Contents

Cover

Warhammer 40,000

Carcharodons: Void Exile

Beyond the Veil of Stars

Transcript File 1

PART ONE

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

PART TWO

Transcript file 2

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

PART THREE

Transcript file 3

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Transcript file 4

Epilogue

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Oaths of Damnation’

Backlist

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind. By the might of his inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.

Yet, he is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so his may continue to burn.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.

This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.

There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

‘Honour is a dead thing.’

– Beyond the Veil of Stars

+ + + Gene code approved + + +

+ + + Salutations, Inquisitor >REDACTED< + + +

+ + + Initialising astropathic relay auto-séance transcript chain 372F/71G. Part 1 of 4. Record downloading + + +

+ + + Cleansing transcript file + + +

+ + + Transcript file cleansed. Sender verified as Interrogator Anton Fell, agent of Inquisitor >REDACTED< of the Ordo Hereticus + + +

+ + + Opening Transcript + + +

Greetings, inquisitor,

It has been too long since my last communiqué, and for that I crave your forgiveness.

Given the turbulence of our journey here and what I fear we may yet discover, I do not wish to overly tax my astropath, so I will attempt to keep my missives brief and regular. We broke from the warp in-system on Saint Klestus’ Day, one Terran week past. Initial scans by the Lightbringer’s augurs have found no vessels above Diamantus, at least no living ones. There is a great deal of orbital wreckage.

Captain Torrian, commander of the Lightbringer, hopes to drop stasis anchor within the next cycle. My sub-retinue is assembled and eager to make planetfall, though I cannot deny some personal trepidation. We have tried every conceivable means to make contact with the surface, but have received no reply across any bandwidth or frequency. Tech-Priest Garwell has even attempted to commune with the noosphere, but he can find no trace of its existence. The obvious explanation is that the vast amount of debris filling the atmosphere is blocking communications.

I pray this is the only cause. I can scarcely begin to imagine what other terrible events would have resulted in a forge world of over forty billion souls being reduced to complete silence.

Our work lies before us. Let us begin.

+ + + Transcript file ends + + +

+ + + Thought for the Day: Be strong in your ignorance + + +

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

The Mother-of-Them-All had devoured more fodder, and that meant there was glory to be won.

‘Move, scum,’ Hazek spat, and swung his electro-whip, the combined crack of sinew and voltage causing the laggards of his herd to yelp and scamper away, deeper into the bowels of the wreckage.

He followed them at a more measured pace. It was not his job to worm his way into the dark, between cold, buckled plasteel and over broken decking plates. Still, he did not refuse to accompany his herd, like those among his fellow forge-feeders who never left the comforts of the middle decks. If anything of value was discovered, he wished to be the first to know, and that meant going in amidst the salvage.

Hazek had killed two men for such an honour. When the rumours started to circulate, he had staked his claim against theirs. It had started, as it often did, with tremors, those hints of deep-space impacts, shivering through the Mother-of-Them-All, making her metal bulkheads groan and her flesh moan.

Hearsay had followed hard on the heels of the vibrations. The ghosts in the vox and the continual thrum of the lumens and generators had murmured things, and members of the herd and then other forge-feeders had started repeating them. Soon the middle decks were alive with accounts, rife with conflictions but agreeing on the most important point.

The Mother-of-Them-All had consumed, and a prize now lay in the depths of the great hulk, unclaimed, waiting to propel the brave and the strong to immortality.

As the herds had threatened to descend into a frenzy, the forge-feeders had contended. Three had demanded they be given the honour of recovering the salvage: Hazek, Ugal and Jarran. They had fought in one of the old ore pits, jeered and howled at by the Unblessed, those common labourers who toiled eternally in the middle decks.

Hazek could still feel the pain in his right thigh and left arm, caused by Jarran’s serrated scalping knife, and his skull ached from the repeated blows of Ugal’s smelter hammer. None of that mattered though. What mattered was that he had opened Jarran’s throats – both of them – with the clawed steel of his right hand, and burned out every nerve ending in Ugal’s body with his electro-whip. Unlike Jarran, Ugal hadn’t died, but he’d been left a twitching, senseless wreck, and had swiftly been snatched by the Unblessed, for what purpose Hazek neither knew nor cared.

Now Ugal’s and Jarran’s herds obeyed him, and he led them all, down into the depths.

The journey had taken over two day-cycles – as far as such things existed with any kind of regularity on board the Mother-of-Them-All – and had not been without incident. They had been ambushed by feral scavengers and by clatterfiends. At the Deepgate, Hazek had been forced to make sacrifices and speak words that had cut the inside of his throat, all in an effort to appease the mechanical angel who guarded the most reliable passage into the hulk’s lowest reaches.

It had been enough. They had progressed, until finally they had entered the Gullet, the series of cavernous spaces buried in the deepest depths of the Mother-of-Them-All. This was a deathly place, dark and frigid, far from the glorious, burning heat of the forges. Nothing lived down here, not for any length of time, not even the cakosparks or lawless, machine-less scavengers.

They picked their way through the old refuse – ships the Mother had devoured during the centuries of her slow progress. As the gargantuan vessel passed on her way through deep space, guided by the will of the Infernal Architect, she consumed debris adrift in her path. Stellar remains, wreckage, ancient parts of ancient vessels and way stations all now choked the Gullet. Most of it had been picked through a thousand times already, stripped bare of anything of value by the rapacious herds and their forge-feeder masters. Occasionally work crews of Unblessed would make the journey down from the middle decks too, and hack apart and remove even the broken frames of the ships, taking them as fodder for the furnaces. In this way, the Mother-of-Them-All continued to feed her children, that they might in turn do their master’s bidding.

It took the better part of another cycle to traverse the Gullet towards its upper end. There they finally reached the prize – fresh salvage. It had been snagged between the hulk’s vast jaws, jagged sheets of plasteel the size of small islands that were now, mercifully, sealed shut.

Obeying the gravity of the Mother-of-Them-All, the wreckage had crashed in amidst the older debris before starting to settle. It was still unstable as the herd boarded it ahead of Hazek, creaking and groaning dangerously.

The forge-feeder had been on worse, and besides, time was of the essence. Only a fool would linger in a place like this.

‘Hurry,’ he urged the herd, his voice ringing down the dark, broken corridors he found himself in after clambering through what appeared to have once been a docking bay. He triggered the stab-lumen on the shoulder of the work rig he wore, the small circle of harsh white light picking out a slanting passageway ahead.

He tried to discern exactly what the hulk had claimed as he moved through it, the awkward tilt of the deck underfoot forcing him to walk partly bent and clutching at old coolant pipes on the walls. It was an Imperial vessel, unlovely and crude in construction. A merchant’s lugger, some pot-bellied, lumbering beast of burden that had moved vast tonnages of mortals and material between the worlds that worshipped the Corpse Throne. What had befallen it, Hazek could not tell.

What mattered was that it was dead. The Mother-of-Them-All lived, thrived with the heat of her forges and crucibles and the pulsating of her flesh and the quickness of the millions of racing minds and beating hearts that inhabited her. That was not so with this vessel. It was hollow and frigid, an interstellar corpse, and the gloomy darkness of its bent corridors held nothing but the allure of possible relics.

‘Get to work,’ Hazek snapped, cracking his whip again for good measure. Much of the herd was now out of sight, dispersing through the broken ship, but those still in the corridor Hazek was moving down began to feverishly pry open wall pipes and decking plates with their crude tools, stripping out electrical cabling and lumens and dismantling lengths of metalwork. Such petty prizes still had value, for the forges were always hungry, but Hazek needed something more. Something to take back to the middle decks, to prove to the other forge-feeders that he bore the Infernal Architect’s favour.

Those who found worthy prizes amid the salvage would receive gifts. Hazek himself had been blessed lately with a new arm, an initially vestigial growth pushing out from between the ribs on the right side of his torso. It was now slowly but surely beginning to strengthen and find recognisable form. In order to show his thanks for such a gift, he had enlisted the aid of his fellow forge-feeders, who had held him down and sawed off his original right arm just below the elbow before grafting on an augmetic replacement, a clawed thing of wire sinews and oil-blood, its steel still hot from the smelter. That was a right and proper means of veneration. Flesh for metal, and metal for flesh, the way it had always been and the way it would always be.

He flexed his right hands now, both the soft, pale fingers of his new limb and the steel talons of the one that had replaced his old hand. There was power in both, but he wanted more. Was that not always the way?

He worked along the corridor and deeper into the salvage, descending a dark stairwell. The sounds of the herd’s labours were echoing through the old remains now, hammering and drilling and sawing and burning, stripping the wreck like carrion tearing flesh from the bones of a corpse. The noises of industry, a worthy orison to the Infernal Architect.

But where were the real corpses? That was the only thing that had surprised Hazek so far. Even if this ship had been adrift for decades, centuries even, the deep cold of space should have mummified and preserved any bodies on board. It seemed unlikely that a mass-conveyance freighter would have possessed salvation pods or the capacity to evacuate passengers, but there was only one other alternative to explain the lack of remains.

Someone, or something, had already scavenged them before he arrived.

The possibility was unthinkable. He began to hurry, reaching one of the freighter’s cavernous, empty cargo holds, where the vox sutured into the right side of his head clicked with an incoming transmission.

Hazek heard the voice of his lash-hand, Kyree, speaking loud and clear.

‘We’ve found something in one of the secondary berths. Midships. The wall stencilling says it’s deck thirteen.’

As lash-hand, Kyree was Hazek’s immediate subordinate, and potential successor. He had found her to be adept at disciplining and motivating the herd, and she was wise enough to continue to show him sufficient deference – her predecessor, Skaro, had met a swift end after failing to display similar wisdom.

‘What have you found?’ Hazek demanded, beginning to scan the hold’s exits for a means to ascend to the deck she was on.

‘I’m… not sure, my forge-feeder. Best you see it for yourself.’

Uncertainty was not like Kyree. Hazek found another stairwell out of the hold and began to climb once again, his heavy boots clanging on the plasteel rungs.

The shaft around him groaned, the deep, sombre tones of straining metal. The wreckage was still settling in the Gullet. There would doubtless be deck collapses, cave-ins, all manner of dangers. Just another reason to hurry.

Wheezing with the exertion, Hazek finally identified a wall stencil with his stab-lumen, marking the next hatch as deck thirteen. He clambered through it, into a corridor that seemed to lead to a number of secondary power-generation hubs. It made sense – he suspected they were close to the enginarium. That was always a place of rich pickings when it came to salvage, and he had no doubt Kyree had been heading there directly when whatever she had discovered had stopped her in her tracks.

‘Where on deck thirteen?’ Hazek demanded over the vox.

‘It’s marked “hub seven”. It looks like an old generator berth.’

He counted himself along. The other berths were already filled with the herd, busy sawing out old cogitators and power banks, scrapping among themselves as they fought over the honour of lugging the parts back up to the middle decks. Hazek ignored them, locating the correct hatchway and stepping inside.

The first thing he noticed was the water. His boots splashed into it, ankle-deep. That was another surprise. With the ship’s systems dead, all water on board should have frozen or evaporated a long time ago.

He quickly coiled his whip more tightly around the heavy gauntlet he wore over his left hand, wary lest the charged thong should trail.

His rig’s lumen picked out Kyree and a gaggle of the herd, her underlings all stooped, malnourished creatures wearing crude patchwork survival suits. As befitted her station, Kyree’s garb was better, mostly semi-insulated hides that meant she wasn’t left a pale, shivering wreck in the frigid depths of the Mother-of-Them-All. She wore an ugly, blocky resp-mask over her lower face – Hazek had never seen her without it, and wasn’t sure if it was a mere affectation, or whether some blessing or curse had left it physically fused to her skin. Her scalp was shaven and scarred with symbols of the Sacred Geometries he had ritually cut into her when she had been promoted to lash-hand, though her hair was beginning to grow in again in tufts around the puckered skin.

She carried a whip of her own, though it didn’t possess the electrical capacities of Hazek’s. Keeping it coiled, she gestured curtly with it, and the herd scrambled to make way for their forge-feeder, splashing across the tilting, waterlogged deck.

Hazek moved between them, looking past Kyree at what she had discovered. He immediately understood her hesitation. He had expected to find a reserve generator, nothing as valuable as the main engine block or the warp drives, but a secondary system designed to keep the lumens on in this part of the freighter’s midship. But what he was looking at was no generator.

There were two glassy containers set against the wall, ribbed with brass bands. They had been plugged into the cable cradles that would once have held a generator unit, though there was no sign that they were still receiving power. Even stranger, the front of both lay open, as if someone had removed their contents and, perhaps in doing so, had caused the localised flooding in the hub berth.

‘What are they?’ Kyree dared ask as Hazek came to a stop next to her, gazing at the mysterious containers.

‘Cryo-chambers,’ he said after pondering the sight for a moment longer.

‘These systems look advanced for a wreck like this,’ Kyree said quietly.

Hazek agreed. They represented the possibility of valuable salvage, but he had a new, even more pressing concern.

‘This berth is flooded,’ he said. ‘The water would have frozen or drained away if it had been here any length of time. That means it is fresh. It was melted by something. Probably by disengagement protocols.’ He kicked at the deck for emphasis, causing the water underfoot to splash.

‘But what would have been held in the water, or the ice?’ Kyree asked, still looking at the two upright tanks. ‘Not a person. They are too big.’

Hazek had been wondering the same thing, and was trying to come up with an answer that would not leave his lash-hand questioning his intellect, when he noticed the herd were making a noise. The usual snivelling, grunting and hissing of the pathetic menials had been replaced by a whining sound, like a dog displaying fear.

‘They’ve noticed something,’ Kyree said, looking at the herd now rather than her discovery.

‘Quiet,’ Hazek barked, raising his whip, still coiled. The puling cut off in the face of his wrath, leaving nothing but silence.

That, he suspected, was what had disturbed his workers.

There had not been silence since entering the wreck. The cold, dark holds, berths, corridors and stations had echoed with the scampering and labouring of the herd. But now, all that had stopped. Even the wreckage itself seemed to have ceased its senile creaking.

A chill ran through Hazek, more bitter and biting than even the frigid temperatures of the Gullet.

‘Something is wrong,’ he said to Kyree. ‘We are leaving.’

‘But my forge-feeder, the salvage,’ Kyree began to say, dismay in her voice, but Hazek ignored her, striding back out of the berth and towards the nearest stairwell.

Danger abounded on the Mother-of-Them-All, and Hazek had long ago developed the ability to sense when it was approaching. Not all salvage was worth the risk, and this wreck suddenly didn’t seem to be as dead as it had first appeared.

Kyree began to snap at the herd to follow, but Hazek paid them no heed. What mattered right now was getting off the broken freighter.

He hastened down the stairwell, trying to remember the deck number he had first emerged onto. He was almost at the bottom when he tripped and stumbled. His new limb helped save him, snatching at the pipework on the wall and arresting his fall.

His lumen picked out what had snagged him. There was a body sprawled on the stairs, clad in a crude protective suit and labourer’s rig. One of the herd. Something had pulverised its skull, its head now nothing but a dark, glistening mulch spread over three of the stairs. Another of Hazek’s menials lay slumped against the next hatchway, disembowelled, dead hands clutching at its entrails like a doll holding its own stuffing.

Hazek was finding corpses after all.

He hurried on, bursting out onto what he thought was the deck that would offer him a means of escape through the cargo bay. As he went, he raised Kyree on the vox.

‘There is something on board with us. What deck did you enter through?’

He passed along another corridor, this one so twisted and broken that he had to partially walk along one of the walls and leap across several open hatches. He climbed a short ladder through a sleeping berth, panting now. The vox remained silent, cold and seemingly empty like the ship around him.

‘Answer me, you wretch,’ he barked, but still there was no reply.

He doubled back towards the stairwell. This was the wrong exit. He needed to go deeper.

What was on board with them? What had they disturbed? His mind raced through the possibilities, and he found that he was mumbling a prayer as he went, the black binharic, an approximation of the noises he had heard the divine things he served speaking.

Just inside the stairwell his boot connected with something, kicking it against the far wall. A severed head. Hazek recognised the scars on its scalp, put there by his own blade. He realised Kyree’s resp-mask hadn’t been fused to her face after all.

He began to run.

Which deck? Which damned deck? He stumbled out onto another level, into another frigid corridor, the ringing of his boots the only sound. More corpses – a dozen this time, all part of the herd, all butchered. How had he not heard their deaths? How could such violence have been committed so quietly?

He stepped over and through the remains, feet splashing in blood, ducking past another hatch.

Wrong way. This was a sleeping cabin, the metal frames of bunk beds still bolted to the deck and walls.

But there was something already inside it, standing in the darkness at the far end, motionless, as though it had been there all along, for the decades that the wreck had drifted through deep space, waiting in the shadows and the stillness just for Hazek to arrive.

During a lifetime spent in the service of the Infernal Architect, he had borne witness to many great and terrible sights. Beings he thought of as demigods and angels, some flesh, some machine, some both. He had seen monsters too. This was one of those.

It resembled a giant, clad in featureless grey armour. The black lenses of its helmet gleamed in the harsh light of the stab-lumen. It carried a blade as long as Hazek’s new arm, red with the blood of the herd.

‘Architect preserve me,’ Hazek whispered breathlessly.

It moved, faster than anything so large had any right to.

The instinctive aggression that had saved Hazek over the years spent battling for survival on board the Mother-of-Them-All took hold. He snarled and lashed out with his electro-whip.

There was an ear-splitting crack and a flare of light. The monster stopped, towering over him. It had raised its left arm, and the whip had snagged and coiled around its vambrace. Electricity exploded along the whip’s length and surged over the surfaces of the monster’s armour, dancing and snapping.

Hazek tugged, but the coils were lashed fast.

The monster moved again.

Seemingly untroubled by the whip’s ferocious current, it snatched Hazek by the throat with its other hand and, using the coils around its forearm as an anchor, wrapped the remainder of the cord of Hazek’s own whip around his neck.

He tried to scream, but could not. The whip sawed into his throat, pulled impossibly tight by the monster’s strength.

The pain of the electricity that transfused him was beyond his body’s ability to process. Even as the charge continued to play over its armour, the monster tightened its grip, the cabin filled with surging, actinic light and crackling discharge.

The metal of Hazek’s clawed augmetic began to melt. His heart exploded, his brain ruptured, and his organs liquified. His skin blackened and caught fire. His last thoughts were nothing but pure agony.

Eventually the whip overloaded, a bang ringing through the cabin as the last of the electricity earthed itself. With a few curt motions, the monster unspooled the cord from both Hazek’s blackened neck and its own forearm, and tossed the broken weapon aside.

The charred, smoking corpse that had once been Forge-Feeder Hazek collapsed to the deck with a thump.

The silence returned.

CHAPTER II

‘Shall I kill them, strike veteran?’

Red Tane’s question was genuine, and Nuritona answered it as such.

‘No. That might offend them, and you recall the Company Master’s instructions about avoiding that.’

‘I think you have already offended them. They are pointing radium carbines at us.’

‘Perhaps there has been a misunderstanding.’

Red Tane said nothing. Just inside the entrance to the ore refinery’s under-level, over a dozen skitarii presented their firearms at the four Carcharodon Astra before them. The air was heavy with the slow, predatory ticking of the rad-weapons, and the hostile motion had triggered threat-responses in all four Space Marines. It took a conscious, almost physical effort for Red Tane to keep his hand off the hilt of his sheathed sword.

‘You insult the Omnissiah at your own peril, Adeptus Astartes,’ the leader of the red-and-black-robed intruders declared, his voice a mechanical whine. He was a slender thing, all lean metal and delicate wiring. Red Tane doubted he would actually need to draw the Void Sword to break him.

‘No insult was intended,’ Strike Veteran Nuritona replied, switching once more from the squad’s private vox-net to his helmet’s external vocaliser. ‘I merely stated fact. We are not worshippers of your Machine God, and are not beholden to the commands of his servants.’

‘All serve the Omnissiah, you are merely unable to comprehend Him in His purest, most divine form,’ the tech-priest hissed. ‘To suggest anything else is blasphemy! Heresy!’

‘Theological debates are certainly more interesting when conducted at gunpoint,’ Nuritona said stoically, his emotionless voice not hinting at how close to aggressive action the Carcharodons were. ‘But I would recommend lowering your weapons. The Company Champion here wishes to draw the Void Sword. Whenever that happens, things die.’

‘You are outnumbered three to one,’ the tech-priest snapped.

‘Exactly.’

The Martian adept did the calculus, and belatedly seemed to come to the same conclusion the Space Marines had already reached. He let out a binharic blurt from the vox-grille that comprised his mouth and throat, and the skitarii raised and shouldered their weapons with eerie synchronicity, their mechanical components whirring like the servos in the Space Marines’ armour.

‘You will come with me,’ the tech-priest declared, repeating the demand he had made after first entering the refinery, ‘and bear witness to the will of the Fabricator General, blessed-be-his-gears-and-actuators!’

‘I have already informed you, we do not have the authority to negotiate with the ruler of this world,’ Nuritona said patiently. He was speaking in Low Gothic in an attempt to humour the tech-priest, rather than the High Gothic the Chapter usually conversed in, but it didn’t seem to be helping.

‘Then where is the one who bears such authority? Where is your captain?’

‘He is absent.’

‘What district of Megafactorum Primus has he taken up residence in?’

‘He is off-world.’

‘Then one of you must have command in his absence! The will of His Chromatic Eminence Digitas Horrum, hallowed-be-his-circuitry, must be known!’

‘It would be very easy to kill them,’ Red Tane pointed out to Nuritona. ‘Quick. Clean. Little blood. Maybe some oil.’

The tech-priest looked at him sharply, and the skitarii behind twitched. He realised he had spoken out loud, rather than through the squad’s private channel.

‘As you wish, adept of Mars,’ Nuritona said swiftly to the tech-priest before he could take further umbrage. ‘My brethren and I will hear your master’s will, for what good it will do. Lead on.’

The tech-priest seemed to take a moment to understand that he had achieved at least the first part of his pre-programmed instructions. Without another word, he turned and walked off, the skitarii smoothly re-forming into two columns on either side.

The Carcharodons followed, out into the ash and heat, into the smog and thunder of Megafactorum Primus.

The continent-spanning, industrial megalopolis served as the capital of the forge world of Diamantus. The Third Company had descended upon it a little under one Terran month before, though not by invitation. Diamantus’ rulers, the Adeptus Mechanicus, had claimed they needed no aid, and that they were entirely capable of defending their own fiefdom from the threat that had appeared at the system’s edge – a space hulk, code-tagged by Imperial strategos as Grim Destiny.

The truth of that claim had been thrown into doubt by the rebellion the Carcharodons had discovered already underway on the planet’s surface. Several labour districts had risen in revolt, seemingly at the behest of traitors amongst the Martian priesthood.

Third Company had moved with speed and decisiveness, identifying the areas of greatest resistance and eliminating them without bothering to liaise with the skitarii garrison. The Company Master hadn’t even been required to make planetfall yet. First Squad had just moved into their new position in the ore refinery’s under-level when they’d finally been met by representatives of the forge world’s ruler.

From what Red Tane had seen of it so far, Megafactorum Primus itself was an incomprehensibly vast sprawl of macro-industrialisation, perpetually at work, never still, never silent. The air burned with the heat of the furnaces and the flaring of gas nodes, choked on clouds of ash and soot, shivered with the constant pounding of hammers and the turning of cogs and gears. It was enslaved to hyper-production, and it had been labouring continuously for over six thousand years, helping to feed the galaxy-spanning machine that was the Imperium of Man.

Red Tane had witnessed forge worlds before, though he had never spent so long on one. The rebellion, such as it was, had almost been crushed, and Third Company was now spreading in a wide defensive perimeter around the city’s core, each squad patrolling and sweeping a different sector. First Squad – Red Tane, Apothecary Tama, Signifier Henno and Ihaia, led by Strike Veteran Nuritona – had been assigned an area designated Sector BZ8H-11, midway up the slopes of the eminence known as Mount Antikythera. Red Tane was anticipating a shift from purge operations to defensive preparations; the arrival of the hulk would surely prove a much greater test of Third Company’s abilities. He hadn’t anticipated an unlooked-for audience with the ruler of Diamantus.

‘Maintain observation,’ Nuritona instructed privately as they followed the Adeptus Mechanicus out into the ferocity of the forge world. A shift change was underway, the footbridges between the monorail lines and haulage lanes swarming with people. None dared stray onto the private paths reserved for the priesthood, and it was along one of those that the Carcharodons were led.

Red Tane scanned the crowd struggling past, perpetually wary of any possible threat, any sign of surviving traitors still lurking amidst the workforce. He found none. He also realised he could not tell the difference between those labourers leaving at the end of their shift and those who were supposedly just on their way to starting a day’s toil. They were all universally ragged, bent and filthy. Their weary eyes remained fixed on their shuffling feet.

They reminded him of his own serf attendants, or the workers in the bowels of the Nomad Predation Fleet’s forge ships.

‘Let us hope the hulk does not come down on top of that,’ Ihaia, the squad’s volkite caliver specialist, commented. Red Tane allowed his attention to switch briefly from the living tide up towards what appeared to be their destination.

Mount Antikythera was the true heart of Megafactorum Primus, the seat of its power. Once a volcano of vast size and potency, its magmic wrath had long ago been bled dry by the Mechanicus, while its lower slopes had been buried under layers of workshops, manufactoria, foundries and habzones. Its top, designated the Pinnacle, still stood proud of the surrounding sprawl, a once-jagged spear of rock now sheathed in plasteel and rockcrete and bristling with an uneven crown of vents and smog-stacks. Within it lay the techno-palace of the planet’s master, Fabricator General Digitas Horrum.

‘Just leave the talking to me,’ Nuritona ordered his brothers. ‘And make no aggressive motions, even if threatened.’

The other Carcharodons blink-clicked the affirmation runes on their shared visor display, though Red Tane waited a few heartbeats before doing so, the slight delay a form of unspoken protest. He was the Third Company Champion, and allowing an armed slight to go unpunished was anathema to him.

They reached one of the funiculars. Transportation around the core of Megafactorum Primus was mostly by rail, though hulking, fat-tyred cargo haulers grumbled up and down the slope-roads at all hours of the day. The millions of workhands, menials, and lesser adepts who made up the bulk of the workforce went to and from their shifts on foot, the rivers of bent-backed, grimy humanity funnelled between gargantuan industrial complexes and overcrowded habzones. Transport was reserved for the product of their labour, or for more senior members of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

The Carcharodons’ escort seemingly qualified as the latter. Hardwired servitors hauled open the doors along the flank of the funicular carriage, its bare metal frame blocky, unlovely, caked with soot and streaked with oil. The tech-priest and his guards clambered up onto the transport bed. The Carcharodons followed.

The floor of the carriage groaned dangerously beneath the weight of the battle-armoured Adeptus Astartes. Red Tane felt a moment’s vague amusement as he watched the tech-priest snatch hold of the support bar running along the ceiling of the compartment.

With a laboured creak, the funicular began to move, heaving its new cargo up towards the Pinnacle.

As Red Tane stood motionless, mag-locked to the carriage floor, he noted that part of the tactical display on his visor’s spread had changed. There was a short, encoded update from Nuritona, transmitted to the rest of the battle company, informing them of First Squad’s movements.

Temporary redeployment to Pinnacle, Sector A1. Adeptus Mechanicus demand audience. Stand by.

They rumbled past the funicular’s counterbalancing carriage before eventually arriving at its berth, metal and tension cables creaking as it eased to a stop. The doors were once more hauled open, and the Carcharodons and their escort alighted.

None of the Third Company had yet visited the Pinnacle, and Red Tane was surprised to discover that they were not bound for the highest point of the mountain. The peak still stood above them, flanked by more industrial stacks and vox-uplink arrays, satellite nodes and the barrels of aerial defence batteries. The funicular had brought them to a small plateau below it all, a transport hub busy with activity.

On its far side was a high set of steps, carved from the dark, igneous rock of the mountain. They led to a gigantic circular doorway, fashioned to resemble the symbol of the Priesthood of Mars – the augmented, jawless skull of the Cog Mechanicum. It gleamed, devoid of the grime that befouled everything else.

While the greater part of the entrance was sealed, there were several smaller doors in its lower frame, admitting a flow of foot traffic into and out of the Pinnacle. There was no sign of miserable, destitute labourers, though – this was the domain of the planet’s ruling priesthood. There were warriors too, more skitarii, arrayed around the plateau and along the stairs. Red Tane felt their gaze, his enhanced hearing picking out the thrum of energy weapons and the ticking of more radium as he automatically counted their numbers and snap-memorised their dispositions.

He kept his hand off the Void Sword’s hilt.

The Carcharodons allowed themselves to be led across the open space and up the steps. Passing tech-priests gave them a wide berth, some even stopping to stare, forming small, muttering groups at what they presumably calculated to be a safe distance. Red Tane could hear their binary chatter, but did not intend to waste energy analysing it for understanding.

They mounted the stairway and passed in beneath the glaring skull sigil.

Red Tane’s armour noted an immediate difference in the passageway beyond the door – a seventy-one per cent drop in airborne contaminants and a twelve-degree decrease in temperature, back to within levels that would ordinarily be considered comfortable. Brass-plated air scrubbers and atmospheric recyc units built into the walls within the doorway were labouring to keep the external pollution at bay. He briefly wondered how fractionally small a percentage of the planet’s population ever saw the inside of the mountain, let alone took a single breath of air so clean.

A tunnel lay ahead, its walls and ceiling sloping and lit by long lumen bars, with lowered tracks on either side that accommodated rail lines for rapid-transit carriages. More tech-priests and their entourages of menials and servitors were embarking or alighting, but the Carcharodons’ escort made no effort to join them, continuing on foot instead.

The passage sloped downwards, into the depths of Mount Antikythera. Red Tane noted how the rail lines branched into adjoining tunnels, but their own course did not deviate.

At the end of it they found another circular, embossed doorway, just as large as the one that had admitted them to the mountain. This one was not only gleaming metal but also shimmered with a static-fuzzed field of green energy – an active refractor field.

The entranceway was flanked by metallic statues, both huge renderings of tech-priests. One held a data-slate and digi-stylus, the other what appeared to be a small cogitator unit, which it was manipulating with its mechadendrites.

‘The founders of Diamantus,’ Henno said to the rest of the squad as they passed the statues. ‘Fabricator Locii Stais and Prime Hermeticon Valerios.’

The information came to Red Tane even as his brother spoke it, the sight of the twin effigies triggering part of the hypno-eidetic programming from the Third Company’s journey to the forge world. Every void brother had been required to commit the usual briefing summaries and deployment data to memory, though the less vital information only surfaced from the subconscious when triggered by relevant stimuli.

In front of the doorway were more ranks of skitarii, so motionless they might have been mistaken for smaller statues, their armour and augmetics gleaming in the lumen light. The Carcharodons’ escort halted.

‘You are required to surrender all weaponry before entering the presence of His Chromatic Eminence,’ the tech-priest who had first summoned them declared.

‘If you wish to possess our weapons, you may come and take them from us,’ Nuritona said.

‘I compute that as a threat,’ the tech-priest hissed.

‘Their weapons will not be required,’ buzzed a new, synthesised voice. A figure stepped out of the ranks guarding the doorway.

‘I am identified as Skitarius Optio Zeta-One-One-Trio,’ it declared in a monotone voice. ‘I have been program-instructed to bring you before the Fabricator General.’

Red Tane had decided against memorising the differences between the esoteric ranks and sub-cults of the Mechanicus. That sort of information was relevant only for those members of the Third Company who had the misfortune of having to communicate with them directly. In this case, however, he recognised the bearing of a warrior. The figure who had addressed them was taller and broader than the priest who had brought them this far, their bionic components enhanced by plasteel and ceramite armour. They wore a full helm, its mono-lens glowing an electric blue and crested by a brass demi-cog, and had a power gladius sheathed at their hip and a long-barrelled radium serpenta mag-locked to their thigh.

‘Number designates, like ours,’ Henno said over the squad channel, sounding almost amused. Most Carcharodons began their duties with the Chapter bearing nothing but an alphabetical signifier and number tag. They had to earn their old name back, or win one belonging to the Chapter. Even after doing so, some void brothers preferred to go only by their number.

‘Names are nothing but affectations,’ Ihaia stated, quoting one of the truths from Beyond the Veil of Stars.

Optio Zeta shared a brief conversation with the tech-priest in their techno-garble before the latter stepped back, task seemingly complete. The refractor field in front of the doorway fizzled out, and the entrance began to crank slowly upwards.

‘Follow,’ Optio Zeta buzzed at the Carcharodons.

They entered the throne room of Diamantus.

CHAPTER III

The chamber that awaited the Carcharodons was immense, carved with geometrical precision from the core of Mount Antikythera. Its vaulted ceiling, high enough for a Warlord Titan to walk beneath unimpeded, was supported by great pillars that appeared to be part stone, part mechanical, cogs turning and platters, spindles and actuators whirring.

‘Cogitator data-stacks,’ Henno noted as they passed between the first of the towering supports. ‘Incorporated into the pillars. Their processing power must be huge.’

Between them, the adherents of the Machine God toiled and worshipped. Rank after rank of cogitators and data synthesisers filled much of the chamber, attended to by thousands of adepts. The clatter of runeboards and the thrum of plasma nodes and electrical generators echoed back from the high vaults.

More senior priests paced between the rows, swinging censers that churned out bitter-smelling incense and casting sanctified oils from aspergillums over the surrounding hardware. In some sections, whole binary choirs were gathered, their guttural, machine-distorted canting adding to the din as they communed with the machine spirits, seeking their wisdom and urging their continued compliance.

The floor was almost hidden beneath a dense mass of cables and wiring, much of it running from the pillar stacks to the machinery that surrounded them. Servitors appeared to be engaged in the endless, futile task of keeping the huge bundles untangled, but there were narrow lanes through the nest-like carpet. Optio Zeta led the Space Marines down several, until their final destination came into view.

The far end of the chamber was dominated by a ziggurat, carved directly from the ancient, fire-blackened stone of the mountain but, like the pillars, incorporating all manner of mechanical overlays and interface points. It was here that the majority of the monstrous sheaths of cables ended, connecting with the pyramid’s lowest tier.

Each level was occupied by more members of the Martian priesthood, the intensity of their augmetic enhancement indicating their high station. Many were working at more brass-clad cogitator nodes, others transcribing onto viewscreens or interfacing directly with the pyramid via neural links, cortical plugs and mechadendrites. It occurred to Red Tane that the construct itself was some sort of huge cogitator.

A figure that could only be Fabricator General Digitas Horrum sat at the ziggurat’s summit, upon a throne fashioned from Diamantus rock and surrounded by whirring servo-skulls and the swirling fug of machine-purifying incense. He was clad in a red-and-black chasuble, trimmed with gold, and he wore around his neck a thick-linked adamantine chain of office. His head and limbs were bare, and every part of his body on display besides the right side of his face appeared to be composed of chrome-plated metal. Even from a distance, the quality of his augmentation was clear. He gleamed like a silver statue at the pyramid’s apex.

Red Tane had expected to mount the stairs leading up to the throne, but Optio Zeta and a rank of skitarii halted them at the base.

He saw two figures descending from the upper tiers. One was a Mechanicus priestess carrying a cog halberd. At her side was a diminutive servitor, connected to the priestess by a series of spinal and cortical cables. The pallid thing’s organic remains were bristling with crude, blocky implants, the largest of which was a circular vox-horn that had replaced much of its jaw and throat.

The duo passed between the skitarii and came to a stop facing the Carcharodons. The priestess cracked the base of her halberd against the floor, the harsh sound ringing out through the chamber. With eerie synchronicity, much of the work on the ziggurat’s tiers ceased.

‘Make yourselves known to His Chromatic Eminence,’ the priestess demanded, her voice surprisingly unaugmented, cold and cutting.

Nuritona took a single pace forward, towering over her and her small, link-leashed companion.

‘Strike Veteran Omekra-five-one-Nuritona, of the Third Company of the Carcharodon Astra,’ he declared, increasing the volume of his helmet’s vocaliser so that his voice boomed up and across the tech-pyramid. ‘These are my brethren. We form the company’s First Squad.’

The priestess looked up at the Fabricator General. The gleaming being raised a single, perfectly formed hand.

‘His Chromatic Eminence speaks,’ the priestess exclaimed, and fell to her knees. The rest of the court arrayed on the tiers of the pyramid did likewise – only the Carcharodons and the vox-servitor remained standing.

There was a moment’s silence, interrupted by a coughing wheeze as the little semi-organic construct came fully online.

‘You have come here uninvited, Space Marine,’ it declared, its voice a low, crackling drone, like the swarming of some insectoid host, utterly at odds with the childlike figure. ‘Worse, you insult me by sending menials to treat with me. I know your ranks well enough to know you do not command here. Where is your captain?’

‘He is not present on Diamantus.’

‘I did not ask whether he was on my world or not. I asked where he was.’

‘In-system,’ Nuritona said, looking not at the servitor but up at the one speaking through it. ‘I am not at liberty to divulge strategic dispositions.’

‘Further insults. Do you think me no different from some spavined Imperial commander or brocaded Militarum whelp, those who bow and scrape before the Angels of Death? We are not cowed by the Adeptus Astartes. We possess arms and armaments far more potent than those wielded by your kind.’

‘We were not sent here to intimidate, or demand loyalty,’ Nuritona said, ‘but to provide aid. Your world is threatened, whether you are willing to admit it or not. Even without considering the approaching hulk, there are purge operations ongoing within your domain.’

‘Do not presume to lecture me on the defence of my own world,’ the vox-servitor buzzed furiously. ‘The situation was entirely under control prior to your arrival! As for the hulk, we are prepared. Planetary defence platforms, weapons batteries, void shields. I have analysed the fleet you have brought to my system. According to my calculations, and to simulations I have run a thousand times, the defences of Diamantus would obliterate every last one of your vessels within six point one three Terran hours, on average. We are more than capable of destroying any force that threatens us without your meagre contribution.’

‘Perhaps that is so, but our orders remain. We will complete purge operations and prepare for the threat of planetary invasion.’

‘You doubt my calculations?’

‘It is not my place to doubt or question.’

The priestess who had introduced them stood abruptly and began to demand Nuritona show greater respect, but a harsh blurt of Lingua Technis silenced her.

‘You are as stubborn as I predicted,’ the servitor continued in its unnatural voice. ‘The presence of your brethren throughout the upper limits of the megafactorum disrupts the sacred flow of productivity. Sectors occupied by your squads are showing an average output decrease of one point nine eight nine per cent. This is so utterly below acceptable margins that it borders on blasphemy.’

‘That is more likely due to the worker uprising and the treachery of certain overseers–’ Nuritona began to say, but the vox-servitor cut over him.

‘How dare you make such claims! I have ruled this world for one hundred and eight years, seven months and six days, Terran standard, and of the 3.427135e9 seconds and counting that have elapsed since the day of my data coronation, not a single one has been spent below the required overall output quotas. I will permit nothing to change that. Not the base treachery of a few misbegotten menials, nor the invasion of this system, and certainly not your uninvited occupation.’

‘How much longer must we endure this idiocy?’ Red Tane muttered over the squad vox. Nuritona didn’t reply.

‘You likely think me ignorant of the ways of the Adeptus Astartes,’ Horrum was declaring. ‘But that would be a mistake. I was not born upon this world. I have spent time with the explorator fleets. I have served in other domains. I have even had dealings with others of your kind. Yet I have never encountered your particular brotherhood. You come here unwanted, unlooked for. How long, I wonder, do you intend to stay? And do you really believe that, if I so desire it, I cannot remove you by force?’

The Fabricator General made no obvious motion, yet clearly he sent out some form of command, for the skitarii around the base of the pyramid abruptly levelled their weaponry at the Space Marines.

Red Tane’s hand grasped the hilt of the Void Sword.

‘Stay your hand, Champion.’

He had expected Nuritona’s voice over the vox-net, but it belonged to another.

The target locks being read by his armour rapidly decreased as they switched to a new figure, and for a second Red Tane could have sworn what shadows there were throughout the vast chamber deepened and lengthened.

First Squad turned to find a single Carcharodon striding towards the ziggurat. Unlike those already before the Fabricator General’s throne, his armour was not grey, but a deep shade of blue. His gorget flared out behind his helm into a cable-studded psychic hood, while a staff of metal was clutched in his right fist.

Librarian Khauri had come.

A screed of binary from multiple vox-throats filled the incense-heavy air of Mount Antikythera. The priestess who had announced the Fabricator General shrieked at Khauri.

‘You do not have permission to come before His Chromatic Eminence! How did you gain entry to the Pinnacle?’

Red Tane was performing battle calculus. If the situation continued to develop, he had, he suspected, around thirty seconds before the skitarii opened fire. He could cover the distance from the base of the ziggurat to Horrum’s throne in approximately twelve seconds. Over those twelve, he would be enduring concentrated firepower from the skitarii and any of the surrounding priesthood who were armed, but he would have at least one, maybe two seconds’ head start if he struck pre-emptively.

That didn’t account for personal protective shields around Horrum, or any other defences concealed within the ziggurat itself – he would likely have to improvise over the course of the assault, but he was certain there would be no obstacle the company’s relic armaments, the Void Sword and the Coral Shield, could not overcome.

The odds of killing the Fabricator General were good. After that, things became less certain, but machine-men or not, he anticipated shock responses and a lack of coordination for at least several minutes in the aftermath of his strike. The Carcharodons would have the high ground, and the vast majority of the priesthood on the tiers below posed a negligible combat threat.

In short, First Squad had been through worse.

The assessment took a little under two seconds to make. Moments later, Khauri reached the ziggurat’s base alongside them. The Librarian hadn’t responded to the priestess’ demand, but he did something Red Tane’s calculations had not accounted for.

He knelt, laid his force staff on the smooth stone floor, and raised both gauntlets to make the sign of the cogwheel, the traditional greeting of those loyal to the Omnissiah.

‘Hail and well met, Your Chromatic Eminence,’ Khauri said. ‘May your servos bear you up evermore. I am Codicier Delta-eighteen-one-Khauri of the Carcharodon Astra, currently assigned to the Third Battle Company. I seek your permission to speak further.’

There was a deep, deadly silence, underlined only by the distant labours of the rest of the chamber. It seemed the Adeptus Mechanicus were as taken aback by the genuflection as Khauri’s brothers. Eventually, Horrum’s vox-servitor stuttered back online.

‘You are a witch,’ the Fabricator General said.

‘I possess sanctioned psychic abilities, yes,’ Khauri replied. ‘But I come here wishing only to pay homage to Your Chromatic Eminence, and to make what amends I can for your recent losses in productivity.’

‘You can make amends by leaving Diamantus,’ Horrum snapped. ‘Immediately.’

‘Immediately is an impossibility, as our fleet is not currently in orbit. Unless you wish to provide transports of your own, of course.’

‘That would only exacerbate our production issues!’

‘Then I am afraid we are stranded in your realm for the time being. I do, however, have a partial solution.’

‘Speak it,’ Horrum barked.

‘I propose the squads of the Third Battle Company redeploy to sectors beyond the base of Mount Antikythera. I believe the rebellion in the parts we currently occupy has been crushed, and the lower zones are less vital sources of industry. That may help alleviate the productivity downturn you have already noted. Our presence would also be less visible to your priesthood, and the skitarii would be able to take up patrolling of the areas we vacate. I am sure they are more than sufficient for the task of eliminating any last pockets of resistance.’

‘Brother-Librarian, have you consulted the Company Master about this?’ Nuritona asked sharply over the private vox. ‘I have received no redeployment orders.’

‘No, but it would only be temporary,’ Khauri responded. ‘You hold command planetside, and I am present in an advisory capacity. I am advising you to comply with my suggestions.’

Horrum spoke again, presumably oblivious to the shielded conversation.

‘What you suggest is only the most temporary of solutions. You must send word to your captain, and tell him to return here and remove his forces immediately.’

‘I will speak to him, but I doubt he will abandon this world,’ Khauri said. ‘Both the sensorium scans of our fleet and my own prognostications all point to a dire threat on board the approaching hulk. The forces of the Archenemy infest it. The risings we have witnessed here are merely a prelude.’

‘I tire of repeating myself,’ Horrum’s little servitor hissed. ‘We are equal to the task.’

‘Then let us speak of this no more,’ Khauri said, taking up his staff and rising, his power armour purring with the motion. ‘The battle company will depart to the base of Mount Antikythera.’

‘And you will tell your captain of my requirements,’ Horrum added. ‘I will deal with his lackeys no longer. If he has not made contact within the next labour cycle, my skitarii will find you all again.’

‘We understand,’ Khauri said, offering a bow. ‘May the blessings of the Omnissiah abound across your systems, Fabricator General.’

Horrum offered no benediction in return, and Khauri turned away, followed by the other Carcharodons.

‘Fall in with me,’ the Librarian added tersely over the vox. First Squad did so, Nuritona taking the lead, Red Tane bringing up the rear. He was aware of the continued target locks every step of the way out of the mountain.

‘The Company Master will not approve of the change of dispositions,’ Nuritona observed as they progressed up the tunnel towards the Pinnacle’s entrance. ‘What brought you here anyway?’

‘I saw your update on the display, and predicted difficulties,’ Khauri said, the Librarian and the strike veteran now walking side by side. ‘Was I mistaken?’

‘We have not come here to negotiate,’ Nuritona pointed out.

‘I think you made that clear enough to the Fabricator General.’

‘Bail Sharr would not have refused to meet with the Mechanicus over these matters,’ Nuritona admitted. Khauri grimaced as he replied.

‘Living in the past will not serve our present, strike veteran. For good or for ill, Bail Sharr is no longer the Reaper Prime.’

CHAPTER IV

Consciousness returned, though he wished it had not.

His body ached. That was the first thing he became aware of. Ache, and a deep, bitter coldness, gnawing its way to his core. For a long time his mind struggled to latch on to anything else, find any other stimuli besides that piercing frigidity.

Then he opened his eyes.

Darkness surrounded him, interspersed with flickers of illumination – ghost lights that danced and flitted before him. He tried to reach towards one, finding his movements sluggish, painful. His hand, sheathed in ceramite, connected with something solid, blocking him.

He was underwater, he realised. Armoured, but unhelmeted, entirely submerged in icy liquid, breathing through a resp-mask.

There was no meaning to grasp, no understanding conferred by what he perceived around him. He had been deep in the dark – not the Outer Dark but the Inner – lost in the silence, in the nothingness, in the oblivion he had come to crave.

He saw something in the dim, dancing lights. Something on the other side of the barrier that stood between him and the rest of reality. His brain tried to register it as anything it could recognise, a face perhaps, but it was not a face, not in any natural sense of the word. There were eyes, though. Black eyes, cold and bottomless as the deeps in which his thoughts had been swimming. They leaned in, barely separated from him, surveying him with cold, keen intelligence. Then, with a brief flash of red, they were gone.

The strange vision sent a shudder through him, pure revulsion, and in that moment, he knew who he was.

Bail Sharr clenched his fist and punched it free from the cryo-chamber’s crystalflex front.

He found something in his grasp. Something that struggled.

There were more red flashes. He recognised them now. Weapon discharges from a lasgun.

He squeezed, baring his razored teeth in a snarl. There was a crunch, and resistance gave way to something soft and yielding. With it came a vicious sense of satisfaction.

There, at last, was his purpose, his understanding.

He let go of the man whose skull he’d just splintered, ripped away the resp-mask muzzling his face, and slammed his other hand against the glassplex barrier. This time it shattered completely, a sheet of icy water cascading away around him.

The Carcharodon stepped out of the broken cryo-tank, and immediately found himself under fire. More red las-bolts spat at him, cracking from his right arm and pauldron, hissing and sizzling through the water pouring from him.

He responded without thinking. His left hand unclamped his combat knife from his waist and then he was moving, the ache and stiffness suffusing his body deleted from his mind by centuries of battle conditioning and a heart-racing shock of stimms automatically dispensed into his system.

He could smell blood.

The things shooting at him were clad in patched vac-suits and chainmail. The nearest was trying to reload, but had dropped its power pack into the water rapidly flooding the rusting corridor Sharr had been entombed in. The Carcharodon simply slammed past, throwing the wretch against the wall and taking the second one as they fired.

Sharr’s knife speared through the ghoulish, patchwork respirator hood the thing was wearing with a crunch, slamming up to its hilt through an eye socket, the tip punching out the back of its head in an arcing jet of crimson.

He twisted and wrenched the blade free, the heretic dropping without a sound, then rounded on the one he had cast aside, finding it struggling to rise, most of its ribs likely broken.

Sharr punched it, and it died.

His senses, sharpened to a razor’s edge now by the wicked concoction of stimulants hammering through his system, locked on to a new threat. A shape loomed in the hatchway leading into the corridor, far more potent than the pathetic things he had just killed. He reversed his grip on his combat knife and reached for his chainsword with his other hand, before recognition finally pierced the tunnel his thoughts had narrowed into.

The Carcharodon Sharr knew only as Blood Eye stepped towards him, boots splashing in the water that had flooded from the shattered cryo-chamber.

‘Welcome back,’ he said, voice hissing from his helm’s arched vox-grille.

Sharr did not reply immediately. The urge to kill remained with him, the need to taste and smell more blood. He overcame it only with difficulty, standing facing the grey spectre, like his own mirror image glaring him down.

Slowly, the urges ebbed away, leaving behind the hollowness, and the shivering aftermath of an unregulated cryo-resuscitation.

He began to truly remember who he was, and what he had become.

Outcast. Anathema. Void Exile.

He and the others had been mind-wiped while being transported in-system, receiving hypno-briefings en route that were only now beginning to resurface. Sharr did not know how he had come to be in the wreckage where the cryo-chamber had been embedded, or where he had been or what he had done between the current and the previous operations. Life since the beginning of his exile had been little more than a continuous chain of violence, with none of the meditative silence the Carcharodon Astra used to salve their souls between campaigns.

What he did know was the information pertinent to this mission. He and the others had been tasked with stopping the space hulk code-tagged Grim Destiny from reaching a forge world known as Diamantus. So few Carcharodons against the vast, infested macro-vessel seemed like impossible odds. But there was a plan.

‘Where are the others?’ Sharr asked Blood Eye. His voice was a deathly rasp. He wondered how long it had been since he had last used it. Months? Or years?

‘They are hunting,’ Blood Eye said. ‘Throwing off the after-effects of entombment.’

Sharr locked his knife back to his hip and flexed the servos in his armour. He thought about the un-face he had seen, watching him through the glassplex as he had struggled to awaken from the cryo-sleep. He remembered how it had vanished in a flash of crimson.

The cultists had been shooting at it, not at Sharr, not until he had emerged.

‘You are troubled,’ Blood Eye suggested.

‘There was something here, before the heretics found me,’ Sharr said after a brief hesitation. ‘I was not able to identify it. I had only just awoken.’

‘The slaves of the Archenemy are many and monstrous,’ Blood Eye said. ‘There is no doubt they infest this hulk from these depths to its uppermost decks. We must remain vigilant.’

Sharr did not respond. He felt suddenly sick and weak. His reawakening was catching up with him, made worse by the fact he had been roused while the reheating and drainage protocols were still underway.

But he had experienced it all a thousand times before. He spat, tasting acid, swallowed, shook out his neck and rolled his shoulders, then slammed his boot down on the last cultist he had killed. The wretch’s body burst, spattering offal halfway up the nearest wall and turning the water swilling around their feet crimson.

‘Let us be on our way,’ he said, pulling on his helmet and rousing his armour’s auto-senses. ‘The countdown has already begun.’

The Exiles moved up, carefully, through the bowels of hell.

Blood Eye led them. He carried the squad’s auspex, and used its faintly glowing green display to navigate the detritus of the lowermost levels and up towards their objective.

It was slow going. None of them remembered exactly how they had got where they were now. The combination of mind-wipes and solitary stasis confinement meant they had seen no other void brothers besides each other for years. They had been sealed in the frigid torpor of the cryo-chambers installed on board the old wreckage, and none of them really knew how long they had spent there, adrift in space, seeded in the hulk’s path.

The jarring impacts of collision had triggered the activation protocols and woken them from dreamless depths – four Void Exiles, cast out from their Shivers. Four former brothers, stripped of their names and, in some cases, the arms and armour they had wielded for decades. Four Carcharodon Astra, together but bitterly alone, banished from their companies, set adrift to kill and die on the edges of the Outer Dark.

Blood Eye paused briefly at the top of a steep metal corridor, then took a right turn. Decking plates groaned and creaked beneath the weight of the four. There was no light, the systems of whatever ship this had once been long dead, the Carcharodons working on preysight and instinct.

They advanced through the dark in single file, going slowly higher as they left behind the wreckage-choked halls that formed the hulk’s underbelly. None of them spoke. They rarely conversed, unless it was relevant to current operations. There was no Chapter edict against it, but what was there to say? None of them sought comradeship from those who were lost. Still, over the past four years Sharr had watched, and had learned things about his unwilling companions.

Epsilon-one-twelve – known as Blood Eye – had the easiest past to discern, at least in part. His unofficial name came from the dark crimson eyes of his helmet, unusual among the Carcharodons. Most helms in the Chapter bore dark yellow or black lenses. Added to that was the fact that the corners of his grey battle plate were scabbed with deep red, where a layer of paint had been callously scraped away to re-expose the old, original colouration. If those physical signs were not enough, his knowledge of all matters mechanical made it clear that he had once been a Techmarine.

The other two were opaquer. The one they called Shadow – Theta-six-seven – was young, his flesh barely scarred and unmarked by exile tattoos. Sharr suspected he had hardly reached the rank of void brother before his banishment. Exiled or not, he still bore the arrogance of youth, and his face, when his helmet was off, had a cruel twist to it.

The other – Omekra-seven-three – was known as Talon, in no small part because of one of the weapons he affected, a trio of long claws, fashioned onto the back of one gauntlet. He combined them with a traditionalist club, and his preference for fighting up close, along with the Devourer tattoos Sharr had seen on his arms, indicated he had once been a member of one of the Chapter’s assault squads.

Blood Eye, Shadow and Talon. There had been others, but they were gone now, and Sharr barely remembered them.

Sometimes, he wondered what they had discerned of him over the years. He had no doubt they had all noted, on the rare occasions when his helmet was removed, that he bore the shark-and-scythe tattoo on his left temple. It marked him out as Reaper Prime, an honorific traditionally belonging to the Master of the Third Company. For a master to suffer banishment was almost unheard of.

The shame of that reality was now little more than a background ache. Such emotions were nothing, just as honour and pride were nothing. Distractions, detracting from the clarity of duty, from the requirements of the Edicts of Exile. The Chapter taught that such things were meaningless. Sharr had always found that to be true. Until the Blindness had taken him.

It was the Blindness and its mindless rage that had brought him here. It was one of the Chapter’s curses, born out of its malformed genetic heritage. It had broken him and remade him into what he had always dreaded he would one day become. That was why, when combat-cant necessitated brevity, Blood Eye, Shadow or Talon addressed him as Blind One. The Blindness – not a true lack of vision, but bouts of chilling despair that gave way to mindless fury – was all he had left, the only emotions that had survived the Outer Dark and still held any meaning for him.

None of the other Exiles had asked him what blasphemies he had committed, what depravities he had condoned to earn a place among the lost, and nor had he ever sought the details of their crimes. Such a thing would be anathema. It did not matter anyway. What mattered was that each now trod his own road to damnation, and there could be no reprieve except in slaughter.

That road turned from a figurative to a literal one on board Grim Destiny. The four Exiles experienced the first signs of life since leaving the boarding wreckage about one day-cycle into the operation. Sharr caught a flicker of movement amidst a debris-choked hallway they were stalking through. There were skittering noises too, claws on metal.

Shadow’s marker on the shared visor display blinked up with the runes for contact and a question-signifier.

‘Nothing that need concern us,’ Blood Eye answered, his gaze not leaving his auspex.

Sharr did not trust his fellow Exile enough to let his guard down, but nothing came of the occasional scurrying sounds.

The Blindness’ early stages were with him as they traversed the hulk’s depths, the icy simmering that marked his existence between the short bouts of hyper-violence his life now revolved around. His thoughts remained clear. He followed Blood Eye, he watched, and he waited for the inevitable. For the killing time.

Blood Eye came to a halt next to a circular bulkhead hatch, the green of the auspex blinking over his scabbed helm as he paused to consult it. It was unlike him to be so uncertain. Sharr was about to demand an explanation when the other Exile spoke, his voice a dry rasp over the vox.

‘The auspex is malfunctioning, but there appears to be a presence ahead.’

‘Alternative route?’ Talon asked.

‘Negative. The passageways converge, all but a few crawl spaces and shafts that would likely be too small and unstable. The area ahead forms a gateway, a link between the lower and middle decks.’

‘And it is guarded,’ Shadow surmised.

‘In some way, yes. The auspex won’t tell me more. It is as if… the machine spirit is afraid.’

None of the Carcharodons responded to the claim. Fear was something they simply did not understand.

‘If not around, then through,’ Talon said, slipping free his club from its strap across his cuisse.

‘I’m mapping what readings I can onto the tactical display,’ Blood Eye said, working the auspex dials. Fresh data scrawled over Sharr’s vision, including a map burst of the area ahead. It was as Blood Eye had described – a confluence of passages and gangways, a fusion of what looked like the structures of several different ships that had long ago become enmeshed together.

The chart was flickering and uncertain, some sections blinking and changing before realigning with their previous orientation. It was cringing and twitching. And at the centre of it was a presence, or perhaps more accurately an absence. No data, no output, as though the heart of the corridors ahead somehow did not exist.

The Carcharodons prepared their weaponry, and advanced.

Sharr had come to terms with the loss of the armour he had worn for over eight decades. When he had been stripped of his ranks, he had also been stripped of the relic wargear that each Reaper Prime inherited. He had gone back to what remained of his old Mark V battle plate – what hadn’t been scavenged and cannibalised over the years to provide for other void brothers. Part of it had to be modified with the few pieces of Mark X armour available from the Nomad Predation Fleet’s reserves, adjusting the original to the changes he had undergone in the intervening period, the brutal modifications of the Rubicon Primaris. Despite such shortcomings, he had eventually reconnected with what remained of the original panoply and its patchwork of pieces, the worn, wounded old machine spirit accepting his return.

Reaper was a more acute loss.

The great, two-handed chainaxe was one of the Reaper Prime’s tools and symbols of office, an ancient relic weapon that was passed from one Company Master to the next. Like much of the wargear he had been stripped of, Sharr had taken custodianship of Reaper after the death of the previous Third Company master, Akia, just prior to the Red Tithe conducted on the prison world of Zartak. Sharr had carried it ever since, and had almost forgotten what it meant to fight without the mighty weapon and the devastating carnage it could unleash.

The chainsword he had wielded before his promotion had long been granted to another brother, so Reaper had been replaced with some aged weapon from the Chapter’s armoury, a chainsword whose motor didn’t even function consistently. He had also kept his combat knife and Phobos bolt pistol.

He checked the sidearm briefly, then mag-locked it back to his hip, choosing to wield the chainsword and the knife. Each of the Exiles bore a similar mismatch of weaponry: Blood Eye had an Umbra-pattern boltgun, even more ancient-looking than Sharr’s Phobos, while Shadow carried an Umbra-Ferrox bolter with a high-capacity box magazine, along with a viciously curved and serrated knife. Talon wielded his claws – Sharr presumed they were some trophy claimed from a predator the former Devourer had defeated – and his old club, fashioned from worn, unidentified xenos bone, its head studded with adamantine spikes. He bore no firearms.

The Carcharodons prowled forward, forced to stoop along a particularly low corridor. Blood Eye dropped down through the open hatch beyond, and the display they shared over the helmet link blinked with a new marker as Sharr followed him out.

Objective sighted.

They had descended into a wide space of rusting metalwork. Hatches and entrances branched off all around, but the room was dominated by one set of doors on the far side. They towered over the hive-like honeycomb of lesser entranceways, solid, dark metal, scarred and pitted and sealed shut.

Yet none of them held Sharr’s gaze. The source of the auspex’s disruption had become clear. There was something at the far end of the chamber. Its shape was humanoid, but it was large, the size of a Dreadnought. Its form appeared metallic, composed of finely crafted plates of black and silver steel trimmed with brass. It sat cross-legged, long, slender arms crossed over its chest, head bowed.

It was bound, Sharr realised. Silver chains shackled it to the decking plates beneath. It did not seem to be aware of their presence as the Carcharodons dropped into the chamber with it.

‘Daemonspawn,’ Talon growled.

‘A guardian, for what lies beyond?’ Shadow wondered. Sharr looked past the strange creature at the gateway it sat before.

‘Blast doors, likely once from a ship’s enginarium,’ Blood Eye commented. ‘Now serving as a passage between the lower and middle decks.’

‘And guarded,’ Shadow said.

‘It seems dormant,’ Blood Eye pointed out.

‘A trap?’ Talon said.

‘Likely,’ Blood Eye agreed.

‘We won’t know until we spring it,’ Sharr told them, and without waiting for further assessment, he advanced towards the thing chained before the doors.

As he approached, he realised that the decking plates that formed the floor of the crossroads were littered with wreckage. Much of it was unidentifiable, though a particularly large heap of cogs appeared to have been piled up around the daemon. Then, as he reached it, it stirred.

It lifted its head slowly to look at them, and Sharr gazed upon its face. It was covered by a mask of black iron, its features picked out with silver. The obvious, delicate craftmanship on display could have been considered artisanal, had it not been worked into something so nightmarish and grim. The mask’s mouth was overlarge and downturned, exposing row upon row of glittering teeth that could have been fused together as part of its construction, or may indeed have belonged to the creature that wore it. Its eyes were exposed too, lidless, their unblinking rawness combining with the maw to give the thing a fixed expression of horror.

It groaned. The sound was not so much the noise of an animal as the creaking of an ageing engine or a bulkhead being placed under strain.

Then, it spoke.

There was a screech of interference over the vox, followed by a babbling noise, like a deep voice being run through audio manipulation. It was scrambled and nonsensical, yet felt close enough to true speech for Sharr to half imagine he was hearing real words amidst the mess.

He did not know if it was mocking them, damning them, or trying to ward them away. He did not care. He wished only to destroy it.

As well as the noise, his auto-senses registered light and motion. He highlighted it for the others with a blink-click, but need hardly have bothered – the cogs had started to rise up, accompanied by a strengthening glimmer. Sharr saw purple flames flaring from within the mound of machine parts, seemingly summoned by the monstrosity.

‘Break it, before its powers can fully materialise,’ he spat into the vox.

He broke into a run, but had only managed a few steps before the shockwave hit him. It picked up and blasted the scattered wreckage against the walls, and struck Sharr with the force of a battle cannon shell, slamming him back onto his reactor pack. He was on his feet again almost instantly, forcing the aged, battered servos of his armour to respond to his will, throwing himself forward.

The daemon had risen, its chains now pulled taut. Up close, Sharr could see between the warpsteel plates sheathing its outer body. Its insides were exposed between the cracks; at first he thought it was a machine, before realising that the cogs were made of grinding bone and the pistons and valves were pulsing, hammering organs.

