It is the 41st millennium. 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 will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

Chapter One

Anrakyr the Traveller was caked in the blood of men. The organic liquid dripped across his skeleton, red and glistening. He could still hear the screams of the dying creatures, still hear them begging and pleading. They shouted prayers with their meat-voices to some deific being.

It was a waste of breath and a waste of their final moments. Nothing awaited them after death. Anrakyr cared nothing for their prayers or their begging. He merely watched as the humans aspirated blood and the life drained from their weeping eyes. His unblinking visage of death gazed upon them without mercy.

Anrakyr the Traveller, would-be overlord of the necrons, descended upon Kehlrantyr in an orgy of death. He brought order. He brought certainty.

Kehlrantyr was infested. It was infested with grey buildings and grey people.

‘What dull creatures, living in their own filth,’ Anrakyr mused. No response met him. The sentient necrons within his forces were out of range, venting their fury upon the humans. Only the dull-witted warriors surrounded him, marching through the streets and avenues of Kehlrantyr’s human stain.

Necron phalanxes smashed through those buildings and those people. Necron warriors turned gauss weaponry on fleeing masses of humans. Bodies carpeted the roads. Fires broke out, sending smoke into the turquoise sky.

Resistance began lightly. Isolated bands of humans fired primitive laser rifles upon marching steel. Then their resolve stiffened. Machines, armoured boxes on wheels, rolled out to fire weak shots into colossal monoliths. Obsidian flanks chipped, but ultimately the human artillery affected nothing. The necron forces rolled down the broad avenues of the human settlement, tearing up the poured stone that served as road material. Human soldiers advanced alongside.

Anrakyr sprinted into them, the metal of his feet clinking against the stone. The Traveller stabbed his lance through the crew compartment of one of the vehicles, laughed as eldritch energies tore the humans sheltering within to dripping hunks. Something exploded inside, some rough human ammunition touched off by the actinic fury of his warscythe. The vehicle broke into millions of pieces of metal and fire. Anrakyr was propelled back, slamming into one of the grey buildings. He flew through the walls, past crying and weeping animals, hiding in their dens.

The Traveller pulled himself to his feet. He could hear bellowing outside. The sounds were deep, registering low on the human wavelengths. Anrakyr spared no glance for the cringing organics that ran screaming away from him, deeper into the building. Paintings and human pictoglyphs covered the walls. Metal rusted. Grime gathered.

‘Filthy, filthy animals,’ Anrakyr cursed. He strode back into the sunlight, skirts of chain-linked metal rustling about his legs.

Rubble shifted beneath his feet as he emerged into the bright light. Already, curious necron warriors, led by dull glimmers of guiding instinct, were pulling themselves into the buildings. Static blurted from between their clenched jaws.

Standing outside were the three triarch praetorians who followed the Traveller.

‘Space Marines,’ said Khatlan.

Dovetlan added, ‘There are human Space Marines active on this world.’

‘How did you come by this information?’ asked Anrakyr.

They provided no answer. They stood, smug and silent. ‘Odious constructs,’ he hissed. Again they offered no response. Spies of the Silent King posing as his emissaries to the Pyrrhian overlord, they assured Anrakyr that they served the glory of the necron race. Perhaps that was true. But where did they judge that glory to lie?

A renewed bout of screaming came from behind Anrakyr as he set foot upon the concourse again. Warriors were striding into the hole after him.

Vehicles burned all around him, casting deep palls of smoke into the bright blue sky. Necron warrior phalanxes and hovering destroyers faced something through the smoke. They waited, filled with the patience of the grave.

Cylindrical objects fell on parabolic arcs into the necron mass, and bounced off warrior chassis, unnoticed. Anrakyr was already running, casting orders for the warriors to disperse and spread out their forces. It was too late. The warriors, dull-witted, lobotomised by the c’tan’s bargain, began to react, but too slowly.

Fire and shrapnel erupted, tearing through milling warriors, breaking sentient necron commanders into shards of spinning metal. More of the objects exploded. More necron warriors fell.

Bullets came tearing out of the smoke, smashing into struggling necrons. Gauss rifles responded, firing into the veil of darkness. A brace of night shrouds roared overhead, setting the smoke to roiling, dropping death spheres down onto whatever lurked beyond Anrakyr’s vision. The anti-matter laden munitions consumed the smoke, annihilating the carbon particles and tearing through reality.

The Traveller pumped his warscythe into the air, signalling the advance for his scattered and reeling forces. Implacable as the tide, the phalanxes reformed and marched forward.

Grotesquely armoured meat-creatures, the human elite, came sprinting through the smoke and rubble.

‘Space Marines,’ Anrakyr cursed. The triarch praetorians had been right.

They cannoned into the necron line, weaponry buzzing and screaming. A spearhead had barrelled through his phalanxes, driving a wedge into the advancing necrons. Explosives tore struggling warriors apart. Humming swords carved through the necron bodies in showers of sparks.

A knot of giant necron immortals, prized soldiers in Anrakyr’s army, the remnants of lost Pyrrhia, met the human wedge. They anchored Anrakyr’s line, blunting the assault on his phalanxes. Their gauss blasters punched through the armour, tearing into the flesh beneath. Humans faltered and fell, torn into steaming pieces by the disciplined fire of the immortals. One of the hulking warriors toted a tesla carbine. Lightning cascaded from the weapon, tearing through multiple bodies.

A flight of Space Marines dropped from the sky, fire ripping from their backpacks. Axes hammered at the immortals, punching through their chassis and breaking their metal bones.

Anrakyr waded towards their position, knowing that if the immortals were defeated then his warriors would be hard pressed to achieve victory here. Frustration flowed through the Traveller. His warscythe rose and fell with economical movements, cracking through the green armoured shell of the animals. Before he could reach the immortals, the human leader showed itself. It was coated in ornate armour, wrought in green and gold. The motif of a skull and star was repeated across the plates.

Organic gibbering emerged from the animal’s throat, a screed of imprecations and unintelligible words, far deviated from the corrupt ‘Gothic’ that the animals usually spoke. Its intent was clear, however. Calm descended around the two as necron warrior protocols ensured that their leader was given a wide berth.

Bright eyes twinkled in a ruddy face. The animal smiled and then raised its sword in some sort of salute.

Anrakyr ignored it, merely standing still and silent. He was above the petty motivations of these beings. The animal’s sword snaked in while the weapon it held in its other hand spat crude ammunition at the overlord.

Economical swings of his warscythe deflected the shells, driving them off with a high, sharp pinging noise.

The animal proved difficult to kill. For hours they fought, beneath the gentle blue sky of Kehlrantyr. For hours they fought, the centre of a melee that swirled around them. Anrakyr was fuelled by frustration, angered at the momentary denial of his destiny. He had come to Kehlrantyr expecting to find a tomb world to draw into his sphere of influence. Instead he had found an infestation of humans. He exorcised that frustration and anger on the animal.

To give it credit, it battled on long after it should have fallen. Blood dripped from between the plates of its dark green armour. Sparks showered from torn cabling.

Anrakyr was implacable, an elemental force. Dents and nicks marked his chassis where the creature had struck him, but they were few.

‘Surrender,’ Anrakyr demanded. ‘Submit to order.’

The animal snorted a laugh. Its twitching features, hidden beneath sweat, blood and its armour of green and gold, jabbered in its organic tongue. It was slowing, strength ebbing with every movement.

Anrakyr grew tired of the animal. As it heaved in great breaths, the overlord shoved his warscythe through its abdomen, driving deep into its spine. He lifted the human, met its dying eyes with his deathless gaze.

‘Filth,’ he muttered. He threw the animal away, casting it to lie broken against the ground. Crypteks scurried after it, driven by curiosity to examine its physiology. With its death, human resistance on Kehlrantyr crumbled.

It awoke to utter darkness. It tried to take a breath that would not come, that brought no oxygen, no relief; a juddering breath that existed only as a soundbite, a piece of manufactured noise.

Panic. Its mind clawed at the emotion. A consciousness stirred and coalesced around a physical form.

Its fists were raised, beating at the sarcophagus that kept it bound, kept it trapped. Obsidian walls enclosed it. No escape. No movement. Cables snaked from the walls towards its body, disappearing into interface ports, driving along its limbs and into the limits of its spine. It was omnipresent, its consciousness undifferentiated between sarcophagus, cable and skeletal body. It saw through the body’s sensors, disoriented by seeing as the sarcophagus, the body and, in some remote sense, the circuits of the tomb world.

It felt the miles and miles of cables and crystalline lattices that stretched through the depths of Kehlrantyr. It was dimly aware of the cousins that walked upon its world above and the dwindling infestation of life that stained its surface.

It saw, in a blink, half glimpsed and little remembered, sixty million cycles of unchanging constancy. Sixty million cycles of unbroken silence and infrequent change.

Then the view was gone, battered into its subconscious. Events became localised, drawn through the cables snaking into the metal of its body.

Fog and smoke whirled around it, drifting through its vision. Green lights blinked. Indicators chirped and demanded attention. Its mouth opened in a silent scream. It writhed, trying to stretch, trying to break open its prison of metal and stone.

Slowly its identity returned, dripping through the feeds that connected it. A name. An existence. A life. A person. Valnyr. Memories joined the name. Identity flowed through her limbs, brought the panic away. Female. It was a she, a female, when such biological distinctions had mattered, during the Time of Flesh, before biotransference. When her race had strode the stars with bodies of meat and bone, before they had been deceived by Mephet’ran, the Messenger, the golden-tongued star god.

A laugh, a shrieking mad cackle, left her, vocalised in the synthetic sound that served her as a voice. The sound reeked of unknowable hunger, of desperation and fear.

Breath. Oxygen. Valnyr was beyond such needs, had been past such requirements for uncounted millennia. She would have smiled, were the skull that served her as features to allow such a gesture.

The panic bled away, the momentary distractions of awakening. Half-remembered preparations and theoretical constructions mumbled in some part of her consciousness.

Trepidation. Concern. These emotions cascaded through her limbs, setting her skull ablaze. The lack of clear memory set her to panic in a way the lack of breath could never equal. The fear of death, the erosion of identity: was this how it began?

Valnyr shuddered. That fear ran through every choice her race had made, the terror of mortality, the grasping jealousy of the overlooked and the passed over. It had led them, in their pride, to war with the old races. It had led them to the abandonment of their very lives.

Twinned emotions had driven her to this place and to this moment: vengeance and the fear of death. The latter, though perhaps not as easily admitted by the proud, was more influential than the former. Frailty and mortality. Easily deceived by the promises of the accursed star gods, these things had driven her entire race into the arms of hubris and made them easy prey to the blandishments of false, vampiric gods. In the end, it had broken their glory. Bereft of the vigour of the living races, Valnyr’s kin had stagnated.

Valnyr mused on what had brought her here, considered the paths her life had taken. Vague memories of mortality, the hint of an identity she no longer coveted, haunted her.

Her sarcophagus shook. Momentum and rushing wind battered the ancient box. Light burned through as the wall facing her became translucent. Quartz-eaten caverns flashed past, marked with lurid green. Metal spread along the caverns, adorning the stone like mould.

Indicators flashed from red to green. A chime beeped. She cancelled it with a thought, banishing the noise. Gravity shifted. Her weight settled on her skeletal feet. Steam whistled and, with subtle pops, the lid to her prison disengaged. Air wafted in, the lifeless sterile atmosphere of the tomb world of Kehlrantyr, tinged with the dust of uncounted ages, utterly empty and devoid of movement. Perfect.

Valnyr, High Cryptek to the Kehlrantyr Dynasts, stepped from the sarcophagus and onto the obsidian floor. She resisted the urge to stretch. Valnyr had gone to the Great Sleep in glory, in a chamber rich with carvings and light. She awoke from that sleep in the same chamber. She emerged from her sarcophagus into ruins.

The walls were broken, caved in by seismic shifting. Neglect, nearly tangible on the still air, ate into everything. Tarnished metal shot through the cold, lifeless rock.

She looked down, her hands outstretched. Her chassis had taken on the form of a skeleton, bones formed from subtly rippling living metal. A strange drift from how she had looked prior to the Great Sleep.

She exhaled, steam vapour leaking from between her clenched jaws. Cracks ran through the chamber, fissures driving deep where unmarred obsidian had once echoed. Quartz crystals sprouted from the fissures, glowing slightly against the darkness. Swooping curves and crossed lines glowed green in the gloom, marking ancient devotions to the c’tan. Name runes whispered prayers, titles and devotions that the necrons had broken and betrayed. Her eyes focused on the symbol of the Void Dragon, the being to whom Valnyr had once bowed.

‘Never again,’ she vocalised. The words hung in the still air, the sound vibrations nearly visible to the vision granted by her metal chassis. Some unknown emotion gnawed at the pit of her being.

Floating on anti-gravitic suspensor fields, an attendant canoptek spyder hovered into Valnyr’s field of vision. Its head, a blocky thing coated with gently blinking lenses, cocked to one side. Curiosity engrams, pre-programmed aeons ago, drove the construct. Sensors winked and scrutinised. Probes extended, tasting the air, examining the electromagnetic fields her skeletal body generated.

She needed to awaken the Dynasts, the overlord and her kin. That was her function. That was her task.

Valnyr started to move, but sensation fired along her neural links. Her mouth cracked open, but no sound emerged. She doubled over, her knees crashing into the stone. Seizures laced through her, jerking her body in random motions. She could hear a buzzing, low and deep.

The sensation passed. Something whispered at the back of her mind. With the moment’s passing, more panic lanced through her. She despised the lack of control, feared any erosion of her authority. Anxiety kicked into life, driving along the synaptic cables that laced through her body. Sensation dimmed. Her eyesight grew dark as the panicked emotion drove away her senses.

In the wake of the fit, a new question emerged.

The Great Sleep had clearly ended, but what had prompted her awakening now? Vague memories of necrons striding across Kehlrantyr came to mind, but there was no time stamp associated with them.

The same unknown feeling flashed through her, bright and malignant. She doubled over, clutching at the unmoving canoptek spyder with fingers of living metal. Her vision blacked out completely. Valnyr lost all control over her motive functions. The canoptek machine compensated, its only reaction a rotation of its head, slow and deliberate.

Sensors stabbed from where its jaws would be. She staggered back. Static emerged from between her jaws, static and panic. Her mind fuzzed, overwhelmed. She felt hunger. Scrabbling, horror mounting, Valnyr surged back to her feet. She could hear a faint buzzing noise.

‘No!’ Valnyr commanded.

Denied its ability to test, to assure purity, the machine drifted away and awaited further orders, looking somehow chastised. Granted a degree of autonomy not usually seen among the constructs of the necrons, the canoptek spyders were responsible for the maintenance of the necrons in their sleeping state. Granted incredibly resilient and robust processors, they had even mimicked independent intelligence.

She appreciated the efforts of the machine in the same way that a person would appreciate an unthinking tool. If there were issues with her awakening, Valnyr would rather test them herself than rely upon the canoptek spyder’s probing senses. Corrections could be made without the constructs’ in-built programs accidentally detecting anomalies and prescribing eradication as the only possible solution. Worry gnawed at her, but she reasoned away the malignant fit as a side effect of the awakening process.

Doors of polished obsidian cracked open. Valnyr left her chamber, canoptek spyder following on her heels, and strode off into the silent tomb world. She entered into a far vaster chamber than the one she had awoken in. On obsidian walls, resplendent in unbroken glory, carved and shaped by the whims of her long-dead people, phalanxes of Kehlrantyr’s most fabled heroes marched.

The skeletal shapes of necrons warred with the lithe alien eldar. Stylised and wrapped in stygian shadows, the carvings were a thing of wonder. Evidence of the pride of Kehlrantyr, its legions of fierce warriors marched across the walls, bound for the glorious wars that served as her history.

Bulwark of the War in Heaven, defender of the dead and doom of the living. This was the reputation Kehlrantyr had earned in ages past. The walls were pristine, kept serviced by scuttling scarabs. They betrayed little of the entropy that had greeted her in her awakening chambers. But the silence was a melancholy thing, thick and turgid in the air. It spoke of ages lost, of time slipped by unremembered and unmourned. The Great Sleep smothered Kehlrantyr.

She stopped in a vast, circular room. Warrior friezes, twelve in all, stared out from the walls. Valnyr walked towards one of the figures and rested her hand on the cheek of the warrior’s skull.

‘Shaudukar,’ she whispered. The name helped dispel the disquiet she felt, driving it to the back of her mind. Then she stepped back, moving towards the centre. The canoptek spyder merely hovered, waiting, probes extended.

An infrasonic buzzing vibrated her metal bones, emanating from the circuitry that laced the walls. Cracks sounded and vapour shot from new fissures. This was no sudden onset of the passage of eons, however. Valnyr adopted the pose of restful relaxation and waited.

Sections of the walls, each marked by a single stylised warrior, pulled away from the rest of the obsidian panels and floated. Slots opened in the floor and the blocks ground into the depths of Kehlrantyr. Vapour hissed with greater intensity. Cruciform shapes resolved from the white steam, and caskets, similar to the one she had recently stepped from, were carved with the images of those who slumbered within.

Her left hand indicated a smile, while her right began the pose of greeting.

Shaudukar’s, fittingly, was the first casket to open. The lychguard was her friend from the time before biotransference. Armoured in thick plates of metal, spine overarched to shelter her head, Shaudukar was a fearsome sight.

Poblaaur’s casket opened next, followed by ten more, until her lychguard surrounded her. They hung, crucified in the sleep of eons. Cables and circuits were attached all over their bodies, snaking through their metal bones. Green lights flickered around them, shining through the steam. The canoptek spyder behind her chattered and broadcast the frequency of awakening.

The bodies jerked in their cradles.

Valnyr awaited their resurrection with excitement. She looked forward to the reunion, eager to hear the voices and thoughts of her guard. Their bonds had been forged in the turbulent days of war against the treacherous and hateful eldar. Those bonds had only been strengthened by conversion as loyalty engrams had rewritten portions of the lychguards’ personality to ensure devotion beyond even that which they had exhibited in their mortality. These lychguard were Valnyr’s wardens, gifts from the Dynasts.

The green lights gave way to arcs of corposant that juddered between the limbs and along the spines of the lychguard.

Emerald balefires flashed in Shaudukar’s eyes, winking with intelligence programs being brought back online. She awoke, the first to do so. Shaudukar, oldest and truest friend of the cryptek called Valnyr. Shaudukar, leader of her lychguard. She fell from the casket. The others followed, some crunching to their knees. Shaudukar’s fist crashed to her chest plate in the old salute. The others echoed her scant seconds later, except for Poblaaur.

Shaudukar said nothing as her sentience resumed control of her body, as she shrugged off the Great Sleep. She reached for her weapons from behind her casket, arming herself with her warscythe and shield. No nonsense and no fuss, as she had been in life. Valnyr felt relief to see her unchanged by sixty million years of dormancy.

Poblaaur kept his eyes dim, facing towards the wall.

‘My mistress,’ Shaudukar said. She stared at her hands.

Valnyr approached her, standing nearly uncomfortably close. For the status-obsessed necrons, where distance often indicated hierarchy and respect, it was an expression of great affection.

‘Shaudukar,’ Valnyr whispered the name. ‘I am glad you are awake.’

The lychguard leader inclined her head. ‘I am too. Is there a reason for our awakening?’

‘No. Not so far as I can tell, at any rate.’

Shaudukar nodded. ‘Your orders?’ She never removed her gaze from her hands. Her fingers continued to flex. ‘Do these… Do my fingers seem longer?’

Valnyr’s head cocked to the side. Her right hand adopted the position signifying confusion.

‘We do as the programs dictate. We awaken the Dynast and her kin.’

This was her sacred duty, her charge and purpose. While the lesser, mindless creatures of Kehlrantyr awoke, it was her duty to ensure the Dynast had weathered the ages and awoke in comfort, attended by a cryptek of her calibre.

The other lychguard waited in patient silence.

Poblaaur’s mouth clacked open, drawing Valnyr’s attention. Then he began to scream, the noise screeching and static-laced. The lychguard collapsed, clattering into a pile of awkwardly laid bones. He placed his hands beneath his shoulders and began to rock back and forth. Crackles sounded from his metal bones. Spikes erupted all along Poblaaur’s body, along with hooks and wicked edges. He juddered along the floor, sending cracks crazing through the obsidian with mindless blows.

The infrasonic buzzing increased in pitch.

Valnyr retreated, hands held out in warding. Her other lychguard placed themselves between her and Poblaaur. Their loyalty engrams ensured that they would defend their cryptek even when doing so contravened their natural instinct of self-preservation.

The light in Poblaaur’s eyes twitched. He stopped shuddering. His hands had lengthened into talons. Erratic madness betrayed his every motion. The intelligence that should have governed his movements, made them economical and precise, was nowhere to be seen. He stood. Static spilled from his mouth, pulsing in time with the buzzing. His fingers flexed.

