board on the Endurance and felt a pang of sorrow. For all of Solun's brashness and arrogance, the cocksure warrior did not deserve a

death of such ignominy. Decius should have perished in glorious battle instead of being reduced to fighting a war with his own body.

The smell was becoming stronger. Sendek's frown deepened. Iago, one of Hakur's squad and a deft hand with a plasma gun, took the watch before Tollen's, but he was overdue. It wasn't like Iago to be so thoughtless. Sergeant Hakur's hard training and battle drills burned that out of his men.

Then the unmistakable aroma of blood finally raised itself from the mix of scents and Sendek tensed. There was no movement anywhere along the infirmary corri­dor, and where the corner turned to the isolation ward the biolumes in the walls and ceiling had been doused. Only a faint red light showed him the vaguest outline of the corridor. He broke into a run, his senses taking in everything. For a moment, the Astartes thought that there had been some kind of accident, like the spillage of some great casket of oil across the floors and wall, but the charnel house stink overwhelmed him with the raw bouquet of fresh blood and rotted meat. Sendek realised abruptly that the biolumes had not been deac­tivated after all. It was only that there was so much blood, in thick, sticky layers, that it damped down the glow from them. His ceramite boots crunched on a paste of broken bone fragments and melted teeth. He made out a shape in the rancid gloom: a forearm end­ing in rags of torn meat, still partly sheathed in the marble armour of a Death Guard. Glittering black motes moved all across the severed limb.

Sendek went for the bolt pistol on his belt as the sound began. Around him the blackened walls flick­ered and hummed with the sharp, piercing scrapes of insect wings. The swarms grazing upon the effluent stirred, sensing the presence of the Astartes.

He saw into the isolation ward and felt his throat tighten. There was Decius's capsule, now little more than a broken glass egg torn open from within. Organs and fleshy objects were scattered about the tiled floor where servitors and other living things had been ripped apart. Sendek's hand went to the neck ring on his armour, as the buzzing grew louder, instinctively keying the battlefield vox channel that would tie him to his squad leader. 'Andus,' he began, 'alert the-'

The claw took him by the leg and yanked him sav­agely from his feet. Sendek cried out and lost the pistol at once, as his attacker threw him bodily into a glass cabinet filled with vials and bottles. He clattered through the storage compartment and rolled to the floor, hands and knees falling into puddles of thick fluid. The Death Guard tried to recover, but a hooked foot swung up and hit him in the face, spinning him over and down.

Sendek slid away, knocking aside remnants of what had once been the torso of Brother Iago, and gasped. The shrieking, roaring storm of flies hammered around the room like a cyclone, the beating of their wings sharp in his ears. He groped for something to use as a weapon and found a large bone saw among a tray of discarded chirurgeon's tools. The Death Guard launched himself forward, turning the bright rod of surgical steel in his grip. He would make this intruder pay for killing his kinsmen.

He had only fleeting impressions of the black figure. He saw the strange wiry hairs festooning the surface of the oily armour, he felt himself gagging at the monsuous stench of death that enveloped it. A head with too many eyes and a chattering spider mouth came at him, but beneath the corrupted, fly-blown

flesh there was a shape that seemed familiar to him. A terrible moment of recognition struck Sendek like a bullet.

'Solun?' He hesitated, the arc of the bone saw halted in his shock.

'Not any more.' The mouth moved but the voice came from the flies, rippling their wings and scraping their carapaces to create a droning facsimile of human speech. The claw came out of the dimness and punctured the meat and bone of Sendek's head, splitting the Death Guard's skull. The pink-grey con­tents gushed out across his armour, and the swarm dived upon the richness to feed.

'Nathaniel!'

The woman's cry tore through Garro's body in a shuddering wave that set his nerves alight. He gasped and the steel mug in his hand fell away from nerve­less fingers, a tongue of dark tea spilling across the floor of the exercise chamber. Voyen saw his reaction and reached out to steady him. 'Captain? Are you all right?'

'Did you hear that?' Garro said, tension running through him. He cast about. 'I heard her call out.'

Voyen blinked. 'Sir, there was no sound. You reacted as if you had been struck-'

Garro pushed him away. 'I heard her, as clear as you speak to me now! It was…' The import of it came all at once, the powerful, unfiltered jolt of fear projected into him. 'Keeler! Something is amiss, it was a… a warning…'

The chamber's hatch slid into the wall and Hakur was there, his expression one of deep concern. Imme­diately, Garro knew something was very wrong. 'Speak!' he snapped.

Hakur tapped the vox module built into the collar of his power armour. 'Lord, I fear Sendek may be in trouble. He started to send me an alert call, but his words were suddenly cut off.'

"Where is he?'

'He went to relieve Iago/ said Voyen, 'at the boy's side.'

Garro tapped him on the chest. Voyen, remain here and be ready for anything.' The battle-captain strode into the corridor. 'Sergeant, get the Luna Wolf and a couple of warriors to meet us at the drop-shaft.'

'Sir, what is going on?' asked Hakur. 'Have these women turned against us?'

Nathaniel closed his eyes and felt the echo of the cry still swimming through his spirit, a dark tide of emotion following with it. 'I don't know, old friend/ he replied, taking up his helmet and locking it in place. 'We'll know soon enough.'

The resonance of gunfire climbed up the shaft to them as Garro and the other Astartes rode the gravity disc down. Qruze shot him a look. 'This damn war's followed us here.'

'Aye,' replied the battle-captain. 'Our warning may have come too late.'

Hakur cursed under his breath. 'No signals from Sendek or Iago, not even a carrier wave. At this dis­tance, there is no way I could not reach them. I could yell and they would hear it!'

The disc slowed as it approached the infirmary level. The stink of new death wafted up to the plat­form and every one of the Astartes tensed. 'Weapons/ ordered Garro, unsheathing his sword.