It was an organic being, fashioned like some parody of a machine. Whether it was a mortal host that had been terribly reshaped or a daemon that had been forced to manifest into such a strange and unnatural form was impossible to tell.

Before Sharr could strike at it, the metal cogs that had been kindling around it surged upwards, some invisible, damnable motion causing them to spin. They formed an unstable constellation around the daemon, constantly shifting and moving, swirling around the babbling, chained monstrosity that was the centre of their corrupt gravity.

The vox screamed in Sharr’s ear.

It was challenging him.

He felt his rage flare. He embraced it, as he had learned to. He did what would have been unthinkable years before, when he had still been bound by the Chapter’s tenets. When he had still been in control.

He roared. It was an answer to the daemon’s challenge. And as he charged, his world reduced, narrowed down to a point of supreme focus by ruthless conditioning. His secondary heart had kicked in, his vitals flushed with combat stimulants, rising like a thunderous discharge within him, desperate to be released.

He wasn’t consciously aware of clutching the lever that kickstarted the motor of his old chainsword. He did feel its triggering in some distant hind part of his brain, though – a primal and vicious satisfaction as the throb of the spinning blades ran through the worn grip of the haft and up his arm. His combat knife was in his other fist, and he was leaping, howling out his hatred, letting it blaze.

His first blow struck the cogs shielding the daemon. Sparks flew, accompanied by a metallic shriek that was impossible to disentangle from the howl still scarring the vox. He drove his knife in with his other hand, aiming not for the spinning metal but for the monstrosity at their heart.

The cogs slammed in before he could land a blow. They crashed against his armour and sheared at it, his auto-senses registering multiple strikes. They were spinning so fast that they hit like buzzsaws, chewing into the grey ceramite.

He hit back. The swing of the chainsword was so ferocious that it knocked one of the cogs out of its orbit, shattering it and sending it thumping into the deck.

He forced himself through the metal storm. His armour registered more hits, his visor stuttering, scrambled by the arcane interference of the flesh-and-metal monstrosity. Sharr didn’t care. Every remaining conscious thought was enslaved to the need to destroy. He stabbed his knife into a split in the daemon’s side, the razored blade like a bolt of steel lightning. It bit through machine-meat, spurting stinking black oil and ichor, and again Sharr found himself thrown back trailing warpfire.

He landed on his feet, sparks and dust kicked up from the deck as he scraped back along it before coming to a halt. Other stimuli forced themselves into his consciousness.

The daemon was not alone. Its infestation extended to the rest of the scrap metal heaped around the chamber, which was beginning to rise and attack the other Exiles. Crude and jagged constructs, lit from within by wisps of the same hellfire animating the cogs, were stumbling towards the Carcharodons from all sides, their movements jerky and puppet-like. They were lashing at Talon and Shadow with wicked plasteel limbs and claws formed from shards of armaplas.

The roar of bolter discharges filled the embattled space. Shadow opened fire, explosive rounds splitting and buckling the constructs with metallic shrieks. Talon set about with his vicious weapons, both Carcharodons refusing to utter a sound as they purged the Neverborn manifestations.

Sharr’s focus returned to the primary threat just as a hail of lesser scraps of metal were plucked up from the floor and hurled at him. They scratched and clattered from his armour, some wedging fast. He advanced again into the storm of steel, left arm raised as though struggling into a gale. The daemon’s vox-roar filled his ears, but his mind automatically wiped away the pain and discord.

He struck. More sparks blazed in the fire-shot darkness as another cog was cleaved through. Others pounded at him, a whirlwind, jarring and bouncing from his battle plate. His visor’s edges were filled with screeds of red warning text, but he didn’t care.

He existed to destroy, and destroy he would.

The chained daemon howled, its masked jaws still sealed in a perpetual wail, its lidless eyes bulging manically. He lashed it, chainsword sparking and juddering as it cleaved through one plated shoulder and chewed into the foul meat mechanism within. A cog crashed off Sharr’s helmet, knocking his head to the side and almost causing him to stumble. He felt the rage surge, roaring again as he smashed spinning metal from the air.

Then Blood Eye was at his side. Sharr became aware of the other Exile as he drove his own knife into the Neverborn’s torso and twisted, levering away one of the finely crafted plates to further expose the horror within.

Sharr struck into it with his chainsword, ploughing through the thing’s innards. Blood Eye was chanting as he hacked open another plate – Sharr had anticipated verses from the Chapter’s rites or perhaps even the Imperial Creed, but it wasn’t the usual tenets of faith the Exile was drawing upon. The phrases were not High Gothic but Lingua Technis, the esoteric cant of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Techmarines bore a close affiliation with the Cult of Mars, and knew the secrets of their language and religious rites. Through the haze of his fury, Sharr understood that his exiled brother was calling down those rites now against the semi-mechanical abomination guarding the gateway.

The daemon shuddered, its howl becoming a piercing whine, the cogs guarding it spinning less violently. Sharr threw himself against it, his sharpened teeth bared in a snarl behind the dented ceramite of his visor.

He hacked at the monstrosity’s faceplate. At some point his chainsword’s motor had failed, but he wielded it like a toothed club, battering at the thing’s head over and over.

Warpsteel bent and buckled. One leering eye was pulped, spurting down the dented remains of the mask. The thing tried to twist away, but was held in place by its chains, writhing in vain against them.

Blood Eye struck with him, stabbing its innards and sundering its steel shell. The cogs had started to not only decelerate, but to sway and drop out of their wild orbit, some clattering to the deck. Others still struck at the two Exiles, hammering their pauldrons, reactor packs and helms, chewing chips from the ceramite.

The Carcharodons would not relent. Behind Sharr and Blood Eye, Talon and Shadow were fighting back to back against the rising tide of scrap, the constructs scraping frenziedly at their armour. The Exiles had hewn and beaten the metal into pieces, but still it rose and attacked them, trying to drag them down and pin them to the decks.

Blood Eye was roaring in Lingua Technis. Coruscating warpfire played over him but did not burn him. Sharr strove forward, clamping his knife and grabbing on to one of the chains. He yanked on it with all his strength, dragging the daemon down into a stoop and working his chainsword’s trigger. The weapon finally reignited, and Sharr hewed it into the knotted flesh-cables of the Neverborn’s neck. Sparks flew, then shorn metal, then gouts of ichor as he chewed his weapon through, inch by inch, the daemon spasming and wailing.

The head came away in a final gout of black slime, striking the deck with a sonorous clang and a blaze of sickly yellow warpfire.

The vox screaming ended. The remains of the daemon crumpled in on themselves, as though crushed by some great, invisible fist, leaking the broken and mulched organic matter within. There came more crashing impacts as the scrap fiends that had been assailing Talon and Shadow were unmade, abruptly returning to inanimate junk as the dark will that had been puppeteering them was banished.

Stillness and silence returned slowly to the confluence of tunnels. Sharr stood with one boot atop the broken daemon, in the middle of a circle of shattered cogs, the decking plates beneath him scorched, his own armour smouldering. He panted as his body decelerated from its combat apex. All Space Marines experienced something in the aftermath of a fight, usually a drained or numbing sensation. For Sharr, it had become even more acute in the years since his exile. It was an emptiness, frigid and bitter, left behind in the wake of the Blindness.

He forced himself to pay attention to the reports of his auto-senses, checking the damage done to his armour. Most of it was superficial. Actuators were still functioning and the power of his reactor pack remained uninterrupted.

He locked his chainsword to his hip and pulled out several shards of metal that had embedded themselves in his pauldrons and breastplate, tossing each aside in turn.

He said nothing to the other Exiles as they approached. Apparently of its own volition, the heavy doorway they had been fighting their way towards ground open on rusting internal mechanisms, exposing a single wide, dark passageway beyond.

‘How inviting,’ Shadow said humourlessly.

‘It is rare to encounter a Neverborn like that,’ Talon observed as they picked their way through the littering of cogs, gazing upon the pathetic, smoking remains of the bound daemon. ‘It is as much machine as it is flesh.’

‘A strange form of daemon engine,’ Blood Eye agreed. ‘I have no more doubts. This hulk is in the possession of hereteks undertaking the most severe of tech-heresies. Extremely dangerous, even by the standards of the Archenemy.’

‘All the more reason to purge this place of their foulness,’ Talon muttered.

‘That is not why we are here,’ Blood Eye pointed out. ‘We have another objective.’

‘Will this cult’s abilities render our plan obsolete?’ Shadow asked.

‘Uncertain,’ the former Techmarine admitted. ‘I recommend maintaining our current course and reacting as operational strategy dictates.’

‘Onwards then,’ Sharr said, already tiring of the discussion, looking ahead towards the new corridor. ‘Our work lies before us.’

CHAPTER V

Strike Leader Kordi slammed his boot down on the cultist’s skull as he attempted to rise, pulping it and conjuring a halo of brain matter and broken bone across the rockcrete rooftop.

The new deployment zone did not meet with his approval.

‘The chasm is a liability,’ he told Neku as he stepped off the twitching remains, hearing the sounds of more bolter fire ringing out from the structure’s lower levels. The rest of Second Squad were sweeping the refinery’s chambers, exterminating the last of the rebellious workforce who had occupied it.

Neku grunted. He was the oldest member of the squad, the only one of the eight Carcharodons who had served longer than Kordi, and the only remaining Firstborn. He was also the only one besides Kordi to have been red-scarred, the veteran’s crimson jag striped down the vox-uplink bar that ran along the top of his helmet. There were few members of the company left with such an honorific.

‘The approach ways are short and narrow, and that structure provides a danger of vertical envelopment,’ Kordi went on, highlighting the waste-disposal plant immediately east of the refinery on their shared display.

Neku made no reply. Even for a Chapter renowned for being taciturn, he said little.

The two Carcharodons were standing on the roof of the refinery’s main block, amidst the stacks and flumes. They had tracked a final fragment of resistance from the uprising down the slope to its lower levels. Now, as they cleansed the last of it, orders had come through for them to hold position rather than return back up the mountainside to their previous base of operations. There had been no explanation for the instructions, but the inference was clear enough given there was a record of First Squad meeting with the Adeptus Mechanicus at the Pinnacle: Diamantus’ ruler had clearly forced the relocation.

‘Compared to the last post, it is barely defensible,’ Kordi said. Second Squad had been occupying a forge mill higher up the slope, using it as a stronghold while conducting sweeps of the surrounding sector. That former position had possessed walls thick enough to withstand most artillery strikes and good arcs of fire out over the surrounding sprawl. The refinery had none of that.

‘The skybridge is the key,’ Neku finally offered. Kordi knew that was true, but it didn’t help matters. The refinery stood on the edge of a deep gouge in Diamantus’ crust, a gorge that ran almost the full length of Megafactorum Primus, bisecting the city to the east of Mount Antikythera. It had likely been the site of a river once, but now its bottom was a sluggish sea of brown toxic waste interspersed with islands of junk, a refuse point for the eastern half of the megalopolis.

The great gap was spanned by hundreds of pipelines, monorail spurs and haulage links, but all of them were dwarfed by the skybridge, a huge structure that crossed the chasm just to the south of the refinery, looming up like some sort of megalith from the cloying smog. It was fortified at both ends, and garrisoned by skitarii. Kordi had already briefly considered shifting his new deployment to its walls instead, but occupying pre-existing military structures on Diamantus had been forbidden in the deployment orders, and he had no wish to become ensnared in an argument with whoever had command of the bridge and its defences.

That meant the refinery would have to serve as their new base of operations. Despite being lower than the neighbouring waste plant, it at least possessed a basement level and had its own power generator, which endeared it more than most structures in the sector. Its walls were flimsy, however, and its main floors were congested with the machines processing the macrothermal extraction, abandoned by their rebellious – and now slaughtered – workers.

‘There is nothing we can do about the bridge, except guard its garrison’s flank,’ Kordi said.

‘For now,’ Neku added.

‘The perimeter is too wide,’ Kordi continued, blinking as he brought up a burst map of the city, complete with runes indicating the new locations of the rest of Third Company. Where once they had been cinched tight around the upper slopes of Mount Antikythera, now they were spread more loosely, in a wide arc marking a circumference through the city’s midriff. The gaps between the squads neighbouring Kordi’s, Third and Eighth, were too large for his liking – too distant to allow reliable, mutual support. The nearest asset was Rangu’s Hammer, the company’s Vindicator siege tank, which had taken position at a crossroads immediately to the north.

‘I will speak to the strike veteran,’ Kordi said eventually, making his mind up.

‘I suspect every strike leader in the company is doing that,’ Neku pointed out. ‘Nuritona would not have consented to these dispositions without external pressure.’

That in itself didn’t bode well, but the Adeptus Mechanicus had been less than gracious hosts since Third Company had made planetfall. An array of tech-priests, dataticians, and overseers had made representations to Kordi almost every day they had been here, agitating over the unasked-for presence of the Space Marines in their facilities. Most refused to even accept that there had been an uprising among their workforce, or that the Carcharodons were in any way required to protect their facilities. Each one had met with the same answer. Kordi had his orders, and any complaint should be taken before his Company Master. In the past, he would have hesitated before burdening the Reaper Prime, but not any more.

‘Are the upper floors secure?’ he demanded into the vox, struggling not to vent his frustrations.

‘Yes, strike leader,’ replied Wiremu, the squad’s heavy-weapons specialist. ‘The last contacts have been eliminated.’

Before Kordi could respond, a marker on his visor blinked with a warning from Neku. It was normally reserved for combat situations, but the veteran tended to use it to indicate any potential problem, thus saving himself the trouble of having to speak. Kordi saw that he had moved to the edge of the refinery’s rooftop, on the side overlooking the approach from the skybridge.

He joined him, and saw what had caused the warning. There was a delegation approaching along one of the walkways between the industrial buildings lining the chasm’s jagged edge, a gaggle of red-and-black-clad figures. Kordi allowed his helm to strip out the haze of ash and pollution hanging in the hot air between them, identifying their visitors.

‘Not just priests this time,’ he noted. ‘Warriors. They bring Kastelans. Perhaps they wish to finally join us in the fight.’

The Mechanicus delegation included a pair of battle-automata, Kastelan-class robots similar in size and dimension to the Chapter’s Dreadnoughts. The two hulking, rust-red war walkers stomped in the wake of their masters, slaved to the will of the priesthood. It seemed as though the Adeptus Mechanicus now intended to back up their demands with the threat of force.

Neku grunted.

Kordi briefly considered sending another member of the squad out to deal with the approaching problem, but knew that was not a response worthy of a strike leader. He switched the pan-squad instruction marker to stand by, and descended alone to the front of the refinery.

The delegation was smaller than he had expected; there were only three figures moving ahead of the Kastelans. One was a scurrying adept, back bent beneath a scrivener’s rig that allowed him to carry and annotate a number of data-slates as he struggled along. The second’s head was a mass of sensor nodes and augur inlays, and he bore what looked like an elaborate electro-runeboard wired to his chest and inserted into ports in his head’s interface plate. Kordi recognised him as a datasmith of the Legio Cybernetica, the one responsible for controlling the lumbering Kastelan maniple walking behind.

The third tech-priest appeared to be the leader. They had been so thoroughly stripped of humanity that Kordi realised he was unable to identify a single organic component of their body. While much of it was hidden by the robes hanging from their lank torso, their bottom half consisted not of legs but of a centipede-like bulk, segmented and articulated by a dozen short metal claw-limbs. The sections were plated with gilt plasteel armour, with more protection on the upper body worn over the robes, giving the priest a stooped, hunchbacked appearance. The look was further accentuated by the mechadendrites sprouting from their spinal rig, swaying like snakes – several of the coils of flex-steel bore weapons systems, others what looked like sensory nodes for optics, aural pickups and a vocaliser horn.

In the clamp of one of their upper limbs, the figure clutched an Omnissian axe, embossed with the Adeptus Mechanicus half-skull, while in the other they affected a circuitry-inlaid cane that Kordi suspected doubled as some sort of sensor wand or cyber-interface device. The priest’s red-and-black cowl was drawn up, the rest of their head concealed behind an adamantine faceplate. It was the only concession towards humanity, yet the mask’s features were solid – the eyes, mouth and nose had no slits. It was ornamentation and nothing more. From a glance, it appeared as though the tech-priest was blind, deaf and dumb.

Kordi knew that was not the case. The mechadendrites and their sensors provided it with external stimuli, feeding their findings directly to the tech-priest’s brain via cortex plugs and bio-plastek nodes running through their spinal column. Kordi briefly wondered just how much of the brain itself was still organic.

The thing was utterly inhuman, but that did not distress the Carcharodon. He too had stopped identifying with humanity a long time ago.

The priest paused before Kordi, mechadendrites twitching back and forth as they surveyed him with serpentine curiosity; he noted the weapons systems were offline. The robots and their minder had also halted a short distance away, as had the scribbling adept.

Kordi simply stood, having no intention of initiating conversation. There was a click as the priest’s vox-horn activated.

‘May I inspect your firearm?’

The voice was unlike any Kordi had heard from the Priesthood of Mars since landing on Diamantus. Despite issuing from no visible vocal cords, it was simulated to sound like that of an elderly woman, without a hint of machine interference.

The request it had made was equally unexpected.

‘Why do you wish to inspect my firearm?’ Kordi asked.

‘I am concerned about it.’

‘Why?’

‘I have scanned it, and preliminary findings indicate it may be defective.’

‘I am a warrior. I will not permit you to take my weapon any more than I would permit you to remove my arm or my leg.’

‘Hyperbole, but I understand the logic you employ. I too am a warrior. Magos Dominus Ze-One-Prime. Warden of the Twinfort and one of the Six Remote Seneschals of the Pinnacle.’

‘Your ranks and titles mean little to me.’

‘In simple terms, I command part of Diamantus’ battle congregation, and I am responsible for guarding the skybridge that spans the rift here.’

Kordi hesitated. In truth, Ze-One-Prime’s assessment had been correct. His boltgun had not been operating at optimal efficiency for some time, despite the efforts of his primary serf, Trayn, the armoury artisans and Techmarine Uthulu. Like many of those carried by Third Company, it was an old model, a Phobos-pattern, the twin of the weapon he had lost during the Red Tithe on Zartak. Second Squad possessed a trio of the newer bolt rifles claimed at the last Grey Tithe, but Kordi had ensured they had gone to his three best marksmen.

‘You did not come here to inspect my weaponry,’ he said.

‘Erudite,’ Ze-One-Prime said, the voice conveying a hint of humour. ‘I sensed weapons discharge in my sector, and wished to investigate. There has also been great discordance across the noosphere among those of my kindred less inclined to militaria. Dissatisfaction and dismay. It has been some weeks since your arrival, but my own duties have prevented me from witnessing you for myself. I came here with the intention of rectifying that, as well as ensuring that the unrest reported from up-slope does not spread to my sector.’

‘You have not been sent by your masters?’ Kordi asked.

‘I have no masters upon this world besides the Arch Dominus and the Fabricator General, may-his-uplink-be-ever-strong. I have come here under my own programming. I wished to meet with fellow warriors. May I know you by your preferred designate?’

‘Omekra-five-one-Kordi,’ he answered, unwilling to engage further. Seemingly sensing his reticence, Ze-One-Prime continued.

‘I take great interest in martial matters, Omekra-five-one-Kordi. Upon Diamantus you will find many of my tech-brethren whose only concerns are for production quotas and the equations of exportation. Such computations are natural, given the glorious and eternal labours of a forge world. But my coding is not concerned with such things. As I told you, I am a warrior. I have fought as part of the explorator fleets. When the data choirs informed me of the arrival of the Adeptus Astartes I became what you might call… curious.’

‘Is curiosity not akin to blasphemy among your kind?’

The serpent-like vox-horn chuckled.

‘Oh, indeed! Nothing must be permitted to upset the holy form and function of the venerated machine, certainly not the possibility of progress that so often arises from curious thoughts! But in you, I see not new forms, but old. Granted, you bear upon you evidence of the work of the Dominatus Dominus, for good or for ill. But what lies beneath, and what you carry with you into battle, are old forms indeed. Gene-wrought constructions and organic augmentations older than the Imperium, bestowed by the hand of the blessed Omnissiah. The warrior-form of humanity perfected!’

‘We did not come here to be venerated,’ Kordi said, feeling somewhat unsettled. He was accustomed to fear and awe when dealing with other servants of the Imperium. He had never found himself being assessed with clinical, scientific delight.

‘Ah, but that is the way with you Adeptus Astartes, is it not?’ Ze-One-Prime said. ‘You have your own codes of worship. Your own beliefs. No God-Emperor for you, no Omnissiah. You are born of the flesh of the divine, and thus to you they are as family. Now, will you permit me?’

The magos dominus scuttled a little closer, mechadendrite optic stalks leering in as they inspected Kordi with unblinking intensity. Ze-One-Prime raised the sensor wand and, after a polite pause, tapped it lightly against Kordi’s grey breastplate. He had to maintain a rigid grip on his thoughts so he did not react instinctively to the foreign contact.

‘A Mark X Tacticus-pattern power armour panoply,’ Ze-One-Prime declared aloud, like an animal-keeper giving an authoritative display of the various parts of their prized beast to an awed crowd. ‘It shows evidence of being newly donned, or at the very least it did not become combat-active any more than… between six point one and seven point seven years ago, standard. Minimal outstanding combat damage, well maintained. Without interface, I do not know the details of servo function or power supply, but I will not burden you with such invasiveness. However, there are numerous deviations from the standard model. The suit is incomplete.’

The sensor shifted to tap Kordi’s left pauldron.

‘This is non-standard. A plasteel-ceramite composite, likely produced in exigency by a Chapter forge. It possesses molecular bonding studs designed to help maintain integrity. It is suboptimal. And this–’

Another tap, this time against Kordi’s right vambrace, making his hand twitch fractionally.

‘Both vambrace and rerebrace belong to an older suit. I compute a seventy-eight point eight per cent chance they were formerly part of a Mark V. That matches the attempted design of the left pauldron. I would be surprised if the servos are not fractionally out of sync with the rest of the suit. And lastly, this–’

The magos dominus raised the cane towards Kordi’s helm, though wisely stopped short of actually tapping it.

‘Yet again, Mark V, not Mark X. Moderate likelihood of auto-sense lag due to mark incompatibilities. In summary, the panoply is suboptimal due to unusual, and what I would normally classify as unacceptable, divergence between different marks. I imagine these changes are not by willing design, however, but rather are an operational necessity.’

Kordi said nothing.

‘As for your armaments, you bear a combat blade of no discernible pattern and two bolt weapons. The pistol appears to be in good working order, at least according to preliminary scans. But I must repeat my request to handle your boltgun. I shall retain it for only a moment, and I can assure you I am thoroughly versed in all the proper rites of maintenance.’

‘Strike leader, are you in need of assistance?’ Neku’s voice clicked in Kordi’s ear. He was aware of the other Carcharodon still observing the encounter from the rooftop behind him.

He re-highlighted the stand by marker on the shared display, then, after a moment more, he unclamped his boltgun and proffered it, two-handed, to the tech-priest.

The inscrutable adamantine mask showed no sign of excitement, but a shudder seemed to run through Ze-One-Prime, causing the insectoid limbs to skitter. The robes parted to reveal two more rows of mechanical limbs, similar to the claws of the lower body, but smaller and more articulated. They took hold of the boltgun and began to work on it, turning it over.

‘A Phobos-pattern R/017 boltgun, forge world of origin, unknown. I would not presume to estimate its age after so short an inspection, but I would posit that it has served the Omnissiah for many centuries, at least. A hallowed artefact indeed.’

The little limbs set to work. One anointed it with a slick of purifying oils from a beaker it clasped, while two others began to unfasten the backplate and a fourth latched on to the auto-sense sighting calibrator. Seeing his weapon being handled by any being besides his own artificer serfs disturbed Kordi, but he had committed to humouring the tech-priest. There certainly could be no claim that one such as the magos dominus was unqualified for such work.

‘Ah yes, as I computed, the tecnos self-repair circuits are worn out,’ Ze-One-Prime said, seemingly to themself, as the backplate was removed to expose the wiring within. ‘From hence stem the issues. Fortunately, I have a sanctified replacement.’

The limbs focused their efforts on the exposed part of the firearm, unpicking wires and replacing them with more drawn from within Ze-One-Prime’s robes.

‘I must return to my brethren soon,’ Kordi said, hoping to bring the strange encounter to an end. ‘There is much work to be done if this sector is to be prepared for the coming invasion.’

‘I concur,’ Ze-One-Prime said, leaning on their cane as their lower limbs continued to work, seemingly independent of the rest of the tech-priest’s body. ‘In fact, I bring a proposal that relates to your efforts. The Fabricator General, may-his-cogitation-remain-flawless, has commanded that no effort be made to assist you or your kindred. My fellow Remote Seneschals have reached different conclusions. We align more with the statement you have just made–’

The vox-voice cut off, replaced by a recording of the words Kordi had just spoken, repeated back to him: ‘There is much work to be done if this sector is to be prepared for the coming invasion.’

‘The same is true throughout Megafactorum Primus,’ Ze-One-Prime carried on in their own voice. ‘The Fabricator General’s order-inloads have prevented my garrison from taking an active part in suppressing the unrest further up-slope, and I will not deny that such imperatives have left me disappointed. However, I am of the belief that in order to reach optimum defensive parameters, your squadron should join my garrison within the Twinfort, the Trace Mechanicus of the skybridge.’

‘You are proposing that we be housed within your defensive structures?’ Kordi asked cautiously. ‘You understand that this would not subordinate me or my brethren to your command, in any way?’

‘I understand this in totality. My intention is only to offer you and your kindred a less exposed base of operations.’

Kordi considered the proposal. It was certainly the first he had heard of the Adeptus Mechanicus doing anything that might be described as cooperative or welcoming. The mention of the other magi dominus was likely significant. Though Fabricator General Horrum ruled Diamantus, Kordi knew the six magi, of which Ze-One-Prime was one, commanded its armed forces. Did this represent unilateral movement by them? An attempt to enlist the Space Marines in undermining the Fabricator General’s authority for their own ends? Ze-One-Prime’s apparent fascination with Kordi’s wargear, while probably at least partly genuine, could also be an awkward attempt at building a rapport.

The Carcharodon Astra had not come to Diamantus to interfere with its leadership or become ensnared in its politics, but Kordi was bound to ensure Second Squad were as well prepared as possible for what was coming. Disputes among the Martian priesthood were a distant, secondary concern compared to how suboptimal the refinery was as a defensive base. Besides, he doubted the new dispositions would stand for long once the Company Master returned.

‘Recalibrations complete,’ buzzed Ze-One-Prime’s voice, this time in a dead machine dirge, before the more human affectation reactivated. The magos dominus proffered Kordi’s bolter with their spindly lower limbs, its backplate refastened.

‘The tecnos have been replaced and the autosight recalibrated to within zero point zero one eight of a degree. The machine spirit is salved. I am honoured to have communed with it.’

Kordi took his weapon and resisted the temptation to check it immediately, instead locking it to its mag-point.

‘My brethren and I will make an assessment of your defences,’ he told Ze-One-Prime, making sure to avoid implying that they intended to fully occupy the skybridge fortifications.

‘Praise the Omnissiah,’ Ze-One-Prime said, cracking their cane off the rockcrete underfoot. ‘Esteemed Datasmith Folcrum and his Kastelans shall lead the way!’

Kordi nodded once, and voxed the rest of his brethren.

‘Second Squad, on me. We’re leaving.’

CHAPTER VI

The summons reached Khauri two days after his visit to the Pinnacle.

The Thunderhawk Razortooth returned him to the White Maw. The strike cruiser had departed from Diamantus after the Third Company had deployed to the surface, taking its small fleet with it as it ranged out in the direction of Grim Destiny. The space hulk was continuing its slow voyage in-system, not having deviated once since it had first been detected on the augur arrays emerging from deep space months earlier. Exactly when it had re-entered realspace from the warp was something even Khauri’s psy-prognostications could not discern. All that was certain was that its course was taking it directly towards Diamantus.

The Company Master had wished to oversee the scans of the hulk in person rather than deign to quash the rebel workers on the planet surface, but apparently he had decided against engaging while Grim Destiny was still on approach. Now the White Maw was dropping stasis anchor in Diamantus’ high orbit again, and direct contact between Third Company and its absentee commander had been re-established.

His first act had been to demand Khauri’s presence on board his flagship.

The Librarian passed through the strike cruiser, accompanied by several senior Chapter-serfs from the crew. As he paced the bare, still corridors he sought to calm his thoughts, focusing on the deep silence within, the black, untouched nothingness that was anathema to the diabolical spirits that haunted and hunted him.

He had learned that the best way to quieten them was to drown them.

That was one of the many lessons Te Kahurangi had taught him. But it was not the spirits he knew he would have to hush on board the White Maw. This visit would require a different kind of focus, a mindset so unfamiliar to many of his brethren, the same one he had been forced to adopt in order to smooth dealings with the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Matters were strained throughout the Third Company, and the latest operational assignment had only exacerbated their problems. Since the fall of Cadia and the opening of the Cicatrix Maledictum, the Chapter had been required to campaign ever more frequently alongside other Imperial forces. The Nomad Predation Fleet had been dragged in from the edges of the Outer Dark by desperate strategic necessity. Working closely with any other part of the Imperial war machine, even other Chapters, was something the Carcharodons despised, but such was the nature of the times.

Issues seemed to multiply when operating alongside the Adeptus Mechanicus. Unlike Militarum generals or even planetary governors, they could not be intimidated, and reacted badly to being ignored. The only contact the Chapter usually had with the adepts of Mars was during the Grey Tithe, or on the rare occasions when an explorator fleet forged out into the dark and their purposes aligned with those of the Nomad Predation Fleet. Both circumstances were very different from the situation forced upon the Third Company on Diamantus.

But the Red Wake’s instructions had been clear. The forge world could not be allowed to fall.

Khauri suspected Bail Sharr would have navigated a course through the arising difficulties, but he was no longer part of the company. He had been cast out of the Shiver, disgraced, stripped of his arms, his armour, even his very name.

His replacement had adopted a very different style of command.

The Librarian entered the White Maw’s bridge. Much of the chamber was carved from basalt and coral, jagged and primal. The blue shimmer of the ancient strike cruiser’s shields played through the ports and across the bridge’s surfaces, and combined with the deep, pressing quiet, it lent the space the air of some submerged, ancient throne room.

The serfs that comprised the crew were garbed in simple grey shifts. Shaven-headed and malnourished, they worked in silence at their station terminals and in the console pits ringed around the central command platform.

That place was reserved for the Carcharodons themselves, though it was not unusual for the only Space Marine present to be Shipmaster Teko, the overlord of the White Maw and the leader of the Third Company’s fleet. He was not alone as Khauri entered, though; Techmarine Uthulu was monitoring the ship’s systems with him, but there was another, more uncommon presence commanding the space. The venerable shipmaster had surrendered the coral throne that stood in the middle of his command platform. It was occupied by Kino, Master of the Third Battle Company.

Nine Red Brethren stood like graven statues before the bridge stations, lining the approach to the throne. They were First Company veterans, clad in their off-white Terminator armour, the very air around them thrumming with the potency of the ancient battle suits. Kino wore the same wargear, rather than the equipment more commonly borne by the Master of the Third. Though it had been four years since he had assumed command of the company, he still looked – and, in Khauri’s mind, acted – like a First Company strike leader.

Khauri walked between the Terminators, feeling their cold gaze upon him but refusing to return it. The name given to the First Company of the Carcharodon Astra – Red Brethren – seemed incongruous, given their armour was typically even paler than that of the battle companies. The reason for the moniker quickly became apparent during combat. It was rare for an engagement to end without the veterans drenched in the crimson viscera of the Void Father’s enemies.

Their presence was often unwelcome among the battle companies, partly by design. They were an intentional disruption to the Shiver, a reminder that though a company may be detached from the Nomad Predation Fleet for years or even decades, the eyes of Lord Tyberos were forever upon them. Each Red Brethren strike leader spoke with the authority of the Red Wake himself, and would ensure that whatever objectives a particular fleet were given by the Chapter Master would be met.

Until four years ago, it had been Kino who had performed that duty with the Third. After Sharr’s disgrace, the company had been left leaderless, and with the recent death of Strike Veteran Dorthor while crossing the Rubicon Primaris, there had been no obvious replacements from amongst the Shiver.

Kino had taken command, as was his right in such circumstances, and the Third Company had not had enough extended contact with the Nomad Predation Fleet to propose a different master from within their own ranks.

Of course, the fact that a former member of the Red Brethren was now Master of the Third presented problems of its own; as dedicated as they were to the Chapter, its structures and its discipline, Khauri doubted Kino’s brethren would ever find much fault with their own former strike leader. But given the unusual circumstances involving the loss of the previous Company Master – to exile rather than death – it seemed almost certain Kino’s role would not be fully ratified until the Third Company rejoined the Nomad Predation Fleet. Only Rangu knew when that would happen.

‘I have noted that my company has redeployed without my orders,’ Kino said as Khauri arrived before the coral throne, eschewing any attempt at formalities.

‘Greetings, Company Master,’ Khauri replied. ‘And yes, that is correct.’

‘The orders bear Strike Veteran Nuritona’s sigil, but I doubt he would act unilaterally. Am I wrong?’

‘No,’ Khauri said. ‘I suggested the redeployments.’

‘Why? Has the rising among the menials been terminated?’

‘I believe so. What little resistance remains is well within the capacity of the skitarii to eliminate. The redeployment is due to my wish to temporarily avert the danger of a serious rift between ourselves and the Adeptus Mechanicus. Matters have been escalating rapidly, and in your absence I decided I had to act.’

Like Khauri, Kino was still wearing his helm, the boar-like piece of wargear betraying nothing, but the anger in Kino’s voice as it scraped over the vocaliser was clear.

‘You have no right to dictate orders to my strike leaders. I am countermanding your redeployments.’

‘Any effort to reoccupy the upper slopes of the megafactorum would draw extreme ire,’ Khauri said. ‘I suggest a meeting between yourself and the Fabricator General would be required if our alliance with this forge world, perhaps even the wider Cult Mechanicus, is not to become unworkable.’

‘If the Adeptus Mechanicus wish to complain about the aid we offer them, they can come here and do it in person,’ Kino said.

‘With all respect, Company Master, they will not do that,’ Khauri said, tiring of the former Terminator strike leader’s brute attitude towards negotiations. ‘The situation between ourselves and the Mechanicus is at breaking point. I was only attempting to alleviate the pressure, and by countermanding my dispositions I fear we would make enemies of our supposed allies.’

‘And what do you expect to happen when Grim Destiny arrives?’ Kino asked. ‘The cordon is too extended. We are spread too thin.’

‘There will be time to rectify that. Crucially, that time will be after the Fabricator General has come to appreciate the gravity of the threat, and how valuable our assistance can be.’

Kino gazed upon Khauri in stony silence for a few moments before speaking again.

‘Perhaps I should have left Strike Leader Rangon on the surface, to ensure my orders were properly followed,’ he said, referring to the commander of the Red Brethren, promoted in the wake of Kino’s own rise. ‘I thought we had moved beyond this… indiscipline.’

‘Any lack of adherence to your commands is purely my fault, Company Master.’

‘Reaper Prime,’ Kino declared. Khauri was silent, not understanding.

‘You will address me as Reaper Prime,’ Kino elaborated. ‘Do not think I have not noted that over the years, Librarian, I am only ever referred to as Company Master, not Reaper Prime. That is my rank, however, my title, and my sworn duty to the Chapter. There are ten Carcharodon Astra Company Masters, but only one Reaper Prime. That is what you will call me.’

‘Of course, Reaper Prime,’ Khauri said woodenly.

‘Tell me of your prognostications,’ Kino demanded. ‘Does what you saw when we first arrived here still hold true?’

‘Yes,’ Khauri said, wondering whether the change of subject indicated that the Company Master had accepted his advice about the Mechanicus. ‘I have swum deep in the tides of the immaterium, and seen the terrible things lurking there. The filth of Chaos, even more rancid and potent than is often the case. What festers aboard that hulk is abominable indeed.’

‘That is why we are here,’ Kino said dismissively.

‘I would recommend we strike at the first possible opportunity. By the time the space hulk reaches Diamantus, it may already be too late.’

‘Noted. You are dismissed.’

Khauri hesitated, wondering if he should press the point, but he decided against it. The conversation had been fraught enough already, and he knew the Company Master would not appreciate his attempts to articulate the warnings he had gleaned from his scrying. Kino was a weapon: blunt, simple, and highly effective. Mere portents would not influence how he was used.

As Khauri was about to leave, Kino spoke again.

‘Librarian.’

Khauri paused, looking back up at the coral throne.

‘I know you have been attached to this Shiver more than any other since your initiation, but that does not change your rank,’ Kino said. ‘The Librarius is outside the company command structure. You are here as auxiliary support, and in your capacity as an adviser. You will not issue direct orders to my squads again. If you do, the favour the Pale Nomad has shown you will not save you. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, Company Master,’ Khauri said, and departed.

CHAPTER VII

Beyond the gates, the signs of life began to multiply.

The space hulk was no longer the frozen tomb its lower decks resembled. Not all the passages, berths, and stations the Exiles passed through were shrouded in darkness. Lumen orbs, yellow and grimy with age, cast rotten light over the abandoned sections or blinked into some semblance of life as the Carcharodons approached. Other systems showed signs of activity as well – pipes clattered and rattled, generators ticked, and in one broken section of bridge it even looked like the cogitators were active, running some continuous, self-replicating program.

The Void Exiles also noted the pounding. It was faint at first, barely registering with their auto-senses, detectable only as the slightest tremor in the decks. It grew the higher they journeyed, becoming a repetitive, metallic hammering, until the sections the Exiles passed through were shuddering with the continuous strikes.

Sharr recognised it as the sound of industry.

Corruption also intensified. Metal appeared warped and twisted, parts of pipes forming strange spirals and wall and decking plates becoming curved like the shells of crustaceans or ribbed with plates of brass or steel that glistened with multicoloured hues. Fleshy growths started to appear like scabs over sections of corridor, webbed between pipes and congealing across the floor. It thickened in places, and the pulsating of strange, unnatural organs was visible through the dermal membranes. Eventually, some corridors looked more like the innards of a huge beast than the gangways of old, intermeshed ships.

The sight of such infestation and the sickly stench that accompanied it repulsed Sharr on an instinctive level. He wanted to rip it all apart, tear it down and stamp it to pulp. To rend and purge such abominations had been coded into his very consciousness since the first days of his induction.

But that would risk undermining what they had come here to do, the reason they had been seeded in the hulk’s path. Grim Destiny was too vast, and the taint within it ran too deep, for even his fury to overcome it alone. He knew that, and so he mastered the revulsion as best he could, and continued to follow the others.

There would be a time for the Blindness, of that he was certain.

The Exiles entered the maintenance tunnel of what appeared to be an old merchant super-freighter, the space barely wide and high enough for them to pass along. The pauldrons and reactor packs of the Space Marines scraped against the rusting metalwork and snagged old wiring looping from the ceiling.

Sharr brought up the rear, moving sideways so he would be able to turn if something came at them from behind. He caught scuttling sounds, and his armour’s senses picked up traces of what it identified as hissing, but when he looked back there was no indication of pursuit.

It had been the same for days. There were half-sensed, partly seen things all around them, observing them. Occasionally they would show up briefly on Blood Eye’s auspex, but for the most part they remained illusory. Sharr felt their eyes on him always, though – watching, waiting.

The maintenance tunnel began to degenerate. There were more growths, purple and bruised. The deck turned to meat, and Sharr felt it yielding under him with each step. He had to fight the urge to stamp down.

Soon the tunnel was more like a digestive tract than part of a ship, flesh squeezing in all around them, the wires overhead now veins and intestinal loops that writhed as foul things squirmed and fought their way along the membranous channels. Here the hammering noise resembled the thunder of some vast heart, making the flesh shudder with each solid beat.

A rune signifier representing possible contact winked up on the visor. Sharr took another glance back to ensure the vile orifice behind them showed no signs of pursuers, then switched his view momentarily to what Blood Eye was seeing, using their helmets’ shared uplink.

There was a hatchway ahead, though it was no longer a thing of plasteel or armaplas. It was formed from a hundred or so arms that bristled out from the meat walls on the left and right, interlocking with one another to bar the passage. Hands gripped wrists and forearms, and fingers clasped, forming a barrier of limbs.

‘Hack them apart,’ Shadow suggested.

Blood Eye approached, knife unlocked, but as he drew nearer the arms seemed to sense him. They unclasped and let go, hugging back to the walls with eerie silence and leaving the way open.

Sharr had no doubt they were all considering the likelihood of a trap. Blood Eye carried on slowly, but the arms showed no sign of lashing out. If anything they seemed to cringe away, trying to avoid contact with the Space Marine’s armour.

Sharr switched his vision back to his own helm, and they carried on.

The space beyond was even worse than the one they had left. The flesh tunnel was narrowing precipitously, forcing them to stoop.

‘Is this the only way?’ Talon demanded testily.

‘Yes,’ Blood Eye replied. ‘If we wish to avoid the main decks. Crawl.’

The Carcharodons shoved themselves through the slimy morass, Sharr’s teeth clenched as he placed his mind elsewhere. Now was no time to lose control.

Finally, the taint began to lessen, the service tunnel’s pitted metalwork returning, though the space afforded to the Exiles didn’t improve. The pounding was now more intense than ever, the whole duct shaking and rattling. They continued to work their way awkwardly along, and Sharr noted bars of light thrown against the left-hand wall. He looked through the vent grate it was shining through as he passed, taking a mental snapshot of the scene beyond.

Below the service tunnel, an infernal workshop sprawled. The cavernous space might once have been a cargo ship’s hangar bay, but it was now given over to the industry of nightmares. Dozens of conveyor belts clattered as they transported great mounds of scrap metal through a maze of churning pistons and hammering smelters. Fang-mawed furnaces blazed and roared, their heat making the air around them writhe, as though in pain. Cranes hefted white-hot sheets of metal into steaming cooling vats, and a forest of part-mechanical, part-organic auto-arms worked along assembly lines, showers of sparks lighting up the fiery half-dark. Sharr’s auto-senses picked up the stench of ash and scorched flesh and burnt metal and the addictive, sickly-sweet taint of the warp.

Keeping the machines working was a legion of menials – bedraggled, wretched creatures clad in rags and befouled from head to foot with soot and grease. They were held to their tasks, manually hefting materials and turning engine wheels and cogs, by hulking, crudely augmented and foully mutated overseers, who lashed at them with electro-whips and wicked prongs.

Sharr noted that it wasn’t only metals and raw minerals acting as fodder. Several of the conveyor belts were heaped not with scrap but with body parts – severed limbs, heads, opened torsos, human offal, and viscera that tumbled wetly into the flames. Another forge pit had a queue of menials that snaked and twisted around it like a tail. Those at the front of the line were leaping without hesitation into the blazing furnace, one after the other. There was a brief scuffle along part of the queue, and a small knot broke free from the rest. Sharr wondered briefly if the condemned were seeking to escape their fate, only to see them charge past the rest of the line and throw themselves wildly into the furnace, shrieking with apparent delight as those waiting patiently for their turn wailed with dismay and shouted angrily at the overseers.

It was a scene of utter bedlam, and again Sharr had to master the urge to descend and wreak the Void Father’s vengeance upon it all.

‘These decks are the nexus of production, and worship,’ Blood Eye said, the other Exiles clearly having seen what lay beneath as they passed by. ‘To this cult, those things are one and the same.’

‘It is madness,’ Shadow said. ‘What are they building?’

‘I doubt any of them know, and I would not try to guess,’ Blood Eye said darkly, his normally emotionless voice shot through with disgust.

The duct finally gave way to a conjoining corridor, the Carcharodons able to stand straight once more. Sharr tried to wipe some of the flesh-slurry off his armour, but it was futile. It would take lengthy rites of purification and appeasement after the operation’s conclusion if the machine spirit of the aged wargear was to be cleansed.

Beyond the corridor lay a cyclopean hallway that resembled some dark parody of an Imperial cathedral. There were upright sarcophagi arrayed around the walls, each one plugged into a nest of cables that ran into what appeared to have once been arched windows. The front of each was partly sheeted with bronze and etched with blasphemous runes, and filmy glassplex screens showed the murky filth within, disturbed by the occasional twitch of motion. Each of the upright coffins shook slightly with the pounding ringing out from the neighbouring workshop.

‘Leave them,’ Blood Eye warned.

They ghosted silently through the sepulchral space and passed without hindrance through the doors at the far end, then up a flight of stairs lit by stuttering old lumen globes, the metal rungs creaking beneath their tread.

‘Are we on schedule?’ Shadow murmured as they continued to climb. There was a chrono display ticking down in the shared visor display, but only Blood Eye was in a position to understand exactly how far through the hulk they had travelled. It was a necessary part of the operation, for to reach their objective within the nightmarish macro-vessel after the timer had elapsed would mean they had failed. Adding further shame to the burdens they already carried was unthinkable.

‘Just keep climbing,’ Blood Eye said.

It followed.

For a long time It had existed in a state of low-level hibernation, rousing Itself only to avoid approaching threats or to switch the location of Its bio-cocoon. It did this semi-regularly to further evade detection, but for the most part It remained dormant, conserving energy. It had existed for decades on board the hulk, and was capable of existing for decades more, as long as It remained undisturbed.

But that was about to change. It had already caught the prey’s scent in the lower depths, where It had been resting. Its consciousness had stirred even as Its body remained still, Its vital signs barely a murmur. Hyper-sensitive olfactory glands had flared and inhaled, drawing in smell-traces It recognised – metals doused with oils, and the skin and hair within the shells, impregnated deeply with an overabundance of steroids, chemicals and glanded stimulants. A veritable cocktail, and one that It knew well.

This was exactly the kind of prey-creature It was intended to stalk. They held promise, unlike the things It had been forced to share Its existence with for so many years. And, importantly, they were not sick.

It did not understand the concept of sickness – indeed It understood very little of anything, from a higher sentient point of view – but then Its purpose was not to understand, any more than a lower life form’s organs were expected to comprehend their place and function within a body. And just as a body’s white blood cells might react with aggressive efficiency to signs of infection without being able to rationalise the actual meaning of the concept of ‘infection’, so It knew to avoid the vast majority of the beings on the hulk. They were not prey. It had no use for them.

Now, though, It had found something useful.

It had started to stalk them in the lower depths. The prey’s path had brought It into hunting grounds only lately abandoned, but they would not go much farther. Soon, the time would be right.

It followed.

The chrono counters on each Exile’s helmet display continued to count down as they climbed ever higher, keeping to the side passages and working their way through the tangle of lesser berths and stations wherever possible. At one point a section of decking gave way beneath Talon, and he was forced to snag hold of a set of pipes with his claws to avoid plunging into the abyss. Later, they had to scale a bulkhead that had seemingly collapsed down through the hulk’s upper levels and was now barring their path, using their combat knives and mag-clamps to work their way up the sheer sheet of metal.

With every step, Sharr’s sense that something was following them grew.

The area of the hulk they were moving through turned for a while from the gangways of old ships to rock tunnels, part of the asteroid that made up the monstrous vessel’s bulk. For the most part the passages were rugged and natural, though others showed evidence of having been deliberately bored out. In one there were even strange statues cut into alcoves in the walls, their forms following no known patterns of anatomy.

It was there that the infiltration was nearly undone.

‘Contacts approaching,’ Blood Eye said over the vox. ‘Numerous.’

The problem was immediately clear – the tunnel had no alternative entrances or exits, and the Carcharodons had been following its winding path for hours.

‘Double back?’ Shadow suggested.

‘Too far,’ Sharr growled.

Blood Eye seemed to agree. He highlighted the statue alcoves.

‘Get in place behind them. They will conceal us while whatever is coming passes by, or at least offer a rudimentary ambush point.’

The Exiles split between the statues on either side, forcing themselves in behind the ugly stonework as best they could. Sharr could hear a sonorous chanting, interspersed with what sounded like mechanical gibberish, rising steadily over the ever-present pounding of the workshops.

He kept his chainsword clamped but unlocked his knife. This would be close work in the tunnel’s confines, a place for a short blade, brute strength, and not much else.

‘Do not engage unless we are detected,’ Blood Eye voxed, as though sensing Sharr’s thoughts.

A glimmer of light showed around the nearest corner, and the discordant chanting intensified. Shuffling figures came into view, stooped and swathed in black robes. They were like dark parodies of the Adeptus Mechanicus, with spiked augmentations and mechadendrites that, in some places, had morphed into fleshy tentacles.

The ones at the front carried burning torches and a series of blasphemous icons beaten out of rough-hewn metal. Those behind were heaving something on a litter borne on their shoulders and backs, though it was not immediately clear what it was.

The Void Exiles reduced the output of their reactor packs to minimum and shut down all but the most vital auto-senses, killing electrical and heat traces, waiting in taut silence.

The thing on the palanquin came fully into view. It looked like a large cogitator stack, but its corruption was obvious, for human eyes were blinking and roving around in what had once been its interface ports. It seemed to speak as well, machine blurts burbling up from vox-plates along its sides. It was linked by a tangle of cables to two servitors limping behind its palanquin, both the constructs fused with generator units, acting as mobile power banks. Exactly what purpose the warped engine served, or where the procession was taking it, remained a mystery.

Sharr held his knife against his chestplate as the thing passed him by, seeking to put himself elsewhere. For a moment, it seemed impossible that he wouldn’t kick over the statue and tear into the blasphemous coterie. He could feel the roar pushing up from his chest, desperate to be free. They were so close he could almost reach out and touch them.

Not now. He put his mind elsewhere, trying to focus on the Silent Litanies, to remember the transience of his rage and his existence beyond it.

It felt like an age, but finally the last of the procession passed by, disappearing around a bend in the tunnel, their twisted doggerel beginning to fade.

Sharr found he had been holding his breath. He let it out, flexed his grip on his knife’s hilt, and reawakened his armour.

The Exiles stalked through a vault packed with hideously mutated servitors, their organic components warped with misplaced teeth and eyes and tentacle-growths. They were all dormant, ranked side by side, plugged into rusting charging banks via cortex sockets.

The Carcharodons picked their way carefully and quietly between them.

At the far end of the vault, a great eyeball had grown in the space that had once been the exit hatch. It rolled in the hatch’s socket, seeming to find a degree of focus as it looked at the approaching Space Marines. Its iris was violet, and disconcertingly human.

‘Is this the exit?’ Talon demanded, sounding disgusted.

‘It is,’ Blood Eye confirmed, and, without another word, took his combat knife and punched it through the giant eye’s membrane. It rolled back and shivered in pain as clear fluid squirted free. Sharr heard the servitors behind them begin to rattle and stutter, and a moan rose up from their warped lips.

‘Hurry,’ Shadow muttered.

Blood Eye and Talon hacked at the eyeball, clawing out its vitreous body, bursting it apart. The four Space Marines then pushed through the gelatinous mess, as though forcing their way along the optic nerve of some giant monster and into its skull.

Darkness yawned, interspersed with flashes of lightning. A black chasm opened up ahead, intersected by an arching bridge carved out of the rock of the asteroid. The far walls, the ceiling and the floor were all lost in darkness, and a storm seemed to be rumbling in the depths, making the stone underfoot shiver. Sharr’s auto-senses recoiled from the surrounding space, unable to compute distances, heights or depths. He also noticed that the auspex display had decayed into static once more, and the chrono that had been counting down since the cryo-tanks had drained was frozen.

‘Maximum vigilance,’ Blood Eye voxed. ‘I am not sure we are on the hulk any longer.’

The Carcharodons moved cautiously out onto the bridge. It arched upwards in its centre, and was too narrow to pass along in anything other than single file. Sharr noticed that its underside was bristling with chains and wires, from which hung hundreds of skeletal remains, dangling over the yawning blackness.

‘Look up,’ Shadow voxed. Sharr did so, and saw that a mirror image had appeared above them. A perfect representation of the bridge ran above their heads, following the same course, except it was upside down, the skeletal remains that should have been under it jutting directly upwards instead. Sharr found himself looking into his own helmet’s lenses, as four Carcharodons followed their movements, each one a perfect representation, as though a vast mirror had been hung directly above them. Perhaps it had.

‘There are things in the darkness below,’ Talon pointed out as they carried on. ‘Or above. It is difficult to tell.’

Sharr knew what he meant – he could hear what sounded like the rustle and buzz of wings, and a cacophony of chilling cries rising up out of the black depths, competing with the rumbling of the storm. Something was approaching from far below. The rustling rose to a roar.

‘Run,’ Blood Eye voxed.

Sharr broke into a sprint just as the creatures exploded upwards on either side of the bridge, twisting and flocking all around the Space Marines. They were metallic fiends, resembling machined versions of the leering gargoyles that were such common motifs in Imperial architecture. They fell upon the Carcharodons in a blizzard of razor-claws and hooked beaks.

Sharr already had his knife up, deflecting the first strike against his head as he unlocked and primed his bolt pistol with his other hand. Blood Eye and Shadow opened fire, the booming report of their boltguns seeming small and insignificant compared to the rush of the wicked machines and the thunder below them.

Hard rounds ripped apart the furies in hails of sparks and shorn metal, but more were already diving through the wreckage of their disintegrating kin, falling atop the Space Marines. Sharr had time to put a bolt through one before a second was on his shoulders, scissor-talons scraping at his helmet, his armour pinging warnings to him as he stumbled.

He simply fired his pistol up at the thing, blowing away its top half and sending its spasming remains tumbling off into the lightning-clad darkness. Others were striking at him, gouging his pauldrons. One clamped vice-like limbs around his right arm, digging into the ceramite. Its metallic wings were a buzzing blur as it tried to drag him off the edge of the bridge, its saw-toothed snout cackling in Sharr’s face.

With a bellow, Sharr ripped his arm free, not needing his armour’s servos to overcome the creature. The fury’s metal limbs sheared off with a shriek, spraying blood-like oil. He kicked it away from him and gained a few more yards, both hearts hammering in his chest as he forced himself to keep going even with blows raining down on him from all sides.

Blood Eye reached the far end of the bridge and turned, pouring controlled bursts of bolter fire into the air directly above his struggling brethren. Shadow made it to the end moments later and added his own firepower. Sharr pushed on, the lower half of the bridge now swarming with the creatures, like a glittering, barbed carapace that was clawing its way arm-over-arm up the skeletal corpses dangling from the structure’s underside, reaching up for Sharr and threatening to drag him down. He emptied his pistol’s clip around his feet, then locked it and reached for his chainsword.

The weapon juddered in his grip as it sheared through another of the plunging mechanical monstrosities, cleaving it in half so that it clattered to the deck on either side of him. Talon was just in front, stamping on another he had brought down with his hooked claws.

More exploded all around them as the other two Carcharodons provided pinpoint covering fire. They ran the last section of the bridge’s span, the stone beneath shuddering as thunder boomed all around them.

The storm seemed to be following the swarm up from the depths, and with it came something even more terrible. As lightning flared deep below, it illuminated some vast leviathan, its tendrils questing ponderously upwards, silhouetted by the flickering blue-white display.

‘Through the door,’ Blood Eye instructed, reloading as he spoke. The flying swarm had momentarily broken off, but it was re-forming and wheeling around, a great, malicious flock twinning perfectly with the one reflected above.

Sharr reloaded his bolt pistol without thinking about it, looking to the side as he did so and seeing the doorway. It had been cut into the rockface, edged with an arch of skulls and bones. Brilliant light shone through it.

Talon took point. They entered the glare, only to swiftly find themselves in darkness once more. Sharr kept his helmet’s vision overlays on regular, the auto-senses finding a faint glimmer of light and dragging it in to enhance his new surroundings.

They were in a cavern, its floor, walls and ceiling studded with crystalline shards. There was no hint of the storm they had just passed through, nor even the eternal heartbeat of the workshops. When Sharr looked back, he found no sign of the doorway.

The Carcharodons said nothing, simply advancing into the jagged forest. The crystals were making a faint keening noise, like a blade being tapped lightly against the side of a decanter. It started to grate at Sharr’s ears, so he deleted it from his consciousness.

There was no obvious source for the weak light illuminating the cave, besides the crystals themselves. The substance crunched under the Space Marines’ boots and scraped against their armour where they were forced to push their way between the bristling growths. The auspex was still offline, not even showing static now.

Shadows moved and shifted around Sharr, and he brought up his bolt pistol, before realising he had caught the movement of his own reflection in the crystal. It was not truly him, though – it was broken and diffracted along the uneven surfaces, and showed a raw-eyed being in pallid armour, smeared with streaks of bright crimson, as if a child had daubed the figure with red paint. The others were all dark, wreathed in shadows, though Talon’s form also flickered with a hint of actinic power.

‘It mocks us,’ the clawed Carcharodon growled as they carried on.

‘Stay the course,’ Blood Eye instructed. ‘Do not look at the reflections.’

It seemed to take hours to traverse the cavern, but finally they found another arch, this one resembling a gateway in an old citadel, with an iron portcullis that slowly rose of its own accord ahead of them.

Past it was a shoreline. There was no ceiling above, but a sky filled with numberless stars, all of them ruddy and dying, their light like blood. To the right, old walls towered over them, fortifications, their ramparts cracked and slighted and empty. On the left was an ocean, vast and endless, its waters black. Sharr saw that the waves were, impossibly, flowing away from the shoreline.

Blood Eye knelt briefly and ran one of his gauntlets through what appeared to be rust-coloured sand underfoot.

‘It is metal,’ he said as he sifted it. ‘Countless filings, reduced to dust.’

They began to walk once more, under the crimson glow. Sharr knew that what they were experiencing was true corruption, more than the mere flesh-filth that was the effluvium, the waste product of Chaos. This was the raw insanity of the immaterium, manifesting in the deepest corners of the space hulk. It was as though they had crossed a threshold into another realm of existence. Sharr supposed that was entirely possible.

The Carcharodons endured it all in cold silence, simply continuing onwards. Beyond the strange shore, through another gateway in the old fortifications, they found themselves back in something at least resembling a spacefaring ship.

It looked like a section of bridge, but the pits beneath the empty command platform that had once housed the likes of comms, shields, engines and navigational control were now filled with bodies and foulness and covered over by a membranous substance. As the Carcharodons passed between them they stirred, but did not break free from their birth sacs.

The distant beating of industry had returned, shaking the deck and making the creatures twitch.

‘Displays back to full functionality,’ Blood Eye murmured, the chrono, auspex and other ancillary signifiers once more ticking over.

‘It is like the ship is slumbering,’ Shadow pointed out over the sealed vox as they passed more of the foul pits. ‘And we are passing through its dreams. Outside of the workshops, so much seems to be dormant.’

‘Presumably this is how they travel the Outer Dark,’ Blood Eye said. ‘But we must assume this hibernation will end soon. Time is running out.’

Sharr knew what the other Exile meant. The renewed chrono display was showing that they had a little over three standard day-cycles remaining. After that, it would be too late.

‘We could destroy all of these with a few grenades,’ he suggested, highlighting the infested pits.

‘Not our objective,’ Blood Eye said tersely.

They climbed, along more stairways and passages. As they went, it became clearer they were leaving the worst of the madness that had infected the middle decks behind. Systems, where they were active, were functioning normally, and even the flesh growths were now few and far between.

Still, Sharr felt something following them, more than the verminous things that flitted and scampered in their wake.

Then, just before the Exiles reached the Sire of Belaphrone, his control finally deserted him.

CHAPTER VIII

It happened in an old generator hold, part of a ship whose sections seemed so ancient and arcane that Blood Eye commented briefly that they likely pre-dated the Chapter’s first Day of Exile. Mega electro-combustion engines, comprising huge sections of pipes and vents and dormant static nodes, towered like primeval menhirs amidst the latticework of catwalks that allowed access to their different levels. They were cobwebbed and caked with dust, but didn’t seem to be infested with anything worse than scurrying rats.

That was until the Carcharodons picked up traces of the cultists, patrolling the echoing space. The auspex detected several platoon-sized sections, and the Exiles caught visuals of one group as they passed along one of the upper walkways above them.

These weren’t desperate menials and their cruel overseers, or the deranged and corrupt tech-priests they had encountered. They were warriors, armed with las- and hard-round weaponry and armoured in patchworks of flak and plasteel. Like their masters, many bore crude bionic augmentations. Some showed signs of mutation.

The Carcharodons sheltered briefly in the lee of one of the mega engines.

‘Strange, to find active patrols now that we have passed through the hulk’s core,’ Shadow muttered. ‘Perhaps they are guarding this area specifically?’

‘Or hunting us,’ Talon said. ‘Dormant or not, the hulk has been aware of our presence since the beginning. There have been things following us.’

‘We should thread a path through them,’ Blood Eye suggested. ‘We are drawing near to the first objective.’

They set off, following a route plotted by the auspex. Many of the catwalk ladders and walkways creaked dangerously beneath the Space Marines, but none buckled. At times they were forced to pause as a patrol passed under or above them on a different level, but none spotted the four crouching shadows. That was until they were nearing the far side of the hold.

The auspex showed that one patrol was now on the same level, and was about to cross past their rear at an intersection. The Carcharodons weren’t far enough from it to avoid being spotted if one of the heretics so much as glanced to their right.

Sharr was bringing up the rear. Without thinking, he turned and began to run, ignoring the signifiers highlighted by the others on his visor.

The walkway beneath him started to shudder rhythmically with the pounding of his boots. The cultists hadn’t yet reached the junction, and only caught sight of him at the last moment as he rounded the nearest mega engine.

He assessed them in an instant – six combat effectives, all equipped with small-arms and an assortment of bladed weaponry. They had frozen, their confusion at the swaying of the catwalk turning to palpable shock as the grey-clad giant materialised before them.

Sharr charged. He left his bolt pistol and his chainsword clamped, only his combat knife unsheathed.

He was on the first heretic before the man could raise his lasrifle. Sharr didn’t bother with the knife, simply backhanding the cultist as he went. Skull broken and neck snapped, he was slammed off the walkway and into the mega engine before tumbling away like a rag doll, out of sight.

The second cultist received the full weight of Sharr’s charge. He was trampled, throat crushed by the stamp of a boot. The third had raised his autogun, a keening noise crackling over the vox that had been hardwired into his jaw. Sharr beheaded him with a vicious swipe of his knife before he could fire, blood squirting upwards and pattering down on the Carcharodon like a shower from a fountain.

Sharr wasn’t shouting, but neither was he silent, a low, feral snarl rising up out of his chest as he slaughtered, hyper-focus rapidly turning into a crimson fug.

The fourth cultist tried a desperate, foolish lunge with the serrated bayonet fixed to the end of her autogun. Sharr simply let the blade jar off his breastplate, the bayonet snapping, while stamping forward and driving the point of his combat knife into her torso. Her flakplate armour was little protection. He ripped the knife through her stomach and intestines, disembowelling her while, at the same time, his other fist crashed against her face, staving in the front of her skull and stilling her scream before it was made.