Disgust and panic warred in Valnyr’s mind. She recognised the signs, believed she knew the affliction clawing through Poblaaur’s soul.

‘What is happening?’ demanded one of the lychguard.

‘The flayer curse,’ Valnyr whispered, her voice filled with horror.

What had begun as the merest whisper of calamity was now confirmed before her eyes. The flayer virus. A curse from a broken and vengeful god.

‘How did it come to Kehlrantyr?’ asked the lychguard, Othekh.

Valnyr answered, ‘The refugees.’ Her mind was distracted, latching onto the implications and the possibilities. ‘To survive so much and to lose it all, to preside over… and then to lose it all to the witless afflictions and hunger of an ancient curse.’

She was muttering, the words emerging thick and fast. They flew, along with her thoughts, racing down paths that she had no desire to consider. The implications flashed through her mind. How deep did the taint run? How far had the words of accursed Llandu’gor reached?

The thought was horrifying. The sudden loss of identity, personality and memory flooded beneath the inescapable and inevitable hunger for flesh and blood. The desire, the need, to profane the body with the fluids and fibre of organic life. That was what the rumours had said, brought by distant necrons fleeing such existential horror on their own tomb worlds.

Some amongst the Khelrantyri had argued for the immediate destruction of such brothers and sisters, that they carried the flayer virus like an unwitting plague host. Cooler heads had prevailed. Sympathy, and a form of patronising dynastic arrogance, had ruled and the Dynasts allowed the unfortunates to strike the sigils of their original tomb worlds from their chassis and to anoint themselves with the glory of Kehlrantyr.

But perhaps that had been wrong. Perhaps they had been blinded by their sympathy. In the eons while they slept, when personality codes had been duplicated by necron artifice and back-up systems, the infection might have spread, leached into the core processes of the tomb world. Even now, the legions that faced awakening might be irretrievably afflicted by the flayer virus.

Horror such as Valnyr had rarely known flowed along her nerve-bundles. Personality fail-safes, designed to prevent the erosion of her mind by strong emotion, enacted themselves and calm slipped into her limbs, even as Poblaaur screamed his transformation before her eyes.

The necrons watched, unable to move, unable to act.

The canoptek spyder barrelled into the flayer-touched lychguard, knocking the still-screaming necron to the ground.

But the contact was enough. The green lights running along the tomb spyder flared, then dimmed. The construct spasmed. Spikes erupted from its back and the thing blurted out static and screams.

Most of the lychguard remained immobile, waiting for their moment to strike, confusion reigning as they assessed threats and friendly targeting prohibitions prevented them from assaulting one of their own. The lychguard were designed to be patient, designed to judge the best moment to strike, but they were also limited by ingrained assurances for loyalty.

Valnyr gripped her scythe and canted activation protocols. Time froze. Poblaaur, locked in a snarling hunched shape, was unable to move. Sound ceased. The buzzing ceased. Valnyr strode forward, feeling as though she were moving through mud.

The energy necessary to stop the passage of time was prodigious, the effort – especially so soon after her awakening – draining. She waded forward, buying each step with a silent grunt of pain. The green lights that played through her circuits dimmed, power drawn away to propel her motive functions against the flow of time.

Supplemental energy flowed from her staff of light, augmenting her power reserves. She approached Poblaaur one stubborn step at a time. Placing herself equidistant between the corrupted lychguard and the tomb spyder, she lowered her staff and fired.

A beam of incandescent fury began the slow crawl out of the head of the staff as the passage of time started to reassert itself.

Reality snapped back. Poblaaur launched himself to his feet while the canoptek spyder continued to spasm and writhe, viral programs rewriting the construct’s processes.

Fire shot from Valnyr’s staff and speared the struggling tomb spyder through the head. Another beam took Poblaaur through the chest as he stumbled to his feet, carving the necron in two.

The lychguard’s torso collapsed, hissing and screaming. Poblaaur clawed his way towards Valnyr, mouth stretched open and teeth sharpened to fangs. Another beam burned away his skull and the room descended into silence.

‘What just happened?’ Shaudukar demanded.

‘The flayer curse.’

‘It is real?’

‘So it would seem.’

‘But how?’

Valnyr had no answer. Around her, screams reverberated from the darkness, similar in pitch and timbre to Poblaaur’s. More necrons were awakening to the dreadful hunger, to the loss of identity and the erosion of all they had been.

Chapter Two

Anrakyr’s army marched through the human settlement, culling the living from the face of the world. A curious destroyer called Armenhorlal hovered near the Traveller and hummed to himself.

The trio of praetorians emerged from the smoke, covenant rods held across their chests. They took up station behind Anrakyr as he paraded through the dying settlement.

As he left the burning, broken concourse behind, Anrakyr toyed idly with a cluster of stones hanging from his neck. Marked with the curving, looping rune-script of the eldar kind, they had been recovered from the snow-coated fields of Carrh-enn-Derac.

Carrh-enn-Derac, the last battlefield he had walked. Carrh-enn-Derac, butchered by the eldar tongue into Carnac in the sixty million cycles the necrons had slept. It was now the site of their latest conflict, another battle in the War in Heaven that still raged. The last tomb world graced by his presence.

Anrakyr could not discern the purpose of the stones, but their ubiquity among the fallen foe, the way the eldar had screamed as he stole them, spoke to their value. At times, as now, the necron overlord believed he could see glimmers in their depths, could catch the faint whisper of torment from within.

Anrakyr had vented his displeasure on the eldar’s world spirit, a rudimentary collection of utility programs and personality repositories that crudely mimicked the majesty of the circuits that cradled a necron tomb world. Such ramshackle attempts at technology were an affront, a reminder of the failures of lesser races. The bruised construct had been given to Trazyn the Infinite in fulfilment of the bargain that had secured the eldar defeat.

Now he came to Kehlrantyr to awaken the tomb world’s fabled legions and welcome them into his growing empire. Hope had flared in his breast, enough to override his distaste at dealing with the worms that were the Kehlrantyr Dynasts. Renowned equally for their flippant arrogance and the limitless numbers of their population, the Kehlrantyri were a necessary evil. Anrakyr found it curious they had yet to awaken, that they had yet to stride forth from their tombs.

The Traveller dropped one of the subtly glowing gems and stabbed it with the edge of his warscythe. He expected to feel something, some emotion or some sense of action. He analysed his responses, examined the tactile sensations of the breaking gem, the change in structure of the stone as it went from whole to shattered, but the metal chassis of his body conveyed no feelings. No emotions welled within him, just empty nothingness: calm, assured, ordered. Only a mild curiosity remained, dissatisfied by the petty experiment. He left the other stones in his hand, dangling from chained wraithbone. He could not see why the eldar invested so much value in the stones, but then, the reasons behind so much of what the living races did escaped him.

Clutching the rest in shining digits, stained by the blood of human animals, Anrakyr tried to ignore the insidious hiss of the organic liquid that dripped down his spine. He clicked together the fingers of his other hand, let the relief at the gesture calm him, let lightning arcs crawl over him and wash away the taint of life, abrading the stain with puffs of burned smoke.

Gravel crunched beneath his feet as he moved through the burning human settlement. Warriors scuttled around him, and the hum of anti-gravitic motors set his skull to vibrating. The metal skirts he wore rustled around his legs.

Movement caught his gaze, drawing the fell fury of the Traveller’s attention. A knot of warriors, their gauss weaponry abandoned, were feasting on the bodies of the slain creatures.

Meat ripped. Blood flashed in the afternoon air. They stuffed flesh down the empty caverns of their mouths. Anrakyr watched, annoyed, angry, as the organic matter dripped down through their chest cavities to flop into the dusty gravel at their feet.

‘Sickness. Accursed,’ Anrakyr said. Disgust flared through him. Without turning, he gestured to the floating destroyer that shadowed him. The flayer-touched had been a constant problem on Kehlrantyr. Normally they followed Anrakyr’s forces in small numbers, cowed by the threat and majesty of the overlord’s presence. Kept confined to their nightmare realm in the aptly named Ghoul Stars, lorded over by the whispered name of Valgûl, the flayed ones were a plague that rarely troubled Anrakyr. Until coming to Kehlrantyr, that was. Something about this tomb world was corrupting his warriors, drawing the flayer curse to rewrite their already damaged souls and psyches.

‘Attend,’ the Traveller ordered. ‘Cull the flayer-touched. Purge those beholden to the dead words of Llandu’gor.’

It was no longer strange to utter the true names of the c’tan. He and his kind had shed that taboo when they broke the c’tan into shards, when they turned gods into servants. Thus they displayed their mastery over the beings to whom they had once owed fealty. Mephet’ran, Llandu’gor, Hsiagn’la. Others existed, lost to the half-forgotten mythologies of the necrons.

The destroyer cackled. His own madness, the nihilism that so gripped his kind, flowed through the laughter. Light crackled along the necron’s spine as it sucked in power, drawing it from the atmosphere in a microscopic siphoning of energy. The heavy barrels of the gauss cannon that was Armenhorlal’s arm flashed blindingly green.

Malignant energy unleashed, chain-whipping into the pack of unwitting flayers and wiping them from existence. Their shadows stretched for a moment, dark against the bright green. The spreading virus of vengeful Llandu’gor manifested more and more among those who walked beneath the Traveller’s banner. All who succumbed would share this fate.

Armenhorlal cooed to himself, a childish sound and a holdover from his mortal existence. Anrakyr knew the destroyer’s mind to have been fractured by some malfunction during his conversion, but it mattered little. For the moment the skimming destroyer was useful. He floated about Anrakyr in looping circles, each flash spinning faster and faster. The overlord shot out a hand.

‘Enough. Cease your motions.’

Anrakyr’s voice cracked into Armenhorlal’s dented head, reaching into the destroyer’s battle-damaged psyche. He slowed to a halt.

‘So many. So many of the damned packs of the accursed. Why? What draws them to this place? These meat-creatures offer little sustenance. Especially not to such as us, who have passed beyond the petty concerns of mortality.’ Anrakyr kicked one of the feebly struggling bodies at his feet, barely noticing as it cried out in unreasoning animal pain. For a moment, Anrakyr thought he could see the cunning gleam of intelligence in the creature’s eyes, some evidence of sentience.

Primitive structures clustered around him, little more than enclosures against the elements. Decorated with bird wing motifs, tiled in grey and black, the buildings were crude. Warriors battered at the walls with single-minded belligerence. More intelligent necrons had sensed lurking humans within and ordered the warriors to deal with them.

That organic beings should so taint Kehlrantyr brought anger to surge through Anrakyr. The jewel of one of the ancient dynasties of his people, populated by savages, reclaimed by the life that had once been extinguished and purged beneath the marching benevolence of the necrons. Life always struggled against order. That was its nature. But just once, Anrakyr wished that he would see organisms submit and accept the gift and honour he brought.

A trio of destroyers flew overhead, followed by flyers. In the distance, a monolith patrolled, its black flanks glistening obsidian-wet in the light of the sun. Phalanxes of lesser warriors, their identities eroded by the epochs since their conversion, marched through the human settlement. They were beneath the pity of Anrakyr and Armenhorlal.

The three triarch praetorians trailed after Anrakyr and the destroyer. They were silent, darkling things, just like their master. They rarely offered commentary or condemnation. They observed. They waited. They served.

Despite the decades they had followed Anrakyr, the trio of necrons had never offered him their names. Anrakyr had first been annoyed by this wilful defiance. Then he had taken to calling them Khatlan, Dovetlan and Ammeg. The names weren’t particularly clever, merely the first three numerals in the necron counting system. The praetorians never questioned his choice. Sometimes they even answered to the names.

The servants of the Silent King had been known to cow even the most recalcitrant phaerons into obedience. That they followed him, that they observed and marched alongside him, filled the necron overlord with trepidation. Why were they here? What did the last ruler of the Necron Empire want with Anrakyr?

That these creatures had refused to submit to the Great Sleep, that they had stridden the stars for sixty million cycles acting on the orders of the Silent King, beggared Anrakyr’s mind. He could have done the same, he reasoned. His will was no less strong. But these triarch praetorians had walked the stars, shaping the mortal races, witnessing events and observing, silent as deathless gods. The evidence of those years lay on them. They were hunched, shamed-looking creatures. The metal of their bodies was tarnished, bronzed edges pitted and shadowed by weapons fire. Yes, they were unimpressive to look at, but what they represented and the havoc they could wreak more than made up for their outlandish and decrepit appearances.

Red-painted human helmets dangled from Ammeg’s elbows. Belonging to one of the warrior caste of that despicable race, the things were crudely constructed but martially impressive. They were broken and pitted, lifted from some battlefield. She too wore eldar spirit-stones, older in provenance than Anrakyr’s looted gems. The tattered robes of some infesting species drifted about her while a fungal reek suffused her metal bones.

All of the triarch praetorians bore some token of the warrior humans. Khatlan’s back was studded with the sickle boxes the humans discarded as they made war. They formed rows of three spines rising from the praetorian’s back and lent the necron the disgusting reek of the propellant the humans used to fire their crude weapons. Other odds and ends from scattered races and cultures coated the triarch praetorian.

Dovetlan had elected to place steel knives in a fan around her face. Stamped and marked by rough human artifice, the weapons were crude and technologically inferior. A winged teardrop of blood decorated each blade.

The praetorians refused to elucidate the circumstances of their acquisition of the human artefacts, nor why they wore the trophies as marks of pride. Each inquiry was met with the same blank stare and infuriating posture as any other. A fruitless endeavour, so Anrakyr could only guess their provenance. When the praetorians spoke, they stated only the obvious.

Humans burst from a side building, led by several of their males. Anrakyr recoiled, annoyed and wary that some of their tainted cells might besmirch his chassis.

Armenhorlal did not have time to spool up his gauss cannon before pinprick lasers ate at his chassis. The destroyer started to giggle, then laugh. Armenhorlal began thrashing, clubbing several of the fleeing humans.

Khatlan and Ammeg stepped into the sky, propelled by their gravity displacement packs. Dovetlan placed herself before Anrakyr while the Traveller watched and observed.

The universe groaned as scything waves of light emerged from the praetorians’ covenant rods. Weeping humans, eyes and mouths wide, desperation spewing from their wretched faces, erupted into clouds of burning ash. Other bodies were dragged out of buildings by unthinking, unfeeling warriors and lined up in rows for incineration. It was endlessly fascinating, Anrakyr mused, that life always followed the same paths. They were fleshy and pink or brown, all colours drawn from the same palette. Some were tall. Others were short. Female and male. But they all followed the same template.

Two legs. Two arms. One head. How unbelievably common. The universe tried to impose order, from the eldar to the necrontyr to these human dregs. Two by two. A curious coincidence or evidence of some great plan? That it all led to entropy and disruption, to chaos, was an eternal shame. Only the necrons had refused such predestination, electing to take a different path rather than walk down the road that led to destruction.

Only under the eternal hegemony of the Necron Empire would the universe finally achieve the order and certainty it so obviously craved. Anrakyr bent his eternal life towards that goal, towards uniting his kind beneath his own banner and conquering all the lesser races.

Khatlan and Ammeg fell back to the ground, crunching into the poured stone. They resumed their place behind Anrakyr as he walked through the human settlement, stalking behind the overlord with silent threat.

Armenhorlal trailed behind them with scattered fires burning about his body. The destroyer crooned to himself.

They waded through piles of ash while fuel bowsers exploded and necron warriors systematically dismantled the signs of human habitation.

The gentle breeze, swaying trees, even the soft light of the sun angered Anrakyr, brought a rage deep to what he considered his soul. It all stank of life, of a time that he wished he could forget. Bodies were gathered and fed to waiting canoptek spyders. Bound for the monoliths and the pyres burning within, the traces of organic life were slowly being cleansed from Kehlrantyr.

The sun that glowed above, driving through the turquoise depths of a cloudless sky, was a pale thing, weak and dying, fed upon by a c’tan in the ages before the Breaking, leeched by the star gods in their desperate hunger before the discovery of the sustenance of souls.

Scourged by the necrons who called this place home, life had crept back, perhaps borne on the stellar winds, perhaps brought by some far-reaching traveller as vermin.

Kehlrantyr had not suffered the eons well.

Change brought anger. Death was an unceasing thing, a constant, and a known quantity. And there was nothing that brought pleasure to Anrakyr like that which was known, that which remained unchanging.

Metal crunched on stone gravel, the footsteps furtive. A cyclopean eye met Anrakyr’s fell gaze. A cryptek. It chattered, its body hunched in a posture that screamed excitement. It wrung its hands together, digits flashing in complex formations that conveyed the emotions that its skull-like visage never would.

Excitement. Relief. Obeisance.

Anrakyr waved the cryptek into stillness. ‘Your news?’

‘We have aligned the maps and the portents, my lord. The approximate entrance location has been found.’

‘Then where are my legions? Where are the phalanxes of this world?’

Profound regret. Unwelcome news. ‘It seems a mountain range has arisen during the Great Sleep. The doors are buried.’

Anrakyr took the news well, surprisingly so.

‘Open the doors. Dig them out. I will have my legions.’

Gratitude. Alacrity. ‘Of course.’

The cryptek left, scurrying away.

Pressure pushed down from above as a shadow passed over Kehlrantyr’s fitful sun. Atmospheric displacement caused the wind to howl. Anrakyr could hear a faint buzzing noise. He turned to the triarch praetorians in confusion. They merely stared back.

A ripple passed through his warriors. They all stiffened. Questions passed between the necrons that still possessed intelligence.

Deathmarks stepped from hidden pocket dimensions. Consummate spies and patient assassins, they were odious creatures, underhanded constructs whose methods were distasteful. They had their uses, however, and Anrakyr permitted their presence within his army, unlike the accursed flayers whose virus was known to spread to others. Still, the overlord flinched at their sudden appearance.

One of their number pointed above. Anrakyr looked up to see a sky pierced with swarming bone and red. From horizon to horizon descended hordes of insectile alien things.

He knew them, knew the creatures that came to feast on Kehlrantyr. Anrakyr wanted to spit curses. His body subconsciously adopted a pose of extreme anger with the subtle inflection of utter disappointment.

Known to the mortal races as the tyranids, he had fought the creatures on several occasions, each nearly disastrous. Their sheer numbers proved a vexing irritation that overwhelmed his mindless hordes. That they dogged him on Kehlrantyr, that they dared to disturb his plans, was unconscionable.

The tyranids were a threat to the necrons. They were life unfettered, anarchic, predictable only in their insatiable hunger. Their consumption of the lesser races proved problematic in the establishment of necron dynastic rule and the eventual goal of the imposition of lifeless order against a galaxy teeming with Chaos.

And now they were here, on Kehlrantyr.

Even as he watched, streaks broke through the sky, flaring with friction fire. Bio-ships, massive organisms, dropped into low orbit.

Already necrons were reacting.

Green lightning started lancing from the drifting monoliths, but there were too many descending objects to knock from the sky. The warrior phalanxes did not react at all. They slouched where they stood, unheeding, oblivious to the tyranids that filled the skies.

Chapter Three

Jatiel was not an introspective man. Stolid, dependable, reliable, he was a sergeant in the Blood Angels Second Company. Proud of the red and gold he wore and the position he occupied, he had earned the rank some hundred years previously, fighting against the orks on Lared VII. He would hold the position until his death, never destined to rise higher.

Beatific cherubs stared down at the gathered Space Marines, watching over the bridge of the frigate Golden Promise. The entire room was a work of art, painstakingly crafted by generations of Blood Angels. Not all of the darkness in the souls of Sanguinius’s sons could be brought to light upon the battlefield, and so the making of art was encouraged. Jatiel himself had carved the throne on which he now sat, taking rad-blasted wood from Baal and creating an artefact surpassing the work of any mortal craftsman. Gilded in red-gold, hand-painted, it dominated the bridge. As he reclined, alabaster angel wings framed his head.

The alabaster had been mined from the deep crust of Baal Prime. When Jatiel leaned back as he did now, if he wore his helmet, the sight echoed the sigil that all Blood Angels and their serfs wore upon their shoulders and worked into every aspect of their armour: the winged teardrop of their beloved primarch.

Pretentious, but no less so than his position demanded. All of his warriors’ armour was marked by the winged teardrop, with details picked out in gold. They were encouraged in this, to modify their battleplate with approval from the Chapter’s forgemasters.

Only Emudor’s armour was mostly devoid of ostentation and grandeur. His artistry was subtler. Filigreed loops and whorls were carved into the curved plates, creating a trail of shadows that lessened his profile, broke it up and added to his talent for stealth. It suited his temperament; he was a brooding, dark and gently sarcastic soul.

Jatiel’s soul, as the saying went, was sanguine. He was fine with this, content to live and serve his primarch and the Emperor in this position. The sergeant knew that he lacked the inspirational quality and the glory that some of his brothers hungered for, that others from the Chapter looked down on him and his squad. The thought brought a fang-bared smile to his craggy, careworn face. He had no desire to rise further. He served where he excelled, at the squad level.

