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.

Something, perhaps the year of living by the skin of his teeth on occupied Gereon, or merely the fact of having been born a sly and ruthless son of a bitch, had given Major Rawne of the Tanith First a certain edge.

He could usually smell trouble coming. That morning, he could definitely smell trouble coming. As edges went, his was as fine and sharp as the one along the blade of his straight silver warknife.

At dawn, with the twin suns beginning to burn up through the petrochemical smog across the city bay, he left the regimental billet and walked down to the rockcrete wasteland of the bayside revetment. There, he wandered as far as the bridge, and crossed over to the pontoons in front of the island guardhouse.

The pontoon walkway clunked underfoot. Looking down through the mesh, he could see the water, toxic brown and frothy. The massive galvanic plants along the bay, Adeptus Mechanicus developments that powered and lit the hive city’s core systems, had just flushed their heatsinks, and filled the coastline with its morning dose of radioactive effluent. There was steam in the air, steam that stank of sulphur and rolled like a fog bank, white in the suns’ light. The waters of the bay and estuary had been corrosively acidic for a thousand years. It was sobering to think that anything still lived in it.

But things did. Just below the surface, they squirmed and moved, leech-mouthed, slug-slick, with dentition like crowded pincushions and eyes like phlegm. Rawne could see them, following him beneath the surface; a dark, wriggling mass. What gave them their edge? Was it the sound of his footsteps, the passing heat signature of his body? Pheromones? His shadow on the water?

They were survivors. They had adapted to their environment instead of allowing it to kill them. And they killed anything that threatened them.

Just like him.

Three Urdeshi troopers were manning the guardhouse. They didn’t know him, and he didn’t know them. They weren’t his concern. He had chosen that particular morning because it was pretty much the last chance he was going to get before the regiment shipped out. The point of no turning back had been reached.

But still, there was the nagging discomfort of his edge. Something was off. Something was wrong. He’d chosen the wrong day to try it. Maybe the troopers suspected him of something, maybe they were wired up for some reason. Maybe something had given away his true intent.

Under ordinary circumstances, the doubt would have been enough to make him abort, turn around, and go home. The uncertainty would have been sufficient to make him blow it off and try again another day when the odds were more favourable.

Except there weren’t going to be any more other days. It was now, or it was never. There were no more chances. The monster, that monster, should have been dead long since. Justice and decency demanded it, and only the dedicated efforts of good men who ought to have known better were ensuring the monster’s salvation.

Dedication. Rawne had always possessed a measure of dedication. He knew what was right and what was wrong. He knew when an order was a bad thing and needed to be ignored. He knew that sometimes a man had to be counter-intuitive. A man had to do what looked like a bad thing so that everything else would be right in the end.

The monster was destined to die. Its death was required, demanded. Efforts had already been made, by more than one interested party. Rawne couldn’t stand by and let things carry on.

Rawne was a man of serious convictions, after all. Thankfully, they’d all been wiped from his record the day he joined the Imperial Guard.

The Urdeshi watched him as he approached. What did they suspect? Did they know what he had really come for?

He stopped at the outer cage gate. The Urdeshi troopers wore black metal pins that indicated they had been seconded to serve the Commissariat’s S Company, the close protection and security detail. They asked him his name and his business, and studied the papers he passed through the metal letterbox. One of them took a long time over the Contact Permission document signed by Rawne’s commanding officer, as though he had literacy problems.

They let him through. They checked his ID tags. They eyed his tattoos with scorn. He was some kind of heathen farm-head from an agri-world, an indentured barbarian, not a proper fighting man from a civilised place like Urdesh. Only his rank kept the insults at bay.

They took his sidearm, put it in the guardhouse locker, and made him sign for it. Then they patted him down.

The Urdeshi had been fairly thorough up until that point, but now the long night shift and a clutch of caffeine headaches began to show. Rawne had been patted down by the very best in his time. He knew precisely how to twist or turn, innocent movements that looked like balance-keeping, so that even somebody taking the pat-down seriously could be misled and misdirected. Rawne kept his hands raised. By the time they’d finished, they would believe they had methodically checked everywhere, where in fact he had kept them entirely clear of one or two areas.

They found the knife. Tanith warknife, straight silver, buckled to his right shin.

‘What’s this?’ asked one.

‘Back-up,’ replied Rawne.

They took it, made him sign for it.

He’d wanted them to find it. It was the decoy. People believed they’d done a thorough job if they found something. People usually stopped searching at that point.

‘You’ve got thirty minutes,’ said one of the guards. ‘That is the permitted duration authorised by your papers. You will be back here in twenty-nine minutes. If you’re not, we will come looking for you and you will be considered a justified target.’

Rawne nodded.

They opened the inner cage gate. Its chain hoist clattered. He walked through the guardhouse and out onto the inner causeway of the pontoons. The tide clearly caught here between the vast stone piers of the island. There was a pronounced stink of sulphur, and a soupy mass of dissolving garbage lapped against the slimy walls of the inlet.

He left the pontoon walkway and climbed stone steps that brought him in under the archway entrance. The island was an artificial atoll of stone and rockcrete built to support a squat, formidable lighthouse tower. The bridge that had originally connected it to the shore had long since rotted away. It had been replaced by the metal pontoon and the walk span.

The lighthouse hadn’t burned for a long time. Dark and neglected, the tower’s thick walls and inaccessibility had been put to other uses.

Once he was out of sight of the guardhouse, Rawne stepped back into the shadows. He reached down to his left calf, and removed the other Tanith warknife he was carrying. He had tied it around his shin with boot laces. The one he’d surrendered had been Meryn’s. Rawne had taken it without asking. Meryn would probably be searching his billet for it already. It added to Rawne’s enjoyment of the whole enterprise to think that, whatever else happened, Meryn would end up on a charge for misplacing his regimental dagger.

Rawne believed the knife would probably be enough. It certainly ought to be enough for any self-respecting Tanith-born to get the job done. But he wanted to cover all the variables.

Off to the side of the lowering entrance archway was a dim stone cistern. It had once been the chute of a garderobe, or a drain-away built to cope with heavy storm swells. The edge of his warknife, deftly applied, freed the lip of the cast iron cover. Rawne hooked his fingers around the bars of the cover and lifted it out. There was a damp stone well underneath, with water lurking in the darkness at the bottom. Other things lurked down there too, things with pincushion gums and egg-white eyes. He could hear them slopping and writhing gleefully, as if entertained by his cunning.

The cord had been attached to the underside of the drain cover, so that it hung down into the shaft of the well, weighted by the waxed burlap musette bag on the end. He pulled the line up, and the bag with it, opened the drawstring top, and took out the heavy object wrapped in vizzy cloth.

It was a collection of objects in fact, all of them dense and heavy. Machined metal components. Rawne spread the cloth on the stone floor beside the drain, and laid the parts out on it. He slotted them together, quickly and skilfully. He’d done it a thousand times before. He could have done it blindfold. Each piece clacked or wound into place. The smell of gun oil was sweet and strong in his nostrils.

Standard Munitorum-issue laspistol, Khulan V pattern. It was one of the original stamped blanks shipped from Khulan for finishing in the armouries of Tanith, prior to issue at the Tanith Founding. The palm-spur had been fitted with a handmade nalwood grip, and age and use had lent the figuring greater beauty than any varnish or lacquer could have achieved.

The pistol had been smuggled into the lighthouse over a period of weeks, one part at a time. It lacked a power cell, a flash sleeve and the side casings. Rawne reached into his belt pouch. Inside were two cigars rolled in black liquorice paper. The S Company sentries had taken them out, sniffed them, and given them back. Each cigar was in a little tin case. Except they weren’t. One of the tin cases was actually a flash sleeve. Rawne blew out the traces of tobacco fibre and screwed the sleeve onto the end of the barrel.

The Urdeshi had also failed to notice that he was wearing four tags, not two. Rawne unlooped the two side plates from the slender chain, dropped the tags back down under the neckline of his vest, and slotted the side plates into position.

Then he struck the tip of his knife into the back of his boot heel, and pulled the heel block away from the upper. The power cell was secured in a cavity he’d hollowed out of the heel. Rawne stamped the heel back in place, then slapped the cell into the gun. He toggled off, armed it, got a tiny green light on the grip just above his thumb. He felt the ambient hum of a charged las weapon.

He dropped the drain cover back, slipped the knife into his belt, and walked up the steps from the entrance archway with the pistol down at his side in his right hand.

There was a semicircular stone chamber beyond, large and full of echoes. Munitorum-issue armoured window units had been bolted or heat-fused into the gaping stone sockets. Rawne passed on into a larger stone chamber, fully circular and three or four storeys high. It was the core of the lighthouse. In the base, dead centre, stood some of the old lampwork, a great, engineered brass contraption with a wick-mount, winding handles, and a reservoir feed from the promethium sump below. A huge frame of gearing and chainlines surrounded it to elevate the lamp to the beacon room at the apex of the tower once it was lit.

The brass lampwork was black with age and the chains had rusted. The gears and winders were so corroded they had frozen, blotched green and white, and would never turn again. Decades of dust had accreted on the black grease of the lamp head and wick assembly in such quantity it looked like some exotic, thickly furred animal mounted on display.

Rawne walked up the stairs that ran around the curve of the chamber wall. There was no rail, and he made no sound, though the latter was not even deliberate. Like many Tanith, he had been taught by that great educator, life, not to give himself away.

He smelled caffeine and the unmistakable aroma of fried nutrition fibre. Slab, staple of the common lasman’s diet, cornerstone of Guard rations.

Rawne reached a landing space. There was a doorway ahead. A guard, another Urdeshi man, was sitting beside the doorway on a chair borrowed from another building. Rawne kept the laspistol against his hip so that the man wouldn’t see it immediately. He kept walking. It was all about confidence. Confidence was the key to everything. Use enough of it and you could pull off any scam, win any fight, or bed any mamzel. The more you acted like you were absolutely supposed to be doing something, the less chance anyone would ask what the hell you were up to, until it was too late, and they were – depending on the circumstances – financially worse off, dead, or surprisingly naked.

The guard didn’t spare him a second look. Rawne passed him, and went in through the doorway.

The room had originally been the tower master’s chamber. It was bare boards and grilled windows, and the corkscrew staircase ran up the inside wall to the platform levels higher in the tower. The room currently contained a heavy wooden cot, a small trolley table and an old wooden chair.

The cot was neatly made, the blanket and bedroll laid out as if for a barrack hall inspection. On the table was a small lumen lamp, some books and a cookhouse tray. On the tray was a tin cup and a flask of caffeine, a salt shaker, a mess dish with the remains of a serving of slab cake, hard biscuits and refried bean paste, and a worn metal spoon. Rawne was surprised they’d allowed a spoon. A determined man could turn a spoon into a weapon. He could sharpen it against stone, stab with it. If he didn’t have time to work its edge, he could improvise. Even blunt, it could do damage to an eye or a throat if driven with enough force.

Maybe it’s me, Rawne thought. Maybe I just see weapons in everything. Maybe to other people, that’s just a spoon.

The books were all Imperial tracts and trancemissionary pamphlets, stamp-printed on brown, low-quality paper. It was all the monster ever seemed to read. He said they helped to settle him and fortify his resolve.

The monster was sitting in the chair beside the table, reading one of the tracts while he digested his breakfast. He was wearing unmarked black fatigues, boots and a brown hide jacket. His shaved scalp and face were covered in deliberate ritual scars, old and puckered, but the hands holding the trancemissionary treatise were soft and unmarked.

The monster became aware of Rawne’s approach. He stopped reading and looked up.

‘Major Rawne,’ he said. ‘I did not expect to see you this morning.’

So damn polite. Like a real person.

‘Pheguth,’ Rawne replied.

The monster looked startled for a second. It wasn’t just the fact that he had been called traitor in his own, abhuman tongue. It was the fluency of it. Rawne’s time on occupied Gereon had allowed him to acquire a conversational grasp of the Archenemy language. He didn’t merely know the word for betrayer, he could deliver it with colloquial authenticity. It was as though a part of the monster’s old life had come back to threaten him.

The monster saw the weapon. He saw Rawne raising the laspistol from the guarded place beside his hip.

‘Major–’ he began.

Rawne said nothing else. He took aim and fired.

The crack of the discharge echoed around the room. Rawne heard seabirds roosting in the upper parts of the lighthouse launch into the air at the sound of the shot. Nothing else.

Footsteps. There would be footsteps. Which side would they come from? What angle did he need to cover?

Rawne looked at the monster. The monster, Mabbon Etogaur, looked back at him.

‘Come on, or you’re a dead man,’ Rawne said.

Mabbon got up out of his chair. Rawne’s shot had severed the heavy iron chain that linked the etogaur’s manacles to a hefty floor pin. He looped up the trailing, cut end of the chain around his right hand.

‘I don’t understand,’ Mabbon said.

‘No time to explain,’ Rawne replied.

It was going to be from the right.

The sea window blew in, exploding in a spray of armoured glass fragments. There was a man outside, on the lighthouse’s external walkway.

Rawne tackled Mabbon and brought him down behind the trolley table and the cot. Three more las-shots shrieked in through the blown window space and scorched holes in the opposite wall. Prone, Mabbon looked at Rawne.

Rawne gestured for him to keep down.

The shooter outside switched his lasrifle to full auto and unleashed a storm of rounds into the room. Several struck the side of the heavy cot, splintering the wood and slamming the frame backwards. Some hit the trolley table and knocked it over. Some punctured the back of the old chair and filled the air with dust and floating animal hair fibres.

Silence. Dust and smoke drifted in the sunlight. Mabbon looked set to move. Rawne, still flat on his belly, reached out and picked up the salt shaker that had been knocked off the tray. He used it like a pen, and drew on the stone floor in salt. The looping white lines formed the scratch symbol for ‘play dead’. The Blood Pact scratch symbol. Some said Rawne had learned far more on Gereon than was entirely good for him.

Mabbon looked at the symbol and nodded.

The shooter was cautious. He had killed the guard at the door before Rawne’s arrival: cut his throat and left him sitting in his chair. Then he’d gone out onto the walkway and circled around, probably intending to get up and fire at Mabbon from above. The noise of Rawne’s shot had forced him to make his play earlier than he had intended.

A minute passed, a full minute. It felt like a year to the two men pressed down on the floor behind the cot as they tried not to twitch or breathe. A second minute was almost up before something moved against the light and a figure stepped in through the blown window.

An Urdeshi trooper, by his clothes and his lasrifle; uniforms and Guard-issue weapons could be stolen. The boots crunched on the broken glass.

Rawne let him get a metre or so into the room, then fired under the cot. The las-shot clipped the man’s left calf and he toppled with a squeal. Rawne leapt up at once, bounding over the battered cot to finish things. He was hoping to take the man alive for interrogation, but he was also fully prepared to seal the deal with a kill shot if necessary.

He almost fell off the cot mid-bound as shots tore down from above. A second shooter was firing from high up inside the tower, perched on the rail-less spiral of the stairs.