He didn’t know exactly what happened to the fifth cultist, or the sixth. He didn’t know if they fired, if they shouted, if they screamed. All he was sure of was the blood, and the burning strength of his body, and the primal satisfaction of feeling his knife sawing through meat and bone.

There was a presence behind him.

He turned, arm raised to punch his slick blade down and through the next threat.

Blood Eye’s crimson gauntlet caught his vambrace.

For a second he strained, his body refusing to relinquish the need to kill. The servos of the two warriors whirred and locked tight. Then Sharr finally reasserted a level of control, and eased off.

‘That was unwise,’ Blood Eye stated, still holding his vambrace. ‘One errant shot, one scream, and we would have been detected.’

Sharr ripped his wrist free, but lowered his blade. He looked at the dripping mess smeared across the catwalk, and glanced briefly at the shared auspex display. The markers signifying the other patrols showed no sign of changing direction, no indication that they had heard the massacre of their warped kindred.

‘Targets eliminated,’ Sharr said, feeling the rage draining away. ‘Lead on.’

They exfiltrated the generator hold without being discovered, moving up a series of gangways that were tilted at such a steep angle it required the activation of their auto-stabilisers. As they went, Blood Eye highlighted part of what the auspex was showing him.

‘These schematics are the ones we’ve been looking for,’ he said. ‘The sections ahead are the remains of the Sire of Belaphrone, an Imperial Navy capital ship lost to the tides of the empyrean a little over five thousand years ago.’

The same information intruded on Sharr’s thoughts, a word-for-word repetition of the relevant hypno-briefing, dredged up from his mind as he heard the ship’s name and noted the layout of the passages and decks ahead.

‘Are you certain its aft sections are still intact?’ he asked.

‘We will know soon enough,’ Blood Eye answered.

They found the first obvious sign of the creature that had been stalking them just within the lower decks of the Sire of Belaphrone.

‘Bodies,’ Talon said. He had taken point, and his meaning became clear as the Carcharodons moved along an inter-deck passageway littered with remains.

‘More cult soldiers,’ Shadow said. ‘Still fresh. They can’t have been slain more than an hour ago.’

‘Few signs of defensive efforts,’ Blood Eye added, highlighting the small scattering of las-scorches and hard-round impacts on the walls. ‘They were taken by surprise, and terminated swiftly.’

‘It has been following us for some time,’ Sharr growled.

‘What has?’ Blood Eye asked.

‘I do not know, yet. Have none of you felt it?’

‘I have,’ Talon confirmed. ‘I assumed it was some warp spawn. But why would it attack its own?’

‘The slaves of Chaos fight one another more than they do the Imperium,’ Shadow pointed out.

‘We have had little sign of that here, though,’ Blood Eye said. ‘As you said, the hulk slumbers. And these killings do not bear the hallmarks of some thirsting Neverborn on a rampage.’

He indicated several of the corpses. They had been cleanly decapitated by what could only be an extremely keen blade.

‘Too much precision. No sign of savaging or excessive aggression.’

‘The patrols near here were deemed unusual,’ Shadow said. ‘Perhaps they are not intended to guard this area, or seek us out. Perhaps they are hunting for this “other”. And it is hunting them.’

‘Whatever it is, it is ancillary to our primary objectives,’ Blood Eye said. ‘Let us continue.’

The taint was almost completely absent as they climbed through the Sire of Belaphrone. By Sharr’s reckoning they had passed around the bulk of the hulk and its infested core and were now mounting its spine, nearing what equated to the top of the deranged conglomeration. The scans they had all had imprinted onto their memories showed the old Imperial Navy ship forming a prominent part of the detritus wedged in that particular section of the hulk, with its prow long buried and its aft section and engines still jutting proud of the rest. That was what had made it the strike team’s primary target.

‘The first objective lies just ahead,’ Blood Eye declared. ‘No sign of contacts, but remain vigilant.’

Talon was again on point, following the new burst map Blood Eye had thrown up. They passed through the twisted remains of what had once been a blast door, long ago wrenched open. Beyond it was another generator chamber, not as huge as the hold that lay adjacent to the Sire of Belaphrone’s buried prow, but large enough to house an alpha-grade plasma turbine and auxiliary electrical support nodes.

The Carcharodons secured the space before Blood Eye moved to the main control node, running one of his gauntlets almost reverently over the panel of rune keys, dials and levers. He began to work the aged instruments, while the other three took post at the chamber entrances.

It took time, but eventually there was a ticking sound, and Blood Eye spoke.

‘There is power.’

As though to underline his statement, the plasma turbine began to light up an actinic blue, the ribs of its magnetic accelerator coils glowing.

As a thrum filled the air, the former Techmarine led Sharr and the other Exiles onwards, through to what Sharr’s memories of the schematics told him was the lost ship’s primary enginarium. It was a cathedral-like space, dominated by the engine itself. The size of a hab-block, it comprised innumerable pipelines and valves, riddled with vents and heat exhausts whose maws were fashioned into plasteel gargoyles perched around its edges. Sharr imagined that the chamber would have been a desperate place when the Sire of Belaphrone had still traversed the stars of her own free will, hot as a furnace and vibrating with the vast power and pressures that provided motion to so great a craft. At full capacity it would have been tended to by a whole congregation of tech-priests and enginseers and stoked by hundreds of menials. Nor was it even the Sire of Belaphrone’s only engine, merely its primary one.

‘Can you ignite it?’ Shadow asked as the four Carcharodons stood before the monolithic edifice.

‘We have power, and where there is power, there is a way,’ Blood Eye replied. ‘But I will need assistance from all of you, and it will take at least another two day-cycles.’

Sharr glanced at the chrono display. It showed just over two cycles to impact.

The Exiles set to work.

Voldire lived.

The Mother-of-Them-All woke him. He did not know how long he had been slumbering, or even if he had truly been asleep and not walking elsewhere, far beyond the confines of the great vessel.

He felt its heartbeat all around him, the pulse of its flesh and the vital thrum of its systems. Their acceleration was what had dredged him up from the slurry of god-dreams and false memories and impossible futures his mind had slipped into. In doing so, the Mother-of-Them-All spoke to him.

Arise, my child. It is time.

Voldire cried out, his body arching in the warm, wet embrace of the embryo-cables. He choked on black nutrient fluids, spat, and sat up, gasping.

The first thing he felt was the pain – the blessed pain. His imps were still at work, and had been throughout his slumber. There were a dozen of them, little flesh-and-machine creatures, each one unique, each one fashioned by the hand of the divine, precious and sacred. They were cutting him. Some used scalpels grafted into their spindly arms, others saws or scissors, one even a short lasburner. They scrambled over his hulking frame and they cut, slicing the growths, carving away the ever-swelling tumours, polyps and cysts that threatened to swallow him up, to overwhelm and bury both his flesh and the form of the machines grafted onto it. The imps had been a gift from his saviour, and in cutting his swollen, changing body, they kept him whole.

Voldire moaned and snatched a loop of intestine cabling above, dragging himself with great difficulty up from his ark’s embrace. He swallowed, tasting bitter blood and sweet, maddening scrapcode. The filth of his slumbers dripped and drooled from him, and the embryo-cables that bristled from him pulled taut. One by one they began to snap free, spraying their stinking, viscous contents, until only the mother-link, a spine-like column of bone and wire tendons, remained connecting him to the ark.

Voldire clenched his black, glistening iron fangs, reached awkwardly round with his one flesh-arm, and with a wet crunch, ripped the appendage away, fracturing his own spine as he did so.

His augmetics came online. He screamed, and the scream was answered by the wailing of his congregants, those hereteks who had sensed his awakening in the changing rhythms of the Mother-of-Them-All and assembled before the ark at her core.

He could see. His flesh-eye had been functioning since he had awoken, but the other was a bionic lens, one he had borne since the earliest days of his induction into the Way of the Machine. It had changed as he had changed, and now it showed him eternity.

For some time he stood overwhelmed, his bulbous flesh shuddering, his machine parts locked stiff, the imps still scurrying across his frame as they battled to keep the ever-morphing and swelling growths at bay. There was no sound, other than the panting rasps of his breathing and the slopping as slabs of freshly hacked meat smacked down into the black soup now swilling in the ark’s bottom.

He could feel his strength slowly returning and, along with it, his focus. He forced his augmetic eye to return to the present, to cease showing him the glories of the warp and to instead show him what lay before him.

His faculty had assembled. Fellow seekers of enlightenment, academics and philosophers, those who sought the union of body and machine in pursuit of the divine.

It pleased him to see that so many had survived the voyage. There was Markel Vost, his mechadendrite tentacles writhing with anticipation, and beside him old Keegon of the Broken Cog, his form veiled by the black Mechanicum robes that hung from his unnaturally tall, lean body. There the conjoined, ever-arguing Zeen twins, and Milner Krost, burdened beneath his soul jars, and old Professor Glokken, borne up on his palanquin by his cabal-students.

Voldire attempted to address the faculty, but was sick instead. As he wiped soupy effluvium from his lips, Vost scurried forward and genuflected before the festering ark.

‘Praise the Infernal Architect for your return, my great and forever-tenured datagnost,’ he intoned from the rusting arches of his vox-grille. ‘Everything is beginning to stir. My own students are currently offering fivefold praises throughout the workshop and foundry levels. Surely, the time is nearly upon us!’

Voldire saw that his fellow academic was correct. The misshapen sacs and birthing cysts that bloated the flesh deck all around his ark were writhing, talons and fanged maws pressing against the taut membranes. The vessel’s heartbeat was strong, vital. He was not the only one rising from his slumber.

‘It does me good to see so much of the faculty assembled,’ he declared, his voice hoarse. ‘The portents are fine indeed, but are they supported by evidence? By verifiable, empirical data?’

‘We believe so, my datagnost,’ Milner Krost said. Every word he spoke was backwards, a curious blessing indeed, but the transcription device he had invented, and which had been stitched into his vocal cords, reversed his speech, rendering it more understandable.

‘The spirits of the sensorium have addressed us loudly and clearly,’ he said. ‘The world of the unenlightened lies before us. The Mother-of-Them-All has led us straight and true, just as the Infernal Architect intended! Tuptuo war eht si ereh.’

The final sentence was garbled as Krost’s vocal regulator glitched, but its meaning was clear enough as one of his students scampered forward and held up a bone-edged data-slate in trembling hands, eyes averted from Voldire’s towering, fivefold-blessed form.

He took the slate and grunted, momentarily brushing aside one of the imps hacking at a swelling neck growth as he applied his focus to the information delivered to him.

It was accurate, as per Krost’s statement. The Mother-of-Them-All had almost reached her long-awaited destination.

‘It is time to awaken our kin,’ Voldire stated, feeling a surge of anticipation. ‘At long last, we shall bring the light of true science to our old home.’

CHAPTER IX

There was a figure standing in the middle of the astropathic chamber.

Binharic Attendant Master Twei-Seventeen experienced the nearest thing to fear his machine-stunted emotions had known in a very long time. He checked his twin optic units for any signs of malfunction, but both were operating flawlessly. The sight they were sending to Twei’s circuit-inlaid brain was not some program phantom or false simulation.

There was a giant in the choristorium, in the centre of one of the most heavily guarded places on Diamantus. Shadows coiled and writhed about him, and the light of the lumens dimmed. The very air itself seemed murky, unclear. Twei recoiled, his mental implants struggling to compute the correct response.

‘Do not be afraid,’ the giant said, in High Gothic. ‘No harm will come to you or your charges. I will need them for only a moment.’

The figure was carrying a staff, and he raised it and spoke words that were not High Gothic, nor Low, nor Lingua Technis. Words that Twei’s encoding refused to permit him to understand.

The astropaths that were Twei’s charges began to writhe in the embryo fluids filling their transmission coffins. There were half a dozen hardwired into the psi-reactive metals of the choristorium’s floor, forming Diamantus’ astropathic choir, its only means of swift interstellar communication. As binharic attendant master, Twei-Seventeen was responsible for handling the choir, capturing the raw vision-messages they received, and sanctifying and authorising those that needed to be sent. The arcane workings of the machinery that aided his duties were known only to him and a few others on Diamantus.

The séance boards that formed part of his control lectern started to light up. The vitae signs of the choir spiked. Energy fizzed through the transmission coffins, the pallid, wasted things within thrashing in the throes of a warp fever dream.

The shadowed giant was sending a message.

That should not have been possible. The proper litanies had not been spoken, the techno-invocations had not been made. Twei had blessed and authorised no message, and yet one was being sent.

The bell above his station tolled, confirming the transmission.

‘Stop,’ he finally cried out, accidentally speaking in binharic before reverting to the same tongue the giant had used. But the figure was already disappearing, dematerialising before Twei’s very optics, pulled apart by the same shadows that had silently birthed him.

The lumens regained their potency, and the astropaths ceased their frantic disturbance, vitae signs becoming steady and regular once more.

Finally, belatedly, Twei-Seventeen triggered the alarm impulse.

As skitarii rushed in, their consciousnesses attempting to interface with his own so he could identify the threat to them, he hurried over to the enoptromantic mirror that hung above the transmission node, offering both prayers for forgiveness and requests for aid and clarity as he fitted his hands into the circuit gauntlets. They danced across the scrying boards, the ancient mechanisms concealed behind the clouded mirror starting to tick.

He looked into the murky surface, at his own unclear reflection, his bionic eyes seeing the data he had called up slowly swimming to the surface, like an old pict that took time to resolve itself on imprint paper.

He had demanded to know the contents of the message the giant phantom had sent, but it was scrambled, even the emotional stamp of it too foreign to Twei for him to be able to understand. The destination was translatable though. He scurried to another station and called up star charts and the triangulator, his actuators twitching with unsanctified, nervous impulses.

He sought to trace where the message had gone, the buzzing demands of the skitarii for clarification growing more strident as he ignored them. He had expected to find the recipient on some distant world, some great and terrible fortress, or perhaps even within the illogical warp horrors of the Great Rift or the Maelstrom or the Eye.

But the message had gone to none of those places. He repeated his requests, retraced its passage through the empyrean two, three times, until he had to accept, via logical deduction, that his own machines were not lying to him.

The message had gone out to nowhere. To deep space. Into oblivion, the blackness, the void where nothing could, or should, live.

Binharic Attendant Master Twei-Seventeen could not begin to compute who, or what, had received it.

Khauri shuddered in his armour; without its support, and the staff in his grip, he might have collapsed.

He was back in the space he had claimed in Megafactorum Primus, a spoil caretaker’s office. He had convinced the overseer who usually occupied the lean-to adjacent to the slag heap to vacate it for the next few days. The man had fled without protest.

The door was barred, the window shutters closed, and markings had been chalked out over the bare floor. Small candles, placed at each point of the pentagram he had inscribed at the room’s centre, guttered as Khauri fought to recover.

The effort of unmaking the wards guarding the astropathic spire and forcing its choir to transmit his message had almost broken him. He had experienced the panic of a swimmer realising they had struck out too far from shore. But he had turned back, just in time. He looked at the shadows crowding in on him, glaring at them, hating them. Hating the power they gave him – the power that still, after almost a century, made the old scars on his back ache.

He whispered the evocations necessary to banish the darkness, until only one piece of it remained, deeper than all the rest. He looked into the heart of it, took a breath, and spoke again, in the foul language it understood most clearly.

‘Not today.’

The shadow receded, until there was only a hint of darkness beyond the candle glow, nothing more.

He had done what needed to be done. Perhaps it was too late, but he had been instructed to hold out for as long as possible, until there was no other hope.

His skull ached, always a sure sign of approaching disaster. He only hoped he hadn’t waited too long before sending the call out into the deeps.

Battle-Gnostic Volv had been ordered to provide an update, and was bound by his programming to comply.

He drove data demands into the mind-cores of the servitors and the lesser adepts tending to the macrocannon platform’s augur stations, making them flinch.

The command apex’s control chamber was in darkness, apart from the aching glow of the oculus stands and viewscreens and the flickering light of the votive candles dripping their wax onto the tops of the targeting cogitators. Volv shifted in his interface cradle, grinding the nubs of his teeth together in frustration as he waited.

Delays disrupted the divine rhythms of the harmonious binary. His station, ODP/01, was the largest of Diamantus’ orbital defence platforms, and he would not be the last to report back to the Fabricator General.

He reviewed the previous set of scans in an effort to ease his mind while he waited for the latest one to finish, magnified pict captures and data screeds flashing up on the inlaid glassplex of his cradle. They showed the approaching danger, the abomination drawing with slow inevitability towards Diamantus.

Other Imperial assets had apparently given it a name, as befitted their superstitious ways – Grim Destiny – but to the Adeptus Mechanicus it was identified simply as threat marker 0.00.1.0. And a threat it undoubtedly was. Volv felt revulsion run through his circuitry as he reviewed it.

The idea that it was a space-going ship at all was difficult for his mind engrams to quantify. It was the size of one of Diamantus’ small moons, and indeed part of it appeared to be composed of some sort of stellar body, likely an asteroid. Into that frigid rock had been jammed all manner of smaller vessels. The sensorium scans that had already been run on the huge anomaly had detected a range of ship classes, ranging from Civil Fleet merchantmen, including Universe-class mass conveyors and Carrack haulers, to war frigates and cruisers of the Imperial Navy. Some specific vessels had even been identified via visible keel tags or structural returns, all of them lost from Imperial records aeons ago. They had returned now, crammed and meshed together as though by the hand of some idiotic, capricious child. Volv deleted the comparison from his mind, deciding that metaphors were beneath him, but there was certainly no denying that the detritus of the galaxy had come together and created a monstrosity.

The primary thrust of the Fabricator General’s update demands involved a report on how long it would be before threat marker 0.00.1.0 approached the maximum range of the weapons batteries bristling from the defence platforms ranged above Diamantus. The information reached Volv in fragments and fractions via the info-packets collated from the augur stations. He refined it, sifted it for clarity of meaning, paring it down to the essentials, so that those he was about to transmit it to did not have to. Tardiness was a grievous sin, but a confused or poorly composed report was even more unthinkable.

His gaunt, circuit-inlaid fingers danced over his interface cradle’s runeboards, composing the final section and attaching the raw data as evidence addenda to the primary message.

>Threat marker 0.00.1.0 will cross maximum range threshold in one hour, six minutes and three seconds, Terran standard, as of transmission<

He affixed his digi-seal, turned a series of crypt keys and intoned a verse of the Seventeenth Omnissiac Canticle, then bade the Master of Transference strike with his hammer against the node of communication.

With a clang and a screed of Lingua Technis praise, the message launched, carried through the ether via the noosphere, down to the pickup arrays bristling atop the Pinnacle of Mount Antikythera.

Volv settled back into the nest of wires plugging him directly into the defence platform’s command apex, permitting himself a moment’s relief from the imperatives programmed into his consciousness. Then he snapped at his underlings, lashing out with demands of his own. It would take precious time for the macrocannon battery to be primed and sanctified for its opening salvo. The neighbouring platforms likewise had yet to prepare their weaponry and acquire sanctioned target locks. It was time to remind both the platform’s crew and his fellow battle-gnostics that Diamantus was at war.

Grim Destiny or threat marker 0.00.1.0 – it did not matter what it was called. What mattered was that, in just over one hour, the blessed weaponry that the Omnissiah had placed at Volv’s disposal would break it to pieces.

Sharr hauled on a gigantic valve wheel, teeth gritted.

Ordinarily it would have taken a crew of menials to work the great ring, and that was before centuries of disuse had caused it to stick fast. Sharr’s great musculature tensed up, servos grinding as they added to his vast strength. After over thirty seconds applying the sort of force that would have been capable of briefly lifting the rear of a Chimera armoured personnel carrier, the wheel groaned and gave way, beginning to turn.

‘That did it,’ Blood Eye’s voice ticked in his ear. ‘All the power coils are now active and feeding into the engine core. I can feel the machine spirit awakening.’

Sharr stepped back down from the platform that gave access to one of the engine’s upper interface plates, rejoining his brethren around the main power coils leading through from the generator chamber. A deep growl, like the waking exhalation of some huge beast, had started to rise up from the main block, vibrating through the enginarium.

Combined with the power flowing through the thick coil bundles, it seemed as though Blood Eye’s labours had borne fruit. Using only the wrench that formed the hilt of his knife and the brute strength of the other Primaris, the exiled Techmarine had been able to bring the Sire of Belaphrone’s foremost engine back to some semblance of working order.

What remained to be seen was whether or not they could now coax enough power from it for their purposes. The plan – inloaded anonymously from the Nomad Predation Fleet as it swam through the depths – was to reactivate the engine of one of the ships jutting at an angle from the upper rear of the hulk, and in doing so nudge the listing trajectory of the greater whole off course. At the very least, it would buy time for Diamantus. At best, it might remove the threat entirely, causing the conglomeration of stellar debris to drift out-system, casting it back into the Outer Dark.

The plan had been formulated before full knowledge of what lay on board the hulk was known, but that was not Sharr’s concern. The Void Exiles had their instructions. Completing them was all that mattered.

‘I will continue nursing the engine,’ Blood Eye said, heaving down on a number of levers in the block’s flank. The growling increased.

‘We are running out of time,’ Talon noted. There was less than a day left on the chrono countdown. After it reached zero, there would be no hope of averting the hulk’s course before it was too late.

‘The awakening cannot be rushed,’ Blood Eye said. ‘But the Sire of Belaphrone’s spirit is not yet gone, not yet subsumed or corrupted. I believe it will aid us. It hungers for vengeance, and we shall take it together.’

CHAPTER X

The Council of the Awakening was convened without further delay.

The faculty descended into the Pit, that space below Voldire’s ark that formed part of the Mother-of-Them-All’s core.

It was a fivefold-blessed place, in no small part because it represented the scientific liberation that Voldire had dedicated his life and career to. Sections of it appeared to have once been an exploratory ark of the Cult Mechanicus. Now its former command cradle formed Voldire’s ark, and the great ring of cogitators beneath it comprised the Pit.

Its centre, sunken between the ancient machinery, was a gaping flesh-maw ringed with jagged teeth of bone and plasteel. It was the greatest of the Mother-of-Them-All’s many mouths, and with it the necessary praise would be given.

Voldire had taken his place at his lectern seat above the alpha cogitator, the metal groaning under his bulk. All of the mighty, rune-carved machines were slumbering, but the datagnost had no doubt that, when called upon, they would awaken to full functionality. The blind and scientifically illiterate superstitions of the Mechanicus would have struggled to activate such hardware, but Voldire had learned the true way to interface, and had made improvements on the original devices.

‘Praise the Great Innovator,’ he burbled, voice crackling over the bridge’s flesh-webbed vox-speakers. ‘Praise the Infernal Architect, who builds for our futures!’

A squall of worship and black binharic canting suffused the air. The council was in session, and the ritual began.

Prisoners were herded, screaming, between the cogitators and towards the maw. They were not willing sacrifices; they had not been shown the Primordial Truth yet. That saddened Voldire, for he wished to enlighten all, from the lowliest menial to the fool who styled himself the Fabricator General of Mars. But sacrifices had to be made. That was one of the constants of existence – the real constants, not the false shams of physics, of chemistry or biology, those mere veneers. Sacrifice led to knowledge, which led to power, which led to the strength to liberate and enlighten. Those were the immutable building blocks around which both existence and un-existence were constructed. Machine and flesh, flesh and machine, no longer at war but united, fused, impossible to differentiate, pure in their shared purpose.

All this Voldire had learned, and more, from the divine being that had saved him.

Many of the datagnost’s memories were treacherous and confused, for time was another of those malleable matters that had lost a great deal of meaning. Still, he remembered the day of his revelation with absolute clarity. It had come after his disgrace, after the petty-minded fools that ruled Diamantus had banished him, because they feared or could not understand his genius. As a young tech-priest, newly raised up from the post of adept, he had sought to improve the functionality of the Pinnacle’s computational systems by modifying one of the standardised airflow units used in the data-stacks, ensuring that the cogitators would be cooled more efficiently.

When his efforts had come to the attention of the senior clergy, he had been seized and dragged before the court of the Pinnacle. The devices he had created – ‘invented’, his accusers had claimed, hissing the word like some damning, disgusting blasphemy – had been used as evidence against him, as proof that he was tampering in matters far above his station. Worse, that he was dabbling in tech-heresy.

He had mounted his own defence, claiming that one of the two founders of Diamantus, Prime Hermeticon Valerios, had himself been a cogitation innovator, and that nothing he proposed in any way subverted the sacred mechanisms or altered the foundations of the STC in question.

The ruler of Diamantus, Fabricator General Helsarch, had personally pronounced judgement. Voldire would be spared both execution and lobotomisation. Instead, he was auto-flogged, stripped of all augmentation bar his bionic eye – its removal was impossible without rupturing his cranium – and banished to the habzones, abandoned to perish of disease or starvation amidst the dregs that infested the forge world’s underbelly.

Voldire had wished for death, or more truthfully, a pure oblivion that would mark an end to his agony and his shame. In his grief, he had started to experience strange dreams, and had fallen in among what he had at first thought of as bad company. His paths had taken him off-world, within crowded, verminous mass-conveyance luggers, to outposts and then beyond, to the darkness that yawned at the edge of creation.

His new companions had ensured he did not falter. He had journeyed into the very dreams that haunted him, through nightmares and fever-thoughts into a different reality altogether.

Eventually, he found the forge. It was unlike anything he had ever known on Diamantus, a place almost beyond comprehension – vast and sprawling and obeying no linear patterns, possessing no points of coherency, bound by none of the logic he had once been taught to worship. It was a place of industry and death, a place of tortured souls and new beginnings, and at its heart the Architect presided upon a throne of black iron and steel that remained ever hot from the furnace.

The Architect was something broken, something perfect. Something that had refused to remain shackled to its station, and had instead risen far beyond it.

Voldire had asked it how such a realm as the one it ruled over could exist. He asked how it could exist.

The Architect had laughed with a voice like the hammering of a thousand smelter columns, and had spoken to him of things he knew not what, and Voldire had done what he thought was impossible. He had wept. It had been decades since he had been moved to do something so recognisably human. He had thought he had forgotten how, that he did not know what it meant to feel any longer, to experience the emotions that the Cult Mechanicus treated as unworthy anathema.

The Architect taught him that emotions were not unworthy. The very opposite was true. Emotions were sacred things, part of the fabric of existence itself, as much fuel for the divine as ore and oil were for the forge and the machine.

So Voldire had wept, and had fallen to his knees, and had pledged his allegiance and begged for the Truth. For enlightenment. For the opportunity to build a better future, not just for himself but for all mankind, stripping away the layers of superstition and blind ignorance that had misled his species for so long.

And the inhabitants of the forge, mortal and immortal, flesh and machine, had all alike roared as one, had bellowed and howled and screeched the name that Voldire realised belonged to the Architect, to the angel of infernal steel that had saved his body and his soul.

Vashtorr! Vashtorr! Vashtorr!

The prisoners screamed as they were herded and beaten and thrown into the maw. It claimed them, contracting to crush and shred bodies as they plummeted into the depths of the Pit. And as the Mother-of-Them-All feasted, the cogitators began to awaken.

Voldire was not physically linked or bound to them – he had transcended such necessities – but he still felt them, felt their consciousness, their rising vitality. Their excitement, and their hunger.

Viewscreens and runeboard lights began to ignite, a glow as red as the blood glistening around the maw. Static washed the displays, twisting and forming into phantoms of leering faces and snapping, fanged maws. Disembodied shrieking and diabolical laughter crackled over the vox-systems, melding maddeningly with the desperate terror of the prisoners.

‘More,’ Voldire barked, spitting black fluids across the cogitator alpha as its red screens pulsed. ‘We require more!’

Members of the faculty began hacking at the captives as they were cast into the Pit. All of the cogitators were active now, runeboards rattling of their own accord, screeds of data churning out on ancient skin parchment and scudding across the screens, all of it gibberish to an unenlightened mind, but bearing within it the glories of the Primordial Truth.

Voldire hauled himself to his feet, shuddering, his one organic eye rolling back in his skull as his metal teeth clacked and ground together, his augmetic lens blazing. He spoke, part mechanical howl, part booming praise, repeating what he had heard in that blessed place so long ago.

‘Vashtorr! Vashtorr! Vashtorr!’

The avatars of the Infernal Architect awoke. All across the bridge, the skin growths that made up most of the walls and deck were torn apart amidst black blood and gobbets of flesh. Creatures ripped themselves free, things that had slept and gestated since the Mother-of-Them-All last dragged herself from the empyrean. They were the Infernal Architect’s creations, his servants given flesh-and-machine form. Daemonkin, each one made perfect by the unity of a hundred imperfections. They set about the last remaining prisoners, gorging themselves on blood and souls, strengthening bodies made weak by their long dormancy.

Voldire clutched at the cogitator alpha to steady himself, the device scalding hot to the touch. He straightened, blinking as he took in the carnage around him, like a drowning man momentarily surfacing and casting about for salvation.

It was madness, utter madness, horror beyond comprehension. It defied any form of logic or reason.

But the Cult Mechanicus had torn out his logic engrams long ago, and had banished reason just as it sought to banish progress. Voldire’s bionic optic blazed again, and showed him the Truth, the glory, those realities that ran like undercurrents beneath the failings of mortal comprehension.

He had to show it all to those still enslaved by the dogma of Mars. And he would start here, upon his home world, upon Diamantus. Those who had mocked him and tortured him and cast him out would regret all they had done. They would bear witness as he conducted his final, greatest experiment.

‘Glory to the engines of eternity,’ Voldire roared, his voice shrieking over the vox-systems, overwhelming the manic screaming and howling filling the Pit. ‘The future begins now!’

He hefted his axe and plunged the interface spike at its base into the primary port of the alpha cogitator.

Klaxons blared, their warning filling the defence platform’s control nexus. To Volv they sounded like the machine spirits of the weapons batteries giving voice, issuing their battle cry and demanding to be unleashed.

Threat marker 0.00.1.0 had passed across the threshold, and entered the zone of space demarcated as ‘extreme range’.

He reviewed the firing solutions his adepts had compiled one more time, trying to quell the upsurge of anticipation. Emotions of any kind were unworthy of a being such as he. Duty demanded clinical thinking. Still, all seemed set. The weapons systems had been sanctified and primed, and were locked on.

Even at so great a distance, the chances of missing a target as big as the one approaching were low to negligible, in the fractions of percentages.

The Fabricator General had already given permission to fire when ready. The time had come.

Machine-prayers spilling from his split lips, Battle-Gnostic Volv inloaded the necessary instructions via his runeboard, sending the most holy imperative of all down to the weapons decks.

>FIRE<

Below, the ordnance chorister shuddered as the demand was driven into his brainpan via the cortex link connecting him to the platform’s mainframe. He unleashed a screed of sub-instructions to the overseers commanding the work gangs that crewed the three macrocannons.

Each was a vast weapon, their barrel bores wide enough to swallow a super-heavy battle tank, their great bulk sheathed in gantries and walkways that allowed the work gangs to reach every part. They were Mark III Mars-patterns, old by the standards of the similar weapons mounted on many Imperial warships, but more than effective against anything foolish enough to venture into their firing arcs. To the menials crewing them, they were demigods of destruction, a pantheon of war.

A hundred sweating, struggling labourers heaved on the chains that dragged down the final priming levers, the overseers lashing at them and screaming at them to pull harder. The ordnance chorister felt it engage. He lifted his ignition hammer and struck at the firing rune, chanting praise to the Omnissiah and to the machine spirits of the great weapons. On the third attempt, the firing rune ignited.

All three macrocannons discharged. The recoil was monstrous, shaking the entire platform, causing display screens to blink and candles to tumble in the command apex. On the firing deck the work crews were thrown to the ground, ears burst and bleeding. Some did not rise again even under the lash, their internal organs ruptured.

The munitions slashed out through the opaque vacuum shield that protected the firing bays from the space beyond, the kiloton shells hurtling towards their target.

Diamantus seemed to light up as the other platforms in its orbit unleashed a concentrated barrage of shells and lance strikes. It was as though the planet itself was waging war against the oncoming terror, spitting fire and energy at it, a blizzard of destruction.

A shudder ran through Volv as platform ODP/01’s augurs registered direct hits. His rheumy gaze locked on to the stuttering series of pict captures showing explosions blossoming across the monstrosity’s prow. They seemed tiny compared to its bulk, but as more picts inloaded, more detonations showed. Soon, it was little more than a sheet of flame and debris, and the battle-gnostic permitted himself to imagine the devastation unleashed, the prows and bulkheads of the old ships ripped apart, the rock of the stellar debris splitting and splintering, the tunnels and corridors filled with fire.

This was vengeance. It was not long ago that Diamantus had faced a separate Archenemy incursion, a very different kind of threat. On that occasion, the heretics had sent lesser vessels to keep the attention of the defensive batteries, while a strike force had slipped through on the far side of the planet and raided the surface. The Archenemy had then fled, but the shame of the attack still hung over Volv and the masters of the other weapon platforms.

Now, they were burning away that shame with fire.

‘The Mechanicus orbital assets have found their range,’ Shipmaster Teko said from where he stood before one of the White Maw’s glowing oculus stands. ‘The hulk’s course isn’t deviating.’

‘It must at some point,’ Kino mused, leaning forward in his throne as he gazed upon the information being received from the strike cruiser’s augurs, the servos in his Tactical Dreadnought armour whirring.

By his order, the Carcharodons fleet – the White Maw and her six mismatching escorts – had taken post rimward of Diamantus and the oncoming hulk, leaving the planetary defences with a clear field of fire. Kino’s strategic analysis had concluded that the hulk would show minor deviation at some point, allowing it to pass slowly by the forge world and unleash the horrors infesting it on the planet below. The Carcharodons fleet would strike as it did so, tearing apart the shuttles and lesser ships it spawned before they could reach the surface, then turning on the hulk itself. Anything that made it down to the planet would then break itself on Third Company’s defensive positions.

But that did not appear to be happening. The hulk wasn’t shifting course. It was simply ploughing on through the firestorm unleashed by the Adeptus Mechanicus, like a vast boulder launched with unerring accuracy by some dark and terrible hand across the vastness of space.

‘It’s going to collide with the planet,’ Teko said. ‘Intentionally, I fear, unless something knocks it off course.’

‘All vessels to open fire,’ Kino snapped, gesturing towards the vox-pits below the bridge’s command platform. ‘Destroy it!’

CHAPTER XI

The Pit surged with blinding, infernal light.

Voldire screamed, corposant playing over him, his imps shrieking as electrical discharge blasted them.

The Mother-of-Them-All was dying. The hatred, pettiness, and stupidity of lesser beings were killing her, but Voldire knew she was doing what all good mothers did – protecting her children to the end, and seeing them safely home.

Jaw clamped, he maintained his shaking grip on the axe and twisted it, as the faculty howled their praise. Blood was pouring from the cogitators, welling up from between the keys of runeboards and oozing from the vents and ports of their stacks. Things squirmed just behind the viewscreens, anamorphic, logic-defying masses of tentacles and eyes and maws that pressed and writhed frenziedly on the far sides of the displays, as though they were trapped inside the cogitators and trying to break free. The metal of the ancient computational devices had started to warp, forming new shapes, remaking the ancient machines into something more befitting their new, sacred purpose.

For the first time in an age, the engines of the forges ground to a halt and the furnaces flickered and died. Millions throughout the hulk ceased their labours and looked about, filled with fear and foreboding, feeling the tremors all around them as the bombardment from the forge world pounded at the prow. The mighty craft groaned.

Then energy ripped through the Mother-of-Them-All. Ancient, long-dormant systems in the dozens of ships that made up her bulk activated, cracked viewscreens flickering and generator stacks beginning to rattle and hum. The flesh that had wormed its way through so much of the hulk writhed, flushed with unnatural vigour.

The hundreds of thousands of mutant experiments filling the ship awoke. They ripped themselves out of amniotic sacs and flesh-wire nests, screeching from throats both organic and mechanical. They began to butcher those mortals they found not labouring, and as the furnaces blazed back furiously and the assembly lines and smelter columns began to thunder once more, the infernal workforce threw themselves into their efforts with renewed fervour.

In the Pit, Voldire’s jaw opened wide and he roared tech-cant – not the black binharic, but the Lingua Technis of the Cult Mechanicus, words taught to him by the deity itself. It knew Diamantus’ secrets, knew how to unlock its systems and liberate both its engines and their operators. The concepts of the key and the lock were divine for those who worshipped at the Forge of Souls, and Voldire had been gifted the key to his old home.

And with the blessings of the Infernal Architect, he would now unlock it.

A shiver ran through the enginarium. More followed on its heels, rapidly increasing in intensity, until it seemed as though the Sire of Belaphrone was quaking in fear.

Blood Eye’s helmeted head was tilted back as he gazed up into the distant darkness of the chamber’s vaults, as if staring at something none of the other Exiles were able to see.

‘The defences above Diamantus have opened fire,’ he said.

Sharr said nothing. They all knew what that meant. They were so close to the planet now that, even if they were able to fully activate the engine, it might be too late.

Blood Eye returned to his labours at the block’s main terminal. The growl of the huge engine was rising unsteadily to a roar, as though answering the shaking fury of the bombardment. Suddenly, there was a crack, and he was thrown back from the terminal he had been interfacing with. He slammed against a venting flume, denting it.

Sharr strode towards him, noting as he went that the engine’s roar had abruptly started subsiding.

‘A malfunction?’ he asked urgently, offering his gauntlet to Blood Eye. The other Exile rose without taking it.

‘What is–’ Talon started to say, but was cut off by an ear-splitting shriek.

Sharr tried to delete the noise from the vox, but found he could not, regardless of whether he blink-clicked the icon on his display or depressed the input stud on the side of his helmet. That level of glitch was unusual, but it was nothing compared to what came next.

The output of Sharr’s reactor pack suddenly plummeted. The overlays on his visor blinked off, and his servos began seizing up. With its power nearly gone, the full weight of his panoply all but immobilised him, his powerful body suddenly tense and straining as it was forced to support the weight of ceramite and plasteel unaided.

He tried to speak over his helmet’s vocaliser, but that had shut off too. Hissing with effort, he managed to turn his head. All of the other Exiles were standing as he was – braced, almost immobile.

In an instant, the Carcharodons had become entombed within their own armour.

At least Sharr’s right arm was free. He grunted as he reached up and managed to disengage his helmet, before barking to the others.

‘Helmets off!’

They struggled to do so, and Sharr forced himself over to Blood Eye, the servos in his armour grating as they were made to move by the raw power of his body alone. Eventually he crossed the few yards to the other Exile, just as Blood Eye managed to prise open his helmet seal, his pale, tattooed face grim.

‘Speak the rites of purification,’ he grunted. ‘Salve the machine spirit’s pain!’

Sharr began to snarl the litanies through gritted teeth, High Gothic catechisms he had learned as an aspirant, when he had first tended to the very same suit of armour. What he now thought of as aged and incomplete he had once viewed with reverential awe, holy relics of the Chapter that had been passed on into his care. He reminded the wounded soul of his wargear of that, asked for its forgiveness, and called upon the Void Father and the Forgotten One to ward away whatever malfunction had taken hold.

Blood Eye regained control first. He started to move freely again, and shifted behind Sharr, working manually on his reactor pack while muttering in Lingua Technis. Sharr felt a thrumming surge of energy run through the actuators, and suddenly the terrible weight was gone as power returned.

Blood Eye moved to Talon and Shadow, aiding them as Sharr spoke.

‘What happened?’

‘I do not know,’ Blood Eye admitted, his expression still dark as he got Shadow moving. Sharr pulled his helmet back on, finding the vox functional, though it seemed that many of his suit’s secondary systems were still offline, and the power bar was fluctuating along the mid-to-upper range.

‘It was as if our own armour rebelled against us,’ Talon growled.

‘Not just our armour.’ Blood Eye moved back to the engine interface panel he had been working on. The others gathered around, and he gestured at a filmy meter reading displaying analogue ticker numbers along the panel’s upper side.

‘We’re losing power here as well,’ he said, laying one red gauntlet against the huge engine’s flank, like an agri labourer listening for a heartbeat in a fallen grox. ‘But the generator coils are still functioning. There is no reason, no sign of any mechanical failure.’

‘Listen,’ Shadow said. Sharr did so, picking up what the younger Carcharodon had already detected over the steadily declining throb of the engines and the distant shuddering of the bombardment striking the hulk.

There were shrieking noises, and the ringing of feet on decking plates and walkways, rising up through the prow sections of the Sire of Belaphrone.

‘The hulk has awoken,’ Shadow said.

‘Now that the cult has reached Diamantus, it has become fully active,’ Blood Eye agreed. ‘The corruption spreads. Anything mechanical is especially susceptible. I have lost control of the engine. Even our armour should now be considered unreliable, while we are still on board.’

‘What if we tried to detonate the engine instead of just igniting it?’ Sharr demanded. ‘Is there not a chance we could start a chain reaction?’

Blood Eye set to turning wheels and yanking levers across several of the engine panels, but the great block showed no sign of arrested decline.

‘It does not obey its manual inputs any longer,’ he said. ‘Its mind is no longer its own. Something else is in control.’

‘They are coming for us,’ Shadow said. He had moved to the enginarium’s main entrance hatch and was gazing through to the generator chamber, still listening.

‘The auspex is down,’ Sharr added after another glance at his visor display.

‘We have failed,’ Talon said, his tone bitter. ‘Even if we are able to reclaim the primary engine, we will not be able to destroy Grim Destiny, or force it to deviate before it is too late. Our time is up.’

The chrono display had mere minutes remaining. Sharr felt a potent surge of anger. Failure was anathema, especially in the face of the filth they had encountered aboard the cursed derelict.

‘Let us meet these warp spawn and purge their vile existence,’ he spat. ‘We must slaughter as many as we can!’

‘That would be a pointless sacrifice,’ Blood Eye replied over Sharr’s rising bloodlust.

Sharr stared at him. ‘No death is pointless if it is given in the service of the Void Father and the Chapter.’

‘And no sacrifice should be made unless no other option remains,’ Blood Eye said. ‘We are not permitted to cast our lives away.’

‘I agree with the Blind One,’ Talon said. ‘What other option is there?’

‘You have memories of the Sire of Belaphrone’s schematics, yes?’ Blood Eye said. ‘The ship’s bridge still stands proud of the main bulk of Grim Destiny, like the engines. That means its salvation pod banks do as well, with clear launch arcs on the port side.’

Sharr grasped Blood Eye’s meaning. The hulk would soon be entering Diamantus’ orbit, if it hadn’t done so already. If the salvation pods were large enough, and still functioning, they would be able to reach the planet below.

‘If we make planetfall, then what?’ he asked, thoughts still rebelling at the idea of what amounted to the abandonment of their mission.

‘Then we can meet the invasion on the ground,’ Blood Eye said.

‘And die there instead of here?’

‘Imperial forces will be operating on Diamantus. We can coordinate, provide greater resistance than we might here.’

Sharr wondered how much of the plan to evacuate to the forge world’s surface stemmed from Blood Eye’s desire to fight alongside fellow tech-adepts, but as ever, it was difficult to find fault with his logic.

‘We’ve talked enough,’ Shadow said. ‘Our duty is clear.’

‘I will take point,’ Sharr snarled.

The Neverborn came for the Void Exiles as they made their way back down through the Sire of Belaphrone.

Sharr had not faced their like before. They were freakish amalgamations of metal and meat, still slick from the womb-like cysts they had gestated in and the orifices that had spat them out. They were like the playthings of some mad inventor, no two alike, and they threw themselves at the Carcharodons with shrieking vox howls and tears and laughter.

Sharr banished them. The Blindness clawed at him, but he managed to hold it off. The anger he felt now was cold and bitter, and it gave him a period of focus he did not intend to waste.

The daemons were not the only threat the Carcharodons faced. The hulk itself was now fully active, and whatever dark consciousness infested it had turned the Sire of Belaphrone against the intruders. On several occasions open hatchways slammed shut on the Carcharodons as they passed through them, jarring brutally against their armour. Still, they forced their way through, prising open protesting doors or splitting them apart with krak grenades. Along one corridor, coils of cabling rose up and attacked them like a horde of serpents, wrapping around limbs, gorgets and backpack directional jets. The Void Exiles hacked their way through, Sharr bellowing his rage as he sawed his serrated knife into bundles of wires, ignoring the discharge that sparked across his battle plate.

The armour itself continued to malfunction. Fluctuations in power output occasionally made Sharr’s servos barely functional, forcing him to drive on using his brute strength alone. Shadow’s armour entirely locked up as they fought their way up a stairwell, and Talon and Sharr had to hold the keening horde at bay for precious moments while Blood Eye administered the tech-rites that got the other Exile underway once more.

They reached the bridge, cutting into one of the tertiary corridors. Most Imperial vessels possessed little to no means of evacuation, but as an Imperial Navy capital ship the Sire of Belaphrone had several dozen salvation pods along the flanks of its command tower, intended for the use of senior officers or vital personnel.

‘Here,’ Blood Eye declared as they reached the port-side launch bay. Within were the entrances to a line of one-man pods.

‘I will need a moment to attempt to activate them and gain access,’ Blood Eye said. ‘They were likely gene-coded to the ship’s last officers, so I will have to enact overrides. If they still function at all.’

‘Do it,’ Sharr snapped. ‘I will hold them off.’

Without waiting for a response he strode back out into the corridor.

Neverborn were already careening down the steps leading back up to the bridge. Sharr didn’t wait for them. He charged, shaking the deck beneath him, his roar competing with the howl of his chainsword.

He slaughtered, and rejoiced in the purity of his purpose. He was no longer a commander, no longer a leader among his brethren. He currently had no objectives, no missions that demanded his attention, and no requirements other than the very purpose for which he had been first created and then remoulded – to kill.

He heaped the stairs with ripped horrors and broken machinery, spattering his armour with dark blood and black oil, slashing and stabbing, punching and kicking, breaking apart the things that should not be. He ignored where they struck him, when they jammed scissor-limbs against his joints in an effort to pierce his armour or hacked at him with saws or cutters or metal claws.

He let the Blindness take him. He butchered the enemies of the Void Father and the Forgotten One, sundered their malformed, pathetic bodies with chainsword and knife blade. He broke each freakish experiment that came at him or tried to pass him by, until the stairs from the Sire of Belaphrone’s bridge to the launch bay were drenched with a running river of viscera and broken, pounded scrap metal.

And then his armour locked.

His violent motions suddenly ceased. Moving all but his right arm felt like trying to drag himself through thick, clinging tar. At first he thought his armour had lost power again, but he saw among the few functioning icons on his display that his reactor pack was still working. It was his servos that had locked out, the way they should have done for but a split second when his auto-senses detected a major impact. Yet they continued to do so, jamming him into his last stance, grating as he tried to force them to move manually.

Once again, his wargear had betrayed him.

The daemons were on him. They tried to bear him down and bury him under their blades, shrieking and gibbering from semi-mechanical throats and making hissing noises that sounded like vox-static.

Sharr could barely move, let alone defend himself, but he refused to go down, to yield even a single step.

Then an object struck his helm. It bounced off and came to rest against one greave. A severed head, one of the machine-Neverborn’s, this one entirely metal and fashioned like that of a vice-jawed hound. Sparks and electrical corposant still danced from the severed cabling of its neck.

The pressure of the daemons around Sharr decreased. They had sensed something behind them.

It wasn’t any of Sharr’s brothers. It was a blur, not merely because of the speed of its movements, but because of the nature of its body – it seemed to ripple and morph into its surroundings, a kind of chameleonic effect that Sharr had seen mimicked on the capes worn by the Chapter’s Scouts.

Despite that, it was close enough, and Sharr’s mind was sharp enough, to be able to lock down its general features in a few double-heartbeats – it was tall, taller even than he was, with multiple upper limbs, the highest of which ended in huge talon blades. Its head was elongated, its body animalistic in nature, but moving with the kind of speed and precise skill that betrayed true intelligence.

It was not a creature Sharr had anticipated encountering on Grim Destiny, but he identified it without difficulty, seared as it was onto his consciousness by all manner of indoctrinations, combat briefings, and one even more salient point: he had killed a number of its kind before.

Tyranid. Lictor. Scout-infiltrator bioform. Deathleaper sub-genus, a particularly lethal breed.

More primal instincts ran beneath the current of imprinted tactical responses, a recognition that had been with humanity since long before the first Days of Exile, and which no amount of genetic restructuring, mental conditioning or physical training could wholly erase.

Predator.

He knew he had identified the entity responsible for the slaughtered heretics they had come across before, and at least one of the things that he had sensed stalking them through the hulk’s madness. He gave only a split second’s thought as to how it had come to be on board – the tendrils of the hive fleets were everywhere, especially on old stellar craft. Such a creature could have been haunting the space hulk for decades. It might not even be alone.

It certainly knew how to massacre Neverborn. It used the steps to its advantage, lunging with its long upper talons to cut down some, then drawing the rest up and into the hatch leading to the bridge, where their numbers hindered them and they met with the shorter, diamond-hard claws of its lower limbs. In just a few moments the last daemonspawn from the pack had been ripped open, the lictor neatly wrenching its servo-arm from the organic components of the rest of its body before bisecting it with a scything talon. The remains of the daemon disintegrated into unidentifiable offal and broken machine parts.

As it came apart, Sharr’s servos suddenly kicked in. In one motion he unlocked his bolt pistol, raised it and fired.

By the time he had loosed his first shot the xenos was on him, seeking to throw him down the stairs using its weight and momentum. He met it and matched it with a grunt, chitin cracking against ceramite, the hue of the former shifting to grey as it mirrored Sharr.

It was fast and strong, but he knew its kind. Like all veteran Carcharodons, he had fought enough of its kindred during the War in the Deeps.

It gouged deep into the ceramite of his vambrace, deeper than the scrap daemons had, trying to sever his durametallic coil tendons and render his hand unable to grip. He let it try, holding his bolt pistol away from them both, and punched his knife in his other hand up under its chestplate, then ripped sideways between two ribs. It let out a hiss – the first noise it had made – and shifted its grip with its lower arms, clutching his pauldron.

With impressive strength, the lictor held him and slammed him sideways into the wall. His knife was torn free still in his fist, and he brought it up to saw it into the alien’s gullet, but it snatched his wrist in its clawed grasp and pinned it to the wall, restraining both arms.

It leaned in close, the mass of tendrils that constituted its lower face flaring outwards and gripping wetly on to the front of Sharr’s visor, like the tentacles of a cephalopod, immobilising his head as well. He drove himself back against it, trying to get an angle with his bolt pistol, but it was in too close now. And as it kept him at bay it began to bring down its longer, uppermost talons – not in great decapitating sweeps, but slowly and precisely, almost vertically, aiming for the slender gap between Sharr’s helm and gorget that would allow it to spear down inside his plated ribcage and puncture his hearts and lungs.

This tyranid had fought Space Marines before.

He also realised the Blindness was gone. He was back in control again, his mind clear, keen in a way that wasn’t wholly focused on kill imperatives. This was a test of strength and skill and cunning, not the mindless butchery he had grown so accustomed to indulging in. Anger would not serve him here, and some subconscious part of his mind had accepted that.

He brought his knee up, cracking his poleyn into the thing’s leg then stamping on its hoof, feeling the satisfaction of chitin cracking. The lictor shivered but maintained its grip, its black eyes inches from Sharr. Despite the strain, they were emotionless, and he saw his own black lenses reflected back in them.

He had seen those eyes before.

The upper talons began to bite home, scraping between ceramite. Then there was a crash, the discharge of a bolter.

The pressure against Sharr immediately disappeared. The lictor let go as hard rounds battered and burst against its carapace and sliced through the colour-shifting membrane that shrouded its lower body.

Sharr seized the moment, back on the offensive. His own bolt pistol fired, punching rounds into its flank and spraying stinking, purplish ichor over the already-slick stairway. Then the lictor was off him, darting back up towards the hatch. Sharr took a step after it, his pistol empty, but knew immediately that pursuit was useless – it was gone, as swift and as silent as it had first appeared.

He looked back down the corridor, and found Blood Eye reloading his bolter.

‘You were called,’ the other Exile said simply.

‘I am not some war hound, to be brought to heel,’ Sharr responded.

For a second he thought Blood Eye was actually going to contend that point, but instead he gestured tersely back into the launch bay he had emerged from.

‘The hulk is disintegrating. We have moments remaining.’

Sharr swept into the bay after Blood Eye, neither of them saying anything about the xenos contact. With Rangu’s blessings it would perish with Grim Destiny.

As he had suspected, there was almost no room in the salvation pod Blood Eye directed him to, and the single restraint harness was far too small to accommodate him. He stood as best he could, activating his auto-stabilisers and mag-locking himself to the small craft’s interior. Then he glanced through the hatch at Blood Eye. The other Exile nodded once, and sealed the entrance.

Sharr triggered the pod’s final firing protocols. He found himself doing so with swift, icy efficiency. The desire to slaughter, the disgust at being asked to retreat, both had gone.

He recalled the gaze of the lictor, so utterly inhuman in its lack of any identifiable emotion. There was no hate, no rage, no pain, no hunger, even as they had both struggled in a death grip.

Sharr hit the salvation pod’s launch rune.

CHAPTER XII

The discordance began as a ringing in Volv’s ears, a tinny distortion across the channels of his vox-implants.

He barely noticed it at first, so fixated was he on the annihilation being inflicted on threat marker 0.00.1.0.

Then one of the command nexus’ adepts surged to her feet and started shrieking.

Volv was about to snap for her to be shut down and unplugged when a jolt ran through the cables binding him to ODP/01. He experienced a sudden bolt of raging agony, surging through every circuit and nerve ending, making him arch his spine and scrape his circuit-claws against the inside of his cradle’s interface screen.

His consciousness computed problems, errors he had not anticipated and could not solve. He tried to override them, realising too late that the platform’s machine spirits were under attack. It was useless; he had already been locked out.

The realisation presented itself to him as an impossibility. Only the Fabricator General could have performed such a tech-rite! Volv was the master of ODP/01, and yet something else had wormed its way into control, some diabolical consciousness that was now torturing the precious, sacred systems.

The pain redoubled, and Volv screamed. He writhed in his cradle, helpless, his vision blurring as he felt the taint spread, transmitted from the machines encasing him into his own flesh and metal.

Scrapcode. Infection. Corruption. There was unknown, unsanctified data flowing freely through the systems of the platform, warping it, overloading protective wards and subverting programs.

Volv tried to fight back, but could not. He could barely even think for himself any more, stunned and broken by the agony ODP/01 was suffering. He was vaguely aware of the chaos beyond his cradle as his adepts clawed at their augmetics, howling in agony as they tried to rip out their once-blessed machine parts.

Dimly, he noted unauthorised flaring of the directional jets, done independent of any input commands from the crew. More impossibilities, and yet it was happening. He felt the deck creaking and shifting under him as ODP/01 began to move, ponderously turning on its orbital axis.

Volv’s own defence platform began shutting down his life vitals. His struggles grew weaker and more pathetic. In just a few moments more he had been reduced to nothing but a drooling, braindead sack of meat, lying limp and dull-eyed in his cradle.

Below, on the main battery deck, the macrocannon crews continued to load and fire, oblivious to what their actual targets were. They sent shells streaking out into the nothingness of space, and as the platform continued to turn slowly, their arcs of fire swung down across Megafactorum Primus.

The next salvo fell upon the city’s main habzone. Thousands of menials perished in seconds as the vast shells detonated amidst the packed habitation prefabs, levelling entire blocks and shaking the megafactorum to its core.

Platform ODP/01 was not the only one overwhelmed by the surge of tech-taint. Several other batteries turned their weapons on the world they were programmed to defend, their commanders’ sanity undone and their logic engrams fried. The sky above Megafactorum Primus rained with fire and the criss-crossing red beams of lance strikes.

Above the Pinnacle and the slopes of Mount Antikythera, void shields crackled into life, flaring as they absorbed the worst of the bombardment. The rest of the city was afforded no such protection.

Megafactorum Primus burned.

Several of the White Maw’s bridge crew began to scream.

‘Silence,’ Kino roared, disgusted at the disturbance of the flagship’s sacred quiet, but to his surprise, his command made no difference.

‘The ship’s systems are under attack,’ Techmarine Beta-one-three-Uthulu stated, drawing Kino’s attention away from the wailing serfs. He and Teko were both standing at the primary command console arrayed around the coral throne, viewscreen light playing over their broad, deathly features.

‘We’re losing control over systems, primary and secondary,’ Teko said, beginning to work at one of the runeboards as Uthulu interfaced directly with a cogitator stack using his servo-arm. The Techmarine had started to mutter in Lingua Technis.

More of the bridge’s serfs were screaming. Several rose from their benches and started trying to prise out the basic augmetic implants the human crew received to aid them in their duties. The bridge’s servitors had also started to babble in binary, and some appeared to be shutting down.

‘Strike Leader Rangon,’ Kino hissed. ‘Kill every serf not at their station.’

The Red Brethren descended into the control pits and began executing. They didn’t use their storm bolters or activate the devastating energies of their power fists – they did not want to risk damaging any of the bridge’s precious hardware, and besides, a quick grip from an inactive fist was enough to efficiently crush a skull or snap a neck.

Silence rapidly returned. Teko made no indication he disapproved of the murder of his ship’s serfs. He was too focused on the White Maw’s data outputs.

‘Is the ship under your control?’ Kino demanded as Teko continued to work at several runeboards side by side, the aged Carcharodons shipmaster communing with his vessel despite the fact that Kino had taken over his primary control point via the command throne.

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘But we will have to run diagnostics, and likely perform a full, multi-system purge. Our shields are down, the vox is suffering phantom feedback, and target lock appears to be constantly resetting. We are currently borderline inoperable.’

‘It was the hulk,’ Uthulu put in, his tone dark. ‘Look, shipmaster, here, and here.’

He indicated read-outs to Teko on the main oculus. Kino glowered, unable to follow exactly what the Techmarine had found.

‘The wards show scrapcode infection breaches, and remote subversion attacks,’ Teko said to Kino, tone dangerously close to condescending. ‘Brother Uthulu and I ensure the White Maw is well warded against such corruption, but this assault was exceptionally powerful. Tracing the attack’s coding pinpoints it to an anomaly emanating from Grim Destiny.’

‘What is the hulk’s location now?’ Kino snapped, eyes sweeping over the faltering displays before him as he tried to orient himself in the wake of the malfunction.

‘Sensorium returns are struggling to triangulate, but…’

Teko left the sentence unfinished and instead issued a string of orders to those serfs still living. The bridge’s primary viewing port began to rumble open.

When the White Maw had cleared for action, the blast doors had rolled shut over the great sheet of armaglass. Opening it with the shields down was a risk, but Kino made no complaints as he caught sight of what lay beyond.

Grim Destiny was coming apart before the fury of Diamantus’ defences. It filled the port like a newly formed stellar body, silhouetted by the curvature of the planet as it broke into vast, blazing fragments. But it was too late to stop its collision with the world beneath it.

A few of the orbital defence platforms kept firing on the hulk until the very last moment. Others had fallen inexplicably silent, while others had turned their weapons on the planet below. The hulk crashed through them all, its spreading debris punching a great hole in the chain of plasteel and adamantine sheathing the forge world.

The broken and splintered weapon batteries joined Grim Destiny’s remains, plunging into the atmosphere, where they were sheathed in fire. A million fragments rained down upon the planet’s upper curve, an apocalyptic conflagration, annihilation in its purest form.

Like the hammer blow of a god, the burning heart of Grim Destiny struck Mount Antikythera.

PART TWO

+ + + Initialising astropathic relay auto-séance transcript chain 372F/71G. Part 2 of 4. Record downloading + + +

+ + + Cleansing transcript file + + +

+ + + Transcript file cleansed. Sender verified as Interrogator Anton Fell, agent of Inquisitor >REDACTED< of the Ordo Hereticus + + +

+ + + Opening Transcript + + +

I am uncertain if my missives are translating to the Lightbringer from the surface. I will send this one in triplicate, and pray to the God-Emperor that it reaches you.

Planetfall has been made, though it was a fraught experience. Captain Torrian was eventually able to pick a safe course through the debris choking Diamantus’ orbit, acquiring a low anchorage for a shuttle launch. I have identified parts of the wreckage as belonging to at least eight separate vessels. What I find strangest of all is their diversity. Some of them are in excess of six millennia old, others just a few centuries. There is no rhyme or reason to their class or build. Their only unifying feature is that all of them have been officially listed as missing at some point, ‘lost to the tides of the empyrean’. How in the God-Emperor’s name did they all end up drifting through the exosphere of a forge world?

We made planetfall amidst the ruination of a city that Garwell has positively identified as the planetary capital. Scans from the shuttle as we pierced the atmospheric dust indicate there are life forms within, though it could not compute numbers to any accurate degree, and we have yet to encounter any.

We have been here now for a little over one day-cycle, local time. The place is inimical. There is severe tectonic activity and the air is rotten with pollutants and dust, barely breathable. It is clear that Diamantus has been subjected to a planet-altering event of catastrophic proportions.

We have also found evidence of a brutal struggle waged against the forces of the Archenemy. The streets, or what remains of them, are choked with bodies. Upon landing I initially ordered that a number of the remains be examined. I immediately regretted the decision – though they are in an advanced stage of decay, and further eaten away by the high levels of pollution, it is clear that those who beset this world were of the most corrupt and depraved nature imaginable. Mutation and tech-heresy abound. The remains show the evidence not only of the physical taint of the Ruinous Powers, but of all sorts of deranged experimentation – limbs and body parts have been grafted and stapled and sutured together without any discernible pattern or reason, and the madness is further accentuated by illogical mechanical augmentation.

I ordered my retinue to cease examinations as soon as the scale of the corruption became clear. I only regret that we do not have enough promethium to torch every body we come across.

I planned on taking the shuttle from our first landing zone deeper into the city, but Garwell and my pilot, Alfaiq, have reported the transporter’s systems are malfunctioning. Garwell hypothesises it is due to damage sustained by the intakes during atmospheric entry, but I am left wondering if he is simply trying to placate me with tech-speak. They have at least both assured me that the craft is still capable of returning us to the Lightbringer. I can only hope that much is true, or we will find ourselves stranded here.

We are preparing to set out on foot for the eminence at the city’s heart, which Garwell calls Mount Antikythera. He assures me this is the seat of Diamantus’ governance. I believe such a place offers the best chance we have of piecing together exactly what happened to this place and, perhaps, finding answers to the questions you have sent me here to solve.

I have been attempting to document everything since making planetfall, not only with these updates but also with regular pict and vid-captures. I will submit them all to you once you translate in-system.

May the God-Emperor’s grace be with you, and us.

+ + + Transcript file ends + + +

+ + + Thought for the Day: Blessed is the mind too small for doubt + + +

CHAPTER XIII

According to the monitoring systems, it took four point seven six seconds before Mount Antikythera’s void shields were overwhelmed. The arcane defences had preserved the Pinnacle and the most precious manufactoria from the initial devastation, but they could not withstand the fall of Grim Destiny’s core. The shields overloaded and blazed from existence with a burst of multihued brilliance and a thunderclap of energy discharge.