That didn’t make his current duty any less onerous.

‘When have so many enemies fallen upon a single system like this?’ he asked, gazing out through the oculus. The question was rhetorical, Jatiel barely conscious of asking it. He received an answer nonetheless. Ventara, studious, curious, bright and quick, provided it.

The battle-brother’s eyes shone green, bright as the emeralds that studded his chestplate. ‘Armageddon.’

‘No.’ This from Asaliah, grizzled, older even than Jatiel. ‘You’re wrong, lad. Armageddon was bad, mark me. I won’t denigrate the warriors who fought and bled for that world, who do so still. But not near such as this.’

Asaliah spoke from experience. Along with the red and gold of his armour, black and silver also served. The skull, crossbones and stylised ‘I’ of the Deathwatch proudly glared from his left shoulder pad. The veteran had served two terms with the alien hunters, sworn never to speak in specifics of his time with the Ordo Xenos. But the experiences he had gained, the horrors he must have seen, were etched into his face. Every gesture of his hooded eyes evoked far-off sights, glories and darkness. He served as Jatiel’s right hand, a pillar of knowledge and experience.

The veteran scratched the dusky beard scrawling across his lower face, diving through the peaks and valleys of scars and wrinkles left by a lifetime of war and secrets in service to hidden masters. ‘Say what you like about the damn orks. They bring numbers. Always have and always will. But a hive fleet.’ Asaliah nearly shuddered. ‘That’s numbers beyond counting, beyond even beginning to count.’

Jatiel thanked the winged primarch that Asaliah had never lost himself to the melancholia that so often afflicted the returned veterans of the Deathwatch. Indeed, many lost themselves to the Black Rage before they could impart their valuable experience and knowledge to the Chapter they returned to.

Asaliah’s deep rumble ceased, the bass tones of his words echoing through the bridge. Silence descended over the room, taking malignant station in creased frowns and worried glances. It lived among the carved cherubs staring down with painted glass eyes.

The hiss and crackle of vox-access disturbed, yet did nothing to dispel the silence. The slack-jawed servitor mumbles of lingua-technis joined it.

War had come to the Cryptus System, war such as the Imperium had rarely known. Doom, blood and bile. Crawling horror. And Jatiel was missing it.

Somewhere out there, the Imperial Navy were fighting to hold back a swarm of hive ships, and the soldiers of the Astra Militarum prepared to face the onslaught on the ground when the fleet inevitably failed. Soon, the Blood Angels would arrive and lend their aid, determined to stop the aliens here before they could strip the system bare and move on, threatening Baal itself.

But Jatiel? His squad and the Golden Promise had been sent ahead of Lord Dante’s forces to monitor the battle and watch over the dead world of Perdita. It wasn’t for Jatiel to ask why. The Space Marine knew his duty. But the order chafed.

Jatiel’s attention drifted down to the planet gently rotating below. Perdita was worthless, broken by calamity, or spawned stillborn in the system’s formation.

Ventara broke the silence again. ‘Why are we guarding this virus-bombed waste?’ Another question lurked beneath. Jatiel knew it well enough, because he kept asking it himself. Why weren’t they fighting alongside their brothers? Why weren’t they taking the Golden Promise and joining the line?

‘Trust in the Chapter Master,’ Asaliah answered. Steel lurked in the veteran’s voice.

Ventara wasn’t willing to let it lie. ‘Who even bothered to virus bomb Perdita in the first place?’

Another of the squad, newly joined Cassuen, asked, ‘Do you think this was one of the battlefields of the Great Heresy?’

‘It’s too old,’ said Ventara simply. ‘Think millions of years, boy, not thousands.’

Cassuen’s smile dipped. ‘The eldar breeds, then?’

‘Perhaps, but I’ve never known them to scour a world like this,’ Jatiel said. These ethereal, blasphemous creatures rarely lowered themselves with such systematic destruction. Their methods tended far more to hit and run attacks or piratical squabblings.

Blocks of xenos material floated by, obscuring their view of the distant fleet. Circling one another in slow, complex orbits, the weaving constructs seemed at times almost to spell out runes, and at others to take on intricate polygonal shapes. Massive constructions of carved xenos bone, they appeared, at first, to belong to known eldar materials. However, these curious stones, stones that the Inquisition had taken a great deal of interest in, were engraved in some other alien runic script.

Silence descended again. The squad sat on the command deck with weapons drawn. Jatiel cradled his mace across his knees, the ornate golden head resting gently on the carved splendour of his command throne.

An air of stymied impotence and impatience suffused the deck. The serfs scurried with downcast faces.

Shadows danced at the edge of Jatiel’s vision, shadows from another age. His fangs bared and he felt the ghost of pain dance through his limbs.

‘No,’ he muttered. ‘Not now.’

Naskos Ventara offered his sergeant a concerned glance. ‘Sergeant?’

‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’ The sergeant pointed back to the viewscreen. ‘Watch.’

The ship’s astropath, Amanther Kidrun – a woman who had been muttering for weeks, wracked with visions of chittering horror and sentient darkness – started to scream. Her shrill cries echoed around the bridge.

Kidrun descended into a seizure, heels drumming against the gilded deck, boots carving scuffs into the murals that featured there. ‘The Great Devourer!’ she cried. ‘The swarms, the ungodly swarms. They descend upon us. They will consume us!’

Alarm spread through the serfs as morale plummeted. Jatiel could feel the fear leach from them all, could smell the foetid animal reek of terror taking root in the souls of his crew. He surged to his feet. A storm cloud passed over his craggy features, drawing his grey brows down over his blue eyes.

‘Enough!’

Asaliah and Emudor dragged the struggling woman from the bridge. They returned moments later and resumed their seats. All eyes returned to the screens.

Swarms of colour arrived at the edge of the map, soon blotting the entire screen like bruised fruit. Grim looks stole over the Space Marines’ faces.

‘Holy Throne,’ someone murmured. It became a litany, over and over, descending into madness. Then screaming.

Jatiel’s armoured fist thundered into the arm of his command chair, sending a crack shivering through the wood. The serfs jumped, but no one looked chastened or chagrined. The sergeant realised the oath had come through the vox, the echo stealing from some Navy captain or officer.

‘Shut off that noise,’ the sergeant ordered.

‘Compliance.’

The waiting was the worst. The trillions of men and women who called Cryptus home would be waiting on their home worlds, each having to shoulder weapons to defend their way of life. Ranks of Astra Militarum would bolster their lines, serving as the core of the defence. They faced untold trillions of tyranid organisms, each designed for death and consumption.

His teeth gritted with duty. Perdita offered no sustenance to the xenos and was likely to be overlooked. Frustration thundered through Jatiel’s veins. But he had his orders, so the Golden Promise continued to orbit Perdita. Swarms of the xenos passed the world, streaming towards the heavily populated core worlds.

Frustration and fear drifted through the bridge. The Golden Promise’s shipmaster, a rad-scarred, formidable Baalite woman by the name of Dabria Korbel, flinched at each flash of light, as each ship died. She stood before Jatiel, clad in the red, black and gold uniform of a Chapter-serf.

‘The swarms are too close for my liking, my lord,’ she spat.

They were not close enough for Jatiel, but he nodded. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it.’

Emudor said, ‘We can move to the other side of the planet.’

‘With respect, lord,’ Korbel said, ‘we can’t. They’ll see our engine flare. And to make matters worse, auspex shows them just as thick coming around the other side.’

‘We hold to Lord Dante’s plan,’ said Jatiel. ‘We wait in orbit and…’

Well, he wasn’t sure of the ‘and’. The Chapter Master had merely said to hold Perdita. Quite how Jatiel was supposed to do that, he wasn’t aware.

Asaliah heard the hesitation. ‘We hold the world or we die in glory.’

‘Simple,’ said Ventara.

‘But it will not come to that,’ predicted Emudor. ‘We present no real threat to the tyranids and Perdita holds nothing of interest to them. Until our brothers arrive, we will remain in orbit around the dead world.’

A uniformed serf approached Shipmaster Korbel with a data-slate. The movement attracted Jatiel’s eyes, but the sergeant ignored the pair. It was a scene that repeated often on the Golden Promise.

The humans conferred for two minutes before the serf rushed back to his station. Korbel approached Jatiel’s throne. Her eyes were wide, eyebrows arched. Wrinkles stood out on her forehead, pushing up at the black and grey hair. Concern was writ large on her face.

She gave the data-slate to the sergeant, retreated five paces and crossed her arms. Her booted foot tapped at the deck-mesh.

‘What is this?’ he asked, glancing at the data scrolling across the slate. He knew the answer, but he wanted to hear the shipmaster’s appraisal.

‘Inbound ship signatures, my lord.’

One of his eyebrows arched. ‘Xenos?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Size and signature point to human origins.’

‘And they’re on an approach vector to Perdita?’

‘Their current speed and direction indicates so, my lord.’

The other members of the squad clustered around the shipmaster. The buzz of active power armour filled the bridge.

‘Any indication of who they are, sergeant?’ Ventara asked.

The sergeant looked to the shipmaster. ‘Nothing yet, my lords,’ she said. ‘We have attempted to hail the ships. No response.’

‘But why head to us? Who even knew we were here?’ asked Ventara.

Jatiel ignored the speculation that ensued. He preferred to deal with facts. ‘How long until they intercept us?’

‘Twenty-four hours, my lord.’

This was a complication that their mission did not need. The ships, whatever their motive, could draw the tyranids to their position, instigating xenos interest in the dead world.

An idea flashed. ‘Have the approaching vessels made any significant course corrections since their launch?’

Korbel stared at the data-slate, brow furrowed and lips pursed. ‘Three registered, my lord.’

She pointed out the times.

‘And competency of those manoeuvres?’

‘The first indicates standard Imperial Navy competency, perhaps a touch out of place. Their route also indicates that they were bound for one of the front-line planets.’

She frowned. ‘The second reeks of desperation and attention seeking. Engine output also flares and then drops at this point. Something went wrong aboard those vessels.’

Since first registering the course corrections, the data had almost become lost beneath a screed of other orders, information and concerns. Jatiel had not forgotten, but Shipmaster Korbel had been forced to. A frigate did not cease functioning while it tried to evade detection.

While they remained a single ship hidden against the backdrop of a massive world that stealth was made moderately easier. Korbel kept the ship’s systems running at the bare minimum. The engine was cool and the ship’s machine-spirit drugged into a haze by the lack of power.

Frost crept across the doors leading away from the bridge, a testament to the low priority currently granted to life-support systems. Chapter-serfs were confined to quarters and only essential personnel were left to man their stations.

Only the bridge retained a modicum of full function. Stale air and stale breath drifted through the room, masked only slightly by the mingled scents of body odour and incense. Air scrubbers wheezed from behind hidden panels, barely coping with the stagnant atmosphere.

A communications officer began yelling, drawing attention to his station. They all believed the moment had arrived that they both dreaded and half hoped for, that the tyranids had caught notice of their ship, drawn against the backdrop of dead Perdita.

The communications officer’s words, seconds later, dispelled concern. Jatiel could hear over a dozen serfs letting slip a sigh of relief.

‘One of the ships has opened a channel. They’re attempting to hail us.’

Korbel looked to Jatiel. The sergeant nodded.

‘Put it through,’ the shipmaster ordered.

Static assaulted their ears, suddenly loud with the background noise of the universe’s birth pangs. Then a voice, hunched and whispered, filled with unremitting fear.

‘Please,’ it whispered. ‘Please.’ Sobbing filled the bridge. ‘Please help. They’ve taken the ship. The convicts…’ Jatiel heard laughter, a deep burbling sound hissed through consumptive teeth. ‘Throne of Terra!’ The feed washed back into static.

A new voice came on, the source of the laughter. ‘Please.’ A man’s voice. He sounded pleading, as desperate as the previous person had been, but Jatiel caught the ripe undercurrent of fear driving through the word. ‘Let us go. We’re leaving this system. We ain’t done nothin’.’

A servitor began to mumble, spouting binaric cant.

Korbel cocked her head to the side, deciphering the lingua-technis, an augmetic ear translating the language of the Adeptus Mechanicus into Gothic.

The colour drained from her face. ‘My lord,’ she began. ‘Multiple targets inbound.’

The convict’s voice and the approaching Imperial vessels were forgotten. A pregnant silence descended on the bridge. Mortals held their breath. An acrid, metallic taste suddenly danced on Jatiel’s tongue. He knew his pupils were dilating, knew it as the lights stabbed into his suddenly hypersensitive vision. Breath heaved in and out from his chest. Adrenaline pounded through his veins. Chemical signifier scents wafted from the Blood Angels. Manic light gleamed in all their eyes.

Cassuen and Emudor both bared their teeth in feral smiles of anticipation. The sergeant could feel his own fangs piercing through his gums, suddenly painful and uncomfortable.

Blood, sacred blood, shared with the primarch Sanguinius, pounded in his ears. His armour’s machine-spirit sensed the rising kill-lust in the sergeant, dampening some less desirable aspects and bringing clarity and thirst to the fore.

His mouth and throat felt dry.

‘Helmets,’ the sergeant growled. It would bring no balm to the mortal serfs to see the thirst painted across their masters’ faces now. The squad complied, shutting the bridge away behind red masks.

The presumed convict’s voice washed away. All vid-screens became occupied by a singular view. The vid-feeds switched to display near space. The feed was no longer on a scale of millions of kilometres, now it was simply thousands. Point blank in void-war terms.

Fleet markers were tagged, although they showed no friendly notifiers. There was just the Golden Promise, held in close orbit to Perdita. The Blood Angels vessel, marked in the red and gold of the Chapter, tried to lose itself against the colossal bulk of the dead world. It should have registered as no more than a mere speck against the drifting snow and ash of Perdita’s landscape.

But with the other human ships drawing closer, somehow having found the Blood Angels vessel, the cluster of life, the heat wash from burning engines, drew the attention of whatever malevolence served the tyranid breed as intelligence. A choice target, canisters of meat and biomatter to fuel the swarm.

Simulated by a marked river against the black of the void, screen overlays brought meaning to the situation. Jatiel ignored the overlays, stepping beyond them, moving to one of the many observation windows that studded the bridge. At first, all he saw were stars against the field of utmost black. But now, just becoming visible at the extremes of his genhanced vision, were pinpricks of light.

They looked to be stars. They were not. The tyranids were now aware of the Golden Promise. And they were coming.

The anxiety aboard the bridge deepened, rancid fear-stink filling the room. Jatiel could not fault them. Despite being serfs in service to one of the most glorious Chapters of the Emperor’s own warriors, they were mortal, after all.

‘With your permission, sergeant?’ Korbel asked.

‘Granted.’

A klaxon broke out wailing.

‘All hands to battle stations,’ Korbel commanded into the ship’s internal communication networks. Jatiel knew that serfs and Chapter slaves were being roused from their bunks, life-support systems increasing by the barest of notches. What had been running on almost uninhabitable was now bolstered to the merely uncomfortable.

Gun batteries opened along the Golden Promise’s flanks. Torpedo tubes in the ship’s armoured prow yawned. Crew began shouting firing solutions, plotting out projected movement patterns and void shield capacities.

‘Fire,’ Korbel whispered. The ship shuddered and torpedoes, loaded as the ship achieved a stable orbit around Perdita, raced forward. Forged on Halfus, half a segmentum away, the torpedoes acted like frag grenades.

Halfus-pattern torpedoes were notoriously effective against tyranid swarms, originally seeing use on Deathwatch vessels. Since that world’s fall to the Tau Empire, the torpedoes were rare and precious things. The Golden Promise only carried four.

All were launched within twenty minutes of detecting the approaching tyranids.

There was no visible change as the torpedoes left visual range. Tags on the overlay watched their course while Adeptus Mechanicus adepts blessed their passage in lingua-technis.

Lance strikes speared out moments later as those weapon systems kicked in. Then the torpedoes detonated, massive bursts of razor-sharp metal that stretched over kilometres of space.

A ragged cheer moved like wildfire through the bridge as the Master of Sensors detected several vessel kills. A drop in the ocean, even against this merest splinter of the hive fleet assailing Cryptus.

More lance strikes stretched into the void, eating millions of kilometres in the blink of an eye.

The winking stars came closer and increased in multitude, Cryptus’s sun shining off the iridescent chitin of the tyranid bio-ships.

‘The other vessels are attempting to hail us again,’ a comms officer said.

‘Deny them,’ Shipmaster Korbel ordered.

Jatiel watched as the convict vessels continued to make for the desperate protection of the Golden Promise.

‘What are they doing?’

Korbel ignored the sergeant, concentrating on the encroaching xenos.

Jatiel could almost see them now. They manifested as a cloud of bright colour against the depthless black of the void.

Mortals kept glancing up from their consoles at the vid-screens. Sweat broke out against pale skin. Fear, nervousness and anxiety once more created a heady stench in the bridge. The carved and gilded cherubs continued to stare down impassively. They had gazed on countless such scenes in countless wars. That they still had a bridge to guard was evidence of the Golden Promise’s resilience.

Void shields shimmered as probing tyranid weapons fire impacted. The Golden Promise shuddered under the kinetic blowback. Point defence cannons streamed their fire into the void as tyranid fighter-analogue organisms, having slipped past the ship’s auspex, ducked through the void shields and attempted strafing runs on the Blood Angels vessel. Jatiel could feel miniscule vibrations through the arms of his throne as the ship shuddered beneath the tyranid onslaught.

‘Shipmaster, my lord,’ a robed serf announced from the sensorium. ‘Sensors detect energy build-up from the xenos structures.’

Jatiel’s mind was awash with tactical inlays. A reprieve or a new threat?

Asaliah gripped his own chair with manic concentration, gauntlets eating grooves into the smooth Baalite marble. He loomed forward, leaning over the table.

‘Brother?’ Jatiel asked.

Asaliah opened and closed a vox-link multiple times. ‘I cannot speak,’ he finally growled. ‘The oath.’

‘It matters little now. We may have to face whatever threat emerges from here in the next few moments. Oath or no, the Inquisition no longer has claim over you, brother. We must seize whatever advantage we can.’

‘Necrons,’ Asaliah spat eventually. ‘It could be the necrons.’

‘What can we expect?’ asked Cassuen.

‘Nothing good,’ came Asaliah’s grim reply.

‘But they allied with us once,’ said Jatiel.

‘Because it suited them,’ Emudor replied. ‘I was there on Gehenna. I fought alongside the xenos, but they did not ally with us out of kindness.’

‘Is there anything to suggest they would do the same here?’ Korbel hissed.

Asaliah shook his head. ‘Not that I can see. These aliens are not like the eldar. We have nothing in common with them.’

‘Then we will prepare for war with them as well,’ Jatiel said. ‘Asaliah, you will advise Shipmaster Korbel of any noteworthy weaknesses and tactics the xenos may try.’

Asaliah laughed. ‘There are few enough of those, but I will do what I can. The aliens are masters of the void. On the ground, they can be countered, but they owned the stars once, if what the Inquisition says is true. They will hammer us with weaponry not fired since before life began on Ancient Terra. Or they will ignore us. But my knowledge is at your disposal, shipmaster.’

‘Why would they come here?’ Korbel asked.

Asaliah shrugged.

‘Watch the structures,’ Jatiel ordered the sensorium officer, his words dripping with finality. ‘But we must focus our efforts on the tyranids. Deal with the immediate threat now. We will face the necrons when, and if, they arrive.’

Chapter Four

Valnyr and her lychguard moved with purpose through the darkness of the awakening tomb world. Canoptek constructs watched from shadowed alleys, letting them pass. Scrabbling sounded from the cracks in the obsidian walkways. Stalactites loomed from the darkness, the result of countless cycles of dripping fluid trickling from the planet’s surface.

They made their way down a memorial processional, an arterial that ran through the entirety of Kehlrantyr’s interior. The ceremonial route of kings and phaerons, it would once have been lined by the living. Now it was a thing of empty shadows and forgotten grandeur. Scarabs scuttled down the walls, attempting to repair yawning fissures through the carvings. All around them towered immense friezes depicting the necrons of Kehlrantyr at their height of glory, figures from countless tomb worlds bowing before the might of Kehlrantyr’s Dynasts.

Silence, broken only by the clack of their footsteps, surrounded the necrons. A dull green glow emanated from scuttling scarab lenses. Valnyr took heart at the silence. Silence meant order. Silence meant assurance.

At times the road became a statue-lined bridge. Below, in rank upon silent rank, Valnyr could see the legions of Kehlrantyr. The bulk of the planet’s population, personalities and identities removed, waited in the darkness. Once, these had been the ordinary citizens of the Necron Empire. Once they had been artisans, children, mothers, fathers, farmers, writers, artists and merchants. The nonessential. Mephet’ran’s deception saw them converted into mindless creatures, their entire existence erased and burned away.