He led them off the elevator and through the corri­dors, crossing through the dank, blood-slick passage.

They entered the infirmary proper and Qruze made a spitting noise. 'Sendek is here/ he said, leaning over a dark shape in the gloom, 'what remains of him.'

Even through his helmet filters, the odour of decay assaulted Garro's nostrils as he came closer. The spongy slurry of meat resembled a body exposed to months of putrefaction. It was undeniably Tollen Sendek, even though the remains of the dead man's skull were a ruined, bloated mass. He recognised the honour pennants and oaths of moment affixed to the armour. These too were discoloured with age and mould, and fingers of orange rust looped around the joints of the limbs.

One of Hakur's men choked back a gasp of disgust. 'He looks like he's been dead for weeks… but I spoke to him only this morning.'

The Luna Wolf leaned closer to the body. 'Iacton, keep your distance-'

Garro's words came too late. Thick white pustules on Sendek's body trembled as they sensed the close­ness of Qruze's blood-warmth and burst, throwing out streams of tiny iridescent beetles. The veteran rocked back and batted the things away, pulping great masses of them with his armoured palm. Agh! Filthy vermin!'

The captain nudged a severed limb with his boot. There were too many torn hanks of meat and bone strewn about the room to be the component parts of just one human body, and he knew with bleak cer­tainty that Iago was as dead as poor Tollen.

From across the chamber, Hakur peered cautiously into the broken isolation pod. 'Empty…' He snagged something with his combat blade from inside the glass container and held it up for the others to see. 'In all the days of Terra, what is this?' It resembled a thin

scrap of torn muslin, slick with black liquids. As it turned in the air, Garro made out holes in the mater­ial that corresponded to eyes, nostrils and a mouth.

Qraze gave the rag a grim examination. 'It is human flesh, sergeant, sloughed off, as species of snakes and insects shed their skins.'

The flat bangs of bolter fire echoed down the corri­dors leading to the other compartments of the infirmary and Garro gestured sharply. 'Leave that. We move, now.'

Qruze's face was locked in a permanent scowl of harsh, cold anger. At every turn, just as he thought he had weathered each new sinister twist of fate, a fresh horror was heaped upon the others. Qruze imagined a vice turning about his spirit, gradually tightening, the pressure upon his mind and his will growing ever more intense. He felt as if he were on the verge of shutting down, as if the goodness and light inside him were in danger of guttering out. Each new sight repulsed and shocked the old soldier in ways he thought he could never be touched.

The Astartes passed quickly through a series of seal doors that lay off their hinges, ripped apart by some­thing of great strength and violence. Past that, they came upon a curative ward with rows of medicae cradles and sickbeds, one of the Silent Sisterhood's hospices for those of their number injured in action, he decided. The ward resembled a slaughterhouse more than a place of healing. Like the isolation chamber, the room was thick with death-stink: blood and excrement, the fetor of disease and rich organic decomposition. In each bed, the patients were dead or near to it, each beneath the smothering hands of a different malady. Qruze saw a pallid,

skeletal witchseeker shaking and foaming at the mouth from some sort of palsy. Next to her was a bloated body wreathed in gaseous vapours. Then a victim killed by bone-rot, a weeping novice wracked by bubonic plague, and a naked girl bleeding from her eyes and ears.

It was not just living flesh that was polluted. Corro­sion covered the steel frames of the medicae cradles, and glasses and plastics were cracked and broken. The decay touched everything. He looked away.

'They have been left to die,' said Hakur, 'infected and left to fester like discarded cuts of meat.'

'A test/ said Garro. 'The hand that did this was toy­ing with them.'

"We ought to burn them,' said Qruze, 'put these poor fools out of their misery.'

'There's no time for that kind of mercy,' Garro retorted. 'Every moment we tarry, the cause of this horror walks free to spread more corruption.'

At the far end of the ward, they came across more dead, this time the bodies of Silent Sisters in the armoured garb of vigilators. Spent, broken bolt pis­tols lay near them, barrels clogged with gobs of acidic mucus. Thousands of tiny scratches covered the places where their skin was bare. They had died from puncture wounds in the chest, from what seemed like a cluster of five daggers stabbed into their torsos. Too narrow for a short sword,' Qraze noted.

Garro nodded and held up his hand, flexing the fin­gers in a gesture of explanation. 'Talons/ he explained.

Hakur and his men were already working the rusted wheel of a large airtight hatch that would give them access to the next section of the tier. The gummed metal shrieked as they forced it open.

'What kind of creature has claws like that?' Qruze asked aloud.

The hatch crashed open off its broken hinges with a roaring displacement of air, and there before them was the answer.

The adjoining chamber was an open space criss­crossed by gantries and walkways, suspended in a steel web far above the open platform of a hangar bay several tiers below. Situated halfway up the side of the Somnus Citadel, the hangar was one of many tertiary landing ports designed for the shuttles deployed aboard the Black Ships. This landing port served the infirmary, allowing injured Sisters to be taken directly to the medicae centre in the event of a critical emer­gency. Normally it would be busy with servitors performing maintenance tasks on the landing grids, the ships or the airlock doors, but now it was the site of a pitched battle.

Garro saw the gold and silver of a dozen Silent Sis­ters engaged in close combat with a whirling, screaming mass of claws and green-black armour. It was difficult to get a good eye on what was happen­ing. A foggy mass of smoke wreathed all the combatants; but no, not smoke. The cloud hummed and writhed with a will of its own, and he saw one witchseeker pitched over the lip of a gantry and sent falling to her death as the swarming mass of flies blinded her. The form barely visible in the midst of the insects, tall and shimmering, continued to send out savage attacks into the lines of the Sisters.