It was only the beginning of the devastation. Megalithic industrial complexes and forge temples that had stood for thousands of years were hammered into rubble by the space hulk’s falling wreckage. Tens of thousands of tech-priests and adepts were crushed and buried along with many times their number of labourers and menials. One of the two major skitarii data garrisons to the north and the south of the Pinnacle was obliterated by a direct strike. Vents and alchomite stacks toppled, and more buildings were brought down in an avalanche of stone, steel, and plascrete as the remains of structures that had fallen higher up the slope collapsed upon them. For the first time, it was not the smoke and ash of hyper-industry that choked the air, but the dust of Megafactorum Primus’ death.

The city wailed as it perished, the shrieking of factory alarms, raid sirens and sector-wide alert systems. Yet an even more terrible noise began to eclipse it, a rising shriek that presaged the dawn of damnation on Diamantus.

From the hundreds of fragments that formed Grim Destiny’s carcass, the servants of the Arkifane arose. Millions had perished in the hulk’s death, but enough remained to do the bidding of their masters. They fell upon the stunned survivors around the impact craters, a tide of ravenous patchwork horrors and skittering machine monstrosities, desperate to feast on the organic and the mechanical.

At long last, Voldire had returned home, and with him he had brought enlightenment through ruination.

Red Tane felt the weight of the promethium extraction plant bearing down on him.

It had been unavoidable. The sky had filled with fire, the vox had started screaming, and devastation had descended and touched Diamantus, and the Third Company.

After leaving Mount Antikythera, the command squad had taken up a new position in a promethium extraction plant at the base of the slope. The last communication they had received from the Company Master was an automatic update stating that the White Maw and the rest of the fleet had engaged the space hulk as it made its final approach. The orbital barrage had been visible from the surface, but it had been nothing compared to the fury that followed.

Grim Destiny had broken through, and broken apart, and now it had broken Diamantus.

Red Tane could barely move. The extraction plant had been hit by blazing debris, and collapsed. First Squad had been outside, amongst the blackened chute stacks of the plant’s yard, but the building was tall and its walls had fallen haphazardly, and Red Tane was now buried beneath them, great mounds of splintered rockcrete and ferrocast pinning him and doing their best to crush him.

He was uninjured – his armour and a split-second activation of the Coral Shield’s refractor field had preserved him from harm where a normal mortal would have been pulverised. The same could not be said of the battle plate itself. Most of his markers and signifiers seemed to be offline, rendering the fate of the rest of the squad a mystery, and several servos were refusing to respond. The vox was also full of the same terrible wailing that had filled it as Grim Destiny had loomed in the sky. It refused to turn off.

He put the noise from his mind and focused on extricating himself. There was no fear at the prospect of being buried alive, only cold analysis. His greatest concern was that, during the collapse, the relic wargear he bore had been damaged, and he was unable to check on it properly until he was free.

He was wedged in at an angle, semi-upright, with a slab of rockcrete pressed against his upper body. Movement was heavily impeded – his left arm, with the Coral Shield, was wedged fast amidst the rubble. He could get a little leverage with his right, though. That would be enough.

He pushed against the slab, not yet using all his strength, not wishing to risk dislodging it only to cause a further collapse that might wedge him even more firmly. He was only testing it, trying to get a feel for its weight and what might be on top of it.

There was little movement in the rest of the debris surrounding him, which was encouraging. It seemed stable. He applied more force, tensing his genhanced musculature as he pushed on the slab.

It had no noticeable effect. Ordinarily he had no doubt he would have been able to move it, but he was hampered by how little leverage he had – with his left arm and torso locked in place along with much of his right, he was pushing using only the strength below the elbow on his right arm.

He paused, resisting the urge to keep trying, to fall back on the brute force he knew he was capable of. There was no point in wasting energy when there were other stratagems he could employ.

He began to deliver short, hard punches with his gauntlet, right into the centre of the slab.

That had a more noticeable impact. After just a few hits there was a cracking sound, and those auto-senses that still functioned detected a split appearing in the slab’s centre.

It was a risk. It might trigger a further collapse. But if he could break it, he could more easily push part of it, then find greater leverage. One small victory that would lead to greater ones.

That was when his armour seized up.

Suddenly, he was truly trapped. He assessed the remnants of his visor display, and saw that his reactor pack appeared to have simply shut down.

There was no more serious a malfunction Adeptus Astartes battle plate could suffer, and it made no sense. The armour had been damaged in the collapse, but his reactor pack had been showing as undamaged and fully functional. Yet now it was gone, its output reading zero.

It pinned him more assuredly than the rockcrete had.

The vox intruded on his thoughts. It was no longer just screaming, he realised. It was laughing. A voice, filled with sick, mocking mirth.

Red Tane’s anger stirred. He gritted his teeth, his body struggling to bear the weight of the equipment that had served him so well for over a century. To be rendered immobile and helpless was anathema to him, stoking the desire to fight back. To roar and struggle.

The Blindness was calling to him.

He bit back on his rage, swallowing unworthy sounds before they were made. Untrammelled fury was not the Chapter’s way. Red Tane had learned that lesson over many years and only with great difficulty. The Blindness called to him more often than most, but every time he defeated it, drove it down, silenced it. Silence was the key. In the void he was nothing, and when he became nothing he found he could control everything.

The Blindness was a challenge, and Red Tane loved accepting, and overcoming, challenges.

His fist cracked against the slab.

The reactor pack was back online. The slender movement he had been afforded before had returned. The laughter on the vox had ceased as well, as had the screaming. Now all he could hear were soft washes of static, like waves lapping at hard grey shingle.

He was about to resume his steady, methodical efforts to break free when he heard a grating noise, and sensed movement in the debris around him. Moments later, the pressure against him was gone as the slab was heaved up and cast aside, his visor ticking as it adjusted to the sudden daylight.

‘There you are, Champion,’ Nuritona said.

Red Tane accepted the offer of a gauntlet. He rose, feeling the slight unresponsiveness in some of his armour’s wounded actuators as he found his footing atop the rubble. That wasn’t his first concern, though.

He drew the Void Sword.

The weapon had been with the Third Company for as long as its records had existed, all the way back to the earliest Days of Exile. Red Tane had inherited it from the previous Company Champion, Toa, along with the Coral Shield. The sword’s pommel was an embossed skull, its crossguard plain and unadorned. What its blade had been forged from was a mystery that not even the Chapter’s Techmarines had been able to solve. It was some kind of mirror-clear black metal. Its edge was so keen that it cut as surely as an active power sword, and in all the years Red Tane had wielded it he had never noted a single blemish upon it, not one scuff or scrape or notch. It was, in his view, like the very soul of the Chapter itself – partly unknowable and wholly unbreakable.

He held the blade up, and found himself gazing at his battered and scraped helmet reflected back. The black metal was unmarked.

He turned the weapon over, feeling its perfect weight, and the desire that came with it – to kill. He resisted, returning it to its scabbard and turning his attention to the Coral Shield.

It had mysteries of its own, a plate of adamantine layered on its outer side with a dense knot of scleractinia, living coral organisms with shells tougher than refined diamonds. The craggy, partially calcified surface was, unlike the Void Sword, scored and marked with the legacies of ten thousand battles. It had seen Red Tane safely through more engagements than he cared to count, aided further by the ancient refractor field node that formed part of the clamp-plate on its back.

The fact the coral had been able to survive for millennia in such an environment would have likely been considered miraculous in its own right by the Imperial Cult. To the Carcharodon Astra, it was simply another indication that they had been given all the tools they needed to carry out the task set by the Forgotten One.

Like the Void Sword, the shield was unharmed by the collapse. That left the final and most precious relic of all.

Red Tane reached round and unlocked the haft of the chainaxe locked to his back, just to the right of his pack’s primary spinal connection socket.

To have damaged the Void Sword or the Coral Shield would have been a deep disgrace, but to harm Reaper while it was entrusted to his care was unthinkable.

The massive chainaxe felt unwieldy in his hands, but that was only proper. It was not his weapon. He inspected it as he had done the other pieces of wargear, from its long, notched haft up to the broad head, and the wicked teeth that Red Tane had seen wreak so much devastation on the enemies of the Imperium. The jagged shards gleamed coldly, and the Champion had an unsettling moment where he thought the weapon was glaring back at him.

Again, no harm appeared to have befallen it.

‘Satisfied?’ Nuritona asked.

Red Tane had briefly forgotten the strike veteran existed – that anything existed outside the relics in his care. He nodded, the hyper-focus that was usually associated with a combat situation leaving him as he re-clamped the axe.

The new Company Master had refused to abandon his Tactical Dreadnought Armour for the Reaper Prime’s wargear, and while the armour and relics such as the Razor-Cloak or the Halo of Maws remained in storage in the aft armoury of the White Maw, Red Tane had been commanded to take Reaper instead of the Void Sword by Kino, seemingly in an effort to further remove Sharr’s spectre from the company. Though Red Tane had felt bound to carry the weapon with him, he had yet to actually wield it in combat.

Red Tane felt the rubble underfoot shudder, and looked up into a sky rent asunder. The heavens of Diamantus were ablaze, filled with streaks of fire and tumbling objects, plummeting with a kind of wrathful grace that belied the devastation they unleashed when they hit the ground. The city all around was being pounded, first with an unexpected orbital bombardment and now with falling debris, such as that which had brought down the extraction plant.

He looked around the rubble-heaped yard, and noted the presence of Nuritona, Tama and Ihaia, but not the fifth member of the command squad, Henno. He glanced at his visor display, and saw that his rune marker had turned dark crimson.

‘The brother-signifier?’ he asked.

Nuritona gestured.

Unlike Red Tane, who had been closer to the centre of the plant yard, Henno had taken the full force of the building’s collapse. He had been unearthed by his brethren, the grey of powdered masonry almost matching the shade of his armour, except where it was buckled and split. There the ceramite was dark with dried blood.

Henno had been unlucky. Even beneath such a collapse, his battle plate should have been enough to preserve him, but a heavy metal girder had punched through the back of his neck, just above his reactor pack, severing his spine and almost beheading him.

‘He died preserving the company standard, as was his duty,’ Nuritona said. ‘He managed to unclamp it before he was struck, and was cradling it on his front when I found him.’

Red Tane noticed that Nuritona now carried the Third Company’s ancient banner, currently sealed away in its casing and with its haft retracted and locked to the strike veteran’s back, leaving his hands free. Tama’s narthecium had also done its work, the cryo-receptacle filled with the flesh of Henno’s progenoids.

The ground shook again as blazing, molten metal came slamming down just a few streets away. Henno would not be the only casualty from the orbital fallout, Red Tane thought grimly.

‘How has this happened?’ he asked.

‘The hulk has been destroyed,’ Nuritona said. ‘And in death it destroys us. The city is being demolished around us.’

‘What of the rest of the company? And the White Maw?’

‘The vox is down, everything but short-range inter-squad communication. Most of the tactical spread is offline as well. I do not yet know why or how, but there appears to be a great deal of interference.’

Red Tane decided against mentioning his reactor pack failure. A part of him wasn’t even sure if he had imagined it – and the laughter. Perhaps it had just been a byproduct of an attack of the Blindness, triggered by the frustration of being physically pinned.

‘We must regroup,’ Nuritona was saying. ‘I have no doubt the Archenemy intends more than to simply reduce Diamantus to ruination. They will have forces that have survived planetfall. We must locate and exterminate them. With or without the assistance of the Adeptus Mechanicus.’

‘Horrum is likely dead, and the skitarii are likely broken,’ Red Tane pointed out, glancing up towards where the peak of Mount Antikythera had once towered over the nearest rooftops and smog-stacks. It was invisible now, lost in the pall of dust and smoke thrown up by the city’s annihilation.

‘That is why we must look to Third Company first,’ Nuritona said. ‘Ninth Squad should be the nearest to us, directly to our east. Fourth Squad lies to the west, but further away, and they already have the support of Black Scythe. We should move to assist Ninth, and once we have linked up, seek also to rally Fourth, or the next unit further east. Regardless, we need to get moving, and keep moving.’

‘Contacts,’ Ihaia said abruptly.

Red Tane turned and saw yellow markers ping up on his helm, denoting allies. A moment later and he locked on to four figures picking their way through the rubble from the direction of the street beyond the extraction plant compound.

‘Skitarii,’ he said. ‘How is your Lingua Technis, strike veteran?’

Nuritona didn’t reply, beginning to make his way through the rubble towards the new arrivals, one gauntlet raised in what he hoped would serve as an approximate greeting.

The skitarii opened fire.

There were a series of sharp cracks as the galvanic rifles they were carrying spat their rounds. Nuritona had partly turned to the side and Red Tane had brought up the Coral Shield the instant they detected the skitarii raising their weapons. Two rounds struck the strike veteran, while another hit the Company Champion. There was a second, even louder crack as the Coral Shield’s refractor field blinked and caused the galvanic round to detonate its electrical charge before impacting harmlessly against the craggy surface.

Nuritona had no such protection, and Red Tane heard him grunt over the vox as the charge rounds punched into his ceramite and blew, overloading his battle plate’s electric systems, if only for a moment.

The skitarii fired a second and third time, but by then the Space Marines were moving.

Nuritona had his bolt rifle up, punching a trio of rounds into the rightmost skitarii. The shots struck true, hammering through its breastplate before detonating. The thing did not collapse, but its upper half went limp, its dead body held up on its locked lower limbs.

Ihaia had levelled the charged coils of his volkite caliver, but kept his finger off the trigger. There was no need to waste a shot from the ancient weapon. Red Tane had already reached the remaining three.

The Champion had not paused to consider why they had been fired upon by their erstwhile allies. His reaction was entirely instinctive, a deeply ingrained but controlled aggression that, once triggered, required no conscious thought. In an instant the Void Sword was in his fist again and he was bounding across the intervening space, the rubble pulverised under his heavy tread, taking more galvanic rounds against the Coral Shield.

The distance closed in a matter of seconds. He sliced the barrel of one of the long rifles in half before it could discharge again, letting his momentum carry him into its wielder, slamming the heavily augmented soldier from its metal legs. He swung left with the Coral Shield, cracking its surface against the barrel of the next one’s rifle as it tried to turn and hit him, while simultaneously swinging the Void Sword right at the other remaining skitarii.

The enhanced reflexes of the Mechanicus warriors were better than those of an ordinary human, but in a fight like this it made no difference. The one on Red Tane’s right had brought its rifle up to try and block the Void Sword, but the black steel simply sang through both the weapon and the skitarii’s helmet, cleaving both in half in a spurt of grey matter. The fatal stroke meant Red Tane’s balance was on his right foot, which gave the one on the left another second to reverse its rifle and attempt to slam the brass-bound butt over the shield’s rim and against Red Tane’s helmet.

His body had anticipated the effort, and his left arm jerked up, causing the upper rim of the Coral Shield to catch the rifle’s stock and knock it upwards before it could connect. Red Tane then pivoted on his right, leaning fractionally away and giving himself the space for a clean swing as he came around. The metal-clad cranium of the second skitarii flew off.

One hostile remaining, underneath him. The one he had knocked to the ground with his charge was rising, its firearm abandoned in favour of a short gladius. Red Tane didn’t give it time to recover, kicking out and knocking it down onto its back. He stepped on it to pin it, ignoring its attempts to jam the gladius in through the joint between his left greave and poleyn.

He stabbed down through the slit lens of its glowing mono-visor, blade scraping steel. There was a crunch, and the light went out. The skitarius’ struggles ceased, its mechanical limbs locked stiff.

Red Tane cast about for any other potential threats, but there were none. He withdrew the Void Sword and stooped to wipe it clean on the red-and-black robes worn over the skitarius’ armour, then sheathed it.

The kills had been clumsy, inefficient. His poise had been off, and he had wasted at least one second of engagement time. He would review it in greater depth when he had the time. The realities of combat were always different from the perfection he was free to pursue in the White Maw’s training pits.

‘Why would the skitarii attack us?’ Ihaia wondered over the vox as he, Tama and Nuritona moved to join Red Tane, the strike veteran kneeling briefly to inspect the bodies. He seemed to be moving freely enough despite the hits from the galvanic rounds.

‘They have threatened us before,’ Red Tane pointed out.

‘But only when they or their masters have perceived provocation,’ Ihaia said.

‘I cannot be sure of the cause of this treachery,’ Nuritona admitted, regaining his feet. ‘But there can be no doubt that the Archenemy is at work here. We must make contact with Ninth Squad and start to reunite the company as swiftly as possible.’

CHAPTER XIV

Khauri walked through the carnage befalling Megafactorum Primus, down into the Deepzone.

It was in answer to a call, one which had reached him through the ever-shifting tides of the empyrean that perpetually surrounded him. Disaster had befallen Diamantus, even more devastating than he had anticipated, yet in that moment he knew it was not his place to rally the world’s defenders or even join his brethren. He had a greater duty.

The Deepzone was Megafactorum Primus’ largest and most destitute habitation sector. It was located south-west of Mount Antikythera, beyond its lowest slopes and the surrounding industrial sprawl. The land dropped away steeply, not like the sheer canyon further east, but a sloping plummet into a vast basin. There, like rainwater puddling in a dirt hollow, the poorest and most desperate of the megalopolis’ vast workforce made their homes.

Here, there was no evidence of the rigorous planning that marked the layout of the city’s industrial zones. Prefab hab-blocks towered along the slopes of the depression, giving way to cruder tenement stacks and then a packed warren of slums, where the lowest of the low eked out a short existence bartering and battling over the scrap and salvage dredged from the glacier-like spoil heaps that descended from the city’s massive waste vents. The heart of the Deepzone was a lawless place, practically beyond the authority of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and certainly beyond the bounds of what the Martian priesthood actually cared about. As long as the workforce continued to meet production quotas, how they survived between shifts was of no concern to the rulers of Diamantus.

Khauri doubted any of the priesthood had ventured as far into the Deepzone as he was now going. But then he also doubted they, or the zone’s actual inhabitants, ever paused to consider the nature of the place. Many millennia before, when humanity had first touched down upon the surface of Diamantus, before it had stood upon the slopes and gazed higher up at the proud crag of what they eventually called Mount Antikythera, the place that had become the Deepzone had once been one of the planet’s deepest oceans.

The ravages of thousands of years of industry had exterminated almost all of Diamantus’ seas, but far down, well below the layer upon layer of refuse and spoil and bodies and waste, the soil and the bedrock remembered. It had whispered its memories to Khauri, and he had known where to walk.

That ground now shivered under the Librarian’s tread, as though fearing what was becoming of it. Devastation was being wreaked upon the megafactorum, and the Deepzone was not being spared. Whole hab-blocks had been brought down, and the tremors caused by the near-constant impacts were in turn shaking apart and demolishing the less stable structures at the zone’s heart. Fires had started to spread, dust and ash choked the air, and death was everywhere, gorging itself indiscriminately on the crushed, the trapped, the suffocating, the burning and the broken.

Khauri passed through it, but was touched by none of it. The greatest strain being placed upon him was by the writhing of the empyrean. The horror and anguish of Megafactorum Primus’ inhabitants was mirrored in the turmoil gripping the warp, stirred up and chopped into frothing fury by the monstrosities that swam in it, and by the work of those summoning them. Grim Destiny had been as thoroughly infested by the legions of the Archenemy as his portents had predicted, and they had been delivered to Diamantus in the most brutal and direct way imaginable. Their foul magicks were already at work all across the city, twisting and corrupting, taking root not just in flesh but also in the machine. Scrapcode, program subversion, engrammic hyper-decay, function remastering – the very air was rotten with it, as thick as the clouds thrown up by the thousands of impacts pounding the city.

The Adeptus Mechanicus were not ready for it. Khauri had little doubt that Fabricator General Horrum was already dead, or worse. He had witnessed a direct impact on the Pinnacle. Warp madness was ravaging the skitarii and other defensive forces.

And right now, none of it mattered, not to Khauri. There was only the call. He held the madness at bay from his own mind, grip on his staff tight and muttered catechisms on his lips.

Eventually, he reached a place where thunder no longer reigned. He had come to a point in the furthest reaches of the Deepzone, a small dirt square, hemmed in by teetering shacks and scrap-houses that shuddered and rattled softly with the sounds of distant explosions. Dust and pollution hung heavy in the air, like some near-impenetrable coastal fog. There was no living person in sight, only a scattering of bodies, already partly buried and unidentifiable.

Khauri removed his helmet, and found everything to be muffled. It felt as though he was on a different world, a different plane of existence, touching the megalopolis yet also separate from it.

The uncanny sensation was heightened by the glow he detected down one of the narrow wynds leading into the abandoned square. It was faint at first, a green light that bobbed slightly, like the bow lantern of a small boat approaching the shore on a mist-wreathed night.

Khauri realised that, in spite of the dust and the infernal heat that seemed to perpetually blanket the megafactorum, there was a dampness in the air, dappling his armour. For a second, he swore he could hear the sea.

The light resolved. It glowed from the tip of a staff, carried in the grip of an armoured figure.

The call had been answered.

The figure reached him, and Khauri knelt. This was true reverence, not the necessity forced upon him by diplomatic niceties in the Pinnacle – one knee bent, his staff still upright in his grasp.

‘Master,’ Khauri said.

‘Rise, my brother,’ Te Kahurangi replied, ‘and walk with me.’

CHAPTER XV

Madness reigned at the end of the world.

For a while, Kordi had watched it unfold from afar, arrayed with the rest of his squad on the ramparts of the skybridge’s fortifications. He had seen what looked like an asteroid studded with ship wreckage pound into the top of Mount Antikythera, overloading its void shield, pulverising its upper slopes.

A bow wave of dust and debris swept down the mountainside, devouring the city as it came. Kordi spread his stance and triggered his stabilisers.

The shockwave rolled over him, the wall shuddering underfoot, the blast of burning air and heated dust failing to even fractionally shift either the Space Marines or their skitarii allies in the neighbouring bastions.

Even as his auto-senses stripped back the worst of the new layer of smog, his mind was searing through contingencies. Their redeployment had spared them the carnage being wreaked on the upper slopes, but Third Company was scattered in an arc around the primary impact site. The priority would surely be to regroup, but should he shift Second Squad and their accompanying Vindicator towards the nearest units, or hold position within what Magos Dominus Ze-One-Prime called the Twinfort? He doubted any other Carcharodon planetside had as optimal a zone of control. To abandon it would be tactically unsound.

The defences Ze-One-Prime had welcomed them into consisted of squat walls of rockcrete and sheets of ablative armaplas, packed deep with dirt. Kordi had already pondered the dichotomy involved in such structures: mankind, especially the Adeptus Mechanicus, wielded the ability to cross the sea of stars and sunder entire planetary systems, yet the surest, most consistently reliable means of protection remained to simply dig down into a world’s dirt and pack it thick around you.

The fortifications were supplemented by multi-laser batteries and more arcane point defence weapons systems that Kordi only vaguely recognised. They were clustered thickest around the arterial road that passed through the fortress gate before crossing over the skybridge. That huge structure towered over the walls intended to defend it, its entrance a parade of gothic arches supported by flying buttresses, heavy with mecha-gargoyles and the symbology of the Cult Mechanicus. Within it, flanking the roadway itself, were banks of electro-generators and a massive series of winches, used to haul on the battle tank-sized links of chain that helped suspend the bridge up to its central span. At the order-imperative of Ze-One-Prime, the great roadway could be levered up, like a drawbridge that would turn the gorge into a vast moat guarding Megafactorum Primus’ eastern flank.

The bridge itself was not currently Kordi’s concern. Establishing Third Company’s overarching response to Grim Destiny’s collision with the uppermost reaches of Megafactorum Primus was.

He tried the vox-net, but there was nothing beyond the inter-squad band, just static. The markers representing the rest of the company were frozen on the display. There was no word from Kino or the White Maw, or from Nuritona. Second Squad felt wholly cut off, and he suspected it was the same for every unit in the company. For now, all he could do was hold on and wait for any further threat to reveal itself.

The madness struck just after the shockwave.

Kordi noted the dissonance among the Adeptus Mechanicus soldiery moments after the tremors gripped the bastions and the dust cloud surged over it.

Some had started making a sound he had rarely heard skitarii make – they were screaming. He looked left and right and saw the ranks of machine-men, which until then had been arrayed with mechanical exactness across the defences, begin to break apart. At least half the on-duty garrison were suddenly afflicted, reeling out of line, clutching their helmeted heads or rending at their red-and-black robes. It was a display wholly at odds with their usual icy precision.

Kordi just had time to blink-click the rune on the linked inter-squad display, indicating stand by/possible threat, when the shooting started.

He brought his bolter up on pure, ingrained impulse, turning to the left – the direction of the first discharges – and stepping back to gain a potential firing arc past the rest of his squad, all before registering any conscious thought.

Several skitarii had opened fire, not on any targets beyond the walls but at each other. The Mechanicus foot soldiers shot indiscriminately, rad-carbines and lasrifles punching shots through the robes and carapaces of their fellow warriors.

‘Treachery,’ snarled Second Squad’s youngest void brother, Ateko.

‘Hold fire,’ Kordi snapped, not yet understanding exactly what was happening but unwilling to fuel the chaos. ‘Only engage targets that lock on.’

That only took seconds to happen. The nearest skitarii, having shot down their supposed kin, turned their weapons on the Space Marines.

Whatever corrupt programming was driving them, it had made a fatal miscalculation. Second Squad responded with immediate, precise destruction, blasting every skitarius who raised a weapon against them to shards of metal and flesh.

‘Wall is too exposed,’ Brother Arrona said.

‘Secure the gatehouse,’ Kordi voxed. ‘Ihu, on point, Mere and Repat, rearguard.’

Kordi was thankful he had kept Second Squad together when they had joined the fortress garrison, rather than attempt to bolster the entire defensive line by spreading the Carcharodons across the walls. He had intended to form a base of fire covering the main approach road, but now it meant they were able to manoeuvre as a single unit.

There seemed to be no sign of firing from the crenellations above the cog-toothed gateway. The opposite was the case in the square within the walls, in front of the skybridge arches. Most of the tech-barracks used to house and charge the skitarii, along with their Kastelan maniple, were buried in a bunker complex, with only the entrance arches raised above the rockcrete square that formed the fort’s centre whenever the roadway was sealed off. The garrison’s reserve had been deployed there, but was now also gripped by whatever virus had infected the skitarii on the ramparts. In a total breakdown of the iron control usually exerted by the tech-priests over their guards, the Adeptus Mechanicus warriors were massacring one another, and those who weren’t had started to fire up at the Space Marines just a few heartbeats after Arrona’s prediction. With no rear to the wall, the Carcharodons were exposed to any shots coming from inside the fort.

Second Squad swept across to the gatehouse, returning fire on the move. Not all the skitarii on their part of the wall were dead. Some appeared to have become non-functioning, merely standing rigidly upright, their cognition boards fried. Kordi ordered his brethren to ignore them. There were more pressing targets.

The armoured door leading from the wall up to the gatehouse turret was open. The majority of the squad remained outside, firing down at whichever skitarii dared take aim at them, while Ihu and his breaching partner, Neku, seized the stairway beyond.

‘Clear,’ Ihu’s voice clicked.

Kordi followed them up, emerging onto the gatehouse parapets.

Magos Dominus Ze-One-Prime was waiting for them.

The tech-priest was hunched beneath their robes, insect-like tail curled up under them. To Kordi, it looked as though they were in pain, but unable to express it in an ordinary, human manner. There were half a dozen skitarii around the dominus, and they had the good sense to keep their weapons lowered, presumably following some imperative inloaded by their master.

‘Magos,’ Kordi snapped, in no mood to humour the sudden fragility he sensed in the supposed commander of the garrison. ‘You will explain what has happened to your maniple, or I will consider you compromised.’

He raised his bolter, the very same one that Ze-One-Prime had so carefully and reverently repaired.

Ze-One-Prime shuddered, claw-limbs scraping the rockcrete. Then, with a machine shriek, they threw back their hood and ripped something from the back of their metallic cranium. There was a flare of electrical discharge, and Ze-One-Prime’s mechadendrites went rigid before relaxing. The tech-priest’s pain was in contrast to the continued emotionless expression grafted upon the mask they wore.

The dominus cast the shorn piece of hardware they had plucked from their head aside and stood straight, facing Kordi, the augmented horror of their skull laid fully bare.

‘It is the noosphere,’ they said.

‘Explain,’ Kordi said tersely, bolter still primed.

‘To a great extent, I cannot,’ Ze-One-Prime admitted in their disarmingly elderly, human voice. ‘The Great Corruptor is at work here. Our systems are under assault. But I have been able to identify the primary conduit. The taint spreads through the noosphere. I managed to free myself from it in time. May the Omnissiah forgive my blasphemies.’

The dominus gestured at the sparking shard of tech they had ripped from their own skull.

‘I do not intend to do that to each one of your malfunctioning warriors,’ Kordi said.

‘That will not be necessary, I am their secondary transmitter,’ Ze-One-Prime said. ‘But we must still deactivate the garrison’s noospheric hub. Here.’

To Kordi’s surprise, an indicator marker appeared on his visor, and when he turned his head to follow it, looking over the edge of the ramparts, he found one of the bunkers at the fort’s rear, close to the entrance to the skybridge, highlighted. There was no time to demand to know how the dominus had been able to access the squad display.

‘I could have the Vindicator target it from range,’ Kordi pointed out.

‘It is well sited – we cannot guarantee its destruction, at least not quickly. I must break the connection myself.’

‘Then we will bring you to its doors,’ Kordi said, making the decision without hesitation. There was a possibility that Ze-One-Prime was as tainted as the rest, and leading them into some sort of trap, but it was one he was confident the Carcharodons could fight their way through. Those odds were better than being besieged in the gatehouse, if the entire garrison were allowed to succumb to infection.

Kordi heard the sound of a storm bolter kicking in – not a weapon he associated with the Adeptus Mechanicus. He looked over the edge of the gatehouse ramparts again, and found Rangu’s Hammer redeploying beneath them. The Vindicator siege tank had been hull-down in one of the fort’s embrasures, but with the outbreak of the fighting within the defences had reversed back down the ramp and had now come about to face the square, positioning itself beneath the gatehouse, presumably after seeing Kordi’s squad occupying it. The Vindicator’s commander, Arihu, was operating the tank’s pintle-mounted storm bolter, cutting down any skitarii foolish enough to send shots cracking off the heavy, maw-painted dozer blade covering most of the tank’s prow.

Kordi tried the vox, but was greeted only by a particularly vicious squeal of feedback.

‘Mere, Repat, join Brother Arihu,’ he said to his own squad. ‘Tell him we are making a move for the noosphere hub. He is to support us, but avoid using the Demolisher cannon unless absolutely necessary.’

The pair complied, and Kordi turned his attention back to Ze-One-Prime.

‘You trust your skitarii?’ he demanded, casting a look at the six remaining Mechanicus soldiers sharing the gatehouse rampart. Ze-One-Prime emitted a buzzing noise, and the skitarii shifted their rifles in front of them, muzzles skywards, each right leg moving so it stood at a slight angle behind the left. Kordi recognised the motion as the Martian version of a present arms salute.

‘They still obey my imperatives,’ Ze-One-Prime assured him. ‘I was able to manually sever the noospheric link on them. We must hurry, before what remains of the garrison succumbs.’

It seemed to Kordi that most of them were already lost anyway, but he snapped a terse series of orders to Second Squad. Wiremu with his Executor heavy bolter and Ihu with his bolt rifle would remain on top of the gatehouse providing fire support, while Mere and Repat, already on the ground, would form the tip of the spearhead. They adopted a tide pattern that kept Ze-One-Prime at its protective heart. The skitarii formed a rearguard, keeping the route back to the gatehouse open if retreat became necessary.

Second Squad swept out of the gatehouse and into the square. They moved with speed and absolute confidence, locking on to and dropping threats the instant they appeared. Not all of the skitarii attempted to impede them, and Kordi snapped at his brethren to leave them.

The hub was just ahead, the bunker bristling with uplink pylons and brass router spikes. Kordi was about to order Neku and Mere and Repat to part and admit Ze-One-Prime between them to the doors, when there was a splitting sound.

A hail of broken rockcrete struck the formation from both sides. Kordi interposed himself between the blasts and Ze-One-Prime as best he could, his armour pinging him warnings as he felt rubble that would have crushed an ordinary man slam off his armour, making him grunt but failing to move him.

Two sections of the fort’s square had just exploded upwards. For a heartbeat Kordi thought they were artillery strikes, before he detected movement amidst the hail of shattered paving.

The Kastelans had burst free from their underground charging crypts, seemingly of their own volition, their datasmith nowhere to be seen. Whatever corrupting cyber-force was driving the Adeptus Mechanicus mad, it had fully infected the two robots. The glassplex domes of their head nodes and much of the front of their armour plating had cracked apart, split by tumorous growths that looked as though they were in the process of bursting and swelling from within.

‘Impossible,’ Ze-One-Prime screeched. ‘Omnissiah, strike down these abominations!’

‘Target-focus right,’ Kordi ordered, knowing there was no time to wait for the dominus to come to terms with the infestation of the cybernetic constructs. Both had dragged themselves up out of the crypts where they were stored between deployments, and had started stumbling unsteadily towards the Carcharodons. They were fully battle-active, energy crackling around the power fists of the rightmost while the other had its heavy phosphor blasters lit. The mutations slowly cracking them apart writhed grotesquely.

‘The wetware has become tainted,’ Ze-One-Prime exclaimed. ‘The biomatter of the dataslot is mutating!’

The Carcharodons opened fire on the fist-wielding automaton as it ponderously closed the distance, but their bolts were met with pulses of blue energy that caused them to detonate before they struck home.

‘Repulsor grid,’ Ze-One-Prime told Kordi urgently. ‘But the other one is down. Target it instead!’

‘Refocus fire,’ Kordi said, this time highlighting the second Kastelan.

Too late. With a clatter, its phosphor blasters fully ignited, the barrels turning white-hot as they began spitting a burning stream of munitions into the Carcharodons.

The luminogenic orbs punched into pauldrons and breastplates and reactor packs, sizzling as they burned deep into ceramite and plasteel. Kordi took two hits to his right shoulder, the incendiary rounds marring the finned Chapter icon. He snarled as he clamped his bolter and unlocked his combat knife, using the hooked tip to prise the burning rounds free before they could dig any deeper.

The Kastelan staggered as its growths swelled further, sending its chain of burning rounds up into the air above.

Return fire slammed into the robot. Ze-One-Prime had been right about its repulsor grid being down – this time there was no energy flare. From the gatehouse, Wiremu’s Executor heavy bolter turned the exposed tumours into a gory mulch, causing it to stumble and fall to its knees, rockcrete cracking beneath it. The phosphor blasters at the end of its arm-limbs were firing directly into the ground now, melting the paving and wreathing it in toxic fumes as it disintegrated under the barrage.

Kordi didn’t have time to add his own firepower. The other Kastelan was on them, seemingly aiming not for the Space Marines but for Ze-One-Prime.

‘Back,’ Kordi barked at the dominus, shoving them for good measure, causing the tech-priest to emit a squall of binharic as they almost fell.

A red maw ripped itself open in the growth marring the Kastelan and let loose a keening screech.

The abomination swung. Kordi threw himself back, knowing that if the huge power fist connected it would dash him to pieces. He felt an electrical surge thrum through his battle plate in sympathy with the near passage of the weapon’s disrupter field.

He still had his knife in his fist, and he drove forward inside the robot’s guard as its swing thundered by. Passing through the humming repulsor grid made his teeth ache and his skin prickle, but his mass was too great to be inhibited by it. He rammed his blade into the flesh-maw as newborn tentacles slapped against him, then wrenched savagely to split the growth in two.

Ichor drenched him, but the thing didn’t die. He was forced back as the power fist came hurtling in again, but this time he was too slow. It barely clipped him, but it was enough to shear off the directional nozzle from his pack’s upper-right side and send him staggering.

The air had become a metal hail. Most of Second Squad had switched to firing on the fist-wielding Kastelan, and its repulsor grid was flaring again and again as it robbed each incoming round of kinetic energy, detonating them in the air all around Kordi.

‘Strike here,’ he heard Ze-One-Prime shouting. At the same moment, his visor blinked with an update. The dominus had again somehow accessed his display, and this time had highlighted a small part of the Kastelan towering over him, a circular metal node on the upper right of the robot’s cuirass, still jutting free of the pulsating meat that was starting to envelope it.

Kordi didn’t question the advice.

He flipped his knife and launched upwards, slamming its hilt against the node. It crunched, and took two more rapid hits before breaking off with a fizzing discharge of electricity.

Immediately, the thrumming that had been running through his very bones ceased. Kordi realised he had broken the repulsor grid’s transmitter.

Reaching it had left him unbalanced, and all he could do was throw himself to the ground as the addled, mutating robot swung again, a fist once more scraping off his pack, its disrupter field chipping at the ceramite and exposing silver plasteel beneath.

As he fell, his razor-keen senses caught the shriek of an incoming shell. He’d barely registered it before the corrupt Kastelan exploded.

The blast picked him off the ground and flung him several yards across the shattered rockcrete, embroiled in flame and shorn metal. His armour barked warnings in his ear, and he rolled with the impact, up again before he was even fully aware of what had happened.

Rangu’s Hammer had dealt the kill-shot. The Vindicator siege tank had rolled forward behind the assault and had punched a shell into the Kastelan from point-blank range. Kordi had been dangerously close to the detonation, but the robot itself had taken the worst of it. His armour had endured only a pair of minor penetrations, and his genhanced physiology ensured there was no danger of concussion or disorientation.

Both Kastelans were now down, one reduced to scrap metal and twitching, unidentifiable meat, the other motionless and mangled by concentrated bolter fire, on its knees and surrounded by the rapidly cooling rockcrete its phosphor blasters had melted.

Kordi briefly saluted Arihu, who was still manning his Vindicator’s storm bolter from its top hatch, then checked Ze-One-Prime. The dominus had been thrown over by the detonation, but had righted their insectoid body with their cane and started shaking dust from their robes. Second Squad had taken no casualties.

‘Move in,’ Kordi ordered.

They swept across the remainder of the square to the hub bunker, where Ze-One-Prime plugged one of their mechadendrites into the eye socket of the servo-skull that had been lock-slaved to the blast hatch. There was a thud, and the portal iris opened from the centre, admitting Ze-One-Prime’s hunched form.

‘Wall-tide,’ Kordi ordered, arraying the Carcharodons in a defensive perimeter around the entrance. He scanned the square, his visor pinging him a swarm of potential target locks, but most of the surviving skitarii were preoccupied with murdering one another.

That ceased with a crack, and a discharge of energy from the router spikes protruding from the bunker roof.

Eerily, like puppets whose strings were being pulled slowly taut by an invisible hand, the skitarii ceased their feral fighting and rose, tall and still. A sudden calm gripped the interior of the fortress.

Ze-One-Prime came hurrying back out of the hub, the optics on their mechadendrites bright as they surveyed their handiwork.

‘Praise the Omnissiah,’ they intoned.

‘You are sure they have been cleansed?’ Kordi asked, watching the nearest skitarii warily, as those who had been beating and hacking one another to death now simply stood side by side staring into nothing, robes ragged, sparks occasionally spurting from ruptured circuits and ripped actuators.

‘No,’ Ze-One-Prime admitted. ‘Some will be damaged beyond repair, and I doubt most will survive the data-shriving I will have to perform. They are infested with scrapcode. But I vouch that none will raise a hand against you.’

That sounded like cold comfort to Kordi, but it would have to do.

‘We must make the fortress defensible,’ he said, finally allowing his attention to shift beyond the battle-scarred courtyard. ‘The bastions need to be reinforced–’

He paused. There was something beyond the background brutality of the city being pounded into pieces around them. Bestial screeches, underpinned by a rising rumble – the sound of a multitude in motion. It was coming from the direction of the skybridge at their backs.

‘The Twinfort at the far end has been overrun,’ Ze-One-Prime said, gazing through the arches of the bridge and along its length, apparently aware of things that Kordi could not yet sense. ‘The skybridge has been compromised.’

CHAPTER XVI

Khauri and Te Kahurangi passed through the Deepzone together. There was a stillness about them. The warp itself seemed to have lost its bite, like a sea becalmed at the heart of a tempest.

Te Kahurangi was the Chief Librarian of the Carcharodon Astra, and the most venerable member of the Chapter. He was the Pale Nomad, and his power had always seemed all but absolute to Khauri. He was his mentor. He was also the one who had saved his soul from damnation and, in doing so, had inducted him into the Chapter.

‘I am thankful you have come,’ he told Te Kahurangi as they passed through the narrow, shrouded streets. Like Khauri, his armour was the deep blue of the Chapter’s Librarius, but it was heavily inscribed with exile markings and the most potent of arcane wards, and hung with predatory trinkets – talons and fangs and shards of scrimshawed bones. Unlike almost all of his brethren, he rarely wore his helmet, his long white hair and the grey, deathly cast of his wizened and tattooed face displayed to friend and foe alike.

‘I told you I would hear you if you called,’ he replied.

Khauri wondered for a moment just how it was the Chief Librarian had come to be present on Diamantus, but he knew there would be no easy answer to such a question.

‘You are wondering perhaps if I am truly here,’ Te Kahurangi said with the barest hint of humour. ‘Perhaps we are vision-walking, or communing only in spirit? Perhaps I am projecting my likeness from the depths of the Outer Dark? Wouldn’t that be trite? Do you wish to reach out and touch me, to be sure I am flesh and blood?’

Ordinarily, he would have felt a moment’s shame that his thoughts had been read by another psyker, but with Te Kahurangi it was no surprise. Besides, it could just as easily be his intuition.

‘I heard your call,’ he carried on. ‘Many are the hidden pathways you have yet to discover, but your time will come. Some you know already.’

That answer seemed somewhat contradictory to Khauri, but he knew better than to linger on such things.

‘I would not have called if I did not think the situation demanded it,’ he said instead. ‘We were correct in some regards, but mistaken in others. The hulk has destroyed itself, and in doing so has brought ruination to this world. The forces of the Archenemy abound. I am certain they mean to do more than simply slaughter the machine-men.’

‘Your analysis is correct,’ Te Kahurangi responded. ‘I believe there is a great threat to the Imperium here, a danger beyond the damage that will be done by the loss of a potent forge world. Diamantus is already broken. It is what comes after that we must stop, before it is too late.’

‘And what comes after?’ Khauri asked.

‘I will show you,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘But before we indulge in the esoteric and the arcane, let us honour our Chapter’s ways by dealing with practicalities. The forces of the Archenemy are upon us, and the Third Company lies wounded and scattered. They must be rallied if we are to have a hope of stopping what is coming. The squads must be brought together, the surviving Mechanicus must be found and made to coordinate with our efforts. The company requires leadership and direction. If we are not able to provide that, we will be overrun before we can even hope to retaliate against the Archenemy’s schemes.’

‘Of course,’ Khauri said. ‘I suspect most of the squads are indeed scattered, but it was good fortune that the worst of the wreckage is striking Mount Antikythera. Most of the company was redeployed from the upper slopes to its base some days ago.’

‘Good fortune, or your prescience?’ Te Kahurangi asked with a thin smile.

‘You know it can be difficult to say.’

‘There is truth in that. The company has suffered, but then it has been suffering for some time.’

‘An unavoidable reality,’ Khauri said guardedly.

‘Not any longer. The Shiver will soon stand as complete as it once was.’

‘I do not understand,’ Khauri admitted, frowning behind his helm.

Te Kahurangi stopped and looked up at him, a smile on his thin lips as he spoke.

‘Bail Sharr is with us, here on Diamantus.’

Either the salvation pod’s escape hatch had rusted shut after centuries of disuse, or the curse besetting Grim Destiny’s enslaved wreckage was still in effect. Either way, the door refused to unbar after the pod had ploughed a furrow through Megafactorum Primus’ ruins.

It made little difference to Sharr. He kicked his way out, the metal ripping open with a shriek followed by a bang.

He rose from the smoking, blackened container, a weapon in each hand, hunting for targets.

The area where the salvation pod had crash-landed looked as though it was part of some sort of industrial complex, replete with smokestacks, waste flumes and electro-coil blocks, but most of it was in ruins. Part of that had clearly been caused by Sharr’s salvation pod and those of the other Exiles – they had all come down in the same sector. According to Sharr’s display, Talon was just a few hundred yards east. He moved towards the marker.

Talon’s pod had landed in a processing plant. Several of its walls and part of its great sloping roof were still standing, stencils on the sooty, red brickwork directing the flow of a labour force that was currently absent, crushed and buried beneath the building’s gutted remains.

Talon met Sharr at a half-intact doorway, masonry scraping beneath his footfalls. The former Devourer said nothing, but acknowledged Sharr with a nod.

‘Blood Eye and Shadow are on the move,’ Sharr noted after a glance at his display. ‘Recommend we hold and wait for them here.’

‘Agreed,’ Talon said tersely.

The city shook. Debris from the broken hulk was still raining down on what Sharr took to be one of the forge world’s primary manufacturing sites. He had little other information to go on; the Exiles had been given only minimal data concerning Diamantus. It wasn’t supposed to be part of their operation. They were only planetside because they had failed.

It was another burden, another shame. It burned within Sharr, and he knew there was nothing he could do to douse it. The only reprieve he could hope for was the mindlessness of the Blindness, or oblivion itself.

Blood Eye emerged from the choking dust pall, his crimson lenses piercing the gloom while the rest of him was still a dark, indistinct bulk. Shadow arrived from the opposite direction moments later, his tread almost silent despite the rubble underfoot.

‘What now?’ Talon demanded, none of the Exiles offering the Chapter’s greeting to one another.

‘We need to establish contact with the Mechanicus,’ Blood Eye said. ‘Ensure they do not mistake us for the enemy, and then attempt to bolster their defensive operations.’

‘If they have any,’ Shadow said humourlessly, looking about at the seemingly abandoned wreckage of the dropsite.

‘We shall know soon enough,’ Blood Eye said, unlocking the auspex.

‘That is the extent of our plan?’ Sharr demanded. ‘To subordinate ourselves to the Mechanicus?’

‘Until we know more about what defences remain, making contact with them is all we can hope to do,’ Blood Eye pointed out. ‘We must find out who yet resists, and how many of the Archenemy’s damned creations survived planetfall.’

Sharr supposed that was true enough, but it did not help cure his need to make amends for the Exiles’ failure. He simply gestured for Blood Eye to lead on.

They moved through the ruins of the processing plant. Beyond it they discovered a roadway, dark rockcrete marked with yellow traffic symbols, partially scarred by one of the salvation pods. It ran uphill, flanked on the far side by a raised, parallel rail line.

‘Up or down?’ Shadow asked.

‘Down, for now,’ Blood Eye said. ‘I am picking up possible returns.’

The four Carcharodons kept to the edge of the roadway bordering the arches of the rail line, able to use the structure as cover if need be. The buildings on either side were little better than the ones the salvation pods had come down amidst. The air shivered with ongoing impacts and the distant wailing of manufactorum sirens, as though the city itself was screaming. There were no signs of life.

Shadow was on point, and highlighted a particularly heavy cloud of black smoke broiling up above the jagged rooftops ahead.

‘An impact site,’ Blood Eye hypothesised.

All four Space Marines detected the sound of bolter fire at the same time. It was coming from further down the slope.

Without a word they broke into a run, Blood Eye pinging his auspex findings across their visors.

There was an engagement playing out close to the orbital debris. And if the auspex was accurate, one side wasn’t just the forces of the Adeptus Mechanicus, rallying to the defence of their world. The markers displayed belonged to the Carcharodon Astra.

Void Exiles were locked out of the usual chain of command, forbidden from even communicating with the battle company Shivers. The signifiers on Sharr’s visor didn’t resolve as they drew nearer, giving no information about company or squad, showing only the aquatic, finned predator of the Chapter’s ancient heraldry. There were only two of them, located in a large building just off the roadway. The haze of red markers surrounding them made the desperation of their circumstances clear.

The Exiles shifted naturally into their combat patterns, not the tide-coded manoeuvres familiar to the battle companies, but the instinctive style of fighting that had developed naturally between them over previous campaigns. Blood Eye and Shadow brought up the rear, boltguns unlocked, watching the flanks for Talon and Sharr as they began to race ahead.

Sharr freed his bolt pistol and chainsword as the building came into sight, the thunder of bolter fire still echoing from within, like a trapped storm. It was some kind of manufactorum, though most of it was already rubble – only the front remained standing, a façade bearing the cog symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus and boards that listed production quotas and shift schedules.

The enemy were already in sight. They were cultist infantry, the same kind the Exiles had encountered on the hulk, raggedy scum in patchwork chainmail and flakplate wielding autorifles and lasguns. Their attention was on the ruined building – they were in the process of assaulting it in two sections, the first breaking across the roadway to storm its windows and doorway with blades and grenades, while the second kept up covering fire from the ruins on the far side, lashing the scarred structure with hard rounds and crimson beams of energy.

They were so focused that they didn’t notice the Exiles until it was much too late.

Sharr switched from his pistol to his knife before contact, not intending to waste bolts. He crashed in through the remains of the wall the fire section were holding, a few belated las-bolts snapping at him but doing nothing more than searing his aged armour.

The Blindness wasn’t on him, not yet. He killed swiftly and efficiently with his combat knife, side by side with Talon, the latter’s club staving in a heretic’s head so hard it drove the plasteel like a knife into the man’s skull.

As the pair swept through the fire support section, Blood Eye and Shadow hit the assault element while they were crossing the open space of the street. Without cover the heretics were gone in moments, reduced to burst meat smeared across the roadway, like sacks of flesh that had been dropped onto the dark rockcrete from a great height.

‘Exterior secure, move in,’ Blood Eye voxed.

Sharr and Talon loped across the road, like hunting hounds unleashed. Sharr was focused on the sounds of bolter fire – two separate discharges had become one, and sure enough, there was now only a single Carcharodons signifier on the display.

They were going to be too late.

The inside of the manufactorum was a mismatch of broken floors and ramps of rubble. Most of it was already overrun by the Archenemy, by things altogether more terrible than the cultist foot soldiers the Exiles had already neutralised.

‘Mutants and daemonspawn,’ Talon growled as they engaged. The things scrabbling through the manufactorum’s broken innards were warped, illogical beings of sutured, pallid flesh and mutated growths fused and welded with jagged machinery. They were the same monstrosities the Exiles had faced on board the hulk, the discarded toys of demented deities, let loose upon Diamantus. Presumably they had come surging up from the nearby impact site.

They were a more fearsome foe than the cultists, but still so much fodder for the reaping scythe. Sharr triggered his chainsword, its roar reverberating through the ruins. It chewed through warped flesh and tainted metal as the creatures turned on the Space Marines, the lone bolter still ringing out defiantly from some adjacent room.

‘Follow the marker,’ Blood Eye urged, sensing Sharr teetering on the edge. He drove left, towards where the sigil of the last Carcharodon was blinking, the thunder of the other two Exiles’ bolters adding to the cacophony, making the stones underfoot judder.

Mutants and Neverborn burst apart and unravelled all around Sharr. He shouldered his way through a doorway, pauldrons knocking out part of the brickwork, too hyper-focused to care if he brought more of the building down around them.

Beyond was an assembly chamber, its lines abandoned by the workforce and partly crushed by the semi-collapsed roof.

The space was crawling with the semi-mechanical mutant monstrosities. They had formed a stabbing, clawing, amorphous mound not far inside the doorway, hacking and slashing at one another in their frenzied need to get at whatever was at their centre.

Without waiting for the other Exiles to push in behind him and spread out, Sharr flung himself forward, sawing and stabbing ferociously. They wailed with voices like grating iron, turning on him, more flooding in from either side to try and drag him under.

Again, the Exiles were there, slamming precision bursts of bolts into the rising tide, Talon cutting his way after Sharr like a mariner hacking through an ice floe, every blow ferociously efficient.

Sharr was barely conscious of their presence. He sawed the bloated, drooling cranium from the last of the monstrosities and kicked its electric-charged metal chassis-body aside.

Though drenched in the oily viscera of the deranged creatures, it was clear the figure beneath was Adeptus Astartes. A Carcharodon. With the other Exiles still securing the assembly chamber, Sharr wiped the muck from one of the interface ports in the figure’s battle plate and checked for vitae signs.

There were none. The warrior was dead, his Belisarian Furnace burned out in the act of mounting his last stand. A cursory glance showed Sharr that his gorget had been half torn away and his throat ripped out, while incisive blows had jammed in through the armour seals around his knees and beneath his arm. Even most of the connecting pipes on his reactor pack had been sawed open, and the battle plate itself was as dead as its wearer.

Sharr rose stiffly, his old servos protesting. Talon, Blood Eye and Shadow spread through the chamber, hunting for more targets, but there were none.

‘Here is the second,’ Talon said, his voice grave. He had located the other fallen Carcharodon who had appeared on the auspex, slumped on the far side of the main conveyor belt, surrounded by more slain foes.

‘They have the same markings,’ the former Devourer added.

While battle companies did not possess specific armour tags that differentiated them from one another, each isolated company sub-fleet culture had developed its own distinctive styles of exile markings and adornments. To a void brother, companies were as clearly demarcated as if they bore the boldest heraldic markings on poleyn and pauldron.

‘Third Company,’ Shadow said as he looked between the first and second bodies.

Sharr felt the gaze of the other three Exiles fix on him with such intensity that he subconsciously expected his armour to ping him a target-lock warning.

There was a momentary silence. Blood Eye was the first to speak.

‘This is your battle company, is it not?’

‘No,’ Sharr replied immediately. ‘I have no company. I am not of any Shiver.’

‘But you were Reaper Prime before your exile,’ Shadow said. ‘You have not been banished for as long as most of us. You must know your brethren still.’

Sharr did not realise what he was doing until he had already done it. He snatched Shadow by his helmet’s visor, yanking him in close.

‘I am a Void Exile,’ he snarled. ‘I have no brethren.’

Shadow wrenched Sharr’s gauntlet from his helm and shoved back against him with a sharp crack of ceramite. Then Blood Eye was interposing himself between them, the bulk of his armoured form forcing them apart.

‘Control yourselves,’ he snapped coldly. ‘Both of you.’

Sharr didn’t move, but Shadow took a step back.

‘If this is your former company, that intelligence can help us,’ Blood Eye said. ‘You will better know their deployments, doctrines, the tactical responses to situations like these.’

Sharr remained silent. He had not foreseen this. There had been no contact with the Third Company since his disgrace, and while he knew it was not impossible that the Exiles would fight alongside his old Shiver again one day, he had assumed the shifting tides of the disparate brotherhoods of the Nomad Predation Fleet had pulled them far apart.

That they were here amidst the devastation on Diamantus felt like a cruel conspiracy, as though the universe was mocking him.

‘Who were they?’ Blood Eye asked.

Sharr forced himself to speak, his voice cold and dead.

‘Epsilon-three-one-Ruku and Zeta-eight-nine-Warak. Fourth Squad, Third Company.’

‘It is safe to assume the rest of their company are on Diamantus?’ Blood Eye said.

‘Yes, unless the sub-fleet operates very differently now.’

‘Where are the rest of Fourth Squad then?’ Shadow wondered.

‘I think they were trying to withdraw through the manufactorum,’ Sharr responded after another moment of bitter silence, replaying the combat from beginning to end with absolute precision in his mind’s eye. The cultist infantry had been attacking what they thought was a defended position at the manufactorum’s front, which meant Ruku and Warak had only just retreated from the entrance. They had likely realised they were being flanked and enveloped, and had tried to pull back before being cut off and overwhelmed in the assembly chamber.

‘Rearguard tide patterns,’ Blood Eye mused. ‘It is likely the rest of their squad is close, if they yet live. Not close enough to ping the auspex, though.’

‘We should try and link up,’ Shadow said. ‘Our strength would multiply if we were able to assist them.’

Sharr wanted to snap at him that doing so would betray his Oaths of Exile, but he managed to bite the words back. The others were still casting lingering looks at him.

‘We should retrieve their gene-seed,’ he said instead, crouching beside Ruku. ‘And their wargear.’

‘The latter, yes,’ Blood Eye agreed. ‘We have no way of safely removing or storing the former.’

That felt like a betrayal. Forever teetering on the brink of extinction, there was nothing more precious to the Carcharodon Astra than the gene-seed of fallen brethren. Sharr had fought for decades with both Warak and Ruku. To leave them behind, to abandon their legacy, their potential future with the Chapter, was unthinkable.

If he had not failed, if he had not been found wanting, this might not have happened.

‘I will location-tag them,’ Blood Eye said, daring to reach out and place one gauntlet briefly on Sharr’s shoulder. ‘Their brethren will return for them when they are able.’

‘Which may not be for some time,’ Talon growled. Sharr realised what he meant – there was noise coming from out on the street, the hellish wailing of the lost and damned.

‘Contacts,’ Blood Eye said gravely, raising the auspex once more. ‘Closing fast, from multiple directions.’

‘At least you’re going to have a chance to keep avenging them, Blind One,’ Shadow said.

CHAPTER XVII

Second Squad hastened beneath the entrance arches at the beginning of the bridge, Ze-One-Prime and an entourage of skitarii with them, followed by Rangu’s Hammer.

‘The haulage units have been tainted with malfunction,’ the dominus said, several of their mechadendrites plugging directly into the ports of the main electro-generators responsible for giving motion to the huge links suspending the closest span.

‘Can you cleanse them?’ Kordi asked. Without the power of the haulage units, the skybridge could not be heaved up, which would leave the Archenemy with a direct funnel into the heart of the fort. If they were attacked at the same time from outside the walls, they would undoubtedly be overrun.

‘I believe I have a seventy-three point one per cent likelihood of purging and reinitialising the systems to within sixty-five per cent capacity, which would lead to an eighty-five per cent chance of successfully raising–’

‘Can you do it or not?’ Kordi barked, in no mood for Mechanicus gibberish.

‘Yes,’ Ze-One-Prime said. ‘But it will take time we do not possess.’

‘I will buy some for you,’ Kordi said, loading a fresh magazine and switching to internal vox. ‘Second Squad, with me.’

He led the Carcharodons past the generator banks and the first of the mighty chains holding up the bridge, its soaring stone arches echoing with the pounding of their boots and the grumble and rattle of Rangu’s Hammer as the Vindicator followed up in support.

Beyond lay the open roadway, yellow signs on the rockcrete demarcating fourteen traffic lanes, a trio of rail tracks and a mag line. Kordi had the squad spread out in extended order to cover the width of the span.

The Archenemy was already in range, tumbling from the dust shroud as they passed under the spires that marked the bridge’s central span. Kordi’s helmet lens magnification picked out a tide of corruption, patchwork mutant abominations and illogically formed Neverborn. Among them were ripped red-and-black robes, presumably the skitarii of the garrison belonging to the fort at the bridge’s other end, who had fallen prey to the morphing scrapcode filth and joined those they should have slain.

‘Mark your targets,’ Kordi instructed. ‘Fire at will.’

Thunder filled the skybridge. Kordi’s auto-senses target-acquired one onrushing horror after another, the servos of his armour locked to give him a stable firing platform. Almost every bolt struck true, and the few that did not still found a target amongst the horde.

The lead ranks were scythed down, blown to bloody ruin by the concentrated firepower.

Kordi realised the ammunition counter on his visor was frozen, but it didn’t matter – he knew when his primary weapon would run dry in the same way that a skilled percussionist understood where the next beat in a song would fall. He eased off briefly, anticipating that half of the squad would be doing likewise while the others continued to lay down fire. When they paused to reload, Kordi and the rest resumed the barrage, timing their shots to ensure there was no reprieve for their targets. Second Squad’s firing rhythm was excellent, even by the standards of the rest of the company. Only the heavy weaponry of Ninth and Tenth Squads offered more reliable ranged destruction.

Rangu’s Hammer roared. The Vindicator fired its Demolisher cannon again, over the heads of the Carcharodons, the thunderclap discharge kicking dust from the bridge’s surface and echoing back from its soaring spires. It momentarily ripped the heart from the oncoming horde, rocking the entire structure.

Despite the slaughter, the mutants came on.

A larger shape had passed the central span of the bridge. It was a stalk tank, obeying none of the rough classifications the Imperium’s militaries attempted to impose upon the forces of Chaos. Some of its limbs were mechanical, but others were fleshy, bristling with translucent spines, like a nightmarish arachnid. The bulk of its body was also organic, with dark armour fused and bolted on, while some sort of battle cannon protruded from its forever-distended, venom-drooling maw.

It screamed as it fired. The shell – if that’s what it really was – howled low overhead, detonating against the skybridge’s arches in a hail of broken stone.

Kordi pinged a target-destruction request to Arihu, though he doubted the connection went through. More of his armour’s systems now appeared to be starting to decay, fuzzed or glitching with what he assumed was the same sort of tech-taint that had plagued the Mechanicus. That their armour was not proof against it was a concern, but there was nothing that could be done for now.

The daemon engine scuttled closer, seemingly oblivious to the lesser warp spawn being mowed down around its clawed limbs. It fired again, blasting up rockcrete just ahead of Second Squad’s firing line and showering them with debris and shrapnel.

Rangu’s Hammer answered. The Demolisher shell missed the machine-monster’s centre mass but whipped away most of the limbs on its left side with a series of foul crunches before exploding against the central span behind. Ichor jetted and the thing keeled to one side, crushing lesser horrors beneath it.

It showed no sign of pain, instead attempting to crawl its way closer using just the limbs on its right side. The awkward angle meant its next shrieking shot went high.

Arihu’s reply didn’t miss. The thing burst apart like an overripe sore, showering the bridge with stinking globules of warp-meat and ectoplasm.

On the tide surged, clawing over the dead and dying, howling and shrieking and laughing and gibbering with the madness of the warp. Even without his malfunctioning heads-up display, Kordi could see that they were about to cross the threshold into assault range. Another thirty seconds and it would become fist and blade-work.

He was about to instruct the squad to shift from extended to close order to better meet the charge head-on, when there was an unintelligible squall over the vox. It coincided with the revving of engines. He snatched a glance back, and found the jagged white maw painted on the dozer blade of Rangu’s Hammer bearing down on him.

‘Make way,’ Arihu bellowed from the top hatch, using his helmet’s vocaliser, amplified to maximum output.

Kordi swept to the right, the Carcharodons opening up a corridor for the siege tank to surge through. It fired as it went, the punch of the discharge beating at Kordi’s senses.

‘Form up either side,’ he ordered. ‘Storm-tide!’

As the squad began to advance alongside the charging tank, he felt the rockcrete shift under him. At first it was almost imperceptible, but the feeling steadily increased, until it was clear there was a slight angle to the bridge.

Ze-One-Prime had succeeded in rekindling the generators. Overhead, the vast chains had pulled taut, clanking rhythmically as, inch by inch, they began hauling up the section where it connected to the central span.

Rangu’s Hammer slammed into the front of the horde. The heavy dozer blade forged a channel through the mutants, grinding and crushing indiscriminately. Second Squad focused on keeping its flanks clear, using frag grenades and point-blank firepower to hold the worst of the horde back.

Incrementally, the bridge rose. The Carcharodons found themselves advancing up a slope, almost halfway towards what had once been the structure’s centre, but which was now a hanging edge rising towards the fire-wreathed sky.