Valnyr almost felt sorry for them, almost felt remorse at what became of the vast populations of the empire. But better that they lose their identity than her. She shuddered at such a fate, could barely understand an eternity of unwitting and unwilling servitude. They were abhorrent things, a reminder of her race’s glory and its decline. They represented her deepest fears, the violation of all that she was, the erasure of everything that made her an individual, deleted in order to create an unthinking, unreasoning construct no better than the scarabs that serviced the tomb worlds.

Metal rasped along stone. The flickering sparks of talons screeching through the obsidian echoed down a side route, followed by running footsteps. The lychguard readied their weapons.

A group of warriors emerged, eyes shining in the darkness. They were altered, gripped by the same changes that had afflicted Poblaaur. Red lights played along their bodies, while their hands stretched into talons. Bent double by unnatural, insatiable hunger, they stalked forward, muttering and screeching at random. Valnyr could hear buzzing, low and subsonic.

‘Flayed ones,’ said Shaudukar.

The lychguard formed a shield wall, once more placing themselves between the corrupt and their cryptek. Dispersion fields activated on their shields, repelling the shambling flayers into the obsidian walls. Three lychguard held the broken necrons in place, while the others approached.

Their warscythes flashed down, crunching into the corrupted warriors’ skulls. The light in their eyes immediately died, while the bodies collapsed to the floor. The warscythes struck once again, severing the flayed ones’ torsos from their legs along the vulnerable spine section.

The lychguard pulled back in lockstep, resuming their guardian position around the cryptek. More hissing came from the shadows. More red lights blinked as corrupted warriors shambled forward, mouthparts clicking open and closed. Their chassis were tarnished by ages uncounted. They spat static at the party of sane necrons.

‘Mistress?’ Shaudukar asked over her shoulder.

‘Through them.’

The lychguard leaned behind their shields and advanced. The flayer-touched flew backwards, propelled by the dispersion shields.

Valnyr and her lychguard rushed through the depths, passing through the decrepit majesty of Kehlrantyr, leaving the flayer packs behind. Kilometres separated them from their goal, the sleeping chambers of the ruling dynasty. Kilometres filled with slumbering warriors and ages-old chambers.

Ruin crept in the closer they came to the crypts of the Dynasts. Fissures lanced from the ceiling, cracking deep through carved walls. There was greater activity in this place, scarabs swarming in the darkness. Canoptek wraiths and other constructs flittered about, attending to pre-programmed tasks, running the same routines for presumably millions of years, guarding for intruders that would never come and enacting repair protocols on damaged regions that could never be fixed.

‘How much have we lost while we slept? How far has our glory fallen?’

‘Mistress? I do not remember.’

Valnyr was shocked to find herself saying, ‘I do not either.’

Some of her memories were gone. She could feel the gaps, the aching wounds in her psyche that were filled with some malignant emotion that recoiled at her scrutiny.

Weak sunlight drifted from fissures, descending from miles above. They walked between the beams and Valnyr felt a moment’s flush of pleasure at the sight.

Something shrieked, something that sounded horribly organic. The screams approached, moving with fierce rapidity. A creature landed in front of them, black eyes staring with malign intelligence. It was bone-white and red. Tendrils stretched from its head, waving like worms or snakes. Great spiked limbs descended from its shoulders, arching over. A tail whipped through the air behind it. The tentacles around its mouth reached out and vile ooze dripped from its pores.

The necrons froze. Green light played out from their eyes, scanning and analysing.

The creature fixed its gaze on them. It sucked in great breaths, betraying its disgusting organic origin. It shuffled forward, moving in quick hops. Bioluminescence rippled along its fleshy skin, tracing out complex patterns. Parts of the creature’s body blended in with the stone surrounding it.

As it drew near to the lychguard, the beast turned its head from side to side. Its tendrils reached outwards. Then it screamed. Hooks shot out from its chest, clattering off the lychguards’ shields.

‘What foulness is this?’ someone asked.

More screeches sounded from far above as the lychguard bulled forward. The creature leapt over the necrons’ heads, twisting in midair. Spiked appendages slammed into one of Valnyr’s guardians and wrenched him apart. He continued to attack, even as he was torn in half. The fallen lychguard used his warscythe and shield to crawl forward, still moving stubbornly towards the source of the attack.

But the creature was already moving out of the way, darting towards Valnyr. The cryptek held her staff out, beginning to summon the energy to freeze the animal in time, to halt it in its tracks. She knew, even as she did so, that it was too fast.

‘No!’ she yelled. ‘I will not die here!’ Panic flew through her. Buzzing overwhelmed her senses.

Shaudukar grasped the creature by the spine. It stalled and mewled in pain, still reaching for the cryptek. The tendrils around its head fluttered as it breathed out. Shaudukar ripped out the beast’s spine with a wet meat thunk. The creature collapsed and flopped against the floor, obscene, pallid flesh glistening against the obsidian.

Blood spilled out in a pool. The necrons gathered around it, curious. It was the first glimpse of organic life they had seen since beginning the Great Sleep. It screamed as it died, still writhing.

More screams answered. Creatures swarmed down the fissures. Buzzing clouds of scarabs met them. Arcs of green lightning stabbed from tiny jaw-gripped weapons. Greater canoptek creatures fired whining streams of energy. Gouts of alien flesh rained down on Valnyr’s head, but the tide was too strong.

There were four-armed beasts, gaping maws filled with sharp teeth. More of the larger beasts with the tentacled faces followed. All moved quickly, scuttling with disgusting living motion, blue and red and purple, flying through the gloom in blurs faster than Valnyr could track. Whirring winged organisms engaged the scarabs in miniature dogfights.

Valnyr could only stare, overwhelmed by the revulsion that swept through her. She suddenly felt hungry, a half-remembered sensation that ghosted through her. The lychguard were frozen, gazing up at the descending animals.

Valnyr knew they were considering, adapting, planning an assessment of the encroaching aliens. But there were too many and they were too slow. They would be overwhelmed.

More canoptek constructs were advancing down the processional. For a moment, Valnyr was distracted, seeing the advancing tide of burnished metal as a mark of the lost glories of her people, the processional reasserting its previous function this one last time.

Flayer-cursed appeared, clambering down walls from hidden crevices, climbing up the bridge with talons spearing into the cracks of the stone.

‘Move,’ she commanded. ‘We must find a way to neutralise these threats.’

Her words echoed, slicing through the static-screams of the flayer-cursed and the organic sounds of the alien organisms. Beneath it all, she could hear the laughter of the necrontyr, almost mocking.

An idea came to her. ‘Halt,’ she commanded her lychguard. ‘Listen.’

Aliens sprinted for them. With a grunt of effort, Valnyr froze them in time, pausing the organisms mere metres away.

All around them, quiet and distant, came the noises of a bustling city, the sounds of the long dead and the long forgotten. She could hardly hear them through the ever-present buzzing. She focused, concentrated, and pinpointed the hall the echoes originated from. A new plan began to crystallise. It was desperate, but what other hope did she have?

‘We move down there!’ she yelled.

They fled through empty dwelling places, marked with sigils proclaiming the habitation of early necron scientists. Aliens and flayers poured after them, some drifting into eddies of battle and the shrieks of hunger.

Valnyr knew this district. She had served here in life. Its emptiness disquieted her, but desperation urged her on. Legs that would no longer tire drove her forward, fear adding to her flight. She outpaced her lychguard, the larger necrons fighting a desperate rearguard against the twin threats that pursued them.

Valnyr heard a faint cry and glanced back. She saw one of the lychguard pounced upon by flayers and torn apart beneath a metallic mass of flashing blade limbs.

She turned down a side passageway and her lychguard followed. Dwellings were replaced by defunct laboratories. The sounds, louder now, screamed all around them, keening with horror and loss. They were thick with the noise of some calamitous event. Valnyr ignored them, focusing only on the origin point.

At the end of the passageway, carved into the obsidian darkness, stood an open laboratory. Half-seen shapes moved through the gloom, pale and translucent. Valnyr burst through them, sparing no glance for the time-dilated ghosts of her lost kin. She emerged into a vast chamber and the sounds of a battle waged in the unimaginable depths of the past. Her lychguard stumbled in moments later.

‘Defend the entrance,’ she told Shaudukar. ‘Buy me time.’

The lychguard nodded and took up position. They hefted their shields and prepared to serve their cryptek. Valnyr cast them from her mind and tried to ignore the sounds that surrounded her: the ululating cries of the aliens, the static-laced screams of the flayers and the time-wounded echoes of her lost kin. Panic and fear drove her. Through her mind, in some dark corner of her being, some facet of her demanded in increasingly shrill tones that she survive.

She knew this chamber, knew what it represented. This had been a room where the early chronomancers practised their art. Here they had perfected the sciences that Valnyr used. She knew the theory behind what had been accomplished in such a place.

She began to chant, activating long dormant protocols in the laboratory. Rock rumbled and lights flickered on. Ancient scenes of glory from the history of the necrontyr looked down from the walls, an inspiration to those chronomancers who would have worked within. The panels slid down, exposing blinking sensors and whizzing gears.

Valnyr recited names, placing exception commands on her and her lychguard. There was no time to fine-tune what she attempted.

Echoes rose around her, sounds of battle and loss, mixing with the looping static of the flayers and the keening of the interloping aliens.

‘Let them through!’ she snarled.

The lychguard did not question her words. They tumbled back, some driven to the ground by organisms or flayers.

Valnyr backed up, running towards the wall. A grim carving showed eldar and necrontyr forces fighting one another above her. She stumbled and an alien dived onto her, four bladed and clawed arms stabbing at her chassis. She raised her staff to ward it away.

There was no time to consider the consequences of what she attempted, no time to replicate perfect conditions. She had to act now. Valnyr shouted the activation command.

Light flashed. Sounds stretched. The buzzing grew louder.

Then the light faded and silence engulfed the chamber.

The aliens and the flayers were gone. So were three of her lychguard, although Valnyr found that she could no longer remember their names.

A new panel on the walls caught her attention. Necrontyr forms battled what could only be altered necrons and stylistic representations of the nameless organisms. A new event in the history of Kelrantyr, but one that, now, had always happened. Such was the power of her art.

‘Mistress?’ asked Shaudukar, shaking her from her reverie.

‘We make for the Dynasts, as before.’

Already they could hear the static cries of more flayer packs and the mindless screaming of the organic beasts.

Chapter Five

Anrakyr’s anger rose. His plans were rapidly being thwarted, lost amid the swarming tyranids.

His already depleted army, comprised of necrons from dozens of tomb worlds, faced countless aliens. That the swarm diverted to consume the oozing remains of the humans offered little consolation. Already the warrior-beasts were probing his lines, already they were attacking his necrons. His deathmark spies, kept hidden in their pocket dimensions, reported massive feeder tendrils descending into the oceans. Crypteks said that the planet’s orbit was destabilising as colossal volumes of liquid were funnelled into orbit.

A monolith dived for the ground, coated in flapping, gnawing creatures. Careening into a wall, it carved a swath through battling necron phalanxes of warriors and scuttling, clawed things.

While it allowed his army to face the uncounted numbers of aliens, they were still vulnerable to attack from the sky. Monoliths anchored the line, but they were slowly being overwhelmed.

A gap opened before him. Necrons were flung into the air. Warriors were broken. Destroyers were rent asunder by clawing, shrieking animals. Huge, towering tyranid beasts sprinted towards him and his sentient attendants.

A great creature, towering three times Anrakyr’s height, came rumbling from the swarms of its lesser brethren. Great scythe arms were brandished to the sky, while a brutal call emerged from its mouth. It barrelled towards Anrakyr, mouth gaping open and oozing ichor.

Anrakyr met its charge, driving a wedge of sentient necrons, immortals and the like, into the tyranids. The huge warrior-beast threw itself upon him, trying to crush his skeletal chassis beneath its bulk.

The Traveller fell. He landed awkwardly, spear stuck beneath his bones. The mass of the tyranid creature cracked down, pushing him into the stone. Anrakyr struggled to get his hands beneath him, to gain leverage against the hulking beast. Blood dripped from above, staining his body and eating into the necrodermis. The living metal reacted, repairing the damage as quickly as it was wrought.

He realised the blood’s source: the axehead crest of his Pyrrhian overlordship. He sawed his head back and forth, carving into the blubber and flesh of the creature above. It roared in pain and fury. Anrakyr carved a space for himself, and soon he was able to push himself to his knees and retrieve his spear.

Blood dripped down his body, pitting the pristine metal, and Anrakyr tried to ignore the cloying disgust that threatened to drown him. More space was opened. He could see green lightning flickering and hear the screams of dying tyranids through the quivering flesh of the beast. He swung the spear, hitting something vital, and a great torrent of acid-blood and viscera gouted out from the animal. Its movements slowed and it ceased breathing.

Anrakyr continued to pull himself through, bursting through the skin, bones and chitin of the monster. He clambered up, stood upon the vast bulk of the tyranid beast and surveyed the battle.

Tyranid creatures milled as something like shock passed through the swarm. Warriors and other slow-moving necrons punished the animals, reaping and killing.

He hoisted his spear into the sky, stabbing out towards the occluded disc of Kehlrantyr’s sun. A cheer emerged from those battered sentient necrons that surrounded him.

Behind him, at the far end of the defile, his crypteks, broken warriors and programmed constructs chewed their way into the mountain range. Beneath, behind, below, lurked his entire reason for coming to this planet. The tombs of the Kehlrantyr Dynasts. Legions of warriors. Enough to drown these aliens, and not just these, but the paltry humans that grew like scabs of bacterial life across planets once belonging to the necrons.

But he must wait to secure them. He must survive long enough.

The tyranids threw themselves at his line, unheeding of the casualties they suffered. Necron warriors endured the onslaught. Anrakyr watched as warriors were pulled beneath thrashing tyranids, dragged beneath rending claws that beat futilely at metal forms. They stood, seconds later, shrugging off the beasts with a stubbornness bred out of ignorance.

What went on within the skulls of Anrakyr’s warriors, he could not even begin to guess. Did they still think? Did they know that they fought? In the end, it mattered little to the Traveller.

Anrakyr threw himself into their midst, stood shoulder to shoulder with the barely cognisant, the dull-minded warriors who made up the bulk of his host and his race. Vast jaws gaped towards him, hissing and spitting acid. One scrabbled over a warrior to his fore, spiked limbs flailing. Its jaws crunched into his head. Diamond-hard teeth punched through the metal of his skull. Something akin to pain flashed along artificial synapses. A thick, glistening tongue slapped against his face, trying to find purchase. Bladed limbs scrabbled against his body, getting hooked into the gaps between his ribs. The jaws tightened. Anrakyr grabbed them. He began to pull.

The creature struggled, desperate and panicking. Something tore in the hinges of its jaw and Anrakyr continued to pull. The head came apart, ripped down the centre. Wriggling worms fell from within and more acid-blood sheeted over the overlord. But there was no respite, yet more creatures already careening into the necrons.

More of the scrabbling, blade-armed organisms sprinted forward, jumping at the last second. Anrakyr skewered one of the mewling beasts, sending ichor erupting out of its chitin-armoured back along with his spearhead.

Great creatures, amongst the few tyranids that seemed capable of independent thought and decision making, marshalled their lesser brethren. They stood amidst the swarm, smaller creatures breaking around them like a sea of flesh and bone.

Destroyers targeted these, bracketing the great beasts with concentrated fire, catechisms of hate spewing from their mouth speakers. The nihilistic necrons cast their spite towards the largest synapse monsters. Armenhorlal led the destroyers.

Beetles fired from flowing schools of tyranids bounced off their necrodermis, smacking with chitinous crunches from the metal. One of the beetles hit something vital in a destroyer, chewing through the necron’s spine. Critical explosive failure followed as the drive skimmer core separated from the commanding section. Shards of metal studded out, thudding into the other destroyers floating around it. Incapable of experiencing pain, none of them even noticed, continuing to fire into the advancing swarms.

A monolith exploded in the sky. Green lightning expanded in a ball, eliminating the flapping tyranids that had proven the construct’s doom. Anrakyr watched it all, noting everything, watching the ebb and flow of the battlefield. His warriors were holding, but barely. While their metal bodies and tireless forms were proof against much of the tyranids’ wiles, they were outnumbered. With every passing second warriors were being pulled beneath shrieking waves of dead-eyed horrors.

Warriors to either side of Anrakyr were torn down by claws and, in horrific squeals of stressed metal, rent asunder. Some stood seconds later, green lightning playing about their joints as the metal that formed their bodies repaired itself. But most never stood back up, buried under a wave of flesh, reanimation protocols unable to activate.

The tide of tyranids receded. Blasted creatures that towered over their lesser kin locked eyes with Anrakyr, and then scuttled back into their ranks. The eyes were appraising, considering. Anrakyr met them.

Marks of green light flickered over the larger creatures’ heads as deathmarks stained their targets.

A new sound arose alongside the shrieking and baying of the tyranids, a deep whuffling noise, followed by rhythmic shudders of earth and stone. Rock cascaded down from the sides of the defile, crunching into unwitting necron warriors. Dust rose and pebbles bounced and danced beneath Anrakyr’s feet.

A number of hulking tyranids came screaming down the defile. Their throats were massive sacs of swinging flesh. The creatures stood nearly as tall as the ravine itself. Anrakyr struggled to divine their purpose, what the tyranids meant to accomplish. He understood, seconds before it was too late.

‘Block the mouth! Kill the creatures!’ he screamed.

The remaining three monoliths arced down, anti-gravitic fields straining as they crashed into the ground, blocking the monstrous beasts from Anrakyr’s view.

A great retching sound filtered through to the necrons, then a steaming hiss as viscous liquid spilled forth. Smoke began to rise from the monoliths almost immediately. A tide of bio-acid spilled around the flanks of the slab-sided constructs, filling the defile in a great, hissing flood. Entire phalanxes of warriors dissolved beneath the slurry, denuded down to nothing.

Displacement field shielding erupted belatedly as crypteks stepped into the air and added the weight of their science to the conflict. More and more were streaming away from the digging project to reinforce Anrakyr’s failing line.

With the monoliths down, the skies were left unprotected. Spores fell from overhead bio-ships, landing behind the necron line. They erupted with a sickening vent of gases and the reek of scorched flesh. Tyranid warrior forms made straight for the necron line.

‘Retreat!’ Anrakyr rumbled. Synaptic relay processes enacted in the dull minds of the embattled warriors. More autonomous constructs, necrons that had survived biotransference with a degree of sense and sanity intact, began to stream back.

The mindless warriors retreated in slow lockstep. Many were lost beneath the slavering claws of the tyranids, pulled down and gnawed upon by mindless beasts that were yet to realise there was no bio-matter to be had from them. The ripped-fabric sound of gauss weaponry grew ragged and inconstant.

A necron retreat was a measured thing, devoid of panic and mindless fear. While Anrakyr’s higher processes may have been capable of approximating such biological responses, he had long since disabled any debilitating emotions.

Instead, the Pyrrhian overlord was filled with rage. His eyes flared while the axe blades on his head quivered with subtle vibration. Lights pulsed all up and down his chassis. Anrakyr raised his left hand, fingers outstretched into the gesture of hesitant decision and anticipation. His body deactivated as power was siphoned to a small weapon embedded in his wrist.

Sentient necrons wailed in sudden terror of what was to come, while the triarch praetorians stationed themselves before the Traveller. Green lightning played about his gauntlet. Then a tiny object, a sliver of Anrakyr’s own necrodermis, launched from his wrist. Part of Anrakyr, a tiny fragment of all that he was, flew with it, leaving a curious buzzing sound in its wake.

Reality itself shrieked as it was violated. But this was no phenomenon born of the warp, like the unearthly powers of the eldar or a crude human starship travelling beyond celestial bodies. This was necron science at its finest, the laws of physics and the material universe exploited to their utmost.

The tachyon arrow gathered mass to it like a thunderclap, manufacturing matter from the air in an alchemical transmutation. It hit the tyranid front, slicing through several of the larger creatures before impacting with the ground. The world broke. Rocks fell. Tyranids died in their hundreds. His own warriors were ripped to pieces or buried beneath tonnes of rock.

Anrakyr saw none of it. His systems were momentarily offline, drained of all power by the needs of the tachyon arrow. They rebooted as he was being thrown back by the blast.

Something felt wrong. Something always felt wrong after the tachyon arrow’s deployment. It was a last resort weapon, a choice only made in the direst of circumstances.

A fraction of him was missing, nearly as intangible as the sliver of his necrodermis used to form the tachyon arrow. A fraction of what made Anrakyr the Traveller, of what drove the great necron overlord, had been denuded away and lost to oblivion. It ached, the void, but he could not identify what was gone.

The prospect of losing himself terrified Anrakyr, the idea that he might lose his personality, become as blunt and worthless as Armenhorlal, or, horror of horrors, a lobotomised drone like one of the warriors that marched in his legions.

Dust drifted, while tyranids hesitantly crawled over the gently glowing fused-glass wreckage of the tachyon arrow impact. They sickened rapidly, broken by the unnatural radiation leaking from the site.