Rawne landed on top of the first shooter. It was an accident, but he worked with it. The man fought back. Rawne saw his face, close-up, and recognised him. They wrestled. Shots from above struck the floor beside them. The man had Rawne’s wrist. Rawne couldn’t aim his pistol. The man’s lasrifle, looped around the man’s torso on its strap, was wedged between them.

Rawne threw a hooking punch. He couldn’t aim with the pistol, so he struck with it. The butt collided with the man’s cheek and snapped his head around, but the impact tore the pistol out of Rawne’s grip, and it went skittering away across the floor.

More shots struck the ground around them from above. Rawne rolled over hard, dragging his dazed assailant with him, like two lovers tumbling. He couldn’t pull the lasrifle off the shooter because of the strap, but he got his right hand around the barrel to direct it, and his left hand down and low to squeeze the trigger.

The weapon was still set on full auto. Las-shots hosed up the throat of the lighthouse, deflecting off the curved walls, blowing out chunks of brick and stonework. It wasn’t the cleanest piece of shooting Rawne had ever executed, but he managed to drag the chasing wildfire across the section of screwstair where the second shooter was crouching.

Hit, though perhaps not fatally, the second shooter yelped and fell. He somersaulted down a dozen steps, cracking off the stone edges, and then grazed against the curve of the wall and flew right off the staircase entirely. He dropped eight metres, straight down, onto the prisoner’s wooden chair, which exploded into kindling and dust under the impact.

Rawne was up. There was no opportunity for respite. A third assassin had appeared, rushing in through the main doorway. Like the other two, he was dressed as an Urdeshi trooper. He had a lasrifle with a bayonet fixed. He, too, had a face Rawne knew.

Rawne’s laspistol was out of reach. The lasrifle was tangled around the body of the first shooter on the floor. Rawne went at the third attacker instead, closing the distance between them as fast as he could, ripping out his warknife.

The third assassin fired, but Rawne’s straight silver had already parried his bayonet and turned the muzzle aside. The shot went out through the blown window. The assassin tried to re-aim, but Rawne fenced with his blade again and deflected the bayonet so that the next shots went clean up the tower space.

The assassin tried to club Rawne with an underswing of his tilted rifle. Rawne spun his warknife so that the pommel was behind his thumb, then punched the blade sideways, knuckles up. The blow slashed the assassin’s throat, left to right. Blood gouted into the air, as though someone had tossed a beaker of red ink. Rawne ripped back in the opposite direction, and tore a second cut across the man’s torso, right to left. The assassin fell on his knees with a deadweight thump, his lifeblood exiting his body under pressure through the two huge splits. He collapsed onto his face.

Rawne stepped back, spinning the warknife back upright in his hand, and then swung around, alerted by a sound from behind him.

The first shooter had got back up on his hobbled leg, raising his rifle to his broken cheek to shoot Rawne in the back. But Mabbon had seized him from behind. The etogaur’s broken manacles were wrapped around the man’s throat, crushing the life out of him. Mabbon’s face was absolutely expressionless.

The man struggled and made a cracked choking noise. Mabbon slammed his face into the stone surround of the blown window and then let the chain go slack, dropping him dead on the floor.

‘The timing of your visit was quite fortunate,’ he remarked.

Rawne nodded, picking up the third assassin’s rifle in case there were any further surprises.

The three dead assassins all had the same face.

‘Rime wants you dead,’ he said.

‘Half the sector wants me dead,’ Mabbon replied.

Rawne shrugged.

‘So, did you get some kind of tip-off that Rime was sending his Sirkle after me today?’

‘No,’ said Rawne. ‘This was a coincidence. I came here this morning to prove a point.’

‘What point?’

‘That the Tanith First can protect you better than the S Company details the Commissariat assigns to you. We’ve all used our visits in the last few weeks to test security, to look for weakness, to smuggle things in. Today, I was going to demonstrate that if we could get a weapon inside, so could anybody, and thus convince the Commissariat to assign S Company duties to my platoon so we could take over from the buffoons they’ve been using to watch you.’

‘Because Gaunt would be happier that way, because he trusts his own to do the job properly?’

‘Something like that,’ said Rawne. ‘And it’s Colonel-Commissar Gaunt to you.’

‘My apologies,’ said Mabbon.

Rawne looked at the bodies. Outside, he could hear men approaching, and an alarm started to sound.

‘Still,’ he said, ‘as demonstrations go, this proved the point well enough.’

‘I’m pleased that my security will be your business for the remainder of my stay here, major,’ Mabbon said.

‘The Suicide Kings will look after you,’ said Rawne.

‘Suicide Kings? Like the card game?’

‘Never mind. It’s a private joke,’ said Rawne. ‘Anyway, there won’t be much of a remainder. That’s why I had to make my point today. It’s also why Rime had to make his move. That suggests he has good intelligence.’

‘You’re moving me. We’re going to begin at last?’

‘Approval has been granted,’ said Rawne. ‘The mission has been authorised. We make shift at nightfall tomorrow.’

‘I take it that when we make shift, we will be en route to Salvation’s Reach?’ Mabbon Etogaur asked.

‘That’s classified,’ said Rawne.

With just a day to go, the Makeshift Revels were well underway.

It was all new to Elodie, of course. Everything was new, even her surname. Dutana. Elodie Dutana. It was her mother’s family name, a name that belonged to her but which she had never used. She’d left a number of temporary professional surnames behind her on Balhaut, and taken up her mother’s name to help rid herself of older memories and unsuitable associations.

She was Elodie Dutana, and she was part of a regimental entourage, and she was the companion of a brave and handsome Imperial Guard officer. It was a new life, and she liked it, and she intended to make the most of it.

She’d been through the whole process of embarkation once before, back on Balhaut, but it had been a blur, and she hadn’t taken much in. Besides, they had been shipping out to what Ban Daur described as a ‘dispersal point’, not a warzone. There had been no sense of apprehension.

Now there was. The dispersal point was a city called Anzimar on a planet called Menazoid Sigma. It had taken sixteen weeks on a stinking troop-and-packet ship to reach it from Balhaut, and they had been there eleven months.

Balhaut, where Elodie had spent the rest of her life, had been a place of towering, majestic cities. It had been the site of the Famous Victory, and though the wounds of war were still healing during her lifetime, and it was still possible to walk past empty lots or the shells of buildings during a day’s business, Balhaut seemed to retain its air of dignity and significance.

Menazoid Sigma, what little she had seen of it, had little of either. Anzimar was dirty and industrial, and sat on a polluted bay where galvanic reactor plants filled the air with smog. There were twin suns, which was unsettling. Everything was noisy and stained. Everywhere smelled of chemicals. Elodie wasn’t sure if the troop-and-packet ship hadn’t been a preferable place to spend some time.

Everyone said the same. It was an ugly place, and not a good posting. They were only there for a time, waiting for routing orders to come through. Menazoid Sigma was simply a place to stop and resupply, a place to make ready. Some of the Tanith men, the ones who had served the regiment longest, talked about Menazoid Epsilon, which was apparently a neighbouring system where they had fought many years before. There was no sense at all they were pleased to be back in this part of the Sabbat cluster.

She had become part of the community attached to the Tanith First regiment. There were at least as many hangers-on following the regiment in supporting roles as there were serving lasmen. Elodie was still getting used to her status, her role, her responsibilities. She was still learning who everyone was. Eleven months, even eleven months spent on a sinkhole like Menazoid Sigma, was enough time to serve as an apprenticeship.

She was, in effect, an officer’s wife. Her man was Captain Ban Daur, commander of G Company. Like many of the regiment, he was from the industrial world Verghast. He was a good man. Elodie quickly found that her impression of him was one shared by most: Daur was a genuinely good man. He was handsome, intelligent and principled. He wasn’t loved by the men, but he was admired for his fairness and determination. He was honourable, and he could be relied upon. He had prospects for advancement, and they weren’t at all hurt by the fact that, unlike most of the Verghastites serving in the regiment, he was from a good, mid-hive family. He came from breeding. He was not some lowly miner or labourman. Juniper said he was a good catch.

None of which was why Elodie was with him. She was with him because he was the one, and she’d known that since the moment she’d first seen him that day in Zolunder’s Club on Selwire Street.

They had not formally married. The matter hadn’t really been discussed. Marriage was permitted, and simply required certain documents and certificates to be signed by the commanding officer. There was no reason to believe that Daur’s commander would refuse his request.

But they had not got around to it. Just a few weeks spent with the regimental train had shown Elodie that formal bonds were unnecessary. Soldiers understood loyalty, and loyalty was the glue that held everything together. She was Ban’s woman, and everyone respected that. They didn’t need a piece of paper to prove it.

As an officer’s woman, Elodie entered entourage society at a comparatively high level. She had certain automatic privileges. Her status earned her respect from the other women. She got to decorate Daur’s arm at certain regimental suppers. Officers were courteous to her. Daur’s rank often secured him his own quarters rather than a shared billet, and she got to share that. She was, she knew, envied by some. There was nothing she could do about that. Juniper called her a trophy, whatever that meant.

The entourage train was a curious community. At the uppermost level were the wives and the women, the wet nurses and the children. A regiment always bred offspring. There were the pleasure girls and the camp followers, the women who were not attached to the regiment by way of blood like a wife or a mother, but by way of reliance. Their living came from the regiment, so they had to follow the regiment wherever it went. And just as their living came from the regiment, so did the livings of the seamsters, the button-makers, the dentists, the potion-grinders, the launderers, the entertainers, the musicians, the portraitists, the cooks, the bottlemen, the victuallers, the errand boys, the knife-sharps, the menders and fixers, the polishers, the cobblers and all the rest, most of whom brought along families of their own. It was an ungainly, parasitic entity that lived so that its host could live, and went with it everywhere, the two dependent on one another for survival.

She spent most days in the entourage camp, talking to the other women. A few, like Juniper, had become her friends and confidantes. They had helped her to find her feet. Juniper had taught her to take certain duties away from Daur’s adjutant. Uniform work was a good one. She could get them cleaned and mended, get the correct one laid out ready for him. She could learn where to go to get the right replacement button or piece of braid, who to ask for the right brass paste, where to take a pair of boots for resoling. Daur had objected at first, saying that it wasn’t her place to wash his clothes. He hadn’t brought her along to shine his boots. She insisted she wanted to. She needed a greater purpose than to look well on his arm by the light of chandeliers. An officer’s woman and his adjutant often developed an elegant partnership. Daur’s adjutant was a man named Mohr. He would advise her, quietly, on expected dress regulations, or send her a note if something was needed from Daur’s quarters. In return, Elodie left service business to Mohr and made sure she wasn’t around or, worse, undressed, in Daur’s quarters when the adjutant took the daily brief. Sometimes, she even advised Mohr of Daur’s mood at the start of a day, a courtesy Mohr often reciprocated at day’s end.

That morning, there was no question what kind of day it was going to be. Before dawn, the cookfires had lit and the musicians had begun turning up. The Makeshift Revels were a festival, a carnival that marked the departure of a regiment from its station. As soon as rumours began to circulate that a regiment was about to make shift, the revels began. All manner of traders and peddlers came to the shore and set up shop, bringing street entertainers, beggars, whores and, inevitably, thieves. It was the last chance for the soldiers to indulge before departure, the last chance for the entourage to acquire items before the next halt, the last chance for the host town to earn coin from the visiting troops.

It felt to Elodie like the heady holiday fairs that led up to a major feast day back on Balhaut. It was noisy and brash and cheerful, and there were treats and temptations to savour. But there was a gaudy, apocalyptic air about it too. The regiment was going to war. No one yet knew where, or what kind of war, and no one even knew the exact hour they would make shift. Such things were classified. Certainly, though, they were not leaving Menazoid Sigma the way they had left Balhaut. They were not heading for a dispersal point or a holding station. This was the real thing, and some of those leaving would never come back, not to here or anywhere.

She rose early. There were things to do. Daur hadn’t told her specifically, but it was probably the last day on shore. She had kissed him while he was still shaving at the mirror, and left their quarters. He was going to need his number one jacket by lunchtime. There was some kind of reception. She’d left the jacket with a tailor on the fifth row the night before and she needed to collect it.

It was early still, the suns just rising in the smog, but it was busy already. The shore bustled around her. Because the Guard camp at Anzimar was literally on the shore, Elodie had assumed that was what ‘the shore’ meant. The camp was a large town of prefab and rockcrete barrack buildings and halls housing, at present, six different regiments including the Tanith. It was flanked on one side by the sprawl of the city, and on the other by vast rockcrete skirts, the huge soot-scorched platforms where the bulk landers waited, cargo doors open, to swallow up the regiment and carry them up to the ships in high anchor orbit. The landers were huge, monolithic craft. The landing skirts met the shoreline and, with their hold jaws open and the waters of the bay behind them, they looked like oceanic monsters that had come ashore to bask and eat.

Elodie had learned that ‘the shore’ was simply Guard slang for any camp they occupied before shipping out. The shore was a lasman’s temporary connection to one world before he marched on to the next. Sometimes a shore was a real shore, like it was on Menazoid Sigma. Sometimes it was a hive top, or a desert platform, a forest town or an island base. Sometimes it was an orbital station, sometimes it was a dizzying metropolis.

One more thing to learn. There was always one more thing to learn.

She was wearing a simple dress and a shawl and an old pair of combat-issue boots. It was cool, but the temperature would increase as the suns came up, and the cold stink of chemicals would acquire a burning tang. Plumes of brown filth trailed from the peaks of the galvanic reactors across the bay. There was fog out on the water.

The revel camp was a temporary fair of stalls and traders that had grown up between the barrack buildings at the landing skirts. Bright, hand-painted signs numbered the rows and thoroughfares to guide people around. Crowds were already growing. There were acrobats and tumblers, men hawking song sheets and hymnals, barrows selling hot slab fritters and fried biscuits, a smell of caffeine and sacra and lho-stick smoke, the tapping of tinkers and cobblers at work.

Trinkets were the most common purchases for the rabble crowd, parting gifts and keepsakes and forget-me-nots. Engravers at small stalls worked to mark names onto cheap jewellery and lockets. Ecclesiarchs and trancemissionaries sold safeguard charms and rosaries; prophylactics against harm, the eternal protection of the God-Emperor. They also handed out pamphlets and treatises for uplifting consolation during the voyage. Blessings were obtainable, and so were sermons, delivered from portable pulpits. Garlands and posies were sold in abundance, and the victuallers and black-marketeers did a busy trade in foodstuffs, drink and smokes, indulgences for the last night on shore or the long nights in transit.

The crowd parted and a jester came by, clown-masked, striding on stilts. Behind him came a gang of laughing children, most of them regimental offspring. Elodie recognised many of them. Some she knew by name. That little girl was Yoncy. She was one of the ones Juniper minded, so Elodie had come to hear the story. For a while, Yoncy and her brother had been minded by a woman called Aleksa, but Aleksa had passed away and Juniper had taken on the care of them. The children were orphans from Verghast, and they’d been adopted by Tona Criid, a woman officer who’d found them on the battlefield. It turned out later their father wasn’t dead at all. He was Major Gol Kolea of C Company. He hadn’t wanted to overturn their little lives any further by taking them away from their adoptive mother, so he’d stayed out of it, and just kept an eye on them through Aleksa. Now the boy, Dalin, was a trooper, the adjutant of E Company, and the girl was getting quite big. The regiment had become their family, and had provided for them.