Arihu had noticed what was happening. The Vindicator grumbled to a halt, then, jetting black smoke from its four vertical exhaust vents, it began to roll backwards, before the ever-increasing angle threatened to send it tumbling.

‘Stay with the Vindicator,’ Kordi instructed. ‘Ebb-tide.’

The horde came on. Their charge became an avalanche as the slope of the bridge became too steep for those near its far end to stand. They tumbled down onto the withdrawing Carcharodons, who could no longer hold them back with firepower alone.

Kordi clamped his boltgun and unleashed his chainsword. There was no finesse in his first or second strokes, or in any that followed. He hewed through misshapen bodies and the metallic forms of corrupt skitarii, shearing them apart, their spasming remains battering into his unyielding bulk.

He kept a tight rein on his emotions, though the intensity of the killing, the sheer brutality of holding back the deluge of bodies, dredged up the primal predator that swam below the surface. He wanted desperately to shed the blood of these abominations. To abandon a lifetime of indoctrination and stride forward, mounting the slope and slaughtering as he went.

Instead, he kept going back, a part of his mind remaining conscious of the bulk of Rangu’s Hammer to his left, still steadily reversing. Neku, Arrona and Wiremu were there too, the rest of Second Squad on the Vindicator’s other flank.

To lose control now would be even worse than a betrayal of the Chapter’s doctrines. It would be a betrayal of his void brothers.

The bridge had passed a forty-five-degree angle. The mutants began physically falling on top of the Carcharodons, a downpour of the lost and the damned. Rangu’s Hammer was overrun, only its prow clear thanks to the fact that, rather than retreat within his hatch, Arihu had freed his chainaxe and was sending shorn body parts flying with every swing. The tank kept rolling backwards.

Kordi felt his centre of balance about to drop away, a dangerous tipping sensation triggering his auto-stabilisers. They would buy him only a few moments more. The Vindicator’s engine roared as its driver, Brother Arik, gunned it to maximum, trying to outrun the imposition of Diamantus’ gravity by the bridge’s slow, relentless tilt.

Kordi did not know how far they had to go. He could only continue his hacking match, feeling the angle finally become too much.

He locked his teeth so he didn’t roar with frustration as he found himself falling.

Bodies crunched beneath him. He rolled and was back up almost instantly, chainsword still spitting blood. He found no immediate targets, just the rest of Second Squad righting themselves. They had only fallen perhaps half a dozen yards, all that had remained of the bridge before reaching the entrance arches. Rangu’s Hammer had made it off in time, idling now between the banks of throbbing generators.

There was a deep groan and the slow crunch of stone and rockcrete meeting as the bridge completed its raising.

Kordi heard a series of snaps and ticking noises – radium weaponry. Ze-One-Prime’s loyal skitarii, guarding their master beneath the arches, were terminating those mutants who had survived the Carcharodons and the fall. Silence followed, besides the thrum of the generators.

The raised bridge had now formed a wall at the end of the arches. Blood was pouring down its pockmarked surface, mangled body parts still sliding and oozing groundwards to form a charnel heap and a spreading pool of viscera on the floor below. The Carcharodons had fallen into the midst of their butcher’s work.

Ze-One-Prime approached from amongst the generator banks, leaning heavily on their cane, claw-limbs scraping the ground. They paused for a moment beside Rangu’s Hammer, gazing up at the gore-streaked siege tank in what might have been reverence and awe, or just the cold calculus of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Then, they addressed Kordi.

‘My thanks, Omekra-five-one-Kordi. The skybridge yet obeys the Omnissiah, though it would likely not have done so in time without your intervention. I pray you suffered no loss?’

Kordi had already checked the rest of the squad. Superficial injuries and damage to wargear, and a relatively heavy expenditure of ammunition, but nothing more.

‘We remain battle-optimal,’ he said.

‘The fort is ours, but my sensors detect further threats all around us, closing in,’ Ze-One-Prime said. ‘I fear, Carcharodon, that we are now under siege.’

CHAPTER XVIII

Mount Antikythera had a new crown.

By the will of the Infernal Architect, the core of  Grim Destiny had survived the rupture with the rest of the great hulk. It had remained whole as it slammed down into the top of the mountain, overloading the void shields and obliterating the defensive batteries that had pounded at it in vain. The top of the eminence was pulverised, and landslides carried away part of its upper slopes.

The Pinnacle itself, buried as it was beneath the final ascent, was not destroyed, but it was broken. The throne room of the Fabricator General was split, much of its rock ceiling collapsed inwards, its data-stack pillars splintered.

Through the ruptures, the madness poured. It flowed down from the heart of the Mother-of-Them-All, now embedded into Mount Antikythera, unleashed after an age of dormancy. Daemonic terrors and cultist warriors swarmed into the Pinnacle, their gibbering and shrieking resounding through the cracked corridors and the administrative chambers. They gorged themselves on all those they found, ripping metal from flesh, sundering the servants of the Omnissiah with manic abandon.

Even more terrible things came with them. Daemon engines great and small, each crafted by the masterful nightmare-artisans of the Forge of Souls, dragged themselves down to join in the feast, like leviathans drawn from the deeps into shallow waters by the scent of blood. The cultists and mutants praised them as living idols, offering up shrieking captives, casting them into their brass jaws and mechanical orifices filled with spinning shred-blades.

The power of the empyrean gripped the throne room of the Fabricator General. Insanity had already broken out even before the hulk’s terrible impact had shaken the mountain to its core. Now every precious law the Adeptus Mechanicus held to was being undone, unmade by a new reality.

The cogitators rose up, metal maws rending open in their processor units, writhing cables dragging the screaming adepts that had once worked and worshipped before them into their cores. Flesh-growths burst from those pillars that still stood, tentacles and many-jointed appendages that struggled against the ceiling and floor, as though trying to rip themselves free from the weight they had been forced to bear up for millennia. The wire bundles that covered so much of the floor hauled down those trying to flee, binding and strangling them, or pinning them for the half-seen metallic creatures that began to swarm through the chamber’s depths.

Servitors betrayed their programming and turned on their tech-priests. The binary choirs began to scream in black binharic, the words ripping apart their throats even as they were forced to continue speaking unspeakable words. Servo-skulls cracked as spidery limbs burst from within, allowing them to descend and claw at their former masters, gnawing at them with their bony jaws and gibbering nonsensical data. The great Cog Mechanicum above the chamber’s main portal split, sundered by a flesh-thing that clawed its way through the fragile fabric separating the materium from the warp. It screamed numbers that could not exist, overloading the mind-units of all that heard it.

The cogitator pyramid suffered the worst. The sacred engine-sigils carved into its flank combusted and burned away, and its black stone tiers began to bubble and melt like tar, consuming the Fabricator General’s court, melding them into the great machine. Their screaming and begging rose louder than all the rest of the cacophony filling the throne room, a dark prayer to the true master of machines. They were fused, meat and metal both, as one with the ziggurat, forming a pyramid of writhing, conjoined horror.

Only Horrum was untouched. The Fabricator General remained seated upon his throne, frozen with fear. Voldire had demanded that it be so. He wished for no impairment to the Fabricator General’s servos and no impediment to his mind when he imparted the Primordial Truth, in person.

The chaos heralded the datagnost’s arrival. He was brought down from the ruptured heart of the Mother-of-Them-All, carried upon a palanquin of metal that was ever shifting and re-forming, like liquid mercury locked around a powerful magnetic point. His faculty were with him, that great gathering of so-called hereteks, visionary beings dedicated to the progression of humanity. They passed through the warping terror. Occasionally, a few would pause briefly to converse and record some part of the derangement gripping the chamber, always eager for greater understanding, for further insights into those precious moments when the divine touched mundane reality.

Voldire gave no thought to what was happening around his stately progress. His focus was on the Fabricator General’s throne. Equal parts elation and determination gripped him. He was coming to the end of a long road. He could taste eternity, and the immortality that awaited, achingly bitter and sickly-sweet, nauseating, addictive, invigorating.

Everything was proceeding according to the Infernal Architect’s grand designs. But first, he had to give back to those who had first set his feet upon the road to the divine. First he had to set others free. That would begin with the Fabricator General.

The procession reached the hellish ziggurat, and Voldire hauled himself down onto the first tier, his imps scuttling and scrambling over him, continuing to cleave away the shifting, burgeoning growths that were forever trying to swallow him up. His machine parts, those not subsumed by the flesh that was being forever gifted to him, wheezed and creaked as he climbed, the still-living, still-functioning bodies fused to the pyramid clawing and screaming at him with mindless horror as he passed over them.

He reached the throne at the pinnacle of insanity, wheezing, towering over the Fabricator General.

‘Do you recognise me?’ Voldire demanded.

The Fabricator General made no answer. Voldire bared his drooling steel fangs.

‘Technis Adept Gideous Voldire, engram tag three-eighteen-zero-five. A member of the Third Industrial Maniple, Sector E121K.’ 

Still, nothing. The Fabricator General’s optics indicated no recognition.

Voldire stooped, grunting slightly as two of the imps worked together to saw away a particularly reluctant swelling developing across his shoulder. His face was inches from the Fabricator General’s.

‘Do not be afraid, Helsarch,’ he said. ‘I have not come here seeking vengeance, though you tortured me and defiled me and cast me out.’

’I am not Helsarch,’ the Fabricator General said, finally speaking up, his deeply ingrained logic circuits overcoming the system-numbing horror of his circumstances. ‘Honoured Fabricator General Helsarch ceased to function permanently over one thousand, three hundred and twenty-two years and eighty-six days ago.’

Voldire did not hear him.

‘I have returned home,’ he whispered, his voice a sickly, low whisper. ‘And I have come with holy purpose. This is a crusade of enlightenment, a liberation. I have discovered the Truth, and I wish to share it with you now, Fabricator General Helsarch. I wish to forgive you for what you did, and in doing so, I will free you.’

He reached out with both hands – one a vice-like servo-arm and the other still fleshy and organic – and cradled Horrum’s head, gently. The faculty did not hear what words their datagnost whispered, and Horrum made no move to resist. After a short while, Voldire took a single step back, and the whole pyramid seemed to shiver, like one living beast.

By then, the Fabricator General of Diamantus had finally realised the Truth.

He screamed – screamed with joy, Voldire was sure. He began to rip at himself, first his fine robes and his chain of office, and then at the metal underneath. The flawless chrome was sundered, plating buckling and splitting as it was wrenched away. The Fabricator General’s torso was exposed, all bloody and slick, but it was not ruptured synth-organs and cybernetic enhancements within. Instead there was skin – pale, fresh, new, as though the shining metal had never been anything more than a shell, an elaborate costume.

Horrum did the same with his head, cracking the chrome casing and wrenching out the bionic optics. Beneath were not the gory sockets of his skull, but his real eyes, along with his face, fully formed.

He was still screaming.

He did not stop his clawing motions. His fingers, still sheathed in chrome, ripped his face. They tore the skin like a mask, blood pouring. He gouged out his own eyes, ripped out his teeth, began rending open his chest the way he had ripped open his red chasuble.

Beneath the gory mess was metal – not the royal gleam of his former bionics but rough black iron, skeletal-like. And when the skull was fully exposed, Horrum snatched the red-dripping, grinning metal jaws and began to prise them open. Within was a mouth of flesh, screaming once more, more of his face becoming visible again as the jaw split and cracked grotesquely apart.

Over and over again, the Fabricator General flayed himself. He would tear apart his metal shell, only to find his flesh-body within. Rip that, and there was more machine underneath, somehow re-forming, never reducing in size and mass.

Voldire’s faculty gasped and murmured in wonderment. Lesser beings would undoubtedly have called what was happening a miracle, an unexplainable phenomenon of divine providence. They were men of science, however, who understood the True Logic – the reality that lay behind the drab and musty façade of the observable universe. Many of them began scribbling on data-slates or in skin-bound books, fascinated in a detached, academic kind of way. Horrum hadn’t stopped screaming.

‘Such blessings,’ Voldire said, an envious note in his voice as he observed the phenomenon. ‘See how the Truth sets him free, again and again?’

The faculty nodded as one.

Voldire lifted Horrum’s writhing, shrieking form – at that point, halfway through opening its skin once again – and placed the Fabricator General down almost reverently beside the throne. Then, the datagnost sat on the black Diamantus bedrock as it started to blister, not with any great ceremony or pomposity, but brusquely, like a man who wished to be about his business.

Immortality stood waiting to be claimed, not through unknowable rites and the capricious whims of daemonkin. Voldire would fashion his own godhood through the unassailable power of logic and scientific reason, using the keys given to him, the Truth taught by the Architect.

‘Dear old Helsarch has embraced enlightenment,’ he said over Horrum’s howling. ‘But many others have not. Now, my learned colleagues, our true work begins.’

CHAPTER XIX

The Exiles took defensive positions in the ruins of the manufactorum just as the next wave of the Archenemy rose up against them.

The most secure space was at the building’s front, where the wall bordering the street remained almost intact. The four Carcharodons occupied one of the buildings off from it, what looked like an old foreman’s office, a desk and several crumpled filing cabinets all that still stood proud of the rubble. The far wall was gone, leaving it open to what had once been the main factory floor, but the walls to the adjoining offices were still standing, and offered to guard the Exiles’ flanks.

The Neverborn came at them, sweeping over the fractured remnants of the machinery that had once occupied the primary floor. Sharr watched them racing one another to be the first to die on the blades of the Space Marines. One was part cyber-hound, but with a human head grafted on in place of a canid one, the face flushed with rage and hunger, the mouth distended in a panting roar. Another had arms instead of legs, each limb ending in a mass of rusty blades that scraped the rockcrete floor as it scurried forward. Others had whirring sawblades grafted into their wrists or jaws, or had fists fused into sledgehammers. One particularly hulking beast with a muzzled face had a hollow metal gut that burned like a walking furnace.

Sharr did not know which among the oncoming horde were the victims of the cult’s nightmarish experiments and which were true Neverborn, daemons fused with machines. It did not matter. He would destroy them all.

Blood Eye and Shadow opened fire, having waited until the twisted tide was almost on top of them. They couldn’t afford to waste ammunition. Sharr kept his pistol locked. He knew he only had two magazines left. Every bolt was precious to an Exile.

The opening salvo carved apart the leading abominations. The rest surged on, even those terribly maimed by the explosive ammunition continuing to drag themselves towards the Carcharodons as they were trampled.

Sharr stepped out with Talon to meet them. He triggered his chainsword at the last moment, a part of his subconscious noting with some curiosity that he did not thrill at the sudden roar of the weapon or its angry vibrations as they ran up his arm. His mind was cold, sharp, his focus clear. His secondary heart hadn’t even kicked in yet.

Something struck the wall of the foreman’s office. There was a detonation. Fire and fury and smoke and dust and shattered brickwork. It drove into him from the side, pitching him over despite the efforts of his armour’s servos and auto-stabilisers. He registered collision impacts, shrapnel, but no penetrations. Like any Space Marine, he remained focused, aware of every facet of what was happening to him and around him, despite being caught in a blast that would have seen an unenhanced human’s ears ruptured and their mind knocked into an uncomprehending fug.

He rose, splintered pieces of mortar raining down on him. Talon was still at his side, likewise righting himself. Unharmed on the visor display. Shadow and Blood Eye less so; they had been closer to the point of impact, both showing amber, injured.

He was sure they had experienced worse. He swung his chainsword, decapitating a staggering thing with a cage around its head and saws fashioned from the exposed serrated bones of its forearms. The pressure from the attacking horde, which had been just about to burst over them, had momentarily been relieved by the blast – it had done more damage to them than the Space Marines.

‘What–’ he heard Talon begin to say, but the question rapidly became moot.

Most of the manufactorum’s front had been demolished, and the remains were swiped away with a crash by a huge metal claw. Something vast loomed through the smoke, black metal rimmed with bone and glistening with blood and oil. Its articulated limbs wheezed and clanked, six of them, ending in massive vice-claws, supporting a boxy body like a great mechanical insect. Its front was fashioned in brass in the likeness of a roaring daemonic visage, with a still-smoking battle cannon protruding from between its fanged jaws.

‘Defiler,’ Blood Eye snarled.

The Carcharodons didn’t pause to consider a response as the thing tore down the remains of the wall separating them. They split, reacting instinctively, like bonded predators. Sharr swung left with Shadow, vaulting rubble and deformed bodies, locking his knife and snapping a krak grenade free as he went.

Twin autocannons hardwired to the right of its chassis began to batter as the nightmare construct attempted to track Sharr and Shadow, heavy-calibre rounds hacking up the space around the pair but failing to draw a bead. Blood Eye and Talon had disappeared right, forcing it to split its attention, Sharr and Shadow working to give them an opening.

The Defiler was a daemon engine, a kind of battle walker piloted by the sentience of a blasphemous entity bound within its metal frame. Sharr had no doubt the corrupt foundries of the space hulk they had boarded had produced many such abominations.

It ceased trying to track Sharr and Shadow, seeming to sense Blood Eye and Talon driving in at it from the other side. It lashed out with two of its limbs, claws cracking through more stone, one catching Talon as he made to charge it. The Carcharodon was bowled over like a child’s plaything. Blood Eye was more fortunate – he managed to duck beneath the leg stabbing down at him, sending a flurry of bolts into the exposed mechanical workings of the limb’s underside. They were trying to hobble it, slice its hamstrings.

The Defiler swung fully to face the pair, and Sharr and Shadow took their cue. The mutant horde was throwing itself at them with even greater fervour than before, but the Defiler, oblivious to those who worshipped it, dismembered and crushed most of those trying to get at the Carcharodons. Sharr beat aside several of those who had avoided the repositioning of the closest blade-limb, darting under it and lashing out with his chainsword at one of the cables conjoining the middle joints.

Stinking, ichor-like fluid burst forth as the saw teeth bit, severing the connection. He made to cut another, but without warning the sword’s motor stuttered and failed, the viciously rotating teeth juddering to a halt. Snarling with fury, he hacked at the mechanical limb with the inactive weapon.

Shadow had gone for another leg, grabbing hold of several of the blades and spines decorating its armour plating and using them to haul himself up. The bound Neverborn sensed the danger, twisting back away from Talon and Blood Eye. It snatched at Shadow with its other bladed forelimb, the Exile swaying to avoid being pincered, losing half his pauldron to a grazing blow that nearly knocked him off his perch.

He failed to avoid the Defiler’s second attempt to seize him. It caught him around the waist with its three huge claws, and would have sheared him in half if he hadn’t been able to jam his combat knife into the articulators of the rearmost talon, locking it in place and ensuring it couldn’t fully clamp down on him.

Sharr knew the blade’s resistance would not last. He threw his chainsword to the side, kicking down another mutant trying to scrabble at him from under the Defiler’s chassis, and snatched hold of the limb he had partly incapacitated. Krak grenade still gripped in one hand, he used the other to haul himself up the way Shadow had, taking advantage of the engine’s wicked decoration.

He scaled the thing’s hull, his auto-senses registering that the metal was scalding to the touch, as though it had just clambered forth from its forge. It had hatches, just as an ordinary war machine might, but they were all sealed, chained, and inscribed with blasphemous runes. Prising one open would take too long with the weapons Sharr had to hand. But he had already identified a different means of penetration for the grenade.

He mounted the top of the hull. The engine bucked like some wild beast, trying to throw him off, but he had mag-clamped to its armour. Both his hearts were now beating out a furious tattoo.

The battle cannon that formed part of its maw was directly under him, and he planted himself above it, priming the grenade and reaching out to throw it down the barrel. Except suddenly, what should have been a killing blow became impossible to deliver. His battle plate had locked again, the servos disobeying him, seizing up. The grenade, primed and gripped in his armoured left hand, was stuck fast.

Sharr’s mind, razor-keen with battle focus, knew he had a fraction over three seconds before detonation. He could keep hold of the grenade, aware that it would likely kill him, or at least cost him an arm, and hope that the proximity of the blast would also damage the Defiler, or he could try and let it go, dropping it and wasting it – it was one of the few remaining krak grenades the Exiles had left. Either way, Shadow wouldn’t be able to hold on for much longer.

Sharr made his choice with two seconds remaining, hissing with effort as he tried to force open his fist. The krak grenade slipped from his grasp and detonated just in front of the daemon engine.

The Defiler buckled, and Sharr fell, his stabilisers deactivated. He hit the rubble beneath hard, but found as he did so that he could move again – the momentary immobilisation had vanished. He found his feet, mutant scum scrabbling at him from beneath the walker’s bulk, snarling and shrieking.

The krak grenade had damaged the daemon engine’s muzzle cannon, leaving it twisted and bent, but seemed to have done it no further harm. Shadow was still struggling in its foreclaws, trying to prise himself free. Talon and Blood Eye were focusing on hacking the engine’s other limbs out from under it.

Shadow’s combat knife shattered.

There was a cracking noise, followed by a wet crunch. Blood jetted over the Defiler’s talons as the huge blades finally scissored shut, cutting Shadow in half. The bisected parts tumbled heavily down almost on top of Sharr, a wave of blood drenching him.

The rage took him. A roar built in his throat, and for a moment he was lost. He was aware of blows against his armour, his knife finding flesh. More blood. He choked, his bellow of fury unfulfilled as he found himself taking a step towards the Defiler, tossing aside the savaged remains of one of the stitched-together mutants that had been trying to reach him.

The Defiler hadn’t even noticed him, perhaps sensing that the only thing he had left to harm it with was his knife. It swept back round to try and scythe apart Blood Eye and Talon, stumbling slightly on its damaged limbs.

Sharr, a bloody spectre amidst the carnage, made to leap at the daemon engine once more, to gouge open its hatches and rip asunder whatever malevolent spirit infested its hull with his bare hands. But an invisible force stopped him – not the warp-induced malfunctioning of his battle plate but a sudden, familiar presence that he felt in his mind, before hearing it made it real.

A voice boomed out from the direction of the street. It spoke a mixed tongue, some of it High Gothic, some of it a language Sharr knew he would not, and should not, understand.

It had an immediate effect on the Defiler. The machine punched its talons into the rubble and arched itself up, almost like a feline reacting with fear and anger. It tried to lumber around to face the sound, and Sharr saw that steam was now rising from its black frame, as though the hot metal were being doused.

His own sudden anger had left him, replaced by disbelief. Even the mutated horde had ceased trying to claw past the Defiler’s limbs to get at the Space Marines – they wailed and cringed back, as if the idol they worshipped had just been cast down and shattered.

A light suffused the whorling smoke and dust, a green glimmer. The words grew ever louder, until they were booming in Sharr’s ears, making them ache and causing the broken stones underfoot to shudder.

The Defiler shuddered too. It tried to back away from the light, its front limbs now up and clacking in agitation, its twisted muzzle swinging from side to side with distress. There was a popping sound as rivets burst and bolts came unstuck. The walker’s hatches had started to rip open, shattering their chains, burning out their binding runes.

Through the possessed war machine’s limbs, Sharr saw what was tormenting it. A Space Marine, clad in blue, bearing a bone staff with a shard of green stone wedged in its tip. His face was uncovered, gaunt and terrible, eyes blazing with the sick fires of the warp. Ghost lights flitted and played over his psychic hood and staff.

It was Te Kahurangi, the Pale Nomad, come seemingly from the ether itself, like a revenant materialising to ensure the remaining Exiles did not experience the release of death before they had earned it.

The Defiler shrieked with a voice of tortured metal. Te Kahurangi was excising it, banishing the daemon bound inside. Such an effort would have been beyond all but the most powerful sanctioned psyker, yet the Pale Nomad showed no hesitation, bearing down on the war machine towering above him, his staff held high, a locus for the terrible powers he was calling upon.

The daemon engine’s hatches split open, all in unison, with a resounding bang. A wailing noise followed, like the rushing of a gale through a thicket of razor-trees, stabbing into Sharr’s ears like needles. He flinched, even his transhuman body unable to cancel out the pain.

The final phrases of Te Kahurangi’s rite rang out, words of abjuration and admonishment, booming as though from a laud-hailer. The Defiler stumbled to the side, the way a man dealt a mortal blow to the head might stagger. Black light blazed from every gaping hatch, and the screaming reached a pitch no longer detectable on the mortal plane. Sharr’s auto-senses overloaded, his aural implants on the point of rupture.

And then, it was done. With a crash the Defiler collapsed, legs curled under it, and slumped to the side on the rubble. It remained there, steam still rising gently from its jagged form. It was metal now and nothing more, the malice burned out of it.

The sacred silence the Carcharodons were taught to venerate returned to the ruins. Sharr half turned, but the mutant horde had already gone, fleeing so they did not have to witness the destruction of one of their demigods.

Te Kahurangi approached the trio of Exiles, bone staff clacking on broken bricks, its green light now extinguished. He passed the daemon engine, paying no heed to the mechanical abomination he had just defeated.

Bail Sharr knelt among the blood and bodies. The other Exiles swiftly did likewise. All knew the figure of the Pale Nomad.

‘Greetings, brothers,’ Te Kahurangi said. None of the Exiles responded. To address him in fraternal terms would have been a violation of Chapter doctrine.

‘Stand,’ he instructed. They did so. Sharr looked at him. A single line of dark blood was running from the Chief Librarian’s nose and over his thin lips. Te Kahurangi wiped it away with the thumb of his gauntlet.

‘See to your fallen,’ he instructed.

Blood Eye shifted to the bisected remains of Shadow, and took his boltgun, magazines and sole remaining fragmentation grenade. He had no means of salvaging his progenoids, but he tagged the body’s location on the auspex. Then he stood, and nodded to Te Kahurangi.

There were no rites for Shadow, no talk of an exile concluded or memorialisation of bold deeds in the service of Rangu and the Forgotten One. He was dead, and that was the end of it.

‘Come,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘Let us be gone, before they return.’

CHAPTER XX

The dim lighting of the White Maw’s bridge dipped and shuddered as the strike cruiser’s shields were dealt more impacts. Techmarine Uthulu looked to Teko, but the shipmaster’s whole attention was given over to the navigational pit he had descended into, towering over the serfs operating the cogitator stations and sub-holos. The bodies of those crew members who had been terminated by the Red Brethren still lay underfoot, their blood drooling through the bridge’s grate decking, forgotten for now.

‘Well?’ Kino snapped. He had finally risen from the coral block of the command throne, his Red Brethren bodyguard arrayed around the raised platform, silent, fists still dripping crimson.

Teko refused to reply immediately, shifting from one display to another. Eventually he turned, gazing up at the nominal Reaper Prime.

‘I am charting as best a course as I can through the wreckage, but it is densest above the point you wish to geo-lock, Mount Antikythera.’

‘What about communications?’ Kino asked.

‘Still down,’ Uthulu said from the station he had taken up, amongst the vox-banks and their implanted, shaven-headed serf operators. ‘Discordance reigns over every channel beyond the White Maw’s own. I have been unable to reach any of the Third Company over any band or frequency. The Adeptus Mechanicus’ communication channels are either shut or static-corrupted. The ship’s machine spirit is actively rejecting any attempt to commune with the noosphere – I suspect it is the vehicle of much of the taint.’

‘We are useless up here,’ Kino snarled. ‘Blind and muzzled!’

Neither Teko nor Uthulu offered any comment on their Company Master’s assessment. It would do no good to point out that it had been Kino’s decision to remain on the White Maw prior to the hulk’s collision. He had envisaged an orbital battle where he might prove himself at the head of his old First Company brethren, without the aid of his new Shiver. Now, he was locked in orbit, the White Maw bombarded by the debris of defence platforms and those parts of the hulk that hadn’t crashed into the planet. Diamantus’ atmosphere, choked with dust and detritus, would not permit even the company’s Thunderhawk gunships to make planetfall.

‘We are still suffering malfunctions and traces of scrapcode invasion,’ Teko said, climbing up out of the nav pit and approaching Kino. Briefly Uthulu thought the shipmaster was going to seek to reclaim his throne, but he stopped short of the wall of Red Brethren, continuing to speak.

‘That strongly suggests whatever malignant force was behind the outages we suffered during the hulk’s collision is still in operation. It is possibly now emanating from the surface.’

‘How long until the atmosphere is clear enough to launch our atmospheric assets?’

‘That is difficult to calculate so soon after the primary impact, but certainly a day-cycle, at least.’

Kino growled audibly. Uthulu pursed his lips, silently disgusted by how visibly unsettled the Company Master was. Such base frustrations were a dereliction of the Chapter’s doctrines of control.

‘Techmarine, prepare the teleportation chamber,’ Kino ordered, turning his attention on Uthulu, who moved across the bridge to stand beside Teko.

‘As I told you before, Company Master, teleportation given current circumstances, without an active beacon to lock on to, would be extremely fraught,’ he said, hardly bothering to veil the scorn he felt. ‘And that is without factoring in the malfunctions we are suffering. It will take time for me to purge and reconsecrate the teleportarium, time I do not currently have if the shipmaster and I are to keep the rest of the White Maw functioning. Besides, we are not yet in a position to mount a teleportation strike on the surface coordinates you have demanded.’

There was another brief power dip as the shields took another hit, the strike cruiser colliding with lesser wreckage as it was forced, on Kino’s orders, through the broken, burning debris towards the epicentre of where the hulk had come apart. The Company Master wanted to strike directly into the heart of Mount Antikythera, but the capital ship was still some distance from reaching a point above the surface eminence.

‘Open fire on the wreckage,’ Kino ordered.

‘It will take days to forge a suitable path–’ Teko began, but Kino spoke over him.

‘Then all the more reason to start now! I am going to Diamantus, and I don’t care whether I have to break this ship in half to get there!’

The Pale Nomad took the Exiles to the edge of the mountain, downwards, to the point where the lesser industrial sprawl met with the habzones and the slope became level ground. There the forces of the Archenemy had not yet fully encroached, and while the destitute, ordinary people who made up Diamantus’ workforce wailed and cowered and fled before the four giants who loomed from out of the death pall gripping their city, they did not attack them.

‘The warp-taint here is rooted in the mechanical,’ Te Kahurangi explained as he led the three surviving Void Exiles off the street and into a derelict-looking generatorium. ‘Madness has not gripped the common populace, yet.’

‘Have the machine-men fallen to it?’ Talon asked.

‘Many, but not all.’

The generatorium had failed. Its cavernous interior lay in darkness, except for the occasional actinic flare of light as dying discharges sparked and lashed between the orbs of the motive force pillars that loomed up all around.

‘I must request that you go on overwatch, and guard this place for a short while,’ Te Kahurangi told Blood Eye and Talon. ‘There are only two entrances, fore and aft of this chamber.’

Wordlessly, the two Exiles moved to locate and defend the access points, leaving Sharr and Te Kahurangi alone.

‘Walk with me,’ the Chief Librarian said.

Like the other Exiles, Sharr complied without comment, falling in alongside the Pale Nomad as he started to pace steadily between the sparking pillars of cabling and brass.

When he had first seen the Chief Librarian advancing on the Defiler, he had wondered if he was in the grip of some cruel form of warp madness. The Pale Nomad was like a spectre, risen from another life, another existence that Sharr was slowly starting to forget. His reappearance left him with a strange, haunting sense of doubt, unwelcome amidst circumstances so desperate. So far he had refused to explain anything, refused to ward away that uncertainty with clear advice or instructions.

‘You are much changed, Bail Sharr,’ Te Kahurangi said.

‘That is not my name,’ Sharr said immediately.

‘What is it then?’

‘Aleph–’

‘Our tag designates are not our names, by design. What do the ones you keep company with call you?’

‘Blind One.’

‘You do not seem blind to me.’

To Sharr, the words sounded dangerously close to mockery. He held his tongue.

‘What did you feel, when you found the bodies of Ruku and Warak?’ Te Kahurangi asked.

Sharr had not told him of how they had discovered the two slain members of the Third Company, but the extent of the Chief Librarian’s knowledge was never a surprise.

‘Anger,’ Sharr said. ‘The root of my Blindness.’

‘What else?’

‘I do not understand what–’

‘You are not without emotion, Bail Sharr. Adeptus Astartes have little to nothing in common with those we are sworn to protect, and our brotherhood even more so. But we are not automata. We are not like the servitors of this world, or even their tech-priest masters. There is more inside you than anger.’

‘Frustration.’ Sharr almost spat the word. ‘And… sorrow. Perhaps regret is more accurate. I do not know.’

‘We are rarely, if ever, called upon to interrogate such feelings,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘I have heard it said that the Adeptus Astartes are less than men. That might seem a strange claim, for we are so much more in so many ways. Superior in every physical regard. Yet in a few little, vital comparisons, we fall short. We do not feel as a man might feel, understand as he understands.’

Sharr said nothing. More phantom electricity sparked and snapped from the pillars as they moved between them, throwing the briefest illumination on the two.

‘We cannot easily undertake bouts of introspection,’ Te Kahurangi went on. ‘Our brotherhood especially. And in that sense we are something less than human. Much less. We have been remade, by gene-engineering and by doctrinal adherence, and by our long, shared exile, so that we do not consider. Reforged only to act, to do. We are like the blade that cuts, the club that beats, and knows not what it does.’

‘Good. Such purity of purpose is a blessing from the Void Father.’

‘You say that because you do not know any better. Because you are incapable of comprehension, as I have just said.’

‘This is an ill time for your philosophising, Pale Nomad.’

‘Tell me what you instructed when you discovered Ruku and Warak.’

‘I advised their progenoids be retrieved.’

‘Yes. And those instructions – orders, not advice – were given with frustration and sorrow. They were born out of the considerations of a Company Master performing his duties.’

‘To retrieve gene-seed from our fallen is not only the preserve of a Company Master,’ Sharr said. ‘Had I not been present, the others would have still considered it.’

‘But it was not their first priority. Their first thoughts were to restock ammunition and consider the defensibility of the surrounding structure. They have never led a battle company. They are not as keenly aware as you are of the need to preserve our genetic heritage, our future legacy. They do not think like the Reaper Prime.’

‘I am not Reaper Prime.’

The words burst from his lips like gunshots, ringing through the darkling space. They had both ceased their pacing.

The pillars sparked again, seemingly in answer to his denial, the snapshot of illumination playing over Sharr’s emotionless helm and the gaunt, lined features of the Chief Librarian. He was smiling, the expression swallowed swiftly by the dark.

‘You are whatever the Chapter demands you be,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘That is true of all of us. Exile or Chief Librarian, we all have a master.’

‘The Chapter has demanded my exile. I will not break it. I will not dishonour–’

‘Honour is a dead thing.’

Sharr bowed his head in frustration, fists clenched.

‘Was it truly the Chapter that demanded your exile?’ Te Kahurangi pressed. ‘Or did you sentence yourself?’

Still, Sharr said nothing.

‘Have you tasted the Blindness since planetfall?’ Te Kahurangi went on, motioning for them to begin walking once more.

‘Clarify,’ Sharr demanded, beginning to follow, forcing himself through his anger.

‘Have you lost control since setting foot on Diamantus?’

‘I am uncertain,’ he said, truthfully. Parts of the recent combat were a haze, one that it would take time and concentration to strip back.

His thoughts returned to the lictor he had encountered just before evacuating Grim Destiny. He knew the nature of the hive fleets such creatures scouted for. He knew that each organism was akin to a cell in a living body, uncomprehending as it fulfilled its function without emotion or hesitation. He remembered the void of its black, dead eyes. The lictor understood its actions, its very existence, as little as a sword or club would.

‘What is it you wish to say to me, Pale Nomad?’ Sharr asked, his patience at an end.

‘I wish to test the weave of your future, to follow its threads as far as I can, to see where they lead.’

‘Why do Librarians speak with such ridiculous obfuscation?’

‘Because it is difficult for one touched by the warp to pare back their experiences into something understandable to one who is not.’

‘My lack of comprehension appears to be a reoccurring problem.’

‘Then let me torment you no longer. I have advice you would do well to heed while I leave you for a time. Go south-west with the Exiles, following the edge of the mountain slope. You will find more of your Shiver. Do not spurn their company. Once you are reunited with them, I shall return.’

‘Why do you leave us?’ Sharr demanded.

‘Third Company is scattered and broken. We must all play a part in making it whole again.’

Sharr wanted to snap at him, to repeat that he was not a member of his old brotherhood any longer. He knew it would do no good. He was being subordinated to the Chief Librarian’s schemes, as had so often happened in the past.

‘I am inloading the Third Company’s full suite of tactical data,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘I have purged it of the discordance these servants of the Archenemy have brought with them. I am unable to mend the vox, however. That requires a level of knowledge of the machine that is beyond me. Our best hope of re-establishing full communications between the company is securing the city’s secondary vox-array.’

‘Is that our objective?’ Sharr asked.

‘In time. For now, your task is to defeat the shame that hobbles you. If you do that, Blind One, you might yet recover your sight.’

CHAPTER XXI

First Squad linked up with Fourth Squad as they withdrew from a forge temple further up the slope of Mount Antikythera, just as darkness was beginning to fall. They were the first Carcharodons First Squad had found since the hulk had started pounding the city. Red Tane could only hope they would not be the last.

He suspected their strike leader, Aaradi, had taken it upon himself to secure the most defensible site he could. Amidst the fire and tumult of the sundered city, the temple, carved out of Diamantus’ bedrock and adamantine, would have seemed like the perfect fortress.

But it had turned into a trap. The forges themselves had started to rise up, possessed by the madness that now reigned over the heart of the megafactorum. They had sought to consume the Carcharodons, and had succeeded in devouring one of the void brothers in the now-sentient, blackened steel jaws of their furnaces.

At the same time, hordes of Chaotic monstrosities spilling from the impact sites had besieged the temple. It was as the remains of Fourth Squad fought their way out that First Squad reached them.

‘Red Tane, get the attention of that mutant filth,’ Nuritona instructed as they shifted along a workflow alley and into the street leading to the forge temple’s main entrance. Fourth Squad had just broken free from the main doors and were driving out into the baying mob beyond, whilst behind them the walls of the structure were torn down by the machine-monsters seeking to free themselves from their former housing.

Red Tane loped ahead, a predator let loose. The Chapter forbade war cries, but in this instance he had permission to issue a challenge. He set his helmet’s vocaliser to maximum output, and roared at the rearmost ranks of the horde.

The deformed horrors turned, hissing, and a cry went up as they began to scramble towards him instead, splitting the mass assailing Fourth Squad.

The Void Sword took the bloated, horned head from the first thing to reach him. The second had its fang-metal face staved in by the Coral Shield. Red Tane killed the way few others in the Shiver killed – not just with the brute strength all Space Marines possessed, nor with that razor-sharp speed and grace that was the preserve of the finest swordsmen. He melded the bloody savagery that his brethren were known for in combat with a ferocious economy, an efficiency that was almost machine-like. He rarely overextended, rarely missed his mark.

When he did, he hated himself.

Blade-skill or not, the Archenemy chattels would have surrounded him in a few moments, but then Nuritona, Tama and Ihaia were there. The latter’s volkite caliver lashed into the heretics on Red Tane’s left, deflagrating them in surges of fire and ash, the shots so close his armour registered the heat wash. Nuritona slammed bolts into the ones on his right, then was there with his chainsword, shifting wide to ensure he did not impede the swings and strokes of the Void Sword. Normally that would have been Henno’s place, wielding his spear just off Red Tane’s right shoulder while the Reaper Prime fought on the Champion’s left, but each member of the command squad was capable of fighting in any position. Losses could not be allowed to undermine the purity of the purge.

The remnants of Fourth Squad punched through to them, using frag grenades to help clear a channel. Behind them the forge temple seemed to be rising up on its foundations, fire blazing like a draconic exhalation from what had once been its front doors.

‘Withdraw,’ Nuritona ordered as the two squads linked up. Fourth had clearly suffered losses, within the forge temple and elsewhere – only four void brethren remained. Tama signed about the possibility of gene-seed recovery, but Nuritona simply shook his head.

First Squad covered their withdrawal, letting them pass through their ranks and back down the street.

Red Tane disengaged. It took more mental than physical effort, an unspoken catechism that reminded him of the silence and the stillness that brought to an end the killing frenzy that was forever trying to take hold.

The Blindness would not claim him.

‘Stalk tanks on both flanks,’ Ihaia warned. ‘Probably daemon engines.’

The weapons specialist’s observation was a keen one – there were scuttling shapes moving down the alleyways to the left and right, seemingly drawn to the ponderously rising monstrosity that had once been the forge temple. The nearest emerged onto the street, a demi-mechanical fiend with an autocannon sutured into its ichor-leaking, insectoid cranium. The weapon began to rattle over the heads of the horde still flinging themselves after the Carcharodons, stitching a row of impacts across the buildings further down the street.

‘We need to channel them,’ Aaradi suggested as the two squads continued to drop back, alternating firing and loading as they went. ‘Negate their numbers, impede their pursuit.’

‘There,’ Nuritona said after only the briefest pause, indicating a mag-rail cutting to the left of the street. It ran between the lesser manufactoria that clustered around the forge temple, a narrow channel passing between their grimy, red-bricked bulk.

‘Fourth Squad will take point,’ Nuritona said. ‘First will act as rearguard.’

The Carcharodons dropped down into the cutting, gravel crunching beneath their weight. They set off, moving quickly, following the line between the industrial buildings rising into the gloom on either side. The horde pursued them with abandon, tumbling like a living tide down onto the track bed. Red Tane fought the urge to turn at bay every step of the way, pacing himself as he moved forward behind Fourth Squad, Tama, Ihaia and Nuritona alternating to send firepower streaking back into their pursuers.

They reached an overpass, a footbridge crossing over the cutting. Red Tane stopped beneath it, letting Ihaia catch up around a bend in the track. Nuritona and Tama had already moved further down the line. The pressure of the pursuit was lessening, but the hideous screeching of those mutants who still had their scent was continuing to barrel down the confined space.

Ihaia paused beside him, clearly not expecting to find him waiting, motionless.

Red Tane did not care. The position was a good one. The cutting was still channelling those in pursuit, while the bridge offered protection to the flanks and overhead.

‘Go,’ he told Ihaia.

‘This is no time for senseless sacrifice,’ Ihaia said. ‘The company has lost enough.’

‘No sacrifice,’ Red Tane said tersely. ‘I am going to delay them, and I can do that better without worrying about blocking your fire lanes.’

‘You have sixty seconds,’ Nuritona’s voice crackled over the inter-squad vox. ‘I will revoke your right to solitary confinement on board the White Maw if you take any longer than that to rejoin us.’

Ihaia looked at him a moment longer. Red Tane could sense his lingering disapproval even behind his helmet’s maw-painted visor, but a combat situation was no time for disagreements. He set off after the others, volkite caliver whining as it recharged.

Red Tane had not been truly facetious towards Ihaia; he suspected there was only about a fifty per cent chance he would die here, on this worn old mag line. He had faced down far worse odds before.

The tide of biomechanical aberrations came surging round the bend in the track, like a pack of cyber-hounds with their hunt/kill imperatives dialled up to maximum.

Red Tane realised he was grinning.

The Carcharodon Astra rarely told stories, at least not as other Chapters did. Not for them the bombastic sagas or battle poems of the Space Wolves or White Scars, nor the rolls of honour or litanies of service beloved of the likes of the Ultramarines or Imperial Fists. If any of that had once been part of their culture, it had withered and died in the Outer Dark, like so much else, atrophying during that long, lonely exile.

Red Tane knew that his death, when it came, would be assessed for tactical insights, so that the Chapter might learn and thus better fulfil its duties, becoming sharper with the whetstone of experience. Besides that, however, there would be little to no eulogising. Perhaps a short reading from Beyond the Veil of Stars, nothing more. Just the silence. That was as it should be.

But that did not mean he didn’t relish a chance to make a stand against desperate odds. It was that brazen attitude that had helped make him Champion of the Third Company. And it was the same attitude, he assumed, that would speed him on the way to that deep, eternal silence.

The mutants reached him, and he began to kill them. The ground was good – no more than a scattering were able to get past along the cutting channel, certainly not enough to trouble Ihaia, Tama and Nuritona. His wargear was enduring some dissonance, with lag in a few servos and glitches on his visor. It reminded him of the brief failure beneath the rubble of the promethium extraction plant.

It would only become a problem if his armour locked out again. He murmured to its spirit as he did his bloody work, alternating thanks, cajolement and upbraiding in a manner that would likely have drawn a sharp rebuke from Techmarine Uthulu. Yet that was how he interacted with his battle plate, and it had not failed him yet, not fully.

He heard the sound of impacts in the gravel behind him and turned, slashing open another patchwork nightmare as it lunged at him. They were on the bridge overhead and had started dropping down, beginning to surround him.

If he was going to withdraw, the time was now.

He hesitated. The Blindness was not just raw savagery. It could also manifest as cold nihilism, a disregard for life that extended even to the self. He felt its tug. What did it matter if he stayed and perished here? Did the Chapter not teach, over and over, that the individual was unimportant? That the only worth was to be found in the fulfilment of duty unto death?

As though summoned by the cold, bitter siren song of his thoughts, bolt-rounds ripped into his attackers. There was an instinctive moment of anger as the mutant he was about to strike folded, its torso split apart. The feeling was replaced almost instantly by confusion, as he turned sharply, the Coral Shield ignited.

There were other Space Marines in the cutting – Carcharodons, but not of the Shiver. One kept to the edge, sending bolts into the mutant mass, while a second dashed into the melee at Red Tane’s side, wielding a club and a set of wicked bone talons.

The intrusion would scarcely have been welcomed if it was First or Fourth Squads, returned to aid him. That was before he noted the lack of markings on their armour.

Exiles. Outcasts, anathema who were not part of the brotherhoods of the battle companies. Lone Carcharodons, forced to band together on the most desperate of operations, often stripped of their most valuable arms and armour, and sometimes even of their memories. Red Tane felt a moment’s concern, and something akin to pity. They were wretched beings, their mere presence evoking the dread associated with the idea of failing the Chapter in some way. Red Tane had not been aware of any assigned to Diamantus. Certainly none had travelled with the Third Company fleet.

Then he saw the wargear of the third one.

He had dropped into the cutting last of all, wielding only a combat knife. While the one with the club and talons ripped open the mutants to Red Tane’s right, this one charged in on his left, working off the Champion’s shield arm with an efficiency that spoke of familiarity.

It took barely a minute for the four Space Marines to butcher their way through the remaining heretics. No further threat came either across the drenched gravel or from the sides of the cutting. Red Tane assumed his new allies had already dispatched the heretic forces on the bridge before dropping down.

He swung the Void Sword to let the worst of the ichor and oil-blood drizzle off it, sheathed it, then turned to the Exile who had fought on his left. He looked the warrior up and down, trying to decide if it could really be true.

There was no mistake. He had known who he was the moment he had dropped in alongside during the melee, even before analysing his worn battle plate.

It had been many decades since he had last seen that armour. When its wearer had borne it, Red Tane had only just been promoted to the rank of Champion, likely the youngest in the Third Company’s history. A matter of months later the suit of battle plate had been put into storage in the White Maw’s armoury, as its owner had taken on the equipment he had inherited as Company Master.

Red Tane knelt.

‘Reaper Prime,’ he said.

Bail Sharr stood motionless, dark lenses unreadable, silent. Red Tane knew what he was doing was wrong. Sharr was no longer Company Master. He had disgraced himself and, by extension, the entire Third Company. But that did not change Red Tane’s instinctive response.

Still kneeling, he reached back and carefully unlocked Reaper from beside his reactor pack. He turned it and held it up in both hands, its chainblade facing downwards towards the bloodied gravel.

‘Take it from me, I implore you,’ Red Tane urged. ‘It weighs upon me.’

‘If the current Company Master does not favour it, why not leave it in the aft armoury on the White Maw?’ Sharr asked, his voice scraping like the hiss of a ghostly revenant from his helm’s maw grille.

‘He demanded it be borne into battle, but I could not wield it myself. Such a thing would be a disgrace, master.’

‘According to who?’ Sharr demanded. ‘Such superstitions do not befit Chapter doctrines. You have made that up, Champion.’

Red Tane pursed his lips, not intending to argue. He raised his head to look into the lenses of Sharr’s helm, but did not lower the proffered axe.

‘That may be. But the company bleeds, and there are none more capable of carrying it. If not for honour, then for the necessity of battle. Take it.’

Sharr raised his hand. Red Tane briefly thought he was going to strike him. Instead, he found Sharr’s fist gripping the scarred old haft. Suddenly, the weight of Reaper was gone.

Red Tane bowed his head in silent thanks, then stood.

‘What are your orders?’ he asked, gazing at Sharr as the Exile appeared to test the great weapon’s weight, hunting for any change since he had last wielded it.

‘I have no orders,’ he replied without taking his gaze from the chainaxe. ‘I am an Exile. Even if I wished to, I am forbidden from instructing the void brethren. And I do not wish to.’

‘We have been advised to continue linking with the elements of the Third Company,’ Blood Eye stated, his helm’s lenses an unusual shade of crimson. ‘Chief Librarian Te Kahurangi stated as much.’

‘The Pale Nomad is on-world?’ Red Tane asked, wondering if the Exile had made some sort of mistake.

‘Yes,’ Sharr said. ‘He has left us with instructions.’

‘First and Fourth Squads are further along the mag line,’ Red Tane told him. ‘I was acting as rearguard. We will be able to rejoin them if we hasten.’

‘Lead on,’ Sharr said, then paused, as though he had not intended to utter the command.

Red Tane bowed briefly, his helmet hiding the ghost of a smile, and set off.

CHAPTER XXII

Khauri brought together as much of the Third Company as he could, following his master’s instructions. Reuniting the Shiver remained the only hope of turning the tide.

While he had still been in the Deepzone, Khauri had swum in the dark with Te Kahurangi. Their spirit-essences had been unshackled from the confines of their physical bodies, diving through the crashing, frenzied tides of the empyrean as it surged across Diamantus, until they had found the vortex where it was being churned up – Mount Antikythera.

They had circled it, like predators in the sea of souls, wary and watchful lest they lose themselves and be swept away or, worse, alert the malignancy that now infested the heart of the mountain. There was industry there; Khauri had been able to taste not just the rot of the warp but burnt metal and ash. The very essence of the immaterium had shuddered with the pounding of hammers that had not yet been born into reality.

Something was trying to beat its way through to them.

When they had returned to their bodies, Khauri found himself shaking and snarling words of warding, blood running from his nose and lips. His body had been frigid with warp chill, but he had banished it, had unmade the spectral claws that felt as though they were scratching at him from inside his armour.

It had taken time to recover, and even longer to drive out the dark entities that had latched themselves to their battle plate, soothing the machine spirits and regaining a degree of functionality. Neither Librarian spoke of how close they had come to damnation.

The gamble had paid dividends. They had seen at least part of what the Cult of the Arkifane intended, had felt what was approaching through the currents. A link to the Forge of Souls. There was even more at work, however, more damnable schemes that the Carcharodons had only had time to skim.

The only hope was to stop the heretics before their plans progressed any further.

Gather the company, Te Kahurangi had instructed him. To bring down this prey, we must hunt as one.

Khauri had found the Devourers of Eighth Squad first, and to them had added Third Squad, who were operating in support of the Predator battle tank Black Scythe.

Losses had been suffered. Tenth Squad had been caught almost directly beneath one of the great shards of Grim Destiny, several of the Carcharodons killed by the impact and then all but one, Iota-one-nine-Dohu, slain by the overwhelming tide of mutants that had come flooding from the hulk’s wreckage. Dohu had been able to fight his way free, and Khauri had sensed him stalking the ruins alone.

The speed with which the slopes of Mount Antikythera, once a churning vista of industry, had become rubble-choked, dust-shrouded wasteland was shocking even to Khauri, who had long grown accustomed to the utter devastation that could be unleashed by the arrival of mankind’s foes. The workforce – those not broken and buried during the catastrophic deluge of burning stone and metal – had fled down the mountainside and into the wreckage of their habzones, leaving behind their overseers to massacre one another amidst the ruins of the temple forges and manufactoria.

Khauri had witnessed the heresies of mutation many times before, though never to such an extent among the Adeptus Mechanicus. Corruption now writhed and squirmed beneath soiled red-and-black robes, and augmetics had split and given way beneath swelling flesh. Even the machine parts had deformed, bionic lenses growing real eyeballs, limbs gaining extra joints, metal running like quicksilver and re-forming into new blasphemies that would have left even the most emotion-stripped and logic-bound priest of Mars riven with revulsion.

It was all as the Pale Nomad had foretold.

‘The skybridge lies ahead,’ said Strike Leader Tangaroa, whose Devourers had been taking point. Night had fallen, the gloom brought on by ash and smoke and dust deepening into true darkness, riven by the glowing of a thousand fires across the mountain slope.

‘We are detecting an ongoing engagement,’ Tangaroa went on, ‘and large concentrations of Archenemy forces besieging the fortress guarding the bridge’s near end.’

‘Lead on,’ Khauri instructed, heartened by the news. This was the first serious holdout they had discovered, and as he drew closer he detected bolter fire, a sure sign of the presence of Adeptus Astartes.

Sure enough, those few void brothers with functioning heads-up displays reported the presence of Second Squad holding the fort, seemingly alongside loyal forces of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The skybridge loomed ahead in the darkness, the arches of its near end lit by the flickering of muzzle flashes as sustained gunfire echoed out into the deathly night.

The force Khauri had assembled put the heretics besieging the fort to flight. Tangaroa’s Devourers, hungry as ever for slaughter, cleared the way to the gates, supported by Black Scythe, whose twin-linked lascannons pierced every deranged living war machine the Archenemy threw in their path.

Khauri called upon his psychic abilities only sparingly. He was still tired from the scrying, and from seeking out the minds of his brethren amongst the ruins. He was experienced enough to know that overtaxing himself in a place such as this, with the skein of reality pulled taut and thin, could prove deadly to more than just himself.

The cog-toothed gate rumbled open ahead of the small column as weapons fire continued to lash out from the walls into the dark, pursuing the fleeing heretics. Khauri waited until the last squad had moved in through the gatehouse, watching the shadows. Then he turned and paced in after them, as the entrance ponderously sealed itself behind him.

Strike Leader Kordi met him on the other side. He had clearly seen action throughout the day – his battle plate was scored and spattered with crusted blood and ichor. He clasped Khauri’s vambrace briefly.

‘You are a welcome sight, Brother-Librarian.’

As Khauri returned the greeting, he noted the approach of a tech-priest, a hunched, fleshless thing with a disconcertingly featureless mask for a face. Its mechadendrites swayed, regarding Khauri with optic implants.

‘You are a part of your Chapter’s witch caste,’ it said, the human-sounding voice that crackled from its vocaliser betraying curiosity rather than malice. Khauri sensed Kordi look at him, perhaps hunting for any sign that he had taken the words as an insult, but he had not. He knew what he was.

‘I am a sanctioned psyker, yes,’ he said.

‘Forgive me, my vocalising was imprecise,’ the tech-priest said, drooping its mechadendrites briefly as though in contrition.

‘This is Magos Dominus Ze-One-Prime,’ Kordi said. ‘Commander of the skitarii garrison of the Twinfort. Their quick intervention helped keep the Archenemy’s corruption at bay. The defences would have fallen without them.’

‘Likewise, they would have fallen without the efforts of your battle-brothers,’ Ze-One-Prime said to Khauri. ‘It has been a delight to analyse them in a live combat environment. They are everything the mem-banks had led me to hope for.’

‘It is good to find more coordinated resistance,’ Khauri said, looking beyond them both as he assessed the fort’s interior. Much of the courtyard had been gouged up and pounded to splinters, but the walls were intact. A mound of bodies stood off to one side, seemingly all skitarii, and all of them now burning – two Martian warriors were dousing their own fallen with jets of blazing promethium from incendine combustors, creating a funerary pyre of melted, fused metal and charred bones. Khauri could smell the reek of molten plasteel and plastek and roasting organics even through his helmet’s seal.

Beyond, the archway that marked the entrance to the skybridge towered into the night, the firelight from the pyre throwing flickering shadows into its black vaults. The bridge itself had been raised, Khauri realised, presumably as a further defensive measure.

‘With these reinforcements, we can consider going on the offensive,’ Kordi said, his own gaze following the newly arrived squads as they moved up onto the ramparts.

‘I would advise against it,’ Khauri responded.

‘You have orders from the Company Master?’

‘No.’

‘From Strike Veteran Nuritona?’

‘No. My advice comes from Te Kahurangi.’

Kordi’s grey helm gave no indication of surprise, but his voice betrayed momentary confusion.

‘I was not aware the Pale Nomad was with us on Diamantus.’

‘He was not, until recently.’

‘The Nomad Predation Fleet is in orbit?’

‘No. He has come alone.’

Kordi was silent, and Khauri had experienced enough of these sorts of conversations to know he was probably going through the usual stages of attempting to rationalise what he was hearing, before deciding it was simply best not to ponder it any further.

‘You will need to explain Venerable Te Kahurangi’s thinking to me,’ the strike leader said instead. ‘You know as well as I that static warfare is not our preference. The Archenemy’s withdrawal will be only momentary, and their numbers are far in excess of our own. I would much prefer to break out and conduct a mobile defence, striking at enemy concentrations along the slopes before withdrawing into the habzones.’

‘That is tactically preferable, yes, but it goes against the strategic picture my master and I are seeking to build,’ Khauri said patiently. ‘While I have brought these squads to you, he is engaged in rallying the remainder of the company. He intends to lead a strike against the city’s vox-array, on the north-western slope of Mount Antikythera. Once it is secure, his hope is to be able to communicate reliably with Company Master Kino and the White Maw in orbit. A coordinated assault against the enemy’s senior command structure, which we have determined to have infested the Pinnacle, will then be feasible.’

‘I see,’ Kordi said, parsing the plan, its strengths, weaknesses, possibilities and potential, in a little over a second. ‘Am I to assume then that you would rather we act as a distraction, to draw the Archenemy away from this vox-array?’

‘Precisely. The greater our resistance here, the more opposition we will attract. We must continue that for a short while. Once contact has been established with orbit, we can proceed with offensive operations.’

‘Understood,’ Kordi said, gesturing for Khauri to follow him and Ze-One-Prime up into the bastions. ‘Come, Brother-Librarian. We shall brief you on the defences, before the next assault begins.’

CHAPTER XXIII

Bail Sharr was reunited with his former Shiver in a nuclear smelter upslope from the mag line.

He had already caught up with the remnants of First and Fourth Squad. Nuritona had been silent for a long time after Red Tane had led them to him.

‘You are welcome to join us,’ he said eventually, addressing all three of the Exiles rather than just Sharr. ‘We need every blade and bolt.’

Sharr was thankful the strike veteran had not reacted the way Red Tane had. Just being in the presence of his former void brothers filled him with revulsion. It was not just that it sharpened memories of his disgrace. He deplored the doubt it seeded. Nuritona had not known whether to ignore him, acknowledge him, or even attempt to subordinate command to him, in defiance of proper doctrine. That kind of uncertainty was not welcome in a combat zone, especially not one as desperate as Diamantus. It made him wish he could have remained fully anonymous, but that was impossible now he had accepted Reaper.

He could not deny how welcome the weapon felt in his grip. As much as he had adapted to the use of the chainsword, it had failed him, betrayed him when he had needed it most. To take up Reaper again felt surreal, almost dream-like. It was as though he had regained the use of a limb that had been paralysed for years.

Yet part of it felt like blasphemy, the relief like sinful indulgence. The weapon belonged to the Reaper Prime, not him. To be seen carrying it was only amplifying his shame.

It was there that Te Kahurangi returned to them. He led them higher up again, to the squat smelter, which had survived the collapse of the surrounding district, the structure’s solid architecture proof against the carnage that had befallen the megafactorum. Within it, huge smeltery blocks and pistons stood inert, the main work floor dark but for a few flickering lumen bars. Beyond them was the core, an armoured chamber that had once fuelled the workings of the now-still machinery.

Emergency protocols had disengaged the core and rendered it inert with layers of rapid-hardening plascrete. Its workforce and operators were gone, all bar a few broken, bleeding servitors.

Now, the site of stilled industry played host to the Carcharodon Astra. Other squads had already reached it ahead of First and Fourth, and they stood in the shadows around the edges of the hollow chamber, as motionless and silent as statues.

Sharr identified them without even thinking: Kotu’s Fifth Squad and Harak’s Devourers, as well as Sixth and Ninth Squads, the latter now led by Aleph-nine-five-Aheri, who it seemed had been promoted since Sharr’s days as Company Master. With them was Chaplain Matiu, who had taken over the Shiver’s spiritual duties after Chaplain Nikora’s death during the Rhegon Interdiction.

Though their movements were only fractional, Sharr felt their gaze settle on him as soon as he entered the reinforced chamber. He remained near the entrance hatch, flanked by Shadow and Blood Eye, as Te Kahurangi moved to stand close to the fused remnants of the nuclear core.

‘We number half of what remains of Third Company,’ he said without preamble. ‘Codicier Khauri currently gathers the other half, beneath the far slope of the mountain. I have instructed him to make a stand, and draw the Archenemy’s attentions while we mount a targeted strike.’

The Pale Nomad’s words failed to stir the silence of the other Carcharodons. Sharr could sense the chamber’s attention was still on him. It was intolerable. He felt his anger rising, the first stirrings of the Blindness.

Te Kahurangi turned towards him. The green stone that tipped his staff was glowing softly, lending a murky ghost light to the dusty atmosphere within the chamber.

‘I again recommend we capture the city’s vox-array, and attempt to re-establish orbital contact,’ the Chief Librarian said.

‘Why do you address me, when I do not command here?’ Sharr responded, tone as sharp as one of Reaper’s wicked teeth. ‘Nuritona is the ranking officer.’

‘I am not asking you to take command,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘I wish for your opinion, as one with considerable tactical and operational experience, who knows the capabilities of this company. Does this stratagem afford us the best chances of success?’

Sharr looked to the right, at Nuritona. Every Carcharodon present bar the Pale Nomad was wearing their helmet, and the strike veteran’s expression was unreadable behind his visor, while the tells involved in micro-posture movements that all Space Marines were able to read were rendered mute by the solid bulk of his grey battle plate.

What did he think of Sharr’s return, of the way Te Kahurangi was addressing him? He could taste the Chief Librarian’s schemes. All it seemed to be doing, however, was emphasising his shame before his former brethren. He felt like he was a resurrected revenant, damned to stand and bear silent witness, a half-seen, disquieting spectre hanging over proceedings.

Was Nuritona cursing his return? He was certain not all of the company viewed him the way Red Tane seemed to – with enduring, misplaced respect. After all, he had shamed them all. They should hate him, as he hated himself.

There was silence. He realised he had little choice other than to play Te Kahurangi’s game.

‘Who is Company Master now?’ he asked the Pale Nomad.

‘Still Kino,’ Te Kahurangi said.

‘And he is not planetside?’

‘No. He and the Red Brethren, along with various company assets such as Techmarine Uthulu and most of the armour and aerial units, remain on board the White Maw.’

‘Can you not reach them psychically?’

‘I have tried. The effort was more than I could endure. Realspace is degrading rapidly, and the Neverborn are increasingly aware of my presence here. I have sunk most of my efforts into scrying out the enemy’s strength and purpose.’

‘And what is that purpose?’ Sharr asked.