But more were pouring across, hesitant and confused. The tyranids seemed aimless, as if the guiding intelligence that governed them had been weakened. It was a start.

Chapter Six

Alien organisms whirled and left Valnyr’s fleeing party alone, focusing on the larger threat of the flayer-touched. Whatever intelligence motivated them, whatever shreds of cunning and cleverness worked away behind their dead-black eyes, knew enough to recognise a greater menace. The creatures shrieked as one and moved forward, as eerily coordinated as the marching necrons.

Flesh hit metal as the party left the tide behind them. More alien creatures were shrieking their way into the fray, some fanning out to infiltrate deeper into the tomb world.

A scattered few of the beasts followed, hissing and drooling. Light stabbed from Valnyr’s staff, obliterating the aliens. Her vision dimmed as her internal power source was temporarily drained.

Then they were moving again. Two of her lychguard peeled off at a narrowing in the processional. Her last sight of them, peering over her shoulder, was of the two hunched necrons crouched with shields and warscythes ready.

The surroundings gradually grew more ornate the deeper into the tomb world they fled. The walls were no longer cut obsidian, but burnished metal as well. The carvings moved with clockwork precision, telling of the glories of the Kehlrantyr Dynasts.

One room displayed a colossal hologrammatic galactic map. Every tomb world was marked and spun about in its orbit. Through some lost science, the map updated in reaction to events out in the universe. Valnyr saw how far things had come in sixty million cycles, how many tomb worlds had been lost, how decrepit the once great empire looked.

Massive gates of metal barred their way, inscribed with gently glowing runes describing the names and deeds of all of Kehlrantyr’s Dynasts stretching back to the Time of Flesh and the emergence of the necrontyr. The gates loomed large, towering into the darkness. Time-etched facial features showed how the Dynasts had once looked.

Green light flashed from the open mouth of the founding Dynast, scanning them from feet to head. Grinding noises sounded from deep within, followed by a rhythmic clunking. The scarabs ceased their scuttling and flowed into the gate’s joints as it rumbled open, splitting down the middle of the largest carved face. Light shone from the revealed chamber, the largest they had yet seen.

Valnyr was assailed by memories of the time she had spent sealed away in the ancient city-within-a-city. Forbidden to the masses of necrontyr – and later necrons – only the favoured of the Dynasts were allowed to walk its depths.

She had once conducted experiments within. Yet while her status within the hierarchy of the tomb world had been high, it had not been enough to warrant her entombment within the rarefied depths of the dynastic palace chambers. Even despite her mandate to awaken the Dynasts, she was forced to suffer the processional as a symbolic reminder that she lacked the former genetic grandeur and the splendour of a dynastic name.

The group entered through the yawning portal. It slowly slammed shut behind them, cutting off the shrieking xenos and the awakening tomb world.

The necron warrior phalanxes continued marching backwards in lockstep. The defile narrowed as they retreated from the tyranids. Rock walls crowded in, dun-coloured and stratified, testament to the ages that had passed while the Kehlrantyri slept. Soon their backs were to a rock wall, cut and carved by working necrons and their constructs. Already Anrakyr could see threads of obsidian lacing through the stone of Kehlrantyr’s crust.

Anrakyr left the battlefield front behind, sweeping towards the furiously working crypteks. ‘Where are my legions?’ he demanded.

‘We are still digging, my lord,’ the lead cryptek answered.

‘The tyranids come on my heels. They will be running over us soon. “Still digging” is not an acceptable answer.’

The lead cryptek bowed, knowing better than to respond further, too wise to offer excuses to Anrakyr the Traveller.

A green flash split the sky and an immense noise rumbled through the cloud layers. Tyranid vessels, sickening blends of meat with mechanical purpose, erupted into expanding clouds of flame. Internal combustion gases must have been touched off. The green flash signified something deeper to Anrakyr. His ship, his fleet, dying in the void, destroyed by the tyranids. A setback such as he had never before faced. How many resources had he just lost? How far had this set back his dreams of a reunified Necron Empire?

His ships, his legacy, destroyed. He swayed on his feet, internal processes struggling to compensate for the sudden surge of negative emotion. Dampeners kicked in, settling his psyche. They were burst nanoseconds later, drowned beneath an ocean of spiralling darkness. Desperation spooled in Anrakyr’s central processes. It gnawed at him, ticking away at his thoughts. A screaming whine built in his vocalisers, a petulant hiss of escaping sound vibrations. Anger and rage joined the sound. Behind it lurked the certainty that some core aspect of himself was missing, shed along with the tachyon arrow.

Personality, memory, the knowledge that some indefinable portion of himself was gone, shivered at his centre. This was the true reason why he rarely fired that weapon, though its efficacy was undeniable. Anrakyr had contemplated mounting it on one of his subordinates in the past, but could not bring himself to place such a massive level of trust in another being.

Intelligent necrons were sent scrambling, redoubling their efforts at an unspoken command. None wished to stand before the Traveller now. None wished to become the object of his wrath. They would rather face the tyranids.

Chapter Seven

A calm machine voice broadcast across the Golden Promise as violent tremors afflicted the venerable frigate. ‘Stand by to repel boarders,’ it stated, repeating every thirty seconds.

Red lights and alarm klaxons flashed across the bridge. Servitors mumbled damage reports and sparks showered from blown-out consoles, broken by feedback and sympathetic damage.

Jatiel’s warriors stood with weapons ready and girded their souls for imminent conflict.

The walls of the spaceship, hidden by paintings of grand Naval warfare, popped open on steam-driven hinges. Shotguns and low-beam lasweapons waited, shiny and wrapped in plastek. They had never been called upon before, still sitting pristine in their original packaging.

Non-essential crew were gearing up, grabbing reinforced armour and assorted weaponry. Ratings brought rifles to enthroned officers, who were engrossed in the battle that they still fought, in order to destroy as many of the tyranid boarding pods as they could before they could breach the Golden Promise’s hull.

‘Your gunnery crews have reaped a fearsome toll on the aliens,’ said Jatiel. ‘That is a worthy achievement. You have my compliments, shipmaster. We could not have asked for more.’

Korbel accepted the praise stoically. Her face was pale and etched with stress. ‘It has been an honour, sergeant,’ she said. Finality undercut every word.

Jatiel knew that the situation was dire. He could see it on every one of the screens within the bridge. The Golden Promise’s primary batteries were still culling the tyranids that reached for them, but the swarm was everywhere. Point defence guns, smaller turrets mounted on the hull, spat at approaching tyranid organisms.

His hearts pounded, pulse beating behind his eyes. It formed almost a migraine, a painful pressure that mounted and mounted. Four drums thrummed in time with the beats of his hearts. His mouth was dry and yet thick with acidic drool, the prospect of battle bringing the Red Thirst to the fore.

His warriors, all four, watched the oculus screens. Emudor spotted it first. ‘They will break through amidships,’ the Space Marine calmly announced over the inter-squad link.

The ship endured a manic bout of shaking. Gravity generators failed and the mortal crew locked themselves into their seats. Jatiel watched them shoot nervous glances towards the massive adamantine doors that guarded the bridge.

‘Shipmaster,’ Jatiel said. He cocked his bolter. ‘We will repel the xenos from this vessel.’ His words were not impassioned. They were delivered with a resigned tone. ‘Cassuen, you will guard the bridge.’

The young Blood Angel nodded his assent, the gesture nearly imperceptible.

‘Shipmaster Korbel, die well,’ Jatiel said.

The high tombs of Kehlrantyr’s ruling Dynasts displayed the forgotten glory of necron civilisation. The decay so evident throughout the rest of the tomb world was nowhere to be found here. It was pristine. Perfect.

Gold warred with obsidian and other precious substances. Rippling curtains of chained metal partitioned the great chambers, forming complex runes announcing the majesty of the sleeping occupants. Glorious sights, beautiful reminders of the technology and mastery her race possessed, but rendered mundane by their familiarity.

Necron constructs swarmed everywhere, filling the tomb in massive numbers. Scuttling motion broke the great silence as the mechanical creatures conducted their tasks with mindless diligence. Gravitic pulses removed accumulated dust while swooping scarabs snatched the offending particles from the air.

The chamber itself was long, shaped like the runic symbol for Kehlrantyr, an announcement of mastery that was not lost on Valnyr. Complex and perfect, the same symbol adorned her chassis and those of her lychguard, making the same declaration of ownership that this chamber did. The message was clear: they belonged to Kehlrantyr, which, in turn, served at the pleasure of the ruling Dynasts.

One long corridor with many branches swooped out to either side. Each led to the resting niche of the ruling family. Subtle green lights ran through the walls, flashing in arrangements of runes that spelled the planet’s history. Gaps showed where devotionary words had once spoken the praises of the c’tan. They had been excised, but not neatly.

The lesser chambers crowded towards the gate, the most easily accessed. Carved first, when the tomb world had still served as a necropolis to house the truly dead, these chambers lacked the impossible artistry of the others. They betrayed an earlier, cruder age. These were the tombs of the false necrons, the beings whose personalities had only been approximated with artificial intelligences, rather than converted. Advanced programs mimicked them as they were said to have been. Bodies had been constructed, made of the same living metal that Valnyr and the true necrons used for motive functions. But no real intelligence motivated them. Only artificiality acted behind the eyes.

They were the ones who had died during the Time of Flesh, whose mortality had prevented them from seeing the true glory of the necrons. These were the fallen leaders of necron society, those who gasped out their last as cancers destroyed their bodies, politicians assassinated in their prime and generals culled in the ages-long wars against the Old Ones and their servants. They were the ones deemed worthy of remembrance and reconstitution.

Nuensis, who had led the necrontyr in battle. Gevegrar, inventor of great and terrible technological marvels. Maantril, one of those who had opened negotiations with the c’tan. Names and beings she had heard stories of when she herself had walked Kehlrantyr in the flesh. Heroes. Luminaries. Now their simulacra would be awoken to advise the Dynasts.

But they were just complex machines, no better nor worse than the tomb constructs that the necrons created to serve their purposes. In such ways was the wisdom of ages preserved and brought to immortality. Valnyr could hear them already stirring, restless in their tombs, locked away behind curtains of rippling scarabs.

‘We will awaken them soon,’ Valnyr said. ‘Our focus must be the ruling Dynasts. They will lead us through this crisis.’

They moved through the Dynasts’ necropolis, hissed at by tomb constructs curious about these interlopers but which withdrew after recognising their authority and legitimacy. A cloud of flowing scarabs buzzed before them, tiny jewelled wings and humming ripples of anti-gravitic fields fluttering in the gloom.

The corridor, wide with marching symbols and friezes, ended in one large looping circle. At the centre of the ring, rising in a stepped ziggurat, was the tomb of the ruling Dynast, Phaerakh Nazkehl.

A statue of the formidable phaerakh stood guard over her tomb, hanging from the ceiling with one hand clutching an ornate weapon and the other cradling a map of the galaxy. Its eyes were dead, black pools, while its skeleton bore the telltale signs of circuitry. Valnyr’s escort took station around the chamber, each standing equidistant from the others.

Recessed niches in the wall hinted at Nazkehl’s own lychguard, where they slumbered away the eons. Valnyr paid them no attention. They would be the last to be awoken. Their services were not required yet.

The cryptek stepped forward onto the dais. Colours inverted as ancient programs scanned everyone in the room, searching for interlopers and tomb robbers. Horns blared. She began to recite the ritual of High Awakening, the words flowing in time to the instruments. Every step she took was marked by green lights in the glassine obsidian.

A sarcophagus rose from the highest tier, pitched vertically. The front was transparent, revealing the ornate chassis of Nazkehl. She was still clad in ancient wisps of frayed fabric. One hand clutched the sceptre of her authority while the other crossed over to hold a recurved sword.

Glass slowly hinged open and lights played along the phaerakh’s chassis. Her mouth yawned open.

She screamed.

Valnyr and her lychguard recoiled back. They knew the sound. They’d heard it before. It was the same static-laced cry of the necrons whose minds were corrupted and controlled by the flayer virus.

‘The phaerakh is cursed,’ cried one of the lychguard.

Nazkehl fell to her knees, cables detaching from her body, hissing and flapping with escaping vapour and energy. Long-fingered hands, tapered with rippling necrodermis talons, clawed at the stone of her ziggurat. The corrupted phaerakh snaked her clawed hand around Valnyr’s shinbones. She looked up, met the cryptek’s horrified gaze. The static-scream echoed from her open maw.

Valnyr panicked, her mind seized by indecision. Loyalty protocols warred with the instinct for self-preservation. Self-preservation won out and Valnyr’s staff slammed down into Nazkehl’s skull, crunching the metal, driving it into the stone with a deep crack. Her vision blurred. Pain danced along her limbs as punishment engrams crackled through her circuits. Hunger blazed through her again, but it was momentary, drowned beneath the agony.

Shaudukar dragged Valnyr away from the spasming phaerakh.

‘Corrupt, my cryptek. We must leave. The tomb world is lost.’

Valnyr heaved, lost in momentary panic as her mind struggled to remember that she no longer lived. ‘How deep does the contagion extend? Some of the Dynasts must surely be pure.’

‘Where will we go?’ one of her lychguard asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Valnyr said. ‘I don’t know.’ Her thoughts fled. No plan of action existed. ‘What contingency could exist for such as this? How could we anticipate and plan against such horror?’

Emptiness filled her, along with a hollow, grief-stricken fear. Emotions burbled that her existence could not countenance or express. What posture could she adopt to say that she had just killed the being she served? What gesture could announce that her people were corrupted, irredeemably so?

‘The gates,’ Valnyr said. ‘We make for the gates. We go to the surface and find…’ What? What would they find outside the tomb? Refuge? Relief?

It did not matter. She needed to move, to escape this horror. Her lychguard waited, patient, loyalty programs ensuring that they would accept her every command. But they offered no opinions or ideas of their own. They stood, silent and still as statues.

She hated them then. She hated the responsibility they gave her, hated the mockery they made of the beings she had known in life. These slaves, these unquestioning constructs, were no better than the false necrons or the ranks of warriors. A reminder, as if she needed any, of the doubts that plagued the cryptek.

More static-laced screams emerged from the darkness, mocking her. Her lychguard readied their shields and hefted their warscythes. They left the phaerakh’s chamber behind.

Automatic processes awakened more of the ruling Dynasts. The static-screams revealed the state of their sanity. Flayer-touched highborn crawled from their tombs, exiting niches in the walls where their metallic chassis had lain for millions of cycles.

Warscythes flashed down and killed the ones who had once ruled over Kehlrantyr, the ones whose minds and bodies had been remade by the vengeance of one of the gods of her people. They died, flailing and broken, destined to be forgotten at the heart of their former glory.

Constructs sought to halt them, confused at the sight. Necrons fighting necrons was inconceivable to their programming. They hovered, gravitic repulsors pushing them from one side to another. In the end, their programming motivated them to attend to the fallen bodies of the exterminated Dynasts.

Valnyr and her lychguard were nearing the end of the chamber when a gang of lesser lords from late in Kehlrantyr’s history sprang upon them. One of the lychguard pushed Valnyr out of the way and was pulled to the ground by the cursed highborn. Screaming his own curses, the lychguard was subsumed by flashing metal limbs and pulled to pieces.

Bright light skewered the lords seconds later from Valnyr’s staff. From behind her, lightning flickered and killed other hunched, flayer-touched necrons. Lychguard heads turned to identify the new threat.

The false necrons marched from their tombs, ornate weapons flashing as they obliterated the flayed ones.

‘Cryptek,’ said the warlord Nuensis. He inclined his head in respect and greeting. ‘We have been waiting to remind the tomb world of our worth.’

‘Your intercession is appreciated, warlord.’

‘What afflicts these Dynasts?’

‘The c’tan.’

‘Such slavish devotion to the star gods,’ said Nuensis, his eyes shifting to regard the hunched and hiding figure of Maantril. Several of the false necrons began to make sigils of obeisance to the star gods before ingrained engrams prevented the motions from completing.

‘It is beyond that,’ Shaudukar said.

Valnyr added, ‘They are afflicted by the curse of Llandu’gor.’

‘We should relieve them of this affliction,’ Nuensis said without hesitation. He hefted a great, curved sword. He sketched the posture for bloodthirsty and anticipation. He was clumsy and awkward, lacking the poise of a true necron. He had never needed the postures and poses in life.

‘There is no time,’ Valnyr asserted. ‘The world is lost to this curse.’

‘Your plan, cryptek?’ asked Maantril.

‘We head for the surface, to find succour or relief.’

The false necrons shared knowing looks. ‘What of the Dolmen Gate?’ one asked.

‘No,’ said Valnyr. ‘Such technology was fickle in its prime. After all this time, to trust that it would still function is madness.’

‘For all we know,’ added Shaudukar, ‘the eldar still haunt the twisting paths. They were mighty of old and while they are frail compared to the strength of our kind, we lack the comfort of numbers. The eldar are cunning creatures.’

‘How do we know the eldar linger into this age? Perhaps they have earned their final extinction,’ insisted Maantril.

Nuensis hissed a laugh. ‘I wish that it were so, but they were persistent creatures. It is equally likely that they rule the galaxy now. Have you had access to updated knowledge since your awakening, cryptek?’

‘No,’ said Valnyr. Her thoughts were distracted, still lingering on the option presented by the Dolmen Gate. Further technology granted to them by the wiles of the c’tan, the Dolmen Gates had been stolen from the Old Ones and their eldar servants. There too lurked tricks and turns not anticipated by the naïve necrontyr. Like the biotransference that had ensured their unending half-life, the Dolmen Gates offered the unexpected and the unwelcome. They were access points to the webway, a means of travelling across vast distances at great speeds and without touching reality. But to move so close to the nightmare dimensions of the otherrealm, to tempt the beings that dwelled therein, was madness.

‘A last resort, then,’ said Maantril. ‘I may be no more than a simulation, but I have no wish to face the darkness of the real grave.’

Valnyr surveyed the gathered necrons. She nodded. ‘A last resort.’

Nuensis grunted his agreement. ‘We make for the surface. We shall stride Kehlrantyr once more.’

Chapter Eight

Bioforms in their shrieking millions dived into the necron line, mindless beasts driven to the slaughter. But for every ten, twenty thousand cut down by the mindless discipline of the necron warriors, hundreds of thousands took their place.

Anrakyr’s back was to a wall, metal scraping against stone. There was more evidence of necron artifice now, the great gates of Kehlrantyr. Storied things, they were said to have once been carved with colossal friezes of the ruling Dynasts. A waste of time and resources, evidence of too-obvious arrogance. Crypteks and canoptek constructs sawed through the carvings, reducing them to atomised ash.

Chronomancers surrounded the Traveller. Each faced the wall, humming harmonics that disrupted the flow of time and space. They projected a field of slipped time. The necrons caught within the field moved at a greatly enhanced pace, allowing work that would take hours to take minutes.

Still, it was too slow; the tyranids felled too many necrons, and too few were reanimating to wreak mindless revenge on their killers.

Nimble creatures dropped from the sky, accelerated through the time field and impacted into geysers of unwholesome flesh. More fell, cratering into the rock floor. One of the tyranids knocked into a working canoptek spyder, denting the construct and dropping both to the earth.

An idea germinated in Anrakyr’s skull. ‘So simple,’ he said. ‘Three of you,’ he bellowed to the working crypteks. ‘I require three of you.’

Three of the crypteks detached themselves from their efforts at the wall, moving like blurs until they reached the edge of the time dilation fields. They approached Anrakyr with bodies posed in anxiety and subservience.

‘How may we serve, my lord?’ they chorused. Their chassis featured ornate markings and esoteric runes scrawled over every surface. A single, cyclopean eye stared from each cryptek’s forehead, the lens nictitating. The markings of Anrakyr’s own tomb world, Pyrrhia, featured heavily. They were of the tattered few, Anrakyr’s original servants. Forces from other tomb worlds made up the bulk of the Traveller’s forces now. His own sub-phaerons and lords from Pyrrhia had been allowed a degree of autonomy, striding the stars to issue Anrakyr’s proclamation of empire and begin the diplomatic process.

The Traveller grabbed one of the working crypteks by the shoulder and roughly shoved it around.

‘Join the front line. Employ your chronomancy for my warriors. Let time serve as our ally to enforce the harvest. These tyranids offend my sight.’

The three crypteks bowed. If they felt any trepidation, any fear, at taking their place in the line of their mindless brethren, Anrakyr did not care, nor did he notice. They departed, moving with alacrity.

The triarch praetorians stepped down from the sky. Vapour wafted from the ends of their covenant rods. They surrounded Anrakyr the Traveller.

‘This will fail,’ said Khatlan.

Dovetlan added, ‘This world will give you nothing.’ As if to punctuate the praetorians’ words, a doomsday barge detonated in an expansive cloud of green-tinged fire.

Anrakyr waved their words away. ‘Be gone,’ he said. Inwardly, he was disquieted. These praetorians were proving to be prescient. ‘You are a chorus of the unwelcome.’