Still, they had suffered and lost a lot. Tragedy had marked their lives. You could see it in them, especially the little girl. From the time she had first seen her, Elodie had detected the most haunting sadness in Yoncy’s eyes.

The girl was a pretty little thing though. She raced past after the stilt-clown, giving Elodie a wave. Behind her, letting her run along, came the brother, Dalin. He was in uniform, a fine young man, watching his sister’s enjoyment with a smile. A last hour of shore leave for him before duties began. He’d bought a little medal of the Saint on a ribbon, no doubt for his sister.

He saw Elodie.

‘Mam,’ he said.

‘Dalin,’ she returned.

‘A good day,’ he said.

‘I would think almost any day is a good day to leave Anzimar,’ she replied.

He laughed.

Elodie walked on, past a bottle stall. She saw two Tanith men purchasing flasks of amasec. One of them saw her and suddenly looked guilty. He put the bottle he had been studying back hastily.

‘How are you today, mam?’ he asked.

‘Well, soldier,’ she said. His name was Costin. She knew it, because Ban had pointed him out as a man who had known great trouble with drink over the years. He was embarrassed because an officer’s woman had seen him buying liquor.

‘I was considering a gift,’ he said. ‘For my good captain, Domor, to mark this making shift. I would otherwise not touch the stuff.’

‘You don’t have to explain yourself, soldier,’ she said.

But perhaps he did. As a hostess in the clubs of Balhaut, Elodie had observed much about the relationship between men and their poisons. Costin was clearly a sot. The raw redness of his face told her that. He drank quantity, not quality, or his Guard pay would not stretch to cover his habit. He was the sort of man who would brew his own sacra to ensure a cheap supply.

So why would he be purchasing a fine bottle of amasec that ought to be locked in a colonel’s tantalus? Was it truly a gift as he said? Where would a man like Costin get that sort of money?

She reached the tailor’s stall on the fifth row and joined a short queue that was being entertained by a fire-eater. Sixteen Valkyrie assault carriers wailed overhead in formation. Elodie watched the entertainer, oiled and lithe, caper as he blew cones of flame from his burning wands.

‘Quite a trick,’ said a voice from beside her. ‘I tried to learn it once, in the hope that it might impress the mamzels.’

She turned and found Commissar Blenner standing in the queue behind her. He smiled and doffed his cap.

‘Good day, Lady Daur,’ he said.

‘Not quite lady yet, sir.’

‘You should see about that,’ he replied.

‘Really?’

‘Yes, before–’

Blenner paused, as if he had strayed into territory he regretted.

‘I always believe,’ he said, changing tack, ‘that sensible provision is the greatest defence against the vagaries of war.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind, sir.’

‘Please,’ he said, ‘a blind man could see you are no soldier, so there is no need to address me like one. Vaynom, I insist.’

Commissar Blenner had, like her, joined the regiment at Balhaut. He was, Ban had told her, an old friend of the commander’s, and he’d been brought in to supplement the Tanith First’s commissar strength, now that Commissar Hark’s work had become so specialised.

Elodie had encountered Blenner at several formal dinners. He didn’t look like a soldier. He seemed a little pudgy and unfit, a touch bloated from an easy life of inaction. He looked like an Administratum clerk dressed up as a soldier. He had, perhaps, been handsome once, but he was no longer as handsome as he thought he was, and his roguish manner was a little obnoxious. Elodie had met his type many times in the clubs of Balhaut. Privileged, silver-tongued, charming enough to like. But you’d always wonder where he was going to put his hands.

‘You are here for the tailor?’ she asked.

‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘My coat is being stitched. I have an influx to greet. Duty calls us all.’

It was her turn. She took Daur’s jacket from the tailor, inspected the work, and paid.

‘Good day, sir,’ she said to Blenner. ‘May we all make shift safely.’

‘The Emperor protects, dear lady,’ he replied. He watched her walk away. The view was worth the effort.

‘Now, where’s my damn coat?’ he said to the tailor.

Tall double doors burst open as though they had been rammed by a siege clearance squad, and the band of officers continued on their way down the long colonnade. They were striding swiftly, boots clattering on the marble floor, coat tails trailing, not in step but at the speed of a forced march. Any faster and they would have broken into a run. To either side, along the imposing route, the sentinel guards snapped to rigid attention as the determined figures swept past.

They were officers, with a gaggle of ceremonial guardsmen trotting to keep at their heels. The ceremonials were struggling with sheathed sabres, lances, pennants, standards and pole honours that hadn’t been designed to be ported in haste.

The main group was led by a formidable augmented human, his towering frame elongated and buttressed by the frames of bionic articulation that cradled his once virile form. He wore emblems of black carrion birds. Lord Militant Cybon was one of the great architects of the Crusade, and his war record needed no interpretation or explanatory notes. He was a conqueror of worlds, a Guard commander of the highest distinction, and had served the great Sabbat Worlds theatre since the very instigation, at Warmaster Slaydo’s side. He was famously ruthless, and he was famously out of favour now the warmastery was held by Macaroth, who looked to younger blood.

Almost at Cybon’s side was Isiah Mercure, a senior figure in the sector’s Commissariat, head of the Intelligence Division. Far shorter than Cybon, upholstered in sallow flesh, Mercure was a grey-haired man with pock-marked skin. He somehow radiated just as much presence and authority as the regal lord militant.

Behind those two came four figures in pristine Commissariat uniforms, three males and a female: Viktor Hark, the robust and powerful senior commissar of the Tanith First; Nahum Ludd, his young and earnest junior; Usain Edur, the regal, dark-skinned commissar serving Mercure as his aide; Luna Fazekiel, a senior commissar from Mercure’s division.

Behind them, and in front of the struggling ceremonial guard, strode a man whose stark, black garb combined the uniform of an Imperial commissar and the authority of a colonel of the Guard. He was tall and lean, and his narrow face, made hollow by care, had the steel threat of an unsheathed weapon about it because of the peculiar quality of his eyes.

The man’s name was Ibram Gaunt.

Without even breaking stride, Cybon raised his left hand and delivered it like a breaching post. The blow opened another set of double doors, which slammed against the colonnade walls. Another line of sentinel guards flew to attention, eyes front. The party swept on.

‘Should we wait for the Administratum envoys?’ Edur called.

‘Screw them,’ Cybon growled.

‘There are formalities, protocols,’ Edur said.

‘Screw protocols,’ said Cybon.

To the left of them, a row of tall windows looked out onto the Anzimar Landing Fields. Lighters and transports hove in through the morning smog towards the main rockcrete aprons. Vendetta gunships roosted like hawks on the sky shield platforms that sprouted around the defence work of the field perimeter like a wreath. Gaunt saw the ship, the armoured ship, out on its own at one corner of the apron, re-entry heat still fuming off its hull in the damp air. The field crews were keeping a respectful distance. It was an Imperial machine, but it wasn’t a pattern used by the Guard or the Navy.

Another set of doors smashed open. Ahead of them lay the entrance to the audience hall. Gilded doors, four times the height of a man, wrought with bas relief lions and carnodons, eagles and angels. Angels of death.

Appropriate, thought Ibram Gaunt.

It was the first set of doors they had come to that Cybon hadn’t smashed open as if he was conducting an insertion raid. He and Mercure simply halted. After a half-second for the cue to sink in, Hark and Edur stepped around them, and opened the doors.

The room beyond the doors was vast, stone flagged and dressed with tall, stained-glass windows that turned the light into autumnal colours. High, clerestory levels stole more daylight from above the morning smog, and shed it down in silver beams between dark vault arches. A giant brass aquila had been inlaid into the centre of the floor.

Three figures awaited them under the chamber’s largest window, a vast roundel rendering the Golden Throne in multicoloured glass.

One sat on a wooden bench seat, brooding. The second had his back to the door, gazing up at the stained glass vision. The third loitered nearby, examining some food and drink that had been presented on a small table. It was hard to tell whether the third figure was debating if he was in need of refreshment, or simply puzzling as to what food was for.

All three were male, but none of them were men. None of them were even slightly men.

‘Holy Terra,’ whispered Ludd.

‘That’s the general idea,’ muttered Hark.

The lord militant stepped forwards.

‘I am Cybon,’ he declared, altering the volume of his augmetic voice box to declamatory mode. ‘Who am I addressing?’

The three figures looked up. Their eyes locked onto him like targeting systems. This was not a fanciful impression. Their eyes were literally biologic, autonomic targeting systems, their scrutiny instantly assessing range, movement, identity and armour. To be stared at was to be in crosshairs.

‘I am Cybon, the lord militant repeated firmly.

‘Not you,’ replied the figure on the bench, without getting up. His accent was thick, as though his language and inflection had been worn away by dry winds in some very distant reach of Imperial space.

‘I don’t think you appreciate who you’re speaking to,’ said Cybon.

‘I know you don’t,’ replied the figure on the bench. His massive plate armour was dirty white, edged in crimson. Ropes of beads and small fetish trophies, along with what looked like scalps, hung off the plates. His war helm rested on the bench beside him, his elbows rested on his knees. His bared head was immaculately shaven apart from a forked chin beard and a plume topknot of the blackest hair.

The figure who had been examining the refreshments was clad in grey plate, with a golden chest ornament and his Chapter symbol in blue on a red-edged white field upon his vast shoulder guards. Parts of his armour were decorated in blue teardrop shapes. He held his war helm under his arm. He was clean shaven, with close-cropped black hair that formed small ringlets on his high forehead.

‘Him,’ he stated, pointing directly past Cybon at Gaunt. His gauntleted fist was huge, the pointing finger like a rifle muzzle with a suppressor attached.

‘He’s why we’re here,’ he said, and lowered his hand. His voice was softer than the seated giant’s, and his accent more clipped.

‘There is a protocol–’ Cybon began.

‘We care not for your protocol,’ said the third figure. His armour was gleaming silver with traceries of white enamel. His voice was just an augmetic rasp. ‘He’s why we’re here. He’s the one we will deal with.’

Cybon hesitated, but decided not to reply. Mercure glowered and scratched his neck. Fazekiel swallowed hard. Edur, Hark and Ludd glanced back at Gaunt. The ceremonial guard had decided that it might be better to hover in the doorway than actually enter the chamber.

Gaunt stepped past the members of his party and walked across the chamber towards the three figures. He walked directly across the brass eagle scored into the flagstones and stopped face to face with the third figure in front of the window. He took off his cap, tucked it under his left arm, and made the sign of the aquila across his breast.

‘Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt,’ he said.

The third figure glared down at him.

‘Veegum said you’d seem small,’ he rumbled. ‘I forget how small human small is.’

‘I didn’t know if the Chapter Master would even consider my request,’ said Gaunt. ‘The fact that three of you–’

‘Three’s all you get,’ murmured the figure in grey.

‘We don’t want to be here,’ said the figure on the bench, rising. The bench creaked painfully.

‘There are more significant actions we should be involved in,’ said the figure in silver. ‘This is a waste of our strength, even just three of us. But my Chapter Master made the petition personally. Your estimation is six weeks’ operational time?’

‘Yes,’ said Gaunt. ‘Transit included. And transit time permitting.’

‘And we make shift tonight?’ asked the figure in white.

‘Yes,’ said Gaunt. He took an encrypted memory wafer out of his coat pocket and handed it to the silver giant. ‘Strategic evaluation. Everything we have so far, plus tactical proposals.’

The silver giant took the tiny sliver and passed it to the giant in white without looking at it. The bearded figure slotted the wafer into a data processor on the cuff of his vambrace. There was a low hum, and small hololithic images began to generate and rotate in the palm of his hand.

‘May I know you?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Brother-Sergeant Eadwine, Silver Guard,’ said the silver giant, tapping his own chestplate. He gestured at the giant in grey.

‘Brother Kater Holofurnace, Iron Snakes.’

He indicated the figure in white.

‘Brother Sar Af, White Scars.’

‘Who made these tactical assessments?’ asked the White Scar, still reading the hololith display.

‘The basics were drafted by Strategic Operations,’ replied Gaunt, ‘but the better parts were modifications made by my men. The regimental scouts, in particular.’

‘Is it the usual nonsense?’ asked the Iron Snake.

Sar Af, the White Scar, ejected the wafer and handed it back to Gaunt.

‘It’s not actually useless,’ he said. ‘I’ve made some initial adjustments. There will be more notes.’

‘I look forward to discussing them,’ said Gaunt.

‘There won’t be a discussion,’ said Sar Af. ‘There will simply be notes.’

‘Then I look forward to adjusting them,’ said Gaunt.

‘You can’t do this without us,’ said Sar Af, a shadow passing across his face. ‘In truth, few can see why this would even be attempted. The odds are long, the risks unrewarding, the objective insubstantial. It’s a tiny and extravagant sideshow, and Brother Eadwine’s Chapter Master is clearly growing sentimental in his dotage to even humour you over this.’

‘If that were true,’ said Gaunt, ‘you wouldn’t even be here.’

Lamps had been lit throughout the complex of the Anzimar Barracks, partly to add to the festival nature of the Makeshift Revels, mostly to combat the gloom of the afternoon smog. It was especially oppressive that day, and would not clear before nightfall. Already, the camp and landing fields felt as though they were cast in an evening shade.

Gaunt returned across the outer quadrangle with Hark, Ludd, Edur and Fazekiel. They could hear exuberant music playing from the halls, the clatter of dishes and glasses from the refectory. The influx reception was underway.

‘At least we’re dressed for it,’ said Hark.

‘I thought the lord militant was going to become apoplectic,’ said Ludd, who was still processing the meeting they were coming from.

‘Lords militant don’t like to be slighted, Ludd,’ said Hark. ‘Not in favour of mere colonels. Not even for that rare beast the colonel-commissar.’

‘Cybon understood the game,’ replied Gaunt. ‘He was playing a part too. He knew they would want to make the bond personally, with me. But the Chapter Master wouldn’t have looked at my petition if it hadn’t come with the explicit backing of Crusade high echelon and a lord militant or two. Cybon was an enabler. He had to be present for form’s sake, even if it was just so they could belittle him.’

‘Are they ever polite?’ asked Ludd.

‘They’re Space Marines,’ said Gaunt.

‘But to be so disrespectful to a lord militant–’

‘They’re powerful beings,’ said Gaunt. ‘They like to remind people where that power lies.’

‘So they’re never cordial or–’

‘I don’t know them, Ludd,’ said Gaunt. He stopped sharply and turned to look at the junior. The others came to a halt around them, in the middle of the quad square. ‘I’ve made no particular study of their etiquette.’

‘No one knows them,’ said Edur quietly.

‘They know you, sir,’ said Ludd to Gaunt. ‘That’s what that was about. You’re calling in some kind of favour.’

Gaunt’s jaw tightened. In the gloom, his eyes seemed haunted by an uncanny light.

‘Not a favour,’ he said. ‘You don’t ask the Adeptus Astartes Space Marines for favours. It’s about compacts and alliances. It’s about doing enough to simply get noticed, so that when you ask them for something, they care who you are.’