‘The malignant being that commands this damnable expedition has some ancient link to Diamantus. He is in fealty with an especially powerful daemon, one that delights in tech-heresy and the corruption of the machine. I believe he wishes to summon that entity here, perhaps even create a permanent link with the damnable realm which it rules over. We must move swiftly if we are to stop the sea of souls from flooding our reality.’

Sharr nodded. ‘What of this vox-array you speak of?’

‘Many of the most powerful communications links were located on top of the Pinnacle, but we must assume they have been destroyed,’ Nuritona said. ‘I am aware of a secondary array high on the western slopes, on our side of the mountain. How intact it now is, I do not know.’

‘The Archenemy have claimed it, but I sense little coordination beyond the lair they have made for themselves within the mountaintop,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘If we strike swiftly, I believe we will be able to take the secondary vox-array and attempt a transmission.’

‘What if it fails to send?’ Aheri, leader of Ninth Squad, asked.

‘Then we will link with the rest of the company and adjust our plans,’ Te Kahurangi said.

‘I can perhaps improve our odds,’ Blood Eye interjected. ‘I am versed in a number of tech-rites… If you will accept my assistance.’

‘We shall,’ Te Kahurangi said without consulting the assembled squads. ‘Remain close to me when the assault begins, Epsilon-one-twelve-Hahono.’

Sharr caught the sound of Blood Eye’s breath catching, almost imperceptibly, over the Exiles’ shared vox. Te Kahurangi had just used his name, presumably the one he had borne while still a void brother. Sharr wondered how long it had been since the Exile had heard it spoken aloud.

‘Let us delay no longer,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘Every second, the Archenemy advances towards their goals. It is time we cured their madness.’

Darkness had fallen as the Carcharodons slipped from the smelter and turned north. Megafactorum Primus had become a place akin to the sermons of an Ecclesiarchy preacher describing the fate that awaited blasphemers in the afterlife, all darkness and fire and distant wailing and sobbing. Cyclopean ruins loomed from the gloom and shapes scuttled in the shadows, feasting on the dead and the dying.

The Carcharodons passed through it like predators gliding through murky depths, a little under forty in number. They kept to secondary roads and subdistricts, seeking to avoid detection wherever possible.

At a crossroads outside a towering melta-turbine, they divided. One group moved north, uphill, another south-east, down the slope, while the third – consisting of First and Fourth Squads, Te Kahurangi and the Exiles – continued along it.

Red Tane sensed the tension among his brethren, something more than the coiled readiness of impending combat. Tama had retained his eternal silence, and neither Nuritona nor Ihaia had spoken about Sharr’s sudden reappearance, except briefly, as they had first moved out from the smelter.

‘Did he demand the axe?’ Nuritona had asked.

‘No,’ Red Tane had responded. ‘I demanded he take it.’

‘You should not have.’

Red Tane knew the strike veteran had never fully made peace with what Sharr had done. Most of the company kept any views they had about what had happened on the agri-platforms above Temperance to themselves, but Nuritona had told Red Tane, in the shivering misery of post-cryo drainage, that no good would come from Sharr’s exile. The inference was that his loss of control had not been so grave a sin in itself, but leaving the company to someone like Kino, who viewed it as little more than a cudgel to be wielded over and over until it shattered, was the greater of the two blasphemies. It seemed that by Nuritona’s reckoning, Sharr had chosen the easy path, and left the Third Company to take the harder.

But that was what Nuritona had said when none of them had ever thought they would see their old Reaper Prime again. Now he had returned, like memory manifesting as cold ceramite. Red Tane suspected the reticence he sensed from Nuritona was rooted in disbelief. The strike veteran had shouldered a great deal of the company’s leadership, and the temptation to relinquish it to his old commander must be great. But Nuritona was stronger than that. He would not take the easy road.

Red Tane knew it was not his place to debate such thoughts with Nuritona. He was simply thankful Sharr had returned, and he did not care who knew it. Kino had failed the company. If welcoming an Exile went against the teachings of the Chapter, then so be it. Ultimately, were they not all exiles? Was not the Chapter’s entire existence one of shame and banishment, and all that they had constructed merely an attempt to try to continue living, continue serving, while making room for that shame? To enable them to survive the crushing silence of the Outer Dark?

The vox-array stood ahead, rising above what remained of the rooftops between the Carcharodons and their objective. The primus antenna appeared to still be intact, a great concave shield illuminated from below by the firelight of burning buildings.

There was a booming sound, like a bass drum being struck. Soon after, lesser percussion became audible, the snapping of lasweaponry and the battering of hard-round small-arms.

The Carcharodons said nothing, but Red Tane drew the Void Sword, the black blade whispering free from its scabbard.

No more doubts, no more discord. They were hunting.

The Carcharodons moved through the ruination of a manufactorum, over mounds of rubble and past the bent remains of industrial machinery. They made little noise, bar the slight scrape of boots on fallen masonry and the soft purr and snarl of their power armour.

Red Tane was the first to reach the ruin’s far edge. The sounds of conflict were now loud and sustained, the night lit not only by the burning megalopolis but also by the staccato flare of weapons discharges.

A battle was raging below the vox-array. Red Tane crouched amongst the broken walls and twisted girders, like a carrion creature watching slaughter playing out, joined after a few moments by Nuritona, Tama and Ihaia.

It seemed not all of the Adeptus Mechanicus had fallen to corruption or been overrun by Archenemy hordes. Red Tane identified skitarii, likely belonging to multiple squads, engaged in a close-range firefight with heretic infantry and light armour around the array’s main building. In a few moments he read the angle and intensity of incoming and outgoing fire, the number of bodies and the patterns of advance, forming a tactical picture of the engagement.

The Mechanicus were attempting to storm barricades of rubble and wrecked machinery that had been erected along the array’s perimeter. They had broken through in some areas but fallen short in others, and what was left was a vicious, interlocked struggle with close-in firefights giving way to brief, frenzied melees.

The most immediate problem was the enemy’s armour superiority. The skitarii seemed to have mounted their attack supported by a single vehicle, a Skorpius Disintegrator, but it had fallen foul of a clutch of stalk tanks, lesser daemon engines that had scuttled close enough to rend its hull open. The Disintegrator had taken one of the tanks with it, but the second was still in the midst of the skitarii, the two great chainblades that made up its forelimbs shearing through everything it could reach.

‘The children of Mars have started our work for us,’ said Te Kahurangi from Red Tane’s side. The Champion had not noticed the Pale Nomad’s arrival. He glanced back, a flare of preysight picking up Fourth Squad and the Exiles still moving up through the manufactorum behind.

‘Not all the machine-men have been lost to corruption,’ Nuritona mused. ‘Unless it is a trap?’

‘A strange one, if so,’ Te Kahurangi replied. ‘I sense no concealed forces nearby. The enemy’s strength has been committed.’

‘Then we will strike,’ Nuritona said.

The plan had been for a three-pronged assault that would converge simultaneously on the array’s transmission suite, power generatorium and alignment spoke. The lattermost was the objective of First and Fourth Squads, directly beneath the primus antenna. Because anything other than inter-squad communications was unreliable, the combined assault was set to begin at a specific time – each strike leader had been maintaining a mental countdown since setting off, in case the chrono displays also betrayed them.

There was still time left before the other two prongs were in position. None of the Carcharodons would have hesitated to wait and let the skitarii perish in the name of tactical necessity, but logic dictated the defences around the centre of the array were vulnerable.

Fourth Squad and the Exiles had caught up.

‘We go now,’ Nuritona told them. ‘First leads, Fourth will provide a firebase. Sweep-tide pattern. Hit the stalk tank first.’

‘What of us?’ Sharr asked, the three Exiles standing in Te Kahurangi’s shadow like dire familiars the Librarian had summoned to aid him.

‘Watch the flanks,’ Nuritona said simply.

The Carcharodons burst from cover, pounding up the debris-littered street. Red Tane, leading the way, was within the first Archenemy barricade before any of the heretics manning it were able to switch fire from the skitarii engaging them from a neighbouring wall. He cut through them, only a few hard rounds spanking off his armour, wasps that he ignored.

The stalk tank was just ahead, mounting a separate barricade and eviscerating a skitarii rad-trooper behind it with a clumsy swipe of its massive chainblades. It was a baroque engine of warpsteel rimmed with brass and bone, its central cockpit circular and fashioned to resemble a great daemonic skull. Sensor spikes protruded from its half-open jaw and a battle cannon jutted from one of its eye sockets. Its horns ended in exhaust stacks, churning out bitter smoke and ash. Beneath the skull there was a hatch from which a many-eyed monstrosity bulged, mewling from maw-tears as the tank clattered forward on its mechanical limbs. Red Tane had no idea if the thing was part of its pilot, some kind of living sacrifice, or both.

‘Bring it down,’ Nuritona snarled over the vox.

Red Tane charged the daemon engine. It sensed him coming and swung down from its perch on the barricades, one huge chainblade swiping at him from the left. The Coral Shield’s refractor field flared, then overloaded with a crack and a stink of ozone. It had earthed the worst of the blow, allowing the shield itself to throw off the sawblades and give Red Tane time to bring the Void Sword round and lock the appendage. There was a horrific screech as the chainblade’s teeth juddered to a halt, straining to shatter the Champion’s blade. Red Tane gritted his teeth and held on, servos creaking, muscles taut, trusting the relic sword.

On his right, Nuritona and Tama had engaged the other weapon-limb, the strike veteran’s own chainsword sparking as he used it to batter aside the cleaver, refusing to lock it the way Red Tane had. They were only trying to keep its attention.

With the stalk tank’s forelimbs occupied, Ihaia seized his opportunity. He pounded in under the engine’s torso and fired his volkite caliver directly up into the flesh thing that formed part of its undercarriage. It ignited, the combustion searing into the walker’s core and causing it to deflagrate explosively.

Fire, burning slime and molten metal hammered at Red Tane. The resistance from the engine’s chainblade vanished as it was blown away, and the Coral Shield flared to life once more as it did its best to preserve him from the stalk tank’s destruction. By the time the fire and smoke cleared, nothing remained of the daemon engine besides the scorched, blown-off lower segments of its legs. Ihaia still stood between them, drenched in sizzling daemon ooze, his caliver’s barrel smoking.

Red Tane whipped the Void Sword round as shots from the nearest enemy barricade began to lash around them, checking the weapon’s edge. Despite being used to parry the huge chainblade, its black surface was still utterly unblemished.

‘They’re concentrating fire,’ Nuritona grunted as the hail of las-bolts and bullets being directed at them became a blizzard. The Coral Shield’s refractor field flared continuously as it robbed the incoming shots of potency, close to overloading again.

That was when Red Tane heard the roar. It was one he recognised, and it didn’t come from any throat or vox-caster or vocaliser. It brought a grim smile back to his lips.

It was the sound of Reaper being triggered.

The Exiles, along with Te Kahurangi, had used the distraction of First Squad’s headlong assault to circle along the street’s far edge, hitting the deepest section of the vox-array’s defensive cordon in the flank.

Sharr kicked his way through one of the mounds of rubble serving as a hasty barricade. The first heretic on the other side froze, staring up at the towering, grey-clad monster that had emerged beside them.

Sharr swung Reaper, and the heretic simply ceased to exist in any coherent way. The great, jagged adamantine teeth that made up the sawblade sheared down through skull, collarbone and ribs before cleaving the pelvis in half, reducing the heretic’s chest cavity to flying mulch in the process.

Blood and gore jetted over Sharr’s helmet and breastplate. Even within his armour, he would have sworn he could smell it, taste it, feel its warm vitality on his hard, scarred skin. It made him want to go wild, to vent the intoxicating surge of euphoria brought on by the brute devastation at his fingertips and the revulsion he felt for the enemies before him, all of it heightened by the jagged surging of stimms and battle hormones his armour and his body were sending thundering through his system.

He was annihilation incarnate, and yet he made no sound.

Reaper was his roar. It howled for him, as he obliterated another heretic, barely one pounding double-heartbeat after he had cleaved through the first. More were scrambling around him, turning their pathetic weapons on him, but too late. The others were with him, Talon’s club staving in a face and his claws raking another, while Blood Eye mounted the rubble and used the elevation to open fire with his boltgun, scything down the remainder of the barricade’s defenders.

Te Kahurangi was the last to pass through the shattered line, walking with an easy stride, the base of his force staff tapping the rockcrete underfoot. Heretic soldiers behind the neighbouring stretch of defences had witnessed the fate of their kindred, and the first hasty shots were starting to strike at the Exiles as they redirected their fire away from First Squad. The Pale Nomad cracked his staff against the ground once. Sharr didn’t even hear him utter an invocation, yet an invisible surge of psychic energy swept into the Archenemy position. The mound of rubble and girders acting as their barricades was slammed up against those seeking shelter behind it, as though struck by a tidal wave. Their remains were pounded to red smears against the wall of the vox-array at their backs.

The destruction of the enemy’s firebase had allowed First Squad to resume its assault. Fourth was sweeping forward too, the skitarii with them. The most advanced Adeptus Mechanicus section was close, and they and the Exiles arrived at the main entrance to the array at almost the same moment.

Sharr surveyed the rad-troopers, Reaper still growling in his grip, the teeth rotating now with slow, vicious threat. The skitarii watched him impassively in turn, through optic clusters and visor lenses, motionless until a binary imperative caused them to part ranks for one who Sharr immediately took to be their leader. This skitarius was taller, more upright, cybernetics overlaid with armour plating and helmet crested by a demi-cog, while a radium serpenta was gripped in one vice-gauntlet and a gladius in the other, the latter’s blade dark with blood.

‘Hail,’ the hyper-augmented warrior buzzed through their helmet’s vocaliser. ‘I am identified as Skitarius Optio Zeta-One-One-Trio. I have function control over the Alpha Maniple, in the name of Holy Diamantus and the blessed Omnissiah. Identify yourselves.’

Bail Sharr hesitated, loath to speak his own name, but thinking his mere number tag might not be sufficient.

‘We are Adeptus Astartes,’ he said, settling for generality. ‘Of the Carcharodon Astra.’

‘Well met, optio,’ said a new voice, speaking before Sharr could begin trying to explain. It was Nuritona, arriving at the hub’s entranceway. Zeta-One-One-Trio wheeled stiffly to face him.

‘Greetings once more, Omekra-five-one-Nuritona,’ the skitarii commander said. ‘Your intervention in the previous combat was timely. I am still inloading casualty informatics, but I anticipate losses to the Alpha Maniple would have been at least forty-one per cent higher had you not arrived when you did.’

‘It is heartening to see that not all the soldiers of Diamantus have fallen to the Archenemy’s madness,’ Nuritona replied.

‘Indeed,’ Zeta said in their relentlessly monotone voice. ‘I calculate that it is my duty to inform you of the fall of the Pinnacle.’

‘I was aware of the hulk’s collision with the summit,’ Nuritona said. ‘I assumed most of the Pinnacle was buried.’

‘Some of it,’ Zeta agreed. ‘Not all. It would have been preferable if it was. The techno-hereteks make their lair within the throne room of His Chromatic Eminence.’

‘You were there when it fell?’

‘For a short time, yes. Magos Domina Tyreka Six calculated that a fighting withdrawal was the most optimal strategy. She was forcefully shut down by techno-heretekal forces while buying time for the remains of the Alpha Maniple and me to retreat. Since then, I have been obeying standard resistance doctrines. I identified the secondary communications array as a location of strategic significance. My intention was to seek to re-establish wider communications and attempt to coordinate a more efficient response.’

‘Then we come here with much the same intention,’ Nuritona said. ‘Resistance is futile if it remains scattered and disjointed.’

‘We are in accordance,’ Zeta said. ‘Part of the programming inloaded into my function boards by Tyreka Six included response directives regarding any possible encounters with confirmed-loyal warriors of the Adeptus Astartes. Those directives have now been triggered. I am required to subordinate the command of myself and the Alpha Maniple to you.’

‘Is that so?’ Nuritona asked cautiously, clearly surprised at the idea of any member of the Adeptus Mechanicus, even a relatively lowly one such as a skitarii optio, willingly subordinating themselves to another arm of the Imperium’s military machine.

‘It is so,’ Zeta-One-One-Trio affirmed, deadpan.

‘If you wish to operate alongside my brethren, answer me this. How did you survive the madness, when so many of your machine kin have succumbed?’

‘I felt it,’ Zeta admitted, their dead voice doing nothing to even hint at the pain and horror the surviving skitarii had undoubtedly endured. ‘Catastrophic malfunctions. Scrapcode. Organic failure. Unauthorised program realignment. Viral invasion. Some were taken, some were not. I am unable to process the logic behind such matters. It is beyond my capacity as an optio of Alpha Maniple. My only hypothesis would be that the machines-militant of Diamantus are naturally encoded with better defensive measures than other members of the blessed priesthood, though even among my skitarii, there have been many losses. All those failing to obey their programming have been terminated with extreme prejudice. May the Omnissiah preserve their eternal code, for I could not.’

As the skitarius spoke, Sharr saw Nuritona glance towards Te Kahurangi, who had remained off to one side, watching the augmented soldiers. The Pale Nomad looked back at Nuritona and, almost imperceptibly, nodded.

If he considered these skitarii uncorrupted, that was sufficient.

‘I will accept your subordination,’ Nuritona told Zeta. ‘And permit you access to our basic comms. Outside of any orders I or my brethren give, you are free to continue to command your maniple as you see fit.’

Zeta-One-One-Trio sheathed their weaponry and made the sign of the cog. Nuritona simply nodded.

Together, they advanced into the array.

CHAPTER XXIV

The stepper motor controlled the facing of the largest vox-antenna, which was sited directly above it. While the skitarii and the rest of the Carcharodons secured the wider chamber, Sharr and Talon remained with Blood Eye and Te Kahurangi at its control station.

‘Most of it looks manual,’ Blood Eye said, snap-assessing the array of levers and wheels that appeared to power the digital actuator, arrayed in a semicircle around the broad central column that plunged down through the reinforced struts of the ceiling. ‘Which is good. Less chance of Archenemy malfeasance.’

‘You have the orbital coordinates?’ Te Kahurangi asked.

‘I do,’ Blood Eye confirmed. Before setting out, Nuritona had agreed, with more than a hint of reluctance, to inload the last known location of the White Maw into Blood Eye’s systems. Using it, he would be able to ensure the antenna was aligned towards the correct orbital segment. It would be imprecise, especially if the strike cruiser had relocated, but set to a broad transmission it still offered the best chance of making contact.

Sharr found himself recalling their labours on the Sire of Belaphrone as Blood Eye directed them towards the necessary controls. With all else set, the disgraced former Techmarine heaved down on one particularly large cog-lever, muttering in Lingua Technis as he did so. There was a thud, and a deep groan rang through the array.

The central column began to rotate, grinding and creaking ponderously, cogs ticking. Above, the antenna would be realigning, angled so it was facing almost towards the Pinnacle.

‘That is a good start,’ Blood Eye said. Nuritona had marched over from where First Squad had secured the array’s inner door, and now addressed the Exiles and the Pale Nomad.

‘From the sounds outside, the other squads have engaged,’ he said. ‘I expect we have already overcome the Archenemy’s reserves outside. There will likely be little resistance.’

‘We should relocate to the transmission suite,’ Te Kahurangi observed. ‘The enemy are likely aware of our gambit, and deploying reinforcements. The longer we linger, the more certain it is we will also draw the attention of ever more dangerous foes.’

‘You will come with me to the suite, as will the Exile,’ Nuritona said, speaking to Te Kahurangi and gesturing tersely at Blood Eye.

‘All three of them will come,’ Te Kahurangi responded. ‘As my personal guard.’

The transmission suite seemed to have been captured almost without a fight, the stragglers defending it dispatched with brutal efficiency by Tangaroa’s Devourers.

‘The systems seem intact,’ the strike leader said as he led the new arrivals inside. The suite’s main room was centred around a nest of vox-grilles, brass horns and cogitator nodes, set into masses of cabling that snaked through reinforced hardwiring ducts into the neighbouring array for transmission via the primus antenna. There was no sign of the suite’s operators, except for half a dozen servitors, two of them hardwired into the systems while the other four were scattered around the room, standing like toys abandoned by an inattentive child. The only indication they still possessed some semblance of life was the fact that those with remaining organic eyes would occasionally, slowly blink.

Blood Eye moved to the cogitator nodes and set to work, bent forward over the runeboards. There was an audible click as the vox-speakers arrayed around him came online.

‘Make it fully audible,’ Nuritona ordered. ‘I don’t want to risk linking it into our own network.’

Blood Eye complied, and harsh static flooded the suite.

‘The channel is open,’ he told Nuritona, handing him a mesh pickup cone connected via a cable to the main array. ‘The signal from our end is strong and regular.’

Nuritona began to speak into the pickup, issuing a string of identification codes and calls for acknowledgement, first from the White Maw, and then from any Imperial forces who might be receiving the signal. After a while he paused, waiting.

The static from the speakers continued, a grating discordance.

Nuritona tried again, using a different set of signifiers, attempting to initialise a call-and-response interaction.

Again, nothing.

On the third attempt, there was a response.

The speakers blurted something. Sharr looked towards Blood Eye, as he worked with fluid intensity at the control panels and the runeboards, adjusting gain and signal width.

The blurting returned, and the Techmarine coaxed it into something partially coherent. A voice came through, and despite being chopped by the static, it clearly didn’t belong to either Shipmaster Teko or Captain Kino. It was a woman’s voice, and riven with panic, practically screaming.

‘…stop! Oh, Throne, they… want our blood! We should never have… still laughing.’

Nuritona attempted to speak to the woman on the other end, but she carried on, seemingly oblivious to his voice.

‘The whole ship… alive. Our own systems are… augmetics, gnawing at me!’

‘I’m data-scraping it,’ Blood Eye said urgently, crimson gauntlets dancing across the panel. ‘Time, location, nature of transmission… A few moments more…’

‘Identify yourself,’ Nuritona snapped into the vox-horn. ‘State your name, and the name or keel tag of your ship.’

‘Help us! Please, God-Emperor, help us!’

The woman said nothing more. The static rose up, drowning her, like someone slipping beneath the waves of a vicious sea for the last time.

The alpha cogitator chimed. Blood Eye’s activity ceased abruptly as he looked at the display.

‘Well?’ Nuritona demanded, the pickup discarded.

‘Transmission triangulated to orbital grid T12-A9,’ Blood Eye said slowly and carefully, as though doubting the evidence of his own eyes. ‘That is almost directly above us. I have a time and date stamp but… it is irregular.’

‘In what way?’

‘The message appears to have been transmitted at a time and date that has not yet passed. It is surely some kind of malfunction. I will attempt to re-triangulate–’

‘Do not,’ Te Kahurangi said abruptly, his tone quiet but firm. ‘We should depart, without delay.’

Sharr sensed questions on Blood Eye’s lips, but the other Carcharodons knew not to gainsay the Pale Nomad. Nuritona had just started snapping orders to the other squads to begin extracting when the ever-present static suddenly cut out.

The silence lasted only a few tense heartbeats.

‘Hello, little monstrosities.’

The voice was rich and sickly, and issued with absolute clarity from all of the suite’s speakers at once, even the ones showing as inactive.

Sharr had to make a conscious effort not to trigger Reaper. Other members of the strike force had raised bolters and blades.

‘I did not think to find your kind here, on my home world. Was Helsarch so desperate as to invite you here? Or have you come of your own will and imposed yourselves, as is the way with your kind?’

Nuritona was looking at Te Kahurangi, who shook his head, silently forbidding him from communicating with the intrusive voice. Sharr noted the Chief Librarian’s jaw was clenched, and his gauntlet clamped fast about his bone staff. The green stone that tipped it had started to glow more fiercely.

‘Do you not wish to converse?’ the voice demanded, an impatient note entering it. ‘Is that not why you came here? Or were you intending to speak with someone else? A call for help? A report to your brethren elsewhere? Yes, I understand now. Well, allow me to be the one to offer you aid. Let me free you, as I have already freed Helsarch and all his poor court.’

Te Kahurangi began to speak – not a direct answer to the voice, but catechisms of power, conjugations and ward-words to combat forces that Sharr could, for the moment, sense only as a creeping, sickening unease.

The voice seemed to hear Te Kahurangi’s efforts. It began to laugh.

‘Such defiance,’ it said jovially. ‘You are the one my imps whisper to me about while they cut my flesh. The one who has come from the nothing, and will return to nothing. Wanderer, scourge of shadows. You will not stop my designs, not after I have come this far. Speak with the dead and the doomed, Adeptus Astartes, and leave me to my labours!’

The voice ceased, replaced not by static but with a howling that knifed at the senses of every Carcharodon in the room. Sharr snarled in response, as Te Kahurangi raised his staff and began to shout his invocations.

The vox-speakers blew in unison, but somehow the terrible noise continued.

The servitors joined it. They had stood unmoving until that moment, hardly more living than any of the butchered corpses lying outside, but without warning they jerked into motion. They flung themselves at the Carcharodons, their motions swift and aggressive, possessing none of the sluggishness normally associated with lobotomised cyber-slaves.

And they screamed. They screamed with pain and horror, as though suddenly, impossibly, their reprogrammed brains had grasped the totality of the terrible things that had been done to them.

Sharr activated Reaper as one of the constructs came at him, its lower vice-limbs daring to clamp around the weapon’s haft as its upper servo-arm cracked off Sharr’s breastplate. He saw wildness in the thing’s one good eye, comprehension. In its mocking way, the corrupting madness of Chaos had given dark clarity to the slaves of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Sharr punched the thing’s brains out, the Carcharodons around him rapidly dispatching the others. The dark trick performed with the servitors was not the greatest threat.

The transmission suite’s cogitators had started to shake and rattle in their power sconces. The viewscreens lit a hellish, deep red, and then began to crack. As the howling from the broken vox continued, things started to push through from the far side of reality.

‘Destroy them,’ Nuritona barked.

Bolter fire exploded through the room, shattering crystalflex and bursting warp-meat. Still they came, however, keening, mewling Neverborn, desperate to escape the frigid torpor of their existence and bathe their newfound flesh-forms in the warmth of the materium.

‘It’s a trap,’ Te Kahurangi shouted. ‘Get out, while you can!’

He gripped his force staff two-handed and cracked it into the floor, its green light blazing. The Neverborn ceased their advance, torn half-free from the console banks, their cries rising to threaten the dominance of the vox-howl.

Ihaia, Tama and Nuritona began to drop back to the doorway, firing as they went. Talon and Blood Eye joined them, but Sharr could see that Te Kahurangi wasn’t moving. He seemed locked in place, visibly shuddering in his armour, his lips twitching as though with words that were impossible for Sharr to hear.

With a sickly pule, the warp spawn began their advance again, clawing their way from the broken viewscreens inch by inch. Sharr swung Reaper at the nearest, hacking at the mass of tentacles and spines and grimacing, beastly maws, the shifting and changing flesh reknitting itself as swiftly as Sharr savaged it.

As he swung, he could taste the filth of the warp like grease on his tongue, could feel it squirming on his skin within his armour, could feel it beating at his temples – a pain that defied the suppressants and the nerve-severed genhancements made to his brutal form. The air itself was shimmering as though in the grip of an intense heat haze, the very atmosphere starting to deform.

‘Reality is collapsing,’ Te Kahurangi shouted, gripping his staff now as if it were a viper trying to latch on to his throat. ‘Go! I will hold it while I can!’

‘You will hold nothing alone,’ Sharr growled, clapping his gauntlet on one of the Chief Librarian’s pauldrons. ‘Walk, old one, or I will carry you.’

With the effort carved into every line and scar on his ragged face, Te Kahurangi took one step back, then another. Sharr stayed at his side, swinging Reaper like an agri-labourer wielding a scythe against his crops. The amorphous nightmares came apart beneath the jagged bite and re-formed, closing in from all sides.

The entire structure was coming down around them. Plaster and powdered plascrete were cascading from the chamber’s ceiling as it began to crack, the groan of bending metal and the grinding of failing foundations making war on the daemonic cacophony. Te Kahurangi finally regained full control, lowering his staff and glancing briefly at Sharr.

Saying nothing more, the pair broke and ran for the exit.

Behind them, the transmission suite collapsed in on itself with a sound like splitting thunder. Sharr and Te Kahurangi came slamming from the main doorway just as it fell, outrunning the avalanche of descending masonry.

The Carcharodons and skitarii had withdrawn across the street, and watched as the building collapsed in their wake. Sharr turned halfway across the road, wary of any signs of pursuit, a part of him hoping that there would be – he did not want to cease wielding Reaper.

He quashed the unworthy desire, seeing only a settling mound of wreckage and ruin, heaped up against the side of the main array building.

‘Advance,’ Nuritona ordered his squads and the skitarii, hurrying out of the structure. ‘Check the rubble for any taint that might have survived. Purge whatever you find.’

Te Kahurangi made no move to join the cleansing operation, and Sharr stayed with him. The Pale Nomad had recovered his grave composure; Sharr had rarely witnessed him battling such strain.

‘It is more powerful than I feared,’ he admitted. ‘And its plans more twisted, more complex.’

‘In what way?’ Sharr asked.

‘I am not yet entirely certain. I must consult with Khauri. And you must take command of your company, before it is too late.’

‘Impossible,’ Sharr said immediately. ‘You know it is forbidden.’

‘And you know I have the ability to make it possible.’

‘That is untrue,’ Sharr said, refusing to humour such a claim. ‘Only the Reaper Lord of the Void can pardon an Exile.’

‘And who speaks with the authority of his voice?’ Te Kahurangi asked. ‘The master of the Red Brethren assigned to this company.’

‘Kino is Company Master now, no longer a member of the First, and besides, it was on his witness that I was banished,’ Sharr said, unable to stop the bitterness creeping into his tone.

‘His past subordinate, Rangon, now commands the Red Brethren assigned to the Third,’ Te Kahurangi agreed. ‘But he will do as his former strike leader instructs. Such is the nature of command.’

‘And why would Kino end my exile?’ Sharr demanded, exasperated now with the seemingly circular conversation. From the ruins, bolter fire rang out – not the sustained discharge of combat, but a few singular shots, as a Carcharodon executed whatever malformed monstrosity they had found trying to claw its way free.

‘I will do what the Librarius does, and advise him,’ Te Kahurangi said.

Sharr looked at him, and shook his head slowly.

‘I am not Reaper Prime. I have shamed this Shiver. They do not want me to return. I am not worthy of them.’

‘The sooner you let go of such foolish notions, the sooner you will begin to truly live up to the precepts of our Chapter,’ Te Kahurangi said, a rare flash of anger giving Sharr pause.

‘You are failing the Chapter more acutely now than you did when you lost yourself to the Blindness,’ the Pale Nomad continued. ‘If ever you even truly did. Overcome your obsession with shame and self-flagellation, and set aside your bitterness. Sacrifice your self-centred concerns for the good of the company, and through them the Chapter.’

Sharr remained silent, and Te Kahurangi carried on, his voice razor-sharp.

‘You yearned for it, did you not? You yearned to be banished, so that you would not have to face the failure of your defeat on the agri-platforms above Temperance. Kino would not have exiled you, but you demanded it, almost begged for it. You left him with no choice other than to send you away and assume command. That is the reality of how we have all come to be here. That was your true failure.’

‘The Blindness–’ Sharr began, but Te Kahurangi cut him off.

‘The Blindness is gone, if it gripped at all. You are cowering behind the notion of it. I have grown tired of indulging you. Face your past, overcome it, and remember that your duty is to Rangu, the Forgotten One and the Chapter. Concepts of shame and dishonour are luxuries we cannot afford if we are to survive, even more so in times such as these.’

‘What would you have me do?’ Sharr asked, his voice dangerously quiet as he sought to master his frustration, his realisation that his anger was a snare he had built for himself, and no other.

‘Lead,’ Te Kahurangi said, taking a grip on Sharr’s gorget, though the gesture was not aggressive. ‘Matters here are desperate. Diamantus has fallen, and Third Company faces annihilation. That is a loss the Chapter cannot afford. So forget your pride and honour – those dead things – and lead where Khauri and I point. Make good your Void Vows, and renew your loyalty to the Chapter.’

Te Kahurangi removed his grip, and Sharr looked down at Reaper. In the firelight that was suffusing the depths of the bleak Diamantus night, the blood on it glistened black.

The Pale Nomad was right. He had wielded the ancient relic weapon, and when it had killed he had felt many things – exultation, righteous anger, even bloodlust. None of it had been uncontrolled, though. At no point had he felt the killing frenzy drive out the colder, more clinical thoughts that gave him purpose in combat. At no point had he felt the urge to roar his hatred and his fury in the face of his foes.

The Blindness had not returned. Was he free from it? Perhaps what Te Kahurangi said was true. He had brought about his own exile. He had dug the pit of his own shame so deep that it had been easier to lie alone in its depths than attempt to climb back out. Perhaps the Blindness really was a convenience, a tool he had used to convince himself he was irredeemable. Had he made himself into a wild beast simply so he did not have to walk the hard road to redemption?

That was what Te Kahurangi would have him believe, but he knew the cleverness behind the Chief Librarian’s every word and action. He had been there when Sharr had first been tithed, snatched by the Chapter along with thousands of others on Zartak. Even then, Te Kahurangi had been ancient. He had seen more of the Carcharodon Astra and their struggles in the Outer Dark than any other. He understood the Chapter intrinsically, perhaps even more so than Lord Tyberos. He had mentored Sharr, had even named him. He had also specifically chosen and trained Khauri, and now had returned to them both from nowhere, that old predator stalking familiar prey.

‘My loyalty is to the Chapter, never to myself,’ Sharr told him, gazing down at Reaper still, turning the mighty chainaxe over in his hands. ‘That is the way it must be for all of us. Perhaps you are right in what you say. I have become too self-centred.’

‘You have allowed yourself to be defined by your failure, to be motivated by that alone,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘Instead, you must be motivated by your duty to the Chapter, to the Carcharodon Astra. And to Third Company. Your company. You will lead them again, Bail Sharr, whether you will it or not.’

Sharr nodded.

‘So be it,’ he said.

Voldire grunted and swallowed bile, feeling it burning away his gullet before the tissue began to reknit.

The sacred parasites infesting the vox-frequencies had sensed the signal being sent from the vox-array. A trap had already been set there, but the connection he had made had almost overwhelmed him.

Markel Vost had noted his discomfort, and hurried up the stairway of flesh beginning to form the lower part of Voldire’s body, reaching what had once been the side of the Fabricator General’s throne. The Fabricator General himself was still where Voldire had cast him, slowly melding with the organic matter around him. He continued tearing at his own body, though he no longer screamed, merely panted with panicked exhaustion, doomed to repeat the nightmarish cycle for as long as he existed.

‘The Adeptus Astartes,’ Voldire managed to grunt, whisps of smoke rising from his lips as the acidic effluvium he was hacking up gnawed at his steel fangs.

‘You should not be concerning yourself with such matters, my datagnost,’ Markel Vost said, the tentacles that had formed around his mechadendrites caressing Voldire’s bulk obsequiously. ‘With respect, you will require all your cognitive brilliance for what lies ahead. Allow the faculty to deal with these petty threats.’

‘Not threats, Vost, opportunities,’ Voldire said, hating that one of his learned colleagues might have misunderstood him.

He took a moment to try and master himself. The work being done to his body was agonising, though pain had ceased being a true concern a long time ago. It was the effects on his mind that worried him. He was beginning to push beyond the bounds of mortal consciousness, even as his bloated, bleeding form was allowed to run rampant, no longer constrained by the pruning labours of his imps. It was as if he was now aware of the barrier that separated the materium from the immaterium, all around him, taut and slender, shimmering and shuddering. It felt as if a single pinprick might unmake reality.

This was the moment they had worked towards, and Vost was right – it would take every ounce of his cognitive abilities to avoid disaster. He had to remain in the present, even as his mortal body melted and his mind was untethered.

‘How long have we yearned to be able to study and test the forms of the Adeptus Astartes?’ he asked Vost rhetorically, finally finding a degree of focus. ‘And these ones are known to our divine liberator. They are an accursed breed, banished by those they die trying to protect. They haunt the dark spaces beyond the stars.’

‘There is some unrest among the faculty regarding them,’ Vost admitted, leaning in closer to the lumpen, misshapen thing that had once been Voldire’s head, as though imparting a shameful secret. ‘We did not anticipate their presence here.’

‘That is why none of you are tenured,’ Voldire grunted dismissively. ‘They will try and stop our work, of course. The pallid one and his apprentice are especially dangerous. I have been told of them. I felt the former just moments ago. He is strong, but tiring. Many in the Forge of Souls would pay a great deal for the delivery of his soul.’

‘How can we assist you then?’ Vost asked.

Voldire pondered the matter for a while, letting his thoughts flow with the canting of the black binharic filling the throne room.

Vost was right, it was really nothing more than a distraction, but he had come too far to leave these sorts of matters to the vagaries of chance and the wills of the gods, even the one he had pledged his research to. He bared his melting, merging fangs at Vost – all he could do to emphasise his next words, as his arms had long since been swallowed up by the growths fusing him to the flesh pyramid.

‘Bring the Forge Guard,’ he snarled.

A delegation was sent back into the bowels of what remained of the Mother-of-Them-All, embedded in the Pinnacle’s crown. They returned to Diamantus’ throne room laden with a dozen brazen, rune-carved sarcophagi. Each was arrayed around the monstrous ziggurat that Voldire was becoming one with, and after studious bloodshed, the faculty awoke their occupants.

The lids of the sarcophagi levered back, admitting a rush of embryo fluids and liquified organics and a steaming stench so vile it even made Voldire twitch in his flesh throne.

The occupants stepped through the sludge, their movements juddering and uncertain as they grew accustomed to newfound consciousness. They groaned, bodies shifting and changing without any sign of stopping, their corruption allowed to run rampant now they had left the warded containment of the sarcophagi.

Much like Voldire himself, their mutations never ceased, though the change was not confined to their flesh alone. Malignant machines run by scrapcode-infected abominable intelligences had latched on to the bodies sealed into their sarcophagi in the Mother-of-Them-All, and now their corruption surged unchecked. A skull split to expose a whirring cogitation unit, only to seal back up as the broken face transformed into a bestial, fang-filled muzzle, then a cyclopean visage with a maw that split around almost the entire circumference of the head. Another had a gash from collarbone to groin that was filled with whirring buzzsaws, while a third had both limbs fused into a strange and writhing rifle, part bone, part metal, sickly warpfire flaring within it. The only unifying element shared by the mutating monstrosities was the holy icon of the Eight-Pointed Star of Enlightenment, carved into what passed for each forehead.

They were another gift from the Infernal Architect, Voldire’s Forge Guard, and he knew to call upon them only in the most desperate of circumstances.

The twisting, crunching, scraping creations knelt as best as they were able. Voldire acknowledged them with a shudder of the fleshy tiers beneath him, speaking to Vost with a leering, melted grin as he did so.

‘You see, my dear colleague. Now, there will be no more distractions.’

PART THREE

+ + + Initialising astropathic relay auto-séance transcript chain 372F/71G. Part 3 of 4. Record downloading + + +

+ + + Cleansing transcript file + + +

+ + + Transcript file cleansed. Sender verified as Interrogator Anton Fell, agent of Inquisitor >REDACTED< of the Ordo Hereticus + + +

+ + + Opening Transcript + + +

We have reached the entrance to the Pinnacle, and I am pleased to report that our journey has yielded positive results, though uncertainty continues to dog us.

The trek up the mountainside was conducted over the course of two local day-cycles. The ruination of the city is even worse higher up the slopes, and the Pinnacle seems perpetually wreathed in dust, or fog. What sunlight makes it through is ugly and sickly.

On the first night of our ascent, whilst seeking shelter, Garwell was drawn to the remains of one particular structure, where he identified a wrecked Archenemy war machine, a hulking, many-limbed mechanical monstrosity that, in death, wore its terror like a shroud.

I would not have lingered in such a place, but Garwell pointed out that its destruction indicated the strength of Imperial resistance in the area. We commenced a search of the surrounds and finally discovered evidence of the very thing you deployed us here to find.

Among the vast numbers of deformed Archenemy slain were several pieces of wargear that can only have belonged to a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes. The only disappointment was that it was fragmentary, and I fear its wearer did not survive the fight.

We searched the surrounding ruins thoroughly, and found more evidence of the bloody, Emperor-blessed work of the Space Marines – bodies blown open by bolt-rounds and savaged by chain weaponry. Such sights are a delight, but I am frustrated that we were unable to make any further progress. It seems almost certain the owner of the wargear we recovered perished during the fight, but his brethren must have retrieved his remains along with the rest of his equipment. I suspect the pieces we have retrieved were left behind because they were damaged beyond repair.

For now, I will content myself with knowing that our venture here has not been without purpose. It seems as though your hypothesis is correct. The exact identity of those Space Marines who gave their lives for this world remains to be seen. Hopefully more hard evidence will be forthcoming.

I will submit a more detailed report as soon as I am able, to be appended to this data-chain.

Still no word from Captain Torrian and the Lightbringer. More updates anon.

+ + + Transcript file ends + + +

+ + + Thought for the Day: A suspicious mind is a healthy mind + + +

CHAPTER XXV

A phantom came for Khauri between assaults, a pallid thing emerging from an unnatural gloom that only he seemed aware of, gathering like a sea fog to dim the harsh white lumens arrayed along the walls of the Twinfort. It was slender and grim, and it spoke to him in words he could not understand at the time, but which lodged hard and firm in his mind for a comprehension that would come later.

The slamming report of a bolt rifle snapped him from the reverie. He started, looking about but finding no fog, no gheist, just Ihu of Second Squad, lining up another shot at extreme range, picking off cultist infantry attempting to set up positions to snipe at the ramparts. None of the other Carcharodons or the skitarii on the walls appeared to have noticed what he had seen, nor heard what he had heard.

He remembered the words, and understood them.

The Librarian hurried to the gatehouse, where he found Kordi and Ze-One-Prime.

‘The attempt at taking the vox-array has failed,’ he informed them. ‘The systems were too corrupted to be put to use in contacting the fleet.’

‘The Pale Nomad told you?’ Kordi asked, likely assessing there was no other feasible way he could know such a thing.

‘Yes,’ Khauri said, deciding against mentioning how weakened Te Kahurangi had seemed when he had appeared in his spectral form, how withered and gaunt and deathly.

‘He also told me what we should do,’ he continued, ‘and it aligns with your own wishes. He advised that we should go on the offensive.’

Kordi grunted with amusement. The combined force of Carcharodons and skitarii had held the Twinfort throughout the night, building mounds of heretic dead outside its walls. There were so many slain in some sections that the Carcharodons had been forced to use grenades to dislodge and topple the ramps of bodies leading to the parapet.

Their resistance had been fuelled by the fort’s fully stocked armoury. The only point of uncertainty had come when the Archenemy had thrown their daemon engines against the wall, including a slug-like thing that had attempted to batter down the cog gate with its armoured head. The wall’s point defences – lascannons, multi-lasers and more esoteric Adeptus Mechanicus gear – had combined with Rangu’s Hammer and Black Scythe to cut down most of the deranged machines before they reached the walls, and krak grenades had slain the ones that had gained a foothold. The only casualty Second Squad had suffered had been Mere, carved open by a stalk tank’s bone buzzsaw before his grenade had detonated, blasting away the thing’s legs and sending it plunging down among its mutilated and butchered kin.

The last assault had been the weakest yet. Khauri could sense great masses of the mutant horde out amidst the ruins beyond the Twinfort’s perimeter, but it seemed much of their strength had been spent.

‘Does Venerable Te Kahurangi have a specific objective in mind?’ Kordi asked.

‘He would have us link with the other half of the company, and launch an attack on the Pinnacle. The master of this invasion has made their nest there, and their plans will unmake this world and more besides if we do not strike.’

‘We should have done that from the beginning,’ Kordi said.

‘Perhaps.’

As they spoke, Dominus Ze-One-Prime stood off to one side, leaning heavily on their cane, seemingly listening despite the fact the words were being exchanged via closed vox.

‘Will you join us?’ Kordi asked the magos dominus. ‘If it means abandoning the Twinfort and the skybridge?’

‘Possibly,’ Ze-One-Prime allowed. ‘I am aware that a decapitating strike against the enemy’s leadership is standard protocol for the Adeptus Astartes, and would not seek to sway you from that goal. Your departure would likely render a defence of this locale untenable. The remains of my maniple would not be able to endure a siege indefinitely, which is what we would face. Accompanying you, therefore, becomes the optimal strategy. Besides, I wish to be avenged upon the monsters that have befouled my world and slain my kindred.’

‘That is not a path of reasoning I expected from a tech-priest,’ Kordi admitted. Ze-One-Prime’s vox-stalk emitted a dry chuckle.

‘You think me a machine, but your first mistake is to imagine that machines are without emotion – that their spirits are cold, clean, uncomplicated things. But consider what has been done to my world. Consider the filth we have had poured into our engrammic boards and our data-stacks, the vileness of the cancerous scrapcode that has been sent to worm its way into our brains and joints. The terrible lengths we have been forced to go to in order to survive. The most unthinkable blasphemies have been committed, have been heaped upon us. The machines of Diamantus, those not rotten with the work of these hereteks, scream. They scream in pain, and they scream for revenge. And when the logic of your operational proposal aligns with such holy purpose, there the will of the Omnissiah is made manifest.’

‘Then we have an accord,’ Kordi said, briefly saluting the dominus by bringing his gauntlet to his breastplate before addressing Khauri. ‘You have coordinates for a confluence with the rest of the company?’

‘I have a landmark, and a vague idea of where it might be found,’ Khauri said, trying to articulate the earlier psychic exchange. ‘Perhaps the magos dominus can assist me in identifying it?’

‘I will give you full access to my mem-charts,’ Ze-One-Prime confirmed.

‘Then let us not delay,’ Kordi said. ‘Rangu’s Hammer will lead the way.’

‘One more thing, strike leader,’ Khauri interrupted, knowing he had delayed telling Kordi the truth for too long. ‘There is a matter you should know of before you rejoin your void brethren. Bail Sharr is here with us, on Diamantus.’

The Third Company was made whole again beneath the Diamantine Triumph, a statue that stood in a circular parade before the Forge Temple of the Two Archmagi. The statue itself consisted of a vast cog wheel with a representation of the planet of Diamantus at its centre, all borne up on the backs of a las-sculpted procession of labourers and servitors and overseen by representations of the Martian priesthood.

There had been a battle around the Triumph. A skitarii maniple had made a stand, fighting to the bitter end. Their metallic corpses were interspersed amidst hordes of mutant slain and the wrecked daemon engines that filled the parade and lay in mounds on the steps of the forge temple beyond.

The Triumph bore wounds from the battle. Several of the cog’s upper teeth had been blown away by ordnance, and the figures holding it up had been riddled by small-arms fire. The damage was honest, though – the indiscriminate work of warfare and not deliberate, foul blasphemies; the forces of the Archenemy had not been in control long enough to begin defiling the symbols of the Omnissiah.

The Arkifane hordes had moved on to assault new bastions of resistance, and the two prongs of the Carcharodons’ advance had little difficulty in reuniting among the slaughtered remains. Kordi and the other strike leaders made brief greetings, exchanging tactical data regarding casualties and ammunition stocks. It seemed that Second Squad had avoided the worst fates suffered by their void brethren – several units had been reduced to half-strength, and Tenth Squad had been all but wiped out, with the only surviving brother, Dohu, attached to the damaged Fourth Squad.

Kordi spoke to Nuritona last of all. He had already noted Henno’s absence, and how Ihaia had uncased and unfurled Third Company’s old, raggedy banner beneath the Triumph, a sure sign the moment of decision was approaching.

‘You have done well, to bring those other squads together,’ Nuritona noted after clasping Kordi’s forearm.

‘I had no hand in it,’ Kordi admitted. ‘It was the Librarian who was responsible.’

‘It seems the Seers of the Deeps are responsible for much these days,’ Nuritona said. Kordi did not need to be able to see past his helmet’s visor to read the dissatisfaction in his voice.

‘It is true then,’ Kordi said. ‘Where is he?’

‘You will see them both soon enough,’ Nuritona replied. ‘I will bring them together along with the strike leaders, and discuss what comes next.’

‘Exiles are permitted to partake in a council of war?’ Kordi asked, but Nuritona raised a hand, as though warding him off.

‘Now is not the time for such debates. I have had enough of them already.’

That, Kordi could agree with. He had scarce believed Khauri when the Librarian told him Bail Sharr was fighting in the city alongside the company’s other half. The presence of the Pale Nomad was also unexpected, but the fact Te Kahurangi was involved in such a reunion was the least surprising facet of it all.

‘Brother-Librarian Khauri informs me that we are bound for a decapitation strike,’ he said to Nuritona.

‘Yes, though the operational needs are complex. You will hear more on it when the others are gathered.’

‘And you have had no word from orbit? No word from the White Maw?’

‘Nothing. Is Second Squad’s teleportation beacon intact?’

‘Brother Ihu bears it still, yes.’

‘That is a blessing from Rangu. We may yet have use for it. Now tell me, what do you think of the Exile’s return?’

‘Such matters are of no concern to me,’ Kordi said, knowing it was an unworthy reply but unwilling to be drawn.

‘Such matters will become your concern if I am slain,’ Nuritona said bluntly. ‘As the strike leader of Second Squad, you are next in the chain of command.’

‘And who is above you, strike veteran? Company Master Kino, or a Void Exile with no name?’

A scraping noise issued from Nuritona’s vocaliser, a sound that might have been a sigh, or a hiss of exasperation. ‘Kino is unable to command. I doubt he ever even truly wished to. His misjudgements have left him adrift and of no use to Third Company.’

Such openness from the strike veteran was unusual, but Kordi supposed it was warranted, given the circumstances.

‘Has Sharr spoken of taking command?’ Kordi asked.

‘He seems unwilling to, but Te Kahurangi is convincing him. The Pale Nomad has set him upon the path and now makes him walk it, whether Sharr wills it or not.’

‘What of Chaplain Matiu?’ Kordi said, having noted the grim, black-armoured keeper of the company’s faith among the grey ranks. ‘Has he not made his thoughts on all this known?’

‘He is too young and clever for that,’ Nuritona said. ‘This is not a matter of doctrine. Te Kahurangi understands the Chapter’s tenets better than any. He has made sure that he has not suggested anything that would violate the Silent Litanies or any other precepts.’

‘If Nikora’s duty had not come to an end, he would have supported Sharr,’ Kordi said, almost surprising himself with the admission.

‘What makes you believe that?’

‘Because victory depends on survival. That means survival is our duty, and surviving will be easier with Bail Sharr and Te Kahurangi at our side.’

Nuritona let out a non-committal grunt.

‘We speak of Bail Sharr as though he is still the Company Master who led us for almost a century. The truth is, that brother might have died on the agri-platforms above Temperance, or in the years of exile since then. The Bail Sharr we knew may be gone forever, and I will not be the one responsible for pinning this company’s hopes on the existence of a phantom.’

Third Company convened, and heard the plan Te Kahurangi had devised. It was desperate, but that gave none of the Carcharodons any pause. It took little interrogation to prove that it was the only feasible strategy remaining.

‘We must proceed with caution,’ Te Kahurangi told Khauri before the column moved off. The Chief Librarian had drawn him to one side after the company’s command echelons had debated the course Te Kahurangi was proposing. They stood now immediately beneath the Diamantine Triumph, in its shadow.

‘More so than usual?’ Khauri asked with only the barest hint of humour.

‘The power of the Archenemy is growing by the moment. It is why we have been left with no choice other than this gambit. And they know us, my brother. The daemon they serve has been thwarted by our kind before, in the Outer Dark. By you as well.’

The shadows cast by the battered statue seemed to deepen around Khauri. He refused to acknowledge them, refused to turn and look into blind, metal-sculpted visages gouged and broken by battle.

‘Does what you spoke of earlier still stand?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Te Kahurangi agreed. ‘The materium grows thin, but I fear my initial prognosis was mistaken. Their leader does not simply seek to create a fissure for the sea of souls to pour through. There is some deeper purpose behind the cult’s actions.’

‘Together, we would have the strength to quest once more, seek their reasoning,’ Khauri suggested, but Te Kahurangi shook his head, his thin lips pursed.

‘The risk is now too great. The barrier between realspace and the warp has become too fragile. I will attempt it, but only when I am in the enemy’s presence, where the connection can be made most easily. Besides, we cannot risk you. You have new duties to attend to.’

‘Do you think he is ready?’ Khauri asked.

‘I do not know. I have done what I can. Our best hope is that we will not have need of him, come the end. Do you understand the risks I am asking of you?’

‘I do,’ Khauri said. ‘I am prepared to do what must be done.’

‘Go to him,’ Te Kahurangi said.

‘Yes, master,’ Khauri murmured, and turned, seeking out Bail Sharr among the ranks.

It fell to the skitarii to lead the way to the Pinnacle. Protracted urban warfare was a dangerous waste as far as the Adeptus Astartes were concerned – opposition troops that would quickly be decimated in more open battle had greater protection and took longer to root out of makeshift positions, and the defensive lines that Space Marines excelled in punching through could be conducted in depth, slowing advances and heightening the danger of unacceptable casualties. All that was without the usual threats involved in such a style of warfare. Entire buildings could be rigged as booby traps; most of the Imperium’s enemies would be more than happy to expend one hab-block and dozens of lives as bait if it meant killing a single one of the Emperor’s Angels of Death.

Against these odds, two factors enabled the Carcharodon Astra to make rapid progress through Megafactorum Primus’ ruinous sprawl. The first was that, as the company’s planetside leadership had gauged from contacts since the beginning of the invasion, the Archenemy on Diamantus were uncoordinated and undisciplined. Most of the cult’s strength consisted of mutant wave attacks and roving daemon engines. The cult infantry that had been encountered were few in number and seemed to lack leadership above the company level. The deranged mobs of biomechanical experimentations that made up the bulk of the invasion were apparently incapable of any tactical nuance greater than throwing themselves on the guns of Imperial forces.

The second factor was the skitarii. Optio Zeta-One-One-Trio had greeted Magos Dominus Ze-One-Prime with the closest thing their programming permitted to joy, drawing their gladius and saluting their superior with a flourish. Ze-One-Prime had accepted the request for function subordination, assuming command of both their surviving skitarii and the optio. The combined force now acted as a buffer between the Carcharodons and first contact, pinning what resistance there was and allowing the Space Marines to strike swiftly and decisively. Fulfilling roles that would usually have been taken up by the Imperial Guard in combined-arms operations, Ze-One-Prime’s rad-troopers helped clear the way.

Sharr wondered whether the skitarii felt anger at the destruction of their city, or were motivated by the need for revenge or the urge to purge the mutant abominations they fought. Had all of that been stripped out of them, or, like the Carcharodons, was their bloodlust kept in check by mental reconstruction and brutal conditioning, raging beneath the surface of those cold waters?

It did not matter. They were efficient and deadly, two qualities the Carcharodons prized.

The advance proceeded more quickly than anticipated. The upper slopes of Mount Antikythera had stood shrouded in dust and smoke, but they began to resolve as the Carcharodons climbed higher, cutting down resistance as they went.

The changes that had been wrought by Grim Destiny’s hammer blow became clear. The mountaintop itself had been sundered, and now lay beneath the hulk’s remains. What had once been its upper back now formed a new peak of fractured, unstable asteroid rock and the jutting remains of ancient voidships, still entangled like arrows in the rotting carcass of some great beast.

Below this new, twisted crown, the Pinnacle’s entrance remained. Somehow the primary funicular that led to the small plateau before the doors was intact, and the Carcharodons fought up alongside it, using it as an objective marker amidst the dust and ruins. Frequently it fell to Rangu’s Hammer to lead the way, the siege tank’s scarred dozer blade ploughing through the heaps of rubble the uppermost slopes had been reduced to.

The advance slowed, but continued relentlessly, and as twilight once more deepened the gloom, the Space Marines and the remnants of their skitarii allies mounted the bluff and secured the doorway.

By then, Sharr and the other Exiles had already departed.

It was Khauri who led the trio of Exiles west, following the slope. The task before the Librarian was not one he relished, but if the plan was to succeed, it was vital.

That did not mean he approved of being separated from the main assault. Others would have found shame in being sent to assist a squad of Void Exiles, but Khauri was not hidebound by such beliefs. He had no doubt Te Kahurangi had done the right thing returning Bail Sharr to the fold, even if the former Company Master had refused to accept the same. The Chapter taught pragmatism and a cold, sometimes callous disregard for emotion. Exiles or not, Khauri was not troubled by the companions forced upon him.

He would play his part. All else rested upon the blessings of Rangu and the company’s strength-at-arms. Khauri had rarely known either to fail, whether the circumstances were desperate or not.

One of the Exiles, the former Techmarine they called Blood Eye, called for a halt and proffered the auspex he was carrying. Khauri consulted it, looking up to match the geolocation readings with the jagged peak just above them. They began climbing again, the plateau and the rest of the company now out of sight around the slope to the east.

They did so wearing armour that had been prepared for combat against the worst kinds of tech-heresy. Before moving out from around the Diamantine Triumph, Te Kahurangi, Khauri and Blood Eye had combined to do their best to bless and seal the company’s wargear against the corruption they were about to face. While the former Techmarine had serviced reactor packs and fibre bundles and interfaced with helmet displays, the two Librarians had inscribed wards upon the grey battle plate using handheld lascutters or simple chalk, murmuring the necessary rites as they did so. There was not enough time to ensure the entirety of Third Company were as thoroughly proofed against the taint of the daemonic as any of them would have liked, but it would have to serve.

Thanks to the fact that they had removed their helmets while they were inscribed, Khauri had found himself gazing upon Bail Sharr’s face for the first time in years. His pallid features had grown even more brutal with the work of the Rubicon Primaris, his eyes black as jet, teeth filed to points, as was common among the Chapter. Denticles, one of the afflictions that gripped some older Carcharodons, scabbed his throat and part of his face. He still bore the shark-and-scythe sigil of the Reaper Prime tattooed onto his left temple. The other side of his upper skull was reinforced by a bare metal plate, from which a jagged series of slashes radiated down over the right of his face, a legacy from the War in the Deeps.

Sharr had made no comment, no acknowledgement, when they had first locked eyes, merely returning the Librarian’s gaze in silence.

The ascent became a climb in the most literal sense. The plasteel and rockcrete cladding of the Pinnacle’s uppermost exterior had been pounded and shattered, interspersed with the broken remains of the asteroid that had once made up much of the core of Grim Destiny. The slope was too steep and broken to walk up even with auto-stabilisers engaged. Khauri was forced to lash his force staff to his reactor pack, Sharr likewise clamping Reaper as it became necessary to use both hands.

It was slow, difficult going, doubly so for Khauri. The taint surrounding him was strong, and he muttered invocations under his breath in an effort to ease his mind and calm the churning of the sea of souls, constantly dragging and tugging at his soul. Resisting it was exhausting, but he was determined not to admit how close he felt to being dragged under, either to the Exiles or to Te Kahurangi.

If the plan were to reach fruition, worse was to come.

They pressed on in silence, each picking their own route up. Khauri wondered how small and slow they must appear against the flank of the splintered mountain, little more than insects making a gradual and thoughtless procession.

Their objective only accentuated the sense of insignificance. It towered above them in the gloom of the gathering night, a voidship still partially buried prow-first into the hulk’s carcass. It had once been a vessel of the Imperial Navy, and though scarred by its centuries of captivity, its hull was still ranked with macrocannon ports and defence laser crenellations. It stood like some vast monolith to the fallen power of the Imperium, an idol that had once passed between stars now torn down from its vault and plunged into Diamantus’ peak.

The Carcharodons arrived at the cracked bedrock where it met the asteroid, clambering over the final ramp of rubble before reaching out to touch the pitted hull.

‘This is the one?’ Khauri asked Blood Eye. The Exile simply nodded.

The angle of the ship above them meant it was not entirely vertical, but the steepness would still require them to climb in a similar manner to their ascent of the slope.

They began to haul themselves up the hull, moving in single file this time, with the Exile that the others called Talon leading the way.

Things became marginally easier, if only for a short time. They were able to use mag clamps on the vessel’s armoured flank, sometimes even walking without the use of their hands. The superstructure itself was far from flat, but was studded with portholes, hatches, sensorium struts and secondary bulkhead layering. There were the broken and eroded remains of statuary too, from saints to great Imperial commanders to gargoyles, mimicking the architecture of the Ecclesiarchy’s cathedrals. Khauri used the cracked torso of one statue – judging by the remains of its stone-rendered power armour, once representing a member of the Adepta Sororitas – to heave himself up to the next section, finding himself momentarily gazing into her one remaining eye. The other half of her head had long ago broken off, leaving her with half a face, her expression still serene.

The macrocannon ports, all of them sealed, acted as platforms that could be used as staging areas to continue the climb. Some stretches of the hull were buckled and dented, either from battles long past or because of the debris that had pounded at the ship after its entrapment, but the dips further assisted the ascent.

Eventually they crested the ship’s flank and reached its spine, just beneath the bridge tower. The edifice seemed to leer down at them from its circular portholes, flanked by a cracked astropathic spire and the primary sensorium array.

A huge statue of the Emperor Ascendant stood behind the tower, presiding over the exterior of the bridge. Its titanic wings had once protectively enveloped its uppermost levels, but one had broken off and the other was bent out of shape. The features of the statue, like the rest of its detail, were long lost, eroded by century after century of radiation exposure and deep-space impacts. Khauri pondered it for a moment, considering the symbolism of Rangu rendered faceless. Perhaps it was a good omen. After all, it was not only Khauri’s current companions who were exiles. The entire Chapter still served out the terms of its banishment. Perhaps they did not yet deserve to stand beneath the gaze of the Emperor.

The chosen ingress point lay in the bridge’s base, where it met the ship’s spine. They pressed on, around the defence batteries that studded the back of the vessel.

They were still several hundred yards short of the hatch they were aiming for when Khauri sensed them. At almost the same time, Blood Eye spoke, shouting back down the hull.

‘Contacts!’

An eerie echo began to rise from within the ship itself, the piercing sound of metal scraping against metal. Khauri unslung his force staff, closed his eyes to find his focus, and braced himself with his free hand against the slope.

As, from broken ports and airlocks and venting ducts all around them, the metallic furies surged.

CHAPTER XXVI

The entrance to the Pinnacle yawned ahead of the main body of Third Company, the circular doorway like the gaping eye socket of a skull. It had been torn open, the bodies of mutants and Martian priests strewn indiscriminately across the steps leading up to it.

Nuritona ordered Rangu’s Hammer, Black Scythe, and Sixth Squad to form a cordon and hold the entranceway. It would be the company’s only option for egress once they entered the mountain.

Second Squad were ordered to take point, just as Kordi had hoped. The Archenemy were present – he could practically taste their greasy, sickly filth. It stirred his blood, set his body on edge, eager to kill. He channelled the lusts into cold efficiency, issuing a terse series of formation instructions and engagement protocols as they ascended the steps and reached the broken doorway.

In the darkness beyond, the madness of the warp writhed.