The praetorians remained where they stood, eyes boring into the Traveller’s. ‘This will fail,’ asserted Khatlan again.

‘You already said that,’ Anrakyr growled. ‘What do you know? What will happen here?’

Ammeg shrugged. ‘There are too many tyranids.’

‘What of the legions that slumber below?’ asked Anrakyr.

‘Worthless,’ said Dovetlan. ‘You will find them to be useless.’

‘You will need allies,’ said Khatlan.

Anrakyr laughed. He knew their game now. In his desperation, he was supposed to call on their master. ‘The Silent King will answer? I suppose all I must do is pledge my eternal fealty.’

‘No,’ said Ammeg.

Anrakyr was taken aback. That was not what he expected them to say. ‘Then who?’ he asked.

They paused, glancing at one another. ‘You will need allies,’ repeated Khatlan.

‘How do you know this?’ Frustration bled through Anrakyr’s voice.

‘Orikan the Diviner revealed this to the last triarch long ago,’ said Ammeg.

‘And you only tell me this now?’

Their heads jerked up. Something in the front line had caught their attention. They stalked forward, hunched forms moving awkwardly.

‘We will speak more on this later,’ said Dovetlan over her shoulder.

The insolence of these enigmatic servants of the Silent King set Anrakyr to fuming. He followed the praetorians, wading through the acidic blood that flooded the battlefield. Their pace increased as a screeching wail sounded from the tyranid swarms.

Flapping creatures streaked overhead, darkening the skies. Warriors angled their gauss rifles towards the sky, firing streams of lightning up above. Smoking corpses fell like rain. The ground shook as they marched forward.

Power reserves, generators supplied by clouds of linked scarabs, swirled around the crypteks. As the art of the chronomancers took hold, scarabs fell, sparks consumed by the hungry science of necron technology. The effect took moments to begin.

It started small, hardly noticeable. A slightly increased tempo in gauss shots from the necron warriors betrayed the effect of the time meddling. Then the true apocalypse began. Where before, disciplined volleys had lashed out at the flowing tides of tyranids, now came sheets and sheets of green lightning. The fabric-tearing refrain of gauss weaponry increased to become a deafening, constant sound, like the crash of rocks falling, but magnified and made constant.

Anrakyr stepped into the field of increased time, marvelling as the tyranids before him slowed. Creatures swarmed towards him, moving like they were wallowing through mud. Anrakyr laughed. This was necron technology functioning as intended.

But some creatures, already monstrously fast, charged forward heedlessly. Numbers pushed them beyond the deadly volleys of the necron warriors and into the field. The ground shook violently beneath them.

Clumsy warriors fell over, made unstable by the tremors. Rock cracked and exploded upwards. Five metres to Anrakyr’s right, a wormlike tyranid with six pairs of grasping limbs spat acid and pulled warriors down. These creatures were bursting all amongst his battleline.

Anrakyr ran towards the burrowing animal, but it retreated down its hole before he drew close. Then it exploded back up, just below the Traveller. Anrakyr cursed as he was thrown up, legs caught in the organism’s jaw.

It started to twist, to rend and bite, trying to pull the overlord beneath the earth. Anrakyr flailed, thoughts and plans flashing through his mind, but instinct took over, honed in a time he could barely remember. His spear stabbed down, diving into the top of the creature’s head. It exhaled a carrion wind, spewing the cloying reek at Anrakyr. His blow carved a furrow through the chitin that guarded the organism’s braincase. Blood oozed, but the creature continued to live.

Grunting with effort, it continued to drag the overlord below ground. He dropped his spear and grabbed at the lip of the hole, trying to find purchase. But he failed, drawn inexorably backwards in convulsive motions.

‘Assist me,’ Anrakyr yelled. No one answered him.

Light flashed, and the creature that held him exploded into clouds of ash.

Dovetlan and Ammeg stood at the lip of the hole. They offered no words and Anrakyr offered no thanks. He retrieved his spear and took up his place once more in the line.

He returned to find the time field failing, overwhelmed by the sheer number of actors moving through it. It failed and the tyranids ran forward, no longer impeded by the constant sheeting of the necron gauss volleys.

The necron line was in shambles, broken up by the tyranid subterranean assault.

Something screamed, setting his skull to shivering. Through occluding mists of boiled tyranid blood came a lumbering form. A crescent shaped head swept from side to side. The animal was the size of one of the huge human war machines, trundling forward on bladed limbs. A spiked tail lashed behind it. Scurrying along its flanks were lesser organisms, still fearsome, each easily the height of a necron.

Everything about the creature displayed its importance in whatever passed for a tyranid hierarchy. It screamed again, sending the tyranids running forward with renewed vigour. Mandibles waved around its jaws, wickedly hooked. Other organisms fell dripping from orifices in the animal’s body, newly born and already hunting.

Anrakyr looked around him, trying to find some means of killing this new threat. There was little help around him, merely dully moving warriors.

Already the emboldened tyranids were breaking the necrons, pushing them back to the gate. There was no time to find a better weapon.

Anrakyr hefted his spear and charged forward.

Surprisingly, the triarch praetorians followed. Their rods of covenant blasted a hole for him through the guardian creatures.

He slipped in the blood. Things swam in it, wormlike organisms and other, less identifiable creatures. They popped beneath his strides.

Anrakyr cast his spear, lancing the weapon deep into the organism’s head. The animal slowed with a trilling squeal. He tried to sprint forward, but the blood slowed him. He managed a run. Then he leapt, fingers punching into the beast’s side.

Other tyranids continued to spill from holes in its side, but Anrakyr ignored them. Thin blood oozed from the small wounds he punched in. He clambered onto its back and ran forward.

It bucked and trembled, trying to dislodge the necron overlord. Anrakyr nearly lost his footing, only just avoiding falling from its side to be trampled beneath its thrashing claws. An orifice opened before him and a hissing thing climbed out. Anrakyr’s fist took it through the skull, punching through chitin and bone, popping the brain.

His spear gleamed where it was lodged in the greater creature’s skull. It beckoned, like a flag. He wrapped his hands around the haft of the spear and thrust down, driving it through the braincase of the beast. It screamed one last time before it collapsed.

Anrakyr leapt clear, ploughing through the pooling tyranid blood. He paused a moment, letting the sense of victory flow through him, but it felt hollow. The tyranids lost their coordination, milling in confusion.

The overlord left the colossal corpse behind and rejoined the main body of his necrons.

The tyranids were thrown back, carved to pieces at the molecular level. Steaming chunks of dead alien collapsed into the rock. Their glutinous, acidic blood washed up the defile, unable to drain down through the solid rock, rolling in thick waves like the sap from millions of cut trees.

The bio-acid hissed and spat, creating foul-smelling, chemical steam, as it slowly ate into the shins and feet of the embattled necrons. Tyranids continued to charge forward, driven by unspeakable hunger and abominable intelligence.

Some of the smaller creatures could barely slog through the remains of their fellows. They thrashed and screamed as they drowned, sucked beneath the waves of their own species’ blood.

The assault faltered. Only the largest creatures were able to navigate the rising tide of blood. Those that approached were torn apart by concentrated gauss fire as coordinated targeting protocols activated in the empty-shelled skulls of the necron warriors. Scarabs fell in carpets as their energy was completely drained.

A reprieve had been bought.

Elation flooded through Anrakyr as further good news arrived. A rush of air fluttered the tattered, ancient fabric that draped his chassis. Jubilant, synthetic cries came from the canoptek creatures. The worker crypteks surrounded the Traveller. All of them bowed.

‘Kehlrantyr is open,’ they chorused.

Anrakyr turned away from the dead tyranids. The great gates of Kehlrantyr, the carved obsidian portals, had been levered open. Air pressure differentiation gusted out as the tomb world opened on to the surface for the first time in countless years.

Tyranid blood already spilled in, rushing in little rivulets past Anrakyr’s legs. Green lights played in the stygian darkness of Kehlrantyr’s interior. It seemed the tomb world had still to awaken, even with the tumult that engulfed its surface.

‘So it is,’ Anrakyr said. Had he been able, he would have smiled.

Shaudukar was the first to notice the pack of flayer-cursed that hunted them.

‘We are being followed, my cryptek,’ she whispered.

Valnyr sighed. ‘The reprieve is over. I suppose it was too much to hope that our path to the gate would leave us unmolested.’

Static followed her words. It sounded like the buzzing she kept hearing.

Numerous side passages branched from their path. Rotten air gusted from statue-carved niches flanking them.

‘What are your orders, Valnyr?’ Shaudukar asked.

‘I don’t know.’ Every fibre of her being demanded that she run, but she remained where she stood.

Footsteps echoed down one of the side passages. Lockstepped, disciplined, they sounded like metal on stone. Lychguard and false necrons readied themselves to face whatever this new threat might be.

The flayers hissed their static from behind, breaking into an ungainly run. A ragged volley of gauss fire and more esoteric weapons slowed them. But it was not enough. The flayers advanced, faster and faster, eager to share their hungry curse.

The mysterious footsteps grew louder and louder, bouncing off the stone, echoing from the statues. Valnyr prepared herself for the worst, diverting her attention away from the flayers. She held her staff ready. The cryptek gathered the threads of time, prepared to do what she could to survive for minutes longer. Green light flickered down the passage.

The flayers faltered as they drew level, stunned and broken by the thunder of gauss weaponry that exploded outwards. Warriors marched from the passage with near mindless belligerence. At their front stood a sentient necron. Valnyr recognised the leader as a necron of high stature, judging by the ornate carvings of his chassis and the crown that stood proud from his skull. She did not know the sigils that marked his allegiance, but she was thankful to see him.

She fell to her knees, elated. Then hunger burned through her once more. Her world went dark.

Strongpoints were being set up all across the ship, manned by armed serfs and combat-tasked servitors. Plates in the floor, walls and ceiling angled out on hydraulic pistons, creating cover and barricades.

Jatiel caught the telltale scent of smoke moving through the ship’s atmosphere.

‘That is not a good sign,’ Emudor said.

‘No, it isn’t,’ agreed Ventara.

They rushed through corridors of preparing serfs, through strobing fields of blood-red light and alarm klaxons. The ship shuddered around them, wracked by palsied tremors. A tech-adept directed them through the vessel, routing them towards the likely ingress point for the tyranid boarders. Serf shock troops, encased in bulky void-suits, were caught up in the Space Marines’ wake.

Great screams of tortured metal overwhelmed the alarms. Localised atmosphere died. Serfs fell, pulled through sudden holes in the hull and out into vacuum. Tentacles erupted through the breaches, questing, reaching and writhing. Asaliah was the first to react, to open fire. The Deathwatch veteran’s bolter coughed, popping frozen blood blisters out of the crimson and bone tyranid limbs.

Jatiel pushed himself forward. Through the vacuum and zero gravity, the Blood Angels sergeant flew towards the hole. He brought his mace down with a thunderous crack, pulverising chitin, flesh and bone. A fine mist of blood droplets sprayed outwards and then quickly froze.

Boltguns fired, the sound muted, and rounds impacted into more of the tentacles, detonating and blowing more chunks from alien flesh. Ventara yelled into the vox as one of the grasping tentacles, coated in bone hooks, rasped along his armour. Vapour shot out from the compromised battleplate, but the Space Marine fought on.

Genestealers flowed in, clambering along the tentacles like jungle predators. They jinked and danced through the hail of bolter fire. One leapt towards Jatiel, face leering with a dead-eyed smile. His mace caught it under the jaw, pulling the head and attached spinal cord off and out.

‘There are too many!’ the sergeant yelled.

Grenades sailed past him in response. The sergeant kicked off a tentacle, pushing himself back into the embrace of the Golden Promise. Shrapnel erupted before his eyes, breaking through the tentacles and running genestealers.

He saw a squid-like organism behind them, mouth open wide, vomiting forth the genestealers. Bolts flew through the void around him, impacting into the grasping organism’s body.

As he floated backwards, Jatiel reached for the krak grenades at his belt. He primed and flung them. Tentacles caught the grenades and pulled them greedily into the grasping organism’s mouth.

Jatiel smiled as they detonated, breaking up the creature’s head. Genestealers were caught in the explosion, pulled apart by bone and chitin fragments.

But Jatiel had misjudged the explosion. He was caught on its edge, flung back towards the ship and cracking into its gothic skin. His armour’s auto-senses warned him of breached integrity. Cold spots flushed against his skin and he could hear a rush of air as his armour’s atmosphere escaped.

Then Asaliah was there. ‘Up you come, sergeant.’ The veteran grabbed Jatiel and dragged him back inside.

The ship’s vox-network intruded. Tyranid creatures flooded her, boarding at multiple locations.

‘The xenos are making for the bridge and the enginarium. This ship is lost if we do not hold those locations,’ Ventara said. Already more squid-like creatures were swarming towards this breach.

‘Asaliah, you and Ventara will go to the enginarium. Secure and hold. I will take Emudor to reinforce the bridge.’

Chapter Nine

Valnyr awoke before the great gates of Kehlrantyr, borne upon the shoulders of her lychguard. The atmosphere was tense. She could hear an argument between Shaudukar and the false necrons.

‘The cryptek is afflicted,’ said Nuensis.

‘No,’ asserted Shaudukar with weary finality. Her tone indicated she had been repeating the word for some time.

‘I am… well,’ Valnyr said. ‘Let me down.’

The great gates of Kehlrantyr lay open. Green glyphs continued to glow, announcing the impeccable glory of Kehlrantyr and her unassailable hosts. The irony was not lost on Valnyr.

Their numbers were greater than they had been. Other necrons had joined the party, marked with symbols the cryptek didn’t recognise. A brace of destroyers, cackling in their own dark tongue, flew overhead, out of reach of the flayers. Canoptek constructs, summoned by the desperation of the necrons, swarmed to them. Valnyr’s fleet splashed through liquid. The acidic fluid pitted her legs, hissing and drawing clouds of dissolved metals into the air.

‘Blood,’ said Shaudukar. There was an edge to the lychguard’s voice. Valnyr glanced over, her posture indicating concern. The cryptek resisted the urge to fall to her knees and lap at the organic liquid with a tongue she no longer possessed. She shuddered. Where had that thought come from?

Sunlight streamed in from beyond, dispelling the gloom that afflicted Kehlrantyr’s interior. More unfamiliar necrons rushed inside, while Valnyr could hear the distinctive wail of necron weaponry from outside.

The Kehlrantyri drew up in a protective circle, hunched in shadow, ready for whatever came at them. Aliens hissed from behind them, joining the static-screams of the flayer-touched. One hundred necrons of Kehlrantyr, perhaps the last left sane of their fabled world, greeted their kin from elsewhere.

‘A paltry display,’ boomed a voice. ‘But a welcome one.’ The other necrons advanced on them, nigh on a thousand of them. ‘I was concerned that the tomb world was not yet awake and I am heartened to see that Kehlrantyr stands ready to greet me.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Valnyr said. Best to err on the side of caution, she thought. Crypteks, distinctive and easily recognised to Valnyr’s practiced gaze, split from the main advancing group and took station beside the great gates. Already the vast portal was humming closed, driven by the cants of these foreign necrons.

‘Your words and presence indicate that this tomb world is awake. Yet your posture states that you wish it were not so.’ The speaker halted. ‘What has happened here?’

One of the bizarrely ornamented necrons that accompanied the speaker whispered, ‘You were warned, Anrakyr.’

Valnyr said, ‘The dead words of Llandu’gor afflict us.’

Curses streamed from the speaker. A great thud sounded from the gate, a bruising organic sound as something large charged into the obsidian doors. He shouted to his crypteks, ‘Seal the gate!’

Valnyr watched them comply, watched the telltale glow of chronomancy centre on the great edifice. ‘A null field?’ she asked, unable to keep the words contained.

The necron lord turned to face her, hands clenched in the sign of profound disappointment. Lightning played over the overlord’s body, abrading away the blood and gore that covered him. A dry circle of stone surrounded him, kept clean by flowing scarabs. ‘Yes,’ he answered.

Such a display of skill, such unsurpassed knowledge of the ancient time science. To seal the doors in a field where time no longer held sway, a permanent region of stasis. They would open no more. They would never again face a progression of time. But to do so would drain the crypteks, using their power to channel the field. The implications were staggering.

She groaned, ‘What comes behind you?’

‘The tyranids swarm on this world, cryptek.’ He spoke slowly, enunciating his words as if to a child.

‘Tyranids?’ asked Maantril. ‘What manner of beasts are these?’

Nuensis blurted the equivalent of an exasperated snort. ‘The aliens that have infiltrated our tombs.’

‘We are trapped, then,’ said Maantril. Other nobles took up the cry. ‘We are trapped and there is no way out.’

The newcomers advanced. One of their number, a floating destroyer, said, ‘What of the tomb’s Dolmen Gate?’

The overlord registered surprise to hear such a question come from the dent-skulled destroyer. ‘You must have a route out.’

The three triarch praetorians flanked the overlord, rods of covenant prepared to compel an answer.

‘We do,’ Valnyr said. ‘We did not wish to use it.’

‘Where does it lead?’ asked one of the praetorians, its skull-visage surmounted by a fan of broken knives. The others chorused the same question.

‘Zarathusa,’ answered Valnyr.

The overlord groaned. ‘Of course it does,’ he muttered. ‘There is no time to waste. You,’ he indicated the Kehlrantyrian necrons, ‘will lead us to the Dolmen Gate.’

The buzzing came first, low and subsonic. It lanced through the darkness, gliding on static wings and setting the metal bones of her chassis to vibrating. Hunger followed. Valnyr’s mouth opened and static joined the screams already echoing from the dark chambers. These were the static-screams of the lost, the haunting cries of those rewritten by the flayer virus. Valnyr could almost hear the tortured personalities, the ghosts of those who had endured so much, who had let bitter jealousy and the fear of death drive them into a bargain in a now forgotten age. Her family, her kin, all those she had known, lost to the creeping vengeance of a broken god.

Necrons recoiled around her. Her fingers tapped against her staff in a restless rhythm. The fit passed.

‘You are afflicted,’ said one of the praetorians.

‘The dead words of Llandu’gor ride your soul,’ said another.

Shaudukar and her lychguard bristled. ‘Our mistress is fine,’ said the lead lychguard. Valnyr could hear a crackle beneath her words, a hint of static and buzzing.

Weapons were drawn, turned upon one another. The old divisions showed themselves. Fear and buzzing, static and horror, branched through hurried conversation, past accusation and understanding.

The tyranids were forgotten, pushed aside as a problem that could be dealt with later.

‘Enough,’ said Anrakyr, steel lashing all the others into silence. Valnyr noticed that the overlord kept his spear levelled, ready to stab out at a moment’s notice.

Two camps were forming. Kehlrantyri and Anrakyr’s foreigners faced one another. They stopped marching to the Dolmen Gate. They stood, immobile, shoulders hunched, faces impassive but with upraised voices echoing through the darkness.

Flayers chose that moment to assault, sprinting in their jerking movements, shambling into momentum from darkened streets.

Lightning lanced out from the unafflicted, punching through clumps of the flayers. Crackling sheets of green light, chained and shackled to the near-mindless necron warriors, stabbed out. Other, more esoteric weapons added their voices to the hue and cry as sentient necrons, gifted with weaponry of ancient science and provenance, fired.

But on the flayers came, talons reaching, mouths stretched wide to taste non-existent flesh.

Valnyr forgot the division between Kehlrantyri and foreigners, between her kin and her accusers. All was subsumed beneath her desire to survive and the dreadful buzzing.

Time slowed, but this was no expression of her science – this was the stress-filled moment of collision, the do or die of combat. She slammed her staff forward with nerveless grace, ramming it into the chest cavity of a hissing flayer. She grunted as she lifted the flayer. It slid towards her down the haft of her staff, hands and talons outstretched, reaching for her head.

The buzzing grew, louder and louder. She yelled, screaming into the flayer, matching the buzzing with her own vocalisations.

Then the flayer’s head was gone, chopped away by Anrakyr the Traveller. ‘Less panic, more restraint,’ he hissed. The melee swept him away.

Valnyr watched as knots of warriors were subsumed, dragged down by the frantic motions of flayers. She channelled energy, stealing atoms from the stale air of Kehlrantyr, converting them to heat and power. It coalesced at the head of her staff and blasted outwards with a thunderclap of noise, shattering flayers into pieces of stinging metal.

Shrapnel expanded in a cloud of flickering metal and smoke, pinging off the chassis of nearby necrons. An unlucky false necron was caught in the blast, flung to pieces.

Valnyr felt a moment’s pity, but it was drowned with the instinctual scrabbling for continued existence. Flayers threw themselves with mindless belligerence onto the shields of Valnyr’s lychguard.

Everywhere she looked there were flayers, stumbling from shadowed doorways, lurching out from dark streets. With them came the static, growing and growing and growing. The sound numbed her, broke her mind apart. The cryptek could scarcely stay standing.