‘You realise we all look alike to them, don’t you?’ said Hark.

Ludd laughed, and then realised it wasn’t supposed to be a joke.

‘What did you do?’ he asked.

‘What?’ asked Gaunt, turning to start walking again.

‘What did you do to get noticed?’

‘Just enough,’ said Gaunt and walked away.

‘Balhaut,’ said Fazekiel. The others looked at her. ‘The Tower of the Plutocrat. The Oligarchy Gate. The infamous Ninth Day,’ she said. ‘Gaunt’s Hyrkans stood alongside the Silver Guard at the height of the battle. He certainly would have had dealings with them, possibly with Veegum himself. His achievements would have brought him to their attention. Perhaps even won their respect. Certainly, made enough of a mark so that years later, when he asked them for help, they would bother considering it.’

She looked at Ludd. She was only a few years his senior, but there seemed a gulf of maturity between them.

‘It’s all in his case file,’ she said. ‘Standard biographic data. There’s more detail, some of it classified, but not hard for someone with Commissariat clearance to get if they’re prepared to dig.’

‘You’ve made a study of him?’ asked Ludd.

‘You seem surprised,’ said Fazekiel. ‘I am going to serve under him. I want to know about him so I know what to expect and how best to perform my duty. Any commissar would do the same before attachment to a new command. The surprise, really, would be that you haven’t.’

‘I don’t know why I would,’ said Ludd, blushing slightly.

‘So you don’t ask stupid questions at the wrong moment?’ Fazekiel suggested.

‘I think Nahum is probably a more intuitive servant of the Throne than you, Luna,’ said Edur gently.

‘It’s not a matter of intuition,’ she replied. ‘It’s not a privacy issue, either. It is in no way invasive to study and understand the career record of an officer you’re serving. It improves your performance. It’s common sense.’

A despatch officer ran up, saluted, and handed Hark a message wafer. Hark acknowledged receipt with a press of his biocoded signet ring. He read the wafer, and then put it in his pocket.

‘We should get to work,’ he said. ‘There are newcomers to accommodate, and final arrangements to be made. Here’s something for you to ponder, Ludd. Fazekiel has accounted for the Silver Guard’s presence. But the other two. An Iron Snake and a White Scar. Why three Chapters?’

‘I’ll find out,’ said Ludd. ‘Meanwhile, when do the rest arrive?’

‘The rest of what?’

‘The Space Marines?’

Hark smiled. ‘We get three Space Marines, Ludd. Just three. They are rare and they are precious. Long gone are the ages when they marched across the stars in their hundreds or thousands. We’re lucky to have three.’

‘Under most circumstances,’ said Edur, ‘three is more than enough.’

‘Let’s hope this is one of those circumstances,’ replied Hark.

‘How will you find out, Ludd?’ Fazekiel asked.

‘I’ll ask them,’ Ludd replied.

‘Why is that funny?’ he added.

At midnight, local time, a new star woke in the skies above Anzimar. The city’s population was hurrying to attend the day’s Sabbat Libera Nos service, which had been held in the temples of the Beati every midnight since the Crusade began, in the hope of vouchsafing a brighter tomorrow. Some of the hundreds of thousands of citizens bustling from their homes, or even their beds, or suspending their labour, at that time may have turned their eyes skywards, for since the very origin of the species, mankind has entertained the notion that some ineffable source of providence may look down upon us. The upward glances were vain, involuntary wishes to glimpse the face of salvation.

No one saw the star light up. The smog that night was as thick as rockcrete.

Aboard the Highness Ser Armaduke, only the ringing of ship bells marked the passage of time. There were no day or night shifts. Some vessels established a day/night cycle with their lighting systems, but this was evidently not Shipmaster Spika’s habit. The Armaduke ploughed onwards in a state of twilight gloom, the decks morose and half lit. There was some talk of power conservation and economies of reserve, but few could avoid the suspicion that the habitat conditions were deliberate. On some decks, power went out completely and inexplicably, for hours at a time. The heating and air circulation of certain compartments and sections ceased and then, after a while, resumed with a bronchial rattle of ducts and flues. The agreed belief was that the Armaduke’s grim conditions had nothing to do with Shipmaster Spika’s conservative approach to power consumption, and everything to do with mechanical decay and infirmity.

In the troop decks, the men and women of the company and its retinue gathered around lamps, or worked by wick-light. Most slept for many hours longer than necessary. Sensing a malaise, Hark initiated a program of fitness and training that involved free marches and squad runs around the outer perimeter of the main hold levels, a circuit of almost five kilometres.

Boredom and inactivity were the real dangers of warp travel. Confinement and idleness allowed minds to stagnate, allowed anxieties to fester. At one end of the scale there would be discontent and despair, and the scale moved up through spats and feuding, criminal activity and mutinous behaviour. Unhappy minds were also more easily preyed upon by the powers of the warp.

The confidential transit estimates at the point of departure suggested three to six days to Tavis Sun, for the fleet conjunction, and then another six to Salvation’s Reach. There was no reliable science. Some warp routes remained stable for centuries. Others vanished into hectic maelstroms overnight. All sorts of variables affected the journey time, both appreciated shipboard and external sidereal. One could travel for a month and arrive the day before one’s departure. One could set out for a three-day shift and never be seen again. If the bulk of the Armaduke’s rationed power was being diverted to turn the warp engine cogitators and assist the ship’s Navigator to track the beacon of the Astronomicon and ascertain the best possible route vector, then the passengers and crew of the Highness Ser Armaduke would be grateful enough.

Only the chiming of the ship’s bells marked the passage of time, but that was only the local time of the ship, a measurement of the turning of the clocks and horologs it took along with it into a hostile ocean outside time.

Cavity 29617 was a hold space, a long and slightly irregular chamber that ran beside and under one of the main plasma engine housings. It was low priority, and had only the rudiments of light and atmospheric processing. From the junk and dust, it was an attic or basement – or whatever they called such things on starships – that hadn’t been used in a few centuries.

That suited Merrt.

Cavity 29617 was out of the way. It wasn’t one of the big holds reserved for training exercise and technique work, and it was far smaller than the hangar decks used for parade and mass drill. It was narrow and long, which gave him some range. It had a breeze running through it from the processor vents, which gave it a cross-draught and made it feel a bit like outdoor conditions. And no one went there, so no one could see him being useless.

Since his injury on Monthax, years of practice had failed to yield any results. Merrt had tried: he’d shown a persistence and resolve rare even by marksman standards. He had worked to rebuild his shattered skill.

The only thing he was sure of was that he should have given up trying a long time ago.

But Larkin, his old friend and rival, was in another of his mad moods. He had invested his manic attention in Merrt, and Merrt didn’t have the heart to let him down. He knew he would let him down, but he wanted to be seen to make an effort, so it didn’t seem like he’d just let it happen. A few dozen hours’ extra target practice, what could that hurt? It proved that Larkin was his friend, and he was willing to humour his friend’s confidence. It meant that when he finally had to say he couldn’t do it, he’d know that he couldn’t do it. He had proof. Evidence. He’d tried, so the failure was softened.

Merrt had the bolt-action rifle Larkin was using to train him and a box of shells. Larkin had yet to explain the full significance of the old mech weapons in terms of the mission profile. A longlas was a far superior weapon. Only a few people in the Tanith First knew what they were heading into and what they might be expected to do when they got there. Merrt knew Larkin himself only understood bits of it. Just enough to train specialisms.

The one and only thing everybody knew was that they were not heading for a happy place. The next mission was going to be damn hard work.

Merrt had lined up some old tin cups, pots and lubricant canisters as targets, and set himself up in a seated position, his back against the cavity wall to take his weight, the rifle braced across a stand he’d rigged from an old metal bench. He’d then adjusted and finessed the rest using a couple of the sand socks every marksman carried in his pouch. He had a simple optic scope for range finding, but he used it separately, lining up an angle then putting the scope aside to take final aim along the iron sights of the gun.

He allowed for air drift, and the rifle’s innate inclination to dip and rise on discharge. The weapon had a tiny left-hand bias, which Larkin had corrected for by adjusting the sights with a watch maker’s screwdriver. Merrt let his tension out, then let all the air in his lungs go, a long slow exhalation so that even the stir of respiration or the tremble of suspended breathing wouldn’t affect the aim. The only thing he couldn’t reduce was the infinitesimal quake of his heartbeat, so he timed to fire between beats. Beat… line up the shot… beat… check the line… beat… fire.

The shot echoed down the cavity. The round clipped the lip of a tin pot, and made it judder. He’d been aiming for a mark on the pot about a middle finger’s distance away from what he’d actually hit.

Hopeless. Fething hopeless.

To even be considered for a lanyard, he’d have needed to partially overlap the target spot.

‘That is a poor shot.’

Merrt jumped. It wasn’t so much that someone had surprised him, it was that someone so big had miraculously appeared in his line of sight.

He scrambled up, knocking over the stand.

‘Gn! Gn! Gn!’

Surprise gave way to fear.

The White Scar squinted down the range, then looked back at the human with the rifle.

‘Very poor,’ said Sar Af. ‘Pathetic. Why do you even bother?’

‘Gn… gn… gn…’

‘Speak up? Are you simple?’

‘I’m gn… gn… gn… practising!’

Sar Af frowned. He coughed, and then rubbed the tip of his nose with armoured fingers that could crush bone.

‘You will be here a long time,’ he said.

‘I’ve been here a long gn… gn… gn… time already,’ said Merrt.

Sar Af nodded. He held out his hand.

‘Give it to me.’

His voice reminded Merrt of Jago. Dry winds, gusting forlornly through dusty valleys. Sandstone eroded by the air. Merrt handed him the rifle.

Sar Af took it; a stick, a toy. He sighted down the barrel, holding it one-handed, as if to check the barrel was actually straight. The trigger guard was entirely too small for his fingers.

He handed it back.

‘I cannot use that. Shoot again.’

‘Sir?’

‘Again.’

Merrt reached to reset the stand and pick up the sand socks.

‘Do not bother with that. Just take a good shot from where you are. Just aim and shoot.’

Merrt slunked the bolt, ejected the shell case, took another round out of the box at his feet, and chambered it. He glanced at the Space Marine. The giant was simply staring down at him, impassive.

Merrt put the gun up to his cheek, chose a tin cup, sighted, breathed out, and fired. The shot clipped the cup hard enough to spin it off the block. It made several dull, hollow sounds as it bounced on the hold deck.

‘Still pathetic,’ said Sar Af. He looked at Merrt ‘Good enough for Guard fire on a field, I suppose, but not precise enough for anything else.’

Merrt didn’t know what to say.

The White Scar was still looking at him, but his mind was far away. It felt to Merrt like the Space Marine was precisely playing back at a painstakingly slow rate the memory of Merrt taking the shot so he could analyse it.

He stopped, looked back at Merrt, and then suddenly reached out a hand, grabbing Merrt by the jaw and throat. The hand turned Merrt’s head to the side. Merrt struggled and choked.

‘This jaw. This augmetic repair, it is your problem,’ said Sar Af. ‘You are being defeated by your own concentration. Your focus is so intense that as you fire the gun, it stimulates the neurodes in your jaw and you twitch.’

‘I gn… gn… gn… twitch?’

‘Just as you fire. Your jaw clenches.’

Sar Af let him go.

‘It is physically impossible for you to shoot well.’

Merrt swallowed.

‘Come back again tomorrow,’ said Sar Af.

Dead space. The visible universe was a weathered brown blackness, as if the void was somehow filled with a fog of dirty starlight. Nebulous beige streamers of some exotic matter streaked the depths. More than anything else, there was distance, the unfathomable distance of gazing out from the bounds of a harsh and inhospitable solar system, a few lonely rocks tumbling around a dull, grinding, electromagnetic light source into the humiliating immensity of the interstellar gulf.

Then lightning struck.

The lightning was a spear one thousand kilometres long. At the heart of its blinding shock-light was a twisting vein of toxic yellow, like scorched ceramic. At its origin point, an interspatial bubble of rupturing subatomics, the root of the lightning was brighter than any star, and shot through with threads of sour green and galvanic blue.

The lightning flashed and died, then another spear flashed, and then a third that was twice as long as the first two. It scored a line of light across the dark firmament, and left a fading afterimage like a jagged fault line.

A fourth flash followed, this one finally puncturing realspace and eating a hole through it, like a hungry flame burning through a sheet of paper. Suffixed by a halo of aftershock lighting, the Highness Ser Armaduke translated through the puncture, leaving the warp behind and coasting slowly out into the materium. Aetheric energies coursed off its flanks like thawing ice, shredding away in its wake and disintegrating.

The translation point behind it popped and crackled as it healed and faded, puffing and cracking like a membrane under pulses of thumping pressure. The Armaduke stabilised and adjusted its realspace passage. Its auspex and detector grids began to pattern-search and composite the visible starfields to verify the navigation plot. Vox systems were enabled.

Six minutes after achieving translation, a deck officer brought a data-slate to Shipmaster Spika.

Spika adjusted his silver-plated voice-horn on its stalk.

‘Translation complete,’ he announced, his voice ringing through the ship. ‘Tavis Sun. Tavis Sun. Approach now factoring for fleet conjunction.’

He turned off the speaker and looked at his deck officer.

‘Have we detected the elements?’

‘Not yet, sir,’ said the officer. ‘If they have made the schedule, we expect to track them in the next twenty minutes.’

‘Has engineering come back on that consultation I requested?’ Spika asked. Since that first anomalous tremble hours before, he had been attempting to trace the aberration.

‘I understand a full field-and-rate diagnostic is on its way up,’ said the officer.

‘Hurry them, please,’ said Spika.

A klaxon sounded.

‘Battlefleet elements detected,’ another officer called out. ‘Holding position around the local star. Close, and preparing for vox-hail.’

Kabry fell backwards into the pheguth’s cell, the back of his skull blown out. A sticky sheen of blood and tissue coated the wall and floor surfaces behind him. Cant forced his way into the cell, laspistol drawn.

It had all happened in a second. Chained at his seat, Mabbon Etogaur looked up, saw Kabry twist over dead, and dropped the trancemissionary text he was reading.

The other guard on duty inside the cell that shift was Varl. He screamed at Mabbon to get on the floor, and threw himself at the open hatch door. His lasrifle was still strapped around his body.

Varl’s weight hit the hatch and swung it hard into Cant. The impact staggered Cant halfway back out of the hatchway, but his chest and shoulder prevented the hatch from fully closing so that Varl could bolt it.

Varl put the full yield of his augmetic shoulder into keeping the hatch pinned on the attacker, but with his body wedged against the door, he couldn’t unship his rifle. He yelled a few savage curses as he rammed the hatch repeatedly.

Cant had his right arm and shoulder inside the cell. He was pushing back, his left hand and cheek pressed against the outside of the hatch.

His laspistol was in his right hand.

He raised it and fired into the cell, shooting blind. Shots smacked off the rear wall and the floor. One grazed the ceiling. Two of the bolts ricocheted like cometary fragments off the dull metal surfaces. One punched clean through the back of the pheguth’s seat. Mabbon was face down on the floor, as far out of the firing line as the chain would allow.