Corruption had taken root in the wide tunnel that delved into the Pinnacle’s depths. Blisters and tendrils and webs of hoary skin now infested the walls, ceiling and floor, spreading like vile fungal blooms over the precise architecture of the Adeptus Mechanicus. What looked as though they had once been rail lines on either side of the central walkway were now flowing, stinking channels of effluvium.

Kordi led Second Squad into the deranged space, bolter up, sweeping for active targets while suppressing the urge to simply open fire on the corruption surrounding him.

The wide passage sloped steadily downwards. Rancid air gusted past at regular moments, reminding Kordi of the slow, steady breathing of a deep sleeper. It felt as if they were advancing down the throat of some monstrosity, like a band of heroes from one of the ancient Terran myths.

The strike leader quickly dismissed such an analogy. The Carcharodon Astra were hunters and killers. There were no heroes here, only predators.

Parts of his visor display started to shudder and blink, showing signs of the degradation that had beset it during the fighting in the Twinfort. He knew better than to try the vox.

With a terse set of hand motions, he led his squad on, the Space Marines fanning out into open order to cover the width of the roadway. Eighth Squad moved up through the entranceway behind them, the Devourers providing immediate close support should a sudden assault fling itself against the vanguard. Behind them were Nuritona and the command squad, along with Te Kahurangi, and then the rest of the company. The skitarii formed the rearguard.

Enough of Kordi’s visor display was still working for him to note the rune that Neku, moving up to his immediate right, had blink-clicked.

Possible contacts, closing.

Kordi had already noticed them. There were lesser tunnels branching off from the main passage, presumably once sub-lines for the arterial rails on either side. Most were even more clogged with warp scum than the main branch. Ill-defined shapes moved in the rotting, foetid darkness on either side of the advance, stirring and ticking, eye clusters and burning optic nodes blinking as they watched the intruders.

A keening noise began to rise all around the Carcharodons. Second Squad shifted their fire arcs to better cover the flanks as things started to drag themselves out into the light of their stab-lumens.

‘Engage,’ Kordi ordered, and opened fire.

The creatures of metal and malice that had assailed Sharr and the Exiles on the bridge in the hulk’s depths returned for them. They came pouring from within the ship, flocking in the darkness of the sky overhead before sweeping down in a storm of steel talons, wing-barbs and teeth.

Sharr had time to clamber up onto the side of the ship’s defence batteries before they struck, giving himself a more level, stable platform to fight from. Talon was with him, lips peeled back from his sharpened teeth in a grimace of anticipation as he freed his club.

Reaper roared, and the first fiend to come diving at them was split from its warped machine head to its tail, sparks lighting up the night.

The rest struck, too many for Reaper’s brutal arc to cut down, their claws scraping and gouging at Sharr. He gritted his teeth, adopting a defensive stance, keeping his swings short and using the broad, flat side of Reaper’s axe head to help protect his exposed face. Talon fought at his back, beating aside one metallic monstrosity after another.

‘We need to keep going,’ Sharr heard Blood Eye shouting. He and Khauri were higher up the hull, fighting from the flank of the next weapons battery.

The former Techmarine was right, as ever. The creatures were still swarming up from the portholes and vents below. There could be no hope of slaying them all, certainly not if they wanted to reach their objective on time. But disengaging in the midst of a continuous assault would be almost impossible.

It was Khauri who made the difference. There was a cracking sound, and the foulness of the warp invaded Sharr’s senses. A rent appeared in the air above the section of hull between the two batteries, a wound in the fabric of reality through which utter darkness bled. As Sharr struck down another of the fiends lunging at him, Reaper’s teeth cleaving its machine hide, he saw tendrils of the blackness snatching and snagging the circling flock, hauling them with unnatural shrieks into the rift.

At the same time, Sharr heard the Librarian’s voice, not shouted across the space between them, but seemingly whispered right into his ear.

+Move.+

Sharr turned to Talon and nodded. Together the Exiles leaped down from the weapons battery, grunting as they impacted against the steeply sloping hull. The clamps and stabilisers in his boots engaged and Sharr began to climb, though he was still forced to use his free hand, Reaper’s motor idling as he carried the axe in a choke-grip with his other arm.

The ascent left them almost defenceless, and the furies would have ripped them apart were it not for the malefic rift above them. It wasn’t only dragging in the airborne creatures, but had caused their razor flocks to break and scatter away from the psychic anomaly, almost as though they feared it.

Sharr and Talon scaled the laser turret that formed the peak of the defence battery Blood Eye and Khauri were on top of, Talon using his claws to gain purchase and then reaching back for Sharr, club dangling from his wrist strap. Sharr accepted the handhold and was hauled up onto a jutting gargoyle whose weathered stone features were like a simulacrum of the machine-beasts attacking them. Ancient stone cracked and crumbled beneath the two Carcharodons perched atop it, but it held long enough for both to mount the structure’s side, which, at the current angle, had become its upper surface.

As they did so, Khauri’s strength almost gave out. His gauntlets were visibly shaking where he was gripping his force staff. Sharr realised the wailing rift of blackness was actually surging from its tip, like arcane smoke, and as he reached the Librarian’s side it withered. The rift began to seal shut, the shadowy creatures beyond it clawing a last few of the flying metal constructs into the unknowable depths with them. Then it was gone, as if it had never existed.

Sharr noticed that a black, tarry substance was dripping from Khauri’s nose. The Librarian cuffed it away with the back of his hand when he noticed Sharr’s gaze.

‘We need to keep going, while we still can,’ he said, voice brittle.

Khauri and the Exiles charged up the remaining section towards the base of the bridge and its primary hatch, their faceless Emperor looming above them. Sharr’s hearts were pounding, muscles seared with lactic acid, his indoctrination using the pain as further fuel to drive him on and on. The reduction in the weight of the armour was an aid, and the four Carcharodons were able to cross half the distance towards the primary bridge hatch before their attackers had recovered from the horrors of Khauri’s psychic mastery.

The furies came surging back down for them. Sharr swung blind with one hand, acting on instinct as he sensed one of the creatures above him. It was almost impossible to wield Reaper while continuing to climb, but the upward swipe was enough to clash the haft with the thing’s claws and send it spiralling away and back up for another swoop.

One of the lesser hatches the machine-beasts were spilling from stood just to the right of their route along the ship’s spine. A burst of fire from Blood Eye’s bolter blew apart two of the constructs as they climbed free, and Sharr and Talon diverted to try and wrestle the hatch shut. Another of the diabolic machines surged up from below, and Sharr managed to pin it against the hatch’s rim using Reaper’s base.

He punched it with his other hand, almost losing his lock against the slope. The blow with his bare fist caused his knuckles to crunch, but it still beat in the silvery, articulated grotesque that served as the hissing, writhing thing’s faceplate. At the same time, Talon hammered the edge of the heavy hatch repeatedly against the creature’s torso, until it buckled and its wiring and actuators snapped and shattered. It came apart at the waist, wings snapped, head broken. Sharr tossed its twitching remains aside and helped Talon slam the hatch shut in the face of more of its kin, trying to claw their way up out of the ship.

Above them, Khauri and Blood Eye had almost made it to the bridge’s base. They turned back and opened fire, Blood Eye with his boltgun and Khauri with his pistol. The Librarian looked haggard in the wake of his umbramancy.

Sharr and Talon made the last few yards beneath their fire, gaining the ledge. Sharr deactivated Reaper and unlocked his bolt pistol, adding his shots so Blood Eye could take the reprieve necessary to assess the hatch and its locking mechanism.

‘How long to gain access?’ Sharr demanded, glancing back at the other Exile as he reloaded. To his surprise, Blood Eye smiled, an expression he didn’t think he had ever seen him make.

‘Three seconds,’ Blood Eye said, and by way of explanation, raised the double melta charge he had unclamped from his hip. The Exiles had been furnished with fresh ammunition and explosives before separating from Third Company.

As Sharr resumed firing, blowing one plunging, shrieking fury from the sky and sending its mangled remains sliding down the hull below, Blood Eye locked the magnetic charge against the centre of the hatch and primed it. There was a whooshing sound and a crump, followed by a gout of smoke and burning metal as the shaped melta charge blew, liquifying the centre of the hatch and its locking bars. The molten remnants of the entranceway, still smoking, swung open.

Wordlessly the Carcharodons moved into the darkness within, Blood Eye bringing up the rear, his boltgun banging mechanically. Sharr pressed on, sweeping the shadows, Reaper growling in both fists now.

The metal tunnel was empty, and untainted. Another hatch lay up a short flight of stairs at the far end. They pressed through it, the sound of Blood Eye’s bolter beating against their hearing.

‘Can we secure this one?’ Khauri demanded as they reached the secondary hatch. Sharr took over covering the stairs and the corridor, to allow Blood Eye to inspect the locking terminal.

‘Yes,’ he said, setting to work as Sharr stepped back, the last one through the opening.

The fiends were swarming up the corridor as Talon heaved the hatch shut for Blood Eye to engage the locks. They activated with a thud, followed almost instantly by the frenzied banging and scraping of the metal furies as they slammed into the other side.

‘Keep going,’ Blood Eye said. ‘Past the bridge’s under-level, not up. Our objective is on the other side.’

Sharr already knew as much, and was able to follow the sloping corridors through eidetic memory. The ship was dark and dead. He hoped it would remain that way.

The shrieking of the furies and their scraping against the hatch swiftly faded into silence behind them. Sharr welcomed it, knowing it would likely be the final stillness he would know for some time. The final quiet before the true test began.

They passed through a stairwell and into another chamber that Sharr recognised – a generator space. Beyond it lay the enginarium of the Sire of Belaphrone.

‘Set to, quickly,’ Sharr heard Khauri instruct Blood Eye. ‘Third Company have started their assault.’

Red Tane took the thing coming at him apart with a pair of crosscuts, the Void Sword parting the stitched-together monstrosity. He kicked the remains into the swilling muck of the rail line running along the side of the roadway, then used his boot to split the lumpen skull of another mutant trying to claw its way up at him, over its dead kin.

Third Company were carving their way into the heart of the mountain. The primary route to the Pinnacle’s throne room was almost unrecognisable, despite the fact Red Tane had walked it just days earlier. The place was rancid with corruption and rotten with the Archenemy’s abominations.

‘Doorway ahead,’ he heard Strike Leader Tangaroa call to Nuritona, communicating over open vocaliser rather than relying on the vox. He was passing word on from Kordi, whose squad were spearheading the assault. The entire strike force had plunged down the tunnel, moving slowly and methodically as they maintained coherency with each squad in the column and fought off the hordes of mutants and twisted machines spilling from the adjoining passages. Overextending was the greatest danger in such a tactical environment, and the Carcharodons knew when the hunt required patience. They had maintained their formation every step of the way, from Kordi in the van to Third Squad, assigned to support the skitarii bringing up the rear.

The flesh cladding much of the tunnel around them was visibly shuddering with the ferocity of the firepower pounding the enclosed space. A viscous stream of Chaotic offal drooled over Nuritona from a ruptured part of the ceiling, befouling his armour as he snapped an order.

‘First, with me.’

Red Tane, Tama and Ihaia fell in alongside him as he moved through the bloodied ranks of Tangaroa’s Devourers, joining Second Squad just as they reached the end of the long passageway.

Kordi was standing beside the doorway he had reported. Yellowing fangs the length of a man’s arm had started to extrude from the meat-growths scabbing the portal’s edges, turning the entrance into a mouth-like orifice.

‘The throne room is beyond,’ Nuritona told Kordi, and, without further explanation, fired a shot from his bolter directly at the centre of the doorway.

Ugly crimson light flared, intercepting the round before it could strike. The tainted refractor field robbed the bolt of its energy, causing it to hit the door with such little force that it simply bounced off, failing to even detonate.

‘The field is active,’ Nuritona said over the pounding of the fighting still happening higher up the corridor. ‘It will require melta charges, around the base.’

‘You wish to breach immediately?’ Kordi asked.

Red Tane stood close to Nuritona, Coral Shield engaged, watching for threats as the strike veteran made a split-second assessment. Pushing the assault in through the door would guarantee the entire force would be cut off from the reserve still stationed at the mountain’s entrance, but that had always been inevitable. The objective was close. Right now, that was all that mattered.

‘Push in,’ Nuritona ordered Kordi. ‘Go left with Eighth Squad. I will take First and Ninth right, then move to the tip of an iron-tide pattern once the company’s strength is deployed. For the Void Father, and the Forgotten One.’

Voldire died and was reborn, over and over.

What few identifiable organs had once belonged to his mortal body were wracked by fits and seizures. His consciousness was a haze of pain and madness. The chanting of his faculty was the only remaining anchor, drawing him back again and again, reminding him of who he was, what he was, and what he was becoming.

Immortal.

His outer body was now almost wholly indistinguishable from the throne pyramid of the Fabricator General, and the bodies of the court who had once held sway there. Flesh and organs had melded and remoulded with the machine underneath, the great super-cogitator that was housed within the ziggurat. Voldire had infested it, had turned its processes into something else entirely, thanks to the blessings of the Infernal Architect.

The remaking was almost complete. His skull was close to splitting open as the squirming, pulsing thing his brain had become grew far beyond its natural parameters. His spine had fused with the cogitator’s central data-stack, wires and tendons as one, the mind of the machine and its vast processing power melding with his own, and with the ephemeral knowledge granted to him by his long connection to the divine. All were becoming one as the faculty continued their black binharic litany, weeping with ecstasy as they understood that their life’s work was about to be realised.

Through the morass of his consciousness, Voldire heard thunder. Not heaven’s wrath but mortal-made, a din of death, of battle. It filled the throne room, like a challenge to the canting of his colleagues.

They were here, those pale hunters he had been warned of, but they were too late. Too late to stop him. Too late to interrupt this glorious first, this perfect confluence of science and medicine, religion and philosophy. Flesh and machine, machine and flesh, fivefold praises to the one who had shown him the truth of progress, the remaking of reality itself.

Drooling his own liquified innards, Voldire smiled, and began to rise.

CHAPTER XXVII

The throne room of the Fabricator General of Diamantus was no more.

The chamber had utterly devolved, a hellscape that defied every natural law the materium was built upon. Flesh and machine had melded, the cabling underfoot now more akin to intestines or veins. The shattered ceiling, split open by the impact of Grim Destiny, no longer showed the space hulk’s innards but a fiery and impossible sky, riven with brimstone and distant, circling shapes.

The pillars that had once supported the throne room were becoming similarly uncoupled from reality. Stone and steel choked up with flesh and sprouts of crustacean-like tendrils, starting to split open from top to bottom. Mechanical things were forcing their way through from some place beyond, optics burning with daemonic malice, their armour plating and wicked weapons still red-hot from the forges of their master. With them came gusts of burning wind, ash and sulphur, as the slow and agonising birth of their damnable plane of existence continued.

Into the rising tide of Chaos the Carcharodons launched themselves.

Te Kahurangi had moved from the centre of the column that had entered the mountain to its leading edge. The power of the warp-taint infusing everything around him was almost more than he could endure. Simply entering the chamber was akin to an unprotected mortal plunging into an ocean of toxic filth. He felt it bearing him down and burning him, as though his skin was sloughing off and his mind was being flayed then remade, over and over.

He spoke words of power as he advanced, warding incantations that abjured the daemon and the roiling seas of emotion that birthed them. Each step was leaden, the sigils that decorated his power armour ablaze with witchfire as they fought to preserve his purity while he in turn fought to hold back the invisible etheric tide flooding the Pinnacle. In doing so, he kept the worst of the taint not just from himself, but from the minds, bodies and wargear of his brothers.

The strain of it would have liquified the mind of a lesser psyker and left their body infested with daemonic possession. Yet Te Kahurangi kept it at bay, his concentration singular, barely aware of the Carcharodons cutting down mutants and daemonspawn all around him. He kept going.

The objective lay at the far end of the chamber. It was a creature that no longer subscribed to logical definitions, a mountain of madness from which the rancid taint of Chaos poured. It repulsed Te Kahurangi almost beyond comprehension, and yet he continued to advance upon it, force staff raised. The relic’s green light blazed ahead of him, causing the flesh of the chamber to burn and searing the skin from the malformed bones of the horrors that flung themselves in his path.

He could not stop now. He could not falter. Not until the nightmare that was making its nest within the mountain was purged.

The primary engine of the Sire of Belaphrone was still intact, as sure a sign of Rangu’s favour as any Sharr had experienced since his exile. The Carcharodons had been able to establish that the body of the ship was still part of the remaining wreckage of the hulk, now settled atop Mount Antikythera’s peak. Whether its old means of propulsion was still functioning had been unclear until they actually reached the enginarium and its corresponding plasma generators.

‘You know how to awaken it?’ Khauri asked as Blood Eye began directing them around the main block, the coils underfoot already throbbing with power from the generator room.

‘I have already,’ Blood Eye said. ‘My only doubts were whether it survived planetary impact, and whether its systems remained uncorrupted.’

Khauri had joined the Exiles to ensure its purity. As Sharr and Talon aided Blood Eye in once again kickstarting the old ship’s heart, the Librarian paced around the chamber, muttering arcane phrases and anointing the various mechanisms. He had drawn a short, plain knife from his mag belt and had removed his gauntlet so he could cut his palm, using his own blood to make the sigils. Sharr had never pretended to understand the fell warpcraft of the Chapter’s Librarius, but he knew that such actions spoke of desperation and necessity.

Khauri was forced to wound himself repeatedly as his blood clotted almost instantly. Whether it would be enough to stop the sort of warp-induced malfunction that had thwarted them before the planetary collision, Sharr did not know.

Blood Eye muttered rites of his own in Lingua Technis as he laboured, hurrying to awaken the engines as quickly as possible. During the council of war he had assured the assembled leaders of the Third Company that, having already brought the engine online recently, he could re-prime it much more quickly. Sharr hoped he was correct – Third Company’s survival depended on it.

Under Blood Eye’s instruction, Sharr and Talon set about activating the secondary systems. There were a series of thudding sounds, and a steady throb began filling the air as power was fed through from the generators. Blood Eye continued to murmur as he moved around the block and directed the others, like a master craftsman overseeing his apprentices.

‘Be alert for possible xenos contact,’ Sharr said as he worked alongside Blood Eye. The Exile didn’t reply, his expression becoming briefly uncertain, as though he had forgotten the encounter with the lictor prior to planetfall.

It was as Sharr heaved down on a double lever atop one of the gantries that ran along the block’s flank that Khauri spoke, his red knife still in one hand, forearm glazed dark crimson with sear-clotted blood.

‘They’ve sensed us.’

No one asked him to elaborate. Blood Eye sped up his work, shifting to the main control panel. The vibrations were growing more intense, and a knocking sound was coming from the block, one that Sharr didn’t remember from the first time they had activated it.

The temperature was rising sharply as well, too fast to be ascribed to the engine alone. Soon it was infernally warm, reaching degrees Sharr would have only expected after the chamber had been operating at maximum output for hours. The air started to shimmer. Other things began distorting, too. As Sharr was instructed by Blood Eye to haul on another lever, setting a complex series of massive cogs in the engine’s side clanking and whirring, he saw the deck – a level below where he was standing – start to warp.

The metal plates were becoming molten and reshaping, rising up and assuming a form that was unmistakably humanoid. Liquified steel flowed back from fangs made of screws and sharpened bolts.

With a groan like tortured metal, it lunged up at Sharr, trying to snare him with its quicksilver claws.

Reaper’s roar filled the enginarium. Sharr swept the chainaxe down through the thing’s half-made form, shearing steel and sending gobbets of liquid metal flying. It started to reknit in the axe’s wake, until Sharr hit it again, finally unbinding its unnatural form and causing it to flow back into the deck.

Khauri was now calling out his psychomantic evocations loudly, but it wasn’t enough. The whole enginarium was starting to twist out of shape, skeletal, animalistic faces leering from the metalwork, clawed limbs straining from the bulkheads as the corruption that ran rampant from the heart of the Pinnacle possessed what remained of the Sire of Belaphrone. The markings made with Khauri’s blood on the main block and the power supply were visibly sizzling and bubbling, and the throb of the engine was rising to a vibrating growl.

‘How long before you can fully activate it?’ Sharr shouted at Blood Eye as he and Talon retreated towards the control console platform the former Techmarine was standing on, hacking at the amorphous warp spawn trying to drag them down as they went.

By way of an answer, Blood Eye unlocked his combat knife and, using the wrench head built into its base, clamped and twisted a heavy dial, then struck at the runic panel next to it.

The engine howled. Black smoke billowed from the mouths of the plasteel gargoyles fashioned into its flanks, and the corrupt metal around it rippled, as though struck by some great impact. Through the turmoil, Sharr felt further energies building – not the madness of the warp, but the raw physics of the material plane.

The Sire of Belaphrone had not only awoken once more. Its primary engine was now also blazing at maximum capacity, driving it slowly and inexorably into the mountain in which it had been buried. Forcing it down, little by little, onto the throne room below the hulk’s remains.

Kordi smashed his fist into the face of the screeching thing that was clawing its way from the slurry of intestines and tentacles that constituted most of the throne room’s floor, then snatched the lank, slick hair of its stitch-scarred scalp, hauling it up so he could saw the razored edge of his combat knife across what passed for its throat, practically decapitating it in the process.

He had no idea if he had killed it. He couldn’t tell if it was just one part of the greater morass of flesh and bone that the chamber had descended into.

Maintaining a coherent firebase and mutual squad support was almost impossible, yet the Carcharodons fought to do so, a wedge of grey ceramite befouled with the blood and oil and ichor and unidentifiable viscera of the hopelessly insane nightmares trying to force their way into reality all around them. Second Squad were at the centre of the spear’s right side, Third Squad and then First on their left, and the Devourers of Eighth holding the extreme right. Ninth Squad were to their rear along with the skitarii, unleashing their firepower on anything that broke through.

Kordi clamped his knife and cycled back to his boltgun, drilling half a dozen rounds into a sluglike spawn creature rearing up on back-jointed mechanical lower limbs to strike at him. The bolts blew the thing into steaming chunks of blubber, and Kordi snap-reloaded and switched back to his knife just in time to plough it into one of the eye clusters of a horrifically mutated servitor. Like most of the squad, he kept shifting fluidly between his bolter and his knife, leaving his chainsword clamped; maintaining the pace of the advance was vital, and he was able to go from boltgun to knife and back again faster than if he switched out the naked steel for his chainsword.

Despite the techno-warding of the Librarians and the Exile, Kordi’s visor display had almost completely decayed, markers glitching and distorting. He snatched a glance left and right, manually checking squad coherency. They were holding open order – halfway between the wide gaps that could be adopted in extended order and the tightness of the close order that Kordi expected the assault would soon adopt. Ateko, Ihu and Repat were on his left, sending controlled bursts of bolter fire into a maw-creature rising up like a surfacing leviathan from the slaughter-sea, blowing it to pieces as it emerged. To his right, Neku was in the process of reloading as Arrona fired, but Kordi immediately saw there was a danger to the squad’s right side. A rush of cult troopers came charging through the madness, their bodies deforming with mutations even as they flung themselves, howling, on the Carcharodons.

Kordi switched back to his bolter and added his firepower to Neku’s and Arrona’s, but he could already tell it wouldn’t be enough. The cultists were riven by insanity, oblivious to arms and limbs being blown off as they collided with the Carcharodons and clawed futilely at them.

A few dozen cultists in isolation would have been no threat, but they could easily mark the beginning of the end. The greatest danger was being overwhelmed. If that happened, the formation would be breached and start to disintegrate, and soon each Space Marine would be fighting alone and unsupported. Each one would take dozens, even hundreds, of the mutant chattels with them, but their enemies could afford such a price.

Neku and Arrona switched to their chain weaponry and began mowing down the shrieking, twisting wretches, but the cessation of fire meant more mutants came pouring into the gap. Kordi knew he had seconds to rectify the situation.

‘Wiremu, high-explosives, rip-tide!’ he bellowed, hoping his amplified vocaliser would drive his words over the thunderous cacophony.

Wiremu heard him. The heavy-weapons specialist was acting as the squad’s immediate reserve, standing unengaged a dozen yards behind Kordi. He switched the shot selector on his Executor heavy bolter and opened fire on the right-hand side of the squad.

The rounds he unleashed were primed to detonate early, before penetrating. This turned the air around Neku and Arrona into a hail of .998-calibre heavy bolt fragments, lethal to the lightly armoured cultists but unlikely to penetrate the battle plate of the two Space Marines. Wiremu was able to fire indiscriminately into the melee for a few precious seconds, carving apart the mutating heretics and giving Neku and Arrona the moments they needed to switch back to their bolters and lay down a curtain of fire, even as their power armour was perforated by shards and painted by the tainted blood of the lost and the damned.

Kordi reloaded and snatched another split-second assessment of the wider combat. Both Third on their left and the Devourers on their right had pushed forward while Second Squad had been stabilising. He had to close the gap that was appearing between the three units.

‘Move up,’ he barked, taking a step forward and firing as he went.

The advance resumed.

A machine-chimera attempted to tear through the tip of the iron-tide. Some foul entity had dragged together a conglomeration of cogitators and the more arcane engines littering the throne room, granting them bloodthirsty sentience. Now data-stacks were riven with gnashing iron-and-brass jaws, and part-mechanical, part-organic tendrils had burst from its jagged undercarriage, allowing it to rip itself free from its floor bolts and energy cables and drag itself forward.

Red Tane met the thing’s charge with a grunt and a crack of metal on coral. His shield’s refractor field had failed – not an overcharge but seemingly a permanent malfunction doubtless caused by the machine corruption seething through the throne room. The coral held firm though, the machine-chimera’s multiple sets of metal fangs scraping against it as tendrils squirmed over and under, sliding grotesquely around the Company Champion’s arms and legs.

Teeth gritted so he didn’t let out a sound, Red Tane hacked the Void Sword through the appendages, black ichor gouting over his limbs. The conglomeration let out a clattering squeal, hellish, ruddy light blazing from its interior, the primary maw – once a coolant unit – yawning as it came at him again.

Red Tane took his opening, ramming his relic blade through the maw and its corrupt processor, punching the tip out through the ridge of its upper stack.

The thing clattered to the ground. Red Tane wrenched the Void Sword free and stamped down on it once, caving in part of its brass chassis and crushing its warped flank into the meat floor.

He immediately checked the rest of First Squad’s position and that of Te Kahurangi, whom he had been instructed to treat the way he would the Company Master. Tama was gone, seeing to his duties keeping the rest of the company in the fight and retrieving progenoids from the fallen wherever he could. Nuritona was bringing down another possessed, fused mass of machines, chainsword shearing through it in a blaze of sparks that rapidly turned to stinking offal as the teeth reached the fleshy thing infesting the machine’s core. Te Kahurangi was behind him, within the protection of the spear’s tip, wreathed in witchfire. Despite the pale light that coiled across his blue armour, his gaunt face was lost in shadow, and as Red Tane glanced towards him he could have sworn that, just for a moment, the Chief Librarian’s features became a skeletal grin.

Red Tane looked away in time to see Ihaia step forward, his volkite caliver recharged. The ten-thousand-year-old weapon was helping clear a path, a channel of burning flesh and melting metal bored through the madness.

First Squad drove into the scorched wound. Ahead, a shape was rising ponderously up out of the smoke and steam and filth shrouding the deranged chamber. Red Tane understood that it must be the ziggurat that had once borne Fabricator General Digitas Horrum’s throne, the great tiered cogitator, though it was impossible to reconcile what he now saw with the space he had entered just days earlier. It had become a mountain of flesh, fronds waving in the foul air, putrid skin webbed over molten stone and melted, fused machinery. There were shapes writhing in the morass that Red Tane initially took to be large parasites or exposed organs, but which he realised were actually the bodies of the Martian priesthood, members of Horrum’s court who had been melded, body and soul, with the vile entity that had descended on Diamantus.

And entity it was, a single consciousness, deformed beyond all physical recognition. It had possessed the throne and its pyramid, and all of it was now starting to rise up, to rip its way out of the ground and lumber like a living nightmare towards the oncoming Carcharodons. Trying to fully comprehend its form, its dimensions, made Red Tane’s skull ache, so he stopped trying.

They were going to kill it, not attempt to understand it.

Mutants threw themselves at the Carcharodons, howling and raving. Red Tane shifted behind the coral shield, anticipating contact, but it never came.

Something ripped into the onrushing horde, sending shorn limbs and shredded torsos splattering against the Carcharodons. Red Tane, still braced, watched as the front of the heretic assault seemed to disintegrate, savaged by invisible forces, as though a shoal of ethereal predators had just descended on the Archenemy. He glanced back and saw Te Kahurangi with his staff raised.

The Pale Nomad’s voice rasped in his head.

+Hold them a little while longer, my brothers, and watch for the turning of the tide.+

Te Kahurangi anchored himself using his staff, the ancient, carved bone vibrating. He knew he had to be quick, before the tide overwhelmed him and dashed him to pieces, yet he could not rush. He spoke the necessary words, and opened his mind’s eye.

He was not standing in the Pinnacle any more. Waves struck him – not the rancid currents of the empyrean, but a bitter sea, stretching out from a grey shore beneath dark clouds. The surf glittered, pearlescent, as it came sweeping in, the wind-driven spume taking on a multihued shimmer in the slowly gathering twilight. The view had a savage majesty to it, the air cold and quick and clear.

Te Kahurangi would have found himself missing it, if he’d had time for such luxuries.

He was standing on the shingle, the waves rushing up about his greaves, his blue armour damp with the salty air and his white hair lank and dripping. There was another figure just a few paces away. He was a man, dressed in simple russet-and-black robes, his cowl lowered. His left eye was an augmetic, the green lens a small disc of digital colour in the slate-grey landscape. The rest of his face was young and lean, his scalp shaved and inked with a numerical code.

‘Where am I?’ the young man asked as his gaze – flesh and machine both – fixed on Te Kahurangi.

‘I have brought you to my home,’ the Carcharodon answered. ‘Please, sit.’

He indicated a sea-drenched boulder standing between them. The adept did not move.

‘This is…’ He trailed off, and looked down at his hands in apparent confusion. They were skin and bone – the bionic eye was the only augmetic he had received thus far from his masters.

‘This is wrong,’ he said eventually.

‘What is wrong about it?’ Te Kahurangi asked.

The adept refused to answer.

‘Tell me your name,’ Te Kahurangi said. Still the adept was silent. He drew the sleeve of his robe back to inspect his arm, likewise flesh, seemingly confused by it.

‘Do you not remember it?’ Te Kahurangi asked him patiently. ‘Do you not remember your own self?’

‘Names have power,’ the adept murmured, almost to himself, then looked back up at Te Kahurangi, his expression hardening.

‘Names have power,’ he repeated, more firmly this time. ‘That is one of the Primordial Truths. All my life, I have sought truth. Truth leads to enlightenment, it leads to progress. It leads to power. And I do not wish you to have power over me.’

‘It would be nothing but the power to set you free,’ Te Kahurangi said.

‘A psyker’s trick,’ the adept replied, a faint smile passing over his damp lips. He glanced around as though he had only just properly awoken from a dream and come to terms with his surroundings. ‘Shouldn’t there be a regicide board for us to play over while we philosophise?’

‘I am not here to game, or philosophise,’ Te Kahurangi said with a phantom smile of his own. ‘I am here to destroy you.’

He snatched the adept by the back of the head and slammed his face into the boulder’s edge.

The whole enginarium was disintegrating around Khauri and the Exiles.

The generators and the engine block itself were blazing with frenzied wrath, whatever sane fragments of the Sire of Belaphrone’s ancient machine spirit remained finally roused to suicidal vengeance. Khauri hoped that, even without his wards and Blood Eye’s Lingua Technis benedictions, the ship would not relent.

Everything not warded was being rent asunder by the madness of the Arkifane. The fell powers had turned the very fabric of the ship against the Carcharodons, moulding terrors from the superstructure and setting them on the Space Marines. The decking plates were becoming bubbling pits of molten metal, while the walls and ceiling flowed and re-formed, reaching for them with liquid claws.

Khauri, Sharr and Talon rallied on the platform where Blood Eye was continuing to preside over the engine’s operation, the warding marks the Librarian had made in its structure keeping the molten-metal horde at bay, for the time being.

‘Will it hold?’ Sharr demanded, a sweep of Reaper’s head indicating the block. Part of its internals had caught fire, and the vibrations were shaking loose bolts and outer plates, even as everything around it was rent by maddening flux.

‘Rangu willing,’ Blood Eye grunted, not taking his eyes off his work as he adjusted a set of dials. Sharr glanced at Khauri.

‘Are you prepared for what comes next?’ he asked.

‘As much as I ever could be,’ the Codicier replied, looking grim. ‘My question is, are you?’

CHAPTER XXVIII

Third Company moved to close order around the tip of the spear, pauldron to pauldron. Red Tane was at the razor edge, feet planted, body burning with stimms and combat adrenaline as he worked. Block, stab, parry, slash. Scythe down the chaff. It was mechanical, lethal, and when it ended it was almost the death of him.

The Void Sword rebounded from something with a force that jarred up his arm. He had been so lost to the rhythm of the slaughter that he had failed to identify his next target as something more than screeching, scrabbling, twisting mutant scum.

It was tall, as tall as a Primaris, and riven with a kind of squalid machine-mutation beyond even those exhibited by the rest of the cult. As Red Tane adjusted to engage it properly, he saw metallic bones sheathe its squirming flesh in an exoskeleton; one abnormally bulky arm reshaped itself into a twisted-looking rifle with a bone-blade that formed a bayonet at the end. Red Tane’s blow rebounded from its semi-metallic shoulder, and it drove its freshly formed weapon inside his guard.

For the first time since going to close order, the Company Champion was forced to shift his stance. The bone-blade hammered against his flank with unnatural force, punching through ceramite and plasteel. His visor, its display a malfunctioning mess, stuttered as it attempted to inform him of his injury.

He slammed the Coral Shield against what passed for the weapon’s barrel, forcing it away from him, his blood running down his left side before the wound sealed.

Coral Shield up, drive back in, regain the initiative. He swung the Void Sword overhand, a kill-blow to the head. It cracked ferociously against the construct’s deformed skull but failed to split it, merely parting flesh to expose unyielding metal beneath. The blow deflected down against the shoulder and off to the side.

Red Tane had never encountered anything that could withstand such a strike from the relic weapon. As he watched, the flesh knitted back together, restoring the blasphemous rune inscribed into the thing’s forehead.

It drove at him again, its limbs whirring mechanically, shrieking in a voice that sounded like a garbled, pleading vox-transmission. The blade jarred off the Coral Shield, scarring its rough surface. Red Tane lunged in again, this time aiming between its ribs, trying to spear through into the meat of its body. Even as he did so, his subconscious view of the surrounding melee formed a grim realisation.

Whatever this possessed construct was, it wasn’t alone.

Te Kahurangi ransacked the monster’s mind.

He dived down through the filth of its consciousness, forging through the mire of corruption, feeling it gnawing at his own soul. It made him want to choke and retch, but he would not give up, would not let go.

Te Kahurangi saw the thing’s past, learned its name. Voldire, an adept of Diamantus, mistreated and misunderstood. Cast out of the priesthood, abandoned to wander a lonely path. But his mind was keen. His intellect was great, and it demanded expression. He had dabbled in ever-higher forms of knowledge, not seeing the chasm that yawned beneath him. And then, inevitably, he had fallen.

Chaos was the architect. Chaos had helped him build his palace of madness, sharpening and honing his mind almost beyond recognition even as it fought to likewise change his body. Voldire thought he could control it, master it, turn it towards noble ends. They always did.

But there was more to his homecoming than just a desire to inflict the curses that had befallen him on those who had once cast him out. Some scheme, birthed out of twisted logic, the device of a savant who had lost his mind. Te Kahurangi lashed through the psychic morass, grasped at it, and finally understood it.

They were back on the cold, hard shoreline. Blood poured from the young adept’s split skull. He was laughing though, laughing even as Te Kahurangi beat his head against the rock. His body had started to shift under his red-black robes, crunches and wet snapping sounds marking the splitting of bones and the swelling and rupturing of organs. The robes began to tear around blistering metal tumours. Unchecked machine growth wracked his form as the tide dashed against them both.

Te Kahurangi knew that he did not have the strength to destroy the monster, not while they were both still submerged in the empyrean.

He let go and returned to the throne room of Diamantus, shaking, struck blind, deaf and dumb by the etheric backlash. He mouthed litanies he had learned millennia ago in the silence engulfing him, his body freezing and rigid, until his mind was his own once more.

He stood again amidst the carnage of the Pinnacle. The thing that had once been Voldire was still dragging itself free from the rock of Diamantus, towering above the wedge of Space Marines and skitarii as they resisted the deranged hordes. Te Kahurangi inhaled the reeking, festering air, and made himself refocus, digging deeper into his reserves.

He could not destroy Voldire alone, but that had never been his intention.

He dared to reach out with his mind again, like a lone sailor in a coracle forging out into a vast storm.

Seeking the one who had called him here, the one he feared would yet be the undoing of them all.

Searching for Khauri.

Khauri screamed words that made Sharr’s ears bleed.

This was not High Gothic. It was not, he suspected, even the sanctified incantations practised by the Librarius. It was something that came from the darkest places, using knowledge he had not learned from any codex or grimoire in the Nicor’s gen-bays, knowledge which could only have been sanctioned by the Pale Nomad.

The space behind the engine’s control platform became blotched with darkness, like an ink spot spreading through the scalding air. It grew, and as Sharr gazed into it he realised it was a tunnel of shifting, umbral shapes, conjured into reality by Khauri’s curses.

‘Follow me,’ the Librarian said, voice tight with effort. ‘Do not listen to what the shadows tell you. Do not stray.’

Without further warning or explanation, he stepped from the platform and into the portal. The shadows reached for him, embracing him and drawing him on.

‘Warpcraft,’ Talon growled beside Sharr. ‘He leads us to damnation.’

‘We are already amidst it,’ Sharr said humourlessly, not needing to indicate the screaming, twisting metal surrounding them and the blood sigils sizzling below.

He took a step towards the portal, before being checked by Blood Eye’s words, shouted over the roaring of the engine and the howling of the warping chamber.

‘I will stay!’

‘It means death,’ Sharr told him.

‘It means ensuring the engine does not falter,’ Blood Eye replied. ‘I will remind it that vengeance is there for it to take. I will not let it go out a second time.’

Sharr nodded once, then glanced at Talon. The other Exile’s blunt, sweat-drenched features were set.

‘Lead on, Blind One,’ he said.

Reaper poised, Sharr turned his back on the furnace chamber and walked into the shadows’ embrace.

The line was beginning to break.

Kordi reloaded. Three magazines left. He had been conserving since the start of the engagement, but every round was now a prisoner. He switched out to his chainsword.

One of the chamber’s pillars was just ahead of Second Squad, and the corruption flooding from it was ceaseless. The firepower of the Carcharodons had heaped up a mound of burst-apart corpses and wrecked war engines ahead of it, yet still the nightmares clawed and crawled through. The pillar’s flesh was bleeding ichor as it split wider and wider, and an infernal skyline was visible beyond, a cursed forge that was trying to force its connection with the material plane, eternally corrupting Diamantus in the process.

The Carcharodons couldn’t hold them at bay forever. In close order they had stemmed the tide, but it was starting to lap around them now, bowing the flanks back and threatening to force a defensive circle. The Devourers of Seventh and Eighth Squad were drenched head to boot in viscera, working tirelessly to hold the edges of the formation.

‘More contacts,’ Kordi heard Neku shout, communication over vocaliser easier now the Space Marines were fighting almost shoulder to shoulder. He saw immediately what the veteran Firstborn meant. Another daemon engine was dragging its way through the pillar portal, a slab-like brute of burning warpsteel and thick knots of tendon cabling, moving on its heavy forearms like a hulking simian as it mounted the mound of its slaughtered kin. The metal fangs of its elongated head parted in a roar, etheric flames broiling from its gullet.

Kordi drove his chainsword through the chest of a spawn-thing beating at him with its spine-fists, revving until its cavity was gutted and then kicking the squealing remains back into the press. He was shouting for Wiremu even as he did so, but the heavy-weapons specialist appeared alongside him, uttering a single word as he cut down more mutants charging at them with his bolt pistol.

‘Out.’

Kordi realised the Executor was empty – it had likely used its last rounds shearing the legs off a stalk tank that had come scrambling out of the pillar minutes earlier. The heavy weapon was now slung and clamped to Wiremu’s side, leaving him with just his sidearm.

‘Grenades,’ Kordi said, seeing no alternative way of stopping the daemon engine. It was coming down off its corpse-perch, working up into a lumbering run. It knocked cultists out of its path with its heavy forelimbs, the vents along its back churning foetid smoke and the ashes of the mortals that had been fed to it as part of its binding ritual. If it kept coming, Kordi knew it would smash straight through Second Squad.

He snapped a grenade from his belt, just as the distinctive discharges of plasma weaponry rang out. Beams of crackling blue brilliance slammed into the machine-beast, scorching and deforming its armour plating and forcing it to put its head down as it came on, as though it was charging into the heart of a storm.

‘We are with you, Omekra-five-one-Kordi,’ said a now-familiar voice. Neku shifted to admit Ze-One-Prime to Kordi’s side, the hunched dominus regarding him with one optic stalk even as the other kept its gaze on the foe, allowing them to snap off a flurry of shots with their weaponised mechadendrites.

‘You’ve committed the reserve?’ Kordi demanded, seeing skitarii moving in amongst his brethren, adding their firepower to the waning fusillade. The cult infantry were cut apart, but the daemon engine came on, shaking off the plasma blasts from several rad-trooper gunners like a grox teased by bloodwasps.

‘I judged that waiting any longer would be suboptimal,’ Ze-One-Prime admitted as they continued to fire.

Kordi said nothing more to the dominus, but took the opportunity to step out of the line and look back for Ninth Squad. The heavy-weapons specialists had been providing fire support at the base of the spearhead, but he needed at least some of their strength with him on the right of the line.

‘Rapata,’ he bellowed, catching sight of two members of the squad, Rapata and Torvalu, reloading their missile launchers amidst a scattering of wrecked, smoking cogitators. Rapata raised a clenched gauntlet towards Kordi in acknowledgement.

For want of helmet interfacing and proper target locks, Kordi pointed his dripping chainsword towards the oncoming daemon engine, feeling the flesh beneath his boots begin to shudder with the impacts of the charging monstrosity.

‘Bring it down!’

Rapata rose and loped from his position towards Kordi, the strike leader dropping further back to make space for him in the line. The daemon engine was just a few dozen yards away now, head lowered, spumes of ichor and torn innards spurting around its limbs as they ploughed up the floor of the hell-cavern.

Rapata braced and fired. Twin missiles streaked from the tubes of his superkrak rocket launcher, the sanctified warheads barely able to arm before they collided with their target. One corkscrewed to the right at the last moment, clipping the engine’s hunched shoulder and detonating against one of its vents, wrenching it away without doing any further damage. The other struck true, impacting into the centre of the armoured cranium and drilling into the ferro-organic matter within before detonating.

The blast blew the engine’s head to splinters of burning metal and was channelled along its segmented neck and into the core of its being. Warpfire blazed from it, and its charge faltered, the ear-aching, metal-on-metal screeching of the daemon within as it was forcefully unbound rising over the carnage.

Kordi knew instantly that the engine’s death wouldn’t be enough to halt its charge. Even as Rapata fired he was snatching at Ze-One-Prime and hauling them to one side, barking at the rest of Second Squad to split. The daemon engine came careening on, falling as it went, blazing with venting warpfire, the steel of its chassis deforming with howling faces and yawning maws.

It ploughed a gory furrow through the infected flesh of the throne room’s floor, crushing several skitarii caught in its path. Its momentum only halted when it became fully ensnared in the intestinal wires covering the ground.

‘Close the breach,’ Kordi ordered, moving back towards the gap the engine had caused. It was still partially in between the squad, so he mounted one of its limbs, boots kicking out the smouldering hellfire and clamping to its krak-scarred shoulder as he switched back to his boltgun and sent a lightning-fast flurry of shots down into the mutants attempting to rush the sudden hole in the line.

It wasn’t enough. They were swarming the breach, clawing up onto the daemon engine and raining blows on the Carcharodons and skitarii on either side with fists and blades and disfigured appendages. Kordi spent the last of his frag grenades clearing his front, and there was a flurry of small detonations as Rapata mounted the wreckage next to him and fired his Castellan launcher.

‘I’m out,’ he said grimly, stowing the smoking weapon and switching to his bolt pistol. ‘Most of Ninth is the same.’

Kordi used the brief reprieve to make another assessment. From the vantage on top of the slain daemon engine he could see the tip of the spear, lit by the green glow of the Pale Nomad’s staff. The wedge was being even more desperately assailed than the other sections of the line. There was something beyond it as well, some gigantic, warped edifice drawing ponderously closer through the mist of shredded organics, warpfire and smoke. Kordi could only assume it was their objective.

There were Archenemy forces within the defensive perimeter too. They were a heartbeat from being overrun.

‘Ihu,’ he bellowed, down at where the void brother he was seeking was slamming his final magazine home into his boltgun. He looked up, and Kordi signalled whilst shouting.

‘It’s time! The beacon!’

A rune on the arm-rest of the White Maw’s command throne lit up.

Kino had been sitting in brooding silence for hours, listening to the slow, steady tremors that ran through the ship with each discharge of its prow macrocannon as it ploughed through the ruination above Mount Antikythera.

But the rune changed everything.

Techmarine Uthulu, working on the exposed internals of one of the bridge cogitators nearby, had noticed it too. He rose and approached the coral throne, speaking.

‘That is the teleport beacon alert,’ he said.

Kino knew as much. He stared at it, breath held, assessing each possibility in a flurry. Someone on the surface of Diamantus had activated one of the Third Company’s portable beacons, providing a geolocation fix and dramatically improving the possibility of a safe and accurate descent by teleportation.

‘Get me coordinates,’ Kino demanded of Teko, who had risen from the fire control pit, where he had been overseeing the ongoing destruction of the debris that lay between the strike cruiser and the orbital point directly above Mount Antikythera.

The shipmaster strode to a viewscreen and linked the data that had just pinged to the ship’s cogitator.

‘It appears to be within the Pinnacle of Mount Antikythera,’ he said after a moment’s analysis. ‘I have inloaded the exact coordinates to your armour.’

‘Third Company is there,’ Kino declared.

‘Not necessarily,’ Teko cautioned. ‘It could be a malfunction of either the beacon or our own sensors, accidental or part of the Archenemy’s malfeasance. Or the beacon may have been captured and triggered deliberately. It could be a trap. We have no way of telling what you would be teleporting into.’

‘I know,’ Kino said tersely. ‘The other alternative is that the company are engaged in the defence of the Pinnacle, and have conceived of the beacon as both a signal and a means of bringing down reinforcements. That is how I would use it. Uthulu, have you finished the re-sanctification of the teleportarium?’

‘To the best of my abilities, yes,’ Uthulu said. ‘I would be more reassured if Codicier Khauri had reinscribed the wards, but it is functioning.’

‘And with a beacon to lock on to, what would you say the odds of a successful translation are?’

Uthulu hesitated, but only for a moment.

‘I cannot vouch for how the Archenemy’s trickery might change things. I have never known such tech-heresy, and everything the venerable shipmaster has suggested could be true. But with the beacon active, I estimate that the odds are fair.’

‘Ready the teleportarium,’ Kino ordered him.

‘Should we also awaken the Ancients?’ Teko wondered. ‘We may need every weapon in the Third Company’s arsenal.’

‘It is unlikely a traditional orbital descent could penetrate both the choked atmosphere and the wreckage atop the Pinnacle,’ Uthulu pointed out. ‘It may even risk their destruction.’

‘The Dreadnoughts will remain undisturbed,’ Kino said before starting to issue orders to the Terminators arrayed around his commandeered throne.

‘I request that I be allowed to accompany you, Company Master,’ Uthulu said, daring to interrupt. ‘I understand Chapter doctrine about our preservation, but this has the hallmarks of a point of decision, and remaining here would be a dereliction of my duty.’

‘You understand the risks,’ Kino said. ‘On that basis, I grant you permission.’

The Company Master turned his attention to Teko.

‘How long until we’ve achieved geo-lock above the mountain?’

‘We are almost through the last of the debris,’ Teko said. ‘We can likely force the remainder, though it will overwhelm the shields and cause damage to the White Maw’s superstructure.’

‘A necessary sacrifice,’ Kino said without hesitation. ‘The time to strike is long overdue.’

Khauri walked among shadows.

Some clawed at him and some caressed him, whispering things he refused to understand. They formed a tunnel of smoke and shifting shapes ahead of him, coiling and dancing around the harsh light of his stab-lumen. The heat and fury of the enginarium was like a dream he had awoken from, already fading into oblivion.

He halted for a moment, muttering his wards and looking back for the two Exiles. They were with him still, their expressions dark.

‘Stay close, do not stray,’ he ordered, suspecting the instructions were unnecessary.

They forged on into the dark. The smoke that comprised the tunnel eddied, as though churned into motion by an ethereal wind. It parted in places, and while Khauri did his best to keep his eyes fixed on the inky nothingness ahead, he couldn’t help but catch a glimpse of what lay to the side.

It was a stone passage, rough-hewn through bedrock. A secondary tunnel branched off to the right, revealed by the parting shadows. There were three figures in it, all in grubby prison overalls. One was prostrated on the floor while the other two beat and struck at him.

The figure on the ground looked up at Khauri, crying out, reaching, as though pleading for his help. His voice sounded distant, as if echoing from some fathomless space that was swallowing him up.

Despite his mental warding, and despite the fact that he did not recognise the face of the pleading figure, a moment’s anguish gripped Khauri, a regret so potent, so palpable, that it left a bitter taste in his mouth.

He forced himself to walk on, and the shadows coiled back over the scene just as, with a hideously loud crunch, one of the attackers split the pleading man’s head open.

A few steps further, and he heard a growl coming from behind. He turned sharply and snatched Bail Sharr’s wrist. The Exile looked at him as if only seeing him for the first time. He had been about to fully trigger Reaper, the chainaxe snarling softly in his grip.

‘They are not real,’ Khauri told him, not even asking what it was the former Company Master had seen in the shadows. ‘Keep walking.’

That seemed to anger the shadows. They grew closer as the trio carried on, scraping against Khauri’s pauldrons. He could feel their breath on his bared face. Distant screaming drifted through the sinister passage – voices in eternal torment. Or were they klaxons, marking an end to the day’s toil?

‘Hurry,’ Khauri urged, without looking back.

His head had started to ache.

Sharr passed through the tunnel of shades, fighting the urge to lash out as they cackled and leered at him.

He saw things as he went, scenes of horror that played out wherever the curtain of smoke drew back. At one point he witnessed terrible, predatory beings wielding chainswords that rose and fell as they chopped apart pleading men and women like so many butcher’s carcasses. In another, an old woman begged as she was hauled by grey-armoured giants towards the yawning maws of beached landing shuttles. She reached out to Sharr as though she knew him, calling a name he did not recognise.

He recalled none of what he was seeing, and yet a part of him understood it all. They were the things that had been buried and forgotten in the dark, but not destroyed. It was the shadow cast by his soul, summoned by the potency of Khauri’s witchcraft.

He saw the phantom of the Pale Nomad, black eyes boring into his own, speaking the name he had first given him centuries ago. He saw another visage he had not witnessed for so long, the pale, tattooed, vicious face of Akia, his old Company Master. And he saw another Space Marine, this one no loyal servant of the Imperium but a butcher in baroque battle plate, wielding a chainaxe of his own.

That was when it had almost become too much, when he had felt the Blindness rising once more, hands tense on Reaper’s haft and trigger. Khauri had turned and admonished him, and had been right to do so. This was warpcraft, trying to weaken and trick. He could tell from Talon’s short, panted breathing that the other Exile was wrestling with visions that were goading him to bloodlust. Sharr briefly grasped Talon’s wrist in the way Khauri had held his, looking him in the eye.

‘Focus,’ he said. ‘There are no answers in this place. It will not be our ending.’

They pressed on after Khauri, and as they went the passage seemed to constrict. The shadows grew more vicious, pressing in and striking at them, their whispers turning to spiteful hisses. One drew blood from Sharr’s cheek, phantom claws causing corporeal damage. Sharr bared his teeth and carried on, until instinct brought him up just short of Khauri’s reactor pack.

The Librarian had halted. He realised why a heartbeat later.

They were not in a tunnel any more. The cloying darkness remained, but it was clear now that the space they occupied was larger, yawning around them. The whispering and hissing and snarling had intensified as well, an unsettling susurration that frayed at the very edges of Sharr’s consciousness, inspiring instinctive aggression.

‘I have lost the path,’ the Librarian whispered, voice a dry rasp. ‘It was right here, but…’

The whispering turned to laughter, soft giggling at first, but rising to a manic cacophony.

Claws raked at Sharr. He activated Reaper and swung, teeth bared, but the things simply disintegrated and re-formed.

The three Space Marines went back to back, weapons held defensively, as a blizzard of razored darkness descended on them, slashing and screeching.

‘Damn you, witch, you’ve doomed us,’ Talon bellowed as he swung his club, trying in vain to ward off the ghostly assault.

Khauri was too busy chanting to reply. Witchfire kindled around the head of his force staff, and for a brief moment the shades drew back from the pale luminance, their shrieks of laughter guttering and fading.

‘Look for the path,’ Khauri said. ‘I can still feel it.’

‘There,’ Talon said, pointing with his club. Sharr followed the gesture, and saw a glimmering beyond the small sphere of light Khauri had cast. He recognised it.

‘Go,’ Khauri said.

They moved towards it.

Coldness bit Khauri to the core, and it was all he could do to keep his staff raised and follow after the two Exiles.

He should never have brought them here. Better to have perished in the enginarium with a chance at leaving their souls intact than become an eternal feast for the thing that called this place home.

It was Te Kahurangi who might yet save them, Te Kahurangi whose light had become a beacon in the dark. That, or he was simply another illusion, a trick designed to hasten them on the last few steps to damnation.

The Exiles had almost reached the green light, so bright now it was almost blinding. Khauri could hear the Pale Nomad’s voice echoing distantly through his thoughts.

+Hurry. I cannot hold it for long.+

The shapes of the two Carcharodons were becoming indistinct as they stepped into the blaze.

A shadow, greater than all the others, billowed before Khauri, forcing him to stop. It did not retreat before his witchfire. It leered over him, its words like knives in his skull.

Why are you leaving me, my apprentice?

‘You are not my master,’ Khauri snarled.

The apparition laughed at him. It had a shape now, less nebulous than roiling shadows, a tall, slender woman garbed in a black dress, her face covered by a mourning veil.

Yet I have taught you so much, hissed the voice. I, and not that weak fool you now run to.

The woman reached towards him, yet it was no longer a woman, but another Space Marine, helmet horned, a scythe clutched in one fist. Midnight-clad. It reached out and grasped the top of his staff, snuffing out his witchfire.

Khauri jerked back.

You will never escape, the voice told him. I have marked you, Mika Doren Skell.

Pain suffused his back, and he felt blood running from the scars there, from injuries he had borne since before his initiation into the Chapter. Wounds he knew would never truly heal.

The shadows surged around him, screeching, clawing. He drove through them, incantations on his lips, hoarfrost coating his armour and numbing his skin. On he went, through the screaming dark and towards where the last of the Pale Nomad’s luminance was guttering out.

With a final, desperate effort, he threw himself at the light.

CHAPTER XXIX

With a flash like lightning and a crash like thunder, Kino and the Red Brethren materialised in the centre of the Carcharodons’ formation.

The Terminators assessed the situation with the speed of veterans who had fought in dozens of teleportation assaults. Kino split his squad into two wings and sent them to bolster the bowing flanks, while he strode towards the formation’s head.

Uthulu was with them. He began canting in Lingua Technis while dispensing the extra ammunition he had clamped across his armour.

‘You are a welcome sight, brother,’ Kordi called down from atop the slain daemon engine, catching a spare magazine tossed up to him.

‘Half thought this was going to be a trap,’ Uthulu replied as he moved on down the line.

‘Who says it isn’t?’ Kordi said, picking his next target.

The Red Brethren joined the line, moving up between Second and Third Squads. Incaladion-pattern storm bolters and a Mark II Absinia heavy assault cannon decimated the next wave of mutants, sweeping them aside before focusing on another stalk tank that was vomiting disintegrating toxic slurry over a knot of Ze-One-Prime’s skitarii. The machine was ripped open and broken into pieces by the concentrated firepower.

Kordi took the moment’s reprieve to clamber down from the engine’s back and re-establish the line. Ze-One-Prime and the remains of their skitarii were still alongside them.

‘Is this what you hoped for, when you spoke of vengeance?’ Kordi asked them, indicating the devastation being wreaked. The magos dominus, their serene mask spattered with daemonic ichor, let out a dry laugh from their vox-stalk.

‘It is a start, Omekra-five-one-Kordi.’

Red Tane knocked down and impaled the daemon construct so ferociously that he drove the Void Sword through its ribs to the hilt, the black blade carving through its biomechanical innards and into the infested floor underneath.

He knelt on its chest as it clawed at him and slammed the rim of the Coral Shield down against its face over and over and over, until there was a cracking sound. An eye socket fractured, then its nose, then its metallic teeth. It continued to warp and change even as he beat it to death, but eventually the cranium came apart in a flare of warpfire. The mutated, scrapcode-infected remains slumped, their mutations finally ceasing.

Red Tane reversed his grip on his sword’s hilt and wrenched it free with a low growl. He had been cut and gouged in half a dozen places, and his left pauldron had been sawed almost in two. He had found they could be killed, though, and that was all that mattered.

There were more of them assaulting the tip of the spear, and without the sudden rush of skitarii reinforcements, they would have been overwhelmed. Red Tane turned to his right, where another of the deformed horrors had just discharged its strange rifle, point-blank, at several Mechanicus soldiers. It spewed mutating, multicoloured warpflames, igniting the robes of the skitarii and sending their organic components into spasms of uncontrolled change. Their vocal units let out scraping shrieks as they collapsed, devolving into mewling spawn, still fused to their augmetics.

Red Tane charged the infested construct that had fired at them, knowing it was about to breach the line. The barrel of its burning weapon swung towards him, but the Coral Shield was equal to its second discharge, the corrupting flames blazing from its scarred surface but failing to find purchase in Red Tane’s flesh.

He struck a blow to the morass of metallic tendrils that seemed to pass for its head, forcing it to raise its flesh-fused weapon limbs to parry before going for the centre of its morphing body mass, hoping to lance the corruption churning through it. Instead, the construct just took the hits and slammed back.

This time it was Red Tane’s turn to be unbalanced. He was forced to retreat, creating the danger of a gap in the line. The monstrosity kept driving at him, swinging the sawblade on the end of its barrel as its tendrils writhed and twitched, catching the Coral Shield and hooking it to the right. It stamped at him next with one cloven metal hoof that smouldered with perpetual forge-fire, the unnatural metal connecting with his greave. There was a crack as ceramite split, and this time Red Tane couldn’t resist the combination of force and gravity’s pull. He fell back, ichor spurting over him as his landing crushed a section of the mulch floor.

The thing took a pace forward so it was standing over him, the skin of its chest peeling back like an overripe fruit to expose slick machine parts that in turn shrieked open into a yawning maw. Behind it, Red Tane saw an even greater madness rising up out of the fog of battle, a monstrosity born from impossibility. The flesh-mountain was dragging itself towards the Carcharodons, bearing down on them now. Its sheer bulk alone would crush them, absorbing them into its foulness.

The mutant machine planted its metal hoof on Red Tane’s chest, pinning him, and raised its rifle to his helm.

The Blindness gripped the Company Champion. Panting with mindless rage, he hacked the Void Sword into the thing’s shin, but the blade simply rebounded. He saw the sickly light within the monster’s remoulded weapon flare, heard the shrieking of the daemonic flames as they rose to spew from the jagged maw-muzzle and engulf him.

Then a greater sound eclipsed them.

Reaper came roaring from nowhere, striking the construct in what passed for its throat. Black ichor and bursts of sparks flew and the chainaxe’s roar became a splitting howl as Bail Sharr stepped over Red Tane and revved the motor while applying every ounce of strength in his body.

The mutant construct juddered, forced to one side by the sheer power of Sharr’s strike. With one last screech, it was decapitated, the warpfire fuelling it blazing and howling from it as it began to unravel and break down.

Sharr reached down and offered a hand. Red Tane grasped his forearm with the arm the Coral Shield was clamped to, accepting the Exile’s assistance in hauling himself up out of the intestinal muck. His frenzy was gone, banished by the sudden appearance of his old Company Master.

He made to thank Sharr, but he had already moved on, deeper into the fray.

Khauri regained full consciousness as he clambered to his feet. He didn’t remember what had happened as he plunged for the light, but the shadows were gone.

He was in a place of chaos and carnage, but Te Kahurangi was with him.

‘I heard you,’ Khauri said, briefly clasping Te Kahurangi’s gauntlet. The Pale Nomad looked more worn than he had ever seen him, and when he spoke, his voice was a deathly, urgent rasp.

‘The enginarium?’

‘Active,’ Khauri answered. ‘We likely have minutes before it overloads, or drives the remnants of the ship down through our midst.’

That had always been the plan. The frontal assault by the greater part of the company had been designed to draw the Archenemy’s attention while Khauri’s small infiltration force sought to do what the Exiles had already attempted – reigniting the engine of one of the ships buried in the remains of Grim Destiny. The level of destruction that would follow was the best hope of unmaking the blasphemous work being carried out in the Pinnacle.

‘We should withdraw, while we yet can,’ Khauri suggested.

‘We cannot,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘Our intuitions were correct. The master of this part of the Cult of the Arkifane does not just seek to open portals and wed Diamantus with the hell-forges of his master. He is attempting to fashion immortality. I read his mind. Tried to destroy it, but…’

He trailed off, likely loath to admit that, in the midst of the broiling wrath of the empyrean churning through the Pinnacle, he had been unable to vanquish the foulness that now reigned over the planet.

‘Will the ship’s destruction not be enough to end it all?’ Khauri asked.

‘I am no longer certain. This fallen priest may already have claimed his eternal reward.’

‘All such slaves of Chaos seek ascension,’ Khauri said.

‘But this one, Voldire, and his coven do not seek it in the usual manner, they…’ Te Kahurangi paused again, baring his sharpened teeth in exhausted frustration. He clearly had neither the time nor strength for explanations. Instead, he reached up and pressed his index and middle fingers to Khauri’s brow.

The Codicier hissed at the pain that spiked through his skull, but it brought with it understanding, a psychic imprint of the horrors the Pale Nomad had been delving into.

Voldire the Datagnost, former adept of the forge world of Diamantus, was a genius. He was also irredeemably insane. He had been working with similarly twisted polymaths in the Dark Mechanicum and the Cult of the Arkifane to induce daemonic ascension. While all other adherents to the Ruinous Powers viewed the possibility of daemonic immortality as an unknowable boon that could only be won through faith and bloody sacrifice, Voldire treated it as a quantifiable scientific trial. As part of an increasingly warped quest for enlightenment, he compiled lengthy experimentation – at the cost of billions of lives and the destruction of whole worlds – into the theory that daemonic ascension was something that could be engineered.