All was confusion. All was broken. The world died around her, not with a bang, nor a whimper, but drowned beneath screams of static and buzzing.

A flayed one broke through the cordon of her lychguard, still clad in the finery of a necron noble. Its mouth stretched open, broken metal teeth glittering in the green light. Talons stretched, scraping for her throat. She stumbled back, but fell into a lychguard.

The flayer scrabbled after her.

Valnyr spat a word. Time froze in a small bubble. It enclosed just the two of them, an intimate moment between flayer-cursed Dynast and cryptek.

The flayer scrabbled on four limbs, prowling like some predator. It skittered and jumped, jaws distended. All the while it announced its terrible hunger. Something in Valnyr’s breast answered, but she shoved it away. She levered her staff, keeping it at bay. It snapped at her, jaws clacking.

Time began to resume. She shoved the bladed end of her staff through the flayer’s skull. Energy swirled down the weapon, blew through the skull and erased one of her lychguard in the blast. Again came the guilt, momentary and fleeting, and again it was smothered beneath self-preservation.

The flayer tide receded, but the buzzing stayed behind.

Valnyr could hear words, faintly through the noise, old and lost to time in a dialect she could scarcely remember. ‘To those who have turned their faces away,’ she could hear in the buzzing and the static. ‘To those who are faithless and wretched in their jealousies.’

She stood still, head cocked to the side. The words echoed from all around them, driven through the shadows and the gloom.

‘Do you hear that?’ she asked Shaudukar. The question echoed through the forgotten halls of her home.

‘To those who have denied us. To those who have denied me. I will wreak vengeance. I will wrench your souls and break your bones. I will cast hunger through your accursed existence. Down the eons, you will not forget. I will grant you this gift from love turned aside and make you like me, break you in my image as you have broken me. I shall cast the fear of myself into you and all of your kind. I am Llandu’gor. I am the hunger. I am the flayer, and from this moment, you shall be too.’

‘I am Llandu’gor,’ announced one Kehlrantyrian necron. The chorus rippled everywhere, bouncing from the dead walls.

The division came back with a sound like fire. The necron who spoke the c’tan’s name was annihilated by one of the triarch praetorians, reduced to its constituent atoms by a covenant rod.

Confusion reigned.

‘Enough,’ Anrakyr bellowed. ‘This bickering solves nothing. Cryptek, where is the entrance to the Dolmen Gate? Are we near?’

‘Yes,’ Valnyr answered, tearing her attention away from the buzzing and the half-heard words. ‘We are close.’

By the time Valnyr was aware of the betrayal, she was already bisected. Anrakyr’s spear stabbed through her spine, carving her body apart. The Traveller’s expression was impassive. How could it not be? His face, his features etched themselves onto Valnyr’s memory.

She opened her mouth to question, to ask why he had done this, but all that emerged was a scream. It sounded like static.

‘I am sorry,’ he said in a tone that implied nothing of the kind.

Shaudukar and Valnyr’s lychguard charged the Traveller, warscythes raised, angry and belligerent. The triarch praetorians turned them to ash with rapid blasts from their rods of covenant.

‘You are afflicted,’ continued Anrakyr, as if nothing had happened. ‘And that is why I am honoured by your continued insistence that you serve.’

Already flayers were emerging from the shadowed ways, lurching out from the darkness. The stunned Kehlrantyrian necrons answered with desperation, or fell to their knees and joined them.

Her mind sought purpose, searching for some utility, some artifice that could salvage this situation. She reached towards Anrakyr, trying to summon the presence of mind to repay his betrayal. Nothing answered, nothing except the frenzied screaming of the flayers.

The foreigners punched free, heading towards the Dolmen Gate and the ship that would take them from this place, take them to safety and freedom. Valnyr could only watch, inching towards her fallen staff. Already lightning played about her severed spine, metal flowing and stretching towards her sundered lower body.

But it was too slow.

Flayers were everywhere now, surrounding the doomed remnants of their kin. A chorus arose, three words repeated over and over from those still with minds and those already broken.

‘I am Llandu’gor,’ they chanted.

A snapping crackle saw her sundered body reunited. Valnyr stumbled to her feet and grasped her staff. She fired at the flayers and her kin. There was no finesse here, no discrimination and no mercy. She killed so that she would not die. She killed so that she could deny the hunger that burned within her.

One flayer attacked, clad in markings she ought to recognise. She punched her hand through its chest, reaching its spine. She tore at it, dropped her staff and reached in with both hands.

She failed. Flayers bore her down, hungry mouths open, eager to share, to welcome her into their curse.

The buzzing swelled, until it was all she could hear. Gone were the words. Gone was her identity, her science, her personality, her artifice.

With the buzzing bloomed hunger, ever-present, but now all-consuming.

The necron once known as Valnyr, High Cryptek to the Kehlrantyr Dynasts, vented its screaming hunger to the darkness, joined by the rest of her doomed kin.

Chapter Ten

Through the faded shadows of Kehlrantyr they moved. Down processional avenues, watched over by the great legions that once called the tomb world home and who would now wander the halls as corrupted revenants of the glory they once possessed. Kehlrantyr’s people doomed to suffer a fate worse than the true death. Their mortality surrendered only to find their personalities erased and their purpose futile and corrupted.

‘A tragic loss,’ insisted Armenhorlal, shockingly lucid. ‘This world is dead. Its people are dead.’

Anrakyr offered no response. The destroyer cooed to himself with an idiot’s sincerity.

The deeper they moved down into the tomb world, the greater the decrepitude of the surroundings and rampant technology became. Machines rumbled. The floor and walls vibrated to a hidden hum, just on the edge of their hearing. Green sigils stood out everywhere, warning signs marked by canoptek constructs. Each announced broken quarters of the tomb world, submerged or stolen by collapse.

Turning a corridor, they found transparent observation windows studding the processional they advanced down, offering a vista into a cavernous space. The centre of the world, the hollowed-out core of Kehlrantyr, gaped to their left, the ceiling arcing away impossibly far until it faded into itself.

A bizarre, thrumming hum coated the air. ‘The warp,’ Armenhorlal said, voice quavering slightly.

A cry went up from the front of their force. Anrakyr prepared himself for the worst. What he saw instead would have brought a smile to his face, had he been capable. Ships floated, still hanging suspended in their docks, over the world-chasm below.

Sentient necrons broke ranks and watched from the windows. Lights activated at their presence, dispelling the darkness at the heart of the tomb world in a wash of brilliance. At the very centre of the world, suspended by sciences lost even to the oldest of crypteks, floated the Dolmen Gate, and before it the great crescent blade of a Cairn-class tombship.

Derelict and desolate, the webway was a truly alien place. Colours that had no basis in reality and sounds and echoes broke all around them, shifting and dazzling. Some comforts were to be found, some anxiety balms. Here and there glowed the bright green of necron technology, eating into the walls, veining through the twisting corridors.

Small spider-like constructs flowed in their wake. The command tomb of the necron vessel was a tense place. None of the necrons spoke. They all stood at their stations, silent in their thoughts, ruminating on the paths that had led them astray, that had lured them to this desperate moment.

The near presence of the warp weighed heavily on their souls. Anrakyr felt observed, as though the eldar were watching.

As if reading his thoughts, Armenhorlal turned to him and asked, ‘Where are our old foes?’

Anrakyr, caught, collected himself, laughed. ‘Fading. They are a shadow of what they once were. Their empire was broken by their own hubris, and they have entered the twilight of their species. Their threat is past.’

‘So why do we hide here? Why not move at full speed?’ asked the destroyer.

Anrakyr provided no answer, merely toyed with his cluster of eldar stones.

‘You will need allies,’ announced Khatlan, apropos of nothing. The praetorian’s tone was conversational.

‘You have already said this,’ said Anrakyr, watching the swirling utterly alien colours of the webway pass.

‘You will need allies,’ repeated Dovetlan. The praetorians moved to surround the Traveller. Their message was clear, but Anrakyr grew tired of their sudden upsurge in communication.

‘We know where you will find them,’ said Ammeg.

‘Where?’ asked Anrakyr, his frustration rising.

‘Where we are already bound,’ answered Dovetlan.

‘The Zarathusans?’ asked Anrakyr.

‘Yes,’ said Khatlan.

‘No,’ said Dovetlan.

‘Probably,’ finished Ammeg.

‘They will help,’ began Khatlan. ‘But you will need more assistance to defeat these tyranids. You cannot rely upon the Zarathusans to stand firm against these foes.’

‘We know of others who will assist.’

‘Who? The Silent King?’

‘No,’ said Ammeg. ‘The living.’

Anrakyr laughed. ‘Why would the living accept our help?’

‘For the same reason you would seek them out. They are desperate. You are desperate.’

‘Desperation does not cause beings to take leave of their wits, nor does it ignore history,’ Anrakyr growled. ‘After what we have wrought here, after what we have wrought all over their “empire”, why would they agree to assist us?’

‘Because they have done so before. These tyranids create strange alliances. Their threat is monumental in scope. The Silent King knows this and has allowed for a loosening of the old prohibitions.’

‘You have hinted at this alliance before. Your decorations betray an organic taint,’ Anrakyr said.

‘We fought alongside the humans at the Silent King’s command once before. The alliance was convenient and ensured his victory there,’ said Ammeg. ‘We wear these decorations as a mark of honour and a reminder.’

‘Tell me more,’ said Anrakyr.

The bridge was destroyed, open to the void. Shipmaster Korbel was dead, erased in a wash of bio-acid. A wing of tyranid fighter organisms had made directly for the vital nerve centre aboard the Golden Promise and broken it open. That the organisms were eliminated scant seconds later by point defence turrets offered no consolation.

The ship was now dead in the void, while secondary systems and strongpoints were still struggling to come online. They had held for three hours, a valiant, desperate effort. A number of tyranid bio-ships lay crippled around them, a testament to Shipmaster Korbel’s command of void war. Killed in long-range duels, or broken by point-blank broadsides, they oozed frozen blood and escaped gases into Perdita’s orbit. But they had been overwhelmed by sheer numbers, surrounded by ever increasing hordes of the twisted creatures.

The convict ships had fared worse, isolated and torn apart before they could reach the perceived safety of the Adeptus Astartes vessel. Their burning hulks already painted Perdita’s skies, carved by the maws of tyranid leviathans and cast down to be rent asunder by atmospheric entry.

‘Asaliah, what is your status?’ Jatiel asked as he drove his mace through a twitching termagant.

‘We cannot hold the enginarium, sergeant,’ Asaliah grunted. ‘Too many creatures swarm this location.’

Frustration filled the Blood Angels sergeant. Duty drove him, sustained him. ‘We must abandon the ship. Head for the ventral hangar bay.’

The hangar sat roughly equidistant between the Blood Angels. Jatiel knew that this was a lost cause, that he would likely not survive making it there, let alone launching a Thunderhawk. But he was a Space Marine, and he was stubborn besides.

The sergeant and Emudor rushed through the gothic steel innards of the Golden Promise. Crew warnings and propaganda stared down at the red-armoured giants, admonishing service and praising diligence.

Bulkheads sealed, dropping down on magnetic hinges, directing the Space Marines. One to their right, sealed and shut, exploded. Acid swamped out, followed by swarming tyranids.

Emudor fell to his knees, a spar of metal skewering his helmet. The Blood Angel sank below the acid.

Jatiel pushed his way through panicking serfs. He fired over his shoulder, trusting in muscle reflexes to target the tyranid swarm behind him. Twenty thousand souls aboard the Golden Promise went about their duties. Some fled from cored and voided sections of the ship, bound for others where their skills could still be useful.

Explosions constantly rocked the ship now. Void shields were down. Jatiel could smell the actinic blowback. Smoke filled the compartments. Screaming, too. Jatiel knew it for a bad sign. ‘The ship’s air scrubbers are down,’ he hissed. Crew recoiled from the Space Marine stalking through their panicking masses. Red-robed magi, tech-priests from the Chapter’s Adeptus Mechanicus allies, swung censers and mumbled binaric prayers over sparking service panels as the Golden Promise died.

Threat identifiers painted every face that spewed past Jatiel’s vision, his helmet locking him away from the hue and cry. Vital signs for each of his squad members showed elevated heart rates and the chemical spill of combat hormones. One flickered where nothing should be, the battle-brother Jatiel had left stationed on the bridge. Cassuen. A ghost return, an imaging artefact. A taunt from his damaged armour.

A channel opened. Jatiel stopped moving. The request for contact, a haunting reminder of casualties presumed.

‘Sergeant,’ Cassuen’s voice hissed.

‘Brother, you live? What of the bridge?’

Cassuen let out a cough that was thick with phlegm. A juddering, sour breath sucked in through lungs rendered consumptive by fluid. ‘The auspex–’ Cassuen began. Another horrific, laboured breath. ‘The auspex still functions.’

It broke Jatiel’s hearts to hear such pain and such belligerent honour, to know that his brother was so near to death, and yet still clinging to duty without succumbing to the perennial curses of the Blood. ‘Sergeant. Sergeant, they have arrived. The xenos. The gate. It is open.’

One more wrenching breath, one more exhalation and then a long, gurgling rattle. The link remained open, but no more sound came through. Cassuen was dead, his warning delivered. His words heralded a great tremor through the cracking ship, shivering it down to its bones. Serfs staggered and fell, flung against walls and bulkheads. The emergency wailing took on an even more plaintive quality.

Disturbing screams filtered down the broad corridors. Shadows filled with hissing, although Jatiel knew that to be escaping atmospherics as compartments were opened to hard vacuum.

Closed bulkheads, sealed to all but the Adeptus Astartes command codes, opened as he approached. The sergeant could hear the distinctive pop-whine of firing shotcasters hurling non-standard ammunition. The weapons fired low-grade plasteks and rubber at tremendous speeds to prevent hull breaches.

Alien cries of pain and hunger met the noises. More tyranids were aboard the Golden Promise, swarming and boiling through the proud vessel’s veins.

A sudden clang was the only warning he had before spikes of super-dense bone chewed through the hull section next to him. Bright blue gas flooded in from the holes in the hull. Nearby serfs started coughing, then spasming as the gas-induced seizures. Their flesh melted seconds later.

Paint abraded from Jatiel’s armour, but the self-sufficient nature of Mark VII plate ensured the gas did little more.

The alien bones flexed and with a sound like hawked spit, the sheared-off section of bulkhead cannoned into the opposite wall. More gas flooded in. Hissing creatures leapt from the darkness, bringing with them cold, trailing vapour from an imperfect seal.

Jatiel’s boltgun barked and a stream of high-velocity, high-calibre rounds cut down the first emerging ranks of tyranid organisms. He fired one-handed. Those that slipped past were met by the sergeant’s power mace. The golden, inverted teardrop of blood crunched into an alien’s misshapen head, blowing out its brains against several more. His return stroke struck them down in turn, breaking bones, shattering bodies, culling meat.

‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius! For the Angel!’ he snarled, helmet vox-casters set to maximum, throwing his cry of belligerence and rage at the invading xenos.

Ventara and Asaliah joined him in the age-old war cry, running into the chamber. The pallid xenos creatures recoiled, sensitive aural organs nearly overwhelmed by the wall of noise. Bolts scythed them down as the two other Space Marines culled them.

‘The hangar is no longer a viable option,’ said the Deathwatch veteran.

Errant shots cut into the boarding organism that had delivered the tyranids onto the Golden Promise, prompting mewling cries of pain.

More creatures emerged from within the boarding pod, vomited out in a slurry of viscera and sickening liquids. These were four-armed organisms, each limb ending in a deadly claw.

‘More genestealers,’ Ventara spat. The aliens jinked and danced, flickering out of the way of fired bolt shells. Nimble and deadly monstrosities loped through the fug of blue smoke and squelched into the slurry of dissolving serfs.

One got inside Jatiel’s guard before Asaliah’s hurled combat knife skewered its head. It aspirated blood as it died, gurgling as dripping chunks of jellied brain oozed from the hole in its skull.

Beetle creatures whirred through the blue smoke, latching on to the front of Jatiel’s armour. They started chewing, spitting acid onto the ceramite and cutting in. He swiped them off, desperate to remove the creatures before they damaged something vital.

More termagants flowed around the genestealers, firing beetles from obscene organic rifles. The Space Marines were pushed down the corridor, retreating in the face of the tyranid onslaught.

‘There are too many of the xenos!’ Ventara yelled.

‘We need a defensible position,’ Asaliah agreed.

Jatiel had a map already overlaying his visor. His eyes rolled over the options, but there were precious few and none nearby. He spat curses into the vox.

They passed from one section into another, vaulting over a trough in the deck. All the while they fired their boltguns. All the while tyranids died. But it was not enough, nowhere near enough.

Asaliah stopped firing, wheeled and slammed his fist into the wall. A bulkhead dropped down, pounding through squealing tyranids.

Silence and smoke filled this section of the ship. Fires burned from within habitation quarters. Life pods sat quiet and empty in their cradles, waiting for serfs too filled with duty and obedience to ever use them. Drooling servitors patrolled the area, sweeping for dust and particulates. Some had fire crawling along their organic flesh.

The distant crackle of lasweaponry echoed through the corridors. The Space Marines followed the sound. Halfway down the Golden Promise’s length, they entered an observation deck.

Armourglass windows stared out into the vacuum. Tyranid creatures, some ray-like, others attached with the mindless insistence of molluscs, glared down from the windows. More organisms swooped past.

But something else dragged at Jatiel’s attention. Beyond the tyranids sucking on the glass, beyond the hive ships, the sergeant could just see a green glow emerging from the ancient structures that orbited Perdita. Lightning stabbed out from a sudden rift in reality. Then a crescent-shaped ship appeared, hanging in the darkness.

‘As if one xenos wasn’t enough,’ Asaliah spat.

The newcomer’s movements were slick, sliding between the grasping tyranid ships. Sheet lightning broke from random surfaces. Each blast terminated a bio-vessel, breaking it to bleeding pieces.

Then it slid past, bound for Perdita’s surface, punching through more xenos hive-ships.

Something critical died in the Golden Promise. Jatiel watched a surge of fire sweep from the bow of the ship, back towards the engines. Secondary blast doors slammed shut. A serf was carved in two by the descending portal. He set up a shrieking wail, agonised and horrible.

Ventara ended him with his gold-encrusted power sword.

Localised gravity failed as the ship began to spin, pushed by the explosion back into Perdita’s orbit. The Blood Angels snapped their maglocked boots to the deck.

Horror dawned in Jatiel’s soul. He knew what was coming. ‘All hands, brace for impact!’ he shouted. He was still bellowing the order when fire danced along the Golden Promise’s battered hull, erasing encrusted tyranids vomiting warrior organisms into her decks, when the storied ship entered Perdita’s atmosphere, on an inexorable course for the dead planet’s surface.

Chapter Eleven

Jatiel awoke to a pain such as he had never known. Something felt wrong in his head, as though something had come loose. He opened his eyes, saw through the green lenses that stared from his helmet. He thanked the primarch that the systems were still functional. He lay over a melting puddle of ash and snow. That should have brought meaning and understanding to where he was, but his mind refused to focus.

The Blood Angels sergeant braced his hands beneath him. Servos whined as he tried to push himself up.

He toppled and fell, overbalanced. Blood pooled beneath him, the deep and rich red of Space Marine vitae. Jatiel tried to push himself up again, grunting and heaving out breath that burned like fire. Something felt wrong, terribly wrong. His vision blurred. The ash and snow was gone, replaced by star-filled blackness. The two images wavered, fading into one another.

‘No,’ he cried.

A weight settled on his back. A calming voice, Adeptus Astartes deep, spoke. ‘Easy, sergeant. Easy.’

His backpack whined as something clicked. Power thrummed through his armour as it reactivated. ‘Up you come,’ said Asaliah, an echo of his words on the Golden Promise.

Jatiel was pulled to his feet. ‘Took a beating, Jatiel,’ said Asaliah. The Deathwatch veteran’s face, left bare to the feeble atmosphere, was a mask of pain and gritted teeth. Furrows had been carved in his flesh, rocks studding it from where he must have slid. Jatiel couldn’t tell whether Asaliah referred to himself, the sergeant, the Golden Promise or the situation in general.

Asaliah shot Jatiel’s right side a pointed look.

Jatiel glanced down and saw the reason why he couldn’t push himself up. His right arm was gone. His prized power mace was missing.

Jatiel’s gaze drifted away from Asaliah and he saw the Golden Promise burning. ‘The serfs?’ he asked, working his jaw, stretching his wrenched muscles. He used his left hand to crack his jaw back into place.

‘No unarmoured mortal would have survived that crash. We are lucky we were in the observation dome. We were thrown free from the ship when it fell. Your head preceded us, sergeant. Truly, you are blessed with a thick skull.’ Asaliah hazarded a smile, and then winced in pain.

Jatiel barked an ugly laugh. ‘What of Ventara?’ he asked after a moment.