Cant fired again, intent on filling the interior of the cell with sizzling, rebounding las bolts.

Calling Cant a name that would not have impressed his poor, dead mother, Varl stabbed him through the forearm with his warknife. The blade cleaved through muscle and bone and bit into the steel liner of the cell, staking Cant’s right arm against the wall inside the hatch, so he was pinned like a specimen. Pain forced Cant to drop his pistol.

Varl redoubled his efforts to shove the door, hoping to crush or crack bone. Cant growled in discomfort.

‘You like that, you bastard?’ Varl shouted. He stepped back and threw the hatch wide so he could gun the assassin down.

Cant faced him.

Varl hesitated, seeing the face of a friend and comrade. He didn’t hesitate long, but it was just enough for Cant to form a beak with the fingers of his left hand and smash Varl in the chest. Varl was thrown clear across the cell.

Alarms started to shriek. The bracket lamps in the approach corridor began to flash and cycle. Battle stations. There was a strong ozone whiff as the void shield generators lit up.

Cant yanked Varl’s warknife out of the wall and freed his pinned arm. Blood ran down his wrist and dripped off his fingers. He took a step forwards.

Varl was trying to get up, gulping in air as he tried to fill lungs that had been pressed empty. His face was bright red, his eyes wet with tears.

Lasfire ripped up the approach hallway and spanked off the hatch and the hatch surround, causing Cant to duck in alarm. Cowering, he turned. At the far end of the hallway, Kolea was approaching, firing his rifle from the hip.

The assassin threw himself flat, rolled close to Mktally’s corpse outside the hatch, and tore the lasrifle away from the dead Tanith. Sitting up, the assassin returned fire down the approach. Kolea dived behind a bulkhead to avoid the hail of bright las rounds.

‘Varl!’ Kolea yelled. ‘Varl, close the hatch.’

The assassin was no longer wearing Cant’s face, nor Rawne’s. Pain, and the necessity of redirecting his strength into the fight, had obliged him to revert to his own face. It wasn’t the one he’d been born with, but it was what amounted to his true identity. It was the face of Sirkle. All of the rogue Inquisitor Rime’s minions had the same visage.

Kolea fired again, two or three loose bursts. The shots spattered around the hatch end of the approach. Sirkle fired back, full auto, his rifle lighting up with bright petals of muzzle flash. The barrage caused Kolea to duck back into cover. Sirkle turned around to unload into the cell and finish his mission.

He was just in time to see the pained, red-faced Varl slamming the cell door in his face.

The hatch locked. Sirkle roared in frustration. He turned back and began blasting down the hallway again, walking forwards, preventing Kolea from getting out of cover or returning fire.

Head down behind the bulkhead rim as shots hammered against it, Kolea yelled into his microbead.

‘Holding level. This is Major Kolea in the holding level. I need security here now! Security and medicae. Urgent!’

Kolea couldn’t hear if there was any reply. The fury of the gunfire coming at him, combined with the shrill of the alarms, filled the boxy hallway.

Sirkle advanced, firing as he came.

Spika stared at his comparatives for a second. His plasma engines were burning hard, and he could feel the grav torque pulling at the ship’s seams as it surged into the hard turn.

They were never going to make it. They were never going to turn in time. They were certainly not going to pull clear of the munitions spread rushing towards them. He had ordered counterfire to try to track and detonate some of the incoming torpedoes, but even with the detection systems on their side, it was like trying to hit an individual grain of sand with a bow and arrow during a hurricane. Another few moments and the enemy munitions would be sufficiently in-range to establish target lock and start to actively hunt them.

A warhead spread that large would demolish an unshielded hull like an eggshell.

Spika had one choice. In truth, he had two, but one of them was ‘die’, so there was little to discuss. Ominator, shrieking its name in grotesque pulses of noise through the void, like a wounded animal in a trap, was coming for them. Aggressor Libertus was racing away from the solid Imperial gunline to offer support, but it was six or seven minutes away from being any use.

Spika adjusted the heading values and added nineteen seconds to the burn duration.

The chief steersman glanced at him.

‘Execute!’ Spika yelled.

Everybody was down on the deck, the women sobbing, the children bawling. Elodie was holding on to Juniper to stop her throwing herself at the man who had seized Yoncy. He had a gun, and he was shooting it wildly. Anyone who waved a gun, and was prepared to fire it in a crowded room, anyone who was prepared to snatch a little girl as a shield, that was someone you didn’t try to tackle.

Elodie wrestled Juniper down, slapping her pawing hands aside. Elodie was moaning. Everyone was making some kind of sound: distress, fear, desperation.

Everyone except Yoncy. Elodie saw that Yoncy was still and expressionless. Trauma had clearly conquered her. She was like a doll in the crook of the gunman’s arm.

The man rattled off a few more shots to keep them all ducking. More screams came from the womenfolk. He was backing towards the hatch under the portside walkway, coming right down past them. Elodie wished she could work out what was wrong with the man’s face. It was twisted, distorted. It wasn’t a proper face at all.

‘Drop her! Drop the girl!’

More panicked screams. Elodie glanced around and saw three Ghosts rushing into the transport deck from the far end, rifles at their shoulders, covering the man and his hostage as they prowled through the rows of cowering retinue personnel.

The man who had shouted the order was a Belladon, Cardass. To his left was Bonin, the Tanith scout, weapon up and sighted. To Bonin’s right was Gol Kolea.

Kolea’s lasrifle was at his cheek. The expression in his eyes tore Elodie in half. It was part hatred, part anguish.

His daughter. His little girl.

‘Drop her!’ Cardass yelled again.

The gunman answered with some inarticulate noise as though his mouth wasn’t working properly. His face seemed tangled.

Elodie felt her heart fluttering. She so wanted to get up, to tear the girl out of the maniac’s grip.

She saw Captain Meryn. He was cowering right beside her, next to one of the cots. Costin was nearby too, his head in his hands, the documents he’d been carrying scattered around his knees. One of the gunman’s wild shots had clipped his shoulder, leaving a grazed burn.

Meryn’s eyes were bright with fear, like those of a cornered animal. He wasn’t carrying his rifle, but Elodie could see the laspistol holstered at his waist.

‘Shoot him,’ she hissed, holding Juniper down. ‘Captain, shoot him!’

Meryn ignored her.

‘Shoot him!’ Elodie repeated.

There was a clear angle. The gunman was side on to them, and he hadn’t seen Meryn or his comrade. Any half-decent shot could have put a las bolt through his head or his torso, missing the girl entirely.

‘Are you mad?’ Meryn rasped back.

‘You can take a clear shot!’

‘Shut up!’

‘Captain, shoot him!’

‘Shut the feth up!’ Meryn snarled.

‘Put the girl down,’ Kolea ordered. His voice cut the air and the panic like a scythe. It was toneless, as if the light had gone out in his heart.

‘Back off! Back off!’ the gunman yelled back, the words clawing, imperfectly shaped, out of his deformed mouth. The strain of his efforts had finally overcome the Sirkle’s face-shifting abilities.

Kolea, Bonin and Cardass had him triangulated, all aiming straight for his head. They were squinting down the top sights of their weapons, shoulders hunched, trotting forwards with short, hurrying steps.

Elodie wondered if any of them would dare take the shot.

‘Put the girl down!’ Cardass demanded.

‘Forget it,’ Kolea said. ‘Judd, forget it. He’s got nothing to lose any more. He’s not going to let us take him.’

He lowered his rifle to his chest, though he still kept it pointing at the gunman.

‘Are you?’ he asked. ‘You bastard. You’re going to make us kill you, and you’re going to make us kill the girl to do it.’

The gunman said something. His lips were too slack and misshapen for the words to be intelligible.

The ship shook. It was violent and abrupt. There was no sound, and no light came through the sealed port shutters, but the ship juddered as though it had been dropped.

A moment’s distraction.

Rawne dropped from the portside walkway onto the gunman’s back. The impact felled the gunman and took Yoncy over too. Rawne’s straight silver blade plunged into the killer’s right shoulder. His weapon went off, spraying las bolts into the air.

All three of them tumbled. Rawne lost his grip on the warknife. The gunman kept his grip on Yoncy. With a bellow that made the civilians sheltering around them shriek, Rawne got hold of Yoncy and wrenched her out of the killer’s grasp. He simply hurled her into the air, perhaps out of desperation, perhaps in the belief that a fall injury would be preferable to letting her stay in the killer’s reach a moment longer. The killer lashed out and clubbed Rawne in the face with the edge of his rifle.

Hoisted, Yoncy tumbled. Elodie sprang forwards, her arms outstretched, and managed to catch her before she bounced off the sheet metal deck. The little girl was heavy. The impact tore muscles in Elodie’s forearm. She kept her grip, rolling, trying to shield Yoncy from the landing. They crunched down onto Elodie’s right shoulder, Yoncy cushioned against Elodie’s breasts and stomach. The back of Elodie’s head struck against the leg of a cot and she blacked out for a second.

There was blood in her mouth, in her nose. She blinked. Yoncy was yelling and thrashing on top of her, squirming, kicking her heels. Pain flooded Elodie’s skull and her right arm.

The gunman was back on his feet. The warknife was still wedged into his shoulder blade. Rawne was down, flattened on the deck by the clubbing blow. The killer pointed his lasrifle at Rawne to cut him apart.

Kolea’s first shot blew the gunman’s right arm off at the elbow, causing the dismembered limb and the lasrifle it was aiming to spin like a slow propeller. Kolea’s second shot blew out his chest in a splash of burned blood and splintered ribs.

Kolea’s third shot traumatically deformed his head far more significantly than anything the face-slip had achieved.

The killer went down, full length, felled like an old straight nalwood, leaving blood mist in the air behind him.

Elodie’s shoulder was busted. The pain speared into her so sharply she couldn’t move.

Meryn took Yoncy off her and turned to Kolea.

‘She’s all right,’ Meryn said. ‘She’s safe, Gol. She’s safe.’

Whatever sentience controlled the daemon ship Ominator, its gleeful hunger for murder was so intense that it only belatedly became aware of the way the Armaduke and the Libertus had squeezed it into an untenable position.

They had met its headlong rush at the Imperial position with calm resolve, intercepting its trajectory so that the Ominator was obliged to pass between them. Such was the Ominator’s fever to engage, it was over pacing itself. It became apparent that it was not going to be able to break off or execute an evasion in time, certainly not without rendering itself more vulnerable. Any attempt to hard turn out of the tactical lock would have consumed vast amounts of its power reserve and de-positioned it hopelessly in the battlesphere alignment.

It continued to shriek its name. The shielding around its prow and flanks began to throb with a sub-photonic gleam the colour of burst entrails. Mechanical organs along its spine and between the blades of its ribs began to throb as it gathered power for a main weapon strike.

Advancing steadily, the Armaduke and the Libertus exchanged a brief non-verbal signal and began to hose fire at the enemy ship. Two streams of bombardment ripped out from the Imperial pair, converging like the lines of some infernal diagram on the Ominator. The streams were traceries of pulsed and beamed energy weapons, the unified output of hundreds of batteries slaved to the master tracking cogitators. Heavy ordnance systems spat torrents of hard shell munitions, missiles, ship-to-ship ballistic charges and bombard rockets.

The Ominator soaked it up without breaking stride, taking the titanic barrage from the Libertus against its forward port shields and the destructive abuse of the slightly extended Armaduke across its starboard side and belly.

The two ships maintained their relentless assault. The Ominator advanced in the face of their sustained fury, apparently oblivious, as if the onslaught was entirely futile. The fire rate was stupendous. Two gunners aboard the Libertus were killed by recoil trying to service the hard batteries fast enough, and an artificer aboard the Armaduke was burned to death by an overheating laser assembly. From his command seat aboard the Armaduke, Spika believed he had never seen a ship take such relentless punishment.

The Ominator squealed its name and attempted to fire, but the hellish lightning failed to develop enough to whip out from the hull. It tried again, and then again: two or three more stuttering attempts at ignition.

Then its shields failed, and its hull tore open like a punctured membrane. Shielding energies billowed out into the void around it like ink in water, like ragged sailcloth carried along by a storm-borne ship, like a ruptured egg sac.

Something catastrophic happened deep inside the daemon ship’s hull. There was a considerable though muffled explosion deep inside the ship about two-thirds of the way down its length. It was not a huge, satisfying sunburst of annihilation, but it blew out areas of deck plate and internal structure. Clouds of burning, toxic energy and atmosphere belched out. The mainframe shuddered.

Then the Ominator went dead. All of its onboard light sources died, even the infernal red glow from its core. Its energy output signature ceased, apart from the shreds of radiation and flame coming from the damaged sections. Its drive failed. Its plant failed. Its reactors failed. It became, in a second or two, an inert, dead lump of black machine junk, scorched and holed. Carried by its own forwards momentum, it began to tumble, prow tipping up, drive section rotating under, debris littering out of it like a spiral vapour trail.

The Imperial ships ceased fire. They waited, poised, in case it was a ruse, in case the daemon ship had decided to turn itself into a weapon and ram one of them.

It was lifeless. Blundering on, spinning like a discarded piece of scrap, it passed between them leaving a trickle of ejecta dispersing in its wake.

‘Kill recorded,’ cried out the Master of Detection.

‘For the Emperor,’ growled Spika.

Dorden took a deep breath. Tension and fatigue had put a tiny tic in the corner of his right eye and a tremble in his liver-spotted hands. Rawne was struck by how grey the old doctor’s skin had become. It reminded him, painfully, of the skin paint used by the sleepwalkers of the Gereon Untill, and of the wood-ash dust that the old nalwoodland communities of Tanith had used to anoint bodies for funerary rites. He’d never made that connection before. He made a point of not thinking about Tanith unless he had to.

‘He’ll live,’ said Dorden.

Rawne nodded. He looked down at Cant. The trooper was unconscious, in a chemically-induced coma, his neck wrapped in bindings and counterseptic wadding. His face was drained of blood, colourless white rather than Dorden’s dead grey. Dorden and the new man, Kolding, had worked for two intensive hours to save Cant’s life. No one could yet tell what brain damage might accompany the catastrophic blood loss of the throat wound.

Rawne patted Dorden’s arm.

‘There’s nothing I could do for the others,’ Dorden said.

Rawne didn’t turn to look at the wrapped corpses of Kabry and MkTally. Two Kings dead, another severely wounded. They had paid a high cost already guarding the pheguth etogaur. And that was without counting Edur and the crew personnel, and the poor bandsman fool that the Sirkle must have slain on Menazoid Sigma in order to worm his way into their midst.

‘Get some rest,’ said Rawne.

Dorden laughed. The infirmary was busy. In the aftermath of the void fight and the commotion aboard, there had been a lot of minor injuries: a few concussions and broken bones. There was still work to be done.

Kolding was nearby, washing Cant’s blood off his hands in a metal sink in preparation for the next patient.

Rawne walked over to him.

‘I understand the technique that saved him was your idea,’ he said.

Kolding stared at Rawne. He wasn’t used to being spoken to or even acknowledged by many of the regiment.