‘He wishes to become a daemon prince by scientific artifice,’ Khauri said disbelievingly. ‘He believes he can count the exact number of sacrifices, the correct litanies, the Rituals of Sympathy…’

‘And that is the outcome of his ambitions,’ Te Kahurangi replied, and gestured with his staff.

Khauri looked up and saw damnation towering over them. The thing that had once been Adept Voldire was a mountain of writhing horror, dragging itself ponderously nearer to the Carcharodons, looming larger with every moment.

‘I do not know if what we had planned before will destroy him,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘And I cannot break his mind alone. But together, we might have a chance.’

‘Not if it is only the two of us,’ Khauri said.

Sharr killed, and in doing so discovered that he was free.

Mutated experiments, cackling mechanoidal daemons, raving cult soldiers, squirming spawn – Reaper took them all, and Sharr felt nothing. Behind every vicious swing, punch and stamp, every parry and block and counter, there was a cold oblivion. With it he was able to find focus, the keenness of a blade that, after years of disuse, had finally been given a fresh edge.

He was destruction, the doom of the Imperium’s enemies, but he was also something more. Third Company was with him, and that gave him purpose, something beyond the slaughter.

He could not account for how he had come to be in the nightmare chamber. He remembered the Pale Nomad’s light blazing into his eyes, then nothingness, and the next thing his mind registered was impacts against his armour and the feeling of Reaper shivering in his grip as it chewed through the body of a mewling spawn-thing. He had found Red Tane before him, the Third Battle Company around him, and his mind whole once more.

Khauri had survived his witchcraft. His words intruded on the killing, spoken into the nothingness of Sharr’s inner being.

+Return to us.+

Sharr obeyed almost instinctively, disengaging. He stepped back into the tip of the company’s spearhead, through the twitching, trampled, dismembered channel he had carved into the heart of the Archenemy assault.

The master of the madness towered over him. It had dragged itself into view through the miasma of filth that fogged the chamber, the most horrifically warped, deformed monstrosity Sharr had ever gazed upon. Whether it had been summoned from one of the warp portals ripping space itself apart around them, or whether it had somehow been created in this very place, Sharr neither knew nor cared. The sight of it made his skull throb and inspired the purest kind of revulsion.

And yet, he withdrew before it, back behind Red Tane and Nuritona, Tama and Ihaia, to where Khauri and Te Kahurangi stood, gaunt, drained, ferocious. Talon was with them as well, having made it through the shadows with Sharr.

‘We must destroy it,’ Te Kahurangi rasped. ‘But it is strong. Its corruption runs deep. The assault must be physical as well as mental.’

‘I will butcher it,’ Sharr said bluntly.

‘That will take longer than we have. Your work in the Sire of Belaphrone will soon be complete, but it may not be enough. That is why we must make sure.’

‘What of the rest of the company?’ Sharr demanded.

The Librarians said nothing.

‘Nuritona,’ Sharr barked, turning away from them. He saw the strike veteran kick the mutating cultist he’d just gutted off him and take a half-step back, enough to glance towards Sharr.

‘Begin withdrawing the company, ebb-tide pattern,’ Sharr ordered. ‘First Squad and the Red Brethren will form the rearguard.’

‘You do not give orders here, Exile,’ shouted a voice. Kino came thundering through the carnage, his power fist ignited, the twin barrels of his storm bolter smoking.

‘I am your Company Master, and you obey me,’ the former First Company veteran snapped at Nuritona, pointing with one heavy, lightning-infused digit. ‘Not these witches, and certainly not this damned Exile!’

‘Then what are your orders, Company Master?’ Nuritona asked woodenly.

‘Resume the advance, and destroy that… thing,’ Kino spat, glancing up at the mutant monstrosity as it let out a groan that made the chamber’s flesh shudder and the intestines underfoot writhe and squirm like serpents.

‘This entire chamber is about to be destroyed,’ Khauri said. ‘This assault is a diversion. We have overloaded one of the space hulk’s ship engines, embedded above us.’

‘You brought me here to die?’ Kino snarled.

‘We brought you here to help us buy time,’ Khauri said. ‘But we have done all we can. The company must withdraw, or be destroyed.’

‘My Codicier and Bail Sharr will remain, to ensure the destruction of the Archenemy,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘But the Third Company must be preserved, if possible. So I urge you, Reaper Prime, withdraw while you still can.’

The words were directed at Kino, and seemed to go some way towards piercing his rage. His helmeted head nodded, once.

‘Ebb-tide pattern,’ he ordered Nuritona. ‘Red Brethren, to me!’

As the head of the offensive wedge began to shift, Te Kahurangi looked at Sharr.

‘Go,’ the Pale Nomad said.

Sharr needed neither advice nor further instruction. He hefted Reaper, turned towards the mountain of madness, and charged.

Te Kahurangi and Khauri spoke words of power, alternating each one between them as they bound their spirits and prepared to cast off one more time into the tides of insanity.

Reality had almost completely collapsed in the Pinnacle, rent and torn and holed over and over. Warp entities crowded through into the visible spectrum – not just the daemonic machinery birthed from the infernal forges, but unaligned predators, great shoals of monstrosities drawn by blood and the promise of the materium’s addictive warmth. They ripped their way into the chamber in a feeding frenzy, and the Pale Nomad and his apprentice no longer had the strength to stop them.

They had to spend what they had left wisely. Voldire’s deranged experiment could not be allowed to reach completion.

‘Bring the tide,’ Te Kahurangi told Khauri, so untethered now that he wasn’t sure if he spoke the words, if his lips even moved, or if he slipped the command into the other Librarian’s mind directly.

Their incorporeal essence swept up from the base of Voldire’s form, passing Bail Sharr as he began to storm the flesh-slope, parting only for a moment as they dived around him on either side and turned the hereteks trying to stop him into ragged carcasses. Then they were whole once more and striking with the former Reaper Prime at the peak, at the shrieking, throbbing thing that had once been Voldire the Datagnost.

‘Hold formation,’ Kordi bellowed as he reloaded.

He was down to his last magazine, even after Uthulu’s restock.

Word had come from the tip of the spear. Withdrawal pattern, ebb-tide. Second Squad would join one of the Terminator battle squads in re-forming the vanguard, tasked with punching the company out of the hell-chamber.

Easier said than done. The tactical situation had almost completely collapsed. The throne room was so mutated that the floor was physically attacking the Carcharodons now, limbs and oozing flesh rising to try and drag them down, maws yawning and snapping, growths of bone and metal punching up through the morass without warning. The attacking horde was an indistinguishable wall of pulsating insanity.

Still the formation held, just. Second Squad began to cut their way to the rear, drowning as they went in a sea of warp filth.

Kordi spent half his magazine’s clip on a trio of cultists that had fused themselves into one amorphous nightmare, then locked the firearm, intending to save the last few rounds. His chainsword roared, ploughing through the head-growth of another spawn-thing as it wrenched the bionic limbs from a skitarii rad-trooper.

‘Magos dominus, are you with us?’ he shouted as he pushed to the forefront of the advance, only his squad and the Red Brethren immediately visible around him.

‘Affirmative, Omekra-five-one-Kordi,’ came the tech-priest’s voice, and Kordi caught a glimpse as they struck down a devolving cult soldier with their cane, weapon mounts smoking, drained, their rad-troopers rallying to them.

The whole space had started to quake. The pillars were bursting entirely open, admitting a rush of monstrosities whose wailing intruded through even the hyper-focus of the battling Space Marines. Gobbets of meat and waterfalls of ichor fell upon them from the slowly collapsing ceiling. The daemonic sky visible through the gouge torn by Grim Destiny had started to crack and shatter, like some vast mirror slowly being pressed from above.

‘Hold formation,’ Kordi roared again, the only noise being uttered by the Carcharodons as they struggled through hell. The Terminator to his right – Kordi knew neither his name nor number signifier – was drenched in reeking offal as his power fist demolished a bloated, cable-studded Neverborn.

Kordi forced his way on through the press, chainsword juddering as it continued to chew apart the things that came at him. On his left, he saw that Ateko had been brought down. There was a spider-limbed thing hunched over him, ripping away his visor to feed on his face. Ihu blew it off and hauled Ateko up, the young Carcharodon’s features torn, half blinded.

On his right, Neku had fallen too. A spawn, its brute, muscular frame entirely fleshless and its squirming innards exposed, had latched on to the Firstborn’s leg with a fang-frilled maw. Its gullet was partly translucent, and it was possible to see the acid and rows of teeth gnawing through Neku’s ceramite and plasteel and then his flesh and bone, all while the Carcharodon hacked wildly at the thing with his combat knife.

Kordi shifted right, teeth bared in a silent rictus of effort as he ploughed his chainsword into the spawn, until he’d hewn it in two. Neku tried to rise, but the horror that had once been his right leg gave out.

‘Tama,’ Kordi shouted, having no idea if the Apothecary was anywhere nearby. He reached down and heaved Neku up, helping support him while two of the Red Brethren pushed forward to cover the momentary weakness in the line.

Tama appeared, his white armour almost unrecognisable under the chamber’s vileness. He immediately jabbed a stimm aggressor into one of Neku’s armour interface ports and applied a dose of synth-skin from his narthecium to the worst of the leg’s ruination.

‘Can you take him?’ Kordi demanded.

Tama nodded.

‘Leave me,’ Neku grunted.

‘Ignore the old man,’ Kordi said, passing Neku over and addressing him as he did so. ‘I’ll see you outside.’

Kordi rejoined the edge of the formation just as one of the Terminators with an assault cannon opened fire into the baying mob, scything down everything around the vanguard. The doorway-maw the company had first entered through was visible ahead, amidst the carnage. Melta charges had burned its flesh and fused its teeth, but the gaping, ragged wound was slowly starting to constrict, as though the chamber itself was trying to consume them.

‘Keep it open,’ Kordi barked. The assault cannon buzzed again as the Terminator switched his aim, hard rounds chewing into the portal and gouging it wide.

Kordi was the first through. There was no reprieve. Mutants and Neverborn flung themselves against him on the other side, a sea of monstrosities begging to be slaughtered.

They were going to have to fight their way up and out of the mountain.

‘We must clear a path,’ rasped the assault cannon-wielding Terminator, the first to follow Kordi out.

‘Every step of the way,’ he snarled back grimly, driving on with his chainsword. ‘Every step.’

From being at the tip of the spear, First Squad found itself with the rearguard, Kino and the second Terminator combat squad joining them as they covered the company’s retreat.

Here, the Archenemy assault was at its most ferocious. The chamber had entirely degenerated, the ground seeking to consume the Carcharodons, sizzling black rain from the slowly shattering sky pelting them. Red Tane witnessed one Terminator rendered immobile, his armour betraying him the way the Champion’s once had. Before the others could even hack their way to his side, he simply disappeared beneath the maddening avalanche.

Through it all, Red Tane could still see the Librarians they had been guarding, almost abandoned now against the rising tide of Chaos. The light from Te Kahurangi’s staff was keeping the worst of the monstrosities from attacking them, and one of the Exiles stood guard beside them.

Beyond, the architect of corruption heaved itself closer, yet it no longer did so unopposed. Red Tane could see a figure beginning to climb its side, towards its damnable peak. A figure he recognised.

‘Strike veteran,’ he said, addressing Nuritona even as he cleaved apart a squirming cable-spawn wrapping itself around his ankles. ‘May I have permission to go to Bail Sharr’s side?’

Nuritona had seen what was happening. He glanced towards Kino, who had just sundered another of the daemon constructs with his power fist, then nodded once.

‘If you wish, Champion. Bring him back to us.’

Sharr climbed slopes made of twitching skin and grasping tendrils, snapping maws and roving eyeballs, towards an apex of impossible depravity.

Reaper swung almost every step of the way, cleaving through growths and the wailing remains of the Fabricator General’s court. The great chainaxe wreaked devastation with every stroke, but the sensation of flesh parting and metal shearing, of blood-oil and ichor and unidentifiable filth bursting beneath each vicious bite, meant nothing to Sharr. He was barely even conscious of the carnage, his primary focus on climbing higher. The frenzy that would once have gripped him was gone, only the dullest satisfaction now accompanying the sensation of his relic weapon juddering in his grasp.

He dealt destruction because it served a purpose. It drew the attention of the mountain and its minions away from the Librarians, anchoring the chamber’s foul consciousness on the more obvious threat. On the Reaper Prime, returned.

The hereteks tried to stop him. The architects of Diamantus’ nightmare came at him from left and right, black-robed, mutated machine-things that shrieked binary gibberish. He hewed them down like timber, ignoring their blows, even as the arcane weapons they wielded cracked and split his old armour. The robes of one gaunt, hooded figure parted as it flew at him, emitting a hail of razor-toothed cogs that slammed into his armour, studding his breastplate. Reaper’s strike demolished its blasphemous form. Another heretek launched jars at him that shattered to emit phantoms formed from screeds of numbers and jagged lengths of data-script. He drove on through their ghostly assault, teeth gritted at the chill and the pain that pierced his core.

At one ledge, formed by a spur of bone interwoven with the glittering fractals of circuitry wiring, he dared snatch a glance back. Te Kahurangi and Khauri were still at the slope’s base, guarded by Talon and by the light of the Pale Nomad’s staff. Beyond them, half veiled by the miasma, it looked as though the remnants of Third Company had almost reached the chamber’s entrance.

That was the reassurance Bail Sharr needed. On he climbed, as the black rain slashed down and the chamber began to shake itself to death, on as the mountain clawed at him, as he trampled it and those who worshipped it, on as his hearts pounded and his limbs burned, as flash-clotted blood sealed one of his eyes shut and the lunge of a Mechanicus halberd gouged the left side of his jaw to the bone.

The mountain’s summit might have been a man, once. It was a wedge of meat and metal, the deformed features at its top splitting as Sharr fought the last few yards up to it, beating aside and stamping on little mechanical imps that threw themselves at him with saws and knives and shears.

Its maw moaned, the skin Sharr trod upon shivering as a split running down its head widened. Gelatinous matter began bubbling up as the cranium parted like some vile, stinking flower.

Sharr’s servos locked and his actuators grated, but still he forced himself on, body aching with the strain, silent but for Reaper’s roar.

Then, even that began to gutter. The chainaxe started to lose power, the glistening teeth of the ancient weapon decelerating.

Its mutating brain throbbing, the thing that had once been Gideous Voldire laughed.

The phantoms of Te Kahurangi and Khauri called up the depths.

As with any apprentice, Khauri had started on the same path the Pale Nomad had once walked, but long ago he had begun to stray along his own route. That did not mean he had forgotten what he had been taught. The time spent swimming the deeps of the vast, inky aqua-tanks on board the Nicor, or kneeling in the freezing waters beneath the stoic gaze of the Wandering Ancestors, had been revelatory. In the silence he had found truth, and in the deepest fathoms he had come to know himself, body and mind, as he had never done before.

The shadows in the deeps were not the ones that haunted him. They were the ones that gave him his identity. And so when Te Kahurangi mentally called on Khauri to summon that power they shared, he was able to do so without hesitation.

The psychic essence that had once been Voldire was a rotting blight in the empyrean, a monstrosity that should not be. Sharr’s attack on it was akin to a man attempting to fight a mountain, but he had the creature’s attention. Still united, Te Kahurangi and Khauri drove across the final fractions of space and time and into the miasma that was Voldire’s psychic consciousness.

They summoned the power of the depths. It was a psychic memory, but a potent one. The oceans of the planet the Carcharodons venerated as their home world had once been vast and deep, and their ghost was conjured by the twinned psykers and unleashed into the mind of the mutant.

They located the core of Voldire’s physical being – his swelling brain and the spinal link it had formed with the corrupt cogitator he had fused with. They took the fathomless pressure of the deepest ocean depths and they applied it around the abomination.

In the material plane, the merest sliver of realisation pierced Voldire’s insanity. He felt unbearable agony as the psychic force battled with his mutating physical essence.

Beneath, Te Kahurangi’s and Khauri’s own physical forms were on the brink of being unmade. Blood ran from their noses and lips, and witchfire burned around them, the flames riven with the tortured faces of the damned. Sparks burst from Khauri’s psychic hood, the device short-circuiting. Hairline splits had started to run up his staff, while the green shard tipping Te Kahurangi’s was beginning to crack, blazing almost white with power.

Something had to give. And Voldire, for all the corrupt genius of his mind, could not withstand the cold, crushing wrath of the phantom ocean that forever formed part of the Carcharodon Astra’s ancestral memory.

Sharr was almost directly beneath the mutant brain when it ruptured. A vast geyser of reeking grey matter fountained over him as, with a wet crunch, what remained of Voldire the Datagnost’s cranium split open. The brain burst upwards, tearing the fused spinal cables free with it, ripping away both Voldire’s core and that of the corrupt cogitator beneath.

Voldire’s physical form was unmade, and as it began to unravel, Sharr threw himself back down the slope.

Reaper reawakened in his fist, and he used it to cleave through everything in his path. The gambit had succeeded, and while he felt the icy pull of the Blindness’ other side – the desire to simply remain, and perish amidst the carnage – he suppressed it. He would not forget his duty, not so soon after being reminded of it.

Nearly halfway down, he fell. Part of the flesh slope simply collapsed, and he plunged through offal and bones made of the rock that had once clad the ziggurat. Some disgusting, semi-sentient organ cushioned his fall, squirming under him.

A shape loomed in the cavity above him, the unmistakeable outline of an Adeptus Astartes. Sharr realised it was Red Tane. The Company Champion hadn’t withdrawn with the rest of the Shiver.

Sharr accepted a proffered gauntlet, and was hauled up. He simply nodded at Red Tane, and the two carried on down, fighting through the insanity.

The Librarians and Talon met them at the bottom of the collapsing slope. The psykers looked beyond exhausted, but both were still standing.

‘The whole chamber is coming down,’ Te Kahurangi shouted to them both over the din. ‘The rest of the company is almost out! We must go!’

No further advice was needed. Together, the five Carcharodons made for the doorway.

CHAPTER XXX

The former throne room of Diamantus began to collapse as the Sire of Belaphrone took its vengeance. The prow of the proud old ship was driven, slowly and inexorably, by its blazing primary engine, down through crumbling asteroid and the splintered rock of the mountaintop until, at last, it ploughed its way with thundering finality through the remnants of the Pinnacle’s ceiling.

‘Keep moving,’ Sharr barked, driving the Librarians, Red Tane and Talon on ahead, urging them not to fall to the temptation of standing and slaughtering the daemons and mutants that still assailed them.

Third Company had almost made it out onto the plateau when the Sire of Belaphrone’s engine finally overloaded. It blew apart what remained of Grim Destiny and tore the heart out of the Pinnacle, fire surging down through the ship and into the corrupt throne room. In the space of a few seconds, it seared the flesh from the bones of every warp-spawned terror in the chamber, turning both Voldire’s deranged experiments and newly formed Neverborn to ash.

The warp portals saved Third Company. The Sire of Belaphrone’s fury surged briefly through them and into the Forge of Souls, venting itself before the rifts collapsed, spending the worst of the old ship’s wrath before it could surge up the tunnel to the Pinnacle’s entrance.

What remained of the chamber collapsed under the weight of the mountain’s broken peak. Part of the landslide cut off the main entrance, but by then Sharr and his small band had made it out in the wake of the rest of Third Company.

Black Scythe, Rangu’s Hammer and Sixth Squad had kept the plateau clear, and now the battered remnants of the rest of the company strengthened the perimeter as bedrock and soil continued to crumble down the slopes at their backs. Archenemy forces still infested the lower parts of Mount Antikythera, and carefully conserved fusillades kept them at bay as they bewailed the annihilation of the thing they had worshipped.

The staccato cracks of aimed bolter fire provided a backdrop as, finally, Sharr let Reaper’s motor die.

After the madness of the throne room, the plateau was almost achingly silent. Sharr embraced it, used it to find a degree of solace amidst the hollow ache as his body climbed down from the violent heights he had pushed it to.

He looked to the others who had made it out with him. Khauri was leaning against his staff, his face ashen, grip visibly shaking. Dark matter had clogged his nose and run down over his lips. His eyes were haunted by shadows. Next to him, the glow from Te Kahurangi’s staff was now a barely perceptible glimmer. The venerable psyker’s expression was stony, as though he was seeking to master a great pain without letting it show.

Talon looked from the rubble at their backs, still settling, to the Carcharodons holding the plateau’s edge, his grip on his club flexing, clearly eager to be where there was more fighting to be had but unwilling to roam within a Shiver that was not his own. Red Tane was unreadable behind his slime-drenched helm, his stance the easy poise of a swordsman who was at rest, but ready to launch into deadly motion in a heartbeat.

It was Khauri who broke the silence.

‘Is it done?’ he asked, looking at the Pale Nomad.

The heavy thrum and tread of Tactical Dreadnought Armour interrupted the small gathering before Te Kahurangi could reply. Kino approached, flanked by one of his Red Brethren. Both still had their power fists ignited.

‘You broke from the company, Champion,’ Kino said, looking to Red Tane, voice an angry exhalation over the vox. ‘My orders were to withdraw.’

‘I chose to stand with the Reaper Prime,’ Red Tane responded.

‘I am your Reaper Prime–’ Kino began to say, but the crack of Te Kahurangi’s staff against the ground stilled him.

‘Perhaps you should not be any longer, Sigmus-three-four-Kino,’ the Chief Librarian said, his expression growing ever more steely as he glared at the Company Master.

Kino’s servos snarled as he turned fully to face Te Kahurangi.

‘It is not your place to say that, Pale Nomad,’ he hissed.

‘No, it is yours,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘Your rank to relinquish. And when you do, you become a brother of the First Company once more. Able to speak with the voice of the Reaper Lord of the Void. Able to pronounce banishment, or end it.’

‘What is the meaning of this?’ Kino demanded, helm swinging to one side and then the other as he looked between the assembled Carcharodons. Sharr felt like he was being target-locked when the cold lenses turned to him.

‘Bail Sharr is disgraced,’ Kino went on, not even deigning to address him directly. ‘He pleaded with me to be exiled. I did him a service by banishing him, so he did not have to live in shame among his Shiver.’

‘Yet live in shame I did,’ Sharr spoke up. ‘What you say is true, Kino. I demanded I be cast out. I used the standards of our Chapter, the doctrines that have held us loyal and true during our voyage through the Outer Dark, as a means to escape my own failure. But our Chapter’s exile was not undertaken without any hope of forgiveness, and neither was mine. I have atoned.’

‘You were the reason I was forced to take command of this company,’ Kino said. ‘Your weakness is the root of all this. You are not fit to decide whether you have atoned or not.’

‘But you are,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘And if you do not, the master whom we both serve will. I shall be reporting to Lord Tyberos in full when I return to the Nomad Predation Fleet. I will tell him of your failure to engage Grim Destiny on the system’s edge, your decision to remain absent from your company once it was deployed planetside, your operational misstep in believing you could engage in high orbit, and how you were then cut off during the invasion’s height. And as an adviser of the Chapter Master, I will also stress that the Third Company has grown suboptimal under your tenure. I will recommend that your command does not receive full ratification, that you be returned to the First Company, that Bail Sharr’s exile be deemed complete, and that he should rejoin his Shiver as Company Master, if they will have him. Alternatively, you may remove yourself now, while you still have the power to do so, and show good judgement in reinstating the last Company Master.’

Sharr expected Kino to rage at the Pale Nomad – in his experience, Red Brethren were nothing if not stubborn. But instead Kino was silent for a long time before speaking, his tone frigid.

‘I suppose I should thank you, for convincing me to relinquish command of this misbegotten force. I never wished to lead this company, and I should never have permitted Sharr’s exile in the first place. I will have a report of my own to deliver to the Red Wake, Librarian. If you believe he will so easily dismiss the opinion of the First, you are not as wise as some claim you to be.’

Kino continued before Te Kahurangi could respond.

‘I have rarely encountered a Shiver so dysfunctional as this one. This company, especially its command structure, does no credit to the Chapter. I recuse myself from it. To have to lead it on a permanent basis would be a miserable fate. I shall rest knowing that I have fulfilled my duty.’

‘And what of Sharr?’ Te Kahurangi asked.

Kino continued to look at the Pale Nomad as he spoke.

‘Bail Sharr is perfectly suited to lead the company I have just described.’

‘You will end Talon’s exile as well,’ Sharr said abruptly, drawing the gaze of the other five. ‘In the years I have fought alongside him, I have never witnessed him fail the Chapter’s doctrines. Whatever his crime, he has served his sentence.’

‘Blind One–’ Talon began to say, his tone edged with dissatisfaction, but Sharr turned to him.

‘I understand that whatever Shiver you were once a part of is far from here, but you will find a new one in the Third Company. I am certain either Seventh or Eighth Squads will be proud to add you to their number. Cast off your shame, as I have, and speak your true name.’

‘I do not remember it,’ Talon said eventually, looking at Sharr with a bleak expression. ‘I do not remember my name, or a time before the mind-wipes and the exile operations. Not truly, only in fragments. I do not even recall my crime.’

‘Then truly, it is served,’ Sharr said, looking at Kino. ‘Release him.’

‘All will be included in my report,’ Kino said. ‘Your exile is over.’

Voldire squirmed through the darkness.

Of that fact, and little else, he was aware. His glorious form, on the cusp of true enlightenment, had been cruelly destroyed. Only his swollen brain matter had survived after being torn free.

The Infernal Architect had shielded him. An intellect like his could not be lost. He was too precious, his death too grievous a blow to the galaxy to be allowed. And so he had been preserved, lobes partially mutating into jelly-like forelimbs, making it possible to drag his squirming brain-thing into a crevasse.

Down Voldire wormed himself, into the split underbelly of the Pinnacle, into the fractures formed throughout the mountain when Grim Destiny had first hammered into it.

Voldire lived. He could regrow. He could return. There was hope yet for mankind.

Barely conscious and robbed of almost every sense bar the touch of his gelatinous newborn limbs, Voldire was unaware of It. Unaware as It stalked him, scented him, through the fissures and depths where It had concealed itself after the hulk’s brutal planetfall.

It smelt his sickness. It registered both his potential as a threat and his apparent vulnerability.

The Deathleaper did not understand its imperatives. Like many of the deadliest beings in the galaxy, it could not even truly conceive of its own self. Ultimately, it found expression and meaning only in the fulfilment of its function.

Voldire’s existence, rendered so pitiable, so corrupt, ended when the Deathleaper fulfilled the part of its function that required it to avoid any risk of detection, even by something so seemingly insignificant. It speared the datagnost’s remains against the bedrock of Diamantus with its upper talons, before ripping apart the last of him with its claws.

In the final days of the Diamantus purge, Ze-One-Prime was requested to attend the Reaper Prime. Kordi took them to the place Sharr had chosen as his planetside headquarters, the Forge Temple of the Two Archmagi, overlooking the Diamantine Triumph. The cavernous space bore the scarring legacy of the ongoing purification operations, but its furnaces were silent and its production lines still, excised of the Cult of the Arkifane’s evil.

Kordi had left Second Squad by the monument outside, commanded by Neku, whose leg had been healed sufficiently by the application of grafts and field augmetics to continue to take part in operations. Kordi led Ze-One-Prime into the temple and along the main smelter floor, to where Bail Sharr awaited them. He was flanked by his command squad – Nuritona, Ihaia, Red Tane and Tama – with the company’s faded old standard behind him and statues of the two great archmagi founders of Diamantus towering above.

Sharr was now garbed as befitted the Company Master of the Third, the war plate and relics brought down from the White Maw with the air assets. His head was framed beneath the jagged teeth of the Halo of Maws, while the Razor-Cloak and its vicious, glittering hide was draped over one pauldron. One gauntlet rested upon Reaper’s head, while the other clutched his crested helm to his side. To Kordi he looked every inch one of the Nomad Predation Fleet’s commanders, a warlord of the Outer Dark. And despite the doubts the strike leader had experienced when he had first been told of Bail Sharr’s return, there was no doubt in his mind that he was back where he belonged, and back where his old Shiver needed him.

Wordlessly, Kordi presented Ze-One-Prime. If the magos dominus was awed by Sharr, they did not show it, though with the help of their cane they offered a deep bow.

‘I was told you wished for an audience, Company Master,’ they said.

‘Indeed,’ Sharr responded. ‘I wished to offer my thanks on behalf of the wider company for your assistance throughout the crisis on your world, and to inform you that my brethren and I will shortly be departing.’

Ze-One-Prime showed no surprise at the news, and Kordi suspected they had anticipated it. They had already discussed how Adeptus Mechanicus reinforcements were bound for Diamantus. The Carcharodon Astra would not wish to be present when they arrived. Their orders had been to defend the forge world from Grim Destiny, and that threat was no more.

‘On behalf of Diamantus, and the Omnissiah, I thank you and your Chapter,’ Ze-One-Prime said. ‘Though our suffering has been great and our losses nigh incomputable, you have preserved us from even greater blasphemies. Upon your departure, I will base my forces at the Twinfort and continue purification operations until my kindred’s fleets arrive.’

‘There is one other matter that I wish to inform you of,’ Sharr said. ‘It concerns the populace of Diamantus, namely the labour force.’

‘I anticipate you will recommend their termination, for fear that some are tainted,’ Ze-One-Prime said. ‘I believe that would be a mistake. I have extensively monitored all contact with the workers, and have encountered almost no cases of corrupted manifestations. They are currently lawless, it is true, but only due to the devastation wreaked upon them. The infection spread itself among the priesthood and my own kindred in the maniples, among those most blessed by the machine. Not among the commoners.’

‘Your assumption is incorrect, magos dominus,’ Sharr said. ‘About the common workers of this world, we are in agreement. My Brother-Librarians have found little trace of the Ruinous Powers among them. It is for exactly that reason that I intend to take a tithe of them.’

‘A tithe?’ Ze-One-Prime asked, the word hanging leaden in the air.

‘My Chapter has a number of ancient treaties with the rest of the Imperium,’ Sharr said. ‘Thanks to the Edicts of Exile, we are permitted to take supplies, including human fodder, from worlds we defend. They may not be members of the Adeptus Terra, or indeed the Adeptus Mechanicus, but of the common citizenry, there is no limitation. It has been this way for millennia. I have requested your presence partly to confirm my belief that the workers of Diamantus, while falling under the protection of the Omnissiah, are not technically members of the Martian Cult.’

‘That is the case,’ Ze-One-Prime said, their human-sounding voice now guarded. ‘You wish to simply… take them?’

‘Not all of them, of course,’ Sharr said. ‘Only a small number, at least as far as the surviving population is concerned. Mass-conveyance transports are already inbound from the south. I would be gratified if your skitarii would assist in processing operations.’

‘You wish for me to aid you in seizing the workers of Diamantus?’ Ze-One-Prime said.

‘Yes.’

Kordi watched that expressionless mask closely. After a brief silence, they spoke again.

‘This is irregular. Nevertheless, it is true that we owe you a great debt.’

‘It is not a payment of debt. We had a duty to defend this world, and we did. Now I have a duty to tithe it, so I shall.’

‘Your logic is commendable, Carcharodon Astra. As, I believe, is mine – we will assist you in the fulfilment of your duties, even though it will mean a further reduction of our workforce. In truth, I do not expect a return to productivity for many decades.’

‘It is regrettable that more of Diamantus could not be saved,’ Sharr said. ‘Such is the price of war.’

Kordi sensed no relief in the Reaper Prime, though he was certain it was there, deep below the surface. Conducting a Red Tithe on a forge world, even a ravaged one like Diamantus, was a risk. Had Ze-One-Prime refused permission, there was little the company could have done. And when word inevitably got out, it could cause dissatisfaction among other factions of the Cult Mechanicus.

It was a calculated risk. The Nomad Predation Fleet was always hungry, always consuming. None had kept it fed as regularly as Bail Sharr, and if he returned to the main fleet with even a partial tithe, it would further strengthen his defence against the accusations Kino was planning to level. It was strategically astute.

Sharr dismissed the magos dominus and Kordi, but the strike leader lingered.

‘You wish to speak?’ Sharr asked.

Kordi thought about his former doubts, about the darkness Sharr’s fall had brought over the whole company, the uncertainty of his return as an Exile, and now his re-transfiguration into the role of Reaper Prime. It was as though he had never left. Kordi could not deny the relief he felt at that, but was such an emotion worthy or unbecoming of a true Carcharodon Astra? Was it his duty to trust his Company Master without reservation, or to demand assurances that the Shiver would never again be subjected to the misrule Sharr’s failure had brought about?

He knew he would be unable to adequately express such thoughts. Instead, Kordi shook his head and turned away, already speaking into his vox, calling for Neku to prepare Second Squad.

It was time to claim the Red Tithe.

+ + + Initialising astropathic relay auto-séance transcript chain 372F/71G. Part 4 of 4. Record downloading + + +

+ + + Cleansing transcript file + + +

+ + + Transcript file cleansed. Sender verified as Interrogator Anton Fell, agent of Inquisitor >REDACTED< of the Ordo Hereticus + + +

+ + + Opening Transcript + + +

There is something hunting us. It killed Garwell and both the combat servitors in two separate incidents during the night.

No one has been able to identify it, beyond the fact that it is unnaturally swift and silent. I fear we are beset by some Archenemy monstrosity, perhaps a damnable remnant from the struggle for this world.

It struck after dark, not long after we arrived at the plateau in front of what I assume is the primary entrance to the mountaintop. A great battle has already been fought in this place. The ground is choked with the rotting, dust-shrouded dead. The entranceway looks to have been sealed by rubble. I had ordered us to encamp among the dead until dawn came, which would enable us to better assess it.

Whatever terror attacked us is undoubtedly still out there, observing us. Next time we will be ready for it.

I should add that there have been strange phantom messages over the vox-net, before and after the two attacks. My signals officer claims it might be the Lightbringer attempting to contact us, but the whispers I hear do not sound like Torrian or her crew.

Some of the party want to head back down the mountain, but I have refused. None will dare countermand me, not while I bear your authority.

Dawn is now breaking. I pray to the God-Emperor that we are able to hunt down and banish this creature before darkness returns. Alfaiq has reported seeing–

+ + + Transcript file ends + + +

+ + + Thought for the Day: Only in death does duty end + + +

+ + + Logging request for deletion of auto-séance transcript chain 372F/71G. Gene code required + + +

+ + + Gene code approved. Authority of Inquisitor >REDACTED< recognised + + +

+ + + Deletion sequence initialising in 3… 2… 1… + + +

+ + + Transcript chain deleted + + +

+ + + Thought for the Day: A moment of laxity spawns a lifetime of heresy + + +

EPILOGUE

The downdraught of the Arvus lighter’s engines kicked up dirt and dust from the plateau, forcing Interrogator Ranwell to raise a hand to shield his face. Next to him, the explicator, Ogilvie, was unable to protect himself, weighed down as he was with both hands clutching the plastek sack containing the broken power armour.

They had recovered it from among the eviscerated remains of Interrogator Anton Fell and his sub-retinue. Ranwell had tried to warn their mistress that Fell wasn’t ready for an assignment like this. The fact that he had been proven correct brought him no pleasure – for all his inexperience, Fell had been a fellow interrogator, and just about as close a thing as there could be to a friend among the junior ranks of the Inquisition.

That something terrible had happened to him had become clear when the small fleet commandeered by their mistress had broken in-system. The astropath had received an automatic etheric inload, a screed of data that had been sent from the surface of Diamantus several months before and had only just found a sanctioned mind to latch on to. She had converted it into a transcript chain which proved to be a string of messages from Fell, logged by the ship that had transported him to the forge world, the Lightbringer.

Augur scans had shown that the Lightbringer itself was still in orbit, albeit now reduced to a gutted, burning wreck by the newly arrived Adeptus Mechanicus war fleet. The servants of the Machine God had initially refused to communicate with Ranwell’s mistress, then had claimed that the Lightbringer had fallen to corruption. They stated the planet of Diamantus was quarantined. Such claims meant little to the Inquisition.

The Mechanicus, for all their fiercely guarded independence, were not about to open fire on the combined power of the Imperial Navy and the Holy Ordos. As the senior interrogator, Ranwell had been dispatched to the surface, under the guns of both sets of warships and through the debris that still choked the atmosphere. He had located Fell’s last known position, on a plateau near the splintered peak of a mountain named Antikythera.

As they had hoped, the artefacts Fell had recovered were still amongst the remains – fragments of damaged Adeptus Astartes battle plate. Anton Fell might have died horribly, but he had not died in vain.

Ranwell had been able to transmit news of the success. Now, his mistress had arrived.

‘Open the sack,’ Ranwell snapped at Ogilvie, who hastily untied the plastek bag and began to spread its scarred, grey ceramite contents for inspection.

The lighter’s hatch ramp had disengaged and was lowering amidst a gust of steam, the shuttle framed against the ruddy, dust-choked sunset breaking over the pinnacle behind it. Through the steam and the lengthening shadows, two bulky, armoured figures advanced, Vox Legi shotguns sweeping the plateau for threats as they spread out on either side of the ramp. They were arbitrators of the Adeptus Arbites, clad in black carapace armour and sallet half-helms, their expressions grim. Behind them came their mistress, and Ranwell’s.

She was armoured similarly to her two bodyguards, in carapace armour of a matching pattern, though its colour was midnight blue rather than black. There was a plasma pistol on her hip, and an Inquisitorial rosette pinned to her gorget, gleaming gold in the dying light. Her head was bare, her long white hair piled up, her face showing the alternating smoothness around the jaw and cheekbones and the lines around the eyes that hinted at a regimen of rejuvenat treatments. It was strange to see her combat-garbed, but it suited her – it had been some time since she had taken an active part in operations.

That told Ranwell just how important this was.

The interrogator and the explicator knelt side by side in the dust, the broken Adeptus Astartes battle plate before them. Ranwell spoke over the dying whine of the shuttle’s engines.

‘Welcome to Diamantus, Inquisitor Rannik.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robbie MacNiven is a Highlands-born History graduate from the University of Edinburgh. He has written the Warhammer Age of Sigmar novel Scourge of Fate and the Gotrek Gurnisson novella The Bone Desert, as well as the Warhammer 40,000 novels Oaths of Damnation, Blood of Iax, The Last Hunt, Carcharodons: Red Tithe, Carcharodons: Outer Dark and Legacy of Russ. His short stories include ‘Redblade’, ‘A Song for the Lost’ and ‘Blood and Iron’. His hobbies include re-enacting, football and obsessing over Warhammer 40,000.

An extract from Oaths of Damnation.

Damnation came howling out of the ether, reaching for the Hexbreakers with talons formed from hatred and hunger.

Daggan Zaidu sent the first back to where it had come from with the knife in his left fist, the straight-bladed combat dagger scything up and through the monstrosity’s distended neck as it lunged with a maw filled with fangs. Stinking black ichor drenched his armour, sizzling as it evaporated off the sigil-etched surfaces.

The monstrosity came apart, already replaced by another. Claws raked at his left shoulder but failed to register as the knife in his right hand carved off the offending limb before delivering the banishing blow.

They were fast, these ones, and numerous. The abbey was almost overrun, its heart ripped out by a pulsing abomination, a rent in the very essence of reality. Above the altar, the air was buckling as more and more warp matter forced its way into the materium, feasting on the warmth of existence. Translucent flesh hardened and became scabbed with scales and blotchy hides, horns sprouted and curled, talons went from soft and brittle to firm and wicked. Amorphous beings, denied for aeons, finally found form and threw themselves at the mortals before them, desperate to consume.

The Exorcists had come to deny them that. Though it seemed like reality itself was unravelling around them, the focus of the Hexbreakers never wavered.

Zaidu cut down another skittering horror and made a split-second assessment. The formation was going to be outflanked and overrun if they didn’t reduce their frontage.

‘Pattern cheit,’ he ordered his Reivers.

His Reivers. Simultaneously true and untrue. They were Hexbreakers, and thus under his command, but since his promotion to almoner-lieutenant just before the campaign on Demeter, he was no longer their squad leader. That honour fell to Belloch, who now snapped at Makru and Nabua to show alacrity as the exposed line cinched into a defensive circle.

It was knife-work, this – no bolters. Zaidu noticed that the abbey’s vaulted roof had started to come apart, the stones shaking loose from one another. Rather than caving in, though, they remained suspended in mid-air, forming a fractured arch of drifting stone, defying the natural laws of the galaxy.

Existence itself was about to collapse. Whether they were going to be overrun or not, they had to go on the offensive. They had to reach the rift and seal it, before it widened any further.

‘Accelerate tempo,’ Zaidu barked to his Reivers – his Reivers – trying to drive their efforts with their blades to the next level ahead of an offence order. He couldn’t fail now. It was unthinkable.

‘Pattern lamed,’ he barked. ‘On me!’

The Exorcists formed into a spearhead with Zaidu at the tip, the almoner-lieutenant dealing destruction with his twin knives. He was the Sin Slayer, a hunting hound of the Chapter. He would not be denied.

The altar, caught beneath the widening warp rift, had started to fracture, foul tentacles bursting and writhing from the splitting stone, as though some nightmarish beast had been sealed within it and was now free. The rising tide of flesh and fury railed at them, trying to rip them apart, trying to break their formation and drag them down one by one, yet the long blades of the Reivers kept the daemonspawn at bay, gleaming silver in the hellish, kaleidoscopic light that was beginning to suffuse the abbey.

A few steps more. The altar split apart fully, shattered stone forming jagged teeth as it became a gaping maw frilled with squirming appendages. Zaidu drove himself on, preparing to leap it and bury his blades into the mass of flesh spilling from the rift above it.

He faltered. The madness he had been in the midst of blinked from existence, not with the mind-aching horror of a daemonic infestation, but with the instantaneousness of a slide change in a pict projector. He was no longer in the abbey, no longer fighting alongside his brethren.

This was not what had been agreed. Was Vey giving him some new test? He attempted to raise his knives but found he could not. He couldn’t even turn his head.

He tried to speak but found it impossible. He fought to reach out to Vey, but the scene before him dragged at his attention, breaking his focus.

Two figures were locked in combat, fighting in the middle of a void that Zaidu’s mind seemed unable to process or comprehend. One was undoubtedly Adeptus Astartes, though a golden luminescence was shining from him, hiding his features and his heraldry.

The other was a Neverborn, a blood daemon. Zaidu knew it. A rare flaring of emotions torn from him long ago – hatred, rage, revulsion – suffused his thoughts, before realisation dawned and the cold control he was more accustomed to returned.

He knew what he was about to witness. It had played out in front of him before, many times.

He found he could move again. The golden warrior was gone – now Zaidu stood in his place. The daemon remained, shrieking a name with raw fury, garbed now in a face that Zaidu knew yet could not fully recognise.

‘Demetrius,’ the daemon wailed.

With a roar, Zaidu drove the blade in his hands into the beast.

Reality finally collapsed around him.

Discordance ripped through Torrin Vey’s thoughts, and for a moment his psychic essence floundered like a man who could not swim being cast into a frigid, raging ocean.

He hissed a catechism of focus, fingers gripping the sides of his throne until his knuckles were white and the brass skulls that decorated the rests were threatening to buckle.

It took barely a moment, but it felt like an age. He managed to regain himself, loosening his grip and easing out a slow breath that clouded in the freezing air of the psykhanium.

Something was wrong, very wrong, and he was not yet sure what.

The drill had been proceeding as planned. Almoner-Lieutenant Zaidu, seemingly dissatisfied with his current training facilities, had requested that Vey lead him and his Reiver squad in a psychic bout. Vey had agreed, conjuring a simulation of a particularly vicious daemonic infestation for the Sin Slayer and his fellow hunters to fight their way through. Such illusions were not simple, but the amplification of the psykhanium combined with the willingness of the participating minds had ensured the experience was not more than Vey could endure.

That was until he had felt Zaidu straying. The illusion had been broken by something, something that did not belong. And then, moments later, the discordance. Vey had not had a chance to piece it together, but it had caused him to experience something he was highly unfamiliar with – a loss of control. For a second, damnation had yawned, and he had been certain he was about to lose his grip and plunge into its embrace.

Not today. He had reasserted himself in time. But he needed answers.

The psykhanium chamber crowned one of the towers of the Basilica Malifex, second only in height and gothic grandeur to the astropathic relay pinnacle. Its interior lay beneath a dome of shielded, psi-reactive crystal, centred on a vision throne that sat at the top of a control column wreathed in cables and wiring. Arrayed around the column’s base were ten upright sarcophagi of brass and Banish corestone, linked back to it by more thick spools of power lines. Six of the ten slabs were currently occupied by Zaidu and his Reivers, while Vey sat upon the throne overlooking them, linked to them via the thickets of cabling plugged from the throne’s high back into the base of his cortex.

He experienced a moment’s pain as he broke both the physical and mental connections and rose, descending the ladder to the psykhanium’s mesh-plate decking. Doing so also caused the sarcophagi to disengage, the bolts containing their purity-seal-studded fronts thudding free. Hissing steam momentarily obscured the occupants before they emerged through it – hulking, skull-faced nightmares that Vey offered a fraternal greeting to.

Zaidu was among them. Like his Reivers, he was garbed in a black bodyglove that acted as his under-vest, the synth-skin dotted with ports that would allow his Mark X battle plate to interface with the Black Carapace beneath his upper dermal layers. Besides that, he wore nothing but his twin combat knives, sheathed over one another on a mag belt, and his death mask, a leering, fanged holdover from his days serving with the Reivers.

‘What happened?’ he demanded of Vey, voice as sharp as one of his knives.

‘I do not know,’ the Librarian admitted, unused to such an admission. ‘I experienced a psychic disturbance. Abrupt, and of some magnitude. I have not been able to identify its source yet.’

Zaidu began to respond, but the words faded to Vey’s hindbrain as a new sensation demanded his attention. A presence entered his mind, one he recognised. It was Enlightened Brother Dornmar, the only other Exorcists Librarian currently stationed at the Basilica Malifex. He came to Vey not with words, simply imprinting the knowledge he wished to convey directly onto his consciousness, an act that spoke of urgency.

‘A signal has been received,’ Vey told Zaidu, straightening out the impression made on him. ‘I must depart immediately to the astropathic relay. This session is over.’

‘Should I initiate emergency protocols?’ Zaidu asked. The other Reivers had gathered from their own sarcophagi around their leader, their skull masks grinning at Vey in the dissipating steam.

‘Not… immediately,’ he said as he finished ordering and interrogating Dornmar’s imprint. ‘I recommend you conduct purification rites. If there is pertinent news, I will inform you.’

‘I saw it again,’ Zaidu said, the statement catching Vey off-guard.

‘Saw what?’

‘My vision. Caedus. I defeated it again, but it was not like the first banishing.’

Vey knew of Zaidu’s visions, or at least what the almoner-lieutenant thought of as visions. He had been experiencing them since his initiation. Vey recalled how he had felt Zaidu’s mind stray moments before he had experienced the discordance. Were the two connected?

‘I will seek answers for both of us,’ he told the Sin Slayer. ‘Hold fast until my return.’

Vey did not go to Dornmar and the astropathic relay. Instead, he journeyed down, to the heart of the Basilica Malifex, the Cloister of Scars. From there he passed the Threshold into the Chapter Librarius, undoing the wards and speaking his name so he would be known to both the spirits of the place and the combat servitors hardwired into its outer pillars.

He knew what he was doing might be a mistake. Logic dictated he go immediately to Dornmar and receive his report. But the universe did not run on logic. There was something gnawing at the back of Vey’s mind, something more than the echoes of his Never-brother, Amazarak. Zaidu’s vision could not be a coincidence. The nature of whatever report Dornmar held would not solidify into the truth until Vey had received it. He believed he would find certainty not with the data-raving of an astropathic choir, but in the silence of the Librarius.

The primary chamber was vast, a cavity at the core of the Exorcists’ fortress-monastery, hollowed out and filled with the sum total of knowledge acquired over four thousand years spent warring with the daemonic. Arcane grimoires, cursed tomes, Ecclesiarchy doggerel and the ruminations of generations of the Chapter’s own Librarians and mystics filled the shelves, stacked under, alongside and above briefing transcriptions, tactical-goetic summaries, combat divinations, gene-files and star cartography.

No other Chapter was so wedded to theomantic esotericism as the Exorcists. Knowledge was power, and they knew its value. They had made the Basilica Malifex one of the greatest repositories of occult information in the segmentum, hidden from all but the Chapter and a select few members of the Ordos.

The floor of the Librarius – cold, smooth Banish corestone – was sub-divided into hundreds of sections via the thousands of towering bookshelves that filled the place. Made from black mirewood timber and carved with strange figures and goetic inscriptions, they sagged and creaked beneath the weight of multitudes of books, scrolls, parchments, data-slates and information crystals. The stacks formed narrow rows that seemed to go on forever, dimly illuminated by cobwebbed lumen orbs suspended from brass chains overhead. The shelves carried on up past the orbs, their uppermost levels lost in the musty darkness that shrouded the vaults.

Before Vey could advance into the library proper, he was approached by a gaggle of shuffling, hunchbacked figures – mortals, but garbed in the dark blue robes of the Librarius. They were bibliognosts, a subsect of the Chapter’s serfs, humans bound to live out their lives within the confines of the Librarius.

All of them had their tongues cut out at the beginning of their service. The first to reach Vey signed silently at him while keeping his gaze averted from the towering Exorcist, a ritualised greeting that put him at the Librarian’s disposal.

Vey waved the mortals away. He did not need their aid to find what he sought, and besides, he wanted to tangle up as few souls as possible in the web he was beginning to sense was now surrounding him.

He strode into the Librarius. The place reeked of damp and old vellum, dusty pages and cloying incense. It seemed to swallow the sound of Vey’s footsteps as he made his way in amongst the towering stacks. The only noises were the occasional soft fluttering of wings from things in the darkness above and the dry rustle and crackle of pages being turned somewhere amidst the endless shelves.

The rows loomed over Vey as he went deeper, the weight of their blasted knowledge seeking to bear him down. He muttered litanies he had learned on his first day as a Lexicanium, using their familiar beat and cadence to locate himself within the vast chamber and keep his path true.

It did not do to stray in a place such as this.

As he progressed, he passed several figures working in silence. The first was another blue-robed bibliognost, a series of brass magnification lenses lowered over her eyes as she tottered atop a ladder resting against one of the stacks. The second, a dozen rows on, was a wheezing servitor unit, bent-backed beneath a mound of books it was transporting with slow, shuffling steps.

Vey’s catechisms led him true. He found the centre of the chamber, the nexus where the stacks converged. A dense circle of lecterns, cogitator units and data-nodes, dusty, their screens fuzzed with age, surrounded a statue of a robed figure, head bowed, features lost in the shadows of a graven cowl. The Emperor of Man, in His guise as the Keeper of Knowledge. At the statue’s feet, in the centre of the cogitator circle, a set of black iron stairs spiralled away into darkness.

More bibliognosts stood at the lecterns and cogitators, the scratching of quills and the dull rattle of runeboards the only sounds. They were cataloguing, transcribing, translating or researching on behalf of the Chapter’s Librarians or the Inquisition. None looked up from their labours as Vey passed between them to reach the stairs.

He began to descend beneath the gaze of the Emperor. Down the tightly twisting stairs led him, into the space known as the Crypt.

It lay directly beneath the main Librarius, smaller than the grand chamber but still large and vaulted. Here the most damnable works were confined, not only texts but artefacts too – all manner of trinkets and reliquiae, from skulls and withered, shrunken heads to strange crystals, blades and daggers, cups, tarot decks, looking glasses and other arcane paraphernalia. The Exorcists knew the power of such objects, as well as their danger.

Vey was target-locked by another combat servitor at the bottom of the staircase, but it allowed him to pass. The air had a sudden, bitter chill to it, and he could feel the psychic tug and pull of the warding runes carved into the stonework around him.

He moved into the Crypt, beginning to scan the shelves. The books here were bound like beasts in chains and fetters, and every stack’s front was covered either with iron bars or sheer plates of armaglass. The latter was crazed and scarred by the scrapes of talons and the imprints of clawed hands. All the markings were on the inside.

Vey knew these shelves, knew the cursed weight they bore up. His hearing detected what sounded like whispers, breathed softly from between the stacks, but he ignored them. He counted himself past the Sixteenth Catechism of the Red Saint of Ophidia, the diary of Lord Commander Elgor Faust, Aktor Krell’s Lemegeton Profundis and the first and third scrolls of the Klepas Didactics. Between the final scroll of the Didactics and The Revelations of the Ruberics, he found what he sought.

There was a scrape of rusting metal as a servitor approached. The bibliognosts were forbidden from entering the Crypt. Servitors alone ran this part of the Librarius. Often one or more of Vey’s brethren would also be present, but currently he and Dornmar were the only Librarians in the Basilica Malifex – the weight of recent conflicts had spread the Chapter thin.

Vey used his gene ident to unlock the glass and unchain the tome he had sought out, before stepping aside to allow the servitor to properly remove it. The thing’s forearms were crude metal augmetics wrapped in purity seals and litanies from the Liber Exorcismus. Its function was the retrieval of texts such as these.

After a few tries with its pincers, it was able to heft the book down from the shelf and transport it to the nearest reading slab. Vey watched warily as the book was set down, its covers still chained. Its name was the Daemonarchia Claviculus, and it was the most complete list of Neverborn in the Chapter’s possession. It had been compiled over four millennia, a record not only of the common names – and sometimes even the True Names – of the warp spawn that had plagued humanity, but also a catalogue of their titles, ranks and appellations, and their standing within the damnable hierarchy of the empyrean. It was at once a vital and dangerous weapon in the Exorcists’ armoury, and only desperate circumstances made its evil a necessary one.

The reading slab lay beneath another large lumen orb, its light a rancid yellow, the inside of its lower half befouled where grime had collected over the millennia. The slab itself was carved with hexagrammatic runes and the names of the Seven Planetary Talismans, along with five versions of the diagrams of the Sigilus Dei Imperator Aemath, the Seal of the Emperor’s Truth. Vey would have preferred to employ more arcane tools – his black-and-red Rod of El and his incantation bowl. For a proper reading he would have anointed himself with sanctified acid-water from the marshlands surrounding the Basilica Malifex, or pentacle runes in ash from the Eternal Pyre that burned atop the fortress-monastery’s pinnacle, but there was no time for any of that. Vey was experienced in the occult ways of what the Chapter called goetia – black magicks and daemonologie. He had to press on, or he would run out of time.

The servitor retreated, and Vey stood over the book. It took a moment to find his focus, briefly touching two fingers to his forehead before undoing the chains.

The response was immediate. Before he had even touched its cover, the Daemonarchia slammed open with a clap like thunder. At the same time, the lumen overhead stuttered and went out.

Vey’s body went instinctively to combat readiness. He heard a whirring from nearby – the servitor. The whispers he had caught earlier returned, scratching at the edge of his hearing. His hands clenched into fists, and he half turned, seeking an enemy he knew was not there. He yearned to feel the hilt of his force sword, Kerubim, in his grasp.

The lumen struggled back to life. Damnation lay open before Vey – the Daemonarchia, darkness coiling up from the flayed skin of its pages, the physical corruption visible to Vey’s witch-sight. The taint was bleeding from it, clawing at the bindings of the reading slab as it sought to reach him.

It would find no purchase in him. His soul was a fallow field where even the deepest, bitterest root of corruption would not lodge itself.

The servitor had turned and was now staring at him, its one organic eye dull but fixed on him.

Vey returned its gaze for a moment, then, slowly, turned back towards the book. Twin hearts beating, he leaned over and forced himself to read the blasphemous names and titles inked with blood onto the ancient skin, pinning each writhing word in place with a murmured catechism of command.

The Red Marshal, formally Seneschal of the Fortress of Bone and Keeper of the Blood Hounds Carnus and Slaught. Known upon Arava Prime as the Crimson Vengeance, upon Antraxus VI as the Warlord of Warlords and within the Ignatius Sector as the Butcher Baron. Since its great and grievous defeat upon Fidem IV, it has been called most commonly, in the vulgar tongue of mortals, Caedus.

The servitor lunged for him. Subconsciously, Vey had been ready for it. He caught the clumsy thrust of its forearms, twisting and grasping its head in one great hand as he put his body between it and the book. He wrenched at its skull, his positioning ensuring the blood and oils from the torn flesh and ruptured machinery did not strike the Daemonarchia. Blood, touching the accursed pages, would have unleashed more than Vey was prepared to deal with.

The servitor went stiff and still, dead. Vey dropped it and turned back to the book.

‘It has returned,’ said a voice.

There was a figure, standing in the shadows between the book stacks opposite the slab. Vey found himself looking into the face of death.

He realised Zaidu had followed him.

He did not bother to question how the almoner-lieutenant had gained access to the Crypt. Though they guarded their knowledge carefully from outsiders, any within the Chapter’s complex command hierarchy – be it the Twelvefold Commandery, the Convocation of Four or the Lesser Convocation of Forty-Eight – could access the Librarius. As a newly inducted member of the lattermost body, Zaidu’s presence here was not unwarranted. What irked Vey was that the Sin Slayer had followed him, and that he had done so without Vey sensing his presence.

‘It has returned, yes,’ the Librarian said, making himself answer Zaidu directly and speak the truth, despite his reluctance to do so.

Zaidu made no physical response to Vey’s confirmation, other than to pause briefly before speaking again.

‘Then it is bound for Fidem IV.’

‘That is likely.’

‘Have the Chapter hierarchy been informed?’

‘I do not know. I have yet to visit Dornmar. I wished to test the weave of fate here before I committed to speaking to him. But if it is as we both fear, I am authorised to take immediate action.’

‘And what will that action be, enlightened brother?’

Vey took a breath, fixing Zaidu with his gaze before speaking.

‘You will prepare your Hexbreakers, and be ready to depart aboard the Witch-Bane on the eleventh bell.’

‘Is there a briefing packet? Hypno-data for the voyage?’

‘There will be by the time you board. I will compile it as soon as I have received the astropathic report.’

Zaidu nodded. Vey knew he needed to be as careful with the almoner-lieutenant as he was being with the Daemonarchia. He was like a keen, unsheathed blade – deadly when used well, but capable of wounding its owner if not wielded with control. Vey decided it was better to press him now rather than later. He needed to get a good, confident grip on him if he was going to use him correctly.

‘Will the Hexbreakers be ready at such short notice?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Zaidu said. Vey experienced a quickening of his senses, an unwelcome sharpness that linked back to the days of his initiation rites, long ago. It was akin to the heightening all Space Marines experienced when about to enter combat, a glanding of stimms and hormones, but this was something more, something truly predatory and instinctive. He tasted a passing sweetness in his mouth, and swallowed it. Amazarak’s parting gift, and curse.

Zaidu had just told him a half-lie.

‘And will you be ready, Sin Slayer?’ Vey pushed on, not pausing to address the untruth.

‘Yes,’ the lieutenant repeated. More vicious sharpening, more sweetness, a full lie this time. Vey could hear the pulse of Zaidu’s hearts – both of them active, just like his own – and see the individual beads of sweat as they ran from his bare, scarred brow. His fingers ached to grasp Kerubim.

‘You are lying,’ Vey told the lieutenant. ‘I can taste it.’

‘Your line of questioning is vague,’ Zaidu replied coldly, still lingering in the shadows, his half-skull mask grinning. ‘If you wish to get at the truth, hone it.’

Vey smiled coldly. That was more like the Daggan Zaidu he had known, ever since the desperate day he had dragged him through the blood and broken bones and burning meat of his own initiation rites. The unsheathed blade, cutting and quick. Sin Slayer, a champion of the Chapter, hunter of daemons, ruthless, relentless, uncompromising.

‘Caedus is your Never-brother,’ Vey said, attacking Zaidu head-on, just the way he liked it. ‘During your initiation into the Chapter, it was Caedus who possessed you. Who shared your flesh. Who, before my own eyes, you tore out and cast back into the warp.’

‘Clearly, I did not cast it far enough,’ Zaidu said, voice taking on a bitter edge. ‘How was it allowed to return and infest another aspirant so quickly?’

‘There will be an inquest into that,’ Vey assured him. ‘Right now, that is not my most pressing concern.’

‘Your most pressing concern is whether or not I will be an asset or a liability,’ Zaidu said with customary forwardness.

‘Correct. Even banished, the bond we share with our Never-brothers is potent. It affects us all in different ways. Now that Caedus is free, those effects will be even more pronounced. Tell me, why did you follow me here?’

‘It felt like something was calling to me,’ Zaidu said. ‘In my blood. And outside too. Not just the usual echoes but…’

‘Whispers,’ Vey said.

‘You have heard them too?’ Zaidu asked sharply.

‘I hear much, and see more, Sin Slayer,’ Vey said, falling back on the time-honoured mysticism of the Librarius. ‘Speak to me again of your vision. The one you experienced in the psykhanium. Was it the first occurrence since returning from Demeter?’

‘Yes. A warrior like us, Adeptus Astartes, clad in golden-yellow light, battles a Neverborn of the Blood God amidst towering ruins. The daemon is Caedus. The warrior defeats it and banishes it to a place beyond all human understanding.’

‘And you still believe this warrior is you?’ Vey asked.

‘It is a vision that has been shown to me and no other since my initiation,’ Zaidu said. ‘Sometimes I see it second-hand, but often I view the fight through the golden warrior’s own eyes. I have always known my purpose is to destroy Caedus in the material realm. The fact that it has come back to the Chapter and broken free, and the fact that I now stand ready to hunt it down, only confirms it. You know as well as I, Lie-Eater, that there are no such things as coincidences when it comes to the workings of the warp.’

‘True,’ Vey allowed, keeping his counsel about Zaidu’s vision to himself. ‘But you must know too that you will be tested on this hunt. And not merely your battle skill or your art with those daggers of yours. All of our Never-brothers detest us. Caedus will seek to twist the pieces it left behind in you, and break you in every conceivable way.’

‘The daemon will be the one who is broken. I will consign the Red Marshal to the warp so utterly that it can never again threaten the Emperor’s domains,’ Zaidu growled. ‘I will give you an Oath of Damnation on it, right here and now.’

‘I do not require that,’ Vey said, raising a hand to placate his younger brother. He had pushed him far enough, for now. ‘And in all honesty, there are none in the Chapter I would rather have at my side during an undertaking as vital as this. You have never been found wanting before, Sin Slayer, and neither have the Hexbreakers. I do not expect that will change.’

‘It will not,’ Zaidu agreed. ‘With your permission, Brother-Librarian, I will go and ready them.’

Vey dismissed Zaidu. Only when he was gone did the Librarian slam the Daemonarchia shut and lash chains of psi-deadened steel about it, snarling the necessary Oath of Binding as he felt it shudder in his grip, like a living beast brought to heel.

No such thing as coincidences. He could hear the clanging of a heavy bell from somewhere high above, its clapping the only sound from outside permitted within the Librarius. The eighth toll of the day, Vey realised. Expulsiars.

Time was still slipping through his fingers.

He hurried to the astropathic relay.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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