‘I’ve yet to find him, sergeant. I did find this, however.’ Asaliah offered Jatiel Ventara’s bolter. ‘We should be armed.’

‘Acknowledged, brother.’ Jatiel cocked the boltgun, awkwardly cradling it with the stump of his right arm. ‘This will take some getting used to.’

Asaliah grinned. ‘I suspect you’ll manage.’

They picked their way out of the rubble, moving away from the burning Golden Promise. The ship groaned as it settled into Perdita’s crust. Jatiel saw that the great vessel had carved into the planet’s depths.

‘What lies beneath us?’ he asked.

‘Some sort of cave network.’ Asaliah shrugged. ‘The tactical briefings never hinted at their existence.’

‘We should ascertain if a threat is here, try to find the xenos that appeared in orbit.’

Asaliah nodded. ‘As you say.’

The pair descended awkwardly through the treacherous footing. Spars of metal stabbed from Perdita’s surface, relics of the crash, offering handholds and a precarious route down.

Obsidian replaced granite the deeper into the crust they moved. Great metal cables snaked through the rock, sparking and stabbing out from broken ends where they had been snapped by the Golden Promise. Melted adamantium, ablated and super-heated by the ship’s disastrous entrance into Perdita’s orbit, dripped past them in sizzling streams.

Jatiel was breathing heavily. An insistent rune in his helm-display announced that he had a fractured skull. Shadows swooped, shadows that Jatiel knew had no basis in reality. He blinked the rune away.

As they neared the bottom of the hole, Jatiel slipped and fell. Without a right arm to stabilise him, the sergeant clattered and slid down into the darkness. He knew that Asaliah would be following as quickly as he dared.

The sergeant slipped over an edge, body cartwheeling as it encountered empty, stale air. Jatiel’s thoughts deserted him as he fell the last metres.

Cables snapped at him, violently arresting his momentum. They held for microseconds, then broke in showers of sparks and lightning. He hit more and more, until he neared the bottom of the chasm. The last held and the sergeant was stuck, gently swaying in the darkness.

Liquid dripped from above, pattering across the blood-red plates of his armour. He blinked. The runes asserted that his skull was fractured. They announced that his brain suffered from oedema, swelling in its case, punished by trauma. Strain was placed on his psyche. The cracks in his mind widened further. He ignored the insistent bio-readouts.

‘Sergeant,’ a voice called.

Jatiel knew the cadences of the voice, recognised them, but could not match a name or a face to it.

‘It’s Asaliah,’ said the voice. Asaliah. Of course. ‘I am going to cut you down. Hang tight.’

Jatiel nodded and then laughed, the sound echoing. ‘Hang tight,’ he said. The words and the situation were absurd. He could see Asaliah’s face highlighted in the darkness, pale and worried.

The report of a boltgun echoed, suddenly loud and bold. Sparks flew and Jatiel fell.

Fifteen metres down he hit the smooth, polished planes of the floor. Stone and ribs cracked. Ceramite fractured. Jatiel blacked out with the pain.

Asaliah was there to help him up. ‘My thanks,’ said Jatiel.

Lights clicked from Asaliah’s armour, splitting the gloom and cutting away the strobing darkness. The broken hulk of the Golden Promise pressed down from above, shifting and creaking in the darkness. Small fires still burned on her. Blood and ichor dripped from cracks in the hull, the last remains of the serfs that had called her home and the xenos that had broken her.

Jatiel pushed out a breath, laboured and wheezing. It emerged as a snarl from his helmet’s vocalisers. A groan replied from the darkness. The two Space Marines’ bolters snapped up, hunting in the darkness. ‘Xenos?’ Jatiel voxed.

‘No,’ said Asaliah. ‘That was human.’

Asaliah’s light pierced the gloom, but barely broke into the obsidian-walled depths. Strange carvings reflected the light back at them, tinging it green. Skulls, great metre-high reliefs, watched from the black, shadows lingering in their sockets.

The groan came again, a wet cough of pain, thick with blood.

Asaliah’s light shone, illuminating the space just below the Golden Promise.

A metal spar had stabbed into the floor, then broken free from the wreck. Impaled on that spar, pierced through his groin and abdomen, was Ventara. The Space Marine hung, blood drooling down the metal. His armour, with all its beautiful decoration, was cracked and broken.

Jatiel and Asaliah rushed to his side, both hobbling as fast as their abused bodies allowed. ‘This looks grim, sergeant,’ said Asaliah.

‘It does. We’ll have to pull him off.’

Asaliah nodded. With a grunt, the Deathwatch veteran stepped below the impaled Space Marine. Jatiel took up position beneath Ventara’s backpack. They shoved, inducing pain-born stars to dance in Jatiel’s vision.

Ventara groaned again, chemically numbed, voice thick with drool. He barely moved, sliding up the glistening length of broken metal. Asaliah grunted and they shoved the wounded Space Marine off the spar.

Jatiel heard scrabbling from above, claws snicking against the adamantium hull of the Golden Promise. Screeches came from the upper darkness, filled with alien hunger. Jatiel caught glimpses of bioluminescence, of bone and red chitin.

He opened fire, trying to track the aliens, to follow their movement patterns. The sergeant hit something. Blood spattered against the broken hulk of the frigate. A headless body fell, crunching grotesquely into the stone beside Jatiel.

The fallen creature writhed on broken limbs before exhaling a noxious breath and dying.

Asaliah added his own fire to his sergeant’s before Jatiel’s bolter clicked dry. He dropped the clip and pulled a new one from his belt, but it would not fit. It had been dented by his fall, wrenched out of shape. He had no time to find another.

Genestealers swarmed towards the Space Marines, hissing their vile hunger. Four-limbed monstrosities leaped forward.

Jatiel missed his mace as they came close in the blink of an eye. Bereft of the beautiful weapon, Jatiel resorted to using the empty bolter as a club. The weapon proved effective as a blunt instrument of death as he broke through a genestealer’s chest cavity. Organs were blown out of the mauled xenos’s back. It flew back into more of the beasts.

Others danced and jinked, moving inhumanly quick on long limbs. They scrabbled and clawed.

Ventara opened up with a bolt pistol, slurring litanies of fury and thirst through his chemical haze. Asaliah’s bolter fire was expertly timed. Each bolt broke through one xenos, breaking out in a spray of blood and bone fragments, to find a home in another.

The horde of genestealers thinned.

‘My–’ Jatiel began. A xenos slipped through his guard, past the bolter, past his armour. Its clawed limb reached out. He ducked, trying to get out of its way. He tried and failed. It knocked into his helmet. A horrible pain blossomed in his skull. He blacked out.

Jatiel awoke to find Asaliah and Ventara surrounded by the broken and bleeding corpses of genestealers.

Ventara shared a worried, knowing look with Asaliah.

‘I am fine, brothers,’ said Jatiel, seeking to allay their concern.

‘As you say, sergeant,’ Ventara replied. The Space Marine clutched at the horrific wound that carved through his centre. It continued to bleed, a bad sign to one blessed by the gene-seed of Sanguinius. That the wound would not clot, that the Larraman cells and leucocytes of his advanced biology could not repair the injury, did not bode well.

With the combat over, the xenos dead – this wave at least – Asaliah sprayed synthetic flesh over the horrific injury. Ventara removed his helm. His pupils were large, dilated to account not just for darkness, but for the chemicals that raged through his system.

‘Your orders, Jatiel?’ Asaliah asked.

The sergeant cradled Ventara’s bolter, reloading it awkwardly with one hand. ‘As before. We ascertain the threat these xenos pose. We find a way to warn Lord Dante.’

His brothers nodded, but he could see disquiet in their eyes. Their situation was dire. Without a ship, how would they warn their Chapter Master? With the tyranids consuming this system, how would such a message even reach him before he brought the strength of the Chapter here?

Jatiel shoved the doubt aside. It served no purpose here. Questions had never suited him. Only duty. Only ever duty. ‘We go deeper.’

So they did, through the darkness, weaving between massive chambers, black as the void. They moved past xenos carvings that glared with mindless, empty hunger. Sounds echoed behind them, the scrabbling purchase of claw against smooth stone, the scrape and susurrus of xenos breath.

The Space Marines ignored the noises, letting the sounds wash over them. They had a mission, and nothing else mattered.

Green lights swam through the gloom-filled depths. A hum suffused the air, setting dust to floating. Jatiel was no expert in xenos blasphemy, but even to him it was apparent that something here was awakening.

Little beetle machines watched from cracks in the wall, Asaliah’s torchlight winking off micro-lenses and metal carapace. All around their reflections were thrown back at them, bouncing off the smooth obsidian of the walls. Carved reliefs displayed skeletal xeno-forms battling against what Jatiel thought appeared to be eldar.

‘What are those?’ Ventara asked, his voice blurring through the gloom, slurred with pain and chemical pain-suppressants.

‘Eldar,’ answered Asaliah simply, his voice grim.

Noise came from above, a subtle clicking sound, like gears shifting or a pen tapping.

Asaliah’s light illuminated the ceiling. Green lenses stared down.

Ventara bellowed, ‘Contact!’

Jatiel opened up with his boltgun as the alien construct descended on millipede callipers from the ceiling, hovering like a Land Speeder. It screeched at them in a machine burble.

Light played about the large lens that served the construct for a face. Energy coalesced. The chattering boltgun threw rounds into the construct’s body, glancing off rippling alien materials. Sparks flew. As it moved, the construct phased in and out of existence, bolts passing through the now translucent body. Each phased effort brought the alien machine closer.

Lightning spat from its eye, barely missing Jatiel. His armour blackened, paint abraded into ash. He could feel intense heat flash-burning his skin.

Asaliah’s bolter barked again, joined by Ventara’s pistol. But the creature faded, dropping into the darkness.

The clicking of its calliper limbs surrounded the Space Marines. Pain punched through Jatiel’s left leg. A metal forelimb erupted through his thigh.

Asaliah dropped his bolter and grabbed the sergeant as the machine started dragging him backwards, pulling him into the darkness. Jatiel bellowed as more limbs gripped his leg, and pressure and pain mounted.

The construct stopped moving. It phased out of existence, leaving holes in Jatiel’s leg. It reared back into reality above Asaliah and Jatiel, energy coruscating about the eye lens.

‘The eye!’ Asaliah yelled. ‘Take out its eye!’

Bolts hammered at the construct, pinging off the metal as Ventara fired his pistol. A well-placed shot blew out the construct’s eye in a wash of actinic lightning. Micro-explosions studded the alien construct, travelling along its length as circuits were consumed by energy blowback. Anti-gravity engines failed and the thing fell to the floor with a clatter of metal.

More tapping came from deeper in the tunnel. A curious looping speech sounded as well, harsh and full of consonants and machine burbles.

The Space Marines moved back, clustering closer to one another. Jatiel hurried to reload his bolter. Ventara and Asaliah readied their close combat weapons.

Lights burst into being all around them, emerging from the walls, eating the darkness. The reliefs seemed to march and writhe, alien figures making war once more.

Screeching sounded from behind them, the unmistakable hiss of questing tyranid organisms. Ventara turned to face that direction. In his hand, he hefted a number of fragmentation grenades, primed and ready for throwing.

‘It seems we are caught between one threat and another,’ Asaliah said. ‘As usual.’

Jatiel barked a dark, sad laugh. ‘We were lucky to survive this long. We lived through the crashing of a starship. Every breath since has been a gift from the Emperor and Sanguinius.’

‘Your orders, sergeant?’ Ventara asked.

‘Die well,’ answered Jatiel. ‘Die well, my brothers.’ The Blood Angels sergeant sighted down his boltgun. He breathed out words, ages old. They felt smothered by the darkness around them, but not by the situation. ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius.’

Asaliah handed his sergeant a bolter magazine and took up the words, belted them out with all three of his lungs, and expelled them at the foe. ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius! By the Blood of our primarch!’

Footsteps arched towards them, the sound slightly off as it echoed, as if it were produced by legs that did not match the proportions of the human frame. The cadence was different, and therefore wrong. Synchronised stamping signalled the double-step of a marching phalanx. Green lights sputtered from ahead of them.

Scuttling claws came from behind, scrabbling and hurried, like rats crawling through the walls of a house, hungry, searching.

The first aliens came into view, skeletal and vile. Jatiel opened fire, boltgun blazing and clawing chunks out of the advancing phalanx. They did not answer back. They withheld fire, weathering the storm of righteousness. Xenos fell, spindly skeletons toppling to twitch in the dust of their dead world. Lightning played about their limbs and they staggered to their feet seconds later, lifeless skulls glaring without malice at the Space Marines.

Still they came on. Still they withheld their fire. Why? The question formed in Jatiel’s mind before being shunted away. The question served no purpose. All that mattered was that he yet drew breath and that the enemies of mankind surrounded him.

Behind him, he could hear the savage movements of Ventara as the Space Marine fought off sprinting tyranids. Creatures vaulted overhead, and soon a sea of hissing, screeching organisms surrounded the Space Marines. Claws extended, hooting and spitting xenos rushed forward in a mad scramble, dead-eyed with mouths twisted by unknowable hunger. Acidic drool pitted the obsidian floor. The ambient temperature rose as the press of bodies grew and Jatiel turned to face the tyranids. If the necrons weren’t going to fight back, the organic aliens were the more pressing threat.

Jatiel’s bolter, emptied of ammunition, became a club once more. He used it with savage efficiency, laying into the tide of genestealers. Bones broke and flesh split. Alien ichor flew from shattered jaws and cloven skulls. The strength of his blood sustained him, driving him to feats that would be considered heroic even by the genhanced standards of the Adeptus Astartes. He was an avatar of fury, an angel of death. His fangs cut into his lips, driving from his gums and drawing his own blood. His fractured skull, his injured brain, were forgotten in the purity of this moment.

But the genestealers were quick things, bouncing and jangling. They slipped through the sergeant’s guard, punching claws into his armour like knives through paper. Blood streamed freely from his many wounds. Already he felt cold, lost blood being barely replaced by synthetic chemicals.

By Jatiel’s side, Ventara’s skulls and sliced off limbs. Adrenaline cast off the sluggishness of the chemicals and medicines that flooded his body. He chanted litanies of death and devastation, hymnals to a secular understanding of the founder of the Imperium and His primarchs.

They fought back-to-back, killing and somehow avoiding death. They moved as one, each action followed by another, anticipated and anticipating. Their boots squelched in the rapidly growing pool of blood and ruptured organs. But they did not slip. They did not fall. They were the Emperor’s finest, none better. They were sons of Sanguinius, the Emperor’s Own Angel.

Wounds were carved, rents made in their armour. Transhuman blood spilled, dripping to the floor, mingling with spilled tyranid perfidy. The wounds were ignored, lost beneath the killing haze. The red thirst of battle gripped their souls, consuming them, filling them with an unquenchable thirst. A low, howling moan slipped through Jatiel’s lips, channelling his pain and rage, expelling it outwards in time with every blow he landed.

The Space Marines fought on, flesh hanging from them in ribbons, bodies torn and bleeding. But no mortal blows fell. They fought with the fury of their primarch, the consummate poise and skill of that angelic being.

Shadows descended over Jatiel’s vision. He heard a scream in his mind, a voice far deeper and more beautiful than his own could ever be. The Blood Angels sergeant blinked the darkness away and turned as he heard a sigh slip through slack lips.

Ventara was the first to die, decapitated by the bladed limbs of a lictor. His body fell, cast aside and dashed against the rock walls. He shattered into a frieze, breaking an eldar warrior-figure and a necron overlord. The body, no longer housing the immortal soul of Naskos Ventara, slumped to the floor with a wet meat thump. It danced and jerked as neurons continued to fire, the flesh not aware that the animating force was gone.

All the while the skeletal ranks of necrons watched and waited, as silent and still as the dead things they resembled. They saw the Space Marines’ heroism, observed Ventara’s death. Their gaudy leaders, covered in ornate trappings, watched with cocked heads.

Through the screen of flickering tyranids, Jatiel saw a skeletal limb flash up and then down. It was obviously an order given.

Green lightning sheeted into the tyranids, slaying the creatures. Skeletal forms waded into the melee, culling and scything down the beasts. The reprieve was entirely unexpected. His brain began to form a question, lost in the distraction. And so, Jatiel was entirely unaware of the chance to save Asaliah’s life, the opportunity to buy the Deathwatch veteran a chance to fight on for a scant few seconds more.

A genestealer lunged forward, four killer limbs outstretched, mouth wide and the filthy, crawling horror of the creature’s ovipositor distended from between drooling jaws. It danced past Jatiel, passing inches from the sergeant. He could have reached out, could have battered the creature, thrown himself before it. But he did not, lost in wonderment at receiving aid from the necrons. The genestealer latched onto Asaliah.

Asaliah, the brother who had served twice with the Ordo Xenos, the brother who had fought horrors beyond counting in both the black and silver of duty and the red and gold of honour, right hand and friend to Jatiel, fell, vivisected into steaming sections by the alien.

Jatiel could have saved him, could have intervened. He could have lashed out with his elbow, knocking the creature away. But he was distracted, and Asaliah paid for his laxity.

Jatiel’s psyche flew apart. The duty that pulled at him, that shaped and guided him, was drowned beneath a tide of blood. The angelic exterior that should have guided every son of Sanguinius fell away, revealing the beast that lurked within.

The sergeant flew at the crouching genestealer that had torn apart his friend. He dropped his bolter and pummelled the alien. It mewled in sudden pain, but he ignored its sounds, as he ignored the claws that ripped at him. All that mattered was that this creature die, that all of these creatures die.

He broke the genestealer, shattering its spine upon his knee. Jatiel tore after the others, seeing only red. In the back of his mind, he could hear the repeated discharge of the necron weaponry, could hear the strange sounds of language coming from the aliens, but he was lost to anger.

More tyranids fell before him, torn apart by his fury. A genestealer landed on his back, hissing and spitting. Its grasping claws tore away his helmet, baring his senses to the foetid reek of blood and spilled viscera. He could feel his fangs carving through his lips.

He was alone and surrounded. The tyranids glared at him with their dead eyes. Then they swarmed him as one. Jatiel fell beneath a mound of the creatures, borne down by claws and bladed limbs. Barbs and spikes shot into his flesh.

His world was filled with hissing, buzzing pain. The red haze lifted from him, beaten into submission by his impending death.

Then came a reprieve. The mass of wriggling, biting tyranids was pulled from him by aliens with expressionless skulls. A blade lanced through a genestealer that crouched on top of him, the tip nearly punching through the aquila that stood proud on Jatiel’s chest. Metal hands gripped his pauldrons, hefting him into the air.

The sergeant looked down.

A skull’s unblinking visage, proportions noxious and alien, met his gaze. The head was cocked to the side, a curious regard. More of them crowded around this overlord, bedecked in tattered gold and tarnished metal. Axe blades crowned its skull and it opened its mouth to speak, to craft words in a halting and unfamiliar accent. The xenos’s skeletal hand stretched up to his throat, grasping at the soft point where the helmet interfaced with the breastplate.

‘I am called Anrakyr the Traveller,’ it said in machine-mimicked language. ‘I wish to offer assistance in your time of trials.’

Jatiel’s mind struggled to comprehend the situation, struggled to make sense of what was happening. ‘By the Blood,’ he said, the oath slipping past his lips unbidden. ‘Why?’ he asked, his voice full of wonder and growling rage. ‘Why would you help us, xenos?’

The necron shifted where it stood, placing Jatiel down almost gently. ‘You assume that we think and behave on the same twisted wavelength that you filthy humans do. You assume our reasoning follows the same paths that your stunted minds take. We wish to help because it is in our interest to aid you here. Be relieved that we offer our assistance. Now, come with me as I awaken this tomb world. Know that you are privileged to witness this. Take it as a mark of respect, for your skill in fighting these things.’ He gestured to the dead and dying tyranids.

‘And then?’ asked Jatiel. ‘After you have awoken this world?’

‘Then,’ said Anrakyr, ‘you will take me to your leader.’

About the Author

Joe Parrino is the author of a range of Warhammer 40,000 stories, including the novella Shield of Baal: Devourer, the audio dramas Alone and Damocles: The Shape of the Hunt, and the short stories ‘Witness’, ‘The Patient Hunter’, ‘Nightspear’, ‘In Service to Shadows’ and ‘No Worse Sin’. He lives, writes and works in the American Pacific Northwest.

The might of Hive Fleet Leviathan bears down on the worlds of the Imperium.
As the xenos threat approaches, the elite soldiers of the Militarum Tempestus are charged with a vital and deadly mission by the agents of the Inquisition.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover illustration by Dave Greco.

© Games Workshop Limited 2014. All rights reserved.

Black Library, the Black Library logo, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy logo, The Horus Heresy eye device, Space Marine Battles, the Space Marine Battles logo, Warhammer 40,000, the Warhammer 40,000 logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated brands, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer 40,000 universe are either ®, TM and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2000-2014, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world. All rights reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78251-756-6

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 You attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.