‘It seemed expedient,’ he managed to say.

Rawne nodded. He held out his hand. Kolding blinked. He hesitated for a moment, because he’d only just got his hands scrubbed ready again. The hesitation was too long. Rawne lowered his hand, and nodded.

‘It’s appreciated,’ he said, and walked away.

Ban Daur entered the medicae suite, squeezing past the walking casualties queuing for treatment.

‘Where is she?’ he asked the orderly Chayker.

Chayker pointed.

Elodie was sitting on a cot in the corner, her arm in a tight, packed sling, a compress against the back of her head. Rawne watched Daur cross to her, kneel beside her, embrace her gently. Dorden had said that the woman had torn shoulder muscles and taken a mild concussion catching the child. Brave. Selfless. There were more reasons than just good looks to admire Elodie Dutana. Rawne kept watching as they spoke quietly. He assumed she was telling Daur what happened. Rawne tried to remember the last time anyone had looked him in the eyes the way she was looking at Daur.

Down the far end of the infirmary unit, where it was quieter, Criid and Juniper were sitting with Yoncy while Curth checked the child over. The little girl was perched on a cot and seemed to be enjoying the attention. There was no indication she had been remotely upset by her adventure.

‘I owe you,’ said Kolea, coming up beside Rawne quietly to stare at Yoncy.

Rawne shrugged.

‘I was protecting the Archenemy feth-head, not the little girl,’ said Rawne.

‘Right.’

They both tensed. Meryn had just walked out of the side ward where he’d been checking on Costin’s graze wound. Criid had crossed to Elodie and Daur to murmur a few words, and she turned as she saw Meryn.

‘Ah shit,’ said Kolea.

Criid walked right up into Meryn’s face. They could feel the hatred radiating off her.

‘You didn’t take the shot,’ she hissed.

‘What? Tona?’

‘Don’t give me Tona, you spineless idiot. You had a shot and you didn’t take it.’

‘What? That bitch tell you that?’ Meryn sneered back, jerked his head in Elodie’s direction.

‘No,’ said Criid. ‘Juniper told me. Juniper said you just kept your coward head down.’

‘She’s a fething liar.’

Criid went for his throat. They crashed into an instrument stand and scattered a stack of steel bowls. The bowls clattered across the deck. Some of the civilian casualties started to wail in alarm.

‘Not in here!’ Curth roared.

Kolea and Rawne stormed forwards and got hold of Criid. She fought back in a frenzy of arms and legs as they pulled her away from Meryn.

‘Get off me!’ she shrieked.

‘He’s not worth ten hours in the tank, Criid,’ Rawne growled.

‘He’s not,’ agreed Kolea.

Criid stopped thrashing and shrugged Kolea and Rawne off as they relaxed their grip. She glared at Meryn.

‘You saw what she did!’ Meryn cried. ‘I want her charged!’

‘Grow some testicles and shut the feth up, Meryn,’ replied Rawne.

Meryn pointed angrily at Kolea.

‘He didn’t care! He’s the fething blood-father. He didn’t attack me!’

‘I was just pulling Criid out of the way,’ said Kolea.

‘What?’ asked Meryn, puzzled.

Kolea’s axe-rake of a fist slammed Meryn into the infirmary wall. The impact demolished a wire shelf and smashed a row of glass bottles.

‘Have you all lost your minds?’ Curth yelled. ‘This is a sick bay. Stop it!’

Working together, Criid and Rawne managed to pull Kolea’s muscle-dense bulk off Meryn. Meryn had his arms over his head and face. Blood was squirting out of his nose. When he realised the fists were no longer raining down, he began to get up, slipped, and then rose to his feet. Kolea lunged at him again, but Daur had joined Criid and Rawne to act as anchors, and they wrenched Kolea back between them.

‘What in Throne’s name is going on in here?’ Hark demanded as he pushed into the infirmary.

‘It’s just a misunderstanding,’ said Rawne, hauling Kolea back.

‘Yes,’ Criid agreed. ‘We thought Meryn was a human gakking being, but we misunderstood.’

‘They were attacking me!’ Meryn squawked. ‘There are witnesses. Charge them!’

‘It won’t happen again,’ Rawne said.

‘There are witnesses!’ Meryn insisted, outraged.

‘Show me one,’ said Rawne. He looked around the room, at the shocked faces of those present. ‘Anyone?’ he caught Curth’s eye.

Curth shook her head.

Hark frowned.

‘Will this happen again?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Kolea.

‘No,’ said Criid. ‘We’re done.’

Daur punched Meryn square in the face and laid him out on the deck.

‘Call her a bitch again and I’ll gut you, you Tanith bastard,’ he said. He looked at Hark.

‘Now we’re done,’ he said.

Tavis Sun was a memory four days behind the Armaduke when Dorden died.

Supplied and stocked with the last pieces of specialist equipment from the fleet group, the frigate had turned and translated away, running out through the murk of the warp towards the cold distances of the Rimworld Marginals.

Lord Militant Cybon had delivered a final broadcast from the Sepiterna, a valedictory address to the entire regiment. Zweil and the ship’s cleric had held services of constancy and deliverance, but the mood on the ship had changed.

They were heading into the dark, into the bleak and underpopulated regions of the Sabbat Worlds, into dead space and zones of risk, into hazardous climes and marginal fields. Though they were thousands strong, together on the ship, they felt the isolation.

Blenner was observing the specialism rehearsals that were being conducted around the clock on several of the main hold decks. The large areas had been cleared, and floor plans had been marked out on the deck in paint. In places, the layouts resembled basic obstacle courses. Squads moved through the areas, reset the obstacles, and then ran the drills again. Most of them were chamber clearance exercises. Ranges had been set up for practice-firing breaching rounds, and the ship’s artificers had rigged up a number of standard template door locks and hatch seals for teams to practise cutting. There was a lot of sweeper training going on too, and when he wasn’t supervising that, Domor was in hold six with his best demolition men, running through methods for making safe explosive devices and triggers. Major Pasha was lecturing the regiment, one company at a time, on improvised explosives and booby traps, and the finer points of pressure pads. She knew her subjects. It seemed to Blenner that Major Pasha had learned a lot of dirty tricks in the scratch war at Vervunhive.

On another range set up in one of the holds, the regimental marksmen were drilling with their old bolt action rifles. They were firing the specially machined, glass-tipped rounds to acquaint themselves with the specific weight and pull of the unfamiliar ammunition. They were saline charges, non-lethal glass projectiles filled with inert salt water.

The accuracy rate required from marksmen like Questa, Banda, Raess and Nessa was painfully demanding. Blenner was, however, astonished at the performance score that Merrt was racking up.

‘I thought Merrt was a lost cause,’ he said to Hark.

‘He was,’ replied Hark. ‘Larkin’s been working with him, one-to-one. The real breakthrough was muscle relaxant.’

‘What?’

‘He’s numbing his jaw,’ said Hark. ‘Apparently, that stops it twitching and ruining his aim. Of course, it means he can’t talk.’

They watched Merrt finish a round of shots and then turn to the other shooters.

‘I wondered why he was signing,’ said Blenner, nodding at Merrt. Everyone in the regiment had learned basic sign language for stealth work. Blenner had assumed Merrt was using it in deference to the deaf troopers like Nessa.

‘Where’d he get that idea from?’ Blenner asked.

Hark shrugged. ‘He hasn’t really explained. Larkin hinted it had something to do with one of the Space Marines.’

Blenner shuddered. The Space Marines, though they were seldom seen around the ship, were a pretty constant reminder that this was going to be more than a pleasant ceremonial excursion. Inexorably, they were heading towards the sort of fate he had spent most of his career in the Guard trying to avoid, the sort of fate where polished buttons, impeccably buffed toe-caps and a winning way with mess-room banter would not matter one iota. It was getting to the point where Blenner couldn’t laugh it off any more.

He’d spent a lot of time reading the stuff Wilder had recommended, the wit and wisdom of Novobazky. The speeches and mottos had survived Blenner’s initial disdain. Novobazky, the Emperor protect and rest his soul, had clearly been a motivating and inspiring man. Blenner had attempted to memorise some of the proclamations. He’d even practised them out loud to the shaving mirror in his quarters.

The trouble was, he didn’t believe them. He couldn’t say them with any conviction. They didn’t make him feel any better about dying, and, if he couldn’t even convince himself, he stood no chance of putting fire into the bellies of his troops.

When he thought about it like that, Blenner felt the fear inside him grow. It made him want to throw back another pill or two, but he had exhausted his supply. There was the contraband he’d confiscated untouched in his desk, but Curth had warned him off that. His hands trembled.

‘Heads up,’ said Hark. A wall hatch had rumbled open and Rawne’s Suicide Kings had entered, escorting the prisoner. Mabbon had been brought to observe and advise the operational drills. He was in shackles, and his face was without expression. Everybody in the hold space gazed at him.

They knew what he was. They knew the price the regiment had already paid simply having him there. They knew what kind of price they were going to pay if he was playing games with them.

Blenner felt an overwhelming urge to find a latrine. Space Marines were bad enough, but the pheguth was worse.

He got into the corridor outside, and found that his urge to crap his pants had diminished. His desire for pharmaceutical support had increased. If drugs could help Trooper Merrt improve his performance, then they would for Vaynom Blenner too.

That was how he came to be sitting with Dorden when he died.

Ship bells rang, and then a siren sounded, alerting every soul on board to the imminent translation.

A judder, a shake that rattled the bones of the ship, and they spat free and clear into realspace. New sirens blasted and a synthetic voice repeated the words ‘Hostile zone, war footing’ over the speaker system.

Spika had brought them to the target three days early.

‘We’re decelerating into the Rimworld Marginals,’ Spika told Gaunt and Eadwine. ‘Navigation has confirmed our realspace position and vector. Sixteen hours of deceleration into the gravimetric plane of this junk system, and then another five as we close on the target location. From this point we are running battle-ready and shields lit; this is a vox-silent phase. I suggest you begin final preparation. You should be ready to deploy from three hours out.’

‘I’ll make that five,’ said Gaunt.

Spika nodded.

‘I will issue half hourly notices to that point,’ he said.

‘What does it look like?’ Gaunt asked.

Beside him, the Space Marine chuckled, as if the question was an idle whim.

Spika raised his eyebrows and called out to a deck officer. The realspace shutters covering the massive bridge ports rumbled open, and weak yellow light spilled in. There was nothing to see except a murky brown haze with a small bloom of light in its lower right corner, like a lens flare. White speckles, like grains of salt or flakes of snow, glittered past them, moving sternwards: a dingy emptiness where the frail available light looked like it was coloured with urine.

‘You see?’ asked Eadwine.

‘I see nothing,’ Gaunt replied.

‘My point precisely,’ the Silver Guard rasped, amused.

Spika reached out and adjusted some dials on his console. He barked another instruction or two to the observation and resolution officers at the sculptural cogitator stands below him.

A large, gridded sub-frame extended from the port sill to cover the bulk of the window space. It was made of thick armaglass, and inlaid with hololithic sensors and actuators. The frame was thick with armoured trunking and clusters of small repeater screens and secondary monitors. It lit, igniting a graphic overlay of luminous green across its grid, which quickly began to section and analyse. Bands of colour-coded sensory data spiked up the edges of the main grid and across the repeater screens. Columns of text data played out. Spika fine-tuned his controls, centred the main green crosshairs on the bloom of light, and began to enhance and magnify the area until the hololithic pict image filled the grid and blocked out the real view.

There was a little more detail. Magnified, the white bloom was a tangle of solids, rendered white by the reflected glare of the local star. It was still blurry and fuzzy, but Gaunt could see enough to tell it wasn’t a planetoid. There was no regular geometric form. It was like a knot, and skirts of tangled matter trailed out of it to a great distance, like the broken ring of a gas giant. The ‘snow’ effect was more intense on this image. There was a density of moving white specks, almost like static. The image resembled some pallid, flaking, submerged thing viewed under water that was thick with sediment and micro organisms.

‘That,’ said Spika, ‘is Salvation’s Reach.’

The Space Marine seemed slightly interested.

‘The specks?’ asked Gaunt. ‘Is that interference?’

‘Debris,’ Spika replied, shaking his head. ‘The debris field is exceptionally dense, and will grow denser the closer we get to the target. Our shields will bear a lot of it, but there will be manoeuvring, and that will degrade our approach time.’

‘Making us more vulnerable,’ said Eadwine.

Spika shrugged.

‘We will be visible for longer, yes,’ he agreed, ‘but the debris belt will also disguise us. If I do my job right, we can approach the main location and we’ll appear to be nothing more or less than another lump of tumbling junk.’

‘As we proceed from here,’ said Gaunt, ‘I’ll need eyes on this.’

‘Why?’ asked Eadwine.

‘I have operational command, brother-sergeant. As we progress with this raid, I want to be aware of all the information possible, interior and exterior. If the shipmaster identifies a threat, I don’t want to know about it later on.’

‘You’ll see it for yourself,’ said Eadwine. ‘The strategium will afford you quite enough–’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Gaunt, ‘you seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that I will be on the bridge during the attack.’

‘Of course,’ said Spika, ‘commanding the operation. I have a place prepared for you. Where else would you be?’

‘I will be leading Beta Strike from the front.’

‘You… you’re going in?’ asked Spika.

Eadwine made a sound that approximated laughter.

‘That has always been my practice,’ said Gaunt. ‘I will not send men in to do something I’m not prepared to do myself.’

‘No wonder Veegum liked you,’ said the Space Marine. ‘There is a spot for you on Alpha Strike at my side.’

‘Appreciated. But you know your business, and I know mine. Major Kolea and Major Baskevyl will lead the regiment with you at Alpha.’

‘And Gamma Strike?’ asked Eadwine.

‘Major Petrushkevskaya and Captain Daur,’ said Gaunt. He turned in his seat and pointed across the upper bridge area to the Tanith trooper waiting beside the main access hatch.

‘That’s my adjutant, Beltayn. I want him in my place here at the strategium, with access to your vox system.’

‘My vox heralds can communicate all data between us,’ said Spika.

‘I have no doubt, but I require you to allow Beltayn’s presence. If he translates an order to you from me, it carries my full authority.’

‘I understand,’ said Spika.

‘You should also have your armsmen stand ready,’ said Gaunt.

Spika frowned.

‘Very well. For a boarding action?’

‘Yes. But also for counter-boarding. We will be opening channels into that target. That means if things go wrong, they can get at us.’

Gaunt rose. The other two got up.

‘Let us prepare,’ said Gaunt.

Spika made the sign of the aquila.

‘The Emperor protects,’ rumbled Eadwine.

The currents of realspace and the vagaries of the warp had condensed a vast cloud of material in the gravity pit of the Rimworld Marginals. The few pale suns fluttered like candles in the deep ditch of blackness and shone their thin light upon a prodigious pall of flotsam.

At the place known as Salvation’s Reach, the junk belt was at its thickest: a monumental agglomeration of debris almost two hundred thousand kilometres deep at its thickest. Part of it was planetary debris: rocks, dust and other mineral effluent forming solid masses like gallstones or bezoars. Some of it, however, was artificial in origin.

There was tech. There were machine parts. There were the hulks and shells of space machines: ships, barges, carriers, void habitats, supermassives, like some graveyard of wrecks. Craft lost and foundered down through the ages had washed up at Salvation’s Reach, and there they had gathered, collected, mangled each other and, through the action of decay and gravitic pressure, fused into a great knot of material, accumulating like a metal reef.

Some of it was Imperial. Some of it was not. Some of it was of human or human-derivative manufacture. Some of it was not. Some ancient scraps, the carcasses of lost Imperial vessels, were relics of Terran tech that had not been seen for so long they were no longer recognisable to the Adeptus Mechanicus. Old template patterns, unrecoverably deformed, lurked in the silent residue.

Some of it was so old, so worn, so alien, it was impossible to discern the source or original function.

Mechanicus expeditions had been mounted down the years, along with Inquisitorial probe missions, and countless endeavours of salvage and scavenging.

But the Marginals were unstable, inhospitable and remote, and the secrets cast away there were too demanding to recover.

The Armaduke, adjusting its course by gentle realspace burns, slowly crept into this increasingly crowded environment, heading for the solid, planet-sized nugget at its heart.

‘They’re in,’ said Beltayn, over the vox. ‘Contact reported.’

‘Begin cutting!’ Gaunt ordered. The artificers nearby had been poised for the order. The blessed engine of the ugly Hades breaching drill thundered into life, and the oily beast, like some giant promethean beetle from the lightless depths beneath some world’s rocky crust, was coaxed forwards. Its heavy tracks clattered on the deck plates of lateral sixteen.

The Hades was a siege engine, a boring drill designed for sapping and trench warfare. Gaunt had seen the engineers of Krieg deploying such devices to great effect when he was still a cadet. Cutting through what amounted to the hull of a starship was not a conventional use, but it was the quickest and most expedient way in that the tactical planners had been able to devise. The Hades’s huge cutting head, a four-part breaching instrument of interlocked, diamantine-tipped rotary power cutters, was mounted on the front of the tank chassis and adjusted by a powerful frame of piston drivers. The power cutters bit from the outside in, so that shredded material passed into the maw between the cutters, down a conveyer belt that ran through the middle of the machine like a digestive tract, and was ejected as spoil through the rear. Seen front-on, the Hades resembled the grotesque concentric mouthparts of some deep sea sucker fish, with rows of teeth surrounding a funnel throat. Deep in that throat, above the belt, was a melta-cutter positioned to weaken and blast the target solids into consumable slag.

The chassis snorted black exhaust fumes. The cutter bits were spinning at maximum cycle. The operator triggered the melta-array and fired several searing blasts into the skin of the Reach.

The skin began to buckle and deform, filling the hold space with a stink of pitch and scorched metal. Then the whizzing teeth bit in.

The noise was painfully loud. It was the shrill scream of a high-speed drill, but mixed with the deep throb and roar of bulk industrial machinery. The heat blasts had softened the hull skin enough for the grinding, rending drill heads to find purchase. Hull metal wailed as it was abraded away. Fine scrap began to tumble out of the belt ejector, shavings polished almost silver by the rotary teeth. Fine dust and smoke rose off the power cutters, which were already super-heating from friction. The crew members standing by unlocked their pressure hoses and began to spray the advancing head with jets of dank water. The Hades operator still applied ferocious heat using the melta, because it was essential for the hull fabric to be soft enough for the teeth to bite. But it was also essential to keep the power cutters cool enough not to fuse and, more importantly, damp down and emulsify the clouds of micro-fine, ultra-sharp spalling that was coming off the cut in clouds like dust. If that got into eyes or throats, if that was inhaled into lungs, it would kill a man through catastrophic micro-laceration. The cooked mineral stink was bad enough. Occasionally, a flaw or imperfection in the hull fabric caused a large shard of debris to splinter off and be flung out by the spinning teeth. These pieces pinged and cracked off the protective screens and baffles. Gaunt knew what the Ghosts behind him were thinking. It sounded exactly like small-arms fire spanking off trench boarding.

One of the operators was struck by a piece of flying debris. It knocked him off his feet, but he got back up again, bruised and shaken. A few seconds later, another operator was hit by a sharpened sliver that went clean through his body armour and into his torso above the right hip. Colleagues pulled him clear, but he was already bleeding out by the time they got him to the hold doorway where the medicae teams were waiting.

‘How thick?’ Gaunt yelled over the howl of the drill.

‘Density scans show just over three metres,’ replied the chief artificer.

‘Time?’

‘Unless the composition changes, eighteen minutes.’

The shrieking of the Hades drill was becoming unbearable. Gaunt felt as if his teeth were about to shatter. The atmosphere in the lateral holdspace was thick with exhaust fumes and the reek of burning metal and oily water. A fine vibration, transmitted through the deck by the drill, was making everything tremble.

He retreated to just outside the hold hatchway so he could hear Beltayn over the vox.

‘Major Baskevyl reports six companies deployed at the primary zone,’ Beltayn said. ‘More coming in, but it’s tight.’

‘Have they kicked the door in and made a lot of noise?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Beltayn.

‘Opposition?’

‘Loxatl. Now Major Kolea reports contact with what he believes are Sons of Sek.’

Gaunt took a deep breath. Loxatl made his skin crawl, but Sons of Sek were something else. The anarch’s rumoured response to Gaur’s Blood Pact. Sworn soldiers, cult devotees of the Ruinous Powers, yet disciplined and organised. Zealot warriors. Gaunt felt a particular type of fear whenever the Archenemy appeared to operate with intent. Their unpredictable insanity was bad enough. But for the Blood Pact, the Sabbat Worlds Crusade would have been prosecuted and done years before.

‘Keep me appraised,’ he said.

He suddenly realised the drill had shut up.

‘We’re through,’ said Mkoll.

Gaunt walked back into the hold. Servitor crews were pulling back the protective baffles. The troop company of Strike Beta was on its feet.

Gaunt waved the lead team forwards. Mkoll, Domor, Larkin and Zered. Each one carried the tools of his trade. They buckled on rebreathers and adjusted lamp packs.

The chief artificer was staring at Gaunt, waiting.

Gaunt took the vox horn from the set operator.

‘This is Strike Beta,’ he said. ‘Be advised, we are beginning insertion. Hull is breached, repeat, hull is breached.’

‘The Emperor protect you,’ Spika’s voice replied over the link.

Gaunt nodded to the chief artificer. The man turned and beckoned urgently with both hands. With a mechanical grumble, the Hades backed into the hold again, treads clattering on the deck. Its retreat unplugged the hole it had bored, a huge tunnel in the hull of the Reach the size of a decent hatchway. The edges of the cut were bright silver metal, whorled and flaked like shredded foil. Approaching, Gaunt could see the cut was under four metres deep. Cold and undisturbed air leaked out towards him from the darkness inside, like the slow bleed of heat from a tomb.

Artificers and servitors were fussing around the hole with tanks of sealant.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Gaunt.

‘The edges will be razor-sharp in places,’ replied the chief artificer, ‘hazardous to touch. We are preparing to seal them with–’

‘No time,’ said Gaunt. ‘We’ll just be careful.’

The artificer’s crew backed off.

Mkoll and Domor led the way, and Gaunt fell in behind them with Larkin. Zered brought up the rear, his flamer lit.

Gaunt drew his boltpistol. Larkin carried the old solid-round rifle he had been training with. His longlas was in its cover across his back.

Mkoll stepped forwards into the gloom, lasrifle ready. Beside him, Domor adjusted his headphones and extended the sweeper broom of his detector set. Gaunt could hear the sweeper’s little portable auspex ticking like a radiation counter.

They advanced down the cut, through the bored hole, carefully avoiding the razor-sharp sides. The skin of the hulk was dense and thick. Light from the hold winked off the milled and sawn edges of the tunnel.

Beyond lay darkness and silence.

They moved slowly. Even by Mkoll’s wary and calculated standards, they were being cautious. Gaunt’s eyes slowly began to adjust to the gloom.

A greyish half-light was revealed ahead of them, a dusk. They were coming through into a cavity that had the dimensions of a hold space, but none of the regularities. The ceiling sloped down at one end. This wasn’t a space that had been designed, it was a chamber that had been partially crushed into its current shape: the internal compartment of one of the ancient vessels that had fused to form the Reach, deformed by slow gravitational pressure.

The deck was uneven. Panels had popped their rivets and sat like displaced flagstones. Cables, ancient and powerless, hung down from busted roof plates. The air was ominously dry. Gaunt noticed that Zered’s flamer began to suck hard, and the trooper had to adjust the mix rate to compensate for the oxygen-poor atmosphere.

Domor swept steadily to and fro, passing his broom across the walls and low ceiling. Gaunt could see the blue glow of his set’s display screen. The ticking was steady.

‘Anything?’ he asked.

‘I’m calibrating,’ said Domor. ‘There’s a lot of bounce. So many different densities and intermixed alloys.’

Gaunt didn’t envy Domor’s task. A quick look at the walls and ceiling showed extraordinary levels of gross compaction, with structural fabric and mechanisms crushed along with circuits and energy filaments into scrap filler. Getting any meaningful discrimination through the auspex was going to be a challenge.

‘Steady,’ said Mkoll. They climbed over a fallen beam and ducked around a fractured metal arch, the remains of some giant hatch, which stuck up out of the mangled deck like a broken tooth. Mkoll waited while Domor scanned both, and marked them with yellow chalk as items to be cleared from the route. Beyond the arch, the compartment seam had ruptured open like a scar. The metal looked molten. Through the rupture lay a service-way.

They went through. The service-way was long, and only slightly deformed. It was wide and high enough to drive a cargo-6 along. It had been built for humanoids, but not by any human. Curious designs along the wall sections had been defaced and over-marked by Archenemy sigils.

‘This area’s in use,’ said Mkoll. ‘The dust on the deck shows footprint scuffs. Not recent. I’d say six months, though environmental conditions are so stable, it could be six years.’

‘Or six hundred,’ said Larkin.

‘They come this way often enough. They didn’t like looking at these markings,’ said Domor, nodding at the defaced walls. ‘They scratched them out, changed them.’

‘Or altered them to leave instructions of their own,’ said Gaunt. ‘Like “Keep out”. Check the deck. Wires, anything.’

Mabbon Etogaur had been quite specific about the ways in which the extremities of the Reach were protected. No wards or warp magic, no infernal devices or daemonic mechanisms. Anything like that might be too easily triggered by the sensitive study and development being undertaken at the facility.

At the Reach, the Archenemy was relying on good, old-fashioned mechanical booby traps: mines, explosives, lethal anti-personnel defences.

Domor scanned ahead, adjusted his settings, and then did it again.

‘Nobody breathe,’ he said. ‘I’m getting something now. The deck plates ahead are hollow. Wait… yes, feth. I’ve got cables, active-fluid hydraulics and an electric charge. We’ve got a pressure trigger. The deck’s live.’

Mkoll pulled a scope that matched the one screwed to the top rail of Larkin’s rifle. The chief scout put it to his eye, and Larkin raised his weapon, hunting.

‘Cable wire comes out eight metres down, to the left,’ said Domor.

‘I see it,’ said Mkoll. ‘That look like storage drums to you?’

‘In the alcove?’ asked Larkin, squinting through his rifle scope. ‘Yes, it does.’

‘The sniffer’s getting fyceline and promethium gel,’ said Domor. ‘About a tonne volume.’

‘Throne,’ said Zered, genuinely appalled.

‘Detonator?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Looking for it now,’ said Mkoll, training his scope. He had it set to low light. ‘Got it. I see the trigger pin. The cable’s cleated up the wall along the bulkhead seam. It goes in at the top of the left-hand drum.’

‘Yes, I see it,’ said Larkin, aiming.

Gaunt wondered if they should back off. The target was tiny and the light levels were poor, but eight metres was comfortably within Larkin’s effective range. If the shot failed, and the device detonated, no amount of shelter or cover would save them. A tonne of fyceline compound explosive would create an overpressure blast in the confined environment that would suck through the narrow apertures of the compartments, pulp their internal organs to soup and their bones to jelly, and probably burst the improvised atmosphere seal between the Armaduke and the Reach. Even the rest of Strike Beta, waiting in the later hold, would probably be killed by focused atmospheric concussion.

Hiding in cover when Larks took the shot might make them feel better, but it would have zero practical safety value.

‘Let’s get this done,’ said Gaunt.

Larkin knelt on one knee, settling his position, shaking out his shoulders. He chambered a single saline round, slammed it home, and then took his aim. Mkoll crouched beside him, and activated the passive tagger on his scope, so that the pencil-thin light beam indicated the precise target. As shot caller, Mkoll wanted to make sure he and Larkin were both appreciating and agreeing upon the same exact spot.

‘Got it,’ said Larkin, locking up his scope.

Domor lowered his broom and murmured a silent prayer. Zered hooked his flamer head to his waist belt and, to Gaunt’s amusement, put his hands over his ears.

‘None of you were actually planning on living forever, were you?’ Larkin asked.

He took the shot.

‘Oh, Holy Throne,’ Daur gasped. ‘Medic!’

Bodies littered the deck of lateral thirty-nine. Torn and bloody, they were strewn about like discarded dolls. The deck was spattered with blood as though canisters of scarlet paint had been indiscriminately spilled.

Mohr ran forwards.

‘You’re cut,’ he said.

‘What?’ Daur reached up and felt blood on his face. A shard had sliced his temple above the eye. Another had gone through Mohr’s sleeve. His left hand was soaked in blood that was running out from under his cuff.

‘Oh, gak, what a fething mess,’ Daur stammered.

Lesp was the medic assigned to Gamma. He was already struggling to cope with the volume of simultaneous injuries, yelling for help from troopers in Gamma who had corpsman training or any first aid skills. Soldiers were setting down their weapons to run forwards and assist. Others looked on at the devastation, aghast. Blood spray from the injuries had dappled the faces of many of them. One unlucky lasman in the front row, a new influx man called Gorgi, had been killed outright by a fragment between the eyes.

All three clearance teams were decimated. Some were alive and struggling to get up, dazed. Others lay still, apparently dead. All of them were soaked in blood.

‘Strike Gamma, Strike Gamma!’ Daur yelled, grabbing the vox from Mohr. ‘We have multiple injuries in lateral thirty-nine. Multiple injuries!’

‘Say again, captain,’ Beltayn responded. ‘Are you under fire? Are you reporting hostile contact?’

‘Negative! Drill accident. Multiple laceration casualties. We need medics from the ship’s infirmaries here now!’

‘Captain, can you proceed?’

‘Assessing now. Stand by.’

Daur gazed around in horror. Major Pasha’s team, the primary, had been slashed to pieces. Lesp was trying to staunch injuries to Pasha’s throat and face while the corpsman Fayner applied compression to wounds in Nessa’s upper arms and legs. Both women were bleeding profusely. Raglon was curled in a ball, gasping and choking, yet barely had a scratch on him. A razor-sharp filament had gone through his torso, puncturing a lung. Zel and Marakof were dead. Marakof’s head had been sliced in half diagonally, from the left corner of his jaw to his right temple, like some immaculate biological sample. The missing piece of his head lay a few metres behind him, internal side down on the deck, so it looked like a small part of someone surfacing out of a pool. Zel’s torso was shredded and his left arm detached. Daur stepped forwards, numb, and killed the feed of Zel’s fallen flamer.

The second team, Pollo’s, was as bad. Pollo had suffered a huge scalp wound that was bleeding copiously, as well as significant wounds to his arms. Bright red blood beaded his dark skin. Questa, the marksman, had taken lacerations to his hands and thighs. A needle sliver of metal the length of a man’s forearm impaled his hip. Maggs was whining in rage and frustration, clutching a bloody stomach wound. Pollo’s sweeper man, Burone, had been cut in two through the waist. Nitorri, his flame trooper, was also dead, so covered in blood it was impossible to tell which of his wounds had proved lethal.

The third team, Haller’s, was covered in the blood of the first two. Haller was looking down at his battledress, astonished at the gore spattering him, amazed that none of it seemed to belong to him. Merrt had taken a scratch, but had rushed to Nessa’s aid. Vahgner, the scout, was virtually unmarked. His mouth was open as if he couldn’t find anything adequate to say. Vadim put down his sweeper broom to help Raglon, but immediately fell over. A flying shard had cut his Achilles tendon. Belloc, a usually cheerful new influx Vervunhiver, was ashen as he tried to unbuckle his flamer unit so he could assist.

‘Leave that on,’ Vadim hissed.

‘What?’ Belloc replied.

‘He’s right,’ said Daur. ‘Team three’s got to move in first. Haller? Haller!’

Haller jumped.

‘What? Yes,’ he said, blinking.

‘The door’s open,’ Daur said, glancing at Pasha. Despite her miserable wounds, she managed to nod. ‘We’ve got to move in before this prong of the assault collapses completely. We have to proceed. Haller?’

‘Yes, all right,’ said Haller, trying to regain his wits, incapacitated by shock. ‘But… but Vadim’s out. I’ve got no sweeper man.’

Daur breathed deeply to control his panic response. ‘I need a replacement sweeper here. A volunteer. Right now!’

Most of the Strike Gamma force had come forwards to help the injured. Those that couldn’t actually help were just looking on in dismay. They glanced at each other dumbly.

‘That’s an order,’ Hark yelled, moving in beside Daur. A flying filament had nicked his cheek, like a nasty shaving cut. ‘The Emperor expects! Captain Daur needs a sweeper. Come on!’

‘A good one,’ Daur added. He could see the problem already. Gamma and Beta had selected the six best sweepers under Raglon and Domor. There were other Ghosts who understood basic operation, but the most skilful operators in the lateral hold, and the best trained, were the ones lying dead or hurt on the deck in front of him.

‘I can do it,’ said Maggs, wincing.

‘Shut up and wait for the medics,’ Daur snapped.

‘I’ll do it,’ growled Hark. ‘I know how they work.’

Haller coughed. He wiped specks of someone else’s blood off his pale skin.

‘No, it has to be me,’ he said. ‘I was the first reserve on the training list.’

Daur nodded. Haller was right. When they’d been making the selections for the clearance teams, Haller would have been made a sweeper if he hadn’t worked so hard for a team command.

‘You’re right’ Daur said. ‘Take Noa’s kit. Check it works. I’ll lead you in.’

He turned to Hark.

‘You and Spetnin have acting command here, Hark. See if you can assemble a functioning second clearance, and send them in. Then bring the troops in if I signal.’

Hark nodded.

‘And for Throne’s sake get more medics.’

‘I will,’ said Hark.

‘Come on, Ghosts, move!’ Daur said.

He turned and walked towards the bore hole. Merrt followed, with Vahgner and Haller. Belloc buckled his flamer tank and went after them. Vadim’s auspex set had been damaged, so Haller had taken Raglon’s instead. Daur heard Haller quietly promising Raglon he’d look after his precious kit and bring it back, though Raglon was probably too far gone with pain and disorientation to hear him.

Daur reached the bore hole. He glanced up at the ragged tear around the rim, the silver split of metal that had just compromised Strike Gamma’s effectiveness, perhaps beyond any hope of recovery.

He activated his lamp pack.

‘Wait,’ whispered Mkoll. ‘Wait.’

‘It was clean,’ Larkin protested, lowering his rifle.

‘Yes,’ Mkoll agreed. He adjusted his tagger beam. ‘You hit the pin, but look.’

The beam from the chief scout’s scope lit up a fat black cable wrapped in tape running down the side of the device Larkin had just crippled.

‘Secondary trigger,’ he said.

‘Feth,’ murmured Larkin.

‘What’s it set to?’ asked Gaunt.

Domor was busy with the auspex.

‘I’m reading some kind of sack under the deck flooring there. To the right. I think it’s a compression bag. Put your weight down and it squeezes air or fluid into the trigger cable. Throne, I almost missed that.’

‘Secondary triggers suggests tighter security,’ said Gaunt.

‘We’re about a kilometre and a half inside,’ said Mkoll. ‘If our friend’s plans and memories are accurate, we’re close.’

Larkin had reloaded.

‘I can sever the cable. The trigger’s partly obscured.’

‘Do it above the trigger,’ said Domor. ‘Even if you only partly snap the line, the pressure will vent backwards out of the breach. Do it under the trigger, and the force of the shot could blow fluid or air up into the trigger anyway.’

‘Thanks for the tip,’ said Larkin, taking aim.

‘It should work,’ said Domor.

‘“Should”?’ said Zered.

‘I like to leave room for circumstantial variability,’ said Domor.

‘Yes? Go feth yourself,’ said Larkin, taking aim.

Mkoll waved Gaunt to one side.

‘Larkin’s getting tired,’ he said quietly. ‘His hands are unsteady.’

‘He’s all right,’ said Gaunt. ‘He was born unsteady.’

The rifle popped. There was a thick slap of water and glass.

‘Aaand we’re still alive,’ said Larkin.

‘He’s taken out eighteen devices so far,’ said Mkoll. ‘The sustained stress is taking its toll.’

‘We all trained for this,’ Gaunt replied.

‘And part of that training and planning involved an agreement to sub out shooters or sweepers if they started to show signs of fatigue.’

‘Sub them out for whom?’ asked Gaunt. ‘You heard what happened to Gamma. Pylar and Curo were the two reserves with lanyards, and they’ve been called in to support Daur.’

‘We’ve got other shooters.’

‘Nobody who’s trained this hard. Nobody this good. That’s why we had so many wash-outs during preparation,’ said Gaunt.

Mkoll marked off the device with red chalk. They began moving up again along the rusty vault. The walls were so corroded they looked like they were dripping in green and white ooze. They’d barely gone forty metres when Domor called in another hidden charge. Larkin began to mark it out.

Gaunt signalled to the main force advancing at a distance behind them to stop and wait.

‘Raess then, or Banda,’ said Mkoll quietly. ‘Get Criid or Mktass to break off and regroup with us.’

‘Raess and Banda have both done a dozen or so shots each,’ said Gaunt. ‘They’re no fresher than Larks. We’re committed and we’re out of options.’

Mkoll sniffed.

‘It’s your call. But I don’t think Larkin’s got more than three or four sound shots left in his finger.’

Mkoll turned to help Larkin line up. Gaunt walked back to the main force.

‘The pheguth says we’re close,’ said Rawne.

‘How close?’ asked Gaunt.

‘He recognises this corrosion. He says two or three chambers on, we’ll reach a hatchway that leads into the complex proper.’

Gaunt looked at the etogaur. Mabbon was flanked by Brostin and Varl. The rest of the S Company detail was nearby. Mabbon had been allowed to make notes on a data-slate. He showed Gaunt his sketched plan.

‘You see?’ said Mabbon. ‘We’re very close. You should get the troops ready.’

Gaunt chewed his lip.

‘How sure are you?’

‘About ninety per cent,’ said Mabbon. ‘This is a vast structure, and my memories are not perfect. But I spent several years here, and everything on this route has looked familiar. It’s been what I expected. No surprises.’

‘Ninety per cent?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Yes.’

‘If Larkin was ninety per cent accurate,’ said Gaunt, ‘we’d all be dead by now.’

‘Then it’s a good thing I’m not the one shooting out the triggers,’ said Mabbon.

There was a pop behind them, another saline round. The world did not dissolve into light and concussion. They had survived another step.

Gaunt waved up the vox.

‘This is Strike Beta, Strike Beta. I want transport ready to follow us in. The route is marked, do not deviate. Wait for my word.’

‘Understood,’ Beltayn replied. ‘I’ll signal Captain Obel.’

Gaunt turned to the long, waiting line of Ghosts that formed his fighting strength.

‘Get ready, straight silver,’ he said. ‘It seems we’re coming up on it.’

The Ghosts fixed their warknives in place.

The convoy of Tauros vehicles had reached the inner hatch that led into the occupied section of the Reach. Blenner, Wilder and their team stood guard by the vehicles. Gaunt had sent troops back from the college to collect the carry crates and begin the extraction of sensitive materials.

Wilder was pacing.

‘Calm down,’ Blenner told him, but only because the pacing was making him feel more tense himself. They were exposed, literally right on the doorstep of the enemy holding. The smells of squalid decay and putrefaction coming out of the hatch were horrifying.

He looked at Felyx. The boy was standing by the tail board of his vehicle, watching the dark cavities around them for movement. He was holding his weapon too tightly.

Blenner tried to think of something encouraging to say, but he had used up all his banter on Perday on the ride in.

The bang made them jump. The ground shuddered. Pressure shock popped their ears so hard many of them cried out and dropped their guns.

A second later, they felt the rush of hot wind come at them down the tunnel, and smelled the grit and fyceline.

‘Damnation,’ said Blenner. ‘What just happened?’

‘Ban! Ban!’ Haller yelled, firing wildly. He couldn’t even reach Daur. He could see that his friend had been hit badly. Daur wasn’t moving.

Haller also knew there was no way he was going to hold off a Sons of Sek assault on his own with just a pistol.

The enemy charged him. A piercing plasma weapon beam blew the leading officer apart. Lasfire ripped in, cutting down several of the others. The gunfire was coming from behind Haller. He ducked down. The las and plasma fire streaked over his head, punishing the Sons, driving them back down the tunnel.

Hark appeared, plasma gun in hand. The rest of the Strike Gamma detachment came up after him.

‘Emperor damn it, Haller,’ Hark said, looking in dismay at the fallen men. ‘Decide to start without us, did you?’

‘They just came at us,’ Haller replied.

‘Medic!’ Hark yelled. Dorden came forwards. He groaned sadly at the sight that greeted him, and knelt down to examine Daur and Merrt. Vahgner and Belloc were way past saving.

‘We can hear fighting up ahead,’ Haller told Hark. ‘Captain Daur was pretty sure that Strike Beta has engaged. It sounds like they’re in the thick of it.’

‘We’ll move up to support,’ said Hark. He looked at Dorden. ‘How long, doctor?’

‘Move ahead,’ said Dorden, busy. ‘I’ve got my hands full here.’

‘I’m not leaving you,’ said Hark.

‘Well, I’d also prefer it if you didn’t carry two critically injured men into a fight with you. Let me patch them up. If you can spare Haller, we’ll move them back down the tunnel as soon as they’re stable.’

Hark looked at Haller.

‘All right with you?’

Haller nodded.

‘Get them to safety,’ Hark said. He leaned closer to Haller. ‘All three of them, all right?’ he whispered.

He stepped back.

‘Well done,’ he said. ‘You’ve opened the way up for us. Strike Gamma? Ready weapons. Look lively! We’re advancing against hostiles.’

There was a clatter of weapons.

‘Forwards!’ Hark ordered. The troops began to file past. Hark looked back at Haller.

‘Get done here and get back. I’ll see you on the other side.’

‘Good luck, commissar,’ said Haller.

‘The Emperor protects.’

Haller watched as Hark’s force moved out of sight then he clambered over to Dorden.

‘Can we move them?’ he asked.

‘What’s wrong with your shoulder, Haller?’ Dorden asked.

‘It got shot. It’s nothing. Can we move them?’

‘Not yet. Maybe soon.’

‘Can you save them?’

Dorden looked at Haller. In the dim, twitching light cast by Belloc’s fallen flamer, his eyes seemed fathomless. He was exhausted. He couldn’t pretend any more

‘I don’t know, Haller. I can’t even save myself. Merrt’s chest wound is severe. His heart is damaged. Daur is… who am I kidding, Daur’s critical too. An infirmary is their best chance. An infirmary and a better medicae.’

‘You’re the best doctor w–’

Dorden shook his head.

‘Hush, Haller. I can barely walk. My hands are weak and clumsy. I am so tired and addled with pain-suppressing drugs I forget basic techniques. The ridiculous sentiment and affection of men like Gaunt and Hark has allowed me to continue serving long past my competence. I shouldn’t be here, Haller. Hark should have seconded a medic from the ship’s crew. He was humouring the last wishes of an old, dying fool.’

‘That’s not true,’ Haller replied.

‘Trust me, Haller. I forced my way into this because I wanted to matter one last time. I’m an old man and I should have known better–’

‘Stuff it. You know what you’re doing. All the while you’ve been spilling out that self-pity, you’ve been working. You know what you’re doing. Tell me what I can do. Compression or something. Let’s get them fixed and get them out. Now.’

Shipmaster Spika nodded the instruction to execute to his steersmen. With a grinding shudder, the Highness Ser Armaduke pulled away from the mangled skin of Salvation’s Reach. All the lighters and landing ships were aboard, and the hatches of the lateral holds had been shut. The ship’s departure broke the atmospheric seals around the boreholes cut by the Hades drills. Explosive decompression ripped up through the lower and uncharted cavities of the Reach, voiding vacuums and collapsing compartments like eggshells.

Parts of the vast structure were already on fire where massive explosions had torn through them, the blasts of carefully laid satchel charges, or of ditched munition loads ignited by departing landing ships.

Some of the damage was the result of booby-trap devices in the lower depths spontaneously detonating.

Tiny cavities in the Reach glowed from within like the heat inside a coal. Explosions and firestorms continued to rumble through the habitat for several days.

Shields up, the Armaduke powered away from the target zone, plotting a hard acceleration line through the dense junk fields towards the nearest viable Mandeville Point. It continued to broadcast the streams of chatter, accusation and insult in Blood Pact battle code until the moment it translated.

Special thanks to

Ead Brown, Richard Dugher, Nik Vincent, Nichola Loftus, and Bruce and Michelle Euans.

Dan Abnett is a novelist and award-winning comic book writer. He has written almost forty novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series, and the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies. His latest Horus Heresy novel Prospero Burns was a New York Times bestseller, and topped the SF charts in the UK and the US. In addition to writing for Black Library, Dan is highly regarded in the comics industry for his work for both Marvel and DC, and has written a number of other bestselling novels, including Torchwood: Border Princes, Doctor Who: The Story of Martha, Triumff and Embedded. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent. Dan’s blog and website can be found at www.danabnett.com. Follow him on Twitter@VincentAbnett.